The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work. We have brought with us the ideas of beauty, breadth of style, pathos and so forth which we might at a pinch have the illusion of recognising in the banality of a conventional face or talent, but our critical spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must disengage the unknown element. It hears a sharp sound, an oddly interrogative inflexion. It asks itself: Is that good? Is what I am feeling now admiration? Is that what is meant by richness of colouring, nobility, strength? And what answers it again is a sharp voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person whom one does not know, in which no scope is left for breadth of interpretation. And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.
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About Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust was a 19th-century French novelist, literary critic, and essayist. Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for his novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Art — Creativity, expression, and the role of art in society
- Beauty — Appreciating aesthetics, grace, and the sublime
- Experience — Learning through living, doing, and facing the world