It
combines and employs in its manifestation the method and material,
not of one art only, but of all the arts, Music is but an arbitrary
trifling with a few of life's majestic chords; painting is but a
shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature does but
drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral obligation, of
virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which it teems. To
"compete with life," whose sun we cannot look upon, whose passions
and diseases waste and slay us - to compete with the flavour of
wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness
of death and separation - here is, indeed, a projected escalade of
heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress coat,
armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the passions, armed
with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can "compete
with life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts,
but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even
when we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are
surprised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be
quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening
of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these
phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute,
convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of
life, can torture and slay.
Pages:
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209