Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/185

Rh are regarding concrete qualities; for example, the form, the verbal and rhythmical excellence, of a poet's poem. Our reference to arts that specially appeal to the eye is illustrative, since they afford the diagrams, so to speak, of most service in this discussion.

For the perception of the beautiful there must be a soul in conjunction; that statement is Beauty is the quality regulating certain vibrations. irrefutable. Yet I think that the quality of beauty exists in substances, even if there be no intelligence at hand to receive an impression of it; that if a cataract has been falling and thundering and prismatically sparkling in the heart of a green forest, from time immemorial, and with no human being to wonder at it, it has no less the attribute of beauty; it is waiting, as Kepler said of its Creator, "six thousand years for an interpreter." Suppose that an exquisite ode by Sappho or Catullus has been buried for twenty centuries in some urn or crypt: its beauty is there, and may come to light. Grant that our sense of material beauty is the impression caused by vibrations; then the quality regulating those vibrations is what I mean by the "beauty" of the substance whence they emanate. Grant what we term the extension of that substance; the characteristics of that extension are what affect us. There is no escape, you see, unless, with Berkeley, you say there is no matter.

This is just what the poet, the artist, is not called upon to do. He is at the outset a phenomenalist.