The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist w...hen the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid, and lambent narrative, finally refines itse...lf out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the fe...eling of joy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase... of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied..., and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A Classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the ...manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams--"a ...mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty." To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success: the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and "re-embody" it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. I...n this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I find (a coffin) a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively subli...me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »