“MERE LITERATURE”
Is there any justification for the phrase “mere literature” which
one often hears nowadays? There is no doubt a serious sneer in it,
as Professor Woodrow Wilson, in a recent “Atlantic” essay, avers;
but I think the sneer is not aimed so much at literature in itself
as at certain phases of literature. Lowell has been quoted as saying
that “mere scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old postage
stamps;” yet at vital scholarship--scholarship that is wielded as a
weapon, and that results in power--Lowell would be the last man to
sneer. In all times of high literary culture and criticism, a great
deal is produced that may well be called mere literature,--the result
of assiduous training and stimulation of the literary faculties,--just
as a great deal of art is produced that may be called mere art.
Literature that is the result of the friction upon the mind of other
literatures, might, with some justice, be called mere literature. That
which is the result of the contact of the mind with reality is, or
ought to be, of another order.
Or we may say “mere literature” as we say “mere gentleman.” Now
gentlemanly qualities--refinement, good breeding, etc.--are not to
be sneered at, unless they stand alone, with no man behind them; and
literary qualities--style, learning, fancy, etc.--are not to be sneered
at unless _they_ stand alone, which is not infrequently the case. We
should not apply the phrase “mere gentleman” to Washington, or Lincoln,
or Wellington, though these men may have been the most thorough of
gentlemen; neither should we apply the phrase “mere literature” to
the works of Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, or Dante, or Plato.
The Bible is literature, but it is not mere literature. We apply the
latter term to writings that have little to recommend them save their
technical and artistic excellence, like the mass of current poetry and
fiction. The men who have nothing to say and say it extremely well
produce mere literature.
Both England and France have at the present time many excellent
writers, men who possess every grace of style and charm of expression,
who still give us only a momentary pleasure. They do not move us, they
do not lay strong hands upon us, their works do not take hold of any
great reality; they produce mere literature. Literary seriousness,
literary earnestness, cannot atone for a want of manly seriousness
and moral earnestness. A sensitive artistic conscience cannot make us
content with a dull or obtuse moral conscience. The literary worker
is to confront reality in just as serious a mood as does the man
of science, if he hopes to produce anything that rises above mere
literature. The picnickers, the excursionists, the flower-gatherers of
literature do not produce lasting works. The seriousness of Hawthorne
was much more than a literary seriousness; the emotion of Whittier at
his best is fundamental and human.
There is a passage in Amiel’s “Journal” that well expresses the
distinction I am aiming at. “I have been thinking a great deal of
Victor Cherbuliez,” he says, under date of December 4, 1876. “Perhaps
his novels make up the most disputable part of his work,--they are so
much wanting in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge,
style, wit, and subtlety,--how much thought everywhere, and what
mastery of language! He astonishes one; I cannot but admire him.
Cherbuliez’s mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, keen, full of
resources; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for the feeling
which makes men earnest the irony which leaves them free. Pascal would
say of him, ‘He has never risen from the order of thought to the order
of charity.’ But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian is not worth an
Augustine, but still he is a Lucian.... The positive element in Victor
Cherbuliez’s work is beauty, not goodness, nor moral or religious life.”
The positive element in the enduring works is always something more
than the beautiful; it is the true, the vital, the real, as well. The
beautiful is there, but the not-beautiful is there also. The world is
held together, life is nourished and made strong, and power begotten,
by the neutral or negatively beautiful. Works are everywhere produced
that are artistically serious, but morally trifling and insincere;
faultless in form, but tame and barren in spirit. We could not say
this of the works of Froude or Ruskin, Huxley or Tyndall; we cannot
say it of the works of Matthew Arnold, because he had a higher purpose
than to produce mere literary effects; but we can say it of most of
the productions of the younger British essayists and poets. In some of
them there is a mere lust of verbal forms and rhythmic lilt. In reading
their poems, I soon find myself fairly gasping for breath; I seem to be
trying to breathe in a vacuum,--an effect which one does not experience
at all in reading Tennyson, or Browning, or Arnold. One is apt to have
serious qualms in reading the prose of Walter Pater, the lust of mere
style so pervades his work. Faultless workmanship, one says; and yet
the best qualities of style--freshness, naturalness, simplicity--are
not here. What in Victor Hugo goes far towards atoning for all his
sins against art, against sanity and proportion, are his terrible
moral earnestness and his psychic power. Whatever we may think of his
work, we are not likely to call it “mere literature.” That masterly
ubiquitous sporting and toying with the elements of life which we find
in Shakespeare we shall probably never again see in letters. The stress
and burden of later times do not favor it. The great soul is now too
earnest, too self-conscious; life is too serious. Only light men now
essay it. With so much criticism, so much knowledge, so much science,
another Shakespeare is impossible. Renan says: “In order to establish
those literary authorities called classic, something especially healthy
and solid is necessary. Common household bread is of more value here
than pastry.” There can be little doubt that our best literary workers
are intent upon producing something analogous to pastry, or even
confectionery,--something fine, complex, highly seasoned, that tickles
the taste. It is always in order to urge a return to the simple and
serious, a return to nature, to works that have the wholesome and
sustaining qualities of natural products,--grain, fruits, nuts, air,
water.