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Just as I sprang toward him his frame stiffened and straightened and he slipped from the chair and fell heavily to the floor, where he lay limp, unbreathing, sprawled upon the bare boards in all the pitiful ugliness of death. I was terribly frightened. For a moment wild thoughts raced through my brain foolish impulses of flight lest I be found with the body and somehow be held responsible.
I’ve an idea that that feeling is just plain ugliness coming to life!” Truax came back from the door, a grin on his face. Yet, when he turned his head away, there was a queer, almost deadly flash in the fellow’s eyes. Jack slept, uneasily, until towards the middle of the afternoon.
It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about this; what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually were these were the matters of his waking dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced farther into the gay ugliness the shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery.
In a week the extreme ugliness of the newborn child had vanished. Its face, which had seemed carved in the imitation of a monkey's face from half a brick, became the face of a happy and healthy baby. It seemed to see things, and sometimes it would laugh and chuckle as though it had been told a good joke. Its black hair all came off and was supplanted by a sort of down. It had no teeth.
The cabin was drawn in with careless angles and lines by a mere stroke or two; and surely no painter, no builder save the utilitarian backwoodsman, would have left it with no relief of trees behind it, no vineyard, no garden, no orchard, no background, naught; in its gaunt simplicity and ugliness it stood against its own ill-tended fields flattening away in the rear.
"That wouldn't have been beautiful, Fraulein, and art ceases when ugliness begins." "Do you think the song in your cloak it dropped on the ground and Nico picked it up beautiful or ugly?" "This one or the other?" "I mean the Beggar-song." "It is fierce, but no more ugly than the roaring of the storm." "It is repulsive, barbarous, revolting." "I call it strong, overmastering in its power."
The Frenchmen of to-day are no longer the big fair men of old; the Greeks are no longer beautiful enough to serve as a sculptor's model; the very face of the Romans has changed as well as their character; the Persians, originally from Tartary, are daily losing their native ugliness through the intermixture of Circassian blood.
Up the rocky sides from the water's edge, bravely clinging to nook and cranny, running along ledges, hanging trembling to ragged edges, boldly climbing up to the forest, were all spring's myriad tender things wherewith she redeems Nature from winter's ugliness. From the river below came gusts of misty wind, waves of sound of the water's many voices.
That was Potterism, the welcoming of ugliness and prosperity; the antithesis of the artist's spirit, which loved beauty for what it was, and did not want to exploit it. Their landlady, said Juke, on Sunday, had looked coldly on him when he went out with his fishing rod in the morning.
They despise those qualities in a work which are cheap and obvious. They like a monopoly of taste and are shocked at the prostitution of intellect implied in popular productions. In like manner, they would choose a friend or recommend a mistress for gross defects; and tolerate the sweetness of an actress's voice only for the ugliness of her face.
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