themselves, they love it next best when they have heard it often, and
they like it least, sometimes not at all, when they hear it for the first
time. The reader likes poetry best when he has lived what it interprets;
next best when he has heard often of the adventures it renders; least,
even to the point of detestation, when he never entered that region of
life at all, not even by hearsay. In such a predicament the real ground
of his objection to the art is that it is original, at least so far as he
is concerned, but the experience of his discomfort will hide the cause of
it from him; not himself but the art will seem to him inadequate—is he
not as much alive as any one ever was? The book, he will say, portrays a
world that is dead. Let us start fresh and be original; let us portray my
world.
II
In the slow fermentation of human societies, as fresh elements work
their way to the top and for a time give their flavor to history, the
new arrival is likely to herald himself in some such terms in a protest
against the art which, because he has as yet no share in it, seems to
him old and worn out, and in a cry for original expression which to
those with a longer memory of the world will be quite familiar. There
have been new arrivals before, and their wish to start fresh is the
cause rather than the result of decadence. For it is only in a figure
of speech that art declines or prospers—it is the artists who are less
competent or more so than their predecessors, and the poet who tells us
that the period before him is at an end, is really proclaiming that he
cannot improve upon it, and if the other poets are like himself, the
preceding period is indeed ended. There is no other reason why the great
moments of literature were not prolonged. Shakespeare was better than his
predecessors, but he was not perfection; why did not the drama continue
to develop? Ben Jonson, being himself a new arrival, and being, for
all his book learning, outside the spiritual regions which Elizabethan
drama had mainly portrayed, thought of course that a new kind of art was
needed. He is in danger now of sharing the ignominy of all writers who
coming after greater men pay homage through jealousy. Tennyson was not
the greatest of poets; why did not his successors treat him as though he
were a Greene or a Marlowe, and make Shakespearean improvements in him?
To hear the critics of today rail against his art, one might suppose he
had hopelessly damaged the language by using it, or that rhyme and meter
had come to a bad end at his hands. The poet who talks this way about his
predecessors is never the one who is conscious of the power to swallow
them up. If Shakespeare had been a little man, he would have taken one
look at Marlowe’s _Faustus_, and given up the Elizabethan drama as a
creaking and antiquated machine for moral doctrine. Had he been really
ignorant of the long-stored-up energies and impulses which were coming to
action in his marvellous hour, had he lacked the instinct to recognize
them even when badly expressed, and to express them better, he might have
walked the streets of London as the oriental arrival walked in Athens,
or as the invader from the north walked in Rome—with a conviction that
the day of this sort of thing was over. Nothing would remain but to be
original.
If the clamor for originality is strong in the United States, it
is, perhaps, because here are many arrivals, and the newcomer not
infrequently desires us to change our ways in the interest of his
comfort. We have so much good will toward him, and we are so conscious
of the fine things the various races may bring to our commonwealth, that
we usually hesitate to speak frankly of his qualifications as writer
or critic. He often brings a rare aptitude for art, and frequently he
desires to write, but writing is the one art where his ignorance of life
will handicap him. In painting an eye for color, in music an ear for tone
and harmony, may carry him through, but in literature he will write in an
acquired language, and even if it were his native tongue, in literature
his attitude toward the art will be conditioned by his knowledge of
life. He will perhaps assert rather vigorously that his knowledge is
superior; has he not borne hardships and risen above them? Those who
have not suffered, he will say, know nothing of life. He will think you
cold-blooded if you tell him the better way to say it—that those who
have not suffered, know nothing of suffering. If he desires to write
the literature of suffering, he is probably competent, but since he is
usually a person of strong energy, with a constructive temperament, he
does not wish to write merely the literature of suffering, nor does he
usually wish his children to repeat his hardship, though he may have said
that only by such discipline comes knowledge. He usually desires to write
about the world in general, as every one would write, and for this task
he usually has had experience too meagre or too special. It is only in
the United States, after his arrival, that he most often makes his first
contact with the older literature—not of America but of his own land;
if he has had the experience necessary for understanding it, he absorbs
it eagerly, but if his hardships in his fatherland deprived him of the
necessary equipment, he will announce that the old literature is played
out and meaningless. He is like the native students in South African
schools, who may read the skating episode in Wordsworth’s _Prelude_, but
cannot get the shiver of the ice or the scratch of the steel runners.
Those who have been with us for several generations and who through
economic or other causes have missed that rich acquaintance with life
which would explain what the great writers talk about, are likely to join
the most recent comer in a plea for originality. Their fortunes are to
be pitied, but their advice in art is hardly to be followed. No amount
of sympathy or admiration for them as human beings will accredit them
as critics, for art is long, as we have heard, and the approaches to it
are long also; though we may teach democracy fast enough to win our vote
after five years, we must know at first-hand youth and maturity, and have
a suspicion of what old age is like, in the world the poet writes of,
before we can give a fair opinion whether he has written well. But if the
newcomer recovers here the adventure of life which his hardships cheated
him of in the old country, he will find that the great literature of the
world represents that adventure faithfully and vitally; it is merely a
question of patience with him, since he is energetic and the upturn of
the new world is exciting, and it is hard for him to believe that the old
shadows in art of a life he has not yet lived will ever again take living
form or pulse again in his imagination.
A new world, a new life, a new art. This is the sequence his hopes dwell
on, though every term in it is debatable. Is there a new world, or a
new life, or a new art? Sometimes we are told that in a new world life
must automatically be new, but the doctrine is not convincing, for at
other times we are summoned to originality, as to another duty, by the
argument that in a new world we ought to be ashamed to lead still an old
life. Sometimes we hear that a new life inevitably means a new art, and
we reflect that if life now differs from what it once was, we need take
no thought for our originality, for we shall be different in spite of
ourselves; even by the old methods art will achieve something new; if we
would write of love, for example, we need only tell the truth about the
passion as we know it, and since the love we know is like nothing that
ever was on sea or land, our romance will be like nothing that ever was
in song or story. Why all this fret about it? And if religion and war
and sorrow and death are all by hypothesis quite other than they once
were, how can we escape originality when we report them in the setting
of the new world and the new life? But the fact is that those who call
for originality in art are not quite sure, after all, that the age is
a new one—they would feel safer if some further vestiges of the past
could be obliterated; and though they justify a new art by speaking much
of their new life, it is far from clear that they really think life
is new, or at heart desire it to be so. Social and political systems,
yes—but life? Horrible indeed is the vision of an absolutely original
career for one who loves his fellows and prefers to take his experience
outside a madhouse. “Your prayer is answered,” says the original Apollo,
touching the original poet’s ears, trembling with originality: “you will
have always a new cadence and a new idea; neither the language nor the
substance of your communications will ever have occurred before in human
experience. Your art will be unique and solitary. Nothing that men have
done before will you condescend to repeat—neither to sleep, nor to eat,
nor to travel, nor to know passion, pain, suffering or peace.” The poet,
lured by the prophecy, might think at last that he had achieved fame, but
Apollo would be there to remind him that his was like no fame achieved
before—not like Shelley’s or Shakespeare’s. He might lose his heart, and
in the throes of love might fancy he knew at last the meaning of Romeo’s
story or Tristram’s, but the god would remind him that his was a special
kind of love, not like the very ancient impulse that moved the sun and
the other stars.
We need some divine reminder that our true desire is to realize in
ourselves the best of old experience—not to find an original life, but
to bring on the stage once more as far as possible the old procession
of passions, sorrows and delights. The latest of us hopes he is not too
late to taste for himself the high flavor of life which those before him
talked so much about. If falling in love is a business incidental to
adolescence, yet it is immensely hastened by our reading and by what we
have heard; those whom the passion does not touch usually worry about
their immunity instead of being thankful for it, and anything is better
than never to have loved at all. It is not passion entirely that fills
the hearts of the lovers brought at last to each other’s arms; at least,
the single thought with which the two hearts beat may be a triumphant
“Now I know for myself.” Similarly, however strange it may seem, we
welcome sorrow and suffering, or we feel ourselves cheated rather than
blest if none of it comes our way. Death, too, is less unwelcome than it
might fairly be. At least those who faced it and have been reprieved,
often remember that a satisfaction in knowing the worst took some of the
terror away. There it was at last, the old shadow that waylays us all.
Desiring to discover for ourselves the well known and traditional
experience, we desire at the same time a more excellent version of it
than our predecessors have enjoyed. We would love as Romeo did, but
we like to think that Romeo never loved so well, and ours is a more
wonderful Juliet. Even our sorrows will be greater, if we have our
way, for in the intensity with which we explore the old experiences we
feel rightly that we ought to equal or surpass other men. We dread the
operation for appendicitis, before we undergo it; then we reach the
point of satisfaction in finding out for ourselves what the operation
is like; then finally we are persuaded that the operation was unusually
severe, the worst of its kind. This is the artist in us, trying for
distinction. And if with the old material of life we seek the distinction
of excellence of statement, our motive is not simply a desire to surpass
others, nor a desire to indicate progress, but often it is the hope to
report the experience once for all. Art has always a dying part in it,
as artists well know—some part which must constantly be restored by
restatement. Try as he may to express only permanent things, the artist
will include something that is aside from the main purpose, that goes out
of date. Of course if an artist deliberately strives to be contemporary,
and succeeds, his work to that extent will shortly become unintelligible;
later poets will then try their hand at refurbishing or restoring the
essential thing in the picture, and incidentally, without meaning
to, they will include some contemporary and insignificant material of
their own, which in time may precipitate another revision. What we call
classics are the lucky masterpieces in which the permanent elements are
so many and the transitory so few, that it seems useless and impertinent
to revise them.
III
The desire for originality is not new, and explanations of it are
old. Some of them are based on the supposed working of the artistic
temperament. The artist, it is said, craves expression at all costs,
and if the craving is not satisfied in one direction, it will reach in
another. If we cannot pour all of our energy into our painting or our
music, we may express the surplus in long hair and flowing cravat. This
explanation, even if it were true, would imply that the artist desires
notoriety rather than expression, for you cannot express yourself unless
you speak a language your audience already knows, but eccentricity,
which is the extreme form of originality, will attract attention even
if it is not understood. But artists are not likely to admit that this
theory does justice to their temperament. They will remark that few of
the greatest masters have been eccentric in their appearance, none of
them in their subject-matter. Like other men they fitted the society in
which their lot fell, except that they had a genius for feeling life more
vitally than other men. So many of them, like Chaucer or Shakespeare or
Scott, cultivated the art of living close to their fellows and sharing
an average fate, that we half suspect the less gifted would do the same
if they could; for the artist who is original in dress or manners is not
likely to meet human nature in its normal state—rather, his neighbors
will whisper when he appears, and nudge each other, and he will never
see what manners they use toward those who are not queer. Poets with
an original or eccentric subject-matter meet the same fate. Could Poe
or Baudelaire learn anything about us if they came among us with a
reputation for the abnormal? Would we not unconsciously close to them
our usual impulses, in our curiosity to observe their strangeness? To
the artist who loves life in the sane way of a Chaucer, a Montaigne, a
Molière, such a welcome would be calamitous; rather hide anything that
distinguishes him from others, even the fact that he can write, if by
this caution he may draw closer to his sensitive race, and observe the
undisturbed mystery and beauty of natural life.
Indeed, the whole question of originality, this desire for novelty, is
in the end a question of our love of life. In the moments when we love
life passionately we are not likely to get too much of it, and we do not
ask to exchange it for another kind. When art and politics were creative,
in the heyday of writers, painters, architects and statesmen who later
seem to us almost solitary in their excellence, there was still no taking
thought to be original; they fell in love, rather, with the obvious.
Columbus made no voyage in search of originality—simply there had been
too many hints and rumors for him to stay at home any longer. Some very
original spirits, we may suppose, took no stock in his expedition. For
Shakespeare or Molière play-writing was an obvious task, and an old one;
they may have expected to do successfully what others had only tried, but
except for the success they aimed at nothing new. Where great poets have
spoken on the matter themselves, their point of view is quite clear. At
the end of the _Vita Nuova_ Dante announced his hope to write of Beatrice
such things as had never been written of any woman. Not to write a new
kind of book, for women had been praised before, as he implied, and
there had been poems of vision and pilgrimages through hell; but his
hope was to excel. He determined to speak no more of his blessed lady
until he could praise her worthily, and to praise such a woman worthily
would be to write such things as had been written of no other. In the
same mood Milton promised his great epic—in passionate love of the best
before him, and in the assurance of doing as well or better—“I began
thus to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and
not less to an inward prompting, which now grew daily upon me, that by
labour and intense study, which I take to be my portion in this life,
joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might leave something so
written to after-times as they should not willingly let it die.” This is
the great manner of the poets. But in the opening words of Rousseau’s
_Confessions_, to take an opposite example, we have the accent of the
modern disease; he would undertake, he said, an enterprise of which there
had never been a parallel, and of which there would be no imitation—he
would tell the truth about one man, about himself. He promised no
excellence except the uniqueness of the subject, for truth-telling,
though always desirable, can hardly be important unless the subject is
worth while.
Rousseau’s book is great in spite of its introductory sentence; his
subject after all was not unique, for each of us can follow his example
and write at least one book about ourselves; and perhaps he told less
of the unvarnished truth than he intended, for being an artist in
every fiber of his body, he selected from his experience not his most
singular adventures, but his adventures in those realms of experience—in
sex, for example—which his readers were surest to understand and find
interesting. But with his famous announcement, whether or not he followed
it, our malady began. Hence all the poems and novels of autobiography,
all the diaries of young men and maidens, old men and children, all the
bouquets of verse still showered upon us in which the poet confides his
intimate symptoms. In all this there is little to remind us of great
art, or of the times in which great art has been made; the resemblance
is rather to a hospital or an old folks’ home, where the inmates find
importance in the fact that they have been there longer than their
fellows, or are younger, or a little less blind and deaf. Hence also
our difficulty in understanding earlier literature, of a date when not
originality but excellence was the aim. When we first read Shakespeare’s
sonnets or Sidney’s, we conclude with satisfaction that the poet was
writing out of his heart, in the Rousseau fashion. But when we learn
that these stories are works of art, dramatic renderings of life, and
that the “I” who speaks in the lines is first of all the hero of the
story, whether or not he is the poet too; and when we learn further that
much of the material is adapted from earlier poets, used over again as
we use old words to make up new sentences—then perhaps our respect for
the master vanishes, our ideal is cracked; they were not such original
poets after all. It is the defect of our taste. We forget that the oldest
phrases, if they have the poetic excellence of being true to all of us,
are renewed and become personal in the adventure of each individual.
Though Job ought to get the credit, by all modern standards, of uttering
that very original profession of faith, “I know that my redeemer liveth”,
yet the words were too full of possible meanings to remain linked with
Job’s private misfortunes; being already immortal, they seem never to
have been said for a first time. Lover after lover has found in his
own passion the meaning of some old song, perhaps “My love is like the
red, red rose”, which until the passion fell on him seemed sentimental
and silly. And Rousseau himself in the _Confessions_, at the very
outset of his egotism, of his originality, of his indecorous opposing
of the individual to the race, records his boyhood love of an old
folk-song—precisely the kind of art from which his doctrine led us away.
But nowadays the desire for originality comes not only from the writer;
a certain class of readers also demand it, the kind of person who reads
with an eye out for imitations and plagiarisms. That plot has been used
before, he says, when two men are in love with the same woman—or, that
character is copied from so-and-so, when Pierrot’s father forgives the
returning prodigal. There are reviewers of this type also, who read
their victims into categories, calling this poet Tennysonian, that
novelist Meredithian, that essayist Emersonian. Such categories become
less definite as we read back into the past, for over the range of a few
centuries no plot is new, nor does any writer seem altogether unlike the
others. There is such a thing as plagiarism, yet unless one is a fanatic
for originality, the question of plagiarism is of no great importance;
the world is not interested, and if the author is concerned from whom
the play or the plot is stolen, his concern is more for his property
than for his art. If his work is stolen unchanged, it is still as good
art as it was before; if the thief has mangled it, his plagiarized
version will not be so good as the authentic text; but if by luck he
has improved on what he took, it becomes his, bag and baggage, so far
as fame is concerned. Who were the authors of those songs Burns made
over into his masterpieces? Who were those dramatists and chroniclers
whom Shakespeare rewrote? The names in many cases can be looked up, but
they are of no account. The world feels that the great writer conferred
a benefit by improving on the earlier work. What is far more important,
the world also feels that the great writer, in improving on another man’s
work, actually invaded no private rights, for the material of literature
is life, and life is no one’s private property. After the invention of
printing, writers saw the possibility of financial dividends from their
works, and plagiarism is an aspect of this financial question, but it has
otherwise nothing to do with art. The world in general continues to think
of art in the old way, as creation rather than as business, and it quite
properly cares little who does the creating, or who afterward receives a
money reward. What were Homer’s annual earnings? Or was it really Homer?
Or who besides David wrote his psalms? We know instinctively that these
questions are trivial.
But imitation in art is often more apparent than real. If a poet is in
touch with his age, he will write of the subjects that interest him, and
other poets in touch with the age will also write about what interests
them, and consequently they may all write of much the same thing; they
are not imitating each other, but they are enjoying a common pleasure, to
which one of them may have shown the way. We often say that the popular
writer is trying to catch the favor of the public by giving it what
it likes, and in some instances he may be calculating and his motives
unworthy. But it is more probable that being typical of his age, he
simply likes the same things as his fellows. The Elizabethan Londoner
liked historical plays; did Shakespeare write them only to please his
audience, or rather did he not share the general taste? The principle
here implied will explain why any poets who have an enormous popularity
will have also an enormous so-called influence. They are popular because
they share the people’s taste, and the people therefore find in their
work what they like; but if their subject-matter is so popular, many
others will be writing of it too. The resulting resemblance is not really
an influence, or rarely is; it is a contemporary tendency. The poet who
is best in the lot will be remembered. All ran, but one receives the
prize. However, those who came in second and third are neither imitators
nor plagiarists.
IV