United States or Somalia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A little reef is sufficient to bring about a great shipwreck; a generation has wasted half its life, and the Old Masters are again becoming the fashion. Mr. Furse seems to be deeply impressed with the truth of the new aestheticism. And he has succeeded within the limits of a tiny panel, a slight but charming intention.
For an artist to believe that his art is concerned with religion or politics or morals or psychology or scientific truth is well; it keeps him alive and passionate and vigorous: it keeps him up out of sentimental aestheticism: it keeps to hand a suitable artistic problem.
English aestheticism would probably disown any religious intention, although it has been accused of a refined interest in Pan and Venus; but in all its feudal sympathies it goes along with the religious art and vestment revival, the return to symbolic ceremonies, monastic vigils, and sisterhoods.
The men average tall and handsome; they look like veritable warrior-priests in their flowing white costumes, and they make a strange picture of mingled barbarism and aestheticism as they loaf in lazy magnificence about the tumble-down ruins of the konak, toying with their roses in silence.
It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert. As little should you judge of the strength and splendour of sun or sea by the dust that dances in the beam, or the bubble that breaks on the wave, as take your critic for any sane test of art.
Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual silliness. All the powers of the self, raised to their in tensest form, shall be used in it; though used perhaps in a new way.
But when the knowledge of their meaning comes to one who feels the divine in all religions, then they will be found to make appeal to the higher aestheticism, to the sense of moral beauty, with a force never to be divined by minds knowing nothing of the Orient and its thought.
I forget his name it is French; I know he writes on Art for Demos; a remarkable being who apparently talks, hears, and sees nothing else but aestheticism. For as there are types peculiar to art exhibitions, so there are certain individuals apparently quite peculiar to art exhibitions. Come, let us go on down to see some Old Masters.
He always gave the impression of being half asleep, he had a way of suddenly lurching on his legs as though in another moment his desire for slumber would be too strong for him, and would send him crashing to the ground. He would be smoking an ancient briar, and his thick red hands would be clasped behind his back.... No encouraging figure for Bohun's aestheticism.
Looking at his child, he was thinking: "By what right have we done this?" For that matter, he was always oppressed by miseries foreign to normal men. For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an anchorite, at one hour reëmbracing aestheticism, at another fleeing back to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense reproach.
Word Of The Day