At Large

by Arthur Christopher Benson

"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."