An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times | Page 4

grappling in deadly earnest with momentous questions of art and life.

AN ESTIMATE of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times

I. PRINCIPLES OF ART

A. EPIC, DRAMA, AND NOVEL
1. We commonly distinguish writings which appeal directly to the emotions from those of which the immediate object is the conveyance of knowledge, by applying to the former a term of conveniently loose meaning, "works of imagination." Of the kinds included in the wide denotation of this term there are three, between which it seems difficult at first sight to draw a definite line; which appeal to similar feelings, and excite a similar interest, in the different ages to which each is appropriate. These are the epic poem, the drama, and the novel. Each purports to be, in some sort, a reflex of human life and action, as obeying certain laws and tending to a certain end. In each men are represented, not as at rest, or in contemplative isolation, but in co-operation or collision. In each there is a combination of two elements, an outer element of incident, an inner of passion and character. In view of these common features, we might be tempted at first sight to suppose the difference between the three kinds to be merely one of form, merely the difference between the vehicle of prose and the vehicle of metre. We shall find, however, on deeper inquiry, that to the true artist, who does not find his materials in the world, but creates them according to the inner laws by which the world and himself are governed, the vehicle is not more a part of his creation than the "impassioned truth" which it conveys. Here, as elsewhere, form and substance are inseparable; and the difference of form that distinguishes the novel from the other kinds of composition which it seems for the present to have superseded, symbolises, or rather is identical with, a different potency in the art by which the substance is created.[1]
FOOTNOTE:
[1] "Though in its most general sense the substance and matter of all fine art is the same, issuing from the common source of the human desire for expression, yet the region of fancy corresponding to each medium of utterance is molded by intercourse with that medium, and acquires an individuality which is not directly reducible to terms of any other region of aesthetic fancy. Feeling, in short, is modified in becoming communicable; and the feeling which has become communicable in music is not capable of re-translation into the feeling which has become communicable in painting. Thus the arts have no doubt in common a human and even rational content--rational in so far as the feelings which are embodied in expression, for expression's sake, arise in connection with ideas and purposes; but each of them has separately its own peculiar physical medium of expression and also a whole region of modified feeling or fancy which constitutes the material proper to be expressed in the medium and according to the laws of each particular art."--B. Bosanquet, 'The Relation of the Fine Arts to One Another' (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society).

B. IMITATION vs. ART
2. Mere copying is not art. The farther the artist rises above the stage of imitation, the higher is his art, the more elevating its influence on those who can enter into its spirit. If the landscape-painter does nothing more than represent nature as seen by the outward eye, the vulgar objection against looking at pictures--"I can see as fine a view as this any day"--is unquestionably valid. But if the painter is anything better than a photographer, he does far more than this. He brings nature before us, as we have seen it, perhaps, only once or twice in our lives, under the influence of some strong emotion. He does that for us which we cannot do for ourselves; he reproduces those moments of spiritual exaltation in which "we feel that we are greater than we know"--moments which we can remember, and of which the mere memory may be the light of our lives, but which no act of our own will can bring back. It is not till the distinction has been appreciated between nature as it is and nature as we make it to be, between that which we see and that which "having not seen we love," that any branch of art can be reckoned in its proper value.

C. NATURE THE CREATION OF THOUGHT
3. In one sense of the the word, it would no doubt be true to say that nature is simply and altogether that which we make it to be. Modern philosophy has discarded the language which represented our knowledge of things as the result of impressions and the transmission of images.[2] If we still not only speak but think of ourselves as primarily passive