but deep, vital, and racial in its range and significance. To possess
the knowledge of an experience at once so remote and so rich in
disclosure of character, so charged with tragic interest, is to push
back the horizons of our own experience, to secure a real contribution
to our own enrichment and development. Whoever carries that process
far enough brings into his individual experience much of the richness
and splendour of the experience of the race.




Chapter XV.

Freshness of Feeling.


The primary charm of art resides in the freshness of feeling which it
reveals and conveys. An art which discloses fatigue, weariness,
exhaustion of emotion, deadening of interest, has parted with its
magical spell; for vitality, emotion, passionate interest in the
experiences of life, devout acceptance of the facts of life, are the
prime characteristics of art in those moments when its veracity and
power are at the highest point. A great work of art may be tragic in
the view of life which it presents, but it must show no sign of the
succumbing of the spirit to the appalling facts with which it deals;
even in those cases in which, as in the tragedy of "King Lear," blind
fate seems relentlessly sovereign over human affairs, the artist must
disclose in his attitude and method a sustained energy of spirit.
Nothing shows so clearly a decline in creative force as a loss of
interest on the part of the artist in the subject or material with