III

I see that I shall be obliged to keep on reiterating the difference

between fine literature and "literature," or in other words between art

and observation expressed with artifice. I am afraid, that in your heart

of hearts, you still believe that the "Odyssey" is fine literature, and

that "Pride and Prejudice" is fine literature, though the "Odyssey" is

"better" than "Pride and Prejudice." It is that "better" that I want to

get out of your head, that monstrous fallacy of comparing Westminster

Abbey with the charming old houses in Queen Square. You would see the

absurdity of imagining that there can be any degree of comparison

between two things entirely different, if I substituted for "Pride and

Prejudice" some ordinary circulating-library novel of our own times. At

least I hope you would see, though, as I told you a few weeks ago, I

doubt very much whether many people realise the distinction between the

"Odyssey" and a political pamphlet. The general opinion, I expect, is

that both belong to the same class, though the Greek poem is much more

"important" than the pamphlet. I think we succeeded in demonstrating the

falsity of this idea, in showing clearly and decisively that fine

literature means the expression of the eternal human ecstasy in the

medium of words, and that it means nothing else whatsoever. Words, it is

true, are used for other ends than this: they are used in sending

telegrams to stockbrokers, for example, but why should this double

office create any confusion? A tub and a tabernacle may each be made of

wood, but you don't mix the two things up on that account? The other day

you gave me a most amusing account of your landlady's quarrels with her

servant girls. I remember that I laughed consumedly, and at the moment,

that solemn preconisation of the servant Mabel to the effect that her

mistress, Mrs Stickings, was not a "lydy," was more to my taste than the

recitation of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." But you surely didn't think

that you were making literature all the while? Or that the history of

Mrs Stickings and Mabel would have mysteriously become literature if you

had written it down and got somebody to print it? Or that it would have

been literature if some of the details had been a little exaggerated (I

thought you had embroidered here and there); or if you had made the

whole story up out of your own head? Exactly, you were, as you say,

amusing me by the relation of facts a little altered, compressed, and

embellished, and I am glad that you see that no process of writing or

printing, no variation in the proportion of truth and invention, even to

the total lack of all truth, could have changed an amusing presentation

of the Stickings _ménage_ into fine literature. But, surely, it is so

very obvious. Did any cook ever think that he could change a turkey into

a bird of paradise by careful attention to the _farse_ and the sauce?

The farmer might as well expect to breed early phœnixes for Leadenhall

Market by the simple process of lighting a bonfire in the farmyard. The

young ducks would jump into the blaze, and the transformation would be

the work of a second! There is no more madness in _that_ notion than in

the other one--that one has only to print an amusing, interesting,

life-like, or pathetic tale to make it into fine literature.

Yes; but what I am afraid is still lurking somewhere in your skull is

this: that if only the stuffing is extremely well made, if only the

sauce is an exquisite concoction, the turkey _is_, somehow or other,

changed into a bird of paradise. That is, to translate the analogy, if

only the plot is very ingenious, if only the construction is well

carried out, if the characters are extremely life-like, if the English

is admirably neat and sufficient, then reading-matter becomes fine

literature. Make the bonfire high enough and your young ducks will be

burned into phœnixes fast enough; let the artifice be sufficiently

artificial and it will be art. Indeed you might as well maintain that a

wooden statue, if it be really well carved, is thereby made into a gold

statue.

Well, I remember saying one night that you were here that ecstasy is at

once the most exquisite of emotions and a whole philosophy of life. And

it is to the philosophy of life that we are brought, in the last resort.

You know that there are, speaking very generally, two solutions of

existence; one is the materialistic or rationalistic, the other, the

spiritual or mystic. If the former were true, then Keats would be a

queer kind of madman, and the "Morte d'Arthur" would be an elaborate

symptom of insanity; if the latter is true, then "Pride and Prejudice"

is not fine literature, and the works of George Eliot are the works of

a superior insect--and nothing more. You must make your choice: is the

story of the Graal lunacy, or not? You think it is not: then do not talk

any more of turning glass into diamonds by careful polishing and

cutting. Do not say: Mr A. spends five years over a book, and therefore

what he writes is fine literature; Miss B. polishes off five novels in a

year, and therefore she does not write fine literature. Do not say, Mr

Shorthouse has got the name of a man who kept a private school in the

time of Charles I. quite right; therefore "John Inglesant" is fine

literature, while the archæological details in "Ivanhoe" are all wrong,

therefore it is not fine literature. Good Lord! You might as well say:

but my landlady's name is Mrs Stickings, and the girl (who left last

month) was really called Mabel; _therefore_ that story of mine was fine

literature. What's that about sustained effort? Can you turn a deal

ladder into a golden staircase by making it of a thousand rungs? What I

say three times is right, eh? and if I tell the tale of Mrs Stickings so

that it extends to "our minimum length for three volume novels," it

becomes fine literature.

Well, I really hope that we have at last settled the matter; that fine

literature is simply the expression of the eternal things that are in

man, that it is beauty clothed in words, that it is always ecstasy, that

it always draws itself away, and goes apart into lonely places, far from

the common course of life. Realise this, and you will never be misled

into pronouncing mere reading-matter, however interesting, to be fine

literature; and now that we clearly understand the difference between

the two, I propose that we drop the "fine" and speak simply of

literature.

But I assure you that, even after having established the grand

distinction, it is by no means plain sailing. Everything terrestrial is

so composite (except, perhaps, pure music) that one is confronted by an

almost endless task of distinguishing matter from form, and body from

spirit. Literature, we say, is ecstasy, but a book must be written about

something and about somebody; it must be expressed in words, it must

have arrangement and artifice, it must have accident as well as essence.

Consider "Don Quixote" as an example; it is, I suppose, the finest prose

romance in existence. Essentially, it expresses the eternal quest of the

unknown, that longing, peculiar to man, which makes him reach out

towards infinity; and he lifts up his eyes, and he strains his eyes,

looking across the ocean, for certain fabled, happy islands, for Avalon

that is beyond the setting of the sun. And he comes into life from the

unknown world, from glorious places, and all his days he journeys

through the world, spying about him, going on and ever on, expecting

beyond every hill to find the holy city, seeing signs, and omens, and

tokens by the way, reminded every hour of his everlasting citizenship.

"From the great deep to the great deep he goes": it is true of King

Arthur and of each one of us; and this, I take it, is the essence of

"Don Quixote," and of all his forerunners and successors. Then, in the

second place, you get the eternal moral of the book, and you will

understand that I am not using "moral" in the vulgar sense. The eternal

moral, then, of "Don Quixote" is the strife between temporal and

eternal, between the soul and the body, between things spiritual and

things corporal, between ecstasy and the common life. You read the book

and you see that there is a perpetual jar, you are continually

confronted by the great antinomy of life. It seems a mere comic

incident when the knight dreaming of enchantment is knocked about, and

made ridiculous; but I tell you it is the perpetual tragedy of life

itself, symbolised. I say that it is, under a figure, the picture of

humanity in the world, that you will find the truth it represents

repeated again and again throughout all history. You know that if one

goes back resolutely to the first principles of things, one finds

oneself, as it were, in a place where all lines that seemed parallel and

eternally divided meet, and so it is with this tragedy symbolised by the

Don Quixote. It is, you may say, the tragedy of the Unknown and the

Known, of the Soul and Body, of the Idea and the Fact, of Ecstasy and

Common Life; at last, I suppose, of Good and Evil. The source of it lies

far beyond our understanding, but its symbol is shown again and again in

Cervantes's page.

Then, there is a third element in the book. The author intended to write

a burlesque on the current romances of chivalry; and he wrote, I

suppose, the best burlesque that has ever been written, or ever will be

written. If you unhappily so choose, you can shut your eyes to

everything serious and everything beautiful, and read merely of Amadis

and Arthur "taken off," of the highest ideals turned into nonsense, of

the best motives shown to be, in effect, mischievous. You will read how

the knight, in the approved manner of knights, helped the oppressed and

the wretched, and how he usually worsened their condition tenfold. You

may lend your ear to Sancho, grumbling and quoting "common-sense"

proverbs all the road, as he rides on his ass, and if it were not for

the wit and the comedy, you might fancy yourself in a suburban train

bound for the city. Why, if you so please, "Don Quixote" is the

Institute of cynicism, the reduction of every generous impulse to

absurdity.

Finally, the knight is the mouthpiece of Cervantes himself, especially

towards the end of the second part, where the armour and the fantasy

drop off, piece by piece, and shred by shred, on that mournful, homeward

journey. At last, I say, Don Quixote is almost simply Cervantes,

commenting on men and affairs in Spain, and I think that in those final

chapters the art has vanished together with the armour and the ecstasy.

Yes, I always dread the ending of "Don Quixote." A star drops a line of

streaming fire, down the vault of the sky, and perhaps you may have

seen the ugly, shapeless thing that sinks into the earth.

But this very brief and imperfect analysis of a great masterpiece of

literary art may give you some idea of the extraordinary complexity of

all literature. As it is I have omitted one most important item in the

account; I have said nothing of the style, because, I am sorry to say

that I have no Spanish, and Cervantes speaks to me through an

interpreter named Charles Jarvis. But, omitting style, you see that we

have, in this particular case, five books in one; we have the utterance

of pure ecstasy, the strife between ecstasy and the common life, the

burlesque of chivalry, the institutes of cynicism, and the comments on

affairs. Each of these different themes is managed with consummate

ability, and (always excepting the last chapters of the book), each

keeps its due place, so that it really rests with the reader, in a

manner, to choose which book he is to read.

And then, there are other elements which must be accounted for if one is

to judge a book as a whole, fairly and thoroughly. I may be so charmed

with the writer's rapture, with the wonder and beauty of his idea, that

I may forget the fact that the artist must also be the artificer; that

while the soul conceives, the understanding must formulate the

conception, that while ecstasy must suggest the conduct of the story,

common-sense must help to range each circumstance in order, that while

an inward, mysterious delight must dictate the burning phrases and sound

in the music and melody of the words, cool judgment must go through

every line, reminding the author that, if literature be the language of

the Shadowy Companion it must yet be translated out of the unknown

speech into the vulgar tongue. Here then we have the elements of a book.

Firstly the Idea or Conception, the thing of exquisite beauty which

dwells in the author's soul, not yet clothed in words, nor even in

thought, but a pure emotion. Secondly, when this emotion has taken

definite form, is made incarnate as it were, in the shape of a story,

which can be roughly jotted down on paper, we may speak of the Plot.

Thirdly, the plot has to be systematised, to be drawn to scale, to be

carried out to its legitimate conclusions, to be displayed by means of

Incident; and here we have Construction. Fourthly, the story is to be

written down, and Style is the invention of beautiful words which shall

affect the reader by their meaning, by their sound, by their mysterious

suggestion.

This, then, is the fourfold work of literature, and if you want to be

perfect you must be perfect in each part. Art must inspire and shape

each and all, but only the first, the Idea, is pure art; with Plot, and

Construction, and Style there is an alloy of artifice. If then any given

book can be shown to proceed from an Idea, it is to be placed in the

class of literature, in the shelf of the "Odyssey" as I think I once

expressed it. It may be placed very high in the class; the more it have

of rapture in its every part, the higher it will be: or, it may be

placed very low, because, for example, having once admired the

Conception, the dream that came to the author from the other world, we

are forced to admit that the Story or Plot was feebly imagined, that the

Construction was clumsily carried out, that the Style is, æsthetically,

non-existent. You will notice that I am never afraid of blaming my

favourites, of finding fault with the books which I most adore. I can do

so freely and without fear of consequences, since having once applied my

test, and having found that "Pickwick," for example, is literature, I

am not in the least afraid that I shall be compelled to eat my words if

flaws in plot and style and construction are afterwards made apparent.

The statue is gold; we have settled that much, and we need not fear that

it will turn into lead, if we find that the graving and carving is poor

enough. Once be sure that your temple _is_ a temple, and I will warrant

you against it being suddenly transmuted into a tub, through the

discovery of scamped workmanship.

Well, suppose we begin to apply our analysis. Let us take the strange

case of Mr R. L. Stevenson, and especially his "Jekyll and Hyde," which,

in some ways, is his most characteristic and most effective book. Now I

suppose that instructed opinion (granting its existence) was about

equally divided as to the class in which this most skilful and striking

story was to be placed. Many, I have no doubt, gave it a very high place

in the ranks of imaginative literature, or (as we should now say) in the

ranks of literature; while many other judges set it down as an extremely

clever piece of sensationalism, and nothing more. Well, I think both

these opinions are wrong; and I should be inclined to say that "Jekyll

and Hyde" just scrapes by the skin of its teeth, as it were, into the

shelves of literature, and no more. On the surface it would seem to be

merely sensationalism; I expect that when you read it, you did so with

breathless absorption, hurrying over the pages in your eagerness to find

out the secret, and this secret once discovered, I imagine that "Jekyll

and Hyde" retired to your shelf--and stays there, rather dusty. You have

never opened it again? Exactly. I _have_ read it for a second time, and

I was astonished to find how it had, if I may say so, evaporated. At the

first reading one was enthralled by mere curiosity, but when once this

curiosity had been satisfied what remained? If I may speak from my own

experience, simply a rather languid admiration of the ingenuity of the

plot with its construction, combined with a slight feeling of

impatience, such as one might experience if one were asked to solve a

puzzle for the second time. You see that the secret once disclosed, all

the steps which lead to the disclosure become, _ipso facto_,

insignificant, or rather they become nothing at all, since their only

significance and their only existence lay in the secret, and when the

secret has ceased to be a secret, the signs and cyphers of it fall also

into the world of nonentity. You may be amazed, and perplexed, and

entranced by a cryptogram, while you are solving it, but the solution

once attained, your cryptogram is either nothing or perilously near to

nothingness.

Well, all this points, doesn't it, towards mere sensationalism, very

cleverly done? But, as I said, I think "Jekyll and Hyde" just scrapes

over the border-line and takes its place, very low down, among books

that are literature. And I base my verdict solely on the Idea, on the

Conception that lies, buried rather deeply, beneath the Plot. The

plot, in itself, strikes me as mechanical--this actual physical

transformation, produced by a drug, linked certainly with a theory of

ethical change, but not linked at all with the really mysterious, the

really psychical--all this affects me, I say, as ingenious mechanism and

nothing more; while I have shown how the construction is ingenious

artifice, and the style is affected by the same plague of laboured

ingenuity. Throughout it is a thoroughly conscious style, and in

literature all the highest things are unconsciously, or at least,

subconsciously produced. It has music, but it has no under-music, and

there are no phrases in it that seem veils of dreams, echoes of the

"inexpressive song." It is on the conception, then, alone, that I

justify my inclusion of "Jekyll" amongst works of art; for it seems to

me that, lurking behind the plot, we divine the presence of an Idea, of

an inspiration. "Man is not truly one, but truly two," or, perhaps, a

polity with many inhabitants, Dr Jekyll writes in his confession, and I

think that I see here a trace that Mr Stevenson had received a vision of

the mystery of human nature, compounded of the dust and of the stars, of

a dim vast city, splendid and ruinous as drowned Atlantis deep beneath

the waves, of a haunted quire where a flickering light burns before the

Veil. This, I believe, was the vision that came to the artist, but the

admirable artificer seized hold of it at once and made it all his own,

omitting what he did not understand, translating roughly from the

unknown tongue, materialising, coarsening, hardening. Don't you see how

thoroughly _physical_ the actual plot is, and if one escapes for a

moment from the atmosphere of the laboratory it is only to be confronted

by the most obvious vein of moral allegory; and from this latter light,

"Jekyll and Hyde" seems almost the vivid metaphor of a clever preacher.

You mustn't imagine, you know, that I condemn the powder business as bad

in itself, for (let us revert for a moment to philosophy) man is a

sacrament, soul manifested under the form of body, and art has to deal

with each and both and to show their interaction and interdependence.

The most perfect form of literature is, no doubt, lyrical poetry which

is, one might say, almost pure Idea, art with scarcely an alloy of

artifice, expressed in magic words, in the voice of music. In a word, a

perfect lyric, such as Keats's "Belle Dame Sans Mercy" is _almost_ pure

soul, a spirit with the luminous body of melody. But (in our age, at all

events) a prose romance must put on a grosser and more material envelope

than this, it must have incident, corporeity, relation to material

things, and all these will occupy a considerable part of the whole. To a

certain extent, then, the Idea must be materialised, but still it must

always shine through the fleshly vestment; the body must never be mere

body but always the body of the spirit, existing to conceal and yet to

manifest the spirit; and here it seems to me that Mr Stevenson's story

breaks down. The transformation of Jekyll into Hyde is solely material,

as you read it, without artistic significance; it is simply an

astounding incident, and not an outward sign of an inward mystery. As

for the possible allegory I have too much respect for Mr Stevenson as an

artificer to think that he would regard this element as anything but a

very grave defect. Allegory, as Poe so well observed, is always a

literary vice, and we are only able to enjoy the "Pilgrim's Progress" by

forgetting that the allegory exists. Yes, that seems to me the _vitium_

of "Jekyll and Hyde": the conception has been badly realised, and by

badly I do not mean clumsily, because from the logical, literal

standpoint, the plot and the construction are marvels of cleverness; but

I mean inartistically: ecstasy, which as we have settled is the synonym

of art, gave birth to the idea, but immediately abandoned it to

artifice, and to artifice only, instead of presiding over and inspiring

every further step in plot, in construction, and in style. All this may

seem to you very fine-drawn and over-subtle, but I am convinced that it

is the true account of the matter, and perhaps you may realise my theory

better if I draw out that analogy of "translation" which I suggested, I

think, a few minutes ago. I was passing along New Oxford Street the

other day, and I happened to look into a shop which displays Bibles in

all languages, and I glanced at the French version, open at the seventh

chapter of the Book of Proverbs. I saw the words "un jeune homme

dépourvu de bon sens," and then, lower down, "comme un bœuf à la

boucherie," and it was some considerable time before I realised that

these phrases "translated," "a young man void of understanding," and "as

an ox goeth to the slaughter." Now you notice that these are in every

way commonplace examples; there is nothing extraordinarily poetical in

either phrase as it stands in the Authorised Version. I might have made

the contrast much more violent by choosing a passage from the Song of

Songs or Ecclesiastes; and I wonder how "Therefore with Angels and

Archangels" would go into French. But isn't the gulf astounding between

"void of understanding" and "dépourvu de bon sens"? Yet the meaning of

the French is really the same as the meaning of the English; logically,

I should think, the two phrases are exactly equivalent. And yet ...

well, we know perfectly well that "dépourvu de bon sens" in no way

renders that noble and austere simplicity that we reverence in the

English text.

Now, I think, you ought to see what I have been trying to express about

the gulf that may open always between the conception and the plot, or

story, that does divide the conception from the plot of "Jekyll and

Hyde." Of course the analogy is not perfect, because the _magnum chaos_

that yawns between the unformulated Idea and the formulated plot,

between pure ecstasy and ecstasy _plus_ artifice, is much vaster than

the distinction between English and French, indeed between the two

former there is almost or altogether the difference of the infinite and

the finite, of soul and body; still, you see how a book is a rendering,

a translation of an Idea, and how a very fine idea may be embodied in a

very mechanical plot.

You remember the "Socialist and Baroness" novel that we were talking

about the other night. We placed it outside of literature firstly and

chiefly because it was not based on ecstasy, on an idea of any kind, and

secondly, and by way of consequence, because in its execution and detail

it was so thoroughly insignificant, because it played Hamlet with the

part of the Prince omitted. Now I think that it is strong evidence of

the soundness of my literary theory that we are enabled by it to take

two books so utterly dissimilar in manner and method, in story and

treatment, and to judge them both by the same scale. For this is what it

really comes to: we say that the "Tragic Comedians" is not literature

because it simply tells of facts without their significance, because it

deals with the outward show and not with the inward spirit, because it

is accidental and not essential. And in just the same way we say that

"Jekyll and Hyde" (its conception apart) is not literature inasmuch as

it too has the body of a story without the soul of a story, the

incident, the fact, without the inward thing of which the fact is a

symbol. For if you will consider the matter you will see that a fact

_qua_ fact has no existence in art at all. It is not the painter's

business to make us a likeness of a tree or a rock; it is his business

to communicate to us an emotion--an ecstasy, if you please--and that he

may do so he uses a tree or a rock as a symbol, a word in his language

of colour and form. It is not the business of the sculptor to chisel

likenesses of men in marble; the human form is to him also a symbol

which stands for an idea. In the same manner it is not the business of

the literary artist to describe facts--real or imaginary--in words: he

is possessed with an idea which he symbolises by incident, by a story of

men and women and things. He is possessed, let us say, by the idea of

Love: then he must write a story of lovers, but he must never forget

that A. and B., his actual lovers in the tale, with their social

positions, their whims and fancies, their sayings and doings are only of

consequence in the degree that they symbolise the universal human

passion, which in its turn is a copy of certain eternal and ineffable

things. If A. and B. do _not_ do this then they are nothing, and worse

than nothing, so far as art is concerned. "But my tree is like a tree,"

says the dull painter, and "my anatomy is faultless," says the bad

sculptor, and "my characters are life-like," says the novelist.

And one can apply exactly the same reasoning to Mr Stevenson's ingenious

story. I do not know whether there is, or has been, or will be a salt in

existence which can turn a man into another person; that is of not the

slightest consequence to the argument. The result of the powder, as it

is described in the book, is an incident, and it makes no difference to

the critical judgment whether the incident is true or false, probable or

improbable. The only point, absolutely the only point is this: is the

incident significant or insignificant, is it related for its own sake,

or is it posited because it is a sign, a symbol, a word which veils and

reveals the artist's ecstasy and inspiration? The socialist fell in love

with the baroness: it is true, you say, it really happened so in Germany

some twenty-five years ago. But in the book it is insignificant. The

doctor took the powder and became another man; it is probably untrue.

But it is also insignificant; and to the critic of art in literature the

one incident stands precisely on the same footing as the other.

And, do you know, I am glad I have made this comparison between "Jekyll

and Hyde" and the "Tragic Comedians," because it has struck me that what

I have been saying about the essential element of all literature might

be open to very grave misunderstanding. I have been insisting, with

reiteration that must have tired you, that there is only one test by

which literature may be distinguished from mere reading matter, and that

that test is summed up in the word, ecstasy. And then we admitted a

whole string of synonyms--desire of the unknown, sense of the unknown,

rapture, adoration, mystery, wonder, withdrawal from the common

life--and I daresay I have used many other phrases in the same sense

without giving you any special warning that it was our old friend again

in a new guise. But it has just occurred to me that with all this wealth

of synonyms, I may not have made my meaning perfectly clear. For

example, while I was laying down the law about Dr Jekyll's powder and

its effects, you might have interrupted me with the remark: "But I

thought you said the sense of wonder was characteristic of literature;

and surely the change from Jekyll into Hyde is extremely wonderful." Or

again, when I was belauding the "Odyssey," dwelling on the voyage of

Ulysses amongst strange peoples, you might have put in some modern tale

of strange adventure, and requested me to distinguish between the two,

to justify my praise of the old, and rejection of the new. And we have

mentioned Sunday-school books, always, I think, with a certain _nuance_

of contempt; but Sunday-school books usually deal with religion, and

religion and adoration are almost synonymous. And so one could go on

with the list, making out, on our premises, with our own test, a

plausible case for books which we know very well are neither literature

nor anything remotely approaching it. And that would look rather like

the collapse of our literary case, wouldn't it?

Well, the solution of the difficulty seems to me to be sought for in the

remarks I was making just now about "facts" in art. I said, you

remember, that in art, facts as facts have no existence at all. Facts,

incidents, plots, simply form the artistic speech--its mode of

expression, or medium--and if there is no idea behind the facts, then

you have no longer language but gibberish. Just as language is made up

of the letters of the alphabet, arranged in significant words and

sentences; so is the artistic language made up of plots, incidents,

sentences which are informed with significance. If I heap up letters of

the alphabet, and arrange them in an arbitrary collocation, without

meaning, I am forming gibberish, and not a language; and so if I pepper

my pages with extraordinary incidents, without attaching to them any

significance, I am writing, it may be, an exciting, absorbing,

interesting book, but I am not making literature. Indeed, some of the

books that might be mentioned in this connection remind me of a man

swearing: he uses the holiest names but he does so in such a manner that

he excites not reverence and awe but disgust and repulsion. Tell the

bare "plot" of the Odyssey to one of these writers, and hint that it

might be made into a "successful Christmas book for boys," and he will

produce you a book which will contain the Lotus-Eaters, and Calypso and

the Cyclops, but which will have just the same relation to literature as

blasphemy bears to the Liturgy. That seems to me the explanation; one

must say again that mere incident is nothing, that it only becomes

something when it is a symbol of an interior meaning. And, turning this

maxim inside out, as it were, we shall sometimes find that a book which

seems on the surface to be "reading matter" is really literature, and

incidents, apparently insignificant, may turn out, on a closer

examination, to be significant and symbolic in a very high degree. So I

don't think our literary criterion is in any way invalidated by the

occurrence of surprising incidents in very worthless books. Look at "Mr

Isaacs" for example. In a sense it is a "wonderful" book, inasmuch as

it contains incidents which are far removed from common experience; but

you have only to read it to discover that the author had not been

visited by any inspiration of the unseen. One may trace some

acquaintance with theosophical "literature," but not even the dimmest

vision of "the other things." The "other things"? Ah, that is another

synonym, but who can furnish a precise definition of the indefinable?

They are sometimes in the song of a bird, sometimes in the scent of a

flower, sometimes in the whirl of a London street, sometimes hidden

under a great lonely hill. Some of us seek them with most hope and the

fullest assurance in the sacring of the Mass, others receive tidings

through the sound of music, in the colour of a picture, in the shining

form of a statue, in the meditation of eternal truth. Do you know that I

can never hear a jangling piano-organ, contending with the roar of

traffic without the tears--not of feeling but of emotion--coming to my

eyes?

And that instance--it is grotesque enough--reminds me that I think I

have an explanation of another puzzle that has often perplexed me, and I

daresay has perplexed you. Do you remember the books that you read when

you were a boy? I can think of stories that I read long ago (I have

forgotten the very names of them) that filled me with emotions that I

recognised, afterwards, as purely artistic. The sorriest pirate, the

most wretchedly concealed treasure, poor Captain Mayne Reid at his

boldest gave me then the sensations that I now search for in the

"Odyssey" or in the thought of it; and I looked into some of these

shabby old tales years afterwards, and wondered how on earth I had

managed to penetrate into "faëry lands forlorn" through such miserable

stucco portals. And you, you say, extracted somehow or other, from

Harrison Ainsworth's "Lancashire Witches," that essence of the unknown

that you now find in Poe, and I expect that everybody who loves

literature could gather similar recollections.

Well, it would be easy enough to solve the problem by saying that the

emotions of children are of no consequence and don't count, but then I

don't think that proposition is true. I think, on the contrary, that

children, especially young children before they have been defiled by the

horrors of "education," possess the artistic emotion in remarkable

purity, that they reproduce, in a measure, the primitive man before he

was defiled, artistically, by the horrors of civilisation. The ecstasy

of the artist is but a recollection, a remnant from the childish vision,

and the child undoubtedly looks at the world through "magic casements."

But you see all this is unconscious, or subconscious (to a less degree

it is so in later life, and artists are rare simply because it is their

almost impossible task to translate the emotion of the sub-consciousness

into the speech of consciousness), and as you may sometimes see children

uttering their conceptions in words that are nonsense, or next door to

it, so nonsense or at any rate very poor stuff suffices with them to

summon up the vision from the depths of the soul. Suppose we could catch

a genius at the age of nine or ten and request him to utter what he

felt; the boy would speak or write rubbish, and in the same way you

would find that he read rubbish, and that it excited in him an ineffable

joy and ecstasy. Coleridge was a Bluecoat boy when he read the "poems"

of William Lisle Bowles, and admired them to enthusiasm, and I am quite

sure that at some early period Poe had been enraptured by Mrs Radcliffe,

and we know how Burns founded himself on Fergusson. When men are young,

the inward ecstasy, the "red powder of projection" is of such efficacy

and virtue that the grossest and vilest matter is transmuted for them

into pure gold, glistering and glorious as the sun. The child (and with

him you may link all primitive and childlike people) approaches books

and pictures just as he approaches nature itself and life; and a

wonderful vision appears where many of us can only see the common and

insignificant.

But all this has been a digression; it has come by the way in a talk

about worthless and insignificant books. But I think that we should by

this time have brought our testing apparatus into working order; we

should be able to criticise any given book on some ground or principle,

not on the rule of thumb of "it sent me to sleep," or "it kept me

awake." And I think that what I have already remarked about the

subconscious element in literature should have answered that question

about "books with a purpose." As a matter of fact I believe that they

are mostly trash, but it is not a case for _à priori_ reasoning; you

must test each book by itself. Mr Stevenson was, I believe, an artist at

heart, but we have seen how the artificer overcame the artist in "Jekyll

and Hyde," and in like manner there have been cases of people who were

artificers, and even preachers, at heart, who were forced to succumb to

the concealed, subconscious artist, when pen touched paper. For example;

first logically analyze "Lycidas"; you will be disgusted just as Dr

Johnson, who had no analysis but the logical, was disgusted. Forget your

logic, your common-sense, and read it again as poetry; you will

acknowledge the presence of an amazing masterpiece. An unimportant

lament over an unimportant personage, constructed on an affected

pseudo-pastoral plan, full of acrid, Puritanical declamation and abuse,

wantonly absurd with its mixture of the nymphs and St Peter; it is not

only wretched in plan but clumsy in construction, the artifice is

atrocious. And it is also perfect beauty! It is the very soul set to

music; its austere and exquisite rapture thrills one so that I could

almost say: he who understands the mystery and the beauty of "Lycidas"

understands also the final and eternal secret of art and life and man.