" Art always
platonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order,
proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternal
flow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some idea
preexistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strive
always (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations and
conditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outward
circumstances) toward ideal perfection--toward what Michelangelo called
Ideal form, the universal mould.
Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness of
scientific definitions, tells us that
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact;
that
as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
And a little before he had told us that
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
Plato had said before him (in his "Ion") that the poet is possessed by a
spirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particle
of understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed by
the god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, _till
they recover their senses_, that they have been drinking mere water.
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