SERIOUS THOUGHTS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 105, 15 April 1933, Page 11

SERIOUS THOUGHTS

FOR EASTERTIDE. WHAT IS VULGARITY! Listen to a few ideas from Ruskin, the philosopher and teacher, and perhaps a thought will still linger with you after Easter has passed: “You have heard many outcries against sensation lately; but, 1 can tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling difference between one man and another—between one animal and another—is precisely in this, that one feels moro than another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us. But being human creatures, it is good for us. Nay, we are only human insofar as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion to our passion. “You know, I said of that great and pure society of the Dead, that it would allow ‘no vain or vulgar person to outer there.’ What do you think J meant, by a vulgar person! What do you yourselves mean by ‘vulgarity’! You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy—of quick understanding, of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the ‘tact’ or ‘touch-l'aculty,’ of body and soul: that tact which Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures; fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason; the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. “Reason can determine what is true: it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recognise what God has made good.”