ART AND FORTUNE
reconstitution and renovation of the will, to formulate a function and
a destiny for the novel, is to put it into a compromised position where
it
has been far too long already. The novel was better off when it
w.as more humbly conceived than it is now; the novelist was in a far
more advantageous position when his occupation was misprized, or
when it was estimated by simpler minds than his own, when he was
nearly alone in his sense of wonder at tlie possibilties of his genre,
at the great effects it might be made to yield. The novel was luckier
when it had to compete with the sermon, with works of history, with
philosophy and poetry and with the ancient classics, when its social
position was in question
;;~nd,
like one of its own poor or foundling or
simple heroes, it had to make its way against odds. Whatever high
intentions it may have had, it was permitted to stay close to its primi–
tive elements from which it drew power. Believing this, I do not wish
to join in the concerted effort of contemporary criticism to increase
the superego of the novel, to conspire with our sense of cultural crisis
to heap responsibilities upon it, to hedge it about with prescribed
functions and spiked criteria; as things are, the novel feels quite guilty
enough.
A sentence in Aristotle's
Ethics
has always been memorable,
perhaps because I have never rightly understood it. Aristotle says,
"There is a sense in which Chance and
Art
have the same sphere;
as Agathon says, 'Art fosters Fortune; Fortune Fosters Art.' " Taken
out of its context and merely as a gnomic sentence, this says much.
It says something about the reciprocation which in the act of compo–
sition exists between form and free invention, each making the other,
which even the most considerate criticism can never really be aware
of and often belies.
Fortune fosters
Art-there is indeed something
fortuitous in all art, and
in
the novel the element of the fortuitous is
especially large. The novel achieves its best effects of
art
often when
it has no concern with them, when it is fixed upon effects in morality,
or when it is simply reporting what it conceives to be objective fact.
The converse is of course also true, that the novel makes some of its
best moral discoveries or presentations of fact when it is concerned
with form, when it manipulates its material merely in accordance with
some notion of order or beauty, although
it
must be stipulated that
this is likely to occur only when what is manipulated resists enough,
the novel being the form whose aesthetic must pay an unusually large
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