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.