A Pilgrimage of Pleasure Author:Algernon Charles Swinburne Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV SIMEON SOLOMON NOTES ON HIS "VISION OF LOVE" AND OTHER STUDIES SIMEON SOLOMON NOTES ON HIS "VISION OF LOVE" AND OTHER STUDIES IF it may be said wi... more »th perfect accuracy that in all plastic art, whether the language chosen be of words or forms, of sounds or colours, beauty is the only truth, and nothing not beautiful is true; yet this axiom of a great living artist and critic must not be so construed as to imply forgetfulness of the manifold and multiform nature of beauty. To one interpreter the terror or the pity of it, the shadow or the splendour, will appear as its main aspect, as that which gives him his fittest material for work or speech, the substance most pliable to his spirit, the form most suggestive to his hand; to another its simplicity or its mystery, its community or its specialty of gifts. Each servant serves under the compulsion of his own charm; each spirit has its own chain. Upon men in whom there is, so to speak, a compound genius, an intermixture of spiritual forces, a confluence of separate yet conspiring influences, diverse in source yet congruous in result—upon men in whose eyes the boundary lines of the several conterminous arts appear less as lines of mere distinction than as lines of mutual alliance—the impression of the mystery in all beauty, and in all defects that fall short of it, and in all excesses that overbear it, is likely to have a special hold.The subtle interfusion of art with art, of sound with form, of vocal words with silent colours, is as perceptible to the sense and as inexplicable to the understanding of such men as the interfusion of spirit with flesh is to all men in common; and in fact when perceived of no less significance than this, but rather a part and complement of the same truth. One of such artists, and at once recog...« less