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The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently saw us off to Westmorland.
Amid this dark ocean of humanity, wherein confusedly move so many defective or misshapen beings, so many forms incomplete or degraded, so many types of bestial ugliness, wretched outlines of nature's experimental essays, I have found beauty, pure, radiant, without spot, without flaw, the ideal made real, the dream accomplished, a form which no painter or sculptor has ever been able to translate upon canvas or into marble I have found Nyssia!
It is because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket of machines and crowds to give us the lead.
Some scanty white curls emerged from under the white skull-cap, thus whitely crowning the thin white face, whose ugliness was softened by all this whiteness, this spiritual whiteness in which Leo XIII's flesh seemed as it were but pure lily-white florescence.
“I don’t want to make it felt too much that I am boss here,” Jack retorted, mildly. “At the same time, though, I’m held responsible, and so I suppose I’ll have to have things done the way that seems best to me.” Sam Truax turned to get his satchel. The instant his back was turned on the young commander Sam’s face was a study in ugliness.
The old woman contorted herself as if there were a fearful time in her insides; and grinned, and twisted the yellow ugliness of her face, and groaned, and howled; and yet there was a tough and fierce kind of endurance with which she fought with her anguish, and would not yield to it a jot, though she allowed herself the relief of shrieking savagely at it, much more like a defiance than a cry for mercy.
The unearthly ugliness of the savages, their thick lips, prominent cheek bones, scowling and overhanging brows, broad snub noses, matted black hair, and above all the keen, steady, and ferocious scrutiny of their deep-set eyes, extinguished the last spark of courage in the heart of Hyde. He did not look fierce and defiant any more.
At this shocking statement Sir Norman looked helplessly round, as if for relief; and Miranda, after a moment's silence, broke into another mirthless laugh. "Of all the pictures of ugliness you ever saw or heard of, Sir Norman Kingsley, do tell me if there ever was one of them half so repulsive or disgusting as that thing?"
To this day my new hats look better out of the shop than they did in it with other new hats. It begins to dawn upon me, now, that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the galleries may be uniform beauty after all. I honestly hope it is, to others, but certainly it is not to me.
Does anyone suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called," as St. Paul, in the spirit of prophecy, remarks? "Ugliness is only the prose of horror," he said.
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