An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times | Page 6

that power, which in the form of religion can make every meal a sacrament, and transform human passion into the likeness of divine love, is represented at a lower stage, not only by the unifying action of speculative philosophy, but by the combining force of art.
FOOTNOTE:
[5] The same thought may be found, in concrete and poetic form, in Wordsworth's lines:
"And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains."

F. THE ARTIST AS IDEALIZER
6. The artist, even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator of imitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessary instruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony and order into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutes for the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thought already finds a resting place. Just as strong emotion tends to make all known existence the setting of a single form; just as intense meditation sees in all experience the manifestation of a single idea; so the artist, even if he be merely telling a story, or painting a common landscape, puts some of his materials in a relief, and combines all in a harmony, which the untaught eye does not find in the world as it is. He presents to us the facts in the one case, the outward objects in the other, as already acted upon by thought and emotion. In this sense every artist, instead of copying nature, idealises it. In degree and mode, however, the idealisation varies infinitely in the various kinds of art. It is by considering the height to which it is carried in the epic poem and the drama that we shall best appreciate its limitations in the novel.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] Here are three beds: one existing in nature, which is made by God, as I think that we may say--for no one else can be the maker?--No.--There is another which is the work of the carpenter?--Yes.--And the work of the painter is a third?--Yes?--Beds, then, are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them: God, the maker of the bed, and the painter?--Yes, there are three of them.--God, whether from choice or from necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.... Shall we, then, speak of Him as the natural author or maker of the bed?--Yes, he replied; inasmuch as by the natural process of creation He is the author of this and of all other things.--And what shall we say of the carpenter--is he not also the maker of the bed?--Yes.--But would you call the painter a creator and maker?--Certainly not.--Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the bed?--I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as the imitator of that which the others make.--Good, I said; then you call him who is third in the descent from nature an imitator?--Certainly, he said.--And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.--That appears to be so.--Plato, 'Republic,' X. 597.

G. THE EPIC
7. In outward form the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse. Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist, or that he imagined himself to be doing anything else than representing events as they happened. We have simply to notice that in him facts have become poetry, and to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How is it that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet shows us in the glass a glory which belongs not to nature as we see it, in its material limitations? The answer is, that though he follows the essential laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the earth we live in. He fills it with actors other than the men who "hoard and sleep and feed" around us. He places