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Mind and thing -feeling and material

not any more, we might say, than minds are out bodies. Our resources in the way of sensation, and our experiences in the way of satisfactory and unsatisfactory feeling, are all of them won out of our intercourse with things, and are thought and imagined by us as qualities and properties of the things. Especially we see this in music. Here we have an art entirely made up of a material-musical tone-which one may say does not exist at all in the natural world, and is altogether originated by our inventive and imaginative manipulation of physical things, pressing on in the line of creative discovery which something very like accident must at first have opened up to us.1 Apart from this imaginative operation upon physical things, our fancy in the realm of music could have done as good as nothing.

And in principle it is the same with all the arts. All the material and the physical process which the artist uses—take our English language as used in poetry for an example—has been elaborated and refined, and, so to speak, consecrated by ages of adaptation and application in which it has been fused and blended with feeling-and it carries the life-blood of all this endeavour in its veins; and that is how, as we have said over and over again, feelings get their embodiment, and embodiments get their feeling. If you try to cut the thought and fancy loose from the body of the stuff in which it moulds its pictures and poetic ideas and musical constructions, you impoverish your fancy, and arrest its growth, and reduce it to a bloodless shade. When I pronounce even a phrase so commonplace in itself as "Rule, Britannia!" the actual vibrations of the sound, the bodily experience I am aware of in saying it, is alive with the history of England which passed into the words in the usage and formation of the language. Up to a certain point, language is poetry ready-made for us.

And I suppose that a greater painter, in his actual handling of his brush, has present with him a sense of meaning and fitness which is one with the joy of execution, both of

'This applies even to the development of song, so far as that involves a musical system.

which the experience of a lifetime has engrained in the cooperation of his hand and eye. I take it, there is a pleasure in the brush stroke, which is also a sense of success in the use of the medium, and of meaning in hitting the exact effect which he wants to get. We common people have something analogous to all this, when we enjoy the too-rare sensation of having found the right word. In such "finding" there is a creative element. A word is, quite strictly speaking, not used twice in the same sense.

idealism

Croce says, indeed, that the artist has every stroke of the brush in his mind as complete before he executes it as after. The suggestion is that using the brush adds nothing to his False inward or mental work of art. I think that this is false idealism. The bodily thing adds immensely to the mere idea and fancy, in wealth of qualities and connections. If we try to cut out the bodily side of our world, we shall find that we have reduced the mental side to a mere nothing.

And so, when we said that you can carry away the soul of a thing and leave its body behind, we always added that you must in doing so confer its soul upon a new and spiritualised body. Your imagination must be an imagination of something, and if you refuse to give that something a definite structure, you pass from the aesthetic semblance to the region of abstract thought. I have spoken of sound as physical; if this is a difficulty it is enough to call it sensuous, and sensuous in immediate connection with other physical properties and experiences. This applies both to music and to language.

All this later argument of ours, starting from the importance of medium and technique, has aimed at exhibiting in detail the double process of creation and contemplation which is implied in the aesthetic attitude, and the impossibility of Getting feeling separating one factor of it from another. And into an object it is the same question as that stated in other words, how a feeling can be got into an object. This is the central problem of the aesthetic attitude; and, as we have seen, the best material for solving it for us who are not great artists comes from any minor experience we may have at

command in which we have been aware of the outgoing of feeling into expression. We must think not merely of the picture in the gallery or the statue in the museum, but of the song and the dance, the dramatic reading, the entering into music, or the feel of the material in the minor arts, or simply, of the creative discovery of the right word.

The festal or social view of art will help us here. Suppose a tribe or a nation has won a great victory; "they are feeling big, and they want to make something big," as I have heard an expert say. That, I take it, is the rough account of the beginning of the aesthetic attitude. And according to their capacity and their stage of culture they may make a pile of their enemies' skulls, or they may build the Parthenon. The point of the aesthetic attitude lies in the adequate fusion of body and soul, where the soul is a feeling, and the body its expression, without residue on either side.

How we may discover the aesthetic value of a piece of art may be seen in the following passage from Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism, by Charles Mills Gayley and Fred Newton Scott (Ginn & Co., 1901). "The absolute aesthetic worth of a literary production is decided on its own merits purely, without reference to the stage of culture which it occupies, its artistic environment, or the value of similar productions of the past or present. A work of absolute aesthetic worth has universal import; it belongs to the literature of the world. The relative aesthetic worth of a literary production is determined by comparing it with similar productions of the nation, and especially of the period. A work may stand relatively to the narrow or undeveloped literature of the race very high, but absolutely very low. Aesthetic criticism is always liable to personal bias or prejudice, but the investigator can, in some degree, guard himself against unfair decisions by subjecting the production under examination to the following questions: (1) Is the tendency of the work worthy? (2) Is the material (the subject) worthy and comformable to the tendency already described? (3) Is the subject fittingly and artistically handled? i. e., is the technical composition or treatment successful? (4) Is the style appropriate and artistic? (5) If the work is a poem, is the rhythmical (metrical) form appropriate and artistic? (6) If epic or dramatic, does the execution of the story satisfy the requirements of essential probability? Are the characters psychologically true and consistent? Do the descriptions (epic) satisy the requirements of probability? Other tests will suggest themselves to the critic. But all such tests are re

ducible to three: Does the work possess qualities of ideal worth, of universal acceptability, of permanent vitality? Now, when this interrogatory can be unreservedly answered in the affirmative, the production concerned may safely be esteemed as of absolute aesthetic value; but when, in answer to the interrogatory, reference must be had to the spirit and productions of the people or the period, the work in question is probably of relative, not of absolute, aesthetic value."-op. cit., pp. 361-2.—Ēditor.

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

By ARNOLD BENNETT

In discussing the value of particular books, I have heard people say—people who were timid about expressing their views of literature in the presence of literary men: "It may be bad from a literary point of view, but there are very good things in it." Or: "I dare say the style is very bad, but really the book is very interesting and suggestive." Or: "I'm not an expert, and so I never bother my head about good style. All I ask for is good matter. And when I have got it, critics may say what they like about the book." And many other similar remarks, all showing that in the minds of the speakers there existed a notion that style is something supplementary to, and distinguishable from, matter; a sort of notion that a writer who wanted to be classical had first to find and arrange his matter, and then dress it up elegantly in a costume of style, in order to please beings called literary critics.

This is a misapprehension. Style cannot be distinguished

Style and matter

inseparable

from matter. When a writer conceives an idea he conceives it in a form of words. That form of words constitutes his style, and it is absolutely governed by the idea. The idea can only exist in words, and it can only exist in one form of words. You cannot say exactly the same thing in two different ways. Slightly alter the expression, and you slightly alter the idea. Surely it is obvious that the expression cannot be altered without altering the thing expressed! A writer, having conceived and expressed an idea, may, and probably will, "polish it up." But what does he polish up? To say that he polishes up his style is merely to say that he is polishing up his idea, that he has discovered faults or imperfections in his idea, and is perfecting it. An idea exists in proportion as it is expressed;

From Literary Taste: How to Form It, by Arnold Bennett. Reprinted by special permission of George H. Doran Company, Publishers.

Mr. Arnold Bennett is one of the ablest of the English realistic novelists and dramatists. His Old Wives' Tale (1908) is perhaps the best of his novels. See footnote, p. 24.-Editor.

it exists when it is expressed, and not before. It expresses itself. A clear idea is expressed clearly, and a vague idea vaguely. You need but take your own case and your own speech. For just as science is the development of commonsense, so is literature the development of common daily speech. The difference between science and common-sense is simply one of degree; similarly with speech and literature. Well, when you "know what you think," you succeed in saying what you think, in making yourself understood. When you "don't know what to think," your expressive tongue halts. And note how in daily life the characteristics of your style follow your mood; how tender it is when you are tender, how violent when you are violent. You have said to yourself in moments of emotion: "If only I could write- etc. You were wrong. You ought to have said: "If only I could think-on this high plane." When you have thought clearly you have never had any difficulty in saying what you thought, though you may occasionally have had some difficulty in keeping it to yourself. And when you cannot express yourself, depend upon it that you have nothing precise to express, and that what incommodes you is not the vain desire to express, but the vain desire to think more clearly. All this just to illustrate how style and matter are co-existent, and inseparable, and alike.

Bad

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Having read,

You cannot have good matter with bad style. Examine the point more closely. A man wishes to convey a fine idea to you. He employs a form of words. That form of words is his style. you say: "Yes, this idea is fine." The writer has therefore achieved his end. But in what imaginable circumstances can you say: "Yes, this idea is fine, but the style is not fine"? The sole medium of communication between you and the author has been the form of words. The fine idea has reached you. How? In the words, by the words. Hence the fineness must be in the words. You may say, superiorly: "He has expressed himself clumsily, but I can see what he means." By what light? By something in the words, in the style. That something is fine. Moreover, if the style is clumsy, are you

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