Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
Beauty and Boredom
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (November 11, 1911) : 26
Purdue copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
There is something very depressing in coming to believe that a stern moral axiom is true. It seems such a capitulation to surrender to its unattractive rightness after years of happy scoffing. It was spirited to scoff, and to proclaim oneself right, in spite of everything, was pleasantly pig-headed and savored of youth. The truism to which the writer has recently succumbed is the one our parents used to utter a little sententiously, or so we thought, when we said we were bored. We rather fancied being bored, because it marked us out in our own minds as above more-easily-pleased mortals. This made it all the more irritating to hear, “If you are bored, my dear, it is a lack in yourself, not in the thing that bores you.” For years that phrase had the power to turn boredom into explosive anger. Hot, denouncing words were tossed at what had proved tiresome, and the truism appeared worsted, so that its sudden appearance wrapped in conviction is a little like tardy revenge. Now, with sheepish humility accompanying our conversion, we confess that there seems nothing half so true as that one is bored in precise ratio to the amount of one’s ignorance. The fact just behind it, lapping as one hill does on the next, is the flooring one that anything less than continued, ecstatic interest is a reflection on one’s intelligence.
There is comfort in the supposition that any one should be able to recognize beauty and that when an object is interesting we will of course be instantly interested. Instead of this being true, it takes long and painful training to enjoy what is beautiful. Many of us never begin the training, more of us go but a little way, and no one has ever finished it. We have to learn all manner of languages before the most palpably important things speak to us. To comprehend the fascinating technic or feel the spiritual allurement of half the interesting things in the world being quite out of the question, it becomes an achievement to know that the gamut of interest is endless and that all things take their graduated place therein. Crocheting may be at the bottom and no two people will ever precisely agree as to what is at the top. it becomes an achievement to know that the gamut of interest is endless and that all things take their graduated place therein. Crocheting may be at the bottom and no two people will ever precisely agree as to what is at the top. A yearning despair comes whenever an expert gloats and glories, for, left to ourselves, we should never have seen the cause and we even, shame be on our heads, might have been bored.
If one believes the parental truism, and it is, in all honesty, irrefutable, these periods of boredom are humiliating. Countless cases of pewter tankards and a Strindberg play may not have equal interest for your type of mind, but neither have interest of any kind if there is no background in your brain of like matter. If you know the processes of making the tankards, the difficulty in getting such perfect specimens, the places in which they are found, and the period in which they were used, you then delight in a complete collection. Just as you must have some conception of the trend of thought of which Strindberg is a part, the social stagnations against which he is in revolt, the society that produced him, and the psychological medium he works in before he is able to say to you what he wishes to say. We, dullards that we are, are being shouted to every minute that we live in terms which we are too ignorant to understand. Satisfied of our alertness, we call life stale and are bored. It is so dull of us. Nothing else is as dull as we. Even the things we know to satiation would be again interesting if we knew more of them and knew of other things as well, so that we saw the amazing juxtaposition and inter-relation of everything.
In case it should be thought that this claim for interest in everything fully understood applies to people equally with things, the writer wishes to draw a line, not of negation or acquiescence, but of caution. It may be that if we really knew dull people we would find them fascinating. It may be. The newness of one’s mood of humility forbids certainty or pessimism. But it would be inefficient to try to find out. It may be that if we really knew dull people we would find them fascinating. It may be. The newness of one’s mood of humility forbids certainty or pessimism. But it would be inefficient to try to find out. For though deep inside and much obscured and entangled by the density of their drabness there may lie delightful treasure, the pain of probing it is too great. Believe it is there — that is a truly magnificent feat ; but permit oneself a tackling of simpler problems. Assail a citadel that will render tribute sooner.
Even if we listen attentively there will be so much that we shall miss because we were born congenitally deaf to it. So many things will remain meaningless. The thought makes us greedy and baffled. Ruefully we feel ourselves to be wearing the bandage in blind man’s buff, figures running past us, brushing our outstretched hands tauntingly, while we, unawares, rather sillily flustered, bump into objects and start back bruised, but still blind, having caught nothing. If every one else has long seen the force of the truism and the writer has just suddenly bumped into the rear of the procession, it is, after all, what often happens to us when we think we are taking a spurt ahead of the rest. We must each take our turn at discovering the oldest things, though their beautiful newness for us is slightly dimmed by the refusal of other people to be startled by our find. We must each take our turn at discovering the oldest things, though their beautiful newness for us is slightly dimmed by the refusal of other people to be startled by our find. As Mr. Colby reminds us, we must pass through Hall Caine on our way up from cannibalism, and each stage, as we reach it, is a mountain-top to the latest arrival.
“Literary people seem to think that every time a volume of Hall Caine is sold Shakespeare is to that extent neglected. It merely means that some semi-savage has reached the Hall Caine; stage, and we should wish him godspeed on his way to Shakespeare. It is only when a pretended Shakespeare man lapses into Hall-Cainery that one need be excited.”
ex Frank Moore Colby, in “The Frightened Minority,” in his collection of essays Imaginary Obligations (1906) : 102
hathitrust : link
- Frank Moore Colby (1865-1925), writer, educator, essayist... epigramist (“Colbyisms”)
wikipedia : link - Hall Caine (1853-1931), (extremely) popular novelist, dramatist, short story writer,
wikipedia : link
8 August 2026