Part 1

THE LITERARY DISCIPLINE

OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN ERSKINE

THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT AND OTHER ESSAYS

THE KINDS OF POETRY AND OTHER ESSAYS

DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS

GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS (With W. P. Trent)

_POETRY_

ACTÆON AND OTHER POEMS

THE SHADOWED HOUR

HEARTS ENDURING

_A Play in one Scene_

COLLECTED POEMS 1907-1922

THE LITERARY DISCIPLINE

BY JOHN ERSKINE _Professor of English at Columbia University_

NEW YORK DUFFIELD & COMPANY 1923

Copyright, 1922, by the NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

Copyright, 1923, by DUFFIELD & COMPANY

_Printed in U. S. A._

TO GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE ix

I. DECENCY IN LITERATURE 3

II. ORIGINALITY IN LITERATURE 47

III. THE CULT OF THE NATURAL 91

IV. THE CULT OF THE CONTEMPORARY 137

V. THE CHARACTERS PROPER TO LITERATURE 187

PREFACE

The following chapters were first published serially in _The North American Review_, from November, 1922, to March, 1923. For their reappearance in this volume I have made slight changes in them all, and have inserted in the fourth chapter a few paragraphs written for _The Bookman_ of July, 1922. The editors of both magazines have my thanks for permission to reprint.

The title of the book will disclose at once the critical theory underlying these essays; they are studies in the discipline which literature imposes on those who cultivate it as an art, and their doctrine is that language as a medium of expression has certain limitations which the writer must respect, and that the psychology of his audience limits him also in what he may say, if he would gain a wide hearing and keep it. To know what can be said in words, and what effect it will have on your readers, is the inward art of writing, much more important even than the management of a sentence or the shaping of a paragraph.

I write here of literature as an art. Since I mean to exclude, as not art, many books of undoubted importance and of wide appeal, I must attempt at least to defend a distinction that to certain readers will seem arbitrary. A book may tell us of a life we already know about, or of a life we as yet do not know; the pleasure it gives us will be of recognition or of curiosity satisfied. Of course no books fall absolutely into one or the other of such extremes, but it is fairly accurate to say that every successful book does give us information, a new experience, or brings back an old experience to recognize. Though both kinds of books may be equally well written, we are inclined to ask only instruction from the one kind, but permanent enjoyment from the other. One is a document in history or sociology, in ethics or psychology; the other, as I understand it, is a work of art. If our country has not proved a favorable birth-place for literary works of art, the reason probably lies in our history rather than in lack of able writers. Ours has always been, and still is, an unknown land; the reader of American works has primarily been looking for information about America. The early visitors from Europe wrote us up for the enlightenment of their friends at home, and since our world has changed rapidly, we still write up ourselves, for our own enlightenment. The too brief flourishing of literature as an art in New England was possible only because life there for one moment in our history was so stable that a considerable body of readers had much experience in common; having had their curiosity satisfied as to their own life, they could recognize it and reflect upon the literary portrait of it. But the New England moment in our literature proved an exception, and we are so accustomed now to read novels and poems, not as art, but as bulletins of information from the west, the northwest, the middle west or the south, that we are losing the sense of living art in the New England writers themselves, and are considering them more and more as documents in a past civilization. Since we have so great need of documents, I realize that I prejudice myself with many readers when I say that my chief interest is in literature as art—in the books which reflect the unchanging aspects of human experience, rather than in the reports of our temporary condition.

If literature in our country has suffered from our passion for information, I believe it has also been damaged in our day by a bad philosophy of esthetics which has encouraged the writer to think much of himself and little of his audience. Literature is an art of expression, we say in the old phrase, and it expresses life. But whose life? The writer’s, of course, replies the philosophy I happen not to like. No; if a book ever becomes famous, it is because it expresses the experience of the reader. The writer’s personality will pervade it, but we must be able to recognize ourselves in it before we can admit that it portrays life truly.

The function of criticism, as I understand it, is to discover, in the past experience of the race, what books have won a secure place in men’s affections, and to find out if possible why men have been permanently fond of them. A great critic would be a scientist, observing the behavior of the reader in the presence of certain stories or poems, and recording the kind of effect produced by various arrangements of character and plot, or by different employments of language. Such a critic was Aristotle in the _Poetics_. The art of literature has never had an observer more accurate or more penetrating, and those who return constantly to his wise pages will understand why I have quoted him so often, and often have drawn upon him for aid when I have not used his name.

I must record my gratitude to two living philosophers also, towers of strength to those of us who love books as works of art—George Santayana and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge. The first has taught me through his books—are any books more beautiful than his written in English today? The second has enriched me with his daily companionship and with those spoken words, grave or gay but always wise, which his friends and disciples learn to save up for remembrance.

And I have offered this book in my dedication to our one poet-critic in America who has spent his genius in the service of literature as art, and as art alone. I do not know whether what I have written will be altogether acceptable to him, and if I put his honored name in the forefront of my pages, it is not to shield me from deserved criticism. But writing on this theme, I must bear witness to his leadership among all in this country who in my lifetime have known how to prize the immortal things in great books—imagination, ideal humanity, beauty, and the kind of truth that is beauty. In a day when literary criticism has been contentious and personal, more like a political campaign in a tough ward than anything that Spenser or Sidney or Shelley would recognize as a pilgrimage to wisdom, Mr. Woodberry has written nothing ungenerous or harsh of new arrivals less scholarly, less gifted, less accomplished and less chivalrous than himself. He has

Let the younger and unskilled go by To win his honour and to make his name.

Indeed, more than anyone else among us, he has kept his faith that youth, given time enough, will discover art as it will find out other incarnations of beauty, and will achieve new miracles in its worship. Twenty-five years ago he taught us to love the masters in poetry—no easier thing to do for boys then than it is now. We have still to acquire his hospitality toward the future, to look on with his good humor and sympathy while the immature in the world of art, as elsewhere, try to rearrange the universe, not knowing that it has been here for some time and is set in its ways.

J. E.

THE LITERARY DISCIPLINE

I

DECENCY IN LITERATURE

I

The quarrel with indecent art is an old one, and the present discussion of improper books, with threats of censorship, begins to rally itself in two familiar camps—on one side the moralists, showing in the heat of debate less understanding of art than they probably have, and on the other side the writers, showing in the same heat somewhat less concern for morals than it is to be hoped they feel. The censorious seem disposed to suppress on the ground of indecency almost any kind of book they happen not to like; the writers seem at times to argue that all books are equally good, or, at least, should be free and equal. These are the old exaggerations of the quarrel. Yet in two important respects the present discussion is quite novel and more than usually interesting; for one thing, the attack now is less on obscenity, about which there are no two opinions, than on indecency, of which we have at the moment no adequate definition; for another thing, the writers themselves, perhaps for the first time in history, have no definition of literary decency to offer, and seem not greatly interested in forming one.

Censorships are usually exercised for the protection of religious or political doctrine, and whatever may be said against the method, at least in the field of religion or politics the censor knows clearly what he wishes to protect. But if we now would protect decency, we must first define the term. It is not enough to have a moral conviction on the subject; we must have also some principle outside of our emotional prejudices, based on something more lasting than fashion. In the present welter of contradictions and opprobrium it is sometimes thought indecent to wear bobbed hair or short skirts; for the morals of the school, teachers have been dismissed who rolled their stockings below the knee. Obviously, these are not great faults in decency, if faults at all; a good deal of camel must have been swallowed before justice could be done to these gnats. Some of our neighbors wish to suppress certain plays; others wish to suppress the theatre. Some wish to suppress Swinburne and Baudelaire, with one hand as it were, while distributing with the other copies of the Bible containing the _Song of Songs_. A minister of this type, earnest in his work for decency and quite muddled as to what it is, told me that he could not give his approval to the _Spoon River Anthology_, brilliant though it was; he could approve of no book that portrayed fornication. Yet he must have read the story of Lot’s daughters and their behavior with their father. He approved of the Bible, and he would probably not call it indecent. What is decency, then, or its opposite?

At this point the writers ought to stand up and answer. In other ages they would have done so; they would have thought no one so competent as the artist to define decency in his own field, and they would have stated their definition from the point of view of art. They would have called it “decorum” instead of “decency”, but they would have meant the same thing—fitness or propriety in the particular art they practised. When Milton made his famous plea on ethical grounds for freedom of the press, he went on, as an artist, to say that of course there are good and bad books, and when a book has had its chance, it must submit to the judgment of the competent. He was writing in an age when the reader might be expected to have some training in artistic definitions of decorum. If books are to enjoy freedom of publication now, it seems incumbent upon the writers to define the decency of their art, and to spread the knowledge of the definition, as widely as possible, that the competent reader of today may have a standard by which to judge.

II

It ought to be possible now, as it once was, to define decency in terms outside our emotions, not variable with our private taste but fixed in the conditions of the artist’s work. When man is inspired by the world he sees to make some lasting record of his feeling about it, and selects a medium to express himself in,—wood, stone, metal, color, language,—he immediately encounters certain problems and difficulties in his medium, certain limitations in it which he must submit to, if he would convey his meaning with precision. The limitations of his medium, therefore, dictate to the artist his first lessons in decorum. For if you will not respect those limitations, you will find yourself saying what you did not intend; instead of beauty, you will convey some effect humorous or grotesque or ugly. It is at least bearable to see actual garments on the wax figures in shop-windows; we dress up dolls. But not even the shop window could tolerate a marble statue with clothes on. When the artist learns that some things, though excellent in themselves, do not come out in his medium with the effect he desires, his good sense and the sincerity of his art compel him to leave these subjects for other mediums. The themes he thus abandons are not indecent in the sense of obscenity or filth, not bad in themselves, but they do not fit his art—or, as writers used to say, do not belong to its decorum.

The decorum of art may seem to the moralist far less important than the decency his own strong emotions feel after, but the moralist is wrong. The decorum of art is the deeper kind of decency, for it is based on lasting principles, and it leads to an understanding of the positive good in art, to beauty, as the moralist’s concern for decency often does not. You cannot explain on moral grounds why the glorification of the body in Walt Whitman, let us say, is sometimes disconcerting, yet the glorification of it in Greek sculpture seems not only decent but noble. The artist could explain the matter if he understood the decorum of artistic mediums. In so far as he does not understand it, he adds to the confusion of the arts in our time; he fills our magazines, for example, with photographs of Greek dances, and is himself, let us hope, disturbed by the grotesque contortions he has perpetuated. The dance was probably a graceful flow of motion; of all that flow, however, only a few moments would be in the decorum of the camera—moments of poise, in which motion might be suggested but not represented. But the photographer was charmed by the moments of motion, which are the essence of dance decorum, and he gives us a picture of grim-faced ladies suspended in the air, with frantic gestures of fingers and toes.

In literature, since the medium is language, decorum is a question of the limitations and capacities of words. The great limitation of language is that it must be heard or read one word at a time, though most of the things we wish to speak of in this world should be thought of or seen all at once, and their true outline and their total effect may be dislocated by piecemeal expression. To represent in language a landscape or a person, a building or any intellectual architecture, is, strictly speaking, impossible; we can merely make statements, carefully selected, about the subject, and trust that no matter how dismembered in the telling, it will somehow come together again in the hearer’s mind, thanks largely to the hearer’s imagination. Where the suggestion is so slight and the collaboration so great, the writer is under some obligation to be precise and conscientious in what he suggests. His responsibility might perhaps seem less when he is telling a story; if language is inapt for the portrayal of stationary things having mass, structure and extent, we might suppose it better fitted to the representation of action, which like language occurs in sequence of time. But even in the recital of events, language has to name separately in an artificial order events which actually coincide, and the reader’s imagination must put the fragments together again. _“Indeed,” replied Mr. Jones_, or, _Mr. Jones replied, “Indeed!”_ Neither formula quite represents what happened. In life, when we heard the “Indeed!” the sound would tell us not only what was said but also who said it. No wonder the poets have so often thought of the drama as the most satisfying literary form, for when a play is acted, words convey in it all that they can convey in life, and they are aided, as in life, by other kinds of language—by gesture, facial expression, scenery, which speak to the eye while the voice is speaking to the ear.

Because words must be spoken one after another, there are not only some things which are hard to say in that medium, but others which in certain circumstances should not be said at all. No matter how much we select the sounds, our utterance will lay a fairly even emphasis on all the things we name; therefore, if we wish to subordinate some part of the picture, to pass over it with no emphasis at all, we cannot throw it into shadow, as a painter can—we must leave it out altogether. A painter may portray a face half in shadow, so that one ear is barely discernible; looking at the picture you do not see the shadowed ear, and do not miss it. But if some one tells you in words that the ear is in shadow, at once the ear enjoys special emphasis, the opposite of the painter’s intention. Or suppose the portrait is not shadowed, but all the features are clear; and suppose the artist has focused your attention on the eyes, or has brought out some characteristic expression. You can attend to the picture exactly as you look at the subject in life—noticing what is important in it, but not examining it otherwise in detail. The head has two ears, but you do not count them. If, however, the writer describes the face as it is in life, or as it is in the portrait, he may speak only of the chief focus or expression of it; he must not say that the subject has two ears. If he does so, he will be indecent in his art, and may seem to the original of the portrait insulting in his manners.

All literary accounts of the human body raise this problem, not a problem of squeamishness or puritanism, but of decorum. The classical Greeks seem to have mastered the question either by instinctive good taste or by analysis, as they mastered so many other problems in art with which we are only beginning to wrestle. They cannot be accused of prudishness where the body is concerned; they loved its naked beauty, and in their sculpture they portrayed it frankly, with a serious and unflagging delight. Yet in their poetry they did not portray it; they merely noted the total effect of physical beauty, and omitted details, as we should omit the number of ears in the portrait. In the classical Homer, to be sure, there remained even after much expurgating certain stereotyped labels of the body; goddesses are “ox-eyed”, beautiful women are “deep-bosomed.” But the phrases are so conventional that they probably called up a general sense of approval, rather than a specific detail, as the word “mortals” calls up to us the general idea of men, rather than the fact of death. Aside from such phrases Homer and the other classical poets suggest the body without detail, trying to render the general effect the body makes in life—its femininity, its masculinity—at the same time avoiding any such attention to anatomical detail as in real life would seem, to the Greek and to us, morbid or clinical. The sculptor, working in another medium, can use the details the poet must omit; when we look at his Apollo or his Aphrodite we see not a naked body but a divine presence. The effect of divinity is not furnished by any anatomical member, nor interfered with by any. The body in detail is before us, but the expression, the something divine we feel, is in the attitude or the character. The wise poet, knowing the limitations and dangers of his medium, tries to reproduce only the attitude or the character. Later sculptors, in the decadence that followed the Periclean age, deserted the decorum of their own medium, and called attention to separate parts of the body—to ribs or veins, neck or breasts. In literature a parallel decadence occurred; the poets tried to give the effect of beauty, not in Homer’s way, by avoiding physical detail, but by citing it. They managed to suggest not beauty but sex.

The modern lover of beauty who quite properly wishes to restore the body to its rightful honor and reverence, usually appeals to the Greeks for his precedent. But if he wishes to celebrate the body in detail, he should appeal not to the Greeks but to the poets of the Renaissance. The praise of the body in the Renaissance is sometimes explained as springing from a newly recovered delight in material beauty. It should also be explained as a reaction, on the part of earnest, even puritanical moralists, against other moralists who, they thought, viewed life but partially and cramped the human soul. In our own language, Edmund Spenser and John Milton led in this praise of beauty—moralists both; as in modern times Walt Whitman led the praise, a moralist also, whether or not his detractors admit it. But a moral purpose is a dangerous approach to art, whether you are a critic or a poet. Whitman is perhaps the easiest illustration to begin with. He felt that to the pure every part of the body is sacred, and at its best is a thing of beauty. Had he been a sculptor, he would have proceeded to make statues which probably would have shocked nobody. Working in language, however, he mistook the decorum of the art, and wrote as though he were sculptor or painter, and the result is in those anatomical catalogues from which no beauty emerges, whatever else does. He differs as widely as possible from Edmund Spenser in most things, but in this one matter they are alike. Milton was too close to the Greeks to go wrong, even with his moral impulse to assert the honor of the body; his impassioned praise of wedded love, and his remarks on the glory of nakedness when Adam and Eve first appear in his epic, put no strain on literary decorum. But Spenser’s moral enthusiasm for beauty leads to such physical inventories as his picture of Belphœbe, in the second book of the _Faerie Queene_, or of his own bride, in the _Amoretti_ and the _Epithalamium_—an accounting of eyes, teeth, hair, neck, shoulders, breasts, waist, arms and legs. Many a critic has suggested that his poems have the character of painting or of tapestry, and had he actually worked in a pictorial medium, he would have made the effect he desired. In his portrait of Serena naked among the savages, in the sixth book of the _Faerie Queene_, he followed Homer’s method with admirable success. No English poet is more spiritual than he—all the more impressive the indecorum to which his moral earnestness occasionally brought him, and all the more helpful his example ought to be to modern beauty-lovers who fancy that the decorum of an art need not be studied and obeyed.

Through ignorance of decorum in language a moralist sometimes comes to grief in the opposite direction; wishing to indicate indecency, he sometimes through reticence stumbles upon the Homeric method and portrays beauty instead. A while ago a minister of some name, an aggressive defender of decency, preached a sermon on the dangers which at the moment he saw threatening us from the arts. According to the newspapers, he said that if certain theatrical managers could get it by the police, we should have a show in which a naked woman in one scene posed before a black velvet curtain. Wishing to touch the sulphurous subject as gingerly as possible, he merely suggested the lovely contrast of body and background; those of his congregation who had seen it forgot their moral danger and remembered the Venus de Milo in the Louvre. It occurred to some of them that this material might be indecorous in the pulpit; in the theatre, however—well, they were not unwilling to see it, if it was actually put on.

III