Freedom to Surrender

Now it appears to me that almost any man may, like the spider, spin from his own inwards, his own airy citadel. The points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine web of his soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean-full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wanderings, of distinctness for his luxury." These words of a nineteenth century poet are the doctrine of a decadent scholasticism in creative art. Objectivity is passivity to a world that is only a function of oneself-"the innocent eye," or else it is creation by the self. But beauty is not a measurement of an eye that first blinds itself to the object measured. It has to be conquered and found, and conquest means pain. It requires the effort of a body and soul caught up in life, in the commerce of the wind and the rain. The philosopher approaches truth by several routes, to do justice to its diversity and without prejudice to its unity: similarly the writer must approach beauty actively otherwise his view will be remote and partial. The Pre-Raphaelite aesthetes selected beautiful words from a dictionary and so composed their poems. The Georgians abandoned the dictionary for the countryside, and the late Georgian, Mr. Auden, abandons the countryside for the town. But objectivity requires only one abandonment, and that abandonment neither the nineteenth century nor the twentieth century can countenance: and that is the abandonment of the self. The work of art is not the visual tension, the interplay of convex and concave. It is plastic action

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