Such, then, are some of the means by which language becomes
identical with thought, and most truly the dialect of life.
The genius will have ways, to which these briefly outlined
ones will seem crude and obvious, but they will be none the
less of the same nature. Shall we then conclude that the
beauty of literature is here? that, in the words of Pater,
from the essay I have quoted, "In that perfect justice (of
the unique word)...omnipresent in good work, in function at
every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole
book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual
beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes
it a fine art."
In its last analysis, such a conception of literature amounts
to the unimpeded intercourse of mind with mind. Literature
would be a language which dispenses with gesture, facial
expression, tone of voice; which is, in its halts, accelerations
and retardations, emphases and concessions, the apotheosis
of conversation. But this clearness,--in the sublime sense,
including the ornate and the subtle,--this luminous lucidity,--
is it not quite indeterminate? Clearness is said of a medium.
WHAT is it that shines through?
Were this clearness the beauty we are seeking, whatever in
the world that wanted to get itself said, would, if it were
perfectly said, become a final achievement of literature. All
that the plain man looks for, we must think rightly, in poetry
and prose, might be absent, and yet we should have to
acknowledge its excellence. Let us then consider this quality
by which the words become what they signify as the specific
beauty rather of style than of literature; the mere refining
of the gold from which the work of art has yet to be made.
Language is the dialect of life; and the most perfect language
can be no more than the most perfect truth of intercourse. It
must then be through the treatment of life, or the sense of
life itself, that we are somehow to attain the perfect moment
of beauty.
The sense of life! In what meaning are these words to be
taken? Not the completest sense of all, because the essence
of life is in personal responsibility to a situation, and this
is exactly what in our experience of literature disappears.
First of all, then, before asking how the moment of beauty is
to be attained, we must see how it is psychologically possible
to have a sense of life that is yet purged of the will to live.
All experience of life is a complication of ideas, emotions,
and attitudes or impulses to action in varying proportions.
The sentiment of reality is constituted by our tendency to
interfere, to "take a hand." Sometimes the stage of our
consciousness is so fully occupied by the images of others
that our own reaction is less vivid. Finally, all conditions
and possibilities of reaction may be so minimized that the
only attitude possible is our acceptance or rejection of a
world in which such things can be. What does it "matter" to
me whether or not "the old, unhappy, far-off things" really
happened? The worlds of the Borgias, of Don Juan, and of the
Russian war stand on the same level of reality. Aucassin and
Nicolette are as near to me as Abelard and Heloise. For in
relation to these persons my impulse is NIL. I submit to
them, I cannot change or help them; and because I have no
impulse to interfere, they are not vividly real to me. And,
in general, in so far as I am led to contemplate or to dwell
on anything in idea, in so far does my personal attitude tend
to parallel this impersonal one toward real persons temporally
or geographically out of reach.
Now in literature all conditions tend to the enormous
preponderance of the ideal element in experience. My mind
in reading is completely filled with ideas of the appearance,
ways, manners, and situation of the people concerned. I leave
them a clear field. My emotions are enlisted only as the
inevitable fringe of association belonging to vivid ideas--
the ideas of their emotions. So far as all the possibilities
of understanding are fulfilled for me, so far as I am in
possession of all the conditions, so far do I "realize" the
characters, but realize them as ideas tinged with feeling.
Here there will be asseverations to the contrary. What! feel
no real emotion over Little Nell, or Colonel Newcome? no
emotion in that great scene of passion and despair, the parting
of Richard Feverel and Lucy,--a scene which none can read save
with tight throat and burning eyes! Even so. It is not real
emotion. You have the vivid ideas, so vivid that a fringe of
emotional association accompanies them, as you might shudder
remembering a bad dream. But the real emotion arises only
from the real impulse, the real responsibility.
The sense of life that literature gives might be described as
life in its aspect as idea. That this fact is the cause of
the peace and painlessness of literature--since it is by his
actions, as Aristotle says, that man is happy or the reverse--
need not concern us here. For the beauty of literature, and
our joy in it, lie not primarily in its lack of power to hurt
us. The point is that literature gives none the less truly a
sense of life because it happens to be one extreme aspect of
life. The literary way is only one of the ways in which life
can be met.
To give the sense of life perfectly--to create the illusion
of life--is this, then, the beauty of literature? But we are
seeking for the perfect moment of stimulation and repose. Why
should the perfect illusion of life give this, any more than
life itself does? So the "vision" of a picture might be
intensely clear, and yet the picture itself unbeautiful. Such
a complete "sense of life," such clear "vision," would show
the artist's mastery of technique, but not his power to create
beauty. In the art of literature, as in the art of painting,
the normal function is but the first condition, the state of
perfection is the end at which to aim.
It is just this distinction that we can properly make between
the characteristic or typical in the sense of differentiated,
and the great or excellent in literature. In the theory of
some writers, perfect fidelity to the type is the only
originality. To paint the Russian peasant or the French
bourgeois as he is, to catch the exact shade of exquisite
soullessness in Oriental loves, to reproduce the Berserker
rage or the dull horror of battle, is indeed to give the
perfect sense of life. But the perfect, or the complete,
sense of life is not the moment of perfect life.
Yet to this assertion two answers might be made. The authors
of "Bel-Ami," or "Madame Chrysantheme," or "The Triumph of
Death," might claim to be saved by their form. The march of
events, the rounding climax, the crystal-clear unity of the
finished work, they might say, gives the indispensable union,
for the perfect moment of stimulation and repose. No syllable
in the slow unfolding of exquisite cadences but is supremely
placed from the first page to the last. As note calls to
note, so thought calls to thought, and feeling to feeling,
and the last word is an answer to the first of the inevitable
procession. A writer's donnee, they would say, is his own.
The reader may only bed--Make me something fine after your
own fashion!
And they would have to be acknowledged partly in the right.
In that inevitable unity of form there is indeed a necessary
element of the perfect moment; but it is not a perfect unity.
For the matter of their art should be, in the last analysis,
life itself; and the unity of life itself, the one basic
unity of all, they have missed. It is a hollow sphere they
present, and nothing solid. Henry James has spent the whole
of a remarkable essay on D'Annunzio's creations in determining
the meaning of "the fact that their total beauty somehow
extraordinarily fails to march with their beauty of parts,
and that something is all the while at work undermining that
bulwark against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of
their own office to throw up." The secret is, he avers, that
the themes, the "anecdotes," could find their extension and
consummation only in the rest of life. Shut out, as they are,
from the rest of life, shut out from all fruition and
assimilation, and so from all hope of dignity, they lose
absolutely their power to sway us.
It might be simpler to say that these works lack the first
beauty which literature as the dialect of life can have--they
lack the repose of centrality; they have no identity with the
meaning of life as a whole. It could not be said of them, as
Bagehot said of Shakespeare: "He puts things together, he
refers things to a principle; rather, they group themselves
in his intelligence insensibly around a principle;...a cool
oneness, a poised personality, pervades him." But in these
men there is no cool oneness, no reasonable soul, and so they
miss the central unity of life, which can give unity to
literature. Even the apparent structural unity fails when
looked at closely; the actions of the characters are seen to
be mechanical--their meaning is not inevitable.
The second answer to our assertion that the "sense of life" is
not the beauty of literature might call attention to the fact
that SENSE of life may be taken as understanding of life. A
complete sense of life must include the conditions of life, and
the conditions of life involve this very "energetic identity"
on which we have insisted. And this contention we must admit.
So long as the sense of life is taken as the illusion of life,
our words hold good. But if to that is added understanding of
life, the door is open to the profoundest excellences of
literature. Henry James has glimpsed this truth in saying that
no good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.
Stevenson has gone further. "But the truth is when books are
conceived under a great stress, with a soul of ninefold power,
nine time heated and electrified by effort, the conditions
of our being seized with such an ample grasp, that even should
the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty
cannot fail to be expressed."
V
The conditions of our being! If we accept, affirm, profoundly
rest in what is presented to us, we have the first condition of
that repose which is the essence of the aesthetic experience.
And from this highest demand can be viewed the hierarchy of the
lesser perfections which go to make up the "perfect moment" of
literature. Instead of reaching this point by successive
eliminations, we might indeed have reached it in one stride.
The perfect moment across the dialect of life, the moment of
perfect life, must be in truth that in which we touch the
confines of our being, look upon our world, all in all, as
revealed in some great moment, and see that it is good--that
we grasp it, possess it, that it is akin to us, that it is
identical with our deepest wills. The work that grasps the
conditions of our being gives ourselves back to us completed.
In the conditions of our being in a less profound sense may
be found the further means to the perfect moment. Thus the
progress of events, the development of feelings, must be in
harmony with our natural processes. The development, the
rise, complication, expectation, gratification, the suspense,
climax, and drop of the great novel, correspond to the natural
functioning of our mental processes. It is an experience that
we seek, multiplied, perfected, expanded--the life moment of
a man greater than we. This, too, is the ultimate meaning of
the demands of style. Lucidity, indeed, there must be,--
identity with the thought; but besides the value of the thought
in its approximation to the conditions of our being, we seek
the vividness of that thought,--the perfect moment of
apprehension, as well as of experience. It is the beauty of
style to be lucid; but the beauty of lucidity is to reinforce
the springs of thought.
Even to the minor elements of style, the tone-coloring, the
rhythm, the melody,--the essence of beauty, that is, of the
perfect moment, is given by the perfecting of the experience.
The beauty of liquids is their ease and happiness of utterance.
The beauty of rhythm is its aiding and compelling power, on
utterance and thought. There is a sensuous pleasure in a
great style; we love to mouth it, for it is made to mouth.
As Flaubert says somewhat brutally, "Je ne said qu'une phrase
est bonne qu'apres l'avoir fait passer par mon gueuloir."
In the end it might be said that literature gives us the
moment of perfection, and is thus possessed of beauty, when
it reveals ourselves to ourselves in a better world of
experience; in the conditions of our moral being, in the
conditions of our utterance and our breathing;--all these,
concentric circles, in which the centre of repose is given
by the underlying identity of ourselves with this world.
Because it goes to the roots of experience, and seeks to give
the conditions of our being as they really are, literature
may be truly called a criticism of life. Yet the end of
literature is not the criticism of life; rather the
appreciation of life--the full savour of life in its entirety.
The final definition of literature is the art of experience.