It must be fully admitted at this point that the fanaticism of the
so-called "pure saint" and the so-called "pure artist" who suppress,
the one for the sake of "goodness" and the other for the sake of
"beauty," the third great primordial idea which we have called
"truth," is a fanaticism just as one sided and just as destructive of
the complete harmonious vision as those other kinds.
That this is the case can easily be proved by recalling how thin,
how strained, how morbid, how ungracious, how inhuman, those
so-called "saints" and "artists" become, when, in their neglect of
reason and truth, they persist in following their capricious,
subjective, fantastic, individual dreams, out of all concrete relation
to the actual world we live in.
We arrive, therefore, at a point from which we are able to detect
the true inner spirit of the nature of art; and what we discover may
thus be stated. Art is the expression, through the medium of an
individual temperament, of a beauty which is one of the primordial
aspects of this pluralistic world. The eternal duality of things
implies that this beauty is always manifested as something in
perpetual conflict with its opposite, namely with that antagonistic
aspect of the universe which we name the hideous or the ugly.
This duality exists as the eternal condition of each one of the three
primordial ideas out of which the universe is evoked. Each of
these three ideas is only known to us as the result of a relative
victory over its opposite. Beauty is known to us as a relative
victory over hideousness. Goodness is known to us as a relative
victory over evil. Truth is known to us as a relative victory over
the false and the unreal. The fact that each of these ideas can only
be known in a condition of conflict with its opposite and in a
condition of relative victory over its opposite is due to the fact that
all three of them are in their own nature only clarifying, selecting,
and value-giving activities; whereas the actual material upon
which they have to work, as well as the energy from which they
derive their motive-power, is nothing else but that mysterious
outflowing of the soul itself which we call emotion.
For since emotion is eternally divided against itself into love and
malice, the three primordial ideas which deal this emotion are also
eternally divided against themselves, into beauty and hideousness,
into goodness and evil, into reality and unreality. And since the
very existence of emotion depends upon the struggle between love
and malice, in the same way the very existence of our aesthetic
sense depends upon the struggle between beauty and hideousness;
and the very existence of reason depends upon the struggle
between reality and unreality. The only love we can possibly have
to deal with is a love which is for ever overcoming malice. The
only beauty we can possibly have to deal with is a beauty which is
for ever overcoming hideousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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