Chapter 11

There are, of course, self-complacent human beings who cannot realize that past literature has in this domain anything to teach them. They imagine that the world was born when they were born. These persons we must perhaps leave to the error of their ways. In earnest truth, there is no real literature too foreign or too old--nor, for the matter of that, too near or too young--to enlighten us concerning human feeling, human thought, and human motive. In these things the world did not have to wait for wisdom and insight until the modern scientific epoch. Age cannot wither the essential truth nor stale the potency of great literature in this respect. Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Tacitus, Dante, or Shakespeare would have nothing to learn of the human mind and heart from Haeckel or from Herbert Spencer.

Nor, again, has human capacity--thinking capacity--appreciably advanced since great literature first arose. "Telephones," says Mr. Frederic Harrison, "microphones, pantoscopes, steam presses, and ubiquity engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain no bigger and no stronger than the brains of men who heard Moses speak and saw Aristotle pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed manuscript." One assuredly cannot say of the twentieth-century man with more truth than Shakespeare's Hamlet said it of man three centuries ago--certainly not with more truth than it might have been said of Shakespeare himself--"How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In apprehension how like a god!" There was, indeed, none of the modern scientific terminology in Thucydides, or AEschylus, or Aristotle, but, in respect of sheer brain power and sanity, literature is at least as lofty in AEschylus as in Browning, in Aristotle as in Spencer. That is why the classics--classics of all languages, classics of Greece, of Italy, of England--are for ever fresh, and can never die.

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Literature, therefore, is a mass of written enlightenment concerning human beings, human hearts, and human thought. Name, if you will, any other study which could better fit a man for grappling with the problems of humanity in that portion of his life which we call public.

But man is something more than a public instrument. We cannot separate the man of citizen life, playing his part in the practical world, from the man of private intercourse, and the man of inward culture and resource. There is a sufficiently "practical" outcome of literary study if it makes the man wiser in himself, if it makes him truer in his judgment, richer and broader in his feelings, makes him put forth antennae of tact and sympathy, if also it supplies him with such inward resources that he can dispense with unattainable luxuries or with vulgar methods of passing his time. Such results are surely a profoundly useful application of the results of study to life.

Take a human being in the loneliness--the absolute isolation or the intellectual isolation--of the bush; take one who is disabled by illness or disease; take one who is perforce environed all his days by company which is ignoble and dull; take one who can ill afford any of the distractions of the wealthy. How shall he keep alive his higher part, or fill his leisure with contentment and delight, except by constant intercourse with the mightiest minds in the history of the thinking world? Said Rousseau: "Let one destine my pupil to the army, to the church, the bar, or anything else; yet, before his parents have chosen his vocation, nature has called him to the vocation of human life; living is the trade I want to teach him." All the rest is but means to an end. "We live," asserts the poet, "by admiration, hope, and love." And nothing can stimulate these sensations like great literature.

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In this connexion I must insist for a few minutes upon the relations of literature to the intellectual idol of to-day--to wit science--science in the popular, if inaccurate, sense. I have to maintain that literature--and particularly poetry--is the indispensable ally and complement of science; that it is, in the end, the means by which the essential truths of science will reach their application to life; that it supplies the force by which the great facts of science are made to operate for good upon our thinking and our feeling. Literature supplies that which science alone cannot supply.

I am aware there are those who fancy that science itself is sufficient guide and equipment for human existence. Huxley, if I remember rightly, asserted in his nonage that science would even afford us a newer and more enlightened morality. But I have never heard any scientist repeat that doctrine; I have never heard any scientist claim that the altruism of the Sermon on the Mount or of Buddha had been superseded by the dry light of scientific conclusions. Physical science and its inventions have not obviously advanced the delicacy of sentiments or of ethical ideas. Chaucer's notion of a "parfit gentil knight," and his "poure parsoun of a toun" could not be bettered for anything discovered in all the five centuries since. It is not easy to see how science can stimulate us to warm-hearted charity, to self-sacrificing love and loyalty, to patriotism, and other manifestations of qualities which we universally recognize as virtues, and as things without which human life would be a dreary and intolerable waste. Without them suicide were almost best. And the cultivation of the emotions belongs to literature, not to objective science.

Will you pardon me if I repeat an illustration which has been used before, though I forget where? There are two ways of regarding tears. They may be the infinitely appealing outward and visible signs of some great inward troubling of the spirit. They may "rise in the heart and gather to the eyes" from "the depths of some divine despair." On the other hand they may be what they were to a certain character in Balzac. The physicist Baltazar retorts in answer to an outburst of tears, "Ah! tears! I have analysed them; they contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium, mucin, and water!" I do not happen to know if that is a correct analysis, but I do know that both these aspects of tears are true aspects. There is nothing contradictory about them. The one is the aspect of objective science; the other--the human and moral aspect--is that of literature. Is there any doubt which aspect ultimately concerns us the more as human beings, livers of human lives?

There is no conflict between science and literature, especially between science and poetry.

The astronomer tells us the immense distances and immense sizes of the stars--great facts, most interesting facts; but the imagination of literature gets hold of all the vastness and wonder and suggestion of such a universe, and by the gift of expression it makes us realize them, makes us feel an awe and admiration, which may at least lend some chastening to minds which sorely need it. I believe that all true men of science recognise this power of literature, and that they are no more satisfied than the veriest poet with the mere facts of nature without the beauty and marvel and moral stimulation. They do not wish that a flower should be rendered less beautiful because they dissect it and classify it under a hard dog-Latin name. "A primrose by the river's brim a dicotyledon was to him, and it was nothing more." That is not their attitude.

There is not much influence on the higher side of life to be got from a study of nothing else but metals, or nothing else but triangles, or nothing else but germs. But literature exerts a most potent influence on this higher side of life; for it not only supplies thoughts and expresses feelings, but it is in itself--thanks to its expression--a force to make them felt and to give them effective life. It not only instructs--it moves. For, remember, great literature was never produced by cynicism nor by affectation: men of weak convictions or feelings have never been supreme writers. As at Athens, at Rome, or in Elizabethan England, great literature belongs to periods full of animation, of enterprise, of high ideals, of strong aims or strong beliefs. In that prevailing spirit the great writers share, and they impart it forever to us who read. There exhales from what they write an inspiring power of earnestness. As Longinus phrases it, we seem to be possessed by a divine effluence from those mighty minds.

It is often complained, in regard to our schools, that moral teaching without religious stimulation is futile. The reason assents, but the will is unmoved. "We want," says Shelley, "the generous impulse to act that which we perceive." Great literature lends this impulse. Let us have plenty of great literature in our schools.

I do not, indeed, claim that literature always and completely conveys the requisite impulsion, but I claim that, in its impressiveness or its charm, by its appeal to the imagination and the sensibilities, it can go far, as Heine thought of Schiller's poetry, to "beget deeds." "Let me," said Fletcher, "make the songs of a people, and let who will make its laws." "Certainly," declares that flower of chivalry, Sir Philip Sidney, "I must confess ... I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." Bare psychology teaches us; bare history teaches us; but great literature both teaches and inspires; it gives not only light, but warmth. "Reading good books of morality," Bacon sadly confesses, "is a little flat and dead." Great literature puts the breath of life into this deadness. Not merely to peruse, but to assimilate, the _King Lear_ of Shakespeare or the _Vita Nuova_ of Dante cannot fail to turn the current of our minds strongly towards right feeling--in the one case of duty and compassion, in the other of purest loyalty in love.

The most vivid conception of high conduct--the one which we can least shake off--is hardly to be gathered from the didactic moral treatise; it is hardly ever derived from set sermons, unless the preacher impose it upon us by some magnetism of his personality; it is more often impressed by some literary embodiment which has been made to live and move and have a being--by a Cordelia or a Jeanie Deans, by a Galahad or a Parson Adams. Such embodiments as these are instruments for that which Matthew Arnold holds to be the object of poetry, namely, the powerful and beautiful application of "ideas to life."

But, it may be objected, the influence of a writer may indeed thus stimulate, but what if it stimulates irrationally and amiss? Yet herein, precisely, lies one great superiority of the study of literature. It is the best means known to humanity of encouraging breadth of mind, many-sidedness of comprehension. That is, of course, with the proviso that your literary worship is not a monotheism. The genuine literary student is not a student of one author, much less of one book. It is true that Shakespeare is in himself almost a compendium of humanity, and that to study Shakespeare alone is as profitable as to study a score of less comprehensive mortals. Nevertheless, even Shakespeare has his limitations. He could not wholly escape the limitations of his times, spacious though these were.

Literary study in the proper sense is as wide as time and opportunity can make it. It includes alike the _Divine Comedy_ and the human comedy. As far as possible it ignores differences of nationality, of language, of date. It seeks to know the best that has been thought and said in the world, wherever and whenever. It ransacks the Hebrew mind, the Greek mind, the Roman mind, the Italian, French, German and English mind. It gathers opinions, suggestions, points of view, elements of culture from all sources. If Shakespeare holds the mirror up to nature as she shows herself in human actions and passions, Wordsworth reflects the manifestations of her spirit as seen in her physical works. If Homer gives us the naive and simple grandeur of pagan life, Dante gives us the mystic grandeur of the Catholic conception, Milton the severer grandeur of the semi-Puritan. The literary student thus approaches truth from every side. He approaches it variously with Bacon, with Johnson, with Voltaire, with Goethe, with Wordsworth, with Carlyle, with Newman. He feels the various emotions of a hundred lyrists. Led by a score of dramatists and novelists he sees into the complexities of human character, motive and mood. Getting away from the narrow and biassed bickerings, gropings, and caprices of the day, he associates with hundreds of the best minds of the past, whose interests were altogether outside the temporary prejudices and passions which now surround us. And what preparation for life could surpass that of the student who has thus taken all literature for his province? He is in reality better equipped with practical psychology than many a professed psychologist.

The professional student of history studies history from books in which long series of facts and their possible relations are presented in the light in which they are seen by Mommsen or Gibbon or Macaulay or Froude. Meanwhile the student of literature sees incidentally, but, so far as he goes, more vividly, into the actual life of breathing men through the legend of _Beowulf_ or the _Vision of Piers Plowman_, through Chaucer or the _Spectator_, through Ben Jonson's _Humours_ or Horace Walpole's Letters, through _Clarissa Harlowe_ or _Pride and Prejudice_.

I know, of course, full well one frequent consequence of the broad-mindedness which results. I realize how promptly the unread man, filled to the lips with the frothy spirit of his own infallibility, will condemn him whose knowledge of men and motives makes him pause and suspend his judgment. But what of that? Some one has said that thinking makes you wise but weak, while action makes you narrow but strong. A terse sentence, but one which will not bear inspection. The man of half-lights who acts with a promptitude often disastrous, is indeed narrow, but I deny that he is strong. He is opinionated and audacious. Far stronger, in a more reasonable world, is the man who can withhold his yea or nay, when neither yea nor nay happens to be the one answer of that truth which is great and will prevail.

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These, then, are the virtues which we claim for the study of literature.

Literature enlarges our imagination; it expands our judgment; it widens our sympathies; it enriches the world to our eyes and minds, by revealing to us the marvels, delights, tendernesses and suggestions which are all around us in man and nature; it keeps alive our better part in places and circumstances when that better part might perish with disease and atrophy; it continually irrigates with benign influences the mind which might grow arid and barren, and so it enables all the little seeds and buds of our intellectual and moral nature to germinate and produce some fruit.

And, therefore, this Society meets to study literature, and, as I said at the beginning, it meets to study in a spirit which is open-minded, grateful, and docile.

The Future of Poetry

A thoughtful friend of mine--but one who withal affects a philistinism which I know to be only skin-deep--is fond of assuring me that "poetry" can no longer justify its existence, that the world of the future will regard it as a trifling and artificial thing, and that therefore serious men will cease to devote themselves either to producing it or to reading it. In our discussions upon the subject, I have asked him whether he merely means that men will cease to compose verses, or whether he believes that "the poetry" is actually going out of life and literature, and that the imaginative and emotional way of looking at things, which belongs to "poetry," will give place to the rigidly philosophical and practical. He answers, of course, that men will continue to have ardours, aspirations, joys, sorrows, and sympathies, which they will and must express as vividly as they can, to their own relief and to the solace or encouragement of their fellow-men; but he asserts that all this can be done in prose, and will be done in prose, seeing that rhymes and regular numbers of syllables are a sort of primitive barbarian device, mechanical, cramping, and, in a certain way, productive of untruth. When we press this latter point, it is admitted that prose itself is capable of inexhaustible rhythms and magnificent melodies, and that these qualities show signs of being more and more developed, more and more adapted to the mood and sentiment of that which is to be expressed. When we get thus far, it appears that we have been very much in agreement all along. To me--and by this time, I hope, to him--poetry is nothing else but this same impassioned expression of ardour and emotion, sensibility and imagination, no matter whether the form it takes be obviously regulated verse or subtly rhythmic "prose."

But, when we have reached our agreement, there are others who confront us with that too well-known sentence from Macaulay: "In an enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones; but little poetry. Men will judge and compare, but they will not create." It is a fashion nowadays to make little of Macaulay as a thinker, to damn him with faint praise as a brilliant rhetorician. It is not to join unreservedly in that censure, if we remark that Macaulay pronounced his dictum on poetry when he was very young. But, young or not, he utterly misses a sound view of the nature and scope of poetry. He asserts that "men will judge and compare, but they will not create"; and particularly, he meant, create epics and romances. If Macaulay is to be taken literally, poetry is to him mainly the creation of stories; it is summed up in _Iliads_, _AEneids_, _Orlandos_, _Faerie Queenes_. Let us for the moment suppose--what, however, there is no ground in fact or reason for supposing--that creations such as these, at least in verse, will engage enlightened men no more. Is there no room for lyrics and for the poetical expression of great truths? "But little poetry!" What else should this imply, except that there will be but little feeling or emotion, but little ecstasy, hope, grief, loveliness, awe, or mystery in all the "wide gray lampless deep unpeopled world" of the future? It is these things which are the most copious and most stimulating subject-matter of poetry, and Macaulay surely never meant to say, and never did say, that these would some day fail.

The poets of the last generation are dead--Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne. The great "makers" have passed away, and there remain to us but certain highly dexterous word-artificers and melodists, a varied chorus of dainty, musical, scholarly, but mostly uninspired, writers of verse. We have passed the crest of the poetical wave, and are sunk into its trough. It is not unnatural, therefore, that we should, at this particular juncture, feel some misgivings. Finding no immediate successor worthy to fill the place of those great departed, we cry out in our haste that "science" is killing poetry, or that "democracy" is crushing out poetry, or that we are "living too fast" for poetry. Poetry was dead in England for a century and three-quarters between Chaucer and Spenser; in a large sense it was dead for four generations between Milton and Burns. In Italy there was almost no real poetry for the thirteen hundred years between Virgil and Dante. In France nearly two centuries before Victor Hugo may be treated as a blank. Yet the revival came, and came with strength. We forget, or do not know, that the complaint of the decay of poetry is a hackneyed tale, familiar to Addison as to Macaulay. We do not, in fact, look the question frankly in the face. When one assures us of the decline of poetry as a fact and as inevitable, we have a right to ask him two questions. One is: "What signs of weakening and degeneracy in poetic genius, or of failing interest in its creations, do you actually discover in the course of history?" the other: "From what arguments are we to conclude that the future must of necessity prove barren of poetry?" Is there evidence in fact? Is there in theory?

We can imagine some champion of the Muses pointing to the mass and excellence of the poetry which has been created during the last hundred years; to the work of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Scott, Beranger, Victor Hugo, De Musset, Leopardi, Longfellow, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson, Morris; to the immense and varied fertility, to the creative and emotional power, of makers like these, displayed during the most "enlightened"--that is to say, we presume, the most rationalistic and scientific--century the world has yet passed through. We can imagine him asking whether, in all the past history of the human race, so great a zeal for poetry, romantic, lyrical-descriptive, speculative, has ever been manifested at once in such force and width in England, Germany, France, America. And we can fancy him completely satisfied with that single phenomenon. We can also imagine him setting opinion against opinion, outweighing Macaulay with the greater name of Wordsworth and Macaulay's disciples with the name of Matthew Arnold. We can hear him answering the assertion that in "the advance of civilization" poetry must necessarily decline, with the declaration of the most single-hearted poet of our century, that "poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science ... carrying the sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself." And we can suppose our champion willing to abide in that faith, because "the master hath said it."

But it is our present concern to go somewhat more closely to the heart of the question, to consider without bias how much truth there really is in this prediction that poetry must of necessity decline with the advance of science and the "progress" of society.