not
boast. It is a vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover her beauty,
who shall discern her.

She is most conspicuous in the atmosphere in smoke "effects," in the
"lurid," the "mystery"; such are the perfervid words. But let us take
the natural and authentic light as our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly
port, her infinite jest, her bluest vein, her variety, her laugh. "O
Eastern star!"

Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these--except
the dog when he bays the moon--look skyward not at all. The events of
the sky do not come and go for the citizens, do not visibly approach and
withdraw, threaten and pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sun
so condescends as to face them at the level of their own horizon (say
from the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he searches out the
eyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowing
lids, looks straight into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the careful
wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say, to sudden
sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would rather
look into puddles than into the pools of light among clouds.

Yet the light is as characteristic of a country as is its landscape. So
that I would travel for the sake of a character of early morning, for a
quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or an accident of moonrise,
or a colour of dusk, at least as far as for a mountain, a cathedral,
rivers, or men. The light is more important than what it illuminates.
When Mr. Tomkins--a person of Dickens's earliest invention--calls his
fellow-boarders from the breakfast-table to the window, and with emotion
shows them the effect of sunshine upon the left side of a neighbouring
chimney-pot, he is far from cutting the grotesque figure that the
humourist intended to point out to banter. I am not sure that the
chimney-pot with the pure light upon it was not more beautiful than a
whole black Greek or a whole black Gothic building in the adulterated
light of a customary London day. Nor is the pleasure that many writers,
and a certain number of painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration
anything other than a sign of derogation--in a word, a pleasure in the
secondary thing.

Are we the better artists for our preference of the waiting-woman? It is
a strange claim. The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful is a
modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor pranks, insole