Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...into the openly, almost abstractly, political drama. His play centers on three carefully humanized beings--a triangle, in fact. One would not expect adultery to be vitally involved with a matter so superficially asexual as the Salem witch trials, especially in the works of so high-minded an author. But the fact that his hero John Proctor has in times recently past "sweated like a stallion" after the slut who is now crying "Witch!" at his wife, adds to the play's intensity without detracting from its integrity--so skillful an artist is Mr. Miller...
...most significant failure, however, is linguistic. He appears to be trying for a grander idiom than his customary one, and an occasional line reverberates with more than usual spaciousness. But many of the speeches are merely clumsy, as if the author was aiming for an archaic effect and did not know quite how to achieve...
...approaching a masterpiece, show simple courtesy, suggests Author Eliot: let the painting speak first. This demands "a kind of reverence, a still gratitude, but definitely not admiration. The moment one stops to say. 'Isn't that lovely!' one is in danger of losing the way." Beauty's shadow is significance: "Every great painting shows something seen plus something seen into . . . sight and insight." If the surface story is only half the story in a painting, the "latent content" is the other half, the question the artist answered without consciously asking...
...Philosophers. No technique-detective or brushstroke spy, Author Eliot is instead one of the sun philosophers who value the lights that men and artists live by. Light is the sensuous hero of Sight and Insight: "Velásquez' light is like transparent golden bees swarming the honeyed shadow, while Rogier van der Weyden's is like water over marble . . . even when stealing into Vermeer's darkest interior by a narrow window, light is welcomed as a lover. The far corners whisper hello to light. Instead of humping their backs like angry cats the shadows under the furniture...
...form of light makes Author Eliot bridle, the "cruel" light of "scientific restoration": "Major paintings are handed over to men in white smocks clutching scalpels and chemical swabs ... If there be fifty nailheads in a painted cask, they want to see all fifty. So they strip away . . . Hardly a single master has escaped intact, but Rembrandt appears to have suffered most of all, both in America and in Europe. His celebrated Night Watch at Amsterdam is now a Day Watch" Some other Eliot reflections...