They are the forms with which nature has made us familiar, and we
seek to perpetuate them. But if the conventionally beautiful form is allied
with spiritual ugliness it ceases to be beautiful to us, and if the
conventionally ugly form is allied with spiritual beauty that beauty
irradiates the physical deficiency. The soul dominates the senses. Francis
Thompson expresses the idea very beautifully when he says:--
I cannot tell what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her features for her soul.
As birds see not the casement for the sky.
But there is another sense in which beauty is the most matter-of-fact
thing. I can conceive that if the human family had developed only one eye,
and that planted in the centre of the forehead, the appearance of a person
with two eyes would be as offensive to our sense of beauty as a hand that
consisted not of fingers but of thumbs. We should go to the show to see the
two-eyed man with just the same feelings as we go now to see the bearded
woman. We should not go to admire his two eyes, any more than we go to
admire the beard; we should go to enjoy a pleasant sense of disgust at his
misfortune and a comfortable satisfaction at the fact that we had not been
the victims of such a calamity.
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