Ann Veronica a Modern Love Story by H. G. Wells

Author:H. G. Wells [Wells, H. G.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Veronica, H.G. Wells, Fiction, Coming of Age, Literary, General
ISBN: 9780548031902
Google: Zik1ku4cUlsC
Amazon: 1846375428
Publisher: Kessinger Publishing
Published: 2004-07-30T22:00:00+00:00

Part 6

Then, arising she knew not how, like a new-born appetite, came a craving in Ann Veronica for

the sight and sound of beauty.

It was as if her aesthetic sense had become inflamed. Her mind turned and accused itself of

having been cold and hard. She began to look for beauty and discover it in unexpected aspects

and places. Hitherto she had seen it chiefly in pictures and other works of art, incidentally, and as a thing taken out of life. Now the sense of beauty was spreading to a multitude of hitherto

unsuspected aspects of the world about her.

The thought of beauty became an obsession. It interwove with her biological work. She found

herself asking more and more curiously, "Why, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, have I any sense of beauty at all?" That enabled her to go on thinking about beauty when it seemed to her right that she should be thinking about biology.

She was very greatly exercised by the two systems of values—the two series of explanations that her comparative anatomy on the one hand and her sense of beauty on the other, set going in her thoughts. She could not make up her mind which was the finer, more elemental thing, which

gave its values to the other. Was it that the struggle of things to survive produced as a sort of necessary by-product these intense preferences and appreciations, or was it that some mystical outer thing, some great force, drove life beautyward, even in spite of expediency, regardless of survival value and all the manifest discretions of life? She went to Capes with that riddle and put it to him very carefully and clearly, and he talked well—he always talked at some length when

she took a difficulty to him—and sent her to a various literature upon the markings of butterflies, the incomprehensible elaboration and splendor of birds of Paradise and humming-birds' plumes,

the patterning of tigers, and a leopard's spots. He was interesting and inconclusive, and the

original papers to which he referred her discursive were at best only suggestive. Afterward, one afternoon, he hovered about her, and came and sat beside her and talked of beauty and the riddle of beauty for some time. He displayed a quite unprofessional vein of mysticism in the matter. He contrasted with Russell, whose intellectual methods were, so to speak, sceptically dogmatic.

Their talk drifted to the beauty of music, and they took that up again at tea-time.

But as the students sat about Miss Garvice's tea-pot and drank tea or smoked cigarettes, the talk got away from Capes. The Scotchman informed Ann Veronica that your view of beauty

necessarily depended on your metaphysical premises, and the young man with the Russell-like

hair became anxious to distinguish himself by telling the Japanese student that Western art was symmetrical and Eastern art asymmetrical, and that among the higher organisms the tendency

was toward an external symmetry veiling an internal want of balance. Ann Veronica decided she

would have to go on with Capes another day, and, looking up, discovered

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