Books by Woodrow Wilson
CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT. A Study in American Politics.
16mo, $1.25.
MERE LITERATURE, and Other Essays. 12mo, $1.50.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
MERE LITERATURE
_AND OTHER ESSAYS_
BY
WOODROW WILSON
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1896,
BY WOODROW WILSON
_All rights reserved._
TO
STOCKTON AXSON
BY EVERY GIFT OF MIND A CRITIC
AND LOVER OF LETTERS
BY EVERY GIFT OF HEART A FRIEND
THIS LITTLE VOLUME
IS AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. MERE LITERATURE 1
II. THE AUTHOR HIMSELF 28
III. ON AN AUTHOR’S CHOICE OF COMPANY 50
IV. A LITERARY POLITICIAN 69
V. THE INTERPRETER OF ENGLISH LIBERTY 104
VI. THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER 161
VII. A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS 187
VIII. THE COURSE OF AMERICAN HISTORY 213
⁂ All but one of the essays brought together in this volume have
already been printed, either in the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _Century
Magazine_, or the _Forum_. The essay on Burke appears here for the
first time in print.
MERE LITERATURE.
I.
“MERE LITERATURE.”
A singular phrase this, “mere literature,”--the irreverent invention
of a scientific age. Literature we know, but “mere” literature? We are
not to read it as if it meant _sheer_ literature, literature in the
essence, stripped of all accidental or ephemeral elements, and left
with nothing but its immortal charm and power. “Mere literature” is a
serious sneer, conceived in all honesty by the scientific mind, which
despises things that do not fall within the categories of demonstrable
knowledge. It means _nothing but literature_, as who should say, “mere
talk,” “mere fabrication,” “mere pastime.” The scientist, with his
head comfortably and excusably full of knowable things, takes nothing
seriously and with his hat off, except human knowledge. The creations
of the human spirit are, from his point of view, incalculable vagaries,
irresponsible phenomena, to be regarded only as play, and, for the
mind’s good, only as recreation,--to be used to while away the tedium
of a railway journey, or to amuse a period of rest or convalescence;
mere byplay, mere make-believe.
And so very whimsical things sometimes happen, because of this
scientific and positivist spirit of the age, when the study of the
literature of any language is made part of the curriculum of our
colleges. The more delicate and subtle purposes of the study are
put quite out of countenance, and literature is commanded to assume
the phrases and the methods of science. It would be very painful if
it should turn out that schools and universities were agencies of
Philistinism; but there are some things which should prepare us for
such a discovery. Our present plans for teaching everybody involve
certain unpleasant things quite inevitably. It is obvious that you
cannot have universal education without restricting your teaching
to such things as can be universally understood. It is plain that
you cannot impart “university methods” to thousands, or create
“investigators” by the score, unless you confine your university
education to matters which dull men can investigate, your laboratory
training to tasks which mere plodding diligence and submissive patience
can compass. Yet, if you do so limit and constrain what you teach, you
thrust taste and insight and delicacy of perception out of the schools,
exalt the obvious and the merely useful above the things which are
only imaginatively or spiritually conceived, make education an affair
of tasting and handling and smelling, and so create Philistia, that
country in which they speak of “mere literature.” I suppose that in
Nirvana one would speak in like wise of “mere life.”
The fear, at any rate, that such things may happen cannot fail to set
us anxiously pondering certain questions about the systematic teaching
of literature in our schools and colleges. How are we to impart
classical writings to the children of the general public? “Beshrew the
general public!” cries Mr. Birrell. “What in the name of the Bodleian
has the general public got to do with literature?” Unfortunately, it
has a great deal to do with it; for are we not complacently forcing the
general public into our universities, and are we not arranging that
all its sons shall be instructed how they may themselves master and
teach our literature? You have nowadays, it is believed, only to heed
the suggestions of pedagogics in order to know how to impart Burke or
Browning, Dryden or Swift. There are certain practical difficulties,
indeed; but there are ways of overcoming them. You must have strength
if you would handle with real mastery the firm fibre of these men; you
must have a heart, moreover, to feel their warmth, an eye to see what
they see, an imagination to keep them company, a pulse to experience
their delights. But if you have none of these things, you may make
shift to do without them. You may count the words they use, instead,
note the changes of phrase they make in successive revisions, put their
rhythm into a scale of feet, run their allusions--particularly their
female allusions--to cover, detect them in their previous reading.
Or, if none of these things please you, or you find the big authors
difficult or dull, you may drag to light all the minor writers of
their time, who are easy to understand. By setting an example in such
methods you render great services in certain directions. You make the
higher degrees of our universities available for the large number of
respectable men who can count, and measure, and search diligently; and
that may prove no small matter. You divert attention from thought,
which is not always easy to get at, and fix attention upon language,
as upon a curious mechanism, which can be perceived with the bodily
eye, and which is worthy to be studied for its own sake, quite apart
from anything it may mean. You encourage the examination of forms,
grammatical and metrical, which can be quite accurately determined and
quite exhaustively catalogued. You bring all the visible phenomena of
writing to light and into ordered system. You go further, and show how
to make careful literal identification of stories somewhere told ill
and without art with the same stories told over again by the masters,
well and with the transfiguring effect of genius. You thus broaden
the area of science; for you rescue the concrete phenomena of the
expression of thought--the necessary syllabification which accompanies
it, the inevitable juxtaposition of words, the constant use of
particles, the habitual display of roots, the inveterate repetition of
names, the recurrent employment of meanings heard or read--from their
confusion with the otherwise unclassifiable manifestations of what had
hitherto been accepted, without critical examination, under the lump
term “literature,” simply for the pleasure and spiritual edification to
be got from it.
An instructive differentiation ensues. In contrast with the orderly
phenomena of speech and writing, which are amenable to scientific
processes of examination and classification, and which take rank with
the orderly successions of change in nature, we have what, for want
of a more exact term, we call “mere literature,”--the literature
which is not an expression of form, but an expression of spirit. This
is a fugitive and troublesome thing, and perhaps does not belong
in well-conceived plans of universal instruction; for it offers
many embarrassments to pedagogic method. It escapes all scientific
categories. It is not pervious to research. It is too wayward to be
brought under the discipline of exposition. It is an attribute of so
many different substances at one and the same time, that the consistent
scientific man must needs put it forth from his company, as without
responsible connections. By “mere literature” he means mere evanescent
color, wanton trick of phrase, perverse departures from categorical
statement,--something _all_ personal equation, such stuff as dreams are
made of.
We must not all, however, be impatient of this truant child of fancy.
When the schools cast her out, she will stand in need of friendly
succor, and we must train our spirits for the function. We must
be free-hearted in order to make her happy, for she will accept
entertainment from no sober, prudent fellow who shall counsel her to
mend her ways. She has always made light of hardship, and she has
never loved or obeyed any, save those who were of her own mind,--those
who were indulgent to her humors, responsive to her ways of thought,
attentive to her whims, content with her “mere” charms. She already
has her small following of devotees, like all charming, capricious
mistresses. There are some still who think that to know her is better
than a liberal education.
There is but one way in which you can take mere literature as an
education, and that is directly, at first hand. Almost any media except
her own language and touch and tone are non-conducting. A descriptive
catalogue of a collection of paintings is no substitute for the little
areas of color and form themselves. You do not want to hear about a
beautiful woman, simply,--how she was dressed, how she bore herself,
how the fine color flowed sweetly here and there upon her cheeks,
how her eyes burned and melted, how her voice thrilled through the
ears of those about her. If you have ever seen a woman, these things
but tantalize and hurt you, if you cannot see her. You want to be in
her presence. You know that only your own eyes can give you direct
knowledge of her. Nothing but her presence contains her life. ’Tis the
same with the authentic products of literature. You can never get their
beauty at second hand, or feel their power except by direct contact
with them.
It is a strange and occult thing how this quality of “mere literature”
enters into one book, and is absent from another; but no man who
has once felt it can mistake it. I was reading the other day a book
about Canada. It is written in what the reviewers have pronounced to
be an “admirable, spirited style.” By this I take them to mean that
it is grammatical, orderly, and full of strong adjectives. But these
reviewers would have known more about the style in which it is written
if they had noted what happens on page 84. There a quotation from Burke
occurs. “There is,” says Burke, “but one healing, catholic principle of
toleration which ought to find favor in this house. It is wanted not
only in our colonies, but here. The thirsty earth of our own country
is gasping and gaping and crying out for that healing shower from
heaven. The noble lord has told you of the right of those people by
treaty; but I consider the right of conquest so little, and the right
of human nature so much, that the former has very little consideration
with me. I look upon the people of Canada as coming by the dispensation
of God under the British government. I would have us govern it in the
same manner as the all--wise disposition of Providence would govern
it. We know he suffers the sun to shine upon the righteous and the
unrighteous; and we ought to suffer all classes to enjoy equally the
right of worshiping God according to the light he has been pleased
to give them.” The peculiarity of such a passage as that is, that it
needs no context. Its beauty seems almost independent of its subject
matter. It comes on that eighty-fourth page like a burst of music in
the midst of small talk,--a tone of sweet harmony heard amidst a rattle
of phrases. The mild noise was unobjectionable enough until the music
came. There is a breath and stir of life in those sentences of Burke’s
which is to be perceived in nothing else in that volume. Your pulses
catch a quicker movement from them, and are stronger on their account.
It is so with all essential literature. It has a quality to move you,
and you can never mistake it, if you have any blood in you. And it has
also a power to instruct you which is as effective as it is subtle,
and which no research or systematic method can ever rival. ’Tis a sore
pity if that power cannot be made available in the classroom. It is
not merely that it quickens your thought and fills your imagination
with the images that have illuminated the choicer minds of the race. It
does indeed exercise the faculties in this wise, bringing them into the
best atmosphere, and into the presence of the men of greatest charm and
force; but it does a great deal more than that. It acquaints the mind,
by direct contact, with the forces which really govern and modify
the world from generation to generation. There is more of a nation’s
politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic
writers upon public affairs and constitutions. Epics are better
mirrors of manners than chronicles; dramas oftentimes let you into the
secrets of statutes; orations stirred by a deep energy of emotion or
resolution, passionate pamphlets that survive their mission because
of the direct action of their style along permanent lines of thought,
contain more history than parliamentary journals. It is not knowledge
that moves the world, but ideals, convictions, the opinions or fancies
that have been held or followed; and whoever studies humanity ought to
study it alive, practice the vivisection of reading literature, and
acquaint himself with something more than anatomies which are no longer
in use by spirits.
There are some words of Thibaut, the great jurist, which have long
seemed to me singularly penetrative of one of the secrets of the
intellectual life. “I told him,” he says,--he is speaking of an
interview with Niebuhr,--“I told him that I owed my gayety and vigor,
in great part, to my love for the classics of all ages, even those
outside the domain of jurisprudence.” Not only the gayety and vigor
of his hale old age, surely, but also his insight into the meaning
and purpose of laws and institutions. The jurist who does not love
the classics of all ages is like a post-mortem doctor presiding at a
birth, a maker of manikins prescribing for a disease of the blood, a
student of masks setting up for a connoisseur in smiles and kisses.
In narrating history, you are speaking of what was done by men; in
discoursing of laws, you are seeking to show what courses of action,
and what manner of dealing with one another, men have adopted. You
can neither tell the story nor conceive the law till you know how the
men you speak of regarded themselves and one another; and I know of
no way of learning this but by reading the stories they have told of
themselves, the songs they have sung, the heroic adventures they have
applauded. I must know what, if anything, they revered; I must hear
their sneers and gibes; must learn in what accents they spoke love
within the family circle; with what grace they obeyed their superiors
in station; how they conceived it politic to live, and wise to die;
how they esteemed property, and what they deemed privilege; when they
kept holiday, and why; when they were prone to resist oppression, and
wherefore,--I must see things with their eyes, before I can comprehend
their law books. Their jural relationships are not independent of
their way of living, and their way of thinking is the mirror of their
way of living.
It is doubtless due to the scientific spirit of the age that these
plain, these immemorial truths are in danger of becoming obscured.
Science, under the influence of the conception of evolution, devotes
itself to the study of forms, of specific differences, of the manner
in which the same principle of life manifests itself variously under
the compulsions of changes of environment. It is thus that it has
become “scientific” to set forth the manner in which man’s nature
submits to man’s circumstances; scientific to disclose morbid moods,
and the conditions which produce them; scientific to regard man, not
as the centre or source of power, but as subject to power, a register
of external forces instead of an originative soul, and character as
a product of man’s circumstances rather than a sign of man’s mastery
over circumstance. It is thus that it has become “scientific” to
analyze language as itself a commanding element in man’s life. The
history of word-roots, their modification under the influences of
changes wrought in the vocal organs by habit or by climate, the laws of
phonetic change to which they are obedient, and their persistence under
all disguises of dialect, as if they were full of a self-originated
life, a self-directed energy of influence, is united with the study
of grammatical forms in the construction of scientific conceptions
of the evolution and uses of human speech. The impression is created
that literature is only the chosen vessel of these forms, disclosing
to us their modification in use and structure from age to age. Such
vitality as the masterpieces of genius possess comes to seem only a
dramatization of the fortunes of words. Great writers construct for the
adventures of language their appropriate epics. Or, if it be not the
words themselves that are scrutinized, but the style of their use, that
style becomes, instead of a fine essence of personality, a matter of
cadence merely, or of grammatical and structural relationships. Science
is the study of the forces of the world of matter, the adjustments, the
apparatus, of the universe; and the scientific study of literature has
likewise become a study of apparatus,--of the forms in which men utter
thought, and the forces by which those forms have been and still are
being modified, rather than of thought itself.
The essences of literature of course remain the same under all forms,
and the true study of literature is the study of these essences,--a
study, not of forms or of differences, but of likenesses,--likenesses
of spirit and intent under whatever varieties of method, running
through all forms of speech like the same music along the chords
of various instruments. There is a sense in which literature is
independent of form, just as there is a sense in which music is
independent of its instrument. It is my cherished belief that Apollo’s
pipe contained as much eloquent music as any modern orchestra. Some
books live; many die: wherein is the secret of immortality? Not
in beauty of form, nor even in force of passion. We might say of
literature what Wordsworth said of poetry, the most easily immortal
part of literature: it is “the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science; it is the breath of the finer spirit of
all knowledge.” Poetry has the easier immortality because it has the
sweeter accent when it speaks, because its phrases linger in our ears
to delight them, because its truths are also melodies. Prose has much
to overcome,--its plainness of visage, its less musical accents, its
homelier turns of phrase. But it also may contain the immortal essence
of truth and seriousness and high thought. It too may clothe conviction
with the beauty that must make it shine forever. Let a man but have
beauty in his heart, and, believing something with his might, put it
forth arrayed as he sees it, the lights and shadows falling upon it on
his page as they fall upon it in his heart, and he may die assured that
that beauty will not pass away out of the world.
Biographers have often been puzzled by the contrast between certain
men as they lived and as they wrote. Schopenhauer’s case is one of the
most singular. A man of turbulent life, suffering himself to be cut
to exasperation by the petty worries of his lot, he was nevertheless
calm and wise when he wrote, as if the Muse had rebuked him. He wrote
at a still elevation, where small and temporary things did not come
to disturb him. ’Tis a pity that for some men this elevation is so
far to seek. They lose permanency by not finding it. Could there be a
deliberate regimen of life for the author, it is plain enough how he
ought to live, not as seeking fame, but as deserving it.
“Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees;
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease.
* * * * *
“Ye love-sick bards, repay her scorn with scorn;
Ye love-sick artists, madmen that ye are,
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu;
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.”
It behooves all minor authors to realize the possibility of their being
discovered some day, and exposed to the general scrutiny. They ought
to live as if conscious of the risk. They ought to purge their hearts
of everything that is not genuine and capable of lasting the world a
century, at least, if need be. Mere literature is made of spirit. The
difficulties of style are the artist’s difficulties with his tools. The
spirit that is in the eye, in the pose, in mien or gesture, the painter
must find in his color-box; as he must find also the spirit that
nature displays upon the face of the fields or in the hidden places
of the forest. The writer has less obvious means. Word and spirit do
not easily consort. The language which the philologists set out before
us with such curious erudition is of very little use as a vehicle
for the essences of the human spirit. It is too sophisticated and
self-conscious. What you need is, not a critical knowledge of language,
but a quick feeling for it. You must recognize the affinities between
your spirit and its idioms. You must immerse your phrase in your
thought, your thought in your phrase, till each becomes saturated with
the other. Then what you produce is as necessarily fit for permanency
as if it were incarnated spirit.
And you must produce in color, with the touch of imagination which
lifts what you write away from the dull levels of mere exposition.
Black-and-white sketches may serve some purposes of the artist,
but very little of actual nature is in mere black-and-white. The
imagination never works thus with satisfaction. Nothing is ever
conceived completely when conceived so grayly, without suffusion
of real light. The mind creates, as great Nature does, in colors,
with deep chiaroscuro and burning lights. This is true not only of
poetry and essentially imaginative writing, but also of the writing
which seeks nothing more than to penetrate the meaning of actual
affairs,--the writing of the greatest historians and philosophers,
the utterances of orators and of the great masters of political
exposition. Their narratives, their analyses, their appeals, their
conceptions of principle, are all dipped deep in the colors of the
life they expound. Their minds respond only to realities, their eyes
see only actual circumstance. Their sentences quiver and are quick
with visions of human affairs,--how minds are bent or governed, how
action is shaped or thwarted. The great “constructive” minds, as we
call them, are of this sort. They “construct” by seeing what others
have not imagination enough to see. They do not always know more, but
they always realize more. Let the singular reconstruction of Roman
history and institutions by Theodor Mommsen serve as an illustration.
Safe men distrust this great master. They cannot find what he finds
in the documents. They will draw you truncated figures of the antique
Roman state, and tell you the limbs cannot be found, the features of
the face have nowhere been unearthed. They will cite you fragments such
as remain, and show you how far these can be pieced together toward the
making of a complete description of private life and public function
in those first times when the Roman commonwealth was young; but what
the missing sentences were they can only weakly conjecture. Their eyes
cannot descry those distant days with no other aids than these. Only
the greatest are dissatisfied, and go on to paint that ancient life
with the materials that will render it lifelike,--the materials of the
constructive imagination. They have other sources of information. They
see living men in the old documents. Give them but the torso, and they
will supply head and limbs, bright and animate as they must have been.
If Mommsen does not quite do that, another man, with Mommsen’s eye and
a touch more of color on his brush, might have done it,--may yet do it.
It is in this way that we get some glimpse of the only relations that
scholarship bears to literature. Literature can do without exact
scholarship, or any scholarship at all, though it may impoverish
itself thereby; but scholarship cannot do without literature. It needs
literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to the
race, to get it out of closets, and into the brains of men who stir
abroad. It will adorn literature, no doubt; literature will be the
richer for its presence; but it will not, it cannot, of itself create
literature. Rich stuffs from the East do not create a king, nor warlike
trappings a conqueror. There is, indeed, a natural antagonism, let it
be frankly said, between the standards of scholarship and the standards
of literature. Exact scholarship values things in direct proportion
as they are verifiable; but literature knows nothing of such tests.
The truths which it seeks are the truths of self-expression. It is a
thing of convictions, of insights, of what is felt and seen and heard
and hoped for. Its meanings lurk behind nature, not in the facts of
its phenomena. It speaks of things as the man who utters it saw them,
not necessarily as God made them. The personality of the speaker runs
throughout all the sentences of real literature. That personality may
not be the personality of a poet: it may be only the personality of
the penetrative seer. It may not have the atmosphere in which visions
are seen, but only that in which men and affairs look keenly cut in
outline, boldly massed in bulk, consummately grouped in detail, to the
reader as to the writer. Sentences of perfectly clarified wisdom may
be literature no less than stanzas of inspired song, or the intense
utterances of impassioned feeling. The personality of the sunlight is
in the keen lines of light that run along the edges of a sword no less
than in the burning splendor of the rose or the radiant kindlings of a
woman’s eye. You may feel the power of one master of thought playing
upon your brain as you may feel that of another playing upon your heart.
Scholarship gets into literature by becoming part of the originating
individuality of a master of thought. No man is a master of thought
without being also a master of its vehicle and instrument, style,
that subtle medium of all its evasive effects of light and shade.
Scholarship is material; it is not life. It becomes immortal only when
it is worked upon by conviction, by schooled and chastened imagination,
by thought that runs alive out of the inner fountains of individual
insight and purpose. Colorless, or without suffusion of light from some
source of light, it is dead, and will not twice be looked at; but made
part of the life of a great mind, subordinated, absorbed, put forth
with authentic stamp of currency on it, minted at some definite mint
and bearing some sovereign image, it will even outlast the time when
it shall have ceased to deserve the acceptance of scholars,--when it
shall, in fact, have become “mere literature.”
Scholarship is the realm of nicely adjusted opinion. It is the business
of scholars to assess evidence and test conclusions, to discriminate
values and reckon probabilities. Literature is the realm of conviction
and vision. Its points of view are as various as they are oftentimes
unverifiable. It speaks individual faiths. Its groundwork is not
erudition, but reflection and fancy. Your thoroughgoing scholar dare
not reflect. To reflect is to let himself in on his material; whereas
what he wants is to keep himself apart, and view his materials in
an air that does not color or refract. To reflect is to throw an
atmosphere about what is in your mind,--an atmosphere which holds all
the colors of your life. Reflection summons all associations, and
they so throng and move that they dominate the mind’s stage at once.
The plot is in their hands. Scholars, therefore, do not reflect;
they label, group kind with kind, set forth in schemes, expound
with dispassionate method. Their minds are not stages, but museums;
nothing is done there, but very curious and valuable collections are
kept there. If literature use scholarship, it is only to fill it with
fancies or shape it to new standards, of which of itself it can know
nothing.
True, there are books reckoned primarily books of science and of
scholarship which have nevertheless won standing as literature; books
of science such as Newton wrote, books of scholarship such as Gibbon’s.
But science was only the vestibule by which such a man as Newton
entered the temple of nature, and the art he practiced was not the art
of exposition, but the art of divination. He was not only a scientist,
but also a seer; and we shall not lose sight of Newton because we value
what he was more than what he knew. If we continue Gibbon in his fame,
it will be for love of his art, not for worship of his scholarship. We
some of us, nowadays, know the period of which he wrote better even
than he did; but which one of us shall build so admirable a monument
to ourselves, as artists, out of what we know? The scholar finds his
immortality in the form he gives to his work. It is a hard saying, but
the truth of it is inexorable: be an artist, or prepare for oblivion.
You may write a chronicle, but you will not serve yourself thereby. You
will only serve some fellow who shall come after you, possessing, what
you did not have, an ear for the words you could not hit upon; an eye
for the colors you could not see; a hand for the strokes you missed.
Real literature you can always distinguish by its form, and yet it is
not possible to indicate the form it should have. It is easy to say
that it should have a form suitable to its matter; but how suitable?
Suitable to set the matter off, adorn, embellish it, or suitable simply
to bring it directly, quick and potent, to the apprehension of the
reader? This is the question of style, about which many masters have
had many opinions; upon which you can make up no safe generalization
from the practice of those who have unquestionably given to the matter
of their thought immortal form, an accent or a countenance never to be
forgotten. Who shall say how much of Burke’s splendid and impressive
imagery is part and stuff of his thought, or tell why even that part
of Newman’s prose which is devoid of ornament, stripped to its shining
skin, and running bare and lithe and athletic to carry its tidings to
men, should promise to enjoy as certain an immortality? Why should
Lamb go so quaintly and elaborately to work upon his critical essays,
taking care to perfume every sentence, if possible, with the fine
savor of an old phrase, if the same business could be as effectively
done in the plain and even cadences of Mr. Matthew Arnold’s prose?
Why should Gibbon be so formal, so stately, so elaborate, when he
had before his eyes the example of great Tacitus, whose direct,
sententious style had outlived by so many hundred years the very
language in which he wrote? In poetry, who shall measure the varieties
of style lavished upon similar themes? The matter of vital thought
is not separable from the thinker; its forms must suit his handling
as well as fit his conception. Any style is author’s stuff which is
suitable to his purpose and his fancy. He may use rich fabrics with
which to costume his thoughts, or he may use simple stone from which
to sculpture them, and leave them bare. His only limits are those of
art. He may not indulge a taste for the merely curious or fantastic.
The quaint writers have quaint thoughts; their material is suitable.
They do not merely satisfy themselves as virtuosi, with collections of
odd phrases and obsolete meanings. They needed twisted words to fit
the eccentric patterns of their thought. The great writer has always
dignity, restraint, propriety, adequateness; what time he loses these
qualities he ceases to be great. His style neither creaks nor breaks
under his passion, but carries the strain with unshaken strength. It
is not trivial or mean, but speaks what small meanings fall in its way
with simplicity, as conscious of their smallness. Its playfulness is
within bounds; its laugh never bursts too boisterously into a guffaw.
A great style always knows what it would be at, and does the thing
appropriately, with the larger sort of taste.
This is the condemnation of tricks of phrase, devices to catch the
attention, exaggerations and loud talk to hold it. No writer can afford
to strive after effect, if his striving is to be apparent. For just
and permanent effect is missed altogether unless it be so completely
attained as to seem like some touch of sunlight, perfect, natural,
inevitable, wrought without effort and without deliberate purpose
to be effective. Mere audacity of attempt can, of course, never win
the wished for result; and if the attempt be successful, it is not
audacious. What we call audacity in a great writer has no touch of
temerity, sauciness, or arrogance in it. It is simply high spirit,
a dashing and splendid display of strength. Boldness is ridiculous
unless it be impressive, and it can be impressive only when backed by
solid forces of character and attainment. Your plebeian hack cannot
afford the showy paces; only the full-blooded Arabian has the sinew
and proportion to lend them perfect grace and propriety. The art of
letters eschews the bizarre as rigidly as does every other fine art. It
mixes its colors with brains, and is obedient to great Nature’s sane
standards of right adjustment in all that it attempts.
You can make no catalogue of these features of great writing; there is
no science of literature. Literature in its essence is mere spirit, and
you must experience it rather than analyze it too formally. It is the
door to nature and to ourselves. It opens our hearts to receive the
experiences of great men and the conceptions of great races. It awakens
us to the significance of action and to the singular power of mental
habit. It airs our souls in the wide atmosphere of contemplation. “In
these bad days, when it is thought more educationally useful to know
the principle of the common pump than Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn,” as
Mr. Birrell says, we cannot afford to let one single precious sentence
of “mere literature” go by us unread or unpraised. If this free people
to which we belong is to keep its fine spirit, its perfect temper
amidst affairs, its high courage in the face of difficulties, its wise
temperateness and wide-eyed hope, it must continue to drink deep and
often from the old wells of English undefiled, quaff the keen tonic of
its best ideals, keep its blood warm with all the great utterances of
exalted purpose and pure principle of which its matchless literature
is full. The great spirits of the past must command us in the tasks of
the future. Mere literature will keep us pure and keep us strong. Even
though it puzzle or altogether escape scientific method, it may keep
our horizon clear for us, and our eyes glad to look bravely forth upon
the world.
II.
THE AUTHOR HIMSELF.
Who can help wondering, concerning the modern multitude of books, where
all these companions of his reading hours will be buried when they
die; which will have monuments erected to them; which escape the envy
of time and live? It is pathetic to think of the number that must be
forgotten, after having been removed from the good places to make room
for their betters.
Much the most pathetic thought about books, however, is that excellence
will not save them. Their fates will be as whimsical as those of the
humankind which produces them. Knaves find it as easy to get remembered
as good men. It is not right living or learning or kind offices, simply
and of themselves, but--something else that gives immortality of fame.
Be a book never so scholarly, it may die; be it never so witty, or
never so full of good feeling and of an honest statement of truth, it
may not live.
When once a book has become immortal, we think that we can see why
it became so. It contained, we perceive, a casting of thought which
could not but arrest and retain men’s attention; it said some things
once and for all because it gave them their best expression. Or else it
spoke with a grace or with a fire of imagination, with a sweet cadence
of phrase and a full harmony of tone, which have made it equally dear
to all generations of those who love the free play of fancy or the
incomparable music of perfected human speech. Or perhaps it uttered
with candor and simplicity some universal sentiment; perchance pictured
something in the tragedy or the comedy of man’s life as it was never
pictured before, and must on that account be read and read again as not
to be superseded. There must be something special, we judge, either
in its form or in its substance, to account for its unwonted fame and
fortune.
This upon first analysis, taking one book at a time. A look deeper
into the heart of the matter enables us to catch at least a glimpse of
a single and common source of immortality. The world is attracted by
books as each man is attracted by his several friends. You recommend
that capital fellow So-and-So to the acquaintance of others because
of his discriminating and diverting powers of observation: the very
tones and persons--it would seem the very selves--of every type of man
live again in his mimicries and descriptions. He is the dramatist
of your circle; you can never forget him, nor can any one else; his
circle of acquaintances can never grow smaller. Could he live on and
retain perennially that wonderful freshness and vivacity of his, he
must become the most famous guest and favorite of the world. Who that
has known a man quick and shrewd to see dispassionately the inner
history, the reason and the ends, of the combinations of society,
and at the same time eloquent to tell of them, with a hold on the
attention gained by a certain quaint force and sagacity resident in
no other man, can find it difficult to understand why we still resort
to Montesquieu? Possibly there are circles favored of the gods who
have known some fellow of infinite store of miscellaneous and curious
learning, who has greatly diverted both himself and his friends by a
way peculiar to himself of giving it out upon any and all occasions,
item by item, as if it were all homogeneous and of a piece, and by his
odd skill in making unexpected application of it to out-of-the-way,
unpromising subjects, as if there were in his view of things mental no
such disintegrating element as incongruity. Such a circle would esteem
it strange were Burton not beloved of the world. And so of those, if
any there be, who have known men of simple, calm, transparent natures,
untouched by storm or perplexity, whose talk was full of such serious,
placid reflection as seemed to mirror their own reverent hearts,--talk
often prosy, but more often touchingly beautiful, because of its
nearness to nature and the solemn truth of life. There may be those,
also, who have felt the thrill of personal contact with some stormy
peasant nature full of strenuous, unsparing speech concerning men and
affairs. These have known why a Wordsworth or a Carlyle must be read by
all generations of those who love words of first-hand inspiration. In
short, in every case of literary immortality originative personality is
present. Not origination simply,--that may be mere invention, which in
literature has nothing immortal about it; but origination which takes
its stamp and character from the originator, which is his spirit given
to the world, which is himself outspoken.
Individuality does not consist in the use of the very personal pronoun,
_I_: it consists in tone, in method, in attitude, in point of view;
it consists in saying things in such a way that you will yourself be
recognized as a force in saying them. Do we not at once know Lamb
when he speaks? And even more formal Addison, does not his speech
bewray and endear him to us? His personal charm is less distinct, much
less fascinating, than that which goes with what Lamb speaks, but a
charm he has sufficient for immortality. In Steele the matter is more
impersonal, more mortal. Some of Dr. Johnson’s essays, you feel, might
have been written by a dictionary. It is impersonal matter that is dead
matter. Are you asked who fathered a certain brilliant, poignant bit
of political analysis? You say, Why, only Bagehot could have written
that. Does a wittily turned verse make you hesitate between laughter at
its hit and grave thought because of its deeper, covert meaning? Do you
not know that only Lowell could do that? Do you catch a strain of pure
Elizabethan music and doubt whether to attribute it to Shakespeare or
to another? Do you not _know_ the authors who still live?
Now, the noteworthy thing about such individuality is that it will not
develop under every star, or in one place just as well as in another;
there is an atmosphere which kills it, and there is an atmosphere
which fosters it. The atmosphere which kills it is the atmosphere of
sophistication, where cleverness and fashion and knowingness thrive:
cleverness, which is froth, not strong drink; fashion, which is a thing
assumed, not a thing of nature; and knowingness, which is naught.
Of course there are born, now and again, as tokens of some rare mood
of Nature, men of so intense and individual a cast that circumstance
and surroundings affect them little more than friction affects an
express train. They command their own development without even
the consciousness that to command costs strength. These cannot be
sophisticated; for sophistication is subordination to the ways of your
world. But these are the very greatest and the very rarest; and it
is not the greatest and the rarest alone who shape the world and its
thought. That is done also by the great and the merely extraordinary.
There is a rank and file in literature, even in the literature of
immortality, and these must go much to school to the people about them.
It is by the number and charm of the individualities which it contains
that the literature of any country gains distinction. We turn
anywhither to know men. The best way to foster literature, if it may be
fostered, is to cultivate the author himself,--a plant of such delicate
and precarious growth that special soils are needed to produce it in
its full perfection. The conditions which foster individuality are
those which foster simplicity, thought and action which are direct,
naturalness, spontaneity. What are these conditions?
In the first place, a certain helpful ignorance. It is best for the
author to be born away from literary centres, or to be excluded from
their ruling set if he be born in them. It is best that he start out
with his thinking, not knowing how much has been thought and said about
everything. A certain amount of ignorance will insure his sincerity,
will increase his boldness and shelter his genuineness, which is his
hope of power. Not ignorance of life, but life may be learned in any
neighborhood;--not ignorance of the greater laws which govern human
affairs, but they may be learned without a library of historians
and commentators, by imaginative sense, by seeing better than by
reading;--not ignorance of the infinitudes of human circumstance, but
these may be perceived without the intervention of universities;--not
ignorance of one’s self and of one’s neighbor; but innocence of the
sophistications of learning, its research without love, its knowledge
without inspiration, its method without grace; freedom from its shame
at trying to know many things as well as from its pride of trying to
know but one thing; ignorance of that faith in small confounding facts
which is contempt for large reassuring principles.
Our present problem is not how to clarify our reasonings and perfect
our analyses, but how to reënrich and reënergize our literature. That
literature is suffering, not from ignorance, but from sophistication
and self-consciousness; and it is suffering hardly less from excess
of logical method. Ratiocination does not keep us pure, render us
earnest, or make us individual and specific forces in the world. Those
inestimable results are accomplished by whatever implants principle
and conviction, whatever quickens with inspiration, fills with purpose
and courage, gives outlook, and makes character. Reasoned thinking
does indeed clear the mind’s atmospheres and lay open to its view
fields of action; but it is loving and believing, sometimes hating and
distrusting, often prejudice and passion, always the many things which
we call the one thing, character, which create and shape our acting.
Life quite overtowers logic. Thinking and erudition alone will not
equip for the great tasks and triumphs of life and literature: the
persuading of other men’s purposes, the entrance into other men’s minds
to possess them forever. Culture broadens and sweetens literature,
but native sentiment and unmarred individuality create it. Not all of
mental power lies in the processes of thinking. There is power also
in passion, in personality, in simple, native, uncritical conviction,
in unschooled feeling. The power of science, of system, is executive,
not stimulative. I do not find that I derive inspiration, but only
information, from the learned historians and analysts of liberty; but
from the sonneteers, the poets, who, speak its spirit and its exalted
purpose,--who, recking nothing of the historical method, obey only the
high method of their own hearts,--what may a man not gain of courage
and confidence in the right way of politics?
It is your direct, unhesitating, intent, headlong man, who has his
sources in the mountains, who digs deep channels for himself in the
soil of his times and expands into the mighty river, to become a
landmark forever; and not your “broad” man, sprung from the schools,
who spreads his shallow, extended waters over the wide surfaces of
learning, to leave rich deposits, it may be, for other men’s crops to
grow in, but to be himself dried up by a few score summer noons. The
man thrown early upon his own resources, and already become a conqueror
of success before being thrown with the literary talkers; the man grown
to giant’s stature in some rural library, and become exercised there
in a giant’s prerogatives before ever he has been laughingly told, to
his heart’s confusion, of scores of other giants dead and forgotten
long ago; the man grounded in hope and settled in conviction ere he has
discovered how many hopes time has seen buried, how many convictions
cruelly given the lie direct by fate; the man who has carried his youth
into middle age before going into the chill atmosphere of _blasé_
sentiment; the quiet, stern man who has cultivated literature on a
little oatmeal before thrusting himself upon the great world as a
prophet and seer; the man who pronounces new eloquence in the rich
dialect in which he was bred; the man come up to the capital from the
provinces,--these are the men who people the world’s mind with new
creations, and give to the sophisticated learned of the next generation
new names to conjure with.