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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 12
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...Symmetry is a human concept, because with all our irregularities we are more or less symmetrical and the balance of a mantel-piece by Adam or a phrase by Mozart reflects our satisfaction with our two eyes, two arms and two legs.
And consistency: again and again in this series I have used that word as a term of praise. But enclosed! That's the trouble: an enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit. One longs to get out, one longs to move. One realizes that symmetry and consistency ... are enemies of movement...
We must leave the trim, finite interiors of eighteenth-century classicism and go to confront the infinite. We have a long, rough voyage ahead of us... We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement, and still victims of the Fallacies of Hope...
The early nineteenth century created a chasm in the European mind as great as that which had split up Christendom in the sixteenth century, and even more dangerous.
On one side of the chasm was the new middle class nourished by the Industrial Revolution. It was hopeful and energetic, without a scale of values...
On the other side of the chasm were the finer spirits -- poets, painters, novelists, who were still heirs of the Romantic movement... They felt themselves ... to be entirely cut off from the prosperous majority...
Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives, scorns conventional values ... that threaten to impair our humanity: lies, tanks, tear-gas, ideologies, opinion polls, mechanisation, planners, computers -- the whole lot.
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