222 THE STONES OF VENICE

vainly accumulated is not indeed knowledge. And this we are exposed to chiefly in the fact of our ceasing to be children. For the child does not seek false pleasure; its pleasures are true, simple, and instinctive: but the youth is apt to abandon his early and true delight for vanities,-seeking to be like men, and sacrificing his natural and pure enjoyments to his pride. In like manner, it seems to me that modern civilisation sacrifices much pure and true pleasure to various forms of ostentation from which it can receive no fruit. Consider, for a moment, what kind of pleasures are open to human nature, undiseased. Passing by the consideration of the pleasures of the higher affections, which lie at the root of everything, and considering the definite and practical pleasures of daily life, there is, first, the pleasure of doing good; the greatest of all, only apt to be despised from not being often enough tasted: and then, I know not in what order to put them, nor does it matter,-the pleasure of gaining knowledge; the pleasure of the excitement of imagination and emotion (or poetry and passion); and, lastly, the gratification of the senses, first of the eye, then of the ear, and then of the others in their order.

§ 30. All these we are apt to make subservient to the desire of praise; nor unwisely, when the praise sought is God’s and the conscience’s: but if the sacrifice is made for man’s admiration, and knowledge is only sought for praise, passion repressed or affected for praise, and the arts practised for praise, we are feeding on the bitterest apples of Sodom, suffering always ten mortifications for one delight. And it seems to me, that in the modern civilised world we make such sacrifice doubly: first, by labouring for merely ambitious purposes; and secondly, which is the main point in question, by being ashamed of simple pleasures, more especially of the pleasure in sweet colour and form, a pleasure evidently so necessary to man’s perfectness and virtue, that the beauty of colour and form has been given lavishly throughout the whole of creation, so that it may become

[Version 0.04: March 2008]