y, Johnson believed his wife to be a woman of perfect beauty.
To the rest of the world she was extraordinarily plain and commonplace, but
to Johnson she was the mirror of beauty. "Pretty creature," he would say
with a sigh in referring to her after her death.

And there, I fancy, we touch the root of the matter. The sense of beauty is
in one respect an affair of the soul, and only superficially an aesthetic
quality. We start with a common prejudice in favour of certain physical
forms. They are the forms with which nature has made us familiar, and we
seek to perpetuate them. But if the conventionally beautiful form is allied
with spiritual ugliness it ceases to be beautiful to us, and if the
conventionally ugly form is allied with spiritual beauty that beauty
irradiates the physical deficiency. The soul dominates the senses. Francis
Thompson expresses the idea very beautifully when he says:--

I cannot tell what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her features for her soul.
As birds see not the casement for the sky.

But there is another sense in which beauty is the most matter-of-fact
thing. I can conceive that if the human family had developed only one eye,
and that planted in the centre of the forehead, the appearance of a person
with two eyes would be as offensive to our sense of beauty as a hand that
consisted not of fingers but of thumbs. We should go to the show to see the
two-eyed man with just the same feelings as we go now to see the bearded
woman. We should not go to admire his two eyes, any more than we go to
admire the beard; we should go to enjoy a pleasant sense of disgust at his
misfortune and a comfortable satisfaction at the fact that we had not been
the victims of such a calamity. We should roll our single eye with a proud
feeling that we were in the true line of beauty, from which the two-eyed
man in front was a hideous and fantastic departure.

Beauty, in short, is only a tribute which we pay to necessity. In equipping
itself for the struggle for existence humanity has found that it is
convenient to have two eyes and a stereoscopic vision, just as it is
convenient to have four fingers on the hand and one thumb instead of five
thumbs. Our members have been developed in the manner best fitted to enable
us to fight our battle. And the more perfectly they fulfil that supreme
condition the more beautiful we declare them to be. Our ideas of beauty,
therefore, are not absolute; they are conditi