A DIALOGUE WITH W. H. AUDEN
81
20 inside. You look at them and think: My dear, if for one moment
you'd allow your face to agree with your age!
I: "Good
looks"-the phrase itself is revealing. Because of some
Platonic streak in thought, word-usage has endowed the physical with
moral attributes. . . .
A:
On some, personal beauty has a bad effect; on others, good.
But the adjective in this phrase should be taken as applying to the
effect on the spectator, not the possessor of beauty.
I: I overvalue good looks; I give comeliness the benefit of any
doubt.
A:
One should not.
As
one grows older one requires in a face
less prettiness or symmetry than self-determination.
I : Self-determination?
A:
Each person, I believe, has two faces-that given him and
the one he is trying to become; through will he can work on the
first to achieve the second. To go back to your analysis of good
looks.
A
young face may reveal sin but perhaps not the conscious–
ness
of it. The higher the intelligent awareness of a person the
greater the conflict between the lower and upper parts of his face.
For a long time the Ancient Greeks tended to associate handsomeness
with virtue which gave them freedom and a love of proportion-
I:
A
freedom that became license?
A:
Yes, but Homer did not fall into this trap. When Helen appears
at the Skaian gates during an interval of war, the elders pay tribute
to her beauty, not her virtue or beneficence. They grant she is
"marvelously made" but add:
Let her go back where she came from,
not stay to vex us and our children.-In reality one can gauge a
person's ethic only by his acts. The Greeks found this out. Socrates
formed living proof that a man with grotesque features (although
his body was strong and well-conditioned) could be the wisest and
best
man in the country.
As
a result the philosophers went off on
another tangent and conceived- mistakenly- that knowledge caused
goodness.
I: In a number of your poems you associate handsomeness and
disease-
A:
Just to make people examine the paradox-
I: It is odd that physical beauty cannot be presented except in
