The reader will always have
his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine."
He says that his purpose has been "not to carry out in the approved
style some choice plot of fortune or misfortune, or fancy, or fine
thoughts, or incidents or courtesies--all of which has been done
overwhelmingly and well, probably never to be excelled . . . but to
conform with and build on the concrete realities and theories of
the universe furnished by science, and henceforth the only
irrefragable basis for anything, verse included--to root both
influences in the emotional and imaginative action of the modern
time, and dominate all that precedes or opposes them." He adds, "No
one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a
literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming
mainly toward art or aestheticism."
It is, of course, quite true that no writer is bound by traditions
of art, and there is no one who need consider how the thing has
been done before, or follow a prescribed code. But for all that,
art is not a thing of rules made and enforced by critics. All that
critics can do is to determine what the laws of art are; because
art has laws underlying it which are as certain as the laws of
gravity, even if they are not known. The more permanent art is, the
more it conforms to these laws; because the fact is that there is a
vital impulse in the human mind towards the expression of beauty,
and a vital discrimination too as to the form and method of that
expression.
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