Lascelles Abercrombie

“ It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word "Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not felt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, the intensity of this feeling was the secret of the intensity of living. ”

“ Beauty is known in thee; but, without thee,
It is a rumour buzzing hardly heard.
And without beauty men are scurrying ants,
Rapid in endless purpose unenjoyed;
Or newts in holes under the banks of ponds,
Feeding and breeding without sound or light.
For the one thing that is the god in man
Is a delight that admirably knows
Itself delighted; and it is but beauty.
And thou art beauty known.
Vashti.
Truly, I say,
I know not how to bear it; that for you
To feel yourselves, though in the depth of the world,
Dizzy, and thence as if elate on high,
We women are devised like drunkenness. ”

“ This is the artist's sincerity; to attend faithfully and laboriously to the utterance which will say exactly what is in him, neither more nor less; to attend to this without allowing the reward of it—beauty—to divide his mind, and perhaps prejudice him in his selection of means. A work of art, in fact, is not created in order to be beautiful; beauty is the sign that it has succeeded in being a work of art. ”

“ He takes a mass of confused splendours, and he makes them into something which they certainly were not before; something which, as we can clearly see by comparing epic poetry with mere epic material, the latter scarce hinted at. He makes this heap of matter into a grand design; he forces it to obey a single presiding unity of artistic purpose. Obviously, something much more potent is required for this than a fine skill in narrative and poetic ornament. Unity is not merely an external affair. There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity ”

“ Judith.
But if we hold him off, will he not grant
The meed of a brave fight, captivity?—
Or we may treat with him, make terms for yielding.
Ozias.
We know his mind: he hath written it plain
In the torn flesh of our ambassadors.
His mind to us is death; we can but choose
Between sharp swords and the slow slaying of thirst.
Judith. He may torment us if we yield.
Ozias. He may. But not to yield is grisly and sure torment.
Judith. There must be hope, if we could reckon right!
Ozias.
Well, thou and God have five days more to build
A bridge of hope over our broken world. ”

“ But art can perfectly achieve what these can but imperfectly endeavour, because art goes for its inspiration to the source of these and expresses it undisturbed by them; art passes serenely by the struggles of philosophy, ethics and civilisation, and arrives at the safety they vainly reach for, because art directly expresses the original of our sense of the significance of things—that which indeed is by its very nature significance—æsthetic experience. ”