LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/ethicsofliteraryOOthomrich 
 
THE ETHICS OF LITERARY ART 
 
THE 
 
 Ethics of Literary Art 
 
 THE CAREW LECTURES 
 
 FOR 1893 
 HARTFORD THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 BY 
 
 Maurice Thompson 
 
 Author of "A Tallahassee Girl," "Sylvan Secrets,' 
 "Songs of Fair Weather," "Poems," etc. 
 
 \6 R A rtT^V 
 
 UN TY 
 
 UFORJ 
 
 Hartford, Conn. 
 
 •fcartforD Seminars press 
 
 1893 
 

 ■ 
 
 
 Copyright, 1893 
 
 By the HARTFORD SEMINARY PRESS 
 
 Press of The Case, Lock-wood <&■» Brainard Co. 
 
*THHE matter of the following pages was delivered 
 in three lectures, and it will not be hard for the 
 reader to find the lines of division. A different plan 
 might have been followed had my purpose originally 
 been a book. Still I have not felt it necessary to recast 
 any part of the work, and in arbitrarily dividing my 
 discussion into three parts, it came easy to make 
 Conception, Composition, and Expression stand, in 
 the order natned, as themes for successive treatment. 
 
 No careful reader will need to be told that my aim 
 has been at suggestion, and that I have not hesitated 
 to sacrifice the graces of diction in order to say with 
 fewest words what might have been turned to excellent 
 account in the way of mere literature. 
 
 My subject covers the whole field of morals j for 
 life and literature cannot be separated so as to say 
 that what is vicious in life is harmlessly delectable in 
 literature. We live life to enjoy it ; we make and 
 read literature to enjoy it. In either case enjoyment is 
 not necessarily a light matter. It is a serious matter 
 
 129003 
 
6 Author's Note 
 
 in the long run; for down the centuries we grow 
 toward what most delights us. 
 
 I do not regard ethics with a long face and a 
 drooping lip. Right-doing is not such a doleful thing 
 that we need groan and look as if God-forsaken at 
 mention of it. Like all precious substances, honor 
 comes high if we count as valuable what we have 
 to give up for it. The little we own of it may be 
 made to go a long ways if we do not care to buy any 
 more. Most of us have enough to make us quite 
 aware of what duty is. 
 
 I have considered chiefly imaginative literature in 
 this discussion, and have assumed that my suggestions 
 are sufficiently connected to form the skeleton of a 
 theory, critical and philosophical, which may be filled 
 out and clothed by the student. 
 
 M. T. 
 
 Sherwood Place, 
 
 Crawfordsville, Indiana, 
 
 August, i8gj. 
 
THE ETHICS OF LITERARY ART 
 
 OSEPH ADDISON undertook 
 to define critical taste in 
 literature, and called it "that 
 faculty of the soul which discerns 
 the beauties of an author with pleasure, and 
 the imperfections with dislike." But what is 
 the distinguishing mark between "beauties" 
 and "imperfections"? If ethics is the "art 
 of conduct," it steps in to suggest moral 
 responsibility. Sir Philip Sidney, that flower 
 of manhood, declared that the end of all 
 earthly learning must be "virtuous action"; 
 and that the chief function of art seemed 
 to be the engendering of good impulses, — 
 "it moveth one to do that which it doth 
 teach." Certainly this moving power is our test 
 of genius. But too often genius sets its face 
 the wrong way, and then, if we are moved by 
 
8 The Ethics of 
 
 it, our impulse is toward evil. An attack upon 
 our sensibility is more dangerous than one upon 
 our mere intellectuality ; the secret sources 
 of action, no matter what materialists may guess, 
 lie deeper than the brain. We may not find 
 the seat of moral pleasure in any particular 
 nerve-cell, dissect no matter how carefully. 
 Men of easy leisure can perhaps afford to enjoy 
 theories as a sort of luxuries, as the gourmand 
 enjoys his p&tt de foie gras ; but in active, 
 militant life most of us must crush facts 
 together, and knead them rapidly into available 
 forms of aliment for body and soul. And it 
 is a rule of Nature that what is good for the 
 body is good for the soul. Health in the 
 broadest sense is the state of happiness. 
 Ethics, therefore, has perfect health in view ; 
 a sound pure body and a sound pure mind with 
 which to pursue the conduct of life. What 
 is good for the soul is good for the body. 
 
 I assume that human ethics is the per- 
 fection of selfishness — but the selfishness of 
 the perfect man who can see that the good 
 
Literary Art 9 
 
 of all mankind is his good, and that the only 
 way to do self the highest service is to serve 
 the race. To accept individual happiness, a 
 variable commodity measured by dispositions 
 as different as persons, and make it the criterion, 
 would be to embrace anarchy. The wholesome 
 notion of right must be human, not personal. 
 
 If ethics broadly stated is the art of con- 
 duct, in our present discussion we shall find 
 it to be the conduct of art. And if human 
 happiness, in the highest sense, is the end 
 of ethics, no one will doubt that the ethical 
 end of art is the same. To please the most 
 perfectly organized and most nobly refined 
 human taste would be the aim of true art, as it 
 is the ethical desire to have all mankind fitted 
 to enjoy true art. In this view the ethical 
 and the aesthetical lines coincide throughout. 
 
 Many persons nurse a remarkable fear of 
 didactic art ; but these are not clear thinkers. 
 All art is didactic, positively or negatively, 
 and wields an influence by attraction or repul- 
 sion. Perhaps it would be better to say that 
 
io The Ethics of 
 
 every form of art creation attracts us toward 
 or away from that equilibrium of good which 
 is the perfection of human conduct. 
 
 I note that certain critics, who in one 
 J way or another are apologists for immoral 
 literature, seem fond of the phrase, " artistic 
 conscience." As if the artist must have a 
 conscience different from that of any other 
 good man ! He is a coward who in any exi- 
 gency makes his own case a special one. The 
 moral responsibility of the artist offers no 
 secret and private avenues of confession and 
 avoidance, and if it does, a true man ought 
 to be too proud to use them. In literature, 
 as in every other sphere of human conduct, we 
 must have vast charity for the man, but no 
 charity for the man's evil. Proper critical ap- 
 preciation of Shelley's poetry, for example, does 
 not involve any such reckless eulogy of Shel- 
 ley's character as has been the recent vogue in 
 America and England. Charity covers faults, 
 but it never lies about them or excuses them. 
 Ethics draws no distinction between the wife- 
 
Literary Art n 
 
 murderer who cleans stables or keeps a dive, 
 and the wife-murderer who writes a " Prometheus 
 Unbound," or an "Ode to a Skylark." The 
 right of the aristocrat is not available as a 
 shield against the operation of moral responsi- 
 bility. The glamour of genius cannot blind 
 the eyes of God. 
 
 It has ever been the function of evil to 
 progress by means of fascination, and this 
 fascination is loosely and mistakenly regarded 
 as pleasure or happiness. The thrill of the \S 
 unholy is mistaken for the calm and lofty 
 ecstasy of pure joy. Ethics does not recognize 
 the legitimacy of evil delights, come from what 
 source they may. The making of a poem 
 which appeals to base sympathies, no matter 
 how perfect the art, is as vile an act as though 
 it were vulgarly done in prose. Our conception 
 of the notion of art takes its color from the 
 surroundings we give to it. J If we deny it an 
 ethical environment, we make the artist a 
 being specially privileged to do evil for art's 
 sake. Such a conception robs the creative 
 
12 The Ethics of 
 
 act of every connection with the sources of 
 true conscience, and sets artistic results apart 
 as excrescences on the substance of life. If 
 the poet, for example, is an agent with power 
 to affect the currents of human conduct, what 
 law of nature exempts him from the common 
 obligation to affect them in a way to do the 
 greatest good to the greatest number ? A 
 ribald song may appeal to a vast audience ; it 
 may have a haunting melody ; but is it justi- 
 fied? 
 
 It is in one of the plays of Aristophanes, 
 "The Birds," that a nightingale sings and, as 
 one of the listeners remarks, " makes the wilder- 
 ness sweet with tender breath of music." 
 Here is a conception of pure and wholesome 
 art in the wilderness of life ; it breathes a civil- 
 izing sweet round about. The Greeks called 
 the Muses" the lamps of the earth," as if to 
 make them guides to lead out of darkness; and 
 this is the key-note of Greek art, the fine note of 
 open illumination. Matthew Arnold denied to 
 the Greeks that magic of genius which he 
 
Literary Art 13 
 
 found in the Celts ; but what magic is more 
 sure or more potent than this light direct, 
 this surprise of sound and joyous conception? 
 Mind, I do not here speak of subject-matter, 
 nor of treatment, but of the conception of the 
 function of art, — namely, to lead by the cord 
 of delight. 
 
 Suddenly the question, Whither is the 
 young mind led by unbridled "art for art's ^ 
 sake " ? I freely grant full sway to the phrase, 
 "a clean mind can cleanly contemplate evil"; 
 but can a clean mind be delectated with what 
 is unclean ? Surely we may discern the dis- 
 tinction here suggested. Youth is the period 
 of happiness and desire, and to youth art makes 
 its most moving appeal. Take the novel, the 
 most popular form of art, and you note that it 
 is the young who read and are swayed by 
 powerful fiction. The tremendous fascination 
 of evil gives to an immoral novel an impetus 
 in the grooves of commerce. Young people, 
 even the purest of them, are curious to know 
 what lies between the lids of a scarlet book. 
 
14 The Ethics of 
 
 A high ethical conception cannot license art 
 to generate such curiosity and then feed it. 
 But certain artists say that their business 
 is not to furnish food for babes. Very well. 
 Is the adult liberated to delectate himself with 
 evil ? By what ethical law can the distinction 
 be recognized ? If art is a factor in the con- 
 duct of life, our conception of it must be that 
 it symbolizes an act of the collective human 
 body and expresses an aspiration. In every 
 area of human action, except, as it would seem, 
 the field of fine art, we are required to avoid 
 evil aspirations and to shun the company of 
 vice and filth. Even the crudest observation 
 and the most rudimentary experience of life 
 convince us that we must grow like what we 
 contemplate, and that intellectual associations 
 give color to the soul. There are no more inti- 
 mate and subtile intellectual associations than 
 those effected through literature. The man or 
 woman we meet in a book walks into our 
 sanctuary of character and writes maxims on its 
 walls. If we are libertines in art, what are 
 
Literary Art 15 
 
 we in the finest tissues of character ? The con- 
 duct of the imagination is the chemistry of 
 life. Physiological study leads more and more 
 toward the conclusion that thought-habit largely 
 influences what we may call nervous alimenta- 
 tion, and nothing is more certainly known than 
 that character-quality depends upon the health 
 of the nerve centers. It is therefore of ethical 
 importance to study the connection between 
 the development of art and the evolution of 
 character. 
 
 One theory is that civilization shapes art to 
 suit its changes. The other theory views art 
 as a factor in developing civilization. A sound 
 thinker who has read history and observed life 
 will blend the two theories into a reciprocal 
 one; but the ethical importance of art will 
 be found in its influence in shaping conduct. 
 Without this influence it is a mere efflores- 
 cence of life. To my mind genius loses its 
 salient value when it takes the attitude of 
 accident and poses as a mere lusus 7iatnrce, 
 like a gall-nut on an oak leaf, or a wart on 
 
1 6 The Ethics of 
 
 your hand. I like to regard it as a healthy- 
 fruit tree, bearing wholesome and invigorating 
 fruit ; a perfect soul working consciously and 
 with conscience to delight and refine all other 
 souls. 
 
 And yet my conception of art does not 
 recognize obvious didactics, or accept the 
 limitations of any arbitrary system of morals. 
 The key to art is taste, and taste is the finest 
 secret of conduct. Behind taste lies moral bias, 
 from which the initial impulse of every art 
 movement springs; for it is moral bias that 
 controls every conception of the form and the 
 function of art. This bias gets into the air 
 of an age ; it is miasm or ozone ; it is a co- 
 efficient operating with conscience or inspiring 
 irresponsible revolt. Now, the deepest reach 
 of art is to engender a right bias, so that good 
 taste shall become hereditary. Says De Quin- 
 cey, " the writer is not summoned to convince, 
 but to persuade"; and Joubert adds, "it is not 
 enough that a work be good ; it must be done 
 by a good author." At the present moment 
 
Literary Art 17 
 
 of history we seem to be hesitating whether or 
 not, after all, literature shall be regarded as a 
 mere mode of commercial motion. "The first 
 value of a book," said a publisher, " is its sala- 
 bility." This is a conception which destroys 
 every imaginable basis of conscience in literary 
 life, unless we can make good books salable; 
 for the publisher holds command. 
 
 Both church and state have tried to educate 
 taste by means of legal censorship. The prac- 
 tice has been as futile as the principle is 
 despicable. Indeed, the circulation of a bad 
 book is always urged to the maximum by legal 
 prohibition. Human perversity is an element 
 in every problem of reform. A man told me 
 that he never thirsted for whisky save when in 
 a prohibition state. To reform conduct we 
 must educate life. If a man is suffering from 
 blood-poisoning, we do not cure him by local 
 treatment ; we try to cleanse his whole system. 
 Ethics must regard the collective body as one 
 patient whose disease is constitutional. The 
 quack doctor panders to a maudlin weakness 
 
1 8 The Ethics of 
 
 of chronic invalids. So in art a certain school 
 of quacks, like Ibsen and Tolstoif, fatten upon 
 the liberality of hysterical souls. 
 
 Speaking of false critics, sturdy and right- 
 minded John Dryden said : " All that is dull, 
 insipid, languishing, and without sinews in a 
 poem they call an imitation of nature." In our 
 day the so-called realists answer to Dryden's 
 description. They boast of holding up a mir- 
 ror to nature ; but they take care to give 
 preference always to ignoble nature. They 
 never hold up their mirror to heroic nature. 
 Have you observed how, as a man becomes a 
 realist, he grows fond of being narrow and of 
 playing with small specialties ? Have you 
 thought out the secret force which controls 
 the movements of this so-called realism, and 
 always keeps its votaries sneering at heroic 
 life, while they revel in another sort of life, 
 which fitly to characterize here would be im- 
 proper? I can tell you what that force is. 
 It is unbelief in ideal standards of human 
 aspiration, and it is impatient scorn of that 
 
Literary Art 19 
 
 higher mode of thought which has given the 
 world all the greatest creations of imaginative 
 genius. It is a long cry from Homer and 
 Aeschylus and Shakespeare and Scott to Zola 
 and Ibsen and Tolsto'f and Flaubert; but it is 
 exactly measured by the space between a voice 
 which utters the highest note of its time and 
 civilization, and one that utters the lowest. I 
 say that these modern realists utter the cry of 
 our civilization's lowest and most belated ele- 
 ment ; and they call it the cry of modern 
 science. But science has nothing to do with it. 
 Science never disports itself in the baleful light 
 of mere coarseness ; nor does it choose dry or 
 commonplace investigations simply because 
 they are dry and commonplace. In its true 
 sphere science aims to lift us above mysteries. 
 The same may be said of all the great masters 
 of art ; they lift us above the mire of degrading 
 things. True, we find coarseness amounting 
 to what is foul in all the ancient classics, and 
 even in Chaucer and Shakespeare ; but we can- 
 not take shelter behind these to cast forth upon 
 
20 The Ethics of 
 
 the world our own surplus of filth. The custom 
 of critics is in charity to refer the obscenities of 
 old writers to the moral taste of the time. 
 Shall we credit our own civilization with an 
 appetency for the Kreihtzer Sonata, Leaves 
 of Grass, and Madame B ovary? Have we 
 moved no farther than this during these centu- 
 ries of Christianity ? 
 
 I know absolutely nothing about theology, 
 which is doubtless to be counted in reckoning 
 what I come to, and I frankly say that I could 
 not, to save me, tell the difference between one 
 creed and another; but I have it clearly in 
 mind that Christianity is responsible for our 
 civilization, and is the datum-line to which we 
 must refer in all our measurements. Our 
 enlightenment may be imaginary, the gleam 
 of a myth, but it comes from the Star of 
 Bethlehem. 
 
 Every reader is aware that there exists 
 a certain strained relation between art and 
 moral responsibility. The first impulse of 
 a solicitous parent is toward forbidding novels 
 
Literary Art 21 
 
 and dramatic literature to his children. The 
 college and the pulpit wrestle with a giant 
 doubt in the matter of approving the current 
 conception of art. We all feel that the con- 
 temporary artistic influence is subtly opposed 
 to the ethical verities. We find that in fiction 
 and poetry we are hobnobbing with persons 
 with whom we could not in real life bear a 
 moment's interview. It is not so much the 
 scenes and characters chosen ; we might regard 
 these, as in real life, with a deep regret ; but the 
 conception of art and its function represented by 
 such a choice of subject and treatment suggests 
 a vicious trend of life. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's theory of " sweetness and 
 light " may be a trifle flabby when put to the 
 average test of practical experience ; yet to 
 irradiate light and to instill sweetness can never 
 be amiss; this indeed seems to me the only 
 excuse for art. Culture must, however, have 
 its root nourished in a stronger soil than that 
 of mere amiability. Art should stand for more 
 than an expression of good-natured commentary 
 
22 The Ethics of 
 
 on current life, or of ill-natured caricature of 
 humanity's frailties. " What is realism ? " in- 
 quired a young woman the other day. Her 
 friend answered, " It's writing what we are too 
 clean to speak, and reading about what we would 
 blush to look at. It is going in books where 
 to go in actual life would disgrace us." Prudery 
 does not appeal to a sound soul, and our strict- 
 ures on art ought not to be different from our 
 strictures on life. Our associations in art 
 should not be lower than our associations in life. 
 Indeed, to me the main service of imaginative 
 activities is in giving higher experiences than 
 ordinary life can afford. In life we aim at the 
 higher life ; in art, why not at the higher life ? 
 The most abject prudery is that which makes 
 us ashamed to insist upon cleanness and sound- 
 ness ; the vilest dishonesty suggests that we 
 account for literary villainy on the score of 
 compulsion by "artistic conscience." Evil is 
 the great foe of true happiness ; but art must 
 give canvas-room for this dark figure with all 
 its scowls and all its fascinating smiles ; it has a 
 
Literary Art 23 
 
 mighty value when set over against goodness 
 to the effect that the conception holds fast to 
 the right. But let us not pass the limit of 
 freedom into the domain of license. In life 
 we face the ills and evils of our state ; we 
 must do the same in art, and in both life and 
 art there must be moral responsibility. If in 
 writing a book we must not steal the thought- 
 work of a fellow, surely in the same pages 
 we must avoid breaking the other nine com- 
 mandments. Still I have known a man who 
 complained loud and long of the immorality of 
 a publisher who had failed to make accurate 
 copyright reports of sales in the matter of a 
 vilely impure novel. This is the special plead- 
 ing which in another form demands that the 
 artist clothe himself before painting a naked 
 picture. 
 
 Plato's dreams and Aristotle's facts may 
 come at last into coincidence, and yet Plato's 
 conception is the only safe ground of art. An 
 imagination which never goes above "scientific 
 dissections " may state conditions ; but a flash 
 
24 The Ethics of 
 
 of empyrean fire cuts through conditions and 
 illuminates the remote high area of the uncon- 
 ditional. Plato's attitude was supremely artis- 
 tic ; Aristotle's posture was realistic. The 
 utilitarian, who measures life by material units, 
 is a peripatetic ; the true artist is platonic, and 
 wherever we find him indicating an ethical con- 
 ception, it is a universal one. The old Dorian 
 notion was the elemental one, that morality was 
 not of the individual but of the people, and this 
 is the poet's notion in all ages. 
 
 But how is ethical leaven to work in literary 
 art ? We cannot brook legal censorship, and, 
 if we could, the remedy would be worse than 
 the disease. Freedom must be next to absolute 
 in letters. The one feasible scheme of ethical 
 reform is education. And here arises the 
 abrupt question, By what particular channel of 
 education can literary taste be most readily 
 purified ? It is safe to assume that a whole- 
 some conception of art is the first stage of 
 reform needed, and I suggest that sound criti- 
 cism would be a potent factor in the work ; but 
 
Literary Art 25 
 
 I speak of criticism in its most liberal sense, 
 certainly not in the sense which would make 
 the critic a mere friendly purveyor of appre- 
 ciation, a sycophant self-trained to lick boots. 
 The zealous fault-hunter, to be sure, is not a 
 critic ; no more is the fault-dodger. I like to 
 read Sainte-Beuve ; but I lay at his door and 
 Wordsworth's much of the insignificance of 
 literary art at this moment. The conception of 
 art in the body of Wordsworth's poetry and 
 the notion of criticism in Sainte-Beuve's essays 
 have easily formed the whey of commonplace 
 and the curd of "appreciation." 
 
 It is the habit of certain editors, I am told, 
 to have their book reviews written by persons 
 who will be sure to praise each work. This is 
 but another expression of that irresponsibility 
 behind which literary folk delight to huddle. 
 The same weakness affects the whole modern 
 theory of criticism. What avails teaching if in 
 the same school every theory, no matter how 
 debauching, has its expert apologist? If criti- 
 cism is nothing more than sympathetic ex- 
 
26 The Ethics of 
 
 position by a special pleader, it amounts simply 
 to the critic's saying: "I can make this artist's 
 purpose and meaning plainer and more enjoy- 
 able than he could himself." 
 
 Criticism is the measuring of conduct — 
 the conduct of life, the conduct of art. Viewed 
 broadly, it is the fine residuum of sound morals 
 left over after the solution of ethical problems. 
 | One man is not a critic; it is the intelligent 
 majority. Say what we may, the average mind 
 is the triumphant criterion ; by it life wins or 
 loses in all that concerns the body of humanity. 
 What does not concern humanity as a body 
 ought not to concern any man. We are the 
 Adam and Eve of to-day ; it is mankind that must 
 make the long run, not the individual. If we 
 suffer from the old Adam's fall, what countless 
 millions must writhe far down the future 
 because we, the new Adam, ate a more deadly 
 fruit! Verily, the day is ours and the light of it. 
 It will be felt that I am suggesting imma- 
 nent criticism, the floating, general, vital im- 
 pression out of which the elusive but powerful 
 
Literary Art 27 
 
 influence of art is so largely drawn. What 
 makes a book popular ? No number of favor- 
 able reviews can do it — no amount of advertis- 
 ing or puffing. The secret lies in touching the 
 nerve of average taste. Every proposition sub- 
 mitted to mankind is at last solved by this 
 average immanent criticism. Artists may 
 rebel; but the democracy of human economy 
 always prevails, and that picture, that poem, 
 that story which appeals to and satisfies a com- 
 mon and steadfast human longing is the lasting 
 and influential one. Ethics, then, as it regards 
 art, must respect the average, and the ethical 
 aim must be to lift the line of mean human 
 aspiration. To have no privileged class and to 
 admit no special pleading in favor of genius 
 by which strict moral responsibility may be 
 avoided in art, are prerequisites of critical 
 honesty. The average mind may be easily 
 convinced of the justice of this democratic 
 rule, and to this end should education tend. 
 The higher we urge the mean level of immanent 
 human criticism, the higher will rise the sur- 
 
28 The Ethics of 
 
 face of human conduct. The conduct of art 
 has no special exemption. 
 
 The chief office of art is to teach through 
 fascination, not openly and dictatorially, but 
 almost unawares. Its appeal is the charm of 
 beauty, the lure of symmetry, the perfume of 
 truth ; or it is the imperious fascination of evil 
 clothed in a counterfeit divinity. This is the 
 old demarcation between good and evil. I 
 repeat that neither genius nor art can success- 
 fully slink out of responsibility through a 
 special side gate. To prevent this cowardice 
 the old Greeks invented dialectics and discussed 
 life vigorously in their schools. We may say 
 that they were heathens ; but what would they 
 say of us with our Christian theories and our 
 pagan practices ? Nakedness, physical and 
 spiritual, in art was a sincere reflex of Greek 
 religion, Greek civilization. It was uncon- 
 sciously projected. Not so with us ; when we 
 go naked it is done self-consciously, with the 
 full understanding that nakedness is not decent. 
 We do it in sheer defiance of immanent criticism. 
 
Literary Art 29 
 
 Is there a man or a woman in the world 
 who believes that any person ever read a novel 
 or a poem for the stark purpose of moral 
 reform? Do you ever read a novel expecting 
 thereby to wash away some stain from your 
 character ? Be honest and answer that in every 
 quest pleasure is your goal. From the notion 
 of heaven down to the wish for a tin whistle 
 your aim is pleasure. You imagine you would 
 enjoy heaven; you feel sure that a tin whistle 
 would delight you. If you buy Anna Karinina 
 or Madame Bovary, it is for delectation and 
 not for personal purification. Speaking of cant, 
 what cant is worse than that of the artist who 
 entertains you at the table of vice with the 
 avowed purpose of sweetening your life ? 
 
 It is that wonderful Joubert again who says, 
 11 Naturally, the soul repeats to itself all that is 
 beautiful or all that seems so." The writer 
 writes what he likes, the reader reads what is 
 to his taste. Ah, taste! there is the found- 
 ation. Can you for a moment credit any man's 
 statement that he reads for delectation and yet 
 
30 The Ethics of 
 
 against his taste ? Perhaps I am a Philistine ; 
 at all events I do not hesitate here flatly 
 to charge insincerity. Who could possibly be 
 more hopelessly insincere than the avowedly 
 pure woman who tells you that she has fortified 
 her virtue by reading Ibsen's picture of Hedda 
 Gabler ? Woman, you have taken Ibsen's arm 
 and have gone with him into vile company and 
 have been delighted with the novelty of it. The 
 smack of hell is sweet to your lips, as it was 
 to those of new-made Eve. It would be strictly 
 true for such a woman to say, "Yes, I read 
 these novels of impure passion, and there is 
 a strain in my taste which enjoys these 
 pictures of temptation and of evil pleasures. 
 Secretly I like a peep into debauchery; but 
 then I hold on to my own rectitude." The 
 word "rectitude" as here used means formal 
 rectitude of life's exterior ; the intrinsic muscles 
 have responded to a coarse and beastly impulse. 
 In producing works of art having evil for 
 their source of fascination, and in reading such 
 works, we are tainting the most secret veins 
 
Literary Art 31 
 
 of immanent criticism. Civilization inevitably 
 responds to these influences working at the 
 farthest tips of its tenderest roots. Vitiate 
 imagination and you destroy character. No 
 pure woman ever wrote a fiction of illicit 
 love ; if she began pure, she ended soiled. Her 
 soul followed her pen. Druggists and physi- 
 cians have told me that a person who takes to 
 opium-eating will lie, steal, or barter body and 
 soul for a morsel of dried poppy-juice. Never 
 in my life have I known a man or a woman 
 given over to the pleasure of writing or of 
 reading novels based on illicit love who did not 
 habitually lie to avoid the application of per- 
 sonal responsibility. 
 
 To the perfectly unbiased observer nothing 
 is clearer than that forbidden fruit is always in 
 demand, and will be as long as human perversity 
 fortifies human animalism. If the author of 
 Tess of the U Urbervilles would say the truth, he 
 would flatly confess that he wrote that bril- 
 liantly fascinating, filthy novel, not to make 
 poor young girls cling to virtue, not to prevent 
 
32 The Ethics of 
 
 rich young men from being villains at heart; 
 but to make a fiction that would appeal to 
 human perversity and delectate human animal- 
 ism. He reckoned safely ; the book sold al- 
 most as fast as whisky. It was named by the 
 author "the story of a pure woman." This 
 woman, after being easily led to shame once 
 prior to marriage, fell again during wedlock, 
 and then committed murder and was executed. 
 This is no extreme case ; I cite it as typical. 
 Nearly all of the critics were loud in praise of 
 this novel — thousands of good people read it. 
 And to justify themselves both critics and 
 readers claimed for it a high moral influence. 
 What I see wrong in this is that it claims 
 for fiction a power and an exemption not pos- 
 sible to real life. How can association with 
 immoral and debauching people and conditions 
 in our reading differ from our association with 
 them in life ? If art is chiefly for delectation, 
 is it not a species of debauchery to indulge in 
 art which takes its fascination from forbidden 
 sources? As I have said, human perversity 
 
Literary Art 33 
 
 demands the forbidden. A publisher told me 
 that for a novel to gain the reputation of being 
 written in the highest strain of art and yet on 
 a subject not considered clean was a sure 
 guaranty of success ; "and yet," said he, "popu- 
 lar sentiment is strong against such books." 
 Here is the fascination of the unclean — the 
 very fascination which it is the duty of all to 
 avoid and which it is the highest mission of 
 Christian civilization to extinguish. And yet 
 Christian artists demand the right to make 
 commerce of this same evil fascination, and in 
 this demand they are upheld by Christian 
 critics. 
 
 In a word, I conclude this part of my argu- 
 ment by propounding a question, Has the 
 immanent meaning of Christian civilization yet 
 showed itself in art ? Or, negatively, Is not 
 fine art, and especially literary fine art, still 
 ^essentially heathen ? Is not the most direct 
 and vigorous appeal of current poetry and 
 fiction made to the ancient, elemental, con- 
 scienceless substance of humanity ? One of 
 
34 The Ethics of 
 
 two things is certainly true, — the artist is 
 specially exempt from moral responsibility, or 
 he is just as responsible as any other person. 
 To me it appears that the commercial value 
 of literary filth is really behind every argument 
 in favor of the moral force assumed by authors 
 and critics to be inherent in the dramatic 
 S presentation of illicit love. We must admit 
 that novels and poems on this subject are im- 
 mensely fascinating and that in a cold com- 
 mercial view they are good property. In the 
 same view whisky and gambling rooms are 
 excellent investments. Gilded dives pay large 
 dividends in the lawful currency. St. Peter's 
 Church has fewer visitors than Monte Carlo. 
 What do you make of this? Is it the true 
 conception of art that the artist may live in 
 honor by the same appeal which enriches the 
 faro-dealer, the saloon-keeper, and the princess 
 of a bagnio ? Is the money earned by writing 
 and selling Tess of the U Urbervilles one whit 
 cleaner than that earned by any other play 
 upon the human weakness for unclean things]? 
 
Literary Art 35 
 
 It is not clear why a feeling should prevail 
 that, to be robust, art must show a great deal 
 of vulgarity. The best athlete carries but little 
 flesh, and I find that fine muscles and sound 
 nerves go farther than fat. Grossness, indeed, 
 is as far removed from true virility as one pole 
 from the other. Mere audacity in handling 
 things not considered by the spirit of our 
 civilization touchable cannot win the badge 
 of Homer or of Horace. Homer sang strictly 
 within the spirit of his age and voiced its char- 
 acteristic aspiration. Horace did no violence 
 to the civilization that inspired him. Full, 
 close, sympathetic touch with Christianity (not 
 with dry dogma, creed, ritual, or sect, or denomi- 
 nation), close touch with Christianity, I say, 
 can give the only true conception of the new 
 art of our just dawning era. 
 
 You will observe that I do not hesitate to' 
 speak of Christianity as distinct from church, 
 priesthood, theology, and formal religion, — as a 
 mode of progress, a great mood of civilization, 
 broadening, deepening, warming day by day. 
 
36 The Ethics of 
 
 It is moving toward the republic in every- 
 thing; not backward toward the republic of 
 the heathen, but forward to the republic of 
 the Christian. Wherefore the conception of 
 art, to be adequate, must apprehend this future 
 while availing itself of the past. The point 
 where the old orb and the new blend the rays 
 of warning and of prophecy is the true focus of 
 inspiration. We must know where we are. 
 There is no return. The Greek with his 
 jocund heathen song is dead; gone is the 
 heathen grace of Virgil ; gone the goatherd 
 genius from the fells of Sicily ; gone Anacreon, 
 the ruddy bibber, and gone the strange cry : 
 
 *X1 irdl irapOevtov fiXeircov. 
 Not much less remote echoes the Dantesque 
 strain, half Christian, half heathen. It is time 
 for the key-note of our era to sound; it is 
 time for genius to speak in the true, in the 
 highest terms of our. civilization. 
 
 "Well," says some practical soul, "when, 
 where, and to what purpose?" I answer: 
 When we make for genius the true Christian 
 
Literary Art 37 
 
 atmosphere ; in that atmosphere will he thrive ; 
 not in the dust of dogma ; not in the twilight 
 of cathedrals ; not yet in the cramped sanctuary 
 of tradition. He shall inhale the rich air, which 
 is buoyant with the significance of our era, and 
 his purpose shall be the good of the brotherhood 
 of man. 
 
 In my remarks on the ethical conception of 
 literary art I have tried to suggest the alien 
 nature of the prevailing current criticism and 
 to refer it to the residual heathenism in our 
 civilization. You will pardon me if I am not 
 relying upon lightness of touch. An earnest 
 man addressing earnest souls need not avoid 
 direct expression in order to etherealize phrases. 
 I have assumed that a civilization generates im- 
 manent criticism to which that civilization's art 
 ought to conform in order to be aesthetically 
 and ethically adequate. 
 
 There are periods when this immanent criti- 
 cism is smothered by factitious and alien forces. 
 The Alexandrine period in Greek poetry is a 
 
38 The Ethics of 
 
 typical one. There art almost completely 
 divorced itself from the human soul and became 
 a mechanical exhibit. A sound thinker would 
 expect this aberration of criticism to be attended 
 by a thoroughly artificial life as devoid as possi- 
 ble of sincerity. Alexandria under Philadelphus 
 was a city of critics ; but then, as now, the 
 critic's chief concern was to do something call- 
 ing attention to himself. The richness of the 
 Ptolemaean civilization was wasted on mere form 
 which really expressed nothing. What I will 
 call the sense of composition, the artistic con- 
 sciousness of an organism to be spoken into life 
 by genius, was dormant. At the great school 
 of Philadelphus phraseology counted for every- 
 thing ; a living form of art-creation was not 
 thought of. Even Theocritus, the one " burn- 
 ing mouth of the muses " in that artificial day, 
 lost his sense of composition at the gate by 
 which he entered Alexandria. 
 
 Before then the Greeks had formed their art 
 on free lines guided by the spirit of their 
 religion. What the word " freshness " best inti- 
 
Literary Art 39 
 
 mates hung upon their thoughts like a dew of 
 morning. You can discover nothing alien to 
 Greek civilization in Homer or Pindar or in the 
 fragments of Anakreon and Sappho. Those 
 poets were guided by the immanent criticism 
 of their times, and so they voiced absolute 
 sincerity. If you will read the seventh Idyl of 
 Theocritus, you will be aware of a certain some- 
 thing, like a fruit-zest or a root-pungence, 
 which, when you analyze it, seems composite, a 
 mingling of many ancient savors and fragrances. 
 Here is native honey brewed directly from the 
 innermost nectaries of a civilization. The 
 happy Greek had not yet remodeled the syrinx 
 of Pan to suit the artificial music of Alexandria. 
 I would accept this Thalysia by Theocritus as 
 a singularly apt illustration of the limiting in- 
 fluence exerted by academical criticism. At 
 the time of its writing Theocritus had just 
 reached manhood and while yet fresh from 
 bathing long and deep in the Pierian spring of 
 old Greek religion was just at the margin of that 
 African desert called the Alexandrian school. 
 
40 The Ethics of 
 
 After that idyl he wrote nothing of real value 
 because he quit the field of true artistic con- 
 science and went to pose for favor in the eyes 
 of incest while studying the forms of a conven- 
 tional artisanship. Plainly he was eager to 
 barter conscience for gold ; and for success in 
 literature he would gladly part with every trace 
 of original freshness and independence. 
 
 With the apostacy of Theocritus, Greek 
 genius came down from the slopes of Helicon 
 and merged itself for ever in the commonplace. 
 What Alexandrine influence was to Greek 
 literature the so-called realistic influence is to 
 the literature of to-day. We might aptly call it 
 literary dry rot. There is no doubting the 
 Alexandrine attitude. While exalting Homer 
 and Aeschylus, as we do Scott and Shakes- 
 peare, they assumed to command a finer art 
 than those old masters ever knew. So the 
 other day a leading realist boldly affirmed the 
 art of his own contemporary school to be finer 
 than that of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens. 
 There was the smack of Callimachus and 
 
Literary Art 41 
 
 Philetas in such a morsel of criticism. Calli- 
 machus, you know, set himself up for a critic of 
 Homer, and, after attempting epic production 
 and failing, came to the conclusion that it was 
 a finer art than Homer's to write an ode to a 
 woman's hair. To-day the prevailing criticism 
 seems to be that to surpass Shakespeare in 
 drama, and Scott in novel-writing, one has but 
 to present commonplace life with the clever 
 touch of conventional humor. 
 
 We of the Western world have accepted 
 realism and suited it to an Abderian mood ; we 
 have laughed it into a sort of popularity as a 
 fun-bundle, and have made believe that we can- 
 not comprehend the difference between art and 
 photography — between the divine verisimili- 
 tude of a work of genius and the mere poll- 
 parrot reporting of clever note-takers in fiction 
 and poetry. It amuses us to be bored. In this 
 temper, content to laugh at ourselves, we are 
 making little progress in serious art. So, 
 when the conscientious critic comes to look 
 facts in the face, he is surprised at the poverty 
 
 6 
 
42 The Ethics of 
 
 of our genius in composition. We have 
 sketches, studies, bits of local color, broad 
 dashes of caricature; but very little that fills 
 the measure of original composition full and 
 finished. What appears to me to be the cause 
 of this is a deep-seated misapprehension of our- 
 selves as a people. We are too sure that it 
 would be well for us to be English, or Russian, 
 or French, instead of being American ; but our 
 social morals are not yet bad enough to admit 
 of the alien treatment, wherefore most of our 
 art has a foreign subject or is at least inter- 
 national to let in the filth. 
 
 Composition_ in art comprehends substance 
 and structure. The true artist designs no life- 
 less image ; he creates an organism informed 
 with the spirit of a strong aspiration. It is safe 
 to add that every true creation of genius is im- 
 mortal, immortally good or immortally bad in 
 the broadest ethical sense. As an organism its 
 natural habitat is Hell or Heaven, its influence 
 benign or malignant. The sanest and wisest 
 among us may fancy that to read a romance 
 
Literary Art 43 
 
 like Manon Lescaut or a novel like Madame 
 Bovary, and discreetly admire its art is not so 
 bad ; but in applying the high calculus of ethics 
 and passing to the limit of moral responsibility, 
 what difference appears between the encourage- 
 ment of such art and the encouragement of any 
 other evil communication to the imagination of 
 mankind ? Some one says that evil must go 
 into art. So it must. It has its important 
 place in composition. Immanent criticism 
 makes us aware of this. What Emerson called 
 "the burden of the Bible old " assigns it a large 
 area and suggests its function in every poem, 
 every drama, every romance based upon human 
 nature and human experience or aspiration. 
 Well does the philosopher of Concord remark 
 that belief in immortality would necessarily 
 take "a base form for the savage and a pure 
 form for the wise." The distinction is just as 
 clear in art. A gross or unwise taste naturally 
 gives evil preference to good in making an 
 article to delectate imagination withal. Here is 
 the secret and here is the menace against 
 
44 The Ethics of 
 
 which we cast ourselves. To set good and evil 
 over against each other in art, preserving their 
 true ethical relations and comparing them with- 
 out prejudice, is the office of composition. 
 Even " art for art's sake," of which our eyes and 
 ears have long been weary, finds nothing in 
 imagination to justify weaving a lure whereby 
 to lead pure beauty into the mire of unholy 
 places. Such a sacrifice is always made on the 
 altar of a sordid god. 
 
 A word here on " sensational " composition. 
 Critics are not very clear in applying the ad- 
 jective "sensational." Some harmless and 
 even valuable romance has to bear that name, 
 while the vilest of French intrigue betinseled 
 with what is called " realistic faithfulness to 
 truth " meets with unqualified critical approval. 
 Passing to the most violent extreme, let a sound 
 conscience decide between the " dime dreadful " 
 and Tess of the D Urbervilles on the score of 
 subtile and deep sensational energy. On your 
 honor, if compelled to decide, which would you 
 prefer, that your boy should read Dick Dead- 
 
Literary Art 45 
 
 shot and dream of being a bold rider among the 
 cows, or that your daughter should pore over 
 the temptations of Tess till every handsome 
 young man she saw looked to her like a leering 
 rmti in polite disguise ? It is composition, not 
 diction that makes a work sensational. 
 
 It is the choice of figures and the determina- 
 tion of their attitudes and meaning individually 
 and collectively that impresses the imagination, 
 and somehow what is named realistic fiction 
 always leaves the autograph of pessimism on 
 the reader's heart. In the end everybody 
 comes to actual or constructive grief and the 
 few who deserve well usually have the worst of 
 the bargain. Whether it is a government, a 
 sermon, a machine, a poem, or a novel, composi- 
 tion fixes the equilibrium and so controls the 
 scope of influence. A prize-fight is a drama as 
 complete as Hamlet or Ivanhoe ; but in the 
 prize-fight we have only the rudimentary com- 
 position of absolutely savage taste. At the 
 other extreme we have the refined, emasculate 
 art of Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. 
 
46 The Ethics of 
 
 Was it Sophocles who said that Aeschylus 
 " did right, all unaware of it " ? It is much 
 easier to reach the other habit and do wrong by 
 mere momentum of acquired conditions. This 
 is true of nations, as of individuals ; and we 
 shall find the composition of political life, the 
 arrangement and emphasis of its masses and 
 the significance of its groups and figures sym- 
 pathetically if not directly connected with the 
 source of imaginative inspiration and controlled 
 by the prevailing popular dream. If you will 
 observe the composition of the French govern- 
 ment under the last Napoleon, its likeness to 
 that of Flaubert's and De Maupassant's novels 
 will strike you with startling force. Rotten- 
 ness of substance and of meaning — debauchery, 
 opium and absinthe, utter absence of con- 
 science, pyaemia, softening of the brain, suicide 
 or the mad-house ; these attend the composition 
 wherein evil predominates. 
 
 It may seem to you that I am not saying 
 much about ethics as a science. There is no 
 such science. Do right. But where dwells 
 
Literary Art 47 
 
 the science of it ? Shall the pot say to the 
 kettle, "thou art black," or the diamond to 
 the dew-drop, "my light is the only"? Be- 
 hind diamond and dew-drop is the sun, and 
 behind blackness is the source of it. Neither 
 force to drive nor laws to prohibit can bring 
 about the conditions favored by ethics. The 
 fiber, the tissue, nay, the very nerve-fluid of the 
 social body, is to be reached and educated by 
 sweet persuasion applied to that strange source 
 of all human progress, the imagination. Com- 
 pulsion breeds perverse stubbornness ; prohibi- 
 tion develops unquenchable desire for the 
 forbidden fruit. This was the springe in Eden. 
 The moment that man shall enact a law of 
 ethics, woe be to the heretics ! We shall then 
 feel again how the axe, the fagot-fire, and the 
 thumb-screws can establish the inviolability of 
 a creed, the inerrancy of a text. We hear 
 much about "higher criticism." Let us have 
 it all along the line ; it may be a " fad," it may 
 be a revelation ; it is death to esoteric bigotry. 
 Do you imagine that truth will wither under 
 
4 8 The Ethics of 
 
 the directest and whitest ray of this higher 
 criticism ? Analysis does not affect ethics in 
 any way ; truth is a single and simple sub- 
 stance, absolutely pure and indestructible. 
 
 Be sure of one thing : the immanent power 
 of Christian civilization is freedom of investiga- 
 gation and nothing which shrinks from the 
 severest test will long appeal to credence. The 
 stupendous composition called Greek mytho- 
 logy or Greek religion would be a living or- 
 ganism to-day had it been true in the first place. 
 The higher criticism dissolved it because it was 
 not a truth. The grip of vitality is fastened in 
 the roots below every possible reading and re- 
 vision. The composition, the attitude of groups 
 and masses, the composite whole, invite belief 
 or disbelief. We are a Christian people because 
 the composition of the Christian picture has 
 met our approval. The moment that an arbi- 
 trary edict sets the picture aside as specially ex- 
 empt from critical tests, that moment a smile 
 and a wink of doubt disturb the face of Chris- 
 tendom. It looks too much like a precaution 
 
Literary Art 49 
 
 against the dissolution of another mythology. 
 The old way of enforcing educational measures 
 was with a rod. Now we appeal, not by brute 
 force, but by tender kindness. Not so long ago 
 witches were burned a few miles from here, and 
 just over yonder the Protestant felt fire and 
 thumb-screw. To-day is the day of open free- 
 dom, and the difference must be respected. But 
 education must not in the name of freedom as- 
 sume license. The only safe taste is that 
 grounded in the deepest meaning of our civiliza- 
 tion. To me the word "heresy" is not a pleas- 
 ing one ; it brings to my ears the hissing of 
 flames, to my nostrils the smell of burning 
 human flesh. I like better the word " educa- 
 tion," and I delight in coupling it with freedom 
 and light. Search the Scriptures of all ages 
 and all peoples ; eternal life is visible by eternal 
 light. Shut off one ray from the picture and 
 the composition is blurred. 
 
 The finest quality of a composition is au- 
 thenticity, which shows it steadfast after all 
 mutations of time, manners, and creeds. Such 
 
 K 
 
50 The Ethics of 
 
 a composition is a criterion only so long as it 
 can resist the criticism of all comers ; its iner- 
 rancy must meet and vanquish every new era's 
 suggestion of readjustment, else suspicion will 
 eat against it like an acid. Not all the critics 
 and grammarians of the Alexandrine period 
 could dim one flower of Homer. What " higher 
 criticism " is likely to shake the solid pillars of 
 the Bible ? With every failure of the critic to 
 remove the foundations of divinely inspired 
 authority, the Book of Books takes deeper hold 
 upon human credence and shows the more its 
 solidity. So it is with the humanly inspired 
 works of art. We put them to the test of 
 higher criticism, and if they stand we know 
 that their value is not a moment's accident or 
 the result of a mere factitious vogue. It may 
 be that some Callimachus of to-day dreams that 
 Scott's day is over ; but the vitality of organic 
 composition keeps and will keep those grand 
 romances alive. The groups and masses of 
 history are there ; the significance of true man- 
 hood and womanhood is there ; the appeal of 
 
Literary Art 51 
 
 honor and courage is there, and life is there 
 bearing itself heroically. Everybody loves a 
 hero. 
 
 The fascination of a composition is always 
 romance ; good or evil it is still romance. Your 
 sermon, your picture, your house, your novel, 
 your poem, your religion, must satisfy the imagi- 
 nation with romance. Romance is not a lie ; it 
 is the surprise of the picturesque. Call up 
 Adam and Eve, or Romeo and Juliet, and there 
 is the composition of romance. Come rever- 
 ently and with unfaltering credence to the story 
 of Christ's life and death, and tell me truly, did 
 Aeschylus, did Shakespeare ever write so pictur- 
 esque a tragedy ? When you tell that story to 
 your child, it clutches his imagination and holds 
 it fast. The wonder of it comes before any 
 deeper significance is comprehended. Here 
 lies the secret of imaginative appeal whether 
 the composition be of life or of fiction. Beecher, 
 Phillips, Webster, and Emerson knew it and 
 used it in sermon, oration, lecture. Napoleon 
 the First, Hugo, Scott, Shakespeare, Plato, Aes- 
 
52 The Ethics of 
 
 chylus, Sappho felt its imperious power. Begin 
 in the far mist of antiquity and come down to 
 the present with microscopic scrutiny, and you 
 cannot lay hand on any great achievement 
 which had not its hero and its romance. 
 
 You academic men are fond of invoking the 
 "scientific spirit." Well, invoke it now. Col- 
 lect the facts of literary history, mass them, 
 classify them, analyze them, and then show 
 me one, just one immortal work of fiction, 
 drama, oratory, or poetry, or religion which 
 has not romance as its chief source of ap- 
 peal. Throw in history for good measure, 
 and still the rule holds. Heroism, extraordinary 
 events, the roll and crash of war, great reforms, 
 the villainies of tyrants, the divine patience of 
 saints, the influence of beautiful women, the 
 charm of poets, the building of temples, the de- 
 struction of cities, wonderful discoveries and in- 
 ventions, revolutions in religion and philosophy, 
 — take these from history and who will read 
 or remember it ? Take any period of our 
 country's life and eliminate the extraordinary 
 
Literary Art 53 
 
 features, the pioneers, the heroism of '76, the 
 mediaeval romance of slavery, the great war, 
 Washington, Lincoln, Grant, Lee, Beecher, 
 Whittier, Stonewall Jackson, Ossawattomie 
 Brown, Grover Cleveland, the ocean telegraph, 
 the stupendous growth of wealth and liberal ed- 
 ucation, — take out the extraordinary and you 
 have no book to write of us. Or if you should 
 persist and write the book it would have no sig- 
 nificance, no human appeal. Take the extraor- 
 dinary from science and what is it ? 
 
 Do you understand how Darwin's theory 
 took hold of mankind ? Do you fancy that it 
 captivated a mere "scientific" taste? Not that. 
 Never did human imagination find a more won- 
 derful romance than this story of the origin of 
 species and the descent of man. Agnostics like 
 to smile at the simple Bible story of creation as 
 at a nursery tale. Well, the story may not be 
 literally true, it may not be true at all ; but 
 this romance of evolution, is it literally true ? Is 
 it true at all ? Go ask the sphinx if its ancestors 
 knew. Like a child with a new toy, the human 
 
54 The Ethics of 
 
 imagination plays with " natural selection " and 
 "the survival of the fittest," and for a little while 
 is content. For awhile it is Darwin ; yesterday 
 it was Humboldt or La Place ; the day before it 
 was Pythagoras. Always it is the genius who 
 presents a great romantic composition. Dar- 
 win's theory may be true ; it may be false ; but 
 it is extraordinary; it is picturesque, and it ap- 
 peals to the elemental universal love of the 
 wonderful in the human mind. When Leib- 
 nitz and Newton were discovering calculus^ 
 imagination was on tip-toe to catch the first 
 glimpse of infinity. 
 
 If you plan to control men, you first capti- 
 vate their imagination. Give me the key to 
 a people's imagination and you may have the 
 rest ; I will lead them through nine crusades 
 in spite of you. Peter the Hermit, John Law, 
 Napoleon, Pasteur, old John Brown — every man 
 who has shaken the world did it with the 
 lever of imagination. When lately the curtain 
 was wrung up and Doctor Pasteur made his 
 bow we were for a thrilling moment sure that 
 
Literary Art 55 
 
 there stood the master of disease and death. 
 The light of perennial health flashed from con- 
 tinent to continent. To-morrow some other 
 great romancer of science will arise. We shall 
 turn our backs upon the epic of microbes and 
 hang Pasteur's picture in the garret with those 
 of Descartes, La Place, and Buffon. It all 
 comes to one goal, which every creative genius 
 grazes with the wheel of his chariot. 
 
 Eliminate from religion, any religion, its 
 specific romance, and you still have left the 
 ancient generic wonder of it. Take this away 
 and the residual composition will not attract a 
 second glance from mankind. Creeds are at 
 best but persistent, refractory wounds upon the 
 fair body of religion ; mayhap some sweet day 
 they will all coalesce and heal without a scar. 
 But deprive religion of its vital romance and ob- 
 serve how quickly it dies. If we can rid our 
 minds of factitious reverence and give ourselves 
 over to true reverence, we shall for the first 
 time feel how God, the universe, religion, and 
 duty form in the imagination a picture sphered 
 
56 The Ethics of 
 
 on the radius of supreme beauty and harmony. 
 How petty and trifling a religion becomes the 
 moment it disengages itself, as Greek religion 
 at last did, from that highest credulity which 
 alone amounts to absolute faith, the credulity of 
 the imagination ! What the human soul longs 
 for is the step beyond, the higher lift, the su- 
 preme surprise. Ethics enters the field to de- 
 mand that this step beyond shall not be into the 
 pit, that this higher lift shall not be to the 
 mountain-top of temptation, that this supreme 
 surprise shall not come of evil splendor. It re- 
 quires that every scene of art shall be so com- 
 posed as to have its focus in a cleanly and 
 wholesome truth. 
 
 It has been well said that the novel is to-day 
 the most popular form of art ; its composition 
 is a matter of large moment if it is come to be 
 an accepted factor in popular education. If it 
 is a physiological fact that imagination is the 
 chemistry of character, then the impression of a 
 composition addressed directly to the imagina- 
 tion may work profound evil or great good to 
 
Literary Art 57 
 
 character. Bad as the French people are in 
 some directions, they go farther than we do in 
 protecting young girls from the danger of pro- 
 miscuous fiction-reading. But I submit that if 
 fiction is for education, it is for the young, it 
 is for the formative period of life. To my mind 
 the fact that a novel is unfit for open reading at 
 the family fireside is positive proof that it is not 
 wholesome reading for any person at any place. 
 Let us not lose sight of a very important 
 distinction. Art is for delectation mainly, for 
 moral teaching incidentally or unawares. 
 Various useful studies are necessarily unfit for 
 fireside rehearsal ; yet they must be pursued. 
 Not so with art ; it is for the galleries of pure 
 culture, for the walls of the churches and 
 schools, for the home library, for the space 
 over the library mantel. Let me say to you 
 that certain assumptions of adults are known 
 by young persons to be downright lies. For 
 instance, when the father and mother of a 
 bright, inquisitive family of children assume 
 that Zola is delicious to old folk, bracing and 
 
 8 
 
58 The Ethics of 
 
 invigorating, but deadly to the souls of the 
 young ! I have seen a father sneak away from 
 his sons to take whisky before breakfast. I 
 have seen a legislator blowing cigarette smoke 
 through his own nose while framing a law to 
 prohibit the sale of cigarettes to young men. 
 The prohibition was all right, but the assump- 
 tion was a lie. A vice is not to be thus sup- 
 pressed. While you sit at the head of the 
 table quaffing Manon Lescaut and Tess and 
 Anna Karhiina and Kreutzer Sonata, your 
 children know what flavor it is that you like. 
 You may tell them that you sip those tipples 
 for the good of your mature soul ; but they 
 will know that you are a mature prevaricator. 
 The least sophisticated mind in all the world is 
 not deceived when it reads an immoral novel 
 which pretends to have a moral purpose, nor 
 can you hoodwink even a babe by pretending 
 that you read such a novel with a view to puri- 
 fying your own morals. 
 
 It seems to me that aesthetics and pessimism 
 cannot blend together ; therefore true art is nee- 
 
Literary Art 59 
 
 essarily optimistic. Even tragedy must offset 
 its catastrophe with a glimpse of eternal justice, 
 or it must leave a bad shadow in the mind. 
 What you read is a personal experience to you. 
 If you read pessimism with delight, your imagi- 
 nation makes you a pessimist. Glance at the 
 sublime master-tragedy of all time and the com- 
 fort of the resurrection redeems it from pessim- 
 ism. Leave Christ a dead preacher between 
 two dead thieves, and you rob the tragedy of its 
 most precious human appeal. Giotto stabbed a 
 man to death in order to paint Christ's death- 
 agony. Realism could go no further ; for the 
 resurrection does not appeal to it. A composi- 
 tion need not be a sermon when it is called a 
 poem or novel ; but it must not meanly dodge 
 being one. I heard a man curse like a pirate to 
 remove a suspicion that he was a preacher. 
 Some novelists seem to go far aside to make 
 their stories unquestionably devoid of every 
 evidence of moral responsibility or ethical sig- 
 nificance. Others distort their compositions 
 with maudlin sentimentalities, thinking by this 
 
60 The Ethics of 
 
 means to prove their loyalty to the sweet 
 springs of human kindness. In the conduct of 
 life neither these nor those are of good account. 
 A faithful, authentic composition addressed to 
 our Christian civilization should have its masses 
 balanced so that the main aspirations of that 
 civilization are clearly acknowledged. Spon- 
 taneous, native art never fails in this. The un- 
 erring Greek artist rooted every drama, every 
 lyric, every dream of sculpture in the soil 
 where the flowers of his religion grew. I do 
 not mean that art must be religious ; I admit 
 that if consciously religious it is likely to be 
 downright insipid ; but the immanent virtue of 
 a Christian civilization ought not to be absent 
 from its art. 
 
 I call serious attention to the indissoluble 
 connection between romance and religion, not 
 to belittle religion or to make irreverent com- 
 parison. Pure romance demands faith in the 
 largest possibilities ; religion exacts precisely 
 the same ; and if you will scrape off the veneer 
 of realism which scouts at romance, you will 
 
Literary Art 61 
 
 find the substance of agnosticism. If you are 
 an agnostic, you are a realist ; if you are a ro- 
 mancer, you have a religion. Religion appeals 
 to us for heroism. The oriental wife must burn 
 herself ; the Mohammedan must fast forty days ; 
 Gautama must agonize seven times seven days 
 and nights under the Bo-tree ; Christ must 
 forego the luxury of worldly triumph to die a 
 felon's death for the good of mankind. But the 
 realists tell you that heroism like Christ's is sen- 
 sational and in very bad taste. 
 
 One dreads to appear polemical ; but how is 
 the issue here presented to be avoided ? The 
 very criticism which cries, "Sensational! sensa- 
 tional!" against harmless melodrama, turns fond 
 and loving praise upon the Sapho of Daudet, 
 or Tess of Hardy. It seems that a heroic gen- 
 tleman or lady is a sensational figure ; but a 
 heroic rout or extraordinary harlot falls naturally 
 into the composition of " high art ! " We are 
 warned by these critics to avoid the unusual and 
 the extraordinary ; but what is the usual and the 
 ordinary ? Is it usual and ordinary for a girl to 
 
62 The Ethics of 
 
 be like "Daisy Miller " on one hand, and like 
 " Tess " on the other ? Which of these two is 
 the ordinary girl ? One is the extreme of mil- 
 linery flimsiness, the other the extreme of dis- 
 honor. One is tinseled vulgarity, the other is 
 sainted debauchery ; you pay your money and 
 take your choice. 
 
 Organized Christianity, using the phrase lib- 
 erally, ought to be the source of ethics in our 
 civilization ; that is, it should be able to set the 
 pace of human conduct and give direction to 
 culture. It should be able to establish the gen- 
 eral criterion by which to measure art. If it 
 cannot do this it must be radically defective as 
 a model composition. If it cannot hold, mould, 
 and color human imagination, its end is near. 
 
 Here is my scholium, Immanent criticism 
 is what a civilization thinks of itself. When- 
 ever the written or unwritten constitution of 
 civilization loses its command of absolute cre- 
 dence, it fails. To command absolute credence 
 it must show itself absolutely invulnerable, at 
 least absolutely self-respecting. But what, in- 
 
Literary Art 63 
 
 deed, does a civilization think of itself, what im- 
 manent criticism does it secretly, if not openly, 
 generate by arbitrarily setting its constitution 
 above the reach of free, honest, earnest, inexor- 
 able tests ? You lose self-respect the moment 
 that you claim special exemption from self-in- 
 spection or from public scrutiny. 
 
 But what has all this to do with the ethics 
 of art ? Look back into history and see. The 
 composition of religion is the composition of 
 art. The two are not identical ; but they are, in 
 a pure state, mathematically similar. The mo- 
 ment that the ancient religion of Greece tot- 
 tered, its art tottered correspondingly. When 
 the Pope was infallible Roman art was infallible. 
 Whenever Christianity shall become homogene- 
 ous, when it shall not call honest investigation 
 heresy, when it shall stand triumphantly inviting 
 all tests, extrinsic and intrinsic, we may expect to 
 see it set its ethical standard on the temple of life 
 and the temple of art. But the cord of a creed 
 drawn over-tight can strangle what it was 
 noosed to save. 
 
64 The Ethics of 
 
 Let me earnestly disclaim any application of 
 my remarks beyond the strict periphery of my 
 subject. Let every word go straight to the re- 
 lation of Christian ethics to the conduct of art. 
 Creeds are good or bad ; men multiply them at 
 need ; art has nothing to do with them, nor with 
 the quarrels they engender ; but it would seem 
 that the ancient well-spring of our Christian 
 civilization, if pure, as I believe it is, need fear 
 no analysis of its water. And then, if the con- 
 duct of life, which is the subject of Christian 
 ethics, has the correlation with the conduct of 
 art which I have suggested, it is impossible to 
 exaggerate the significance of recent movements 
 of Christian thought when we would attempt to 
 ascertain the effect upon both life and art of the 
 critical standard likely to be established. The 
 world is moving ; it must move or die. Move- 
 ment is life ; stillness is death. Movement is 
 reform ; inertia is decay. The supreme compo- 
 sition of the universe tells us of a goal far be- 
 yond our vision. We must not struggle to pre- 
 vent the waste of old tissues ; for it is by such 
 
Literary Art 65 
 
 waste that we live and grow. Each day we 
 must throw off error once thought to be truth. 
 This is the winnowing and selecting process of 
 progressive enlightment. What is the conclu- 
 sion ? It is that, if ours is really a Christian 
 civilization, the controlling spirit of Christianity 
 ought to appear in its art composition ; that the 
 immanent criticism generated by Christianity 
 must in the long run shape the history of our 
 civilization, and in the long run Christianity 
 must bear the blame of our failure or the praise 
 of our triumph. 
 
 The Greeks had a word which perfectly ex- 
 pressed style, the word ^^0?, which I would 
 translate by the phrase "smile of meaning." 
 The rjOr) were the character-beams of a coun- 
 tenance, as if the soul looked out with a twinkle 
 of its own. They had another golden word, 
 Odkepov, the bloom of vigor. If we could blend 
 the two words into one, it would give what I 
 want. Individuality, luminosity, sincerity, and 
 rosy health must characterize the expression of 
 
66 The Ethics of 
 
 sound art. Physicians say that our diseases 
 register themselves in our faces ; a disease of 
 culture comes out in the lineaments of civiliza- 
 tion. A sick man is whimsical ; sick society 
 indulges in ' fads ; ' to-day it cries for Tolstoi, 
 to-morrow it whines for Ibsen. 
 
 A perfectly healthy civilization is a happy 
 organism content with its natural bill of fare ; 
 and it remains healthy just so long as it holds to 
 the soil of nativity and dreams not of alien man- 
 ners. Such a civilization was the Greek ; not 
 merely conservative, but true to itself and sin- 
 cerely homogeneous. Its religion turned out to 
 be false, as any religion possibly may ; still 
 Greek sincerity and loyalty in religion was the 
 standard of a perfect art. The Greek poet was 
 a healthy animal, well-fed and well-groomed. In 
 the light of his time he was good. He was a 
 consistent and sincere heathen glad to be alive ; 
 his song was the perfect exponent of his nature. 
 This reaching down to the original elements of 
 character for the terms of expression justifies 
 Buffon's definition, le style est Vhomme mime. 
 
Literary Art 67 
 
 Style, when sincere, is civilization itself, and 
 properly speaking there can be no such thing as 
 insincere style. What we are apt to call style, 
 in the literature of to-day, stands for nothing, 
 being a mere whiff of evanescence puffed from 
 the lips of conventional humor or stereotyped 
 smartness ; it is not the spontaneous exhalation 
 of elemental significance. It is interesting to 
 observe how the self-styled realists go about 
 trying to draw style out by connecting them- 
 selves with vulgarity, evidently mistaking it for 
 simplicity. A vulgar spirit may be simple ; 
 oftenest it is not ; true simplicity has a refining 
 power which eludes academical control. Your 
 simple man is clean, and he seems not to know 
 it ; or at least makes no distinction of it. Your 
 vulgar man, if not rank, has faith in the efficacy 
 of low means. An old mountaineer doctor was 
 called by a city woman touring in the hills to 
 see her child, who was ill. " Madam," he said, 
 " let yer little gal run out doors an' git some 
 dirt. Gross personal cleanliness air very on- 
 healthy." He was a critic laying down a maxim 
 
68 The Ethics of 
 
 of realism. Another saying of his was : " A 
 leetle bit o' clean dirt air not nasty." In other 
 words a certain amount of filth is supposed to 
 be necessary to vigorous life. I think that this 
 notion as applied to literary art comes of a sup- 
 erficial reading of Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
 Horace, Homer, and other old masters, and of 
 mistaking their smut for their style. 
 
 It is past the time when a man can live like 
 Diogenes or sing like Anakreon. A tub is no 
 longer habitable, and our wine gives headache 
 instead of joy. We should feel like very be- 
 nighted children if we shaped our destiny by 
 the direction of the Sybilline Books. It is the 
 difference of civilizations that sets up the bar — 
 it is the failure to take this difference into ac- 
 count that brings the realist to grief with his 
 boasted sincerity. These realists forget, or 
 mayhap never knew, that what superficially ap- 
 pears to be the most daring realism in Greek 
 art was indeed the romantic flower of their re- 
 ligion and not a "society report " or a transcript 
 of observation. What manner of impression of 
 
Literary Art 69 
 
 our era, its stupendous forces and its almost 
 unimaginable significance will the far-off future 
 man draw from reading one of Henry James's 
 novels or one of Walt Whitman's poems ? I do 
 not speak of these two men as imitators ; they 
 are not that. What I do mean is that they do 
 not see or express any of the deep character- 
 lines of our civilization as a whole. What they 
 grasp is exotic and superficial ; each has im- 
 ported his art-spirit, one from modern, artificial 
 Europe, the other from ancient Egypt. One is 
 infinitely crude, the other infinitessimally fine ; 
 neither expresses anything deeply characteristic 
 of our civilization. Indeed, whenever we try to 
 fit old life to a new body we always somehow 
 get nothing but the dregs. Imitation invariably 
 means the imitation of faults. It is said that in 
 counterfeit money the simplest and clearest 
 lines of engraving are most often badly exe- 
 cuted. The same is true in counterfeit litera- 
 ture ; we detect its spuriousness in the failure 
 to reproduce authentic strokes. 
 
 To give composition the rjOos, the counten- 
 
70 The Ethics of 
 
 ance of character, and the OaXepov, the clean, 
 fair bloom of vigor, is the highest function of 
 artistic expression. Those writers who have 
 most signally failed in expression have been 
 clearly wanting in this magnetism of literary 
 countenance. Walt Whitman pleases one reader 
 and repels ten thousand. Not so with Newman, 
 or Tennyson, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Lowell, or Howells. 
 These have the eye of the Ancient Mariner to 
 hold ten thousand, to repel none. With this 
 particular fascination the writer's subject-mat- 
 ter has nothing to do. He will detain you an 
 hour on your way to dinner with the analysis of 
 a vague smile just as easily as with an epic. 
 There are two extremes of artificial sin- 
 cerity. Walt Whitman stands at one, the 
 " goody-goody " school at the other. You 
 know at a glance that Walt Whitman's sin- 
 cerity is a matter of his own manufacture ; it is 
 an assumption that has grown into his tissues 
 and become indurated. So of the Sunday- 
 school story-writer. We all know that this his- 
 
Literary Art 71 
 
 tory of the good little girl who came to be so 
 sentimentally religious that she melted away 
 into a sort of pathetic treacle for angel-bread is 
 out of the bounds of all honesty. It is the 
 worst of all sensational trickery. I count it the 
 meanest of pessimism to make a child believe 
 that the road to Heaven is always out of repair 
 and its bridges broken. 
 
 Plato taught that pleasure is the return to 
 nature ; but the admirers of Walt Whitman ac- 
 cept no return to nature save that which brings 
 up at brutal coarseness or even obscenity. 
 Ethics demands a return to the divine purity, 
 candor, and jocund optimism of nature. For 
 without trust in the good of nature there is no 
 ethics. If, as the realists represent, life is a 
 failure and all of its stories come out wrong, 
 how can conduct avail ? You know that realists 
 consider it maudlin art to have a novel end hap- 
 pily. When I hear a singularly emasculate lit- 
 erary voice prating about "inexorable art" and 
 "merciless truth" I know that there's another 
 disagreeable novel coming. Singularly enough, 
 
72 The Ethics of 
 
 but naturally, too, by the way, pessimism of con- 
 ception and of composition has enforced ultra- 
 refinement of literary artisanship ; for human 
 nature must have beauty, if not of substance, 
 then of surface. What realism, so-called, lacks 
 in intrinsic interest is hoped to be compensated 
 for by extrinsic cleverness. Mr. Howells must 
 have meant this when he said that in our day 
 literary art is finer than it was in the day of Sir 
 Walter Scott. He meant a finer verbal artisan- 
 ship ; for who could believe that Daisy Miller 
 is a greater novel than Ivanhoe ? The dis- 
 tinction to be drawn is between contents and 
 superficies. We galvanize more cleverly than 
 Scott did ; but do we equal the body of his art ? 
 I have said that true expression is from 
 within, the exhalation or irradiation of meaning 
 and influence, the tjOos and the OaXepov of art. 
 No superficial dressing can give it ; for it is not 
 like the sheen of varnish ; it beams out from the 
 sphere's center and makes every substance a 
 fire-hearted crystal. No amount of word-study 
 or of phrase-practice can compass style. Die- 
 
rary Art 73 
 
 tion may be perfected so that correct and flexi- 
 ble language becomes habitual ; but the mag- 
 netism of expression is not to be drawn from 
 grammar, or rhetoric, or dictionary. Here 
 again comes in that subtile chemistry of char- 
 acter — imagination. There must be a clearly 
 assignable difference between a pure and fine 
 academical diction, and what we would mean by 
 the phrase " a fascinating style." Something 
 like far and fair perspectives glimpsed between 
 words gives the sweet, strong sense of surprise, 
 the precious shock of discovery, the unexpected 
 return to nature. 
 
 Style is not literary, not bookish, not lubri- 
 cated with lamp-oil and garnished with quota- 
 tions and references, nor spiked with mere nov- 
 elties. You find it as you find youth and beauty 
 and rare charm of soul, quite free of debt to any 
 loan-office and standing upon no patent of con- 
 ventional nobility. It is by a writer's style that 
 we get into his soul and breathe his moral at- 
 mosphere. Here the refined essence of his na- 
 ture floats free, and here is distilled the dew of 
 
74 The Ethics of 
 
 his character. So the highest personal compli- 
 ment we can pay an author is to tell him that he 
 has rare charm of style. But what if he uses this 
 charm in the bazars of art to make poison-pro- 
 ducts look wholsesome ? All along as we plow 
 our furrow of inquiry we turn up this stubborn 
 bulb of responsibility. To the average tongue 
 it has an acrid taste, but we must bite it every 
 day and every hour of our toil, whether we 
 relish it or not. Is it worth while to try to 
 imagine that in art there is a domain where the 
 love of evil brings no sense of ethical disturb- 
 ance ? The ill-starred men of genius have been 
 those who attempted revolt and tried to smother 
 the still, small voice in a wet blanket which they 
 called freedom. The Villons, the Baudelaires, 
 the Byrons, the Rousseaus, the Shelleys, the De 
 Maupassants, all these, say what we may, looked 
 at good with a sinister eye of intense selfishness 
 and hate ; but they each gnawed a file. These 
 anarchists in art are also antinomians in morals. 
 Not one of them ever drew a clean breath or 
 ever honored wedlock, wifehood, motherhood, or 
 
Literary Art 75 
 
 womanhood, or virtue. They prated, with the 
 thrilling power of genius, about freedom and 
 conscience ; but what did they mean ? The up- 
 shot of it all was they desired license. Villon 
 desired to steal, Shelley wished to put away 
 his wife and get another, Byron longed to be a 
 libertine and yet be a hero. Now, at least two 
 or three of these had great genius ; Shelley and 
 Villon especially set a lasting fascination in 
 their works, and although Byron does not wear 
 so well, he compels a slowly relaxing attention 
 as he retreats in the romantic distance. Rous- 
 seau's five children are still crying in the found- 
 ling hospital and wondering what is the matter 
 with the " Social Contract." 
 
 I am not appealing to the argumentum ad 
 hominem ; I am suggesting the rjOos, the char- 
 acter-glow of these exponents of revolt against 
 the inevitable good and of apology for the im- 
 mitigable bad. From the heart's fullness the 
 mouth speaketh. Here is anarchic liberty 
 urged and merged into hideous personal license, 
 and all so alluringly expressed that any restraint 
 
76 The Ethics of 
 
 seems a tyranny. But it would be safe to say 
 that immanent criticism has settled the ethical 
 point in the light of our civilization. Rousseau 
 made a revolution, and yet his books have not 
 kept their hold like those of Scott. Sound- 
 hearted and true-souled Sir Walter speaks a 
 language informed with robust health and fra- 
 grant of moral purity and sanity. We feel with- 
 out going into biography that he has never de- 
 serted a wife or his children, or tried to upset 
 the laws of marriage. He seems large, strong, 
 safe, steadfast ; and we like to have him near 
 us. An influence like his never leaves a morbid 
 heat in the nerve-centers, never suggests that 
 hell has some advantages over Heaven as a high- 
 toned summer resort. After reading Ivanhoe 
 you may indulge some romantic desire for a 
 spear, a shield, an armored horse, and plenty of 
 muscle ; but you breathe good air and feel clean. 
 Not so at the end of a novel by Zola. As 
 was said by a reader of Balzac, the first impulse 
 after laying aside one of his books is to wash 
 one's hands and brush one's coat. The atmos- 
 
Literary Art 77 
 
 phere is swarming with evil germs. The ob- 
 jection has been made to Scott that his stories 
 seem unreal. This is scarcely just. History 
 as well as romance speaks in those novels with 
 what Sir Walter himself called the " big bow- 
 bow," and their weight of truth will withstand 
 yet a long while the puffs of " scientific " criti- 
 cism aimed at their " artless loquacity " of style. 
 The lasting underglow of his works is their 
 sturdy spirit of elemental honesty and sympa- 
 thy with the right. 
 
 It may be unfashionable to express art in the 
 simple terms of moral responsibility — the taste 
 of our moment may not relish honesty ; but be- 
 hind the taste lies disease. Certainly if we 
 need filth to feed upon we are in a bad way. 
 Here comes forth the significance of expression ; 
 for in art as in a face the countenance is the 
 outer manifestation of inner value. What the 
 Greeks named Karoxn, the enthusiasm of in- 
 spiration, may be of good or of evil ; but we have 
 a way to distinguish. No paint and powder 
 of mere artifice can make the sweet glow of 
 
78 The Ethics of 
 
 health on cheek and lip. Instinctively we know 
 through some fine ray of expression the pure (^ 
 from the spurious ; and every thrill of fascina- 
 tion tells us where its wellspring is, and 
 whether it is good or bad. Beauty is of ethical 
 importance ; even mere beauty of raiment. Let 
 whatever is clothed be adorned, not decorated. 
 A sense of being well dressed is not the same 
 as a consciousness of wearing foppish finery. 
 A book, an oration, a poem, a sermon, is but the 
 measure of a man, and it betrays good or bad 
 taste in the same way that a man does. 
 
 We think aside that it is no strong sign of 
 greatness for a man to be troubled about the 
 fashion-plates in the tailor's window ; and I ven- 
 ture to remark that no very great book wears 
 clothes of the extreme current style. Paris sets 
 the pace for light people ; but no genuine genius 
 can be led by the nose ; he likes a way of his 
 own. So it appears that expression is indeed, 
 while nominally (or rather conventionally) super- 
 ficial, the radical characteristic, the innermost 
 meaning outwardly manifest of organic art. 
 
Literary Art 79 
 
 There is in the word rjOos a lingering trace of 
 the earlier definition — the lair of a wild thing — 
 the gleam of eyes in the gloom of a cave, the in- 
 dependence absolute and resolute of nature lying 
 on a primitive bed, the ari/3d<; of the old poets. 
 The soul of man, in other words, glares out or 
 smiles out through his style, and expression re- 
 lates to the conduct of life just as the fluidity of 
 matter relates to movement ; for culture does 
 not change substance, but renders it plastic, 
 malleable, ductile. Etherealized in the empy- 
 rean we have no giddiness in whirling with the 
 stars ; annealed in the heat of hell we play with 
 fire and feel no shriveling of conscience. It is 
 easy enough to see when a man is dipping his 
 pen into his ink-pot of culture instead of into 
 the veins of his being ; the outcome is the dif- 
 ference between impression and expression. 
 The pseudo-realists, like Mr. James, and the 
 genuine realists, like Paul Bourget, are confess- 
 edly mere reporters ; consequently, no matter 
 how analytical in manner, they are in fact but 
 superficial impressionists. They pour no wine 
 
80 The Ethics of 
 
 of life from within — they express no sap of 
 originality. What Jane Austen was in her day 
 Mr. James and his "school " are to our day — a 
 cleverly trained and finely modulated voice of 
 current social gossip. No amount of analytical 
 refinement can give to this voice the holding 
 and haunting power. So with the true realist, 
 Paul Bourget, who to-day stands in the old shoes 
 of the Abbe Prevost ; his novels have only the 
 strong fascination of evil, the eye of the deadly 
 serpent. Are these novels medicine for sick 
 souls or confections for well ones ? 
 
 Let us see-saw this alternative. Art is for 
 reform or it is for delectation ; there is no Mid- 
 way Plaisance. But how shall the mere realistic 
 reproduction of the social evil, as in a mirror, 
 work reform to the great mass of honest society ? 
 Or how can it legitimately delectate a pure mind 
 or a mind preferring purity ? Such art is either 
 a fool's folly or a pander's lure. It is either 
 filth for the good, or vice for the vicious. The 
 subtlest quality of expression exerts a sort of 
 electrical influence for good or for bad. As a 
 
Literary Art 81 
 
 battery current flowing through certain metals 
 disintegrates or molecularly reforms their sub- 
 stance, so the thrill of art, for weal or ill, changes 
 the crystals of the imagination and shocks char- 
 acter into conformity with the noble aspiration 
 or the groveling passion it arouses and feeds. 
 We might take stock of history and find its 
 larger statistics intensely significant in this con- 
 nection. A loose or reckless moral temper 
 shows in epochs as clearly as in persons. The 
 style, the 17 #o?, of a period as it gleams from the 
 record gives the golden key of that civilization. 
 I read a man as I read geology, by the strata 
 he has built and the organic forms they inclose. 
 If he has believed on evil he has deposited pes- 
 simism. Despite every condition, it is out of 
 his central absolute self-core that man delivers 
 his message ; no other order of expression 
 amounts to authentic communication. The 
 ethical concern is to warm and purify the self- 
 core. It is the mission of Christian civilization 
 to make the source of expression pure, so that 
 the face of life shall have an honest and hopeful 
 countenance. 
 
82 The Ethics of 
 
 I am mindful of the limitations I must 
 observe; but I will risk suggesting the uni- 
 versal application of what I have but inti- 
 mated. In our republic we have but one final 
 absolute vehicle of political expression — the 
 ballot. Through it life and all that life can 
 compass are controlled ; but if the ballot is a 
 mere commodity on the stalls for sale what be- 
 comes of life ? Our Senators speak for our 
 States ; but if Senators buy their seats or sell 
 their official influence, what is the measure of 
 political expression ? Our preachers stand as 
 mouth-pieces of Christianity ; but if they find 
 their field only where salary is largest, what is 
 the true exponent of their purpose ? And now 
 I offer either horn of the dilemma, — let art be 
 for education, or let it be for comfort or delecta- 
 tion ; in either case to be safe it must be sound 
 and sweet in substance and in essence. But 
 where does it sink to when it assumes the posi- 
 tion and condition of mere unconscionable com- 
 mercial manufacture ? At this point the artist 
 stands ready to meet any mood of public de- 
 bauchery with the tipple it affects. 
 
Literary Art 83 
 
 I thoroughly sympathize with the scientific 
 spirit in the true field of science ; but I cannot 
 conceive of any kinship between the mood of 
 science and the mood of art. So soon as art is 
 set to academic rule it becomes mere artisanship. 
 Baudelaire proposed to teach the art of poetry 
 just as we teach mathematics ; but no pupil of 
 his ever wrote true poetry. The only way to con- 
 trol art or religion or political impulse is to edu- 
 cate the taste of the world, for the genius is all 
 men in one ; in almost every instance he comes 
 out of the average class, that middle stratum 
 into which rises the rank sap of low life and 
 upon which settles the richest sediments of all 
 the higher currents. We speak of mud-sills. 
 Well, if the mud-sills are sound, the building has 
 a good base. Moral education is needed on the 
 ground, among the classes whence genius rises. 
 Let the imagination of the masses be trained in 
 pure channels and taste will take care of itself. 
 Almost every person reads now with a grow- 
 ing appetite for the flavor of art. Shall the 
 rudimentary lesson of literature for these 
 
84 The Ethics of 
 
 awakening millions be a discouraging and 
 debauching pessimism ? Decadence lies that 
 way. Not mere literary decadence alone ; but 
 the breaking up of the heroic tissues of 
 manhood. 
 
 I cannot accept art as the dream of irre- 
 sponsibility, nor yet as the mere photography 
 of visible nature. It must enlarge vision and 
 glorify prospects, not in the fairy-tale mood, 
 but in the mood of faith in God and in man- 
 kind. It is not time to discard heroism ; what we 
 need is the higher heroism and more heroism. 
 The poet and the novelist may well dream 
 of, nay, awake to examine, a more exalted 
 chivalry than the templars knew, a higher 
 regard for woman, for wifehood, motherhood, 
 manhood, brotherhood, fatherhood. In Paris a 
 pure girl dare not venture in broad daylight 
 alone in the best street. There too is where a 
 novel or a poem nearly always keys itself in 
 illicit love. Glance at the face of Parisian 
 fiction, and you see the countenance of a 
 courtesan. The gleam of evil comes from 
 
Literary Art 85 
 
 within. Its expression suggests that no woman 
 is pure, no man honorable, no home free of the 
 scarlet stain. Realism has found this sort of 
 thing fascinating and is beginning to import it 
 into our fiction and poetry for the healing it 
 brings to diseased souls ! We may treat lightly 
 the fact that cheap editions of these novels are 
 devoured by our shop-girls, our factory-girls, our 
 poor women everywhere hungry for something 
 to amuse the imagination withal ; we may avoid 
 the truth while evading observation ; but yet 
 we know what is coming to future generations 
 when our college boys gorge their minds with 
 De Maupassant and Zola and Bourget and Hardy 
 and Flaubert, recommended to them, alas, by 
 the leading critics ! I do not care to draw 
 pictures, nor would I appeal by means of mere 
 emphasis of apprehension. It is one thing to ** 
 recognize genius and it is quite another thing 
 to accept and assimilate the evil that genius 
 does. Flaubert was unquestionably a great 
 genius ; but the sort of novels he wrote cannot 
 but carry an evil influence into any mind. 
 
86 The Ethics of 
 
 Here then is the ethical connection : what 
 we express by art is the loosing of a fascina- 
 tion which takes hold upon the innermost 
 sources of life to color conduct through a hun- 
 dred hidden veins. In the countenance of a 
 fiction or a poem we find the magnetism of 
 good or evil out of a genius able to master 
 our imagination and set us forth upon a new 
 way. Rare Ben Jonson touched the key-note 
 of ethics when he said of the poet, "We do 
 not require of him mere elocution, or an ex- 
 cellent faculty in verse, but the exact knowledge 
 of all virtues and their contraries, with ability 
 to render one loved, the other hated, by his 
 proper embattling them." Again he sounds it 
 when he remarks, "Language most shows a 
 man : speak, that I may see thee. . . No 
 glass renders a man's form or likeness so true 
 as his speech." He says that speech is 
 "likened to a man," and that a "good man al- 
 ways profits by his endeavor. . . So good 
 authors in their style." It was Matthew Arnold, 
 a cunning stylist, and in the main a safe critic, 
 
Literary Art 87 
 
 who observed closely, that said of the best Eng- 
 lish style, it is "magical," contradistinguishing 
 it from the Greek style. I find true style every- 
 where magical, and it seems to me that the use 
 of this magic does not fall outside the bound of 
 ethics ; that it is a part of the conduct of life 
 so to direct its use that it shall not become 
 black magic. 
 
 Our scientists are turning their search-lights 
 upon hypnotism or the alleged mysterious power 
 of personal physical magnetism. In the expres- 
 sion of genius lurks a force, almost irresistible 
 and yet more occult than mesmerism, which 
 may work for ill or for good. But I will discard 
 genius and take the case of the average literary 
 artificer, the successful novelist who makes his 
 bread out of his ink-horn. In no small degree 
 the literary artist is a sorcerer ; he takes posses- 
 sion of his reader by a force proportionate to 
 style. An evil subject may have in itself a fas- 
 cination, but style will make it irresistible. So 
 of a good subject. "Virtues and their contra- 
 ries" are handled by this magic and exhibited for 
 
88 The Ethics of 
 
 our good or our harm with all the power of verisi- 
 militude ; and the result is the same, whether art 
 is for education or for mere amusement. Here 
 again we are cast back upon the largest consid- 
 eration of life, that conduct is a seed to-day, a 
 fruit to-morrow, and that what is sown in art 
 produces the food for the thousands whose only 
 share in aesthetic economy is to eat, assimilate, 
 and grow. The banquet may be for pleasure 
 only ; but the result is drunkenness or healthful 
 alimentation, a headache or a pleasant memory. 
 It was the burden of heathen song that our indi- 
 vidual span of life is all. The merry Greek saw 
 nothing in the long run, thought not of 
 mankind, but only of himself and the space be- 
 tween him and the grave. Our era came in 
 with a teaching which awoke a sense of one 
 generation's responsibility for strains running 
 through all succeeding generations. We can- 
 not escape, try as we may, the tension of the 
 endless chain, of which each of us is an im- 
 perishable link. 
 
Literary Art 89 
 
 Speaking my own mind, art seems to me 
 both for education and for rational delectation, 
 and the expression of it demands highest regard 
 for the outcome. We are but children, and 
 whether in schoolroom or play-ground, what we 
 take in becomes a part of us and shines or 
 scowls for evermore in the countenance of char- 
 acter, to rj6o<$ /cal to avOos, the flash from within 
 and the bloom of desire. 
 
Books and Pamphlets for the Times. 
 
 Open-Air Preaching. By Rev. E. H. Bying- 
 
 ton. 104 pp., illustrated. 
 Introductory Hebrew Grammar. By Prof. 
 
 E. C. Bissell, D.D. 2d ed. 141 pp. 
 Hebrew Exercises for Classes. By Prof. 
 
 James Robertson, D.D. 38 pp. 
 Vocabulary of New Testament Words. 
 
 By O. S. Davis. 32 pp. 
 The Brookfield Services. Five Series. 
 
 26 Services. (Over 700,000 sold.) 
 The Hartford Seminary Record. Bi-monthly 
 
 Magazine. Vol. IV. 1893-94 
 Handy Harmony of the Gospels. By Prof. 
 
 A. T. Perry. 16 pp. 
 Numerous Theological Pamphlets. By 
 
 various authors. 
 
 For circulars and price-list, address — 
 1bartfor& Seminars firess 
 
 HARTFORD, CONN. 
 
LOAN DEPT 
 
 *»>" book is due ' * 
 
 
 or 
 
 Due end of FALL Quarter 
 sd^je^Mo^^aiL^ftexf- OCT 2 * '/I. 9 £( 
 
 (-E4555sl0)476B 
 
 rT„ Gen . eraI library 
 

 II 
 
 YB 22743 
 
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