Beauty and strength

If we admit beauty as an achievement, then it might make sense to revisit strength to make some comparisons.

There will always be some people stronger than me and there is nothing I can do about it. It is not my fault, then, that some other people are stronger than me.*

But I should be strong enough to shovel the driveway, carry furniture around when required, stack and split firewood and open jars; if I am not capable of these things, there is something wrong with me. (Although it is not a very popular argument nowadays, you can make the same sort of argument about beauty and I'd argue that Austen implicitly makes this argument over and over again.)

Even within the reasonable range of strength there will be some who are stronger than me. I may be able to move most furniture but ask for help with some pieces. (And the same is true of beauty. Elizabeth Bennett is beautiful but Jane Bennett is more so. BTW: Have you ever seen a movie or television series that was true to the novel on this point?)

Strength, like beauty, also allows us to move metaphorically from an observable physical quality to something else. We talk of moral strength and courage. And we move both ways; we stop thinking of physical strength without moral strength as strength at all; for example, Errol Flynn was probably physically stronger than Leslie Howard but Leslie Howard was a hero and Errol Flynn was a worthless moral coward.

And the same sorts of refined judgments can be made about female and male beauty. Austen makes them all the time.







* I grew up in a mill town where there were a lot of guys seriously invested in proving that they were the strongest and toughest guys in town. They all managed to prove that they weren't in the long run. One guy who lived in my neighbourhood ended up in a wheelchair as a consequence and I used to see him downtown selling pencils. We might say what a ridiculous thing to believe but Shakespeare's As You Like It starts with a young man intent on such a project and Shakespeare not only doesn't criticize the young man for this, he makes him the hero of the play.