I had two literary men staying with me a week ago, both of them
accomplished writers, and interested in their art, not professionally
and technically only, but ardently and enthusiastically. I here label
them respectively Musgrave and Herries. Musgrave is a veteran writer,
a man of fifty, who makes a considerable income by writing, and
has succeeded in many departments--biography, criticism, poetry,
essay-writing; he lacks, however, the creative and imaginative gift; his
observation is acute, and his humour considerable; but he cannot infer
and deduce; he cannot carry a situation further than he can see it.
Herries on the other hand is a much younger man, with an interest in
human beings that is emotional rather than spectacular; while Musgrave
is interested mainly in the present, Herries lives in the past or the
future. Musgrave sees what people do and how they behave, while Herries
is for ever thinking how they must have behaved to produce their
present conditions, or how they would be likely to act under different
conditions. Musgrave's one object is to discover what he calls the
truth; Herries thrives and battens upon illusions. Musgrave is fond
of the details of life, loves food and drink, conviviality and social
engagements, new people and unfamiliar places--Herries is quite
indifferent to the garniture of life, lives in great personal
discomfort, dislikes mixed assemblies and chatter, and has a fastidious
dislike of the present, whatever it is, from a sense that possibilities
are so much richer than performances. Musgrave admits that he has been
more successful as a writer than he deserves; Herries is likely, I
think, to disappoint the hopes of his friends, and will not do justice
to his extraordinary gifts, from a certain dreaminess and lack of
vitality. Musgrave loves the act of writing, and is always full to the
brim of matter. Herries dislikes composition, and is yet drawn to it by
a sense of fearful responsibility. Neither have, fortunately, the least
artistic jealousy. Herries regards a man like Musgrave with a sort of
incredulous stupefaction, as a stream of inexplicable volume. Herries
has to Musgrave all the interest of a very delicate and beautiful type,
whose fastidiousness he can almost envy. As a rule, literary men will
not discuss their art among themselves; they have generally arrived at
a sort of method of their own, which may not be ideal, but which is the
best practical solution for themselves, and they would rather not be
disquieted about it; literary talk, too, tends to partake of the
nature of shop, and busy men, as a rule, like to talk the shop of their
recreations rather than the shop of their employment. But Musgrave will
discuss anything; and as for Herries, writing is not an occupation, so
much as a divine vocation which he regards with a holy awe.
The discussion began at dinner, and I was amused to see how it affected
the two men. Musgrave, by an incredible mental agility, contrived to
continue to take a critical interest in the meal and the argument at
the same time; Herries thrust away an unfinished plate, refused what
was offered to him, pushed his glasses about as if they were
chessmen, filled the nearest with water at intervals--he is a rigid
teetotaller--and drank out of them alternately with an abstracted air.
The point was the question of literary finish, and the degree to which
it can or ought to be practised. Herries is of the school of Flaubert,
and holds that there may be several ways of saying a thing, but only one
best way, and that it is alike the duty and the goal of the writer to
find that way. This he enunciated with some firmness.
"No," said Musgrave, "I think that is only a theory, and breaks down, as
all theories do, when it is put in practice: look at all the really big
writers: look at Shakespeare--to me his work gives the impression of
being both hasty and uncorrected. If he says a thing in one way, and
while he is doing it thinks of a more telling form of expression, he
doesn't erase the first statement; he merely says it over again more
effectively. He is full of lapses and inappropriate passages--and it is
that very thing which gives him such an air of reality."
"Well, there is a good deal in that," said Herries, "but I do not see
how you are going to prove that it is not deliberate. Shakespeare wrote
like that in his plays, breathlessly and eagerly, because that was the
aim he had in view; if he makes one of his people say a thing tamely,
and then more pointedly, it is because it is exactly what people do in
real life, and Shakespeare was thinking with their mind for the time
being. He is behind the person he has made, moving his arms, looking
through his eyes, breathing through his mouth; and just as life itself
is hurried and inconsequent, so the perfection of art is, not to be
hurried and inconsequent, but to give one the impression of being so. I
don't believe he left his work uncorrected out of mere impatience. Look
at the way he wrote when he was writing in a different manner--look at
the Sonnets, for instance--there is plenty of calculated art there!"
"Yes," I said, "there is art there, but I don't think it is very
deliberate art. I don't believe they were written SLOWLY. Of course
one can hardly be breathless in a sonnet. The rhymes are all stretched
across the ground, like wires, and one has to pick one's way among
them."
"Well, take another instance," said Musgrave. "Look at Scott. He speaks
himself of his 'hurried frankness of execution.' His proof-sheets are
the most extraordinary things, full of impossible sentences, lapses
of grammar, and so forth. He did not do much correcting himself, but I
believe I am right in saying that his publishers did, and spent hours in
reducing the chaos to order."
"Oh, of course I don't deny," said Herries, "that volume and vitality
are what matters most. Scott's imagination was at once prodigious and
profound. He seems to me to have said to his creations, 'Let the young
men now arise and play before us.' But I don't think his art was the
better for his carelessness. Great and noble as the result was, I think
it would have been greater if he had taken more pains. Of course
one regards men of genius like Scott and Shakespeare with a kind of
terror--one can forgive them anything; but it is because they do by a
sort of prodigal instinct what most people have to do by painful
effort. If one's imagination has the poignant rightness of Scott's or
Shakespeare's, one's hurried work is better than most people's finished
work. But people of lesser force and power, if they get their stitches
wrong, have to unpick them and do it all over again. Sometimes I have
an uneasy sense, when I am writing, that my characters are feeling as if
their clothes do not fit. Then they have to be undressed, so to speak,
that one may see where the garments gall them. Now, take a book like
Madame Bovary, painfully and laboriously constructed--it seems obvious
enough, yet the more one reads it the more one becomes aware how every
stroke and detail tell. What almost appals me about that book is the way
in which the end is foreseen in the beginning, the way in which Flaubert
seems to have carried the whole thing in his head all the time, to have
known exactly where he was going and how fast he was going."
"That is perfectly true," I said. "But take an instance of another of
Flaubert's books, Bouvard et Pecuchet, where the same method is pursued
with what I can only call deplorable results. Every detail is perfect of
its kind. The two grotesque creatures take up one pursuit after another,
agriculture, education, antiquities, horticulture, distilling perfumes,
making jam. In each they make exactly the absurd mistakes that such
people would have made; but one loses all sense of reality, because one
feels that they would not have taken up so many things; it is only a
collection of typical absurdities. Given the men and the particular
pursuit, it is all natural enough, but one wearies of the same process
being applied an impossible number of times, just as Flaubert was often
so intolerable in real life, because he ran a joke to death, and never
knew when to put it down. The result in Bouvard et Pecuchet is a lack of
proportion and subordination. It is like one of the early Pre-Raphaelite
pictures, in which every detail is painted with minute perfection. It
was all there, no doubt, and it was all exactly like that; but that is
not how the human eye apprehends a scene. The human mind takes a central
point, and groups the accessories round it. In art, I think everything
depends upon centralisation. Two lovers part, and the birds' faint chirp
from the leafless tree, the smouldering rim of the sunset over misty
fields, are true and symbolical parts of the scene; but if you deal in
botany and ornithology and meteorology at such a moment, you cloud and
dim the central point--you digress when you ought only to emphasise."
"Oh yes," said Herries with a sigh, "that is all right enough--it all
depends upon proportion; and the worst of all these discussions on
points of art is that each person has to find his own standard--one
can't accept other people's standards. To me Bouvard et Pecuchet is
a piece of almost flawless art--it is there--it lives and breathes. I
don't like it all, of course, but I don't doubt that it happened so.
There must be an absolute rightness behind all supreme writing. Art must
have laws as real and immutable and elaborate as those of science and
metaphysics and religion--that is the central article of my creed."
"But the worst of that theory is," I said, "that one lays down canons
of taste, which are very neat and pretty; and then there comes some
new writer of genius, knocks all the old canons into fragments, and
establishes a new law. Canons of art seem to me sometimes nothing more
than classifications of the way that genius works. I find it very hard
to believe that there is a pattern, so to speak, for the snuffers and
the candlesticks, revealed to Moses in the mount. It was Moses' idea of
a pair of snuffers, when all is said."
"I entirely agree," said Musgrave; "the only ultimate basis of all
criticism is, 'I like it because I like it'--and the connoisseurs of any
age are merely the people who have the faculty of agreeing, I won't say
with the majority, but with the majority of competent critics."
"No, no," said Herries, raising his mournful eyes to Musgrave's face,
"don't talk like that! You take my faith away from me. Surely there must
be some central canon of morality in art, just as there is in ethics.
For instance, in ethics, is it conceivable that cruelty might become
right, if only enough people thought it was right? Is there no absolute
principle at all? In art, what about the great pictures and the great
poems, which have approved themselves to the best minds in generation
after generation? Their rightness and their beauty are only attested by
critics, they are surely not created by them? My view is that there
is an absolute law of beauty, and that we grow nearer to it by slow
degrees. Sometimes, as with the Greeks, people got very near to it
indeed. Is it conceivable, for instance, that men could ever come to
regard the Venus of Milo as ugly?"
"Why yes," said Musgrave, laughing, "I suppose that if humanity
developed on different lines, and a new type of beauty became desirable,
we might come to look upon the Venus of Milo as a barbarous and savage
kind of object, a dreadful parody of what we had become, like a female
chimpanzee. To a male chimpanzee, the wrinkled brow, the long upper lip,
the deeply indented lines from nose to mouth, of a female chimpanzee in
the prime of adolescence, is, I suppose, almost intolerably dazzling and
adorable--beauty can only be a relative thing, when all is said."
"We are drifting away from our point," I said. "The question really is
whether, as art expands, the principles become fewer or more numerous.
My own belief is that the principles do become fewer, but the varieties
of expression more numerous. Keats tried to sum it up by saying, 'Beauty
is Truth, Truth Beauty'; but it is not a successful maxim, because, as a
peevish philosopher said, 'Why in that case have two words for the same
thing?'"
"But it is true, in a sense, for all that," said Herries. "What we HAVE
learnt is that the subject is of very little importance in art--it is
the expression that matters. Genre pictures, plots of novels, incidents
of plays--they are all rather elementary things. Flaubert looked forward
to a time in art when there should be no subjects at all, when art
should aspire to the condition of music, and express the intangible."
"I confess," said Musgrave, laughing, "that that statement conveys
nothing to me. A painter, on that line, would depict nothing, but simply
produce a sort of harmony of colour. A picture would become simply
a texture of colour-vibrations. My own view is rather that it is a
question of accurate observation, followed by an extreme delicacy and
suggestiveness of expression. Some people would say that it was all a
question of reality; and that the point is that the writer shall suggest
a reality to his reader, even though the picture he evoked in the
reader's mind was not the same as the picture in his own mind--but that
is to me pure symbolism."
"Exactly," said Herries, "and the more symbolical that art becomes, the
purer it becomes--that is precisely what I am aiming at."
"Well," I said, "that gives me an opportunity of making a confession.
I have never really been able to understand what technical symbolism
in art is. A symbol in the plain sense is something which recalls
or suggests to you something else; and thus the whole of art is pure
symbolism. The flick of colour gives you a distant woodland, the phrase
gives you a scene or an emotion. Five printed words upon a page make one
suffer or rejoice imaginatively; and my idea of the most perfect art is
not the art which gives one a sense of laborious finish, but the art
in which you never think of the finish at all, but only of the thing
described. The end of effort is to conceal effort, as the old adage
says. Some people, I suppose, attain it through a series of misses; but
the best art of all goes straight to the heart of the thing."
"Yes," said Musgrave, "my own feeling is that the mistake is to consider
it can only be done in one way. Each person has his own way; but I agree
in thinking that the best art is the most effortless."
"From the point of view of the onlooker, perhaps," said Herries, "but
not from the point of view of the craftsman. The pleasure of art, for
the craftsman, is to see what the difficulty was, and to discern how the
artist triumphed over it. Think of the delightful individual roughness
of old work as opposed to modern machine-made things. There is an
appropriate irregularity, according to the medium employed. The
workmanship of a gem is not the same as that of a building; the essence
of the gem is to be flawless; but in the building there is a pleasure in
the tool-dints, like the pleasure of the rake-marks on the gravel
path. Of course music must be flawless too--firm, resolute, inevitable,
because the medium demands it; but in a big picture--why, the other day
I saw a great oil-painting, a noble piece of art--I came upon it in
the Academy, by a side door close upon it. The background was a great
tangled mass of raw crude smears, more like coloured rags patched
together than paint; but a few paces off, the whole melted into a great
river-valley, with deep water-meadows of summer grass and big clumps
of trees. That is the perfect combination. The man knew exactly what he
wanted--he got his effect--the structure was complete, and yet there
was the added pleasure of seeing how he achieved it. That is the kind of
finish I desire."
"Yes, of course," said Musgrave, "we should all agree about that; but my
feeling would be that the way to do it is for the artist to fill himself
to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all
believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit
of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me
like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some
noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind
were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a
cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an
excellent thing to take all the trouble, if you throw it away when it is
done; you will do your next piece of real work all the better; but for
a piece of work to have the best kind of vitality, it must flow, I
believe, easily and sweetly from the teeming mind. Take such a book as
Newman's Apologia, written in a few weeks, a piece of perfect art--but
then it was written in tears."
"But on the other hand," said I, "look at Ariosto's Orlando; it took ten
years to write and sixteen more to correct--and there is not a forced or
a languid line in the whole of it."
"Yes," said Musgrave, "it is true, of course, that people must do things
in their own way. But, on the whole, the best work is done in speed
and glow, and derives from that swift handling a unity, a curve,
that nothing else can give. What matters is to have a clear sense
of structure, and that, at all events, cannot be secured by poky and
fretful treatment. That is where intellectual grasp comes in. But, even
so, it all depends upon what one likes, and I confess that I like large
handling better than perfection of detail."
"I believe," I said, "that we really all agree. We all believe in
largeness and vitality as the essential qualities. But in the lesser
kinds of art there is a delicacy and a perfection which are appropriate.
An attention to minutiae which the graving of a gem or the making of a
sonnet demands is out of place in a cathedral or an epic. We none of us
would approve of hasty, slovenly, clumsy work anywhere; all that is to
be demanded is that such irregularity as can be detected should not be
inappropriate irregularity. What we disagree about is only the precise
amount of finish which is appropriate to the particular work. Musgrave
would hold, in the case of Flaubert, that he was, in his novels, trying
to give to the cathedral the finish of the gem, and polishing a colossal
statue as though it were a tiny statuette."
"Yes," said Herries mournfully, "I suppose that is right; though when
I read of Flaubert spending hours of torture in the search for a single
epithet, I do not feel that the sacrifice was made in vain if only the
result was achieved."
"But I," said Musgrave, "grudge the time so spent. I would rather have
more less-finished work than little exquisite work--though I suppose
that we shall come to the latter sometime, when the treasures of art
have accumulated even more hopelessly than now, and when nothing but
perfect work will have a chance of recognition. Then perhaps a man
will spend thirty years in writing a short story, and twenty more in
polishing it! But at present there is much that is unsaid which may
well be said, and I confess that I do not hanker after this careful and
troubled work. It reminds me of the terrible story of the Chinaman who
spent fifty years in painting a vase which cracked in the furnace. It
seems to me like the worst kind of waste."
"And I, on the other hand," said Herries gravely, "think that such a
life is almost as noble a one as I can well conceive."
His words sounded to me like a kind of pontifical blessing pronounced
at the end of a liturgical service; and, dinner now being over, we
adjourned to the library. Then Musgrave entertained us with an
account of a squabble he had lately had with a certain editor, who had
commissioned him to write a set of papers on literary subjects, and then
had objected to his treatment. Musgrave had trailed his coat before
the unhappy man, laid traps for him by dint of asking him ingenuous
questions, had written an article elaborately constructed to parody
derisively the editor's point of view, had meekly submitted it as one
of the series, and then, when the harried wretch again objected, had
confronted him with illustrative extracts from his own letters. It was a
mirthful if not a wholly good-natured performance. Herries had listened
with ill-concealed disgust, and excused himself at the end of the
recital on the plea of work.
As the door closed behind him, Musgrave said with a wink, "I am afraid
my story has rather disgusted our young transcendentalist. He has no
pleasure in a wholesome row; he thinks the whole thing vulgar--and I
believe he is probably right; but I can't live on his level, though I am
sure it is very fine and all that."
"But what do you really think of his work?" I said. "It is very
promising, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Musgrave reflectively, "that is just what it is--he has got
a really fine literary gift; but he is too uncompromising. Idealism in
art is a deuced fine thing, and every now and then there comes a man
who can keep it up, and can afford to do so. But what Herries does
not understand is that there are two sides to art--the theory and the
practice. It is just the same with a lot of things--education, for
instance, and religion. But the danger is that the theorists become
pedantic. They get entirely absorbed in questions of form, and the plain
truth is that however good your form is, you have got to get hold of
your matter too. The point after all is the application of art to life,
and you have got to condescend. Things of which the ultimate end is to
affect human beings must take human beings into account. If you aim at
appealing only to other craftsmen, it becomes an erudite business: you
become like a carpenter who makes things which are of no use except to
win the admiration of other carpenters. Of course it may be worth doing
if you are content with indicating a treatment which other people can
apply and popularise. But if you isolate art into a theory which has no
application to life, you are a savant and not an artist. You can't be
an artist without being a man, and therefore I hold that humanity comes
first. I don't mean that one need be vulgar. Of course I am a mere
professional, and my primary aim is to earn an honest livelihood.
I frankly confess that I don't pose, even to myself, as a public
benefactor. But Herries does not care either about an income, or about
touching other people. Of course I should like to raise the standard.
I should like to see ordinary people capable of perceiving what is good
art, and not so wholly at the mercy of conventional and melodramatic
art. But Herries does not care twopence about that. He is like the
Calvinist who is sure of his own salvation, has his doubts about the
minister, and thinks every one else irreparably damned. As I say, it is
a lofty sort of ideal, but it is not a good sign when that sort of thing
begins. The best art of the world--let us say Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Shakespeare--was contributed by people who probably did not think about
it as art at all. Fancy Homer going in for questions of form! It is
always, I believe, a sign of decadence when formalism begins. It is just
like religion, which starts with a teacher who has an overwhelming sense
of the beauty of holiness; and then that degenerates into theology.
These young men are to art what the theologians are to religion.
They lose sight of the object of the whole thing in codification and
definition. My own idea of a great artist is a man who finds beauty so
hopelessly attractive and desirable that he can't restrain his speech.
It all has to come out; he cannot hold his peace. And then a number of
people begin to see that it was what they had been vaguely admiring and
desiring all the time; and then a few highly intellectual people think
that they can analyse it, and produce the same effects by applying their
analysis. It can't be done so; art must have a life of its own."
"Yes," I said, "I think you are right. Herries is ascetic and
eremitical--a beautiful thing in many ways; but there is no transmission
of life in such art; it is a sterile thing after all, a seedless
flower."
"Let us express the vulgar hope," said Musgrave, "that he may fall in
love; that will bring him to his moorings! And now," he added, "we will
go to the music-room and I will see if I cannot tempt the shy bird from
his roost." And so we did--Musgrave is an excellent musician. We flung
the windows open; he embarked upon a great Bach "Toccata"; and before
many bars were over, our idealist crept softly into the room, with an
air of apologetic forgiveness.