The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic TheorySantayana, George
Philosophy
The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
Santayana, George
Aesthetics
And another point. The wider diffusion of sensuous beauty makes
it as it were the poor man's good. Fewer factors are needed to
produce it and less training to appreciate it. The senses are
indispensable instruments of labour, developed by the necessities
of life; but their perfect development produces a harmony between
the inward structure and instinct of the organ and the outward
opportunities for its use; and this harmony is the source of
continual pleasures. In the sphere of sense, therefore, a certain
cultivation is inevitable in man; often greater, indeed, among
rude peoples, perhaps among animals, than among those whose
attention takes a wider sweep and whose ideas are more abstract.
Without requiring, therefore, that a man should rise above his
station, or develope capacities which his opportunities will seldom
employ, we may yet endow his life with aesthetic interest, if we
allow him the enjoyment of sensuous beauty. This enriches him
without adding to his labour, and flatters him without alienating
him from his world.
Taste, when it is spontaneous, always begins with the senses.
Children and savages, as we are so often told, delight in bright and
variegated colours; the simplest people appreciate the neatness of
muslin curtains, shining varnish, and burnished pots. A rustic
garden is a shallow patchwork of the liveliest flowers, without that
reserve and repose which is given by spaces and masses. Noise and
vivacity is all that childish music contains, and primitive songs add
little more of form than what is required to compose a few
monotonous cadences. These limitations are not to be regretted;
they are a proof of sincerity. Such simplicity is not the absence of
taste, but the beginning of it.
A people with genuine aesthetic perceptions creates traditional
forms and expresses the simple pathos of its life, in unchanging but
significant themes, repeated by generation after generation. When
sincerity is lost, and a snobbish ambition is substituted bad taste
comes in. The essence of it is a substitution of non-aesthetic for
aesthetic values. To love glass beads because they are beautiful is
barbarous, perhaps, but not vulgar; to love jewels only because
they are dear is vulgar, and to betray the motive by placing them
ineffectively is an offence against taste. The test is always the same:
Does the thing itself actually please? If it does, your taste is real; it
may be different from that of others, but is equally justified and
grounded in human nature. If it does not, your whole judgment is
spurious, and you are guilty, not of heresy, which in aesthetics is
orthodoxy itself, but of hypocrisy, which is a self-excommunication
from its sphere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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