Love of beauty

Somewhere in every human heart – even the meanest, surely – is a desire for beauty.

When the city-dweller articulates this love of beauty and seeks to satisfy it as best as he can, he is disclosing that he lives not in beauty but in squalor and ugliness. For, as Socrates says, you can desire only that which you lack. The greater the lack, the greater the desire.

The more I live in the natural world, the more I realise – despite everything – how truly and utterly I live in beauty, walk in beauty as the poet says. Sometimes, gazing at the immense arch of the evening sky over the sea or the green silent river that flows into it, absorbing the pervasive lushness of trees and plants, inhaling the fragrance of a flower, I am overwhelmed by this glorious, mysterious thing we call Beauty.

It is not as if there is no ugliness in the natural world. There are ugly creatures enough, yet even their ugliness seems to exist almost solely to make you note and appreciate, by contrast, the beautiful and sublime.

This is not to say that the man-made is not beautiful. As a result of man’s creative urge we have sublime works of art and objects of great beauty. Yet this is always an individual endeavor. The great mass of humanity seems to have no aesthetic sense. The love of beauty is deadened in the hurly-burly of living. Ugly buildings sprout as a result. Squalor and chaos reign.

There are those – some environmentalists, for example - who are accused of romanticising nature and opposing progress. The arguments and counterarguments fly fast and furious. Yet, somewhere in all this jungle of strident angry words there is – or so it seems sometimes - an inarticulate, truly heartfelt cry for something that appears to be in danger of getting lost in a world that everyday grows more unnatural and more ugly.

When, I wonder, did the natural human desire for beauty become this inchoate yearning? Did it begin with industrialisation, when, sickened by the belching chimneys and a grey landscape, by the overall degradation, men turned their faces away? Does it continue as the stress of living in crowded cities intensifies? In beauty there is harmony, a harmony that simply doesn’t exist in the mad world.

D H Lawrence – always a lover of nature – writes this, almost a hundred years ago:

"The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling."

It is undoubtedly true that man is losing touch with something deep and true within himself when he disconnects from the natural world and embraces all that is plastic.

To see a complete negation of beauty and harmony in our world is a horror that is hard even to imagine.