se principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise
we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should
have been less securely grounded.

So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of
one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other
faces--though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could
ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during
the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it
is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense
discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority,
but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty
brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious
threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us;
that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining
essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel.

The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its
sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say,
conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect,
faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses
of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the
very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of
combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of
all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it
is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive
that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we
chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no
more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a
wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half
in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how
beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and
orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete,
marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal.

The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never
speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a
beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways,
victoriously alive?

Perhaps it were well for us that we should never unde