DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0021
A REVIVAL
upwards, the equilibrium of spiritual and physical, were too remote from the
controlling intellect of the bourgeois and his bodiless morality.
Here it was manifest that poetical creation, on the plastic plane also, could
not be comprehended by the outward eye alone. An enjoyment of art that
seeks to grasp everything at once is destroyed when confronted by an experience
much less comprehensive but far more profound in its reach. The one barely
touches the soul, the other demands creative response from within: instead of
elucidation and the desire to be understood, reverence, just that sympathetic
consciousness of the elemental, of germination and growth, of climate, blood
and epoch in their effect on destiny, the master perpetually seeking revival
from the powers of nature after the labours of creative activity, to the advan-
tage of man’s wellbeing. Only this aptitude for responsive vibration brings
deliverance from the limitations of the ephemeral, of the passing epoch, from
the accidents of frontiers and creeds, leading to that creative and emanci-
pating power from which spring, in common, life and poetry alike. When
therefore we turn back to the profoundest poets among the German masters,
when the boundaries set up to fence off the Ancient world by Classicalism and by
the mere ink and paper which its teachings have become, collapse before the
impact of the younger generation, then, at that very moment, a path will be
opened to Raphael’s universal sensibility, to the daemonic character of his
appearing and language, to that dominating and incomprehensible quality
which, in his own time, was signified by the still current epithet dioino.
3
upwards, the equilibrium of spiritual and physical, were too remote from the
controlling intellect of the bourgeois and his bodiless morality.
Here it was manifest that poetical creation, on the plastic plane also, could
not be comprehended by the outward eye alone. An enjoyment of art that
seeks to grasp everything at once is destroyed when confronted by an experience
much less comprehensive but far more profound in its reach. The one barely
touches the soul, the other demands creative response from within: instead of
elucidation and the desire to be understood, reverence, just that sympathetic
consciousness of the elemental, of germination and growth, of climate, blood
and epoch in their effect on destiny, the master perpetually seeking revival
from the powers of nature after the labours of creative activity, to the advan-
tage of man’s wellbeing. Only this aptitude for responsive vibration brings
deliverance from the limitations of the ephemeral, of the passing epoch, from
the accidents of frontiers and creeds, leading to that creative and emanci-
pating power from which spring, in common, life and poetry alike. When
therefore we turn back to the profoundest poets among the German masters,
when the boundaries set up to fence off the Ancient world by Classicalism and by
the mere ink and paper which its teachings have become, collapse before the
impact of the younger generation, then, at that very moment, a path will be
opened to Raphael’s universal sensibility, to the daemonic character of his
appearing and language, to that dominating and incomprehensible quality
which, in his own time, was signified by the still current epithet dioino.
3