"Beautiful" is a word that spurs idealism. It is a superlative meant to mean the very height of something. Typically, we feel good about ourselves when we throw around words such as beauty, truth and goodness. These words mean big things, pure things.
Me, I always reach for my gun when purity raises its ugly head.
Unfortunately, I don't own a gun, which makes reaching for it pointless, so I reach for Iris Murdoch instead. She made a more practical point about words like beauty and truth and goodness. When we use these words as if they meant something no other word can mean we impoverish our vocabulary. There are all sorts of words in the English language that mean something like beautiful: attractive, cute, pretty, stunning, alluring, striking, handsome, gorgeous, sexy, wonderful, kind, loving &c. When we restrict ourselves to just "beautiful" we lose something.
But surely we gain something too, someone might say. "Beautiful" means something all those words can't. Yes it does but is that difference in meaning a good thing? "The beautiful" tends to take the achievement away from the person and put it up in a heaven of ideas. A beautiful woman tends to be something that just happened, a physical phenomenon rather than something she has made of herself.
Cute, to pick one word at random, is different. No matter what her physical qualities, a surly girl cannot be cute. You can't just be cute, you have to live cute.
Austen had the advantage of the sublime to contrast with beauty. By making a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, Burke shifted a lot of the crazy idealism away from beauty and onto the sublime. Beauty was a more domestic word, a humbler word. Austen picked that ball up and ran with it.
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