Herbert Read on Sincerity

“[Rousseau], [t]he man who would be sincere is unconsciously insincere. This confirms the supposition I began with: that a contradiction exists between self-consciousness and sincerity. To be conscious of a self, vis-a-vis other selves, is already to expose that self to corruption.”

“Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man—the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings.… The value of words help to define the feeling itself.… The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.”

“All art is artifice, and therefore no work of art is sincere. Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an ac? tivity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is "sincere" will tell you) to moderate the feeling to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling. Art is the definition, the delimitation, of feeling. To quote a powerful image of Stravinsky's (in The Poetics of Music) the lava is already cold by the time it has assumed a form. When we recognize feeling in a work of art, it is not the artist's feeling: it is our own feeling transferred to a ready form. A work of art is a feeling in-formed.”