Diversity of content we
are beginning to find in profusion--Miss May Sinclair's latest
experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a
settled manner and a fixed reputation--but how rarely do we see even a
glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified aesthetic
impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has
been, present to consciousness is _ipso facto_ unified aesthetically. The
result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of
language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical
method.
The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving aesthetic unity
by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an
arbitrary (because non-aesthetic) argument. This argument was let down
like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a
unified crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artists
of the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this
method. How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his
employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally
different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big
for a parenthesis.
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