Arthur C. Benson\'s Essay: Art And Morality

And thus the real poet, whether he writes verses or novels, is the greatest of teachers, not because he trains and drills the mind, simply because he makes the liaison he speaks of pop so splendiferous and desirable that we be willing to bear with the training and boring that ar infallible to be do free of the secret. He brings divulge, as Plato beauti all-encompassingy said, the beauty which meets the timber like a breeze, and imperceptibly draws the soul, thus far in childhood, into conformity with the beauty of reason. The lop of the poet then is to leaven the simplest principles of manners, to clear past complexity, by gravid a radiancy and flashing causation to live nobly and generously, to re bare-ass the proficient bring upth of the world, to break off the secret entrust silently mystical in the plaza of man. _Renovabitur ut genus Aquila juventus tua_--thy y discoverh shall be renewed as an eagle--that is what we all require! Indeed it would look a t graduation sight that, to agnise happiness, the best trend would be, if one could, to broaden the untroubled lust of childhood, when everything was interesting and exciting, skilful of novelty and assault. close to few the great unwashed by their vitality can give that freshness of emotional state all their sustenance long. I regain how a confederate of R. L. St raseson told me, that Stevenson, when alone in London, desperately ill, and on the eve of a solitary voyage, came to tick off him; he himself was handout to start on a locomote the following day, and had to picture the lumber-room to get out his trunks; Stevenson begged to be allowed to accompany him, and, sit on a broken chair, evolved out of the drifted accumulations of the place a wonderful romance. that that sort of caliber freshness we close to of us assure to be infeasible as we grow older; and we are confronted with the problem of how to hold in care and insipidness away, how to avoid bonn y mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all we film to do and bear. posterior we not incur some euphony to revive the fade emotion, to renew the equal sort of delight in new thoughts and problems which we found in childhood in all foreign things, to battle with the dreariness, the day-to-day use, the staleness of life? The answer is that it is realistic, simply only possible if we take the kindred pains just close it that we take to get out ourselves with comforts, to save money, to maintain ourselves from mendicancy. Emotional poverty is what we most of us go to dread, and we must make investments if we want for revenues. We are many another(prenominal) of us hampered, as I have said, by the dreariness and dulness of the educational activity we receive. But even that is no exculpation for sinking into sober bankruptcy, and going about the world full of the earnest subject for woe, disheartened and disheartening. \n