We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

Le Gallienne argues that beauty is not exhausted by clarity, symmetry, or complete explanation; it depends crucially on what remains partially hidden. “Mystery” here is not mere obscurity but the felt presence of something beyond immediate comprehension—an “element of strangeness” that activates the imagination and, through it, intensifies sensory experience. The claim aligns with late-Victorian/fin-de-siècle aestheticism, which prized suggestion, atmosphere, and the evocative over the didactic. In this view, art (and perhaps persons or places) becomes more alluring when it invites pursuit and interpretation rather than delivering itself entirely at once.