The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and the reason is that he is really never doing anything else.1 It is not in writing only, in all art, in all science, the task before each is that defined by Bacon : Man added to Nature. It is so also in painting, as a great artist of modern time, Cezanne, recognised even in those same words : “ He who wishes to make art/’ he once said to Vollard, “ must follow Bacon, who defined the artist as “ Homo additus Naturae/’ So it is that the artist, if he has succeeded in being true to his function, is neces¬ sarily one who makes all things new.2 That remarkable artist who wrote the Book of the Revelation has expressed this in his allegorical, perhaps unconscious, Oriental way, for he represents the artist as hearing the divine spirit 1 Speaking as a writer who has been much quoted—it ought to be a satisfaction but I have had my doubts—I may say that I have observed that those who quote belong mostly to two classes, one consisting of good or at all events indifferent writers, and the other of bad writers. Those of the first class quote with fair precision and due acknowledg¬ ment, those of the second with no precision, and only the vaguest intimation, or none at all, that they are quoting. This would seem to indicate that the good writer is more honest than the bad writer, but that conclusion may be unjust to the bad writer. The fact is that, having little thought or knowledge of his own, he is not fully conscious of what he is doing. He is like a greedy child who, seeing food in front of him, snatches it at random, without being able to recognise whether or not it is his own. There is, however, a third class of those who cannot resist the temptation of deliberately putting forth the painfully achieved thought or knowledge of others as their own, sometimes, perhaps seeking to gloss over the lapse with : “As everyone knows— ” 2 Croce, who is no doubt the most instructive literary critic of our time, has, in his own way, insisted on this essential fact. As he would put it, there are no objective standards of judgment, we cannot approach a work of art with our laws and categories. We have to comprehend the artist’s own values, and only then are we fit to pronounce any judgment on his work. The task of the literary critic is thus immensely more difficult than it is vulgarly supposed to be. The same holds good, I would add, of criticism in other fields of art, not excluding the art of love and the arts of living in general.