Personality in Literature | Page 7

novelist deals are ideas, persons,
associated things, having character and interest of their own. The
experience he is to provide is primarily a spiritual experience, an affair
of the mind and the emotions. And being, as it must clearly be, an

experience sui generis, it is obviously not derived from a mere
reproduction of life; for life cannot be reproduced excepting in life
itself, whereas art claims no more than to be an imitation, or an
envisagement, of nature, and its life is its own. What we demand of it is
that it should put into its picture something that is and is not in
nature--something, in other words, that is only there for those who
choose to see it, but which the artist makes clearer, awakening the
perceptions to that aspect of truth which he has in view. In a book
called The Ascending Effort, Mr. George Bourne urged that the art of
life consists in the realisation of "choice ideas"; meaning by "choice
ideas" those which are refined out of the commonplace and the meagre;
the ideas which are apprehended most actively, with all the mind and
all the perceptions; the ideas which admit of relation to all other ideas,
which come into some sort of harmony with such schemes of life as we
have made. If this is true of the art of life, a fortiori is it true of the fine
arts from which the analogy is drawn. In other words, the artist's aim is
not to reproduce the facts which make up the mass of our ordinary and
undigested life, but to substitute for the dishevelled commonplace the
"choiceness" of an ordered interpretation. Only in this way can art give
us an experience sui generis; only by the refinement and re-energising
of the treatment can it give us emotions vivid enough to compete in
some measure with the vividness of nature.
Implicitly all great artists must have accepted this general view of their
function, and many in one way or another have explicitly stated it. "As
light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind," said Coleridge,
whose meaning was philosophically definite, but in no way at variance
with Shakespeare's too hackneyed but ever memorable words:
Spirits are not finely touched, But to fine issues.
The "fine": the "alight" or "luminous": the "choice"--here are three
ways of qualifying the objects which artists seek to present. Matthew
Arnold was captivated by the simile of light, and having repeated
Amiel's passionate cry for "more light," used "sweetness and light" as a
refrain in all his criticism. Walter Pater, to whom the beauty of the
human form, and therefore of sculpture, was especially appealing,

loved to use such terms as "shapely," "comely," "blythe," "gracious,"
"engaging," to express the fine flavour[2] of a work of art. The quality
may be manifested primarily through the intellect, as with Meredith;
through the senses, as with Swinburne; through the perceptions, as with
Turgeniev, Flaubert and Joseph Conrad; or through intellect and
perceptions acutely balanced, as with Mr. Henry James (who gives us
"curiosity" as the keynote); but in any case it is that which we require
an artist to bring with him--"fineness," "light," "choiceness,"
"comeliness," "graciousness"--when he visualises or focusses his object.
Does not that untranslatable +liparos aithêr+ of Homer--the shining
upper air--suggest not only the physical atmosphere breathed by the
gods of Olympus and the great-hearted Odysseus, but also the poetic
atmosphere of the Odyssey itself?
We have, then, added a third term to our generalisation about art. We
now require, as it seems, that it should provide us with an energetic
experience; that it should be disinterested in the sense that it cannot aim
at any competing, alien end; and thirdly, that this experience should
come from objects made beautiful in the sense of being shown in a
certain light, or made alight--in a manner which demands further
inquiry. And here indeed is the difficulty. For we must endeavour to
examine the question from the artist's standpoint, and seek counsel
from him.
It would be no less futile than presumptuous to lay down exact formulæ
as to what the artist ought and ought not to do. No modern critic is
likely to waste his time in framing rules and canons, which can be so
easily handled by the pedant and stand condemned by the first great
man who defies them. Aristotle did it once and for all for the Greek
drama, and when the perspective of life widened and new forms of
literature grew up to compete with drama, his rules were destined either
to shackle literature or to be thrown ruthlessly overboard in the violent
revulsion against Classicism. Shakespeare fortunately was guiltless of
any exact knowledge of Aristotle, and the fact that Corneille and
Racine, who had no French