he would have his power transcend a single age. He belittles himself
who takes from the world no more than he can get from the speech of his
own generation. The only advantage of books over speech is that they
may hold from generation to generation, and reach, not a small group
merely, but a multitude of men; and a man who writes without being a
man of letters is curtailed of his heritage. It is in this world of
old and new that he must form himself if he would in the end belong to
it and increase its bulk of treasure. If he has conned the new theories
of society, but knows nothing of Burke; the new notions about fiction,
and has not read his Scott and his Richardson; the new criminology, and
wots nothing of the old human nature; the new religions, and has never
felt the power and sanctity of the old, it is much the same as if he
had read Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and had never opened Shakespeare. How
is he to know wholesome air from foul, good company from bad, visions
from nightmares? He has framed himself for the great art and handicraft
of letters only when he has taken all the human parts of literature as
if they were without date, and schooled himself in a catholic sanity of
taste and judgment.
Then he may very safely choose what company his own work shall be done
in,--in what manner, and under what masters. He cannot choose amiss
for himself or for his generation if he choose like a man, without
light whim or weak affectation; not like one who chooses a costume,
but like one who chooses a character. What is it, let him ask himself,
that renders a bit of writing a “piece of literature”? It is reality.
A “wood-note wild,” sung unpremeditated and out of the heart; a
description written as if with an undimmed and seeing eye upon the very
object described; an exposition that lays bare the very soul of the
matter; a motive truly revealed; anger that is righteous and justly
spoken; mirth that has its sources pure; phrases to find the heart
of a thing, and a heart seen in things for the phrases to find; an
unaffected meaning set out in language that is its own,--such are the
realities of literature. Nothing else is of the kin. Phrases used for
their own sake; borrowed meanings which the borrower does not truly
care for; an affected manner; an acquired style; a hollow reason; words
that are not fit; things which do not live when spoken,--these are its
falsities, which die in the handling.
The very top breed of what is unreal is begotten by imitation.
Imitators succeed sometimes, and flourish, even while a breath may
last; but “imitate and be damned” is the inexorable threat and prophecy
of fate with regard to the permanent fortunes of literature. That has
been notorious this long time past. It is more worth noting, lest some
should not have observed it, that there are other and subtler ways of
producing what is unreal. There are the mixed kinds of writing, for
example. Argument is real if it come vital from the mind; narrative
is real if the thing told have life and the narrator unaffectedly
see it while he speaks; but to narrate and argue in the same breath
is naught. Take, for instance, the familiar example of the early
history of Rome. Make up your mind what was the truth of the matter,
and then, out of the facts as you have disentangled them, construct
a firmly touched narrative, and the thing you create is real, has
the confidence and consistency of life. But mix the narrative with
critical comment upon other writers and their variant versions of the
tale, show by a nice elaboration of argument the whole conjectural
basis of the story, set your reader the double task of doubting and
accepting, rejecting and constructing, and at once you have touched
the whole matter with unreality. The narrative by itself might have
had an objective validity; the argument by itself an intellectual
firmness, sagacity, vigor, that would have sufficed to make and keep
it potent; but together they confound each other, destroy each other’s
atmosphere, make a double miscarriage. The story is rendered unlikely,
and the argument obscure. This is the taint which has touched all our
recent historical writing. The critical discussion and assessment of
the sources of information, which used to be a thing for the private
mind of the writer, now so encroach upon the open text that the story,
for the sake of which we would believe the whole thing was undertaken,
is oftentimes fain to sink away into the foot-notes. The process has
ceased to be either pure exegesis or straightforward narrative, and
history has ceased to be literature.
Nor is this our only sort of mixed writing. Our novels have become
sociological studies, our poems vehicles of criticism, our sermons
political manifestos. We have confounded all processes in a common use,
and do not know what we would be at. We can find no better use for
Pegasus than to carry our vulgar burdens, no higher key for song than
questionings and complainings. Fancy pulls in harness with intellectual
doubt; enthusiasm walks apologetically alongside science. We try to
make our very dreams engines of social reform. It is a parlous state
of things for literature, and it is high time authors should take
heed what company they keep. The trouble is, they all want to be “in
society,” overwhelmed with invitations from the publishers, well known
and talked about at the clubs, named every day in the newspapers,
photographed for the news-stalls; and it is so hard to distinguish
between fashion and form, costume and substance, convention and truth,
the things that show well and the things that last well; so hard to
draw away from the writers that are new and talked about and note those
who are old and walk apart, to distinguish the tones which are merely
loud from the tones that are genuine, to get far enough away from the
press and the hubbub to see and judge the movements of the crowd!
Some will do it. Choice spirits will arise and make conquest of us,
not “in society,” but with what will seem a sort of outlawry. The
great growths of literature spring up in the open, where the air is
free and they can be a law unto themselves. The law of life, here as
elsewhere, is the law of nourishment: with what was the earth laden,
and the atmosphere? Literatures are renewed, as they are originated,
by uncontrived impulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in the
mind. Once conceive the matter so, and Lamb’s quaint saying assumes a
sort of gentle majesty. A man should “write for antiquity” as a tree
grows into the ancient air,--this old air that has moved upon the face
of the world ever since the day of creation, which has set the law of
life to all things, which has nurtured the forests and won the flowers
to their perfection, which has fed men’s lungs with life, sped their
craft upon the seas, borne abroad their songs and their cries, blown
their forges to flame, and buoyed up whatever they have contrived. ’Tis
a common medium, though a various life; and the figure may serve the
author for instruction.
The breeding of authors is no doubt a very occult thing, and no man can
set the rules of it; but at least the sort of “ampler ether” in which
they are best brought to maturity is known. Writers have liked to speak
of the Republic of Letters, as if to mark their freedom and equality;
but there is a better phrase, namely, the Community of Letters; for
that means intercourse and comradeship and a life in common. Some take
up their abode in it as if they had made no search for a place to dwell
in, but had come into the freedom of it by blood and birthright. Others
buy the freedom with a great price, and seek out all the sights and
privileges of the place with an eager thoroughness and curiosity. Still
others win their way into it with a certain grace and aptitude, next
best to the ease and dignity of being born to the right. But for all it
is a bonny place to be. Its comradeships are a liberal education. Some,
indeed, even there, live apart; but most run always in the market-place
to know what all the rest have said. Some keep special company, while
others keep none at all. But all feel the atmosphere and life of the
place in their several degrees.
No doubt there are national groups, and Shakespeare is king among
the English, as Homer is among the Greeks, and sober Dante among his
gay countrymen. But their thoughts all have in common, though speech
divide them; and sovereignty does not exclude comradeship or embarrass
freedom. No doubt there is many a willful, ungoverned fellow endured
there without question, and many a churlish cynic, because he possesses
that patent of genuineness or of a wit which strikes for the heart of
things, which, without further test, secures citizenship in that free
company. What a gift of tongues is there, and of prophecy! What strains
of good talk, what counsel of good judgment, what cheer of good tales,
what sanctity of silent thought! The sight-seers who pass through from
day to day, the press of voluble men at the gates, the affectation of
citizenship by mere sojourners, the folly of those who bring new styles
or affect old ones, the procession of the generations, disturb the calm
of that serene community not a whit. They will entertain a man a whole
decade, if he happen to stay so long, though they know all the while he
can have no permanent place among them.
’T would be a vast gain to have the laws of that community better
known than they are. Even the first principles of its constitution
are singularly unfamiliar. It is not a community of writers, but a
community of letters. One gets admission, not because he writes,--write
he never so cleverly, like a gentleman and a man of wit,--but because
he is literate, a true initiate into the secret craft and mystery of
letters. What that secret is a man may know, even though he cannot
practice or appropriate it. If a man can see the permanent element
in things,--the true sources of laughter, the real fountains of
tears, the motives that strike along the main lines of conduct, the
acts which display the veritable characters of men, the trifles that
are significant, the details that make the mass,--if he know these
things, and can also choose words with a like knowledge of their power
to illuminate and reveal, give color to the eye and passion to the
thought, the secret is his, and an entrance to that immortal communion.
It may be that some learn the mystery of that insight without tutors;
but most must put themselves under governors and earn their initiation.
While a man lives, at any rate, he can keep the company of the
masters whose words contain the mystery and open it to those who can
see, almost with every accent; and in such company it may at last be
revealed to him,--so plainly that he may, if he will, still linger in
such comradeship when he is dead.
It would seem that there are two tests which admit to that company, and
that they are conclusive. The one is, Are you individual? the other,
Are you conversable? “I beg pardon,” said a grave wag, coming face
to face with a small person of most consequential air, and putting
glass to eye in calm scrutiny--“I beg pardon; but are you anybody
in particular?” Such is very much the form of initiation into the
permanent communion of the realm of letters. Tell them, No, but that
you have done much better--you have caught the tone of a great age,
studied taste, divined opportunity, courted and won a vast public,
been most timely and most famous; and you shall be pained to find them
laughing in your face. Tell them you are earnest, sincere, consecrate
to a cause, an apostle and reformer, and they will still ask you, “But
are you anybody in particular?” They will mean, “Were you your own man
in what you thought, and not a puppet? Did you speak with an individual
note and distinction that marked you able to think as well as to
speak,--to be yourself in thoughts and in words also?” “Very well,
then; you are welcome enough.”
“That is, if you be also conversable.” It is plain enough what they
mean by that, too. They mean, if you have spoken in such speech and
spirit as can be understood from age to age, and not in the pet terms
and separate spirit of a single day and generation. Can the old authors
understand you, that you would associate with them? Will men be able to
take your meaning in the differing days to come? Or is it perishable
matter of the day that you deal in--little controversies that carry no
lasting principle at their heart; experimental theories of life and
science, put forth for their novelty and with no test of their worth;
pictures in which fashion looms very large, but human nature shows very
small; things that please everybody, but instruct no one; mere fancies
that are an end in themselves? Be you never so clever an artist in
words and in ideas, if they be not the words that wear and mean the
same thing, and that a thing intelligible, from age to age, the ideas
that shall hold valid and luminous in whatever day or company, you may
clamor at the gate till your lungs fail and get never an answer.
For that to what you seek admission is a veritable “community.” In it
you must be able to be, and to remain, conversable. How are you to test
your preparation meanwhile, unless you look to your comradeships now
while yet it is time to learn? Frequent the company in which you may
learn the speech and the manner which are fit to last. Take to heart
the admirable example you shall see set you there of using speech and
manner to speak your real thought and be genuinely and simply yourself.
IV.
A LITERARY POLITICIAN.
“Literary politician” is not a label much in vogue, and may need first
of all a justification, lest even the man of whom I am about to speak
should decline it from his very urn. I do not mean a politician who
affects literature; who seems to appreciate the solemn moral purpose
of Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior, and yet is opposed to ballot reform.
Neither do I mean a literary man who affects politics; who earns his
victories through the publishers, and his defeats at the hands of the
men who control the primaries. I mean the man who has the genius to see
deep into affairs, and the discretion to keep out of them,--the man to
whom, by reason of knowledge and imagination and sympathetic insight,
governments and policies are as open books, but who, instead of trying
to put haphazard characters of his own into those books, wisely prefers
to read their pages aloud to others. A man this who knows polities, and
yet does not handle policies.
There is, no doubt, a very widespread skepticism as to the existence of
such a man. Many people would ask you to prove him as well as define
him; and that, as they assume, upon a very obvious principle. It is
a rule of universal acceptance in theatrical circles that no one can
write a good play who has no practical acquaintance with the stage.
A knowledge of greenroom possibilities and of stage machinery, it is
held, must go before all successful attempts to put either passion
or humor into action on the boards, if pit and gallery are to get a
sense of reality from the performance. No wonder that Sheridan’s plays
were effective, for Sheridan was both author and actor; but abundant
wonder that simple Goldsmith succeeded with his exquisite “She Stoops
to Conquer,”--unless we are to suppose that an Irishman of the last
century, like the Irishman of this, had some sixth sense which enabled
him to understand other people’s business better than his own; for poor
Goldsmith could not act (even off the stage), and his only connection
with the theatre seems to have been his acquaintance with Garrick.
Lytton, we know, had Macready constantly at his elbow, to give and
enforce suggestions calculated to render plays playable. And in our
own day, the authors of what we indulgently call “dramatic literature”
find themselves constantly obliged to turn tragedies into comedies,
comedies into farces, to satisfy the managers; for managers know the
stage, and pretend to know all possible audiences also. The writer for
the stage must be playwright first, author second.
Similar principles of criticism are not a little affected by those
who play the parts, great and small, on the stage of politics. There
is on that stage, too, it is said, a complex machinery of action and
scene-shifting, a greenroom tradition and practice as to costume and
make-up, as to entry and exit, necessities of concession to footlights
and of appeal to the pit, quite as rigorous and quite as proper for
study as are the concomitants of that other art which we frankly call
acting. This is an idea, indeed, accepted in some quarters outside
the political playhouse as well as within it. Mr. Sydney Colvin, for
example, declares very rightly that:--
“Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to
declaiming at their ease against the delinquencies of men of action
and affairs. The inevitable friction of practical politics,” he
argues, “generates heat enough already, and the office of the thinker
and critic should be to supply not heat, but light. The difficulties
which attend his own unmolested task--the task of seeking after and
proclaiming salutary truths--should teach him to make allowance for
the far more urgent difficulties which beset the politician; the man
obliged, amidst the clash of interests and temptations, to practice
from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain and at the
same time the most indispensable of the experimental arts.”
Mr. Colvin is himself of the class of men of letters and of thought; he
accordingly puts the case against his class much more mildly than the
practical politician would desire to see it put. Practical politicians
are wont to regard closeted writers upon politics with a certain
condescension, dashed with slight traces of uneasy concern. “Literary
men can say strong things of their age,” observes Mr. Bagehot, “for no
one expects that they will go out and act on them. They are a kind of
ticket-of-leave lunatics, from whom no harm is for the moment expected;
who seem quiet, but on whose vagaries a practical public must have its
eye.” I suppose that the really serious, practical man in politics
would see nothing of satirical humor in such a description. He would
have you note that, although traced with a sharp point of wit, the
picture is nevertheless true. He can cite you a score of instances
illustrative of the danger of putting faith in the political judgments
of those who are not politicians bred in the shrewd and moving world of
political management.
The genuine practical politician, such as (even our enemies being the
witnesses) we must be acknowledged to produce in great numbers and
perfection in this country, reserves his acidest contempt for the
literary man who assumes to utter judgments touching public affairs
and political institutions. If he be a reading man, as will sometimes
happen, he is able to point you, in illustration of what you are to
expect in such cases, to the very remarkable essays of the late Mr.
Matthew Arnold on parliamentary policy and the Irish question. If he
be not a reading man, as sometimes happens, he is able to ask, much to
your confusion, “What does a fellow who lives inside a library know
about politics, anyhow?” You have to admit, if you are candid, that
most fellows who live in libraries know little enough. You remember
Macaulay, and acknowledge that, although he made admirable speeches in
Parliament, held high political office, and knew all the considerable
public men of his time, he did imagine the creation to have been made
in accordance with Whig notions; did hope to find the judgments of
Lord Somers some day answering mankind as standards for all possible
times and circumstances. You recall Gibbon, and allow, to your own
thought at least, that, had he not remained silent in his seat, a
very few of his sentences would probably have sufficed to freeze the
House of Commons stiff. The ordinary literary man, even though he be
an eminent historian, is ill enough fitted to be a mentor in affairs
of government. For, it must be admitted, things are for the most part
very simple in books, and in practical life very complex. Not all the
bindings of a library inclose the various world of circumstance.
But the practical politician should discriminate. Let him find a
man with an imagination which, though it stands aloof, is yet quick
to conceive the very things in the thick of which the politician
struggles. To that man he should resort for instruction. And that there
is occasionally such a man we have proof in Bagehot, the man who first
clearly distinguished the facts of the English constitution from its
theory.
Walter Bagehot is a name known to not a few of those who have a zest
for the juiciest things of literature, for the wit that illuminates
and the knowledge that refreshes. But his fame is still singularly
disproportioned to his charm; and one feels once and again like
publishing him, at least to all spirits of his own kind. It would be
a most agreeable good fortune to introduce Bagehot to men who have
not read him! To ask your friend to know Bagehot is like inviting him
to seek pleasure. Occasionally, a man is born into the world whose
mission it evidently is to clarify the thought of his generation,
and to vivify it; to give it speed where it is slow, vision where it
is blind, balance where it is out of poise, saving humor where it is
dry,--and such a man was Walter Bagehot. When he wrote of history, he
made it seem human and probable; when he wrote of political economy,
he made it seem credible, entertaining,--nay, engaging even; when he
wrote criticism, he wrote sense. You have in him a man who can jest to
your instruction, who will beguile you into being informed beyond your
wont and wise beyond your birthright. Full of manly, straightforward
meaning, earnest to find the facts that guide and strengthen conduct, a
lover of good men and seers, full of knowledge and a consuming desire
for it, he is yet genial withal, with the geniality of a man of wit,
and alive in every fibre of him, with a life he can communicate to
you. One is constrained to agree, almost, with the verdict of a witty
countryman of his, who happily still lives to cheer us, that when
Bagehot died he “carried away into the next world more originality of
thought than is now to be found in the three Estates of the Realm.”
An epitome of Bagehot’s life can be given very briefly. He was born in
February, 1826, and died in March, 1877,--the month in which one would
prefer to die. Between those two dates he had much quaint experience as
a boy, and much sober business experience as a man. He wrote essays on
poets, prose writers, statesmen, whom he would, with abundant insight,
but without too much respect of persons; also books on banking, on
the early development of society, and on English politics, kindling a
flame of interest with these dry materials such as made men stare who
had often described the facts of society themselves, but who had never
dreamed of applying fire to them, as Bagehot did, to make them give
forth light and wholesome heat. He set the minds of a few fortunate
friends aglow with the delights of the very wonderful tongue which
nature had given him through his mother. And then he died, while his
power was yet young. Not a life of event or adventure, but a life
of deep interest, none the less, because a life in which those two
things of our modern life, commonly deemed incompatible, business and
literature, namely, were combined without detriment to either; and from
which, more interesting still, politics gained a profound expounder in
one who was no politician and no party man, but, as he himself said,
“between sizes in politics.”