Cakes and Ale – And Some Perspective Too

I’m currently reading, and quickly I might add, W Somerset Maugham’s great Cakes and Ale.  A musing of our narrator, William Ashenden, quite caught my attention and got me thinking.  I thought I would share and solicit opinions:

I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long.  For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of Endymion.  When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders…Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger…All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian’s Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it.  What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not…Beauty if perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but for a little while.

So I’m not entire sure of my own feelings, other than a piqued curiosity, and a love of Maugham’s prose.  Any thoughts?  My immediate reaction is to agree and say that what those of us contemplating the refined life are seeking is to search out and prolong these ecstasies.  Our hungers are never fully sated.  Or maybe the opposite.  Back to reading…