Pagina 5 van 490

"Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know

you were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between

you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and

this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and

rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you-well,

of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But

beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression

begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and

destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to

think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something

horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned

professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course,

in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop

keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when

he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always

looks absolutely delightful.