Instead of a simply giving your subjective aesthetic evaluation, based on some measure of "elegance", you could objectively compare, in HCI terms, the usability of the languages as user-interfaces to the computer. A mouse may be more elegant than a keyboard, but for, say, word-processing, it would have comparatively-horrible usability.

Likewise (and this is just a throwaway argument, not the general point I'm trying to make), Lisp may be more elegant conceptually than Ruby, but when trying to find an individual incorrect line of code to make a change, Lisp's "elegant" uniformity actually hinders scanning, whereas Ruby's bumpy, "inelegant" syntax gives your eyes regularized shapes to abstract sections of code into, and thus visually skip them without having to read into their contents.

However, as the mouse's elegance matches well with a paint program, Lisp matches well with Turing-complete data-specifications ("code as data.") Usability is not a one-dimensional spectrum, like your partial ordering of "beauty" above, but rather a consideration made separately for each task an interface is used for.