Gravity and Grace

Gravity and grace are spiritual terms, but they can also offer us a way to think about literature. Grace may mean not only the felicity and ease - what Schiller refers to as the 'mobile beauty' - inhabiting certain works of art, but also the sense of something given, or about to be given, by a work as we read it: something incalculable, perhaps accidental, but vital and regenerative. Like a promise, this quality also needs gravity, a sense of substance within it. The gracefulness of a dancer relies upon gravity, and the grace of a text depends on the weight of words. These matters are pursued here in essays on subjects ranging from Voltaire to Ali Smith, from Baudelaire to Beckett, not forgetting Mallarm , and offered to Roger Pearson in honour of the grace and gravity of his own writing.