The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

There are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique of / another person is indifferent to them, that they care only for the / communion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. There / are some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however often / they are made.

But while nothing in this world would persuade us that a great friend of / Mr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise or / discomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr. / Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted by / exterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what is / called physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in the / least universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception of / physical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical / beauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of external / attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts / the possibilities of moral attractiveness.

The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the / Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have / wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against / the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have / long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a / stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the / Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism -- an / asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish / severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men / lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees / of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve / their instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave two / wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all the / riotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police / regulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of the / earth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.

It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters / of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The / chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have / been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie / a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feels / that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big -- big as some / folk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks for / miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the / bridge of the giant's nose. That is what we should call, with a calm / conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the / Greeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural / love of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness. Nature intended every / human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to / be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an / oak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did / for trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped away its living / and sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape; they hacked / off noses and pared down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. And / they have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the most / powerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly and / repulsive faces beautiful. This disgraceful _via media_, this pitiful / sense of dignity, has bitten far deeper into the soul of modern / civilization than the external and practical Puritanism of Israel. The / Jew at the worst told a man to dance in fetters; the Greek put an / exquisite vase upon his head and told him not to move.

Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the / same conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face is / ugly because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo is to look at it / entirely in a misleading light. It is strange that we should resent / people differing from ourselves; we should resent much more violently / their resembling ourselves. This principle has made a sufficient hash of / literary criticism, in which it is always the custom to complain of the / lack of sound logic in a fairy tale, and the entire absence of true / oratorical power in a three-act farce. But to call another man's face / ugly because it powerfully expresses another man's soul is like / complaining that a cabbage has not two legs. If we did so, the only / course for the cabbage would be to point out with severity, but with / some show of truth, that we were not a beautiful green all over.

But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conquering / the art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it has / never held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will show / how independent are Orientals of the conventional idea of facial and / bodily regularity, and how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of real / beauty, of goggle eyes, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths and / writhing coils. In the Middle Ages men broke away from the Greek / standard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers, / which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer of / technical artistic perfection the revolt was carried to its real / consummation in the study of the faces of men. Rembrandt declared the / sane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like a / Greek god, but when he had a strong, square nose like a cudgel, a / boldly-blocked head like a helmet, and a jaw like a steel trap.