For the welter of impressions, all
forcible but all discreet, which life presents, it substitutes a
certain artificial series of impressions, all indeed most feebly
represented, but all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the
same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or
like the graduated tints in a good picture. From all its chapters,
from all its pages, from all its sentences, the well-written novel
echoes and re-echoes its one creative and controlling thought; to
this must every incident and character contribute; the style must
have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a
word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer,
and (I had almost said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous,
infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in
comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and
emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of
experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.
A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a
proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work
of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both
inhere in nature, neither represents it. The novel, which is a
work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are
forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but
by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and
significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.
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