Stop and think for a while about your reading, and you’ll discover not just what your favourite genres might be, but also the themes and ways of looking at the world which preoccupy your mind.

Time and again, I return to the strange idea that beauty and goodness have something to do with one another. Maybe being surrounded by teenagers has contributed to it?

It’s certainly everywhere in literature.

Keats gives us “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”.¹ Richard III is painfully conscious of being ‘cheated of feature’ and “deformed, unfinished”.² In Carol Ann Duffy‘s Mrs Quasimodo, beauty becomes something socially desirable enough to be almost a moral imperative: “cos it’s better to be pretty, isn’t it”.³ And don’t get me started on how Frankenstein’s creature is treated.⁴

Just recently, I found myself thinking about the same thing in King Lear: how easily we can mistake an attractive outward appearance — fine clothes, impressive status, a convincing performance — for evidence of something good underneath.

So I was pleased to discover Tolstoy putting the whole problem more bluntly:

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”

I don’t have any particular expertise in Tolstoy, and The Kreutzer Sonata isn’t a work I know well. But perhaps that’s part of the point. Sometimes a sentence leaps out of a book and starts having conversations with things you’ve been reading for years.

And the more I think about it, the stranger the assumption seems.

Beauty is, to a considerable extent, a lottery. We don’t earn our faces. We don’t choose our symmetry, our hair, our height, our bone structure. Yet somehow we can end up treating the result as though it tells us something about character. Psychologists have a name for part of this tendency: the halo effect — the habit of allowing one positive characteristic to colour our judgement of everything else.

Perhaps the really interesting literary question isn’t simply why we judge by appearances.

It’s why we find it so tempting to believe that what is beautiful ought to be good.

Tolstoy seems to think that’s a delusion.

I’m inclined to think literature gives him – and us – a lot of evidence.

Over to you: tell me about beautiful yet evil characters, or ‘ugly’ yet good ones.

References

1. John Keats, ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn’ (1820) ↩︎
2. William Shakespeare, Richard III (1592) ↩︎
3. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Mrs Quasimodo’, in The World’s Wife (1999) ↩︎
4. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) ↩︎