On the Art of Writing | Page 6

crucial test of a play's quality is only applied when it is read. So
long as the illusion of the stage gives credit to the action, and the words
and gestures of the actor impose themselves on the imagination of the
spectator, the latter will pass over a thousand imperfections, which
reveal themselves to the reader, who, as he has to satisfy himself with
the drama of silent images, will nor be content if this or that in any way
fall short of his conception of truth and nature,
--which seems equivalent to saying that the crucial test of the frieze of
the Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in Bloomsbury. So
long as the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to Pheidias' design, and
the sunlight of Attica imposed its delicate intended shadows edging the
reliefs, the countrymen of Pericles might be tricked; but the visitor to
the British Museum, as he has to satisfy himself with what happens
indoors in the atmosphere of the West Central Postal Division of
London, will not be content if Pheidias in any way fall short of his
conception of truth and nature. Yet Fletcher (I take it) constructed his
plays as plays; the illusion of the stage, the persuasiveness of the actor's
voice, were conditions for which he wrought, and on which he had a
right to rely; and, in short, any critic behaves uncritically who,
distrusting his imagination to recreate the play as a play, elects to
consider it in the category of something else.
In sum, if the great authors never oppress us with airs of condescension,
but, like the great lords they are, put the meanest of us at our ease in
their presence, I see no reason why we should pay to any commentator
a servility not demanded by his master.

My next two principles may be more briefly stated.
(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will deal largely
with style, that curiously personal thing; and since (as I have said) they
cannot in their nature be readily brought to rule-of-thumb tests, and
may therefore so easily be suspected of evading all tests, of being mere
dilettantism; I propose (I say) that my pupils and I rebuke this suspicion
by constantly aiming at the concrete, at the study of such definite
beauties as we can see presented in print under our eyes; always
seeking the author's intention, but eschewing, for the present at any rate,
all general definitions and theories, through the sieve of which the
particular achievement of genius is so apt to slip. And having excluded
them at first in prudence, I make little doubt we shall go on to exclude
them in pride. Definitions, formulæ (some would add, creeds) have
their use in any society in that they restrain the ordinary unintellectual
man from making himself a public nuisance with his private opinions.
But they go a very little way in helping the man who has a real sense of
prose or verse. In other words, they are good discipline for some
thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use for them. As Thomas à
Kempis 'would rather feel compunction than understand the definition
thereof,' so the initiated man will say of the 'Grand Style,' for
example--'Why define it for me?' When Viola says simply:
I am all the daughters of my father's house, And all the brothers too,
or Macbeth demands of the Doctor
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a
rooted sorrow..?
or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of Hours, with
Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remembered!
or when Milton tells of his dead friend how
Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd Under the opening eyelids
of the morn, We drove afield,

or describes the battalions of Heaven
On they move Indissolubly firm: nor obvious hill, Nor strait'ning vale,
nor wood, nor stream divide Their perfect ranks,
or when Gray exalts the great commonplace
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that
wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour; The paths of glory
lead but to the grave,
or when Keats casually drops us such a line as
The journey homeward to habitual self,
or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when I open on
a page of William Watson and read
O ancient streams, O far descended woods, Full of the fluttering of
melodious souls!...
'why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any
definition of the Grand Style in English, when here, and here, and again
here--in all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or solemn--I
recognise and feel the _thing_?'
Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie