Still, on the whole, such as can care for beautiful things and
beautiful thoughts are beginning to care for them more fully, and are
growing, undoubtedly, in a certain moral sensitiveness which, as I
have said, is coincident with æsthetic development.
This strikes me every time that I see or think about a certain
priest's house on a hillside by the Mediterranean: a little house
built up against the village church, and painted and roofed, like the
church, a most delicate grey, against which the yellow of the
spalliered lemons sings out in exquisite intensity; alongside, a wall
with flower pots, and dainty white curtains to the windows. Such a
house and the life possible in it are beginning, for many of us, to
become the ideal, by whose side all luxury and worldly grandeur
becomes insipid or vulgar. For such a house as this embodies the
possibility of living with grace and decorum _throughout_ by dint of
loving carefulness and self-restraining simplicity. I say with grace
and decorum _throughout_, because all things which might beget
ugliness in the life of others, or ugliness in our own attitude
towards others, would be eliminated, thrown away like the fossil which
Thoreau threw away because it collected dust. Moreover, such a life as
this is such as all may reasonably hope to have; may, in some more
prosperous age, obtain because it involves no hoarding of advantage
for self or excluding therefrom of others.
And such a life we ourselves may attain at least in the spirit, if we
become strenuous and faithful lovers of the beautiful, æsthetes and
ascetics who recognise that their greatest pleasure, their only true
possessions are in themselves; knowing the supreme value of their own
soul, even as was foreshadowed by the Abbot Joachim of Flora, when he
said that the true monk can hold no property except his lyre.