To a male chimpanzee, the
wrinkled brow, the long upper lip, the deeply indented lines from
nose to mouth, of a female chimpanzee in the prime of adolescence,
is, I suppose, almost intolerably dazzling and adorable--beauty can
only be a relative thing, when all is said."
"We are drifting away from our point," I said. "The question really
is whether, as art expands, the principles become fewer or more
numerous. My own belief is that the principles do become fewer, but
the varieties of expression more numerous. Keats tried to sum it up
by saying, 'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'; but it is not a
successful maxim, because, as a peevish philosopher said, 'Why in
that case have two words for the same thing?'"
"But it is true, in a sense, for all that," said Herries. "What we
HAVE learnt is that the subject is of very little importance in
art--it is the expression that matters. Genre pictures, plots of
novels, incidents of plays--they are all rather elementary things.
Flaubert looked forward to a time in art when there should be no
subjects at all, when art should aspire to the condition of music,
and express the intangible.
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