Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2413

Letter to Monroe K. Spears, Editor, The Sewanee Review, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. The enclosed piece has been very slightly amended, primarily by punctuation and paragraphing, by Spencer MacCallum, who originally caught it on a note pad at the home of Mrs. Frances Manning, Halesworth Street, Santa Ana, California, as Heath, unawares, spoke through a closed bathroom door one morning while shaving. 

August 20,1955

 

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Spears:

 

As a recent subscriber to the Sewanee Review, I wish to express to you my interest and appreciation of the contents in the July-September issue.

 

 I am especially impressed and inspired by the very penetrating observations and analyses in Mr. Blackmur’s “The Language of Silence”, and it makes me happy to see a renewal of interest in George Eliot as exhibited in Geoffrey Tillotson’s review.

 

 Enclosed, you will find a little apostrophe (if I may call it that) to Beauty as the transcendent member of the common trilogy. If you can find a fitting niche for this, I think it would give pleasure to others who enjoy your review as I do.

 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

SH/m

 

ENC: “Beauty”

 

 

_____________________________________

 

 

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B E A U T Y

 

The only absolute is Beauty. The Good, is only how you feel about it. The Good for you is what feels good to you, and for the other fellow, what you feel is good for him. Beauty is spontaneous. It does not have to be enforced. The only force that enforces the Good is brute force.

 

 Truth is a little higher, but not much; for there are many kinds of Truth, both good and bad. To say merely that something is true — and to praise it for that — is to lack discrimination.

 

 Goodness is the virtue of slaves, Truth the color of the chameleon, but Beauty is as the song of the lark and the nightingale. It is the source of inspiration. It cometh from above and never sets one man above or below another, as do Goodness and Truth. Without Beauty men would be forever as worms or slaves.

 

/See Item 2175 for the circumstances of this and Heath’s amendment of the last four lines/