sensitive side, and receives the shock upon the adamantine shield of the sceptical reason. In this way it substitutes one imperfect kind of knowledge for another. Before, it realised strongly, but scarcely analysed at all; now, it analyses most carefully, but ceases in turn to realise. As the victory of the scientific spirit becomes more and more decided, there passes a deep shudder of discomfort through the whole world of those whose business is with realising, and not with testing knowledge. Religion is struck first . . . . but poetry and art suffer in their turn. We may look forward to a time when a new reconciliation shall have taken place between the two sorts of knowledge. When the distinction of the two kinds of knowledge has been laid down, it becomes clear that literature, in the most general sense, is the organ of the fuller knowledge, the knowledge which apprehends with the imagination and sympathy, and in which we make personal appropriation of what we understand. To knowledge in this sense no subject-matter ever becomes antiquated. Literary study becomes a foreign travel, into all ages and among all peoples: not-like science for the purpose of making discoveries, but with a view to that personal contact with others which is the enlargement of ourselves. Literature, then, by its matter is in close affiliation with philosophy; by its mode of treatment, with art. It would be deemed the very narrowest of literary study that should treat the content of literature as if it were only philosophy, and ignore the element of art. It is an equally narrow conception of the study that makes the whole a question of literary art, and overlooks that literature is also a mode of philosophy. BOOK VI LITERATURE AS A MODE OF ART CHAPTER XXII: THE GRAMMAR OF LITERARY ART CHAPTER XXIII: PLOT AS POETIC ARCHITECTURE AND ARTISTIC PROVIDENCE CHAPTER XXIV: POETIC ORNAMENT: THEORY OF IMAGERY AND SYM BOLISM CHAPTER XXV: LITERARY ECHOING: THE CONCEPTION OF LITERATURE AS A SECOND NATURE CHAPTER XXVI: LANGUAGE AS A FACTOR IN LITERARY ART CHAPTER XXII THE GRAMMAR OF LITERARY ART No argument is needed to prove that literary study includes the recognition of literature as one of the fine arts. To this side of the general subject this Sixth Book is devoted. The mode of treatment seems to be conveyed by the expression, 'the grammar of literary art.' We are familiar with the grammar of language, the grammar of music, the grammar of Greek art. By a similar usage of the term 'the grammar of literary art' will indicate analysis applied to the elements and effects of literary art from the theoretic point of view. Traditionally, the discussion of literature from the art side has been left to such studies as poetics and rhetoric. These titles go back to the age of Aristotle. But it must be remembered that at that period the classification of studies was not well established: thus the modern reader of Aristotle's Poetics is astonished to find a considerable section of it devoted to the linguistic grammar of our school books. There will be much in common between the studies so named and the grammar of literary art. But the point of view is different: the interest of grammar is theoretic, the other studies are concerned with technique and the practical application of literary art. To a large extent the Poetics of Aristotle is a manual of composition. And rhetoric from the first has been made a practical art—the equipment of the professional orator for his daily work, though there has been a gradual modification in the conception of rhetoric, until it can almost mean literary appreciation. To me it seems that there is real value in separating the theoretical and the practical treatments of art. In a modern manual of 1 Poetics, chapters xx-xxii. rhetoric a large space will be given to tropes and figures of speech, to the detailed exposition of such things as metonymy, synecdoche, apostrophe, irony, hyperbole, and the like. All this will be serviceable to practice in style, which is applied literary art; it will be like the 'exercises' by which the pianist or violinist develops his technique. But all this yields little to the theory of literature: such things sum up as the application of specific means to specific ends, or as the economy of force. Grammar, on the other hand, is a matter of theory. Whether it be the grammar of literary art, or the ordinary grammar of linguistic usage, we may say that no man by such grammatical study will add one cubit to his stature as poet or expositor; though perhaps some poetry or exposition has been dwarfed by the lack of it. A more serious objection to the terms 'poetic' and 'rhetoric' is that the distinction of these seems to rest largely upon what in this work I have maintained to be a capital error of traditional literary study the confusion of the distinction between verse and prose with the distinction between poetry and prose. Aristotle was the first to warn against this confusion: but it has become vastly more serious in our time, when the larger half of creative literature is expressed in prose. It would of course be possible to discuss separately modes of creative and modes of discussional literature; but it seems doubtful whether there would be any advantage in the separation. One element in literary art is description: it is clear that what goes to make effective description will to a very large extent be the same whether the description is to be in prose or in verse, whether it is to be part of creative poetry or rhetorical exposition. Most of the elements claimed for poetry have their counterparts in discussional literature. The simile is supposed to be a great poetic weapon: but in final analysis it is difficult to separate this from the illustration or analogy in the exposition of prose. Metaphorical 1 Compare above, chapter i, page 13. |