We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine.
If command, eloquence, art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher.
The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain.
Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, “With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle.
” It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, “he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England.”
“Since I am so ugly,” said Du Guesclin, “it behooves that I be bold.”
Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, “was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and long.”
Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.
If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowledge, ’tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all: whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole.
This is the triumph of expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of passing our lives with them insupportable.
There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features are.
When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.
Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before.
Still, “it was for beauty that the world was made.”
The lives of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own.
If a man can cut such a head-on his stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable meaning:—if a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.
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