There is another factor that may be so used, but I confess I shall speak
of it with some hesitation. It is at present, and has been for ages,
entirely outside the possibility even of consideration, and in a sense
that goes beyond the general ignoring of religion, for while Catholics,
who form the great majority of Christians, still hold to religion as a
prime element in education, there are none--or only a minority so small
as to be negligible--who give a thought to art in this connection. I
bring forward the word, and the thing it represents, with diffidence,
even apologetically: indeed, it is perhaps better to renounce the word
altogether and substitute the term "beauty," for during the nineteenth
century art got a bad name, not altogether undeservedly, and the
disrepute lingers. So long as beauty is an instinct native to men (and
it was this, except for very brief and periodic intervals, until hardly
more than a century ago, though latterly in a vanishing form), it is
wholesome, stimulating and indispensable, but when it becomes
self-conscious, when it finds itself the possession of a few highly
differentiated individuals instead of the attribute of man as such, then
it tends to degenerate into something abnormal and, in its last estate,
both futile and unclean. In its good estate, as for example in Greece,
Byzantium, the Middle Ages, and in Oriental countries until the last few
decades, beauty was so natural an object of endeavour and a mode of
expression, and its universality resulted in so characteristic an
environment, it was unnecessary to talk about it very much, or to give
any particular thought to the educational value of the arts which were
its manifestation through and to man, or how this was to be applied. The
things were there, everywhere at hand; the temples and churches, the
painting and the sculpture and the works of handicraft; the music and
poetry and drama, the ceremonial and costume of daily life, both secular
and religious, the very cities in which men congregated and the villages
in which they were dispersed. Beauty, in all its concrete forms of art,
was highly valued, almost as highly as religion or liberty or bodily
health, but then it was a part of normal life and therefore taken for
granted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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