"We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination"
About this Quote
Beauty, for Le Gallienne, is less a thing you possess than a feeling you fail to finish. The line insists on a counterintuitive “perfect truth”: that what makes something beautiful is not its clarity but its remainder - the part that refuses to be fully named. Calling mystery “more than half” isn’t just romantic vapor; it’s an argument about how desire works. We don’t fall for what we can inventory. We fall for what keeps moving in the mind after the eyes have looked away.
The key move is the pivot from the senses to the imagination. “Strangeness” doesn’t replace sensation; it “stirs” it, like a spoon in a glass, mixing the raw data of sight and sound with the personal, private compounds of memory, fantasy, projection. Le Gallienne is smuggling in an aesthetic psychology: the imagination is the organ that completes beauty, and mystery is the stimulus that keeps it active. Explain the object too completely and you kill the very mechanism that animates it.
Context matters. Writing at the fin de siecle and into the early modern period, Le Gallienne stands in the long shadow of Aestheticism and Symbolism, movements suspicious of moral utility and blunt realism. This is beauty as enchantment, not improvement; art as an invitation to linger, not a lesson to absorb. Subtextually, it’s also a defense of artifice and ambiguity in an age increasingly addicted to facts, classifications, and “explaining” everything. The quote flatters the reader into complicity: if you need certainty, you’re missing the point.
The key move is the pivot from the senses to the imagination. “Strangeness” doesn’t replace sensation; it “stirs” it, like a spoon in a glass, mixing the raw data of sight and sound with the personal, private compounds of memory, fantasy, projection. Le Gallienne is smuggling in an aesthetic psychology: the imagination is the organ that completes beauty, and mystery is the stimulus that keeps it active. Explain the object too completely and you kill the very mechanism that animates it.
Context matters. Writing at the fin de siecle and into the early modern period, Le Gallienne stands in the long shadow of Aestheticism and Symbolism, movements suspicious of moral utility and blunt realism. This is beauty as enchantment, not improvement; art as an invitation to linger, not a lesson to absorb. Subtextually, it’s also a defense of artifice and ambiguity in an age increasingly addicted to facts, classifications, and “explaining” everything. The quote flatters the reader into complicity: if you need certainty, you’re missing the point.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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