English fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Fiction
Group D. (Static). Its chief quality, _balance_, is easily defined in
painting. Where there is correspondence between every section of the
picture, where no value is exaggerated, _balance_ exists. Hence the
failure of Futurism. While the Futurists understand very well
_intensity_, _reaction_, and _relief_, they refuse to give _balance_ any
attention at all; leaving aside the absurdity of rendering the mental
into terms of the pictorial, and taking as an instance one who was once
less Futurist than the Futurists, Severini, we see in his 'Pan-pan
Dance' how he detached himself from his school: he attained _balance_ by
giving every object an equal _intensity_. Such is also the tendency of
Wadsworth. Evidently if there are no clashes of tone-values, there must
be _balance_, and the instance serves to show that where there are
clashes of tone-values _balance_ must be ensured by the artist's hand.
There is always _balance_ in the purely decorative; in the realistic
there is _balance_ if the attention of the beholder is directed
simultaneously to the several points of _culmination_ indicated by the
_rhythm_ of the picture. Thus there is _balance_ in Rothenstein's
'Chloe' because the rocks on the right repeat the significance of the
rocks on the left.
Likewise in literature there is balance in certain groupings of
phrases:--
'The waves rolled in. Every one, edged with foam, curved forward to
kiss the sand. Silvery in the sun they rolled. And they came
assured, as if they had forgotten that they had come at other
dawns, only to retire before the inert earth.'
This is almost the exact 'short-long-short-long' of waves themselves,
and there is _balance_ because each short-long grouping figures one
curled wave. Nothing clarifies this idea so well as the Morse Code.
With perfect _balance_ go _grace_ and _harmony_. While _grace_ must
stand by itself as a not especially important quality because it is not,
need not, always be present, _harmony_ must be recognised as a synonym
of _balance_. It is only because _grace_ is often used where _harmony_
is meant that it finds a place in this glossary. Obviously there is no
_grace_ in Rodin's Balzac, while there is _grace_ in every note of Lulli
and Glueck; by _grace_ we mean the quality of lightness we find in Pater,
Meredith, Andre Gide, Mozart, Watteau, Donatello: the instances suffice
to indicate the meaning, while _harmony_, if it be taken as a synonym of
_balance_, needs no further explanation than has been given for that
term.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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