Excerpt from The Elusive Stallion, and Related Concerns
The Nature of Art: Art is simply to be describ' ed as the resultant when the creative process (which always involves some degree of imagination) achieves in a primary intention to produce beauty whether in words, in colors, in musical tones, in marble, or in any other medium; and Bailey has reasonably remark! Ed (in his essay on The Antiquity and Universality of the Arts, in The Arts and Religion: n.y., 1944) that an original aim of art has always been to im* pose rhythm and other patterns upon experience, and that archaeology appears to prove that the es' thetic aspects of art are aboriginal. Certainly one does not necessarily accept Masefield's overfsimple contention, Art is nothing but delightful work however appealing one find the poet's claim that Art is the work of healthy men with lively delight in what they do.' For the basic thing to recognize is the fact that the quality of art depends essentially on the poetry which is in it, poetry which may manifest itself in a variety. Of ways from intensity (one recalls Keats: The excellence of every art is its intensity or largeness of conception to passion of expression. It follows that whatever is true of poetry is intrinsicf ally true of art in general e. G., that spirituality is a necessary condition of art. And spirituality, it may be remarked, is primarily and most sharply recogniz' able through the sudden appearance of luminosity,often signified by its inducing actual physical sensa' tion or perception when it reaches acute subtlety of expression, as confirmed not only by one's own sens ory experience but also by such testimony as that of A. E. Housman (in The Name and Nature of Poetry) it is instantly apparent in certain passages in music (for example, the last eleven measures especially of the posthumous Chopin Nocturne in B Minor) in the apocalyptic skies of El Greco in lines like Yeats's There is enough evil in the crying of wind. No middle scale is possible here: the effect blooms suddenly out of the most direct response to f unda mentals and the response is most exquisitely refined in its perfection and ecstatic subtlety, thus attesting the truest distinction in its stimulus.
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