  What is the nature of beauty such that it can achieve these ends through the communication of truth and goodness? Du Bois never states a clear answer to this  question.[41]  But he offers clues to an answer in “Of Beauty and Death,” chapter 9 of Darkwater.  In that essay, his most sustained reflection on the nature of beauty, Du Bois contrasts beauty to “ugliness and hate and ill…with all their contradiction and illogic;” beauty, he writes, “is fulfillment. It satisfies. It is always new and strange. It is the reasonable thing” (1920, 120). Perhaps Du Bois’s point is an expressivist one: that beauty satisfies by clarifying our ideas of truth (at once consistent and reasonable) and goodness (the opposite of hate and ill); that is, by embodying those ideas in novel and unsettling works of art.