All 3 Uses
aesthetic
in
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
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- Now, at the age of seventy-five, he has once again re-read the entire works of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, and I have felt with an even greater force, the same feelings—this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits—thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding—is a great evil, as is every untruth.†
aesthetic = beautiful, tasteful, or related to beauty or tasteunconventional spelling: This is the British spelling. Americans spell it esthetic.
- Tolstoy then makes a sort of exposition of the plot of KING LEAR, finding it at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, "wild ravings", "mirthless jokes", anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.†
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- He has no power of delineating character or of making words, and actions spring naturally out of situations, Us language is uniformly exaggerated and ridiculous, he constantly thrusts his own random thoughts into the mouth of any character who happens to be handy, he displays a "complete absence of aesthetic feeling", and his words "have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry".†
Definitions:
-
(1)
(aesthetic) related to beauty or good taste -- often referring to one's appreciation of beauty or one's sense of what is beautiful
or:
beautiful or tasteful -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) In Philosophy, "aesthetics" is the study of theories of what is beautiful.