" If you shudder at the touch of a withered hand or at the
sight of a one-eyed cat, it is because you feel that they are a menace to
the established forms of life. You are unconsciously playing the part of
policeman for nature. You are the guardian of its traditions when you blush
at the glance of two eyes and shudder at the glance of one.
And yet it is not impossible to fall in love with the physically defective
and sincerely to believe that they are beautiful. Take that incident
mentioned by Descartes. He said that when he was a child he used to play
with a little girl who had a squint, and that to the end of his days he
liked people who squinted. In this case it was the associations of memory
that gave a glamour to deformity and made it beautiful. The squint brought
back to him the memory of the Golden Age, and through the mist of that
memory it was transmuted into loveliness.
Nor is it memory alone that will work the miracle. Intellectual sympathy
will do it, too. Wilkes was renowned for his ugliness, but he claimed that,
given half an hour's start, he would win the smiles of any woman against
any competitor.
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