Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life — John Shaqi
Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and LifeLee, Vernon
Philosophy
Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life
Lee, Vernon
Aesthetics
But, among those of us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there is
not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our
spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught
ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness,
expense, rareness, already necessarily obtruded far too much by our
struggling, imperfect civilisation. We are indeed angry with little
boys and girls if they enquire too audibly whether certain people are
rich or certain things cost much money, as little boys and girls are
apt to do in their very far from innocence; but we teach them by our
example to think about such things every time we stretch a point in
order to appear richer or smarter than we are. While, on the contrary,
we rarely insist upon the intrinsic qualities for which things are
really valuable, without which no trouble or money would be spent on
them, without which their difficulty of obtaining would, as in the
case of Dr. Johnson's musical performance, become identical with
impossibility. I wonder how many people ever point out to a child that
the water in a tank may be more wonderful and beautiful in its beryls
and sapphires and agates than all the contents of all the jewellers'
shops in Bond Street? Moreover, we rarely struggle against the
standards of fashion in our habits and arrangements; which standards,
in many cases, are those of our ladies' maids, butlers, tradesfolk,
and in all cases the standards of our less intelligent neighbours.
Nay, more, we sometimes actually cultivate in ourselves, we superfine
and aesthetic creatures, a preference for such kinds of enjoyment as
are exclusive and costly; we allow ourselves to be talked into the
notion that solitary egoism, laborious self-assertion of ownership (as
in the poor mad Ludwig of Bavaria) is a badge of intellectual
distinction. We cherish a desire for the new-fangled and far-fetched,
the something no other has had before; little suspecting, or
forgetting, that to extract more pleasure not less, to enjoy the same
things longer, and to be able to extract more enjoyment out of more
things, is the sign of aesthetic vigour.
XV.
Still, on the whole, such as can care for beautiful things and
beautiful thoughts are beginning to care for them more fully, and are
growing, undoubtedly, in a certain moral sensitiveness which, as I
have said, is coincident with aesthetic development.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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