' The element of song in the singing accompanied by the
profound joy of motion, is so sweet that, while the incomplete
lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the thorn-
crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure; for our
delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like
Adonis, be beautiful in its agony; and when the poet's heart breaks
it will break in music.
And health in art - what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane
criticism of life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there
is in [Kingsley]. Health is the artist's recognition of the
limitations of the form in which he works. It is the honour and
the homage which he gives to the material he uses - whether it be
language with its glories, or marble or pigment with their glories
- knowing that the true brotherhood of the arts consists not in
their borrowing one another's method, but in their producing, each
of them by its own individual means, each of them by keeping its
objective limits, the same unique artistic delight. The delight is
like that given to us by music - for music is the art in which form
and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be
separated from the method of its expression, the art which most
completely realises the artistic ideal, and is the condition to
which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.
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