style. Further, the significance and the worth of literature are to be comprehended and assessed in the same way as the significance and the worth of any other phenomenon: by the exercise of common-sense. Common-sense will tell you that nobody, not even a genius, can be simultaneously vulgar and distinguished, or beautiful and ugly, or precise and vague, or tender and harsh. And common-sense will therefore tell you that to try to set up vital contradictions between matter and style is absurd. When there is a superficial contradiction, one of the two mutually-contradicting qualities is of far less importance than the other. If you refer literature to the standards of life, common-sense will at once decide which quality should count heaviest in your esteem. You will be in no danger of weighing a mere maladroitness of manner against a fine trait of character, or of letting a graceful deportment blind you to a fundamental vacuity. When in doubt, ignore style, and think of the matter as you would think of an individual.

SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON

By THE EDITOR

1

An English artist who renders the Orient has told how a Japanese Japanese boy learns to paint. Having already painting mastered the brush through long practice of writing, which to the Chinese and Japanese is a fine art in itself, and having learned the secrets of line and color from silent service in the master's studio, the novice is one day sent out of doors to follow the artist strokes of nature. For hours he will sit watching the iris lean from the wind, then spring back to snare the sunshine; or he will gaze into a pool where fish play like vagrant rainbows. Every changing gleam, every flowing motion is awaited, seen, and imaged in the mind. The lad returns to his corner, and with brush and color writes the memories down. Again and again he goes to the same pool or garden; again and again he strives to record the images. At last, flower, fish, and bird seem to drop living from his brush, as did rose and pearl from the lips of our fairytale maiden. There is in an American university a collection of Japanese paintings of many species of fish, so faithful in form and tint as to be treasured as scientific data. Yet the artist does not stop with such amazing imitation of nature, he does not for a moment confuse photographic realism with art. He cannot rest even in human portraiture: the actors, geishas, and samurai whom he paints must honorably arrange themselves as units of simplified color-patterns. The Japanese artist, in fact, prefers to paint the extra-human, partially because the particulars of nature fall more readily into artistic synthesis; partially also because in lotus and tiger, in pinetree and sea-wave he divines that essential spirit or kokoro which eye has not seen but which the magic brush may surprise and reveal.

Near my work-table there has long hung a cheap Japanese wood-print, representing a crow perched amid cherry-blossoms: a central mass of dramatic black, with dashes of soft

brown to make leaves and of white to make petals, all against a wash of pearl-grey that does not pretend to be either earth or sky. The thing is life that does not look before or after, but rejoices to simply be. Somehow spring carols aloofly through these staccato whites, while the black figure by some shrug of shoulder, glint of eye diffuses a libertine, ironic, world-embracing fellowship. An imaginative jest at nature, this, and by an obscure artist-one remembers also the famous Hokusai who, scorning imitation, turns a vast storm-wave into sculptured jade and flings the foam aloft to congeal into fleeting gulls. And Okio who, on that priceless screen, with a few dim lines of broken rhythm spreads the sea, and above it, by a grey gesture, unleashes from the void the two wild geese that leave us dizzy with their swiftness, yet poise forever on wings of stone. As if they were thoughts and the sea were death.

Need of

imagination

Such are the images which the artist catches from the flux of things, such the sweet anguish he draws from the harp of life. Painting which thus moves us cannot result from keen perception and retentive memory alone, but requires also a sense for the humanly significant even in the non-human, a power to reconceive and vitalize fragmentary facts, a deftness in handling the expressive sensuous medium of the art that must be amazing to the ungifted and the untrained. The materials are supplied by sense through the experience called living; they must be treasured in memory because no single or momentary aspect of things is sufficiently meaningful; they must be selected, supplemented, rewrought before a work of art is achieved. This purposeful play with images and ideas, which are the mental counterparts of sensations and perceptions, is called imagination. It is what makes art possible; more than we realize, it also determines society and all that we call humane. In daily life, in the efforts of science to understand and control that life and the stubborn physical world conditioning it, in the efforts of art to interpret and to delight all who live, imagination is a prime factor. To appreciate the nature and rôle

of imagination in both the practical and the aesthetic realm, we need to recall some of the simpler explanations offered by psychologists.

2

Knowing
through

The objective world—that complexity or stream of things felt to be external to our thinking selves—is continually being reflected into us and thus "known" through sense contacts and mental imaging recognition. Through eye, ear, finger-tip and the rest, with the connected nerves, we maintain liaison with this external world, and a first report of light, sound, pressure, momentarily cognized by itself, is called a sensation. It seems to come directly from an outside object, and to belong to it. But immediately upon entering consciousness it is related to records of previous sensations, becoming enriched in content, somewhat like a man enlisting in an army that serves the common cause. At once it joins a squad or a corporal's guard, and the whole is placed and evaluated, to be theorized about as a perception. It is now knowledge about a fact, which is still present outside. It means that fact, as, for example, whiteness and coldness together may mean snow blown against the cheek. When a thing or happening that has been perceived ceases to be felt as present it remains, if at all, as image or idea. Therefore memory has been defined as knowledge of things that were physically present but are no longer so.

Now when sensations come they affect us as pleasant or unpleasant, or in biological terms as either physically upbuilding and promotive of the life process or physically destructive and diminishing of life. Familiar or continual sensations like the presence of light or the weight of clothing, adjustments of the bodily organs to routine encounter with color, form, sound, etc., are so habitually prepared for and registered as to be generally unattended to. So what the psychologist calls the affection-sense of pleasantness or of unpleasantness-natural to any of these workaday sensation-groups tends to lessen with repetition and to cease. And here we are reminded of one of the functions of art: by means of characteristic or associational images it restores to the drab

scene, the parrot babble, the stale notion, the commonplace good or evil deed, their pristine charm or lost significance. It even reworks magically what is discordant, mysterious, terrifying, or loathly, enabling new perceptions of these that bring emotions strangely delightful.

We have just been using other terms that, although familiar, need definition. To the psychologist,

Feeling and emotion

feeling is the effect of a sensation or a simple sensation-group coming through a bodily organ and rising into consciousness with its peculiar affection of pleasantness or unpleasantness. So one is properly said to have a feeling of heat or of hunger. Emotion is differentiated as the effect of a group of sensations related through repeated experience with other groups, all colored by affection. One is therefore said to be under emotion when a set of circumstances, a series of incidents, an accumulation of facts or of supplemental inferences, or other integration of experiences excites hope, anger, pride, love, dread, or what not. Emotion is then the conscious side of a general bodily adjustment to an external complex, and is stronger than mere feeling. When prolonged, emotion is called mood: thus dread may become melancholy; approval, enthusiasm. When a mood in turn continues and comes to control the personality, it determines temperament. So a man may be found, in the old terminology, mercurial, jovial, or saturnine. Or, again, artistic: sensitive, that is, and driven to self-expression through the concrete. And art, by vivifying ideas that were once affective perceptions and by combining these into new totalities through associations cunningly sought to this end, creates permanent sources of wonder, sympathy, and joy.

To the scientific man, who is but little subject to the tyranny of names, imagination is far from seeming

Scientific

mere artistic moonshine. Observation and ex- uses of periment fill his note-books; to heap up simple imagination facts he will break up the most stony or venerable associations. Yet a world in fragments is not a world possessed and understood, and the aims of science are to discover relationships among discrete phenomena, to reunite scattered