The Cutting of an AgateYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
History
The Cutting of an Agate
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays; Literature -- History and criticism
There is an art of the flood, the art of Titian when his Ariosto, and
his Bacchus and Ariadne, give new images to the dreams of youth, and of
Shakespeare when he shows us Hamlet broken away from life by the
passionate hesitations of his reverie. And we call this art poetical,
because we must bring more to it than our daily mood if we would take
our pleasure; and because it delights in picturing the moment of
exaltation, of excitement, of dreaming (or in the capacity for it, as in
that still face of Ariosto's that is like some vessel soon to be full of
wine). And there is an art that we call real, because character can only
express itself perfectly in a real world, being that world's creature,
and because we understand it best through a delicate discrimination of
the senses which is but entire wakefulness, the daily mood grown cold
and crystalline.
We may not find either mood in its purity, but in mainly tragic art one
distinguishes devices to exclude or lessen character, to diminish the
power of that daily mood, to cheat or blind its too clear perception. If
the real world is not altogether rejected, it is but touched here and
there, and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance,
pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past
times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance; and if we are
painters, we shall express personal emotion through ideal form, a
symbolism handled by the generations, a mask from whose eyes the
disembodied looks, a style that remembers many masters, that it may
escape contemporary suggestion; or we shall leave out some element of
reality as in Byzantine painting, where there is no mass, nothing in
relief, and so it is that in the supreme moment of tragic art there
comes upon one that strange sensation as though the hair of one's head
stood up. And when we love, if it be in the excitement of youth, do we
not also, that the flood may find no stone to convulse, no wall to
narrow it, exclude character or the signs of it by choosing that beauty
which seems unearthly because the individual woman is lost amid the
labyrinth of its lines as though life were trembling into stillness and
silence, or at last folding itself away? Some little irrelevance of
line, some promise of character to come, may indeed put us at our ease,
'give more interest' as the humour of the old man with the basket does
to Cleopatra's dying; but should it come as we had dreamed in love's
frenzy to our dying for that woman's sake, we would find that the
discord had its value from the tune.
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.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account