Commonplace Book

'"Don't talk to me about beauty as if it was a thing by itself - a quantity, measurable, ponderable, producible or removable at will," he was saying - "as if it could be laid on, as a cabinetmaker lays on a veneer of precious wood over a plain deal surface; as if it could be bought and sold, taken hold of, carried about; as if you could put your finger on it and say, Here it is; or on the absence of it, and say, Here it is not. That is a horribly gross, carnal conception of it. Beauty is a spirit, and they that worship it must worship it in spirit and in truth - specially in truth, not in shams, and delusions, and pretences, and fashions, and affectations, which are precisely that in which the majority always have worshipped it, and always will worship it, I suppose, human nature being what it is, protest as one may. Beauty is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and yet it is always changing, shifting, showing you a fresh face, revealing itself anew. It is endlessly stable and endlessly fertile. It informs all things, and yet in a sense is nothing. You apprehend it more with your intellect than with your eyes. And that is what English people persistently refuse to understand. They are ruining their stage, as they have already ruined their picture-galleries, by the besotted belief that intellect has nothing to do with it; that beauty - which is only another word for art - begins and ends with an appeal to the eyes. We English plume ourselves on our respectability and decency, on avoiding the quagmire of sensuousness into which other nations fall. Only look at the walls of our exhibitions, look at the mise en scene of our theatres! I declare I believe we are the most sensuous nation on the face of the earth. The appeal is always to the eye, and to what are called the domestic affections. And the domestic affections are the biggest shams out. Legalized sensuousness - that is what the domestic affections amount to if you run them to earth."'

from The Wages of Sin by Lucas Malet (Book III, Chapter II)