The reward of social consideration is refused, it is true, to all artists, or accepted by them at their immediate peril.By a natural adjustment, in countries where the artist has sought and attained a certain modest social elevation, the issue has been changed, and the architect or painter, when his health is proposed, finds himself, sorely against the grain, returning thanks for the employer of labour, the genial host, the faithful husband, the tender father, and other pillars of society.The risk of too great familiarity with an audience which insists on honouring the artist irrelevantly, at the expense of the art, must be run by all; a more clinging evil besets the actor, in that he can at no time wholly escape from his phantasmal second self.On this creature of his art he has lavished the last doit of human capacity for expression;with what bearing shall he face the exacting realities of life?
Devotion to his profession has beggared him of his personality;ague, old age and poverty, love and death, find in him an entertainer who plies them with a feeble repetition of the triumphs formerly prepared for a larger and less imperious audience.The very journalist - though he, too, when his profession takes him by the throat, may expound himself to his wife in phrases stolen from his own leaders - is a miracle of detachment in comparison; he has not put his laughter to sale.It is well for the soul's health of the artist that a definite boundary should separate his garden from his farm, so that when he escapes from the conventions that rule his work he may be free to recreate himself.But where shall the weary player keep holiday? Is not all the world a stage?
Whatever the chosen instrument of an art may be, its appeal to those whose attention it bespeaks must be made through the senses.
Music, which works with the vibrations of a material substance, makes this appeal through the ear; painting through the eye; it is of a piece with the complexity of the literary art that it employs both channels, - as it might seem to a careless apprehension, indifferently.
For the writer's pianoforte is the dictionary, words are the material in which he works, and words may either strike the ear or be gathered by the eye from the printed page.The alternative will be called delusive, for, in European literature at least, there is no word-symbol that does not imply a spoken sound, and no excellence without euphony.But the other way is possible, the gulf between mind and mind may be bridged by something which has a right to the name of literature although it exacts no aid from the ear.The picture-writing of the Indians, the hieroglyphs of Egypt, may be cited as examples of literary meaning conveyed with no implicit help from the spoken word.Such an art, were it capable of high development, would forsake the kinship of melody, and depend for its sensual elements of delight on the laws of decorative pattern.In a land of deaf-mutes it might come to a measure of perfection.But where human intercourse is chiefly by speech, its connexion with the interests and passions of daily life would perforce be of the feeblest, it would tend more and more to cast off the fetters of meaning that it might do freer service to the jealous god of visible beauty.The overpowering rivalry of speech would rob it of all its symbolic intent and leave its bare picture.Literature has favoured rather the way of the ear and has given itself zealously to the tuneful ordering of sounds.Let it be repeated, therefore, that for the traffic of letters the senses are but the door-keepers of the mind; none of them commands an only way of access, - the deaf can read by sight, the blind by touch.
It is not amid the bustle of the live senses, but in an under-world of dead impressions that Poetry works her will, raising that in power which was sown in weakness, quickening a spiritual body from the ashes of the natural body.The mind of man is peopled, like some silent city, with a sleeping company of reminiscences, associations, impressions, attitudes, emotions, to be awakened into fierce activity at the touch of words.By one way or another, with a fanfaronnade of the marching trumpets, or stealthily, by noiseless passages and dark posterns, the troop of suggesters enters the citadel, to do its work within.The procession of beautiful sounds that is a poem passes in through the main gate, and forthwith the by-ways resound to the hurry of ghostly feet, until the small company of adventurers is well-nigh lost and overwhelmed in that throng of insurgent spirits.
To attempt to reduce the art of literature to its component sense-elements is therefore vain.Memory, "the warder of the brain," is a fickle trustee, whimsically lavish to strangers, giving up to the appeal of a spoken word or unspoken symbol, an odour or a touch, all that has been garnered by the sensitive capacities of man.It is the part of the writer to play upon memory, confusing what belongs to one sense with what belongs to another, extorting images of colour at a word, raising ideas of harmony without breaking the stillness of the air.He can lead on the dance of words till their sinuous movements call forth, as if by mesmerism, the likeness of some adamantine rigidity, time is converted into space, and music begets sculpture.To see for the sake of seeing, to hear for the sake of hearing, are subsidiary exercises of his complex metaphysical art, to be counted among its rudiments.Picture and music can furnish but the faint beginnings of a philosophy of letters.Necessary though they be to a writer, they are transmuted in his service to new forms, and made to further purposes not their own.
