“Not always,” said I, “not if it were blended into the landscape, and mellowed.”
“No,” Henry answered, “perhaps not, if the colors were beautiful.”
“But if it were ugly,” I said, “it would be inharmonious. A newly burnt forest suggests death and desolation in the midst of life and summer—an incongruity. It suggests destruction where the thought is most unwelcome and horrible.”
“Then,” said Marian, “it is not the thing itself, but the feeling which it gives us, that is beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said, “it gives us the thrill of that complete joy. We seem to see something which is what cannot be; complete harmony. The sight of the sea makes Virginia feel so. And you, the out-of-doors.”
Virginia said: “I have sometimes thought beauty is light, because the sun is most beautiful—and, at night, the moon.”
“But,” said I, “if there were no shadows and no darkness, sun and moon would not be beautiful.”
“Then contrast?” she asked.
I said: “There must be contrast in all beautiful things, because without contrast we could not have completeness.”
“Yes,” she said, “in pictures it is so.”