A LOST SECRET.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 5558, 8 April 1905, Page 10

A LOST SECRET.

The beauty of earth, except for soma sorts that jour sordid industries hare ravaged, has altered but little since the days of Augustus, and Pericles. The sea is infinite still, still inviolate. The forest, the plain, the harvest/ the villages, rivers and streams, the mountains, the dawn and the evening, stars ana the sky—vary as these all may according to climate and latitude—offer ua still the same spectacles of grandeur and tenderness, ■ the same soft, profound harmonies, the same fairy-like scenes of changing complexity that they showed to the Athenian citizens and the people of Home, nature remains more or less as it was; and besides we have grown more sensitive, and to-day can admirs more freely. , But when we turn to the beauty special to man, the beauty that is his own immediate aim, we find that, owing perhaps to our too great wealth or excessive application, to the scattering of our efforts, lack of concentration, or to the want of a certain goal and an incontestable starting-point, we appear to have lost almost all that the ancients had been able to establish and make their own. In all that regards purely human aesthetics, in what concerns our body, our gestures, our clothes, the objects w« live with, our homes and gardens, our monuments, even our landscapes, we ara groping so timidly, we display such confusion and inexperience, that one might truly believe our occupation of this planet to dste but from yesterday, and that we are still at the very beginning of the period of adaptation. . For the work or our hands there exists no longer a common measure, an accepted rule or conviction. Our painters, our architects, our sculptors, onr men of letters —and we in our homes, our cities—seek in a thousand different contradictory directions for the sure, th« undeniable beauty that the ancients pos'sessed so fully. Should one of us by any chance create, join together or discover a few lime, a harmony of form and colour, that should incontestably prova that the mysterious, decisive point had been attained, , it would be regarded os the merest-hazard, as an isolated and precious phenomenon, and neither tht author nor any one else would be abla to repeat it.—Maurice Maeterlinck is "The Fortnightly Eeview."