Friday, May 30 @ 12:45 AM a new hedonism The worship of the senses is often, and with much justice, decried, with men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. However, it appears that the true nature of the senses has never been understood, and that they remain savage and animal merely because the world seeks to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. Looking back upon man moving through history, we are to be haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape. Yes, there have to be a new Hedonism; that is to recreate life and to save it from that harsh purity. It is to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it is never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, is to experience itself, and not the fruits of the experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. It is to know nothing of the asceticism that deadens the senses, and of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them but it is to teach man to concentrate himself upon the beautiful moments of life. There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the letters that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain. It is the creation of such worlds as these that seem to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life, and in our search for sensations that will be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, we should often adopt certain modes of thoughts that I know to be really alien to our nature, abandon ourselves to their subtle influences, catch their colour and satisfy our intellectual curiosity and leave them with that curious indifference that it is incompatible with a real ardour of temperament. Back to top.