Page:Sixteen years of an artist's life in Morocco, Spain and the Canary Islands.djvu/41

30 taste, the judgment, and the senses of Europeans are directed; and I also found that the lady who presided over the establishment in which we were now favoured with the spectacle of so much that was new, instructive, and amusing, and to whom we had been properly introduced, afforded in her own person a most adequate exemplification of what true beauty, as it appears to the eyes of the enlightened inhabitants of Morocco and of other lands which are under the influence of Eastern habits of thought and feeling, really is. What, then, was that standard of taste, as regards beauty, by which we were to be enabled to appreciate the surpassing loveliness of our hostess? Was it Platonic or Aristotelic? Was it Jeffreyan or Ruskinian? Was it material or ideal? Did it trace the line of beauty in regular features, or did it look for the soul that mantles in the expressive face, the eloquence that speaks in the intelligent eye? Oh, no, ye philosophers, and poets, and artists of the West, all these are merely fanciful theories, which have no foundation in fact, which are not accordant with that great standard, the nature of things. Learn, then, from the shores of Northern Africa what genuine beauty is, and henceforth bestow your admiration only where it is due. Beauty, then, is size, magnitude, amplitude