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Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24932, 20 July 1946, Page 5

MINUTE

PEACE IN LIFE AND ART There are, probably, few persons who are so unhappy as not to have experienced a few moments in life during which they have drawn breath in a region in which pleasure and pain are discerned to be, in themselves, neither good nor evil, and even so much like each other that there is not much to choose between them. Those who have known such moments, and who preserve the memory of them as the standard of life, at least in desire, have alone the key to the comprehension of great art, or the possibility of approaching it in execution. Such knowledge so respected is the initial condition of that alone true “style” which is the unique aspect of the individual soul to the absolute beauty and joy; of that living “repose, which marks the manners of the great” in art, and which bears upon the stately movement of its eternal stream the passions, pains, and pleasures of life like eddies which show the motion that is too great to be perturbed by them.

For the time, at least, this quality . . . has almost disappeared from art. It lingered in the best poetry, painting and music of the last century and of the beginning of this. It was the ideal to which Goethe. Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth aspired, and in a few pieces attained. The gravity of Handel is sweet with it. and the sweetness of Mozart grave. Gainsborough, Crome. and Hogarth were moved by it, more or less; and we still judge art—such of us as have any power of judgment—by the standard of this glory, though we have lost the secret of its creation.

COVENTRY PATMpRE: “Religio Poetae”