Art & Creativity Quote by J. G. Holland

A “temple” is where a culture puts its most serious reverence, and Holland’s line quietly insists that art deserves that kind of devotion. But the provocation is in the building material: not marble, not paint, not melody - words. For a novelist in 19th-century America, that’s less a neutral observation than a claim of jurisdiction. He’s arguing that language doesn’t just describe art; it scaffolds it, legitimizes it, and gives it public life. Without words, art can exist as sensation, craft, or private experience. With words, it becomes a shared institution: taught, critiqued, sold, moralized, canonized.

The subtext is a defense of the literary class at a time when the United States was still anxious about cultural maturity and hungry for “civilizing” forms. Holland, a popular writer with reformist instincts, is pointing to the democratizing power of print: temples aren’t only built by aristocratic patrons; they can be raised by sentences circulating through newspapers and books. The line flatters readers, too. If the temple is built in words, then anyone fluent in them can enter, judge, and even help construct what counts as art.

It also carries a warning. Temples organize belief, and words can turn aesthetics into doctrine. Language can illuminate a painting or a symphony, but it can also fence them in with piety, taste-policing, and moral instruction. Holland’s sentence works because it’s both praise and power grab: the artist makes, the writer explains - and explanation, in the long run, becomes architecture.