Collected Essays by Herbert Read

...It may be arguable whether human relations need such a stiffening, but there is no doubt that art dies if confined to intellectual purposes...

...With such an attitude, with which painters like Picasso and philosophers like Bergson would agree, the possibilities of success are much greater when it is necessary to form an opinion about an airplane or a dogma, a poem or a symphony...

...As for style, Read is a writer of "understanding," not "intellect," which gives his prose a terribly convincing quality...

...The purpose of art is to communicate let us leave it at that...

...Reviewed by Ramon Sender Teacher and critic author, "The Sphere" and other novels Herbert Read can be to English anarchism what Chesterton was to Catholicism and Bernard Shaw to socialism...

...The essay is a difficult genre...

...In religion, he is an agnostic with sympathies, more poetical than philosophical, for Kierkegaard...

...He is, in other words, an intellectual who is still human...

...In him everything is as clear as two and two are four so clear in its delicate and amiable complexity that in the end it sometimes seems like a mystery...

...In the moral field, he is a stoic...

...Furthermore, Read is one of the few intellectuals of today who dares show some kind of unconditional enthusiasm for a picture, a poem or a novel...

...The confused labyrinths of poetic or artistic conception become diaphanous and familiar...

...At least this is what we in our Hispanic world believe...

...An intellectual so careful of the rights of his understanding as Read, when he talks about the work of art, says: "To accept the view that the purpose of art is primarily to communicate a gnosis' is to acquiesce in a petrification of life the suppression of human relations by abstract doctrines...

...After reading this rich and protean book, we see clearly into the author's mind and consciousness...

...Rather than convince or conquer, enslave or dazzle him, the essayist must try, simply, to stir up the reader's intuition and set it to working on problems and angles of reality outside the range of his own experience in ordinary life...

...Read knows it very well, even though he renounces the privilege...

...In philosophy, he is an eclectic with a natural inclination toward Schopenhauer and Bergson...

...Read approaches the complexity of the critique of criticisms with the simplicity of the ordinary man and with the language of every day...

...It must be an exercise of transference from one personality to another on all levels, even the emotional, but taking care not to "move or convince" the reader overmuch...

...Tradition is integrated into the life of the moment, and from this life of today the only perspectives of tomorrow that seem really possible for us all are born spontaneously...

...Rarely have such sharp and original things been stated in more colloquial terms...

...In poetry, two Frenchmen, Verlaine and Rimbaud, and some Englishmen, Shelley and De la Mare among them...

...The purpose of art is to communicate, we agree, but not primarily to communicate a gnosis, or any other conceptual entity...

...In painting, he seems to lean toward the Spanish school: El Greco, Goya, Picasso...

...Some may say that Picasso belongs to the French school, but there is none French nationalism in painting ended with impressionism...

...In the modern novel, Read likes Stendhal, Thomas Hardy and Lawrence...

...I doubt if in all England there is a clearer head facing up to the social and political problems of the day or the new historical outlook...

...Even so, his best essays in this superb collection are those relating to art criticism...

...The wisdom of these essays is harmonious, as in the Greeks of the best periods...

...Chesterton and Shaw were also on familiar ground here...

...Nevertheless, there is in the essay, as in the poem and symphony (as well as in painting), a part that must be left to the confused potentiality of the unconscious world, as Aristotle says...

...In politics (if one may say so), an anarchist: Anarchists refuse to have anything to do with politics...

...It must not only communicate an idea, or generalize a notion "which is in the air" and waiting to be fixed in the form of a new commonplace...

...The art is in the power to communicate, and this power depends without any doubt on the vitality of the senses which are used by the artist in the process of giving form to anything be it a religious symbol or a chair to sit on, a poem or an airplane...