Beauty Loses Herself

Extract

A modern proverb has arisen as a star to guide the erring artist: ‘Look after Truth and Goodness, and Beauty will look after herself.’ But let the artist beware. Such a star may prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp. At first sight the proverb appears to contain the complete ethic for aesthetics, reducing the tough problem of beauty to a simple and practical formula. How attractive to unite the Good and the True in holy wedlock and then turning discover Beauty the bridesmaid carrying the train behind. Simplifications, however, have their dangers. To bring them in touch with reality requires such care that in practice they become most complex, disclosing many an attractive but misleading view. A simplification should only be the completion of thought, never the commencement. For Mr. Gill this proverb has come as the answer to a long process of reasoning, as appears from this volume. He thus avoids the only serious pitfall. But other artists who begin with this motto may not be so fortunate.

Truth belongs to the mind, goodness to the will, and beauty is the fruit of both the mind and the will. Any being in its perfection will be true in its correspondence to God’s idea of it; it will be good in its dependency on God’s will; and will be beautiful in its reflection of the harmony of God’s mind and will, which have produced the first two effects. Therefore beauty follows necessarily from the truth and goodness of a thing. Concentration on the first and the second produces the third automatically, since it is nothing less than the harmony between those two.