The Two Supreme and Highest Arts by Oscar Wilde

Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The / principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise / in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the / latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can / hardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that / which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated / the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material / of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of / reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying, / for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a / modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say, / with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they / were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the / fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower / classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to / appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is / really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek / to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even / the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of / English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of / mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the / true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect / that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing a / definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate / design.

The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a / method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its / musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear / the critic. I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindness / might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving / to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing / less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, / but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music, / repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the / secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are winged / with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his / blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England's great poet / owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later / verse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing. -- _The Critic / as Artist_.