So it goes, till the book is ended and we look back at the whole
design. It may be absolutely satisfying to the eye, the expression of
the subject, complete and compact. But with the book in this condition
of a defined shape, firm of outline, its form shows for what it is
indeed--not an attribute, one of many and possibly not the most
important, but the book itself, as the form of a statue is the statue
itself. If the form is to the eye imperfect, it means that the subject
is somehow and somewhere imperfectly expressed, it means that the
story has suffered. Where then, and how? Is it because the treatment
has not started from the heart of the subject, or has diverged from
the line of its true development--or is it that the subject itself was
poor and unfruitful? The question ramifies quickly. But anyhow here is
the book, or something that we need not hesitate to regard as the
book, recreated according to the best of the reader's ability. Indeed
he knows well that it will melt away in time; nothing can altogether
save it; only it will last for longer than it would have lasted if it
had been read uncritically, if it had not been deliberately recreated.
In that case it would have fallen to pieces at once, Anna and
Clarissa would have stepped out of the work of art in which their
authors had so laboriously enshrined them, the book would have
perished.
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