RE A FIN

ical if not disreputable to plain and honest men. I remember an Oxford don, chiefly noted for his cricket and his knowledge of Homer, and in later life for his dyspepsia, abusing a distinguished Austrian critic who visited the University-"These foreigners are always talking about Art!" Foreigners and long-haired ?sthetes were one and the same thing

e regard our own judgments as fallible. We are all disposed to mistrust the opinions of our contemporaries, though we have a childlike faith in the verdict of posterity. Well, what is it that will satisfy posterity, and that ought, a fortiori, to satisfy us? What is it, in the domain of the delightful, as opposed to the merely knowable, which has value for the future, and therefore should have more value for the present? And what is it-an even more important question-which may have this kind of value for us, whether posterity choose to value it or not? That is the main point. We want to find what that quality is, in literature or any of the fine arts, which makes it a matter of so great consideration to us. What do we expect and demand from it, if it is to be somet

ition to experience, an experience sui generis. We demand that it should be something which will occupy us and engage our faculties, something not to be approached carelessly and indolently, but with energy and alertness of the mind; not because it is

l exercise it affords him. To some extent the mind is more elastic than the body. Even when it is tired it can sometimes be whipped into energy by thought, or reading, or talk, whereas the body in its corresponding state cannot so readily respond with accuracy and effectiveness. But the mind too-Heaven knows-may be dulled to fine issues; and it is only when it is in well-balanced activity that it can do full justice to a work of art; and that is no work of art which the jaded intelligence can wholly grasp. Anyone who enjoys pictures, and

quences, although consequences of some kind are inevitable. In the same way the activity called forth in all art, both in the artist at the time of creation and in the man who is appreciating it, is disinterested; he is, in proportion as he is an artist or an appreciator of art, concerned at the moment in nothing but the subject-matter of the artist, and the treatment; in making or receiving a certain effect, without thought of the possible practical consequences which may follow through some inference drawn from the work or some psychological result attending upon it. This is not a re-statement of the much-abused theory of "Art for Art's sake," fo

and its life is its own. What we demand of it is that it should put into its picture something that is and is not in nature-something, in other words, that is only there for those who choose to see it, but which the artist makes clearer, awakening the perceptions to that aspect of truth which he has in view. In a book called The Ascending Effort, Mr. George Bourne urged that the art of life consists in the realisation of "choice ideas"; meaning by "choice ideas" those which are refined out of the commonplace and the meagre; the ideas which are apprehended most actively, with all the mind and all the perceptions; the ideas which admit of r

r have explicitly stated it. "As light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind," said Coleridge, whose meaning

e not fine

fine

se such terms as "shapely," "comely," "blythe," "gracious," "engaging," to express the fine flavour[2] of a work of art. The quality may be manifested primarily through the intellect, as with Meredith; through the senses, as with Swinburne; through the perceptions, as with Turgeniev, Flaubert and Joseph Conrad; or through intellect and perceptions acutely balanced, as with Mr. Henry James (who gives us "curiosity" as th

the sense that it cannot aim at any competing, alien end; and thirdly, that this experience should come from objects made beautiful in the sense of being shown in a certain light, or made

roved that literature itself is not only profoundly affected, but made and unmade, by theories of literature. And Corneille and Racine bestowed at any rate this immeasurable benefit on their countrymen: they taught them the lesson of form and technique-a lesson which they have never forgotten, which is illustrated as much in fiction as in drama-in Merimée, Flaubert, Maupassant and Anatole France. Shakespeare, on the contrary, whose influence on English literature has been supreme since the beginning of the Romantic movement, provided no obvious model for the student of form. To the casual reader his very imagination seems to be lawlessness and extravagance, carrying him tempestuously and recklessly into the mêlée of poetry. But every careful reader knows that Shakespeare was not so reckless as he seems; observe how rigidly he conformed to the conditions prescribed by the Elizabethan theatre and audience; it is to the credit of his technique that he com

ose creative impulses which as a theorist he endeavoured to account for. He had had the inspiration of poetry; he had achieved it; and to that extent he had indisputable evidence before him. If only on the one hand he had extended his method a little further than he did, and taken into consideration that formal side of art which is dear to classicism, and on the other hand been more confident-or shall I say less shy?-when he considered

he whole soul of man into activity," and "diffuses a tone and spirit of unity." Coleridge's theory of the Fine Arts presupposes his metaphysic; and it asserts the primacy of the reason. "Of all we see, hear, feel and touch the substance is and must be in ourselves: and therefore there is no alternative in

t to be the function of the human reason to discover the unifying idea which underlies all the variety of nature; and thus it is that when manifold objects of sense are reduced by the imagination to order and unity the soul is satisfied, and its experience is an experience of what is called the beautiful. It is with this discovering of order in the seemingly chaotic, in other words the discovering of beauty, that the creative artist is concerned. It is his business to inform matter with idea; and matter symbolically used becomes the expression of the artist's thought ju

ternal nature, the manifestation of Natura naturans, lends itself to the artist so that he too may manifest himself. To attain this end the artist will imitate nature but not copy her. ("What idle rivalry!" he exclaims. Is not a copy of nature like a wax-work figure, which shocks because it lacks "the motion and the l

ut a complete metaphysical theory; but both are difficult to attain. Both lead to speculation, controversy, and a thousand opportunities of error. And any systematically complete theory of art, seeking as it must to account for infinity, must, like all metaphysical systems, fall short of the truth by precisely the difference between infinite thought and the thought of one man-by the difference between the Universe and Yo

e imperfect artist-the only artist that has yet been given to the world. It is true the great genius in letters, or any other kind of art, can never rest content until he has bodied forth in a multitude of works all of that complex which is his conception of life. But he works under the conditions of time and space. His conception of life has been modified before he has had time to vanquish time. In practice, at any given moment, he is at work

Coleridge extolled the reason, which apprehends intuitively. For Coleridge, the intellect was only the organ by which rational conceptions and intuitions are logically applied, and adapted to circumstance. From his point of view we might conclude that the genius of Meredith missed the greatest effects because, applying his intellect discursively to life, he so often refused to make it subservient to any central conception or intuition. However that may be, it is impossible to resist at least this conclusion, that the artist in whose work we feel a background, whose work suggests more than it directly is, being capable of arousing numberless feelings and associations in the mind, so that it stands veritably as a symbol of the whole of life, is the artist par excellence. Much of this effect may be produced by an unconscious activity which Coleridge recognised as a part of the ac

question I should have no quarrel. But the former implies that the artist has devoted himself to metaphysical studies. Mr. Abercrombie may have meant only that every work of art presupposes a metaphysic; but so does everything in the world. The remark would scarcely have been worth making. So I suppose him to have meant that every great artist must have subdued his mind to a definite philosophical interpretation of the Universe, and that in his works he shows nature and human life as parts of the cosmic scheme definitely conceived by him. As it happened, the particular novelist whom he was considering, Mr. Thomas Hardy, exactly answers to this description. So does Sophocles, so does Milton-authors specially esteemed by Mr. Abercrombie. Homer, too, might perhaps be accounted for in this way; for he had at any rate a perfectly definite conception of the relation of men to

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

t 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 wh

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 wo

is 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 palp

on 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 w

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

e 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 irr

s which was central to himself, he required no pregnancy or subtle suggestiveness of phrase; he needed no more than rhyme, rhythm and onomatop?ic 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 questi

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

ea 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

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

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 g

ch 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 onl

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