John Wood the Younger, Royal Crescent, Bath, 1775
6.
A perplexing consequence of fixing our eyes on an ideal is that it may make us sad. The more beautiful something is, the sadder we risk feeling, so that standing in front of a painting by Pieter de Hooch of a grave-faced little boy diligently bringing his mother some loaves of bread, or of John Wood the Younger’s Royal Crescent in Bath, we may find ourselves not so far from tears.
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
Pieter de Hooch, A Boy Bringing Bread, c. 1665
Pieter de Hooch’s figures and the curve of the Royal Crescent stir us through the contrast they present to the emotions which more usually colour our days. The gentle manner of the mother and the trusting, dutiful expression of her son make us conscious of our own cynicism and brusqueness. The Royal Crescent, in all its solemn dignity, shows up the trivial and chaotic nature of so many of our ambitions. These works of art touch us because they are unlike us and yet also like the way we might wish ourselves to be.
Christian philosophers have been singularly alive to the sadness which beauty may provoke. ‘When we admire the beauty of visible objects, we experience joy certainly,’ observed the medieval thinker Hugh of St Victor, ‘but at the same time, we experience a feeling of tremendous void.’ The religious explanation put forward for this sadness, as rationally implausible as it is psychologically intriguing, is that we recognise beautiful things as symbols of the unblemished life we once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. While we may one day resume this sublime existence in Heaven, the sins of Adam and Eve have deprived us of that possibility on earth. Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us. The qualities written into beautiful objects are those of a God from whom we live far removed, in a world mired in sin. But works of art are finite enough, and the care taken by those who create them great enough, that they can claim a measure of perfection ordinarily unattainable by human beings. These works are bitter-sweet tokens of a goodness to which we still aspire, however infrequently we may approach it in our actions or our thoughts.
Even stripped of its theological elements, this story helps to account for the sorrow that can cling to our encounters with attractive objects. Imagine a man in an especially tormented period, sitting in the waiting room of a Georgian townhouse before a meeting. Uninterested in the magazines on offer, he looks up at the ceiling and recognises that at some point in the eighteenth century, someone took the trouble to design a complicated but harmonious moulding made up of interlocking garlands of flowers and painted it a mixture of white, porcelain blue and yellow. The ceiling is a repository of the qualities the man would like to have more of in himself: it manages to be both playful and serious, subtle and clear, formal and unpretentious. Though it must have been commissioned by people no less practical than he, it has a profound unsentimental sweetness, like that of a smile breaking across a child’s face. At the same time, the man is aware that the ceiling contains everything that he does not. He is embroiled in professional complications which he cannot resolve, he is permanently tired, a sour expression is etched onto his face, and he has begun shouting intemperately at strangers – when all he wants to explain is that he is in pain. The ceiling is the man’s true home, to which he cannot find his way back. There are tears in his eyes when an assistant enters the room to usher him to his meeting.
The man’s sadness points us to a subsidiary claim. It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. Our downhearted moments provide architecture and art with their best openings, for it is at such times that our hunger for their ideal qualities will be at its height. It is not those creatures with well-organised, uncluttered minds who will be most moved by the sight of a clean and empty room in which sunlight washes over a generous expanse of concrete and wood, nor will it be the man with every confidence that his affairs are in order who will crave to live under – and perhaps even shed a tear over – the ceilings of a Robert Adam townhouse.
7.
While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.
A human ideal on a ceiling:
Robert Adam, Home House, Portman Square, London, 1775
Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Why Ideals Change
1.
An antique shop on one of north-west London’s more ragged edges. Outside, ambulance sirens hint at the homicidal conclusions to disagreements, police helicopters hover overhead, and people with unmatched socks advance down the street announcing millennial disasters to indifferent passers-by.
But the term ‘antique shop’ may be too quaint and tactful to capture the nature of this establishment. There are no smells of old leather and salesmen with half-moon glasses here; this more closely resembles a bailiff’s depot or junk yard. This is where objects make a last attempt to tempt the partially sighted before they are carted off to erode in a landfill.
In one corner stands an especially grievous-looking item, a sideboard with bulbous wings, two bay windows, Corinthian columns and a gilt-edged mirror. Though the piece’s drawers still work and the finish remains miraculously unspoilt, its price is closer to that of firewood than furniture, testifying to an ugliness too blatant for even the most generous-minded or myopic to ignore.
And yet how loved this sideboard must once have been. A maid might have run her duster over it every few days in an ample house in Richmond or Wimbledon. A cat perhaps playfully rubbed its tail against it on the way into the living room. For a generation, it would have proudly displayed Christmas pudding, champagne glasses and wedges of Stilton. But now, in the corner of this shop, it has all the poignancy of an ageing exiled Russian princess, dreaming of a palace in St Petersburg from a fleapit in Paris, letting all who will listen know of how attractive she looked at seventeen – even as despair and alcohol hang heavy on her breath.