Poe was not altogether right in saying that the object of poetry was
Beauty as distinguished from Truth. I don't for a moment suppose that
his meaning was amiss, but I hardly like his expression of it. I should
contend, on the other hand, that poetry κατ' ἐξοχήν, and literature,
generally, are the sole media by which the very highest truth can be
conveyed. Poe, no doubt, meant to state a proposition which is true and
self-evident--that poetry has nothing to do with scientific truth, or
facts, or information of any kind, and I say that that proposition is
self-evident, because we have already seen that in literature, facts as
facts, have no existence at all. They are only "words" in the language
of literary art, and are used as symbols of something else. That A. is
in love with B. is a "scientific truth," a fact; but if it be not also a
symbol, it has no literary existence whatever; and this of course is
what Poe wished to say--literature is not a matter of information.
But I doubt, after all, whether Poe had quite grasped the theory of
literature, of all the arts. You remember that he says that he yields to
no man in his love of the truth; and unless he meant the highest truth
the statement is almost nonsensical. No one, I should imagine, surely
not Poe, would express his enthusiasm for facts as facts, would adore
correct information in the abstract. You remember what Rossetti
said--that he neither knew nor cared whether the sun went round the
earth or the earth round the sun--and so far as art is concerned this
is, no doubt, the expression of the true faith, which, from what we know
of Poe, would be his faith also. We should therefore conclude that by
truth he meant philosophical truth, the highest truth, the essential
truth as distinguished from the accidental, the universal as
distinguished from the particular. Yet in the next breath he contrasts
this Truth with Beauty, being clearly under the impression that they
were two different things. Of course he was completely mistaken. In the
last analysis it is entirely true that "Beauty is Truth and Truth
Beauty": they are one and the same entity seen from different points of
view. You will see how this fits in with all we have been saying about
literature lately: how we can if we please put our test of literature
into yet another phraseology. For instance: "Vanity Fair" is
information, while "Pickwick" is Truth; the one tells you a number of
facts about Becky Sharpe and other people, while the other symbolises
certain eternal and essential elements in human nature by means of
incidents. And, as I said, it is doubtful whether truth in this, its
highest and its real significance, can be adequately expressed in any
other way. All the profound verities which have been revealed to man
have come to him under the guise of myths and symbols--such as the myth
of Dionysus--and truth in the form of a mathematical demonstration or a
"rational" statement is a contradiction in terms. Yet note the profound
vice of language; we are obliged to use the same word to imply things
which are separated by an immeasurable gulf. It is "true" that Mrs
Stickings sent away Ethelberta to-night (you imparted that interesting
fact, and I rely on your testimony), and the "Don Quixote" is "true":
that is, it conveys to us by means of symbols the verities of our own
nature.
But Poe had not grasped the essential distinction between literature
and "literature." He thought that poetry alone should be beautiful, or
as we should say, ecstatic; he did not see that the qualities which make
poetry to be what it is must also be present in prose if it is to be
something more than "reading-matter." Poetry of course is literature in
its purest state; it is, as I think I once said, _almost_ the soul
without the body; at its highest it is _almost_ pure art unmixed with
the alloy of artifice. And to carry on the analysis, the finest form of
poetry is necessarily the lyrical. Where you get the element of
narrative, you are apt also to get the element of prose; there have to
be passages linking the raptures together, and these will, probably or
indeed necessarily, run on lower levels.
Of course primitive man had moods in which rapture seemed to embrace
everything, to invest every detail of existence with its own singular
and inexplicable glory. A meal by the seashore, the dry wood flaming and
crackling on the sand, the roasting goat's flesh, the honey-sweet wine,
dark and almost as glorious as the sea itself--a mere dinner of
half-savages, one might think it, but it too seems to have its solemnity
and its inner meaning. I believe this element in the early poetry has
often been noticed; people have wondered at the _naïve_ delight with
which the writers describe the work of man's hands, and they are, I
think, inclined to account for it on the ground that then everything was
new. This might pass, perhaps, since as you, no doubt, perceive,
"everything new" means "everything unknown" (that which is known is no
longer new), but I hardly think that the explanation can stand in its
present form. I am not at all up in the theories which assign this or
that age to the appearance of man on the earth, but I presume that on
the gentlest and most antiquated computation man must have long known
the world before Homer wrote; so one scarcely sees that human skill and
art, the knack of making things and the gift of adorning them, could
have been novelties, or in any sense, "things unknown." I repeat I know
nothing or next to nothing about these dates in anthropology, but one
has heard something about the neolithic age, and the palæolithic age,
about the very early man who scratched the rude likeness of a reindeer
on the brute's own bone, and so there hardly seems room for this theory
of novelty. And besides, as we have seen, the rapture is universal or
all but universal; it colours the whole of life, including the meal by
the seashore; and there, we see, there was no possibility of invention
or sense of newness. No; the theory is tempting, and it would fall in
perfectly, as I daresay you see, with all that we have concluded about
literature, but I really think that it must be definitely abandoned. No;
it seems to me that primitive man, Homeric man, mediæval man, man,
indeed, almost to our own day when the School Board (and other things)
have got hold of him, had such an unconscious but all-pervading,
all-influencing conviction that he was a wonderful being, descended of a
wonderful ancestry, and surrounded by mysteries of all kinds, that even
the smallest details of his life partook of the ruling ecstasy; he was
so sure that he was miraculous that it seemed that no part of his life
could escape from the miracle, so that to him every meal became a
sacrament.
It is the attitude of the primitive man, of the real man, of the child,
always and everywhere; it may be briefly summed up in the phrase: things
are because they are wonderful. This, of course, is the atmosphere in
which poets ought to live, and in which poetry should be produced.
Formerly it was natural to all men or almost all; now, perhaps, it has
to be regained by a conscious effort; and the difficulty of the effort,
the impossibility of sustaining it for long, explain the supremacy of
lyrical poetry. If you lived in a world that could regard a common meal
as a sacrament, you could be supreme in narrative poetry; but, that
atmosphere wanting, we have to be content for the most part with the
lyric, with the simple incantation, without any description of the
circumstance or occasion.
Yet prose, though it yields in much to the world, must still keep the
same ideal before it as poetry. I say, distinctly, that the only
essential, defining difference between the two is to be sought in the
"numbering" of poetry, in the fact that art, in its intensest raptures,
in its most truly "natural" moment, desires and obtains the strictest
and most formal laws. It is, I suppose, immaterial what these laws are,
rhyme, assonance, accents, feet, alliteration, all testify to the
important and essential rule that freedom is chiefly free when it is
most bound and bounded by restrictions which _we_ should call
artificial, which are, in truth, in the highest sense, natural. And
this, I am sure, is the only possible distinction that can be
established between such a book as the "Odyssey" and such a book as the
"Morte d'Arthur." Neither is "prosaic" in the common sense of the word;
each is "poetical"; but the Greek book is poetry because it is numbered,
and the English is prose because it lacks number. Of course there are
difficult cases; hybrids, as there always are, whatever laws one may lay
down.
* * * * *
That word "natural" is another of the many traps that language sets us.
I think that its real meaning has become almost reversed. Take the
average man to church, and ask him his opinion of the "intoning," and in
nine cases out of ten he will say that it may be pretty, but that it is
very unnatural. He means, of course, that speaking is natural, and that
singing--"numerosity" of tone--is not natural, is, in a word,
artificial. He is utterly wrong. It is artificial to speak in the
ordinary manner, while the priests' chant, and every chant are purely
natural. For the proof of this you have only to read a little--a very
little--about primitive, or "natural" peoples, or, more simply, to
listen to children at play. You will always find that where convention
has not cast out nature, some kind of "sing-song," some sort of chant is
the entirely natural utterance of man in his most fervent, that is, his
most natural moments. Listen to half-a-dozen children (children, you
must remember, are all "primitives" and therefore natural) playing some
game, learning their lesson at school. Their voices are pretty sure to
fall into a very rude, but a distinctly measured, chant. The Greek drama
was intoned, the Koran is intoned, the Welsh preacher of to-day at the
impassioned height of eloquence begins to chant, the Persian
passion-plays are recited in a sing-song. Nay, but listen only to our
great tragic actor. Quite unconsciously, I am sure, he has elaborated
for himself a distinctly musical and measured utterance, so that a
skilful musician, provided with scored paper, could note Irving's
delivery of many passages, as if it were music. The Chinese language, I
am told, depends largely on the tonal variations which distinguish the
meaning of one word from that of another; you will find the same thing
in the Norwegian; and the Jewish "cantillation," which is "sing-song" in
a very simple form, bears witness to the truth--that "speaking" is
acquired, conventional, and artificial, while "singing" is natural. All
this would be perfectly clear in itself, would require no demonstration
of any kind, if it were not for the fact that we have, somehow or other,
got into the way of making the very impudent assumption that man is only
natural when he is doing business on the Stock-Exchange or reading
leading-articles. It seems almost too nonsensical an assumption to put
into words, but I really do believe that "at the back of our heads"
there is a sort of vague, floating idea that there never were any real
men at all till the period of the first Reform Bill, and I suppose that
before very long Lord John Russell will be pushed back into the region
of myth, and the foundation of the School Board will be the era of true
humanity. I say, this sounds too ridiculous, but examine yourself and
see whether you don't dimly believe that before the advent of trousers
the whole world was really "play-acting," that existence in the days of
laced coats was, in a way, a kind of phantasmagoria, and that a man who
wore chain-mail was hardly a man. I believe it really is so, and you
will find the same nonsense influencing religious opinion. Take your
average Protestant, and I am much mistaken if you do not discover that
he believes some grotesque preacher, in his greasy black suit, mouthing
platitudes at his conventicle to be somehow more "natural" than the
priest, clad in the mystical robes of his office, chanting Mass at the
altar. But in literature--why this perversion of the word influences the
whole of criticism. Jane Austen, we say, is natural, and Edgar Allan Poe
is unnatural, or as it is sometimes expressed, inhuman. Of course, if
you wish for the truth, the proposition must be reversed, unless you are
willing to believe that a Company Prospectus is, somehow, more natural
and more human than, say, Tennyson's "Fatima." If you think that the
real man is the stomach, there is, of course, an end of the discussion;
but then we should have to admit that all the greatest artists of the
world were maniacs. But you see clearly, don't you, that all these
questions as to what we shall get for dinner, and whom shall we meet at
dinner, and in what order shall we go into dinner, and how shall we
behave at dinner, are in no sense natural, since they are all so purely
temporary, since they will be answered by one age in a manner that will
seem wholly "unnatural" to the next. That, I think, is truly natural
which is unchanging, which belongs to men always, at all times, and in
all ages. In this sense, ecstasy is natural to man, and it finds
expression in the arts, in poetry, in romance, in singing, in melody, in
dancing, in painting, in architecture. Many animals have sufficient
artifice to shelter themselves from the weather, no animal has
architecture, or the art of beauty in building; many animals, or all
animals, have the faculty of communicating with one another by means of
signs, but man alone has the art of language.
* * * * *
Has it ever struck you while I have been talking of ecstasy in books,
that it is nearly always a question of degree, of more or less? I think
I indicated as much while I was talking about "Pickwick"; I showed how
the ecstatic conception had been alloyed with much baser matter, in
other words that there was much in "Pickwick" that was by no means
literature. And, I daresay, though I am not sure, that if you were to go
through your Meredith you might succeed in finding some passages and
sentences which are literature, and for all I know there may be hints
of rapture between the lines of "Pride and Prejudice." Still, we do not
call a man poet on the strength of a single line.
But sometimes one is confronted with books which are really very
difficult to judge, and this sometimes happens because the ecstasy, the
true literary feeling, supposing it to be present, is present not here
or there, not in a phrase or in a particular passage, but throughout, in
a very weak solution, if one may borrow the phraseology of physical
science. We read such books, and are puzzled, feeling that, somehow,
they are literature, only we can't say why, since on the face of it they
seem only to be entertaining reading. Do you know that I can conceive
many people who would find something of this difficulty in Mark Twain's
"Huckleberry Finn"? Here you have a tale of the rude America of forty or
fifty years ago, of a Mississippi village, full of the most ordinary
people, of a boy and a negro who "run away." I don't think anyone with
the slightest perception of literature could read it without
experiencing extraordinary delight, but I can imagine many people would
be a good deal puzzled to justify the pleasure they had received. The
"stuff" of the book is so very common and commonplace, isn't it, it
seems so frankly a rough bit of recollection drawn up from the author's
boyish days with jottings added from the time when he was a pilot on one
of the river-boats--it is all so apparently devoid of "literary" feeling
that I am sure many a reader must have felt greatly ashamed of his huge
enjoyment. To me "Huckleberry Finn" is not a very difficult case. That
flight by night down the great unknown, rolling river, between the dim
marshy lands and the high "bluffs" of the other shore comes in my mind
well under the great "Odyssey" class; it has, indeed, the old,
unquenchable joy of wandering into the unknown in a more acute degree
than "Pickwick," which, as we have seen, is to be reckoned under the
same heading. In a word it is pure romance, and you will note that the
story is told by a boy, and that by this method a larger element of
wonder is secured, for even in this absurd age children are allowed to
be amazed at the spectacle of the world. In the mouth of a man the tale
would necessarily have lost somewhat of its "strangeness," since partly
from affectation, partly from vicious training, partly from the
absorption of the "getting-on" process, grown-up people have largely
succeeded in quenching the sense of mystery which should be their
principal delight. You have only to read the average book of travels to
see how this affectation (or perversion of the soul) has deprived the
seeing being of his sight. Dip into a book--say a book on China--and you
will probably find that Pekin streets are dusty in summer and muddy in
winter, and that the author caught cold through imprudent bathing. So it
is well for us that Mark Twain put his story in the mouth of an
"infant," who is frankly at liberty to express his sense of the marvels
of the world. Later, there is an introduction of the "literary" feeling;
those chapters about Jim's "Evasion" are very Cervantic in their
artifice and method, but, to my thinking, they have lost the spirit,
though they preserve the body. They are most amusing reading, but they
are burlesque and nothing more than burlesque; and from them one can
almost imagine what "Don Quixote" would have been if it had been written
by a very clever man, by an artificer who was not an artist. But the
earlier chapters are wonderfully fine, and I think that it would be
difficult to find a more successful rendering of the old "wandering"
theme with modern language.
* * * * *
But there is another writer who is much more difficult to account for--I
mean Miss Wilkins. I confess I find her tales delightful, and I often
read them, but as you know I am not content to rest on my own pleasure
in literary criticism. We are no longer talking of the great
masterpieces, of the gigantic achievements of such men as Homer,
Sophocles, Rabelais, Cervantes; we agreed that when we spoke of these
great, enduring miracles of art, it was best to lay aside all question
of liking or not liking, of reading often or reading seldom. But when
one comes to modern days, to books which have yet to prove their merit
by the test of their endurance, it is pardonable if one is sometimes a
little confused, if one fails to discriminate at once between the merely
interesting and the really artistic. I may be so delighted with a book
for reasons that have nothing to do with art, that, by an unconscious
trick of the mind, I persuade myself that I am reading literature while
there is only reading-matter. And at one time I was inclined to think
that I had "confused" Miss Wilkins in this manner. For, on the surface,
you have in her books merely village tales of New Englanders, tales
often sentimental, often trivial enough, and sometimes, it would seem,
of hardly more than local interest. Hardly can one conceive the
possibility of any ecstasy in these pleasant stories; for they deal,
ostentatiously, with the surface of things, with a breed of Englishmen
whose chief pride it was to hide away and smother all those passions and
emotions which are the peculiar mark of man as man.
Yet, I believe that I can justify my love of Miss Wilkins's work on a
higher ground than that of mere liking. In the first place I agree with
Mr T. P. O'Connor, who pointed out very well that the passion does come
through the reserve, and occasionally in the most volcanic manner. He
selects a scene from "Pembroke," in which the young people play at some
dancing game called "Copenhagen," and Mr O'Connor shows that though the
boys and girls of Pembroke knew nothing of it, they were really animated
by the spirit of the Bacchanals, that the fire and glow of passion, of
the youthful ecstasy, burst through all the hard crusts of Calvinism
and New England reserve. And we have agreed that if a writer can make
passion for us, if he can create the image of the eternal human ecstasy,
we have agreed that in such a case the writer is an artist.
But I think that there are other things, more subtle, more delicately
hinted things in Miss Wilkins's tales; or rather I should say that they
are all pervaded and filled with an emotion, which I can hardly think
that the writer has realised. Well, I find it difficult to express
exactly what I mean, but I think that the whole impression which one
receives from these tales is one of loneliness, of isolation. Compare
Miss Wilkins with Jane Austen, the New England stories with "Pride and
Prejudice." You might imagine, at first, that in one case as in the
other there is a sense of retirement, of separation from the world, that
Miss Austen's heroines are as remote from the great streams and
whirlpools of life as any "Jane Field" or Charlotte of Massachusetts.
But in reality this is not so. The people in the English novels are in
no sense remote; they are merely dull; they cannot be remote, indeed,
since they are not human beings at all but merely the representatives of
certain superficial manners and tricks of manner which were common in
the rural England of ninety years ago. "Remoteness" is an affection of
the soul, and wicker-figures, dressed up in the clothes of a period,
cannot have any such affections predicated of them; and consequently
though Emma or Elizabeth may appear very quaint to us from the contrast
between the manners of the 'tens and the 'nineties, they cannot be
remote. But that does seem to me the quality of those books of Miss
Wilkins's; the people appear to be very far off from the world, to live
in an isolated sphere, and each one lives his own life, and dwells apart
with his own soul, and in spite of all the trivial chatter and
circumstance of the village one feels that each is a human being moved
by eminently human affections.
* * * * *
It seems to me that one of the most important functions of literature is
to seize the really fine flavours of life and to preserve them, as it
were, in permanent form. When we were talking about "Huckleberry Finn,"
for example, I remember that I spoke of it as the story of a boy who "runs
away." But what a curious magic there is in these words "runs away."
Doesn't it, when you come to examine the phrase, exhale the very essence
and spirit of romance? Some time ago I reminded you that the essential
thing is concealed under all manner of grotesque and unseemly forms, that
one can detect a veritable human passion under the cry of the news-boy,
shouting, "All the winners!" So I think that phrase, "run away," carries
to us its meaning and significance. For, after all, what did all the
heroes of romance do but "run away"? They left the region of the known,
the familiar fields or the familiar shores, and adventured out in the
great waste of the unexplored, into the forest or upon the sea. Here,
perhaps, you have the true interpretation of the phrase "divine
discontent," for surely only that is divine which revolts from the
commonness of the common life, which is conscious of things beyond, of
better things, of a world which transcends all daily experience. I said
once, I think, that the English passion for trading goes very well with
the supremacy of English poetry, since poetry and shop-keeping are but
different expressions of the one idea; and here again you find
confirmation of the theory in that very marked English characteristic--the
desire of wandering, of "going on and on" in the manner of a knight
errant or a fairy tale hero. Of course, in practice, this really divine
impulse is corrupted by all kinds of earthly, secondary motions; and just
as the love of a venture which is at the root of trade often or always
ends in a very vulgar wish to make money and more money and to set up a
brougham and confound the Smiths, so the great joy of exploration, of
running away from the mapped and charted land has for its issues the
"development of markets," the "progress of civilisation," the profitable
sale of poison, and all manner of base and blackguardly manœuvres. But, of
course, one expects all this; it is the inevitable mixture of the lower
with the higher which characterises all our human ways. Still the higher
motive dwells within us--I suspect, indeed, that if it were not for the
higher the lower could hardly flourish--and so when you hear that a boy
has run away to sea or elsewhere I wish you to think kindly of him as a
survival of the most primitive and important human passions. Yes, I think
I am right in saying that the lower things of humanity only flourish in
consequence of the existence of the higher. Take the French nation, for
example. It is infinitely more bent on gain for the mere sake of gain
than the English; it is ready to work harder, to give more time, to live
more unpleasantly, to eat less and to drink less than the English; and all
in the pursuit of money. Rationally, in short, the French should be
infinitely better men of business than the English; and yet we know that
this is not so, that the English is, _par excellence_, the business
nation. Seriously, I believe, that this is so because the French are
money-grubbers and nothing more, because they hate a "risk" of any kind,
because they abhor any kind of mercantile venturing into the unknown. In
other words, they engage in money-making simply for the sake of making
money: they have no joy of the hazard, they will never deserve the title
of "merchant adventurers," and, _therefore_, they remain in truth a nation
of shopkeepers and of second-rate shopkeepers. Sir, a man of acute
intelligence would, in the seventeenth century, have deduced the future
state of French and English commerce, of French and English colonization
from a comparison between Shakespeare and Racine. I have no doubt that the
Phœnicians were shopkeepers of the French kind, and hence their
extinction, their shadowy survival merely in the history of their
conquerors.
* * * * *
You think the Roman Empire a formidable objection to my theory, because
Roman literature and Roman art show, in general, so little of the
imaginative, adventurous faculty? I think the objection _is_ formidable,
but I believe that it can be redargued, as Dominie Sampson used to say.
The Roman Empire was such a purely military settlement, wasn't it? it
was, if one may say so, a garrisoning of the world, not in any way a
real colonizing in the Greek and the English sense. And in the second
place, do you know that I have grave doubts whether we know very much of
the Roman spirit from the Roman literature. How far into the English
character would the works of the excellent Dr. Johnson carry us? One
hardly finds Chaucer, the Elizabethans, the Cavalier poets, Keats or
Wordsworth in "Rasselas" and "The Rambler," and I have always suspected
that Latin literature was in a great measure "Johnsonized," periwigged,
hidden and perverted by the irresistible flood of Greek culture. It may
be a paradox, but I have a very strong conviction that the Missal and
the Breviary tell us more about the true Latin character than Cicero and
Horace. But we must be thankful that in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries England stood aloof from the continent of Europe,
and that when it did borrow it transformed and transmuted so that the
original entirely lost its foreign character. I always think that change
of Madame de Querouaille into Madam Carewell such a wonderful instance
of our nationalism--our transforming force! If it had been otherwise, if
we had grovelled before the literature of France or Spain or Italy, as
Rome grovelled before the literature of Greece--well, perhaps, English
literature would have meant "Chevy Chace" and a few old ballads, and the
eighteenth century! I hate the Reformation, but perhaps it saved our
literature, simply by isolating the nation.
* * * * *
I claimed, I think, literary merit for Miss Wilkins because her books
give out an impression of loneliness. I think that is so, but I should
like to point out that "loneliness" is merely another synonym for that
one property which makes the difference between real literature and
reading-matter. If you look into the French literature of the last two
hundred years and complain of its elegant nothingness, of its wholly
secondary character, I would point out that it is second-rate because it
is the expression, not of the lonely human soul, like a star, dwelling
apart, but of society, of the _ruelles_, of the _salon_, of polite
company, of the _café_ and the _boulevard_. I am not making an
accusation, I am adopting the terms of the eminent M. de Brunetière, who
tells us, I think, that French literature is beautiful because it is
firstly sociable, and secondly because it is a kind of a long "talk to
ladies." I hardly think that I need go into the merits of the question;
you and I, I take it, are convinced of the vast immeasurable inferiority
of Racine to Shakespeare (with these two names one sums up the whole
debate), but I am quite sure that M. de Brunetière has given the true
reason of the French literature being on the distinctly low level. It is
always Thackeray, it is always Pope, it is always Jane Austen; it is, in
our sense of the word, not literature at all, though, to be sure, its
artifice is often of the most exquisite description. Of course I do not
speak of the ultimate reason--that is to be sought, I presume, in the
mental constitution of the nation--but when one reads M. de Brunetière's
account of the formation of modern French letters, and notes his
insistance on the social element as the chief factor, one may be pretty
sure that this social factor is responsible for the pleasant nullities
which we all know. You may feel pretty certain, I think, that real
literature has always been produced by men who have preserved a certain
loneliness of soul, if not of body; the masterpieces are not generated
by that pleasant and witty traffic of the drawing-rooms, but by the
silence of the eternal hills. Remember; we have settled that literature
is the expression of the "standing out," of the withdrawal of the soul,
it is the endeavour of every age to return to the first age, to an age,
if you like, of savages, when a man crept away to the rocks or to the
forests that he might utter, all alone, the secrets of his own soul.
So this is my plea for Miss Wilkins. I think that she has indicated this
condition of "ecstasis"; she has painted a society, indeed, but a
society in which each man stands apart, responsible only for himself and
to himself, conscious only of himself and his God. You will note this,
if you read her carefully, you will see how this doctrine of awful,
individual loneliness prevails so far that it is carried into the
necessary and ordinary transactions of social life, often with results
that are very absurd. Many of the people in her stories are so
absolutely convinced of their "loneliness," so certain that there are
only two persons in the whole universe--each man and his God--that they
do not shrink from transgressing and flouting all the social orders and
regulations, in spite of their very strong and social instinct drawing
them in the opposite direction. You remember the man who vowed that
under certain circumstances he would sit on the meeting-house steps
every Sunday? He kept his vow--for ten years I think--and he kept it in
spite of his profound horror of ridicule, of doing what other people
didn't do, in spite of his own happiness; but he kept it because he
realised his "loneliness," because he saw quite clearly that he must
stand or fall by his own word and his own promise, and that the opinions
of others could be of no possible importance to him. The instance is
ludicrous, even to the verge of farce, and yet I call it a witness to
the everlasting truth that, at last, each man must stand or fall alone,
and that if he would stand, he must, to a certain extent, live alone
with his own soul. It is from this mood of lonely reverie and ecstasy
that literature proceeds, and I think that the sense of all this is
diffused throughout Miss Wilkins's New England stories.
* * * * *
You ask me for a new test--or rather for a new expression of the one
test--that separates literature from the mass of stuff which is not
literature. I will give you a test that will startle you; literature is
the expression, through the æsthetic medium of words, of the dogmas of the
Catholic Church, and that which in any way is out of harmony with these
dogmas is not literature. Yes, it is really so; but not exactly in the
sense which you suppose. No literal compliance with Christianity is
needed, no, nor even an acquaintance with the doctrines of Christianity.
The Greeks, celebrating the festivals of Dionysus, Cervantes recounting
the fooleries of Don Quixote, Dickens measuring Mr Pickwick's glasses of
cold punch, Rabelais with his thirsty Pantagruel were all sufficiently
Catholic from our point of view, and the cultus of Aphrodite is merely a
symbol misunderstood and possibly corrupted, and if you can describe an
initiatory dance of savages in the proper manner, I shall call you a good
Catholic. You say that "Robert Elsmere" is not literature, and you are
perfectly right, but I hope you don't condemn it because it contains
arguments directed against the Catholic Faith? These, from our own
standpoint, are simply nothing at all, not reckoning either way. We pass
them over, just as we should pass over a passage on quadratic equations
pleasantly interpolated by an author into the body of his romance. The
conscious opinions of a writer are simply not worth twopence in the court
of literature; who cares to enquire into the theology of Keats? But when
we find not only the consciousness but also the subconsciousness permeated
by the impression that man is a logical, "rationalistic" creature and
nothing more, when the total impression of the human being gathered from
the book is of a simply demonstrating and demonstrable animal; then, we
may be perfectly assured that we have not to deal with literature. It is
the subconsciousness, remember, alone that matters; and (to put it again
theologically) you will find that books which are not literature proceed
from ignorance of the Sacramental System. Thackeray was an unconscious
heretic, while George Eliot was a conscious one, but each was ignorant of
the meaning of Sacramentalism, and so, making allowance for the fact that
the one was a clever man, while the other was a dull, industrious woman,
you have from each a view of life that is substantially the same, and
entirely false. Each was profoundly convinced that there _are_ milestones
on the Dover Road, and each, in his several way, was so intent on the
truth of this proposition (and it _is_ a perfectly true one) that the
secret of the scenery and the secret of Canterbury Cathedral are
altogether to seek in their books. Certainly the gentleman is a delightful
companion, and the milestones seem few indeed while we are on the way,
while with the other guide we feel like a girls' school, compelled to
listen to the "now, young ladies" and the "lessons" which every object on
the road suggests. Still, the total view is much the same, the same in
genus if not in species, and you may add Flaubert to your companions on
the road and you will be in the same case. But read a chapter of "Don
Quixote"; you will not be aware of the existence of the milestones, since
your gaze is fixed on the mystery of the woods, and you are a pilgrim to
the blissful shrine beyond. Don't imagine that you can improve your
literary chances by subscribing the Catechism or the Decrees of the
Council of Trent. No; I can give you no such short and easy plan for
excelling; but I tell you that unless you have assimilated the final
dogmas--the eternal truths--upon which those things rest, consciously if
you please, but subconsciously of necessity, you can never write
literature, however clever and amusing you may be. Think of it, and you
will see that from the literary standpoint, Catholic dogma is merely the
witness, under a special symbolism, of the enduring facts of human nature
and the universe; it is merely the voice which tells us distinctly that
man is _not_ the creature of the drawing-room and the Stock Exchange, but
a lonely awful soul confronted by the Source of all Souls, and you will
realise that to make literature it is necessary to be, at all events,
subconsciously Catholic.
* * * * *
Have you noticed how many of the greatest writers, so far from desiring
that compliment of "fidelity to life" do their best to get away from
life, to make their books, in ordinary phraseology, "unreal?" I do not
know whether anybody has compared the facts before or made the only
possible inference from them; but you remember how Rabelais professes to
derive his book from a little mouldy manuscript, found in a tomb, how
Cervantes, beginning in _propria persona authoris_, breaks off and
discovers the true history of "Don Quixote" in the Arabic Manuscript of
Cid Hamet Benengeli, how Hawthorne prologises with the custom-house at
Salem, and lights, in an old lumber-room, on the documents telling him
the history of the "Scarlet Letter." "Pickwick" was a transcript of the
"Transactions" or "Papers" of the Pickwick Club, and Tennyson's "Morte
D'Arthur" shelters itself, in the same way, behind the personality of an
imaginary writer. There is a very profound significance in all this, and
you find a trace of the same instinct in the Greek Tragedies where the
final scene, the peripeteia, is not shown on the stage, but described by
a "messenger." The fact is that the true artist, so far from being the
imitator of life, endures some of his severest struggles in endeavouring
to get away from life, and until he can do this he knows that his labour
is all in vain. It would be amusing to trace all the various devices
which have been used to secure this effect of separation, of withdrawal
from the common track of common things. I have just pointed out one, the
hiding of the author, as it were, behind a mask, and in the Greek Play
the analogous talking of what has happened in place of visibly showing
it, but there must be many more. From this instinct I imagine arises the
historical novel in all its forms, you make your story remote by placing
it far back in time, by the exhibition of strange dresses and unfamiliar
manners. Or again you may get virtually the same effect by using the
remoteness of space, by playing on the theme "far, far away" which
really calls up a very similar emotion to that produced by the other
theme of "long, long ago," or "once on a time," as the fairy tale has
it. Briefly we may say that all "strangeness" of incident, or plot, or
style makes for this one end; and of course you see that all this is
only the repetition of our old text in another form. It is, perhaps,
hardly necessary to give the caution that, on the principle of
_corruptio optimi_, there is nothing more melancholy than the book which
has the body of fine literature without the soul, which uses literary
methods without understanding. You needn't ask for proofs of that
proposition; our memories are aghast with recollections of futile
"historical novels," of the terrific school of the "two horsemen," and
every Christmas brings its huge budget of those dreadful "boys' books,"
which carry commonplace to the very ends of the earth, and occasionally
penetrate to the stars. And in style, too, what can be more depressing
than the style which is meant to be "strange" and is only flatulent? In
many cases of course such books as I have alluded to are mere survivals
of tradition, conventions of bookmaking which bear witness to the fact
that pirates and treasure-hoards were once symbols of wonder, and the
extravagancies of style are probably to be accounted for in the same
way. At some remote period it may, possibly, have been effective to call
the sun, "the glorious orb," and even now some minds may be made to
realise the strangeness of great flights of birds by the phrase "the
feathered Zingari of the air"; but if one is a little sophisticated one
feels the pathos and the futility of such efforts. The writer has felt
and experienced the wonder of things--the beauty of the sun and the
hieroglyphic mystery of the figures that the birds make in the air--and
he feels, quite rightly, that to describe wonders one must suggest
wonder by words. Unfortunately, he breaks down at this point, and falls
back on unhappy phrases that give the very opposite impression to that
which he wishes to excite. Here you have the whole history of "poetic
diction." The instinct is in itself an entirely right one, and I need
hardly say that the masters--those who have the secret--can use archaic
forms, obsolete constructions, conventional phrases even, with
miraculous effect. But the beginner would do well to be wary of these
things, and to turn his face resolutely away from "flowery meads" and
all the family of inversions. How is one to know when such phrases may
be used? If I could give you the answer to that question I should be
also giving you the secret of making literature, and from all our talks
I expect you have gathered this much at all events--that the art of
literature, with all the arts, is quite incommunicable. Many kinds of
artifice, even, are unteachable--I could not write or be taught to write
one of those George Eliot novels that I have been abusing with such
hearty good will--but art is by its very definition quite without the
jurisdiction of the schools, and the realm of the reasoning process,
since art is a miracle, superior to the laws.
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
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