A THING OF BEAUTY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23631, 15 October 1938, Page 21

A THING OF BEAUTY

By Edwin J. Tapp.

I have looked upon as lovely a sunset as I can remember ever having seen. A calm, shimmering sea, lazily slapping on a sandy shore, red roofed cottages squatting serenely beneath towering cliffs that slope away to grassy hills, a cloudflecked sky—all transmuted into an experience of ineffable joy by a magical suffusion of colour! The delicate flush of dying day conjured out of this natural setting a revelation. Enraptured I was awed to silence. It was an aesthetic whole. To attempt to analyse the experience into a number of component parts is to lose sight of the essential element which gave it the arresting appeal. The secret of its loveliness lay in its unity. Here was the world bathed in living colour by the light of the setting sun, -transforming the prosaic comeliness of earth into a scenic poem. We can no more analyse such moments to any good purpose than we can hope to appreciat: a sonnet by parsing every word. We can only stare, and know with an overwhelming certainty that for a brief moment we have become part of the eternal,

poised in the infinite. We are as Francis Thompson so exquisitely puts it: “Lulled on the luminous levels of air.”

The everyday matter-of-fact world assumes an ethereal aspect, revealing the uncharted which surrounds us on every side. The feelings we experience from a sunset may also be gained from the apprehension of any thing of beauty to a greater or less degree. Beauty resides everywhere. So long as the wonder spirit is alive in us and our finer susceptibilities are not dulled by over-absorption in the grossest considerations of life, we shall find aesthetic stimuli _ in the simplest of things. A dancing shadow, a falling leaf, a ripple on the waters, a humble blade of grass, are in their relatively obscure way pregnant with the spirit of beauty Seen through our sensitive inner eyes, they, too, reflect “the master light of all our seeing.” They, too. can in a subtle, indefinable way become part of us, become infused into the being by the assimilation of their qualitative values. That is the way of art: it is the way of all experience.

A thing of beauty is never a pure aesthetic experience to us, for the very sensuous elements in it seem charged with something transcending the material stuff of which it is made. It pulsates with the spirit of reality, which is inherent in all things. Hence through the apprehension of the beautiful in life we become more acutely aware of our relationship with the universe. Briefly, we became as one with reality, which is suddenly revealed to us with an unerring and intense directness. And a glimpse of reality, momentary though it may be. is a glimpse of truth. Hence the apprehension of beauty is the recognition of truth, for both are aspects of one and the same thing—the ultimate nature of the universe. It may well be, then, that our aesthetic enjoyment is derived from a vague realisation that we are excitinglv near the inscrutable absolute truth itself. Perhaps, then, a thing of beauty is so only in so far as it is true. The revealing visions that we get from the contemplation of things beautiful would seem to affirm Keats’s dictum. “ Beauty is Truth. Truth Beauty.”