Chapter 6
Beauty in nature, persons and works; taste; the relation of the beautiful to the good and the true.
875 passages · 314 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Beauty is the most familiar of the great ideas and the least willing to be pinned down. In these volumes it covers the loveliness of landscapes, faces and made things, the faculty of taste by which we judge them, and the old question of how the beautiful stands to the good and the true. It is a great idea for these books because nearly every kind of writer in them touches it. The philosopher asks what it is. The scientist wonders why a flower is coloured. The lyric poet catalogues his mistress’s features. The traveller tries and fails to describe a sunset. Few other ideas gather so wide a company, and few leave their disputants so far from agreement.
The oldest answer makes beauty a gift from above. Plato’s Socrates holds that nothing makes a thing beautiful except the presence and participation of beauty itself, not its colour or shape1. Augustine finds that the beautiful patterns in craftsmen’s hands descend from a Beauty above the soul, a rule for judging them though not for using them2. Shelley sings of a universal Beauty that each thing mirrors3. Poe speaks of an immortal instinct in man that strives toward a “supernal” Beauty beyond earthly forms4,5. Emerson says every beautiful object holds something immeasurable and divine6.
A second family of answers looks for beauty in the structure of the thing itself. Coleridge defines it as unity in multeity, the shapely joined with the vital, and holds it independent of interest or use7,8. Schiller calls it “living form,” in which form lives in feeling and life in understanding9,10. Emerson insists that all beauty is organic, resting on necessity and economy, and that outside embellishment is deformity11,12. Yet the same writers often confess that definition fails. Schiller says the beautiful is a mystery that analysis extinguishes13. Pascal observes that poetical beauty, unlike mathematical beauty, has no known object14. Arnold holds that high poetic beauty is felt rather than defined15. Emerson declines to define beauty at all and only enumerates its marks16.
Against all of these, Burke offers a frankly sensuous definition. Beauty is the set of qualities in bodies that cause love or some similar passion17. They act mechanically on the mind through the senses and not through reason18, and he locates their effect even in a relaxing of the body’s solids19.
The longest quarrel concerns proportion. Augustine wrote books on the “fair and fit.” He defined the fair as what is beautiful in itself and the fit as beauty in correspondence to something else20,21. Cervantes’s canon says delight springs from the conformity of parts to the whole22. Browne finds music in harmony, order and proportion23, and Hume places the beauty of a work in the correspondence of its parts24. Emerson can still say that the love of beauty is mainly the love of measure25.
Burke attacks this whole tradition. The rose and the orange-tree are beautiful despite disproportion26. The swan and the peacock differ widely in their proportions, yet both are beautiful27. The proportions of the human body are found in the ugly and the beautiful alike28. Fitness fares no better. The swine’s snout is useful and not beautiful29, and fitness earns our approbation, not our love30. Perfection is not the cause either, since beauty is often joined to weakness and distress31. He explains the prestige of proportion as our fondness for our own works and the lingering influence of Platonic fitness32.
The question of use divides others as well. Faraday argues that the best-acting thing, not the best-looking, has the true beauty33. Emerson replies that a flower proudly asserts that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world34. Schiller sees the beginning of humanity in the moment when the useless becomes man’s best joy35. Newman notes that the light and colour of Attica are invisible to a utilitarian surveyor36.
Burke goes on to name the qualities of the beautiful: smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy and mild, clear colour37,38,39,40. He finds them answered across the senses, in touch and in sound41,42. Bacon had placed the best beauty instead in graceful motion and “some strangeness” of proportion, beyond any rule43. Emerson calls beauty the moment of transition and holds that expression triumphs over mere form44,45.
Burke sets the beautiful firmly against the sublime. The beautiful rests on positive pleasure and excites love, while the sublime rests on terror and astonishment46,47. Mazzini makes the pair a contrast of temperaments, with Goethe seeking the beautiful and Byron the sublime48.
Ugliness receives surprisingly generous treatment. Marcus Aurelius finds a peculiar beauty in the cracks of baked bread and the foam of a boar, as consequences of nature’s working49,50. Browne holds that no creature is truly ugly, since all conform to God’s will51. Hugo makes the point a modern manifesto. The ancient type of beauty, he argues, grew conventional and monotonous, and the grotesque set beside it lets us rise to the beautiful with fresher perception52,53. Tennyson’s Maud, “Faultily fauldess, icily regular, splendidly null,” shows how perfection without living defect can chill54.
The beauty of nature fills the travellers’ pages. Raleigh’s Guiana seems made by art55. Dana watches the iceberg’s indigo pinnacles, which he finds beyond any painter’s picture56,57. Darwin compares the view from the Peuquenes to a chorus of the Messiah58, and he confesses that the multitude of tropical beauties cannot be retained59. Emerson declares that every landscape lies under a necessity of being beautiful60.
Whether knowledge dims such delight is an open question here. The scientists answer that it does not. Mill finds that knowing a cloud to be vapour does not hinder feeling its beauty61. Darwin says that understanding each part heightens the enjoyment of scenery, as it does with music62. Helmholtz finds the mountains more magnificent once glaciers are understood63. Darwin also unsettles the older piety, however. He rejects the idea that structures were made for beauty to delight man. Flowers are coloured to attract insects, and the sense of beauty varies among races64,65. Much of nature’s beauty is owed to sexual selection, while the origin of the sense of beauty itself remains unknown66,67. Beside such passages stand the imagined paradises: Plato’s upper earth, fairer than anything here68, Dante’s flowery valley69, and Milton’s heaven on earth70.
Human beauty is most often met in praise. Nausicaa outshines her companions like Artemis among nymphs71. The Thousand and One Nights compares women to moon and sun72. Spenser, Lodge and Burns catalogue hair, cheeks and lips feature by feature73,74,75. Quixote recites the conventional attributes of Dulcinea, whom he has never seen76,77. Burke observes that Helen moves us more through the elders’ reaction than through laboured description78. Plutarch similarly places Cleopatra’s allure less in her features than in her voice and presence79.
The power of beauty is a recurring theme. Adam finds that Eve’s loveliness makes wisdom seem degraded80. Dryden’s Ventidius beholds Cleopatra with malignant desire81. Cervantes’s Marcela protests that beauty, an unchosen gift of Heaven, obliges her to love no one82. Against such power the poets set its mortality. Daniel says beauty fades like dew83, Herrick warns the proud beauty that her day will pass84, and Milton’s Comus urges that beauty must be spent before it withers85. Burns answers that worth and truth outlast the bloom86,87. In Andersen’s tale the ugly duckling discovers that a despised form may hide the most beautiful of birds88.
In the arts, poetry claims the highest office. Shelley calls it the source of whatever is beautiful, and says it lays bare the sleeping beauty of forms89,90. Emerson makes the poet the man of Beauty91,92. Whitman democratizes the claim: beauty comes from beautiful blood and brain, and every trade and process shows its own beauty93,94. Cellini calls an antique marble boy a miracle of beauty and explains the science of its workmanship95.
Whether art surpasses nature is disputed. Jonson prefers sweet neglect to the “adulteries of art”96, and Crashaw’s ideal mistress needs no cosmetics97. Sheridan’s gossips mock painted faces98. Yet Shelley’s water images the forest “with more than truth”99. Andersen’s courtiers prefer the jewelled mechanical bird to the real nightingale, whose song moves the Emperor to tears100,101.
The kinship of beauty and goodness is ancient. Marcus Aurelius says simply that the good is beautiful and the bad ugly102. Sidney, following Plato, holds that virtue seen would ravish us with love of her beauty103. Montaigne thinks inner beauty of mind the worthier104, and Emerson finds a moral element in all high beauty105,106. Burke dissents. He holds that applying beauty to virtue confounds our ideas107.
The sign-question divides the writers. Hobbes defines the beautiful as the countenance that promises good108. Goethe’s pastor thinks a perfect body suggests a pure soul109. Hamlet, by contrast, says beauty will sooner corrupt honesty110, and Coleridge’s Geraldine is beautiful and corrupt111.
On beauty and truth, Keats’s urn makes the boldest identification112. Schiller asks more modestly that truth be given incarnate form through beauty so that feeling may grasp it113. Above both stands God. Augustine addresses God as Beauty ever ancient and ever new, while warning that fair forms must not occupy the soul instead of their Maker114,115. Dante marks his ascent by Beatrice’s growing beauty116. Molière’s Tartuffe shows the same doctrine turned to hypocrisy117.
Taste is where the moderns argue most. Pascal holds that each finds beauty by an inner model in himself, regulated by fashion and country118,119. Hume states the sceptical view fairly: beauty exists only in the mind, so no standard is possible120. He then replies that common sense refuses to rank Ogilby with Milton. The durable admiration of Homer reveals principles that hold universally121,122, and the joint verdict of delicate, practised critics is the standard123. He still allows legitimate variation from age and temperament124. Burke argues that nobody thinks a goose more beautiful than a swan, and that differences in taste come from differences in knowledge125,126.
Later writers loosen the standard. Wordsworth calls taste a passive faculty unfit for the sublime127. Hugo calls taste the common sense of genius and treats defects as inseparable from beauties128,129. Sainte-Beuve would rebuild the temple of taste to admit poets from every age and land130.
Schiller gives beauty its largest social role. Through beauty, he argues, we arrive at freedom131. The play instinct weds sense and reason and consummates humanity132,133. The aesthetic state yields no result for knowledge or will, yet restores the capacity for both134,135. Beauty alone, he concludes, makes man whole and unites society136.
Others dwell on beauty’s shadow. Poe finds a taint of sadness in all its higher manifestations137. Keats has beauty dwell with Melancholy138. Emerson holds that beauty remains forever inaccessible, so that the lover loses the maiden’s charm once she accepts him139.
The questions remain open. These books never decide whether beauty lies in the thing, as Burke’s qualities suggest, or in the mind, as Hume’s sceptic and Darwin’s varying races suggest. They also leave unsettled whether beauty is a rung toward the good and God, or a separate and even rival delight.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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See also: Quality 5a · Pleasure and Pain 1e · The Sublime 1b · Sense 5a
See also: The Sublime 1b · Emotion 5f
See also: The Sublime 1c · Art 3b · Poetry 9a
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