When William Morris, for example, says that "love
is enough," it is obvious that he asserts in those words that art,
science, politics, ambition, money, houses, carriages, concerts,
gloves, walking-sticks, door-knockers, railway-stations, cathedrals, and
any other things one may choose to tabulate are unnecessary. When Omar
Khayyam says:
"A book of verses underneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness--
O wilderness were Paradise enow."
It is clear that he speaks fully as much ascetically as he does
aesthetically. He makes a list of things and says that he wants no more.
The same thing was done by a mediaeval monk. Examples might, of course,
be multiplied a hundred-fold. One of the most genuinely poetical of our
younger poets says, as the one thing certain, that
"From quiet home and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends--
There's nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends."
Here we have a perfect example of the main important fact, that all true
joy expresses itself in terms of asceticism.
But if, in any case, it should happen that a class or a generation lose
the sense of the peculiar kind of joy which is being celebrated, they
immediately begin to call the enjoyers of that joy gloomy and
self-destroying. The most formidable liberal philosophers have called
the monks melancholy because they denied themselves the pleasures of
liberty and marriage.
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