Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...this ninth annual Festival, the painting jury made its choices, and the battle was on. The jury stated that it recognized certain common denominators in all art: "competence, craftsmanship, honesty, and individual vision." It went on: "Skillful manipulation of pigment has taken precedence over the expression of deep human involvement. The Festival entries underline this generalization. . . . In particular we missed the more disciplined constructive aspect of image making, and, at the other extreme, the painter's pure joy of uncovering the visible world. We observed with regret that some of the most vigorous painters of our regional community...
...British playwright N. F. Simpson is not a raving lunatic, although that is the first impression his two plays give. On the contrary, Mr. Simpson is lucidly, frighteningly, overwhelmingly sane. His unblinking perception of the rationalized madness that we call human life misleads one at first into thinking his plays gibberish, but we soon perceive that they are not the products of a chimpanzee pecking away at a typewriter, beloved example of statisticians as the primate may be. A Resounding Tinkle and The Hole are the result of something as rare as chimps actually--rather than in imagination--at typewriters...
Shakespeare's breathtaking change of pace carries a man to the brink of eternity and then restores him to common humanity. On seeing Cordelia's body, the grief-stricken Lear cries: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?" In the extremity of human despair ("Thou'lt come no more") he utters his towering, fivefold "Never, never, never, never, never!" Then the dam of his unbearable anguish breaks with the homely request, "Pray you undo this button." No one but Shakespeare would have dared put those two lines together...
...grounds as relative as these, there has been and will be a spate of other Hamlets. For Hamlet and Shakespeare's other great characters are so rich in possible meanings because they are fashioned on the essentially human principle of both/and rather than either/or. Hamlet is more than the sum of his paradoxes; he is the paradox of man seen whole. All one knows for certain is that being Hamlet is Hamlet's tragedy-as being himself is everyman...
...also indifferent. His rational disposition made him considerate, but also negligent. His sense of loyalty made him generous, but also extravagant. His mental balance gave him humour as well as irresponsibility. His natural charity brought indolence as well as callousness." Withal, concludes Pearson, he was "the sanest, most human and civilised of monarchs...