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 Mallarmé, and offered to Roger Pearson in honour of the grace and gravity of his own writing.