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CHAPTER IV - A NOTE ON REALISM (16)
STYLE is the invariable mark of any master; and for the
student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with
the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may
improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force,
the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of
birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the
just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the
proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the
elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important,
and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end -
these, which taken together constitute technical perfection,
are to some degree within the reach of industry and
intellectual courage. What to put in and what to leave out;
whether some particular fact be organically necessary or
purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it
may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally,
whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and
notably, or in some conventional disguise: are questions of
plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that
patrols the highways of executive art has no more
unanswerable riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great
change of the past century has been effected by the admission
of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at
length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less
wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the
novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more
ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it
has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely
technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still
too harsh to call survival. With a movement of alarm, the
wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from these
extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked,
narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified,
and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general
lightening of this baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld
the starveling story - once, in the hands of Voltaire, as
abstract as a parable - begin to be pampered upon facts.
The introduction of these details developed a particular
ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has
led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A
man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on
technical successes. To afford a popular flavour and attract
the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to
call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what
more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of
the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to
degenerate into mere FEUX-DE-JOIE of literary tricking. The
other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible
colours and visible sounds.
This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to
remind us of the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict
of the critics. All representative art, which can be said to
live, is both realistic and ideal; and the realism about
which we quarrel is a matter purely of externals. It is no
especial cultus of nature and veracity, but a mere whim of
veering fashion, that has made us turn our back upon the
larger, more various, and more romantic art of yore. A
photographic exactitude in dialogue is now the exclusive
fashion; but even in the ablest hands it tells us no more - I
think it even tells us less - than Moliere, wielding his
artificial medium, has told to us and to all time of Alceste
or Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is
forgotten. Yet truth to the conditions of man's nature and
the conditions of man's life, the truth of literary art, is
free of the ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a
novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene may be
pitched in London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on
the mountains of Beulah. And by an odd and luminous
accident, if there is any page of literature calculated to
awake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that TROILUS AND
CRESSIDA which Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly anger with
the world, grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy.
This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood,
regards not in the least degree the fundamental truth, but
only the technical method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or
as abstract as you please, you will be none the less
veracious; but if you be weak, you run the risk of being
tedious and inexpressive; and if you be very strong and
honest, you may chance upon a masterpiece.
A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during
the period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from
these swaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and
becomes at length that most faultless, but also, alas! that
incommunicable product of the human mind, a perfected design.
On the approach to execution all is changed. The artist must
now step down, don his working clothes, and become the
artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his
delicate Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide,
almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the
particularity of execution of his whole design.
The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical
preoccupation stands them instead of some robuster principle
of life. And with these the execution is but play; for the
stylistic problem is resolved beforehand, and all large
originality of treatment wilfully foregone. Such are the
verses, intricately designed, which we have learnt to admire,
with a certain smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang
and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity
or even breadth of plastic style takes the place of pictorial
nobility of design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to
begin to write ESMOND than VANITY FAIR, since, in the first,
the style was dictated by the nature of the plan; and
Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of mind, enjoyed
and got good profit of this economy of effort. But the case
is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that have been
conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from
the author's mind, the moment in which he begins to execute
is one of extreme perplexity and strain. Artists of
indifferent energy and an imperfect devotion to their own
ideal make this ungrateful effort once for all; and, having
formed a style, adhere to it through life. But those of a
higher order cannot rest content with a process which, as
they continue to employ it, must infallibly degenerate
towards the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work
in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engagement of
the whole forces of their mind; and the changing views which
accompany the growth of their experience are marked by still
more sweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So
that criticism loves to dwell upon and distinguish the
varying periods of a Raphael, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven.
It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive
moment when execution is begun, and thenceforth only in a
less degree, that the ideal and the real do indeed, like good
and evil angels, contend for the direction of the work.
Marble, paint, and language, the pen, the needle, and the
brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable
impotences, their hours, if I may so express myself, of
insubordination. It is the work and it is a great part of
the delight of any artist to contend with these unruly tools,
and now by brute energy, now by witty expedient, to drive and
coax them to effect his will. Given these means, so
laughably inadequate, and given the interest, the intensity,
and the multiplicity of the actual sensation whose effect he
is to render with their aid, the artist has one main and
necessary resource which he must, in every case and upon any
theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress much and omit
more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, and
suppress what is tedious and necessary. But such facts as,
in regard to the main design, subserve a variety of purposes,
he will perforce and eagerly retain. And it is the mark of
the very highest order of creative art to be woven
exclusively of such. There, any fact that is registered is
contrived a double or a treble debt to pay, and is at once an
ornament in its place, and a pillar in the main design.
Nothing would find room in such a picture that did not serve,
at once, to complete the composition, to accentuate the
scheme of colour, to distinguish the planes of distance, and
to strike the note of the selected sentiment; nothing would
be allowed in such a story that did not, at the same time,
expedite the progress of the fable, build up the characters,
and strike home the moral or the philosophical design. But
this is unattainable. As a rule, so far from building the
fabric of our works exclusively with these, we are thrown
into a rapture if we think we can muster a dozen or a score
of them, to be the plums of our confection. And hence, in
order that the canvas may be filled or the story proceed from
point to point, other details must be admitted. They must be
admitted, alas! upon a doubtful title; many without marriage
robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceeds towards
completion, too often - I had almost written always - loses
in force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is
swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our
little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive
eloquence or slipshod talk.
But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those
particulars which we know we can describe; and hence those
most of all which, having been described very often, have
grown to be conventionally treated in the practice of our
art. These we choose, as the mason chooses the acanthus to
adorn his capital, because they come naturally to the
accustomed hand. The old stock incidents and accessories,
tricks of work-manship and schemes of composition (all being
admirably good, or they would long have been forgotten) haunt
and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectly
appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean
us from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice
of art. To struggle, to face nature, to find fresh
solutions, and give expression to facts which have not yet
been adequately or not yet elegantly expressed, is to run a
little upon the danger of extreme self-love. Difficulty sets
a high price upon achievement; and the artist may easily fall
into the error of the French naturalists, and consider any
fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground of brilliant
handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modern landscape-
painter, who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and
science well displayed can take the place of what is, after
all, the one excuse and breath of art - charm. A little
further, and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy
sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious
passage as an infidelity to art.
We have now the matter of this difference before us. The
idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines,
loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the
conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in
tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine
intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so
dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-
pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the
eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once
chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities and
dangers. The immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice
the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity,
or, in the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his
readers under facts; but he comes in the last resort, and as
his energy declines, to discard all design, abjure all
choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to
communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger
of the idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose
all grip of fact, particularity, or passion.
We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which
is conceived with honesty and executed with communicative
ardour. But though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and
though in every case the artist must decide for himself, and
decide afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding work and new
creation; yet one thing may be generally said, that we of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we do
the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err
upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal.
Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct our own
decisions, always holding back the hand from the least
appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to
begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate,
dignified, happily mirthful, or, at the last and least,
romantic in design.
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