Phoenix Club

Professor Shelley Speaks

The notable success of the first lecture under the auspices of the Phoenix Club augurs well for future proceedings.

Professor Shelley, last week, spoke to an audience who listened with keen appreciation of his humorous and stimulating lecture on "The Fundamentals of Art." Introducing his subject, the professor said it was quite impossible to reduce art to intellectual terms for the aesthetic experience was outside the terms of the intellect. The Nature of Art is that which tries to express what the intellect does not deal with.

The laws of composition in art, music or prosody are not rigid; they are merely systematised finger-posts pointing in certain directions, e.g., Ibsens replied to critics that if his lines were not poetry his work should determine the Laws of poetry.

Our senses are restricted to definite dimensions and the intellect has to cut off from existence certain dimensions before it can deal with them. It has to reduce everything to deadness and can only deal with relations into which our own being doesn't enter. We have certain sequences of times, beats, colours, which affect us in various ways, the relations of the sequences depending upon ourselves or our personalities.

Where science deals with the external and is impartial, impersonal, objective. Art treats of the relations of something internal and it is partial, personal and subjective. Art gives us not merely an environment but another aspect of existence which embodies our experience. Thus the statement that art begins where science leaves off gives a wrong impression, for art and science are merely different views of our own life.

Where, in science, the fundamental thing is ratio, the feeling common to all the arts is rhythm.

The mathematician would reduce these arts to terms of reason, but he can only deal with the material used by art.

Zeno, of Carthage, 2000 years ago propounded a philosophy and for one of his illustrations he used the flight of an arrow.

Everything has to occupy space a certain length of time in order to exist. The arrow, in moving, must stand still at each point a certain length of time or it doesn't exist. Thus, as far as our intellect is concerned, it is standing still all the time.

We can calculate the course of the flight and its probable result, but we cannot understand how it moves.

The aim of poetry is to arouse in the reader the emotional experience of the poet. Whether he receives the experience or not depends on his own personality.

Rhythm varies independantly of metre and several well-known poems were quoted in illustration.

All art involves the feeling of the infinite the feeling of the nature of life. Though it starts with the particular it ends in the universal.