think that we will be genuine is dangerously near a pose in itself. It
is that he finds himself in a company so thoroughly manly, so real and
virile, that he instinctively will take long breaths, and without
thinking of it lay aside the conventional pose which self is so apt to
impose upon self. We do not, while reading, lose in the least the power
of judging between right and wrong. We realize that Ulysses, delightful
old rascal though he is, is an unconscionable trickster. We are no more
likely to play fast and loose with domestic ties because the Grecian
heroes, and even the Greek gods, left their morals at home for their
wives to keep bright while they went abroad to take their pleasure.
Manners and standards in those days were not altogether the same that
they are now; but right is right in Homer, and wrong is wrong, as it is
in the work of every really great poet since the world began. The whole
of Greek poetry, like Greek sculpture, has an enchanting and wholesome
open-air quality; and even when it is nude it is not naked. We miss much
of the beauty by losing the wonderful form, and no translation ever
approached the original, but we get always the mood of sanity and
reality.
The mood of Dante seems sometimes more difficult for the modern reader
than that of the Greeks. The high spiritual severity, the passionate
austerity of the Florentine, are certainly far removed from the busy,
practical temper of to-day. Far away as they are in time, the Greeks
were after all men of tangible deeds, of practical affairs; they knew
the taste of ginger hot i' the mouth, and took hold upon life with a
zest thoroughly to be appreciated in this materialistic age. Dante, on
the other hand, has the burning solemnity of the prophets of the Old
Testament, so that the point of view of the "Divine Comedy" is not far
removed from that of Isaiah. Of all the greatest classics the "Divine
Comedy" is probably the least read to-day, at any rate in this country.
The translations of it are for the most part hopelessly unsatisfactory,
the impossibility of setting poetry over from the honeyed Italian into a
language of a genius so different as the English being painfully obvious
even to those little critical. There is a great deal that is obscure,
and yet more which cannot be understood without a good deal of special
historical information; so that it is impossible to read Dante for the
first time without that frequent reference to the notes which is so
unfortunate and undesirable in a first reading. It is practically
necessary to go over the notes with care once or twice before attempting
the poem. Get the information first, and then plunge into the poetry. It
is a plunge into a sea whereof the brine is bitter, the waters
piercingly cold, and where not infrequently the waves roll high; but it
is a plunge invigorating and life-giving. The man who has once read
Dante with sympathy and delight can never again be wholly common and
unclean, no matter into what woful faults and follies he may thereafter
fall.
To come nearer home, readers are somewhat foolishly apt to feel that it
is about as difficult to read Chaucer as it is to read Homer or Dante.
As a matter of fact any intelligent and educated person should be able
to master the theories of the pronunciation of Chaucerian English in a
couple of mornings, and to read him with ease and pleasure in a week or
two at most. It is a pity that there is not a good complete edition of
Chaucer pointed and accented, so that the reader might not be troubled
with any consciousness of effort; but after all, the difficulty lies
more in the idea than in the fact. When one has mastered the language of
the thirteenth century, in company how enchanting does he find himself!
The sweetness, the wholesomeness, the kindliness, the sincerity, the
humor, and the humanity of Chaucer can hardly be over-praised.
Of Shakespeare,--"our myriad-minded Shakespeare,"--it seems almost
needless to speak. Concerning his poetry one may be silent because the
theme is so wide, and because writers so many and so able have already
discoursed upon the subject so eloquently. To attempt to-day to explain
why men should read Shakespeare is like entering into an argument to
prove that men should delight in the sunshine or to explain that the sea
is beautiful and wonderful. If readers to-day neglect this supreme
classic it is not from ignorance of its importance. It may be from a
want of realization of the pleasure and inspiration which the poet
affords. Those who have not tested it may doubt as one heart-whole
doubts the joys of love, and in either case only experience can make
wise.
Dryden's words may suffice here and stand for all the quotations which
might be made:--
To begin with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern and
perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All
the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not
laboriously, but luckily: when he describes anything you more than see
it, you feel it.
The man who does not read and delight in this poet is scarcely to be
considered intellectually alive at all, as far as there is any
connection between the mind and literature; and the highest
intellectual crime of which an English-speaking man is capable is to
leave his Shakespeare to gather dust upon his shelves unread.
In all this I do not wish to be understood as holding that we are always
to read the classics, or that we are to read nothing else. To live up to
the requirements of the society of Apollo continuously would be too
fatiguing even for the Muses. We cannot be always in a state of
exaltation; but we cannot in any high sense live at all without becoming
familiar with what exalted living is. The study of the classics calls
for conscious and often for strong endeavor. We do not put ourselves
thoroughly into the mood of other times and of remote conditions without
effort. Indeed, it requires effort to lift our less buoyant imaginations
to the level of any great work. The sympathetic reading of any supremely
imaginative author is like climbing a mountain,--it is not to be
accomplished without strain, but it rewards one with the breath of an
upper air and a breadth of view impossible in the valley. For him who
prefers the outlook of the earth-worm to that of the eagle the classics
have no message and no meaning. For him who is not content with any view
save the widest, these are the mountain peaks which lift to the highest
and noblest sight.
XII
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
We speak of the classics, of ancient literature, and of contemporary
literature, but in reality all literature is one. We divide it into
sections for convenience of study, but it is a notable error to forget
that it is consecutive from the dawn of civilization to the present. It
is true that in applying the term to works of our own time it is both
customary and necessary to employ the word with a meaning wider than
that which it has elsewhere. It is often difficult to distinguish in
contemporary productions that which is of genuine and lasting merit from
that which is simply meretricious and momentary, and still harder to
force others to recognize such distinction when made. It is therefore
inevitable that the name literature should have a broader signification
than when applied to work which has been tested and approved by time.
There are few things more perplexing than the attempt to choose from the
all but innumerable books of our own day those which are to be
considered as genuine. If we are able to keep vividly in mind what
qualities make a thing literature, it is possible to have some not
inadequate idea of what contemporary writings most completely fulfill
the given conditions. We are able to speak with assurance of the work
of a Tennyson or a Browning; and to feel that we have witnessed the
birth of classics of the future. Beside these, however, stand the
enormous multitude of books which are widely read, much talked about,
and voluminously advertised; books which we cannot openly dispraise
without the risk of being sneered at as captious or condemned as
conceited. There are the poems which publishers inform the public in
column-long advertisements, bristling with the testimonials of men and
women who make writing their business, are the finest productions since
Shakespeare; there are the novels which prove themselves to be works of
genius by selling by the hundreds of thousands of copies and very likely
being given to the purchasers of six bars of some patent soap; there are
the thin and persecuted looking volumes of "prose poems" or rhyming
prose which are looked upon by small bands of devoted followers as the
morsel of leaven which is to leaven the whole lump; there are, in short,
all those perplexing writings which have merit of some kind and in some
degree, yet to decide the genuine and lasting merit of which might tax
the wisdom and the patience of a Solomon of Solomons.
I have already spoken of the effect which temporary qualities are sure
to have in determining the success of an author. The history of books is
full of instances of works which have in their brief day filled the
reading world with noisy admiration, but which have in the end been
found destitute of enduring merit. While transient fame is at its
height, while enthusiastically injudicious admirers are praising and
judiciously enthusiastic publishers are reëchoing their plaudits, it is
a well-trained mind that is able to form a sound and rational judgment,
and to distinguish between the ephemeral and the abiding. The only hope
lies in a careful and discriminating application of standards deduced
from the classics. He who desires to judge the books of to-day must
depend upon comparison with the books of yesterday. He must be able to
feel toward the literature of the past as if it were of the present, and
toward that of the present as if it were of the past.
It is not to the popular verdict upon a work that one can look for aid
in deciding upon real merit. In time the general public accepts the
verdict of the few, but at first it is the noisy opinion of the many,
voluble and undiscriminating, which is heard. The general public is
always affected more by the accidental than by the permanent qualities
of a work, and it is more often imposed upon by shams than touched by
real feeling. It is easy to recognize conventional signs for sentiment,
and it is not difficult for the ordinary reader to persuade himself that
he experiences emotions which are explicitly set forth for him. Popular
taste and popular power of appreciation are not inaccurately represented
by those eminently successful journals which in one column give the
fashions and receipts for cake and in the next detailed directions for
experiencing all the sensations of culture. Sentimentality is always
more instantly and more widely effective than sentiment. Sentimentality
finds a ready response from the fact that it only calls upon us to seem,
while sentiment demands that for the time being at least we shall be.
It is necessary here to say that I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do
not mean in the least to speak with scorn or contempt of the lack of
power justly to discriminate and to appreciate which comes from either
natural disability or lack of opportunities of cultivation. Narrowness
of comprehension and appreciation is a misfortune, but it is not
necessarily a fault. I mean only to point out that it is a thing to be
outgrown if possible. Of the pathos of lives which are denied their
desire in this I am too keenly aware to speak of such otherwise than
tenderly. For the young women who put their sentiments up in curl-papers
and the young men who wax the mustaches of their minds I have no
patience whatever; but for those who are seeking that which seems to
them the best, even though they blunder and mistakenly fall prostrate
before Dagon, the great god of the Philistines, it is impossible not to
feel sympathy and even admiration. In what I have been saying of the
fallibility of popular opinion I have not meant to cast scorn on any
sincerity, no matter where it is to be found; but merely to point out
that the general voice of the public, even when sincere, is greatly to
be distrusted.
Whatever contemporary literature may be, however mistaken may be the
popular verdict, and however difficult it may be for the most careful
criticism to determine what is of lasting and what of merely ephemeral
merit, the fact remains that it is the voice of our own time, and as
such cannot be disregarded. To devote attention exclusively to the
classics is to get out of sympathy with the thought of our own
generation. It is idle to expend energy in learning how to live if one
does not go on to live. The true use of literature is not to make
dreamers; it is not to make the hold upon actual existence less firm. In
the classics one learns what life is, but one lives in his own time. It
follows that no man can make his intellectual life full and round who
does not keep intelligently in touch with what is thought and what is
written by the men who are alive and working under the same conditions.
Contemporary literature is the expression of the convictions of the time
in which it is written. The race having advanced so far, this is the
conclusion to which thinkers have come in regard to the meaning of life.
Contemporary literature is like news from the front in war-time. It is
sometimes cheering, sometimes depressing, often enough inaccurate, but
continually exciting. It is the word which comes to us of the progress
of the eternal combat against the unknown forces of darkness which
compass humanity around. There are many men who make a good deal of
parade of never reading books of their own time. They are sometimes men
of no inconsiderable powers of intellect and of much cultivation; but it
is hardly possible to regard them as of greater contemporary interest
than are the mummies of the Pharaohs. They may be excellent in their day
and generation, but they have deliberately chosen that their generation
shall be one that is gone and their day a day that is ended. They may be
interesting relics, but relics they are. It is often wise to wait a time
for the subsiding of the frenzy of applause which greets a book that is
clever or merely startling. It is not the lover of literature who reads
all the new books because they are new, any more than it is he who
neglects the old because they are old; but if we are alive and in
sympathy with our kind, we cannot but be eager to know what the
intellectual world is thinking, what are the fresh theories of life,
born of added experience, what are the emotions of our own generation.
We cannot, in a word, be in tune with our time without being interested
in contemporary literature.
It is here that the intellectual character of a man is most severely
tested. Here he is tried as by fire, and if there be in him anything of
sham or any flaw in his cultivation it is inevitably manifest. It is
easy to know what to read in the classics; they are all explicitly
labeled by the critics of succeeding generations. When it comes to
contemporary work a reader is forced largely to depend upon himself.
Here he must judge by his individual standards; and here he both must
and will follow his own inclinations. It is not always possible for a
man accurately to appraise his mental advancement by the classics he
reads, because his choice may there be influenced by conventional
rather than by personal valuation; but if he will compare with the
established classics the books which he genuinely likes and admires
among the writings of his own time, he may come at an estimate of his
mental state as fair as a man is ever likely to form of himself.
It is, then, easy to see that there is a good deal of danger in dealing
with current work. It is necessary to be in sympathy with the thought of
the day, but it is only too common to pay too dear for this. It is
extremely hard, for instance, to distinguish between genuine literary
taste and curiosity when writings are concerned which have the fresh and
lively interest which attaches to those things about which our fellows
are actually talking and thinking. It is of course allowable to gratify
a healthy curiosity, but it is well to recognize that such reading is
hardly likely to promote mental growth. There is no law, civil or moral,
against indulging the desire to know what is in any one of those books
which are written to be talked about at ladies' luncheons; and it is not
impossible that the readers who give their time to this unwholesome
stuff would be doing something worse if they were not reading it. The
only point upon which I wish to insist is that such amusement is neither
literary nor intellectual.
There is, moreover, the danger of allowing the mind to become fixed upon
the accidental instead of the permanent. I have spoken of the fact that
the temporary interest of a book may be so great as to blind the reader
to all else. When "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was new, it was practically
impossible for the readers of that day to see in it anything but a fiery
tract against slavery. To-day who reads "Ground Arms" without being
chiefly impressed with its arguments against war? It is as controversial
documents that these books were written. If they have truth to life, if
they adequately express human emotion, they will be of permanent value
after this temporary interest has passed. The danger is that the passing
interest, which is natural and proper in itself, shall blind us to false
sentiment, to unjust views of life, to sham emotion. We are constantly
led to forget the important principle that books of our own time must be
judged by the standards which are afforded by the books which are of all
time.
There has never been a time when self-possession and sound judgment in
dealing with contemporary literature were more important than they are
to-day. The immeasurably prolific press of the nineteenth century is
like a fish-breeding establishment where minnows are born by the million
a minute. There are so many books that the mind becomes bewildered. The
student who might have the strength of mind to form an intelligent
opinion of five books is utterly incapable of doing the same by five
thousand. We are all constantly led on to read too many things. It has
been again and again remarked that our grandfathers were better educated
than their grandsons because they knew thoroughly the few works which
came in their way. We have become the victims of over-reading until the
modern mind seems in danger of being destroyed by literary gluttony.
It is well in dealing with contemporary work to be especially
self-exacting in insisting that a book is not to be read once which is
not to be read a second time. This may seem to be a rule made merely for
the sake of having a proper theory, yet it is to be taken literally and
observed exactly. It is true that the temptation is so great to read
books which are talked about, that we are all likely to run through a
good many things which we know to be really unworthy of a single
perusal, and of course to go over them again would be a waste of more
time. Where to draw the line between the permanent and the ephemeral is
a point which each must settle for himself. If, on the whole, it seem to
a man well to pay the price in time and in the risk of forming bad
mental habits, it is his right to do this, but pay the price he must and
will.
* * * * *
It is hardly possible to discuss contemporary literature without
speaking of that which is not literature,--the periodicals. One of the
conditions of the present time which most strongly affects the relations
of ordinary readers to reading in general is the part which periodicals
of one sort or another play in modern life. The newspaper enters so
intimately into existence to-day that no man can escape it if he would,
and with innumerable readers it is practically the sole mental food. It
is hardly necessary to say that there is no more relation between the
newspaper and literature than there would be between two persons
because they both wear hats. Both books and journals are expressed in
printed words, and that is about all that there is in common. It is
necessary to use the daily paper, but its office is chiefly a mechanical
one. It is connected with the purely material side of life. This is not
a fault, any more than it is the fault of a spade that it is employed to
dig the earth instead of being used to serve food with. It is not the
function of the newspapers to minister to the intellect or the
imagination in any high sense. They fulfill their mission when they are
clean and reliable in material affairs. What is beyond this is a
pretense at literature under impossible conditions, assumed to beguile
the unwary, and harmless or vicious, according to circumstances. It is
seen at its worst in the Sunday editions, with their sheets as many
--as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa.
It is safe to say that for the faithful reader of the Sunday newspaper
there is no intellectual salvation. Like the Prodigal Son, he is fain to
fill his belly with the husks which the swine do eat, and he has not the
grace even to long for the more dignified diet of fatted calf.
The newspaper habit is pretty generally recognized as demoralizing, and
in so far it may be in a literary point of view less dangerous than the
magazine habit. The latter is often accompanied by a self-righteous
conviction that it is a virtue. There is a class who take on airs of
being of the intellectual elect on the strength of reading all the
leading magazines; who are as proud of having four serials in hand at
once as is a society belle of being able to drive as many horses; who
look with a sort of pitying contempt upon persons so old-fashioned as to
neglect the magazines in favor of books, and who in general are as
proudly patronizing in their attitude toward literature as they are
innocent of any connection with it. This is worse than too great a
fondness for journalism, and of course this is an extreme type; but it
is to be feared that at their best the magazines represent mental
dissipation.
It is true that genuine literature is often published in periodicals;
and there are many editors who deeply regret that the public will not
allow them to print a great deal more. As things are, real literature in
the magazines is the exception rather than the rule. The general
standard of magazine excellence is the taste of the intellectually
_nouveaux riches_--for persons who have entered upon an intellectual
heritage which they are not fitted rightly to understand or employ are
as common as those who come to material wealth under the same
conditions. It is to this class, which is one of the most numerous, and
still more one of the most conspicuous in our present civilization, that
most of the magazines address themselves. The genuinely cultivated
reader finds in the monthlies many papers which he looks through as he
looks through the newspaper, for the sake of information, and less often
he comes upon imaginative work. The serials which are worth reading at
all are worthy of being read as a whole, and not in the distorted and
distorting fashion of so many words a month, according to the size of
the page of a particular periodical. Reading a serial is like plucking a
rose petal by petal; the whole of the flower may be gathered, but its
condition is little likely to be satisfactory. While the magazines,
moreover, are not to be looked to for a great deal of literature of
lasting value, they not only encourage the habit of reading indifferent
imitations, but they foster a dangerous and demoralizing inability to
fix the attention for any length of time. The magazine-mind is a thing
of shreds and patches at best; incapable of grasping as a whole any
extended work. Literature holds the mirror up to nature, but the
magazine is apt to show the world through a toy multiplying-glass, which
gives to the eye a hundred minute and distorted images.