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FROM THE °<

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1854-1919

BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY

The writings of John Burroughs.

Cornell University

Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022149938

THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS

MRiberside ECvition

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN 6 CO.

eo

LITERARY VALUES

AND OTHER PAPERS

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Che Riverside Press, Cambridge

1902 ue be

COPYRIGHT 1902 BY JOHN BURROUGHS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published December, 1902

4

XIII.

CONTENTS

. LirerarRy VALUES

. ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE

. STYLE AND THE Man

. CRITICISM AND THE MAN

. Recent PHAsEs or LITERARY CRITICISM
. “THOU SHALT NOT PREACH ”’

. DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE .
. Poetry AnD ELoQuENcE

. GILBERT WHITE AGAIN

. Lucrp LITERATURE

. Mere LITERATURE”?

. ANOTHER WoRD ON EMERSON

THOREAU’s WILDNESS

XIV. Nature in LITERATURE

XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.

SUGGESTIVENESS .

On THE RE-READING oF Books

THE SPELL OF THE Past ‘ x
Tue SecrET oF Happiness

The frontispiece is from a photograph of Mr. Burroughs sitting
in the doorway of Slabsides, taken by Clifton Johnson in 1901.

The vignette of Slabsides is from a photograph by Clifton
Johnson in 1900.

LITERARY VALUES

I
LITERARY VALUES
I

eas day inevitably comes to every writer when

he must take his place amid the silent throngs
of the past, when no new work from his pen can call
attention to him afresh, when the partiality of his
friends no longer counts, when his friends and ad-
mirers are themselves gathered to the same silent
throng, and the spirit of the day in which he wrote
has given place to the spirit of another and a differ-
ent day. How, oh, how will it fare with him then ?
How is it going to fare with Lowell and Longfellow
and Whittier and Emerson and all the rest of them ?
How has it fared with so many names in the past,
that were, in their own day, on all men’s tongues ?
Of the names just mentioned, Whittier and Emerson
shared more in a particular movement of thought
and morals of the times in which they lived than
did the other two, and to that extent are they in
danger of dropping out and losing their vogue.
Both had a significance to their own day and genera-

2 LITERARY VALUES

tion that they can hardly have to any other. The
new times will have new soul maladies and need
other soul doctors. The fashions of this world pass
away — fashions in thought, in style, in humor, in
morals, as well as in anything else.

As men strip for a race, so must an author strip
for this race with time. All that is purely local and
accidental in him will only impede him ; all that is
put on or assumed will impede him — his affecta-
tions, his insincerities, his imitations; only what
is vital and real in him, and is subdued to the pro-
per harmony and proportion, will count. A mal-
formed giant will not in this race keep pace with the
lesser but better-built stripling. How many more
learned and ponderous tomes has Gilbert White’s lit-
tle book left behind! Mere novelty, how short-lived
is that! Every age will have its own novelties.
Every age will have its own hobbies and hobby-
ists, its own clowns, its own follies and fashions
and infatuations. What every age will not have in
the same measure is sanity, proportion, health, pen-
etration, simplicity. The strained and overwrought,
the fantastic and far-fetched, are sure to drop out.
Every pronounced style, like Carlyle’s, is sure to
suffer. The obscurities and affectations of some re-
cent English poets and novelists are certain to drag
them down. Browning, with his sudden leaps and
stops, and all that Italian rubbish, is fearfully han-
dicapped.

Things do not endure in this world without a
certain singleness and continence. Trees do not

LITERARY VALUES 3

grow and stand upright without a certain balance
and proportion. A man does not live out half his
days without a certain simplicity of life. Excesses,
irregularities, violences, kill him. It is the same
with books—they, too, are under the same law;
they hold the gift of life on the same terms. Only
an honest book can live; only absolute sincerity
can stand the test of time. Any selfish or second-
ary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a
religious life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreci-
ate the literary value of the staple, fundamental hu-
man virtues and qualities — probity, directness, sim-
plicity, sincerity, love. There is just as much room
and need for the exercise of these qualities in the
making of a book as in the building of a house, or
in a business career. How conspicuous they are in
all the enduring books——in Bunyan, in Walton, in
Defoe, in the Bible! It is they that keep alive
such a book as “Two Years before the Mast,” which
Stevenson pronounced the best sea-story in the lan-
guage, as it undoubtedly is. None of Stevenson’s
books have quite this probity and singleness of pur-
pose, or show this effacement of the writer by the
man. It might be said that our interest in such
books is not literary at all, but purely human, like
our interest in “ Robinson Crusoe,” or in life and
things themselves. The experience itself of a sailor’s
life, however, would be to most of us very prosy and
distasteful. Hence there is something in the record,
something in the man behind the record, that col-
ors his pages, and that is the source of our interest.

4 LITERARY VALUES

This personal element, this flavor of character, is the
salt of literature. Without it, the page is savorless.

II

It is curious what an uncertain and seemingly
capricious thing literary value is. How often it re-
fuses to appear when diligently sought for, labored
for, prayed for; and then comes without call to
some simple soul that never gave it a thought.
Learning cannot compass it, rhetoric cannot compass
it, study cannot compass it. Mere wealth of lan-
guage is entirely inadequate. It is like religion:
often those who have it most have it least, and those
who have it least have it most. In the works of
the great composers — Gibbon, De Quincey, Macau-
lay —it is a conscious, deliberate product. Then,
in other works, the very absence of the literary mo-
tive and interest gives an esthetic pleasure.

One is surprised to read the remark of the “ Sat-
urday Review” on the published letters of Whit-
man, — letters that have no extrinsic literary value
whatever, not one word of style, —namely, that
few books are so well calculated to “purge the
soul of nonsense ;’’ and the remark of the fastidious
Henry James on the same subject, that, with all
their enormities of the common, the letters are pos-
itively delightful. Here, again, the source of our
interest is undoubtedly in the personal revelation, —
the type of man we see through the letters, and not in
any wit or wisdom lodged in the letters themselves.

One reader seeks religious or moral values alone

LITERARY VALUES 5

in the works he reads; another seeks scientific or
philosophical values; another, artistic and literary
values; others, again, purely human values. No
one, I think, would read Scott or Dickens for purely
artistic values, while, on the other hand, it seems
to me that one would go to Mr. James or to Mr.
Howells for little else. One might read Froude
with pleasure who had little confidence in him as
an historian, but one could hardly read Freeman
and discount him in the same way; one might have
great delight in Ruskin, who repudiated much of
his teaching.

I suppose one comes to like plain literature as he
comes to like plain clothes, plain manners, simple
living. What grows with us is the taste for the
genuine, the real. The less a writer’s style takes
thought of itself, the better we like it. The less
his dress, his equipage, his house, concern them-
selves about appearances, the more we are pleased
with them. Let the purpose be entirely serious,
and let the seriousness be pushed till it suggests the
heroic; that is what we crave as we grow older and
tire of the vanities and shams of the world.

To have literary value is not necessarily to sug-
gest books or literature; it is to possess a certain
genuineness and seriousness that is like the validity
of real things. See how much better literature Lin-
coln’s speech at Gettysburg is than the more elabo-
rate and scholarly address of Everett on the same
occasion. General Grant’s “ Memoirs’? have a
higher literary value than those of any other gen-

6 LITERARY VALUES

eral in our Civil War, mainly because of the greater
simplicity, seriousness, and directness of the person-
ality they reveal. There is no more vanity and
make-believe in the book than there was in the man.
Any touch of the elemental, of the veracity and sin-
gleness of the natural forces, gives value to a man’s
utterances, and Lincoln and Grant were undoubtedly
the two most elemental men brought out by the
war. ‘The literary value of the Bible, doubtless,
arises largely from its elemental character. The
utterances of simple, unlettered men — farmers, sail-
ors, soldiers — often have great force and impres-
siveness from the same cause; there are in them
the virtue and seriousness of real things. One great
danger of schools, colleges, libraries, is that they
tend to kill or to overlay this elemental quality in
aman—to make the poet speak from his culture
instead of from his heart. “To speak in literature
with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the
movement of animals and the unimpeachableness
of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by
the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art;” and
who so likely to do this as the simple, unbookish
man? Hence Sainte-Beuve says the peasant always
has style.

In fiction the literary value resides in several dif-
ferent things, as the characterization, the action, the
plot, and the style; sometimes more in one, some-
times more in another. In Scott, for instance, it is
found in the characters and the action; the style is
commonplace. In George Eliot, the action, the dra-

LITERARY VALUES 7

matic power, is the weakest factor. In Mr. How-
ells we care very little for the people, but the art,
the style, is a perpetual delight. In Hawthorne our
pleasure, again, is more evenly distributed. In Poe
the plot and the style interest us. In Dickens it
is the character and the action. The novelist has
many strings to his bow, and he can get along very
well without style, but what can the poet, the his-
torian, the essayist, the critic, do without style —
that is, without that vital, intimate, personal rela-
tion between the man and his language which seems
to be the secret of style? The true poet makes
the words his own; he fills them with his own
quality, though they be the common property of all.
This is why language, in the hands of the born
writer, is not the mere garment of thought, not even
a perfectly adjusted and transparent garment, as a
French writer puts it. It is a garment only as the
body is the garment of the soul. This is why a
writer with a style loses so much in a translation,
while with the ordinary eomposer translation is lit-
tle more than a change of garments.

I should say that the literary value of the modern
French writers and critics resides more in their style
than in anything else, while with the German it re-
sides least in the style; in the English it resides in
both thought and style. The French fall below the
English in lyric poetry, because, while the French-
man has more vanity, he has less egoism, and hence
less power to make the universe speak through him.
The solitude of the lyric is too much for his in-

8 LITERARY VALUES

tensely social nature, while he excels in the light
dramatic forms for this very reason. He has more
power of intellectual metamorphosis.

Apart from style and the other qualities I have
mentioned, is another gift, the gift of narration — the
story-teller’s gift, which novelists have in varying
degrees. Probably few of them have this talent in so
large a measure as Wilkie Collins had it, yet this
power does not of itself seem sufficient to save his
work from oblivion. Still apart from these quali-
ties, and of high literary worth, and apart from the
attractiveness of the subject matter, is the power to
interest, Can you interest me in what you have to
say, by your manner of saying it? This is one of
the most intimate and personal gifts of all. No
matter what the subject, some writers, like some
speakers, catch our attention at once, and hold it to
the end. They appear to be telling us some import-
ant bit of news which they are in a hurry to be de-
livered of. No time or words are wasted. There
is something special and imminent in the look and
tone. The sentences are definitely aimed. The
man knows what he wants to say and is himself
interested in it. His mind is not somnolent or
stagnant; the style is specific and direct — no be-
numbing effects of vague and featureless generaliza-
tions. The thoughts move, they make a current,
and the reader quickly yields himself to it. How
soon we tire of the mumbling, soliloquizing style,
where the writer seems talking to himself. He
must talk to his reader and must catch his eye.

LITERARY VALUES 9

Then those dead-level sentences that seem to re-
turn forever into themselves, that have no direction
or fall, that do not point and hurry to some definite
conclusion, —- we soon yawn over these too.

What rare power the late Henry George had to
invest his subject with interest! What a current in
his book “Progress and Poverty ” !— While it seems
to me that in his “Social Evolution” Benjamin
Kidd suffers from the want of this talent; I do not
get the full force of his periods at the first reading.

III

Literature abounds in attempts to define literature.
One of the most strenuous and thorough-going defi-
nitions I have seen has lately been published by one
of our college professors — it is a most determined
attempt to corral the whole subject. ‘‘ Nothing be-
longs to real literature,” says the professor, “ unless
it consists of written words that constitute a carrying
statement which makes sense, arranged rhythmically,
euphoniously, and harmoniously, and so chosen as to
connote an adequate number of ideas and things, the
suggestion of which will call up in the reader sus-
tained emotions which do not produce undue ten-
sion, and in which the element of pleasure predomi-
nates, on the whole, over that of pain. Practically,’
the writer goes on to say, “every word of this de-
scription should be kept in our minds, so that we
may consciously apply it as a test to any piece of
writing about the literary character of which we are
in doubt.”

o

10 LITERARY VALUES

Fancy a reader, in his quest for the real article,
going about with this drag-net of a paragraph in his
mind. ‘Will the definition or description bear turning
around upon itself? Is it a good sample of literary
art? The exactness and literalness of science are
seldom permissible in literature. That a definition
of anything may have literary value it must possess
a certain indirect and imaginative character, as when
Carlyle defined poetry as the heroic of speech. Con-
trast with the above John Morley’s definition of lit-
erature: ‘All the books—and they are not so
many — where moral truth and human passion are
touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attrac-
tion of form.” This is much better literature, be-
cause the language is much more flexible and imagi-
native. It imparts more warmth to the mind; it is
more suggestive, while as a literary touchstone it is
just as available.

Good literature may be a much simpler thing
than our teachers would lead us to believe. The
prattle of a child may have rare literary value. The
little Parisian girl who, when asked by a lady the
price of the trinkets she offered for sale, replied,
“ Judge for yourself, madam; I have tasted no food
since yesterday,” expressed herself with consum-
mate art. If she had said simply, “‘ Whatever your
ladyship pleases to give,’ her reply would have
been graceful, but commonplace. By the personal
turn which she gave it, she added almost a lyrical
touch. When Thackeray changed the title of one
of his novels from “Scenes from Town Life,” or

LITERARY VALUES 11

some such title, to ‘“ Vanity Fair,” he achieved a
stroke of art, It is said that a now famous line of
Keats was first written thus:

“A thing of beauty is a continual joy.”

How the effect of the line was heightened by the
change of one word, and itself became “a joy for-
ever.” Poe, too, altered two lines of his with like
magical effect, when for

“To the beauty of fair Greece,
And the grandeur of old Rome,”

he wrote:

“To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.”

The phrase “ well of pure English” conveys the
same idea as “ well of English undefiled,” but how
much greater the artistic value of the latter than of
the former! Thus the literary value of a sentence
may turn upon a single word.

The everyday speech of the people is often full
of the stuff of which literature is made. No poet
could invent better epithets and phrases than abound
in the common vernacular. The sayings and pro-
verbs of a people are also, for the most part, of the
pure gold of literature.

One trouble with all definitions of literature is
that they proceed upon the theory that literature is
a definite something that may be determined by de-
finite tests like gold or silver, whereas it is more
like life or nature itself. It is not so much some-
thing as the visible manifestation of something; it

12 LITERARY VALUES

assumes infinite forms, and is of infinite degrees of
potency. ‘There is great literature, and there is fee-
ble and commonplace literature : a romance by Haw-
thorne and a novel by Haggard; a poem by Tenny-
son and a poem by Tupper; an essay by Emerson
and an essay by John Foster —all literature, all
touching the emotions and the imagination with
varying degrees of power, and yet separated by a
gulf. There are no degrees of excellence in gold or
silver, but there are all degrees of excellence in lit-
erature. How hard it is to tell what makes a true
poem, a lasting poem! When one asks himself
what it is, how many things arise, how hard to nar-
row the list down to a few things! Is it beauty ?
Then what is beauty? One meets with beautiful
poems every day that he never thinks of or recurs
to again. It is certain that without one thing there
is no real poetry — genuine passion. The fire came
down out of heaven and consumed Elijah’s offering
because Elijah was sincere. Plan and build your
poem never so deftly, mankind will not permanently
care for it unless it has genuine feeling. It must
be impassioned,

The genus Literature includes many species, as
novels, poems, essays, histories, etc., but our busi-
ness with them all is about the same — they are
books that we read for their own sake. We read
the papers for the news, we read a work of science
for the facts and the conclusions, but a work of lit-
erature is an end in and of itself. We read it for
the pleasure and the stimulus it affords us, apart from

LITERARY VALUES 13

any other consideration. It exhibits such a play
of mind and emotion upon the facts of life and na-
ture as results in our own mental and spiritual en-
tichment and edification.

Another thing is true of the best literature: we
cannot separate our pleasure and profit in the sub-
ject-matter from our pleasure and profit in the per-
sonality of the writer. We do not know whether
it is Hawthorne himself that we most delight in, or
his style and the characters and the action of his
romance. One thing is quite certain: where there is
no distinct personal flavor to the page, no stamp ofa
new individual force, we soon tire of it. The savor
of every true literary production comes from the
man himself. Hence, without attempting a formal
definition of literature, one may say that the literary
quality seems to arise from a certain vital relation of
the writer with subject-matter. It is his subject ; it
blends with the very texture of his mind; his rela-
tion to it is primary and personal, not secondary and
mechanical. The secret is not in any prescribed
arrangement of the words—it is in the quality
of mind or spirit that warms the words and shines
through them. A good book, says Milton, is the
precious life-blood of a master spirit. Unless there
is blood in it, unless the vital currents of a rare
spirit flow through it and vivify it, it has not the
gift of life.

In all good literature we have a sense of touching
something alive and real. The writer uses words
not as tools or appliances; they are more like his

14 LITERARY VALUES

hand or his eye or his ear— the living, palpable
body of his thought, the incarnation of his spirit.

The true writer always establishes intimate and
personal relations with his reader. He comes forth,
he is not concealed; he is immanent in his words,
we feel him, our spirits touch his spirit.

Style in letters is a quality of mind — a certain
flavor imparted to words by the personality back
of them. Pass language through one mind and it
is tasteless and colorless; pass it through another,
and it acquires an entirely new value and signifi-
cance and gives us a unique pleasure. In the one
case the sentences are artificial; in the other they
bud and sprout out of the man himself as naturally
as the plants and trees out of the soil.

There is nothing else in the world so sensitive
and chameleon-like as language; it takes on at once
the hue and quality of the mind that uses it. See
how neutral and impersonal, or old and worn and
faded the words look in the pages of some writers,
then see how drastic or new and individual they
become when a mind of another type marshals them
into sentences. What vigor and life in them! they
seem to have been newly coined since we last met
them. It is the test of a writer’s real worth — does
the language tarnish, as it were, in his hand, or is it
brightened and freshened in his use ?

A book may contain valuable truths and sound
sentiments of universal appeal, but if the literary
coinage is feeble, if the page is not strongly individu-
alized, freshly and clearly stamped by the purpose

LITERARY VALUES 15

of the writer, it cannot take rank as good litera-
ture. To become literature, truth must be perpet-
ually reborn, reincarnated, and begin life anew.

A successful utterance always has value, always
has truth, though in its purely intellectual aspects it
may not correspond with the truth as we see it. I
cannot accept all of Ruskin’s views upon our civili-
zation or all of Tolstoi’s upon art, yet I see that
they speak the truth as it defines itself to their
minds and feelings. A counter-statement may be
equally true. The struggle for existence goes on in
the ideal world as well as in the real. The strong-
est mind, the fittest statement, survives for the time
being. That a system of philosophy or religion
perishes or is laid aside is not because it is not or
was not true, but because it is not true to the new
minds and under the new conditions. It no longer
expresses what the world thinks and feels. It is
outgrown. Was not Calvinism true to our fathers ?
It is no longer true to us because we were born at a
later day in the world. With regard to truths of
science, we may say, once a truth always a truth,
because the world of fact and of things is always
under the same law, but the truth of sentiments and
emotions changes with changing minds and hearts.
The tree of life, unlike all other trees, bears differ-
ent fruit to each generation. What our fathers
found nourishing and satisfying in religion, in art,
in philosophy, we find tasteless and stale. Every
gospel has its day. The moral and intellectual hori-
zon of the race is perpetually changing.

16 LITERARY VALUES

Iv

In our modern democratic communities the moral
sense is no doubt higher than it was in the earlier
ages, while the artistic or esthetic sense is lower.
In the Athenian the artistic sense was far above the
moral; in the Puritan the reverse was the case.
The Latin races seem to have a greater genius for
art than the Teutonic, while the latter excel in vir-
tue. In this country, good taste exists in streaks
and spots, or sporadically here and there. There
does not seem to be enough to go around, or the
supply is intermittent. One writer has it and an-
other has it not, or one has it to-day and not to-mor-
row; one moment he writes with grace and simpli-
city, the next he falls into crudenesses or affectations.
There is not enough leaven to leaven the whole
lump. Some of our most eminent literary men, such
as Lowell and Dr. Holmes, are guilty of occasional
lapses from good taste, and probably in the work of
none of them do we see the thorough ripening and
mellowing of taste that mark the productions of
the older and more centralized European communi-
ties. One of our college presidents, writing upon a
serious ethical subject, allows himself such rhetoric as
this: “ Experiment and inference are the hook and
line by which Science fishes the dry formulas out of
the fiuid fact. Art, on the other hand, undertakes to
stock the stream with choice specimens of her own
breeding and selection.” We can hardly say of such
metaphors what Sainte-Beuve said of Montaigne’s,
namely, that they are of the kind that are never “ de-

LITERARY VALUES 17

tached from the thought,” but that they “ seize it
in its very centre, in its interior, and join and bind
it.”

v

The keener appreciation in Europe of literature
as a fine art is no doubt the main reason why Poe
is looked upon over there as our most noteworthy
poet. Poe certainly had a more consummate art
than any other American singer, and his productions
are more completely the outcome of that art. They
are literary feats. “The Raven” was as deliber-
ately planned and wrought out as is any piece of
mechanism. Its inspiration is verbal and technical.
“The truest poetry is most feigning,” says Touch-
stone, and this is mainly the conception of poetry
that prevails in European literary circles. Poe’s
poetry is artistic feigning, like good acting. It is
to that extent disinterested. He does not speak
for himself, but for the artistic spirit. He has
never been popular in this country, for the reason
that art, as such, is far less appreciated here than
abroad. The stress of life here is upon the moral
and intellectual elements much more than upon the
esthetic. We demand a message of the poet, or
that he shall teach us how to live. Poe had no
message but that of art; he made no contribution
to our stock of moral ideas; he made no appeal to
the conscience or manhood of the race; he did not
touch the great common workaday mind of our peo.
ple. He is more akin to the Latin than to the Anglo-

18 LITERARY VALUES

Saxon. Hence his deepest impression seems to have
been made upon the French mind. In all our New
England poets the voice of humanity, of patriot-
ism, of religious ideas, of strenuous moral purpose,
speaks. Art is subordinated to various human pas-
sions and emotions. In Poe alone are these emo-
tions subordinated to art. In Poe alone is the
effort mainly a verbal and technical one. In him
alone is the man lost in the artist. To evoke music
from language is his constant aim. No other Ameri-
can poet approaches him in this kind of verbal mastery,
in this unfettered creative technical power. In ease,
in splendor, in audacity, he is like a bird. One
may understand and admire him and not be touched
by him. To be moved to anything but admiration
is foreign to pure art. Would one make meat and
drink of it? Our reading is selfish, we seek our
own, we are drawn to the book that is going our
way. Can we appreciate beyond our own personal
tastes and needs? Can we see the excellence of the
impersonal and the disinterested ? We want to be
touched in some special and intimate way ; but art
touches us in a general and impersonal way. No
one could take to himself Shakespeare, or Milton’s
“ Lycidas,” or Keats’s odes as directed especially
to his own personal wants and aspirations, We for-
get ourselves in reading these things, and share for
the time the sentiment of pure art, which lives in
the universal. How crude the art of Whittier com-
pared with that of Poe, and yet Whittier has touched
and moved his countrymen, and Poe has not. There

LITERARY VALUES 19

is much more of the substance of character, of pa-
triotism, of strenuous New England life, in the one
than in the other. “Snow-Bound” is a metrical
transcript from experience; not a creation of the
imagination, but a touched-up copy from the mem-
ory. We cannot say this of “The Bells” or “The
Raven,” or of the work of Milton or Keats or Ten-
nyson. Whittier sings what he feels; it all has a
root in his own experience. The great poet feigns
the emotion and makes it real to us.

We complain of much current verse that it has
no feeling. The trouble is not that the poets feign,
but that the feigning is feeble; it begets no emo-
tion in us. It simulates, but does not stimulate.

It is not Wordsworth’s art that makes him great;
it is his profound poetic emotion when in the pre-
sence of simple, common things. Tennyson’s art, or
Swinburne’s art, is much finer, but the poetic emo-
tion back of it is less profound and elemental.

Emerson’s art is crude, but the stress of his poetic
emotion is great; the song is burdened with pro-
found meanings to our moral and spiritual nature.
Poe has no such burden; there is not one crumb of
the bread of life in him, but there is plenty of the
elixir of the imagination.

This passion for art, so characteristic of the Old
World, is seen in its full force in such a writer as
Flaubert. Flaubert was a devotee of the doctrine
of art for art’s sake, He cared nothing for mere
authors, but only for “ writers ; ”’ the work must be
the conscious and deliberate product of the author’s

20 LITERARY VALUES

literary and inventive powers, and in no way in-
volve his character, temperament, or personality.
The more it was written, the more it savored of de-
liberate plan and purpose, — in other words, the less
it was the product of fate, race, or of anything local,
individual, inevitable, — the more it pleased him.
Art, and not nature, was his aspiration. And this
view has more currency in Europe than in this
country. In some extreme cases it becomes what
one may fairly call the art disease. Baudelaire, for
instance, as quoted by Tolstoi, expressed a prefer-
ence for a painted woman’s face over one showing
its natural color, “and for metal trees and a theatri-
cal imitation of water, rather than real trees and
real water.”’ Thus does an overweening passion for
art degenerate into a love for the artificial for its
own sake. In the cultivation of letters there seems
always to be a danger that we shall come to value
things, not for their own sake, but for the literary
effects that may be wrought out of them. The
great artist, I take it, is primarily in love with life
and things, and not with art. On these terms alone
is his work fresh and stimulating and filled with
good arterial blood.

VI

Teaching literature is like teaching religion.
You can give only the dry bones of the matter in
either case. But the dry bones of theology are not
religion, and the dry bones of rhetoric are not liter-
ature. The flesh-and-blood reality is alone of value,

LITERARY VALUES 21

and this cannot be taught, it must be felt and ex-
perienced.

The class in literature studies an author’s sen-
tence - structure and paragraphing, and doubtless
could tell the author more about it than he knows
himself. The probabilities are that he never
thought a moment about his sentence-structure or
his paragraphing. He has thought only of his sub-
ject-matter and how to express himself clearly and
forcibly ; the structure of his sentences takes care
of itself. From every art certain rules and princi-
ples may be deduced, but the intelligent apprehen-
sion of those rules and principles no more leads to
mastery in that art, or even helps to mastery in it,
than a knowledge of the anatomy and the vital
processes of the stomach helps a man to digest his
dinner, or than the knowledge of the gunsmith
helps make a good marksman. In other words the
science of any art is of little use to him who would
practice that art. To be a fiddler you must fiddle
and see others fiddle; to be a painter you must paint
and study the painting of others; to be a writer
you must write and familiarize yourself with the
works of the best authors. Studying an author
from the outside by bringing the light of rhetoric to
bear upon him is of little profit. We must get in-
side of him, and we can only get inside of him
through sympathy and appreciation. There is only
one way to teach literature, only one vital way, and
that is by reading it. The laboratory way may
give one the dry bones of the subject, but not the

22 LITERARY VALUES

living thing itself. If the teacher, by his own liv-
ing voice and an occasional word of comment, can
bring out the soul of a work, he may help the stu-
dent’s appreciation of it; he may, in a measure, im-
part to him his own larger and more intelligent
appreciation of it. And that is a true service.
Young men and young women actually go to col-
lege to take a course in Shakespeare or Chaucer or
Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course be-
comes a mere knowledge course, as Professor Corson
suggests. My own first acquaintance with Milton was
through an exercise in grammar. We parsed “ Par-
adise Lost.’? Much of the current college study of
Shakespeare is little better than parsing him. The
minds of the pupils are focused upon every word
and line of the text, as the microscope is focused
upon a fly’s foot in the laboratory. The class prob-
ably dissects a frog or a star-fish one day, and a
great poet the next, and it does both in about the
same spirit. It falls upon one of these great plays
like hens upon a bone in winter: no meaning of
word or phrase escapes it, every line is literally picked
to pieces ; but of the poet himself, of that which makes
him what he is, his tremendous dramatic power,
how much do the students get? Very little, I fear.
They have had an intellectual exercise and not
an emotional experience. They have added to their
knowledge, but have not taken a step in culture.
To dig into the roots and origins of the great poets
is like digging into the roots of an oak or a maple,
the better to increase your appreciation of the beauty

LITERARY VALUES 23

of the tree. There stands the tree in all its sum-
mer glory ; will you really know it any better after
you have laid bare every root and rootlet ? There
stand Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer. Read
them, give yourself to them, and master them if
you are man enough. The poets are not to be ana-
lyzed, they are to be enjoyed; they are not to be
studied, but to be loved; they are not for knowledge,
but for culture — to enhance our appreciation of life
and our mastery over its elements. All the mere facts
about a poet’s work are as chaff compared with the
appreciation of one fine line or fine sentence. Why
study a great poet at all after the manner of the
dissecting-room ? Why not rather seek to make the
acquaintance of his living soul and to feel its power ?

The mere study of words, too, — of their origin
and history, or of the relation of your own language
to some other, — how little that avails! As little
asa knowledge of the making and tempering of a
sword would help a man to be a good swordsman.
What avails in literature is a quick and delicate
sense of the life and individuality of words — “a
sense practiced as a blind man’s touch,” or as a
musician’s ear, so that the magic of the true style
is at once felt and appreciated ; this, and an equally
quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality
of things. “Is there any taste in the white of an
egg ?”? No more is there in much merely correct
writing. There is the use of language as the vehicle
of knowledge, and there is the use of it as an in-
strument of the imagination. In Wordsworth’s line,

24 LITERARY VALUES

“ The last to parley with the setting sun,”
in Whitman’s sentence,
“Oh, waves, I have fingered every shore with you,”

in Emerson’s description of an Indian-summer day,
“the day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad
hills and warm, wide fields’? — in these and such
as these we see the imaginative use of words.

Most of the Dantean and Homeric and Shake-
spearean scholarship is the mere dust of time that
has accumulated upon these names. In the course
of years it will accumulate upon Tennyson, and
then we shall have Tennysonian scholars and learned
dissertations upon some insignificant detail of his
work. Think of the Shakespeareana with which liter-
ature is burdened! It is mostly mere shop litter
and dust. In certain moods I think one may be
pardoned for feeling that Shakespeare is fast becom-
ing a curse to the human race. Of mere talk about
him, it seems, there is to be no end. He has been
the host of more literary parasites probably than
any other name in history. He is edited and re-
edited as if a cubit could be added to his stature by
marginal notes and comments. On the contrary,
the result is, for the most part, like a mere growth
of underbrush that obscures the forest trees. The
reader’s attention is being constantly diverted from
the main matter —he is being whipped in the face
by insignificant twigs. Criticism may prune away
what obscures a great author, but what shall we
say when it obstructs the view of him by a multi-
tude of unimportant questions ?

LITERARY VALUES 25

The main aim of the teacher of literature should
be to train and quicken the student’s taste — his
sense of the fitness and proportion of things — till he
can detect the true from the false, or the excellent
from the common. There is but one way to learn
to detect the genuine from the counterfeit in any
department of life, and that ts by experience. Fa-
miliarize the student with the works of the real
masters of literature and you have safeguarded him
against the pretenders. After he has become ac-
quainted with the look and the ring of the pure gold
he is less likely to be imposed upon by the counterfeit.
The end here indicated cannot be reached by analy-
sis, or by a course in rhetoric and sentence struc-
ture, or by a microscopical examination of the writer’s
vocabulary, but by direct sympathetic intercourse
with the best literature, through the living voice,
or through your own silent perusal of it. The great
Dantean and Shakespearean scholar is usually the
outcome of a mental habit that would make Dante
and Shakespeare impossible.

So eminent a critic as Frederic Harrison is reported
as praising this sentence from the new British author
Maurice Hewlett: “In the milk of October dawns
her calm brows had been dipped.” The instructor
in literature should be able to show his class why
this is not good literature. The suggestion of brows
dipped in milk is nota pleasant one. One cannot
conceive of any brow the beauty of which would be
enhanced by it, even by the milk of October dawns,
if there were anything in October dawns that in the

26 LITERARY VALUES

remotest way suggested milk. Mr. Hewlett is so in
love with a crisp style that he describes his heroine
as lying white and twisting on a couch, crisping and
uncrisping her little hands.

Such things come from straining after novelty.
They proceed from an unripe taste. Men of real
genius and power are at times guilty of such lapses,
or go astray in quest of novel images. Walter
Bagehot sometimes did. Writing of Sydney Smith,
his rhetoric shows its teeth in this fashion: ‘ Writ-
ers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders ;
Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long
sharp argument into the interior of a question; he did
not, in the common phrase, go deeply into it; but he
kept it steadily under the contact of a strong, capable,
jawlike understanding, pressing its surface, effacing
its intricacies, grinding it down.” Such a comparison
has the merit of being vivid; it also has the demerit
of an unworthy alliance, —it marries the noble and
the ignoble. You cannot lift mastication up to the
level of intellectual processes, and to seriously compare
the two is to degrade the latter. Sydney Smith him-
self could not have been guilty of such bad taste.

Let me finish this chapter with a bit of prose
from Ben Jonson.

“Some words are to be culled out for ornament
and color, as we gather flowers to strow houses or
make garlands; but they are better when they
grow to our style; as in a meadow where, though
the mere grass and greenness delight, yet the variety
of flowers doth heighten and beautify.”

II
ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE

L HAVE never seen any thorough examination of

the grounds of analogy. The works on logic
make but slight reference to them, yet the argument
from analogy is one of the most frequent forms of
argument, and one of the most convincing. It is
so much easier to captivate the fancy with a pretty
or striking figure than to move the judgment with
sound reasons,—so much easier to be rhetorical
than to be logical.

We say that seeing is believing; the rhetorician
makes us see the thing; his picture appeals to the
mind’s visual sense, hence his power over us, though
his analogies are more apt to be false than true.
We love to see these agreements between thoughts
and things, or between the subjective and the ob-
jective worlds, and a favorite thought with profound
minds in all ages has been the identity or oneness
which runs through creation.

“A vast similitude interlocks all,” says Whit-
man, “spans all the objects of the universe and com-
pactly holds and encloses them.”

Everywhere in Nature Emerson said he saw the
figure of a disguised man. The method of the uni-

28 LITERARY VALUES

verse is intelligible to us because it is akin to our
own minds. Our minds are rather akin to it and
are derived from it. Emerson made much of this
thought. The truth here indicated is undoubtedly
the basis of all true analogy — this unity, this one-
ness of creation; but the analogies that ‘are con-
stant and pervade Nature ” are probably not so nu-
merous as Emerson seemed to fancy. Thus one can
hardly agree with him that there is “ intent ” of ana-
logy between man’s life and the seasons, because
the seasons are not a universal fact of the globe, and
man’s life is. The four seasons are well defined in
New England, but not in Ecuador.

The agreement of appearances is one thing, the
identity of law and essence is another, and the agree-
ment of man’s life with the seasons must be consid-
ered accidental rather than intentional.

Language is full of symbols. We make the
world without a symbol of the world within. We
describe thoughts, and emotions, in the terms of an
objective experience. Things furnish the moulds in
which our ideas are cast. Size, proportion, mass,
vista, vastness, height, depth, darkness, light, coarse,
fine, centre, surface, order, chaos, and a thousand
other terms, we apply alike to the world without
and to the world within. We know a higher temper-
ance than concerns the body, a finer digestion and
assimilation than go on in it.

Our daily conversation is full of pictures and par-
ables, or the emblematic use of things. From life
looked at as a voyage, we get the symbolic use of

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 29

anchor, compass, pole-star, helm, haven; from life
considered as a battle, we read deep meanings in
shield, armor, fencing, captain, citadel, panic, onset.
Life regarded under the figure of husbandry gives
us the expressive symbols of seedtime and harvest,
planting and watering, tares and brambles, pruning
and training, the chaff and the wheat. We talk in
parables when we little suspect it. What various
applications we make of such words as dregs, gutter,
eclipse, satellite, hunger, thirst, kindle, brazen, echo,
and hundreds of others. We speak of the reins of
government, the sinews of war, the seeds of rebel-
lion, the morning of youth, the evening of age, a
flood of emotion, the torch of truth, burning with
resentment, the veil of secrecy, the foundations of
character, a ripple of laughter, incrusted dogmas,
corrosive criticism. We say his spirits drooped, his
mind soared, his heart softened, his brow darkened,
his reputation was stabbed, he clinched his argu-
ment. We say his course was beset with pitfalls,
his efforts were crowned with success, his eloquence
was a torrent that carried all before it, and so on.
Burke calls attention to the metaphors that are
taken from the sense of taste, as a sour temper, bit-
ter curses, bitter fate; and, on the other hand, a
sweet person, a sweet experience, and the like.
Other epithets are derived from the sense of touch,
as a soft answer, a polished character, a cold recep-
tion, a sharp retort, a hard problem; or from the
sense of sight, as brilliant, dazzling, color, light,
shade; others from our sense of hearing, as discord-

30 LITERARY VALUES

ant, echoing, reverberating, booming, grumbling.
All trades, pursuits, occupations, furnish types or
symbols for the mind. The word “ whitewash”
has become a very useful one, especially to political
parties. Thoreau said he would not be as one who
drives a nail into mere lath and plaster. Even the
railroad has contributed useful terms, as side-tracked,
down brakes, the red flag, way station, etc. Great
men are like through trains that connect far-distant
points; others are merely locals. From the builder
we get the effective phrase and idea of scaffolding.
So much in the world is mere scaffolding, so much
in society is mere varnish and veneer. Life is said
to have its “‘seamy side.” The lever and the ful-
crum have their supersensuous uses. The chemist
with his solvents, precipitants, crystallizations, attrac-
tions, and repulsions, and the natural philosopher
with his statics and dynamics and his correlation of
forces, have enlarged our powers of expression. The
strata of the geologist furnish useful symbols. What
a significant symbol is afforded by the wave! There
is much in life, in history, and in all nature that is
typified by it. We have cold waves and hot waves,
and in the spring and fall migrations of the birds
we have “bird waves.” Earthquake shocks go in
waves and circles; how often our views and concep-
tions of things are expressed by the circle! Itisa
symbol of most profound meaning. It helps us to
understand how the universe is finally inexplicable ;
that there is neither beginning nor end, and that it
retreats forever into itself.

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 31

‘We speak of currents of thought, of opinion, of
influence, and of tides in the affairs of men. We
can conceive of these things under no better figure.
Fire and all that pertains to it give us symbols, as
heat, light, flame, sparks, smoke.

The words juicy, unctuous, fluid, have obvious
appropriateness when applied to the mind and its
products. Running water gives us the delightful
epithets limpid and lucid. Youth is plastic, ductile,
impressible — neither the mind nor the body has
yet hardened. The analogy is vital. A habit gets
deeper and deeper hold of us; we fall into a rut —
these figures convey the exact truth.

When used as a symbol how expressive is the
dawn, the twilight, the sunset! The likeness is not
accidental but fundamental.

The calm that comes after the storm in human
life as in nature — how true the analogy. To
give vent to things, how significant. To give vent
to angry feelings in words, how like giving vent to
smothered fire; or to any suppressed and confined
force: the words come faster and hotter, the passion
of anger mounts and there is a “ blow out” indeed.
Deny yourself the first word, and the conflagration
is avoided. A passion can be smothered as liter-
ally as a fire.

The use of metaphor, comparison, analogy is two-
fold—to enliven and to convince; to illustrate
and enforce an accepted truth, and to press home
and clinch one in dispute. An apt figure will put
a new face upon an old and much worn truism,

32 LITERARY VALUES

and a vital analogy may reach and move the reason.
Thus when Renan, referring to the decay of the old
religious beliefs, says that people are no poorer for
being robbed of false bank notes and bogus shares,
his comparison has a logical validity, —as has also
Herbert Spencer’s figure when he says, “ The illusion
that great men and great events came oftener in early
times than now is partly due to historical perspec-
tive. As in a range of equidistant columns the far-
thest off look the closest, so the conspicuous objects
of the past seem more thickly clustered the more
remote they are.” We seem to see the identity of
law in both these cases. We are treated to a pic-
torial argument.

We are using analogy in a legitimate and forceful
way when we speak of our fund or capital of bodily
health and strength, and of squandering or impairing
it, or of investing it poorly.

The accidental analogies or likenesses are limit-
less and are the great stock in trade of most writers
and speakers. They tickle the fancy and enliven
the page or the discourse. But essential analogies,
or those that spring from unity of law, are more
rare. These have the force of logic; they shed a
steady light.

St. Paul’s famous comparison of the body dead
and buried with the seed in the soil, which, he says,
dies before it can grow, is used with logical intent.
But will it bear examination? Is the germinating
seed dead in any sense that the body is dead ? It is
no more dead than the egg buried beneath the mo-

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 33

ther hen is dead. When the egg really dies we
know the result, as we know the result when the
corn rots in the ground. It is not dissolution that
the seed experiences, but evolution. The illustra-
tion of the eloquent apostle may captivate the fancy,
but as argument designed to convince the under-
standing it has no force.

There might be force in the argument for immor-
tality drawn from the metamorphosis of the grub
into the butterfly, if the chrysalis really were a
shroud and held a dead body. But it is not, any
more than an egg is; it is quick, and capable of
movement. The analogy between it and the dead
body will not hold. A much more sound analogy,
based upon the chrysalis, is that which takes it as
the type of a mind or soul undeveloped, — slumber-
ing, gestating, — and the winged creature as the de-
veloped, emancipated mind,

Analogy means an agreement of relations or an
equality of ratios.

When we speak of the body as a tenement and
the soul as the tenant, we mean or aver that the re-
lation of the soul to the body is the same as that
of the man to the house he occupies. In either case
the occupant can move out or in, and is entirely dis-
tinct from the structure that shelters him. But if
we know anything about the relations of the mind
and the body, we know that they are not like this;
we know that they are not truthfully expressed in
this comparison.

Bishop Butler’s “analogy from nature,’ upon

34 LITERARY VALUES

which he built his famous work, will not any better
bear close examination. What analogy is there be-
tween death and sleep or a swoon? what agreement
of ratios ? The resemblance is entirely superficial.
Or how can we predict another sphere of existence
for man because another sphere awaits the unborn
infant ? But another sphere does not await the un-
born infant; only new and different relations to the
same physical sphere. An embryo implies a future ;
but what is there embryonic about the mature man ?

This breakdown of Butler’s argument in regard to
a future life was pointed out by Matthew Arnold;
the very point in dispute, namely, a future life, is
assumed. If there is a future life, if there is another
world, it doubtless bears some analogy to this. In
like manner, if there are fairies and nymphs and
demigods, it is not improbable to suppose that they
bear some resemblance to human beings, but shall
we assume their actual existence upon such a proba-
bility ?

That the unborn child starting as a bit of proto-
plasmic jelly should become a man, a Napoleon, or
a Shakespeare, may be quite as startling a fact as
the assumption of a future existence; yet the former
is a matter of experience, which lends no color to
the truth of the latter. It is not a matter of reason
that babes become men, but a matter of observation
and experience. Indeed, in Butler’s famous argu-
ment, the analogy of nature is everywhere forced
and falsified. In every case he puts the words into
her mouth that he would have her speak. His faith

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 35

supplies him with the belief in a future life, and in
a moral governor of the universe, and then he seeks
to confirm or to demonstrate the truth of this faith
by an appeal to the analogy of nature.

Out of this whirling, seething, bubbling universe
of warring and clashing forces man has emerged.
How impossible it all seems to reason! Experience
alone tells us that it is true. Upon the past history
of the earth and of the race of man we may pre-
dict astonishing changes and transformations for the
future of both, because the continuity of cause and
effect is not broken; but the perpetuity of the ““me”
and the “you” is not implied. All that is implied
is the perpetuity of the sum of physical forces. But
as to the future of the individual, standing upon the
past or upon the present, what are we safe in affirm-
ing? Only this—that as we had a beginning we
shall have an ending; that as yesterday we were
not, so to-morrow we shall not be. A man is like
the electric spark that glows and crackles for an in-
stant between two dark, silent, inscrutable eternities.
The fluid is not lost, but that tiny bolt has come
and gone. Darkness and silence before; darkness
and silence after. I do not say this is the summing
up of the whole question of immortality. I only
mean to say that this is where the argument from
analogy lands us.

We can argue from the known to the unknown in
a restricted way. We do this in life and in science
continually. We do not know that the fixed stars
have worlds revolving about them ; yet the presump-

36 LITERARY VALUES

tion, based upon our own solar system, is that they
have. But could we infer other suns, from the ex-
istence of our own, were no others visible? Could
we predict the future of the earth did we not know
its past, or read aright its past did we not know its
present state? From an are we can complete a cir-
cle. We can read the big in the little. The mo-
tion of a top throws light upon the motion of the
earth. An ingenious mind finds types everywhere,
but real analogies are not so common.

The likeness of one thing with another may be
valid and real, but the likeness of a thought with a
thing is often merely fanciful. We very frequently
unconsciously counterfeit external objects and laws
in the region of mind and morals. Out of a physi-
cal fact or condition we fabricate a mental or spirit-
ual condition or experience to correspond. Thus a
current journal takes the fact that the sun obscures
but does not put out the light of the moon and the
stars, and from it draws the inference that the light
of science may dim but cannot blot out the objects of
faith. It counterfeits this fact and seeks to give it
equal force and value in the spiritual realm. The
objects of faith may be as real and as unquenchable
as the stars, but this is the very point in dispute, and
the analogy used assumes the thing to be proved. If
the objects of faith are real, then the light of science
will not put them out any more than the sun puts
out the stars; but the fact that the stars are there,
notwithstanding the sunlight, proves nothing with
regard to the reality of the objects of faith. The

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 37

only real analogy that exists in the case is between
the darkness and the daylight of the world within
and the darkness and the daylight of the world
without. Science, or knowledge, is light; ignorance
is darkness; there are no other symbols thatso fully
and exactly express these things. The mind sees,
science lets in the light, and the darkness flees.

If there is anything in our inward life and expe-
rience that corresponds or is analogous to the night
with its stars, it is to be found in that withdrawal
from the noise and bustle of the world into the
atmosphere of secluded contemplation. If there
are any stars in your firmament, you will find them
then. But, after all, how far the stars of religion
and philosophy are subjective, or of our own crea-
tion, is always a question.

I recently met with the same fallacy in a leading
article in one of the magazines. ‘“‘ The fact revealed
by the spectroscope,” says the writer, “that the
physical elements of the earth exist also in the stars,
supports the faith that a moral nature like our own
inhabits the universe.” A tremendous leap — a
leap from the physical to the moral. We know
that these earth elements are found in the stars by
actual observation and experience. We see them as
truly as we see the stars themselves; but a moral
nature like our own — this is assumed and is not
supported at all by analogy. The only legitimate
inference from the analogy is, that as our sun has
planets and that these planets, or one of them at
least, is the abode of life, so these other suns in

38 LITERARY VALUES

composition like our own, and governed by laws like
our own, have planets revolving around them which
are or may be the abode of beings like ourselves.
If this “ moral nature like our own”’ pervades our
system, then the inference is just that it also per-
vades the other systems. But to argue from physi-
cal elements to moral causes is to throw upon ana-
logy more than it will bear.

Analogy is a kind of rule of three: we must have
three terms to find the fourth. We argue from the
past to the present and from the present to the
future. Things that begin must end. If man’s life
has been continuous in the past, then we may infer
that it will be continuous in the future.

Our earth has a moon ; it is reasonable, there-
fore, to suppose that some of the other planets have
moons. It is reasonable to suppose that there are
other planets and suns and systems, myriads of them.
It may be reasonable to think with Sir Robert Ball
that the extinct or dark and burnt-out bodies in
the sky exceed in numbers the luminous ones, as the
non-luminous bodies exceed the luminous ones upon
the earth. No man has seen live steam; when it
can be seen it is dead; yet we know that it exists.

We may complete a circle from a small segment
of it. If we have two sides of a triangle, we may
add the third. To find the value of an unknown
quantity, we must have a complete equation and as
many equations as we have unknown quantities.
We can argue from this life to the future life only
after proof that there is a future life.

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 39

Professor Drummond was able to show the con-
tinuity of natural law in the spiritual world by as-
suming that a spiritual world which was the counter-
part of the physical world actually existed. That
Calvinism in its main tenets tallies, or seems to
tally, with science is no more proof of the literal
truth of those tenets than the ascribing of human
form and features to the man in the moon is proof
of the existence of such a man. Our minds, our
spirits, are no doubt in a way under the same law as
are our bodies, because they are the outcome of our
bodies and our bodies are the outcome of material
nature ; but to base upon that fact the existence of a
corresponding world and life after death is to leap
beyond the bounds of all possible analogy.

Many of the dogmas of theology have a grain of
natural truth in them. This does not prove their
truth, as applicable to some hypothetical other
world, but as applied to this world. The kingdom
of heaven, as the founder of Christianity taught, is
not yonder and of to-morrow, but is now and here.

Tolstoi, I think, is guilty of false analogy when,
in attempting to get rid of the idea of pleasure as
the aim and purpose of art, he makes the compari-
son with food, and says that pleasure is no more the
end in eating than it is in painting, or poetry, or
music. The analogy is false because the necessities
of our bodies are not to be compared with the luxu-
ries, so to speak, of our minds. We cannot live
without food, but we can and do live without art.
And yet, do we not eat because the food tastes good ?

40 LITERARY VALUES

Is not the satisfaction of appetite the prime motive in
eating ? If dining gave us no pleasure, we should
probably soon learn to swallow our food in a highly
concentrated form, in capsules, and thus make short
work of it. Nature, of course, conceals her own pur-
pose in the pleasure we take in our food, just as she
does in the pleasure of the sexes; but of this pur-
pose we take little thought, except in the latter case
how to defeat it. We do not have conscious plea-
sure in breathing ; hence our breathing is involuntary.
We do have conscious pleasure in food; hence our
elaborate and ingenious cookery — often to the detri-
ment of our bodies. Take away the pleasures of life,
the innocent natural pleasure, take away the plea-
sures of art, and few of us would care for either.
Man is a microcosm, an epitome of the universe,
and its laws and processes are repeated dimly or
plainly in him. Then there are, of course, real ana-
logies and homologies between different parts of na-
ture, as between fluids and gases, and fluids and
solids, between the organic and the inorganic, be-
tween the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.
When we strike the great vital currents or laws,
— the law of growth, of decay, of health and disease,
of reproduction, of evolution, — we strike the re-
gion of true analogy. These laws must be continu-
ous throughout nature. All phases of development
must be analogous. The mind grows with the body
and is under the same law. Exercise is the same to
both. Each has its appetites. Each has its tonics
and stimulants. All beginnings are the same; that

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 41

is, from a germ. Language must have begun in
the most rudimentary sounds. Art, we know, be-
gan in the most rude and simple marks and signs;
science in the crudest, simplest facts; religion in
childish superstition ; and so on through the whole
scope of human development. Development is al-
ways from the simple to the complex.

There is, no doubt, a deep-seated analogy between
the growth of the individual and the growth of the
state or nation ; between revolutions in history, and
storms and convulsions in nature.

We speak of the root of the matter; everything
really has its root, its obscure beginning, its hidden
underground processes.

There are types and suggestions everywhere —
fresh fuel checks the fire; the soft stone cuts the
steel the fastest; the first big drops of the shower
raise the dust.

The analogy between the development of animal
life upon the earth and the growth of organized
communities seems complete. In the lower forms of
life, there is no specialization, or division of func-
tions. The ameba can move, feel, digest, reproduce
in every part of its structure; it is not differen-
tiated or specialized; so in the rudest tribes, there
is little division of labor. As animal life develops,
each part of the body has a function of its own; and
as communities develop, extreme specialization takes
place. Organic life goes from the simple to the
complex, as does progress in human affairs. This
is the law of all growth.

42 LITERARY VALUES

When Schopenhauer says “riches are like sea
water; the more you drink the thirstier you be-
come,” the mind is instantly pleased by the force
and aptness of the comparison, and for the moment
we look upon riches as something to be avoided.
But is the analogy entirely true? Sea water is to
be avoided altogether, even a single mouthful of it;
but even Schopenhauer defends riches and the pur-
suit of riches. “ People are often reproached for
wishing for money above all things, and for loving
it more than anything else; but it is natural and
even inevitable for people to love that which, like
an unwearied Proteus, is always ready to turn it-
self into whatever object their wandering wishes or
manifold desires may for the moment fix upon.”
Here the comparison will bear a closer scrutiny.
Wealth is indeed a Proteus that will take any form
your fancy may choose. “ Other things are only
relatively good,’ the great pessimist further says;
“money alone is absolutely good, because it is not
only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particu-
lar; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.’ What,
then, becomes of its analogy to sea water, which
so mocks and inflames our thirst ? Even the re-
semblance in the one particular that Schopenhauer
had in mind is not true. To the great majority of
people wealth brings a degree of satisfaction; they
give over its pursuit and seek the enjoyment of it,
When a man enters into the race for wealth, he is
unflagging in seeking it as long as his cup of life is
full; but when the limits of his powers are reached,

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 43

he begins to lose interest, and the appetite for gold,
as for other things, declines.

When the same philosopher says that to measure
a man’s happiness only by what he gets, and not
also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to
try to express a fraction which shall have a numera-
tor but no denominator, he uses a figure that con-
veys the truth much more fully. It may be open
to the objection of being too technical, but it ex-
presses a real relation for all that. When you in-
crease your expectations, you increase your denom-
inator ; and as most men expect or want more than
they have, human happiness is nearly always a frac-
tion — rarely is it a whole number. With many it
is a very small fraction indeed. Blessed is he who
expects little. The man who expects ten and gets
but five is more to be envied than he who expects
a thousand and gets but fifty. He is nearer the sum of
his wishes. Hence the truth of the old saying that
it is our wants that make us poor. When a piece
of good fortune that he did not expect comes to a
man, his happiness or satisfaction is no longer a
fraction ; it is-more than a unit.

Quintilian says that the early blossom of talent is
rarely followed by the fruit of great achievement, but
the early works of a man or a youth are just as
much fruit as his later ones. ‘There is really no
analogy between the early works of an author and
the blossoms of a tree. The dreams, the visions,
the aspirations of youth are more like blossoms.
Probably no great man has been without them; but

44 LITERARY VALUES

how they wither and fall, and how much more sober
the aspect which life puts on before any solid
achievements can be pointed to! There is usually
something more fresh and pristine about the earlier
works of a man—more buoyancy, more unction,
more of the “ fluid and attaching character ;”’ but
the ripest wisdom always goes with age.

There are, no doubt, many strict and striking ana-
logies between the mind and the body, their growth
and decay, their health and disease, their assimila-
tive, digestive, and reproductive processes.

The mind is only a finer body. It is hardly a
figure of speech to speak of wounded feelings, of
a wounded spirit. How acute at first, and how
surely healing with time. But the scar remains.
Then there are real analogies, real parallels, be-
tween the mind and outward nature, in the laws
of growth and decay, nutrition and reproduction.
“The mind of Otho,” says Tacitus, “ was not, like
his body, soft and effeminate.” There are minds
that are best described by the word masculine, and
others by the word feminine. There are dull,
sluggish minds, just as there are heavy, sluggish
bodies, and the two usually go together. There
are dry, lean minds, and there are minds full of
unction and juice. We even use the phrase “ men-
tal dyspepsia,” but the analogy here implied is prob-
ably purely fanciful, though mental dissipation and
mental intemperance are no idle words. Some per-
sons acquire the same craze for highly exciting and
stimulating mental food that others have for strong

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 45

drink, or for pepper and other condiments. They
lose their taste for simple, natural, healthful things,
— for good sound literature, — and crave sensational
novels and the Sunday newspapers. Doubtless a
large part of the reading of the American people to-
day is sheer mental dissipation, and is directed by
an abnormal craving for mental excitement. There
is degeneration in the physical world, and there is
degeneration, strictly so called, in the intellectual
world. There are proportion, relation, cause and
effect, health and disease, in one as in the other.
Logic is but the natural relation of parts as we see
them in the organic world. In fact, logic is but
health and proportion. The mind cannot fly any
more than the body can; it progresses from one
fact or consideration to another, step by step, though
often, or perhaps generally, we are not conscious of
the steps. A large view of truth may be suddenly
revealed to the mind, as of a landscape from a
hill-top; but the mind did not fly to the vantage
ground; it reached it by a slow and maybe obscure
process.

The world is simpler than we think. The modes
and processes of things widely dissimilar are more
likely to be identical than we suspect. There are
homologies where we see apparent contradiction.
There is but one protoplasm for animal and vege-
table. A little more or less heat makes the gaseous,
makes the liquid, makes the solid. Lava crystal-
lizes or freezes at a high temperature ; water, at alow
one; mercury, at a still lower. Charcoal and the

46 LITERARY VALUES

diamond are one; the same law of gravitation which
makes the cloud float makes the rain fall. The law
that spheres a tear spheres a globe. These facts
warrant us in looking for real homologies, vital cor-
respondences, in nature. Only such correspondences
give logical and scientific value to analogy. If the
likeness means identity of law, or is the same prin-
ciple in another disguise, then it is an instrument
of truth. We might expect to find many analogies
between air and water, the atmosphere being but
a finer ocean; also between ice and water, and be-
tween ice and the stratified rocks. If water flows,
then will ice flow ; if ice bends, then will the rocky
strata bend. If cross fertilization is good in the
vegetable world, we should expect to find it good in
the animal world.

There is thought to be a strict analogy between
the succession of plants in different months of the
year and the prevalence of different diseases at dif-
ferent seasons. The germ theory of disease gives
force to the comparison. The different species of
germs no doubt find some periods of the year more
favorable to their development than others.

If on this planet men walk about while trees are
rooted to the ground, we may reasonably expect that
the same is true — provided that on them there are
men and trees — ofall other planets. If the law of
variation, and the survival of the fittest, are the laws
of one species, then they will prove to be the laws of
all. The bud is a kind of seed; the fruit is a kind
of leaf. High culture has the same effect upon man

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 47

and animals that it has upon plants, —it lessens
the powers of reproduction. The lowest organisms
multiply by myriads; the higher barely keep from
retrograding. A wild apple is full of seeds; ina
choice pippin the seeds are largely abortive. Indeed,
all weeds and parasites seem bent on filling the world
with their progeny, while the higher forms fall off
and tend to extinction. Such agreements and corre-
spondences point to identity of law. The analogy
is vital.

In the animal economy there are analogies with
outward nature. Thus respiration is a kind of com-
bustion. Life itself is a kind of fire which goes out
when it has no fuel to feed upon. The foliage of a
tree has functions like those of the lungs of an ani-
mal. Darwin has noted the sleep of plants and
their diurnal motions. Dr. Holmes had a bold fancy
that trees are animals, with their tails in the air
and their heads in the ground ; but there is nothing in
the trunk and branches of a tree analogous to a tail,
though there is a sort of rudimentary intelligence in
the root, as Darwin has shown. We use the tree as
a symbol of the branching of a family; hence the
family tree. But the analogy is not a true one.
The branches of a family multiply and diverge when
traced backward the same as forward. You had two
parents, they had four, these four had eight, and so
on. Ifthe human race sprang from one pair, then
are its branchings more a kind of network, an end-
less multiplication of meshes. All the past appears
to centre in you, and all the future to spring from

48 LITERARY VALUES

you. We get the family tree only by cutting out a
fragment of this network.

There is little doubt that certain natural laws
pervade alike both mind and matter. The law of
evolution is universally operative, and is the key to
development in the moral and intellectual world no
less than in the physical. We are probably, in all
our thoughts and purposes, much more under the
dominion of universal natural laws than we suspect.
The will reaches but a little way. I have no doubt
that the race of man bears a definite relation to the
life of the globe, — that is, to its age, its store of
vitality ; that it will culminate as the vital power
of the earth culminates, and decline as it declines.
Like man, the earth has had its youth, —its nebu-
lous, fiery, molten youth; then its turbulent, luxuri-
ant, copious, riotous middle period; then its placid,
temperate, ripe later age, when the higher forms
emerge upon the scene. The analogy is deep and
radical. The vital energy of the globe was once
much more rampant and overflowing than it is now;
the time will come when the pulse of the planet will
be much feebler than it is now. Youth and age,
growth and decay, are universal conditions. The
heavens themselves shall wax old as doth a garment,
Life and death are universal conditions, and to fancy
a place where death is not is to fancy one’s self
entirely outside of this universe and of all possible
universes.

Men in communities and assemblages are under
laws that do not reach or affect the single individ-

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 49

ual, just as vast bodies of water respond to attrac-
tions and planetary perturbations that do not affect
the lesser bodies. Men kindle one another as do fire-
brands, and beget a collective heat and an enthusi-
asm that tyrannize over the individual purposes and
wills. We say things are in the air, that a spirit is
abroad ; that is, that influences are at work above
the wills and below the consciousness of the people.
There are changes or movements in the world and
in the communities that seem strictly analogous to
drifting ; it is as when a ship is carried out of its
course by unsuspected currents, or as when arctic.
explorers, with their faces set northward, are uncon-
sciously carried in the opposite direction by the ice
floe beneath them. The spirit of the age, or the
time-spirit, is always at work, and takes us with
it, whether we know it or not. For instance, the
whole religious world is now drifting away from the
old theology, and drifting faster than we suspect.
Certain zealots have their faces very strongly set
against it, but, like Commodore Parry on the ice
floe, they are going south faster than their efforts are
carrying them north. Indeed, the whole sentiment
of the race is moving into a more genial and tem-
perate theological climate, away from purgatorial
fires rather than toward them.

The political sentiment of a country also drifts.
That of our own may be said to have been drifting
for some time now in the direction of freer commer-
cial intercourse with other nations.

A man’s life may stagnate as literally as water may

50 LITERARY VALUES

stagnate, and just as motion and direction are the
remedy for one, so purpose and activity are the rem-
edy for the other. Movement is the condition of
life, anyway. Set the currents going in the air, in
the water, in the body, in the mind, in the commu-
nity, and a healthier condition will follow. Change,
diversity, activity, are the prime conditions of life
and health everywhere. Persons with doubts and
perplexities about life go to work to ameliorate some
of its conditions, and their doubts and perplexities
vanish — not because their problems are solved, as
they think they are, but because their energies have
found an outlet, the currents have been set going,
Persons of strong will have few doubts and uncer-
tainties. They do not solve the problems, but they
break the spell of their enchantment. Nothing re-
lieves and ventilates the mind like a resolution.

A true work of art is analogous to a living organ-
ism. ‘The essential condition of art creations,”
says Renan, ‘‘is to form a living system every por-
tion of which answers and demands every other. .. .
The intimate laws of life, of the development of
organic products, and of the toning down of shades
must be considered at every step.”” Works such as
certain of Victor Hugo’s, which have no organic
unity and proportion, are, according to this dictum,
monstrosities.

When Matthew Arnold insisted upon it that in
all vital prose there is a process of evolution, he
enunciated the same principle as did Renan. We
all know well that which is organic in books as dis-

ANALOGY — TRUE AND FALSE 51

tinguished from the inorganic, the vital as distin-
guished from the mechanical. Read the learned
address of the president of some local scientific or
literary society, and then turn to one of Professor
Huxley’s trenchant papers. The difference is just
that between weapons in an armory and weapons in
the hands of trained soldiers. Huxley’s will and
purpose, or his personality, pervade and vitalize his
material and make it his own, while the learned
president sustains only an accidental and mechanical
relation to what he has to say. Happy is the writer
who can lop off or cut out from his page everything
to which he sustains only a secondary and mechani-
eal relation.

The summing up of the matter would then seem
to be, that there is an analogy of rhetoric and an
analogy of science; a likeness that is momentary
and accidental, giving rise to metaphor and parable ;
and a correspondence that is fundamental, arising
from the universality of law.

TIT

STYLE AND THE MAN
I

ree difference between a precious stone and a
common stone is not an essential difference —
not a difference of substance, but of arrangement of
the particles — the crystallization. In substance char-
coal and the diamond are one, but in form and effect
how widely they differ. The pearl contains nothing
that is not found in the coarsest oyster shell.

Two men have the same thoughts ; they use about
the same words in expressing them; yet with one
the product is real literature, with the other it is a
platitude.

The difference is all in the presentation ; a finer
and more compendious process has gone on in the
one case than in the other. The elements are bet-
ter fused and welded together; they are in some
way heightened and intensified. Is not here a clue
to what we mean by style? Style transforms com-
mon quartz into an Egyptian pebble. We are apt
to think of style as something external, that can be
put on, something in and of itself. But it is not;
it is in the inmost texture of the substance. Choice
words, faultless rhetoric, polished periods, are only

STYLE AND THE MAN 53

the accidents of style. Indeed, perfect workman-
ship is one thing; style, as the great writers have
it, is quite another. It may, and often does, go
with faulty workmanship. It is the use of words
in a fresh and vital way, so as to give us a vivid
sense of a new spiritual force and personality. In
the best work the style is found and hidden in the
matter.

If a writer does not bring a new thought, he must
at least bring a new quality, — he must give a fresh,
new flavor to the old thoughts. Style or quality
will keep a man’s work alive whose thought is es-
sentially commonplace, as is the case with Addison ;
and Arnold justly observes of the poet Gray that
his gift of style doubles his force and “raises him to
a rank beyond what his natural richness and power
seem to warrant.”

There is the correct, conventional, respectable and
scholarly use of language of the mass of writers, and
there is the fresh, stimulating, quickening use of
it of the man of genius. How apt and racy and
telling is often the language of unlettered persons ;
the born writer carries this same gift into a higher
sphere. There is a passage in one of Emerson’s
early letters, written when he was but twenty-four,
and given by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, which shows
how clearly at that age Emerson discerned the secret
of good writing and good preaching.

“T preach half of every Sunday. When I at-
tended church on the other half of a Sunday, and
the image in the pulpit was all of clay, and not of

54 LITERARY VALUES

tunable metal, I said to myself that if men would
avoid that general language and general manner in
which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and
would say only what is uppermost in their own
minds, after their own individual manner, every
man would be interesting. . . . But whatever pro-
perties a man of narrow intellect feels to be peculiar
he studiously hides; he is ashamed or afraid of him-
self, and all his communications to men are unskill-
ful plagiarisms from the common stock of thought
and knowledge, and he is of course flat and tire-
some.”

The great mass of the writing and sermonizing of
any age is of the kind here indicated; it is the re-
sult of the machinery of culture and of books and
the schools put into successful operation. But now
and then a man appears whose writing is vital; his
page may be homely, but it is alive; it is full of
personal magnetism. The writer does not merely
give us what he thinks or knows; he gives us him-
self. There is nothing secondary or artificial be-
tween himself and his reader. It is books of this
kind that mankind does not willingly let die. Some
minds are like an open fire, — how direct and instant
our communication with them; how they interest
us; there are no screens or disguises; we see and
feel the vital play of their thought; we are face to
face with their spirits. Indeed all good literature,
whether poetry or prose, is the open fire; there is
directness, reality, charm; we get something at first-
hand that warms and stimulates.

STYLE AND THE MAN 55

In literature proper our interest, I think, is always
in the writer himself, — his quality, his personality,
his point of view. We may fancy that we care only
for the subject matter; but the born writer makes
any subject interesting to us by his treatment of it
or by the personal element he infuses into it. When
our concern is primarily with the subject matter, with
the fact or the argument, or with the information
conveyed, then we are not dealing with literature in
the strict sense. It is not so much what the writer
tells us that makes literature, as the way he tells
it; or rather, it is the degree in which he imparts to
it some rare personal quality or charm that is the gift
of his own spirit, something which cannot be de-
tached from the work itself, and which is as inherent
as the sheen of a bird’s plumage, as the texture of
a flower’s petal. There is this analogy in nature.
The hive bee does not get honey from the flowers ;
honey is a product of the bee. What she gets from
the flowers is mainly sweet water or nectar; this she
puts through a process of her own, and to it adds a
minute drop of her own secretion, formic acid. It
is her special personal contribution that converts the
nectar into honey.

In the work of the literary artist, common facts
and experiences are changed and heightened in the
same way. Sainte-Beuve, speaking of certain parts
of Rousseau’s “Confessions,” says, “Such pages were,
in French literature, the discovery of a new world, a
world of sunshine and of freshness, which men had
near them without having perceived it.” They had

56 LITERARY VALUES

not perceived it because they had not had -Rousseau’s
mind to mirror it for them. The sunshine and the
freshness were a gift of his spirit. The new world
was the old world in a new light. What charmed
them was a quality personal to Rousseau. Nature
they had always had, but not the Rousseau sensibil-
ity to nature. The same may be said of more re-
cent writers upon outdoor themes. Readers fancy
that in the works of Thoreau or of Jefferies some new
charm or quality of nature is disclosed, that some-
thing hidden in field or wood is brought to light.
They do not see that what they are in love with is
the mind or spirit of the writer himself. Thoreau
does not interpret nature, but nature interprets him.
The new thing disclosed in bird and flower is simply
a new sensibility to these objects in the beholder.
In morals and ethics the same thing is true. Let
an essayist like Dr. Johnson or Arthur Helps state a
principle or an idea and it has a certain value; let
an essayist like Ruskin or Emerson or Carlyle state
the same principle and it has an entirely different
value, makes an entirely different impression, — the
qualities of mind and character of these writers are
so different. The reader’s relation with them is
much more intimate and personal,

It is quality of mind which makes the writings
of Burke rank above those of Gladstone, Ruskin’s
criticism above that of Hamerton, Froude’s histories
above Freeman’s, Renan’s “Life of Jesus’ above
that of Strauss; which makes the pages of Goethe,
Coleridge, Lamb, literature in a sense that the works

STYLE AND THE MAN 57

of many able minds are not. These men impart
something personal and distinctive to the language
they use. They make the words their own. The
literary quality is not something put on. It is not.
of the hand, it is of the mind; it isnot of the mind,
but of the soul; it is of whatever is most vital and
characteristic in the writer. It is confined to no
particular manner and to no particular matter. It
may be the gift of writers of widely different man-
ners — of Carlyle as well as of Arnold; and in men
of similar manners, one may have it and the other
may not. It is as subtle as the tone of the voice
or the glance of the eye. Quality is the one thing
in life that cannot be analyzed, and it is the one
thing in art that cannot be imitated. A man’s man-
ner may be copied, but his style, his charm, his real
value, can only be parodied. In the conscious or
unconscious imitations of the major poets by the
minor, we get only a suggestion of the manner of
the former ; their essential quality cannot be repro-
duced.

English literature is full of imitations of the
Greek poets, but that which the Greek poets did not
and could not borrow they cannot lend; their qual-
ity stays with them. The charm of spoken dis-
course is largely in the personal quality of the
speaker — something intangible to print. When
we see the thing in print, we wonder how it could
so have charmed or moved us. To convey this
charm, this aroma of the man, to the written dis-
course is the triumph of style. A recent French

58 LITERARY VALUES

critic says of Madame de Staél that she had no style;
she wrote just as she thought, but without being able
to impart to her writing the living quality of her
speech. It is not importance of subject matter that
makes a work great, but importance of the subjec-
tivity of the writer, —a great mind, a great soul, a
great personality. A work that bears the imprint
of these, that is charged with the life and power of
these, which it gives forth again under pressure, is
alone entitled to high rank.

All pure literature is the revelation of a man. In
a work of true literary art the subject matter has
been so interpenetrated and vitalized by the spirit
or personality of the writer, has become so thor-
oughly identified with it, that the two are one and
inseparable, and the style is the man. Works in
which this blending and identification, through emo-
tion or imagination, of the author with his subject
has not taken place, or has taken place imperfectly,
do not belong to pure literature. They may serve a
useful purpose; but all wsefud purposes, in the strict
sense, are foreign to those of art, which means for-
eign to the spirit that would live in the whole, that
would live in the years and not in the days, in time
and not in the hour. The true literary artist gives
you of the substance of his mind; not merely his
thought or his philosophy, but something more inti-
mate and personal than that. It is not a tangible
object passed from his hand to yours; it is much
more like a transfusion of blood from his veins to
yours. Montaigne gives us Montaigne, — the most

STYLE AND THE MAN 59

delightfully garrulous man in literature. ‘These
are fancies of my own,” he says, ‘“ by which I do
not pretend to discover things, but to lay open my-
self.” ‘Cut these sentences,’ says Emerson, “and
they bleed.” Matthew Arnold denied that Emer-
son was a great writer; but we cannot account for
the charm and influence of his works, it seems to
me, on any other theory than that he has at least this
mark of the great writer: he gives his reader of his
own substance, he saturates his page with the high and
tare quality of his own spirit. Everything he pub-
lished has a distinct literary value, as distinguished
from its moral or religious value. The same may be
said of Arnold himself: else we should not care much
for him. It isa particular and interesting type of
man that speaks and breathes in every sentence;
his style is vital in his matter, and is no more sepa-
table from it than the style of silver or of gold is
separable from those metals,

In such a writer as Lecky on the other hand, or
as Mill or Spencer, one does not get this same sub-
tle individual flavor; the work is more external,
more the product of certain special faculties, as the
reason, the memory, the understanding ; and the per-
sonality of the author is not so intimately involved.
But in the writer with the creative touch, whether
he be poet, novelist, historian, critic, essayist, the
chief factor in the product is always his own person-
ality.

Style, then, in the sense in which I am here us-
ing the term, implies that vital, intimate, personal

60 LITERARY VALUES

relation of the man to his language by which he
makes the words his own, fills them with his own
quality, and gives the reader that lively sense of be-
ing in direct communication with a living, breathing,
mental and spiritual force. The writer who appears
to wield his language as an instrument or a tool, some-
thing exterior to himself, who makes you conscious
of his vocabulary, or whose words are the garments
and not the tissue of his thought, has not style in
this sense. Style,” says Schopenhauer, “is the
physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to char-
acter than the face.”? This definition is as good as
any, and better than most, because it implies that
identification of words with thoughts, of the man
with his subject, which is the secret of a living
style. Hence the man who imitates another wears
a mask, as does the man who writes in a language
to which he was not born.

II

It has been said that novel-writing is a much
finer art in our day than it was in the time of Scott,
or of Dickens and Thackeray, — finer, I think, be-
cause it is in the hands of finer-strung, more dain-
tily equipped men; but would one dare to say it is
a greater art? One may admit all that is charged
about Scott’s want of style, his diffuseness and cum-
brousness, and his tedious descriptions, and still justly
claim for him the highest literary honors. He was
a great nature, as Goethe said, and we come into
vital contact with that great nature in his romances.

STYLE AND THE MAN 61

He was not deficient in the larger art that knows
how to make a bygone age live again to the imagina-
tion. He himself seems to have deprecated his “ big
bow-wow ” style in comparison with the exquisite
touches of Jane Austen. But no fineness of work-
manship, no deftness of handling, can make up for
the want of a large, rich, copious human endowment.
I think we need to remember this when we compare
unfavorably such men as Dickens and Thackeray with
the cleverer artists of our own day. Scott makes
up to us for his deficiencies in the matter of style
by the surpassing human interest of his characters
and incidents, their relations to the major currents
of human life. His scenes fill the stage of history,
his personages seem adequate to great events, and
the whole story has a certain historic grandeur and
impressiveness. There is no mistaking a great force,
a great body, in literature any more than there is in
the physical world; in Scott we have come upon a
great river, a great lake, a great mountain, and we
are more impressed by it than by the lesser bodies,
though they have many more graces and pretti-
nesses.

Frederic Harrison, in a recent address on style, is
cautious in recommending the young writer to take
thought of his style. Let him rather take thought
of what he has to say; in turning his ideal values
into the coin of current speech he will have an ex-
ercise in style. If he has no ideal values, then is
literature barred to him. Let him cultivate his sen-
sibilities; make himself, if possible, more quickly

62 LITERARY VALUES

responsive to life and nature about him; let him try
to see more clearly and feel more keenly, and con-
nect his vocabulary with his most radical and spon-
taneous self. Style can never come from the outside,
— from consciously seeking it by imitating the man-
ner of favorite authors. It comes, if at all, like the
bloom upon fruit, or the glow of health upon the
cheek, from an inner essential harmony and felicity.

In a well known passage Macaulay tells what
happened to Miss Burney when she began to think
about her style, and fell to imitating Dr. Johnson ;
how she lost the “charming vivacity’”” and “ per-
fectly natural unconsciousness of manner” of her
youthful writings, and became modish and affected.
She threw away her own style, which was a “ toler-
ably good one,” and which might “have been im-
proved into a very good one,” and adopted “a style
in which she could attain excellence only by achiev-
ing an almost miraculous victory over nature and
over habit. She could cease to be Fanny Burney;
it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson.”

It is giving too much thought to style in the more
external and verbal aspects of it, which I am here
considering, that leads to the confounding of style
with diction, and that gives rise to the “ stylist.”
The stylist shows you what can be done with mere
words. He is the foliage plant of the literary flower
garden, An English college professor has recently
exploited him in a highly wrought essay on Style.
Says our professor, ‘‘ The business of letters is two-
fold, to find words for meaning and to find meaning

STYLE AND THE MAN 63

for words.” It strikes me that the last half of this
proposition is not true of the serious writer, of the
man who has something to say, but is true only of
what is called the stylist, the man who has been so
often described as one having nothing to say, which
he says extremely well. The stylist’s main effort
is a verbal one, to find meaning for words; he does
not wrestle with ideas, but with terms and phrases ;
his thoughts are word-begotten and are often as un-
substantial as spectres and shadows.

The stylist cultivates words as the florist culti-
vates flowers, and a new adjective or a new colloca-
tion of terms is to him what a new chrysanthemum
or a new pansy is to his brother of the forcing
house. He is more an European product than an
American. London and Paris abound in men who
cultivate the art of expression for its own sake, who
study how to combine words so as to tickle the
verbal sense without much reference to the value of
the idea expressed. Club and university life, exces-
sive library culture —a sort of indoor or hothouse
literary atmosphere — foster this sort of thing.

French literature can probably show more stylists
than English, but the later school of British writers
are not far behind in the matter of studied expres-
sion. Professor Raleigh, from whose work on style
I quoted above, often writes forcibly and sugges-
tively ; but one cannot help but feel, on finishing his
little volume, that it is more the work of a stylist
than of a thinker. This is the opening sentence:
“Style, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come

64 LITERARY VALUES

to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh
vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of
speech.” Does not one faintly scent the stylist at
the start ? Later on he says: “In proportion as a
phrase is memorable, the words that compose it be-
come mutually adhesive, losing for a time something
of their individual scope, — bringing with them, if
they be torn away too quickly, some cumbrous frag-
ments of their recent association.”” Does not the
stylist stand fully confessed here? ‘That he may
avoid these “cumbrous fragments” that will stick
to words when you suddenly pull them up by the
roots, “a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts,
and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the
accident of his encumbrance.” The lust of expres-
sion, the conjuring with mere words, is evident.
“‘ He is a poor stylist,” says our professor, “ who can-
not beg half a dozen questions in a single epithet,
or state the conclusion he would fain avoid in terms
that startle the senses into clamorous revolt.”
What it is in one that starts into ‘“clamorous re-
volt”? at such verbal gymnastics as are shown in
the following sentences I shall not try to define, but
it seems to me it is something real and legitimate.
“A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of
archaism in the common turn of speech that you em-
ploy, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob
that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a
select audience of ticket holders with closed doors.
A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct
physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance

STYLE AND THE MAN 65

authorizes readily enough in its metaphorical sense,
and at a touch you have blown the roof off the
drawing-room of the villa and have set its ob-
scure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun-
shine.”

Amiel says of Renan that science was his material
rather than his object; his object was style. Yet
Renan was not a stylist in the sense in which I am
using the word. His main effort was never a ver-
bal one, never an effort to find meaning for words;
he was intent upon his subject; his style was vital
in his thought, and never took on airs on its own
account. You cannot in him separate the artist from
the thinker, nor give either the precedence. All
writers with whom literature is an art aim at style
in the sense that they aim to present their subject in
the most effective form, — with clearness, freshness,
force. They become stylists when their thoughts
wait upon their words, or when their thoughts are
word-begotten. Such writers as Gibbon, De Quin-
cey, Macaulay, have studied and elaborate styles, but
in each the matter is paramount and the mind finds
something solid to rest upon.

“The chief of the incommodities imposed upon
the writer,” says Professor Raleigh, is “the neces-
sity at all times and at all costs to mean something,”’
or to find meaning for words. This no doubt is a
hard task. The trouble begins when one has the
words first, To invoke ideas with words is a much
more difficult experience than the reverse process.
But probably all true writers have something to say

66 LITERARY VALUES

before they have the desire to say it, and in propor-
tion as the thought is vital and real is its expression
easy.

When I meet the stylist, with his straining for ver-
bal effects, I love to recall this passage from Whitman.
“The great poet,” he says, “swears to his art, I will
not be meddlesome. I will not have in my writing
any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way
between me and the rest, like curtains. Iwill have
nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains.
What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who
may, exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe; I will
have purpose, as health or heat or snow has, and be
as regardless of observation. What I experience or
portray shall go from my composition without a
shred of my composition. You shall stand by my
side and look in the mirror with me.”

This is the same as saying that the great success
in writing is to get language out of the way and to
put your mind directly to the reader’s, so that there
be no veil of words between you. If the reader is
preoccupied with your words, if they court his at-
tention or cloud his vision, to that extent is the
communication imperfect. In some of Swinburne’s
poems there is often such a din and echo of rhyme
and alliteration that it is almost impossible to hear
what the man is really saying.

To darken counsel with words is a common oc-
currence. Words are like lenses, —they must be
arranged in just such a way, or they hinder rather
than help the vision. When the adjustment is as it

STYLE AND THE MAN 67

should be, the lens itself is invisible ; and language in
the hands of the master is as transparent. Some of
the more recent British poets affect the archaic, the
quaint, the eccentric, in language, so that one’s at-
tention is almost entirely occupied with their words.
Reading them is like trying to look through a pair
of spectacles too old or too young for you, or with
lenses of different focus.

But has not style a value in and of itself? As in
the case of light, its value is in the revelation it
makes. Its value is to conceal itself, to lose itself in
the matter. If humility, or self-denial, or any of the
virtues becomes conscious of itself and claims credit
for its own sake, does it not that moment fall from
grace ? What incomparable style in the passage I
have quoted from Whitman when we come to think
of it, but how it effaces itself and is of no account
for the sake of the idea it serves! The more a writ-
er’s style humbles itself, the more it is exalted.
There is nothing true in religion that is not equally
true inart. Give yourself entirely. All selfish and
secondary ends are of the devil. Our Calvinistic
grandfathers, who fancied themselves willing to be
damned for the glory of God, illustrate the devotion
of the true artist to his ideal. ‘ Consider the lilies
of the field, . . . they toil not, neither do they
spin.” The style of the born poet or artist takes
as little thought of itself, and is the spontaneous
expression of the same indwelling grace and neces-
sity.

68 LITERARY VALUES

III

I once overheard a lady say to a popular author,
‘¢ What I most admire about your books is their fine
style.” ‘But I never think about my style” was
his reply. ‘I know you don’t,” said his admirer,
“and that is why I like it so much.” But we
may regard him as thinking about his style, when
he fancied himself thinking only about his matter.
In his case the style and the matter were one.
When he was consciously occupied only with the
substance and texture of his thought, he was oc-
cupied with his style. Every effort to make the
idea flow clear and pure, to give it freshness and
fillip, or to seize and embody in words a mental or
emotional impression in all its integrity, without
blur or confusion, is an effort in style. It is like
taking the alloys and impurities out of a metal ;
the style or beauty of it is improved. The mak-
ing of iron into steel is a process of purification.
When Froude was questioned about his style, he
confessed that he had never given any thought to
the subject; his aim had been to say what he had
to say in the most direct and simple way possible.
He was conscious only of trying to see clearly and
to speak truly. I suppose this is the case with all
first-class minds, in our day at least: the main en-
deavor is directed toward the matter, and not toward
the manner; or rather, it is to make the one identi-
cal with the other. In no page of Froude’s, nor in
any writer of equal range and seriousness, are we

STYLE AND THE MAN 69

conscious of the style as something apart and that
claims our admiration on its own account, as we are
in the case of Walter Pater, forexample. Such men
as Pater are enamored of style itself, and cultivate
it for its own sake. They conceive of it as an inde-
pendent grace and charm that may be imparted to
any subject by dint of an effort directed to verbal
arrangement and sequence alone.

Iv

There is a good deal of wisdom in Voltaire’s say-
ing that “all styles are good that are not tiresome.”
Voltaire’s own style certainly had the merit of not
tiring. Even in the English translation I never
cease to marvel at its grace and buoyancy. In keep-
ing with this dictum is the remark I heard concern-
ing a certain living writer, namely, that he had the
best style in literature to-day because one could read
fifty pages of his and not know that one was reading
at all; it was pure expression — offered no resistance.

This offering no resistance, this ease and limpidity
—a getting rid of all friction in the written page —
herein certainly lies the secret of much that is
winsome in literature. How little friction the
mind encounters in Addison, in Lamb, or in the
best of our own prose writers; and how much in
Meredith, and the later writings of Henry James!
Is not friction to be got rid of as far as possible
in all departments of life? One does not want
his shoes to pinch, nor his coat to bind, neither does
he want to waste any strength on involved sentences,

70 LITERARY VALUES

or on cryptic language. Did you ever try to row
a boat in water in which lay a sodden fleece of
newly fallen snow? I find the reading of certain
books like that. Some of Browning’s poems im-
pede my mind in that way.

Force of impact—that is another matter; that
warms and quickens the mind. Browning’s “ How
they brought the Good News from Ghent ” makes
the mind hot by its rush and power. ‘There is no
mere mechanical friction of elliptical sentences and
obscure allusions here.

Yes, the style that does not tire us is better than
the style that does. Thus Arnold’s style is better than
Walter Pater’s, because it is easier to follow ; itis not
so conscious of itself; it is not so obviously studied.
Pater studied words; Arnold studied ideas. Pater
sacrificed the more familiar democratic traits of
language — ease, simplicity, flexibility, transparency
—to his passion for the more choice aristocratic
features, — the perfumed, the academic, the highly
wrought. Again, I find Arnold’s style less fatiguing
than Lowell’s, because it has more current, more
continuity of thought, and is freer from concetti and
mere surface sparkle. I find Swinburne’s prose
more tiresome than that of any contemporary Brit-
ish critic, because of its inflated polysyllabie charac-
ter, and his poetry more cloying than that of any
other poet, because of its almost abnormal lilt and
facility ; it has a pathological fluidity; it seems as
though, when he begins to write verse, his whole
mental structure is in danger of melting down and

STYLE AND THE MAN 71

running away in mere words. His heat is that of
fever; his inspiration borders on delirium.

We never tire of Addison by reason of his style,
or of Swift or of Lamb or of our own Irving or
Hawthorne or Warner. It is probably as rare to find
a French writer whose style tires the reader as it is
to find a German whose style does not. As M. Bru-
netiére well says, French literature is a social litera-
ture, German is philosophic, and English individual-
istic. It is the business of the first to be agreeable,
of the second to be profound, of the third to be origi-
nal. Who does not tire of Strauss sooner than of
Renan, of Macaulay sooner than of Sainte-Beuve ?

A writer with a pronounced, individualistic style
—one full of mere mechanical difficulties, like
Browning’s or Carlyle’s —runs great risk of weary-
ing the reader and of being left behind. So far as
his style degenerates into mannerism, so far is he
handicapped in the race. Smoothness is not beauty,
neither is roughness power; yet without a certain
harmony and continuity there is neither beauty
nor power. Herbert Spencer, in his essay on the
Philosophy of Style, would have a writer avoid this
danger of wearying his reader, by writing alter-
nately in different styles. “To have a specific style,”
he says, “‘is to be poor in speech.” “The perfect
writer will express himself as Junius, when in the
Junius frame of mind; when he feels as Lamb felt,
will use a like familiar speech; and will fall into
the ruggedness of Carlyle when in a Carlylean
mood.” A man who should try to follow this

72 LITERARY VALUES

advice would be pretty sure to be Jack-of-all-styles
and master of none. What a piece of patchwork
his composition would be! A “specific style” is
not to be avoided; it is to be cultivated and prac-
ticed till every false note, every trace of crudeness
and insincerity, is purged out of it.

The secret of good prose is a subtle quality or
flavor, hard to define, like that of a good apple or
a good melon, and it is as intimately bound up in
the very substance and texture in the one case as
in the other, and, we may add, is of as many varie-
ties. We are sure always to get good prose from Mr,
Howells and Colonel Higginson, but we are not
always so sure of getting it from certain of our
younger novelists.

Here is a sample of bad prose from a popular
novel by a Southern writer: —

“The whole woods emerged from the divine bath
of nature with the coolness, the freshness, the im-
mortal purity of Diana united to the roseate glow and
mortal tenderness of Venus, and haunted by two
spirits: the chaste, unfading youth of Endymion and
the dust-born warmth and eagerness of Dionysus.”

Yet the man who could permit himself the use of
such inflated language as that, was capable of turn-
ing off such a passage as this : —

“ Some women, in marrying, demand all and give
all: with good men they are happy; with base men
they are the broken-hearted. Some demand every-
thing and give little: with weak men they are ty-
rants; with strong men they are the divorced. Some

STYLE AND THE MAN 73

demand little and give all: with congenial souls they
are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are
soon in their graves. Some give little and demand
little: they are the heartless, and they bring neither
the joy of life nor the peace of death.”

That is sound prose; it is like a passage from a
great classic.

‘When we advise the young writer to go honestly
to work to say in the simplest manner what he really
thinks and feels, one does not mean that by this
course he is likely to write like the great prose mas-
ters, but that by this means alone can his work have
the basic qualities of good literature, — directness,
veracity, vitality, the beauty and reality of natural
things. Genuineness first, grace and eloquence after-
wards.

“The ugliest living face,” says Schopenhauer, “ is
better than a mask.” It is real, itis alive. So the
simple, direct speech of a man in earnest is so much
better than the perfunctory eloquence one is so often
compelled to hear or to read. Reality, reality —
nothing can make up for a want of reality.

Sainte-Beuve said, as I have already quoted, that
the peasant always has style; the French peasant
probably more often than any other. This is cer-
tainly so if we take such a character as Joan of Arc
as a typical peasant. What adroitness, and at times,
classic beauty in her answer to her judges! When
they sought to entrap her with the question, “Do
you know if you are in the grace of God?” she re-
plied, “If Iam not, may God place me there ; if I am,

74 LITERARY VALUES

may God so keep me.” Under pressure, the peasant
mind, and indeed all other minds, are, at times, ca-
pable of these things. But usually the charm of
rustic speech is in its plainness and simplicity, like
that of other rural things, a bridge, a woodshed, a
well-sweep, a log house, — no thought of style,
thought of service only. But the beauty of what
may be called the architectural style of the great
prose masters, — Gibbon, Burke, Browne, Hooker,
De Quincey, — like the beauty of a Greek temple or
a Gothic cathedral, is quite another matter. What
both have in common is the beauty of sincerity and
reality.

The vernacular style of writers of the seventeenth
century, like Walton, Fuller, Baxter, Jonson, is more
in keeping with the taste of to-day than the rhetori-
cal and highly wrought style of certain of the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth century writers.

Hence, when we ascribe style to simple, homely
things, or to speech, we mean something quite dif-
ferent from style when applied to the great composi-
tions either in literature, music, or architecture.

Milton could plan and build the lofty rhyme and
attain beauty ; Wordsworth attains beauty by his sin-
cerity and simplicity, and his fervent love of rural
things. He has not style in the Miltonic sense.
One has classic beauty, the other, natural or naive
beauty. The monumental works of the ancients
were planned and wrought like their architecture,
and have a beauty that rivals nature. Shakespeare
rarely attains anything like classic beauty, and has

STYLE AND THE MAN vii)

any poem since Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”
struck the note firmly and surely ?

v

I have often asked myself why it is that the in-
terviewer will sometimes get so much more wisdom
out of a man, and so many more fresh and enter-
taining statements — in short, so much better liter-
ature — than the man can get out of himself. Is
it because one’s best and ripest thoughts rise to the
surface, like the cream on the milk, and does the
interviewer simply skim them off? Maybe, in writ-
ing, we often dip too deep, make too great an effort.
Interviews are nearly always interesting, — much
more so than a formal studied statement by the in-
terviewed himself. Many a piece of sound, excellent
literature has been got out of a man who had no
skill at all with the pen. His spoken word is vital
and real; but in a conscious literary effort the fire
is quenched at once. Hence the charm of letters,
of diaries, of the simple narrations and recitals of
pioneers, farmers, workers, or persons who have no
conscious literary equipment. Who would not rather
read a bit of real experience of a soldier in battle,
such as a clever interviewer could draw out of him,
than to read his general’s studied account of the
same engagement? ‘To elaborate is of no avail,”
says Whitman. ‘ Learned and unlearned feel that it
is so.” Only the great artist can rival or surpass the
sense of reality we often find in common speech, Set
a man to writing out his views or his experience and

76 LITERARY VALUES

the danger is that he will be too formal; he will
get himself up for the occasion; there will be no
ease or indifference in his manner; he will go to
delving in his mind, and we shall miss the simple,
direct self-expression that we are after.

In Dr. Johnson’s talk, as reported by Boswell, we
touch the real man; in the “ Rambler” you touch
only his clothes or periwig. His more formal writing
seems the product of some kind of artificial put-on
faculty, like the Sunday sermons one hears or the
newspaper editorials one reads. The sermon is in
what may be called the surpliced style, the Ram-
bler in the periwigged style. Emerson said of Al-
cott that his conversation was wonderful, but that
when he sat down to write his inspiration left him.
Most men are wiser in company than in the study.
What is interesting in a man is what he himself
has felt or seen or experienced. If you can tell us
that, we shall listen eagerly. The uncultured man
does not know this, but seeks the far-off or the deep
down.

Our thoughts, our opinions, are like apples on
the tree: they must take time to ripen ; and when
they are ripe, how easily they fall! A mere nudge
brings them down. How easily the old man talks;
how full he is of wisdom! Time was when his
tongue was tied; he could not express himself; his
thoughts were half formed and unripe; they clung
tightly to the bough. Set him to writing, and with
great labor he produced some crude, half-formed no-
tions of his own, mixed with the riper opinions of

STYLE AND THE MAN W7

the authors he had read. But now his fruit has ma-
tured and it has mellowed; it has color and flavor;
and his conversation abounds in wisdom.

VI

The standard of style of the last century was more
aristocratic than is the standard of to-day. The im-
portant words with Hume, Blair, Johnson, Boling-
broke, as applied to style, were elegance, harmony,
ornament ; and the chief of these was elegance: the
composition must make the impression of elegance,
as to-day we demand the impression of the vital and
the real. Even the homely is more suited to the
genius of democracy than is the elegant. Perhaps the
word is distasteful to modern ears from its conven-
tional associations or its appropriation by milliners
and dressmakers. One would not care to write in-
elegantly, but would rather his page did not suggest
the word at all, as he would have his home or his
dress suggest the quieter, humbler, more serviceable
virtues. In the old story of Bruce’s saying, the style
may be said to be homely. “I doubt I have killed
the comyn.” ‘Ye doubt?” replies Kirkpatrick ;
‘“T mak siccar.” Hume puts this into elegant lan-
guage in this wise: “Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, one
of Bruce’s friends, asking him soon after if the traitor
was slain, ‘I believe so,’ replied Bruce. ‘And is
that a matter,’ cried Kirkpatrick, ‘to be left to con-
jecture ? Iwill secure him.’” This is polite prose,
dressed-up prose, but its charm for us is gone.

78 LITERARY VALUES

VII

There are as many styles as there are moods and
tempers in men. Words may be used so as to give
us a sense of vigor, a sense of freshness, a sense of
the choice and scholarly, or of the dainty and exclu-
sive, or of the polished and elaborate, or of heat or
cold, or of any other quality known to life. Every
work of genius has its own physiognomy — sad,
cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined, meditative.
This book has the face of a saint; that of a scholar
oraseer. Here is the feminine, there the mascu-
line face. One has the clerical face, one the judi-
cial, Each appeals to us according to our tempera-
ments and mental predilections. Who shall say
which style is the best ? What can be better than
the style of Huxley for his purpose, — sentences level
and straight like a hurled lance; or than Emerson’s
for his purpose, — electric sparks, the sudden, unex-
pected epithet or tense, audacious phrase, that gives
the mind a wholesome:shock ; or than Gibbon’s for
his purpose, — a style like solid masonry, every sen-
tence cut four square, and his work, as Carlyle said
to Emerson, a splendid bridge, connecting the an-
cient world with the modern ; or than De Quincey’s
for his purpose, —a discursive, roundabout style,
herding his thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep; or
than Arnold’s for his academic spirit, — a style like
cut glass; or than Whitman’s for his continental
spirit, — the processional, panoramic style that gives
the sense of mass and multitude ? Certain things we

STYLE AND THE MAN 79

may demand of every man’s style, — that it shall do
its work, that it shall touch the quick. To be color-
less like Arnold is good, and to have color like Rus-
kin is good; to be lofty and austere like the old
Latin and Greek authors is good, and to be playful
and discursive like Dr. Holmes is good; to be con-
densed and epigrammatic like Bacon pleases, and to
be flowing and copious like Macaulay pleases. Within
certain limits the manner that is native to the man,
the style that is a part of himself, is what wears
best. What we do not want in any style is hard-
ness, glitter, tumidity, superfetation, unreality.

In treating of nature or outdoor themes, let the
style have limpidness, sweetness, freshness ; in cri-
ticism let it have dignity, lucidity, penetration ; in
history let it have mass, sweep, comprehension; in
all things let it have vitality, sincerity, and genuine-
ness,

IV
CRITICISM AND THE MAN
I

4* looks as though we were never to get to the

end of the discussion about criticism — its scope,
aims, functions, any more than we are likely to get
to the end of the discussion of any real question in
philosophy, ethics, or religion.

Is the aim of literary criticism judgment, or in-
terpretation, or analysis, or description ? May it not
have all these aims? For myself, I am disposed to
answer in the affirmative.

I doubt if there will ever be a critical method
which all may apply. Every man will have his own
method, as truly as he has his own manners. The
French critic Schérer inclines to “‘ the method which
sets to work to comprehend rather than to class, to
explain rather than to judge,” or which asks as the
first step to possess itself of the author’s point of
view. This is substantially Pope’s dictum that a
work is to be read in the spirit in which it was writ-
ten, and it accords with Heine’s saying that the critic
is to ask, ‘‘ What does the artist intend?” Thisisa
part of, but does it sum up, the critical function ?

A man’s writing upon the works of another takes

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 81

the form of description and analysis — like the re-
port of a naturalist upon a new species, which Mr.
Howells thinks is the main function of criticism ;
or it may aim chiefly at interpretation, which a recent
essayist emphasizes as the latest and highest phase
of criticism; or it may aim at a judicial estimate, an
authoritative verdict from the rules and standards,
which is the more classic and academic phase of crit-
icism.

Each phase is legitimate and leads to valuable re-
sults.

Of any considerable artistic work we want a de-
scription and an analysis, we want an interpretation
and an exposition, and we want an appraisement ac-
cording to the standard of the best that has been
thought and done in the world, — not a comparison
with the externals of the accepted models, but with
the originality, the spontaneity, the sanity, the in-
ner necessity and consistency of them — the truth
to nature and to the laws of the human mind. Is
it liberating, vitalizing, cheering? Is it ethically
sound ? Does it favor large and manly ideals? Does
it go along with evolution and progress ?

What, for instance, will criticism do with the
work of such a man as Whitman, or Ibsen, or Tol-
stoi? It will describe it and analyze it, and name
it as lyric, epic, dramatic, etc. ; it will interpret it, or
draw out and expound the ideas that lie back of it
and out of which it sprang; it will seek to under-
stand it and to get at the writer’s point of view;
then it will judge it, try it by its own standards, and

82 LITERARY VALUES

seek to estimate the value of these standards as
they stand related to the best aims and achievements
of the human mind.

We demand of these men what we demand of
Browning, Tennyson, Hugo, and every other poet
and writer of high claims, — genuineness, sincerity,
power, inspiration, and that they awaken in us fresh
and vivid currents of ideas andemotions. We shall
not quarrel with their methods, or materials, or their
form, or formlessness, but they must go to the quick.
All our pleasure and profit in great art — painting,
sculpture, architecture, poetry — is at last one, a new
experience of the beauty and significance of nature
and life. We aremade to feel these emotions afresh
and as if for the first time.

Here are the old eternal elements, — life, nature,
the soul, man and woman, all in danger of becoming
dull, commonplace, uninteresting to us. But the
man with the creative touch gives us a new and lively
sense of them, by presenting them to us in new com-
binations and under new lights. The only new thing
added is himself, —the quality or flavor of his own
genius.

A complete criticism will not limit itself to de-
scription or to interpretation; it will seek to esti-
mate, to bring out the relative or absolute value of
the thing. Mr. Howells in his trenchant little vol-
ume on “ Criticism and Fiction,” says the critic has
no more business to trample on a poem, a novel, or
an essay that does not please him, than the botanist
has to grind a plant under his heel because he does

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 83

not find it pretty. His business “is to classify and
analyze the fruits of the human mind as the natural-
ist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to
praise or blame them.”

To classify and analyze the fruits of the human
mind is certainly one of the functions of criticism, and
only one. The analogy Mr. Howells employs is mis-
leading. We do not sitin judgment on natural spe-
cimens and products except as they stand related to
human wants and utilities. We compare climates,
seasons, soils, landscapes, with reference to racial and
individual needs and well-being. If you bring me
trees from the woods or stone from the quarry to
build my house with, I am bound to sit in judgment
upon them. And when my house is built, my neigh-
bors will sit in judgment upon it. Of all artificial
things, of all man’s works, we are bound to ask, Are
they well done ? are they what they should be? are
they the best of their kind? Shall we not ask these
questions of the poem also, of the novel, the essay,
the history ?

Art has relations to life, and the critic is bound to
consider what these relations are in any given work,
— how true, how important ; he is examining a human
product, not a natural specimen, and is as competent
to reject as to accept; he must compare, weigh, ap-
praise, to the best of his ability.

The specimens of natural history are perfect after
their kind; the main question with them is, to which
kind or species does a given specimen belong ? But
the poem or the history or the novel is not always

84 LITERARY VALUES

perfect after its kind. Their kind is usually obvi-
ous at a glance, but their merits or demerits, their
relation to the best that has been thought and done
in the world, are not so obvious. Hence we praise
or blame according as they come up to or fall short
of their own ideal. The critic is not so much a bot-
anist naming a new flower, as he is a brother gar-
dener criticising your horticulture, or a brother law-
yer criticising your brief. We are all critics in this
sense one way or another every day of our lives ; we
try to get at the real value of whatever is offered us,
whether it be lands, houses, goods, friends, stocks,
bonds, news, pictures, or books ; we criticise the men
we deal with and employ in order to find out whom
to trust ; we must have our wits about us when we
go to market or go shopping. he critical habit —
sifting, testing, comparing, to get at the true value of
things — goes with us through life, or else we come
often to grief. The finer the product, or the higher
the purpose it serves, the more careful is our inves-
tigation.

When we come to literature and art our worldly
practical wisdom does not carry very far. It is not
now a question of fact or of material values, but of
ideal and esthetic values; it is a question of truth
to nature and to life, and of the largest, most vital
truth. The mass of readers have little power of
divining the good from the bad, the true from the
false, in this field. Not the first best, but the sec-
ond or third best will draw the multitude.

The literary value of a work is more intangible

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 85

and elusive, harder to define and bring out, than its
scientific or moral or other values. It resides in a
certain vitality and genuineness of expression; we
have a sense of having come face to face with some-
thing real and alive in the man, and not, as is so often
the case, with something assumed or put on. There
is always an original inherent quality and flavor, as
in natural products, The language is not the mere
garment of the thought, it is the very texture and
substance. In all true literature something more
than mind and erudition speak,—a man speaks;
a vital personality is imminent, —a Charles Lamb,
a Wordsworth, a Carlyle, a Huxley, an Emerson, a
Thoreau, a Lowell, — all distinct types of intelli-
gence speaking through character.

Self-expression within certain limits is as impor-
tant in criticism as in any other form of literature.

The French critic Ferdinand Brunetiére says that
the truly personal way of seeing and feeling, which is
a merit of the poet and the novelist, is a fault in the
critic, because the critical function is mainly a judi-
cial one.

In every man there is the common humanity, a
measure of the pure reason which he shares with all ;
then there are the race traits, the family traits, the
bias of his times, the bent given by his training and
surroundings, and his own special stamp and make-
up, — what we call his idiosyncrasy. All these
things will play a part in his view of any matter.
His success as a critic is when his humanity, his pure
intelligence, furnishes the light which is only colored

86 LITERARY VALUES

or refracted by its passage through these elements.
But colored and refracted it will be, and it is this
coloring and refraction or stamp of the personal equa-
tion that gives value and charm to the man’s work as
literature. Reduce criticism to a science, or elimi-
nate the element of impressionism, and the result is
no longer literature. The reason may be convinced,
but the emotions are untouched.

The one thing that distinguishes all modern lit-
eratures from the works of the ancient or classic
period is their more permanent subjectivity, and the
piercing lyrical note in them.

Self-expression has been the aim of the modern
artist in a much fuller sense than it was with the
artists of the pagan world. Our religion is a per-
sonal and subjective religion, — the kingdom of
heaven is within. Christianity turned the thoughts
of men upon themselves. Self-examination, self-crit-
icism began. Man became conscious of himself, of
his sins, and of his shortcomings, and learned to be
more interested in the elements of his own character.

There is probably no greater delusion than that
under which the critic labors when he thinks he is
trying the new work by the standard of the best that
has been thought and achieved in the world. He is
trying it by his own conception of that standard;
so much of it as is vital in his own mind he can
apply, and no more. His own individual taste and
judgment are, after all, his tests. The standard of
the best is not some rule of thumb or of yardstick
that every one can apply; only the best can apply
the best.

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 87

Impressionism, therefore, is at the bottom of all
criticism, in whatever field. The impression which
the work makes upon your intelligence, your taste,
your judgment, is all that you can finally give.

Criticism in France, where the art has been more
assiduously cultivated than in any other country,
seems divided between judicial critics like Brune-
tigre and impressionist critics like Lemaitre. The
latter states in terms of his own likes and dislikes
what the other aims to state in terms of the imper-
sonal reason. But their conclusions are likely to
differ only as their temperaments and innate affini-
ties differ. Brunetiére has the more dogmatic mind
and the more violent antipathies. He could call
Sainte-Beuve a rat, —a verdict that savors more of
political and religious intolerance than of the impar-
tial reason.

Are we not coming more and more to demand
that in all literary and artistic productions, the pro-
ducer be present in his work, not merely as mind,
as pure intelligence, but also as a distinct personal-
ity, giving a flavor of his own to the principles he
utters ? Every vital creative work is the revelation
of a man as well as of a mind, and this is true in
criticism no less than in other forms of literature.

Suppose Brunetiére’s criticism lacked that which
makes it Brunetiére’s, or Arnold’s lacked that which
makes it Arnold’s, should we long care for it? Elim-
inate from the works of these men all that is indi-
vidual, all that in each makes the impression of a
new literary force, the accent of personality, and

88 LITERARY VALUES

you take from the salt its savor. Dare we say that
the most precious thing in literature is the indi-
vidual and the specific? Is nota platitude a plat-
itude because it lacks just these things? The
vague and the general may be had in any quantity,
at any time. The distinct and the characteristic
are always rare. How many featureless novels,
featureless poems, featureless discourses, how much
savorless criticism of one kind and another, every
community produces! Now and then we catch a
distinct personal note, a new, penetrating voice, and
this we remember and follow in criticism as readily
as in poetry or fiction. Have we not here the se-
cret of the greater interest we take in signed criti-
cism over unsigned ?

The pure, disinterested, impersonal reason is a
fine thing to contemplate. Who would flout it or
deny it? One might as well throw stones at the
sun. But as the pure white light of the sun is
broken up into a thousand hues and shades as it
comes back to us from the living world, so the light
of reason comes to us from literature in a thou-
sand blended tints and colors, or as modified by the
varying moods and temperaments of the individual
writers. Whether or not we want or have a right
to expect this pure white light in criticism, what
we get is the light as it is reduced or colored by
the critic’s personality, ——the media of his time,
his race, his personal equation. It must render ac-
curately the objects, form and feature; but the hue,
the atmosphere, the sentiment of it all, the highest

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 89

value of it all, will be the contribution of the critic’s
most private and radical self.

Every eminent writer has his way of looking at
things, gives his own coloring to general truths,
and it is this that endears him to us. Is the word
he speaks Ais word, —is it inevitable, the verdict
of his character, the outcome of that which is most
vital and characteristic in him? Or is it something
he has learned, or the result of fashion, convention,
imitation ?

See how the old elements of the air, soil, water,
forever recombine under the touch of that mysteri-
ous something we call life, and produce new herb-
age, new flowers, new fruit, new men, new women,
— forever and yet never the same. So do the forces
of man’s spirit recombine with the old facts and
truisms, and produce new art and new literature.

II

Is it not equally true that the value of criticism
as a guide to the judgment or the taste, teaching us
what to admire and what to condemn, is less than
its value as an intellectual pleasure and stimulus, its
power to awaken ideas? Judgment is good, but

inspiration is better. How rarely we make the
judgments of the greatest critics our own! We
are pleased when they confirm our own, but is
not our main interest and profit in what the critic
gives us out of himself? We do not, for instance,
care very much for Carlyle’s literary judgments,
but for Carlyle’s quality of mind, his flashes of

90 LITERARY VALUES

poetic insight, his burden of conscience, his power
of portraiture, his heroic moral fibre, we care a great
deal. Arnold thought Carlyle’s criticism less sound
than Johnson’s, — more tainted with engowement,
with passion and appetite, as it probably is; but
how much more incentive, how much more quicken-
ing power, how much more of the stuff of which
life is made, do we get from Carlyle than from
Johnson or from Arnold himself !

That the criticism is sound is not enough, — it
must also warm and stimulate the mind; and if it
do this we shall not trouble ourselves very much
about its conclusions. Even M. Brunetiére says that
there are masterpieces in the history of literature
and art whose authors were downright fools, as there
are, on the other hand, mediocre works from the hands
of men of vast intelligence. Very many readers, I
fancy, will not rest in the main conclusions at which
Tolstoi arrives in his recent discussion of the ques-
tion *‘ What is art ?” but who can fail to feel that
here is a large, sincere, helpful soul, whose concep-
tion of life and of artis of great value? If we were
to estimate Ruskin by the soundness of his judg-
ments alone, we should miss the most important part
of him. It is as a prophet of life as well as a critic
of art that we value him. Would he be a better
critic were he less a prophet ?

Or take a more purely critical mind, such as Mat-
thew Arnold’s. Do we care very much even for his
literary judgments? Do we not care much more for
his qualities as a writer, — his lucidity, his central-

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 91

ity, his style, his continuity of thought, his turns of
expression, his particular interpretation of literature
and life? His opinions may be sound, but this is
not the secret of his power; it resides in something
more intimate and personal to himself. The late
Principal Shairp was probably as sound a critic as
was Arnold, but his work is of much less interest,
because it does not contain the same vital expression
of a new and distinct type of mind. Arnold was a
better critic of literature than of life and history.
There were other values than literary ones that were
not so clearly within his range. In 1870 he thought
the Germans would stand a poor chance in the war
with France. How could the German Gemeinheit,
or commonness, stand up before the French esprit ?
In our civil war, he expected the South to win.
Did not the South have distinction? But distinc-
tion counts for more in style than in war. Arnold’s
criticism has the great merit of being a clear and for-
cible expression of a fine-bred, high-toned, particu-
lar type of man, and that type a pure and noble
one. There was no bungling, no crudeness, no strain-
ing, no confusion, no snap judgment, and apparently
no bias. He was as steady asaclock. His ideas
were continuous and homogeneous; they run like
living currents all through his works, and give them
unity and definitiveness. He is not to be effaced or
overthrown ; he is only to be matched and appraised.
His word is not final, but it is fit and challenges
your common sense. His contribution flows into
the current of English criticism like a clear stream

92 LITERARY VALUES

into a turbid one; it is not deep, but pellucid, —a
tributary that improves the quality of the whole.
It gives us that refreshment and satisfaction that we
always get from the words of a man who speaks in
his own right and from ample grounds of personal
conviction.

Positive judgments in literature or in art, or in
any matters of taste, are dangerous things. The
crying want always is for new, fresh power to break
up the old verdicts and opinions, and set all afloat
again. ‘We must learn under the master how to
destroy him.” The great critic gives us courage to
reverse his judgments. Dr. Johnson said that Dry-
den was the writer who first taught us to determine
the merit of composition upon principle ; but criti-
cism has been just as much at variance with itself
since Dryden’s time as it was before. It is an art,
and not a science, — one of the forms of literary art,
wherein, as in all other forms of art, the man, and
not the principle, is the chief factor.

III

When one thinks of it, how diverse and contra-
dictory have been the judgments of even the best
critics! Behold how Macaulay’s verdicts differ from
Carlyle’s, Carlyle’s from Arnold’s, Arnold’s from
Frederic Harrison’s or Morley’s or Stephen’s or
Swinburne’s; how Taine and Sainte-Beuve diverge
upon Balzac; how Renan and Arnold diverge upon
Hugo; how Lowell and Emerson diverge upon Whit-
man; and how wide apart are contemporary critics

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 93

about the merits of Browning, Ibsen, Tolstoi. Lan-
dor could not tolerate Dante, and even the great
Goethe told Eckermann that Dante was one of the
authors he was forbidden to read. In Byron’s judg-
ment, Griffiths and Rogers were greater poets than
Wordsworth and Coleridge. The German Professor
Grimm sees in Goethe “the greatest poet of all
times and all people,” which makes Matthew Arnold
smile. Chateaubriand considered Racine as much
superior to Shakespeare as the Apollo Belvidere is
superior to an uncouth Egyptian statue. Every na-
tion, says a French critic, has its chords of sensi-
bility that are utterly incomprehensible to another.
“Many and diverse,” says Arnold, “must be the
judgments passed upon every great poet, upon every
considerable writer.” And it seems that the greater
the writer or poet, the more diverse and contradic-
tory will be the judgments upon him. The small
men are easily disposed of, —there is no dispute
about them; but the great ones baffle and try us.
It is around their names, as Sainte-Beuve some-
where remarks, that there goes on a perpetual critical
tournament.

It would seem that the nearer we are, in point of
time, to an event, a man, a book, a work of art, the
less likely we are to estimate them rightly, especially
if they are out of the usual and involve great ques-
tions and points, Such a poet as Dante or Victor
Hugo or Whitman, or such a character as Napoleon
or Cromwell or John Brown, or such an artist as
Angelo or Turner or Millet, will require time to

94 LITERARY VALUES

settle his claim. In literature, the men of the high-
est order, to be understood, must undoubtedly, in a
measure, wait for the growth of the taste of them-
selves, or until their own ideals have become at home
in men’s minds. With every great innovation, in
whatever field, every year that passes finds our
minds better adjusted to it and more keenly alive to
its merits. Contemporary criticism is bound to be
contradictory. Men take opposite views of current
questions; they are too near them to see all their
bearings. How different the aspect the slavery ques-
tion wears at this distance, and the civil war that
grew out of it, from the face they wore a generation
or two ago! It is only the few great minds that see
to-day what the masses will see to-morrow. They
occupy a vantage ground of character and principle
that is like an eminence ina landscape, commanding
a wide view. Sainte-Beuve certainly did injustice to
Balzac, and Schérer to Béranger. Theirs were con-
temporary judgments, and personal antipathy played
a large part in them. Sainte-Beuve says that when
two good intellects pass totally different judgments
on the same author, it is because they are not fixing
their thoughts, for the moment, on the same object;
they have not the whole of him before their eyes ;
their view does not take him in entirely. That is
just it: we each look for different values; we are
more keenly alive to some merits than to others;
what one critic misses another sees. We are more
or less like chemical elements, that unite eagerly
with some of their fellows, and not with others.

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 95

The elective affinities are at work everywhere, —
where is the critical genius that is a universal
solvent ? Probably Sainte-Beuve himself comes as
near it as anybody who has lived.

IV

It is not truth alone that makes literature; it is
truth plus a man. KReaders fancy they are inter-
ested in the birds and flowers they find in the pages of
the poets ; but no, it is the poets themselves that they
are interested in. There are the same birds and flow-
ers in the fields and woods, — do they care for them ?
In many of the authors of whom Sainte-Beuve writes
I have no interest, but I am always interested in
Sainte-Beuve’s view of them, in the play of his in-
telligence and imagination over and around them.
After reading his discussion of Cowper, or Fénelon,
or Massillon, or Pascal, it is not the flavor of these
writers that remains in my mind, but the flavor of
the critic himself. I am under his spell, and not
that of his subject. Is not this equally true of the
criticism of Goethe, or Carlyle, or Macaulay, or
Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Coleridge, or any other? The
pages of these writers are no more a transparent
medium, through which we see the subject as in
itself it is, than are those of any other creative
artist. Science shows us, or aims to show us, the
thing as it is; but art shows it to us tinged by the
prismatic rays of the human spirit. Criticism that
warms and interests is perpetual creation, as Sainte-
Beuve suggested. It is a constant combination of

96 LITERARY VALUES

the subject with the thought of the critic. When
Mr. James writes upon Sainte-Beuve we are under
his spell; it is Mr. James that absorbs and delights
us now. We get the truth about his subject, of
course, but it is always in combination with the
truth about Mr, James. The same is true when
Macaulay writes about Milton, and Carlyle about
Burns or Johnson, and Emerson about Montaigne or
Plato, and Lowell about Thoreau or Wordsworth, —
the critic reveals himself in and through his subject.

We do not demand that Arnold get the real Ar-
nold out of the way and merge himself into general
humanity (this he cannot do in any case), but only
that he put aside the conscious exterior Arnold, so
to speak, — Arnold the supercilious, the contemptu-
ous, the hater of dissent, the teaser of the Philistine.
The critic must escape from the local and accidental.
We would have Macaulay cease to be a Whig,
Johnson cease to be a Tory, Schérer forget his theo-
logical training, and Brunetiere escape from his
Catholic bias.

v

No matter how much truth the critic tells us, if
his work does not itself rise to the dignity of good
literature, if he does not use language in a vital and
imaginative way, we shall not care for him. Liter-
ary and artistic truth is not something that can be
seized and repeated indifferently by this man and by
that, like the truths of science: it must be repro-
duced or recreated by the critic ; it must be as vital

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 97

in his page as in that of his author. The truths of
science are static; the truths of art are dynamic.
If a mediocre mind writes about Shakespeare, the
result is mediocre, no matter how much bare truth
he tells us.

What, then, do we mean by a great critic? We
mean a great mind that finds complete self-expres-
sion in and through the works of other men. Ar-
nold found more complete self-expression through
literary criticism than through any other channel:
hence he is greatest here; his theological and reli-
gious criticism shows him to lessadvantage. Sainte-
Beuve tried poetry and fiction, but did not find a
complete outlet for his talent till he tried criti-
cism. Not a profound or original mind, but a won-
derfully flexible, tolerant, sympathetic, engaging one;
a climbing plant, one might say, that needed some
support to display itself to the best advantage. We
say of the French mind generally that it is more
truly a critical mind than the English; it finds in
criticism a better field for the display of its special
gifts — taste, clearness, brevity, flexibility, judgment
—than does the more original and profoundly emo-
tional English. French criticism is rarely profound,
but it is always light, apt, graceful, delicate, lucid,
felicitous, — clear sense and good taste marvelously
blended.

Criticism in its scientific aspects or as a purely
intellectual effort —a search for the exact truth, a
sifting of evidence, weighing and comparing data, dis-
entangling testimony, separating the false from the

98 LITERARY VALUES

true, as with the lawyer, the doctor, the man of
science, the critic of old texts and documents —
is one thing. Criticism of literature and art, in-
volving questions of taste, style, poetic and artistic
values, is quite another, and demands quite other
powers. In the former case it is mainly judicial,
dispassionate, impersonal; in the latter case the
sympathies and special predilections are more in-
volved. We seek more or less to interpret the im-
aginative writer, to draw out and emphasize his
special quality and stimulus, to fuse him and restate
him in other terms; and in doing this we give our-
selves more freely. We cannot fully interpret what
we do not love, and love has eyes the judgment
knows not of. What a man was born to say, what
he speaks out of his most radical selfhood, — that
the same fate and power in you can alone fully
estimate and interpret.

vi

One’s search after the truth in subjective matters
is more or less a search after one’s self, after what
is agreeable to one’s constitutional bias or innate
partialities. We do not see the thing as it is in
itself so much as we see it as it stands related to
our individual fragment of existence. The lesson
we are slowest to learn and to act upon is the rela-
tivity of truth in all these matters, or that it is
what we make it. It is a product of the mind, as
the apple is of the tree. We get one kind of truth
from Renan, another from Taine, still another from

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 99

Ruskin or Carlyle or Arnold. The quality differs
according as the minds or spirits differ whence the
truth proceeds. Do we expect all the apples in
the orchard to be alike ? In general qualities, but
not in particular flavors; and in literature it is the
particular flavor that is most precious. It is the
quality imparted to the truth by the conceiving
mind that we prize.

It is a long while before we rise to the perception
that opposites are true, that contrary types equally
serve. ‘One supreme does not contradict another
supreme,”’ says Whitman, ‘any more than one eye-
sight contravenes another eyesight, or one hearing
contravenes another hearing.” Great men have
been radical and great men have been conservative ;
great men have been orthodox and they have been
heterodox; they have been forces of expansion and
they have been forces of contraction. In literature,
it is good to be a realist, and it is good to be a
romanticist ; it is good to bea Dumas, and it is good
to be a Zola; it is good to be a Carlyle, and it is
good to be a Mazzini, — always provided that one is
so from the inside and not from without, from origi-
nal conviction and not from hearsay or conformity.

A man makes his way in the world amid opposing
forces; he becomes something only by overcoming
something ; there is always a struggle for survival,
and always merit in that which survives. Let each
be perfect after its kind. We do not object to the
Gothic type of mind because it is not the classic,
nor to the Englishman because he is not the French-

100 LITERARY VALUES

man. We look for the measure of nature or natural
force and authority in these types. Nature is of all
types; she is of to-day as well as of yesterday; she
is of this century as well as of the first; she was with
Burns as well as with Pindar. Because the Greek
was natural, shall we say therefore nature is Greek ?
She is Asiatic, Icelandic, Saxon, Celtic, American,
as well. She is all things to all men; and without
her nothing is that is.

VII

Truth is both subjective and objective. The for-
mer is what is agreeable to one’s constitution and
point of view, or mental and spiritual make-up.
Objective truth is verifiable truth, or what agrees
with outward facts and conditions.

Criticism deals with both aspects. It is objective
when it is directed upon objective or verifiable facts ;
it is subjective when it is directed upon subjective
facts. It is an objective fact, for instance, that such
a man as Shakespeare lived in such a country in
such a time, that he wrote various plays of such and
such a character, and that these plays were founded
upon other plays or legends or histories. But the
poetic truth, the poetic beauty of these plays, their
covert meanings, the philosophy that lies back of
them, are not in the same sense objective facts. In
these respects no two persons read them just alike.
Hamlet has been interpreted in many ways. Which
Hamlet is the true one, Goethe’s, or Coleridge’s, or
Hazlitt’s, or Kean’s, or Booth’s? ach is true, so

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 101

far as it expresses a real and vital conception begot-
ten by the poet upon the critic’s or the actor’s
mind. The beauty of a poem or any work of art
is not an objective something patent to all; it is
an experience of the mind which we each have in
different degrees. In fact, the field of our esthetic
perceptions and enjoyments is no more fixed and
definite than is the field of our religious percep-
tions and enjoyments, and we diverge from one an-
other in the one case as much asin the other. This
divergence is of course, in both cases, mainly super-
ficial; it is in form and not in essence. Religions
perish, but religion remains. Styles of art pass,
but art abides. Go deep enough and we all agree,
because human nature is fundamentally the same
everywhere, All that I mean to say is that the out-
ward expressions of art differ in different ages and
among different races as much as do the outward
expressions of religion. In all these matters the sub-
jective element plays an important part. Is Brown-
ing a greater poet than Tennyson? Is Thackeray
a greater novelist than Dickens? Has Newman a-
better style than Arnold? Is Poe our greatest poet,
as many British critics think ? These and all sim-
ilar questions involve the personal equation of the
critic, and his answer to them will be given more by
his unconscious than by his conscious self. The
appeal is not so much to his rational faculties as to
his secret affinities or his esthetic perceptions. You
can move a man’s reason, but you cannot by any
similar process change his taste or his faith. If we

102 LITERARY VALUES

are not by nature committed to certain views, we
are committed to a certain habit of mind, to a cer-
tain moral and spiritual attitude, which makes these
views almost inevitable to us. “It is not given to
all minds,” says Sainte-Beuve, “to feel and to relish
equally the peculiar beauties and excellences of Mas-
sillon,” or, it may be added, of any other author,
especially if he be of marked individuality.

We do not and cannot all have the same measure
of appreciation of Emerson, or Wordsworth, or Rus-
kin, or Whitman, or Browning. To enjoy these men
“sincerely and without weariness is a quality and
almost a peculiarity of certain minds, which may
serve to define them.” Sainte-Beuve himself was
chiefly interested in an author’s character, — “in
what was most individual in his personality.” He
had no arbitrary rules, touchstones, or systems, but
pressed each new work gently, almost caressingly,
till it gave up its characteristic quality and flavor.

But the objective consideration of the merits of a
man’s work does not and cannot preclude or measure
the subjective attraction or repulsion or indifference
which we do or do not feel toward that work.
Something deeper and more potent than reason is at
work here. Back of the most impartial literary
judgment lies the fact that the critic is a person;
that he is of a certain race, family, temperament,
environment; that he is naturally cold or sympa-
thetic, liberal or reactionary, tolerant or intolerant,
and therefore has his individual likes and dislikes ;
that certain types attract him more than others;

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 103

that, of two poets of equal power, the voice of one
moves him more than that of the other. Something
as subtle and vital and hard to analyze as the flavor
of a fruit, and analogous to it, makes him prefer
this poet to that. One may see clearly the superi-
ority of Milton over Wordsworth, and yet cleave to
the latter. How beautiful is “‘ Lycidas,” yet it left
Dr. Johnson cold and critical. There is much more
of a cry —a real cry of the heart —in Arnold’s
“ Thyrsis.”” One feels that the passion is real in one,
and assumed in the other. Is “ Lycidas”’ therefore
less a creative work? The affirmative side of the
question is not without support. Johnson under-
valued some of Gray’s best work; the touch of sym-
pathy was lacking. This touch of sympathy does not
wait upon the critical judgment, but often underruns
and outruns it. It is said that Miss Martineau
found “Tom Jones” dull reading, that Charlotte
Bronté cared not for Jane Austen, and that Thack-
eray placed Cooper above Scott, —all, no doubt,
from a lack of the quickening touch of sympathy,

As arule, we have more sympathy with the au-
thors of our own country than with those of another.
Few Englishmen can do justice to Victor Hugo, and
even to some Frenchmen he is a “ gigantic blusterer.”’
It is equally hard for a Frenchman to appreciate
Carlyle, and how absurd seems Voltaire’s verdict
upon Shakespeare, — ‘‘a drunken savage’!

The French mind is preéminently a critical mind,
yet in France there are and have been as many schools
of criticism as of poetry or philosophy or romance.

104 LITERARY VALUES

Different types of mind, individual idiosyncrasy, op-
posing theories and methods, stand out just as clearly
in this branch as in any other branch of mental ac-
tivity. From Madame de Staél down through Ba-
rante, Villemain, Nisard, Sainte-Beuve, to Brunetiére
and the critics of our own day, criticism has been in-
dividualistic, and has reflected as many types of mind
and points of view as there have been critics. Where
shall we look for the final criticism? First it is
classicism that rules, then it is romanticism, then
naturalism, and next, we are told, it is to be idealism.
Whichever it is, it is true enough when uttered by
vital and earnest minds, and serves its purpose.
There are many excellences, but where is the supreme
excellence ? The naturalism of Sainte-Beuve is ex-
cellent, the positivism of Nisard is excellent, the
classicism of Brunetiére is excellent, and the deter-
minism of Taine yields interesting results; but all
are relative, all are experimental, all are subject to
revision. It is given to no man to have a mono-
poly of truth. It is given to no poet to have a mo-
nopoly of beauty. There is one beauty of Milton,
another of Wordsworth, another of Burns, another
of Tennyson. To seize upon and draw out the char-
acteristic beauty of each, and give his reader a lively
sense of it, is the business of the critic,

VIII

Our reading is a search for the excellent, for the
vital and characteristic, which may assume as many
and diverse forms in art and literature as it does

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 105

in life and nature. The savant, the scientist, the
moralist, the philosopher, may have pleasure in a
work that gives little or no pleasure to the literary
artist. Criticism may be looked upon as a search
for these various values or various phases of truth,
which the critic expresses in terms of his own taste,
knowledge, insight, etc., for scientific values, philo-
sophical values, literary and poetic values, or moral
and religious values, acccording to the subject upon
which the critical mind is directed. No two men
look for exactly the same values, nor have the same
measure of appreciation of them. Emerson and
Lowell, for instance, make quite different demands
and form different estimates of the poets they read.
Lowell lays the emphasis upon the conventional
literary values, Emerson more upon spiritual and
religious values. An Englishman will find values
in the poets of his own country that a Frenchman
does not find, and a Frenchman, values in his poets
that an Englishman does not find. See how Schérer
and Taine handled Milton. Milton’s great epic has
poetic and literary value, often of a high order, but
as philosophy or religion it is grotesque.

Ix

Yet let me not seem to underrate the value of
what is called judicial criticism. Criticism as an act
of judgment, as a disinterested endeavor to see the
thing as it is in itself and as it stands related to other
things, is justly jealous of our personal tastes and
preferences. These tastes and preferences may blind

106 LITERARY VALUES

us to the truth. Can we admire above them, or
even against them? To cherish no writers but
those of our own stripe or mental complexion is the
way of the half cultured. Can we rise to a disin-
terested view? The danger of individualism in
letters is caprice, bias, partial views; the danger of
intellectualism is the cold, the colorless, the formal.
The ideal critic will blend the two; he will be
disinterested and yet sympathetic, individual and yet
escape caprice and bias, warm with interest and yet
cool with judgment; surrendering himself to his
subject and yet not losing himself in it, upholding
tradition and yet welcoming new talent, giving the
personal equation free play without blurring the
light of the impersonal intelligence. From the point
of view of intellectualism, criticism seeks to elimi-
nate the personal equation, that which is private and
peculiar to us as individuals, and to base criticism
upon something like universal principles. What we
crave, what our minds literally feed upon, may blind
us to the truly excellent. Our wants are personal ;
what we should aim at is an excellence that is imper-
sonal. When we rise to the sphere of the disinter-
ested, we lose sight of our individual tastes and pre-
dilections. The question then is, not what we want,
not what we have a taste for, but what we are ca-
pable of appreciating. Can we appreciate the best ?
Can we share the universal mind to the extent of
delighting in the best that has been known and
thought in the world ? Emerson said he was always
glad to meet people who saw the superiority of Shake-

CRITICISM AND THE MAN 107

speare to all other poets. If we prefer Pope to Shake-
speare, as we are apt to ata certain age, we may know
by that that there is an excellence beyond our reach.
It is certain that the mass of readers will not appre-
ciate the best literature, but only the second or third
best. A man’s esthetic perceptions may be broadened
and educated as well as his intellectual. An unread
man feels little interest beyond his own neighbor-
hood, — the personal doings of the men and women he
sees and knows. Educate him a little, give him his
county paper, and the sphere of his interests is wid-
ened ; a little more, and he takes an interest in his
State; more still, and he broadens out to his whole
country ; still more, and the whole world is within
his sympathy and ken. So in the esthetic sphere;
he gets beyond his personal tastes and wants into the
great world currents of literature and art. He can
appreciate works written in other ages and lands, and
that are quite foreign to his own temperament and
outlook. This is to be disinterested. To emanci-
pate the taste is as much as to emancipate the intel-
lect; to rise above one’s personal affinities is as much
as to rise above one’s personal prejudices and supersti-
tions. The boy of a certain stamp has an affinity for
the dime novel; if we can lift him to an apprecia-
tion of Scott, or Thackeray, or Hawthorne, how have
we emancipated his taste! So that Brunetiére was
right in saying that, in art and literature, the begin-
ning of wisdom is to distrust what we like. Distrust,
not repudiate. ‘Let us examine first and see upon
what grounds we like it, —see if we ought to like

108 LITERARY VALUES

it; see if it is akin to that which is of permanent
value in the world’s best thought. A French critic
tells a story of a man who sat cool and unmoved
under a sermon that made the people about him
shed torrents of tears, and who excused himself by
saying, ‘I do not belong to this parish.” One’s
tastes must be broader than one’s parish. I suppose
any of our religious brethren would feel a little shy
of weeping in the church of a religious denomination
not his own. Our religion is no more emancipated
than are our tastes. Lowell says there are born
Popists and born Wordsworthians; but the more
these types can get out of their limitations and ap-
preciate one another, the more they are emancipated.

Vv
RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM
I

HE criticism of criticism is one of the marked
literary characteristics of the last ten or fifteen
years, both in this country and in Europe. It is
seen in France in Brunetiére’s essays and in Hen-
nequin’s “Scientific Criticism ;” in England in the
recent work of Wm. B. Wordsfold on the “ Princi-
ples of Criticism ” and in Mr. John M. Robertson’s
two volumes of ‘‘ Essays toward a Critical Method ;”
in this country in Mr. Howells’s “Criticism and
Fiction,” in Prof. Johnson’s “Elements of Criti-
cism ”’ and in the still more recent work of Professor
Sears on ‘“ Methods and Principles of Criticism,”
besides the numerous discussions of the subject in
the magazines and literary journals.

A Western college professor lately discussed some
phases of the subject under the head of “ Demo-
cratic Criticism ;”? whereupon other college profes-
sors raised the voice of protest, one of them asking
ironically, Why not have a democratic botany and
zodlogy and geology and astronomy ? I think it
may be said in reply that, so far as democracy is
based upon natural law and means free inquiry, a fair

110 LITERARY VALUES

field and no favor, we have these things already.
All science is democratic, in the sense that it is no
respecter of persons, has no partialities, stops at no
arbitrary boundaries, and places all things on an
equal footing before natural law. Surely the spirit
of science makes directly for democracy. When
science shows us that the universe is all made of
one stuff, that the celestial laws, as Whitman said,
do not need to be worked over and rectified, that
inherent power and worth alone finally tell, and
that there is not one rule for the heavens above and
another for the earth below, it is making smooth the
way for democratic ideas and ideals.

Still, pure science is outside the domain of litera-
ture, and does not reflect a people’s life and character
as literature does. It does not hold the mirror of
man’s imagination up to nature, but resolves nature
in the alembic of his understanding. It is not an
exponent of personality, as art is, but an index of
the development and progress of the impersonal
reason. But when we enter the region of the senti-
ments and the emotions —the subjective world of
criticism, literature, art — the case is different. Here
we find reflected social and arbitrary distinctions ;
here we find mirrored the spirit and temper of men
as they are acted upon and modified by the social
organism and the ideals of different times and races.
A democratic community will have standards of
excellence in art and criticism differing from those
of an aristocratic community, and will be drawn by
different qualities. It seems to me that Dr. Triggs

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 111

was quite right in saying that a criticism that esti-
mates literary products according to absolute stand-
ards, that clings to the past, that cultivates the
academic spirit, that is exclusive and unsympathetic,
may justly be called aristocratic; and that a crit-
icism that follows more the comparative method,
that adheres to principles instead of to standards,
and lays the stress upon the vital and the character-
istic in a man’s work, rather than upon its form
and extrinsic beauty, is essentially democratic.

No doubt the ideal of the monumental works
of antiquity is essentially anti-democratic. It was
fostered by an exclusive culture. It goes with the
idea of the divine right of kings, of a privileged
class, and is at war with the spirit of our times.
The Catholic tradition in religion and the classical
tradition in literature are as foreign to the spirit of
democracy as is the monarchical tradition in poli-
tics. They are all branches from the same root.
The classical tradition begat Milton, but it did not
beget Shakespeare, the most marvelous genius of the
modern world. To the classic tradition, as it spoke
through Voltaire, Shakespeare was a barbarian. In-
deed, Shakespeare’s art was essentially democratic,
how much soever it may have occupied itself with
royal and aristocratic personages. It is as free as an
uncaged bird, and pays no tribute to classic models,
Its aim is inward movement, fusion, and vitality,
rather than outward harmony and proportion. A
Greek play is like a Greek temple, — chaste, severe,
symmetrical, beautiful. A play of Shakespeare is, as

112 LITERARY VALUES

Dr. Johnson long ago suggested, more like a wood
or a piece of free nature.

II

Democratic and aristocratic may not be the best
terms to apply to the two opposing types of critics,
—men like Matthew Arnold or the French critic
Ferdinand Brunetiére, on the one hand, both the
spokesmen of authority in letters; and men like
Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France, and the younger
generation of English and American critics on the
other, men who are more tolerant of individual
differences and more inclined to seek the reason of
each work within itself. Yet these terms indicate
fairly well two profoundly different types.

Brunetiére is a militant and dogmatic critic, as we
saw by his severe denunciation of Zola while lectur-
ing in this country a few years since. One of his
eulogists speaks of him as the “ autocrat of trium-
phant convictions.” Of democratic blood in his
veins there is very little. He reflects the old ortho-
dox and aristocratic spirit in his dictum that nature
is not to be trusted; that both in taste and in morals
what comes natural to us and gives us pleasure is, for
that very reason, to be avoided. Nature is depraved.
In morals, would we attain to virtue, we must go
counter to her; and in art and literature, would we
attain to wisdom, we must distrust what we like.
This suspicion of nature was the keynote of the
old theology, which found its authority in a mirac-
ulous revelation, and it is the keynote of the old

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 113

Aristotelian criticism, which found its authority in a
body of rules deduced from the masters. The new
theology looks for a scientific basis for its morals, or
seeks for the sanction of nature herself ; and demo-
cratic criticism aims to stand upon the same basis,
and cleaves to principles and not to standards, not
by yielding to the caprices of uninformed taste, but
by seeking the law and test of every work within
itself. We no longer judge of the worth of a man by
his creed, but by what he is in and of himself; by his
natural virtues and aptitudes; and we no longer con-
demn a work of art because it breaks with the old
traditions.

Arnold was of similar temper with Brunetiére.
His elements of style are “ dignity and distinction,”
a part of the classic tradition, a survival from the
feudal and aristocratic world, from a literature of
courts and courtiers, as distinguished from a litera-
ture of the people, a democratic literature. Distinc-
tion of utterance, distinction of manners, distinction
of dress and equipage — they are all of a piece, and
adhere in the aristocratic and monarchical ideal.
The special antipathy of this ideal is the common;
all commonness is vulgar. When Arnold came to
this country and became interested in the lives of
Grant and Lincoln, he found them both wanting in
distinction, — there was no savor of the aristocratic
in their words or manners, And the criticism is
true. From all accounts, Grant presented a far less
distinguished appearance at Appomattox than did
Lee ; and Lincoln was easily outshone in aristocratic

114 LITERARY VALUES

graces by some members of his cabinet. Indeed,
the predominant quality of the two men was their
immense commonness. Washington and Jefferson
came much nearer the aristocratic ideal. Lincoln
and Grant both had greatness of the first order, but
their type was democratic and not aristocratic. The
aristocratic ideal of excellence embraces other quali-
ties; there is more pride, more exclusiveness in it;
it holds more by traditions and special privileges.
Lincoln had less distinction than Sumner or Chase,
Grant less than Sherman or Lee, but each had an
excellence the others had not. The choice, the re-
fined, the cultured, belong to one class of excel-
lencies: the qualities of Lincoln and Grant belong
to another and more fundamental kind. Arnold
himself had distinction, he had urbanity, lucid-
ity, proportion, and many other classic virtues, —
but he had not breadth, sympathy, heartiness, com-
monness. The quality of distinction, an air of
something choice, high-bred, superfine, will doubt-
less count for less and less in a country like ours.
In literature and in character we are looking for
other values, for the true, the vital, the characteris-
tic. There is nothing in life or character more win-
some than commonness wedded to great excellence ;
the ordinary crowned with the extraordinary, as in
Lincoln the man, Socrates the philosopher, Burns
or Wordsworth the poet. Distinction wins admi-
ration, commonness wins love. The note of equal-
ity, the democratic note, is much more pronounced
in Browning than in Tennyson, in Shelley than in

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 115

Arnold, in Wordsworth than in Milton, and it is
more pronounced in American poets than in English.
In times and for a people like ours, the suggestion
of something hearty and heroic in letters is more
needed than the suggestion of something fine and
exquisite. Distinction is not to be confounded with
dignity or elevation, which flourishes more or less in
all great peoples. A common laboring man may
show great dignity, but never distinction. Dignity
often shone in the speeches of the old Indian chiefs,
but not distinction, as the term is here used.

The more points at which a man touches his fel-
low man, the more democratic he is. The breadth
of his relation to the rest of the world, that is the
test. Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic
critic than is Brunetiere. The democratic pro-
ducer in literature will differ from the aristocratic
less in his standards of excellence than in the at-
mosphere of human equality and commonness which
he effuses. We are too apt to associate the common
with the vulgar. There is the commonness of a
Lincoln or a Grant, and there is the commonness of
the lower strata of society. There is the common-
ness of earth, air, and water, and there is the com-
monness of dust and mud; the commonness of the
basic and the universal, and the commonness of the
cheap and tawdry. Grant’s calmness, self-control,
tenacity of purpose, modesty, comprehensiveness of
mind, were uncommon in degree, not in kind. He
was the common soldier with extraordinary powers
added, but the common soldier was always visible.

116 LITERARY VALUES

So with Lincoln, — his greatness was inclusive, not
exclusive.
III

So far as good taste means “ good form,” and so
far as good form is established by social and conven-
tional usages of the fashionable world, the poet of
democracy has little to do with it. But so far as it
is based upon the inherent fitness of things and
the health and development of the best there is in
a man, so far is he bound to enlist himself in its
service. In a world where everybody is educated
and reads books, much poor literature will circulate ;
but will not the good, the best, circulate also ? Will
there not be the few good judges, the saving rem-
nant? Is there not as much good taste and right
reason now in England or France as during more
rigidly monarchical times ?

The ideal democracy is not the triumph of bar-
barism or the riot of vulgarity, but it is the triumph
of right reason and natural equality and inequality.
Some things are better than others, better from the
point of view of the whole of life. These better
things we must cling to and make much of in a demo-
cracy, as in an aristocracy. We must aspire to the
best that is known and thought in the world. This
best a privileged class seeks to appropriate to itself;
a democracy seeks to share it with all. All are not
capable of receiving it, but all may try. They will
be better able to-morrow if they have the chance
to-day. We must not ignore the vulgarity, the bad
taste incident to democratic conditions. If we do,

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 117

we never get rid of them, Political equality brings
to the foreground many unhandsome human traits,
the loud, the mediocre, the insolent, etc. All the
more must we fix attention upon the true, the noble,
the heroic, the disinterested. The rule of temper-
ance, of good taste, of right reason, antedates any
and every social condition. ‘Democracy cannot ab-
rogate fundamental principles. The essential condi-
tions of life are not changed, but arbitrary, accidental
conditions are modified. One still needs food and
raiment and shelter and transportation; he is still
subject to the old hindrances and discouragements
within himself.

We must give the terms good taste, right reason
a broader scope; that is all. The principles of good
taste when applied to art are not fixed and absolute,
like those of mathematics or the exact sciences.
They are vital and elastic. They imply a certain
fitness and consistency. Shakespeare shocked the
classic taste of the French critics. He violated the
unities and mixed prose and poetry. But what was
good taste in Shakespeare — that is, in keeping with
his spirit and aim — might be bad taste in Racine.
What is permissible to an elemental poet like Whit-
man would jar in a refined poet like Longfellow.
But bad taste in Whitman, that is, things not in
keeping with the ideal he has before him, jar the
same as in any other poet. He has many lines and
passages and whole poems that set the teeth of many
readers on edge, that are yet in perfect keeping with
his plan and spirit. They go with the poet of the

118 LITERARY VALUES

Cosmos, but not with the poet of the drawing-room
or library. My taste is not shocked, but my cour-
age is challenged.

In Whitman’s case the appeal is not so directly
and exclusively to our esthetic perceptions as it is
in most other poets; he is elemental where they
are cultured and artificial; at the same time he can
no more escape esthetic principles than they can.
Because a flower, a gem, a well-kept lawn, etc., are
beautiful, we are not compelled to deny beauty to
rocks, trees, and mountains. If Whitman does not,
in his total effects, attain to something like this kind
of beauty, he is not a poet.

IV

I have said that Sainte-Beuve was more truly a
democratic critic than is M. Brunetiére. He is more
tolerant of individualism in letters. He called him-
self a naturalist of minds. His main interest in
each work was in what was most individual and
characteristic in it. He was inclusive rather than
exclusive, less given to positive judgments, but more
to sympathetic interpretation. He united the method
of Darwin to the sensibility of the artist. Critics
like Arnold and Brunetiére uphold the classic and
academic traditions. They are aristocratic because
they are the spokesmen of an exclusive culture.
They derive from Catholicism more than from Pro-
testantism; they uphold authority rather than en-
courage individuality in life and letters. In criti-
cism they aim at that intellectual disinterestedness

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 119

which is indeed admirable, and which has given the
world such noble results, but which seems unsuited
to the genius of our time. Ours is a democratic
century, a Protestant century. Individualism has
been the dominant note in literature. The men of
power, for the most part, have not been the disin-
terested, but the interested men, the men of convic-
tion and of more or less partial views, who have
not so much aimed to see the thing as it is in itself
as they have aimed to make others see it as they
saw it. In other words, they have been preachers,
doctrinaires, men bent upon the dissemination of
particular ideas.

One has only to run over the list of the foremost
names in literature for the past seventy-five years,
There is Tolstoi, in Russia, clearly one of the great
world writers, but a doctrinaire through and through.
There are Renan, Victor Hugo, Taine, Thiers,
Guizot, in France; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle,
Ruskin, Newman, Huxley, George Eliot, Mrs. Ward,
in English literature, and in American literature
Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. All these writers
had aims ulterior to those of pure literature. They
were not disinterested observers and recorders.
They obtruded their personal opinions and convic-
tions. They are the writers with a message. Their
thoughts spring from some special bent or experience,
and address themselves to some special mood or want.
They wrote the books that help us, that often come
to us as revelations; works of art, it may be, but
of art in subjection to moral conviction, and they

120 LITERARY VALUES

are directed to other than purely esthetic ends.
They gave expression to their individual tastes and
predilections; they were more or less tethered to
their own egos; they may be called the personal
authors, as their predecessors may be called the im-
personal. They are not of the pure breed of men
of letters, but represent crosses of various kinds, as
the cross of the artist with the thinker, the savant,
the theologian, the man of science, the reformer, the
preacher. These personal authors belong to the
modern world rather than to the ancient; to a time
of individualism rather than to a time of institution-
alism; to an industrial and democratic age, rather
than to an imperial and military age.

Modern life is undoubtedly becoming more and
more impersonal in the sense that it favors less and
less the growth and preservation of great personali-
ties, yet its utilitarian spirit, its tendency to speciali-
zation, its right of private judgment, and its religious
doubts and unrest, find their outcome in individ-
ualism in literature. The disinterested critics and
recorders are still among us, but power has departed
from them. The age is too serious, the questions
are too pressing. ‘The man of genius is no longer
at ease in Zion. If he rises at all above the masses,
he must share the burden of thought and conscience
of his times. This burden may hinder the free artis-
tic play of his powers, as it probably has in most
of the writers I have mentioned, yet it will greatly
deepen the impression his words will make. The
saying “Art for art’s sake’? cannot be impeached,

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 121

even by Tolstoi. When rightly understood, it is
true. Art would live in the whole, and not in the
part called morals or religion, or even beauty. But
its exponents in our day have been, with few excep-
tions, of a feeble type, men of words and fancies like
Swinburne or Poe. In Tennyson we have as pure a
specimen of artistic genius as in Shakespeare, but
a far less potent one. His power comes when he
thrills and vibrates with some special thought or
ery of his time. With the great swarms of our
minor poets the complaint is, not that the type is
not pure, but that the inspiration is feeble. They
have more ‘art than nature. It is the same with
the novelists. Since Hawthorne and Thackeray the
pure artistic gift has no longer been the endowment
of great or profound personalities. George Eliot,
Mrs. Ward, Tolstoi, all interested writers, all with
aims foreign to pure art, are the names of power in
our half of the century. Henry James is a much
finer artist, but he has nothing like their hold upon
the great common elements of human life. The
disinterested writer gives us a higher, more unselfish
pleasure than the type I am considering; we are
compelled to rise more completely out of ourselves
to meet him. Iam only insisting that in our day
he has little penetration, and that the men of power
have been of the other class.

I have placed Taine among the interested critics ;
he was interested in putting through certain ideas;
he had a thesis to uphold; he will not value all
truths equally, he will take what suits him. Like

122 LITERARY VALUES

all men with preconceived ideas, his mind was more
like a searchlight than like a lamp. This makes him
stimulating asa critic, but not always satisfying.
The same is true of our own Emerson, probably
our most stimulating and fertilizing mind thus far.
Lowell, as a man of letters, is of a much purer strain ;
he is in the direct line of succession of the great
literary names, yet the value of his contribution
undoubtedly falls far short of that of Emerson. As
a poet, Emerson was a poor singer with wonderfully
penetrating tones, almost unequaled in this respect.
The same may be said of him as a critic; he was a
poor critic with a wonderfully penetrating glance.
He had the hawk’s eye for the game he was looking
for; he could see it amid any tangle of woods or
thicket of the commonplace, His special limitation
is that he was looking for a particular kind of prey.
His sympathies were narrow but intense. The elec-
tive affinities were very active in his criticism. He
loved Emersonian poetry, he loved the Emersonian
paradoxes, he valued the wild eolian tones; he de-
lighted in the word that gave the prick and sting of
the electric spark; abruptness, surprise, the sudden,
intense, forked sentence — these took him, these he
dealtin. His survey of any man or matter is never
a complete one, never a disinterested one, never done
in the scientific spirit. He writes about representa-
tive men, and exploits Plato, Goethe, Montaigne, etc.,
in relation to his thought. He is always on quests
for particular ideas, in search for Emersonian values.
He will not do justice to such poets as Poe and

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 123

Shelley, but he will do more than justice to Donne
and Herbert; he finds in them what he sets out to
find; it is a partial view, but it is penetrating and
valuable; it is not criticism, and does not set out
to be; it is a suggestive study of kindred souls.
Emerson’s work is kindling and inspiring; it un-
settles rather than settles; it is not a lamp to guide
your feet, it is a star to give you your bearings.

Carlyle and Ruskin fall into the same category.
They sin against the classic virtues of repose, pro-
portion, serenity, but this makes their penetrating
power all the greater. Carlyle cannot rank with the
great impartial historians, yet as a painter of histori-
cal characters and scenes the vividness and reality
of his pictures are almost unequaled. Carlyle
lacked the disinterestedness of the true artist. He
had great power of description and characterization,
but he could not as an historian stand apart from his
subject as the great Greek and Roman historians do.
He is a portion of all that he sees and describes,
He is bent upon persuasion quite as much as upon
portrayal. He could not succeed as a novelist or a
poet, because of his vehement, intolerant nature. He
succeeds as an historian only in portraying men in
whom he sees the lineaments of his own character,
as in Cromwell. He did not or could not live in the
whole, as did his master, Goethe. His mind was
a steep incline. His opinions were like mountain
torrents. Arnold, in one of his letters, complained
that in his criticism of Goethe there was too much
of engouement, — too much, I suppose, of the fond-

124 LITERARY VALUES

ness of the gourmand fora particular dish, or of the
toper for his favorite tipple. His enthusiasm was
intemperate, and therefore unsound. Doubtless
some such objection as this may be urged against
most of Carlyle’s criticisms. He was ruled by his
character more than by his intellect; his feeling
guided his vision. If he is not always a light to the
reason, he is certainly an electric excitant to the
imagination and the moral sense. In his essays,
pamphlets, histories, we hardly get judicial estimates
of things; rather do we get overestimates or un-
der estimates. Yet always is there something that
kindles and brings the blood to the surface. Car-
lyle will beget a stronger race than Arnold, but it
will not be so cool and clear-headed. Emerson will
fertilize more minds with new thought than Lowell,
but there will be many more cranks and fanatics
and hobbyists among them.

Professor Dowden says Landor falls below Shelley
and Wordsworth because he had no divine message
or oracle to deliver to the men of his generation, —
no authentic word of the Lord to utter. Landor had
great thoughts, but they were not of first-rate impor-
tance with reference to his times. He was more
thoroughly imbued with the classic spirit than either
Shelley or Wordsworth, and the classic spirit is at
ease in Zion. The modern world differs from the
ancient in its moral stress and fervor. This moral
stress and fervor both Shelley and Wordsworth
shared, but Landor did not. Where would the
world be in thought, in works, in civilization, had

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 125

there been no one-sided, overloaded, fanatical men,
—wmen of partial views, of half-truths, of one idea ?
Where would Christianity have been, under the play
of disinterested intellect, without disciples, without
devotees, without saints and martyrs, without its
Paul and its Luther, without prejudice, without
superstition, without inflexibility ?

We might fitly contrast these two types of mind
under the heads of Protestant and Catholic, the one
personal, the other impersonal. With the Protest-
ant type goes individualism, which, as I have said,
is so marked a feature of the modern world. With
the Catholic type goes institutionalism, which was
so marked a feature of the ancient world. With
the former goes the right of private judgment, inno-
vation, progress, new forms of art; with the latter
goes authority, obedience, the power of the past.
The Protestant type is more capricious and willful ;
it is restless, venturesome, impatient of rules and
precedents; the older type is more serene, composed,
conservative, orderly. In criticism it is more objec-
tive ; it upholds the standards, it lays down the law;
it cherishes the academic spirit. The French mind
is the more Catholic; the English the more Protest-
ant. In literature the Protestant type is the more
subjective and creative; it makes new discoveries, it
founds new orders. Catholicism is exterior, formal,
imposing; it takes little account of personal needs
and peculiarities, while Protestantism is almost en-
tirely concerned with the private, interior world.
Individualism in religion begat Protestantism, and

126 LITERARY VALUES

upon Protestantism it begat the numerous progeny
of the sects, the thousand and one isms that now
divide the religious world. To this spirit religion is
something personal and private to every man, and in
no sense a matter of forms and rituals. In fact, in-
dividualism fairly confronts institutionalism. This
spirit carried into the region of esthetics or liter-
ature gives rise to like results, — to a freer play of
personal taste and preferences, to more intense indi-
vidual utterances, to new and unique types of artistic
genius, and to new lines of activity in the esthetic
field.

Another name for it is the democratic spirit. Its
special dangers are the crude, the odd, the capricious,
just as the danger of institutionalism is the coldly
formal, the lifeless, the traditional. In English lit-
erature the former begat Shakespeare, as it did Tup-
per; the latter begat Milton, as it did Young and
Pollock. With institutionalism goes the divine right
of kings, the sacredness of priests, the authority of
forms and ceremonies, and the slavery of the masses;
with individualism goes the divinity of man, the
sacredness of life, the right of private judgment,
the decay of traditions and forms, and the birth
of the modern spirit. With one goes stateliness,
impressiveness, distinction, as well as the empty,
the moribund, the despotic; with the other goes
force, strenuousness, originality, as well as the loud,
the amorphous, the fanatical.

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 127

Vv

Goethe said that a loving interest in the per-
son and the works of an author, amounting to a
certain one-sided enthusiasm, alone led to reality in
criticism ; all else was vanity. No doubt more will
come of the contact of two minds under these cir-
cumstances than from what is called the judicial
attitude; there will be more complete fusion and
interpenetration ; without a certain warmth and pas-
sion there is no fruitfulness, even in criticism. In
the field of art and literature, to be disinterested
does not mean to be cold and judicial; it means to
be free from bias, free from theories and systems,
with mind open to receive a clear impression of the
work’s characteristic merits and qualities,

It is tradition that always stands in the way of
the new man. In politics, it is the political tradi-
tion; in religion, the religious tradition; and in
literature, the literary tradition. Professional criti-
cism is the guardian of the literary tradition, and
this is why any man who essays a new departure in
literary art has reason to fear criticism or despise it,
as the case may be.

It is when we take up any new work in the judi-
cial spirit, bent upon judging and classifying, rather
than upon enjoying and understanding, the conscious
analytical intellect on duty and the sympathies and
the intuitions under lock and key, that there is
danger that judicial blindness will fall upon us,
When we approach nature in the spirit of technical

128 LITERARY VALUES

science, our minds already preoccupied with certain
conclusions and systems, do we get as much of the
joy and stimulus which she holds for us as do the
children on the way to school of a spring morning
with their hands full of wild flowers, or as does the
gleesome saunterer over hills in summer with only
love and appreciation uppermost in his mind ?

Professional criticism often becomes mere pedago-
gical narrowness and hardness; it gets crushed over
with rules and precedents, pinched and sterilized by
routine and convention, so that a new work makes
no impression upon it. The literary tradition, like
the religious tradition, ceases to be vital and forma-
tive.

Is it not true that all first-class works have to be
approached with a certain humility and free giving
of one’s self? In a sense, “except ye become as
little children’ ye cannot enter the kingdom of the
great books.

I suppose that to get at the true inwardness of
any imaginative work, we must read it as far as pos-
sible in its own spirit, and that if it does not engraft
and increase its own spirit upon us, then it is feeble
and may easily be brushed aside.

Criticism which has for its object the discovery of
new talent and, in Sainte-Beuve’s words, to “ appor-
tion to each kind of greatness its due influence and
superiority,” is one thing; and criticism the object
of which is to uphold and enforce the literary tradi-
tion, is quite another. Consciously or unconsciously,
when the trained reader opens a new book he is under

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 129

the influence of one or the other of these notions, —
either he submits himself to it disinterestedly, intent
only upon seizing and appreciating its characteristic
quality, or he comes prepossessed with certain rules
and standards upon which his taste has been formed.
In other words, he comes to the new work simply
as a man, a human being seeking edification, or he
comes clothed in some professional authority, seek-
ing judgment.

Our best reading is a search for the excellent;
but what is the excellent ? Is there any final stand-
ard of excellence in literature? Each may be ex-
cellent after its kind, but kinds differ. There is one
excellence of Milton and Arnold and the classic
school, and another excellence of Shakespeare and
Pope and Burns and Wordsworth and Whitman, or
of the romantic and democratic school. The critic
is to hold a work up to its own ideal or standard.
Of the perfect works, or the works that aim at per-
fection, at absolute symmetry and proportion, ap-
pealing to us through the cunning of their form,
scheme, structure, details, ornamentation, we make
a different demand from the one we make of a prim-
itive, unique, individual utterance or expression of
personality like “Leaves of Grass,” in which the end
is not form, but life; not perfection, but suggestion ;
not intellect, but character ; not beauty, but power;
not carving, or sculpture, or architecture, but the
building of a man.

It is no doubt a great loss to be compelled to read
any work of literary art in a conscious critical mood,

130 LITERARY VALUES

because the purely intellectual interest in such a
work which criticism demands, is far less satisfying
than our esthetic interest. The mood in which we
enjoy a poem is analogous to that in which it was
conceived. We have here the reason why the pro-
fessional reviewer is so apt to miss the characteristic
quality of the new book, and why the readers of
great publishing houses make so many mistakes.
They call into play a conscious mental force that is
inimical to the emotional mood in which the work
had its rise; what was love in the poet becomes a
pale intellectual reflection in the critic.

Love must come first, or there can be no true
criticism; the intellectual process must follow and
be begotten by an emotional process. Indeed, criti-
cism is an afterthought; it is such an account as we
can give of the experience we have had in private
communion with the subject of it. The conscious
analytical intellect takes up one by one, and exam-
ines the impression made upon our subconsciousness
by the new poem or novel.

Where nothing has been sown, nothing can be
reaped. The work that has yielded us no enjoyment
will yield us no positive results in criticism. Dr.
Louis Waldstein, in his suggestive work on “ The
Subconscious Self,’ discovers that the critical or
intellectual mood is foreign to art; that it destroys
or decreases the spontaneity necessary to creation.
This is why the critical and the creative faculty so
rarely go together, or why one seems to work against
the other. Probably in all normal, well-balanced

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 181

minds the appreciation of a work of the imagination
is a matter of feeling and intuition long before it is
a matter of intellectual cognizance. Not all minds
can give a reason for the faith that is in them, and it
is not important that they should; the main mat-
ter is the faith. Livery great work of art will be
found upon examination to have an ample ground of
critical principles to rest upon, though in the artist’s
own mind not one of these principles may have been
consciously defined.

Indeed, the artist who works from any theory is
foredoomed to at least partial failure. And art that
lends itself to any propaganda, or to any idea “ out-
side its essential form, falls short of being a pure
art creation.”

The critical spirit, when it has hardened into fixed
standards, is always a bar to the enjoyment or under-
standing of a poet. One then has a poetical creed,
as he has a political or religious creed, and this creed
is likely to stand between him and the appreciation
of a new poetic type. Macaulay thought Leigh Hunt
was barred from appreciating his “Lays of Ancient
Rome” by his poetical creed, which may have been
the case. Jeffrey was no doubt barred from appre-
ciating Wordsworth by his poetical creed. It was
Byron’s poetical creed that led him to rank Pope so
highly. A critic who holds to one of the conflicting
creeds about fiction, either that it should be realistic
or romantic, will not do justice to the other type.
If Tolstoi is his ideal, he will set little value on
Scott; or if he exalts Hawthorne, he will depreciate

132 LITERARY VALUES

Howells. What the disinterested observer demands
is the best possible work of each after its kind. Or,
if he is to compare and appraise the two kinds, then
I think that without doubt his conclusion will be
that the realistic novel is the later, maturer growth,
more in keeping with the modern demand for real-
ity in all fields, and that the romantic belongs more
to the world of childish things, which we are fast
leaving behind us.

Our particular predilections in literature must, no
doubt, be carefully watched. There is danger in
personal absorption in an author, — danger to our
intellectual freedom. One would not feel for a poet
the absorbing and exclusive love that the lover feels
for his mistress, because one would rather have the
whole of literature for his domain. One would
rather admire Rabelais with Sainte-Beuve, as a Ho-
meric buffoon, than be a real “ Pantagruelist devo-
tee,” who finds a flavor even in “the dregs of Mas-
ter Frangois’s cask” that he prefers to all others.
No doubt some of us, goaded on by the opposite
vice in readers and critics, have been guilty of an
intemperate enthusiasm toward Whitman and Brown-
ing. To make a cult of either of these authors, or
of any other, is to shut one’s self up in a part when
the whole is open to him. The opposite vice, that of
violent personal antipathy, is equally to be avoided
in criticism. Probably Sainte-Beuve was guilty of
this vice in his attitude toward Balzac; Schérer in
his criticism of Béranger, and Landor in his dislike
of Dante. One might also cite Emerson’s distaste

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM 133

for Poe and Shelley, and Arnold’s antipathy to Vic-
tor Hugo’s poetry. Likes and dislikes in literature
that are temperamental, that are like the attraction
or repulsion of bodies in different electrical condi-
tions, are hard to be avoided, but the trained reader
may hope to overcome them. ‘Taste is personal, but
the intellect is, or should be, impersonal, and to be
able to guide the former by the light of the latter is
the signal triumph of criticism.

VI
“THOU SHALT NOT PREACH”
After Reading Tolstoi on “ What is Art?”

HERE is one respect in which pure art and pure
science agree: both are disinterested, and seek

the truth, each of its kind, for its own sake; neither
has any axe to grind. Both would live in the whole,
— one through reason and investigation, the other
through imagination and contemplation. Science
seeks to understand the universe, art to enjoy it. A
man of pure science like Darwin is as disinterested
as a great artist like Shakespeare. He has no prac-
tical or secondary ends ; the truth alone is his quest.
He is tracing the footsteps of creative energy through
organic nature. He is like a detective working up a
case. His theory about it is only provisional, for
the moment. Every fact is welcome to him, and
the more it seems to tell against his theory of the
case, the more eagerly he weighs it and studies it.
Indeed, the man of science follows an ideal as truly
as does the poet, and will pass by fortune, honors,
and all worldly success, to cleave to it. Tolstoi
thinks that science for science’ sake is as bad as art
for art’s sake; but is not knowledge a reward in it-
self, and is there any higher good than that mastery

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 135

of the intellect over the problems of the universe
which science gives? By bending science to partic-
ular and secondary ends we lay the basis of our ma-
terial civilization, but it is still true that the final end
of science is, not our material benefit, but our mental
enlightenment; nor is the highest end of art the good
which the preacher and the moralist seek to give us.
A poem of Milton’s or Tennyson’s carries its own
proof, its own justification. When we demand a mes-
sage of the poet, or of any artist, outside of himself,
outside of the truth which he unconsciously con-
veys through his own personality and point of view,
we degrade his art, or destroy that disinterestedness
which is its crown. Art exists for ideal ends; it
looks askance at devotees, at doctrinaires, at all
men engaged in the dissemination of particular ideas,
I am not now thinking of art as mere craft, but as
the province of man’s freest, most spontaneous, most
joyous, most complete soul activity, —the kind of
activity that has no other end, seeks no other reward,
than it finds in or of itself, the joy of being and be-
holding, the free play of creative energy. Art does
not rebuke vice, it depicts it; it does not urge re-
form, it shows us the reformers. Its work is play,
its lesson is an allegory. The preacher works by
selection and exclusion, the artist by inclusion and
contrast.

When the resources of literary art are enlisted in
any propaganda, in the dissemination of particular
ideas or doctrines, or when the end is moral or sci-
entific or political or philosophical, and not esthetic,

1386 LITERARY VALUES

the result is a mixed product, a cross between litera-
ture and something else, which may be very vigorous
and serviceable, but which cannot give the kind of
satisfaction that is imparted by a pure artistic crea-
tion. A great poem or work of art does not speak
to any special and passing condition, mental or spir-
itual; its ministrations are neither those of meat nor
those of medicine ; it does not subserve any private
or secondary ends, even the saving of our souls,
The books that seem written for us are quite certain
to lose in interest to the next generation. <A great
poem heals, not as the doctor heals, but as nature
does, by bringing the conditions of health. It con-
soles, not as the priest consoles, but as love and life
themselves do. It does not offer a special good, but
a general benefaction.

I once heard Emerson quote with approval Shake-
speare’s saying, “ Read what you most affect ;”” but no
doubt a broad culture demands wide reading, and that
we be on our guard against our particular predilec-
tions, because such predilections may lead us into nar-
row channels. Do the devotees of Browning, those
who cry Browning, Browning, and Browning only,
do him the highest honor? Do the disciples of
Whitman, who would make a cult of him, live in
the spirit of the whole, as Whitman himself tried to
live ? — Whitman, who said that there may be any
number of Supremes, and that the chief lesson to be
learned under the master is how to destroy him ?
Our love for an author must not suggest the fondness
of the epicure for a special dish, or partake of the

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 137

lover’s infatuation for his mistress. Infatuation is
not permissible in literature. If art does not make
us free of the whole, it fails of its purpose. Only
the religious bigot builds upon specific texts, and only
the one-sided, half-formed mind sees life through the
eyes of a single author. In the esthetic sphere one
may serve many masters; he may give himself to
none. One of the latest and most mature percep-
tions that comes to us is the perception of relativity,
in art as well as in all other matters. .

With respect to this question, both readers and
writers may be divided into two classes, the inter-
ested and the disinterested, — those who are seeking
special and personal ends, and those who are seeking
general, universal ends.

The poet is best pleased with the disinterested
readers and admirers of his work; that is, with
those who take to it on the broadest human grounds,
and not upon grounds merely personal to them-
selves. Thus Longfellow will find a wider and
more disinterested audience than Whittier, because
his Muse is less in the service of special ideas; he
looks at life less as a Quaker and a Puritan, and
more as a man.

The’ special ideas of an age, its moral enthusiasms
and revolts, give place to other ideas and enthusi-
asms, which in their turn give place to others; but
there are certain currents of thought and emotion
that are perennial, certain experiences common to
all men and peoples. Such a poemas Gray’s Elegy,
for instance, is filled with the breadth of universal

138 LITERARY VALUES

human life. On the other hand, such a work as
Schiller’s ‘ Robbers,” or Goethe’s ‘ Werther,” seems
to us like anempty shell picked up on the shore, the
life entirely gone out of it. One can see why Poe
is looked upon by foreign critics as outranking any
of our more popular New England poets. It is be-
cause his work has more of the ubiquitous character
of true art, is less pledged to moral and special ends,
less the result of personal tastes and attractions, and
more the pure flame of the unpledged esthetic na-
ture. The “Raven” and “The Bells” have that
play, that scorn of personal ends, that potential spir-
itual energy, of great art. Poe does not increase
our stock of ideas or widen the sphere of our sym-
pathies. He was a conjurer with words. Asa poet
he used language for the music he could evoke from
it. What is the mental content of his ‘“ Annabel
Lee” ? It is as vague and shadowy as its angels
and demons, its sepulchres and seraphim, and its
kingdom by the sea.

Is it Coleridge who tells of an artist who al-
ways copied his wife’s legs in his pictures, and
thereby won great fame? The creative touch it is
that marks the artist. He smites the rocks, and a
fountain gushes forth, Tennyson has the artist
nature in greater measure than Wordsworth, a more
flexible receptive spirit, though he never attains to
the homely pathos or the moral grandeur of the
latter. Yet individual convictions and attractions
played a less part in his poetry. Wordsworth
gathered the harvest of his own feelings and ex-

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 139

periences, Tennyson that of other men as well.
One reaped only where he had sown, the other
where all men had sown. One is colored by West-
moreland, the other by the whole of England.
Wordsworth wrote more from character and natural
bias than Tennyson. What nature does with a man,
—that is no credit to him; but what he does with
nature. If his character inspired the poem, is it
not less than if his imagination had inspired it?
What a man does out of and independent of him-
self, or the degree in which he transcends his own
experience and partialities and rises into universal
relations, — is not that the measure of him as an
artist ? If I tell only what I know, what I have
felt, what I have seen, no matter how well I do it,
that is not to come into the sphere the artist dwells
in. What Wordsworth writes is more personal to
himself, more out of his own life, than what Ten-
nyson writes. He is more limited by his tempera-
ment and natural bias than Tennyson is by his.
His word is more inevitable, more the word of fate,
but is it not therefore less the word of art? Be
sincere, be sincere; be not too sincere, lest you sub-
stitute a moral rigidity for the flexibility demanded
by art. The artist is never the slave of his sin-
cerity.

Graphic power is only a minor part of artistic
power. One can say what one has felt, and tell
what one has experienced; but the artist can tell
what he has not experienced, and say what he has
not felt. He can make the assumed, the imaginary,

140 LITERARY VALUES

real to himself and to his reader. He can depict
the passion of love, of anger, of remorse, though he
may never have felt them. Many persons have
written one good novel, but not a second, because
in the first they exhausted their experience; to
transcend that is denied them. ‘True art will have
many messages and many morals, as life and nature
have, but we must draw them out for ourselves,
They do not lead, they follow; they do not make
the argument, they are made by it. Let us repeat
and re-repeat. Art makes us free of the whole, —
not art for craft’s sake, but art as implying the en-
tire sphere of man’s spontaneous esthetic activity.
Beauty is indeed its own excuse for being. Litera-
ture is an end in and of itself, as much as music
is or religion is. Or are we religious. only upon
pay ? What message has a bird, a flower, a summer
day, frost, rain, wind, snow? There are sermons in
stones — when we put them there. What message
has Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Virgil, or any true
poet ? The message we have the power to draw
from him, and no two of us will draw the same.
Art isa circle; it is complete within itself; it re-
turns forever upon itself. There is no great poetry
without great ideas, and yet the ideas must exist as
impulse, will, emotion, and not lie upon the surface
as formulas, The enemies of art are reflection,
special ideas, conscious intellectual processes, be-
cause these things isolate us and shut us off from
the life of the whole, — from that which we reach
through our sentiments and emotions. The zsthetic

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 141

mood, says the author of “The Subconscious Self,”
“is, in its essence, receptive, contemplative, distinctly
personal, and therefore free from purpose and con-
scious selection.”? ‘ Whenever a work of art is the
vehicle for an idea or purpose outside of its essential
form, it falls short of being a pure art creation, and
fails in its appeal to the esthetic mood, whilst, be
it conceded, it may serve some other but secondary
purpose, which belongs to the province of the arche-
ologist, the art historian, and the collector,” and,
we may add, the moralist and preacher. Words-
worth’s poet was content if he “might enjoy the
things that others understood,” and this is always
characteristic of the poetic mood. Absorption, con-
templation, enjoyment, and not criticism and reflec-
tion, are as the air it breathes. Byron was a great
poet, but, said Goethe, “the moment he reflects, he
isa child.’ It is better that the poet should not
be a child when he reflects, but it is much more
important that he be a child when he feels. His
power as a poet does not lie in the reflective facul-
ties, but in the direct, joyous, solvent power of his
spirit.

We do not find our individual selves in great
art, but the humanity of which we are partakers.
Something is brought home to us; but not to our
partialities, rather to our higher selves. We are
never so little selfish and hampered by our individ-
ualism as when admiring a great work of the imagi-
nation. No doubt our modern world calls for doc-
tors of the soul in a sense that the more healthful

142 LITERARY VALUES

and joyous pagan world had no need of. Still, so
far as the poet is a doctor or a priest, so far does he
fail to live in the spirit of the whole.

It is, I think, in these or similar considerations
that we are to look for the justification of the phrase,
now almost everywhere disputed, ‘“ Art for art’s
sake.” It is only saying that art is to have no par-
tial or secondary ends, but is to breathe forth the
spirit of the whole. It must be disinterested ; it is
to hold the mirror up to nature. It may hold the
mirror up to the vices and follies of the age, but
must not take sides. It represents; it does not
judge. The matter is self-judged in the handling
of the true artist. Didactic poetry or didactic fiction
can never rank high. Thou shalt not preach or
teach; thou shalt portray and create, and have ends
as universal as has nature.

Our moral teachers and preachers often fail to see
that the first condition of a work of pure art is that
it be disinterested, that it be a total and complete
product in and of itself; and that it is its own excuse
for being. Its business is to represent, to portray,
or, as Aristotle has it, to imitate nature, and not to
preach or to moralize. Our ethical and religious
writers and speakers are apt to call this artistic dis-
interestedness indifferentism. If the novelist does
not openly and avowedly take sides with his good
characters against his bad, or if, as Taine declares his
function to be, he contents himself with oe iim,
ing them to us as they are, whole, not bl. artist who

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 143

punishing, not mutilating, transferring them to us
intact and separate, and leaving “us the right of
judging if we desire it,” —if this is his attitude,
says the Reverend Washington Gladden in his late
brochure on “ Art and Morality,” he is guilty of in-
differentism. ‘ His work begins to be the work of
a malefactor, and he himself is preparing to be fit
company for fiends.’ Mr. Gladden misapprehends
Taine, whom he quotes, and he misapprehends the
spirit and method of art. If the artist does really
convey to us the impression that he is personally
indifferent as to which triumphs in life, good or evil,
and that he is as well pleased with the one as with
the other, then he is culpable and merits this harsh
language.

What art demands is that the artist’s personal
convictions and notions, his likes and dislikes, do
not obtrude themselves at all; that good and evil
stand judged in his work by the logic of events, as
they do in nature, and not by any special pleading
on his part. He does not hold a brief for either
side; he exemplifies the working of the creative en-
ergy. He is neither a judge nor an advocate; he is
a witness on the stand ; he tells how the thing fell
out, and the more impartial he is as a witness, the
better. We, the jury, shall watch carefully for any
bias or leaning on his part. We shall try his testi-
mony by the rules of evidence; in this case, by our
acquaintance with other imaginative works and by
titer perience of life. The great artist works in
censure it q. and from moral ideas; his works are

\

\

144 LITERARY VALUES

indirectly a criticism of life. He is moral without
having a moral. The moment a moral or an im-
moral intention obtrudes itself, that moment he be-
gins to fall from grace as an artist. He confesses his
inability to let nature speak for herself. He is in-
adequate to the logic of events, and gives us a logic
of his own. Shakespeare is our highest type of the
disinterested artist. Does he do aught but hold the
mirror up to nature? Is his work overlaid with an
avowed moral intention? Does he go behind the
returns, so to speak ? Does he tamper with the
logic of events, the fate of character ? What is the
moral of “Hamlet’’? Has any one yet found out ?
Yet the plays all fall within the scope of moral
ideas; they treat moral ideas with energy and depth,
as Voltaire said of English poetry in general.

We must discriminate between a conscious moral
purpose and an unconscious moralimpulse. A work
of art arises primarily out of the emotions, and not out
of the intellect, and is sound and true to the extent to
which it repeats the method of nature. Ruskin,
whom Mr. Gladden quotes, was of course right when
he said that the art of a nation is an exponent of its
ethical state. But the condition of first importance
with the artist is, not that he should have an ethi-
cal purpose, but that he should be ethically sound.
He may work with ethical ideas, but not directly
for them. The preacher speaks for them; the poet
speaks out of them, —he plays with them, he takes
his will of them; they follow, but do not lesd Aim.
Again, Ruskin says, “He is the greatest artist who

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 145

has embodied in the sum of his works the greatest
number of the greatest ideas;”? but he is an artist
only by virtue of having embodied these ideas in an
imaginative form. If they run through his work as
homilies or intellectual propositions, or lie upon it
as moral reflections, they are not within the vital
sphere of art.

Art is not thought, but will, impulse, intuition ;
not ideas, but ideality. None knew this better than
Ruskin. No great artist can be cornered with the
question, “What for?’ What is creation for ?
What are you and I for? The catechism answers
promptly enough, and the artist does not contradict
it. But of necessity his answer is not so dogmatic; or
rather, he does not give a direct answer at all, but lets
the epitome of life which he brings answer for him.
He is not to exhibit the forces of life harnessed to a
purpose and tilling some man’s private domain, but
he is to show them in spontaneous play and fusion,
obeying no law but their own, and working to uni-
versal ends. His work is finally for our edification.
If it be also for our reproof, he must conceal his pur-
pose so well that we do not suspect it. He must let
the laws of life alone speak for him. Sainte-Beuve
has a passage bearing upon this subject which is ad-
mirable. He had been censured asa critic for being
too lax in his dealings with the morality of works of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Let me
quote his reply: “If there are some readers (and I
think I know some) who would prefer to see me
censure it oftener and more roundly, I beg them to

146 LITERARY VALUES

observe that I succeed much better by provoking
them to condemn it themselves than by taking the
lead and seeming to try to impose a judgment of my
own every time. In the long run, if a critic does
this (or an artist either), he always wearies and of-
fends his readers. They like to feel themselves more
severe than the critic. I leave them that pleasure.
For me, it is enough if I represent and depict things
faithfully, so that every one may profit from the in-
tellectual substance and the good language, and be in
a position to judge for himself the other, wholly
moral parts, There, however, I am careful not to
be crucial.”” French art is less moral than English
art, not because it preaches less, but because it is
more given to levity and trifling, because it exagger-
ates the part one element plays in life, and because
it draws less inspiration from fundamental ethical
ideas. It may at times be guilty of indifferentism,
but against very little English or American art can
this charge be made.

The great distinction of art is that it aims to see
life steadily and to see it whole. This is its high
and unique service; it would enable us to live in the
whole and in the spirit of the whole ; not in the part
called morality, or philosophy, or religion, or beauty,
but in the unity resulting from the fusion and trans-
formation of these varied elements. It affords the
one point of view whence the world appears harmo-
nious and complete. The moralist, the preacher,
seizes upon a certain part of the world, and makes
much of that; the philosopher seizes upon another

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 147

part, the zesthete upon another; only the great artist
comprehends and includes all these, and sees life and
nature as a vital, consistent whole.

Hence it is that a work of pure art is a complete
product in a sense that no other production of a
man’s mind is; or, as Ruskin says, “It is the work
of the whole spirit of man,” and faithfully reflects
that spirit. The intellect may write the sermon, or
the essay, or the criticism, but the character, the en-
tire life and personality are implicated in a creative
work.

Disinterestedness means no more in art, in letters,
than it means in life. In our kind deeds, our acts
of charity, in love, in virtue, we act from disinter-
ested motives. We have no ulterior purpose. These
things are their own reward. A noble life is disin-
terested ; it bestows benefits without thought of self.
But it is not indifferent. Indifference is personal,
— it is a state in which one personal motive cancels
another; whereas disinterestedness is impersonal, —
it is the complete effacement of self. It is a high,
heroic moral state, while indifference is a lax or neg-
ative state. We are disinterested when we rescue a
child from drowning or stop a runaway horse, but we
are not indifferent. A novelist is disinterested when
he has no motives but those inherent in his story, no
purpose but to hold the mirror upto nature. He is
interested and departs from his high calling when he
seeks to enforce a particular moral, or to indoctrinate
his reader with a particular set of ideas. And yet if
he betrays indifference as to the issues of right and

148 LITERARY VALUES

wrong, that is a vice ; it is contrary to the self-efface-
ment which art demands. To obtrude your indiffer-
ence is of the same order of faults as to obtrude your
preferences. The innate necessities of the situation
may alone speak.

To suppress or to ignore the world of vice and
sin is not to be moral; to portray it is not to be im-
moral. But to gloat over it, to dwell fondly upon it,
to return to it, to exaggerate it, to roll it under the
tongue as a sweet morsel, — that is to be immoral;
and to treat it as time and nature do or as the great
artists do, as affording contrasts and difficulties, and
disturbing but not destroying the balance of life, is
within the scope of the moral. Art must make us
free of the whole; every work must in a measure
reflect the whole of life; if it dwell too much on
that part called sin and evil, it is false to its ideal ;
it must keep the balance; it must be true to the
integrity of nature. All things are permissible in
their time and place. That a thing is real and
true is no reason why it should go into the ar-
tist’s picture; but that it belongs there, that it is
organic there, a part of a vital whole, and that that
whole is a fair representation of human life —in
this is the justification. Not every scene in nature
composes well into a picture, and not every phase
of human life is equally significant in a creative
work. That nature does this or that is no reason
why the artist should do it, unless he can show an
equal insouciance and an equal prodigality and power.
He must take what he can make his own and imbue

THOU SHALT NOT PREACH 149

with the spirit of life. I lately read a novel by
one of our most promising young novelists, in which
there was a streak of vulgar realism, forced in,
evidently, under the pressure of a theory, — the the-
ory that art is never to shrink from the true. It
offended because it was entirely gratuitous; there was
no necessity for it. If it was true, it was not apt;
if it was real, it was not fit; it jarred; it was dragged
in by main force; it was a false note. Is not any-
thing disagreeable in a novel of the imagination a
false note? Disagreeable, I mean, not by reason of
the subject matter, but by reason of the treatment.
Dante makes hell fascinating by his treatment.
There are three ways of treating the under side
of nature. There is the childlike simplicity of. the
Biblical writers, who think no evil; there is the
artistic frankness of the great dramatic poets, who
know the value of foils and contrasts, and who can-
not ignore any element of life; and there is the
license and levity of the lascivious poets, who live
in the erotic alone. Both Ibsen and Tolstoi have
been condemned as immoral only because their
artistic scheme embraces all the elements that are
potent in life. Of levity, of exaggeration, they are
not guilty. If Zola is to be condemned, it is prob-
ably because he makes too prominent certain things,
and thus destroys the proportion. In nature no-
thing is detached. Her great currents flow on and
purify themselves. The ugly, the unclean, are
quickly lost sight of; the sky and the sun cover all,
bathe all. But art is detachment : our attention is

150 LITERARY VALUES

fixed upon a few points, and a drop or two too
much of certain things spoils itall. In nature a
drop or two too much does not matter; we quickly
escape, we find compensation. A bad odor in the
open air is of little consequence; but in Zola’s
books the bad odors are as in a closed room, and we
soon pray to be delivered from them.

VII
DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE

pee one new thing in the world in our day is
democracy, the coming forward of the people,
and that which has grown out of it, or which goes
along with it, — science, free inquiry, the indus-
trial system, the humanitarian spirit. The old and
past world from which we inherit our literary tastes
and standards was characterized by a condition of
things quite different, the supremacy of the few,
the leadership of the hero, the strong man, — the
picturesque age that gave us art, theology, philoso-
phy, and the great epic poems. It was the youth
of the race. Mankind seems now fast nearing its
majority. The bewitching, the delusive, the un-
reasoning, pathetic time of youth is past. What
the man loses and what he gains in passing from
youth to manhood the race has lost and has gained
in passing from the age of myth to the age of science.
A charm, an innocence, a susceptibility, a credulity,
and many other things are gone; a seriousness, a
reasonableness, a width of outlook, power to deal
with real things, sanity, and self-control, have come.
Youth is cruel, age is kind and considerate. All
forms, ceremonies, titles, all conferred dignities and

152 LITERARY VALUES

arbitrary distinctions, all pomp and circumstance,
count for less and less in the world. Art is less
and less; nature is more and more. The extrinsic,
the put on, the ornamental, the factitious, count for
less and less; theology, metaphysics, the sacredness
. of priests, the divinity of kings, count for less and
less, while the real, the true, the essential, in all
fields, count for more. It is doubtful if art for art’s
sake can ever be in the future what it has been
in the past. We are too deeply absorbed in the
reality ; we care less and less for the symbol and
more and more for the thing symbolized. The
monarchical idea is dwindling; the throne as a
symbol has lost its force; the old religious language
of supplication and praise begins to have a hollow,
archaic sound. The idea of the fatherhood of God
is fast taking the place of the idea of the despotism
of God. It has taken mankind all these centuries
to rise to the conception of a being with whom the
language of excessive flattery and adulation seems
out of place. The democratic idea will eventually
penetrate and modify our religious notions. We
shall no longer seek to propitiate an offended deity
by groveling in the dust before an imaginary throne.
The despot goes out, the Brother comes in. All
these things and many more cluster around the word
democracy.

What is the import of the word as applied to
literature ? How far will it carry in this field ?
Is the democratic movement favorable or unfavorable
to the growth of true literature? It has been often

DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE 153

said that literature is essentially aristocratic; that
is, I suppose, that it implies a degree of excellence,
a kind of excellence, quite beyond the appreciation
of the masses. This is no doubt in a measure true,
and always has been true. While the mass of the
people are not good offhand judges of the best litera-
ture, it is equally true that great literature — litera-
ture that has. breadth and power, like the English
Bible or like Bunyan, and many other books that
transcend the sphere of mere letters — makes its
way more or less among the people. The highest
ideals in any sphere can never draw the many ; yet
the few, the elect who are drawn by them, are prob-
ably just as sure to appear in a democracy as in an
oligarchy.

To some readers democracy in literature seems to
suggest only an incursion of the loud, the vulgar,
the cheap and meretricious. Apparently it suggests
only these things to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose
volume “Questions at Issue’ contains an essay
upon this subject.

Mr. Gosse congratulates the guild of letters that
the summits of literature have not yet been sub-
merged by the flood of democracy. The standards
have not been lowered in obedience to the popular
taste.

But Mr. Gosse thinks the social revolution or
evolution now imminent will require a new species
of poetry, that this poetry will be democratic to a
degree at present unimaginable, though just what it
is to be democratic in poetry is not very clear to

154 LITERARY VALUES

him. He says: “ The aristocratic tradition is still
paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the
symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as we
now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales,’”’ and
he does not see what will be left if this romantic
phraseology is done away with. We shall certainly
have left what we had before these types and sym-
bols came into vogue, — nature, life, man, God. If
out of these things we cannot supply ourselves with
new types and values, then certainly we shali be
hard put.

The critic cites the popularity of Tennyson as
an illustration of the influence of literature upon
democracy rather than of democracy upon literature.
It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the
democratic spirit, but by the old feudal spirit; to
him the people was but a hundred-headed beast, and
his temper toward this beast, if reports are true,
was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of
the haughty, exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and
his popularity simply showed how widespread the
appreciation of literary excellence may become in
democratic times.

Of course universal suffrage is of slight import
in literature: not by the vote of the many, but by
the judgment of the few, are the true standards up-
held. The novels that sell by the hundred thou-
sand will not be the best, or even the second or
third best, and their great vogue only indicates that
the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged
the reading public, and that in democratic times, as

DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE 155

in all other times, there never has been and probably
never will be enough good taste to go around.

Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, litera-
ture, no more means a lowering of the standard of
excellence than it means a lowering of the standards
in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering
or ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It
means a lifting up of the average, with the great
prizes, the high ideals, as attractive and as difficult
as ever. Because the people are crude and run for
the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are
not therefore to infer that the cheap and meretricious
will permanently content them. Democracy in litera-
ture, as exemplified by the two great modern demo-
crats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new
and more deeply religious way of looking at man-
kind, as well as at all the facts and objects of the
visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding
of new artistic motives and values in the people, in
science and the modern spirit, in liberty, fraternity,
equality, in the materialism and industrialism of
man’s life as we know it in our day and land, — the
carrying into imaginative fields the quality of com-
mon humanity, that which it shares with real things
and with all open-air nature, with hunters, farmers,
sailors, and real workers in all fields.

The typical democratic poet will hold and wield
his literary and artistic endowment as a common,
everyday man, the brother and equal of all, and
never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts
and advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poems

156 LITERARY VALUES

will imply a great body of humanity —the masses,
the toilers — and will carry into emotional and ideal
fields the atmosphere of these.

Behold the artistic motives furnished by feudal-
ism, by royalty, by lords and ladies, by the fears
and superstitions of the past, by mythology and
ecclesiasticism, by religious and political terrorism
in all their manifold forms. Art and literature
have lived upon these things for ages. Can demo-
cracy, can the worth and picturesqueness of the peo-
ple, furnish no worthy themes and motives for the
poets ? Can science, can the present day, can the
religion of humanity, the conquest of nature’s forces,
inspire no poetic enthusiasm and give rise to great
art rivaling that of the past ? As between the past
and the present, undoubtedly the difficulty is not
in the poverty of the material of to-day, but in the
inadequacy of the man. It requires a great spirit,
a powerful personality, to master and absorb the
diverse and complex elements of our time and imbue
them with poetic enthusiasm.

The humanitarian enthusiasm as a motif in liter-
ature and art, — the inspiration begotten by the con-
templation of the wrongs, the sufferings, and the
hopes of the people, — undoubtedly came in with
democracy. It was quite unknown to the ancient
and tothe feudal world. To all the more vital voices
of our time this enthusiasm gives the tone. How
pronounced it is in two of our latest and most
promising poets, Mr. Edwin Markham and Mr. Wil-
liam Vaughn Moody !

DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE 157

It is hard to shake off the conviction that the old
order of things had the advantage of picturesque-
ness. Is it because it is so hard to free ourselves
from the illusions of time and distance? Charm,
enticement, dwell with the remote, the unfamiliar.
The now, the here, are vulgar and commonplace.
We find it hard to realize that the great deeds were
done on just such a day as this, and that the actors
in them were just such men as we see about us.
Then the days of one’s youth seem strange and
incredible; how different their light from this hard,
prosy glare! Our distrust of our own day and land
as furnishing suitable material for poetry and ro-
mance doubtless springs largely from this illusion.

At the same time, a mechanical and industrial
age like ours no doubt offers a harder problem to the
imaginative producer than the ages of faith and fa-
naticism of the past. The steam whistle, the type of
our civilization, what can the poet make of it? The
clank of machinery, it must be confessed, is less in-
spiring than the clash of arms; the railroad is less
pleasing to look upon than the highway, because it
is more arbitrary and mechanical. In the same way,
the steamship seems unrelated to the great forces
and currents of the globe. Yet to put these things
in poetry only requires time, only requires a more
complete adjustment of our lives to them, and hence
the proper vista and association. As is always the
case, it is a question of the man and not of the ma-
terial. Goethe said to Eckermann, “Our German
esthetical people are always talking about poetical

158 LITERARY VALUES

and unpoetical objects, and in one respect they are
not quite wrong; yet at bottom no real object is
unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it pro-
perly,” —if he can throw enough feeling into it.
I lately read a poem by one of our younger poets on
an entirely modern theme, the building of the rail-
road, — the gang of men cutting through hills, tun-
neling mountains, filling valleys, bridging chasms,
etc. But, though vividly described, it did not quite
reach the poetical; it lacked the personal and the
human; it was realistic without the freeing touch
of the idealistic. Some story, some interest, some
enthusiasm overarching it, would have supplied an
atmosphere that was lacking. We cannot be perma-
nently interested in the gigantic or in sheer brute
power unless they are in some way related to life
and its aspirations. The battle of man with man is
more interesting than the battle of man with rocks
and chasms, because men can strike back, and vic-
tory is not to be had on such easy terms.

The same objection cannot be urged against Mr.
William Vaughn Moody’s poem on the steam en-
gine, which he treats under the figure of “The
Brute,” —a poem of great imaginative power in
which the human interest is constantly paramount.
The still small voice of humanity is always heard’
through the Brute’s roar, as may be seen in the first
stanza : —

“ Through his might men work their wills;
They have boweled out the hills
For food to keep him toiling in the cages they have wrought;

DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE 159

And they fling him hour by hour
Limbs of men to give him power,
Brains of men to give him cunning; and for dainties to devour
Children’s souls, the little worth; hearts of women, cheaply
bought.
He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them scanty
thought.’

Quite different is the treatment of “The Light-
ning Express ” by a western poet, Mr. J. P. Irvine,
yet the poetic note is clearly and surely struck in
his stanzas too : —

“Tn storm and darkness, night and day,
Through mountain gorge or level way,
With lightening rein and might unspent,
And head erect in scorn of space,

Holds, neck-and-neck, with time a race,
Flame-girt across a continent.

Think not of danger; every wheel

Of all that clank and roll below

Rings singing answers, steel for steel,
Beneath the hammer’s testing blow;
And what though fields go swirling round,
And backward swims the mazy ground,
So swift the herds seem standing still,
As scared they dash from hill to hill;
And though the brakes may grind to fire
The gravel as they grip the tire

And holding, strike a startling vein

Of tremor through the surging train,
The hand of him who guides the rein

Is all-controlling and intent;

Fear not, although the race you ride

Is on the whirlwind, side by side,

With time across a continent.”

What are the sources of the interesting in life ?
Novelty is one, but itis short-lived ; beauty and sub-
limity are others, and are more lasting. But the
main source of the interesting is human association.

160 LITERARY VALUES

The landscape that is written over with human his-
tory, how it holds us and draws us! All phases of
modern industrial life — the miner, the lumberman,
the road-builder, the engineer, the factory-hand, are
available for poetic treatment to him who can bring
the proper fund of human association, who can make
the human element in these things paramount over
the mechanical element. The more of nature you get
in, the more the picture has a background of earth
and sky, or of great human passions and heroisms,
the more the imagination is warmed and moved.
The railroad is itself a blotch upon the earth, but it
has a mighty background. In itself it is at war
with every feature of the landscape it passes through ;
it stains the snows, it befouls the water, it poisons
the air, it smuts the grass and the foliage, it expels
the peace and the quiet, it puts to rout every rural
divinity. It adapts itself to nothing; it is as arbi-
trary as a cyclone and as killing as a pestilence.
Yet a train of cars thundering through storm and
darkness, racing with winds and clouds, is a sub-
lime object to contemplate; it is sublime because
of its triumph over time and space, and because of
the danger and dread that compass it about. It has
a tremendous human background. The body-kill-
ing and soul-blighting occupations peculiar to our
civilization are not of themselves suggestive of po-
etic thoughts ; but if Dante made poetry out of hell,
would not a nature copious and powerful enough
make poetry out of the vast and varied elements of
our materialistic civilization ?

VIII
POETRY AND ELOQUENCE

VY SERE does eloquence end, where does poetry

begin ?”’ inquires Renan in his “ Future of
Science.” And he goes on to say, “The whole dif-
ference lies in a peculiar harmony, in a more or less
sonorous ring, with regard to which an experienced
faculty never hesitates.”

Is not the “sonorous ring,” however, more charac-
teristic of eloquence than of poetry? Poetry does
begin where eloquence ends; it is a higherand finer
harmony. Nearly all men feel the power of elo-
quence, but poetry does not sway the multitude; it
does not sway at all, — it lifts, and illuminates, and
soothes. It reaches the spirit, while eloquence stops..
with the reason and the emotions.

Eloquence is much the more palpable, real, avail-.
able; it is a wind that fills every sail and makes
every mast bend, while poetry is a breeze touched
with a wild perfume from field or wood. Poetry is
consistent with perfect tranquillity of spirit; a true
poem may have the calm of a summer day, the pla-
cidity of a mountain lake, but eloquence is a torrent,
a tempest, mass in motion, an army with banners, the
burst of a hundred instruments of music. Tenny-.
son’s “ Maud ” is a notable blending of the two.

162 LITERARY VALUES

There is something martial in eloquence, the roll
of the drum, the cry of the fife, the wheel and flash
of serried ranks. Its end is action; it shapes events,
it takes captive the reason and the understanding.
Its basis is earnestness, vehemence, depth of convic-
tion.

There is no eloquence without heat, and no po-
etry without light. An earnest man is more or less
an eloquent man. Eloquence belongs to the world
of actual affairs and events; it is aroused by great
wrongs and great dangers, it flourishes in the forum
and the senate. Poetry is more private and personal,
is more for the soul and the religious instincts; it
courts solitude and wooes the ideal.

Anything swiftly told or described, the sense of
speed and volume, is, or approaches, eloquence ;
while anything heightened and deepened, any mean-
ing and beauty suddenly revealed, is, or approaches,
poetry. Hume says of the eloquence of Demosthe-
nes, “It is rapid harmony, exactly adjusted to the
sense. It is vehement reasoning without any ap-
pearance of art; it is disdain, anger, boldness, free-
dom, involved in a continual stream of argument.”

The passions of eloquence and poetry differ in this
respect ; one is reason inflamed, the other is imagi-
nation kindled.

Any object of magnitude in swift motion, a horse
at the top of his speed, a regiment of soldiers on the
double quick, a train of cars under full way, moves
us in a way that the same object at rest does not.
The great secret of eloquence is to set. mass in mo-

POETRY AND ELOQUENCE 163

tion, to marshal together facts and considerations,
imbue them with passion, and hurl them like an
army on the charge upon the mind of the reader or
hearer.

The pleasure we derive from eloquence is more
acute, more physiological, I might say, more of the
blood and animal spirits, than our pleasure from po-
etry. I imagine it was almost a dissipation to have
heard a man like Father Taylor. One’s feelings and
emotions were all out of their banks like the creeks
in spring. But this was largely the result of his
personal magnetism and vehemence of utterance.

The contrast between eloquent prose and poetic
prose would be more to the point. The pleasure
from each is precious and genuine, but our pleasure
from the latter is no doubt more elevated and endur-
ing.

Gibbon’s prose is often eloquent, never poetical.
Ruskin’s prose is at times both, though his tempera-
ment is not that of the orator, There is more ca-
price than reason in him. The prose of De Quincey
sometimes has the “ sonorous ring” of which Renan
speaks. The following passage from his essay on
“The Philosophy of Roman History ” isa good sam-
ple: —

“The battle of Actium was followed by the final
conquest of Egypt. That conquest rounded and in-
tegrated the glorious empire ; it was now circular as
a shield, orbicular as the disk of a planet; the great
Julian arch was now locked into the cohesion of
granite by its last keystone. From that day forward,

164 LITERARY VALUES

for three hundred years, there was silence in the
world; no muttering was heard ; no eye winked be-
neath the wing. Winds of hostility might still rave
at intervals, but it was on the outside of the mighty
empire, it was at a dreamlike distance; and, like
the storms that beat against some monumental castle,
‘and at the doors and windows seem to call,’ they
rather irritated and vivified the sense of security,
than at all disturbed its luxurious lull.”

Contrast with this a passage from Emerson’s first
prose work, “ Nature,” wherein the poetic element
is more conspicuous : —

“The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose
senses have been nourished by their fair and appeas-
ing changes, year after year, without design and
without heed, shall not lose their lesson altogether,
in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long
hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national
councils, —in the hour of revolution, — these sol-
emn images shall reappear in their morning lustre,
as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the
passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble
sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur,
the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon
the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his in-
fancy. And with these forms, the spells of persua-
sion, the keys of power are put into his hands.”

Or this passage from Carlyle’s “ French Revolu-
tion,” shall we call it eloquent prose or poetic prose ?

“In this manner, however, has the Day bent
downwards. Wearied mortals are creeping home

POETRY AND ELOQUENCE 165

from their field labors; the village artisan eats with
relish his supper of herbs, or has strolled forth to the
village street for a sweet mouthful of air and human
news. Still summer eventide everywhere! The
great sun hangs flaming on the uttermost northwest ;
for it is his longest day this year. The hilltops, re-
joicing, will ere long be at their ruddiest, and blush
good-night. The thrush in green dells, on long-
shadowed leafy spray, pours gushing his glad sere-
nade, to the babble of brooks grown audible; silence
is stealing over the Earth.”

What noble eloquence in Tacitus! Indeed, elo-
quence was natural to the martial and world-subdu-
ing Roman ; but his poetry is for the most part of a
secondary order. It is often said of French poetry
that it is more eloquent than poetic. Of English
poetry the reverse is probably true, though of such
a poet as Byron it seems to me that eloquence is the
chief characteristic.

Byron never, to my notion, touches the deeper
and finer poetic chords. He is witty, he is brilliant,
he is eloquent, but is he ever truly poetical? He
stirs the blood, he kindles the fancy, but does he
ever diffuse through the soul the joy and the light
of pure poetry? Goethe expressed almost un-
bounded admiration for Byron, yet admitted that he
was too worldly-minded, and that a great deal of his
poetry should have been fired off in Parliament in
the shape of parliamentary speeches. Wordsworth,
on the other hand, when he was not prosy and heavy,
was poetical; he was never eloquent,

166 LITERARY VALUES

A fine sample of eloquence in poetry is Browning’s
“ How they brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix.” Of its kind there is nothing in the language
to compare with it. One needs to read such a piece
occasionally as a moral sanitary measure; it aerates
his emotions as a cataract does a creek. Scott’s
highest excellence as a poet is his eloquence. The
same is true of Macaulay and of Campbell, though
the latter’s “To the Rainbow” breathes the spirit
of true poetry.

Among our own poets Halleck’s “ Marco Bozzaris ”
thrills us with its fiery eloquence. Dr. Holmes’s
“ Qld Ironsides ” also is just what such a poem should
be, just what the occasion called for, a rare piece of
rhymed eloquence.

Eloquence is so good, so refreshing, it is such a
noble and elevating excitement, that one would fain
have more of it, even in poetry. It is too rare and
precious a product to be valued lightly.

Here is a brief example of Byron’s eloquence : —

“‘There, where death’s brief pang was quickest,
And the battle’s wreck lay thickest,
Strewed beneath the advancing banner
Of the eagles’ burning crest, —
There with thunder-clouds to fan her
Victory beaming from her breast!
While the broken line enlarging
Fell, or fled along the plain; —
There be sure Murat was charging!
There he ne’er shall charge again!’?

This from Tennyson is of another order: —

‘Thy voice is heard through rolling drums
That beat to battle where he stands ;
Thy face across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands:

POETRY AND ELOQUENCE 167

A moment, while the trumpets blow,

He sees his brood about thy knee;

The next, like fire, he meets the foe,

And strikes him dead for thine and thee.”

The chief value of all patriotic songs and poems,
like Mrs. Howe’s “ Battle Hymn of the Republic,”
or Mr. Stedman’s John Brown poem, or Randall’s
“ Maryland,” or Burns’s ‘‘ Bannnockburn,”’ or Whit-
man’s “ Beat! Beat! Drums,’ is their impassioned
eloquence. Patriotism, war, wrong, slavery, these
are the inspirers of eloquence.

Of course no sharp line can be drawn between
eloquence and poetry; they run together, they blend
in all first-class poems; yet there is a wide difference
between the two, and it is probably in the direction
I have indicated. Powerand mastery in either field
are the most precious of human gifts.

Ix
GILBERT WHITE AGAIN

(CYNE of the few books which I can return to

and re-read every six or seven years is Gilbert
White’s Selborne. It has a perennial charm. It is
much like country things themselves. One does not
read it with excitement or eager avidity; it is ina
low key ; it touches only upon minor matters; it is
not eloquent, or witty, or profound ; it has only now
and then a twinkle of humor or a glint of fancy,
and yet it has lived an hundred years and promises
to live many hundreds of years more. So many
learned and elaborate treatises have sunk beneath
the waves upon which this cockle-shell of a book
rides so safely and buoyantly! What is the secret
of its longevity ? One can do little more than
name its qualities without tracing them to their
sources. It is simple and wholesome, like bread, or
meat, or milk. Perhapsit is just this same unstrained
quality that keeps the book alive. Books that are
piquant and exciting like condiments, or cloying
like confectionery or pastry, it seems, have much
less chance of survival. The secret of longevity of
a man— what is it? Sanity, moderation, regular-
ity, and that plus vitality, which is a gift. The

GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 169

book that lives has these things, and it has that
same plus vitality, the secret of which cannot be ex-
plored. The sensational, intemperate books set the
world on fire for a day, and then end in ashes and
forgetfulness.

White’s book diffuses a sort of rural England at-
mosphere through the mind. It is not the work of
a city man who went down into the country to write
it up, but of a born countryman, — one who had in
the very texture of his mind the flavor of rural things.
Then it is the growth of a particular locality. Let
a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and
say, “This is home,” and describe things from
that point of view, or as they stand related to that
spot, — the weather, the fauna, the flora, — and his
account shall have an interest to us it could not
have if not thus located and defined. This is one
secret of White’s charm. His work has a home air,
a certain privacy and particularity. The great world is
afar off; Selborne is as snug and secluded as a chim-
ney corner; we get an authentic glimpse into the
real life of one man there; we see him going about
intent, lovingly intent, upon every phase of nature
about him. We get glimpses into humble cottages
and into the ways and doings of the people; we see
the bacon drying in the chimneys; we see the poor
gathering in Wolmer Forest the sticks and twigs
dropped by the rooks in building their nests; we
see them claiming the “lop and top’ when the
big trees are cut. Indeed, the human touches, the
human figures here and there in White’s pages, add

170 LITERARY VALUES

much to the interest. The glimpses we get of his
own goings and comings — we wish there were more
of them. We should like to know what took him
to London during that great snowstorm of January,
1776, and how he got there, inasmuch as the roads
were so blocked by the snow that the carriages from
Bath with their fine ladies on their way to attend
the Queen’s birthday, were unable to get through.
“The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to
labourers if they would shovel them a track to Lon-
don, but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky
to be removed.”” The parson found the city bedded
deep in snow, and so noiseless by reason of it that
“it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of de-
solation.”

When one reads the writers of our own day upon
rural England and the wild life there, he finds that
they have not the charm of the Selborne naturalist ;
mainly, I think, because they go out with deliberate
intent to write up nature. They choose their theme ;
the theme does not choose them. They love the
birds and flowers for the literary effects they can
produce out of them. It requires no great talent to
go out in the fields or woods and describe in grace-
ful sentences what one sees there, — birds, trees,
flowers, clouds, streams; but to give the atmosphere
of these things, to seize the significant and interest-
ing features and to put the reader into sympathetic
communication with them, that is another matter.

Hence back of all, the one thing that has told
most in keeping White’s book alive is undoubtedly

GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 171

its sound style — sentences actually filled with the
living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to
face with something genuine and real ; objects, ideas,
stand out on the page; the articulation is easy and
distinct. White had no literary ambitions. His
style is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to
natural knowledge. There was evidently something
winsome and charming about the man personally,
and these qualities reappear in his pages.

He was probably a parson who made as many
calls afield as in the village, if not more. An old
nurse in his family said of him, fifty years after his
death, “‘ He was a still, quiet body, and that there
was not a bit of harm in him.”

White was a type of the true observer, the man
with the detective eye. He did not seek to read his
own thoughts and theories into Nature, but sub-
mitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and
ingenuousness. He had infinite curiosity, and de-
lighted in nothing so much as a new fact about the
birds and the wild life around him. To see the
thing as it was in itself and in its relations, that was
his ambition. He could resist the tendency of his
own mind to believe without ‘sufficient evidence.
Apparently he wanted to fall in with the notion cur-
rent during the last century, that swallows hiber-
nated in the mud in the bottoms of streams and
ponds, but he could not gather convincing proof. It
was not enough that a few belated specimens were
seen in the fall lingering about such localities, or
again hovering over them early in spring; or that

172 LITERARY VALUES

some old grandfather had seen a man who had taken
live swallows out of the mud. Produce the man
and let us cross-question him,— that was White’s
attitude. Dr. Johnson said confidently that swal-
lows did thus pass the winter in the mud “ conglob-
ulated into a ball,’ but Johnson had that literary
cast of mind that prefers a picturesque statement to
the exact fact. White was led astray by no literary
ambition. His interest in the life of nature was
truly a scientific one; he must know the fact first,
and then give it to the humanities. How true it is
in science, in literature, in life, that any secondary
motive vitiates the result! Seek ye the kingdom of
truth first, and all things shall be added.

But White seems finally to have persuaded him-
self that at least a few swallows passed the winter
in England in a torpid state —if not in the bottom
of streams or ponds, then in holes in their banks.
He reasoned from analogy, though he had expressed
his distrust of that mode of reasoning. If bats, in-
sects, toads, turtles, and other creatures can thus
pass the winter, why not swallows? On many dif-
ferent occasions, during mild days late in the fall
and early in the spring, he saw house-martins flying
about; the weather suddenly changing to colder,
they quickly disappeared. Bats and turtles came
forth, then vanished in the same way. White finally
concluded that the mystery was the same in both
cases, — that the creatures were brought from their
winter retreats by the warmth, only to retire to them
again when it changed to cold. If he had adhered

GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 173

to his usual caution he would have waited for actual
proof of this fact, — the finding of a torpid swallow.
He made frequent search for such, but never found
any.

This notion so long current about the swallows
probably had its origin in two things: first, their
partiality for mud as nesting material ; and secondly,
the habit of these birds, after they have begun to
collect into flocks in midsummer, preparatory to
their migrations, of passing the night in vast numbers
along the margins of streams and ponds. White
knew of their habits in this respect, and wanted to
see in the fact presumptive evidence of the truth of
the notion that, though they may not retire into
the water itself, yet that they “may conceal them-
selves in the banks of pools and rivers during the un-
comfortable months of the year.” One midsummer
twilight in northern Vermont I came upon hundreds
of swallows — barn and cliff — settled for the night
upon some low alders that grew upon the margin
of a deep, still pool in the river. The bushes bent
down with them as with an over-load of fruit. This
attraction for the water on the part of the swallow
family is certainly a curious one, and is not easily
explained.

Our sharp-eyed parson had observed that the
nesting habits of birds afford a clue to their roosting
habits, — that they usually pass the night in or near
those places where they build their nests, Thus,
the tree-builders roost in trees; the ground-builders
upon the ground. I have seen our chickadee and

174 LITERARY VALUES

woodpecker enter, late in the day, the cavities in de-
caying limbs of trees. I have seen the oriole dis-
pose of herself for the night on the end of a maple
branch where her “pendent bed and procreant
cradle’ was begun a few days later. In walking
through the summer fields in the twilight, the ves-
per sparrow or the song sparrow will often start up
from almost beneath one’s feet. It is said that the
snow-bunting will plunge beneath the snow and
pass the night there. The ruffled grouse often does
this, but the swallows seem to be an exception to
this rule. I have seen a vast cloud of swifts take
up their lodging for the night in a tall, unused
chimney ; but the barn swallows and the cliff and the
white-bellied swallows, at least after the young have
flown, appear to pass the night in the vicinity of
streams. White noticed also—and here the true
observer again crops out — that the fieldfare, a kind
of thrush, though a tree-builder, always appears to
pass the night on the ground. ‘The larkers, in
dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them
in the wheat stubbles.” He learned, as every ob-
server sooner or later learns, to be careful of sweep-
ing statements, — that the truth of nature is not al-
ways caught by the biggest generalizations. After
speaking of the birds that dust themselves, earth
their plumage — pulveratrices, as he calls them —
he says, ‘‘ As far as I can observe, many birds that
dust themselves never wash, and I once thought that
those birds that wash themselves would never dust;
but here I find myself mistaken,” and he instances the

GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 175

house sparrow as doing both. White seems to have
been about the first writer upon natural history who
observed things minutely ; he saw through all those
sort of sleight-o’-hand movements and ways of the
birds and beasts. He held his eye firmly to the
point. He saw the swallows feed their young on the
wing; he saw the fern-owl, while hawking about a
large oak, “put out its short leg while on the wing,
and by a bend of the head deliver something into
its mouth.” This explained to him the use of its
middle toe, “ which is curiously furnished with a ser-
rated claw.” He timed the white owls feeding their
young under the eaves of his church, with watch in
hand. He saw them transfer the mouse they brought,
from the foot to the beak, that they might have the
free use of the former in ascending to the nest.

In his walks and drives about the country he was
all attention to the life about him, simply from his
delight in any fresh bit of natural knowledge. His
curiosity never flagged. He had naturally an alert
mind. His style reflects this alertness and sensi-
tiveness. In his earlier days he was an enthusiastic
sportsman, and he carried the sportsman’s trained
sense and love of the chase into his natural history
studies. He complained that faunists were too apt
to content themselves with general terms and bare
descriptions; the reason, he says, is plain, — “ be-
cause all that may be done at home in a man’s
study ; but the investigation of the life and conversa-
tion of animals is a concern of much more trouble
and difficulty, and is not to be attained but by the

176 LITERARY VALUES

active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much
in the country.”’ He himself had the true inquisi-
tiveness and activity, and the loving, discriminating
eye. He saw the specific marks and differences at a
glance. Then, his love of these things was so well
known in the neighborhood, that this kind of know-
ledge flowed to him from all sides. He was a magnet
that attracted all the fresh natural lore about him.
People brought him birds and eggs and nests, and
animals or any natural curiosity, and reported to him
any unusual occurrence. They loaned him the use
of their eyes and ears. One day a countryman told
him he had found a young fern-owl in the nest of
a small bird on the ground, and that it was fed by
the little bird. ‘TI went to see this extraordinary
phenomenon, and found that it was a young cuckoo
hatched in the nest of a titlark; it was become
vastly too big for its nest, appearing to have its large
wings extended beyond the nest,
‘in tenui re
Majores pennas nido extendisse,’

and was very fierce and pugnacious, pursuing my
finger, as I teased it, for many feet from the nest,
and sparring, and buffeting with its wings like a
gamecock. The dupe of a dam appeared at a dis-
tance, hovering about with meat in its mouth, and
expressing the greatest solicitude.”

He observed that the train of the peacock was
really not its tail, but an entirely separate append-
age. He remarked how extremely fond cats are of
fish, and yet of all quadrupeds “ are the least dis-

GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 177

posed towards the water.” This is a curious fact to
him. A neighbor of his, in ploughing late in the
fall, turned a water-rat out of his hibernaculum in
a field far removed from any water. The rat had
laid up more than a gallon of potatoes for its winter
food. This was another curious fact that set the
writer speculating. His correspondent tells him of
a heronry near some manor-house that excites his
curiosity much. “ Fourscore nests of such a bird on
one tree is a rarity which I would ride half as many
miles to get a sight of.” Such a lively curiosity had
the parson. His thirst for exact knowledge was so
great that on one occasion he took measurements of
the carcass of a moose when he was probably com-
pelled to hold his nose to finish the task. At one
place he heard of a woman who professed to cure
cancers by the use of toads; some of his brother
clergymen believed the story, but when he came
to sift the evidence he made up his mind that the
woman was a fraud.

He said truly, ‘There is such a propensity in
mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that
one cannot safely relate anything from common re-
port, especially in print, without expressing some
degree of doubt and suspicion.”

The observations of hardly one man in five hun-
dred are of any value for scientific purposes.

White had the true scientific caution, and was, as
a rule, very careful to verify his statements.

Of course the science of White’s time was far be-
hind our own. The phenomenon of the weather, for

178 LITERARY VALUES

instance, was not understood then as it is now. The
great atmospheric waves that sweep across the con-
tinents, and the regular alternations of heat and cold,
were unsuspected. White observed that cold de-
scended from above, but he thought that thaws often
originated underground, “ from warm vapours which
arise.’ He was greatly puzzled, too, when, during
the severe cold of December, 1784, the thermometer
fell many degrees lower in the valley bottoms than
on the hills. He had not observed that the very
cold air on such occasions settles down into the val-
leys and fills them like water, marking the height to
which itrises by a level line upon the trees or foliage.
It is a wonder that his sharp eye did not detect
the true source of honey dew, but it did not. He
thought it proceeded from the effluvia of flowers,
which, being drawn up into the sky by the warmth
of the sun by day, descended again as dew by night.

When a French anatomist announced that he had
discovered why the cuckoo did not hatch its own
eggs, —namely, because the crop or craw of the bird
was placed back of the sternum, so as to make a pro-
tuberance on the belly, — White dissected a cuckoo
for himself, and, finding the fact as stated, proceeded
to dissect other birds that he knew did incubate, as
the fern-owl and a hawk, and finding the craw situ-
ated the same as in the cuckoo, justly charged the
Frenchman with having reached an unscientific
conclusion.

In his seventy-seventh letter White clearly antici-
pates Darwin as to the beneficial functions of earth-
worms in the soil, and tells farmers and gardeners

GILBERT WHITE AGAIN 179

that the little creatures which they look upon as
their enemies are really their best friends.

White has had imitators, but no successful rivals.
A work much in the spirit and manner of his
famous book, called “ Jesse’s Gleanings in Natural
History,” was published fifty years later. It had
some reputation in its own day, but seems to be
quite forgotten in our time. A good reader quickly
sees that its pages have not the same fresh, distinc-
tive quality as White’s, not the same atmosphere of
unconscious curiosity and alert interest. They are
stamped with a die far less clear and individual.
The field covered is the same, the facts and incidents
are the same, but the medium through which we see
them all is not the same.

The following extract gives a fair sample of the
style: —

“The enjoyments and delights of a country life
have been sung by poets in all ages, and it is our
own fault if we find the country irksome, or less
agreeable than a crowded metropolis, It affords
many resources of a most agreeable nature, to those
who seek for rational and tranquil enjoyments, A
beautiful prospect, a walk by the side of a river in
fine weather, in the agreeable shade of a wood or
cool valley, have great charms for those who are
fond of the country. We may then exclaim with
Virgil, —

‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra! ’

But even the Virgilian quotation does not give it
the flavor of White’s pages.

x
LUCID LITERATURE

NGG can make up in a writer for the

want of lucidity. It is one of the cardinal
literary virtues. If the page is not clear, if we see
through it as through a glass darkly, if there is the
least blur or opacity, the work to that extent is con-
demned. It is a false notion that some thoughts or
ideas are necessarily obscure, or complex, or involved.
Ideas are what we make them. If we think ob-
scurely, our ideas are obscure ; if one’s mental activity
is complex, his ideas are complex. Always is the
mind of the writer the medium through which we
see his matter. Such a poet as George Meredith
thinks obscurely. There isa large blind spot in his
mind, so that at times an almost total eclipse passes
over his page. Strain one’s vision as one may, one
cannot make out just what he is trying to say. Then
there are lucid intervals — strong, telling lines ; then
the shadow falls again and the reader is groping in
the dark. The difficulty is never innate in his sub-
ject, but is in the poet’s use of language, as if at
times he caught at words blindly and used them with-
out reference to their accepted meanings, as when
he says of the skylark, “He drinks his hurried

LUCID LITERATURE 181

flight and drops.” How can one adjust his mind to
the notion of a bird drinking its own flight ?
Or take this puzzle : —
“Vermilion wings, by distance held
To pause aflight while fleeting swift,

And high aloft the pearl inshelled
Her lucid glow in glow will lift.”

Does not the reading of such lines set one’s head
in a whirl ?

The impression of novelty can never be made by
a trick in the use of language, nor can the sense of
mystery be given by obscurity of expression. Veils
and screens and dim lights may do it in the world
of sense, but not in the world of ideas. The reader
feels all the time that there is something in the
way, and that he would see clearly if the writer
thought clearly. Freshness and novelty are the
gifts of the writer whose mind is fresh and who has
lively and novel emotions in the presence of every-
day things and events.

There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry
of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in our own
Emerson and Whitman, but little or none of the
Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at
once catch the full meaning of Wordsworth’s “Ode
to Immortality,’ or Tennyson’s “ Tiresias”” or “ An-
cient Sage,” or Emerson’s “Brahma,” or Whit-
man’s “Sleep Chasings,” but how transparent the
language, how unequivocal the emotion, how direct
and solid the expression! There is a vast difference
between the impression or want of impression

182 LITERARY VALUES

made by a commonplace thought veiled and hidden
by ambiguity of phrase, and that made by “ some-
thing far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is
the light of setting suns.” Great poets give us a
sense of depth and height, of the far and the rare.
Meredith does at times, but oftener he gives us only
a sense of the dense and the foggy.

There are two reasons why we may not understand
a man. In one case the fault is in him, —in his
clouded and ambiguous way of thinking, such as I
have already spoken of. In the other case the
fault, or rather the difficulty, is in us. The man
may live and move upon a different spiritual plane,
he may have an atmosphere and cherish ideals that
belong to another world than ours. Thus the solid
men of Boston did not understand Emerson, but
said their daughters did. The daughters were ha-
bitually more familiar with Emerson’s ideal values
than the fathers were. Thus Scott said he did
not understand Wordsworth, could not follow his
“abstruse ideas;”? Campbell suited him better.
Scott belonged to another type of mind than that
of Wordsworth’s, lived in another world. There
was no sense of mystery-in his mind, —of that
haunting, elusive something which Wordsworth felt
in all outward nature. There was no religion in
Scott’s love of nature, and it is this probably that
baffled him in Wordsworth. Both were born country-
men and equal lovers of common, rural things, but
Wordsworth associated them with his spiritual and
ideal joys and experiences, while Scott found in

LUCID LITERATURE 183

them an appeal to his copious animal spirits, and
his love of sensuous beauty. Wordsworth would
understand Scott much better than Scott would un-
derstand Wordsworth. The ancient poets probably
would not understand the moderns nearly as well as
the moderns understand the ancients. We are fur-
ther along on the road of human experience.

Then, we may understand a work and not appre-
ciate it, not respond to its appeal. Appreciation is
based upon kinship. We are more in sympathy
with some types of mind than with others of equal
parts. The most impersonal and judicious of critics
cannot escape the law of elective affinities. Some
books jind us more than others of similar merit.
See how people differ, and are bound to differ, about
Whitman, and it is because his aim is not merely to
give the reader poetic truth disassociated from all,
personal qualities and traits, but to give him him-
self. We cannot separate the poet from the man,
and if we do not respond to the man, to his type,
to his quality, to his wholesale and radical de
mocracy, we shall not respond to the poet. If we
all read authors only through our taste. in bedles-
lettres, through our love of literary truth, we
should agree in our estimate of them according as
our tastes agreed. But the. feeling we bring to.
them is very complex. Character, predisposition,
natural affinities, race traits, all play a part. We.
are very apt to agree about such a poet as Milton,
because the personal element plays so small a part
in his poetry. If we do.not,get poetic truth in him.

184 LITERARY VALUES

we do not get anything. His style is the main
thing, as it is with the Greek poets. In other
words, there is nothing in Milton that makes a per-
sonal appeal. One cannot conceive of any reader
taking him to his heart, appropriating him, and find-
ing his life colored and changed by him, as by some
later poets. Wordsworth was a revelation to Mill;
Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman have in the
same way been revelations to many readers, and for
the same reason, — their intense individual point of
view. Their appeal is a personal and a religious
one as well as a poetic. No one who has not some-
thing of the modern pantheistic feeling toward na-
ture will be deeply touched by Wordsworth. No
one who has not felt the burden of modern problems,
the decay of the old faiths, will be moved by Arnold’s
poetry. His “sad lucidity of soul” belongs to our
age. No one who has not broken away from the
old traditions in art and religion and in politics, and
possessed himself emotionally of the point of view
afforded by modern science, will make much of
Whitman. Without a certain mental and spiritual
experience and a certain stamp of mind Emerson
will not be much to you. In Poe one’s sense of
artistic forms and verbal melody are alone appealed
to. He is more to a Frenchman than to an Ameri-
can. If you are ahungered for the bread of life do
not go to Poe, do not go to Landor or to Milton,
do not go to the current French poets. Go sooner
to Goethe, to Tennyson, to Browning, to Arnold, to
Whitman, — the great personal poets, the men who

LUCID LITERATURE 185

have spiritual and religious values as well as poetic.
All the great imaginative writers of our century have
felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century,
and have been its priests and prophets. The lesser
poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been
greater or broader he would have felt them, so
would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to
touch the formative currents of our social or reli-
gious or national life. In the past the great artist
has always been at ease in Zion; in our day only
the lesser artists are at ease, unless we except Whit-
man, man of unshaken faith, who is absolutely
optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the
breadth of his vision and the depth and universality
of his sympathies,

XI
“MERE LITERATURE”

TF there any justification for the phrase “ mere
literature” which one often hears nowadays ?
There is no doubt a serious sneer in it, as Professor
Woodrow Wilson, in a recent “Atlantic” essay,
avers ; but I think the sneer is not aimed so much
at literature in itself as at certain phases of litera-
ture. Lowell has been quoted as saying that ‘mere
scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old
postage stamps; yet at vital scholarship — schol-
arship that is wielded as a weapon, and that results
in power — Lowell would be the last man to sneer.
In all times of high literary culture and criticism, a
great deal is produced that may well be called mere
literature, — the result of assiduous training and stim-
ulation of the literary faculties, —just as a great
deal of art is produced that may be called mere art.
Literature that is the result of the friction upon the
mind of other literatures, might, with some justice,
be called mere literature. That which is the result
of the contact of the mind with reality is, or ought
to be, of another order.
Or we may say “ mere literature ”’ as we say “‘ mere
gentleman.” Now gentlemanly qualities — refine-

MERE LITERATURE 187

ment, good breeding, etc. — are not to be sneered at,
unless they stand alone, with no man behind them ;
and literary qualities — style, learning, fancy, etc. —
are not to be sneered at unless they stand alone,
which is not infrequently the case. We should not
apply the phrase “mere gentleman” to Washing-
ton, or Lincoln, or Wellington, though these men
may have been the most thorough of gentlemen ;
neither should we apply the phrase “ mere litera-
ture’ to the works of Bacon, or Shakespeare, or
Carlyle, or Dante, or Plato. The Bible is literature,
but it is not mere literature. We apply the latter
term to writings that have little to recommend them
save their technical and artistic excellence, like the
mass of current poetry and fiction. The men who
have nothing to say and say it extremely well pro-
duce mere literature.

Both England and France have at the present
time many excellent writers, men who possess every
grace of style and charm of expression, who still
give us only a momentary pleasure. They do not
move us, they do not lay strong hands upon us, their
works do not take hold of any great reality; they
produce mere literature. Literary seriousness, lit-
erary earnestness, cannot atone for a want of manly
seriousness and moral earnestness. A sensitive artis-
tic conscience cannot make us content with a dull
or obtuse moral conscience. The literary worker is
to confront reality in just as serious a mood as does
the man of science, if he hopes to produce anything
that rises above mere literature. The picnickers,

188 LITERARY VALUES

the excursionists, the flower-gatherers of literature
do not produce lasting works. The seriousness of
Hawthorne was much more than a literary serious-
ness; the emotion of Whittier at his best is funda-
mental and human.

There is a passage in Amiel’s “Journal” that well
expresses the distinction I am aiming at. ‘I have
been thinking a great deal of Victor Cherbuliez,”
he says, under date of December 4, 1876. ‘‘ Perhaps
his novels make up the most disputable part of his
work, —they are so much wanting in simplicity,
feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge, style,
wit, and subtlety ,— how much thought everywhere,
and what mastery of language! He astonishes one;
I cannot but admire him. Cherbuliez’s mind is of
immense range, clear-sighted, keen, full of resources ;
he is an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for the
feeling which makes men earnest the irony which
leaves them free. Pascal would say of him, ‘ He
has never risen from the order of thought to the
order of charity.’ But we must not be ungrateful.
A Lucian is not worth an Augustine, but still he is
a Lucian. ... The positive element in Victor
Cherbuliez’s work is beauty, not goodness, nor moral
or religious life.”’

The positive element in the enduring works is
always something more than the beautiful ; it is the
true, the vital, the real, as well. The beautiful is
there, but the not-beautiful is there also. The world
is held together, life is nourished and made strong,
and power begotten, by the neutral or negatively

MERE LITERATURE 189

beautiful. Works are everywhere produced that
are artistically serious, but morally trifling and in-
sincere; faultless in form, but tame and barren in
spirit. We could not say this of the works of
Froude or Ruskin, Huxley or Tyndall; we cannot
say it of the works of Matthew Arnold, because he
had a higher purpose than to produce mere literary
effects; but we can say it of most of the produc.
tions of the younger British essayists and poets. In
some of them there is a mere lust of verbal forms
and rhythmic lilt. In reading their poems, I soon
find myself fairly gasping for breath; I seem to be
trying to breathe in a vacuum, —an effect which
one does not experience at all in reading Tenny-
son, or Browning, or Arnold. One is apt to have
serious qualms in reading the prose of Walter Pa-
ter, the lust of mere style so pervades his work.
Faultless workmanship, one says; and yet the best
qualities of style — freshness, naturalness, simplicity
—are not here. What in Victor Hugo goes far
towards atoning for all his sins against art, against
sanity and proportion, are his terrible moral earnest-
ness and his psychic power. Whatever we may think
of his work, we are not likely to call it ‘ mere liter-
ature.” That masterly ubiquitous sporting and toy-
ing with the elements of life which we find in Shake-
speare we shall probably never again see in letters.
The stress and burden of later times do not favor
it. The great soul is now too earnest, too self-con-
scious; life is too serious. Only light men now
essay it. With so much criticism, so much know-

190 LITERARY VALUES

ledge, so much science, another Shakespeare is impos-
sible. Renan says: “In order to establish those lit-
erary authorities called classic, something especially
healthy and solid is necessary. Common household
bread is of more value here than pastry.” There
can be little doubt that our best literary workers
are intent upon producing something analogous to
pastry, or even confectionery, — something fine, com-
plex, highly seasoned, that tickles the taste. It is
always in order to urge a return to the simple and
serious, a return to nature, to works that have the
wholesome and sustaining qualities of natural pro-
ducts, — grain, fruits, nuts, air, water.

XII
ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON

ie. one respect many of us feel toward Emerson as
a wife feels toward her husband; we like to
find fault with him ourselves, but it hurts us to
have others do the same. He was a friend of our
youth.

Though we may in a measure have outgrown him,
and now find his paradoxes, his daring affirmations,
his trick of overstatement and understatement less
novel and stimulating than we once did, yet we
cherish him in our heart of hearts.

The process of maturing, with the spirit as with
the body, with man as with the various organic
growths, is more or lessa hardening and toughening
process, —a hardening for strength and endurance.
Emerson belongs to the earlier period, before the
hardening has progressed far, while the grain of our
thoughts is yet in the milk. He appeals to us most
strongly in youth or early manhood, when we are
not too critical and while we are yet full of brave
and generous impulses. A little callow we may be,
but buoyant and optimistic. As we grow older some-
thing seems to evaporate from him, and one returns
to his pages in middle or later life as to the scene of

192 LITERARY VALUES

some youthful festival, half religious, half social, in
which he took part, and the memory of which still
stirs his emotions.

Emerson finally dropped the church, but he never
ceased to be a clergyman. He was like a flower es-
caped from the garden, and finding a lodgment in an
adjoining field, but which never ceased to be a gar-
den flower. A certain sanctity and unworldliness
always clung to him,—a certain remoteness from
the common thoughts, aims, attractions, of every-
day humanity. If he had been a better worldling
he would have been a better poet, — that is, if he
had had more of the feelings, passions, sympathies
and thoughts of ordinary men. These things would
have given him more flexibility and brought him
closer to human life. Rarely, as poet or prose
writer, could he speak in the tone of the people.
There was always, more or less concealed, the tone
of the pulpit. Mr. James expressed this idea well
when he said that Emerson “had no prosaic side
relating him to ordinary people.”

This prosaic side is very important to the poet,
.or to any man who would touch and move his
fellow-men. We desire our singer or teacher to be
of the same flesh and blood as ourselves. Emerson
was always a preacher, and his theme, by whatever
name he called it, was always religion, or what he
called religion, namely, the universality of the moral
law.

No lover of Emerson, I imagine, would have had
him other than what he was; I certainly would not,

ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON 193

At the same time it is a pleasure to explore his
limitations and see just what he was, and what he
was not. He was a rare soul, probably the most
astral genius in English or any other literature.
His books are for young men and for those of
a religious cast of mind. His signal defect as a
writer, as a contributor to the world’s literature,
arises from this same want of sympathy with the
world, —from the select, abridged, circumscribed
character of his genius. He did not and could not
deal with human life as Montaigne, or Bacon, or
Plutarch, or Cicero did.

He was conscious of his defect in this direction,
and would fain have had it otherwise. Thus he
writes in his journal in 1839: ‘ We would all be
public men if we could afford it. I am wholly
private; such is the poverty of my constitution.
‘ Heaven betrayed me to a book and wrapped me in
a gown.’ I have no social talent, no will, and a
steady appetite for insights in any or all directions,
to balance my manifold imbecilities.’ He even
quotes approvingly the remark of some one that he
“ always seemed to be on stilts.” ‘It is even so.
Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I
see across a gulf. I cannot go to them nor they
come to me.” He lacked sympathy with men. He
cared nothing for persons as such, but only for the
genius of humanity which they embodied, and this
genius of humanity he did not find in any sufficiency
in ordinary mortals.

He writes in his journal, “I like man, but not

194 LITERARY VALUES

men!” He liked ideas, but not things. He dwelt
in the abstract, not in the concrete. “In the high-
est friendship,” he says, “we form a league with
the Idea of the man who stands to us in that re-
lation — not with the actual person.” And his
letters, fine and eloquent as most of them are, do not
read like a message from one person to another
person, but from one Idea to another Idea.

Yet Emerson’s leading trait is eminently Ameri-
ean; I mean his hospitality toward the new, —
the eagerness with which he sought and welcomed
the new idea and the new man. Perhaps we might
call it his inborn radicalism. No writer ever made
such rash, such extreme statements, in the hope
that some new truth might be compassed. Any-
thing new and daring instantly challenged his atten-
tion. His face was wholly set toward the future,
—the new. The past was discredited the moment
it became the past. ‘The coming only is sacred,’?
he said ; “no truth so sublime but it may be trivial
to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.”

As a writer, he sought to make all the old thoughts
appear trivial in the light of his audacious affirma-
tions. He stood ready at all times to strike his
colors to the man who could bring a larger generali-
zation than his own. All his knowledge, all his
opinions, were at the mercy of the new idea. He
did not tread the beaten paths, or seek truth in the
logical way ; he sought for it by spurts and sallies of
the mind. He called himself an “ experimenter,” and
said he did not pretend to settle anything as true

ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON 195

or false. ‘TI unsettle all things. No facts are to
me sacred; none are profane: I simply experiment;
an endless seeker with no Past at my back.” In his
random, prophetic way he hits on many sublime
truths — hits on them by sheer force of affirmation,
like the truth of evolution, and of the correlation of
forces. Indeed, there are few great thoughts
current in our time that were not indicated by the
bold guessing of Emerson. The fragmentary and
projectile-like character of his thinking is often very
effective. He spent no force upon logic, upon forti-
fying his position, but sent his single bullet as far
and as deep as he could. Emerson’s hope and con-
fidence in the new is shown in his serious prophecy
and expectancy of the coming man.

He was apparently always on the lookout for a
new and greater man than had yet appeared, He
was always sweeping the horizon for this strange
sail. ‘“ A new person,” he says, “ is to me a great
event, and keeps me from sleep.” He met every
stranger with a curious, expectant glance. He
looked at you and waited for you to speak, as if the
thought that perhaps here is the man I am waiting
for, was never absent from his mind. “If the com-
panions of our childhood,” he says, “should turn
out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would
not surprise us.” But the experience of most per-
sons, I fancy, points just the other way: we are
always incredulous when told that our playmates
have turned out to be heroes; just as the whole
world, except the Emersons in it, are skeptical of

196 LITERARY VALUES

the worth of the new idea, or of the new inven-
tion,

Emerson does not so much expound a philosophy
as he celebrates a sentiment or a law. He does not
inculcate a virtue, but quickens our moral sense.
He does not teach a religion, but shows all nature as
religious. His method is not that of the analyst;
he celebrates and presents whole what others give in
detail. His mind is deficient in continuity, but
strong in affirmation, strong in its separate sallies
and flights. He has not a definite, practical bent
like Carlyle; he seldom lays his hand on any cur-
rent evil or want, but rather glorifies the world as
it is. He is abstract in his aim, and concrete in
his methods. He fixes his eye on the star, but
would make it draw his wagon.

Carlyle was like an engine tied to its iron rails,
— he turned aside for nothing; Emerson was more
like a sailing yacht that hovers about all shores and
takes advantage of every breeze.

XIII
THOREAU’S WILDNESS.

OUBTLESS the wildest man New England
has turned out since the red aborigines vacated
her territory was Henry Thoreau, —a man in
whom the Indian reappeared on the plane of taste
and morals. One is tempted to apply to him his
own lines on “ Elisha Dugan,” as it is very certain
they fit himself much more closely than they ever
did his neighbor : —

‘*O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares,

Only to set snares,

Who liv’st all alone
Close to the bone,

And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.”

His whole life was a search for the wild, not only
in nature but in literature, in life, in morals. The
shyest and most elusive thoughts and impressions
were the ones that fascinated him most, not only in
his own mind, but in the minds of others. His
startling paradoxes are only one form his wildness
took. He cared little for science, except as it es-
caped the rules and technicalities, and put him on
the trail of the ideal, the transcendental. Thoreau

198 LITERARY VALUES

was of French extraction; and every drop of his
blood seems to have turned toward the aboriginal, as
the French blood has so often done in other ways
in this country. He, for the most part, despised
the white man; but his enthusiasm kindled at the
mention of the Indian. He envied the Indian; he
coveted his knowledge, his arts, his woodcraft. He
accredited him with a more “ practical and vital
science’ than was contained in the books. “The
Indian stood nearer to wild Nature than we.” “It
was a new light when my guide gave me Indian
names for things for which I had only scientific ones
before. In proportion as I understood the lan-
guage, I saw them from a new point of view.” And
again, “The Indian’s earthly life was as far off
from us as Heaven is.” In his ‘‘ Week” he com-
plains that our poetry is only white man’s poetry.
“Tf we could listen but for an instant to the chant
of the Indian muse, we should understand why he
will not exchange his savageness for civilization.”
Speaking of himself, he says, “ I am convinced that
my genius dates from an older era than the agricul-
tural. I would at least strike my spade into the
earth with such careless freedom, but accuracy, as
the woodpecker his bill into a tree. There is in
my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward
all wildness.” Again and again he returns to
the Indian. “We talk of civilizing the Indian,
but that is not the name for his improvement.
By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim
forest life he preserves his intercourse with his

THOREAU’S WILDNESS 199

native gods, and is admitted from time to time to
a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has
glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons
are strangers, The steady illumination of his genius,
dim only because distant, is like the faint but satis-
fying light of the stars compared with the dazzling
but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.”
“We would not always be soothing and taming
nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but some-
times ride the horse wild, and chase the buffalo.”
The only relics that interest him are Indian relies,
One of his regular spring recreations or occupations
is the hunting of arrow-heads. He goes looking for
arrow-heads as other people go berrying or botaniz-
ing. In his published journal he makes a long en-
try under date of March 28, 1859, about his pursuit
of arrow-heads. “TI spend many hours every spring,”
he says, “gathering the crop which the melting
snow and rain have washed bare. When, at length,
some island in the meadow or some sandy field
elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps for rye, in
the fall, I take note of it, and do not fail to repair
thither as soon as the earth begins to be dry in the
spring. If the spot chances never to have been culti-
vated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it.
The farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest
which is the fruit of his toil.” He probably picked
up thousands of arrow-heads. He had an eye for
them. The Indian in him recognized its own,

His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical of the
wild weapon he so loved, — hard, flinty, fine-grained,

200 LITERARY VALUES

penetrating, winged, a flying shaft, bringing down
its game with marvelous sureness. His literary
art was to let fly with a kind of quick inspira-
tion; and though his arrows sometimes go wide,
yet it is always a pleasure to watch their aerial
course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind of Emerso-
nian or transcendental red man, going about with
a pocket-glass and an herbarium, instead of with a
bow and a tomahawk. He appears to have been as
stoical and indifferent and unsympathetic as a veri-
table Indian; and how he hunted without trap or
gun, and fished without hook or snare! Everywhere
the wild drew him. He liked the telegraph because
it was a kind of eolian harp; the wind blowing
upon it made wild, sweet music. He liked the rail-
road through his native town, because it was the
wildest road he knew of: it only made deep cuts
into and through the hills. “ On it are no houses nor
foot-travellers. The travel on it does not disturb
me. The woods are left to hang over it. Though
straight, it is wild in its accompaniments, keeping
all its raw edges. Even the laborers on it are not
like other laborers.” One day he passed a little
boy in the street who had on a home-made cap of
woodchuck’s skin, and it completely filled his eye.
He makes a delightful note about it in his journal.
That was the kind of cap to have, — “a perfect
little idyl, as they say.” Any wild trait unexpect-
edly cropping out in any of the domestic animals
pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was his
favorite apple, because of its beauty and perfume.

THOREAU’S WILDNESS 201

He perhaps never tried to ride a wild horse, but
such an exploit was in keeping with his genius.
Thoreau hesitated to call himself a naturalist. That
was too tame; he would perhaps have been content
to have been an Indian naturalist. He says in this
journal, and with much truth and force, ‘ Man can-
not afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature
directly, but only with the side of his eye. He
must look through and beyond her. To look at her
is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It
turns the man of science to stone.’ When he was
applied to by the secretary of the Association for
the Advancement of Science, at Washington, for in-
formation as to the particular branch of science he
was most interested in, he confesses he was ashamed
to answer for fear of exciting ridicule. But he says,
“Tf it had been the secretary of an association of
which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I should
not have hesitated to describe my studies at once
and particularly.” ‘The fact is, I am a mystic,
a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to
boot.” Indeed, what Thoreau was finally after in
nature was something ulterior to science, something
ulterior to poetry, something ulterior to philosophy ;
it was that vague something which he calls “the
higher law,” and which eludes all direct statement.
He went to Nature as to an oracle; and though he
sometimes, indeed very often, questioned her as a
naturalist and a poet, yet there was always another
question in his mind. He ransacked the country
about Concord in all seasons and weathers, and at

202 LITERARY VALUES

all times of the day and night he delved into the
ground, he probed the swamps, he searched the
waters, he dug into woodchuck holes, into muskrats’
dens, into the retreats of the mice and squirrels; he
saw every bird, heard every sound, found every
wild-flower, and brought home many a fresh bit of
natural history; but he was always searching for
something he did not find. This search of his for
the transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will
not be caught, he has set forth in a beautiful parable
in “ Walden: ” —

“JT long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a
turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are
the travellers I have spoken concerning them, de-
scribing their tracks, and what calls they answered
to. Ihave met one or two who had heard the hound,
and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove
disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as
anxious to recover them as if they had lost them
themselves.”

XIV
NATURE IN LITERATURE

Soe different kinds or phases of this thing

we call Nature have at different times appeared
in literature. For instance, there is the personified
or deified Nature of the towering Greek bards, an
expression of Nature born of wonder, fear, childish
ignorance, and the tyranny of personality; the
Greek was so alive himself that he made everything
else alive, and so manly and human that he could
see only these qualities in Nature. Or the Greek
idyllic poets, whose Nature is simple and fresh like
spring water, or the open air, or the taste of milk or
fruit or bread. The same thing is perhaps true in
a measure of Virgil’s Nature. In a later class of
writers and artists that arose in Italy, Nature is
steeped in the faith and dogmas of the Christian
Church; itis a kind of theological Nature.

In English literature there is the artificial Nature
of Pope and his class, a kind of classic liturgy
repeated from the books, and as dead and hollow as
fossil shells. Earlier than that, the quaint and af-
fected Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later the
melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the Byronic
muse; and lastly, the transmuted and spiritualized

204 LITERARY VALUES

Nature of Wordsworth, which has given the pre-
vailing tone and cast to most modern poetry. Thus,
from a goddess Nature has changed to a rustic
nymph, a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance, be-
sides other characters not so definite, till she has at
last become a priestess of the soul. What will be
the next phase is perhaps already indicated in the
poems of Walt Whitman, in which Nature is re-
garded mainly in the light of science, through the
immense vistas opened up by astronomy and geology.
This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs, and has
sought to adjust his imagination to the modern pro-
blems and conditions, always taking care, however,
to preserve an outlook into the highest regions.

I was much struck with a passage in Whitman’s
last volume, “Two Rivulets,” in which he says
that he has not been afraid of the charge of obscurity
in his poems, “because human thought, poetry or
melody, must have dim escapes and outlets, — must
possess a certain fluid, aérial character, akin to space
itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination,
but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic
style, when addressed to the soul, is less definite
form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista music,
half-tints, and even less than half-tints.”” I know
no ampler justification of a certain elusive quality
there is in the highest poetry — something that re-
fuses to be tabulated or explained, and that is a
stumbling-block to many readers — than is contained
in these sentences.

xv
SUGGESTIVENESS

PL Sane is a quality that adheres to one man’s

writing or speaking, and not to another’s, that
we call suggestiveness, — something that warms and
stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite
apart from the amount of truth or information
directly conveyed.

It is a precious literary quality, not easy of defini-
tion or description. It involves quality of mind,
mental and moral atmosphere, points of view, and
maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every
book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sen-
tence of a writer float deeper than it shows.

Thus, of the great writers of English literature,
Dr. Johnson is, to me, the least suggestive, while
Bacon is one of the most suggestive. Hawthorne is
undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers;
he has the most atmosphere and the widest and most
alluring horizon. Emerson is the most suggestive of
our essayists, because he has the deepest ethical and
prophetic background. His page is full of moral elec-
tricity, so to speak, which begets a state of electric
excitement in his reader’s mind. Whitman is the
most suggestive of our poets; he elaborates the least
and gives us in profusion the buds and germs of

206 LITERARY VALUES

poetry. A musical composer once said to me that
Whitman stimulated him more than Tennyson, be-
cause he left more for him to do,—he abounded
in hints and possibilities that the musician’s mind
eagerly seized.

This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase
or to cryptic language or to vagueness and obscurity.
It goes, or may go, with perfect lucidity, as in
Matthew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely pre-
sent in the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has
great clearness and compass, but there is nothing
resonant in his style, —nothing that stimulates the
imagination. He isa great workman, but the metal
he works in is not of the kind called precious.

The late roundabout and enigmatical style of
Henry James is far less fruitful in his readers’ minds
than his earlier and more direct one, or than the
limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The
indirect and elliptical method may undoubtedly be
so used as to stimulate the mind; at the same time
there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating
around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon
the page of the great novelist there fall, more or less
distinct, all the colors of the spectrum of human
life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent
only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his
readers grope in the darkness accordingly.

In the world of experience and observation the
suggestiveness of things is enhanced by veils, con-
cealments, half lights, flowing lines. The twilight
is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a

SUGGESTIVENESS 207

rolling field than a lawn, a winding road than a
straight one. In literature perspective, indirection,
understatement, side glimpses, have equal value; a
vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the
writer, sentences that start a multitude of images,
that abound in the concrete and the specific, that
shun vague generalities, — with these go the power
of suggestiveness.

Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive,
while the elaborated, the highly wrought, the per-
fected afford us a different kind of pleasure. The
art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence, and
the art that stimulates and makes us ahunger has
another. All beginnings in nature afford us a pe-
culiar pleasure. The early spring with its hints
and dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first
robin or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first
tender skies, the first rainbow, the first wild flower,
the dropping bud scales, the awakening voices in
the marshes, —all these things touch and move us
in a way that later developments in the season do not.
What meaning, too, in the sunrise and the sunset, in
the night with its stars, the sea with its tides and
currents, the morning with its dews, autumn with
its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its
sands, — in everything in the germ and in the bud,
— in parasites, suckers, blights, in floods, tempests,
droughts! The winged seeds carry thoughts, the
falling leaves make us pause, the clinging burrs have
a tongue, the pollen dust, not less than meteoric dust,
conveys a hint of the method of nature.

208 LITERARY VALUES

Some things and events in our daily experience are
more typical, and therefore more suggestive, than
others. Thus the sower striding across the ploughed
field is a walking allegory, or parable. Indeed the
whole life of the husbandman, — his first-hand rela-
tion to things, his ploughing, his planting, his fer-
tilizing, his draining, his pruning, his grafting, his
uprootings, his harvestings, his separating of the
wheat from the chaff, and the tares from the wheat,
his fencing his field with the stones and boulders
that hindered his plough or cumbered his sward, his
making the wilderness blossom as the rose, —all
these things are pleasant to contemplate because in
them there is a story within a story, we translate
the facts into higher truths.

In like manner, the shepherd with his flocks, the
seaman with his compass and rudder, the potter with
his clay, the weaver with his warp and woof, the
sculptor with his marble, the painter with his can-
vas and pigments, the builder with his plans and
scaffoldings, the chemist with his solvents and pre-
cipitants, the surgeon with his scalpel and antisep-
tics, the lawyer with his briefs, the preacher with
his text, the fisherman with his nets, — all are more
or less symbolical and appeal to the imagination.

In both prose and poetry, there is the suggestive-
ness of language used in a vivid, imaginative way,
and the suggestiveness of words redolent of human
association, words of deep import, as friend, home,
love, marriage.

To me Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most sugges-

SUGGESTIVENESS 209

tive sonnets in the language, because they so abound
in words, images, allusions drawn from real life ;
they are the product of a mind vividly acted upon
by near-by things, that uses language steeped in the
common experience of mankind. The poet drew his
material not from the strange and the remote, but,
as it were, from the gardens and thoroughfares of
life. Does not that poetry or prose work touch us
the most nearly that deals with that with which we
are most familiar? One thing that separates the
minor poet from the major is that the thoughts and
words of the minor poet are more of the nature of
asides, or of the exceptional; he does not take in the
common and universal ; we are not familiar with the
points of view that so agitate him; and he has not
the power to make them real to us. I read poems
every day that provoke the thought, “Well, that is
all news to me. I do not know that heaven or that
earth, those men or those women,’’ —all is so shad-
owy, fantastic, and unreal, But when you enter the
world of the great poets you find yourself upon solid
ground; the sky and the earth, and the things in them
and upon them, are what you have always known,
and not for a moment are you called upon to breathe
in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright position to
see the landscape. Dante even makes hell as tan-
gible and real as the objects of our senses, if not
more so.

Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power
of pregnant, compact sentences, —type thoughts,
compendious phrases, — vital distinctions or gen-

210 LITERARY VALUES

eralizations, such as we find scattered through
literature, as when De Quincey says of the Ro-
man that he was great in the presence of man,
never in the presence of nature; or his distinction
between the literature of power and the literature
of knowledge, or similar illuminating distinctions in
the prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold,
Goethe, Lessing. Arnold’s dictum that poetry is
a criticism of life, is suggestive, because it sets you
thinking to verify or to disprove it. John Stuart
Mill was not what one would call a suggestive
writer, yet the following sentence, which Mr. Au-
gustine Birrell has lately made use of, makes a de-
cided ripple in one’s mind: “TI have learnt from
experience that many false opinions may be ex-
changed for true ones without in the least altering
the habits of mind of which false opinions are the
result.” In anew home writer whose first books
are but a year or two old, I find deeply suggestive
sentences on nearly every page. MHere are two or
three of them: “In your inmost soul you are
as well suited to the whole cosmical order and every
part of it as to your own body. You belong here.
Did you suppose that you belonged to some other
world than this, or that you belonged nowhere at
all, just a waif on the bosom of the eternities? . . .
Conceivably He might have flung you into a world
that was unrelated to you, and might have left you:
to be acclimated at your own risk; but you happen
to know that this is not the case. You have lived
here always; this is the ancestral demesne; for

SUGGESTIVENESS 211

ages and ages you have looked out of these same win-
dows upon the celestial landscape and the star-deeps.
You are at home.” “ How perverse and pathetic
the desires of the animals! But they all get what
they ask for,— long necks and trunks, flapping
ears and branching horns and corrugated hides, any-
thing, if only they will believe in life and try.” !

The intuitional and affirmative writers, to which
class our new author belongs, and the most notable
example of which, in this country, was Emerson,
are, as a rule, more suggestive than the clearly de-
monstrating and logical writers. A challenge to the
soul seems to mean more than an appeal to the rea-
son; an audacious affirmation often irradiates the
mind in a way that a logical sequence of thought
does not. Science rarely suggests more than it
says; but in the hands of an imaginative man like
Maeterlinck a certain order of facts in natural history
becomes fraught with deepest meaning, as may be
witnessed in his wonderful “ Life of the Bee,’? —
one of the most enchanting and poetic contributions
to natural history ever made. Darwin’s work upon
the earthworm, and upon the cross fertilization of
flowers, in the same way seems to convey more
truth to the reader than is warranted by the subject.

The writer who can touch the imagination has
the key, at least one key, to suggestiveness. This
power often goes with a certain vagueness and in-
definiteness, as in the oft-quoted lines from one of
Shakespeare’s sonnets : —

1 The Religion of Democracy. By Charles Ferguson.

212 LITERARY VALUES

‘the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,”
a very suggestive, but not a clearly intelligible
passage.

Truth at the centre, straightly put, excites the
mind in one way, and truth at the surface, or at the
periphery of the circle, indirectly put, excites it
in another way and for other reasons; just as a
light in a dark place, which illuminates, appeals to
the eye in a different way from the light of day fall-
ing through vapors or colored glass, wherein objects
become softened and illusory.

A common word may be so used as to have an
unexpected richness of meaning, as when Coleridge
speaks of those books that “find” us; or Shake-
speare of the “ marriage of true minds,” or Whitman
of the autumn apple hanging “indolent-ripe” on
the tree. Probably that language is the most sug-
gestive that is the most concrete, that is drawn most
largely from the experience of life, that savors of
real things. The Saxon English of Walton or Bar-
row is more suggestive than the latinized English of
Johnson or Gibbon.

Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite
exceptional in the eighteenth-century writers. It is
much more abundant in the writers of the seven-
teenth century. It goes much more with the ver-
nacular style, the homely style, than with the pol-
ished academic style.

With the stream of English literature of the
nineteenth century has mingled a current of German

SUGGESTIVENESS 213

thought and mysticism, and this has greatly height-
ened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and
in prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell
or Moore or Macaulay or Irving, but it is in Words-
worth and Coleridge and Landor and Carlyle and
Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and
Emerson and Whitman, —a depth and richness of
spiritual and emotional background that the wits of
Pope’s and Johnson’s times knew not of. It seems
as if the subconscious self played a much greater
part in the literature. of the nineteenth century than
of the eighteenth, probably because this term has
been recently added to our psychology.

Asarule it may be said that the more a writer
condenses, the more suggestive his work will be.
There is a sort of mechanical equivalent between
the force expended in compacting a sentence and the
force or stimulus it imparts again to the reader’s
mind. A diffuse writer is rarely or never a sugges-
tive one. Poetry is, or should be, more suggestive
than prose, because it is the result of a more com-
pendious and sublimating process. The mind of the
poet is more tense, he uses language under greater
pressure of emotion than the prose writer, whose
medium of expression gives his mind more play-
room. The poet often succeeds in focusing his mean-
ing or emotion in a single epithet, and he alone
gives us the resounding, unforgettable line. There
are pregnant sentences in all the great prose writers ;
there are immortal lines only in the poets,

Whitman said the word he would himself use as

214 LITERARY VALUES

most truly descriptive of his “Leaves of Grass”
was the word suggestiveness. “I round and finish
little, if anything; and could not consistently with
my scheme. The reader will always have his or her
part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I
seek less to state or display my theme or thought,
and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere
of the theme or thought — there to pursue your own
flight.” These sentences themselves are suggestive,
because they bring before the mind a variety of
definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a
thing, doing your part, pursuing your own flight,
and yet the idea conveyed has a certain subtlety and
elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a
whole probably lies in its blending of realism and
mysticism, and in the art of it running parallel to or
in some way tallying with the laws and processes of
nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few
modern works do.

Of course the suggestiveness of any work — poem,
picture, novel, essay — depends largely upon what
we bring to it; whether we bring a kindred spirit
or an alien one, a full mind or an empty one, an
alert sense or a dull one. If you have been there,
so to speak, if you have passed through the experi-
ence described, if you have known the people por-
trayed, if you have thought, or tried to think, the
thoughts the author exploits, the work will have a
deeper meaning to you than to one who is a stranger
to these things. The best books make us acquainted
with our own, — they help us to find ourselves. No

SUGGESTIVENESS 215

book calls forth the same responses from two differ-
ent types of mind. The wind does not awaken
wolian-harp tones from cornstalks, No man is a
hero to his valet. It is the deep hollows and passes
of the mountains that give back your voice in pro-
longed reverberations. The tides are in the sea, not
in the lakes and ponds. Words of deep import do
not mean much to a child. The world of books is
under the same law as these things. What any
given work yields us depends largely upon what we
bring to it.

XVI :
ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS

PS Qantas one has passed the middle period of life,

or even long before that, it is interesting to
note what books he spontaneously recurs to and re-
reads. Do his old favorites retain anything of their
first freshness and stimulus for him, or have they
become stale and trite, or completely outgrown? On
taking down for the third or fourth time a favorite
author the present winter, I said to myself, “There
is no test of a book like that: can we, and do we,
go back to it?” If not, is it at all probable that
future generations will go back to it? One’s own
experience may be looked upon as the experience of
the race in miniature. If one cannot return to an
author again and again, is it not pretty good evidence
that his work has not the keeping qualities? One
brings a different self, a different experience, to each
re-reading, and thus in a measure brings the test of
time and humanity. Yet there is always some diffi-
culty in going back. It is difficult to go back, after
some years, to live in a place from which one has
once flitted. Somehow things look stale to us. Is
it our dead selves that we encounter at every turn ?
Even the old homestead has a certain empty, pa-

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 217

thetic, forlorn look. In the journey of life there is
always more or less pain in going back; and I sup-
pose it is partly because in every place in which we
have lived we have had pain, and partly because
there is some innate dislike in us to going back ; the
watchword of the soul is onward. If the book has
given us pain, we cannot return to it; and our sec-
ond or third or fourth pleasure in it will be in pro-
portion to the depth and genuineness of our first.
If our pleasure was in the novelty or strangeness or
unexpectedness of the thing, it will not return, or
only in small measure. Stories of exciting plots, I
find, one can seldom re-read. One can go back to
the “ Vicar of Wakefield ; ” but can he read a second
time “The Woman in White”? In such books
there can be only one first time. Pluck out the
heart of a mystery once, and it never grows again.
Curiosity and astonishment make a poor foundation
to build upon. The boy tires of his jumping-jack
much sooner than of his top or ball. Only the
normal, the sane, the simple, have the gift of long
life; the strained, the intemperate, the violent will
not live out half their days. We never outgrow our
pleasure in simple, common things; if we do, so much
the worse for us; and I think it will be found that
those books to which we return and that stand the
test of time have just this quality of simple, universal,
every-day objects and experiences, with, of course,
some glint of that light that never was on sea or
land, — the light of the spirit. How many times
does a reading man return to Montaigne, not to make

218 LITERARY VALUES

a dead set at him, but to dip into him here and there,
as one takes a cup of water froma spring! Human
nature is essentially the same in all ages; and Mon-
taigne put so much of his genuine, unaffected self
into his pages, and put it with such vivacity of style,
that all men find their own in his book; it is for-
ever modern. We return to Bacon for a different
reason, — the breadth and excellence of his wisdom,
and his masterly phrases. The excellent is always
modern ; only, what is excellent ?

A man of my own tastes re-reads Gilbert White
two or three times, and dips into him many times
more. It is easy to see why such a book lasts. So
much writing there is that is like half-live coals
buried in ashes; but here there are no ashes, no dead
verbiage at all; we are in immediate contact with a
live, simple, unaffected mind and personality. But
this general description applies to all books that last ;
they all have at least one quality in common, liv-
ing reality. What is special to White is his fine,
scholarly style, busied with the common, homely
things of everyday country life. The facts are just
enough heightened and related to the life of this man
to make them of perennial interest.

We probably go back to books from two motives :
one, because we want to recover some past mood or
experience to which the book may be the key; and
the other from the perennial sources of pleasure and
profit which a good book holds; in other words for
association and inspiration.

I suppose it was with some such motives as these

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 219

that I recently opened the “Autocrat” after the
pages had been closed to me for over a quarter of a
century. To recover as far as possible the spirit of
the old days, I got out the identical numbers of the
“ Atlantic” in which I had first read those sparkling
sentences. Life to me had the freshness and buoy-
ancy of the morning hours in those first years of the
great Boston magazine. I recall how impatiently I
waited for each number to appear, and how, on one
occasion at least, I ran all the way home from the
post-office with the new issue in my hand, so eager
was I to be alone with it inmy room. J remember,
too, how I resented the criticism of a schoolmate,
then at Harvard College, who said that Holmes was
not the great writer I fancied him to be, but only a
Boston great writer.

Well, I found places in the “ Autocrat” that
would not bear much pressure, — thin places where
a lively rhetoric alone carried the mind over. And
I found much that was sound and solid, that would
not give way beneath one under any pressure he
could bring.

When Dr. Holmes got hold of a real idea, as he
often did, he could exploit it in as taking a way as
any man who has lived; but frequently, I think, he
got hold of sham or counterfeit ideas; and these,
with all his skill in managing them, will not stand
the pressure of time. (His classing poems with
meerschaum pipes, as two things that improve with
use, is an instance of what I mean by his sham
ideas.)

220 LITERARY VALUES

As a writer Dr. Holmes always reminded me of cer-
tain of our bird songsters, such as the brown thrasher
or the catbird, whose performances always seem to
imply a spectator and to challenge his admiration.
The vivacious doctor always seemed to write with
his eye upon his reader, and to calculate in advance
upon his reader’s surprise and pleasure. If the world
finally neglects his work, it will probably be because
it lacks the deep seriousness of the enduring produc-
tions.

Yet this test of re-reading is, of course, only an
approximate one. So great an authority as Hume
said it was sufficient to read Cowley once, but that
Parnell after the fiftieth reading was as fresh as at
the first. Now, for my part, I have to go to the
encyclopzdia to find out who Parnell was, but of
Cowley even desultory readers like myself know
something. His essays one can not only read, but
re-read. They make one of the unpretentious minor
books that one can put in his pocket and take with
him on a walk to the woods, and nibble at under a
tree or by a waterfall. Solitude seems to bring out
its quality, as it does that of some people.

In our intellectual experience there can probably
be but one first time. We go back to an author
again and again; yet in all save a few exceptional
cases, the pleasure of the second or third reading is
only a lesser degree of the first. On the other hand,
a favorite piece of music one may hear with the same
keen delight any number of times. Is it because
music is so largely made upof the sensuous, at

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 221

least to a greater extent than is any other phase
of art? It is the same with perfumes, flavors, col-
ors: they never lose their first freshness to us. But
a book or a poem we absorb and exhaust more or
less, — that is, as to its intellectual content; and if
we return to it, it is probably for some charm or
quality that is to the spirit what music or perfume or
color is to the senses, or what a congenial companion
is to our social instincts. We shall not go back
to a book that does not in some way, apart from its
mere intellectual service, relate itself to our lives.
Time tries all things, and surely does it sift out
the false and fugitive in books. Contemporary judg-
ment is usually unreliable. It is like trial by jury,
the local and accidental play so large a part in the
verdict. The next age, or the next, forms the higher
court of appeal. In the same way a man’s future
self corrects or sets aside his verdict of to-day. Ifin
later life he reaffirms his first opinion, the chances are
that time is on his side. There is, of course, a sense
or a degree in which any book that one has once read
becomes a sucked orange; but some books become
much more so than others. I doubt if many of us
find books that, like a few people, become dearer to
us as time passes, and to which we always return
with increasing interest. And the reason is that one’s
mental and spiritual outlook is not uniformly the
same, while his social and human wants, such as his
need of food and warmth, do remain about the same.
One in a measure absorbs the book and puts it be-
hind him. It is like a place he has visited: he has

222 LITERARY VALUES

had the view, and until the impression is more or
less obliterated he does not care to repeat it. But
one’s friend is always a fresh stimulus: he keeps
the past alive for him (which the book can also do
in a measure), and he consecrates the present (which
the book cannot do). Indeed, the sense of compan-
ionship which one can have in a book is but a faint
echo or shadow of the companionship he has with
persons. Yet this sense of companionship does ad-
here to some books much more vividly than to
others. They are our books; they were written for
us; they become a part of our lives, and they do
not drop away from us with the lapse of time, as do
others. Different readers have felt this way about
such writers as Emerson, Carlyle, Wordsworth, and
Whitman; but it may be a question how writers
who make the intense personal appeal that these men
make will wear. Are they too special and individ-
ual for future generations to recognize close kinship
with? Will each age have its own doctors and
saviors, and go back only for lovers and for the touch
of nature that makes all the world kin? I know
not; yet it is apparent that he who stands upon the
common ground where all men stand, and by the
magic of his genius makes poetry and romance out of
that, has the best chance to endure. Only so far as
the writers named, or any writers, represent states
of mind and spirit that are likely to return again
and again, and not to be outgrown in the progress of
the race, are we likely to come back to them, or is
the future likely to feel an interest in them. A path

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 223

or a road becomes obsolete when there are no more
travelers going that way; and an author becomes
obsolete when there are no more readers going his
way.

For my part, I find myself returning again and
again to the works of the men named, but, of course,
with the cooled ardor that years bring to every man.
I feel that I am less near the end with Whitman
than with any of the others; he is the most stimulat-
ing to my intellect, because he suggests the most far-
reaching problems. I re-read Wordsworth as I walk
again along familiar paths that lead to the seques-
tered and the idyllic. I climb the Whitman moun-
tain when I want a big view, and a wide horizon,
and a glimpse of the unknown.

I think the service most of us get from Carlyle is
a moral rather than an intellectual one. He was to
his generation more like a much-needed drastic tonic
remedy than like a simple hygienic regimen; we get
the virtue of him now ina thousand ways without
re-reading him. Hence there are more chances of
our outgrowing him than of our outgrowing some
lesser but more normal men. Ina measure, I think,
this is true of Emerson, but not entirely so. Emer-
son has charm ; he has illusion ; he has the witchery
of the ideal. He is like the wise doctor whose pre-
sence, whose reassuring smile, and whose cheerful
prognosis do more for the patient than anything else.
‘We want him to come again and again. To re-
read his first essays, his “ Representative Men,” his
“English Traits,” and many of his poems, is again

224 LITERARY VALUES

to hear music, to breathe perfume, or to walk in a
spring twilight when the evening star throbs above
the hill.

One winter night I tried to re-read Carlyle’s ‘ Past
and Present” and certain of his ‘“‘ Latter-Day Pam-
phlets;’’ but I found I could not, and thanked my
stars that I did not have to. It was like riding a
spirited but bony horse bareback. There was tre-
mendous “go” in the beast; but oh, the bruises
from those knotty and knuckle-like sentences! But
the ‘“ Life of Sterling’ I have found I can re-read
with delight; it has a noble music. Certain of the es-
says, also, such as the ones on Scott, Burns, and John-
son, have a perennial quality. Parts of ‘“ Frederick ”
I mean to read again, and the “ Reminiscences.” I
have re-read “Sartor Resartus,” but it was a task,
hardly a pleasure. Nearly four fifths of the book, I
should say, is chaff; but the other fifth is real wheat,
if you are not choked in getting it. Yet I have just
read the story of an educated tramp who carried the
book in his blanket thousands of miles and knew it
nearly by heart. Carlyle wrote as he talked; his
“Latter-Day Pamphlets’ are harangues that it
would have been a delight to hear, but in the printed
page we miss the guiding tone and emphasis, and
above all do we miss the laugh that mollified the
bitter words. One can stand, or even welcome, in
life what may be intolerable in print; put the same
thing in a book, and it is the pudding without the
sauce, and cold at that. The colloquial style is good,
or the best, if perfectly easy and simple. In reading

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 225

aloud we teach our children to read as they speak,
and thus make the words their own. The same thing
holds in writing: the less formal, the less written,
the sentences are, or the more they are like familiar
speech, the more genuine and real the writing seems,
the more it becomes one’s own; but when the form
and manner of spoken sentences are very pronounced,
they become tiresome when transferred to print.
Carlyle will doubtless hold his place in English lit-
erature, but he is terribly handicapped in some of
his books by his crabbed, raw-boned style.

What reading man does not re-read Boswell’s
“ Johnson’? two or three times in the course of his
life? The charm of this is that it is so much like
the spoken word, and so filled with the presence
of the living man. Another volume of a similar
kind, which I have read three times and dipped into
any number of times, is Eckermann’s “ Conversa-
tions with Goethe.” It is a pregnant book; in
fact, I know no such armory of critical wisdom any-
where else as this book contains. Its human in-
terest may not be equal to Boswell, though I find
this very great; but as an intellectual excitant it is
vastly superior.

It is a profitable experience for one who read
Dickens forty years ago to try to read him now.
Last winter I forced myself through the “Tale of
Two Cities.” It wasa sheer dead pull from start
to finish. It all seemed so insincere, such a trans-
parent make-believe, a mere piece of acting. My
sympathies were hardly once touched. I was not

226 LITERARY VALUES

insensible to the marvelous genius displayed in the
story, but it left me cold and unmoved. A feeling
of unreality haunted me on every page. The fault
may have been my own. I give myself reluctantly
to a novel, yet I love to be entirely mastered by one,
But my poor success with this one, of course, makes
me think that Dickens’s hold upon the future is not
at all secure. A man of wonderful talents, but of
no deep seriousness ; a matchless mimic through and
through, and nothing else. But I am proud to add
that my boy, a youth of eighteen, reads his books
with great enthusiasm.

Natural, irrepressible humor is always welcome;
but the humor of the grotesque, the exaggerated,
the distorted, is like a fashion in dress: it has its
day. How surely we tire of the loud, the too pro-
nounced, the merely peculiar, whether it be in car-
pets and wall-papers, or in books and art! The
common, the average, the universal, quickened with
a new spirit, imbued with a vernal freshness — that
is the stuff of enduring works.

One often wonders what is the secret of the vital-
ity of such a book as Dana’s “Two Years before
the Mast.’”? ach succeeding generation reads it
with the same pleasure. I can myself re-read it
every ten or a dozen years. Parkman’s “ Oregon
Trail”? has much of the same perennial charm as
has Franklin’s autobiography.

How far perfect seriousness and good faith carry
in literature! Why should they not count for just
as much here as in life ? They count in anything.

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 227

The least bit of acting and pretense, and the words
ring false. The effort of the writer of books like
“Two Years before the Mast” is always entirely
serious and truthful; his eye is single; he has no
vanities to display before the reader. Compare this
book with such a record as Stevenson’s “Inland
Voyage” or his “Travels with a Donkey.” Here
the effort is mainly literary, and we get the stimu-
lus of words rather than of things; we are one re-
move more from reality.

General Grant’s “ Memoirs,” I think, are likely
to last, because of their deep seriousness and good
faith. The effort here is not a literary one, but a
real one. The writer is not occupied with his man-
ner, but with his matter. Had Grant had any liter-
ary vanity or ambition, is it at all probable that his
narrative would cleave to us as it does? The near
presence of death would probably cure any man of
his vanity, if he had any; but Grant never had
any.

I have always felt that Tennyson’s famous poem
“Crossing the Bar” did not ring quite true, be-
cause it was not conceived in a spirit serious enough
for the occasion. The poetic effort is too obvious ;
the pride of the verse is too noticeable ; it bedecks
itself with pretty fancies. The last solemn strain
of Whitman, wherein he welcomes death as the
right hand of God, strikes a far deeper chord, I
think. As in the Biblical writers, the literary effort
is entirely lost in the religious faith and fervor.
We do not want a thing too much written ; in fact,

228 LITERARY VALUES

we do not want it written at all, but spoken directly
from the heart. It is in this respect that I think
Wordsworth’s poetry, at its best, is better than
Tennyson’s. It is more inevitable; it wrote it-
self; the poetic intention is not so obvious; the art
of the singer is more completely effaced by his in-
spiration.

There are probably few readers of the critical lit-
erature of the times who do not recur again and
again to Matthew Arnold’s criticism, not only for
the charm of the style, but for the currents of vital
thought which it holds. One may not always agree
with Arnold, but for that very reason one will go
back to see how it is possible to differ from a man
who sees so clearly and feels so justly. Of course,
Arnold’s view is not final, any more than is that of
any other man; but it is always fit, and challenges
your common sense. After the muddle and puddle
of most literary criticism, the reader of Arnold
feels like a traveler who has-got out of the confusion
of brush and bog into clean and clear open spaces,
where the ground is firm, and where he can see his

course.
‘‘Where’er the trees grow biggest,
Huntsmen find the easiest way,’’

says Emerson, and for a similar reason the way is
always easy and inviting through Arnold’s pages.
But his theological criticism has less charm ; and,
for my part, I doubt if it will survive. I once
seriously tried to re-read his “Literature and
Dogma,”’ but stuck before I had got half-way

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 229

through it. I suppose I found too much dogma in
it, Arnold makes a dogma out of what he calls the
“method and secret of Jesus,” his ‘ method of in-
wardness”’ and “ secret of self-renunciation ;” he
iterates and reiterates these phrases till one never
wants to hear them again. Arnold’s besetting sin
of giving a quasi-scientific value to certain literary
terms here has free rein, and one finds only a new
kind of inflexibility in place of the one he con-
demns. Sir Thomas Browne directed a free play of
mind upon the old dogmas, and the result was the
“ Religio Medici,’ a work which each generation
treasures and re-reads, not because of the dogma, but
because of the literature; it is a rare specimen of
vital, flexible, imaginative writing. It is full of
soul, like Emerson’s “ Divinity School Address,”
which sought to dissolve certain of the old dogmas.
In both these authors we are made free as the spirit
makes free; but in Arnold’s criticism we are made.
free only as a liberal Anglicanism makes free, which
is not much.

The books that we do not like to part with after
we have read them, that we like to keep near us, —
like Amiel’s “ Journal,” say, — are probably the books
that our children’s children will like to have around,
A Western woman once paid an Eastern author this
rare compliment. “Most of the new books,” she
said, “ we see at the public library ; but your books
we always buy, because we like to have them in the
house.” Probably it is the personal element in a
book, the quality of the writer, that alone endears

230 LITERARY VALUES

it tous. If we could not love the man, is it prob-
able that we can love his book ?

Of our New England poets, I find myself taking
down Emerson oftener than any other ; then Bryant;
occasionally Longfellow for a few poems; then
Whittier for “The Playmate” or “Snow-Bound” ;
and least of all, Lowell. I am not so vain as to
think that the measure of my appreciation of these
poets is the measure of their merit; but as this
writing is so largely autobiographical, I must keep
to the facts. As the pathos and solemnity of life
deepen with time, I think one finds only stray
poems, or parts of poems, in the New England an-
thology that adequately voice them; and these he
finds in Emerson more plentifully than anywhere
else, though in certain of Longfellow’s sonnets there
is adequacy also. The one on “Sumner,” begin-
ning, —

River, that stealest with such silent pace,
easily fixed itself in my mind.

I think we go back to books not so much for the
amount of pleasure we have had in them, as the kind
of pleasure. There isa pleasure both in books and in
life that is inconsistent with health and wholeness,
and there is a pleasure that is consistent with these
things. The instinct of self-preservation makes us
cleave to the latter. Ido not think we go back to
the exciting books, —they do not usually leave a
good taste in the mouth; neither to the dull books,
which leave no taste at all in the mouth; but to
the quiet, mildly tonic and stimulating books, —

ON THE RE-READING OF BOOKS 231

books that have the virtues of sanity and good na-
ture, and that keep faith with us.

At any rate, an enduring fame is of slow growth.
The man of the moment is rarely the man of the
eternities. If your name is upon all men’s tongues
to-day, some other name is likely to be there to-
morrow.

XVII
THE SPELL OF THE PAST

I NOTICE that asa man grows old he is more

and more fond of quoting his father, — what he
said, what he did. It has more and more force or
authority with him. It is a tribute to the past.
Not until one has reached the meridian of life or
gone beyond it, does the spell of the past begin to
creep over him.

Said a middle-aged woman to me the other day,
“Qld people are beginning to look very good to
me; I like to be near them and to hear them talk.”
It is a common experience. I have seen many a
granny on the street whom I felt like kidnapping,
taking home, and seating in my chimney corner, for
the sake of the fragrance and pathos of the past
which hovered about her; for the sake also, I sup-
pose, of the filial yearning which is pretty sure to
revive in one after a certain time.

No woman can ever know the depths of her love
for her mother until she has become a mother
herself, and no man knows the depths of his
love for his father until he has become a father.
When we have experienced what they experienced,
when we have traveled over the road which they

THE SPELL OF THE PAST 233

traveled over, they assume a new value,a new
sacredness in our eyes. They are then our former
selves, and a peculiarly tender regard for them
awakens in our hearts, ‘There is pathos in the fact
that so many people lose their parents before the
experiences of life have brought about that final
flavoring and ripening of the filial instinct to which
I refer.

After one has lived half a century, and maybe
long before, his watch begins to lose time; the years
come faster than he is ready for them; while he is
yet occupied with the old, the new is upon him.
How alien and unfriendly seem the new years,
strangers whom we reluctantly entertain for a time but
with whom we seem hardly to get on speaking terms,
—with what uncivil haste they come rushing in!
One writes down the figures on his letters or in his
journals, but they all seem alien; before one has
become at all intimate with them, so that they come
to mean anything special to him, they are gone.
While he is yet occupied with the sixties, living
upon the thoughts and experiences which they
brought him, the seventies have come and gone and
the eighties have knocked at his door.

The earlier years one took to his heart as he did
his early friends. How much we made of them;
what varied hues and aspects they wore; how we
came to know each other; how rounded and com-
plete were all things! Ah, the old friends and the
old years, we cannot separate them; they had a
quality and an affinity for us that we cannot find in

234 LITERARY VALUES

the new. The new years and the new friends
come and go, and leave no impression. Youth
makes all the world plastic; it creates all things
anew; youth is Adam in Paradise, from which the
burdens and the experiences of manhood will by
and by cause him to depart with longing and sorrow.
‘‘ When we were young,” says Schopenhauer, “ we
were completely absorbed in our immediate sur-
roundings ; there was nothing to distract our atten-
tion from them; we looked upon the objects about
us as though they were the only ones of their kind,
—as though, indeed, nothing else existed at all.”

It is perhaps inevitable that a man of sensibility
and imagination should grow conservative as he
grows old. The new is more and more distasteful
to him. Did you ever go back to the old home-
stead where you had passed your youth or your
early manhood, and find the old house, the old barn,
the old orchard, in fact all the old landmarks gone ?
What a desecration, you thought. The new build-
ings, how hateful they look to you! They mean
nothing to you but the obliteration of that which
meant so much. ‘This experience proves nothing
except that the past becomes a part of our very
selves ; our roots, our beginnings, are there, and we
bleed when old things are cut away.

After a certain age is reached, how trivial and
flitting seem the new generations! The people whom
we found upon the stage when we came into the
world, — the middle-aged and the elderly people who
were bearing the brunt of the battle, — they seem

THE SPELL OF THE PAST 235

important and like a part of the natural system of
things. When they pass away what a void they
leave! hose who take their places, the new set,
do not seem to fill the bill at all, But the chances
are that they are essentially the same class of peo-
ple, and will seem as permanent and important to
our children as the old people did to us.

To repeat the experience, go to a strange town
and take up your abode. Everybody seems in his
proper place, there are no breaks, we miss nothing,
the social structure is complete. In a quarter of a
century go back to the place again; ruins every-
where, nearly all the old landmarks gone, and a
new generation upon the stage. But to the new-
comer nothing of this is visible; he finds every-
thing established and in order as we first found it.
It is so in life. Our children are the newcomers
who do not and cannot go behind the visible scene.

We are always wondering who are going to take
the place of the great poets, the great preachers, the
great statesmen and orators who are passing away.
We see the new men, but they are not the worthy
successors of these. The great ones are all old or
dead. The new ones we know not; they cannot be
to us what the others were; they cannot be the
star actors in the drama in which we have played
a part, and therefore we fancy they are of little
account.

Are there any genuine old men any more? Why,
the old men, the real ones, are all dead long ago ;
we knew them in our youth; they were always old,

236 LITERARY VALUES

old from the foundations of the world. These old
men of to-day are mere imitations; we can remem-
ber when they were not old, — it is all put on. The
grandfathers and the grandmothers whom we knew
— think of any present-day grandparents being any-
thing more than mere counterfeits of them !

Hence, also, the new generation always go astray
according to the old, and run after strange gods.
“ And also all that generation were gathered unto
their fathers; and there arose another generation
after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the
works which He had done for Israel.”

How ready we are to believe in the past as against
the present; to believe that wonders happened then
that do not happen now! Miracles happened then,
but not now. The Divine One came upon earth
then, but he comes no more! Our whole religion is
of the past. How hard to believe in a present reve-
lation, or to believe in the advantages and oppor-
tunities of the present hour!

From the standpoint of each of us the sunrise
and the sunset seem like universal facts; it must
be evening or morning throughout the world, we
think, instead of just here on our meridian. In the
same way we are prone to look upon youth and age
as commensurate with human existence; the world
was young when we were young, and it grows old
as we grow old; youth and age we think are not
subjective experiences, but objective realities.

How can these youths here by our side feel as we
have felt, see what we have seen, have the same

THE SPELL OF THE PAST 237

joys and sorrows, the same friends, the same experi-
ences, see the world clad in the same hues, feel the
same ties of home, of father and mother, of school
and comrades, when all the world is so changed, —
when these things and persons that were so much to
us are forever past? What is there left? How
can life bring to them what it brought tous? But
it will. The same story is told. over and over to
each succeeding generation, and each finds it new
and true for them alone. As we find our past in
others, so our youths will find their past in us, and
find it unique and peculiar.

The lives of men are like the sparks that shoot up-
ward ; the same in the first ages as in the last, each
blazing its brief moment as it leaps forth, some at-
taining a greater brilliancy or a higher flight than
others, but all ending at last in the same black ob-
scurity. Or they are like the waves that break upon
the shore; one generation following swift upon the
course of another, repeating the same evolutions,
and crumbling and vanishing in the same way.

Probably no man ever lost his father or his
mother or his bosom friend without feeling that no
one else could ever have had just such an experi-
ence, Carlyle, in writing to Emerson shortly after
each had lost his mother, said, “You too have lost
your good old mother, who stayed with you like
mine, clear to the last; alas, alas, it is the oldest
Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us
with a strange originality, as if it had never hap-
pened before!”

238 LITERARY VALUES

Speaking of these two rare men, each so attrac-
tive to the other, how unlike they were in their atti-
tude toward the past, — the one with that yearning,
wistful, backward glance, bearing the burden of an
Old World sorrow and remorse, long generations of
baffled, repressed, struggling humanity coming to
full consciousness in him ; the other serene, hopeful,
optimistic, with the spell of the New World upon
him, turning cheerfully and confidently to the future!
Emerson describes himself as an endless seeker with
no past at his back. He seemed to have no regrets,
no wistful retrospections. His mood is affirmative
and expectant. The power of the past was not upon
him, but it had laid its hand heavily upon his
British brother, so heavily that at times it almost
overpowered him. Carlyle’s dominant note is dis-
tinctively that of retrospection. He yearns for the
old days. The dead call to him from their graves.
In the present he sees little, from the future he
expects less; all is in the past. How he magnifies
it, how he re-creates it and reads his own heroic
temper into it! The twelfth century is more to
him than the nineteenth.

It is true that the present time is more or less
prosy, vulgar, commonplace to most men; not till
we have lived it and colored it with our own experi-
ences does it begin to draw us. This seems to have
been preéminently the case with Carlyle; he was
morbidly sensitive to the crude and prosy present,
and almost preternaturally alive to the glamour of
the past. What men had done, what they had

THE SPELL OF THE PAST 239

touched with their hands, what they had colored
with their lives, that was sacred to him.

Is it not a common experience that as we grow
old there comes more and more a sense of solitude
and exposure? Life does not shut us in and house
us as it used todo. One by one the barriers and
wind-breaks are taken down, and we become more
and more conscious of the great cosmic void that en-
compasses us. Our friends were walls that shielded
us; see the gaps in their ranks now. Our parents
were like the roof over our heads ; what a sense of
shelter they gave us! Then our hopes, our enthusi-
asms, how they housed us, or peopled and warmed
the void! A keen living interest in things, what an
armor against the shafts of time is that! Always on
the extreme verge of time, this moment that now
passes is the latest moment of all the eternities,
New time always. The old time we cannot keep.
The old house, the old fields, and in a measure the
old friends may be ours, but the atmosphere that
bathed them all, the sentiment that gave to them
hue, this is from within and cannot be kept.

Time does not become sacred to us until we have
lived it, until it has passed over us and taken
with it a part of ourselves, ‘While it is here we
value it not, — it is like raw material not yet woven
into the texture and pattern of our lives; but the
instant it is gone and becomes yesterday, or last
spring, or last year, how tender and pathetic it looks
tous! The shore of time! I think of it as a shore
constantly pushing out into the infinite sea, stretch-

240 LITERARY VALUES

ing farther and farther back of us like a fair land
idealized by distance into which we may not again
enter. The future is alien and unknown, but the
past is a part of ourselves. So many ties bind us
to it. The past is the cemetery of our days. There
they lie, every one of them. Musingly we recall
their faces and the gifts they brought us, — the
friends, the thoughts, the experiences, the joys, the
sorrows; many of them we have quite forgotten, but
they were all dear to us once.

If our friends should come back from their graves,
could they be what they once were to us ? Not un-
less our dead selves came back also. How precious
and pathetic the thought of father and mother to all
men; yet the enchantment of the past is over them
also. They are in that sacred land; their faces
shine with its hallowed light, their voices come to us
with its moving tones.

Pope in replying toa letter of Swift’s said, “ You
ask me if I have got asupply of new friends to make
up for those who are gone? I think that impossi-
ble; for not our friends only, but so much of our-
selves is gone by the mere flux and course of years,
that, were the same friends restored to us, we could
not be restored to ourselves to enjoy them.”

In view of this power and attraction of the past,
what do we mean by saying we would not live our
lives over again? It seems to be an almost univer-
sal feeling. Cicero says, ‘“ If any god should grant
me, that from this period of life I should become a
child again and cry in the cradle, I should earnestly

THE SPELL OF THE PAST 241

refuse it;”’ and Sir Thomas Browne says, “For my
own part I would not live over my hours past, or
begin again the thread of my days.” Sir Thomas
did not want to live his life over again, for fear he
would live it worse instead of better. Cicero did
not regret that he had lived, but intimates that he
had had enough of this life, and wanted to enter
upon that new and larger existence. “Oh, glorious
day! when I shall depart to that divine company
and assemblage of spirits, and quit this troubled and
polluted scene!”

But probably the true reason was not given in
either case. We do not like to go back. We are
done with the past; we have dropped it, sloughed
it off. However pleasing it may be in the retro-
spect, however fondly we may dwell upon it, our
real interest is in the present and the future. Prob-
ably no man regrets that he did not live at an earlier
period, one hundred, five hundred, two thousand
years ago; while the wish that our existence had
been deferred to some future age is quite common.
It all springs from this instinctive dislike to going
back, and this zest for the unknown, the untried,
There are many experiences in the lives of us all
that we would like to repeat, but we do not want to
go back. We habitually look upon life as a journey ;
the past is the road over which we have just come ‘
these were fair countries we just passed through, de-
lightful experiences we had at this point and at that,
but we do not want to turn back and retrace our
steps. There is more or less a feeling of satiety.

W

242 LITERARY VALUES

We want to go ahead, but of what is behind us we
have had our fill. What is the feeling we have
when we meet a crowd pressing into the show as we
are coming out, or when we see our eager friends
embarking for Europe as we again set foot on our
native shore? Do we not have a kind of pity
for them? Do we not feel that we have taken the
cream and that they will find only the skimmed
milk ? We think of the world as moving on, every-
body and everything as pressing forward. To live
our lives over again would be to go far to the rear.
It would be to give up the present and all that it
holds ; it would be a kind of death.

Take from life all novelty, newness, surprise, hope,
expectation, and what have you left ? Nothing but
acold pancake, which even the dog hesitates over.
One’s life is full of routine and repetition, but then
it is always a new day ; it is always the latest time ;
we are on the crest of the foremost wave; we are
perpetually entering a new and untried land. Iam
told that lecturers do not weary of repeating the same
lecture over and over, because they always have a
new audience. The routine of our lives is endur-
able because, as it were, we always have anew audi-
ence ; this day is the last birth of time and its face
no man has before seen. Life becomes stale to us
when we cease to feel any interest in the new day,
when the night does not re-create us, when we are
not in some measure born afresh each morning. As
age comes on we become less and less capable of re-
newal by rest and sleep, and so gradually life loses

THE SPELL OF THE PAST 243

its relish, till it is liable to become a positive weari-
ness,

Hence in saying we would not live our lives over,
we are only emphasizing this reluctance we feel at
going back, at taking up again what we have finished
and laid down. ‘Time translates itself in the mind
as space; our earlier lives seem afar off, to be reached
only by retracing our steps, and this we are not will-
ing todo. In the only sense in which we can live
our lives over, namely, in the lives of our children,
we live them over again very gladly. We begin the
game again with the old zest.

Who would not have his youth renewed ? What
old man would not have again, if he could, the vigor
and elasticity of his prime? But we would not go
back for them; we would have them here and now,
and date the new lease from this moment. It argues
no distaste for life, therefore, no deep dissatisfaction
with it, to say we would not live our lives over again.
We do live them over again from day to day, and
from year to year; but the shadow of the past, we
would not enter that. Why is it a shadow? Why
this pathos of the days that are gone? Is it be-
cause, as Schopenhauer insists, life has more pain
than pleasure? But it is all beautiful, the painful
experiences as well as the pleasurable ones; it is all
bathed in a light that never was on sea or land, and
yet we see it as it were through a mist of tears,
There is no pathos in the future, or in the present;
but in the house of memory there are more sighs
than laughter,

XVIII
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS

poe the pursuit of happiness, how often I

say to myself, that considering life asa whole,
the most one ought to expect is a kind of negative
happiness, a neutral state, the absence of acute or
positive unhappiness. Neutral tints make up the
great background of nature, and why not of life?
Neutral tints wear best in anything. We do not
tire of them. How much even in the best books is
of a negative or neutral character, — a background
upon which the positive beauty is projected. A kind
of tranquil, wholesome indifference, with now and
then a dash of positive joy, is the best of the com-
mon lot. To be consciously and positively happy
all the while, — how vain to expect it! We cannot
walk through life on mountain peaks. Both laugh-
ter and tears we know, but a safe remove from both
is the average felicity.

Another thought which often occurs to me is that
we each have a certain capacity for happiness or un-
happiness which is pretty constant. We are like
lakes or ponds which have their level, and which as
arule are not permanently raised or lowered. As
things go in this world, each of us has about all the

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 245

happiness he has the capacity for. We cannot be
permanently set up or cast down, A healthful na-
ture, in the vicissitudes of experience, is not made
permanently unhappy, nor, on the other hand, is its
water level permanently raised. Deplete us and we
fill up; flood us and we quickly run down. We
think that if a certain event were to come to pass,
if some rare good fortune should befall us, our stock
of happiness would be permanently increased, but
the chances are that it would not; after a time we
should settle back to the old everyday level. We
should get used to the new conditions, the new pros-
perity, and find life wearing essentially the same
tints as before. Our pond is fed from hidden springs ;
happiness is from within, and outward circumstances
have but little power overit. The poor man thinks
how happy he would be with the possessions of his
rich neighbor, but it is one of the commonplace say-
ings of the preacher that he would not be. Wealth
would not change his nature. His wants, his long-
ings, would still run on as before. It would be high
water with him for a season, but it could not last,

I have been told that, as a rule, the millionaires
are the unhappiest of men. Restless, suspicious,
sated, ennuied, they are like a sick man who can
find no position in which he can rest. Our real
and necessary wants are so few and so easily met,
— food, clothes, shelter! If a little money will
bring us such comfort, what will not riches do?
So we multiply our possessions many fold, hoping
thereby to multiply our happiness. But it does not

246 LITERARY VALUES

work, or works inversely. Do you suppose the mil-
lionaire’s little girl has any more pleasure with her
hundred-dollar doll than your washerwoman’s child
has with her rag baby? And what would not the
millionaire himself give if he could eat his rich din-
ner with the relish the day laborer has in eating his!

The great depressor and destroyer of happiness is
death; but from this blow, too, a healthful nature
recovers. The broken and crushed plant rises again.
The scar remains, but in the tissue beneath runs the
same old blood.

It is undoubtedly true, however, that as time wears
on, life becomes of a soberer hue. Weare young but
once, and need not wish to be young more than once.
There is the happiness of youth, there is the happi-
ness of manhood, there is the happiness of old age,
— each period wearing a hue peculiar to itself. One
of the illusions of life, however, which it is hard
to shake off, is the fancying we were happier in the
past than we arein the present. The past has such
power to hallow and heighten effects! In the dis-
tance the course we have traveled looks smooth and
inviting. The present moment is always the lowest
point in the circle ; it is that part of the wheel which
touches the ground. Those days in the past that so
haunt our memory and that seem invested with a
charm and a significance that is unknown to the
present, — how shall we teach ourselves that it is all
a trick of the imagination, the result of the medium
through which they are seen, and that they, too,
were once the present, and were as prosy and com-
monplace as the moment that now is?

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 247

It is equally a mistake to suppose we shall be hap-
pier to-morrow or next day than we are to-day. When
the future comes it will then be the present, no longer
a matter of imagination, but of actual experience.
This prosy, care-burdened self will be there, and the
rainbow tints will still be in the distance.

The man who is hampered and constrained by the
circumstances of his life, thinks his happiness would
be greatly augmented by greater freedom, if he could
go here or there, do this or that. But the chances
are that such would not be the case. For instance,
when I see a man going up and down the country
looking for a place to settle, to build himself a home,
and when I think of my own experience in that
direction, I say, happy is the man whom circum-
stances take by the collar and set down without any
choice on his part, in a particular place, and say to
him, ‘ There, abide there, and earn thy bread there.”
He is a free man then, paradoxical as it may seem,
— free to make the most of his opportunities without
regret. He is not the victim of his own whims or
follies. He is not forever tormenting himself with
the notion that he has made a mistake, that if he had
gone here or there, he would have been happier.
Now he accepts the inevitable and makes the most
of it. He goes to work with the more heart be-
cause he has no choice. He wastes no time in re-
grets, he makes no comparisons that disturb him,
but devotes all his strength to getting all the satis-
faction out of life that is possible.

If one were to make a choice of going on foot

248 LITERARY VALUES

while other people had the privilege of wings, he
would be haunted by the fear that he had made a
mistake, and as he trudged along in the mire, doubt-
less would envy the people in the air above him;
but if he had no choice in the matter and was com-
pelled to go afoot through no fault of his, he would
thank his stars that his fate was no worse. When
choice comes in and we can elect this or that, then
the door for regret, for unhappiness, is opened. We
do not mourn because we were born in this place
and not that, but if we had been consulted we might
fancy some cause of regret.

Yet there is a condition or circumstance that has
a greater bearing upon the happiness of life than any
other. What is it? I have hardly hinted at it in
the foregoing remarks. It is one of the simplest
things in the world and within reach of all. If this
secret were something I could put up at auction, what
a throng of bidders I should have, and what high
ones! People would come from all parts of the
earth to bid upon it. Only the wise ones can guess
what it is. Some might say it is health, or money,
or friends, or this or that possession, but you may
have all these things and not be happy. You may
have fame and power, and not be happy. I main-
tain there is one thing more necessary to a happy
life than any other, though health and money and
friends and home are allimportant. That one thing
is— what? The sick man will say health; the
poor man, wealth; the ambitious man, power; the
scholar, knowledge ; the overworked man, rest.

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 249

Without the one thing I have in mind, none of
these things would long help their possessors to be
happy. We could not long be happy without food
or drink or clothes or shelter, but we may have all
these things to perfection and still want the prime
condition of happiness. It is often said that a con-
tented mind is the first condition of happiness, but
what is the first condition of a contented mind?
You will be disappointed when I tell you what this
all-important thing is, — it is so common, so near at
hand, and so many people have so much of it and
yet are not happy. They have too much of it, or
else the kind that is not best suited tothem. What
is the best thing for a stream? It is to keep mov-
ing. If it stops, it stagnates. So the best thing
for a man is that which keeps the currents going, —
the physical, the moral, and the intellectual currents.
Hence the secret of happiness is — something to do;
some congenial work. Take away the occupation of
all men, and what a wretched world it would be!
Half of it would commit suicide in less than ten
days.

Few persons realize how much of their happiness,
such as it is, is dependent upon their work, upon
the fact that they are kept busy and not left to feed
upon themselves. Happiness comes most to persons
who seek her least, and think least about her. It
is not an object to be sought; it is a state to be in-
duced. It must follow and not lead. It must over-
take you, and not you overtake it. How important
is health to happiness, yet the best promoter of
health is something to do.

250 LITERARY VALUES

Blessed is the man who has some congenial work,
some occupation in which he can put his heart, and
which affords a complete outlet to all the forces
there are in him.

A man does not want much time to think about
himself. Too much thought of the past and its
shadows overwhelms; too much thought of the pre-
sent dissipates ; too much thought of the future un-
settles. I find that if a horse stands too much in
the stable, with too little work, he gets the crib-bite.
Too little work makes a kind of windsucker of a
man.

I recently had a letter from a friend who, from
having rented his farm for a number of years, had had
too much leisure. In this letter he writes how well
and happy he has been during the season; he has
enjoyed existence, — the gods have smiled upon him
and he has found life worth living. Then he told
me, not by way of explanation, but as a matter
of news, that his head man had been disabled two
months before, and the care of the farm had de-
volved upon himself; more than that, he was reno-
vating a place he had recently bought, remodeling
the house, shaping the grounds, ete. Then I knew
why he had been so unusually well and happy. He
had had something to do into which he could throw
himself, and it had set all the currents of his being
going again.

About the same time I had a letter from another
farmer friend who told me how busy he was, — so
many things pressing that there was need of his

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 251

going in two or more directions at once, not to get
rich, but to make both ends meet. And yet he
was so happy! (Therefore he was so happy, say I.)
Troubles and trials, he says, are few and soon over
with, while the pleasures are past all enumeration.
“There is so much to be enjoyed, one never gets to
the end of it.”

This man was too busy to be unhappy ; he had no
time for ennui or the blues. You see he did not
overindulge in the luxury of leisure. He was com-
pelled to take it sparingly, hence it always tasted
good to him. The fruit of the tree of life of which
we must eat very sparingly is leisure. Too much
of it, and it turns to gall on our tongue. A little
too much of those things which we think will make
us happy, and we are cloyed, and miserable indeed.
The boy would like to dine entirely upon pie or
sweetmeats, and we all need the lesson that the des-
sert of life is to be taken sparingly. Because money
is good, do not, therefore, think that riches are an
unmixed blessing ; because leisure is sweet to you,
do not, therefore, imagine you would be happy with
nothing todo. My correspondent was too busy and
too poor to be cloyed or sated, too much the victim
of circumstances to be self-accusing and repining.
He had no choice but to go on and make the most
of things.

I overheard an old man and a young man talking
at the station, The young man was telling of an
old uncle of his who had sold his farm and retired
to the village. He had enjoyed going to the vil-

252 LITERARY VALUES

lage, so now he thought he would take his fill of it,
But it soon cloyed upon him. He had nothing to
do. Every night he would say with a sigh of relief,
‘“‘ Well, another day is through,” and each morning
wondered how he could endure the day.

In every village up and down the older parts of
the country there are several such men; every day
is a burden to them because they have nothing to
do. They drift aimlessly up and down the street;
they loiter in the post-office or lounge in the grocery
store or hotel bar-room, — no comfort to themselves
and no use to the world. With what longing they
must look upon the farmers that drive in to get a
horse shod or to do a little trading and then drive
briskly away! How the vision of the farm, the
cattle, the sheep, the barn, the growing crops, the
early morning, the sowing, the planting, the harvest-
ing must haunt them! Nothing to do! When
they were driven and oppressed with work they had
thought, What pleasure to be free from all this, to
be at liberty to go and come as one likes, with no
cows to milk or chores to do! Now they probably
have not a hen ora dog to comfort them. These
men do not live out more than half their latter
days. Nature has no use for them, and they soon
drop away; whereas their neighbors who stick to
the farm and keep the currents going, reach a much
more advanced period of life.

Rust and rot and mildew come to unused things.
An empty and deserted house, how quickly it goes
to decay! and an unoccupied man, how is his guard

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 253

down on every side! When the will relaxes or is
not stimulated, the physical powers relax also and
their power to ward off disease is greatly lessened.
Among men of all kinds who have retired from
active life the mortality should be and doubtless is
much greater than among men of the same age who
stick to their lifelong occupations, Here is a farmer
just died at eighty-eight who managed his farm till
within a few months of his death ; here is his neigh-
bor, ten years younger, who retired to the village
several years ago, now wandering about more than
half demented,

Oh, the blessedness of work, of life-giving and life-
sustaining work! The busy man is the happy man;
the idle man is the unhappy. When you feel blue
and empty and disconsolate, and life seems hardly
worth living, go to work with your hands, — delve,
hoe, chop, saw, churn, thrash, anything to quicken
the pulse and dispel the fumes. The blue devils can
be hoed under in less than half an hour; ennui can-
not stand the bucksaw fifteen minutes; the whole
outlook may be brightened in a brief time by turn-
ing your hands to something you can do witha will.

I speak from experience. A few years ago I found
my life beginning to stagnate; I discovered that T
was losing my interest in things, I was out of sorts
both physically and mentally ; sleep was poor, diges-
tion was poor, and my days began to wear too som-
brea tinge. There was no good reason for it that I
could perceive except that I was not well and fully
occupied. I had too much leisure.

254 LITERARY VALUES

What was to be done? Go to work. Get more
land and become a farmer in earnest. Exchange
the penholder for the crowbar and the hoe-handle,
I already had a few acres of land and had been'a
fruitgrower in a small way; why should I not
double my possessions and plant a vineyard that
promised some returns? Sol began to cast covet-
ous eyes upon some land adjoining me that was for
sale. I nibbled at it very shyly at first. I walked
over it time after time and began to note its good
points. Then I began to pace it off. I found
pleasure and occupation even in this. Then I took
a line and began to measure it. I measured off a
pretty good slice and fancied it already my own.
This tasted so good to me that I measured off a
larger slice and then a still larger, till I found that
nothing short of the whole field would satisfy me;
I must go to the fence and take a clean strip one
field broad from the road to the river.

This I did, thus doubling the nine acres I already
possessed. It was winter; I could hardly wait till
spring to commence operations upon the new pur-
chase. Already I felt the tonic effect of those nine
acres. They were a stimulus, an invitation, and a
challenge. To subdue them and lick them into shape
and plant them with choice grapes and currants and
raspberries, — the mere thought of it toned me up
and improved my sleep.

Before the snow was all off the ground in March
we set to work under-draining the moist and springy
places. My health and spirits improved daily. I

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 255

seemed to be underdraining my own life and carry-
ing off the stagnant water, as well as that of the
land. Then a lot of ash stumps and brush, an old
apple orchard, and a great many rocks and large
stones were to be removed before the plough could
be set going.

With what delight I saw this work go forward, and
I bore my own part in it! I had not seen such elec-
tric April days for years; I had not sat down to
dinner with such relish and satisfaction for the past
decade; I had not seen the morning break with
such anticipations since I was a boy. The clear,
bright April days, the great river dimpling and shin-
ing there, the arriving birds, the robins laughing, the
high-holes calling, the fox sparrows whistling, the
blackbirds gurgling, and the hillside slope where we
were at work, — what delight I had in it all, and
what renewal of life it brought me! I found the best
way to see the spring come was to be in the field at
work. You are then in your proper place, and the
genial influences steal in upon you and envelop you
unawares. You glance up from your work, and the
landscape is suddenly brimming with beauty. There
is more joy and meaning in the voices of the birds
than you ever before noticed. You do not have
time to exhaust the prospect or to become sated with
nature, but feel her constantly as a stimulating pre-
sence. Out of the corners of your eyes and by a
kind of indirection you see the subtle and renewing
spirits of the season at work.

Before April was finished, the plough had done

256 LITERARY VALUES

its perfect work, and in early May the vines and
plants were set. Then followed the care and culti-
vation of them during the summer, and the pruning
and training of them the subsequent season, all of
which has been a delight to me. Indeed the new
vineyard has become almost a part of myself. I walk
through it with the most intimate and personal re-
gard for every vine. I know how they came there.
I owe them a debt of gratitude. They have done
more for me than a trip to Europe or to California
could have done. If it brings me no other returns,
the new lot already has proved one of the best in-
vestments I ever made in my life.

Oh, the blessedness of motion, of a spur to ac-
tion, of a current in one’s days, of something to
stimulate the will, to help reach a decision, to carry
down stream the waste and débris of one’s life!
Hardly a life anywhere so befouled or stagnant, but
it would clear and renew itself, if the currents were
set going by the proper kind and amount of honest
work!

INDEX

INDEX

ADDISON, JOSEPH, 53, 69, 71

Alcott, A. Bronson, 76. |

American literature, art in, 16.
See also Literature.

Amiel, Henri Frédéric, on
Renan, 65; on Cherbuliez,
188 ; his Jowrnal, 229 ; quota-
tion from, 188.

Analogy, a frequent form of
argument, 27; between man
and nature, 27, 28, 48-50; met-
aphors, 28-31 ; legitimate uses
of, 31, 32; accidental and es-
sential, 32; immortality in,
32-39; in theology, 39; false
and true, 3944; between
mind and body, 44, 45; in the
physical world, 45-47; be-
tween art and nature, 50, 54;
rhetorical and scientific, 51.

Arnold, Matthew, 34, 50, 53, 59,
70, 78, 79; aS a critic, 90-92,
228; 93, 96; greatest as a lit

erary critic, 97; his Thyrsis, |

103; his aristocratic ideals,
112-114, 118; 123, 124, 133, 184,
189, 206, 210; his Literature
and Dogma, 228, 229; quota-
tions from, 53, 93.
Art, disinterestedness of, 134,
135 ; universality of, 135-142;
disinterestedness not indif-
ferentism in, 142-148; treat-
ment of vice and sin in, 148-
150.

Bacon, Francis, 205, 218.

Bagehot, Walter, 26 ; quotation
from, 26.

Barante, Baron de, 104.

Baudelaire, Charles, 20,

Birds, dusting and bathing, 174.

Books, the enduring, 3; the
re-reading of, 216-231 See
also Literature,

Boswell, James, his Life of
Samuel Johnson, 225.

Bronté, Charlotte, 103.

Browne, Sir Thomas, his Re-
ligio Medici, 229 ; on the past,
241; quotation from, 241.

Browning, Robert, 2; his How

brought the Good News
Srom Ghent to Aix, 70, 166:
114, 184. :

Brunetiére, Ferdinand. 71. 85;
his criticism, 87: 90, 98. 164,
107, 109 ; a critic of the aristo-
cratic type, 112, 11%

Bunting, snow (Passerinz
nivalis), 174.

Burney, Fanny, 62.

Butler, Joseph, 33, 34

Byron, Lord, 131, 141; eloquent
but not truly poetical. 165;
an example of his eloquence,
166; quotation from, 166.

Campbell, Thomas, 164: his To
the Rainbou, 166; 182.

Carlyle, Thomas,?; his defini.
tion of poetry, 10; his criti
cism, 89, 90; 119; his vehe-
mence and enthusiasm, 133,
124; his French Revolution,
164; 196; his service to most
readers more moral than in-
tellectual, 223 ; his Past and
Present, 4; his Latter-Day
Pampi 224; his Live of

224; his Frederick, 91; his
Reminiscences, 4; his Sar-
tor Resartus, 24; handi
capped by his style, 294, 95;
to Emerson on the loss of his
mother, 237: his attitude
toward the past, 238 : quota
tions from, 164, 165, 237.

260

Catholicism, 125.

Cats, 176.

Chateaubriand, 93.

Cherbuliez, Victor, 188.

Chickadee (Parus atricapit-
lus), 173.

Cicero, quotations from, 240,
241.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 119.

Collins, Wilkie, 8.

Conversations with Goethe, 225.

Cowley, Abraham, his essays,
220.

20.

Criticism, the scope, aims, and
functions of, 80-84; vital
truth the important thing in,
84; personality and impres-
sionism in, 85-89; inspiration
more important than judg-
ment in, 89-92; diversity of
critical judgments, 92-95 ; the
inner self of the critic a ne-
eessary element in, 95, 96;
importance of the power of
expression in, 96-98; relativ-
ity of truth in, 98-100; sub-
jective and objective, 100-
104; individual taste in, 104,
105; catholicity in, 105-108;
democratic and aristocratic,
109-115; good and bad taste
in, 116-118; the doctrinaire
in, 118-126; the most produc-
tive attitude in, 127-132; pro-
fessional, 127, 128, 130; predi-
lection in, 132; antipathy in,
132, 133.

Cuckoo, European, 176, 178.

Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., his
Two Years Before the Mast,
3, 226, 227.

Dante, 209.

Darwin, Charles, 211.

Defoe, Daniel, 3.

Democracy, in literature, 109-
115; modern growth of, 151,
152; its effect upon litera-
ture, 152-156.

Democratic Criticism, 109.

Demosthenes, 162.

De Quincey, Thomas, 78, 163;
his Philosophy of Roman

istory, 163; 210; quotation
Tom, 163, 164.

Dickens, Charles, 5, 7; his Tale

of Two Cities, 225, 226; a

INDEX

matchless mimiewith nodeep
seriousness, 2265, 226.
Didacticism, 142.
Distinction, 113-115.
Dowden, Edward, 124,
Dryden, John, 92.

Earthworm, Gilbert White’s
observations on, 178.

Eckermann, Johann Peter, his
Conversations with Goethe,

225.

Eliot, George, 6,119, 121.

Eloquence, its relation to poe-
try, 161-167.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 19,
24, 27, 28; on individuality,
53, 54; 59, 76, 78, 105, 106, 119;
as a poet, 122; as acritic, 122,
123; 124, 132, 136 ; his Nature,
164; an example of poetic
prose from, 164; 181, 182, 184;
his appeal chiefly to youth
and early manhood, 191;
never ceased to be a clergy-
man, 192; no prosaic side,
192; his sympathy for ideas
rather than for men or
things, 193, 194; his inborn
radicalism, 194, 195; ab-
stract in his aim and con-
erete in his methods, 196;
his suggestiveness, 205 ; 223,
228-230, 237; his attitude
toward the past, 238 ; quota-
tions from, 24, 63, 54, 59, 164,
193-195.

English poetry, 165.

English writers, 7, 63.

Evans, Mary Ann (George
Eliot), 6, 119, 121.

Everett, Edward, 5.

Family tree, the, 47, 48.

Fashions, 2.

Ferguson, Charles, his Feli-
gion of Democracy, quota-
tions from, 210, 211.

Fern-owl, 175.

Fiction, values in, 6, 7; a finer
but not a greater art to-day
than formerly, 60, 61.

Fieldfare, 174.

Flaubert, Gustave, 19.

France, Anatole, 112.

Franklin, Benjamin, his Auto-
biography, 226.

INDEX

Freeman, Edward Augustus, 5.

French art, 146,

French criticism, 97.

French poetry, more eloquent
than poetic, 165.

French writers, modern, 7, 63.

Froude, James Anthony, 5; his
style, 68.

George, Henry, as a writer, 9.

German writers, 7.

Gibbon, Edward, 78, 163.

Gladden, Rev. Washington, bis
Art and Morality, 143, 144;
quotation from, 143.

God, the old and the new ideas
of, 152.

Goethe, Conversations with,
225.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,
93, 123, 127; his Sorrows of
Young Werther, 138 ; 141; on

oetical and unpoetical ob-
ects, 157; on Byron, 165; 184;
quotations from, 141, 157.

Gosse, Edmund, his Questions
at Issue, 153, 154; quotation
from, 154,

Grant, Gen. Ulysses Simpson,
his Memoirs, 5, 227; an ele-
mental man, 6; his greatness
of the democratic type, 113,
114; his commonness, 115;
his lack of vanity, 227.

Gray, Thomas, 53, 103; his
Elegy in a Country Church-
yard, 137.

Greeks, the, their view of Na-
ture, 203.

Grimm, Hermann, 93.

Grouse, ruffed (Bonasa um-
bellus), 174.

Guizot, Francois Pierre Guil-
Taume, 119.

Halleck, Fitz-Greene, his
Marco Bozzaris, 166.

Happiness, negative happiness
the most one ought to expect,
244; one’s capacity for hap-
piness not affected perma-
nently by adventitious cir.
cumstances, 244-248; conge.
ey work essential to, 248-

Harrison, Frederic, 25, 61.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7; the

261
most suggestive of our ro-
mancers, 205.

Heine, Heinrich, 80.
Hennequin, his Sci Crit-
icism, 109.

Heronry, 177.

Hewlett, Maurice, 25, 26; quo-
tation from, 25.

Higginson, Thomas Went-
worth, 72.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 47,
79; his Old Ironsides, 166;
his Autocrat of the Break-
Fast-Table, 219 ; his real ideas
and sham ideas, 219; his lack
of deep seriousness, 220.

Honey dew, 178.

Howells, William Dean, 5, 7,
72,81; his Criticism and Fic.
tion, 82, 83, 109; 206; quota-
tion from, 83.

Hugo, Victor, 103, 119; his
moxal earnestness, 189.

Hume, David, elegance of his
style, 77; onthe eloquence of
Demosthenes, 162; on Cow.
ley and Parnell, 220; quota-
tions from, 77, 162.

Hunt, Leigh, 131.

BUAey, Thomas Henry, 51, 78,

Ibsen, Henrik, 149.

Immorality in art and litera-
ture, 148-150.

Immortality, false analogies
of, 32-39,

Tees the, Thoreau on, 198,

Indifferentism, 142, 143, 146-
148.

Individualism, 125, 126,
HIP TRBIBEEY in literature, 53-

60.
Institutionalism, 125, 126.
Irvine, J. P., quotation from
his poem The Lightning Ex.
press, 159.

James, Henry, on Whitman’s
letters, 4; 5, 69, 121; style of
his later works, 206,

Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 131.

Jesse's Gleanings in Natural
History, 179,

Joan of Are, 73.

Johnson, Charles Frederick,

262

his Elements of Literary
Criticism, 109.

Johnson, Samuel, 76; his Ram-
bler, 76; his criticism, 90; on
Dryden, 92; 96, 103, 112, 172,
205 ; Boswell’s Life of, 225.

Jonson, Ben, a bit of his prose,
2

Keats, John, 11; his Ode toa
Nightingale, 7B.

Kidd, Benjamin, his Social Ev-
olution, 9

Landor, Walter Savage, 93;
lacking in moral stress and
fervor, 124; 132, 184.

Lemaitre, Jules, 87.

Life, Be earlier years of one’s,
231-24:

Lincoln, - khieatum, his Gettys-
burg Speech, 5; an elemental
man, 6; his greatness of the
democratic type, 113, 114;
his commonness, 115, 116.

Literature, the enduring in, 1-
3, 216-231; values in, 4-9; de-
finitions of, 9-13; style in, 14,
52-79 ; truth i in, 14, 15; morak
ity and art in, 16; art in, 17-
20; the teaching of, 20-25;
good and bad taste in, 26,
116-118 ; democracy in, 109-
115; the doctrinaire in, 118-
126; art vs. didacticism in,
135-142, 144-150; an end in
and of itself, 140 ; immorality
in, 148-150; effect of demo-
eracy upon, 152-156 ; human-
itarianism in, 156; the me-
chanical and "industrial age
in, 157-160; lucidity in, 180-
189 ; appreciation in the
reading of, 182-185; neces-
sity of something more than
style in, 186-190; Nature in,
202-204 ; suggestiveness in,
205-215.

Longfellow, Henry Wads-
worth, 137, 185, 230; his son-
net on Sumner, 230.

Lowell, James Russell, 105, 108,
122, 124; on scholarship, 186;
quotation from, 186.

Lucidity, 180-182.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington,

INDEX

Lord, on Miss Burney, 62 ; 65,
79, 96, 131, 166; quotation
from, 6 62.

Maeterlinck, ot eaataage his Life
of the Bee,. 211

Martineau, Harriet, 103.

Meredith, George, 69; his ob-
security of expression, 180-
182; quotations from, 180,
181.

Metaphors, 28-31.

Mill, John Stuart, a suggestive
sentence of, 210.

Milton, John, 13, 74; his Lyct-
das, 103; his Paradise Lost,
105; begotten of the classical
tradition, 111; 115; makes no
personal appeal, 183, 184. —

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de,
16, 68, 59, 217, 218 ; quotation
from, 59.

Moody, William Vaughn, 156 ;
his poem on the steam en-
gine, 158, 159; quotation
from, 158, 159.

Morley, John, his definition of
literature, 10.

Nature, Thoreau’s interest in,
201, 202; in literature, 203,
204.

Newman, John Henry, 119.
Nisard, Jean Marie Napoléon
Désiré, 104.

Doseurity of expression, 180-

Gaentnslon; essential to hap-
piness, 249-256.

Oriole, 174.

Owl, white, 175.

Parkman, Francis, his Oregon
Trail,

Parnell, Thomas, 220,

Past, the, our feeling for, 232-
243, 246.

Pater, Walter, 69, 70; a mere
stylist, 189.

Peacock, 176.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 7,11; his art,
17-19; his Raven, 17, 19, 138;
his Bells, 19, 138; the univer-
sality of his art, 138; his An-
nabel Lee, 138; his appeal
only to the sense of artis-
tic forms and verbal mel-

INDEX

ody, 184,185; quotation from,

Poetry, relation of eloquence
to, 161-167; the elusive in,
204; more suggestive than
prose, 213. See also Litera-
ture.

Pope, Alexander, 80, 203; on
friends, 240; quotation from,

240. ,
Protestantism, 125, 126.
Quintilian, 43.

Rabelais, Frangois, 132.

Raleigh, Prof. Walter, on the
business of letters, 62; his
Style, 63, 64; 65; quotations
from, 62-65.

Rat, water, 177.

Reading, understanding and
appreciation in, 182-185; the
re-reading of books, 216-231.

Renan, Ernest, 32, 50; his ob-
ject as a writer, 65; 119; his
Future of Science, 161; on
eloquence and poetry, 161;
190; quotations from, 50, 161,
19

0.

Robertson, John M., his Essays
toward a Critical Method,
109.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 55,
56

Ruskin, John, 5, 79, 90, 119, 123,
144, 145, 147, 163; quotations
from, 144, 147.

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augus-
tin, 6; on Montaigne’s meta-
phors, 16 ;o0n Rousseau’s Con-
Sessions, 55; 73, 92-96; as a
critic, 97, 112, 115, 118, 132,
145, 146 ; 102, 104, 128, 132; on
Moral censure in criticism,
145, 146; quotations from, 16,
55, 145, 146,

Saturday Review, The, 4.
Schérer, Edmond Henri
Adolphe, 80, 94, 96, 105, 132.

Schiller, his Robbers, 138.

Schopenhauer, Arthur, his use
of analogy, 42, 43; his defi.
nition of style, 60; 73, 234,
aa quotations from, 60, 73,

Science, democracy of, 110; dis.

263

angers tPanese ot Bal 135;

rarely suggestive, 211.

Scott, Sir Walter, the literary
value of his novels, 5, 6, 60,
61; the eloquence of his po-
etry, 166; his lack of under-
standing of Wordsworth,
182, 183. ,

Sears, Lorenzo, his Methods
and Principles of Literary
Criticism, 109.

Shairp, Principal John Camp-
bell, 91.

Shakespeare, William, 74; Vol-
taire’s verdict upon, 103; de-
mocracy of his art, 111; 136 ;
the highest type of the disin-
terested artist, 144; 189; his
Sonnets, 208, 209, 211 ; quota-
tions from, 136, 212.

Shakespeareana, 24.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 114, 124.

Smith, Sydney, 26.

Sparrow, house (Passer do-
mesticus), 175.

Sparrow, song (Aelospiza me-
lodia), 174.

Sparrow, vesper (Powcetes
gramineus), 174.

Spencer, Herbert, 32, 59; on
the philosophy of style, 71;
his style, 206; quotations
from, 32, 71.

Staél, Madame de, 104.

Steam engine in recent poetry,
the, 158, 159.

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 3;
his Inland Voyage, 227; his
Travels with a Donkey, 227.

Style, value of, 6-8; a quality
of mind, 14; nature of, 52,53;
personality an element of,
54-60; of the stylist, 61-67;
unconsciousness of good, 68,
69; simplicity of good, 69-
74; in conversation, 75-77;
aristocracy and democracy
in, 77; variety of, 78, 79.

Stylist, the, 62-67.

Suggestiveness in literature,
205-215.

Swallow, barn (Hirundo ery-
throgastra), 173, 174.

Swallow, cliff (Petrochelidon
lunifrons), 173, 174.

Swallow, white-bellied, or tree
(Tachycineta bicolor), 174,

264

Swallows, supposed hiberna-
tion of, 171-173; feeding
young on the wing, 175.

Swift, chimney (Chetura pela-
gica), 174.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles,
19; his style, 66, 70, 71.

Tacitus, his eloquence, 165.

Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 104,
105, 119; a stimulating but
not disinterested critic, 121,
122 ; 142, 143.

Taste, lapses of, 25, 26; good
and bad, 116-118.

Taylor, Edward Thompson
(“ Father ”’), 163.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 19,
114, 121; universality of his
art, 138, 139; begotten of the
feudal spirit, 154; his Maud,
161; an example of his elo-
quence, 166; 181, 184; his
Crossing the Bar, 227; quo-
tation from, 166.

Thackeray, William Make-
peace, the title of his Vanity
Fair, 10, 11; 103.

Thiers, Louis Adolphe, 119.

Thoreau, Henry David, 30, 56,
119; his wildness, 197-202;
his enthusiasm for the In.
dian, 198, 199; the Indian in,
199, 200; his search for the
transcendental in nature,
201, 202; quotations from,
197-202.

Titlark, 176.

To the Rainbow, 166.

Tolstoi, Leo, 39, 90, 119, 121, 134,
149, 155.

Triggs, Oscar Lovell, 110.

Universe, the, 35-38.

Villemain, Abel Frangois, 104.

Vineyard, preparing a new,
254-256.

Voltaire, Francois Marie
Arouet, his style, 69; his
verdict upon Shakespeare,
103,111; 144; quotation from,

Waldstein, Dr. Louis, his The

Subconscious Self, 130, 141;
quotations from, 141.

INDEX

Wand, Mrs. Humphry, 119,
2

121,

Water-rat, 177.

Weather, Gilbert White’s ob-
servations on the, 177, 178.
White, Gilbert, the longevity
of his book, 168; homeliness
of his book, 169; its human
interest, 169, 170; his genu-
ineness, 170, 171; his person-
ality, 171 ; a type of the true
observer, 171; his observa-
tions as to the supposed
hibernation of swallows,
171-173 ; examples of his truly
scientific observations, 174-
178; his alertness and enthu-
siasm, 175-177; a magnet for
the natural lore of his neigh.
borhood, 176; his observa-
tions on the weather, 178 ; his
imitators, 179; 218 ; quotations

from, 170, 173-178.

Whitman, Walt, his published
letters, 4; 24, 27; on style, 66;
67, 75, 78, 99, 110; his respon-
sibility to esthetic princi-
ples, 117,118,119; his Leaves
of Grass, 129, 214; 155, 181,
183, 184; his faith and opti-
Mmism, 185; his view of Na-
ture, 204; his Two Rivulets,
204; on the elusive in poetry,
204; his suggestiveness, 205,
206, 214; 223, 227; quotations
from, 24, 27, 66, 75, 99, 204; 214.

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 1;
his poetry, 18, 19; 137.

Wilson, Woodrow, 186.

Woodpecker, 174.

Wordsfold, William B., his
Principles of Criticism, 109.

Wordsworth, William, 19, 23,
74, 115, 119, 124; his poetry
more personal and less uni-
versal than Tennyson’s, 138,
139 ; never eloquent, 165 ; 181;
his attitude toward nature
compared with Scott’s, 182,
183 ; 184, 204, 223, 228; quota-
tions from, 24, 141. .

Work, essential to happiness,
249-256.

Zola, Emile, 112; his exaggera-
tion of certain things, 149,

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