Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/196

166 a certain naturalization; until then you will find it Taste is congenital yet cultivable. as hard to master as the idioms of a language not your own. These seem grotesque and childish until you speak, even think, in their tongue without mentally translating it. A translation will give you the imagination, action, thought, of a poem, for instance, but not its native and essential beauty. Æsthetics relate to the primal sense, and must be taken at first hand. This is all the truth there is in the maxim De gustibus. If the rays of our sun were as green as those of the star Libræ, beauty would exist and have its standard in conformity. Taste would be as intuitive as now, and just as open to cultivation.

These general principles should entitle us to our Poetic beauty. surmise respecting the ultimate value of a poem. A mode attractive for its novelty may be only the vogue of a generation, or of a brief season. I take endurance to be the test of art. History will show, I think, that if a poem had not the element of beauty, this potency in art, its force could not endure. Beauty partakes of eternal youth and conveys its own immortality. Passion and imagination intensify much of the poetry that has survived; but under their stress the poet summons beauty to his aid. Wisdom and morals do not so inevitably take Its conserving power. on grace: their statements, impressive at the time, must be recast perpetually. The law of natural selection conserves artistic beauty