making a plea for an English school of fiction, with such a detailed program as he suggested for a school of architecture. It was in those countries which had a rich Gothic architecture that the romantic movement was most naturally developed. (Compare Garnett's statement, given in Section 153.) The Gothic elements in architecture and in fiction were in one manner or another connected in the minds of Horace Walpole, Goethe, Scott, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Hugo. In external materials, architecture varies more than any other art. In part, it uses rare and precious materials, associated mainly with artistic service; in part, materials as common and as intimately associated with practical daily life as language. In materials and in structure, architecture is the most objective of the arts. The average mind is at once impressed by the mere physical presence length, height, mass of a great building; and these characteristics are also of essential artistic meaning. The labor of construction, and the comparative permanence of works of architecture, are facts which make the lamp of memory shine more clearly in its domain than in that of fiction. The processes of material decay, addition, and restoration have no analogies in the novel. The relation of part to whole is very different in a building and in a novel. In the former, there are many details which have less artistic meaning, separately considered, than the single words in a work of fiction. Yet it is in unity of structure that the two arts may be most readily compared. The best plots in the novel have a marked architectural quality. When the mind grasps the general design of a cathedral, the effect ceases to be sensuous and becomes one of the best examples of calm, free, intellectual mastery over the senses to be found in any form of art. In all that concerns the warmth of concrete individual experience, the trivial affairs of the common heart, architecture can offer no successful rivalry to the novel. It cannot readily be associated with the emotional history of an individual artist, as every novel can be. So far as architecture serves practical purposes as a shelter from the elements, and a center for community interests, it is connected with social life, however, in a more real manner than the novel is. In any novel of ethical quality, Ruskin's interpretation of the lights and shadows of architecture can be applied. In an imaginative view, the note of aspiration in Silas Marner is Gothic, the sceptical element belongs to the Renaissance. This novel is hardly simple enough in general structure to be classical; not sensuous enough to be Oriental. There is of course pronounced contrast between the lights and shadows of human experience. The constant presence of the author's personality is an important non-architectural quality. There is too much of her feminine and personal view, too little of the social, the national, or racial, for the spirit of architecture. 195. Landscape Gardening. The Catholic spirit of the middle ages was inclined to consider nature as under the curse of human sin, and given over to the devil. The art of landscape gardening, in modern Europe, is one of the innumerable results of the Renaissance spirit. At first it seems to have been decidedly aristocratic in tendency, as appears in the essay of Bacon on Gardens, and in similar essays by later writers. In the verse of the Restoration period, the parks of London are associated largely with the sovereign rather than with the citizens. Later, the progress of democracy may be followed in this art in a line causally related to the corresponding line in the history of fiction. The schools of pseudo-classic, romantic, and realistic taste are all represented in landscape gardening. Addison, for example, shows in this respect, as in many others, an interesting combination of pseudo-classicism with a foreshadowing of Gothic taste. The external materials of this art are natural in a more complete sense than is true of any other art. Landscape gardening, from one point of view, might be called the most real of all the arts; and in connection with realism, the idealization of nature, and especially with naturalism, a comparison with the novel offers some quite tangible points. In subject-matter, it would be very difficult to give any specific theme for a work of landscape gardening, which could be in any definite way compared with themes in the other arts. There are some analogies, interesting to the fancy at least, in the relations of miniature compositions to life-size in this art and in prose fiction. The small, perfectly kept city square might be compared in a number of respects with the short story; while such great masterpieces of the art as Lincoln Park, Central Park, and Hyde Park, or still more clearly the entire unified system of parks in a great modern city, might be quite closely compared with the full-length novel, in some very important if very broad qualities of style. CHAPTER XIV GENERAL ÆSTHETIC INTEREST 196. Esthetic Analysis and Esthetic Theory. — If, with out any a priori theory of what art is or should be, an inductive, comparative study is made of works of art, certain common elements are discovered in all of them. It may be that no one of these elements, or even the combination of them, will entirely distinguish an artistic work from a nonartistic; but a careful study of them may keep the student from wandering too far from facts in his later theorizing. In the present volume, the intention has been to follow, in the main, the method of such an inductive study. A summary of some of the principal points of analysis has been given in Section 189. In this chapter, the movement is, in a general way, from such analysis toward a more free, and perhaps a more suggestive, glance at æsthetic theory. 197. Nature and Humanity in a Work of Art. — Art may be briefly and broadly characterized as the modification of nature by man. Nature appears in every work of art, first, in a direct manner, in the sensuous material which the artist uses as a medium; second, in a more remote manner, in the mental substance and form for the artist takes his ideas largely from nature, and arranges them in forms, particularly those and time, which are in a real sense given to man of space by nature. The humanity of a work of art appears always in the personality of the artist and the personality of the recipient; often, and in the novel always, in the subject-matter. 248 THE STUDY OF A NOVEL 191 - 198. Language as External Material. — Considering language as an artistic medium, one may study its antiquity, beauty, rarity, flexibility, etc., in itself, or in comparison with the other mediums of art. It has already been noticed that language is in such constant use in practical life that the average mind finds it somewhat difficult to acquire a keen sense of its qualities as an artistic material. This fact might be considered as an advantage or a disadvantage for the novelist. To the realistic novelist, it has a certain clear advantage. No sensuous material can ever be perfectly satisfactory as a medium through which to express all the nature of an artistic soul. This fact recalls the various technical and moral attitudes of the artist toward his material. He may be vexed at its limitations, and attempt in a rebellious spirit to transcend them; or he may take delight in calm obedience to the will of nature, as it appears in marble, paint, or language. He may fail to acquire complete understanding of his medium; or he may become so absorbed in it as almost to forget that ideas and ideals may be expressed by means of its service. Some degree of special interest in language would naturally prove helpful in the study of a novel. One with a limited color sense would hardly make the most successful student of painting; one indifferent to variations of tone would not undertake serious criticism of music as an art. It is mainly the facts and theories immediately related to the external mediums of art which give rise to physiological æsthetics.1 The physiological view of art seems to require less emphasis in literature than in the non-literary arts, because language itself is only in part to be considered as a sensuous medium. 1 For special attention to this phase of æsthetic interest see, for example, Grant Allen's Physiological Æsthetics, N.Y., 1877; and Véron. |