dream of eternal beauty, which a Greek urn or a nightingale's song
brought to Keats, and the fatal word 'forlorn', bringing back the light
of common day, dispelled. The old ethical and aesthetic canons are
submerged in a passion for life which finds a good beyond good and evil,
and a beauty born of ugliness more vital than beauty's self. 'The worth
of a drama is measured', said D'Annunzio, 'by its fullness of life', and
the formula explains, if it does not justify, those tropical gardens,
rank with the gross blooms of 'superhuman' eroticism and ferocity, to
which he latterly gave that name. And we know how Maeterlinck has
emerged from the mystic dreams and silences of his recluse chamber to
unfold the dramatic pugnacities of Birds and Bees.

Even the downright foulness and ugliness which some people find so
puzzling in poets with an acute delight in beauty, like Mr. Masefield,
come into it not from any aesthetic obtuseness, but because these
uglinesses are full of the zest of drama, of things being done or made,
of life being lived. When Masefield sounded his challenge to the old
aesthetics:

'Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth',

he knew well, as _The Everlasting Mercy_ and _The Widow of Bye Street_
showed, that dirt and dross, if wrought into tragedy, can win a higher
beauty than the harmonies of idyll. Even the hideous elder women in Mr.
Bottomley's _Lear's Wife_, or his Regan--an ill-conditioned girl,
sidling among the 'sweaty, half-clad cook-maids' after pig-killing,
'smeary and hot as they', participate in this beauty and energy of
doing.