Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 31))

what beauty is. Where attempt at reply is made at all the answer will be a
wordy evasion, impressionistically vague and indeterminate. Turn to the
Standard Dictionary, for example, and look up the word beautiful; you will
read the following:
1. Having conspicuously the qualities of beauty; excelling in form or
grace; exerting the charm of beauty; appealing to or satisfying the
esthetic faculty.
2. Finely illustrating a type or principle; complete and harmonious in
form or development, as a beautiful specimen in botany or case in
surgery; a beautiful system.
Then below we find defined: “The beautiful, beauty in the abstract; the
domain of beauty; also that which is beautiful; distinguished from
the true and the good, as the beautiful in nature or art. The beautiful
is apprehended by taste or esthetic powers, the true by the logical or
rational, the good by the moral or practical. Anything may thus beat
the same time true, beautiful and good though from different points
of view and for different reasons.”
Let us now turn to the Standard definition of beauty:
1. That quality of objects in nature, art or mind that appeals and
gratifies the esthetic nature or faculty; the perfection of form or
shaping, physical or spiritual, resulting from the harmonious com-
bination of diverse elements in unity.
2. The sense of the beautiful, or the power in man of perceiving and
appreciating the beautiful; the esthetic faculty, including taste and
constructive imagination.
3. A feature or element in any object that helps to make it beautiful; a
person or thing that is beautiful, especially by way of contrast; said
of a very attractive woman, or a fine specimen of its kind, as a horse,
dog, etc.
4. In mysticism, the perfection of the Supreme Being.
5. The ruling style; fashion.
Here we have a fine example of wordiness that is vague and indefinite in
meaning. It does not give us any very clear conception when we are told that
the beautiful is that “having conspicuously the qualities of beauty; excelling in
form or grace; exerting the charm of beauty; appealing to or satisfying the
esthetic faculty.”
Nor are we more illumined by the explanation of the beautiful that it is
“beauty in the abstract; the dominion of beauty; also that which is beautiful;
distinguished from the true and the good, as the beautiful in nature or art.”
We might as well say Jones is Jones as distinguished from Brown or Smith.
Jones, as a matter of fact, does not need to be distinguished in order to be Jones
nor are Brown and Smith necessary to explain the why of Jones unless Jones
chances to be dumb or intoxicated.
We are told that the beautiful is apprehended by taste or the esthetic
powers, etc., etc., and find ourselves very much at the point whence we
started.

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