Now, a passion for ugliness like this is really a revolt against ugliness,--not the tender-skinned æsthete's revolt, which consists in denying ugliness and escaping into a remote dream, but the strong man's, the poet's,--the revolt that is in effect a seizing of ugliness in all its repulsiveness and giving it a reason for existence by embodying it in a chosen pattern that is beautiful. By this method the poet masters emotion, even unpleasant emotion, making it subservient to a decorative design dictated by his own sense of proportion. It is thus that he is able to endure the world of actualities, and to find it comparable in interest with the world of his own thoughts. And by this process he saves himself from the sharpest bite of evil. For there is a curious consolation in transforming a spontaneous cry into a calculated work of art. By such a process one can give, to elements that before seemed only parts of a torturing chaos, their ordered places in a known scheme. One can impose propitious form upon one's recollections, and create a little world of design-relations where the poignancy of experience is lost in the discipline of beauty. It is for this reason that the poet must be considered, in spite of everything, the happiest of men. THE NEW LOYALTY GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER Back to the Old Greek for a starting-point! Two seeds, of the same species, though distant in space and time, go through an identical development. Root corresponds with root, stem with stem, flower with flower, fruit with fruit. Something seems to control all this change. It is not mere change. It is change with a plan, a purpose, a pattern. Hence the Greek said that there must be an unchanging type, a fixed "idea," a spiritual, invisible norm, the "first" and "final" cause of all this change, to which all concrete, particular plants of the species are true. Back of the visible tangible plant must be its _Eidos_, its eternal norm, form, idea, "species." So with everything. An elaboration of this conclusion gives the real unchanging, fixed eternal world back of, underpinning, supporting this visible changing, temporal world. Such a world-view as this was made more valuable and more imperative by the break-up of the traditional morals and religion of the Greek state. The search for the _meaning_ of life was precipitated by the disintegration of social sanctions and of the guarantees of custom. This search was voiced in the questionings of Socrates. It was made serious by the menacing individualism of the sophists. The outcome was that stability, security, confidence were found in the Platonic doctrine. Back of this ephemeral world is the real world of "ideas," the unchanging and eternal, upon which we may rest our minds and hearts amid all this disappointing and desperate flux.