I shall send back the magazine: read the article again: take away all phrases and periphrases: squeeze every period; and then send to me the first idea or view which strikes you as new to yourself. I shall retract.
The whole article amounts to this: repeating fifty times in rather harmonious words that Art is the reproduction of Beauty, etc., etc. Many thanks. Only, what is Beauty? How to discern it? Why is Nature beautiful? Are we to copy, to reproduce Nature? or to add a work of our own, finding out the idea shut in within every symbol? Is Nature anything but the symbolic representation of some truth, which we are to evolve? Or is the drapery of Nature, Nature? Miss C—— says that the Artist must choose the object which is Beautiful. Is not every object more or less so? Is not the grotesque causing the beautiful to shine by contrast? Are the grave-diggers to be suppressed in Hamlet?
Without sifting the nature of Beauty, without giving some definition of it, nobody can attempt to construct a Hierarchy of Art. Miss C. has not even attempted to do so. Still you have been in raptures. Something, therefore, must be in the article. I have not been able to make it out. I beg pardon humbly. That is all I can say.
—ever affectionately yours,
Joseph.
Thursday.
X
Letter to Mr William Malleson [Nov. 11, 1865].