Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/223

Rh committing themselves to the extreme view that the record should be untinged with the personality of the writer. And, indeed, it is now fairly well agreed that such absolute objectivity, is neither possible nor desirable. It is not possible for many reasons. All the facts concerning any human episode, not to say life, cannot be recorded in a book, so infinitely numerous and complex are they, linked to thousands of others which are necessary to a full statement of them, and themselves involving a life history and an immemorial ancestry. Thus in the most severely realistic work selection is necessary, the selection of what seems significant to the author; and with this selection the personal element has already entered. Again, the sympathy of the author unconsciously determines questions of relative stress and emphasis; and intimate qualities of temperament and imagination affect the atmosphere in which the most baldly reported incidents take place.

So we arrive at the important distinction between artistic and literal truth. This is a distinction which everyone is accustomed to recognize in daily intercourse, yet which even professional critics are liable to muddle at times in the discussion of art. We all know how it is possible to report the bare facts of an action or the actual words of a conversation so as to convey to the hearer a totally false impression. On the other hand, an accurate view of what was done and said, with the right implications as to character, motive, and tone, may be conveyed without any reproduction of facts, in the narrow sense, at all. The second method is clearly that at which the artist should aim. His business is with the typical, not the individual; the permanently characteristic, not the temporarily actual; the spirit, not the letter. Most of us have heard discussions of a book in which a critic has urged as an objection that a certain incident is not lifelike, when a friend of the author has triumphantly answered that that precise incident is the thing in the work which actually happened. Supposing that the criticism was just, we see at once that one of two things must have occurred; either the author did not understand what happened in real life, failed to see its true causes and relations,