The points discussed at our last meeting were mainly of such a nature
that I need not occupy your time with the detailed review which has
seemed advisable heretofore.
You will remember, in a general way, that we finished examining the
claims of the poetry of the future, as presented by Whitman, and found
reason to believe, from several trains of argument, that its alleged
democratic spirit was based on a political misconception; that its
religious spirit was no more than that general feeling of good
fellowship and _cameraderie_ which every man of the world knows to be
the commonest of virtues among certain classes; its strength rested
upon purely physical qualifications which have long ago practically
ceased to be strength; its contempt for dandyism was itself only a
cruder dandyism, and its proposed substitution of power for beauty not
only an artistic blindness but a historical error as to the general
progress of this world, which has been _from_ strength _to_ beauty
ever since the ponderous old gods Oceanus and Gaea--representatives of
rude strength--gave way to the more orderly (that is, more beautiful)
reign of Saturn, and he in turn to the still more orderly and
beauty-representing Jupiter, whom Chaucer has called the "fadyr of
delicacye."
Passing thus from the Whitman school, we attacked that third
misconception of literary form which had taken the shape of the
so-called naturalistic school, as led by Zola in his novels and
defended by him in his recent work, _The Experimental Romance_. Here
we quickly discovered that if the term "experiment" were used by this
school in its ordinary and scientific sense, it would, in a large
number of cases, involve conditions which would exterminate the
authors of the projected experimental romances often at an early stage
of the plot; but that secondly, this inconvenience was avoided through
the very peculiar meaning which was attached to the word by this
school, and which reveals that they make no more use of experiment, in
point of fact, than any one of the numerous novelists who have for
years been in the habit of studying real life and nature as the basis
of their work.
In short, it appeared that to support the propriety of circulating
such books by calling them experimental romances, was as if a man
should sell profitable poison under the name of scientific milk, and
claim therefor both the gratitude of society and the privileges of
science. Finally, supplying ourselves with clear ideas as to the
difference between what has become so well known in modern times as
the scientific imagination and the poetic imagination, we determined
to regard the novel as a true work of art, and the novelist as an
artist, by reason of the _created forms_ in the novel which were shown
to be the distinctive outcome of the poetical imagination as opposed
to _the formula_ which is the distinctive outcome of the scientific
imagination. Nevertheless, in view of the circumstance that the facts
embodied in these forms are facts which must have been collected by a
genuine exercise of the true scientific faculty of observing and
classifying, we were compelled to regard the novel as a joint product
of science and art, ranking as art by virtue of its final purely
artistic outcome in the shape of beautiful created forms.
It is with a sense of relief that one turns away from what I fear has
seemed the personal and truculent tone of the last lecture--an
appearance almost inseparable from the fact that certain schools of
writing have become represented by the names of their living founders,
and which would, indeed, have prevented your present lecturer from
engaging in the discussion had not his reluctance been overwhelmed by
the sacred duty of protesting against all this forcible occupation of
the temple of art by those who have come certainly not for worship; it
is with a sense of relief that one turns from this to pursue the more
gracious and general studies which will now occupy us.
According to the plan already sketched: having now acquired some clear
fundamental conceptions of the correlations among form, science, art,
and the like notions often so vaguely used, we are next to inquire, as
our first main line of research: Is it really true that what was
explained as the growth in human personality is the continuing single
principle of human progress; is it really true that the difference
between the time of Aeschylus and the time of (say) George Eliot is the
difference in the strength with which the average man feels the scope
and sovereignty of his age? For upon this fundamental point
necessarily depends our final proposition that the modern novel is
itself the expression of this intensified personality and an
expression which could only be made by greatly extending the form of
the Greek drama. Pursuing our custom of leaving the abstract and
plunging into the concrete as soon as possible, let us determine this
question by endeavoring to find some special notable works of antique
and of modern times in which substantially the same subject matter has
been treated; let us then compare the difference in treatment, let us
summarize the picture of things evidently existing in the old, as
contrasted with the modern author's and reader's minds; and finally
let us see whether the differences thus emerging will not force
themselves upon us as differences growing out of personality. For the
purposes of this comparison I have thought that the _Prometheus Bound_
of Aeschylus, the _Prometheus Unbound_ of Shelley, and the _Prince
Deukalion_ of Bayard Taylor offered inviting resources as works which
treat substantially the same story, although the first was written
some two thousand three hundred years before the last two. Permit me
then, in beginning this comparison, to set before you these three
works in the broadest possible sketch by reading from each, here and
there a line such as may bring the action freshly before you and at
the same time elucidate specially the differences in treatment we are
in search of. As I now run rapidly through the _Prometheus_ of
Aeschylus, I ask you to bear along in mind the precise nature of this
spontaneous variation between man and man which I was at some pains to
define in my first lecture; and perhaps I may extend profitably the
partial idea there given by adopting a pretty fancy which I find in
No. 44 of Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and carrying it to a larger sphere
than there intended. The poet is here expressing the conception that
perhaps the main use of this present life of ours is for each one to
learn _himself_,--possibly as preparatory to learning other things
hereafter. He says:
The baby new to earth and sky
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that 'this is I:'
But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,'
And finds, 'I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.'
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin,
As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.
This use may lie in blood and breath,
Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew
Beyond the second birth of Death.
Now if we extend the process of growth here described as of a single
child passing through a single life to the collective process of
growth effected by humanity from age to age, we have quite clearly the
principle whose light I wish to shed upon our comparison of the works
I have named. Just as the child learns to know himself--"that I am
I"--so man comes in the course of time to feel more and more
distinctly I am I; and the growth of this feeling continually uproots
his old relations to things and brings about new relations with new
forms to clothe them in.
One may say indeed that this recognition of the supreme finality of
the _ego_ feeling among modern men seems a curious and not unrelated
counterpart of the theory by which the modern physicist, in order to
explain his physical world, divides it into atoms which atoms are
themselves indivisible. We have here the perplexing problem which in
the poem _De Profundis_, partially read to you, was poetically called
"the pain of this divisible, indivisible world." To explain the world,
whether the moral or the physical world, we must suppose it divisible
into atoms; to explain the atom, we must suppose that indivisible. Let
us see then in what form this "pain of the divisible, indivisible
world" with all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and
free will,--between the Infinite Personality, which should seem
boundless, and the finite personality which nevertheless seems to
bound it,--let us see, I say under what explicit forms this pain
appears in the _Prometheus Bound_, for alas it was an old grief when
Aeschylus was a baby. Here, then, in the centre of the stage lies the
gigantic figure of Prometheus, (let us fancy) stark, prostrate, proud,
unmoving throughout the whole action. Two ministers of Jove, Might and
Force, have him in charge and Hephaestus--the god more commonly known
as Vulcan--stands by with chain, hammer and bolt. Might acquaints us
at once with what is toward.
At length the utmost bound of earth we've reached,
This Scythian soil, this wild untrodden waste.
Hephaestus, now Jove's high behests demand
Thy care; to these steep, cliffy rocks bind down
With close-linked chains of during adamant
This daring wretch. For he the bright rayed fire,
Mother of arts....
Filched from the gods and gave to mortals. Here
.....
Let his pride learn to bow to Jove supreme;
And love men well but love them not too much.
Hephaestus proceeds to chain him, but with many protests, not only
because Prometheus' act seems over-punished, but because he is
Prometheus' kinsman.