‘As a man raises himself towards Heaven, so his view of the spiritual world becomes simplified and his words fewer.’—DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE, Mystical Theology.
The best poetry of our time, although it is held to be of an extreme complication, has actually attained to a new kind of simplicity and compression. That so much of a varying character should be compressed into a line is startling, because it involves the fusion of exceedingly complicated cross-currents and cross-lights into an element.
It is only by attaining to this fusion, that poetry becomes ‘the voice of the world’.—E. S.
To attain to this simplicity, involves the problem of becoming our subject.—E. S. ‘Everything that is not believed remains decorative.’—COCTEAU, Opium. Trans. Ernest Boyd. ‘It is a question of the painter who likes to paint trees becoming a tree.’—EMERSON, quoted by Cocteau, in Opium. Trans. Ernest Boyd.
‘The Beautiful is invariably of a double composition, in spite of the fact that the impression it makes is single; for the difficulty of discerning the varying elements of beauty in the unity of the impression, in no way invalidates the need for variety in the composition. The Beautiful is composed of an eternal, invariable element, of a quantity difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which may be the epoch, the mode, ethics, or passion (either alternatively, or together). Without this second element … the first element would be indigestible, unappreciable, not adapted or appropriate to human nature.’—BAUDELAIRE, L’Art Romantique.
‘What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.’—COCTEAU (‘Le Secret Professionnel’) Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘Satie invents a new simplicity. The transparent air undresses the lines. Pain does not grimace.’—COCTEAU (‘Carte Blanche’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘A true poet does not trouble about the poetical. In the same way as a horticulturist does not scent his roses. He makes them follow a system that perfects their cheeks and their breath.’—COCTEAU (‘Le Secret Professionnel’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘Simplicity changes sides. That which is simple, is the mass, the unformed. That which is composed, is the element.
‘The elementary form reveals itself as polymorphous and iridescent.
‘Often unity scintillates.’ —GASTON BACHELARD, Irrationalism: appeared in the review Minotaure.
‘One need only look closely at a drawing by Ingres, to see that it sparkles with little touches, chips from the spiritual mine. Yet they speak of Ingres as if they were seeing a pure line.’—COCTEAU (‘Le Coq et l’Arlequin’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
Simplicity is not paucity.—E. S.
‘The Greek temple is beautiful because taste has banished from it the superfluous. The sky-scraper is beautiful because utility has banished from it the superfluous. These beauties are antipodal, but the antipodes resemble each other.’—COCTEAU (‘Carte Blanche’), Le Rappel à l’Ordre.
‘Machinery and American sky-scrapers resemble Greek Art, in the sense that utility bestows on them a dryness and a grandeur deprived of the superfluous. But that is not art. The rôle of art is to seize the sense of the epoch and extract from the contemplation of this practical aridity an antidote to the beauty of the useless, which encourages superfluity.’ —Ibid.
A valuable example of modern simplicity and compression occurs in the scene in Cocteau’s Orphé’e, in which Orpheus and Eurydice have returned from Hades. This scene, however, is in prose, not verse:
‘EURYDICE: If you knew how unimportant are these “histoires”’ — (scenes about? stories about — the word can mean either.—E. S.) ‘the moon and the sun.
‘ORPHEUS: Madame is above such things.
‘EURYDICE: If I could only speak …’