The name is absent

26 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

most brilliant representation. Such, for example, are the
works of Hellenic art, and such those of Italian poetry
and art: the transcendentalism of the Middle Ages became
fixed in the bronze of the Dantesque terzina; melancholy
and suave fancy, in the transparency of the songs and son-
nets of Petrarch; sage experience of life and badinage with
the fables of the past, in the limpid ottaυa rima of Ariosto;
heroism and the thought of death, in the perfect blank-verse
hendecasyllabics of Foscolo; the infinite variety of every-
thing, in the sober and austere songs of Giacomo Leopardi.
Finally (be it said in parenthesis and without intending
comparison with the other examples adduced), the volup-
tuous refinements and animal sensuality of international
decadentism have received their most perfect expression in
the prose and verse of an Italian, D’Annunzio. All these souls
were profoundly passionate (all, even the serene Lodovico
Ariosto, who was so amorous, so tender, and so often re-
presses his emotion with a smile); their works of art are the
eternal flower that springs from their passions.

These expressions and these critical Judgments can be
theoretically resumed in the formula, that what gives co-
herence and unity to the intuition is feeling; the intuition is
really such because it represents a feeling, and can only ap-
pear from and upon that. Not the idea, but the feeling, is
what confers upon art the airy lightness of the symbol: an
aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representation—that is
art; and in it the aspiration alone stands for the representa-
tion, and the representation alone for the aspiration. Epic
and lyric, or drama and lyric, are scholastic divisions of the
indivisible: art is always lyrical—that is, epic and dramatic
in feeling. What we admire in genuine works of art is the
perfect fanciful form which a state of the soul assumes; and
we call this life, unity, solidity of tire work of art. What

<<   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   >>

More intriguing information