The Golden Treasury: Selected from the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language and Arranged with Notes (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Golden Treasury: Selected From the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language and Arranged With Notes

For the lyric is essentially that literary type which expresses emo tion, just as the drama and the novel express active experience, and the essay expresses thought. In his study of The School Of Giorgione Walter Pater said that all art tends to become music, that is, to stir emotions rather than to state intellectual ideas. A musician is annoyed when some one asks what the music means to him it is a feeling, not a statement; it means no more than does the taste of sugar. So the painter is annoyed at the common attempt to read a story into a picture; to him the picture is a scheme of color and an arrangement of lines, - a sensation for the eye, as music is for the ear. But the average man looks for an idea, especially in the United States, where intellect has unfortunately been rated higher than the gift and training to appreciate beauty; and in all art we see a certain struggle between the artist's desire to set out the loveliness of the world for man's enjoyment, and man's contrary desire that art shall say something that can be translated into words.

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