Amateur prose, again, has an unevenness of texture and arrangement,
good ideas and salient thoughts floundering in a vapid and inferior
substance; it is often not appreciated by amateurs how much depends
on craftsmanship. I have known brilliant and accomplished
conversationalists who have been persuaded, perhaps in mature life,
to attempt a more definite piece of writing; when it is pathetic to
see suggestive and even brilliant thought hopelessly befogged by
unemphatic and disorderly statement. Still more difficult is it to
make people of fine emotions and swift perceptions understand that
such qualities are only the basis of authorship, and that the vital
necessity for self-expression is to have a knowledge, acquired or
instinctive, of the extremely symbolical and even traditional
methods and processes of representation. Vivid life is not the same
thing as vivid art; art is a sort of recondite and narrow
symbolism, by which the word, the phrase, the salient touch,
represents, suggests, hints the larger vision. It is in the
reducing of broad effects to minute effects that the mastery of art
lies.
Good work has often been done for the sake of money; I could name
some effective living writers who never willingly put pen to paper,
and would be quite content to express themselves in familiar talk,
or even to live in vivid reflection, if they were not compelled to
earn their living. Ambition will do something to mould an artist;
the philanthropic motive may put some wind into his sails, but by
itself it has little artistic value.
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