Read-Aloud Plays by Horace Holley


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Page 49

Yes--discover it all over again. It gets lost, lost in hard and fast rules
or sentimentality, then a genius comes along and digs down to the buried
city--creation. Art isn't like invention. It's more like religion.

MR. WENTWORTH

There you are!

JOE

There we are! Isn't there a struggle going on all the time to free
religion, the _spirit_ of religion, from hard and fast rules and from
false emotions? It's exactly the same thing.

MR. WENTWORTH

Ah, but rules are necessary to maintain order. That's what I insist about
art. We _must_ have rules!

SILVIA

I know exactly what you mean, Mr. Wentworth. You mean that if fanatics
tore down all the churches on the street corners, and there weren't any
more Sunday morning sermons, everybody would run wild. But there again
it's the same thing as with art: the man who has the spirit of the thing
in him feels that the spirit itself is a far better control than heaps of
stones and sermons. It's all a matter of _living_. Imagine asking one of
the Apostles which church he went to!

MR. WENTWORTH

Wait! We are getting art mixed up with too much else. Didn't you say, Mr.
Carson, that pictures died when they no longer gave out impulses of
beauty?

JOE

Yes.

MR. WENTWORTH

Well! I admit there are dead pictures, too many of them, but they are the
canvasses that were still-born. The masterpieces in the Louvre _still_
give out impulses--beautiful impulses--to many of us, thank heaven!

SILVIA

But that's just it! The impulses you mean aren't those of art at all.
They--

JOE

Those pictures don't give out impulses to the _artist_. The impulses they
do give out are only the emotions that satisfy the student who has learned
some rules and then sees the rules worked out. The artist produced the
rules as a side issue, but you are trying to make the rules produce the
artist. That's the difficulty when people as a whole lose the creative
sense. They are satisfied with things at second-hand. Second-hand
expressions of life, and second-hand philosophies to justify the
expressions. It's a kind of conspiracy in which everybody works against
everybody else. Only the few real artists in any generation break through
it into the light.

SILVIA

The light of the sun!

MR. WENTWORTH

I fear we are hopelessly at odds in this question. Well, as the Romans
said, there's no disputing about tastes. Every one to his own taste.

JOE

No!

MR. WENTWORTH

What do you mean?

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Mon 22nd Dec 2025, 0:39