Villa Rubein and Other Stories | Page 4

long ago to my oldest literary friend, I expressed in a
moment of heedless sentiment the wish that we might have again one
of our talks of long-past days, over the purposes and methods of our art.
And my friend, wiser than I, as he has always been, replied with this
doubting phrase "Could we recapture the zest of that old time?"
I would not like to believe that our faith in the value of imaginative art

has diminished, that we think it less worth while to struggle for
glimpses of truth and for the words which may pass them on to other
eyes; or that we can no longer discern the star we tried to follow; but I
do fear, with him, that half a lifetime of endeavour has dulled the
exuberance which kept one up till morning discussing the ways and
means of aesthetic achievement. We have discovered, perhaps with a
certain finality, that by no talk can a writer add a cubit to his stature, or
change the temperament which moulds and colours the vision of life he
sets before the few who will pause to look at it. And so--the rest is
silence, and what of work we may still do will be done in that dogged
muteness which is the lot of advancing years.
Other times, other men and modes, but not other truth. Truth, though
essentially relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its ever-new
and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human
consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to whole
which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before the
imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all these
aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear and
mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.
I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings of
others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision is so
coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only the just
proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for, after all, no
two living things are alike. A work of fiction should carry the hall mark
of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a
Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters.
This is not to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to
that facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing
and feeling. A young poet once said of another and more popular poet:
"Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice. "And, when one came to think of it, he did
not; a certain flabbiness of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence,
perhaps, of the ironic, or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work; it
had no edge--just a felicity which passed for distinction with the crowd.
Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of ham.
One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour; just that,
for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant and

fascinating writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and Thackeray
more living and permanent than George Eliot or Trollope. It once fell
to my lot to be the preliminary critic of a book on painting, designed to
prove that the artist's sole function was the impersonal elucidation of
the truths of nature. I was regretfully compelled to observe that there
were no such things as the truths of Nature, for the purposes of art,
apart from the individual vision of the artist. Seer and thing seen,
inextricably involved one with the other, form the texture of any
masterpiece; and I, at least, demand therefrom a distinct impression of
temperament. I never saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or
Tchekov--those masters of such different methods entirely devoid of
didacticism--but their work leaves on me a strangely potent sense of
personality. Such subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen is the
outcome only of long and intricate brooding, a process not too favoured
by modern life, yet without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos
of clever insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism,
holding much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of
Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to a play.
Speaking for myself, with the immodesty required of one who hazards
an introduction to his own work, I was writing fiction for five years
before I could master even its primary technique, much less achieve
that union of seer with thing seen, which perhaps begins to show itself
a little in this volume--binding