be remembered that in the less thickly settled parts of this great
inchoate country, where libraries are not, the magazine is often a
comfort and even an inspiration. It is to be acknowledged that, with the
enormous mass of half-educated but often earnest and sincere souls, the
periodical has done and may still do a great deal of good. The child
must play with toys before it is fitted to grasp the tools of
handicraft, and enjoyment of the chromo may be a healthy and legitimate
stage on the way to an appreciation of the masters of painting. It is
not a reproach to call a man a toy-vender or a maker of chromos; nor do
I see that what I have been saying is to be interpreted as reflecting on
the makers of periodicals. It must be remembered that the publication of
a magazine is a business enterprise in the same sense that the selling
of carpets or calicoes is a business enterprise. The manufacturer of
magazines must please the general public with what he prints, as the
manufacturer must satisfy the ordinary buyer by the designs of his
fabrics. In either case it is the taste of the intellectual
_bourgeoisie_ which is the standard of success. The maker of periodicals
can no more afford to appeal to the taste of the cultivated few than can
the thrifty maker of stuffs. What is sold in open market must be adapted
to the demands of the open market. It is simply legitimate business
prudence which keeps most magazines from attempting to print literature.
They publish, as a rule, all the literature that the public will
have,--modified, unhappily, by the difficulty of getting it to publish
in a world where literature cannot be made to order. A book, it is to be
remembered, is a venture; a magazine is an enterprise. The periodical
must pay or it must be discontinued.
The moral of the whole matter is that the only thing to do is to accept
magazines for what they are; neither to neglect them completely, nor to
give to them that abundant or exclusive attention which they cannot even
aim under existing conditions at deserving. They may easily be dangerous
intellectual snares; but the wise student will often find them
enjoyable, and sometimes useful.
XIII
NEW BOOKS AND OLD
The quality of "timeliness" is one of the things which makes it
especially difficult to distinguish among new books. There is in this
day an ever increasing tendency to treat all topics of popular
discussion in ways which profess to be imaginative, and especially in
the narrative form. The novel with a theory and the poem with a purpose
are so enveloped with the glamour of immediate interest that they appear
to be of an importance far beyond that which belongs to their real
merit. Curiosity to know what these books have to say upon the questions
which most deeply interest or most vitally affect humanity is as natural
as it is difficult to resist. The desire to see what a book which is
talked about is like is doubly hard to overcome when it is so easily
excused under the pretense of gaining light on important questions. Time
seems to be proving, however, that the amount of noise made over these
theory-mongering romances is pretty nearly in adverse ratio to their
worth. We are told in Scripture that wisdom calleth in the streets, and
no man regardeth, but the opposite seems to be true of the clamors of
error. The very vehemence of these books is the quality which secures
to them attention; and it is impossible wholly to ignore them, and yet
to keep in touch with the time.
It is the more difficult to evade pretentious and noisily worthless
writings because of the great ingenuity of the advertising devices which
force them upon the attention. The student of genuine literature
naturally does not allow himself to be led by these, no matter how
persuasive they may be. The man who bases his choice of books upon the
advertisements is like him who regulates the health of his family by the
advice of a patent-medicine almanac. It is not easy, however, to escape
entirely from the influence of advertising. If we have seen a book
talked about in print, been confronted with its title on a dazzling
poster, if it has been recommended by the chief prize-fighter in the
land, or damned by the admiration of Mr. Gladstone, we are any of us
inclined to read it, just to see what it is like. The ways by which new
publications are insinuated upon the attention are, too, so impalpably
effective, so cunningly unexpected, that we take our opinion from them
without realizing that we have not originated it. The inspiration and
stress of soul which in Greece begot art, bring forth in our day
advertising, and no man can wholly escape its influence.
Innumerable are the methods by which authors, whose sole claim to genius
is this skill in advertising, keep themselves and their books before the
public. Eccentricities of manner and of matter are so varied as to
provoke wonder that mental fertility of resource so remarkable should
not produce results really great and lasting. Some writers claim to be
founders of schools, and talk a good deal about their "modernity," a
word which really means stale sensationalism revamped; others insist in
season and out of season that they have discovered the only true theory
of art, and that literature is only possible upon the lines which they
lay down. It is unfortunately to be observed that the theory invariably
follows the practice; that they first produce queer books, and then
formulate a theory which excuses them. Still others call attention to
themselves by a variety of artifices, from walking down Piccadilly
mooning over a sunflower to driving through the Bois de Boulogne in
brocade coat, rose-pink hat, and cravat of gold-lace, like Barbey
d'Aurevilly. No man ever produced good art who worked to advertise
himself, and fortunately the day of these charlatans is usually short. I
have spoken in another place of the danger of confounding an author and
his work; and of course this peril is especially great in the case of
writers of our own time. I may add that the parading of authors is a
vice especially prevalent in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Leo Hunter
advertises herself, and incidentally the celebrities whom she captures,
and the publishers not infrequently show a disposition to promote the
folly for the sake of their balance-sheet. If Apollo and the Muses
returned to earth they would be bidden instantly to one of Mrs. Hunter's
Saturday five o'clocks, and a list of the distinguished guests would be
in the Sunday papers. That is what many understand by the encouragement
of literature.
Another method of securing notice, which is practiced by not a few
latter-day writers, is that of claiming startling originality. Many of
the authors who are attempting to take the kingdom of literary
distinction by violence lay great stress upon the complete novelty of
their views or their emotions. Of these, it is perhaps sufficient to say
that the men who are genuine insist that what they say is true, not that
they are the first to say it. In all art that is of value the end sought
is the work and not the worker. Perhaps most vicious of all these
self-advertisers are those who force themselves into notice by thrusting
forward whatever the common consent of mankind has hitherto kept
concealed. It is chiefly to France that we owe this development of
recent literature so-called. If a French writer wishes to be effective,
it is apparently his instant instinct to be indecent. The trick is an
easy one. It is as if the belle who finds herself a wall-flower at a
ball should begin loudly to swear. She would be at once the centre of
observation.
Of books of these various classes Max Nordau has made a dismal list in
"Degeneration," a book itself discouragingly bulky, discouragingly
opinionated, discouragingly prejudiced and illogical, and yet not
without much rightness both of perception and intention. He says of the
books most popular with that portion of society which is most in
evidence, that they
diffuse a curious perfume, yielding distinguishable odors of incense,
eau de Lubin, and refuse, one or the other preponderating
alternately.... Books treating of the relations of the sexes, with no
matter how little reserve, seem too dully moral. Elegant titillation
only begins where normal sexual relations leave off.... Ghost-stories
are very popular, but they must come on in scientific disguise, as
hypnotism, telepathy, or somnambulism. So are marionette plays, in
which seemingly naïve but knowing rogues make used-up old ballad
dummies babble like babies or idiots. So are esoteric novels in which
the author hints that he could say a deal about magic, fakirism,
kabbala, astrology, and other white and black arts if he chose.
Readers intoxicate themselves in the hazy word-sequences of symbolic
poetry. Ibsen dethrones Goethe; Maeterlinck ranks with Shakespeare;
Nietzsche is pronounced by German and even French critics to be the
leading German writer of the day; the "Kreutzer Sonata" is the Bible
of ladies, who are amateurs in love, but bereft of lovers; dainty
gentlemen find the street ballads and gaol-bird songs of Jules Jouy,
Bruant, MacNab, and Xanroff very _distingué_ on account of "the warm
sympathy pulsing in them," as the phrase runs; and society persons,
whose creed is limited to baccarat and the money market, make
pilgrimages to the Oberammergau Passion-Play, and wipe away a tear
over Paul Verlaine's invocations to the Virgin.--_Degeneration_, ii.
This is a picture true of only a limited section of modern society, a
section, moreover, much smaller in America than abroad. Common sense and
a sense of humor save Americans from many of the extravagances to be
observed across the ocean. There are too many fools, however, even in
this country. To secure immediate success with these readers a writer
need do nothing more than to produce erotic eccentricities. There are
many intellectually restless persons who suppose themselves to be
advancing in culture when they are poring over the fantastic
imbecilities of Maeterlinck, or the nerve-rasping unreason of Ibsen;
when they are sailing aloft on the hot-air balloons of Tolstoi's
extravagant theories, or wallowing in the blackest mud of Parisian slums
with Zola. Dull and jaded minds find in these things an excitement, as
the jaded palate finds stimulation in the sting of fiery sauces. There
are others, too, who believe that these books are great because they are
so impressive. The unreflective reader measures the value of a book not
by its permanent qualities but by its instantaneous effect, and an
instantaneous effect is very apt to be simple sensationalism.
It is not difficult to see the fallacy of these amazing books. A
blackguard declaiming profanely and obscenely in a drawing-room can
produce in five minutes more sensation than a sage discoursing
learnedly, delightfully, and profoundly could cause in years. Because a
book makes the reader cringe it by no means follows that the author is a
genius. In literature any writer of ordinary cleverness may gain
notoriety if he is willing to be eccentric enough, extravagant enough,
or indecent enough. An ass braying attracts more attention than an
oriole singing. The street musician, scraping a foundling fiddle, vilely
out of tune, compels notice; but the master, freeing the ecstasy
enchanted in the bosom of a violin of royal lineage, touches and
transports. All standards are confounded if notoriety means excellence.
There is a sentence in one of the enticing and stimulating essays of
James Russell Lowell which is applicable to these writers who gain
reputation by setting on edge the reader's teeth.
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of
mankind.--_Rousseau and the Sentimentalists._
Notice: the delight of mankind; not the sensation, the pastime, the
amazement, the horror, or the scandal of mankind,--but the delight. This
is a wise test by which to try a good deal of the best advertised
literature of the present day. Do not ask whether the talked-of book
startles, amuses, shocks, or even arouses simply; but inquire, if you
care to estimate its literary value, whether it delights.
It is necessary, of course, to understand that Mr. Lowell uses the word
here in its broad signification. He means more than the simple pleasure
of smooth and sugary things. He means the delight of tragedy as well as
of comedy; of "King Lear" and "Othello" as well as of "Midsummer Night's
Dream;" but he does not mean the nerve-torture of "Ghosts" or the mental
nausea of "L'Assommoir." By delight he means that persuasion which is an
essential quality of all genuine art. The writer who makes his readers
shrink and quiver may produce a transient sensation. His notoriety is
noisily proclaimed by the trumpets of to-day; but the brazen voice of
to-morrow will as lustily roar other fleeting successes, and all alike
be forgotten in a night.
I insisted in the first of these talks upon the principle that good art
is "human and wholesome and sane." We need to keep these characteristics
constantly in mind; and to make them practical tests of the literature
upon which we feed our minds and our imaginations. We are greatly in
need of some sort of an artistic quarantine. Literature should not be
the carrier of mental or emotional contagion. A work which swarms with
mental and moral microbes should be as ruthlessly disinfected by fire as
if it were a garment contaminated with the germs of fever or cholera. It
is manifestly impossible that this shall be done, however, in the
present state of society; and it follows that each reader must be his
own health-board in the choice of books.
The practical question which instantly arises is how one is to know good
books from bad until one has read them. How to distinguish between what
is worthy of attention and what is ephemeral trash has perplexed many a
sincere and earnest student. This is a duty which should devolve largely
upon trained critics, but unhappily criticism is not to-day in a
condition which makes it reliable or practically of very great
assistance where recent publications are concerned. The reader is left
to his own judgment in choosing among writings hot from the press.
Fortunately the task of discriminating is not impossible. It is even far
less difficult than it at first appears. The reader is seldom without a
pretty clear idea of the character of notorious books before he touches
them. Where the multitude of publications is so great, the very means of
advertising which are necessary to bring them into notice show what they
are. Even should a man make it a rule to read nothing until he has a
definite estimate of its merit, he will find in the end that he has lost
little. For any purposes of the cultivation of the mind or the
imagination the book which is good to read to-day is good to read
to-morrow, so that there is not the haste about reading a real book that
there is in getting through the morning paper, which becomes obsolete by
noon. When one considers, too, how small a portion of the volumes
published it is possible to have time for, and how important it is to
make the most of life by having these of the best, one realizes that it
is worth while to take a good deal of trouble, and if need be to
sacrifice the superficial enjoyment of keeping in the front rank of the
mad mob of sensation seekers whose only idea of literary merit is noise
and novelty. It is a trivial and silly vanity which is unhappy because
somebody--or because everybody--has read new books first.
There is, moreover, nothing more stupid than the attempt to deceive
ourselves,--especially if the attempt succeeds. Of all forms of lying
this is at once the most demoralizing and the most utterly useless. If
we read poor books from puerile or unworthy motives, let us at least be
frank about it in our own minds. If we have taken up with unwholesome
writers from idle curiosity, or, worse, from prurient hankering after
uncleanness, what do we gain by assuring ourselves that we did not know
what we were doing, or by pretending that we have unwillingly been
following out a line of scientific investigation? Fine theories make but
flimsy coverings for unhealthy desires.
Of course this whole matter lies within the domain of individual liberty
and individual responsibility. The use or the abuse of reading is
determined by each man for himself. To gloat over scorbutic prose and
lubricious poetry, to fritter the attention upon the endless repetition
of numberless insignificant details, to fix the mind upon phonographic
reports of the meaningless conversations of meaningless characters, to
lose rational consciousness in the confusion of verbal eccentricities
which dazzle by the cunning with which words are prevented from
conveying intelligence,--and the writings of to-day afford ample
opportunity for doing all of these things!--is within the choice of
every reader. It is to be remembered, however, that no excuse evades the
consequence. He who wastes life finds himself bankrupt, and there is no
redress.
Always it is to be remembered that the classics afford us the means of
measuring the worth of what we read. He who pauses to consider a little
will see at once something of what is meant by this. He will realize the
wide difference there is between familiarity with the permanent
literature of the world and acquaintance with the most sensational and
widely discussed books of to-day. A man may be a virtuous citizen and a
good husband and father, with intelligence in his business and common
sense in the affairs of life, and yet be utterly ignorant of how
Achilles put the golden tress into the hand of dead Patroclus, or of the
stratagem by which Iphigenia saved the life of Orestes at Tauris, or of
the love of Palamon and Arcite for Emilie the fair, or of whom Gudrun
married and whom she loved, or of how Sancho Panza governed his island,
or of the ill-fated loves of Romeo and Juliet, or of the agony of
Othello, or of Hamlet, or Lear, or Perdita, or Portia. The knowledge of
none of these is necessary to material existence, and it is possible to
make a creditable figure in the world without it. Yet we are all
conscious that the man who is not aware of these creations which are so
much more real than the majority of the personages that stalk
puppet-like across the pages of history, has missed something of which
the loss makes his life definitely poorer. We cannot but feel the
enrichment of mind and feeling which results from our having in classic
pages made the acquaintance with these gracious beings and shared their
adventures and their emotions. Suppose that the books most noisily
lauded to-day were to be tried by the same test. Is a man better for
knowing with Zola all the diseased genealogy of the Rougon-Macquart
family, morbid, criminal, and foul? Is not the mind cleaner and saner if
it has never been opened to the entertainment of Poznyscheff, Hedda
Gabler, Dr. Rank, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Oswald Alving, or any of this
unclean tribe? It is not that a strong or well-developed man will
ignore the crime or the criminals of the world; but it is not necessary
to gloat over either. It is not difficult to learn all that it is
necessary to know about yellow fever, cholera, or leprosy, without
passing days and nights in the pest hospitals.
These unwholesome books, however, are part of the intellectual history
of our time. He who would keep abreast of modern thought and of life as
it is to-day, we are constantly reminded, must take account of the
writers who are most loudly lauded. Goethe has said: "It is in her
monstrosities that nature reveals herself;" and the same is measurably
true in the intellectual world. The madness, the eccentricity, the
indecencies of these books, are so many indications by which certain
tendencies of the period betray themselves. It seems to me, however,
that this is a consideration to which it is extremely easy to give too
much weight. To mistake this noisy and morbid class of books, these
self-parading and sensational authors, for the most significant signs of
the intellectual condition of the time is like mistaking a drum-major
for the general, because the drum-major is most conspicuous and always
to the fore,--except in action. The mind is nourished and broadened,
moreover, by the study of sanity. It is the place of the physician to
concern himself with disease; but as medical treatises are dangerous in
the hands of laymen, so are works of morbid psychology in the hands of
the ordinary reader.
Fortunately contemporary literature is not confined to books of the
unwholesome sort, greatly as these are in evidence. We have a real
literature as well as a false one. Time moves so swiftly that we have
begun to regard the works of Thackeray and Dickens and Hawthorne, and
almost of Browning and Tennyson, as among the classics. They are so,
however, by evident merit rather than by age, and have not been in
existence long enough to receive the suffrages of generations. The names
of these authors remind us how many books have been written in our time
which endure triumphantly all tests that have been proposed; books to
miss the knowledge of which is to lose the opportunity of making life
richer. Certainly we should be emotionally and spiritually poorer
without the story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, between whom
the Scarlet Letter glowed balefully; without Hilda in her tower and poor
Miriam bereft of her Faun below. To have failed to share the Fezziwigs'
ball, or the trial of Mr. Pickwick for breach of promise; to have lived
without knowing the inimitable Sam Weller and the juicy Micawbers, the
amiable Quilp and the elegant Mrs. Skewton, philanthropic Mrs. Jellyby
and airy Harold Skimpole, is to have failed of acquaintances that would
have brightened existence; to be ignorant of Becky Sharp and Colonel
Newcome, of Arthur Pendennis and George Warrington, of Beatrix and
Colonel Esmond, is to have neglected one of the blessings, and not of
the lesser blessings either. No man is without a permanent and tangible
gain who has comprehendingly read Emerson's "Rhodora," or the
"Threnody," or "Days," or "The Problem." Whoever has been
sympathetically through the "Idylls of the King" not only experienced a
long delight but has gained a fresh ideal; while to have gone to the
heart of "The Ring and the Book,"--that most colossal _tour-de-force_ in
all literature,--to have heard the tender confidences of dying Pompilia,
the anguished confession of Caponsacchi, the noble soliloquy of the
Pope, is to have lived through a spiritual and an emotional experience
of worth incalculable. In the age of Thackeray and Dickens, of Hawthorne
and Emerson and Tennyson and Browning, we cannot complain that there is
any lack of genuine literature.
Nor are we obliged to keep to what seems to some a high and breathless
altitude of reading. There are many readers who are of so little natural
imagination, or who have cultivated it so little, that it is a conscious
and often a fatiguing effort to keep to the mood of these greater
authors. Beside these works to the keen enjoyment of which imagination
is necessary, there are others which are genuine without being of so
high rank. It is certainly on the whole a misfortune that one should be
deprived of a knowledge of Mrs. Proudie and the whole clerical circle in
which she moved, and especially of Mr. Harding, the delightful "Warden;"
he is surely to be pitied who has not read the story of "Silas Marner,"
who does not feel friendly and intimate with shrewd and epigrammatic
Mrs. Poyser, with spiritual Dinah Morris, and with Maggie Tulliver and
her family. No intelligent reader can afford to have passed by in
neglect the pleasant sweetness of Longfellow or the wholesome soundness
of Whittier, the mystic sensuousness of Rossetti or the voluptuous
melodiousness of Swinburne.