the young. Few young writers are lured into the profession by the
impossibility of being original in their craft, or by the excellent
chance their best works have of becoming anonymous with time. We can
imagine them pleading for the rights of their personalities; what on
earth did the old pagan mean by his proud _non omnis moriar_, if his
personality was not to survive in his work? For their comfort let us add
that personality in art is indestructible. If we have any of it, it will
live. And if we mean personality when we say originality, thinking of the
author rather than of his subject, then we may add also that genuine
personality is original in spite of itself. How hard it is to tell a
story twice the same way; how difficult to form anything permanent, even
habits; how impossible to get once for all into a rut. A dull lecture,
though we hear it a second time word for word, is subtly changed, for we
no longer hear it the first time, and “afflictions induce callosities”,
as Sir Thomas Browne said, and “sorrows destroy us or themselves.” The
record we buy for our phonograph, though we liked it at first, may empty
itself with each repetition, till the charm is gone; even the photograph
of our dear ones, framed on the wall, has a tendency at last to merge
itself in the wall paper. Whatever is repeated in our consciousness
becomes mechanical and unnoticed, or the edge of it is blunted. To
restore the sharp edges of impression, to bring back the first flavor
of things, is the ideal of life and of art; only strong personality
can do it, but where such a personality comes, it is irresistible and
undisguisable. It shows up best in those attitudes of life which in other
hands have grown drab and sordid; the contrast brings out the genius.
This kind of success in life is the art of the actor who plays a long
run, and who gives even in the one hundredth performance the impression
of a fresh experience. A poorer actor would have needed a new play long
before. Or we might say that art is a summary of life—and where will
personality show itself sooner than in summarizing? When Lafcadio Hearn
lectured to his Japanese students, he followed the reading of each
English poem by a brief paraphrase in prose, which usually is the most
precious part of his criticism; for in the retelling, his personality
emphasized what he liked in the verses. If we could ask Tennyson, Morris,
Browning, Arnold and Meredith each to write out a summary of something
we all know, we should have five criticisms, and five revelations of
personality. And there are more personalities in the world than we may
realize; only they waste themselves in the search for the original, when
all that is needed is to be sincere.
III
THE CULT OF THE NATURAL
I
It belongs with the confusion of esthetics in our time that the same
people who ask art to be original often ask it to be natural. Being
natural would appear at first sight the least original of programmes.
Even if by originality we mean personality, yet there still seems
some contradiction in the wish at one and the same time to develop a
strong personality and to remain in a state of nature. Since it is
the thoroughbred, not the wild animal, that is distinguished from his
fellows, and the cultivated bloom, not the field flower, that charms by
its single self rather than in quantity, a condition of impulse close
to the unsifted accidents of life would seem to promise an art notable
chiefly for its volume, its indistinction and its insignificance. But
those who ask art to be natural never mean completely natural. In their
wiser moments they are only asking art not to be artificial, or at least
to help them forget it is artificial. They demand a “realistic and
romantic naturalism”, or “a world of honest, and often harsh reality”,
and what they are looking for is indicated by the fact that they find
something convincingly lifelike in a drama of low life or an American
vulgarization of a French farce, but something strained and mechanical in
a comedy by Sheridan or Oscar Wilde. Art, no doubt, is still desirable in
literature—art shot through with crude material, to reassure us that we
are human. Since all plays are highly artificial, naturalness is hardly
the word for the virtue of good plays; they are convincing, rather, they
take us frankly into another world, and for the moment make us forget it
is not our world of everyday. Yet those who ask the stage to be natural
are apparently reassured when through the imaginary world of art breaks
some accent of ordinary speech, some aspect of our common sordidness.
Here, it seems, we touch earth and are strengthened.
The cult of the natural at its best asks of the medium of art also,
as well as of the subject, that it wear a common aspect, untouched by
artifice. Many of the new poets take as their ideal “the sequence of
the spoken phrase”, with a special dislike of all “inversions”; the
“language of common speech” will serve their purposes. Yet most of them
are better poets than their theories would indicate, and their practise,
like Wordsworth’s in a similar predicament, is perhaps sufficient guide
to the kind of naturalness they are after. _An Extempore Effusion upon
the Death of James Hogg_ is the kind of naturalness Wordsworth fell into
when he was off his guard. “Other poets”, says a more modern cultivator
of naturalism, “will come and perchance perfect where these men have
given the tools. Other writers, forgetting the stormy times in which
this movement had its birth, will inherit in plenitude and calm that for
which they have fought.” Most of us who are convinced that all speech is
artful in so far as it is intelligible, can occasionally put up with a
bit of fine writing like this, but we note in passing that “perchance”
and “plenitude” are not the language of common speech today. As for the
fear of inversions and the sacredness of the natural word-order, it is
enough for the moment to observe that no one order is natural for all
peoples, nor for any one speech at all times; different word-orders
express different states of emotion, even different ideas, and one is
as natural as the other. “Tell me not in mournful numbers” or “Tell not
me in mournful numbers”—which is the natural order? From another and
contemporary New England poet, who sticks valiantly for the natural
sequence of speech, we may examine a characteristic line, which has as
high a percentage of nature in it as absence of art can insure—“I must
pass that door to go to bed.” Would it be less natural to say, “To go to
bed, I must pass that door”?
To practise artifice and yet to seem spontaneous, to be natural and yet
to achieve art—these ancient paradoxes against which the cultivators
of the natural arrive, in both the subject-matter and the medium of
literature, need to be examined in greater detail, but it is well to
observe them first in a general way, in order to mark how much confusion
lies on the very surface of such thinking. It is emotion perhaps rather
than thinking; it is a protest in another form against what seems old and
inherited; it is an impatience with art itself. Yet art exerts its old
charm upon us all, and the worshipper of the natural succumbs unawares to
every triumph over nature. In American letters we fix on Abraham Lincoln
as our type of natural expression; the legend of his humble beginnings
and the plainness of his manner deceive us into a conviction that he was
less indebted to art than Thomas Jefferson, and we therefore talk of the
rhetorical extravagances of the Declaration and contrast them with the
Attic simplicities of the Gettysburg Address. Perhaps we see a final
proof of our sound taste in the story that Matthew Arnold gave up the
Address for lost when he got to the colloquial “proposition”; “dedicated
to the proposition”, we say, was more than his artificial spirit could
bear. Whether Arnold expressed such an opinion, or whether he would
have been right in so doing, is of less consequence than our emotional
readiness, if we cultivate the natural, to accept the Lincoln speech as
an illustration of our ideal, and to set it over against the artifice of
Jefferson’s great document—to detect a literary manner in such a phrase
as “When in the course of human events”, and nothing but naturalness in
“Fourscore and seven years ago”—or to find an empty and sounding rhetoric
in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, but only the democratic
syllables of common sense in “government of the people, by the people,
for the people.” Both documents are as rich as they can well be in
rhetoric, as all great oratory is, and of the two, Lincoln’s as a matter
of fact is rather more artful in the progress of its ideas.
II
Our confusion in the search for the natural in art springs from the many
different meanings that attach to both words, art and nature. For most
of us, perhaps, art is a decoration, something supplementary to life; in
the spirit of this definition we understand what it is to cultivate the
arts—to buy pictures when our means will permit us that addition to more
primary interests, or to attend the opera after the preliminary stages of
our social pilgrimage. We use the word art so often in this bad sense,
with the implication of insincerity, that there is something bracing in
any invitation to return to nature and to be once more what we were while
we still were honest with ourselves and had a sense of humor.
This nature that we return to, haunts our thoughts as a fixed state
in which the wise soul can find enduring refuge. Just how we get the
idea that nature is stable, is not easy to see; the notion often
exists in our minds side by side with a deep conviction that life is a
flux, and that time and space are but relative terms in the universal
stream. But perhaps it is the outer appearance of the world, nature as
landscape, that first suggests a refuge even against time, mountains
are so immovable in their mysterious silence for us as for Wordsworth,
the ocean is so untamable for us, as it was for Byron. Perhaps also the
contemplation of the changing universe during the past century of daring
and imaginative science has endowed nature with a romantic career of
its own, such as the old humanists ascribed only to men; perhaps the
progress of stars, planets and solar systems, observed or guessed at,
suggests in spite of the evolution it illustrates a deeper kind of rest
in the laws by which that evolution conducts itself; so that the last
result of turning from human art to watch the behavior of inanimate
things is the conviction that nothing is really inanimate, but that all
move in the wisdom of an art superhuman, in an order peaceful and eternal
as only a divine vitality could conceive. When we think of nature in this
sense of the word, leaving man out of the picture, ourselves too as far
as possible who do the thinking, we are ready to say with Emerson that
art is an impertinent intrusion, nature is all. “Nature in the common
sense refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the
leaf; art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things,
as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture; but his operations taken
together are so insignificant,—a little shaping, baking, patching and
washing,—that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human
mind they do not vary the result.”
We can speak of nature in this all-embracing way so long as, like
Emerson for the moment, we lay aside every thought of man and of the
moral world which he creates or brings under his control, and in which
his responsibility is fixed. But once we resume that human outlook, we
begin to use the word natural in at least two other senses. In the first
place we use it to describe the process of life, that constant birth or
becoming which seems to have been present to the mind of the Greek also
when he used his word for nature—as when Aristotle says, in a famous
phrase, that art is an imitation of nature, meaning that the process of
art is a copy of the processes of birth and becoming, and creates by the
same methods that life does. In this sense of the word nature is like
art, not opposed to it, and with this interpretation Polixenes tried to
rebuke the cult of the natural in Perdita, who would not have in her
garden a flower artificially bred:
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean: so, o’er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature—change it rather: but
The art itself is nature.
We use the word nature also to describe the raw material of life which is
the result of a previous birth or becoming. It is what some earlier art,
human or divine, has already worked on, and what we must work on now if
art is to continue. Nature in this sense is the marble, the color, the
language which are to be the mediums of various arts; human passions and
instincts also, the social and the material environments which attend our
lives, the accidents of fortune which make up their plots; and since all
this is what art must work upon, nature so defined is forever somewhat
opposed to art, as inanimate materials are opposed to the workman, as
the wood and the chisel are opposed to the carpenter. For art is the
use of the materials of life for human benefit, a method employed for
a premeditated end in a world which except for art might seem given
over to chance. Because it is a rearrangement and a control of nature
to effect the will of man, life itself, so far as it becomes civilized,
becomes an art. But in a world as old as ours the raw material with
which art deals is itself the result of art; the wood has been already
shaped into boards, the chisel and the hammer have been made into tools
before the carpenter touches them, and the environment in which the
carpenter is born, the instincts and passions he inherits, the turns and
coincidences of his fate, are all probably the result of what others
before him made of their materials and opportunities. Thinking of life
so, we see it as an alternation of nature and art, or as an alternation
in which what first is art becomes afterwards nature, all the achievement
of one generation turning into mere starting point and opportunity for
the next; and thinking of life so, we understand how nature, to the
true artist, is forever set over against art in a contrast that implies
affection rather than antagonism, for those who instead of defining
art as a decorative supplement to life identify it with civilization
itself, are free to love nature without abandoning an ideal, as a
sculptor is free to love fine marble, or the painter to love his medium
of tint and tone. With time and by such a process of reworking, nature
draws nearer and nearer to art; the raw material is made constantly
more orderly by rearrangement, as a field is enriched by plowing in the
crops. Even in the sphere of human character this is true, in the very
seat of the natural, in our instincts and passions; for though we may
agree that character should be measured by a moral career rather than
by impulses wholly innate, yet it is well to reflect that your impulses
and sentiments, if you are born and brought up in Florence or Chartres,
Heidelberg or Seville, are likely to be different from the impulses
and sentiments natural to a child born or brought up in The Bronx or
in Hoboken. In the eyes of the naturalist, nature is all, as Emerson
said, and art only a little shaping, baking, patching and washing, but
to the artist who carries in his imagination something of the scope of
agelong growth and creation, the truth is what Nature said to the poet in
Voltaire’s dialogue—“They call me nature, but by this time I am become
all art.”
III
The possibility, then, of returning to nature disappears when we realize
how long a road we have traveled; all that the most primitive minded of
us can do is to stick close to the raw material of his own life, to the
circumstances with which the art of his predecessors surrounded him. This
is the nature which the realists cultivate today. They report those facts
of life from which art might take its beginning, but they report them as
much as possible in an arrested state, for fear they might pass on into
art. Among the poets one, catching the accent of the spoken language,
gives us the language of one phase of New England; another, with a
like faithfulness to the natural cadence, gives us another kind of New
England speech; a third has the colloquialism of Illinois. They are all
artists, or they would not mean much to us, but in so far as they have
followed their own ideals of the natural they have laid aside some of
the magician’s robes to which by inheritance they are entitled, and they
leave with us their renderings of our world in a form of utterance less
noble than their theme and out of harmony with it. In our prose and verse
alike, the studied inadequacy of style to the occasion is a standing
reproach to us, all the worse since it is often the pose of an inverted
vanity, like the democratic conviction still flourishing in the land that
the dinner coat or the evening coat is an artifice of a worn-out society,
whereas the senatorial frock coat and wide hat are natural and God-given
sheathings of our original nakedness.
To revert to the starting point of our lives is to seek nature in vain,
since the alternations of art and nature proceed relentlessly, whether
we rest our dead weight on the process or try to help it along. It is a
vain flattery of our reluctance to travel, to take our seat always in
the last car. But, however futile, the cult of the natural in literature
has a reasonable explanation, and it is well to understand with sympathy
why it is likely to recur periodically in a civilization that must feel
its age more and more. Art criticizes life, as we have often been told,
by selecting or sifting it; that is what the word criticism means.
The authority that art has over us, its right to make such a sifting,
derives not from books but from the human brain itself, from the method
of memory; we remember only by forgetting most of the things we have
done or have suffered, and rearranging the rest. As we grow older life
becomes clearer, we say, thanks to this selection and forgetting. When
art sifts life, then, it is only imitating the process of nature, and
when we observe the process we can understand why the Greeks said that
memory was the mother of the muses. But this sifting of life on the part
of memory and of art is progressive, and in all honesty we may wonder at
times whether it has not gone too far. Some of the clarity of vision,
the firmness of doctrine, which is the reward of old age, may be not the
genuine harvesting of experience which is almost the gift of prophecy;
it may be rather a partial memory which seems clear because so much has
been left out. If a poet could get a first-hand impression of life, his
art would be one sifting of nature; if he reacts not only to nature but
to the interpretations of other poets, his art is a second sifting,
more highly organized, perhaps, more intelligible, than is normally
recorded from immediate contact with life. It makes no difference
whether we call these siftings poetry or criticism, since poetry, as
Arnold reminded us, is a criticism of life. The poet may submit his
sensitiveness to nature as sifted through three or four or any number
of interventions of personality, and we may call the result poetry, or
criticism, or criticism of criticism; very often we cannot tell, and
the poet does not know, whether the life that stimulates him is direct
or transmitted. But in each remove from the first contact with nature,
in each additional intervention of personality, we get a clearer order
and a finer intelligibility—truth instead of facts, formulas instead of
experiences, and fewer exceptions. The literature, then, which begins in
naturalism will at last emerge in philosophy, if we allow it time enough,
and the biography of an individual will be condensed and generalized into
a proverb.
There are two good reasons, however, for suspecting this economical
result. One is that the proverb is probably not true. To arrive at it,
in each successive sifting we have left out something, and the total of
all the omissions has become almost as comprehensive as the original
experience. We must go back and gather up the discarded fragments of
our adventure, in order to qualify properly our too simple and absolute
summary of life. The art of the historian, we often fear, progresses by
some such over-elimination; archæology sometimes rescues him by restoring
large sections of a past, the absence of which he had not noticed, but in
periods too recent for archæology to take him by surprise, he constantly
rewrites his history, to sift it more to his mind, until we may suspect
that his account is nearer to our philosophy than to the original facts.
In history this tendency is hardly a matter of concern, for if we have a
criticism of the eighteenth century which satisfies us, we are content,
and the eighteenth century, being dead and gone, will not mind; the poet,
therefore, can look on with equanimity while the historians propose to
rewrite our national life in order to bring it more in harmony with our
present sentiments toward this or that other country; the poet knows
that history is not a science but one of the most fascinating of the
arts, closely allied to eloquence in its mission to teach and persuade,
and that having to do strictly with the past it enjoys rare freedom in
sifting its facts. But the poet himself enjoys no such freedom. Whatever
he writes will be checked up by the life we now live; his readers will
look into their hearts and criticize. If therefore he has gained his
clarity by leaving out things essential in our experience, we reject him
as too far from our reality to be of consequence to the race. He may be
a philosopher; he is no poet.
His philosophy may even be true, and yet his right to the laurel may be
justly denied. For the special service of art is to make us live more
intensely in the very life which art sifts and selects—in fact, the
sifting has for its conscious purpose a more vivid realization of what we
live through, and a novel or a play is successful, from the standpoint
of imaginative literature, only in the degree to which we enter the
work, become ourselves the hero, fall in love with the heroine, hate
the villain. In this sense the dime novel and the melodrama, though
carelessly branded by the theorist as bad art, are likely to be very
good art indeed, and the over-reasoned story, though adorned with subtle
reflection and refinements of diction, is in fact poor art, as the
average person in his heart knows, for in such books the reflection
upon life is paid for by a failure to represent what the reflection is
about. If the author would only share with us the adventures that caused
him to reflect, we could do our own reflecting upon them, but if he
will not share the secret which inspires him, we do not care much what
philosophizing he does. Literature continues to be great so long as the
sifting it makes it really a selection only from life, and what remains
is for the imagination still a first-hand experience; when the residue
grows thin to the imagination and addresses itself rather to logic, we
feel justified in making whatever return we can to our starting point in
nature, to reassure ourselves there, if we cannot in the book, that this
human life we love is still with us.
IV