Beth Ditto and the truth about beauty

In this Facebook world we are expected to elevate almost everyone and everything into the category of beauty when, for the most part, all that is celebrated is rubbish art, hideous clothes or overweight people.

It is not PC to say so, but I believe for instance that Beth Ditto (pictured), the singer and cover girl, is merely fat - quite apart from muddling her with Beth Chatto, the garden lady. There's nothing wrong with being fat, or indeed new about putting fat women in fashion magazines - Richard Avedon and I used fat girls as models in an issue of Harper's Bazaar in 1965 - but there's a determined smugness about her and about those feting her. Much as I like Gareth Pugh, I think his clothes really are hideous. And most art now is merely silly.

Beauty has moved away from the eye of the beholder to the mind of the believer, and people swallow any drivel that's fed them, falling in line behind a slew of such cliched mantras as 'All Brazilians are beautiful'; some are, but the general assembly line perfection, a glut of Porsches in Speedos, palls in the sultry Copacabanian sun.

Well, Roger Scruton has written a little book entitled, boldly, Beauty (Oxford University Press, £10.99), exploring and pronouncing on almost every aspect of that fugitive subject at exhaustive, for such a tiny volume, length. While every other avenue of beauty is well trodden, and despite the fact that Scruton seems to have an absolute thing about place-settings, more that once extolling the beauty in a daintily-laid table and even printing a rather dull photograph of one, he touches on interior decoration merely in passing, lumping it in with clothes and "bodily adornment".

Not to include interior decoration as a facet of beauty seems strange. Surely a beautiful interior is a valid candidate for the canon? A room may be not only beautiful in itself, but as the setting to enhance human beauty, every bit as much as architecture and landscape. (And even though a room is man-made and carefully contrived, it can create an accidental, unintentional beauty – when someone praised Nancy Lancaster for the beauty of the different  colours of two adjoining rooms, she replied that it was really the colour of the air between the two rooms that was beautiful.)

It is the (vanishing) beauty of landscape, or rather the land's scope, that makes Scruton's heart bleed or sing. His previous work, On Hunting, is a paean to the beauty inherent in the chase, and shows how in some way it touches each of us. You, like Wilde, may despise it, your neighbour's children may have been 'blooded', while I, though horse-and-houndless, live in a hunting lodge. Recently re-reading On Hunting while staying with two gay MFHs - you see, hunting does touch everyone - reminded me that one night, almost exactly forty years ago, I combined hunting and beauty in a midsummer ball.

The theme, tenue de chasse, brought out diverse creativity in the attending beauties. Pandora Delevigne, as beautiful as her daughters Poppy and Chloe are now, was a cat-lithe ocelot, Mary Soames a white-crinolined Victorian butterfly collector. Bindy Lambton, whose strange beauty gleams in her many portraits by Lucian Freud, dressed as a deep-sea diveress. Diana Phipps came uniformed as a Strauss marchallin, Evangeline Bruce a solar-topee'd lady explorer. Min Hogg and Nico Fame were side-saddling huntresses stepped from a Romney portrait.

Not to include interior decoration as a facet of beauty seems strange

And the greatest beauties of their respective eras? Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal's turban accentuated her long white throat, her high, arched brow, while around that of her aunt, Lady Diana Cooper, a gilded wreath echoed the cord encircling her white dress, a modern Helen. Though every bit as lovely as the fleet-launching daughter of a goddess and a swan, Diana was dismissive of her own beauty (she told me she wished she was tall and dark) unlike proud Helen who, when asked in Lord Dunsany's poem if her beauty pleased her, replied:

Pleased? When all Troy's towers fell
And slain were Priam's sons, and lost his throne.
And such a war was fought as none had known
And even the Gods took part, and all because of me alone.
Pleased? I should think I was!

Such arrogant beauty clearly has its own fatal reward.

For Roger Scruton and his ilk, it is the eye that is rewarded by beauty. But, remembering the words of the old Jerome Kern song - And when I told them/ How beautiful you are/They didn't believe me - one realizes that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder: it's all in the mind ·