Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/217

 VI.

TRUTH.

all natural things make for beauty,—if the statement is well founded that they are as What is meant by the Unity of Beauty and Truth. beautiful as they can be under their conditions, then truth and beauty, in the last reduction, are equivalent terms, and beauty is the unveiled shining countenance of truth. But a given truth, to be beautiful, must be complete. Tennyson's line,

will bear inversion. Truth which is half a lie is intolerable. A certain kind of preachment, antipathetic to the spirit of poesy, has received the name of didacticism. Instinct tells us that it is The didactic heresy. a heresy in any form of art. Yet many persons, after being assured by Keats that the unity of beauty and truth is all we know or need to know, are perplexed to find sententious statements of undisputed facts so commonplace and odious. Note, meanwhile, that Keats' assertion illustrates itself by injuring the otherwise perfect poem which contains it. So obtrusive a moral lessens the effect of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In other words, the