Art & Creativity Quote by Rebecca West

“Serene” is a bracing choice because it’s not the adjective people reach for when they’re trying to praise music’s power. West isn’t talking about prettiness or calm; she’s pointing to a kind of inner composure that comes from conviction. Great music, in her framing, doesn’t beg for permission or hedge its bets. It moves as if the moral and emotional stakes are already settled, and that certainty is what lets it feel spacious instead of strained.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to art that advertises its importance. Sereneness here is the opposite of anxious striving: not the performance of depth, but depth that doesn’t need to announce itself. Think of how a symphony can carry grief without melodrama, or how a blues standard can be devastating without pleading. The “values” aren’t a manifesto stapled to the score; they’re embedded in the music’s choices - what it repeats, what it withholds, where it resolves, where it refuses to. Music asserts what matters by behaving like it matters.

Context sharpens the edge. West lived through the era when culture was conscripted for ideology - the propagandistic bombast of mass politics, the suspicion that art must justify itself socially, economically, nationally. Against that noise, “serene” becomes almost political: a defense of aesthetic authority that can’t be reduced to slogans. She suggests that the highest art doesn’t mirror our panic; it outlasts it, precisely because it knows what it’s doing and doesn’t flinch.