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. . . Probably nobody knows
what actual beauty
is—except those serious writers of humorous essays in art magazines,
who accurately,
but kindly, with club in hand, demonstrate for all time and men that beauty
is a quadratic monomial—that it is absolute—that it
is relative—that it is not relative—that it
is not. . . . The word “beauty”
is as easy to use
as the word “decadent.” Both come
in handy when one does or does not agree with you. For our part, something
that Roussel-Despierres says comes nearer to what we like to think beauty
is . . . “an infinite source of
good . . . the
love of the beautiful . . . a constant anxiety for
moral beauty.” Even here we go around in a circle—a thing
apparently inevitable, if one tries to reduce art to philosophy.
But personally, we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a parallelepipedon,
for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics; or for the same
reason we prefer Whittier to Baudelaire, a poet to a genius, or a healthy
to a rotten apple—probably not so much because it is more nutritious,
but because we like its taste better: We like the beautiful and don’t
like
the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don’t like
is ugly—and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were
we would like something we don’t like. . . .
Charles Ives
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