The Two Kinds of Asceticism by W.B. Yeats — Read

It is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the / image that calls it up and gives it expression. Michael Angelo's Moses, / Velasquez' Philip the Second, the colour purple, a crucifix, call into / life an emotion or state that vanishes with them because they are its / only possible expression, and that is why no mind is more valuable than / the images it contains. The imaginative writer differs from the saint in / that he identifies himself -- to the neglect of his own soul, alas! -- with / the soul of the world, and frees himself from all that is impermanent / in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of the newspapers. / That which is permanent in the soul of the world upon the other hand, / the great passions that trouble all and have but a brief recurring life / of flower and seed in any man, is the renunciation of the saint who / seeks not an eternal art, but his own eternity. The artist stands / between the saint and the world of impermanent things, and just in so / far as his mind dwells on what is impermanent in his sense, on all that / 'modern experience and the discussion of our interests,' that is to say / on what never recurs, as desire and hope, terror and weariness, spring / and autumn recur in varying rhythms, will his mind become critical, as / distinguished from creative, and his emotions wither. He will think less / of what he sees and more of his own attitude towards it, and will / express this attitude by an essentially critical selection and emphasis. / I am not quite sure of my memory but I think that Mr. Ricketts has said / in his book on the Prado that he feels the critic in Velasquez for the / first time in painting, and we all feel the critic in Whistler and / Degas, in Browning, even in Mr. Swinburne, in the finest art of all ages / but the greatest.

The end for art is the ecstasy awakened by the / presence before an ever changing mind of what is permanent in the world, / or by the arousing of that mind itself into the very delicate and / fastidious mood habitual with it when it is seeking those permanent & / recurring things. There is a little of both ecstasies at all times, but / at this time we have a small measure of the creative impulse itself, of / the divine vision, a great one of 'the lost traveller's dream under the / hill,' perhaps because all the old simple things have been painted or / written, and they will only have meaning for us again when a new race or / a new civilisation has made us look upon all with new eyesight.