United States or Switzerland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In his youth Vergil had, to be sure, avoided the extremes of photographic realism illustrated by the very curious Moretum, but he had nevertheless, in works like the Copa, the Dirae, and the eighth Eclogue, practiced the craft of the miniaturist whenever he found the minutiae aesthetically significant.
Poor Tom, indeed, seems to have seen deeper things in the holy book than I.... Tom, perhaps, understands them better than I, because more flogging occurs in them; that is to say, those ceaseless blows of the whip which have aesthetically disgusted me in reading the Gospels and the Acts. But a poor negro slave reads with his back, and understands better than we do.
And how great a development could they attain to thereafter? If we had landed here after the great saurians had been swept from the scene, we might first have considered the lemurs or apes. They had hands. Aesthetically viewed, the poor simians were simply grotesque; but travelers who knew other planets might have known what beauty may spring from an uncouth beginning in this magic universe.
In point of substantial fact, the gratification and the culture, or the spiritual attitude or habit of mind, resulting from an habitual contemplation of the anthropomorphism, clannishness, and leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an early day, or from a familiarity with the animistic superstitions and the exuberant truculence of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is, aesthetically considered, more legitimate than the corresponding results derived from a matter-of-fact knowledge of things and a contemplation of latter-day civic or workmanlike efficiency.
A bear in high spirits this is what one thinks of. The poetry it produces, too, is desperately vulgar and commonplace. Why? In the first place, because, in spite of the pretenses of our democratic philosophies, the classes whose backs are bent with manual labor are aesthetically inferior to the others.
He wrote strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was aesthetically bad.
To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the highest beauty, all other works of fiction that have been written, and I believe that they do this because they obey the law of the author's own life. His conscience is one ethically and one aesthetically; with his will to be true to himself he cannot be false to his knowledge of others.
If we approach a work of art or nature scientifically, for the sake of its historical connexions or proper classification, we do not approach it aesthetically. The discovery of its date or of its author may be otherwise interesting; it only remotely affects our aesthetic appreciation by adding to the direct effect certain associations.
Apparently, the rear building was three stories in height I say apparently, for, being entirely destitute of windows, it was impossible to accurately deduce the number of its floors. Aesthetically, it made no pretensions, its only architectural feature being a domed roof of copper and a couple of chimney-stacks, from one of which a thin streak of vapor ascended.
Are such anachronisms as those of which Voltaire accuses Shakespeare in Hamlet, such as the introduction of cannon before the invention of gunpowder, and making Christians of the Danes three centuries too soon, of the least bearing aesthetically? I think not; but as they are of a piece with a great many other criticisms upon the great poet, it is worth while to dwell upon them a moment.
Word Of The Day