I. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. He who is aware of a complete or of any considerable personal loneliness may express it and be praised for it and thought great. But not because he really has more to say than another. The loneliness may be a particular form of self-contemplation by which he obtains a personal sense of the absolute or the universal; but if that sense is achieved by reflection and not by immediate experience, the value of the poem is not increased.
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. The emotion of art is impersonal. This depersonalization, or the substitution of art for the artist, is the very condition of the creation of an "objective correlative," which expression must be taken in its very broad sense. The emotion is experienced and articulated by the mind before it is communicated; and the communication consists in an escape from, not an evocation of, the personality of the author.
The emotion may be transformed, or it may be expressed less perfectly—on account of the limitation of the individual's experience, or because of his confusion of himself with the emotion; but the worth of the emotion in art is not dependent upon the extent or peculiar quality of the individual's direct personal experience. The activity of an artist often appears to us like the activity of another kind of mind. The artist is, in fact, a critic of his own emotions.
The poet exists as a man who experiences emotions, but the way these emotions are presented in the poem is not merely a transcription of private feeling. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
And the poet who is only a personality, who has not the knowledge and an existing tradition of poetry, will have little to communicate and will pass away; his work will be of the moment. It is the tradition which prevents such personality from being merely egotistic. The poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past. He must be aware of the great works of his own language; he must know their relation to one another and to the present; and he must know how the present modifies them.
When a new work of art is created, the existing order is incomplete: it will be modified; the new way of writing will alter the existing order, and the past must be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. No artist has his complete meaning alone; he must be judged by the standards of the existing literary tradition. And the more complete the poet's knowledge of the past, the more will he be able to place himself in relation to it and to alter that tradition in an organic way.
Literary history is an ideal order, which is modified by the introduction of new facts as they are found to be compatible with the existing order. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a perception that the whole of literature forms an order.
No poet, no artist of any form, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, does not exist in isolation. History is shaped by a series of enduring rates of change, and what seems to be a development is often the reinterpretation of an earlier fact by a later mind. The personality of the artist is less important than his relation to the literary tradition; the tradition and the individual talent are interdependent, each invigorating and altering the other.