Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/45

 Creek 39 the "emotion recollected in tranquillity?" In a sense, perhaps, yes; but this emotion has been transformed under the influence of another emotion, that of the creator of the object of aesthetic interest. 26 If the emotion of love or hate or despair were upper- most, the tendency would be to quite another kind of action than writing. What I wish to say is, that the emotion becomes the material for an activity beyond itself, and the emotion which reappears in tranquillity if the description is to be accepted is in truth another emotion. From the point of view of the creative theory, literature is a distinct phase of human activity, just as the other arts are, yet the material entering into this phase of life is precisely human life, thoughts, language, emotions, images, and so on emotions being probably of greatest importance. Moreover, a fine aesthetic pro- duct can be built only from the finest materials that is, from the most intense and noblest emotions, which are of course subject to criticism other than aesthetic. And yet it is not the emotion as such that we feel; it is the emotion transformed. Normal emotion tends toward appropriate action. When the idea of appropriate action is removed, the emotion is often directed toward aesthetic accomplishment. For this reason art depends upon contemplation. But as the emotion becomes an element in art it becomes something different in character. This modification of the emotions is a difficult fact to explain, the difficulty being often mentioned in connection with tragedy. In great tragedy the emotions ostensibly aroused are the most painful; yet the final effect is a lofty pleasure, and, often, a very unalloyed pleasure. But the problem is precisely the same with the pleasurable emotions. They do not come to the reader as they are in themselves, or, if they do, the effect is not artistic at least, not aesthetic. In fact, I think all will agree from exper- ience that if the emotion per se, whether painful or pleasurable, is allowed to dominate the reader (as it may in reading fiction, for instance), the effect is not aesthetic. It is a commonplace that the emotional element of great litera- ture resides largely in the style. In making this statement one is ordinarily thinking of the reader, but it is equally true for the 26 Wordsworth himself, in the passage to which I have referred, recognizes that the emotion is modified into something "kindred. "