Nor is it memory alone that will work the miracle.  Intellectual sympathy will do it, too.  Wilkes was renowned for his ugliness, but he claimed that, given half an hour’s start, he would win the smiles of any woman against any competitor.  And when one of his lady admirers, engaged in defending him, was reminded that he squinted badly, she replied:  “Of course he does; but he doesn’t squint more than a man of his genius ought to squint.”  Nor was it women alone whom the fellow fascinated.  Who can forget the scene when Tom Davies brought him into the company of Dr. Johnson, who hated Wilkes’ Radicalism, and would never willingly have consented to meet him?  For a time Johnson refused to unbend, but at last he could hold out no longer, and fell a victim to the charm of Wilkes’ talk.

In the same way, 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.