easier by all the myriads of men and women who have lived upon the
globe. The standing want is never for more skill, but for newer, fresher
power,--a more plentiful supply of arterial blood. The discoverer, or
the historian, or the man of science, may begin where his predecessor
left off, but the poet or any artist must go back for a fresh start.
With him it is always the first day of creation, and he must begin at
the stump or nowhere.

VIII BEFORE BEAUTY

I

Before genius is manliness, and before beauty is power. The Russian
novelist and poet, Turgenieff, scattered all through whose works you
will find unmistakable traits of greatness, makes one of his characters
say, speaking of beauty, "The old masters,--they never hunted after
it; it comes of itself into their compositions, God knows whence, from
heaven or elsewhere. The whole world belonged to them, but we are unable
to clasp its broad spaces; our arms are too short."

From the same depth of insight come these lines from "Leaves of Grass,"
apropos of true poems:--

"They do not seek beauty--they are sought; Forever touching them, or
close upon them, follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick."

The Roman was perhaps the first to separate beauty from use, and to
pursue it as ornament merely. He built his grand edifice,--its piers,
its vaults, its walls of brick and concrete,--and then gave it a
marble envelope copied from the Greek architecture. The latter could be
stripped away, as in many cases it was by the hand of time, and leave
the essentials of the structure nearly complete. Not so with the Greek:
he did not seek the beautiful, he was beauty; his building had no
ornament, it was all structure; in its beauty was the flower of
necessity, the charm of inborn fitness and proportion. In other words,
"his art was structure refined into beautiful forms, not beautiful forms
superimposed upon structure," as with the Roman. And it is in Greek
mythology, is it not, that Beauty is represented as riding upon the back
of a lion? as she assuredly always does in their poetry and art,--rides
upon power, or terror, or savage fate; not only rides upon, but
is wedded and incorporated with it; hence the athletic desire and
refreshment her coming imparts.

This is the invariable order of nature. Beauty without a rank material
basis enfeebles. The world is not thus made; man is not thus begotten
and nourished.

It comes to me there is something implied or understoo