PDF-file (The same edition. Another cover. 2.2 Mb)

The Suprarational Beauty 139nature in inspired forms of artistic beauty. But great art is notsatisfied with representing the intellectual truth of things, whichis always their superficial or exterior truth; it seeks for a deeperand original truth which escapes the eye of the mere sense or themere reason, the soul in them, the unseen reality which is notthat of their form and process but of their spirit. This it seizesand expresses by form and idea, but a significant form, whichis not merely a faithful and just or a harmonious reproductionof outward Nature, and a revelatory idea, not the idea which ismerely correct, elegantly right or fully satisfying to the reasonand taste. Always the truth it seeks is first and foremost the truthof beauty, — not, again, the formal beauty alone or the beautyof proportion and right process which is what the sense and thereason seek, but the soul of beauty which is hidden from theordinary eye and the ordinary mind and revealed in its fullnessonly to the unsealed vision of the poet and artist in man who canseize the secret significances of the universal poet and artist, thedivine creator who dwells as their soul and spirit in the formshe has created.The art-creation which lays a supreme stress on reason andtaste and on perfection and purity of a technique constructed inobedience to the canons of reason and taste, claimed for itselfthe name of classical art; but the claim, like the too trenchantdistinction on which it rests, is of doubtful validity. The spirit ofthe real, the great classical art and poetry is to bring out whatis universal and subordinate individual expression to universaltruth and beauty, just as the spirit of romantic art and poetryis to bring out what is striking and individual and this it oftendoes so powerfully or with so vivid an emphasis as to throwinto the background of its creation the universal, on which yetall true art romantic or classical builds and fills in its forms.In truth, all great art has carried in it both a classical and aromantic as well as a realistic element, — understanding realismin the sense of the prominent bringing out of the external truthof things, not the perverse inverted romanticism of the “real”which brings into exaggerated prominence the ugly, common ormorbid and puts that forward as the whole truth of life. The