May 4, 1895. Hazlitt.
"Coming forward and seating himself on the ground in his white dress
and tightened turban, the chief of the Indian jugglers begins with
tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and
concludes with keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of
us could do to save our lives." ... You remember Hazlitt's essay on
the Indian Jugglers, and how their performance shook his self-conceit.
"It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as
well as this. Nothing..... Is there no one thing in which I can
challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact
perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost I can
pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can
write a book; so can many others who have not even learned to spell.
What abortions are these essays! What errors, what ill-pieced
transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little
is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do."
Nevertheless a play of Shakespeare's, or a painting by Reynolds, or an
essay by Hazlitt, imperfect though it be, is of more rarity and worth
than the correctest juggling or tight-rope walking. Hazlitt proceeds
to examine why this should be, and discovers a number of good reasons.
But there is one reason, omitted by him, or perhaps left for the
reader to infer, on which we may profitably spend a few minutes. It
forms part of a big subject, and tempts to much abstract talk on the
universality of the Fine Arts; but I think we shall be putting it
simply enough if we say that an artist is superior to an "artiste"
because he does well what ninety-nine people in a hundred are doing
poorly all their lives.
Selection.
When people compare fiction with "real life," they start with
asserting "real life" to be a conglomerate of innumerable details of
all possible degrees of pertinence and importance, and go on to show
that the novelist selects from this mass those which are the most
important and pertinent to his purpose. (I speak here particularly of
the novelist, but the same is alleged of all practitioners of the fine
arts.) And, in a way, this is true enough. But who (unless in an idle
moment, or with a view to writing a treatise in metaphysics) ever
takes this view of the world? Who regards it as a conglomerate of
innumerable details? Critics say that the artist's difficulty lies in
selecting the details proper to his purpose, and his justification
rests on the selection he makes. But where lives the man whose
difficulty and whose justification do not lie just here?--who is not
consciously or unconsciously selecting from morning until night? You
take the most ordinary country walk. How many millions of leaves and
stones and blades of grass do you pass without perceiving them at all?
How many thousands of others do you perceive, and at once allow to
slip into oblivion? Suppose you have walked four miles with the
express object of taking pleasure in country sights. I dare wager the
objects that have actually engaged your attention for two seconds are
less than five hundred, and those that remain in your memory, when you
reach home, as few as a dozen. All the way you have been, quite
unconsciously, selecting and rejecting. And it is the brain's
bedazzlement over this work, I suggest, and not merely the rhythmical
physical exertion, that lulls the more ambitious walker and induces
that phlegmatic mood so prettily described by Stevenson--the mood in
which
"we can think of this or that, lightly or laughingly, as a child
thinks, or as we think in a morning doze; we can make puns or
puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words
and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to
gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet
as long and loud as we please; the great barons of the mind will
not rally to the standard, but sit, each one at home, warming his
hands over his own fire and brooding on his own private thought!"
Again, certain critics never seem tired of pelting the novelist with
comparisons drawn between painting and photography. "Mr. So-and-So's
fidelity to life suggests the camera rather than the brush and
palette"; and the implication is that Mr. So-and-So and the camera
resemble each other in their tendency to reproduce irrelevant detail.
The camera, it is assumed, repeats this irrelevant detail. The
photographer does not select. But is this true? I have known many
enthusiasts in photography whose enthusiasm I could not share. But I
never knew one, even among amateurs, who wished to photograph
everything he saw, from every possible point of view. Even the amateur
selects--wrongly as a rule: still he selects. The mere act of setting
up a camera in any particular spot implies a process of selection. And
when the deed is done, the scenery has been libelled. Our eyes behold
the photograph, and go through another process of selection. In short,
whatever they look upon, men and women are selecting ceaselessly.
The artist therefore does well and consciously, and for a particular
end, what every man or woman does poorly, and unconsciously, and
casually. He differs in the photographer in that he has more licence
to eliminate. When once the camera is set up, it's owner's power over
the landscape has come to an end. The person who looks on the
resultant photograph must go through the same process of choosing and
rejecting that he would have gone through in contemplating the natural
landscape. The sole advantage is that the point of view has been
selected for him, and that he can enjoy it without fatigue in any
place and at any time.
The truth seems to be that the human brain abhors the complexity--the
apparently aimless complexity--of nature and real life, and is for
ever trying to get away from it by selecting this and ignoring that.
And it contrives so well that I suppose the average man is not
consciously aware twice a year of that conglomerate of details which
the critics call real life. He holds one stout thread, at any rate, to
guide him through the maze--the thread of self-interest.
The justification of the poet or the novelist is that he discovers a
better thread. He follows up a universal where the average man follows
only a particular. But in following it, he does but use those
processes by which the average man arrives, or attempts to arrive, at
pleasure.