who in one form or another now cultivate nature rather than art may
plead with justice that the best literature our country produced before
them was perilously deficient in a sense of reality. If they do so
plead, however, they ought to be consistent. If they think that so great
an artist as Hawthorne was deficient in reality, that transcendental
philosophy occupies too much room in his romances and the sense of
actual American life too little, then they ought not to tell us at
the same time that Poe and Whitman are our great poets, for those
two were even further along toward the abstract than Hawthorne. And
there will be an increasing obligation on those who in each generation
of the fast-ripening world make a return to nature, to provide some
demonstration that it is not life after all they are running away from.
Some men have taken to the hermit’s cell to find God; others to avoid
responsibility. As civilization becomes greater in quantity, with more
discoveries of science, with more apparatus of education, we need more
and more the poetic genius that will dedicate this material to great
ends, and by articulating for us what we can recognize as our best ideal,
teach us to simplify life by casting off the other less significant
interests. The solution of all this raw material for art can only be
a greater art. When we turn back from this heroic opportunity to take
refuge in what is for us nature, we must convince ourselves, if we can
that our retreat does not indicate in us inadequate equipment or weak
nerve or small heart.
In our present cult of the natural there is cause to suspect some such
lack of skill and courage. The plea that our predecessors were so
deficient in reality that we, to save the day, must exhibit less art than
theirs, will not go in the long run. Our new poetry is curiously relaxed
and enervated in temper, ground-hugging, grey and flat; if we have moods
which such writing adequately represents, we have other moments more
cheerful and creative, which our architecture and our engineering manage
to express, but which cannot be guessed at in our poetry, not as much as
the oak can be guessed at in the acorn. Our novels, too, have lost their
courage, and though they often represent photographically the machine of
civilization which builds up around us, and which now is the raw material
on which our art is to operate, they do not even attempt to portray the
spirit of the artist which actually pervades the land, the joy in putting
the machine to human uses, the almost divine ecstasy in having made so
much of nature subject already to the mind. This mood of confidence in
art is as much a fact in our national life as the number of gallons that
flow over Niagara each hour, but the poets and novelists seem to have
taken fright.
In both verse and prose, in style as well as subject, the cult of the
natural has limited our writers to a few individualistic attitudes, and
has taken from them the power to speak with authority on all subjects
for us all. We have no American poet, no American novelist; each is
the poet or novelist of Vermont or Boston or Maine or Chicago—whatever
scene is to him by birth or habit his natural world. To find a universal
utterance of universal experience is the aim and the tendency of art,
but the cult of nature compels us to return each in what state he came.
The counsel to use the language of ordinary speech limits us to the
speech of some locality; and such limitation is a fatal handicap for
great poetry. The advice to use only the natural word-order limits us to
the word-order which each of us finds natural, whereas it is our duty, on
the contrary, if we make any claim to mastery in literature, to enlarge
our vocabulary even beyond the words our family and our neighbors made
natural to us, and to cultivate all the variety of word-order our speech
permits, that we may enrich and refine our style, and render our meaning
more precise. The temptation to get along with a small vocabulary and a
meagre change of construction is altogether too natural; we did not need
this premeditated urging to a still greater poverty. Hitherto the best
remedy for a narrow equipment in language has been to read constantly
in the great writers; it was they who extended the powers of speech and
laid upon each tongue the shape and cadence which to the ill-informed
might seem the gift of nature. But now that the ideal of the writer is to
shrink to the measure of the conversation he is used to, how shall our
nobler moments find expression? Not even in reading old authors, for by
the contemporary doctrine of naturalness the old masters are artificial.
“Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy
people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I
die, and there will I be buried.” ... “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he
lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed there he fell
down dead.” ... “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be
broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at
the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the
spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”
These cadences are not natural, and they are not modeled on the sounds
that habitually fill our ears. Their distinction, or if you like, their
condemnation, is that they are works of art. Such language gets away
as far as it can from time and place, and by much sifting out from
unessentials it tries to preserve a universal appeal. If you can write
this way at all, you can write as well in New York as in London, as well
now as in 1611.
The purpose of art is to make its subject-matter also universal, to sift
and rearrange the raw material of life into a history that will have as
much meaning as possible for as many readers as possible, for as long as
possible. But the cult of the natural tends to the opposite effect—to
make the subject-matter of literature temporary in its interest and
limited in its meaning. The Broadway entertainments which please us for
the moment, since they conform to our taste in the spontaneous, the
impromptu and the natural, are but the raw material of drama; good plays
might be made out of them; but in each case the author stops the story
before we pass from nature to art. It is natural, in the sense of our
definition, that a stoker in modern times should have two ideas—that
to the idle and effete he may seem akin to the missing link, and that
since he is at the bottom of society, he must be supporting it. Quite
a philosophy can be made out of two ideas, and these two, when put
together, as in a recent drama, promise an explosion. But after all,
nothing explodes. The man simply enunciates his two ideas in different
accents of violence, until the author thinks it is time to stop, and
gets him strangled in the zoo. An artist would have been interested to
see in action a character with such a philosophy. We have recently seen
another play with an idea, a very simple one; by any means in her power a
girl is going to capture the man she loves. Since the only means in her
power are eccentric ones, we watch her eccentricity with astonishment for
three acts; her behavior is original, like nothing that ever was or will
be, and our interest is held by the growing desperation of her ingenuity.
Well, she gets him—for much the same reason that the philosophic stoker
was strangled, because it is time for the audience to go home. An artist
would have granted her ambition as natural, and her success as natural
too; he would have shown us, however, what happened after her success,
when her philosophy of opportunism in etiquette would have met its
test. Had _Much Ado About Nothing_ been written by the author of either
of the plays just described, the famous comedy would never have got
further than the raw material of the story, the legend that Benedick and
Beatrice waged a merry war between them; we should have had an evening’s
entertainment of jokes and insults, made gradually more intensive, more
violent and more surprising in order to hold us till the last curtain.
Shakespeare, choosing the way of art, begins rather at the point where
the wit of Beatrice and Benedick is exhausted; they have the reputation
for it, but their public efforts show signs of strain and flagging. From
this start in nature the play proceeds to represent what happened to
Benedick and Beatrice, the witty enemies, when serious accidents brought
their fates together.
V
Nowhere in literature, perhaps, is art so obviously essential and
naturalism so obviously fatal as in drama, for drama, by exhibiting life
to us directly, quickens to its utmost whatever desire we have to see
our fellows move on from their natural beginnings to some achievement or
significant conclusion. Impulses, ideas, motives, prejudices, passions,
and as we now say, complexes, are all natural forms of energy; in real
life they weary us if they have only a lyric expression, and we wish
they would get started into action. Their attempts toward action may
be thwarted, and such a defeat may be tragically significant, but at
least they should try, and if instead of trying they waste themselves
in talk, they become not energies but nuisances. It is for this reason,
we suppose, that Aristotle long ago cautioned us that tragedy, or all
drama, is an imitation not of men but of an action, and that plot is the
essential thing. He might have said that character may exist in a state
of nature, but plot presupposes art in life, a selection from all other
incidents of one succession of events which so selected have a meaning.
What he did say was that without action there can be no drama, but there
may be without character. Plot is a generalization of life, in which the
actors may or may not be portrayed as individuals. The woman who lost
the piece of silver, the good Samaritan, the mother of Œdipus, are clear
enough in their universal relation to the story in which they appear;
their personalities may be restated to suit our taste, or left undefined.
We read in the newspaper that a man jumps into the river to save a
drowning child, and having got to land, discovers that he has rescued his
own son. We live in that drama without asking what was the character of
the father or what was the psychology of the son.
It is remarkable how Shakespeare illustrates Aristotle’s doctrine, by
showing his characters in action and by avoiding as far as possible an
analysis of their motives, their instincts, their prejudices, their
passions. Life with him finds expression in art or not at all. It is a
mirror indeed which he applies to nature, not a microscope; in his glass
we see the form of virtue and the features of vice, we know who are
good and who are bad, at least as accurately as we form such judgments
in life, but we do not know the motives of the good or the bad. What
were Falstaff’s motives? Should he be acted as a comic or a tragic
character? Why did Portia like Bassanio? Why did Cordelia take such
an absolute stand with her father? What did Hero think of Claudio, or
Hermione of Leontes, after the restoration to the jealous husband? Was
Hamlet’s mother an accessory to the murder of his father, or did her
conscience trouble her only because she had made a second marriage and in
such haste? The profundity of Shakespeare’s art lies in his genius for
representing the surface of action; in art as in ethics, life is chiefly
conduct, and it is enough that behind conduct lies unprobed the same
mystery that lies behind existence itself.
But since naturalism thinks otherwise, Shakespeare is no longer our
example. Browning is more in our vein. For him the natural man, the raw
material of each one of us, the hidden instincts and impulses, must be
the whole subject, and action he finds useful only in the fragmentary
incidents that must be premised before you can conclude anything even
about instincts. Few verdicts in criticism are wider of the mark than
the too familiar saying that Browning’s genius is Shakespearean. He
is the opposite of Shakespeare. He is absorbed in what we call in a
loose way psychology, in the original man apart from his conduct, or
as far apart from it as you can separate him. To be so concerned about
motives and instincts is to be a kind of inverted dramatist, moving
back from action instead of toward it; it is no wonder, therefore, that
Browning’s so-called dramas fail on the stage, since in that direct
relation to the audience their static naturalness, their inability to
live out a significance in conduct, is pitilessly revealed. Everybody
examines himself and talks about himself, as God made him; nothing
gets under way; the audience is finally delivered by the death of the
soliloquizer, not in a zoo, but more politely, it may be, in a gondola.
“Even if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character,”
said Aristotle, “though well finished in diction and in thought, yet
you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with
a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and
artistically constructed incidents.” To return to nature absolutely
would be to return to silence. Short of silence, to return to nature in
literature is to confess your private character in monologue. Browning is
master in that kind. It would be untactful to name the writers today who
share the mastery with him, and perhaps it is enough merely to suggest
the idea. To save time we might prudently meditate rather upon the few
poets and novelists remaining whose art gets further than monologue.
Meanwhile the universe marches on its secret errand, not altogether
secret since it marches, and its art is slowly dramatized in its vast
conduct. Art for art’s sake is a formula inspiring if taken in a noble
sense, but in any sense it is intelligible as a programme deliberately
chosen. To cultivate nature for nature’s sake is absurd. For nature is
here without our aid, and to preserve it in what we call its pure state,
we need cultivate nothing—unless it be a more animal contentedness to
profit in indolence by the art of those who came before us.
IV
THE CULT OF THE CONTEMPORARY
I
“The end of playing”, said Hamlet, “both at the first and now, was and
is, to show the very age and body of the time, his form and presence.” It
would seem that Hamlet thought the business of art was to portray the age
in which the artist lived, not only to address his contemporaries, but to
speak to them about themselves. The cult of the contemporary, then, in
our own day could ask for no better text than this phrase of the Prince
of Denmark; what a pity he uttered it so long ago!
Shakespeare did not agree with Hamlet—at least, he made some pretence
to show his Elizabethan audience the form and presence of remote times
and far-away countries, Rome and Athens, Denmark itself, Italy, Scotland,
Bohemia, the age of King John and the Richards and the Henrys, the
time and place, whatever they were, of _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, the
_Tempest_, _Cymbeline_, the _Winter’s Tale_. And Hamlet himself, be it
noted, is hardly faithful to his theory, for when he asks the players to
repeat a favorite speech of his, it turns out to be Æneas’s tale to Dido.
It was from a piece, he said, that pleased not the million, perhaps never
had a second performance, but in the judgment of the competent and in his
own opinion it was an excellent play. Perhaps the million were at the
moment bred exclusively to appreciate contemporary themes; costume plays
were not the fashion. Hamlet’s other choice in drama is poor evidence
of his esthetic theory; the murder of Gonzaga seems to have been already
ancient history, but he chose it to catch the conscience of the king,
since the story fitted his own household tragedy. Shall we follow the
hint, and suggest that Hamlet, like Shakespeare, really had nothing in
common with those who would make contemporary life the proper subject for
art? Perhaps he would not have mentioned the age and body of the time,
if he had not just said that the end of playing is to show scorn her own
image, if indeed the purpose of his meddling with the drama at all, at
that moment, had not been to sting the royal murderer into a confession
of his guilt.
The cult of the contemporary follows logically from the cult of the
natural. If we are to write of a life untouched with art, we can write
only of life about us, as our fathers left it to us—our best of nature,
the talent buried in a napkin; and if we are to use the ordinary
language of men, we must use today’s language, the only speech that to
us is ordinary. And if it is possible to understand the search for the
natural as an effort to correct the generalizing tendency in literature,
we may also find a sympathetic explanation of the insistence on the
contemporary, when we recall how many writers have reasoned themselves
into a determination to walk in the ways of their heart and in the
sight of their eyes. Did not Homer celebrate the glory of Hellenism?
Did not Virgil celebrate the empire of Rome? Well, then, we ought to
celebrate the United States, our United States, rather than the country
of Washington or Jefferson; we ought to celebrate the hour and the place
we know, for we ought to love what we know—New York, Boston, Chicago
or the Middle West. This conclusion seems rational, but the desired
enthusiasm does not follow; the celebration of the contemporary in our
literature is as dreary in its results as the worship of the natural,
inspired merely by the sense of some duty rather than by delight in what
is portrayed. Homer’s zest for Hellenism is undeniable, and the instinct
is right that we, too, must love life as he loved it before we can write
as he wrote. For the moment we postpone the question, whether we must
not also live a life as noble in kind as he portrayed. Virgil, writing
in a more complicated, a sadder age, none the less loved imperial Rome,
and we are right to think that before we shall be worthy to sing of our
own land, in its own grave and complex era, we must take it to heart,
problems and all. “The proof of a poet”, said Whitman, “shall be sternly
deferred till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he absorbed
it.” But Whitman’s own practise is a provoking comment on his saying; he
succeeded remarkably in loving his land under an eternal form; the form
and presence of his day he did not leave us. His poems are no guide-books
to Manhattan and Long Island in 1855; even his beloved ferry-boats are
dateless.
In what sense, then, would Whitman have us love our country, the home
of our own times, and how did Homer and Virgil, as artists, love the
Greece or the Rome they knew? To be of one’s age, yet to be immortal, is
a problem more subtle perhaps than to achieve an art that seems natural,
but it can be solved in the same way, by defining the terms of our
esthetic, and by referring them, as to a touchstone, to what we know of
our common human nature. The question can also be narrowed at the start,
and very profitably, by pressing home our reflections on Hamlet’s remark
to the players. There is one kind of writing which does confine itself
to the feature of virtue and the image of scorn, and which does indeed,
for that very reason, limit itself always to giving the form and presence
of the time—the kind of writing, that is, which indicts human nature
instead of portraying it. Our better selves, our ideals, are of no time,
but our faults are personal responsibilities and strictly contemporary.
Satire, therefore, which holds up to merriment or to scorn what is
ridiculous or base, must always take a present subject, and in general
any art that leans toward the consideration of our shortcomings will lean
also toward the life enacted at the moment. If Hamlet meant to trap the
king, of course he would write into the old play the very murder the king
had committed only three or four months ago; this would not be satire in
the usual sense, but it would serve the same end, to convict the guilty
and to reform the world. The cult of the contemporary, then, is proper
quite literally for satire; it remains only to ask how far it is proper
for art.
But is satire not art? Did not Martial and Juvenal, Dryden and Pope write
highly artistic satires? There is an art of satire, we must answer, as
there is an art of preaching and an art of prosecuting a criminal case.
But if there is a distinction between art and morals, then satire belongs
to the world of ethics, and of ethics on the grim side, rather than to
the world of beauty and delight. To survey and judge the morals of one’s
age is a serious office that no thoughtful and sensitive person seems
altogether to neglect; if the purpose of art is to make such a survey, as
Hamlet seems to say, then _Twelfth Night_ is hardly a masterpiece in art,
and _Sandford and Merton_ is certainly one. If art, on the other hand,
has for its purpose to salvage out of our crude days the truth which can
be translated into beauty, and which so translated may be a joy for ever,
then art will have as little as possible to do with men’s faults—what
faults are joys for ever?—and the kind of writing which confines itself
to our frailties or our sins will be as far removed as possible from
art. Moreover, the moralist desires a cure of souls, and when the fault
is remedied, who will care for the satire or even understand it? It is
easy enough, without taking thought, to perish with our own time, but it
is one of the oldest hopes art has held out to natural man, that being
purified into art he should not altogether die. But mortality is germane
to satire. When we read Dryden’s terrible excoriations of Og and Doeg, we
can only wonder who were the human beings he hated so, and when we come
to know something of their lives and characters, we are more confused to
name the moral impulse in him which made it necessary to fix them in so
warm a hell. In art, loving your own times does not mean loving to find
fault with them.
II
A genuine love of your own time is the recognition, in what you meet in
it, of those best moments which crave to be made accessible even for the
remotest of ages following. To immortalize any given moment, however,
is to take it out of the temporary and somehow to find a language for
it so general in its appeal that hereafter it may preserve in its own
significance the trivial circumstances from which it first arose.
Whenever a genuine love of life stirs the artist, it will be a passion
for what he thinks is the best in his own day; even if he is antiquarian
and takes for object of his devotion some medieval phase of life, it
is medievalism in his own day that he worships. Such a passion leads
the writer toward the future, for since it is an ideal passion, yet to
be realized, he instinctively proclaims it to posterity, or tries to;
but in his search for the right language in which to utter it, he as
instinctively turns to the past. To cultivate the contemporary in art
is therefore as absurd as to waste effort cultivating the natural, for
the present, like nature, is always with us; but the problem for the
artist is to express a vision which necessarily points toward the future
in language which necessarily trails from the past. We cannot remind
ourselves too often that even the single words of common speech must be
used by each one of us perhaps a lifetime before they are charged with
emotions or sharpened to precise meanings, and before the writer can
use them with full effect they must be so charged and sharpened for all
his readers. The language of poetry, moreover, is far more than single
words; it is chiefly the metaphors and the legends, the characters and
the episodes, which the race has met with so often that at last they
suggest accurately to all men the same feelings and the same thoughts.
Life at each moment may be on its way to become something to talk with,
but only the rash would try to express a serious ideal through a picture
of that life which is still near us, and therefore still imperfectly
seasoned or digested. The patriotism that Shakespeare dramatized for
his audience was certainly a passion for the England of Elizabeth; that
is why he expressed it through Faulconbridge, the child of Richard the
Lion-Hearted, or through John of Gaunt, or through Henry V. Why did he
not put Elizabeth on his stage, with Raleigh and Spenser and Drake and
Sidney? Was he blind to the glory of his own hour? He seems not to have
been so, but in his own hour neither the Queen nor any of her great
courtiers was as clear a figure to the emotions as time has since made
them all; the sentiment of the audience would be divided as to each one
of them, the adherents to Rome still perhaps cursing Henry’s daughter
in their hearts, the friends of Ireland perhaps cursing the poet of the
_Faerie Queene_. But the wise dramatist was on safe ground, he knew, when
the audience heard their common love of country issue unprejudiced from
the lips of old Gaunt, who died two centuries earlier:
This fortress, built by nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this England.