THE LITERARY DISCIPLINE
OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN ERSKINE
THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT AND OTHER ESSAYS
THE KINDS OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS
DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS
GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS (With W. P. Trent)
_POETRY_
ACTÆON AND OTHER POEMS
THE SHADOWED HOUR
HEARTS ENDURING
_A Play in one Scene_
COLLECTED POEMS 1907-1922
THE
LITERARY DISCIPLINE
BY
JOHN ERSKINE
_Professor of English at Columbia University_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1923
Copyright, 1922, by the
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Copyright, 1923, by
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
_Printed in U. S. A._
TO GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE ix
I. DECENCY IN LITERATURE 3
II. ORIGINALITY IN LITERATURE 47
III. THE CULT OF THE NATURAL 91
IV. THE CULT OF THE CONTEMPORARY 137
V. THE CHARACTERS PROPER TO LITERATURE 187
PREFACE
The following chapters were first published serially in _The North
American Review_, from November, 1922, to March, 1923. For their
reappearance in this volume I have made slight changes in them all, and
have inserted in the fourth chapter a few paragraphs written for _The
Bookman_ of July, 1922. The editors of both magazines have my thanks for
permission to reprint.
The title of the book will disclose at once the critical theory
underlying these essays; they are studies in the discipline which
literature imposes on those who cultivate it as an art, and their
doctrine is that language as a medium of expression has certain
limitations which the writer must respect, and that the psychology of
his audience limits him also in what he may say, if he would gain a wide
hearing and keep it. To know what can be said in words, and what effect
it will have on your readers, is the inward art of writing, much more
important even than the management of a sentence or the shaping of a
paragraph.
I write here of literature as an art. Since I mean to exclude, as not
art, many books of undoubted importance and of wide appeal, I must
attempt at least to defend a distinction that to certain readers will
seem arbitrary. A book may tell us of a life we already know about, or
of a life we as yet do not know; the pleasure it gives us will be of
recognition or of curiosity satisfied. Of course no books fall absolutely
into one or the other of such extremes, but it is fairly accurate to say
that every successful book does give us information, a new experience, or
brings back an old experience to recognize. Though both kinds of books
may be equally well written, we are inclined to ask only instruction
from the one kind, but permanent enjoyment from the other. One is a
document in history or sociology, in ethics or psychology; the other,
as I understand it, is a work of art. If our country has not proved a
favorable birth-place for literary works of art, the reason probably
lies in our history rather than in lack of able writers. Ours has always
been, and still is, an unknown land; the reader of American works has
primarily been looking for information about America. The early visitors
from Europe wrote us up for the enlightenment of their friends at home,
and since our world has changed rapidly, we still write up ourselves,
for our own enlightenment. The too brief flourishing of literature as an
art in New England was possible only because life there for one moment
in our history was so stable that a considerable body of readers had
much experience in common; having had their curiosity satisfied as to
their own life, they could recognize it and reflect upon the literary
portrait of it. But the New England moment in our literature proved an
exception, and we are so accustomed now to read novels and poems, not as
art, but as bulletins of information from the west, the northwest, the
middle west or the south, that we are losing the sense of living art in
the New England writers themselves, and are considering them more and
more as documents in a past civilization. Since we have so great need of
documents, I realize that I prejudice myself with many readers when I say
that my chief interest is in literature as art—in the books which reflect
the unchanging aspects of human experience, rather than in the reports of
our temporary condition.
If literature in our country has suffered from our passion for
information, I believe it has also been damaged in our day by a bad
philosophy of esthetics which has encouraged the writer to think much of
himself and little of his audience. Literature is an art of expression,
we say in the old phrase, and it expresses life. But whose life? The
writer’s, of course, replies the philosophy I happen not to like. No; if
a book ever becomes famous, it is because it expresses the experience of
the reader. The writer’s personality will pervade it, but we must be able
to recognize ourselves in it before we can admit that it portrays life
truly.
The function of criticism, as I understand it, is to discover, in the
past experience of the race, what books have won a secure place in men’s
affections, and to find out if possible why men have been permanently
fond of them. A great critic would be a scientist, observing the
behavior of the reader in the presence of certain stories or poems,
and recording the kind of effect produced by various arrangements of
character and plot, or by different employments of language. Such a
critic was Aristotle in the _Poetics_. The art of literature has never
had an observer more accurate or more penetrating, and those who return
constantly to his wise pages will understand why I have quoted him so
often, and often have drawn upon him for aid when I have not used his
name.
I must record my gratitude to two living philosophers also, towers of
strength to those of us who love books as works of art—George Santayana
and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge. The first has taught me through his
books—are any books more beautiful than his written in English today? The
second has enriched me with his daily companionship and with those spoken
words, grave or gay but always wise, which his friends and disciples
learn to save up for remembrance.
And I have offered this book in my dedication to our one poet-critic
in America who has spent his genius in the service of literature as
art, and as art alone. I do not know whether what I have written will
be altogether acceptable to him, and if I put his honored name in the
forefront of my pages, it is not to shield me from deserved criticism.
But writing on this theme, I must bear witness to his leadership among
all in this country who in my lifetime have known how to prize the
immortal things in great books—imagination, ideal humanity, beauty, and
the kind of truth that is beauty. In a day when literary criticism has
been contentious and personal, more like a political campaign in a tough
ward than anything that Spenser or Sidney or Shelley would recognize as
a pilgrimage to wisdom, Mr. Woodberry has written nothing ungenerous or
harsh of new arrivals less scholarly, less gifted, less accomplished and
less chivalrous than himself. He has
Let the younger and unskilled go by
To win his honour and to make his name.
Indeed, more than anyone else among us, he has kept his faith that
youth, given time enough, will discover art as it will find out other
incarnations of beauty, and will achieve new miracles in its worship.
Twenty-five years ago he taught us to love the masters in poetry—no
easier thing to do for boys then than it is now. We have still to acquire
his hospitality toward the future, to look on with his good humor and
sympathy while the immature in the world of art, as elsewhere, try to
rearrange the universe, not knowing that it has been here for some time
and is set in its ways.
J. E.
THE LITERARY DISCIPLINE
I
DECENCY IN LITERATURE
I
The quarrel with indecent art is an old one, and the present discussion
of improper books, with threats of censorship, begins to rally itself
in two familiar camps—on one side the moralists, showing in the heat of
debate less understanding of art than they probably have, and on the
other side the writers, showing in the same heat somewhat less concern
for morals than it is to be hoped they feel. The censorious seem disposed
to suppress on the ground of indecency almost any kind of book they
happen not to like; the writers seem at times to argue that all books
are equally good, or, at least, should be free and equal. These are the
old exaggerations of the quarrel. Yet in two important respects the
present discussion is quite novel and more than usually interesting; for
one thing, the attack now is less on obscenity, about which there are
no two opinions, than on indecency, of which we have at the moment no
adequate definition; for another thing, the writers themselves, perhaps
for the first time in history, have no definition of literary decency to
offer, and seem not greatly interested in forming one.
Censorships are usually exercised for the protection of religious or
political doctrine, and whatever may be said against the method, at
least in the field of religion or politics the censor knows clearly
what he wishes to protect. But if we now would protect decency, we must
first define the term. It is not enough to have a moral conviction on
the subject; we must have also some principle outside of our emotional
prejudices, based on something more lasting than fashion. In the present
welter of contradictions and opprobrium it is sometimes thought indecent
to wear bobbed hair or short skirts; for the morals of the school,
teachers have been dismissed who rolled their stockings below the knee.
Obviously, these are not great faults in decency, if faults at all; a
good deal of camel must have been swallowed before justice could be done
to these gnats. Some of our neighbors wish to suppress certain plays;
others wish to suppress the theatre. Some wish to suppress Swinburne
and Baudelaire, with one hand as it were, while distributing with the
other copies of the Bible containing the _Song of Songs_. A minister of
this type, earnest in his work for decency and quite muddled as to what
it is, told me that he could not give his approval to the _Spoon River
Anthology_, brilliant though it was; he could approve of no book that
portrayed fornication. Yet he must have read the story of Lot’s daughters
and their behavior with their father. He approved of the Bible, and
he would probably not call it indecent. What is decency, then, or its
opposite?
At this point the writers ought to stand up and answer. In other ages
they would have done so; they would have thought no one so competent
as the artist to define decency in his own field, and they would have
stated their definition from the point of view of art. They would have
called it “decorum” instead of “decency”, but they would have meant the
same thing—fitness or propriety in the particular art they practised.
When Milton made his famous plea on ethical grounds for freedom of the
press, he went on, as an artist, to say that of course there are good
and bad books, and when a book has had its chance, it must submit to the
judgment of the competent. He was writing in an age when the reader might
be expected to have some training in artistic definitions of decorum.
If books are to enjoy freedom of publication now, it seems incumbent
upon the writers to define the decency of their art, and to spread the
knowledge of the definition, as widely as possible, that the competent
reader of today may have a standard by which to judge.
II
It ought to be possible now, as it once was, to define decency in terms
outside our emotions, not variable with our private taste but fixed in
the conditions of the artist’s work. When man is inspired by the world
he sees to make some lasting record of his feeling about it, and selects
a medium to express himself in,—wood, stone, metal, color, language,—he
immediately encounters certain problems and difficulties in his medium,
certain limitations in it which he must submit to, if he would convey
his meaning with precision. The limitations of his medium, therefore,
dictate to the artist his first lessons in decorum. For if you will not
respect those limitations, you will find yourself saying what you did
not intend; instead of beauty, you will convey some effect humorous or
grotesque or ugly. It is at least bearable to see actual garments on
the wax figures in shop-windows; we dress up dolls. But not even the
shop window could tolerate a marble statue with clothes on. When the
artist learns that some things, though excellent in themselves, do not
come out in his medium with the effect he desires, his good sense and
the sincerity of his art compel him to leave these subjects for other
mediums. The themes he thus abandons are not indecent in the sense of
obscenity or filth, not bad in themselves, but they do not fit his
art—or, as writers used to say, do not belong to its decorum.
The decorum of art may seem to the moralist far less important than the
decency his own strong emotions feel after, but the moralist is wrong.
The decorum of art is the deeper kind of decency, for it is based on
lasting principles, and it leads to an understanding of the positive
good in art, to beauty, as the moralist’s concern for decency often does
not. You cannot explain on moral grounds why the glorification of the
body in Walt Whitman, let us say, is sometimes disconcerting, yet the
glorification of it in Greek sculpture seems not only decent but noble.
The artist could explain the matter if he understood the decorum of
artistic mediums. In so far as he does not understand it, he adds to the
confusion of the arts in our time; he fills our magazines, for example,
with photographs of Greek dances, and is himself, let us hope, disturbed
by the grotesque contortions he has perpetuated. The dance was probably
a graceful flow of motion; of all that flow, however, only a few moments
would be in the decorum of the camera—moments of poise, in which motion
might be suggested but not represented. But the photographer was charmed
by the moments of motion, which are the essence of dance decorum, and
he gives us a picture of grim-faced ladies suspended in the air, with
frantic gestures of fingers and toes.
In literature, since the medium is language, decorum is a question of the
limitations and capacities of words. The great limitation of language
is that it must be heard or read one word at a time, though most of
the things we wish to speak of in this world should be thought of or
seen all at once, and their true outline and their total effect may be
dislocated by piecemeal expression. To represent in language a landscape
or a person, a building or any intellectual architecture, is, strictly
speaking, impossible; we can merely make statements, carefully selected,
about the subject, and trust that no matter how dismembered in the
telling, it will somehow come together again in the hearer’s mind, thanks
largely to the hearer’s imagination. Where the suggestion is so slight
and the collaboration so great, the writer is under some obligation to be
precise and conscientious in what he suggests. His responsibility might
perhaps seem less when he is telling a story; if language is inapt for
the portrayal of stationary things having mass, structure and extent, we
might suppose it better fitted to the representation of action, which
like language occurs in sequence of time. But even in the recital of
events, language has to name separately in an artificial order events
which actually coincide, and the reader’s imagination must put the
fragments together again. _“Indeed,” replied Mr. Jones_, or, _Mr. Jones
replied, “Indeed!”_ Neither formula quite represents what happened. In
life, when we heard the “Indeed!” the sound would tell us not only what
was said but also who said it. No wonder the poets have so often thought
of the drama as the most satisfying literary form, for when a play is
acted, words convey in it all that they can convey in life, and they
are aided, as in life, by other kinds of language—by gesture, facial
expression, scenery, which speak to the eye while the voice is speaking
to the ear.
Because words must be spoken one after another, there are not only some
things which are hard to say in that medium, but others which in certain
circumstances should not be said at all. No matter how much we select the
sounds, our utterance will lay a fairly even emphasis on all the things
we name; therefore, if we wish to subordinate some part of the picture,
to pass over it with no emphasis at all, we cannot throw it into shadow,
as a painter can—we must leave it out altogether. A painter may portray
a face half in shadow, so that one ear is barely discernible; looking
at the picture you do not see the shadowed ear, and do not miss it. But
if some one tells you in words that the ear is in shadow, at once the
ear enjoys special emphasis, the opposite of the painter’s intention. Or
suppose the portrait is not shadowed, but all the features are clear; and
suppose the artist has focused your attention on the eyes, or has brought
out some characteristic expression. You can attend to the picture exactly
as you look at the subject in life—noticing what is important in it, but
not examining it otherwise in detail. The head has two ears, but you do
not count them. If, however, the writer describes the face as it is in
life, or as it is in the portrait, he may speak only of the chief focus
or expression of it; he must not say that the subject has two ears. If
he does so, he will be indecent in his art, and may seem to the original
of the portrait insulting in his manners.
All literary accounts of the human body raise this problem, not a problem
of squeamishness or puritanism, but of decorum. The classical Greeks
seem to have mastered the question either by instinctive good taste or
by analysis, as they mastered so many other problems in art with which
we are only beginning to wrestle. They cannot be accused of prudishness
where the body is concerned; they loved its naked beauty, and in their
sculpture they portrayed it frankly, with a serious and unflagging
delight. Yet in their poetry they did not portray it; they merely noted
the total effect of physical beauty, and omitted details, as we should
omit the number of ears in the portrait. In the classical Homer, to be
sure, there remained even after much expurgating certain stereotyped
labels of the body; goddesses are “ox-eyed”, beautiful women are
“deep-bosomed.” But the phrases are so conventional that they probably
called up a general sense of approval, rather than a specific detail,
as the word “mortals” calls up to us the general idea of men, rather
than the fact of death. Aside from such phrases Homer and the other
classical poets suggest the body without detail, trying to render the
general effect the body makes in life—its femininity, its masculinity—at
the same time avoiding any such attention to anatomical detail as in
real life would seem, to the Greek and to us, morbid or clinical. The
sculptor, working in another medium, can use the details the poet must
omit; when we look at his Apollo or his Aphrodite we see not a naked
body but a divine presence. The effect of divinity is not furnished by
any anatomical member, nor interfered with by any. The body in detail
is before us, but the expression, the something divine we feel, is in
the attitude or the character. The wise poet, knowing the limitations
and dangers of his medium, tries to reproduce only the attitude or the
character. Later sculptors, in the decadence that followed the Periclean
age, deserted the decorum of their own medium, and called attention
to separate parts of the body—to ribs or veins, neck or breasts. In
literature a parallel decadence occurred; the poets tried to give the
effect of beauty, not in Homer’s way, by avoiding physical detail, but by
citing it. They managed to suggest not beauty but sex.
The modern lover of beauty who quite properly wishes to restore the body
to its rightful honor and reverence, usually appeals to the Greeks for
his precedent. But if he wishes to celebrate the body in detail, he
should appeal not to the Greeks but to the poets of the Renaissance.
The praise of the body in the Renaissance is sometimes explained as
springing from a newly recovered delight in material beauty. It should
also be explained as a reaction, on the part of earnest, even puritanical
moralists, against other moralists who, they thought, viewed life but
partially and cramped the human soul. In our own language, Edmund Spenser
and John Milton led in this praise of beauty—moralists both; as in modern
times Walt Whitman led the praise, a moralist also, whether or not his
detractors admit it. But a moral purpose is a dangerous approach to
art, whether you are a critic or a poet. Whitman is perhaps the easiest
illustration to begin with. He felt that to the pure every part of the
body is sacred, and at its best is a thing of beauty. Had he been a
sculptor, he would have proceeded to make statues which probably would
have shocked nobody. Working in language, however, he mistook the decorum
of the art, and wrote as though he were sculptor or painter, and the
result is in those anatomical catalogues from which no beauty emerges,
whatever else does. He differs as widely as possible from Edmund Spenser
in most things, but in this one matter they are alike. Milton was too
close to the Greeks to go wrong, even with his moral impulse to assert
the honor of the body; his impassioned praise of wedded love, and his
remarks on the glory of nakedness when Adam and Eve first appear in his
epic, put no strain on literary decorum. But Spenser’s moral enthusiasm
for beauty leads to such physical inventories as his picture of Belphœbe,
in the second book of the _Faerie Queene_, or of his own bride, in
the _Amoretti_ and the _Epithalamium_—an accounting of eyes, teeth,
hair, neck, shoulders, breasts, waist, arms and legs. Many a critic has
suggested that his poems have the character of painting or of tapestry,
and had he actually worked in a pictorial medium, he would have made the
effect he desired. In his portrait of Serena naked among the savages, in
the sixth book of the _Faerie Queene_, he followed Homer’s method with
admirable success. No English poet is more spiritual than he—all the more
impressive the indecorum to which his moral earnestness occasionally
brought him, and all the more helpful his example ought to be to modern
beauty-lovers who fancy that the decorum of an art need not be studied
and obeyed.
Through ignorance of decorum in language a moralist sometimes comes
to grief in the opposite direction; wishing to indicate indecency,
he sometimes through reticence stumbles upon the Homeric method and
portrays beauty instead. A while ago a minister of some name, an
aggressive defender of decency, preached a sermon on the dangers which
at the moment he saw threatening us from the arts. According to the
newspapers, he said that if certain theatrical managers could get it by
the police, we should have a show in which a naked woman in one scene
posed before a black velvet curtain. Wishing to touch the sulphurous
subject as gingerly as possible, he merely suggested the lovely contrast
of body and background; those of his congregation who had seen it forgot
their moral danger and remembered the Venus de Milo in the Louvre. It
occurred to some of them that this material might be indecorous in the
pulpit; in the theatre, however—well, they were not unwilling to see it,
if it was actually put on.
III
The principle of literary decorum which applies to the representation
of the body applies also to the allied theme of sex. The body is a fit
subject for literature, but not in detail. Sex is a proper subject for
literature, so long as it is represented as a general force in life, and
particular instances of it are decent so long as they illustrate that
general force and turn our minds to it; but sexual actions are indecent
when they cease to illustrate the general fact of sex, and are studied
for their own sake; like the ears in the portrait, they then assume
an emphasis they do not deserve. This seems to be the decorum of the
theme as great writers have treated it, and this is the decorum which
men instinctively adopt in discussion, if they have not been trained
to think that all discussion of sex is naughty. People so trained will
call any book indecent which in any way touches the theme. When _Trilby_
appeared years ago, many of us then youngsters were protected (in vain)
from the lovely story because Trilby had been somebody’s mistress before
the romance began. So to an earlier generation _The Scarlet Letter_ had
seemed dangerous because Hester Prynne’s child was illegitimate. But
neither book had physical passion for its theme, though the force of sex
in life, for good or evil, gave each story most of its interest and its
pathos. How indecent in the artistic sense, how indecorous, either book
might have been, we realize by supposing that Du Maurier had centred
attention on Trilby’s early and sordid affairs, before she met her true
love, or that Hawthorne had given us in detail the experiences of Hester
in Arthur Dimmesdale’s arms. One has an uneasy feeling that so the books
might have been written today; the general fact of sex and its influence
would not operate as a colossal force in the story, but would be deduced
in an argument or assumed as an hypothesis—modern specialists in sex are
so uncertain of its existence—and the focus would have been on the animal
behavior of human beings, which the hypothesis of sex would explain.
This kind of book is indecent, though it is usually too psychological in
manner to disturb the censorious, and entirely too frequent in recent
literature to suppress.
We turn for relief to the decorum of great literature. “From the roof
David saw a woman washing herself, and the woman was very beautiful to
look upon.” The painter might give the details of that beauty; the writer
could not. But he could continue: “And David sent and inquired after
the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam,
the wife of Uriah the Hittite? And David sent messengers and took her,
and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; and she returned unto her
house. And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am
with child. And David sent to Joab, saying, Send me Uriah the Hittite.”
So begins one of the greatest of stories from both points of view,
artistic and moral. Is it too frank for our taste? Would the minister who
described so well the naked woman and the black velvet, set this story
also before his congregation? He ought to, for it is a masterpiece of
decency. David’s passion, Bathsheba’s acceptance of it and her consequent
terror, were important only as beginning the spiritual tragedy; the old
writer names the facts and passes on to his great subject. To have
begun less frankly would have been to misrepresent life and spoil the
moral; to have elaborated the scene of David’s love-making would have
been indecent. In the same decorum the classical Greeks told their
stories; Helen eloped with Paris; Œdipus had children by his own mother;
Clytemnestra killed her husband and made her lover king—so much of the
fact is necessary in each case to understand the magnificent and tragic
consequences; but the Greek poets did not pry further into the details of
passion.
There are, of course, unhealthy minds which have developed a mania
for obscenity, and at the other extreme of exaggeration there are the
unbalanced minds which do not care to admit the existence of sex. But
sex, in one form or another, is in the thoughts of most people most of
the time, and common folk—and the great poets—speak of it constantly,
and in the same way. In unsophisticated society, among sincere and
simple men, the references to sex are at once reticent and frank; it is
recognized and respected as gravitation might be or as the sea is by
sailors—as a power always immanent, in contact with which men may be lost
or saved. Gossip in that kind of society may whisper that such a girl had
a child by such a boy only a month after their wedding, or that so and
so is not really the son of his supposed father. Exactly this kind of
scandal furnishes material to Homer and to the old prophets in the Bible,
to Dante and to Shakespeare, for sex is one of the permanent sides of our
moral world. If this treatment of it is essential to a complete picture
of life, the thinness of American literature may well come from lack of
frankness; but current attempts to correct the thinness by dwelling on
physical details are seeking frankness in the wrong direction and are but
so many offenses against literary decorum. One reason why we cling with
such pride to _The Scarlet Letter_ is that with all its shortcomings as a
novel it bases its great moral vision on just such a complete and decent
observation of life as our books do not usually give us.
IV
In this discussion of sex our attention has shifted from the problem of
language to the question of the general and the particular in art—that
is, from the principle of decorum involving the medium of literature
to the principle of decorum involving its subject-matter. This second
principle, rightly understood, marks the chief difference between
contemporary art and what some of us still believe was the great art
of the world hitherto—the best of the Greek, the best of the medieval.
When you look at life naturally, in the directions dictated by your
spontaneous impulses, it is your own life that seems important, your
private fortunes, your personal ambitions. Everything that belongs to
you seems peculiar, because it is not natural at first to compare the
lives of others with our own. A poet who presents experience from this
angle of individuality will always make a strong initial appeal and
perhaps a lasting one, since he falls in with our instincts, and this
accord will seem to us evidence of something profound. Such a poet, to
some extent, was Euripides, who imagined his characters sympathetically
from their private points of view, and portrayed for us the egotism of
human nature in its most tragic form. It is not fair to say that in
his world men and women need only to explain themselves in order to be
right; but, at least, after they have explained themselves it is hard
to tell who are right and who are wrong. Such another poet is Browning,
who represents human nature one individual at a time, always from the
individual’s point of view. By such a simple and primitive method he
obtains effects of obvious richness—he shows how varied life is, since
there are so many individuals in it, and how novel it perpetually must
be, since each of us is discovering the world for the first time, and
how much right there is in every man’s cause, once he has the chance
to speak for himself. If we had all the works of Euripides, we should
probably find in them as rich and varied a world as Browning’s, expressed
with clearer and more direct poetic genius. Our contemporary taste is
rather solidly for this kind of literature—Browning flourishes more and
more, and Euripides has been revived; and if you really approve of the
individualistic approach to art, it is hard to see how you can call
anything indecent. Anything that is natural to any kind of character must
get a hearing.
But men can also be imaginative enough to look at life as a whole—first,
perhaps, to look out at all other men, and then to stand off and look
at all men, oneself included. When you begin to take an interest in
other men, you notice of course that their lives are not like yours, not
so important nor interesting nor promising, but in their drabness they
are all curiously alike; they all, with slight variation, are born, are
brought up, fall in love according to their lights, marry, earn their
living, have children, grow old, and die. When this uniformity begins
to interest you, you are making your first intelligent acquaintance
with life; and when you have looked at mankind and included yourself in
the picture, when you have admitted however reluctantly that the single
addition does not change the total effect, that life is still simple and
uniform and that you are less peculiar than you thought—then you have
seen yourself at last as one of the human race.
To see this calls for imagination and for the Greek virtue which we
translate as magnanimity—great-mindedness. The virtue is not to be
acquired all at once. We have made a great advance when we can think of
life in terms not of ourselves but of moral and material aspects and
powers—in terms of youth and age, for example, of strength or beauty or
pride. This is the allegorical stage of our pilgrimage in wisdom, no mean
stage to reach, though it happens to be out of fashion just now. We are
acquainted with it in the old morality plays, especially in the almost
popular _Everyman_, and perhaps in Æschylus, especially in _Prometheus
Bound_.
But our advance is greatest when we can recognize these aspects and
powers in the individuals around us—when our observation includes at
one and the same time the general truths of life and the particular
instances. The poet preëminently master of this sane wisdom was
Sophocles, who, in Arnold’s familiar phrase, saw life steadily and saw it
whole. The point of view which he represented is the most magnanimous,
the least egotistical, that art has yet taken, and one would have to
think meanly of the race to believe that we shall not return to it,
as to the noblest part of the Greek legacy. But Sophocles was only
the illustration of a decorum generally practised. In the brief and
magnificent period which left us our greatest perfection in the arts,
the Athenians thought of the individual as important if he illustrated
for the moment the general truths or fortunes of life, but his strictly
private fate was insignificant.
This attitude has been explained by saying that the Greeks, having no
gift for introspection, took always an objective view of life, but such a
formula hardly accounts for all the illustrations of magnanimity. When
Athens was in her glory, for example, it was only the public buildings
that were glorious; no individual, not even Pericles himself, thought of
putting Phidias to decorate his private home. Again, in the _Antigone_
Sophocles is introspective enough—as introspective as Euripides or Ibsen
himself—but the introspection is concerned with the general theme of
piety, of one’s duty to blood relations, not at all with the love story
of Antigone. She was betrothed to the son of the king who condemned her
to death, and the fact proves tragic for the son and for the king, but
the love of the two young people is their private business, and the poet
therefore does not let his heroine discuss the problem of piety from that
point of view.
It was the genius of Shakespeare and of Molière, even in comedy, to
preserve the same decorum. They show us those aspects of man’s fortune
which are of interest to all men; of course we are free to fill in the
gaps according to our taste in gossip, but the dramatist awakens our
feelings and calls our attention only to general experiences and common
wisdom. In Shakespeare, _Measure for Measure_ is a good example, a noble
tragedy and a decent play. It is less glorious than the _Antigone_,
obviously, since it shows human nature resisting temptation rather than
establishing an ideal, but the grimness of its subject and the fact
that it portrays an indecent character do not make it indecent, as some
critics think. Its power is its probing into general truths of life,
chiefly into the capriciousness of temptation where sex is concerned, and
into the various forms of the fear of death.
Claudio, condemned to die and convinced that there is no hope, persuades
himself that he does not care to live; but immediately he has a chance
to live at the cost of his sister’s honor, and he finds himself slipping
into casuistry to make his escape possible even on such terms. Here is
introspection of the Sophoclean sort, touching the psychology not of a
particular man but of all of us. Walter Pater remarked the paradox that
Angelo is tempted to his fall by sight of the pure-minded Isabella, the
incarnation of virtue. He might have named other paradoxes of Isabella’s
influence. She fascinates all the men she meets, good or bad. At the end
of the play the Duke announces that he intends to marry her himself,
and since he gives her little opportunity to dispute this plan, we may
speculate how far his motives differ essentially from Angelo’s. But
Lucio, the wretch so steeped by habit in indecency that he can hardly
frame a clean sentence, is immediately and permanently sensitive
to Isabella’s beauty of soul as well as of body. Why? Shakespeare
merely exhibits the paradox, in his characteristic way, without hint
of explanation. But we may read a lesson in decorum, if we wish, in
the decency of art, from the first speech of Lucio to Isabella in the
nunnery, when the dirty-minded wretch, having none but coarse formulas in
his vocabulary, tries to address her with the reverence he feels.
V
On all this the moralist may comment that decency as a matter of art is
one thing, and the protection of public morals is another; that however
artists may be interested in the decorum of their medium, or in the
general truth of their subject-matter, the public is also interested in
the motives and the possible effects of their writing. Granted; but if
the moral point is to be made, as against the artistic, the artist has
his own conclusions to draw. The first is that one may as reasonably
question the motives of the vice-suppressors as the motives of the
artists. Better not to question the motives of either, but if the mean
insinuation begins, it must in justice spread in both directions. The
woman before the velvet curtain, described by the preacher, seemed a
vision of loveliness; yes, you may say, but what would be the motives
of those who produce such an exhibition—worship of beauty, or wish to
capitalize our baser impulses? The question is unanswerable unless
you can see into men’s hearts, but it applies also to the minister
who preached the sermon; was he interested only in morals, or was
he capitalizing to some extent our craving for the sensational? An
artist would be content to answer that where the result is beautiful,
in the decorum of the art, it is sensible as well as kind to suppose
men’s motives of the best; and when the result is not beautiful, it is
sufficient to condemn the result, without reference to the motives.
But the more actively censorious hold that the weak need to be saved from
themselves; that a constant brooding upon indecencies is the death of
the soul. Well, if it is obscenity that we war against, by all means root
it out, for it can be recognized at a glance, and the reformer need not
brood long upon it. But in the realm of art in which decency rises, the
suppression of indecency involves as much brooding on it by the reformer
as by the endangered public—in fact, the reformer must specialize in such
brooding. Whether or not it is to the death of his soul, it seems to be
to the impairment of his taste. You cannot give all your time to bad
art and know much about good. The rôle of the censor would take on some
dignity if there ever were a censor who was a connoisseur, who was the
patron of good poets and painters, who actively supported a clean stage.
But then, if you had the taste for the best, no inducement whatever would
make you give your life to the detection of indecency.
Human nature is wiser in the long run than any censor; in the long run
the books of the highest decency hold their place in fame by crowding
out the others. The public suppresses indecent books by reading decent
ones. Every artist would respectfully suggest this method to all censors.
Perhaps the censors will say that the method is too slow—that it takes
too long for the good books to crowd out the others. It does take too
long now, but why not hasten the process by calling attention to the
good books, instead of delaying it by advertising the bad? If the energy
which now tries to suppress books sure to be forgotten in fifty years,
were directed to the encouragement of the few books which after fifty
years might still be worth reading, the final verdict of fame might be
hastened. But there seems to be a decorum in morals too, or perhaps two
decorums, a creative and a negative—one seeking to displace evil by a
positive good, the other too much preoccupied with the evil to notice the
good at all.
II
ORIGINALITY IN LITERATURE
I
If we accept the doctrine of criticism today, originality is a great
virtue in a writer, and if we believe the book advertisements, all the
new writers as they appear, and as they reappear, have this virtue to a
striking, even to an explosive extent. But with all their originality,
some of the new books turn out to be dull, and if we reconsider for a
moment the books men have finally judged great, we observe that they were
rather destitute of the kind of originality we talk of nowadays.
“In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea”, wrote the imagist some time
ago, defending the use of free verse. The doctrine was in the interest
of the cadence, but it implied something larger and more significant,
that in poetry newness of ideas is desirable. More recently, an American
critic remarked, in effect, that what Lytton Strachey has accomplished in
his literary portraits is nothing but what Gamaliel Bradford accomplished
in his, and since Mr. Bradford’s portraits came first, they should
have the credit and the praise which an undiscriminating world bestows
on Mr. Strachey’s. If the question of priority is raised in this kind
of writing, perhaps something should be said for Plutarch; but are we
sure we should raise the question of priority? What arrests us in the
remark of the American critic is the undebated assumption that literary
excellence derives from doing something before somebody else does it. Is
it the business of art to discover new ideas, or indeed to busy itself
much with any ideas, as separated from emotion and the other elements
of complete experience? Is it the originality of genius in art to say
something no one has ever thought of before, or to say something we all
recognize as important and true? As for the mere question of priority,
even stupid things have been said for a first time; do we wear the laurel
for being the first to say them?
One suspects that the new cadence will persist in poetry only if we like
it, and that Mr. Bradford’s reputation will outstrip Mr. Strachey’s only
if we prefer what he wrote, and if by chance we care for neither, then
both will be neglected, though one preceded the other by a hundred years.
Excellence is the only originality that art considers. They understand
these things better in France. There the young poet even of the most
radical school will respect the bias of art towards continuity rather
than toward novelty, toward the climax of a tradition rather than its
beginning; his formula of self-confidence will be, “Victor Hugo was a
great poet, Alfred de Musset was a great poet, and now at last I’m here.”
But in America the parallel gospel is, “Poor Tennyson couldn’t write, nor
Longfellow, of course; now for the first time let’s have some poetry.”
The writers finally judged great, so far from sharing our present concern
for originality, would probably not even understand it. What is the
object of literature? they would ask. Of course, if it is to portray the
individual rather than human nature, or those aspects of life which stand
apart from life in general, then each book may have something queer in
it, something not in any other book and in that sense original; but then
the reader, before long, will be looking for peculiarity in every book
he buys—it must be, not better, but “different”, to use an American
term in esthetics; and the writer then who would meet this demand for
the peculiar must make a fresh start with every book. What bad luck,
they would say, to be forever a primitive, to be condemned, after every
success, to produce something in another vein, the first of its kind.
Originality in this sense will be continually undermined by fame, for
the more an author is read, and the more people become accustomed to his
world, the less he will seem original. On the other hand, if the reader
looks for originality, there will be no fame, for no matter how popular
an author is, we shall read his book only once, and then be waiting for
his next novelty.
But if the object of literature is still, as it was for the great
writers, to portray human nature, then the only new thing the artist
will look for is a greater success in his art. Human nature is old and
unchangeable; he will hope to make a better portrait than has yet been
made—better, at any rate, for his own people and his own age, and if
possible better absolutely. There is nothing new about religion or love
or friendship, war, sunsets, the sea, danger or death, yet something
remains to be told of each eternal theme, and when a book comes which
tells the whole, which satisfies some hitherto unexpressed yearnings or
defines more sharply something hitherto half-seen, then that portrait of
human nature serves our purposes until we have a still finer, and other
versions meanwhile are neglected and forgotten. We remember how many
accounts of Romeo and Juliet there were before Shakespeare told the story
to suit us, and how many records of the journey to hell before Dante told
us the whole truth of that pilgrimage; perhaps we know the many desperate
attempts, long since mercifully swallowed up in oblivion, to portray the
American Indian before Fenimore Cooper made the picture the world wanted.
The achievements of literature are all, as in these instances, a gradual
reworking of traditional or popular or folk material, and in the process
it is precisely because the subject is not original that the audience can
decide how well it has been portrayed. A sequence of writers interpreting
Life are therefore like a succession of virtuosos playing the classics,
each trying to give us the true Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann. Their
renderings will be different enough, but the music is the same, and we
know it by heart. The player who calls our attention to most beauty in
it, will be original or unique in the only way that art permits.
The example of the musician may not seem to all writers a fair parallel;
they may protest that the writer creates, as the composer does, but the
player only interprets what is already created. But they are wrong, and
the parallel is correct. The writer does not create as the composer does.
Music is an ultimate pleasure in itself, like the taste of sugar; so long
as it delights us, we do not ask what it means. Moreover, since there
is no question of its meaning, we may not need a previous experience to
find some enjoyment in it; it may be satisfactory at first contact. Of
course every art gives a more subtle pleasure as we become practised in
appreciating it, yet the contrast between music and literature remains
a real one, since without any knowledge of life at all men and even
children often penetrate deeply into the heart of music, but without some
knowledge of life they are stopped at the very threshold of literature.
The key to that door is some first-hand acquaintance with life. Music
has no other subject-matter than itself, but literature has life for
its content, and to find one’s way about in it, we must recognize what
it is dealing with. Life is a music already composed. It has been here
a long time, and had become already an ancient history when the first
poets began to play upon it. They merely said for us the things we had
been vainly feeling after, they brought out the colors our eyes had
almost missed, they defined sharply the flavors and the half tastes that
had haunted us. The amateurs in the audience listen spellbound when the
master plays to perfection a piece they have struggled with; this is more
to them than the loveliest of new sonatas, for it is their own world in a
better light. So mankind will listen to the authentic poet who completes
their half-realized selves; and will say of him, somewhat with the woman
of Samaria, “He told me all the things that ever I did.”