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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: from which the world fancies that they spring. Have you a grief
that corrodes your heart? Steep yourself in the Language of grief,
learn its utterance from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you
will find that mere expression is a mode of consolation, and that
Form, which is the birth of passion, is also the death of pain.
And so, to return to the sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not
merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct,
that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their
conditions of beauty. Start with the worship of form, and there is
no secret in art that will not be revealed to you, and remember
that in criticism, as in creation, temperament is everything, and
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