The Enchantment of Art; As Part of the Enchantment of Experience (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1914. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... IMPRESSIONISM IN POETRY POETRY began with song which was then the mere crude expression of physical impulse. Gradually the mind developed and its ideas soon flowered into literature. Artificial at first, poets learned at last to speak from their own experience. Poetry grew fairer and stronger as time went on, until in its happiest hours, in ages flushed with thrilling inspiration, it became the inevitable expression of man's complex inner life, as Mathew Arnold expressed it "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." Music is the model for all those arts which appeal to the emotions not through the reasoning intelligence but directly through the senses, since in its perfect union of form and substance it realizes their ideal. Literature, however, is the peer of all the arts, because its dominion extends not only over the five kingdoms of sense but also over the vast inexhaustible continent of human thought. Of late realism has succeeded romance, while classification and criticism almost overwhelm artistic creation. The craftsman and the dilettante luxuriate in expressing states of body and moods of mind, and the poet, the poet of an age of prose, too often abandons the still unexhausted continent of thought to return to the five kingdoms of sense, there to dispute the sway of sculpture, painting and music. An age of science is inevitably aggressive in its iconoclasm, in its intolerance of artistic conventions supposedly outworn. For better or worse old forms and old ideas are irreverently cast aside, and new styles cleverly adapted to new subjects proudly introduced. Modern poetry, therefore, preferably lyric in form, must now-a-days be spontaneous and original. It may be slight but the form must be in perfect harmony with the subject. Finally it mu...