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What is the Satisfaction that arises from Country Sports, or the politer Diversions of Balls and Operas, compar'd with the delightful Conversation of Men of Parts and facetious Talents? Other Amusements, how agreeable soever, only please the Body and gratify the Senses, but this strikes the Imagination, touches the Passions, and recreates the Intellectual Faculties.
Furthermore, it demands a mastery of style, "the verbal magic that recreates for us what the imagination has seen." But, on the other hand, "to write a short-story requires no sustained power of imagination"; "nor does the short-story demand of its author essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view."
If it is the aim that is moral, art loses all that by which it is powerful, I mean its freedom, and that which gives it so much influence over us the charm of pleasure. The play which recreates is changed into serious occupation, and yet it is precisely in recreating us that art can the better complete the great affair the moral work.
The life of God enters our world by two paths personally, through individuals whom it recreates, and by whom it remakes society; socially, through a new communal order which reshapes the men and women who live under it. The New Testament speaks of both entrances of the Spirit of God into human life: it pictures "one born from above," and "the holy city coming down from God out of heaven."
In the one case, as in the other, the attempt is made to "represent" as he himself puts it; and when one represents nothing except the vulgar, the common, the mediocre, the everyday, commonplace, or grotesque, he is a "naturalist," like the author of Madame Bovary; but one is a "romanticist" when, like the author of Salammbô, he makes this world vanish, and recreates a strange land filled with Byzantine or Carthaginian civilization, with its barbaric luxury, its splendour of corruption, immoderate appetites, and monstrous deities.
A limitless resource against ennui, it refreshes, rests, and recreates, relieves the tension of our working hours, makes for health and sanity. "If a man find himself with bread in both hands," said Mohammed, "he should exchange one loaf for some flowers of the narcissus, since the loaf feeds the body, indeed, but the flowers feed the soul."
The sight of that refreshing element recreates the mind, and communicates a powerful attraction even to a wilderness. In fact, at this season of the year, the Champs Elysees resemble a desert; but, in summer, they present one of the most agreeable scenes that can be imagined.
But Vetch is nearer to the truth of things. Vetch has the one attribute that John needs to make him complete." She nodded. "I know. You mean feeling?" "Human sympathy the sympathy that means imagination and insight. That is the only power that Vetch has, but, by Jove, it is the greatest of all! It is the spirit that comprehends, that reconciles, and recreates.
It is an excellent book; but what English writer would think it necessary to inform English readers that "the American student recreates himself on the athletic field rather than in the ale-house"? We know something of the life of a German student; but it is only when a German himself says a thing like that that he illuminates in a flash the abyss which yawns between the moral qualities of the youth of his country and the young American or young Englishman.
The Christian seeks salvation through the activity of the will; this is secured through the new birth. The Buddhist leaves each man to save himself from his illusion by the discovery that it is an illusion. The Greek relies on intellectual education, on philosophy the Christian recreates the will. The Buddhist and Greek gods make no effort to help the lost man.