Category: Blog

  • The Relation Of Art To Nature

    During all the great periods of art able men have striven earnestly to attain a knowledge of character and beauty and to achieve their truthful representation. Even when the purpose of the artist has been to express some specific idea or to record some incident or historical event, the work has lived, not because of…

  • Tintoretto

    Tintoretto

    Aubé is another sculptor of acknowledged eminence who ranges himself with M. Rodin in his opposition to the Institute. His figures of "Bailly" and "Dante" are very fine, full of a most impressive dignity in the ensemble, and marked by the most vigorous kind of modelling. One may easily like his "Gambetta" less. But for…

  • Battle Of Constantine

    It is a sure mark of narrowness and defective powers of perception to fail to discover the point of view even of what one disesteems. We talk of Poussin, of Louis Quatorze art—as of its revival under David and its continuance in Ingres—of, in general, modern classic art as if it were an art of…

  • 10 Unforgettable Sailing Destinations

    10 Unforgettable Sailing Destinations

    In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing…

  • Many Puzzles Of The Oddyssey

    Many Puzzles Of The Oddyssey

    The “Odyssey” (as every one knows) abounds in passages borrowed from the “Iliad”; I had wished to print these in a slightly different type, with marginal references to the “Iliad,” and had marked them to this end in my MS. I found, however, that the translation would be thus hopelessly scholasticised, and abandoned my intention.…

  • Omnilingual

    To translate writings, you need a key to the code — and if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years before the first writer of Earth was born … how could the Martian be translated?

  • The House On The Borderland

    The House On The Borderland

    Right away in the west of Ireland lies a tiny hamlet called Kraighten. It is situated, alone, at the base of a low hill.

  • Some Seasons Later

    Some Seasons Later

    I admit that even among amateurs this is rather small talk, but it brings me to this point: in the passage of water down a ravine of its own making, this line of Nature astir may repeat itself again and again but is commonly too inaffable, abrupt, angular, to suggest the ogee. In that middle…

  • The Windows of Absolute Night

    The Windows of Absolute Night

    To most minds mystery is more fascinating than science. But when science itself leads straight up to the borders of mystery and there comes to a dead stop, saying, “At present I can no longer see my way,” the force of the charm is redoubled.

  • First Days In The Eternal City

    My strange, and perhaps whimsical, incognito proves useful to me in many ways that I never should have thought of.