The emotional glow of the creative
imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more
absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual
significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to
which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold
of youth.
What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so
much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is
the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the
arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it
forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictest
sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space
and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot,
it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous
order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as
a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,--the mood, the
act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man,
giving grace to form, feature, and attitude.
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