TALKS
ON
THE STUDY OF LITERATURE
BY
ARLO BATES
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1897
BY ARLO BATES
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
This volume is made up from a course of lectures delivered under the
auspices of the Lowell Institute in the autumn of 1895. These have been
revised and to some extent rewritten, and the division into chapters
made; but there has been no essential change.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. What Literature Is 1
II. Literary Expression 23
III. The Study of Literature 33
IV. Why we Study Literature 45
V. False Methods 60
VI. Methods of Study 69
VII. The Language of Literature 88
VIII. The Intangible Language 111
IX. The Classics 123
X. The Value of the Classics 135
XI. The Greater Classics 142
XII. Contemporary Literature 154
XIII. New Books and Old 167
XIV. Fiction 184
XV. Fiction and Life 199
XVI. Poetry 219
XVII. The Texture of Poetry 227
XVIII. Poetry and Life 241
TALKS ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE
I
WHAT LITERATURE IS
As all life proceeds from the egg, so all discussion must proceed from a
definition. Indeed, it is generally necessary to follow definition by
definition, fixing the meaning of the terms used in the original
explanation, and again explaining the words employed in this exposition.
I once heard a learned but somewhat pedantic man begin to answer the
question of a child by saying that a lynx is a wild quadruped. He was
allowed to get no further, but was at once asked what a quadruped is. He
responded that it is a mammal with four feet. This of course provoked
the inquiry what a mammal is; and so on from one question to another,
until the original subject was entirely lost sight of, and the lynx
disappeared in a maze of verbal distinctions as completely as it might
have vanished in the tangles of the forest primeval. I feel that I am
not wholly safe from danger of repeating the experience of this
well-meaning pedant if I attempt to give a definition of literature.
The temptation is strong to content myself with saying: "Of course we
all know what literature is." The difficulty which I have had in the
endeavor to frame a satisfactory explanation of the term has convinced
me, however, that it is necessary to assume that few of us do know, and
has impressed upon me the need of trying to make clear what the word
means to me. If my statement seem insufficient for general application,
it will at least show the sense which I shall give to "literature" in
these talks.
In its most extended signification literature of course might be taken
to include whatever is written or printed; but our concern is with that
portion only which is indicated by the name "polite literature," or by
the imported term "belles-lettres,"--both antiquated though respectable
phrases. In other words, I wish to confine my examination to those
written works which can properly be brought within the scope of
literature as one of the fine arts.
Undoubtedly we all have a general idea of the limitations which are
implied by these various terms, and we are not without a more or less
vague notion of what is indicated by the word literature in its most
restricted and highest sense. The important point is whether our idea is
clear and well realized. We have no difficulty in saying that one book
belongs to art and that another does not; but we often find ourselves
perplexed when it comes to telling why. We should all agree that "The
Scarlet Letter" is literature and that the latest sensational novel is
not,--but are we sure what makes the difference? We know that
Shakespeare wrote poetry and Tupper doggerel, but it by no means follows
that we can always distinguish doggerel from poetry; and while it is not
perhaps of consequence whether we are able to inform others why we
respect the work of one or another, it is of much importance that we be
in a position to justify our tastes to ourselves. It is not hard to
discover whether we enjoy a book, and it is generally possible to tell
why we like it; but this is not the whole of the matter. It is necessary
that we be able to estimate the justice of our preferences. We must
remember that our liking or disliking is not only a test of the
book,--but is a test of us as well. There is no more accurate gauge of
the moral character of a man than the nature of the books which he
really cares for. He who would progress by the aid of literature must
have reliable standards by which to judge his literary feelings and
opinions; he must be able to say: "My antipathy to such a work is
justified by this or by that principle; my pleasure in that other is
fine because for these reasons the book itself is noble."
It is hardly possible to arrive at any clear understanding of what is
meant by literature as an art, without some conception of what
constitutes art in general. Broadly speaking, art exists in consequence
of the universal human desire for sympathy. Man is forever endeavoring
to break down the wall which separates him from his fellows. Whether we
call it egotism or simply humanity, we all know the wish to make others
appreciate our feelings; to show them how we suffer, how we enjoy. We
batter our fellow-men with our opinions sufficiently often, but this is
as nothing to the insistence with which we pour out to them our
feelings. A friend is the most valued of earthly possessions largely
because he is willing to receive without appearance of impatience the
unending story of our mental sensations. We are all of us more or less
conscious of the constant impulse which urges us on to expression; of
the inner necessity which moves us to continual endeavors to make others
share our thoughts, our experiences, but most of all our emotions. It
seems to me that if we trace this instinctive desire back far enough, we
reach the beginnings of art.
It may seem that the splendidly immeasurable achievements of poetry and
painting, of architecture, of music and sculpture, are far enough from
this primal impulse; but I believe that in it is to be found their germ.
Art began with the first embodiment of human feelings by permanent
means. Let us suppose, by way of illustration, some prehistoric man,
thrilled with awe and terror at sight of a mastodon, and scratching upon
a bone rude lines in the shape of the animal,--not only to give
information, not only to show what the beast was like, but also to
convey to his fellows his feelings when confronted with the monster. It
is as if he said: "See! I cannot put into words what I felt; but look!
the creature was like this. Think how you would feel if you came face to
face with it. Then you will know how I felt." Something of this sort may
the beginnings of art be conceived to have been.
I do not mean, of course, that the prehistoric man who made such a
picture--and such a picture exists--analyzed his motives. He felt a
thing which he could not say in words; he instinctively turned to
pictorial representation,--and graphic art was born.
The birth of poetry was probably not entirely dissimilar. Barbaric men,
exulting in the wild delight of victory, may seem unlikely sponsors for
the infant muse, and yet it is with them that song began. The savage joy
of the conquerors, too great for word, found vent at first in excited,
bounding leaps and uncouthly ferocious gestures, by repetition growing
into rhythm; then broke into inarticulate sounds which timed the
movements, until these in turn gave place to words, gradually moulded
into rude verse by the measures of the dance. The need of expressing the
feelings which swell inwardly, the desire of sharing with others, of
putting into tangible form, the emotions that thrill the soul is common
to all human beings; and it is from this that arises the thing which we
call art.
The essence of art, then, is the expression of emotion; and it follows
that any book to be a work of art must embody sincere emotion. Not all
works which spring from genuine feeling succeed in embodying or
conveying it. The writer must be sufficiently master of technique to be
able to make words impart what he would express. The emotion phrased
must moreover be general and in some degree typical. Man is interested
and concerned in the emotions of men only in so far as these throw light
on the nature and possibilities of life. Art must therefore deal with
what is typical in the sense that it touches the possibilities of all
human nature. If it concerns itself with much that only the few can or
may experience objectively, it has to do with that only which all human
beings may be conceived of as sharing subjectively. Literature may be
broadly defined as the adequate expression of genuine and typical
emotion. The definition may seem clumsy, and hardly exact enough to be
allowed in theoretical æsthetics; but it seems to me sufficiently
accurate to serve our present purpose. Certainly the essentials of
literature are the adequate embodiment of sincere and general feeling.
By sincerity here we mean that which is not conventional, which is not
theoretical, not artificial; that which springs from a desire honestly
to impart to others exactly the emotion that has been actually felt. By
the term "emotion" or "feeling" we mean those inner sensations of
pleasure, excitement, pain, or passion, which are distinguished from the
merely intellectual processes of the mind,--from thought, perception,
and reason. It is not necessary to trespass just now on the domain of
the psychologist by an endeavor to establish scientific distinctions.
We are all able to appreciate the difference between what we think and
what we feel, between those things which touch the intellect and those
which affect the emotional nature. We see a sentence written on paper,
and are intellectually aware of it; but unless it has for us some
especial message, unless it concerns us personally, we are not moved by
it. Most impressions which we receive touch our understanding without
arousing our feelings. This is all so evident that there is not likely
to arise in your minds any confusion in regard to the meaning of the
phrase "genuine emotion."
Whatever be the origin of this emotion it must be essentially
impersonal, and it is generally so in form. There are comparatively few
works of art which are confessedly the record of simple, direct,
personal experience; and perhaps none of these stand in the front rank
of literature. Of course I am not speaking of literature which takes a
personal form, like any book written in the first person; but of those
that are avowedly a record of actual life. We must certainly include in
literature works like the "Reflections" of Marcus Aurelius, the
"Confessions" of Augustine, and--though the cry is far--Rousseau, and
the "Journal Intime" of Amiel, but there is no one of these which is to
be ranked high in the scale of the world's greatest books. Even in
poetry the same thing is true. However we may admire "In Memoriam" and
that much greater poem, Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese,"
we are little likely to regard them as standing supremely high among
the masterpieces. The "Sonnets" of Shakespeare which we suppose to be
personal are yet with supreme art made so impersonal that as far as the
reader is concerned the experiences which they record might be entirely
imaginary. It is in proportion as a poet is able to give this quality
which might be called generalization to his work that it becomes art.
The reason of this is not far to seek. If the emotion is professedly
personal it appeals less strongly to mankind, and it is moreover likely
to interfere with its own effective embodiment. All emotion in
literature must be purely imaginative as far as its expression in words
is concerned. Of course poetical form may be so thoroughly mastered as
to become almost instinctive, but nevertheless acute personal feeling
must trammel utterance. It is not that the author does not live through
what he sets forth. It is that the artistic moment is not the moment of
experience, but that of imaginative remembrance. The "Sonnets from the
Portuguese" afford admirable examples of what I mean. It is well known
that these relate a most completely personal and individual story. Not
only the sentiments but the circumstances set forth were those of the
poet's intimate actual life. It was the passion of love and of
self-renunciation in her own heart which broke forth in the fine
sonnet:--
Go from me, yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of the door
Of individual life shall I command
The uses of my soul; or lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before
Without the sense of that which I forebore,--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes: and when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.
There came to Mrs. Browning a poignant moment when she realized with a
thrill of anguish what it would mean to her to live out her life alone,
separated forever from the lover who had won her back from the very
grasp of death. It was not in the pang of that throe that she made of it
a sonnet; but afterward, while it was still felt, it is true, but felt
rather as a memory vividly reproduced by the imagination. In so far both
he who writes impersonally and he who writes personally are dealing with
that which at the instant exists in the imagination. In the latter,
however, there is still the remembrance of the actuality, the vibration
of the joy or sorrow of which that imagining is born. Human
self-consciousness intrudes itself whenever one is avowedly writing of
self; sometimes even vanity plays an important part. From these and
other causes it results that, whatever may be the exceptions, the
highest work is that which phrases the general and the impersonal with
no direct reference to self. Personal feeling lies behind all art, and
no work can be great which does not rest on a basis of experience, more
or less remotely; yet the greatest artist is he who embodies emotion,
not in terms of his own life, but in those which make it equally the
property of all mankind. It is feeling no longer egotistic, but broadly
human. If the simile do not seem too homely, we might say that the
difference is that between arithmetic and algebra. In the one case it is
the working out of a particular problem; in the other of an equation
which is universal.
Mankind tests art by universal experience. If an author has really felt
what he has written, if what he sets down has been actual to him in
imagination, whether actual in experience or not, readers recognize
this, and receive his work, so that it lives. If he has affected a
feeling, if he has shammed emotion, the whole is sure to ring false, and
the world soon tires of his writings. Immediate popular judgment of a
book is pretty generally wrong; ultimate general estimate is invariably
correct. Humanity knows the truth of human feeling; and while it may be
fooled for a time, it comes to the truth at last, in act if not in
theory. The general public is guided by the wise few, and it does not
reason out the difference between the genuine and the imitation; but it
will in the end save the real, while the sham is forgotten through utter
neglect.
Even where an author has seemingly persuaded himself that his pretended
emotions are real, he cannot permanently deceive the world. You may
remember the chapter in Aldrich's delightful "Story of a Bad Boy" which
relates how Tom Bailey, being crossed in love at the mature age of
fourteen, deliberately became a "blighted being;" how he neglected his
hair, avoided his playmates, made a point of having a poor appetite, and
went mooning about forsaken graveyards, endeavoring to fix his thoughts
upon death and self-destruction; how entirely the whole matter was a
humbug, and yet how sincere the boy was in supposing himself to be
unutterably melancholy. "It was a great comfort," he says, "to be so
perfectly miserable and yet not to suffer any. I used to look in the
glass and gloat over the amount and variety of mournful expression I
could throw into my features. If I caught myself smiling at anything, I
cut the smile short with a sigh. The oddest thing about all this is, I
never once suspected that I was not unhappy. No one ... was more
deceived than I." We have all of us had experiences of this kind, and I
fancy that there are few writers who cannot look back to a stage in
their career when they thought that it was a prime essential of
authorship to believe themselves to feel things which they did not feel
in the least. This sort of self-deception is characteristic of a whole
school of writers, of whom Byron was in his day a typical example. There
is no doubt that Byron, greatly gifted as he was, took his mooning
melancholy with monstrous seriousness when he began to write it, and the
public received it with equal gravity. Yet Byron's mysterious misery,
his immeasurable wickedness, his misanthropy too great for words, were
mere affectations,--stage tricks which appealed to the gallery. Nobody
is moved by them now. The fact that the poet himself thought that he
believed in them could not save them. Byron had other and nobler
qualities which make his best work endure, but it is in spite of his
Bad-Boy-ish pose as a "blighted being." The fact is that sooner or later
time tries all art by the tests of truth and common sense, and nothing
which is not genuine is able to endure this proving.
To be literature a work must express sincere emotion; but how is feeling
which is genuine to be distinguished from that which is affected? All
that has been said must be regarded as simply theoretical and of very
little practical interest unless there be some criterion by which this
question may be settled. Manifestly we cannot so far enter into the
consciousness of the writer as to tell whether he does or does not feel
what he expresses; it can be only from outward signs that we judge
whether his imagination has first made real to him what he undertakes to
make real for others.
Something may be judged by the amount of seriousness with which a thing
is written. The air of sincerity which is inevitable in the genuine is
most difficult to counterfeit. What a man really feels he writes with a
certain earnestness which may seem indefinite, but which is sufficiently
tangible in its effects upon the reader. More than by any other single
influence mankind has in all its history been more affected by the
contagion of belief; and it is not easy to exaggerate the
susceptibility of humanity to this force. Vague and elusive as this test
of the genuineness of emotion might seem, it is in reality capable of
much practical application. We have no trouble in deciding that the
conventional rhymes which fill the corners of the newspapers are not the
product of genuine inner stress. We are too well acquainted with these
time-draggled rhymes of "love" and "dove," of "darts" and "hearts," of
"woe" and "throe;" we have encountered too often these pretty, petty
fancies, these twilight musings and midnight moans, this mild melancholy
and maudlin sentimentality. We have only to read these trig little
bunches of verse, tied up, as it were, with sad-colored ribbons, to feel
their artificiality. On the other hand, it is impossible to read "Helen
of Kirconnel," or Browning's "Prospice," or Wordsworth's poems to Lucy,
without being sure that the poet meant that which he said in his song
with all the fervor of heart and imagination. A reader need not be very
critical to feel that the novels of the "Duchess" and her tribe are made
by a process as mechanical as that of making paper flowers; he will not
be able to advance far in literary judgment without coming to suspect
that fiction like the pleasant pot-boilers of William Black and W. Clark
Russell, if hand-made, is yet manufactured according to an arbitrary
pattern; but what reader can fail to feel that to Hawthorne "The Scarlet
Letter" was utterly true, that to Thackeray Colonel Newcome was a
creature warm with human blood and alive with a vigorous humanity?
Theoretically we may doubt our power to judge of the sincerity of an
author, but we do not find this so impossible practically.
Critics sometimes say of a book that it is or is not "convincing." What
they mean is that the author has or has not been able to make what he
has written seem true to the imagination of the reader. The man who in
daily life attempts to act a part is pretty sure sooner or later to
betray himself to the observant eye. His real self will shape the
disguise under which he has hidden it; he may hold out the hands and say
the words of Esau, but the voice with which he speaks will perforce be
the voice of Jacob. It is so in literature, and especially in literature
which arouses the perceptions by an appeal to the imagination. The
writer must be in earnest himself or he cannot convince the reader. To
the man who invents a fiction, for instance, the story which he has
devised must in his imagination be profoundly true or it will not be
true to the audience which he addresses. To the novelist who is
"convincing," his characters are as real as the men he meets in his
walks or sits beside at table. It is for this reason that every novelist
with imagination is likely to find that the fictitious personages of his
story seem to act independently of the will of the author. They are so
real that they must follow out the laws of their character, although
that character exists only in imagination. For the author to feel this
verity in what he writes is of course not all that is needed to enable
him to convince his public; but it is certain that he is helpless
without it, and that he cannot make real to others what is not real to
himself.
In emotion we express the difference between the genuine and the
counterfeit by the words "sentiment" and "sentimentality." Sentiment is
what a man really feels; sentimentality is what he persuades himself
that he feels. The Bad Boy as a "blighted being" is the type of
sentimentalists for all time. There is about the same relation between
sentimentality and sentiment that there is between a paper doll and the
lovely girl that it represents. There are fashions in emotions as there
are fashions in bonnets; and foolish mortals are as prone to follow one
as another. It is no more difficult for persons of a certain quality of
mind to persuade themselves that they thrill with what they conceive to
be the proper emotion than it is for a woman to convince herself of the
especial fitness to her face of the latest device in utterly unbecoming
headgear. Our grandmothers felt that proper maidenly sensibility
required them to be so deeply moved by tales of broken hearts and
unrequited affection that they must escape from the too poignant anguish
by fainting into the arms of the nearest man. Their grandchildren to-day
are neither more nor less sincere, neither less nor more sensible in
following to extremes other emotional modes which it might be invidious
to specify. Sentimentality will not cease while the power of
self-deception remains to human beings.
With sentimentality genuine literature has no more to do than it has
with other human weaknesses and vices, which it may picture but must not
share. With sentiment it is concerned in every line. Of sentiment no
composition can have too much; of sentimentality it has more than enough
if there be but the trace shown in a single affectation of phrase, in
one unmeaning syllable or unnecessary accent.
There are other tests of the genuineness of the emotion expressed in
literature which are more tangible than those just given; and being more
tangible they are more easily applied. I have said that sham sentiment
is sure to ring false. This is largely due to the fact that it is
inevitably inconsistent. Just as a man has no difficulty in acting out
his own character, whereas in any part that is assumed there are sure
sooner or later to be lapses and incongruities, so genuine emotion will
be consistent because it is real, while that which is feigned will
almost surely jar upon itself. The fictitious personage that the
novelist actually shapes in his imagination, that is more real to him
than if it stood by his side in solid flesh, must be consistent with
itself because it is in the mind of its creator a living entity. It may
not to the reader seem winning or even human, but it will be a unit in
its conception and its expression, a complete and consistent whole. The
poem which comes molten from the furnace of the imagination will be a
single thing, not a collection of verses more or less ingeniously
dovetailed together. The work which has been felt as a whole, which has
been grasped as a whole, which has as a whole been lived by that inner
self which is the only true producer of art, will be so consistent, so
unified, so closely knit, that the reader cannot conceive of it as being
built up of fortuitous parts, or as existing at all except in the
beautiful completeness which genius has given it.
What I mean may perhaps be more clear to you if you take any of the
little tinkling rhymes which abound, and examine them critically. Even
some of more merit easily afford example. Take that pleasant rhyme so
popular in the youth of our fathers, "The Old Oaken Bucket," and see how
one stanza or another might be lost without being missed, how one
thought or another has obviously been put in for the rhyme or to fill
out the verse, and how the author seems throughout always to have been
obliged to consider what he might say next, putting his work together as
a joiner matches boards for a table-top. Contrast this with the absolute
unity of Wordsworth's "Daffodils," Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection," or any really great lyric. You
will perceive the difference better than any one can say it. It is true
that the quality of which we are speaking is sufficiently subtile to
make examples unsatisfactory and perhaps even dangerous; but it seems to
me that it is not too much to say that any careful and intelligent
reader will find little difficulty in feeling the unity of the
masterpieces of literature.
This lack of consistency is most easily appreciated, perhaps, in the
drawing of character. Those modern writers who look upon literature as
having two functions, first, to advance extravagant theories, and
second,--and more important,--to advertise the author, are constantly
putting forward personages that are so inconsistent that it is
impossible not to see that they are mere embodied arguments or
sensationalism incarnate, and not in the least creatures of a strong and
wholesome imagination. When in "The Doll's House" Ibsen makes Nora Helma
an inconsequent, frivolous, childish puppet, destitute alike of moral
and of common sense, and then in the twinkling of an eye transforms her
into an indignant woman, full of moral purpose, furnished not only with
a complete set of advanced views but with an entire battery of modern
arguments with which to support them,--when, in a word, the author, for
the sake of his theory, works a visible miracle, we cease to believe in
his imaginative sincerity. We know that he is dogmatizing, not creating;
that this is artifice, not art.
Another test of the genuineness of what is expressed in literature is
its truth to life. Here again we tread upon ground somewhat uncertain,
since truth is as elusive as a sunbeam, and to no two human beings the
same. Yet while the meaning of life is not the same to any two who walk
under the heavens, there are certain broad principles which all men
recognize. The eternal facts of life and of death, of love and of hate,
the instinct of self-preservation, the fear of pain, the respect for
courage, and the enthrallment of passion,--these are laws of humanity
so universal that we assume them to be known to all mankind. We cannot
believe that any mortal can find that true to his imagination which
ignores these unvarying conditions of human existence. He who writes
what is untrue to humanity cannot persuade us that he writes what is
true to himself. We are sure that those impossible heroes of Ouida, with
their superhuman accomplishments, those heroines of beauty
transcendently incompatible with their corrupt hearts, base lives, and
entire defiance of all sanitary laws, were no more real to their author
than they are to us. Conviction springs from the imagination, and
imagination is above all else the realizing faculty. It is idle to say
that a writer imagines every extravagant and impossible whimsy which
comes into his head. He imagines those things, and those things only,
which are real to his inner being; so that in judging literature the
question to be settled is: Does this thing which the author tells, this
emotion which he expresses, impress us as having been to him when he
wrote actual, true, and absolutely real? To unimaginative persons it
might seem that I am uttering nonsense. It is not possible for a man
without imagination to see how things which are invented by the mind
should by that same mind, in all sanity, be received as real. Yet that
is precisely what happens. No one, I believe, produces real or permanent
literature who is not capable of performing this miracle; who does not
feel to be true that which has no other being, no other place, no other
significance save that which it derives from the creative power of his
own inner sense, working upon the material furnished by his perception
of the world around him. This is the daily miracle of genius; but it is
a miracle shared to some extent by every mortal who has the faintest
glimmer of genuine imagination.
To be convincing literature must express emotion which is genuine; to
commend itself to the best sense of mankind, and thus to take its place
in the front rank, it must deal with emotion which is wholesome and
normal. A work phrasing morbid emotion may be art, and it may be
lasting; but it is not the highest art, and it does not approve itself
to the best and sanest taste. Mankind looks to literature for the
expression of genuine, strong, healthy human emotion; emotion
passionate, tragic, painful, the exhilaration of joy or the frenzy of
grief, as it may be; but always the emotion which under the given
conditions would be felt by the healthy heart and soul, by the virile
man and the womanly woman. No amount of insane power flashing here and
there amid the foulness of Tolstoi's "Kreutzer Sonata," can reconcile
the world to the fact that the book embodies the broodings of a mind
morbid and diseased. Even to concede that the author of such a work had
genius could not avail to conceal the fact that his muse was smitten
from head to feet with the unspeakable corruption of leprosy. Morbid
literature may produce a profound sensation, but it is incapable of
creating a permanent impression.
The principles of which we are speaking are strikingly illustrated in
the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. He was possessed of an imagination narrow,
but keen; uncertain and wayward, but alert and swift; individual and
original, though unhappily lacking any ethical stability. In his best
work he is sincere and convincing, so that stories like "The Cask of
Amontillado," "The Gold Bug," or "The Purloined Letter," are permanently
effective, each in its way and degree. Poe's masterpiece, "The Fall of
the House of Usher," is a study of morbid character, but it is saved by
the fact that this is viewed in its effect upon a healthy nature. The
reader looks at everything through the mind of the imaginary narrator,
so that the ultimate effect is that of an exhibition of the feelings of
a wholesome nature brought into contact with madness; although even so
the ordinary reader is still repelled by the abnormal elements of the
theme. There is in all the work of Poe a good deal that is fantastic and
not a little that is affected. He is rarely entirely sincere and sane.
He shared with Byron an instinctive fondness for the rôle of a "blighted
being," and a halo of inebriety too often encircles his head; yet at his
best he moves us by the mysterious and incommunicable power of genius.
Many of his tales, on the other hand, are mere mechanical tasks, and as
such neither convincing nor permanent. There is a great deal of Poe
which is not worth anybody's reading because he did not believe it, did
not imagine it as real, when he wrote it. Other stories of his
illustrate the futility of self-deception on the part of the author.
"Lygeia" Poe always announced as his masterpiece. He apparently
persuaded himself that he felt its turgid sentimentality, that he
thrilled at its elaborately theatrical setting, and he flattered himself
that he could cheat the world as he had cheated himself. Yet the reader
is not fooled. Every man of judgment realizes that, however the author
was able to deceive himself, "Lygeia" is rubbish, and sophomoric rubbish
at that.
There has probably never before been a time which afforded so abundant
illustrations of morbid work as to-day. We shall have occasion later to
speak of Verlaine, Zola, Ibsen, and the rest, with their prurient prose
and putrescent poetry; and here it is enough to note that the diseased
and the morbid are by definition excluded from literature in the best
sense of the word. Good art is not only sincere; it is human, and
wholesome, and sound.
II
LITERARY EXPRESSION
So much, then, for what literature must express; it is well now to
examine for a little the manner of expression. To feel genuine emotion
is not all that is required of a writer. Among artists cannot be
reckoned
One born with poet's heart in sad eclipse
Because unmatched with poet's tongue;
Whose song impassioned struggles to his lips,
Yet dies, alas! unsung.
He must be able to sing the song; to make the reader share the throbbing
of his heart. All men feel; the artist is he who can by the use of
conventions impart his feelings to the world. The musician uses
conventions of sound, the painter conventions of color, the sculptor
conventions of form, and the writer must employ the means most
artificial of all, the conventions of language.
Here might be considered, if there were space, the whole subject of
artistic technique; but it is sufficient for our purposes to notice that
the test of technical excellence is the completeness with which the
means are adapted to the end sought. The crucial question in regard to
artistic workmanship is: "Does it faithfully and fully convey the
emotion which is the essence of the work?" A work of art must make
itself felt as well as intellectually understood; it must reach the
heart as well as the brain. If a picture, a statue, a piece of music, or
a poem provokes your admiration without touching your sensibilities,
there is something radically wrong with the work--or with you.
First of all, then, expression must be adequate. If it is slovenly,
incomplete, unskillful, it fails to impart the emotion which is its
purpose. We have all sat down seething with excitement and endeavored to
get our feelings upon paper, only to discover that our command of
ourselves and of technical means was not sufficient to allow us to
phrase adequately that which yet we felt most sincerely. It is true that
style is in a sense a subordinate matter, but it is none the less an
essential one. It is manifestly of little consequence to the world what
one has to say if one cannot say it. We cannot be thrilled by the song
which the dumb would sing had he but voice.
Yet it is necessary to remember that although expression must be
adequate, it must also be subordinate. It is a means and not an end, and
the least suspicion of its having been put first destroys our sense of
the reality of the feeling it embodies. If an actress in moments of
impassioned declamation is detected arranging her draperies, her art no
longer carries conviction. Nobody feeling the heart-swelling words of
Queen Katharine, for instance, could while speaking them be openly
concerned about the effective disposition of her petticoats. The reader
of too intricate and elaborate verse, such as the French forms of
triolet, rondeau, rondel, and so on, has an instinctive perception that
a poet whose attention was taken up with the involved and artfully
difficult versification could not have been experiencing any deep
passion, no matter how strongly the verse protests that he has.
Expression obviously artful instantly arouses suspicion that it has been
wrought for its own sake only.
Technical excellence which displays the cleverness of the artist rather
than imparts the emotion which is its object, defeats its own end. A
book so elaborated that we feel that the author was absorbed in
perfection of expression rather than in what he had to express leaves us
cold and unmoved, if it does not tire us. The messenger has usurped the
attention which belonged to the message. It is not impossible that I
shall offend some of you when I say that Walter Pater's "Marius the
Epicurean" seems to me a typical example of this sort of book. The
author has expended his energies in exquisite excesses of language; he
has refined his style until it has become artfully inanimate. It is like
one of the beautiful glass flowers in the Harvard Museum. It is not a
living rose. It is no longer a message spoken to the heart of mankind;
it is a brilliant exercise in technique.
Literature, then, is genuine emotion, adequately expressed. To be
genuine it must come from the imagination; and adequate expression is
that which in turn reaches the imagination. If it were not that the
phrase seems forbiddingly cumbersome, we might, indeed, define
literature as being such writings as are able to arouse emotion by an
appeal to the imagination.
A sensational story, what the English call a "penny dreadful" or a
"shilling shocker" according to the cost of the bundle of cheap
excitement, may be an appeal to the emotions, but it aims to act upon
the senses or the nerves. Its endeavor is to work by the grossest and
most palpable means. It is an assault, so to say, upon the perceptions.
Books of this sort have nothing to do with imagination, either in reader
or writer. They would be ruled out by all the tests which we have given,
since they are not sincere, not convincing, not consistent, not true to
life.
One step higher in the scale come romances of abounding fancy, of which
"She" may serve as an example. They are clever feats of intellectual
jugglery, and it is to the intellectual perceptions that they appeal.
Not, it is true, to the intellect in its loftiest moods, but the
understanding as distinguished from the feeling. No reader is really
moved by them. The ingenuity of the author amuses and absorbs the
attention. The dexterity and unexpectedness of the tale excite and
entertain. The pleasure experienced in reading these books is not far
removed from that experienced in seeing a clever contortionist. To read
them is like going to the circus,--a pleasant diversion, and one not
without a certain importance to this over-wrought generation. It is
amusement, although not of a high grade.
Do not suppose, however, that I am saying that a story cannot have an
exciting plot and yet be literature. In the restricted sense in which
these lectures take the term, I should say that "The Adventures of
Captain Horn," an agreeable book which has been widely read of late, is
not literature; and yet "Treasure Island," upon which perhaps to some
extent the former was modeled, most certainly is literature. The
difference is that while Stockton in "Captain Horn" has worked with
clever ingenuity to entertain, Stevenson in "Treasure Island" so vividly
imagined what he wrote that he has made his characters human, informed
every page with genuine feeling, and produced a romance permanently
vital. The plot of those superb masterpieces of adventure, the
"D'Artagnan Romances," is as wild, perhaps as extravagant, as that of
the marrow-curdling tales which make the fortunes of sensational papers;
but to the excitement of adventure is added that unification, that
humanization, that perfection of imaginative realism which mark Dumas as
a genius.
The difference of effect between books which are not literature and
those which are is that while these amuse, entertain, glance over the
surface of the mind, those touch the deepest springs of being. They
touch us æsthetically, it is true. The emotion aroused is impersonal,
and thus removed from the keen thrill which is born of actual
experiences; but it depends upon the same passions, the same
characteristics, the same humanity, that underlie the joys and sorrows
of real life. It is because we are capable of passion and of
disappointment that we are moved by the love and anguish of Romeo and
Juliet, of Francesca and Paolo. Our emotion is not identical with that
with which the heart throbs in personal love and grief; yet art which is
genuine awakes emotion thoroughly genuine. Books of sensationalism and
sentimentality may excite curiosity, or wonder, or amusement, or sham
feeling; but they must have at least some spark of sacred fire before
they can arouse in the intelligent reader this inner throb of real
feeling.
The personal equation must be considered here. The same book must affect
different readers differently. From the sentimental maid who weeps in
the kitchen over "The Seventy Sorrows of Madelaine the Broken-hearted,"
to her master in his library, touched by the grief of King Lear, is
indeed a far cry; and yet both may be deeply moved. It may be asked
whether we have arrived at a standard which will enable us to judge
between them.
The matter is perhaps to be cleared up somewhat by a little common
sense. It is not hard to decide whether the kitchen-maid in question has
an imagination sufficiently well developed to bring her within the
legitimate grounds of inquiry; and the fiction which delights her
rudimentary understanding is easily ruled out. It is not so easy,
however, to dispose of this point entirely. There is always a
border-land concerning which doubts and disagreements must continue to
exist. In all matters connected with the feelings it is necessary to
recognize the fact that the practical is not likely to accord fully with
the theoretical. We define literature only to be brought face to face
with the difficulty which is universal in art, the difficulty of degree.
No book will answer, it may be, to a theoretical definition, no work
conform completely to required conditions. The composition which is a
masterpiece stands at one end of the list, and comes so near to the
ideal that there is no doubt of its place. At the other end there is the
rubbish, equally unquestioned in its worthlessness. The troublesome
thing is to decide where between comes the dividing line above which is
literature. We call a ring or a coin gold, knowing that it contains a
mixture of alloy. The goldsmith may have a standard, and refuse the name
gold to any mixture into which enters a given per cent of baser metal;
but in art this is impossible. Here each reader must decide for himself.
Whether works which lie near the line are to be considered literature is
a question to be decided individually. Each reader is justified in
making his own decision, provided only that he found it upon definite
principles. It is largely a question what is one's own responsiveness to
literature. There are those to whom Tolstoi's "War and Peace" is a work
of greatness, while others fail to find it anything but a chaotic and
unorganized note-book of a genius not self-responsible. "John Inglesant"
appeals to many persons of excellent taste as a novel of permanent
beauty, while to some it seems sentimental and artificial. Mr. Lowell
and others have regarded Sylvester Judd's "Margaret" as one of the
classics of American fiction; yet it has never appealed to the general
public, and an eminent literary man told me not long ago that he finds
it dull. To these and to all other varying opinions there is but one
thing to be said: Any man has a right to his judgment if it is founded
upon the logical application of definite principles. Any opinion which
is sincere and based upon standards must be treated with respect,
whether it is agreed with or not.
It is difficult, on the other hand, to feel that there is any moral
excuse for prejudices which are the result of individual whims rather
than of deliberate judgment. An opinion should not be some burr caught
up by the garments unawares; but a fruit carefully selected as the best
on the tree. The fact is that the effort of forming an intelligent
judgment is more severe than most persons care to undertake unless
absolutely forced to it. It sometimes seems as if the whole tendency of
modern life were in the direction of cultivating mental dexterity until
the need of also learning mental concentration is in danger of being
overlooked. Men are trained to meet intellectual emergencies, but not to
endure continued intellectual strain. The difficulty which is to be
conquered by a sudden effort they are able to overcome, but when
deliberation and continuous mental achievement are required, the
weakness of their training is manifest. The men, and perhaps still more
the women, of to-day are ready to decide upon the merits of a book in
the twinkling of an eye; and it is to be acknowledged that these snap
judgments are reasonable far more often than could have been expected.
When it comes, however, to having a reason for the faith that is in
them, it is lamentable how many intelligent persons prove utterly
incapable of fairly and logically examining literature; and it must be
conceded that there should be some other test by which to decide whether
a book is to be included under the gracious name of literature than the
dogmatic assertion: "Well, I don't care what anybody says against it; I
like it!"
* * * * *
We have discussed the distinctions by which it may be decided what is to
be considered literature; and, did space warrant, we might go on to
examine the principles which determine the rank of work. They are of
course largely to be inferred from what has been said already. The merit
of literature will be chiefly dependent upon the closeness with which it
conforms to the rules which mark the nature of literature. The more
fully genuine its emotion, the more adequate its expression, the higher
the scale in which a book is to be placed. The more sane and healthful,
the more entirely in accord with the needs and springs of general human
life, the greater the work. Indeed, beyond this there is little to say
save that the nobility of intention, the ethical significance of the
emotion embodied, mark the worth and the rank of a composition.
I have tried to define literature, and yet in the end my strongest
feeling is that of the inadequacy of my definition. He would be but a
lukewarm lover who was capable of framing a description which would
appear to him to embody fully the perfections of his mistress; and art
is a mistress so beautiful, so high, so noble, that no phrases can fitly
characterize her, no service can be wholly worthy of her. Life is full
of disappointment, and pain, and bitterness, and that sense of futility
in which all these evils are summed up; and yet even were there no other
alleviation, he who knows and truly loves literature finds here a
sufficient reason to be glad that he lives. Science may show man how to
live; art makes living worth his while. Existence to-day without
literature would be a failure and a despair; and if we cannot
satisfactorily define our art, we at least are aware how it enriches and
ennobles the life of every human being who comes within the sphere of
its wide and gracious influence.
III
THE STUDY OF LITERATURE
When it is clearly understood what literature is, there may still remain
a good deal of vagueness in regard to the study of it. It is by no means
sufficient for intellectual development that one have a misty general
share in the conventional respect traditionally felt for such study.
There should be a clear and accurate comprehension why the study of
literature is worth the serious attention of earnest men and women.