Essays in the Art of Writing

"There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanismof any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface thatwe perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled bytheir emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similarway, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers an abhorrent baldness, butrather from the fault of our analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. Andperhaps in æsthetics the reason is the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to thedignity of art seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and thoseconscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist toemploy were yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs, indications of adelicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities ofbeauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man."