him where the best masters of his profession are bred,--in the city or
in the country. He will reply without hesitation, “In the country.”
You will hardly need to have him state the reason. The country lawyer
has been obliged to study all parts of the law alike, and he has known
no reason why he should not do so. He has not had the chance to make
himself a specialist in any one branch of the law, as is the fashion
among city practitioners, and he has not coveted the opportunity to
do it. There would not have been enough special cases to occupy or
remunerate him if he had coveted it. He has dared attempt the task
of knowing the whole law, and yet without any sense of daring, but as
a matter of course. In his own little town, in the midst of his own
small library of authorities, it has not seemed to him an impossible
task to explore all the topics that engage his profession; the guiding
principles, at any rate, of all branches of the great subject were
open to him in a few books. And so it often happens that when he has
found his sea legs on the sequestered inlets at home, and ventures,
as he sometimes will, upon the great, troublous, and much-frequented
waters of city practice in search of more work and larger fees, the
country lawyer will once and again confound his city-bred brethren by
discovering to them the fact that the law is a many-sided thing of
principles, and not altogether a one-sided thing of technical rule and
arbitrary precedent.
It would seem to be necessary that the author who is to stand as a
distinct and imperative individual among the company of those who
express the world’s thought should come to a hard crystallization
before subjecting himself to the tense strain of cities, the corrosive
acids of critical circles. The ability to see for one’s self is
attainable, not by mixing with crowds and ascertaining how they look
at things, but by a certain aloofness and self-containment. The
solitariness of some genius is not accidental; it is characteristic
and essential. To the constructive imagination there are some immortal
feats which are possible only in seclusion. The man must heed first and
most of all the suggestions of his own spirit; and the world can be
seen from windows overlooking the street better than from the street
itself.
Literature grows rich, various, full-voiced largely through the
re-discovery of truth, by thinking re-thought, by stories re-told, by
songs re-sung. The song of human experience grows richer and richer
in its harmonies, and must grow until the full accord and melody are
come. If too soon subjected to the tense strain of the city, a man
cannot expand; he is beaten out of his natural shape by the incessant
impact and press of men and affairs. It will often turn out that the
unsophisticated man will display not only more force, but more literary
skill even, than the trained _littérateur_. For one thing, he will
probably have enjoyed a fresher contact with old literature. He reads
not for the sake of a critical acquaintance with this or that author,
with no thought of going through all his writings and “working him up,”
but as he would ride a spirited horse, for love of the life and motion
of it.
A general impression seems to have gained currency that the last of
the bullying, omniscient critics was buried in the grave of Francis
Jeffrey; and it is becoming important to correct the misapprehension.
There never was a time when there was more superior knowledge, more
specialist omniscience, among reviewers than there is to-day; not
pretended superior knowledge, but real. Jeffrey’s was very real of
its kind. For those who write books, one of the special, inestimable
advantages of lacking a too intimate knowledge of the “world of
letters” consists in not knowing all that is known by those who review
books, in ignorance of the fashions among those who construct canons
of taste. The modern critic is a leader of fashion. He carries with
him the air of a literary worldliness. If your book be a novel, your
reviewer will know all previous plots, all former, all possible,
motives and situations. You cannot write anything absolutely new for
him, and why should you desire to do again what has been done already?
If it be a poem, the reviewer’s head already rings with the whole gamut
of the world’s metrical music; he can recognize any simile, recall all
turns of phrase, match every sentiment; why seek to please him anew
with old things? If it concern itself with the philosophy of politics,
he can and will set himself to test it by the whole history of its
kind from Plato down to Benjamin Kidd. How can it but spoil your
sincerity to know that your critic will know everything? Will you not
be tempted of the devil to anticipate his judgment or his pretensions
by pretending to know as much as he?
The literature of creation naturally falls into two kinds: that which
interprets nature or human action, and that which interprets self. Both
of these may have the flavor of immortality, but neither unless it be
free from self-consciousness. No man, therefore, can create after the
best manner in either of these kinds who is an _habitué_ of the circles
made so delightful by those interesting men, the modern _literati_,
sophisticated in all the fashions, ready in all the catches of the
knowing literary world which centres in the city and the university. He
cannot always be simple and straightforward. He cannot be always and
without pretension himself, bound by no other man’s canons of taste in
speech or conduct. In the judgment of such circles there is but one
thing for you to do if you would gain distinction: you must “beat the
record;” you must do certain definite literary feats better than they
have yet been done. You are pitted against the literary “field.” You
are hastened into the paralysis of comparing yourself with others,
and thus away from the health of unhesitating self-expression and
directness of first-hand vision.
It would be not a little profitable if we could make correct analysis
of the proper relations of learning--learning of the critical, accurate
sort--to origination, of learning’s place in literature. Although
learning is never the real parent of literature, but only sometimes its
foster-father, and although the native promptings of soul and sense are
its best and freshest sources, there is always the danger that learning
will claim, in every court of taste which pretends to jurisdiction,
exclusive and preëminent rights as the guardian and preceptor of
authors. An effort is constantly being made to create and maintain
standards of literary worldliness, if I may coin such a phrase. The
thorough man of the world affects to despise natural feeling; does at
any rate actually despise all displays of it. He has an eye always
on his world’s best manners, whether native or imported, and is at
continual pains to be master of the conventions of society; he will
mortify the natural man as much as need be in order to be in good form.
What learned criticism essays to do is to create a similar literary
worldliness, to establish fashions and conventions in letters.
I have an odd friend in one of the northern counties of Georgia,--a
county set off by itself among the mountains, but early found out by
refined people in search of summer refuge from the unhealthful air of
the southern coast. He belongs to an excellent family of no little
culture, but he was surprised in the midst of his early schooling by
the coming on of the war; and education given pause in such wise seldom
begins again in the schools. He was left, therefore, to “finish” his
mind as best he might in the companionship of the books in his uncle’s
library. These books were of the old sober sort: histories, volumes of
travels, treatises on laws and constitutions, theologies, philosophies
more fanciful than the romances encased in neighbor volumes on another
shelf. But they were books which were used to being taken down and
read; they had been daily companions to the rest of the family, and
they became familiar companions to my friend’s boyhood. He went to
them day after day, because theirs was the only society offered him in
the lonely days when uncle and brothers were at the war, and the women
were busy about the tasks of the home. How literally did he make those
delightful old volumes his familiars, his cronies! He never dreamed the
while, however, that he was becoming learned; it never seemed to occur
to him that everybody else did not read just as he did, in just such
a library. He found out afterwards, of course, that he had kept much
more of such company than had the men with whom he loved to chat at
the post-office or around the fire in the village shops, the habitual
resorts of all who were socially inclined; but he attributed that to
lack of time on their part, or to accident, and has gone on thinking
until now that all the books that come within his reach are the natural
intimates of man. And so you shall hear him, in his daily familiar
talk with his neighbors, draw upon his singular stores of wise, quaint
learning with the quiet colloquial assurance, “They tell me,” as if
books contained current rumor; and quote the poets with the easy
unaffectedness with which others cite a common maxim of the street! He
has been heard to refer to Dr. Arnold of Rugby as “that school teacher
over there in England.”
Surely one may treasure the image of this simple, genuine man of
learning as the image of a sort of masterpiece of Nature in her own
type of erudition, a perfect sample of the kind of learning that might
beget the very highest sort of literature; the literature, namely, of
authentic individuality. It is only under one of two conditions that
learning will not dull the edge of individuality: first, if one never
suspect that it is creditable and a matter of pride to be learned, and
so never become learned for the sake of becoming so; or, second, if
it never suggest to one that investigation is better than reflection.
Learned investigation leads to many good things, but one of these is
not great literature, because learned investigation commands, as the
first condition of its success, the repression of individuality.
His mind is a great comfort to every man who has one; but a heart is
not often to be so conveniently possessed. Hearts frequently give
trouble; they are straightforward and impulsive, and can seldom be
induced to be prudent. They must be schooled before they will become
insensible; they must be coached before they can be made to care first
and most for themselves: and in all cases the mind must be their
schoolmaster and coach. They are irregular forces; but the mind may
be trained to observe all points of circumstance and all motives of
occasion.
No doubt it is considerations of this nature that must be taken to
explain the fact that our universities are erected entirely for the
service of the tractable mind, while the heart’s only education must be
gotten from association with its neighbor heart, and in the ordinary
courses of the world. Life is its only university. Mind is monarch,
whose laws claim supremacy in those lands which boast the movements
of civilization, and it must command all the instrumentalities of
education. At least such is the theory of the constitution of the
modern world. It is to be suspected that, as a matter of fact, mind
is one of those modern monarchs who reign, but do not govern. That
old House of Commons, that popular chamber in which the passions, the
prejudices, the inborn, unthinking affections long ago repudiated by
mind, have their full representation, controls much the greater part
of the actual conduct of affairs. To come out of the figure, reasoned
thought is, though perhaps the presiding, not yet the regnant force in
the world. In life and in literature it is subordinate. The future may
belong to it; but the present and past do not. Faith and virtue do not
wear its livery; friendship, loyalty, patriotism, do not derive their
motives from it. It does not furnish the material for those masses of
habit, of unquestioned tradition, and of treasured belief which are
the ballast of every steady ship of state, enabling it to spread its
sails safely to the breezes of progress, and even to stand before the
storms of revolution. And this is a fact which has its reflection in
literature. There is a literature of reasoned thought; but by far the
greater part of those writings which we reckon worthy of that great
name is the product, not of reasoned thought, but of the imagination
and of the spiritual vision of those who see,--writings winged, not
with knowledge, but with sympathy, with sentiment, with heartiness.
Even the literature of reasoned thought gets its life, not from its
logic, but from the spirit, the insight, and the inspiration which
are the vehicle of its logic. Thought presides, but sentiment has the
executive powers; the motive functions belong to feeling.
“Many people give many theories of literary composition,” says the most
natural and stimulating of English critics, “and Dr. Blair, whom we
will read, is sometimes said to have exhausted the subject; but, unless
he has proved the contrary, we believe that the knack in style is to
write like a human being. Some think they must be wise, some elaborate,
some concise; Tacitus wrote like a pair of stays; some startle us, as
Thomas Carlyle, or a comet, inscribing with his tail. But legibility
is given to those who neglect these notions, and are willing to be
themselves, to write their own thoughts in their own words, in the
simplest words, in the words wherein they were thought.... Books are
for various purposes,--tracts to teach, almanacs to sell, poetry to
make pastry; but this is the rarest sort of a book,--a book to read. As
Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, a good book is one you can hold in your hand,
and take to the fire.’ Now there are extremely few books which can,
with any propriety, be so treated. When a great author, as Grote or
Gibbon, has devoted a whole life of horrid industry to the composition
of a large history, one feels one ought not to touch it with a mere
hand,--it is not respectful. The idea of slavery hovers over the
Decline and Fall. Fancy a stiffly dressed gentleman, in a stiff chair,
slowly writing that stiff compilation in a stiff hand; it is enough to
stiffen you for life.”
It is devoutly to be wished that we might learn to prepare the best
soils for mind, the best associations and companionships, the least
possible sophistication. We are busy enough nowadays finding out
the best ways of fertilizing and stimulating mind; but that is not
quite the same thing as discovering the best soils for it, and the
best atmospheres. Our culture is, by erroneous preference, of the
reasoning faculty, as if that were all of us. Is it not the instinctive
discontent of readers seeking stimulating contact with authors that
has given us the present almost passionately spoken dissent from the
standards set themselves by the realists in fiction, dissatisfaction
with mere recording or observation? And is not realism working out upon
itself the revenge its enemies would fain compass? Must not all April
Hopes exclude from their number the hope of immortality?
The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other
men prepare for him,--not even to consent to it; but to strive to
see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in
self-surrender.
III.
ON AN AUTHOR’S CHOICE OF COMPANY.
Once and again, it would seem, a man is born into the world belated.
Strayed out of a past age, he comes among us like an alien, lives
removed and singular, and dies a stranger. There was a touch of this
strangeness in Charles Lamb. Much as he was loved and befriended, he
was not much understood; for he drew aloof in his studies, affected a
“self-pleasing quaintness” in his style, took no pains to hit the taste
of his day, wandered at sweet liberty in an age which could scarcely
have bred such another. “Hang the age!” he cried. “I will write for
antiquity.” And he did. He wrote as if it were still Shakespeare’s day;
made the authors of that spacious time his constant companions and
study; and deliberately became himself “the last of the Elizabethans.”
When a new book came out, he said, he always read an old one.
The case ought, surely, to put us occasionally upon reflecting. May an
author not, in some degree, by choosing his literary company, choose
also his literary character, and so, when he comes to write, write
himself back to his masters? May he not, by examining his own tastes
and yielding himself obedient to his natural affinities, join what
congenial group of writers he will? The question can be argued very
strongly in the affirmative, and that not alone because of Charles
Lamb’s case. It might be said that Lamb was antique only in the forms
of his speech; that he managed very cleverly to hit the taste of his
age in the substance of what he wrote, for all the phraseology had so
strong a flavor of quaintness and was not at all in the mode of the
day. It would not be easy to prove that; but it really does not matter.
In his tastes, certainly, Lamb was an old author, not a new one; a
“modern antique,” as Hood called him. He wrote for his own age, of
course, because there was no other age at hand to write for, and the
age he liked best was past and gone; but he wrote what he fancied the
great generations gone by would have liked, and what, as it has turned
out in the generosity of fortune, subsequent ages have warmly loved and
reverently canonized him for writing; as if there were a casual taste
that belongs to a day and generation, and also a permanent taste which
is without date, and he had hit the latter.
Great authors are not often men of fashion. Fashion is always a
harness and restraint, whether it be fashion in dress or fashion
in vice or fashion in literary art; and a man who is bound by it is
caught and formed in a fleeting mode. The great writers are always
innovators; for they are always frank, natural, and downright, and
frankness and naturalness always disturb, when they do not wholly break
down, the fixed and complacent order of fashion. No genuine man can
be deliberately in the fashion, indeed, in what he says, if he have
any movement of thought or individuality in him. He remembers what
Aristotle says, or if he does not, his own pride and manliness fill
him with the thought instead. The very same action that is noble if
done for the satisfaction of one’s own sense of right or purpose of
self-development, said the Stagirite, may, if done to satisfy others,
become menial and slavish. “It is the object of any action or study
that is all-important,” and if the author’s chief object be to please
he is condemned already. The true spirit of authorship is a spirit of
liberty which scorns the slave’s trick of imitation. It is a masterful
spirit of conquest within the sphere of ideas and of artistic form,--an
impulse of empire and origination.
Of course a man may choose, if he will, to be less than a free
author. He may become a reporter; for there is such a thing as
reporting for books as well as reporting for newspapers, and there
have been reporters so amazingly clever that their very aptness and
wit constitute them a sort of immortals. You have proof of this in
Horace Walpole, at whose hands gossip and compliment receive a sort
of apotheosis. Such men hold the secret of a kind of alchemy by which
things trivial and temporary may be transmuted into literature. But
they are only inspired reporters, after all; and while a man was
wishing, he might wish to be more, and climb to better company.
Every man must, of course, whether he will or not, feel the spirit
of the age in which he lives and thinks and does his work; and the
mere contact will direct and form him more or less. But to wish to
serve the spirit of the age at any sacrifice of individual naturalness
or conviction, however small, is to harbor the germ of a destroying
disease. Every man who writes ought to write for immortality, even
though he be of the multitude that die at their graves; and the
standards of immortality are of no single age. There are many qualities
and causes that give permanency to a book, but universal vogue during
the author’s lifetime is not one of them. Many authors now immortal
have enjoyed the applause of their own generations; many authors now
universally admired will, let us hope, pass on to an easy immortality.
The praise of your own day is no absolute disqualification; but it may
be if it be given for qualities which your friends are the first to
admire, for ’tis likely they will also be the last. There is a greater
thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages.
It is present in your own day; it is even dominant then, with a sort of
accumulated power and mastery. If you can strike it, you will strike,
as it were, into the upper air of your own time, where the forces are
which run from age to age. Lower down, where you breathe, is the more
inconstant air of opinion, inhaled, exhaled, from day to day,--the
variant currents, the forces that will carry you, not forward, but
hither and thither.
We write nowadays a great deal with our eyes circumspectly upon the
tastes of our neighbors, but very little with our attention bent upon
our own natural, self-speaking thoughts and the very truth of the
matter whereof we are discoursing. Now and again, it is true, we are
startled to find how the age relishes still an old-fashioned romance,
if written with a new-fashioned vigor and directness; how quaint and
simple and lovely things, as well as what is altogether modern and
analytic and painful, bring our most judicious friends crowding,
purses in hand, to the book-stalls; and for a while we are puzzled to
see worn-out styles and past modes revived. But we do not let these
things seriously disturb our study of prevailing fashions. These books
of adventure are not at all, we assure ourselves, in the true spirit of
the age, with its realistic knowledge of what men really do think and
purpose, and the taste for them must be only for the moment or in jest.
We need not let our surprise at occasional flurries and variations in
the literary market cloud or discredit our analysis of the real taste
of the day, or suffer ourselves to be betrayed into writing romances,
however much we might rejoice to be delivered from the drudgery of
sociological study, and made free to go afield with our imaginations
upon a joyous search for hidden treasure or knightly adventure.
And yet it is quite likely, after all, that the present age is
transient. Past ages have been. It is probable that the objects and
interests now so near us, looming dominant in all the foreground of our
day, will sometime be shifted and lose their place in the perspective.
That has happened with the near objects and exaggerated interests of
other days, so violently sometimes as to submerge and thrust out of
sight whole libraries of books. It will not do to reckon upon the
persistence of new things. ’Twere best to give them time to make trial
of the seasons. The old things of art and taste and thought are the
permanent things. We know that they are because they have lasted long
enough to grow old; and we deem it safe to assess the spirit of the age
by the same test. No age adds a great deal to what it received from
the age that went before it; no time gets an air all its own. The same
atmosphere holds from age to age; it is only the little movements of
the air that are new. In the intervals when the trades do not blow,
fleeting cross-winds venture abroad, the which if a man wait for he may
lose his voyage.
No man who has anything to say need stop and bethink himself whom he
may please or displease in the saying of it. He has but one day to
write in, and that is his own. He need not fear that he will too much
ignore it. He will address the men he knows when he writes, whether he
be conscious of it or not; he may dismiss all fear on that score and
use his liberty to the utmost. There are some things that can have no
antiquity and must ever be without date, and genuineness and spirit
are of their number. A man who has these must ever be “timely,” and
at the same time fit to last, if he can get his qualities into what
he writes. He may freely read, too, what he will that is congenial,
and form himself by companionships that are chosen simply because
they are to his taste; that is, if he be genuine and in very truth a
man of independent spirit. Lamb would have written “for antiquity”
with a vengeance had his taste for the quaint writers of an elder day
been an affectation, or the authors he liked men themselves affected
and ephemeral. No age this side antiquity would ever have vouchsafed
him a glance or a thought. But it was not an affectation, and the men
he preferred were as genuine and as spirited as he was. He was simply
obeying an affinity and taking cheer after his own kind. A man born
into the real patriciate of letters may take his pleasure in what
company he will without taint or loss of caste; may go confidently
abroad in the free world of books and choose his comradeships without
fear of offense.