Appreciations, With An Essay on Style | Page 6

or plainer
functions of literature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is the
essence of such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no
merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long
run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer
accommodation of speech to that vision within.
--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being
preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In literature,
as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding of a bell or a
platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts itself, wherever the
producer so modifies his work as, over and above its primary use or
intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of course, in the first instance)
there, "fine" as opposed to merely serviceable art, exists. Literary art,
that is, like all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of
fact--form, or colour, or incident--is the representation of such fact as
connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its
volition and power.
Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--this transcript,
not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as modified by human

preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms. It will be good literary
art not because it is brilliant or sober, or rich, or impulsive, or severe,
but just in proportion as its representation of that sense, that soul-fact,
is true, verse being only one department of such literature, and
imaginative prose, it may be thought, being the special art of the
modern world. That imaginative prose should be the special and
opportune art of the modern world results from two important facts
about the latter: first, the chaotic variety and complexity of its interests,
making the intellectual issue, the really master currents of the present
time incalculable--a condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint
proper to verse form, so that the most characteristic verse of the
nineteenth century has been lawless verse; and secondly, an
all-pervading naturalism, a curiosity about everything whatever as it
really is, involving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must,
after all, be the less ambitious form of literature. And prose thus
asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty of the
present day, will be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as
varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its
latest experience--an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,
descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties will be not
exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all the varied
charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12] or
Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives its musical value to every
syllable.*
The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he . proposes to
do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the scholarly
conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we must think it,
under a system of education which still to so large an extent limits real
scholarship to men. In his self-criticism, he supposes always that sort of
reader who will go (full of eyes) warily, considerately, though without
consideration for him, over the ground which the female conscience
traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the material in which he works is
no more a creation of his own than the sculptor's marble. Product of a
myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and
minute association, a language has its own abundant and often
recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which
scholarship consists. A writer, full of a matter he is before all things

anxious to express, may think of those laws, the limitations of
vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a restriction, but if a [13] real
artist will find in them an opportunity. His punctilious observance of
the proprieties of his medium will diffuse through all he writes a
general air of sensibility, of refined usage. Exclusiones debitae--the
exclusions, or rejections, which nature demands--we know how large a
part these play, according to Bacon, in the science of nature. In a
somewhat changed sense, we might say that the art of the scholar is
summed up in the observance of those rejections demanded by the
nature of his medium, the material he must use. Alive to the value of an
atmosphere in which every term finds its utmost degree of expression,
and with all the jealousy of a lover of words, he will resist a constant
tendency on the part of the majority of those who use them to efface the
distinctions of language, the facility of writers often reinforcing in this
respect the work of