Part 4
All this is now changed. One or two of the evening newspapers of London deserve great commendation for having dared to treat literary subjects, in distinction from mere reviews of books, as of immediate public interest. Their example has at length quickened some of the morning papers, and has spread into the provinces to such a signal degree that several of the great newspapers of the North of England are now served with literary matter of a quality and a fulness not to be matched in a single London daily twenty years ago. When an eminent man of letters dies, the comments which the London and country press make upon his career and the nature of his work are often quite astonishing in their fulness; space being dedicated to these notices such as, but a few years ago, would have been grudged to a politician or to a prize-fighter. The newspapers are the most democratic of all vehicles of thought, and the prominence of literary discussion in their columns does not look as though the democracy was anxious to be thought indifferent or hostile to literature.
In all this bustle and reverberation, however, it may be said that there is not much place for those who desire, like Jean Chapelain, to live in innocence, with Apollo and with their books. There can be no question, that the tendency of modern life is not favourable to sequestered literary scholarship. At the same time, it is a singular fact that, even in the present day, when a Thomas Love Peacock or an Edward FitzGerald hides himself in a careful seclusion, like some rare aquatic bird in a backwater, his work slowly becomes manifest, and receives due recognition and honour. Such authors do not enjoy great sales, even when they become famous, but, in spite of their opposition to the temper of their time, in spite of all obstacles imposed by their own peculiarities of temperament, they receive, in the long run, a fair measure of success. They have their hour, sooner or later. More than that no author of their type could have under any form of political government, or at any period of history. They should not, and, in fairness it must be said they rarely do, complain. They know that "Dieu paie," as Alphonse Karr said, "mais il ne paie pas tous les samedis."
It is the writers who want to be paid every Saturday upon whom democracy produces the worst effect. It is not the neglect of the public, it is the facility with which the money can be wheedled out of the pockets of the public on trifling occasions that constitutes a danger to literature. There is an enormous quantity of almost unmitigated shoddy now produced and sold, and the peril is that authors who are capable of doing better things will be seduced into adding to this wretched product for the sake of the money. We are highly solicitous nowadays, and it is most proper that we should be, about adequate payment for the literary worker. But as long as that payment is in no sort of degree proportioned to the merit of the article he produces, the question of its scale of payment must remain one rather for his solicitor than for the critics. The importance of our own Society of Authors, for instance, lies, it appears to me, in its constituting a sort of firm of solicitors acting solely for literary clients. But the moment we go further than this, we get into difficulties. The money standard tends to become the standard of merit. At a recent public meeting, while one of the most distinguished of living technical writers was speaking for the literary profession, one of those purveyors of tenth-rate fiction, who supply stories, as they might supply vegetables, to a regular market, was heard to say with scorn, "Call _him_ an author?" "Why, yes!" her neighbour replied, "don't you know he has written so and so, and so and so?" "Well," said the other, "I should like to know what his sales are before I allowed he was an author."
It would be highly inopportune to call for a return of the _bonâ fide_ sales of those of our leading authors who are not novelists. It is to be hoped that no such indulgence to the idlest curiosity will ever be conceded. But if such a thing were done, it would probably reveal some startling statistics. It would be found that many of those whose names are only next to the highest in public esteem do not receive more than the barest pittance from their writings, even from those which are most commonly in the mouths of their contemporaries. To mention only two writers, but these of singular eminence and prominence, it was not until the later years of their lives that either Robert Browning or Matthew Arnold began to be sure of even a very moderate pecuniary return on their books. The curious point was that both of them achieved fame of a wide and brilliant nature long before their books began to "move," as publishers call it. It is not easy to think of an example of this curious fact more surprising than this, that _Friendship's Garland_ during many years did not pass out of one moderate edition. This book, published when Arnold was filling the mouths of men with his paradoxical utterances, lighted up all through with such wit and charm of style as can hardly, of its kind, be paralleled in recent prose; a masterpiece, not dealing with remote or abstruse questions, but with burning matters of the day--this entertaining and admirably modern volume enjoyed a sale which would mean deplorable failure in the case of a female novelist of a perfectly subterranean order. This case could be paralleled, no doubt, by a dozen others, equally striking. I have just taken up a volume of humour, the production of a "funny man" of the moment, and I see on its title-page the statement that it is in its one hundred and nineteenth edition. Of this book, 119,000 copies have been bought during a space of time equal to that in which Matthew Arnold sold probably about 119 copies of _Friendship's Garland_. In the face of these facts it is not possible to say that, though it may buy well, the democracy buys wisely.
It is this which makes me fear that, as I have said, the democratic spirit is influencing disadvantageously the quantity rather than the quality of good literature. It seems to be starving its best men, and helping its coarsest Jeshuruns to wax fat. The good authors write as they would have written under any circumstances, valuing their work for its own sake, and enjoying that state of happiness of which Mr. William Morris has been speaking, "the happiness only possible to artists and thieves." But while they produce in this happy mood, the democracy, which honours their names and displays an inexplicable curiosity about their persons, is gradually exterminating them by borrowing their books instead of buying them, and so reducing them to a level just below the possibility of living by pure literature. The result is, as any list of the most illustrious living authors (not novelists) will suggest, that scarcely a single man or woman of them has lived by the production of books. An amiable poet of the older school, whose name is everywhere mentioned with honour, used to say that he published books instead of keeping a carriage, as his fortune would not permit him to afford both of those luxuries. When we think of the prizes which literature occasionally offered to serious work in the eighteenth century, it seems as though there had been a very distinct retrogression in this respect.
The novel, in short, tends more and more to become the only professional branch of literature; and this is unfortunate, because the novel is the branch which shelters the worst work. In other sections of pure letters, if work is not in any way good, it is cast forth and no more heard of. But a novel may be utterly silly, be condemned by every canon of taste, be ignored by the press, and yet may enjoy a mysterious success, pass through tens of editions, and start its author on a career which may lead to opulence. It would be interesting to know what it is that attracts the masses to books of this kind. How do they hear of them in the first instance? Why does one vapid and lady-like novel speed on its way, while eleven others, apparently just like unto it, sink and disappear? How is the public appetite for this insipidity to be reconciled with the partiality of the same readers for stories by writers of real excellence? Why do those who have once pleased the public continue to please it, whatever lapses into carelessness and levity they permit themselves? I have put these questions over and over again to those whose business it is to observe and take advantage of the fluctuations of the book-market, but they give no intelligible reply. If the Sphinx had asked Oedipus to explain the position of "Edna Lyall," he would have had to throw himself from the rock.
If the novelists, bad or good, showed in their work the influence of democracy, they would reward study. But it is difficult to perceive that they do. The good ones, from Mr. George Meredith downwards, write to please themselves, in their own manner, just as do the poets, the critics, and the historians, leaving it to the crowd to take their books or let them lie. The commonplace ones write blindly, following the dictates of their ignorance and their inexperience, waiting for the chance that the capricious public may select a favourite from their ranks. Almost the only direct influence which the democracy, as at present constituted in England, seems to bring to bear on novels, is the narrowing of the sphere of incident and emotion within which they may disport themselves. It would be too complicated and dangerous a question to ask here, at the end of an essay, whether that restriction is a good thing or a bad. The undeniable fact is that whenever an English novelist has risen to protest against it, the weight of the democracy has been exercised to crush him. He has been voted "not quite nice," a phrase of hideous import, as fatal to a modern writer as the inverted thumb of a Roman matron was to a gladiator. But all we want now is a very young man strong enough, sincere enough, and popular enough to insist on being listened to when he speaks of real things--and perhaps we have found him.
One great novelist our race has however produced, who seems not only to write under the influence of democracy, but to be absolutely inspired by the democratic spirit. This is Mr. W. D. Howells, and it is only by admitting this isolation of his, I think, that we can arrive at any just comprehension of his place in contemporary literature. It is the secret of his extreme popularity in America, except in a certain Europeanised clique; it is the secret of the instinctive dislike of him, amounting to a blind hereditary prejudice, which is so widely felt in this country. Mr. Howells is the most exotic, perhaps the only truly exotic writer of great distinction whom America has produced. Emerson, and the school of Emerson in its widest sense, being too self-consciously in revolt against the English oligarchy, out of which they sprang, to be truly distinguished from it. But England, with its aristocratic traditions and codes, does not seem to weigh with Mr. Howells. His books suggest no rebellion against, nor subjection to, what simply does not exist for him or for his readers. He is superficially irritated at European pretensions, but essentially, and when he becomes absorbed in his work as a creative artist, he ignores everything but that vast level of middle-class of American society out of which he sprang, which he faithfully represents, and which adores him. To English readers, the novels of Mr. Howells must always be something of a puzzle, even if they partly like them, and as a rule they hate them. But to the average educated American who has not been to Europe, these novels appear the most deeply experienced and ripely sympathetic product of modern literature.
When we review the whole field of which some slight outline has here been attempted, we see much that may cheer and encourage us, and something, too, that may cause grave apprehension. The alertness and receptivity of the enormous crowd which a writer may now hope to address is a pleasant feature. The hammering away at an idea without inducing it to enter anybody's ears is now a thing of the past. What was whispered in London yesterday afternoon was known in New York this morning, and we have the comments of America upon it with our five o'clock tea to-day. But this is not an unmixed benefit, for if an impression is now quickly made, it is as quickly lost, and there is little profit in seeing people receive an idea which they will immediately forget. Moreover, for those who write what the millions read, there is something disturbing and unwholesome in this public roar that is ever rising in their ears. They ensconce themselves in their study, they draw the curtains, light the lamp, and plunge into their books, but from the darkness outside comes that distracting and agitating cry of the public that demands their presence. This is a new temptation, and indicates a serious danger. But the popular writers will get used to it, and when they realise how little it really means it may cease to disturb them. In the meantime, let no man needlessly dishearten his brethren in this world of disillusions, by losing faith in the ultimate survival and continuance of literature.
_1891._
HAS AMERICA PRODUCED A POET?
Has America Produced a Poet?
For the audacious query which stands at the head of this essay, it is not I, but an American editor, who must bear the blame, if blame there be. It would never have occurred to me to tie such a firebrand to the tail of any of my little foxes. He gave it to me, just as Mr. Pepys gave _Gaze not on Swans_ to ingenious Mr. Birkenshaw, to make the best I could of a bad argument. On the face of it the question is absurd. There lies on my table a manual of American poetry by Mr. Stedman, in which the meed of immortality is awarded to about one hundred of Columbia's sons and daughters. No one who has a right to express an opinion is likely to deny that the learning, fidelity, and catholic taste which are displayed in this book are probably at this time of day shared, in the same degree, with its author, by no other living Anglo-Saxon writer. Why, then, should not Mr. Stedman's admirable volume be taken as a complete and satisfactory answer to our editor's query? Simply because everything is relative, and because it may be amusing to apply to the subject of Mr. Stedman's criticism a standard more cosmopolitan and much less indulgent than his. Mr. Stedman has mapped out the heavens with a telescope; what can an observer detect with the naked eye?
There is an obvious, and yet a very stringent, sense in which no good critic could for a moment question that America has produced poets. A poet is a maker, a man or woman who expresses some mood of vital passion in a new manner and with adequate art. Turning to the accepted ranks of English literature, Tickell is a poet on the score of his one great elegy on Addison, and Wolfe, a century later, by his _Burial of Sir John Moore_. Those poems were wholly new and impassioned, and time has no effect upon the fame of their writers. So long as English poetry continues to be studied a little closely, Tickell and Wolfe will be visible as diminutive fixed stars in our poetical firmament. But in a rapid and superficial glance, Wolfe and Tickell disappear. Let the glance be more and more rapid, and only a few planets of the first magnitude are seen. In the age before Elizabeth, Chaucer alone remains; of the Elizabethan galaxy, so glittering and rich, we see at length only Spenser and Shakespeare; then come successive splendours of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns; then a cluster again of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Last of all, still too low on the horizon to be definitely measured, Tennyson and Browning. Fifteen names in all, a sum which might be reduced to ten, perhaps, but never to fewer than ten, nor expanded, on the same scale, beyond eighteen or twenty at the outside. These fifteen are the great English poets, the selected glory and pride of five centuries, the consummation of the noblest dynasty of verse which the world has ever seen. What I take to be the problem is, Has America hitherto produced a poet equal to the least of these, raised as high above any possible vacillation of the tide of fashion? What an invidious question!
In the first place, I will have nothing to do with the living. They do not enter into our discussion. There was never a time, in my opinion, when America possessed among her citizens so various and so accomplished singers, gifted in so many provinces of song, as in 1888. But the time has not arrived, and long may it delay, when we shall be called upon to discuss the ultimate _status_ of the now living poets of America. From the most aged of them we have not yet, we hope, received "sad autumn's last chrysanthemum." Those who have departed will alone be glanced at in these few words. Death is the great solution of critical continuity, and the bard whom we knew so well, and who died last night, is nearer already to Chaucer than to us. I shall endeavour to state quite candidly what my own poor opinion is with regard to the claim of any dead American to be classed with those fourteen or fifteen English inheritors of unassailed renown.
One word more in starting. If we admit into our criticism any patriotic or political prejudice, we may as well cease to wrangle on the threshold of our discussion. I cannot think that American current criticism is quite free from this taint of prejudice. In this, if I am right, Americans sin no more nor less than the rest of us English, and French; but in America, I confess, the error seems to me to be occasionally more serious than in Europe. In England we are not guiltless of permitting the most puerile disputes to embitter our literary arena, and because a certain historian is a home-ruler or a certain novelist a Tory, each is anathema to the literary tribunal on the other side. Such judgments are as pitiable as they are ludicrous; but when I have watched a polite American smile to encounter such vagaries of taste in our clubs or drawing-rooms, I have sometimes wondered how the error which prefers the non-political books of a Gladstonian to those of a Unionist, on political grounds alone, differs from that which thinks an American writer must have the advantage, or some advantage, over an English writer. Each prejudice is natural and amiable, but neither the one nor the other is exempt from the charge of puerility. Patriotism is a meaningless term in literary criticism. To prefer what has been written in our own city, or state, or country, for that reason alone, is simply to drop the balance and to relinquish all claims to form a judgment. The true and reasonable lover of literature refuses to be constrained by any meaner or homelier bond than that of good writing. His brain and his taste persist in being independent of his heart, like those of the German soldier who fought through the campaign before Paris, and who was shot at last with an Alfred de Musset, thumbed and scored, in his pocket.
One instance of the patriotic fallacy has so often annoyed me that I will take this opportunity of denouncing it. A commonplace of American criticism is to compare Keats with a certain Joseph Rodman Drake. They both died at twenty-five and they both wrote verse. The parallel ends there. Keats was one of the great writers of the world. Drake was a gentle imitative bard of the fourth or fifth order, whose gifts culminated in a piece of pretty fancy called _The Culprit Fay_. Every principle of proportion is outraged in a conjunction of the names of Drake and Keats. To compare them is like comparing a graceful shrub in your garden with the tallest pine that fronts the tempest on the forehead of Rhodopé.
When the element of prejudice is entirely withdrawn, we have next to bear in mind the fluctuations of taste in respect to popular favourites, and the uncertainty that what has pleased us may ever contrive to please the world again. I have been reminded of the insecurity of contemporary judgments, and of the process of natural selection which goes on imperceptibly in criticism, by referring to a compendium of literature published thirty years ago, and remarkable in its own time for knowledge, acumen, and candour. In these volumes the late Robert Carruthers, an excellent scholar in his day and generation, gives a certain space to the department of American poetry. It is amusing to think how differently a man of Carruthers's stamp would cover the same ground to-day. He gives great prominence to Halleck and Bryant, he treats Longfellow and Poe not inadequately, he spares brief commendation to Willis and Holmes, and a bare mention to Dana and Emerson (as a poet). He alludes to no one else; and apart from his omissions, which are significant enough, nothing can be more curious than his giving equal _status_ respectively to Halleck and Bryant, to Willis and Holmes, to Dana and Emerson. Thirty years have passed, and each of these pairs contains one who has been taken and one who has been left. Bryant, Holmes, and Emerson exist, and were never more prominent than to-day; but where are Halleck, Willis, and Dana? Under the microscope of Mr. Stedman, these latter three together occupy but half of one page out of four hundred, nor is there the slightest chance that these writers will ever recover the prominence which they held, and seemed to hold so securely, little more than a generation ago. The moral is too obvious to need appending to this suggestive little story.
It is not in America only that a figure which is not really a great one gets accidentally raised on a pedestal from which it presently has to be ignominiously withdrawn. But in America, where the interest in intellectual problems is so keen, and where the dull wholesome bondage of tradition is unknown, these sudden exaltations are particularly frequent. When I was in Baltimore (and I have no happier memories of travel than my recollections of Baltimore) the only crumple in my rose-leaf was the difficulty of preserving a correct attitude toward the local deity. When you enter the gates of Johns Hopkins, the question that is asked is, "What think you of Lanier"? The writer of the _Marshes of Glynn_ had passed away before I visited Baltimore, but I heard so much about him that I feel as though I had seen him. The delicately-moulded ivory features, the profuse and silken beard, the wonderful eyes waxing and waning during the feverish action of lecturing, surely I have witnessed the fascination which these exercised? Baltimore would not have been Baltimore, would have been untrue to its graceful, generous, and hospitable instincts, if it had not welcomed with enthusiasm this beautiful, pathetic Southern stranger. But I am amazed to find that this pardonable idolatry is still on the increase, although I think it must surely have found its climax in a little book which my friend, President Gilman, has been kind enough to send me this year. In this volume I read that Shelley and Keats, "before disconsolate," now possess a mate; that "God's touch set the starry splendour of genius upon Lanier's soul"; and that all sorts of persons, in all sorts of language, exalt him as one of the greatest poets that ever lived. I notice, however, with a certain sly pleasure, that on the occasion of this burst of Lanierolatry a letter was received from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "of too private a character to read." No wonder, for Dr. Holmes is the dupe of no local enthusiasm, and very well indeed distinguishes between good verse and bad.