It is curious what an uncertain and seemingly capricious thing literary
value is. How often it refuses to appear when diligently sought for,
labored for, prayed for; and then comes without call to some simple
soul that never gave it a thought. Learning cannot compass it, rhetoric
cannot compass it, study cannot compass it. Mere wealth of language
is entirely inadequate. It is like religion: often those who have it
most have it least, and those who have it least have it most. In the
works of the great composers--Gibbon, De Quincey, Macaulay--it is a
conscious, deliberate product. Then, in other works, the very absence
of the literary motive and interest gives an æsthetic pleasure.
One is surprised to read the remark of the “Saturday Review” on the
published letters of Whitman,--letters that have no extrinsic literary
value whatever, not one word of style,--namely, that few books are so
well calculated to “purge the soul of nonsense;” and the remark of
the fastidious Henry James on the same subject, that, with all their
enormities of the common, the letters are positively delightful. Here,
again, the source of our interest is undoubtedly in the personal
revelation,--the type of man we see through the letters, and not in any
wit or wisdom lodged in the letters themselves.
One reader seeks religious or moral values alone in the works he
reads; another seeks scientific or philosophical values; another,
artistic and literary values; others, again, purely human values. No
one, I think, would read Scott or Dickens for purely artistic values,
while, on the other hand, it seems to me that one would go to Mr. James
or to Mr. Howells for little else. One might read Froude with pleasure
who had little confidence in him as an historian, but one could hardly
read Freeman and discount him in the same way; one might have great
delight in Ruskin, who repudiated much of his teaching.
I suppose one comes to like plain literature as he comes to like plain
clothes, plain manners, simple living. What grows with us is the taste
for the genuine, the real. The less a writer’s style takes thought of
itself, the better we like it. The less his dress, his equipage, his
house, concern themselves about appearances, the more we are pleased
with them. Let the purpose be entirely serious, and let the seriousness
be pushed till it suggests the heroic; that is what we crave as we grow
older and tire of the vanities and shams of the world.
To have literary value is not necessarily to suggest books or
literature; it is to possess a certain genuineness and seriousness that
is like the validity of real things. See how much better literature
Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is than the more elaborate and scholarly
address of Everett on the same occasion. General Grant’s “Memoirs”
have a higher literary value than those of any other general in our
Civil War, mainly because of the greater simplicity, seriousness, and
directness of the personality they reveal. There is no more vanity and
make-believe in the book than there was in the man. Any touch of the
elemental, of the veracity and singleness of the natural forces, gives
value to a man’s utterances, and Lincoln and Grant were undoubtedly the
two most elemental men brought out by the war. The literary value of
the Bible, doubtless, arises largely from its elemental character. The
utterances of simple, unlettered men--farmers, sailors, soldiers--often
have great force and impressiveness from the same cause; there are in
them the virtue and seriousness of real things. One great danger of
schools, colleges, libraries, is that they tend to kill or to overlay
this elemental quality in a man--to make the poet speak from his
culture instead of from his heart. “To speak in literature with the
perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movement of animals and the
unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by
the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art;” and who so likely to do
this as the simple, unbookish man? Hence Sainte-Beuve says the peasant
always has style.
In fiction the literary value resides in several different things, as
the characterization, the action, the plot, and the style; sometimes
more in one, sometimes more in another. In Scott, for instance, it is
found in the characters and the action; the style is commonplace. In
George Eliot, the action, the dramatic power, is the weakest factor.
In Mr. Howells we care very little for the people, but the art, the
style, is a perpetual delight. In Hawthorne our pleasure, again, is
more evenly distributed. In Poe the plot and the style interest us.
In Dickens it is the character and the action. The novelist has many
strings to his bow, and he can get along very well without style, but
what can the poet, the historian, the essayist, the critic, do without
style--that is, without that vital, intimate, personal relation between
the man and his language which seems to be the secret of style? The
true poet makes the words his own; he fills them with his own quality,
though they be the common property of all. This is why language, in
the hands of the born writer, is not the mere garment of thought, not
even a perfectly adjusted and transparent garment, as a French writer
puts it. It is a garment only as the body is the garment of the soul.
This is why a writer with a style loses so much in a translation, while
with the ordinary composer translation is little more than a change of
garments.
I should say that the literary value of the modern French writers and
critics resides more in their style than in anything else, while with
the German it resides least in the style; in the English it resides
in both thought and style. The French fall below the English in lyric
poetry, because, while the Frenchman has more vanity, he has less
egoism, and hence less power to make the universe speak through him.
The solitude of the lyric is too much for his intensely social nature,
while he excels in the light dramatic forms for this very reason. He
has more power of intellectual metamorphosis.
Apart from style and the other qualities I have mentioned, is another
gift, the gift of narration--the story-teller’s gift, which novelists
have in varying degrees. Probably few of them have this talent in so
large a measure as Wilkie Collins had it, yet this power does not of
itself seem sufficient to save his work from oblivion. Still apart
from these qualities, and of high literary worth, and apart from the
attractiveness of the subject matter, is the power to interest. Can
you interest me in what you have to say, by your manner of saying it?
This is one of the most intimate and personal gifts of all. No matter
what the subject, some writers, like some speakers, catch our attention
at once, and hold it to the end. They appear to be telling us some
important bit of news which they are in a hurry to be delivered of. No
time or words are wasted. There is something special and imminent in
the look and tone. The sentences are definitely aimed. The man knows
what he wants to say and is himself interested in it. His mind is not
somnolent or stagnant; the style is specific and direct--no benumbing
effects of vague and featureless generalizations. The thoughts move,
they make a current, and the reader quickly yields himself to it. How
soon we tire of the mumbling, soliloquizing style, where the writer
seems talking to himself. He must talk to his reader and must catch his
eye.
Then those dead-level sentences that seem to return forever into
themselves, that have no direction or fall, that do not point and hurry
to some definite conclusion,--we soon yawn over these too.
What rare power the late Henry George had to invest his subject with
interest! What a current in his book “Progress and Poverty”!--While it
seems to me that in his “Social Evolution” Benjamin Kidd suffers from
the want of this talent; I do not get the full force of his periods at
the first reading.