Beauty, like truth and goodness, is ineffable.
A “great beauty”, as the term was used in the Gilded Age and portrayed at the time by John Singer Sargent in his portraits of elegant, well dressed, highly coiffed and made up women, were people of poise, presence and a bit of haughtiness, allowed to be so by their wealth,education and pampering, and so shining to one and all as exemplars of that particular role, the great beauty, as a singular attribute that describes both a gift and an accomplishment, like a great racehorse or a poet. That attribution seems today antiquated in that women are to be judged by other qualities, such as intelligence or assertiveness, but resisting beauty as making women a commodity like a racehorse or today women to be regarded as just complicated rather than prized for a single quality. But the category “great beauty” survives and has perhaps always been there, back to the Greeks, and Sargent’s exemplifications of this category can allow for the appreciation of this fundamental role.
Here are some of the qualities of being a great beauty. First, it does not requires specification or science of what makes a woman beautiful. As Sargent makes clear, they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are plump and some thin in face as well as in body. Some seem friendly and some remote, though they are inclined to be haughty, a result of their breeding and position. They know they are or can emulate beauty, including Lady Agnew, who had bad particular features such as bushy eyebrows, but conveyed herself and was portrayed as a beauty. There are no measurements, such as the length of Cleopatra’s nose, that make up the configuration of being a beauty, the way dog shows measure or judge the confirmations of the contestants. It is the entire aura that makes it so. So competitive beauty is not trying to achieve a perfect score, as in bowling, but expressing perhaps a fresh way of being beautiful, as would be the case with a singer or a poet, tied to and modifying previous enactments of that role, straying a little bit but not too much, like the latest season for fashion designers, who repackage old fashions with a contemporary touch. Mrs. George Swinton is a bit plump but her healthy skin shines out.
Second, great beauties, and all beauties, are comparative and hierarchical, which is true of most attributes, like intelligence or strength, in that some are more than others, whether or not there are foot races or I. Q. tests to prove it. Everybody knows where the rankings stand. Indeed, perhaps the only noncomparative attribute of people is individuality, whereby everyone can claim to be their own person even if they pretty much agree with most other people. Some people are called individualistic people simply to mean that they are more contrarian, which is to trumpet rather than remain silent in their disagreements. Similarly, ethnic groups are thought all to be equal in that they are all to be respected, whale status groups are ranked by power and privilege, even though it is obvious that some ethnic groups are more favored with money or talent or social stability and are regarded in that way. There are local beauty pageant winners and some who win Hollywood contracts. A woman I knew acknowledged she was good looking but not in comparison to the women who worked in downtown offices. People find a girl beautiful who is in their circle while a great beauty is out of their league. So there are beauties and there are great beauties, the last category a burden to be managed for its separation between the attribute and the rest of your life. A great beauty can do her laundry or may decide to leave that to others, given her own status.
Third, beauties are variable in that they display themselves better in some times than at other times, just as a swimmer does best when at the peak of the training cycle. Beauties can let down tier hair or fall sick and pale, or, as largely happens, are subject to age, able to remain beautiful for decades, though not much longer than that even if people insist some remain to have timeless beauty as if it were superficial to think beauty were other than timeless, however much the breasts sag, the skin wrinkles, and the sinews in the neck become pronounced. As Edith Wharton made clear, beauties have to keep themselves up, manage their appearances, but they too will inevitably deteriorate, like math geniuses who reach their peak in their twenties.
Fourth, beauties are immediately apparent as such, as opposed to qualities which have to be understood so as to be appreciated. Beauties are pleasant and attractive to look at, whether or not you think that the goodness of their souls or any soul shines through. Dorian Gray had blemishes on his portrait but not his presence, all real people carrying the burdens of their own ill will, never atoned or redeemed, while real beauties are treated as flukes or constructions that have no meaning other than being beautiful in itself, whatever that might mean. Beauties are therefore akin to cuisines, which have no meaning, even if Levi Straus thought otherwise, and are akin to music, which is haunting and ingenious but where explanations of why music is so attractive and emotion filled is left to vague metaphors about the emulation of natural sound, which most music is not, or by declaring some to be telling stories. You need no expert to think some people are beautiful or take pleasure in seeing them, though only an expert can appreciate presidencies and differential calculus. If meaning means referring to something else, then great or mediocre stories do that but beauties are an end in themselves, no interpretation necessary or possible however it may be that meanings are belabored, as when one says beauty is the presence of the soul when it is just skin deep.
Sargent lived to being a n old man and so reached beyond his Belle Epoque years, overlapping with the advent of movies, who offered a new set of beauties to rival those who Sargent painted. These were the actresses that arose in film who, to the surprise of filmmakers, became the celebrities of the entire enterprise of film, the heroines of the nation and the world, despite the tawdry background of theatrical actresses. They still remain supreme and are to be described in the four qualities I have associated with Sargent’s great beauties. Movie stars are temporary and conditional in that most of them do not last very long, tier careers, like professional football players, lasting less than a decade. These lesser beauties include Debra Paget and Demi Moore. Some great stars are able to last for careers of twenty or more years, but many of these are associated with their abilities as actresses rather than being great beauties. Those include Meryl Streep and Bette Davis and Rosiland Russell, attractive enough but without that visible aura of pure looks. Other beauties, who last somewhat long, are pinup girls known for voluptuousness, and include Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe, whose voluptuousness was on the edge or over the line of being a joke, people to ogle, rather than have the awesome aura of pure beauty.
The highest rank of great beauty is accorded to a few, just as the portraits of the greatest beauties are limited, in my mind, to Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa”, Vermeer’s “The Girl With the Pearl Earring”, and Botticelli’s “Venus On The Half Shell”, each of them more than pretty and approaching being ethereal and remote and mysterious. And not ordinarily known as conforming to the shape of a model beauty. My own nominations include Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, and Grace Kelly and perhaps Catherine Deneauve and maybe Julie Andrews, though both Kelly and Andrews seem conventionally beautiful but redeemed by their aristocratic mien, fully congruent with Sargeant. SophisaLoren does not make the mark in part because she was portrayed in so many sleazy presentations thanks to her manager husband Carlos Ponti, and also because she was a bit hawk faced.
It is interesting that all three had shortened careers. Clara Bow played the tomboy in “Wings” but was shown through as alluring and lovely with her big eyes and prominent hair and was destined for a long career but she was undone by mental illness. Greta Garbo made ten years of films but ended her career on her own right after her greatest achievement, which was “Ninochka”, where her impeccable ironic timing was associated with her angular figure, and Grace Kelly also cut her career short so as to marry, become a literal princess, when people still wanted to hire her. But note that these greatest beauties are in accord with the Sargent dictims that they are singular or not defined as a type and also aristocratic in setting and demeanor. The greatest beauties are to be appreciated for themselves alone rather than for what they mean. Great beauties are akin to charismatics in establishing their own types even if political scientists prefer to think of themselves as just strongmen, while great beauties offer nothing other than the fact and charm of being beautiful.
Charismatics are the glittering stars that challenge law and convention and so are an independent source of power. Beauty is a distinctive and admired capacity which charms and attracts. Sargent was correct in associating great beauty with women. The late David Konstan pointed out that beauty was not perfection of form, as in a Grecian urn, where there might be a formula whereby the curvature of the urn was too much or too little, but meant instead that beauty meant attractive in a sexual sense and so female beauty was the essential type of beauty. That might mean, I would say, that beauty was an inferior sort of the trinity of truth, goddess and beauty, because it was superficial, a mere bauble of pleasure, a distraction, rather than the serious business of goodness, which is necessary to create social order and is an ultimate judgment f people, and truth, whereby people can apprehend reality so as to master it either by manipulating it or understanding it, and is also the basis of comprehensible communication. These two are weighty matters while beauty is only skin deep in that it is a diversion and a mere impulse.
But the three essential virtues and metaphysically informed properties can be understood otherwise, not as their universal substructures, but as ends in themselves. Truth is not to establish the reality of what is and to be distinguished from falsehood or illusion, as Plato thought, but rather a taste for the texture of reality, a preference for reality, when all about the world are falsehoods and partial truths developed through language whereby citizens and observers orient their lies, preferring heir illusions, about religion and politics, to what is the truth they can ascertain. Only specialists such as medical researchers and philosophers prefer the truth and the test of people can do without it. Truth, as Weber said, is a calling, a special value and capacity which is a person’s taskmaster and seems for many a rather lower calling than making money, which may be being wise enough be sly, but reason not itself much of a concern, just diverting, such as learning the attributes of an armadillo.
Similarly, morality or goodness need not be treated as a law or an inclination deep within and defining a soul, and so to some defining their way to eternity, but just another taste, as in food musical tastes, that suit that person but not with greater significance than their other tastes. Some people are moral and people should be wary of those who are not, though moral people can be harsh on people who do not share their taste in morality and so the prudence of dealing with moral people is questionable. G.E. Moore may have got it right in thinking that an appreciation of morality is a personal attribute, akin to an appreciation of color or having perfect pitch, in that you appreciate it if you have it while most people have a passing acquaintance with morality and somehow always find themselves to be moral even if they lie or are philanderers or plagiarize or start wars. Get over the Judaic-Christian notion that morality is the coin by which God and humans intersect.
The same is true again with beauty to be understood as a thing or end in itself, worthwhile for its own qualities rather than for its consequences, however much it seems less weighty than truth or goodness but rather a luxury or a pleasant diversion. Men can find pretty women attractive but most want to settle down with women they find compatible with their backgrounds or perhaps because of the way they twerk their noses. I am reminded of one of those fantasy movies at the end of the Second World War where an ugly duckling and a disfigured veteran played by the very attractive Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire saw one another as beautiful in “The Enchanted Cottage”. Perception outranks physical qualities.
But beauty is like truth and goodness in that they are ineffable qualities that are not explained so much as experienced. Everyone has a sense of the truthiness of a situation, whether in the facticity of a novel or in asserting that a table is made up of atoms, which only specialists can attest to exist, rather than the wood the table is made of and where you can feel the wood. Everyone can sense what is right and wrong even if people disagree and whether or not they have Jesuitical explanations to instruct which actions are good and which are bad. And the same with beauty. A sunset is beautiful simply because it is familiar and regarded as such even if the explanation is that it results from a lot of sought in the air and that women’s faces and shapes are, some of them, attractive while their pancreas or livers are not. Familiar objects are some of them designated as attractive.
Consider Sargent’s great beauty, Mrs.. Charles E. Inches, her portrait made in 1887 and none of his portraits do not qualify as those greatest beauties, perhaps because Sargent did so well at capturing the elegant but all too human of his subjects. Mrs. Inches has penetrating eyes even if she is not looking at the viewer. She has an aquiline nose and a high neck, the neck accentuated by her pearls. She is pale skinned and prominent eyebrows and.curly hair upswept to make her hair orderly. So her portrait is an assemblage of distinctive features giving her distinctiveness for that particular association of her features. She is what she seems, perfections and various imperfections just as in a modern day one might observe that being dumpy or a wide behind also makes a woman also part of what she is, not cancelling out points of imperfection. The whole effect is the essence of the person, the opposite of the ideal from the Greeks to the Georgians.
Sargent is deeply Conservative because he is attuned to non comparable qualities to be measured and appreciated each for themselves alone and so make the texture of life more various and subtle than is available to liberals who think that people share qualities, such as being equal, or subject to majority vote, or who reflect that there are only causes and consequences, as in science, but allow whys rather than hows. Conservatives see themselves as sophisticated because there are ineffable and non comparable qualities that make life complicated, such as the differences between ethnicities and that people are both greedy and generous, while Liberals prefer to quantify, go make generalizations that are lawlike and apply to large numbers of people, such as a citizenry or the human family. Liberals are Malthusian in declaring a law whereby agricultural products increase in a linear fashion while population increases exponentially and that statistical inferences trump seat of the pants decisions that are based on a sense of variables not individually specified or specifiable. Not that statisticians can’t be conservative, but not about really important things like faith or honor.There is a fundamental clash between science and faith, older than Galileo. The Scopes Trial is alive and well even if the Catholic Church, a quintessentially Conservative force, has come to terms with the theory of evolution by dismissing it as a how rather than a why when the theory of evolution proclaims that how is all there is.