it's like your maugham says

Some people always seem to know best. It has been years since Ms B read even a line by Somerset Maugham - though I do distinctly remember the impression Of Human Bondage made on me at sixteen (and you know what - it is so true).

A friend in California, too busy drinking wine in the sunshine in Golden Gate Park with his new love to write me a proper letter, has emailed about how rapturously happy he is. Well, here in rainy, celibate London we had better look to higher places for our pleasures - of which carping on about our fellow humans is definitely among the chief. Fortunately my friend has thought to sent me this nugget (geddit??) from Maugham's essay on El Greco:

"I have long abjured the heresy prevalent in my youth of art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde popularized it in England and Oscar Wilde learnt it from Whistler.* It gave art an esoteric quality that flattered the artist and it was accepted by the cultured public with the humility that characterizes them. The cultured public have always taken a masochistic pleasure in the contempt that artists have shown them and, browbeaten and intimidated, have comforted themselves with a feeling of superiority over the common herd. It was believed that the object of a work of art was to arouse the aesthetic emotion and when you had felt that you had got all it had to give you. But what is an emotion that results in nothing? To experience the aesthetic emotion is pleasurable and all pleasure is good; but it is pleasurable also to drink a glass of beer and no one has ever been able to show that, taken simply as pleasure, one surpasses the other. Attempts have been made by moralists to prove that spiritual pleasures are keener and more lasting than sensual pleasures; they carry no conviction. No pleasure endures and to please it must be taken in small doses and at not too frequent intervals. It would be no less tedious to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony every day than it would be to eat caviar. And until age has blunted the sensibilities the general experience is surely that the pleasures of sense are more vivid than the pleasures of the spirit. We have all known omnivorous readers who read for the delight of it; they absorb books as the machines of Chicago absorb hogs, but no sausages come out of them at the other end; and we have all known the people who moon their days away in picture galleries in imbecile contemplation; they are no better than opium smokers, worse if anything, for the opium smoker at all events is not self-complacent. The value of emotion lies in its effects. Santa Teresa insisted on this over and over again: the ecstasy of union with the Godhead was precious only if it resulted in a greater capacity for works. The aesthetic emotion, however delightful and however subtle, has worth only if it leads to action."

*This may be true, and if so the fact that I have always loved the picture above - in which Whistler used his own mother as an "Arrangement in Black and Gray" - in fact, have loved it for its arrangement-in-black-&-grayness - may say enough to damn me completely for a Baroque.