Part 24

“Then,” said Marian, “it is not the thing itself, but the feeling which it gives us, that is beautiful.”

“Yes,” I said, “it gives us the thrill of that complete joy. We seem to see something which is what cannot be; complete harmony. The sight of the sea makes Virginia feel so. And you, the out-of-doors.”

Virginia said: “I have sometimes thought beauty is light, because the sun is most beautiful—and, at night, the moon.”

“But,” said I, “if there were no shadows and no darkness, sun and moon would not be beautiful.”

“Then contrast?” she asked.

I said: “There must be contrast in all beautiful things, because without contrast we could not have completeness.”

“Yes,” she said, “in pictures it is so.”

“A small thing,” I went on, “might symbolize completeness, as well as a large one. A dog, in his way, a beautiful Scotch collie, for instance, might be as beautiful as a man.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Ruth.

We criticized, and found lacking, according to our standard, the beauty of prize bulldogs; the teeth were too suggestive of strife and biting, the spots unsymmetrical, and so on. They spoke of many instances of beauty in things, especially the beauty of little children, and fitted them to this new standard.

Marian said: “A drop of water is so symmetrical and harmonious, so beautiful in the sunshine; and yet, on a dark day, on the sidewalk, it is not beautiful.”

I explained even that. I showed her how a drop on the sidewalk was not a drop, but a daub, how it suggested all sorts of ugly and incongruous things. “But,” I said, “if we take the trouble to look at a drop hanging from anything, say from a leaf, we shall always find it beautiful.”

She agreed to that. Then she said: “Don’t you think we sometimes do think of our own life as a beautiful thing?”

“Yes,” I answered. “There are moments when our own life suddenly seems complete, when we feel an artist’s delight in it, and for a while we, and the whole world with us, seem to have reached what we longed for.”

Florence asked: “Don’t you think it is usually when we are having a very good, jolly time?”

Marian answered quickly: “No, not at all.”

I understood what Marian meant, and did not attempt, naturally, to explain it to the others.

Now we all agreed, every one of us, that completeness and harmony were beauty. But the children had started time and again to bring up instances in art which to them seemed not to fit, and which they thoroughly misunderstood.

“You see,” I said, “that the beautiful thing is the same as that which seems to us most true and good.”

Marian said again that one idea seemed to cover everything, and that we came to conclusions quickly.

“Now I will tell you,” I said, “what I mean by art and the artist. In speaking of art here to-day I mean not only painting—as one of you thought—but everything which expresses beauty; poetry, the novel and drama, sculpture, music, acting. You see the difference between science and art?”

“Science gives us knowledge,” said Marian.

“Yes,” I answered, “or, rather, science gives us facts, truths, but never at all the complete truth. It gives us parts as parts, never the whole. Philosophy, on the other hand, does what we are doing here. It reaches out for the complete whole, for understanding, for unity, but it knows well that it can never attain the end. It reaches out for the complete good, and is satisfied with nothing less than that unattainable whole. But art does another thing; it tells us a lie—the most wonderful lie in the world—truer than any truth. It says: Look, here is completeness, harmony, wholeness, in this one small shape. And we know it cannot be so, but still we feel it to be there. That lie gives us, as no truth can, the thing we long for, and know to be most true.

“Now, what do you mean by the word genius? What is genius?” I asked.

“Usually,” said Virginia, “a genius is a crank. There is a girl in my art class who is the frousiest, queerest crank in the world, and every one calls her a genius.”

“Geniuses are often queer,” said Henry.

Ruth said, too, that many geniuses were anything but great and good in their private lives.

“Well,” I answered, “I am surprised by your definition of a genius. But perhaps you will be more surprised, and sorry you said so much, when I tell you that I consider every one of you a genius.”