It is the same with literature. In “Jane Eyre” the “subject” is more tangible and vivid than in “Villette,” but the latter is the finer book, because the technical skill is greater, the insight deeper. “There are no good subjects or bad subjects,” says Hugo; “there are only good poets and bad poets.” Any subject is interesting when a master-mind presents it in full significance. A custom-house is a prosaic thing, and a custom-house that has neither exports nor imports, but only a few sleepy old pensioners dozing in the sun, might be thought a dull subject for a writer; but Hawthorne’s imagination and subtlety of literary expression clothe it with both beauty and significance. Even the noblest and most tragic deeds find their best justification in a sublime harmony of beauty. The Greeks knew this well. Euripides, in “The Trojan Women,” puts on the lips of Hecuba these words:-- “Had He not turned us in his hand, and thrust Our high things low and shook our hills as dust, We had not been this splendor, and our wrong An everlasting music for the song Of earth and heaven!”[3] Deeds, monuments, cities, and civilizations fade into nothingness, but a few words, or a strain of music turned by an artist, will live on forever. The battle of Gettysburg will become merely a paragraph of history, the causes for which it was fought will be as nothing, but the words spoken by Lincoln will be preserved for all time, not because they were wise, but because they were wise and beautiful. There is no escape from this condition. An occasional great writer has railed at beauty, only to prove finally that his own permanence depended on it. Carlyle, for example, was more caustic than usual when he discussed poetry. His comment on Browning’s “The Ring and the Book” ran thus: “A wonderful book, one of the most wonderful ever written. I re-read it all through--all made out of an ‘Old Bailey’ story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting.” Yet the best part of “Sartor Resartus” is its beauty, and there are in “The French Revolution” many passages of quite perfect poetic imagery and characterization without which it would lose much of its value. What we call “Carlyle” is no longer a man; nor is it a philosophy, or a history; it is nothing but a _style_, a manner of saying things--an individual, characteristic, and strange blend of hard and soft, of high and low, of rugged and tender, all struggling with a Puritanical conscience. So we say that beauty is the lodestone by which all life is tested. No game can be perfectly played unless the physical motions are timed in beauty; no machine will act save in perfect synthesis; no character is strong until it attains a harmony within itself. Beauty is the matrix in which life shall be finally moulded.