BeautyBy Roger Scruton (Oxford University Press, £10.99)
The fire in the cast-iron grate, the winter roses outside the window, the crumbly brick wall and the snow-covered meadow beyond: they may not be in the same league as Salisbury Cathedral or the Mona Lisa, but in their way they strike me as equally perfect, equally beautiful. Aesthetic value is not, after all, a matter of scarcity; and—whether you're an atheist or a creationist or something in between—you can hardly help wondering at the extravagant loveliness of untamed nature, or feeling grateful for episodes of unexpected grace or flair in everyday life.
For more than 30 years, Roger Scruton has been an eloquent admirer of ordinary beauty, and his new book is a lucid and often graceful compendium of his reflections on the aesthetics of everyday life: on the choices involved, as he says, in laying the table, tidying your room, or designing a web page. He discusses beauty in nature and the beauty of human bodies as well as beauty in music and painting, and above all—to go back to one of his earliest books—the beauty of beautiful buildings.
Even in an artistic paradise like Venice, Scruton's attention will move quickly from the heroic buildings on the waterfronts to the "modest neighbours" that surround them. "Ravishing beauties," as he puts it, "are less important in the aesthetics of architecture than things that fit appropriately together, creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail."
Beauty may have its roots in simple sensuous enjoyment, but even at its humblest it appeals to something larger: a capacity to step back and pay attention, and a willingness to consider, compare and arrive at a judgement. The "judgement of taste," as Immanuel Kant called it, spans two different worlds: a private world of individual subjectivity, as idiosyncratic as you please, and a public world where you defend and develop your tastes through conscientious discussion and debate—where you try to reason me out of wearing a yellow shirt, for instance, and I try to persuade you to get rid of the Carmen ringtone on your phone.
Beauty is one of those books that seem bigger from the inside than the outside. After laying out his conception of beauty and its relation to morality and sacredness, Scruton sets off to explore it in its various forms, starting with the beauties of nature. He maintains, for instance, that the beauty of unspoilt wilderness—of mountains and plains and open skies—depends on an evident absence of any fixed centre, a lack of prescribed edges. If you go up the hill or round the corner, or simply hang around watching the light change, there will always be new views to admire. The beauty of birds, animals and flowers, on the other hand, is rooted in their existence as self-defining entities with boundaries of their own. And the special beauty of the human body belongs not to a mere assemblage of body parts but to the personality that finds expression in it, especially through the face. Even a stony-hearted cynic is liable to be impressed by the sight of a graceful child or a moonlit sky with scudding clouds, or by coming upon a demure cowslip or spotting the blended plumage of a pheasant. Natural beauty gives you "an enhanced sense of belonging," as Scruton puts it—a sense that "a world that makes room for such things makes room for you."
Gardens are different again. They are places where the beauty of wild nature has been disciplined, more or less sympathetically, into artificial forms. Their beauty is not that of infinite landscapes but of bounded spaces that surround us, rather like architectural interiors; and they enable Scruton to move smoothly from natural beauty to the far more contentious terrain of high art. Scruton can be as perceptive about sculpture, painting and classical music as about the varieties of natural beauty, but inevitably he is more controversial. He turns from a fine appreciation of Schubert's Win-terreise, for instance, to a sharp reproach to Mahler's susceptibility to "sentimental grief," before lambasting the work of the scatological opera producer Calixto Bieito—an example, he thinks, of the kind of art that consciously "cultivates a posture of transgression" while smugly "announcing itself as a visitor from the future."
By this point, the serenity of the earlier parts of the book is coming under strain; and Scruton concludes with a reckless jeremiad about a supposed "flight from beauty" in contemporary art. For, as well as being an imaginative and eloquent philosopher, Scruton is an accomplished popular journalist—and when he chooses to stir, he does it with a shovel. He folds in bucketfuls of non-specific allegations about "censorious feminists" and "the increasingly standard fare at official modern art shows," not to mention the "increasingly many teachers of the humanities" who instruct their students that " soaps are as good as Shakespeare." The cult of ugliness has gone so far, he claims, that it now reaches "every aspect of our contemporary culture."
It is curious to observe how Scruton's indignation leads him to transgress his own standards of courtesy and decorum, and indeed of accurate and well-tuned prose. And you do not have to be a complete punk to suspect that the cause of his anguish may lie within him, and particularly in his assumption that there is an unbroken continuum between the beauties of nature and the operation of works of art. Any attempt to cover the entire spectrum of reasonable pleasure with a single concept of beauty is bound, after all, to be quite a stretch.
Take the literary arts. Scruton is conspicuously vague when he invokes the concept of "beautiful novels," and he sounds distinctly uneasy when describing story, dialogue and commentary as "sensory features" of narrative fiction, as if they could appeal to the same aesthetic sense as forests, wildflowers or glorious sunsets. Yet, in the case of literature, beauty is not the half of it. There are also questions of perceptiveness, wit, perspective and above all truth; and the same applies to other art forms too. To concentrate on the beauty of a singer's voice is to risk turning a tin ear to expressiveness, dynamic variety and accuracy of attack; to focus on the loveliness of a painting may mean attending to fields of colour at the expense of precision of representation or design. In a revealing passage, Scruton confesses to a general dislike for cinema, but he makes one exception: you could take a still from any film by Ingmar Bergman, he says, put it in a frame and hang it on your wall, and it would hold its own there "like an engraving." That may or may not be true; but single, silent images, however beautiful, are hardly a promising basis for understanding cinematic techniques or judging how they may have extended the ancient arts of storytelling.
Scruton sometimes reminds me of RG Collingwood, who was one of the most gifted philosophers of the 20th century, with a marvellous sense of history, and—apart from a weakness for irritable sarcasm—a wonderful way with words. Like Scruton, he worked out his philosophical ideas in constant engagement with the arts. Unlike him, though, he was aware that there is more to art than beauty. In his Autobiography, he described how, as a child growing up among artists, he learned "to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting." He realised that works of art, however beautiful they are, will fail if they are phoney, imperceptive, stupid or obtuse; and that works that disappoint the adepts of beauty may still articulate issues about the world and the way it presents itself to our senses. If a work does not achieve beauty, it may still bear witness to truth.
The fire in the cast-iron grate, the winter roses outside the window, the crumbly brick wall and the snow-covered meadow beyond: they may not be in the same league as Salisbury Cathedral or the Mona Lisa, but in their way they strike me as equally perfect, equally beautiful. Aesthetic value is not, after all, a matter of scarcity; and—whether you're an atheist or a creationist or something in between—you can hardly help wondering at the extravagant loveliness of untamed nature, or feeling grateful for episodes of unexpected grace or flair in everyday life.
For more than 30 years, Roger Scruton has been an eloquent admirer of ordinary beauty, and his new book is a lucid and often graceful compendium of his reflections on the aesthetics of everyday life: on the choices involved, as he says, in laying the table, tidying your room, or designing a web page. He discusses beauty in nature and the beauty of human bodies as well as beauty in music and painting, and above all—to go back to one of his earliest books—the beauty of beautiful buildings.
Even in an artistic paradise like Venice, Scruton's attention will move quickly from the heroic buildings on the waterfronts to the "modest neighbours" that surround them. "Ravishing beauties," as he puts it, "are less important in the aesthetics of architecture than things that fit appropriately together, creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail."
Beauty may have its roots in simple sensuous enjoyment, but even at its humblest it appeals to something larger: a capacity to step back and pay attention, and a willingness to consider, compare and arrive at a judgement. The "judgement of taste," as Immanuel Kant called it, spans two different worlds: a private world of individual subjectivity, as idiosyncratic as you please, and a public world where you defend and develop your tastes through conscientious discussion and debate—where you try to reason me out of wearing a yellow shirt, for instance, and I try to persuade you to get rid of the Carmen ringtone on your phone.
Beauty is one of those books that seem bigger from the inside than the outside. After laying out his conception of beauty and its relation to morality and sacredness, Scruton sets off to explore it in its various forms, starting with the beauties of nature. He maintains, for instance, that the beauty of unspoilt wilderness—of mountains and plains and open skies—depends on an evident absence of any fixed centre, a lack of prescribed edges. If you go up the hill or round the corner, or simply hang around watching the light change, there will always be new views to admire. The beauty of birds, animals and flowers, on the other hand, is rooted in their existence as self-defining entities with boundaries of their own. And the special beauty of the human body belongs not to a mere assemblage of body parts but to the personality that finds expression in it, especially through the face. Even a stony-hearted cynic is liable to be impressed by the sight of a graceful child or a moonlit sky with scudding clouds, or by coming upon a demure cowslip or spotting the blended plumage of a pheasant. Natural beauty gives you "an enhanced sense of belonging," as Scruton puts it—a sense that "a world that makes room for such things makes room for you."
Gardens are different again. They are places where the beauty of wild nature has been disciplined, more or less sympathetically, into artificial forms. Their beauty is not that of infinite landscapes but of bounded spaces that surround us, rather like architectural interiors; and they enable Scruton to move smoothly from natural beauty to the far more contentious terrain of high art. Scruton can be as perceptive about sculpture, painting and classical music as about the varieties of natural beauty, but inevitably he is more controversial. He turns from a fine appreciation of Schubert's Win-terreise, for instance, to a sharp reproach to Mahler's susceptibility to "sentimental grief," before lambasting the work of the scatological opera producer Calixto Bieito—an example, he thinks, of the kind of art that consciously "cultivates a posture of transgression" while smugly "announcing itself as a visitor from the future."
By this point, the serenity of the earlier parts of the book is coming under strain; and Scruton concludes with a reckless jeremiad about a supposed "flight from beauty" in contemporary art. For, as well as being an imaginative and eloquent philosopher, Scruton is an accomplished popular journalist—and when he chooses to stir, he does it with a shovel. He folds in bucketfuls of non-specific allegations about "censorious feminists" and "the increasingly standard fare at official modern art shows," not to mention the "increasingly many teachers of the humanities" who instruct their students that " soaps are as good as Shakespeare." The cult of ugliness has gone so far, he claims, that it now reaches "every aspect of our contemporary culture."
It is curious to observe how Scruton's indignation leads him to transgress his own standards of courtesy and decorum, and indeed of accurate and well-tuned prose. And you do not have to be a complete punk to suspect that the cause of his anguish may lie within him, and particularly in his assumption that there is an unbroken continuum between the beauties of nature and the operation of works of art. Any attempt to cover the entire spectrum of reasonable pleasure with a single concept of beauty is bound, after all, to be quite a stretch.
Take the literary arts. Scruton is conspicuously vague when he invokes the concept of "beautiful novels," and he sounds distinctly uneasy when describing story, dialogue and commentary as "sensory features" of narrative fiction, as if they could appeal to the same aesthetic sense as forests, wildflowers or glorious sunsets. Yet, in the case of literature, beauty is not the half of it. There are also questions of perceptiveness, wit, perspective and above all truth; and the same applies to other art forms too. To concentrate on the beauty of a singer's voice is to risk turning a tin ear to expressiveness, dynamic variety and accuracy of attack; to focus on the loveliness of a painting may mean attending to fields of colour at the expense of precision of representation or design. In a revealing passage, Scruton confesses to a general dislike for cinema, but he makes one exception: you could take a still from any film by Ingmar Bergman, he says, put it in a frame and hang it on your wall, and it would hold its own there "like an engraving." That may or may not be true; but single, silent images, however beautiful, are hardly a promising basis for understanding cinematic techniques or judging how they may have extended the ancient arts of storytelling.
Scruton sometimes reminds me of RG Collingwood, who was one of the most gifted philosophers of the 20th century, with a marvellous sense of history, and—apart from a weakness for irritable sarcasm—a wonderful way with words. Like Scruton, he worked out his philosophical ideas in constant engagement with the arts. Unlike him, though, he was aware that there is more to art than beauty. In his Autobiography, he described how, as a child growing up among artists, he learned "to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting." He realised that works of art, however beautiful they are, will fail if they are phoney, imperceptive, stupid or obtuse; and that works that disappoint the adepts of beauty may still articulate issues about the world and the way it presents itself to our senses. If a work does not achieve beauty, it may still bear witness to truth.
