Notes on My Books | Page 5

all art, the appeal of one
temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle
and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning,
and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time.
Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through
the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because
temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to
persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the
artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its
appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring
of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of
sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of
music--which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete,
unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it
is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape
and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to
colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to
play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words:
of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on
that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering,
weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in
prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the
fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand
specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be
promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or
charmed, must run thus:--My task which I am trying to achieve is, by
the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is,
before all, to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything. If I
succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement,
consolation, fear, charm--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a
passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task
approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly,
without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in
the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its
form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the
substance of its truth--disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and
passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded
attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may
perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented
vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of
the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in
mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds
men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.
It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions
expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary
formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them--the truth which each
only imperfectly veils--should abide with him as the most precious of
his possessions, but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even
the unofficial sentimentalism (which, like the poor, is exceedingly
difficult to get rid of), all these gods must, after a short period of
fellowship, abandon him--even on the very threshold of the temple--to

the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness
of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry
of Art for Art, itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality.
It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a
whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging.
Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch
the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time begin to
wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the
movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down,
stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour
to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a
stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real
interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of