Without Lifting A Finger

‘Look at this flower,’ said I to the philosopher, ‘it is utterly impossible that this symmetry with its definitely numbered points and indentations, these little white and red streaks, this little golden crown in the middle, should not have been thought out beforehand! And how beautiful and charming it is, a poem, a work of art, a witticism, a bright-coloured, fragrant jest! A thing like that does not make itself!’ ‘It is beautiful in any case,’ said the philosopher, ‘whether it has been made or not! Put a question to it! The flower says nothing, it has no time for talking either, for it has to blossom and cannot bother about your doubts. For all these are doubts, which you are voicing, doubts of God, and contemptible doubts of Nature; and it makes me sick just to listen to a doubter, a sentimental doubter! Oh dear!’ He had heard this played as a trump card in the arguments of older people and he used it against me now, as well as other skirmishing devices of the kind which he had adop...

Having read some of his "biggies" years ago, I decided to start here (besides, it was free on Kindle). If I get on a De Quincey "roll," perhaps I'll read more. Enjoyed the first essay re MacBeth (see quote below); eventually got a bit tired of Murder-as-Art in the next two; have started one on Joan of Arc. * From the end of "On the Knocking at the Gate, in MacBeth":      O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, -- like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert -- but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen not...

Mary Wollstonecraft can wax poetic re what she sees and feels. Given that, plus two centuries of "advancement," we can forgive her uber-optimism. * Excerpt from her letters:      The increasing population of the earth must necessarily tend to its improvement, as the means of existence are multiplied by invention.      You have probably made similar reflections in America, where the face of the country, I suppose, resembles the wilds of Norway. I am delighted with the romantic views I daily contemplate, animated by the purest air; and I am interested by the simplicity of manners which reigns around me. Still nothing so soon wearies out the feelings as unmarked simplicity. I am therefore half convinced that I could not live very comfortably exiled from the countries where mankind are so much further advanced in knowledge, imperfect as it is, and unsatisfactory to the thinking mind. Even now I begin to long to hear what you are doing in Engl...

Emily's view of herself and her art: something along the lines of Art = Religion and Artist = Translator of Mute Nature. An entry from 1930: TUESDAY, JANUARY 20TH I have been to the woods at Esquimalt. Day was splendid -- sunshine and blue, blue sky, and two arbutus with tender satin bark, smooth and lovely as naked maidens, silhouetted against the rough pine woods. Very joyous and uplifting, but surface representation does not satisfy me now. I want not "the accidentals of individual surface" but "the universals of basic form, the factor that governs the relationship of part to part, of part to whole and of the whole object to the universal environment of which if forms a part."