bout life.
Were this not so, art would not be concerned, as it claims to be, with
what is most important in the world, or at least most important to the
artist. "No man was ever yet a great poet," he insisted, "without
being at the same time a profound philosopher." We may recall the
dictum of Meredith: "If we do not speedily embrace philosophy in
fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction." But there is a great
difference between the two views. A work of art which is broad enough
to embrace philosophy is not the same thing as a work of art which is
embraced by philosophy, and is a complete product of the philosophical
imagination. Meredith extolled the intellect, which works
discursively; Coleridge extolled the reason, which apprehends
intuitively. For Coleridge, the intellect was only the organ by which
rational conceptions and intuitions are logically applied, and adapted
to circumstance. From his point of view we might conclude that the
genius of Meredith missed the greatest effects because, applying his
intellect _discursively_ to life, he so often refused to make it
subservient to any central conception or intuition. However that may
be, it is impossible to resist at least this conclusion, that the
artist in whose work we feel a _background_, whose work suggests more
than it directly is, being capable of arousing numberless feelings and
associations in the mind, so that it stands veritably as a symbol of
the whole of life, is the artist _par excellence_. Much of this effect
may be produced by an _unconscious_ activity which Coleridge
recognised as a part of the activity of genius. Nevertheless, whether
the activity is conscious or unconscious, it cannot do more than
express what arises in, or passes through, the imagination of the
artist; it is his complex conception of life and the significance of
life, his definite individual outlook, which accounts for this
background to a work of art, for this suggestiveness which makes it
appealing and awakening, for these associations which it has cunningly
brought before us. And whether or not we are going to allow that
something less than this can be called art, that the merely shapely
(shapely as if by accident) ought to be included in its category,
nevertheless, it is this which holds the highest place. The answer is
given by all the great authors of the world who have left their
individual stamp upon their art, who created images representative of
life as they conceived i