Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
Of the Essays in this book, “Art for Life’s Sake” appeared in _The English Review_; “The Poetry of Yone Noguchi,”[1] “Remy de Gourmont,” and “Aloysius Bertrand” in _The Fortnightly Review_; “Kinetic and Potential Speech,” in _The Oxford and Cambridge Review_. The papers on Dau...
Of the Essays in this book, “Art for Life’s Sake” appeared in _The English Review_; “The Poetry of Yone Noguchi,”[1] “Remy de Gourmont,” and “Aloysius Bertrand” in _The Fortnigh...
2. Part 2Besides this fundamental morality of a work of art, it may hold other moralities which are also not without their influence. Codes of values may themselves be the material of ar...
3. Part 3“Art,” he says in his preface, “has always two antithetical faces; it is a medal, one side of which, for example, would suggest the image of Rembrandt, and the other that of Jac...
4. Part 4Most Frenchmen are performers; and the Frenchman from the south is he who wins the greatest joy from his performance. I remember a big bare studio in the Boulevard Vaugirard, wh...
5. Part 5He defended himself against the charge of decadence, claiming that “apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the reverse of such a creature.” A decadent, he said, was...
6. Part 6There remains Nietzsche’s distinction between good and evil and good and bad. His conception of morality resembles his conception of truth. Morality and truth, like the Sabbath,...
7. Part 7Yet these and many other neglected ideas were of real importance to the personality that obscures them now. Pater owed much of the slow rhythm of his mind to his careful observa...
8. Part 8Thus, though it is as a critic that Pater lives and will live, it is as a critic of a kind that he may almost be said to have invented. His criticism is aesthetic and personal....
9. Part 9“Il ne faut pas chercher la vérité; mais devant un homme comprendre quelle est sa vérité.” We must not seek in a man’s work for the truth, since there are as many truths as brai...
10. Part 10It may be asked, what of ballad poetry in which there is much so stated as to approach purely kinetic speech? Does not the admitted power of a sea-song, a song whose words are u...