I

THE DEGRADATION OF BEAUTYToC

Some time ago I found myself at an exhibition of Post-Impressionist pictures, under the Ægis of an artist who was himself of that persuasion. Indeed, he was one of the exhibitors, and I was constrained to express my opinions in the form of questions. We passed before a picture which to my untutored eyes was formless, meaningless and ugly. It was by a well-known artist, and my instructor admired it. He said it was the head of a woman, and he indicated certain hook-like marks in the painting which to him distinctly suggested the nose, the mouth and the neck of a woman, reduced to their simplest terms. After he had fully explained the picture, I asked him if the result was in any sense beautiful to him.

"Beautiful!" he exclaimed, with something of disdain in his voice. "Why should it be beautiful? I do not require that a picture should be beautiful."

He had not finished, but I was relieved by the first part of his reply. As I cannot hope to appreciate more than a certain number of things in the world, I am willing, so far as pictures are concerned, to be limited to beautiful pictures, and to be proved ignorant and obtuse in regard to all others. For the same reason I have long since reconciled myself to the fact that there are some branches of science and natural history which I shall never master. I shall always endeavour to follow clever writers like Shaw and Brieux whose plays have, as the former puts it, "a really scientific natural history" for their basis. But I cannot hope to acquire the whole of knowledge or reform the whole of the world, and there are books which contain a great deal of sound knowledge and urgent opinion for which I have no use. Moreover, I deny Mr. Shaw's right to interfere with my enjoyment if I turn to literature which teaches nothing and serves no utilitarian or reforming purpose. It is only when I am in the scientific frame of mind that I desire accurate natural history, or when I am in the reforming frame of mind that I desire earnest exhortations to improve society. In the same way I am only drawn to the Post-Impressionists when I want, not beautiful pictures, but an agreeable sense of the impudence and imbecility of professional craftsmen. But when I am in the mood for literature and art, I demand something that shall appeal to my sense of beauty; and I refuse to be shamed into believing that I ought to prefer scientific knowledge, or ethical suasion, or those particular kinds of ugliness admired by some Realists and some Post-Impressionists.

But I was a little disconcerted when my Post-Impressionist artist concluded with the remark: "I have never yet found anyone who could tell me what he meant by beauty."

Certainly I had not asked him for an exact definition, or any definition of Beauty in the abstract. I should have been satisfied if, for the moment, he had taken it on trust, as most of us take the law of gravity, the postulates of Euclid, and the evidence of our senses. I was not dismayed because a single Post-Impressionist thought that "beautiful" is a word that has no meaning; but because the reply came so pat upon his lips;—he was repeating, parrot-like, a current view; he was adopting the fashionable attitude of scorn towards what is regarded as an ancient tyranny, long since indicted and exploded. This bland acceptance of the meaninglessness and the inefficacy of beauty is habitual to most young professionals who wield pen or pencil. They have learnt it from Mr. Shaw, forgetting that when Mr. Shaw demands complete freedom for the writer he also demands objective truth; or they have learnt it from Mr. Roger Fry, forgetting that even Mr. Fry demands some kind of subjective truth. Every young artist like my acquaintance at the Grafton Gallery, every young novelist like Mr. Gilbert Cannan,[1] is encouraged by the intellectuals to accept formlessness and anarchy as evidence of a magnanimous and enlightened spirit.

But it is not necessary to expose this falsity in its crude and most violent forms. For we may find it expressed in an almost academic way, with philosophical aloofness, a show of nice reasoning, and a kind of Epicurean sweetness in a Romanes lecture delivered by Mr. Arthur James Balfour and published under the title Criticism and Beauty. It is worth while to study so responsible a writer, for we may be sure that he will weigh his words, that he will not over-state his case, or be led away by passion or fanaticism. And it is assuredly interesting to examine the argument for anarchy as stated and defended by a Conservative statesman.

Indeed, it is hard to believe that the author of this essay is the same Mr. Balfour whom we know as the leader of the Conservative party. A statesman ostensibly so consistent in upholding order and authority in the Church, in adhering to time-honoured standards of government, and in trusting the judgment of men "trained in the tradition of politics," might have been expected to hold views somewhat similar in matters of art. We should have expected him to believe in the existence, not perhaps of artistic canons, but of artistic standards; to be convinced that in Æsthetics there is an Æsthetic right and wrong; to attach weight to the judgment of men of "trained sensibility." But it is not so. He holds in the most extreme form the ancient doctrine that seeming is being. Art, as such, has for him nothing to do with truth. He recognises no valid standard of excellence. The only excellence in a work of art is to afford Æsthetic pleasure, and the pleasure which a boy derives from a blood-curdling adventure-book or the public from a popular melodrama is, in Mr. Balfour's view, no less "Æsthetic" than the pleasure which another may derive from contemplating a statue by Michelangelo. There is no universal standard; no criterion; no excellence in art except such as each man accepts for himself.Mr. Balfour does, indeed, make a proper distinction between art as "technical dexterity" and art as related to the "sublime," the "beautiful," the "pathetic," the "humorous," the "melodious," and admits that it is possible to apply an "objective test" to technical skill—to decide that this line scans, that this rhyme is flawless, that these bars in music are in such-and-such a key. But he will allow no objective grounds of excellence to art in the more important sense. If you say that this poem is beautiful or sublime, you are asserting what is only true for you, a mere personal preference which others need not be expected to share. Not only do men of "trained sensibility" differ from the uncultured, but they differ equally from one another. He cites the evidence of Greek music to show how widely the cultured of one nation and epoch may differ from the cultured of other nations and epochs. Having laid it down as an axiom that our Æsthetic judgments are "for the most part immediate, and, so to speak, intuitive," and observing that the fastidious differ among themselves, and that their delight in fine objects is no more intense than the delight of the vulgar in coarser themes, he proceeds to the conclusion that there can be no valid right or wrong in taste, no absolute standard of beauty. He even maintains that art is not based upon any special faculty for perceiving the true. "I can find no justification in experience for associating great art with penetrating insight."

Before going further it is necessary to hint at a curious confusion in which he here involves himself—a surely rather crude confusion between Æsthetic, and moral, right and wrong. Being concerned to disprove the existence of the former, he for a moment identifies it with the latter. It is either, as I have taken it, a crude confusion of thought, or an equivocating device more often used in political controversy than in the domain of art criticism—that of identifying the opinion attacked with another of an ignominious character. The view which he is rejecting is thus set forth. "An artist is deemed to be more than the maker of beautiful things. He is a seer, a moralist, a prophet." Surely he must realise that there are many who would most fervently hold that an artist must be a seer or even a prophet, who would ridicule the idea that he must be that very different sort of thing, a moralist. And in the same way, when he has declared categorically: "I can find no justification in experience for associating great art with penetrating insight," he almost ludicrously adds, "or good art with good morals."

It is this confusion of the aim of the artist with the aims of other expounders—the moralist, the philosopher, the theologian—that vitiates his argument against the insight of the great artists. Why does he deny them this "penetrating insight?" Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt—each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty." The non sequitur of this argument lies in the fact that he only shows that artists have differed in respect of what is not essential to art. If he had shown that some artists have created the beautiful, and others have created the ugly, he would have produced evidence fatal to his opponents. As it is he has denied perception of the beautiful to artists because they differ in respect of that which has no necessary connection with beauty.

But to leave this technical, though not wholly unreal, disputation. There is this merit in Mr. Balfour's essay: that it states in its most extreme form a view for which there is something to be said and which has been gaining in favour in modern times. It is a reaction against the view which became established in the course of the last century. It was the habit of the eighteenth century to judge poetry by its form alone; the nineteenth judged it by the spirit which inspired it, by that which, as De Quincey puts it, was "incarnated" in a work of art. William Blake literally believed that there was a real world of the imagination which was opened up to the artist in his visions, and that was why he said: "Learn to see through, not with, the eye." Coleridge, too, asserted the primacy of Reason and imagination; and for Wordsworth poetry was "Reason in her most exalted form," just as for Keats "Beauty is truth, truth Beauty." Even so logical and prosaic a thinker as John Stuart Mill recognised that supremacy of the artist to which he himself could not attain; the artist, as he said in a letter to Carlyle, perceives truth immediately, by intuition, and it was his own humble function to translate the truths discerned by the artist into logic. "Is not the distinction between mysticism, the mysticism which is of truth, and mere dreamery, or the institution of imaginations for realities, exactly this, that mysticism may be translated into logic?" Logic, for Mill, was only the hand-servant of that art which is concerned, not with "imaginations" only, but with realities. And it was in the same spirit that Matthew Arnold laid down his decisive verdict that literature is a criticism of life, that it may be subjected to a "universal" estimate, and that the standard is "the best that has been said and thought in the world."

But in recent years there has been a revolt against the idea of standards or authority in art. Art has always been conceived as something which affords pleasure; but now it is conceived as that which affords pleasure to anyone. The democracy, now that it has become literate, claims the right of private judgment, equality for its members even in matters of art. And in a sense it is right. Nothing should be or can be acclaimed as beautiful unless it appears beautiful to the spectator. There is no criterion of beauty outside the perception of beauty. For each man, that only is beautiful which affords him the experience of beauty; and whatever does afford him that experience has given him the Æsthetic pleasure which is the true pleasure of art. But there are many pleasurable thrills which have nothing to do with beauty or with art. That is why Mr. Balfour surely is wrong when he suggests that the youthful delight in blood-curdling adventures is an "enjoyment of what is Art, and nothing but Art." But I agree that we are confronted with an antinomy which seems hard enough to overcome—on the one hand art is only good because some people have judged or felt it to be good; on the other hand all sincere critics are convinced that some works are absolutely good, that their excellence is beyond reasonable challenge, and that those who do not perceive this excellence are lacking in fineness of perception.

The anarchistic side of the paradox is put in its crudest form by Mr. Balfour. It has been put in perhaps its finest and truest form by Mr. Henry James:

It is true; in art, at least, we are "not under theological government," and that was a maxim worth asserting at a time when the dicta of Matthew Arnold and Ruskin were being converted into shibboleths. It is necessary for happiness no less than for honesty that we should realise that poetry, music, and pictures are personal things; that what they are worth to us is their sole measure of value. And here it must be mentioned that Mr. Balfour puts forth two hints which are inconclusive enough, but which do dimly suggest a truer way of escape than that to which his argument leads. He notes, first of all, that art is disinterested; that it is not a means, but an end in itself. And, secondly, we feel towards beautiful things as we feel towards persons; if they are congenial we may like or love them, though we can assign no ground for our preference.

If the analogy were pursued it might lead to something like a solution of the difficulty. For all fine art is beautiful expression; it is self-expression; it is the expression of something which the artist perceives. If it strikes an answering chord in us we are satisfied; and that fact of response means a community of perception, of Æsthetic knowledge, between the artist and the recipient, something perhaps which is dragged from the depths of our duller natures but which burst forth in expression from the artist with his quicker and more apt perception. But let it be noted that there could be no such response or sympathy conveyed from one to another by a symbol unless there were some real bond, some existent principle possessed in common. Art is communicative, but not surely a communication of nothing. It communicates something which is not the less real because it is intangible and mysterious. If it inexplicably affords us—as it does—an experience which some persons describe as transcendent, then that quality in it, which we call the "sublime" or the "beautiful," has at least to this extent a definite reality, that it affords us unique experiences. It is this question which I shall examine in the following chapter.

Some men have not been so made that they can respond to the beauty which is summoned by art, just as some men, born blind, are not touched by the light of the sun. But it is of no moment to say that tastes differ. Men may differ about their friends, but they do not differ about friendship. They may have different codes of honour, but a sense of honour is the same thing for a savage as it is for a bishop. And so not all things are called beautiful by the same men, but beauty is the same for all.

FOOTNOTES:

II

LITERATURE A FINE ARTToC

There are many people of my acquaintance who think it almost indecent to talk of literature as a fine art. They have the same distaste for the word "art" as others have for the name of God. It has indeed been misused in certain Æsthetic circles and discussed almost unctuously, so that it is often associated with long hair and cant, and seems nonsensical 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 Æsthetes were one and the same thing to my atrabilious instructor. The latter was an exact man. No wonder he detested a word which is used so vaguely and in so many contrary senses; which is sometimes applied to a poem or a novel as if its "art" were an ornamental thing separate from the poem or the novel; or as if it were a mere synonym for style or adherence to some technical formula.

Yet we cannot very well get on without the word, and we certainly cannot avoid its connotation. No man in his senses can deny that there is such a thing as the "art of literature," though it may seem absurd to talk about it. No one, however healthy in his tastes, would refuse to distinguish the statement "This is a very good book"—which may mean only that it is instructive, or useful for certain purposes—from the statement "This, anyhow, is literature"—which means something quite specific, namely, that this is a work of art. The very word would become less offensive if we could be a little less vague about it, if we could make up our minds what it is that it does mean or that we wish it to mean. We all of us distinguish between good and bad in literature, even if we 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 something of real moment? That is one side of the question. And putting the question from the other side—What sort of process is implied in the writing of literature, and what is the sanction of the writer? It seems we are compelled to form some provisional theory of art before we can make the most modest pretensions to discuss literature. For such a theory is implied in every literary discussion, in every review of a book, and in every appreciative or antagonistic reading of a book. I myself have written hundreds of reviews of books, and I certainly do not think it more presumptuous to set down what it is that I require, or believe that I require, in creative literature, and what that requirement presupposes in the artist, than to have written those hundreds of reviews.

I begin, then, from the side of our actual requirements, and I lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that if we mean anything at all by creative literature, or literature regarded as a fine art, we must mean something which provides us with an addition 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 abstruse or difficult, but because we are demanding something which will give full play to the spirit, which will come profoundly in contact with us when we are in fullest possession of ourselves, which will not merely stir us, but stir us to activity.

That I would take as an axiom. If we are going to regard fiction, for example, as a fine art, the artistic novel will be a book which we approach not for mere distraction, but for activity, mental and spiritual, for the opportunity it affords of putting forth energy, of giving full play to the vitality, of going through a vital experience. Just as the keen golfer delights in the skilful use of eye and limb, and is exhilarated by the difficulties and the physical exertion of the game, so the keen reader of a book enjoys the strenuous mental 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 does not care to look at them perfunctorily or in a "sightseeing" spirit, knows well that he can only appreciate a picture when he allows eyes and imagination to concentrate upon it, so that he perceives as well as sees it, and derives a complex impression from it akin to that which the artist felt at the moment when he conceived it. And in the same way with every work of art worthy of the name, whether it be a picture, a statue, a poem, a play or a novel, it is part of its excellence to call forth activity in the mind which apprehends it.

But we must note that it not only calls forth activity, but disinterested activity—and by that I mean an activity of the kind which is especially called forth in the fine arts, and not that which science, or religion, or ethics might call forth without the aid of the arts. To preserve the analogy of golf, it may happen—and generally does happen—that the playing of golf makes the limbs more elastic and promotes general health. But to take an interest in golf is not the same thing as to take an interest in the health-producing results of golf. The true golfer is he who plays golf for its own sake and without any ulterior end, without thought of consequences, 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," for that theory has always tended to minimise the importance of subject-matter, and to represent Beauty as something aloof from the rest of life, instead of being inseparable from the warp and woof of things social, moral, intellectual, religious, and physical. When I say that the activity of the artist is disinterested, I do not mean that he may not be concerned with any conceivable theme under the sun, but that his business is to provide us with an experience, and that any end he may have beyond making that experience vivid and complete is an alien end, destroying his singleness of purpose, wholly disruptive of his art and destructive to its energy.

And here we must abandon the analogy of a game of skill, for whereas golf-balls have no interest except as things to be knocked about, the objects with which poet, dramatist or novelist deals are ideas, persons, associated things, having character and interest of their own. The experience he is to provide is primarily a spiritual experience, an affair of the mind and the emotions. And being, as it must clearly be, an experience sui generis, it is obviously not derived from a mere reproduction of life; for life cannot be reproduced excepting in life itself, whereas art claims no more than to be an imitation, or an envisagement, of nature, 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 relation to all other ideas, which come into some sort of harmony with such schemes of life as we have made. If this is true of the art of life, a fortiori is it true of the fine arts from which the analogy is drawn. In other words, the artist's aim is not to reproduce the facts which make up the mass of our ordinary and undigested life, but to substitute for the dishevelled commonplace the "choiceness" of an ordered interpretation. Only in this way can art give us an experience sui generis; only by the refinement and re-energising of the treatment can it give us emotions vivid enough to compete in some measure with the vividness of nature.

Implicitly all great artists must have accepted this general view of their function, and many in one way or another have explicitly stated it. "As light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind," said Coleridge, whose meaning was philosophically definite, but in no way at variance with Shakespeare's too hackneyed but ever memorable words:

The "fine": the "alight" or "luminous": the "choice"—here are three ways of qualifying the objects which artists seek to present. Matthew Arnold was captivated by the simile of light, and having repeated Amiel's passionate cry for "more light," used "sweetness and light" as a refrain in all his criticism. Walter Pater, to whom the beauty of the human form, and therefore of sculpture, was especially appealing, loved to use 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 the keynote); but in any case it is that which we require an artist to bring with him—"fineness," "light," "choiceness," "comeliness," "graciousness"—when he visualises or focusses his object. Does not that untranslatable ??pa??? a???? of Homer—the shining upper air—suggest not only the physical atmosphere breathed by the gods of Olympus and the great-hearted Odysseus, but also the poetic atmosphere of the Odyssey itself?

We have, then, added a third term to our generalisation about art. We now require, as it seems, that it should provide us with an energetic experience; that it should be disinterested in 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 alight—in a manner which demands further inquiry. And here indeed is the difficulty. For we must endeavour to examine the question from the artist's standpoint, and seek counsel from him.

It would be no less futile than presumptuous to lay down exact formulÆ as to what the artist ought and ought not to do. No modern critic is likely to waste his time in framing rules and canons, which can be so easily handled by the pedant and stand condemned by the first great man who defies them. Aristotle did it once and for all for the Greek drama, and when the perspective of life widened and new forms of literature grew up to compete with drama, his rules were destined either to shackle literature or to be thrown ruthlessly overboard in the violent revulsion against Classicism. Shakespeare fortunately was guiltless of any exact knowledge of Aristotle, and the fact that Corneille and Racine, who had no French Shakespeare to precede them, were in bondage to that influential philosopher, had a lasting effect upon French literature which the mighty influence of Hugo was insufficient to destroy. But at least the example of these Classicist writers has proved 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 complied with these exacting conditions without cramping the finer issues of poetry and drama. And in the broader sense of the term Shakespeare's form was precisely proportionate to his genius, though it is seen rather in the transcendence of his poetry and the management by which his persons are swept along on their own characters than in those more obvious elements of form—structure of plot, the subservience of dialogue and incident to the dramatic purpose, and all the minor probabilities and proprieties. But it is just the obvious elements which are most noticeable to those who study form in a superficial way; for those who imitate Shakespeare, or are influenced by him, his careless freedom and extravagance often bulk larger than the expression of genius which made trifles of these defects. A result is that throughout the nineteenth century Shakespeare has been for English authors not always an inspiration, but a national pretext for decrying technique.

And yet those who had the insight and the power to restore Shakespeare in all his fulness to English readers were wholly free from this ignorance—conspicuously Charles Lamb and S.T. Coleridge. Coleridge was indeed the first of Englishmen to think out anything like a complete and satisfactory theory of poetry and the fine arts. The supreme value of his theory comes from the fact that he was one of the few who had actually experienced those 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 the origin of the creative imagination, the ideal conceiver and creator of Natura Naturata, then his scheme would have been complete—probably too complete. On the latter subject, however, he threw out hints which were broad enough, and did not wholly shun the controversial sphere of metaphysics. The critic who would avoid the heights and depths of mysticism would do well to imitate his reserve, and exceed him in metaphysical diffidence.

"Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius," said Coleridge, "Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole." It is by that "synthetic and magical power" which he calls "imagination" that the poet "brings the 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 reason between the dreary (and, thank Heaven! almost impossible) belief that everything around us is but a phantom, or that the life which is in us is in them likewise.... The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols."

He defines the beautiful as "that in which the many, still seen as many, becomes one," and takes as an instance: "The frost on the windowpane has by accident crystallised into a striking resemblance of a tree or a sea-weed. With what pleasure we trace the parts, and their relation to each other and to the whole." "The beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination, and it is always intuitive." It is that which "calls on the soul" (?a??? quasi ?a????). He conceives it 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 just as for the theologian the world of nature is an expression of the thought of God. "To make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature—this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts." And he goes on significantly: "Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind—that it is mind in its essence?" And in all the Biographia Literaria there is perhaps no more striking suggestion than: "Remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former."

It should be observed that Coleridge's philosophy presupposes "a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of a man," presupposes, that is, that the spirit of the artist "has the same ground with nature," whose unspoken language he must learn "in its main radicals." It is only by reason of this bond that external 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 life which we expected?") The artist imitates what he perceives to be essential in nature; he takes the images which life affords him and so disposes of them as to bring to light the unities which the spirit loves; it is he who brings order out of disorder, imposing upon matter a form which the imagination has conceived.

For the purposes of the general critic of art, Coleridge has given us too much and too little. He gives us too much: for the acceptance of his theory in its completeness is only possible for those who can also accept his metaphysic (his artist stands in a special relationship to that Natura naturans which is a name for God). It is indeed clear to me that no complete conception of the operations of art can be formed without 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 You or Me. Those who are anxious to learn what can be learnt about the creative process, and to explain it to themselves, not in terms of abstract thought, but in terms of the humanly intelligible and appreciable, may be satisfied with a lower degree of truth, with something more certain though not fully explained. We may be content if we can hit upon some least common denominator free from the controversies of metaphysics.

If that is our object, Coleridge has given us too much. But he has also given us too little. So generalised is his treatment that we are led to the conclusion that his perfect artist (who cannot exist) ought to express nothing less than the whole of himself in one single comprehensive work of art, as the divine Creator is conceived to have produced one harmonious expression of Himself in the Universe. What he does not sufficiently discuss is the 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 upon a single aspect of life, upon one part only of his general conception, so that the most immediate task before him is not that of unifying nature, but of separating, of selecting; and only when he has thus separated and selected can he proceed to make a unity within that restricted sphere of nature—his particular subject. On this practical question, this problem, not of perfection but of imperfection, Coleridge is characteristically silent.

But at least we must follow him in his view that the great artist is engaged in the attempt to body forth, through the symbols which external nature provides him, his fundamental conceptions about life. Were this not so, art would not be concerned, as it claims to be, with what is most important in the world, or at least most important to the artist. "No man was ever yet a great poet," he insisted, "without being at the same time a profound philosopher." We may recall the dictum of Meredith: "If we do not speedily embrace philosophy in fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction." But there is a great difference between the two views. A work of art which is broad enough to embrace philosophy is not the same thing as a work of art which is embraced by philosophy, and is a complete product of the philosophical imagination. Meredith extolled the intellect, which works discursively; 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 activity of genius. Nevertheless, whether the activity is conscious or unconscious, it cannot do more than express what arises in, or passes through, the imagination of the artist; it is his complex conception of life and the significance of life, his definite individual outlook, which accounts for this background to a work of art, for this suggestiveness which makes it appealing and awakening, for these associations which it has cunningly brought before us. And whether or not we are going to allow that something less than this can be called art, that the merely shapely (shapely as if by accident) ought to be included in its category, nevertheless, it is this which holds the highest place. The answer is given by all the great authors of the world who have left their individual stamp upon their art, who created images representative of life as they conceived it essentially to be.

But I am far from holding that those central conceptions which the artist embodies through the forms of his art are metaphysical conceptions. This is where I should disagree with Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, who wrote some profoundly interesting chapters on this subject in a book on Thomas Hardy. Mr. Abercrombie laid it down that every great artist must have a metaphysic, and that in bringing his subject-matter under the form conceived by his imagination his metaphysic is throughout the work consistently represented (of course implicitly, not explicitly); and he suggested that we may apply a definite standard of criticism by asking: How far does a work of art correspond with the artist's philosophical view of life?—this being for him another way of saying: How far has the artist succeeded in imposing the desired form upon his material? With the latter mode of stating the 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 the gods of Olympus and to the ghosts who trod the mead of Asphodel; and to the perfect spontaneity, the unhesitating certainty with which Homer bodies forth the conviction of pantheism is due much of the charm and infinite delight of the Epics. Perhaps with ingenuity one might discover a metaphysic for Shakespeare—and even if we could not discover it, none the less it may have been there. But how about Herrick, Robert Burns, or even Mr. Henry James? Are we to equip them with a metaphysic, or exclude them from the portals of art? Shall we not gain more by requiring from an artist something, definite indeed, but less exacting and elusive than a definite scheme of the Universe; something which would admit, for example, Calverley; which would take some heed of the simplest of songs, and account for Lewis Carroll in the same way that we can account for Sophocles or Milton?

There is surely something more essential to a man even than his 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 onomatopoeic 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.