![]() ![]() ![]() For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. ![]() Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. Only be sure it is passion-that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, esctasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. Well, we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve- les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. 1 Walter Pater, The Renaissance (London, 1961), pp. ![]()
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