Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/197

Rh in the poem as in the bird and butterfly. Besides, just as gems and gold are hoarded while iron is left to rust, and as paintings that are beautiful in line and color grow costlier with time, so the poetry that has the beauty of true art becomes the heirloom of generations. For beauty seems to consecrate both makers and possessors. Just as all the world clings to the legends of Helen and Cleopatra and Mary Stuart, so it has a fondness for the Cellinis and Villons and Marlowes and Lovelaces,—the ne'er-do-weels of art and song. This is because it reads the artist's higher self in his work; there alone it is expressed, and we give him credit for it. The truth of fairy tales is that of beauty; the Florizels and Cinderellas and Percinets are its ideals. Beauty loves the Beast, but the Beast is beauty in disguise. Thus creative taste holds the key to the future, and art for art's sake is a sound motto in so far as beauty is a legitimate end of art. That it is not the sole end of art—life is the lesson of Tennyson's "The Palace of Art." One who thought otherwise at last found need to throw her royal robes away:

All in all, if concrete beauty is not the greatest