The Philosophical And Aesthetic Letters And Essays PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1845 edition. Excerpt: ...true Beauty. If genuine genius slumbers in the interrogating youth, at first, indeed, his modesty will prove a stumbling-block, but the courage of true talent will soon animate him to endeavor. If nature has designed him for a creative artist, he studies the human structure beneath the knife of the anatomist, enters the profoundest depths, in order to be true upon the surface, and investigates the whole genus in order to prove his right to the individual. If he is born to be a poet, he watches the humanity in his own breast, in order to comprehend its infinitely changing play upon the wide theatre of the world; he subjects luxuriant fancy to the discipline of taste, and surfers the sober intellect to survey the banks, between which the stream of inspiration is to leap and sparkle. He is well aware that the great increases only from unseemly trifles, and he rears, grain for grain, the wondrous fabric whose single impression now makes us giddy. But if, on the contrary, nature has only stamped him for a dilettante, difficulty cools his lifeless zeal, and he either deserts, if he is modest, a path which self-deception pointed out; or, if he is not, he diminishes the great ideal to the little diameter of his own capacity, since he is not in a condition to enlarge his capacity to the noble proportions of the ideal. The genuine artistic genius, then, is ever to be recognized in this, that in the most glowing feeling for totality, it preserves coldness and enduring patience for the partial, and rather sacrifices the delight of consummation, lest it should mar perfection. The laboriousness of the means disgusts the mere amateur with the end, and he would fain remain at ease in production as in observation: Hitherto we have spoken of the...