Earmarks of literature Arthur E. Bostwick Hiiiiljji EARMARKS OF LITERATURE Earmarks of Literature The Things That Make Good Books Good BY ARTHUR E. BOSTWICK, Ph.D. Librarian, St. Louis Public Library CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1914 Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1914 Published January, 1914 »J FOREWORD This is an attempt to gather and group to- gether many things that are discussed more § thoroughly and at greater length in other places, but nowhere, the writer believes, all in one place, or in a style that will commend j^ them to the general reader. The book is based on a series of lectures given first to the training class of the Brook- ~- lyn Public Library, afterward to that of the New York Public Library, and finally to that of the St. Louis Public Library. The series has grown from year to year by the inclu- § gsion of material that seemed necessary to I S supplement and round out the knowledge commonly obtained in the schools. Arthur E. Bostwick. St. Louis Public Library. CO CD CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I The Nature of Literature .... i II Style — Its Grammatical Form . . lo III Clearness of Style 21 IV Appropriateness of Style .... 32 V Character in Style 40 VI Special Literary Forms 47 VII On the Reading of Poetry Aloud . 61 VIII Our Two Languages 70 IX The Structure of Literature ... 76 X Literature as a Form of Art ... 87 XI The Appreciation of Literature . . 93 XII The Preservation of Literature . . 99 XIII The Ownership of Literature . . 107 XIV The Makers of Literature . . . .114 XV Some Formalities of Written Speech 120 XVI The Context in Literature .... 128 XVII The Sampling of Literature . . . 134 XVIII The Sum of the Matter 139 Index 143 I Earmarks of Literature CHAPTER I The Nature of Literature S THERE anything about real literature that marks it for what it is? May we learn to recognize the blooded literary stock from the "mavericks" — the waifs and strays of literature? The untrained reader may sometimes err; that is because he does not know where to seek for the marks of identifi- cation. The earmarks of literature may not be evident to a careless passer-by, but they exist, and it may be worth while to try to define and describe some of them. And at the outset it should be noted that the word ''literature" itself has been used in various senses. In its broadest use the term includes all that has been put into written words since the earliest dawn of time. Even the rude 1 2 Earmarks of Literature scribblings of Roman loungers on columns and doorways, preserved to us by the storm of ashes that overwhelmed Pompeii, are part of it, and we can not deny the claim of the rudest picture-writing of th,e earliest savage to be placed in the same category. The multiplica- tion table is literature in this sense, and the class includes every book in the largest libran.'. It is in this sense that we speak of the "literature" of arithmetic or of agriculture, meaning all that has been written on those subjects. In its narrowest sense the class includes only such writings as have permanent value due to their form and the treatment of their subject-matter, independently of their sub- stance itself. They may have and should have value for the latter reason also, but their value should not rest entirely on this. To illustrate: we are not accustomed to rank works on fishins: as literature; vet Izaak Walton's Complete Angler stands in the ver\- first rank among purely literary- compositions simply on account of the manner in which it The Nature of Literature 3 is written. Manner can make anything good literature, no matter what it is about. Between these two classes — literature in its widest and literature in its narrowest sense — the word has been used and cAn be used to mean almost any desired class or combination of written works. Is it any wonder that there is continued dispute about whether this or that work is "literature?" For instance, many authorities would exclude from the class all works not marked by nobility of thought, and all that are on special as opposed to gen- eral subjects. This would make substance have a good deal to do with the definition. The class as defined in the Dewey Decimal Classification, used in many libraries, is mixed. It is determined partly by form, because poetry, drama, essays, etc., are made sub-classes, and partly by the character of the subject-matter, because humor, fiction, etc., are made other sub-classes. In other words, in this classification, poetry, no matter what its subject may be, is classed as literature because of its peculiar form. Humor, no matter in 4 Earmarks of Literature what form it may be, is classed there because its subject matter is " funny." Of course this is scarcely logical, but a strictly logical system of library classification is impossible. When a writer on the subject speaks of "literature" he may include very much more, or very much less, than is contained in the library class of that name. We shall consider here literature in its narrowest meaning, which is at the same time its highest; namely, those writings that have permanent value due to their form independ- ently of their substance. We have already seen, in our glance at the decimal classification, that certain formal ar- rangements of words or sentences entitle the works in which they are used to be regarded as literature from the standpoint of library classification. This, of course, is not the only case in which classification must take pretense into account instead of facts. When Dr. Cook's narrative of North Pole discovery was first discredited, there was an amusing news- paper controversy over its proper library The Nature of Literature 5 classification. Reporters waited upon public librarians, in various parts of the country, to inquire whether the book was to be cata- logued as travel or fiction. Evidently if the classification is to depend on the result of an investigation of the credibility of a work, the classifier might have to wait long to complete it, and in controverted instances different librarians would classify differently, causing much confusion. Here the author's intention must govern us. No one would call Baron Munchausen's book history, because the author himself did not intend us to believe it. David Copperfield is not autobiography, for the same reason. But General Butler's Own Story would be so classed, even by one who considered it largely fiction. The same thing is true of classification from the standpoint of literary form. Thus, if a work is written in meter, it is poetry from a library standpoint and must be classified as such. We do not inquire whether it is good or bad poetry. But in the highest sense of the word, as we have just defined it, only good 6 Earmarks of Literature poetry is literature, and, indeed, only good poetry is poetry at all in the best sense. Schoolboy doggerel may be verse, and a good deal that is little better finds its way into our libraries. It must then be classified as ''liter- ature" under "poetry," but it is neither poetry nor literature in the best sense. When a work is dismissed, then, with the remark, " It is all very well, but it is not literature," the speaker means simply that it will never have permanent value from its form alone. This may or may not be a condemnation, ac- cording as the work does or does ijot aspire to have such value. To say that Robinson's High School Algebra or Roscoe and Schor- lemmer's Chemistry is "not literature" is in no wise derogatory, because these aim to be of value only through their subject-matter. Such books must, it is true, conform to cer- tain rules of form. They must be plainly and grammatically written and the subject- matter must be logically expressed. But their permanent value is due not to this form but to the information that they contain. In a The Nature of Literature 7 book of this kind the form is generally only the handmaiden of the subject, while in a purely literary work the subject is generally but the foundation on which the literary qualities of the work are built up. To say that Martin's Physiology is not literature is not therefore to condemn it, but to say the same thing of a piece of verse is to say of it the very worst thing that could be thought of, because here the form is everything. If it is literature it is so by virtue of its poetic form and style, and to say that it is not literature is to condemn these as hopelessly bad. i^ It may be well to repeat here that very few works of pure literature have not also valu- able subject-matter, and that very many tech- nical books can claim to be also works of liter- ature by reason of their perfect form. That is the case with Walton's book on angling, mentioned at the outset of this chapter. It may be the case even with so dry a work as a mathematical treatise. This is notably so in the French language, where beauty of form is prized more highly than it is in English. 8 Earmarks of Literature From this point of view the Romance lan- guages — that is, those derived from the Latin, like French, Italian, and Spanish — are more literary than Teutonic tongues like English and German. Not that their highest points overtop us, for Shakespeare is higher than Moliere and Goethe than Cervantes, but that on the whole the general level of writing rises more nearly to a good literary plane. From the standpoint of literary style alone, a trashy French novel is apt to be better than a far more serious work in English, and the general run of German fiction is still further down than our own. It may happen, curiously enough, that a work written as a serious contribution to knowledge survives only through its excellent literary form, its facts being out of date, or that a work intended as a literary masterpiece is of value now only because it contains curi- ous facts, like Erasmus Darwin's poem The Botanick Garden. In order to be good literature, therefore, a work must possess good form. The work of The Nature of Literature 9 literature is the polished gentleman among other works. A man may have sterling worth, but he cannot hope to move among cultivated people if he eats with his knife or sits with his boots on the table. Now there are kinds of form which all literary works must possess, and there are in addition rules to which each work must con- form when it is written according to some special formula, as in poetry, the drama, or the essay. General literary form is called style, and we shall take up this before con- sidering the rules of the various kinds of special literary form. Style is nothing more nor less than the manner in which an author expresses himself. To pass muster it must be: (i) Grammatical; (2) clear; (3) appro- priate to its subject; (4) characteristic of the writer. We shall consider these qualities in turn in the chapters that follow. CHAPTER II Style — Its Grammatical Form NO WORK is entitled to rank as good literature that is not written grammatic- ally. By this I mean that it must conform in all respects with the mode of writing gen- erally accepted among educated persons as correct. It must be properly expressed, and properly capitalized and punctuated. What determines whether it is so or not? Here we find that authorities differ, being divided, in the main, into two schools: those who believe that the rules as laid down in text books and treatises rest on certain scien- tific principles of language and that these rules and principles may always be applied to test correctness; and those, on the other hand, who believe that the sole test of correct- ness is good usage, and that no matter how contrary to fixed grammatical rules an ex- pression may be, it becomes correct as soon 10 Style — Its Grammatical Form 11 as it is in general use among cultivated per- sons. According to the first view, what is good English today will be good English twenty years hence; according to the other view, an expression that is positively incorrect today may be good English in 1920. As is usual in such cases the truth doubtless lies between these extremes. In the first place, the rules in the books are deduced from the language itself, not the language from the rule^' If I wish to write a grammar of some savage tongue that has never been reduced to writing, I cannot do it from my own inner consciousness; I must go and observe how the language is used by those who speak it. Doubtless I shall find that, in general, it con- forms to rules and laws; all natural phe- nomena do that; but if I write them down I must follow what I find ; if my written rules do not agree with the language, so much the worse for the rules — not so much the worse for the language. The fact is that man is part of nature, not apart from it, and that his lan- guages are a part of natural phenomena. 12 Earmarks of Literature Their laws are therefore on a par with other natural laws. Astronomers once deduced from their observations the rule that all the planets moved in circles. Years afterward closer observation showed that the curves were not circles after all. The astronomers did not shut their eyes to the new facts and hold to the old rules; they made new rules to fit the facts. This is what natural philosophers are continually doing and grammarians will have to do the same. Again, students of nature now recognize the fact of growth and development every- where. Language is not exempt from this. If a language is alive it will grow and there- fore change. We may not want it to grow; but it will, for all that; just as trees will grow even when we much prefer that they should remain as they are. Growth, however, does not mean exemption from law. On the con- trary, it always takes place along certain lines, although we may not always be able to tell beforehand what those lines may be.' The usage of words and their changes are like- Style — Its Grammatical Form 13 wise not erratic, although they may seem to be so. One of the great sources from which our stock of words is replenished is slang. Slang has been called " language in the making." Now slang does not arise hap- hazard. Slang words become popular usually because of their extreme aptness; that is, they have some special connection with the lan- guage in the light of existing conditions that makes them more expressive than any legiti- mate word. Often they last but a short time and are forgotten ; sometimes they continue in use, are taken first into colloquial speech and then into more careful diction, and finally become regular literary forms. The same is true of new grammatical forms, which start- ing in slang phrases may at last end as recog- nized idioms. Now it is quite possible to look ahead and at least to surmise whether an expression, not now good English, may ever become so. For instance, I do not believe that the slang expression ''to douse the glim," meaning to put out the light, will ever be literary English. My reason is that it has 14 Earmarks of Literature been recognized as slang for a hundred years or more; that it is not in very common use and that if there had been need for it in literary English it would have reached its goal long ago. This is not by any means certain, however. The word "kid," meaning a child, was originally slang used by thieves and ex- actly on a par with " douse the glim." It has recently come into wide use in colloquial speech, and it is within the bounds of pos- sibility that it may one day be literary English. In the compound "kidnap" it is so already. To take an expression that is not slang but simply incorrect, I do not believe that literary English will ever sanction the double nega- tive. We shall probably never be allowed to say "he didn't go no farther." It is usual to teach children that this is wrong because it is not logical. "If he didn't go no farther, he must have gone some'what farther." But the double negative is used in Greek, and the negatives there are regarded as strengthening each other, not as destroying each other. And Style — Its Grammatical Form 15 the double negative is used in English by quite as many people as do not use it. The trouble with it is that it has always been used by people of imperfect education and has always been regarded as a special mark of lack of education. Hence it is quite improb- able that it will ever be thought fit for good company. Again, some expressions have been for some time on the borders of good literary society but have never succeeded in gaining admit- tance. Such a form is "you was," for the second person singular of the past tense of the verb " to be." This is still occasionally used by educated persons. In Fielding's Tom Jones all the characters use it. Jane Austen, in her novels, frequently makes her characters employ it, but never when she represents them as persons of great cultivation. Those who still use it call our attention to the fact that originally and properly "thou" and not "you" is the singular pronoun of the second person. "You" is plural, and was used for the singular originally as a polite form. It 16 Earmarks of Literature has now taken the place of "thou" every- where except in solemn and provincial dic- tion. Now when the pronoun "you" is used as a singular, why should it not take the singu- lar verb? This is logical enough, but the same logic would permit us to say "you is," which never pretended to be correct. This is only one more of the instances that show plainly how little logic has to do with the matter. "You were" is the correct form simply because it is used by the great ma- jority of educated persons. Good English, then, is determined by good usage, and good usage follows definite lines both in what it is and in the changes that occur in it, although we may not always see that any lines at all are being followed. One thing is certain : a man will never write good English simply by following rules. That results in what has been called "school teacher's English," which can be told by an expert as soon as he hears it, and which is apt to lead to the conclusion that the user has been accustomed to speak very incorrectly Style — Its Grammatical Form 17 and is trying to mend his fault by observing certain set rules. The rigid following of rules would tend to destroy all the characteristics of a language. The forms in which a language seems to break rules and to cut out new paths for itself are called idioms, and no one can write a lan- guage well who does not write it idiomatic- ally. Idioms, though they seem to be depar- tures from rules, are usually only the result of growth in an unusual direction. Some- times their origin has been forgotten, and then those who would adhere too closely to rule pounce upon them and brand them as incor- rect. I have heard of a school teacher who insisted that "methinks" was incorrect and that it was simply an illiterate form of " I think." He did not know, evidently, that the last syllable of the word is not our present word "think" but an obsolete similar form meaning to seem, and that "me" is the indi- rect object. "Methinks" is simply "it seems to me." But suppose that there was no record of this old form, and that we could not explain 18 Earmarks of Literature "methinks" any more than we can explain many other idiomatic forms. Its use in good literature would still sustain it and we should be sure that it arose in some logical way. This is the attitude to take in all disputed questions of good or bad English. I do not mean to say that it is always possible to decide at once. The best authorities may dififer and do differ. It may be necessary to take all sorts of circumstances into account. Only, a critic should never point triumphantly to a rule without giving any other reason. When Archbishop Trench stoutly maintained that "It is me" is perfectly good English, he brought down on himself a storm of protest. Most of it was based simply on the fact that the form violates the rule of grammar that requires a predicate pronoun to agree with the subject. Yet the French say c'est mot, which is the same thing, and there is no dis- pute about it in their language. The only reason for a dispute in English is that usage is divided. The best writers and speakers nowadays do not say " it is me," and if that Style — Its Grammatical Form 19 form was ever idiomatic English it has dropped, or is dropping, from good literary use. Doubtless the reason it has so dropped is that it appears to be against rule, and rules do thus have a powerful effect in forcing a language to conform to them unless an idiom is very strongly established. It is well that this is so, for no one wants a language con- sisting entirely of idioms. What I have said applies also to pronuncia- tion, although I shall not touch on that here, as it is a part of spoken, not of written lan- guage. It applies also to capitalization and punctuation. Of these I will say only that the tendency of the language is to use as few capitals and marks of punctuation as usage will permit. We go further in both directions in this country than they do in England. The question of good English is very much more difficult than the corresponding one in many other languages. In France, for in- stance, there is a body — the Academy — whose word on literary matters is law. There is no question, therefore, on matters of good 20 Earmarks of Literature French, when the academicians have made a decree. Some have lamented because there is no such body to settle English usage, but it is probably better that there is none. Eng- lish thus remains a very vital tongue, sending out feelers in all directions like a vigorous vine, making some mistakes but keeping to the same general trend. It has always been so and its freedom has made it, as we whose mother tongue it is like to think and proclaim, the most flexible and best vehicle of expres- sion on the globe — perhaps the destined world-language to which some enthusiasts look forward. The question of good English is treated sanely in the appendix on Faulty Diction in the Standard Dictionary, and cur- rently in the Bookman Letter-box and in some of the daily papers, notably the New York Sun. Among good books on the subject are White's Words and Their Uses, Trench's Study of Words, and the works of Prof. Lounsbury of Yale. An amusing controversy on the subject is contained in Dean Alvord's The Queen s English, followed by Moon's The Dean's English. N CHAPTER III Clearness of Style O STYLE is good that is not clear. In fact, /lo book is a work of good litera- ture when the ordinary reader cannot under- stand the author's meaning readily, whether his difficulty arises from the subject or from the way in which it is treated. If the subject is a complex or confusing one, which requires close study, the book is a technical treatise or a text book, and is therefore, as we have seen, without the borders of pure literature. If, on the other hand, there is no particular diffi- culty with the ideas that the writer wishes to impart, but his meaning is obscure owing to the way in which he tries to express them, then his want of clearness mars the literary quality which his work would otherwise possess. These two kinds of obscurity are frequently confused by readers. Both prevent a work 21 22 Earmarks of Literature from being classed with literature in the purest sense; but the first kind — that due to deep thought — may of course exist in a work of the very highest plane — for instance, a philosophical treatise. The difficulty here is that the writer is trying to impart unfamiliar ideas which cannot be grasped without mental effort. But the fact that you find it hard to grasp an author's ideas may be due to his own inability to realize exactly what they are, or at any rate, to express them clearly. More than one writer or speaker has received credit for profound thought, when he should have been censured for lack of clearness and con- ciseness. It should be remembered that this question is, in the main, entirely apart from that of grammar. An ungrammatical sentence may be perfectly clear and a grammatical one very obscure. If a boy says, " I hain't got no money," we are in no doubt whatever of his meaning. If, on the other hand, we are in- formed that "John asked James to tell his aunt to mend his coat," the use of the pronouns Clearness of Style 23 makes the meaning quite confused, although the fault in the sentence is rhetorical, not grammatical. This illustrates how a sentence containing only half a dozen words or so may be quite confused. On the other hand a sen- tence two pages in length may be quite clear, although the construction of such a sentence requires care and is a piece of work that not every one can do. William M. Evarts was noted for his long sentences, and yet so nicely balanced were they that no one could fail to understand them. Occasionally the necessity for clearness con- flicts very sharply with grammatical rules. For instance, grammarians have always ob- jected to "splitting the infinitive," that is, to the insertion of modifying words between " to," used as the infinitive sign, and the verb itself. Thus they tell us we must not say " to greatly err," but "greatly to err" or "to err greatly." There is no particular logical rea- son for this rule, for the word "to," here, was originally only the preposition and not a com- ponent part of the verb — no more so, at any 24 Earmarks of Literature rate, than the auxiliaries in such forms as " can be " or " may be." No one objects to our saying "it may not be" or "it may possibly be." There can be no doubt, however, that a "split" infinitive is regarded as inadmissible by most good authorities on English. There can be as little doubt, probably, that almost all good writers have used it, either habitu- ally or occasionally. The reason is that clear- ness often requires it. English has lost almost all its inflections and is obliged to make the relations of its words clear by their position in the sentence. "John hit James" and "James hit John" mean very different things; but in Latin the shifting of names would not change the meaning. The name of the boy who did the hitting would be in the nominative case, and that of the one who was hit would be in the accusative, no matter what position they might occupy. The only thing effected by shifting the names about would be a slight alteration in the emphasis. With pronouns, when we still have distinct forms for the cases, the same is true in English. "I saw him" Clearness of Style 25 and " Him saw I " mean precisely the same thing, although the latter order of words would be used only in poetry. Now the clearest place in the world for an adverbial modifier is within the verb-phrase itself, when this phrase consists of more than one word. Here it cannot possibly be mis- understood. And writers who are accustomed to place it so in verbal forms with auxiliaries are very apt to claim the same privilege with the infinitive. The more outrageous the *' split" is, the truer this is, and it is truer in spoken than in written language. Take the following: "I wish emphatically and with as much deliberation as possible to say." Here the speaker "wishes to say." Does the long modifier tell how he wishes or how he is to say? The meaning is somewhat ambiguous even in the written form, but the reader will glance ahead and may make up his mind that the modifier belongs to the in- finitive. But when the sentence is spoken the hearer does not know what is coming until after the word "possible." In his mind the 26 Earmarks of Literature modifier may belong to ''wish" or it may go with something that is yet to come. The doubt confuses him. The speaker is very apt, there- fore, to put his infinitive sign before the modifier and say "I wish to — emphatically and with as much deliberation as possible — say that," etc., etc. When chided for so ab- surd a "split," he would be very likely to plead: "Oh yes; I know it is incorrect, but I could make my meaning plainer that way." In a colloquial or impromptu address, or in a similar form of writing, as in a news- paper article, this reason holds good, whereas in a more formal composition, where the writer has time to rearrange his sentences and secure clearness, if possible, by some other method, it ought not to be accepted. Much more might be said on this conflict of clearness and good usage, and such things are doubtless playing their part in the slow alteration of the language. Obscurity, however, may exist or be avoided in ways that have nothing to do with either grammatical or rhetorical rules. .^ writer, Clearness of Style 27 for instance, may use obsolete or provincial forms of expression, or foreign words, in doing either of which he lays himself open to the charge of using bad English as well as obscure diction. A foreign word, of course, may or may not be clear, according to the degree of knowledge of the person to whom it is addressed. It used to be presumed that every well-educated person knew Latin, and it was therefore admissible to use Latin words and quotations quite freely in any work ad- dressed to people of education. But in our time education does not follow fixed lines, and it is quite possible that one may be well- educated without a knowledge of the classical tongues. Much Latin, or even any Latin at all, therefore, may sin against clearness. The same may be said of French, German, and other languages. In an essay intended to be used by those who are presumably familiar with those languages, words and expressions may be freely used that in another class of writing would be hopelessly obscure. The same is true of all sorts of allusions, technical 28 Earmarks of Literature or otherwise. Clerk Maxwell, the great English physicist, wrote numerous poems embodying in every line reference to the quantities and processes of higher mathe- matics. To a mathematician these were thoroughly clear, and indeed approached closely to literature, while to the ordinary reader they conveyed no more meaning than if they had been written in the Choctaw language. The classical allusions with which Milton's works are often loaded, were doubtless familiar to those to whom they were especially addressed, but nowadays even the student needs a note now and then to help him. If a twentieth century poet should follow Milton's example in this regard, he would be pronounced pedantic. The writing, in other words, should be adapted to its public. And if it is so adapted we do not quarrel with it because it is not adapted to some other public. We do not insist that Milton is obscure because the c-di- nary reader has to look up some of his allu- sions, any more than we should hold that Clearness of Style 29 Moliere is unintelligible because we do not happen to understand French. Comparatively few persons can read Henry James with pleasure. This is partly because of late years he has cultivated certain pecu- liarities of style that are vexing, and in so far he is to be condemned. But it is also largely because he makes his points indirectly and imparts his ideas by saying what appears to refer to something different. He thus appeals directly to those persons who have cultivated quickness of mind — mental alert- ness — in his particular line, and therefore he is not to be condemned because his meaning is not at once apparent to everyone. It is even conceivable that a man might invent a form of expression which should be intelli- gible to himself alone, and write in it a beautiful work of pure literature which should yet be uncomprehended by the rest of mankind. Yet, other things being equal, a work of literature is more catholic as it appeals to a greater number of people; hence a writer 30 Earmarks of Literature who limits his audience in any way, so far falls in the literary scale. Of course every writer must be limited to those who speak the tongue, unless his work is translated, yet I cannot help thinking that those who can be successfully translated and so appeal to a wider circle must have more of that quality of universal sympathy which characterizes the greatest literature. It is this which is the very acme of clearness — which enables the writer to reach his reader's heart almost before his sentence comes to an end. But there is such a thing as being too clear, or rather, I should say, as trying too hard to be clear. Take the simple case where one's pronouns are mixed. Some writers are so afraid that they will be laughed at for con- fusing their pronouns that they seem to have eschewed these parts of speech altogether, and say "John asked James to tell John's aunt to mend John's coat," or, still worse, they explain themselves in parentheses, as, "John asked James to tell his (John's) aunt to mend his (John's) coat." This procedure may be Clearness of Style 31 necessary in certain cases, but it is hardly a characteristic of literary style. Similarly, when a writer appears to be trying very hard to avoid obscurity in any way, as when he introduces long footnotes to explain his allu- sions, or translates his Latin or German quota- tions in parentheses, he at once suggests the very thing that he tries to avoid. No one can attain lucidity in this way. The clearest style is generally the simplest. The writer whose meaning is so plain that it never gives us a thought, and whose diction is so simple and ordinary that it seems easy, until we try to imitate it, is, so far as this quality of style is concerned, the one who makes the most successful contribution to literature. A CHAPTER IV Appropriateness of Style LL tools must be adapted to the work that they are to perform. A screw- driver is an excellent device for its purpose, but one cannot cut meat with it. And lan- guage, after all, is a tool to convey our ideas — to get them into other people's heads. Its^ shape and character, therefore, must depend on the kind of ideas that it is necessary to convey and the kind of people to whom we desire to convey them.- We saw in the last lecture that a series of words might be clear to one person and not to another. But it is more than a question of clearness. All knives will cut, but we choose a carving knife for one kind of cutting and a penknife for another. So a sermon and a comic anecdote may both be perfectly clear to the reader, but if either were told in the style of the other we should recognize the inappropriateness of it at once. 32 Appropriateness of Style 33 It must be said that a good deal of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of lan- guage to its subject rests on considerations that have nothing to do with language itself. It is largely a matter of association and fashion, and it is here, therefore, that for- eigners stumble very frequently. You look in your French dictionary and find several w^ords corresponding to an English word; but the dictionary does not and cannot tell you the fine shades of usage. On the other hand, the Frenchman, knowing that an animal may be called either a "beast" or a "creature," and knowing that the latter word is applicable also to a human being, assumes that the former also may be so used, and calls a woman " that dear beast," much to our amusement. If we analyze the matter, it is purely an affair of custom that one word is not used in both senses, just as the other is. Why do we call the sun " he " and the moon " she " ? In some other languages the reverse is the case, and there are thousands of such instances. For solemn discourse we have in English almost 34 Earmarks of Literature a separate dialect. Some recent English writers on literary criticism lay special stress on this as one of the strong points of the language. No one could possibly think that a prayer in English was addressed to anyone but the Deity, even though the name of God does not appear in it. In French the same diction is used that is employed in speaking to an intimate friend, a child, or a servant. The finer shades of appropriateness of style are often unnoticed and neglected, especially in letter-writing. People write letters of con- dolence in the same style that they would use to tell of a trip to New York; they address aged persons who are barely known to them in the same style that they would use to a friend of equal age; they are flippant when they ought to be serious; or ponderous when they ought to be graceful. The art of letter writing is very largely the art of adapting one's manner to the particular person ad- dressed and to the particular occasion and object of the letter. It is the same with books, many of which fall below the best Appropriateness of Style 35 standards of literature in just this way. They are grammatical, well-expressed, clear, but not adapted to their readers, their occasions or their objects. As examples of books badly adapted to readers, take many children's books, especially those written in former times for religious instruction. The lan- guage, the forms of thought, the method of the writer, are all such as to repel the child instead of to attract him. On the other hand, there are books that are "too easy" — written down to the child's supposed intellect in a way to excite his contempt. A candidate for governor of a state once lost many votes by addressing an audience of working-men in his shirt sleeves. He thought they would be pleased at this show of democracy, but they were offended because he did not show the same respect to them that he would have shown to a more fashionable or scholarly audience. This is the way that many books fail: the writer misjudges his readers and does not properly adapt his treatment of the subject to them. He is too learned, or too 36 Earmarks of Literature condescending, or uses words that are too big or too simple. I once heard a library trustee make an address at the opening of a new branch, on the supposition that those to whom he spoke were residents of the neighborhood, whereas they were library assistants who had come from all parts of the city. I once pre- pared an address explaining many features of library work to the general public, and had to deliver it, much to my chagrin, to an audi- ence of library workers who knew quite as much about the subject as I did. In all these cases there was lack of adaptation to the reader or the listener. As examples of literary efforts badly adapted to the occasion, take any effort that is purely "occasional" — a poem, an oration, an after-dinner speech. Half of them are cal- culated to throw the hearer into gloom when the day should be joyful, or to make him laugh hysterically at a funeral. This kind of literature is most freely undertaken by ama- teurs, and yet it is one of the hardest in which to succeed: hence the very few examples of Appropriateness of Style 37 it that have been preserved as pure literature. There are a few: Lincoln's Gettysburg speech stands at the very head. Cicero delivered legal addresses in court that have been pre- served as models of literature. Bossuet's funeral orations are part of the treasures of French literature. But as for the average effort of this kind, it will, I fear, never find its way into our list of what is greatest and best. For examples of writing whose form is not in accord with its object we have to go no further than our familiar songs, from hymns down to the latest coon song. These consist of poetry that is intended to be set to music; that is its object. But in nine cases out of ten it is not well-fitted for a musical setting. Music has both accent and quantity; that is, there are accented notes, and also long and short notes. Now English poetry depends primarily on accent, not on quantity, as Latin poetry did; but quantity is still an important feature, and especially so in verse that is to be set to music. Some of the bad settings, to 7 38 Earmarks of Literature be sure, are the fault of the musician, not of the poet. Sometimes the words were not intended by the poet to be set to music at all, in which case he can scarcely be held responsible. But if a writer deliberately writes, for a musical setting, words that it is difficult or impossible to set to music at all he is surely guilty of the literary sin of not adapting his style to his object. Equally guilty is he who writes, we will say, an adver- tisement in a way that makes his readers resolve that they will under no circumstances buy the articles that he advertises. I do not see why an advertisement should not be a work of pure literature, although I do not recollect ever seeing such a one. The " Spotless Town " Sapolio verses come pretty near it. Of course we do not quarrel with inappro- priateness that exists simply from lapse of time or change of place. Cicero's orations addressed to the Conscript Fathers do not cease to be good literature because the Con- script Fathers long ago ceased to exist. Neither do we deny the claims of many books Appropriateness of Style 39 from foreign countries that conform to the standard of propriety where they were writ- ten, though that standard is not our own. A writer adapts his work to a single time and place; if it is good literature, it remains good though time and place change. Yet greatest of all is the literature that is appropriate to all times and all places — deals with the great facts and emotions of human life in such a way that it is universally true. This is the great literature of inspiration. N CHAPTER V Character in Style O MAN or woman is precisely like any other man or woman that ever was, is, or will be. This is what we mean when we speak of individuality; and when that indi- viduality shows itself in a person's writings, those writings are said to be characteristic. It is to this feature that the French writer referred when he said " st}'le is the man." He uses the word "style" to mean character alone, and it is often so used; in fact, we may consider all the other desirable features as part of it — clearness, correctness, appropri-^ ateness. If the man has a clear mind, his writing, if characteristic, will also be clear; if he has a strong sense of the fitness of things, his writing will be appropriate. If his mind is muddy and his taste bad, then his writings, if characteristic, will condemn him instead of winning him approval. 40 X Character in Style 41 But there is more than this in character.! The best of it consists of combinations of deli- j cate qualities that cannot be defined, but are ( easily recognized. How common it is for the / reader of a letter to exclaim, " Now, doesn't that sound exactly like John?" Some sen- tence, some peculiar phraseology, some turn of thought, stamps the letter as the special product of one mind, with which we are familiar, and whose reflection we recognize in the written words. It is precisely the same with books. No one familiar with Dickens, with Thackeray, with Kipling, could read half a dozen pages of one of these writers without knowing which one was the author. If there is here and there a colorless passagej without the stamp of the writer's individuality on it, we say simply, "That is not character- istic; anyone might have written it." A book made up wholly of such passages cannot be a great book. If the writer is great; if he is a genius, a characteristic style may so far over- shadow all the other qualities that we have been considering that he may qualify as a 42 Earmarks of Literature creator of literature, even though he is some- times ungrammatical, sometimes obscure, sometimes lacking in taste. Shakespeare occasionally sins in every one of these ways: yet he is the greatest figure in our literature. This is not to contradict what I have been saying about correctness, clearness, and taste; for great genius overrides rules. If you are a second Shakespeare we will forgive you an occasional lapse of this kind, but hardly other- wise. Posterity will sit in judgment on every writer who has claims to be called great, and Posterity is a hard judge. It may turn out, for instance, that Henry James and George Meredith may be denied admission to the inner circle on account of their lack of clear- ness, despite the fact that they have very characteristic and interesting styles. The ad- mirers of both these writers would say that their strong characters outweigh their faults, just as Shakespeare's does; but what the final verdict will be we do not know. What is the mechanical method by which a man puts himself — translates himself, we Character in Style 43 may say — into words? If we could describe it, and formulate effective rules for carrying it out, then any one of us could write like Shakespeare or Kipling or Poe. A good imitator, to be sure, can do very wonderful things in this direction; but he can hardly tell how, any more than a mimic can describe to you just how he is able to imitate the per- sonal peculiarities of an actor. After all, he can simply reproduce a few superficial tricks; he cannot give us the soul of the man, because it is not in his body. You see a man imitate Henry Irving or a woman imitate Nazimova and you say it is done to the life; yet the imitators could not play Shylock like the one, or Nora, in "The Doll's House," like the other; if they could they would be earning five hundred dollars a performance instead of five. So we often read successful short paro- dies of Carlyle, of Kipling, or of Poe; but the writers could not produce books like either of these. The style is the man; if the man is not there, the style in its fullness, its depth, its entirety, cannot be there either. The char- 44 Earmarks of Literature acteristic of all great art is that it records the soul of the artist; the picture at which you look may be that of a house or a horse or a hill: if the artist is great he will tell you just how he was feeling when he studied that house or that hill : you will feel sad, or gay, or quiet, or inspired by it, just as he was. So with literary art; the writer may be describ- ing a riot or a herd of cows ; he may be writing a lyric or a set of resolutions: if he is an artist he will reproduce in his readers his own soul, as it was when he wrote. This is why the great artists are great, be they artists in tone — great musicians, artists in form — great painters and sculptors, or artists in words — great writers. Here we may return for a moment to the subject-matter of the works whose claims to be considered as great literature we are con- sidering. From our present standpoint it is important only as furnishing the author an opportunity to reveal himself. Obviously an enthusiastic political reformer would not choose as such a vehicle a treatise on painting Character in Style 45 or a passionate lover of nature a book on the history of the Middle Ages. But when a skilled writer writes on what he loves he can make it great literature, whether he tries to do so or not. Ruskin was an art critic; he wrote to convert his readers to his views, but in so doing he made great literature. Gibbon wrote a history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; in doing this he produced great literature. If each had written on the other's subject the result might have been good, but not great. From this point of view the choice of a subject is important. And it is equally so from the reader's standpoint. He will nat- urally appreciate most thoroughly great literature whose subject is likely to rouse enthusiasm in him. This is why the literature that is most universally appreciated is on sub- jects that have a universal appeal — that voice the great emotions of humanity — love, grief, pity, and so on. It is none the less true, how- ever, that, except indirectly, the subject is not an element of the literature's greatness any 46 Earmarks of Literature more than the material of which a statue is made contributes to its artistic excellence. Certain materials are fit, while others are unfit; bronze and marble are better than tallow, and molasses could not be used at all, but it is what the sculptor does with his bronze or marble — what he reveals with it, what he teaches through it — that matters. So it is what the historian does with his story, what the art essayist does with his criticism, that makes it literature — that sets him on high with Ruskin and Gibbon or ranks him with the most trivial writer of the daily press. CHAPTER VI Special Literary Forms OPECIAL kinds of literary form are not ^ arbitrary; they are born of some necessity and are efforts to follow some line of least resistance. There are hundreds of them that we do not recognize and that are trivial in origin or results. Take, for instance, the tele- graphic form, born of the necessity of putting an intelligible message into the fewest pos- sible words. It is marked especially by its omissions. Thus, when a man wishes to telegraph, ''Your proposition is satisfactory to me as you have finally modified it, and you may expect me on the train that arrives about noon. Please notify our friends in New York that I am coming," he may put it into ten words as follows : " Proposition satisfactory as modi- fied. Coming noon train. Notify New York." This is as much a special literary 47 48 Earmarks of Literature form as poetry or the drama. Another form that is born of necessity for brevity is the newspaper headline. Here the writer is con- fined to a certain number of letters instead of a certain number of words, as in the telegram. The writing of inscriptions, long recognized as an important and serious form of literature, is limited in much the same way. We shall consider here only one or two of these special literary forms, and those the most widely recognized and most important. Poetry Most persons, if asked what is most neces- sary to poetry, would say that it must have meter and rhyme; yet there has been poetry without either. In particular, much ancient Teutonic poetry depended on alliteration — the beginning of certain conspicuous words with the same sound — a property akin to rhyme, where the similar sounds are at the end, but not at all like it in effect. What is called meter, also, has varied greatly in its elements; Latin meter, for instance, depends Special Literary Forms 49 chiefly on quantity, or tiie length of syllables, while English meter depends chiefly on accent or the stress given to certain syllables in pro- nunciation. It is quite possible that other ways of writing poetry may be found in the future, so that we may only say that it is a form of literary expression in which the words are given some kind of symmetry marked by regular recurrence of quantity, accent, similar sounds, or the like. We shall consider here chiefly English poetry, whose characteristic is the regular recurrence of accent. The recurrence of accent is a strong characteristic of all English speech, marking it off distinctly from such a language as the French, which has practically none. Unfortunately, the word "accent" is commonly used in two senses — ''stress" and " intonation." When we speak of a " French accent" we mean a French intonation. The marks called " accents," used over certain French vowels, simply indicate special pro- nunciations. The absence of stress is a pecu- liarity of French intonation. One may imitate 50 Earmarks of Literature a Frenchman very well by simply pronounc- ing an English sentence with great care that precisely the same stress is bestowed on each syllable and word. In pronouncing a word of two or more syllables, the English-speaking person always puts in one primary or strong accent and as many secondary or weak ones as may be necessary, and in indicating the pronunciation of a word the location of these accents is very important. It is difficult to explain to a Frenchman what this means, just as it is difficult for a Chinaman to explain to us that in his language musical pitch is an important element of pronunciation. Now, just as we accent the syllables of our words, so we accent the words in our sen- tences.* We instinctively try to make these accented words in prose fall at as regular intervals of time as possible, by slowing up where there are few or no words between accents and by hurrying where there are many. Thus, we say naturally: S'ay I are you | go'ing down ] to'wn this [ ev'ening? *A very interesting book on this subject, Saintsbury's Rhythm of English Prose, has just been published. Special Literary Forms 51 Now, the chief difference between English poetry and English prose is that in the former the number of syllables between accents is made uniform, so that if spoken uniformly, without dragging or hurrying in any part, the accents will fall at regular time intervals. There are many modifications of this — poetry with elements of prose, and prose with some of the features of poetry — but this is the broad principle. Hitherto, we have said nothing about quantity. Unfortunately, again, this word is used in two senses. Writers on English verse have used it to mean the dif- ference between accent and the lack of accent, calling an accented syllable long and an unaccented one short. It really depends on the time it takes to pronounce a syllable. Take, for instance, the three monosyllables "fat," "fair," and "fenced." The first is uttered in a very short time, while it takes longer to say either of the other two, one because of the character of the vowel sounds and the other because of the combination of final consonants. Latin and Greek meter 52 Earmarks of Literature depended entirely on quantity — the proper succession of long and short syllables. In English, while the meter does not depend on quantity, it may be improved or spoiled by giving attention to quantity. Verses in which the accented syllables are long and the unac- cented ones short are recognized by most persons as "smooth" and "flowing." Where a long syllable, especially one where there is a combination of consonants, is unaccented, the verse is harsh. Of course, a poet may make verse harsh on purpose to produce an effect. Another element of poetry is alliteration, spoken of above as the distinctive feature of old Teutonic poetry. It is used by Wagner in his music-dramas and is found in all very early English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. It is used in modern English poetry only to heighten an effect, and may be very effectively employed. When we think of a line that we have just read, " How fine that is ! how well expressed ! " we shall often find by examination that quan- Special Literary Forms 53 tity and alliteration, skilfully used, are responsible for the effect. D ram a So far as drama is a special literary form, that form is born of the necessities arising from stage representation. Thus there is a very rigid time limitation, a division into scenes and acts, close attention to the action of the piece, the necessity of adapting the words to the positions and movements of the actors, and so on. These limitations are joined to the necessity of making the whole seem, to the audience, natural and spontaneous, although it is really not so. All this makes drama the most difficult of literary forms, especially when it is written in poetry, joining two kinds of form with two sets of limitations to observe. Writers have tried to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of these forms, but they are based on obvious necessities, so little can be done. In former times it was considered that certain "unities" must be observed, chiefly those of time and place. 54 Earmarks of Literature According to these, a play should occupy the same time that the action represented would really occupy, and the scene should not shift about from place to place. Such limitations are not necessary, and hamper the writer unduly. They are now seldom observed. Playwrights suppose years to elapse between acts, and they shift the scene from Africa to Europe without warning. We have also dramas intended not to be acted, but merely to be read; and in these the writers have been able to throw ofif the burden of dramatic form except in so far as they desire to use it to produce their effects. In this way we have poems in the ^'form" of drama that it would be absurd to try to act. These eflforts are hybrids, and although some of the greatest figures in literature have composed them they rarely make a universal appeal. When they do so, it is usually for reasons unconnected with the peculiar form, as in the case of works like Goethe's Faust. Of late it has been customary to rewrite popular fiction in dramatic form and enact it Special Literary Forms 55 on the stage. Still more recently popular plays have been rewritten as novels. These dramatized novels and "novelized" dramas labor under the disadvantage that they are translations from one kind of literary form to another. Such translation is difficult, though not impossible, and it has not generally been executed by competent hands. The original author may be the very w^orst person to do it, for he generally is not familiar with both forms. Dramatization has been more success- ful than "novelization" because the play- wrights who have done the work have usually been technically competent. "Novelization" has so far been successfully accomplished rarely, if at all. And neither of these kinds of transfer from one literary form to another is well calculated to produce a work of literature. Oratory Like the playwright, the writer of an ora- tion composes not to be read but to be listened to. Besides this limitation his object usually is to convince his hearers of something, and 56 Earmarks of Literature the form is adapted to that end. Language that is to be heard, not read, is hampered by the fact that the hearer can take in only what the speaker is saying at the time; he cannot grasp a paragraph at a glance, nor can he look ahead at all to see what is coming. Cer- tain constructions allowable in written speech, therefore, are objectionable in an oration. On the other hand, the speaker has an opportunity of making his meaning clear, by emphasis and intonation, that is denied to the writer; so that in some cases a passage that would be evident to the listener reads somewhat obscurely. Again, the writer of words that are to be read, not heard, must reason somewhat closely and pay attention to his points, for the reader has him at a disadvantage. His words, set down in black and white, may be re-read, studied, and compared with what is said on another page. This cannot be done by a lis- tener. It is easier, therefore, for an orator to appeal to emotions and to prejudices, and this is often done. The style used is adapted to this aim, and in reading some orations that Special Literary Forms 57 move the hearer powerfully, we often wonder what could possibly have produced that eflfect. In other cases, where the orator and his audi- ence are in sympathy from the start, the wording may be as simple as possible, and all the more moving for its simplicity. This is the case with Lincoln's Gettysburg address. In general, to get the full effect of an oration we must hear it recited, just as to get the full effect of a play we must see it acted on the stage. The Novel Some may say that there is no special lit- erary form appropriate to the novel, and it is true that it is the freest of all forms, but the writer must observe certain literary rules, as well as those that apply directly to his management of the story, with which we have nothing to do here. Some of these rules are apparently unknown to writers generally, for they are constantly broken. Take, for in- stance, the difference between a passage merely supposed to be reported by the writer and one actually supposed to be written by 58 Earmarks of Literature one of the characters. Novelists often make the mistake of writing down a letter not as the writer would write it, but as it might be taken down by someone else. For instance, if the writer is a cockney he is made to write '' 'alf " for half and " hactive " for active. He would pronounce the words in that way, but not write them. Characters are often made to use language unsuited to them, and, in particular, conver- sations are often stilted and unnatural. We recognize this when we say that a person "talks like a book." Characters in a book should not "talk like a book" if they are to give the impression of naturalness. The way in which the writer of a novel treats his own personality is responsible for various marked forms in romance. For example, a story may assume the form of an autobiography, the supposed writer being also the hero or heroine; or the supposed writer may be some secondary character in the story. In both these cases there is much use of the first person, and the narrator is Special Literary Forms 59 brought into the foreground. In other cases the narrator is not identified, and there is nothing in the novel that betrays who he is or how he knows what he is writing about. In other books the narrator frankly puts himself forward from time to time as the writer of a fictitious story. He speaks of "our hero" and discusses the tale with the reader in such a way as to leave no illusion of reality. This is rather an old-fashioned method of treatment. Whichever treatment is selected, the writer must be consistent. If he is writing as the hero he should not describe scenes at which he was not present, without letting the reader know how he was informed of them. If he tells the story as a real series of events written by a real person, he should not drop into the character of an avowed narrator of fiction. These are all special forms, although the lack of formality in them makes it difficult to recognize them as such. This is enough to show, perhaps, that a novel writer cannot altogether ignore literary form. The limitations under which he works, 60 Earmarks of Literature however, are so vague and peculiar that he usually does disregard them. Readers are often at a loss to know why one novel is good and another bad, why one interests him and holds his attention while the other does not. Aside from considerations connected with the character of the story, the reason may often be found in the superior care with which the better writer, consciously or unconsciously, has adhered to the literary form that is proper for a prose romance. p CHAPTER VII On the Reading of Poetry Aloud OETRY is essentially a form of spoken, not of written language. Its elements depend on the sound of words, not on their appearance on the printed page. An occa- sional attempt by the poets to introduce " eye- rhymes," as of " cough " with " bough," or the like, has not met with favor. One who reads verse silently to himself must at least imagine the sound of the words if he is to appreciate it as poetry. The very fact that it is poetry instead of prose implies fitness for reading aloud or for recitation. Now, there are those who counsel the readers of poetry to treat it precisely like prose — to make no pauses or to give no accents that would not be made or given if the passage were not poetry at all. From one point of view this is just. In poetry words should be so arranged that the natural accents fall into 61 62 Earmarks of Literature rhythmic sequence, so that if read naturally the fact that the passage is poetry appears at once, and the effect on the listener is that of poetry, not prose. There are passages that may be treated in just this way. It would be hard, for instance, to read such verses as this without showing that they are poetry: On Linden, when the sun was low, All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, And dark as winter was the flow Of Iser, rolling rapidly. Or this: The little toy dog is covered with dust, Yet sturdy and stanch he stands; And the little tin soldier is red with rust And his musket moulds in his hands. In both of these extracts the rhyme aids the meter in marking off the lines and empha- sizing the poetical character of the composi- tion. If either were written as prose, the reader would not go far before finding that he was being tricked. For instance: On Linden, when the sun was low, all bloodless Reading Poetry Aloud 63 lay the untrodden snow, and dark as winter was the flow of Iser, rolling rapidly. This reminds one of the paragraphs in the newspapers where verse is printed as prose to enhance its humorous effect. If all poetry were carefully constructed with a view to this kind of reading, the advice to disregard its structure would be sound. But it is not so. Consider the following passage: To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language. Here there is no rhyme and no rhetorical pause at the end of either line. If it were written as prose, the reader who did not pre- viously know that it was verse might have difficulty in recognizing it as such. Thus: To him who, in the love of Nature, holds com- munion with her visible forms, she speaks a vari- ous language. Here the trouble is largely with the length of the lines, the distribution of pauses and the lack of rhyme. But in poetry in general, 64 Earmarks of Literature besides syllables that call for an accent and those that demand to be left unaccented, there are others that may or may not receive stress, at the reader's will. Even in the strict and formal quantitative verse of the ancients, there were "common" or doubtful quantities as well as long and short ones. Besides this, much verse is purposely rugged, and disre- gards accent more or less; and its rhythmic quality depends on the watchfulness of the reader in bringing out stress in places where it would not be given in the natural reading of prose. Of course, this requires judgment. If the reader remembers simply that what he reads has rhythm and forgets that it has also sense, his reading will degenerate into a mean- ingless sing-song. If he regards the sense and forgets the rhythm it will often sound like plain prose, and rather odd prose at that. Oftener still the listener will be annoyed and pained by an involuntary effort to catch the rhythm, which prevents his enjoyment of the verse as a whole. This is what makes the reading of poetry Reading Poetry Aloud 65 difficult. What, for instance, shall the reader do at the end of a line where there is no rhetorical pause? If he reads straight ahead, he goes far towards turning the verse into prose. If he pauses, he spoils the sense and makes his performance childish and ridicu- lous. It is possible for him to indicate the meter and the succession of lines — now by an almost unnoticeable pause, now by an inflec- tion of voice — so that the listener may recog- nize the metric quality of what he hears without being conscious that there is inter- ference with the sense. The art of the great actor, in declaiming Shakespearean or other metrical drama, depends largely upon pre- cisely this ability. Some lines of poetry may be interpreted rhythmically in more than one way. The other lines in the stanza generally give the key, but the reader might read the line in more than one way if it stood by itself. Those who believe that the reader should not con- cern himself with the meter will not object to this, but if the meter is to be brought out in 66 Earmarks of Literature reading it is important for the reader to know what it is. Sometimes he meets with this kind of line at the very beginning of his selection, and these doubtful lines, owing to the pecu- liarities of English poetry, are specially easy to write in our language. Take, for instance, the first line of Enid's celebrated and beautiful song in Tennyson's Idylls: Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel, and lower the proud This may be read, or sung, in at least three ways, having, respectively, six, five, and seven " feet," as follows : Tu'rn — I Fo'r-tune | tu'rn thy | wh'eel and | lo'wer the | pr'oud — Turn, F'or | tune tu'rn | thy wh'eel | and loV | er the pro'ud Tu'rn — I Fo'r-tune | tu'rn thy | wh'eel — | -^and I lo'wer the | pr'oud — From one standpoint, these ambiguous lines are objectionable ; from another the ambiguity may be thought an additional beauty. The Reading Poetry Aloud 67 rhythm shifts and changes as we think of it, so that to the steadfast progress of the meter is added a sinuous motion, which may either exasperate or fascinate. In composing music for the lines of a poet, musicians have generally taken great liberties with his meter, so that the rhythm of the lines when sung is not at all that as read, which is that bestowed on them by the author. Musicians think that this alteration is justifi- able and that it even lends additional beauty to the words, probably on the theory just suggested. Instances will occur to anyone. It is a fact that the number of meters com- monly used for singing is small; and if com- posers followed them slavishly in their music monotony would result. Perhaps this is the fault of the poets in not devising and using new meters. This has been done notably by Kipling, some of whose rhythms seem to have been borrowed from musical forms — often from dance music. The Last Chantey is a conspicuous instance. Unfortunately, many of our best songs — 68 Earmarks of Literature practically all those in operatic music — are by foreigners, and the words have to be translated. It is most difficult to translate poetry; and when in addition the translation must be adapted to precisely the same music as the original, the task becomes impossible. The translator is generally content with writ- ing another song that expresses the sentiments of the original, but in entirely different words. This is the reason why the English words of foreign operas and of most songs by French or German composers are apt to be trivial or silly. This is unfortunate, because it has led music-lovers to disregard the words in vocal music and to dwell wholly on the musical setting. In reality singing is a special case of reading poetry aloud. The music should aid in interpreting the words, so that a poem, properly set to music and properly sung, should mean more to the listener than if it were simply read. Wagner was the first writer of operas to realize this, and his music cannot be fully appreciated unless the words are heard and understood. Reading Poetry Aloud 69 The listener who finds himself bored by the long monologues in Wagner's music-dramas, those of Wotan in Siegfried, for instance, is usually he who does not understand the words, or does not attend to them, and expects to be impressed by the music alone. This is true also of the typical recitative of the Italian opera, only here the composer himself, in too many instances, disregarded the words, which are often trivial even in the original tongue, and quite worthless in translation. T CHAPTER VIII Our Two Languages HE very derivation of the word "liter- ature" — from the Latin litera, a letter — implies that it has to do with written lan- guage. Most persons think that written language is merely spoken language set down in black and white. In some cases it is this, in others it is something very different. The two methods of expressing ideas are different in their origins. When it became necessary to express ideas by sounds, such expression arose in various ways. Some think that the earliest attempt at speech was when the sound made by an animal was adopted as its name, as when the baby calls a dog a "bow-wow." However this may be, it is certain that the first attempt to make a written sign for a thing had nothing to do with any sound made by or in connection with that thing, but was simply a rude picture of it. Such pictures, 70 Our Two Languages 71 greatly conventionalized, and so modified as to have lost their value as pictures altogether, are still used in some parts of the world; for instance, in China, where there is no alphabet, in our sense of the word, every character standing for a whole word. This seems absurd and difficult to us. It seems vastly easier to learn twenty-six characters than to become familiar with thousands; yet we must remember that the practiced reader of any language reads his words as wholes and rec- ognizes each without stopping to separate it mentally into its letters. So that we read in the Chinese fashion after all; and children are generally so taught in modern schools. Our letters, each of which is supposed to stand for a sound, arose from the adoption of these picture-characters to represent, in each case, the sound with which the spoken name of the pictured character began. In lan- guages that use an alphabet, therefore, the written and spoken forms were, at the time of its adoption, closely correspondent, while in Japanese and Chinese, for instance, they 72 Earmarks of Literature may be widely different. Two Chinese, whose dialects sound to each other like foreign tongues, may understand each other clearly in writing. So a Frenchman who pronounced English very badly might be totally unable to make you understand him; yet when he wrote the words down they would be intel- ligible at once. In Chinese the character does not represent the sound of a word signifying a thing; it stands for the thing itself. In English the written word '* cow" not only sig- nifies the animal but it also stands for the combination of sounds that forms the spoken word " cow." So, in the beginning, that is, when English words first began to be written in Roman let- ters, there were for every word three things that closely corresponded: 1. The object or idea signified. 2. The spoken word. 3. The written word. These things at once began to change, so as to make their continued correspondence Our Two Languages 73 difficult. The degrees of change depended on circumstances. In some cases the object itself changed hardly at all; in others, it is quite a different thing now from what it was when its name began to be spelled. A house, for instance, is not now the same as a house in the tenth century, nor is a ship or a hat; although a horse is practically the same. Some things have changed so utterly that we must have new names for them, though the tendency is to retain the old ones. And we have a host of new things altogether, for some of which we have made new names, while we have simply applied old ones to others. So our modern dictionaries are complicated affairs. We see from them that a single word may have scores of meanings and that a single object or idea may be expressed by any one of a dozen different words. The spoken word also has changed, always a little, sometimes utterly. This we usually call change of " pronunciation." It used to be a difficult thing to record. We try to do it now by scientific alphabets and diacritical 74 Earmarks of Literature marks, but we have a better way still — the phonograph. Museums of records are being formed abroad to store up data about present- day pronunciation. Unfortunately, we have none yet in this country. If the material of the records lasts, our great-great grandchildren will know how we talked. As for us, we absolutely do not know how our great-great grandsires talked, except that they talked very differently from us. We think the Irish "brogue" a queer thing, but it is believed that the Irish still talk English as our ancestors taught it to them ; their brogue is the spoken tongue of seventeenth-century Englishmen. The written word is unchangeable, or it would be if we were to let it alone. We probably should let it alone if, like the Chi- nese character, it represented an idea rather than the sound of a spoken word. As it is, we are not only introducing new words to signify new things, but we are altering the spelling of our written words in an attempt to follow the changes of sound in our spoken Our Two Languages 75 words. If the spoken words are the important things, perhaps this is defensible, but from the standpoint of literature the written word is the important thing; we use it for recording thought, and if we are going to change it the time will come when we shall not be able to read our records. The alteration of spelling to fit the changed sounds of words is often called spelling reform. Reform is, or should be, the restora- tion of some good thing that has been changed or lost. In this instance the thing that has changed is the sound of the word — the pro- nunciation. If there is to be reform, then, we should go back to the old sound — not make a further change by altering the spelling. Writing has done much to keep one form of language steady. It is to be hoped that the phonograph is going to do the same thing for the spoken form. If this should prove to be the case, the problem that some have attempted to solve by what is called "spelling reform" may ultimately cease to present itself. w CHAPTER IX The Structure of Literature E ARE apt to think of all written language as made up of letters more or less like our own. We know that many foreign alphabets closely resemble ours. Such are the German, the Russian, even the Greek; and we assume that other characters, such as those used by the Chinese and Japanese, or the Hebrew and Arabic characters, are of the same nature. This is not the case. Hebrew and Arabic have characters to represent consonants only. Chinese and Japanese characters are not letters — the Chinese are ideographs and the Japanese represent not elementary sounds, but syllables. In Chinese every word is monosyllabic, so that the char- acters represent also words. Modern languages are of three kinds, rep- resenting, it is thought, three different stages of development. There is the syllabic stage, 76 The Structure of Literature 77 when every word has one syllable, and ideas are expressed by stringing these one-syllabled words along without changing any of them. Such is the Chinese. In Chinese there are no separate " parts of speech," as we understand these words, and no grammar. The Chinese, for instance, instead of saying, " At what time do you go to bed?" says, "You here all are what time sleep feel?" If he wishes to say, "To wash the hands and face is a necessary part of each day's work," he puts it: "Wash hands wash face this is day day less not finish of affair." Secondly, we have languages where the syllables denoting different ideas are fastened together with some degree of permanence to denote complex ideas. These are called agglutinative tongues — languages where the elements are simply "stuck together," as it were. The American Indian languages were all of this type, and the Japanese is now its foremost representative. Some words in Eng- lish are agglutinative. Prof. W. D. Whitney gives " un-tru-th-f ul-ly," as an example. Here 78 Earmarks of Literature each syllable has its meaning. In Japanese, the combination of separate root-words, which is very common, does not tend to produce formative elements, as it does with us. Turkish is similarly agglutinative, but with greater complexity, admitting such intricate derivatives as "sev-ish-dir-il-e-me-mek" — ** Not to be capable of being made to love one another." Lastly, we have inflected speech, where a word is modified, either by altering the root somewhat, or using prefixes or sufRxes with it to denote changed relationships. All of the languages commonly studied in our schools, both ancient and modern, are of this type. In Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, or French, the verb has different forms for its different moods and tenses, the noun for its different cases, the adjective for its degrees — all made in this way. It may be that these changes are all that remain of an original agglutinative process, and that prefixes, case- endings, mood-signs, etc., were once separate syllabic words. In his interesting book about The Structure of Literature 79 the Eskimos, Vilhjalmur Stefansson indicates that their tongue has both inflectional and agglutinative features, and is possibly chang- ing from the latter to the former type. It is not so certain, however, as was once supposed, that these three forms of language are three definite stages through which all language has passed. The most highly in- flected tongues are not the most modern, but languages like Homeric Greek, that were spoken thousands of years ago. The modern languages are dropping off their inflections, and our own language has in many respects ceased to be an inflected tongue at all. There is no separate form for the objective case ex- cept in pronouns, and the only noun inflection is for the possessive. Even here the idea of possession can also be expressed by the use of the preposition ''of," and there is some reason to think that this non-inflected possessive is driving the other out. Most of our verb rela- tions are expressed, not by inflection, but by the use of auxiliaries — such as the simple verbs " to be," " to do," and *' to have." We 80 Earmarks of Literature denote future action, not by adding an ending to the root of our verb, but by using the aux- iliary verbs " shall" and "will." For past ac- tion we may still use an inflected form, made either by changing the vowel in the root, as from "speak" to "spoke," or by adding -ed, as in the words "granted" or "shocked." But we may also express the same idea by the past tense of the auxiliary verb "do" — "did speak," " did grant," etc. This loss of inflectional forms is recent. In its earliest written form, generally known as "Anglo-Saxon," English is almost as fully inflected as Latin. It also looks as if, besides losing our inflec- tions, the distinction between our parts of speech were becoming weaker. It may even be said that there is no part of speech in English that may not be used in place of any other part, at least colloquially. Thus, we use verbs as nouns, as when we speak of the "kill" of a lion or the "take" of a compos- itor; nouns as verbs, as when we "motor" or "dust;" nouns as adjectives, in speaking of a The Structure of Literature 81 "concrete" house or an "angel" child, and so on. In this respect, therefore, English is getting more like Chinese, and it has been suggested that the lack of grammar in such a language may be a sign of age and not of undeveloped youth. To go back to the written forms of lan- guage, the syllabic and agglutinative tongues usually employ not alphabets but syllabaries. Naturally this requires a vast number of char- acters. In Chinese there are in the great standard dictionary no less than 41,000 one- syllabled words, each of which has its separate character. For ordinary purposes it is suffi- cient to learn about 2,500 to 3,500 of these characters. In Japanese there are two syllabaries — the Katakana, which is the simpler, and the Hiragana, which is the more popular, as it can be written more smoothly and continu- ously, like the letters used in our "hand- writing." Each of the Japanese characters represents a consonant combined with a vowel, so that they may be learned in series — ba, be, 82 Earmarks of Literature bi, bo, bu; ta, te, ti, to, tu, etc., which makes them more systematic than the Chinese. An alphabet is usually regarded as more convenient than a syllabary, but it is not so much so as we are apt to think. No experi- enced reader picks out the separate letters of the alphabet that form a word. He recognizes the word as a whole, just as he would do if it were represented by one character, as in Chi- nese, or by one for each of its syllables, as in Japanese. Arabic has an alphabet, but the vowels have no corresponding letters, being represented by points over the consonants with which they are associated. A consonant, with its vowel point, thus very nearly takes the place of a syllabic character such as those of the Japanese syllabaries. In ancient Hebrew, which is of the same family of languages as the Arabic, even the points for the vowels were omitted, and the vowel had to be guessed. Here we have a sliding scale connecting the syllabaries with the alphabets, starting with a pure ideographic syllabary like the Chinese and running through the Japanese, by way of The Structure of Literature 83 the Hebrew and Arabic, down to alphabets of the modern form. Even these have some peculiarities that connect them with the sylla- baries. The names of our consonants, for instance. Be, De, Ef, Jay, etc., are purely syl- labic. Then, some of them represent not simple sounds but combinations. In the Russian al- phabet there is a single character for the sound represented in English by ch, as in "church." French requires three letters for this sound, namely tch, and German has to use four — tsch. The English letter "j" rep- resents a complex sound which in French re- quires dj to express it. If our spelling were strictly phonetic — one sound to a letter and one letter to a sound — an alphabet would be much preferable to a sylla- bary, not for ordinary reading, but in indicat- ing the pronunciation of a strange word and in assisting the learner to some extent. As it is, it is often but a stumbling block. Since the introduction of western learning, Chinese and Japanese, especially the latter, are sometimes written with the Roman alpha- 84 Earmarks of Literature bet. It is not possible to do this, or indeed to use any alphabet or syllabary in place of any other, without making some arbitrary rules to govern the change. No two persons would do it in the same way. Such changes have been productive of much confusion. Even in so simple a matter as the writing of Russian in Roman characters, there are several different systems in use. The same Russian termination, for instance, is written as oif, ov, and ow. The same Russian letter appears as ch, tch, and tsch. This is due partly to the fact that the Roman letters, as used in different tongues, do not always have the same value. Commercial contact and the necessities of trade are operating in all these things in a direction contrary to the requirements of lit- erature as an art. Commerce and communi- cation demand the unification of alphabets, the abolition of syllabaries, even the fusing of languages. But from the artistic standpoint these things should not be. The Arabs, for in- stance, have developed a beautiful language The Structure of Literature 85 with a fine, characteristic literature corre- sponding to their inborn and inbred character, customs, and modes of thought. Their al- phabet and mode of writing is part of it. The translation of such a tongue makes it lose its atmosphere; even its transliteration into Roman alphabetic signs destroys its peculiar color to the eye. From the standpoint of lit- erature as an art, these should be preserved. We have seen that in literature the way of doing things is all-important; and things have been said and written in the Chinese, Arabic, and Bengali languages and characters in a way that never would have existed had those nations spoken English and used the Roman alphabet. This tendency of commercial needs to de- stroy literary values has led to the plan — it is hardly more than a dream yet — of an arti- ficial world-language. If we had this kind of a language business might be transacted in it without injuring the separate use and develop- ment of local languages and literatures. Unfortunately, no artificial language has 86 Earmarks of Literature yet been constructed that has met, or is likely to meet, with universal approval. Language is a thing of growth, not of invention. In other fields, to be sure, man has replaced things that grow with things specially devised and constructed. Machines are everywhere taking the place of animals or of man himself. There is no inherent reason why an invented language should not prove satisfactory. But it took long years to introduce machinery, and we may expect that invented tongues will ex- perience the same opposition and inertia. Probably the particular line of least resist- ance has not yet been found. Volapuk, once a promising candidate, is now little regarded. Esperanto, after making much progress, is being discarded by many for Ido, which they regard as an improvement. All these tongues are yet in the laboratory stage. They are not actually "on the market." CHAPTER X Literature as a Form of Art ART aims to make a special appeal to the feelings as opposed to the reasoning powers. This is true of literature as a form of art, just as it is of painting or sculpture or music. This is why, as we have seen above, the way of doing is more important than the subject-matter in literature, for it is so with all arts that have a subject-matter — with what are called representative arts. Such arts are painting and sculpture, in so far as they represent actual objects, as opposed to music, which represents nothing but itself, or to merely geometrical decoration. If the sub- ject-matter were of prime importance in such art, then one statuette of a wolf would be as good as another, all paintings of Pike's Peak would be of equal merit, and so on. In non- representative arts, like music or some forms of decoration, as there is no subject-matter, 87 88 Earmarks of Literature no representation of anything else, the art is all manner; there is nothing at all to it except the way in which it is done. Music, to be sure, has occasionally made an effort to represent something — the songs of birds, or the noise of a battle, perhaps. Such music belongs to the type known as "program music," and if we admit its claims to legitimacy we may say precisely the same thing about it as about painting and sculp- ture — otherwise the music sung by the bird in Wagner's music-drama of Siegfried would be no whit better than the melody of "The Mocking Bird." When we say, therefore, that the manner and not the matter of a poem or an essay makes it literature, we are merely citing a special case of a general rule that applies to all art. And it is only the same rule, stated a little differently, that limits the effect of art, as art, to its action on the feelings. Art may make us feel in various ways. It may aroi^se grief, anger, joy, or admiration. It may be simply beautiful, but it may also be touching, amus- Literature as a Form of Art 89 ing, or inspiring. But it cannot prove a prop- osition. It may cause you to believe that a proposition is true, but it does so through the feelings, not through the intellect. And of a purely intellectual proposition, such as are those of mathematics, it has nothing to say. Now, the reason for this, as has been noted in another chapter, is that the artist puts him- self into his art; he makes us see his subject through his own eyes. We feel terror when we see a lion about to spring; and even a pho- tograph may remind us of the reality and so recall that terror; but in the springing lion of a great sculptor we feel also the artist's terror, something that he puts into his work and that his work transmits to us. The only way in which one artist can work thus on our feelings while another cannot, is by his way of doing what he does. We are terrified not be- cause we see something that the artist intended to represent a lion, but because he put some- thing terrific into the representation. This is all true of literary art as it is of other kinds. Why is there something terrifying about cer- 90 Earmarks of Literature tain stories by Poe — The Pit and the Pen- dulum or The Black Cat? We may think that it is what Poe is telling about that terri- fies us, but this is merely the vehicle of his art. An artist who desires to inspire terror naturally selects a subject that is capable of being treated so as to bring about this re- sult; but whether it really does inspire terror or not depends on how he treats it. An in- ferior writer might select precisely the same subjects and incidents and only make his read- ers laugh. / Another thing is true of literature as a form of art — it does not have to represent nature exactly. Written speech that professes to de- scribe nature must do so, of course, but this is usually science or travel and not generally pure literature, though it may be. A literary masterpiece may be entirely fanciful ; its ob- ject may be to inspire a feeling of vague beauty or even of mere uneasy suspicion or terror, as of objects seen through a mist. Thus the criticism "it is not true to nature" may be quite beside the point. Even where the Literature as a Form of Art 91 writer's aim is to give an impression of reality- he may often best do this by departing from literal description. He may give it by dwell- ing on some features to the exclusion of others ; by slightly exaggerating here and toning down there. No two persons get the same impression from looking at the same thing or from wit- nessing the same series of incidents. When a faithful witness describes a scene or an in- cident he lets his public know exactly how it seemed to him. Other witnesses will not agree and will frequently accuse him of ro- mancing. A writer who desires to be con- sidered realistic will set down everything that the various witnesses would be apt to agree on and omit everything that would be affected by what scientific men call *'the personal equation." Then everyone will agree that the description is wonderfully true to life. But there are some artists and some writers who have the power not only to describe things as they see them but to make their public see them in the same way. The public will then 92 Earmarks of Literature say, "Why, how true that is! how obvious! and yet I never thought of it before!" And others have the power to choose some unnat- ural point of view not really their own, and force it upon their readers. This is the kind of realism that describes a blue elephant with a yellow tail — as someone has said — "and makes you believe it." A critic of Turner, the English artist, is said to have remarked of one of the paint- er's sunsets that he had never seen such tints in the sky. " Probably not," rejoined Turner, " but don't you wish you could ? " Turner was a great artist, but he would have been greater if he had been able to make his critic think that the sunset colors were normal and usual, even if they were not so. CHAPTER XI The Appreciation of Literature IT HAS been said that the effect of all art, and of literature as an art, depends on the way in v/hich the artist has done his work — on his technic or his style. This is a very different thing from saying that one must understand just how the effect is pro- duced before one can appreciate it. Rather is it true that we appreciate more fully when we do not know. It is indeed interesting to know just where the mechanism is and how the artist operates it, but the effect of such knowledge is something apart from the ef- fect of the work of art that results from the artist's skill. It is interesting to be able to tell, by looking at a picture, what pigments the artist used, how he handled his brush and what were his views and abilities in drawing, perspective, and the distribution of light and shade. But 93 94 Earmarks of Literature none of these things are necessary to the im- pression that the painting, as a work of art, is intended to make on the beholder. Similarly, it is interesting to know that the poet has made skilful use of quantity and alliteration, that the dramatist has used cer- tain tricks to work up the situation that seems to us so naturally brought about, and so on. The student must investigate and know these things; the creator of a work of art or of literature must understand all the methods that can be successfully used to bring about the effects that he desires to create; but it by no means aids these effects to lay bare the methods to him upon whom they are to be produced. This may comfort some of the lovers of art or literature who feel hopelessly in the dark when artistic or literary friends talk glibly in professional jargon on technical details. These are highly interesting for those who care to go into them, so long as the skilful manipulation of some method is not lauded irrespective of the result that is attained. A The Appreciation of Literature 95 student of surgery is interested and enthusi- astic when he sees a surgical expert perform some rare operation with consummate skill. It may matter little to him if, after all, the opera- tion has been unable to save the man's life. But to the man himself, life and death are the only things that matter. It is to be feared that many of us have been taught methods, when what we need is the ability to appreciate results — to tell the good from the bad, the noble from the mean, in lit- erature, art, or music. This can be done only by example. One cannot become a good man by studying ethics — by finding out someone's theory about the difference between good and evil. One must be brought up by and with good persons, in an atmosphere of goodness. Good literature, likewise, cannot be appre- ciated by analysis. We have analyzed, in this book, some of its phases, but no reader need think that this process will help him to appreciate or love it, although it may aid him to recognize it. Wagner freely employed in his music the 96 Earmarks of Literature so-called leit-motif, or leading motive, a musical phrase which he connected in the minds of his hearers with some character, in- cident, idea, or emotion. He thus made use of the principle of association so familiar to students of psychology, which is especially strong with musical sounds. If one hears for the first time a striking melodic phrase when gazing at a beautiful scene, the repetition of that phrase at any time will act forcibly to bring the scene again impressively before the "mind's eye." So, when we have once seen a Wagnerian hero enter to a peculiar and recognizable strain, we shall think of him when we hear it again, and the composer may thus control our thoughts and emotions to a certain extent. In order that this effect may be produced it is not at all necessary that the hearer should consciously recognize the "motive," or even that he should know that there exists such a method of playing upon his feelings. Yet it is the commonest thing to see persons commit- ting these motives to memory and delightedly The Appreciation of Literature 97 calling them by name when they occur in the music. The real effect of these motives is like that of a sight of the stars and stripes on a patri- otic soul. As he sees his country's flag his pulses leap. He does not say "Ah! a piece of cloth with stars and stripes on it! Such a piece of cloth constitutes the flag of the United States. It is now in order for me to feel pa- triotic!" No, a man can never argue himself into an appreciation of art or literature, nor can he attain it by learning the tricks of the art- ist's trade. We have seen above that no work of lit- erature can be good unless it is grammatical. Will our appreciation of it be increased by a grammatical analysis? Ask those miserable creatures who have been forced to *' parse" Paradise Lost what they think of Milton's masterpiece! Ask countless students of Latin and Greek whether their grammatical analy- sis of the Iliad and the Aeneid conduced to literary appreciation of those epics! 98 Earmarks of Literature It is much to be regretted that the ana- lytical knowledge of construction and its methods, which is necessary for a constructive artist, should be so widely deemed necessary for the art lover to whom the art is to deliver its message. This belief and whatever has been done to act upon it, have killed the love and appreciation of art, music, and literature in thousands of souls where, perhaps, it had begun to bud. Anglo-Saxons are not natur- ally appreciative of what is good and great in art. So much the more should they be led to see it — not taught to butcher art and peer into its dismembered body, like the Roman soothsayers, in the vain hope of finding there what was never meant to be revealed in this way. u CHAPTER XII The Preservation of Literature NTIL within a very few years there has been no way of preserving spoken lan- guage except by remembering it. Informa- tion stored in this way must be handed down from father to son. Tradition, as this method of preservation is called, may or may not be accurate, and there is no way of testing its accuracy. Spoken language may now be re- corded and reproduced by the phonograph, and where the sound is the thing to be pre- served, rather than the sense, there is no other way that approaches it in accuracy. For in- stance, it gives us a means of preserving and reproducing pronunciation; and great muse- ums are availing themselves of this to record the way in which languages and dialects are spoken by all classes of people and in all parts of the world. But for long centuries no accurate method 99 100 Earmarks of Literature of preserving spoken language was known. It became necessary to appeal to another sense- organ than the ear, and the eye was chosen. Written speech appeals almost entirely to the eye; not entirely, for when the sense of sight is wanting it has been necessary to put the rec- ord into such shape that it can be read by touch. The result is the various raised al- phabets for the blind. Any sense may be rused to receive ideas. A telegraphic message has been read by wire-tappers, by using the sense of taste, placing one end of the cut wire above the tongue and the other below it; but no record of such a use is possible. For a so-called permanent record, one that may be seen has always been chosen. The advan- tage that such a record has over tradition is not so much that it is really permanent, as that it is unchanging as long as it lasts, and can then be accurately transferred. Tradition suffers all sorts of change not only in its place of storage — the memory — but also in its transfer from one memory to another. No record is really permanent without The Preservation of Literature 101 transfer. Records cut in stone or cast in metal have disappeared, not so rapidly, but quite as effectually, as those scribed in wax. Per- haps the most nearly permanent are those stamped on clay cylinders and afterward baked, after the manner of the ancient Baby- lonians, and even these are not proof against breakage. The only way to keep a record beyond danger of loss is to duplicate it widely and make sure that it is renewed frequently. This is the plan that we have adopted since the invention of printing, and it is working well, especially in the case of pure literature — the subject of this book. For pure litera- ture, as we have seen, is an art, and appeals to the feelings; it is the object of emotions, such as love, admiration, or wonder; it is fitted for companionship. So long as it in- spires feelings like these, the world will not let it die. Hence the works of a writer like Shakespeare are preserved, not so much be- cause someone, realizing that they contain matter worth keeping, sees that new editions are constantly issued; but because so many 102 Earmarks of Literature readers admire them that they are reissued automatically to satisfy a commercial demand. It is somewhat different with records that are not a part of pure literature — with the vital statistics of towns, for instance. These are put into type and are reissued when nec- essary, not because anyone loves them, but be- cause governments, or societies, or scholars, know their value and take measures for their preservation. In our complete realization of the fact that a permanent record may be assured only by transfer, we have become more and more careless about using durable material, until we are overdoing the matter. Transfer will al- ways be necessary at some time, and it may be foolish to use awkward materials or difficult and costly processes merely to put it off for a century; but to require it at short intervals is surely quite as wasteful. No one would think of printing the works of Shakespeare with ink that would completely fade away at the end of a year; yet we are using paper for most of our books that will crumble into dust in The Preservation of Literature 103 a few years. And we are using this kind of paper chiefly, not for the things that we are morally sure must and will be reprinted, no matter how soon they wear out, because mil- lions of readers love them, but for things that are not at all likely to be reprinted and will probably be a total loss when they do crumble away. Such are our periodicals, particularly our daily newspapers. Probably there never was such an amazing instance of the creation with great labor of a useful record with ab- solute disregard of its preservation — even with contemptuous disbelief in its value — by the very persons who have framed it. Librarians, historians, and scholars gener- ally, do not regard the newspapers in this way. In some state libraries, every newspaper in the state, no matter how small and insignifi- cant, is carefully preserved. Thousands of huge, bulky volumes are thus accumulated annually, at great expense — all to be lost eventually, because the poor paper on which they are printed will crumble to dust. It is not necessary, of course, to add to the expense 104 Earmarks of Literature of printing by using good paper for the whole edition. Most of the papers are glanced at or read hurriedly and then thrown away. Only the copies that are to be preserved, amounting to a very few each day, need be printed on strong, durable paper. An effort has recently been made by a com- mittee of the American Library Association to induce at least a few of the more important American newspapers to do this, but only one paper agreed, and after a year's trial, that one has abandoned its strong-paper edition on the ground of expense. Our papers are thus perfectly willing that the material gathered at great labor and expense for the information of the public today should be absolutely lost to- morrow. Our present method of preserving written language by printing with ink on paper and then binding the paper into volumes, involves some care in the preservation of these volumes — it means buildings to shelter them and per- sons to care for them. The library is thus a necessary factor in our preservation of litera- The Preservation of Literature 105 ture. But we should not forget that the most important factor in this preservation, after all, is not to care for the paper and leather of the books, but to see that they have readers who will love them and insist on their per- petuation. If through some strange accident only one set of Shakespeare's works should remain to us, the very worst way of trying to prevent loss of his name and fame, would be to lock that set up in a vault, guard it jeal- ously, and permit no one to handle it. Sooner or later its paper and leather would decay, and by that time a generation would have arisen that knew not Shakespeare. No one would care what became of the words of genius in those forgotten volumes, and they would perish with the rotting paper on which they were printed. The way to keep Shakespeare would be to let as many readers as possible see and read the volumes, so as to create a demand for duplicates. The unique set might fall apart years earlier, but it would leave many others behind it. 106 Earmarks of Literature All this is appreciated by the modern li- brarian. He sees to it that his books, so far as they are really books and not mere curi- osities, are seen and read as widely as may be possible. When he finds that he wears out thousands of volumes in a year, he is glad, so far as this wear is caused by legitimate use; for he knows that such use means a love of books, and that such a love, widely diffused, is the best possible guaranty of the continued preservation of what is best in the world's literature. CHAPTER XIII The Ownership of Literature MOST of us do not realize that art is an affair of our every-day lives. It is commonly regarded as something difficult and technical, like higher mathematics, to be shown in great museums and talked about by learned people. Few persons think of it as having anything to do with the clothes they wear or their furniture, or the utensils of their dining-rooms and kitchens. Yet if we love beautiful things, we shall desire to be surrounded with them and to use them. There is a widespread idea that none but the rich can afford to be artistic; but the fact is that those who live most simply are most often sur- rounded with tasteful and beautiful objects. The same is even more true of the literary art. It is easier to live among the beautiful and noble and tasteful in books, than it is in furniture or pottery. With the latter we are 107 108 Earmarks of Literature limited to what is in the markets accessible to us ; and those markets often contain only ugly things. This is never the case with lit- erature. The noblest, the loveliest, and the best in books are apt to be the cheapest. On the standards of tried and accepted worth, the copyrights have expired. Their cost is but the expense of reproduction, and they may be had in readable form for a trifle. Anyone, there- fore, who knows the earmarks of literature; who is able to select what is good and has the taste to appreciate and love it, may have it in his own house, as his personal possession. We saw in the last chapter how important a part the library is playing in the preserva- tion of literature, not so much by shutting up books jealously, as minerals are shut up in a museum, as by distributing them widely, so that as many readers as possible may know and love them and become an active force tending to their continued renewal. It is thus part of the library's work to make book-lovers, and this means that it is part of its business to foster book-ownership. Modern libraries are The Ownership of Literature 109 becoming more and more the expert advisers of those who want to own books. Modern bookstores of the best class are performing service of very much the same kind. It is not to the bookseller's advantage that he should force upon an unwilling reader something that will breed dislike instead of love. He should strive, and does strive, if he is a good bookseller, so to advise and direct purchasers that they will come to love books; for such a love means that he has established a perma- nent market. The would-be purchaser has always accessible to him the collections in the public libraries and in the large bookstores, so that he can browse freely, taste a little here and there, and select for purchase what he feels will satisfy his demands for literary companionship. The way to increase one's appreciation and love for what is best in an art is to saturate oneself with it. The way to understand music is to hear much of it; the way to understand painting or sculpture is to see much of it. So the way to understand and appreciate the 110 Earmarks of Literature good and great in literature is to read much, not forcing oneself to wade through some- thing distasteful, but lingering over that which appeals to what is best in us. It should not be forgotten that we are speaking here only of literature in its nar- rowest and highest sense. If the reader is using a book for the information that it con- tains he may properly compel himself to read it, and such a task may be the very best thing for him. He does not love the book ; he simply finds it necessary and profitable to acquire its contents. The feeling of friend- ship and affection that one has for a book that is part of the literature of inspiration is quite a different thing from this. Both may and do lead logically to book-ownership. It is neces- sary that we should have at hand dictionaries and cyclopedias and informational books of all sorts, though our feeling toward them is the sort of gratitude that we accord to the stranger who has told us the name of the street on which we are walking. The book-owner will buy for his own use The Ownership of Literature 111 books of information, recreation, and inspira- tion. The first he will keep in his study, the second, perhaps, in the family living-room; the last in the room that is his very own, forming there a sort of inner circle of inti- mates. And in all these cases purchase should be a response to a personal need. A library made up of books of information that the owner has no occasion to use, books of recrea- tion that merely bore him, books of inspiration that he neither understands nor appreciates, and that meet with no response from his brain or his body — this, surely, is no library at all, but simply a miscellany, whose elements are unrelated both to each other and to the life and needs of the owner. In a recent study of the causes of lethargy among nations, a writer on sociology comes to the conclusion that one of these causes is the exaltation of processes above results. One generation wishes to reach a certain end and uses an appropriate method. The next generation no longer needs the result, but it keeps on with the process, through blind habit and a mistaken feeling that it is worth 112 Earmarks of Literature something for itself alone. Such a feeling is fatal to progress and it has halted great nations like the Chinese in their tracks, so that they have merely marked time for centuries, while others who were savage when they had long been civilized, have emerged from bar- barism and far surpassed them in science and the arts. Now if there is one thing even more fatal than adherence to a process long after the need that gave rise to it has passed, it is the worship of an object associated in some way with that process. This is the mistake made by persons who reverence books merely be- cause they are books, and who think that they own libraries when the threads of human need and interest that should bind the volumes together, and to the owners, are totally lacking. A man wishes to be informed, or amused, or inspired; that is his need. It compels him to consult the records of what other minds have learned, or discovered, or elaborated; that is the process by which he tries to satisfy his need. The material object that we call a The Ownership of Literature 113 book is merely associated with that process. There is not even any reason for the process itself unless the need exists, still less for its machinery. The buyers of books too frequently make this sad mistake of becoming the owners of devices to facilitate processes for reaching results to which they are quite indifferent. He would be a foolish man indeed who should spend his money for a churn when what he needed was not butter but the bread of life. And the most foolish thing of all is to own no books. An ill-assorted library is at least the vague expression of a literary need — illogical, perhaps, but capable of being amended and developed. The absence of a library is almost akin to the absence of a soul. Even the angels can do no more in such a case than to weep — and hope. CHAPTER XIV i The Makers of Literature IN THE chapter on style it has been made clear that much of what is characteristic in a work of pure literature is derived from the author — his personality, his abilities and training; the way in which he looks at things and his way of describing what he sees and expressing what he feels. The precise man- ner in which each of these things comes to af- fect the general result is plain in some cases; in others it is not so clear — it may be quite obscure sometimes. They are very much more important in pure literature than in works of any other kind. When a writer on arithmetic informs us that twice two is four, the factors in this statement are only three; the existence of the fact, the writer's knowl- edge of it, and his ability to convey it to us. When a poet describes a sunset, the fact that the sun is setting is not the all-important thing. 114 The Makers of Literature 115 The important things are the effect of the sunset on the poet's mind, and the way in which he reproduces that effect in the mind of the reader. There are many who are poets in so far as they experience the effect, but they may be totally unable to convey it to others. Possibly, on the other hand, there are some who would be able to convey it to us if they felt it themselves, but they do not. Of a man of this sort the poet writes: A primrose by the river's brim, A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more. Now why is it that some literature has "vision" in it — makes us see clearly what we could not see before; gives us glimpses of beautiful or wonderful things; inspires us to be good, noble, or useful, and to do good, noble, or useful things? Under what circum- stances is such literature produced? If we can find out, it would pay to go to enormous trouble and expense to reproduce and make these conditions permanent. "Let me write 116 Earmarks of Literature the songs of a nation," says a writer, " and I care not who makes the laws." We may ex- pand this to say: the influence of the litera- ture of inspiration on a people is more far reaching than that of any kind of direct legis- lation or training. It has been assumed by some that if compe- tent persons were only removed from the pressure of daily labor, they would be free to occupy their time with creative work in literature. It is partly for this reason that authors are pensioned in some European countries. On the other hand it has been held that work done for pay is never of the best quality. If a man has in him some of this vision — this inspiration, it will struggle out, they say, no matter what the obstacles may be. Others have very strong ideas on the influence of environment; writers pro- duce great literature, they assert, in appropri- ate surroundings; they sometimes need stimu- lation — great sights, the stirring of ambition or love; even drugs, like alcohol, caf¥ein, or nicotine. It has even been asserted that The Makers of Literature 117 genius, whether in literature or other fields, is due to disease — either directly or by the stimulation afforded by pain or other abnor- mal conditions. Probably these persons " all are right and all are wrong." The fact is that what we call genius is the product of many factors — of some that we understand; of others, doubtless, that are yet hidden from us. In some cases it may result from heredity, in others from environment, in others still from years of plodding work. Sometimes it may come from an exceptional opportunity, sometimes it is brought out by some stimulus, ambition, love, the desire for wealth, or even by bodily pain or incipient dementia. In some cases there seems to be nothing on earth that will account for it. Under these circumstances, we see that a great literary masterpiece may arise under the most varied circumstances. It may bud and blossom in the least expected place; it may be the product of years of labor; it may be done for pay, or it may be put forth in the pure joy of creative accomplishment. There 118 Earmarks of Literature are various ways in which we may raise the average level of accomplishment in any field or in all fields, but no way in which we may produce a genius at will. One thing, however, may surely be done. Genius may arise spontaneously; or, what is the same thing, it may be produced under conditions that are yet obscure to us. But once produced, it may be given an opportu- nity for expression, or it may be smothered or allowed to "blush unseen and waste its fragrance on the desert air." This latter has too often been the case. Many great scien- tists, inventors, poets, and artists are not dis- covered until after they are dead. Earlier discovery and recognition might not have im- proved their output; it might have spoiled some of them, but at least it would have been an act of justice. Conditions at present are more favorable than ever before to the early recognition and discovery of genius, because they are more favorable to the wide dissemination of all artistic products and to the training of the The Makers of Literature 119 public to appreciate them. These conditions favor also the dissemination of all sorts of inferior products, as a fertile soil favors the growth of weeds as well as plants. Our pres- ent methods are like those of the old-fash- ioned cultivator: we let weeds and plants both spring up and then uproot the former. A better method is coming to be recognized — the preparation of the soil by sterilization so that the weeds will not spring up at all. If we could only so deal, by education and training, with the minds of the people, that the mental product should never fall below a standard grade, we should be doing the same thing in the field of art and literature. Of course we shall never succeed altogether, but this is the goal at which educators should aim. Schools and colleges, and libraries, and study clubs, and civic and social organizations of all kinds, are continually working toward this end. We can scarcely doubt that they will do something at least to improve the makers of literature and to raise the standard of their output. s CHAPTER XV Some Formalities of Written Speech OME of the things that dififerentiate spoken from written speech are consid- ered in a previous chapter. In addition there are certain formal or symbolical elements be- longing to written speech, that can, by their very nature, have no part in spoken language. Foremost among these are capitalization and punctuation. We may first consider the ques- tion: Since it is impossible to capitalize and punctuate spoken language, of what use are capitals and points in written speech? Do we not understand clearly what a good speaker is saying to us? If so, why add to the complexities of writing in an endeavor to make it clearer still? Are not these addi- tions purely arbitrary, and should we not gain by omitting them? To a large extent this question is undoubtedly justified, and in so far as capitalization and punctuation are arbi- 120 Formalities of Written Speech 121 trary it might be an improvement to disregard them. They are in fact being disregarded more today than formerly and more in the United States than in England. Still, it is probable that we shall always retain them or their equivalents to some extent in written speech. In the first place, it may be noted that elements making for clearness in spoken language are necessarily absent in the writ- ten form, so that it is necessary to supply their place. Intonation, inflection, and pauses play a large part in spoken language. In ordinary speech we do not find it necessary to indicate in any way the end of one word and the be- ginning of the next; in other words, we do not speak our words separately, except to a child or a foreigner. Intonation and accent make this necessary. In older forms of al- phabetical written language the same thing was done, and in some old inscriptions, for in- stance, there is no separation of the words, making reading a slow and difficult matter. Later it was found indispensable to make such separation, which was done first by punctua- 122 Earmarks of Literature tion and afterward by leaving a space between each word and the next. Something like the same reason is valid in all punctuation. It is not true, as used to be taught, that each point corresponds to a pause. The points are to bring out the grammatical relations of the sentence, which in spoken language would be brought out not only by pauses, but also by stress, intonation, and inflection. When a question is asked, for instance, a speaker makes it clear by an upward turn of his voice at the end. In writing, we replace this by an interrogation point. It is a fact, however, that we generally apprehend these gram- matical relations more easily when the punc- tuation is not too close. This is partly due to the fact that w^e have no point of lower grade than the comma, and when many commas are used we have no means of telling which ones correspond in marking the beginning and end of clauses. Hence the tendency, as noted above, is to be sparing with points. In other words, we are bearing in mind that the point is simply to clear up the writer's meaning, Formalities of Written Speech 123 in places where the means used for this pur- pose in spoken language are lacking. Where there is no such necessity — where the ob- scurity could be avoided by a rearrangement of words, or where everything is perfectly clear as it stands, no point need be used, no matter what "rule" some writer may have evolved on the subject. A mark that is practically one of punctua- tion is the hyphen. In studying its use we meet the whole question of whether two words, used together, should be written sepa- rately, or as a solid word, or with a hyphen between them. Evidently no such distinctions obtain in oral speech. Small volumes have been written on the subject, laying down ar- bitrary rules and condemning departures therefrom as incorrect. So far as these rules conduce to clearness they are well made, but if we regard the hyphen as a mark of punctu- ation, we shall conclude, and conclude rightly, that it may be used anywhere for the improve- ment of clearness, and omitted anywhere when its use would not clear up an obscurity. 124 Earmarks of Literature Lack of appreciation of these principles leads to an occasional obscurity. For instance, the title Vice President is always written as two words. But when we use the prefix ex- with it, to denote a former vice president, what shall we do? Sticklers for form write ex- vice president, connecting the prefix closely with the first word and not at all with the second. If we could use algebraic symbols we could write "ex- (vice president)," using the paren- thesis to denote that the prefix applies to all within. This, of course, is impracticable. What we can do, however, is either to write the title as one word here, or to hyphenate it, making either "ex-vicepresident" or *' ex- vice-president." This breaks rules and is in- consistent, but makes for clearness, which is the object, after all, that the rules were meant to attain. Sometimes punctuation supplies a need that is not filled in spoken language. For in- stance, marks of quotation are obviously use- ful, and we can supply their place in reading or speaking only by using some awkward Formalities of Written Speech 125 phrase, such as "beginning of quotation," "the quotation ends here," or the like. In capitalization, we have a much more ar- bitrary formality of written speech, having ab- solutely nothing in spoken language to corre- spond with it. Some of the purposes for which it was once used have been abandoned, at least in English. It was once the custom to begin all nouns with a capital, and it is still so in German, but we have given this up. Library cataloguers have given up most of the capitals. We might give up the use of capi- tals altogether without sacrificing the clear- ness and intelligibility of written speech. It would " look queer," but that means nothing more than that it would be a change. Modern German would look very odd to its readers if the nouns were not all capitalized. Cap- italization as we employ it is a pure formality, a relic of medievalism. The only reason for retaining it is that it is a familiar feature of written language, and it is very doubtful whether this should have weight against the efifort and time necessary to learn and retain «i. 126 Earmarks of Literature the purely arbitrary rules for its use. We are dropping useless punctuation and we have already dropped much capitalization. Prob- ably the rest could be spared also. Another formality is the use of special type in the body of the word, such as italics, cap- itals, or small capitals. This usually repre- sents some peculiarity of stress or tone in spoken language. Italics, for instance, often denote emphasis, although a reference to the rules for their use will show that they may also serve other purposes, in cases where they might as well be dropped. It is difficult to see why the name of a newspaper or of a steamer should be italicized. No special stress or intonation is used in pronouncing either and no confusion could arise, in a prop- erly constructed sentence, from printing them in Roman type. Italics or capitals are some- times used with humorous effect. Thackeray employs them in this way. Howells makes good use of italics to bring out unusual or ab- normal stress in dialectal speech; so does Mark Twain. We could not altogether dis- Formalities of Written Speech 127 pense with them ; but we could cut down their use considerably, and we are doing so. A further consideration of this subject brings us again to that of so-called spelling " reform." Is it not true that a silent letter, for instance, has the same status as a useless capital or mark of punctuation; and may it not be omitted, since there is now nothing to correspond to it in the spoken tongue? This is doubtless the view of those who ad- vocate changes in our spelling, but it is not that of the present writer. To him it seems that while capitalization and punctuation are not integral parts of the language, being merely formalities, handmaidens of speech, whose services may be dispensed with when they are no longer needed, symbols that are part of the word itself, even if corresponding sounds have been dropped from speech, stand on a different footing, as integral parts of the written language. This, of course, is to re- gard the written tongue as having a separate status — as being something other than merely a way of recording spoken language. CHAPTER XVI The Context in Literature WE CANNOT study literature long without seeing that it cannot be dis- membered without injury. An article, a poem, even a book, must be read as a whole if we are to get at its meaning and if we are to receive its full effect as literature. A para- graph or a sentence, separated from its sur- roundings, is much like an arm or a finger broken from a statue. It may be beautiful and may convey an idea, but it gives no idea of the whole. Nothing is more common than to quote ex- tracts from some great work. If these serve to whet the reader's curiosity so that he goes at once to see the gem in its real setting, they do no harm; but often they simply give a wrong idea of the work that they profess to illustrate. The point of a jest is often lost or altered 128 The Context in Literature 129 by removing it from its context. For instance, Sydney Smith, the great English humorist, is often quoted as saying of a certain man that he " spoke very disrespectfully of the equator." This always seemed to me to be a poor joke, or rather a hint at some joke that lay con- cealed. So in fact it is. The context brings it out. This is the real story: A certain bore had devised a method of map-drawing with which he bothered all his friends. Occasionally they rebelled. Confid- ing in Sydney Smith, the map-drawer was telling of a recent rebuff. "And when I was explaining about my parallels of latitude, what do you suppose he said? He said 'Damn the parallels of latitude!'" "Oh, that's nothing at all," quickly replied Smith. " Do you know, I've even heard him speak very disrespectfully of the equator!" The context, it will be seen, makes a sorry jest into a good one. Perhaps nothing illustrates how utterly an expressed idea, separated from its context, may change, than the present use of the word 130 Earmarks of Literature "muck-raker." This word originated in a speech of Theodore Roosevelt's, in which he compared petty faultfinders to "The man with the muck-rake," in the Pilgrim's Prog- ress of Bunyan. His hearers, most of whom must have been unfamiliar with Bunyan, con- cluded that the man must have been out in the barnyard raking muck, or filth; and the whole use of the word has been affected by this idea. If anyone had taken a few minutes to look up the context, he would have found that the name "muck-rake" was used by Bun- yan simply as denoting a familiar form of rake, and that the first element of it meant nothing in particular. The man was not in a filthy barnyard, raking over the muck; he was in a room, gathering straws and other trivial and inconsequential things with the aid of his rake. Bunyan's point was that the man was overlooking essentials to pick out trivialities, and Roosevelt's use of the word is perfectly explicable on this theory. But no one takes the trouble to read the context, and for ninety-nine readers out of a hundred The Context in Literature 131 "the man with the muck-rake" will hence- forth be a man who is raking muck. Often a widely-quoted passage in some poem or play fails to be perfectly understood or appreciated because the reader does not know something that precedes it. Take for instance such a celebrated speech as Portia's in The Merchant of Venice, beginning "The quality of mercy is not strained." This first line is often both misunderstood and under- estimated because the reader does not remem- ber its connection with the previous lines, to which it is an answer. Why should Portia, in a discourse on Mercy, begin by saying that it is not "strained?" Because, when she has just told Shylock that he must be merciful, he has asked: On what compulsion must I ? Tell me that ! This is an excuse for the discourse. Portia says in effect: "My poor fellow, you have misconceived the whole nature and operation of the quality called mercy, and I shall have to enlighten you. In the first place, mercy is 132 Earmarks of Literature not something that comes with compulsion; it is not 'strained' or forced — it droppeth gently as the dew." How the context here illumines the whole passage! In some cases popular misapprehension goes so far that it seems as if the public could not have read the work at all. Take, for in- stance, the persistence with which the island of Juan Fernandez is spoken of as " Robinson Crusoe's island." No reader of Robinson Crusoe is ignorant of the fact that his island was in the Atlantic, whereas Juan Fernandez is in the Pacific. The mistake arose from the fact that Defoe is said to have received a sug- gestion of his fictitious story from the true tale of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who lived alone for years on Juan Fernandez. Here the whole story of Robinson Crusoe is a corrective con- text to the incorrect popular idea. These things should warn a reader never to trust an extract that appears by itself. If he is inclined to disagree with its statements or to think it obscure or odd, let him read the context before he draws a conclusion. The The Context in Literature 133 reading of extracts is not to be condemned, but the best way is to pick them out for one- self with the context always present, so that one may take in as much of it as may be nec- essary. Something is said of this in the next chapter. CHAPTER XVII The Sampling of Literature TT HAS been here stated, or implied, that -*- in no kind of art, least of all in literature, will the mere knowing how a thing is done conduce to an appreciation of that thing or lend itself to the heightening of the effect that the thing was intended to produce. To en- joy literature one must read, and read again, and keep on reading. This does not mean that every masterpiece is fitted to appeal to every kind of man, though doubtless the greater it is the more universal will be its appeal. The only way in which one can ascertain and form one's taste is to read very freely by sample — to browse, as it is gen- erally called. It may be thought that this contradicts what has been said in another chapter on the value of the context, but there is in reality no contradiction. If the samples are removed from the context they may easily 134 The Sampling of Literature 135 give a wrong impression, as we have seen. But in "browsing" they are not so separated. They are taken in connection with the con- text, and as much of it as may be necessary to complete understanding and appreciation will naturally be read with them. The advantages of ''browsing" are two- fold — that gained in the process itself and that obtained through reading suggested or guided by it. In the first place, the browser gains a first- hand knowledge of authors, with the titles and general character of their works. One may discover that Omar Khayyam wrote a book called the Rubaiyat, by holding a copy in the hand for a second, without even open- ing it; a brief glance within will disclose that the work consists of poetry in four-line stanzas. Nor is such knowledge to be sneered at as superficial. It is all that we need to possess about scores of authors. One may never study higher mathematics, but it may be good for him to know that Lagrange was a French writer on analytical mechanics, that 136 Earmarks of Literature Euclid was a Greek geometer and that Ham- ilton invented quaternions. All this and vastly more may be impressed on the mind by an hour in the mathematical alcove of a library of moderate size. Information of this kind is almost impossible to acquire from lists or from oral statement, whereas a moment's handling of a book in the concrete may fix it in the mind for good and all. This is on the supposition that not a word is read. But in a very brief perusal the reader may get an idea of the author's style, may absorb and appre- ciate some of his ideas, and may definitely place him in some sort of scheme of literature. The direct eflfect of what one may get by this sort of sampling is thus by no means neg- ligible. The indirect effect is even more important; for it may result in the definite formation of literary taste. Taste formed in this way is more characteristic of the indi- vidual, and on the whole more valuable, than that which is the result of too much guidance. Taste fixed by someone who tells the reader what he ought to like is not the reader's taste The Sampling of Literature 137 at all but that of his informant. We have, on the whole, too little individual taste and too much tendency tow^ard teaching that one must and should follow the taste of the majority. The student who likes what is trivial and below standard is by no means hopeless. As he grows in knowledge and judgment, as well as in breadth of reading, he may, and prob- ably will, change his mind about many books. If he frankly acknowledges his likes and dis- likes there is some hope for him. If he pre- tends to like that which is good simply be- cause he thinks he ought to like it, he is forming a habit of hypocrisy, which will be good neither for his mind nor his character. The reader who investigates the field of literature for himself and forms his own esti- mates will frequently find that he admires that which generations have admired before him. The sensation of pleasure and satisfaction that will result from such a discovery is vastly greater than that of liking a writer whom one has been previously told he ought to like. And if the reader admires one who has not 138 Earmarks of Literature yet found his place in the literary pantheon, then there is equal satisfaction, but of a dif- ferent kind — that of original discovery. CHAPTER XVIII The Sum of the Matter WE HAVE seen that literature has ear- marks — that there are signs to identify it among the mass of trivial, unfit, ignoble, and ephemeral works with which it first sees the light and under which it is often buried. Those signs may be vague; it may not be pos- sible for some to read them. He who does not know correct English from incorrect can not condemn the ungrammatical book; he who has not a sense of fitness will not be able to discard what is unfitting; he whose feeling for rhyme or rhythm is deficient will never be a judge of poetry. And he whose pulses do not respond to what is noble and inspiring will never recognize nobility and inspiration when he meets them in literature. Some read- ers, doubtless, never can acquire these things. Others, unfortunately, have lacked opportu- nity. But the marks are there; it is right that 139 140 Earmarks of Literature we should realize this fact and not imagine that the difference between a great writer and a poor one depends wholly on some kind of critical appreciation that bears no tangible relation to their works. We have seen that the reader's own interest in a work of literature and love for it is an important element in his relationship to it, and that his lack of knowledge of its technical construction is no reason why its message should not reach him. We have seen that literature is a form of art, and that, as in other forms, such as sculpture, painting, or music, the artist's message is conveyed in it by the way in which he has been able to handle his subject, rather than by the content of that subject itself. We have seen that literature is preserved by love — by wide knowledge and apprecia- tion rather than by seclusion, and that a wide- spread love of good literature is vitally necessary if we are to hand down to our descendants what is best instead of something scarcely worth while. The Sum of the Matter 141 In this dissemination and the popular education that accompanies it, the great col- lections of books in our public libraries play an important part, but no less important is the ownership of books by those who love them. He who has never loved a book has lost something from his life. He who has loved books, but has owned none, must have loved them little; for the book-lover who is content with his first reading can hardly be one to whom literature in its highest and best sense makes a moving appeal. The conclu- sion of the whole matter is this : Know books ; love books — and be their possessor. INDEX Academy, French, 19 Accent, definition, 49 Accent in poetry, 62 ; in prose, 50 Agglutinative stage of lan- guage, Tj Alliteration, in poetry, 48, 52 Alphabet, origin of, 71 ; vs. syllabary, 82 Alphabets for the blind, 100; foreign, 76 Analysis, misuse of, 97 Appreciation of literature, 93 Appropriateness of style, 32 Arabic characters, 76, 82; lan- guage, 85 Art, characteristics of, 44; lit- erature, a form of, 87 Authors of literature, 114 Auxiliaries, use of, 79 Brovk^sing, 134 Capitalization, 120 Character in style, 40 Children's books, inappropri- ate, 35 Chinese characters, 71, 76, 81 Classical allusions in litera- ture, 28 Classification of literature, 3 Clearness and correctness dis- tinguished, 22; confusing attempts at, 30; of style, 21 Context in literature, 128 Drama, The, 53 Dramas, "novelized," 55 Eskimo language, 79 Esperanto, 86 Foreign words, use of, 27 Formalities of literature, 120 Forms, special, in literature, 47 French a literary tongue, 8 Genius, causes of, 117 German, capitalization in, 125 Grammar, in style, 10 Greek language, 79 Headlines, style of, 48 Hebrew characters, 76, 82 Hiragana syllabary, 81 Hyphen, The, 123 Idiographs, ^d Idioms, 17 Ido, modified Esperanto, 86 Indian languages, "jy Infinitives, "split," 23 Inflected languages, 78 Irish "brogue," 74 Italics, use of, 126 James, Henry, style of, 29, 42 Japanese characters, 76, 81 Katakana syllabary, 81 Language, growth of, 12; in- 143 144 Index ternational, 85; laws of, 11 ; origin of, 70; three stages of, 76; written and spoken, 70 Leit-motif, in Wagner's op- eras, 96 Letters, style of, 34 Library and book-ownership, 108; a factor in book-pres- ervation, 104 Literature, meaning of the word, I Meredith, George, style of, 42 Meter, in poetry, 51. 62, 67 "Methinks," use of, 17 Muck-raker, origin of term, 130 Music, for verse, 37, 67 ; "pro- gram," 88 Nature in art, 90 Negative, the double, 14 Newspapers, evanescence of, 103 Novels, dramatized, 55; form in, 57 Obscurity, two kinds of, 21 "Occasional" literature, 36 Operas, librettos of, 68 Oratory, 55 Paper, poor quality of, 103 Parodies, 43 Pensions for authors, 116 Phonograph records, 74, 99 Poetry, 48; as literature, 5; reading aloud, 61 ; set to music, 27, 67 Portia, speech on mercy, 131 Pronunciation, 73 ; records of, 99 Punctuation, 120 Quantity, in poetry, 51, 64 Reading poetry aloud, 61 Records, permanence of, lOI Rhymes for the eye, 61 Rhythm in poetry, 62 Robinson Crusoe's island, 132 Roosevelt, Theodore, use of "muck-rake," 130 Rules, status in language, 18 Slang, 13 Smith, Sydney, anecdote of, 129 Solemn diction, in English, 34 Spelling reform, 75, 127 Style, definition, 9 "Style is the man," 40 Subjects, in literature, 44 Syllabaries, 81 Syllabic stage of language, 77 Technic, in art, 93 Telegraphic style, 47 Tradition, 100 Translation of poetry, 68 Transliteration, 84 Turkish language, 78 Unities, dramatic, 53 Volapuk, 86 Wagner's music-dramas, 52, 68,95 "You was," incorrectness of, 15 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below ISt!i