In fact, the beauty we affect is aggressively spiritual, and in so far as beauty is demonstrably physical we dismiss it with disdain. Our ideal, indeed, might be said to consist in a beauty which is beautiful in spite of the body rather than by means of it; a beauty defiantly clothed, so to say, in the dowdiest of fleshly garments—radiantly independent of such carnal conditions as features or complexion. Our ideal of figure might be said to be negative rather than positive, and that "little sister" mentioned in Solomon's Song would bring us no disappointment.
We are often heard to say that beauty consists chiefly, if not entirely, in expression, that it is a transfiguration from within rather than a gracious condition of the surface, that the shape of a nose is no matter, and that a beautifully rounded chin or a fine throat has nothing to do with it—indeed, is rather in the way than otherwise. We point to the fact—which is true enough—that the most famous beauties of antiquity were plain women—plain, that is, according to the conventional standards.
We also maintain—again with perfect truth—that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination. These and other perfectly true truths about beauty we discover through our devotion to the one face that we love—and we should hardly have discovered them had we begun with the merely cherry-ripe. It is with faces much as it is with books. There is no way of attaining a vital catholic taste in literature so good as to begin by mastering some difficult beautiful classic, by devoting ourselves in the ardent receptive period of youth to one or two masterpieces which will serve as touchstones for us in all our subsequent reading. Some books engage all our faculties for their appreciation, and through the keen attentiveness we are compelled to give them we make personal discovery of those principles and qualities of all fine literature which otherwise we might never have apprehended, or in which, at all events, we should have been less securely grounded.
So with faces: it is through the absorbed worship, the jealous study, of one face that we best learn to see the beauty in all the other faces—though the mere thought that our apprehension of its beauty could ever lead us to so infidel a conclusion would seem heresy indeed during the period of our dedication. The subtler the type, the more caviare it is to the general, the more we learn from it. We become in a sense discoverers, original thinkers, of beauty, taking nothing on authority, but making trial and investigation always for ourselves. Such beauty brings us nearer than the more explicit types to that mysterious threshold over which beauty steps down to earth and dwells among us; that well-spring of its wonder; the point where first its shining essence pours its radiance into the earthly vessel.
The perfect physical type hides no little of its own miracle through its sheer perfection, as in the case of those masterpieces which, as we say, conceal their art. It is often through the face externally less perfect, faces, so to say, in process of becoming beautiful, that we get glimpses of the interior light in its divine operation. We seem to look into the very alembic of beauty, and see all the precious elements in the act of combination. No wonder we should deem these faces the most beautiful of all, for through them we see, not beauty made flesh, but beauty while it is still spirit. In our eager fanaticism, indeed, we cannot conceive that there can be beauty in any other types as well. Yet, because we chance to have fallen under the spell of Botticelli, shall there be no more Titian? Our taste is for a beauty of dim silver and faded stars, a wistful twilight beauty made of sorrow and dreams, a beauty always half in the shadow, a white flower in the moonlight. We cannot conceive how beauty, for others, can be a thing of the hot sun, a thing of purple and orange and the hot sun, a thing of firm outlines, superbly concrete, marmoreal, sumptuous, magnificently animal.
The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks. How should we understand a beauty that is vociferously gay, a beauty of dash and dance, a beauty of swift and brilliant ways, victoriously alive?
Perhaps it were well for us that we should never understand, well for us that we should preserve our singleness of taste through life. Some contrive to do this, and never as long as they live are unfaithful to the angel-blue eyes of their boyish love. Moralists have perhaps not realized how much continence is due to a narrowness of aesthetic taste. Obviously the man who sees beauty only in blue eyes is securer from temptation than the man who can see beauty in brown or green eyes as well; and how perilous is his state for whom danger lurks in all beautiful eyes, irrespective of shape, size, or colour! And, alas! it is to this state of eclecticism that most of us are led step by step by the Mephistopheles of experience.
As great politicians in their maturity are usually found in the exact opposite party to that which they espoused in their youth, so men who loved blondness in boyhood are almost certain to be found at the feet of the raven-haired in their middle age, and vice versa. The change is but a part of that general change which overtakes us with the years, substituting in us a catholic appreciation of the world as it is for idealist notions of the world as we see it, or desire it to be. It is a part of that gradual abdication of the ego which comes of the slow realization that other people are quite as interesting as ourselves—in fact, a little more so,—and their tastes and ways of looking at things may be worth pondering, after all. But, O when we have arrived at this stage, what a bewildering world of seductive new impressions spreads for us its multitudinous snares! No longer mere individuals, we have not merely an individual's temptations to guard against, but the temptations of all the world. Instead of being able to see only that one type of beauty which first appealed to us, our eyes have become so instructed that we now see the beauty of all the other types as well; and we no longer scorn as Philistine the taste of the man in the street for the beauty that is robustly vital and flamboyantly contoured. Once we called it obvious. Now we say it is "barbaric," and call attention to its perfection of type.
The remembrance of our former injustice to it may even awaken a certain tenderness towards it in our hearts, and soon we find ourselves making love to it, partly from a vague desire to make reparation to a slighted type, and partly from the experimental pleasure of loving a beauty the attraction of which it was once impossible for us to imagine. So we feel when the charm of some old master, hitherto unsympathetic, is suddenly revealed to us. Ah! it was this they saw. How blind they must have thought us!
Brown eyes that I love, will you forgive me that I once looked into blue eyes as I am looking now into yours? Hair black as Erebus, will you forgive these hands that once loved to bathe in a brook of rippled gold? Ah! they did not know. It was in ignorance they sinned. They did not know.