A Writer's Notebook (69 page)

It is a book that owes its celebrity rather to the accident of time than to intrinsic excellence.

Seville. When you are in the country toward evening the light has just that warm golden glow with which Murillo surrounds his saints, and the little white clouds on the horizon are like the cherubs that surround the Virgin in glory.

The crowd in the bull-ring. A thousand paper fans of all colours fluttered in the heat; it looked as though a swarm of butterflies had suddenly started into life.

Valdes Leal. It is all fluid. The design has a vague sweep of no significance. It gives you the impression of a badly blurred photograph. These people have no bones in their bodies. Valdes Leal had no power of composition and his pictures have no architecture; the vast canvases seem to be filled at haphazard. The colour is dull and conventional. It
must be admitted that he had a certain imagination, but it was the inept, exaggerated imagination of the counter-reformation.

Andalusia. The moon leaned low against the sky like a white-faced clown lolling against a circus wall.

The harvest moon flitted in and out of the trees as the car sped by, like a fat gay woman playing hide and seek with a grotesque but rather appealing archness.

The hoots of the motor-horns and the roar of the exhausts pierced the night like the jagged peaks of the mountains in Japan against the unclouded sky.

M. P. He threw his bread on the waters in the confident hope that it would be returned four-fold, but in case providence were inattentive, took care to attach a string to it, so that if need be he could pull it back.

In the development of every art there is an interval between the charm of naïveté and the elegance of sophistication, and it is then that perfection is produced. But in this interval is also produced dullness. For then artists are in complete command of their medium, and their personality must be out of the ordinary if they are to avoid the tediousness of realism.

Compare the springlike delightfulness of Raphael's early works and the sumptuous power of the
stanze
of the Vatican with the emptiness of the pictures when he painted like Giulio Romano.

In perfection there is always the malaise of the degeneration which will succeed it.

The artist has by his nature the detachment and freedom which the mystic seeks in the repression of desire.

The artist, like the mystic who seeks to attain God, is detached in spirit from the world.

Intense activity blunts the doer to the sense of sin; it is only when his activity is thwarted that his conscience has opportunity to gnaw.

The art of the Renaissance gives you all it has to give at once. It has peace, healthiness and serenity. It more nearly reached perfection than any other style. It is stimulating, but not to the imagination, rather to the general sense of well-being. It gives you the feeling of physical contentment that a sunny morning does in spring.