Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

George Jean Nathan, a prominent American drama critic and essayist, often wrote aphoristically about aesthetics, taste, and the limits of rational explanation in art. This remark reflects his recurring stance that the highest artistic achievements resist being reduced to tidy theories or moral lessons. In Nathan’s critical milieu—early-to-mid 20th-century debates about modernism, realism, and “message” art—he frequently defended art’s autonomy and its right to be excessive, sensuous, and even “mad” in its pursuit of beauty. The comparison to music underscores a long-standing critical idea: music’s power is immediate and emotional, and great visual or literary art can operate with a similar, non-discursive force.

Nathan likens the highest achievements in the visual or literary arts to music in order to stress their resistance to purely rational explanation. “Irrational” here is not a defect but a mark of greatness: truly powerful art exceeds the tidy categories of argument, utility, or moral lesson. By calling it “mad with its own loveliness,” he suggests an ecstatic self-sufficiency—art so intensely beautiful that it seems intoxicated by its own aesthetic force. The remark aligns with Nathan’s broader critical stance that art should be judged by its aesthetic vitality rather than by didactic or conventional standards.