Drama, fiction, poetry, and the other fine arts cannot tolerate even the best-intentioned insincerity. There is here no arbitrary dogma or canon of art, but merely an assertion of the simple fact that you cannot achieve two wholly different ends at one and the same time, that success is dependent upon singleness of aim and enthusiasm. It is true that there is no subject whatsoever that may not lend itself to treatment. But it must be treated for its own sake, disinterestedly. Literature will not move us greatly unless it is concerned with great emotions. It will not move us finely except in the presence of an ideal. For in the great passions of literature, as in the great passions of life, there is always an ideal at stake, an ideal that is more than the attainable, a grasping at a fulness of satisfaction which is more than experience can afford.
I am making no appeal for what is misunderstood by the term "Art for Art's sake," or for that typically French view the expression of which I may take from the younger Dumas' Affaire Clemenceau:
Savez-vous ce que c'est que l'art? C'est le Beau dans le vrai, et, d'après ce principe, l'art s'est créé des règles absolus, que vous chercheriez en vain dans la nature seule. Si la nature seule pouvait le satisfaire, vous n'auriez qu'à mouler un beau modèle de la tête aux pieds, pour faire un chef d'œuvre. Ou, si vous exécutiez cette idée, vous ne produiriez qu'un grotesque. Le talent consiste à compléter la nature, à recueillir çà et là ses indications merveilleuses, mais partielles, à les résumer dans un ensemble homogène et a donner à cet ensemble une pensée ou un sentiment, puisque nous pouvons lui donner une âme.
I am in sympathy with that view so far as it implies that the artist cannot be content with a slavish reproduction of isolated facts taken from nature; and that he sets his gaze upon "le Beau dans le vrai," which I should like to render, not the "beautiful in the true," but the "Ideal in the true." But I am not in sympathy with it so far as it implies a formal beauty which the artist discerns in accordance with a principle mysteriously and exclusively artistic, existing in a region remote from life. Art is not a sacred mystery into which only the initiated can penetrate. It is not concerned with beauties drawn from a peculiar and exclusive artistic Absolute. Literature deals with life, but in life in an intense manifestation, with that passionate life which attains its richness, its breadth, its tremendous lustiness through the desire for something more than normal life can give. Nobody can object that these ideals are not real, that they are not true to life, and indeed the most vital part of life. The passions they call forth in men are the most real, the most vivid, the most illuminating; they widen and refine experience; they bring us into a larger universe, they add to the stature of personality, they are the means of growth. Literature is an expansion of the mind out of the narrower truth into the larger. It despises no experience, but drags to light its hidden resources, its unexpected wealth. It is profoundly interested in experience on its intense, that is to say, its passionate side. The original mind, not content to find poetic value in a single emotion such as that of love, finds it on all sides, discovering interests here, there, and everywhere. If it concentrates on one of these for the purposes of a poem, a play, a novel, it neglects, of course, no adventitious aid which gives reality to the persons, sufficiency to their motives, contrast, relief, atmosphere—all that is expressed by the ordinary jargon of criticism. To sum up: great creative literature does not deal with things painful or otherwise merely because they are facts of life. Its business is the intensification of life, to bring home to us its myriad finenesses; it achieves this end by presenting persons passing through the intense experiences which we call passions; and these are conditions of the spirit in which an idealised object encourages, thwarts, or tantalises the seeker, and dejects him utterly if the reality turns out to be less than the ideal. The inquiry opens a question for the metaphysician—What is the source of this ideal element which enters into every object passionately sought, and so transcends realisation that the object cannot be attained without a sense of loss?
IV
THE POPULAR TASTE[ToC]
If anything is worse than bad literature it is the tedious Pharisaism of the "man of culture." How flattering to the self-esteem to cast a supercilious eye upon the melodramatic, sentimental, unbeautiful books which constitute the mass of modern literature! The mass of modern literature is provided for the mass of men and women, but history has proved that a small and educated public may embrace stupidities not less desiccating than the stupidity of the million. A cultured public in the eighteenth century which could tolerate Colley Cibber gains nothing by comparison with an uncultured public which delights in Hall Caine. An author who attempted a poetic drama in the eighteenth century had to conform to the rules, but his compliance with convention is worth no more to literature than the libertinism of the modern reporter. The correct taste of that period is sufficiently flagellated in Swift's Recipe to make an Epic Poem, wherein he "makes it manifest that epic poems may be made without genius, nay without learning or much reading.... It is easily brought about by him that has a genius, but the skill lies in doing it without one." To this day there exists an oligarchy of academic persons whose taste is almost exactly on a par with the taste most in evidence two hundred years ago. They are the people who estimate literature by its correctness rather than by its fineness or power, who are impregnable in their little fortress of pedantry, and are for ever secure against the attacks of original genius.