Such is the world in the book--in
Tolstoy's book I do not say; but it is the world in the book as it may
be, in the book where imagination and execution are perfectly
harmonized. And in any case the critic accepts this ordered, enhanced
display as it stands, better or worse, and uses it all for the
creation of the book. There can be no picking and choosing now; that
was the business of the novelist, and it has been accomplished
according to his light; the critic creates out of life that is already
subject to art.
But his work is not the less plastic for that. The impressions that
succeed one another, as the pages of the book are turned, are to be
built into a structure, and the critic is missing his opportunity
unless he can proceed in a workmanlike manner. It is not to be
supposed that an artist who carves or paints is so filled with emotion
by the meaning of his work--the story in it--that he forgets the
abstract beauty of form and colour; and though there is more room for
such sensibility in an art which is the shaping of thought and
feeling, in the art of literature, still the man of letters is a
craftsman, and the critic cannot be less. He must know how to handle
the stuff which is continually forming in his mind while he reads; he
must be able to recognize its fine variations and to take them all
into account. Nobody can work in material of which the properties are
unfamiliar, and a reader who tries to get possession of a book with
nothing but his appreciation of the life and the ideas and the story
in it is like a man who builds a wall without knowing the capacities
of wood and clay and stone.
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