Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/39

 Creek 33 the goal of life, it criticizes life, it " shows the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," it expresses life. In testing literature, consequently, the tests are almost exactly those which are applied to life. The work is a kind of index to the life of an author, or community, or century. An underlying philosophy of life is looked for, and to this philosophy of life are applied the tests which have been learned by contact with the real world, and in the end the work of art is judged good or bad accordingly. In the word of Aristotle, it must have " truth. " By the theory of creation (in the modern, not the Baconian sense), literature is life, is one of the many embodiments of the will to live, and Bacon himself seems to have meant something of the sort. The author is not trying, fundamentally, to give expression to a particular way of looking at life; he is merely driven by an instinct toward the reali- zation of his own nature. The writer starts with a need which may be satisfied only by artistic creation, and the process by which the need is satisfied is life, not a substitute for life, nor a representation of life, nor even an interpretation of life. In discussing the larger question of all art Lord Haldane, in The Pathway to Reality (Stage the Second), 20 presents, in philosophical language, the theory of creation: "Beauty and the objective world of art constitute a real by themselves, a real complete in itself, an aspect of the world as it seems which is real, as every other aspect is real, because it is an aspect in which the mind presents itself to itself, is for itself, a phase which cannot be explained away or melted down because it is one among the ultimate forms of reality." The author, en- deavoring later to make a division of his completed product into matter and form, sometimes says that he is merely a spectator of his own activity. But as a matter of fact he is no more and no less a spectator of the process than is one who talks a spectator or auditor of his speech process. Both the one and the other, to a very considerable extent, know what they meant to say only after they have said it. 21 Consequently, since literature is merely a distinct phase of life, the tests which are to be applied to it must be unique that is, they must be tests applicable to this particular form of life, and not tests borrowed from some other form or phase of life. 20 P. 182. 21 Joubert's statement, "We only know just what we meant to say after we have said it, " is quoted by Huey, The Psychology of Reading, p. 132.