Part 7

The movement began a few years ago in a protest against the narrow choice of books permitted by the requirements for entrance to college. Some of the schools thought they could do their best work if their teachers—and their pupils—could select the books for this arduous study; there could be some wise consulting of taste, some adaptation to special temperaments. So long as the choice was still to be made from books of recognized merit, it was unreasonable to deny this request. But the trend toward the contemporary developed quickly; if we consulted the taste and the temperament of our students, the children of many racial traditions, we found that few of the older writers were easy for them to understand; the difficulty of bridging over the gap between traditions was too great for many of our teachers to solve, or perhaps they themselves were not at home in the tradition either of the books or of the students; and the most graceful form of surrender was to study only what was easy for everybody. The process was paralleled in society outside of the schoolroom, in the change in ideals and in competence which overtook professed criticism in our reviews; but the heart of the matter was and still is in the centers of education.

A teacher of English in New York City recently presented the case for contemporary literature vs. the classics, in some such argument as this: When she was in college, she said, the faculty took such an inhospitable view of the world about them that only one author, of all those they studied in literature classes, was still alive when they studied his books. She and her fellow students felt somehow cramped and cheated, not to be studying more books of which the authors were still living. In other words, whereas the critics in Mr. Shaw’s play could not judge the work till they knew who wrote it, these lovers of the contemporary could not estimate a book till they knew whether the author was in or out of the graveyard. In these better days, the teacher went on to say, she and her colleagues allow for the natural desire of their students to read what is written at the moment—a life of a prominent man like Theodore Roosevelt, the work of a columnist in the daily press, the popular plays, the most talked-of novels. Such reading, she explained, gives opportunity for ethical or social or political discussion in class; she meant, it seems, that you can argue whether the Middle West was fairly portrayed, and if so, what should be done to cure it, or whether we should have gone into the war at all, or if so, what should have been done to make the lot of the private easier, and establish the officer on a less privileged plane. Out of this open discussion of spontaneous interest in current events, will come, she thought, a finer taste for the best in art.

It is obvious that the training, such as it is, which is to produce this finer taste is a training not in art at all, but in Americanization, if you choose to call it so, in sociology or in politics. These purposes are good in their place, but if they usurp the classroom where literature as an art should be taught, we need expect no aid from the schools in training us to a common culture, not at least so far as the word applies to poetry, to romance, to the drama, to the novel. We might Americanize ourselves in literature by reading our older poets—three of them, Whitman, Poe and Emerson, of influence in the whole world today; we might read our elder novelists, two of whom, Cooper and Hawthorne, at their best were among the prose-poets of the nineteenth century; or we might read Parkman, an historian not likely to be surpassed for the beauty of his spirit, for the solidity of his method, and for the romantic charm of his subject, by any who will hereafter write about this land. We might read Lincoln, about whom we talk so much, and we might profitably read Jefferson and Hamilton. We might even discover the charm of the colonial records, north and south, and the heroic poetry of our frontier, as it pushed through wilderness and across plain and canyon, to face at last the Orient again and our inscrutable future. This kind of Americanization would produce class discussion of some dignity, even though it had nothing to do immediately with the art of literature, for it would give us, not only a sense of our common destiny, but an escape from our own circumstances into other days and other minds, and it would cultivate the sympathy and the imagination once thought to be the fruit of literary study. But to discuss always and exclusively only what is under our own noses, to study a life of Mr. Roosevelt not because it is a great biography but because it is about Mr. Roosevelt, and to study novels not because they are good novels, but because they are about us, is to find ourselves in the end just where we were in the beginning, with our prejudices more firmly rooted and our skin a bit thicker to any joy or sorrow in the world not our own. As for the ability to understand great writing when it comes to us, we have learned only this, that since Mr. Roosevelt lived nearer our day than Dr. Johnson, the biography of him is a better biography and a more interesting one than Boswell could write, and we need not read Boswell; and since Main Street is nearer to us than Salem, Mr. Lewis is a greater novelist than Hawthorne, and we need not read Hawthorne. Enough to know that the whole contains the part.

IV

Well, then, says the teacher of current literature, there never can be any great books, for you approve of nothing contemporary, and every book, unfortunately, has to be written in its own time. Yes, in a sense, anything you write, on however remote a subject, will be of your time and will represent it; Walter Pater was expressing one phase of Victorian England when he wrote _Marius the Epicurean_. But the artist hopes to appeal to more than the present generation; even the most contemporary of our contemporaries, who read no books of which the authors are not living, cherish some ambition to have their own works read after they themselves are gone. And since the fame of a book depends on its ability to meet the interest of readers over a long period of time, the life of our works will depend on two things—on our gift for selecting the matter which is permanently interesting to men, and on the willingness or unwillingness of any generation to be interested in the same things as its predecessors. If readers are now brought up to neglect as a matter of course any works of literature that once were loved, there will be no fame for any one hereafter, and no masters of the art, but only in each publishing season a nine days’ wonder. But if human nature still asserts its primal interests, in spite of mistaken teaching, and continues to like in the long run the same things that have been loved in the past, then the writer will finally be reckoned great who answers, not the mood of his hour, but the spirit of those constant demands. He will get his inspiration from life as he knows it; he will express it in an eternal form, as we say—at least in a form so durable that instead of our understanding his work through the incident that inspired it, we shall know of the incident through the work. Molière has so immortalized one moment of his times in his _Précieuses Ridicules_; without the play, would we know much of the temporary affectation? And to be quite frank, has not something died in the play, along with what was contemporary in it, so that we enjoy it now with an historical effort not needed to be at home, let us say, with Falstaff? Tennyson really immortalized the Charge of the Light Brigade, for the incident on so many grounds has since proved regrettable that we should be glad to forget it, but for the poem, and we begin to be sorry that the poem is anchored to so much that was transitory. Our own civil war poet, Henry Howard Brownell, true genius if we ever had one, wrote his verses on the very scene, after the fights he had passed through as Farragut’s secretary on the flagship, and the virulence of contemporary passion is in his work forever, an embarrassing alloy. But of the danger of being contemporary, Dante is the great illustration. It is not hard to see what an impact his great poem must have made on his first hearers, it was so immediate in its reference to persons, places, incidents, crimes and disasters which Florence, Rome and Italy well knew; but what an effort it is now to recover all those allusions to the times, indeed how impossible! We wrestle with them, if at all, because the greatness of the poem bears up their leaden weight; and the poem is great for what is least contemporary in it, for the vision which Dante drew from his masters, and which he handed on to the future in images of the past.

The impulse to be contemporary is in our time, and perhaps always was, an impulse to tell the news. This impulse is felt perhaps in all the arts, but most in books and in the theatre, less in music, still less in painting, and least in architecture and sculpture. From these last we can learn, if we need a reminder, what are the conditions of enduring art, and what, in contrast to popularity, is fame. Sculpture and architecture, from the substantial nature of their medium, must submit to be looked at more than once, to be lived with, finally to be judged by the good opinions of many men over a long period of time; and a good opinion of such work, so lived with, will depend less on the first impression than on habitual contact. For such work popularity is difficult, if not impossible. A book about the war may be a popular book; the Farragut statue in Madison Square is not a popular statue. What statue is popular? It can have only the better kind of success, if any; like the Farragut, it can be famous, loved and returned to over an indefinite length of time. For we can read a book once and throw it aside, or hear music or see a play but once, and then criticize it; it lies entirely in our choice whether we shall read or hear twice. How different our criticism would be if it were based on at least half a dozen readings and hearings! But the bronze and the building are not easily removed or ignored, and even the painting has a good chance of being looked at more than once. It is not surprising then that the sculptor, like the architect or the painter, attends to the conditions on which fame is secured, since popularity is denied him, and makes his appeal to revised judgments and to second thoughts.

It would be a misfortune to seem to say that the author who misses popularity is necessarily an artist, or that even temporary success is not to be admired. But in American letters we are beginning to wonder why our great successes are so transitory; why a writer who sells more copies of his first book than did Thackeray or Dickens, does not continue like them to reach a large public with succeeding books; and why he does not, like them, continue to be read after he has ceased to write. The explanation suggested is that most American writers, not only today but throughout the last twenty-five years, have written as journalists—have put out their material not as life but as news about life, and the critics have discussed it as news, and the readers have come to look for the news in it, and for nothing else. Some novelists still writing began their work with successful stories of local color, which we read in order to learn about Louisiana or Pennsylvania or the Middle West, and having got the information we were looking for, we went elsewhere to look into other novelties. It goes without saying that in this process we readers have done injustice to many a work of art; _Old Creole Days_ and _Main Traveled Roads_ have something for the permanent reader, as well as for the news-seeker, and _Trilby_—to speak of an English book—is still a magnificent romance of friendship and chivalry, though it expired of its own success as a bulletin from the Latin Quarter and a document in hypnotism.

At least, says again the lover of current things, you must write in the language of the hour. Some beauty is lost when the poet does not speak in his native tongue, or when we cannot read him in it. Well, some languages are better than others; Greek was a better language, more precise, more varied, more forceful and more colorful, than English or any of the modern tongues. But all language changes, as the works of art in language do not; in literature we have this haunting paradox, that through a temporary medium we can build something imperishable. Much as we may dislike literature in translation, it is perhaps salutary to remember that literary masterpieces must survive in translation or not at all. In what language were the parables spoken? If Homer were not Homer still in English or French or German, how much of Homer would the world know? Some bouquet of his own time is gone, but perhaps we should not have liked it if it had remained. At least we have kept what we liked; we have kept what suited our spiritual needs, we have loved Andromache and Hector, and wondered in the old way why such fine men as Achilles and Agamemnon should quarrel, and have decided, as all our fathers have done, that for so beautiful a woman as Helen to waste her time on so mean a fellow as Paris, there must have been queer influences at work. To live in art in this timeless way, is to satisfy what is eternal in ourselves; it is to leave behind us the limitations of our hour, our place, and our language. And unless art is wide enough for us to live in it so, we shall trifle with it only for an hour, and without regret let it go the way of other contemporary things.

V

THE CHARACTERS PROPER TO LITERATURE

I

Our impulse might be to say that any character at all is proper to literature, or to any phase of literature, for we have long ago discarded that convention of ancient story which introduced the hero and heroine always as nobly born, or if at first they were not gentlefolk, yet in the last chapter they were shown to be prince and princess in disguise. Our leading characters now may have whatever origin God wills; the author does not interfere. No longer do we reserve the peasant, the poor or the ignorant for the foot of our list of _dramatis personæ_, nor do we smuggle them into the scene at resting moments, for comic relief. Since human nature is the subject of art, and since the Almighty (we quote Lincoln for this) showed us where to put the emphasis in human nature, by creating common folk in the vast majority, we have even followed the example with an excess of enthusiasm, until the elect are pretty well put down from their former seat in literature, and in their stead are the socially humble and the mentally weak. For a hundred years or more we have been pressing this charitable revolution. Wordsworth, though not the first to try it, first won a considerable hearing in English poetry for the beggar, the pedlar, the afflicted, the half-witted—a hearing for them, that is, as central figures in the poems where they occur; and shortly afterwards the novelists, on the irresistible tide of humanitarianism, invited not only our attention but our admiration for persons who hitherto had seemed obscure and unfortunate. Dickens perhaps went too far, we now feel; he demonstrated the weakness of the gentry, and sent them to the background of the story, where we are willing enough they should remain, but he also tried to endow the lower classes with so much delicacy, tact, and spirit that his leading persons seem to be gentry still, masquerading in a temporary eclipse of fortune, like the lost prince and princess of the fairy tale. But he taught us how to carry on his unfinished revolution; since he stripped sentimentality, all that sort of nonsense, from the gentry, we have known at last how to strip it from the bourgeois. Some of our novelists riddle the polite world for us, others tell us the unflinching truth about our middle classes. We have no heroes; any character can get into our literature, if we may use him as a target rather than worship him as a god.

It is too late to return, even if we desired to do so, to the sentimental misreading of social conditions against which our modern realism, however grim, tries honestly to protest, and there is a form of discourse in which human frailties can properly be discussed; social science or the science of ethics would neither of them deserve the name of science if we excluded from their consideration any aspect of human character or conduct—just as medicine would fail in its office if we forbade it to study any part or function of the body. But it is not too late to ask ourselves the difference between science and art; between a story which represents our physical actions with that conscience in detail which would aid a medical diagnosis, and a story through which Helen’s body walks, a joy forever; between a record of our neighbors just as they are, or a bit meaner, and a picture of men and women as we would gladly be. Anything printed may be called literature, even last year’s time-tables, but if we preserve in the word an emphasis upon art rather than upon information, we may ask after all whether certain characters, or certain attitudes toward character, are not essential to art; or, putting it another way, we may ask whether the type of character we portray will not determine the kind of art we produce, with or without our will, and whether the kind of character we portray will not finally classify our writing for us as art or as social document.

To have our novel appraised as a social document may seem to us a compliment, and we may be glad to escape the equivocal verdict that our picture of life is art. The terms are unimportant and our prejudices in words may be respected. But the fact remains that some books we are to read many times, and permanently, whereas others are for a season only, and may be read but once; and books which must serve us in ways so different would seem to need certain special privileges of method and material—they may even be permitted certain varieties of emphasis not usually found in life. The temporary writing helps us on our way, and we ought to have one honorable name for it all—newspapers, telephone directory, time-tables, all our telegrams and most of our letters. We stop over them only for a moment, in order to go about our business more conveniently. But the other kind of books will detain us forever, or will try to—and this kind of literature is art; we return thither for no information and for no immediate aid in our daily affairs, but rather to taste again an experience we enjoyed before, to meet old friends, to breathe an atmosphere which we crave, and which is hard to find elsewhere.

If this distinction needs often to be made between the literature which is information and the literature which is art, it is because both kinds of book use the same medium, and speech is the commonest of mediums. Painting or music escape such a confusion, but writing is a slippery craft, now running to a bare record or to good advice, now drifting into a music of words, articulating a beauty that seems ageless and impersonal, and sometimes doing a bit of all these things at once. In daily conversation, when we talk of anything in human interest, we use the same words as literature is made of; what more natural than to conclude that literature therefore may deal with any subject we talk of? We resent the suggestion that art should be narrower than life itself. Yet if we admit any difference at all between art and life, between literature and our average conversations, between books which give information and books which give delight, and if art is the record of that aspect of life we delight in not for the moment but permanently, then art is indeed narrower than life itself; outside of it will remain the trivial things, however likable, of our daily round, which we forget gladly, so many other pleasant and trivial things supplant them; and outside of it also will remain very important issues which we hope and resolve shall be temporary—the grave wrongs and errors which call not for eternal contemplation but for reform. Face to face with such problems, we often feel that art is inadequate. What can poetry do for the sick or the dying? What solace is there in music or sculpture for the wretchedly poor? The answer to such questions is not in art but in conduct; death calls for fortitude, sickness must be cured, poverty must be relieved; and if books deal with such subjects, it is not for a literary end, but to aid us in practical remedies. Indeed, to have a literary ambition as we contemplate another’s misery, would seem possible only for a fiend; it is in the merit of Mrs. Stowe’s story of Uncle Tom that the book seems a protest from the soul rather than a work of art. If there are sins and misfortunes, it may be necessary to spread the news, as though the house were on fire, but if we really care for our house we shall not linger to enjoy the cadence of the thrilling call. On the other hand, if we are to lose ourselves in a book or a play, if we are to live in it repeatedly, ourselves the hero, in love with the heroine, and hating the villain, then the book or play must give us an experience in some sense better than the life ordinarily available to us; who would waste a moment on Cleopatra in a book, if he knew where to find her in the world? Or perhaps in life she was less charming than Plutarch said she was, or than Shakespeare showed her to be; perhaps we could not be drawn irresistibly to her until the poet made her better than she was—made her, that is, a character proper for the literature which is to be enjoyed as art.

II

The effect of the excellence or the inferiority of the character on the book was long ago observed by Aristotle, when he said that tragedy and the epic—that is, all serious literature—will aim at representing men as better than in actual life, and that comedy and satire will represent them as worse. In this second kind of writing, he added, satire came first, and it was Homer who laid down the principles of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of composing personal satire. This famous observation of the ancient critic has been too often read as doctrine, as though Aristotle were telling us what should take place in literature, whereas he is recording what actually does take place. If you wish to write a story or a play in which the reader can lose himself with delight, you must portray character better than the reader, character which in some degree satisfies and strengthens his aspirations. If you wish the reader to laugh at the world, or to scorn it, or to feel the need of improving it, you portray for him character in a condition inferior to his estimate of himself; if you wish him to profit by that wholesome self-observation which we call the comic-spirit, you mingle satire with tragedy—you show him character which satisfies his aspirations, so that he will identify himself with it, and which at the same time is inferior in some respects to what he would prefer to be, so that he must laugh at himself. He will have a tendency to save the day for self-respect by laughing, not at himself, but at human nature, and the universal comic spirit will then have come to birth, akin to both satire and tragedy, but more nearly a dramatizing of the ludicrous, as Aristotle said, than a scoring of personal faults.