Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The British Academy First Annual Shakespeare Lecture: What to Expect of Shakespeare
But there is something true also in the theory of 'art for art. If it cannot be maintained with Hegel, that art purifies all it touches, and that any kind of art is morally beneficial to mankind, it must be acknowledged to-day that art, when not wilfully perverse, is useful simply because it produces things of beauty. 'all that is great, ' Goethe said, 'contributes to our education.' A tragedy, a picture, a statue; Othello, Rembrandt's philosopher, the Victory of Samo thrace, raise us above ourselves. We cannot enjoy works of art, Paul Gaultier has observed, without 'a preliminary forgetting of our habitual preoccupations, and of the interested views which form, so to say, the woof of our lives. They free us from the tyranny of interest. The emotion caused by works, of art acts like a preface to moral activity.' The Same author adds with great truth 'the morality of a work is not to be measured by the morality of the things represented, but by that of the sentiment in which they have been represented.'
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