One reason why journalism is a lesser thing than literature is that it
subserves the tyranny of timeliness. It narrates the events of the day and
discusses the topics of the hour, for the sole reason that they happen for
the moment to float uppermost upon the current of human experience. The
flotsam of this current may occasionally have dived up from the depths and
may give a glimpse of some underlying secret of the sea; but most often it
merely drifts upon the surface, indicative of nothing except which way the
wind lies. Whatever topic is the most timely to-day is doomed to be the
most untimely to-morrow. Where are the journals of yester-year? Dig them
out of dusty files, and all that they say will seem wearisomely old, for
the very reason that when it was written it seemed spiritedly new. Whatever
wears a date upon its forehead will soon be out of date. The main interest
of news is newness; and nothing slips so soon behind the times as novelty.
With timeliness, as an incentive, literature has absolutely no concern.
Its purpose is to reveal what was and is and evermore shall be. It can
never grow old, for the reason that it has never attempted to be new. Early
in the nineteenth century, the gentle Elia revolted from the tyranny of
timeliness. "Hang the present age!", said he, "I'll write for antiquity."
The timely utterances of his contemporaries have passed away with the times
that called them forth: his essays live perennially new. In the dateless
realm of revelation, antiquity joins hands with futurity. There can be
nothing either new or old in any utterance which is really true or
beautiful or right.
In considering a given subject, journalism seeks to discover what there is
in it that belongs to the moment, and literature seeks to reveal what there
is in it that belongs to eternity. To journalism facts are important
because they are facts; to literature they are important only in so far as
they are representative of recurrent truths. Literature speaks because it
has something to say: journalism speaks because the public wants to be
talked to. Literature is an emanation from an inward impulse: but the
motive of journalism is external; it is fashioned to supply a demand
outside itself. It is frequently said, and is sometimes believed, that the
province of journalism is to mold public opinion; but a consideration of
actual conditions indicates rather that its province is to find out what
the opinion of some section of the public is, and then to formulate it and
express it. The successful journalist tells his readers what they want to
be told. He becomes their prophet by making clear to them what they
themselves are thinking. He influences people by agreeing with them. In
doing this he may be entirely sincere, for his readers may be right and may
demand from him the statement of his own most serious convictions; but the
fact remains that his motive for expression is centred in them instead of
in himself. It is not thus that literature is motivated. Literature is not
a formulation of public opinion, but an expression of personal and
particular belief. For this reason it is more likely to be true. Public
opinion is seldom so important as private opinion. Socrates was right and
Athens wrong. Very frequently the multitude at the foot of the mountain are
worshiping a golden calf, while the prophet, lonely and aloof upon the
summit, is hearkening to the very voice of God.
The journalist is limited by the necessity of catering to majorities; he
can never experience the felicity of Dr. Stockmann, who felt himself the
strongest man on earth because he stood most alone. It may sometimes happen
that the majority is right; but in that case the agreement of the
journalist is an unnecessary utterance. The truth was known before he
spoke, and his speaking is superfluous. What is popularly said about the
educative force of journalism is, for the most part, baseless. Education
occurs when a man is confronted with something true and beautiful and good
which stimulates to active life that "bright effluence of bright essence
increate" which dwells within him. The real ministers of education must be,
in Emerson's phrase, "lonely, original, and pure." But journalism is
popular instead of lonely, timely rather than original, and expedient
instead of pure. Even at its best, journalism remains an enterprise; but
literature at its best becomes no less than a religion.
These considerations are of service in studying what is written for the
theatre. In all periods, certain contributions to the drama have been
journalistic in motive and intention, while certain others have been
literary. There is a good deal of journalism in the comedies of
Aristophanes. He often chooses topics mainly for their timeliness, and
gathers and says what happens to be in the air. Many of the Elizabethan
dramatists, like Dekker and Heywood and Middleton for example, looked at
life with the journalistic eye. They collected and disseminated news. They
were, in their own time, much more "up to date" than Shakespeare, who chose
for his material old stories that nearly every one had read. Ben Jonson's
_Bartholomew Fair_ is glorified journalism. It brims over with
contemporary gossip and timely witticisms. Therefore it is out of date
to-day, and is read only by people who wish to find out certain facts of
London life in Jonson's time. _Hamlet_ in 1602 was not a novelty; but it is
still read and seen by people who wish to find out certain truths of life
in general.
At the present day, a very large proportion of the contributions to the
theatre must be classed and judged as journalism. Such plays, for instance,
as _The Lion and the Mouse_ and _The Man of the Hour_ are nothing more or
less than dramatised newspapers. A piece of this sort, however effective it
may be at the moment, must soon suffer the fate of all things timely and
slip behind the times. Whenever an author selects a subject because he
thinks the public wants him to talk about it, instead of because he knows
he wants to talk about it to the public, his motive is journalistic rather
than literary. A timely topic may, however, be used to embody a truly
literary intention. In _The Witching Hour_, for example, journalism was
lifted into literature by the sincerity of Mr. Thomas's conviction that he
had something real and significant to say. The play became important
because there was a man behind it. Individual personality is perhaps the
most dateless of all phenomena. The fact of any great individuality once
accomplished and achieved becomes contemporary with the human race and
sloughs off the usual limits of past and future.
Whatever Mr. J.M. Barrie writes is literature, because he dwells isolate
amidst the world in a wise minority of one. The things that he says are of
importance because nobody else could have said them. He has achieved
individuality, and thereby passed out of hearing of the ticking of clocks
into an ever-ever land where dates are not and consequently epitaphs can
never be. What he utters is of interest to the public, because his motive
for speaking is private and personal. Instead of telling people what they
think that they are thinking, he tells them what they have always known but
think they have forgotten. He performs, for this oblivious generation, the
service of a great reminder. He lures us from the strident and factitious
world of which we read daily in the first pages of the newspapers, back to
the serene eternal world of little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness
and of love. He educates the many, not by any crass endeavor to formulate
or even to mold the opinion of the public, but by setting simply before
them thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears.
The distinguishing trait of Mr. Barrie's genius is that he looks upon life
with the simplicity of a child and sees it with the wisdom of a woman. He
has a woman's subtlety of insight, a child's concreteness of imagination.
He is endowed (to reverse a famous phrase of Matthew Arnold's) with a sweet
unreasonableness. He understands life not with his intellect but with his
sensibilities. As a consequence, he is familiar with all the tremulous,
delicate intimacies of human nature that every woman knows, but that most
men glimpse only in moments of exalted sympathy with some wise woman whom
they love. His insight has that absoluteness which is beyond the reach of
intellect alone. He knows things for the unutterable woman's
reason,--"because...."
But with this feminine, intuitive understanding of humanity, Mr. Barrie
combines the distinctively masculine trait of being able to communicate the
things that his emotions know. The greatest poets would, of course, be
women, were it not for the fact that women are in general incapable of
revealing through the medium of articulate art the very things they know
most deeply. Most of the women who have written have said only the lesser
phases of themselves; they have unwittingly withheld their deepest and most
poignant wisdom because of a native reticence of speech. Many a time they
reach a heaven of understanding shut to men; but when they come back, they
cannot tell the world. The rare artists among women, like Sappho and Mrs.
Browning and Christina Rossetti and Laurence Hope, in their several
different ways, have gotten themselves expressed only through a sublime and
glorious unashamedness. As Hawthorne once remarked very wisely, women have
achieved art only when they have stood naked in the market-place. But men
in general are not withheld by a similar hesitance from saying what they
feel most deeply. No woman could have written Mr. Barrie's biography of his
mother; but for a man like him there is a sort of sacredness in revealing
emotion so private as to be expressible only in the purest speech. Mr.
Barrie was apparently born into the world of men to tell us what our
mothers and our wives would have told us if they could,--what in deep
moments they have tried to tell us, trembling exquisitely upon the verge of
the words. The theme of his best work has always been "what every woman
knows." In expressing this, he has added to the permanent recorded
knowledge of humanity; and he has thereby lifted his plays above the level
of theatric journalism to the level of true dramatic literature.