LIMITATIONS OF BEAUTY
An analogy is to be seen at the theatre in the reception of the
public's favourite actors: the spectators are no longer conscious of
the beauty or ugliness which the actors have in reality. Lekain, for
all his remarkable ugliness, had a harvest of broken hearts--Garrick
also. There are several reasons for this; the principal being that it
was no longer the actual beauty of their features or their ways which
people saw, but emphatically that which imagination was long since used
to lend them, as a return for, and in memory of, all the pleasure they
had given it. Why, take a comedian--his face alone raises a laugh as he
first walks on.
A girl going for the first time to the Français would perhaps feel some
antipathy to Lekain during the first scene; but soon he was making her
weep or shiver--and how resist him as Tancrède[1] or Orosmane?
If his ugliness were still a little visible to her eyes, the fervour
of an entire audience, and the nervous effect produced upon a young
heart,[2] soon managed to eclipse
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it. If anything was still heard about his ugliness, it was mere talk;
but not a word of it--Lekain's lady enthusiasts could be heard to
exclaim "He's lovely!"
Remember that beauty is the expression of character, or, put
differently, of moral habits, and that consequently it is exempt from
all passion. Now it is passion that we want. Beauty can only supply us
with probabilities about a woman, and probabilities, moreover, based on
her capacity for self-possession; while the glances of your mistress
with her small-pox scars are a delightful reality, which destroys all
the probabilities in the world.
[1] See Madame de Staël in _Delphine_, I think; there you have the
artifice of plain women.
[2] I should be inclined to attribute to this nervous sympathy the
prodigious and incomprehensible effect of fashionable music. (Sympathy
at Dresden for Rossini, 1821.) As soon as it is out of fashion, it
becomes no worse for that, and yet it ceases to have any effect upon
perfectly ingenuous girls. Perhaps it used to please them, as also
stimulating young men to fervour.
Madame de Sévigné says to her daughter (Letter 202, May 6, 1672):
"Lully surpassed himself in his royal music; that beautiful _Miserere_
was still further enlarged: there was a _Libera_ at which all eyes were
full of tears."
It is as impossible to doubt the truth of this effect, as to refuse wit
or refinement to Madame de Sévigné. Lully's music, which charmed her,
would make us run away at present; in her day, his music encouraged
crystallisation--it makes it impossible in ours.
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