Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases. It will never
Pass into nothingness.
The poetry of earth is never dead.
John Keats penned the above poem (To Autumn). The initial lines, where beauty and truth equal each other, are the heart throb of every heart beating with romanticism in it's veins. This being a lower case romance and not the upper case Romance (though perhaps of this one too).
Oscar Wilde culminated the Aesthetic movement (begun by Keats) with his death, yet before his death in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray one of the characters says, "And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty....Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."
Beauty cannot be equalled to either Truth or Genius. It is neither above nor beneath these two virtues. Rather Beauty must occupy its proper rank right alongside them. Too many times we underestimate the value (and even virtue) of Beauty. On the other hand I do believe that both Keats and Wilde overestimated it in their equalizations of it to Truth and Genius. It is poetically wonderful (and accurate) though to note that Beauty does indeed not require explanation. No one explains the sublime Beauty of sunlight or other such wonderful and yet natural phenomenons. More so, then, with a human. Male and female - these two must and often do compose the essence of what is Beautiful. They must and also often do compose the essence of Truth and Genius. Unfortunately humans do not always succeed in doing what they must. They, or rather, we, fail at being Beautiful, Truthful, or Genius.
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