e
material is to miss the meaning of the work.

In an art such as music, in which form and content are one and
inextricable, it is not difficult to understand that the medium of
expression which the art employs is necessarily symbolic, for here
the form cannot exist apart from the meaning to be conveyed. In the
art of literature, however, the case is not so clear, for the material
with which the poet, the novelist, the dramatist works, material
made up of the facts of the world about us, we are accustomed to
regard as objective realities. An incident is an incident, the
inevitable issue of precedent circumstances, and that's all there is to
it Character is the result of heredity, environment, training, plus the
inexplicable _Ego._ To regard these facts of life which are so actual
and immediate as a kind of animate algebraic formulae seems
absurd, but absurd only as one is unable to penetrate to the inner
meaning of things. "Madame Bovary," to take an example quite at
random, is called a triumph of realism. Now realism, of all literary
methods, should register the fact as it is, and least of all should
concern itself with symbols. But this great novel is more than the
record of one woman's life. Any one who has come to understand
the character and temperament of Flaubert as revealed in his Letters
must feel that "Madame Bovary" is no arbitrary recital of tragic
incident, but those people who move through his pages, what they
do and what goes on about them, expressed for Flaubert his own
dreary, baffled rebellion against life. That the artist may consciously
employ the facts of life, not for the sake of the fact, but to
communicate his feeling by thus bodying it forth in concrete
symbols, there is explicit testimony. In an essay dealing with his
own method of composition, Poe writes: "I prefer commencing with
the consideration of an _effect._ Keeping originality _always_ in
view . . . I say to myself, in the first place, 'of the innumerable
effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
occasion, select?' Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid
effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or
tone . . . afterwards looking about me (or rather within) for such
combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the
construction of the effect." Yes, physical circumstances, the
succession of incident, shift