Uneducated people are far more charmed by the appearance of a
rock which has a resemblance to something else--a human face or an
animal--than by a beautifully proportioned and irregular crag. The
uncultivated human being, again, loves geometrical forms in nature,
such as the crystal and the basalt column, or the magnified snowflake,
better than it loves forms of lavish wildness. We gather about our
dwellings flowers which please by their sharply defined tint, and their
correspondence of petal with petal; and yet there is just as precisely
ordered a structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous
in shape and outline, as there is in things whose outline is more
strictly geometrical. The laws which regulate the shape of a chalk down
or an ivy tendril are just as severe as the laws which regulate the
monkey-puzzle tree or the talc crystal. My own belief is that the
trained artistic sense is probably only in its infancy, and that it
will advance upon the line of the pleased apprehension of the existence
of less obvious structure.
If we apply this to literature, it is my belief that the love of human
beings for the stanza and the rhyme is probably an elementary thing,
like the love of the crystal and the flower-shape, and that it is the
love not so much of the beautiful as of the kind of effect that the
observer could himself produce.
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