Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

Beauty thrives on what cannot be fully known. Richard Le Gallienne pushes the claim boldly, insisting that mystery is not an ornament but the greater part of beauty itself, the strangeness that wakens the senses by calling the imagination into play. The phrasing recalls Walter Pater, who had defined the romantic as the addition of strangeness to beauty; Le Gallienne intensifies it and makes it a principle. The strange does not disfigure; it animates. Without that element, perception is merely consumption. With it, perception becomes participation.

The context is fin-de-siecle aestheticism, a culture of suggestion rather than statement. Against the Victorian confidence in clarity, utility, and moral instruction, Le Gallienne and his circle argued that art works most powerfully when it withholds, when it creates an alluring penumbra. The unknown invites the beholder to supply meanings that no explanation could fix. That invitation is what he calls the stirring of the senses through the imagination. Sensory delight is not a blunt impact but a mediated experience; imagination filters, recomposes, intensifies. The mind becomes a co-creator, and the pleasure is doubled by the act of inward making.

There is also a romantic inheritance here, from Burke’s sense of the sublime to Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief. Yet the claim is distinctly modern in its suspicion of overexposure. Explain a joke and it dies; anatomize a flower and its aura fades. The line draws a boundary: too much light bleaches out color. Beauty needs a margin of dusk.

Le Gallienne’s own prose and verse often chase an ideal that recedes as it beckons, a golden girl or a mood always half veiled. That receding quality is not a failure of possession but the secret of allure. Mystery preserves depth, prolongs desire, and keeps art from closing upon a single meaning. To love beauty is to accept a measure of not-knowing as the very condition of delight.