sales of those of our leading authors who are not novelists. It is to
be hoped that no such indulgence to the idlest curiosity will ever be
conceded. But if such a thing were done, it would probably reveal some
startling statistics. It would be found that many of those whose names
are only next to the highest in public esteem do not receive more than
the barest pittance from their writings, even from those which are
most commonly in the mouths of their contemporaries. To mention only
two writers, but these of singular eminence and prominence, it was
not until the later years of their lives that either Robert Browning
or Matthew Arnold began to be sure of even a very moderate pecuniary
return on their books. The curious point was that both of them achieved
fame of a wide and brilliant nature long before their books began to
"move," as publishers call it. It is not easy to think of an example
of this curious fact more surprising than this, that _Friendship's
Garland_ during many years did not pass out of one moderate edition.
This book, published when Arnold was filling the mouths of men with his
paradoxical utterances, lighted up all through with such wit and charm
of style as can hardly, of its kind, be paralleled in recent prose; a
masterpiece, not dealing with remote or abstruse questions, but with
burning matters of the day--this entertaining and admirably modern
volume enjoyed a sale which would mean deplorable failure in the case
of a female novelist of a perfectly subterranean order. This case could
be paralleled, no doubt, by a dozen others, equally striking. I have
just taken up a volume of humour, the production of a "funny man" of
the moment, and I see on its title-page the statement that it is in
its one hundred and nineteenth edition. Of this book, 119,000 copies
have been bought during a space of time equal to that in which Matthew
Arnold sold probably about 119 copies of _Friendship's Garland_. In the
face of these facts it is not possible to say that, though it may buy
well, the democracy buys wisely.
It is this which makes me fear that, as I have said, the democratic
spirit is influencing disadvantageously the quantity rather than the
quality of good literature. It seems to be starving its best men, and
helping its coarsest Jeshuruns to wax fat. The good authors write as
they would have written under any circumstances, valuing their work for
its own sake, and enjoying that state of happiness of which Mr. William
Morris has been speaking, "the happiness only possible to artists and
thieves." But while they produce in this happy mood, the democracy,
which honours their names and displays an inexplicable curiosity about
their persons, is gradually exterminating them by borrowing their books
instead of buying them, and so reducing them to a level just below the
possibility of living by pure literature. The result is, as any list of
the most illustrious living authors (not novelists) will suggest, that
scarcely a single man or woman of them has lived by the production of
books. An amiable poet of the older school, whose name is everywhere
mentioned with honour, used to say that he published books instead
of keeping a carriage, as his fortune would not permit him to afford
both of those luxuries. When we think of the prizes which literature
occasionally offered to serious work in the eighteenth century, it
seems as though there had been a very distinct retrogression in this
respect.
The novel, in short, tends more and more to become the only
professional branch of literature; and this is unfortunate, because the
novel is the branch which shelters the worst work. In other sections
of pure letters, if work is not in any way good, it is cast forth and
no more heard of. But a novel may be utterly silly, be condemned by
every canon of taste, be ignored by the press, and yet may enjoy a
mysterious success, pass through tens of editions, and start its author
on a career which may lead to opulence. It would be interesting to know
what it is that attracts the masses to books of this kind. How do they
hear of them in the first instance? Why does one vapid and lady-like
novel speed on its way, while eleven others, apparently just like unto
it, sink and disappear? How is the public appetite for this insipidity
to be reconciled with the partiality of the same readers for stories
by writers of real excellence? Why do those who have once pleased the
public continue to please it, whatever lapses into carelessness and
levity they permit themselves? I have put these questions over and
over again to those whose business it is to observe and take advantage
of the fluctuations of the book-market, but they give no intelligible
reply. If the Sphinx had asked Oedipus to explain the position of "Edna
Lyall," he would have had to throw himself from the rock.
If the novelists, bad or good, showed in their work the influence of
democracy, they would reward study. But it is difficult to perceive
that they do. The good ones, from Mr. George Meredith downwards, write
to please themselves, in their own manner, just as do the poets, the
critics, and the historians, leaving it to the crowd to take their
books or let them lie. The commonplace ones write blindly, following
the dictates of their ignorance and their inexperience, waiting for the
chance that the capricious public may select a favourite from their
ranks. Almost the only direct influence which the democracy, as at
present constituted in England, seems to bring to bear on novels, is
the narrowing of the sphere of incident and emotion within which they
may disport themselves. It would be too complicated and dangerous a
question to ask here, at the end of an essay, whether that restriction
is a good thing or a bad. The undeniable fact is that whenever an
English novelist has risen to protest against it, the weight of the
democracy has been exercised to crush him. He has been voted "not
quite nice," a phrase of hideous import, as fatal to a modern writer
as the inverted thumb of a Roman matron was to a gladiator. But all
we want now is a very young man strong enough, sincere enough, and
popular enough to insist on being listened to when he speaks of real
things--and perhaps we have found him.
One great novelist our race has however produced, who seems not only to
write under the influence of democracy, but to be absolutely inspired
by the democratic spirit. This is Mr. W. D. Howells, and it is only
by admitting this isolation of his, I think, that we can arrive at
any just comprehension of his place in contemporary literature. It is
the secret of his extreme popularity in America, except in a certain
Europeanised clique; it is the secret of the instinctive dislike of
him, amounting to a blind hereditary prejudice, which is so widely
felt in this country. Mr. Howells is the most exotic, perhaps the only
truly exotic writer of great distinction whom America has produced.
Emerson, and the school of Emerson in its widest sense, being too
self-consciously in revolt against the English oligarchy, out of which
they sprang, to be truly distinguished from it. But England, with
its aristocratic traditions and codes, does not seem to weigh with
Mr. Howells. His books suggest no rebellion against, nor subjection
to, what simply does not exist for him or for his readers. He is
superficially irritated at European pretensions, but essentially, and
when he becomes absorbed in his work as a creative artist, he ignores
everything but that vast level of middle-class of American society out
of which he sprang, which he faithfully represents, and which adores
him. To English readers, the novels of Mr. Howells must always be
something of a puzzle, even if they partly like them, and as a rule
they hate them. But to the average educated American who has not been
to Europe, these novels appear the most deeply experienced and ripely
sympathetic product of modern literature.
When we review the whole field of which some slight outline has here
been attempted, we see much that may cheer and encourage us, and
something, too, that may cause grave apprehension. The alertness and
receptivity of the enormous crowd which a writer may now hope to
address is a pleasant feature. The hammering away at an idea without
inducing it to enter anybody's ears is now a thing of the past. What
was whispered in London yesterday afternoon was known in New York
this morning, and we have the comments of America upon it with our
five o'clock tea to-day. But this is not an unmixed benefit, for if
an impression is now quickly made, it is as quickly lost, and there
is little profit in seeing people receive an idea which they will
immediately forget. Moreover, for those who write what the millions
read, there is something disturbing and unwholesome in this public
roar that is ever rising in their ears. They ensconce themselves in
their study, they draw the curtains, light the lamp, and plunge into
their books, but from the darkness outside comes that distracting and
agitating cry of the public that demands their presence. This is a new
temptation, and indicates a serious danger. But the popular writers
will get used to it, and when they realise how little it really means
it may cease to disturb them. In the meantime, let no man needlessly
dishearten his brethren in this world of disillusions, by losing faith
in the ultimate survival and continuance of literature.
_1891._
HAS AMERICA PRODUCED A POET?
Has America Produced a Poet?
For the audacious query which stands at the head of this essay, it is
not I, but an American editor, who must bear the blame, if blame there
be. It would never have occurred to me to tie such a firebrand to the
tail of any of my little foxes. He gave it to me, just as Mr. Pepys
gave _Gaze not on Swans_ to ingenious Mr. Birkenshaw, to make the best
I could of a bad argument. On the face of it the question is absurd.
There lies on my table a manual of American poetry by Mr. Stedman,
in which the meed of immortality is awarded to about one hundred of
Columbia's sons and daughters. No one who has a right to express an
opinion is likely to deny that the learning, fidelity, and catholic
taste which are displayed in this book are probably at this time of
day shared, in the same degree, with its author, by no other living
Anglo-Saxon writer. Why, then, should not Mr. Stedman's admirable
volume be taken as a complete and satisfactory answer to our editor's
query? Simply because everything is relative, and because it may be
amusing to apply to the subject of Mr. Stedman's criticism a standard
more cosmopolitan and much less indulgent than his. Mr. Stedman has
mapped out the heavens with a telescope; what can an observer detect
with the naked eye?
There is an obvious, and yet a very stringent, sense in which no good
critic could for a moment question that America has produced poets.
A poet is a maker, a man or woman who expresses some mood of vital
passion in a new manner and with adequate art. Turning to the accepted
ranks of English literature, Tickell is a poet on the score of his one
great elegy on Addison, and Wolfe, a century later, by his _Burial
of Sir John Moore_. Those poems were wholly new and impassioned, and
time has no effect upon the fame of their writers. So long as English
poetry continues to be studied a little closely, Tickell and Wolfe
will be visible as diminutive fixed stars in our poetical firmament.
But in a rapid and superficial glance, Wolfe and Tickell disappear.
Let the glance be more and more rapid, and only a few planets of the
first magnitude are seen. In the age before Elizabeth, Chaucer alone
remains; of the Elizabethan galaxy, so glittering and rich, we see at
length only Spenser and Shakespeare; then come successive splendours of
Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns; then a cluster again of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Last of all, still too low on the
horizon to be definitely measured, Tennyson and Browning. Fifteen names
in all, a sum which might be reduced to ten, perhaps, but never to
fewer than ten, nor expanded, on the same scale, beyond eighteen or
twenty at the outside. These fifteen are the great English poets, the
selected glory and pride of five centuries, the consummation of the
noblest dynasty of verse which the world has ever seen. What I take to
be the problem is, Has America hitherto produced a poet equal to the
least of these, raised as high above any possible vacillation of the
tide of fashion? What an invidious question!
In the first place, I will have nothing to do with the living. They
do not enter into our discussion. There was never a time, in my
opinion, when America possessed among her citizens so various and so
accomplished singers, gifted in so many provinces of song, as in 1888.
But the time has not arrived, and long may it delay, when we shall be
called upon to discuss the ultimate _status_ of the now living poets of
America. From the most aged of them we have not yet, we hope, received
"sad autumn's last chrysanthemum." Those who have departed will alone
be glanced at in these few words. Death is the great solution of
critical continuity, and the bard whom we knew so well, and who died
last night, is nearer already to Chaucer than to us. I shall endeavour
to state quite candidly what my own poor opinion is with regard to the
claim of any dead American to be classed with those fourteen or fifteen
English inheritors of unassailed renown.
One word more in starting. If we admit into our criticism any
patriotic or political prejudice, we may as well cease to wrangle on
the threshold of our discussion. I cannot think that American current
criticism is quite free from this taint of prejudice. In this, if I
am right, Americans sin no more nor less than the rest of us English,
and French; but in America, I confess, the error seems to me to be
occasionally more serious than in Europe. In England we are not
guiltless of permitting the most puerile disputes to embitter our
literary arena, and because a certain historian is a home-ruler or a
certain novelist a Tory, each is anathema to the literary tribunal on
the other side. Such judgments are as pitiable as they are ludicrous;
but when I have watched a polite American smile to encounter such
vagaries of taste in our clubs or drawing-rooms, I have sometimes
wondered how the error which prefers the non-political books of a
Gladstonian to those of a Unionist, on political grounds alone, differs
from that which thinks an American writer must have the advantage, or
some advantage, over an English writer. Each prejudice is natural and
amiable, but neither the one nor the other is exempt from the charge of
puerility. Patriotism is a meaningless term in literary criticism. To
prefer what has been written in our own city, or state, or country, for
that reason alone, is simply to drop the balance and to relinquish all
claims to form a judgment. The true and reasonable lover of literature
refuses to be constrained by any meaner or homelier bond than that of
good writing. His brain and his taste persist in being independent of
his heart, like those of the German soldier who fought through the
campaign before Paris, and who was shot at last with an Alfred de
Musset, thumbed and scored, in his pocket.
One instance of the patriotic fallacy has so often annoyed me that I
will take this opportunity of denouncing it. A commonplace of American
criticism is to compare Keats with a certain Joseph Rodman Drake.
They both died at twenty-five and they both wrote verse. The parallel
ends there. Keats was one of the great writers of the world. Drake
was a gentle imitative bard of the fourth or fifth order, whose gifts
culminated in a piece of pretty fancy called _The Culprit Fay_. Every
principle of proportion is outraged in a conjunction of the names of
Drake and Keats. To compare them is like comparing a graceful shrub
in your garden with the tallest pine that fronts the tempest on the
forehead of Rhodopé.
When the element of prejudice is entirely withdrawn, we have next
to bear in mind the fluctuations of taste in respect to popular
favourites, and the uncertainty that what has pleased us may ever
contrive to please the world again. I have been reminded of the
insecurity of contemporary judgments, and of the process of natural
selection which goes on imperceptibly in criticism, by referring to a
compendium of literature published thirty years ago, and remarkable in
its own time for knowledge, acumen, and candour. In these volumes the
late Robert Carruthers, an excellent scholar in his day and generation,
gives a certain space to the department of American poetry. It is
amusing to think how differently a man of Carruthers's stamp would
cover the same ground to-day. He gives great prominence to Halleck
and Bryant, he treats Longfellow and Poe not inadequately, he spares
brief commendation to Willis and Holmes, and a bare mention to Dana
and Emerson (as a poet). He alludes to no one else; and apart from his
omissions, which are significant enough, nothing can be more curious
than his giving equal _status_ respectively to Halleck and Bryant,
to Willis and Holmes, to Dana and Emerson. Thirty years have passed,
and each of these pairs contains one who has been taken and one who
has been left. Bryant, Holmes, and Emerson exist, and were never more
prominent than to-day; but where are Halleck, Willis, and Dana? Under
the microscope of Mr. Stedman, these latter three together occupy but
half of one page out of four hundred, nor is there the slightest chance
that these writers will ever recover the prominence which they held,
and seemed to hold so securely, little more than a generation ago. The
moral is too obvious to need appending to this suggestive little story.
It is not in America only that a figure which is not really a great
one gets accidentally raised on a pedestal from which it presently has
to be ignominiously withdrawn. But in America, where the interest in
intellectual problems is so keen, and where the dull wholesome bondage
of tradition is unknown, these sudden exaltations are particularly
frequent. When I was in Baltimore (and I have no happier memories of
travel than my recollections of Baltimore) the only crumple in my
rose-leaf was the difficulty of preserving a correct attitude toward
the local deity. When you enter the gates of Johns Hopkins, the
question that is asked is, "What think you of Lanier"? The writer of
the _Marshes of Glynn_ had passed away before I visited Baltimore,
but I heard so much about him that I feel as though I had seen him.
The delicately-moulded ivory features, the profuse and silken beard,
the wonderful eyes waxing and waning during the feverish action
of lecturing, surely I have witnessed the fascination which these
exercised? Baltimore would not have been Baltimore, would have been
untrue to its graceful, generous, and hospitable instincts, if it
had not welcomed with enthusiasm this beautiful, pathetic Southern
stranger. But I am amazed to find that this pardonable idolatry is
still on the increase, although I think it must surely have found its
climax in a little book which my friend, President Gilman, has been
kind enough to send me this year. In this volume I read that Shelley
and Keats, "before disconsolate," now possess a mate; that "God's
touch set the starry splendour of genius upon Lanier's soul"; and that
all sorts of persons, in all sorts of language, exalt him as one of
the greatest poets that ever lived. I notice, however, with a certain
sly pleasure, that on the occasion of this burst of Lanierolatry a
letter was received from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "of too private a
character to read." No wonder, for Dr. Holmes is the dupe of no local
enthusiasm, and very well indeed distinguishes between good verse and
bad.
From Baltimore drunk with loyalty and pity I appeal to Baltimore sober.
What are really the characteristics of this amazing and unparalleled
poetry of Lanier? Reading it again, and with every possible inclination
to be pleased, I find a painful effort, a strain and rage, the most
prominent qualities in everything he wrote. Never simple, never easy,
never in one single lyric natural and spontaneous for more than one
stanza, always forcing the note, always concealing his barrenness and
tameness by grotesque violence of image and preposterous storm of
sound, Lanier appears to me to be as conclusively not a poet of genius
as any ambitious man who ever lived, laboured, and failed. I will judge
him by nothing less than those poems which his warmest admirers point
to as his masterpieces; I take _Corn_, _Sunrise_, and _The Marshes of
Glynn_. I persist in thinking that these are elaborate and learned
experiments by an exceedingly clever man, and one who had read so
much and felt so much that he could simulate poetical expression with
extraordinary skill. But of the real thing, of the genuine traditional
article, not a trace.
_I hear faint bridal-sighs of brown and green_
_Dying to silent hints of kisses keen_
_As far lights fringe into a pleasant sheen._
This exemplifies the sort of English, the sort of imagination, the sort
of style which are to make Keats and Shelley--who have found Bryant and
Landor, Rossetti and Emerson, unworthy of their company--comfortable
with a mate at last. If these vapid and eccentric lines were
exceptional, if they were even supported by a minority of sane and
original verse, if Lanier were ever simple or genuine, I would seize
on those exceptions and gladly forget the rest; but I find him on
all occasions substituting vague, cloudy rhetoric for passion, and
tortured fancy for imagination, always striving, against the grain, to
say something prophetic and unparalleled, always grinding away with
infinite labour and the sweat of his brow to get that expressed which a
real poet murmurs, almost unconsciously, between a sigh and a whisper.
_Wheresoe'er I turn my view,_
_All is strange, yet nothing new;_
_Endless labour all along,_
_Endless labour to be wrong._
Lanier must have been a charming man, and one who exercised a great
fascination over those who knew him. But no reasonable critic can turn
from what has been written about Lanier to what Lanier actually wrote,
and still assert that he was the Great American Poet.
It is not likely to be seriously contended that there were in 1888
more than four of the deceased poets of America who need to have their
claims discussed in connection with the highest honours in the art.
These are Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson, Poe. There is one other name
which, it may seem to some of my readers, ought to be added to this
list. But originality was so entirely lacking in the composition of
that versatile and mellifluous talent to which I allude, that I will
not even mention here the fifth name. I ask permission rapidly to
inquire whether Longfellow, Bryant, Emerson and Poe are worthy of a
rank beside the greatest English twelve.