unbidden into our minds as we review M. Bergeret’s story. To us, we
must confess, the old Latin professor seems almost as real a personage
as the Great Cham of literature himself. We hope he is happy in his new
post of honor at the Sorbonne. It was time, surely, that some of the
quails and the manna should be found in his basket.
And now it is pleasant to add, by way of ending, that the latest
book of M. Anatole France seems to indicate that he also, as well
as the man of his creation, has come out into a larger place. His
mood is quieter and less satirical, though he is still many degrees
more serious than in the old days of “Thaïs” and “Sylvestre Bonnard.”
“Sur la Pierre Blanche” is a work of the rarest distinction; not
a book for the casual reader to hurry over in pursuit of a story
(in a loose way of speaking it may be characterized as a volume of
imaginary conversations), but one to be cherished and dwelt upon by
such as love the perfection of art and are not averse to knowing what
kind of thoughts visit a free-thinking, humanity-loving man, of a
philosophical, half-conservative, half-radical turn of mind, in these
days of social and political unrest, as he looks back upon the origins
of Christianity and forward into those new and presumably brighter eras
which we who live now may dream of, but never see.
The motto of the book explains the significance of its title: “You
seem to have slept upon the white stone amongst the people of dreams.”
Toleration, the spread of peace, imperialism, the socialistic
evolution (following hard upon the capitalistic evolution, now at its
height, or passing), the yellow peril, so called, the white peril,
the future of Africa,--these are some of the larger and timelier
questions considered. In general, the thoughts of the book are those
of a scholar whose face is turned toward practical issues. The author
is not concerned with any Utopia,--absolute justice, by his theory,
being not a thing to be so much as hoped for,--but with some quite
possible amelioration of the existing order, and some gradual, natural,
irresistible approaches (irresistible because they are the work of
Nature herself) toward a state of society less unequal, not to say less
unendurable, than the present.
Let those scoff who will; for ourselves we rejoice to see the man, like
the boy, “dreaming on things to come.”
At the same time, we should not be sorry to believe that, in the heat
of writing, and out of the love, natural to all of us, of making facts
conform to theory, we may have laid a thought too much of emphasis
upon the alterations through which his mind has passed. His days, we
suspect, have, after all, been pretty closely bound each to each by
natural piety. We recall his fine saying about Renan, brought up in the
Roman Church and dying an unbeliever, that he changed little. “He was
like his native land, where clouds float across the sky, but the soil
is of granite, and oaks are deeply rooted.”
Changed or unchanged, in his first manner or his second, Republican or
Nationalist, socialist, anti-imperialist, “intellectual,” or what not,
who will refuse to read a writer who can express himself after such a
fashion?
VERBAL MAGIC
VERBAL MAGIC
A music-lover and devoted concert-goer of my
acquaintance--“uninstructed, but sensitive,” to characterize him in
his own words--is accustomed to say that he distinguishes several
kinds of enjoyable music. One kind is interesting: here he puts the
work of composers so unlike as Berlioz and Brahms. Another kind is
exciting; under which head he ranks the greater part of Wagner and
the Bach fugues! And still another kind is charming. Whenever he uses
this last epithet, he adds an explanation, the word being now so worn
by indiscriminate handling as hardly to pass by itself at its full
face value. He means that the music thus described--heavenly music, he
sometimes calls it (of which his typical example seems to be Schubert’s
unfinished symphony)--has upon him an indescribable ravishing effect,
as if it really and literally charmed him. Exactly why this should
be, he does not profess to decide. All such compositions are highly
melodious and in some good degree simple; but then there is plenty
of other excellent music to which the same terms seem to be equally
applicable, which nevertheless lays him under no such spell. “I don’t
undertake to explain it,” he says; “so far as I am concerned, it is all
a matter of feeling.”
Analogous to this is my own experience--and, I suppose, that of
readers in general--with certain fragments of poetry, which have for
me an ineffable and apparently inexhaustible charm. Other poetry is
beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, everything that poetry ought to
be, except that it lacks this final something which, not to leave it
absolutely without a name, we may call magic. Whatever it be called,
it pertains not to any poet’s work as a whole, nor in strictness, I
think, to any poem as a whole, but to single verses or couplets. And
to draw the line still closer, verse of this magical quality--though
here, to be sure, I may be disclosing nothing but my own intellectual
limitations--is discoverable only in the work of a certain few poets.
The secret of the charm is past finding out: so I like to believe,
at all events. Magic is magic; if it could be explained, it would be
something else; to use the word is to confess the thing beyond us. Such
verses were never written to order or by force of will, since genius
and our old friend--or enemy--“an infinite capacity for taking pains,”
so far from being one, are not even distantly related. The poet himself
could never tell how such perfection was wrought or whence it came; nor
is its natural history to be made out by any critic. The best we can do
with it is to enjoy it, thankful to have our souls refreshed and our
taste purified by its “heavenly alchemy;” as the best that our musical
friend can do with the unfinished symphony is to surrender himself to
its fascination, and be carried by it, as I have heard him more than
once express himself, up to “heaven’s gate.”
And yet it is not in human nature to forego the asking of questions.
The mind will have its inquisitive moods, and sometimes it loves
to play, in a kind of make-believe, with mysteries which it has no
thought of solving,--a harmless and perhaps not unprofitable exercise,
if entered upon modestly and pursued without illusions. We may wonder
over things that interest us, and even go so far as to talk about them,
though we have no expectation of saying anything either new or final.
Take, then, the famous lines from Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper:”--
“Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.”
The final couplet of this stanza is a typical example of what is here
meant by verbal magic. I am heartily of Mr. Swinburne’s mind when he
says of it, “In the whole expanse of poetry there can hardly be two
verses of more perfect and profound and exalted beauty;” although my
own slender acquaintance with literature as a whole would not have
justified me in so sweeping a mode of speech. The utmost that I could
have ventured to say would have been that I knew of no lines more
supremely, indescribably, perennially beautiful. Nor can I sympathize
with Mr. Courthope in his contention that the lines are nothing in
themselves, but depend for their “high quality” upon their association
with the image of the solitary reaper. On such a point the human
consciousness may possibly not be infallible; but at all events, it is
the best ground we have to go on, and unless I am strangely deluded,
my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly
in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials they are
composed, and how artlessly they are put together! Nine every-day
words, such as any farmer might use, not a fine word among them,
following each other in the most unstudied manner--and the result
perfection!
By the side of this example let us put another, equally familiar, from
Shakespeare:--
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Here, too, all the elements are of the plainest and commonest; and
yet these few short, homely words, every one in its natural prose
order, and not over-musical,--“such stuff” and “little life” being
almost cacophonous,--have a magical force, if I may presume for once
to speak in Mr. Swinburne’s tone, unsurpassable in the whole range of
literature. We hear them, if we _do_ hear them, and all things earthly
seem to melt and vanish.
Not unlike them in their sudden effectiveness is a casual expression
of Burke’s. For in prose also, and even in a political pamphlet, if
the pamphleteer have a genius for words, an inspired and unexpected
phrase (and inspired phrases are always unexpected, that being one mark
of their divinity) may take the spirit captive. Thus, while Burke is
talking about the troubles of the time, being now in the opposition,
and blaming the government as in duty bound, suddenly he lets fall the
words, “Rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn plausibilities
of the world;” and for me, I know not whether others may be similarly
affected, politics and government are gone, an “insubstantial pageant
faded.” “All the solemn plausibilities of the world,” I say to myself,
and for the present, though I am hardly beyond the first page of the
pamphlet, I care not to read further; like Emerson at the play, who had
ears for nothing more after Hamlet’s question to the ghost:--
“What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”
I am writing simply as a lover of poetry, “uninstructed, but
sensitive,” not as a critic, having no semblance of claim to that
exalted title,--among the very highest, to my thinking, as the men who
wear it worthily are among the rarest; great critics, to this date,
having been fewer even than great poets; but I believe, or think I
believe, in the saying of one of the brightest of modern Frenchmen: “Le
bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu
des chefs-d’œuvre.” So I delight in this adventure of Emerson’s mind in
the midst of “Hamlet,” as I do also in a similar one of Wordsworth’s,
who was wont to say, as reported by Hazlitt, that he could read
Milton’s description of Satan--
“Nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured”--
till he felt “a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of
beauty and grandeur.”
One thing, surely, we may say about verse of this miraculous quality:
it does not appeal first or principally to the ear; it is almost never
rich in melodic beauty, as such beauty is commonly estimated. It is
musical, no doubt, but after a secret manner of its own. Alliteration,
assonance, a pleasing alternation and interchange of vowel sounds,
all such crafty niceties are hidden, if not absent altogether,--so
completely hidden that the reader never thinks of them as either
present or absent.[11] The appeal is to the imagination, not to the
ear, and more is suggested than said. Such lines, along with their
simplicity of language, may well have something of mysteriousness. Yet
they must not puzzle the mind. The mystery must not be of the smaller
sort, that provokes questions. If the curiosity is teased in the
slightest to discover what the words mean, the spell is broken. There
is no enchantment in a riddle.
Neither is there charm in an epigram, be it never so happy, nor in any
conceit or play upon words.
“I could not love thee, Dear! so much,
Loved I not Honor more,”--
nothing of this kind, perfect as it is, will answer the test. Mere
cleverness might compass a thing like that. Indeed, the very cleverness
of it, its courtly gracefulness, its _manner_ (one seems to see the
bodily inflection and the wave of the hand that go with the phrase),
the spice of smartness in it, are enough to remove it instantly out of
the magic circle. Magical verse is neither pretty nor clever. It speaks
not of itself. If you think of _it_, the charm has failed.
In my own case, in lines that are magical to me, the suggestion or
picture is generally of something remote from the present, a calling up
of deeds long done and men long vanished, or else a foreboding of that
future day when _all_ things will be past; a suggestion or picture that
brings an instant soberness,--reverie, melancholy, what you will,--that
is the most delicious fruit of recollection. It suits with this idea
that the verse has mostly a slow, meditative movement, produced, if the
reader chooses to pick it to pieces, by long vowels and natural pauses,
or by final and initial consonants standing opposite each other, and,
between them, holding the words apart; such a movement as that of the
Wordsworth couplet first quoted,--
“For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,”--
or as that of the still more familiar slow-running line from the
sonnets of Shakespeare,--
“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,”--
a movement that not merely harmonizes with the complexion of the
thought, but heightens it to an extraordinary degree. Not that the
poet wrote with that end consciously in view, or altered a syllable to
secure it. Wordsworth’s lines, it is safe guessing, were for this time
given to him, and dropped upon the paper as they are, faultless beyond
even his too meddlesome desire to alter and amend. Indeed, in this as
in all the best verse, it is not the metrical structure that produces
the imaginative result, but exactly the opposite.
And here, as I think, we may gather a hint as to the impassable gulf
that separates inspired poetry from the very highest verse of the next
lower order. Take such a dainty bit of musical craftiness as this, the
first that offers itself for the purpose:--
“The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.”
Admirable after its kind, a kind of which it might seem unfair to say
that less is meant than meets the ear; but set it beside the Wordsworth
couplet, so easy, so simple,--
“Without all ornament, itself and true,”--
so inevitable and yet so impossible. One is cheap in its materials,
but divine in its birth and in its effect; the other is made of rare
and costly stuffs, but when all is done it _is_ made. Though it sound
old-fashioned to say so, there is no art like inspiration.
The supreme achievement of poetic genius is not the writing of
beautiful passages, but the conception and evolution of great
poems,--the whole, even in a work of the imagination, being greater
than any of its parts; but poetic inspiration reaches its highest
jet, if we may so speak, its ultimate bloom, in occasional lines of
transcendent and, as human judgment goes, perfect loveliness. I should
like to see a rigorously sifted collection of such fragments, an
anthology of magical verse, nothing less than magic being admitted. It
would be a small volume,--
“Infinite riches in a little room;”
but it would need an inspired reader to make it.
QUOTABILITY
QUOTABILITY
There is a kind of writing by which the reader is led along, perhaps
hurried along, if it be a narrative, without pause from beginning to
end. Everything follows directly from what has gone before; the mind
is held upon the same level of interest; and the impression produced
is, as it were, a single impression. There is another kind of writing,
which brings the reader now and then to a halt. He looks up from the
page, perhaps, fixing his eyes upon vacancy, and turning the thought,
or the expression of it, over in his mind; or he betakes himself to
a book of extracts and conveys a sentence or two into its keeping;
or, possibly, if he is one of the rare ones who buy books and read
with pencil in hand, he may indite a note on the margin of the leaf,
or at least set a mark there,--as one blazes a tree at the foot of
which treasure is buried. The author has said something,--something
in particular, fresh, surprising, original; something that seems to
have come from his own mind; a thing to be pondered over and returned
upon. For the moment there is no going further; the reader has turned
thinker, or is lost in a dream. It is as if a man had been walking down
a pleasant road bordered with hedges and fields, one much like another,
and now of a sudden has rounded a corner, and sees before him a lake
or a waterfall, something new, different, unexpected, at the sight of
which he stops as by instinct. Or you may say, it is as if a man had
been traveling steadily forward, thinking only of his journey’s end,
and all at once catches the shine of a gold piece in the path, or sees
by the wayside a flower so novel and beautiful that it must be stepped
aside for and looked at.
We have had in America three writers, living in the same country
village at the same time, who exemplified in a really striking manner
these two styles of writing: Hawthorne on the one hand, and Emerson and
Thoreau on the other.
Hawthorne’s work you may read from end to end without the temptation
to transfer so much as a line to the commonplace book. The road has
taken you through many interesting scenes, and past many a beautiful
landscape; you may have felt much and learned much; you might be
glad to turn back straightway and travel the course over again; but
you will have picked up no coin or jewel to put away in a cabinet.
This characteristic of Hawthorne is the more noteworthy because of
the moral quality of his work. A mere story-teller may naturally
keep his narrative on the go, as we say,--that is one of the chief
secrets of his art; but Hawthorne was not a mere story-teller. He was
a moralist,--Emerson himself hardly more so; yet he has never a moral
sentence. The fact is, he did not make sentences; he made books. The
story, not the sentence, nor even the paragraph or the chapter, was
the unit. The general truth--the moral--informed the work. Not only
was it not affixed as a label; it was not given anywhere a direct and
separable verbal expression. If the story does not convey it to you,
you will never get it. Hawthorne, in short, was what, for lack of a
better word, we may call a literary artist.
Emerson and Thoreau, on the other hand, were journalizers. Their life
was not to create, but to think, to see, to read, and to set down
the results of it all, day by day. When Emerson would make a piece
of literature,--a lecture, or an essay, or even a book,--he sought
out related paragraphs from his diary, dove-tailed them together,
disguising the joints more or less successfully, as might happen,--it
was no great matter,--added collateral ideas as they occurred to him,
and the job was done. It was done the more easily because the journal
was not a receptacle for impressions hastily noted. Sentence and
paragraph had been assiduously finished to a word, turned this way and
that and settled finally into shape, before they went into it; for a
journal, with him, was not a collection of rough jewels, but a drawer
full of pearls and precious stones, each carefully cut and polished,
ready for the setting or the string.
And what was true of Emerson was true in good degree of Thoreau, who
followed the same general method, but with a less pronounced and
continuous effect of discontinuity: partly, it would appear, because of
a difference in the turn of his mind (more given to reason, and less
to intuition), and partly because of the narrative form into which
his natural historical bent almost of necessity carried him,--a form
by which pages and whole chapters of his work are held pretty closely
together.
If with Hawthorne we put Irving,--who was like him so far as the
point now under consideration is concerned, fluidity of style and
an absence of “passages,”--we have four of our American classics
in well-contrasted pairs. One pair, we may say, did work that was
like tapestry, woven throughout; the other’s product was rather like
patchwork,--composed of rare and valuable stuff, but still patchwork.
This comparison, be it understood, is not to be taken as an attempt to
settle a question of comparative rank. A contrast is not of itself an
appraisal, nor a figure of speech an end of the argument. And after
all, if figures of speech are to be regarded, a floor of tiles may be
as beautiful, and even as “artistic,” as the finest of woven carpets.
Let comparisons go. We may study differences without exalting one or
depreciating another. Of the four writers now named, we are not to say
that any one was greater than all the rest. Each had his superiorities
and his inferiorities, the second necessary concomitants of the first;
for every virtue casts its shadow.
Emerson, for his part, seems to have been keenly aware of the
disconnectedness of his work,--his “formidable tendency to the lapidary
style,” he terms it,--and even to have accepted it as a defect. “I dot
evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature,”
he writes to Carlyle; “but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a
brick-kiln instead of a house.” That was one face of the medal; but his
“bricks” are now of more value than many another man’s streetful of
buildings.
Thoreau, though he too had his humble moods, was in general more
self-reliant--or at least more self-assertive--than his older friend
and master. He _believed_ in the “lapidary style,” or in some wholesome
approach to it; and what he believed in he would stand up for. “We
hear it complained of some works of genius,” he says, “that they
have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. But even the
mountain peaks on the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one
range.” He is defending Emerson,--though he does not name him,--and,
indirectly, himself; and with the same end in view he goes on to praise
Sir Walter Raleigh, whose style, he says, has a natural emphasis, like
a man’s tread, “and a breathing space between the sentences.” And he
declares, correctly enough, that what the ignorant applaud as a “flow”
of style is much of it nothing but a “rapid trot.”
One thing is certain: a man must work according to his own method. For
him that is the best method, and indeed the only one. Carlyle entreated
Emerson to “become concrete, and write in prose the straightest way.”
“I wish you would take an American Hero, one whom you really love;
and give us a History of him,--make an artistic bronze statue (in
good _words_) of his Life and him. I do indeed.” Thoreau’s appeal
to Emerson is for exactly the opposite: less art, if need be, and
less concreteness, but more “far-off heats,” more “star-dust and
undissolvable nebulæ.” To that end he turns Emerson’s own verse against
him. “From _his_
‘lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle.’
And yet sometimes,--
We should not mind if on our ear there fell
Some less of cunning, more of oracle.”
Clever critics, both of them, the Scotchman and the Yankee; but
meanwhile, between the two fires, Emerson kept on polishing pearls
and cutting cameos, with hardly so much as an attempt at an “artistic
bronze statue.” The author of the essay on “Self-Reliance” knew that a
man must work with his own mind, as he must wear his own face; that no
method is so good or so bad but that it may be damaged by an attempt to
make it as good as another’s.
And admirable as artistic perfection and absolute unity are, there
remains a place, and a high place, for works of another order. All
the world, even the stickler for classical perfection, loves a good
sentence. Blessed is the writer who now and then makes one. We forgive
him for carelessness of construction, and, almost, for every other
literary fault, if once in a while--not _too_ infrequently--he packs
wit or wisdom into a score or so of memorable words.