Fiction as self expression

It is some such set of considerations which we forget when we define art as "self-expression"—an unintel¬ligible definition, confusing as it does this ordered and self-possessed visioning of the artist with the unbridled self-gratification of our most selfish moments. Of course we express ourselves in whatever we do ; all activity is self-expression, so that the term really de¬fines nothing because it covers everything. Walking is self-expression, if you like, and the gait an index of character. So is lying: it is possible that we are never more truly ourselves than when we think we are concealing ourselves. But we walk to get some¬where; we lie to accomplish something. A novel too is a measure of its writer; but he writes it in order to get something communicated. He cannot help ex¬pressing himself: a man under an anesthetic, or inco¬herently drunk, or suffocating in thick smoke where he must shout for help, does that. But the whole crux of the novelist's difficulty is to get himself communicated; and it is a sentimental mistake of some popular theorists to suppose that he can do that by pure "inspiration," or pure self-communion apart from his audience in the penetralia of his own con¬sciousness. The lyric poet may sometimes, not other¬wise than by happiest accident, speak to us intelligibly from those hidden recesses. Not so the novelist. He deals with a truth which cannot be breathed out of himself: he must seek it through the world with pain and effort, win it for his own by living it—

"For truth needs doing; beauty seems A dream till we awake from dreams"— and shape and re-clothe it, not for himself, but for us.