Probably not a few readers of Prof. Barrett Wendell's suggestive
lectures on the 'Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English
Literature' were surprized to be told that a chief peculiarity of the
greatest of dramatic poets "was a somewhat sluggish avoidance of
needless invention. When anyone else had done a popular thing, Shakspere
was pretty sure to imitate him and to do it better. But he hardly ever
did anything first." In other words, Shakspere was seeking, above all
else, to please the contemporary playgoers; and he was prompt to
undertake any special type of piece they had shown a liking for; so we
can see him borrowing, one after another, the outer form of the
chronicle-play from Marlowe, of the tragedy-of-blood from Kyd, of
romantic-comedy from Greene, and of dramatic-romance from Beaumont and
Fletcher. And in like manner Molière was content to return again and
again to the type of play which he had taken over from the Italian
comedy-of-masks.
This "sluggish avoidance of needless invention," which is
characteristic of Shakspere--and of Molière also, altho in a less
degree--is evidenced not only by their eager adoption of an accepted
type of play, an outer form of approved popularity, it is obvious also
in their plots, wherein we find situations, episodes, incidents drawn
from all sorts of sources. In all the twoscore of Shakspere's plays,
comic and tragic and historic, there are very few, indeed, the stories
of which are wholly of his own making. The invention of Molière is not
quite so sluggish; and there are probably three or four of his plays the
plots of which seem to be more or less his own; but even in building up
these scant exceptions he never hesitated to levy on the material
available in the two hundred volumes of uncatalogued French and Spanish
and Italian plays, set down in the inventory of his goods drawn up at
his death. Apparently Shakspere and Molière accepted in advance Goethe's
theory that much time may be lost in mere invention, whereas, "with a
given material all goes easier and better. Facts and characters being
provided, the poet has only the task of animating the whole. He
preserves his own fulness ... since he has only the trouble of
execution."
It has long been a commonplace of criticism that great poets seldom
invent their myths; and it may in time become a commonplace of
criticism that they seldom invent their forms. But in default of the
lesser invention, they have the larger imagination; and there is no
pedantry in seeking to emphasize the distinction between these two
qualities, often carelessly confused. Invention is external and
imagination is internal. The poets, by the mere fact that they are
poets, possess the power of imagination, which alone gives vitality and
significance to the ready-made plots they are willing to run into
ready-made molds. Invention can do no more than devise; imagination can
interpret. The details of 'Romeo and Juliet' may be more or less
contained in the tale of the Italian novelist; but the inner meaning of
that ideal tragedy of youthful love is seized and set forth only by the
English dramatist.
Imagination in its fullest meaning must be held to include invention;
but invention is only one of the less important elements of imagination;
and it is the element which seems to be more or less negligible when the
other elements are amply developed. La Fontaine, one of the most
individual of French poets, devised only a few--and not the best--of the
delightful fables he related with unfailing felicity. Calderon, who was
the most imaginative of the dramatists of Spain, was perhaps the least
inventive of them all, contentedly availing himself of the situations,
and even of the complete plots of his more fertile fellow-playwrights;
and two of his most characteristic dramas, for example, two in which he
has most adequately exprest himself, the 'Alcalde of Zalamea' and the
'Physician of His Own Honor,' are borrowed almost bodily from his fecund
contemporary Lope de Vega. Racine seems to have found a special pleasure
in treating anew the themes Euripides had already dealt with almost a
score of centuries earlier. Tennyson, to take another example, displayed
not a little of this "sluggish avoidance of needless invention," often
preferring to apply his imagination to the transfiguring of what Malory
or Miss Mitford, Froude or Freeman had made ready for his hand. This
eschewing of overt originality fitted him all the more to be spokesman
of his time, and to voice the ideals of his race and of his day.
Tennyson, so Sir Leslie Stephen told us, "could express what occurred to
everybody in language that could be approached by nobody." Browning, on
the other hand, made his own plots, and on the whole made them none too
well, especially in his dramatic poems, in the structure of which he was
entirely neglectful of the accepted forms of the theater of his own
time--accepted forms of which Shakspere and Molière would have availed
themselves instinctively. It was not Browning, but Whitman--and Whitman
in 1855, when the bard of Manhattan had not yet shown the stuff that
was in him--that Lowell had in mind in the letter where he says "when a
man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously
unoriginal.... The great fellows have always let the stream of their
activity flow quietly."
What is true of the poets is true also of the painters; and Lowell, who
did not lose his Yankee shrewdness in the galleries of Italy, saw this
also and phrased it happily in another of his letters. "The great merit,
it seems to me, of the old painters was that they did not try to be
original." The old painters were following in the footsteps of painters
still older, from whom they received the accepted formulas for
representing the subjects most likely to be ordered by customers. These
accepted formulas representing the Annunciation, for instance, the
Disputing in the Temple, the Crucifixion even, were passed down from one
generation of artists to another; and in each successive generation the
greatest painter was generally he who had no strong desire to be
different from his fellows, and who was quite willing to express himself
in the patterns which were then accepted traditions of his craft. To a
student of the work of the generation that went before, there is often
little or no invention in some of the mightiest masterpieces of
painting, however much imagination there may be. The painters who
wrought these masterpieces were only doing what their immediate
predecessors had been doing, the same thing more or less in the same
way--but with infinitely more insight, power, and inspiration. As
Professor Butcher has put it tersely, "the creative art of genius does
not consist in bringing something out of nothing, but in taking
possession of material that exists, in appropriating it, interpreting it
anew."
In the very ingenious and highly original tale called the 'Murders in
the Rue Morgue,' the earliest of all detective-stories, Poe displayed
his remarkable gift of invention; but he revealed his share of
penetrative imagination far more richly in the simpler story of the
'Fall of the House of Usher.' Wilkie Collins had more invention than
Dickens, as Dickens had more than Thackeray. Indeed, Thackeray, indolent
as he was by temperament, was not infrequently "sluggish in his
avoidance of needless invention." He kept his eye intent on the lurking
inconsistencies of human nature, and did not give his best thought to
the more mechanical element of the novelist's art. Cooper and Dumas were
far more fertile in the invention of situations than was Thackeray; and
even Scott, careless as he was in his easy habit of narration, gave more
of his thought to the constructing of unexpected scenes.
Three centuries ago Sidney asserted that "it is not riming and versing
that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate"; and
to-day we know that it is not skill in plot-making or ingenuity in
devising unforeseen situations which proves the story-teller's
possession of imagination. It is scarcely needful now to repeat that
'Called Back' and 'She'--good enough stories, both of them, each in its
kind--did not demand a larger imaginative effort on the part of their
several authors than was required to write the 'Rise of Silas Lapham' or
'Daisy Miller.' More invention there may be in the late Hugh Conway's
tale and in Mr. Haggard's startling narrative of the phenix-female; but
it is invention that we discover in their strange stories rather than
imagination. Indeed, he is an ill-equipt critic who does not recognize
the fact that it calls for less imagination to put together a sequence
of unexpected happenings such as we enjoy in the fictions of the
neo-romanticists than is needed to vitalize and make significant the
less exciting portrayals of character which we find in the finer
narratives of the true realists.
It was Dr. Johnson who declared, rather ponderously, it is true, but
none the less shrewdly, that "the irregular combinations of fanciful
invention may delight a while by that novelty of which the common
satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden
wonder are soon exhausted and the many can only repose on the stability
of truth." Johnson was speaking here from the point of view of the
reader only; but he might have noted also that the "irregular
combinations of fanciful invention" tend to lose their interest even for
the very writers who have been successful in supplying their readers
with the "pleasures of sudden wonder." For example, in the opening years
of this twentieth century the witty historian of the kingdom of
Zenda--that land of irresponsible adventure which lies seemingly between
the Forest of Arden and the unexplored empire of Weissnichtwo--this
historian, after regaling us with brisk and brilliant chronicles of that
strange country and of the adjacent territory, apparently wearied of
these pleasant inventions of his and wisht to come to a closer grapple
with the realities of life and character. But he soon found that this
task was not so easy as it appeared--not so easy, indeed, as the earlier
writing had been; and 'Quisanté,' for all its cleverness, did not prove
its author's possession of the informing imagination which alone can
give life and meaning to a novel dealing with men and women as they are
in the real world.
Not unlike is the case of the narrator of the manifold and varied
deductions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that British reincarnation of Poe's
M. Dupin. There is danger of unfairness in accepting the authenticity
of words put into a man's mouth by any interviewer, however well
intentioned; and there is, therefore, a possibility that the biographer
of the Brigadier Gerard did not confess his own slight esteem for the
many tales of invented adventure which had given him his wide-spread
popularity. But there is an accent of veracity in the reported assertion
of the author of 'A Duet with an Occasional Chorus' that this is the
book closest to his heart, because it is an honest attempt to deal with
the facts of life as they stare us in the face to-day. And yet 'A Duet'
is unknown to a tithe of the countless readers who have devoured its
writer's other volumes with avidity. And what is more to the point, it
does not--favorite of its author tho it is--it does not deserve to be
known so widely. This is because it is not so good as the other books of
the same writer, not so good in its kind as they are in theirs. The
tales that dealt with Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard and the White
Company are works of invention mainly; and the writer had proved himself
capable of adroit and ingenious invention. 'A Duet,' dealing with the
commonplaces of life, needed not invention, which would indeed almost be
out of place in a humdrum chronicle; it demanded imagination to
interpret the commonplace and to transfigure the humdrum, revealing
their essential significance. And this imagination the author had not
at his call, in spite of his command over the more showy invention.
It may not be without interest to consider how another writer of our
time, not seeking for originality, happened to find it, and how his
acceptance of certain literary patterns, so to call them--patterns
inherited from the remote and shadowy past of our race--led him to an
unforeseen effort of illuminative imagination, which suddenly elevated
what he had done and gave it a significance far wider and far deeper
than the author had foreseen. In the two successive volumes of the
'Jungle Book' (as it was originally published) there are two sets of
stories commingled and yet sharply distinct. One group deals with the
boyhood of Mowgli among the beasts of the forest; and to many of us
these linked tales represent the highest achievement of Mr. Kipling's
genius; they seem as assured of survival as anything which the
nineteenth century has transmitted to the twentieth. The other stories,
the 'White Seal' and the 'Undertakers' and their companions, stand on a
lower level; they are good stories, no doubt,--very good, indeed, one or
two of them. But they have an added importance in that they seem to have
been the needful accompaniment of the Mowgli tales; they may be
considered as the underbrush that at first protected the growth of the
loftier tree.
They are modern examples of the beast-fable, latter-day amplifications
of the simple tale of animals credited with human cunning, such as
primitive man told to his naked children as they huddled around the
embers in the cave, which was then their only home. The beast-fable is a
literary pattern of an undiscoverable antiquity, as alluring to-day as
ever before, since the child in us fortunately never dies. It is a
pattern which Mr. Kipling has handled with a constant affection and with
a large freedom. His earlier animal tales dealt with wild beasts, or at
least with the creatures of the forests and of the ocean beyond the
influence of man and remote from his haunts. Soon he availed himself of
the same pattern to tell stories of animals domesticated and in close
contact with man; and thus he gave us the 'Walking Delegate' and the
'Maltese Cat.' In time betook a further step and applied to the iron
horse of the railroad the method which had enabled him to set before us
the talk of the polo pony and of the blooded trotter; and thus he was
led to compose '007,' in which we see the pattern of the primitive
beast-fable so stretched as to enable us to overhear the intimate
conversation of humanized locomotives, the steeds of steel that puff and
pant in and out of the roundhouse in an American railroad yard. Yet one
more extension of the pattern enabled him to take a final step; after
having given a human soul to separate engines, he proceeded then to
animate the several parts of a single machine. And thus we have 'How the
Ship Found Herself' and the later 'Below the Mill-dam.' But altho these
are successive stages of the primitive beast-fable as it has been
modified in Mr. Kipling's restless hands, there is little flagrant
originality, even at the end, since 'How the Ship Found Herself' is seen
to be only an up-to-date version of one of the earliest fables, the
'Belly and the Members.'
Interesting as it may be to clamber up into the spreading family-tree of
fiction, it is not here that we must seek for the stem from which the
Mowgli stories ultimately flowered. These stories are not directly
derived from the beast-fable, altho his mastery of that literary pattern
may have helped the author to find his final form. They are a
development from one of his own tales, 'In the Rukh,' included at first
in 'Many Inventions,' and now transferred to its proper place at the end
of the book in which the adventures of Mowgli are recorded. In that
first tale, which is now the last, we have set before us the impression
Mowgli and his little brothers, the wolves, made upon two white men in
the Indian service; and incidentally we are permitted to snatch a
glimpse or two of Mowgli's youth in the jungle. But the story is told
from the point of view of these white men; and it is small wonder that
when the author came to look again at what he had written he saw how
rich it was in its possibilities. He was moved to go back to narrate the
whole series of Mowgli's adventures from the very beginning, with Mowgli
himself as the center of the narrative and with little obtrusion of the
white man's civilization.
There was invention in this early story, and imagination also, altho not
so abundant. But as the author brooded over the incidents of Mowgli's
babyhood there in the thick of the forest, in the midst of the beasts,
whose blood-brother he became, suddenly his imagination revealed to him
that the jungle and all its inhabitants must be governed by law, or else
it was a realm of chaos. It is this portrayal of wild life subject to an
immitigable code which gives its sustaining moral to the narrative of
Mowgli's career. As Mr. Kipling said to me once, "When I had found the
Law of the Jungle the rest was easy!" For him it may have been easy,
since his invention is ever fresh and fertile; but the finding of the
Law of the Jungle--that transcended mere invention with all its
multiplied ingenuities--that was a stroke of imagination.
This distinction between imagination and invention may not be as
important as that between imagination and fancy urged by Wordsworth a
century ago; and no doubt there is always danger in any undue
insistence upon catchwords, which are often empty of meaning, and which
are sometimes employed to convey a misleading suggestion. This
distinction has its own importance, however, and it is not empty or
misleading. It needs to be accepted in art as it has been accepted in
science, in which domain a fertile discovery is recognized as possible
only to the imagination, while a specific device is spoken of as an
invention. Newton and Darwin were discoverers by their possession of
imagination; whereas the telegraph and the telephone are to be credited
to humbler inventors, making application of principles already
discovered.
This opening century of ours is an era of extraordinary dexterity and of
wide-spread cleverness, and we need to be put on our guard against the
risk of mistaking the products of our abundant invention for the rarer
gifts of inspiring imagination. It is well for us to be reminded now and
again that the great masters, painters and poets alike, novelists and
dramatists, have often displayed "a sluggish avoidance of needless
invention" at the very minute when their robust imagination was putting
forth its full strength.
(1904.)