Village books

"
It was always the author, the work of God, that interested him more
than the book--the work of man; the painter more than the picture;
the composer more than the music. "If a writer, a painter, or a
musician makes me feel that he held those things to be lovable which
I myself hold to be lovable I am satisfied; art is only interesting
in so far as it reveals the personality of the artist." Handel was,
of course, "the greatest of all musicians." Among the painters he
chiefly loved Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Gaudenzio Ferrari,
Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, and De Hooghe; in poetry Shakespeare,
Homer, and the Authoress of the Odyssey; and in architecture the
man, whoever he was, who designed the Temple of Neptune at Paestum.
Life being short, he did not see why he should waste any of it in
the company of inferior people when he had these. And he treated
those he met in daily life in the same spirit: it was what he found
them to be that attracted or repelled him; what others thought about
them was of little or no consequence.


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