Talks on the study of literature.

Fortunately we are in this day provided with a great deal of light fiction which is sound and wholesome and genuine as far as it goes. Some of it even goes far in the way of being imaginative and good. As examples – not at all as a list – may be named Blackmore, Crawford, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope, or the numerous writers of admirable short stories, Cable, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren, or Thomas Nelson Page. All these and others may be read for simple entertainment, and all are worth reading for some more or less strongly marked quality of permanent worth. There are plenty of writers, too, like William Black and Clark Russell and Conan Doyle, concerning the lasting value of whose stories there might easily be a question, yet who do often contrive to be healthily amusing, and who furnish the means of creating a pleasant and restful vacuity in lives otherwise too full. Every reader must make his own choice, and determine for himself how much picnicking he will do on his way up the hill of life. If he is wise he will contrive to find his entertainment chiefly in books which besides being amusing have genuine value; and he will at least see to it that his intellectual dissipations shall be with the better of such books as will amuse him and not with the poorer.

The mention of the short story brings to mind the great part which this form of fiction plays to-day. The restlessness of the age and the fostering influence of the magazines have united to develop the short story, and it has become one of the most marked of the literary features of the time. It has the advantage of being easily handled and comprehended as a whole, but it lessens the power of seizing in their entirety works which are greater. It tends rather to increase than to diminish mental restlessness, and the lover of short stories will do well not to let any considerable length of time go by without reading some long and far-reaching novel by way of corrective. Another consequence of the wide popularity of the short story is that we have nowadays so few additions to that delightful company of fictitious yet most admirably real personages whose acquaintance the reader makes in longer tales. The delight of knowing these characters is not only one of the most attractive joys of novel-reading, but it is one which helps greatly to brighten life and enhance friendship. Few things add more to the sympathy of comradeship than a community of friends in the enchanted realms of the imagination. Strangers in the flesh become instantly conscious of an intimacy in spirit when they discover a common love for some character in fiction. Two men may be strangers, with no common acquaintances in the flesh, but if they discover that both admire Elizabeth Bennet, or Lizzie Hexam, or Laura Bell, or Ethel Newcome; that both are familiar friends with Pendennis, or Warrington, or Harry Richmond, or Mulvaney, or Alan Breck, or Mowgli, or Zagloba; or belong to the brave brotherhood of D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, they have a community of sympathy which brings them very close together.

It is seldom and indeed almost never that the short story gives to the reader this sense of knowing familiarly its characters. If there be a series, as in Kipling's "Jungle Book" or Maclaren's tales, where the same actors appear again and again, of course the effect may be in this respect the same as that of a novel; but cases of this sort are not common. All the aged women of Miss Wilkins' stories, for instance, are apt in the memory either to blend into one composite photograph of the New England old woman, or to stand remotely, not as persons that we know, but rather as types about which we know. The genuine novel-reader will realize that this consideration is really one of no inconsiderable weight; and it is one which becomes more and more pressing with the increase of the influence of the short story.

This consideration is the more important from the fact that novels in which the reader is able to identify himself with the characters are by far the most effective, because thus is he removed from the realities which surround him, and for the time being freed from whatever would hamper his imagination. That which in real life he would be, but may not, he may in fiction blissfully and expandingly realize. The innate sense of justice – not, perhaps, unseconded by the innate vanity; we are all of us human! – demands that human possibilities shall be realized, and in the story in which the reader merges his personality in that of some actor, all this is accomplished. In actual outward experience life justifies itself but rarely; to most men its justification is reached only by the aid of the imagination, and it is largely by the aid of literature that the imagination works. Even more true is this of the other sex. Much that men learn from life women must learn from books; so that to women fiction is the primer of life as well as the text-book of the imagination. By the novels he reads the man gives evidence of his imaginative development; the woman of her intellectual existence.

Fiction should be delightful, absorbing, and above all inspiring. Genuine art may sadden, but it cannot depress; it may bring a fresh sense of the anguish of humanity, but it must from its very nature join with this the consolation of an ideal. The tragedy of human life is in art held to be the source of new courage, of nobler aspiration, because it gives grander opportunities for human emotion to vindicate its superiority to all disasters, all terrors, all woe. The reader does not leave the great tragedies with a soured mind or a pessimistic disbelief in life. "Lear," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet," tragic as they are, leave him quivering with sympathy but not with bitterness. The inspiration of the thought of love triumphant over death, of moral grandeur unsubdued by the worst that fate can do, lifts the mind above the disaster. One puts down "The Kreutzer Sonata" with the very flesh creeping with disgust at human existence; the same sin is treated no less tragically in "The Scarlet Letter," yet the reader is left with an inspiration and a nobler feeling toward life. The attitude of art is in its essence hopeful, and the work of the pessimist must therefore fail, even though it be informed with all the cleverness and the witchery of genius.

It is, I believe, from something akin to a remote and perhaps half-conscious perception of this principle that readers in general desire that a novel shall end pleasantly. The popular sentiment in favor of a "happy ending" is by no means so entirely wrong or so utterly Philistine as it is the fashion in these super-æsthetical days to assume. The trick of a doleful conclusion has masqued and paraded as a sure proof of artistic inspiration when it is nothing of the kind. Unhappy endings may be more common than happy ones in life, although even that proposition is by no means proved; they seem so from the human habit of marking the disagreeables and letting pleasant things go unnoted. Writers of a certain school have assumed from this that they were keeping more close to life if they left the reader at the close of a story in a state of darkest melancholy; and they have made much parade of the claim that this is not only more true to fact, but more artistic. There is no reason for such an assumption. The artistic climax of a tale is that which grows out of the story by compelling necessity. There are many narrations, of course, which would become essentially false if made to end gladly. When the ingenious Frenchman rewrote the last act of "Hamlet," marrying off the Prince and dismissing him with Ophelia to live happily ever after, the thing was monstrously absurd. The general public is not wholly blind to these things. No audience educated up to the point of enjoying "Hamlet" or "Othello" at all would be satisfied with a sugar-candy conclusion to these. The public does ask, however, and asks justly, that there shall be no meaningless agony; and if it prefers tales which inevitably come to a cheerful last chapter, this taste is in the line with the great principle that it is the function of art to uplift and inspire.

It has already been said over and over that it is the office of literature to show the meaning of life, and the meaning of life is not only what it is but what it may be. To paint the actualities of life is only to state a problem, and it is the mission of art to offer a solution. The novel which can go no further than the presentation of the apparent fact is from the higher standpoint futile because it fails to indicate the meaning of that fact; it falls short as art in so far as it fails to justify existence.

Lowell complains: —

Modern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be "the world's sweet inn," whither we repair for refreshment and repose, has become rather a watering-place, where one's private touch of liver-complaint is exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk is a narrative of morbid symptoms. —Chaucer.

We have introduced into fiction that popular and delusive fallacy of emotional socialism which insists not so much that all shall share the best of life, as that none shall escape its worst. The claim that all shall be acquainted with every phase of life is enforced not by an endeavor to make each reader a sharer in the joys and blessings of existence, but by a determined thrusting forward of the pains and shames of humanity. Modern literature has too generally made the profession of treating all facts of life impartially a mere excuse for dealing exclusively with whatever is ugly and degraded, and for dragging to light whatever has been concealed. This is at best as if one used rare cups of Venetian glass for the measuring out of commercial kerosene and vinegar, or precious Grecian urns for the gathering up of the refuse of the streets.

The wise student of literature will never lose sight of the fact that fiction which has not in it an inspiration is to be looked upon as ineffectual, if it is not to be avoided as morbid and unwholesome. Fiction may be sad, it may deal with the darker side of existence; but it should leave the reader with the uplift which comes from the perception that there is in humanity the power to rise by elevation of spirit above the bitterest blight, to triumph over the most cruel circumstances which can befall.

One word must be added in conclusion, and that is the warning that fiction can never take the place of actual life. There is danger in all art that it may win men from interest in real existence. Literature is after all but the interpreter of life, and living is more than all imaginative experience. We need both the book and the deed to round out a full and rich being. It is possible to abuse literature as it is possible to abuse any other gift of the gods. It is not impossible to stultify and benumb the mind by too much novel-reading; but of this there is no need. Fiction properly used and enjoyed is one of the greatest blessings of civilization; and how poor and thin and meagre would life be without it!

XVI

POETRY

The lover of literature must approach any discussion of poetry with feelings of mingled delight and dread. The subject is one which can hardly fail to excite him to enthusiasm, but it is one with which it is difficult to deal without a declaration of sentiments so strong that they are not likely to be spoken; and it is one, too, upon which so much has been said crudely and carelessly, or wisely and warmly, that any writer must hesitate to add anything to the abundance of words already spoken.

For there have been few things so voluminously discussed as poetry. It is a theme so high that sages could not leave it unpraised; while there is never a penny-a-liner so poor or so mean that he hesitates to write his essay upon the sublime and beautiful art. It is one of the consequences of human vanity that the more subtile and difficult a matter, the more feeble minds feel called upon to cover it with the dust of their empty phrases. The most crowded places are those where angels fear to tread; and it is with reverence not unmixed with fear that any true admirer ventures to speak even his love for the noble art of poetry. No discussion of the study of literature, however, can leave out of the account that which is literature's crown and glory; and of the much that might be said and must be felt, an effort must be made here to set something down.

There are few characteristics more general in the race of man than that responsiveness to rhythm which is the foundation of the love of verse. The sense of symmetry exists in the rudest savage that tattoos the two sides of his face in the same pattern, or strings his necklace of shells in alternating colors. The same feeling is shown by the unæsthetic country matron, the mantel of whose sacredly dark and cold best room is not to her eye properly adorned unless the ugly vase at one end is balanced by another exactly similar ugly vase upon the other. In sound the instinct is yet more strongly marked. The barbaric drum-beat which tells in the quivering sunlight of an African noon that the cannibalistic feast is preparing appeals crudely to the same quality of the human mind which in its refinement responds to the swelling cadences of Mendelssohn's Wedding March or the majestic measures of the Ninth Symphony. The rhythm of the voice in symmetrically arranged words is equally potent in its ability to give pleasure. Savage tribes make the beginnings of literature in inchoate verse. Indeed, so strongly does poetry appeal to men even in the earlier states of civilization that Macaulay seems to have conceived the idea that poetry belongs to an immature stage of growth, – a deduction not unlike supposing the sun to be of no consequence to civilization because it has been worshiped by savages. In the earlier phases of human development, whether of the individual or of the race, the universal instincts are more apparent; and the hold which song takes upon half-barbaric man is simply a proof of how primal and universal is the taste to which it appeals. The sense and enjoyment of rhythm show themselves in a hundred ways in the life and pleasures of primitive races, the vigorous shoots from which is to spring a splendid growth.

Not to go so far back as the dawn of civilization, however, it is sufficient here to recall our own days in the nursery, when Mother Goose, the only universal Alma Mater, with rhymes foolish but rhythmical, meaningless but musical, delighted ears yet too untrained to distinguish sense from folly, but not too young to enjoy the delight of the beating of the voice in metrically arranged accents.

This pleasure in rhythm is persistent, and it is strongly marked even in untrained minds. In natures unspoiled and healthy, natures not bewildered and sophisticated by a false idea of cultivation, or deceived into unsound notions of the real value of poetry, the taste remains sound and good. In the youth of a race this natural enjoyment of verse is gratified by folk-songs. These early forms are naturally undeveloped and simple, but the lays are genuine and wholesome; they possess lasting quality. Different peoples have in differing degrees the power of appreciating verse, but I do not know that any race has been found to lack it entirely. There is abundant evidence that the Anglo-Saxon and Norman ancestors from whom sprang the English-speaking peoples were in this respect richly endowed, and that they early went far in the development of this power. The old ballads of our language are so rich and so enduringly beautiful that we are proved to come from a stock endowed with a rich susceptibility to poetry. If this taste has not been generally developed it is from some reason other than racial incapacity. Nothing need be looked for in early literatures sweeter and sounder than the fine old ballads of "Chevy Chace," "Tamlane," "Sir Patrick Spens," or "Clerk Saunders." Many a later poet of no mean reputation has failed to strike so deep and true a note as rings through these songs made by forgotten minstrels for a ballad-loving people. There are not too many English-speaking poets to-day who could match the cry of the wraith of Clerk Saunders at the window of his love: —

Oh, cocks are crowing a merry midnight,
The wild fowls are boding day;
Give me my faith and troth again,
Let me fare on my way…

Cauld mould it is my covering now,
But and my winding sheet;
The dew it falls nae sooner down
Than my resting-place is weet!

How far popular taste has departed from an appreciation of verse that is simple and genuine is shown by those favorite rhymes which are unwearyingly yearned for in the columns of Notes and Queries, and which reappear with periodic persistence in Answers to Correspondents. In educated persons, it is true, there is still a love of what is really good in verse, but it is far too rare. The general ear and the general taste have become vitiated. There is a melancholy and an amazing number of readers who are pleased only with rhymes of the sort of Will Carleton's "Farm Ballads," the sentimentally inane jingles published in the feminine domestic periodicals, and the rest of what might be called, were not the phrase perilously near to the vulgar, the chewing-gum school of verse.

One of the most serious defects in modern systems of education seems to me to be, as has been said in an earlier talk, an insufficient provision for the development of the imagination. This is nowhere more marked than in the failure to recognize the place and importance of poetry in the training of the mind of youth. It might be supposed that an age which prides itself upon being scientific in its methods would be clever enough to perceive that from the early stages of civilization may well be taken hints for the development of the intellect of the young. Primitive peoples have invariably nourished their growing intelligence and enlarged their imagination by fairy-lore and poetry. The childhood of the individual is in its essentials not widely dissimilar from the childhood of the race; and what was the instinctive and wholesome food for one is good for the other. If our common schools could but omit a good deal of the instruction which is falsely called "practical," because it deals with material issues, and devote the time thus gained to training children to enjoy poetry and to use their imagination, the results would be incalculably better.[2 - I say to enjoy poetry. There is much well-meant instruction which is unconsciously conducive to nothing but its detestation. Students who by nature have a fondness for verse are laboriously trained by conscientiously mistaken instructors to regard anything in poetical form as a bore and a torment. The business of a teacher in a preparatory school should be to incite the pupil to love poetry. It is better to make a boy thrill and kindle over a single line than it is to get into his head all the comments made on literature from the beginning of time.]

The strain and stress of modern life are opposed to the appreciation of any art; and in the case of poetry this difficulty has been increased by a wide-spread feeling that poetry is after all of little real consequence. It has been held to be an excrescence upon life rather than an essential part of it. It is the tendency of the time to seek for tangible and present results; and men have too generally ceased to appreciate the fact that much which is best is to be reached more surely indirectly than directly. Since of the effects which spring from poetry those most of worth are its remote and intangible results, careless and superficial thinkers have come to look upon song as an unmanly affectation, a thing artificial if not effeminate. This is one of the most absolute and vicious of all intellectual errors. In high and noble truth, poetry is as natural as air; poetry is as virile as war!

It is not easy to discover whence arose the popular feeling of the insignificance of poetry. It is allied to the materialistic undervaluing of all art, and it is probably not unconnected with the ascetic idea that whatever ministers to earthly delight is a hindrance to progress toward the unseen life of another world. Something is to be attributed, no doubt, to the contempt bred by worthless imitations with which facile poetasters have afflicted a long-suffering world; but most of all is the want of an appreciation of the value of poetry to be attributed to the fact that men engrossed in literal and material concerns have not been able to appreciate remote consequences, or to comprehend the utterances of the masters who speak the language of the imagination.

While the world in general, however, has been increasingly unsympathetic toward poetry, the sages have universally concurred in giving to it the highest place in the list of literary achievements. "Poetry," Emerson said, "is the only verity." The same thought is expanded in a passage from Mrs. Browning, in which she speaks of poets as

– the only truth-tellers now left to God, —
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun-skirts, through conventual gray glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel wall
To find man's veritable stature out,
Erect, sublime, – the measure of a man.

    – Aurora Leigh
So Wordsworth: —

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, it is the impassioned expression which is on the face of all science.

It is needless, however, to multiply quotations. The world has never doubted the high respect which those who appreciate poetry have for the art.

It is true also that however general at any time may have been the seeming or real neglect of poetry, the race has not failed to preserve its great poems. The prose of the past, no matter how great its wisdom, has never been able to take with succeeding generations the rank held by the masterpieces of the poets. Mankind has seemed not unlike one who affects to hold his jewels in little esteem, it may be, yet like the jewel owner it has guarded them with constant jealousy. The honor-roll of literature is the world's list of great poets. The student of literature is not long in discovering that his concern is far more largely with verse than with anything else that the wit of mankind has devised to write. However present neglect may at any time appear to show the contrary, the long-abiding regard of the race declares beyond peradventure that it counts poetry as most precious among all its intellectual treasures.

XVII

THE TEXTURE OF POETRY

In discussing poetry it is once more necessary to begin with something which will serve us as a definition. No man can imprison the essence of an art in words; and it is not to be understood that a formal definition can be framed which shall express all that poetry is and means. Its more obvious characteristics, however, may be phrased, and even an incomplete formula is often useful. There have been almost as many definitions of poetry made already as there have been writers on literature, some of them intelligible and some of them open to the charge of incomprehensibility. Schopenhauer, for instance, defined poetry as the art of exciting by words the power of the imagination; a phrase so broad that it is easily made to cover all genuine literature. It will perhaps be sufficient for our purpose here if we say that poetry is the embodiment in metrical, imaginative language of passionate emotion.

By metrical language is meant that which is systematically rhythmical. Much prose is rhythmical. Indeed it is difficult to conceive of fine or delicate prose which has not rhythm to some degree, and oratorical prose is usually distinguished by this. The Bible abounds in excellent examples; as, for instance, this passage from Job: —

Hell is naked before Him, and destruction hath no covering; He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing. He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not rent under them. He holdeth back the face of His throne, and spreadeth His cloud upon it. He hath compassed the waters with bounds until the day and night come to an end. The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astonished at His reproof. He divideth the sea with His power, and by His understanding He smiteth through the proud. —Job, xxvi. 6-12.

Here, as in all fine prose, there is a rhythm which is marked, and at times almost regular; but it is not ordered by a system, as it must be in the simplest verse of poetry. Take, by way of contrast, a stanza from the superb chorus to Artemis in "Atalanta in Calydon: " —

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
Maiden most perfect, lady of light,
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamor of waters and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Here the rhythm is systematized according to regular laws, and so becomes metrical. The effect upon the ear in prose is largely due to rhythm, but metrical effects are entirely within the province of poetry.