r less degree, beauty and enjoyableness; nor should we always despise
the less, since we cannot always obtain the greater. I do not mean
that all art is equally valuable; such intellectual democracy, Walt.
Whitmanish assertion of the equality of body and soul, good and
evil, high and low, being just the most brutal rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul
dishonesty that I know; but I think that in most art there is something
valuable, and that we ought to make the most of it, and doubtless
should, did not our eternal theorising interfere, with its arbitrary
standard and requirements. Were we guided solely by our feelings, we
should not be ashamed of taking a certain pleasure in the half-dapper,
half-grotesque stone nymphs and tritons, with golden-lichened tresses
and beards of green pond ooze, who smirk among the ill-clipped hedges,
and puff at their horns among the flags and lilies of every abandoned
Prince-Bishop or Margrave's garden, where the apricots ripen against the
palace wall, and the old portraits fade behind the blistered palace
shutters; we should not be ashamed of being just a little the better
pleased for some common dance tune, heard vaguely, and between our work,
from the neighbouring houses; we should not be ashamed of liking our
village church all the more for the atrocious stained glass which we
have decried as vandalism, when the sunlight falls rosy, and golden,
and green, through its monstrosities on to the extremely chaste, but
excessively dreary, grey arches and pillars. We should not be so
hypocritical to ourselves, so exclusive in our adoration of only the
best pictures, and statues, and music, to appreciate rightly whose
great merit we ought (but do not), to appreciate also the small, more
appreciable merit of the less perfect things of art. When, instead of
enjoying, we fantasticate in theory, we not only remove a proportion of
our attention from the work in hand, but also exclude ourselves from
getting the good we might from other things; one man will positively
whip his soul out of enjoying the sweet solemnity of Claude's sea
sunsets, the tragedy pomp of Poussin's black rustling ilex-groves,
and ominous green evening skies, because he seeks in painting a moral
sincerity which is incompatible with a false shadow or a lumpishly
rendered cloud. Another man thinks music ought to be the expression
of dramatic passion, and closes his ears to the splendours of poor
Rossini's vocal arabesques, theory-blinded to the sen