Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth.
He must picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees them, not as he is
expected to see them, and he must comfort himself, when others cry out
against what he has seen, by remembering that no two men are alike, and
that there is no 'excellent beauty without strangeness.' In this matter he
must be without humility. He may, indeed, doubt the reality of his vision
if men do not quarrel with him as they did with the Apostles, for there is
only one perfection and only one search for perfection, and it sometimes
has the form of the religious life and sometimes of the artistic life; and
I do not think these lives differ in their wages, for 'The end of art is
peace,' and out of the one as out of the other comes the cry: _Sero te
amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova! Sero te amavi!_
The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because the
Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people
because it does not always speak in the language they are used to. I once
heard my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in honour of a
writer whose fame had not come till long after his death, 'It is not the
business of a poet to make himself understood, but it is the business of
the people to understand him. That they are at last compelled to do so is
the proof of his authority.' And certainly if you take from art its
martyrdom, you will take from it its glory. It might still reflect the
passing modes of mankind, but it would cease to reflect the face of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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