CHAPTER VIII.
THE BEAUTIFUL.
'Tweet!' cried the sparrows, 'it is nothing! It only looks like something. Tweet! that is the beautiful. Can you make anything of it? I can't?'
Hans Andersen.
'How exceedingly successful,' observed Queen Mab one day, 'the Permanent Scarecrows have been!'
'The Permanent Scarecrows?' said the Owl.
The winged and gifted pair had been on another visit to London, and Mab had found rows on rows of stucco houses, where she had left green fields, running brooks, and hedges white with may, on the northern side of the Strand.
'Yes 'said Mab 'you hardly ever see a crow now, where, in my time, the farmers were so much plagued by the furtive bird. But, as the crows have been thoroughly frightened off, and as there are now no crops to protect, I do think they might remove the permanent scarecrows.'
'Your Majesty's meaning,' said the Owl, 'is beginning to dawn on me. True, in your time there were no statues in London, and the mistake into which you have fallen is natural. You went away before the great development of British Art, and British Sculpture, and British worship of Beauty. The monuments you notice are expressive of our love of loveliness, our devotion to all that is fair. These objects of which you complain are not meant to alarm predatory fowls (though well calculated for that purpose) but to commemorate heroes, often themselves more or less predatory.'
'Do you mean to tell me?' asked Mab, 'that that big burly scarecrow, about to mend a gigantic quill with a blunt sword, was a hero?'
'He was indeed,' said the Owl, 'though I admit that you would never have guessed it from his effigy.'
'And that other scarecrow, all claws and beak, who blocks up the narrow street where the Dragon worshippers throng? Was he a hero?'