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Title: Literary values and other papers
Author: John Burroughs
Release date: July 23, 2024 [eBook #74104]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902
Credits: Alan, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY VALUES AND OTHER PAPERS ***
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
LITERARY VALUES
AND OTHER PAPERS
BY
JOHN BURROUGHS
[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1902
COPYRIGHT 1902 BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published December, 1902_
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. LITERARY VALUES 1
II. ANALOGY--TRUE AND FALSE 27
III. STYLE AND THE MAN 52
IV. CRITICISM AND THE MAN 80
V. RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 109
VI. “THOU SHALT NOT PREACH” 134
VII. DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE 151
VIII. POETRY AND ELOQUENCE 161
IX. GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 168
X. LUCID LITERATURE 180
XI. “MERE LITERATURE” 186
XII. ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON 191
XIII. THOREAU’S WILDNESS 197
XIV. NATURE IN LITERATURE 203
XV. SUGGESTIVENESS 205
XVI. ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 216
XVII. THE SPELL OF THE PAST 232
XVIII. THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 244
LITERARY VALUES
I
LITERARY VALUES
I
The day inevitably comes to every writer when he must take his place
amid the silent throngs of the past, when no new work from his pen can
call attention to him afresh, when the partiality of his friends no
longer counts, when his friends and admirers are themselves gathered
to the same silent throng, and the spirit of the day in which he wrote
has given place to the spirit of another and a different day. How, oh,
how will it fare with him then? How is it going to fare with Lowell and
Longfellow and Whittier and Emerson and all the rest of them? How has
it fared with so many names in the past, that were, in their own day,
on all men’s tongues? Of the names just mentioned, Whittier and Emerson
shared more in a particular movement of thought and morals of the
times in which they lived than did the other two, and to that extent
are they in danger of dropping out and losing their vogue. Both had
a significance to their own day and generation that they can hardly
have to any other. The new times will have new soul maladies and need
other soul doctors. The fashions of this world pass away--fashions in
thought, in style, in humor, in morals, as well as in anything else.
As men strip for a race, so must an author strip for this race with
time. All that is purely local and accidental in him will only impede
him; all that is put on or assumed will impede him--his affectations,
his insincerities, his imitations; only what is vital and real in him,
and is subdued to the proper harmony and proportion, will count. A
malformed giant will not in this race keep pace with the lesser but
better-built stripling. How many more learned and ponderous tomes has
Gilbert White’s little book left behind! Mere novelty, how short-lived
is that! Every age will have its own novelties. Every age will have its
own hobbies and hobbyists, its own clowns, its own follies and fashions
and infatuations. What every age will not have in the same measure is
sanity, proportion, health, penetration, simplicity. The strained and
overwrought, the fantastic and far-fetched, are sure to drop out. Every
pronounced style, like Carlyle’s, is sure to suffer. The obscurities
and affectations of some recent English poets and novelists are certain
to drag them down. Browning, with his sudden leaps and stops, and all
that Italian rubbish, is fearfully handicapped.
Things do not endure in this world without a certain singleness and
continence. Trees do not grow and stand upright without a certain
balance and proportion. A man does not live out half his days without a
certain simplicity of life. Excesses, irregularities, violences, kill
him. It is the same with books--they, too, are under the same law;
they hold the gift of life on the same terms. Only an honest book can
live; only absolute sincerity can stand the test of time. Any selfish
or secondary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a religious
life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreciate the literary value of the
staple, fundamental human virtues and qualities--probity, directness,
simplicity, sincerity, love. There is just as much room and need for
the exercise of these qualities in the making of a book as in the
building of a house, or in a business career. How conspicuous they
are in all the enduring books--in Bunyan, in Walton, in Defoe, in the
Bible! It is they that keep alive such a book as “Two Years before the
Mast,” which Stevenson pronounced the best sea-story in the language,
as it undoubtedly is. None of Stevenson’s books have quite this probity
and singleness of purpose, or show this effacement of the writer by the
man. It might be said that our interest in such books is not literary
at all, but purely human, like our interest in “Robinson Crusoe,” or in
life and things themselves. The experience itself of a sailor’s life,
however, would be to most of us very prosy and distasteful. Hence there
is something in the record, something in the man behind the record,
that colors his pages, and that is the source of our interest. This
personal element, this flavor of character, is the salt of literature.
Without it, the page is savorless.
II
It is curious what an uncertain and seemingly capricious thing literary
value is. How often it refuses to appear when diligently sought for,
labored for, prayed for; and then comes without call to some simple
soul that never gave it a thought. Learning cannot compass it, rhetoric
cannot compass it, study cannot compass it. Mere wealth of language
is entirely inadequate. It is like religion: often those who have it
most have it least, and those who have it least have it most. In the
works of the great composers--Gibbon, De Quincey, Macaulay--it is a
conscious, deliberate product. Then, in other works, the very absence
of the literary motive and interest gives an æsthetic pleasure.
One is surprised to read the remark of the “Saturday Review” on the
published letters of Whitman,--letters that have no extrinsic literary
value whatever, not one word of style,--namely, that few books are so
well calculated to “purge the soul of nonsense;” and the remark of
the fastidious Henry James on the same subject, that, with all their
enormities of the common, the letters are positively delightful. Here,
again, the source of our interest is undoubtedly in the personal
revelation,--the type of man we see through the letters, and not in any
wit or wisdom lodged in the letters themselves.
One reader seeks religious or moral values alone in the works he
reads; another seeks scientific or philosophical values; another,
artistic and literary values; others, again, purely human values. No
one, I think, would read Scott or Dickens for purely artistic values,
while, on the other hand, it seems to me that one would go to Mr. James
or to Mr. Howells for little else. One might read Froude with pleasure
who had little confidence in him as an historian, but one could hardly
read Freeman and discount him in the same way; one might have great
delight in Ruskin, who repudiated much of his teaching.
I suppose one comes to like plain literature as he comes to like plain
clothes, plain manners, simple living. What grows with us is the taste
for the genuine, the real. The less a writer’s style takes thought of
itself, the better we like it. The less his dress, his equipage, his
house, concern themselves about appearances, the more we are pleased
with them. Let the purpose be entirely serious, and let the seriousness
be pushed till it suggests the heroic; that is what we crave as we grow
older and tire of the vanities and shams of the world.
To have literary value is not necessarily to suggest books or
literature; it is to possess a certain genuineness and seriousness that
is like the validity of real things. See how much better literature
Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is than the more elaborate and scholarly
address of Everett on the same occasion. General Grant’s “Memoirs”
have a higher literary value than those of any other general in our
Civil War, mainly because of the greater simplicity, seriousness, and
directness of the personality they reveal. There is no more vanity and
make-believe in the book than there was in the man. Any touch of the
elemental, of the veracity and singleness of the natural forces, gives
value to a man’s utterances, and Lincoln and Grant were undoubtedly the
two most elemental men brought out by the war. The literary value of
the Bible, doubtless, arises largely from its elemental character. The
utterances of simple, unlettered men--farmers, sailors, soldiers--often
have great force and impressiveness from the same cause; there are in
them the virtue and seriousness of real things. One great danger of
schools, colleges, libraries, is that they tend to kill or to overlay
this elemental quality in a man--to make the poet speak from his
culture instead of from his heart. “To speak in literature with the
perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movement of animals and the
unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by
the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art;” and who so likely to do
this as the simple, unbookish man? Hence Sainte-Beuve says the peasant
always has style.
In fiction the literary value resides in several different things, as
the characterization, the action, the plot, and the style; sometimes
more in one, sometimes more in another. In Scott, for instance, it is
found in the characters and the action; the style is commonplace. In
George Eliot, the action, the dramatic power, is the weakest factor.
In Mr. Howells we care very little for the people, but the art, the
style, is a perpetual delight. In Hawthorne our pleasure, again, is
more evenly distributed. In Poe the plot and the style interest us.
In Dickens it is the character and the action. The novelist has many
strings to his bow, and he can get along very well without style, but
what can the poet, the historian, the essayist, the critic, do without
style--that is, without that vital, intimate, personal relation between
the man and his language which seems to be the secret of style? The
true poet makes the words his own; he fills them with his own quality,
though they be the common property of all. This is why language, in
the hands of the born writer, is not the mere garment of thought, not
even a perfectly adjusted and transparent garment, as a French writer
puts it. It is a garment only as the body is the garment of the soul.
This is why a writer with a style loses so much in a translation, while
with the ordinary composer translation is little more than a change of
garments.
I should say that the literary value of the modern French writers and
critics resides more in their style than in anything else, while with
the German it resides least in the style; in the English it resides
in both thought and style. The French fall below the English in lyric
poetry, because, while the Frenchman has more vanity, he has less
egoism, and hence less power to make the universe speak through him.
The solitude of the lyric is too much for his intensely social nature,
while he excels in the light dramatic forms for this very reason. He
has more power of intellectual metamorphosis.
Apart from style and the other qualities I have mentioned, is another
gift, the gift of narration--the story-teller’s gift, which novelists
have in varying degrees. Probably few of them have this talent in so
large a measure as Wilkie Collins had it, yet this power does not of
itself seem sufficient to save his work from oblivion. Still apart
from these qualities, and of high literary worth, and apart from the
attractiveness of the subject matter, is the power to interest. Can
you interest me in what you have to say, by your manner of saying it?
This is one of the most intimate and personal gifts of all. No matter
what the subject, some writers, like some speakers, catch our attention
at once, and hold it to the end. They appear to be telling us some
important bit of news which they are in a hurry to be delivered of. No
time or words are wasted. There is something special and imminent in
the look and tone. The sentences are definitely aimed. The man knows
what he wants to say and is himself interested in it. His mind is not
somnolent or stagnant; the style is specific and direct--no benumbing
effects of vague and featureless generalizations. The thoughts move,
they make a current, and the reader quickly yields himself to it. How
soon we tire of the mumbling, soliloquizing style, where the writer
seems talking to himself. He must talk to his reader and must catch his
eye.
Then those dead-level sentences that seem to return forever into
themselves, that have no direction or fall, that do not point and hurry
to some definite conclusion,--we soon yawn over these too.
What rare power the late Henry George had to invest his subject with
interest! What a current in his book “Progress and Poverty”!--While it
seems to me that in his “Social Evolution” Benjamin Kidd suffers from
the want of this talent; I do not get the full force of his periods at
the first reading.
III
Literature abounds in attempts to define literature. One of the most
strenuous and thorough-going definitions I have seen has lately been
published by one of our college professors--it is a most determined
attempt to corral the whole subject. “Nothing belongs to real
literature,” says the professor, “unless it consists of written words
that constitute a carrying statement which makes sense, arranged
rhythmically, euphoniously, and harmoniously, and so chosen as to
connote an adequate number of ideas and things, the suggestion of which
will call up in the reader sustained emotions which do not produce
undue tension, and in which the element of pleasure predominates, on
the whole, over that of pain. Practically,” the writer goes on to say,
“every word of this description should be kept in our minds, so that we
may consciously apply it as a test to any piece of writing about the
literary character of which we are in doubt.”
Fancy a reader, in his quest for the real article, going about with
this drag-net of a paragraph in his mind. Will the definition or
description bear turning around upon itself? Is it a good sample of
literary art? The exactness and literalness of science are seldom
permissible in literature. That a definition of anything may have
literary value it must possess a certain indirect and imaginative
character, as when Carlyle defined poetry as the heroic of speech.
Contrast with the above John Morley’s definition of literature: “All
the books--and they are not so many--where moral truth and human
passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction
of form.” This is much better literature, because the language is much
more flexible and imaginative. It imparts more warmth to the mind;
it is more suggestive, while as a literary touchstone it is just as
available.
Good literature may be a much simpler thing than our teachers would
lead us to believe. The prattle of a child may have rare literary
value. The little Parisian girl who, when asked by a lady the price
of the trinkets she offered for sale, replied, “Judge for yourself,
madam; I have tasted no food since yesterday,” expressed herself with
consummate art. If she had said simply, “Whatever your ladyship pleases
to give,” her reply would have been graceful, but commonplace. By the
personal turn which she gave it, she added almost a lyrical touch. When
Thackeray changed the title of one of his novels from “Scenes from Town
Life,” or some such title, to “Vanity Fair,” he achieved a stroke of
art. It is said that a now famous line of Keats was first written thus:
“A thing of beauty is a continual joy.”
How the effect of the line was heightened by the change of one word,
and itself became “a joy forever.” Poe, too, altered two lines of his
with like magical effect, when for
“To the beauty of fair Greece,
And the grandeur of old Rome,”
he wrote:
“To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.”
The phrase “well of pure English” conveys the same idea as “well of
English undefiled,” but how much greater the artistic value of the
latter than of the former! Thus the literary value of a sentence may
turn upon a single word.
The everyday speech of the people is often full of the stuff of which
literature is made. No poet could invent better epithets and phrases
than abound in the common vernacular. The sayings and proverbs of a
people are also, for the most part, of the pure gold of literature.
One trouble with all definitions of literature is that they proceed
upon the theory that literature is a definite something that may be
determined by definite tests like gold or silver, whereas it is more
like life or nature itself. It is not so much something as the visible
manifestation of something; it assumes infinite forms, and is of
infinite degrees of potency. There is great literature, and there
is feeble and commonplace literature: a romance by Hawthorne and a
novel by Haggard; a poem by Tennyson and a poem by Tupper; an essay
by Emerson and an essay by John Foster--all literature, all touching
the emotions and the imagination with varying degrees of power, and
yet separated by a gulf. There are no degrees of excellence in gold or
silver, but there are all degrees of excellence in literature. How hard
it is to tell what makes a true poem, a lasting poem! When one asks
himself what it is, how many things arise, how hard to narrow the list
down to a few things! Is it beauty? Then what is beauty? One meets with
beautiful poems every day that he never thinks of or recurs to again.
It is certain that without one thing there is no real poetry--genuine
passion. The fire came down out of heaven and consumed Elijah’s
offering because Elijah was sincere. Plan and build your poem never so
deftly, mankind will not permanently care for it unless it has genuine
feeling. It must be impassioned.
The genus Literature includes many species, as novels, poems, essays,
histories, etc., but our business with them all is about the same--they
are books that we read for their own sake. We read the papers for the
news, we read a work of science for the facts and the conclusions,
but a work of literature is an end in and of itself. We read it for
the pleasure and the stimulus it affords us, apart from any other
consideration. It exhibits such a play of mind and emotion upon the
facts of life and nature as results in our own mental and spiritual
enrichment and edification.
Another thing is true of the best literature: we cannot separate
our pleasure and profit in the subject-matter from our pleasure and
profit in the personality of the writer. We do not know whether it
is Hawthorne himself that we most delight in, or his style and the
characters and the action of his romance. One thing is quite certain:
where there is no distinct personal flavor to the page, no stamp
of a new individual force, we soon tire of it. The savor of every
true literary production comes from the man himself. Hence, without
attempting a formal definition of literature, one may say that the
literary quality seems to arise from a certain vital relation of the
writer with subject-matter. It is _his_ subject; it blends with the
very texture of his mind; his relation to it is primary and personal,
not secondary and mechanical. The secret is not in any prescribed
arrangement of the words--it is in the quality of mind or spirit that
warms the words and shines through them. A good book, says Milton, is
the precious life-blood of a master spirit. Unless there is blood in
it, unless the vital currents of a rare spirit flow through it and
vivify it, it has not the gift of life.
In all good literature we have a sense of touching something alive and
real. The writer uses words not as tools or appliances; they are more
like his hand or his eye or his ear--the living, palpable body of his
thought, the incarnation of his spirit.
The true writer always establishes intimate and personal relations with
his reader. He comes forth, he is not concealed; he is immanent in his
words, we feel him, our spirits touch his spirit.
Style in letters is a quality of mind--a certain flavor imparted to
words by the personality back of them. Pass language through one mind
and it is tasteless and colorless; pass it through another, and it
acquires an entirely new value and significance and gives us a unique
pleasure. In the one case the sentences are artificial; in the other
they bud and sprout out of the man himself as naturally as the plants
and trees out of the soil.
There is nothing else in the world so sensitive and chameleon-like as
language; it takes on at once the hue and quality of the mind that
uses it. See how neutral and impersonal, or old and worn and faded the
words look in the pages of some writers, then see how drastic or new
and individual they become when a mind of another type marshals them
into sentences. What vigor and life in them! they seem to have been
newly coined since we last met them. It is the test of a writer’s real
worth--does the language tarnish, as it were, in his hand, or is it
brightened and freshened in his use?
A book may contain valuable truths and sound sentiments of universal
appeal, but if the literary coinage is feeble, if the page is not
strongly individualized, freshly and clearly stamped by the purpose
of the writer, it cannot take rank as good literature. To become
literature, truth must be perpetually reborn, reincarnated, and begin
life anew.
A successful utterance always has value, always has truth, though in
its purely intellectual aspects it may not correspond with the truth as
we see it. I cannot accept all of Ruskin’s views upon our civilization
or all of Tolstoi’s upon art, yet I see that they speak the truth as
it defines itself to their minds and feelings. A counter-statement may
be equally true. The struggle for existence goes on in the ideal world
as well as in the real. The strongest mind, the fittest statement,
survives for the time being. That a system of philosophy or religion
perishes or is laid aside is not because it is not or was not true, but
because it is not true to the new minds and under the new conditions.
It no longer expresses what the world thinks and feels. It is outgrown.
Was not Calvinism true to our fathers? It is no longer true to us
because we were born at a later day in the world. With regard to truths
of science, we may say, once a truth always a truth, because the world
of fact and of things is always under the same law, but the truth
of sentiments and emotions changes with changing minds and hearts.
The tree of life, unlike all other trees, bears different fruit to
each generation. What our fathers found nourishing and satisfying in
religion, in art, in philosophy, we find tasteless and stale. Every
gospel has its day. The moral and intellectual horizon of the race is
perpetually changing.
IV
In our modern democratic communities the moral sense is no doubt higher
than it was in the earlier ages, while the artistic or æsthetic sense
is lower. In the Athenian the artistic sense was far above the moral;
in the Puritan the reverse was the case. The Latin races seem to have
a greater genius for art than the Teutonic, while the latter excel in
virtue. In this country, good taste exists in streaks and spots, or
sporadically here and there. There does not seem to be enough to go
around, or the supply is intermittent. One writer has it and another
has it not, or one has it to-day and not to-morrow; one moment he
writes with grace and simplicity, the next he falls into crudenesses or
affectations. There is not enough leaven to leaven the whole lump. Some
of our most eminent literary men, such as Lowell and Dr. Holmes, are
guilty of occasional lapses from good taste, and probably in the work
of none of them do we see the thorough ripening and mellowing of taste
that mark the productions of the older and more centralized European
communities. One of our college presidents, writing upon a serious
ethical subject, allows himself such rhetoric as this: “Experiment
and inference are the hook and line by which Science fishes the dry
formulas out of the fluid fact. Art, on the other hand, undertakes
to stock the stream with choice specimens of her own breeding and
selection.” We can hardly say of such metaphors what Sainte-Beuve
said of Montaigne’s, namely, that they are of the kind that are never
“detached from the thought,” but that they “seize it in its very
centre, in its interior, and join and bind it.”
V
The keener appreciation in Europe of literature as a fine art is no
doubt the main reason why Poe is looked upon over there as our most
noteworthy poet. Poe certainly had a more consummate art than any other
American singer, and his productions are more completely the outcome
of that art. They are literary feats. “The Raven” was as deliberately
planned and wrought out as is any piece of mechanism. Its inspiration
is verbal and technical. “The truest poetry is most feigning,” says
Touchstone, and this is mainly the conception of poetry that prevails
in European literary circles. Poe’s poetry is artistic feigning, like
good acting. It is to that extent disinterested. He does not speak for
himself, but for the artistic spirit. He has never been popular in this
country, for the reason that art, as such, is far less appreciated here
than abroad. The stress of life here is upon the moral and intellectual
elements much more than upon the æsthetic. We demand a message of the
poet, or that he shall teach us how to live. Poe had no message but
that of art; he made no contribution to our stock of moral ideas; he
made no appeal to the conscience or manhood of the race; he did not
touch the great common workaday mind of our people. He is more akin to
the Latin than to the Anglo-Saxon. Hence his deepest impression seems
to have been made upon the French mind. In all our New England poets
the voice of humanity, of patriotism, of religious ideas, of strenuous
moral purpose, speaks. Art is subordinated to various human passions
and emotions. In Poe alone are these emotions subordinated to art.
In Poe alone is the effort mainly a verbal and technical one. In him
alone is the man lost in the artist. To evoke music from language is
his constant aim. No other American poet approaches him in this kind
of verbal mastery, in this unfettered creative technical power. In
ease, in splendor, in audacity, he is like a bird. One may understand
and admire him and not be touched by him. To be moved to anything
but admiration is foreign to pure art. Would one make meat and drink
of it? Our reading is selfish, we seek our own, we are drawn to the
book that is going our way. Can we appreciate beyond our own personal
tastes and needs? Can we see the excellence of the impersonal and the
disinterested? We want to be touched in some special and intimate
way; but art touches us in a general and impersonal way. No one could
take to himself Shakespeare, or Milton’s “Lycidas,” or Keats’s odes
as directed especially to his own personal wants and aspirations. We
forget ourselves in reading these things, and share for the time the
sentiment of pure art, which lives in the universal. How crude the art
of Whittier compared with that of Poe, and yet Whittier has touched
and moved his countrymen, and Poe has not. There is much more of the
substance of character, of patriotism, of strenuous New England life,
in the one than in the other. “Snow-Bound” is a metrical transcript
from experience; not a creation of the imagination, but a touched-up
copy from the memory. We cannot say this of “The Bells” or “The Raven,”
or of the work of Milton or Keats or Tennyson. Whittier sings what he
feels; it all has a root in his own experience. The great poet feigns
the emotion and makes it real to us.
We complain of much current verse that it has no feeling. The trouble
is not that the poets feign, but that the feigning is feeble; it begets
no emotion in us. It simulates, but does not stimulate.
It is not Wordsworth’s art that makes him great; it is his profound
poetic emotion when in the presence of simple, common things.
Tennyson’s art, or Swinburne’s art, is much finer, but the poetic
emotion back of it is less profound and elemental.
Emerson’s art is crude, but the stress of his poetic emotion is great;
the song is burdened with profound meanings to our moral and spiritual
nature. Poe has no such burden; there is not one crumb of the bread of
life in him, but there is plenty of the elixir of the imagination.
This passion for art, so characteristic of the Old World, is seen in
its full force in such a writer as Flaubert. Flaubert was a devotee of
the doctrine of art for art’s sake. He cared nothing for mere authors,
but only for “writers;” the work must be the conscious and deliberate
product of the author’s literary and inventive powers, and in no way
involve his character, temperament, or personality. The more it was
written, the more it savored of deliberate plan and purpose,--in other
words, the less it was the product of fate, race, or of anything local,
individual, inevitable,--the more it pleased him. Art, and not nature,
was his aspiration. And this view has more currency in Europe than in
this country. In some extreme cases it becomes what one may fairly
call the art disease. Baudelaire, for instance, as quoted by Tolstoi,
expressed a preference for a painted woman’s face over one showing
its natural color, “and for metal trees and a theatrical imitation of
water, rather than real trees and real water.” Thus does an overweening
passion for art degenerate into a love for the artificial for its own
sake. In the cultivation of letters there seems always to be a danger
that we shall come to value things, not for their own sake, but for the
literary effects that may be wrought out of them. The great artist, I
take it, is primarily in love with life and things, and not with art.
On these terms alone is his work fresh and stimulating and filled with
good arterial blood.
VI
Teaching literature is like teaching religion. You can give only the
dry bones of the matter in either case. But the dry bones of theology
are not religion, and the dry bones of rhetoric are not literature. The
flesh-and-blood reality is alone of value, and this cannot be taught,
it must be felt and experienced.
The class in literature studies an author’s sentence-structure and
paragraphing, and doubtless could tell the author more about it than
he knows himself. The probabilities are that he never thought a moment
about his sentence-structure or his paragraphing. He has thought only
of his subject-matter and how to express himself clearly and forcibly;
the structure of his sentences takes care of itself. From every art
certain rules and principles may be deduced, but the intelligent
apprehension of those rules and principles no more leads to mastery
in that art, or even helps to mastery in it, than a knowledge of the
anatomy and the vital processes of the stomach helps a man to digest
his dinner, or than the knowledge of the gunsmith helps make a good
marksman. In other words the science of any art is of little use to him
who would practice that art. To be a fiddler you must fiddle and see
others fiddle; to be a painter you must paint and study the painting
of others; to be a writer you must write and familiarize yourself with
the works of the best authors. Studying an author from the outside by
bringing the light of rhetoric to bear upon him is of little profit.
We must get inside of him, and we can only get inside of him through
sympathy and appreciation. There is only one way to teach literature,
only one vital way, and that is by reading it. The laboratory way
may give one the dry bones of the subject, but not the living thing
itself. If the teacher, by his own living voice and an occasional word
of comment, can bring out the soul of a work, he may help the student’s
appreciation of it; he may, in a measure, impart to him his own larger
and more intelligent appreciation of it. And that is a true service.
Young men and young women actually go to college to take a course in
Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course
becomes a mere knowledge course, as Professor Corson suggests. My own
first acquaintance with Milton was through an exercise in grammar.
We parsed “Paradise Lost.” Much of the current college study of
Shakespeare is little better than parsing him. The minds of the pupils
are focused upon every word and line of the text, as the microscope
is focused upon a fly’s foot in the laboratory. The class probably
dissects a frog or a star-fish one day, and a great poet the next, and
it does both in about the same spirit. It falls upon one of these great
plays like hens upon a bone in winter: no meaning of word or phrase
escapes it, every line is literally picked to pieces; but of the poet
himself, of that which makes him what he is, his tremendous dramatic
power, how much do the students get? Very little, I fear. They have had
an intellectual exercise and not an emotional experience. They have
added to their knowledge, but have not taken a step in culture. To dig
into the roots and origins of the great poets is like digging into the
roots of an oak or a maple, the better to increase your appreciation of
the beauty of the tree. There stands the tree in all its summer glory;
will you really know it any better after you have laid bare every root
and rootlet? There stand Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer. Read
them, give yourself to them, and master them if you are man enough.
The poets are not to be analyzed, they are to be enjoyed; they are not
to be studied, but to be loved; they are not for knowledge, but for
culture--to enhance our appreciation of life and our mastery over its
elements. All the mere facts about a poet’s work are as chaff compared
with the appreciation of one fine line or fine sentence. Why _study_
a great poet at all after the manner of the dissecting-room? Why not
rather seek to make the acquaintance of his living soul and to feel its
power?
The mere study of words, too,--of their origin and history, or of the
relation of your own language to some other,--how little that avails!
As little as a knowledge of the making and tempering of a sword would
help a man to be a good swordsman. What avails in literature is a quick
and delicate sense of the life and individuality of words--“a sense
practiced as a blind man’s touch,” or as a musician’s ear, so that the
magic of the true style is at once felt and appreciated; this, and
an equally quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality of
things. “Is there any taste in the white of an egg?” No more is there
in much merely correct writing. There is the use of language as the
vehicle of knowledge, and there is the use of it as an instrument of
the imagination. In Wordsworth’s line,
“The last to parley with the setting sun,”
in Whitman’s sentence,
“Oh, waves, I have fingered every shore with you,”
in Emerson’s description of an Indian-summer day, “the day,
immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm, wide
fields”--in these and such as these we see the imaginative use of words.
Most of the Dantean and Homeric and Shakespearean scholarship is the
mere dust of time that has accumulated upon these names. In the course
of years it will accumulate upon Tennyson, and then we shall have
Tennysonian scholars and learned dissertations upon some insignificant
detail of his work. Think of the Shakespeareana with which literature
is burdened! It is mostly mere shop litter and dust. In certain moods I
think one may be pardoned for feeling that Shakespeare is fast becoming
a curse to the human race. Of mere talk about him, it seems, there is
to be no end. He has been the host of more literary parasites probably
than any other name in history. He is edited and re-edited as if a
cubit could be added to his stature by marginal notes and comments. On
the contrary, the result is, for the most part, like a mere growth of
underbrush that obscures the forest trees. The reader’s attention is
being constantly diverted from the main matter--he is being whipped in
the face by insignificant twigs. Criticism may prune away what obscures
a great author, but what shall we say when it obstructs the view of him
by a multitude of unimportant questions?
The main aim of the teacher of literature should be to train and
quicken the student’s taste--his sense of the fitness and proportion of
things--till he can detect the true from the false, or the excellent
from the common. There is but one way to learn to detect the genuine
from the counterfeit in any department of life, and that is by
experience. Familiarize the student with the works of the real masters
of literature and you have safeguarded him against the pretenders.
After he has become acquainted with the look and the ring of the pure
gold he is less likely to be imposed upon by the counterfeit. The
end here indicated cannot be reached by analysis, or by a course in
rhetoric and sentence structure, or by a microscopical examination of
the writer’s vocabulary, but by direct sympathetic intercourse with the
best literature, through the living voice, or through your own silent
perusal of it. The great Dantean and Shakespearean scholar is usually
the outcome of a mental habit that would make Dante and Shakespeare
impossible.
So eminent a critic as Frederic Harrison is reported as praising this
sentence from the new British author Maurice Hewlett: “In the milk
of October dawns her calm brows had been dipped.” The instructor in
literature should be able to show his class why this is not good
literature. The suggestion of brows dipped in milk is not a pleasant
one. One cannot conceive of any brow the beauty of which would be
enhanced by it, even by the milk of October dawns, if there were
anything in October dawns that in the remotest way suggested milk. Mr.
Hewlett is so in love with a crisp style that he describes his heroine
as lying white and twisting on a couch, crisping and uncrisping her
little hands.
Such things come from straining after novelty. They proceed from an
unripe taste. Men of real genius and power are at times guilty of such
lapses, or go astray in quest of novel images. Walter Bagehot sometimes
did. Writing of Sydney Smith, his rhetoric shows its teeth in this
fashion: “Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders;
Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long sharp argument into
the interior of a question; he did not, in the common phrase, go
deeply into it; but he kept it steadily under the contact of a strong,
capable, jawlike understanding, pressing its surface, effacing its
intricacies, grinding it down.” Such a comparison has the merit of
being vivid; it also has the demerit of an unworthy alliance,--it
marries the noble and the ignoble. You cannot lift mastication up to
the level of intellectual processes, and to seriously compare the two
is to degrade the latter. Sydney Smith himself could not have been
guilty of such bad taste.
Let me finish this chapter with a bit of prose from Ben Jonson.
“Some words are to be culled out for ornament and color, as we gather
flowers to strow houses or make garlands; but they are better when
they grow to our style; as in a meadow where, though the mere grass
and greenness delight, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and
beautify.”
II
ANALOGY--TRUE AND FALSE
I have never seen any thorough examination of the grounds of analogy.
The works on logic make but slight reference to them, yet the argument
from analogy is one of the most frequent forms of argument, and one
of the most convincing. It is so much easier to captivate the fancy
with a pretty or striking figure than to move the judgment with sound
reasons,--so much easier to be rhetorical than to be logical.
We say that seeing is believing; the rhetorician makes us see the
thing; his picture appeals to the mind’s visual sense, hence his power
over us, though his analogies are more apt to be false than true. We
love to see these agreements between thoughts and things, or between
the subjective and the objective worlds, and a favorite thought with
profound minds in all ages has been the identity or oneness which runs
through creation.
“A vast similitude interlocks all,” says Whitman, “spans all the
objects of the universe and compactly holds and encloses them.”
Everywhere in Nature Emerson said he saw the figure of a disguised
man. The method of the universe is intelligible to us because it is
akin to our own minds. Our minds are rather akin to it and are derived
from it. Emerson made much of this thought. The truth here indicated
is undoubtedly the basis of all true analogy--this unity, this oneness
of creation; but the analogies that “are constant and pervade Nature”
are probably not so numerous as Emerson seemed to fancy. Thus one can
hardly agree with him that there is “intent” of analogy between man’s
life and the seasons, because the seasons are not a universal fact of
the globe, and man’s life is. The four seasons are well defined in New
England, but not in Ecuador.
The agreement of appearances is one thing, the identity of law and
essence is another, and the agreement of man’s life with the seasons
must be considered accidental rather than intentional.
Language is full of symbols. We make the world without a symbol of the
world within. We describe thoughts, and emotions, in the terms of an
objective experience. Things furnish the moulds in which our ideas are
cast. Size, proportion, mass, vista, vastness, height, depth, darkness,
light, coarse, fine, centre, surface, order, chaos, and a thousand
other terms, we apply alike to the world without and to the world
within. We know a higher temperance than concerns the body, a finer
digestion and assimilation than go on in it.
Our daily conversation is full of pictures and parables, or the
emblematic use of things. From life looked at as a voyage, we get
the symbolic use of anchor, compass, pole-star, helm, haven; from
life considered as a battle, we read deep meanings in shield, armor,
fencing, captain, citadel, panic, onset. Life regarded under the figure
of husbandry gives us the expressive symbols of seedtime and harvest,
planting and watering, tares and brambles, pruning and training, the
chaff and the wheat. We talk in parables when we little suspect it.
What various applications we make of such words as dregs, gutter,
eclipse, satellite, hunger, thirst, kindle, brazen, echo, and hundreds
of others. We speak of the reins of government, the sinews of war,
the seeds of rebellion, the morning of youth, the evening of age, a
flood of emotion, the torch of truth, burning with resentment, the
veil of secrecy, the foundations of character, a ripple of laughter,
incrusted dogmas, corrosive criticism. We say his spirits drooped, his
mind soared, his heart softened, his brow darkened, his reputation was
stabbed, he clinched his argument. We say his course was beset with
pitfalls, his efforts were crowned with success, his eloquence was a
torrent that carried all before it, and so on.
Burke calls attention to the metaphors that are taken from the sense of
taste, as a sour temper, bitter curses, bitter fate; and, on the other
hand, a sweet person, a sweet experience, and the like. Other epithets
are derived from the sense of touch, as a soft answer, a polished
character, a cold reception, a sharp retort, a hard problem; or from
the sense of sight, as brilliant, dazzling, color, light, shade; others
from our sense of hearing, as discordant, echoing, reverberating,
booming, grumbling. All trades, pursuits, occupations, furnish types
or symbols for the mind. The word “whitewash” has become a very
useful one, especially to political parties. Thoreau said he would
not be as one who drives a nail into mere lath and plaster. Even the
railroad has contributed useful terms, as side-tracked, down brakes,
the red flag, way station, etc. Great men are like through trains
that connect far-distant points; others are merely locals. From the
builder we get the effective phrase and idea of scaffolding. So much
in the world is mere scaffolding, so much in society is mere varnish
and veneer. Life is said to have its “seamy side.” The lever and the
fulcrum have their supersensuous uses. The chemist with his solvents,
precipitants, crystallizations, attractions, and repulsions, and the
natural philosopher with his statics and dynamics and his correlation
of forces, have enlarged our powers of expression. The strata of
the geologist furnish useful symbols. What a significant symbol is
afforded by the wave! There is much in life, in history, and in all
nature that is typified by it. We have cold waves and hot waves, and
in the spring and fall migrations of the birds we have “bird waves.”
Earthquake shocks go in waves and circles; how often our views and
conceptions of things are expressed by the circle! It is a symbol of
most profound meaning. It helps us to understand how the universe is
finally inexplicable; that there is neither beginning nor end, and that
it retreats forever into itself.
We speak of currents of thought, of opinion, of influence, and of tides
in the affairs of men. We can conceive of these things under no better
figure. Fire and all that pertains to it give us symbols, as heat,
light, flame, sparks, smoke.
The words juicy, unctuous, fluid, have obvious appropriateness when
applied to the mind and its products. Running water gives us the
delightful epithets limpid and lucid. Youth is plastic, ductile,
impressible--neither the mind nor the body has yet hardened. The
analogy is vital. A habit gets deeper and deeper hold of us; we fall
into a rut--these figures convey the exact truth.
When used as a symbol how expressive is the dawn, the twilight, the
sunset! The likeness is not accidental but fundamental.
The calm that comes after the storm in human life as in nature--how
true the analogy. To give vent to things, how significant. To give vent
to angry feelings in words, how like giving vent to smothered fire; or
to any suppressed and confined force: the words come faster and hotter,
the passion of anger mounts and there is a “blow out” indeed. Deny
yourself the first word, and the conflagration is avoided. A passion
can be smothered as literally as a fire.
The use of metaphor, comparison, analogy is twofold--to enliven and to
convince; to illustrate and enforce an accepted truth, and to press
home and clinch one in dispute. An apt figure will put a new face
upon an old and much worn truism, and a vital analogy may reach and
move the reason. Thus when Renan, referring to the decay of the old
religious beliefs, says that people are no poorer for being robbed
of false bank notes and bogus shares, his comparison has a logical
validity,--as has also Herbert Spencer’s figure when he says, “The
illusion that great men and great events came oftener in early times
than now is partly due to historical perspective. As in a range
of equidistant columns the farthest off look the closest, so the
conspicuous objects of the past seem more thickly clustered the more
remote they are.” We seem to see the identity of law in both these
cases. We are treated to a pictorial argument.
We are using analogy in a legitimate and forceful way when we speak of
our fund or capital of bodily health and strength, and of squandering
or impairing it, or of investing it poorly.
The accidental analogies or likenesses are limitless and are the great
stock in trade of most writers and speakers. They tickle the fancy and
enliven the page or the discourse. But essential analogies, or those
that spring from unity of law, are more rare. These have the force of
logic; they shed a steady light.
St. Paul’s famous comparison of the body dead and buried with the seed
in the soil, which, he says, dies before it can grow, is used with
logical intent. But will it bear examination? Is the germinating seed
dead in any sense that the body is dead? It is no more dead than the
egg buried beneath the mother hen is dead. When the egg really dies
we know the result, as we know the result when the corn rots in the
ground. It is not dissolution that the seed experiences, but evolution.
The illustration of the eloquent apostle may captivate the fancy, but
as argument designed to convince the understanding it has no force.
There might be force in the argument for immortality drawn from the
metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly, if the chrysalis really
were a shroud and held a dead body. But it is not, any more than an
egg is; it is quick, and capable of movement. The analogy between it
and the dead body will not hold. A much more sound analogy, based upon
the chrysalis, is that which takes it as the type of a mind or soul
undeveloped,--slumbering, gestating,--and the winged creature as the
developed, emancipated mind.
Analogy means an agreement of relations or an equality of ratios.
When we speak of the body as a tenement and the soul as the tenant, we
mean or aver that the relation of the soul to the body is the same as
that of the man to the house he occupies. In either case the occupant
can move out or in, and is entirely distinct from the structure that
shelters him. But if we know anything about the relations of the mind
and the body, we know that they are not like this; we know that they
are not truthfully expressed in this comparison.
Bishop Butler’s “analogy from nature,” upon which he built his famous
work, will not any better bear close examination. What analogy is
there between death and sleep or a swoon? what agreement of ratios?
The resemblance is entirely superficial. Or how can we predict another
sphere of existence for man because another sphere awaits the unborn
infant? But another sphere does not await the unborn infant; only new
and different relations to the same physical sphere. An embryo implies
a future; but what is there embryonic about the mature man?
This breakdown of Butler’s argument in regard to a future life was
pointed out by Matthew Arnold; the very point in dispute, namely, a
future life, is assumed. If there is a future life, if there is another
world, it doubtless bears some analogy to this. In like manner, if
there are fairies and nymphs and demigods, it is not improbable to
suppose that they bear some resemblance to human beings, but shall we
assume their actual existence upon such a probability?
That the unborn child starting as a bit of protoplasmic jelly should
become a man, a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare, may be quite as startling
a fact as the assumption of a future existence; yet the former is a
matter of experience, which lends no color to the truth of the latter.
It is not a matter of reason that babes become men, but a matter of
observation and experience. Indeed, in Butler’s famous argument, the
analogy of nature is everywhere forced and falsified. In every case he
puts the words into her mouth that he would have her speak. His faith
supplies him with the belief in a future life, and in a moral governor
of the universe, and then he seeks to confirm or to demonstrate the
truth of this faith by an appeal to the analogy of nature.
Out of this whirling, seething, bubbling universe of warring and
clashing forces man has emerged. How impossible it all seems to reason!
Experience alone tells us that it is true. Upon the past history of
the earth and of the race of man we may predict astonishing changes
and transformations for the future of both, because the continuity of
cause and effect is not broken; but the perpetuity of the “me” and the
“you” is not implied. All that is implied is the perpetuity of the sum
of physical forces. But as to the future of the individual, standing
upon the past or upon the present, what are we safe in affirming?
Only this--that as we had a beginning we shall have an ending; that
as yesterday we were not, so to-morrow we shall not be. A man is like
the electric spark that glows and crackles for an instant between two
dark, silent, inscrutable eternities. The fluid is not lost, but that
tiny bolt has come and gone. Darkness and silence before; darkness
and silence after. I do not say this is the summing up of the whole
question of immortality. I only mean to say that this is where the
argument from analogy lands us.
We can argue from the known to the unknown in a restricted way. We do
this in life and in science continually. We do not know that the fixed
stars have worlds revolving about them; yet the presumption, based
upon our own solar system, is that they have. But could we infer other
suns, from the existence of our own, were no others visible? Could
we predict the future of the earth did we not know its past, or read
aright its past did we not know its present state? From an arc we can
complete a circle. We can read the big in the little. The motion of a
top throws light upon the motion of the earth. An ingenious mind finds
types everywhere, but real analogies are not so common.
The likeness of one thing with another may be valid and real, but the
likeness of a thought with a thing is often merely fanciful. We very
frequently unconsciously counterfeit external objects and laws in the
region of mind and morals. Out of a physical fact or condition we
fabricate a mental or spiritual condition or experience to correspond.
Thus a current journal takes the fact that the sun obscures but does
not put out the light of the moon and the stars, and from it draws the
inference that the light of science may dim but cannot blot out the
objects of faith. It counterfeits this fact and seeks to give it equal
force and value in the spiritual realm. The objects of faith may be
as real and as unquenchable as the stars, but this is the very point
in dispute, and the analogy used assumes the thing to be proved. If
the objects of faith are real, then the light of science will not put
them out any more than the sun puts out the stars; but the fact that
the stars are there, notwithstanding the sunlight, proves nothing with
regard to the reality of the objects of faith. The only real analogy
that exists in the case is between the darkness and the daylight of the
world within and the darkness and the daylight of the world without.
Science, or knowledge, is light; ignorance is darkness; there are no
other symbols that so fully and exactly express these things. The mind
sees, science lets in the light, and the darkness flees.
If there is anything in our inward life and experience that corresponds
or is analogous to the night with its stars, it is to be found in that
withdrawal from the noise and bustle of the world into the atmosphere
of secluded contemplation. If there are any stars in your firmament,
you will find them then. But, after all, how far the stars of religion
and philosophy are subjective, or of our own creation, is always a
question.
I recently met with the same fallacy in a leading article in one of
the magazines. “The fact revealed by the spectroscope,” says the
writer, “that the physical elements of the earth exist also in the
stars, supports the faith that a moral nature like our own inhabits the
universe.” A tremendous leap--a leap from the physical to the moral.
We know that these earth elements are found in the stars by actual
observation and experience. We see them as truly as we see the stars
themselves; but a moral nature like our own--this is assumed and is
not supported at all by analogy. The only legitimate inference from
the analogy is, that as our sun has planets and that these planets,
or one of them at least, is the abode of life, so these other suns
in composition like our own, and governed by laws like our own, have
planets revolving around them which are or may be the abode of beings
like ourselves. If this “moral nature like our own” pervades our
system, then the inference is just that it also pervades the other
systems. But to argue from physical elements to moral causes is to
throw upon analogy more than it will bear.
Analogy is a kind of rule of three: we must have three terms to find
the fourth. We argue from the past to the present and from the present
to the future. Things that begin must end. If man’s life has been
continuous in the past, then we may infer that it will be continuous in
the future.
Our earth has a moon; it is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that some
of the other planets have moons. It is reasonable to suppose that there
are other planets and suns and systems, myriads of them. It may be
reasonable to think with Sir Robert Ball that the extinct or dark and
burnt-out bodies in the sky exceed in numbers the luminous ones, as the
non-luminous bodies exceed the luminous ones upon the earth. No man has
seen live steam; when it can be seen it is dead; yet we know that it
exists.
We may complete a circle from a small segment of it. If we have two
sides of a triangle, we may add the third. To find the value of
an unknown quantity, we must have a complete equation and as many
equations as we have unknown quantities. We can argue from this life to
the future life only after proof that there is a future life.
Professor Drummond was able to show the continuity of natural law in
the spiritual world by assuming that a spiritual world which was the
counterpart of the physical world actually existed. That Calvinism in
its main tenets tallies, or seems to tally, with science is no more
proof of the literal truth of those tenets than the ascribing of human
form and features to the man in the moon is proof of the existence of
such a man. Our minds, our spirits, are no doubt in a way under the
same law as are our bodies, because they are the outcome of our bodies
and our bodies are the outcome of material nature; but to base upon
that fact the existence of a corresponding world and life after death
is to leap beyond the bounds of all possible analogy.
Many of the dogmas of theology have a grain of natural truth in them.
This does not prove their truth, as applicable to some hypothetical
other world, but as applied to this world. The kingdom of heaven, as
the founder of Christianity taught, is not yonder and of to-morrow, but
is now and here.
Tolstoi, I think, is guilty of false analogy when, in attempting to get
rid of the idea of pleasure as the aim and purpose of art, he makes
the comparison with food, and says that pleasure is no more the end
in eating than it is in painting, or poetry, or music. The analogy is
false because the necessities of our bodies are not to be compared with
the luxuries, so to speak, of our minds. We cannot live without food,
but we can and do live without art. And yet, do we not eat because the
food tastes good? Is not the satisfaction of appetite the prime motive
in eating? If dining gave us no pleasure, we should probably soon learn
to swallow our food in a highly concentrated form, in capsules, and
thus make short work of it. Nature, of course, conceals her own purpose
in the pleasure we take in our food, just as she does in the pleasure
of the sexes; but of this purpose we take little thought, except in
the latter case how to defeat it. We do not have conscious pleasure in
breathing; hence our breathing is involuntary. We do have conscious
pleasure in food; hence our elaborate and ingenious cookery--often
to the detriment of our bodies. Take away the pleasures of life, the
innocent natural pleasure, take away the pleasures of art, and few of
us would care for either.
Man is a microcosm, an epitome of the universe, and its laws and
processes are repeated dimly or plainly in him. Then there are, of
course, real analogies and homologies between different parts of
nature, as between fluids and gases, and fluids and solids, between the
organic and the inorganic, between the animal, vegetable, and mineral
kingdoms.
When we strike the great vital currents or laws,--the law of growth, of
decay, of health and disease, of reproduction, of evolution,--we strike
the region of true analogy. These laws must be continuous throughout
nature. All phases of development must be analogous. The mind grows
with the body and is under the same law. Exercise is the same to
both. Each has its appetites. Each has its tonics and stimulants. All
beginnings are the same; that is, from a germ. Language must have
begun in the most rudimentary sounds. Art, we know, began in the most
rude and simple marks and signs; science in the crudest, simplest
facts; religion in childish superstition; and so on through the whole
scope of human development. Development is always from the simple to
the complex.
There is, no doubt, a deep-seated analogy between the growth of the
individual and the growth of the state or nation; between revolutions
in history, and storms and convulsions in nature.
We speak of the root of the matter; everything really has its root, its
obscure beginning, its hidden underground processes.
There are types and suggestions everywhere--fresh fuel checks the fire;
the soft stone cuts the steel the fastest; the first big drops of the
shower raise the dust.
The analogy between the development of animal life upon the earth and
the growth of organized communities seems complete. In the lower forms
of life, there is no specialization, or division of functions. The
amœba can move, feel, digest, reproduce in every part of its structure;
it is not differentiated or specialized; so in the rudest tribes, there
is little division of labor. As animal life develops, each part of the
body has a function of its own; and as communities develop, extreme
specialization takes place. Organic life goes from the simple to the
complex, as does progress in human affairs. This is the law of all
growth.
When Schopenhauer says “riches are like sea water; the more you drink
the thirstier you become,” the mind is instantly pleased by the force
and aptness of the comparison, and for the moment we look upon riches
as something to be avoided. But is the analogy entirely true? Sea water
is to be avoided altogether, even a single mouthful of it; but even
Schopenhauer defends riches and the pursuit of riches. “People are
often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving
it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for
people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready
to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or manifold
desires may for the moment fix upon.” Here the comparison will bear a
closer scrutiny. Wealth is indeed a Proteus that will take any form
your fancy may choose. “Other things are only relatively good,” the
great pessimist further says; “money alone is absolutely good, because
it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is
an abstract satisfaction of all.” What, then, becomes of its analogy to
sea water, which so mocks and inflames our thirst? Even the resemblance
in the one particular that Schopenhauer had in mind is not true. To the
great majority of people wealth brings a degree of satisfaction; they
give over its pursuit and seek the enjoyment of it. When a man enters
into the race for wealth, he is unflagging in seeking it as long as his
cup of life is full; but when the limits of his powers are reached,
he begins to lose interest, and the appetite for gold, as for other
things, declines.
When the same philosopher says that to measure a man’s happiness
only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as
futile as to try to express a fraction which shall have a numerator
but no denominator, he uses a figure that conveys the truth much more
fully. It may be open to the objection of being too technical, but
it expresses a real relation for all that. When you increase your
expectations, you increase your denominator; and as most men expect
or want more than they have, human happiness is nearly always a
fraction--rarely is it a whole number. With many it is a very small
fraction indeed. Blessed is he who expects little. The man who expects
ten and gets but five is more to be envied than he who expects a
thousand and gets but fifty. He is nearer the sum of his wishes. Hence
the truth of the old saying that it is our wants that make us poor.
When a piece of good fortune that he did not expect comes to a man, his
happiness or satisfaction is no longer a fraction; it is more than a
unit.
Quintilian says that the early blossom of talent is rarely followed by
the fruit of great achievement, but the early works of a man or a youth
are just as much fruit as his later ones. There is really no analogy
between the early works of an author and the blossoms of a tree. The
dreams, the visions, the aspirations of youth are more like blossoms.
Probably no great man has been without them; but how they wither and
fall, and how much more sober the aspect which life puts on before any
solid achievements can be pointed to! There is usually something more
fresh and pristine about the earlier works of a man--more buoyancy,
more unction, more of the “fluid and attaching character;” but the
ripest wisdom always goes with age.
There are, no doubt, many strict and striking analogies between the
mind and the body, their growth and decay, their health and disease,
their assimilative, digestive, and reproductive processes.
The mind is only a finer body. It is hardly a figure of speech to speak
of wounded feelings, of a wounded spirit. How acute at first, and how
surely healing with time. But the scar remains. Then there are real
analogies, real parallels, between the mind and outward nature, in the
laws of growth and decay, nutrition and reproduction. “The mind of
Otho,” says Tacitus, “was not, like his body, soft and effeminate.”
There are minds that are best described by the word masculine, and
others by the word feminine. There are dull, sluggish minds, just as
there are heavy, sluggish bodies, and the two usually go together.
There are dry, lean minds, and there are minds full of unction and
juice. We even use the phrase “mental dyspepsia,” but the analogy
here implied is probably purely fanciful, though mental dissipation
and mental intemperance are no idle words. Some persons acquire the
same craze for highly exciting and stimulating mental food that others
have for strong drink, or for pepper and other condiments. They lose
their taste for simple, natural, healthful things,--for good sound
literature,--and crave sensational novels and the Sunday newspapers.
Doubtless a large part of the reading of the American people to-day
is sheer mental dissipation, and is directed by an abnormal craving
for mental excitement. There is degeneration in the physical world,
and there is degeneration, strictly so called, in the intellectual
world. There are proportion, relation, cause and effect, health and
disease, in one as in the other. Logic is but the natural relation
of parts as we see them in the organic world. In fact, logic is but
health and proportion. The mind cannot fly any more than the body can;
it progresses from one fact or consideration to another, step by step,
though often, or perhaps generally, we are not conscious of the steps.
A large view of truth may be suddenly revealed to the mind, as of a
landscape from a hill-top; but the mind did not fly to the vantage
ground; it reached it by a slow and maybe obscure process.
The world is simpler than we think. The modes and processes of things
widely dissimilar are more likely to be identical than we suspect.
There are homologies where we see apparent contradiction. There is but
one protoplasm for animal and vegetable. A little more or less heat
makes the gaseous, makes the liquid, makes the solid. Lava crystallizes
or freezes at a high temperature; water, at a low one; mercury, at
a still lower. Charcoal and the diamond are one; the same law of
gravitation which makes the cloud float makes the rain fall. The law
that spheres a tear spheres a globe. These facts warrant us in looking
for real homologies, vital correspondences, in nature. Only such
correspondences give logical and scientific value to analogy. If the
likeness means identity of law, or is the same principle in another
disguise, then it is an instrument of truth. We might expect to find
many analogies between air and water, the atmosphere being but a finer
ocean; also between ice and water, and between ice and the stratified
rocks. If water flows, then will ice flow; if ice bends, then will the
rocky strata bend. If cross fertilization is good in the vegetable
world, we should expect to find it good in the animal world.
There is thought to be a strict analogy between the succession of
plants in different months of the year and the prevalence of different
diseases at different seasons. The germ theory of disease gives force
to the comparison. The different species of germs no doubt find some
periods of the year more favorable to their development than others.
If on this planet men walk about while trees are rooted to the ground,
we may reasonably expect that the same is true--provided that on them
there are men and trees--of all other planets. If the law of variation,
and the survival of the fittest, are the laws of one species, then
they will prove to be the laws of all. The bud is a kind of seed;
the fruit is a kind of leaf. High culture has the same effect upon
man and animals that it has upon plants,--it lessens the powers of
reproduction. The lowest organisms multiply by myriads; the higher
barely keep from retrograding. A wild apple is full of seeds; in a
choice pippin the seeds are largely abortive. Indeed, all weeds and
parasites seem bent on filling the world with their progeny, while
the higher forms fall off and tend to extinction. Such agreements and
correspondences point to identity of law. The analogy is vital.
In the animal economy there are analogies with outward nature. Thus
respiration is a kind of combustion. Life itself is a kind of fire
which goes out when it has no fuel to feed upon. The foliage of a tree
has functions like those of the lungs of an animal. Darwin has noted
the sleep of plants and their diurnal motions. Dr. Holmes had a bold
fancy that trees are animals, with their tails in the air and their
heads in the ground; but there is nothing in the trunk and branches
of a tree analogous to a tail, though there is a sort of rudimentary
intelligence in the root, as Darwin has shown. We use the tree as a
symbol of the branching of a family; hence the family tree. But the
analogy is not a true one. The branches of a family multiply and
diverge when traced backward the same as forward. You had two parents,
they had four, these four had eight, and so on. If the human race
sprang from one pair, then are its branchings more a kind of network,
an endless multiplication of meshes. All the past appears to centre in
you, and all the future to spring from you. We get the family tree
only by cutting out a fragment of this network.
There is little doubt that certain natural laws pervade alike both mind
and matter. The law of evolution is universally operative, and is the
key to development in the moral and intellectual world no less than in
the physical. We are probably, in all our thoughts and purposes, much
more under the dominion of universal natural laws than we suspect.
The will reaches but a little way. I have no doubt that the race of
man bears a definite relation to the life of the globe,--that is, to
its age, its store of vitality; that it will culminate as the vital
power of the earth culminates, and decline as it declines. Like man,
the earth has had its youth,--its nebulous, fiery, molten youth; then
its turbulent, luxuriant, copious, riotous middle period; then its
placid, temperate, ripe later age, when the higher forms emerge upon
the scene. The analogy is deep and radical. The vital energy of the
globe was once much more rampant and overflowing than it is now; the
time will come when the pulse of the planet will be much feebler than
it is now. Youth and age, growth and decay, are universal conditions.
The heavens themselves shall wax old as doth a garment. Life and death
are universal conditions, and to fancy a place where death is not is to
fancy one’s self entirely outside of this universe and of all possible
universes.
Men in communities and assemblages are under laws that do not reach or
affect the single individual, just as vast bodies of water respond to
attractions and planetary perturbations that do not affect the lesser
bodies. Men kindle one another as do firebrands, and beget a collective
heat and an enthusiasm that tyrannize over the individual purposes and
wills. We say things are in the air, that a spirit is abroad; that is,
that influences are at work above the wills and below the consciousness
of the people. There are changes or movements in the world and in the
communities that seem strictly analogous to drifting; it is as when a
ship is carried out of its course by unsuspected currents, or as when
arctic explorers, with their faces set northward, are unconsciously
carried in the opposite direction by the ice floe beneath them. The
spirit of the age, or the time-spirit, is always at work, and takes us
with it, whether we know it or not. For instance, the whole religious
world is now drifting away from the old theology, and drifting faster
than we suspect. Certain zealots have their faces very strongly set
against it, but, like Commodore Parry on the ice floe, they are going
south faster than their efforts are carrying them north. Indeed, the
whole sentiment of the race is moving into a more genial and temperate
theological climate, away from purgatorial fires rather than toward
them.
The political sentiment of a country also drifts. That of our own may
be said to have been drifting for some time now in the direction of
freer commercial intercourse with other nations.
A man’s life may stagnate as literally as water may stagnate, and
just as motion and direction are the remedy for one, so purpose and
activity are the remedy for the other. Movement is the condition of
life, anyway. Set the currents going in the air, in the water, in the
body, in the mind, in the community, and a healthier condition will
follow. Change, diversity, activity, are the prime conditions of life
and health everywhere. Persons with doubts and perplexities about life
go to work to ameliorate some of its conditions, and their doubts and
perplexities vanish--not because their problems are solved, as they
think they are, but because their energies have found an outlet, the
currents have been set going. Persons of strong will have few doubts
and uncertainties. They do not solve the problems, but they break the
spell of their enchantment. Nothing relieves and ventilates the mind
like a resolution.
A true work of art is analogous to a living organism. “The essential
condition of art creations,” says Renan, “is to form a living system
every portion of which answers and demands every other.... The intimate
laws of life, of the development of organic products, and of the toning
down of shades must be considered at every step.” Works such as certain
of Victor Hugo’s, which have no organic unity and proportion, are,
according to this dictum, monstrosities.
When Matthew Arnold insisted upon it that in all vital prose there is
a process of evolution, he enunciated the same principle as did Renan.
We all know well that which is organic in books as distinguished from
the inorganic, the vital as distinguished from the mechanical. Read the
learned address of the president of some local scientific or literary
society, and then turn to one of Professor Huxley’s trenchant papers.
The difference is just that between weapons in an armory and weapons
in the hands of trained soldiers. Huxley’s will and purpose, or his
personality, pervade and vitalize his material and make it his own,
while the learned president sustains only an accidental and mechanical
relation to what he has to say. Happy is the writer who can lop off or
cut out from his page everything to which he sustains only a secondary
and mechanical relation.
The summing up of the matter would then seem to be, that there is an
analogy of rhetoric and an analogy of science; a likeness that is
momentary and accidental, giving rise to metaphor and parable; and a
correspondence that is fundamental, arising from the universality of
law.
III
STYLE AND THE MAN
I
The difference between a precious stone and a common stone is not an
essential difference--not a difference of substance, but of arrangement
of the particles--the crystallization. In substance charcoal and the
diamond are one, but in form and effect how widely they differ. The
pearl contains nothing that is not found in the coarsest oyster shell.
Two men have the same thoughts; they use about the same words in
expressing them; yet with one the product is real literature, with the
other it is a platitude.
The difference is all in the presentation; a finer and more compendious
process has gone on in the one case than in the other. The elements
are better fused and welded together; they are in some way heightened
and intensified. Is not here a clue to what we mean by style? Style
transforms common quartz into an Egyptian pebble. We are apt to think
of style as something external, that can be put on, something in and of
itself. But it is not; it is in the inmost texture of the substance.
Choice words, faultless rhetoric, polished periods, are only the
accidents of style. Indeed, perfect workmanship is one thing; style,
as the great writers have it, is quite another. It may, and often
does, go with faulty workmanship. It is the use of words in a fresh
and vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of a new spiritual force
and personality. In the best work the style is found and hidden in the
matter.
If a writer does not bring a new thought, he must at least bring a new
quality,--he must give a fresh, new flavor to the old thoughts. Style
or quality will keep a man’s work alive whose thought is essentially
commonplace, as is the case with Addison; and Arnold justly observes of
the poet Gray that his gift of style doubles his force and “raises him
to a rank beyond what his natural richness and power seem to warrant.”
There is the correct, conventional, respectable and scholarly use of
language of the mass of writers, and there is the fresh, stimulating,
quickening use of it of the man of genius. How apt and racy and telling
is often the language of unlettered persons; the born writer carries
this same gift into a higher sphere. There is a passage in one of
Emerson’s early letters, written when he was but twenty-four, and given
by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, which shows how clearly at that age Emerson
discerned the secret of good writing and good preaching.
“I preach half of every Sunday. When I attended church on the other
half of a Sunday, and the image in the pulpit was all of clay, and
not of tunable metal, I said to myself that if men would avoid that
general language and general manner in which they strive to hide
all that is peculiar, and would say only what is uppermost in their
own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be
interesting.... But whatever properties a man of narrow intellect feels
to be peculiar he studiously hides; he is ashamed or afraid of himself,
and all his communications to men are unskillful plagiarisms from the
common stock of thought and knowledge, and he is of course flat and
tiresome.”
The great mass of the writing and sermonizing of any age is of the kind
here indicated; it is the result of the machinery of culture and of
books and the schools put into successful operation. But now and then
a man appears whose writing is vital; his page may be homely, but it
is alive; it is full of personal magnetism. The writer does not merely
give us what he thinks or knows; he gives us himself. There is nothing
secondary or artificial between himself and his reader. It is books
of this kind that mankind does not willingly let die. Some minds are
like an open fire,--how direct and instant our communication with them;
how they interest us; there are no screens or disguises; we see and
feel the vital play of their thought; we are face to face with their
spirits. Indeed all good literature, whether poetry or prose, is the
open fire; there is directness, reality, charm; we get something at
first-hand that warms and stimulates.
In literature proper our interest, I think, is always in the writer
himself,--his quality, his personality, his point of view. We may fancy
that we care only for the subject matter; but the born writer makes any
subject interesting to us by his treatment of it or by the personal
element he infuses into it. When our concern is primarily with the
subject matter, with the fact or the argument, or with the information
conveyed, then we are not dealing with literature in the strict sense.
It is not so much what the writer tells us that makes literature, as
the way he tells it; or rather, it is the degree in which he imparts
to it some rare personal quality or charm that is the gift of his own
spirit, something which cannot be detached from the work itself, and
which is as inherent as the sheen of a bird’s plumage, as the texture
of a flower’s petal. There is this analogy in nature. The hive bee does
not get honey from the flowers; honey is a product of the bee. What she
gets from the flowers is mainly sweet water or nectar; this she puts
through a process of her own, and to it adds a minute drop of her own
secretion, formic acid. It is her special personal contribution that
converts the nectar into honey.
In the work of the literary artist, common facts and experiences are
changed and heightened in the same way. Sainte-Beuve, speaking of
certain parts of Rousseau’s “Confessions,” says, “Such pages were, in
French literature, the discovery of a new world, a world of sunshine
and of freshness, which men had near them without having perceived it.”
They had not perceived it because they had not had Rousseau’s mind to
mirror it for them. The sunshine and the freshness were a gift of his
spirit. The new world was the old world in a new light. What charmed
them was a quality personal to Rousseau. Nature they had always had,
but not the Rousseau sensibility to nature. The same may be said of
more recent writers upon outdoor themes. Readers fancy that in the
works of Thoreau or of Jefferies some new charm or quality of nature is
disclosed, that something hidden in field or wood is brought to light.
They do not see that what they are in love with is the mind or spirit
of the writer himself. Thoreau does not interpret nature, but nature
interprets him. The new thing disclosed in bird and flower is simply a
new sensibility to these objects in the beholder. In morals and ethics
the same thing is true. Let an essayist like Dr. Johnson or Arthur
Helps state a principle or an idea and it has a certain value; let an
essayist like Ruskin or Emerson or Carlyle state the same principle
and it has an entirely different value, makes an entirely different
impression,--the qualities of mind and character of these writers are
so different. The reader’s relation with them is much more intimate and
personal.
It is quality of mind which makes the writings of Burke rank above
those of Gladstone, Ruskin’s criticism above that of Hamerton, Froude’s
histories above Freeman’s, Renan’s “Life of Jesus” above that of
Strauss; which makes the pages of Goethe, Coleridge, Lamb, literature
in a sense that the works of many able minds are not. These men impart
something personal and distinctive to the language they use. They make
the words their own. The literary quality is not something put on. It
is not of the hand, it is of the mind; it is not of the mind, but of
the soul; it is of whatever is most vital and characteristic in the
writer. It is confined to no particular manner and to no particular
matter. It may be the gift of writers of widely different manners--of
Carlyle as well as of Arnold; and in men of similar manners, one may
have it and the other may not. It is as subtle as the tone of the voice
or the glance of the eye. Quality is the one thing in life that cannot
be analyzed, and it is the one thing in art that cannot be imitated. A
man’s manner may be copied, but his style, his charm, his real value,
can only be parodied. In the conscious or unconscious imitations of the
major poets by the minor, we get only a suggestion of the manner of the
former; their essential quality cannot be reproduced.
English literature is full of imitations of the Greek poets, but
that which the Greek poets did not and could not borrow they cannot
lend; their quality stays with them. The charm of spoken discourse is
largely in the personal quality of the speaker--something intangible
to print. When we see the thing in print, we wonder how it could so
have charmed or moved us. To convey this charm, this aroma of the man,
to the written discourse is the triumph of style. A recent French
critic says of Madame de Staël that she had no style; she wrote just
as she thought, but without being able to impart to her writing the
living quality of her speech. It is not importance of subject matter
that makes a work great, but importance of the subjectivity of the
writer,--a great mind, a great soul, a great personality. A work that
bears the imprint of these, that is charged with the life and power of
these, which it gives forth again under pressure, is alone entitled to
high rank.
All pure literature is the revelation of a man. In a work of true
literary art the subject matter has been so interpenetrated and
vitalized by the spirit or personality of the writer, has become so
thoroughly identified with it, that the two are one and inseparable,
and the style _is_ the man. Works in which this blending and
identification, through emotion or imagination, of the author with his
subject has not taken place, or has taken place imperfectly, do not
belong to pure literature. They may serve a useful purpose; but all
_useful_ purposes, in the strict sense, are foreign to those of art,
which means foreign to the spirit that would live in the whole, that
would live in the years and not in the days, in time and not in the
hour. The true literary artist gives you of the substance of his mind;
not merely his thought or his philosophy, but something more intimate
and personal than that. It is not a tangible object passed from his
hand to yours; it is much more like a transfusion of blood from his
veins to yours. Montaigne gives us Montaigne,--the most delightfully
garrulous man in literature. “These are fancies of my own,” he says,
“by which I do not pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself.”
“Cut these sentences,” says Emerson, “and they bleed.” Matthew Arnold
denied that Emerson was a great writer; but we cannot account for the
charm and influence of his works, it seems to me, on any other theory
than that he has at least this mark of the great writer: he gives his
reader of his own substance, he saturates his page with the high and
rare quality of his own spirit. Everything he published has a distinct
literary value, as distinguished from its moral or religious value. The
same may be said of Arnold himself: else we should not care much for
him. It is a particular and interesting type of man that speaks and
breathes in every sentence; his style is vital in his matter, and is no
more separable from it than the style of silver or of gold is separable
from those metals.
In such a writer as Lecky on the other hand, or as Mill or Spencer,
one does not get this same subtle individual flavor; the work is more
external, more the product of certain special faculties, as the reason,
the memory, the understanding; and the personality of the author is
not so intimately involved. But in the writer with the creative touch,
whether he be poet, novelist, historian, critic, essayist, the chief
factor in the product is always his own personality.
Style, then, in the sense in which I am here using the term, implies
that vital, intimate, personal relation of the man to his language by
which he makes the words his own, fills them with his own quality, and
gives the reader that lively sense of being in direct communication
with a living, breathing, mental and spiritual force. The writer who
appears to wield his language as an instrument or a tool, something
exterior to himself, who makes you conscious of his vocabulary, or
whose words are the garments and not the tissue of his thought,
has not style in this sense. “Style,” says Schopenhauer, “is the
physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face.”
This definition is as good as any, and better than most, because it
implies that identification of words with thoughts, of the man with
his subject, which is the secret of a living style. Hence the man who
imitates another wears a mask, as does the man who writes in a language
to which he was not born.
II
It has been said that novel-writing is a much finer art in our day
than it was in the time of Scott, or of Dickens and Thackeray,--finer,
I think, because it is in the hands of finer-strung, more daintily
equipped men; but would one dare to say it is a greater art? One may
admit all that is charged about Scott’s want of style, his diffuseness
and cumbrousness, and his tedious descriptions, and still justly
claim for him the highest literary honors. He was a great nature, as
Goethe said, and we come into vital contact with that great nature
in his romances. He was not deficient in the larger art that knows
how to make a bygone age live again to the imagination. He himself
seems to have deprecated his “big bow-wow” style in comparison with
the exquisite touches of Jane Austen. But no fineness of workmanship,
no deftness of handling, can make up for the want of a large, rich,
copious human endowment. I think we need to remember this when we
compare unfavorably such men as Dickens and Thackeray with the cleverer
artists of our own day. Scott makes up to us for his deficiencies in
the matter of style by the surpassing human interest of his characters
and incidents, their relations to the major currents of human life.
His scenes fill the stage of history, his personages seem adequate to
great events, and the whole story has a certain historic grandeur and
impressiveness. There is no mistaking a great force, a great body, in
literature any more than there is in the physical world; in Scott we
have come upon a great river, a great lake, a great mountain, and we
are more impressed by it than by the lesser bodies, though they have
many more graces and prettinesses.
Frederic Harrison, in a recent address on style, is cautious in
recommending the young writer to take thought of his style. Let him
rather take thought of what he has to say; in turning his ideal
values into the coin of current speech he will have an exercise in
style. If he has no ideal values, then is literature barred to him.
Let him cultivate his sensibilities; make himself, if possible, more
quickly responsive to life and nature about him; let him try to see
more clearly and feel more keenly, and connect his vocabulary with
his most radical and spontaneous self. Style can never come from the
outside,--from consciously seeking it by imitating the manner of
favorite authors. It comes, if at all, like the bloom upon fruit, or
the glow of health upon the cheek, from an inner essential harmony and
felicity.
In a well known passage Macaulay tells what happened to Miss Burney
when she began to think about her style, and fell to imitating Dr.
Johnson; how she lost the “charming vivacity” and “perfectly natural
unconsciousness of manner” of her youthful writings, and became modish
and affected. She threw away her own style, which was a “tolerably good
one,” and which might “have been improved into a very good one,” and
adopted “a style in which she could attain excellence only by achieving
an almost miraculous victory over nature and over habit. She could
cease to be Fanny Burney; it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson.”
It is giving too much thought to style in the more external and
verbal aspects of it, which I am here considering, that leads to
the confounding of style with diction, and that gives rise to the
“stylist.” The stylist shows you what can be done with mere words. He
is the foliage plant of the literary flower garden. An English college
professor has recently exploited him in a highly wrought essay on
Style. Says our professor, “The business of letters is twofold, to find
words for meaning and to find meaning for words.” It strikes me that
the last half of this proposition is not true of the serious writer, of
the man who has something to say, but is true only of what is called
the stylist, the man who has been so often described as one having
nothing to say, which he says extremely well. The stylist’s main effort
is a verbal one, to find meaning for words; he does not wrestle with
ideas, but with terms and phrases; his thoughts are word-begotten and
are often as unsubstantial as spectres and shadows.
The stylist cultivates words as the florist cultivates flowers, and
a new adjective or a new collocation of terms is to him what a new
chrysanthemum or a new pansy is to his brother of the forcing house.
He is more an European product than an American. London and Paris
abound in men who cultivate the art of expression for its own sake, who
study how to combine words so as to tickle the verbal sense without
much reference to the value of the idea expressed. Club and university
life, excessive library culture--a sort of indoor or hothouse literary
atmosphere--foster this sort of thing.
French literature can probably show more stylists than English, but
the later school of British writers are not far behind in the matter
of studied expression. Professor Raleigh, from whose work on style I
quoted above, often writes forcibly and suggestively; but one cannot
help but feel, on finishing his little volume, that it is more the work
of a stylist than of a thinker. This is the opening sentence: “Style,
the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that
handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements
of speech.” Does not one faintly scent the stylist at the start? Later
on he says: “In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that
compose it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of
their individual scope,--bringing with them, if they be torn away too
quickly, some cumbrous fragments of their recent association.” Does
not the stylist stand fully confessed here? That he may avoid these
“cumbrous fragments” that will stick to words when you suddenly pull
them up by the roots, “a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts,
and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his
encumbrance.” The lust of expression, the conjuring with mere words, is
evident. “He is a poor stylist,” says our professor, “who cannot beg
half a dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the conclusion
he would fain avoid in terms that startle the senses into clamorous
revolt.”
What it is in one that starts into “clamorous revolt” at such verbal
gymnastics as are shown in the following sentences I shall not try to
define, but it seems to me it is something real and legitimate. “A
slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism in the common
turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off
the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select
audience of ticket holders with closed doors. A single natural phrase
of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel
parlance authorizes readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and
at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa
and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed
sunshine.”
Amiel says of Renan that science was his material rather than his
object; his object was style. Yet Renan was not a stylist in the sense
in which I am using the word. His main effort was never a verbal
one, never an effort to find meaning for words; he was intent upon
his subject; his style was vital in his thought, and never took on
airs on its own account. You cannot in him separate the artist from
the thinker, nor give either the precedence. All writers with whom
literature is an art aim at style in the sense that they aim to present
their subject in the most effective form,--with clearness, freshness,
force. They become stylists when their thoughts wait upon their words,
or when their thoughts are word-begotten. Such writers as Gibbon, De
Quincey, Macaulay, have studied and elaborate styles, but in each the
matter is paramount and the mind finds something solid to rest upon.
“The chief of the incommodities imposed upon the writer,” says
Professor Raleigh, is “the necessity at all times and at all costs
to mean something,” or to find meaning for words. This no doubt is a
hard task. The trouble begins when one has the words first. To invoke
ideas with words is a much more difficult experience than the reverse
process. But probably all true writers have something to say before
they have the desire to say it, and in proportion as the thought is
vital and real is its expression easy.
When I meet the stylist, with his straining for verbal effects, I love
to recall this passage from Whitman. “The great poet,” he says, “swears
to his art, I will not be meddlesome. I will not have in my writing any
elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and
the rest, like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the
richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who
may, exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe; I will have purpose, as
health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I
experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of
my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with
me.”
This is the same as saying that the great success in writing is to
get language out of the way and to put your mind directly to the
reader’s, so that there be no veil of words between you. If the reader
is preoccupied with your words, if they court his attention or cloud
his vision, to that extent is the communication imperfect. In some
of Swinburne’s poems there is often such a din and echo of rhyme and
alliteration that it is almost impossible to hear what the man is
really saying.
To darken counsel with words is a common occurrence. Words are like
lenses,--they must be arranged in just such a way, or they hinder
rather than help the vision. When the adjustment is as it should
be, the lens itself is invisible; and language in the hands of the
master is as transparent. Some of the more recent British poets affect
the archaic, the quaint, the eccentric, in language, so that one’s
attention is almost entirely occupied with their words. Reading them is
like trying to look through a pair of spectacles too old or too young
for you, or with lenses of different focus.
But has not style a value in and of itself? As in the case of light,
its value is in the revelation it makes. Its value is to conceal
itself, to lose itself in the matter. If humility, or self-denial,
or any of the virtues becomes conscious of itself and claims credit
for its own sake, does it not that moment fall from grace? What
incomparable style in the passage I have quoted from Whitman when we
come to think of it, but how it effaces itself and is of no account
for the sake of the idea it serves! The more a writer’s style humbles
itself, the more it is exalted. There is nothing true in religion
that is not equally true in art. Give yourself entirely. All selfish
and secondary ends are of the devil. Our Calvinistic grandfathers,
who fancied themselves willing to be damned for the glory of God,
illustrate the devotion of the true artist to his ideal. “Consider the
lilies of the field, ... they toil not, neither do they spin.” The
style of the born poet or artist takes as little thought of itself,
and is the spontaneous expression of the same indwelling grace and
necessity.
III
I once overheard a lady say to a popular author, “What I most admire
about your books is their fine style.” “But I never think about my
style” was his reply. “I know you don’t,” said his admirer, “and that
is why I like it so much.” But we may regard him as thinking about
his style, when he fancied himself thinking only about his matter. In
his case the style and the matter were one. When he was consciously
occupied only with the substance and texture of his thought, he was
occupied with his style. Every effort to make the idea flow clear and
pure, to give it freshness and fillip, or to seize and embody in words
a mental or emotional impression in all its integrity, without blur
or confusion, is an effort in style. It is like taking the alloys and
impurities out of a metal; the style or beauty of it is improved. The
making of iron into steel is a process of purification. When Froude
was questioned about his style, he confessed that he had never given
any thought to the subject; his aim had been to say what he had to say
in the most direct and simple way possible. He was conscious only of
trying to see clearly and to speak truly. I suppose this is the case
with all first-class minds, in our day at least: the main endeavor is
directed toward the matter, and not toward the manner; or rather, it
is to make the one identical with the other. In no page of Froude’s,
nor in any writer of equal range and seriousness, are we conscious
of the style as something apart and that claims our admiration on its
own account, as we are in the case of Walter Pater, for example. Such
men as Pater are enamored of style itself, and cultivate it for its
own sake. They conceive of it as an independent grace and charm that
may be imparted to any subject by dint of an effort directed to verbal
arrangement and sequence alone.
IV
There is a good deal of wisdom in Voltaire’s saying that “all styles
are good that are not tiresome.” Voltaire’s own style certainly had
the merit of not tiring. Even in the English translation I never cease
to marvel at its grace and buoyancy. In keeping with this dictum is
the remark I heard concerning a certain living writer, namely, that he
had the best style in literature to-day because one could read fifty
pages of his and not know that one was reading at all; it was pure
expression--offered no resistance.
This offering no resistance, this ease and limpidity--a getting rid
of all friction in the written page--herein certainly lies the secret
of much that is winsome in literature. How little friction the mind
encounters in Addison, in Lamb, or in the best of our own prose
writers; and how much in Meredith, and the later writings of Henry
James! Is not friction to be got rid of as far as possible in all
departments of life? One does not want his shoes to pinch, nor his
coat to bind, neither does he want to waste any strength on involved
sentences, or on cryptic language. Did you ever try to row a boat in
water in which lay a sodden fleece of newly fallen snow? I find the
reading of certain books like that. Some of Browning’s poems impede my
mind in that way.
Force of impact--that is another matter; that warms and quickens the
mind. Browning’s “How they brought the Good News from Ghent” makes the
mind hot by its rush and power. There is no mere mechanical friction of
elliptical sentences and obscure allusions here.
Yes, the style that does not tire us is better than the style that
does. Thus Arnold’s style is better than Walter Pater’s, because it
is easier to follow; it is not so conscious of itself; it is not so
obviously studied. Pater studied words; Arnold studied ideas. Pater
sacrificed the more familiar democratic traits of language--ease,
simplicity, flexibility, transparency--to his passion for the more
choice aristocratic features,--the perfumed, the academic, the highly
wrought. Again, I find Arnold’s style less fatiguing than Lowell’s,
because it has more current, more continuity of thought, and is freer
from _concetti_ and mere surface sparkle. I find Swinburne’s prose more
tiresome than that of any contemporary British critic, because of its
inflated polysyllabic character, and his poetry more cloying than that
of any other poet, because of its almost abnormal lilt and facility;
it has a pathological fluidity; it seems as though, when he begins
to write verse, his whole mental structure is in danger of melting
down and running away in mere words. His heat is that of fever; his
inspiration borders on delirium.
We never tire of Addison by reason of his style, or of Swift or of
Lamb or of our own Irving or Hawthorne or Warner. It is probably as
rare to find a French writer whose style tires the reader as it is to
find a German whose style does not. As M. Brunetière well says, French
literature is a social literature, German is philosophic, and English
individualistic. It is the business of the first to be agreeable,
of the second to be profound, of the third to be original. Who does
not tire of Strauss sooner than of Renan, of Macaulay sooner than of
Sainte-Beuve?
A writer with a pronounced, individualistic style--one full of mere
mechanical difficulties, like Browning’s or Carlyle’s--runs great risk
of wearying the reader and of being left behind. So far as his style
degenerates into mannerism, so far is he handicapped in the race.
Smoothness is not beauty, neither is roughness power; yet without a
certain harmony and continuity there is neither beauty nor power.
Herbert Spencer, in his essay on the Philosophy of Style, would have a
writer avoid this danger of wearying his reader, by writing alternately
in different styles. “To have a specific style,” he says, “is to be
poor in speech.” “The perfect writer will express himself as Junius,
when in the Junius frame of mind; when he feels as Lamb felt, will use
a like familiar speech; and will fall into the ruggedness of Carlyle
when in a Carlylean mood.” A man who should try to follow this advice
would be pretty sure to be Jack-of-all-styles and master of none. What
a piece of patchwork his composition would be! A “specific style” is
not to be avoided; it is to be cultivated and practiced till every
false note, every trace of crudeness and insincerity, is purged out of
it.
The secret of good prose is a subtle quality or flavor, hard to define,
like that of a good apple or a good melon, and it is as intimately
bound up in the very substance and texture in the one case as in the
other, and, we may add, is of as many varieties. We are sure always to
get good prose from Mr. Howells and Colonel Higginson, but we are not
always so sure of getting it from certain of our younger novelists.
Here is a sample of bad prose from a popular novel by a Southern
writer:--
“The whole woods emerged from the divine bath of nature with the
coolness, the freshness, the immortal purity of Diana united to the
roseate glow and mortal tenderness of Venus, and haunted by two
spirits: the chaste, unfading youth of Endymion and the dust-born
warmth and eagerness of Dionysus.”
Yet the man who could permit himself the use of such inflated language
as that, was capable of turning off such a passage as this:--
“Some women, in marrying, demand all and give all: with good men they
are happy; with base men they are the broken-hearted. Some demand
everything and give little: with weak men they are tyrants; with strong
men they are the divorced. Some demand little and give all: with
congenial souls they are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are
soon in their graves. Some give little and demand little: they are the
heartless, and they bring neither the joy of life nor the peace of
death.”
That is sound prose; it is like a passage from a great classic.
When we advise the young writer to go honestly to work to say in the
simplest manner what he really thinks and feels, one does not mean that
by this course he is likely to write like the great prose masters, but
that by this means alone can his work have the basic qualities of good
literature,--directness, veracity, vitality, the beauty and reality of
natural things. Genuineness first, grace and eloquence afterwards.
“The ugliest living face,” says Schopenhauer, “is better than a mask.”
It is real, it is alive. So the simple, direct speech of a man in
earnest is so much better than the perfunctory eloquence one is so
often compelled to hear or to read. Reality, reality--nothing can make
up for a want of reality.
Sainte-Beuve said, as I have already quoted, that the peasant always
has style; the French peasant probably more often than any other. This
is certainly so if we take such a character as Joan of Arc as a typical
peasant. What adroitness, and at times, classic beauty in her answer
to her judges! When they sought to entrap her with the question, “Do
you know if you are in the grace of God?” she replied, “If I am not,
may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me.” Under pressure,
the peasant mind, and indeed all other minds, are, at times, capable
of these things. But usually the charm of rustic speech is in its
plainness and simplicity, like that of other rural things, a bridge, a
woodshed, a well-sweep, a log house,--no thought of style, thought of
service only. But the beauty of what may be called the architectural
style of the great prose masters,--Gibbon, Burke, Browne, Hooker, De
Quincey,--like the beauty of a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral,
is quite another matter. What both have in common is the beauty of
sincerity and reality.
The vernacular style of writers of the seventeenth century, like
Walton, Fuller, Baxter, Jonson, is more in keeping with the taste of
to-day than the rhetorical and highly wrought style of certain of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers.
Hence, when we ascribe style to simple, homely things, or to speech,
we mean something quite different from style when applied to the great
compositions either in literature, music, or architecture.
Milton could plan and build the lofty rhyme and attain beauty;
Wordsworth attains beauty by his sincerity and simplicity, and his
fervent love of rural things. He has not style in the Miltonic sense.
One has classic beauty, the other, natural or naïve beauty. The
monumental works of the ancients were planned and wrought like their
architecture, and have a beauty that rivals nature. Shakespeare rarely
attains anything like classic beauty, and has any poem since Keats’s
“Ode to a Nightingale” struck the note firmly and surely?
V
I have often asked myself why it is that the interviewer will sometimes
get so much more wisdom out of a man, and so many more fresh and
entertaining statements--in short, so much better literature--than
the man can get out of himself. Is it because one’s best and ripest
thoughts rise to the surface, like the cream on the milk, and does
the interviewer simply skim them off? Maybe, in writing, we often
dip too deep, make too great an effort. Interviews are nearly always
interesting,--much more so than a formal studied statement by the
interviewed himself. Many a piece of sound, excellent literature
has been got out of a man who had no skill at all with the pen. His
spoken word is vital and real; but in a conscious literary effort the
fire is quenched at once. Hence the charm of letters, of diaries, of
the simple narrations and recitals of pioneers, farmers, workers, or
persons who have no conscious literary equipment. Who would not rather
read a bit of real experience of a soldier in battle, such as a clever
interviewer could draw out of him, than to read his general’s studied
account of the same engagement? “To elaborate is of no avail,” says
Whitman. “Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.” Only the great
artist can rival or surpass the sense of reality we often find in
common speech. Set a man to writing out his views or his experience
and the danger is that he will be too formal; he will get himself up
for the occasion; there will be no ease or indifference in his manner;
he will go to delving in his mind, and we shall miss the simple, direct
self-expression that we are after.
In Dr. Johnson’s talk, as reported by Boswell, we touch the real man;
in the “Rambler” you touch only his clothes or periwig. His more
formal writing seems the product of some kind of artificial put-on
faculty, like the Sunday sermons one hears or the newspaper editorials
one reads. The sermon is in what may be called the surpliced style,
the Rambler in the periwigged style. Emerson said of Alcott that his
conversation was wonderful, but that when he sat down to write his
inspiration left him. Most men are wiser in company than in the study.
What is interesting in a man is what he himself has felt or seen or
experienced. If you can tell us that, we shall listen eagerly. The
uncultured man does not know this, but seeks the far-off or the deep
down.
Our thoughts, our opinions, are like apples on the tree: they must
take time to ripen; and when they are ripe, how easily they fall! A
mere nudge brings them down. How easily the old man talks; how full he
is of wisdom! Time was when his tongue was tied; he could not express
himself; his thoughts were half formed and unripe; they clung tightly
to the bough. Set him to writing, and with great labor he produced some
crude, half-formed notions of his own, mixed with the riper opinions
of the authors he had read. But now his fruit has matured and it has
mellowed; it has color and flavor; and his conversation abounds in
wisdom.
VI
The standard of style of the last century was more aristocratic than is
the standard of to-day. The important words with Hume, Blair, Johnson,
Bolingbroke, as applied to style, were elegance, harmony, ornament;
and the chief of these was elegance: the composition must make the
impression of elegance, as to-day we demand the impression of the vital
and the real. Even the homely is more suited to the genius of democracy
than is the elegant. Perhaps the word is distasteful to modern ears
from its conventional associations or its appropriation by milliners
and dressmakers. One would not care to write inelegantly, but would
rather his page did not suggest the word at all, as he would have
his home or his dress suggest the quieter, humbler, more serviceable
virtues. In the old story of Bruce’s saying, the style may be said
to be homely. “I doubt I have killed the comyn.” “Ye doubt?” replies
Kirkpatrick; “I mak siccar.” Hume puts this into elegant language in
this wise: “Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, one of Bruce’s friends, asking him
soon after if the traitor was slain, ‘I believe so,’ replied Bruce.
‘And is that a matter,’ cried Kirkpatrick, ‘to be left to conjecture?
I will secure him.’” This is polite prose, dressed-up prose, but its
charm for us is gone.
VII
There are as many styles as there are moods and tempers in men.
Words may be used so as to give us a sense of vigor, a sense of
freshness, a sense of the choice and scholarly, or of the dainty and
exclusive, or of the polished and elaborate, or of heat or cold, or
of any other quality known to life. Every work of genius has its own
physiognomy--sad, cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined, meditative.
This book has the face of a saint; that of a scholar or a seer. Here
is the feminine, there the masculine face. One has the clerical face,
one the judicial. Each appeals to us according to our temperaments
and mental predilections. Who shall say which style is the best? What
can be better than the style of Huxley for his purpose,--sentences
level and straight like a hurled lance; or than Emerson’s for his
purpose,--electric sparks, the sudden, unexpected epithet or tense,
audacious phrase, that gives the mind a wholesome shock; or than
Gibbon’s for his purpose,--a style like solid masonry, every sentence
cut four square, and his work, as Carlyle said to Emerson, a splendid
bridge, connecting the ancient world with the modern; or than De
Quincey’s for his purpose,--a discursive, roundabout style, herding
his thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep; or than Arnold’s for his
academic spirit,--a style like cut glass; or than Whitman’s for his
continental spirit,--the processional, panoramic style that gives the
sense of mass and multitude? Certain things we may demand of every
man’s style,--that it shall do its work, that it shall touch the quick.
To be colorless like Arnold is good, and to have color like Ruskin is
good; to be lofty and austere like the old Latin and Greek authors is
good, and to be playful and discursive like Dr. Holmes is good; to be
condensed and epigrammatic like Bacon pleases, and to be flowing and
copious like Macaulay pleases. Within certain limits the manner that is
native to the man, the style that is a part of himself, is what wears
best. What we do not want in any style is hardness, glitter, tumidity,
superfetation, unreality.
In treating of nature or outdoor themes, let the style have limpidness,
sweetness, freshness; in criticism let it have dignity, lucidity,
penetration; in history let it have mass, sweep, comprehension; in all
things let it have vitality, sincerity, and genuineness.
IV
CRITICISM AND THE MAN
I
It looks as though we were never to get to the end of the discussion
about criticism--its scope, aims, functions, any more than we are
likely to get to the end of the discussion of any real question in
philosophy, ethics, or religion.
Is the aim of literary criticism judgment, or interpretation, or
analysis, or description? May it not have all these aims? For myself, I
am disposed to answer in the affirmative.
I doubt if there will ever be a critical method which all may apply.
Every man will have his own method, as truly as he has his own manners.
The French critic Schérer inclines to “the method which sets to work to
comprehend rather than to class, to explain rather than to judge,” or
which asks as the first step to possess itself of the author’s point of
view. This is substantially Pope’s dictum that a work is to be read in
the spirit in which it was written, and it accords with Heine’s saying
that the critic is to ask, “What does the artist intend?” This is a
part of, but does it sum up, the critical function?
A man’s writing upon the works of another takes the form of
description and analysis--like the report of a naturalist upon a new
species, which Mr. Howells thinks is the main function of criticism;
or it may aim chiefly at interpretation, which a recent essayist
emphasizes as the latest and highest phase of criticism; or it may aim
at a judicial estimate, an authoritative verdict from the rules and
standards, which is the more classic and academic phase of criticism.
Each phase is legitimate and leads to valuable results.
Of any considerable artistic work we want a description and an
analysis, we want an interpretation and an exposition, and we want
an appraisement according to the standard of the best that has been
thought and done in the world,--not a comparison with the externals
of the accepted models, but with the originality, the spontaneity,
the sanity, the inner necessity and consistency of them--the truth to
nature and to the laws of the human mind. Is it liberating, vitalizing,
cheering? Is it ethically sound? Does it favor large and manly ideals?
Does it go along with evolution and progress?
What, for instance, will criticism do with the work of such a man as
Whitman, or Ibsen, or Tolstoi? It will describe it and analyze it,
and name it as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc.; it will interpret it, or
draw out and expound the ideas that lie back of it and out of which it
sprang; it will seek to understand it and to get at the writer’s point
of view; then it will judge it, try it by its own standards, and seek
to estimate the value of these standards as they stand related to the
best aims and achievements of the human mind.
We demand of these men what we demand of Browning, Tennyson, Hugo, and
every other poet and writer of high claims,--genuineness, sincerity,
power, inspiration, and that they awaken in us fresh and vivid currents
of ideas and emotions. We shall not quarrel with their methods, or
materials, or their form, or formlessness, but they must go to the
quick. All our pleasure and profit in great art--painting, sculpture,
architecture, poetry--is at last one, a new experience of the beauty
and significance of nature and life. We are made to feel these emotions
afresh and as if for the first time.
Here are the old eternal elements,--life, nature, the soul, man and
woman, all in danger of becoming dull, commonplace, uninteresting to
us. But the man with the creative touch gives us a new and lively sense
of them, by presenting them to us in new combinations and under new
lights. The only new thing added is himself,--the quality or flavor of
his own genius.
A complete criticism will not limit itself to description or to
interpretation; it will seek to estimate, to bring out the relative or
absolute value of the thing. Mr. Howells in his trenchant little volume
on “Criticism and Fiction,” says the critic has no more business to
trample on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him, than
the botanist has to grind a plant under his heel because he does not
find it pretty. His business “is to classify and analyze the fruits of
the human mind as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study,
rather than to praise or blame them.”
To classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind is certainly one
of the functions of criticism, and only one. The analogy Mr. Howells
employs is misleading. We do not sit in judgment on natural specimens
and products except as they stand related to human wants and utilities.
We compare climates, seasons, soils, landscapes, with reference to
racial and individual needs and well-being. If you bring me trees from
the woods or stone from the quarry to build my house with, I am bound
to sit in judgment upon them. And when my house is built, my neighbors
will sit in judgment upon it. Of all artificial things, of all man’s
works, we are bound to ask, are they well done? are they what they
should be? are they the best of their kind? Shall we not ask these
questions of the poem also, of the novel, the essay, the history?
Art has relations to life, and the critic is bound to consider what
these relations are in any given work,--how true, how important; he is
examining a human product, not a natural specimen, and is as competent
to reject as to accept; he must compare, weigh, appraise, to the best
of his ability.
The specimens of natural history are perfect after their kind; the
main question with them is, to which kind or species does a given
specimen belong? But the poem or the history or the novel is not
always perfect after its kind. Their kind is usually obvious at a
glance, but their merits or demerits, their relation to the best that
has been thought and done in the world, are not so obvious. Hence we
praise or blame according as they come up to or fall short of their own
ideal. The critic is not so much a botanist naming a new flower, as
he is a brother gardener criticising your horticulture, or a brother
lawyer criticising your brief. We are all critics in this sense one
way or another every day of our lives; we try to get at the real
value of whatever is offered us, whether it be lands, houses, goods,
friends, stocks, bonds, news, pictures, or books; we criticise the
men we deal with and employ in order to find out whom to trust; we
must have our wits about us when we go to market or go shopping. The
critical habit--sifting, testing, comparing, to get at the true value
of things--goes with us through life, or else we come often to grief.
The finer the product, or the higher the purpose it serves, the more
careful is our investigation.
When we come to literature and art our worldly practical wisdom does
not carry very far. It is not now a question of fact or of material
values, but of ideal and æsthetic values; it is a question of truth to
nature and to life, and of the largest, most vital truth. The mass of
readers have little power of divining the good from the bad, the true
from the false, in this field. Not the first best, but the second or
third best will draw the multitude.
The literary value of a work is more intangible and elusive, harder to
define and bring out, than its scientific or moral or other values. It
resides in a certain vitality and genuineness of expression; we have
a sense of having come face to face with something real and alive in
the man, and not, as is so often the case; with something assumed or
put on. There is always an original inherent quality and flavor, as in
natural products. The language is not the mere garment of the thought,
it is the very texture and substance. In all true literature something
more than mind and erudition speak,--a man speaks; a vital personality
is imminent,--a Charles Lamb, a Wordsworth, a Carlyle, a Huxley, an
Emerson, a Thoreau, a Lowell,--all distinct types of intelligence
speaking through character.
Self-expression within certain limits is as important in criticism as
in any other form of literature.
The French critic Ferdinand Brunetière says that the truly personal way
of seeing and feeling, which is a merit of the poet and the novelist,
is a fault in the critic, because the critical function is mainly a
judicial one.
In every man there is the common humanity, a measure of the pure
reason which he shares with all; then there are the race traits, the
family traits, the bias of his times, the bent given by his training
and surroundings, and his own special stamp and make-up,--what we
call his idiosyncrasy. All these things will play a part in his view
of any matter. His success as a critic is when his humanity, his pure
intelligence, furnishes the light which is only colored or refracted
by its passage through these elements. But colored and refracted
it will be, and it is this coloring and refraction or stamp of the
personal equation that gives value and charm to the man’s work as
literature. Reduce criticism to a science, or eliminate the element of
impressionism, and the result is no longer literature. The reason may
be convinced, but the emotions are untouched.
The one thing that distinguishes all modern literatures from the works
of the ancient or classic period is their more permanent subjectivity,
and the piercing lyrical note in them.
Self-expression has been the aim of the modern artist in a much fuller
sense than it was with the artists of the pagan world. Our religion
is a personal and subjective religion,--the kingdom of heaven is
within. Christianity turned the thoughts of men upon themselves.
Self-examination, self-criticism began. Man became conscious of
himself, of his sins, and of his shortcomings, and learned to be more
interested in the elements of his own character.
There is probably no greater delusion than that under which the critic
labors when he thinks he is trying the new work by the standard of the
best that has been thought and achieved in the world. He is trying it
by his own conception of that standard; so much of it as is vital in
his own mind he can apply, and no more. His own individual taste and
judgment are, after all, his tests. The standard of the best is not
some rule of thumb or of yardstick that every one can apply; only the
best can apply the best.
Impressionism, therefore, is at the bottom of all criticism, in
whatever field. The impression which the work makes upon your
intelligence, your taste, your judgment, is all that you can finally
give.
Criticism in France, where the art has been more assiduously cultivated
than in any other country, seems divided between judicial critics like
Brunetière and impressionist critics like Lemaître. The latter states
in terms of his own likes and dislikes what the other aims to state
in terms of the impersonal reason. But their conclusions are likely
to differ only as their temperaments and innate affinities differ.
Brunetière has the more dogmatic mind and the more violent antipathies.
He could call Sainte-Beuve a rat,--a verdict that savors more of
political and religious intolerance than of the impartial reason.
Are we not coming more and more to demand that in all literary and
artistic productions, the producer be present in his work, not merely
as mind, as pure intelligence, but also as a distinct personality,
giving a flavor of his own to the principles he utters? Every vital
creative work is the revelation of a man as well as of a mind, and this
is true in criticism no less than in other forms of literature.
Suppose Brunetière’s criticism lacked that which makes it Brunetière’s,
or Arnold’s lacked that which makes it Arnold’s, should we long care
for it? Eliminate from the works of these men all that is individual,
all that in each makes the impression of a new literary force, the
accent of personality, and you take from the salt its savor. Dare we
say that the most precious thing in literature is the individual and
the specific? Is not a platitude a platitude because it lacks just
these things? The vague and the general may be had in any quantity, at
any time. The distinct and the characteristic are always rare. How many
featureless novels, featureless poems, featureless discourses, how much
savorless criticism of one kind and another, every community produces!
Now and then we catch a distinct personal note, a new, penetrating
voice, and this we remember and follow in criticism as readily as in
poetry or fiction. Have we not here the secret of the greater interest
we take in signed criticism over unsigned?
The pure, disinterested, impersonal reason is a fine thing to
contemplate. Who would flout it or deny it? One might as well throw
stones at the sun. But as the pure white light of the sun is broken up
into a thousand hues and shades as it comes back to us from the living
world, so the light of reason comes to us from literature in a thousand
blended tints and colors, or as modified by the varying moods and
temperaments of the individual writers. Whether or not we want or have
a right to expect this pure white light in criticism, what we get is
the light as it is reduced or colored by the critic’s personality,--the
media of his time, his race, his personal equation. It must render
accurately the objects, form and feature; but the hue, the atmosphere,
the sentiment of it all, the highest value of it all, will be the
contribution of the critic’s most private and radical self.
Every eminent writer has his way of looking at things, gives his own
coloring to general truths, and it is this that endears him to us. Is
the word he speaks _his_ word,--is it inevitable, the verdict of his
character, the outcome of that which is most vital and characteristic
in him? Or is it something he has learned, or the result of fashion,
convention, imitation?
See how the old elements of the air, soil, water, forever recombine
under the touch of that mysterious something we call life, and produce
new herbage, new flowers, new fruit, new men, new women,--forever and
yet never the same. So do the forces of man’s spirit recombine with the
old facts and truisms, and produce new art and new literature.
II
Is it not equally true that the value of criticism as a guide to the
judgment or the taste, teaching us what to admire and what to condemn,
is less than its value as an intellectual pleasure and stimulus, its
power to awaken ideas? Judgment is good, but inspiration is better.
How rarely we make the judgments of the greatest critics our own! We
are pleased when they confirm our own, but is not our main interest
and profit in what the critic gives us out of himself? We do not, for
instance, care very much for Carlyle’s literary judgments, but for
Carlyle’s quality of mind, his flashes of poetic insight, his burden
of conscience, his power of portraiture, his heroic moral fibre, we
care a great deal. Arnold thought Carlyle’s criticism less sound
than Johnson’s,--more tainted with _engouement_, with passion and
appetite, as it probably is; but how much more incentive, how much more
quickening power, how much more of the stuff of which life is made, do
we get from Carlyle than from Johnson or from Arnold himself!
That the criticism is sound is not enough,--it must also warm and
stimulate the mind; and if it do this we shall not trouble ourselves
very much about its conclusions. Even M. Brunetière says that there are
masterpieces in the history of literature and art whose authors were
downright fools, as there are, on the other hand, mediocre works from
the hands of men of vast intelligence. Very many readers, I fancy, will
not rest in the main conclusions at which Tolstoi arrives in his recent
discussion of the question “What is art?” but who can fail to feel that
here is a large, sincere, helpful soul, whose conception of life and of
art is of great value? If we were to estimate Ruskin by the soundness
of his judgments alone, we should miss the most important part of him.
It is as a prophet of life as well as a critic of art that we value
him. Would he be a better critic were he less a prophet?
Or take a more purely critical mind, such as Matthew Arnold’s. Do we
care very much even for his literary judgments? Do we not care much
more for his qualities as a writer,--his lucidity, his centrality,
his style, his continuity of thought, his turns of expression, his
particular interpretation of literature and life? His opinions may be
sound, but this is not the secret of his power; it resides in something
more intimate and personal to himself. The late Principal Shairp was
probably as sound a critic as was Arnold, but his work is of much less
interest, because it does not contain the same vital expression of a
new and distinct type of mind. Arnold was a better critic of literature
than of life and history. There were other values than literary ones
that were not so clearly within his range. In 1870 he thought the
Germans would stand a poor chance in the war with France. How could
the German _Gemeinheit_, or commonness, stand up before the French
_esprit_? In our civil war, he expected the South to win. Did not the
South have distinction? But distinction counts for more in style than
in war. Arnold’s criticism has the great merit of being a clear and
forcible expression of a fine-bred, high-toned, particular type of
man, and that type a pure and noble one. There was no bungling, no
crudeness, no straining, no confusion, no snap judgment, and apparently
no bias. He was as steady as a clock. His ideas were continuous and
homogeneous; they run like living currents all through his works,
and give them unity and definitiveness. He is not to be effaced or
overthrown; he is only to be matched and appraised. His word is not
final, but it is fit and challenges your common sense. His contribution
flows into the current of English criticism like a clear stream into
a turbid one; it is not deep, but pellucid,--a tributary that improves
the quality of the whole. It gives us that refreshment and satisfaction
that we always get from the words of a man who speaks in his own right
and from ample grounds of personal conviction.
Positive judgments in literature or in art, or in any matters of taste,
are dangerous things. The crying want always is for new, fresh power to
break up the old verdicts and opinions, and set all afloat again. “We
must learn under the master how to destroy him.” The great critic gives
us courage to reverse his judgments. Dr. Johnson said that Dryden was
the writer who first taught us to determine the merit of composition
upon principle; but criticism has been just as much at variance with
itself since Dryden’s time as it was before. It is an art, and not a
science,--one of the forms of literary art, wherein, as in all other
forms of art, the man, and not the principle, is the chief factor.
III
When one thinks of it, how diverse and contradictory have been the
judgments of even the best critics! Behold how Macaulay’s verdicts
differ from Carlyle’s, Carlyle’s from Arnold’s, Arnold’s from Frederic
Harrison’s or Morley’s or Stephen’s or Swinburne’s; how Taine and
Sainte-Beuve diverge upon Balzac; how Renan and Arnold diverge upon
Hugo; how Lowell and Emerson diverge upon Whitman; and how wide
apart are contemporary critics about the merits of Browning, Ibsen,
Tolstoi. Landor could not tolerate Dante, and even the great Goethe
told Eckermann that Dante was one of the authors he was forbidden to
read. In Byron’s judgment, Griffiths and Rogers were greater poets
than Wordsworth and Coleridge. The German Professor Grimm sees in
Goethe “the greatest poet of all times and all people,” which makes
Matthew Arnold smile. Chateaubriand considered Racine as much superior
to Shakespeare as the Apollo Belvidere is superior to an uncouth
Egyptian statue. Every nation, says a French critic, has its chords of
sensibility that are utterly incomprehensible to another. “Many and
diverse,” says Arnold, “must be the judgments passed upon every great
poet, upon every considerable writer.” And it seems that the greater
the writer or poet, the more diverse and contradictory will be the
judgments upon him. The small men are easily disposed of,--there is no
dispute about them; but the great ones baffle and try us. It is around
their names, as Sainte-Beuve somewhere remarks, that there goes on a
perpetual critical tournament.
It would seem that the nearer we are, in point of time, to an event,
a man, a book, a work of art, the less likely we are to estimate them
rightly, especially if they are out of the usual and involve great
questions and points. Such a poet as Dante or Victor Hugo or Whitman,
or such a character as Napoleon or Cromwell or John Brown, or such an
artist as Angelo or Turner or Millet, will require time to settle his
claim. In literature, the men of the highest order, to be understood,
must undoubtedly, in a measure, wait for the growth of the taste of
themselves, or until their own ideals have become at home in men’s
minds. With every great innovation, in whatever field, every year that
passes finds our minds better adjusted to it and more keenly alive to
its merits. Contemporary criticism is bound to be contradictory. Men
take opposite views of current questions; they are too near them to
see all their bearings. How different the aspect the slavery question
wears at this distance, and the civil war that grew out of it, from
the face they wore a generation or two ago! It is only the few great
minds that see to-day what the masses will see to-morrow. They occupy a
vantage ground of character and principle that is like an eminence in a
landscape, commanding a wide view. Sainte-Beuve certainly did injustice
to Balzac, and Schérer to Béranger. Theirs were contemporary judgments,
and personal antipathy played a large part in them. Sainte-Beuve says
that when two good intellects pass totally different judgments on the
same author, it is because they are not fixing their thoughts, for
the moment, on the same object; they have not the whole of him before
their eyes; their view does not take him in entirely. That is just it:
we each look for different values; we are more keenly alive to some
merits than to others; what one critic misses another sees. We are more
or less like chemical elements, that unite eagerly with some of their
fellows, and not with others. The elective affinities are at work
everywhere,--where is the critical genius that is a universal solvent?
Probably Sainte-Beuve himself comes as near it as anybody who has lived.
IV
It is not truth alone that makes literature; it is truth plus a man.
Readers fancy they are interested in the birds and flowers they find
in the pages of the poets; but no, it is the poets themselves that
they are interested in. There are the same birds and flowers in the
fields and woods,--do they care for them? In many of the authors of
whom Sainte-Beuve writes I have no interest, but I am always interested
in Sainte-Beuve’s view of them, in the play of his intelligence and
imagination over and around them. After reading his discussion of
Cowper, or Fénelon, or Massillon, or Pascal, it is not the flavor of
these writers that remains in my mind, but the flavor of the critic
himself. I am under his spell, and not that of his subject. Is not
this equally true of the criticism of Goethe, or Carlyle, or Macaulay,
or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or any other? The pages of these
writers are no more a transparent medium, through which we see the
subject as in itself it is, than are those of any other creative
artist. Science shows us, or aims to show us, the thing as it is;
but art shows it to us tinged by the prismatic rays of the human
spirit. Criticism that warms and interests is perpetual creation, as
Sainte-Beuve suggested. It is a constant combination of the subject
with the thought of the critic. When Mr. James writes upon Sainte-Beuve
we are under his spell; it is Mr. James that absorbs and delights us
now. We get the truth about his subject, of course, but it is always
in combination with the truth about Mr. James. The same is true when
Macaulay writes about Milton, and Carlyle about Burns or Johnson,
and Emerson about Montaigne or Plato, and Lowell about Thoreau or
Wordsworth,--the critic reveals himself in and through his subject.
We do not demand that Arnold get the real Arnold out of the way
and merge himself into general humanity (this he cannot do in any
case), but only that he put aside the conscious exterior Arnold, so
to speak,--Arnold the supercilious, the contemptuous, the hater of
dissent, the teaser of the Philistine. The critic must escape from
the local and accidental. We would have Macaulay cease to be a Whig,
Johnson cease to be a Tory, Schérer forget his theological training,
and Brunetière escape from his Catholic bias.
V
No matter how much truth the critic tells us, if his work does not
itself rise to the dignity of good literature, if he does not use
language in a vital and imaginative way, we shall not care for him.
Literary and artistic truth is not something that can be seized and
repeated indifferently by this man and by that, like the truths of
science: it must be reproduced or recreated by the critic; it must be
as vital in his page as in that of his author. The truths of science
are static; the truths of art are dynamic. If a mediocre mind writes
about Shakespeare, the result is mediocre, no matter how much bare
truth he tells us.
What, then, do we mean by a great critic? We mean a great mind that
finds complete self-expression in and through the works of other
men. Arnold found more complete self-expression through literary
criticism than through any other channel: hence he is greatest here;
his theological and religious criticism shows him to less advantage.
Sainte-Beuve tried poetry and fiction, but did not find a complete
outlet for his talent till he tried criticism. Not a profound or
original mind, but a wonderfully flexible, tolerant, sympathetic,
engaging one; a climbing plant, one might say, that needed some support
to display itself to the best advantage. We say of the French mind
generally that it is more truly a critical mind than the English;
it finds in criticism a better field for the display of its special
gifts--taste, clearness, brevity, flexibility, judgment--than does
the more original and profoundly emotional English. French criticism
is rarely profound, but it is always light, apt, graceful, delicate,
lucid, felicitous,--clear sense and good taste marvelously blended.
Criticism in its scientific aspects or as a purely intellectual
effort--a search for the exact truth, a sifting of evidence, weighing
and comparing data, disentangling testimony, separating the false
from the true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of science,
the critic of old texts and documents--is one thing. Criticism of
literature and art, involving questions of taste, style, poetic and
artistic values, is quite another, and demands quite other powers.
In the former case it is mainly judicial, dispassionate, impersonal;
in the latter case the sympathies and special predilections are more
involved. We seek more or less to interpret the imaginative writer, to
draw out and emphasize his special quality and stimulus, to fuse him
and restate him in other terms; and in doing this we give ourselves
more freely. We cannot fully interpret what we do not love, and love
has eyes the judgment knows not of. What a man was born to say, what he
speaks out of his most radical selfhood,--that the same fate and power
in you can alone fully estimate and interpret.
VI
One’s search after the truth in subjective matters is more or
less a search after one’s self, after what is agreeable to one’s
constitutional bias or innate partialities. We do not see the thing
as it is in itself so much as we see it as it stands related to our
individual fragment of existence. The lesson we are slowest to learn
and to act upon is the relativity of truth in all these matters, or
that it is what we make it. It is a product of the mind, as the apple
is of the tree. We get one kind of truth from Renan, another from
Taine, still another from Ruskin or Carlyle or Arnold. The quality
differs according as the minds or spirits differ whence the truth
proceeds. Do we expect all the apples in the orchard to be alike? In
general qualities, but not in particular flavors; and in literature
it is the particular flavor that is most precious. It is the quality
imparted to the truth by the conceiving mind that we prize.
It is a long while before we rise to the perception that opposites
are true, that contrary types equally serve. “One supreme does
not contradict another supreme,” says Whitman, “any more than one
eyesight contravenes another eyesight, or one hearing contravenes
another hearing.” Great men have been radical and great men have
been conservative; great men have been orthodox and they have been
heterodox; they have been forces of expansion and they have been
forces of contraction. In literature, it is good to be a realist, and
it is good to be a romanticist; it is good to be a Dumas, and it is
good to be a Zola; it is good to be a Carlyle, and it is good to be a
Mazzini,--always provided that one is so from the inside and not from
without, from original conviction and not from hearsay or conformity.
A man makes his way in the world amid opposing forces; he becomes
something only by overcoming something; there is always a struggle for
survival, and always merit in that which survives. Let each be perfect
after its kind. We do not object to the Gothic type of mind because
it is not the classic, nor to the Englishman because he is not the
Frenchman. We look for the measure of nature or natural force and
authority in these types. Nature is of all types; she is of to-day
as well as of yesterday; she is of this century as well as of the
first; she was with Burns as well as with Pindar. Because the Greek
was natural, shall we say therefore nature is Greek? She is Asiatic,
Icelandic, Saxon, Celtic, American, as well. She is all things to all
men; and without her nothing is that is.
VII
Truth is both subjective and objective. The former is what is agreeable
to one’s constitution and point of view, or mental and spiritual
make-up. Objective truth is verifiable truth, or what agrees with
outward facts and conditions.
Criticism deals with both aspects. It is objective when it is directed
upon objective or verifiable facts; it is subjective when it is
directed upon subjective facts. It is an objective fact, for instance,
that such a man as Shakespeare lived in such a country in such a time,
that he wrote various plays of such and such a character, and that
these plays were founded upon other plays or legends or histories.
But the poetic truth, the poetic beauty of these plays, their covert
meanings, the philosophy that lies back of them, are not in the same
sense objective facts. In these respects no two persons read them
just alike. Hamlet has been interpreted in many ways. Which Hamlet
is the true one, Goethe’s, or Coleridge’s, or Hazlitt’s, or Kean’s,
or Booth’s? Each is true, so far as it expresses a real and vital
conception begotten by the poet upon the critic’s or the actor’s mind.
The beauty of a poem or any work of art is not an objective something
patent to all; it is an experience of the mind which we each have in
different degrees. In fact, the field of our æsthetic perceptions and
enjoyments is no more fixed and definite than is the field of our
religious perceptions and enjoyments, and we diverge from one another
in the one case as much as in the other. This divergence is of course,
in both cases, mainly superficial; it is in form and not in essence.
Religions perish, but religion remains. Styles of art pass, but art
abides. Go deep enough and we all agree, because human nature is
fundamentally the same everywhere. All that I mean to say is that the
outward expressions of art differ in different ages and among different
races as much as do the outward expressions of religion. In all these
matters the subjective element plays an important part. Is Browning
a greater poet than Tennyson? Is Thackeray a greater novelist than
Dickens? Has Newman a better style than Arnold? Is Poe our greatest
poet, as many British critics think? These and all similar questions
involve the personal equation of the critic, and his answer to them
will be given more by his unconscious than by his conscious self.
The appeal is not so much to his rational faculties as to his secret
affinities or his æsthetic perceptions. You can move a man’s reason,
but you cannot by any similar process change his taste or his faith. If
we are not by nature committed to certain views, we are committed to a
certain habit of mind, to a certain moral and spiritual attitude, which
makes these views almost inevitable to us. “It is not given to all
minds,” says Sainte-Beuve, “to feel and to relish equally the peculiar
beauties and excellences of Massillon,” or, it may be added, of any
other author, especially if he be of marked individuality.
We do not and cannot all have the same measure of appreciation of
Emerson, or Wordsworth, or Ruskin, or Whitman, or Browning. To
enjoy these men “sincerely and without weariness is a quality and
almost a peculiarity of certain minds, which may serve to define
them.” Sainte-Beuve himself was chiefly interested in an author’s
character,--“in what was most individual in his personality.” He had
no arbitrary rules, touchstones, or systems, but pressed each new work
gently, almost caressingly, till it gave up its characteristic quality
and flavor.
But the objective consideration of the merits of a man’s work does not
and cannot preclude or measure the subjective attraction or repulsion
or indifference which we do or do not feel toward that work. Something
deeper and more potent than reason is at work here. Back of the most
impartial literary judgment lies the fact that the critic is a person;
that he is of a certain race, family, temperament, environment; that
he is naturally cold or sympathetic, liberal or reactionary, tolerant
or intolerant, and therefore has his individual likes and dislikes;
that certain types attract him more than others; that, of two poets of
equal power, the voice of one moves him more than that of the other.
Something as subtle and vital and hard to analyze as the flavor of a
fruit, and analogous to it, makes him prefer this poet to that. One
may see clearly the superiority of Milton over Wordsworth, and yet
cleave to the latter. How beautiful is “Lycidas,” yet it left Dr.
Johnson cold and critical. There is much more of a cry--a real cry
of the heart--in Arnold’s “Thyrsis.” One feels that the passion is
real in one, and assumed in the other. Is “Lycidas” therefore less a
creative work? The affirmative side of the question is not without
support. Johnson undervalued some of Gray’s best work; the touch of
sympathy was lacking. This touch of sympathy does not wait upon the
critical judgment, but often underruns and outruns it. It is said that
Miss Martineau found “Tom Jones” dull reading, that Charlotte Brontë
cared not for Jane Austen, and that Thackeray placed Cooper above
Scott,--all, no doubt, from a lack of the quickening touch of sympathy.
As a rule, we have more sympathy with the authors of our own country
than with those of another. Few Englishmen can do justice to Victor
Hugo, and even to some Frenchmen he is a “gigantic blusterer.” It is
equally hard for a Frenchman to appreciate Carlyle, and how absurd
seems Voltaire’s verdict upon Shakespeare,--“a drunken savage”!
The French mind is preëminently a critical mind, yet in France
there are and have been as many schools of criticism as of poetry
or philosophy or romance. Different types of mind, individual
idiosyncrasy, opposing theories and methods, stand out just as clearly
in this branch as in any other branch of mental activity. From Madame
de Staël down through Barante, Villemain, Nisard, Sainte-Beuve,
to Brunetière and the critics of our own day, criticism has been
individualistic, and has reflected as many types of mind and points
of view as there have been critics. Where shall we look for the final
criticism? First it is classicism that rules, then it is romanticism,
then naturalism, and next, we are told, it is to be idealism. Whichever
it is, it is true enough when uttered by vital and earnest minds,
and serves its purpose. There are many excellences, but where is the
supreme excellence? The naturalism of Sainte-Beuve is excellent, the
positivism of Nisard is excellent, the classicism of Brunetière is
excellent, and the determinism of Taine yields interesting results; but
all are relative, all are experimental, all are subject to revision. It
is given to no man to have a monopoly of truth. It is given to no poet
to have a monopoly of beauty. There is one beauty of Milton, another
of Wordsworth, another of Burns, another of Tennyson. To seize upon
and draw out the characteristic beauty of each, and give his reader a
lively sense of it, is the business of the critic.
VIII
Our reading is a search for the excellent, for the vital and
characteristic, which may assume as many and diverse forms in art and
literature as it does in life and nature. The savant, the scientist,
the moralist, the philosopher, may have pleasure in a work that gives
little or no pleasure to the literary artist. Criticism may be looked
upon as a search for these various values or various phases of truth,
which the critic expresses in terms of his own taste, knowledge,
insight, etc., for scientific values, philosophical values, literary
and poetic values, or moral and religious values, according to the
subject upon which the critical mind is directed. No two men look for
exactly the same values, nor have the same measure of appreciation of
them. Emerson and Lowell, for instance, make quite different demands
and form different estimates of the poets they read. Lowell lays the
emphasis upon the conventional literary values, Emerson more upon
spiritual and religious values. An Englishman will find values in
the poets of his own country that a Frenchman does not find, and a
Frenchman, values in his poets that an Englishman does not find. See
how Schérer and Taine handled Milton. Milton’s great epic has poetic
and literary value, often of a high order, but ad philosophy or
religion it is grotesque.
IX
Yet let me not seem to underrate the value of what is called judicial
criticism. Criticism as an act of judgment, as a disinterested endeavor
to see the thing as it is in itself and as it stands related to other
things, is justly jealous of our personal tastes and preferences. These
tastes and preferences may blind us to the truth. Can we admire above
them, or even against them? To cherish no writers but those of our own
stripe or mental complexion is the way of the half cultured. Can we
rise to a disinterested view? The danger of individualism in letters
is caprice, bias, partial views; the danger of intellectualism is the
cold, the colorless, the formal.
The ideal critic will blend the two; he will be disinterested and
yet sympathetic, individual and yet escape caprice and bias, warm
with interest and yet cool with judgment; surrendering himself to
his subject and yet not losing himself in it, upholding tradition
and yet welcoming new talent, giving the personal equation free play
without blurring the light of the impersonal intelligence. From
the point of view of intellectualism, criticism seeks to eliminate
the personal equation, that which is private and peculiar to us as
individuals, and to base criticism upon something like universal
principles. What we crave, what our minds literally feed upon, may
blind us to the truly excellent. Our _wants_ are personal; what we
should aim at is an excellence that is impersonal. When we rise to
the sphere of the disinterested, we lose sight of our individual
tastes and predilections. The question then is, not what we want, not
what we have a taste for, but what we are capable of appreciating.
Can we appreciate the best? Can we share the universal mind to the
extent of delighting in the best that has been known and thought in
the world? Emerson said he was always glad to meet people who saw the
superiority of Shakespeare to all other poets. If we prefer Pope to
Shakespeare, as we are apt to at a certain age, we may know by that
that there is an excellence beyond our reach. It is certain that the
mass of readers will not appreciate the best literature, but only the
second or third best. A man’s æsthetic perceptions may be broadened
and educated as well as his intellectual. An unread man feels little
interest beyond his own neighborhood,--the personal doings of the men
and women he sees and knows. Educate him a little, give him his county
paper, and the sphere of his interests is widened; a little more,
and he takes an interest in his State; more still, and he broadens
out to his whole country; still more, and the whole world is within
his sympathy and ken. So in the aesthetic sphere; he gets beyond his
personal tastes and wants into the great world currents of literature
and art. He can appreciate works written in other ages and lands, and
that are quite foreign to his own temperament and outlook. This is to
be disinterested. To emancipate the taste is as much as to emancipate
the intellect; to rise above one’s personal affinities is as much as
to rise above one’s personal prejudices and superstitions. The boy of
a certain stamp has an affinity for the dime novel; if we can lift him
to an appreciation of Scott, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, how have we
emancipated his taste! So that Brunetière was right in saying that,
in art and literature, the beginning of wisdom is to distrust what we
like. _Distrust_, not repudiate. Let us examine first and see upon
what grounds we like it,--see if we _ought_ to like it; see if it is
akin to that which is of permanent value in the world’s best thought.
A French critic tells a story of a man who sat cool and unmoved under
a sermon that made the people about him shed torrents of tears, and
who excused himself by saying, “I do not belong to this parish.”
One’s tastes must be broader than one’s parish. I suppose any of our
religious brethren would feel a little shy of weeping in the church
of a religious denomination not his own. Our religion is no more
emancipated than are our tastes. Lowell says there are born Popists
and born Wordsworthians; but the more these types can get out of their
limitations and appreciate one another, the more they are emancipated.
V
RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM
I
The criticism of criticism is one of the marked literary
characteristics of the last ten or fifteen years, both in this country
and in Europe. It is seen in France in Brunetière’s essays and in
Hennequin’s “Scientific Criticism;” in England in the recent work of
Wm. B. Wordsfold on the “Principles of Criticism” and in Mr. John M.
Robertson’s two volumes of “Essays toward a Critical Method;” in this
country in Mr. Howells’s “Criticism and Fiction,” in Prof. Johnson’s
“Elements of Criticism” and in the still more recent work of Professor
Sears on “Methods and Principles of Criticism,” besides the numerous
discussions of the subject in the magazines and literary journals.
A Western college professor lately discussed some phases of the subject
under the head of “Democratic Criticism;” whereupon other college
professors raised the voice of protest, one of them asking ironically,
Why not have a democratic botany and zoölogy and geology and astronomy?
I think it may be said in reply that, so far as democracy is based
upon natural law and means free inquiry, a fair field and no favor,
we have these things already. All science is democratic, in the sense
that it is no respecter of persons, has no partialities, stops at no
arbitrary boundaries, and places all things on an equal footing before
natural law. Surely the spirit of science makes directly for democracy.
When science shows us that the universe is all made of one stuff, that
the celestial laws, as Whitman said, do not need to be worked over and
rectified, that inherent power and worth alone finally tell, and that
there is not one rule for the heavens above and another for the earth
below, it is making smooth the way for democratic ideas and ideals.
Still, pure science is outside the domain of literature, and does not
reflect a people’s life and character as literature does. It does
not hold the mirror of man’s imagination up to nature, but resolves
nature in the alembic of his understanding. It is not an exponent of
personality, as art is, but an index of the development and progress of
the impersonal reason. But when we enter the region of the sentiments
and the emotions--the subjective world of criticism, literature,
art--the case is different. Here we find reflected social and arbitrary
distinctions; here we find mirrored the spirit and temper of men
as they are acted upon and modified by the social organism and the
ideals of different times and races. A democratic community will have
standards of excellence in art and criticism differing from those of an
aristocratic community, and will be drawn by different qualities. It
seems to me that Dr. Triggs was quite right in saying that a criticism
that estimates literary products according to absolute standards,
that clings to the past, that cultivates the academic spirit, that is
exclusive and unsympathetic, may justly be called aristocratic; and
that a criticism that follows more the comparative method, that adheres
to principles instead of to standards, and lays the stress upon the
vital and the characteristic in a man’s work, rather than upon its form
and extrinsic beauty, is essentially democratic.
No doubt the ideal of the monumental works of antiquity is essentially
anti-democratic. It was fostered by an exclusive culture. It goes with
the idea of the divine right of kings, of a privileged class, and is at
war with the spirit of our times. The Catholic tradition in religion
and the classical tradition in literature are as foreign to the spirit
of democracy as is the monarchical tradition in politics. They are all
branches from the same root. The classical tradition begat Milton,
but it did not beget Shakespeare, the most marvelous genius of the
modern world. To the classic tradition, as it spoke through Voltaire,
Shakespeare was a barbarian. Indeed, Shakespeare’s art was essentially
democratic, how much soever it may have occupied itself with royal and
aristocratic personages. It is as free as an uncaged bird, and pays
no tribute to classic models. Its aim is inward movement, fusion, and
vitality, rather than outward harmony and proportion. A Greek play is
like a Greek temple,--chaste, severe, symmetrical, beautiful. A play of
Shakespeare is, as Dr. Johnson long ago suggested, more like a wood or
a piece of free nature.
II
Democratic and aristocratic may not be the best terms to apply to the
two opposing types of critics,--men like Matthew Arnold or the French
critic Ferdinand Brunetière, on the one hand, both the spokesmen of
authority in letters; and men like Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France, and
the younger generation of English and American critics on the other,
men who are more tolerant of individual differences and more inclined
to seek the reason of each work within itself. Yet these terms indicate
fairly well two profoundly different types.
Brunetière is a militant and dogmatic critic, as we saw by his severe
denunciation of Zola while lecturing in this country a few years since.
One of his eulogists speaks of him as the “autocrat of triumphant
convictions.” Of democratic blood in his veins there is very little. He
reflects the old orthodox and aristocratic spirit in his dictum that
nature is not to be trusted; that both in taste and in morals what
comes natural to us and gives us pleasure is, for that very reason, to
be avoided. Nature is depraved. In morals, would we attain to virtue,
we must go counter to her; and in art and literature, would we attain
to wisdom, we must distrust what we like. This suspicion of nature
was the keynote of the old theology, which found its authority in a
miraculous revelation, and it is the keynote of the old Aristotelian
criticism, which found its authority in a body of rules deduced from
the masters. The new theology looks for a scientific basis for its
morals, or seeks for the sanction of nature herself; and democratic
criticism aims to stand upon the same basis, and cleaves to principles
and not to standards, not by yielding to the caprices of uninformed
taste, but by seeking the law and test of every work within itself.
We no longer judge of the worth of a man by his creed, but by what he
is in and of himself; by his natural virtues and aptitudes; and we no
longer condemn a work of art because it breaks with the old traditions.
Arnold was of similar temper with Brunetière. His elements of style
are “dignity and distinction,” a part of the classic tradition, a
survival from the feudal and aristocratic world, from a literature of
courts and courtiers, as distinguished from a literature of the people,
a democratic literature. Distinction of utterance, distinction of
manners, distinction of dress and equipage--they are all of a piece,
and adhere in the aristocratic and monarchical ideal. The special
antipathy of this ideal is the common; all commonness is vulgar. When
Arnold came to this country and became interested in the lives of
Grant and Lincoln, he found them both wanting in distinction,--there
was no savor of the aristocratic in their words or manners. And the
criticism is true. From all accounts, Grant presented a far less
distinguished appearance at Appomattox than did Lee; and Lincoln was
easily outshone in aristocratic graces by some members of his cabinet.
Indeed, the predominant quality of the two men was their immense
commonness. Washington and Jefferson came much nearer the aristocratic
ideal. Lincoln and Grant both had greatness of the first order, but
their type was democratic and not aristocratic. The aristocratic
ideal of excellence embraces other qualities; there is more pride,
more exclusiveness in it; it holds more by traditions and special
privileges. Lincoln had less distinction than Sumner or Chase, Grant
less than Sherman or Lee, but each had an excellence the others had
not. The choice, the refined, the cultured, belong to one class of
excellencies: the qualities of Lincoln and Grant belong to another
and more fundamental kind. Arnold himself had distinction,--he had
urbanity, lucidity, proportion, and many other classic virtues,--but
he had not breadth, sympathy, heartiness, commonness. The quality of
distinction, an air of something choice, high-bred, superfine, will
doubtless count for less and less in a country like ours. In literature
and in character we are looking for other values, for the true, the
vital, the characteristic. There is nothing in life or character more
winsome than commonness wedded to great excellence; the ordinary
crowned with the extraordinary, as in Lincoln the man, Socrates the
philosopher, Burns or Wordsworth the poet. Distinction wins admiration,
commonness wins love. The note of equality, the democratic note, is
much more pronounced in Browning than in Tennyson, in Shelley than in
Arnold, in Wordsworth than in Milton, and it is more pronounced in
American poets than in English. In times and for a people like ours,
the suggestion of something hearty and heroic in letters is more needed
than the suggestion of something fine and exquisite. Distinction is
not to be confounded with dignity or elevation, which flourishes more
or less in all great peoples. A common laboring man may show great
dignity, but never distinction. Dignity often shone in the speeches of
the old Indian chiefs, but not distinction, as the term is here used.
The more points at which a man touches his fellow man, the more
democratic he is. The breadth of his relation to the rest of the
world, that is the test. Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic
critic than is Brunetière. The democratic producer in literature will
differ from the aristocratic less in his standards of excellence than
in the atmosphere of human equality and commonness which he effuses.
We are too apt to associate the common with the vulgar. There is the
commonness of a Lincoln or a Grant, and there is the commonness of the
lower strata of society. There is the commonness of earth, air, and
water, and there is the commonness of dust and mud; the commonness
of the basic and the universal, and the commonness of the cheap and
tawdry. Grant’s calmness, self-control, tenacity of purpose, modesty,
comprehensiveness of mind, were uncommon in degree, not in kind. He
was the common soldier with extraordinary powers added, but the common
soldier was always visible. So with Lincoln,--his greatness was
inclusive, not exclusive.
III
So far as good taste means “good form,” and so far as good form is
established by social and conventional usages of the fashionable
world, the poet of democracy has little to do with it. But so far as
it is based upon the inherent fitness of things and the health and
development of the best there is in a man, so far is he bound to enlist
himself in its service. In a world where everybody is educated and
reads books, much poor literature will circulate; but will not the
good, the best, circulate also? Will there not be the few good judges,
the saving remnant? Is there not as much good taste and right reason
now in England or France as during more rigidly monarchical times?
The ideal democracy is not the triumph of barbarism or the riot of
vulgarity, but it is the triumph of right reason and natural equality
and inequality. Some things are better than others, better from the
point of view of the whole of life. These better things we must cling
to and make much of in a democracy, as in an aristocracy. We must
aspire to the best that is known and thought in the world. This best
a privileged class seeks to appropriate to itself; a democracy seeks
to share it with all. All are not capable of receiving it, but all may
try. They will be better able to-morrow if they have the chance to-day.
We must not ignore the vulgarity, the bad taste incident to democratic
conditions. If we do, we never get rid of them. Political equality
brings to the foreground many unhandsome human traits, the loud,
the mediocre, the insolent, etc. All the more must we fix attention
upon the true, the noble, the heroic, the disinterested. The rule of
temperance, of good taste, of right reason, antedates any and every
social condition. Democracy cannot abrogate fundamental principles. The
essential conditions of life are not changed, but arbitrary, accidental
conditions are modified. One still needs food and raiment and shelter
and transportation; he is still subject to the old hindrances and
discouragements within himself.
We must give the terms good taste, right reason a broader scope;
that is all. The principles of good taste when applied to art are
not fixed and absolute, like those of mathematics or the exact
sciences. They are vital and elastic. They imply a certain fitness
and consistency. Shakespeare shocked the classic taste of the French
critics. He violated the unities and mixed prose and poetry. But what
was good taste in Shakespeare--that is, in keeping with his spirit and
aim--might be bad taste in Racine. What is permissible to an elemental
poet like Whitman would jar in a refined poet like Longfellow. But bad
taste in Whitman, that is, things not in keeping with the ideal he has
before him, jar the same as in any other poet. He has many lines and
passages and whole poems that set the teeth of many readers on edge,
that are yet in perfect keeping with his plan and spirit. They go with
the poet of the Cosmos, but not with the poet of the drawing-room or
library. My taste is not shocked, but my courage is challenged.
In Whitman’s case the appeal is not so directly and exclusively to our
æsthetic perceptions as it is in most other poets; he is elemental
where they are cultured and artificial; at the same time he can no more
escape æsthetic principles than they can. Because a flower, a gem,
a well-kept lawn, etc., are beautiful, we are not compelled to deny
beauty to rocks, trees, and mountains. If Whitman does not, in his
total effects, attain to something like this kind of beauty, he is not
a poet.
IV
I have said that Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic critic than
is M. Brunetière. He is more tolerant of individualism in letters.
He called himself a naturalist of minds. His main interest in each
work was in what was most individual and characteristic in it. He was
inclusive rather than exclusive, less given to positive judgments, but
more to sympathetic interpretation. He united the method of Darwin
to the sensibility of the artist. Critics like Arnold and Brunetière
uphold the classic and academic traditions. They are aristocratic
because they are the spokesmen of an exclusive culture. They derive
from Catholicism more than from Protestantism; they uphold authority
rather than encourage individuality in life and letters. In criticism
they aim at that intellectual disinterestedness which is indeed
admirable, and which has given the world such noble results, but which
seems unsuited to the genius of our time. Ours is a democratic century,
a Protestant century. Individualism has been the dominant note in
literature. The men of power, for the most part, have not been the
disinterested, but the interested men, the men of conviction and of
more or less partial views, who have not so much aimed to see the thing
as it is in itself as they have aimed to make others see it as they saw
it. In other words, they have been preachers, doctrinaires, men bent
upon the dissemination of particular ideas.
One has only to run over the list of the foremost names in literature
for the past seventy-five years. There is Tolstoi, in Russia, clearly
one of the great world writers, but a doctrinaire through and through.
There are Renan, Victor Hugo, Taine, Thiers, Guizot, in France;
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Huxley, George Eliot,
Mrs. Ward, in English literature, and in American literature Emerson,
Whitman, and Thoreau. All these writers had aims ulterior to those of
pure literature. They were not disinterested observers and recorders.
They obtruded their personal opinions and convictions. They are the
writers with a message. Their thoughts spring from some special bent or
experience, and address themselves to some special mood or want. They
wrote the books that help us, that often come to us as revelations;
works of art, it may be, but of art in subjection to moral conviction,
and they are directed to other than purely æsthetic ends. They gave
expression to their individual tastes and predilections; they were more
or less tethered to their own egos; they may be called the personal
authors, as their predecessors may be called the impersonal. They are
not of the pure breed of men of letters, but represent crosses of
various kinds, as the cross of the artist with the thinker, the savant,
the theologian, the man of science, the reformer, the preacher. These
personal authors belong to the modern world rather than to the ancient;
to a time of individualism rather than to a time of institutionalism;
to an industrial and democratic age, rather than to an imperial and
military age.
Modern life is undoubtedly becoming more and more impersonal in the
sense that it favors less and less the growth and preservation of
great personalities, yet its utilitarian spirit, its tendency to
specialization, its right of private judgment, and its religious
doubts and unrest, find their outcome in individualism in literature.
The disinterested critics and recorders are still among us, but power
has departed from them. The age is too serious, the questions are
too pressing. The man of genius is no longer at ease in Zion. If he
rises at all above the masses, he must share the burden of thought
and conscience of his times. This burden may hinder the free artistic
play of his powers, as it probably has in most of the writers I have
mentioned, yet it will greatly deepen the impression his words will
make. The saying “Art for art’s sake” cannot be impeached, even
by Tolstoi. When rightly understood, it is true. Art would live in
the whole, and not in the part called morals or religion, or even
beauty. But its exponents in our day have been, with few exceptions,
of a feeble type, men of words and fancies like Swinburne or Poe.
In Tennyson we have as pure a specimen of artistic genius as in
Shakespeare, but a far less potent one. His power comes when he thrills
and vibrates with some special thought or cry of his time. With the
great swarms of our minor poets the complaint is, not that the type
is not pure, but that the inspiration is feeble. They have more art
than nature. It is the same with the novelists. Since Hawthorne and
Thackeray the pure artistic gift has no longer been the endowment of
great or profound personalities. George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, Tolstoi, all
interested writers, all with aims foreign to pure art, are the names of
power in our half of the century. Henry James is a much finer artist,
but he has nothing like their hold upon the great common elements of
human life. The disinterested writer gives us a higher, more unselfish
pleasure than the type I am considering; we are compelled to rise more
completely out of ourselves to meet him. I am only insisting that in
our day he has little penetration, and that the men of power have been
of the other class.
I have placed Taine among the interested critics; he was interested
in putting through certain ideas; he had a thesis to uphold; he will
not value all truths equally, he will take what suits him. Like all
men with preconceived ideas, his mind was more like a searchlight than
like a lamp. This makes him stimulating as a critic, but not always
satisfying.
The same is true of our own Emerson, probably our most stimulating
and fertilizing mind thus far. Lowell, as a man of letters, is of a
much purer strain; he is in the direct line of succession of the great
literary names, yet the value of his contribution undoubtedly falls
far short of that of Emerson. As a poet, Emerson was a poor singer
with wonderfully penetrating tones, almost unequaled in this respect.
The same may be said of him as a critic; he was a poor critic with a
wonderfully penetrating glance. He had the hawk’s eye for the game he
was looking for; he could see it amid any tangle of woods or thicket
of the commonplace. His special limitation is that he was looking for
a particular kind of prey. His sympathies were narrow but intense.
The elective affinities were very active in his criticism. He loved
Emersonian poetry, he loved the Emersonian paradoxes, he valued the
wild æolian tones; he delighted in the word that gave the prick and
sting of the electric spark; abruptness, surprise, the sudden, intense,
forked sentence--these took him, these he dealt in. His survey of any
man or matter is never a complete one, never a disinterested one, never
done in the scientific spirit. He writes about representative men, and
exploits Plato, Goethe, Montaigne, etc., in relation to his thought.
He is always on quests for particular ideas, in search for Emersonian
values. He will not do justice to such poets as Poe and Shelley, but
he will do more than justice to Donne and Herbert; he finds in them
what he sets out to find; it is a partial view, but it is penetrating
and valuable; it is not criticism, and does not set out to be; it is
a suggestive study of kindred souls. Emerson’s work is kindling and
inspiring; it unsettles rather than settles; it is not a lamp to guide
your feet, it is a star to give you your bearings.
Carlyle and Ruskin fall into the same category. They sin against the
classic virtues of repose, proportion, serenity, but this makes their
penetrating power all the greater. Carlyle cannot rank with the great
impartial historians, yet as a painter of historical characters and
scenes the vividness and reality of his pictures are almost unequaled.
Carlyle lacked the disinterestedness of the true artist. He had great
power of description and characterization, but he could not as an
historian stand apart from his subject as the great Greek and Roman
historians do. He is a portion of all that he sees and describes. He
is bent upon persuasion quite as much as upon portrayal. He could not
succeed as a novelist or a poet, because of his vehement, intolerant
nature. He succeeds as an historian only in portraying men in whom he
sees the lineaments of his own character, as in Cromwell. He did not or
could not live in the whole, as did his master, Goethe. His mind was
a steep incline. His opinions were like mountain torrents. Arnold, in
one of his letters, complained that in his criticism of Goethe there
was too much of _engouement_,--too much, I suppose, of the fondness of
the gourmand for a particular dish, or of the toper for his favorite
tipple. His enthusiasm was intemperate, and therefore unsound.
Doubtless some such objection as this may be urged against most of
Carlyle’s criticisms. He was ruled by his character more than by his
intellect; his feeling guided his vision. If he is not always a light
to the reason, he is certainly an electric excitant to the imagination
and the moral sense. In his essays, pamphlets, histories, we hardly get
judicial estimates of things; rather do we get overestimates or under
estimates. Yet always is there something that kindles and brings the
blood to the surface. Carlyle will beget a stronger race than Arnold,
but it will not be so cool and clear-headed. Emerson will fertilize
more minds with new thought than Lowell, but there will be many more
cranks and fanatics and hobbyists among them.
Professor Dowden says Landor falls below Shelley and Wordsworth because
he had no divine message or oracle to deliver to the men of his
generation,--no authentic word of the Lord to utter. Landor had great
thoughts, but they were not of first-rate importance with reference
to his times. He was more thoroughly imbued with the classic spirit
than either Shelley or Wordsworth, and the classic spirit is at ease
in Zion. The modern world differs from the ancient in its moral stress
and fervor. This moral stress and fervor both Shelley and Wordsworth
shared, but Landor did not. Where would the world be in thought, in
works, in civilization, had there been no one-sided, overloaded,
fanatical men,--men of partial views, of half-truths, of one idea?
Where would Christianity have been, under the play of disinterested
intellect, without disciples, without devotees, without saints and
martyrs, without its Paul and its Luther, without prejudice, without
superstition, without inflexibility?
We might fitly contrast these two types of mind under the heads of
Protestant and Catholic, the one personal, the other impersonal.
With the Protestant type goes individualism, which, as I have said,
is so marked a feature of the modern world. With the Catholic type
goes institutionalism, which was so marked a feature of the ancient
world. With the former goes the right of private judgment, innovation,
progress, new forms of art; with the latter goes authority, obedience,
the power of the past. The Protestant type is more capricious
and willful; it is restless, venturesome, impatient of rules and
precedents; the older type is more serene, composed, conservative,
orderly. In criticism it is more objective; it upholds the standards,
it lays down the law; it cherishes the academic spirit. The French mind
is the more Catholic; the English the more Protestant. In literature
the Protestant type is the more subjective and creative; it makes new
discoveries, it founds new orders. Catholicism is exterior, formal,
imposing; it takes little account of personal needs and peculiarities,
while Protestantism is almost entirely concerned with the private,
interior world. Individualism in religion begat Protestantism, and
upon Protestantism it begat the numerous progeny of the sects, the
thousand and one isms that now divide the religious world. To this
spirit religion is something personal and private to every man, and in
no sense a matter of forms and rituals. In fact, individualism fairly
confronts institutionalism. This spirit carried into the region of
æsthetics or literature gives rise to like results,--to a freer play of
personal taste and preferences, to more intense individual utterances,
to new and unique types of artistic genius, and to new lines of
activity in the æsthetic field.
Another name for it is the democratic spirit. Its special dangers
are the crude, the odd, the capricious, just as the danger of
institutionalism is the coldly formal, the lifeless, the traditional.
In English literature the former begat Shakespeare, as it did
Tupper; the latter begat Milton, as it did Young and Pollock. With
institutionalism goes the divine right of kings, the sacredness of
priests, the authority of forms and ceremonies, and the slavery of the
masses; with individualism goes the divinity of man, the sacredness
of life, the right of private judgment, the decay of traditions and
forms, and the birth of the modern spirit. With one goes stateliness,
impressiveness, distinction, as well as the empty, the moribund, the
despotic; with the other goes force, strenuousness, originality, as
well as the loud, the amorphous, the fanatical.
V
Goethe said that a loving interest in the person and the works of an
author, amounting to a certain one-sided enthusiasm, alone led to
reality in criticism; all else was vanity. No doubt more will come of
the contact of two minds under these circumstances than from what is
called the judicial attitude; there will be more complete fusion and
interpenetration; without a certain warmth and passion there is no
fruitfulness, even in criticism. In the field of art and literature,
to be disinterested does not mean to be cold and judicial; it means
to be free from bias, free from theories and systems, with mind open
to receive a clear impression of the work’s characteristic merits and
qualities.
It is tradition that always stands in the way of the new man. In
politics, it is the political tradition; in religion, the religious
tradition; and in literature, the literary tradition. Professional
criticism is the guardian of the literary tradition, and this is why
any man who essays a new departure in literary art has reason to fear
criticism or despise it, as the case may be.
It is when we take up any new work in the judicial spirit, bent upon
judging and classifying, rather than upon enjoying and understanding,
the conscious analytical intellect on duty and the sympathies and the
intuitions under lock and key, that there is danger that judicial
blindness will fall upon us. When we approach nature in the spirit
of technical science, our minds already preoccupied with certain
conclusions and systems, do we get as much of the joy and stimulus
which she holds for us as do the children on the way to school of a
spring morning with their hands full of wild flowers, or as does the
gleesome saunterer over hills in summer with only love and appreciation
uppermost in his mind?
Professional criticism often becomes mere pedagogical narrowness and
hardness; it gets crushed over with rules and precedents, pinched
and sterilized by routine and convention, so that a new work makes
no impression upon it. The literary tradition, like the religious
tradition, ceases to be vital and formative.
Is it not true that all first-class works have to be approached with
a certain humility and free giving of one’s self? In a sense, “except
ye become as little children” ye cannot enter the kingdom of the great
books.
I suppose that to get at the true inwardness of any imaginative work,
we must read it as far as possible in its own spirit, and that if it
does not engraft and increase its own spirit upon us, then it is feeble
and may easily be brushed aside.
Criticism which has for its object the discovery of new talent and,
in Sainte-Beuve’s words, to “apportion to each kind of greatness its
due influence and superiority,” is one thing; and criticism the object
of which is to uphold and enforce the literary tradition, is quite
another. Consciously or unconsciously, when the trained reader opens
a new book he is under the influence of one or the other of these
notions,--either he submits himself to it disinterestedly, intent only
upon seizing and appreciating its characteristic quality, or he comes
prepossessed with certain rules and standards upon which his taste
has been formed. In other words, he comes to the new work simply as a
man, a human being seeking edification, or he comes clothed in some
professional authority, seeking judgment.
Our best reading is a search for the excellent; but what is the
excellent? Is there any final standard of excellence in literature?
Each may be excellent after its kind, but kinds differ. There is one
excellence of Milton and Arnold and the classic school, and another
excellence of Shakespeare and Pope and Burns and Wordsworth and
Whitman, or of the romantic and democratic school. The critic is to
hold a work up to its own ideal or standard. Of the perfect works, of
the works that aim at perfection, at absolute symmetry and proportion,
appealing to us through the cunning of their form, scheme, structure,
details, ornamentation, we make a different demand from the one we
make of a primitive, unique, individual utterance or expression of
personality like “Leaves of Grass,” in which the end is not form, but
life; not perfection, but suggestion; not intellect, but character; not
beauty, but power; not carving, or sculpture, or architecture, but the
building of a man.
It is no doubt a great loss to be compelled to read any work of
literary art in a conscious critical mood, because the purely
intellectual interest in such a work which criticism demands, is
far less satisfying than our æsthetic interest. The mood in which
we enjoy a poem is analogous to that in which it was conceived. We
have here the reason why the professional reviewer is so apt to miss
the characteristic quality of the new book, and why the readers of
great publishing houses make so many mistakes. They call into play
a conscious mental force that is inimical to the emotional mood in
which the work had its rise; what was love in the poet becomes a pale
intellectual reflection in the critic.
Love must come first, or there can be no true criticism; the
intellectual process must follow and be begotten by an emotional
process. Indeed, criticism is an afterthought; it is such an account as
we can give of the experience we have had in private communion with the
subject of it. The conscious analytical intellect takes up one by one,
and examines the impression made upon our subconsciousness by the new
poem or novel.
Where nothing has been sown, nothing can be reaped. The work that has
yielded us no enjoyment will yield us no positive results in criticism.
Dr. Louis Waldstein, in his suggestive work on “The Subconscious
Self,” discovers that the critical or intellectual mood is foreign
to art; that it destroys or decreases the spontaneity necessary to
creation. This is why the critical and the creative faculty so rarely
go together, or why one seems to work against the other. Probably in
all normal, well-balanced minds the appreciation of a work of the
imagination is a matter of feeling and intuition long before it is a
matter of intellectual cognizance. Not all minds can give a reason for
the faith that is in them, and it is not important that they should;
the main matter is the faith. Every great work of art will be found
upon examination to have an ample ground of critical principles to rest
upon, though in the artist’s own mind not one of these principles may
have been consciously defined.
Indeed, the artist who works from any theory is foredoomed to at least
partial failure. And art that lends itself to any propaganda, or to
any idea “outside its essential form, falls short of being a pure art
creation.”
The critical spirit, when it has hardened into fixed standards, is
always a bar to the enjoyment or understanding of a poet. One then has
a poetical creed, as he has a political or religious creed, and this
creed is likely to stand between him and the appreciation of a new
poetic type. Macaulay thought Leigh Hunt was barred from appreciating
his “Lays of Ancient Rome” by his poetical creed, which may have been
the case. Jeffrey was no doubt barred from appreciating Wordsworth by
his poetical creed. It was Byron’s poetical creed that led him to rank
Pope so highly. A critic who holds to one of the conflicting creeds
about fiction, either that it should be realistic or romantic, will
not do justice to the other type. If Tolstoi is his ideal, he will set
little value on Scott; or if he exalts Hawthorne, he will depreciate
Howells. What the disinterested observer demands is the best possible
work of each after its kind. Or, if he is to compare and appraise the
two kinds, then I think that without doubt his conclusion will be that
the realistic novel is the later, maturer growth, more in keeping with
the modern demand for reality in all fields, and that the romantic
belongs more to the world of childish things, which we are fast leaving
behind us.
Our particular predilections in literature must, no doubt, be carefully
watched. There is danger in personal absorption in an author,--danger
to our intellectual freedom. One would not feel for a poet the
absorbing and exclusive love that the lover feels for his mistress,
because one would rather have the whole of literature for his domain.
One would rather admire Rabelais with Sainte-Beuve, as a Homeric
buffoon, than be a real “Pantagruelist devotee,” who finds a flavor
even in “the dregs of Master François’s cask” that he prefers to all
others. No doubt some of us, goaded on by the opposite vice in readers
and critics, have been guilty of an intemperate enthusiasm toward
Whitman and Browning. To make a cult of either of these authors, or
of any other, is to shut one’s self up in a part when the whole is
open to him. The opposite vice, that of violent personal antipathy, is
equally to be avoided in criticism. Probably Sainte-Beuve was guilty
of this vice in his attitude toward Balzac; Schérer in his criticism
of Béranger, and Landor in his dislike of Dante. One might also cite
Emerson’s distaste for Poe and Shelley, and Arnold’s antipathy to
Victor Hugo’s poetry. Likes and dislikes in literature that are
temperamental, that are like the attraction or repulsion of bodies
in different electrical conditions, are hard to be avoided, but the
trained reader may hope to overcome them. Taste is personal, but the
intellect is, or should be, impersonal, and to be able to guide the
former by the light of the latter is the signal triumph of criticism.
VI
“THOU SHALT NOT PREACH ”
_After Reading Tolstoi on “What is Art?”_
There is one respect in which pure art and pure science agree: both
are disinterested, and seek the truth, each of its kind, for its own
sake; neither has any axe to grind. Both would live in the whole,--one
through reason and investigation, the other through imagination and
contemplation. Science seeks to understand the universe, art to enjoy
it. A man of pure science like Darwin is as disinterested as a great
artist like Shakespeare. He has no practical or secondary ends; the
truth alone is his quest. He is tracing the footsteps of creative
energy through organic nature. He is like a detective working up a
case. His theory about it is only provisional, for the moment. Every
fact is welcome to him, and the more it seems to tell against his
theory of the case, the more eagerly he weighs it and studies it.
Indeed, the man of science follows an ideal as truly as does the poet,
and will pass by fortune, honors, and all worldly success, to cleave
to it. Tolstoi thinks that science for science’ sake is as bad as art
for art’s sake; but is not knowledge a reward in itself, and is there
any higher good than that mastery of the intellect over the problems
of the universe which science gives? By bending science to particular
and secondary ends we lay the basis of our material civilization, but
it is still true that the final end of science is, not our material
benefit, but our mental enlightenment; nor is the highest end of art
the good which the preacher and the moralist seek to give us. A poem of
Milton’s or Tennyson’s carries its own proof, its own justification.
When we demand a message of the poet, or of any artist, outside of
himself, outside of the truth which he unconsciously conveys through
his own personality and point of view, we degrade his art, or destroy
that disinterestedness which is its crown. Art exists for ideal ends;
it looks askance at devotees, at doctrinaires, at all men engaged in
the dissemination of particular ideas. I am not now thinking of art
as mere craft, but as the province of man’s freest, most spontaneous,
most joyous, most complete soul activity,--the kind of activity that
has no other end, seeks no other reward, than it finds in or of itself,
the joy of being and beholding, the free play of creative energy. Art
does not rebuke vice, it depicts it; it does not urge reform, it shows
us the reformers. Its work is play, its lesson is an allegory. The
preacher works by selection and exclusion, the artist by inclusion and
contrast.
When the resources of literary art are enlisted in any propaganda, in
the dissemination of particular ideas or doctrines, or when the end is
moral or scientific or political or philosophical, and not æsthetic,
the result is a mixed product, a cross between literature and something
else, which may be very vigorous and serviceable, but which cannot
give the kind of satisfaction that is imparted by a pure artistic
creation. A great poem or work of art does not speak to any special
and passing condition, mental or spiritual; its ministrations are
neither those of meat nor those of medicine; it does not subserve any
private or secondary ends, even the saving of our souls. The books that
seem written for us are quite certain to lose in interest to the next
generation. A great poem heals, not as the doctor heals, but as nature
does, by bringing the conditions of health. It consoles, not as the
priest consoles, but as love and life themselves do. It does not offer
a special good, but a general benefaction.
I once heard Emerson quote with approval Shakespeare’s saying,
“Read what you most affect;” but no doubt a broad culture demands
wide reading, and that we be on our guard against our particular
predilections, because such predilections may lead us into narrow
channels. Do the devotees of Browning, those who cry Browning,
Browning, and Browning only, do him the highest honor? Do the disciples
of Whitman, who would make a cult of him, live in the spirit of the
whole, as Whitman himself tried to live?--Whitman, who said that there
may be any number of Supremes, and that the chief lesson to be learned
under the master is how to destroy him? Our love for an author must
not suggest the fondness of the epicure for a special dish, or partake
of the lover’s infatuation for his mistress. Infatuation is not
permissible in literature. If art does not make us free of the whole,
it fails of its purpose. Only the religious bigot builds upon specific
texts, and only the one-sided, half-formed mind sees life through the
eyes of a single author. In the æsthetic sphere one may serve many
masters; he may give himself to none. One of the latest and most mature
perceptions that comes to us is the perception of relativity, in art as
well as in all other matters.
With respect to this question, both readers and writers may be divided
into two classes, the interested and the disinterested,--those who are
seeking special and personal ends, and those who are seeking general,
universal ends.
The poet is best pleased with the disinterested readers and admirers
of his work; that is, with those who take to it on the broadest human
grounds, and not upon grounds merely personal to themselves. Thus
Longfellow will find a wider and more disinterested audience than
Whittier, because his Muse is less in the service of special ideas; he
looks at life less as a Quaker and a Puritan, and more as a man.
The special ideas of an age, its moral enthusiasms and revolts, give
place to other ideas and enthusiasms, which in their turn give place
to others; but there are certain currents of thought and emotion that
are perennial, certain experiences common to all men and peoples. Such
a poem as Gray’s Elegy, for instance, is filled with the breadth of
universal human life. On the other hand, such a work as Schiller’s
“Robbers,” or Goethe’s “Werther,” seems to us like an empty shell
picked up on the shore, the life entirely gone out of it. One can see
why Poe is looked upon by foreign critics as outranking any of our
more popular New England poets. It is because his work has more of the
ubiquitous character of true art, is less pledged to moral and special
ends, less the result of personal tastes and attractions, and more
the pure flame of the unpledged æsthetic nature. The “Raven” and “The
Bells” have that play, that scorn of personal ends, that potential
spiritual energy, of great art. Poe does not increase our stock of
ideas or widen the sphere of our sympathies. He was a conjurer with
words. As a poet he used language for the music he could evoke from it.
What is the mental content of his “Annabel Lee”? It is as vague and
shadowy as its angels and demons, its sepulchres and seraphim, and its
kingdom by the sea.
Is it Coleridge who tells of an artist who always copied his wife’s
legs in his pictures, and thereby won great fame? The creative touch
it is that marks the artist. He smites the rocks, and a fountain
gushes forth. Tennyson has the artist nature in greater measure
than Wordsworth, a more flexible receptive spirit, though he never
attains to the homely pathos or the moral grandeur of the latter.
Yet individual convictions and attractions played a less part in
his poetry. Wordsworth gathered the harvest of his own feelings and
experiences, Tennyson that of other men as well. One reaped only
where he had sown, the other where all men had sown. One is colored by
Westmoreland, the other by the whole of England. Wordsworth wrote more
from character and natural bias than Tennyson. What nature does with a
man,--that is no credit to him; but what he does with nature. If his
character inspired the poem, is it not less than if his imagination had
inspired it? What a man does out of and independent of himself, or the
degree in which he transcends his own experience and partialities and
rises into universal relations,--is not that the measure of him as an
artist? If I tell only what I know, what I have felt, what I have seen,
no matter how well I do it, that is not to come into the sphere the
artist dwells in. What Wordsworth writes is more personal to himself,
more out of his own life, than what Tennyson writes. He is more limited
by his temperament and natural bias than Tennyson is by his. His word
is more inevitable, more the word of fate, but is it not therefore less
the word of art? Be sincere, be sincere; be not too sincere, lest you
substitute a moral rigidity for the flexibility demanded by art. The
artist is never the slave of his sincerity.
Graphic power is only a minor part of artistic power. One can say what
one has felt, and tell what one has experienced; but the artist can
tell what he has not experienced, and say what he has not felt. He can
make the assumed, the imaginary, real to himself and to his reader.
He can depict the passion of love, of anger, of remorse, though he may
never have felt them. Many persons have written one good novel, but
not a second, because in the first they exhausted their experience;
to transcend that is denied them. True art will have many messages
and many morals, as life and nature have, but we must draw them out
for ourselves. They do not lead, they follow; they do not make the
argument, they are made by it. Let us repeat and re-repeat. Art makes
us free of the whole,--not art for craft’s sake, but art as implying
the entire sphere of man’s spontaneous æsthetic activity. Beauty is
indeed its own excuse for being. Literature is an end in and of itself,
as much as music is or religion is. Or are we religious only upon
pay? What message has a bird, a flower, a summer day, frost, rain,
wind, snow? There are sermons in stones--when we put them there. What
message has Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Virgil, or any true poet? The
message we have the power to draw from him, and no two of us will draw
the same. Art is a circle; it is complete within itself; it returns
forever upon itself. There is no great poetry without great ideas, and
yet the ideas must exist as impulse, will, emotion, and not lie upon
the surface as formulas. The enemies of art are reflection, special
ideas, conscious intellectual processes, because these things isolate
us and shut us off from the life of the whole,--from that which we
reach through our sentiments and emotions. The æsthetic mood, says
the author of “The Subconscious Self,” “is, in its essence, receptive,
contemplative, distinctly personal, and therefore free from purpose and
conscious selection.” “Whenever a work of art is the vehicle for an
idea or purpose outside of its essential form, it falls short of being
a pure art creation, and fails in its appeal to the æsthetic mood,
whilst, be it conceded, it may serve some other but secondary purpose,
which belongs to the province of the archæologist, the art historian,
and the collector,” and, we may add, the moralist and preacher.
Wordsworth’s poet was content if he “might enjoy the things that others
understood,” and this is always characteristic of the poetic mood.
Absorption, contemplation, enjoyment, and not criticism and reflection,
are as the air it breathes. Byron was a great poet, but, said Goethe,
“the moment he reflects, he is a child.” It is better that the poet
should not be a child when he reflects, but it is much more important
that he be a child when he feels. His power as a poet does not lie in
the reflective faculties, but in the direct, joyous, solvent power of
his spirit.
We do not find our individual selves in great art, but the humanity of
which we are partakers. Something is brought home to us; but not to
our partialities, rather to our higher selves. We are never so little
selfish and hampered by our individualism as when admiring a great work
of the imagination. No doubt our modern world calls for doctors of the
soul in a sense that the more healthful and joyous pagan world had no
need of. Still, so far as the poet is a doctor or a priest, so far does
he fail to live in the spirit of the whole.
It is, I think, in these or similar considerations that we are to look
for the justification of the phrase, now almost everywhere disputed,
“Art for art’s sake.” It is only saying that art is to have no partial
or secondary ends, but is to breathe forth the spirit of the whole. It
must be disinterested; it is to hold the mirror up to nature. It may
hold the mirror up to the vices and follies of the age, but must not
take sides. It represents; it does not judge. The matter is self-judged
in the handling of the true artist. Didactic poetry or didactic fiction
can never rank high. Thou shalt not preach or teach; thou shalt portray
and create, and have ends as universal as has nature.
* * * * *
Our moral teachers and preachers often fail to see that the first
condition of a work of pure art is that it be disinterested, that it
be a total and complete product in and of itself; and that it is its
own excuse for being. Its business is to represent, to portray, or, as
Aristotle has it, to imitate nature, and not to preach or to moralize.
Our ethical and religious writers and speakers are apt to call this
artistic disinterestedness indifferentism. If the novelist does not
openly and avowedly take sides with his good characters against his
bad, or if, as Taine declares his function to be, he contents himself
with representing them to us as they are, whole, not blaming, not
punishing, not mutilating, transferring them to us intact and separate,
and leaving “us the right of judging if we desire it,”--if this is his
attitude, says the Reverend Washington Gladden in his late brochure on
“Art and Morality,” he is guilty of indifferentism. “His work begins
to be the work of a malefactor, and he himself is preparing to be fit
company for fiends.” Mr. Gladden misapprehends Taine, whom he quotes,
and he misapprehends the spirit and method of art. If the artist does
really convey to us the impression that he is personally indifferent as
to which triumphs in life, good or evil, and that he is as well pleased
with the one as with the other, then he is culpable and merits this
harsh language.
What art demands is that the artist’s personal convictions and notions,
his likes and dislikes, do not obtrude themselves at all; that good and
evil stand judged in his work by the logic of events, as they do in
nature, and not by any special pleading on his part. He does not hold
a brief for either side; he exemplifies the working of the creative
energy. He is neither a judge nor an advocate; he is a witness on the
stand; he tells how the thing fell out, and the more impartial he is
as a witness, the better. We, the jury, shall watch carefully for any
bias or leaning on his part. We shall try his testimony by the rules
of evidence; in this case, by our acquaintance with other imaginative
works and by our experience of life. The great artist works in and
through and from moral ideas; his works are indirectly a criticism
of life. He is moral without having a moral. The moment a moral or an
immoral intention obtrudes itself, that moment he begins to fall from
grace as an artist. He confesses his inability to let nature speak
for herself. He is inadequate to the logic of events, and gives us a
logic of his own. Shakespeare is our highest type of the disinterested
artist. Does he do aught but hold the mirror up to nature? Is his work
overlaid with an avowed moral intention? Does he go behind the returns,
so to speak? Does he tamper with the logic of events, the fate of
character? What is the moral of “Hamlet”? Has any one yet found out?
Yet the plays all fall within the scope of moral ideas; they treat
moral ideas with energy and depth, as Voltaire said of English poetry
in general.
We must discriminate between a conscious moral purpose and an
unconscious moral impulse. A work of art arises primarily out of the
emotions, and not out of the intellect, and is sound and true to the
extent to which it repeats the method of nature. Buskin, whom Mr.
Gladden quotes, was of course right when he said that the art of a
nation is an exponent of its ethical state. But the condition of first
importance with the artist is, not that he should have an ethical
purpose, but that he should be ethically sound. He may work with
ethical ideas, but not directly for them. The preacher speaks for them;
the poet speaks out of them,--he plays with them, he takes his will of
them; they follow, but do not lead him. Again, Ruskin says, “He is the
greatest artist who has embodied in the sum of his works the greatest
number of the greatest ideas;” but he is an artist only by virtue of
having embodied these ideas in an imaginative form. If they run through
his work as homilies or intellectual propositions, or lie upon it as
moral reflections, they are not within the vital sphere of art.
Art is not thought, but will, impulse, intuition; not ideas, but
ideality. None knew this better than Ruskin. No great artist can be
cornered with the question, “What for?” What is creation for? What are
you and I for? The catechism answers promptly enough, and the artist
does not contradict it. But of necessity his answer is not so dogmatic;
or rather, he does not give a direct answer at all, but lets the
epitome of life which he brings answer for him. He is not to exhibit
the forces of life harnessed to a purpose and tilling some man’s
private domain, but he is to show them in spontaneous play and fusion,
obeying no law but their own, and working to universal ends. His work
is finally for our edification. If it be also for our reproof, he must
conceal his purpose so well that we do not suspect it. He must let the
laws of life alone speak for him. Sainte-Beuve has a passage bearing
upon this subject which is admirable. He had been censured as a critic
for being too lax in his dealings with the morality of works of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Let me quote his reply: “If there
are some readers (and I think I know some) who would prefer to see me
censure it oftener and more roundly, I beg them to observe that I
succeed much better by provoking them to condemn it themselves than by
taking the lead and seeming to try to impose a judgment of my own every
time. In the long run, if a critic does this (or an artist either), he
always wearies and offends his readers. They like to feel themselves
more severe than the critic. I leave them that pleasure. For me, it is
enough if I represent and depict things faithfully, so that every one
may profit from the intellectual substance and the good language, and
be in a position to judge for himself the other, wholly moral parts.
There, however, I am careful not to be crucial.” French art is less
moral than English art, not because it preaches less, but because it
is more given to levity and trifling, because it exaggerates the part
one element plays in life, and because it draws less inspiration from
fundamental ethical ideas. It may at times be guilty of indifferentism,
but against very little English or American art can this charge be made.
The great distinction of art is that it aims to see life steadily and
to see it whole. This is its high and unique service; it would enable
us to live in the whole and in the spirit of the whole; not in the
part called morality, or philosophy, or religion, or beauty, but in
the unity resulting from the fusion and transformation of these varied
elements. It affords the one point of view whence the world appears
harmonious and complete. The moralist, the preacher, seizes upon a
certain part of the world, and makes much of that; the philosopher
seizes upon another part, the æsthete upon another; only the great
artist comprehends and includes all these, and sees life and nature as
a vital, consistent whole.
Hence it is that a work of pure art is a complete product in a sense
that no other production of a man’s mind is; or, as Ruskin says, “It
is the work of the whole spirit of man,” and faithfully reflects that
spirit. The intellect may write the sermon, or the essay, or the
criticism, but the character, the entire life and personality are
implicated in a creative work.
Disinterestedness means no more in art, in letters, than it means in
life. In our kind deeds, our acts of charity, in love, in virtue,
we act from disinterested motives. We have no ulterior purpose.
These things are their own reward. A noble life is disinterested; it
bestows benefits without thought of self. But it is not indifferent.
Indifference is personal,--it is a state in which one personal motive
cancels another; whereas disinterestedness is impersonal,--it is the
complete effacement of self. It is a high, heroic moral state, while
indifference is a lax or negative state. We are disinterested when we
rescue a child from drowning or stop a runaway horse, but we are not
indifferent. A novelist is disinterested when he has no motives but
those inherent in his story, no purpose but to hold the mirror up to
nature. He is interested and departs from his high calling when he
seeks to enforce a particular moral, or to indoctrinate his reader with
a particular set of ideas. And yet if he betrays indifference as to
the issues of right and wrong, that is a vice; it is contrary to the
self-effacement which art demands. To obtrude your indifference is of
the same order of faults as to obtrude your preferences. The innate
necessities of the situation may alone speak.
To suppress or to ignore the world of vice and sin is not to be moral;
to portray it is not to be immoral. But to gloat over it, to dwell
fondly upon it, to return to it, to exaggerate it, to roll it under the
tongue as a sweet morsel,--that is to be immoral; and to treat it as
time and nature do or as the great artists do, as affording contrasts
and difficulties, and disturbing but not destroying the balance of
life, is within the scope of the moral. Art must make us free of the
whole; every work must in a measure reflect the whole of life; if it
dwell too much on that part called sin and evil, it is false to its
ideal; it must keep the balance; it must be true to the integrity of
nature. All things are permissible in their time and place. That a
thing is real and true is no reason why it should go into the artist’s
picture; but that it belongs there, that it is organic there, a part
of a vital whole, and that that whole is a fair representation of
human life--in this is the justification. Not every scene in nature
composes well into a picture, and not every phase of human life is
equally significant in a creative work. That nature does this of that
is no reason why the artist should do it, unless he can show an equal
insouciance and an equal prodigality and power. He must take what he
can make his own and imbue with the spirit of life. I lately read a
novel by one of our most promising young novelists, in which there was
a streak of vulgar realism, forced in, evidently, under the pressure
of a theory,--the theory that art is never to shrink from the true. It
offended because it was entirely gratuitous; there was no necessity
for it. If it was true, it was not apt; if it was real, it was not
fit; it jarred; it was dragged in by main force; it was a false note.
Is not anything disagreeable in a novel of the imagination a false
note? Disagreeable, I mean, not by reason of the subject matter, but by
reason of the treatment. Dante makes hell fascinating by his treatment.
There are three ways of treating the under side of nature. There is
the childlike simplicity of the Biblical writers, who think no evil;
there is the artistic frankness of the great dramatic poets, who know
the value of foils and contrasts, and who cannot ignore any element of
life; and there is the license and levity of the lascivious poets, who
live in the erotic alone. Both Ibsen and Tolstoi have been condemned as
immoral only because their artistic scheme embraces all the elements
that are potent in life. Of levity, of exaggeration, they are not
guilty. If Zola is to be condemned, it is probably because he makes too
prominent certain things, and thus destroys the proportion. In nature
nothing is detached. Her great currents flow on and purify themselves.
The ugly, the unclean, are quickly lost sight of; the sky and the sun
cover all, bathe all. But art is detachment: our attention is fixed
upon a few points, and a drop or two too much of certain things spoils
it all. In nature a drop or two too much does not matter; we quickly
escape, we find compensation. A bad odor in the open air is of little
consequence; but in Zola’s books the bad odors are as in a closed room,
and we soon pray to be delivered from them.
VII
DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE
The one new thing in the world in our day is democracy, the coming
forward of the people, and that which has grown out of it, or which
goes along with it,--science, free inquiry, the industrial system,
the humanitarian spirit. The old and past world from which we inherit
our literary tastes and standards was characterized by a condition
of things quite different,--the supremacy of the few, the leadership
of the hero, the strong man,--the picturesque age that gave us art,
theology, philosophy, and the great epic poems. It was the youth of
the race. Mankind seems now fast nearing its majority. The bewitching,
the delusive, the unreasoning, pathetic time of youth is past. What
the man loses and what he gains in passing from youth to manhood the
race has lost and has gained in passing from the age of myth to the
age of science. A charm, an innocence, a susceptibility, a credulity,
and many other things are gone; a seriousness, a reasonableness,
a width of outlook, power to deal with real things, sanity, and
self-control, have come. Youth is cruel, age is kind and considerate.
All forms, ceremonies, titles, all conferred dignities and arbitrary
distinctions, all pomp and circumstance, count for less and less
in the world. Art is less and less; nature is more and more. The
extrinsic, the put on, the ornamental, the factitious, count for
less and less; theology, metaphysics, the sacredness of priests, the
divinity of kings, count for less and less, while the real, the true,
the essential, in all fields, count for more. It is doubtful if art
for art’s sake can ever be in the future what it has been in the past.
We are too deeply absorbed in the reality; we care less and less for
the symbol and more and more for the thing symbolized. The monarchical
idea is dwindling; the throne as a symbol has lost its force; the old
religious language of supplication and praise begins to have a hollow,
archaic sound. The idea of the fatherhood of God is fast taking the
place of the idea of the despotism of God. It has taken mankind all
these centuries to rise to the conception of a being with whom the
language of excessive flattery and adulation seems out of place. The
democratic idea will eventually penetrate and modify our religious
notions. We shall no longer seek to propitiate an offended deity by
groveling in the dust before an imaginary throne. The despot goes out,
the Brother comes in. All these things and many more cluster around the
word democracy.
What is the import of the word as applied to literature? How far
will it carry in this field? Is the democratic movement favorable or
unfavorable to the growth of true literature? It has been often said
that literature is essentially aristocratic; that is, I suppose, that
it implies a degree of excellence, a kind of excellence, quite beyond
the appreciation of the masses. This is no doubt in a measure true,
and always has been true. While the mass of the people are not good
offhand judges of the best literature, it is equally true that great
literature--literature that has breadth and power, like the English
Bible or like Bunyan, and many other books that transcend the sphere
of mere letters--makes its way more or less among the people. The
highest ideals in any sphere can never draw the many; yet the few, the
elect who are drawn by them, are probably just as sure to appear in a
democracy as in an oligarchy.
To some readers democracy in literature seems to suggest only an
incursion of the loud, the vulgar, the cheap and meretricious.
Apparently it suggests only these things to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose
volume “Questions at Issue” contains an essay upon this subject.
Mr. Gosse congratulates the guild of letters that the summits of
literature have not yet been submerged by the flood of democracy. The
standards have not been lowered in obedience to the popular taste.
But Mr. Gosse thinks the social revolution or evolution now imminent
will require a new species of poetry, that this poetry will be
democratic to a degree at present unimaginable, though just what it
is to be democratic in poetry is not very clear to him. He says:
“The aristocratic tradition is still paramount in all art. Kings,
princesses, and the symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as
we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales,” and he does not
see what will be left if this romantic phraseology is done away with.
We shall certainly have left what we had before these types and symbols
came into vogue,--nature, life, man, God. If out of these things we
cannot supply ourselves with new types and values, then certainly we
shall be hard put.
The critic cites the popularity of Tennyson as an illustration of the
influence of literature upon democracy rather than of democracy upon
literature. It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the democratic
spirit, but by the old feudal spirit; to him the people was but a
hundred-headed beast, and his temper toward this beast, if reports
are true, was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of the haughty,
exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and his popularity simply showed
how widespread the appreciation of literary excellence may become in
democratic times.
Of course universal suffrage is of slight import in literature: not
by the vote of the many, but by the judgment of the few, are the true
standards upheld. The novels that sell by the hundred thousand will not
be the best, or even the second or third best, and their great vogue
only indicates that the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged
the reading public, and that in democratic times, as in all other
times, there never has been and probably never will be enough good
taste to go around.
Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, literature, no more means
a lowering of the standard of excellence than it means a lowering of
the standards in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering or
ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It means a lifting up
of the average, with the great prizes, the high ideals, as attractive
and as difficult as ever. Because the people are crude and run for
the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are not therefore
to infer that the cheap and meretricious will permanently content
them. Democracy in literature, as exemplified by the two great modern
democrats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new and more deeply
religious way of looking at mankind, as well as at all the facts and
objects of the visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding of
new artistic motives and values in the people, in science and the
modern spirit, in liberty, fraternity, equality, in the materialism and
industrialism of man’s life as we know it in our day and land,--the
carrying into imaginative fields the quality of common humanity, that
which it shares with real things and with all open-air nature, with
hunters, farmers, sailors, and real workers in all fields.
The typical democratic poet will hold and wield his literary and
artistic endowment as a common, everyday man, the brother and equal
of all, and never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts and
advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poems will imply a great body of
humanity--the masses, the toilers--and will carry into emotional and
ideal fields the atmosphere of these.
Behold the artistic motives furnished by feudalism, by royalty, by
lords and ladies, by the fears and superstitions of the past, by
mythology and ecclesiasticism, by religious and political terrorism
in all their manifold forms. Art and literature have lived upon these
things for ages. Can democracy, can the worth and picturesqueness
of the people, furnish no worthy themes and motives for the poets?
Can science, can the present day, can the religion of humanity, the
conquest of nature’s forces, inspire no poetic enthusiasm and give
rise to great art rivaling that of the past? As between the past and
the present, undoubtedly the difficulty is not in the poverty of the
material of to-day, but in the inadequacy of the man. It requires a
great spirit, a powerful personality, to master and absorb the diverse
and complex elements of our time and imbue them with poetic enthusiasm.
The humanitarian enthusiasm as a _motif_ in literature and art,--the
inspiration begotten by the contemplation of the wrongs, the
sufferings, and the hopes of the people,--undoubtedly came in with
democracy. It was quite unknown to the ancient and to the feudal world.
To all the more vital voices of our time this enthusiasm gives the
tone. How pronounced it is in two of our latest and most promising
poets, Mr. Edwin Markham and Mr. William Vaughn Moody!
It is hard to shake off the conviction that the old order of things had
the advantage of picturesqueness. Is it because it is so hard to free
ourselves from the illusions of time and distance? Charm, enticement,
dwell with the remote, the unfamiliar. The now, the here, are vulgar
and commonplace. We find it hard to realize that the great deeds were
done on just such a day as this, and that the actors in them were just
such men as we see about us. Then the days of one’s youth seem strange
and incredible; how different their light from this hard, prosy glare!
Our distrust of our own day and land as furnishing suitable material
for poetry and romance doubtless springs largely from this illusion.
At the same time, a mechanical and industrial age like ours no doubt
offers a harder problem to the imaginative producer than the ages of
faith and fanaticism of the past. The steam whistle, the type of our
civilization, what can the poet make of it? The clank of machinery,
it must be confessed, is less inspiring than the clash of arms; the
railroad is less pleasing to look upon than the highway, because it
is more arbitrary and mechanical. In the same way, the steamship
seems unrelated to the great forces and currents of the globe. Yet to
put these things in poetry only requires time, only requires a more
complete adjustment of our lives to them, and hence the proper vista
and association. As is always the case, it is a question of the man and
not of the material. Goethe said to Eckermann, “Our German æsthetical
people are always talking about poetical and unpoetical objects,
and in one respect they are not quite wrong; yet at bottom no real
object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly,”--if
he can throw enough feeling into it. I lately read a poem by one of
our younger poets on an entirely modern theme, the building of the
railroad,--the gang of men cutting through hills, tunneling mountains,
filling valleys, bridging chasms, etc. But, though vividly described,
it did not quite reach the poetical; it lacked the personal and the
human; it was realistic without the freeing touch of the idealistic.
Some story, some interest, some enthusiasm overarching it, would have
supplied an atmosphere that was lacking. We cannot be permanently
interested in the gigantic or in sheer brute power unless they are in
some way related to life and its aspirations. The battle of man with
man is more interesting than the battle of man with rocks and chasms,
because men can strike back, and victory is not to be had on such easy
terms.
The same objection cannot be urged against Mr. William Vaughn Moody’s
poem on the steam engine, which he treats under the figure of “The
Brute,”--a poem of great imaginative power in which the human interest
is constantly paramount. The still small voice of humanity is always
heard through the Brute’s roar, as may be seen in the first stanza:--
“Through his might men work their wills;
They have boweled out the hills
For food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought;
And they fling him hour by hour
Limbs of men to give him power.
Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devour
Children’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply bought.
He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty thought.”
Quite different is the treatment of “The Lightning Express” by a
western poet, Mr. J. P. Irvine, yet the poetic note is clearly and
surely struck in his stanzas too:--
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“In storm and darkness, night and day,
Through mountain gorge or level way,
With lightening rein and might unspent,
And head erect in scorn of space,
Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race,
Flame-girt across a continent.
Think not of danger; every wheel
Of all that clank and roll below
Rings singing answers, steel for steel,
Beneath the hammer’s testing blow;
And what though fields go swirling round,
And backward swims the mazy ground,
So swift the herds seem standing still,
As scared they dash from hill to hill;
And though the brakes may grind to fire
The gravel as they grip the tire
And holding, strike a startling vein
Of tremor through the surging train,
The hand of him who guides the rein
Is all-controlling and intent;
Fear not, although the race you ride
Is on the whirlwind, side by side,
With time across a continent.”
What are the sources of the interesting in life? Novelty is one, but
it is short-lived; beauty and sublimity are others, and are more
lasting. But the main source of the interesting is human association.
The landscape that is written over with human history, how it holds
us and draws us! All phases of modern industrial life--the miner,
the lumberman, the road-builder, the engineer, the factory-hand, are
available for poetic treatment to him who can bring the proper fund
of human association, who can make the human element in these things
paramount over the mechanical element. The more of nature you get in,
the more the picture has a background of earth and sky, or of great
human passions and heroisms, the more the imagination is warmed and
moved. The railroad is itself a blotch upon the earth, but it has a
mighty background. In itself it is at war with every feature of the
landscape it passes through; it stains the snows, it befouls the water,
it poisons the air, it smuts the grass and the foliage, it expels the
peace and the quiet, it puts to rout every rural divinity. It adapts
itself to nothing; it is as arbitrary as a cyclone and as killing as a
pestilence. Yet a train of cars thundering through storm and darkness,
racing with winds and clouds, is a sublime object to contemplate; it
is sublime because of its triumph over time and space, and because of
the danger and dread that compass it about. It has a tremendous human
background. The body-killing and soul-blighting occupations peculiar to
our civilization are not of themselves suggestive of poetic thoughts;
but if Dante made poetry out of hell, would not a nature copious and
powerful enough make poetry out of the vast and varied elements of our
materialistic civilization?
VIII
POETRY AND ELOQUENCE
“Where does eloquence end, where does poetry begin?” inquires Renan in
his “Future of Science.” And he goes on to say, “The whole difference
lies in a peculiar harmony, in a more or less sonorous ring, with
regard to which an experienced faculty never hesitates.”
Is not the “sonorous ring,” however, more characteristic of eloquence
than of poetry? Poetry does begin where eloquence ends; it is a higher
and finer harmony. Nearly all men feel the power of eloquence, but
poetry does not sway the multitude; it does not sway at all,--it lifts,
and illuminates, and soothes. It reaches the spirit, while eloquence
stops with the reason and the emotions.
Eloquence is much the more palpable, real, available; it is a wind that
fills every sail and makes every mast bend, while poetry is a breeze
touched with a wild perfume from field or wood. Poetry is consistent
with perfect tranquillity of spirit; a true poem may have the calm of
a summer day, the placidity of a mountain lake, but eloquence is a
torrent, a tempest, mass in motion, an army with banners, the burst of
a hundred instruments of music. Tennyson’s “Maud” is a notable blending
of the two.
There is something martial in eloquence, the roll of the drum, the cry
of the fife, the wheel and flash of serried ranks. Its end is action;
it shapes events, it takes captive the reason and the understanding.
Its basis is earnestness, vehemence, depth of conviction.
There is no eloquence without heat, and no poetry without light. An
earnest man is more or less an eloquent man. Eloquence belongs to the
world of actual affairs and events; it is aroused by great wrongs
and great dangers, it flourishes in the forum and the senate. Poetry
is more private and personal, is more for the soul and the religious
instincts; it courts solitude and wooes the ideal.
Anything swiftly told or described, the sense of speed and volume,
is, or approaches, eloquence; while anything heightened and deepened,
any meaning and beauty suddenly revealed, is, or approaches, poetry.
Hume says of the eloquence of Demosthenes, “It is rapid harmony,
exactly adjusted to the sense. It is vehement reasoning without any
appearance of art; it is disdain, anger, boldness, freedom, involved in
a continual stream of argument.”
The passions of eloquence and poetry differ in this respect; one is
reason inflamed, the other is imagination kindled.
Any object of magnitude in swift motion, a horse at the top of his
speed, a regiment of soldiers on the double quick, a train of cars
under full way, moves us in a way that the same object at rest does
not. The great secret of eloquence is to set mass in motion, to
marshal together facts and considerations, imbue them with passion, and
hurl them like an army on the charge upon the mind of the reader or
hearer.
The pleasure we derive from eloquence is more acute, more
physiological, I might say, more of the blood and animal spirits, than
our pleasure from poetry. I imagine it was almost a dissipation to have
heard a man like Father Taylor. One’s feelings and emotions were all
out of their banks like the creeks in spring. But this was largely the
result of his personal magnetism and vehemence of utterance.
The contrast between eloquent prose and poetic prose would be more to
the point. The pleasure from each is precious and genuine, but our
pleasure from the latter is no doubt more elevated and enduring.
Gibbon’s prose is often eloquent, never poetical. Ruskin’s prose is at
times both, though his temperament is not that of the orator. There is
more caprice than reason in him. The prose of De Quincey sometimes has
the “sonorous ring” of which Renan speaks. The following passage from
his essay on “The Philosophy of Roman History” is a good sample:--
“The battle of Actium was followed by the final conquest of Egypt.
That conquest rounded and integrated the glorious empire; it was now
circular as a shield, orbicular as the disk of a planet; the great
Julian arch was now locked into the cohesion of granite by its last
keystone. From that day forward, for three hundred years, there was
silence in the world; no muttering was heard; no eye winked beneath the
wing. Winds of hostility might still rave at intervals, but it was on
the outside of the mighty empire, it was at a dreamlike distance; and,
like the storms that beat against some monumental castle, ‘and at the
doors and windows seem to call,’ they rather irritated and vivified the
sense of security, than at all disturbed its luxurious lull.”
Contrast with this a passage from Emerson’s first prose work, “Nature,”
wherein the poetic element is more conspicuous:--
“The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been
nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without
design and without heed, shall not lose their lesson altogether,
in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter,
amidst agitation and terror in national councils,--in the hour of
revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their morning
lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing
events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods
wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low
upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with
these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into
his hands.”
Or this passage from Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” shall we call it
eloquent prose or poetic prose?
“In this manner, however, has the Day bent downwards. Wearied mortals
are creeping home from their field labors; the village artisan eats
with relish his supper of herbs, or has strolled forth to the village
street for a sweet mouthful of air and human news. Still summer
eventide everywhere! The great sun hangs flaming on the uttermost
northwest; for it is his longest day this year. The hilltops,
rejoicing, will ere long be at their ruddiest, and blush good-night.
The thrush in green dells, on long-shadowed leafy spray, pours gushing
his glad serenade, to the babble of brooks grown audible; silence is
stealing over the Earth.”
What noble eloquence in Tacitus! Indeed, eloquence was natural to the
martial and world-subduing Roman; but his poetry is for the most part
of a secondary order. It is often said of French poetry that it is more
eloquent than poetic. Of English poetry the reverse is probably true,
though of such a poet as Byron it seems to me that eloquence is the
chief characteristic.
Byron never, to my notion, touches the deeper and finer poetic chords.
He is witty, he is brilliant, he is eloquent, but is he ever truly
poetical? He stirs the blood, he kindles the fancy, but does he ever
diffuse through the soul the joy and the light of pure poetry? Goethe
expressed almost unbounded admiration for Byron, yet admitted that he
was too worldly-minded, and that a great deal of his poetry should have
been fired off in Parliament in the shape of parliamentary speeches.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, when he was not prosy and heavy, was
poetical; he was never eloquent.
A fine sample of eloquence in poetry is Browning’s “How they brought
the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” Of its kind there is nothing in
the language to compare with it. One needs to read such a piece
occasionally as a moral sanitary measure; it aerates his emotions as
a cataract does a creek. Scott’s highest excellence as a poet is his
eloquence. The same is true of Macaulay and of Campbell, though the
latter’s “To the Rainbow” breathes the spirit of true poetry.
Among our own poets Halleck’s “Marco Bozzaris” thrills us with its
fiery eloquence. Dr. Holmes’s “Old Ironsides” also is just what such
a poem should be, just what the occasion called for, a rare piece of
rhymed eloquence.
Eloquence is so good, so refreshing, it is such a noble and elevating
excitement, that one would fain have more of it, even in poetry. It is
too rare and precious a product to be valued lightly.
Here is a brief example of Byron’s eloquence:--
“There, where death’s brief pang was quickest.
And the battle’s wreck lay thickest,
Strewed beneath the advancing banner
Of the eagles’ burning crest,--
There with thunder-clouds to fan her
Victory beaming from her breast!
While the broken line enlarging
Fell, or fled along the plain;--
There be sure _Murat_ was charging!
There he ne’er shall charge again!”
This from Tennyson is of another order:--
“Thy voice is heard through rolling drums
That beat to battle where he stands;
Thy face across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands:
A moment, while the trumpets blow,
He sees his brood about thy knee;
The next, like fire, he meets the foe,
And strikes him dead for thine and thee.”
The chief value of all patriotic songs and poems, like Mrs. Howe’s
“Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or Mr. Stedman’s John Brown poem, or
Randall’s “Maryland,” or Burns’s “Bannnockburn,” or Whitman’s “Beat!
Beat! Drums,” is their impassioned eloquence. Patriotism, war, wrong,
slavery, these are the inspirers of eloquence.
Of course no sharp line can be drawn between eloquence and poetry; they
run together, they blend in all first-class poems; yet there is a wide
difference between the two, and it is probably in the direction I have
indicated. Power and mastery in either field are the most precious of
human gifts.
IX
GILBERT WHITE AGAIN
One of the few books which I can return to and re-read every six or
seven years is Gilbert White’s Selborne. It has a perennial charm.
It is much like country things themselves. One does not read it with
excitement or eager avidity; it is in a low key; it touches only upon
minor matters; it is not eloquent, or witty, or profound; it has only
now and then a twinkle of humor or a glint of fancy, and yet it has
lived an hundred years and promises to live many hundreds of years
more. So many learned and elaborate treatises have sunk beneath the
waves upon which this cockle-shell of a book rides so safely and
buoyantly! What is the secret of its longevity? One can do little more
than name its qualities without tracing them to their sources. It is
simple and wholesome, like bread, or meat, or milk. Perhaps it is just
this same unstrained quality that keeps the book alive. Books that are
piquant and exciting like condiments, or cloying like confectionery
or pastry, it seems, have much less chance of survival. The secret of
longevity of a man--what is it? Sanity, moderation, regularity, and
that plus vitality, which is a gift. The book that lives has these
things, and it has that same plus vitality, the secret of which cannot
be explored. The sensational, intemperate books set the world on fire
for a day, and then end in ashes and forgetfulness.
White’s book diffuses a sort of rural England atmosphere through the
mind. It is not the work of a city man who went down into the country
to write it up, but of a born countryman,--one who had in the very
texture of his mind the flavor of rural things. Then it is the growth
of a particular locality. Let a man stick his staff into the ground
anywhere and say, “This is home,” and describe things from that point
of view, or as they stand related to that spot,--the weather, the
fauna, the flora,--and his account shall have an interest to us it
could not have if not thus located and defined. This is one secret
of White’s charm. His work has a home air, a certain privacy and
particularity. The great world is afar off; Selborne is as snug and
secluded as a chimney corner; we get an authentic glimpse into the real
life of one man there; we see him going about intent, lovingly intent,
upon every phase of nature about him. We get glimpses into humble
cottages and into the ways and doings of the people; we see the bacon
drying in the chimneys; we see the poor gathering in Wolmer Forest the
sticks and twigs dropped by the rooks in building their nests; we see
them claiming the “lop and top” when the big trees are cut. Indeed,
the human touches, the human figures here and there in White’s pages,
add much to the interest. The glimpses we get of his own goings and
comings--we wish there were more of them. We should like to know what
took him to London during that great snowstorm of January, 1776, and
how he got there, inasmuch as the roads were so blocked by the snow
that the carriages from Bath with their fine ladies on their way to
attend the Queen’s birthday, were unable to get through. “The ladies
fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers if they would shovel
them a track to London, but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky
to be removed.” The parson found the city bedded deep in snow, and so
noiseless by reason of it that “it seemed to convey an uncomfortable
idea of desolation.”
When one reads the writers of our own day upon rural England and the
wild life there, he finds that they have not the charm of the Selborne
naturalist; mainly, I think, because they go out with deliberate
intent to write up nature. They choose their theme; the theme does not
choose them. They love the birds and flowers for the literary effects
they can produce out of them. It requires no great talent to go out
in the fields or woods and describe in graceful sentences what one
sees there,--birds, trees, flowers, clouds, streams; but to give the
atmosphere of these things, to seize the significant and interesting
features and to put the reader into sympathetic communication with
them, that is another matter.
Hence back of all, the one thing that has told most in keeping White’s
book alive is undoubtedly its sound style--sentences actually filled
with the living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to face with
something genuine and real; objects, ideas, stand out on the page; the
articulation is easy and distinct. White had no literary ambitions.
His style is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to natural
knowledge. There was evidently something winsome and charming about the
man personally, and these qualities reappear in his pages.
He was probably a parson who made as many calls afield as in the
village, if not more. An old nurse in his family said of him, fifty
years after his death, “He was a still, quiet body, and that there was
not a bit of harm in him.”
White was a type of the true observer, the man with the detective eye.
He did not seek to read his own thoughts and theories into Nature, but
submitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and ingenuousness.
He had infinite curiosity, and delighted in nothing so much as a new
fact about the birds and the wild life around him. To see the thing
as it was in itself and in its relations, that was his ambition. He
could resist the tendency of his own mind to believe without sufficient
evidence. Apparently he wanted to fall in with the notion current
during the last century, that swallows hibernated in the mud in the
bottoms of streams and ponds, but he could not gather convincing proof.
It was not enough that a few belated specimens were seen in the fall
lingering about such localities, or again hovering over them early in
spring; or that some old grandfather had seen a man who had taken live
swallows out of the mud. Produce the man and let us cross-question
him,--that was White’s attitude. Dr. Johnson said confidently that
swallows did thus pass the winter in the mud “conglobulated into a
ball,” but Johnson had that literary cast of mind that prefers a
picturesque statement to the exact fact. White was led astray by no
literary ambition. His interest in the life of nature was truly a
scientific one; he must know the fact first, and then give it to the
humanities. How true it is in science, in literature, in life, that
any secondary motive vitiates the result! Seek ye the kingdom of truth
first, and all things shall be added.
But White seems finally to have persuaded himself that at least a few
swallows passed the winter in England in a torpid state--if not in the
bottom of streams or ponds, then in holes in their banks. He reasoned
from analogy, though he had expressed his distrust of that mode of
reasoning. If bats, insects, toads, turtles, and other creatures can
thus pass the winter, why not swallows? On many different occasions,
during mild days late in the fall and early in the spring, he saw
house-martins flying about; the weather suddenly changing to colder,
they quickly disappeared. Bats and turtles came forth, then vanished in
the same way. White finally concluded that the mystery was the same in
both cases,--that the creatures were brought from their winter retreats
by the warmth, only to retire to them again when it changed to cold. If
he had adhered to his usual caution he would have waited for actual
proof of this fact,--the finding of a torpid swallow. He made frequent
search for such, but never found any.
This notion so long current about the swallows probably had its origin
in two things: first, their partiality for mud as nesting material; and
secondly, the habit of these birds, after they have begun to collect
into flocks in midsummer, preparatory to their migrations, of passing
the night in vast numbers along the margins of streams and ponds. White
knew of their habits in this respect, and wanted to see in the fact
presumptive evidence of the truth of the notion that, though they may
not retire into the water itself, yet that they “may conceal themselves
in the banks of pools and rivers during the uncomfortable months of the
year.” One midsummer twilight in northern Vermont I came upon hundreds
of swallows--barn and cliff--settled for the night upon some low
alders that grew upon the margin of a deep, still pool in the river.
The bushes bent down with them as with an over-load of fruit. This
attraction for the water on the part of the swallow family is certainly
a curious one, and is not easily explained.
Our sharp-eyed parson had observed that the nesting habits of birds
afford a clue to their roosting habits,--that they usually pass the
night in or near those places where they build their nests. Thus, the
tree-builders roost in trees; the ground-builders upon the ground. I
have seen our chickadee and woodpecker enter, late in the day, the
cavities in decaying limbs of trees. I have seen the oriole dispose of
herself for the night on the end of a maple branch where her “pendent
bed and procreant cradle” was begun a few days later. In walking
through the summer fields in the twilight, the vesper sparrow or the
song sparrow will often start up from almost beneath one’s feet. It
is said that the snow-bunting will plunge beneath the snow and pass
the night there. The ruffled grouse often does this, but the swallows
seem to be an exception to this rule. I have seen a vast cloud of
swifts take up their lodging for the night in a tall, unused chimney;
but the barn swallows and the cliff and the white-bellied swallows,
at least after the young have flown, appear to pass the night in the
vicinity of streams. White noticed also--and here the true observer
again crops out--that the fieldfare, a kind of thrush, though a
tree-builder, always appears, to pass the night on the ground. “The
larkers, in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in the
wheat stubbles.” He learned, as every observer sooner or later learns,
to be careful of sweeping statements,--that the truth of nature is
not always caught by the biggest generalizations. After speaking of
the birds that dust themselves, earth their plumage--_pulveratrices_,
as he calls them--he says, “As far as I can observe, many birds that
dust themselves never wash, and I once thought that those birds that
wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken,”
and he instances the house sparrow as doing both. White seems to have
been about the first writer upon natural history who observed things
minutely; he saw through all those sort of sleight-o’-hand movements
and ways of the birds and beasts. He held his eye firmly to the point.
He saw the swallows feed their young on the wing; he saw the fern-owl,
while hawking about a large oak, “put out its short leg while on the
wing, and by a bend of the head deliver something into its mouth.”
This explained to him the use of its middle toe, “which is curiously
furnished with a serrated claw.” He timed the white owls feeding their
young under the eaves of his church, with watch in hand. He saw them
transfer the mouse they brought, from the foot to the beak, that they
might have the free use of the former in ascending to the nest.
In his walks and drives about the country he was all attention to the
life about him, simply from his delight in any fresh bit of natural
knowledge. His curiosity never flagged. He had naturally an alert mind.
His style reflects this alertness and sensitiveness. In his earlier
days he was an enthusiastic sportsman, and he carried the sportsman’s
trained sense and love of the chase into his natural history studies.
He complained that faunists were too apt to content themselves
with general terms and bare descriptions; the reason, he says, is
plain,--“because all that may be done at home in a man’s study; but
the investigation of the life and conversation of animals is a concern
of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be attained but
by the active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the
country.” He himself had the true inquisitiveness and activity, and the
loving, discriminating eye. He saw the specific marks and differences
at a glance. Then, his love of these things was so well known in the
neighborhood, that this kind of knowledge flowed to him from all sides.
He was a magnet that attracted all the fresh natural lore about him.
People brought him birds and eggs and nests, and animals or any natural
curiosity, and reported to him any unusual occurrence. They loaned him
the use of their eyes and ears. One day a countryman told him he had
found a young fern-owl in the nest of a small bird on the ground, and
that it was fed by the little bird. “I went to see this extraordinary
phenomenon, and found that it was a young cuckoo hatched in the nest of
a titlark; it was become vastly too big for its nest, appearing to have
its large wings extended beyond the nest,
‘in tenui re
Majores pennas nido extendisse,’
and was very fierce and pugnacious, pursuing my finger, as I teased it,
for many feet from the nest, and sparring, and buffeting with its wings
like a gamecock. The dupe of a dam appeared at a distance, hovering
about with meat in its mouth, and expressing the greatest solicitude.”
He observed that the train of the peacock was really not its tail, but
an entirely separate appendage. He remarked how extremely fond cats are
of fish, and yet of all quadrupeds “are the least disposed towards the
water.” This is a curious fact to him. A neighbor of his, in ploughing
late in the fall, turned a water-rat out of his hibernaculum in a field
far removed from any water. The rat had laid up more than a gallon of
potatoes for its winter food. This was another curious fact that set
the writer speculating. His correspondent tells him of a heronry near
some manor-house that excites his curiosity much. “Fourscore nests of
such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I would ride half as many
miles to get a sight of.” Such a lively curiosity had the parson. His
thirst for exact knowledge was so great that on one occasion he took
measurements of the carcass of a moose when he was probably compelled
to hold his nose to finish the task. At one place he heard of a woman
who professed to cure cancers by the use of toads; some of his brother
clergymen believed the story, but when he came to sift the evidence he
made up his mind that the woman was a fraud.
He said truly, “There is such a propensity in mankind towards deceiving
and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate anything from common
report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt
and suspicion.”
The observations of hardly one man in five hundred are of any value for
scientific purposes.
White had the true scientific caution, and was, as a rule, very careful
to verify his statements.
Of course the science of White’s time was far behind our own. The
phenomenon of the weather, for instance, was not understood then as it
is now. The great atmospheric waves that sweep across the continents,
and the regular alternations of heat and cold, were unsuspected. White
observed that cold descended from above, but he thought that thaws
often originated underground, “from warm vapours which arise.” He was
greatly puzzled, too, when, during the severe cold of December, 1784,
the thermometer fell many degrees lower in the valley bottoms than on
the hills. He had not observed that the very cold air on such occasions
settles down into the valleys and fills them like water, marking the
height to which it rises by a level line upon the trees or foliage.
It is a wonder that his sharp eye did not detect the true source of
honey dew, but it did not. He thought it proceeded from the effluvia of
flowers, which, being drawn up into the sky by the warmth of the sun by
day, descended again as dew by night.
When a French anatomist announced that he had discovered why the cuckoo
did not hatch its own eggs,--namely, because the crop or craw of the
bird was placed back of the sternum, so as to make a protuberance on
the belly,--White dissected a cuckoo for himself, and, finding the fact
as stated, proceeded to dissect other birds that he knew did incubate,
as the fern-owl and a hawk, and finding the craw situated the same as
in the cuckoo, justly charged the Frenchman with having reached an
unscientific conclusion.
In his seventy-seventh letter White clearly anticipates Darwin as to
the beneficial functions of earthworms in the soil, and tells farmers
and gardeners that the little creatures which they look upon as their
enemies are really their best friends.
White has had imitators, but no successful rivals. A work much in
the spirit and manner of his famous book, called “Jesse’s Gleanings
in Natural History,” was published fifty years later. It had some
reputation in its own day, but seems to be quite forgotten in our time.
A good reader quickly sees that its pages have not the same fresh,
distinctive quality as White’s, not the same atmosphere of unconscious
curiosity and alert interest. They are stamped with a die far less
clear and individual. The field covered is the same, the facts and
incidents are the same, but the medium through which we see them all is
not the same.
The following extract gives a fair sample of the style:--
“The enjoyments and delights of a country life have been sung by poets
in all ages, and it is our own fault if we find the country irksome, or
less agreeable than a crowded metropolis. It affords many resources of
a most agreeable nature, to those who seek for rational and tranquil
enjoyments. A beautiful prospect, a walk by the side of a river in fine
weather, in the agreeable shade of a wood or cool valley, have great
charms for those who are fond of the country. We may then exclaim with
Virgil,--
‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”
But even the Virgilian quotation does not give it the flavor of White’s
pages.
X
LUCID LITERATURE
Nothing can make up in a writer for the want of lucidity. It is one
of the cardinal literary virtues. If the page is not clear, if we see
through it as through a glass darkly, if there is the least blur or
opacity, the work to that extent is condemned. It is a false notion
that some thoughts or ideas are necessarily obscure, or complex, or
involved. Ideas are what we make them. If we think obscurely, our
ideas are obscure; if one’s mental activity is complex, his ideas are
complex. Always is the mind of the writer the medium through which we
see his matter. Such a poet as George Meredith thinks obscurely. There
is a large blind spot in his mind, so that at times an almost total
eclipse passes over his page. Strain one’s vision as one may, one
cannot make out just what he is trying to say. Then there are lucid
intervals--strong, telling lines; then the shadow falls again and the
reader is groping in the dark. The difficulty is never innate in his
subject, but is in the poet’s use of language, as if at times he caught
at words blindly and used them without reference to their accepted
meanings, as when be says of the skylark, “He _drinks_ his hurried
flight and drops.” How can one adjust his mind to the notion of a bird
drinking its own flight?
Or take this puzzle:--
“Vermilion wings, by distance held
To pause aflight while fleeting swift,
And high aloft the pearl inshelled
Her lucid glow in glow will lift.”
Does not the reading of such lines set one’s head in a whirl?
The impression of novelty can never be made by a trick in the use
of language, nor can the sense of mystery be given by obscurity of
expression. Veils and screens and dim lights may do it in the world of
sense, but not in the world of ideas. The reader feels all the time
that there is something in the way, and that he would see clearly if
the writer thought clearly. Freshness and novelty are the gifts of the
writer whose mind is fresh and who has lively and novel emotions in the
presence of everyday things and events.
There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry of Wordsworth and
Tennyson, and in our own Emerson and Whitman, but little or none
of the Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at once catch the
full meaning of Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality,” or Tennyson’s
“Tiresias” or “Ancient Sage,” or Emerson’s “Brahma,” or Whitman’s
“Sleep Chasings,” but how transparent the language, how unequivocal
the emotion, how direct and solid the expression! There is a vast
difference between the impression or want of impression made by a
commonplace thought veiled and hidden by ambiguity of phrase, and
that made by “something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is
the light of setting suns.” Great poets give us a sense of depth and
height, of the far and the rare. Meredith does at times, but oftener he
gives us only a sense of the dense and the foggy.
There are two reasons why we may not understand a man. In one case the
fault is in him,--in his clouded and ambiguous way of thinking, such
as I have already spoken of. In the other case the fault, or rather
the difficulty, is in us. The man may live and move upon a different
spiritual plane, he may have an atmosphere and cherish ideals that
belong to another world than ours. Thus the solid men of Boston did not
understand Emerson, but said their daughters did. The daughters were
habitually more familiar with Emerson’s ideal values than the fathers
were. Thus Scott said he did not understand Wordsworth, could not
follow his “abstruse ideas;” Campbell suited him better. Scott belonged
to another type of mind than that of Wordsworth’s, lived in another
world. There was no sense of mystery in his mind,--of that haunting,
elusive something which Wordsworth felt in all outward nature. There
was no religion in Scott’s love of nature, and it is this probably
that baffled him in Wordsworth. Both were born countrymen and equal
lovers of common, rural things, but Wordsworth associated them with
his spiritual and ideal joys and experiences, while Scott found in
them an appeal to his copious animal spirits, and his love of sensuous
beauty. Wordsworth would understand Scott much better than Scott would
understand Wordsworth. The ancient poets probably would not understand
the moderns nearly as well as the moderns understand the ancients. We
are further along on the road of human experience.
Then, we may understand a work and not appreciate it, not respond to
its appeal. Appreciation is based upon kinship. We are more in sympathy
with some types of mind than with others of equal parts. The most
impersonal and judicious of critics cannot escape the law of elective
affinities. Some books _find_ us more than others of similar merit.
See how people differ, and are bound to differ, about Whitman, and
it is because his aim is not merely to give the reader poetic truth
disassociated from all personal qualities and traits, but to give him
himself. We cannot separate the poet from the man, and if we do not
respond to the man, to his type, to his quality, to his wholesale and
radical democracy, we shall not respond to the poet. If we all read
authors only through our taste in _belles lettres_, through our love of
literary truth, we should agree in our estimate of them according as
our tastes agreed. But the feeling we bring to them is very complex.
Character, predisposition, natural affinities, race traits, all play
a part. We are very apt to agree about such a poet as Milton, because
the personal element plays so small a part in his poetry. If we do not
get poetic truth in him we do not get anything. His style is the main
thing, as it is with the Greek poets. In other words, there is nothing
in Milton that makes a personal appeal. One cannot conceive of any
reader taking him to his heart, appropriating him, and finding his life
colored and changed by him, as by some later poets. Wordsworth was a
revelation to Mill; Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman have in the same
way been revelations to many readers, and for the same reason,--their
intense individual point of view. Their appeal is a personal and a
religious one as well as a poetic. No one who has not something of
the modern pantheistic feeling toward nature will be deeply touched
by Wordsworth. No one who has not felt the burden of modern problems,
the decay of the old faiths, will be moved by Arnold’s poetry. His
“sad lucidity of soul” belongs to our age. No one who has not broken
away from the old traditions in art and religion and in politics, and
possessed himself emotionally of the point of view afforded by modern
science, will make much of Whitman. Without a certain mental and
spiritual experience and a certain stamp of mind Emerson will not be
much to you. In Poe one’s sense of artistic forms and verbal melody are
alone appealed to. He is more to a Frenchman than to an American. If
you are ahungered for the bread of life do not go to Poe, do not go to
Landor or to Milton, do not go to the current French poets. Go sooner
to Goethe, to Tennyson, to Browning, to Arnold, to Whitman,--the great
personal poets, the men who have spiritual and religious values as
well as poetic. All the great imaginative writers of our century have
felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been
its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things.
Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would
Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of
our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist
has always been at ease in Zion; in our day only the lesser artists
are at ease, unless we except Whitman, man of unshaken faith, who is
absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth
of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.
XI
“MERE LITERATURE”
Is there any justification for the phrase “mere literature” which
one often hears nowadays? There is no doubt a serious sneer in it,
as Professor Woodrow Wilson, in a recent “Atlantic” essay, avers;
but I think the sneer is not aimed so much at literature in itself
as at certain phases of literature. Lowell has been quoted as saying
that “mere scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old postage
stamps;” yet at vital scholarship--scholarship that is wielded as a
weapon, and that results in power--Lowell would be the last man to
sneer. In all times of high literary culture and criticism, a great
deal is produced that may well be called mere literature,--the result
of assiduous training and stimulation of the literary faculties,--just
as a great deal of art is produced that may be called mere art.
Literature that is the result of the friction upon the mind of other
literatures, might, with some justice, be called mere literature. That
which is the result of the contact of the mind with reality is, or
ought to be, of another order.
Or we may say “mere literature” as we say “mere gentleman.” Now
gentlemanly qualities--refinement, good breeding, etc.--are not to
be sneered at, unless they stand alone, with no man behind them; and
literary qualities--style, learning, fancy, etc.--are not to be sneered
at unless _they_ stand alone, which is not infrequently the case. We
should not apply the phrase “mere gentleman” to Washington, or Lincoln,
or Wellington, though these men may have been the most thorough of
gentlemen; neither should we apply the phrase “mere literature” to
the works of Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, or Dante, or Plato.
The Bible is literature, but it is not mere literature. We apply the
latter term to writings that have little to recommend them save their
technical and artistic excellence, like the mass of current poetry and
fiction. The men who have nothing to say and say it extremely well
produce mere literature.
Both England and France have at the present time many excellent
writers, men who possess every grace of style and charm of expression,
who still give us only a momentary pleasure. They do not move us, they
do not lay strong hands upon us, their works do not take hold of any
great reality; they produce mere literature. Literary seriousness,
literary earnestness, cannot atone for a want of manly seriousness
and moral earnestness. A sensitive artistic conscience cannot make us
content with a dull or obtuse moral conscience. The literary worker
is to confront reality in just as serious a mood as does the man
of science, if he hopes to produce anything that rises above mere
literature. The picnickers, the excursionists, the flower-gatherers of
literature do not produce lasting works. The seriousness of Hawthorne
was much more than a literary seriousness; the emotion of Whittier at
his best is fundamental and human.
There is a passage in Amiel’s “Journal” that well expresses the
distinction I am aiming at. “I have been thinking a great deal of
Victor Cherbuliez,” he says, under date of December 4, 1876. “Perhaps
his novels make up the most disputable part of his work,--they are so
much wanting in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge,
style, wit, and subtlety,--how much thought everywhere, and what
mastery of language! He astonishes one; I cannot but admire him.
Cherbuliez’s mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, keen, full of
resources; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for the feeling
which makes men earnest the irony which leaves them free. Pascal would
say of him, ‘He has never risen from the order of thought to the order
of charity.’ But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian is not worth an
Augustine, but still he is a Lucian.... The positive element in Victor
Cherbuliez’s work is beauty, not goodness, nor moral or religious life.”
The positive element in the enduring works is always something more
than the beautiful; it is the true, the vital, the real, as well. The
beautiful is there, but the not-beautiful is there also. The world is
held together, life is nourished and made strong, and power begotten,
by the neutral or negatively beautiful. Works are everywhere produced
that are artistically serious, but morally trifling and insincere;
faultless in form, but tame and barren in spirit. We could not say
this of the works of Froude or Ruskin, Huxley or Tyndall; we cannot
say it of the works of Matthew Arnold, because he had a higher purpose
than to produce mere literary effects; but we can say it of most of
the productions of the younger British essayists and poets. In some of
them there is a mere lust of verbal forms and rhythmic lilt. In reading
their poems, I soon find myself fairly gasping for breath; I seem to be
trying to breathe in a vacuum,--an effect which one does not experience
at all in reading Tennyson, or Browning, or Arnold. One is apt to have
serious qualms in reading the prose of Walter Pater, the lust of mere
style so pervades his work. Faultless workmanship, one says; and yet
the best qualities of style--freshness, naturalness, simplicity--are
not here. What in Victor Hugo goes far towards atoning for all his
sins against art, against sanity and proportion, are his terrible
moral earnestness and his psychic power. Whatever we may think of his
work, we are not likely to call it “mere literature.” That masterly
ubiquitous sporting and toying with the elements of life which we find
in Shakespeare we shall probably never again see in letters. The stress
and burden of later times do not favor it. The great soul is now too
earnest, too self-conscious; life is too serious. Only light men now
essay it. With so much criticism, so much knowledge, so much science,
another Shakespeare is impossible. Renan says: “In order to establish
those literary authorities called classic, something especially healthy
and solid is necessary. Common household bread is of more value here
than pastry.” There can be little doubt that our best literary workers
are intent upon producing something analogous to pastry, or even
confectionery,--something fine, complex, highly seasoned, that tickles
the taste. It is always in order to urge a return to the simple and
serious, a return to nature, to works that have the wholesome and
sustaining qualities of natural products,--grain, fruits, nuts, air,
water.
XII
ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON
In one respect many of us feel toward Emerson as a wife feels toward
her husband; we like to find fault with him ourselves, but it hurts us
to have others do the same. He was a friend of our youth.
Though we may in a measure have outgrown him, and now find his
paradoxes, his daring affirmations, his trick of overstatement and
understatement less novel and stimulating than we once did, yet we
cherish him in our heart of hearts.
The process of maturing, with the spirit as with the body, with man
as with the various organic growths, is more or less a hardening and
toughening process,--a hardening for strength and endurance. Emerson
belongs to the earlier period, before the hardening has progressed
far, while the grain of our thoughts is yet in the milk. He appeals
to us most strongly in youth or early manhood, when we are not too
critical and while we are yet full of brave and generous impulses. A
little callow we may be, but buoyant and optimistic. As we grow older
something seems to evaporate from him, and one returns to his pages in
middle or later life as to the scene of some youthful festival, half
religious, half social, in which he took part, and the memory of which
still stirs his emotions.
Emerson finally dropped the church, but he never ceased to be a
clergyman. He was like a flower escaped from the garden, and finding a
lodgment in an adjoining field, but which never ceased to be a garden
flower. A certain sanctity and unworldliness always clung to him,--a
certain remoteness from the common thoughts, aims, attractions, of
everyday humanity. If he had been a better worldling he would have been
a better poet,--that is, if he had had more of the feelings, passions,
sympathies and thoughts of ordinary men. These things would have given
him more flexibility and brought him closer to human life. Rarely, as
poet or prose writer, could he speak in the tone of the people. There
was always, more or less concealed, the tone of the pulpit. Mr. James
expressed this idea well when he said that Emerson “had no prosaic side
relating him to ordinary people.”
This prosaic side is very important to the poet, or to any man who
would touch and move his fellow-men. We desire our singer or teacher
to be of the same flesh and blood as ourselves. Emerson was always a
preacher, and his theme, by whatever name he called it, was always
religion, or what he called religion, namely, the universality of the
moral law.
No lover of Emerson, I imagine, would have had him other than what
he was; I certainly would not. At the same time it is a pleasure to
explore his limitations and see just what he was, and what he was not.
He was a rare soul, probably the most astral genius in English or
any other literature. His books are for young men and for those of a
religious cast of mind. His signal defect as a writer, as a contributor
to the world’s literature, arises from this same want of sympathy with
the world,--from the select, abridged, circumscribed character of his
genius. He did not and could not deal with human life as Montaigne, or
Bacon, or Plutarch, or Cicero did.
He was conscious of his defect in this direction, and would fain have
had it otherwise. Thus he writes in his journal in 1839: “We would
all be public men if we could afford it. I am wholly private; such
is the poverty of my constitution. ‘Heaven betrayed me to a book and
wrapped me in a gown.’ I have no social talent, no will, and a steady
appetite for insights in any or all directions, to balance my manifold
imbecilities.” He even quotes approvingly the remark of some one
that he “always seemed to be on stilts.” “It is even so. Most of the
persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf. I cannot go
to them nor they come to me.” He lacked sympathy with men. He cared
nothing for persons as such, but only for the genius of humanity which
they embodied, and this genius of humanity he did not find in any
sufficiency in ordinary mortals.
He writes in his journal, “I like man, but not men!” He liked ideas,
but not things. He dwelt in the abstract, not in the concrete. “In the
highest friendship,” he says, “we form a league with the Idea of the
man who stands to us in that relation--not with the actual person.” And
his letters, fine and eloquent as most of them are, do not read like a
message from one person to another person, but from one Idea to another
Idea.
Yet Emerson’s leading trait is eminently American; I mean his
hospitality toward the new,--the eagerness with which he sought and
welcomed the new idea and the new man. Perhaps we might call it
his inborn radicalism. No writer ever made such rash, such extreme
statements, in the hope that some new truth might be compassed.
Anything new and daring instantly challenged his attention. His face
was wholly set toward the future,--the new. The past was discredited
the moment it became the past. “The coming only is sacred,” he said;
“no truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of
new thoughts.”
As a writer, he sought to make all the old thoughts appear trivial in
the light of his audacious affirmations. He stood ready at all times to
strike his colors to the man who could bring a larger generalization
than his own. All his knowledge, all his opinions, were at the mercy
of the new idea. He did not tread the beaten paths, or seek truth in
the logical way; he sought for it by spurts and sallies of the mind.
He called himself an “experimenter,” and said he did not pretend to
settle anything as true or false. “I unsettle all things. No facts are
to me sacred; none are profane: I simply experiment; an endless seeker
with no Past at my back.” In his random, prophetic way he hits on many
sublime truths--hits on them by sheer force of affirmation, like the
truth of evolution, and of the correlation of forces. Indeed, there are
few great thoughts current in our time that were not indicated by the
bold guessing of Emerson. The fragmentary and projectile-like character
of his thinking is often very effective. He spent no force upon logic,
upon fortifying his position, but sent his single bullet as far and as
deep as he could. Emerson’s hope and confidence in the new is shown in
his serious prophecy and expectancy of the coming man.
He was apparently always on the lookout for a new and greater man than
had yet appeared. He was always sweeping the horizon for this strange
sail. “A new person,” he says, “is to me a great event, and keeps me
from sleep.” He met every stranger with a curious, expectant glance.
He looked at you and waited for you to speak, as if the thought that
perhaps here is the man I am waiting for, was never absent from his
mind. “If the companions of our childhood,” he says, “should turn out
to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us.” But
the experience of most persons, I fancy, points just the other way: we
are always incredulous when told that our playmates have turned out
to be heroes; just as the whole world, except the Emersons in it, are
skeptical of the worth of the new idea, or of the new invention.
Emerson does not so much expound a philosophy as he celebrates a
sentiment or a law. He does not inculcate a virtue, but quickens our
moral sense. He does not teach a religion, but shows all nature as
religious. His method is not that of the analyst; he celebrates and
presents whole what others give in detail. His mind is deficient in
continuity, but strong in affirmation, strong in its separate sallies
and flights. He has not a definite, practical bent like Carlyle; he
seldom lays his hand on any current evil or want, but rather glorifies
the world as it is. He is abstract in his aim, and concrete in his
methods. He fixes his eye on the star, but would make it draw his wagon.
Carlyle was like an engine tied to its iron rails,--he turned aside for
nothing; Emerson was more like a sailing yacht that hovers about all
shores and takes advantage of every breeze.
XIII
THOREAU’S WILDNESS.
Doubtless the wildest man New England has turned out since the red
aborigines vacated her territory was Henry Thoreau,--a man in whom the
Indian reappeared on the plane of taste and morals. One is tempted to
apply to him his own lines on “Elisha Dugan,” as it is very certain
they fit himself much more closely than they ever did his neighbor:--
“O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares.
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.”
His whole life was a search for the wild, not only in nature but in
literature, in life, in morals. The shyest and most elusive thoughts
and impressions were the ones that fascinated him most, not only in
his own mind, but in the minds of others. His startling paradoxes are
only one form his wildness took. He cared little for science, except
as it escaped the rules and technicalities, and put him on the trail
of the ideal, the transcendental. Thoreau was of French extraction;
and every drop of his blood seems to have turned toward the aboriginal,
as the French blood has so often done in other ways in this country.
He, for the most part, despised the white man; but his enthusiasm
kindled at the mention of the Indian. He envied the Indian; he coveted
his knowledge, his arts, his woodcraft. He accredited him with a more
“practical and vital science” than was contained in the books. “The
Indian stood nearer to wild Nature than we.” “It was a new light
when my guide gave me Indian names for things for which I had only
scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I
saw them from a new point of view.” And again, “The Indian’s earthly
life was as far off from us as Heaven is.” In his “Week” he complains
that our poetry is only white man’s poetry. “If we could listen for
an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why
he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.” Speaking of
himself, he says, “I am convinced that my genius dates from an older
era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the
earth with such careless freedom, but accuracy, as the woodpecker
his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular
yearning toward all wildness.” Again and again he returns to the
Indian. “We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name
for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his
dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods,
and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with
Nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons are
strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because
distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared
with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.”
“We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse
and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild, and chase the buffalo.”
The only relics that interest him are Indian relics. One of his regular
spring recreations or occupations is the hunting of arrow-heads. He
goes looking for arrow-heads as other people go berrying or botanizing.
In his published journal he makes a long entry under date of March
28, 1859, about his pursuit of arrow-heads. “I spend many hours every
spring,” he says, “gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain
have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some
sandy field elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps for rye, in the fall,
I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the
earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have
been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. The
farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of
his toil.” He probably picked up thousands of arrow-heads. He had an
eye for them. The Indian in him recognized its own.
His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical of the wild weapon he so
loved,--hard, flinty, fine-grained, penetrating, winged, a flying
shaft, bringing down its game with marvelous sureness. His literary art
was to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration; and though his arrows
sometimes go wide, yet it is always a pleasure to watch their aerial
course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind of Emersonian or transcendental
red man, going about with a pocket-glass and an herbarium, instead
of with a bow and a tomahawk. He appears to have been as stoical and
indifferent and unsympathetic as a veritable Indian; and how he hunted
without trap or gun, and fished without hook or snare! Everywhere the
wild drew him. He liked the telegraph because it was a kind of æolian
harp; the wind blowing upon it made wild, sweet music. He liked the
railroad through his native town, because it was the wildest road he
knew of: it only made deep cuts into and through the hills. “On it are
no houses nor foot-travellers. The travel on it does not disturb me.
The woods are left to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild in its
accompaniments, keeping all its raw edges. Even the laborers on it are
not like other laborers.” One day he passed a little boy in the street
who had on a home-made cap of woodchuck’s skin, and it completely
filled his eye. He makes a delightful note about it in his journal.
That was the kind of cap to have,--“a perfect little idyl, as they
say.” Any wild trait unexpectedly cropping out in any of the domestic
animals pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was his favorite apple,
because of its beauty and perfume. He perhaps never tried to ride a
wild horse, but such an exploit was in keeping with his genius.
Thoreau hesitated to call himself a naturalist. That was too tame; he
would perhaps have been content to have been an Indian naturalist. He
says in this journal, and with much truth and force, “Man cannot afford
to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side
of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as
fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to
stone.” When he was applied to by the secretary of the Association for
the Advancement of Science, at Washington, for information as to the
particular branch of science he was most interested in, he confesses
he was ashamed to answer for fear of exciting ridicule. But he says,
“If it had been the secretary of an association of which Plato or
Aristotle was the president, I should not have hesitated to describe
my studies at once and particularly.” “The fact is, I am a mystic, a
transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” Indeed, what
Thoreau was finally after in nature was something ulterior to science,
something ulterior to poetry, something ulterior to philosophy; it
was that vague something which he calls “the higher law,” and which
eludes all direct statement. He went to Nature as to an oracle; and
though he sometimes, indeed very often, questioned her as a naturalist
and a poet, yet there was always another question in his mind. He
ransacked the country about Concord in all seasons and weathers, and
at all times of the day and night he delved into the ground, he probed
the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug into woodchuck holes,
into muskrats’ dens, into the retreats of the mice and squirrels;
he saw every bird, heard every sound, found every wild-flower, and
brought home many a fresh bit of natural history; but he was always
searching for something he did not find. This search of his for the
transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he
has set forth in a beautiful parable in “Walden:”--
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still
on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met
one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and
even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious
to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”
XIV
NATURE IN LITERATURE
Several different kinds or phases of this thing we call Nature have
at different times appeared in literature. For instance, there is
the personified or deified Nature of the towering Greek bards, an
expression of Nature born of wonder, fear, childish ignorance, and the
tyranny of personality; the Greek was so alive himself that he made
everything else alive, and so manly and human that he could see only
these qualities in Nature. Or the Greek idyllic poets, whose Nature is
simple and fresh like spring water, or the open air, or the taste of
milk or fruit or bread. The same thing is perhaps true in a measure of
Virgil’s Nature. In a later class of writers and artists that arose
in Italy, Nature is steeped in the faith and dogmas of the Christian
Church; it is a kind of theological Nature.
In English literature there is the artificial Nature of Pope and his
class,--a kind of classic liturgy repeated from the books, and as
dead and hollow as fossil shells. Earlier than that, the quaint and
affected Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later the melodramatic and
wild-eyed Nature of the Byronic muse; and lastly, the transmuted and
spiritualized Nature of Wordsworth, which has given the prevailing
tone and cast to most modern poetry. Thus, from a goddess Nature has
changed to a rustic nymph, a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance,
besides other characters not so definite, till she has at last become a
priestess of the soul. What will be the next phase is perhaps already
indicated in the poems of Walt Whitman, in which Nature is regarded
mainly in the light of science, through the immense vistas opened up
by astronomy and geology. This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs,
and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and
conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into
the highest regions.
I was much struck with a passage in Whitman’s last volume, “Two
Rivulets,” in which he says that he has not been afraid of the charge
of obscurity in his poems, “because human thought, poetry or melody,
must have dim escapes and outlets,--must possess a certain fluid,
aërial character, akin to space itself, obscure to those of little
or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic
style, when addressed to the soul, is less definite form, outline,
sculpture, and becomes vista music, half-tints, and even less than
half-tints.” I know no ampler justification of a certain elusive
quality there is in the highest poetry--something that refuses to
be tabulated or explained, and that is a stumbling-block to many
readers--than is contained in these sentences.
XV
SUGGESTIVENESS
There is a quality that adheres to one man’s writing or speaking, and
not to another’s, that we call suggestiveness,--something that warms
and stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite apart from the
amount of truth or information directly conveyed.
It is a precious literary quality, not easy of definition or
description. It involves quality of mind, mental and moral atmosphere,
points of view, and maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every
book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sentence of a writer float
deeper than it shows.
Thus, of the great writers of English literature, Dr. Johnson is, to
me, the least suggestive, while Bacon is one of the most suggestive.
Hawthorne is undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers; he
has the most atmosphere and the widest and most alluring horizon.
Emerson is the most suggestive of our essayists, because he has the
deepest ethical and prophetic background. His page is full of moral
electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of electric excitement
in his reader’s mind. Whitman is the most suggestive of our poets; he
elaborates the least and gives us in profusion the buds and germs of
poetry. A musical composer once said to me that Whitman stimulated him
more than Tennyson, because he left more for him to do,--he abounded in
hints and possibilities that the musician’s mind eagerly seized.
This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase or to cryptic
language or to vagueness and obscurity. It goes, or may go, with
perfect lucidity, as in Matthew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely
present in the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has great clearness
and compass, but there is nothing resonant in his style,--nothing that
stimulates the imagination. He is a great workman, but the metal he
works in is not of the kind called precious.
The late roundabout and enigmatical style of Henry James is far less
fruitful in his readers’ minds than his earlier and more direct one,
or than the limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The indirect and
elliptical method may undoubtedly be so used as to stimulate the mind;
at the same time there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating
around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon the page of the
great novelist there fall, more or less distinct, all the colors of the
spectrum of human life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent
only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his readers grope in
the darkness accordingly.
In the world of experience and observation the suggestiveness of things
is enhanced by veils, concealments, half lights, flowing lines. The
twilight is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a rolling
field than a lawn, a winding road than a straight one. In literature
perspective, indirection, understatement, side glimpses, have equal
value; a vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the writer,
sentences that start a multitude of images, that abound in the concrete
and the specific, that shun vague generalities,--with these go the
power of suggestiveness.
Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive, while the elaborated,
the highly wrought, the perfected afford us a different kind of
pleasure. The art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence,
and the art that stimulates and makes us ahunger has another. All
beginnings in nature afford us a peculiar pleasure. The early spring
with its hints and dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first
robin or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first tender skies, the
first rainbow, the first wild flower, the dropping bud scales, the
awakening voices in the marshes,--all these things touch and move us
in a way that later developments in the season do not. What meaning,
too, in the sunrise and the sunset, in the night with its stars, the
sea with its tides and currents, the morning with its dews, autumn
with its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its sands,--in
everything in the germ and in the bud,--in parasites, suckers, blights,
in floods, tempests, droughts! The winged seeds carry thoughts, the
falling leaves make us pause, the clinging burrs have a tongue, the
pollen dust, not less than meteoric dust, conveys a hint of the method
of nature.
Some things and events in our daily experience are more typical, and
therefore more suggestive, than others. Thus the sower striding across
the ploughed field is a walking allegory, or parable. Indeed the
whole life of the husbandman,--his first-hand relation to things, his
ploughing, his planting, his fertilizing, his draining, his pruning,
his grafting, his uprootings, his harvestings, his separating of the
wheat from the chaff, and the tares from the wheat, his fencing his
field with the stones and boulders that hindered his plough or cumbered
his sward, his making the wilderness blossom as the rose,--all these
things are pleasant to contemplate because in them there is a story
within a story, we translate the facts into higher truths.
In like manner, the shepherd with his flocks, the seaman with his
compass and rudder, the potter with his clay, the weaver with his warp
and woof, the sculptor with his marble, the painter with his canvas
and pigments, the builder with his plans and scaffoldings, the chemist
with his solvents and precipitants, the surgeon with his scalpel and
antiseptics, the lawyer with his briefs, the preacher with his text,
the fisherman with his nets,--all are more or less symbolical and
appeal to the imagination.
In both prose and poetry, there is the suggestiveness of language used
in a vivid, imaginative way, and the suggestiveness of words redolent
of human association, words of deep import, as friend, home, love,
marriage.
To me Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most suggestive sonnets in the
language, because they so abound in words, images, allusions drawn from
real life; they are the product of a mind vividly acted upon by near-by
things, that uses language steeped in the common experience of mankind.
The poet drew his material not from the strange and the remote, but,
as it were, from the gardens and thoroughfares of life. Does not that
poetry or prose work touch us the most nearly that deals with that with
which we are most familiar? One thing that separates the minor poet
from the major is that the thoughts and words of the minor poet are
more of the nature of asides, or of the exceptional; he does not take
in the common and universal; we are not familiar with the points of
view that so agitate him; and he has not the power to make them real
to us. I read poems every day that provoke the thought, “Well, that is
all news to me. I do not know that heaven or that earth, those men or
those women,”--all is so shadowy, fantastic, and unreal. But when you
enter the world of the great poets you find yourself upon solid ground;
the sky and the earth, and the things in them and upon them, are what
you have always known, and not for a moment are you called upon to
breathe in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright position to see the
landscape. Dante even makes hell as tangible and real as the objects of
our senses, if not more so.
Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power of pregnant, compact
sentences,--type thoughts, compendious phrases,--vital distinctions
or generalizations, such as we find scattered through literature, as
when De Quincey says of the Roman that he was great in the presence
of man, never in the presence of nature; or his distinction between
the literature of power and the literature of knowledge, or similar
illuminating distinctions in the prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Carlyle, Arnold, Goethe, Lessing. Arnold’s dictum that poetry is a
criticism of life, is suggestive, because it sets you thinking to
verify or to disprove it. John Stuart Mill was not what one would call
a suggestive writer, yet the following sentence, which Mr. Augustine
Birrell has lately made use of, makes a decided ripple in one’s
mind: “I have learnt from experience that many false opinions may be
exchanged for true ones without in the least altering the habits of
mind of which false opinions are the result.” In a new home writer
whose first books are but a year or two old, I find deeply suggestive
sentences on nearly every page. Here are two or three of them: “In
your inmost soul you are as well suited to the whole cosmical order
and every part of it as to your own body. You belong here. Did you
suppose that you belonged to some other world than this, or that you
belonged nowhere at all, just a waif on the bosom of the eternities?...
Conceivably He might have flung you into a world that was unrelated to
you, and might have left you to be acclimated at your own risk; but you
happen to know that this is not the case. You have lived here always;
this is the ancestral demesne; for ages and ages you have looked out
of these same windows upon the celestial landscape and the star-deeps.
You are at home.” “How perverse and pathetic the desires of the
animals! But they all get what they ask for,--long necks and trunks,
flapping ears and branching horns and corrugated hides, anything, if
only they will believe in life and try.”[1]
[1] _The Religion of Democracy._ By Charles Ferguson.
The intuitional and affirmative writers, to which class our new author
belongs, and the most notable example of which, in this country, was
Emerson, are, as a rule, more suggestive than the clearly demonstrating
and logical writers. A challenge to the soul seems to mean more than
an appeal to the reason; an audacious affirmation often irradiates the
mind in a way that a logical sequence of thought does not. Science
rarely suggests more than it says; but in the hands of an imaginative
man like Maeterlinck a certain order of facts in natural history
becomes fraught with deepest meaning, as may be witnessed in his
wonderful “Life of the Bee,”--one of the most enchanting and poetic
contributions to natural history ever made. Darwin’s work upon the
earthworm, and upon the cross fertilization of flowers, in the same
way seems to convey more truth to the reader than is warranted by the
subject.
The writer who can touch the imagination has the key, at least one key,
to suggestiveness. This power often goes with a certain vagueness and
indefiniteness, as in the oft-quoted lines from one of Shakespeare’s
sonnets:--
“the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,”
a very suggestive, but not a clearly intelligible passage.
Truth at the centre, straightly put, excites the mind in one way, and
truth at the surface, or at the periphery of the circle, indirectly
put, excites it in another way and for other reasons; just as a light
in a dark place, which illuminates, appeals to the eye in a different
way from the light of day falling through vapors or colored glass,
wherein objects become softened and illusory.
A common word may be so used as to have an unexpected richness of
meaning, as when Coleridge speaks of those books that “find” us; or
Shakespeare of the “marriage of true minds,” or Whitman of the autumn
apple hanging “indolent-ripe” on the tree. Probably that language is
the most suggestive that is the most concrete, that is drawn most
largely from the experience of life, that savors of real things. The
Saxon English of Walton or Barrow is more suggestive than the latinized
English of Johnson or Gibbon.
Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite exceptional in the
eighteenth-century writers. It is much more abundant in the writers of
the seventeenth century. It goes much more with the vernacular style,
the homely style, than with the polished academic style.
With the stream of English literature of the nineteenth century has
mingled a current of German thought and mysticism, and this has
greatly heightened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and in
prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell or Moore or Macaulay
or Irving, but it is in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Landor and
Carlyle and Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and Emerson and
Whitman,--a depth and richness of spiritual and emotional background
that the wits of Pope’s and Johnson’s times knew not of. It seems as if
the subconscious self played a much greater part in the literature of
the nineteenth century than of the eighteenth, probably because this
term has been recently added to our psychology.
As a rule it may be said that the more a writer condenses, the more
suggestive his work will be. There is a sort of mechanical equivalent
between the force expended in compacting a sentence and the force
or stimulus it imparts again to the reader’s mind. A diffuse writer
is rarely or never a suggestive one. Poetry is, or should be, more
suggestive than prose, because it is the result of a more compendious
and sublimating process. The mind of the poet is more tense, he uses
language under greater pressure of emotion than the prose writer, whose
medium of expression gives his mind more playroom. The poet often
succeeds in focusing his meaning or emotion in a single epithet, and he
alone gives us the resounding, unforgettable line. There are pregnant
sentences in all the great prose writers; there are immortal lines only
in the poets.
Whitman said the word he would himself use as most truly descriptive
of his “Leaves of Grass” was the word suggestiveness. “I round and
finish little, if anything; and could not consistently with my scheme.
The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I
have had mine. I seek less to state or display my theme or thought,
and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or
thought--there to pursue your own flight.” These sentences themselves
are suggestive, because they bring before the mind a variety of
definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a thing, doing your
part, pursuing your own flight, and yet the idea conveyed has a certain
subtlety and elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a whole
probably lies in its blending of realism and mysticism, and in the art
of it running parallel to or in some way tallying with the laws and
processes of nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few modern
works do.
Of course the suggestiveness of any work--poem, picture, novel,
essay--depends largely upon what we bring to it; whether we bring a
kindred spirit or an alien one, a full mind or an empty one, an alert
sense or a dull one. If you have been there, so to speak, if you have
passed through the experience described, if you have known the people
portrayed, if you have thought, or tried to think, the thoughts the
author exploits, the work will have a deeper meaning to you than to one
who is a stranger to these things. The best books make us acquainted
with our own,--they help us to find ourselves. No book calls forth
the same responses from two different types of mind. The wind does
not awaken æolian-harp tones from cornstalks. No man is a hero to his
valet. It is the deep hollows and passes of the mountains that give
back your voice in prolonged reverberations. The tides are in the sea,
not in the lakes and ponds. Words of deep import do not mean much to a
child. The world of books is under the same law as these things. What
any given work yields us depends largely upon what we bring to it.
XVI
ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS
After one has passed the middle period of life, or even long before
that, it is interesting to note what books he spontaneously recurs
to and re-reads. Do his old favorites retain anything of their first
freshness and stimulus for him, or have they become stale and trite,
or completely outgrown? On taking down for the third or fourth time
a favorite author the present winter, I said to myself, “There is no
test of a book like that: can we, and do we, go back to it?” If not, is
it at all probable that future generations will go back to it? One’s
own experience may be looked upon as the experience of the race in
miniature. If one cannot return to an author again and again, is it not
pretty good evidence that his work has not the keeping qualities? One
brings a different self, a different experience, to each re-reading,
and thus in a measure brings the test of time and humanity. Yet there
is always some difficulty in going back. It is difficult to go back,
after some years, to live in a place from which one has once flitted.
Somehow things look stale to us. Is it our dead selves that we
encounter at every turn? Even the old homestead has a certain empty,
pathetic, forlorn look. In the journey of life there is always more or
less pain in going back; and I suppose it is partly because in every
place in which we have lived we have had pain, and partly because there
is some innate dislike in us to going back; the watchword of the soul
is onward. If the book has given us pain, we cannot return to it; and
our second or third or fourth pleasure in it will be in proportion to
the depth and genuineness of our first. If our pleasure was in the
novelty or strangeness or unexpectedness of the thing, it will not
return, or only in small measure. Stories of exciting plots, I find,
one can seldom re-read. One can go back to the “Vicar of Wakefield;”
but can he read a second time “The Woman in White”? In such books there
can be only one first time. Pluck out the heart of a mystery once, and
it never grows again. Curiosity and astonishment make a poor foundation
to build upon. The boy tires of his jumping-jack much sooner than of
his top or ball. Only the normal, the sane, the simple, have the gift
of long life; the strained, the intemperate, the violent will not live
out half their days. We never outgrow our pleasure in simple, common
things; if we do, so much the worse for us; and I think it will be
found that those books to which we return and that stand the test of
time have just this quality of simple, universal, every-day objects and
experiences, with, of course, some glint of that light that never was
on sea or land,--the light of the spirit. How many times does a reading
man return to Montaigne, not to make a dead set at him, but to dip
into him here and there, as one takes a cup of water from a spring!
Human nature is essentially the same in all ages; and Montaigne put so
much of his genuine, unaffected self into his pages, and put it with
such vivacity of style, that all men find their own in his book; it is
forever modern. We return to Bacon for a different reason,--the breadth
and excellence of his wisdom, and his masterly phrases. The excellent
is always modern; only, what is excellent?
A man of my own tastes re-reads Gilbert White two or three times,
and dips into him many times more. It is easy to see why such a book
lasts. So much writing there is that is like half-live coals buried in
ashes; but here there are no ashes, no dead verbiage at all; we are in
immediate contact with a live, simple, unaffected mind and personality.
But this general description applies to all books that last; they all
have at least one quality in common, living reality. What is special
to White is his fine, scholarly style, busied with the common, homely
things of everyday country life. The facts are just enough heightened
and related to the life of this man to make them of perennial interest.
We probably go back to books from two motives: one, because we want to
recover some past mood or experience to which the book may be the key;
and the other from the perennial sources of pleasure and profit which a
good book holds; in other words for association and inspiration.
I suppose it was with some such motives as these that I recently
opened the “Autocrat” after the pages had been closed to me for over a
quarter of a century. To recover as far as possible the spirit of the
old days, I got out the identical numbers of the “Atlantic” in which I
had first read those sparkling sentences. Life to me had the freshness
and buoyancy of the morning hours in those first years of the great
Boston magazine. I recall how impatiently I waited for each number to
appear, and how, on one occasion at least, I ran all the way home from
the post-office with the new issue in my hand, so eager was I to be
alone with it in my room. I remember, too, how I resented the criticism
of a schoolmate, then at Harvard College, who said that Holmes was not
the great writer I fancied him to be, but only a _Boston_ great writer.
Well, I found places in the “Autocrat” that would not bear much
pressure,--thin places where a lively rhetoric alone carried the mind
over. And I found much that was sound and solid, that would not give
way beneath one under any pressure he could bring.
When Dr. Holmes got hold of a real idea, as he often did, he could
exploit it in as taking a way as any man who has lived; but frequently,
I think, he got hold of sham or counterfeit ideas; and these, with all
his skill in managing them, will not stand the pressure of time. (His
classing poems with meerschaum pipes, as two things that improve with
use, is an instance of what I mean by his sham ideas.)
As a writer Dr. Holmes always reminded me of certain of our bird
songsters, such as the brown thrasher or the catbird, whose
performances always seem to imply a spectator and to challenge his
admiration. The vivacious doctor always seemed to write with his eye
upon his reader, and to calculate in advance upon his reader’s surprise
and pleasure. If the world finally neglects his work, it will probably
be because it lacks the deep seriousness of the enduring productions.
Yet this test of re-reading is, of course, only an approximate one. So
great an authority as Hume said it was sufficient to read Cowley once,
but that Parnell after the fiftieth reading was as fresh as at the
first. Now, for my part, I have to go to the encyclopædia to find out
who Parnell was, but of Cowley even desultory readers like myself know
something. His essays one can not only read, but re-read. They make one
of the unpretentious minor books that one can put in his pocket and
take with him on a walk to the woods, and nibble at under a tree or by
a waterfall. Solitude seems to bring out its quality, as it does that
of some people.
In our intellectual experience there can probably be but one first
time. We go back to an author again and again; yet in all save a few
exceptional cases, the pleasure of the second or third reading is only
a lesser degree of the first. On the other hand, a favorite piece of
music one may hear with the same keen delight any number of times. Is
it because music is so largely made up of the sensuous, at least to
a greater extent than is any other phase of art? It is the same with
perfumes, flavors, colors: they never lose their first freshness to us.
But a book or a poem we absorb and exhaust more or less,--that is, as
to its intellectual content; and if we return to it, it is probably for
some charm or quality that is to the spirit what music or perfume or
color is to the senses, or what a congenial companion is to our social
instincts. We shall not go back to a book that does not in some way,
apart from its mere intellectual service, relate itself to our lives.
Time tries all things, and surely does it sift out the false and
fugitive in books. Contemporary judgment is usually unreliable. It
is like trial by jury, the local and accidental play so large a part
in the verdict. The next age, or the next, forms the higher court of
appeal. In the same way a man’s future self corrects or sets aside his
verdict of to-day. If in later life he reaffirms his first opinion,
the chances are that time is on his side. There is, of course, a sense
or a degree in which any book that one has once read becomes a sucked
orange; but some books become much more so than others. I doubt if many
of us find books that, like a few people, become dearer to us as time
passes, and to which we always return with increasing interest. And the
reason is that one’s mental and spiritual outlook is not uniformly the
same, while his social and human wants, such as his need of food and
warmth, do remain about the same. One in a measure absorbs the book
and puts it behind him. It is like a place he has visited: he has had
the view, and until the impression is more or less obliterated he does
not care to repeat it. But one’s friend is always a fresh stimulus: he
keeps the past alive for him (which the book can also do in a measure),
and he consecrates the present (which the book cannot do). Indeed, the
sense of companionship which one can have in a book is but a faint echo
or shadow of the companionship he has with persons. Yet this sense
of companionship does adhere to some books much more vividly than to
others. They are our books; they were written for us; they become a
part of our lives, and they do not drop away from us with the lapse of
time, as do others. Different readers have felt this way about such
writers as Emerson, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Whitman; but it may be a
question how writers who make the intense personal appeal that these
men make will wear. Are they too special and individual for future
generations to recognize close kinship with? Will each age have its
own doctors and saviors, and go back only for lovers and for the touch
of nature that makes all the world kin? I know not; yet it is apparent
that he who stands upon the common ground where all men stand, and
by the magic of his genius makes poetry and romance out of that, has
the best chance to endure. Only so far as the writers named, or any
writers, represent states of mind and spirit that are likely to return
again and again, and not to be outgrown in the progress of the race,
are we likely to come back to them, or is the future likely to feel an
interest in them. A path or a road becomes obsolete when there are
no more travelers going that way; and an author becomes obsolete when
there are no more readers going _his_ way.
For my part, I find myself returning again and again to the works of
the men named, but, of course, with the cooled ardor that years bring
to every man. I feel that I am less near the end with Whitman than with
any of the others; he is the most stimulating to my intellect, because
he suggests the most far-reaching problems. I re-read Wordsworth as I
walk again along familiar paths that lead to the sequestered and the
idyllic. I climb the Whitman mountain when I want a big view, and a
wide horizon, and a glimpse of the unknown.
I think the service most of us get from Carlyle is a moral rather than
an intellectual one. He was to his generation more like a much-needed
drastic tonic remedy than like a simple hygienic regimen; we get the
virtue of him now in a thousand ways without re-reading him. Hence
there are more chances of our outgrowing him than of our outgrowing
some lesser but more normal men. In a measure, I think, this is true
of Emerson, but not entirely so. Emerson has charm; he has illusion;
he has the witchery of the ideal. He is like the wise doctor whose
presence, whose reassuring smile, and whose cheerful prognosis do
more for the patient than anything else. We want him to come again
and again. To re-read his first essays, his “Representative Men,” his
“English Traits,” and many of his poems, is again to hear music, to
breathe perfume, or to walk in a spring twilight when the evening star
throbs above the hill.
One winter night I tried to re-read Carlyle’s “Past and Present” and
certain of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets;” but I found I could not, and
thanked my stars that I did not have to. It was like riding a spirited
but bony horse bareback. There was tremendous “go” in the beast; but
oh, the bruises from those knotty and knuckle-like sentences! But the
“Life of Sterling” I have found I can re-read with delight; it has a
noble music. Certain of the essays, also, such as the ones on Scott,
Burns, and Johnson, have a perennial quality. Parts of “Frederick” I
mean to read again, and the “Reminiscences.” I have re-read “Sartor
Resartus,” but it was a task, hardly a pleasure. Nearly four fifths of
the book, I should say, is chaff; but the other fifth is real wheat,
if you are not choked in getting it. Yet I have just read the story
of an educated tramp who carried the book in his blanket thousands of
miles and knew it nearly by heart. Carlyle wrote as he talked; his
“Latter-Day Pamphlets” are harangues that it would have been a delight
to hear, but in the printed page we miss the guiding tone and emphasis,
and above all do we miss the laugh that mollified the bitter words.
One can stand, or even welcome, in life what may be intolerable in
print; put the same thing in a book, and it is the pudding without the
sauce, and cold at that. The colloquial style is good, or the best, if
perfectly easy and simple. In reading aloud we teach our children to
read as they speak, and thus make the words their own. The same thing
holds in writing: the less formal, the less _written_, the sentences
are, or the more they are like familiar speech, the more genuine and
real the writing seems, the more it becomes one’s own; but when the
form and manner of spoken sentences are very pronounced, they become
tiresome when transferred to print. Carlyle will doubtless hold his
place in English literature, but he is terribly handicapped in some of
his books by his crabbed, raw-boned style.
What reading man does not re-read Boswell’s “Johnson” two or three
times in the course of his life? The charm of this is that it is
so much like the spoken word, and so filled with the presence of
the living man. Another volume of a similar kind, which I have read
three times and dipped into any number of times, is Eckermann’s
“Conversations with Goethe.” It is a pregnant book; in fact, I know no
such armory of critical wisdom anywhere else as this book contains. Its
human interest may not be equal to Boswell, though I find this very
great; but as an intellectual excitant it is vastly superior.
It is a profitable experience for one who read Dickens forty years ago
to try to read him now. Last winter I forced myself through the “Tale
of Two Cities.” It was a sheer dead pull from start to finish. It all
seemed so insincere, such a transparent make-believe, a mere piece of
acting. My sympathies were hardly once touched. I was not insensible
to the marvelous genius displayed in the story, but it left me cold and
unmoved. A feeling of unreality haunted me on every page. The fault
may have been my own. I give myself reluctantly to a novel, yet I love
to be entirely mastered by one. But my poor success with this one, of
course, makes me think that Dickens’s hold upon the future is not at
all secure. A man of wonderful talents, but of no deep seriousness; a
matchless mimic through and through, and nothing else. But I am proud
to add that my boy, a youth of eighteen, reads his books with great
enthusiasm.
Natural, irrepressible humor is always welcome; but the humor of the
grotesque, the exaggerated, the distorted, is like a fashion in dress:
it has its day. How surely we tire of the loud, the too pronounced, the
merely peculiar, whether it be in carpets and wall-papers, or in books
and art! The common, the average, the universal, quickened with a new
spirit, imbued with a vernal freshness--that is the stuff of enduring
works.
One often wonders what is the secret of the vitality of such a book as
Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.” Each succeeding generation reads it
with the same pleasure. I can myself re-read it every ten or a dozen
years. Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” has much of the same perennial charm as
has Franklin’s autobiography.
How far perfect seriousness and good faith carry in literature! Why
should they not count for just as much here as in life? They count in
anything. The least bit of acting and pretense, and the words ring
false. The effort of the writer of books like “Two Years before the
Mast” is always entirely serious and truthful; his eye is single; he
has no vanities to display before the reader. Compare this book with
such a record as Stevenson’s “Inland Voyage” or his “Travels with a
Donkey.” Here the effort is mainly literary, and we get the stimulus of
words rather than of things; we are one remove more from reality.
General Grant’s “Memoirs,” I think, are likely to last, because of
their deep seriousness and good faith. The effort here is not a
literary one, but a real one. The writer is not occupied with his
manner, but with his matter. Had Grant had any literary vanity or
ambition, is it at all probable that his narrative would cleave to us
as it does? The near presence of death would probably cure any man of
his vanity, if he had any; but Grant never had any.
I have always felt that Tennyson’s famous poem “Crossing the Bar” did
not ring quite true, because it was not conceived in a spirit serious
enough for the occasion. The poetic effort is too obvious; the pride
of the verse is too noticeable; it bedecks itself with pretty fancies.
The last solemn strain of Whitman, wherein he welcomes death as the
right hand of God, strikes a far deeper chord, I think. As in the
Biblical writers, the literary effort is entirely lost in the religious
faith and fervor. We do not want a thing too much written; in fact,
we do not want it written at all, but spoken directly from the heart.
It is in this respect that I think Wordsworth’s poetry, at its best,
is better than Tennyson’s. It is more inevitable; it wrote itself;
the poetic intention is not so obvious; the art of the singer is more
completely effaced by his inspiration.
There are probably few readers of the critical literature of the times
who do not recur again and again to Matthew Arnold’s criticism, not
only for the charm of the style, but for the currents of vital thought
which it holds. One may not always agree with Arnold, but for that very
reason one will go back to see how it is possible to differ from a man
who sees so clearly and feels so justly. Of course, Arnold’s view is
not final, any more than is that of any other man; but it is always
fit, and challenges your common sense. After the muddle and puddle of
most literary criticism, the reader of Arnold feels like a traveler who
has got out of the confusion of brush and bog into clean and clear open
spaces, where the ground is firm, and where he can see his course.
“Where’er the trees grow biggest,
Huntsmen find the easiest way,”
says Emerson, and for a similar reason the way is always easy and
inviting through Arnold’s pages.
But his theological criticism has less charm; and, for my part, I doubt
if it will survive. I once seriously tried to re-read his “Literature
and Dogma,” but stuck before I had got half-way through it. I suppose
I found too much dogma in it. Arnold makes a dogma out of what he
calls the “method and secret of Jesus,” his “method of _inwardness_”
and “_secret of self-renunciation_;” he iterates and reiterates these
phrases till one never wants to hear them again. Arnold’s besetting
sin of giving a quasi-scientific value to certain literary terms here
has free rein, and one finds only a new kind of inflexibility in place
of the one he condemns. Sir Thomas Browne directed a free play of
mind upon the old dogmas, and the result was the “Religio Medici,” a
work which each generation treasures and re-reads, not because of the
dogma, but because of the literature; it is a rare specimen of vital,
flexible, imaginative writing. It is full of soul, like Emerson’s
“Divinity School Address,” which sought to dissolve certain of the old
dogmas. In both these authors we are made free as the spirit makes
free; but in Arnold’s criticism we are made free only as a liberal
Anglicanism makes free, which is not much.
The books that we do not like to part with after we have read them,
that we like to keep near us,--like Amiel’s “Journal,” say,--are
probably the books that our children’s children will like to have
around. A Western woman once paid an Eastern author this rare
compliment. “Most of the new books,” she said, “we see at the public
library; but your books we always buy, because we like to have them in
the house.” Probably it is the personal element in a book, the quality
of the writer, that alone endears it to us. If we could not love the
man, is it probable that we can love his book?
Of our New England poets, I find myself taking down Emerson oftener
than any other; then Bryant; occasionally Longfellow for a few
poems; then Whittier for “The Playmate” or “Snow-Bound”; and least
of all, Lowell. I am not so vain as to think that the measure of my
appreciation of these poets is the measure of their merit; but as this
writing is so largely autobiographical, I must keep to the facts. As
the pathos and solemnity of life deepen with time, I think one finds
only stray poems, or parts of poems, in the New England anthology that
adequately voice them; and these he finds in Emerson more plentifully
than anywhere else, though in certain of Longfellow’s sonnets there is
adequacy also. The one on “Sumner,” beginning,--
River, that stealest with such silent pace,
easily fixed itself in my mind.
I think we go back to books not so much for the amount of pleasure we
have had in them, as the kind of pleasure. There is a pleasure both in
books and in life that is inconsistent with health and wholeness, and
there is a pleasure that is consistent with these things. The instinct
of self-preservation makes us cleave to the latter. I do not think
we go back to the exciting books,--they do not usually leave a good
taste in the mouth; neither to the dull books, which leave no taste
at all in the mouth; but to the quiet, mildly tonic and stimulating
books,--books that have the virtues of sanity and good nature, and
that keep faith with us.
At any rate, an enduring fame is of slow growth. The man of the moment
is rarely the man of the eternities. If your name is upon all men’s
tongues to-day, some other name is likely to be there to-morrow.
XVII
THE SPELL OF THE PAST
I notice that as a man grows old he is more and more fond of quoting
his father,--what he said, what he did. It has more and more force or
authority with him. It is a tribute to the past. Not until one has
reached the meridian of life or gone beyond it, does the spell of the
past begin to creep over him.
Said a middle-aged woman to me the other day, “Old people are beginning
to look very good to me; I like to be near them and to hear them talk.”
It is a common experience. I have seen many a granny on the street whom
I felt like kidnapping, taking home, and seating in my chimney corner,
for the sake of the fragrance and pathos of the past which hovered
about her; for the sake also, I suppose, of the filial yearning which
is pretty sure to revive in one after a certain time.
No woman can ever know the depths of her love for her mother until she
has become a mother herself, and no man knows the depths of his love
for his father until he has become a father. When we have experienced
what they experienced, when we have traveled over the road which they
traveled over, they assume a new value, a new sacredness in our eyes.
They are then our former selves, and a peculiarly tender regard for
them awakens in our hearts. There is pathos in the fact that so many
people lose their parents before the experiences of life have brought
about that final flavoring and ripening of the filial instinct to which
I refer.
After one has lived half a century, and maybe long before, his watch
begins to lose time; the years come faster than he is ready for them;
while he is yet occupied with the old, the new is upon him. How alien
and unfriendly seem the new years, strangers whom we reluctantly
entertain for a time but with whom we seem hardly to get on speaking
terms,--with what uncivil haste they come rushing in! One writes down
the figures on his letters or in his journals, but they all seem alien;
before one has become at all intimate with them, so that they come to
mean anything special to him, they are gone. While he is yet occupied
with the sixties, living upon the thoughts and experiences which they
brought him, the seventies have come and gone and the eighties have
knocked at his door.
The earlier years one took to his heart as he did his early friends.
How much we made of them; what varied hues and aspects they wore; how
we came to know each other; how rounded and complete were all things!
Ah, the old friends and the old years, we cannot separate them; they
had a quality and an affinity for us that we cannot find in the new.
The new years and the new friends come and go, and leave no impression.
Youth makes all the world plastic; it creates all things anew; youth is
Adam in Paradise, from which the burdens and the experiences of manhood
will by and by cause him to depart with longing and sorrow. “When we
were young,” says Schopenhauer, “we were completely absorbed in our
immediate surroundings; there was nothing to distract our attention
from them; we looked upon the objects about us as though they were the
only ones of their kind,--as though, indeed, nothing else existed at
all.”
It is perhaps inevitable that a man of sensibility and imagination
should grow conservative as he grows old. The new is more and more
distasteful to him. Did you ever go back to the old homestead where you
had passed your youth or your early manhood, and find the old house,
the old barn, the old orchard, in fact all the old landmarks gone? What
a desecration, you thought. The new buildings, how hateful they look to
you! They mean nothing to you but the obliteration of that which meant
so much. This experience proves nothing except that the past becomes a
part of our very selves; our roots, our beginnings, are there, and we
bleed when old things are cut away.
After a certain age is reached, how trivial and flitting seem the new
generations! The people whom we found upon the stage when we came into
the world,--the middle-aged and the elderly people who were bearing
the brunt of the battle,--they seem important and like a part of the
natural system of things. When they pass away what a void they leave!
Those who take their places, the new set, do not seem to fill the bill
at all. But the chances are that they are essentially the same class of
people, and will seem as permanent and important to our children as the
old people did to us.
To repeat the experience, go to a strange town and take up your abode.
Everybody seems in his proper place, there are no breaks, we miss
nothing, the social structure is complete. In a quarter of a century go
back to the place again; ruins everywhere, nearly all the old landmarks
gone, and a new generation upon the stage. But to the newcomer nothing
of this is visible; he finds everything established and in order as we
first found it. It is so in life. Our children are the newcomers who do
not and cannot go behind the visible scene.
We are always wondering who are going to take the place of the great
poets, the great preachers, the great statesmen and orators who
are passing away. We see the new men, but they are not the worthy
successors of these. The great ones are all old or dead. The new ones
we know not; they cannot be to us what the others were; they cannot
be the star actors in the drama in which we have played a part, and
therefore we fancy they are of little account.
Are there any genuine old men any more? Why, the old men, the real
ones, are all dead long ago; we knew them in our youth; they were
always old, old from the foundations of the world. These old men
of to-day are mere imitations; we can remember when they were not
old,--it is all put on. The grandfathers and the grandmothers whom we
knew--think of any present-day grandparents being anything more than
mere counterfeits of them!
Hence, also, the new generation always go astray according to the
old, and run after strange gods. “And also all that generation were
gathered unto their fathers; and there arose another generation after
them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which He had done for
Israel.”
How ready we are to believe in the past as against the present; to
believe that wonders happened then that do not happen now! Miracles
happened then, but not now. The Divine One came upon earth then, but
he comes no more! Our whole religion is of the past. How hard to
believe in a present revelation, or to believe in the advantages and
opportunities of the present hour!
From the standpoint of each of us the sunrise and the sunset seem
like universal facts; it must be evening or morning throughout the
world, we think, instead of just here on our meridian. In the same way
we are prone to look upon youth and age as commensurate with human
existence; the world was young when we were young, and it grows old as
we grow old; youth and age we think are not subjective experiences, but
objective realities.
How can these youths here by our side feel as we have felt, see what we
have seen, have the same joys and sorrows, the same friends, the same
experiences, see the world clad in the same hues, feel the same ties of
home, of father and mother, of school and comrades, when all the world
is so changed,--when these things and persons that were so much to us
are forever past? What is there left? How can life bring to them what
it brought to us? But it will. The same story is told over and over to
each succeeding generation, and each finds it new and true for them
alone. As we find our past in others, so our youths will find their
past in us, and find it unique and peculiar.
The lives of men are like the sparks that shoot upward; the same in the
first ages as in the last, each blazing its brief moment as it leaps
forth, some attaining a greater brilliancy or a higher flight than
others, but all ending at last in the same black obscurity. Or they
are like the waves that break upon the shore; one generation following
swift upon the course of another, repeating the same evolutions, and
crumbling and vanishing in the same way.
Probably no man ever lost his father or his mother or his bosom friend
without feeling that no one else could ever have had just such an
experience. Carlyle, in writing to Emerson shortly after each had lost
his mother, said, “You too have lost your good old mother, who stayed
with you like mine, clear to the last; alas, alas, it is the oldest Law
of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality,
as if it had never happened before!”
Speaking of these two rare men, each so attractive to the other, how
unlike they were in their attitude toward the past,--the one with
that yearning, wistful, backward glance, bearing the burden of an Old
World sorrow and remorse, long generations of baffled, repressed,
struggling humanity coming to full consciousness in him; the other
serene, hopeful, optimistic, with the spell of the New World upon him,
turning cheerfully and confidently to the future! Emerson describes
himself as an endless seeker with no past at his back. He seemed to
have no regrets, no wistful retrospections. His mood is affirmative
and expectant. The power of the past was not upon him, but it had laid
its hand heavily upon his British brother, so heavily that at times it
almost overpowered him. Carlyle’s dominant note is distinctively that
of retrospection. He yearns for the old days. The dead call to him from
their graves. In the present he sees little, from the future he expects
less; all is in the past. How he magnifies it, how he re-creates it and
reads his own heroic temper into it! The twelfth century is more to him
than the nineteenth.
It is true that the present time is more or less prosy, vulgar,
commonplace to most men; not till we have lived it and colored it
with our own experiences does it begin to draw us. This seems to have
been preëminently the case with Carlyle; he was morbidly sensitive to
the crude and prosy present, and almost preternaturally alive to the
glamour of the past. What men had done, what they had touched with
their hands, what they had colored with their lives, that was sacred to
him.
Is it not a common experience that as we grow old there comes more and
more a sense of solitude and exposure? Life does not shut us in and
house us as it used to do. One by one the barriers and wind-breaks are
taken down, and we become more and more conscious of the great cosmic
void that encompasses us. Our friends were walls that shielded us;
see the gaps in their ranks now. Our parents were like the roof over
our heads; what a sense of shelter they gave us! Then our hopes, our
enthusiasms, how they housed us, or peopled and warmed the void! A keen
living interest in things, what an armor against the shafts of time is
that! Always on the extreme verge of time, this moment that now passes
is the latest moment of all the eternities. _New_ time always. The old
time we cannot keep. The old house, the old fields, and in a measure
the old friends may be ours, but the atmosphere that bathed them all,
the sentiment that gave to them hue, this is from within and cannot be
kept.
Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it, until it
has passed over us and taken with it a part of ourselves. While it
is here we value it not,--it is like raw material not yet woven into
the texture and pattern of our lives; but the instant it is gone
and becomes yesterday, or last spring, or last year, how tender and
pathetic it looks to us! The shore of time! I think of it as a shore
constantly pushing out into the infinite sea, stretching farther and
farther back of us like a fair land idealized by distance into which we
may not again enter. The future is alien and unknown, but the past is a
part of ourselves. So many ties bind us to it. The past is the cemetery
of our days. There they lie, every one of them. Musingly we recall
their faces and the gifts they brought us,--the friends, the thoughts,
the experiences, the joys, the sorrows; many of them we have quite
forgotten, but they were all dear to us once.
If our friends should come back from their graves, could they be what
they once were to us? Not unless our dead selves came back also. How
precious and pathetic the thought of father and mother to all men; yet
the enchantment of the past is over them also. They are in that sacred
land; their faces shine with its hallowed light, their voices come to
us with its moving tones.
Pope in replying to a letter of Swift’s said, “You ask me if I have
got a supply of new friends to make up for those who are gone? I think
that impossible; for not our friends only, but so much of ourselves is
gone by the mere flux and course of years, that, were the same friends
restored to us, we could not be restored to ourselves to enjoy them.”
In view of this power and attraction of the past, what do we mean by
saying we would not live our lives over again? It seems to be an almost
universal feeling. Cicero says, “If any god should grant me, that
from this period of life I should become a child again and cry in the
cradle, I should earnestly refuse it;” and Sir Thomas Browne says,
“For my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again
the thread of my days.” Sir Thomas did not want to live his life over
again, for fear he would live it worse instead of better. Cicero did
not regret that he had lived, but intimates that he had had enough of
this life, and wanted to enter upon that new and larger existence. “Oh,
glorious day! when I shall depart to that divine company and assemblage
of spirits, and quit this troubled and polluted scene!”
But probably the true reason was not given in either case. _We do
not like to go back._ We are done with the past; we have dropped it,
sloughed it off. However pleasing it may be in the retrospect, however
fondly we may dwell upon it, our real interest is in the present and
the future. Probably no man regrets that he did not live at an earlier
period, one hundred, five hundred, two thousand years ago; while the
wish that our existence had been deferred to some future age is quite
common. It all springs from this instinctive dislike to going back, and
this zest for the unknown, the untried. There are many experiences in
the lives of us all that we would like to repeat, but we do not want
to go back. We habitually look upon life as a journey; the past is the
road over which we have just come; these were fair countries we just
passed through, delightful experiences we had at this point and at
that, but we do not want to turn back and retrace our steps. There is
more or less a feeling of satiety. We want to go ahead, but of what
is behind us we have had our fill. What is the feeling we have when we
meet a crowd pressing into the show as we are coming out, or when we
see our eager friends embarking for Europe as we again set foot on our
native shore? Do we not have a kind of pity for them? Do we not feel
that we have taken the cream and that they will find only the skimmed
milk? We think of the world as moving on, everybody and everything as
pressing forward. To live our lives over again would be to go far to
the rear. It would be to give up the present and all that it holds; it
would be a kind of death.
Take from life all novelty, newness, surprise, hope, expectation, and
what have you left? Nothing but a cold pancake, which even the dog
hesitates over. One’s life is full of routine and repetition, but
then it is always a new day; it is always the latest time; we are on
the crest of the foremost wave; we are perpetually entering a new and
untried land. I am told that lecturers do not weary of repeating the
same lecture over and over, because they always have a new audience.
The routine of our lives is endurable because, as it were, we always
have a new audience; this day is the last birth of time and its face
no man has before seen. Life becomes stale to us when we cease to feel
any interest in the new day, when the night does not re-create us,
when we are not in some measure born afresh each morning. As age comes
on we become less and less capable of renewal by rest and sleep, and
so gradually life loses its relish, till it is liable to become a
positive weariness.
Hence in saying we would not live our lives over, we are only
emphasizing this reluctance we feel at going back, at taking up again
what we have finished and laid down. Time translates itself in the
mind as space; our earlier lives seem afar off, to be reached only by
retracing our steps, and this we are not willing to do. In the only
sense in which we can live our lives over, namely, in the lives of our
children, we live them over again very gladly. We begin the game again
with the old zest.
Who would not have his youth renewed? What old man would not have
again, if he could, the vigor and elasticity of his prime? But we would
not go back for them; we would have them here and now, and date the new
lease from this moment. It argues no distaste for life, therefore, no
deep dissatisfaction with it, to say we would not live our lives over
again. We do live them over again from day to day, and from year to
year; but the shadow of the past, we would not enter that. Why is it a
shadow? Why this pathos of the days that are gone? Is it because, as
Schopenhauer insists, life has more pain than pleasure? But it is all
beautiful, the painful experiences as well as the pleasurable ones;
it is all bathed in a light that never was on sea or land, and yet we
see it as it were through a mist of tears. There is no pathos in the
future, or in the present; but in the house of memory there are more
sighs than laughter.
XVIII
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS
About the pursuit of happiness, how often I say to myself, that
considering life as a whole, the most one ought to expect is a kind of
negative happiness, a neutral state, the absence of acute or positive
unhappiness. Neutral tints make up the great background of nature, and
why not of life? Neutral tints wear best in anything. We do not tire
of them. How much even in the best books is of a negative or neutral
character,--a background upon which the positive beauty is projected.
A kind of tranquil, wholesome indifference, with now and then a dash
of positive joy, is the best of the common lot. To be consciously and
positively happy all the while,--how vain to expect it! We cannot walk
through life on mountain peaks. Both laughter and tears we know, but a
safe remove from both is the average felicity.
Another thought which often occurs to me is that we each have a certain
capacity for happiness or unhappiness which is pretty constant. We
are like lakes or ponds which have their level, and which as a rule
are not permanently raised or lowered. As things go in this world,
each of us has about all the happiness he has the capacity for. We
cannot be permanently set up or cast down. A healthful nature, in the
vicissitudes of experience, is not made permanently unhappy, nor, on
the other hand, is its water level permanently raised. Deplete us
and we fill up; flood us and we quickly run down. We think that if a
certain event were to come to pass, if some rare good fortune should
befall us, our stock of happiness would be permanently increased, but
the chances are that it would not; after a time we should settle back
to the old everyday level. We should get used to the new conditions,
the new prosperity, and find life wearing essentially the same tints as
before. Our pond is fed from hidden springs; happiness is from within,
and outward circumstances have but little power over it. The poor man
thinks how happy he would be with the possessions of his rich neighbor,
but it is one of the commonplace sayings of the preacher that he would
not be. Wealth would not change his nature. His wants, his longings,
would still run on as before. It would be high water with him for a
season, but it could not last.
I have been told that, as a rule, the millionaires are the unhappiest
of men. Restless, suspicious, sated, ennuied, they are like a sick man
who can find no position in which he can rest. Our real and necessary
wants are so few and so easily met,--food, clothes, shelter! If a
little money will bring us such comfort, what will not riches do? So
we multiply our possessions many fold, hoping thereby to multiply
our happiness. But it does not work, or works inversely. Do you
suppose the millionaire’s little girl has any more pleasure with her
hundred-dollar doll than your washerwoman’s child has with her rag
baby? And what would not the millionaire himself give if he could eat
his rich dinner with the relish the day laborer has in eating his!
The great depressor and destroyer of happiness is death; but from this
blow, too, a healthful nature recovers. The broken and crushed plant
rises again. The scar remains, but in the tissue beneath runs the same
old blood.
It is undoubtedly true, however, that as time wears on, life becomes
of a soberer hue. We are young but once, and need not wish to be young
more than once. There is the happiness of youth, there is the happiness
of manhood, there is the happiness of old age,--each period wearing a
hue peculiar to itself. One of the illusions of life, however, which it
is hard to shake off, is the fancying we were happier in the past than
we are in the present. The past has such power to hallow and heighten
effects! In the distance the course we have traveled looks smooth and
inviting. The present moment is always the lowest point in the circle;
it is that part of the wheel which touches the ground. Those days in
the past that so haunt our memory and that seem invested with a charm
and a significance that is unknown to the present,--how shall we teach
ourselves that it is all a trick of the imagination, the result of the
medium through which they are seen, and that they, too, were once the
present, and were as prosy and commonplace as the moment that now is?
It is equally a mistake to suppose we shall be happier to-morrow or
next day than we are to-day. When the future comes it will then be the
present, no longer a matter of imagination, but of actual experience.
This prosy, care-burdened self will be there, and the rainbow tints
will still be in the distance.
The man who is hampered and constrained by the circumstances of his
life, thinks his happiness would be greatly augmented by greater
freedom, if he could go here or there, do this or that. But the
chances are that such would not be the case. For instance, when I see
a man going up and down the country looking for a place to settle, to
build himself a home, and when I think of my own experience in that
direction, I say, happy is the man whom circumstances take by the
collar and set down without any choice on his part, in a particular
place, and say to him, “There, abide there, and earn thy bread there.”
He is a free man then, paradoxical as it may seem,--free to make the
most of his opportunities without regret. He is not the victim of
his own whims or follies. He is not forever tormenting himself with
the notion that he has made a mistake, that if he had gone here or
there, he would have been happier. Now he accepts the inevitable and
makes the most of it. He goes to work with the more heart because he
has no choice. He wastes no time in regrets, he makes no comparisons
that disturb him, but devotes all his strength to getting all the
satisfaction out of life that is possible.
If one were to make a choice of going on foot while other people had
the privilege of wings, he would be haunted by the fear that he had
made a mistake, and as he trudged along in the mire, doubtless would
envy the people in the air above him; but if he had no choice in the
matter and was compelled to go afoot through no fault of his, he would
thank his stars that his fate was no worse. When choice comes in and
we can elect this or that, then the door for regret, for unhappiness,
is opened. We do not mourn because we were born in this place and not
that, but if we had been consulted we might fancy some cause of regret.
Yet there is a condition or circumstance that has a greater bearing
upon the happiness of life than any other. What is it? I have hardly
hinted at it in the foregoing remarks. It is one of the simplest things
in the world and within reach of all. If this secret were something I
could put up at auction, what a throng of bidders I should have, and
what high ones! People would come from all parts of the earth to bid
upon it. Only the wise ones can guess what it is. Some might say it is
health, or money, or friends, or this or that possession, but you may
have all these things and not be happy. You may have fame and power,
and not be happy. I maintain there is one thing more necessary to a
happy life than any other, though health and money and friends and
home are all important. That one thing is--what? The sick man will say
health; the poor man, wealth; the ambitious man, power; the scholar,
knowledge; the overworked man, rest.
Without the one thing I have in mind, none of these things would long
help their possessors to be happy. We could not long be happy without
food or drink or clothes or shelter, but we may have all these things
to perfection and still want the prime condition of happiness. It is
often said that a contented mind is the first condition of happiness,
but what is the first condition of a contented mind? You will be
disappointed when I tell you what this all-important thing is,--it is
so common, so near at hand, and so many people have so much of it and
yet are not happy. They have too much of it, or else the kind that is
not best suited to them. What is the best thing for a stream? It is to
keep moving. If it stops, it stagnates. So the best thing for a man is
that which keeps the currents going,--the physical, the moral, and the
intellectual currents. Hence the secret of happiness is--something to
do; some congenial work. Take away the occupation of all men, and what
a wretched world it would be! Half of it would commit suicide in less
than ten days.
Few persons realize how much of their happiness, such as it is, is
dependent upon their work, upon the fact that they are kept busy and
not left to feed upon themselves. Happiness comes most to persons who
seek her least, and think least about her. It is not an object to be
sought; it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It
must overtake you, and not you overtake it. How important is health to
happiness, yet the best promoter of health is something to do.
Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in
which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all
the forces there are in him.
A man does not want much time to think about himself. Too much thought
of the past and its shadows overwhelms; too much thought of the present
dissipates; too much thought of the future unsettles. I find that if a
horse stands too much in the stable, with too little work, he gets the
crib-bite. Too little work makes a kind of windsucker of a man.
I recently had a letter from a friend who, from having rented his farm
for a number of years, had had too much leisure. In this letter he
writes how well and happy he has been during the season; he has enjoyed
existence,--the gods have smiled upon him and he has found life worth
living. Then he told me, not by way of explanation, but as a matter
of news, that his head man had been disabled two months before, and
the care of the farm had devolved upon himself; more than that, he
was renovating a place he had recently bought, remodeling the house,
shaping the grounds, etc. Then I knew why he had been so unusually
well and happy. He had had something to do into which he could throw
himself, and it had set all the currents of his being going again.
About the same time I had a letter from another farmer friend who told
me how busy he was,--so many things pressing that there was need of
his going in two or more directions at once, not to get rich, but to
make both ends meet. And yet he was so happy! (Therefore he was so
happy, say I.) Troubles and trials, he says, are few and soon over
with, while the pleasures are past all enumeration. “There is so much
to be enjoyed, one never gets to the end of it.”
This man was too busy to be unhappy; he had no time for ennui or the
blues. You see he did not overindulge in the luxury of leisure. He was
compelled to take it sparingly, hence it always tasted good to him.
The fruit of the tree of life of which we must eat very sparingly is
leisure. Too much of it, and it turns to gall on our tongue. A little
too much of those things which we think will make us happy, and we are
cloyed, and miserable indeed. The boy would like to dine entirely upon
pie or sweetmeats, and we all need the lesson that the dessert of life
is to be taken sparingly. Because money is good, do not, therefore,
think that riches are an unmixed blessing; because leisure is sweet to
you, do not, therefore, imagine you would be happy with nothing to do.
My correspondent was too busy and too poor to be cloyed or sated, too
much the victim of circumstances to be self-accusing and repining. He
had no choice but to go on and make the most of things.
I overheard an old man and a young man talking at the station. The
young man was telling of an old uncle of his who had sold his farm and
retired to the village. He had enjoyed going to the village, so now
he thought he would take his fill of it. But it soon cloyed upon him.
He had nothing to do. Every night he would say with a sigh of relief,
“Well, another day is through,” and each morning wondered how he could
endure the day.
In every village up and down the older parts of the country there are
several such men; every day is a burden to them because they have
nothing to do. They drift aimlessly up and down the street; they
loiter in the post-office or lounge in the grocery store or hotel
bar-room,--no comfort to themselves and no use to the world. With what
longing they must look upon the farmers that drive in to get a horse
shod or to do a little trading and then drive briskly away! How the
vision of the farm, the cattle, the sheep, the barn, the growing crops,
the early morning, the sowing, the planting, the harvesting must haunt
them! Nothing to do! When they were driven and oppressed with work they
had thought, What pleasure to be free from all this, to be at liberty
to go and come as one likes, with no cows to milk or chores to do! Now
they probably have not a hen or a dog to comfort them. These men do not
live out more than half their latter days. Nature has no use for them,
and they soon drop away; whereas their neighbors who stick to the farm
and keep the currents going, reach a much more advanced period of life.
Rust and rot and mildew come to unused things. An empty and deserted
house, how quickly it goes to decay! and an unoccupied man, how is his
guard down on every side! When the will relaxes or is not stimulated,
the physical powers relax also and their power to ward off disease is
greatly lessened. Among men of all kinds who have retired from active
life the mortality should be and doubtless is much greater than among
men of the same age who stick to their lifelong occupations. Here is
a farmer just died at eighty-eight who managed his farm till within a
few months of his death; here is his neighbor, ten years younger, who
retired to the village several years ago, now wandering about more than
half demented.
Oh, the blessedness of work, of life-giving and life-sustaining work!
The busy man is the happy man; the idle man is the unhappy. When you
feel blue and empty and disconsolate, and life seems hardly worth
living, go to work with your hands,--delve, hoe, chop, saw, churn,
thrash, anything to quicken the pulse and dispel the fumes. The blue
devils can be hoed under in less than half an hour; ennui cannot stand
the bucksaw fifteen minutes; the whole outlook may be brightened in a
brief time by turning your hands to something you can do with a will.
I speak from experience. A few years ago I found my life beginning to
stagnate; I discovered that I was losing my interest in things. I was
out of sorts both physically and mentally; sleep was poor, digestion
was poor, and my days began to wear too sombre a tinge. There was no
good reason for it that I could perceive except that I was not well and
fully occupied. I had too much leisure.
What was to be done? Go to work. Get more land and become a farmer in
earnest. Exchange the penholder for the crowbar and the hoe-handle. I
already had a few acres of land and had been a fruitgrower in a small
way; why should I not double my possessions and plant a vineyard that
promised some returns? So I began to cast covetous eyes upon some land
adjoining me that was for sale. I nibbled at it very shyly at first.
I walked over it time after time and began to note its good points.
Then I began to pace it off. I found pleasure and occupation even in
this. Then I took a line and began to measure it. I measured off a
pretty good slice and fancied it already my own. This tasted so good
to me that I measured off a larger slice and then a still larger, till
I found that nothing short of the whole field would satisfy me; I must
go to the fence and take a clean strip one field broad from the road to
the river.
This I did, thus doubling the nine acres I already possessed. It was
winter; I could hardly wait till spring to commence operations upon the
new purchase. Already I felt the tonic effect of those nine acres. They
were a stimulus, an invitation, and a challenge. To subdue them and
lick them into shape and plant them with choice grapes and currants and
raspberries,--the mere thought of it toned me up and improved my sleep.
Before the snow was all off the ground in March we set to work
under-draining the moist and springy places. My health and spirits
improved daily. I seemed to be underdraining my own life and carrying
off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land. Then a lot of ash
stumps and brush, an old apple orchard, and a great many rocks and
large stones were to be removed before the plough could be set going.
With what delight I saw this work go forward, and I bore my own part in
it! I had not seen such electric April days for years; I had not sat
down to dinner with such relish and satisfaction for the past decade;
I had not seen the morning break with such anticipations since I was a
boy. The clear, bright April days, the great river dimpling and shining
there, the arriving birds, the robins laughing, the high-holes calling,
the fox sparrows whistling, the blackbirds gurgling, and the hillside
slope where we were at work,--what delight I had in it all, and what
renewal of life it brought me! I found the best way to see the spring
come was to be in the field at work. You are then in your proper place,
and the genial influences steal in upon you and envelop you unawares.
You glance up from your work, and the landscape is suddenly brimming
with beauty. There is more joy and meaning in the voices of the birds
than you ever before noticed. You do not have time to exhaust the
prospect or to become sated with nature, but feel her constantly as a
stimulating presence. Out of the corners of your eyes and by a kind of
indirection you see the subtle and renewing spirits of the season at
work.
Before April was finished, the plough had done its perfect work, and
in early May the vines and plants were set. Then followed the care and
cultivation of them during the summer, and the pruning and training
of them the subsequent season, all of which has been a delight to me.
Indeed the new vineyard has become almost a part of myself. I walk
through it with the most intimate and personal regard for every vine.
I know how they came there. I owe them a debt of gratitude. They have
done more for me than a trip to Europe or to California could have
done. If it brings me no other returns, the new lot already has proved
one of the best investments I ever made in my life.
Oh, the blessedness of motion, of a spur to action, of a current
in one’s days, of something to stimulate the will, to help reach a
decision, to carry down stream the waste and débris of one’s life!
Hardly a life anywhere so befouled or stagnant, but it would clear and
renew itself, if the currents were set going by the proper kind and
amount of honest work!
INDEX
Addison, Joseph, 53, 69, 71.
Alcott, A. Bronson, 76.
American literature, art in, 16.
_See also_ Literature.
Amiel, Henri Frédéric, on Renan, 65;
on Cherbuliez, 188;
his _Journal_, 229;
quotation from, 188.
Analogy, a frequent form of argument, 27;
between man and nature, 27, 28, 48-50;
metaphors, 28-31;
legitimate uses of, 31, 32;
accidental and essential, 32;
immortality in, 32-39;
in theology, 39;
false and true, 39-44;
between mind and body, 44, 45;
in the physical world, 45-47;
between art and nature, 50, 54;
rhetorical and scientific, 51.
Arnold, Matthew, 34, 50, 53, 59, 70, 78, 79;
as a critic, 90-92, 228; 93, 96;
greatest as a literary critic, 97;
his _Thyrsis_, 103;
his aristocratic ideals, 112-114, 118; 123, 124, 133, 184, 189, 206,
210;
his _Literature and Dogma_, 228, 229;
quotations from, 53, 93.
Art, disinterestedness of, 134, 135;
universality of, 135-142;
disinterestedness not indifferentism in, 142-148;
treatment of vice and sin in, 148-150.
Bacon, Francis, 205, 218.
Bagehot, Walter, 26;
quotation from, 26.
Barante, Baron de, 104.
Baudelaire, Charles, 20.
Birds, dusting and bathing, 174.
Books, the enduring, 3;
the re-reading of, 216-231.
_See also_ Literature.
Boswell, James, his _Life of Samuel Johnson_, 225.
Brontë, Charlotte, 103.
Browne, Sir Thomas, his _Religio Medici_, 229;
on the past, 241;
quotation from, 241.
Browning, Robert, 2;
his _How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_, 70, 166;
114, 184.
Brunetière, Ferdinand, 71, 85;
his criticism, 87; 90, 96, 104, 107, 109;
a critic of the aristocratic type, 112, 118.
Bunting, snow (_Passerina nivalis_), 174.
Burney, Fanny, 62.
Butler, Joseph, 33, 34.
Byron, Lord, 131, 141;
eloquent but not truly poetical, 165;
an example of his eloquence, 166;
quotation from, 166.
Campbell, Thomas, 166;
his _To the Rainbow_, 166; 182.
Carlyle, Thomas, 2;
his definition of poetry, 10;
his criticism, 89, 90; 119;
his vehemence and enthusiasm, 123, 124;
his _French Revolution_, 164; 196;
his service to most readers more moral than intellectual, 223;
his _Past and Present_, 224;
his _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 224;
his _Life of Sterling_, 224;
his essays on Scott, Burns, and Johnson, 224;
his _Frederick_, 224;
his _Reminiscences_, 224;
his _Sartor Resartus_, 224;
handicapped by his style, 224, 225;
to Emerson on the loss of his mother, 237;
his attitude toward the past, 238;
quotations from, 164, 165, 237.
Catholicism, 125.
Cats, 176.
Chateaubriand, 93.
Cherbuliez, Victor, 188.
Chickadee (_Parus atricapillus_), 173.
Cicero, quotations from, 240, 241.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 119.
Collins, Wilkie, 8.
_Conversations with Goethe_, 225.
Cowley, Abraham, his essays, 220.
Criticism, the scope, aims, and functions of, 80-84;
vital truth the important thing in, 84;
personality and impressionism in, 85-89;
inspiration more important than judgment in, 89-92;
diversity of critical judgments, 92-95;
the inner self of the critic a necessary element in, 95, 96;
importance of the power of expression in, 96-98;
relativity of truth in, 98-100;
subjective and objective, 100-104;
individual taste in, 104, 105;
catholicity in, 105-108;
democratic and aristocratic, 109-115;
good and bad taste in, 116-118;
the doctrinaire in, 118-126;
the most productive attitude in, 127-132;
professional, 127, 128, 130;
predilection in, 132;
antipathy in, 132, 133.
Cuckoo, European, 176, 178.
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., his _Two Years Before the Mast_, 3, 226,
227.
Dante, 209.
Darwin, Charles, 211.
Defoe, Daniel, 3.
Democracy, in literature, 109-115;
modern growth of, 151, 152;
its effect upon literature, 152-156.
_Democratic Criticism_, 109.
Demosthenes, 162.
De Quincey, Thomas, 78, 163;
his _Philosophy of Roman History_, 163; 210;
quotation from, 163, 164.
Dickens, Charles, 5, 7;
his _Tale of Two Cities_, 225, 226;
a matchless mimic with no deep seriousness, 225, 226.
Didacticism, 142.
Distinction, 113-115.
Dowden, Edward, 124.
Dryden, John, 92.
Earthworm, Gilbert White’s observations on, 178.
Eckermann, Johann Peter, his _Conversations with Goethe_, 225.
Eliot, George, 6, 119, 121.
Eloquence, its relation to poetry, 161-167.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 19, 24, 27, 28;
on individuality, 53, 54; 59, 76, 78, 105, 106, 119;
as a poet, 122;
as a critic, 122, 123; 124, 132, 136;
his Nature, 164;
an example of poetic prose from, 164; 181, 182, 184;
his appeal chiefly to youth and early manhood, 191;
never ceased to be a clergyman, 192;
no prosaic side, 192;
his sympathy for ideas rather than for men or things, 193, 194;
his inborn radicalism, 194, 195:
abstract in his aim and concrete
in his methods, 196;
his suggestiveness, 205; 223, 228-230, 237;
his attitude toward the past, 238;
quotations from, 24, 53, 54, 59, 164, 193-195.
English poetry, 165.
English writers, 7, 63.
Evans, Mary Ann (George Eliot), 6, 119, 121.
Everett, Edward, 5.
Family tree, the, 47, 48.
Fashions, 2.
Ferguson, Charles, his _Religion of Democracy_, quotations from, 210,
211.
Fern-owl, 175.
Fiction, values in, 6, 7;
a finer but not a greater art to-day than formerly, 60, 61.
Fieldfare, 174.
Flaubert, Gustave, 19.
France, Anatole, 112.
Franklin, Benjamin, his Autobiography, 226.
Freeman, Edward Augustus, 5.
French art, 146.
French criticism, 97.
French poetry, more eloquent than poetic, 165.
French writers, modern, 7, 63.
Froude, James Anthony, 5;
his style, 68.
George, Henry, as a writer, 9.
German writers, 7.
Gibbon, Edward, 78, 163.
Gladden, Rev. Washington, his _Art and Morality_, 143, 144;
quotation from, 143.
God, the old and the new ideas of, 152.
_Goethe, Conversations with_, 225.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 93, 123, 127;
his _Sorrows of Young Werther_, 138; 141;
on poetical and unpoetical objects, 157;
on Byron, 165; 184;
quotations from, 141, 157.
Gosse, Edmund, his _Questions at Issue_, 153, 154;
quotation from, 154.
Grant, Gen. Ulysses Simpson, his _Memoirs_, 5, 227;
an elemental man, 6;
his greatness of the democratic type, 113, 114;
his commonness, 115;
his lack of vanity, 227.
Gray, Thomas, 53, 103;
his _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_, 137.
Greeks, the, their view of Nature, 203.
Grimm, Hermann, 93.
Grouse, ruffed (_Bonasa umbellus_), 174.
Guizot, François Pierre Guillaume, 119.
Halleck, Fitz-Greene, his _Marco Bozzaris_, 166.
Happiness, negative happiness the most one ought to expect, 244;
one’s capacity for happiness not affected permanently by
adventitious circumstances, 244-248;
congenial work essential to, 248-256.
Harrison, Frederic, 25, 61.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7;
the most suggestive of our romancers, 205.
Heine, Heinrich, 80.
Hennequin, his _Scientific Criticism_, 109.
Heronry, 177.
Hewlett, Maurice, 25, 26;
quotation from, 25.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 72.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 47, 79;
his _Old Ironsides_, 166;
his _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, 219;
his real ideas and sham ideas, 219;
his lack of deep seriousness, 220.
Honey dew, 178.
Howells, William Dean, 5, 7, 72, 81;
his _Criticism and Fiction_, 82, 83, 109; 206;
quotation from, 83.
Hugo, Victor, 103, 119;
his moral earnestness, 189.
Hume, David, elegance of his style, 77;
on the eloquence of Demosthenes, 162;
on Cowley and Parnell, 220;
quotations from, 77, 162.
Hunt, Leigh, 131.
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 51, 78, 119.
Ibsen, Henrik, 149.
Immorality in art and literature, 148-150.
Immortality, false analogies of, 32-39.
Indian, the, Thoreau on, 198, 199.
Indifferentism, 142, 143, 146-148.
Individualism, 125, 126.
Individuality in literature, 53-60.
Institutionalism, 125, 126.
Irvine, J. P., quotation from his poem _The Lightning Express_, 159.
James, Henry, on Whitman’s letters, 4; 5, 69, 121;
style of his later works, 206.
Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 131.
_Jesse’s Gleanings in Natural History_, 179.
Joan of Arc, 73.
Johnson, Charles Frederick, his _Elements of Literary Criticism_, 109.
Johnson, Samuel, 76;
his _Rambler_, 76;
his criticism, 90;
on Dryden, 92; 96, 103, 112, 172, 205;
Boswell’s Life of, 225.
Jonson, Ben, a bit of his prose, 26.
Keats, John, 11;
his _Ode to a Nightingale_, 75.
Kidd, Benjamin, his _Social Evolution_, 9.
Landor, Walter Savage, 93;
lacking in moral stress and fervor, 124; 132, 184.
Lemaître, Jules, 87.
Life, the earlier years of one’s, 231-243.
Lincoln, Abraham, his Gettysburg speech, 5;
an elemental man, 6;
his greatness of the democratic type, 113, 114;
his commonness, 115, 116.
Literature, the enduring in, 1-3, 216-231;
values in, 4-9;
definitions of, 9-13;
style in, 14, 52-79;
truth in, 14, 15;
morality and art in, 16;
art in, 17-20;
the teaching of, 20-25;
good and bad taste in, 26, 116-118;
democracy in, 109-115;
the doctrinaire in, 118-126;
art _vs._ didacticism in, 135-142, 144-150;
an end in and of itself, 140;
immorality in, 148-150;
effect of democracy upon, 152-156;
humanitarianism in, 156;
the mechanical and industrial age in, 157-160;
lucidity in, 180-182;
appreciation in the reading of, 182-185;
necessity of something more than style in, 186-190;
Nature in, 202-204;
suggestiveness in, 205-215.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 137, 185, 230;
his sonnet on Sumner, 230.
Lowell, James Russell, 105, 108, 122, 124;
on scholarship, 186;
quotation from, 186.
Lucidity, 180-182.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord, on Miss Burney, 62; 65, 79, 96,
131, 166;
quotation from, 62.
Maeterlinck, Maurice, his _Life of the Bee_, 211.
Martineau, Harriet, 103.
Meredith, George, 69;
his obscurity of expression, 180-182;
quotations from, 180, 181.
Metaphors, 28-31.
Mill, John Stuart, a suggestive sentence of, 210.
Milton, John, 13, 74;
his _Lycidas_, 103;
his _Paradise Lost_, 105;
begotten of the classical tradition, 111; 115;
makes no personal appeal, 183, 184.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 16, 58, 59, 217, 218;
quotation from, 59.
Moody, William Vaughn, 156;
his poem on the steam engine, 158, 159;
quotation from, 158, 159.
Morley, John, his definition of literature, 10.
Nature, Thoreau’s interest in, 201, 202;
in literature, 203, 204.
Newman, John Henry, 119.
Nisard, Jean Marie Napoléon Désiré, 104.
Obscurity of expression, 180-182.
Occupation, essential to happiness, 249-256.
Oriole, 174.
Owl, white, 175.
Parkman, Francis, his _Oregon Trail_, 226.
Parnell, Thomas, 220.
Past, the, our feeling for, 232-243, 246.
Pater, Walter, 69, 70;
a mere stylist, 189.
Peacock, 176.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 7, 11;
his art, 17-19;
his _Raven_, 17, 19, 138;
his _Bells_, 19, 138;
the universality of his art, 138;
his _Annabel Lee_, 138;
his appeal only to the sense of artistic forms and verbal melody,
184, 185;
quotation from, 11.
Poetry, relation of eloquence to, 161-167;
the elusive in, 204;
more suggestive than prose, 213.
_See also_ Literature.
Pope, Alexander, 80, 203;
on friends, 240;
quotation from, 240.
Protestantism, 125, 126.
Quintilian, 43.
Rabelais, François, 132.
Raleigh, Prof. Walter, on the business of letters, 62;
his style, 63, 64; 65;
quotations from, 62-65.
Rat, water, 177.
Reading, understanding and appreciation in, 182-185;
the re-reading of books, 216-231.
Renan, Ernest, 32, 50;
his object as a writer, 65; 119;
his _Future of Science_, 161;
on eloquence and poetry, 161; 190;
quotations from, 50, 161, 190.
Robertson, John M., his _Essays toward a Critical Method_, 109.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 55, 56.
Ruskin, John, 5, 79, 90, 119, 123, 144, 145, 147, 163;
quotations from, 144, 147.
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 6;
on Montaigne’s metaphors, 16;
on Rousseau’s _Confessions_, 55; 73, 92-96;
as a critic, 97, 112, 115, 118, 132, 145, 146; 102, 104, 128, 132;
on moral censure in criticism, 145, 146;
quotations from, 16, 55, 145, 146.
_Saturday Review, The_, 4.
Schérer, Edmond Henri Adolphe, 80, 94, 96, 105, 132.
Schiller, his Robbers, 138.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, his use of analogy, 42, 43;
his definition of style, 60; 73, 234, 243;
quotations from, 60, 73, 234.
Science, democracy of, 110;
disinterestedness of, 134, 135;
rarely suggestive, 211.
Scott, Sir Walter, the literary value of his novels, 5, 6, 60, 61;
the eloquence of his poetry, 166;
his lack of understanding of Wordsworth, 182, 183.
Sears, Lorenzo, his _Methods and Principles of Literary Criticism_,
109.
Shairp, Principal John Campbell, 91.
Shakespeare, William, 74;
Voltaire’s verdict upon, 103;
democracy of his art, 111; 136;
the highest type of the disinterested artist, 144; 189;
his _Sonnets_, 208, 209, 211;
quotations from, 136, 212.
Shakespeareana, 24.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 114, 124.
Smith, Sydney, 26.
Sparrow, house (_Passer domesticus_), 175.
Sparrow, song (_Melospiza melodia_), 174.
Sparrow, vesper (_Poœcetes gramineus_), 174.
Spencer, Herbert, 32, 59;
on the philosophy of style, 71;
his style, 206;
quotations from, 32, 71.
Staël, Madame de, 104.
Steam engine in recent poetry, the, 158, 159.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 3;
his _Inland Voyage_, 227;
his _Travels with a Donkey_, 227.
Style, value of, 6-8;
a quality of mind, 14;
nature of, 52, 53;
personality an element of, 54-60;
of the stylist, 61-67;
unconsciousness of good, 68, 69;
simplicity of good, 69-74;
in conversation, 75-77;
aristocracy and democracy in, 77;
variety of, 78, 79.
Stylist, the, 62-67.
Suggestiveness in literature, 205-215.
Swallow, barn (_Hirundo erythrogastra_), 173, 174.
Swallow, cliff (_Petrochelidon lunifrons_), 173, 174.
Swallow, white-bellied, _or_ tree (_Tachycineta bicolor_), 174.
Swallows, supposed hibernation of, 171-173;
feeding young on the wing, 175.
Swift, chimney (_Chœtura pelagica_), 174.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 19;
his style, 66, 70, 71.
Tacitus, his eloquence, 165.
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 104, 105, 119;
a stimulating but not disinterested critic, 121, 122; 142, 143.
Taste, lapses of, 25, 26;
good and bad, 116-118.
Taylor, Edward Thompson (“Father”), 163.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 19, 114, 121;
universality of his art, 138, 139;
begotten of the feudal spirit, 154;
his _Maud_, 161;
an example of his eloquence, 166; 181, 184;
his _Crossing the Bar_, 227;
quotation from, 166.
Thackeray, William Makepeace, the title of his _Vanity Fair_, 10, 11;
103.
Thiers, Louis Adolphe, 119.
Thoreau, Henry David, 30, 56, 119;
his wildness, 197-202;
his enthusiasm for the Indian, 198, 199;
the Indian in, 199, 200;
his search for the transcendental in nature, 201, 202;
quotations from, 197-202.
Titlark, 176.
_To the Rainbow_, 166.
Tolstoi, Leo, 39, 90, 119, 121, 134, 149, 155.
Triggs, Oscar Lovell, 110.
Universe, the, 35-38.
Villemain, Abel François, 104.
Vineyard, preparing a new, 254-256.
Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, his style, 69;
his verdict upon Shakespeare, 103, 111; 144;
quotation from, 69.
Waldstein, Dr. Louis, his _The Subconscious Self_, 130, 141;
quotations from, 141.
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 119, 121.
Water-rat, 177.
Weather, Gilbert White’s observations on the, 177, 178.
White, Gilbert, the longevity of his book, 168;
homeliness of his book, 169;
its human interest, 169, 170;
his genuineness, 170, 171;
his personality, 171;
a type of the true observer, 171;
his observations as to the supposed hibernation of swallows,
171-173;
examples of his truly scientific observations, 174-178;
his alertness and enthusiasm, 175-177;
a magnet for the natural lore of his neighborhood, 176;
his observations on the weather, 178;
his imitators, 179; 218;
quotations from, 170, 173-178.
Whitman, Walt, his published letters, 4; 24, 27;
on style, 66; 67, 75, 78, 99, 110;
his responsibility to æsthetic principles, 117, 118, 119;
his _Leaves of Grass_, 129, 214; 155, 181, 183, 184;
his faith and optimism, 185;
his view of Nature, 204;
his _Two Rivulets_, 204;
on the elusive in poetry, 204;
his suggestiveness, 205, 206, 214; 223, 227;
quotations from, 24, 27, 66, 75, 99, 204; 214.
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 1;
his poetry, 18, 19; 137.
Wilson, Woodrow, 186.
Woodpecker, 174.
Wordsfold, William B., his _Principles of Criticism_, 109.
Wordsworth, William, 19, 23, 74, 115, 119, 124;
his poetry more personal and less universal than Tennyson’s, 138,
139;
never eloquent, 165; 181;
his attitude toward nature compared with Scott’s, 182, 183; 184,
204, 223, 228;
quotations from, 24, 141.
Work, essential to happiness, 249-256.
Zola, Emile, 112;
his exaggeration of certain things, 149, 150.
The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Transcriber’s Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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