power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due
proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas
glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest
excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out
the painter's art with your own resources of sensibility and
imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to
what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under
his control and work along with him to such an extent that, in a
different mood, when you are cold and critical instead of sympathetic,
you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were
of your own dreaming, not of his creating. Like all revelations of the
better life, the adequate perception of a great work demands a gifted
simplicity of vision.--_Marble Faun_, xxxvii.
Often it is difficult to find any meaning in what is written unless the
reader has entered into the spirit in which it was composed. I seriously
doubt, for instance, whether the ordinary person, coming upon the
following catch of satyrs, by Ben Jonson, is able to find it much above
the level of the melodies of Mother Goose:--
"Buz," quoth the blue fly,
"Hum," quoth the bee;
Buz and hum they cry,
And so do we.
In his ear, in his nose,
Thus, do you see?
He ate the dormouse;
Else it was he.
If you are not able to make much out of this, listen to what Leigh Hunt
says of it:--
It is impossible that anything could better express than this, either
the wild and practical joking of the satyrs, or the action of the
thing described, or the quaintness and fitness of the images, or the
melody and even harmony, the intercourse, of the musical words, one
with another. None but a boon companion, with a very musical ear,
could have written it.--_A Jar of Honey._
If the reader has the key to the mood in which this catch is written, if
he has given himself up to the sportive spirit in which "rare old Ben"
conceived it, it is possible to find in it the merit which Hunt points
out; but without thus giving ourselves up to the leadership of the poet
it is hardly possible to make of it anything at all. The example is of
course somewhat extreme, but the principle is universal.
It is always well in a first reading to give one's self up to the sweep
of the work; to go forward without bothering over slight errors or small
details. Notes are not for the first or the second perusal so much as
for the third and so on to the hundredth. Dr. Johnson is right when he
says:--
Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that
is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to
feel the highest pleasures that the drama can give, read every play
from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his
commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop to
correction or explanation.
One of the great obstacles to the enjoyment of any art is the too
conscientious desire to enjoy. We are constantly hindered by the
conventional responsibility to experience over each classic the proper
emotion. The student is often so occupied in painful struggles to feel
that which he has been told to feel that he remains utterly cold and
unmoved. It is like going to some historic locality of noble suggestion,
where an officious guide moves the visitor from one precious spot to
another, saying in effect: "Here such an event happened. Now thrill.
Sixpence a thrill, please." For myself, being of a somewhat contumacious
character, I have never been able to thrill to order, even if a shilling
instead of sixpence were the price of the luxury; and in the same way I
am unable to follow out a prescribed set of emotions at the command of a
text-book on literature. Perhaps my temperament has made me unjustly
skeptical, but I have never been able to have much faith in the
genuineness of feelings carried on at the ordering of an emotional
programme. The student should let himself go. On the first reading, at
least, let what will happen so you are swept along in full enjoyment. It
is better to read with delight and misunderstand, than to plod forward
in wise stupidity, understanding all and comprehending nothing; gaining
the letter and failing utterly to achieve the spirit. The letter may be
attended to at any time; make sure first of the spirit. I do not mean
that one is to read carelessly; but I do mean that one is to read
enthusiastically, joyously, and, if it be possible, even passionately.
The best test of the completeness with which one has entered into the
heart of a book is just this keenness of enjoyment. Fully to share the
mood of the author is to share something of the delight of creation. It
is as if in the mind of the reader this work of beauty and of immortal
significance was springing into being. This enjoyment, moreover,
increases with familiarity. If you find that you do not care to take up
again a masterpiece because you have read it once, you may pretty safely
conclude that you have never truly read it at all. You have been over
it, it may be, and gratified some superficial curiosity; but you have
never got to its heart. Does one claim to be won to the heart of a
friend and yet to be willing never to see that friend more?
One may, of course, outgrow even a masterpiece. There are authors who
are genuine so far as they go, who may be enjoyed at one stage of
growth, yet who as the student advances become insufficient and
unattractive. The man who does not outgrow is not growing. One does not
healthily tire of a real book, however, until he has become greater than
that book. The interest which becomes weary of a masterpiece is more
than half curiosity, and at best is no more than intellectual. It is not
imaginative. Margaret Fuller confessed that she tired of everything she
read, even of Shakespeare. She thereby unconsciously discovered the
quality of mind which prevented her from being a great woman instead of
merely a brilliant one. She fed her intellect upon literature; but she
failed because literature does not reach to its highest function unless
its appeal to the intellect is the means of touching and arousing the
imagination; because the end of all art is not the mind but the
emotions.
It may seem that enough has already been required to make reading the
most serious of undertakings; yet there is still one requirement more
which is of the utmost importance. He is unworthy to share the delights
of great work who is not able to respect it; he has no right to meddle
with the best of literature who is not prepared to approach it with some
reverence. In the greatest books the master minds of the race have
graciously bidden their fellows into their high company. The honor
should be treated according to its worth. Irreverence is the deformity
of a diseased mind. The man who cannot revere what is noble is innately
degraded. When writers of genius have given us their best thoughts,
their deepest imaginings, their noblest emotions, it is for us to
receive them with bared heads. He is greatly to be pitied who, in
reading high imaginative work, has never been conscious of a sense of
being in a fine and noble presence, of having been admitted into a place
which should not be profaned. Only that soul is great which can
appreciate greatness. Remember that there is no surer measure of what
you are than the extent to which you are able to rise to the heights of
supreme books; the extent to which you are able to comprehend, to
delight in, and to revere, the masterpieces of literature.
VII
THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE
Whatever intelligence man imparts to man, at least all beyond the
crudest rudimentary beginnings, must be conveyed by conventions. There
must have been an agreement, tacit or explicit, that a certain sign
shall stand for a certain idea; and when that idea is to be expressed,
this sign must be used. In order that the meaning of any communication
may be understood, it is essential that the means of expression be
appreciated by hearer as well as by speaker. We have agreed that in
English a given sound shall represent a given idea; and to one who knows
this tongue the specified sound, either spoken or suggested by letters,
calls that idea up. To one unacquainted with English, the sound is
meaningless, because he is not a party to the agreement which has fixed
for it a conventional significance; or it may awake in his thought an
idea entirely different, because he belongs to a nation where tacit
agreement has fixed upon another meaning. The word "dot," for instance,
has by English-speaking folk been appropriated to the notion of a
trifling point or mark; while those who speak French, writing and
pronouncing the word in the same way, take it to indicate a dowry. In
order to communicate with any man, it is necessary to know what is the
set of conventions with which he is accustomed to convey and to receive
ideas.
The principle holds also in art. There is a conventional language in
sound or color or form as there is in words. It is broader as a rule,
because oftener founded upon general human characteristics, because more
directly and obviously borrowed from nature, and because not so warped
and distorted by those concessions to utility which have modified the
common tongues of men. Indeed, it might at first thought seem that the
language of art is universal, but a little reflection will show that
this is not the case. The sculpture of the Aztecs, for instance, is in
an art language utterly different from that of the sculpture of the
Greeks. If you recall the elaborately intricate uncouthness of the gods
of old Yucatan, you will easily appreciate that the artists who shaped
these did not employ the same artistic conventions as did the sculptors
who breathed life into the Venus of Melos, or who embodied divine
serenity and beauty in the Elgin marbles. To the Greeks those twisted
and thick-lipped Aztec deities, clutching one another by their crests of
plumes, or grasping rudely at one another's arms, would have conveyed no
sentiment of beauty or of reverence; while it is equally to be supposed
that the Aztec would have remained hardly moved before the wonders of
Greek sculpture. The Hellenic art conventions, it is true, were more
directly founded upon nature, and therefore more readily understood;
but even this would not have overcome the fact that one nation had one
art language and the other another. Those of you who were at the
Columbian Exposition will remember how the music in the Midway Plaisance
illustrated this same point. The weird strain of one or another savage
or barbaric folk came to the ear with a strangeness which showed how
ignorant we are of the language of the music of these dwellers in far
lands. To us it was bizarre or moving, but we could form little idea how
it struck the hearers to whom it was native and familiar. It was even
all but impossible to know whether a given strain was felt by the savage
performers to be grave or gay. Of all the varieties of sound which there
surprised the ear, that evolved by the Chinese appeared most harsh and
unmelodious. The almond-eyed Celestial seemed to delight in a
concatenation of crash and caterwauling, mingled in one infernal
cacophony at which the nerves tingled and the hair stood on end. Yet it
is on record that when in the early days of European intercourse with
China, the French missionary Amiot played airs by Rossini and Boieldieu
to a Chinese mandarin of intelligence and of cultivation according to
eastern standards, the Oriental shook his head disapprovingly. He
politely expressed his thanks for the entertainment, but when pressed to
give an opinion of the music he was forced to reply: "It is sadly devoid
of meaning and expression, while Chinese music penetrates the soul."
After we have smiled at the absurdity, from our point of view, of the
penetration of the soul by Chinese music, we reflect that after all our
music is probably as absurd to them as theirs to us. We perhaps recall
the fact that even the cultivated Japanese, with their sensitive feeling
for art, and their readiness to adopt occidental customs, complain of
the effect of dividing music into regular bars, and making it, as they
say, "chip-chop, chip-chop, chip-chop." The fact is that every
civilization makes its art language as it makes its word language; and
he who would understand the message must understand the conventions by
which it is expressed.
We are apt to forget this fact of the conventionality of all language.
We become so accustomed both to the speech of ordinary intercourse and
to that of familiar art, that we inevitably come to regard them as
natural and almost universal. No language, however, is natural, unless
it be fair to apply that word to the most primitive signs of savages. It
is an arbitrary thing, and as such it must be learned. We acquire the
ordinary tongue of our race almost unconsciously, and while we are too
young to reason about it. We gain the language of art later and more
deliberately, although of course we may owe much to our early
surroundings in this as in every other respect. The point to be kept in
mind is that we do learn it; that it is not the gift of nature. This is
of course true of all art; but here our concern is only with the fact
that literature has as truly its own peculiar language as music or
painting or sculpture,--its language, that is, distinct from the
language of ordinary daily or common speech.
The conventions which serve efficiently to convey ordinary ideas and
matter-of-fact statements, are not sufficient for the expression of
emotions. The man who has to tell the price of pigs and potatoes, the
amount of coal consumed in a locomotive engine, or the effect of
political complications upon the stock-market, is able to serve himself
sufficiently well with ordinary language. The novelist who has to tell
of the bewitchingly willful worldliness of Beatrix Esmond, of the
fateful and tragic experiences of Donatello and Miriam, the splendidly
real impossibilities of the career of D'Artagnan and his three friends,
the passion of Richard Feverel for Lucy, of Kmita for Olenka, of Marius
for Cosette; the dramatist who endeavors to make his readers share the
emotions of Lear and Cordelia, of Caliban and Desdemona, of Viola and
Juliet; the poet who would picture the emotions of Pompilia, of Lancelot
and Guinevere, of Porphyrio and Madeline, of Prometheus and Asia,--all
these require an especial language.
The conveying from mind to mind of emotion is a delicate task. It is not
difficult to make a man understand the price of oysters, but endeavor to
share with a fellow-being the secrets of a moment of transcendent
feeling, and you have an undertaking so complex, and so all but
impossible, that if you can perfectly succeed in it you may justly call
yourself the first writer of your age. This is the making of the
intangible tangible; the highest creative act of the imagination. The
cleverness and the skill of man have been exhausted in devising means to
impart to readers the thought and feeling, the passion and emotion,
which sway the hearts of mankind. It is not necessary here to go into
those devices which belong especially to the domain of rhetoric,--the
mechanics of style. They are designated in the old-fashioned text-books
by tongue-twisting Greek names which most of us have learned, and which
all of us have forgotten. It is not with them that I am here concerned.
They are meant to affect the reader unconsciously. It is with those
matters which appeal to the conscious understanding that we have now to
do; the conventions which are the language of literature as Latin was
the language of Cæsar or Greek the tongue of Pericles.
I have spoken already of the necessity of understanding what is said in
literature; this is, however, by no means the whole of the matter. It is
of even greater importance to be clearly aware of what is implied. We
test the imaginative quality of what is written by its power of
suggestion. The writer who has imagination will have so much to say that
he is forced to make a phrase call up a whole train of thought, a word
bring vividly to the mind of the reader a picture or a history. This is
what critics mean when they speak of the marvelous condensation of
Shakespeare; and in either prose or verse the criterion of imaginative
writing is whether it is suggestive. Imagination is the realizing
faculty. It is the power of receiving as true the ideal. It is the
accepting as actual that which is conjured up by the inner vision; the
making vital, palpitant, and present that which is known to be
materially but a dream. That which is written when the poet sees the
unseen palpably before his inner eye is so filled with the vitality and
actuality of his vision that it fills the mind of the reader as a tenth
wave floods and overflows a hollow in the rocks of the shore. When Keats
says of the song of the nightingale that it is
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,
all the romance and witchery of faery-lore are in this single phrase.
The reader feels the glow of delight, the fascination of old tales which
have pleased mankind from the childhood of the race. Into two lines the
poet has condensed the fragrance of a thousand flowers of folk-lore.
In the best literature what is said directly is often of less importance
than what is meant but not said. In dealing with imaginative writers, it
is necessary to keep always in mind the fact that the literal meaning is
but a part, and often not the greater part. The implied, the indirect,
is apt to be that for the sake of which the work is written.
In its earlier stages all language is largely made up of comparisons.
The fact that every tongue is full of fossil similes has been constantly
commented upon, and this fact serves to illustrate how greatly the force
of a word may be diminished if its original meaning is lost sight of.
If, in ordinary conversation, to take a common illustration, some
old-fashioned body now speak of a clergyman as a "pastor," it is to be
feared that the word connotes little, unless it be a suspicion of rustic
seediness in apparel, a certain provincial narrowness, and perhaps a
conventional piety. When the word was still in its prime, it carried
with it the force of its derivation; it spoke eloquently of one who
ministered spiritual food to his followers, as a shepherd ministers to
his flock. A pastor may now be as good as a pastor was then, but the
title has ceased to do him justice. The freshness and force of words get
worn off in time, as does by much use the sharpness of outline of a
coin. We need constantly to guard against this tendency of language. We
speak commonly enough in casual conversation of "a sardonic smile," but
the idea conveyed is no more than that of a forced and heartless grin.
As far back as the days of Homer, some imaginative man compared the
artificial and sinister smile of a cynic to the distortions and
convulsions produced by a poisonous herb in Sardinia; and from its very
persistence we may fancy how forcible and striking was the comparison in
its freshness. Of course, modern writers do not necessarily keep in mind
the derivation of every word and phrase which they employ; but they do
at least use terms with so much care for propriety and exactness that it
is impossible to seize the whole of their meaning, unless we appreciate
the niceties of their language. Ruskin says rightly:--
You must get yourself into the habit of looking intensely at words,
and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, letter
by letter.... You might read all the books in the British Museum (if
you could live long enough), and remain an utterly "illiterate,"
uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by
letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,--you are forevermore in
some measure an educated person.--_Of Kings' Treasuries._
Unless our attention has been especially called to the fact, there are
few of us who at all realize how carelessly it is possible to read. We
begin in the nursery to let words pass without attaching to them any
idea which is really clear. We nourish our infant imaginations upon
Mother Goose, and are content to go all our days in ignorance even of
the meaning of a good many of the words so fondly familiar in pinafore
days. We are all acquainted with the true and thrilling tale how
Thomas T. Tattamus took two tees
To tie two tups up to two tall trees;
but how many of us know what either a "tee" or a "tup" is? We have all
been stirred in our susceptible youth by the rhyme wherein is recounted
the exciting adventure of the four and twenty tailors who set forth to
slay a snail, but who retreated in precipitate confusion when
She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow;
but it is to be feared that the proportion of us is not large who have
taken the trouble to ascertain what is a Kyloe cow. Or take the
well-worn ditty:--
Cross-patch,
Draw the latch,
Sit by the fire and spin.
Have you ever stopped to reflect that "draw the latch" means to pull in
the latch-string, and that in the days of homely general hospitality to
which this contrivance belonged the image presented by the verse was
that of a misanthropic hag, shutting herself off from her neighbors and
sulking viciously by her fire behind a door rudely insulting the caller
with the empty hole of the latch-string?
Perhaps this seems trifling; and it may easily be insisted that these
rhymes become familiar to us while we are still too young to think of
the exact meaning of anything. The question then is whether we do better
when we are older. We are accustomed, very likely, to hear in common
speech the phrase "pay through the nose." Do you know what that means,
or that it goes back to the days of the Druids? When you hear the phrase
"where the shoe pinches" do you recall Plutarch's story? Does the
anecdote of St. Ambrose come to mind when the saying is "At Rome do as
the Romans do"? It happens every few years that the newspapers are full
of more or less excited talk about a "gerrymander." Does the word bring
before the inner eye that uncouth monster wherewith the caricaturist of
his day vexed the soul of Governor Gerry? I have tried to select
examples which are not remote from the talk of every day. It seems to me
that these illustrate well enough how apt we are to accept words and
phrases as we accept a silver dollar, with very little idea of the
intrinsic worth of what we are getting. This may be made to do well
enough in practical buying and selling, but it is eminently
unsatisfactory in matters intellectual or æsthetic. In the study of
literature approximations are apt to be pretty nearly worthless.
The most obvious characteristic in literary language is that of
allusion. Constantly does the reader of imaginative works encounter
allusions to the Bible, to mythology, to history, to folk-lore, and to
literature itself. To comprehend an author it is needful to realize
fully what he had in mind when using these. They are the symbols of
thoughts and feelings which are not to be expressed in ordinary ways.
When we are familiar with the matter alluded to we see by the sudden and
vivid light which is cast over the page by the comparison or the
suggestion how expressive and comprehensive this form of language may
be. To the reader who is ignorant the allusion is of course a
stumbling-block and a rock of offense. It is like a sentence in an
unknown tongue, which not only conceals its meaning but gives one an
irritated sense of being shut out of the author's counsels.
It is probable that in English literature the allusions to the Bible are
more numerous than any other. We shall have occasion later to speak of
the place and influence of the King James version upon the literature of
our tongue, and here we have to do only with those cases in which a
scriptural reference is made part of the special language of an author.
Again and again it happens that a writer takes advantage of the
associations which cluster about a phrase or an incident of the Bible,
and by a simple touch brings up in the mind of the understanding reader
all the sentiments connected with the original.