Passages about art and beauty

I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.

Glaucon imagines a ring that makes its wearer invisible and asks whether any man, just or unjust, would keep his hands off what he wanted.

The desire and pursuit of the whole is what we call love.

Love is not a god and not a mortal, but something in between, a spirit born of Poverty and Resource, always needy, always scheming, never rich and never destitute.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.

Sancho points out that the giants are windmills, and Quixote answers that the enchanter Freston turned them into windmills to rob him of the glory of the victory.

You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!

Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.

What is the meaning of life? That was all, a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

The country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do.

The greatest of goods come to us through madness, provided the madness is given by divine gift.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.

Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.

He seems to me equal to the gods, that man who sits opposite you and hears you speaking sweetly and laughing. It makes the heart in my breast take flight.

Some say an army of horsemen, some of foot soldiers, some of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth; but I say it is whatever one loves.

Brekekekex koax koax.

The poet should be admired for skill and for good counsel, and because we make people better in their cities.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

Her limbs grew heavy and numb, a thin bark closed over her breast, her hair became leaves, her arms branches; her feet, so swift a moment before, stuck fast in sluggish roots.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.

My design in this book is not to explain the properties of light by hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by reason and experiments.

The light of the sun consists of rays differently refrangible.

She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning.

The square of the periodic time of any planet is to the square of the periodic time of another as the cube of its mean distance is to the cube of the other's.

I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far from the borders of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you reproach me, I shall endure.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, and with forced fingers rude shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (that last infirmity of noble mind) to scorn delights, and live laborious days.

Beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept.

Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful.

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a dream. / It is not now as it hath been of yore.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down.

For a long time I went to bed early.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Socrates meets Ion, a professional reciter of Homer fresh from winning a prize, and asks how he can speak so well about Homer and not about other poets, a puzzle Ion cannot answer since genuine expertise should ordinarily transfer across a subject's various instances.

Socrates suggests that rhapsode and poet alike work not by knowledge or skill but by divine possession, passed down like the pull of a magnet through a chain of iron rings, offering antiquity's most memorable model of inspiration as external force moving through passive conduits.

In the first Eclogue Tityrus, reclining under his beech and playing his pipe, has kept his farm by the favour of a young god at Rome, while Meliboeus drives his goats into exile, dispossessed by a veteran.

The fourth Eclogue foretells a child whose birth will bring back the golden age, when the earth will give its fruits unasked and the serpent will die, a prophecy that Christians later read as foretelling Christ.

Horace advises seizing the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow, a piece of advice delivered within a specific ode addressing the shortness of life and the folly of relying on astrological calculation to predict how much time remains.

He claims to have built a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal pyramids' structure, a boast that his poetry itself will outlast physical monuments, political power and even the erosion of time and weather that eventually destroys every material structure.

The True History parodies travelers' tales by taking its narrator on a journey to the moon and inside the body of a whale, announcing from the outset that everything the narrator relates is invented, a genuine novelty in ancient literature's typically more earnest claims to factual truth.

The Sale of Creeds stages an auction in which the major philosophical schools are sold off to bidders like commodities at a marketplace, turning philosophy's own claimed seriousness and dignity into comic spectacle through this deliberately undignified commercial framing.

There are three kinds of music, and the first is cosmic, the second human, and the third is that which is created by certain instruments, such as the cithara or the flute, or by other instruments that serve melody.

That man is a musician who has taken up the science of making judgments about song, mode and rhythm by weighing them with reason, not through the servitude of work but through the sovereignty of contemplation.

Ibn Arabi's poems mourn a departed beloved in the classical manner of the qasida, naming the abandoned desert campsites, the departing caravan, and the stations of the pilgrimage, working entirely within poetic conventions inherited from earlier Arabic love poetry.

He describes a heart that has become capable of every form, a pasture for gazelles and a convent for monks, a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba, and tables of the Torah and the scroll of the Quran, a single image absorbing multiple religious traditions' particular symbols into one unified capacity for love.

Dante recounts that when he first saw Beatrice, both of them nine years old, his vital spirit trembled so violently that he felt it in the most secret chambers of his heart, and from that moment love ruled over his soul.

In his sonnet on love and the gentle heart, Dante writes that love and the noble heart are a single thing, exactly as the philosopher says in his poem, one existing only where the other already is.

Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell to see again the stars, and Dante writes that to course over better waters the small vessel of his talent now hoists sail, leaving behind so cruel a sea.

Virgil explains that neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, natural or of the mind, and that natural love is never in error, but the love of the mind can err in its object, or in too much or too little vigor.

Leonardo's notes on painting and perspective develop a systematic account of how light, distance and the human eye actually interact, treating rigorous observational and mathematical method as inseparable from painting's practical artistic technique.

Leonardo's anatomical studies record detailed observations of the human body's proportions and internal structure, drawn from his own direct dissection work, connecting his artistic interest in rendering the body accurately to genuine, systematic medical and biological investigation.

All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of merit, or which really has a semblance of merit, if so be they are men of truth and good repute, should write the tale of their life with their own hand.

I began to throw in the pewter plates, plates and bowls, to the number of some two hundred, all at once, into the channels, feeding the furnace at the same time with wood, until the fury of the fire caused the bronze to flow.

Sidney argues that poetry is the oldest of learning and the best teacher of virtue, because it joins the philosopher's precept to the historian's example in a golden world of its own making, combining abstraction's generality with narrative's concrete particularity.

Sidney answers the charges that poets lie and corrupt, treating poetry's fictional status not as a liability requiring apology but as the very source of its distinctive pedagogical power, addressing moral objections to literature with unusual philosophical seriousness.

Spenser's twenty-four stanzas follow the wedding day from the poet waking the bride before dawn, through the procession, the church service and the feast, to nightfall and the wedding bed, ending with a prayer for children, a comprehensive single-day structure.

The structure tracks the hours of the day and the year, giving the wedding cosmic significance beyond private celebration, a single couple's marriage mirrored in and validated by the sun's own daily progress and the calendar's larger seasonal rhythm.

Hermia, ordered by her father to marry Demetrius, runs into the woods outside Athens with Lysander, followed by Demetrius and by Helena, who loves him, establishing the tangled romantic pursuit the woods' magic will further complicate.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are quarrelling over a changeling boy, and Oberon's servant Puck misapplies a love potion, the lovers' affections tangle, and the weaver Bottom is given an ass's head and Titania's love.

The poet walks by the Thames and sees two swans, white as the brides, gliding down to Essex House while nymphs strew flowers, and follows them to the wedding, staging the river's natural setting as an extended allegorical mirror for the human betrothal.

Between the pageant Spenser laments his own disappointed hopes at court and praises the Earl of Essex, revealing genuine personal grievance and practical patronage concerns surfacing through occasional verse's conventional public celebratory form.

Leontes, king of Sicilia, suddenly convinces himself that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, staging jealousy as genuinely irrational psychological eruption rather than response to actual evidence.

He imprisons Hermione, has the newborn daughter abandoned on the Bohemian coast, and learns from the oracle that he was wrong just as his son and, apparently, his wife die, one man's delusion inflicting cascading harm across his entire family.

In a Paris salon a prude, a fop, a pedantic poet and their more sensible hosts argue about whether The School for Wives is indecent, badly built and beneath the rules of art, staging the actual critical attacks on Molière's earlier play as dramatic dialogue.

Molière's spokesmen answer that the point of comedy is to please, that the rules critics invoke are only common sense rather than fixed law, and that the ordinary audience in the pit is a better judge of a play's worth than professional critics.

The life of Donne follows him from his Catholic upbringing through his secret marriage and years of poverty to his ordination and his deanship of St Paul's, and to his death, for which he rose from his sickbed to pose in his shroud.

The life of Herbert tells of a courtier who gave up preferment to become the rector of Bemerton, rebuilt the church, kept his parish with exact devotion, and died at forty, sending The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar to print or burn.

Monsieur Jourdain, a rich cloth merchant's son, spends his money on masters of music, dancing, fencing and philosophy in the hope of passing as a nobleman, and discovers with delight that he has been speaking prose all his life.

Jourdain refuses to let his daughter marry a commoner despite being a commoner himself by birth, so her suitor disguises himself as the son of the Grand Turk and confers a bogus title on Jourdain in an elaborate mock ceremony.

The satirical poem Hombres necios turns on men who blame women for the faults men cause, staking out a genuinely early and pointed feminist critique exposing a specific logical hypocrisy in gendered moral judgment with considerable wit and precision.

The long philosophical poem First Dream traces the soul's rise by night toward total knowledge and its fall back, staging intellectual ambition's genuine limits, human aspiration toward complete understanding meeting reality's actual epistemic constraints.

Pope argues that good criticism follows nature and the rules the ancients drew from her, staking out a considered middle position between purely subjective taste and rigid rule-following, treating inherited critical principles as genuine discoveries about nature itself.

Part two lists the causes of bad judgement, pride, imperfect learning, love of parts rather than the whole, and fashion, diagnosing specific and recognizable critical failures with examples of sound echoing sense throughout the poem's own technical execution.

Belinda wakes, is warned in a dream by the sylph Ariel, dresses at her toilet as a hero arms for battle, and sails up the Thames to Hampton Court, staging the elaborate rituals of feminine self-presentation with mock-epic gravity and formal ceremony.

After coffee and a game of cards, the Baron snips Belinda's lock with a pair of scissors, and the gnome Umbriel fetches spleen from the underworld, escalating this trivial social offense into a battle of fans and frowns among the assembled company.

Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen. / Come, you daughters, help me lament.

Und die Hohepriester und Ältesten hielten einen Rat über Jesum, dass sie ihn töteten. / And the chief priests and elders took counsel against Jesus, that they might kill him.

Hume examines whether the British constitution inclines more toward absolute monarchy or toward a republic, weighing the actual institutional evidence on both sides with genuine skeptical care rather than simply declaring a settled partisan conclusion on a question that divided contemporary political opinion.

He examines the idea of an original contract as the philosophical foundation for legitimate government, testing this influential theory's actual coherence and historical basis rather than simply accepting or rejecting it according to prevailing political doctrine.

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

Beauty is a social quality, for where women and men, and not only they but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, and make us count nothing in the estimation of ourselves which do not command such regard, they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection.

Hume states his central problem directly: beauty is no quality in things themselves but a sentiment in the mind, which seems to make all tastes equally valid, and yet no reasonable person actually believes the poet Ogilby wrote as well as Milton, creating a genuine tension his essay sets out to resolve.

Hume argues that although sentiment cannot be argued with directly, since it expresses the mind's own response rather than a claim about external fact, some sentiments are nonetheless produced by better instruments than others, relocating the actual standard for judgment onto the quality of the judging mind itself.

Lui declares that he would rather be a brilliant madman than a dull, sensible fool, and defends this preference at length, arguing that dullness serves no one while even a corrupt genius at least provides entertainment and occasional insight.

Lui performs, alone at the café table, an entire imagined opera and an entire imagined society dinner in rapid succession, switching voices, postures and instruments with such total physical commitment that onlookers gather to watch, and Moi records the performance with genuine, unresolved admiration.

Johnson argues that Shakespeare has stood the test of time because he is the poet of general nature, his characters not individuals defined by narrow, topical particularity but genuine species, recognizable human types whose truth to human nature generally explains his continued, undiminished appeal across changing periods and audiences.

Johnson lists Shakespeare's faults with genuine bluntness, his carelessness with plot construction, his frequent indulgence in punning wordplay Johnson considers a persistent weakness, and his failure to teach clear moral lessons through his dramatic plots, criticisms offered directly rather than glossed over in service of uncomplicated reverence.

Johnson states his critical opinions on figures like Milton and Gray without hedging, judging Milton's republican politics harshly even while praising Paradise Lost's genuine poetic achievement, and offering pointed criticism of Gray's odes that many contemporary readers found considerably less generous than expected.

The life of Cowley opens with Johnson's extended account of the metaphysical poets, a group he defines and critically evaluates as a distinct category, an influential piece of literary criticism that shaped how English poetry from this period would subsequently be classified and discussed.

Schiller argues that political freedom cannot be achieved by people who are inwardly divided, and that modern specialisation has split the human being into a sense drive and a form drive, a psychological diagnosis with direct political consequences.

Only beauty, through the play drive, can reconcile the sense drive and the form drive, Schiller argues, giving aesthetic experience unusually consequential stakes as the necessary psychological precondition for any genuinely free political order.

The volume opens with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which a sailor shoots an albatross, watches his shipmates die, and is redeemed when he blesses the water-snakes unaware, and must tell his tale forever.

Between are ballads of the rural poor, a girl who insists that her dead brother and sister still make seven, a mad mother, an idiot boy sent for the doctor, and an old huntsman whose neighbours will not let him gather wood.

Lamb argues that acting reduces Hamlet's inward, constantly qualifying thought to definite physical gesture and vocal delivery, foreclosing the interpretive openness a reader's own imagination can sustain indefinitely when encountering the same language on the page rather than embodied by a specific actor.

Lamb contends that Lear's storm and his descent into madness cannot be adequately represented onstage without becoming either painful to watch or genuinely absurd, since the physical spectacle of staged madness risks undermining the sublime terror the same material achieves when read privately in the mind.

Goethe's title itself, Poetry and Truth, announces directly that the account which follows will inevitably blend invented shaping with remembered fact, a warning to readers that even his own apparently candid retrospective narrative cannot escape the transforming pressure memory and narrative form exert on lived experience.

He describes his friendship with Herder, met during his student years, as genuinely transformative, crediting Herder's ideas about language, history and the organic development of national culture with reshaping his own understanding of what literature could actually be and do.

Coleridge defines the primary imagination as the living power and prime agent of all human perception, a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite mind.

Fancy, by contrast, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites, and must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association, unable, unlike the imagination, to dissolve, diffuse and recreate its materials into something genuinely new.

I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence.

A typical selection includes Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and the Immortality Ode, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Byron, Shelley's Mont Blanc and Ode to the West Wind, and Keats's odes.

Common threads across the selection are nature, the imagination, childhood, revolution and the poet's own mind, themes recurring across genuinely distinct individual voices spanning roughly the generation between the French Revolution and the Reform Act.

Shelley argues that poetry in the broad sense, the imaginative making of order, underlies language, law, religion and science, and that poets have been the founders of civil society, considerably expanding poetry's claimed scope beyond verse alone.

Poetry enlarges the sympathetic imagination, which is the instrument of moral good, giving aesthetic experience direct ethical consequence and connecting imaginative literature's pleasures to genuine moral development rather than treating them as merely decorative.

Adonais, the dead poet, is mourned by Urania and by the personified dreams and desires that were his poems, and by a procession of fellow poets including a self-portrait of Shelley, gathering an entire poetic community around Keats's death and loss.

The poem turns from grief to consolation: Adonais is not dead but has become part of the one Spirit that animates nature, a specifically Romantic and pantheist answer relocating immortality within nature's ongoing processes rather than any conventional Christian afterlife.

The company at Charles Lamb's plays a game of naming which dead persons they would most wish to have met, and Lamb, rejecting the more obvious and fashionable choices other guests propose, argues instead for the considerably less expected Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville.

The conversation ranges widely across Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Pope, Dr Johnson and Rousseau, weighing for each the specific pleasure or risk of actual acquaintance against the more distant pleasure of admiring their work from a comfortable historical remove.

Hugo divides human history into three successive ages, primitive, ancient and modern, arguing that each age naturally produces its own characteristic literary form, lyric poetry, epic poetry and drama respectively, treating literary form itself as developing alongside broader historical change.

He argues that modern art must mix the sublime and the grotesque within a single work, as Shakespeare did, rejecting the classical separation of tragedy and comedy into distinct, formally pure genres in favor of a considerably more mixed and historically accurate representation of human experience.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

A savage place! as holy and enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Hegel argues that beauty in art ranks above beauty in nature because artistic beauty is born of spirit, and spirit and its productions stand higher than nature and its appearances, giving art a philosophical dignity natural beauty, however striking, cannot possess.

He identifies art, alongside religion and philosophy, as one of the three ways in which spirit comes to know itself, giving art genuine philosophical significance as a vehicle through which truth achieves concrete, sensuous existence in the world.

But a mermaid has no tears, and so she suffers so much more.

But he has nothing on at all!

Sir Walter Scott, in speaking of him, we are to speak chiefly of the literary man, though it was not chiefly as a literary man that he wished to be regarded, or perhaps was regarded, either by himself or by the world.

The Waverley Novels, without one true delineation of human passion or human character, have taught all men this, at least, that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men.

Mazzini takes Byron and Goethe as the twin summits of the age just ended, Byron the poet of the individual, of subjective will and rebellion, and Goethe the poet of objective contemplation and serene detachment, representing between them the full range of Romantic individualist achievement.

Mazzini argues that each poet is genuinely incomplete, that Byron's subjective rebellion and Goethe's objective detachment each capture only half of what poetry should actually accomplish, brilliant but partial achievements rather than fully realized artistic completeness.

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive. I call / That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands / Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

She had / A heart, how shall I say? too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

The Raven, Poe's best known poem, follows a bereaved scholar who questions a bird that answers only Nevermore, the poem's entire structure subordinated to building toward this single repeated word as its unified, devastating emotional effect.

Annabel Lee, Ulalume and Lenore, elegies for dead women, work out Poe's conviction that the death of a beautiful woman was poetry's most poetic subject, testing this claim across multiple formal variations rather than treating it as mere morbid fixation.

Emerson argues that great men exist to be used, not worshipped, and that the real value of studying them lies in discovering that the specific power each one demonstrates at unusual scale is actually latent, in smaller measure, in every person who studies them.

Emerson praises Montaigne for an honesty so complete it refuses even the comfort of settled philosophical conclusion, presenting genuine, sustained skepticism not as a failure of nerve but as itself a rare and difficult form of intellectual courage.

Poe argues that a long poem is a contradiction in terms, since poetic excitement cannot be sustained, challenging the entire epic tradition and staking out an unusually radical position about the proper scale and duration of genuine poetic experience.

Poe denounces the heresy of the didactic, the belief that poetry should teach a moral, insisting instead that poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty and that its province is taste, between the pure intellect and the moral sense.

Sainte-Beuve asks what makes a writer a classic and answers that it is not conformity to ancient rules but the enrichment of the human mind in a form that is at once new and old, large and fine, easily contemporary with every age.

Sainte-Beuve surveys Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and the French seventeenth century, demonstrating his criterion's genuine cross-cultural applicability rather than remaining merely a parochial defense of any single national or period-specific literary tradition.

Renan, himself a Breton, describes the character of the Celtic peoples as timid, melancholy, imaginative, devoted to a lost cause and to the ideal woman, constructing a specifically national character type from within rather than through detached outside observation.

Renan surveys the Mabinogion, the Arthurian romances, the legends of the saints and the Breton folk poetry collected by La Villemarqué, treating this literary and legendary material as reliable evidence for the Celtic people's genuine collective psychology.

Isolde, brought to Cornwall as bride for King Marke by the man who killed her betrothed, means to poison them both, but her servant Brangäne substitutes a love potion, and they drink believing it is death.

In the king's garden by night the lovers sing that day is the realm of illusion and honour, and night the realm of truth, and long to sink into the night together and be free of the world.

Of Kings' Treasuries argues that books are the company of the best minds and that the English do not read, valuing wealth and advancement over education, a considerable indictment of Victorian materialism delivered through reading's neglected transformative power.

Of Queens' Gardens describes the separate powers of men and women, assigning women the guardianship of the home and of moral order, and calls for girls to be educated to fit them for it, a specifically Victorian gender ideology given eloquent expression.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Solness remains haunted by the fire that destroyed his wife Aline's family home and killed their infant sons, a catastrophe he half believes he willed into being, and one that, by clearing the ground for new construction, made possible the architectural career and reputation he has since built.

Hilde Wangel arrives and reminds Solness that ten years earlier, after he climbed the tower of a church he had built, he kissed her, then a young girl, and promised her a kingdom, a promise she has evidently taken seriously enough to return and hold him to a decade later.

Art is the activity by which one person, having experienced a feeling, intentionally transmits it to others by means of external signs, so that they are infected by it and experience it too.

Good art is sincere, clear and infectious, and the best art conveys the religious feeling of its age and unites people; on this test most of the art of the upper classes, including Wagner, Baudelaire and Tolstoy's own novels, is counterfeit.

The leisure class arose when predatory exploit became more honourable than productive work, and its members prove their standing by conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, wasting time and goods in ways that visibly cost money.

Veblen applies the idea to dress, manners, sport, religion and higher learning, finding in each an institution shaped by the need to display wealth rather than by the use it claims to serve.

Strether arrives in Paris as Mrs Newsome's ambassador, sent specifically to rescue her son Chad from what she believes is a corrupting affair with a bad woman and bring him home to Woollett, the family business, and an advantageous marriage his mother has already arranged.

Under Paris's spell, Strether tells a young man he meets in a garden to live all he can, since it's a mistake not to, a piece of advice that crystallizes his own growing conviction that Woollett's provincial caution has cost him chances he can no longer recover at fifty-five.