§ 11. 2. Levity from the same cause.
3. Reactionary love of inanimate beauty.
This faithlessness operates among us according to our tempers, producing
either sadness or levity, and being the ultimate root alike of our discontents
and of our wantonnesses. It is marvellous how full of contradiction it makes us;
we are first dull, and seek for wild and lonely places because we have no heart
for the garden;presently we recover our spirits, and build an
assembly room among the mountains, because we have no reverence for the desert.
I do not know if there be game on Sinai, but I am always expecting to hear of
some one's shooting over it.§ 12. There is, however, another, and a more innocent root of our delight in wild scenery. oil paintings
All the Renaissance principles of art tended, as I have before often explained, to the setting Beauty above Truth, and seeking for it always at the expense of truth. And the proper punishment of such pursuit—the punishment which all the laws of the universe rendered inevitable—was, that those who thus pursued beauty should wholly lose sight of beauty. All the thinkers of the age, as we saw previously, declared that it did not exist. The age seconded their efforts, and banished beauty, so far as human effort could succeed in doing so, from the face of the earth, and the form of man. To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick walls, and pictures to brown stains. One desert of Ugliness was extended before the eyes of mankind; and their pursuit of the beautiful, so recklessly continued, received unexpected consummation in high-heeled shoes and periwigs,—Gower Street, and Gaspar Poussin cheap oil paintings on canvas
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