THE Substance of Literature BEING AN ESSAY PRINCIPALLY ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE SUBJECT MATTER SIN, ffl IN TJTJa^ATJURE, gnnnifin anj moil x a a ;>T By L"P. ' NEW YORK THOMAS BENTON I9J3 LOVE AND DEATH From the Painting By G. F. WATTS, R. A. Reproduced uilh the permission of Mn- Watti MB THE Substance of Literature BEING AN ESSAY PRINCIPALLY ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE SUBJECT MATTER OF SIN, IGNORANCE AND MISERY IN LITERATURE By L. P. GRATACAP, A. M. NEW YORK THOMAS BENTON 1913 Copyright by FRANK ROGERS 1913 TO THE MEMORY OF MRS. OLIVER LAY WHOSE INTEREST IN THE THEME HERE PRESENTED ENCOURAGED THE AUTHOR. MANY YEARS AFTER HER DEATH, TO FINISH THIS WORK CONTENTS Chapter I Substance of Literature 7 II Evolution of Literary Types - - 46 " III French Literature - 127 " IV The SIN substance of Literature - - 1 66 V The SIN substance of Literature in Drama and Poetry - - 198 " VI The SIN substance and the MISERY substance of Literature in Fiction - 231 " VII IGNORANCE as the substance of Poetry 263 " VIII The Conclusion 280 t/lssurement il sera bon que le boiteux de la tragedie boite comme Hephaistos; il sera bon que I'insense s'abandonne aux fureurs d'Ajax, que la femme incestueuse renouvelle les crimes de 'Phedre, que le traitre trahisse, que le fourbe mente, que le meutrier tue, et quand la piece sera jouee, tous les acteurs, rots, justes, tyrans, sanguin- aires, vierges, pieuses, epouses impudi- ques, citoyens magnanimes et laches assassins recevront du poete une part egale de felicitations. France CHAPTER I. THE SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Literature is of course not simply words, the literal succession of vocables in an intelligible form. It is not essentially bound books and printed pages. Its nature is more correctly perhaps a class of mental impressions in the production of which these signs and forms and sensible manifestations, and embodi- ments are today associated. But such physical ren- ditions of literature are not necessary, and the tra- ditional welding of stories and events, ideas and relig- ious rites into verbal compositions repeated by word of mouth, and "learned by heart," is the well known form which literature presents in the earlier days, where the vehicle becomes reduced to the thinnest possible objective form, a series of audible articula- tions, lost almost in their utterance. In this phase of literary activity literature reveals its real character, and is detached from the secondary and artificial media by which it is made negotiable, permanent and ponderable. Max Muller says, "how then were these ancient hymns and the Brahmanas and, it may be said, the [7] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Sutras too, preserved? Entirely by memory, but by memory kept under the strictest discipline. "As far back as we know anything of India, we find that the years which we spend at school, and at university, were spent by the sons of the three higher classes in learning from the mouth of a teacher their sacred literature. * * * * These men, I know it as a fact, know the whole Rig Veda by heart, just as their ancestors did, three or four thousand years ago; and though they have MSS and though they now have a printed text, they do not learn their sacred lore from them. They learn it as their ancestors learnt it, thousands of years ago, from the mouth of a teacher, so that the Vedic succession should never be broken." A friend of Prof. Muller engaged in preparing notes for the professor's edition of the Rig Veda wrote to him, referring to these men, "I am collecting a few of our walking Rig Veda MSS, taking your text as a basis, I find a good many differences which I shall soon be able to examine more closely, when I may be able to say whether they are various readings or not." Gladstone (/uven/us MunJi) discussing the ob- jections made to the acceptance of the authenticity of the Homeric poems, on the ground of the difficulty of their retention by unaided memory, says, "that they could not be transmitted orally, is also very com- SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE monly denied. Quintillian says Invenio apud Plat- onem obstare memoriae usum literarum. Even in the period when the exercise of the memory had become subject to this disadvantage, Nicerator, ac- cording to Xenophon, stated that he knew the Iliad and Odyssey by heart; and Athenaeus states that Cassander, King of Macedon, could do nearly as much; he could repeat the chief part of the poems." Grote in the twenty-first chapter of his great work, wherein he discusses the epic cycle and Homer, says, "nor will it be found, after all, that the effort of memory required either from bards or rhapsodes, even for the longest of these old epic poems though doubtless great, was at all superhuman. Taking the case with reference to the entire Iliad and Odyssey, we know that there were educated gentlemen at Athens who could repeat both poems by heart." And in a note to this passage he recalls "the labor- ious discipline of the Gallic Druids, and the number of unwritten verses which they retained in their mem- ories," as noticed by Caesar, and refers to Heroditus as a witness to "the prodigious memory of the Egyp- tian priests at Heliopolis." If we consider carefully then the nature of Litera- ture, when we have, so to speak, divested it of those sensible embodiments which give it a physical objec- [9] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE tivity, we find it to be composition a related, con- tinuous, and purposive arrangement of ideas and facts, expressed in language, by which the mind of the auditor is informed or charmed or stimulated. In this designation we could hardly include very trivial though useful examples of verbal records, as the cat- alogue of a king's wardrobe, the toilet of a princess, or the menu of a Roman banquet. They do not conform to the notion of composition a continu- ous related and purposive arrangement of ideas and facts, for, as Taine says, "the more a book represents visible sentiments, the more it is a work of Literature ; for the proper office of Literature is to take note of the sentiments," and as sentiments proceed from facts, their study or their philosophy, or are illustrated by facts, Literature is a plant growing in the soil of his- tory and bearing flowers of ideation, spirituality, and artistic beauty. But what makes a literary work, what is its sub- stance, what expresses the totality of those mental impressions it makes upon us? It is the subject matter, the style including the word aspect of the composition, its verbal stuff and the treatment. Every literary work must be about something, must convey a substantial reference to an idea or a fact; even the most volatile and chasing race of prettily [10] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE united words must mean something, say something. Neither Catullus nor Austin Dobson can escape this sane necessity. Then comes the style, that elective skill, temperamental or educational or mimetic, by which a writer builds his idea in words, or to use a different simile casts the fluid magma of his thought in phrases, collocated and linked clauses, making this sound image repeat to the world his exact or peculiar conceptions. "Omnis igitur oratio conficitur ex verbis; quorum primum nobis ratio simpliciter videnda est; deinde conjuncte: nam est quidam ornatus orationis, qui ex singulis verbis est; alius, qui ex continuatis conjunctis- que constat. Ego utemur verbis aut iis quae propria sunt et certa quasi vocabula rerum, paene una nata cum rebus ipsis; aut iis quae transferuntur, et quasi alieno in loco collocantur; aut iis quae novamus et facimus ipsi." "Therefore all oration is made up of words, of which first the method is seen to be simple, then com- posite; for there is a certain decoration of the oration arising from single words, another which resides in their succession and conjunction. Therefore we make use of words, either such as are, as it were, proper and exact vocables of things, being almost born with [11] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE the things themselves: or such as are transferred and as it were gathered in a different place, or such as we introduce and make ourselves" Cicero, DeOratore Lib. III. Cap. XXXVII. Dr. Blair describes the characters of style as dif- fuse, concise, feeble, nervous, dry, plain, neat, ele- gant, flowery; and Spencer says "the perfect writer will express himself as Junius when in the Junius frame of mind; when he feels as Lamb felt, will use a familiar speech ; and will fall into the ruggedness of Carlyle when in a Carlylean mood;" but whatever distinctions are made, and whatever its cause, style results from the conjunction and character of words as the pattern of a silk is made from the combination of different colored threads, or the form of a flower from the elements of its floral envelope. The treatment of a subject is the third element of literary substance, and means the form of composition as a whole, the form of its parts, the relation and suc- cession of its parts, the pitch of its expression, light or gay or grave, its arrangements of detail, of lights and shadows, in short its artistic effectiveness. It reveals the power of an author to seize and reproduce a de- terminate, definable impression, to the making of which all the sections of his work have accumula- tively ministered. For instance critics, especially in [12] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE France, have spent some time in picking out the dis- tinctions to be made between the classic and romantic schools of writing, particularly in the drama, which schools are strikingly contrasted in their treatment. The classic school has been compared, in disparage- ment, to a royal garden of Versailles; "bien nivele bien taille, bien nettoye, bien ratisse, bien sable; tout plein de petites cascades, de petits bassins, de petits bosquets, de tritons de bronze folatrant en ceremonie sur des oceans pompes a grands frais dans la Seine, de faunes de marbre courtisant les dryades allegoriquement renfermees dans une multitude d, ifs coniques, de lauriers cylindriques, d'orangers spherique, de myrtes elliptiques et d' autres arbres dont la forme naturelle, trop triviale sans doute, a etc gracieusement corrigee par la serpette du jardi- nier. And the romantic school has been favorably likened to a primeval forest: "avec ses arbres geants, ses hautes herbes, sa veg- etation profonde, ses mille oiseaux de mille coleurs, ses larges avenues, ou 1, ombre et la lumiere ne se jouent que sur la verdure, ses sauvages harmonies, ses grands fleuves qui charrient des iles de fleurs, ses immenses cataractes qui balancent des arcs-en-ciel!" The French classic drama, that of Racine and [13] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Corneille is well contrasted with the irregular action of the plays of Victor Hugo, Dumas, and Gautier. Less generalized examples of treatment recur to everyone the art with which in George Elliot's Romola, in the first chapter, we are thrown back in the atmosphere and society of mediaeval Florence, and so immersed in the local color and life that the events of the story borrow this antique illusion, and we watch the drama of Tito's perfidy and Romola's disenchantment and despair with eyes that have be- come accustomed to the fair white walls, Where the Etrurian Athens claims and keeps A softer feeling for her fairy halls. The conception and treatment of the Pilgrims' Progress, by Bunyan, is an unapproached example of perfect allegory. The graphic narrative, the enter- taining and suggestive dialogue, the delightful and descriptive epithets and names, the recurrent crude- ness and abrupt incidents, unintentional of course but exhilarating and helpful to a rude but valuable real- ism, the quick cutting satire and humour, and the straightforward conduct of an intense composition have placed this fable amongst the brightest and most admired gems of English literature. [14] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE In Milton's Paradise Lost we find an example of treatment of august distinction. How many careful critics have pointed out the heightening effect of that vague adumbration and half discovered movement, which the great poet has employed in his description of Hell and its terrific populace, and of that supreme voyage of Satan, who. with thoughts inflamed of highest design Puts on swift wings, and towards the gates of hell Explores his solitary flight. It is true the discreet Addison, who was some- thing of a haberdasher in poetry himself, complains (very kindly of course) of Milton's language "as often much labored, and sometimes obscured by old words, transpositions, and foreign idioms," but Mr. Garnett who has a less narrowwaisted taste, and the gift of the modern faculty says of this masterpiece: that it conforms to the highest standards of literary art, and displays throughout, a marvelous learning and an unrivalled power of language. And Prof. Woodberry has added only lately the convincing tribute of his appreciation in the "Torch" (Lectures delivered before the Lowell Institute) ; "but no words I can use would sufficiently express the admiration which this poem excites in me not merely for its unrivalled music, nor for its style which [15] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Matthew Arnold thought keeps it alive, but for its construction as an act of intellect, for its sublime imagination in dealing with infinite space, infinite time, and eternity, and the beings of eternity: for its beautiful surface in the scenes in Paradise, its idyllic sweetness and charm, the habitual eloquence and noble demeanor in the characters." In each of these three ingredients of the substance of Literature style, treatment, and the subject matter there is an impersonal and a personal ele- ment, that is, there is an uncontrolled resident factor of permanence, and a factor of voluntary choice. In style the impersonal element is the language which is a fixed scarcely variable unit. The slight novel- ties which an exuberant or unrestrained fancy can introduce, are necessarily few, and after a language has reached its maturity, has crystallized into its final shape, has completed its vocabulary and settled its grammatical and idiomatic expression, though it re- sponds to a slow secular tendency of change, it, at any short period of time, is finished and immovable. The words of Chaucer, himself an innovator, even at that early emergence of our tongue from an amor- phous consistency of Norman-French, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Latin* are practically the same as those of *Mr. Skeat in his Etymological Dictionary "finds that of 1 3,500 primary words, 4,000 are of Teutonic origin, 5,000 taken from the French, 2,700 direct from the Latin, 400 from the Greek, 250 from the Celtic, and the rest from various sources." [16] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Tennyson, the words of Froissart in the thirteenth century are unmistakably French, and are not so con- siderably contrasted with the words of Victor Hugo in the nineteenth, the verses of Dante imply a lan- guage and construction familiar in the lines of Maz- zoni or the pages of D'Annuncio, and the sentences of Cervantes are certainly intelligible to the admirers of Madame Bazan. The fable of Reynard the Fox marks the early birth of the German tongue and the Nieberlungen Lied and the Heldenbuch furnish the sentiment and the rugged euphony of the language of Schiller and Goethe, just as in Piers the Plowman, Jusserand has indicated the subliminal conditions of English speech : "his poem is not only strange, it is likewise grand and beautiful, and is far from being as well known as it should be. From a historical point of view, again, it offers considerable interest, for, as in Chau- cer's tales, all England is in it. The same types are there: knights, monks, mendicant friars, pardoners, London shopkeepers, poor workingmen, honest laborers, gay tavern-haunting roysters, and pious clerks, creeping to heaven under the shadow of the church.'* The large additions made by science, and the scientific fashions of writing in all branches of learn- [17] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ing have widened the scope and augmented the dic- tionaries of language, but the linguistic strain and the linguistic matter for purposes of literary employ- ment are not greatly changed. At any rate at the time an author writes, he finds (unless he incurs against himself the accusation which Chaucer raised of bringing in "cartloads of words" from some other source) a language, a solidified and shaped mass of words and constructions. M. Albert has well expressed a conviction similar in import, though the paragraph encloses a reference to the dis- appearance of words along with the extinction of ideas ; "Toute epoque a ses idees propres, il faut qu, elle ait aussi les mots propres a ses idees. Les langues sont comme le mer, elles oscillent sans cesse. A cer- taines temps elles quittent un rivage du monde de la pensee et en envahissent un autre. Tout ce que leur flot deserte ainsi seche et s'efface du sol. C'est de cette fac.on que des idees s' eteignent, que des mots s' en vont." But Symonds has distinctly said "an Italian can- not put into words exactly the same shade of thought as a German, or an Englishman as a Frenchman, the genius of the mother tongue in each case forbids identity of utterance." [18] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE The personal element in the element of style is obvious. It is the personal skill, ingenuity, power and insight of an author to put his thoughts in words so that the words express it clearly, and as it were imitatively. It is that magic of choice, that instinct of accurate selection by which the style expresses the mind. Again we may quote Symonds accept- ably "style, in Literature, may be roughly described as the adequate investiture of thought with language. The best style is that in which no other verbal form could be imagined more appropriate for the utterance of thought than the one which has been given by the author. 'Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style' said Swift." Shakespeare is the supreme example of this power, for words flowed into the matrix of his thought as liquid metal into the configuration of a mould, repro- ducing each outward and inward curve. Are not these instances exemplars of perfection of style, as they are models of imaginative execution ? Othello: "If I do prove her haggard, Though that her jesses were my dear heart strings I'd whistle her off, and let her down the wind To prey at fortune." Hamlet: "No ! let candied tongue lick absurd pomp, [19] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, Where thrift may follow fawning." Romeo: O! here Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes look your last, Arms take you last embrace : and lips O ! you The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss, A dateless bargain to engrossing death ! Come bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide ! Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on The dashing rocks, thy sea-sick weary bark." Ruskin, the "lunatic with a style," possessed ex- quisite power in the control and use of words, and Carlyle, a man of verbal affectations and aberrant phraseology displayed a style of singular descriptive force and rare picturesque suggestiveness. Here are two extracts from these writers lying side by side and their individuality and innate differences heighten the beauty of each. Here is what Ruskin says of a blade of grass: "gather a single blade of grass, and examine for a minute, quietly, its narrow sword-shaped strip of fluted green. Nothing, as it seems there, of notable goodness or beauty. A very little strength, and a very little tallness and a few delicate [20] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE long lines meeting in a point not a perfect point either, but blurred and unfinished, by no means a creditable or apparently much cared for example of Nature's workmanship, made, as it seems, only to be trodden on today, and tomor- row to be cast into the oven: and a little pale and hollow stalk, feeble and flaccid, leading down to the dull brown fibre of roots. And yet, think of it well, and judge whether of all the gorgeous flowers that beam in summer air, and of all strong and goodly trees, pleasant to the eye and good for food stately palm and pine, strong ash and oak, scented citron, burdened vine there be any by man so deeply loved, by God so highly graced as that narrow point of feeble green." And here on the other hand is Carlyle describing the Revolution of France: "what then is this Thing, called La Revolution, which like an Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading, fighting, gunboring, tanning human skins? La Revolution is but so many Alphabetic Letters; a thing nowhere to be laid hands on, to be clapt under lock and key; where is it? What is it? It is the madness that dwells in the hearts of men. In this man it is, and in that man ; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men. In- visible, impalpable; and yet no black Azrael, with [21] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE wings spread over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could be a truer Reality." And the poets, whose nature expresses itself with an unchecked impulse of delight and power, render in their styles their personal distinction. As Mr. Masson describes it we find in Wordsworth "the exquisite propriety and delicacy of his style, his easy and perfect mastery over the element of language;" "greater smoothness and beauty and more of strict logical coherence, in Wordsworth's style than is usual even among careful poets, as well as a more close fitting of the language to the measure of the thought, and a comparative freedom from forced rhymes, and jarring evasions of natural forms of words." Of Keats, Masson says "he possessed in short, sim- ply in virtue of his organization, a rich intellectual 1 foundation of that kind which consists of notions, furnished directly by sensations, and of a correspond- ing stock of names and terms. Even had he remained without education, his natural vocabulary of words for all the varieties of thrills, tastes, odors, sounds, colors, and tactual perceptions, would have been unusually precise and extensive." There is no denying the individuality of the style of Robert Browning. It is one of the perplexities of literature. Many a man has chased his patience [22] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE out of doors trying to understand him, and felt no compunction at venting a vociferous scorn on his un- intelligibility. Tennyson himself said he understood only two lines of his Sordello. Browning's style reaches a kind of ferocity of disorder, and tumultuous oddity. But how effective! Of these singularities, which were imbedded and philosophical consisten- cies, G. K. Chesterton, Browning's latest and most effective student and disciple, has said, "Browning's verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder cloud, it is top-heavy, like the toad stool. Energy which disregards the standard of classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the uproar- ious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a philosophical idea." Yet beyond the widest vagaries of speech, of liter- ary caprice, the circumscribing limits of national speech remain inviolate and precise. Like the pre- ordained boundaries of ordinal form in animal life wherein, a mollusk, throughout the whole range of its diversities in shape and function, never becomes a crustacean or a fish, the styles possible to a tongue [23] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE are its own and not another's. In treatment the impersonal element is the fashion of the day, in literary measures, by which a current of feeling is set in one direction, and the taste and appetite of the reading public or the patrons of litera- ture so formed as to act compulsorily upon the writer. And the writer, as an element himself of the literary life of the time instinctively obeys the same monitions, follows the same habit, and deals with his subjects after a conventional form. As M. Albert says 'Vest 1'esprit d'une epoque, ce sont ses institutions, ses moeurs, ses prejuges, qui determinent d'abord la forme de 1'oeuvre." Thus the treatment of the drama in the days of Louis XIV, was prescribed by a severe chaste classicism which respected the unities of time, place, and action, in- sisted upon a courtly and decorous movement, and progressively narrowed the area of invention. It elicited those limpid and exquisitely polished plays with which Corneille and Racine have enriched French literature, wherein the exactitudes of royal etiquette, the refinement of artificial grace, and the proprieties of verbal expression, have mingled in a creation, dramatic in character, where the action is all rythmical and uniform, and the personages superb and inaccessible, where natural emotion is hidden [24] beneath the nacre of an inimitable style, and natural action inexorably directed by the baton of a master of ceremonies. In the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Miss Burney, we can easily see a method or fashion of treatment by which they can be assigned to one literary epoch. There is a simple alignment of events, a string of incidents, which display the char- acters in a narrational succession. Interest is con- stantly evoked by a new predicament, and the dia- logue is concerned with expressing the superficial emotional excitement of the moment, by which the reader is informed or aroused or amused. This linear treatment is diverting, and resembles a series of re- lated pictures whose connections are made more obvious by the sagacity and instinct of the exhibitor as he simulates the voice of each character, or brings them into juxtapositions that are ridiculous or pathetic. The involution of circumstance and char- acter, the reflections of the interior surfaces of different natures cast outward in voice and action, the omni- present sense of plot, passing through its various phases of reaction from a suggested uncertainty through deepening stages of obscurity and aberrant and delightful chapters of excitement, until the diges- tion of its parts completed, a lucid and entertaining [25] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE result is secured these characteristics belong to more modern novelists though, to be sure, not the latest. This previous modelling of the treatment a growth of circumstances, tastes and precedents of a literary subject, to whose outlines the successful writer conforms is the impersonal element in this sec- ond ingredient of the substance of literature, but it does not exclude a personal element. The personal element appears in the diversifications of a popular or conventional treatment, in its modifications, in an elision of some of its members, in a revolt against it, or in an exacting conformity to it. Racine and Corneille both follow a classical treat- ment; it is a willing and desirable subjugation, but in Racine there is a less restrained use of the soliloquy, not such evenly distributed parts and occasional em- ployment of adventitious decoration as with the chor- uses in Esther. In Corneille the rigid symmetry of the classic form is severely respected, and the bal- anced parts continue their salutatory oscillations with the precision of a colloquial pendulum. So in Fielding and Smollett we have the reportorial and pictorial novel, the panoramic ambulatory story, but in Fielding the scenes succeed each other more quickly and the incidental divertissements are more frequent and more equivocal. [26] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Before looking at the personal and impersonal ele- ment in the last ingredient of the substance of litera- ture, viz. in the Subject Matter, it is necessary to have attention called to the fact, that after all the imper- sonal element in the two other ingredients, Style and Treatment is the expression of a generalized person- ality, itself. For language, which is the impersonal element in Style, is the expression of a race's tempera- ment. Symonds says "slowly and obscurely, amid stupidity and ignorance were being forged the nations and the languages of Europe. Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany, took shape. The action of the future drama acquired their several characters, and formed the tongues whereby their personalities should be expressed." And the same cultivated writer says of the types of literature wherein lies the element of Treatment that they distinguish groups of men and national eras. He says, (Speculative and Suggestive Essays) "the germ, however generated, is bound to expand; the form however determined controls the genius, which seeks expression through this medium. In the earliest stages of expansion the artist becomes half a prophet, and 'sows with the whole sack,' in the plen- titude of superabundant inspiration. After the orig- inal passion for the ideas to be embodied in art has [27] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE somewhat subsided, when the form is fixed and its capacities can be severely measured but before the glow and fire of enthusiasm have faded out, there comes a second period. In this period art is studied more for art's sake, but the generative potency of the first founders is by no means exhausted;" "it is im- possible to return upon the past; the vigor of those former workers may survive in their successors, but their inspiration has taken shape, forever in their works. And that shape abides fixed in the habits of the nation. The type cannot be changed because the type grew itself out of the very nature of the people who are still existent." Treatment is indeed the expression of that Taine has specified as the "elementary moral state," and which he determines to be the resultant of the race, the surroundings and the epoch; the last two of course, as modifying agencies, eliciting or retarding hidden capabilities, ripening or sterilizing the func- tional appetite and mental fruitage of the first the race. Thus Style and Treatment, though approximately separable into two elements as personal and imper- sonal are reconditely and ultimately referable to human attributes. They embody the superficial configurations of the mental aspect of a period [28] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE or people, but refer also to latent tendencies, capabilities and tastes, as all the superficies of embodied thought must refer to the pro- creative quality and quantity of the thought itself. They are personal expressions, whether inceptively genuine and spontaneous, or secondarily modified, diverted or intensified by the batteries and atmos- phere of circumstance and climate. But in the Subject Matter, the third element in literary substance, this separation of the personal and impersonal elements is obviously valid and conspicu- ous. The substratum of reality anything that appeals to our senses as scenes, sights, scents and sounds, or is retrospectively recognized in imagina- tion as in the incidents of history, is distinctly a collo- cation outside of us, and if we give it a literary treat- ment is in itself impersonal. But our view of it, our thoughts in regard to it, the emotions it excites in us, the medium or the devices we choose to use in its literary presentation is a personal element. We see the flowing current of a little stream, its banks deeply buried in a rich and sumptuous growth of sedges, of crowded alders, of bending and flowering willows, and wading within its waters stand mermaid weeds and water hemlocks ; its surface is spotted with dimly moving islands of colored leaves; here it is wrinkled [29] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE by a breath of descending air, and there it lies in calm repose disclosing a glimpse of sandy shoals, and shooting fishes, with clustered sheaves of piercing sunrays. This all is an impersonal element in any literary lucubration which such a scene may suggest. But how it shall be presented, what semi-mythic fancies it may gather in our description, what terms of literal instruction we may devote to it, or how we shall enfold its suggestive beauties in verse, to the reader who has not seen it, is a personal, a subjective, element, depending upon the mental, psychological or educational peculiarities of ourselves, or even upon the plan and scope of our object, the intention for which we write about it at all. The incident in Queen Elizabeth's reign of her love for Lord Leicester and of the murder of Amy Robsart is told by an historian in the ornate and con- templative manner of a philosophic chronicler, as when Hume wrote "the Earl of Leicester, the great and powerful favorite of Elizabeth, possessed all those exterior qualities which are naturally alluring to the fair sex; a handsome person, a polite address, an insinuating behaviour; and by means of these accomplishments, he had been able to blind even the penetration of Elizabeth, and conceal from her the [30] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE great defects, or rather odious vices, which attended his character. He was proud, insolent, interested, ambitious; without honor, without generosity, with- out humanity; and atoned not for these bad qualities by such abilities as courage, as could fit him for that high trust and confidence, with which she always honored him. Her constant and declared attach- ment to him had naturally emboldened him to aspire to her bed; and in order to make way for these nup- tials, he was universally believed to have murdered, in a barbarous manner, his wife, the heiress of one Rob- sart." But to the novelist this episode forms the pathetic motif of a beautiful story, and enriched with the cabinet splendors of a stored heraldic mind be- comes the tragedy of Kenilworth Castle. Keats and Leigh Hunt each agreed to write a poem on the cricket and grasshopper in friendly rivalry, and though the specific objects were neces- sarily identical in both cases, yet how contrasted the results, that flowed from their appeal to different minds ! Though the impersonal element two orthopter- ous insects remained unchanged in this literary event, the personal contingent influence in Keats and Leigh Hunt responded to different suggestions con- tained in these same organisms. Keats coupled the [31] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE cricket with the grasshopper, and enfolded each in the pleasing thought of the perennial melody of Nature. He wrote : The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead : That is the grasshopper's he takes the lead In summer luxury he has never done With his delights, for when tired out with fun, He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never : On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, And seems to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper's among the grassy hills." Leigh Hunt brought them together in a harmonic unison of mirthful homely sweetness and delight; his sonnet is less tenderly contemplative than Keats, and a realistic effort in it seems to make its art more labored and ingenious. Leigh Hunt wrote : Green little vaulter in the sunny grass, Catching your heart up at the feel of June, Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon, [32] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE When even the bees lag at the summoning brass And you, warm little housekeeper, who class With those who think the candles come too soon, Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune Nick the glad silent moments as they pass; Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong, One to the fields, the other to the hearth, Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong At your clear hearts ; and both seem given to earth To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song Indoors and out, summer and winter, Mirth. But whatever the personal element of mind and temperament effects in literature, its excitant is that impersonal element in the subject matter, that body of energizing influence or expression in things and events about which we speak, that lies outside of us, that is not imagined or invented, but upon which we may indeed expend imagination and invention. These external happenings, the events we hear of, the persons and acts we inspect, the combinations of natural and artificial phenomena and features in the world, the common course of nature herself, and the scenes and expressions of physical material life, of the wide range of movements and incidents of animal existence, the more dramatic aspects of the [33] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE episodes and course of history, and the wide areas of human emotion, conflict and progress, these are to the writer the impersonal factor of his subject matter. They have a natural objective reality which he cannot eliminate or modify, they form the irritants and occasions of his writing. The personal element of this subject matter is his interpretation of them, his affinity or repulsion for their various phases, and the productive or creative crises which they evoke in him. Now the object of this essay is to show that a very large part of the most entertaining, the grand- est, the most thoughtful, the most varied, subtle, and diversified literature has proceeded from the imper- sonal element in the occurrences and the appearances of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery. That if we are to form any estimate of a possible literature after this life, and if that life as we all generally hope, will be more serene and blissful than this one, then its litera- ture will lose those characteristics of the impersonal element which in Sin, Ignorance, and Misery have contributed so much to the wealth and merit of that we now possess in any and all languages. And derivatively, if in a less degree, the literature of im- proved or improving society must suffer a delimina- [34] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE tion and curtailment with its progressive suppression of these three facts. Especially we wish to draw attention to an aspect of literary fertility which is not, to our minds, made enough of. The influence of the impersonal, matter of fact actualities in the subject matter of a work of literature especially imaginative literature is enor- mous. Today we have partly forgotten it because we are contemplating individualities in writers only, but those individualities are the results and resultants of an inextricable and an interminable series of in- fluences or rather reactions arising from the contact of Mind with the world outside of us. Taine is consumed with a single thought. He perceives in the varying panorama of literary activity the interaction of a racial force upon objective con- ditions. He pays but small attention to the effect of what is to be written about upon the writer. This is a less conspicuous and grandiose point of view. To see in the climate, the ethnology, the state of civ- ilization and the mental preoccupations, the formative influences of literature, affords his penetrative fancy a broad and philosophic scope. In English literature it is first the analysis of the Saxon and the Norman, then a description of a fusing and mixing period when the "New Tongue" [35] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE is formed. Then comes the Pagan Renaissance with the unbolting of the doors of knowledge, animal ex- cess, and natural proclivities, endowed, encouraged and elevated. Within the widened horizon of thought and desire, the literature of Elizabeth raises its virile and multitudinous beauties. Then follows the Christian Renaissance with a serious morality, sturdy convictions, enduring hopes and intrepid resistance, and its literature, born of its spirit and the new social conditions, is polemic, vivid with religious enthusiasm and exaltation. Then the Restoration with its violent reaction, its unbridled license, its incessant and boisterous parade of lust, and the classic age, conceived within it, rises hollow, ele- gant, veneered with fine phrases and shining with a kind of parlor wit, while the modern period succeeds, variegated, busy, arduous, and involved. As M. Albert has said, "la literature du XIXe siecle offre un aspect de confusion, de desordre, d'intemperance, qui trouble. Si Ton penetre dan la detail, on est frappe de 1'intensite de vie, de Torig- Jnalite, de la variete." Taine exerts his copious and exhilarating power of language to gauge and draw and paint these differ- ences in men and ages ; he is careful to emphasize the contrast between the precision, logicalness, and con- [36] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE secutive regularity of a French mind and the ampli- tude imaginativeness and interior complexity of the Teutonic. But nowhere does he hint at a certain broader underlying basis of distinction between lit- erature and books and writers, which is hidden in the nature of the stuff itself about which they write or are written. He does not pause to think it is the matter and its peculiar forms or aspects that becomes visu- alized, incorporated by exact contact and sympathy with the mental structure of the man or race, that helps to produce the variegation and modes, moods and works of literature. He does indeed hint at an influence of this sort, when he enlarges on the effect of surroundings, and when he tells us so frequently what new results in art and literature appeared, when men turned their mental eyes from the asceticism and pauperized nar- rowness of the middle ages to the rounded intellec- tual and poetic fleshliness of antiquity. But he does not bring to the surface the fact that after all it is the subject matter that has moulded in the course of ages, literary feeling and invested minds with a pecu- liar atmosphere. That it is a fact, that if a mind con- templates fossils only, it becomes fossilized; if stones, petrified ; if flowers verdant painted and fragrant, that to look at Melancholy induces sadness and sober [37] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE tones of thought, to see gayety makes the spectator gay, and to trace effects analytical, and that, however begun, these objective influences having slowly formed a type of mind by acting upon some undif- ferentiated matrix, it the type has become inher- ited, and under the agency of elections, fixed, strengthened, and deepened. In the succeeding chapter on the "The Evolution of Literary Types" we shall point this out more systematically, and it will assume that novelty which the idea we think possesses, but which fails to imbue its simple state- ment here made. But that the radical assumption of the influence of the subject matter upon writing or literary com- position may be appreciated, let us ask "What is the Language itself?" It is the sensuous image of thought, therefore the single expression of literature. But how did language arise? Max Muller in his profound work on the "Science of Thought" has shown us. This thinker asserts that by sensations we awaken our thought, which putting on the aspect at first of a "percept" becomes a "concept," when instantly language announces the result. The meta- physics of this operation need not detain us. He says, "thought, in the usual sense of the word, is utterly impossible without the simultaneous working of sen- [38] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE sations, percepts, concepts, and names, and that in reality the four are inseparable." "Sensation being shared in common by men and animals is often rep- resented as the lowest degree of mental activity. But though it may be the lowest, in so far as it is the first act, it is also in another sense the highest, the first, the most important act. Instead of being the most easy to understand, it is really the most mysterious, an act which admits of no simile or metaphor any- where, an act which we cannot explain by any other, an ultimate fact in our subjective world, as motion is in the objective world." We wish for our purpose to fix attention upon the fact, that sensation begins the development of language, that at the time When thought is speech and speech is truth, the avenues of sense arouse thought, and there is pre- cipitated upon the mental image the sensuous particles of sound, and language is created. As the invisible image of the visible scene lies entrapped in the chem- ical potentialities of the sensitized film, and emerges when the developing solutions have poured over it, and thrown down the silver salts along all the lines and threads of light, and emerges too in an ideal identity with that original which shone through the objective; so the multitudinous aspects and qualities of external nature acting upon us through the senses, [39] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE arouse our minds, and weave upon the unfolding tables of memory and psychological impressibility the patterns of vocal composition which are again uttered, and remain as language. Then upon the aspects of nature, succeed the as- pects of men and the events of history, and these appeals stirring the mind evoke the literary powers of races, in an analogous way to that by which lan- guage, the material of literature, has arisen itself. To estimate the value of this impersonal factor, imagine a world entirely different from ours while we remain as n?e are; could literatures, exactly as we have them, have arisen? New impacts upon sensation, a differ- ent order and combination of events would have elicited very different literary results. But we are ourselves part and parcel of this world, we have grown together in the manifold processes of change, evolution, and adaptation, and we have become so fitted to this world, so knit into the frame of things, that our minds are calculated accord- ingly to express the world itself. We have become the legitimate expositors of the world, and reveal its beauty, its intensity, its purpose. Further we have become responsive to our common nature, so that in the path of development and through the exigencies of daily life, the composite [40] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE structure of society changes as a unit in its multi various parts, and each element or individual in that society, having grown up in it becomes its index and reflects its feelings, its humour, its passion, its quantity and quality of mind. Whatever happens, whatever is seen or heard or tasted, the externalities in their entirety, are the provocatives of thought. The difference in literature, in different ages is due to different external aspects, different impersonal fac- tors in the subject matter of literature. It is the im- personal factor of the subject matter which practically controls the nature of our writings. To be sure the peculiarities of the writer are considerable and dis- tinctive elements, but it is the reaction between these peculiarities and the outside facts and sensations, which give birth to books. It is not altogether the separative faculties of thought and imagination differ- ently combined, differently directed, and blended, and differently made, that gives us literature. It is also largely that impersonal factor of the subject mat- ter, which entering in the mind, through sensation, or imaginative sensation as it were, in records and stories, traditions, and history, elicits its response in forms, and combinations of language. Certainly it is a common truism that the nature of [41] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE a topic prescribes its verbal treatment Tristia moestum Vultum verba decent; iratum, pleno minarum; Ludentem, lasciva; severum, seria dictu. Format enim natura prius nos intus ad omnem Fortunarum habitum ; juvat, aut impellit ad iram Aut ad humum moerore gravi deducit et augit Post effert animi motus interprete lingua. So the various aspects of a subject matter are re- sponded to by the nature of writers, and from the very fact of the existence of such aspects in the sub- ject matter the peculiarities of authors are elicited. Byron could not have existed as a literary product if a long antecedent history and a certain physiologi- cal growth involving the emotions had not been es- tablished in the world, and in psychology. Scott reechoes a romance, an external group of facts, which made him the peculiar and delightful literary event he really was. Keats has, to use the words of Mr. Masson an abiding and pregnant sense of "sensuous impressions," and the same discriminating critic has seen in Shelly the movements of a spirit responsive to the "meteorological" phases of nature. Words- worth was a man calculated and educated to mirror the spirituality and the realism of nature. The personal element in style is well shown in [42] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Prof. Woodberry's description of the literary char- acter of Coleridge, and Aubrey de Vere, and James Russell Lowell. Of Coleridge he says: "The tem- perament of Coleridge was one of diffused sensuous- ness physically, and of abnormal mental moods moods of languor, collapse, of visionary imaginative life, with a night atmosphere of the spectral, moonlit, swimming, scarcely substantial world ; and the poems he wrote, which are the contributions he made to the world's literature, are based on this temperament, like some Fata Morgana upon the sea ;" and of Aubrey de Vere, "lyrical in verse, strong in style, mainly historical in theme, heroic or spiritual in substance, above all placid, he stirs and tranquil- lizes the soul, in the presence of lovely scenes, high actions and those Great ideas that man was born to learn : and its outlook is upon the field of the soul, regen- erate, where suffering is remembered only through its purification, blessed in issues of sweetness, dignity and peace;** and of James Russell Lowell : "It is a style which Mr. Lowell has developed for himself, and is to be met with here and there in detached passages of his earlier poetry, but nowhere else is it so even and con- tinuous as in the odes. It is characterized by a [43] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE breadth and undulation of tone, and a purity hard to describe, but these traits are not of consequence in comparison with the certainty with which, no matter how finally resonant the wave of sound may be, the thought absorbs it and becomes itself vocal and musi- 1 . The beginnings of all literature are in subject mat- ter; change it, change the process by which it arose, and literature is changed. Subject matter is the epi- tome of climate, place, and race, and any radical alteration, any abolition of any classes of Subject Matter will influence and disturb literature. If Mis- ery, Sin, and Ignorance are driven out of the world, if there is any place where they do not exist, then at that time and in that sphere literature will have lost some of its most penetrating inspirations indeed if thoroughly defined and understood in their widest and most expressive sense, their highest and ethereal- ized aspects without Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, there will be no literature whatever, and a state of perfection will inaugurate a reign of feeling without imagery and without ideas; where those immortal shapes Of bright aerial spirits live insphered In regions mild of calm and serene air, Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot, [44] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Which men call earth; and, with low-thoughted care Confined and pester'd in this pinfold here, Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being. We find then that the substance of literature is Style, Treatment, and Subject Matter; that in each of these there are two elements, a personal and im- personal factor; in Style the language of a people, and the author's use of that language; in Treatment the fashion of the day, and the author's use of that fashion; in Subject Matter, the external facts and the author's subjective interpretation or use of them. [45] CHAPTER II. EVOLUTION OF LITERARY TYPES It has appeared probable to some unprejudiced and discriminating thinkers that the human race has retrograded from a high pristine state, wherein it was more inaccessible than at present to the attacks of vice, and more richly endowed with the preroga- tives of knowledge. This belief will generally be treated as a fortuitous conception or a christian con- ventionality of thought. For most purposes of phil- osophic speculation it is best to assume that man has improved through the long periods of pre-historic and historic evolution, and has always been attended by those accidents of nature which make living hard, and those incidents of disposition which make living irreg- ular. For the evolutionist and student of progressive changes, man has always lived in a state of things where hardship, experiment, and experience have slowly paved the way to new and better conditions. For him indeed ; Jovis malum virus serpentibus addidit atris, Praedarique lupos jussit, pontusque moveri, Mellaque decussit foliis, ignemque removit, Et passim rivis currentia vina repressit; [46] EVOLUTION OF TYPES Ut varias usus meditando extunderet artes Paulatim, et sulcis frumenti quaereret herbam; Ut silicis venis abstrusum excuderet ignem. But it is difficult to construct, even speculatively, the steps by which the rudest possible forms of men have risen to such intellectual and imaginative activity as to produce a Plato, a Sophocles, a Shakespeare, a Goethe, or a Cuvier. If we are, upon the logical extremes assumed by an Origin of Derivation, to begin with something like a Hottentot* or a Fuegian, it is a rather startling task to trace the procession of mental shapes, and at the same time the series of modifying causes by which this primordial type passes upward and into the divine lineaments and powers of the great poets, phil- osophers, and thinkers. Such a task invincibly recalls the reasonableness of commencing at the top, in some ideal creation, and allowing the facile force of deter- ioration to work its defacing, depleting, and deform- ing results, until we reach grovelling Botocudos or the senseless Californian Indian. However that may be, the purposes of our inquiry can be satisfied by beginning far back amid the first social communities of any race, whose mental proclivities are first-rate, *En passant we may remark that Sir Francis Gallon has vindicated the claims of the Hottentot or Bushman to^a higher place in die scale of intelligence than_it has been custom- ary to allow him. See " Inquiry in the Origin of the Human Faculty." [47] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE and whose environment continually summons them forth upon an ascending line of self-improvement, self-culture, and self-reliance. Sir Francis Gallon awards the palm of superiority to the Greeks, and perhaps, viewed in the totality of their diverse capabilities they deserve it. He says, "the ablest race of whom history bears record, is unquestionably the ancient Greek, partly because their masterpieces in the principal departments of in- tellectual activity are still unsurpassed, and in many respects unequalled, and partly because the popula- tion that gave birth to the creators of those master- pieces was very small."* Perhaps we may be able to discern in these people the evolution of a literary type, and discern it formed, as a budding polyp from the tissues of its mother colony, from the peculiarities and quantity of Subject Matter. Not indeed that we can disregard the men- tal construction of the Greek himself, but that that construction was in a measure determined by events, by the subject matter of his thoughts, by the drift of circumstances, by the accumulated impression of in- numerable impacts, acting through sensation upon his conception. For what has differentiated types and classes of *Hereditary Genius. F. Gallon, p. 340. [48] EVOLUTION OF TYPES minds both in races, and in time but subject matter? If monogenism or the theory of descent from a single pair of progenitors, is to control human conclusions, as to our ethnological history, what other influence but the subject matter of thought, has parcelled the populations of the world, so far as their literary aspect goes, into different word-making and book-making groups? Is it not correct to affirm that the same "variability" which the biologists find in animals may be found in minds, and that as the "variability" of an animal form is perpetuated when the environment is favorable, and that variation survives which is best suited to present circumstances, to the extinction of all other variations not so suited, so those variations of mind as literary effects, survive, which respond to the subject matter the literary material at their com- mand, and those which do not dwindle and disap- pear. And as "selection," in the "struggle for existence" acts by promoting the continuance of those organic varieties which can get their living most easily, safely and uniformly, "selection" in the origin of literary types acts simply through the suppression of those writers who are not able appropriately to express the subject matter of a place or time in accordance with the taste of that place and time. [49] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Practically there is no such literary disaffection, no aberrant mental forms. A race in its literary shape is moulded so gradually, the process is so delicately cumulative that all literary products are expressions of the people and the period, are the summation of the literary value of the subject matter at command. Latent peculiarities of mind, or minds incipiently at variance with the prevalent subject matter are not developed, and therefore are not known, and any disquieting or subversive force they might have, is eliminated. But sharp abrupt changes in the evolu- tion of literary types may be produced by the appear- ance of a mind which completely and intimately re- sponds to a phase of the subject matter which has not previously been expressed. Even then, these literary upheavals may be traced back along some low and unnoticed oscillations in the public mind which arose from an increasing literary sense of new values in the subject matter. The return of poetry to nature which began in English poetry after the period of Pope heralded that significant resurrection of poetic images and thought which in Wordsworth and the lake poets seemed so revolutionary (and momentarily, was,) but which soon took on an expression of complete harmony with the aroused sense in the people of the inspiration and beauty of nature. [50] EVOLUTION OF TYPES Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. The scheme of thought then in this inquiry is sim- ply this : that differentiations of the literary qualities of races, were established by the continued action of subject matter exercised upon incipient varietal liter- ary peculiarities, which arose, as it were, spontan- eously. This action continued for a long time and uninterruptedly, and assisted by the laws of heredity, created literary types. Of course the representative mind of a race whether it appears in literature, in statesmanship, in war, or in industries, is formed by the culture of those occupations, predicaments and discoveries which engage its attention, and are indeed themselves subject matter; its literary type as a subor- dinate result is influenced, we claim, in a paramount and determinative fashion, by the subject matter thus created. Now what type is represented in Greek literature? Is it not the intellectually imaginative? the combina- tion of distinctness and beauty? At least if we accept the reports of those apt and efficient observers and critics who read and feel the genius of Greek authors, this epithet seems qualitatively just. Imagination and intellect were theirs, with intellect in the ascendancy, [51] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE and gaining ground, as the years of the Greek race lengthened, through its own analytical impulses. Imagination makes pictures, and intellect defines ideas, reflectively making the pictures which imagi- nation furnishes lucid definite and orderly. Greek poetry is a wonderful gallery of pictures, and Greek composition, is the consummate expression of aes- thetic refinement. The epic, the drama, and the sys- tematized music of poetic measures came from Greece. Says Colonel Mure,* "from Olympus down to the workshop or the sheepfold, from Jove and Apollo to the wandering mendicant, every rank and degree of the Greek community divine or human, had its own proper allotment of poetical celebration. The gods had their hymns, nomes, peans, dithyrambs; great men had their encomia and epinikia ; the votar- ies of pleasure their erotica and symposiaca; the mourner his threnodia and elegies; the vine-dresser had his epilenia; the herdsmen their bucolica; even the beggar his eiresione and chelidonisma." Must there not have been imagination amongst such people? Could such a wealth of poetic flowers have sprung upon a soil not enriched with the ger- minating warmth of imagination? Quoted by Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poet*. [52] EVOLUTION OF TYPES And as to intellect, wherein lies the power and the thought of definition, Mr. Symonds says, "the Greek genius was endowed with the faculty of distinguish- ing, differentiating, vitalizing what the Oriental nations left hazy and confused and inert. Therefore with the very earliest stirrings of conscious art in Greece we remark a powerful specializing tendency. Articulation succeeds to mere interjectional utterance. Separate forms of music and of metre are devoted, with the unerring instinct of a truly aesthetic race, to the expression of the several moods and passions of the soul." And a more coldly scientific estimate of their intellectual grade is given by Sir Francis Gallon, who says,* "that the average ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own, that is about as much as our race is above that of the African negro, "~\ Nothing could be more pervasive in Greek art than its intellectual delicacy. Says Taine, "c* est toujours 1'esprit fin, adroit, ingenieux, qui se manifeste." Art in Greece became sculpture; it was not music or painting. But art is itself the expression of imagina- tion, and so Greek art is the refined control of imagi- *Hereditary Genius, Sir F. Gallon, p. 342. fThe expostulation of Mr. Mahaff y in his Rambles and Studies in Greece may here be recalled. He says, " A long and careful survey of the extant literature of ancient Greece has convinced me that the pictures usually drawn of the old Greeks are idealized, and that the real people were of a very different, if you please, of a much lower type." [53] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE nation by intellect. Under a clear infinite atmos- phere, a multitude of distinct scenic incidents in the landscape became clear, and sharpened into precision and fixity. Under an abounding animal impulse of health and the love of health, fostered by a salubrious climate, exercise and athletic grace became the divinely appointed regimen of handsome youth. The result was perfection of form which increasingly stim- ulated the appetite and sense of form, and heightened mere physical results to the last attainable excellence of aesthetic design. This definition and exquisitely perfected cleanness and brightness of outline turned the Greek mind to sculpture. And their literary re- sults were also sculpturesque. Says Symonds, "The national games, the religious pageants, the theatrical shows, and the gymnastic exercises of the Greeks were sculpturesque. The conditions of their speculative thought in the first dawn of civilized self-consciousness, when spiritual energy was still conceived as incarnate only in a form of flesh, and the soul was inseparable from the body except by an unfamiliar process of analysis, harmon- ized with the art which interprets the mind in all its movements by the features and the limbs. Their careful choice of distinct motives in poetry, their appeal in all imaginative work to the inner eye [54] EVOLUTION OF TYPES that sees, no less than to the sympathies which thrill, their abstinence from description of landscape and analyses of emotion, their clear and massive character delineation point to the same conclusion. Every thing tends to confirm the original perception that the simplicity of form, the purity of design, the self re- straint and the parsimony, both of expression and material, imposed by sculpture on the artist were observed as laws by the Greeks in their mental activ- ity, and more especially in their arts. It is this which differentiates them from the romantic nations." Greek literature is then an illustration of intellect and imagi- nation mingling together in verbal forms. And what was the subject matter? How varied rich and graphic was the subject mat- ter of Greek literature! In the very dawn of that wonderful ethnic growth we encounter an accumu- lated wealth of legendary anecdote, amidst which the towering and sky-enveloped forms of Gods mingle upon the platform of human action with the passions and achievements of heroes. How viril and stren- uous and picturesque are the stories! The fused outlines of history yield in the solvents of imagination and romance, and portentous deeds, transcending all earthly powers, are woven into a tradition where the struggles of passion convulse the heavens and the [55] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE earth. It is as if we witnessed the first processes of a segregation of men from gods ; when the process has only so far advanced as to have established a home for each, but not so far advanced as to divide their mingled interests. And there is intellectual coherence in these tales, and a deep strain of psychological impressiveness and meaning. Imagination plays in them with a beauti- ful and fertile spontaneity, and intellect endows them with a subtle discrimination, so that they make poems and teach lessons, so that they fix the eye of the artist and inform the thinker. They are excellent composi- tions and where they become grotesque and out- rageous, as the early Gaean myths, the sewing of Dionysius in the thigh of Jupiter, or the love of Pasiphaea for a bull, they quickly escape from this primitive formlessness, and hide it in a new growth of stimulating invention. The Trojan stories, the Pelopid genealogy, the Argonautic enterprise, are examples of vivid anecdote enclosing a moral inten- tion. Of the whole treasury of Grecian legend, Grote says, "these myths or current stories, the spon- taneous and earliest growth of the Grecian mind, constituted at the same time the entire intellectual stock of the age to which they belonged. [56] EVOLUTION OF TYPES They are the common root of all those ramifica- tions into which the mental activity of the Greek subsequently diverged; containing as it were, the preface and germ of the positive history and philos- ophy, the dogmatic theology, and the professed romance, which we shall hereafter trace, each in its separate development. They furnished aliment to the curiosity, and solution to the vague doubts and aspirations of the age; they explained the origin of those customs and standing peculiarities with which men were familiar; they impressed moral lessons, awakened patriotic sympathy, and exhibited in de- tail the shadowy, but anxious presentiments of the vulgar, as to the agency of the gods; moreover they satisfied that craving for adventure, and appetite for the marvelous which has, in modern times, become the province of fiction proper." In this great mass of interwoven narrative, with its episodes and accidents, we find a mingling of literary elements, in which the intellectually imaginative is predominant but not constant. There is besides it, much that is barbaric, prodigious, vulgarly sensible and sensuous, the inchoate clamor of a juvenile fancy for monstrous facts and momentous agents, but every- where in it is alertness of mind in invention, and the invention lends itself readily to intellectual and imag- [57] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE inative treatment; says Symonds, "Viewed even as a Pantheon, reduced to rule and order by subsequent reflection, Greek mythology is, therefore, a mass of the most heterogeneous materials. Side by side with some of the sublimest and most beautiful conceptions which the mind has ever produced we find in it much that is absurd and trivial and revolting. Different ages and conditions of thought have left their pro- ducts embedded in its strange conglomerate. While it contains fragments of fossilized stories, the meaning of which has either been misunderstood, or can only be explained by reference to barbaric custom, it also contains, emergent from the rest, and towering above the rubbish, the serene forms of the Olympians. Those furnish the vital and important elements of Greek mythology. To perfect them was the work of poets and sculptors in the brief blooming time of Hellas." It was this aspect of their subject matter that the Greek literary variations of mind progressively assimi- lated, recreated, and published. The Hesiod the- ogony was a believing chronicle and record of those mythic episodes, and that cosmogony which the Greek fancy had grouped together around some pos- sible, but now undeterminable nucleus of history or tradition, and which became the nutriment of their [58] EVOLUTION OF TYPES religious nature. The Homeric poems seized the Trojan myth and recreated it, into an imaginative epic, whose intellectual power lies in its spontaneous effectiveness, directness and pictorial beauty. Dis- crimination, a bright mentality, and lofty composition characterize its sonorous and melodic lines. It lived in Grecian literature satisfying the literary taste of the Greeks who lived after it, and who retained it as the most venerated exposition of their literary feeling. But the process of literary differentiation contin- ued, by an increasing sympathy with the intellectual elements of the mythopoeic subject matter, and with it a more exalted grandiose imaginative treatment. Grote remarks, "The expansive force of Grecian in- tellect itself was a quality in which this remarkable people stand distinguished from all their neighbors and contemporaries. Most, if not all nations have had myths, but no nation except the Greeks, have imparted to them immortal charm and universal inter- est : and the same mental capacities, which raised the great men of the poetic age to this exalted level, also pushed forward their successors to outgrow the early faith in which the myths had been generated and accredited." The less intellectually elevating, the less imagina- tively impressive elements of the myths were pro- [59] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE gressively abandoned, modified or recast. Grote says of Pindar that he "repudiates some stories, and trans- forms others because they are inconsistent with his conceptions of the Gods." Of Aeschylus and Soph- ocles he says, "both of them exalted rather than low- ered the dignity of the mythical world, as something divine and heroic rather than human," and he further says that the great poets and logographers aided each other in this exaltation of the popular mythology. "Their grand object was, to cast the myths into a continuous readable series, and they were in conse- quence compelled to make selections between incon- sistent or contradictory narratives ; to reject some nar- ratives as false, and to receive others as true. But their preference was determined more by their sen- timents as to what was appropriate than by any pretended historical test." This assimilation of the intellectually imaginative in the subject matter leads to increasing intellectual variations of the Greek mind, until we reach the period of philosophy and research when the historical sense is developed, and the mind interests itself more and more with ideas and the interpretation and dis- cussion of authentic facts; when indeed its intellec- tual aspect is its most significant aspect. But even [60] EVOLUTION OF TYPES then in Plato and Aristotle, the energizing influence of imagination seems a necessary incident and in all valuable intellectual exercise the activity of the im- agination seems a necessary incident. Grote says, "the transition of the Greek mind from its poetical to its comparatively positive state was self-operated, accomplished by its own in- herent expansive force aided indeed; but by no means either impressed or provoked, from without. From the poetry of Homer to the history of Thucydides and the philosophy of Plato and Aris- totle was a prodigious step, but it was the nature growth of the Hellenic youth into an Hellenic man." This last sentence might be regarded as a very direct denial of the positions assumed here, that the elements of the subject matter are influential factors in the literary growth of a race. But if we concede that when the incipient varietal literary impulses in any class of minds have become so strengthened through the evocative action of a certain quality of subject matter, that they may then continue by an automatic action of growth we do not seem so seriously at fault. For it must be remembered that in the discussion of the Substance of Literature, the factors of Subject Matter, as with style and treatment, are regarded as consisting of two parts, the impersonal and personal, [61] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE or "the external facts and the author's subjective interpretation or use of them." Had not the Greeks been provided with a wide and deep ocean of material of a distinctively imagina- tive, and, in its latent capability, intellectual nature, the glorious course of Greek literature and Greek art would have been quite different. The responses of creative and intellectually made minds to an imagi- native and intellectual subject matter effectively strengthened the former quality and elicited more conspicuously the latter. The process started, the imaginative sections of literature receded in import- ance, and the intellectual exercises of the mind be- came overbearing and exclusive. Whether primarily the mythical world of Greece was entirely due to the Greek mind, as it developed, cannot be safely discussed. It does not admit of a correct, or at least a demonstrably correct conclusion. As a secondary fact which satisfies our inquiry en- tirely here, this subject matter, however it arose, seems to have formed the subsequent Grecian mind and at least hastened and aided its development into a char- acter which was consistent with itself, and which harmonized also with de facto elements of the subject matter, which it used, and by which it was nurtured. If we look back further and examine the causes or [62] EVOLUTION OF TYPES the sources which have raised, and whence this re- markable accumulations of legends, myths, stories, and persons came, and if we still hold on to the direo; live principle that it is a primitive evolution from subject matter, we are met with plain difficulties. In the first place to account for the mythopoeic fertil- ity of the Greeks we have at the hands of scholars a number of explanations. Mr. Symonds has reviewed them, and Mr. Grote in his masterful discussion of the same topic in the first volume of his History of Greece has much more strikingly treated the same on narrower lines. Mr. Symonds enumerates the various hypotheses which have been advanced to account for the re- markable stories of anecdote and marvels, which furnished Greece with the subject matter of poetry for ten centuries. First we are given Grote's system, which is to regard them as an inexplicable mass of legends, made and believed in as the product of a myth making and a myth realizing mind ; second that they are a "degradation of primitive truth, revealed to mankind by God." Third that they are the cre- ations of priests and informed leaders of action and opinion, for the satisfaction of less advanced minds, in short for the ignorant people. Fourth to assume an historical basis, a factual nucleus, now covered and [63] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE hidden by later growths of fiction invented or im- agined. Fifth, fetichism. Sixth the linguistic method of Max Mueller by which words given to things have reacted on those who employ them, and, through first, a latent suggestiveness primarily hidden within them when first used, led the human mind at that early day on into a maze of congenial dreams and blunders; second through a loss of their original ap- plication in history, led to forced assumptions, which attached themselves to words in the form of long and complex narrations. Seventh, the Solar theory by which nearly all mythology becomes the repetition of the history of the seasons and its endless variations encircle and move around the single astronomical fact of the Sun's rising and setting, and of his progress up and down the heavens, with the revolution of the secular year. Mr. Symonds, however, himself is disposed to be- lieve that in that early day "there was no check laid upon fancy, because nothing as yet was conceived as thought, but everything existed as sensation. In this infancy the nation told itself stories, and believed in them. The same faculties of the mind, which afterwards gave birth to poetry and theology, phil- osophy and state-craft, science, and history, were now so ill-defined, and merely germinal that they [64] EVOLUTION OF TYPES produced but fables. Yet these faculties were vig- orous and vivid. The fables they produced were infinite in number and variety, beautiful, and so preg- nant with the thought under the guise of fancy that long centuries scarcely sufficed for disengaging all that they contained." But in such a view it might seem that subject mat- ter is abandoned. These early literary creations were born, as it were, out of the interstitial endowment of the ^ind of mind they sprang from. Where was subject matter when the creating mind, the informing and transmuting mind looked out upon the fresh earth? What influences played then upon it, by which its thought was swayed and prompted, and from whose power it acquired distinctiveness, distinctness and expression? Upon the threshold of the first appearances of any form of literature, the environment and the occupation of a race is its sub- ject matter ; Us place and its n>or. There is nothing else. But how quickly in the rapid movement of days, events transpire, transitions take place, and the inevitable drama of life is enacted. How rapidly the phenomena of nature appeals to the unfolding senses, and through the avenues of sen- sation arouse and instruct the mind! With a stock of impressions accumulated, with a line of recalled [65] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE events, with a series of experienced emotions wrought within the heart by the contact and appeal of other men the course of literature begins. We have said that the "representative mind of a race is formed by the culture of those occupations, predicaments and discoveries which engage its attention, and are indeed themselves subject matter." What were the occu- pations, predicaments, and discoveries of the early Greeks what was their place and work? The place was the irregular and diversified neigh- borhood of the Aegean Sea. This region is varied by the presence of all the physical constants of geo- graphy, and was visited by all the incidents and effects of climatal caprice. Islands and peninsulas, mountains and valleys, streams and lakes, the wooded glade of Boetia, its fertile plains and swiftly flowing and broken waters, the hard and inhospitable soil of Attica, the lofty ridges of Arcadia, the fruitful plain of Sparta, the mountain locked and ravine threaded approaches of Parnassus, were combined, and impressed the early Greek with a multiform natural imagery, and revealed in endless combina- tions atmospheric effects, whose picturesqueness in- sensibly elevated and delighted his mind. A clear atmosphere brought to his eye the interlined fre- quency of cape upon cape, bay upon bay, island [66] EVOLUTION OF TYPES upon island, along the bending and unfolding shores of his fatherland. Mahaffy remarks that "we know the Greeks of all civilized people thought least about landscape as such, and neglected the picturesque."* It may have been so, but there must have been subjective responses to these external impressions, impressions which were in unison with the most obvi- ous effects these same scenes would make today upon a modern. If there failed to be developed a school of landscape painting, in the elaborate and poetic sense we are accustomed to regard that art, its absence does not so much arise from obtuseness and insensibility to natural beauty, as from inability to form or control the sort of technique such scenes require for their portrayal, or because these aspects of nature failed to predominate amid the epic, his- trionic, and personal intensity of the subject matter they contemplated and used in literature. Travellers have paid their tribute to the beauty of Greece, and though we may suspect that the charm of reminis- cence, in the thoughts of its bewitching and storied past, has shed perhaps a magical light over its land- scape, yet their praise and enthusiasm cannot be taken at less than half its literal sense.* *A History of Classical Greek Literature. J. P. Mahaffy, Vol. I, p. 244. *Humboldt, in the wide comprehensiveness of his observations, says in his "Travels, to the Equinoctial Regions of America"; "if the mass of light which circulates about objects fatigues the external senses during a part of the day, the inhabitant of the southern climates has his compensation in moral enjoyment. A lucid clearness in the conceptions, and a serenity of mind, correspond with the transparency of the surrounding atmosphere." [67] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE About says, (Grece contemporaine) "mais cette route est si variee qu, on y marcherait toute la vie sans se lasser; tantot elle suit le versant d'une mon- tagne rude et escarpee; tantot elle descend dans les ravines immenses, peuples d'arbres de toute espece et revetus de grandes fleurs sauvages que nos jardins devraient envier. Quelques enormes figuiers tordent leurs bras puissants au milieu des amandiers au feuillage grele; on rencontre c.a et la des Grangers d'un vert sombre, des pins roussis par 1'hiver, des cypres aux formes bizarres; et d'espace en espace, le roi des arbres, le palmier, eleve sa belle tete eche- velee. Dorez tout ce paysage d'un large rayon de soleil ; semez partout des mines anciennes et modernes, des eglises sur tout les sommets, sur tous les versants, des maisons turques carrees comme des tours, cour- ronnees de terrasses et proprement blanchies a la chaux, sur les chemins, de petites troupes d'annes portant des families entieres; dans les champs, des troupeaux de brebis; des bandes de chevres sur les rochers; ca et la quelques vaches maigres, couchees sur le ventre, et fixant sur le voyageur leurs gros yeux etonnees: et partout le chant des alouettes qui s'ele- vent dans 1'air comme pour escalader le soleil; par- tout la bavardage impertinent des merles qui se re- jouissent de voir pousser la vigne, et des centaines [68] EVOLUTION OF TYPES d'oiseaux de toute sorte, se disputant a grands cris une goute de rosee que la soleil a oublie de boire. Je 1' ai revue bien des fois cette route charmante, et quoiqu, un y trebuche dans les pierres, qu, on y glisse sur les rochers, qu, on s'y baigne les pieds dans 1'eau des misseaux, je voudrais la parcourrir encore." Mahaffy says of the Temple of Sunium*, "It was our good fortune to see it in a splendid sunset, with all the sea a sheet of molten gold, and all the head- lands and islands coloured with hazy purple. The mountains of Eubaea, with their promontory of Ger- aestus, closed the view upon the northeast, but far down into the Aegean reached island after island, as it were striving to prolong a highway to the holy Delos. The ancient Andros, Terras, Myconos were there, but the eye sought in vain for the home of Apollo's shrine the smallest, and yet the greatest of the group. The parallel chains, reaching down from Sunium itself, were hidden behind one another, Keos, Kythnus, Seriphos and Siphnos, but left open to view the distant Melos. Then came a short space of open sea, due south, which alone prevented us from imagining ourselves on some fair and quiet island lake; and then to the southwest we saw the point of Hydria, the only spot in all Hellas whose "Rambles and Studies in Greece, J. P. Mahaffy. SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE recent fame exceeds the report of ancient days. The mountains of Argolis lay behind Aegina, and formed with their Arcadian neighbors, a solid background, till the eye wandered round to the Acropolis of Corinth, hardly visible in the burning brightness of the sun's decline." Those glimpses of Greece, afforded us by Pau- sanias and the fragments of Dicaearchus, convince the reader of the so-to-speak panoplied legendary coverings of Grecian scenery, its varied charm, the soft, subtle, and enchaining mythic spell which dwelt in wood, lake, stream, hill and plain. To quote a passage from Mr. Frazer's Introduction to Pausan- ias: "He (Pausanias) remarks the bareness of the Cirrhaean plain, the fertility of the valley of the Pho- cian Cephisus, the vineyards of Ambrosus, the palms and dates of Aulis, the olive oil of Tithorea that was sent to the emperor, the dikes that dammed off the water from the fields in the marshy flats of Caphyae and Thisbe. He mentions the various kinds of oaks that grew in the Arcadian woods, the wild straw- berry bushes of Mount Helicon on which the goats browsed, the hellebore, both black and white, of Anticyra, and the berry of Ambrosus which yielded the crimson dye." And in all these places dwelt the genius of mythology, with innumerable clustering [70] EVOLUTION OF TYPES legends and fables, mingled with the more strict and forceful traditions of history and heroes. A salubrious and invigorating climate both Mahaffy and Byron bear witness to the peculiar wholesomeness and purity of the air enabled this great race to enjoy the unbroken influences of an out- door life, and assisted them in reaching physical per- fection. Their mental powers were thus fortified and in the study and admiration of themselves, new factors of subject matter contributed a latent inclina- tion to clearness, cleanness, and acuteness of literary expression, as well as of grand conceptions of the prowess and splendor of strong men and idealized men-gods. But in this restless life, in the keen competition between their communities, in the sea faring and ad- venturesome pursuits*, in the long process of trans- migration to Greece itself from some remote ethnic centre of dispersion, in the genius of primitive agri- cultural and pastoral life we may suspect were to be found the influences of subject matter which especi- *The earliest traditional notices of the social condition of Greece, after the spread of Hellenic Supremacy, describe that country as divided into petty patriarchal states, where tribes of high spirited vassals yielded a ready, but not a servile, obedience to martial chiefs descended from the heroes under whose guidance their possessions had been acquired. This state of society was fostered by the natural features of the country, which marked out the boundaries of the separate principalities, and interposed barriers against mutual encroachment. Its full influence on the language, as exemplified in the distinction and cultivation of the dialects, was reserved for a later period. In these early times its bene- ficial effects are chiefly perceptible in cherishing the chivalrous spirit which supplies materials for epic minstrelsy, the foundation of all primitive literature. Wm. Mure, Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece ; Vol. II. p. 102. [71] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ally trained and inspired their minds, which left upon them the traces of numerous and bold impres- sions, and stirred the depths of their mental life evoking with increasing vivacity and directness the play of imagination, and shaping an esoteric intellec- tual bias through a conflict with nature and with themselves. Thucydides alludes to the free booting expedi- tions of the early Greeks which must have led them into peril and exciting adventure, and fed with stir- ring incidents the awakening instincts of dramatic narrative. He says, "for the Grecians in old time, and of the barbarians, both those on the continent who lived near the sea, and all who inhabited islands, after they began to cross over more commonly to one another in ships, turned to piracy under the conduct of their most powerful men, with a view both to their own gain, and to maintenance of the needy; and falling upon towns that were unfortified, and inhab- ited like villages, they rifled them, and made most of their livelihood by this means." Again in that expressive address of Nestor to Patroclus at the end of the eleventh book of the Iliad, Homer depicts the vigorous and belligerent activity of the young Greek warriors Would I were strong and vigorous as of yore [72] EVOLUTION OF TYPES When strife arose between our men and those Of Elis, for your oxen driven away, And, driving off their beeves in turn, I slew The Elean chief, the brave Itymoneus, Son of Hypirochus! For as he sought To save his herd, a javelin from my arm Smote him the first among his band. He fell; His rustic followers fled on every side ; And mighty was the spoil we took ; of beeves We drove off fifty herds, as many flocks Of sheep, of swine as many, and of goats An equal number, and of yellow studs Thrice fifty : these were mares, and by their sides Ran many a colt. We drave them all within Neleian Pylos in the night. Well pleased Was Neleus, that so large a booty fell To me, who entered on the war so young. When morning brake, the herald's cry was heard Summoning all the citizens to meet, To whom from fruitful Elis debts were due; And then the princes of the Pyleans came, And made division of the spoil, for much The Epeians owed us : we were yet but few In Pylos, and had suffered grievously. The mighty Hercules in former years Had made us feel his wrath and of our men [73] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Had slain the bravest : of the twelve who drew Their birth from Neleus, I alone am left ; The others fell. The Epeians brazen mailed Saw this, delighted, and insulted us And did us wrong. When now the spoil was shared, The old man for himself reserved a herd Of oxen, and a numerous flock of sheep, Three hundred with their shepherds, for to him Large debts were due in Elis. He had sent Four horses once, of peerless speed, with cars, To win a tripod, the appointed prize, Augeias, king of men, detained them there, And sent the grieving charioteer away. My father, angered at the monarch's words And acts, took large amends, and gave the rest To share among the people, that no one Might leave the ground, defrauded of his right. All this was justly done, and we performed Due sacrifices to the gods, throughout The city ; when the third day came, and brought The Epeians all at once, in all their strength, Both men on foot and prancing steeds. Came the Molians twain, well armed, with these And yet untrained to war. There is a town Named Thryoessa, on a lofty hill [74] EVOLUTION OF TYPES Far off beside Alpheius, on the edge Of sandy Pylos. They beleaguered this And sought to overthrow it. As they crossed The plain, Minerva came, a messenger, By night from Mount Olympus, bidding us Put on our armor. Not unwillingly The Pyleans mustered, but in eager haste, For battle. Yet did Neleus not consent That I should arm myself, he hid my steeds : For still he deemed me inexpert in war. Yet even then, although I fought in foot, I won great honor even among the knights ; For so had Pallas favored me. A stream Named Minyeius pours into the sea, Near to Arena, where the Pylean knights Waited the coming of the holy morn, While those who fought on foot came thronging in, Thence with our host complete, and all in arms We marched, and reached at noon the sacred stream Alpheius, where to Jove Omnipotent We offered chosen victims, and a bull To the river-god, another to the god Of ocean, and a heifer yet unbroke To blue-eyed Pallas ; Then we banqueted, [75] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE In bands, throughout the army, and lay down In armor by the river side to sleep, Meantime the brave Epeians stood around The city, resolute to lay it waste. But first was to be done a mighty work Of war; for as the glorious sun appeared Above the earth we dashed against the foe, Praying to Jove and Pallas. When the fight Between the Eleans and the Pylean host Was just begun, I slew a youthful chief, Mulius, and bore away his firm paced steeds. The fair haired Agamedi, eldest born Of King Augeias' daughters, was his spouse: And well to her each healing herb was known That springs from the great earth. As he drew near, I smote him with my brazen lance : he fell To earth : I sprang into his car, and stood Among the foremost warriors : while around, The brave Epeians, as they saw him fall, The leader of their knights, their mightiest In battle, turned and, panic stricken, fled, Each his own way. I followed on their flight Like a black tempest, fifty cars I took, And from each car I dashed two warriors down Pierced by my spear. [76] EVOLUTION OF TYPES Thus we surmise that place and occupation brought to the Greeks the scenes and incidents, the contrasts of situation, the heroics of early struggle with invaders, and with the elements of the world, the more otiose and halcyon intervals of direct sub- jection to nature in quiet retreats of bucolic happiness ; brought all, that resting in memory awakened the mysterious course of his mental growth, and made its fruitage an unsurpassingly expressive language, and an intellectual and imaginative literature. There was no doubt a Theban Siege, an Argon- autic expedition, a Trojan conflict, an Heracleian cru- sade, a Cretan forfeiture; and if poetry threw the veil of its hallucinations and imagery over these events, it was because the minds which idealized and mag- nified them, had themselves been brought into a con- dition of imaginative vigor and bold conjecture by the aspect of the subject matter of thought and experi- ence, which was the history of their restless life, the notice of the strong natures which predominated amongst them, and the effects of the multitudinous natural phenomena they saw and contemplated. Had the same Greeks mind whose development in the peninsular of Greece, along the coasts of Asia Minor, and in the islands of the Grecian Archipel- [77] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ago, is one of the marvels of human history, been placed upon a boundless plain like the steppes of Asia, or the pampas of South America, and had it been subjected to climatic severities which curtail and impede life; had the sea and its notable aspects been never seen by them, and the summits of mountains, printed on morning and evening skies, never been before their eyes, what literary treasures of intellec- tual imaginativeness would have been created, amidst unpropitious surroundings and in the dearth of all subject matter exhilirating and varied? The mind would have lapsed, from the disuse of its higher qualities, or produced a poor counterpart of that excellent and crowded literature, which has become the synonym of mental vigor. The problem of existence itself, the phases of life would have seemed more simple, less baffling and suggestive. The chronicles of the people would have been mo- notonous, arid and circumscribed, and while a study of the skies might have prevailed, and a possibly sub- lime conception of an overruling Providence been developed, while a pleasant poetry and natural phil- osophy might have arisen, the brilliancy, the intensity, the consummate art, the poetic richness of Greek liter- ature, it seems to me, never could have been engen- [78] EVOLUTION OF TYPES dered in the absence of a favorable stimulating sub- ject matter, amidst unpropitious physical accompani- ments. An illustration of the diverse results in intellectual activity arising from different habits of life, may be taken quite appositely from the apparently contrasted mental fancies of the Pelasgic and Thracian races, both themselves ethnic elements in the Grecian type. Says Mahaffy, "with the Pelasgi we are not much concerned. They were great builders and great re- claimers of land. They settled all over Greece, and especially in such rich plains as those of Thessaly and Argos. But their literary character is nowhere at- tested. Nor have we remaining any certain trace of their language, save the words Argos and Larissa, which point to these very tastes. They seem to have been a peace loving, quiet people; they must have been a settled and agricultural race; opposed to the roving pirates whom they doubtless dreaded." The legends about the Thracians are of quite a different order. This remarkable people appear from the notices of the Iliad to have been allied rather to "Col. Mure has said something quite similar to all this, but has also emphasized the qualitative importance of the Grecian genius itself. He says : 'Had the Hellenic race, in the course of its early migrations, fixed its abode among the wilds of Scythia, we might at this day have been under as little obligation to its artists or authors as to those of the Tartar tribes who now inhabit the same regions. Had Greece, on the other hand, in the vicissitudes of human settlement, fallen to the lot of a swarm of Huns, centuries of brilliant sun and balmy air. would hardly have infused into them the spirit of Homer or Phidias." Critical History, &c., &c. [79] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE the Phrygians, than to the western Greeks; The Phrygians have been proved, from the extant words of the language to be not only Aryans, but Aryans of the European branch, and thus we can conceive an early culture among the great Phrygio-Thracian tribes extending to the borders of Thessaly. These singers were especially devoted to the wor- ship of the muses three Goddesses, who are always associated with wells and water springs, and who were the special patronesses and inspirers of poetry. There are traces of these Thracian bards down through the mountains of Phocis to Delphi, and round about Parnassus; and still more certainly are they (and with them the worship of the Muses) associated with the northern slopes of Helicon. There is no range through all Greece so rich in springs and tumbling brooks as the northern slopes of Helicon, and men might well imagine it a favorite abode of goddesses, who loved this most speaking voice in nature. It is here that the author of the Theogony, ascribed to Hesiod possibly Hesiod himself fixes their abode, when he calls them to come from Pieria at the opening of his didactic poem. Attic legends seem to indicate that the Thracians were not mere singers, and that they sought to ex- [80] EVOLUTION OF TYPES tend their influence still further. The legend of the war of Eumolpus, the Thracian warrior, king and bard, against Erectheus, king of Athens, implies that the Thracians extended their power from the slopes of Helicon, across the glades and gorges of Cithaerin to its last spur the citadel of Eleusis." The Pelasgig environment and occupations were narcotic and indulgent, less stimulating than the wilder, freer, more dangerous life of the Thracians, and to the Thracian may very probably be traced the myths which form the subject matter of Greek imag- inative writing for six centuries. Greek literature was itself a plant of natural and deliberate growth. Ma- haffy tells us "everywhere in the history of Greek cul- ture we find the same rude beginnings, and gradual growth, in grace and power." It is only a false and random metaphor when older critics speak of epic poetry "springing like Athene full grown, and in panoply from the brain of a single Homer;" the great epic of the Iliad was the flower of an age of epic efforts, and through its wonderful power and interest it perpetuated in the cyclic poets the thread and strain of epic narrative, and it was still the subject matter that gave these epics character. It seems certainly true that from the great treasury of [81] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE mythology, a legacy of inexhaustible abundance and variety, the poets of Greece continually drew their subjects and their inspiration. Of Grecian drama Mahaffy says "above all, we must insist upon the staid and conservative character of all the Attic trag- edy, the subjects were almost as fixed as the scenery, being always or almost always, subjects from the Tro- jan and Theban cycle, with occasional excursions into the myths about Heracles." The melic poets, the lyricists, who composed odes in various measures, sung or danced and used in pub- lic ceremonies, or which were expressive of the per- sonal devotion of the author, his friendship or his despair, were perhaps more spontaneous and new, but upon them was enforced at least the traditions and the taste acquired through historic evolution of the Greek people, a taste itself derivative from the contemplation and study of the great mythopoetic sources of their popular literature, the subject matter of their books. Not simply, observe, that subject matter fur- nished them with topics, but that it trained their minds into ways of thinking, supplied them with a class of images that again reacted upon their speech, and directed them or led them into special avenues [82] EVOLUTION OF TYPES of invention; that it became conjunct in their minds with the tone of those minds, and mingled a sway of its own, as a distinct determinable factor, with the more unique incommunicable sway of their own cere- bral and physiological constitution. For they dwelt in their themes upon the visible presence of Gods, upon their own lineal descent from demi-gods, upon superhuman tragedies, and loves; they created before their minds ideals of action, and types of form surpassingly puissant and glorious, they lived within the charmed presence of divinity, and it was divinity whose heart beat with the emotions they felt themselves, and on whose cheeks flushed the signals of the same passions they acknowledged. The Greek by humanizing his gods raised his own mind into a serene empyrean of restrained and artistic im- pulses, and borrowed, by familiar intercourse with the beautiful conceptions of his Theogony, a delicate "animalism," a choice aptitude for nice relations of form, a clear, bright, style, and a balanced intellec- tual vigor, warmth and directness. In English Literature we find an example of letters which the world has recognized as lofty, diversified, inspiring and persistent. Throughout that marvel- lous history of writing, which commences in Saxon [83] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE chronicles and ends in the comprehensiveness of mod- ern literature, what a striking succession of contrasted men; and how broad the range of expression, and the power and beauty of ideas and images ; each pas- sion and every phase and accent of feeling, the pro- foundest sentiments and the most exhilirating fickle- ness of humour, have received their verbal incarna- tion in the books of England. English Literature may be regarded as one of the representative expres- sions of modern literature, and in it we may discern the moulding and producing influences of subject matter. As Greece presents the highest and best type of classical antiquity, and the embodiment of the quality of a peculiar subject matter, so English liter- ature may be studied as the philosophic result of high and good literary tendencies of the time since Christ, and the presentation of the peculiar qualities of a very different subject matter. A determinative difference of feeling, arising from the introduction of a new and original series of sub- ject matters has entered literature since the days of Homer, Eschylus and Pindar. Areas of contact still exist between pagan and modern literature, as human nature still follows a line of similar develop- ment, and, at any rate, is the same bundle of feelings [84] EVOLUTION OF TYPES and faculties ; but, in its general expression, in its tone and temper, in its artistic methods, putting aside the intentional use of imitation English literature is a very dissimilar psychological product from Greek litera- ture, and the powerful infusion of the Pagan Renais- sance has utterly failed to reduce it to any sort of con- formity with the spirit of Plato and Sophocles. Its separative spirit has absorbed the influences of the great classic revival, and merged them into the domi- nant tendencies arising from the procreative powers of different subject matters; like a stream, which, though receiving fresh additions of purer water than itself, still carries these new contributions along its own channel, and reflects in them the peculiar scenery of its own banks. Between Shakespeare and Euripides and Aristo- phanes lies the enormous period of two thousand years, and in that period the stupendous convulsion of instincts produced by Christianity, the sudden ir- ruption into life of a new psychosis, the complexity of introspection, and the new intricacy of a minute response to nature in all her moods, with new rela- tions between men and women, and with the purely historic accumulation of a vast sum of subject matter bearing the impress of this novel cultus, has pro- foundly affected literary methods and literary results. [85] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE First in the beginning of our era Christianity woke up a new retinue of emotions, by starting the religious impulses upon a new and .satisfying development of mysticism. In the old world before Christ, the Eleu- sinian mysteries had done something of this sort. Its votaries, initiated in peculiar rites and taught a super- sensual philosophy, had gratified aspirations, which receive a democratic recognition in the graver mes- sages of Revelation. What a spectacle of events the persecution of the Church, the destruction of Rome, the assimilation of the northern tribes with their fierceness and rudeness, their heroism and rom- ance, and the oscillations of empire, the establishment of kingdoms, feudalism, chivalry, and the revival of learning, leavening the great mass of traditions and inherited tendencies with intellectual seriousness and industry. The subject matter was no longer the simple or dramatic incidents of budding existence. A new host of things was to be told, and talked about, and though the world was the same, the emo- tions had been revitalized with a strange earnestness, and the vague unrest, which is so subtle an ingredient in all thought about ourselves, and others, had per- meated like fungus spores through damp earth, the speculations of art, and science. Knowledge had [86] EVOLUTION OF TYPES grown unwearingly, and conceptions, expanding to the infinite, knit together science and revelation into a realm of intellectual glory; The awful shadow of some unseen power Floats, though unseen, among us visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams, that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance Each human heart and countenance, Like hues and harmonies of evening, Like stars in starlight widely spread, Like memory of music fled, Like aught that for its grace may be Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. Literature embraced this abundance of motives, and enclosed wide and diverging vistas of feeling and thought; a sort of intellectual sentimentalism,* deli- cate and interesting, became engendered in writing as the mind dwelt on the picture of the universe, and the pictures of history. A symbolism, religious in its origin and tendency, carried out in myth and poem the mingling currents of ethnic legend and Christian morals. Picturesqueness of treatment, the kaleido- *Says ij Mahaffy (Social Life in Greece) "Sentimentality was in the Greek almost unknown." [87] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE scope of romantic phrases and combinations entwined themselves, like flowering vines, around the laby- rinthine suggestiveness of the subject matter. Chateaubriand in his eulogy of Christianity has alluded to the literary suggestiveness of this extraor- dinary system, in these eloquent words: "sublime par 1'antiquite de ses souvenirs, qui remontent au berceau du monde ; ineffable dans ses mysteres, adorable dans ses sacrements, interessant dans son historic, celeste dans sa morale, riche et charmant dans ses pompes, il reclame toutes les sortes de tableaux. Voulez-vous le suivre dans la poesie? le Tasse, Milton, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, vous retracent ses miracles; dans les belles lettres, 1'eloquence, 1'histoire, la philo- sophic? que n'ont point fait, par son inspiration, Bos- suet, Fenelon, Massilon, Bourdaloue, Bacon, Pascal, Euler, Newton, Leibnitz! dan les arts? que de chefs- d'oeuvre! Si vous 1'examinez dan$ son culte, que de choses ne vous disent point et ses vieilles eglises goth- iques, et ses prieres admirable, et ses, superbe cere- monies!" One very conspicuous result of the new classes of subject matter offered us in the modern era is the birth of humour, that delineation of the many com- plexities and contrasts of situation and character [88] EVOLUTION OF TYPES which make the novels, the skillful and entertaining story, and the realistic drama. The field of writing embraces no longer solely the movements and passions of lofty personages, nor is it limited to the routine of a stereotyped form of living. In Grecian literature there was humour, in Aristo- phanes and Theocritus, and Comedy was born itself from the satiric play or interlude, but, it was immature and nascent. That wider sense of humour which gathers together the sentiments of sympathy and affection, and involves the functions of amusement also, was poorly illustrated, and never had any broad effectiveness. It is difficult for us rightly to seize and designate the picturesque complexity of literature in the Christian era, but in sentiment and in treatment it must be admitted that this picturesque character of the material the subject matter has swayed and moulded the minds of men. As birds denote the variation of their eating by a change in their plumage, as animals change their skins and are even, we believe, modified internally by a change of climate and surroundings, and as shells be- come diminished and partially altered in shape or vice versa according to the body of water in which they live, so do writers respond unerringly and by an [89] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE organic flexure of their minds to the mass and quality of subject matter. English language is a very com- posite structure, and it grew slowly through centur- ies, amid a series of events which left their impress upon it, so that the nature of subject matter is imbed- ded, as it were, in, or made congenial with, the very language which the wit of man uses to describe it. English literature as expressed in Chaucer, Spen- cer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, is clearly a very dissimilar literary result from that embodied in Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Pindar, and it is a difference not measured solely by the interval, more or less, of two thousand years, but by that which separates Pagan mythology and Grecian history, from Christian revelation and the history of Europe. It is not simply that the Christian writers were different men from their Grecian compeers, but that that differ- ence, as presented in them, sprang from a difference in subject matter, which is, to quote a simile of Mr. Lowell's "a soil from which the roots of thought and feeling unconsciously draw the coloring of vivid ex- pression." And perhaps this difference in all its manifold diversifications may be well summed up in the lan- guage also of Mr. Lowell, in his learned and eloquent [90] EVOLUTION OF TYPES critique upon Dante, where he says: "arma Vir- umque cano, that is the motto of classic song; the things of this world and great men. Dante says, sub- jectum est homo, not vir; my theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old epic and drama was in this world and its catastrophe here; Dante lays his scene in the human soul, and his faith in the other world. He makes himself the protagonist of his own drama. In the Commedia for the first time Christi- anity wholly revolutionizes art, and becomes its semi- nal principle." A widened inspection of all classes of life, an interior esoteric sensibility to the multiplied aspects of life, and their aggregate value, has been distinctive of the modern or Christian epoch, and this spirit has itself been in a measure generated from the vitality and interest of a subject matter, itself organ- ized under influences very diverse from those which affected Pagan life and history. The English language grew together from Celtic, Saxon, Norman, Danish and Latin stocks, though but two of these, Saxon and Norman, can be said to form the tap root of its linguistic tree. English Lit- erature found its subject matter in the legends of the Saxon the Teutonic mythology in warrior gods, goblins, witches, fairies, demons, monstrous deeds of [91] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE valor, in aspects of nature wherein the animal world blended with the human to express a more intense effect. As Taine says, "here all is imagery. In their impassioned minds events are not told with the dry propriety of an exact description ; each fits in with its pomp of sound, shape, coloring; it is almost a vision which is raised, complete with its accompanying emotions, joy, fury, excitement." English Literature found its subject matter in the tales and romances of the Norman, in tournaments and serenades, in quick-witted and flowery fables, notable knights and beautiful pageants, for the Nor- mans, says Taine, were "talkers, tale-tellers, speakers above all, ready of tongue, and never stinted in speech." Taine continues "they were the earliest who wrote the Song of Roland ; upon this they accu- mulated a multitude of songs concerning Charle- magne, and his peers, concerning Arthur and Merlin, the Greeks and Romans, King Horn, Guy of War- wick, every prince and every people. Their minstrels like their knights draw in abundance from Welsh, Franks, and Latins, and descend upon East and West, in the wide field of adventure. They address themselves to a spirit of inquiry, as the Saxons to en- thusiasm, and dilute in their long clear and flowing [92] EVOLUTION OF TYPES narratives the lively colors of German and Breton tra- ditions; battles, surprises, single combats, embassies, speeches, processions, ceremonies, huntings, a vari- ety of amusing events, employ their ready and wan- dering imaginations." The history of feudal England, and the sights of royal England, the Castles crowning cliff and spur, the glorious glitter of court array, when it was "a common thing to put a thousand goats and a hundred oxen on a coat, and to carry a whole manor on one's back," the woodlands wild and dangerous, masques like that at Kenilworth castle, and the pomp of religi- ous functions, such things with the composite charac- ters they employed, was a subject matter which bred into English Literature that romantic and picturesque quality, that mingled sweetness and strength which remains today, and which neither artifice nor classic- ism have expelled nor hidden. The Pagan Renaissance affected English literature. Surely Mr. Taine has made the most of that, whether in art or in literature. It is true it gave a new appre- hension of form, a new keenness to the appetite for beauty, but it did not revoke, nor minimize even the spirit of Christian tendencies. The subject matter of thought even though thought had not been very [93] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE busy for fifteen hundred years had permanently affected literary processes and results, and at any rate no reading of classics could modify the life they saw, the life they led, for the writers of English. Pagan Renaissance opened eyes and stirred the sources of sense and taste, but it opened and aroused them, that "the pele-mele of the men and women of Shakes- peare plays," might be recognized and recorded. It is true the Pagan Renaissance may have helped the Protestant Reformation, but in doing that it did not annull or supercede Christianity, rather it freed Christianity from the manacles of a corrupt, a narrow, and egoistic Romanism, freed it so that that very Romanism entered upon a new and better day, so that the spirit of St. Francis might keep the world godly and keep it glad too. For of this St. Francis, Matthew Arnold writes, "his hymn expresses a far more cordial sense of happiness, even in the material world, than the hymn of Theocritus. It is that which made the fortune of Christianity its gladness, not its sorrow ; not its assigning the spiritual world to Christ, and the material to the devil, but its drawing from the spiritual world a source of joy, so abundant that it ran over upon the material world and transfigured it." [94] EVOLUTION OF TYPES So the Pagan Renaissance, though it kept with relentless persistency the subject matter of Paganism before the eyes of scholars, could not change the in- fluence of a very different sort of subject matter the complex history and events, sentiments and spirit of an advancing Christian civilization. What literary creations distinguish the modern era? The novel and the scientific style, style prolonged and produced into temperament and treatment. Are not both the result of Subject Matter? The former aris- ing from the psychological development of character which has been studied and presented within the mise en scene of modern society, with its tumultuous mixture of all sorts and conditions of men. And the scientific style, whence has it arisen? From the nice scrutiny of details, and the imaginative conception of laws, from a subject matter which from one point of view is a mass of concrete facts, from another a com- posite but orderly procession of ideas, manifesting themselves in a self developing or preordained series. We are not blind to the importance of tempera- ment as a literary factor. But we lay stress upon subject matter as an atmosphere, an environment, by which all temperament is modified. We are engaged in a peculiar enquiry. [95] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE We expect to show that our best literary works involve Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, in some form, as subject matter, that where these are absent, literary results must be very different and, by our present standards of taste, less notable and subtle, that in Heaven, where exhypothesi, there is no Sin, Ignor- ance, or Misery, literature must attain either an inferioi excellence, or fail to exist at all, and even more point- edly, that in the approaching ages wherein human conditions may be expected to undergo increasing ameliorations, the slow decadence of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, will also mean, in its essential sections, the decadence of literature! But it will mean more than that. We shall lose I mean the possible inhabitants of a world or heaven where Sin, Ignorance, and Misery have disappeared our sympathy with these conditions, resent even their imaginative resumption in literature. A state of perfection, of complete illumination, of inviolate bliss will probably produce psychological results which will greatly narrow and limit our sensibilities, so far as those sensibilities are involved in a response to literary appeals based upon Sin, Ignorance, and Misery. There might be some intellectual recognition of a [96] EVOLUTION OF TYPES good piece of literature, wherein bad men, or fool- ish men, or suffering men were depicted, and history with its dramatic displays of crime, folly, and pathos, might awaken a momentary admiration. Yet in the main the favored beings, we are thinking of, would be indifferent to the meaning of such pictures, and suffer a disabling mental contraction or torpidity, that would make them the worst possible auditors of a splendid tragedy or a good comedy. They might indeed be victims of a moral or physical repugnance to such scenes. Certainly good men and women, wise men and women, and happy men and women enjoy the artis- tic skill with which the exhilirating wickedness of the world, its genial dullness or fatuity and its picturesque suffering are depicted, but every one of them can understand the sinner, the fool, and the victim, for after all they themselves are in a measure all these. But the transcendental or divine people, we are think- ing of, will doubtless be literary dullards; their hope- less and consummate ideality will kill effort, kill skill, kill curiosity, kill imagination. Another thought of interest needs a moment's eluci- dation and extension. The varying phases and de- grees of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery and the con- [97] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE trasted persons affected by each will naturally have some, or a great deal of influence in determining the works of literature for which they serve as subject matter. The sin of Richard is a rather different mat- ter in every aspect and every literary result from that of Caliban, the majestic defiance of Satan far apart, as the heavens and the earth, from the seduction of Adam ; the ignorance of those who seek to unbind The interwoven clouds which make their wisdom blind, is surely different in expression and in quality from the ignorance of those "sedately torpid and devoutly dumb;" the misery of Prometheus, bound in the icy recess, bearing Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours And moments aye divided by keen pangs Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, Scorn and despair, from the plaintive sadness of her who sings For old unhappy things, And battles long ago. Then there are the more common, brutal, vulgar forms of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery; these are seen in the Salammbo of Flaubert, the Emperor of Ebers, [98] EVOLUTION OF TYPES the Pompeii of Lytton, the Quo Vadis of Sienkewitz, the Hypatia of Kingsley, grading into conditions of sentimental wretchedness, mental opacity and human obliquity as in Daudet's Jack, Meredith's Egoist, Hawthorn's Blithedale Romance. And in the broad or fortuitous advances of the world we have sections or ages which show the pressure of these en- tities, if we may so call them, as distinctive character- izations. The classic ages or at least the ages before the Christian dispensation and the present ages of bar- barism are types of unrestrained, or at best half dis- couraged Sin, the sections of time included between A. D. 500 and 1200 unmistakably a state of Ignor- ance, and the subsequent long years of popular op- pression, monarchical misrule, and class bigotry with the attendant horrors of war, persecution, individual rancor and internecine struggles, years of Misery. And their literature, where it is a national exhibit, is reflective if these qualities. The Bible is literature, whatever else one cares to think of it, and it is a bit- ter blood thirsty, pitiless and cruel chronicle with the impress of its ideas and want of mercy imprinted in the stern hard and majestic utterances of its writers, wherein, also, observe, we get the reaction from these [99] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE things in spiritual aspirations and gentle admonish- ments and tender thoughts. For here again we touch an important matter, we are compelled to admit that the forces which oppose Sin, Ignor- ance, and Misery, owe their spirituous vitality and insistent pugnacity and intrepidity, their endless rejuvenation, to the insertive irritation of just these other conditions, viz.: Sin, Ig- norance and Misery. It makes no differenece what we think as to the affirmative or negative character of Sin or Goodness, Ignorance or Knowledge, Misery or Happiness; drive out the three first and leave be- hind them only the three last alternatives, and litera- ture ceases, I mean in the large and larger number of its aspects, because it is the picture of the fecundity and power of Goodness against Sin, the interpellation and repulse of Ignorance by Knowledge, the dissipa- tion of Misery by Happiness that gives us those mani- fold realizations of intellectual pleasure that in books make up the world of Literature. Reduce this question to a physical basis and see how convincing the contention becomes, how cred- ible an apparently aberrant and ridiculous proposi- tion. Take away darkness from the natural world, and immerse all natural objects in an unopposed flood [100] EVOLUTION OF TYPES of light and what becomes of the beauty of the world? Its shadows, its half lights, its tones and tints, the in- effable mystery of the sunrise, the poetic intimations of the twilight vanish. Abolish the extremes of heat and cold and dissipate the seasons, and there disap- pears a countless retinue of visual impressions which in art and in language compose half the charm of life. Level the mountains and fill up the valleys, reducing the obstacles of travel and locomotion, and the earth as landscape loses its intrinsic powers of inspiration, its perpetual and bewitching variety. Now it seems a natural and sufficient rejoinder to say that without light, without moderation or even- ness of temperature, without levels the effects of dark- ness and extremes of heat and cold and the inequali- ties of topography would also be valueless, and that it is illogical and precipitate to disregard the essen- tial reciprocity of meaning and influence in these op- posites. We appeal in answer to the chronology of occurrence, to the priority of darkness, of tempera- tural mutations in the year, to the priority of surficial configurations ; and in similar sense to the priority of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery in this world, themselves as pre-occupants of the world, now slowly receding before the movements of amelioration which may in [101] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE the long end, scarcely yet apparent, finally dismiss them, and with them the excitants of literature. I may indeed choose a phrase of Hallam's to illustrate this; "we begin in darkness and calamity; and though the shadows grow fainter as we advance, yet we are to break off our pursuit as the morning breathes upon us, and the twilight reddens into the lustre of day." Let us return to the suggestion of the separation of the ages as literary epochs into one of Sin, one of Ignorance, and one of Misery. This is a tentative and experimental hint, and even if it bears only slen- derly the marks of likelihood it in no way subverts the thesis here presented. It is its misapplication only. But let us see. I have suggested that the classic age and the time before the dispensation might be re- garded as marked in a separative way by Sin, though, it is evident that this useful literary agent along with its concomitants, Ignorance and Misery, has never been absent from the world, and to distinguish any one group of centuries by any of these three is simply to try an approximative estimate of the controlling trait of that time. Now again I call attention to the strength of the reaction, as Sin or Ignorance or Misery predominates in any time, the reaction of Goodness, of Knowledge, [102] EVOLUTION OF TYPES or the Love of Knowledge, and Benevolence, or the Love of Man. The examples of virtue will be most conspicuous and most beautiful, probably most splen- did, in a time of flagrancy and crime, the instances of Knowledge or its individual seekers most admir- able in a time of Ignorance, and the struggle of Ben- evolence most intense at a time of general Misery. Instantly it is apparent that Subject Matter for litera- ture is supplied, not only by the contents of the Sin, or Ignorance, or Misery, but further because the re- pugnance or resistance they excite, forces them into literature as things to be avoided, or corrected, or overcome, to be drawn, and dissected, and used for the ends of description, or art, or enlightenment or morals, for plays, or stories, or sermons; for poetry or prose. These great things, Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, form the excitation of conscience, mind and sympathy. Objectively as facts they are subject matter of lit- erature, subjectively they are subject matter in the thrill of resistance they excite for their own extermi- nation. And, not to be perverted into too high a vein of exaltation and rhapsody let us recall that Dothe- boys Hall was made by Dickens a most comic liter- ary incident, because its whole delineation sprang [103] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE from a movement of rage against cruel and inadequate schools in England. To return to our Ages. As chief literary products we have the Bible and Greek literature, in the first, the age of Sin. The Bible is the continuous picture of Sin, and the continuous revolt and exhortation against it; Greek Literature is the poetic or histori- cal narrative of cruel and crude and wrathful and unbridled men, brave and strong and picturesque of course; and further Greek Literature is philosophic dicta and poetic aphorisms to correct conduct, har- monize or idealize society. Men count, Style and Treatment count, but Subject Matter encloses the roots of all literary growth. And, as to the Age of Ignorance, the period con- ventionally held between 500, A. D. and 1200; in spite, or, notwithstanding Lilly, and all other apolo- gists, the sentence of Hallam remains unimpeached: "in the shadows of this universal ignorance a thous- and superstitions like foul animals of night, were pro- pogated and nourished. It would be very unsatis- factory to exhibit a few specimens of this odious brood, when the real character of those times is only to be judged by their accumulated multitude. In every age it would be easy to select proofs of irra- [104] EVOLUTION OF TYPES tional superstition, which, separately considered, seem to degrade mankind from its level in the creation; and perhaps the contemporaries of Swedenborg and Southcote have no right to look very contemptuously upon the fanaticism of their ancestors. There are many books from which a sufficient number of in- stances may be collected to show the absurdity and ignorance of the middle ages." Well, the Middle Ages gave Literature, Feudal- ism, and Chivalry as its foil, and both entered into song and story, and have continued to do so, long after both as actualities vanished. But in the poem of Dante we have the swelling and concentrated literary impulse which only could have been born and written in that peculiar time of piety and superstition in which indeed a spiritual and allegorical wisdom shines luminously, almost arrogantly, as the protest of a learned and illumined mind against the ignorance of the time he himself had just overpast, for that ignor- ance was not only the want of knowledge, but the deeper ignorance of temperamental degradation. And as to the Age of Misery, the Age of greedy and forgetful kings, of the long hideous serfdom of peoples to the wretched pretences of crowns and titles, the depravity and scintillating viciousness of [105] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE courts and courtier beginning to end somewhere around the death bed of Louis the XV for whom as Carlyle has so fiercely said no prayer may be ex- pected for "from a France smitten (by black-art) with plague after plague; and lying now, in shame and pain, with a Harlot's foot on its neck, what prayer can come?" As to this Age what literature has it created ? As subject matter it has furnished a strange tide of livid terrors, a wonderful picture of royal extrava- gance and boisterous frivolity and sin, a source of picturesque narrative, a study of a degraded populace, the sumptuous pageants of palaces, the stress and scourge of war, the rage of religious intolerance, tumult, turmoil, and suffering, the struggle upward of nations into liberty, a weird and stimulating mosaic of events, that to the minds of historian and poet, and story teller, spreads its end- less tangle of stuff for literary fabrics. And the Mis- ery of this Age, as its reactionary protest, created, as Carlyle says, "a Noblesse of Literature; without steel on their thigh, without gold in their purse, but with the grand thaumaturgic faculty of Thought in their head. French Philisophism has arisen ; in which little word how much do we include ! Here indeed, lies properly the cardinal symptoms of the whole wide [106] EVOLUTION OF TYPES spread malady. Faith is gone out; Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and accumulates; no man has faith to withstand it, to amend it, to begin by amending himself; it must even go on accumulating. While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and want and stagnation the Lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other is cer- tain?" Perhaps this is not the exact sense in which we have accentuated the value of Misery as subject mat- ter, but in the derivative sense, which we have men- tioned and which we must lay hold of as helpful and complementary to our thesis, in the sense of reaction this literature of the philosophes and encyclopedists, did arise from the subject matter at hand. Perhaps it is a rather metaphysical view of the matter to in- sist on these separate ages of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, and it is strictly more true, that at no time can we find literary products without all of these ele- ments, but it might prove a fruitful theme for those, qualified by learning and reading, to show, as we in- deed think it may be shown that there was a separa- tive index in literature between these periods on these very lines. And if so then it would form a just contribution to the topic here rendered, The Evolu- tion of Literary Types. [107] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE But in a more literal way, and without straining our ingenuity in high-flown speculations, what are the types of Literature which may be classified as due to Sin as subject matter, or to Ignorance as such, or to Misery, and further in what ordinal relations, as higher or lower, do such types stand? The moment we ask this question, we at once realize that the three elements of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, vary them- selves, as higher and lower, in their kind or species of details and contents. The brutal murder of Nancy by Sykes in Oliver Twist is a lower, more degraded form of Sin that that indicated in the refined self- accusations of Keith Rickman in The Divine Fire because he had not told Miss Lucia Harden that he knew of her Father's insolvency, before he inventor- ied his library. One was a sin of physical ferocity, the other, if so construed, a sin of mental lassitude or inaction. The Ignorance of Topsy in the Uncle Tom's Cabin is a very remote and lower form, than the ignorance of Robert Elsmere over the evidences of Christianity, in Mrs. Ward's novel of that name. The Misery of fleshly torture inflicted upon Matho by the Carthagenians in Flaubert's story of Salamm- bo, in an artistic sense, is a much lower form of suffer- ing than the mental agonies of the Rev. Mr. Dim- [108] EVOLUTION OF TYPES mesdale in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. This by way of interjection. Now it would be generally admitted that the lit- erary effectiveness of Sin springs largely from the in- dissoluble connection made with it by Misery, and that the delineation of Sin alone without the height- ening accompaniments of remorse, contrition, fear, reparation would be lacking in strong impressive ele- quent literary traits, it would degenerate into a sen- sational picture of deeds of crime, pictures indeed which have an interest according to the skill of the writer, but which can not be ranked with those which involve mental suffering as a consequence of the Sin. Similarly Ignorance except as it is crass, vulgar, im- pudent and amusing, has few literary uses unless it brings with it a kind of pain, that enriching sadness of regret or wonderment or importunity, which trans- mutes ignorance in its higher forms (such as appear in Maeterlinck or even Tolstoi and Ibsen) into the aspirations of poetry, the far away longing cry of men in a blind, misleading or enigmatical, and yet alto- gether wonderful world. It also therefore seems apparent that Misery, as it is in the higher illustrations of Literature derivative from Sin and Ignorance, must be ranked below these, [109] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE though we all know how well Defoe, Bunyan, Sien- kewitz, Jack London, Crabbe have used the stark properties of Misery to give literary intensity and ter- ror. The questions of primacy as subject matter in literature is thus narrowed down between Sin and Ignorance. And as between these a little reflection makes it clear that Sin must originate the highest, most pro- found and interesting literary works; Sin that preva- lent and curious delinquency of thought and word and act, that inextricable element of obliquity, half physi- ological, half spiritual, sometimes a mere conventional error, often the wildest raging of uncontrollable de- sires and appetites, and again the delicate almost delicious peccadilloes, infirmities, and foibles, of age and youth (See Chapter IV) ! For let it be also recalled that a Sinfulness of a sort, not to be excluded in our wide investiture of meaning in this word, has created Humour, for Humour, to quote Lowell, is "in its first analysis a perception of the incongruous, and in its highest development, of the incongruity be- tween the actual and the ideal in men and life. " Thus from Sin we get tragedy and comedy in which latter indeed Ignorance enters as a surprising and entertain- ing ingredient, for therein we have all the grotesquer- [110] EVOLUTION OF TYPES ies of fools, and simpletons, and egotists, the lavish procession of the self-deluded, the fops, dupes, hys- tericals, sentimentalists, mockers, inflated, dullards, the variegated and laugh-producing army of the Silly. As Subject matter Sin gives us the Play, the Novel, and surely most History would prove dry reading unless we had the word paintings of their authors of wickedness, roguery, viciousness, temper, violence, contumacy, cruelty, craft, and then all the milder forms of Sin, what Lowell calls "the social pictur- esque which gives piquancy to anecdote." We may continue to quote Lowell acceptably: "in what gutters had not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with which he has put together his admirable mosaic picture of England under the last Stuarts? Even Mommsen himself, who dislikes Plutarch's method as much as Montaigne loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of ancient Rome, without run- ning to the comic poets and anecdote-mongers. He gives us the very beef tea of history, nourishing and even palatable enough, exceptionally portable for a memory that must carry her own packs, and can af- ford little luggage; but for our own part, we prefer a full, old-fashioned meal, with its side dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish, the Stilton of scandal, so it be not too high." [Ill] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE But what is the subject matter of Ignorance? I will not instance its contributions to Comedy, in- stanced above, and in all cases plain enough, but go to a more subtle and exalted aspect of its power in Literature. For Ignorance is our attitude towards Nature and the Universe, towards our destiny, our meaning, and the myriad-headed enigmas all about us. Here surely we enter upon a most wide and beautiful field of literary thought where Poetry with dreams, and Philosophy with guesses, and Religion with revelations and Science with hypotheses play tumultuously, and in their profuse way shower us with books. Not indeed do we solely mean the crass ignorance of the rude illiterary of boors, or the less picturesque foolishness of society, or the pallid nonsense of drones and crokers (all useful and immoderately funny for literary commodity), but that mystifying and yet not unpleasant incertitude that makes to construe for our purpose the language of Maeterlinck all "our reflections, our obstinate search for the final cause, our admiration and hopes all these in truth no more than our feeble cry as, in the depths of the unknown, we clash against what is more unknowable still; and this feeble cry declares the highest degree of individ- ual existence attainable for us on this mute and im- [112] EVOLUTION OF TYPES penetrable surface, even as the flight of the condor, the song of the nightingale, reveal to them the highest degree of existence their species allows. But the evo- cation of this feeble cry, whenever opportunity offers, is none the less one of our most unmistabable duties; nor should we let ourselves be discouraged by its apparent futility." Here we encounter the subject matter of idea and feeling rather than the subject matter of facts, that in- tangible atmosphere of supersensuous recognition which enters into the poet's wail and pathos, and fugitive yearnings, which starts into life the hetero- geneous schemes of renovators, reformers and preachers, which in more concrete and toler- able ways is the inspiration of scientific spec- ulations and forms the reasonableness of beau- tiful interpretation of nature. Illumine the world, set all the dark places in the light of assurance and intelligibility, unravel the netted and confusing mesh of ends, aims, projects, fortunes and misfortunes, ad- vances and reversals in national and individual lives, dissolve the mystery of our relations to the past, to the future, erect high the irreversible standard of an absolute form of conduct, and so enforce it that all society becomes a model community, correct the vagaries of our physiological disquietudes and contra- [113] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE dictions, so that we our bodies work with auto- matic ease and regularity and become endued at last with a fine compunction to afford each the full rev- enue of delight in a sound body and appeased appe- tites, saturate to the full the clamorous desire to know the essence of things, pull up the curtain on all sides, and place us in the petrifying light of certitude, and we shall succumb to the stupefaction of cognition, without a word, unenviably relieved of the power o\ vocal beauty, robbed of the blessed literary material of Ignorance. Our poets shall become as dumb as the birds in the flooded sunlight at noon, when questions of the dawn and the twilight are no longer felt, our tremu- lous hopefulness over new discoveries will vanish in the glare of absolute confidence, society will subside in the stagnation of universal happiness, and in the general illumination of our surfeited minds language will forego its beautiful uses in the service of literary invention. In some exact and rigid interpretation of Nature and her work, where will the insinuating charm of the sensitive thoughts of a man like Maeterlinck come in with their refreshing loveliness, when he says in his book on flowers: "all the flowers of the world, the successful efforts, the deep inmost beauties, the joyful [114] EVOLUTION OF TYPES thoughts and wishes of the planet, rose up to us, borne on a shaft of light that in spite of its heavenly wonder, issued from our own earth. Man ventured forth from the cloister, the crypt, the town of brick and stone, the gloomy stronghold in which he had slept. He went down into the garden, which be- came peopled with azure and purple, perfumes opened his eyes, astounded like a child escaping from the dreams of the night, and the forest, the plain, the sea, and the mountains, and lastly the birds and the flowers, that speak in the name of all a more human language which he already understood, greeted his awakening." The to-and-fro play of fancy and observation on the mere marvels of the outside world will droop in inaction, as we know the single solitary way to under- stand it all, and with the chrysalis of wonder and doubt broken and our escaping souls freed in the con- sciousness of an unquestionable explanation, on what food of fascinating surmises would our literary im- pulses feed? No! Ignorance, in the wide appanage of its implications means much for Literature, and in a world completely informed, the exquisite verbal dissimulations of our minds could not exist. For as Lowell has said "imagination, has always been and still is, in a narrower sense, the great myth- SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ologizer." Kill Ignorance, the nuances of whose meanings grade all the way from brutish torpidity to the refined credulity of the fancy which "fills moonlit dells with dancing fairies, sets out a meal for the Brownie, hears the tinkle of airy bridal bells as Tarn- lane rides away with the Queen of Dreams, changes Pluto and Proserpine into Oberon and Titania, and makes friends with unseen powers as Good Folk," destroy it utterly in all its forms, and there suddenly vanishes with it the necromancy of the poet, not only his own repressed activity of creation, but our own willing and charmed acquiescence. And now let us try to find out in what realms of literature the impress of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery is distinctly shown, as subject matter. After some thinking over the question it appears to us that Sin subject-matter produces Drama, Misery subject- matter produces the Novel, and Ignorance subject- matter produces Poetry. It is not meant that these kinds of subject matter are all involved in each sort of literary product to the exclusion of the others, but that, elemental stuff of the play is Sin, and of the novel or story, is Misery, (albeit generally overcome and repulsed), and of poetry, or fanciful dreaming and picture making quests of thought, is Ignorance. To say this, may seem only a trick of singularity, but let [116] EVOLUTION OF TYPES us look beneath the mere surface and ordinary mean- ing or usage of words, to find its intrinsic and truthful reflection of a principle. Sin furnishes the most powerful dramatic motives that can be conceived, those that most fruitfully serve the designs of the dramatist. How can that be doubted? Let us take a good instance of a success- ful play, and one which is quite modern in the history of the stage, Cyrano de Bergerac and L'Aiglon, both by the same author, who for their excellence was admitted into the envied fraternity of the Immortals in France, and in which plays there was no element of Sin involved, and then compare these dramas, re- spectively made famous by their presentation by Mansfield and Bernhardt compare them with a play in which the Sin-substance enters completely. In Cyrano we indeed have Suffering, poignant, subtle, and poetic, and the play interests by its play of delicate sentiment, the comic situations of Rague- neau, and the bluffing and boasting Gascons, the stumbling awkwardness and gaucherie of the tongue- tied Christien, and the exacting fastidiousness of the fair Roxane, this all deliciously relieved against the whimsical valor of the brave and heart stricken Cy- rano. But what else is there in this admirable trifle? It would not endure long on the stage without the [117] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE prestige and art of individual mastery. It may make a tour de force of stage craft, but it falls short of the thrilling and emotional crescendoes of those plays, where the course of Sin, its triumph or its overthrow, moulds and changes character and, with the direful presage of defeat or victory, condenses in some su- preme moment its malignancy or its sorrow ; or broods like some cloud weirdly disturbed and lit by unearthly fires, over the stage of human weakness and despair. Take the great illustrations of Othello, Antigone, Phedre or go to Sardou, contemporaneous and French, and also blamed for his hollow artifice, and trumped up and surcharged paroxisms, of unhealthy sentiment. Take Fedora or Theodora or the Sor- ceress or Gismonda. Here is Sin, or what passes for Sin, the tumultuous and illicit or irregular storms of the love passion. But given their strong and appeal- ing interpretation, how arresting and absorbing they are, how the eye is fascinated and fixed upon the stage in an absorption that is the sign of the capture of the mind, at least, (if not the heart), in the vice of an inexorable interest. It will be instantly said that none of Sardou's plays can be compared for an instant as literature with the masterpieces of Rostand. Let it be so. But we are discussing the essential substance of great plays, and if the questions of mere literary [118] EVOLUTION OF TYPES excellence is urgent, we will fall back on the Grecian authors, or seize upon the unquestionable supremacy of Shakespeare. And indeed it seems to us that L'Aiglon, although dealing with a much less interesting character in the Duke of Reichstadt, than the magnanimous and ec- centric Cyrano, obtains from the malign purpose of Metternich, the shadowy vindictiveness of his arch hatred, a kind of steadying intensity, that is lacking in the greater composition. It plays better. But we do not wish to be driven to subterfuge. Comedy is good drama. Of course. And the amused and unconvinced reader will then ask: "is then Comedy a dramatic expression of Sin?" It is. Laughter and rebuke meet this claim. But should they? We have elsewhere dwelt on this, (Chapter IV), but we can here exert a little pressure to secure a toleration for so apparently exigent a plea. What is Comedy? "A play that makes us laugh" may be a good general account of the matter from the ob- jective standpoint of an audience paying for an en- tertainment that keeps them diverted. But let us make some necessary exceptions. Farces, buffoonery, Vaudeville "sketches," clown stunts, comic opera, are not literature. The Misanthrope, The School for Scandal, She stoops to Conquer, Medecin malgre [119] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Lui, Twelfth Night, Peg Woffington are comedies, and are literature. The audiences also laugh here. But why? Is not their laughter the masked grim- ace of regret at human frailty, weakness, imperfec- tion, gross or disturbing vanity, grotesque perversion of justice, the travesties of virtues in borrowed clothes, stalking in pitiful or abject hardness of heart and blindness of mind as something excellent and worthy, mental deception, crudities of limping speech; all this a sort of lessened non-criminal Sin, not august by rea- son of a moral lesson involving a basic transgression of Right, but still an infraction, at some point, of per- fection, of the ideal, of the complete, of the just, of the transcendent. Let it be said then for the pur- pose of this tentative classification of these three sub- ject matters that the Subject Matter of Sin makes the drama. Now in regard to Misery, it is the subject matter (of course admitting its admixture in all literature) of the Story the Novel, though, for the pacification of sympathy, and simply as a bit of literary therapeutics, the novel the Story usually "ends well." But Misery Suffering are its theme. The three great epics of the world, the Iliad, the Inferno of the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Para- dise Lost are novels stories simply all three [120] EVOLUTION OF TYPES painting with tremendous power the aspects and depths of suffering, of pain, of disappointment, of many hued and variously voiced Misery. The story or as we now have it the novel, is a reflection of the experiences of the daily life of men and women. There are stories of fancy, of myths, of legendary heroes, of fairies, the Arabian Nights, and arithmeti- cal folk lore tales, but they generally are scarcely lit- erature. They attain the literary stature in the Can- terbury Tales, and Spenser's Fairy Queene, for these, though couched in lovely poetic form, are still stor- ies, metrical novels. And in both surely there is misery ; Though vertue then were held in highest price, In those old times of which I doe entreat, Yet then likewise the wicked seede of vice Began to spring; which shortly grew full great, And with their boughes the gentle plants did beat : But evermore some of the vertuous race Rose up, inspired with heroicke heat, That cropt the branches of the sient base, And with strong hand their fruitful ranckes did deface. Thus Spenser sings, and his beautiful, winding, and lofty hearted verse tells the wars of Goodness fighting oppression and guile, and the many blotted [121] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE efforts of wrong. Artegall, Arthur, Calidore, seem to be ceaselessly engaged in purging a world beset with wicked knights, giants, sorcerers, beasts, trucu- lent Souldans and sense-chaining Radigunds ; the alle- gorical figures for our many evils, both now and then, which bestow on life its chequered interest. And what is told in the Canterbury Tales? Saunders tells us: "what Shakespeare said the stage should be and made it Chaucer had previ- ously made his works: a mirror reflecting the very image and body of the time and with the same ob- ject as Shakespeare, that vice and scorn might see their image. In consequence what Froissart was merely to chivalry, an unreal but brilliant institution of the hour, Chaucer was to the entire life of Eng- land, with all its variety of character and class, all its conflicting interests and passions and views." The Novel has become the significant literary ex- pression of our day. It embraces the most notable contributions to literature, and in its highest forms, displays, perhaps more widely than in any other form, the union of imagination, observation, phil- osophy, learning, sensibility, and verbal skill. We are indeed inundated with novels, and some of Jeffer- son's aversion arises naturally at their frequent useless- ness, their not infrequent insipidity. But the novel [122] EVOLUTION OF TYPES appeals to an almost insatiable appetite. It pays to write, even poor novels, and when we consider the incalculable deluge of stories, their absorption by the reading public appears almost stupifying. And in all the really immortal novels, the theme is human misery, suffering, battle, pains, defeats, ending, to be sure quite generally in some sort of compromise-happiness at the immediate end, which lasts the short time of the few last pages, when the curtain drops, beyond which again, were we permitted to see further, the toil and trouble and weariness goes on as before. And are not the best novels, those that will most likely survive as representative expressions of national literature, just those which most ingrainedly express the misery of the world? The Scarlet Letter, The Heart of Midlothian, Lucia de Lammermoor, Arma- dale, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, Pecheur d'Islande, Pere Goriot, The Manxman, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the Pirate, Les Miserables, Cloister and the Hearth, On the Heights, Daughter of Heth, Daniel Deronda, Silas Marner, Hypatia, Barchester Towers, Fathers and Daughters, Jude, The Laodi- cean, and so on and so on. This is a random selec- tion, but it means what we claim. There are thous- ands of novels that do not so piercingly tell us the trag- edy of life, and they are excellent literature, and will [123] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE be so classed, but still an analysis of their contents would finally resolve them into a distinct growth from the subject matter of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, and principally Misery. For as there is a lesser state of Sin in the Comedy, so there are lesser states of Mis- ery, which may give us entertaining and merely mirth- ful novels or stories. And now lastly as to Ignorance, as the imbedded subject matter of Poetry. Ignorance is protean. We have spoken of that. In poetry it is the ignorance of doubt, questioning, the grief of the lacerated mind before the mystery of all things, before the inevitable conflict of our aspirations and our conditions. It may be quite right in a partial way to find fault with Mat- thew Arnold, as Prof. Woodbury has done, when the former writes such lines and sentiments as these, Ah, love let us be true To one another! for the world which seems To lie before us like a world of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, and again : Yet Fausta, the mute turf we tread, The solemn hills about us spread, The stream that falls incessantly, [124] EVOLUTION OF TYPES The strange scrawled rock, the lonely sky If I might lend their life a voice, Seem to bear rather than rejoice? but it is just as evident that Arnold was sane, intelli- gent, observant, and this mournfulness had to him jus- tifiable provocation. Nor is his view a solitary one. We are not here called upon to suggest more prof- itable reflections upon life than those Arnold consist- ently expressed; it is pertinent only to observe that the inspiration of a distinguished poet has found its springs in the contemplation of life's sadness. Prof. Woodbury has himself said that "the spirit of discontent has been a presiding genius in literature since the reflective life of man began." He has also spoken, in another place, of "mankind itself suffer- ing in all its race life, and throughout its history, wretched, tyrannized over by some dark and unjust necessity, yet unterrified." The sacred gift of poetry is allowed to temperaments and souls delicately ad- justed to feel outward impressions, to see and ex- press the inwardness of things. How the poet must respond to these apparent conditions of ignorance, of darkness, of destitution, of unanswered prayer! and because he feels their poignancy, his voice swells most musically into the exaltation of defiance, of resigna- tion, of despair, of pathos, of faith. Has not Wood- [125] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE bury said of Shelley, his favorite poet, "he also gave a voice to the lament of the soul, to its aspirations and its ineradicable, if mistaken, faith in the results of time ; and the ideas which he uttered with such afflu- ence of expression, such poignancy of sympathy, such a thrill of prophetic triumph, are absorbed in the spirit which poured them forth in its indignation at injus- tice, its hopefulness of progress, its complete convic- tion in the righteousness of its cause." In a world of scientific demonstration there would be torpor of curiosity; in a world of complete illumination, there would be silence of questioning ; and in Heaven, the peculiar haunting mysticism and grave beauty, and tender melancholies and bold negations and irrefra- gable sweetness of Poetry might all disappear. [126] CHAPTER III. FRENCH LITERATURE In all respects, as far as writing in prose is con- cerned, nothing existing in the living languages of the day can be compared with French. The vehicle of ideas provided, by the French language is incompar- able. A thorough feeling for the unequalled perfec- tion of this language must convince an Englishman that his own tongue is a somewhat clumsy, and crip- pled instrument, out of tune, abortive, raucous, and stupid. This superiority of French is so obvious to the attuned and informed ear that it is almost a won- der that English writers persist in their attempts to write at all. It is possible that Americans may, by a certain velocity of mind and an emancipation of ver- bal form and treatment, save this venerable tongue from extinction as a literary medium, and of course the hopeless ignorance of every one, who today writes English, of how to write French, will still provide English and American printers with material for their presses, and probably contrive to do so for a century or more. These reflections hardly seem exaggeration. Eng- lish can be used quite effectively in prose writing, and [127] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE does well enough, but to recognize its hopeless infer- iority to French as a vehicle of expression one has only to take an essay of St. Beuve or T. Gautier, or Brun- etiere in criticism, and one of Matthew Arnold, or Mr. Hutton, or Burroughs, or Jeff cries, a novel of Maupassant, Balzac, George Sand, Pierre Loti, Zola, Victor Hugo, or even Dumas and one of Thackeray, Scott, or Dickens, George Elliot, Haw- thorne, or even Mrs. Ward. There is an incom- municable vitality and subtlety, a most trans- cending unity of form with idea both in mere vocabulary and in construction that makes French writing in prose the last and most consummate product of man's mentality as a vehicle of thought. The evolution of French literature, as in all litera- tures, has been through the phases of First, subject matter; Second, treatment; Third, style. The earliest writers collect stories, incidents, fables, and history, and tell what they know of the things in nature in a simple way; then follows a period of arrangement and logical disposition, of chronological sequence and ref- erence of like to like, with some sense or appreciation of effect, of mass, of detail, and lastly the processes of refinement bring style, the collocation and succes- sion of words, the structure of sentences, the involu- [128] FRENCH LITERATURE tion of clauses and the exact reflection in language of an idea, a picture, a character, a period. In the 1 6th and 1 7th centuries there were the chroniclers Ville- hardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Commynes, 2d the nar- rators and poets, Rabelais, Villon, Marot, Palissy, 3d the stylists Ronsard, Montluc, d'Aubigne, Mon- taigne, Racan, Regnier, Balzac (a prose writer of the 1 7th century.) Albert in writing of the origins of French literature says (LaLitterature Francaise, du XVI siecle, Paul Albert, p. 5) "il ne faut pas non plus oublier 1'influ- ence du climat. Le notre est essentiellement tempere ; nous ne connaissons ni les froids rigoureux, ni les chaleurs excessives. Notre pays est a la fois terre ferme, et pays maritime. II ne s'etend pas en plaines infinJes, d'une monotome morne; il n'est pas enserre, ecrase par des montagnes enormes. Pas d. animaux gigantesque, pas de bizarreries naturelles. Les pro- ductions du sol sont variees et simple. Le pays se suffit a lui-meme. II a du ble, il a du vin, des forets, des paturages. Tout est mesure, equilibre, regulier- ement proportionne, rien de sublime et d, extraordi- naire, mais aussi pas de lacunes choquantes, et un en- semble satisfaisant, Si la force et la sante ne resident point dans le developpement excessif d'un organe par- ticulier, mais dans la proportion et le jeu harmonieux [129] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE de tous les organes, la France est la pays le mieux partage; et Ton comprend que sa litterature soil la plus riche et la mieux equilibree de toutes les littera- tures modernes." Here again we meet the irrefragable effort to trace the moulding influence of the subject matter. For if the environment of a race forms its language, it forms its ideas by a psychology as subtle. Its charac- ter and environment are subject matter. The mind, the writers, are, it is true, the result of mingled blood and the composite offspring of indefinite and insoluble fusions of cells and tissues, and the qualifying and in- teracting germs of mother and father. Yet back of all physiological factors, remains the procreant cradle of air and earth and things. So far as literature is concerned there is no escape from the controlling powers of the outside world, no matter what force or relevancy one tries to collect from the concession to the existence of the "categorical impera- tive, "or of "ideas a priori. " The color of the mind, so to speak, its attitude, its felicity of feeling, of seeing, of noting, of saying, the pattern of its web, the in- flections of its sympathies, its humanity, are the slowly matured growth from the incidence and the reactions of ages of climate and sustenance and history. The mythology of a race is a function of its country's [130] FRENCH LITERATURE meteorology, geology, physiography ; and all its litera- ture finds, by an endless labyrinth of descending threads of derivation, its distant roots in what its peo- ple saw, and felt, and did. Moods come with the rising or the setting sun, with the deathless music of the storm, the peering bashful glance of spring, the balance of the night and day, the progression of all the symbols of childhood, of youth, of manhood, of age ; and moods are literature. If as Taine says "the proper office of literature is to take note of sentiments" and if our own somewhat ornamented image is recognized or accepted, viz. that "literature is a plant growing in the soil of history, bearing flowers of ideation, spirituality and artistic beauty," then literature does become quite reasonably and unfailingly dependent upon moods. That is so far as moods are made to be mental states advancing from mere emotional atmospheres through more pro- nounced movements and heapings up of ideas and feelings to the brilliancy of rapid and productive in- tellectual work. Newton's Principia and Laplace's Mecanique Celeste have literary value, though one would hardly, by reason of their exalted and profound mathematical nature assign to them the literary significance of Dante's Divina Commedia, Petrarch's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Cervantes Don Quix- [131] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ote, Scott's Heart of Midlothian, or Emerson's Es- says. They were, however, the products, the out- come of moods which in this case controlled the whole lives of these marvelous thinkers, though moods deep- ening at moments to the extremest depths of mental absorption and remoteness. Indeed even these recon- dite and sublime speculations appeal to sentiment, for as Allison says in his Essay on Taste, "the anecdote of a late celebrated Mathematician is well known, who read the Paradise Lost, without being able to discover in it anything that was sublime, but who said that he could never read the queries at the end of Newton's Optics, without feeling his hair stand on end, and his blood run cold," a certainly very un- compromising image of emotional response. A mood we commonly and naturally regard as a temporary condition, a fugitive and shifting phase of feeling as melancholy, or exulting, or dreary, or repining, and it blends, in our thought, with poetical and physiological sensitivity to events and things. It is a capricious staying in a certain web or stage of feeling which we in common parlance consider tem- porary or evanescent. But such stages of feeling determine creative work and even if by a process of exact rigid setting down to tasks of invention as Poe describes his reasoned out artifices of construction in [132] FRENCH LITERATURE the Raven we force our minds into literary labor, and eventually thereby add to the sum of literary ef- fects, we shall always realize that a favorable mood helps us to think and construct, that indeed without it or without working ourselves into such a mood we work hampered and disabled. This is all apropos of our assertion that moods are the generative occasions of literary work, and because moods are themselves symptoms of objective influ- ences and because objective influences shape language have shaped, as Albert declares, the French lan- guage then objective influences have something to do or all to do with literary work, and in an especial way therefore subject matter does the same thing. This has been from the beginning our contention. So far as scientific works can be classed with liter- ary productions their literary character is due to the negotiable element of literary meaning in the subject matter they contain. A treatise on birds will afford more room for an appeal to sentiment than a discus- sion of mineral species or a review of chemical prin- ciples ; a work on flowers furnishes wider scope for the literary faculty than an essay on quaternions or a re- view of commercial statistics. In all writing the qual- ity of style, and the charm and lucidity and depth of treatment supervene to give a literary expression to [133] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE almost any topic, no matter how remote its subject matter seems to be from the proper texts of literature. Imagery, exact and illuminating language, the very cadence of sentences, the choice of epithet and de- scriptive terms, the regular and informing development of the theme convey literary impressions. This is inseparable from the genius of language, and the gen- ius of mind, but back, far back in the primitive areas of linguistic growth and mental evolution, the subject matter appears as the pregnant source of ideas and words. Imagine a being capable of ideas, of emotional re- sponses to external irritants of speech, possessed of the senses and endowed with sensibility and put him in an illimitable void of atmosphere and leave him there. Would the conjunction of air and mind be likely to generate literature? Never. Mind is a percipient but its percipiency hangs around the neck of an ex- ternal world with its physical and moral and social facts. Disjoin them and so far as literature is con- cerned, in any real sense of the term, there is utter blankness and silence. Even those sentiments which are supposed to be inherent and less dependable upon external excitants the religious would be deprived of literary life, and ideation itself remain sterile, numb and unproductive. Like a closed chrysalis, which [134] FRENCH LITERATURE can never open in a vacuum or at zero, the mind placed in either without colors or sounds or things, movements, acts, events, would stay congealed, motionless and barren. In the movement from the first stages of narrative where subject matter dominates, through the subse- quent refinements of statement and description we reach style and treatment, in which the personal ele- ment of literature belonging, (as we have seen ; Chap. 1 st) both to the era and the individual, is reflected. French literature, the French language has attained the consummate flower of expression. Its form is un- approachable. Greek had form and a form of unmis- takable and convincing loveliness but Greek for mod- ern ideas, for the intricacies of thought and swaying impulsiveness and insatiable realism of our day would have experienced in its writers a strange inconven- ience as a medium of literature. But French, insinuating, insidious, fashioned in phrase, as in word for the mirroring of shades and, so to speak, attitudes of thought, catching in its subtle arrangement of letters the hues of myriad meanings of pleasure and pain and criticism and study and color and all things social, animate, and human, this most excellent speech seizes all that is seen or imaginable and throws it on the printed page scarcely robbed, by [135] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE that transition, of a shade even of its absolute verity and value. No tongue but French would have an- swered the necessities of Voltaire's mind and none else could have embodied its wit and license so acutely. Nothing but French would have permitted Rous- seau to give to his composition as Joubert has said, "such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant that his writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate our reason," and in the exquisite pictures pictures so true, so suggestive that they half deceive the eye that reads by the affirm- ation of the eye that sees of Pierre Loti, nothing provided by men to use, as words, but this supreme language could have placed them in words scarcely jarred from their proportions as they existed in the mind of the author. Imagine an English writer hold- ing the interest of the reader in a narrative of such fra- gile topics as Les Desirs de Jean Servien, which Ana- tole France, by an indubitable delicacy, has made exquisite. As literature passes into the last stages of its pro- gressive elaboration the subject matter still holds its sway over literary productivity but in a different way from its control in more youthful periods. Whereas [136] FRENCH LITERATURE in its beginnings literature fills its pages with events and personages their succession and nature, in its re- condite phases as it approaches the highest felicity of expression in later periods it dwells on the psycho- logical effects of an event, or a personage, or scene, or it seizes for portraiture some picture, and conveys it to our minds by an invincible precision of language. Literature improves, and it improves in the direction of analysis and intellectual and emotional richness and depth. The novels of Balzac, Hugo, and Daudet, and Zola, and Maupassant, are incalculably better than those of Madame de La Fayette, and the narrative of Pierre Loti in sensibility, delicious freshness, and the keen propriety of words much finer in essential verbal accuracy and subjective power over that of Saint Simon, Fenelon, La Bruyere. Language in France has seemed all the time to gain in intensity, in colorature, in its miscellaneous ability to catch the shades and depths of thought. Indeed this is so everywhere. Language feels the influence of pro- gressive culture of knowledge, and as it itself is thought, expands and evolutes, unfolds, along the widening and rising areas of understanding and feel- ing. Not exactly that new words arise (though that is true also) but new meanings, new arrangements [137] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE grow and the vocabulary of a tongue seems increas- ingly used in ingenious, quickening, and alert phrases. It is certainly impossible today to read with any patience the weak wearisome and vapid works of Bulwer Lytton, his stupid and vaporous dialogue, the aimless silly plot, the artificial elegance of insin- cere phraseology, the sickening cadences and the empty periods of adjectives and paraphrases. Think of Kipling, of Stevenson, of Norris, of Wister, Caine, Harris, Smith, London, Wharton, in comparison, though, of course Bulwer had contemporaries who could startle the slowest minds into attention by power and incision. In France this exhilarating progress dates perhaps from the tumult of the conflict between the classic and romantic schools, a conflict started before the revolution and found already raging though hope- lessly with the advantages all on one side in the classic discussions under "le grand monarque" as to the dictatorship of Aristotle over the range and method of all literary invention. French literature suffered in the 1 7th century the affliction of the veneering and formal processes which in England had succeeded the splendid and almost profligate exuberance of invention and writing of the Elizabethan day. In France the tendencies of one [138] FRENCH LITERATURE side of the French literary activity to refinement, to verbal accuracy and microscopic precision of phrase became enormously abetted by the profusion and enamelled elegance of a sumptuous court, in which the incense of adulation, ridiculous and artificial as- criptions of power were sedulously offered to an egotist, a provincial, and a bigot, Louis XIV. Only the delicacies of speech, the Corinthian ornaments of epithet, the lacquered surfaces of brilliant dialogue were tolerated, and the wide world of nature, of con- trasts, of rude and savage strength, of abrupt and blended beauty, the world of unaffected and natural passion impulse and sympathy was shut out, decried, rejected. "Et nous voila condamnes aux Neptune, aux Venus, aux Flore, aux Pomone, aux Ceres, aux Apollon. Les plus belles, les plus vivantes creations du genie antique sont transformees en machines, en recettes, en ficelles." (Albert). With the disappearance of the overshadowing in- fluences of the court, the rising indictments by public sentiment of the corrupt and brutal tyranny of a class, the irrepressible intellectual revolt against boudoir rules of composition, and the emergence of new minds not strapped into moulds of approved style, but lib- erated by sentiment and indignation from the cere- ments of authority, French literature ran wild in a [139] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE vast fertility of contrasted composition. It, however, always remained itself, expressive, adaptable, lit up with the radiance of spirit ( esprit) and intuition. But subject matter pervasively made itself felt in all the classes of French literature and always had an in- fluence in both style and treatment, personal as these two features of literary work are. When the early chroniclers wrote, the wars and intrigues the tournaments and court revelries gave their writing a simple gayety and a direct interest; they are illuminated trains of events and personages. There is no intricacy, little commentary, an unfailing acquiescence, the loyalty of subjects, a keen and ob- vious patriotism, and abundance of pictures. When society and the kingdom had become more elabor- ated, as institutions, study, philosophy, science were introduced, and the unfolding mind of men reflected in reliefs, in shadows, in high lights, the variety of the new interests, the new suggestions, and specula- tions, then the chroniclers of the 1 7th century, as Cardinal de Retz, La Rouchfoucald in (his Max- imes) , Madame de Motteville, Saint Simon, become introspective, more critical, reveal analyses and psy- chological portraiture. They assume a modern phase. Their writing in- volves more distinctively literary procedure and liter- [140] FRENCH LITERATURE ary thought. The subject matter is more compli- cated, motives of conduct have become more subtle and confusing, new vices arose, new indulgences, running alongside of an improving art and industry, have expanded men's appetites; then are discovered new facts, new worlds; study and learning have awakened a new ambition, and taste; and audiences pleased in refined ways with drama and poetry and fancy applaud the powers of the gratified authors. The pages of these later historians show all this. They are more individual, more intricate, they dis- play critical skill, and th,ey aim at artistic effects. They exhibit the stretched and deepened scope of the subject matter. The poets of the earlier periods of French litera- ture are shown to us as experimental rhymsters elicit- ing new tones and singing with sweeter phrase as they get control of the divine instrument of poetry. Ronsard, Villon, Marot, all take love generally as a theme and from its very simplicity as a primal passion sing themselves simply with intermittent inspiration, with many renewed attempts at metrical modelling and form. Fantasies and allegories amused the court and the legends of the ancients furnished to the more ambi- tious themes of perennial interest. Palissy alone [141] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE touched a deeper note by reason of his own fervid and unaffected nature. Montaigne was himself an untrammelled spirit and anticipated the later day, the Gallic sap of his nature bursting forth in literary leaf- age full of unexpected and individual promise. The coteries of the 1' Hotel de Rambouillet furnished new conceits of word play and the travesties of fashionable skill, in saying things. The French poets of the 1 7th century are closeted within the walls of a classic garden, monotonously decorated and patterned in stiff and chastely ornate plots, and as they have one subject matter their poetry is itself starched with regulated epithets, exquisitely constructed like a joiner's table, but mechanical, tire- somely correct and lifeless. As Albert most admir- ably says 'est il un poete au XVIIe siecle qui, n.ait rime quelque madrigal ou quelque somnet en 1'hon- neur d'une Iris, d'une Chloris, d'une Philis quelcon- que? Chez tous un jargon con venue, des metaphores et des comparaisons banales, le soleil, les astres, la rose, les lis, 1'albatre, 1'ivoire, le corail ; des desespoirs connus, des regrets qui ont deja servi, des tourments dont le programme est depuis longtemps arrete. On puisse la passion avec toutes ses phrases at ses orages dans les modeles du genre; on fait un agreeable me- lange de Catulle, d'Ovide, de Tibulle; les erudits se [142] FRENCH LITERATURE risquant jusqu, a imiter Anacreon. II ne manque a ces rimeurs qu, une chose; le sentiment. Le bonhomme La Fontaine seul, qu, on ne prend pas au serieux, a jete ca et la une note emue qui vibre encore. Lui seul aussi est sorti de I'horizon etroit de Versailles, et a vu autre chose dans la nature que les merveilles du genie de Le Notre et de La Quintinie. Tous ces poetes meprisent les champs: n'est ce pas la qu, on est expose a rencontrer les animaux farouches dont parle La Bruyere? On chante Ceres, Flore et Pomone, mais on ne sait com- ment vient le ble; on peuple les forets de nymphes et de dryades, mais on ne sait pas distinguer un chene d'une hetre. II n'y a pas de paysan ni de pay- sanne; tout devient berger et bergere" (Albert p. 416). Corneille and Racine furnished the French stage with those sublimated dramas which so please the French, and which were only concerned with the lofty emotions; dignified and heroic dilemmas of ac- tion, carried along upon a stream of classic declama- tion in which nothing common or even very natur- al was permitted to mix, lest the adulteration might lessen the shining and eloquent periods, lest the audi- ence might be aware of a sudden disillusion in find- [143] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ing themselves listening to normal and human char- acters. The subject matter, heroes and heroines, kings, queens, the immolation of faithful lovers, the perfidy of aristocratic scamps, a certain unmistakable social elevation of every one, and the strict exclusive atmos- phere of one spot and one time, influenced the exalted style, the interminable dialogue, the tone pitched to a key of irreconcilable and austere nobility of feeling. Moliere filled the stage with more living and pleas- ing and natural or at least ordinary pictures, his situ- ations in burlesque mimicry of life, the genial gayety and wit of his dialogue, the irony, moving like shift- ing wind over a lake of water, in ripples or in threat- ening waves of censure, comported with a subject matter taken from the realities about him, from draw- ing rooms and streets and banquets, from the facts of society and the traits of individuals known to exist, or at least capable of existing. As the 1 8th century increased in years the mind of France was employed in vast philosophic prepara- tions for that greatest of modern historical events, the Revolution. The rights of men, the orders and ra- tionale of governments, the spirit of law, employed the thoughts of Montesquieu. Liberty of opinion, liberty of action, equality in civic recognition, the [144] FRENCH LITERATURE vanities of dogma, the emancipation of the mind, the repulse of superstition, and theological domination, the material origins of society, the individual, his dig- nity, his aims, his importance, these engaged the poig- nant and comprehending study of Voltaire, and an expression, as clear and acute, made known to all the world, his results, his conclusions. The phases of natural man, the charter of the emotions, the freedom of aboriginal life, the sovereignty of natural feeling, the exposure of deformities in society, a return to prim- itive methods, even primitive nakedness, such things worked in Rousseau the springs of feeling which caused him to pour out the torrents of his fervid elo- quence, those pages of blazing, melting, intoxicating French. Diderot was there, the patient, inexhaustible, the designing sustaining mind and heart, chaotic, un- bridled, penetrated with new visions of changed es- tates, a renovated kingdom amongst men, an enlight- ened and sympathetic state. D'Alembert was there, the sufferer and the magnanimous, still more noble, more earnest, working in the fields of science search- ing out the secrets of that Truth which should make all men free. Buffon was there pretentiously display- ing his eloquence in magnificent schemes of cosmic evolution, dressing the sober, simple and deep facts of [145] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE nature in rhetoric and verbal symphonies. Marmon- tel, LaHarpe, Beaumarchais, were all there reflect- ing the new attitudes of men to the nation as a whole, and from the wider outlooks catching at least some phases of the new life, perhaps distorted, grotesque, or even still adulterated with the tinsel and formal ornament of the past. The personal elements of the Time and public Taste, and the Temperament in the author helped to form the literary output, its form, and treatment; but inasmuch as all Literature is the reaction between the percipient and the subject matter this reaction may be indefinitely varied, and yet the features of the Subject Matter, are the irreducible nuclei of the re- action, whatever form, color, turn, expression, con- sistency, and texture the literary products take. As the history of the world itself extends, a great increase of subject matter necessarily follows, as research brings into view unexpected and hitherto unknown incidents and aspects of that very history, its contents, and illusions, the range of the choice of subjects for authors is enormously increased. The wider culture and the mere fact of temporal accretion was all the time storing up fresh matter for literature ; and knowl- edge, extravagantly pushing its conquests and enlarg- ing its stores, was offering to imagination and reason, [146] FRENCH LITERATURE invention and mere curiosity, a greater and greater number of texts and suggestions. The 1 9th century was to outrun all the sections of previous time in the variety and the extent of its spec- ulations and resulted, in the complexity of its social currents, in the intricacy of its psychological feelings, in its sympathy with widest contrasts of social states, in its thirst for novelty, in its successful study of ver- bal uses, in its heterogeneity of phenomena, in its stu- pendous scientific preeminence, its humor, its absolute divorce from convention or precedent or authority, its wild and jubilant mutiny against conservatism and ponderous pretentions in opinion or in the individual, its realism, its good sense, the thousand and one new avenues to writing and thinking it has opened; in all these things the 1 9th century rises gigantically over all competition. This wide assemblage of topics, the effort at liber- ation from the narrow limits of a formal elegance in style, and from the restrictions of the rigorously im- posed categories of dignified subjects met with a deeper and more exasperated resistance in France than in England. It is true that in England as Mr. E. Gosse has shown, the construction of a polished style the imposition of a metrical rule had accompanied a [147] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE revolt against the luxuriance and profusion of Eliza- bethan composition. But it resulted as a pruning down and weeding out, a dilution and repression of that riotous power of language which accompanied an equally (at least in the earlier phases of this epoch) vigorous activity of thought. This discerning critic's characterization of the lit- erary situation in England is well worth considera- tion. He says "but this change of form was accom- panied by an equally extraordinary change of subject and of treatment. Here again, where all had been liberty, where no bounds of space or time, no regula- tions of any kind, had curbed the erratic inclinations of the poets, they suddenly and willfully shut them- selves up between walls of rule, and abandoned the wild woods for stately and mechanical circuits around the box-walks of a labyrinth. For the direct appeal to nature, and the naming of specific objects, they sub- stituted generalities and second-hand allusions. They no longer mentioned the gilly flower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising, the gentlemanly expression was Cynthia is lifting her silver horn. Women became nymphs, [148] FRENCH LITERATURE in this new phraseology, fruits became the treasures of Pomono, a horse became the impatient courser. "The classical poet must not only avoid the direct word, he must select one circumlocution and keep to it. His principle is restriction, ingenuity, and strait- laced elegance ; the romantic poet's principle is liberty even though it lead to license. The secret of the enigma that a whole generation meekly and even eagerly consented to clip its own wings and subside into servitude, is primarily to be found in the word we have just used, license. The people of the seventeenth century were weary of lib- erty, weary of the unmitigated rage of the chromat- ists, cloyed with the roses and the spices and the kisses of the lyrists, tired of being carried over the universe and up and down the avenues of history at the freak of every irresponsible rhymster. Literature had been set open to all the breezes of heaven by the bluster- ing and glittering Elizabethans, and in the hands of their less gifted successors it was fast declining into a mere cave of the Winds. The last efflorescence of the spirit of humanism had taken that strange form which it found in the hands of Lyly, Marini, and Gongora, and the brief vogue of this wonderful heresy, with its extravagance, affectation and preci- [149] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE osity, had but hastened on the certain and necessary reaction." In France no Elizabethan age preceded the chaste sometimes frigid, sometimes limpidly intellectual per- fection of French literature under Louis XIV. The mental process in France which at length crystallized the language into exact literary types and distilled, refined, and clarified its mere verbal form were con- genital and instinctive tendencies belonging to the cre- ators and possessors of a tongue, whose genius is exquisite accuracy of expression, with an aptitude for proportion, balance, regime and logic. As Albert so penetratingly says, in the classic French 'Toeuvre se deroule lentement, regulierement ; elle charme les yeux par l'harmonie de ses proportions, la dignite, la noblesse soutenue ; il s'en degage comme une placidite penetrante." This classicism became endeared to Frenchmen, because with all its artifice it also had lineal claims upon the origins of the language itself. The storm burst as the 1 9th century developed, and its immensity of ideas and knowledge overwhelmingly demanded entrance into literature over wider avenues, or indeed over and by any kind of path which would afford them access to the ears and minds of man. The stiff and starched, or the restrained and stately style [150] FRENCH LITERATURE found itself suddenly confronted with a babel of sounds, a horde of new propositions in literary form, a tumult of articulations, like the multitude of new things and feelings in which the nation, the race, the world, gloriously revelled. The mutilation, or disordering, or adulteration, or rejection of a style and treatment which had been developed at a period of French national greatness, which was looked upon as an epoch of literary su- premacy and which intrinsically possessed a unique interest, could not be readily borne with patience or self control by those who realized the extreme verbal perfection of the old masters. But the contention of these recalcitrants was hope- less. New subject matter had changed the condi- tions of literary production, and a response was inev- itable. The throb of new ideas expressed the in- fluence of new surroundings ; new pictures, new facts. In France it was met with reproaches, an offended pride, excitement and abuse, disdain and the shrug- ged shoulders of mournful contempt. In the theatre the appearance of the new roman- ticism evoked a physical rebuke. The new men affected libertinism, and disarray in dress, in person, in deportment. The forces clashed, and Dumas in his Memoires describes the fisticuffs and hisses, the [151] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE tumult of slang and mudslinging. The plays went on in a storm of attack and defence. Successful strategy introduced to the theatre the advocates of either side, and in a whirlwind of denunciation and of applause the bewildered actors stumbled through their roles, while these enthusiasts belabored each other with vocatives and cudgels. Gautier (1'Histoire du Romanticism) has drawn and crayoned the portraits of the little group of radi- cals which gathered around Victor Hugo, and of which he was a unit, and who all embodied the sen- timent and hopes of Romanticism. Eccentric, pas- sionate, nervous exponents of the "new era," delight- ing in social heresies, in personal trademarks, full of mysterious secrets and threading, in literary compo- sition, dark or twilight avenues of wonderment and melancholy and confusion. Touching and beautiful was the mutual devotion of these men whose emotions and thoughts twined about each other, and by some instinctive contraction of protection linked them all together in a sweet and diversified friendship. Certainly Theophile Gautier intended, upon that momentous evening when the Ernani of Victor Hugo was given at the theatre, amidst the clash and warfare of opposing tastes, to express the emancipation of the coming era by thoroughly outraging the timidity of [152] FRENCH LITERATURE the past. His red vest, grey trousers, black velvet stripe down the latter, black coat, grey overcoat with green satin borders, his collar ribbon, were flagrant and blinding insults upon customary decorum and it was a symbol of the new fury for literary liberty or libertinism. As Gautier himself says most relishingly, *'oui, nous regardames avec un sang-froid parfait tou- tes ces larves du passe et de la routine, tous ces enne- mis de 1'art, de 1'ideal, de la liberte et de la poesie, qui cherchaient de leurs debiles mains tremblotantes a tenir fermee la porte de 1'avenir; et nous sentions dans notre coeur un sauvage desir de lever leur scalp avec notre tomahawk pour en orner notre ceinture; mais a cette lutte, nous eussions courir le risque de cueillir moins de chevelures que de perruques; car si elle raillait 1'ecole moderne sur ses cheveux, 1'ecole classique en revanche etalait au balcon et a la galerie du Theatre Francaise une collection de tetes chauves pareille au chapelet de cranes de la deesse Dourga." The nineteenth century moved on in literature, as in science, in art, in music, in life, in social usage, bringing at each new step a fresh accession of imag- ery, of fancy, of illustration. It opened up again, be- fore eyes grown torpid in an artificial light, the radi- ance of nature; and with the new powers of vision, with new vistas and an inextricable profusion of the [153] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE wonderful fruits of thought suddenly or slowly en- tranced the awakened and fervently responsive minds of men. Berlioz in musical composition, Delacroix, Rous- seau, in painting, Barye in sculpture and all those poets from Chenier to Vigny and de Mussel whom Gautier has rehearsed in his "Les Progres de la Poe- sie Francaise" with such opulent and bewitching dic- tion, all extended the bounteous influence of the wider vision. And the modern period from 1830 on pro- duced each year new treasures of creative genius. The modern French novel and drama were born and Balzac, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Daudet, Maupassant, Coulevent, Ohnet, Zola, Tinseau, Merimee, Loti, Sardou, Flaubert, Scribe, Feuillet, Cherbuliez, Bour- get, gathered into the pages of French literature their wide and sometimes dangerous impressions of life, ex- pressed with a new and dazzling power of language, that makes all other writing pale, insipid, stuttering, and fugitive. That art of expression whose refinement the class- icists of the 1 7th century had so imperiously insisted on, reached in French writing of this new day a most intricate perfection. It became intellectually expres- sive and emotionally convincing. It seized the verbal and structural contents of this great tongue and under [154] FRENCH LITERATURE the inspiration of deeper insight, sympathetic feeling, and an immensely perfected technique of invention, made the pages burn and sparkle and sing with unac- customed linguistic beauties. The vocabularies of the modern French writers were clustered, grape laden vineyards, compared with the too carefully pruned hothouse growths of their predecessors ; rush- ing and broad rivers compared with confined and monotonously regulated streams, like surveyed canals, of the &e//e period of le grand monarque. Rabelais in the early emergence of French writing recalls the modern profusion, the eccentricity of his genius, a certain unappeasible madness for novelty and outrage made his work in its superficial naked exuberance suggestive of the richness of the moderns. Yet a very brief discrimination separates Rabelais from the moderns by a wide and impassible distance. Rabelais is crude, profuse, and disorderly, certainly with both humor and learning. The modern is won- derfully expressive and because his expression searches out the last mote or molecule of meaning in a situa- tion or a picture, or reproduces both with broad vital- izing touches of verbal color, he also is rich, but in the one case it is the richness of profligate and inar- tistic misuse of language, in the other the richness of a chaste though searching adequacy. [155] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE But again here we have the irreducible provocation of the subject matter determining the new school of writing in this modern day. In many ways the same subject matter existed before, but it had not been recognized, and then again in many ways the subject matter was new. Take Ossian as an example of the new romanti- cism. It carried the fevered aspirants for weird mel- ancholies and fantastic wildness off their feet. Trans- lated in French it appealed to the vague restlessness of youth, and seemed to fix the ardor of the soul upon images of spectral or nocturnal beauty. The moon, the bleak and wind swept moor, the moaning trees beaten by gusts of wind, and throwing their tortured branches to the sky in mimic supplication, the steep cliffs, the solitudes of the eagle's eyrie, the crashing horrors of the storm, the hissing cataracts of falling rain, blistering bolts of lightning and the rolling rever- berations of the thunder lost amid crags, over high- land passes, or in the tempest kissed pinnacles of the mountains ; these hair raising pictures with lovely and anaemic ladies in mental anguish over fallen lovers and melancholy heroes, the whole wrapped in a met- rical expression swinging and monotonously musical, fed the young imagination, and pinched the hearts of the young authors with a pleasant and picturesque [156] FRENCH LITERATURE sadness. The changed subject matter meant a lot of changed words and combinations of words, changed view, changed susceptibilities and a different litera- ture. This Ossian (the minstrel protagonist of Mac- pherson) was translated into French and forms one of the standards of revolt, a rallying cry, and a point of departure for new effects in art and books. The new age grew rapidly. It quickly passed be- yond the crude rhapsodies of Ossian, and became in- volved in a cycle of wonders, and discoveries in science, sociology, thought, art, music, geography; and literature found thrust upon it (for expression) a mass of sentiment and pictures and learning, which taxed even the inexhaustible adaptability of the French language to meet. The audiences before the writer were enormously extended both in numbers and in their spiritual insight. All things made the new authors, those at least that met the new requirements well, miracles of execution and penetration. As Sainte Beuve says in his superb study of Balzac, "au- jourd, hui par suite de 1'immense travail que 1'ecrivain s'impose et que la societe lui impose a courte eche- ance, par suite de la necessite ou il est de frapper vite et fort, il n'a pas le temps d'etre si platonique ni si delicat. La personne de 1'ecrivain, son organisation tout entiere s'engage et s'accuse ellememe jusque dans [157] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ses oeuvres ; il ne les ecrit pas seulement avec sa pure pensee, mais avec son sang et ses muscles. La physi- ologic et 1'hygiene d'un ecrivain sont devenues un des chapitres indispensables dans 1'analyse qu' on fait de son talent." Through Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Madame de Stael, de Maistre, Vigny, Victor Hugo, Ducis, La- mennais, Mercier, Beranger, de Mussel the passage was made to the multitudinous present. And criti- cism grew; grew as it never had before. It became wide, cognizant of the whole world. It abounded in reason; in delicate and keen appreciations, in correct estimates, in searching and uncompromising expres- sion, in enlightenment. Fetters of prejudice, of self assumption, of class slavery dropped from its wrists and the freed hands wrote large, plentifully, zeal- ously, with brain matter pushing off from each finger tip into the current of observation, argument, and con- clusion. The beautiful moderate chaste classicism, worth- iest in France, because there dressed in the raiment of a language which clung to its form with solicitous grace and elegance, fled before the enfranchised nine- teenth century; this century into whose life, as if lib- erated from the sealed regions of the sky, a thousand new interests, sympathies, knowledges, poured their [158] FRENCH LITERATURE floods of stimulating thought, was crowding upon human attention myriads of new things and forming for literature new societies, new commerces, new nations, new sciences, new religions. What wonder that a new literature arose or that the old shrank back into neglect. To quote again Sainte Beuve, "ce style (the mod- ern style typified in Balzac) si souvent chatouilleux et dissolvant, enerve, rose, et veine de toutes les tein- tes, ce style d'une corruption delicieuse, tout asiatique comme disaient nos maitres, plus brise par places et plus amolli que le corps d'un mime antique; * * * * il 1'a fin, subtil, courant, pittoresque, sans analogic aucune avec la tradition. Je me suis demande quel- quefois 1'effet que produirait un livre de M. de Bal- zac sur un honnete esprit, mourri jusqu, alors de la bonne prose francaise ordinaire dans toute sa fruga- lite, sur un esprit comme il n'y en a plus, forme a la lecture de Nicole, de Bourdaloue, a ce style simple, serieux et scrupuleux, qui va loin, comme disait La Bruyere ; un tel esprit en aurait le vertige pendant un mois." But Brunetiere has expended his sane and reveal- ing energies of critical analysis in defining the essence of this same romanticism which we have been notic- ing. He has traced and defined the development [159] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE within it of the new school of Naturalism, which again, from a painful or revolting realism, passed into the higher realms of feeling, wherein moral and social ideals and a deeply humane humanity also control the writer and his readers, while in all directions philosophy and psychology gave dignity and absorp- tion to the new studies of life. He tells us in the first place that romanticism, help- ful and invigorating as this movement was, is the en- trance of the Ego, the /, of the author into literature, an entrance, be it observed, not without aspirations and solemn vows and nobility of thought. Brune- tiere writes (La Literature Europeenne au XIX Siecle) ; "on a donne beaucoup de definitions du romantism, et on 1'a lui-mene caracterise tour a tour par les moins essentiels de ses traits. Mais, quels qu, ils soient et de quelques nom qu, on les nomme, ils se ramement tous a deux, qui sont: exterieurement, son opposition a 1'ideal classique; et interieurement, 1'emancipation du Moi de 1'ecrivain. Tandis que 1'ideal classique ne se concevait et ne se formulait qu, en fonction du public, 1'ideal romantique n'a de raison d'etre ou d'existence meme qu, en fonction ou plutot, et a vrai dire dans la manifestation de la personnalite du poete ou de recrivain. Aucun souci de plaire et encore moins d'instruire ; il ne s'agit que d'etre soi. [160] FRENCH LITERATURE Je ne suis rien, a dit quelque part Wordsworth, si je ne suis pas un maitre, un professeur, un institu- teur: a teacher; mais il cut dit encore aves plus de verite Si je ne suis pas moi, je ne suis rien. Ce qui importe, ce n'est ni la verite de ce que dit le poete, ni sa beaute, ni son utilite, mais son originalite; et 1'or- iginalite n'en est faite que de ce qu, il y met de lui- meme ; et si ce qu, il y met de lui ne ressemble a per- sonne, c'est alors vraiment qu, il est poete." And again he says more expressively "On n'ecrit point pour se faire lire, mais a cause d'un besoin qu, on eprouve de penser, ou de sentir tout haul; de se repandre ou de s'epancher; de prendre en ecrivant conscience de soi-meme, et d'apprendre aux autres hommes en combien de manieres nous differons d eux. This phase of literature was succeeded by an ob- jective phase, when, instead of interpreting nature in terms of the observer, the observer was expected to exactly reproduce nature, and to make its reproduc- tion so completely vraisemblable as to place before the reader at least in history, in the drama, and fiction, a deceptively real, speaking, and emotionally moving picture. Sympathy with life, broader pictorial fields of study and interest in every state of man soon broke [161] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE away the sullen or morbid and fantastic sheaths of personal feeling, and the romanticist in his more nar- row and foolish examples vanished. This second stage was naturalism, the expansion of literature to embrace all that the great world of phenomena offered to all the senses. This school perhaps at first harshly literal, despis- ing questions of morality, of artistic repression, be- came more highly cultivated, more intricately inter- ested in the beauty of sentiment and character and conduct, as well as in the beauty of an enthralling realism which had hitherto imprisoned it. The in- cessant progress of science introduced also into sys- tems of the philosophy of history, or art, or religion, or literature itself, views of the relationship of men to environment, to physical circumstances, new views on heredity, on evolution, and raised the level of lit- erary study, while it enormously extended the reaches of literary sympathy. Then came the period of those later novel writers and dramatists whose names we have above, rather carelessly, assembled with those of the earlier and strictly limited romanticists. Still romanticism as an interpretation of nature in the terms of the observer, as an emphasis of the I, remained long after its exact reflection in literature had disappeared. While many [162] FRENCH LITERATURE exact romanticists became later exponents of natural- ism, of realism, of the last stages of progressive analy- sis of men's minds and characters, their social state and its beauties and defects, still traces of the first assertions of individualism remained. And on the other hand many writers born under the very latest influences showed on their pages the inevitable re- sumption of the old romanticism. The last cosmopolitan phases of literature present us with the encouraging display of the authors diving into all the social, religious, artistic, scientific, political questions of the hour and race, and of the disappear- ance of hierarchical degrees in literature as the in- tellectual democracy of the new century seized all the avenues of learning and expression. It is of this phase that Brunnetiere in another place has spoken with such noble sincerity, "on ne saurait travailler trop activement, ni surtout trop continu- ment, a assoupir les haines de races a les endormir, a les aneantir, et, quand 1'extension du cosmopoli- tisme litteraire n'aboutirait quelque jour qu, a cet unique resultat, nous I'estimons des a present assez considerable. Ai-je besoin d'ajouter qu, aucun role ne saurait mieux convenir a la litterature que de se consacrer a cette tache? et, dans un monde qui ne [163] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE valait pas le notre, n'etait ce pas deja ce que voulaient dire les anciens quand ils disaient que beaucoup d'au- tres choses assurement sont humaines, mais que la litterature est plus humaine encore; humaniores litter- ae?" At every step in this evolution of French literature the subject matter changed. Not that the world be- fore the eyes of the classicist was any different thing from that one before the eyes of the romanticist, the naturalist, the realist, the psychologist, the cosmopol- itan, but because all these saw different things in it, selecting their own sort, the subject matter which the world offered them was also different to each, and a different kind of writing resulted. And this general effect of difference in the schools was reflected in the individual, for again, according to temperament and place, each individual would contemplate a different subject matter different, even though the mere phy- sical outlines, substance, and contents of the things looked at were the same. To one an order of events meant a subjective impression, to another a scene to be carefully described in words, to a third a glimpse into souls or epochs. For it was and is, as with the white light of the Sun and colored glasses. Each kind of colored glass abstracts its own color from the fused glory in the [164] FRENCH LITERATURE sunlight of all the rainbow, and the idealist, the naturalist, the romanticist took from the wonderful world about them, what their genius might return to the minds of men, in some form of desirable or attrac- tive or touching literature. Certainly the evolution of literature depends upon the interaction of the mind of man and the outside world of things moral, physical and social. But cer- tainly also that outside world the subject matter forms the basic part in that reaction and the final precipitate must be determined by its contents. The study of any literature would show this, the study of French literature, as the worthiest of study, makes it increasingly clear. Let us now advance to the unique purpose of this whole inquiry and see how far Sin, Ignorance and Misery enter into the composition of literary works and how indispensable they are to furnish us with the loftiest or the most entertaining products of human creative thought. [165] CHAPTER IV. THE SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE A world without a trace of sin would be a curi- ous and unfamiliar sight and one robbed, I take it, of a great deal of that interest which the present world most unmitigatedly affords. The disappearance of the police from the streets of New York alone would furnish the keenest disappointment. The sudden withdrawal of the courts and the lawyers, however advantageous to our pocket books, would empty the daily news papers of half of their most entertaining paragraphs. The placidity of a life without politic- ians and high finance would be contemplated with abhorrence by ninety out of one hundred of the pres- ent inhabitants of New York City. The substitution of an era of complete release from starvation, heart- ache, and rags, while doubtless saving us from many harrowing thoughts would deprive us of the pathos we need for the gratification of our sense of philan- thropy, and incidentally destroy the groundwork of a lot of pretty poetry, and dry the sources of our amiable tears. A world without war, infringement, complicity, intimidation, plots, revenges, envies, hatreds, deceptions, tricks, murders, recriminations, [166] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE and passion, while no doubt offering some agreeable and lucid reasons for continuing our publishing houses, would completely fail in supplying the neces- sary nutriment for plays and stories, not to speak of the broad and flowing retinue of novels that thereby would be most abruptly arrested. For be it observed that while most of us might be quite free of these crimes, misdemeanors and infirmi- ties, none of us are at all free of weaknesses that are themselves only the reduced and, so to speak, sublim- inal reflections of these worser states. Kill all wick- edness, estop all sinful thought, exterminate and expel all nefarious sympathies and projects, stab to death in its vitality, freedom and exuberant productivity the procreant centres of wrong-doing, and with that wholesale regeneration of the moral estate of the human, clarify the inner consciousness of even the most refined, tender and immaculate individuals, and at one stroke you would expel from the world the substance for the best fiction, and the receptivity of temperament and appreciation which, in authors, in- nocent of all crime, is essential for their self incorpo- ration in the feelings and motives, designs, and con- ducts of those who make history and story. There is a latent possibility of all manner of evil in most of us, though convention and cowardice, and very gen- [167] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE erally good living in a physical sense, keep it sup- pressed or unsuspected. It is this latent possibility that makes us sensitive and properly responsive to the flagitiousness of Richard of Gloster or Lucretia Borgia, I mean in a histrionic and literary way. But it does not end there, the innuendoes, pecca- dillos, little avarices, amusing envies, small mean- nesses, caricatures of imitation, and the whole tribe of venial sins would vanish in an atmosphere of sin- less brilliancy and excellence. And this would largely mean the disappearance of humour, the sud- den extinction of a cloud of petty and ludicrous themes for the play and the story. Then the innum- erable qualities of passion with the wonderful mix-: ture of every kind of shade of violence, and warring hopes and intentions attending its daily manifesta- tions would all go. Whether creditable or not, the libidinous charm of many novels which now are read with a keen and unruffled interest, especially in French, would go too. And what in the name of curiosity and speculation would the ordinary play- wright do when he finds himself in a world devoid of sin? His gasping incredulity as to the existence of any kind of perfection in human conduct might sud- denly find itself confronted with the fact, but with what a shock to his theatrical ambitions and designs ! [168] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE And indeed should we go higher in the literary interpretation of the value of sin as a book and sermon making power we should point to the pathos of the world in this regard, and endeavor to estimate the wonderful power of the eloquence which has been expended to recall men from the errors of their ways, and of those dissertations which, for no other reason than the existence of sin, are today counted, and justly, as the world's proudest examples of verbal beauty. The learning and majesty of Barrow, the weight, dignity and firm construction of Hooker, the melli- fluous urgency of Taylor, the passionate periods of Bossuet, the inerrant and penetrating sweetness o Newman, the skill and earnest force of Robertson, the nervous intensity of Rosmini, the varied manifold and indubitable splendor of the works of all men devoted to this especial mission of getting wickedness out of the world has arisen and continued because of Sin. "For the rest" to quote with the slightest alteration a notable sentence of Carlyle in his essay on Voltaire, "the question how Sin originated is doubtless a high question; resolvable enough, if we view only its surface; involved in sacred, silent, un- fathomable depths, if we investigate its interior meanings; which meanings, indeed, it may be, every [169] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE new age will develop to itself in a new manner and with new degrees of light; for the whole truth may be called infinite, and to man's eye discernible only in parts; but the question itself is nowise the ulti- mate one in this matter." Would it be possible to find in the vast circum- ference of human circumstances then, when we con- template the subtle and pervasive entrance of Sin into all the innumerable and labyrinthine crevices and corners of human affairs, its textural admixture in the substance of all living, to find anything which could be eliminated from the world with more dam- age to its literary output. With sin out of the world doubtless a certain glit- tering perfection and a very comfortable salubrity of social atmosphere would be distinctly noticeable, but where would the panting authors then find the stirring and woefully picturesque conflicts of Virtue with its arch enemy ; of which conflicts books from the 2d chapter of Genesis have been memorably crowded? The reasonableness of life disappears, with sin gone all gone and certainly its majesty and tenderness. Our merits lose their perspicacity and relief, their moral value and emotional appeal, because all their significance and beauty rests in the index they present of resistance, of struggle, of waver- [170] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ing success and defeat. Happiness of a very serene and ethereal hue might invite portraiture, but it would hardly furnish ardent souls with the fluent joy of perusing the Wandering Jew, or yield us the piercing pain and fascination of Romola and the Scarlet Letter. A world deprived of contrasts, a world flattened into an immaculate plane of universal propriety and individual beatitude would seem, of all spots, the least likely to give us a Shakespeare, a Scott, or a Cervantes. Our daily food is indigestible without salts, peppers, bitters and acids and no in- eptitude of composition could probably exceed the insipidity of the results of depicting and dramatising saintliness. The extirpation of endeavor to reach certain desirable ideals might mean a nerveless ecstacy of feeling, but how inconceivable would then be the generation of the Goethes, the Schillers, the Ruskins, the Carlyles, the Tennysons? The proof of this is visibly easy. Old age is per- haps in most well regulated and at least normally healthy lives, the period of least interest, and it is also the period the least harassed with sin. Its pla- cidity and remoteness of any occasions to commit murder, rape, burglary, falsehood, to feel envy, hatch plots, connive at deceptions, wage war, fall into fits of desperation, jealousy and ignominous turpitude, to [171] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE climb the stairs of renunciation, or to liberate the prisoners of Hope, absolutely erase it from all con- sideration as a literary epoch in men's existence. Old age, with its weakened sensibilities, its easy assent to circumstances, its debilitated temper, its remote calmness, its lucid freedom from desire, or vanity, its illustrious knowledge of a life-time expresses a kind of state of release from sin, ignorance and misery, granting it, as so often is the case, bodily repose and bodily functional equilibrium. And who expects literature from Old Age? At least literature of a notable sort? How under such circumstances or any circumstances of suggestion would tragedies and epics, (now already lost) and histories, threnodies and novels be expected from the old? The simile is deceptive and erroneous in large measure, but it helps us to see pretty clearly that irt a state heavenly or earthly where the motley and endless diversity of psychological phases produced by Sin, Ignorance, or Misery were absent, a very big portion of great literature must be absent also. And it is still the subject matter that is absent. Even if very good poetry and very good writing were conceivable in an ideal existence it would still fail in the note of discontent, of yearning, or wonder- ment, of aweful hope, in the vague subconscious grief [172] and wondering regret and haunting sadness that makes human writing, even when pleasurable and gay, sweet and fascinating. Indeed it might be such absolutely good writing as to be good for nothing. I cannot, in a broad sense, regret that we have poor or even dull writing, for does it not allow the cleverer ones, the Macaulays, the Carlyles, the Chestertons, the Ripleys, new chances to be more mirthful and irresistible? And yet their eager satire, their sun- dering blows of denunciation or ridicule, their split- ting volleys of wit and comic correction are them- selves light, so to speak, vaporous forms of sin, but yet how good and delectable, how incommunicable and valuable! Goodness need not be stupid, but how (some- times) uninteresting! I am a good man myself, but of all men the most blinking and owl-like. And yet I have this advantage; sin is in my veins, in my humour, in my speech, in my environment, and thereby I am tolerably well saved from being an utter mental and social blank. The more one thinks of it, the deeper we search after the rivulous main- springs and secondary and tertiary or quarternary or centenary springs of literary motive and execution, the more conclusively we note how die imperfection of our state makes the perfection of our literature, how [173] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE from subject matter to the last attenuation of our response to our forlorn ignorance, our dejection, or our impiety and discontent, the most pronounced and the most fugitive excellence and beauties of what we write (if we are speaking of essential literature) seems to spring from our Sin, Ignorance, and Misery. Shall we be more exact? Shall we hunt this matter out by the baneful but convincing fashion of scrutiny and analysis, mathematical balancing and tabulation? We set out on this book for that pur- pose, and a thesis proved, even if scowled at and neglected, is better than a non-sequitur admired, and hastily and universally purchased. It would be more pleasant if we were so gifted in allusion and anec- dote, simile and modern instances, to demonstrate our theme more discursively and lure the reader, if he still remains at these pages, to a tardy assent by a humorous wheedling of his judgment. But the matter contains food for thought; and a little academic logic, evidence and prose brings it forward in a rather startling guise, and while we may lose his smiles we shall feel repayed if we awaken the fears of our reader. Repayed if we jolt him into the surprised attitude of being thankful after all that there are murders and burglaries and slaughters, and poisonings and general immorality, multitudinous [174] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE back-sliding, back biting, assassinations, wars, op- pression, tyranny, larcenies, arson, corruption, lieing, deceits, avarice, bombast, inflation, detraction, hate, malevolence, with all lesser villainies, which, if they be not actually with us (and the most credulous optimism would not doubt a few still stick to us) are at least so near at hand, in time, that our authors have neither forgotten them, nor lost their admirable appreciation of their literary usefulness. Let us see to what extent we can inveigle the grace-saying and newspaper-reading Christian to rejoice over his muffin and egg-coffee that the sinner is yet extant, rejoice even that in himself he (the sinner) has a reasonable claim to recognition. Not indeed as it obviously appears, that the monopoly of existence by sin would be propitious to Literature^ It is the struggle, the pulling hither and thither, the tug to and fro, the fluctuating ebb and flow, between Sinner and Saint that furnishes the incessant provo- cation of speech and incident. But the emphasis however is not to be laid on Goodness as a literary tonic, for that increases, pre- vailingly grows stronger, so that in Heaven, or, in the approaching earthly millenium (already not in- distinguishable) Goodness, alone regnant, there will be no reaction, and our virtues robbed of their right- [175] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ecus indignation, their militant and choleric deter- mination, their heroisms of warfare and daring, their sensible and pleasing admixture of genuine and wicked rage, will become chlorinated into colorless and motionless moral appurtenances, and literature consist of essays on finance, adventure, and science; and poems, descriptive ejaculations of happiness. There may be room for Courage even in Heaven^ and for Love, and these will no doubt help literary zeal, but in a sinless world or a sinless heaven, some- how, it seems as if both Courage and Love would assume a variable and decadent form, to what we recognize in both categories here at present, or in the past. The prospect in all ways seems dismal. The book-lover is having his best time now, but let us begin our formal inquiry. We venture to say, and our claim cannot easily be made exorbi- tant, that without Sin the best Drama, History, some of the best Poetry, much of the best Essay writing, and almost all Fiction or what we now so consider, would not have been produced, would not have been possible. A word as to Sin. We are not to be stultified by any narrow interpretation of that quality. We mean everything that an industrious analysis can see in or get out of it. Not only its terrific manifestations but [176] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE those subtleties of imperfection which made Sancho Panza, rejoice over the embarrassment of his master, or Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch and Maria yield to unstinted mirth at the affectations of Malvolio, the fugitive insolence of Fallstaff, and the illnatured even if seasonable sarcasm of Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bebe, the irresolute depravity of Mr. Tupman, or the droll knavery of Jingle, nor except indeed, those postures of virulent derision which gave us the Dunciad, or English Bards and Scotch Re- viewers. For what after all is Sin? Imperfection; or what we can call imperfection if we have regard to an abso- lute ideal of conduct. Can it not grade from murder by our hands or in our hearts, to the whisper of scan- dal or the jocular invention of a practical joke. The categories of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery are much mixed up in actual life, and their blended expressions, in the web and woof of every day affairs, and more mightily in those affairs that are not at all daily oc- currences, are difficult, accurately, to gauge. Ignor- ance and Misery greatly, as we all know, accentuate and aggravate Sin, and often lend to it a grotesque reasonableness, often horribly distend and confuse its lineaments, often form the motives or auxiliary incentives for its worse and most sensual pictures; [177] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE as Caliban, and Thersites, and Cyclops, Cousin Bette, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Rogue Rider- hood. But in the chapters which follow we shall try to keep separate these elements in the substance of Literature recognizing instinctively how much, how often, how indefinitely and infinitely they react on each other, producing all sorts of complications, in- verted and topsy turvy medleys of circumstances, out of which imagination, fancy, verbal cleverness, and invention produce the wide, crowded, and uninter- rupted currents of publications which we call liter- ature. But not only does Ignorance and Misery modify Sin, but temperament, mind, individual aptitude, taste and judgment, so that here again appears a long train of literary consequences. As Montaigne says in his chapter on Drunkenness (De 1'Yvrognerie) 'Tesprit a plus de part ailleurs; et il y a des vices qui ont ie ne sc,ais quoy de genereux, s'il le fault ainsi dire; il y en a ou la science se mesle, la diligence, la vaillance, la prudence, 1'adresse et la finesse." Montaigne has himself pointed out how our vir- tues gain their real beauty from the obstacles or dis- couragements they undergo. He says in his Essay on Cruelty, "II me semble que la vertu est chose aul- [178] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE tre, et plus noble, que les inclinations a la bonte qui naissent en nous. Les ames reglees d'elles mesmes et bien nees, elles suyvent mesme train, et represent- ent, en leurs actions, mesme visage que les vertueuses : mais la vertu sonne ie ne s^ais quoy de plus grand et de plus actif que de se laisser, par une heureuse com- plexion, doulcement et paisiblement conduire a la suitte de la raison. Celuy qui, d'une doulceur et facilite naturelle, mepriseroit les offenses receues, feroit chose tresbelle et digne de louange ; mais celuy qui, picque et oultre iusques au vif d'une offense, s' armeroit des armes de la raison centre ce furieux appetit de vengeance, et, aprez un grand conflict, s'en rendroit enfin maistre, feroit sans double beau- coup plus. Celuy la feroit bien; et cettuy cy, ver- tueusement; 1'une action se pourroit dire bonte; 1'aultre, vertu; car il semble que le nom de la vertu presuppose de la difficulte et du contraste, et qu, elle ne peult s'exercer sans partie. C'est a 1'adventure pour quoy nous nommons Dieu, bon, fort, et liberal, et iuste, mais nous ne le nommons pas vertueux; ses operations sont toutes naifves et sans effort." And all this happens because, as Spenser says, "all evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to con- ditions." We are in a world of difficulties, and one of the chief difficulties is this very Sin, which, with a [179] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE psychological value far surpassing anything Spenser would assign to it, keeps up an incessant display of moral marvels, subtleties and jokes. Emotions cause our sin. What are these emotions? That is not what is their nature but their aspects for we, in this inquiry, have no interest in them, except as Substance for literature. Dr. McCosh has used a convenient system for the classification of the emotions as First, single emotions, then under single emotions, those directed to Inanimate, and those directed to Animate objects. In the former category we observe the sentiment of beauty the Aesthetic and the in- stinct of the Ludicrous. In the latter we have Retro- spective, (back-looking), and Immediate (present) and Prospective, (forward-looking) emotions. The feelings under these headings which put on allowing the broad interpretation we assign to Sin the hue of imperfection, are, or can be tabulated in the following manner : Retrospective. Self Satisfaction, or Regret. Righteousness, Self Esteem. Sufficiency. " Adulation. Bitterness. Chagrin. [180] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Anger, Irritation, Temper, Indignation, Rage, Wrath, Malignancy, Resentment, Vengeance, Vin- dictiveness. Immediate. Discontent, Bad Humour, Pride, Self-Conceit, Vanity, Haughtiness, Contempt, Disdain, Scorn, Sneering, Disgust, Resistance, Repining, Peevish- ness, Sourness, Hardness of Heart, Envy, Suspicion, Jealousy. Prospective. Apprehension, Fear, Shrinking, Greed, Glut- tony, (these latter two, if they be emotions, breeding covetousness, meanness, penuriousness, stinginess, miserliness, and the entertaining but slovenly vices of niggardly self seeking, &c.) and also profligacy, self indulgence, waste, luxury; while from Fear, I take it, we may derive those fruitful sources of literary activ- ity in fawning, obsequiousness, flattery, deceit, lieing ; though some of this springs from Greed. And then amongst these Prospective emotions may be inserted the varied forms and degrees of animal passion, which, of all things, seems most helpful to the accumulation of incidents and predicaments for the novelist, the dramatist, and the poet. Now it is obvious that these emotions offer an ac- tive (dynamic or kinetic) and a passive (static) side; [181] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE that we may contemplate rage simply as a state, and also as an act, in murder, violence, outrage or assault, pride as a condition and as an offensive exhibition of insulting conduct; discontent as an attitude and as an exhibition of sighs, groans, recriminations, and tears ; suspicion as a frame of mind, and as the display of devices, surveillance, innuendoes, and plots, for the detection of the suspected person, and so on and so on. Regarding then this assemblage of emotions, and the fruitful consequences of their activity, under a thousand changing conditions of time, place, and indi- vidual character, noting also how they may excite and involve each other, so that an act of Sin engages a group of related emotions, and plunges its subject into a diversified series of motions, all contributing something to a dramatic denouement or at the least a pleasing problem for analysis, and further recalling the contrasted accidents of age, climate, environment, dress, associations, how unavailing, almost, seems any attempt to imagine a virile and picturesque literature, in its essential elements, deprived of this stimulating assortment of minor and great sins. Let it also be apologetically urged that we mean that this spectacle of sin mingles abundantly and profusely with a world of goodness, and infinitely and inexhaustively fur- nishes interest, excitement, amusement, pleasure, de- [182] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE light, tonicity, and wonder, as invention and genius weave from it the marvellous radiant and sombre tapestries of epic and story, and it strews the pathway of history with romance, pictures, character, conflict; is indeed history itself. We will look at the measure of all this in History, Drama, Poetry, and Fiction. History began in an act of Sin if the tale of Adam and Eve can now count for something, and almost up to the nineteenth century History has largely con- sisted of wars which are very large and copious com- plications of Sin. Altera jam teritur bellis civilibus aetas, Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit; Quam neque finitimi valuerunt perdere Marsi, Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenae manus, Aemula nee virtus Capuae, nee Spartacus acer, Novisque rebus infidelis Allobrox, Nee fera coerulea domuit Germania pube, Parentibus que abominatus Hannibal, Impia perdemus devoti sanguinis aetas, Ferisque rursus occupabitur solum. Thus sung Horace at the beginning of our Chris- tion era and ever since and, before, the centuries have been punctuated with these recurrent deluges of blood and suffering, many of them so densely crowded with carnage that their History becomes little else than [183] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE a chronicle of human combat, waged too with all the most shocking accompaniments of deliberate cruelty which as Goldwin Smith has said, "is the worst, the most unpardonable of vices." But in the main what interest has war imparted to History! Waged as it generally has been for the gratification of ambition, greed, rapacity, abnormal and monstrous love of power, the satisfaction of ven- geance, the mad and dissolute egotism of kings and princes, the hideous vindictiveness of religious big- otry, the stifling calls of vanity, yet how wonderfully it brings life and tumultuous accident into the pages of the historian. Has not Macaulay well summarized the matter when he describes the narration of Hero- ditus, the Father of History? "the chronicler had now to tell the story of that great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political supremacy a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most marvelous and the most touching in the annals of the human race, a story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is pathetic and animating ; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth and despotic power with the mightier miracles of wisdomr of virtue and of courage." Had not the Sin of a reckless, a stupid, an insatiate vanity reigned in the heart of Xerxes, the glories and the scenes of [184] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE a Thermopilae, a Marathon, a Salamis, would never have enlivened the pages of literature. And what justifies the splendid praise of Thucy- dides by Macaulay, what has given fervor, vividness, and charm, to his narrative, but the subject matter of a war? A war between the Grecian states of Athens and Sparta conceived in jealousy and carried on with crime and desolating violence? The absorbing interest of the beginnings of states rests in aggression, in racial collision, in the personal domination of men whose chief articles of conduct are based on anything else than the principles of Chris- tian ethics. And in those brilliant pages of history, on which literary skill and intellectual analysis spend their finest gifts, where the power of epithet and the force of description match the bewildering progress of events, it is the conquerors, the world's heroes, the captains of genius, who furnish the occasion for the entertainment and the mind's delight. Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Atilla, Charlemagne, William, Henry the 5th, the Duke of Palermo, Frederick, Marlborough, Napoleon, with the innumerable host of lesser commanders in the conversion of kingdoms, in the overthrow of dynasties, in the setting up and the pulling down of thrones who have evoked the capabilities of art to describe their careers. [185] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Milite nam tuo Drusus Genaunos, implacidum genus, Brennosque veloces, et arces Alpibus impositas tremendis, Dejecit acer plus vice simplici, Major Neronum mox grave proelium Commisit, immanesque Rhaetos Auspiciis pepulit secundis; Spectandus, in certamine Martio, Devota morti pectora liberae Quantis fatigaret minis, Indomitas prope qualis undas Exercet Auster, Pleiadum choro Scindente nubes, impiger hostium. Vexare turmas, et frementem Mittere equum medios per ignes. That Historical Progress which Goldwin Smith has spent so much time and eloquence, research and magnanimous zeal to defend, expound and establish is the panorama of a constant struggle, much of it in literal war, in sanguinary revolt and oppression, in alternating victory and defeat of rival principles, and nowhere, at no time, exempt from the dominating or discernible stains of Sin, indeed absolutely the result of that very thing. Would a community or communi- ties of sinless impeccable industrious workmen or mer- [186] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE chantmen make of history a literary fabric? Let them be governed by self respecting and beneficent rulers, or let them govern themselves with discretion, rigid rectitude, unsullied principles and their succes- sive generations succeed each other in a persistent de- sire and achievement to illustrate goodness, and dis- tribute justice, what likelihood that the annals of such an aggregate would require the noblest powers of language to detail their sumptuary precision, or their correct deportment? Granting them art, and science, and adventure, would the historian find involved in their lives the stimulating oscillations of events, and the emphatic relief of personalities which fiH the pages of a Clar- endon or a Machievelli? Heaven or a perfect state of society would be unproductive of a Robertson, Froude, or a Guizot. The history of the Quakers would never rival as a literary recreation the annals of Dahomey. The quiet and decorous communities with the benignancy of virtue bodily present in their acts and doings would hardly invite the scrutiny of Livy or Tacitus. I have signified war as a typical influence in giving literary-subject-matter in History, because it is so prevalent, and fills the pages of history with such an abundance of tremendous tableaux of startling [187] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE changes, of furious and accentuated movements, and because it quite usually embodies a great part or all of those emotions which make us sinful. But it requires but a moment's inspection of the varied story of man's life upon this fantastic stage of affairs, from the first murder of Abel to the last con- nivance of rapacity in the conscienceless nations of Europe for the spoils of China's division and plunder, to feel impressed with the remorseless presence of Sin in all the chapters of that long tale. And the longer such an inspection lasts, the more carefully the gazer or reader follows the tortuous infusion of every sort of depravity, vice, cruelty, excess, madness, ambition, mendacity, hypocrisy, and bestiality, the more con- vincing seems the inference that the most prolific in- vention could not create a storehouse of materials, whose relation invited more adroitness, more elo- quence, which offered more stirring episodes or touched the artistic mind with a more indelible fasci- nation of interest. And were the hypothetical subject of this inspec- tion, someone, let us presume or imagine, endowed with a keen susceptibility to the availability of its lightest detail for literary treatment, must he not, upon reflection on the contrasted hopelessness of a record of undeviating righteousness to invite any response [188] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE from inquisitive minds; conclude that History for its consummate beauty, and the possession of its multi- tudinous galleries of portraiture and characterization, its dramatic power and progress, its literary perfection must have poured into it the swirling and turbid cur- rents of Man's Sinfulness. Such an observer might use the words, with an ulterior sense, that Byron puts in the mouth of Dante: From out the mass of never-dying ill, The Plague, the Prince, the Stranger, and the Sword, Vials of wrath but emptied to refill And flow again, I cannot all record That crowds on my prophetic eye : the earth And ocean written o'er would not afford Space for the annal, yet it shall go forth ; Yes all, though not by human pen is graven, There where the farthest suns and stars have birth Spread like a banner at the gate of heaven, The bloody scroll of (earth's) millenial wrongs Waves, and the echo of its groans is driven Athwart the sound of archangelic songs. It is not likely that the stately glowing and fervid pages of Motley would have preserved their verbal elevation and splendor if the same mind that wrote them had been compelled to give the world the dull [189] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE but generally homogeneously moral and happy story of the Dutch burgers on Manhattan Island. The History of the New World in its modern period, could scarcely yield the opportunities which the Old World of Europe offers to literary adventure, and ex- ploits; because in Europe the barbarism and worth- lessness of human nature are so notable and persist- ent, its vehemence of wickedness, its subtlety of crime, its ferocity of greed, its false governments with their sinful and sinning agents and agencies, their direct encouragement of perverted emotions, or downright diabolism, the fundamental falsity of all judgment has made, in a measure still keeps, Europe for the talent and the purposes of literature. The New World can never produce History of exceptional literary interest because the New World is good. Its best results lie in those years when European wickedness invaded, devastated, and ruled it, when the Spaniards conquered Mexico and Peru, when it fought for its liberation, and in the eras of its own slow emergence from cruelty, or bigotry or shame or political turpitude, a heritage from Europe. The History of the Old World today in its better condition, its gradual unfolding reasonableness and greater kindliness and sympathy and love of man, with some increase in good behavior will never again [190] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE excite the genius of History to produce works as Gibbons, Hume, Michelet, Allison, Ranke, Sim- monds, Thirwall, have left us. As Russia loses its inhumaneness and inhumanity, the pages of Sienkie- wicz in the With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, will escape the danger forever of a rival who might wrest from them their immense and absorbing interest. Pro- gressive betterment over the whole world would rather seriously threaten the literary excellence of History. History of course remains, but a recountal of the successive steps in the evolution of a sky-scraper, or of the benign influence of a Mortgage Tax, will not compete successively in the circulating libraries with a narrative of the insolent butcheries of a Commodus, the paintings of the fopperies of Louis the XIV, or the ludicrous vanities of Frederic the Great, the mad- ness of Peter the Great, or the corrupt inclinations of Catherine of Russia. The very fact that society approaches, in this dem- ocratic day a more ideal form, a more virtuous or just relation of men to men, eliminates a group of con- spicuous sins, in the vagaries, extravagances, lusts and egotisms of individual characters, and, by just so much elimination, robs History of its piquancy and poignancy, its literary availability. It substitutes the [191] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE mass for the unit, and the mind contemplates wide sections of civic virtue instead of individual crime. This is as it should be, but the obvious conclusion remains that with the amelioration of manners, the subjection of lawless license, the suppression of splen- did incorrigible and undaunted Vice, of the gratifica- tion of tyranny, of the domination of prejudice, the Literature of History loses color, vivacity and great- ness, becomes generally less conspicuously adapted for the display of literary gifts. The history of the people in their avocations and pleasures, customs, and in- dustries, the pleasing picture of old times when mod- ern facilities were unthought of, and modern knowl- edge unsuspected, do indeed afford literary material. Macaulay, to whom the honor is justly due of hav- ing turned the glass of history from princes and mon- archs diplomats and barons, to the every day occu- pations of the people has said: "it will be my en- deavor to relate the history of the people as well as the history of the government, to trace the progress of useful and ornamental arts, to describe the rise of religious sects, and the changes of literary taste, to portray the manners of successive generations, and not to pass by with neglect even the revolutions which have taken place in dress, furniture, repasts and pub- lic amusements. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach [192] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE of having descended below the dignity of history, if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors." And McMaster, no less fascinating in his History of the American People begins that most entertaining narrative with these inviting sentences: "yet the his- tory of the people shall be the chief theme. At every stage of the splendid progress which separates the America of Washington and Adams from the Amer- ica in which we live, it shall be my purpose to describe the dress, the occupations, the amusements, the liter- ary canons of the times ; to note the changes of man- ners and morals; to trace the growth of that humane spirit which abolished punishment for debt, which reformed the discipline of prisons and of jails, and which has, in our own time, destroyed slavery and lessened the miseries of dumb brutes. Nor shall it be less my aim to recount the manifold improvements which, in a thousand ways, have multiplied the con- veniences of life and ministered to the happiness of our race; to describe the rise and progress of that long series of mechanical inventions and discoveries which is now the admiration of the world, and our just pride and boast; to tell how, under the benign influence of liberty and peace, there sprang up, in the course of [193] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE a single century, a prosperity unparalleled in the an- nals of human affairs ; how, from a state of great pov- erty and feebleness, our country grew rapidly to one of opulence and power ; how her agriculture and her manufacture flourished together; how, by a wise sys- tem of free education and a free press, knowledge was disseminated, and the arts and sciences advanced; how the ingenuity of her people became fruitful of wonders far more astonishing than any of which the alchemists had ever dreamed." Yet after all both Macaulay and McMaster would have found that the sinews of their story were absent, the dramatic power and interest of their pages van- ished if the temper, collisions, short sightedness, viru- lence, ambition, sins and vices, of public characters, the pressure of popular delusions, the knavery of indi- viduals and associations had not entered the currents of their histories, and forced from them appreciation and analysis, comment, description, criticism, and praise. The motor force of events seem somehow to proceed from the imperfections of men, whether they are sins or ignorances, or from their sufferings, and without events, History as a literary phenomenon would soon decline into a colorless and vapid tale. The inquiry of Lucan in the very first lines of his [194] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Civil War are pertinent to all stages of History, which fasten and fascinate the ears and eyes of men : Jamque irae patuere deum, manifestaque belli Signa dedit mundus : legesque, et foedera rerum, Praescia monstrifero vertit natura tumultu, Indixitque nefas, cur hanc tibi rector Olympi Sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam, Noscant Venturas ut dira per omina clades? At this point it is desirable to consider that the sins of mere brutishness are not as diversified or in any way as interesting as those of refinement and intellect, and of the higher range of cultivated and gifted na- tures, and never furnish the historian or the romancer with the finer grades of literary stuff. The cruelty of Verres versa/us que sit, sine ulla, non modo religione, verum etiam dissimulatione, in omni genere furandi atque praedandi, is more interesting, and certainly less excusable than the brutality of a street loafer, and the turpitude of Cataline, furentem audacia, scelus anhelantem, pestem patriae nefarie molientem, more serviceable for literary workmanship (witness Cicero's orations) than the iniquities of a McKane, boss of Coney Island, admirably as Edward M. Shepard has used the latter for purposes of consummate descrip- tion and characterization. [195] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are cleped All by the name of dogs : the valued file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The house keeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous nature Hath in him closed, whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike ; and so of men. Sins of men in History administer to our literary pleasure, because of picturesque accompaniments, because they are of psychological interest, (see the curious and learned speculations of S. Baring Gould on the congenital insanity of the Caesars) because they fascinate us by a certain terror, a weird semb- lance in our own souls or understanding and appreci- ation, a sensational delight in monstrous things, a trembling sense of expurgation, guilt and sympathy, the power of subjugating immensity, because of their sinister significance, because of their wide inalienable concordance with the nature of things, because they start a retinue of stirring events, and tumultuously throw into the arena of the world the sharp passion- ate conflict of good and evil. This indeed is the last and most pervasive and real quality of their effective- ness as literary agents. [196] SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE It is the picture of improvement, of rising against the massed bodies of selfishness, error, lunacy, stub- bornness, apathy, tyranny, cruelty, priggishness and lust, the apparent predetermination that makes of men's willfulness or ambition, serviceable instruments in the forward motion of the world that charms us. For in every sense what gives dramatic force to the History of this Earth, but the ingrained and rooted deviltry of things? The mystery of its redemption, the pathos of its suffering, the intensity of that earnest- ness which in noble souls breeds that desperate revolt against ruling conditions, and perpetually engages in new campaigns for restoration and purity; all these aspects rise from the phenomenon of Sin, make His- tory literary, and produce engrossing and masterly studies, analyses, and volumes of immortal prose. [197] CHAPTER V. THE SIN SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE IN DRAMA AND POETRY Browning puts into the mouth of Paracelsus these singular and damning words : Festus, were your nature fit To be defiled, your eyes the eyes to ache At gangrene-blotches, eating poison-blains, The ulcerous barky scurf of leprosy Which finds a man, and leaves a hideous thing That cannot but be mended by hell fire, I would lay bare to you the human heart Which God cursed long ago, and devils make since Their pet nest and their never-tiring home. We will admit the words are over-wrought, the outpourings of a frenzied and disappointed nature, also saved from parched and feeble judgments by its resolute and frantic frankness, its insight. These are memorable words because they exaggerate and ex- aggeration is a kind of sin because they draw out the margins of a fact until it becomes a spectre, a ter- ror and by this procedure of caricature make us think more closely on the truth they burlesque. The words of Paracelsus may seem like "wild and [198] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY whirling" words, but they emphasize the matter clearly enough ; that in the human heart, with its wide envisagement of irregular and monstrous feelings we may expect to find the motives for stirring deeds. Cut out from the stock in trade of the dramatist the emotions that disturb society, mar conjugal ties, or bliss, hasten revolutions, instigate murder and arson, those that blind the eyes with jealousy, distort the features or sear the heart with grief, those that feed envy with rapine, and assuage discontent with ven- geance, those that cheat the heart with temptations or freeze the mind with suicide; destroy all these, banish them, involve them in a psychological anni- hilation so profound and extensive that at that very moment, Consideration like an angel came, And whipp'd the offending Adam out of us Leaving our bodies as a paradise, T'envelope and contain celestial spirits. Do this and how could the entranced mind follow the fatality that dethroned Caesar, or crazed Othello, blinded Macbeth, or heaped on Timon the contumely of the world? Of course these plays are written. They can never be rewritten but can the mind con- ceive such masterpieces arising in a world of spir- itual beauty, individual perfection, social benignity, [199] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE animal consecration; in a world upon whose altars burns nothing less pure than the oil of humility and the incense of adoration? Emerson says, "a man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to in- habit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg pre-suppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air and appear stupid." This describes the dramatist. Put him in a world without contacts and responses in evil or imperfect natures, without the myriad phased conditions of weak or wicked action, without the splendors of mag- nificent crime, or its sordidness, without the retinue of disasters, eruptions, desolations, and remorse, that follows in its train, without passion, excess, intemper- ance, and subterfuge, and he would shrink into a pusillanimous versifier, a rural mimic, a Thesbian piper, a decorous emitter of flaccid and sleepy dia- logue, his plays would be motionless, his plots vacuity, his denouements and climaxes normal coincidences with a certain time on the dial of a clock. Look at the drama in all its large and typical developments, in [200] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY all its epochs of literary immensity, intensity, and greatness. The plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, .the deca- dent Euripides, and the mad burlesquer Aristophanes are strenuous with power, when they have it, because they are strenuous with sin. The author can speak in this matter at second hand only. His Greek has the slenderest growth and barely suffices to dimly illum- inate with meaning the verses of Homer. But John Addington Symonds, amongst other scholars less ade- quately gifted with poetic insight, has devoted pages of eloquent English, to an analysis and review of the wonderful creations of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and with marvelous sympathy rendered in- telligible, in a manner, the extravagance of Aristo- phanes. Symonds points out for us, in his powerful and expressive way, the determinative features of these plays and some sort of Sin of course in conjunction with much Misery and Ignorance underlies their literary splendor, furnishes the impulses of their move- ment, and inflames, or inspires (as you please), their terrific and portentous meanings. He says Aeschy- lus "apprehended immaterial and elemental forces as lusts, ambitions and audacities of soul as though they were substantial entities, and gave them shape [201] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE and form." The imposing and grand outlines of Clytemnestra's wicked resoluteness are described for us as Aeschylus has depicted them in the drama of Agamemnon. The delineator thus teaches to us her character and temperament, "the solidity of Clytemnestra's charac- ter is impressed upon us with a force and a reality of presentation that have never been surpassed. She maintains the same aplomb, the same cold glittering energy of speech, the same presence of mind and unswerving firmness of nerve, whether she bandies words of bitter irony with the Chorus, or ceremon- iously receives the King, or curls the lip of scorn at Cassandra, or defies the Argives after Agamemnon's (whom she murders) death. She loves power and despises show. When the deed is done, and fair words are no longer needed, her hypocrisy is cast aside. At the same time she defends herself with a moral impudence which is only equalled by her intel- lectual skill, and rises at last to the sublimity of arro- gance when she asserts her right to be regarded as the incarnate demon of the house. Her sin feeds and nourishes her nature, instead of starving and palsy- ing it ; her soul grows fat and prospers, nor does she know what conscience means. " This whole play, as those of Aeschylus, deal with [202] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY the stages of retributive justice, as a Fate or Destiny a Nemesis, working out some supreme plan of super- natural recompense, and brought into play by the errors, the contumacy, the Sin, of men, or of gods. The splendid proportions of the sinful deeds of men in Aeschylus gives a majesty and unapproachable terror and agony to the drama, and communicates a glory and inspiring power to the diction. The very conflict of human motives and desires and the un- swerving ends of justice accumulate a storm of emo- tions, which strain the limits of poetic power to give them utterance, and thus the motive force of Sin supplies what Goodness, or Placidity, or Excel- lence, or Orderliness, or Innocence, could never sup- ply the rushing torrents of expression which give Aeschylus his colossal place amongst poets, is the source of his literary fame. His titanic imagination carries him still further. He climbs the skies and assails the recesses of the Ethics of the Skies. He shows us Prometheus strug- gling against the irrevocable selfishness of Zeus him- self thus entangled in the widespread meshes of Sin that like a universal web throws its skeins of disorder over stars and earths mutinous to fulfill a noble en- thusiasm, and lift men high enough to resist the un- governable rapacity of the Heavens. [203] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Prometheus "found humanity abject and forsaken by the gods. Zeus, who had recently seized upon the empire of the universe, designed to extirpate men from the world, and to create a new race after his own heart. Prometheus took pity upon them, saved them from destruction, gifted them with fire, the mother of all arts, taught them carpentry and hus- bandry, revealed to them the stars, whereby they knew the order of the seasons and recurrences of crops, instructed them in letters, showed them how to tame the horse and ox, and how to plow the sea with ships, then taught them medicine and the cure of wounds, then divination and the sacrifice of victims to propitiate the gods, and lastly how to smelt the ore contained within the bowels of the earth. All these good things Prometheus gave to men." However interpreted for it is a dismaying paradox, the drama furnishes the author with a spectacle of disorder, of revolt, of cruelty, of recrimination, mingled, as turpitude and conflict always must be, with Misery and Ignorance, and thus, in the tumult and preordained antagonism of Obedience and Dis- obedience, warring on a scale of mythic immensity, he finds the impulses to great creative writing. Can anything be truer? In the Triology of the Oresteia "the masterpiece [204] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY of Aeschylus as a dramatic poet" Aeschylus we are told "has plucked the last fruit upon the Upas-tree of crime which flourished in the palace of Mycenae." Here are assembled the crimes of Agamemnon, of Clytemnestra, of Aegisthus, the assault of the Furies upon Orestes, the murder of Cassandra; doom and punishment, the thickened horrors of remorseless Des- tiny, gather in a darkness that is only relieved by the forceful perfection of the poet's verse. With what muscular skill of words Symonds paints it! "As the Chorus cries, the rain of blood, that hitherto has fallen drop by drop, descends in torrents on the house of Atreus ; but the end is not yet. The whole tragedy becomes yet more sinister when we regard it as the prelude to ensuing tragedies, as the overture to fresh symphonies and similar catastro- phes. W ave after Wave of passion gathers and breads in these stupendous scenes; the ninth wave mightier than all, with a crest whereof the spray is blood, falls foaming; over the outspread surf of gore and ruin; the curtain drops, to rise upon the self-same theatre of new woes." It is useless to consider this as the sin substance of Literature, without also irrime- diately recognizing the simultaneous presence of Ig- norance and Misery in it all. Intellectual and Moral Ignorance, the fateful moan- [205] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ings of beings immersed in a sea of contradictions, submerged beneath the mystery of portents, warnings, signs, and inscrutable decisions, and with that goes Misery, physical, mental, spiritual. It was the con- templation of all this that stirred the imagination, gave life to the language, supplied it with imagery, inflamed the mind, and gathered to the lips of the poet, by a preordained congruity, the words of inspiration. We touch upon a deep psychologic-literary truth. The dramas of Aeschylus could not have been written in the Garden of Eden, nor could any dramas as good have been written there. This is of interest. For in passing we may observe that while it is true that "he who rules o'er freemen must himself be free," Dr. Johnson's querulous re- joinder is not true, that "he who kills fat porkers must himself be fat." In the first case there is constructive temperamental sympathy between Ruler and Ruled; in the second there is (certainly no sympathy) physi- cal resemblance. The dramatist who shows us the terrors of guilt, the power of character, the tumult of remorse, must realize, in a manner, in himself (with- out going so far as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who seems to think that the delineator on the stage of a woman's fall must have stepped down herself) the elements of the crime, the character, the remorse. [206] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY The stage of our action and being in this world involves, in the literary exemplifications of its aspects of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, some analogy between the state of the writer and the emotions he depicts. At any rate he must quite deeply understand them. By any conceivably absolutely pure and perfect mind and heart the literary effectiveness of Sin, Ignorance and Misery, could not be developed. The acquaint- ance with them, as temporary feeling only, would be absent. But Sin to come back to this pervasive literary motive in drama is perhaps, abstractly considered, and considered in all its phases, light, trivial, and tragic the most likely element to give dramatic movement, contrast, climaxes, denouments, plot. It supplies situations that exhaust emotion and stimu- late expression, and its variety is extraordinary. Good- ness by comparison seems monotonous, it Sin runs in its daedalian web of mutations all the way from murder, rapine, brutality, through phases of refined cruelty, subtle enmity, mixed passions, to the evanes- cent and just cloud-like blemishes of ill-humour, irri- tation, trickery and the equivoque. Eliminate from any play, the reader admires, all human imperfection and what remains of the play as a work of effective and stirring interest? Nothing. [207] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE The very atmosphere of this earth with its vague unrest, repining sorrows, combat and struggle and deliberate vice, forms dramatic stuff as fast as the mothers of the human family can produce children. Heaven is hopelessly out of the question as a place where we may expect to get good dramatic literature, and it is grotesquely improbable that there will be any kind of theatres there! Of course it can be frankly admitted that goodness is necessary for our dramatic situations. We must have the conflict, and the probable force of Sin as a dramatic motor lies in the revolt alarm and protest we instinctively feel before it. But pushing our claim to its last extreme we think that a possible Hell would produce some sort of a stage exceeding in literary brilliancy anything another possible Heaven could do in that line. Then again Hell, from the inexpugnable nature of Goodness and Conscience, and their deepseated ap- proval, would probably furnish some glimmerings of contrast in its dramatic creations, but Heaven, from the transitory and passing nature of Sin, would afford none, and its plays would be or will be incandescent visions, unrelieved by shadows, and half tones, and, as artistic masterpieces, useless, perfunctory, and flat. The sadness, the pathos, the Misery of Aeschylus' [208] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY Agamemnon, his Choephorae, and Eumenides need not be recalled here, but a moment's thought over their heaped up majesty and depth of woe, their in- spired utterance of suffering, their blind fortuity and intimations of human darkness, engraves upon our mind the hopelessness of expecting to find in Heaven dramatic power, and the consequent restrained and expurgated and insipid quality of its Theatre. In Sophocles we find, as Symonds tells us, an art "distinguished above all things by its faultless sym- metry, its grace and rhythm, and harmonious equi- poise of strength and beauty." Sophocles introduced new features in the theatre, increased the number of actors, and while diminishing the immensity of the action developed the detail of character, and gener- ally humanized the superhuman vigor of Aeschylus with more moderation and balance, and, it might be said, expanded the play by adding intricacy. We have seven tragedies of Sophocles: Oedipus Colon- eus, Oedipus Tyrrannus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Trachiniae, Electra, Ajax. We may follow our guides and point only to the tragedies based on the tale of Thebes, as illustrating our thesis in the particular here emphasized Sin as a literary substance: "the house of Laius was scarcely less famous among the Greeks than the house of [209] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Atreus for its overwhelming disasters, the conse- quences of an awful curse which rested on the family. Laius, the son of Labdacus, was supposed to have introduced an unnatural vice into Hellas; and from this first crime sprang all the subsequent disasters of his progeny. He took in marriage Jocasta, the sister of Prince Creon, and swayed the state of Thebes. To him an oracle was given that a son of his by Jocasta should kill him. Yet he did not therefore, in obedience to the divine warning put away his wife or live in chastity. A boy was born to the royal pair, who gave him to one of their shepherds, after piercing his feet and tying them together, and bound the hind to expose him on Cithaeron. Thus they hoped to defeat the will of heaven. The shepherd moved by pity, saved the baby's life and handed him over to a friend of his, who used to feed his master's sheep upon the hill-pastures. This man carried the infant, named Oedipus because of his wounded and swollen feet, to Polybus of Corinth, a childless king, who brought him up as his own son. Oedipus, when he had grown to manhood, was taunted with his obscure birth by his comrades in Corinth. Thereupon he journeyed alone to Delphi to make inquiry concern- ing his parentage from Phoebus. "Phoebus told him nought thereof, but bade him [210] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY take heed lest he slay his father and wed his mother. Oedipus deeming that Polybus was his father and Merope his mother, determined to return to Corinth no more. At that time Thebes was troubled with the visitation of the Sphinx, and no one might rede her riddle. Oedipus, passing through the Theban land, was met in a narrow path, where three roads joined, by an old man on a chariot attended by servants. "The old man spoke rudely to him, commanding him to make way for his horses, and one of the ser- vants struck him. Whereupon Oedipus slew the master, knowing not that he was his own father Laius, and the men too, all but one, who fled. Thereafter he passed on to the Thebes, and solved that riddle of the Sphinx, and the Thebans made him their king, and gave him the lady Jocasta to be his wife. Thus were both the oracles accomplished, and yet Oedipus and Jocasta remained ignorant of their doom." The pediment of Sin thus created is built upon to rear dramatic structures of great perfection, interest, and symmetrical development. Splendid situations, powerful sketches, moral strength, skill and the im- aginative treatment of difficult and stimulating crises, after a design of the loftiest literary and aesthetic beauty are all discovered in these wonderful remnants of the Grecian stage. The unfolding and deepening [211] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE of the character of Oedipus, the chastening effects of punishment following with fateful foot the track of Sin, the pathetic majesty of the old man Oedipus, blind and conducted by the noble and enthralling Antigone, the craven submission of Creon, the infidel- ity of the perfidious sons, the manly and magnani- mous friendship of King Theseus and, ending all of this gallery of pictures, this sublime progress of linked and fated consequences is the death of Oedipus, and the sacrifices of Antigone, "who is willing, lest her brother lie unburied on the Theban plane, to lay her own life down, disobeying the law of her sovereign, defying Creon to the face, appealing against unjust tribunals to the judgment seat of powers more ancient than the throne of Zeus himself, and marching to her living tomb with dauntless strength in order that the curse-attainted ghost of Polyneices shall have rest in Hades." The same result follows our inspection of the Euri- pides, viz. : that the substance of his literary products, his plays, is Sin, as by necessitous conditions of human action, as generally based upon an assumed superna- tural order of justice. It must be in all tragedies. Tragedies so far as Literature exhibits them as orna- ments, so far as we read and hear them as aesthetic creations, involve the contradiction of the moral law [212] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY or some violation of the finest standards of conduct involve Sin ; or else give us the mournful and bewild- ering picture of frustrated hopes, clouded dreams, per- secuted character, in short a picture of sorrow, of Misery, as in Goethe's Egmont, Schiller's William Tell and Wallenstein, and no hypothetical Paradise whatever physical or mental restoration it promises will ever capture our approval for its dramatic works, for Sin, Ignorance, or Misery ex hypothesi are absent there. Without dwelling at all upon the Theatre of France, Spain, and what there is of it of Ger- many, let us, as this chapter grows inordinately long, turn to the English stage which has such deserved preeminence and see in its great master how, not only in tragedy, but in all forms of drama the pro- creant and protean agencies of Sin understood in the wide sense hitherto insisted upon, are vividly and continuously mingled. And because it seems un- necessary to rehearse the rich displays of the Eliza- bethan stage with its opulence of playwrights, its pro- fusion of plays, we will turn the pages of Shakespeare alone for the complete elucidation of our theme. Shakespeare's plays are the most human and beau- tiful of dramatic productions. They are intensely human. They possess that fixed quality of credibility [213] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE which comes from our feeling that they are true. Their purely imaginative aspects, as in the Tempest, the Midsummer Night's Dream never lessen the sweet reasonableness of every character associated there with delicate and bewitching fancies. Authors, as W. H. Fleming, have instructively analyzed them, but such anatomy, having a certain taxonomic and scientific quality, does nothing to show how they were created. For never by any pos- sible chance is it likely that Shakespeare calculated Protasis, Epitasis, Peripeteia, Katabasis, Katastrophy, their even relation, their structural curve. Apart from the reflection that commentators may, in the vehe- ment plausibility of their assumptions make a Shakes- pearian drama more exact and formal in its architec- ture than it really is, the tacit deduction of their read- ers that the divine author worked out the items of his drama's excellence according to some studied pre- cept, plan, or formula is a jejune and silly fallacy. Shakespeare's art was art, and purposed art, but it was directed by the instinct for character rather than for structure. Scenes explicatory and commenta- tive were inserted to reveal a phase of temperament, not so much to vary, to lengthen or divert or hasten the action of the play. His work is not always help- fully arranged for the stage, but it seldom fails, upon [214] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY analysis, to exhibit poetic charm, and at every point to build out, complete, and color character. The atmosphere and the temperature of Shakes- peare's plays are earthly. They could never have been achieved in Heaven, or in any hypothetical dis- trict of supernatural bliss, immaculate manners, and incorporeal estates of being where flesh and blood, and all they stand for, were utterly absent and abhor- rent. Sin is in Shakespeare from beginning to end; sin as crime, sin as the genial susceptibilities of carnal appetite, sin as mischief, roguery, trickery, intoxica- tion, sin as sly humour, insinuating equivoque, playful scandal, delicate innuendo, the heartless taunt, the thrust of satire, the cloudy vaporings of vanity, the sauciness of frippery, foppery and fools, the gayety of deceit and the lewdness of gluttony and vice, the comedy of pretence. Sin as the generalized appella- tion for the irregularities, the excess, defect, the mis- demeanors, misdeeds, wickedness, faults, appetite, glamour, sophistries, weakness, parade, foolishness, the amiable and unamiable declensions of men, is spread widely and deeply throughout those wondrous pages. For to come to the meat of this matter. The aesthetic artistic and literary excellencies of the race arise from a disposition saturated in all its cells with [215] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE the virus of the old serpent, or at any rate with the temporizing, palliating and acquiescent humours of the old Adam. It is a mild claim but it offers food for thought. It is, to use a remark of Carlyle's, in his essay on Voltaire, " a European subject, or there never was one; and must, if we would in the least comprehend it, be looked at neither from the parish belfry, nor any Peteloo platform; but if possible, from some natural and infinitely higher point of vision." To the student of literature Sin as an incident or an accident or a textural and irreconcilable fact has no theological import or even moral significance, except as it gives life to drama, power to fiction, and mean- ing to poetry. He knows well enough that there is a state of right and wrong, such things as good and bad feelings, knows it not only from a glance at the world but from a review of his own superabundant delin- quencies. But he hesitates to separate physiology from morals, and saves himself from the perplexities of definition by fixing his eye on the essence of interest in the play, the novel, and the epic. And with his eye fixed on these literary constants, he suddenly becomes aware that the whole web mass and, so to speak, labyrinth of congenital impulses in man which in mild, definite, or drastic ways, are [2161 SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY at war with the features seen or desired in the visions of holy men of Heaven; furnish the impetus, are the exuberant and penetrating sap which enters the man- ifold twigs, branches and, indeed, trunks of the Tree of Life, nourishing, and, so to speak, exhaling various blooms, noxious flowers, with all gaudy and high colored, dull drooping and dark colored flowers, hidden and loathsome flowers, flowers of changing hues, capricious, fleeting, weak and deliquescent, gay flowers, flowers variegated in color, variously scented, some killing with transporting aromas, and others confusingly good and bad in their emissions, but all, in this great growth of the Life Tree; like a banyan tree spreading its ample skirts of foliage throughout the world; contributing interest, wonder- ment, and inexhaustible provocation to thought, to fancy, to creative enterprises, the wild, willful and exuberant joy of artists, and poets, and story tellers and dreamers, and those who chase facts and those who chase legends. For, to get at it more closely, any kind of ignor- ance is Sin, any kind of darkness natural, congenital, or acquired, is Sin, any kind of pretension or halting, broken promises or incomplete achievement is Sin, any kind of inordinateness or excess or defect, is Sin, and there flowers from all this secondary and tertiary [2171 SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE proliferous and smaller magnitudes of Sin, as satire, and invective, and indeed wayward jollity, love of pleasure, too abundant mirth, tricks, shallowness, dullness, humour, a wide host of things venial and vendable, and simple; but yet Sin, or ultimately traceable thereto, and all helpful, indispensable, to the dramatist, his very life, being, and sustention. Carlyle has superbly drawn a picture of the social conditions at the end of the 1 8th century in his essay on Cagliostro ; and painted the myriad hued garment of Sin and Sinfulness then covering the face of the earth. Listen to him: "the portentous extent of Quackery, the multitudinous variety of Quacks that, along with our Beppo and under him, each in his degree, overran all Europe during that same period, the latter half of the 18th century! It was the very age of impostors, cutpurse, swindlers, double goers, enthusiasts, ambiguous persons, quacks simple, quacks compound; crackbrained or with deceit prepense; quacks and quackery of all colours and kinds. How many Mesmerists, Magicians, Cabalists, Swedenbor- gians, Illuminati, Crucified Nuns, and devils of Lou- dun, to which the Inquisition-Biographer adds Vampires, Sylphs, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, and an Etcetera. Consider your Schropfers, Cagliostros, Casanovas, Saint-Germains, Dr. Grahams ; the Chev- [218] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY alier d'Eon, Psalmanazar, Abbe Paris, and the Ghost of Cock-lane! As if Bedlam had broken loose; as if rather in that spiritual Twelfth-hour of the night, the everlasting Pit had opened itself, and from its still blacker bosom, had issued Madness and all manner of shapeless Misberths, to masquerade and chatter there." Here all is Sin, amusing and vicious, but what room for the scene maker and scene shifter, for the merry maker, the dramatist and historian," in that loud roaring Loom of Time (where, above nine hundred millions of hungry Men, for one item, rest- lessly weave and work) , so many threads fly humming from their eternal spindles; and swift invisible shut- tles, far darting to the Ends of the World-complex" (Carlyle) ! Now perhaps it is very hard to concede that our humour, the blessedest privilege of life and the eternal glory of Literature, springs also from this inextricable, inexpugnable, sap and fecund juice, (circulating in our system) of so-called Sin, or at least, if it does not, could find in a sinless and etherially divine world, such as theory makes Heaven, no opportunity for its pervasive literary usefulness. It does indeed seem hard, for of true humour Car- lyle writes thus charmingly, "true humour springs not more from the head than from the heart ; it is not con- [219] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE tempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter but in still smiles which lie far deeper. It is a sort of inverse sublimity; exalting as it were, into our affections, what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us. The former is scarcely less precious or heart affecting than the latter; perhaps it is still rarer, and, as a test of genius still more decisive. It is, in fact, the bloom and perfume, the purest effluence of a deep, fine and loving nature; a nature in harmony with itself, reconciled to the world and its stintedness and contradiction, nay find- ing in this very contradiction, new elements of beauty as well as goodness. Among our writers Shakespeare in this as in all other provinces, must have his place ; yet not the first; his humour is heartfelt, exuberant, warm, but seldom the tenderest or most subtle. Swift inclines more to simple irony; yet he had genuine humour too, and of no unloving sort, though cased, like Ben Jonson's in a most caustic and bitter rind. Sterne follows next; our last specimen of humour, and, with all his faults, our best; our finest if not our strongest; for Yorick and Corporal Trim and Uncle Toby have yet no brother but in Don Quixote, far as he lies above them. Cervantes is indeed the purest of all humorists; so gentle and genial, so full, yet so [220] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY ethereal is his humour, and in such accordance with itself and his whole noble nature." Could we then prove that this humour which in all its forms is the very staple and often groundwork, fabric, and end of drama is the concomitant, if not a product of Sin, then its effects in the Literature of this World, would be quite absent in the Literature of any theoretical Heaven. That is certainly self- evident. And Shakespeare and the firmament of beauties which he stands for, could never have arisen, nor indeed could now exist in such a Heaven as Prof. Kedney (a good authority) thus describes: "the elements which must constitute the heavenly state may be summed up as exhibiting the normal, the ideal relations of concrete existence and are: First, individual perfection, on which all depends. This has for its motive-spring religion, the personal bond, the responsive and spontaneous love of the individual soul to the divine love, which can have the form of sacrifice no more. Second, the mirroring in the inter- relations of the human commonwealth, the harmony of the imminent relations of the Godhead, uniting thus the members of the same into one organism, of which Christ will be the unifying center. Third, physical glorification, or the domination over nature, over the material of the universe, now adapted in its [221] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE recuperated state to the activities, the desires, we may say to the caprices, of the purified and perfected souls, now to be trusted in sharing the divine potence and presence, and sure never to misuse them en- dowed even with creative powers to bring forth end- less combinations and new beauty. Fourth, mental illumination the disappearance of all that is con- fusing and bewildering, and that can produce error, the possession of the true center of knowledge, whence every thing in the scope of the mental visage is harmoniously related, yet which vision can be for- ever extended toward the forever receding circum- ference the discovery and enjoyment of the divine thoughts, the penetration of the secrets that now elude us, the wonders of the spatially little, as well as of the spatially great the extension of the vision beyond the present bounds of knowledge into the manifold or numberless disclosures of the stellar universe. Fifth, the extension of the sphere of fellowship and love, in which the penetration into each new soul and discovery of its content will be satisfying from its loving perfection, and full of delight from its unique- ness in which sphere new ties can be formed guided by special sympathies; for there can be no monotony or repetition among the perfected souls, as there is none among the souls undergoing purification." [222] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY Now it is quite inconceivable, that under such conditions, and in such a spiritual and moral environ- ment, with an accordant physical nidus, milieu, or matrix, plastic enough in its substance to express these incandescent, remote, and lofty states that any temperament or mind could mature, swayed by the faculties of observation, which would take pleas- ure in Captain Costigan, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, the Antiquary himself Jonathan Oldenbuck with the immortal Edie Ochiltree, even Saddletree, Sir An- thony Absolute, Tommy Lumpkin, Uncle Toby, Sam Weller, Rip-van- Winkle, Don Quixote, Hudi- bras, Pantagruel, Bob Acres, Gulliver, Tartuffe, Tarn O'Shanter, and thousands upon thousands of char- acters, phases, situations, which in dramatic litera- ture and in all literature which has dramatic meanings, however formed, as play, story, or history, present the myriad hued picture of mirth, incongruity, mis- chief and fun. Thus reasoned out, in an instant there comes troop- ing before us, the fantastic hosts of Shakespeare's comedy and those of all other comedians. And they seem essentially human, distinctly earthly, irre- versibly of this world, as part and marrow of its indescribable wrongness, foolishness, weakness, mal- ice, inadvertence, perversion, and struggle. Note [223] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE them how they enter. Caliban, the sinister distorted mask of malevolence, pinched, vituperative, harlequin mischief, brutish spite, and mixed, in a spirit of boisterous frolic and carnal jollity, with the drunken animal jestings of Stephano and Trinculo ; Speed and Launce, amiable types of servants wittily contrasted as capricious merriment, and soliloquizing humorous philosophy; Falstaff in that gay deshabillement of rustic loquacity, fun, conceit, intrigue, and vulgarity, with Shallow, Slender, Evans, Caius, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nymn and the indispensable ladies, and their obedient spouses; the Clown in Measure for Measure, a grievous and inextricable mixture of ribal- dry and license; the Dromios in their mad frolic of exchanged persons with their distracted masters; the mirthful and bewitched Benedict with his spry wit and failing heart, and all the simple comedy of Dog- berry and Verges; the amorous perversity of Love's Labor Lost, with its meandering interludes of Arm- ado, Dull, and Costard, Moth, and Jaquenetta; the crystalline beauty of Midsummer Night's Dream, with its exquisite burlesque and laughter, its sylvan odours and the thousand shimmering lights of earth and fairy land, a web of human peccadillos spun on a thread of purest poesy; the fair human comedy transcendently beautiful in the Merchant of Venice, [224] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY like a jewel radiant with some interior fire of light borrowed from the sun itself, sparkling with tears and rimmed with smiles; Jacques and Touchstone and Audrey so soothing and rare a combination, phil- osophy and whimsicality and sluttishness, gathered within the world embracing power of love and cour- age, and where the agile spirit of the poet follows nature swifter than nature outsteps genius; Petruchio and Katherine with the profuse artistry of delicate design, in a tempest of preposterous temper and deceit; Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Ague-cheek, Maria, Malvolio, Clown, moving together in one con- cise group of delicious merriment, where the unspent powers of mind and fancy paint the very pressure and image of a vanished day; the sweet and mournful loveliness of The Winter's Tale, that like a fair land- scape, burnished with the sun, begins in joy, then like the same picture drenched in summer mists and rains, breathes an etherial sorrow, to close a setting day with rainbows, through the skirts of passing storm ; all these stand in the catalogue of Shakespeare's consummate drama of Comedy, and stand there because, as the Courtier says in Alls Well That Ends Well, "the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults [225] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues." It thus however becomes quite clear upon reflec- tion, that Carlyle did not distinguish, or at least men- tion, the fact that we have in the world, Humour as an object, and also as a quality or temperament. As an object, Humour in all its phases, passages, and complications, does report our imperfect, our sinful state, but as a quality, in those who appreciate, por- tray or describe it, it is quite correctly and attractively associated with a loving, a sympathetic heart. That so divine a trait as gentleness and love should be gath- ered together in the literary effort of pleasingly repro- ducing the comedy of life, even its most trifling juven- ility and fantasy, whims, caprices, and contradictions, in no way exempts the examples of Humour from being classed in our wide sense of the word as Sin, Imperfection. We dwell especially upon this point as proven, for dramatic works have particularly their popularity amongst us by reason of their Humour, and few dramatic amusements, few literary pastimes, exceed the untarnished jollity and whistling liveliness of Shakespeare fun. Certainly in Shakespeare's historical plays, in his tragedies, our assumption of the value of the Sin Substance of Literature need provoke no protest. [226] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY Herein lies indeed the splendors of those dusky scenes, wherein avarice or hate or envy or despair or murder- ous design lift their haggard faces to the eyes of men, and hasten "along the doomed highways of destruc- tion," where "witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecates, offerings : and withered murder, Alarmed by his sentinel the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design, Moves like a ghost." From Sin in such plays, apart from the involved Ignorance and Misery, comes the springs of action, the motives of expression, the color of the lines, their imagery, and forms, by the predestined congruity of thought and its embodiment, the outlines, features, play, figure, and presentment of the actors. Dear Reader to whom perchance the theory that these glorious achievements of the imaginative quality of the human mind owe their creation to the presence and multivarious influences of Sin, even in a measure to the responses mental and emotional of the Author, and his characters you, to whom such a theory seems a ludicrous and appalling fancy, contrive to think out for yourself the literary aptitudes of a sinless, a perfect state. [227] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Remember too that in such a state our minds would doubtless assume an exalted purity and strength, and all the fragrant littlenesses of entertainment which we now enjoy, would become distasteful. Contrive cor- dially and profoundly to think out such a place, and is it not extremely obvious that Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Timon, Richard, John, Leontes, Shylock, Angelo, Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra, would never be thought of there? Would not the drama be ex- tinguished ? Heaven further, as a perfect state means perfect knowledge, and it seems more than likely that Science would go too, though with that we are not here concerned. We shall miss nothing, for we shall be so different, but that enormous section of Life which we call Literature, and that other enormous section which we call Science, will be done with just now a rather frightful prospect. Extending thus the skirt of this conclusion to em- brace all Drama, it is surely reasonable to believe that that earthliness, that conjunction of sense with pleasure, and inclination with passion, which all theological adage and dogma holds to be contrary to perfect purity, in short our sinful state, is the sub- stantive stuff which has made literature dramatic. And that further, however stimulating to drama is the triumphant conflict of good with evil, still the com- [228] SIN IN DRAMA AND POETRY plete suppression of the latter would stultify the dra- matic poet, and reduce the possibilities of his crea- tive act to eventless and vapid dialogue. In concluding this chapter we are to consider the Sin Substance of Literature in Poetry and it may not long delay us as it does not so weightily enter the tissue of Poetry, as does Ignorance and Misery, and far less than in Drama does it effect those intel- lectual results which bestow to Drama and dramatic poetry such distinction and splendor. Drama is action, and poetry outside of drama, is contemplation, description, reflection, and pervasively, the re-presentation of Nature in words, wherein of course we get Nature as the reaction of the outward physical world and the nature and temperament of the poet. But Poetry especially consumes its creator in his submission to the emotions, and they are the emotions of a noble cast, love, patriotism, heroic rage; it deals in the lyrics of devotion, self-denial, epithilamiums, limpid apostrophes to the past, the great, the sorrows of life, passionate regrets, the invo- lution of himself in the processes of Nature, as the sunsets, the moonlight, the trees, and birds, the sea- sons, moral postulation, the verbal painting of scenes, of character, of pictorial narrative, and those evoca- [229] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE live appeals which stimulate seriousness, sadness, and a certain beneficial intellectual elevation. It is true that Poetry in these offices finds its human standpoint involved and expressively tinted, to its own advantage, with sin and misery and ignorance, but it is the latter two that more effectively and pervasively minister to its needs, and offer it the provocatives of a subtle melancholy, a gentle and sometimes a fierce fever of scepticism, the puzzled questionings which like the chasmal darkenings and purple shadows of a closing day impart to Poetry a vague glory and attraction. Of this we shall I think be convinced in another chapter. And just here at any rate it is appropriate to call attention that the three great epics of the world have had their immediate cause in adventuresome and ethnic Sin, in the formal and traditional story of the enormous event that put this singular ingredient in our natures. They are the Iliad, the Inferno of the Divine Comedy of Dante, and Milton's Paradise Lost. These masterpieces of Literature fundamen- tally, however we construe the meanings of their sub- jects, have to do with a sinning world, the metaphor- ical or metaphysical tragedy of Sin, and the religious symbolization of its advent. [230] CHAPTER VI. THE SIN-SUBSTANCE AND THE MISERY-SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE IN FICTION Dr. Johnson called Madame D'Arblay, the crea- tor of Evelina and Cecilia, a "character-monger," by which he meant to describe a method of fiction writ- ing, which is an evolutionary stage in the develop- ment of the really ideal novel, that stage which suc- ceeds the merely narrative, episodical, and catastro- phic style of Smollett and Fielding, or in its less humorous and more sophistical form the story of Ainsworth and Sylvanus Cobb. To take a trait of character, invest it with some sort of appropriate human guise, ventriloquize it with a speaking apparatus whose outpourings shall yield a corroborative endorsement of the aforesaid trait, and mingle it upon a stage of relevant action with other characters, as cleverly designed and as skillfully exe- cuted, is a recipe of commendable dignity. It has in a way been the formula by which Evelina and Cecilia and some of the less advanced and less men- tally profound novels of Dickens have been elabo- rated. Needless to say with humour and expression, descriptive power, and an edequate dialogue it fur- nishes our bookshelves with distinguished occupants. [231] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Macaulay has thus summarized its results in the novels of Madame D'Arblay: "about every one of her men and women has some one propensity devel- oped to a morbid degree. In Cecilia, for example, Mr. Delille never opens his lips without some allu- sion to his own birth and station ; or Mr. Briggs, with- out some allusion to the hoarding of money; or Mr. Hobson, without betraying the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud upstart; or Mr. Simpkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the purpose of currying favor with his customers; or Mr. Meadows, without expressing apathy and weariness of life; or Mr. Albany, without declaiming about the vices of the rich and the misery of the poor; or Mrs. Belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or Lady Margaret, without indicating jeal- ousy of her husband. Morrice is all skipping, offici- ous impertinence, Mr. Gosport all sarcasm, Lady Honoria all lively prattle, Miss Larolles all silly prat- tle. If ever Madame D'Arblay aimed at more, we do not think that she succeeded well." Now it is unnecessary, in view of the wide impli- cations given in the previous chapter to the notion or aspect of Sin it is unnecessary particularly to demonstrate that in the preceding inventory of the attributes of Madame D'Arblay's characters, we are [232] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION reviewing aspects of Sin, light, venial, entertaining, pleasantly, for literary purposes, exasperating aspects, but all incomprehensible and inferentially excluded from Heaven, or the societies of perfect men. It is significant, as a further supporting considera- tion in this thesis, that novel writing assumes high prerogatives, endues itself with the art of dramatic and poetic portraiture as its exponents follow the psychological intricacies of Sin, bend their informing scrutiny upon the subtleties and vulgarities of Sin, its littlenesses and its magnitude, as they throw into picturesque groups the contrasted vices, and virtues of men and women, and crowd their pages with the forms of living sinful beings, filling up the relations between them with illuminating conversations, in which, from sentence to sentence, the reader discerns the progress of temptation, the reticence of virtue, the shades of criminal intention, or is startled into new interest by the menaces and expletives of brutality and lust. In nearly all novels the matter of absorbing inter- est is the way in which a man and a woman fall in love, and over small or great obstructions finally con- summate a union. It does not always fall out so pleasantly, and the novel becomes tragic and sad, [233] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE as this union is unachieved, blurred or ruined. Art and experience wonderfully complicate the situation, and in the ingenious intricacies of bringing to bear misdirection or enmity, upon the central motive, the tale gathers its harvest of incident and most of its scenic effectiveness, certainly its dramatic intensity. Herein a vast capital of Sin Substance is expended, in creating the novel, substance which grades all the way from the malignant and repulsive scheming of Count Fosco in the Woman in White, through the subtle mendacity of Mr. Monckton in Cecilia, to the circumstantial vulgarity of Mr. Rosendale in the House of Mirth; from the fierce denunciatory vio- lence of Arbaces against Glaucus in the Last Days of Pompeii, through the mean and stealthy vindic- tiveness of Mr. Bradly Headstone in Our Mutual Friend, to the scarcely conspicuous slurrs of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. Nor is this necessary love between man and woman always so adjusted as to relieve the story from the more sensational agonies of illicitness and immorality and when, as in Tess of the D'Urber- villes, in the Manxman, in Mill on the Floss, in Lady Rose's Daughter, The Scarlet Letter, and in the multivarious and iridescent tints of French libidinous and errant humanity, all this appears, then the novel [234] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION seems to assume, at least today, a rather higher liter- ary excellence and interest, quite absent from the homely tales of Rory O'More and Handy Andy, or the galloping pages of Mr. Lever. And this is reasonable. Sin is indeed literary sub- stance of the most illimitable variety, and itself pos- sesses the most urgent or delicate shades of commis- sion or intangible suspicion. The sexual relation has passed in Society, into conventional recognition and regulation, and this relation has revealed, under the fine analysis of modern study, higher co-ordination of aptitudes, and faculties, and tastes, between the man and the woman, stimulating inordinately the mere physical basic element of love, and thus furnish- ing the novelist innumerable gradations, aspects, phases, of the peculiar sin which arises from the in- fraction of the above mentioned convention. It is quite needless to remark, that such conditions can't exist in Heaven, and are likely to disappear in any millennial condition of human society on this earth. For it must be again brought to the reader's notice, that the literary interest to us all of this invol- ution of Sin, is because we are all sinners potentially, and if, by any transposition or transfiguration of our parts we get to be saints, the keenest literary enjoy- ments, in these ways, will be cancelled. [235] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE The two greatest novels in English are Vanity Fair of Thackeray, and Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte, in French Balzac's Pere Goriot, and Dau- det's Fromont jeune et Risler aine, Consuelo is a masonic rhapsody in German there are no great novels ; Freytag's Sollen und Haben, and Auerbach's Auf der Hb'he can hardly be considered great ; some- thing insupportably bourgeoise seems to cling to all German fiction; the Sin substance is not well man- aged, Hauptman, Suderman, Wasserman the new men excepted. Now in the English and French novels I have in- stanced as splendid, if not the greatest, examples of their respective fiction, we have an admixture of that fascinating Sin Substance we have been regarding as essential to literary creation, diminishing, to be sure, in Jane Eyre to an atmosphere of temptation, and how acutely and wonderfully impressed upon us! to a possible calamity, only avoided by con- vulsing concentration of self-command and illuminat- ing thought. And what would these great books be without the terrors and brilliancy of Sin? They might remain interesting, because they would still have some sort of characterization and ample spaces for description of scenery. But they would not be [236] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION the books they are. They would not touch our hearts. It is pretty generally recognized that literary taste has changed since the first years of the nineteenth century, that we have small patience with the dia- logue of Madame D'Arblay, which according to credible accounts delighted Burke, a man by whom most men of today are of insufferably small stature, that Scott is good enough for the nursery but not for the modern "grown-ups." We have grown psycho- logical note the meandering and exhaustive analy- ses of Miss Sinclair in her remarkable production "The Divine Fire" and we have become attached to literary methods, that like sub-marine diving and deep-sea dredging get below the surface currents of things, bringing to our gaze with realistic precision things strange and rare, not infrequently very appall- ing. Today the treatment of subjective events rather than of objective events is preferred, to watch the inclination of the soul, its struggles and torments, affinities and repulsions, its ecstacy, while, helping the evolution of its interior tumults, a few dramatic situations, and much irrefragable scenery, interiors and exteriors, is provided. The narrative of adven- ture has become psychologic or, I might say, physio- [237] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE logical-psychologic. We would prefer the Sea Wolf of Jack London and the Kim of Kipling and the wood scenery of Edward Stuart White to all of Cooper or G. P. R. James or perhaps even Dumas. These moderns tell their story with compelling real- ism, they get to the marrow of what they tell, and they bring you too with them; they breed, by the power of words, the sensation he would feel, who reads them, if he were present in the places and at the temperatures they describe. The old style of telling is superficial, because it is commonplace or eloquent, and never gets the psychologic value out of words that is in them. The old writers made cop- perplates the new ones photographs. Well this sudden penetration of diction has given Sin Substance in literature a new value and taken in conjunction with our awakened psychologic sense makes our novels contracted in figures, but most in- tense in evolution, in emotional growth, in supple paragraphs picturing a man's descent into Sin or his happy extrication from it. One of the recent death- less books (I mean within the half century) is Har- rison's The Damnation of Theron Ware. Here is the Sin Substance used with the most remarkable sincerity and skill. But how immensely heightened by the selection and the emphasis of words. Take [238] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION again the French part of David Grieve the best which Mrs. Humphrey Ward has ever written how insinuating and delicious is the French woman and reasonable the declension of David! It is Sin and it is the pearl of the book. We have not hesitated in the previous chapter to claim that the Sin Substance means more than the acrid, horrid, or defiling crimes and vices; it also must include, for the verity of this thesis, the imper- fections of humanity, his frailities, foibles, weaknesses, small practices and devious guiles. Nor can the claim be forcibly ejected either by reason, observa- tion, or philosophy. If these cracks and ambiguities in our nature are not of the nature of Sin, what are they? At this point the older writers come by their due, and Scott, Trollope, Dickens and Thackeray carry us away with laughter till the venerable joy they give us kills all the memory of the Howells, Jameses, Whartons, Besants, Churchills, Wisters, Tarking- tons, Mitchells, Johnsons, Doyles, Caines, Hopes, Zangwills, Jewetts, Harrises, Smiths, Glasgows, and the long line of amiable and skillful story tellers who so profusely depict the whole panorama of creation and living for us. And let it be here remembered that this Sin Substance of Literature we are after [239] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE embraces mental and physical irregularities as well as all moral derelictions. The irregularities and malformations, distortions of the body and the face, the lapses, vacuity, imbecil- ity, and madness of the mind are all implied in the Sin Substance of Literature, and their wide use in the pages of the novelist is just and convincing evi- dence of the favorable elements the world offers for the growth, development and fruitage of this sort of literature, and certainly none else ministers so acutely to pleasure. Here enter Silas Weg and Venus in our Mutual Friend, one lame in his legs and the other in his mind, the three curates Malone, Donne, and Sweeting in Shirley, all equally afflicted with pal- tryness and inefficiency, the terrible Guine Plaine in The Man Who Laughs of Victor Hugo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the strange and awful figure of Wolf Arsen in the Sea Wolf, a man sinful by reason of an original atrophy of moral conscious- ness, the sinister errors of Quilp, and the erotic amen- ities of Mr. Swiveller. It is again insisted here, as it was in the examina- tion of the influence of Sin in Drama, that defects, imperfections, twists, awryness, insufficiencies, are of the nature of Sin, at least they are eliminated in any hypothetical condition of bliss and perfection. And [240] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION the humorists of fiction find a reflex of these short- comings in the faces, features, behavior, speech, and actions of their characters, a reflex instantly inconceiv- able in more heavenly conditions of living, where we become angelic, beautiful, symmetrical, and divinely ship-shape. And while we thus generally collocate these peculiarities under the name of Sin as a collective ex- pression for a lack of conformity to an ideal state they furnish an amazing number of whimsical comi- calities to the observant gleaner of human foibles. What a maze of ludicrous and mirth making people fill the pages of Boz! Such curious abortive types, with their jocular and also evil idiosyncracies, their flagrant habits, their stubby and twisted taste, car- icatures and distorted exaggerated human objects, but doubtless copies too. Here is Mr. Wackford Squeers for instance, with his one eye, "greenish grey and in shape resembling the fan light of a street door," and "the blank side of his face much wrinkled and puckered up;" Mr. Noggs with his goggle eyes, "wherof one was a fixture," and Crummies and Pyke and Pluck, Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Frederick Verisopht, not forgetting the old gentleman who makes love to Mrs. Nickelby over the garden wall, and Mr. Arthur [241] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Gride "the whole expression of whose face was con- centrated in a wrinkled leer, compounded of cun- ning lecherousness, slyness and avarice." This in one book! But think of Miss Mb'ucher, and Uriah Heep, and Mrs. Pipchin, Skettles and Toots, Jack Bunsby and Captain Cuttle. Far back in the sixteenth century we are told of the so-called "picaresque" story which Jusserand de- scribes in his "English Novel in the Times of Shakes- peare;" he says "the great time for the rascal, the rogue, the knave, for all those persons of no particu- lar class whom adventures had left poor and by no means peaceable, for the picaro in all his varieties, was the sixteenth century. A whole literature was devoted to describing the fortunes of these strange persons : Spain gave it its name of picaresque and spread it abroad, but did not altogether invent it. * * * * the picaro holds a place in literature which is peculiarly his own. Faithless, shameless, if not joyless, the plaything of fortune, by turn valet, gen- tleman, beggar, courtier, thief, we follow him into all societies. From hovel to palace he goes first, opens the door, and shows us the characters. There is no plot more simple or flexible, none that lends itself better to the study of manners or abuses, of social eccentricities. The only defect is that, in order to [242] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION abandon himself with necessary good will to the caprices of Fate, and in order to be able to penetrate everywhere, the hero has necessarily little conscience and still less heart ; hence the barrenness of the greater part of the picaresque romances, and the weak role, entirely incidental, reserved in these works for senti- ment." Gil Bias was itself a picaresque story and why are not the adventures of Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random, even Don Quixote picar- esque stories too? We have in these tales the itin- erant exploits and adventures of their several heroes, relieved in each case by the proper assumption of the partial incorporation in the hero, of a little decency, not too much, by the way, for the liberal customs of the day. Tom Jones wanders considerably and falls in adventures which are certainly not constructed upon the strictest lines of decorum. Of course char- acters are added which have the imprint of contem- poraneous truthfulness, and some attempt, not alto- gether factitious, is made to give them individuality. There is the impossible, swearing, coarse, Squire Western, with a sort of sub-acid flavor of candor and vituperative affection, the judicious and judicial All- worthy, the lecturing Miss Western, the implacable and religious (after a fashion) Mr. Thwackum, and [243] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE the cold blooded and disputatious Square, the mean- spirited Blifil, and the melting and virtuous Sophia, with a jumble of diverting supernumeraries. In Per- egrine the device of amusing adventures is even more conspicuously used, and the tale, in its humor, de- rives a really preposterous jollity from the ludicrous picture of the nautical Trunnion and his household, while Pickle's adventures with his ridiculous com- panions in France, form a picture of rude but unmis- takable mirth. But its comedy certainly relies upon the use of inci- dents which, however, exactly categorized, belong to the vulgar, the indecent, the undecorous and hence may be, under the extended limits of its implications here assumed, referred to the subject matter of Sin. Indeed the preparation of these works have not insensibly been influenced by that sort of philosophy which is expressed in the reflections of Cadwallader in Peregrine Pickle, "I have travelled over the great- est part of Europe, as a beggar, pilgrim, priest, soldier, gamester, and quack; and felt the extremes of indigence and opulence, with the inclemency of weather in all its vicissitudes. I have learned that the characters of mankind are everywhere the same : that common sense and honesty bear an infinitely small [244] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION proportion to folly and vice ; and that life is at best a paltry province." While a great deal of Peregrine Pickle contributes to the merriment of the careless reader, it is not con- ceived and it is just to admit that it displays much invention and has the interest of a contemporaneous study from the early eighteenth century upon the tenderest lines of human virtue. Especially does the adventures of A Lady of Quality, enter within the precincts of Sin, though the treatment possesses that rollicking audacity and verve that robs it of its weary- ing profligacy. Roderick Random, supposed to be the partial autobiography of its author, contains the usual thing, the escapades of youth, the fraility of women, the feints of humbug, the shifts of penury and debauched indulgence, the arts of fortune hunt- ing rakes, and tumbled, frowsy, and despairing maids. In "The Adventures of Ferdinand Fathom" still deeper depths of human depravity are painted, and the tired reader may be permitted to rejoice that in the varied retinue depicted today in the novel, of Misery and Sin, he is not expected to peruse pages loaded with stifling filth and forlorn imposture, nor read the hero's addresses to his goddess, couched in language like that which Roderick Random uses to [245] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE the fair Narcissa: "My condition is insupportable! I am distracted with passion! Why are you so ex- quisitely fair? Why are you so enchantingly good? Why has nature dignified you with charms so much above the standard of women? and wretch that I am how dares my unworthiness aspire to the enjoy- ment of such perfection?" And yet this is Literature, not destitute either of many meritorious emblems of her sacred muse. There is style and treatment and the subject matter has interest and excites the reader's laughter even if it does not qualify altogether to the refinement of his taste, at least the reader of today, for undoubtedly it met the standards of a time when coarse reference to the necessitous physiology of nature was applauded and enjoyed, and when the habits of life were directed by lust, brutal tastes, and the stupid sycho- phancy of wits and parasites to the vanity and prig- gishness of station. In Mr. Howell's very readable Heroines of Fic- tion, (in which it seems to us, injustice is done to Walter Scott, and to Thackeray, and to Dickens, through Mr. Howell's constitutional quakeristic taste, and the veiled malevolence of a literary pre- ciosity), we are told that "it is not going too far to say that the nineteenth century English novel, as we [246] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION understand it now, with its admirable limitations, was invented by Oliver Goldsmith." It is certainly a very grateful relief to escape from the monotonous relation of blackguards and pimps, the inordinate vulgarity of passionate brutes, and simpering servants, panders and parasites to pages like those of The Vicar of Wakefield, refined with feeling, and gently pathetic with the unmistakable sorrows of life, less jeeringly narrated than in Fielding and Smollett. We then encounter that more modernized form of the novel in which the subject-matter is quite generally Misery of some sort usually of the heart under whose dispensation character strengthens or deter- iorates. Howells in touching in his ubiquitous way this beautiful story, says most adroitly: Goldsmith "does not portray the incidents or characters which Richardson studies with a pious abhorrence, or Field- ing with a blackguardly sympathy. His realism stops short of the facts which may appall or which may defile the fancy. It contents itself with the gentle domestic situation of the story, and its change from happiness to misery, through chances none the less probable because they are operated by the author so much more obviously than they would be now by an author of infinitely less inspiration." Goldsmith, at any rate, began the introduction [247] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE premeditated by Richardson of the woes of life, the nervous strains, the mental wearinesses, the torture of the heart, and he made them a thousand times more real than the jocular treatment and unabashed familiarity and shameless apathy of his predecessors in fiction had ever done. Goldsmith began that em- ployment of the subject matter of Misery, which has since, as we believe (See Chapter IV) characterized Fiction, in so far as Fiction reflects the reality of Life. Frances Burney has pictured youth and innocence and sensibility making its perilous and embarrassed way amid temptations, vulgarity and impudence, and while the danger reaches no great intensity, there is plenty of uneasiness, inconvenience, tormenting dis- quietude and indirection. As we have insisted, the Sin substance of literature declines from tragedy to comedy, the Ignorance substance from despair and mystery to a pleasurable dalliance with doubt and imaginative invention, so does the Misery substance in fiction furnish its readers with grief or with per- plexity. The novel in the hand of Frances Burney, Marie Edgworth, and Jane Austen parted with its former abominable viciousness, or outspoken ribal- dry and coarseness and as Mr. Howells points out became "forever dedicated to decency; as women they were faithful to their charge of the chaste mind ; [248] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION and as artists they taught the reading world to be in love with the sort of heroines who knew how not only to win the wandering hearts of men but to keep their homes pure and inviolable." But the literary interest deepens as it rises to higher levels of feeling and conduct, because of the more richly elaborated details of pain, of uncertainty, of aching struggle, of misunderstanding, of the play of conflicting emotions, and the realism of corroding passions, in short as the categories of Misery are more deeply studied, and the store houses of its garnered terrors are more and more explicitly and truthfully depicted absorbing to the last tension of interest our gaze and sympathy in the dramatic story of trial, and disappointment, the agonies of conscience, and the dull hideousness of repining envy and hatred the novel rises in aesthetic and artistic merit. And this absorption, this entrance into the tissues of the story of our own feelings, is intense as the story is real, not empty, grandiose, and frescoed with redun- dant sentimentality; as the Misery appeals to us be- cause we recognize and know it. In Jane Austen, who, it is now satisfactorily proven, was a very great artist indeed, and who made her admirable works Howells calls them all master- pieces by the unaided skill, penetration and sobri- [249] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ety of a literary genius which was half correct atten- tion to facts, and half exquisite power of expression in Jane Austen, Misery displays its lean and shrunken visage, but is always amiably overcome, for the contentment of the reader, and is never hope- lessly misshapen, haggard and haunting. It is there, though, all the same, and its being there is the raison d'etre of the novel itself. Howells is clearly entranced with her, but yet apparently at the behest of a good literary taste. He says "the wonder of any beautiful thing is that it is beautiful in so many ways; and her fiction is as admirable for its lovely humour, its delicate satire, its good sense, its kind- ness, its truth to nature, as for its form. There is nothing hurried or huddled in it, nothing confused or obscure, nothing excessive or inordinate." Of course Howells is controlled by the nicest of modern abstemiousness from tolerance of literary in- discretions, however pleasing. He certainly pitches into "pitches" is too vigorous a word to describe his Minos-Like certainty of disparagement Walter Scott when he says, "in prose, at least the prose of his novels, he was shapeless, tautological, heavy, infirm, wandering, melodramatic and over literary." He does not like Scott's romantic experiments and generally when he (Scott) gets away from Scotland, [250] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION its laddies, lassies, lairds, and beggars, he finds him tiresome. We are not here involved in criticism. It is clear that Scott made fiction out of the misery- substance of life as every one must and his best work Howells concurring is in The Bride of Lammermoor and The Heart of Midlothian, where human sorrow touches its deeper stress of pain, and the chords of the heart are most poignantly assailed with violence. Dickens is not artful enough for Mr. Howells, and his fun and sometimes his tragedy seem to him unreal, artificial, stagey, and reprehensible. Well! there is Misery in Dickens it is the substance of all that will survive the deterioration and oblivion of time. The Pickwick Papers will continue to enliven life and add its mirthful charm and frolicsome nonsense to the sum of literary joys in spite of Mr. Howells' thumb-in-his-vest polite and exigent reserve concern- ing its excellence for long years perhaps, but it can- not be quite so surely accounted literature as those stories of Dickens which move the heart with thrill- ing responses of sympathy; as Great Expectations or David Copperfield, or The Tale of Two Cities; in fine as those stories in which misery is so much of their subject matter. If we come to Hawthorne, in quest of the sub- [251] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE stance of his wonderful fiction, "which," as Howells most adequately says, "owed nothing to English models and differed from English fiction in nothing so much as its greater refinement, its subtler beauty, and its delicate perfection of form," if we look for the materials his potent and magical art converted into a kind of remote and ideal literature, it is the Misery of Life, the wealth and burden of human sorrow. Hawthorne seems to us hardly so typical flattering as that view is of America as typical of a peculiar temperament, an interior imaginative power, and a psychological curiosity which revealed itself in the most difficult tasks of romantic composition. But in the "Scarlet Letter" if we must follow Mr. Howells' preferences we reach the deepest levels of human suffering, we stand in the midst of an almost unbearable agony, the more insufferable, be- cause those who carry it are themselves silent and patient, and noble, because they intensify their own pain and ours by the elemental keenness of their perception of Sin, and their essential and insuperable sensitiveness to a wrong in which they participate, through the inexorable tyranny of nature. And again in the Blithdale Romance still clinging to the ineffable guidance of our literary pre- ceptor what tormenting sorrow! How endless [252] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION seems the bitterness of Zanobia's repulse who be- comes "more and more compassed about by the trag- ical shadows which the effulgence of her own pas- sion costs, till her despair ends with the defeat of her last vanity in the ugliness of her self-sought death." And in the novels of Thackeray is there not Misery when he attains the most impressive and inimitable results? Does his mastery of human nature, his knowledge of its springs of action, his intuition often marred in its rendition we are told by Howells of the mixed motives and interlaced and warring tendencies hither and thither in human affections does all this subserve any better purpose than to realize in Fiction, the Misery of Life ? We have accentuated the omnipresent use of misery substance in Fiction. It is not that this use dispossesses the use of the Sin-substance as well; in- deed the misery is quite generally the outcome, the inflexible moral consequence of the sin. But in its literary effectiveness the misery seems to be the ele- ment emphasized, at least brought home most acutely to the feelings of the reader, and it is a mark of the modern novel that this extraordinary skill moves him most profoundly, so profoundly that the novelist is forced to relieve his depressed mind by supplying some escape from the insupportable pressure of lacer- [253] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ated sympathies and as Howells says "to kill people or to marry them is to beg the question ; but into some corner the novelist is commonly driven who deals with this problem. It is only life that can deal master- fully with problems, and life does not solve them by referring them to another life or by stifling them with happiness," and when the author so solves the prob- lem, and takes his unendurable strain off the reader, then the literary value of his production ceases, and the book ends. In Thackeray we meet one of the greatest of fiction makers, gifted with the most inexpugnable powers of entertainment, and certainly capable of dramatic intensity with a hand at character drawing almost unmatched. In Vanity Fair he seems the greatest, though Howells, bothered with scruples about work- manship, thinks this wonderful work inferior to The Newcombs and Pendennis, and his bowels of com- passion are not moved to regard it as unique. It is to us a marvelous tale. Herein we have depicted for our wonderment and remembrance a woman consummately formed for the enjoyment of social ambition, and so artfully com- posed that she is neither very bad nor devoid of the quasi instincts of goodness, a creature rebellious at the accidents of her dependent life, and harboring [254] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION a resentful contempt for the mental inferiority of those whom the social tradition has placed above her, not susceptible of love in any sense that would carry her over the brink of conventional propriety, and yet so adulterated with pride and the fancy of conquest that she involves herself in a tormenting train of duplicities and miseries and sinks from step to step in a gradual renunciation of respectability. This is literature, as to the novel, and it is a study of the ingrained wretchedness of life, at any rate those phases of it which prompt writers to write, and read- ers to buy the products of their creative industry. We have never quite forgotten the fascination of Jane Eyre, and we recur to it with a feeling that it is greater than even Middle March or Romola, greater than Charles Reade or William Black or Thomas Hardy. The suffering, which makes of it Literature, is intense, almost insupportable, and its growth, its slow coming to age, from the sad moments when the bewildered lonely little girl is bullied by that infernal brat of a boy-scoundrel John Reed, through the distressful days at Lowood, to those strange experiences at Thornfield Hall, where the nervous imaginative girl, grown up into an aspiring affectionate and dreaming woman, falls in love with Rochester, and, when he is surrounded by the fine [255] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ladies and swells from London, looks at him with "a precious, yet poignant pleasure; pure gold with a steely point of agony; a pleasure like what the thirst perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless," all is drawn with a most enthralling and heart stirring power. And the catastrophe, the awful disclosure of Rochester's marriage, the unflinching earnestness of that last talk with Rochester, the flight, the grateful and quiet days at Moor House, the unearthly and intellectual self-mastery of St. John Rivers, and then the return, those heaven born days when Rochester recovers Jane, and the piteous beauty of the reunion, with Rochester blind and with the unquenched fires of his love still burning brightly, how perfectly con- ceived and drawn! There are greater fabrics of construction, more marvelous stories, or design more glorious, perhaps charged with more subtlety and graced with a wider outlook, and a more teeming vocabulary, but what tale in the whole galaxy of English Fiction, can so infix itself upon the memory, or strain with every turning page the expectant vision of its readers? And how it grips the heart, with its unswerving intensity and reality, its verbal strength, and its many moments of humour and gentle charm! [256] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION And in Trollope, a great favorite with us, who has such inestimable excellence of style, such natural- ness, and the gift of a discreet power to represent, as Howells has said "the English world as it ap- peared to him in its normal moods of high-and-low mindedness; vicious, virtuous; dull, amusing; respect- able and disreputable; wise and foolish; but in all its vanities entirely and for the most part unconsci- ously English;" in him again, how many aspects of misery, how many overweighted hearts, how much tangible grief, which we know is true, what mists of disappointment settle on his pictures of life, into what touching strains are the chords composed which sing the "sad humanity" of his recurrent groups of men and women! There is the Warden, unhappy John Bold, the heart-break of Lily Dale, the cross pur- poses of Lord Lufton, and Griselda and Lucy Rob- arts, yet that indeed is all delightful perversion, and very sweetly ended, though here we have the mourn- ful troubles of Mark Robarts; and there is Mrs. Proudie and the Bishop, and the resolute though perturbed Mr. Crawley; surely there is some Misery there, and it is just so compounded, in its every day quality, of irritations, and perversions, and foolish ambitions, as to demonstrate even more fully how that Life, to be Life at all, must be sensibly wretched, [257] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE and unless wretched, defies literary skill to give it any interest at all. But where Misery stands immemorially revealed is in the pages of George Elliott. The great novels of this woman move along wide avenues of life to predestined tragedies. Of her literary limitations Mr. Ho wells has taught us thus carefully to think, "she had many lamentable defects; the very seriousness and sincerity of her motives implied them : her learn- ing over- weighted her knowledge; her conscience clogged her art; her strong grasp of human nature was weakened by foibles of manner; the warmth of her womanly sympathies and the subtlety of her womanly intuition failed of their due effect, because the sympathies were somewhat hysterical, and the intuitions were sometimes over-intellectualized. Her immense reading which freed her from the worst influences of the English example in fiction, cumbered her with pedantic acquisitions, under which her style labored conscious and diffuse; her just sense of her own power fostered a kind of intellectual vanity, fatal to art, in which the first personally intruded herself into the story." This profound mind searching over her materials for a reproduction of Life, seldom found them un- touched with the stains of tears, seldom of so strong [258] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION a thread as to have withstood the strain of tempta- tion, and never so pure as to have escaped its tarnish, and she voluntarily chose just this kind of fabric, because from it, for literary purposes, the highest results issued, the most wonderful tapestries could be woven. Thus Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest are drawn for us, and Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, Casaubon and Dorethea Brooke, Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy, Daniel Deronda and Grand- court, and Gwendolen Harleth, and all the earthly terrors of Janet Dempster's fate. And so it is with Thomas Hardy and William Black and Miss Wilkins and Mrs. Ward. But we hear the incredulous protest arising on all sides, that in making the literary excellence of these works to consist in the subject matter of Misery, we have substituted for people, scenes, conversations, episodes, a purely moral expression, a quite indefinite generalization of feeling such as misery or suffering that instead of emphasizing that Romola for in- stance, is a reconstruction of Florence in the fifteenth century, or Barnaby Rudge a picture of life at the time of the Lord Gordon riots, we dwell upon the emotional expression, the prevalent or predominant impression of suffering men and women, portrayed in these books. [259] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE This however is not quite true, since the misery or the sin varies in its individual aspects in each case. It becomes incorporated in each person, and gathers a special character from the contrasted scenes or times at which it is represented. We mean in in- sisting upon Sin, Misery, and Ignorance, as controll- ing factors in the creation of permanent human liter- ature that these words express genera, of which each literary example is a specialized case or manifesta- tion, a particular, even an individualized case. It would be as impossible to put Misery or Sin or Ignor- ance on the page of the novelist, or the historian or the dramatist without some concrete illustration, as to give an adequate or comprehensible idea of a chemical reaction without a definite instance. Chem- ical reactions are the whole substance of chemistry, but of course their interest resides in the results gained, in the special associations of contacts which the chemist forms. Our terms are of necessity gen- eral, and the especial illustrations drawn from liter- ature simply exemplify a general proposition. In each case the literary charm and interest inheres in the treatment and style which we have elsewhere alluded to and the especial subject matter of place and individual and time, but that literary interest is after all only the specialized embodiment of the pri- [260] SIN AND MISERY IN FICTION mary stuff of feeling, and the existence, so admirable and stimulating to our thoughts, of this or that char- acter, in a book, is a particular realization of the undifferentiated magma (to borrow a term from vulcanology) of Sin, or Misery or Ignorance. But the pre-organized condition of those three terms in human life makes it possible for the creative mind of the writer to assume and incorporate them in his or her exact and discrete creations. This is plain enough. Nor need it molest us, for the value of this thesis, that it can be shown that much and even a creditable proportion of literature involves a different kind of material. We may have been hur- ried here and there in this hastily composed essay to claim too much for our promulgation, but it is in nowise impaired thereby, for we do now again assert that a great, a paramount amount of the noble and permanent literature, in the highest sense, has come to be by reason of the imminence everywhere on all sides and in myriad forms of Ignorance, Sin, and Misery. Walton's "Complete Angler," and White's "Na- tural History of Selborne," together with such a book as Henry James' "A Little Tour in France" are certainly literature, and they do not pervasively or even at any point essentially dwell on these things. [261] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Let it be so. It is none the less true that Browning's Mr. Sludge the Spiritualist, or Carlyle's French Rev- olution, or Goethe's Sorrows of Werther, or Poe's Tales do, and the more regnant manifestations of the literary genius always will. In which matter, as we in our conclusion point out, as the world progressively grows better, and a more even material happiness devolves through all the elements of the state, as we escape the European incubus, it is to be expected that Literature, in its most imaginative forms, will also progressively dwindle and disappear, and it is no matter. [262] CHAPTER VII. IGNORANCE AS THE SUBSTANCE OF POETRY The title of this chapter repells attention. It is a monstrous and an unquestionably invidious statement. That those lovely word weaving and inspired struc- tures of verbal music have anything to do with Ignor- ance, when too they so often are full of learning and thought, seems an especially rude assault upon the patience of the reader. We have said something about it elsewhere and it is now our unpleasant task to be more explicit, even at the risk of failure. Let us be as deliberate and cautious as the responsi- bilities of this disagreeable operation demand. And in the outset as a useful tonic to our atten- tion and the liberalization of our point of view, we must learn to forget that Ignorance, in a cosmic sense, is so ignoble or humiliating a condition; that it, as applied to the verity of things, is almost surely the enforced position of the most informed. We might have used a different word in the connections we are about to encounter, but we retain the word because, for the universality of our contention, it thus includes the kind of necessary darkness enshrouding even the highest speculation and inspired utterance, and the [263] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE really opprobious and simply amusing forms of un- knotying, which again, in literature, serve so widely and amiably their purpose. Are we not profoundly ignorant? Are we not frequently driven to the dread resentment of Omar Khayam's protest: What, without asking, hither hurried Whence And without asking, Whither hurried hence ! Oh many a cup of this forbidden Wine Must drown the memory of that insolence? To what extent in the categories of knowledge can we say the human intelligence has reached the ulti- mate term? Is not the ultimate term itself a rational impossibility, or if definable, at any time do we not retrace our steps, feeling the delicious unquiet, the restless expectancy of suddenly surprising the forma- tive soul of things, has departed, and we should surrender to the stupifying satisfaction of comprehen- sion? The reflections of Mr. Hartley Burr Alexander in his most penetrating essay "Poetry and The Indi- vidual," under the topic of Imagination, are im- mensely pleasing to us. He says: "there is a kind of inherent futility in any effort to understand the world. Our knowledge is at best a parable, and the under- standing mind, the human mind whose business it is to interpret the dark revelation, is itself but a filtra- [264] IGNORANCE AND POETRY tion of the mystery it seeks to comprehend; the very substance of the comprehension is also the substance of the puzzle. Man is the measure of reality, but that may be wholly because reality comes to us humanized : our perceptions not only colour the world of substantial things, but they colour our understand- ing as well, and give to all our knowledge the bias of their aberrations; our emotions not only enliven the grey hues of thought, but they also, as we say, warm with human interest that play of fact which is the thought's mainstay and source; our desires not only make reasonable our aggressions, but they also animate the counter-aggressions of the world at large, and so make the world intelligible to us. But the intelligibility can never be more than seeming." The poet realizes this mystery of the world, his deep immersement in a sea of beautiful wonders; he turns to the spectacle of the changing seasons, the innumerable riddles of mere life, the sensuous splen- dor of its color and form, the epic glory of its history, he finds himself enrolled in its tumultuous or rhythmic progress, and by the instinct of his own intention, as well as from those subtle sympathies with the nature of things, and by the picturing skill of his mind, and the insistent voice within him becomes in litera- ture an expression of this sublime Ignorance, as if his [265] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE imagination, reckless of limitations, spoke in dreams and riddles. And yet the poet is credited with a peculiar in- sight the poetic insight that insight which Alex- ander has called mood, and thus defined, "mood is a kind of insight. It is not insight into colourless, in- tellectual truth, nor is it a state of personal bias such as is consequent upon emotion. Rather it is an un- folding of what is deep-lying in character, a revela- tion of spiritual diatheses and of the nature of that which is most native and lasting in us. Hence ex- pression of mood, if the expression be true, seems to represent an insight into reality more fundamental and inevitable than any other. It is insight into truth through spiritual perspective. It is poetic in sight." But this insight is itself a revelation of the incom- prehensible. It is the insight that evokes the passion of dismay or faith, according to temperament, and makes the poet an organism of exquisite searching and revealing eloquence. It becomes a kind of sublime reiteration of Ignorance, an elevation of view which, granting a further outlook adds a more dis- tant prospect which is involved in mists in whose fluctuations the poet discerns all manner of beauties, or before which as the mists seem dark and impen- [266] IGNORANCE AND POETRY etrable he sings repiningly or mutinously. The sub- ject matter is not precisely Ignorance, because that only becomes subject matter as it is revealed in indi- viduals, or in the confession of ignorance by the writer himself, though as literary substance and in- deed as poetic substance it is often so, but the second sight the deuleros scopos of the poet reveals our circumvallation of mystery. He raises our eyes from the apparent and hard reality of pains and stones and stocks, struggles, com- panionships, games, eating and wearing and the finite emoluments of the secular chase, to a world which he creates from the flowing and discreet images of his imagination, to a world which he may pretend duplicates this present one but which still is the lofty creature of his mind. The poet in his self-surrender passes into a realm of ideas, images, and expressions, which reflect the world around him, but reflect it through his person- ality, or, as Alexander might allow, a super-person- ality which is an ideal. To quote Alexander him- self; he says "the poetic idea is not merely intellec- tual ; it is never apprehended through rationative pro- cess. It deals not with the utile, logical truth of science, but with a truth colored by personality and mood. Yet here is the paradox: the personality [267] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE which is celebrated, and in its celebration creates the habilliment of the idea, is itself impersonal. It rep- resents no real self or character, but always an apoth- eosised, ideal self; and all its value arises from the felt worth of this ideal, toward which the creating mood must ever unattainingly aspire." Now it may seem a useless anachronism of idea and word to claim that in the literature of poetry, its substance is Ignorance, indeed at first it resembles something much worse, a deliberate perversion of language and an affected and forced violence of thought. But we are not willing to be so ruthlessly routed. The poet indeed creates, and does so with infinite verissimilitude ; he uses the power of his expression to reflect the moods of his mind, and imparts to us, his listeners, his own radiant and colored visions; as a dramatist he gathers together characters who move in stately lines, or breathe in animated ranks before us, and play in a mimic world some idealized parts, using always as the instruments of their dia- logue the exuberant fancy of their creator; he seizes familiar things and spins around them the lucid chrysalis of words which gives them a strange and probably unmerited beauty and mean- ing; he is an expert necromancer and while we [268] IGNORANCE AND POETRY boast, in the adulatory rapture of our surprise and pleasure, that the poet speaks truth, reflection points out that he more generally awakens our minds to a new aspect of things or defines for us feelings tran- sient or scarcely perceptible, and, elevating or inten- sifying them, acquaints us with keen realizations of emotion, which but for his mediation, we had not known. As Father Barry has written (Essay on Dante) "himself to himself the poet sings as in a lone land where the sky and sun, streams and woods, and all they nourish, are for his delight. But now mark the wonder. This being, so set apart, cannot open his lips, breathing his hidden thoughts, but he is answered by innumerable souls, who find in those accents their comfort, in those meditations what they have ever believed, in the strange yet familiar music a rhythm to which the heart that is in them vibrates." Now it is quite clear that in all the poet writes we have a supersensualized world, an imaginary world, a world to which, except as the poet invites and leads them, the great crowd are strangers. He pours out his imagery, he devises symbol, he energizes allu- sion, he transcribes dreams, he initiates feeling, he intensifies emotions, he describes relations, for that [269] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE purpose, and above all he is endowed with the "gift of tongues" and with music. But the poet is not a reality, nor are his dreams and visions and allocutions real. They are artifices, deli- cate, beautiful, helpful, inspiring, especially literary, and have the slenderest connection or no connection at all, with the facts of the case whether it be a flower or a bird, a cloud, or an historic episode. Of course they have aesthetic reality, some people insist (and in a transcendental way, rightly) that they are more real than stones and figures, but they are invariably a re-presentation of the poet's mood, his eye, his thought, his excitement or pleasure or rage. They appeal to the undeveloped poet in his auditors, and all together, poet and audience are raised into a psychological phase which has no reference to facts. Shelley sings, making his "cloud" talk, "The sanguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack, When the morning star shines dead. As in the jag of a mountain crag, Which an earthquake rocks and swings, An eagle alit one moment may sit In the light of his golden wings. [270] IGNORANCE AND POETRY And when sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath, Its ardours of rest and love, And the crimson pall of eve may fall From the depths of heaven above, With wings folded I rest, on mine airy nest, As still as a brooding dove." But this is impossible. Lovely and appealing and veritably evoking subjective aspects of the cloud to which we respond with joy and thankfulness, but in any literal sense absurd because the sunrise is not sanguine nor does it have meteor eyes and there are certainly no plumes anywhere discernible, nor could it be conceived as leaping on the back of any cloud, nor do sunsets, as animate things, breathe ardors or indeed anything, and it is obvious enough that no crimson pall falls from the depths of heaven, while it is an aspect of mild dementia for anyone to insist that a cloud folds its wings. What is a cloud? a condensation of moisture in minute vesicles, intoler- able as a place of habitation, absolutely devoid of feeling, and most propitious when precipitated as water, on terrestrial cabbages and peas. Poe sings, he whom Lang has called "the singer of rare hours of languor, when the soul is vacant of the pride of life, and inclined to listen, as it were, to [271] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE the echo of a lyre from behind the hills of death," this poet sings in his Ulalume : Here once through an alley Titanic, Of cypress I roamed with my soul Of cypress, with Psyche, my soul, These were days when my heart was volcanic As the scoriae rivers that roll As the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphureous currents down Yaanek In the ultimate climes of the pole That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realm of the boreal pole. This more nearly approaches that definition of poetry as "sense swooning into nonsense." But it is tolerated, it is admired, we do ourselves admire it, and there is no reason that we should not, because it becomes literature by reason of the basic and con- ditioning Ignorance which envelopes every human statement of that kind. We can afford to live in dreams with the poet, when we get rid of the assump- tions of science, as we easily can, since fundamentally we do not know what our exact unconditioned nature is, and the wildest fancies may be indulged in and momentarily, at least, made to take the place of the dull commonplaces around us. Even Shakespeare, in his sublime tragedies, is put- [272] IGNORANCE AND POETRY ting words and thoughts into the mouths of dead men and women, who never said such things, and prob- ably never would have said them. The point we reach is this. That the poet's role and his poetry, is inextricably conditioned upon the intangibility of our human position as cognizers of the world about us, its history, its future, its meaning, substance and contents. The poet and poetry is permissible here, because we do not ^non>; because the pervasive Ignorance which envelopes the whole of life, pene- trates its interstices, clouds even sensation with a scepticism of its own realness, gives the Imagination a welcome, an inevitable activity. The very mutability of individual life, its precari- ousness, its, so to speak, episodic and momentary character, its changing conditions, its shortness, the disappearance, complete and irrevocable, of the past, with its scenes and actors involves every utterance we make about them in Ignorance, and compels us to invoke the poetic, the imaginative function of repro- duction, of dramatic assimilation and representation. There can be no doubt of this. Saturated with the self-satisfaction of complete knowledge, literature in its imaginative forms dies. Reflect also upon the fact, that complete knowledge means more than a memorization of phenomena and principles, more [273] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE than the ability to accurately assemble the scenes and events of the past. It means the understanding of the phenomena, and the exact realization of the past. Take the great poems, take little ones, for that matter. What are they? Verbal illusions. Real in one sense but still dependent upon the shrouded nature of life, to give them applicability and vogue, dependent upon the unescapable isolation of the man who wrote them, dependent upon, if we may force so violent and true a statement across the readers protest, upon Ignorance, for only as we are ignorant can we illusionize, idealize, poetize, or, as we say, "romance." Look at the poem of Paradise Lost. If there are any facts in the matter at all, with which that won- derful creation concerns itself, no one believes they were as Milton paints them. It is quite inconceivable that they could be. If we exactly knew, or better, if Milton knew, he never could have indulged for an instant in his splendid word pictures. Knowledge of it would have exploded the balloon of his inspira- tion in an instant. The preclusion would have been absolute, and he would have turned to other themes unknown or unknowable, in their details, for the ex- pansion and exercise of his majestic faculty. The psychology of this is peculiar, the fact unde- [274] IGNORANCE AND POETRY niable. As science which stands today for a kind of absolutism in knowing, as science increases, and invades attention, poetry decreases or is driven to those fields where science holds no sway, and the scientific mind, with its stocked phrases, its weariless compunctions, its enormous gravity, would hardly be expected to furnish literature with a Keats or a Spenser. In Goethe perhaps we find the exception- ally rare union of the poetic and the scientific, and, to my mind, we do not find in him the sweet, the ineluct- able thrill of poetry. He rationalizes, and Schiller, as a poet, seems more genuine. Goethe, where he is a poet speculates and moves into areas of thought where science has as yet made but indifferent progress, and, at any rate, Goethe possessed the dual nature either one of which he might at will cast off, or so vaguely mix them that we have a tantalizing product, which is a kind of philosophy, and perhaps no philosophy should be called literature. But where philosophy becomes poetic, as so much of it does, it is quite measurably ignorant. The poesy of nations is in their youth, when they do not know, and when they do not care to know. It might be asked contemptuously why not go farther back and see the poetic results in the Botocudos and the Patagonians; they are early enough, and they [275] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE are steeped in ignorance; if ignorance is the best soil for poetry why not get it from the long shoremen, and the coolies, children, and nursemaids. Well there is possibly a just rebuke in this, since the word, ignorance, easily permits misinterpretation. We have chosen it, because of its rude and brutal suggestivity, but it is quite evident that there are grades of ignor- ance on higher and lower levels of general culture. It is evident that the child is ignorant, and it is no less plain that the man is ignorant, the ignorance of the child is within a narrower range of cognitions and the ignorance of the man within a greater, the ignor- ance of the child carries with it no keen suggestive- ness, and the ignorance of the man does. By reason of a deep apperception in the man of the limits of human knowledge, his ignorance passes by a finer name than the primitive uneducation of the child. This ignorance of the child makes him, especially if he has some adumbrant gift of poesy, put life in his toys and meaning in his childish acts, makes him love the baby doll, or hate the harmless and ugly skin. Imagination comes into its province and holds domin- ion as we free ourselves from the tyranny of knowl- edge. The poet is a child, and he runs out into the world of impressions, and sights, and moving spec- tacles, and beauty, and unencumbered or, at least, [276] IGNORANCE AND POETRY not worried by the sciences, puts a dryad in the tree, a nymph in the stream, a god in the cloud, voices in the leaves, and spirits in the winds, and perchance in a verdant field, where the sage botanist will chiefly find ten or more species of graminae, the poet sings (and in this case it is Robert Herrick) Here in green meadows sits eternal May, Purpling the margents, while perpetual day So doubly gilds the air, as that no night Can ever rust the enamel of the light. Here naked younglings, handsome striplings, run Their goals for maidens' kisses, which when done Then unto dancing forth the learned round Commixt they meet, with endless roses crowned ; And here we'll sit on primrose banks, and see Love's chorus led by Cupid. Certainly the poets who have been singing these last three hundred years are not victims of hallucina- tions, they are not averse to occasionally taking the world as the rest of us do, and they suffer from no in- vincible prejudice against chemistry or physics. But their imagination, which is the gift which makes them literary, is their charter of liberty from the restrictions of formal knowledge, giving them free play in the azure and purple fields of dreams. They assume an ignorance, and they can assume it, because we, as [277] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE humans, possess no indisputable sense of certainty, and here our claim remains fortified and unassailable. Those of us who are certain, will never make poets, and never add poetry to the sum of literary effects. Poetry is a surrender to caprice, but a caprice which ministers to emotion, and always is beautiful. If we may say so with entire reverence, God can use neither imagination or poetry; for His absolute knowledge forbids both. The intense basic and in- terfused oneness of His existence with creation, allows no subterfuges of fancy, no indulgence of aes- thetic invention, no room for alternatives, no place for tasteful suggestions or melodic impersonations, nor is there any desire or need of them. Absolute iden- tification with reality kills the main springs of inven- tion as a literary agent. Immobility of mind is the penalty of perfect knowledge, and "to know as we are known" means the death note of creative enter- prise. As we have noted, in Heaven, or in any state where Sin and Misery are quite absent, and forgot- ten, much of the literature of the earth as we know it must cease, so also in such beatific conditions where ignorance is absolutely banished; that mortal state of irreparable doubt, in which we now live, quite gone, poetry will become a memory, the impulse, the ener- gumen, that makes it, dead. [278] IGNORANCE AND POETRY Today, so full and dauntless is the light of science, so enthralling the hunt for facts, so sanitary and clean the asylums of religion, that poetry feels the negation of its province, and turns its fancies to the far past, of which it may say what it best pleases. If it stands in the light of the forum and feels its mythologies all banished, it still turns to the ends and purposes of life, it becomes introspective and mingles its lament or raises its paean with those who despair, or those who challenge and go forward. [279] CHAPTER VIII. THE CONCLUSION If books were quite absent from the world and the pleasure of reading banished the ennui of life to some might seem quite insurmountable. The daily papers which are now involved in our lives to such a degree as to seem almost a necessary part of its tissue, and which carry on their pages the chronology of each day as it were, lifting their Argus-eyed inspection upon the business, the political, the domestic, or social aspects of the earth, these as indispensable adjuncts to the mechanics of life might be less easily spared. Books seem to us invaluable, but it is ap- parent that great numbers of people go through the motions of life successfully, and even enjoy its vari- ous stock of sensations without recourse to the pages of authors. And it can be at once remembered that the ancients accomplished life without them, in our sense, while almost whole nations of men endure the privation today of never seeing a book from their cradle to their grave. All of which goes to prove that they are not essen- tial to the routine of life, to which the cynic might eagerly add that they are not only not necessary, but [280] THE CONCLUSION that the real pleasures of life would gain a desirable prominence if they were out of the way, and that the conceit and stupidity of authors only aggravated or in- creased the miseries of existence. He might point with ill-natured admiration to the unmolested physi- cal happiness of animals whose brains are not invaded by the eccentricities of philosophers, or their diges- tion disturbed by the accumulation of ephemeral in- formation. Of course this is perversion, and the burden of life has derived a sensible easement by rea- son of the pleasures brought to the mind through books. But all books are not literature. A great number serve us all sorts of facts, and the enormous mass of purely educational works, though well written, and the clusters of reportorial books on travels, lives, and events, are hardly to be considered as literary. They may become so, as scientific books often do, if so written in style and treatment as to edify or recreate our minds with that peculiar pleasure which we realize in choice and expressive phraseology, adroit- ness of illustration, and illuminating thought. But Literature per se addresses the sentiments, and we have endeavored to show that as an accident of human nature, or let us say more convincingly, as a part of it, Literature best develops in an environ- [281] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE ment, nay that it derives its substance from, the pres- ence, of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery, that Heaven is without Literature, and that the progressive physi- cal betterment of social conditions, the improving sanitation of civics, the lessening horrors of life, the widening influences of humanitarian and scientific methods of government, are likely to lessen the cre- ative faculties. As we less intensely throb to the urgent presence of these three things, and decline, so to speak, into universal contentment, and reach artificial states where even the emotions shall be subdued to the control of a regulated judgment, or somehow submitted to the monitor of legislative in- junction and, as Spencer and Wells in their con- trasted ways have shown, the integration of nations goes on, and war disappears, and communities assume the diethral pulsations of ideal machines or, as in "Looking Backward" the individual is lost in the communal commonwealth, and the fine glow of universal well being spreads, then Literature declines. The commercial state of society is not however without its display of Misery and Sin. Avarice and greed and the ingenuity of heartless money making are then offered to the study of the observer, and indeed we are just now having such an illustration of the useful literary effectiveness of these things. Here [282] THE CONCLUSION is Norriss' Octopus and his Pit and lately Upton Sinclair's Jungle, though the latter perhaps has more merit as a denunciation than as a novel, and Mclvar's Overlord. There will be indeed wide fields of pos- sibilities in the writing line, in science, in natural description, in travel, but such writing is one way of admitting n>e don't nou>, as a l ar e P art f lt K conjecture, argument, the eloquence of an advocate who feels his own predicament of mental insecurity. Even so charming a book as Ruskin's Modern Paint- ers is an unestablished plea, and at any rate is an appendage and commentary upon Art, and there- fore not primarily Literature. The conclusion we reach is interesting, and per- haps to some may have the merit of novelty. In no way can it cause alarm. If Literature, as an inci- dent of our human state, and doubtless one of its embellishments as well, is the splendid sign of our imperfect condition it is small consequence if it van- ishes with our transference to finer realms of feeling, unlimited affluence of knowledge, and supreme delight; for there, even the provocative of desire (itself a kind of misery) will be absent, and the ecstatic lines of Richard Crashaw to St. Teresa would, in the place of the poet's entire happiness, be impossible: [283] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE Let all thy scattered shafts of light that play Among the leaves of thy large books of day, Combined against this breast at once break in, And take away from me myself and sin ; This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be, And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me. O thou undaunted daughter of desires ! By all thy dower of lights and fires By all the eagle in thee, all the dove, By all thy lives and deaths of love. By thy large draughts of intellectual day And by thy thirsts of love more large than they, By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire, By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His ; By all the heaven thou hast in Him, Fair sister of the seraphim ! By all of thine we have in thee Leave nothing of myself in me ; Let me so read thy life that I Unto all life of mine may die." And thus veritably it appears that Literature, which is so often regarded as the Glory of Life is the Symbol of our Fall. Now of course this exclusion of Literature in Heaven is not limited to the physical [284] THE CONCLUSION circumstances of books and printing presses, binder- ies and proof, but to the essential implications of Literature, viz. verbal arrangements of ideas, affect- ing the sentiments, so that in Heaven there can be no drama, no poetry, no fiction, no history. It is well enough to have it so, but if Heaven is itself a dream there are some practical apprehensions to be in- dulged in here on earth as to the extinction of the same mental activities. Society grows generally better, more humane, even more uniform. In a country like ours, which in- creases in prosperity, in which the dispensation of education and opportunity is allowed to all, Misery, Sin and Ignorance tend to disappear; society tends to become mechanically perfect, if not morally good. That Ignorance, even which we made the substance of Poetry, and which certainly never can depart from life, is meretriciously replaced by a kind of sci- entific cock-sureness, which expels its literary effec- tiveness. In an essay on Signs of the Times Carlyle has said, deploring the predominance of Man's mechanical powers, that "we might fancy either that man's Dynamical nature was, to all spiritual intents, extinct, or else so perfected that nothing more was to be [285] SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE made of it by the old means." Whatever rhetorical clamor is just now being made by College and Uni- versity presidents over national deterioration, it is quite certain that in these United States general humanity is better off than anywhere else or otherwise there must be some monstrous misconception in the minds of men, that brings them to our shores at the rate of one million a year. And every year seems to bring new ameliorations to their condition here. We can produce such improvement forward until we reach a time when a kind of social quietude pre- vails, from the high average of individual comfort, individual sobriety, and individual intelligence, cur- rent everywhere. And with that quietude the men- tal powers of creation, unstimulated by the spectacle of Sin, Ignorance and Misery will themselves grad- ually lapse into quiescence. This means the retirement, even, of the faculty of aesthetic appreciation of the literary qualities of Sin, Ignorance and Misery; and so, with us, happier, bet- ter, and less ignorant, than the Old World, which will never reach any of these conditions, Literature will wane. [286] UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL UBRARY FACILITY A 000 679 050 5