These upshootings in "Don Juan" irradiate the
cantos, giving an attractiveness which draws to them eyes that
otherwise would not have known them; and if too pure in their light
and too remote to mingle directly with the flare and flash that dazzle
without illuminating, silently they shine and steadily, an unconscious
heavenly influence, above these coruscations of earthly
thoughts,--thoughts telling from their lively numerousness, but
neither grand nor deep.
From the same solar center fall frequently single rays that make lines
and stanzas glisten, and but for which this poem, lacking their
perfusive light, would soon pass into oblivion; for from the
beautiful it is that the satire, the wit, the voluptuousness get their
sparkle and their sheen. If passages morally censurable are hereby
made more captivating, we are not content with saying that God's sun
fructifies and beautifies poison-oak and hemlock; but we affirm that
the beautiful, being by its nature necessarily pure, communicates of
its quality to whoever becomes aware of it, and thus in some measure
counterweighs the lowering tendency. Moreover, the morally bad,
deriving its character of evil from incompleteness, from the arresting
or the perversion of good, like fruit plucked unripe, and being
therefore outside the pale of the beautiful (the nature of which is
completeness, fullness, perfection of life) cannot by itself be made
captivating through the beautiful.
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