"Precisely, my dear sir! We ought to have another word. All values are
continually being revised, and tested anew. Are they not? We have been
restating moral values within the last half-century; it is the same
with artistic ones. New canons of taste, new standards, are continually
being evolved; there is a general widening and multiplying of notions.
This, I think, ought to make us careful as to the words we employ, and
ready to coin new ones whenever a new idea is to be expressed. If we
enlarge our concepts, we should likewise enlarge our vocabulary. When I
spoke of beauty, I used the word in its narrow classical meaning, a
meaning which may be out of fashion, but which has the great advantage
that it happens to be irrevocably fixed and defined for us by what the
ancients themselves have handed down in the way of art and criticism.
This particular beauty, I say, is irreconcilable with that other beauty
of which you spoke."
"How so?" asked the millionaire.
"There resides, for example, in Hellenic sculpture a certain
ingredient--what shall we call it? Let us call it the factor of
strangeness, of mystery! It is a vague emanation which radiates from
such works of art, and gives us a sense of their universal
applicability to all our changing moods and passions. That, I suppose,
is why we call them ever young. They beckon to all of us familiarly and
yet, as it were, from an unexplored world. They speak to us at all
seasons in some loving and yet enigmatical language, such language as
we may read, at times, in the eyes of a child that wakes from sleep.
Now the swiftest and fairest steam-engine in the world is not for ever
young; it grows obsolete and ends, after a short life, on the
scrap-heap. That is to say, where usefulness enters, this spirit of
mystery, of eternal youth, is put to flight. And there is yet another
element of classical beauty which is equally at variance with your
modern conception of it: the element of authority. Beholding the
Praxitelean Eros, the veriest ruffian feels compelled to reverence the
creator and his work. 'Who was the man?' he asks; for he acknowledges
that such things impose themselves upon his untutored mind. Now a
certain Monsieur Cadillac builds the most beautiful motor-cars. Who is
this man? We do not care a fig about him. He is probably a Jewish
syndicate. Such being the case, I cannot bring myself to reverence
Monsieur Cadillac and his cars. They are comfortable, but that factor
of authority, which compels our homage to the Eros, is wholly lacking.
Yet both things are called beautiful. That we should apply the same
word to products so different, so hopelessly conflicting, as those of
Praxiteles and Monsieur Cadillac--what does it prove? It proves our
poverty of invention. And what does it explain? It explains our
confusion of thought."
The millionaire remarked:
"I suppose the human outlook has shifted with the years. Democracy hyas
changed your old point of view."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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