Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
eternal, their satanic from their divine part; and this can only be done
by desiring always beauty, the one mask through which can be seen the
unveiled eyes of eternity. We must then be artists in all things, and
understand that love and old age and death are first among the arts. In
this sense he insists that 'Christ's apostles were artists,' that
'Christianity is Art,' and that 'the whole business of man is the arts.'
Dante, who deified law, selected its antagonist, passion, as the most
important of sins, and made the regions where it was punished the largest.
Blake, who deified imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the
most accursed of things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the
sovereignty of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and
this is 'the captivity in Egypt.' True art is expressive and symbolic, and
makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a signature of
some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not expressive but
mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and is the mother of
all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no matter what cost of
rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last day, which begins for
every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and which seeks to burn all
things until they 'become infinite and holy.'
III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE
The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote--in a preface to certain Dante
illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no great
excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892--that the
illustrations of Gustave Doré, 'in spite of glaring artistic defects,
must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to translate
Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art.' One can only account for
this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing that a temperament,
strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness the countless schools
and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is of necessity a little
lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the finer substances of emotion. It
is more difficult to account for so admirable a scholar not only
preferring these illustrations to the work of what he called 'the graceful
and affected Botticelli,'--although 'Doré was fitted for his task, not by
dramatic vigour, by feeling for beauty, or by anything sternly in sympathy
with the supreme poet's soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity
and gloom,'--but preferring them because 'he created a fanciful world,
which makes the movement of Dante's _dramatis personæ_ conceivable,
introducing the ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged
with destinies of souls and creeds and empires.' When the ordinary student
finds this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text, while
work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression of their
own ideas and feelings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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