And after all the conclusion does return to us from other than literary
sources. You cannot conceive a builder of the fourteenth century
hesitating as to the respective merits of Romanesque, Norman, First and
Second Pointed; to him there was only one possible method, and he built,
as he spoke, without calculation and without conscious effort, only
knowing the joy of his work. So indeed we all speak and live when we are
not bound by convention and acquired usages and manners, and you see
that art, properly so called, takes its place in the great scheme of
things; it is no studied contortion, no strange trick acquired by the
late ingenuity of man, but as "natural" (and as supernatural) as the
blossoming of a flower, and the singing of the nightingale. Art, indeed,
is wholly natural, artifice is more or less acquired, the creature of
reason, of experiment, of systematised intelligence. It is doubtful, I
suppose, whether the natural, untaught man has of himself, by endowment,
any artifice at all; doubtful, perhaps, whether, in the beginning, his
artifice was not the product of his art; whether he did not learn to
speak with artifice because he had received from nature the art of
singing; certainly the child, entering the world, has not the inborn
artifice of the swallow and the bee. This artifice, it seems, man has
been forced to acquire by slow and painful degrees, and perhaps it only
differs from the artifice of animals in that it has been aided and
reinforced by imagination, that is by art, that is by the power the
human soul possesses of projecting itself into the unknown, and
adventuring in the realm of nothingness. Man, I mean, could never have
invented the telephone, had he not first created it, had he not
conceived the possibility of its existence, when as yet, it was
non-existent, and so his artifice will always be progressive, and
distinguished from the artifice of animals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account