The Last Books of H.G. Wells by HG Wells

Author:HG Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Published: 2013-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

IX

THE DIVINE TIMELESSNESS OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS

THE OTHER DAY the Happy Turning took me to the sunlit sweetness of the Elysian fields, and sometimes, after the manner of Dreamland, it seemed to me I was talking to a great number of poets, painters, artists, makers of every sort, and sometimes that I was just talking to myself, and the talk was all about the beautiful things that man has got out of this unrighteous world, and whether there can ever be another happy harvest of Beauty, and, if so, what sort of harvest it may be.

A point we found we were all agreed upon was that Beauty is eternal and final, a joy for ever. There is no progress in it and no decline. You cannot go beyond it. You may make replicas of it; you may record and imitate it, you can destroy it for yourself and others, obliterate it and blaspheme it, but you cannot do away with its invincible divinity. Even when it is a lost God, a Beauty is still God, a being in itself, serene, untroubled, above all the accidents of space and time.

But what we had most in mind was this, that there is a definite limit set to the abundance of any particular Beauty. It is discovered, it is revealed, and that is its end. That God has smiled and passed and returns no more. Other Gods may smile in their turn, and they too will pass away.

We cited instances of these immortal visitations.

There was, said a classical scholar, that gracious beauty which was distilled by Hellenic poets and sculptors out of the vast confusion of antique mythology. It has lit this dull world for all its lovers with an inalienable charm. Pan and the dryads haunt the woodlands, the naiads bathe in the stream, Diana steals down the beams of misty silver to Endymion, and eternally amidst the glittering waters, Triton blows his wreathed horn.

“But one thing goes on,” said a man who called himself an anthologist, “and that is the creative magic in English poetic creation.” Which threw us all into an intricate disputation that carried us over the whole field of English literature and drama and was shot with a flashing multitude of interests and surprises. “There is not one single Goddess here,” we agreed, “but a varied sisterhood, and most of these sisters are wantons and have led lives that make the Olympians seem by comparison calm and consistent and at least superficially decorous.” Gradually we begin to disentangle the preoccupations of these lively Beauties.

There is that lost Goddess of beautiful English who, with little Latin and less Greek, played with it so delightfully in Shakespearian days and was finally murdered by her Latin lover in a fit of jealousy because she flirted with the far more lively colloquial scullion downstairs. She came to her tragic end before the Stuarts were done for. For a while she lay calm and rigid in death before her ultimate decay. All that Swift

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