On Art and Artists [antikvár]

PREFACE by Aldous Huxley Music can say four or five different things at the same time, and can say them in such a way that the different things will combine into one thing. The nearest approach to a demonstration of the doctrine of the Trinity is a fugue or a good piece of counterpoint. Painting too can exhibit the simultaneity of incompatibilities—serene composition along with agonized brush-work and the most passionate violence of color, as in so many of Van Gogh's landscapes; neurotically restless drapery, as in one of Cosimo Tura's saints or Virgins, combined with an image of beatitude or love; the final inwardness of mystical feeling expressed in the nonhuman otherness and outwardness of a Sung landscape. We can see more than one thing at a time, and we can hear more than one thing at a time. But unfortunately we cannot read more than one thing at a time. In any good metaphor, it is true, there is a blending, almost at a point and almost in one instant, of differences harmonized into a single expressive whole. But metaphors cannot be drawn out, and there is no equivalent in literature of sustained counterpoint or the spatial unity of diverse elements brought together so that they can be perceived at one glance as a significant whole. We are manifold amphibians falling perpetually between half a dozen stools, and so, to us, the co-existence of in-