Among the mind's powers is one that comes of itself to many children and
artists. It need not be lost, to the end of his days, by anyone who has
ever had it. This is the power of taking delight in a thing, or rather
in anything, everything, not as a means to some other end, but just
because it is what it is, as the lover dotes on whatever may be the
traits of the beloved object. A child in the full health of his mind
will put his hand flat on the summer turf, feel it, and give a little
shiver of private glee at the elastic firmness of the globe. He is not
thinking how well it will do for some game or to feed sheep upon. That
would be the way of the wooer whose mind runs on his mistress's money.
The child's is sheer affection, the true ecstatic sense of the thing's
inherent characteristics. No matter what the things may be, no matter
what they are good or no good for, there they are, each with a thrilling
unique look and feel of its own, like a face; the iron astringently cool
under its paint, the painted wood familiarly warmer, the clod crumbling
enchantingly down in the hands, with its little dry smell of the sun and
of hot nettles; each common thing a personality marked by delicious
differences.
This joy of an Adam new to the garden and just looking round is brought
by the normal child to the things that he does as well as those that he
sees. To be suffered to do some plain work with the real spade used by
mankind can give him a mystical exaltation: to come home with his legs,
as the French say, re-entering his body from the fatigue of helping the
gardener to weed beds sends him to sleep in the glow of a beatitude that
is an end in itself. Then the paradoxes of conduct begin to twinkle into
sight; sugar is good, but there is a time to refrain from taking it
though you can; a lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet,
strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the
scrape and left out the lie. Divine unreason, as little scrutable and
yet as surely a friend as the star that hangs a lamp out from the Pole
to show you the way across gorse-covered commons in Surrey. So he will
toe the line of a duty, not with a mere release from dismay, but
exultantly, with the fire and lifting of heart of the strong man and the
bridegroom, feeling always the same secret and almost sensuous
transport, while he suppresses a base impulse, that he felt when he
pressed the warm turf with his hand or the crumbling clay trickled warm
between his fingers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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