The desire for beauty and harmony, therefore, in proportion as it
becomes active and sensitive, explores into every detail, establishes
comparisons between everything, judges, approves, and disapproves; and
makes terrible and wholesome havoc not merely in our surroundings, but
in our habits and in our lives. And very soon the mere thought of
something ugly becomes enough to outweigh the actual presence of
something beautiful. I was told last winter at San Remo, that the
scent of the Parma violet can be distilled only by the oil of the
flower being passed through a layer of pork fat; and since that
revelation violet essence has lost much of the charm it possessed for
me: the thought of the suet counterbalanced the reality of the
perfume.
Now this violet essence, thus obtained, is symbolic of many of the
apparently refined enjoyments of our life. We shall find that luxury
and pomp, delightful sometimes in themselves, are distilled through a
layer of coarse and repulsive labour by other folk; and the thought of
the pork suet will spoil the smell of the violets. For the more dishes
we have for dinner, the greater number of cooking-pots will have to be
cleaned; the more carriages and horses we use, the more washing and
grooming will result; the more crowded our rooms with furniture and
nicknacks, the more dust will have to be removed; the more numerous
and delicate our clothes, the more brushing and folding there will
be; and the more purely ornamental our own existence, the less
ornamental will be that of others.
There is a _pensée_ of Pascal's to the effect that a fop carries on
his person the evidence of the existence of so many people devoted to
his service. This thought may be delightful to a fop; but it is not
pleasant to a mind sensitive to beauty and hating the bare thought of
ugliness: for while vanity takes pleasure in lack of harmony between
oneself and one's neighbour, æsthetic feeling takes pleasure only in
harmonious relations. The thought of the servile lives devoted to make
our life more beautiful counterbalances the pleasure of the beauty;
'tis the eternal question of the violet essence and the pork suet. Now
the habit of beauty, the æsthetic sense, becomes, as I said, more and
more sensitive and vivacious; you cannot hide from it the knowledge of
every sort of detail, you cannot prevent its noticing the ugly side,
the ugly lining of certain pretty things. 'Tis a but weak and sleepy
kind of æstheticism which "blinks and shuts its apprehension up" at
your bidding, which looks another way discreetly, and discreetly
refrains from all comparisons. The real æsthetic activity _is_ an
activity; it is one of the strongest and most imperious powers of
human nature; it does not take orders, it only gives them. It is, when
full grown, a kind of conscience of beautiful and ugly, analogous to
the other conscience of right and wrong, and it is equally difficult
to silence. If you can silence your æsthetic faculty and bid it be
satisfied with the lesser beauty, the lesser harmony, instead of the
greater, be sure that it is a very rudimentary kind of instinct; and
that you are no more thoroughly æsthetic than if you could make your
sense of right and wrong be blind and dumb at your convenience, you
could be thoroughly moral.
Hence, the more æsthetic we become, the less we shall tolerate such
modes of living as involve dull and dirty work for others, as involve
the exclusion of others from the sort of life which we consider
æsthetically tolerable. We shall require such houses and such habits
as can be seen, and, what is inevitable in all æsthetical development,
as can also be _thought of_, in all their details. We shall require a
homogeneous impression of decorum and fitness from the lives of others
as well as from our own, from what we actually see and from what we
merely know: the imperious demand for beauty, for harmony will be
applied no longer to our mere material properties, but to that other
possession which is always with us and can never be taken from us, the
images and feelings within our soul. Now, that other human beings
should be drudging sordidly in order that we may be idle and showy
means a thought, a vision, an emotion which do not get on in our mind
in company with the sight of sunset and sea, the taste of mountain air
and woodland freshness, the faces and forms of Florentine saints and
Antique gods, the serene poignancy of great phrases of music. This is
by no means all. Developing in æsthetic sensitiveness we grow to think
of ourselves also, our own preferences, moods and attitudes, as more
or less beautiful or ugly; the inner life falling under the same
criticism as the outer one. We become aristocratic and epicurean about
our desires and habits; we grow squeamish and impatient towards
luxury, towards all kinds of monopoly and privilege on account of the
mean attitude, the graceless gesture they involve on our own part.