The Renaissance: Studies in Art and PoetryMacmillan and Company, limited, 1922 - 238 pages |
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abstract æsthetic æsthetic criticism antique art of Italy artistic Aucassin Aucassin and Nicolette beauty become Bellay Botticelli character characteristic charm Christian church classical colour culture curious Dante death delicate divine effect element expression fancy fifteenth century Florence Florentine flowers French French language genius Giorgione Giorgione's gods Goethe grace Greek art Greek religion hand Hellenic human mind ideal imaginative impression intellectual interest Italian Italy Joachim du Bellay language legend Leonardo light limits living Luca della Robbia matter medieval ment Michelangelo middle age modern mystical nature Nicolette outward pagan painter painting passed passion peculiar penetrate perfect perhaps philosophy Pico picture Pitti Palace Plato Pleiad poem poetry Raphael realise refined religious Renaissance Rome Ronsard Saint sculpture secret seems sense sensuous sentiment songs spirit story strange sweetness Tannhäuser taste things thought Titian touch tradition true Vasari Venetian Verrocchio Winckel Winckelmann youth
Popular passages
Page 236 - Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
Page 235 - Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.
Page 237 - While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.
Page 236 - The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irrestibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Page 237 - With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what...
Page 238 - Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among " the children of this world,
Page 126 - The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one ; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
Page 135 - That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation — that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter : this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.
Page viii - What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me?
Page 124 - Besides the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image denning itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last.