codification of himself in the final terms of philosophy. It is that
kernel of personality which inclines him in this direction or that. It
is this kernel of personality which turns him in the first place to
philosophy, if he be a philosopher; or which makes him detest abstract
speculation, if he is another kind of man. It is prior to philosophy.
It is a condition of its being. It determines, surely, even the
character of a man's metaphysic, setting him, not to range like an
aimless ghost of thought across the Universe, but to express himself
accurately; to express himself, with the help of his intellect,
consistently. Now the artist, or imaginative person, is not seeking to
express himself, like the philosopher, in terms of logical notions;
and he is under no obligation to express himself, to himself,
logically, before he proceeds to express himself imaginatively. All
that is essential is that the kernel of his personality, that which
determines philosophies as it determines every other achievement,
should be directly, immediately, expressed in the figurative language
of his art. This is the central, the all-important thing, that final,
_essential_, and therefore indefinable entity which has thrust itself
upon us when we say of a man that he has an "interesting personality."
The more powerful and energetic a man is, the more distinctive become
his ways of looking at things, his ways of thinking, observing,
appreciating; we discover a kind of centre of gravity in him, or a
kernel which has been developed by active experience and reflection.
This kernel of his character is to the rest of him, the accidental or
inessential, what in the language of modern philosophy the "real will"
of an individual is to the variety of his particular desires. The less
he concentrates, the less is his real personality expressed; the
weaker the will, the more evident the inessential and slovenly parts
of his nature; the weaker the intelligence, the less adequate is his
attempt to express himself.
The artist has not necessarily that "strong personality" which
attempts to assert itself by influencing the action of others. His is
the personality which wishes to express imaginatively. And by
imagination I mean the making of images--I mean that stretching out of
the _essential_ personality towards nature, so that it may touch
nature at as many points as possible, fashioning it into images,
binding itself to nature, and nature to itself, ever seeking to expand
in this contact or sympathy, so that as far as possible the whole
essential personality may be expressed through as much as possible of
nature. The artistic impulse, the poetic or creative impulse, is that
which impels him to the expression of what is most really and
centrally himself. The world of nature as perceived by him when he is
in full possession of himself assumes a form schemed by his
imagination; and it is this which he endeavours to body forth when he
selects now these and now those objects to represent his conception of
life.
We may, then, take it that the first essential to an artist is the
imaginative impulse which makes him desire to express himself in terms
of life. And the second is that energetic quality by which he
endeavours to express what is central to his personality, that part of
him which is his "real self." This is what is meant by "sincerity" in
art. And a third surely is a sort of self-detachment, or sympathy, or
knowledge, by means of which he is able to estimate the material in
which he works. The two last mentioned qualities, taken together,
imply a sense of form, in accordance with which the idea is embodied
in the finished work of art, and technique--the professional knowledge
by the help of which this embodiment is accomplished.
The objection may be raised that the man who has an essentially
distorted or meagre personality and succeeds exactly in expressing
himself is, according to my estimate, entitled to the same artistic
credit as a man of the loftiest ideas. To that I reply that though the
clue to his work is to be found, in the last resort, in his
personality, it is not by his personality that he is to be judged; he
is to be judged by his works; and in producing these works he
expresses himself, not in terms of himself, but in terms of external
objects, in terms of life known to all of us; and that if he perfectly
expresses distorted or meagre views of life, the representation of
life which he gives to us will itself be palpably distorted and
meagre. We are all capable of detecting the falsity if the facts of
life are distorted before our eyes, or represented in so dull or
meagre a way that they afford us no vivid experience whatsoever. An
artist stands self-condemned if his interpretation fails to correspond
with that outward life to which our senses are a sufficient guide.
Indeed we have already demanded, as a self-evident axiom, that the
artist should afford us a vivid experience, and that which directly
contradicts the truth of common sense can produce no experience except
that of confusion or disgust. It belongs to the first rudiments of
art--the mere grammar--that an artist's convictions, as bodied forth
in sense-given symbols, should not palpably and shockingly contradict
the conditions of the sensible world; his is the far more difficult
and delicate task of expressing himself, not by violation, but by
selection, emphasis, reconstruction. The penalty he must pay if he
refuses these terms is that of being unintelligible.
But granted that the artist has obeyed this law, which is obvious to
the majority of the sane, we further demand from him that his work
should be "sincere," that is to say, that it should be consistent with
his own clearest conceptions, his most urgent convictions, his most
penetrating intuitions--in a word, consistent with that central thing
which I have called the kernel of his personality. An artist is in
this sense insincere whenever, for example, he inserts anything in his
work which exists solely for the sake of convention--some of
Shakespeare's clown scenes were often put in solely because an
Elizabethan audience demanded them, and they were to that extent a
truckling to convention, an insincerity. They do not express the real
Shakespeare. Any artist not capable of entirely direct and spontaneous
expression (and probably no great art was ever completely spontaneous)
must make up his mind about himself, about what is temperamentally
real in him, about that which is his primary _raison d'être_; and in
accordance with, and out of this kernel of himself he must interpret
all that he touches. By this means alone can he introduce order, form,
unity into the indeterminate chaos of life. By this means alone can
life assume coherent shape under his hands, and it is coherence and
shape which alone can give us the impression of beauty, of that
coherent shapeliness of matter drawn into the semblance of a living
organism.
It may be a very simple unity, this microcosm of art, like a cell
compounded from protoplasm, yet it will give us its corresponding
pleasure, so long as it is made with the sincerity of the imagination.
If it is merely the informing of life with the spirit of light
laughter--as in Calverley--it affords its proper pleasure--it is the
spectacle of life drawn up into that kind of imagination to which
laughter belongs. Lewis Carroll's _Alice_ is in the same sense a work
of art. Is there not throughout those two most charming of children's
books an entirely consistent spirit of bonhomie and exquisite
rationality--rationality of an order high enough to produce those
delightful expositions of the irrational and the absurd? That the
author of _Alice in Wonderland_ was a mathematician is exactly what we
might have expected--though he was, what mathematicians rarely are,
the artist-mathematician, who understood the world intuitively as well
as logically, and thus manifested his spirit of laughter and logic
through an inverted world of contradiction.
And so again, if we take a modern author of a very different type,
such a one as Henry James, whose concern it is to state life, with a
view to throwing into relief the finer shades, we shall observe that
most of his work is characterised by a kind of intensive culture, as
opposed to that extensive method which through lack of form was abused
in Dickens, and through obedience to form was satisfactorily applied
by the poet Swinburne at his best. We may safely say that when
Swinburne was at his best, when he was "himself," his world was a
world of rhythmical energy, of impetuous freedom and sensuous
activity, which, translated into poetry, was expressed through the
symbols of love and sea-foam and battle; to be true to the genius
which was central to himself, he required no pregnancy or subtle
suggestiveness of phrase; he needed no more than rhyme, rhythm and
onomatopœic words, and with these he gave all he had to give--the
sense of energy remembered, the sensuous delight of physical activity,
a world of divinely glorified sensation. Mature readers do not seek
him often, for there are only a few moods which he can satisfy. A
writer such as Mr. Henry James stands at the exactly opposite pole. It
was the proper business of such a man as Swinburne merely to affirm
sensation, and he could do it perfectly. It is the proper business of
Mr. James, not to assert sensation or any experience--he could not do
it with sincerity--but to question sensation, to question emotion and
sentiment; it is his proper business to examine experience with the
amused, searching gaze of one who expects the unexpected. It is his
business to make experience interesting, not, like Swinburne, by
multiplication, but rather by division--by the method of the
microscope which reveals in a fly's wing some unsuspected fineness of
pattern and variegated brilliance of colour. He himself is fond of the
word "curiosity"; it defines something that is central to his
personality; this, brought into activity by the "representational
impulse" (which in his opinion is the one justification for the
artist), takes form in the intricate and delicately woven patterns of
human temperament which are the objects of his curiosity.
And now we begin to see why every critic, when considering an author's
works, almost invariably, and instinctively, examines not only his
finished works, but also whatever may be known about him as a man. I
admit, as all would admit, that his works must stand or fall solely on
their own account; but the critic finds that in seeking to discover
the central interest and significance of an author's art his task is
facilitated if once he can find the clue to his temperament. This
backstairs knowledge does the trick for him. The bond between the man
and his art is so necessary and immediate that no objectiveness of
method can conceal it. It was by realising this fact, and applying his
exceptionally fine critical intuition to this task, that Professor
Raleigh, considering the _essentials_, was able to draw a very much
more convincing picture of the personality of Shakespeare than that
which was drawn, brilliantly indeed, by Mr. Frank Harris; but Mr.
Harris, I think, devoted his attention to qualities in Shakespeare
which--whether in any sense real or not--were in any case secondary
and inessential elements in the dramatist's character. And this is why
his criticism, in spite of its brilliance, was comparatively
unimportant.
I must not be supposed to mean that the artist begins with an abstract
conception, and that he then proceeds to search for objects suitable
to its concrete representation. There are, I know, brilliant novelists
and painters who have proceeded in that manner; but the result, to my
mind, seldom reveals that complete unity of object and idea which men
require; for this method is so dependent upon the intellectual fitting
of facts to idea that either the facts are forced and made unreal, or
the idea is sacrificed. I am told that in the case of Mr. Joseph
Conrad the process is reversed; he perceives, as by vision, some
intense single situation--that picture, for instance, in _Lord Jim_,
where the Captain looking over the side of his ship is tempted to
desert his crew. Such a situation, a focal point in a story, is for
the artist object and idea in one, simultaneously presented by the
imagination; the union of matter and spirit is already there at the
moment of creation; and in that way, I imagine, most of the finest
pictures, poems, dramas and stories have been first conceived. When
once that focal point has been presented in all its vividness and
significance by the imagination, it remains for the artist to mass his
detail in and around it as appropriately as his invention and
technique permit.
We have now reached conclusions which were approached from two
distinct points of view. Starting from certain axioms or self-evident
propositions, and looking at art from the outside, I suggested that it
must provide us with an energetic experience which we value for its
own sake without thought of consequences or alien interests, an
experience which has a fineness or an illuming quality of its own. And
examining the same question from the inside--from the side of the
mental processes implied in the act of creation--I have tried to adapt
the conclusions of Coleridge to a view which should not pre-suppose
his metaphysic, and have asked what is implied in this fineness or
illuming quality in a work of art, this which is called beautiful. And
when we learnt that all creative art comes from the imagination of the
artist projecting itself upon the material of life, I concluded that
the two things essential to the creative imagination were knowledge
and sincerity--knowledge of life itself, so that the artist can use an
intelligible language and speak in terms of things real to
everyone--and sincerity, meaning conformity with that which is
essential or central in the artist himself. Art is thus a
representation of actual life in terms of the artist. It must be real,
and it must be ideal. It is the act of genius to be able to give us in
one and the same creation a representation of nature and an expression
of the artist's personality. This is the new thing which genius
constantly adds to the sum-total of human experience--it is the old
stuff of life quickened and illuminated by the new incarnation. And
thus the stuff of life itself is increased, and succeeding artists
start with a wider range of material.
We shall not find any actual artist completely satisfying the demand.
For the difficulties of form are endless, and sounds, colours, words
are obstinate materials when they are to be made the vehicle of ideas;
and even the artist in the full tide of the creative impulse must
always find that he has expressed something less than his intention
and has strayed into the pathless wastes of the inessential. But it is
the business of the critic to give him credit for all that is
attempted in the sincere spirit of the imagination, and at the same
time, in sympathy with the actualities of nature; for on the union of
these two depends the truth which is the beauty of art.
But the artist himself is not necessarily concerned with these
theories. His main business is intercourse with life, and also the
envisaging of life rather "by meditation" as Coleridge says, "than by
observation." He has to beware of the facts which overcame Coleridge
himself, when he sacrificed the divinity of his art to that philosophy
which banished the god. "Well were it for me," he exclaims, "if I had
continued to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the
cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver
mines of metaphysic depths." The "shaping spirit of imagination" which
impelled him to unrivalled poetry in his youth was starved in him, not
only because of his ill-health, his poverty, his drugs and laziness,
but equally because he denied expression to "fancy, and the love of
nature and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." For him perhaps
it was a poor compensation that through this denial he was able to
leave us a unique interpretation of his æsthetic and creative
experience.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The word "flavour" in this connection was constantly used by the
late Canon Ainger.
III
PASSIONS SPIN THE PLOT
If the reader has borne with my audacity in generalising about the
main functions of imaginative literature, he will be willing to pursue
a further and plainer question concerning its subject-matter. It is
time to discuss a little more fully what I mean by that "energetic
experience "which a work of art can give us. For the sake of
simplicity I will confine myself to a single issue--to that kind of
energetic experience invariably afforded by that small body of
imaginative literature which the world has agreed to regard as
supreme. If we can understand how literature in its greatest examples
provides us with an "addition to life," we can, if we are in the mind
to do so, extend the inquiry to the lighter and less intense
experiences of secondary literature.
By "supreme" literature I mean the literature which has proved itself
to be supreme--supreme by virtue of its conquest over time and over
changes in thought and environment. The Iliad and the Odyssey are in a
language which we should have to learn if only for the sake of these
two epics; they still profoundly interest us, they present emotions
which can still move us; without Homer, the society which they
describe would have vanished from human knowledge; through Homer, it
is an intimate and cherished part of our experience. This kind of
supremacy belongs, I think, to Æschylus and Sophocles, and might
perhaps be attributed to the Gospel of S. Mark, if that book may be
considered as imaginative literature. Virgil and Dante--in part at
least--are of this order, as also are Milton, in _Samson Agonistes_
and the earlier books of _Paradise Lost_, and Goethe in the first part
of _Faust_. And there are few besides Mr. Shaw who would deny such
supremacy to the tragedies of Shakespeare.
Now these authors have survived, and are likely to survive, for a
variety of reasons. But what is common to them all, and what makes us
set especial store on them, is not merely that they have in large
measure achieved what they set out to do (lesser artists have done
that), but that they have set out to do a big thing, to give us the
most intense kind of experience that we can have. In other words, they
have produced the fineness which emerges through the intensity of
human passion, and it is in proportion to their fine realisation of
passion that we find them most moving.
I am not, of course, using the word "passion" in its modern vulgarised
sense. For just as the word "romance" is often degraded to signify no
more than a petty love affair, so the word "passion" has been
appropriated to the amorous, sexual pre-occupation which is the only
intense feeling of many jaded moderns. Humanity, however devitalised,
however incapable of varied passions, does not lose the love passion
so long as it has the animal instinct of the fly and the rudimentary
human instinct to idealise. But a race must be strangely incurious if
the only romance it can conceive is the romance of a youth and a maid,
and its only passion the passion of sexual desire. Yet such is the
state of mind--to judge by the common usage of words--of the major
portion of modern society.
Needless to say, I am not wishing to disparage the literature of love,
whether it be poetry, fiction, or of any other kind. English people
least of all can afford to belittle it, for if we eliminated it half
of our best lyrical poetry would go. For we count it a distinction in
English poetry that upon this theme the changes have been rung so
finely and to such exquisite effect. But much of the fineness of love
poetry is to be distinguished from the fineness of the emotion of
love. Lovelace declares to his Lucasta:
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
That is in the true spirit of English love poetry, which does not so
idealise the amorous passion as to make it, in the modern emasculate
manner, a substitute for valour, faith, honour; it is not opposed to
the manly virtues; it may be the song which a warrior sings to the
clank of "a sword, a horse, a shield."
But let us for a moment examine this matter of passion with which
great creative literature is so evidently concerned. No acute physical
pain or thrilling sensuous delight is ever dignified with the name of
passion, in the significant sense of the word; the essence of passion
is mental, or spiritual; emotion made intense by idealism turned in a
definite direction, that is to say, by the idealising of an object
which a man has set before himself. The meaning the word has acquired
is almost the opposite of passivity; it implies a state of the soul in
unrest, a state requiring action. Passion is a suffering where the
mind assails the body and torments it with an ideal imperative; and it
is the double tragedy of passion that the will may not be strong
enough, as in the case of Hamlet, to translate that imperative into
action; and second, as we have it in _Faust_, that the object, when
attained, proves to be not the thing that was desired. In a great
passion the mind is set upon an object which it idealises beyond the
possibility of complete satisfaction, and there is suffering because
the will is thwarted and cheated of its ideal. Macbeth's passionate
ambition to be a king, encouraged in him by the witches' chant, is an
ambition for something that no being a king can satisfy; and the
tragedy of his passion lies in the painful effort by which he wins his
object and the painful disillusion when it turns to dust.
The passions with which literature deals run side by side with actions
that are impelled by ideals. The richest mind is that which can
idealise every kind of activity, which can see what we call poetry in
every commonplace, which can read destiny in apparently petty desires,
which widens the vision of life by seeing in every action man in
relation to the Universe. In art and in life passions are limited by
the bounds of our perceptive imagination; by the extent to which we
are capable of seeing and feeling things intensely. If we only see or
feel ambition as a petty and sordid thing, in a petty and sordid
person, we cannot make a tragic passion of ambition; if jealousy is a
little vice with no more than small results it cannot be the theme of
imaginative literature; if the religious ideal cannot be conceived as
possessing the whole soul, we cannot appreciate the religious passion
of a John Inglesant; if revenge is no more than spite there can be no
Hamlet, nor a Lear if arrogance is unmixed with love and honour. If,
to-day, the passion of love is treated more often than any other
emotion, that is probably because the one capacity for intense
experience, which never seems to desert the human race, is the
capacity to identify the sex impulse with an ideal. The great artist
is not confined to this one channel of idealism. He sees branching out
in every direction all the human activities intensified or refined by
a spirituality which the lesser person sees only under the stress of
love. But this fact is to be noticed, that whether it is love of a
woman, whether it is ambition, whether it is love of humanity, whether
it is religious zeal, revenge, or anything else whatsoever on a great
scale, passion implies idealism, an object set before the mind in its
spiritual or imaginative capacity, and that the intensity of the
passion is enhanced by the difficulty of the quest.
Great passion, then, is a kind of critical union, or rather
half-union, of body and soul. It is the perpetual effort of the body
to become soul, the real to become ideal; the painful and ever
frustrated effort of the individual to become universal; or
conversely, the painful condition of the human soul which sees its
ideal shattered and its glory reduced to dust and ashes. Its character
is a problem for religion no less than for æsthetics. It is Browning
who declares:
But priests
Should study passion; how else cure mankind,
Who come for help in passionate extremes?
The dramatist and the novelist need no more than the power to create
such a passion; for the greater includes the less; it is not achieved
in art, unless plot, narrative, style, and all the subsidiary devices
have served to expose it in its reality and its intensity. This is
presumably what Dumas _père_ meant in the lines which Henley quotes
from him: "All _he_ wanted was 'four trestles, four boards, two
actors, and a passion.'" The passionate hero either strains towards an
idealised object, or he still proclaims his yearning after the ideal
by the lamentations with which he curses his ill-fate. Throughout
Greek tragedy there is an undercurrent of protest against inexorable
Fate which is set against the realisation of the ideal. The passion of
Prometheus sums up the perpetual agony of the human race in its
perpetual striving to rise beyond its limitations. The tragic irony of
the Greeks is but the expression of the tragedy of passion in its
pitiful reaction from hope, the intensity of feeling with which men
see desire defeated and ideal unattainable. So, too, in the most
intense moments the characters of Shakespeare become ironical:
Misery makes Sport to mock itself.