l"; chop the descriptions and chop the
incidents; chop the characters; "chop it and pat it and mark it with
T," as the nursery rhyme says, "and put it in the oven for Baby and
me!" It is an impertinence, this theory, and an insult to natural
human instincts.

Art is not a "hole and corner" thing, an affair of professional
preciosities and discriminations, a set of tiresome rules to be learned
by rote.

Art is the free play of generous and creative imaginations with the
life-blood of the demiurgic forces of the universe in their veins.
There is a large and noble joy in it, a magnanimous nonchalance and
aplomb, a sap, an ichor, a surge of resilient suggestion, a rich
ineffable magic, a royal liberality.

Devoid of the energy of a large and free imagination, art dwindles
into an epicene odalisque, a faded minion of pleasure in a perfumed
garden. It becomes the initiatory word of an exclusive Rosicrucian
order. It becomes the amulet of an affected superiority, the signet
ring of a masquerading conspiracy.

The habitation of the spirit of true art is the natural soul of man, as it
has been from the beginning and as it will be to the end. The soul of
man has depths which can only be fathomed by an art which breaks
every rule of the formalists and transgresses every technical law.

The mere fact that the kind of scrupulous artistry advocated by these
pedants of "style" is a kind that can be defined in words at all writes
its own condemnation upon it. For the magical evocations of true
genius are beyond definition.

As Goethe says the important thing in all great art is just what
cannot be put in words. Those who would seek so to confine it are
the bunglers who have missed the mark themselves, and "they
like"--the great critic adds malignantly--"they like to be together."

The so-called rules of technique are nothing when you come to
analyse them but a purely empirical and pragmatic deduction from
the actual practise of the masters. And every new master creates new
laws and a new taste capable of appreciating these new laws. There
is no science of art. These modern critics, with their cult of "the
unique phrase" and the "sharply defined image," are just as
intolerant as the old judicial authorities whose prestige they scout;
just as intolerant and just as unilluminating.

It is to the _imagination_ we must go for a living appreciation of
genius, and many quite simple persons possess this, to whom the
jargon of the st