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
 
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