Art is the free play of generous and creative imaginations with the life-blood of the demiurgic forces of the universe in their veins. There is a large and noble joy in it, a magnanimous nonchalance and aplomb, a sap, an ichor, a surge of resilient suggestion, a rich ineffable magic, a royal liberality.
Devoid of the energy of a large and free imagination, art dwindles into an epicene odalisque, a faded minion of pleasure in a perfumed garden. It becomes the initiatory word of an exclusive Rosicrucian order. It becomes the amulet of an affected superiority, the signet ring of a masquerading conspiracy.
The habitation of the spirit of true art is the natural soul of man, as it has been from the beginning and as it will be to the end. The soul of man has depths which can only be fathomed by an art which breaks every rule of the formalists and transgresses every technical law.
The mere fact that the kind of scrupulous artistry advocated by these pedants of "style" is a kind that can be defined in words at all writes its own condemnation upon it. For the magical evocations of true genius are beyond definition.
As Goethe says the important thing in all great art is just what cannot be put in words. Those who would seek so to confine it are the bunglers who have missed the mark themselves, and "they like"—the great critic adds malignantly—"they like to be together."
The so-called rules of technique are nothing when you come to analyse them but a purely empirical and pragmatic deduction from the actual practise of the masters. And every new master creates new laws and a new taste capable of appreciating these new laws. There is no science of art. These modern critics, with their cult of "the unique phrase" and the "sharply defined image," are just as intolerant as the old judicial authorities whose prestige they scout; just as intolerant and just as unilluminating.
It is to the imagination we must go for a living appreciation of genius, and many quite simple persons possess this, to whom the jargon of the studios is empty chatter.
No human person has a right to say "Balzac ought to have put more delicacy, more subtlety into his style," or to say, "Balzac ought to have eliminated those long descriptions." Balzac is Balzac; and that ends it. If you prefer the manner of Henry James, by all means read him and let the other alone.
There is such a thing as the mere absence of what the "little masters" call style being itself a quite definite style.
A certain large and colourless fluidity of manner is often the only medium through which a vision of the world can be expressed at all; a vision, that is to say, of a particular kind, with the passion of it carried to a particular intensity.