Books Are A Refuge, A Sort Of

What Is Important, Then, Is Not That The Critic Should Possess A Correct Abstract Definition Of Beauty For The Intellect, But A Certain Kind Of Temperament, The Power Of Being Deeply Moved By The Presence Of Beautiful Objects.

Experience, Already Reduced To A Group Of Impressions, Is Ringed Round For Each One Of Us By That Thick Wall Of Personality Through Which No Real Voice Has Ever Pierced On Its Way To Us, Or From Us To That Which We Can Only Conjecture To Be Without.

For Us Necessity Is Not As Of Old An Image Without Us, With Whom We Can Do Warfare; It Is A Magic Web Woven Through And Through Us, Like That Magnetic System Of Which Modern Science Speaks, Penetrating Us With A Network Subtler Than Our Subtlest Nerves, Yet Bearing In It The Central Forces Of The World.

To Regard All Things And Principles Of Things As Inconstant Modes Or Fashions Has More And More Become The Tendency Of Modern Thought.

The Base Of All Artistic Genius Is The Power Of Conceiving Humanity In A New, Striking, Rejoicing Way, Of Putting A Happy World Ofits Own Creation In Place Of The Meaner World Of Common Days, Of Generating Around Itself An Atmosphere With A Novel Power Of Refraction, Selecting, Transforming, Recombining The Images It Transmits, According To The Choice Of The Imaginative Intellect. In Exercising This Power, Painting And Poetry Have A Choice Of Subject Almost Unlimited.