Life & Wisdom Quote by William Shenstone

Shenstone is drawing a neat, almost surgical line between what dazzles and what awes. Grandeur, in his formulation, isn’t just “big” or “impressive”; it’s the effect produced by restraint. Simplicity gives scale room to register. Strip away ornament and the mind can feel the mass of the thing. Beauty, by contrast, thrives on detail, texture, and the small surprises that keep attention moving. Hence “variety”: not chaos, but the controlled multiplicity of curves, colors, turns of phrase.

The subtext is a warning to artists (and, quietly, patrons) who want everything at once. Pile embellishment onto a grand design and you risk shrinking it into prettiness. Pursue grandeur with too much fuss and you get cluttered spectacle rather than elevated feeling. Pursue beauty with too rigid a simplicity and you end up with austerity: worthy, maybe, but emotionally thin.

Placed in Shenstone’s century, the claim reads like a cultural position statement. Mid-18th-century taste was sorting the categories that would harden into “the sublime” and “the beautiful,” with philosophers and poets debating why mountains move us differently than gardens. Shenstone, a poet and landscape-garden obsessive, is writing from inside that argument, translating it into practical aesthetic advice. He’s also defending a kind of cultivated moderation: the art of knowing which register you’re playing in, and refusing the seductive mistake of treating ornament as an automatic upgrade.