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It may be said of beauty that although it is, it is not. Grab it and your hand is empty. It is real but elusive. All kinds of things, anything, may be beautiful: objects, ideas, situations, events, living things—anything may have beauty, in part or in whole, yet beauty cannot be defined or measured. The observer, sometimes overwhelmed, sometimes vaguely moved, will acknowledge beauty, but when he tries to isolate what it is that brings forth the response, no analysis works. We say that a flower is beautiful, or a machine, or a relationship, or a plan, but when we try to zero in on some specific aspect or dimension or quality that we have noticed, something that we think is the beauty, we find we are talking about something else. Try it.

 There is a very popular slogan, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Since it is impossible to set forth and measure beauty, and since people will disagree, the easy out is to say that it is an individual matter. If you think you see beauty, why, so you do. To each his own. Well, think about it. Would you really say that beauty and ugliness are the same thing? If you put side by side a healthy, active toddler and a diseased, suffering child, would you really say the difference is in your eye? If there were a vote for an improvement to beautify the city park, would the vote be split between a garden and a garbage heap? Would anyone say that a cascade of falling tin cans is the musical equivalent of a Beethoven sonata? Does anyone think smog is beautiful whereas a sunset is an eyesore? Indeed, is anyone really willing to say that the beautiful and the ugly are six of one and a half dozen of the other? No, beauty is itself and not something else.

But while we cannot manufacture beauty on demand, there are elements or aspects of something that may move us to accept that there is beauty: order, balance, harmony, variety, etc., (Note their opposites: disorder, imbalance, dissonance, monotony.) In themselves or blended, the elements do not constitute beauty, but they may—or may not—bring forth beauty. Somehow, someway, sometimes, beauty presents itself to us, and our lives are the better for it.

By the way, art is not the same thing as beauty. The word ‘art’ means something made. An artist is a maker. He may set about to make something beautiful and will draw upon those elements, and he may succeed, but there is no guarantee. No one can make beauty. (Especially if the artist is of the modern school which holds that whatever is new is good and whatever is different is better.)  No, there is beauty, and as Emily Dickenson said, it is not caused, it is.