the least part of the ordeal that is to be undergone by the writer. The
same musical note or phrase affects different ears in much the same way;
not so the word or group of words. The pure idea, let us say, is
translated into language by the literary composer; who is to be
responsible for the retranslation of the language into idea? Here begins
the story of the troubles and weaknesses that are imposed upon literature
by the necessity it lies under of addressing itself to an audience, by
its liability to anticipate the corruptions that mar the understanding of
the spoken or written word. A word is the operative symbol of a relation
between two minds, and is chosen by the one not without regard to the
quality of the effect actually produced upon the other. Men must be
spoken to in their accustomed tongue, and persuaded that the unknown God
proclaimed by the poet is one whom aforetime they ignorantly worshipped.
The relation of great authors to the public may be compared to the war of
the sexes, a quiet watchful antagonism between two parties mutually
indispensable to each other, at one time veiling itself in endearments,
at another breaking out into open defiance. He who has a message to
deliver must wrestle with his fellows before he shall be permitted to ply
them with uncomfortable or unfamiliar truths. The public, like the
delicate Greek Narcissus, is sleepily enamoured of itself; and the name
of its only other perfect lover is Echo. Yet even great authors must lay
their account with the public, and it is instructive to observe how
different are the attitudes they have adopted, how uniform the
disappointment they have felt. Some, like Browning and Mr. Meredith in
our own day, trouble themselves little about the reception given to their
work, but are content to say on, until the few who care to listen have
expounded them to the many, and they are applauded, in the end, by a
generation whom they have trained to appreciate them. Yet this noble and
persevering indifference is none of their choice, and long years of
absolution from criticism must needs be paid for in faults of style.
“Writing for the stage,” Mr. Meredith himself has remarked, “would be a
corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style into which some great ones
fall at times.” Denied such a corrective, the great one is apt to sit
alone and tease his meditations into strange shapes, fortifying himself
against obscurity and neglect with the reflection that most of the words
he uses are to be found, after all, in the dictionary. It is not,
however, from the secluded scholar that the sharpest cry of pain is wrung
by the indignities of his position, but rather from genius in the act of
earning a full meed of popular applause. Both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson
wrote for the stage, both were blown by the favouring breath of their
plebeian patrons into reputation and a competence. Each of them passed
through the thick of the fight, and well knew that ugly corner where the
artist is exposed to cross fires, his own idea of masterly work on the
one hand and the necessity for pleasing the rabble on the other. When
any man is awake to the fact that the public is a vile patron, when he is
conscious also that his bread and his fame are in their gift—it is a
stern passage for his soul, a touchstone for the strength and gentleness
of his spirit. Jonson, whose splendid scorn took to itself lyric wings
in the two great Odes to Himself, sang high and aloof for a while, then
the frenzy caught him, and he flung away his lyre to gird himself for
deeds of mischief among nameless and noteless antagonists. Even Chapman,
who, in _The Tears of Peace_, compares “men’s refuse ears” to those gates
in ancient cities which were opened only when the bodies of executed
malefactors were to be cast away, who elsewhere gives utterance, in round
terms, to his belief that
No truth of excellence was ever seen
But bore the venom of the vulgar’s spleen,
—even the violences of this great and haughty spirit must pale beside the
more desperate violences of the dramatist who commended his play to the
public in the famous line,
By God, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may.
This stormy passion of arrogant independence disturbs the serenity of
atmosphere necessary for creative art. A greater than Jonson donned the
suppliant’s robes, like Coriolanus, and with the inscrutable honeyed
smile about his lips begged for the “most sweet voices” of the journeymen
and gallants who thronged the Globe Theatre. Only once does the wail of
anguish escape him—
Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.
And again—
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand,
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed.
Modern vulgarity, speaking through the mouths of Shakesperian
commentators, is wont to interpret these lines as a protest against the
contempt wherewith Elizabethan society regarded the professions of
playwright and actor. We are asked to conceive that Shakespeare humbly
desires the pity of his bosom friend because he is not put on the same
level of social estimation with a brocaded gull or a prosperous stupid
goldsmith of the Cheap. No, it is a cry, from the depth of his nature,
for forgiveness because he has sacrificed a little on the altar of
popularity. Jonson would have boasted that he never made this sacrifice.
But he lost the calm of his temper and the clearness of his singing
voice, he degraded his magnanimity by allowing it to engage in
street-brawls, and he endangered the sanctuary of the inviolable soul.
At least these great artists of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries
are agreed upon one thing, that the public, even in its most gracious
mood, makes an ill task-master for the man of letters. It is worth the
pains to ask why, and to attempt to show how much of an author’s literary
quality is involved in his attitude towards his audience. Such an
inquiry will take us, it is true, into bad company, and exhibit the
vicious, the fatuous, and the frivolous posturing to an admiring crowd.
But style is a property of all written and printed matter, so that to
track it to its causes and origins is a task wherein literary criticism
may profit by the humbler aid of anthropological research.
Least of all authors is the poet subject to the tyranny of his audience.
“Poetry and eloquence,” says John Stuart Mill, “are both alike the
expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the
antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.
Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us
to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.” Poetry,
according to this discerning criticism, is an inspired soliloquy; the
thoughts rise unforced and unchecked, taking musical form in obedience
only to the law of their being, giving pleasure to an audience only as
the mountain spring may chance to assuage the thirst of a passing
traveller. In lyric poetry, language, from being a utensil, or a medium
of traffic and barter, passes back to its place among natural sounds; its
affinity is with the wind among the trees and the stream among the rocks;
it is the cry of the heart, as simple as the breath we draw, and as
little ordered with a view to applause. Yet speech grew up in society,
and even in the most ecstatic of its uses may flag for lack of
understanding and response. It were rash to say that the poets need no
audience; the loneliest have promised themselves a tardy recognition, and
some among the greatest came to their maturity in the warm atmosphere of
a congenial society. Indeed the ratification set upon merit by a living
audience, fit though few, is necessary for the development of the most
humane and sympathetic genius; and the memorable ages of literature, in
Greece or Rome, in France or England, have been the ages of a literary
society. The nursery of our greatest dramatists must be looked for, not,
it is true, in the transfigured bear-gardens of the Bankside, but in
those enchanted taverns, islanded and bastioned by the protective decree—
_Idiota_, _insulsus_, _tristis_, _turpis_, _abesto_.
The poet seems to be soliloquising because he is addressing himself, with
the most entire confidence, to a small company of his friends, who may
even, in unhappy seasons, prove to be the creatures of his imagination.
Real or imaginary, they are taken by him for his equals; he expects from
them a quick intelligence and a perfect sympathy, which may enable him to
despise all concealment. He never preaches to them, nor scolds, nor
enforces the obvious. Content that what he has spoken he has spoken, he
places a magnificent trust on a single expression. He neither explains,
nor falters, nor repents; he introduces his work with no preface, and
cumbers it with no notes. He will not lower nor raise his voice for the
sake of the profane and idle who may chance to stumble across his
entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of
worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what
he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship,
and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his achievement.
Sometimes they come late.
This blend of dignity and intimacy, of candour and self-respect, is
unintelligible to the vulgar, who understand by intimacy mutual
concession to a base ideal, and who are so accustomed to deal with masks,
that when they see a face they are shocked as by some grotesque. Now a
poet, like Montaigne’s naked philosopher, is all face; and the
bewilderment of his masked and muffled critics is the greater. Wherever
he attracts general attention he cannot but be misunderstood. The
generality of modern men and women who pretend to literature are not
hypocrites, or they might go near to divine him,—for hypocrisy, though
rooted in cowardice, demands for its flourishing a clear intellectual
atmosphere, a definite aim, and a certain detachment of the directing
mind. But they are habituated to trim themselves by the cloudy mirror of
opinion, and will mince and temporise, as if for an invisible audience,
even in their bedrooms. Their masks have, for the most part, grown to
their faces, so that, except in some rare animal paroxysm of emotion, it
is hardly themselves that they express. The apparition of a poet
disquiets them, for he clothes himself with the elements, and apologises
to no idols. His candour frightens them: they avert their eyes from it;
or they treat it as a licensed whim; or, with a sudden gleam of insight,
and apprehension of what this means for them and theirs, they scream
aloud for fear. A modern instance may be found in the angry
protestations launched against Rossetti’s Sonnets, at the time of their
first appearance, by a writer who has since matched himself very exactly
with an audience of his own kind. A stranger freak of burgess criticism
is everyday fare in the odd world peopled by the biographers of Robert
Burns. The nature of Burns, one would think, was simplicity itself; it
could hardly puzzle a ploughman, and two sailors out of three would call
him brother. But he lit up the whole of that nature by his marvellous
genius for expression, and grave personages have been occupied ever since
in discussing the dualism of his character, and professing to find some
dark mystery in the existence of this, that, or the other trait—a love of
pleasure, a hatred of shams, a deep sense of religion. It is common
human nature, after all, that is the mystery, but they seem never to have
met with it, and treat it as if it were the poet’s eccentricity. They
are all agog to worship him, and when they have made an image of him in
their own likeness, and given it a tin-pot head that exactly hits their
taste, they break into noisy lamentation over the discovery that the
original was human, and had feet of clay. They deem “Mary in Heaven” so
admirable that they could find it in their hearts to regret that she was
ever on earth. This sort of admirers constantly refuses to bear a part
in any human relationship; they ask to be fawned on, or trodden on, by
the poet while he is in life; when he is dead they make of him a
candidate for godship, and heckle him. It is a misfortune not wholly
without its compensations that most great poets are dead before they are
popular.
If great and original literary artists—here grouped together under the
title of poets—will not enter into transactions with their audience,
there is no lack of authors who will. These are not necessarily
charlatans; they may have by nature a ready sympathy with the grossness
of the public taste, and thus take pleasure in studying to gratify it.
But man loses not a little of himself in crowds, and some degradation
there must be where the one adapts himself to the many. The British
public is not seen at its best when it is enjoying a holiday in a foreign
country, nor when it is making excursions into the realm of imaginative
literature: those who cater for it in these matters must either study its
tastes or share them. Many readers bring the worst of themselves to a
novel; they want lazy relaxation, or support for their nonsense, or
escape from their creditors, or a free field for emotions that they dare
not indulge in life. The reward of an author who meets them half-way in
these respects, who neither puzzles nor distresses them, who asks nothing
from them, but compliments them on their great possessions and sends them
away rejoicing, is a full measure of acceptance, and editions unto
seventy times seven.
The evils caused by the influence of the audience on the writer are many.
First of all comes a fault far enough removed from the characteristic
vices of the charlatan—to wit, sheer timidity and weakness. There is a
kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man when he takes pen in hand to
address an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to
deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces. This is the true panic
fear, that walks at mid-day, and unmans those whom it visits. Hence come
reservations, qualifications, verbosity, and the see-saw of a wavering
courage, which apes progress and purpose, as soldiers mark time with
their feet. The writing produced under these auspices is of no greater
moment than the incoherent loquacity of a nervous patient. All
self-expression is a challenge thrown down to the world, to be taken up
by whoso will; and the spirit of timidity, when it touches a man, suborns
him with the reminder that he holds his life and goods by the sufferance
of his fellows. Thereupon he begins to doubt whether it is worth while
to court a verdict of so grave possibilities, or to risk offending a
judge—whose customary geniality is merely the outcome of a fixed habit of
inattention. In doubt whether to speak or keep silence, he takes a
middle course, and while purporting to speak for himself, is careful to
lay stress only on the points whereon all are agreed, to enlarge
eloquently on the doubtfulness of things, and to give to words the very
least meaning that they will carry. Such a procedure, which glides over
essentials, and handles truisms or trivialities with a fervour of
conviction, has its functions in practice. It will win for a politician
the coveted and deserved repute of a “safe” man—safe, even though the
cause perish. Pleaders and advocates are sometimes driven into it,
because to use vigorous, clean, crisp English in addressing an ordinary
jury or committee is like flourishing a sword in a drawing-room: it will
lose the case. Where the weakest are to be convinced speech must stoop:
a full consideration of the velleities and uncertainties, a little
bombast to elevate the feelings without committing the judgment, some
vague effusion of sentiment, an inapposite blandness, a meaningless
rodomontade—these are the by-ways to be travelled by the style that is a
willing slave to its audience. The like is true of those
documents—petitions, resolutions, congratulatory addresses, and so
forth—that are written to be signed by a multitude of names. Public
occasions of this kind, where all and sundry are to be satisfied, have
given rise to a new parliamentary dialect, which has nothing of the
freshness of individual emotion, is powerless to deal with realities, and
lacks all resonance, vitality, and nerve. There is no cure for this,
where the feelings and opinions of a crowd are to be expressed. But
where indecision is the ruling passion of the individual, he may cease to
write. Popularity was never yet the prize of those whose only care is to
avoid offence.
For hardier aspirants, the two main entrances to popular favour are by
the twin gates of laughter and tears. Pathos knits the soul and braces
the nerves, humour purges the eyesight and vivifies the sympathies; the
counterfeits of these qualities work the opposite effects. It is
comparatively easy to appeal to passive emotions, to play upon the
melting mood of a diffuse sensibility, or to encourage the narrow mind to
dispense a patron’s laughter from the vantage-ground of its own small
preconceptions. Our annual crop of sentimentalists and mirth-makers
supplies the reading public with food. Tragedy, which brings the naked
soul face to face with the austere terrors of Fate, Comedy, which turns
the light inward and dissipates the mists of self-affection and
self-esteem, have long since given way on the public stage to the
flattery of Melodrama, under many names. In the books he reads and in
the plays he sees the average man recognises himself in the hero, and
vociferates his approbation.
The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenth century was of
a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and
sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the
fantasies of unsubstantial grief. The real Princess of Hans Andersen’s
story, who passed a miserable night because there was a small bean
concealed beneath the twenty eider-down beds on which she slept, might
stand for a type of the aristocracy of feeling that took a pride in these
ridiculous susceptibilities. The modern sentimentalist works in a
coarser material. That ancient, subtle, and treacherous affinity among
the emotions, whereby religious exaltation has before now been made the
ally of the unpurified passions, is parodied by him in a simpler and more
useful device. By alleging a moral purpose he is enabled to gratify the
prurience of his public and to raise them in their own muddy conceit at
one and the same time. The plea serves well with those artless readers
who have been accustomed to consider the moral of a story as something
separable from imagination, expression, and style—a quality, it may be,
inherent in the plot, or a kind of appendix, exercising a retrospective
power of jurisdiction and absolution over the extravagances of the piece
to which it is affixed. Let virtue be rewarded, and they are content
though it should never be vitally imagined or portrayed. If their eyes
were opened they might cry with Brutus—“O miserable Virtue! Thou art but
a phrase, and I have followed thee as though thou wert a reality.”
It is in quite another kind, however, that the modern purveyor of
sentiment exercises his most characteristic talent. There are certain
real and deeply-rooted feelings, common to humanity, concerning which, in
their normal operation, a grave reticence is natural. They are universal
in their appeal, men would be ashamed not to feel them, and it is no
small part of the business of life to keep them under strict control.
Here is the sentimental hucksters most valued opportunity. He tears
these primary instincts from the wholesome privacy that shelters them in
life, and cries them up from his booth in the market-place. The
elemental forces of human life, which beget shyness in children, and
touch the spirits of the wise to solemn acquiescence, awaken him to
noisier declamation. He patronises the stern laws of love and pity,
hawking them like indulgences, cheapening and commanding them like the
medicines of a mountebank. The censure of his critics he impudently
meets by pointing to his wares: are not some of the most sacred
properties of humanity—sympathy with suffering, family affection, filial
devotion, and the rest—displayed upon his stall? Not thus shall he evade
the charges brought against him. It is the sensual side of the tender
emotions that he exploits for the comfort of the million. All the
intricacies which life offers to the will and the intellect he lards and
obliterates by the timely effusion of tearful sentiment. His
humanitarianism is a more popular, as it is an easier, ideal than
humanity—it asks no expense of thought. There is a scanty public in
England for tragedy or for comedy: the characters and situations handled
by the sentimentalist might perchance furnish comedy with a theme; but he
stilts them for a tragic performance, and they tumble into watery bathos,
where a numerous public awaits them.
A similar degradation of the intellectual elements that are present in
all good literature is practised by those whose single aim is to provoke
laughter. In much of our so-called comic writing a superabundance of
boisterous animal spirits, restrained from more practical expression by
the ordinances of civil society, finds outlet and relief. The grimaces
and caperings of buffoonery, the gymnastics of the punster and the
parodist, the revels of pure nonsense may be, at their best, a
refreshment and delight, but they are not comedy, and have proved in
effect not a little hostile to the existence of comedy. The prevalence
of jokers, moreover, spoils the game of humour; the sputter and sparkle
of their made jokes interferes with that luminous contemplation of the
incongruities of life and the universe which is humour’s essence. All
that is ludicrous depends on some disproportion: Comedy judges the actual
world by contrasting it with an ideal of sound sense, Humour reveals it
in its true dimensions by turning on it the light of imagination and
poetry. The perception of these incongruities, which are eternal,
demands some expense of intellect; a cheaper amusement may be enjoyed by
him who is content to take his stand on his own habits and prejudices and
to laugh at all that does not square with them. This was the method of
the age which, in the abysmal profound of waggery, engendered that
portentous birth, the comic paper. Foreigners, it is said, do not laugh
at the wit of these journals, and no wonder, for only a minute study of
the customs and preoccupations of certain sections of English society
could enable them to understand the point of view. From time to time one
or another of the writers who are called upon for their weekly tale of
jokes seems struggling upward to the free domain of Comedy; but in vain,
his public holds him down, and compels him to laugh in chains. Some day,
perchance, a literary historian, filled with the spirit of Cervantes or
of Molière, will give account of the Victorian era, and, not disdaining
small things, will draw a picture of the society which inspired and
controlled so resolute a jocularity. Then, at last, will the spirit of
Comedy recognise that these were indeed what they claimed to be—comic
papers.