friends, that comprehension and delicate sympathy for which we long.
Indeed, such is human egotism that it is all but impossible for any one
so far to abandon his own personality as to enter fully into the more
delicate and intangible feelings of his fellow. A friend is another
self, according to the proverb, but it is apt to be himself and not
yourself. To find sympathy which comes from a knowledge that our inmost
emotions are shared we turn to books. Especially is this true in
bereavement and in sorrow. The touch of a human hand, the wistful look
in the eye of the friend who longs to help, or the mere presence of some
beautiful and responsive spirit, is the best solace where comfort is
impossible; but even the tenderest human presence may jar, while in
books there is a consolation and a tenderness unhampered by the baffling
sense of a consciousness still outside of our own no matter how
strenuously it longs to be in perfect unity. I knew once a mother who
had lost her only child, and who used to sit for hours pressing to her
heart Plutarch's divinely tender letter to his wife on the death of his
own little one. It was almost as if she felt her baby again in her arms,
and the leather covers of the book were stained with tears consecrated
and saving. Who could count the number to whom "In Memoriam" has carried
comfort when living friends had no message? The critical defects of that
poem are not far to seek; but it would ill become us to forget how many
grief-laden hearts it has reached and touched. The book which lessens
the pain of humanity is in so far higher than criticism.
Josiah Quincy used in his old age to relate how his mother, left a young
widow by the death of her husband within sight of the shores of America
when on his return from a mission to England, found comfort in the
soothing ministration of books:--
She cultivated the memory of my father, even in my earliest childhood,
by reading me passages from the poets, and obliging me to learn by
heart and repeat such as were best adapted to her own circumstances
and feelings. Among others the whole leave-taking of Hector and
Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one of her favorite
lessons.... Her imagination, probably, found consolation in the
repetition of lines which brought to mind and seemed to typify her own
great bereavement.
And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be,--
A widow I, a helpless orphan he?
These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's address and
circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, which seemed
relieved by the tears my repetition of them drew from her.
This comforting power of literature is one which need not perhaps have
been enlarged upon so fully, but it is one which has to do with the most
intimate and poignant relations of life.
It is largely in virtue of the sympathy which it is possible to feel for
books that from them we not only receive a knowledge of the capacities
of human emotion, but we are given actual emotional experience as well.
For literature has a twofold office. It not only shows the possibilities
of life, but it may make these possibilities realities. If art simply
showed us what might be without aiding us further, it would be but a
banquet of Tantalus. We must have the substance as well as the shadow.
We are born not only with a craving to know what emotions are the
birthright of man, but with an instinctive desire to enter into that
inheritance. We wish to be all that it is possible for men to be. The
small boy who burns to be a pirate or a policeman when he grows up, is
moved by the idea that to men of these somewhat analogous callings come
a richness of adventure and a fullness of sensation which are not to be
found in ordinary lives. The lad does not reason this out, of course;
but the instinctive desire for emotion speaks in him. We are born with
the craving to know to the full the emotions of the race. It is to few
of us in modern civilized life that circumstances permit a widely
extended experience in actual mental sensations. The commonplace
actualities of every-day life show plain and dull beside the almost
infinite possibilities of existence. The realization of the contrast
makes not a few mortals unhappy and dissatisfied; but those who are
wiser accept life as it is, and turn to art for the gratification of the
instinctive craving which is unsatisfied by outward reality.
It may be that fate has condemned us to the most humdrum of existences.
We trade or we teach or are lawyers or housekeepers, doctors or nurses,
or the curse of the gods has fallen upon us and we are condemned to the
dreariness of a life of pleasure-seeking. We cannot of ourselves know
the delights of the free outlaw's life under "the greene shaw,"--the
chase of the deer, the twang of the bowstring, the song of the minstrel,
the relish of venison pasty and humming nut-brown ale, are not for us in
the flesh. If we go into the library, however, take down that volume
with the cover of worn brown leather, and give up the imagination to the
guidance of the author, all these things become possible to the inner
sense. We become aware of the reek of the woodland fire, the smell of
the venison roasting on spits of ash-wood, the chatter of deep manly
voices, the cheery sound of the bugle-horn afar, the misty green light
of the forest, the soft sinking feel of the moss upon which in
imagination we have flung ourselves down, while Will Scarlet teases
Friar Tuck yonder, and Allan-a-Dale touches light wandering chords on
his harp.--Ah, where are the four walls of the library, where is the
dull round of cares and trifles which involve us day by day? We are in
merry Sherwood with bold Robin Hood, and we know what there was felt and
lived.
We cannot in outward experience know how a great and generous heart must
feel, broken by ingratitude and unfaith, deceived and tortured through
its noblest qualities, outraged in its highest love. The poet says to
us: "Come with me; and through the power of the imagination, talisman
more potent than the ring of Solomon, we will enter the heart of
Othello, and with him suffer this agony. We will endure the torture,
since behind it is the exquisite delight of appeasing that insatiable
thirst for a share in human emotions. Or would you taste the passion of
young and ardent hearts, their woe at parting, and their resolved
devotion which death itself cannot abate? We will be one with Romeo and
one with Juliet." Thus, if we will, we may go with him through the
entire range of mortal joys and sorrows. We live with a fullness of
living beside which, it may be, our ordinary existence is flat and pale.
We find the real life, the life of the imagination; and we recognize
that this is after all more vital than our concern over the price of
stocks, our petty bother about the invitation to the Hightops' ball on
the twenty-fourth, or the silly pang of brief jealousy which we
experienced when we heard that Jack Scribbler's sonnet was to appear in
the next number of the magazine which had just returned our own poem
"with thanks." The littlenesses of the daily round slip out of sight
before the nobility of the life possible in the imagination.
It is not necessary to multiply examples of the pleasures possible
through the imagination. Every reader knows how varied and how
enchanting they are. To enter into them is in so far to fulfill the
possibilities of life. The knowledge which is obtained through books is
not the same, it is true, as that which comes from actual doing and
enduring. Perhaps if the imagination were sufficiently developed there
would be little difference. There have been men who have been hardly
able to distinguish between what they experienced in outward life and
what belonged solely to the inner existence. Coleridge and Wordsworth
and Keats made no great or sharply defined distinction between the
things which were true in fact and those that were true in imagination.
To Blake the events of life were those which he knew through
imagination, while what happened in ordinary, every-day existence he
regarded as the accidental and the non-essential.
It will probably be thought, however, that those who live most
abundantly are not likely to feel the need of testing existence and
tasting emotions through the medium of letters. The pirate, when decks
are red and smoke of powder is in the air, is not likely to retire to
his cabin for a session of quiet and delightful reading; the lover may
peruse sentimental ballads or make them, but on the whole everything
else is subordinate to the romance he is living. It is when his
lady-love keeps him at a distance that he has time for verse; not when
she graciously allows him near. It is told of Darwin that his absorption
in science destroyed not only his love of Shakespeare but even his power
of enjoying music. The actual interests of life were so vivid that the
artistic sense was numbed. The imagination exhausted itself in exploring
the unknown world of scientific knowledge. It is to be noted that boys
who go deeply into college sports, especially if they are on the
"teams," are likely to become so absorbed in the sporting excitement
that literature appears to them flat and tame. The general rule is that
he who lives in stimulating and absorbing realities is thereby likely to
be inclined to care less for literature.
It is to be remembered, however, that individual experience is apt to be
narrow, and that it may be positively trivial and still engross the
mind. That one is completely given up to affairs does not necessarily
prove these affairs to be noble. It is generally agreed, too, that the
mind is more elastic which is reached and developed by literature; and
that even the scientist is likely to do better work for having ennobled
his perceptions by contact with the thoughts of master spirits. Before
Darwin was able to advance so far in science as to have no room left for
art, he had trained his faculties by the best literature. At least it is
time enough to give up books when life has become so full of action as
to leave no room for them. This happens to few, and even those of whom
it is true cannot afford to do without literature as an agent in the
development and shaping of character.
The good which we gain from the experiences of life we call insight. No
man or woman ever loved without thereby gaining insight into what life
really is. No man has stood smoke-stained and blood-spattered in the
midst of battle, caught away out of self in an ecstasy of daring,
without thereby learning hitherto undreamed-of possibilities in
existence. Indeed this is true of the smallest incident. Character is
the result of experience upon temperament, as ripple-marks are the
result of the coming together of sand and wave. In life, however, we are
generally more slow to learn the lessons from events than from books.
The author of genius has the art so to arrange and present his truths as
to impress them upon the reader. The impressions of events remain with
us, but it is not easy for ordinary mortals so to realize their meaning
and so to phrase it that it shall remain permanent and clear in the
mind. The mental vision is clouded, moreover, by the personal element.
We are seldom able to be perfectly frank with ourselves. Self is ever
the apologist for self. Knowledge without self-honesty is as a torch
without flame; yet of all the moral graces self-honesty is perhaps the
most difficult to acquire. In its acquirement is literature of the
highest value. A man can become acquainted with his spiritual face as
with his bodily countenance only by its reflection. Literature is the
mirror in which the soul learns to recognize its own lineaments.
Above all these personal reasons which make literature worthy of the
serious attention of earnest men and women is the great fact that upon
the proper development and the proper understanding of it depend largely
the advancement and the wise ordering of civilization. Stevenson spoke
words of wisdom when he said:--
One thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing,
which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as
a high flight of metaphysics,--namely, that the business of life is
mainly carried on by the difficult art of literature, and according to
a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and fullness of
his intercourse with other men.
In a fine passage in a little-known pamphlet, James Hannay touches upon
the relation of literature to life and to the practical issues of
society:--
A notion is abroad that that only is "practical" which can be measured
or eaten. Show us its net result in marketable form, the people say,
and we will recognize it! But what if there be something prior to all
such "net results," something higher than it? For example, the writing
of an old Hebrew Prophet was by no manner of means "practical" in his
own times! The supply of figs to the Judean markets, the price of oil
in the synagogue-lamps, did not fluctuate with the breath of those
inspired songs! But in due time the prophet dies, stoned, perhaps, ...
and in the course of ages, his words do have a "practical" result by
acting on the minds of nations.... In England what has not happened
from the fact that the Bible was translated? We have seen the
Puritans--we know what we owe to them--what the world owes to them! A
dozen or two of earnest men two centuries ago were stirred to the
depths of their souls by the visions of earnest men many centuries
before that; do you not see that the circumstance has its practical
influence in the cotton-markets of America at this hour?--Quoted in
Espinasse's _Literary Recollections_.
It is impossible to separate the influences of literature from the
growth of society and of civilization. It is because of the reaching of
the imagination into the unknown vast which incloses man that life is
what it is. The order that is given to butcher or baker or
candlestick-maker is modified by the fact that Homer and Dante and
Shakespeare sang; that the prophets and the poets and the men of
imagination of whatever time and race have made thought and feeling what
they are. "The world of imagination," Blake wrote, "is the world of
eternity." Whatever of permanent interest and value man has achieved he
has reached through this divine faculty, and it is only when man learns
to know and to enter the world of imagination that he comes into actual
contact with the vital and the fundamental in human life. Easily abused,
like all the best gifts of the gods, art remains the noblest and the
most enduring power at work in civilization; and literature is its most
direct embodiment. To it we go when we would leave behind the sordid,
the mean, and the belittling. When we would enter into our birthright,
when we remember that instead of being mere creatures of the dust we are
the heirs of the ages, then it is through books that we find and possess
the treasures of the race.
V
FALSE METHODS
The most common intellectual difficulty is not that of the lack of
ideas, but that of vagueness of ideas. Most persons of moderately good
education have plenty of thoughts such as they are, but there is a
nebulous quality about these which renders them of little use in
reasoning. This makes it necessary to define what is meant by the Study
of Literature, as in the first place it was necessary to define
literature itself. Many have a formless impression that it is something
done with books, a sort of mysterious rite known only to the initiated,
and probably a good deal like the mysteries of secret societies,--more
of a theory than an actuality. Others, who are more confident of their
powers of accurate thinking, have decided that the phrase is merely a
high-sounding name for any reading which is not agreeable, but which is
recommended by text-books. Some take it to be getting over all the books
possible, good, bad, and indifferent; while still others suppose it to
be reading about books or their authors. There are plenty of ideas as to
what the study of literature is, but the very diversity of opinion
proves that at least a great many of these must be erroneous.
In the first place the study of literature is not the mere reading of
books. Going on a sort of Cook's tour through literature, checking off
on lists what one has read, may be amusing to simple souls, but beyond
that it means little and effects little. As the question to be asked in
regard to a tourist is how intelligently and how observantly he has
traveled, so the first consideration in regard to a reader is how he
reads.
The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time
has been extended to fashions of reading. By some sort of a vicious
perversion, the old saw that he who runs may read seems to have been
transposed to "He who reads must run." In other words there is too often
an assumption that the intellectual distinction of an individual is to
be estimated by the rapidity with which he is able to hurry through the
volumes he handles. Intellectual assimilation takes time. The mind is
not to be enriched as a coal barge is loaded. Whatever is precious in a
cargo is taken carefully on board and carefully placed. Whatever is
delicate and fine must be received delicately, and its place in the mind
thoughtfully assigned.
One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in
the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken
in at a glance. The modern reader is apt to insist that a book shall be
like a theatre-poster. He must be able to take it all in with a look as
he goes past it on a wheel, and if he cannot he declares that it is
obscure. W. M. Hunt said, with bitter wisdom: "As print grows cheap,
thinkers grow scarce." The enormous increase of books has bred a race of
readers who seem to feel that the object of reading is not to read but
to have read; not to enjoy and assimilate, but to have turned over the
greatest possible number of authors. This idea of the study of
literature is as if one selected as the highest social ideal the
afternoon tea, where the visitor is presented to numberless strangers
and has an opportunity of conversing rationally with nobody.
A class of self-styled students of literature far more pernicious than
even the record-breaking readers is that of the gossip-mongers. These
are they who gratify an innate fondness of gossip and scandal under the
pretext of seeking culture, and who feed an impertinent curiosity in the
name of a noble pursuit. They read innumerable volumes filled with the
more or less spicy details of authors; they perhaps visit the spots
where the geniuses of the world lived and worked. They peruse eagerly
every scrap of private letters, journals, and other personal matter
which is available. For them are dragged to light all the imperfect
manuscripts which famous novelists have forgotten to burn. For them was
perpetrated the infamy of the publication of the correspondence of Keats
with Miss Brawne; to them Mrs. Stowe appealed in her foul book about
Byron, which should have been burned by the common hangman. It is they
who buy the newspaper descriptions of the back bedroom of the popular
novelist and the accounts of the misunderstanding between the poet and
his washerwoman. They scent scandal as swine scent truffles, and degrade
the noble name of literature by making it an excuse for their petty
vulgarity.
The race is by no means a new one. Milton complained of it in the early
days of the church, when, he says:--
With less fervency was studied what St. Paul or St. John had written
than was listened to one that could say: "Here he taught, here he
stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited," and, "O happy
this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he rested,
this village where he wrought a miracle."
Schopenhauer, too, has his indignant protest against this class:--
Petrarch's house in Arqua, Tasso's supposed prison in Ferrara,
Shakespeare's house in Stratford, Goethe's house in Weimar, with its
furniture, Kant's old hat, the autographs of great men,--these things
are gaped at with interest and awe by many who have never read their
works.
All this is of course a matter of personal vanity. Small souls pride
themselves upon having these things, upon knowing intimate details of
the lives of prominent persons. They endeavor thus to attach themselves
to genius, as burrs cling to the mane of a lion. The imagination has
nothing to do with it; there is in it no love of literature. It is
vanity pure and simple, a common vulgar vanity which substitutes
self-advertisement and gossip-mongering for respect and appreciation.
Who can have tolerance for the man whose proudest boast is that he was
in a crowd presented to some poet whose books he never read; for the
woman who claims attention on the ground that she has from her
seamstress heard particulars of the domestic infelicities of a great
novelist; or for the gossip of either sex who takes pride in knowing
about famous folk trifles which are nobody's business but their own?
A good many text-books encourage this folly, and there are not a few
writers who pass their useless days in grubbing in the dust-heaps of the
past to discover the unessential and unmeaning incidents in the lives of
bygone worthies. They put on airs of vast superiority over mortals who
scorn their ways and words; they have only pitying contempt for readers
who suppose that the works of an author are what the world should be
concerned with instead of his grocery bills and the dust on his library
table. Such meddlers have no more to do with literature than the spider
on the eaves of kings' houses has to do with affairs of state.
It is not that all curiosity about famous men is unwholesome or
impertinent. The desire to know about those whose work has touched us is
natural and not necessarily objectionable. It is outside of the study of
literature, save in so far as it now and then--less often, I believe,
than is usually assumed--may help us to understand what an author has
written; yet within proper limits it is to be indulged in, just as we
all indulge now and then in harmless gossip concerning our fellows. It
is almost sure to be a hindrance rather than a help in the study of
literature if it goes much beyond the knowledge of those circumstances
in the life of an author which have directly affected what he has
written. There are few facts in literary history for which we have so
great reason to be devoutly thankful as that so little is known
concerning the life of the greatest of poets. We are able to read
Shakespeare with little or no interruption in the way of detail about
his private affairs, and for this every lover of Shakespeare's poetry
should be grateful.
The study of literature, it must be recognized farther, is not the study
of the history of literature. The development of what are termed
"schools" of literature; the change in fashions of expression; the
modifications in verse-forms and the growth and decay of this or that
phase of popular taste in books, are all matters of interest in a way.
They are not of great value, as a rule, yet they will often help the
reader to a somewhat quicker appreciation of the force and intention of
literary forms. It is necessary to have at least a general idea of the
course of literary and intellectual growth through the centuries in
order to appreciate and comprehend literature,--the point to be kept in
mind being that this is a means and not in itself an end. It is
necessary, for instance, for the student to toil painfully across the
wastes of print produced in the eighteenth century, wherein there is
little really great save the works of Fielding; and where the reader
has to endure a host of tedious books in order properly to appreciate
the manly tenderness of Steele, the boyishly spontaneous realism of
Defoe, the kindly humanity of Goldsmith, and the frail, exquisite pipe
of Collins. The rest of the eighteenth century authors most of us read
chiefly as a part of the mechanics of education. We could hardly get on
intelligently without a knowledge of the polished primness of Addison,
genius of respectability; the vitriolic venom of Swift, genius of
malignity; the spiteful perfection of Pope, genius of artificiality; or
the interminable attitudinizing of Richardson, genius of sentimentality.
These authors we read quite as much as helps in understanding others as
for their own sake. We do not always have the courage to acknowledge it,
but these men do not often touch our emotions, even though the page be
that of Swift, so much the greatest of them. We examine the growth of
the romantic spirit through the unpoetic days between the death of
Dryden and the coming of Blake and Coleridge and Wordsworth; and from
such examination of the history of literature we are better enabled to
form standards for the actual estimate of literature itself.