Art & Creativity Quote by George Jean Nathan

Nathan’s line flatters art by refusing to flatter reason. Calling great art “irrational” isn’t a put-down; it’s a jab at the tidy, explanatory impulse that critics (including editors like Nathan) are paid to indulge. He pairs art with music because music is the classic problem child of aesthetics: it moves people without needing a thesis statement. You can’t cross-examine a melody. It just happens to you. By aligning “great art” with “great music,” Nathan quietly demotes interpretation from sovereign to sidekick.

“Mad with its own loveliness” is where the cynic turns romantic and makes it sting. “Mad” suggests excess, a kind of self-forgetting compulsion, as if the artwork is intoxicated by the very beauty it generates. There’s ego in that phrase, but also innocence: the best work doesn’t behave like a well-mannered argument aimed at approval; it behaves like a force that can’t help being itself. The subtext is anti-utilitarian and anti-moralistic. If art must justify itself as instructive, socially improving, or logically coherent, you’ve already missed the thing that makes it “great.”

Context matters: Nathan came up in the early 20th-century ferment of modernism and American theater criticism, when artistic legitimacy was being renegotiated against Victorian respectability and middlebrow taste. As an editor-critic, he knew the institutional pressure to rationalize beauty into categories. This sentence is his escape hatch and his warning: when art is truly alive, it doesn’t ask to be understood first. It insists on being felt.