| OCR Text |
Show ALONG the wayside some blossom, with unusually glowing color or prettiness of form, attracts us: held by it, we accept gratefully its perfect loveliness; but, seek- ing to discover the secret of its charm, we find the blossom, whose more obvious claim first arrests our attention, intimately related to the texture and shape of its foliage; we discover a strange sympathy between the form of the flower and the system upon which the leaves are arranged about the stalk. From this we are led to observe a characteristic habit of growth, and resultant nature of structure, having its first direction and form in the roots hidden in the warm earth, kept moist by the conservative covering of leaf mould. This structure proceeds from the general to the particular in a most inevitable way, arriving at the blossom to proclaim in its lines and form the nature of the structure that bore it. It is an organic thing. Law and order are the basis of its finished grace and beauty: its beauty is the expression of fundamental conditions in line, form and color, true to them, and existing to fulfill them according to design. ditions. We can in no wise prove beauty to be the result of these harmonious internal con- That which through the ages appeals to us as beautiful does not ignore in its fibre the elements of law and order. Nor does it take long to establish the fact that no lasting beauty ignores these elements ever present as conditions of its existence. It will appear, fromstudy of the forms or styles which mankind has considered beautiful, that those which live longest are those which in greatest measure fulfill these conditions. That a thing grows is no concern of ours, because the quality of life is beyond us and we are not necessarily concerned with it. Beauty,in its essence, is for us as mysterious as life. All attempts to say is the love of life which quietly and inevitably finds the right way, and in lovely color, gracious line and harmonious arrangement imparts it untroubled by any burden,-as little concerned with literature or indebted to it as the flower by the wayside that turns its petals upward to the sun is concerned with the farmer who passes in the road or is indebted to him for the geometry of its petals or the mathematics of its structure. Of this joy in living, there is greater proof in Italy than elsewhere. Buildings, pic- tures and sculpture seem to be born, like the flowers by the roadside, to sing themselves into being. music of life. Approached in the spirit of their conception, they inspire us with the very No really Italian building seems ill at ease in Italy. All are happily content with what ornament and color they carry, as naturally as the rocks and trees and garden slopes which are one with them. Wherever the cypress rises, like the touch of a magician's wand, it resolves all into a composition harmonious and complete, The secret of this ineffable charm would be sought in `vain in the rarefied air of scholasticism or pedantic fine art. It lies close to the earth. Like a handful of the moist, sweet earth itself, it is SO simple that, to modern minds, trained in intellectual gymnastics, it would seem unrelated to great purposes. overlooked. It is so close that almost universally it is |
