The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 69
its complexity and interests; by interpreting these, we shall
be able to clear the ground upon which must arise our duty.
Contemporary art, sensual, insatiable in its desire for en-
joyments, furrowed with turbid attempts at an ill-under-
stood aristocracy, which reveals itself as a voluptuous ideal
or an ideal of arrogance and of cruelty, sometimes sighing
for a mysticism which is also egoistic and voluptuous, with-
out faith in God and without faith in thought, incredulous
and pessimistic,--and often very powerful in its rendering of
such states of the soul: this art,—vainly condemned by mor-
alists,—when understood in its profound motives and in its
genesis, asks for action, which will certainly not be directed
toward condemning, repressing, or rearranging art, but to-
ward directing life more energetically toward a more healthy
and more profound morality, which will be mother of a no-
bler art, and, I would also say, of a nobler philosophy. A
more noble philosophy than that of our epoch, incapable of
accounting not only for religion, for science, and for itself,
but for art itself, which has again become a profound mys-
tery, or rather a theme for horrible blunders by positivists,
neocriticists, psychologists, and pragmatists, who have
hitherto represented contemporary philosophy, and have
relapsed (perhaps in order to acquire new strength and to
mature new problems!) into the most childish and most
crude conceptions of art.

<<   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   >>

More intriguing information