The name is absent

36 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

is really thought, when it has attained to the maturity of
thought, the words run through our whole organism, solicit-
ing the muscles of our mouth and ringing internally in our
ears; when music is truly music, it trills in the throat and
shivers in the fingers that touch ideal notes; when a pictorial
image is pictorially real, we are impregnated with lymphs
that are colours, and maybe, where the colouring matters
were not at our disposition, we might spontaneously colour
surrounding objects by a sort of ixτadiation, as is said of cer-
tain hysterics and of certain saints, who caused the stigmata
upon their hands and feet by means of an act of imagination!
Thought, musical fancy, pictorial image, did not indeed ex-
ist without expression, they did not exist at all previous to
the formation of this expressive state of the spirit. To believe
in their pre-existence is ingenuousness, if it be ingenuous to
have faith in those impotent poets, painters, or musicians
who always have their heads full of poetic, pictorial, and
musical creations, and only fail to translate them into exter-
nal form, either because, as they say, they are impatient of
expression, or because technique is not sufficiently advanced
to afford sufficient means for their expression: many centu-
ries ago it offered sufficient means to Homer, Pheidias, and
Apelles, but it does not suffice for them, who, if we are to
believe them, carry in their mighty heads an art greater than
those others! Sometimes, too, ingenuousness arises from the
illusion due to keeping a bad account with ourselves that,
having imagined, and consequently expressed, some few im-
ages, we already possess in ourselves all the other images
that must form part of a work, which we do not yet possess,
as well as the vital nexus that should connect them, which
is not yet formed and therefore is not expressed.

Art, understood as intuition, according to the concept that

<<   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   >>

More intriguing information