Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/117

they are mere absences of beauty. No doubt they would have a positively shocking effect. But we see what they would be. They would be, not something new and alien and brought from somewhere else than beauty. They would consist in a beauty in the wrong place, parallel to conceiving moral badness as a goodness in the wrong place. You can easily fancy a case by misuse of the human form, substituting limbs of the lower animals for its limbs, as in fauns or mediaeval devils. Suppose the beautiful silky ear of a dachshund replacing the ear of a beautiful human face. It would be, I imagine, a horribly hideous thing. Here we have, in principle, I think a genuine case of ugliness. But we see how limited its antagonism to beauty is. Then you get again the problem whether in the whole context of what is imagined this discord may not itself be made expressive, and so subordinated to beauty, as in some fairy tale of enchantment. If so, note that it becomes really a part of the whole beauty. It is a half-