This is indispensable. It is this personality
which gives the final value to every work of art as well as of
literature. It is not enough to copy nature or to copy, even accurately,
the incidents of life. Only by digestion and transmutation through
personality does any work attain the dignity of art. The great works of
architecture, even, which are somewhat determined by mathematical rule,
owe their charm to the personal genius of their creators. For this reason
our imitations of Greek architecture are commonly failures. To speak
technically, the masterpiece of literature is characterized by the same
knowledge of proportion and perspective as the masterpiece in art.
If there is a standard of literary excellence, as there is a law of
beauty--and it seems to me that to doubt this in the intellectual world
is to doubt the prevalence of order that exists in the natural--it is
certainly possible to ascertain whether a new production conforms, and
how far it conforms, to the universally accepted canons of art. To work
by this rule in literary criticism is to substitute something definite
for the individual tastes, moods, and local bias of the critic.
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