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CambriDge COPYHIOHT, 189r BY ARLO BATES J BIGHTS K£S£BVI!D This volume is made up from a course of lectures delivered under the auspices of the Lowell Institute in the autumn of 1895. These have been revised and to some extent rewritten, and the division into chapters made ; but there has been no essential change. 285876 • I. What Literature Is . PAGS . 1 n. Literary Expression . . 23 ni. The Study of Literature . . . 33 IV. Why we Study Literature . 45 V. Faxse Methods . 60 VI. Methods of Study .... 69 VII. The Language of Literature . . . 88 VIII. The Intangible Language . Ill IX. The Classics . 123 X. The Value of the Classics . . 135 XI. The Greater Classics . 142 XII. Contemporary Literature . 154 xm. New Books and Old .... . . 167 XIV. Fiction . 184 XV. Fiction and Life . 199 XVI. Poetry . 219 XVII. The Texture of Poetry . . 227 xvm. Poetry and Life .... . . 241 TALKS ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE WHAT LITEEATURE IS As all life proceeds from the egg, so all dis- cussion must proceed from a definition. Indeed, it is generally necessary to follow definition by definition, fixing the meaning of the terms used in the original explanation, and again explaining the words employed in this exposition. I once heard a learned but somewhat pedantic man begin to answer the question of a child by saying that a lynx is a wild quadruped. He was allowed to get no further, but was at once asked what a quadruped is. He responded that it is a mammal with four feet. This of course provoked the inquiry what a mammal is; and so on from one question to another, until the original subject was entirely lost sight of, and the lynx disap- peared in a maze of verbal distinctions as com- pletely as it might have vanished in the tangles of the forest primeval. I feel that I am not wholly safe from danger of repeating the experience of this well-meaning pedant if I attempt to give a ^' " ' THE StUI^Y OF LITERATURE definition of literature. The temptation is strong to content myself with saying : " Of course we all know what literature is." The difficulty which I have had in the endeavor to frame a satisfactory explanation of the term has convinced me, how- ever, that it is necessary to assume that few of us do know, and has impressed upon me the need of trying to make clear what the word means to me. If my statement seem insufficient for general ap- plication, it will at least show the sense which I shall give to " literature " in these talks. In its most extended signification literature of course might be taken to include whatever is writ- ten or printed ; but our concern is with that por- tion only which is indicated by the name " polite literature," or by the imported term " belles-lettres," — both antiquated though respectable phrases. In other words, I wish to confine my examination to those written works which can properly be brought within the scope of literature as one of the fine arts. Undoubtedly we all have a general idea of the limitations which are implied by these various terms, and we are not without a more or less vague notion of what is indicated by the word literature in its most restricted and highest sense. The important point is whether our idea is clear and well realized. We have no difficulty in saying that one book belongs to art and that another does not ; but we often find ourselves perplexed when it comes to telling why. We should all agree that " The Scarlet Letter " is literature and WHAT LITERATURE IS 3 that the latest sensational novel is not, — but are we sure what makes the difference? We know that Shakespeare wrote poetry and Tupper dog- gerel, but it by no means follows that we can al- ways distinguish doggerel from poetry ; and while it is not perhaps of consequence whether we are able to inform others why we respect the work of one or another, it is of much importance that we be in a position to justify our tastes to ourselves. It is not hard to discover whether we enjoy a book, and it is generally possible to tell why we like it ; but this is not the whole of the matter. It is necessary that we be able to estimate the justice of our preferences. We must remember that our liking or disliking is not only a test of the book, — but is a test of us as well. There is no more accurate gauge of the moral character of a man than the nature of the books which he really cares for. He who would progress by the aid of literature must have reliable standards by which to judge his literary feelings and opinions ; he must be able to say : " My antipathy to such a work is justified by this or by that principle ; my pleasure in that other is fine because for these reasons the book itself is noble." It is hardly possible to arrive at any clear un^ derstanding of what is meant by literature as an art, without some conception of what constitutes art in general. Broadly speaking, art exists in consequence of the universal human desire for sympathy. Man is forever endeavoring to break down the wall which separates him from his fel- 4 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE lows. Whether we call it egotism or simply hu- manity, we all know the wish to make others appreciate our feelings; to show them how we suffer, how we enjoy. We batter our fellow-men with our opinions sufficiently often, but this is as nothing to the insistence with which we pour out to them our feelings. A friend is the most valued of earthly possessions largely because he is willing to receive without appearance of impa- tience the unending story of our mental sensa- tions. We are all of us more or less conscious of the constant impulse which urges us on to ex- pression; of the inner necessity which moves us to continual endeavors to make others share our thoughts, our experiences, but most of all our emotions. It seems to me that if we trace this instinctive desire back far enough, we reach the beginnings of art. It may seem that the splendidly immeasurable achievements of poetry and painting, of architec- ture, of music and sculpture, are far enough from this primal impulse ; but I believe that in it is to be found their germ. Art began with the first embodiment of human feelings by permanent means. Let us suppose, by way of illustration, some prehistoric man, thrilled with awe and ter- ror at sight of a mastodon, and scratching upon a bone rude lines in the shape of the animal, — not only to give information, not only to show what the beast was like, but also to convey to his fel- lows his feelings when confronted with the mon- ster. It is as if he said : " See ! I cannot put into WHAT LITERATURE IS 5 words what I felt ; but look ! the creature was like this. Think how you would feel if you came face to face with it. Then you will know how I felt.'* Something of this sort may the beginnings of art be conceived to have been. I do not mean, of course, that the prehistoric man who made such a picture — and such a pic- ture exists — analyzed his motives. He felt a thing which he could not say in words ; he in- stinctively turned to pictorial representation, — and graphic art was born. The birth of poetry was probably not entirely dissimilar. Barbaric men, exulting in the wild delight of victory, may seem unlikely sponsors for the infant muse, and yet it is with them that song began. The savage joy of the conquerors, too great for word, found vent at first in excited, bounding leaps and uncouthly ferocious gestures, by repetition growing into rhythm; then broke into inarticulate sounds which timed the move- ments, until these in turn gave place to words, gradually moulded into rude verse by the meas- ures of the dance. The need of expressing the feelings which swell inwardly, the desire of shar- ing with others, of putting into tangible form, the emotions that thi-ill the soul is common to all human beings ; and it is from this that arises the thing which we call art. The essence of art, then, is the expression of emotion ; and it follows that any book to be a work of art must embody sincere emotion. Not all works which spring from genuine feeling sue- 6 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE ceed in embodying or conveying it. The writer must be sufficiently master of technique to be able to make words impart what he would express. The emotion phrased must moreover be general and in some degree typical. Man is interested and concerned in the emotions of men only in so far as these throw light on the nature and possi- bilities of life. Art must therefore deal with what is typical in the sense that it touches the possi- bilities of all human nature. If it concerns itself with much that only the few can or may experi- ence objectively, it has to do with that only which all human beings may be conceived of as sharing subjectively. Literature may be broadly defined as the adequate expression of genuine and typical emotion. The definition may seem clumsy, and hardly exact enough to be allowed in theoretical sesthetics ; but it seems to me sufficiently accurate to serve our present purpose. Certainly the essen- tials of literature are the adequate embodiment of sincere and general feeling. By sincerity here we mean that which is not conventional, which is not theoretical, not arti- ficial; that which springs from a desire honestly to impart to others exactly the emotion that has been actually felt. By the term " emotion " or " feeling " we mean those inner sensations of pleasure, excitement, pain, or passion, which are distinguished from the merely intellectual pro- cesses of the mind, — from thought, perception, and reason. It is not necessary to trespass just now on the domain of the psychologist by an en- WHAT LITERATURE IS T deavor to establish scientific distinctions. We are all able to appreciate the difference between what we think and what we feel, between those things which touch the intellect and those which affect the emotional nature. We see a sentence written on paper, and are intellectually aware of it ; but unless it has for us some especial message, unless it concerns us personally, we are not moved by it. Most impressions which we receive touch our un- derstanding without arousing our feelings. This is all so evident that there is not likely to arise in your minds any confusion in regard to the mean- ing of the phrase " genuine emotion." Whatever be the origin of this emotion it must be essentially impersonal, and it is generally so in form. There are comparatively few works of art which are confessedly the record of simple, direct, personal experience; and perhaps none of these stand in the front rank of literature. Of course I am not speaking of literature which takes a per- sonal form, like any book written in the first per- son ; but of those that are avowedly a record of actual life. We must certainly include in litera- ture works like the " Reflections " of Marcus Au- relius, the " Confessions " of Augustine, and — though the cry is far — Rousseau, and the " Jour- nal Intime " of Amiel, but there is no one of these which is to be ranked high in the scale of the world's greatest books. Even in poetry the same thing is true. However we may admire " In Memoriam " and that much greater poem, Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets from the Portuguese," we are 8 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE little likely to regard them as standing supremely high among the masterpieces. The " Sonnets " of Shakespeare which we suppose to be personal are yet with supreme art made so impersonal that as far as the reader is concerned the experiences which they record might be entirely imaginary. It is in proportion as a poet is able to give this quality which might be called generalization to his work that it becomes art. The reason of this is not far to seek. If the emotion is professedly personal it appeals less strongly to mankind, and it is moreover likely to interfere with its own effective embodiment. All emotion in literature must be purely imaginative as far as its expression in words is concerned. Of course poetical form may be so thoroughly mas- tered as to become almost instinctive, but never- theless acute personal feeling must trammel utter- ance. It is not that the author does not live throusrh what he sets forth. It is that the artistic moment is not the moment of experience, but that of imaginative remembrance. The " Sonnets from the Portuguese " afford admirable examples of what I mean. It is well known that these relate a most completely personal and individual story. Not only the sentiments but the circumstances set forth were those of the poet's intimate actual life. It was the passion of love and of self-renunciation in her own heart which broke forth in the fine sonnet : — Go from me, yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore Alone upon the threshold of the door WHAT LITERATURE IS 9 Of individual life shall I command The uses of my soul ; or lift my hand Serenely in the svmshine as before Without the sense of that which I f orebore, — Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine With pulses that beat double. What I do And what I dream include thee, as the wine Must taste of its own g-rapes : and when I sue God for myself, He hears that name of thine, And sees within my eyes the tears of two. There came to Mrs. Browning a poignant mo- ment when she realized with a thrill of anguish what it would mean to her to live out her life alone, separated forever from the lover who had won her back from the very grasp of death. It was not in the pang of that throe that she made of it a sonnet ; but afterward, while it was still felt, it is true, but felt rather as a memory vividly re- produced by the imagination. In so far both he who writes impersonally and he who writes per- sonally are dealing with that which at the instant exists in the imagination. In the latter, however, there is still the remembrance of the actuality, the vibration of the joy or sorrow of which that im- ao:inino: is born. Human self - consciousness in- trudes itself whenever one is avowedly writing of self; sometimes even vanity plays an important part. From these and other causes it results that, whatever may be the exceptions, the highest work is that which phrases the general and the imper- sonal with no direct reference to self. Personal feeling lies behind all art, and no work can be great which does not rest on a basis of experience, 10 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE more or less remotely ; yet the greatest artist is he who embodies emotion, not in terms of his own life, but in those which make it equally the prop- erty of all mankind. It is feeling no longer ego- tistic, but broadly human. If the simile do not seem too homely, we might say that the differ- ence is that between arithmetic and algebra. In the one case it is the working out of a particular problem; in the other of an equation which is universal. Mankind tests art by universal experience. If an author has really felt what he has written, if what he sets down has been actual to him in im- agination, whether actual in experience or not, readers recognize this, and receive his work, so that it lives. /If he has affected a feeling, if he has shammed emotion, the whole is sure to ring false, and the world soon tires of his writingsTl Immediate popular judgment of a book is pretty generally wrong ; ultimate general estimate is in- variably correct. Humanity knows the truth of human feeling ; and while it may be fooled for a time, it comes to the truth at last, in act if not in theory. The general public is guided by the wise few, and it does not reason out the difference be- tween the genuine and the imitation ; but it will in the end save the real, while the sham is forgot- ten through utter neglect. Even where an author has seemingly persuaded himself that his pretended emotions are real, he cannot permanently deceive the world. You may remember the chapter in Aldrich's delightful WHAT LITERATURE IS 11 *' Story of a Bad Boy " which relates how Tom Bailey, being crossed in love at the mature age of fourteen, deliberately became a " blighted being ; " how he neglected his hair, avoided his playmates, made a point of having a poor appetite, and went mooning about forsaken graveyards, endeavoring to fix his thoughts upon death and self-destruc- tion ; how entirely the whole matter was a hum- bug, and yet how sincere the boy was in supposing himself to be unutterably melancholy. " It was a great comfort," he says, " to be so perfectly mis- erable and yet not to suffer any. I used to look in the glass and gloat over the amount and variety of mournful expression I could throw into my fea- tures. If I caught myself smiling at anything, I cut the smile short with a sigh. The oddest thing about all this is, I never once suspected that I was not unhappy. No one . . . was more deceived than I." We have all of us had experiences of this kind, and I fancy that there are few writers who cannot look back to a stage in their career when they thought that it was a prime essential of authorship to believe themselves to feel things which they did not feel in the least. This sort of self-deception is characteristic of a whole school of writers, of whom Byron was in his day a typical example. There is no doubt that Byron, greatly gifted as he was, took his mooning melancholy with monstrous seriousness when he began to write it, and the public received it with equal gravity. Yet Byron's mysterious misery, his im- measurable wickedness, his misanthropy too great 12 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE for words, were mere affectations, — stage tricks which appealed to the gallery. Nobody is moved by them now. The fact that the poet himself thought that he believed in them could not save them. Byron had other and nobler qualities which make his best' work endure, but it is in spite of his Bad-Boy-ish pose as a " blighted being." The fact is that sooner or later time tries all art by the tests of truth and common sense, and nothing which is not genuine is able to endure this proving. To be literature a work must express sincere emotion; but how is feeling which is genuine to be distinguished from that which is affected ? All that has been said must be regarded as simply theoretical and of very little practical interest un- less there be some criterion by which this ques- tion may be settled. Manifestly we cannot so far enter into the consciousness of the writer as to tell whether he does or does not feel what he ex- presses; it can be only from outward signs that we judge whether his imagination has first made real to him what he undertakes to make real for others. Something may be judged by the amount of seriousness with which a thing is written. The air of sincerity which is inevitable in the genuine is most difficult to counterfeit. What a man really feels he writes with a certain earnestness which may seem indefinite, but which is sufficiently tan- gible in its effects upon the reader. More than by any other single influence mankind has in all its history been more affected by the contagion of WHAT LITERATURE IS . 13 belief; and it is not easy to exaggerate the sus- ceptibility of humanity to this force. Vague and elusive as this test of the genuineness of emotion might seem, it is in reality capable of much prac- tical application. We have no trouble in decid- ing that the conventional rhymes which fill the corners of the newspapers are not the product of genuine inner stress. We are too well acquainted with these time - draggled rhymes of " love " and "dove," of "darts" and "hearts," of "woe" and " throe ; " we have encountered too often these pretty, petty fancies, these twilight musings and midnight moans, this mild melancholy and maud- lin sentimentality. We have only to read these trig little bunches of verse, tied up, as it were, with sad-colored ribbons, to feel their artificiality. On the other hand, it is impossible to read " Helen of Kirconnel," or Browning's " Prospice," or Wordsworth's poems to Lucy, without being sure that the poet meant that which he said in his song with all the fervor of heart and imagination. A reader need not be very critical to feel that the novels of the " Duchess " and her tribe are made by a process as mechanical as that of making paper flowers ; he will not be able to advance far in literary judgment without coming to suspect that fiction like the pleasant pot-boilers of William Black and W. Clark Russell, if hand-made, is yet manufactured according to an arbitrary pattern ; but what reader can fail to feel that to Hawthorne "The Scarlet Letter" was utterly true, that to Thackeray Colonel Newcome was a creature warm 14 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE with human blood and alive with a vigorous hu- manity? Theoretically we may doubt our power to judge of the sincerity of an author, but we do not find this so impossible practically. Critics sometimes say of a book that it is or is not " convincing." What they mean is that the author has or has not been able to make what he has written seem true to the imagination of the reader. The man who in daily life attempts to act a part is pretty sure sooner or later to betray him- self to the observant eye. His real self will shape the disguise under which he has hidden it; he may hold out the hands and say the words of Esau, but the voice with which he speaks will perforce be the voice of Jacob. It is so in literature, and especially in literature which arouses the perceptions by an appeal to the imagination. The writer must be in earnest himseK or he cannot convince the reader. To the man who invents a fiction, for instance, the story which he has devised must in his imagination be profoundly true or it will not be true to the audience which he addresses. To the novelist who is "convincing," his characters are as real as the men he meets in his walks or sits beside at table. It is for this reason that every novelist with imagina- tion is likely to find that the fictitious personages of his story seem to act independently of the will of the author. They are so real that they must follow out the laws of their character, although that char- acter exists only in imagination. For the author to feel this verity in what he writes is of course not all that is needed to enable him to convince his WHAT LITERATURE IS 15 public ; but it is certain that he is helpless without it, and that he cannot make real to others what is not real to himself. In emotion we express the difference between the genuine and the counterfeit by the words " sen- timent " and " sentimentality." Sentiment is what a man really feels ; sentimentality is what he per- suades himself that he feels. The Bad Boy as a " blighted being " is the type of sentimentalists for all time. There is about the same relation between sentimentality and sentiment that there is between a paper doll and the lovely girl that it represents. There are fashions in emotions as there are fash- ions in bonnets ; and foolish mortals are as prone to follow one as another. It is no more difficult for persons of a certain quality of mind to per- suade themselves that they thrill with what they conceive to be the proper emotion than it is for a woman to convince herself of the especial fitness to her face of the latest device in utterly unbecom- ing headgear. Our grandmothers felt that proper maidenly sensibility required them to be so deeply moved by tales of broken hearts and unrequited affection that they must escape from the too poig- nant anguish by fainting into the arms of the near- est man. Their grandchildren to-day are neither more nor less sincere, neither less nor more sensi- ble in following to extremes other emotional modes which it might be invidious to specify. Sentimen- tality will not cease while the power of self-decep- tion remains to human beings. With sentimentality genuine literature has no 16 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE more to do than it has with other human weak- nesses and vices, which it may picture but must not share. With sentiment it is concerned in every line. Of sentiment no composition can have too much ; of sentimentality it has more than enough if there be but the trace shown in a single affecta- tion of phrase, in one unmeaning syllable or unne- cessary accent. There are other tests of the genuineness of the emotion expressed in literature which are more tangible than those just given ; and being more tangible they are more easily applied. I have said that sham sentiment is sure to ring false. This is largely due to the fact that it is inevitably incon- sistent. Just as a man has no difficulty in acting out his own character, whereas in any part that is assumed there are sure sooner or later to be lapses and incongruities, so genuine emotion will be con- sistent because it is real, while that which is feigned will almost surely jar upon itself. The fictitious personage that the novelist actually shapes in his imagination, that is more real to him than if it stood by his side in solid flesh, must be consistent with itself because it is in the mind of its creator a living entity. It may not to the reader seem winning or even human, but it will be a unit in its conception and its expression, a complete and consistent whole. The poem which comes molten from the furnace of the imagination will be a sin- gle thing, not a collection of verses more or less ingeniously dovetailed together. The work which has been felt as a whole, which has been grasped WHAT LITERATURE IS 17 as a whole, which has as a whole been lived by that inner self which is the only true producer of art, will be so consistent, so unified, so closely knit, that the reader cannot conceive of it as being built up of fortuitous parts, or as existing at all except in the beautiful completeness which genius has given it. What I mean may perhaps be more clear to you if you take any of the little tinkling rhymes which abound, and examine them critically. Even some of more merit easily afford example. Take that pleasant rhyme so popular in the youth of our fa- thers, " The Old Oaken Bucket," and see how one stanza or another might be lost without being missed, how one thought or another has obviously been put in for the rhyme or to fill out the verse, and how the author seems throughout always to have been obliged to consider what he might say next, putting his work together as a joiner matches boards for a table-top. Contrast this with the ab- solute unity of Wordsworth's " Daffodils," Keats' " Ode to a Grecian Urn," Shelley's " Stanzas Written in Dejection," or any really great lyric. You will perceive the difference better than any one can say it. It is true that the quality of which we are speaking is sufficiently subtile to make ex- amples unsatisfactory and perhaps even dangerous ; but it seems to me that it is not too much to say that any careful and intelligent reader will find little difficulty in feeling the unity of the master- pieces of literature. This lack of consistency is most easily appreci- 18 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE ated, perhaps, in the drawing of character. Those modern writers who look upon literature as having two functions, first, to advance extravagant theo- ries, and second, — and more important, — to ad- vertise the author, are constantly putting forward personages that are so inconsistent that it is impos- sible not to see that they are mere embodied argu- ments or sensationalism incarnate, and not in the least creatures of a strong and wholesome imagina- tion. When in " The Doll's House " Ibsen makes Nora Helma an inconsequent, frivolous, childish puppet, destitute alike of moral and of common sense, and then in the twinkling of an eye trans- forms her into an indignant woman, full of moral purpose, furnished not only with a complete set of advanced views but with an entire battery of mod- ern arguments with which to supj^ort them, — : when, in a word, the author, for the sake of his theory, works a visible miracle, we cease to believe in his imaginative sincerity. We know that he is dog- matizing, not creating ; that this is artifice, not art. Another test of the genuineness of what is ex- pressed in literature is its truth to life. Here again we tread upon ground somewhat uncertain, since truth is as elusive as a sunbeam, and to no two human beings the same. Yet while the mean- ing of life is not the same to any two who walk under the heavens, there are certain broad princi- ples which all men recognize. The eternal facts of life and of death, of love and of hate, the instinct of self-preservation, the fear of pain, the respect for courage, and the enthrallment of passion, — WHAT LITERATURE IS 19 these are laws of humanity so universal that we assume them to be known to all mankind. We cannot believe that any mortal can find that true to his imagination which ignores these unvarying conditions of human existence. He who writes what is untrue to humanity cannot persuade us that he writes what is true to himself. We are sure that those impossible heroes of Ouida, with their superhuman accomplishments, those heroines of beauty transcendently incompatible with their corrupt hearts, base lives, and entire defiance of all sanitary laws, were no more real to their author than they are to us. Conviction springs from the imagination, and imagination is above all else the realizing faculty. It is idle to say that a writer imagines every extravagant and impossible whimsy which comes into his head. He imagines those things, and those things only, which are real to his inner being ; so that in judging literature the ques- tion to be settled is: Does this thing which the author tells, this emotion which he expresses, im- press us as having been to him when he wrote ac- tual, true, and absolutely real ? To unimaginative persons it might seem that I am uttering nonsense. It is not possible for a man without imagination to see how things which are invented by the mind should by that same mind, in all sanity, be received as real. Yet that is precisely what happens. No one, I believe, produces real or permanent litera- ture who is not capable of performing this miracle ; who does not feel to be true that which has no other being, no other place, no other significance 20 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE save that which it derives from the creative power of his own inner sense, working upon the materia] furnished by his perception of the world around. him. This is the daily miracle of genius ; but it is a miracle shared to some extent by every mortal who has the faintest glimmer of genuine imagi- nation. To be convincing literature must express emo- tion which is genuine ; to commend itself to the best sense of mankind, and thus to take its place in the front rank, it must deal with emotion which is wholesome and normal. A work phrasing mor- bid emotion may be art, and it may be lasting; but it is not the highest art, and it does not ap- prove itself to the best and sanest taste. Mankind looks to literature for the expression of genuine, strong, healthy human emotion; emotion passion- ate, tragic, painful, the exhilaration of joy or the frenzy of grief, as it may be ; but always the emo- tion which under the given conditions would be felt by the healthy heart and soul, by the virile man and the womanly woman. No amount of in- sane power flashing here and there amid the foul- ness of Tolstoi's " Kreutzer Sonata," can reconcile the world to the fact that the book embodies the broodings of a mind morbid and diseased. Even to concede that the author of such a work had genius could not avail to conceal the fact that his muse was smitten from head to feet with the un- speakable corruption of leprosy. Morbid litera- ture may produce a profound sensation, but it is incapable of creating a permanent impression. WHAT LITERATURE IS 21 The principles of which we are speaking are strikingly illustrated in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. He was possessed of an imagination narrow, but keen ; uncertain and wayward, but alert and swift; individual and original, though unhappily lacking any ethical stability. In his best work he is sincere and convincing, so that stories like " The Cask of Amontillado," " The Gold Bug," or "The Purloined Letter," are permanently effect- ive, each in its way and degree. Poe's master- piece, " The Fall of the House of Usher," is a study of morbid character, but it is saved by the fact that this is viewed in its effect upon a healthy nature. The reader looks at everything through the mind of the imaginary narrator, so that the ultimate effect is that of an exhibition of the feelings of a wholesome nature brought into con- tact with madness ; although even so the ordinary reader is still repelled by the abnormal elements of the theme. There is in all the work of Poe a good deal that is fantastic and not a little that is affected. He is rarely entirely sincere and sane. He shared with Byron •an instinctive fondness for the role of a " blighted being," and a halo of ine- briety too often encircles his head ; yet at his best he moves us by the mysterious and incommuni- cable power of genius. Many of his tales, on the other hand, are mere mechanical tasks, and as such neither convincing nor permanent. There is a great deal of Poe which is not worth anybody's reading because he did not believe it, did not imagine it as real, when he wrote it. Other stories 22 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE of his illustrate the futility of self-deception on the part of the author. " Lygeia " Poe always announced as his masterpiece. He apparently per- suaded himself that he felt its turgid sentimental- ity, that he thrilled at its elaborately theatrical setting, and he flattered himself that he could cheat the world as he had cheated himself. Yet the reader is not fooled. Every man of judgment realizes that, however the author was able to de- ceive himself, " Lygeia " is rubbish, and sopho- moric rubbish at that. There has probably never before been a time which afforded so abundant illustrations of morbid work as to-day. We shall have occasion later to speak of Yerlaine, Zola, Ibsen, and the rest, with their prurient prose and putrescent poetry ; and here it is enough to note that the diseased and the morbid are by definition excluded from literature in the best sense of the word. Good art is not only sincere; it is human, and wholesome, and sound. n LITERAKY EXPRESSION So much, then, for what literature must express ; it is well now to examine for a little the manner of expression. To feel genuine emotion is not all that is required of a writer. Among artists can- not be reckoned One born with poet's heart in sad eclipse Because unmatched with poet's tongue ; Whose song impassioned struggles to his lips, Yet dies, alas ! unsung. He must be able to sing the song; to make the reader share the throbbing of his heart. All men feel ; the artist is he who can by the use of con- ventions impart his feelings to the world. The musician uses conventions of sound, the painter conventions of color, the sculptor conventions of form, and the writer must employ the means most artificial of all, the conventions of language. Here might be considered, if there were space, the whole subject of artistic technique ; but it is sufficient for our purposes to notice that the test of technical excellence is the completeness with which the means are adapted to the end sought. The crucial question in regard to artistic work- manship is : " Does it faithfully and fully convey 24 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE the emotion which is the essence of the work?" A work of art must make itself felt as well as in- tellectually understood ; it must reach the heart as well as the brain. If a picture, a statue, a piece of music, or a poem provokes your admiration without touching your sensibilities, there is some- thing radically wrong with the work — or with you. First of all, then, expression must be adequate. If it is slovenly, incomplete, unskillful, it fails to impart the emotion which is its purpose. We have all sat down seething with excitement and endeavored to get our feelings upon paper, only to discover that our command of ourselves and of technical means was not sufficient to allow us to phrase adequately that which yet we felt most sin- cerely. It is true that style is in a sense a sub- ordinate matter, but it is none the less an essential one. It is manifestly of little consequence to the world what one has to say if one cannot say it. We cannot be thrilled by the song which the dumb would sing had he but voice. Yet it is necessary to remember that although expression must be adequate, it must also be sub- ordinate. It is a means and not an end, and the least suspicion of its having been put first destroys our sense of the reality of the feeling it embodies. If an actress in moments of impassioned declama- tion is detected arranging her draperies, her art no longer carries conviction. Nobody feeling the heart - swelling words of Queen Katharine, for instance, could while speaking them be openly LITERARY EXPRESSION 25 concerned about the effective disposition oi her petticoats. The reader of too intricate and elab- orate verse, such as the French forms of triolet, rondeau, rondel, and so on, has an instinctive per- ception that a poet whose attention was taken up with the involved and artfully difficult versifica- tion could not have been experiencing any deep passion, no matter how strongly the verse protests that he has. Expression obviously artful instantly arouses suspicion that it has been wrought for its own sake only. Technical excellence which displays the clever- ness of the artist rather than imparts the emotion which is its object, defeats its own end. A book so elaborated that we feel that the author was ab- sorbed in perfection of expression rather than in what he had to express leaves us cold and un- moved, if it does not tire us. The messenger has I usurped the attention which belonged to the mes- " sage. It is not impossible that I shall offend some of you when I say that Walter Pater's " Marius the Epicurean " seems to me a typical example of this sort of book. The author has expended his energies in exquisite excesses of language ; he has refined his style until it has become artfully inani- mate. It is like one of the beautiful glass flowers in the Harvard Museum. It is not a living rose. It is no longer a message spoken to the heart of mankind ; it is a brilliant exercise in technique. Literature, then, is genuine emotion, adequately expressed. To be genuine it must come from the imagination ; and adequate expression is that 26 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE which in turn reaches the imagination. If it were not that the phrase seems forbiddingly cumber- some, we might, indeed, define literature as being such writings as are able to arouse emotion by an appeal to the imagination. A sensational story, what the English call a " penny dreadful "or a ^' shilling shocker " accord- ing to the cost of the bundle of cheap excitement, may be an appeal to the emotions, but it aims to act upon the senses or the nerves. Its endeavor is to work by the grossest and most palpable means. It is an assault, so to say, upon the perceptions. Books of this sort have nothing to do with imagi- nation, either in reader or writer. They would be ruled out by all the tests which we have given, since they are not sincere, not convincing, not con- sistent, not true to life. One step higher in the scale come romances of abounding fancy, of which " She " may serve as an example. They are clever feats of intellectual jugglery, and it is to the intellectual perceptions that they appeal. Not, it is true, to the intellect in its loftiest moods, but the understanding as dis- tinguished from the feeling. No reader is really moved by them. The ingenuity of the author amuses and absorbs the attention. The dexterity and unexpectedness of the tale excite and enter- tain. The pleasure experienced in reading these books is not far removed from that exjierienced in seeing a clever contortionist. To read them is like going to the circus, — a pleasant diversion, and one not without a certain importance to this over- LITERARY EXPRESSION 27 wrought generation. It is amusement, although not of a high grade. Do not suppose, however, that I am saying that a story cannot have an exciting plot and yet be literature. In the restricted sense in which these lectures take the term, I should say that " The Adventures of Captain Horn," an agreeable book which has been widely read of late, is not litera- ture ; and yet " Treasure Island," upon which per- haps to some extent the former was modeled, most certainly is literature. The difference is that while Stockton in " Captain Horn " has worked with clever ingenuity to entertain, Stevenson in " Treas- ure Island " so vividly imagined what he wrote that he has made his characters human, informed every page with genuine feeling, and produced a romance permanently vital. The plot of those su- perb masterpieces of adventure, the " D'Artagnan Romances," is as wild, perhaps as extravagant, as that of the marrow-curdling tales which make the fortunes of sensational papers ; but to the excite- ment of adventure is added that unification, that humanization, that perfection of imaginative real- ism which mark Dumas as a genius. The difference of effect between books which are not literature and those which are is that while these amuse, entertain, glance over the surface of the mind, those touch the deepest springs of being. They touch us aesthetically, it is true. The emo- tion aroused is impersonal, and thus removed from the keen thrill which is born of actual experiences ; but it depends upon the same passions, the same 28 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE characteristics, the same humanity, that underlie the joys and sorrows of real life. It is because we are capable of passion and of disappointment that we are moved by the love and anguish of Romeo and Juliet, of Francesca and Paolo. Our emotion is not identical with that with which the heart throbs in personal love and grief ; yet art which is genuine awakes emotion thoroughly genuine. Books of sensationalism and sentimentality may excite curiosity, or wonder, or amusement, or sham feeling ; but they must have at least some spark of sacred fire before they can arouse in the intelligent reader this inner throb of real feeling. The personal equation must be considered here. The same book must affect different readers dif- ferently. From the sentimental maid who weeps in the kitchen over " The Seventy Sorrows of Madelaine the Broken-hearted," to her master in his library, touched by the grief of King Lear, is indeed a far cry; and yet both may be deeply moved. It may be asked whether we have arrived at a standard which will enable us to judge be- tween them. The matter is perhaps to be cleared up some- what by a little common sense. It is not hard to decide whether the kitchen-maid in question has an imagination sufficiently well developed to bring her within the legitimate grounds of inquiry ; and the fiction which delights her rudimentary under- standing is easily ruled out. It is not so easy, however, to dispose of this point entirely. There is always a border-land concerning which doubts LITERARY EXPRESSION 29 and disagreements must continue to exist. In all matters connected with the feelings it is necessary to recognize the fact that the practical is not likely to accord fully with the theoretical. We define literature only to be brought face to face with the difficulty which is universal in art, the difficulty of degree. No book will answer, it may be, to a theoretical definition, no work conform completely to required conditions. The composition which is a masterpiece stands at one end of the list, and comes so near to the ideal that there is no doubt of its place. At the other end there is the rubbish, equally unquestioned in its worthlessness. The troublesome thing is to decide where between comes the dividing line above which is literature. We call a ring or a coin gold, knowing that it contains a mixture of alloy. The goldsmith may have a standard, and refuse the name gold to any mixture into which enters a given per cent of baser metal ; but in art this is impossible. Here each reader must decide for himself. Whether works which lie near the line are to be considered literature is a question to be decided individually. Each reader is justified in making his own deci- sion, provided only that he found it upon definite principles. It is largely a question what is one's own responsiveness to literature. There are those to whom Tolstoi's " War and Peace " is a work of greatness, while others fail to find it anything but a chaotic and unorganized note-book of a genius not self -responsible. " John Inglesant " appeals to many persons of excellent taste as a novel of 30 • THE STUDY OF LITERATURE permanent beauty, while to some it seems senti- mental and artificial. Mr. Lowell and others have regarded Sylvester Judd's " Margaret " as one of the classics of American fiction ; yet it has never appealed to the general public, and an eminent lit- erary man told me not long ago that he finds it dull. To these and to all other varying opinions ihere is but one thing to be said : Any man has a right to his judgment if it is founded upon the logi- cal application of definite principles. Any opinion which is sincere and based upon standards must be treated with respect, whether it is agreed with or not. It is difficult, on the other hand, to feel that there is any moral excuse for prejudices which are the result of individual whims rather than of deliberate judgment. An opinion should not be some burr caught up by the garments unawares; but a fruit carefully selected as the best on the tree. The fact is that the effort of forming an in- telligent judgment is more severe than most per- sons care to undertake unless absolutely forced to it. It sometimes seems as if the whole tendency of modern life were in the direction of cultivating mental dexterity until the need of also learning mental concentration is in danger of being over- looked. Men are trained to meet intellectual emer- gencies, but not to endure continued intellectual strain. The difficulty which is to be conquered by a sudden effort they are able to overcome, but when deliberation and continuous mental achieve- ment are required, the weakness of their training LITERARY EXPRESSION 31 is manifest. The men, and perhaps still more the women, of to-day are ready to decide upon the merits of a book in the twinkling of an eye ; and it is to be acknowledged that these snap judgments are reasonable far more often than could have been expected. When it comes, however, to hav- ing a reason for the faith that is in them, it is lamentable how many intelligent persons prove utterly incapable of fairly and logically examining literature ; and it must be conceded that there should be some other test by which to decide whether a book is to be included under the gra- cious name of literature than the dogmatic asser- tion ; " Well, I don't care what anybody says against it ; I like it ! " We have discussed the distinctions by which it may be decided what is to be considered litera- ture ; and, did space warrant, we might go on to examine the principles which determine the rank of work. They are of course largely to be in- ferred from what has been said already. The merit of literature will be chiefly dependent upon the; closeness with which it conforms to the rules which mark the nature of literature. The more fully genuine its emotion, the more adequate its ex- pression, the higher the scale in which a book is to be placed. The more sane and healthful, the more entirely in accord with the needs and springs of general human life, the greater the work. In- deed, beyond this there is little to say save that the nobility of intention, the ethical significance of 32 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE the emotion embodied, mark the worth and the rank of a composition. I have tried to define literature, and yet in the end my strongest feeling is that of the inadequacy of my definition. He would be but a lukewarm lover who was capable of framing a description which would appear to him to embody fully the perfections of his mistress ; and art is a mistress so beautiful, so high, so noble, that no phrases can fitly characterize her, no service can be wholly worthy of her. Life is full of disappointment, and pain, and bitterness, and that sense of futility in which all these evils are summed up ; and yet even were there no other alleviation, he who knows and truly loves literature finds here a sufiicient reason to be glad that he lives. Science may show man how to live ; art makes living worth his while. Existence to-day without literature would be a failure and a despair ; and if we cannot satisfacto- rily define our art, we at least are aware how it en- riches and ennobles the life of every human being who comes within the sphere of its wide and gra- cious influence. m THE STUDY OF LITERATUEE When it is clearly understood what literature is, there may still remain a good deal of vagueness in regard to the study of it. It is by no means sufficient for intellectual development that one have a misty general share in the conventional respect traditionally felt for such study. There should be a clear and accurate comprehension why the study of literature is worth the serious atten- tion of earnest men and women. It might at first thought seem that of this ques- tion no discussion is needed. It is generally as- sumed that the entire matter is sufficiently obvi- ous, and that this is all that there is to it. The obvious, however, is often the last to be perceived ; and such is the delusiveness of human nature that to call a thing too plain to need demonstration is often but a method of concealing inability to prove. Men are apt to fail to perceive what lies nearest to them, while to cover their blindness and ignorance they are ready to accept without rea- soning almost any assumption which comes well recommended. The demand for patent medicines, wide-spread as it is, is insignificant in comparison to the demand for ready-made opinions. Most 34 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE men accept the general belief, and do not trouble themselves to make it really theirs by examining the grounds upon which it is based. We all agree that it is well to study literature, it is probable; but it is to be feared that those of us who can say exactly why it is well do not form a majority. The word " study," it may be remarked in pass- ing, is not an entirely happy one in this connec- tion. It has, it is true, many delightful associa- tions, especially for those who have really learned how to study ; but it has, too, a certain doleful suggestiveness which calls up painful memories of childhood. It is apt to bring to mind bitter hours when some example in long division stood like an impassable wall between us and all happiness ; when complex fractions deprived life of all joy, or the future was hopelessly blurred by being seen through a mist of tears and irregular French verbs. The word *' study " is therefore likely to seem to indicate a mechanical process, full of weariness and vexation of spirit. This is actually true of no study which is worthy of the name ; and least of all is it true in connection with art. The word as applied to literature is not far from meaning in- telligent enjoyment ; it signifies not only apprehen- sion but comprehension ; it denotes not so much accumulation as assimilation ; it is not so much acquirement as ajipreciation. By the study of literature can be meant nothing pedantic, nothing formal, nothing artificial. I should like to call the subject of these talks " Ex- periencing Literature," if the verb could be re- THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 35 ceived in the same sense as in the old-fashioned phrase " experiencing religion." That is what I mean. The study of literature is neither less nor more than experiencing literature, — the taking it to heart and the getting to its heart. To most persons to study literature means no- thing more than to read. There is, it is true, a vague general notion that it is the reading of some particular class of books, not always over clearly defined. It is not popularly supposed that the reading of an ordinary newspaper is part of the study of literature ; while on the other hand there are few persons who can imagine that the perusal of Shakespeare, however casual, can be anything else. Since literary art is in the form of written works, reading is of course essential ; but by study we mean something more grave and more fruit- ful than the mere surface acquaintance with books, no matter how high in the scale of excellence these may be. The study of literature, in the true signification of the phrase, is that act by which the learner gets into the attitude of mind which enables him to enter into that creative thought which is the soul of every real book. It is easily possible, as every reader knows, to read without getting below the surface ; to take a certain amount of intellect- ual account of that which we skim ; to occupy with it the attention, and yet not to be at all in the mood which is indispensable for proper comprehen- sion. It is this which makes it possible for the young girl of the present day to read novels which 86 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE her more sophisticated brothers cannot look at "without blushing to see them in her hands — at least, we hope that it is this I We all have mo- ments when from mental weariness, indifference, indolence, or abstraction, we slide over the pages as a skater goes over the ice, never for a moment having so much as a glimpse of what is hidden be- neath the surface. This is not the thing about which we are talking. We mean by study the making our own all that is contained in the books which we read ; and not only all that is said, but still more all that is suggested ; all that is to be learned, but above everything all that is to be felt. The object of the study of literature is always a means and not an end, and yet in the development of the mind no means can fulfill its purpose which is not an enjoyment. Goethe has said : " Woe to tl;iat culture which points man always to an end, instead of making him happy by the way." No study is of any high value which is not a delight in itself; and equally, no study is of value which is pursued simply for itself. Every teacher knows how futile is work in which the pupil is not inter- ested, — in other words, which is not a pleasure to him. The mind finds delight in all genuine activ- ity and acquirement; and the student must take pleasure in his work or he is learning little. Some formal or superficial knowledge he may of course accumulate. The learning of the multiplication table is not to be set aside as useless because it is seldom accompanied by thrills of passionate en- joyment. There must be some drudgery in edu- THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 37 cation ; but at least what I have said certainly holds good in all that relates to the deeper and higher development of the mind. The study of literature, then, is both a duty and a delight ; a pleasure in itself and a help toward what is better. By it one approaches the compre- hension of those books which are to be ranked as works of art. By it one endeavors to fit himself to enter into communication with the great minds and the great imaginations of mankind. What we gain in this may be broadly classified as pleasure, social culture, and a knowledge of life. Any one of these terms might almost be made to include the other two, but the division here is convenient in discussion. Pleasure in its more obvious meaning is the most superficial, although the most evident, gain from art. In its simplest form this is mere amuse- ment and recreation. We read, we say, " to pass the time." There are in life hours which need to be beguiled ; times when we are unequal to the fa- tigue or the worry of original thought, or when some present reality is too painful to be faced. In these seasons we desire to be delivered from self, and the self-forgetfulness and the entertainment that we find in books are of unspeakable relief and value. This is of course a truism ; but it was j never before so insistently true as it is to-day. Life has become so busy, it is in a key so high, so nervously exhaustive, that the need of amuse- ment, of recreation which shall be a relief from the severe nervous and mental strain, has become 38 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE most pressing. The advance of science and civi- lization has involved mankind in a turmoil of mul- titudinous and absorbing interests from the pres- sure of which there seems to us no escape except in self-oblivion ; and the most obvious use of read- ing is to minister to this end. At the risk of being tedious it is necessary to remark in passing that herein lies a danger not to be passed over lightly. There is steadily increas- ing the tendency to treat literature as if it had no other function than to amuse. There is too much reading which is like opium-eating or dram-drink- ing. It is one thing to amuse one's self to live, and quite another to live to amuse one's self. It is universally conceded, I believe, that the intel- lect is higher than the body; and I cannot see why it does not follow that intellectual debauch- ery is more vicious than physical. Certainly it is difficult to see why the man who neglects his intel- lect while caring scrupulously for his body is on a higher moral plane than the man who, though he neglect or drug his body, does cultivate his mind. In an entirely legitimate fashion, however, books may be read simply for amusement ; and greatly is he to be pitied who is not able to lose himself in the enchantments of books. A physical cripple is hardly so sorrowful an object. Everybody knows the remark attributed to Talleyrand, who is said to have answered a man who boasted that he had never learned whist : " What a miserable old age you are preparing for yourself." A hundredfold is it true that he who does not early cultivate the THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 39 habit of reading is neglecting to prepare a resource for the days when he shall be past active life. While one is in the strength of youth or manhood it is possible to fill the mind with interests of activ- ity. As long as one is engaged in affairs directly the need of the solace of books is less evident and less pressing. It is difficult to think without pro- found pity of the aged man or woman shut off from all important participation in the work or the pleasure of the world, if the vicarious enjoyment of human interests through literature be also lacking. It is amazing how little this fact is realized or in- sisted upon. There is no lack of advice to the young to provide for the material comfort of their age, but it is to be doubted whether the counsel to prepare for their intellectual comfort is not the more important. Reading is the garden of joy to youth, but for age it is a house of refuge. The second object which one may have in read- ing is that of social cultivation. It is hardly necessary to remark how large a part books play in modern conversation, or how much one may add to one's conversational resources by judicious read- ing. It is true that not a little of the modern talk about books is of a quality to make the genuine lover of literature mingle a smile with a sigh. It is the result not of reading literature, so much as of reading about literature. It is said that Boston cul- ture is simply diluted extract of " Littell's Living Age ;" and in the same spirit it might be asserted that much modern talk about books is the extract 40 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE of newspaper condensations of prefaces. The tale is told of the thrifty paupers of a Scotch alms- house that the aristocrats among them who had friends to give them tea would steep and re-steep the precious herb, then dry the leaves, and sell them to the next grade of inmates. These in turn, after use, dried the much-boiled leaves once again, and sold them to the aged men to be ground up into a sort of false snuff with which the poor crea- tures managed to cheat into feeble semblance of joy their withered nostrils. I have in my time heard not a little so-called literary conversation which seemed to me to have gone to the last of these processes, and to be a very poor quality of thrice-steeped tea-leaf snuff! Indeed, it must be admitted that in general society book talk is often confined to chatter about books which had better not have been read, and to the retailing of second- hand opinions at that. The majority of mankind are as fond of getting their ideas as they do their household wares, at a bargain counter. It is per- haps better to do this than to go without ideas, but it is to be borne in mind that on the bargain counter one is sure to find only cheap or damaged wares. Real talk about books, however, the expression of genuine opinions about real literature, is one of the most delightful of social pleasures. It is at once an enjoyment and a stimulus. From it one gets mental poise, clearness and readiness of ideas, and mental breadth. It is so important an element in human intercourse that it is difficult to conceive I THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 41 of an ideal friendship into which it does not enter. There have been happy marriages between men and women lacking in cultivation, but no marriage relation can be so harmonious that it may not be enriched by a community of literary tastes. A wise old gentleman whom I once knew had what he called an infallible receipt for happy marriages : " Mutual love, a sense of humor, and a liking for the same books." Certainly with these a good deal else might be overlooked. Personally I have much sympathy with the man who is said to have claimed a divorce on the ground that his wife did not like Shakespeare and would read Ouida. It is a serious trial to find the person with whom one must live intimately incapable of intellectual talk. He who goes into general society at all is ex- pected to be able to keep up at least the appearance of talking about literature with some degree of in- telligence. This is an age in which the opportuni- ties for what may be called cosmopolitan knowledge are so general that it has come to be the tacit claim of any society worth the name that such know- ledge shall be possessed by all. I do not, of course, mean simply that acquaintance with foreign affairs which is to be obtained from the newspapers, even all wisdom as set forth in their vexingly voluminous Sunday editions. I mean that it is necessary to have with the thought of other countries, with their customs, and their habits of thought, that famil- iarity which is by most to be gained only by gen- eral reading. The multiplication of books and the modern habit of travel have made an acquaintance 42 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE with tlie temper of different peoples a social neces- sity almost absolute. To a great extent is it also true that modern so- ciety expects a knowledge of social conditions and gestheiic affairs in the past. This is not so much history, formally speaking, as it is the result of a certain familiarity with the ways, the habits of thought, the manners of bygone folk. Professor Barrett Wendell has an admirable phrase : " It is only in books that one can travel in time." What in the present state of society is expected from the accomplished man or woman is that he or she shall have traveled in time. He shall have gone back into the past in the same sense as far as temper of mind is concerned that one goes to Europe ; shall have observed from the point of view not of the dry historian only, but from that of the student of humanity in the broadest sense. It is the human- ness of dwellers in distant lands or in other times which most interests us ; and it is with this that he who would shine in social converse must become familiar. The position in which a man finds himself who in the company of educated men displays ignorance of what is important in the past is illustrated by a story told of Carlyle. At a dinner of the Royal Academy in London, Thackeray and Carlyle were guests, and at the table the talk among the artists around them turned upon Titian. " One fact about Titian," a painter said, " is his glorious coloring." " And his glorious drawing is another fact about Titian," put in a second. Then one added one THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 43 thing in praise and another another, until Carlyle interrupted them, to say with egotistic emphasis and deliberation : " And here sit I, a man made in the image of God, who knows nothing about Ti- tian, and who cares nothing about Titian ; — and that's another fact about Titian." But Thack- eray, who was sipping his claret and listening, paused and bowed gravely to his fellow -guest. " Pardon me," he said, " that is not a fact about Titian. It is a fact — and a very lamentable fact — about Thomas Carlyle." Attempts to carry off ignorance under the guise of indifference or supe- riority are common, but in the end nobody worth deceiving is misled by them. It is somewhat trite to compare the companion- ship of good books to that of intellectual persons, and yet the constant repetition of a truth does not make it false. To know mankind and to know one's self are the great shaping forces which mould character. It has too often been said to need to be insisted upon at any great length that literature may largely represent experience ; but it may fitly be added that in reading one is able to choose the experiences to which he will be exposed. In life we are often surrounded by what is base and igno- ble, but this need not happen to us in the library unless by our deliberate choice. Emerson aptly Go with mean people and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us, who will not let us sleep. 44 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE It so often happens that we are compelled in daily- life to encounter and to deal with mean people that our whole existence would be in great danger of becoming hopelessly sordid and mean were it not for the blessed company of great minds with whom we may hold closest communion through what they have written. One more point in regard to the social influence of reading should be mentioned. Social ease and aplomb can of course be gained in no way save by actual experience ; but apart from this there is nothing else so effective as familiarity with the best books. Sympathetic comprehension of litera- ture is the experience of life taken vicariously. It is living through the consciousness of others, and those, moreover, who are the cleverest and most far-reaching minds of all time. The mere man of books brought into contact with the real world is confused and helpless ; but when once the natural shyness and bewilderment have worn off, he is able to recall and to use the knowledge which he has acquired in the study, and rapidly adapts himself to any sphere that he may find himself in. I do not mean that a man may read himself into social grace and ease ; but surely any given man is at a very tangible advantage in society for having learned from books what society is. IV WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE In all that is said in the last chapter we have dealt only with the outward and accidental, barely- touching upon the really significant and deeper meanings of our subject. The third object which I named, the gaining a knowledge of life, tran- scends all others. The desire to fathom the meaning of life is the most constant and universal of human longings. It is practically impossible to conceive of conscious- ness separated from the wish to understand self and the significance of existence. This atom self- hood, sphered about by the infinite spaces of the universe, yearns to comprehend what and where it is. It sends its thought to the farthest star that watches the night, and thence speeds it down the unsounded void, to search unweariedly for the an- swer of the baffling, insistent riddle of life. What- ever man does or dreams, hopes or fears, loves or hates, suffers or enjoys, has behind it the eternal doubt, the question which man asks of the universe with passionate persistence, — the meaning of life. Most of all does man seek aid in solving this ab- sorbing mystery. Nothing else interests the human like the human. The slatternly women leaning 46 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE out of tenement-liouse windows and gossiping across squalid courts talk of their neighbors. The wisest philosopher studies the acts and the thoughts of men. In the long range between these extremes there is every grade of intelligence and cultivation ; and in each it is the doings, the thoughts, most of all the feelings, of mankind which elicit the keen- est interest. The motto of the Latin playwright is in reality the motto of the race : " Nothing human is indifferent to me." We are all intensely eager to know what are the possibilities of humanity. We seek knowledge of them as an heir questions searchingly concerning the extent of the inheritance which has fallen to him. Literature is the inventory of the heritage of humanity. Life is but a succession of emotions ; and the earnest mind burns with desire to learn what emotions are within its possibilities. The discoverer of an unsuspected capability of receiving delight, the realization of an unknown sensation, even of pain, increases by so much the extent of the possessions of the human being to whom he imparts it. As explorers in a new country tell one another of the springs upon which they have chanced, of the fertile meadows one has found, of the sterile rocks or the luscious jungle, so men tell one another of their fresh findings in emotion. The knowledge of life — this is the passionate quest of the whole race of men. All that most deeply concerns man, all that reaches most penetratingly to the roots of being, is recorded, so far as humanity has been able to WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 47 give to it expression, in art. Of all art, literature is perhaps the most universally intelligible ; or, if not that, it is at least the most positively intelli- gible. Our interest in life shows itself in a burn- ing curiosity to know what goes on in the minds of our friends ; to discover what others make put of existence, what they find in its possibilities, its limitations, its sorrows, and its delights. In vary- ing degrees, according to individual temperament, we pass life in an endeavor to discover and to share the feelings of other human beings. We explain our feelings, our motives ; we wonder whether they look to others as they do to us ; we speculate whether others have found a way to get from life more than we get ; and above all are we consciously or unconsciously eager to learn whether any other has contrived means of finding in life more vivid sensations, more vibrant emotions, more far-reach- ing feelings than those which we experience. It is in this insatiable curiosity that our deepest in- terest in literature lies. Books explain us to ourselves. They reveal to us capabilities in our nature before unsuspected. They make intelligible the meaning and signifi- cance of mental experiences. There are books the constant rereading of which presents itself to an imaginative man as a sort of moral duty, so great is the illumination which they throw upon the inner being. I could name works which I person- ally cannot leave long neglected without a feeling of conscious guilt. It is of books of this nature that Emerson says that they 48 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative, — books which are the work and the proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the world which they paint, that though one shuts them with meaner ones, he feels the exclusion from them to accuse his way of living. — Books. There are probably none of us who have lived in vital relations to literature who cannot remem- ber some book which has been an epoch in our lives. The times and the places when and where we read them stand out in memory as those of great mental crises. We recall the unforgettable night in which we sat until the cold gray dawn looked in at the window reading Lessing's "Na- than the Wise," the sunny slope where we experi- enced Madame de Gasparin's " Near and Heavenly Horizons," the winter twilight in the library when that most strenuous trumpet blast of all modern ethical poetry, " Childe Koland to the Dark Tower Came," first rang in the ears of the inner self. We all have these memories. There are books which must to us always be alive. They have spoken to us ; we have heard their very voices ; we know them in our heart of hearts. That desire for sympathy which is universal is another strong incentive to acquaintance with lit- erature. The' savage who is less miserable in fear or in suffering if he find a fellow whose living presence saves him from the awful sense of being alone is unconsciously moved by this desire. The WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 49 more fully the race is developed the more is this craving for human companionship and human ap- preciation conscious. We know how impossible it is ever completely to blend our consciousness for the smallest instant with that of any other human being. The nearest approach to this is the shar- ing with another some common feeling. There are blissful moments when some other is absorbed in the same emotion as that which we feel ; when we seem to be one with the heart and the mind of another creature because the same strong passion sways us both. These are the mountain-tops of existence. These are the times which stand out in our remembrance as those in which life has touched in seeming the divine impossible. It is of the greatest rarity, however, that we find, even in our closest friends, that comprehen- sion and delicate sympathy for which we long. Indeed, such is human egotism that it is all but impossible for any one so far to abandon his own personality as to enter fully into the more delicate and intangible feelings of his fellow. A friend is another self, according to the proverb, but it is apt to be himself and not yourself. To find sympathy which comes from a knowledge that our inmost emotions are shared we turn to books. Especially is this true in bereavement and in sorrow. The touch of a human hand, the wistful look in the eye of the friend who longs to help, or the mere pres- ence of some beautiful and responsive spirit, is the best solace where comfort is impossible ; but even the tenderest human presence may jar, while in 60 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE books there is a consolation and a tenderness un- hampered by the baffling sense of a consciousness still outside of our own no matter how strenuously it longs to be in perfect unity. I knew once a mother who had lost her only child, and who used to sit for hours pressing to her heart Plutarch's divinely tender letter to his wife on the death of his own little one. It was almost as if she felt her baby again in her arms, and the leather covers of the book were stained with tears consecrated and saving. Who could count the number to whom " In Memoriam " has carried comfort when living friends had no message ? The critical defects of that poem are not far to seek ; but it would ill be- come us to forget how many grief-laden hearts it has reached and touched. The book which lessens the pain of humanity is in so far higher than criti- cism. Josiah Quincy used in his old age to relate how his mother, left a young widow by the death of her husband within sight of the shores of America when on his return from a mission to England, found comfort in the soothing ministration of books : — She cultivated the memory of my father, even in my earliest childhood, by reading me passages from the poets, and obliging me to learn by heart and re- peat such as were best adapted to her own circum- stances and feelings. Among others the whole leave- taking of Hector and Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one of her favorite lessons. . . • Her imagination, probably, found consolation in the repetition of lines which brought to mind and seemed to typify her own great bereavement. WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 51 And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be, — A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's ad- dress and circumstances, she identified with her own sufferings, which seemed relieved by the tears my repe- tition of them drew from her. This comforting power of literature is one which need not perhaps have been enlarged upon so fully, but it is one which has to do with the most inti- mate and poignant relations of life. It is largely in virtue of the sympathy which it is possible to feel for books that from them we not only receive a knowledge of the capacities of human emotion, but we are given actual emotional experi- ence as well. For literature has a twofold office. It not only shows the possibilities of life, but it may make these possibilities realities. If art sim- ply showed us what might be without aiding us further, it would be but a banquet of Tantalus. We must have the substance as well as the shadow. We are born not only with a craving to know what emotions are the birthright of man, but with an instinctive desire to enter into that inheritance. We wish to be all that it is possible for men to be. The small boy who burns to be a pirate or a police- man when he grows up, is moved by the idea that to men of these somewhat analogous callings come a richness of adventure and a fullness of sensation which are not to be found in ordinary lives. The lad does not reason this out, of course ; but the instinctive desire for emotion speaks in him. We are bom with the ci'aving to know to the full the 62 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE emotions of the race. It is to few of us in modern civilized life that circumstances permit a widely extended experience in actual mental sensations. The commonplace actualities of every-day life show plain and dull beside the almost infinite possibili- ties of existence. The realization of the contrast makes not a few mortals unhappy and dissatis- fied ; but those who are wiser accept life as it is, and turn to art for the gratification of the in- stinctive craving which is unsatisfied by outward reality. It may be that fate has condemned us to the most humdrum of existences. We trade or we teach or are lawyers or housekeepers, doctors or nurses, or the curse of the gods has fallen unon us and we are condemned to the dreariness of a life of pleasure-seeking. We cannot of ourselves know the delights of the free outlaw's life under " the greene shaw," — the chase of the deer, the twang of the bowstring, the song of the minstrel, the relish of venison pasty and humming nut-brown ale, are not for us in the flesh. If we go into the library, however, take down that volume with the cover of worn brown leather, and give up the ima- gination to the guidance of the author, all these things become possible to the inner sense. We become aware of the reek of the woodland fire, the smell of the venison roasting on spits of ash-wood, the chatter of deep manly voices, the cheery sound of the bugle-horn afar, the misty green light of the forest, the soft sinking feel of the moss upon which in imagination we have flung ourselves WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 53 down, while Will Scarlet teases Friar Tuck yon- der, and Allan-a-Dale touches light wandering chords on his harp. — Ah, where are the four walls of the library, where is the dull round of cares and trifles which involve us day by day? We are in merry Sherwood with bold Robin Hood, and we know what there was felt and lived. We cannot in outward experience know how a great and generous heart must feel, broken by ingratitude and unfaith, deceived and tortured through its noblest qualities, outraged in its high- est love. The poet says to us : " Come with me ; and through the power of the imagination, talis- man more potent than the ring of Solomon, we will enter the heart of Othello, and with him suffer this agony. We will endure the torture, since behind it is the exquisite delight of appeas- ing that insatiable thirst for a share in human emotions. Or would you taste the passion of young and ardent hearts, their woe at parting, and their resolved devotion which death itseK cannot abate ? We will be one with Romeo and one with Juliet." Thus, if we will, we may go with him through the entire range of mortal joys and sor- rows. We live with a fullness of living beside which, it may be, our ordinary existence is flat and pale. We find the real life, the life of the imagination; and we recognize that this is after all more vital than our concern over the price of stocks, our petty bother about the invitation to the Hightops' ball on the twenty-fourth, or the silly pang of brief jealousy which we experienced 64 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE when we heard that Jack Scribbler's sonnet was to appear in the next number of the magazine which had just returned our own poem "with thanks." The littlenesses of the daily round slip out of sight before the nobility of the life possible in the imagination. It is not necessary to multiply examples of the pleasures possible through the imagination. Every reader knows how varied and how enchanting they are. To enter into them is in so far to fulfill the possibilities of life. The knowledge which is ob- tained through books is not the same, it is true, as that which comes from actual doing and enduring. Perhaps if the imagination were sufficiently devel- oped there would be little difference. There have been men who have been hardly able to distinguish between what they experienced in outward life and what belonged solely to the inner existence. Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats made no great or sharply defined distinction between the things which were true in fact and those that were true in imagination. To Blake the events of life were those which he knew through imagination, while what happened in ordinary, every-day exis- tence he regarded as the accidental and the non- essential. It will probably be thought, however, that those who live most abundantly are not likely to feel the need of testing existence and tasting emotions through the medium of letters. The pirate, when decks are red and smoke of powder is in the air, is not likely to retire to his cabin for a session of WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 55 quiet and delightful reading ; the lover may peruse sentimental ballads or make them, but on the whole everything else is subordinate to the romance he is living. It is when his lady-love keeps him at a distance that he has time for verse ; not when she graciously allows him near. It is told of Dar- win that his absorption in science destroyed not only his love of Shakespeare but even his power of enjoying music. The actual interests of life were so vivid that the artistic sense was numbed. The imagination exhausted itself in exploring the un- known world of scientific knowledge. It is to be noted that boys who go deeply into college sports, especially if they are on the " teams," are likely to become so absorbed in the sporting excitement that literature appears to them flat and tame. The general rule is that he who lives in stimulating and absorbing realities is thereby likely to be in- clined to care less for literature. It is to be remembered, however, that individual experience is apt to be narrow, and that it may be positively trivial and still engross the mind. That one is completely given up to affairs does not necessarily prove these affairs to be noble. It is generally agreed, too, that the mind is more elas- tic which is reached and developed by literature; and that even the scientist is likely to do better work for having ennobled his perceptions by con- tact with the thoughts of master spirits. Before Darwin was able to advance so far in science as to have no room left for art, he had trained his faculties by the best literature. At least it is time 56 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE enough to give up books when life has become so full of action as to leave no room for them. This happens to few, and even those of whom it is true cannot afford to do without literature as an agent in the development and shaping of character. The good which we gain from the experiences of life we call insight. No man or woman ever loved without thereby gaining insight into what life really is. No man has stood smoke-stained and blood-spattered in the midst of battle, caught away out of self in an ecstasy of daring, without thereby learning hitherto undreamed-of possibili- ties in existence. Indeed this is true of the small- est incident. Character is the result of experience upon temperament, as ripple-marks are the result of the coming together of sand and wave. In life, however, we are generally more slow to learn the lessons from events than from books. The author of genius has the art so to arrange and present his truths as to impress them upon the reader. The impressions of events remain with us, but it is not easy for ordinary mortals so to realize their meaning and so to phrase it that it shall remain permanent and clear in the mind. The mental vision is clouded, moreover, by the personal ele- ment. We are seldom able to be perfectly frank with ourselves. Self is ever the apologist for self. Knowledge without self-honesty is as a torch with- out flame ; yet of all the moral graces self -honesty is perhaps the most difficult to acquire. In its acquirement is literature of the highest value. A man can become acquainted with his spiritual face WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 57 as with his bodily countenance only by its reflec- tion. Literature is the mirror in which the soul learns to recognize its own lineaments. Above all these personal reasons which make literature worthy of the serious attention of ear- nest men and women is the great fact that upon the proper development and the proper understanding of it depend largely the advancement and the wise ordering of civilization. Stevenson spoke words of wisdom when he said : — One thing you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics, — namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by the difiicult art of literature, and according to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and fullness of his intercourse with other men. In a fine passage in a little-known pamphlet, James Hannay touches upon the relation of literature to life and to the practical issues of society : — A notion is abroad that that only is "practical " which can be measured or eaten. Show us its net result in marketable form, the people say, and we will recognize it! But what if there be something prior to all such "net results," something higher than it? For example, the writing of an old Hebrew Prophet was by no manner of means "practical " in his own times! The supply of figs to the Judean markets, the price of oil in the synagogue-lamps, did not fluctuate with the breath of those inspired songs ! But in due time the prophet dies, stoned, perhaps, % . . and in the course of ages, his words do have a 68 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE "practical " result by acting on the minds of nations. ... In England what has not happened from the fact that the Bible was translated ? We have seen the Puritans — we know what we owe to them — what the world owes to them! A dozen or two of earnest men two centuries ago were stirred to the depths of their souls by the visions of earnest men many centuries before that ; do you not see that the circumstance has its practical influence in the cotton- markets of America at this hour ? — Quoted in Espi- nasse's Literary Recollections. It is impossible to separate the influences of lit- erature from the growth of society and of civili- zation. It is because of the reaching of the im- agination into the unknown vast which incloses man that life is what it is. The order that is given to butcher or baker or candlestick-maker is modi- fied by the fact that Homer and Dante and Shake- speare sang ; that the prophets and the poets and the men of imagination of whatever time and race have made thought and feeling what they are. " The world of imagination," Blake wrote, " is the world of eternity." Whatever of permanent inter- est and value man has achieved he has reached through this divine faculty, and it is only when man learns to know and to enter the world of im- agination that he comes into actual contact with the vital and the fundamental in human life. Easily abused, like all the best gifts of the gods, art remains the noblest and the most enduring power at work in civilization ; and literature is its most direct embodiment. To it we go when we would leave behind the sordid, the mean, and the WHY WE STUDY LITERATURE 59 belittling. When we would enter into our birth- right, when we remember that instead of being mere creatures of the dust we are the heirs of the ages, then it is through books that we find and possess the treasures of the race. FALSE METHODS The most common intellectual difficulty is not that of the lack of ideas, but that of vagueness of ideas. Most persons of moderately good education have plenty of thoughts such as they are, but there is a nebulous quality about these which renders them of little use in reasoning. This makes it necessary to define what is meant by the Study of Literature, as in the first place it was necessary to define literature itself. Many have a formless impression that it is something done with books, a sort of mysterious rite known only to the initiated, and probably a good deal like the mysteries of secret societies, — more of a theory than an actu- ality. Others, who are more confident of their powers of accurate thinking, have decided that the phrase is merely a high-sounding name for any reading which is not agreeable, but which is recom- mended by text-books. Some take it to be getting over all the books possible, good, bad, and indif- ferent ; while still others suppose it to be reading about books or their authors. There are plenty of ideas as to what the study of literature is, but the very diversity of opinion proves that at least a great many of these must be erroneous. FALSE METHODS 61 In the first place the study of literature is not the mere reading of books. Going on a sort of Cook's tour through literature, checking off on lists what one has read, may be amusing to simple souls, but beyond that it means little and effects little. As the question to be asked in regard to a tourist is how intelligently and how observantly he has traveled, so the first consideration in regard to a reader is how he reads. The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. By some sort of a vicious perversion, the old saw that he who runs may read seems to have been transposed to " He who reads must run." In other words there is too often an as- sumption that the intellectual distinction of an individual is to be estimated by the rapidity with which he is able to hurry through the volumes he handles. Intellectual assimilation takes time. The mind is not to be enriched as a coal barge is loaded. Whatever is precious in a cargo is taken carefully on board and carefully placed. Whatever is deli- cate and fine must be received delicately, and its place in the mind thoughtfully assigned. One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience with which anything is regarded which is not to be taken in at a glance. The modern reader is apt to insist that a book shall be like a theatre-poster. He must be able to take it all in with a look as he goes past it on a wheel, and if he cannot he declares that it is obscure. W. M. Himt said, with 62 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE bitter wisdom: "As print grows cheap, thinkers grow scarce." The enormous increase of books has bred a race of readers who seem to feel that the object of reading is not to read but to have read ; not to enjoy and assimilate, but to have turned over the greatest possible number of au- thors. This idea of the study of literature is as if one selected as the highest social ideal the after- noon tea, where the visitor is presented to number- less strangers and has. an opportunity of conversing rationally with nobody. A class of self-styled students of literature far more pernicious than even the record-breaking readers is that of the gossip-mongers. These are they who gratify an innate fondness of gossip and scandal under the pretext of seeking culture, and who feed an impertinent curiosity in the name of a noble pursuit. They read innumerable volumes filled with the more or less spicy details of authors ; they perhaps visit the spots where the geniuses of the world lived and worked. They peruse eagerly every scrap of private letters, journals, and other personal matter which is available. For them are dragged to light all the imperfect manuscripts which famous novelists have forgotten to burn. For them was perpetrated the infamy of the pub- lication of the correspondence of Keats with Miss Brawne ; to them Mrs. Stowe appealed in her foul book about Byron, which should have been burned by the common hangman. It is they who buy the newspaper descriptions of the back bedroom of the popular novelist and the accounts of the mis- FALSE METHODS 63 understanding between the poet and his washer^ woman. They scent scandal as swine scent truf- fles, and degrade the noble name of literature by making it an excuse for their petty vulgarity. The race is by no means a new one. Milton complained of it in the early days of the church, when, he says : — With less fervency was studied what St. Paul or St. John had written than was listened to one that could say : " Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited," and, " O happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought a miracle." Schopenhauer, too, has his indignant protest against this class : — Petrarch's house in Arqua, Tasso's supposed prison in Ferrara, Shakespeare's house in Stratford, Goethe's house in Weimar, with its furniture, Kant's old hat, the autographs of great men, — these things are gaped at with interest and awe by many who have never read their works. All this is of course a matter of personal vanity. Small souls pride themselves upon having these things, upon knowing intimate details of the lives of prominent persons. They endeavor thus to at- tach themselves to genius, as burrs cling to the mane of a lion. The imagination has nothing to do with it ; there is in it no love of literature. It is vanity pure and simple, a common vulgar van- ity which substitutes self-advertisement and gossip- mongering for respect and appreciation. Who 64 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE can have tolerance for the man whose proudest boast is that he was in a crowd presented to some poet whose books he never read; for the woman who claims attention on the ground that she has from her seamstress heard particulars of the do- mestic infelicities of a great novelist ; or for the gossip of either sex who takes pride in knowing about famous folk trifles which are nobody's busi- ness but their own ? A good many text-books encourage this folly, and there are not a few writers who pass their useless days in grubbing in the dust-heaps of the past to discover the unessential and unmeaning incidents in the lives of bygone worthies. They put on airs of vast superiority over mortals who scorn their ways and words ; they have only pity- ing contempt for readers who suppose that the works of an author are what the world should be concerned with instead of his grocery bills and the dust on his library table. Such meddlers have no more to do with literature than the spider on the eaves of kings' houses has to do with affairs of state. It is not that all curiosity about famous men is unwholesome or impertinent. The desire to know about those whose work has touched us is natural and not necessarily objectionable. It is outside of the study of literature, save in so far as it now and then — less often, I believe, than is usually assumed — may help us to understand what an author has written ; yet within proper limits it is to be indulged in, just as we aU indulge now and FALSE METHODS 65 then in harmless gossip concerning our fellows. It is almost sure to be a hindrance rather than a help in the study of literature if it goes much be- yond the knowledge of those circumstances in the life of an author which have directly affected what he has written. There are few facts in literary history for which we have so great reason to be devoutly thankful as that so little is known con- cerning the life of the greatest of poets. We are able to read Shakespeare with little or no inter- ruption in the way of detail about his private affairs, and for this every lover of Shakespeare's poetry should be grateful. The study of literature, it must be recognized farther, is not the study of the history of lit- erature. The development of what are termed " schools " of literature ; the change in fashions of expression ; the modifications in verse-forms and the growth and decay of this or that phase of popular taste in books, are all matters of interest in a way. They are not of great value, as a rule, yet they will often help the reader to a somewhat quicker appreciation of the force and intention of literary forms. It is necessary to have at least a general idea of the course of literary and intellect tual growth through the centuries in order to ap. preciate and comprehend literature, — the point to be kept in mind being that this is a means and not in itself an end. It is necessary, for instance^ for the student to toil painfully across the wastes of print produced in the eighteenth century, wherein there is little really great save the works 66 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE of Fielding ; and where the reader has to endure a host of tedious books in order properly to appre- ciate the manly tenderness of Steele, the boyishly spontaneous realism of Defoe, the kindly humanity of Goldsmith, and the frail, exquisite pipe of Col- lins. The rest of the eighteenth century authors most of us read chiefly as a part of the mechanics of education. We could hardly get on intelli- gently without a knowledge of the polished prim- ness of Addison, genius of respectability ; the vit- riolic venom of Swift, genius of malignity; the spiteful perfection of Pope, genius of artificiality ; or the interminable attitudinizing of Richardson, genius of sentimentality. These authors we read quite as much as helps in understanding others as for their own sake. We do not always have the courage to acknowledge it, but these men do not often touch our emotions, even though the page be that of Swift, so much the greatest of them. We examine the growth of the romantic spirit through the unpoetic days between the death of Dry den and the coming of Blake and Coleridge and Wordsworth ; and from such examination of the history of literature we are better enabled to form standards for the actual estimate of literature itself. There is a wide and essential difference between really entering into literature and reading what somebody else has been pleased to say of it, no matter how wise and appreciative this may be. Of course the genuine student has small sympathy with those demoralizing flippancies about books , FALSE METHODS 67 which are just now so common in the guise of smart essays upon authors or their works ; those papers in which adroit literary hacks write about books as the things with which they have meddled most. The man who reads for himself and thinks for himself realizes that these essayists are the gypsy-moths of literature, living upon it and at the same time doing their best to destroy it ; and that the reading of these petty imitations of criti- cism is about as intellectual as sitting down in the nursery to a game of " Authors." Even the reading of good and valuable papers is not the study of literature in the best sense. There is much of profit in such admirable essays as those, for instance, of Lowell, of John Morley, or of Leslie Stephen. Excellent and often inspir- ing as these may be, however, it is not to be for- gotten that as criticisms their worth lies chiefly in the incitement which they give to go to the foun- tain-head. The really fine essay upon a master- piece is at its best an eloquent presentment of the delights and benefits which the essayist has received from the work of genius ; it shows the possibilities and the worth within the reach of all. Criticisms are easily abused. We are misusing the most sym- pathetic interpretation when we receive it dogmat- ically. In so far as they make us see what is high and fine, they are of value ; in so far as we depend upon the perceptions of the critic instead of our own, they are likely to be a hindrance. It is easier to think that we perceive than it is really to see ; but it is weU to remember that a man may be plas- 68 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE tered from head to feet with the opinions of others, and yet have no more genuine ideas of his own than has a bill-board because it is covered with posters. Genuine emotion is born of genuine con- viction. A reader is really touched by a work of art only as he enters into it and comprehends it sympathetically. Another may point the way, but he must travel it for himself. Reading an imagi- native work is like wooing a maiden. Another may give the introduction, but for real acquaint- ance and all effective love-making the suitor must depend upon himself if he would be well sped. Critics may tell us what they admire, but the vital question is what we in all truth and sincerity ad- mire and appreciate ourselves. VI METHODS OF STUDY We have spoken of what the study of literature ;s not, but negations do not define. It is necessary to look at the affirmative side of the matter. And arst it is well to remark that what we are discuss- ing is the examination of literature, — literature, that is, in the sense to which we have limited the term by definition : " The adequate expression of genuine emotion." It is not intended to include trash, whether that present itself as undisguised rubbish or whether it mask under high-sounding names of Symbolism, Impressionism, Realism, or any other affected nomenclature whatever. It has never been found necessary to excuse the existence of the masterpieces of literature by a labored lit- erary theory or a catchpenny classification. It is generally safe to suspect the book which must be defended by a formula and the writers who insist that they are the founders of a school. There is but one school of art — the imaginative. " But," it may be objected, " in an age when the books of the world are numbered by millions, when it is impossible for any reader to examine per- sonally more than an insignificant portion even of those thrust upon his notice, how is the learner to 70 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE judge what are worthy of his attention? To this it is to be answered that there are works enough universally approved to keep the readiest reader more than busy through the span of the longest human life. We shall have occasion later to speak of especial authors and of especial books. Here it is enough to say that certainly at the start the student must be content to accept the verdict of those who are capable of judging for him. Herein lies one of the chief benefits to be derived from critics and essayists. As the learner advances, he will find that as his taste and appreciation advance with them will develop an instinct of choice. In the end he should be able almost at a glance to judge rightly whether a book is worthy of atten- tion. In the meanwhile he need not go astray if he follow the lead of trustworthy experts. In accepting the opinions of others it is of course proper to use some caution, and above all things it is important to be guided by common sense. The market is full of quack mental as well as of quack physical nostrums. There is a large and enterprising body of publishers who seem per- suaded that they have reduced all literature to a practical industrial basis by furnishing patent outr sides for newspapers and patent insides for aspir- ing minds. In these days one becomes intellectual by prescription, and it is impossible to tell how soon will be advertised the device of inoculation against illiteracy. Common sense and a sense of humor save one from many dangers, and it is well to let both have full play. METHODS OF STUDY 71 I have spoken earlier in these talks of the pleas- ure of literary study. One fundamental principle in the selection of books is that it is idle to read what is not enjoyed. For special information one may read that which is not attractive save as it serves the purpose of the moment ; but in all read- ing which is of permanent value for itself, enjoy- ment is a prime essential. Heading which is not a pleasure is a barren mistake. The first duty of the student toward literature and toward himself is the same, — enjoyment. Either take pleasure in a work of art or let it alone. It is idle to force the mind to attend to works which it does not find pleasurable, and yet it is necessary to read books which are approved as the masterpieces of literature. Here is a seeming con- tradiction ; but it must be remembered that it is possible to arouse the mind to interest. The books which are really worth attention will surely attract and hold if they are once properly approached and apprehended. If a mind is indolent, if it is able to enjoy only the marshmallows and chocolate car- amels of literature, it is not to be fed solely on literary sweetmeats. Whatever is read should be enjoyed, but it by no means follows that whatever can be enjoyed should be read. It is possible to cultivate the habit of enjoying what is good, what is vital, as it is easy to sink into the stupid and slipshod way of caring for nothing which calls for mental exertion. It requires training and purpose. The love of the best in art is possessed as a gift of nature by only a few, and the rest of us must 72 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE labor for it. The full appreciation of the work of a master-mind comes to no one without effort. The reward of the student of literature is great, but his labor also is great. Literature is not like an empty- public square, which even a blind beggar may cross almost unconsciously. It more resembles an en- chanted castle beset with spell-infested forests and ghoul-haunted mountains ; a place into which only that knight may enter who is willing to fight his way through dangers and difficulties manifold ; yet a place, too, of infinite riches and joys beyond the imaginings of dull souls. It is a popular fallacy that art is to be appreci- ated without especial education. Common feeling holds that the reader, like the poet, is born and not made. It is generally assumed that one is en- dowed by nature with an appreciation of art as one is born with a pug nose. The only element of truth in this is the fact that all human powers are modified by the personal equation. One is en- dowed at birth with perceptions fine and keen, while another lacks them ; but no matter what one's nat- ural powers, there must be cultivation. This culti- vation costs care, labor, and patience. It is, it is true, labor which is in itself delightful, and one might easily do worse than to follow it for itself without thought of other end ; but it is still labor, and labor strenuous and long enduring. It is first necessary, then, to make an endeavor to become interested in whatever it has seemed worth while to read. The student should try ear- nestly to discover wherein others have found it J METHODS OF STUDY 73 good. Every reader is at liberty to like or to dis- like even a masterpiece ; but he is not in a position even to have an opinion of it until he appreciates why it has been admired. He must set himself to realize not what is bad in a book, but what is good. The common theory that the critical faculties are best developed by training the mind to detect short- comings is as vicious as it is false. Any carper can find the faults in a great work ; it is only the enlightened who can discover all its merits. It will seldom happen that a sincere effort to appreciate a good book will leave the reader uninterested. If it does, it is generally safe to conclude that the mind is not ready for this particular work. There must be degrees of development ; and the same literature is not adapted to all stages. If you cannot honestly enjoy a thing you are from one cause or another in no condition to read it. Either the time is not ripe or it has no message for your especial temperament. To force yourself to read what does not please you is like forcing yourseK to eat that for which you have no appetite. There may be some nourishment in one case as in the other, but there is far more likely to be indigestion. An essential condition of profitable reading is that it shall be intelligent. The extent to which some persons can go on reading without having any clear idea of what they read is stupefyingly amaz- ing ! You may any day talk in society with per- sons who have gone through exhaustive courses of reading, yet who from them have no more got real ideas than a painted bee would get honey from a 74 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE painted flower. Fortunately ordinary mortals are not so bad as this ; but is there one of us who is not conscious of having tobogganed down many and many a page without pausing thoroughly to seize and master a single thought by the way ? It is well to make in the mind a sharp distinction between apprehending and comprehending. The difference is that between sighting and bagging your game. To run hastily along through a book, catching sight of the meaning of the author, get- ting a general notion of what he would convey, — casually apprehending his work, — is one thing ; it is quite another to enter fully into the thoughts and emotions embodied, to make them yours by thorough appreciation, — in a word to comprehend. The trouble which Gibbon says he took to get the most out of what he read must strike ordinary readers with amazement : — After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had fin- ished the task of self-examination ; till I had resolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some particular chapter ; I was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock ; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, I was some- times armed by the opposition, of our ideas. It often happens that the average person does not read with sufficient deliberation even to appre- hend what is plainly said. If there be a succession of particulars, for instance, it is only the excep- tional reader who takes the time to comprehend METHODS OF STUDY 75 fully each in turn. Suppose the passage to be the lines in the " Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni : " — Your stren^h, your speed, your fury, and your joy, Unceasing thunder, and eternal foam. The ordinary student gets a general and probably a vague impression of cataracts, dashing down from the glacier-heaped hills ; and that is the whole of it. A poet does not put in a succession of words like this merely to fill out his line. Coleridge in writing undoubtedly realized the torrent so fully in his imagination that it was as if he were behold- ing it. " What strength ! " was his first thought. *' What speed," was the next. " What fury ; yet, too, what joy ! " Then the ideas of that fury and that joy made it seem to him as if the noise of the waters was the voice in which these emotions were embodied, and as if the unceasing thunder were a sentient cry ; while the eternal foam was the visi- ble sign of the mighty passions of the " five wild torrents, fiercely glad." In the dirge in " Cymbeline," Shakespeare writes : — Fear no more the frown o' the great. Thou art past the tyrant's stroke ; Care no more to clothe and eat ; To thee the reed is as the oak ; The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. As you read, do you comprehend the exquisite propriety of the succession of the ideas ? Death has removed Fidele from the possibility of misfor- 76 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE tune ; even the lords of the world can trouble no longer. Nay, more ; it has done away with all need of care for the sordid details of every-day life, food and raiment. All that earth holds is now alike indifferent to the dead ; the pale, wind- shaken reed is neither more nor less important than the steadfast and enduring oak. And to this, the thought runs on, must come even the mighty, the sceptred ones of earth. Not learning, which is mightier than temporal power, can save from this ; not physic itself, of which the mission is to fight with death, can in the end escape the uni- versal doom. All follow this, and come to dust. ■I Hurried over as a catalogue, to take one example more, how dull is the following from Marlowe's "Jew of Malta; " but how sumptuous it becomes when the reader gloats over the name of each jewel as would do the Jew who is speaking : — The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks Without control can pick his riches up, And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones, Receive them free, and sell them by the weight * Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, And seld-seen costly stones of so great price As one of them indifferently rated, And of a carat of this quantity. May serve, in peril of calamity. To ransom great kings from captivity. I have not much sympathy with the trick oi reading into an author all sorts of far-fetched METHODS OF STUDY 11 meanings of which he can never have dreamed; but, as it is only by observing these niceties of language that a writer is able to convey delicate shades of thought and feeling, so it is only by ap preciation of them that the reader is able to grasp completely the intention which lies wrapped in the verbal form. To read intelligibly, it is often necessary to know something of the conditions under which a thing was written. There are allusions to the history of the time or to contemporary events which would be meaningless to one ignorant of the world in which the author lived. To see any point to the fiery and misplaced passage in " Lycidas " in which Milton denounces the hireling priesthood and the ecclesiastic evils of his day, one must un- derstand something of theological politics. We are aided in the comprehension of certain passages in the plays of Shakespeare by familiarity with the conditions of the Elizabethan stage and of the court intrigues. In so far it is sometimes an ad- vantage to know the personal history of a writer, and the political and social details of his time. For the most part the portions which require elab- orate explanation are not of permanent interest or at least not of great importance. The intelligent reader, however, will not wish to be tripped up by passages which he cannot understand, and will therefore be likely to inform himself at least suffi- ciently to clear up these. Any reader, moreover, must to some extent know the life and customs of the people among 78 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE whom a work is produced. To one who failed to appreciate wherein the daily existence of the ancient Greeks differed from that of moderns, Homer would hardly be intelligible. It would be idle to read Dante imder the impression that the Italy of his time was that of to-day ; or to under- take Chaucer without knowing, at least in a gen- eral way, how his England was other than that of our own time. The force of language at a given epoch, the allusions to contemporary events, the habits of thought and custom must be understood by him who would read comprehendingiy. When all is said there will still remain much that must depend upon individual experience. If one reads in Lowell : — And there the fount rises ; . . . No dew-drop is stiller In its lupin-leaf setting Than this water moss-hounded ; one cannot have a clear and lively idea of what is meant who has not actually seen a furry lupin-leaf, held up like a green, hairy hand, with its dew- drop, round as a pearl. The context, of course, gives a general impression of what the poet in- tended, but unless experience has given the reader this bit of nature-lore, the color and vitality of the passage are greatly lessened. One of the priceless advantages to be gained from a habit of careful reading is the consciousness of the significance of small things, and in consequence the habit of ob- serving them carefully. When we have read the bit just quoted, for instance, we are sure to perceive METHODS OF STUDY 79 the beauty of the lupin-leaf with its dew-pearl if it come in our way. The attention becomes acute, and that which would otherwise pass unregarded becomes a source of pleasure. The most sure way to enrich life is to learn to appreciate trifles. There is a word of warning which should here be spoken to the over-conscientious student. The desire of doing well may lead to overdoing. The student, in his anxiety to accomplish his full duty by separate words, often lets himself become ab- sorbed in them. He drops unconsciously from the study of literature into the study of philology. There have been hundreds of painfully learned men who have employed the whole of their mis- guided lives in encumbering noble books with philological excrescences. I do not wish to speak disrespectfully of the indefatigable clan character- ized by Cowper as Philologists, who chast; A panting- syllable through time and space ; Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece and into Noah's ark. These gentlemen are extremely useful in their way and place ; but the study of philology is not the study of literature. It is at best one of its humble bond-slaves. A philologist may be minutely ac- quainted with every twig in the family-tree of each obsolete word in the entire range of Elizabethan literature, and yet be as darkly and as completely ignorant of that glorious world of poetry as the stokers in an ocean steamer are of the beauty of the sunset seen from the deck. It is often neces- 80 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE sary to know the derivation of a term, and perhaps something of its history, in order to appreciate its force in a particular usage ; but to go through a book merely to pick out examples for philologic research is like picking to pieces a mosaic to ex- amine the separate bits of glass. While, moreover, attention to the force and value of details is insisted upon, it must never be for- gotten that the whole is of more value than any or all of its parts. The reader must strive to receive the effect of a book not only bit by bit, and page by page, and chapter by chapter, but as a book. There should be in the mind a complete and ample conception of it as a unit. It is not enough to appreciate the best passages individually. The work is not ours until it exists in the mind as a beautiful whole, as single and unbroken as one of those Japanese crystal globes which look like spheres of living water. He who knows the worth and beauty of passages is like an explorer. He is neither a conqueror nor a ruler of the territory he has seen until it is his in its entirety. I believe that to comparatively few readers does it occur to make deliberate and conscious effort to realize works as wholes. The impression which a book leaves in the thought is of course in some sense a result of what the book is as a unit ; but this is seldom sharply clear and vivid. The greatest works naturally give the most complete impression, and the power of producing an effect as a whole is one of the tests of art. The writer of genius is able so to choose what is significant, and so to METHODS OF STUDY 81 arrange his material that the appreciative reader cannot fail to receive some one grand and domi- nating impression. It is hardly possible, for in- stance, for any intelligent person to fail to feel the cumulative passion of " King Lear." The calami- ties which come upon the old man connect them- selves in the mind of the reader so closely with one central idea that it is rather difficult to escape from the dominant idea than difficult to find it. In " Hamlet," on the other hand, it is by no means easy to gain any complete and adequate grasp of the play as a unit without careful and intimate study. It is, moreover, not sure that one has gained a full conception of a work as a whole be- cause one has an impression even so strong as that which must come to any receptive reader of " King Lear " or " Othello." To be profoundly touched by the story is possible without so fully holding the tragedy comprehendingly in the mind that its poignant meaning kindles the whole imagination. We have not assimilated that from which we have received merely fragmentary impressions. The ap- preciative reading of a really great book is a pro- found emotional experience. Individual portions and notable passages are at best but as incidents of which the real significance is to be perceived only in the light of the whole. The power of grasping a work of art as a unit is one which should be deliberately cultivated. It is hardl}^ likely to come unsought, even to the most imaginative. It must rest, in the first place, upon a reading of books as a whole. Whatever in any 82 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE serious sense is worth reading once is worth reread- ing indefinitely. It is idle to hope to grasp a thing as a whole until one has become familiar with its parts. When once the details are clear in the mind, it is possible to read with a distinct and de- liberate sense of the share that each passage bears in the entire purpose. It is necessary, and I may add that it is enchanting, to reread until the de- tached points gather themselves together in the inner consciousness as molecules in a solution gather themselves into a crystal. The delight of being able to realize what an author had in mind as a whole is like that of the traveler who at last, after long days of baffling mists which allowed but broken glimpses here and there, sees before him the whole of some noble mountain, stripped clean of clouds, standing sublime between earth and heaven. Whatever effect a book has must depend largely upon the sympathy between the reader and the author. To read sympathetically is as fundamen- tal a condition of good reading as is to read intelligently. It is well known how impossible it is to talk with a person who is unresponsive, who will not yield his own mood, and who does not share another's point of view. On the other hand, we have all tried to listen to speakers with whom it was not in our power to find ourselves in accord, and the result was merely unprofitable weariness. For the time being the reader must give himself up to the mood of the writer ; he must follow his guid- ance, and receive not only his words but his sug- gestions with fullest acquiescence of perception, METHODS OF STUDY 83 whatever be the differences of judgment. What Hawthorne has said of painting is equally applica- ble to literature : — A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a sur- render of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its high- est excellence escapes you. There is always the ne- cessity of helping out the painter's art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected ; but they must be put so entirely under his control and work along with him to such an , extent that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating. Like all reve- lations of the better life, the adequate perception of a great work demands a gifted simplicity of vision. — Marble Faun, xxxvii. Often it is difficult to find any meaning in what is written unless the reader has entered into the spirit in which it was composed. I seriously doubt, for instance, whether the ordinary person, coming upon the following catch of satyrs, by Ben Jonson, is able to find it much above the level of the melo- dies of Mother Goose : — " Buz," quoth the blue fly, " Hum," quoth the bee ; Buz and hum they cry, And so do we. In his ear, in his nose, Thus, do you see ? He ate the dormouse ; Else it was he. 84 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE If you are not able to make mucli out of this, lis- ten to what Leigh Hunt says of it : — It is impossible that anything could better express than this, either the wild and practical joking of the satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and even harmony, the intercourse, of the musical words, one with another. None but a boon companion, with a very musical ear, could have written it. — A Jar of Honey. If the reader has the key to the mood in which this catch is written, if he has given himself up to J;he sportive spirit in which " rare old Ben " con- ceived it, it is possible to find in it the merit which Hunt points out ; but without thus giving ourselves up to the leadership of the poet it is hardly possi- ble to make of it anything at all. The example is of course somewhat extreme, but the principle is universal. It is always well in a first reading to give one's self up to the sweep of the work ; to go forward without bothering over slight errors or small de- tails. Notes are not for the first or the second perusal so much as for the third and so on to the hundredth. Dr. Johnson is right when he says : — Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted with the pow- ers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasures that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop to correction or explanation. One of the great obstacles to the enjoyment of METHODS OF STUDY 85 any art is the too conscientious desire to enjoy. We are constantly hindered by the conventional responsibility to experience over each classic the proper emotion. The student is often so occu- pied in painful struggles to feel that which he has been told to feel that he remains utterly cold and unmoved. It is like going to some historic local- ity of noble suggestion, where an officious guide moves the visitor from one precious spot to an- other, saying in effect : " Here such an event hap- pened. Now thrill. Sixpence a thrill, please." For myself, being of a somewhat contumacious char- acter, I have never been able to thrill to order, even if a shilling instead of sixpence were the price of the luxury ; and in the same way I am unable to follow out a prescribed set of emotions at the command of a text-book on literature. Per- haps my temperament has made me unjustly skep- tical, but I have never been able to have much faith in the genuineness of feelings carried on at the ordering of an emotional programme. The stu- dent should let himself go. On the first reading, at least, let what will happen so you are swept along in full enjoyment. It is better to read with delight and misunderstand, than to plod forward in wise stupidity, understanding aU and compre- hending nothing ; gaining the letter and failing utterly to achieve the spirit. The letter may be at- tended to at any time ; make sure first of the spirit. I do not mean that one is to read carelessly ; but I do mean that one is to read enthusiastically, joy- ously, and, if it be possible, even passionately. 86 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE The best test of the completeness with which one has entered into the heart of a book is just this keenness of enjoyment. Fully to share the mood of the author is to share something of the delight of creation. It is as if in the mind of the reader this work of beauty and of immortal significance was springing into being. This enjoyment, more- over, increases with familiarity. If you find that you do not care to take up again a masterpiece be- cause you have read it once, you may pretty safely conclude that you have never truly read it at all. You have been over it, it may be, and gratified some superficial curiosity ; but you have never got to its heart. Does one claim to be won to the heart of a friend and yet to be willing never to see that friend more? One may, of course, outgrow even a master- piece. There are authors who are genuine so far as they go, who may be enjoyed at one stage of growth, yet who as the student advances become insufficient and unattractive. The man who does not outgrow is not growing. One does not health- ily tire of a real book, however, until he has be- come greater than that book. The interest which becomes weary of a masterpiece is more than half curiosity, and at best is no more than intellectual. It is not imaginative. Margaret Fuller confessed that she tired of everything she read, even of Shakespeare. She thereby unconsciously discov- ered the quality of mind which prevented her from being a great woman instead of merely a brilliant one. She fed her intellect upon literature; but METHODS OF STUDY 87 she failed because literature does not reach to its highest function unless its appeal to the intellect is the means of touching and arousing the imagina- tion ; because the end of all art is not the mind but the emotions. It may seem that enough has already been re- quired to make reading the most serious of under- takings ; yet there is still one requirement more which is of the utmost importance. He is imwor- thy to share the delights of great work who is not able to respect it ; he has no right to meddle with the best of literature who is not prepared to approach it with some reverence. In the greatest books the master minds of the race have graciously bidden their fellows into their high company. The honor should be treated according to its worth. Irrev- erence is the deformity of a diseased mind. The man who cannot revere what is noble is innately degraded. When writers of genius have given us their best thoughts, their deepest imaginings, their noblest emotions, it is for us to receive them with bared heads. He is greatly to be pitied who, in reading high imaginative work, has never been conscious of a sense of being in a fine and noble presence, of having been admitted into a place which should not be profaned. Only that soul is great which can appreciate greatness. Remember that there is no surer measure of what you are than the extent to which you are able to rise to the heights of supreme books ; the extent to which you are able to comprehend, to delight in, and to revere, the masterpieces of literature. VII THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE "Whatever intelligence man imparts to man, at least all beyond the crudest rudimentary begin- nings, must be conveyed by conventions. There must have been an agreement, tacit or explicit, that a certain sign shall stand for a certain idea ; and when that idea is to be expressed, this sign must be used. In order that the meaning of any com- munication may be understood, it is essential that the means of expression be appreciated by hearer as well as by speaker. We have agreed that in English a given sound shall represent a given idea ; and to one who knows this tongue the specified sound, either spoken or suggested by letters, calls that idea up. To one unacquainted with English, the sound is meaningless, because he is not a party to the agreement which has fixed for it a conven- tional significance ; or it may awake in his thought an idea entirely different, because he belongs to a nation where tacit agreement has fixed upon an- other meaning. The word " dot," for instance, has by English-speaking folk been appropriated to the notion of a trifling point or mark ; while those who speak French, writing and pronouncing the word in the same way, take it to indicate a dowry. THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 89 In order to communicate with any man, it is neces- sary to know what is the set of conventions with which he is accustomed to convey and to receive ideas. The principle holds also in art. There is a con- ventional language in sound or color or form as there is in words. It is broader as a rule, because oftener founded upon general human characteris- tics, because more directly and obviously borrowed from nature, and because not so warped and dis- torted by those concessions to utility which have modified the common tongues of men. Indeed, it might at first thought seem that the language of art is universal, but a little reflection will show that this is not the case. The sculpture of the Aztecs, for instance, is in an art language utterly different from that of the sculpture of the Greeks. If you recall the elaborately intricate uncouthness of the gods of old Yucatan, you will easily appreciate that the artists who shaped these did not employ the same artistic conventions as did the sculptors who breathed life into the Venus of Melos, or who embodied divine serenity and beauty in the Elgin marbles. To the Greeks those twisted and thick- lipped Aztec deities, clutching one another by their crests of plumes, or grasping rudely at one another's arms, would have conveyed no sentiment of beauty or of reverence ; while it is equally to be supposed that the Aztec would have remained hardly moved before the wonders of Greek sculp- ture. The Hellenic art conventions, it is true, were more directly founded upon nature, and there* 90 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE fore more readily understood ; but even this would not have overcome the fact that one nation had one art language and the other another. Those of you who were at the Columbian Exposition will remember how the music in the Midway Plaisance illustrated this same point. The weird strain of one or another savage or barbaric folk came to the ear with a strangeness which showed how ignorant we are of the language of the music of these dwell- ers in far lands. To us it was bizarre or moving, but we could form little idea how it struck the hearers to whom it was native and familiar. It was even all but impossible to know whether a given strain was felt by the savage performers to be grave or gay. Of all the varieties of sound which there surprised the ear, that evolved by the Chinese appeared most harsh and unmelodious. The almond-eyed Celestial seemed to delight in a concatenation of crash and caterwauling, mingled in one infernal cacophony at which the nerves tingled and the hair stood on end. Yet it is on record that when in the early days of European intercourse with China, the French missionary Amiot played airs by Rossini and Boieldieu to a Chinese mandarin of intelligence and of cultiva- tion according to eastern standards, the Oriental shook his head disapprovingly. He politely ex- pressed his thanks for the entertainment, but when pressed to give an opinion of the music he was forced to reply : " It is sadly devoid of meaning and expression, while Chinese music penetrates the soul." After we have smiled at the absurdity, from THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 91 our point of view, of the penetration of the soul by Chinese music, we reflect that after all our music is probably as absurd to them as theirs to us. We perhaps recall the fact that even the cultivated Japanese, with their sensitive feeling for art, and their readiness to adopt occidental customs, com- plain of the effect of dividing music into regular bars, and making it, as they say, " chip-chop, chip- chop, chip-chop." The fact is that every civiliza- tion makes its art language as it makes its word language ; and he who would understand the mes- sage must understand the conventions by which it is expressed. We are apt to forget this fact of the convention- ality of all language. We become so accustomed both to the speech of ordinary intercourse and to that of familiar art, that we inevitably come to re- gard them as natural and almost universal. No lan- guage, however, is natural, unless it be fair to apply that word to the most primitive signs of savages. It is an arbitrary thing, and as such it must be learned. We acquire the ordinary tongue of our race almost unconsciously, and while we are too young to reason about it. We gain the language of art later and more deliberately, although of course we may owe much to our early surroundings in this as in every other respect. The point to be kept in mind is that we do learn it ; that it is not the gift of nature. This is of course true of all art ; but here our concern is only with the fact that literature has as truly its own peculiar language as music or painting or sculpture, — its 92 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE language, that is, distinct from the language of ordinary daily or common speech. The conventions which serve efficiently to convey ordinary ideas and matter-of-fact statements, are not sufficient for the expression of emotions. The man who has to tell the price of pigs and potatoes, the amount of coal consumed in a locomotive en- gine, or the effect of political complications upon the stock-market, is able to serve himself suffi- ciently well with ordinary language. The novelist who has to tell of the bewitchingly willful worldli- ness of Beatrix Esmond, of the fateful and tragic experiences of Donatello and Miriam, the splen- didly real impossibilities of the career of D'Artag- nan and his three friends, the passion of Richard Feverel for Lucy, of Kmita for Olenka, of Marius for Cosette ; the dramatist who endeavors to make his readers share the emotions of Lear and Cor- delia, of Caliban and Desdemona, of Viola and Juliet ; the poet who would picture the emotions of Pompilia, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Por- phyrio and Madeline, of Prometheus and Asia, — all these require an especial language. The conveying from mind to mind of emotion is a delicate task. It is not difficult to make a man understand the price of oysters, but endeavor to share with a fellow-being the secrets of a moment of transcendent feeling, and you have an under- taking so complex, and so all but impossible, that if you can perfectly succeed in it you may justly call yourself the first writer of your age. This is the making of the intangible tangible ; the highest THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 93 creative act of the imagination. The cleverness and the skill of man have been exhausted in devis- ing means to impart to readers the thought and feeling, the passion and emotion, which sway the hearts of mankind. It is not necessary here to go into those devices which belong especially to the domain of rhetoric, — the mechanics of style. They are designated in the old-fashioned text-books by tongue-twisting Greek names which most of us have learned, and which all of us have forgotten. It is not with them that I am here concerned. They are meant to affect the reader unconsciously. It is with those matters which appeal to the con- scious understanding that we have now to do ; the conventions which are the language of literature as Latin was the language of Caesar or Greek the tongue of Pericles. I have spoken already of the necessity of under- standing what is said in literature; this is, how- ever, by no means the whole of the matter. It is of even greater importance to be clearly aware of what is implied. We test the imaginative quality of what is written by its power of suggestion. The writer who has imagination will have so much to say that he is forced to make a phrase call up a whole train of thought, a word bring vividly to the mind of the reader a picture or a history. This is what critics mean when they speak of the mar- velous condensation of Shakespeare ; and in either prose or verse the criterion of imaginative writing is whether it is suggestive. Imagination is the realizing faculty. It is the power of receiving as 94 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE true the ideal. It is the accepting as actual that which is conjured up by the inner vision; the making vital, palpitant, and present that which is known to be materially but a dream. That which is written when the poet sees the unseen palpably before his inner eye is so filled with the vitality and actuality of his vision that it fills the mind of the reader as a tenth wave floods and overflows a hollow in the rocks of the shore. When Keats says of the song of the nightingale that it is The same that oft-times hath Charm' d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn, all the romance and witchery of faery-lore are in this single phrase. The reader feels the glow of delight, the fascination of old tales which have pleased mankind from the childhood of the race. Into two lines the poet has condensed the fragrance of a thousand flowers of folk-lore. In the best literature what is said directly is often of less importance than what is meant but not said. In dealing with imaginative writers, it is necessary to keep always in mind the fact that the literal meaning is but a part, and often not the greater part. The implied, the indirect, is apt to be that for the sake of which the work is written. In its earlier stages all language is largely made up of comparisons. The fact that every tongue is full of fossil similes has been constantly com- mented upon, and this fact serves to illustrate how greatly the force of a word may be diminished if THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 95 its original meaning is lost sight of. If, in ordi- nary conversation, to take a common illustration, some old-fashioned body now speak of a clergyman as a "pastor," it is to be feared that the word con- notes little, unless it be a suspicion of rustic seedi- ness in apparel, a certain provincial narrowness, and perhaps a conventional piety. When the word was still in its prime, it carried with it the force of its derivation ; it spoke eloquently of one who ministered spiritual food to his followers, as a shepherd ministers to his flock. A pastor may now be as good as a pastor was then, but the title has ceased to do him justice. The freshness and force of words get worn off in time, as does by much use the sharpness of outline of a coin. We need con- stantly to guard against this tendency of language. We speak commonly enough in casual conversation of " a sardonic smile," but the idea conveyed is no more than that of a forced and heartless grin. As far back as the days of Homer, some imaginative man compared the artificial and sinister smile of a cynic to the distortions and convulsions produced by a poisonous herb in Sardinia ; and from its very persistence we may fancy how forcible and striking was the comparison in its freshness. Of course, modern writers do not necessarily keep in mind the derivation of every word and phrase which they employ ; but they do at least use terms with so much care for propriety and exactness that it is impossible to seize the whole of their meaning, unless we appreciate the niceties of their language. Ruskin says rightly : — 96 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE You must get yourself into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. . . . You might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly " illiterate, " uneducated person ; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real accuracy, — you are forevermore in some measure an educated person. — Of King s^ Treasuries. Unless our attention has been especially called to the fact, there are few of us who at all realize how carelessly it is possible to read. We begin in the nursery to let words pass without attaching to them any idea which is really clear. We nourish our infant imaginations upon Mother Goose, and are content to go all our days in ignorance even of the meaning of a good many of the words so fondly familiar in pinafore days. We are all acquainted with the true and thrilling tale how Thomas T. Tattamus took two tees To tie two tups up to two tall trees ; but how many of us know what either a " tee " oi a " tup " is ? We have all been stirred in our sus- ceptible youth by the rhyme wherein is recountea the exciting adventure of the four and twenty tail- ors who set forth to slay a snail, but who retreated in precipitate confusion when She put out her horns hke a little Kyloe cow ; but it is to be feared that the proportion of us is not large who have taken the trouble to ascertain what is a Kyloe cow. Or take the well-worn ditty : — THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 97 Cross-patch, Draw the latch, Sit by the fire and spin. Have you ever stopped to reflect that " draw the latch " means to pull in the latch-string, and that in the days of homely general hospitality to which this contrivance belonged the image presented by the verse was that of a misanthropic hag, shutting herself off from her neighbors and sulking viciously by her fire behind a door rudely insulting the caller with the empty hole of the latch-string ? Perhaps this seems trifling ; and it may easily be insisted that these rhymes become familiar to us while we are still too young to think of the exact meaning of anything. The question then is whether we do better when we are older. We are accus- tomed, very likely, to hear in common speech the phrase " pay through the nose." Do you know what that means, or that it goes back to the days of the Druids ? When you hear the phrase " where the shoe pinches" do you recall Plutarch's story? Does the anecdote of St. Ambrose come to mind when the saying is " At Rome do as the Romans io " ? It happens every few years that the news- papers are full of more or less excited talk about a " gerrymander." Does the word bring before the inner eye that uncouth monster wherewith the caricaturist of his day vexed the soul of Governor Gerry ? I have tried to select examples which are not remote from the talk of every day. It seems to me that these illustrate well enough how apt we are to accept words and phrases as we accept a 98 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE silver dollar, with very little idea of the intrinsic worth of what we are getting. This may be made to do well enough in practical buying and selling, but it is eminently unsatisfactory in matters intel- lectual or aesthetic. In the study of literature ap- proximations are apt to be pretty nearly worthless. The most obvious characteristic in literary lan- guage is that of allusion. Constantly does the reader of imaginative works encounter allusions to the Bible, to mythology, to history, to folk-lore, and to literature itself. To comprehend an author it is needful to realize fully what he had in mind when using these. They are the symbols of thoughts and feelings which are not to be ex- pressed in ordinary ways. When we are familiar with the matter alluded to we see by the sudden and vivid light which is cast over the page by the comparison or the suggestion how expressive and comprehensive this form of language may be. To the reader who is ignorant the allusion is of course a stumbling-block and a rock of offense. It is like a sentence in an unknown tongue, which not only conceals its meaning but gives one an irritated sense of being shut out of the author's counsels. It is probable that in English literature the allusions to the Bible are more numerous than any other. We shall have occasion later to speak of the place and influence of the King James version \ipon the literature of our tongue, and here we have to do only with those cases in which a scriptural reference is made part of the special language of an author. Again and again it happens that a THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 99 writer takes advantage of the associations which cluster about a phrase or an incident of the Bible, and by a simple touch brings up in the mind of the understanding reader all the sentiments connected with the original. With many of the more common of these phrases it is impossible for any one who associates with educated persons not to be familiar. They have become part and parcel of the common speech of the time. We speak of the " widow's mite," of a " Judas' kiss," of " the flesh-pots of Egypt," of " a still, small voice," of a " Jehu," a " perfect Babel," a " Nimrod," of " bread upon the waters," and of a "Delilah." The phrases have to a considerable extent acquired their own meaning, so that even one who is not familiar with the Scriptures is not likely to have difficulty in getting from them a general idea. To the reader who is acquainted with the force and origin of these terms, however, they have a vigor and significance which for others they must lack. The name Jehu brings up to him not merely a driver on a New England stage-coach, but the figure of the newly crowned usurper rush- ing down to the slaughter of King Joram, his mas- ter, when the watchman upon the wall looked out and said : " The driving is like the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi ; for he driveth furiously." The phrase " bread upon the waters " affords a good illustration here. Perhaps most readers are likely to know the origin of the quotation, and probably the promise which concludes it. The number is smaller who realize the figure to be that of the 100 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE oriental farmer casting abroad the seed-rice over flooded fields, sowing for the harvest which he shall find " after many days." The phrase " a still, small voice " has become dulled by common use, — one might almost say profane, since the quota- tion is of a quality which should render it too dig- nified and noble for careless employment. It speaks to the reader who knows its origin of that magnifi- cently impressive scene on Horeb when Elijah stood on the mount before the Lord : — And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountain, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord ; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake : and after the earth- quake a fire ; but the Lord was not in the fire : and after the fire a still, small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out and stood in the entering in of the cave. And behold, there came a voice unto him, and said : " What doest thou here, Elijah ? " — 1 Kings xix. 11-13. It is not necessary to dwell upon this class of al- lusions. The reader who expects to get from them their full force must know the original ; and while in ordinary speech these phrases are used care- lessly and with little regard for their f idl signifi- cance, they are in the work of imaginative writers to be taken for all that they can and should convey. There are other Biblical allusions which are less common and less obvious. When in the " Ode on the Nativity," Milton speaks of that twice batter'd god of Palestine, THE LANGUAGE OP LITERAWfi^: IPI. the verse means much to the reader who recalls the double fall of the fish-tailed god Dagon before the captured ark of Israel, but to others it is likely to mean nothing whatever. To be ignorant of the tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego is to miss completely the force of Hazlitt's remark that certain artists are so absorbed in their own pro- ductions that " they walked through collections of the finest works like the Children in the Fiery Furnace, untouched, unapproached." Not to know the declaration of St. Paul of what he had suffered for his faith 1 is to lose the point of Tennyson's verse Not in vain, Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death. Prose and poetry are alike full of scriptural phrase- ology. In short, for the understanding of the lan- guage of allusion in English literature a knowledge of the English Bible is neither more nor less than essential. Another class of allusions frequent in literature is the mythological. Here also we find phrases which have passed so completely into every-day currency that we hear and use them almost with- out reflecting upon their origin. "Scylla and Charybdis," "dark as Erebus," "hydra-headed," and " Pandora's box," are familiar examples. We speak of " a herculean task " without in the least calling to mind the labors of Hercules, and employ the phrase " the thread of life " without seeming ^ If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesvis, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not ? — 1 Cor, XV. 32. i0 ; TJIE S^TIIDY OF LITERATURE to see the three grisly Fates, spinning in the chill gray dusk of their cave. We have gone so far as to condense a whole legend into a single word, and then to ignore the story. We say " lethean," "mercurial," "aurora," and "bacchanalian," with- out recalling their real significance. It is obvious how a perception of the original meaning of these terms must impart vividness to their use or to their understanding. There are innumerable instances, more particular, in which it is essential to know the force of a reference to old myths, lest the finer meaning of the author be altogether missed. In " The Wind-Harp " Lowell wrote ; — I treasure in secret some long, fine hair 9 Of tenderest brown . . . I twisted this magic in gossamer strings Over a wind-harp's Delphian hollow. In the phrase "a wind-harp's Delphian hollow" the poet has suggested all the mysterious and fate- ful utterances of the abyss from which the Delphic priestess sucked up prophecies, and he has pre- pared the comprehending reader for the oracular murmur which swells from the instrument upon which have been stretched chords twisted from the hair of the dead loved one. To miss this suggestion is to lose a vital part of the poem. When Keats writes of " vaUey-lilies whiter still than Leda's love," unless there come instantly to the mind the image of the snowy swan whose form Jove took to win Leda, the phrase means nothing. The woeful cry in "Antony and Cleopatra," The shirt of Nessus is upon me ; teach me, Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage, THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 103 is full of keen-edged horror when one recalls the garment poisoned with his own blood by which the centaur avenged himself on Hercules. In a flash it brings up the picture of the demigod tearing his flesh in more than mortal agony, and calling to Philoctetes to light the funeral pyre that he might be consumed alive. It is not needful to multiply examples since they so frequently present them- selves to the reader. The only point to be made is that here we have another well defined division of literary language. AUusion to history is another characteristic form of the language of literature. References to classic story are perhaps more common than those to gen- eral or modern, but both are plentiful. Sometimes the form is that of a familiar phrase, as " a Cad- mean victory," " a Procrustean bed," " a crusade," " a Waterloo," and so on. Phrases like these are easily understood, although it is hardly possible to get their full effect without a knowledge of their origin. What, however, would this passage in Gray's " Elegy " convey to one unfamiliar with English history ? — Some village Hampden, that with daontless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood ; Some mnte, inglorious Milton here may rest ; Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood. It is necessary to know about the majestic figure of ivory and gold which the Athenian sculptor wrought, or one misses the meaning of Emerson's couplet, — Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought. 104 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Shakespeare abounds in examples of this use of allusions to history to produce a clear or vivid im- pression of some emotion or thought. I will make a Star-Chamber matter of it. Merry Wives, i. 1. Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable. Merchant of Venice, i. 1. Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone. Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night, And would have told him haK his Troy was burnt. 2 Henry IF., i. 1. The reader must know something of the Star-cham- ber, of the gravity and wisdom of Nestor, of the circumstances of the tragic destruction of Troy, or these passages can have little meaning for him. Sometimes references of this class are less evi- dent, as where Byron speaks of The starry Galileo with his woes ; or where Poe finely compresses the whole splendid story of antiquity into a couple of lines : — To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome. If we have in mind the varied and inspiring story of Greece and Rome, these lines unroll before us like a matchless panorama. We linger over them to let the imagination realize the full richness of their suggestion. The heart beats more quickly, and we find ourselves murmuring over and over to ourselves with a kindling sense of warmth and glow : — To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome. THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 105 Poe affords an excellent example of this device of historical allusion carried to its extreme. In " The Fall of the House of Usher," there is a stanza which reads : — Wanderers in that happy valley Through two luminous windows saw Spirits moving- musically To a lute's well-tun^d law, Round about a throne, where sitting (Porphyrogene !) In state his glory well-befitting, The ruler of the realm was seen. If the reader chance to know that in the great palace of Const an tine the Great at Constantinople there was a building of red porphyry, which by special decree was made sacred to motherhood, and that here the princes of the blood were born, be- ing in recognition called " porphyrogene," there will come to him the vision which Poe desired to evoke. The word will suggest the regal splendors of the Byzantine court at a time when the whole world babbled of its glories, and will give to the verse a richness of atmosphere which could hardly be produced by any piling up of specific details. The reader who is not in possession of this infor- mation can only stumble over the word as I did in my youth, with an aggrieved feeling of being shut out from the inner mysteries of the poem. I spoke of this as an extreme instance of the use of this form of literary language, because the know- ledge needed to render it intelligible is more un- usual and special than that generally appealed to by writers. It is one of those bold strokes which 106 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE are tremendously effective when they succeed, but which are likely to fail with the ordinary reader. After historic allusion comes that to folk-lore, which used to be a good deal appealed to by ima- ginative writers. Some knowledge of old beliefs is often essential to the comprehension of earlier authors. Suckling, for instance, says very charm- ingly : — But oh, she dances such a way ! No sun upon an Easter day Is half so fine a sight ! The reference, of course, is to the superstition tbat the sun on Easter morning danced for joy at the coming of the day when the Lord arose. To get the force of the passage, it is necessary to put one's self into the mood of those who believed this pretty legend. In the same way it is only to one who is acquainted with the myth of the lubber fiend, the spirit who did the work of the farm at night for the wage of a bowl of cream set for him beside the kitchen fire, that there is meaning in the lines in " L' Allegro : " — Tells how the gTudging goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set. When in one night, ere glimpse of mom, His shadowy flail hath thresh 'd the com That ten day- laborers could not end ; And, stretch'd out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength ; And crop-full out of doors he flings, Ere the first cock his matin rings. There is much of this folk-lore language in Shake- speare, and in our own time Browning has perhaps more of it than any other prominent author. It 4 THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 107 may be remarked iu passing, that Browning, who loved odd books and read a good many strange old works which are not within general reach, is more difficult in this matter of allusion than any other contemporary. References of this class are gener- ally a trouble to the ordinary reader, and especially are young students likely to be unable to under- stand them readily. The last class of allusions, and one which iu books written to-day is especially common, is that which calls up passages or characters in literature itself. We speak of a " quixotic deed ; " we allude to a thing as to be taken " in a Pickwickian sense ; " we have become so accustomed to hearing a married man spoken of as a " Benedick," that we often forget the brisk and gallant bachelor of " Much Ado about Nothing," and how he was transformed into " Benedick the married man " almost without his own consent. When an author who weighs his words employs allusions of this sort, it is need- ful to know the originals well if we hope to get the real intent of what is written. In "II Pen- seroso," Milton says : — Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall come sweeping by, Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line, Or the tale of Troy divine. There should pass before the mind of the reader all the fateful story of the ill-starred house of Lab- dacus : the horrible history of CEdipus, involved in the meshes of destiny ; the deadly strife of his sons, and the sublime self-sacrifice of Antigone r 108 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE all the involved and passionate tragedies of the de- scendants of Pelops : Agamemnon, the slaughter of Iphigenia, the vengeance of Clytemnestra, the waiting of Electra, the matricide of Orestes and the descent of the Furies upon him ; and after this should come to mind the oft-told tale of Troy in all its fullness. Milton was not one to use words inadvertently or without a clear sense of all that they implied. He desired to suggest all the rich and tragic histories which I have hinted at, to move the reader, and to show how stirring and how preg- nant is tragedy when dealing with high themes. In two lines he evokes all that is most potent in Grecian poetry. Or again, when Wordsworth speaks of The gentle Lady married to the Moor, And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb, it is not enough to glance at a foot-note and dis- cover that the allusion is to Desdemona, and to the first canto of Spenser's '' Faerie Queene." The reader is expected to be so familiar with the poems referred to that the spirit of one and then of the other comes up to him in all its beauty. An allu- sion of this sort should be like a breath of perfume which suddenly calls up some dear and thrilling memory. Enough has been said to show that the language of literature is a complicated and in some respects a difficult one. Literature in its highest and best sense is of an importance and of a value so great as to justify the assumption that no difficulties of language are too great if needed for the full ex- THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE 109 pression of the message which genius bears to man- kind. In other words, the writer who can give to his fellows works which are genuinely imaginative is justified in employing any conventions which will really aid in expression. It is the part of his readers to acquaint themselves with the means which he finds it best to employ ; and to be grate- ful for the gift of the master, whatever the trouble it costs to appreciate and to enter into its spirit. If we are wise, if we have a proper sense of val- ues, we shall find it worth our while to familiarize ourselves with scriptural phrases, with mythology, history, folk-lore, or whatever will aid us in seizing the innermost significance of masterpieces. It is important, moreover, to know literary lan- guage before the moment comes for using it. In- formation grubbed from foot-notes at the instant of need may be better than continued ignorance, but it is impossible to thrill and tingle over a passage in the middle of which allusions must be looked up in the comments of the editor. It is like feel- ing one's way through a poem in a foreign tongue when one must use a lexicon for every second word. The feelings cannot carry the reader away if they must bear not only the intangible imagi- nation but a solidly material dictionary. As has been said in a former page, notes should not be allowed to interrupt a first reading. It is often a wise plan to study them beforehand, so as to have their aid at once. It is certainly idle to expect a vivid first impression if one stops continually to look up obscure points ; one cannot soar to the stars with foot-notes as a flying-machine. 110 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE One danger must here be noted. The student may so fill his mind with concern about the lan- guage that he cannot give himself up to the author. The language is for the work, and not the work for the language. The teacher who does not in- struct the student in the meaning and value of allusion fails of his mission ; but the teacher who makes this the limit, and fails to impress upon the learner the fact that all this is a means to an end, commits a crime. I had rather intrust a youth to an instructor ill-informed in the things of which we have been speaking, and filled with a genuine love and reverence for beauty as far as he could ap- prehend it, than to a preceptor completely equipped with erudition, and filled with Philistine satisfac- tion over this knowledge for its own sake. No amount of learning can compensate for a lack of enthusiasm. The object of reading literature is not only to understand it, but to experience it ; not only to apprehend it with the intellect, but to comprehend it with the emotions. To understand it is necessary and highly important ; but this is not the best thing. When the gods send us gifts, let us not be content with examining the caskets. VIII THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE We have spoken of the tangible language of literature ; we have now to do with that which is intangible. Open and direct allusion is neither the more important nor the more common form of suggestion. He who has trained himself to recog- nize references to things historical, mythological, and so on, has not necessarily become fully familiar with literary language. Phrase by phrase, and. word by word, literature is a succession of symbols. The aim of the imaginative writer is constantly to excite the reader to an act of creation. He only is a poet who can arouse in the mind a creative imagination. Indeed, one is tempted to indulge here in an impossible paradox, and to say that h© only is a poet who can for the time being make his reader a poet also. The object of that which o expressed is to arouse the intellect and the emt tions to search for that which is not expressed The language of allusion is directed to this end, but literature has also its means far more subtile and far more effective. Suggestion is still the essence of this, but it is suggestion conveyed more delicately and impalpa- bly. Sometimes it is so elusive as almost to seem 112 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE accidental or even fanciful. The clioice of a single word gives to a sentence a character which without it would be entirely wanting; a simple epithet modifies an entire passage. In Lincoln's " Gettys- burg Address," for instance, after the so concise and forceful statement of all that has brought the assembly together, the speaker declares " that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain." The adverb is the last of which an ordinary mind might have thought in this connec- tion, and yet once spoken, it is the one inevitable and supreme word. It lifts the mind at once into an atmosphere elevated and noble. By this single word Lincoln seems to say : " With the dead at our feet, and the future for which they died before us, lifted by the consciousness of all that their death meant, of all that hangs upon the fidelity with which we carry forward the ideals for which they laid down life itself, we ' highly resolve that their death shall not have been in vain.' " The phrase is one of the most superb in American literature. It is in itself a trumpet-blast clear and strong. Or take Shakespeare's epithet when he speaks of "death's dateless night." To the appreciative reader this is a word to catch the breath, and to touch one with the horror of that dull darkness where time has ceased ; where for the sleeper there is neither end nor beginning, no point distin-j guished from another ; night from which all that makes life has been utterly swept away. " Death's dateless night " ! It is told of Keats that in reading Spenser he THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 113 shouted aloud in delight over the phrase "sea- shouldering whales." The imagination is taken captive by the vigor and vividness of the image oi the great monsters shouldering their mighty way through opposing waves as a giant might push his path through a press of armed men, forging on- ward by sheer force and bulk. The single word says more than pages of ordinary, matter-of-fact description. The reader who cannot appreciate why Keats cried out over this can hardly be said to have begun truly to understand the effect of the epithet in imaginative writing. Hazlitt cites the lines of Milton : — Him followed Rimmon, whose delightfid seat Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams ; and comments : " The word lucid here gives to the idea all the sparkling effect of the most perfect landscape." In each of the following passages from Shakespeare the single italicized word is in itself sufficient to give distinction : — Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber. Julius Ccesar, ii. 1. When love begins to sicken and decay It useth an enforced ceremony. lb., iv. 2. After hie^sjitful fever he sleeps well. Macbeth, iii. 2. It would lead too far to enter upon the suggest- iveness which is the result of skillful use of tech- nical means ; but I cannot resist the temptation to call attention to the great effect which may result from a wise repetition of a single word, even if 114 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE that word be in itself commonplace. I know of nothing else in all literature where so tremendous an effect is produced by simple means as by the use of this device is given in the familiar lines : — To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time. Macbeth, v. 5. The suggestion of heart-sick realization of the fol- lowing of one day of anguish after another seems to sum up in a moment all the woe of years until it is almost more than can be borne. In many passages appreciation is all but im- possible unless the language of suggestion is com- prehended. To a dullard there is little or nothing in the line of Chaucer : — Up roos the Sonne, and up roos Emelye. It is constantly as important to read what is not written as what is set down. Lowell remarks of Chaucer : " Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as where the Friar, before setting him- self softly down, drives away the cat. We know without need of more words that he has chosen the snuggest corner." The richest passages in litera- ture are precisely those which mean so much that to the careless or the obtuse reader they seem to mean nothing. The great principle of the need of complete com- prehension of which we have spoken before meets us here and everywhere. It is necessary to read with a mind so receptive as almost to be creative : creative, that is, in the sense of being able to evoke i THE INTANGIBLE LANGUAGE 115 before tlie imagination of the reader those things which have been present to the inner vision of the writer. The comprehension of literary lan- guage is above all else the power of translating suggestion into imaginative reality. When we read, for instance : — Like waiting nymphs the trees present their fruit ; the line means nothing to us unless we are able with the eye of the mind to see the sentient trees holding out their branches like living arms, tender- ing their fruits. When Dekker says of patience : — ' T is the perpetual prisoner's liberty, His walks and orchards ; we do not hold the poet's meaning unless there has come to us a lively sense of how the wretch con- demned to life-long captivity may by patience find in the midst of his durance the same buoyant joy which swells in the heart of one who goes with the free step of a master along his own walks and through his richly fruited orchards. Almost any page of Shakespeare might be given bodily here in illustration. Take, for instance, the talk of Lorenzo and Jessica as in the moonlit gar- den at Belmont they await the return of Portia. Lor. The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise, — in such a night Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls, And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, Where Cressid lay that night. Jes. In such a night Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew, And saw the lion's shadow ere himself, And ran dismayed away. 116 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Lor. In such a night Stood Dido with a ■willow in her hand Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love To come again to Carthage. Jes. In such a night Medea gathered the enchanted herbs That did renew old -