It is all very well for Keats in his airy manner to
assert that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that that is all he
knows or needs to know. I, for one, need to know a lot more. And I
never shall know. Nobody, not even Hazlitt nor Sainte-Beuve, has ever
finally explained why he thought a book beautiful. I take the first
fine lines that come to hand--
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy--
and I say that those lines are beautiful, because they give me
pleasure. But why? No answer! I only know that the passionate few
will, broadly, agree with me in deriving this mysterious pleasure from
those lines. I am only convinced that the liveliness of our pleasure
in those and many other lines by the same author will ultimately cause
the majority to believe, by faith, that W.B. Yeats is a genius. The
one reassuring aspect of the literary affair is that the passionate
few are passionate about the same things. A continuance of interest
does, in actual practice, lead ultimately to the same judgments. There
is only the difference in width of interest. Some of the passionate
few lack catholicity, or, rather, the whole of their interest is
confined to one narrow channel; they have none left over.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31