FEELING AND INTELLECT.

Otago Witness, Issue 2728, 27 June 1906, Page 79

FEELING AND INTELLECT.

(By Francis Gribrson, in the New York Critic.) The longer I live the less I esteem work that is purely intellectual. In the history of great writers and artists tlie head has been the servant of the heart. Take any man or woman known to the public, in any capacity, from playing a violin to preaching a sermon, and then judge between the power of intellect and the power of feeling. Take any art, from sculpture to poetry, music, painting, oratory, and story-telling, euinp&re the work of one man with that of another, and then judge. Put your .finger ■ blindly on any of the arts, and choose- a subject — for it matters not where you niay begin. Is it poetry ? Everyone must know why Virgil and Dante holdtheir own after the lapse ©f ages. Is it music? Competent judges know why Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner are preferred to composers' like Brahms. Is it novel -writing? Dickens has had, and is still having, more influence than Thackeray, in spite of the latter's keen wit and original power. As for Charlotte Bronte, emotional energy made her a unique personality among novelists, as the same energy has made Signora Duse a unique personality among the figures of the stage. . . . Some men live with the world, some in it but not of it. and some on it hut not in it. But all great writers have, by some process, known the world. The seci'et of Sir Walter Scott's power lies in three things —i imagination, knowledge, and feeling. But without feeling, imagination, and knowledge would have left him a -novelist of th& second or third order. All the great writers t o;we .their -power to the concentration of energy in feeling. Milton says that imagination and passion constitute the poet ; the same definition holds good for the others. Scott. Balzac, Flaubert, Hawthorne, Meredith, Haudy, George Eliot, and 20 others prove to us how futile would have been tiheir imagination without deep, emotional power. In vain do pedantic writers try to draw a line between the best prose and the best poetry, for the Jine exists only by rule, and the feelings recognise none. If such a thing were possible to invent, a psychometer would be a jiseful thing for measuring the height and depth of thought and feeling. As in the science of meteorology the weather expert has to consider more than one atmospheric condition before he makes a prediction, so it is of vital interest to know how far above and how far beneath the surface a writer or a speaker can go. In every sphere of art the things most eseential are altitude for vision and depth for -emotion. Sometimes the speaker or writer attains both height and depth in a few periods : the eye, the ear, and the soul are affected as by the passing of a procession of heroes, with the sound of a great bell and the thunder of distant cannon. The -words and phrases -assume the character of a guard of honour that conducts the mind to a seat among the immortals. Once in a long while an occasion presents itself when it requires a child of nature to speak for nature, once in an age the occasion and the orator j arise as one. Lincoln, at Gettysburg, unified thought and feeling in a single embrace; by a few simple gestures he conciliated defeat and victory, evoking j in a brief space the mysterious har- j monies that dwell on the borders of life j and death; by an exalted union of heart and intellect he spread the mantle of glory over the dead and the memory of genius over the living. Here, the railsplitter of the prairies took his place beside Shakespeare the actor and Burns the ploughman. These names are typical examples of the heights and depths attained by Nature left to herself.