United States or Maldives ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But dirt upon a face that he wished to be clean he could not see a fluid in his blue eyes dissolved that dirt while the image of the face was passing on to their retinae. The process was unconscious, and has been called idealism. This was why the longer he reflected the more agonisedly certain he became that his ward was right to be faithful to the man she loved, right to join her life to his.
Mrs. Culpeper, a small imperious woman of distinguished lineage and uncertain temper, had gone through an entire life seeing only one thing at a time, and never seeing that one thing as it really was. If her husband embodied the moral purpose, she herself was an incarnation of the evasive idealism of the nineteenth century. Her universe was comprised in her family circle; her horizon ended with the old brick wall between the alley and the Culpepers' garden. All that related to her husband, her eight children and her six grandchildren, was not only of supreme importance and intense interest to her, but of unsurpassed beauty and excellence. It was intolerable to her exclusive maternal instinct that either virtue or happiness should exist in any degree, except a lesser measure, outside of her own household; and praise of another woman's children conveyed to her a secret disparagement of her own. Having naturally a kind heart she could forgive any sin in her neighbours except prosperity though as Corinna had once observed, with characteristic flippancy, "Continual affliction was a high price to pay for Aunt Harriet's favour." In her girlhood she had been a famous beauty; and she was still as fine and delicately tinted as a carving in old ivory, with a skin like a faded microphylla rose-leaf, and stiff yellowish white hair, worn
In a word, Italy was treated as a poor and importunate relation, and was asked to console herself with the reflection that she was working in the vineyard of idealism. In vain eminent publicists in Rome, Turin, and Milan pleaded their country's cause. Adopting the principle which Mr.
Aldington continued: "The trouble with Douglas is that he does not see that idealism is as real as realism. Douglas is something of a sophist. I do not mean to disparage his value to the country. But he is a genius in making the course of Jackson consistent. He has applied the same art to justify his own conduct.
The trivial on the one hand, the criminal on the other, in the individual, are the extremes of realistic art, while idealism rises to an almost superhuman emphasis on that wisdom and virtue, and the beauty clothing them, which are the goal of a nation's effort.
In Germany our hypocrisy consists in always talking about idealism while we think of nothing but our interests, and we even believe that we are idealists while we think of nothing but ourselves. Art for art's sake!... That's a fine faith! But it is the faith of the strong. Art!
Psychologists at present are much concerned to entreat us to "face reality," discarding idealism along with the other phantasies that haunt the race. Yet this facing of reality can hardly be complete if we do not face the facts of the spiritual life. Certainly we shall find it most difficult to interpret these facts; they are confused, and more than one reading of them is possible.
Speculation was the breath of life to him. He had metaphysical genius. He tended to transform in this direction everything which he touched. Religion is thought. He criticised the rationalist movement from the height of vantage which idealism had reached. But as pure intellectualist he would put most rationalists to shame.
To misunderstand this is to suppose there is no such thing as national idealism, and that a people will accept substitutes for the principle of nationality, whereas the past history of the world and present circumstance in Europe are evidence that nothing is more unconquerable and immortal than national feeling, and that it emerges from centuries of alien government, and is ready at any time to flare out in insurrection.
No lovely human outline could charm it to vulgar fact. He saw the fair form made perfect; he rose to the vision without tremor, without effort of wing; he communed with it face to face, and resolved into finer and lovelier truth the purity which completes it as the fragrance completes the rose. That's what they call idealism; the word's vastly abused, but the thing is good.
Word Of The Day