Ugliness

“ It is to one of the more delicate phases that we would point—to that phase of the contrast wherein the fight between the two qualities is seen progressing towards victory, and ugliness is not only overborne but overwhelmed by beauty. ”

“ Yet, so does my nature act and react, ever tumbling from the sublime to the ridiculous, that I had hardly realized the perfect human beauty before me when my mind began to drop down into one of its most annoying analytical moods, tearing, as it were, all soft and delicate covering from the face, and pointing mockingly to the hollow skull beneath, the framework alike of beauty and ugliness. ”

“ Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you? ”

“ If we knew beauty—human beauty; if we were familiar from childhood with the real proportions of the body; if we were familiar with pictures of the human figure, and then shown that same figure, the woman's, with her feet artificially mis-shapen and out of poise, her waist distorted, her head obscured, her every action hampered and confined,—we should see the ugliness of these things, as we do not now. ”

“ Defining ugliness provisionally as disorder, it may have a great attraction for the artist, it may even be the artist's sole attraction, and in converting it—the thing he despises most—into beauty, which we shall define provisionally as order, he reaches the zenith of his power. ”

“ The Increase of Beauty.—Why has beauty increased by the progress of civilisation? because the three occasions for ugliness appear ever more rarely among civilised men: first, the wildest outbursts of ecstasy; secondly, extreme bodily exertion, and, thirdly, the necessity of inducing fear by one's very sight and presence—a matter which is so frequent and of so great importance in the lower and more dangerous stages of culture that it even lays down the proper gestures and ceremonials and makes ugliness a duty. ”

“ But though ugliness be the opposite to beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness. For it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness to any uses. ”

“ She had been an ugly girl and an ugly woman, marked by the hopeless ugliness of a long, ill-proportioned face, small eyes, and a nose too large and high—that ugliness which even love’s eyes can scarcely ameliorate into good drawing. ”

“ Furthermore, unalleviated ugliness should ever go unpainted, as something unnecessary to duplicate. But the only ugliness is that of the heart, seen through the face. And though beauty be obvious, the only loveliness is invisible. ”

“ But when we listen to some attractive person, who has the power to describe what she feels, whose eyes and voice are equally eloquent, who charms us by her thoughts and attracts us by her conversation, do we pay any heed to her ugliness? ”

“ And, the human mind being what it is, it was but natural that the particular god of their worship came to be the very god of ugliness, a despiser of beauty who looked with jealousy on those who were won by it even as he did on those who kissed their hands to the rising moon. ”

“ UGLINESS We have a frequent moment when we see “more beauty in ugliness, which often penetrates our soul; the ugliness, in such a case, must show a sort of eagerness of hope, though vague and distant, of reshaping. ”

“ Just so fast as human intelligence advances, it finds that what seemed disorder is really governed by strictest order. You say, "We see ugliness as well as beauty,—what does that mean?" Ugliness serves its purpose in aiding by repulsion to train the sense of beauty. Beauty, and man's delight in it, is the end; ugliness, and our repulsion from it, is but an incident and means. You say, "We see wickedness,—what of that?" May we not hope that wickedness, in the broad survey of mankind's upward progress, is the stumbling of a child over its alphabet? ”

“ But one might perhaps rejoin again, “Yes, but in her infinite wealth of contexts and appearances, there is always ample opportunity for the selection of beautiful form, and therefore we have no right to pin her down to an ugliness which does really spring from our limitation.” You may reply again that if it is left to us there is just as much room for seeing ugliness as for seeing beauty. ”

“ The ugly are therefore for the most part wicked too, and the beautiful are good: and we may say that beauty is the pleasant, gay, acceptable and desirable face of good, and that ugliness is the dark, disagreeable, unpleasant and sad face of evil. And if you will consider all things, you will find that those which are good and useful always have a charm of beauty also. ”

“ And though of course you will meet ugliness in plenty—a cancer that will find you shocked and, alas, largely impotent—yet, if you look long enough, and carefully enough, how often will you discover it to be but the shadow of some clearly shining spiritual beauty. ”

“ To be quite fair toward the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with servile, pompous, and trivial prose. ”

“ And though, indeed, beauty is transient, while ugliness endures, and there may be inconveniences, or even dangers in the impressions it makes on those who see you, still you would hardly convince me, young lady, that you are seriously annoyed at having such a face. ”

“ Thus, we may know numbers of persons who would certainly be ugly but for the redeeming expression; and this good expression, which is "feature in the making," is, like good features, an "outward sign of inward perfections."
To continue with the description of my young gentleman of blue blood and plebeian countenance, his expression not only saved him from ugliness but made him singularly attractive, it revealed a good nature, friendliness, love of his fellows, sincerity, and other pleasing qualities. ”

“ Hence, while they are an admiration to us, we shall be but a laughter to those that come behind us, and that whether their fashions be better than ours or no, for nothing is so ridiculous as ugliness out of date. ”

“ What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of great beauty.
“In the domain of fact we call ugly whatever is deformed, whatever is unhealthy, whatever suggests the idea of disease, of debility, or of suffering, whatever is contrary to regularity, which is the sign and condition of health and strength: a hunchback is ugly, one who is bandy-legged is ugly, poverty in rags is ugly. ”

“ The question is not, whether you or your sex prefer beauty to brains, but whether you prefer beauty to ugliness? It is curious to notice how this question is always confused in this way, by mixing up with it an element that does not properly belong to it. People say, 'Oh, a clever plain man before a handsome fool!' and then argue, as if all the plain men were necessarily clever, and all the handsome men imperatively fools."
"Well, I'm sure, handsome men generally are—not, perhaps, fools—but certainly not clever; they think of nothing but their beauty. Their beauty—the frights!" ”

“ Little more need be said about the disastrous ugliness which, with still rarer exception, pervades the whole work. There are those who like the ugly, and those—perhaps more numerous—who think they ought to like it. ”

“ On the other hand, absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty; but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life. ”

“ moral ugliness when interpreted by minds so clear and penetrating becomes a marvellous theme of beauty. ”

“ I think that our ugliness arises from our metaphysical remnants . our confused morals, the worthlessness of our marriages, and so on, are the cause. The beautiful man, the healthy, moderate, and enterprising man, moulds the objects around him into beautiful shapes after his own image. ”

“ We also call good the loathing of ugliness and the desire to suppress it; we therefore approve of deep suspicion towards ugliness and illness, and towards everything and everybody that attempts to give ugliness and illness fine-sounding and euphemistic names, and we cultivate a love of moderation and a loathing of excess. ”

“ nothing keeps me in such awe as perfect beauty—now there is something consoling and encouraging in ugliness. ”

“ The propriety and necessity of it is entirely relative to our experience and faculty of apperception. The shock of surprise, the incongruity with the formed percept, is the essence and measure of ugliness. ”

“ If the intentional attempt at beauty is the main condition of ugliness, then in nature the main condition of ugliness is certainly absent, while immeasurable stores of form and order are as certainly present for those who can elicit them. ”

“ Whatever is false, whatever is artificial, whatever seeks to be pretty rather than expressive, 47whatever is capricious and affected, whatever smiles without motive, bends or struts without cause, is mannered without reason; all that is without soul and without truth; all that is only a parade of beauty and grace; all, in short, that lies, is ugliness in art.
“When an artist, intending to improve upon nature, adds green to the springtime, rose to the sunrise, carmine to young lips, he creates ugliness because he lies. ”

“ If extreme ugliness were not repulsive I should prefer it to extreme beauty; for before very long the husband would cease to notice either, but beauty would still have its disadvantages and ugliness its advantages. ”

“ And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months. ”

“ It will not deny the facts of ugliness or decrepitude, or relative inferiority and33 superiority of feature as necessarily manifested in a crowd, but it will, so far as it is in its power, seek for and dwell upon the fairest forms, and in all things insist on the beauty that is in them, not on the ugliness. ”

“ A little more of the spirit of impartial investigation which is the method of science would have saved him from much foolish exaggeration about the exaltation of ugliness in ‘poetry, painting, sculpture, and all forms of human expression.’ There is much half-truth in the book, much restatement of the obvious. ”

“ Ugliness depresses: it is the sign of depression. It robs strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down, ... Ugliness suggests repulsive things. From one's [Pg 253] states of health one can test how an indisposition may increase one's power of fancying ugly things. One's selection of things, interests, and questions becomes different. Logic provides a state which is next of kin to ugliness: heaviness, bluntness. In the presence of ugliness equilibrium is lacking in a mechanical sense: ugliness limps and stumbles—the direct opposite of the godly agility of the dancer. ”

“ For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our intellectual discernment ”

“ Beauty being attractive and ugliness the reverse, if we invent a word for that which is neither, 'plainness,' it at once becomes tinged with the ugly. We seem to love beauty and morality so much as to be almost incapable of signifying their absence without expressing aversion. ”

“ For example, my desire to improve my knowledge leads me to minute appreciation and analysis of everything which interests me. In regard to the fine arts, I study the nude, human anatomy, generally with no emotion beyond passionate admiration for beauty. I never have been able to find beauty shameful: ugliness, yes. ”

“ day and night—ever bearing witness against man that he has deliberately chosen ugliness instead of beauty, and to live where he is strongest amidst squalor or blank emptiness. ”

“ The familiar proverb tells us that “beauty is only skin deep,” which nicely exemplifies the mendacity of proverbs; ugliness, it is true, is often skin deep, but beauty, never. Beauty, as I hope to be able to show, is something which depends upon the whole organism. ”

“ Beauty without wit offers love nothing but the material enjoyment of its physical charms, whilst witty ugliness captivates by the charms of the mind, and at last fulfils all the desires of the man it has captivated. ”

“ As to beauty—we do not think of expecting it save in the rarely exceptional case. Look at the faces—the figures—in any crowd you meet; compare the average man or the average woman with the normal type of human beauty as given us in picture and statue; and consider if there is not some general cause for so general a condition of ugliness. ”

“ Ugliness is understood to signify a hint and a symptom of degeneration: that which reminds us however remotely of degeneracy, impels us to the judgment “ugly.” Every sign of exhaustion, of gravity, of age, of fatigue; every kind of constraint, such as cramp, or paralysis; and above all the smells, colours and forms associated with decomposition and putrefaction, however much they may have been attenuated into symbols,—all these things provoke the same reaction which is the judgment “ugly.” ”

“ This gives us the clue to a reasonable estimate of the current idea that ugliness is all of man’s making and not of nature’s. It seems in principle to rest upon the fact we have noted, that man alone has in him the capacity for the attempt to achieve pure expression for its own sake, in other words, beauty, and therefore he is much more likely to produce the appearance of the combined attempt and failure which we have seen to be the essence of the ugly.
One further ambiguity in a common phrase seems worth clearing up. Is beauty the aim of art? ”