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Art and the Imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
Extract
The pleasures of literature may be classified as arising either from form or from content or else—and it is a classification which cuts across the first scheme—from the intellectual or architectonic element on the one hand, or the sensuous or harmonious on the other. By the pleasures of form one means the qualities of structure in novel or play, the satisfaction of speech sound in poetry produced by all the devices of the art— examples, widely different, are Spenser or Fray Luis de Leon, Swinburne or Jose Asuncion Silva, and T. S. Eliot or Luis Cernuda. By the pleasures of content one means either the incident-interest, the captivation of the attention that makes it impossible to ignore the command: ‘Now read on’, or the philosophical content, by which is meant the extent—if any—to which an author’s content and form contain any understanding of experience, any interpretation: here the pleasure that is exclusively literary is derived from the skill with which the interpretative element is presented or conveyed. The pleasure of rightness of interpretation is, of course, of a non-literary order. But the architectonic pleasure may arise from the form and the content taken together: it is the pleasure that is given by a wide sweep of subject matched by form on a grand scale. The Divina Commedia, the Faery Queen, Shakespeare’s tragedies—all procure us an aesthetic pleasure drawn from a power within the artist’s mind which sees and conveys an apprehension of life on a grand scale, and is not dependent on either subject-matter or form taken by themselves.
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- Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 I think it is the presentation of a portion of reality seen with love. If so, it is here that the root unity of painting with literature is to be found. The pleasure derived from the manipulation and from the texture of the paint and all that kind of technical quality must not be omitted, and, of course, I am not rejecting form and composition, only placing them second.
2 It is when M. Sartre says that ‘Alive, appealing and strong as an image is, it presents its object as not being’ that we are compelled to disagree. Not being there is not the same thing as not being. Vide J.‐P. Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, English translation, 1950.
3 The passage incorporated into the text is taken from Vol. I of the Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, p. 211; the passages inset are condensed from pp. 208‐10.