Citations:beau idéal

English citations of beau idéal

1. An emulable eidolon embodying excellence in a particular respect.
   • 1817, Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, France, page 64:

     The modern French critics boast, that their tragedy is the true “beau idéal” of dramatic poetry. But the “beau idéal”, though a more splendid combination of Nature’s finer proportions, must still be true to its original, or it becomes pedantry, mannerism, and affectation.

   • 1825: Horace Smith, Gaieties and Gravities: A Series of Essays, Comic Tales, and Fugitive Vagaries; Now First Collected, § “Ugly Women”, pp200^{1} & 201^{2}

     ^{1}By constantly straining above humanity, and aspiring to the representation of celestial beauty; by fostering the enthusiasm of their imaginations in the pursuit of the beau idéal, — they acquired a distaste, or at least an indifference, for mortal attractions, and turned up their noses at their fair countrywomen for not being Junos and Minervas. Not one of them equalled the model which had been conjured up in their minds, and not one of them, consequently, would they deign to notice. At the public games, the women were all huddled together, whispering and looking glum, while the men congregated as far from them as possible, discussing the beau idéal.

     ^{2}In this emergency, Pygmalion, the most eminent statuary of the place, falling in love with one of his own works, a figure of Diana, which happened to possess the beau idéal in perfection, implored Venus to animate the marble; and she, as is well known to every person conversant with authentic history, immediately granted his request.

   • 1844, William Jesse, Beau Brummell, page 224:

     She appeared to me to be always vigilant for admiration, coarse in her manners, and far from resembling what I should have conceived the beau idéal of Byron.*

   • 1847, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, page 594:

     Take a lady, in every meaning of the word, born and bred, and let her father pass through the gazette, and she wants nothing more to suit our highest beau idéal of a guide and instructress to our children.

   • 1854, St. John Bayle, Purple Tints of Paris: Character and Manners in the New Empire, page 62:

     Our beau-idéal of a human being, indeed, requires that he should be tightly encased in clothes, strapped, buckled, braced; and, above all, that two blinkers should conceal the contour of the face.

   • 1870, Francis Cowley Burnand et al., Punch, page 12:

     …ROGER ASCHAM, who has left us the beau idéal of a book in his Toxophilus, took a bowl of arrowroot every night before going to bed, flavoured with rum and molasses…

   • 1903, Edward Tyas Cook of the British Museum Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, A Popular Handbook to the Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum, page 49:

     We have seen in the Diadumenus of Polyclitus the beau idéal of athletic repose; in the Discobolus of Myron we have the beau idéal of athletic motion.

   • 1965, Frederic Will, Flumen Historicum: Victor Cousin’s Aesthetic and Its Sources, page 70:

     Earlier I discussed Cousin’s relation to Quincy’s ‘beau idéal’, in order to point up the different premises underlying the Plotinian and … of the ‘beau idéal’ into the moral-aesthetic realm, a transfar which he justifies on the authority of the Platonic tradition.

   • 1985, Joan Dargan, Balzac and the Drama of Perspective: The Narrator in Selected Works of La Comédie Humaine, page 118:

     Far more present than the turban itself is the “beau idéal” of the narrator, the exotic scene full of contrasts.⁸

   • 1997, Christopher Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting: Antoine-Jean Gros’s La Bataille D’Eylau, page 72:

     Known as the ‘David du Paysage’,⁵ Valenciennes claimed the prestige of the beau idéal for a category of landscape painting he called ‘paysage historique’…

   • 2004: Samantha Matthews, Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century, p101^{1}; QUOTING FROM:
   • circa 1827: “Ms. Hemans”, A letter to Clara Graves^{2}

     ^{1}She professes the necessity of giving up her ‘beau idéal’ of Tighe, yet her manner of retailing the information discredits its tellers.

     ^{2}I was sorry to find that I must give up my beau idéal of Mrs. Tighe’s Character … much of her domestic sorrow I learned, was caused by her excessive passion for shining in Society, which quite carried her away from all Home-enjoyments, until her health gave way, and she was compelled to relinquish this career of dissipation.

   • 2006, Thomas Sergeant Perry, The Life And Letters of Francis Lieber, page 182:

     He has all sorts of beautiful rarities, — in short, his apartments are a beau-idéal of the rooms of a gentleman, scholar, and poet.