then beauty is not a mere torturing menace, a heartless and
unkind parading of joy which we cannot feel, but a faithful pledge of
something secure and everlasting, which will return to us again and
again in ever fuller measure, even if the flow of it be sometimes
suspended.

We ought then to train and practise our sense of beauty, not selfishly
and luxuriously, but so that when the dark hour comes it may help us
to realise that all is not lost, may alleviate our pain by giving us
the knowledge that the darkness is the interruption, but that the joy
is permanent and deep and certain.

Thus beauty, instead of being for us but as the melody swiftly played
when our hearts are high, a mere momentary ray, a happy accident that
befalls us, may become to us a deep and vital spring of love and hope,
of which we may say that it is there waiting for us, like the home
that awaits the traveller over the weary upland at the foot of the
far-looming hill. It may come to us as a perpetual sign that we are
not forgotten, and that the joy of which it makes mention survives all
interludes of strife and uneasiness. It is easy to slight and overlook
it, but if we do that, we are deluded by the passing storm into
believing that confusion and not peace is the end. As George Meredith
nobly wrote, during the tragic and fatal illness of his wife, "Here I
am in the very pits of tragic life.... Happily for me, I have learnt
to live much in the spirit, and see brightness on the other side of
life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable
arrow in her flanks would pull me down too." The spirit, the
brightness of the other side, that is the secret which beauty can
communicate, and the message which she bears upon her radiant wings.

XXVI

THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY

"I have loved," said Keats, "the _principle_ of beauty in all things."
It is that to which all I have said has been leading, as many roads
unite in one. We must try to use discrimination, not to be so
optimistic that we see beauty if it is not there, not to overwhelm
every fling that every craftsman has at beauty with gush and
panegyric; not to praise beauty in all companies, or to go off like a
ripe broom-pod, at a touch. When Walter Pater was confronted with
something which courtesy demanded that he should seem to admire, he
used to say in that soft voice of his, which lingered over emphatic
syllables, "Very costly, no doubt!"

But we must be generous to a