290
ROBERT B. HEILMAN
it through all the obstacles, traps, and distorting perspectives set up
by the script-writer, through the camouflage of commonplaces that
may effectively hide the existence of workable grounds. The art–
writer may not want to use up energy in dispossessing the script–
writer. Yet he does. In more than one age, indeed, we can find a
historical pattern of development from initial, unskilled routines
to distinction. Out of the banalities of Senecan imitations Shake–
speare took the revenge tragedy into brilliance and profundity, and
out of the Gothic mode in the eighteenth century, with its endless
repetition of clumsy devices, there sprang the achievements of the
romantic novel in the nineteenth century. This evolution, from
conventional practices to gifted creation, is of course the antithesis
of the movement we have already described: the decline from
full-blown, successful innovation to the uninspired carrying-on of
the new mode. Both patterns give useful clues to the history of
generic forms.
The two activities of which we may speak as if they were
independent-side-stepping, or passing through, the cliches of
others and making one's own definition of the subject-do in one
sense come together. Like all creative artists, the writer who is
attracted by western themes must discover the form of the material.
We might alter the last
phr~se
thus: "the form proper to the ma–
terial," or thus, "the form in the material." I introduce
th~
familiar
alternatives, not to attempt a resolution of the basic' disharmony
between the view of the imagination as constructive and the view
of the imagination as imitative, but to focus attention upon a par–
ticular problem of western materials. Making a work of art is an
ambiguous process: if it be considered as basically drawing upon
some anterior reality, nevertpeless the modifying power of the
"making" is extraordinary; if it be considered essentially "crea–
tive," nevertheless its ties to pre-artistic models are unmistakable.
Further, it is questionable
wh~ther
any model, that is, any lump of
material not yet transmuted into artistic form, is infinitely sus–
ceptible of being molded, re-shaped, or radically transformed. It
is just possible, for instance, that western themes-all the events of
westering-have inner limitations that in some way encourage
stereotypes and, conversely, .impede the individualizing, depth–
seeking imagination.
If
this were true, the art-writer would have
