After hearing a singularly interesting lecture on Tennyson by Lord
Esher a week ago 1 took down from the shelf (because it happened to be the nearest book on the subject at hand) Stopford Brooke's Tennyson—part of a college prize quite a few years ago. Though the book was first published nearly sixty years ago one passage I came on might have fOrmed part of an art critic's article in March, 1953.
" This creation," it runs, " this representation of the beautiful, is art; and the most skilful representation of the ugly—that is of anything which awakens either repulsion, or base pleasure, or horror which does not set free and purify the soul, or scorn instead of reverence, or which does not kindle in us the desire of reproduction of it that we may stir in others similar emotions to our own— is not art at all. It is clever imitation, it is skill, it is artifice, it is not art."
Consider this before visiting the so-called sculpture exhibition at the Tate; or better still perhaps*, consider it after visiting the so-called sculpture exhibition at the Tate.
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