This sense of Beauty is something in me
which demands not simply gratification but the best and keenest of a
sense or continuance of sense impressions, and which refuses coarse
quantitative assuagements. It ranges all over the senses, and just as I
refuse to wholly cut off any of my motives, so do I refuse to limit its
use to the plane of the eye or the ear.
It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and
taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of
beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism
and sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink
well one must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one's eye
must be clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and
sweet and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest sense of all--the
joyous sense of bodily well-being--comes only with exercises and
restraints and fine living. There I think lies the way of my
disposition. I do not want to live in the sensual sty, but I also do not
want to scratch in the tub of Diogenes.
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