I

LITERARY VALUES

THE 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 admirers 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 different 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 generationthat 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 affectations, his insincerities, his imitations; only what is vital and real in him, and is subdued to the proper harmony and proportion, will count. A malformed 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 little 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 hobbyists, its own clowns, its own follies and fashions and infatuations. What every age will not have in the same measure is sanity, proportion, health, penetration, 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 recent English poets and novelists are certain to drag them down. Browning, with his sudden leaps and stops, and all that Italian rubbish, is fearfully handicapped.

Things do not endure in this world without a certain singleness and continence. Trees do notgrow 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 secondary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a religious life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreciate the literary value of the staple, fundamental human virtues and qualities—probity, directness, simplicity, 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 language, as it undoubtedly is. None of Stevenson’s books have quite this probity and singleness of purpose, 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 colors his pages, and that is the source of our interest.This personal element, this flavor of character, is the salt of literature. Without it, the page is savorless.

It is curious what an uncertain and seemingly capricious thing literary value is. How often it refuses 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 language 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, Macaulay—it is a conscious, deliberate product. Then, in other works, the very absence of the literary motive and interest gives an æsthetic pleasure.

One is surprised to read the remark of the “Saturday Review” on the published letters of Whitman,—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 positively 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 alonein 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 themselves 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 suggest 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 Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is than the more elaborate and scholarly address of Everett on the same occasion. General Grant’s “Memoirs” have a higher literary value than those of any other generalin our Civil War, mainly because of the greater simplicity, seriousness, and directness of the personality 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 singleness 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, sailors, soldiers—often have great force and impressiveness 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 a man—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 different things, as the characterization, the action, the plot, and the style; sometimes more in one, sometimes 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 dramaticpower, is the weakest factor. In Mr. Howells 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 historian, the essayist, the critic, do without style—that is, without that vital, intimate, personal relation 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 composer translation is little 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 resides 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 Frenchman 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 intenselysocial 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 qualities, 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 important bit of news which they are in a hurry to be delivered 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 benumbing effects of vague and featureless generalizations. 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.

Then those dead-level sentences that seem to return 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 definitions 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 belongs 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 sustained emotions which do not produce undue tension, and in which the element of pleasure predominates, on the whole, over that of pain. Practically,” the writer goes on to say, “every word of this description 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.”

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. Contrast with the above John Morley’s definition of literature: “All the books—and they are not so many—where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.” This is much better literature, because the language is much more flexible and imaginative. 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 consummate 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,” orsome 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 forever.” 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,”

“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.”

“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 proverbs 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 definite tests like gold or silver, whereas it is more like life or nature itself. It is not so much something as the visible manifestation of something; itassumes infinite forms, and is of infinite degrees of potency. There is great literature, and there is feeble and commonplace literature: a romance by Hawthorne and a novel by Haggard; a poem by Tennyson 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 literature. 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 narrow 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 business 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 literature is an end in and of itself. We read it for the pleasure and the stimulus it affords us, apart fromany other consideration. It exhibits such a play of mind and emotion upon the facts of life and nature as results in our own mental and spiritual enrichment and edification.

Another thing is true of the best literature: we cannot separate our pleasure and profit in the subject-matter from our pleasure and profit in the personality 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 of a 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 ishissubject; it blends with the very texture of his mind; his relation 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 hishand 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 significance 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 individualized, freshly and clearly stamped by the purposeof the writer, it cannot take rank as good literature. To become literature, truth must be perpetually 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 civilization 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 strongest 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 different 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 horizon of the race is perpetually changing.

In our modern democratic communities the moral sense is no doubt higher than it was in the earlier ages, while the artistic or æsthetic 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 virtue. 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 another has it not, or one has it to-day and not to-morrow; one moment he writes with grace and simplicity, 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 communities. 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 fluid 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 “detachedfrom the thought,” but that they “seize it in its very centre, in its interior, and join and bind it.”

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 deliberately planned and wrought out as is any piece of mechanism. Its inspiration is verbal and technical. “The truest poetry is most feigning,” says Touchstone, 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 æsthetic. 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 people. He is more akin to the Latin than to the Anglo-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 patriotism, of religious ideas, of strenuous moral purpose, speaks. Art is subordinated to various human passions and emotions. In Poe alone are these emotions 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 American 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 forget 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 compared with that of Poe, and yet Whittier has touched and moved his countrymen, and Poe has not. Thereis much more of the substance of character, of patriotism, 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 memory. We cannot say this of “The Bells” or “The Raven,” or of the work of Milton or Keats or Tennyson. 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 emotion 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 presence of simple, common things. Tennyson’s art, or Swinburne’s art, is much finer, but the poetic emotion 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 profound 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’sliterary and inventive powers, and in no way involve his character, temperament, or personality. The more it was written, the more it savored of deliberate 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 preference for a painted woman’s face over one showing its natural color, “and for metal trees and a theatrical 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.

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 literature. The flesh-and-blood reality is alone of value,and this cannot be taught, it must be felt and experienced.

The class in literature studies an author’s sentence-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 subject-matter and how to express himself clearly and forcibly; the structure of his sentences takes care of itself. From every art certain rules and principles may be deduced, but the intelligent apprehension 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 inside 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 theliving thing itself. If the teacher, by his own living voice and an occasional word of comment, can bring out the soul of a work, he may help the student’s appreciation of it; he may, in a measure, impart 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 college to take a course in Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course becomes a mere knowledge course, as Professor Corson suggests. My own first acquaintance with Milton was through an exercise in grammar. We parsed “Paradise 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 probably 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 beautyof the tree. There stands the tree in all its summer 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 analyzed, 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. Whystudya 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 as a 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 instrument of the imagination. In Wordsworth’s line,

“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 Shakespearean 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 literature 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 becoming 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 multitude of unimportant questions?

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 is by experience. Familiarize the student with the works of the real masters of literature and you have safeguarded him against the pretenders. After he has become acquainted 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 analysis, or by a course in rhetoric and sentence structure, 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 not a 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 theremotest 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: “Writers, 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 himself 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.”

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