File:The Savoy (1896) (14595720978).jpg

Identifier: savoy02symo (find matches)
Title: The Savoy
Year: 1896 (1890s)
Authors: Symons, Arthur, 1865-1945 Beardsley, Aubrey, 1872-1898
Subjects: English literature Literature, Modern Art
Publisher: London, L. Smithers
Contributing Library: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Lyrasis Members and Sloan Foundation

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or its depth from being in light orin shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding line dividing a formfrom its background, as one of his commentators has thought, but the linethat divides it from surrounding space, and unless you have an overmasteringsense of this you cannot draw true beauty at all, but only the beauty that isappended to folly, a beauty of mere voluptuous softness, a lamentableaccident of the mortal and perishing life, for the beauty proper for sublimeart is lineaments, or forms and features capable of being the receptacles ofintellect, and the face or limbs that alter least from youth to old age arethe face and limbs of the greatest beauty and perfection. His praise of asevere art had been beyond price had his age rested a moment to listen, inthe midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and the later Renaissance, forBartolozzi and for Stothard ; and yet in his visionary realism, and in hisenthusiasm for what, after all, is perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary
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BLAKES ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE COMEDY 49 part of every picture that is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the visionin lights and shadows, in irridescent or glowing colour ; having in the midstof his labour many little visions of these secondary essences ; until form behalf lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself asymbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence : for is not theBacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with intel-lectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city seen onPatmos ? To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflectedlights was to fall into the power of hisVala, the indolent fascination of nature,the woman divinity who is so often described in the prophetic books as sweet pestilence, and whose children weave webs to take the souls of men ;but there was yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has also a masculineportion, or spectre, which kills instead of m

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