Commonplace Book

'"Beauty lies far deeper than most people are willing to suppose. It consists in the true relation of things to themselves. Everything natural is beautiful."
[...]
"Every action, expression, aspect, rightly understood, is beautiful in as far as it is spontaneous and according to nature. And by that I don't only mean nature groomed, and rubbed down, and in magnificent condition, like a prize animal at a show. I am not going back to any mythic golden age for my beauty - not to impossible gods and goddesses in marble."

"You acknowledge the antique as the basis of instruction, surely?" gasped Mr Barwell.

"No, not as the basis - most emphatically not as the basis. That is getting hold of quite the wrong end of the stick. Work towards perfection, if you like - if you can - if perfection exists; but to begin with it and work back from it is a self-evident mistake, I should say, contrary to all known laws of development. By setting your students down opposite to those faultless marble impossibilities you create a false standard in their minds. Nature does not come up to that standard; consequently, when you show them Nature, they despise her. Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. Nature is the good; it is an impiety as well as a stupidity to discredit her by filling your students' minds with dreams of a non-existent better. The very best life model you can get looks defective after the Apollos, and Venuses, and all those other ill-conducted classic divinities whom it is customary to make such free use of in the education of English youth. The final measure must always be Nature. Why not send your students to her at once? Why use lies, in short, as a preface to the truth? And why be afraid to take the truth as a whole? I find Nature is full of imperfection, failure, pain, of irony, and of humour of a very broad literal kind. Well, I accept her unhappy and malign aspects as just as true as her happy and benign ones. After a tremendous struggle we have come to understand, thanks chiefly to Turner and Constable - some of the younger men are beginning already to forget or ignore the lesson, though, I am afraid - that rain and storm and cloud are at least as beautiful as clear sky and sunshine, the elements at war as beautiful as the elements at peace. Well, I want to carry that understanding further and deeper. I want to show that, if intelligently looked at, poverty, disease, sorrow, decay, death, sin - yes, I am not much afraid of the word - are ideally beautiful too, paintable too, intrinsically and enduringly poetic."'

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