Is High Culture a Pleasure of the Elite, or a Necessity for a Gentleman?

Seeing through Shakespeare

Still, what does high culture do for us?  We can see the point of scientific and medical advances, since they offer knowledge that will benefit us all, even if we do not understand it.  But how does the person with no ear benefit from an expensive symphony orchestra, or a person with no feeling for verse benefit from a poetry festival?  Why is it good that such things exist, even for those who are not interested in them?

Scientific and technological innovation may confer collective mastery over the means to our ends.  But it will not bring us any nearer to the ends themselves.  It will not tell us which goals to pursue or which things to value.  Shakespeare portrays, in the character of King Lear, the slow crumbling of a vain old man as he discovers the difference between real and fake devotion.  Shakespeare does not merely awaken our sympathy.  He shows how the fault and its remedy lie deep within ourselves.  He is helping us to know our own emotions, and to distinguish the ones that raise us up from those that drag us down.

Similar things can be said about all great works of art, and those who are moved by them have a beauty and completion in their lives that is hard to obtain in any other way.  Art makes us conscious of what we are and what we can hope to be, and it does so through moments of revelation in which all our being is aroused.  Surely, we are tempted to think, it is better that the world contains people who are in that way alert to their condition.  Certainly Shakespeare thought so:

The man that hath no music in himself, 
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. 
The motions of his spirit are dull as night, 
And his affections dark as Erebus. 
Let no such man be trusted. 

(from The Merchant of Venice)

Lasting impressions

I grew up in an early exposure to the books of the ancient Greece & Rome, through my father's collections. It was only by chance that we acquired what high culture & refined civilization are all about.

Early this year, quite by accident, I discovered the soul of the classical music while I was on vacation in Athens.  It was soon obvious to me that the high culture contained a kind of sophistication that could never be obtained from a textbook, prestigious university or sacred text.  I captured this knowledge through gentleman's journal on this website — even though I could not tell you what it is, and what would lead me next. But this knowledge guides me through life.  

Were the ability to understand high culture to be forgotten, I know that the gentleman's world would be a much poorer place.  We would have lost one avenue to the culture of refinement.  Those that have this knowledge will do whatever they can to perpetuate it.  They will teach it to their children; they will embrace it as the way of live (dressing, manner, perspective, etc).  They will do this not for their own good but for the common good, knowing that something necessary to gentleman's life is at stake.

Wordsworth wrote that 'getting and spending, we lay waste our powers'.  But when we stand back from the mill of consumption and look on the turbulent waters with the eye of an artist, we are rested in our hearts and our powers are restored. 

What is that necessary thing?  We can take a lesson here from how the European gentleman's way of life -  put aside a day in the week when we rest from our labours and stop being merely busy about our purposes, but learn to reflect on them and judge between them.  If we do not do this then our life remains one of means without meaning, endless technological mastery, but without a goal beyond the technique.

High culture is the meditation of busy people, the moment of sitting down and listening, seeing, thinking, so that meaning can dawn.  As long as places and times exist where this can be done there is hope in the world.  Wordsworth wrote that 'getting and spending, we lay waste our powers'.  But when we stand back from the mill of consumption and look on the turbulent waters with the eye of an artist, we are rested in our hearts and our powers are restored.  People who do this are the friends of order in a world of entropy, for they see, in the depths of the swirling pool, the still point where meaning lies.  They cannot describe what they see, and that is why the highest forms of art exist — not to describe the meaning, but to reveal it, as the loveliness of the world was revealed. 

So culture — which at first sight may seem to be a pleasure of the elite — turns out, after all, to be an all-time necessity for a gentleman.