Part 12 (1/2)
Mr Moore speaks of M Zola's vast i at a ti as it appears to ination that sees a whole world under the influence of one particular fury be compared with that which surveys this planet and sees its inhabitants busy with a million diverse occupations? Drink, Money, War--these els, for pulpit purposes But the e of the Rougon-Macquart fael smote Alexander McGlue”
while the methods of the _Roman Experimental_ can hardly be better illustrated than by the rest of the faave him protracted repose: He wore a check shi+rt and a Number 9 shoe, And he had a pink wart on his nose”
SELECTION
May 4, 1895 Hazlitt
”Coround in his white dress and tightened turban, the chief of the Indian jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to save our lives”You relers, and how their performance shook his self-conceit
”It makes me ashamed of myself I ask what there is that I can do as well as this Nothing Is there no one thing in which I can challenge co as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do I can write a book; so can many others who have not even learned to spell
What abortions are these essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do”
Nevertheless a play of Shakespeare's, or a painting by Reynolds, or an essay by Hazlitt, ih it be, is of ht-rope walking Hazlitt proceeds to exaood reasons
But there is one reason, omitted by him, or perhaps left for the reader to infer, on which wesubject, and tempts to much abstract talk on the universality of the Fine Arts; but I think we shall be putting it sih if we say that an artist is superior to an ”artiste”
because he does hat ninety-nine people in a hundred are doing poorly all their lives
Selection
When people co ”real life” to be a conglorees of pertinence and io on to show that the novelist selects from this mass those which are the most important and pertinent to his purpose (I speak here particularly of the novelist, but the saed of all practitioners of the fine arts) And, in a way, this is true enough But who (unless in an idlea treatise in ards it as a conglomerate of innumerable details? Critics say that the artist's difficulty lies in selecting the details proper to his purpose, and his justification rests on the selection he makes But where lives the man whose difficulty and whose justification do not lie just here?--who is not consciously or unconsciously selecting froht? You take the most ordinary country walk How rass do you pass without perceiving them at all?
How many thousands of others do you perceive, and at once allow to slip into oblivion? Suppose you have walked fourpleasure in country sights I dare wager the objects that have actually engaged your attention for two seconds are less than five hundred, and those that remain in your memory, when you reach home, as few as a dozen All the way you have been, quite unconsciously, selecting and rejecting And it is the brain's bedazzleest, and not merely the rhythmical physical exertion, that lulls the matic mood so prettily described by Stevenson--the htly or laughingly, as a child thinks, or as we think in adoze; we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ords and rhyather ourselves together for an effort, we reat barons of the mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one at ho on his own private thought!”
Again, certain critics never see the novelist with coraphy ”Mr So-and-So's fidelity to life suggests the camera rather than the brush and palette”; and the implication is that Mr So-and-So and the camera resemble each other in their tendency to reproduce irrelevant detail
The camera, it is assurapher does not select But is this true? I have known raphy whose enthusias a he saw, from every possible point of view Even the aly as a rule: still he selects Theup a camera in any particular spot implies a process of selection And when the deed is done, the scenery has been libelled Our eyes behold the photograph, and go through another process of selection In short, whatever they look upon,ceaselessly
The artist therefore does well and consciously, and for a particular end, what every man or woman does poorly, and unconsciously, and casually He differs in the photographer in that he has more licence to eliminate When once the camera is set up, it's owner's power over the landscape has coraphthat he would have gone through in contee is that the point of view has been selected for hiue in any place and at any time
The truth seems to be that the human brain abhors the complexity--the apparently aimless coet away fro that
And it contrives so well that I suppose the average lomerate of details which the critics call real life He holds one stout thread, at any rate, to guide hih the maze--the thread of self-interest
The justification of the poet or the novelist is that he discovers a better thread He follows up a universal where the averageit, he does but use those processes by which the average man arrives, or attempts to arrive, at pleasure
EXTERNALS
Nov 18, 1893 Story and Anecdote
I suppose I am nofroestions, outlines of plots, sketches of situations, characters, and so forth