Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to EuphorionLee, Vernon
History
Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to Euphorion
Lee, Vernon
Art, Italian; Art, Renaissance -- Italy
But there is another side of this same question, and of it we are
admonished, as it seems to me, still louder by our growing intellectual
instincts--those instincts, let us remember, which do but represent
whatever has been congruous and uniform in repeated experience. Art is
a much greater and more cosmic thing than the mere expression of man's
thoughts or opinions on any one subject, of man's attitude towards his
neighbour or towards his country, much as all this concerns us. Art is
the expression of man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations
with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to
the universe's unspoken message. Hence it represents not the details of
his existence, which, more's the pity, are rarely what they should be,
whether in thought or action, but the bulk of his existence, _when that
bulk is unusually sound_. This clause contains the whole philosophy of
art. For art is the outcome of a surplus of human energy, the expression
of a state of vital harmony, striving for and partly realising a yet
greater energy, a more complete harmony in one sphere or another of man's
relations with the universe. Now if evil is a non-vital, deciduous, and
sterile phenomenon _par excellence_, art must be necessarily opposed to
it, and opposed in proportion to art's vigour. While, on the other hand,
the seeking, the realisation of greater harmony, whether harmony visible,
audible, thinkable, and livable, is as necessarily opposed to anomaly
and perversity as the great healthinesses of air and sunshine are
opposed to bodily disease. Hence, in whatever company we find art,
even as in whatever company we find bodily health and vigour, let us
understand that _in so far as truly art_, it is good and a source of
good. Let us never waver in our faith in art, for in so doing we should
be losing (what, alas! Puritan contemners of art, and decadent defilers
thereof, are equally doing) much of our faith in nature and much of our
faith in man. For art is the expression of the harmonies of nature,
conceived and incubated by the harmonious instincts of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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