"It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction"
About this Quote
Le Gallienne is watching a cultural reflex flicker into view: we don’t just admire beauty, we suspect it. His “curious how” opens like a parlor-room observation, but it’s a scalpel. “From time immemorial” isn’t a throwaway flourish; it frames the reaction as a durable, almost mythic pattern - Eve’s apple, sirens, femmes fatales, the gleam of forbidden wealth. Beauty becomes less an aesthetic category than a moral provocation, something that threatens to reorder the self.
The sentence works because it stages a double bind in real time. We “shrink” with “ghostly fear” (the language of superstition, contagion, haunting) even as we’re “drawn” by “hypnotic attraction” (the language of trance, loss of agency). Le Gallienne isn’t merely describing temptation; he’s describing the humiliating mechanics of it. Hypnosis implies consent that isn’t quite consent, a way to blame the spell instead of the desire. The subtext: we moralize beauty precisely because it exposes how little control we have over our appetites.
As a late-Victorian/early-modern poet and critic-adjacent aesthete, Le Gallienne is writing in the long shadow of Decadence, when “art for art’s sake” collided with social anxiety about surface, sensuality, and “corruption.” Beauty, in this climate, is suspicious because it looks like pleasure without justification. His intent is to name that anxious alchemy: the way societies weaponize morality to manage fascination, then secretly feed on the very thing they condemn.
The sentence works because it stages a double bind in real time. We “shrink” with “ghostly fear” (the language of superstition, contagion, haunting) even as we’re “drawn” by “hypnotic attraction” (the language of trance, loss of agency). Le Gallienne isn’t merely describing temptation; he’s describing the humiliating mechanics of it. Hypnosis implies consent that isn’t quite consent, a way to blame the spell instead of the desire. The subtext: we moralize beauty precisely because it exposes how little control we have over our appetites.
As a late-Victorian/early-modern poet and critic-adjacent aesthete, Le Gallienne is writing in the long shadow of Decadence, when “art for art’s sake” collided with social anxiety about surface, sensuality, and “corruption.” Beauty, in this climate, is suspicious because it looks like pleasure without justification. His intent is to name that anxious alchemy: the way societies weaponize morality to manage fascination, then secretly feed on the very thing they condemn.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by Richard
Add to List
