Essays in the Art of Writing : Large Print

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of anyart.

All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive theirbeauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shockedby the coarseness of the strings and pulleys.

In a similar way, psychology itself, when pushed to anynicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from anypoverty native to the mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those disclosureswhich seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; andthose conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist to employwere yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of the sensefiner than we conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature.

This ignorance at least is largelyirremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too farback in the mysterious history of man.

The amateur, in consequence, will always grudgingly receivedetails of method, which can be stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, on the principle laiddown in Hudibras, that