Confessions and Criticisms by Julian Hawthorne
page 20 of 156 (12%)
page 20 of 156 (12%)
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Imitation is servitude, imagination is royalty. He who claims the name of
artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality--a more true because a more beautiful world--which only imagination can reveal. A truer world, --for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren, incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them, and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of detail will be lost, no homely picturesque circumstance, no touch of human pathos or humor; but all hardness, rigidity, and finality will disappear, and your story will be not yours alone, but that of every one who feels and thinks. Spirit gives universality and meaning; but alas! for this new gospel of the auctioneer's catalogue, and the crackling of thorns under a pot. He who deals with facts only, deprives his work of gradation and distinction. One fact, considered in itself, has no less importance than any other; a lump of charcoal is as valuable as a diamond. But that is the philosophy of brute beasts and Digger Indians. A child, digging on the beach, may shape a heap of sand into a similitude of Vesuvius; but is it nothing that Vesuvius towers above the clouds, and overwhelms Pompeii? * * * * * In proceeding from the general to the particular,--to the novel as it actually exists in England and America,--attention will be confined strictly to the contemporary outlook. The new generation of novelists (by which is intended not those merely living in this age, but those who actively belong to it) differ in at least one fundamental respect from the later representatives of the generation preceding them. Thackeray and Dickens did not deliberately concern themselves about a philosophy of life. With more or less complacency, more or less cynicism, they accepted the religious and social canons which had grown to be the commonplace of |
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