But not one like the child has heard.
A hundred butterflies saw I,
But not one like the child saw fly.
I saw the horses roll in grass,
But no horse like the child saw pass.
My world this day has lovely been,
But not like what the child has seen.”
Rossetti believed that “Poetry should seem to the hearer to have been always present to his thought, but never before heard,” and the statement that this has been accomplished (so just, sometimes, is popular instinct) is the commonest praise accorded to individual works of art. Many of Mr. Davies’ readers must have said, rightly, but, critically speaking, with imperfect accuracy, “Now that expresses what I have always felt.” They should have said, “That enables me to feel what I always could have felt.” For they have never truly felt it. That wistful, regretful moment, now articulate, was carried unhappily past them in the general flux of incompletely conscious life. They suspected a possibility of feeling something, of knowing what they dimly felt, but it eluded them in the tangled currents of the stream, and they did not detain it, know it, and make it part of themselves. Mr. Davies has not so allowed it to escape; he warily netted it in his consciousness, learnt it accurately and fully, and wrote that poem, thus isolating it for ever from unconsciousness. And we, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of the work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories behind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness such a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately with our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it, an increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The conscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as self-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not self but other people’s eyes. It implies a new reading of the Delphic command, γνῶθι σεαυτόν. It does not mean Know thy opinions only, nor yet, Know what are thy desires, but Know thy life, not thy biography but thy living, thine innumerable acts of life.
I took my example from a short poem of extreme simplicity, and, as I have again and again in this essay spoken of “moments” of conscious life, a scrupulous reader might well conclude that I concerned myself only with what is commonly known as lyrical art, or that I should presently offer a proof of Croce’s theory that all art is essentially lyrical. I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in believing, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion, that all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic conception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation shall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for this reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to himself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be representative of more than one moment, it would be representative of more than one man. It would not be homogeneous, and could not be beautiful. This applies not only to a song or a picture, but to those works of art which are in appearance the most elaborate, the least uniform, the least determined by a single moment. A play, whose reading or performance may occupy hours, during which a number of characters whom we accept provisionally as human, as separate entities, live imaginary lives before us, is, no less than a song, the result of becoming completely conscious of a single moment. The duration of the reading is in no way affected by the duration of the moment of life that set the author playing with his marionettes. A moment of life such as would, for a poet, become articulate in a song, may require from a playwright that he represent it to himself in persons talking, a clash of personalities, a breaking of personalities by destiny, a series of events explicable within itself, not resembling any one moment of his life, but in their totality representing his means of knowing a moment, and the means he offers us whereby, as nearly as we may, we shall share that knowing. When a play is not the artist’s learning a moment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building at dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be empty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion. Passage of time, intricacy of construction, apparent multiplicity of imagined lives do not affect the question.
John Masefield did not by a sudden effort of genius conceive “Nan,” scenes, persons, and dialogue in a moment. One moment, however, determined its conception, and implied all that is in the play. Let me, with deference, suggest what may have happened. He heard a story that affected him with a mixture of emotions. If he had not been an artist, he would probably have done no more than repeat the story to others as it was told to him, and wonder idly if it produced the same mixture of emotions in them. Instead, he lingered with it, and let the unconscious flux flow on unobserved while he brooded over this one emotional moment, becoming more and more clearly conscious of the emotions it contained as they, in the formative processes of his mind, came to be represented by persons and actions and words. His mind was not making but discovering, following the implications of the original emotional moment, careful only to be true to that, and rejecting proffered representations solely on account of their inaccuracy. His skill was shown only in so dealing with the flood of representations that no one particle of it should contradict another, should hamper the full realisation of that moment. His greatness was shown in the profundity with which he realised that moment, and the depth to which he could follow its implications.