On the other side, every piece of ordinary perception is shot through with imagination, as with emotion. The mind is not a tabula rasa, but a most marvellous and intricate activity. And there is another explanation possible of the difference between the art, say, of Velasquez and of Fra Angelico than that the one was reproductive, the other the work of fantasy. At the time of Velasquez the whole interest and value of life centred round man and pre-eminently round the life of kings and nobles. On these people was focussed the emotional imagination of the age. To Fra Angelico the world was altogether different; its quintessential value lay outside it in our experience after death: this life was but a preparation for the next, and art was as it were the imaginative anticipation of the loveliness of heaven. Nevertheless, this anticipation spoke in terms of the most refined delights of this world, and the pæan to heaven was but a pæan to the beauty of life. Or if one may diverge from the artist to an appreciator of art, it is clear from Mr. Clive Bell's book, Art, that at the back of his mind there is a mystical metaphysics, a sort of conviction that the objects and events of this muddled material world are contemptible, and that we must seek for the reality of realities in some aloof inhuman state of consciousness. This is his third and in many ways most interesting preoccupation.
5. Each of the three definitions of art referred to at the beginning of this essay, those of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, sets up claims which must be satisfied if we do not want to be continually dogged by their importunate ghosts. One of the strongest objections to Plato's premise that the artist imitates is that it does not allow any element of novelty. It is true that in the physical act of painting the artist reproduces his vision, and that this act requires considerable technical accomplishment. But throughout the principal, all-powerful, radiating influence is the vision. This cannot correctly be called reproductive; it is just the unmediated consciousness of something, and of that something for the first time. For instance, the artist apparently works with a limited number of colours just as the musician with notes; but out of these he produces entirely new colours in combination (colours are never really out of combination), just as the musician produces literally new sounds. And this production is not a mere abstract physical fact, it is emotional and can contain the whole significance of a given period of history. The seeing of the colours and the emotional impulse coincide: it is an act of creation. Nor do the colours belong, so to speak, merely to the artist's palette and canvas, they are seen out there "in nature." It is a new vision of nature. It is, however, futile for the man in the street, when he sees the picture for the first time, to refer back to his own past experience, because this is a new experience, a new vision. At the same time, although the picture is hung up indoors in a room or gallery, the vision pierces, as it were, right through the canvas and walls and comes to a halt out there in the mysterious and infinite world. We have seen that this process of consciousness is undoubtedly imaginative, even if the completed product is almost historically real. It is not a mere statement of fact, but it always includes facts, surrounding them with concrete living individuality. Further, it always contains an element of the ideal, of aspiration, not of an abstract schematised Utopia or stereotyped moralising, but of a pulsating individual love and hate. In all art, even in the most realistic, this is transparent. It is, in a sense, the goodwill bending over the present and dreaming of the future.
Briefly, pictorial and plastic art is the creation of the visual feeling or emotional consciousness of the human mind. As such it is inseparably bound up in real objects, actions, and events. Remove it (speculatively in thought) and you get the bare though magnificent framework of science and the stark matters-of-fact of history.
PROSE AND MORTALITY
By J. C. SQUIRE
IN recent years several editors have put together anthologies of English prose passages, among them Mr. S. L. Edwards (An Anthology of English Prose; Dent), Messrs. Broadus and Gordon (English Prose; Milford), Mr. Treble (English Prose; Milford), and Professor Cowl (An Anthology of Imaginative Prose; Simpkin). Only the last of these books has much in common with the "treasury"[21] now presented by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. There are many kinds of good prose, of which Samuel Butler's is one, Jane Austen's another, Cowley's another: but the last two of these authors do not appear, and the first is only here by favour. A few exceptions are made, presumably owing to personal predilections or a feeling that such and such a great prose name should not be omitted. Swift is an instance. His prose, the faithful reflection of his mind, has many qualities, but it is out of place here. Generally speaking, to satisfy Mr. Pearsall Smith, in his present capacity, it is not enough—in fact, it is not anything—that prose should be adequate to its purpose, neat, easy, vivacious, well-knit. It must be prose on what by common consent is the highest level of prose, prose impeccably written, and prose with a dignity, a richness, a sonority or a sweetness of flow that rival the attributes of great poetry. Almost all his examples come into this category: he has no room here for the most vigorous pages of Scott or the most amusing chapters of Dickens. His extracts are to be detachable jewels, gorgeous or exquisite. On his fly-leaf he quotes Keats:
[21] A Treasury of English Prose. Edited by Logan Pearsall Smith. Constable. 6s. net.
"I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale—But when will it do so? Never—When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all the two-and-thirty Palaces. How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent indolence!"