not reveal its beauty except by the expenditure of
time and study. It is foolish to expect that the secret beauty of a human
person will reveal itself more easily. The lover is an artist, an artist
who constructs an image, it is true, but only by patient and concentrated
attention to nature; he knows the defects of his image, probably better
than anyone, but he knows also that art lies, not in the avoidance of
defects, but in the realization of those traits which swallow up defects
and so render them non-existent. A great artist, Rodin, after a life spent
in the study of Nature, has declared that for art there is no ugliness in
Nature. "I have arrived at this belief by the study of Nature," he said;
"I can only grasp the beauty of the soul by the beauty of the body, but
some day one will come who will explain what I only catch a glimpse of and
will declare how the whole earth is beautiful, and all human beings
beautiful. I have never been able to say this in sculpture so well as I
wish and as I feel it affirmed within me. For poets Beauty has always
been some particular landscape, some particular woman; but it should be
all women, all landscapes. A negro or a Mongol has his beauty, however
remote from ours, and it must be the same with their characters. There is
no ugliness. When I was young I made that mistake, as others do; I could
not undertake a woman's bust unless I thought her pretty, according to my
particular idea of beauty; to-day I should do the bust of any woman, and
it would be just as beautiful. And however ugly a woman may look, when she
is with her lover she becomes beautiful; there is beauty in her character,
in her passions, and beauty exists as soon as character or passion becomes
visible, for the body is a casting on which passions are imprinted. And
even without that, there is always the blood that flows in the veins and
the air that fills the lungs."[68]

The saint, also, is here at one with the lover and the artist. The man who
has so profoundly realized the worth of his fellow men that he is ready
even to die in order to save them, feels that he has discovered a great
secret. Cyples traces the "secret delights" that have thus risen in the
hearts of holy men to the same source as the feelings generated between
lovers, friends, parents, and children. "A few have at intervals walked in
the world," he remarks, "who have, each in his own original way, found out
this marvel.... Straightway man in general