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GREATNESS IN LITERATURE 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 
 BY 
 
 W. P. TRENT 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 AUTHOR OF "SOUTHERN STATESMEN OF THE OLD 
 
 REGIME," "THE AUTHORITY OF 
 
 CRITICISM," ETC., ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
Copyright, 1905, 
 By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 Published, September, 1905. 
 

 
 PREFACE 
 
 This volume might have been described as a 
 collection of literary addresses rather than of 
 " papers," since far the larger portion of its con- 
 tents was prepared for delivery on academic occa- 
 sions. Everything, however, has been somewhat 
 altered for publication, whether here or in the 
 magazines from which I have been kindly allowed 
 to reprint some articles ; hence I have adopted 
 the rather non-committal term " papers." I could 
 not bring myself to employ that delightful and 
 alluring word "essays," because that connotes to 
 my mind a discursive charm which, perhaps, I 
 could not impart to any composition, and which 
 I certainly did not try to impart to most of the 
 writings here collected. In every case except 
 the last paper I was pursuing, successfully or 
 unsuccessfully, a line of thought rather than 
 loitering in the highways and byways of appre- 
 ciative criticism. This fact, or what I think to 
 be a fact, seemed at least not obscured by the 
 
 266971 
 
IV PREFACE 
 
 use of the term " papers," whereas, if I had 
 employed the term " essays," I should have run 
 the risk of beguiling some readers not acquainted 
 with my idiosyncratic deficiencies into suppos- 
 ing that they were taking up a book designed 
 primarily to give them pleasure. I should be 
 delighted to give pleasure, and I sincerely hope 
 I shall give no pain ; but my main object is to 
 discuss certain topics with all the readers I can 
 secure, especially with those who like myself are 
 interested in the problems that confront the critic 
 and the teacher of literature. But now, having 
 done my best to warn off any reader who is on 
 the lookout for true essays and to indicate the 
 class of persons likely, if any are, to find some- 
 thing to their account in my volume, I leave that 
 newcomer into the world of books to take care 
 
 of itself. 
 
 W. P. TRENT. 
 
 New York, 
 March n, 1905. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Question of "Greatness in Litera- 
 ture" i 
 
 II. A Word for the Smaller Authors and 
 
 for Popular Judgment .... 43 
 
 III. The Aims and Methods of Literary Study 59 
 
 IV. Criticism and Faith 95 
 
 V. Literature and Science . . . .109 
 
 VI. Teaching Literature 147 
 
 VII. Some Remarks on Modern Book-burning . 185 
 VIII. The Love of Poetry 219 
 
I 
 
 THE QUESTION OF 
 "GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 
 
[Prepared originally in answer to some queries propounded 
 by students of a course given in the Columbia Summer Ses- 
 sion of 1901. Delivered as a lecture in Cincinnati, Decem- 
 ber, 1 90 1. Published in The International Monthly for May, 
 1902.] 
 
THE QUESTION OF 
 "GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 
 
 It is hard to conceive of a rasher attempt, at 
 least in the sphere of thought, than the one im- 
 plied by the title above. A discussion of " great- 
 ness in literature," and of some of the standards 
 by which it may be determined, involves the infer- 
 ence that the person who voluntarily enters upon 
 it, thinks he knows something definite about a 
 matter over which critics have been disputing for 
 centuries as violently as physicians and theolo- 
 gians have wrangled over their respective topics 
 of contention. Such an implication hampers both 
 him who conducts a discussion and him who fol- 
 lows it. Yet it is obvious that if every man stood 
 in awe of being deemed presumptuous, and kept 
 silence with regard to all vexed problems, few at- 
 tempts would be made either to settle or to come 
 nearer settling them. In consequence, the world 
 of thought would almost stand still and the world 
 of action, to use a homely phrase, would surely 
 slow down. A certain amount of rashness in 
 
 3 
 
4 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 theorizing is therefore permissible, especially in 
 connection with topics of marked importance, 
 even though the results obtained should, after 
 all, appear very commonplace. 
 
 That it is important to be able, approximately, 
 to estimate "greatness in literature" seems appar- 
 ent. Never before has literature meant so much 
 to the public at large as it does in our democratic 
 age, in which books are wonderfully cheap and 
 education is widely diffused. It follows that the 
 struggle between good books and bad, between 
 great books and trivial, has never before meant 
 so much to mankind. When readers were few, 
 the harm done by bad or poor books was com- 
 paratively limited, and the world could often well 
 afford to allow time to do the necessary sifting. 
 But now that we are all readers, now that our 
 daily newspapers describe countless new books 
 and new editions, while our department stores set 
 them before our eyes at any price we may have 
 fixed upon, the question how we may best pick and 
 choose among the thousands of volumes offered 
 us, is one that many conscientious men and 
 women who care for literature cannot dismiss 
 lightly, despite the fact that there is no lack of 
 genial eclectic lovers of books to tell them, with 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 5 
 
 more than a grain of truth, that overserious read- 
 ing is one of the banes of our self-conscious age. 
 But this question of the Choice of Books, about 
 which critics like Frederic Harrison have written 
 helpfully and delightfully, is indissolubly involved 
 with the question of " greatness in literature," 
 and of the standards by which this may be de- 
 termined. The marked importance of the latter 
 question being thus apparent, the rashness of 
 discussing it is minimized, and further apologies 
 may be waived. 
 
 The use of the word "greatness" implies stand- 
 ards of comparison, which may be individual or 
 collective. It is clear that a poem or other piece 
 of literature may be great to me and not to the 
 rest of the world, or that it may be accepted as 
 great by a majority of critics and readers and not 
 seem at all great to me. Furthermore, a piece 
 of literature may be great to contemporaries of 
 its author and by no means great to posterity, or 
 vice versa, — although, as a matter of fact, it sel- 
 dom happens that posterity sees real greatness in 
 what did not profoundly appeal to contemporaries. 
 It often sees interest, charm, but rarely greatness. 
 
 From these facts we infer that collective stand- 
 ards are not of paramount value when they 
 
6 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 merely involve contemporary appreciation of a 
 book or writer, but that they do gain very great 
 value when they have been held by a number 
 of generations. For example, it is probably 
 not wise, but it is certainly permissible, to affirm 
 that Tennyson is not a great poet. It would 
 be the height of unwisdom to maintain that 
 Homer is not a great poet, provided we admit 
 his existence, or to announce as Joel Barlow, 
 our own half-forgotten epic poet, once did, in a 
 far from Platonic style, that Homer has exerted 
 a most immoral influence on mankind. But while 
 this is true, it is equally true that our individual 
 standards are of paramount importance to us as 
 individuals. If we cannot see that the "Iliad" is 
 great, we are reduced to three unpleasant modes 
 of procedure, — we either stifle our thoughts, or 
 pretend to admire what we do not, which is unedi- 
 fying conventionality or rank hypocrisy, or else as 
 Herbert Spencer did in his "Autobiography," we 
 proclaim our disagreement with the world's verdict, 
 and run the risk of being sneered at or called stupid 
 by people whose acquaintance with Homer is prob- 
 ably far from profound. 
 
 Such being the case, we may infer that it is a 
 matter of some importance, if we care for litera- 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 7 
 
 ture at all, for us who study or read books, to put 
 our individual standards as far as possible in ac- 
 cord with the collective standards. In this way we 
 shall approximate true culture ; to apply Matthew 
 Arnold's words, we shall learn to know and agree 
 with the best that has been thought and said 
 in the world about literature. This is not all of 
 culture, but it is a most important part of it. It 
 is only fair to add, however, that a whole school 
 of critics has of late more or less denied the need 
 of our taking account of collective standards. 
 These are the Impressionists, well represented 
 by M. Jules Lemaitre, and their shibboleth seems 
 to be, " I like this book ; if you don't, you can keep 
 your own opinion and I'll keep mine." This is a 
 very independent, and ostensibly liberal, statement 
 of principles, and it is naturally popular ; but a fool 
 can make it as complacently as a wise man, and it 
 leads to chaos in matters of taste. In its extreme 
 forms, impressionism is individualism run mad, and 
 has few or no uses ; in more moderate forms it 
 has uses which, however, need not be discussed 
 here. 
 
 But what has all this to do with the question of 
 " greatness in literature " ? This much at least. 
 Greatness implying standards of comparison, those 
 
8 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 standards being individual and collective, and the 
 collective being the more important of the two, but 
 the individual nearer to us, it seems to follow that 
 we ought first to examine our own ideas of " great- 
 ness in literature," then consult the chief critics to 
 determine what writings the collective wisdom of 
 mankind has pronounced great, and finally try to 
 corroborate and enlarge our own ideas by means 
 of such consultation and of wide reading. In this 
 process we start with what is nearest to us, our 
 own feelings and thoughts, and widen out our con- 
 ceptions until we embrace as much of the universal 
 as we can. This appears to be logical and to be 
 analogous with other mental processes. 
 
 Now how do we as individuals use the term 
 "great" in connection with literature? We use it 
 loosely, but no more loosely than in other connec- 
 tions, and presumably we use it mainly of things or 
 persons that do something, not of things or persons 
 that are on the whole quiescent, no matter how full 
 they may be of potential energy. The great states- 
 man, for example, is to each of us the man who 
 accomplishes something in the sphere of politics, 
 not the man who has merely the potentialities of suc- 
 cess. And he must accomplish something which 
 in our view is large, important, influential, com- 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 9 
 
 paratively permanent, more or less original, and 
 unique, or we shall not call him great — at least 
 we shall not call him great for long. Do we not 
 apply the term with respect to literature in some 
 such way ? The poem or the poet, the book or 
 the writer, must do something with us, and 
 that something must be large, important, influ- 
 ential, comparatively permanent, more or less 
 original, and unique. Obviously there are two 
 spheres in which this large, important something 
 may be done, — the sphere of our emotions and 
 the sphere of our intelligence. One book stirs 
 our feelings deeply and permanently ; another 
 opens out a range of new ideas which make an 
 impression upon our lives ; we call both these 
 books great, and rightly. 
 
 Perhaps I may venture by way of illustration 
 to give two instances out of my own experience. 
 When I first read it, I called Balzac's " Pere 
 Goriot " a great book because the life of the 
 devoted old father who gave up everything for 
 his heartless daughters, left upon me a large 
 and deep impression of the power of the pater- 
 nal instinct ; it left a permanent sense of the 
 pathos of much of this mortal life ; it was im- 
 portant and influential, I trust, in widening my 
 
10 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 sympathies; and the novel seemed original and 
 unique because I saw that Balzac had not imi- 
 tated Shakspere in " Lear," but had accom- 
 plished the wonderful feat of taking a situation 
 not dissimilar to that treated by Shakspere, and 
 developing it into something very different from 
 " Lear," and almost as impressive, though not 
 so grandly poetical. So I called that a great 
 novel when I first read it, and I have continued 
 to call it such. 1 The other book I shall men- 
 tion only, but its effects upon me might be 
 analyzed as easily. It was Gibbon's " Decline 
 and Fall of the Roman Empire." That book 
 enlarged my knowledge and my conception of 
 history so immensely and permanently that I 
 rose from perusing its final pages as certain of 
 its tremendous greatness as I was of my own 
 existence. But it should be observed that while 
 Gibbon's great history affects the mind pri- 
 marily, it affects the emotions also, — think of 
 the splendid pictures it contains, — and that 
 
 1 Whether I or any one else should call Turgenev's " Lear of 
 the Steppes " great or merely impressive is a point that may be 
 raised in this connection, but not discussed here. The universality 
 of the appeal made by the Lear story is curiously illustrated by the 
 fact that it has been recently made the motive of a Yiddish play 
 by Mr. Jacob Gordin. 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" I I 
 
 " Pere Goriot," while it affects the emo- 
 tions primarily, affects the mind also by giving 
 it many fresh ideas about human, and espe- 
 cially French, life. It follows that while it 
 is convenient to distinguish between the two 
 spheres in which literature acts, — the emotions 
 and the intelligence, — as a matter of fact, al- 
 most every piece of good literature will operate 
 in both. One cannot really separate, for purposes 
 of isolation, the effects of a book any more than 
 one can so separate, save in theory, the faculties 
 of the person that feels those effects. 
 
 From these two instances of the application of 
 the individual standard to determine " greatness in 
 literature," let us turn to consider the application 
 of the collective standards. With regard to "Pere 
 Goriot " and the " Decline and Fall " I knew 
 long beforehand that the world had pronounced 
 them both to be great books. It was, therefore, 
 not necessary to verify my main conclusions, al- 
 though I have found it worth while to read criti- 
 cisms of Balzac and Gibbon in order to determine, 
 if I could, whether the various grounds on which I 
 based my judgments were correctly taken. That 
 is usually a very good thing to do. But it may 
 easily happen, especially if we are not widely 
 
12 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 read, or are desultory in our reading, that we 
 may chance upon a book the name and reputation 
 of which are unfamiliar to us, which nevertheless 
 moves us profoundly and seems to us great. This 
 is a case for using the collective standards. We 
 may find that the book has for years been regarded 
 as great by a sufficient number of readers fairly to 
 entitle it to rank as a classic, — in which case our 
 own standards are proved to be in harmony with 
 those of the world, and we are encouraged more 
 and more to trust to our own judgments. This is 
 the way, it seems to me, that we best educate our- 
 selves in literature, — by constantly reading and 
 verifying the judgments we pass, — not slavishly, 
 not giving up our own points of view simply be- 
 cause we do not find the best critics on our side, 
 and, on the other hand, not dogmatically or ego- 
 tistically maintaining our own views, — but quietly 
 and with an open mind confirming our presumably 
 correct judgments, and reconsidering and revising 
 our presumably erroneous ones by reading and 
 conversation and reflection. 
 
 But in case the book we have accidentally read 
 and thought great is condemned by the critics, or 
 not even mentioned by them, what are we to con- 
 clude ? That we were entirely mistaken ? That 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 1 3 
 
 is scarcely necessary. The book has done great 
 things for us, and is truly great thus far. We 
 may be the one reader out of a thousand for 
 whom the author was writing, — his fit audience, 
 though very few. It may be because the book or 
 poem suited a transient mood. It may be because 
 it suited our special epoch of life, or our class in- 
 stincts and prepossessions, or what not. Here we 
 have a reason why books are immensely popu- 
 lar with one generation, yet are scarcely read by 
 the next. Generations change, — progressing in 
 some ways, losing in others, but, as we trust, on 
 the whole progressing. What wonder, then, that 
 the book which exactly suited our fathers, but did 
 not go much below the surface, so as to touch 
 permanent ideas and emotions uniquely and pro- 
 foundly should be unread to-day ! As we rise in 
 culture, we leave behind a novelist like E. P. Roe, 
 and turn to Thackeray; but this does not mean 
 that we should sneer at the popular American 
 novelist, or at the people who liked his books, — 
 much less at those who still like them, — any more 
 than it means that on first reading " Henry 
 Esmond " and finding it delightful, we should 
 naively write a letter commending it to the 
 readers of our favorite literary weekly. 
 
14 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 Are we not led to conclude that there is a rela- 
 tive "greatness in literature," as well as, what we 
 may call for convenience, an absolute greatness, 
 and that we can safely use the word " great" only 
 in connection with works that have stood the col- 
 lective standards successfully ? It seems better 
 for practical purposes to emphasize the latter con- 
 clusion. Let us call that "great" which has pro- 
 duced large, important, influential, permanent, 
 original, and unique results both in ourselves and 
 in a majority of readers and critics, past and 
 present. Let us insert a "perhaps" or a "prob- 
 ably " or some other qualification before the word 
 "great" used of any living writer, except, it may 
 be, in the case of an author like Count Tolstoy, 
 whose chief works have been long before the 
 world, and have attained that cosmopolitan fame 
 which as a criterion of merit is no bad substitute 
 for the fame awarded by time. This may seem 
 cold and heartless and pedantic, yet it surely 
 raises the dignity of literature, and gives us a 
 better chance for free and honest contemporary 
 criticism. 
 
 But let us look for a moment at the negative 
 side of the question. If we so limit the word 
 " great " in its application, what terms are we to 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" I 5 
 
 apply to the enormous masses of literature that lie 
 below the line of greatness ? There are several 
 terms that seem available. The writings that 
 have appealed to us and to those similarly minded 
 may be delightful, as in the case of the society 
 poetry of Matthew Prior. They may be charming, 
 as in the case of the delicate verses of Mr. Austin 
 Dobson. They may be good, as in the case of 
 perhaps eight out of ten of the poets who survive 
 sufficiently to be represented at considerable 
 length in such a standard anthology as Mr. 
 Humphry Ward's " English Poets," or of the 
 essayists and novelists whose works continue to 
 be published in uniform collected editions. Prob- 
 ably at least eight-tenths of the literature which 
 the best critics discuss ranges from fair to good as 
 a whole. If it is only fair, we need not read it, 
 unless we are trying to make critics of ourselves, 
 or historians of literature; and we can tell very 
 accurately whether it is only fair by observing the 
 amount of attention it receives from critics whose 
 judgments we have learned to respect. In the 
 case of good literature, — a very considerable 
 amount of which is being written to-day all over 
 the world, — we must pick and choose. We 
 should have to live to be a thousand years old 
 
1 6 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 to read it all or nearly all, and our real concern 
 is with the great, and with that portion of the 
 delightful, the charming, and the good that makes 
 a special appeal to us as individuals. It is plain 
 that we must discover for ourselves this specially 
 appealing literature, for no one else has precisely 
 our tastes ; but we may, of course, be aided by 
 wide reading in criticism, and by using the other 
 instrumentalities of culture. 
 
 It goes without saying that there are other 
 classes of books, or rather that the term " good 
 literature " may be resolved into various classes. 
 One book is interesting, because the main fact 
 of which we are conscious when we put it down 
 is that it held our attention remarkably well. We 
 read on and on to see what the end would be. 
 We did not pause for contemplation, we felt no 
 rapture, — if we had, probably we should have 
 pronounced it "great" immediately, — but we 
 did feel interest, we recommended the book to 
 our friends, and perhaps were among the hundred 
 thousand readers whom the jubilant publisher 
 advertised in every conspicuous place. Another 
 book is valuable, because we frequently make use 
 of it or of the ideas it contains. Another is agree- 
 able, because it helps us to while away the time. 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 1 7 
 
 Against these books, when they have not through 
 the lapse of years become standard, it would be 
 only a pessimistic, almost an inhuman, critic who 
 would inveigh ; they have become necessaries of 
 life. What would the publishers or the literary 
 supplements of the newspapers do without them ? 
 But they are either not literature at all, or else in 
 many cases lie outside the province of the serious 
 critic or of the teacher and student of literature. 
 That enigmatical personage, the average reader, 
 is fully capable of attending to them without 
 assistance. 
 
 There is, however, one further class of compo- 
 sitions that needs a word. There are books, and 
 especially single poems, which it is our first 
 impulse to call beautiful. Are these really great ? 
 
 We may safely answer, " Yes," provided they are 
 truly and more or less completely beautiful, and 
 provided the beauty is pure and elemental. 
 Keats's line will help us here, " A thing of beauty 
 is a joy forever." An eternal joy is bound, unless 
 there is something the matter with us, to produce 
 in us large, permanent, important, and unique 
 emotions. Thus it is that many of the poems of 
 Keats himself are great poems in a true sense, — 
 although they may seem at first thought to lie out- 
 
1 8 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 side the sphere of our normal life, and thus to 
 lack vitality. As their loveliness takes possession 
 of us, it energizes our souls, perhaps just as much, 
 in the case of many of us, as the more obvious 
 power and passion and contagious optimism of 
 Browning do. But if the work is merely beautiful 
 in parts, not as a whole, — if it is the so-called 
 purple passages that affect us, — then it is no 
 more great than a picture of a woman is great, 
 merely because the painter has succeeded in 
 giving her a pair of beautiful eyes. And if we 
 suspect that the poem or book is merely pretty, if 
 it leaves us with a sense of placid contentment, we 
 may be very sure that it is not great for us. 
 Some of Longfellow's poetry appears, as we 
 advance in culture, to produce fainter impressions 
 upon us than it did upon our fathers and mothers, 
 — which is perhaps the chief reason why we are 
 hearing so many people assert that he is not a 
 great poet. Personally, I think that some in- 
 justice is being done to Longfellow, but the main 
 point here is to understand why with many readers 
 his work seems to have lost ground. 
 
 Now, while Longfellow has apparently been 
 losing ground, another American poet, Edgar 
 Allan Poe, has been gaining it. This leads us 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 19 
 
 naturally to consider a question fully as important 
 as that of " greatness in literature," to wit, What 
 standards must we apply in order to determine the 
 relative greatness of writers ? After we have 
 learned approximately to recognize the best litera- 
 ture, we are almost inevitably bound to observe 
 that, while we may call two books great, and 
 refrain from further comparison, we cannot in 
 most cases disguise the fact that we find one 
 decidedly superior to the other, and that thus 
 we pass to asking the question which author is 
 the greater. 
 
 But some critics and readers, notably the Im- 
 pressionists, object to this emphatically. Why 
 not be content, they say, with the fact that you 
 like this writer for one reason and that for 
 another ? Why run down any one ? Why com- 
 pare writers when it is almost certain that you do 
 not know them equally well, and are thus in con- 
 stant danger of being unfair ? Why try to meas- 
 ure what is incommensurable, since you cannot 
 measure so subtle a thing as literature, at least 
 when it is imaginative, and you have no inflexible 
 standards ? 
 
 There is truth in this point of view so far as it 
 involves a protest that we should not discriminate 
 
20 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 against one writer, because by our standards we 
 find another greater. A catholic taste will enjoy 
 everything that is good. Our love for Shak- 
 spere and Milton need not impair our affection 
 for Charles Lamb and Goldsmith and Irving. 
 Great writers will kill mediocre or bad writers ; 
 for example, many people cannot read trashy 
 novelists after the masters of fiction, — but no 
 great author ever really injures by comparison a 
 genuinely good one, who has done well his own 
 work no matter how small. Thus we see from 
 the world's experience that the attempt to rank 
 men of letters has not annihilated or cast into the 
 shade the lesser authors who have genuine qualities, 
 and that the plea of the Impressionist against run- 
 ning writers down does not in fact apply to us 
 when we set up our standards of measurement. 
 
 But there is a positive reason for setting up 
 these standards, which the Impressionist is likely 
 to overlook. It is a law of the human mind 
 and heart to seek the best and to pay it due 
 homage when found. Could we check the 
 operations of this law, we should do much to 
 stop human progress, much to sap the foun- 
 dations of society. The law is universal ; it is 
 seen in monarchies and republics, in politics 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 21 
 
 and literature; nay, more, is it not the main- 
 spring of every religion ? The highest deserves 
 the utmost homage, when, in that highest, truth, 
 beauty, and goodness are found in supreme 
 measure. How useless, then, to ask us to stop 
 applying our standards ; that is, to stop measuring 
 to determine the highest ! 
 
 For generations on generations men have 
 been comparing the various arts, and on the 
 whole have given the palm to poetry, for reasons 
 which may be found in such critics as Aristotle 
 and Lessing. All the other arts have their 
 advocates and lovers, of course ; but thus far the 
 consensus of opinion seems to be in favor of 
 poetry, and for the present we can let the ques- 
 tion stand as if it were settled, although, as a 
 matter of fact, it is anything but settled. Then, 
 by inexorable law, men began to classify poetry, 
 and to ask which kind of poetry is greatest. 
 Here, again, there is no unanimity of opinion ; 
 but collective standards, which in these more or 
 less general and abstruse subjects are the only safe 
 ones to use, have put either the poetic tragedy 
 or the epic first, have placed the impassioned, 
 highly wrought ode above all other forms of 
 lyric, and have ranked the satire and the didactic 
 
22 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 poem beneath the other categories of poetry. 
 This is not saying, to be sure, that a very good 
 satire may not be better than a mediocre or even 
 a fairly good ode, nor is it saying that the kinds 
 of poetry are not frequently fused, not to say 
 confused — the only point that need be em- 
 phasized here is that, since the days of the 
 Greeks, there has been what may be called a 
 hierarchy of the literary species} — that is, a 
 ranking of the kinds of literature, especially of 
 poetry, — and that if we are to give this up, we 
 must do so for better reasons than are advanced 
 by the critics who will have none of it. 
 
 But just as there has been a comparison of the 
 arts and of the kinds of literature, so there has 
 been a comparison of the artists and the writers. 
 The poets, for example, have been compared and 
 ranked according to the kinds of poetry they 
 have attempted, and according to the total power 
 and value of their work. Thus, until Shakspere 
 arose, Homer was regarded as not merely the 
 Father of Poets, but as, take him all in all, the 
 
 1 Perhaps the best equivalent we have for the French term genre 
 when it is applied to literature. " Categories," which is sometimes 
 employed in this connection, does not seem to be altogether satis- 
 factory. 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 23 
 
 greatest of poets. Some of us still think him 
 the greatest, but nearly all the world has given 
 the palm to Shakspere. There is room, however, 
 in this case as in others, for the individual stand- 
 ard to apply, because it is generally admitted by 
 persons who know both poets that they are so 
 very great that estimating their greatness is 
 almost like taking the altitudes of two tremendous 
 mountains of nearly equal heights. The slightest 
 deflection of the instrument may cause an error; 
 it is permissible, therefore, to take new measure- 
 ments from time to time. So it is with Milton 
 and Dante. But merely because two sets of 
 observers differed slightly in their measurements 
 of those two mountains, would be no reason what- 
 ever for inferring either that the mountains were 
 not very high or that the methods employed in 
 observing them were without scientific value. 
 Just so, because there may be some question 
 still whether Shakspere is greater than Homer, 
 or vice versa, — we are assuming, to be sure, that 
 Shakspere wrote his own plays and that the 
 name "Homer" does not cover a multitude of 
 singers, — is no reason for denying the proposition 
 that they are in all probability the two most mar- 
 vellously endowed poets that ever lived, or for 
 
24 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 holding that the collective standards applied to 
 determine their unique greatness are valueless. 
 
 But enough has probably been said on these 
 points ; let us turn to the practical matter of 
 endeavoring to determine how authors are to be 
 ranked in the scale of greatness. One fact seems 
 settled, — it is that there is a small group of what 
 are sometimes called world-writers, — writers, 
 chiefly poets, supremely great ; who are read in 
 nearly every land and in some cases have been 
 so read almost since they wrote ; who are sepa- 
 rated in point of genius by a wide chasm from 
 all other authors. The writers of universal 
 genius we may call them, although supreme 
 writers is, probably, a better designation. They 
 are very few in number; Homer, Sophocles, 
 Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, Goethe, nearly 
 exhaust the list. Moliere, however, should be 
 added because he represents the comedy of 
 manners so marvellously, and we should doubt- 
 less include Cervantes and a few others. It is 
 clear that the authors named are supreme in 
 their excellence, and it is also obvious that 
 they have no living peers. In fact, there are 
 scarcely more than three recent writers known 
 to us who seem possibly entitled to such a high 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 25 
 
 rank, and they are Scott, Victor Hugo, and Balzac, 
 about whom the critics are still arguing pro and 
 con. 
 
 Below these masters, yet far above the majority 
 even of authors to whom the term " great " is 
 freely applied, comes a small group of writers of 
 very eminent originality and power, of great 
 reputation outside their own nationalities, but 
 still not universal in their genius, nor so dazzling 
 in their achievements as the supreme or world 
 writers. This group is often not separated from 
 the classes above it and below it ; hence there 
 is no classification for it that is accepted 
 everywhere. It will not do to apply Mr. Swin- 
 burne's suggestive division of poets as gods and 
 giants, because, while it is fairly easy to recognize 
 a giant, the gleaming presence of some divinities, 
 especially of Mr. Swinburne's own, is occasionally 
 hidden from mortal eyes. Then, again, there are 
 semi-divinities ; indeed, there is no telling how 
 minutely the divine essence may be parcelled out. 
 In the case of the men of letters we are now 
 discussing it might be permissible to call them 
 the dii minores, — the minor divinities of literature, 
 if we chose to call the world-writers the dii 
 majores, — the major divinities of literature; em- 
 
26 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 phasis being laid on the fact that they differ 
 from all authors below them in fairly seeming 
 to surpass in their power and influence what 
 merely great writers might be expected to accom- 
 plish. This implies, it is true, a somewhat stable 
 standard of level greatness, a point which we 
 shall discuss in a moment, and there is probably 
 no need at this late day of taking refuge in such 
 an undefinable term as "divinities." It is, per- 
 haps, better to distinguish this class as that of the 
 very great writers. Into it would seem to fall 
 such poets as Pindar in Greek, Lucretius in 
 Latin, Petrarch, Tasso, and Ariosto in Italian, 
 Chaucer and Spenser in English, Schiller and 
 Heine in German. It is not unlikely that some 
 critics, desiring to give the French a place in 
 the list, would insert the name of Victor Hugo; 
 but, as we have just seen, he is a candidate for 
 higher honors, and personally I should unhesitat- 
 ingly assign those same higher honors to Voltaire 
 for his excellence in prose and verse combined. 
 But whatever we may say of French poets, 
 there are at least two masters of French prose 
 who seem very great, — Rabelais and Montaigne, 
 — and to balance them we may name two very 
 great British prose writers, Swift and Gibbon. 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 27 
 
 But we must be tentative in our illustrations, 
 for there is little unanimity among the critics, 
 as may be seen by comparing the rank given 
 Chaucer by Matthew Arnold with that given him, 
 let us say, by Professor Lounsbury. Not a few 
 of us would doubtless like to assert emphatically 
 the supreme position of the author of "The 
 Canterbury Tales " ; but, while his merits are being 
 more and more acknowledged by foreign scholars, 
 it may be questioned whether he has even yet 
 attained a truly cosmopolitan fame. 
 
 Immediately below these very great writers 
 comes a class which is plainly great, yet also 
 plainly not supremely great, sometimes not great 
 enough to be well known outside of their respec- 
 tive countries, but cherished by their countrymen 
 as national glories. These are the authors one 
 would never think of calling supreme, although 
 one would as little think of calling them minor. 
 We may call them, as is usual, simply "great 
 writers " ; for if we speak of them as constituting a 
 "second class," as is sometimes done, we ignore the 
 real distinction between them and the very great 
 writers of whom mention has just been made. Of 
 these really, but not supremely, or very great, 
 authors every nation that has an important litera- 
 
28 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 ture can point to several. No attempt at enumera- 
 tion is here demanded, but we may be reasonably 
 sure that both Catullus and Horace belong to the 
 Roman list and Leopardi to the Italian. In Eng- 
 lish we have in this class such poets as Marlowe, 
 Ben Jonson, Dryden, probably Pope and perhaps 
 Gray, Burns, Coleridge, Keats, very probably 
 Tennyson and Robert Browning, as well as Words- 
 worth, Byron, and Shelley, unless the partisans of 
 the last group succeed in elevating one or more of 
 them into the class of the very great poets. The 
 reason one cannot speak more definitely is mainly 
 to be found in the facts that not even yet have we 
 settled the places of the eighteenth-century poets, 
 and that the critics have too often spent their time 
 in anathematizing one another instead of attending 
 to their real business of attempting to reach such 
 a consensus of opinion with regard to our classic 
 authors as would correspond with, let us say, the 
 consensus more or less obtaining in France. Still, 
 scarcely any critic denies the existence of this class 
 of great but not greatest writers, and the places of 
 a majority of the names given are probably secure. 
 This is enough for us, nor need we add the names 
 of many corresponding masters of prose. Those 
 of Charles Lamb and Hazlitt and Hawthorne will 
 be sufficient. 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 29 
 
 As for the rest of the writers of a nation, for we 
 have passed from the sphere of the cosmopolitan 
 authors, critical usage is perplexingly various. 
 Some critics have two or three classes, especially of 
 poets, and speak of Dryden or Ben Jonson as the 
 head of the second class. Some talk indefinitely of 
 third and fourth classes. Some use the qualifying 
 epithet " minor." In the midst of this confusion, 
 which often puzzles students, and presumably gen- 
 eral readers also, it may not be presumptuous to 
 hazard the suggestion, — which harmonizes in part 
 with a remark made by Sainte-Beuve to Matthew 
 Arnold, — that it might be well to divide all worthy 
 authors who fall below the class universally or 
 usually called great into two classes as follows : — 
 
 First, important writers, — writers who have not 
 power and range enough to be called great, al- 
 though they often have a considerable range and 
 have written some poetry, or a book or two, that 
 may fairly be regarded as great ; — writers whom 
 most of us will want to read in whole or in part 
 because their genius, within well-defined limits, is 
 genuine, and because they stand for something 
 important in culture and in the history of litera- 
 ture and are also likely to interest in and for them- 
 selves. The poet William Collins will serve as an 
 
3<D THE QUESTION OF 
 
 example. He did not write enough to be called 
 great ; his range of powers was not sufficiently 
 wide ; but he is regarded by those who know his 
 work as a thoroughly genuine poet ; he composed 
 several poems like the " Ode to Evening " that are 
 truly classic ; and he is important because with 
 Gray he helped to inaugurate the romantic move- 
 ment among the eighteenth-century poets. To call 
 Collins " minor " would be misleading, yet he is 
 not great. He is, however, important, as is also, 
 for example, in the realms of prose fiction, or at 
 least of American fiction, our own first novelist, 
 Charles Brockden Brown. To this class would 
 probably belong those authors of large endeavor 
 who with a little more genius or under more favor- 
 able circumstances, might have been indisputably 
 great ; such a man of letters, for example, as Robert 
 Southey. 
 
 Secondly, the minor writers, — a class which 
 should consist of writers of genuine quality, but of 
 no conspicuous excellence, — poets, for instance, 
 who are not mere versifiers, novelists who are not 
 mere manufacturers of salable fiction, — authors 
 in whose works any lover of books would be likely 
 to find things well worth reading, but who might 
 be neglected with no great loss. In other words, 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 3 I 
 
 our class of minor writers should include those 
 whom, without being impelled to blush at owning 
 the fact, we might never find time to read, but 
 who make a genuine appeal to many persons, and 
 sometimes a strong appeal to a small class of 
 readers. Such authors are very numerous and are 
 sure to be increasingly numerous in the future, in 
 view of the fact that so many men and women 
 have become fairly equipped for the profession of 
 letters. If concrete examples are needed, we may 
 cite such a poet as the late Mr. Aubrey De Vere 
 and such a novelist as Henry Kingsley. It should 
 be remembered, however, that a minor or an occa- 
 sional poet whose entire works we need not read, 
 may write a poem we should all do well to read. 
 Perhaps the name of the Rev. Charles Wolfe 
 means nothing to most of us, but we do remember 
 his 
 
 " Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note." 
 
 It is superfluous to add that below our minor 
 writers fall the versifiers, the scribblers, the 
 authors who won applause for a day, but were 
 soon forgotten, and need not be revived. For 
 these no classification is required here. 
 
 We do require, however, some practical tests to 
 enable us to separate and place authors for our- 
 
32 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 selves. I think that in the description or defini- 
 tion of what I proposed to call the important 
 and the minor writers, tests will be found for 
 determining who should belong to these classes; 
 but, after all, our main concern is with the 
 greatest and the great, and we can leave the 
 lesser authors to one side. Are there any tests 
 by which the greatest masters can be set apart; 
 that is, tests other than that of universal consent ? 
 There seem to be. 
 
 If we examine the works of the supreme or 
 world-writers, we shall find that they have many 
 of their wonderful characteristics in common. 
 
 Their art, their technic is nearly always high 
 and uniform. We may open any page at ran- 
 dom and we shall discover some evidence — 
 whether a noble line — or a passage of supreme 
 metrical power and beauty — or marvellous turns 
 of expression or command of language — some- 
 thing that makes us exclaim, Here is a great 
 artist ! . In other words, the style of the world- 
 poet rarely flags. This is not true of most 
 of the merely great poets; it is not true, for 
 instance, of Wordsworth, or Byron, and, where 
 it is in the main true, as with Tennyson, there 
 is some unevenness of matter, some deficiency 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 33 
 
 of poetic energy, that counterbalances the per- 
 fection of style. 
 
 In the second place, the genius of none of 
 these supreme writers seems cramped ; their 
 power is sovereign and sustained ; their range 
 is either universal or very lofty. Homer, for 
 example, and Shakspere seem to set every 
 phase of life and character before us. They do 
 not really do this, but they seem to do it. Milton 
 and Dante, on the other hand, make up for their 
 lack of this universality by being able to rise to 
 sublime heights and to maintain their elevation. 
 They penetrate heaven itself. Goethe appears 
 to be universal in his knowledge of life and art, 
 and he succeeds in almost every form of litera- 
 ture. Balzac's acquaintance with human nature 
 seems portentously wide and deep. These things 
 are not true of the merely great authors. On 
 their own ground they may be great, nay, su- 
 preme; but off it their genius flags. Words- 
 worth, for instance, is almost unrivalled as a 
 nature and a reflective poet, but he had no dra- 
 matic genius, little humor, and slight sympathy 
 with many phases of life. 
 
 In the third place, each of these supreme 
 writers has achieved a long, sustained master- 
 
34 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 piece, or a number of masterpieces. The " Iliad," 
 the "Odyssey," the " CEdipus Rex," the " JEneid," 
 the " Divine Comedy," " Othello," " Hamlet," and 
 "Lear," "Paradise Lost," "Faust," — at once rise 
 before us. The great writers, on the other hand, 
 when poets, rarely succeed when they attempt 
 long masterpieces, and, when novelists, rarely 
 give us a series of genuine masterpieces. Words- 
 worth's " Excursion," Shelley's " Revolt of Islam " 
 and " Prometheus Unbound," Tennyson's " Idylls," 
 Browning's "Ring and the Book," — are either 
 acknowledged failures as wholes or else have so 
 many critics and readers against them that the 
 question of their eminent greatness remains un- 
 decided. But the world-writer has his practically 
 undisputed masterpiece, although he may have 
 much besides. So, also, the very great writers 
 like Spenser have their undisputed masterpieces, 
 but these authors, as we have seen, lack some 
 of the characteristics of the world or supreme 
 writers. 
 
 In the fourth place, the world-writer, as his 
 name implies, has conquered the civilized world. 
 Whether he is read or not, his name is widely 
 known, and his place is yielded him ungrudgingly. 
 Milton is not very generally read, but his place is 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 35 
 
 secure, and if his name were mentioned to a culti- 
 vated Frenchman, the latter would know some- 
 thing about him. The Italians, on the other hand, 
 know very little about Wordsworth, while we do 
 know not a little about Dante. Most of us do 
 not know Leconte de Lisle, but the Frenchman, 
 while he does know Poe, retaliates by knowing 
 practically nothing about Bryant. As the world 
 is drawn closer together, this test of cosmopolitan 
 fame may cease to mean very much j 1 but at present 
 it is only supremely great authors, or exceptional 
 ones like Byron and Poe, who acquire really world- 
 wide fame, and the test is useful. 
 
 Our fifth and last test is one that applies also to 
 the other classes of writers, — the test of duration 
 of fame. But in the case of the genuine world- 
 writers a longer period of probation is normally 
 required. Victor Hugo, to use an example already 
 given, is probably a very great poet ; but it will be 
 some years, perhaps some generations, before it 
 will be definitely known whether or not he has 
 risen to the dignity of being a world-poet. 
 
 1 Note in this connection the increasing number of important 
 French studies of British and American writers. Two elaborate 
 volumes, one dealing with Poe and one with Hawthorne, have 
 appeared in the past few months. 
 
36 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 There are obviously other tests that might be 
 applied, but they are less concrete. World-writers 
 are generally marked by supreme qualities in 
 every respect, — supreme imagination, supreme 
 range and copiousness of creative power, supreme 
 command of language and rhythm, supreme seri- 
 ousness and splendor of thought 
 
 It would seem plain, in conclusion, that if we 
 apply these tests, we ought to be able to tell 
 quickly whether any given writer is worthy of 
 the highest praise, and that we ought to make 
 it almost a matter of duty not to indulge in 
 hyperbolic laudation of any save the noblest 
 authors. 
 
 A few words remain to be said about tests that 
 may be applied to writers just below the highest 
 rank, — to the writers I have proposed to denomi- 
 nate "very great." This, as we have seen, is a 
 perplexing problem; but, if we will lay hold of the 
 masterpiece test, it may help us. Any writer who 
 has a long masterpiece or, in the case of prose, a 
 series of books pronounced admirable by succes- 
 sive generations in his own country, and respected 
 by competent critics abroad, seems entitled to 
 rank among the very great writers, — the dii 
 minores of literature. Thus, Spenser, Tasso, 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 37 
 
 Ariosto, and their peers belong to this class, 
 and so, also, do novelists like Fielding. It is 
 clear that none of these writers is characterized 
 by universality of genius as Homer, Shakspere, 
 Goethe are, nor by sublimity as Dante and Milton 
 are ; nor do any of them completely fulfil any of 
 the other tests just given, although all do partially 
 fulfil them. This class includes also, however, 
 writers who have not a long masterpiece to their 
 credit, but who can substitute for it a body of 
 work of sufficient power, uniformity of merit, 
 and important influence to be fairly equivalent 
 to a masterpiece. The sonnets and canzoni of 
 Petrarch, the lyrics of Heine, seem to entitle 
 them to rank with or very near the writers of 
 sustained and indubitable masterpieces. Thus 
 we perceive that the fundamental test, both for 
 the supreme writers and for the very great 
 writers immediately below them, is excellence 
 of sustained achievement. 
 
 Finally, as to the class of great writers, who 
 are in the main of national importance only, we 
 observe that they are separated from the classes 
 above them by one fact, at least. They have no 
 undisputed masterpiece, — indeed, they are gener- 
 ally marked by having an attempted masterpiece 
 
38 THE QUESTION OF 
 
 which, on the whole, is a failure or only fairly 
 good, — nor have they a body of work of uni- 
 form and very high excellence. Wordsworth, 
 for instance, has his " Excursion " and " Prelude," 
 when, if he is to rank with Spenser, he ought to 
 have something equivalent in both style and sub- 
 stance to the "Faerie Oueene." He has in the 
 body of his poetry poems like "The Idiot Boy," 
 and " Vaudracour and Julia," to offset the " Ode 
 to Duty " ; he has not left a body of poetry 
 marked by uniform excellence in its kind, such 
 as the sonnets of Petrarch. He has ups and 
 downs, and while his completely successful poems 
 and passages are probably better than anything 
 in Petrarch, his conspicuous failures more than 
 neutralize this advantage, and they have limited 
 his influence. But is not this another way of 
 saying that Wordsworth and writers of his class 
 often lack the power of self-criticism? They 
 leave us mixed work, because they cannot criti- 
 cise themselves and cut out the poor work. This 
 seems to be a good test by which to separate these 
 poets from their superiors. A Spenser almost 
 invariably appears to have well in mind the essen- 
 tial principles and rules of his craft; a Words- 
 worth, a Browning, an Emerson, does not. 
 
" GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 39 
 
 It is less easy to separate the great writers 
 from those whom we may call merely important. 
 The critics are at sea in the matter, but there 
 are one or two tests that seem applicable. The 
 great writer is supreme or nearly so on his own 
 special ground, in his peculiar line — at least 
 when he is at his best, and when his special 
 line makes a genuine and wide appeal. Further- 
 more, in most cases, he has energy and versatility 
 enough to try other lines of work, in some of 
 which he achieves partial success. The merely 
 important writer, on the other hand, is not su- 
 preme in any broad or really noteworthy sphere. 
 Wordsworth is confessedly supreme as nature 
 poet, but he also achieves success in reflective 
 lyrics dealing with human life, and in classical 
 themes. Byron is supreme as a poet of revolt, 
 Browning as a courageous optimist, Keats as an 
 apostle of pure beauty. But Collins and other 
 important writers are either not supreme in any- 
 thing, or else, as in the case of Thomas Campbell, 
 are supreme only in a rather narrow class of com- 
 positions ; in Campbell's case, in battle lyrics. 
 Campbell's " Hohenlinden " and "Battle of the 
 Baltic " are fine things ; yet for two generations 
 probably no one has thought that they may fairly 
 
4<D THE QUESTION OF 
 
 be set over against Wordsworth's supreme suc- 
 cesses as a nature poet. 
 
 But there is a limit to human endurance, and 
 a time or space limit ought to be set to all theo- 
 rizers. In view of these facts let me summarize 
 the points I have tried to make. I have tried 
 to show that it is proper to apply standards in 
 order to answer questions relating to approxi- 
 mately absolute and relative " greatness in litera- 
 ture," and that, whatever else " greatness in 
 literature " may mean, the truly great book or 
 writer must do something with us that is large, 
 important, influential, permanent, original, and 
 unique, and must do it either in the sphere of 
 our emotions or in that of our intelligence, or 
 in both. I have tried to show also that the 
 universal tendency to rank writers and the forms 
 of literature is founded on a law of our nature, 
 and that the application of collective standards 
 of judgment will enable us to classify authors 
 in a useful and not too arbitrary way. I have 
 tried to show that writers worthy of attention 
 may be conveniently divided according as they 
 are supreme, very great, great, important, and 
 minor. I have distinguished these classes from 
 one another, and have endeavored to give prac- 
 
"GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 41 
 
 tical tests by which any reader may at least 
 begin to discriminate in his reading. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to insist that all that has 
 been said is intended to be suggestive merely. 
 Even if the classification attempted has been made 
 on correct lines, it needs filling out and requires 
 many qualifications. There are writers who can 
 only with difficulty be classified under this or any 
 other scheme. Is Herrick, for instance, a great 
 or only an important poet? Then, again, by the 
 classification here suggested, a writer might be 
 put in a rather high class, yet certain obvious 
 defects might make it very questionable whether 
 his rank ought not to be reduced. And we must 
 always remember that any scheme of classification 
 is bad if it tends to make our judgments hard and 
 fast, if it induces us to think that we can stick a 
 pin through a writer and ticket him as' an en- 
 tomologist does an insect. 1 But if we use such a 
 
 1 See in this connection the curious essay on "The Balance of 
 the Poets " by Mark Akenside, based on a French attempt to 
 " balance " the painters. On a scale of twenty he marked Ariosto, 
 Dante, Horace, Pindar, Pope, Racine, and Sophocles thirteen; 
 that is, five below the marks assigned to Homer and Shakspere. 
 This particular exercise of the " Pleasures of the Imagination " 
 may be found in the New Brunswick (New Jersey) edition of 
 Akenside, 1808. 
 
42 QUESTION OF "GREATNESS IN LITERATURE" 
 
 scheme intelligently, it may prove useful, if only 
 by stimulating us to candid objections, for can- 
 did objections imply honest thought, and honest 
 thought on such a noble subject as literature can- 
 not but be beneficial. On the other hand, if any 
 one finds that ranking and weighing authors and 
 books tends to diminish his enjoyment of them, 
 he may safely relegate discussions like the present 
 to any sort of limbo he pleases, provided he does 
 not intolerantly insist, as some good people are 
 too likely to do, that his way of approaching 
 literature is the only one permitted to rational 
 mortals. 
 
II 
 
 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER 
 AUTHORS AND FOR POPU- 
 LAR JUDGMENT 
 
[The substance of two short papers contributed to The 
 Churchman for December 4 and 18, 1897.] 
 
II 
 
 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER 
 AUTHORS AND FOR POPU- 
 LAR JUDGMENT 
 
 I trust that in the preceding paper I have suf- 
 ficiently guarded myself against any imputation 
 that I consider literature as something that can 
 be accurately measured by hard and fast rules. 
 I really do not think that there is any instrument 
 by which one can tell the amount of greatness in 
 a particular book with the ease and certainty with 
 which one can tell the number of degrees to which 
 steam has heated our deadly offices and apart- 
 ments. Nor do I actually range authors on my 
 shelves according to their size as though they 
 were bushel, peck, quart, and pint measures. 
 But, although I may not have left any such im- 
 pression, I may very possibly have failed to 
 say enough on two points closely related to the 
 discussion just ended — if, indeed, any such dis- 
 cussion ever is ended. I have not dwelt suffi- 
 ciently on the uses of the "smaller" authors, 
 
 45 
 
46 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER AUTHORS 
 
 whether, adopting the classification I have sug- 
 gested, we call them " important " or " minor " ; 
 and I have not said enough in regard to the 
 adequacy, within certain limits, of popular judg- 
 ment in matters literary and artistic. On these 
 two points I should like to dwell for a moment. 
 
 I. Smaller Authors and their Uses 
 
 It is surely good advice that our great critics 
 bestow, when they tell us, as they all do, that we 
 should live with the classics. That is, of course, 
 what we mean to do, but it is emphatically what 
 the majority of us fail to do for the whole or the 
 greater portion of our lives. Some of us, although 
 we may legitimately call ourselves readers, do not 
 pretend to do more than glance through a few 
 standard authors and read a few essays or books 
 about them. Others of us are glad if we can say 
 that we have read through once the chief poets 
 and some of the great prose writers of the litera- 
 tures to which we have access. A few of us en- 
 deavor to keep up fairly well with contemporary 
 books and writers and at the same time to reread 
 now and then a standard author. An almost infini- 
 tesimal fraction of us obeys the critical mandate, 
 and lives, even in part, with the classics. 
 
AND FOR POPULAR JUDGMENT 47 
 
 This is not to be wondered at so much as it is 
 to be deplored. Contemporary literature has the 
 potent voice of fashion on its side. It has, too, 
 the siren voice of discovery, of appropriation. 
 The classics belong to every one ; few or no stand- 
 ard authors can be appropriated except after years 
 of patient labor. A contemporary writer is always 
 more or less in need of a prophet, a herald, an 
 interpreter. Then, again, although the true classics 
 exist for all men and all times, it is hard to per- 
 suade ourselves that they are as modern, as " up-to- 
 date " as Mr. Hardy's last novel 1 or Mr. Kipling's 
 last volume of poems. Whether it be true or not, 
 we at least imagine that the classics require more 
 intellectual effort on our part for their proper 
 understanding and appreciation than is necessary 
 in the case of the latest novel or biography of 
 which we have read a review. In fine, the recent 
 novel comes to us ; we have to go to the classics. 
 Hence it is that we cut new pages instead of add- 
 ing thumb-marks to old ones ; and hence it is that 
 some of us are even heterodox enough to smile 
 when critics preach the classics to us. Fortunately, 
 
 1 When these words were written, it was still possible to speak of 
 Mr. Hardy's last novel as one that would soon be his next to the 
 last. 
 
48 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER AUTHORS 
 
 or unfortunately, not many of us are yet sufficiently 
 bold to enter with Mr. Howells and Mr. Garland 
 upon a veritable "battle of the books " and to bear 
 a lance against the redoubtable champions of the 
 looming past. 1 
 
 If all this be true, it would seem that it is a 
 work of supererogation to plead the cause of the 
 writers whom we designate as " smaller." If the 
 classics fail to receive proper recognition, of what 
 avail will it be to call attention to the subtle beau- 
 ties of any minor poet that sleeps in the dust of a 
 graveyard or a library ? If contemporary literature 
 already has the upper hand, is not the minor poet 
 of the " living present " thoroughly able to take 
 care of himself ? In view of this dilemma, it would 
 seem that no one could seriously undertake to dis- 
 cuss minor poets, taken either separately or col- 
 lectively, unless he were one of those specialists so 
 common now whose main excuse for writing is, 
 not that their subject is worth knowing, but that 
 it is so little known. 
 
 Dilemmas, however, are not always such dan- 
 gerous forks to the writer who loves his theme as 
 
 1 I had in mind "Criticism and Fiction" and "Crumbling 
 Idols." Romance still clings to the idols, which still stand firmly 
 on their pedestals. 
 
AND FOR POPULAR JUDGMENT 49 
 
 those of Caudium were to the Roman legionaries. 
 Logic has been known to go down before volu- 
 bility, and it is always possible to restate proposi- 
 tions in such a way as to lead imperceptibly to 
 conclusions quite different from those formerly 
 reached. Perhaps, after all, when the great critics 
 tell us we must live with the classics, their in- 
 junction is not to be taken as a universal impera- 
 tive. Granted that we had the time and the 
 inclination, would it be possible for us to live al- 
 ways with the classics without experiencing some 
 of the effects of ennui, not to say repulsion ? With 
 the exception of the two universal poets, Shak- 
 spere and Homer, if even they are to be excepted, 
 could we find in the classics an answer to our 
 every mood? Hardly, if we mean by the classics 
 the more important, the larger writers of the past. 
 There is, of course, a sense in which Matthew 
 Prior is a classic. He is, in the judgment of 
 some of us, the greatest English writer of vers de 
 socie'te'. His position in our literature is well 
 defined and secure. But, in another sense of the 
 word, Prior can scarcely be termed a classic, be- 
 cause his work does not reach a sufficiently high 
 level of moral and intellectual greatness. He is 
 plainly a " smaller " poet, but just as plainly one 
 
50 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER AUTHORS 
 
 that has his uses. However much we ought to 
 study and love Shakspere, there are surely times 
 when we can well afford to read Prior, and it is a 
 pleasure to love him always. 
 
 If this be true of Prior and of other poets of the 
 same category, it is clear that we need fear the 
 horns of no dilemma. We may cheerfully grant 
 that we ought to live with the classics far more 
 than we do, and that the critics are right in devot- 
 ing most of their time and talents to praising and 
 elucidating the larger and more splendid writers 
 of the past. But we may hold at the same time 
 that there are authors of less worth who should be 
 sojourned with for a season by all persons fond of 
 good literature, and that the hospitable virtues of 
 these writers should be praised and set forth by 
 grateful critics. Because, as in the case of the clas- 
 sics, few contemporary readers will be affected by 
 this praise is no reason why it should not be given 
 often and ungrudgingly. It is even possible that 
 through this praise of authors, especially of minor 
 poets, who answer to particular moods and desires, 
 some of us may be led to a study and appreciation 
 of the genuine classics. Not infrequently general 
 consensus of praise alienates those whom it was 
 intended to attract. Like erring Guineveres with 
 
AND FOR POPULAR JUDGMENT 5 1 
 
 perfect Arthurs, we find too late that we have 
 rebelled against what has been universally extolled, 
 although it has been all along what our higher 
 nature craved. If, however, we become attracted 
 to what is really good, though not the highest, we 
 may pass on by slow steps to an appreciation of 
 the greatest and best ; not by quick revulsion, as 
 was the case with the guilty queen who tampered 
 with crime. If, with a taste for good literature 
 implicit in us, we yet consent to defile or enervate 
 our minds with what is foul or frivolous, we shall 
 probably some day revolt from our mental slavery 
 when it is too late. Let us, then, cherish the 
 " smaller " writers who appeal to special tastes 
 and aptitudes of a wholesome sort, and we may be 
 sure that in a majority of cases we shall be sooner 
 or later drawn into the company of those who love 
 the classics. For it is with literature as it is with 
 religion and morals. One of the most effective 
 ways to render a man fit and likely to practise 
 the heroic virtues is to inure him in the practice of 
 the homely virtues. All sermons cannot deal with 
 patriotism, and self-abnegation of the Sidneyan 
 type, and the like exalted themes ; some sermons 
 must deal with filial obedience, neighborly charity, 
 and kindred homely virtues. Just so it is well for 
 
52 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER AUTHORS 
 
 critics occasionally to cease preaching the classics 
 and to invite us to learn to love the lesser writers. 
 
 II. Popular Judgment and Expert Opinion 
 
 Turning now to the second of the topics named 
 above, we are at once brought face to face with 
 the fact that there has long existed with a cer- 
 tain class of critics a profound distrust of popular 
 judgment in matters of literature and art. " The 
 people at large," say these literary and artistic 
 mandarins in effect, " has only coarse and rudi- 
 mentary tastes and is continually bestowing its 
 affection upon unworthy objects. It prefers 
 the late General Lew Wallace to Mr. George 
 Meredith, and not at all on patriotic considera- 
 tions. It cannot appreciate Wagner, and has 
 never really given its suffrage to Browning. We 
 will therefore ignore the likes and dislikes of the 
 people, will form ourselves into a coterie, and will 
 write criticism for the benefit of one another — 
 that is to say, of the elect." 
 
 Unfortunately, there is a large element of truth 
 in the reasons given consciously or held un- 
 consciously by the mandarins for the exclusive 
 attitude they assume. The popular taste is often 
 extremely crude, and public favorites are often 
 
AND FOR POPULAR JUDGMENT 53 
 
 distinctly unworthy of praise. Two facts, how- 
 ever, should be remembered by the fastidious 
 critics who seek to shun the ignotum vztlnis. 
 The first is that, if reasoned with patiently, the 
 public is almost sure to come around in the end to 
 right ways of thinking. The second is that some 
 of the greatest writers and artists have long since 
 become genuinely popular, which could not have 
 happened if the public were totally devoid of taste. 
 Italians of all degrees of cultivation are said to read 
 and love Dante, and the same thing is approxi- 
 mately true of Englishmen with regard to Shak- 
 spere. Mere lip-service to great poets and artists 
 counts, indeed, for nothing, since your public is 
 generally willing to acknowledge that a man must 
 be great if it hears his name often enough ; but 
 genuine fondness for a great author does count 
 for much in any proper estimate of the aesthetic 
 capacity of the masses. 
 
 Critics have, to be sure, frequently recognized 
 the fact that certain great writers make a universal 
 appeal ; but they nearly always draw from it con- 
 clusions relative rather to the power of the writer 
 than to the inherent capacity of the public to 
 appreciate what is largely noble and true. Yet 
 that the public is normally capable of this sort 
 
54 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER AUTHORS 
 
 of appreciation seems to be proved by political 
 no less than by literary history. The American 
 people as a whole recognized the large nobleness 
 and sincerity of Washington's character even dur- 
 ing his lifetime — recognized it in much the same 
 way as the Italian peasant recognizes the large 
 nobleness and sincerity of his national poet. Just 
 so in spiritual matters the large nobleness and 
 truth of the great historic religions are recognized 
 by the lowly as well as by those in high places 
 whose advantages have naturally given them a 
 wider culture. It was for this reason that in 
 Christian England Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " 
 became almost immediately a favorite book among 
 the poor, and was enabled, after Cowper's day, to 
 live down the neglect and contempt of the educated 
 classes. 
 
 As I have said, the mandarins are not ignorant 
 of the facts just cited, but it would certainly look 
 as if they failed to draw one salutary lesson from 
 them. This lesson, if I am not mistaken, may 
 be condensed as follows : If a writer or artist has 
 been before the public for a period sufficiently 
 long to allow all mere temporary aberrations of 
 judgment to be eliminated, and still fails of gen- 
 uine popularity, then the inference ought to be 
 
AND FOR POPULAR JUDGMENT 55 
 
 that, unless some definite reason not properly 
 chargeable to the man or his work can be as- 
 signed for the continued lack of popularity, the 
 writer or artist in question — Landor, for example 
 — ought not to be regarded as possessing sufficient 
 nobleness and sincerity of character, as expressed 
 in his work, to be worthy of a place among the 
 greatest masters. 
 
 The position here taken may become plainer if it 
 is couched in other words. Are we not bound by 
 the teaching of history and experience to presume 
 that in the long run the judgment of the public 
 with regard to the greatness of the men of a 
 very high order of endowments, not adequately 
 recognized by contemporaries, will coincide with 
 that of the few far-sighted critics who proclaimed 
 their glory before it was generally acknowledged ? 
 If such a presumption is fair, it follows that if the 
 public continues obdurate to the claims made by 
 critics for certain writers, the critics are mistaken, 
 at least in part. This is certainly the stand an 
 optimist ought to take ; for if large nobleness and 
 truth fail in the end, except under very special 
 circumstances, to win the admiration and recog- 
 nition of the masses of men, the future of the race 
 is dark indeed. 
 
56 A WORD FOR THE SMALLER AUTHORS 
 
 I believe that the critics will have to accept this 
 conclusion at some not distant day. It will simply 
 mean that a few special favorites of the mandarins 
 will have to be set in a lower niche in the Temple 
 of Fame ; for the supreme and the very great and 
 even the great writers, as a rule, appeal to the 
 people as well as to the critics. No thoughtful 
 man will deny the value of expert opinion, and it 
 is plainly expert opinion which does most to place 
 the secondary men of genius where they belong. 
 When large nobleness and truth are absent, the 
 verdict of the public is of no great moment, and 
 the more minute study of the expert tells with full 
 force. Botticelli, therefore, if I may be allowed to 
 draw my examples from an art in which I am 
 certainly anything but expert, may take a second- 
 ary place undisputed if the experts decide that he 
 is entitled to it ; but it would seem that the critics 
 of art may as well give up trying to place him 
 alongside of or above Titian and Raphael. Ap- 
 parently he has not the large and permanent quali- 
 ties that win the suffrage of the public ; hence he 
 does not belong of right to the very highest rank 
 of painters. 
 
 There is, however, one point that needs to be 
 noticed in this connection. It happens sometimes, 
 
AND FUR POPULAR JUDGMENT 57 
 
 though rarely, that the form of expression chosen 
 by a master of the highest rank becomes, for 
 reasons over which he has no control, somewhat 
 repellent to the masses in later generations. When 
 this is the case, as it partly is, for example, with 
 Milton, the consensus of the best current critical 
 opinion with that of past critical and popular 
 opinion is practically sufficient to establish the 
 rank of the writer or artist in question. In this 
 case it will be observed that the large nobility 
 and sincerity which have been posited are not as 
 a rule denied; they are merely obscured by the 
 form of expression which has become obsolete. In 
 the case of the famous painter just used as an ex- 
 ample, the large nobility and sincerity required do 
 not seem to be present in sufficient quantity to im- 
 press the public as they do in the cases of Titian and 
 Raphael. Something may, however, be said with 
 regard to the popular inability to appreciate such 
 an artist on account of certain impediments to a 
 full understanding of his form of expression ; and 
 if this be true, it is possible that what has just 
 been said with regard to Milton, holds good also 
 of him. But certainly the sneers and the Phari- 
 saical bearing of the mandarins toward the public 
 cannot be justified on any grounds. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 LITERARY STUDY 
 
[Read before a few students of English at Princeton Uni- 
 versity, November, 1901. Delivered before the Missouri 
 Teachers 1 Association at Kansas City, December, 1901. Pub- 
 lished in The Sewanee Review, January, 1904.] 
 
Ill 
 
 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 LITERARY STUDY 
 
 That within the past ten years there has been 
 in this country a marked increase of interest in 
 literature and literary studies is a statement which 
 will scarcely be disputed by any person occupied 
 with such matters. The growth of literary clubs, 
 especially among women, the emphasis laid upon 
 English literature in primary and secondary 
 schools, the work done by university extension 
 lecturers, and, particularly, the trend in our col- 
 leges and universities from purely philological 
 to literary courses may be cited as evidences that 
 the phenomenon exists. If these evidences are 
 not sufficient, we may add to them the development 
 of libraries, of the publishing business, and of 
 literary departments in the daily newspapers. 
 That this interest is more intense or more deep- 
 seated than was the similar interest manifested 
 in New England during the days of the Transcen- 
 
 61 
 
62 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 dental Movement need be neither affirmed nor 
 denied ; but it is naturally far more widespread, 
 and it is certainly an advance upon whatever 
 popular interest in literature was displayed dur- 
 ing the two decades that followed the civil war. 
 
 The causes of the phenomenon need not be 
 investigated too curiously. Throughout the world 
 our generation has been critical rather than crea- 
 tive, and a critical age is in the main only another 
 name for an epoch of literary studies. Then, 
 to go somewhat deeper, great accumulation of 
 wealth and great accompanying desire for luxury 
 and for culture, as a fit adjunct of luxury, coin- 
 ciding with an era of self-consciousness and of 
 democratic development, must make for an in- 
 crease in studies which themselves make for refine- 
 ment, for personal distinction, and for relief from 
 ennui. The very confusion of our age, which 
 has probably affected its creative work disas- 
 trously, has driven many men and women to 
 pursuits of a literary nature as to a kind of haven, 
 even if this same confusion has often rendered 
 their studies mainly nugatory, except as a moral 
 sedative. 
 
 But while this increase of popular interest in 
 literature and in literary studies may be taken for 
 
LITERARY STUDY 63 
 
 granted and while its causes may remain uninves- 
 tigated, it hardly seems wise not to consider some- 
 what carefully the aims and methods of the eager 
 students of literature we see on all sides, and to 
 compare their ends and means with those ideal 
 ends and means which, after a due survey of 
 the field, we may set up for ourselves and for 
 them. Such a setting up of ideals for other 
 people is always hazardous ; but if our methods 
 of reasoning are both inductive and deductive, if 
 we rely upon observation as much as upon theory, 
 and upon common sense as much as upon either, 
 we shall be able, perhaps, to reach some use- 
 ful results. What, then, seem to be the aims of 
 students of literature, as to-day we see them in 
 this country applying themselves to their chosen 
 and delightful work? In answering this question 
 a rough classification of such students will be 
 serviceable. 
 
 The most obvious division is into professional 
 students and amateurs or dilettantes, but it is easy 
 and necessary to divide further. Professional 
 students of literature fall, I think, into much the 
 same classes as other professional men. There 
 are those who are born with an aptitude for let- 
 ters, who become successful critics, noted teachers 
 
64 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 of literature, or men of letters devoting a por- 
 tion of their creative energy to criticism, such as 
 Mr. Howells and Mr. Henry James for our own 
 epoch, or as Ben Jonson and John Dryden among 
 the elder writers. These are the leaders occupy- 
 ing, except when they are great geniuses, much 
 the same position as the more eminent clergymen, 
 lawyers, and physicians do. In the rank and file 
 are found the minor critics, a majority of the 
 teachers of literature, most of the itinerant lec- 
 turers on literary subjects, and the book reviewers. 
 These correspond with the safe, respectable prac- 
 titioners whom most of us are glad to employ when 
 we are ill. Below these, as in every other profes- 
 sion, come the utter mediocrities, the failures and 
 the quacks, about whom we need say nothing. 
 
 The amateurs are harder to classify. At their 
 head, however, plainly stands the literary virtuoso, 
 the man of refined taste who lives in an atmos- 
 phere of culture, and who, if he writes, is almost 
 sure to illuminate whatever subject he touches. 
 He frequently has other than literary interests, 
 and he never has hard and fast obligations to 
 publishers, readers, or students. A good type of 
 such a virtuoso is Horace Walpole ; another and 
 very different type is Edward FitzGerald, the 
 
LITERARY STUDY 6$ 
 
 translator of Omar Khayyam, who, if he had been 
 less of a recluse, would now probably be ranked 
 among the greater English critics. Below the 
 virtuoso comes what we may call loosely the cul- 
 tivated man or woman who has acquired through 
 natural instinct and training a love of books 
 and a fairly wide knowledge of them, often con- 
 siderable in one or more departments. We all 
 know many such persons, although in busy 
 America they are doubtless proportionally fewer 
 in number than in England or in France. Below 
 these come the serious and honorable aspirants 
 for culture, the men and women who, in spite of 
 meagre educational opportunities and of lives full 
 of other and more pressing cares and duties, seize 
 every chance and means of cultivating themselves. 
 University, college, and high school students, who 
 may, in a short time, belong to one of the other 
 groups already mentioned, must, at some period 
 in their career, be numbered with these aspirants 
 for culture. Finally, in the lowest class, fall the 
 men and women who are entitled only to the 
 unpleasant designation of smatterers, of whom, 
 as of the quacks, we need take no further notice. 
 With regard, now, to the aims of all lovers of 
 literature who are worthy of being in any sense 
 
66 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 classed as students, it is obvious that from many 
 points of view the most inspiring are those cherished 
 by the great critics and men of letters to whom 
 literature, in some blended words of Keats, is a 
 thing of beauty, and therefore a thing of truth 
 and a joy forever. But because these men are as 
 much born to literary studies as Plato, about 
 whose young lips the bees clustered, was born to 
 golden eloquence, their aims and methods, while 
 serviceable as ideal standards, must always be 
 unattainable by the large majority; and this is 
 true also of the aims and methods of the virtuoso, 
 although these, while honorable, are not fully 
 inspiring because they are less purely philan- 
 thropic in character, less founded on the noble 
 idea of service to fellow-men. It follows that it is 
 with the aims of the majority of literary students, 
 whether professional or amateur, that we are most 
 concerned; and in pursuing this subject let us ask 
 and try to answer a fundamental question : Why 
 do or why should men study literature ? 
 
 If one is born with a bent to such study, it is a 
 sufficient answer to our question to assert the 
 existence of the bent ; for we may assume that 
 literature is a worthy object of knowledge, and 
 that all worthy objects of knowledge deserve to be 
 
LITERARY STUDY 67 
 
 studied by chosen spirits. But there are few 
 chosen spirits, and students of literature are very 
 numerous. Is not this because there is implanted 
 in all persons endowed with spiritual aspirations 
 a desire, not merely of self-distinction (smatterers 
 and mediocrities have this), but of drawing nearer 
 to ideal beauty, truth, and goodness, preferably in 
 some form of combination ? And because in 
 genuine literature ideal beauty, truth, and good- 
 ness are found in combination, expressed through 
 the medium of language, with which, when it is 
 our own, we are more familiar than we are with 
 the mediums of expression employed by the sculp- 
 tor, the painter, and the musician, do not more 
 men and women seek the ideal through literature 
 than through any other means save religion ? 
 Students of literature are numerous, then, and 
 increasingly numerous, because they find through 
 literature their easiest access to the ideal. 
 
 But if a more or less conscious aspiration for 
 the most accessible ideal be the basic reason for 
 the popular interest in literary studies, which we 
 have posited, it would seem to follow that the 
 aims and methods of the teacher and the student 
 of literature ought to make for the attainment of 
 ideal truth, beauty, and goodness in the fullest 
 
68 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 possible measure. The introduction of any antago- 
 nistic aim or method must necessarily militate 
 against the attainment of the central purpose for 
 which, according to our reasoning, literary studies 
 are begun. An important consequence ensues. 
 We do not draw nearer to ideal beauty, truth, and 
 goodness in combination if we give the acquisition 
 of mere knowledge a disproportionate place in our 
 aims and methods. Knowledge helps us to attain 
 truth, but it does not prompt to, although it does 
 direct, the realization of goodness in conduct and 
 the appreciation of beauty. We do not truly 
 study literature unless through our studies we gain 
 wisdom in contradistinction to mere knowledge, 
 and unless we also develop our aesthetic faculties 
 and, what is far more to the purpose, become 
 better men and women. Hence knowledge in 
 relation to literature should always occupy an 
 ancillary position — it should be the handmaiden 
 charged with ushering us into the presence of the 
 ideal. But what have our teachers and professors 
 of literature, our editors of school and college 
 texts, our writers of learned monographs and 
 manuals, and finally our promoters of literary clubs 
 and lecture courses to say about themselves in these 
 premises ? Do they not too frequently make mere 
 
LITERARY STUDY 69 
 
 knowledge the be-all and the end-all of their 
 work ? It is so easy for teacher and pupil to add 
 fact to fact and call it studying literature — 
 whereas in its best estate such attainment of 
 knowledge about literature is only a means to cul- 
 ture, not culture itself ; while in its worst estate it 
 is a positive bar to culture and its pleasures. 
 
 Just here we may note a distinct advance that 
 has been made in the past ten years. Most of the 
 literary work that was done in our colleges and 
 universities fell under the department of English 
 and, in consequence, under the direction of men 
 who, in general, were trained philologists. What 
 attention they gave to the literature produced by 
 Englishmen and Americans after the year 1600 
 was in the main perfunctory ; and although there 
 was no lack of great authors and books prior to 
 that year, these were seldom treated save as store- 
 houses of linguistic facts. 
 
 Now philology * is far from being an uninter- 
 esting study, and it is, of course, most important, 
 whether considered in itself or in its relations with 
 history and literature and other subjects of human 
 inquiry. But unless admirably handled by the 
 
 1 It is almost needless to say that the word is used here in its 
 narrower, not in its larger sense. 
 
JO THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 teacher, philology, like any other science, however 
 valuable it may be in other respects, is less avail- 
 able than literature as a means to culture. It 
 tends to aid us but slightly in our approach to the 
 ideal, whereas literature should aid us greatly. 
 Fortunately during the past ten years this fact has 
 been more and more recognized in American col- 
 leges and universities, until, in some institutions 
 indeed, the balance has been tipped almost un- 
 fairly against philology. In England this does 
 not seem to be the case ; yet there a great amount 
 of literary training has always been obtainable 
 through the best of mediums, the Greek and 
 Latin classics. 
 
 But while all our institutions of learning, schools 
 and libraries, as well as colleges and universities, 
 afford better facilities for the study of literature 
 than they did a decade ago, the improvement is 
 not great enough to warrant a large amount of 
 self-approbation. Philology no longer stalks about 
 in borrowed plumes ; but the history of literature, 
 which is a branch of culture-history, is frequently 
 studied to the exclusion of literature itself ; and 
 when great poetry and great prose are put before 
 the student, this is often done so mechanically and 
 with such a lack of proportion in the treatment that 
 
LITERARY STUDY J I 
 
 the cause of culture is not greatly subserved. For 
 example, deadly methods of analysis, supplemented 
 by a terrifying apparatus of largely irrelevant 
 questions, are daily applied in our schoolrooms to 
 poems which were written to stir the emotions, not 
 perplex the minds of unoffending children. In 
 other words, the letter of literature is diligently 
 conned, but the delicate spirit of literature — I was 
 going to say — escapes both the teacher and the 
 pupil — but it really does not escape at all. It 
 remains, as it were, an Ariel imprisoned in the 
 tree of knowledge, waiting for a Prospero to give 
 it freedom. Again, through over-emphasis and 
 under-emphasis in their treatment of writers, 
 our teachers and professors and lecturers and 
 critics are giving the world of students and 
 readers very narrow and distorted views as to 
 the scope of that literature which is one of the 
 main glories of the Anglo-Saxon race. I have 
 often found that the names of important seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth century writers meant 
 absolutely nothing, not to a schoolboy or an under- 
 graduate, but to a graduate student who intended 
 to make the teaching of literature his life-work. 
 Perhaps just here, even at the risk of some- 
 what attenuating the strength of whatever argu- 
 
72 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 ments this discussion may involve, it will not be 
 amiss for me to dwell for a moment upon what 
 seem to be faults of our professional teach- 
 ing and studying of literature that demand 
 correction. 
 
 One, as hinted above, is the preponderating 
 part in literary teaching and criticism played by 
 analysis. It is the fashion with many critics to 
 dwell upon the internal rather than upon the 
 external features of a piece of literature, to dilate 
 upon its qualities rather than upon what it is as 
 a whole, to treat it as something to be dissected 
 rather than to discuss its general effects upon 
 readers at large and its position in the body of 
 national or world literature. To put it otherwise, 
 their criticism tends to be analytic and subjective 
 rather than synthetic and objective. There is 
 much room, indeed, for such criticism, since 
 it obviously serves to bring out beauties that 
 would otherwise lie hidden, and to intensify 
 our interest in the writer and his work. Yet 
 it is very questionable whether such analytic 
 criticism should occupy so prominent a part or 
 come so early in our literary training. After all, 
 it seems mainly to ask and answer the question, 
 Why does this author appeal to us in such and 
 
LITERARY STUDY 73 
 
 such a way ? But this is a question more important 
 to a writer than to a reader. If we are under- 
 taking to write poetry, by all means let us analyze 
 great poetry and try to seize the secret of its 
 power. If we are readers, however, it is perhaps 
 better to try first to answer the questions, How 
 has this writer affected others — that is, What 
 ought we to expect to find in him ? and, How 
 does this writer compare with others in his class — 
 that is, Should we devote ourselves to him as much 
 as to some other and greater man ? 
 
 It is at once plain that we have here in 
 somewhat disguised forms the two well-defined 
 methods of criticism for which those distin- 
 guished Frenchmen, M. Lemaitre and M. Bru- 
 netiere, and other critics ranged behind each of 
 them, have long been doing battle — methods of 
 criticism which, in fact, have been in the world 
 for ages and to which we give the names Im- 
 pressionist and Academic. It is plain also that 
 my complaint is that of late, and especially in 
 our teaching of literature, we have not been 
 giving academic criticism — the criticism of judg- 
 ment — due consideration; that we have been 
 overpartial to the criticism of interpretation, 
 which tends more or less to be impressionist in 
 
74 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 character. I am constantly reading and hearing 
 criticisms of books that make me wonder 
 whether the analyzer has ever put together the 
 qualities he discovers, whether he has ever 
 grasped as a whole the piece of literature with 
 which he is dealing. He talks of sublimity, 
 charm, love of nature, et cetera, until I wonder 
 whether he is not in the position of the prover- 
 bial person who cannot see the wood for the 
 trees. It seems to me that it would be much 
 more logical and profitable for our critics 
 and teachers to begin with the criticism of judg- 
 ment — for example, to judge a poem as a 
 whole ; to get its position, as near as one can 
 in the poet's own works, in the class of poems 
 to which it belongs, in the literature of the 
 nation, and finally, if it be worth the pains, 
 in the literature of the world. Then it would 
 be logical and proper to pass to the more 
 intensive method of analysis and interpreta- 
 tion, which would increase both our knowl- 
 edge and our enjoyment. It is true that no 
 one can entirely separate these two methods 
 of criticising. We analyze somewhat when we 
 are trying to determine what a poem or book 
 stands for as a whole. But I am quite sure 
 
LITERARY STUDY 75 
 
 that in our school and college classes we 
 give too much place to the analytic or interpre- 
 tive method, with the result that, when we 
 ought to be getting wide views of literature and 
 life, we learn to know a few works of a few 
 writers only, trusting to time to introduce us to 
 the rest. Time, however, is more like a slave 
 driver than a master of ceremonies, and thus 
 nine out of ten of us are confined throughout 
 our lives to a mere hearsay acquaintance even 
 with great authors, much more with minor ones. 
 From what I have just said, the reader will 
 not be surprised to learn that I am somewhat 
 sceptical as to the good results of much of the 
 teaching of literature based on the so-called 
 series of English classics, though I have con- 
 tributed to such series myself ; 1 that I am not 
 altogether convinced that the excessive attention 
 paid to Shakspere in schools and colleges is 
 wise ; that I doubt very much whether it is 
 profitable to spend a term or a year on any one 
 writer or small group of writers, unless it can 
 be done in connection with courses that give a 
 wide survey of the form of literature that is 
 being studied ; that I am inclined to think that 
 
 1 See the sixth paper for a fuller discussion of this matter. 
 
76 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 all so-called " laboratory courses " in literature 
 should be accompanied, as they are in the case 
 of the natural sciences, by lectures that serve 
 not merely to present the subject as a whole 
 but also to set it in its historical and philosoph- 
 ical relations with other subjects of human 
 inquiry and with life itself. I know that it is 
 much easier to teach and learn a minute divi- 
 sion of a subject, and that for purposes of im- 
 parting methods of study — that is, for graduate 
 instruction — such division is often absolutely 
 necessary. But I cannot perceive that our 
 specialistic training is giving us the grasp upon 
 literature that many of our untrained fathers and 
 mothers had, and I think it is time for us to ask 
 ourselves where we are and whither we are tending. 
 Nor should our queries be confined to the 
 whereabouts and the whitherwards of the teachers 
 of literature. The literary specialists who fur- 
 nish us with admirably detailed studies and 
 monographs often lead us astray by the impor- 
 tance they give to very minor writers or to small 
 literary movements, and cause us to blunder by 
 applying to literature that historic or, perhaps 
 better, that pedantic estimate against which 
 Matthew Arnold warned us. Yet the mono- 
 
LITERARY STUDY JJ 
 
 graphs and dissertations continue to come out, 
 and we may easily swamp ourselves in the 
 minutiae of scholarship, while philosophic criti- 
 cism goes begging for adherents, and compara- 
 tive literature attracts too few students. As a 
 result, even the nomenclature of the art of 
 criticism is at sixes and sevens. Think, for 
 example, of how little definiteness attaches to 
 the term "lyric." So also the application of the 
 theory of evolution to the study of literature 
 is yet in its infancy. Where, for instance, will 
 one find a consistent and full account of the 
 evolution of that highest form of lyric, the ode? 
 No wonder that the students of the sciences 
 look severely askance at us when we pose as 
 anything but amateurs. No wonder that the 
 late Mr. Freeman, the historian, spoke scorn- 
 fully of us as chatterers about poor Harriet 
 Shelley, or that Mark Twain, after reading 
 Professor Dowden's treatment of the relations 
 between Shelley and his unfortunate first wife, 
 was constrained like a knight-errant to enter 
 the lists against the biographer. In nine cases 
 out of ten, when we have not chattered, we have 
 been grubbing ; yet we are neither sparrows nor 
 worms. 
 
78 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 Still, even if all that I have just said by way of 
 adverse criticism be well founded, it is undeniable 
 that a great advance has been made in the study 
 of literature viewed as a constituent element in the 
 academic curriculum ; it is equally undeniable that 
 in this country in matters of culture we can never 
 afford to confine our attention to the academic 
 class. As we have seen, there is an immense and 
 increasing amount of self-cultivation in literature 
 being attempted by American men and women of 
 all classes. What are the aims and methods of 
 these people ? 
 
 I am not sure that their aims are not often 
 higher, I will not say than those of teachers 
 generally, — for I believe that the aims of our 
 teachers are very high, — but higher than those 
 of the apparently more fortunate college student 
 or professor, or of the minor critical writers and 
 lecturers. These very frequently appear to 
 me to be turning to the study of literature as a 
 means for obtaining a livelihood or as a peculiarly 
 pleasant and easy method of exploiting a popular 
 taste. We may posit, to be sure, in most cases, a 
 bent for literary studies ; but very frequently a fair 
 salary, a good social position, and a long vacation 
 are more in evidence as motives to the assumption 
 
LITERARY STUDY 79 
 
 of a literary calling as college teacher than any 
 oestrus sent by the gods to goad the aspiring spirit 
 up the steep and arduous heights of culture. And 
 as for the popular lecturer, it would at least appear 
 easy for a soulful young man to persuade himself 
 that it is his life-work to lecture on Dante to a 
 group of adoring women at so many dollars per 
 head. 
 
 On the other hand, if we eliminate the dab- 
 bling in literature done by men and women who 
 think that a certain show of culture is desirable, 
 it seems to me that the aims of a considerable 
 portion of the amateur students of literature in 
 America are distinctly high, at least from a 
 moral point of view. They are trying to elevate 
 themselves by contact with the ideal, and there 
 can be no higher individual aim. There is a 
 tremendously impressive earnestness to be ob- 
 served among such literary workers in every 
 section of the country. And where this strenu- 
 ousness is not visible, there is often a quiet, dig- 
 nified pursuit of culture, though perhaps along 
 narrow lines, to be found among persons whose 
 vocations hardly suggest literary or artistic procliv- 
 ities. It is plain, however, that all aspiration for 
 self-culture is more or less lacking in that altruism 
 
80 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 which is to be seen, in some measure at least, in 
 the aims of teachers and of other professional 
 students, and that, as a rule, the methods of the 
 amateur are less well-grounded and comprehen- 
 sive than those of his fellow-worker. 
 
 It is desirable in this connection to comment 
 briefly upon the increasing number of " collectors " 
 to be found in America. The treasures in the 
 shape of rare manuscripts and books contained in 
 the libraries of some of our rich men, and in many 
 cases made accessible to the student with unparal- 
 leled generosity, are startling to the uninitiated in 
 these matters. That such collectors, especially 
 those who delight in rich bindings and extra illus- 
 trations, are always men of true culture, it would 
 be hazardous to assert ; but many of them are, and 
 any manifestation of a love of the beautiful or 
 even of respect for the instrumentalities of culture 
 is of great importance in educating the taste of the 
 public. But we must not rest satisfied with wit- 
 nessing the raids made by our millionaires upon 
 the collections of Europe or with chronicling the 
 growth of bibliophile societies, excellent work 
 though these are doing. We must be insistent in 
 our demands that our great cities one and all range 
 themselves with Boston in the zealous formation 
 
LITERARY STUDY 8 1 
 
 of libraries in which the student can find practi- 
 cally all the originals and facsimiles he needs for 
 the most minute investigation. 1 
 
 From what has been said it would seem to fol- 
 low that the aims of the professional student of 
 literature need to be made more ideal and less 
 practical, his methods more flexible and less me- 
 chanical, while the aims of the amateur should 
 be made more altruistic and his methods less 
 nebulous. How are these ends best to be at- 
 tained ? 
 
 I know of no better way than for the one class 
 of literary students to keep constantly in mind the 
 aims of the other class, and to consider carefully 
 and partly adopt its methods of study. This is 
 precisely what they are not doing at present. The 
 critic is much too likely to smile with condescen- 
 sion at literary opinions advanced by people who 
 have not read so many hundreds of books as he 
 has. On the other hand, the literary amateur or 
 the cultivated reader is much too likely to think 
 that the critic is the slave of his own rules or a 
 mere dry-as-dust whose opinion is pedantic and 
 
 1 With regard to the acquisition of facsimiles upon a large scale, 
 see the letters by Professor Charles M. Gayley and others which 
 The Evening Post has recently been publishing. 
 
82 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 absurd. This is especially the case among Anglo- 
 Saxons, who as a race have cherished a distrust of 
 criticism, apparently on the principle that, as an 
 Englishman's house is his castle, so his opinions 
 ought to be surrounded by a moat of ignorance 
 and prejudice. In other words, our two classes 
 of literary workers are in many respects sundered ; 
 whereas it appears, as I have just said, that each 
 class should consider carefully and partly adopt 
 the aims and methods of the other. 
 
 The professional student is constantly in danger 
 of forgetting that the spirit of literature, not its 
 mere external form or garb, should be the true 
 object of his study. He forgets that study means 
 zeal for, as well as application to, an object, and 
 he is too seldom zealous for that ideal of truth, 
 beauty, and goodness in combination which gen- 
 uine literature embodies. The better class of 
 amateurs, however, the men and women of 
 acquired or accumulating culture, are nearly 
 always more or less alive to the value of literature 
 as a means to lift themselves from the plane of 
 the real to that of the ideal. They are less likely 
 than the professional student to use literary studies 
 either as a practical means of livelihood or as an 
 exercise of their purely intellectual faculties. On 
 
LITERARY STUDY 83 
 
 the other hand, the amateur, to whom literature is 
 generally a "side issue," a matter apart, is likely to 
 make it a matter of merely personal gratification. 
 He seldom has to consider the interests of others, 
 whether as an expounder or a popularizer or what 
 we may call a literary missionary. He can hold 
 his own opinions regardless of what others think, 
 can be as erratic as he pleases, can be selfish, and 
 all the while can fall back upon the favorite 
 maxim of the Englishman, which is often ex- 
 pressed in Latin, "De gustibus non est dispu- 
 tandutn" there is no disputing about tastes. This 
 selfish, nonaltruistic attitude toward something 
 that is essentially noble and ^deal cannot be good 
 for any one. Perhaps there ought to be no 
 disputing about tastes, but there ought to be 
 calm discussion of them, and we should endeavor 
 to make our own taste and that of our neighbor 
 relish the highest possible forms of literature and 
 art. Hence it is well for the amateur to do what 
 the professional student must always do, — con- 
 sider the tastes of others, determine what has 
 been the verdict of cultivated readers in the past 
 with regard to the relative ranking of the various 
 forms of literature and other cognate matters ; 
 in short, equip himself to pursue his favorite 
 
84 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 subject in a critical and not in a purely desultory 
 and inconsequential manner. 
 
 But we have passed, almost without knowing it, 
 from a discussion of aims to a discussion of 
 methods. The methods of the professional student 
 are naturally such as we loosely denominate 
 critical, whether or not his bias be toward history 
 or linguistics or aesthetics, or his allegiance be 
 given to the academic or the impressionist school. 
 There is no time to discuss the best methods 
 by which the critic or judge appraises the value 
 of a work of literary art; what mainly con- 
 cerns us is the fact that the chief danger which 
 confronts the critic or the teacher is that his 
 methods may easily become mechanical. Against 
 this danger his best safeguard will be found, I 
 believe, in an application of the less hard-and- 
 fast methods of study pursued by the amateur. 
 The professional student should relax his mind by 
 a limited following of his own bent in reading, by 
 an indulgence at times in uncritical enthusiasm, 
 by a frequent surrender of his spirit to the appeals 
 of the ideal. He should remember the adage 
 about the ever-stretched bow, and not forget that 
 he has a soul as well as an intellect. On the con- 
 trary, the amateur has much to gain by endeavor- 
 
LITERARY STUDY 85 
 
 ing to catch something of that balanced judgment, 
 that free play of mind which will always be found to 
 characterize the true critic. He should not weight 
 himself down with learning or cease to enjoy what 
 he is laboring to apprehend; but he should en- 
 deavor to impart some system to his reading, and 
 he should avoid nebulosity and inconsistency in 
 the judgments he forms upon literary topics. For 
 example, he should not without a murmur wade 
 through the theology with which Dante overloads 
 "The Divine Comedy," and inveigh against that 
 with which Milton overloads " Paradise Lost." 
 Above all, he should avoid the prevailing lack of 
 critical catholicity. He should strive, for instance, 
 to appreciate both Byron and Shelley, and not 
 decry the one in order to laud the other. 
 
 The mention of Byron leads naturally to a con- 
 sideration of the only other point I wish to make in 
 this paper. It is Byron, of all modern English poets 
 — indeed, of all modern Englishmen save Scott — 
 who has had most influence upon the Continental 
 public ; it is Byron of all modern English poets of 
 eminence, toward whom most opposition, not to 
 say rancor, has been displayed by native critics. 
 Of late it has been growing more and more plain, 
 I think, that British and American depreciation of 
 
86 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 Byron has ridiculously overshot the mark ; that 
 while certain technical defects, not obvious to 
 foreigners, must be emphasized by Anglo-Saxon 
 critics, — not for the purpose of running down 
 Byron, but for the sake of warning present and 
 future poets against his mistakes, — the point of 
 view of the foreign critics is far more sound 
 than that of almost any critic writing in English 
 save Matthew Arnold. Whether this be true or 
 not, it is abundantly clear that no student of litera- 
 ture, whether professional or amateur, can afford 
 either to ignore foreign criticism of his own litera- 
 ture or to neglect to obtain a fair knowledge at 
 least of the chief European literatures, either in 
 the originals or through translations. 
 
 In this connection it is a pleasure to refer to a 
 paper by Mr. Edmund Gosse, entitled " The Isola- 
 tion of the Anglo-Saxon Mind," which appeared 
 a few years ago in the Cosmopolitan magazine. 
 Mr. Gosse has never given better proof of his 
 critical acumen than in this warning against the 
 growing insularity of the British mind. He plau- 
 sibly — as it seems to me, correctly — attributes 
 much of the British ignorance and indifference 
 with regard to what foreigners are doing in the 
 world of letters to the rise of rampant imperialism 
 
LITERARY STUDY 87 
 
 which has been coincident with the growth of 
 Mr. Kipling's popularity. As we Americans have 
 done a little in the imperial line ourselves, and 
 have developed our own " strenuous " literature, 
 Mr. Gosse rather logically includes us with his 
 own countrymen, and warns us also against the 
 deplorable effects of mental isolation. While ad- 
 mitting the force of much that he says, I cannot, 
 however, think that any such marked isolation 
 since 1895 can be found in America as he seems 
 to have observed in Great Britain. The growing 
 vogue of French and Russian novelists in transla- 
 tion — Balzac, Alphonse Daudet, Flaubert, Mau- 
 passant, and even Gautier among the French, 
 as well as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and other Russians, 
 have recently been made accessible to us in whole 
 or in part ; the increasing number of scholarly and 
 popular books on French and German literature ; 
 the lecture courses given at our great universities 
 by distinguished French scholars 1 — these facts 
 seem to me to indicate that the American mind is 
 not closing itself to foreign influences. It surely 
 has not closed itself to German scholarship ; and 
 
 1 Since these words were written, the country has welcomed 
 many foreign scholars, who were brought over in connection with 
 the St. Louis Exposition. 
 
88 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 while one occasionally reads a blatantly chauvinis- 
 tic article or an insularly ignorant book, I suspect 
 that we have a right to regard ourselves as intel- 
 lectually a wide-awake people. 
 
 It does not follow, however, that Mr. Gosse's 
 warning is not worth heeding. Conceit will 
 speedily make any man or any nation ignorant, 
 and we are by no means free from conceit, whether 
 as individuals or as a people. We are rightly proud 
 of our literary achievements, especially of those of 
 the entire race of which we have come to be a 
 most important branch ; but this should not blind 
 us to the fact that there are other Teutonic peoples 
 with literatures worthy of study, nor to the equally 
 important fact that there is a very great body of 
 Romance literature well worthy of vying with our 
 own and supplementing it admirably. Yet when 
 I assert, as I am frequently forced in fairness to do, 
 that in my judgment the French literature of the 
 nineteenth century is perhaps, if not probably, supe- 
 rior to that produced in Great Britain during the 
 same period, it is always easy for me to perceive 
 that in nine cases out of ten the fact that such may 
 possibly be the case has not before dawned upon 
 any of the persons doing me the honor to listen to 
 me. This is but to say that it rarely occurs to 
 
LITERARY STUDY 89 
 
 us to think that we have not a monopoly of literary 
 as well as of all the other virtues, whereas we not 
 only have no monopoly of the virtues, we have not 
 even a monopoly of the vices, other races pushing 
 us very closely in conceit, in ignorance, and in 
 their concomitant bellicosity. But surely conceit, 
 ignorance, and bellicosity are things to be avoided 
 by the attainment of a cosmopolitan outlook upon 
 literature and life. If, as some persons inform us, 
 the instinct of racial self-preservation is opposed 
 to cosmopolitanism, so much the worse for the 
 racial instinct. Humanity as a whole is greater 
 than any of its parts, and a world-wide extension 
 of the highest ideals has been the goal of reli- 
 gion and art and literature and science since man 
 began his arduous, upward march of progress. It 
 is impossible to believe that this goal will ever be 
 really lost sight of or that it can be achieved by 
 any one race, particularly by any race that relies 
 on mental inbreeding for its progeny of ideas, or 
 that depends on its muscles to do the work of its 
 brains. Mr. Gosse enforces his warning by a 
 homely story of a young Londoner who was 
 brought almost to his grave by a never-varied diet 
 of mutton chops. It would be quite possible for 
 a nation to be brought to an intellectual grave, or 
 
90 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 at least to a stagnation like that to be observed in 
 China, if, as is most improbable at this stage of 
 the history of Western Christendom, it were, for any 
 long time, to narrow its mental diet to the works 
 of its own authors, and especially to the works 
 of its own contemporary writers. 
 
 But although no great modern nation is in 
 such a state of mental isolation, or is likely to 
 reach it, there are always millions of persons 
 in every generation who, often through no fault 
 of their own, suffer from such isolation. Many 
 teachers, writers, and scholars suffer from it 
 badly. But surely our ideal literary student 
 should not. In addition to endeavoring to com- 
 bine in his work of self-culture the methods em- 
 ployed both by the professional student and by 
 the literary amateur, he should always aim to look 
 at every problem that confronts him from the 
 cosmopolitan point of view, a point of view not 
 to be attained without labor or without cordial 
 sympathy with the best spirits of other nations. 
 For example, it would seem very undesirable, for 
 men aiming at ideal culture to educate themselves 
 without the least reference to the work of Count 
 Tolstoy or with an explosive wrath against it. 
 Yet not a few persons place themselves in the 
 
LITERARY STUDY 9 1 
 
 one category or in the other. National and 
 individual isolation in literature is just as much 
 to be shunned as the mechanical methods of the 
 professional student and the desultoriness of the 
 amateur. 
 
 I am well aware, in conclusion, that all that I 
 have said may be rightly pronounced extremely 
 general, and, in so far, more or less common- 
 place, inadequate, and difficult of application. 
 But it must be remembered that literature, holding 
 as it does by the ideal, is, like the ideal, always 
 eluding us. No one has ever succeeded in satis- 
 factorily defining literature, much less in telling 
 us exactly how best to appreciate and study it. 
 In fact, if one could teach literature with the 
 precision with which one can teach mathematics, 
 would the fascinating study be itself ? Would it 
 not lose much of its fascination ? 
 
 But apart from the comparative impossibility 
 of laying down hard-and-fast, concrete methods 
 of studying literature to advantage, it should be 
 remembered, I think, that a statement of sound 
 general principles is often of great positive utility 
 in furnishing us with a proper point of departure 
 for our own studies and investigations. It is in 
 their statement of general principles that the great 
 
92 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 critics are as a rule most illuminating and instruc- 
 tive. For this reason the " Poetics " of Aristotle, 
 as Mr. Courthope has shown us in his admirable 
 volume entitled " Life in Poetry, Law in Taste," 
 is of as much value to us as it was to that philos- 
 opher's contemporaries, and of greater value than 
 it was to critics of two centuries ago, because the 
 latter emphasized and misapprehended minor and 
 special statements, whereas we emphasize rather 
 Aristotle's profound generalizations. For this 
 reason, too, I venture to think, certain essays of 
 Matthew Arnold's — for example, that on " The 
 Study of Poetry " prefixed to Ward's " English 
 Poets " — will mean more to posterity than many 
 a more brilliant essay of his contemporary, 
 James Russell Lowell. It is, I repeat, most 
 important to obtain a safe point of departure 
 from sound generalizations. It is like having the 
 union station in a town we are leaving pointed 
 out to us. We may take the wrong train after 
 we enter the station ; but if we go wandering 
 about the town, we shall get no train at all. 
 
 I am not sure, of course, that the generaliza- 
 tions I have given are worthy of confidence, but 
 experience teaches me to think that they are. 
 I believe that the reason why men and women 
 
LITERARY STUDY 93 
 
 are turning more and more to literary studies is 
 that they find in them the readiest means of 
 access to the ideal. I believe that those stu- 
 dents who, like myself, make literature a pro- 
 fession are constantly in danger of mistaking the 
 letter of their pursuit for its spirit, and of prosecut- 
 ing mechanically a study that should engage the 
 highest faculties of mind and heart and soul. 
 Hence I am sure that the professional student 
 will find it profitable always to bear in mind 
 the aims and methods of the lovers of literature 
 whom, for convenience, we call amateurs. On 
 the other hand, I am convinced that, while the 
 aims of many amateurs are high, their methods 
 of approaching literature are often narrow, in- 
 consistent, unintelligent, and their purposes too 
 self-centred. They may, therefore, profit greatly 
 by following the guidance of competent critics 
 and teachers — in other words, by acknowledg- 
 ing some authority in matters of taste besides 
 their own sweet wills. In short, I give my alle- 
 giance neither to an aristocracy of letters, a so- 
 called class of cultured Mandarins in whom all 
 learning resides, nor to a democracy of letters, 
 in which every man's judgment is as good as 
 his neighbor's, but to a constitutional republic 
 
94 AIMS AND METHODS OF LITERARY STUDY 
 
 of letters like the United States in politics — a 
 republic in which there are both aristocratic and 
 democratic classes or estates, which can flourish 
 only through mutual intelligence and coopera- 
 tion and through cultivating the friendliest 
 international relations. This means that we need 
 a critic to do for students of British and Ameri- 
 can literature what Burke has done for stu- 
 dents of British and American politics. After 
 we get him, we may perhaps look forward to the 
 time when a great modern Aristotle shall apply 
 the critical method to the chaos of knowable 
 things, and give the world a " Synthetic Phi- 
 losophy " that shall surpass even the great struc- 
 ture of Herbert Spencer. In the meanwhile, we 
 whose functions and aspirations are much humbler 
 may labor while we wait, may somewhat lighten 
 his labors, and may prepare men and women to 
 appreciate them. For to prepare men and women 
 to study literature is really to prepare them to 
 appreciate the highest, mental and moral achieve- 
 ments. 
 
IV 
 
 CRITICISM AND FAITH 
 
[The substance of two short papers contributed to The 
 Churchman, October 2, 1897, and February 12, 1898.] 
 
IV 
 
 CRITICISM AND FAITH 
 
 I have just been re-reading one of the most 
 subtle of M. Jules Lemaitre's charming char- 
 acterizations of his contemporaries — I mean 
 the four pages that he devoted some years ago 
 to M. Ferdinand Brunetiere in the collection of 
 sketches entitled "Figurines." As the reading 
 world has long known, M. Lemaitre and M. Bru- 
 netiere are as far apart as the poles in their criti- 
 cal methods and ideals. Each is a master in his 
 way, each has always been conscious of his 
 rival's influence and power; hence every thrust 
 and parry of the duel they have waged has its 
 interest for the spectator. In that particular stage 
 of the encounter to which I referred above, M. 
 Lemaitre gave a thrust so clever, so unexpected 
 that he might well have been pardoned for 
 deeming it a home thrust indeed. I myself 
 
 97 
 
98 CRITICISM AND FAITH 
 
 may perhaps be pardoned for trying to give 
 an English equivalent of it : — 
 
 " One must have seen at times, in some con- 
 vent when the middle age was at its zenith, a 
 theologian-monk, ardent in controversy, ortho- 
 dox, but rash in his dialectic to the point of 
 making one tremble, austere, secretive, never 
 giving a glimpse of his heart or of his sensa- 
 tions, hard in aspect and a stranger to every 
 pleasure. . . . One morning his brothers found 
 him hanged in his cell, beneath his large cruci- 
 fix. What had taken place? A drama of 
 metaphysical speculations ending in despair? 
 a drama of mortal ennui ? or something still less 
 to be suspected ? 
 
 " My pleasantry is not of a gay kind, and it 
 is horribly romantic. But M. Brunetiere makes 
 me think, in spite of "myself, of a theologian 
 damned." 
 
 Now I do not propose to discuss this duel 
 in detail, but simply wish to ask why M. 
 Lemaitre took the trouble to deliver this par- 
 ticular thrust. Perhaps he acted on the prin- 
 ciple that your own strongest point is likely to 
 be your adversary's weakest. This may be a 
 bad principle, but Lemaitre plainly believed that 
 
CRITICISM AND FAITH 99 
 
 his own strength consisted in an utter independ- 
 ence of all critical standards save those of 
 individual preference, and that Brunetiere's weak- 
 ness lay in his distrust of himself and in his 
 acquiescence in established opinions and judg- 
 ments. Be this as it may, there is surely food 
 for reflection for us in the position taken by the 
 impressionist critic. 
 
 Are critical standards a hindrance or a help ? 
 or, in other words, Can a man in literature, any 
 more than in life, dispense with faith in some- 
 thing higher than himself? Yes, M. Lemaitre 
 appeared to say; no, M. Brunetiere would doubt- 
 less have replied. And yet the former critic, in the 
 essay from which I have quoted, assured us that 
 his rival was pessimistic to the core — that there- 
 fore he was profoundly melancholy and that to 
 give himself the solace of work, he labored inde- 
 fatigably "to defend principles and institutions" 
 in which he did not "believe." 
 
 But this is a curious role for a pessimist to play 
 — especially when he is credited with being sin- 
 cere. Is it fair to call a man a pessimist when 
 his whole life has been a consistent struggle for 
 principles which, he claims, possess validity 
 through the fact that they are based on something 
 
100 CRITICISM AND FAITH 
 
 higher than his own belief in them — to wit, on the 
 credence accorded them by generation upon gen- 
 eration of thinking men ? Did not Lemaitre 
 change rapiers in the contest, and was he able to 
 handle his adversary's effectively ? Was he not 
 himself the pessimist in spite of his jaunty mien 
 and his alluring smile ? The man who frankly 
 confesses his disbelief in the power of his fellows 
 to find standards of right thinking in matters of 
 art is just as truly a pessimist as the man who 
 can discover no standards of conduct, no rules of 
 life based on faith in God and fellow-men. How 
 shall we write or live effectively or consistently if 
 we have not a pattern, an example, to guide us ? 
 We cannot know what we may safely enjoy in 
 art unless we have standards of judgment and 
 taste, any more than we can know what drugs are 
 wholesome unless we have standards of experience. 
 The coarse novel, the obscene picture, may be like 
 the brilliantly colored drug, attractive to the eye, 
 but deadly to the taste. Now we should surely 
 call a man who consistently flouted the lessons of 
 experience either a fool or a pessimist a outrance; 
 but experience applies not merely to the physical 
 and moral spheres, but to the artistic as well. To 
 be seduced by the blue depths of the lake, by the 
 
CRITICISM ANI^FAJTU • 10 1 
 
 red lights of the bar-room, by the yellow covers 
 of the foul novel — are kindred catastrophes in a 
 sense. All sooner or later result in death of one 
 sort or another, and all proceed, either from igno- 
 rance or thoughtlessness — cases we are not here 
 considering — or from the wilful setting up of 
 one's own judgment against the experience of 
 the race. Self-assertion is a basis if not the chief 
 basis of pessimism, and faith is the main basis of 
 optimism, nor do all M. Lemaitre's subtle powers 
 of fence save him from falling at last before the 
 keen point of this fundamental truth. 
 
 M. Brunetiere may have many points in com- 
 mon with the mediaeval monk of M. Lemaitre's 
 imagination. His recent turning to Roman Cathol- 
 icism seems to show this. He has faith in 
 ideals and standards, and he believes that it is his 
 duty to try to win the world to these ; but he has 
 not shut himself up in a cell, and so long as he 
 follows the precepts of the gospel of work, he 
 is not likely to hang himself. If any such fate 
 could legitimately have been predicted ten years 
 ago as in store for either of the rivals, it was for 
 M. Lemaitre himself. It might have been im- 
 agined that, jaded with a multiplicity of sensations 
 leading no whither, he would some day realize that 
 
1 02 CRITICISM AND FAITH 
 
 life had no charms left, and that some one would 
 be impelled to draw a companion picture repre- 
 senting him as a sated Epicurean lying dead and 
 deserted amid the paraphernalia of a soulless 
 luxury. Fortunately, neither rival has yet perished 
 either by his own or by the other's hand, and the 
 world has had so many larger and more important 
 contests to witness that it has almost forgotten 
 their various passages at arms. Some of us have 
 not forgotten, however, the sides on which they 
 fought, nor are we disconcerted in having M. 
 Brunetiere of late sally forth in defence of author- 
 ity in another garb against other foes. We still 
 remember some of the lessons we learned from 
 him. We still believe that here in this new land 
 of half-formed ideals we can by no means afford 
 to dissociate art from conduct, that in both we 
 have continual need of standards — that is, of faith 
 in the true, the beautiful, and the good, not as they 
 merely seem to be such to us, but as they always 
 have existed and always will exist beyond and 
 above ourselves within the bosom of God. 
 
 II 
 
 That faith of some sort is as necessary to the 
 critic as it is to the man who wishes to lead a good 
 
CRITICISM AND FAITH 103 
 
 life and do a good work in this perplexing world 
 is a point not only, I hope, brought out by the com- 
 ments made above, but also, it would seem, in- 
 volved in what was said in a former paper about 
 the propriety of laying emphasis upon the value of 
 popular judgment in literary and artistic matters. 
 Yet I fancy that most persons, if they were to 
 think about the matter at all, would opine at first 
 blush that good criticism is much more an affair 
 of scepticism than one of faith. 
 
 Perhaps one reason why so many people, for- 
 getting that comparatively sterile periods seem to 
 be needed in order to enable creative forces to 
 gather strength, regret the fact that the period in 
 which we live is on the whole one of criticism 
 rather than of consummate literary creation, is to 
 be found in the close affiliation scepticism seems 
 to have with criticism, scepticism being naturally 
 repellent to normally healthy minds. There is 
 no inherent reason why criticism should be pre- 
 dominantly sceptical in character, but it often is so, 
 and the public seems generally to assume that it 
 will be so. Throughout the nineteenth century it 
 was the sceptical side of criticism that forced itself 
 upon public attention, mainly because it exhibited 
 piquant and sensational characteristics. There is 
 
104 CRITICISM AND FAITH 
 
 a plain element of the sensational in the mainte- 
 nance of the Baconian authorship of the Shaksper- 
 ian plays, which is not entirely lacking in the 
 criticism that makes Homer a myth and Captain 
 John Smith a mere braggadocio. One can be 
 much more piquant when one is combating a 
 theory or an opinion universally held to be true, 
 than when one is saying for the thousandth time 
 what one is expected to say. 
 
 Of late there has seemed, however, to be a feel- 
 ing among all classes of critics that the sceptical 
 spirit has led them too far, and perhaps it is not 
 too much to say that a reaction is slowly setting in 
 which will tend to restore to modern criticism 
 some of the popular respect it has lost. The 
 late Mr. Fiske's defence of the veracity of Captain 
 John Smith is an example in point, because it was 
 based on the strictly scientific desire to find an 
 explanation for something posited as true, rather 
 than on the purely sceptical desire to sweep 
 away something that did not square with normal 
 experience. Still more striking, perhaps, is the 
 attitude of a few critics toward Defoe, whose 
 character cannot be completely rehabilitated but 
 whose positive statements no sensible man is likely 
 to dismiss jauntily as the utterances of " the great- 
 
CRITICISM AND FAITH 105 
 
 est liar that ever lived," now that Mr. G. A. Aitken 
 has clearly proved that all the details given in the 
 famous ghost story of " Mrs. Veal " were obtained 
 by Defoe in precisely the way that would be 
 employed by a modern reporter sent to investi- 
 gate a matter interesting to the public. 
 
 This anti-sceptical tendency, which may be 
 observed throughout the world of thought, will 
 be of great importance in literary and artistic 
 criticism if it is allowed free play. The popular 
 standing of an author or an artist of established 
 reputation is the posited fact, and truly scientific 
 criticism will endeavor to account for this reputa- 
 tion, to maintain it, and even to unfold it, rather 
 than to assert that modern taste finds little to 
 enjoy in what has pleased our ancestors. It is 
 much easier to decry and endeavor to dethrone, 
 than it is to serve loyally in matters of criticism. 
 If we succeed in showing that some long-popular 
 author is after all really of no great consequence ; 
 if we prove that a forgotten writer is in fact deserv- 
 ing of immortal bays, we naturally expect that we 
 shall come in for more glory than we should if we 
 were to choose the less ambitious part of praising, 
 in our turn, what has long been regarded as a just 
 subject of praise. 
 
106 CRITICISM AND FAITH 
 
 This is but to say that if there is a reaction 
 against sceptical criticism, it will make itself felt 
 in matters literary and artistic by encouraging 
 academic at the expense of impressionist criticism. 
 The impressionist is in most cases sceptical of the 
 judgments of others, because he is too prone to over- 
 value his own. But the desire to pass unique judg- 
 ments of one's own leads at once to the desire to 
 sweep away that which is posited about authors 
 and books, painters and pictures, and the sweep- 
 ing away of posited judgments produces as dis- 
 astrous effects in literary criticism as the more 
 obvious but closely related sceptical methods of 
 treatment produce in historical studies. 
 
 It is almost needless to say, in conclusion, that 
 I do not wish to be accused of heralding a return 
 of the old, unquestioning spirit of acceptance of 
 all that antiquity has handed down to us. Modern 
 science has done its work too thoroughly for such 
 a spirit to be again dominant among cultivated 
 people, or for any sane man to wish that it should 
 become dominant. My desire is simply to point 
 out the fact that if the purely sceptical spirit in 
 criticism continues to be held in check, sounder 
 methods of study will be applied to literature and 
 the arts, the judgments of past generations will be 
 
CRITICISM AND FAITH 1 07 
 
 treated with respect and modified only when neces- 
 sary, and academic criticism will receive its due 
 recognition. There will be fewer surprises in store 
 for the readers of our magazines, who will not be 
 confronted each month with some new candidate 
 for fame, but the great masters will receive more 
 and more adequate comprehension and applause. 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
[Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa of Lehigh University, 
 June, 1904.] 
 
V 
 
 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 It is very commonly assumed that there is a 
 necessary antagonism of ends and methods be- 
 tween those who devote themselves to scientific 
 pursuits and those who occupy themselves with 
 any of the fine arts, whether as a calling or as a 
 pastime. That this antagonism is often visible 
 enough will scarcely be denied — certainly not by 
 any one who has ever sat in a college faculty. 
 That it is necessary is something I have not been 
 able to perceive during the nearly twenty years 
 of my academic experience. I have never looked 
 upon my scientific associates as rivals to be fought 
 with and circumvented, and I have striven, while 
 maintaining my own devotion to literature, to 
 give them no occasion to view me in such a sin- 
 ister light. Perhaps this fact will serve as an 
 excuse for my rashness in attempting to discuss 
 afresh the very large and time worn subject of 
 the relations of science and literature, especially 
 
112 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 as constituent parts of that indefinite something 
 denominated culture. 
 
 In such a discussion the first step, obviously, is 
 to try to define the terms employed. Here, how- 
 ever, we encounter an initial difficulty which will 
 prove insuperable if we are strenuous in main- 
 taining our rights. Scientists may have defined 
 science in a manner satisfactory to themselves, but 
 I am very sure that no literary man's definition 
 of literature has ever long satisfied any other lit- 
 erary man. It goes without saying that no man of 
 letters (if only for shame's sake) would allow a 
 scientist to define literature for him. Hence, if 
 we insist upon definitions, this discussion may as 
 well be adjourned indefinitely. 
 
 There is, however, another plane than that of 
 accepted definitions, upon which the scientist and 
 the literary man may meet for discussion. It is 
 the Socratic plane — the plane of consecutive 
 questions and answers, without, however, the 
 trap-door through which Socrates's opponents 
 used to disappear in an undignified manner. 
 
 Let each ask himself what he is about, what 
 his primary concern is as scientist or man of 
 letters respectively. The scientist will probably 
 reply that he is striving to advance the bounds 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 113 
 
 of systematic human knowledge. The historian, 
 the biographer, or the critic might conceivably 
 make this answer also; but, if a true man of 
 letters, he would at once add something to the 
 effect that he was at the same time and with 
 equal, or at least considerable zeal, striving to 
 increase the sum of human pleasure. The scien- 
 tist might rejoin that such was his purpose as 
 well, and he might easily show how the discov- 
 eries of science have redounded to human happi- 
 ness. But when the two had threshed their 
 meanings out, it would probably appear that the 
 end of giving pleasure to others was only a sub- 
 sidiary one with the scientist, whereas it was a 
 primary and vital one with the literary historian, 
 biographer, or critic. I may illustrate the point 
 I am trying to bring out, by saying that the histo- 
 rian who confessed that he had but one primary 
 aim, viz., to add to the sum of human knowledge 
 about a particular period of a nation's history, 
 would at once be disowned by men of letters. If 
 the scientists would not receive him on account of 
 the fact that he could not apply absolutely rigid 
 tests to determine the credibility of the results of 
 his work, the rejected individual would have to 
 flock with the economists, the students of politics, 
 
114 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 law, and similar subjects — that is, with what we 
 may call the semi-scientists, among whom he could 
 doubtless make himself comfortable. 
 
 But historians, biographers, and critics who do 
 not regard the extension of the bounds of system- 
 atized knowledge as their sole primary aim, and 
 are hence entitled to call themselves men of let- 
 ters, are generally regarded, after all, as servants 
 or suspected aliens within the realm of literature. 
 Some of them actually subscribe to their own in- 
 feriority to a minor poet or a third-rate novelist ; 
 but this will probably not be for long, since minor 
 poets and third-rate novelists are increasing with 
 such rapidity under our tolerant laws that the day 
 may be not far distant when writing poems and 
 novels will be almost as commonplace a domestic 
 phenomenon as china painting and embroidering 
 now are. We are not concerned, however, with 
 the ranking of authors or with the loss of dis- 
 tinction which some of them may incur, if books 
 continue to be manufactured and sold like shoes. 
 What we wish to know is how a truly great poet 
 or novelist would answer our question as to the 
 primary purpose for which he writes. 
 
 Whatever form his answer might take, it is 
 almost inconceivable, I think, that it should be 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 115 
 
 that of the scientist,— :to extend the bounds of sys- 
 tematized knowledge. The great creative writers 
 do extend the bounds of knowledge very materi- 
 ally in certain ways ; but their ways are not those 
 of the scientist, the knowledge they furnish is 
 rarely of the kind he deals with, — though Tenny- 
 son, I believe, did give, or else might have given, 
 a fact or two to the botanist, — and the extension 
 of the bounds of knowledge is scarcely, if at all, 
 in their thoughts when they are in the act of 
 composing. As for the lesser creative writers, — 
 especially in these days of art for art's sake, — it 
 is needless to say that they would disclaim any 
 intention of trying to extend the bounds of human 
 knowledge. Indeed, how could many of them 
 make such a claim without turning scarlet? 
 
 But our questioning has not carried us very far. 
 Scientists and semi-scientists, from the greatest 
 to the least, have one clear, common end in view. 
 This end is shared partly only by some kinds 
 of writers, while, if writers as a class have one 
 clear, common end in view, it is certainly not that 
 of the scientists. Given that most normal of hu- 
 man characteristics, — the desire to pursue one's 
 own end unimpeded, to make it triumph over the 
 end another is pursuing, to attract other adherents 
 
Il6 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 to it, — why should we not suppose that scientists 
 and men of letters will maintain more or less 
 antagonistic relations till, time is no more? What 
 wonder is it that the present poet laureate should 
 complain that in this age of science there is a 
 marked decrease of interest in the higher forms 
 of poetry ? What wonder is it that history and 
 biography, categories of literature the spirit of 
 which is least alien to that of science, should 
 daily be gaining favor, as we are told, with serious 
 readers ? What wonder, finally, that in our 
 schools, colleges, and universities, scientific and 
 semi-scientific studies have not only been winning 
 their rightful place in the curriculum, but have 
 taken on an aggressive attitude that threatens the 
 very existence of certain more or less literary 
 courses, particularly those in Greek and Latin, 
 without which the study of literature in the 
 vernacular can be prosecuted only in a halting 
 and incomplete manner ? 
 
 That the day will ever come when no professor 
 of physics will be impelled to ask, as one did the 
 other day in New York, why boys would not be 
 better employed in studying the motions of the 
 planets than in learning the names of obscure and 
 obscene heathen divinities, I hesitate to affirm. 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 117 
 
 Such a protesting professor will always have Plato 
 for something of a prototype and a long line of 
 utilitarians for successors. Much less do I dare 
 to affirm that the day will ever come in which 
 artists and men of letters, whenever they can 
 indulge their prejudices in safety, will cease to 
 display ignorance and bad temper at the mention 
 of science. But I should also and to an equal 
 degree be disinclined to asseverate that class 
 hatred will cease short of some sort of a millen- 
 nium, or that nations will in any calculable future 
 refrain from settling certain classes of disputes by 
 the barbaric means of war ; yet I am willing to 
 maintain that class hatred and wars between na- 
 tions are unnecessary evils, on the supposition that 
 man is a free agent capable of distinguishing and 
 choosing the better from the worse. In other 
 words, the fact that something will probably long 
 continue to exist should not deter us from ques- 
 tioning whether it ought to exist — should not 
 disincline us to ask, 
 
 " Can such things be, 
 And overcome us like a summer's cloud, 
 Without our special wonder ? " 
 
 Now I am never made aware of the antag- 
 onisms that exist among men to whom the things 
 
Il8 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 of the mind are of primary concern, without a very 
 special wonder. Scientists and artists, men of 
 letters and scholars, may find it difficult to dis- 
 cover a clear purpose held in common ; but one 
 and all, in accomplishing their respective tasks, 
 they are envisaging this mysterious universe of 
 which they are insignificant parts. One and all 
 they stand in the presence of an Awful Reality, 
 who to the poet may be 
 
 " God — the mighty source 
 Of all things — the stupendous force 
 
 On which all strength depends ; 
 From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes, 
 All period, power, and enterprise 
 
 Commences, reigns, and ends — " 
 
 or who to the philosopher may be that " insoluble 
 enigma," which man " evermore perceives to be 
 an insoluble enigma." In such a presence how 
 are human antagonisms possible? How, except 
 on the supposition that the clear, common end 
 which we found for the scientists and ceased to 
 inquire for in the case of the men of letters, is 
 not, after all, the ultimate end for either ? If the 
 final end of science and the final end of literature 
 and every other art be not to envisage " steadily " 
 and "whole," as best may be, this mysterious 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 119 
 
 universe and to bring the minds and souls of 
 scientists and artists and writers and of all who 
 profit from their labors most completely and be- 
 comingly into the presence of the Awful Reality, 
 are science and art and literature fully compre- 
 hended by their votaries ? 
 
 It is most necessary at this point to avoid all 
 temptation or inclination to drop into cant — that 
 besetting weakness of Anglo-Saxons. It is so 
 easy to talk about wonder and awe without feel- 
 ing them, so easy to miss the solid and neces- 
 sary facts of life while groping about in the 
 spacious and nebulous region of ideas. Yet can 
 the scientific mind that stops short in its probing, 
 that does not question until it encounters the in- 
 scrutable mystery of the universe, be regarded as 
 fulfilling its functions properly and completely, or 
 can the creative faculty of the artist that does not 
 impinge upon the same inscrutable mystery be 
 looked on as worthy of special admiration ? Did 
 not Newton and Darwin, Shakspere and Milton, 
 however different the paths they blazed through 
 the forests of nature and life, emerge upon the 
 shore of the same infinite ocean ? And unless we 
 also, following paths already cut or making them 
 for ourselves, finally get a glimpse of 
 
120 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 " that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither," 
 
 will not our last state be that of wanderers lost in 
 tangled and impenetrable woods ? We may make a 
 circle with our steps and fancy we are progressing, 
 or we may lie down in a spot which in our hallu- 
 cination we take to be our true goal ; yet, if we 
 do these things, shall we be any the less pitiable 
 because we are complacent? But do those who 
 emerge on the shore of the infinite sea strive to 
 drown with their objurgations and rival clamors 
 the rhythmical plash of its waves ? Or is it 
 sensible for wanderers in a forest to pelt one 
 another with missiles, when their paths happen 
 to cross or to lie side by side ? 
 
 But it may be urged that, if all this is not cant, 
 it is very figurative and far from being clear-cut 
 and definitive. Such an objection has force, 
 although it should be remembered that many 
 high forms of truth are only with great diffi- 
 culty, if at all, to be expressed in terms of the 
 concrete and definite. I will confess further that 
 in one important particular my figure breaks down. 
 He who has once emerged upon the shore of the 
 infinite ocean becomes endowed with a power 
 never granted to toilers through actual and tan- 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 121 
 
 gible forests. He may renew his toils and wan- 
 derings in other parts of the thickets of life and 
 nature, and yet always have the power, not 
 merely of remembering the sight of the great 
 ocean, but of transporting himself at any moment 
 to its margin. To put it differently, the true scien- 
 tist and the true artist or man of letters, having 
 once grasped firmly the idea that his ultimate pur- 
 pose is to help on man's interpretation of the uni- 
 verse in its marvellous entirety, never lets go that 
 idea, even when he is absorbed in a delicate piece 
 of investigation, or in painting a miniature, or in 
 polishing a sonnet. Adequately to express this 
 great truth in figurative terms of concrete human 
 action will be, I think, impossible so long as a man 
 is unable to be in two places at the same time. It 
 is none the less certain, however, that the really 
 successful creative mind, whether in science or in 
 art, moves simultaneously in the two spheres of the 
 finite and the infinite, and that this is not a meta- 
 physical impossibility, since the larger sphere in- 
 cludes the lesser. 
 
 Perhaps it is now sufficiently plain, not only 
 why opposition between scientists and men of 
 letters is not necessary, but also why they should 
 regard themselves as brothers ever ready to lend a 
 
122 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 helping hand to one another. In many particu- 
 lars the subject-matters with which they deal re- 
 spectively, the methods they apply, the proximate 
 ends and purposes they have in view, are so dis- 
 tinct that it is no wonder that at first thought 
 occasions for misunderstanding, if not of strife, 
 present themselves. But in the final analysis 
 their main end is a common one, however dif- 
 ferent the means by which it is to be accom- 
 plished. That end, as we have seen, is the more 
 complete interpretation of the universe in its en- 
 tirety, and the chief reason why contentions arise 
 between the two classes of interpreters is that 
 neither fully and continually realizes that the 
 universe is in itself, for the purposes of ultimate 
 interpretation, an indissoluble entity. We, being 
 finite and a part of it, portion it out into mechan- 
 ical and metaphysical segments and devote our- 
 selves to the study and understanding of one or 
 more of these purely relative and often purely 
 ideal divisions, forgetting the while that we are 
 dealing only with the perceptions of our senses 
 and the creations of our intellectual and imagi- 
 native faculties, and not with that indissoluble 
 entity, the interpretation or partial interpreta- 
 tion of which, though it be the mystery of mys- 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1 23 
 
 teries, is also the desire of desires and the dream 
 of dreams of the aspiring soul of man. It is our 
 doom, of course, since we are finite, never to 
 interpret the universe completely, and it is also 
 our doom to move forward only by slow, almost 
 imperceptible degrees toward such a partial inter- 
 pretation of it as will not seem unworthy of intelli- 
 gent beings. Hence there should be no repining 
 at the necessity we are under of dealing with per- 
 ceived or imagined segments instead of with the 
 transcendant whole. Yet, while in our finiteness 
 we are so constituted that we can take pleasure in 
 dealing with the parts we perceive and create, in 
 our infinite aspirations we are dwarfed and emas- 
 culated if we do not keep always before us the 
 entire universe, material and spiritual, — in other 
 words, the ultimate phenomenon. 
 
 But the moment we grasp the idea that the 
 mind's problem of problems is to square itself 
 with the universe, it becomes apparent that the 
 larger and more comprehensive the mind can be 
 made, the wider view it will take of the universe 
 and the nearer it will come to the desiderated 
 interpretation. Civilization is but another name 
 for this endlessly repeated process of squaring 
 the mind of the race with the universe. Yet we 
 
124 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 surely do not make the mind larger and more 
 comprehensive if we insist that it shall deal in the 
 main only with sense-perceptions or in the main 
 only with ideas, or if we insist that it shall employ 
 only one set of methods with which to envisage the 
 universe. Nor do we display much acumen, if in 
 the presence of an indissoluble phenomenon, we 
 spend our time in wrangling over the fruitless 
 question as to which of two or more sets of rela- 
 tive phenomena may fairly be said to be of greater 
 or greatest importance. I may be preternatu- 
 rally dull, but I must frankly confess that I have 
 never been able to see how science can be more 
 important than art or art than science. Both are 
 indispensable to any interpretation of the universe, 
 if only for the reason that the one answers chiefly 
 to the intellectual, the other chiefly to the emo- 
 tional nature of man, the interpreter. The uni- 
 verse in which we live is one of passions as well 
 as of stars, of stages of thought as well as of geo- 
 logical strata, of sighs of love and sorrow as well 
 as of cataclysmal forces. Perhaps on "this dim 
 spot which men call earth " the steam-engine has 
 made a deeper impression than the sonnet, but the 
 one is, in the last analysis, no less wonderful than 
 the other, and to leave either out of account in an 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1 25 
 
 attempted interpretation of the universe would be 
 fatal. Yet how often do we see the poet and the 
 mechanical engineer bound together by the ties 
 of intelligent sympathy ? How often does a pro- 
 fessor of literature urge his students to give a fair 
 amount of their time to his colleague who lec- 
 tures on chemistry, and how often does the lat- 
 ter return the courtesy ? But such sympathies 
 and such courtesies should not be rare among 
 men whose common concern is with the won- 
 ders of the universe. 
 
 If, then, there is one idea that ought to emerge 
 more prominently and frequently than any other 
 in a discussion of the relations of science and liter- 
 ature, — or science and art, if you will, for litera- 
 ture in this connection must be conceived as an 
 art, — it is the idea of catholicity. Man, the inter- 
 preter, is a whole, and the universe which he must 
 strive to interpret, if he is not to live in it as a 
 mere animal, is a whole also. The whole inter- 
 preter must take a whole view of the whole phe- 
 nomenon — that is to say, man, to be worthy of 
 his high attributes, must be catholic in his aims 
 and methods, especially when he is bringing his 
 powers to bear on subjects of vast importance to 
 his spiritual, mental, and bodily welfare. He does 
 
126 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 injustice to himself when he fancies that he can 
 pursue and capture Truth without at the same 
 time pursuing and capturing her sister Beauty. 
 Indeed, man must not, like Apollo, pursue a single 
 nymph — he must pursue Three Graces whose 
 names are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. If he 
 pursues a sole and single object, no matter how 
 desirable, he must expect a metamorphosis and 
 a frustration. Instead of the nymph the god 
 grasped a bough of laurel, from the leaves of which 
 he wove a garland for his brow. So the scientist 
 pursuing Truth alone may grasp new and impor- 
 tant facts, the poet pursuing Beauty alone may 
 snatch exquisite harmonies and images, and both 
 may gain plaudits that will partly repay them for 
 their endeavors ; but neither will achieve the true 
 object of his pursuit, for facts are not Truth nor 
 are exquisite harmonies and images Beauty, any 
 more than the shapely laurel was the flying 
 nymph. This is old doctrine, and never better 
 expressed than by Keats when he wrote 
 
 " < Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty ' — this is all 
 Ye know on earth and all ye need to know." 
 
 Add the third member of the trinity, Goodness, 
 and we have the Golden Rule transferred from the 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE I 27 
 
 sphere of conduct to that of thought and emotion. 
 But it is only the catholic man who can come near 
 to living up to the Golden Rule. 
 
 What now should be the practical outcome of 
 the adoption of a catholic attitude toward the 
 claims of science and art — especially literature — 
 as constituent parts in human education or cul- 
 ture ? In the first place, it would seem that every 
 catholic-minded man should rejoice in all the 
 triumphs of science and in all the achievements of 
 art; that jealousy should be banished, save that 
 commendable jealousy for the honor of one's 
 chosen pursuit ; that the complete democratic 
 equality of all the arts and sciences should be pro- 
 claimed throughout the thinking and the reading 
 world. The last statement does not mean, of 
 course, that there should be no differences of pres- 
 tige among the arts and sciences, any more than 
 the assertion of democratic equality in the sphere 
 of politics means that descent from a long line of 
 honorable ancestors should carry no weight in a 
 normally constituted community. You can no 
 more put history out of doors with a fork than 
 you can expel nature with the same instrument. 
 The poet Horace, whose words I have just used, 
 derives much of his prestige from the fact that his 
 
128 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 poems have been handed down for nearly two 
 thousand years ; but if he were writing to-day, he 
 would enjoy, rightly or wrongly, a sort of prestige 
 over many other writers and over certain classes 
 of scientific investigators merely because he would 
 come before the public crowned with the venerable 
 title of poet. The mineralogist, on the other hand, 
 in spite of the truth and beauty of the systems of 
 crystallography he expounds, must long expect to 
 have his books read and his classes attended, save 
 in rare cases, only by a few persons of special 
 endowments and proclivities. But the mineralogist 
 has his compensations, and he can, take his stand 
 by the side of the poet upon the margin of the 
 infinite sea. He, too, is helping man to interpret 
 the universe. 
 
 Another consequence of the adoption of a catho- 
 lic attitude toward the respective claims of science 
 and literature in education ought to be a cessation of 
 wrangling among those who frame the curriculums 
 of our schools and colleges. Discussion as to the 
 relative amounts of each to be allowed, as to the 
 divisions of students to be effected according to 
 their respective aptitudes, as to relative value in 
 mental training, and similar subjects must con- 
 tinue, indeed, for many a day to come ; and if 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1 29 
 
 my colleagues of the so-called humane studies 
 persist in holding their inherited, not personally 
 achieved, ground in such a Bourbon-like fashion, I 
 fear that my colleagues of the natural sciences will 
 for a long time be justified in banding together 
 to resist ultraconservatism by radical aggression. 
 But wrangling is at no time necessary, and it is to 
 be hoped that the outcome of every contest be- 
 tween extreme conservatism and irritated radicalism 
 will be true progress. And if reason and catho- 
 licity prevail, as they doubtless will in the long 
 run, the questions at issue will be answered by a 
 sound pedagogy, which must be based upon educa- 
 tional history in its broadest sense and experi- 
 mental psychology. When that day comes, there 
 will be no "college fetich" to give offence and, let 
 us hope, no denouncers of it to give still greater 
 offence by their denunciations. Yet I suspect 
 that in that blessed time Greek, the most beautiful 
 of languages, preserved in the most perfect of 
 literatures, will still be taught, even in those univer- 
 sities in which for good and sufficient reasons the 
 chief emphasis is laid upon science. 
 
 A third consequence of the adoption of a catho- 
 lic attitude seems to be more important still. The 
 scientist will gain inspiration and concrete help in 
 
130 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 greater abundance from the man of letters and the 
 artist, and the man of letters and the artist will in 
 turn gain inspiration and help from the scientist. 
 Precisely what benefits will flow to the scientist I 
 am not specially competent to say ; but he cannot 
 fail to be a better scientist if he becomes a better 
 man, and a better man he is sure to be if he lives 
 in charity with his fellow-interpreters of the uni- 
 verse and if he submits his emotional nature to 
 the charms of art and literature. Some of the 
 aberrations of literary taste displayed by Her- 
 bert Spencer have recently been subjected to 
 comment, and capital has been so frequently 
 made of Darwin's confession with regard to the 
 starving of his aesthetic faculties, that one hesi- 
 tates to mention it, especially if one belongs to 
 the literary class that has used it as a text for 
 numerous sermons. Still, with no intention of 
 preaching, I may say that, whenever a full, catho- 
 lic understanding is arrived at between the vota- 
 ries of science and those of literature, it is altogether 
 likely that scientists will be less self-centred than 
 they now are, more alive to the aesthetic appeal 
 made by the world whose material phenomena it is 
 their chief concern to investigate, more interested 
 in human life with its mysterious and complex 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 131 
 
 forces, and, finally, more willing to admit that the 
 phenomena we vaguely denominate spiritual are 
 not only worthy of the fullest scientific in- 
 vestigation, but are also often set in relief and 
 thus made amenable to study by the subtle in- 
 sight and the plastic genius of the artist and the 
 writer. In other words, the day will surely come 
 when creative genius in art and letters will not 
 be merely a source of innocuous and unimpor- 
 tant pleasure to some scientists, or an object of 
 study with a particular branch of them, to wit, 
 the alienists. Yet, as I speak, I realize that I 
 am doing the scientific mind an injustice in im- 
 plying that it does not often take seriously the 
 serious art of the world. John Stuart Mill was 
 not a born scientist, but his was preeminently a 
 scientific mind, and it was more receptive of the 
 early poetry of Robert Browning than were the 
 minds of nine out of ten professed critics in 
 the England of the thirties and the forties. 
 
 With regard to the inspiration and concrete help 
 to be gained by men of letters from the adoption 
 of a catholic attitude toward scientific interpreters 
 of the universe, I can perhaps speak a little more 
 definitely. Creative literature, certainly in its ob- 
 jective forms, such as the epic, the drama, the 
 
132 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 novel, rests primarily upon observation of human 
 and, to a less extent, of external nature. Even in 
 its subjective forms, such as the lyric poem, litera- 
 ture rests upon a certain amount of self-observa- 
 tion or introspection, although the writer may be 
 unconscious of the fact when he is in the fervor of 
 actual creation. But observation is one of the two 
 foundation stones upon which the whole structure 
 of science has been reared. The other foundation 
 stone of science is experiment, which is also indis- 
 pensable, not merely to every man of letters who 
 wishes to test his powers, but also to literature, if 
 it is to be a thing of growth and adaptation to 
 human needs. That the experimental tests of 
 the scientist are vastly different from those of 
 the man of letters is a statement that needs 
 scarcely to be made ; but it is equally obvious 
 that the results of every writer's observation 
 are continually being tested both by himself and 
 by his critics and readers. Constant recognition 
 of the latter fact and sympathy with the mental 
 attitude of cautious pursuit of accuracy character- 
 istic of the scientist cannot but be beneficial to the 
 writer by increasing his sense of responsibility and 
 by reminding him of the impermanence, not to say 
 the impertinence, of slipshod work. 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1 33 
 
 But the self-consciousness which is necessary 
 to the scientific investigator, even if it vitiates 
 his work to a degree determinable by the " per- 
 sonal equation," is often more or less of a draw- 
 back to the writer; hence experiment is of far 
 less significance to him than observation. Even 
 the wildest romancer is more dependent upon 
 observation of the facts of life than would ap- 
 pear at first thought; and the great creative 
 writer, whether in prose or in verse, is abso- 
 lutely dependent upon it. The more accurate 
 his observation, and in many cases the more 
 minute, the more authentic his genius. Balzac 
 described the houses of Saumur as minutely 
 almost as a botanist describes a plant. 
 Thackeray, writing in his last years a ro- 
 mance of England at the end of the eight- 
 eenth century, left behind him topographical 
 and biographical notes so numerous and so 
 careful that it is easy to judge in the main 
 the course the unfinished story of "Denis 
 Duval " would have followed. Shakspere has 
 left us no manuscript notes of the observations 
 which enabled him to develop an Italian story 
 or an old chronicle play or a tragedy of blood 
 into a consummate dramatic masterpiece ; but 
 
134 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 if he did not take his notes on paper or on a 
 tablet of the kind he speaks of in his " Sonnets," 
 he took them in his capacious and retentive 
 mind. In literature, however, observation deals 
 not alone with the external and the material ; 
 it is concerned with thoughts as well as with 
 actions, with ideas as well as with facts. Here 
 is where literary observation differs from most 
 varieties of scientific observation, and here is 
 precisely where, in my judgment, the man of 
 letters has most to learn from his fellow-inter- 
 preter of the universe. Having to observe and 
 explain the actions of men, the creative writer 
 is ever laboring under the temptation to square 
 the facts of life with theories of life and the 
 universe which he has accepted upon hear- 
 say or through inherited prejudices. He is 
 rarely as honest and thorough in his observa- 
 tion or study of ideas as he is in his observa- 
 tion of individuals and types. For example, 
 Maupassant could sketch a Norman peasant to 
 the life, but he gave little evidence of having 
 studied with equal fidelity the social system 
 that has made that rural brute a possibility. 
 In other words, no writer, not even a Shak- 
 spere or a Balzac, appears to me comparable with 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 135 
 
 a scientist in the impartiality and thoroughness 
 of his observation. Should he aim to be or 
 should we wish him to be ? Is it not enough 
 that his observation be sufficiently accurate to 
 give us the pleasures that accompany aesthetic 
 illusion ? I am quite sure that many persons 
 would answer these questions in the affirmative, 
 but I cannot. For me the great writer must 
 be the great interpreter of life, and to be such 
 he must see it steadily and see it whole, as 
 Matthew Arnold said Sophocles did. I hold 
 implicitly and unwaveringly to Keats's apothegm, 
 " Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," and I perceive 
 nothing but aesthetic loss when a fragment of 
 necessary truth escapes the artist's hand. Un- 
 necessary truth is, to be sure, a phrase that 
 means more to an artist than to a scientist or 
 to an ultra-realistic novelist. We accept readily 
 a Hamlet stout and short of breath, but we should 
 reject a Hamlet with a nose as large as Cyrano's. 
 In our rejection, however, we should be really 
 relying upon accurate and more or less scientific 
 observation, which teaches us that to centre 
 attention upon a physical characteristic is to 
 obscure to some extent those spiritual and men- 
 tal characteristics which are the mainsprings of 
 
136 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 dramatic action. It may be safely affirmed, never- 
 theless, that in the realm of ideas the phrase 
 " unnecessary truth " has far less meaning to 
 the writer than it has in the realm of facts. 
 His theories of life, his ideas about man and 
 his environment, should be thought out to the 
 last point of analysis, and should be squared 
 with every observation it has been within his 
 power to make. When he accepts a theory of 
 politics, a system of religion, a social order, 
 without accurate observation and investigation, 
 he does so at his peril. He may be excused 
 for not being ahead of his generation, but unless 
 he possesses compensating merits, he runs the 
 risk of being valued solely as an exponent of 
 his epoch ; in other words, as possessing historical 
 importance merely. Even Shakspere has suf- 
 fered somewhat from the fact that the spirit of 
 Tudor absolutism is more in evidence in his 
 plays than that of modern democracy. Thack- 
 eray suffers as compared with Dickens because, 
 whether the latter could draw a conventional 
 gentleman or not, the former, with all his ability 
 to detect the follies of individuals, undoubtedly 
 regarded the social set in which he lived and 
 moved rather with the partiality of an easy-going 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1 37 
 
 clubman than with the impartiality of the philo- 
 sophical observer of life or with the amused 
 tolerance of the cosmopolitan democrat. Shak- 
 spere and Thackeray, however, possessed and 
 exercised such wonderful powers of observation 
 in so many fields both of facts and of ideas 
 that their limitations are not merely pardoned, 
 but almost overlooked. Inconsistently enough, 
 we do not similarly overlook the limitations of 
 Milton and Byron ; but the main point is that 
 all these writers would have been greater still 
 if their observation had been still more extended 
 in the realm of ideas. This is but to say that 
 the absolute unwillingness of the scientist to 
 leave a single phenomenon uninvestigated ought 
 to be true of the writer, within the limits set 
 by our fallible nature. The boundaries between 
 fact and fancy should not be passed by writer 
 or by reader without a clear recognition of 
 the step taken. When that step has been 
 taken in an unambiguous manner, the writer 
 may carry us whithersoever his imagination 
 leads, provided only that he obey the laws of 
 artistic consistency. Within the realm of the 
 actual his duty to us is as clear and ineluctable 
 as that of the scientist — he must observe as 
 
138 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 thoroughly and impartially as is possible, in 
 order that he may the more completely inter- 
 pret to us the universe as he sees it. Absolute 
 honesty and absolute thoroughness of observa- 
 tion are the watchwords of the writer just as 
 truly as they are those of the scientist ; or, to 
 vary the figure, both march under the same 
 banner, ■ — ■ a tricolor, the stripes of which coincide 
 with that trinity of truth, beauty, and goodness 
 about which poets have sung and philosophers 
 expounded since the dawn of civilization. 
 
 Time is wanting for a careful consideration of 
 a point which will very probably occur here to 
 many, — to wit, the bearing of these remarks upon 
 certain forms of literature in which observation 
 scarcely seems to play the important part it does 
 in such works as the plays of Sophocles and the 
 novels of Balzac. The dreamer, the symbolist, 
 the mystic, the idealist — what have these in 
 common with the chemist and his blowpipe ? 
 This much at least, as I have already said, — they 
 must obey the laws of artistic consistency, or, to 
 put it otherwise, they must apply to the universe of 
 their fancy or imagination the observation that can 
 alone make it coherent and harmonious. If they 
 do not do this, and if they do not make clear the 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 139 
 
 relations borne by their creations to the visible, 
 concrete universe in which they as writers and we 
 as readers move and have our being, they cannot 
 be great writers, simply because they cannot be 
 sane and honest writers. We should be uncatholic 
 if we did not give the fullest scope to dreamers 
 and idealists, we should hamper art without bene- 
 fiting science ; but we should be false to our 
 highest duty, that of interpreting the universe, if, 
 without protest, we allowed the dreamer to call 
 his dreams realities, or the idealist to lure us into 
 believing that he has actually discovered a world 
 different from that in which our lots are cast. To 
 talk of higher realities is to talk of nonsense. To 
 deny the existence of determinable realities is 
 logical, although convincing to but few ; to dis- 
 cover transcendent realities in the shape of ideals 
 and symbols, or of concrete phenomena that elude 
 all observation save that of the elect, is in the last 
 analysis immoral. When we pass the boundaries 
 of the known and the knowable, we shall, if we 
 be honest, furl our tricolor and unfurl another 
 banner, whether it be a streamer of fancy or a 
 flag bearing on its field the anchor of hope. 
 
 In illustration of these remarks, let me cite 
 three creations of English writers, all of which 
 
140 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 are ideal, all wonderfully poetic, but of which 
 two seem thoroughly sound, the third partly un- 
 sound. The first is "The Tempest" of Shak- 
 spere, the second, the " Comus " of Milton, the 
 third, the " Epipsychidion " of Shelley. " The 
 Tempest " is the most exquisite, just as "Comus" 
 is probably the purest of idealistic compositions 
 in the English tongue ; both are the products 
 of noble and wholesome imaginations moving in 
 enchanted and enchanting regions never disturbed 
 by " the tread of hateful steps " or even " of some 
 chaste footing " ; but both are wonderfully true to 
 the laws of truth, beauty, and goodness as we see 
 them work in this unenchanted and often unen- 
 chanting world of ours. " The Tempest " is as 
 fundamentally honest as " Hamlet." But the 
 " Epipsychidion " of Shelley, which in turn trans- 
 ports us to an ideal spot, although, if studied only 
 in the light of its marvellous lyrical intensity and 
 pictorial power, it must always rank among 
 poetic masterpieces, is not an essentially honest 
 and moral work because it had its source in a 
 false set of human relations and in mistaken ideals 
 of love. Shelley in writing the poem did an 
 injustice to his faithful wife, to the Italian girl 
 who inspired it, to himself, and to humanity. It 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 141 
 
 is idle to suppose that the " Epipsychidion " can 
 be accepted as a poem divorced from its setting in 
 the facts of Shelley's life. The spirit in which a 
 composition is written must permeate it and be 
 perceptible to any sensitive reader. The " Epipsy- 
 chidion " has never been truly popular ; should 
 it ever become so, it would be a dire day, I think, 
 to the English race. On the other hand, the day 
 when "The Tempest" and " Comus " ceased to 
 delight would be equally dire. 
 
 What has just been said of the advantages to be 
 derived by creative writers from familiarity with 
 the aims and methods of scientists applies with 
 even greater force to critics and students of litera- 
 ture. Observation, combined with experiment, is 
 the foundation stone of all the studies known as 
 humane. As in the natural sciences, coordination 
 of the results of study and speculation upon them 
 are essential to progress ; but that we may have 
 results to work upon, observation of phenomena 
 must precede. " Observe the facts in your chosen 
 sphere of investigation " should be the first piece 
 of advice given to the student of literature as well 
 as to the student of chemistry, it being remem- 
 bered, however, that a piece of literature, as a 
 product of the human spirit, partakes of the 
 
142 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 elusiveness of that spirit and hence cannot be 
 subjected to such complete analysis as is possible 
 in the case of a chemical product. But unless the 
 comparatively tangible characteristics of a literary 
 product are accurately observed and noted down, 
 there is no study of it in any true sense of the 
 term, for it is only on such observation, combined 
 with coordination and speculation, that any report 
 capable of carrying conviction to others can be 
 made on the product. This is a hard saying to 
 many persons who fancy that expatiating upon 
 the beauty of a poem is studying that poem. It 
 is not. It partakes much more of worship than 
 of investigation or study. It may be better than 
 study, but it is not study, and its results may be 
 communicated, — enthusiasm is generally conta- 
 gious, — but they cannot be taught, that is, made 
 objects of knowledge and of reasoned belief. 
 
 If this be so, it follows that the opposition 
 between scientific and literary studies in our in- 
 stitutions of learning should tend to disappear as 
 the true relations between science and literature 
 are better apprehended. The student of litera- 
 ture is in his way a scientific observer, and his 
 prime object as student is the pursuit of truth. 
 As a lover of the beautiful and the good, — and, 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 143 
 
 as we have seen, he must be lover and student at 
 the same time, — he uses literature in a different 
 way, — he enjoys it, he derives noble ideals from 
 it, he becomes through contact with it a better 
 man. But he can succeed in being a true student 
 and a true lover at one and the same time only on 
 the terms by which it is possible for the scientist 
 to be a true student and a true lover of the prov- 
 ince of the universe with which he deals. Both 
 must draw the proper distinction between what 
 they know and what they feel. The temptation 
 of the literary student to confound these is the 
 greater, but he must manfully resist it. It is 
 because so many critics and historians and stu- 
 dents of literature fail to do this, that so much 
 confusion and contradiction prevails in literary 
 studies — to the amusement or the disgust of the 
 scientist. It is quite possible, however, to study 
 the facts of literature scientifically while enjoying 
 aesthetically its beauties, and not to confound the 
 two processes. Just so, the botanist can admire 
 and enjoy the beauty of the flower he dissects. 
 But neither the student of literature nor the stu- 
 dent of botany will derive the full disciplinary 
 value from his studies unless he bases them firmly 
 upon systematic observation. This means that 
 
144 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 literary studies rest ultimately on the same basis as 
 that sublime science, astronomy. We hitch our 
 wagons to books instead of to stars ; but, after all, 
 books are the products of man's creative soul, and 
 the soul of a man like Milton, as Wordsworth long 
 since told us, is like a star. In the final analysis 
 a drop of water is as wonderful as a star, and a 
 book is as wonderful as either ; and although our 
 instruments of observation, when we play our parts 
 as students of literature, are not so accurate as the 
 microscope and the telescope, neither our fallible 
 instruments nor the objects of our study will be 
 underrated by the catholic mind. 
 
 But we come around so often to that one word 
 " catholic " and the idea which underlies it, that it 
 seems both needless and impertinent to continue 
 this line of argument any further. He who once 
 grasps the idea of catholicity does not need argu- 
 ments to convince him of the futility of wrangling, 
 of the narrow-mindedness implicit in the assump- 
 tion that there can be real opposition between two 
 great groups of mental pursuits. I will reason, 
 therefore, no longer, and will conclude with an 
 appeal to all who hear me to set their faces against 
 every endeavor to advance any science at the 
 expense of any art, or any art at the expense of 
 
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 1 45 
 
 any science. Why cannot you, my biological 
 friend, gather your students around you in your 
 laboratory, and you, my colleague in Greek lit- 
 erature, read with your class the adventures of 
 Ulysses among the blameless Phaeacians, without 
 having the unanswerable question raised, Which 
 of you is doing the more to advance the interests 
 of the race ? That is a silly question to ask. A 
 proper question would be, When will sentimen- 
 talists cease to hamper the biologist in his ex- 
 periments, and when will the state or generous 
 individuals give him every facility he needs in 
 the prosecution of his noble services to humanity ? 
 Another proper question would be, When will 
 Philistines cease to make mere utilitarianism the 
 sole standard of life ? in other words, When will 
 they cease to be Philistines, and therefore to be 
 obnoxious ? To these questions, probably but one 
 answer can be given — Never ! But they are not 
 profitless questions, because involved in each there 
 is an ideal to be striven for. Intellectual freedom 
 and generosity and sympathy are attainable by all, 
 and are beneficial to the entire race ; but any 
 ungenerous rivalry between studies is founded in 
 selfishness, and is therefore base and to be es- 
 chewed. The picture of Nausicaa receiving the 
 
146 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
 
 shipwrecked Ulysses is as priceless a possession 
 of the human race as any discovery of science or 
 any achievement of statesman or soldier. 1 It is 
 an integral part of civilization, for if there had 
 been no Greek race capable of producing in its 
 dawn that Father of Poets upon whose inner eye 
 that ineffably lovely picture stamped itself, there 
 is no reason to believe that modern science would 
 be what it is, or that the annals of Western Europe 
 would have been rendered so illustrious by soldiers 
 and by statesmen. And if, furthermore, the day 
 should ever come when the world would consent 
 to drop from the category of desirable acquisitions 
 the knowledge of that Greek tongue in which 
 centuries ago that exquisite picture was unfolded 
 before the minds of barbarian chieftains by wan- 
 dering bards, the heirs of Homer's art, then the 
 scientist would do well to break his instruments 
 and the statesman to close his books and his 
 portfolio ; for the reign of chaos described by the 
 poet would have begun, and there would be noth- 
 ing left for any lover of his kind but to exclaim, 
 
 " Thy hand, great Anarch ! lets the curtain fall, 
 And universal darkness buries all." 
 
 1 See the closing pages of this volume. The Sixth Book of the 
 "Odyssey" is a poetic creation, the beauty of which might well 
 turn a critic into a harper on one string. 
 
VI 
 
 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
[Delivered as one of a series of public lectures during the 
 Summer Session of Columbia University, July, 1902. Published 
 in The Sewanee Review for October, 1904.] 
 
VI 
 
 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 It need scarcely be said that a fairly large 
 literature, in a special sense of the term, has of 
 late grown up around the question how literature 
 in general should be taught. Whole books have 
 been devoted to it, and the number of articles 
 concerning it is rather formidable. I myself have 
 written three such papers ; but it is a subject that 
 admits of much discussion, and I suppose that I 
 am not exceptional in finding myself dissatisfied, 
 in the light of accumulating experience, with 
 much of my past theorizing and writing. For 
 this reason, if for no other, I should like to 
 examine the matter afresh. 
 
 To do this, we must reason from the bottom up ; 
 and we shall require working definitions of our 
 two terms, " literature " and " teaching." No one 
 has yet succeeded in defining " literature," but 
 it is generally understood that, when used in con- 
 nection with schools and colleges, to a less extent 
 
 149 
 
150 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 with universities and the reading public, the scope of 
 the term "literature" is narrowed by the exclusion 
 of books that have little or no aesthetic value. In 
 other words, only the books which through their 
 subject-matter or their style or through both please 
 us to a certain extent — that is, affect our emo- 
 tions in a more or less agreeable way — are 
 counted as constituting " literature " in our sense 
 of the term. These agreeable books are mainly 
 differentiated through the fact that they are full 
 of that indefinable something which we call " im- 
 agination " — that is to say, they fall chiefly under 
 the categories of poetry, drama, and fiction. It is 
 furthermore evident, not merely that masses of 
 books, useful for various purposes, yet not capable 
 of giving much or any aesthetic pleasure, are ex- 
 cluded from literature, but that perhaps as many 
 more are shut out because, comparatively speaking, 
 they have ceased to please and are no longer litera- 
 ture for us. This is equivalent to saying that time 
 does part of our winnowing for us. The teaching 
 of literature means really the teaching, not of once 
 popular, but of classic books, and, in a few cases, 
 of such contemporary books as seem to possess 
 qualities likely to make them classic. 
 
 But what does the term " teaching " mean 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 151 
 
 when applied to a subject that involves our emo- 
 tional natures ? Here is really the crucial point of 
 our problem. Do we understand that, for us, to 
 teach shall mean to inculcate, or that it shall mean 
 to impart pleasure, or that it shall mean to instruct, 
 or that it shall mean all three ? If we emphasize 
 the idea of inculcation, we must obviously intend 
 to give ourselves up chiefly to what I have else- 
 where termed teaching the spirit of literature — to 
 inculcating the higher and the lower virtues of 
 humanity that in various ways are illustrated in 
 the classical writings of our own literature and of 
 foreign literatures. For example, we shall use 
 Lowell's odes in order to inculcate the virtue of 
 patriotism. 
 
 If we emphasize the idea of imparting delight, 
 we must intend to give ourselves up to the task of 
 training the aesthetic faculties of our pupils so that 
 they may more fully appreciate the beauties of 
 literature and learn more and more to take pleas- 
 ure in the choicest books. For example, we shall 
 use Lowell's odes in order to impart and develop 
 the delight the trained ear receives from choice 
 diction and harmonious rhythm. For many of 
 us, to be sure, it is impossible to avoid com- 
 bining inculcation of the humane virtues with 
 
152 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 this imparting of aesthetic delight ; but it is pos- 
 sible greatly to emphasize the latter function of 
 the teacher, since the giving of aesthetic pleasure 
 is held by not a few critics to be the chief if not 
 the sole reason for the existence of literature. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we emphasize the idea of 
 instruction, we must obviously intend to give our- 
 selves up, in the main, to teaching the facts of 
 literature — that is, to dwelling upon literary 
 history and biography, to laying stress on names 
 and dates and periods, to tracing literary influ- 
 ences, to studying the evolution of a special form 
 of composition ; for example, the drama. In brief, 
 if we use literature as matter for inculcation, we 
 teachers of it must take our stand, at least in part, 
 with the preachers, the moralists ; and if as a 
 means of imparting delight, with the apostles of 
 aesthetic culture ; if, on the contrary, we use 
 literature as matter for instruction, we must take 
 our place with our friends who endeavor to convey 
 a knowledge of the facts of language, of history, 
 of economics, of the natural sciences. 
 
 But I doubt whether there are many teachers of 
 literature who do not try to combine the methods 
 involved in the phrases, to impart delight, to incul- 
 cate, and to instruct. They use Lowell's odes to 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE I 53 
 
 inculcate the virtue of patriotism, and to impart 
 and develop aesthetic pleasure ; but they also give 
 instruction with regard to those facts of Lowell's 
 life and of American history which explain how and 
 why he came to write his odes, and to fill them 
 with the patriotic spirit. Yet this does not get us so 
 far away from our crucial point as we may imagine. 
 The question of the proportions of inculcation and 
 aesthetic training to be blended with one another 
 and with instruction still remains to perplex us ; 
 and we are still confronted with the more diffi- 
 cult and certainly the more practical question of 
 how we shall test the value of the instruction we 
 convey. If we are to have our courses recog- 
 nized as integral parts of the school or college 
 curriculum, we must either hold our examina- 
 tions and make our reports, as our friends — I 
 will not call them rivals — do, or we must adopt 
 other methods of advancing our students and must 
 satisfy our fellow-teachers that we are not merely 
 giving what are technically known in college slang 
 as " snap courses." 
 
 I suppose my own experience in this matter 
 has been that of many others. I have detected 
 among my friends engaged in other forms of 
 instruction a tendency to question the strict- 
 
154 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 ness, the mental discipline, the definite, tangible 
 qualities of the work done in school and college 
 classes devoted to the study of literature. Cer- 
 tainly this is the case with respect to English and 
 other modern literatures ; the literatures of Greece 
 and Rome, having so long been used as material 
 for philological studies, have been less questioned 
 on the score of the strictness of the mental disci- 
 pline derived from instruction in them, but have 
 not escaped censure on the score of general utility. 
 I do not believe that the doubts of these critical 
 teachers are unnatural, or that they will be 
 removed unless we succeed in doing one of two 
 things. We must either impart such rigidity to 
 our tests of the amount and quality of our in- 
 struction as shall make it obvious that our 
 classes are as difficult to pass as those of any 
 teacher of another branch of study; or, by a 
 clear analysis of the theory of the teaching and 
 study of literature, we must convince all other 
 educators, and perhaps the public as well, that, 
 while literature is as important a study as any 
 other and must be included in any good school, 
 college, or university curriculum, the methods of 
 teaching it are of necessity fundamentally differ- 
 ent from those employed in other studies and 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 155 
 
 warrant a wide departure from the normal tests 
 of instruction. 
 
 Has any one made such an analysis of the 
 theory of the teaching of literature as clearly sets 
 that study apart from all others ? If any one 
 has, I have not seen it. On the other hand, has 
 any one succeeded in imparting such rigidity to the 
 methods of teaching literature and of testing the 
 instruction conveyed as to make it plain that lit- 
 erature is as difficult and important a study as any 
 other ? I have no doubt that many persons have 
 done this, at least so far as concerns the matter of 
 difficulty. I have done it myself, and I can engage 
 to "pitch" anybody else, or to get "pitched" my- 
 self, in an indefinite series of examinations. But, 
 while we are imparting rigidity to our instruc- 
 tion, are we not in constant danger of forgetting 
 our work of inculcation and of aesthetic training ? 
 Are we not further haunted by the thought that 
 an extremely large proportion of the facts about 
 literature that we make our pupils learn must be 
 speedily forgotten by them, and can in few cases 
 do them any direct good ? 
 
 I confess I have been haunted by this thought 
 for fifteen years. Ever since I had certain an- 
 swers given me, which I am fond of repeating, 
 
I56 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 I have doubted the great value of instruction, 
 not merely in the facts of literary history and 
 biography, but in minute verbal exegesis. Ever 
 since a student, remembering that cynosure is 
 derived from the Greek for dog's tail, com- 
 mented on the lines of " L'Allegro," 
 
 " Where perhaps some beauty lies, 
 The cynosure of neighboring eyes," 
 
 to the effect that they had something to do with a 
 dog, I have been sceptical of the utility of much 
 of the teaching that we feel obliged to examine 
 upon. I have also been sceptical of many of the 
 other tests of memory to which unfortunate chil- 
 dren have been and are subjected — for example, 
 of the tests of memory required of them in geog- 
 raphy and grammar ; but in geography and gram- 
 mar the use of maps and examples helps the 
 memory, whereas in literature there is little support 
 given to the memory save by a comparatively few 
 specimens of poetry and prose read in class and 
 in private. Surely our brethren who teach the 
 sciences have in their laboratories, in their ex- 
 periments, a great advantage over us who can 
 seldom bring our students into sufficient contact 
 with the body of that literature about the history 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 157 
 
 and minute details of which we propose to ex- 
 amine them more or less strictly. 
 
 But some one may say, " You are behind the 
 times. Literature used to be taught from 
 manuals and other dry-as-dust compilations ; 
 now we use carefully selected and edited texts, 
 we have school libraries, we make our pupils do 
 a considerable amount of outside reading. We 
 require them to study up special topics and 
 write essays upon them — in other words, we use 
 ' laboratory methods.' " 
 
 So be it ; yet I fancy that I have had a fair op- 
 portunity of watching the development of English 
 instruction in this country. I can go back to the 
 day when a little English grammar and a weekly 
 composition or the recitation of a poem consti- 
 tuted the English work of many a well-regulated 
 school. I can recollect when specific English 
 chairs were first established in large universities. 
 I well remember the leading features of English 
 instruction during the decade from 1880 to 1890. 
 It was almost entirely linguistic. Young doc- 
 tors from German universities were returning in 
 large numbers, the Johns Hopkins University was 
 initiating German methods, and as a result it was 
 difficult anywhere in the United States to secure 
 
158 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 specifically literary instruction. The text-books 
 used in school and college alike were filled with 
 notes tracing the history of words, and were 
 singularly lacking, not merely in anything that 
 would stimulate a pupil's love of literature, but 
 often in anything that would give him an adequate 
 idea of the place in literary history held by the 
 author and book he was studying. 
 
 Late in the eighties and early in the nineties 
 came the inevitable reaction — a small crusade 
 against the neglect of literature in the universities 
 and schools. The result was soon apparent. 
 Philologians began to desire to prove themselves 
 to be experts in literature as well, and issued some 
 queer text-books. Specific chairs of literature were 
 established, and soon some colleges and universities 
 gave perhaps disproportionate attention to the 
 new subject. The change was even more marked 
 in the schools. Classes in English literature 
 were added to the programme of studies, and a 
 series of English classics was selected on which 
 examinations for entrance into college were based. 
 Latter-day school-teachers know the woes and the 
 blessings attendant upon teaching those English 
 classics better than I do, since, when I taught in 
 schools, English literature was scarcely recognized 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE I 59 
 
 as a fit subject of instruction — at least in the 
 South. 
 
 But has this movement of the past ten years 
 been as much of an advance as some of us who 
 tried to help it on fondly imagined it would be ? 
 Are teachers of literature in possession of methods 
 of teaching comparable in applicability and preci- 
 sion with those of other teachers ? Are the pupils 
 they teach satisfactorily trained ? Is literature as 
 a subject of instruction really on a par with other 
 subjects of instruction ? 
 
 To these questions varying answers will be 
 given. I myself do not doubt that we have pro- 
 gressed, although I do doubt whether we have 
 made much advance. I suspect that our methods 
 are still very faulty, not merely because literature 
 is a difficult subject to teach, but because we have 
 not thoroughly analyzed our purposes or our 
 means. I scarcely believe that literature, in spite 
 of the increased attention given to it, is on a par 
 with other subjects of instruction. And I even 
 venture to question whether many boys and girls 
 go to college with a greater knowledge and love of 
 literature than was the case before they were 
 drilled and examined in the redoubtable " English 
 Classics." Observe that I do not question that our 
 
160 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 public schools have done something very useful in 
 bringing into some contact with literature masses 
 of children who a generation ago would have been 
 left without that refining influence upon their lives. 
 What I doubt is whether the generation now en- 
 tering college, after a course of literature in the 
 schools, is much better off, so far as a love and a 
 knowledge of literature are concerned, than my 
 own generation was with practically no training 
 in the subject. The present generation, if it has 
 been properly trained, ought to be a good deal 
 better off ; but while it is certainly a most athletic 
 generation, to the muscular strength and dexterity 
 of which I willingly pay tribute, it has not suc- 
 ceeded in making me feel that it knows much 
 more about Shakspere and Milton and Byron 
 and Shelley than we benighted youngsters did 
 over twenty years ago. 
 
 What I am mainly concerned with, however, is 
 the question from which I have wandered away — 
 the question whether we teachers of literature can 
 safely make our methods as rigid as those of 
 other teachers, and, if we cannot, whether we 
 can convince our brother teachers of the sciences 
 and the semi-sciences that our methods must be 
 radically different from theirs. This question with 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE l6l 
 
 regard to rigidity of methods is an old one. The 
 late Professor Freeman, the historian, violently 
 opposed the establishment of a chair of litera- 
 ture at Oxford. " We cannot examine," he said, 
 "in tastes and sympathies." To which Mr. 
 Churton Collins replied : " No, examine in the 
 Poetics, in the Rhetoric, in Quintilian's Institutes, 
 in the De Sublimitatc, in the Laocoon, and exam- 
 ine with the object of testing the results of such 
 discipline." This was an excellent answer so far 
 as postgraduate classes in criticism were con- 
 cerned ; but, as I pointed out over ten years 
 ago in The Sewanee Review, Mr. Collins did very 
 little to help school and college teachers of litera- 
 ture. These have to examine, let us say, in " The 
 Merchant of Venice," not in Aristotle, Longinus, 
 and Lessing. They do examine in the former, 
 and, with the aid of the notes learned editors 
 furnish, the examinations set may be made rigid 
 enough to satisfy the most censorious critic. But 
 at once we are thrown on the other horn of our 
 dilemma. Do we not sacrifice the spirit of lit- 
 erature while we are examining on the letter, or 
 rather training our poor children so that they 
 may stand some other person's examination on 
 the letter ? As the dread day comes around, do 
 
1 62 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 teachers find themselves and their classes reading 
 with rapt interest the noble speeches of Portia, or 
 are they busy with the date of the play, with 
 some critic's opinion with regard to Portia's 
 womanliness, with the names and dates of act- 
 ual women lawyers and law teachers in Italy, 
 with the sources of the caskets incident, and 
 similar matters only too dear to examiners? 
 
 I do not know how others feel about the matter, 
 but I know that after about two years' firm grasp- 
 ing of the rigid horn of the dilemma, if I may 
 so express it, I began gradually to swing my- 
 self over to the other horn — to what I may 
 call the flexible horn. I began to doubt the 
 value of strenuous examinations and to appre- 
 ciate more and more the necessity of trying to 
 inculcate in my students some of the high moral 
 and spiritual truths taught by great writers, and 
 to impart to them a taste for reading, a love of 
 the best literature. In order to achieve this re- 
 sult, even to a slight extent (and a slight success 
 is all that I think any teacher should dare to 
 hope for), I found that I must do much less in- 
 structing — much less questioning with regard to 
 the facts of literary history — and that I must do 
 far more reading of authors than talking about 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 1 63 
 
 them. I found also that it seemed advisable, in 
 a college at least, to make a distinction between 
 the younger and the older students — to treat 
 the younger ones somewhat as I should treat 
 high-school pupils, the older ones somewhat as 
 I should treat postgraduate students. With the 
 latter I adopted methods which need not be dis- 
 cussed here ; with the former, methods which, if 
 sound, should, it seems to me, be shared in the 
 main by all teachers of literature in schools; for 
 if our American college is anything, it is a half- 
 way house, or station, between the high school and 
 the university. In consequence, it should begin 
 by continuing in considerable measure the meth- 
 ods of teaching used in the schools, and it should 
 gradually change these methods so as to make 
 them lead up to those of the university. 
 
 But my new treatment of my younger students 
 led to some important results. Reading so much 
 to them myself and giving them so much outside 
 reading to do left no time for the study of a for- 
 mal manual of literary history. As a text-book 
 of that sort does little good if used by the pupil 
 alone, it followed that I had to reduce to a 
 minimum the study of the history of literature. I 
 finally required the reading of Stopford Brooke's 
 
164 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 excellent " Primer of English Literature," but did 
 not examine on it. I knew well enough that I was 
 making a sacrifice on the side of exact knowledge, 
 but it seemed to me it had to be made. There 
 were other sacrifices requisite. I like to criticise, 
 I like to theorize, and I have my favorite authors, 
 some of whom are not specially suited to the com- 
 prehension and needs of young people. I found 
 that only the most general and obvious kind of 
 criticism was possible under my new system, that 
 much theorizing was out of the question, and that 
 often the books I should never have thought 
 of taking down from my shelves for my own 
 delectation were precisely the ones I ought to 
 take down for the delectation and profit of my 
 students. This is merely to say that I learned by 
 bitter experience that the teacher must sacrifice 
 to his students his preferences, his prejudices, his 
 time, almost everything except his enthusiasm and 
 such other traits as make him a real individual. 
 A mere repeater of other people's thoughts, a man 
 or woman who has no standards, no decided points 
 of view, will certainly fail as a teacher ; but so I 
 think will the man or woman who is not willing to 
 sacrifice prejudices and preferences, and to sym- 
 pathize with the tastes and needs of students. 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 1 65 
 
 Let me illustrate my meaning by a concrete inci- 
 dent. I had an excellent assistant once, to whom, 
 however, I had to give one mild scolding. I hap- 
 pened to overhear him making fun of Scott's 
 poetry to a class of boys, few of whom were 
 over seventeen. Neither that assistant nor my- 
 self was at the age when " The Lady of the 
 Lake" is a surpassing delight; but those boys 
 were, and I expostulated with the jocular teacher. 
 He could scarcely have displayed greater fatuity, 
 unless he had imitated a bit of fatuity I myself 
 had been guilty of a few years before — that is, 
 ridiculing Longfellow. It is scarcely necessary to 
 say that teaching should almost invariably be posi- 
 tive rather than negative in character. It should 
 bring out the merits of the book studied rather 
 than its defects. It should aim to develop in 
 children a catholic taste for everything that is 
 good in literature, rather than to encourage preju- 
 dices, although a prejudice in favor of an author 
 or a book should be dealt with cautiously. This is 
 but to say that the good teacher of literature must 
 have many of the qualifications requisite to a good 
 critic — he must be sympathetic, healthy in his 
 tastes, sound in his judgments, and fairly well 
 read. 
 
1 66 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 But the teacher who devotes himself mainly to 
 wide and sympathetic reading with his classes, 
 who rarely instructs but continually endeavors by 
 direct and indirect means to inculcate humane vir- 
 tues and develop aesthetic tastes— in other words, 
 to instil into his pupils a love of the books that 
 illustrate those virtues and exercise those tastes — 
 must be prepared to make other sacrifices. He 
 must be prepared, as I have said, to sink his own 
 preferences for special books and to use such as 
 will best suit his pupils. He must also be willing 
 to rely on his own judgment rather than on the 
 judgments of others, even of omniscient college 
 professors. If the annotated texts furnished him 
 do not produce the best results, he must eschew 
 their use as far as he may. Personally I have 
 found such texts occasionally valuable, but I 
 prefer Palgrave's " Golden Treasury of Songs 
 and Lyrics " * to any annotated text I ever used, 
 and that delightful anthology, I need scarcely say, 
 is one that every teacher should be glad to take 
 down from his shelves for his own enjoyment. 
 
 1 It is a pleasure to notice that the larger part of this book has 
 been added to the list of volumes that may be read by pupils pre- 
 paring for college, and that teachers now have a wider range of 
 books to select from. But it is the methods rather than the mate- 
 rials of instruction that are chiefly in question. 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 167 
 
 But the teacher must often make a sacrifice 
 of part of what may be called his technical 
 equipment. Most of us are trained to question 
 our students systematically and to make use of 
 the tests furnished by oral and written exami- 
 nations. Yet I do not see, any more than Pro- 
 fessor Freeman did, how the teacher can 
 examine on tastes and sympathies, how he can 
 ask questions about the humane virtues, without 
 running great risk of making his students prigs, 
 and himself — what shall I say? — a canting 
 Pharisee? Perhaps that is too strong — let me 
 say a plain fool. I believe it to be very foolish 
 to make young people self-conscious with regard 
 to spiritual and aesthetic things by insisting upon 
 their talking and writing about them. It is 
 still more foolish to think that one can satisfac- 
 torily mark and grade their answers on such 
 topics. 
 
 But some one may ask : " Can we not exam- 
 ine on the facts we instruct in, and require 
 essays on the spiritual and aesthetic matters we 
 inculcate and impart ? By means of a combina- 
 tion of marks for diligence and interest shown 
 in class work, for success in written examina- 
 tions, and for ability displayed in the composi- 
 
1 68 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 tion of themes and essays, can we not grade our 
 pupils in a thoroughly satisfactory manner ? " 
 
 So far as marks for diligence and interest in 
 class work are concerned, I fancy that no school 
 superintendent or principal or fellow-teacher in 
 another study will deny that a good teacher 
 of literature is able to grade his pupils satis- 
 factorily. So far as advancement in school or 
 college is dependent upon such grading, which 
 is itself dependent upon the judgment of the 
 individual teacher, I cannot see that literature 
 stands on a markedly different footing from 
 other studies. With regard to examinations on 
 the facts of ■ literary history and biography, I 
 suppose their disciplinary value is not less than 
 that of examinations in many other studies. 
 Their value as a means to store the mind with 
 useful and available knowledge is more ques- 
 tionable, and, although literature means much 
 to me personally, I am obliged to confess that 
 I doubt whether it is not outranked by most 
 other studies as a body of useful and avail- 
 able knowledge. As matters stand, teachers 
 must examine in it. The colleges require en- 
 trance examinations and will continue for some 
 time to require them — whether or not a few 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 1 69 
 
 unfashionable people like myself think they 
 have made too much of a fetich of their written 
 tests. 
 
 I gladly admit that probably the required 
 examinations on English texts have done good 
 in making room for the study of English litera- 
 ture in schools, and that as a temporary expedi- 
 ent the establishment of the system was warranted. 
 But I think that a radical change in the methods 
 of preparing boys and girls for college is called 
 for, — so far at least as English is concerned, — 
 since I doubt whether more or less rigid exami- 
 nations in literature now help the colleges or 
 the school-teachers greatly, and I suspect they 
 help the unfortunate pupils still less. I doubt 
 if any of us knows so clearly as the teacher of 
 mathematics does, for example, in his specialty, 
 what amount of knowledge of literary history 
 and biography, and of metrical, linguistic, and 
 rhetorical facts needed in literary studies, a 
 Freshman should possess on entering college. I 
 doubt whether any of us can be truly said to 
 be very sapient with regard to the best methods 
 of conveying this unknown minimum of instruc- 
 tion, — for that there should be some instruction 
 in these matters is clear, — and I also doubt 
 
170 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 whether most of the instruction we do attempt 
 does not frequently act as a deterrent from the 
 true comprehension and enjoyment of literature. 
 I will even go so far as to say that at present I 
 should prefer to admit to college on positive 
 tests in composition, rhetoric, and grammar, — 
 in other words, on tests relating to the use of 
 the vernacular, — and on the statement by the 
 teacher that the pupil had done a wide amount 
 of reading under direction. 
 
 For it is wide reading that best develops any 
 native love of literature, that is most likely to 
 bring out a latent love for it, and that not in- 
 frequently leads to the attainment of a greater 
 knowledge of the facts of literary history and 
 biography than is often secured through cut-and- 
 dried methods of instruction. It is a lack of 
 fairly wide reading on the part of students and 
 a certain inflexibility of taste resulting from 
 narrow reading and faulty literary instruction 
 that hamper me more than anything else in 
 teaching college classes. It is this same lack 
 of wide reading that chiefly discourages post- 
 graduate students during the first year of their 
 university course and that renders so many of 
 their dissertations jejune and amateurish. I grant 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 171 
 
 that the school and college curriculums are so 
 crowded that it is almost unfair to expect of 
 pupils and students as much general reading 
 as was done by some of my contemporaries ; 
 but I believe that if the annotation employed 
 in the school classics were reduced in amount, 
 and if examinations in literature in school or 
 college were either done away with or mini- 
 mized, the time saved might be profitably em- 
 ployed in reading. The amount and quality of 
 this reading could be at least fairly tested — not 
 so well, perhaps, by concrete questions, which 
 might be anticipated by the pupil, as by the 
 intelligence with which certain passages were 
 read aloud. This would not be a conclusive 
 test. The bright pupil willing to be dishonest 
 could easily pretend to have read more than 
 he had done ; but is any test that can be de- 
 vised sufficiently flexible to catch bright dishonest 
 pupils without being unfair to less bright and 
 more honest ones ? 
 
 Whether now the school authorities would be 
 satisfied to admit to the programme of studies a 
 subject in which no examinations were held, 
 even if the colleges waived entrance examina- 
 tions on it, is a point on which I have no 
 
172 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 data for forming an opinion. I should think, 
 however, that a fairly satisfactory system of 
 grading could be built up on marks for dili- 
 gence, which are in the nature of conduct marks, 
 and on the time spent on reading in class as well 
 as on the hours presumably covered by the out- 
 side reading. Such a system of grading could 
 also take into account the character of the read- 
 ing aloud done by the pupil; and on the intelli- 
 gence displayed in this, on the general diligence 
 vouched for by the teacher, and on the time de- 
 voted to reading by the pupil I should imagine 
 that all questions relating to advancement could 
 be determined satisfactorily to parents, principals, 
 and fellow-teachers. Such satisfaction would nat- 
 urally depend upon all parties concerned being 
 made to see clearly that rigid examinations and 
 other tests in literary studies not only do little 
 positive good, but are really harmful as lessening 
 the teacher's opportunities to inculcate and train 
 rather than to instruct, and as boring pupils and 
 putting a barrier between them and that body of 
 literature with which it is most essential that they 
 should be brought into frequent and prolonged 
 contact. If, finally, written tests must be set in 
 order not to disturb too violently the school ma- 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 173 
 
 chinery, why should it not be understood that all 
 examinations in literature would be graded on the 
 interest, diligence, and general intelligence shown 
 by the pupil, and on his ability to write correct 
 English, rather than on his knowledge of facts 
 about literature, except as regards that unknown 
 minimum of instruction about which a word will 
 be said later? Such examinations would supple- 
 ment those given in English composition, would 
 throw fresh light upon the character and mental 
 attainments of each pupil, and would assist in the 
 determination of all questions relative to advance- 
 ment. They would also furnish those ocular evi- 
 dences of a pupil's immaturity or unwillingness 
 to apply himself that are so needed by teachers 
 whenever their decisions are disputed. 
 
 But the third sort of test mentioned above re- 
 mains to be considered — the test furnished by the 
 writing of frequent essays. This is much favored 
 by some teachers, and it is doubtless successful 
 when the pupil has an aptitude for writing. But 
 that aptitude is comparatively rare, and I am not 
 sure that essay-writing is not nearly or quite as bad 
 for most young people as rigid examinations in 
 literature are likely to be. In this particular I 
 fear I am a grievous heretic. Neatly written 
 
174 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 essays are such gentlemanly and ladylike things 
 — especially when they are tied with ribbons. I 
 always feel as if I were highly honored when a 
 nice young man or woman presents me with the 
 product of many hours' study and creative energy, 
 particularly when it is typewritten and of moder- 
 ate length. When the writer is a person of some 
 maturity, a graduate student who has done either 
 a small or a large amount of individual research, I 
 examine the essay with pleasure, both because I 
 very frequently learn something I am glad to 
 know and because I feel that I may be of service 
 in directing a bent for study which I presume to 
 exist from the fact that the graduate student has 
 taken the trouble to enter as a candidate for a 
 higher degree. 
 
 But for the school or college essay used as a 
 test of literary work rather than as a test of work 
 in English composition, I must confess I have 
 very little respect. I fear that it encourages 
 smattering, that it stimulates juvenile conceit, that 
 it tends to crystallize tastes and opinions at an 
 age when every effort should be made to widen 
 and lend flexibility to the mind, that it leads 
 to unconscious plagiarism and to a complacent 
 habit of airing one's commonplaceness and fatuity. 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 175 
 
 I wish to avoid seeming extreme, but I must say- 
 that American schools and colleges have in my 
 judgment set far too high a premium upon essay- 
 writing. I gather from some remarks of Mr. 
 Frederic Harrison that this has been done in 
 England also, and I am glad that in Mr. Harrison 
 I find at least one sharer of my pessimistic views 
 with regard to the future of a race that is encour- 
 aged from its earliest youth to write itself down 
 with Dogberry. I have no quarrel, of course, 
 with the theme or essay employed as a means to 
 improve a student's use of his mother tongue ; I 
 have no quarrel with it employed as a means to 
 develop the critical powers and the literary tastes 
 of students who in one way or another have given 
 evidence of aptitude for the study of letters ; I 
 have no quarrel with the essay or written report 
 used moderately in connection with classes in 
 literature, especially in universities. What moves 
 me to wrath is our national habit of requiring 
 graduation theses of Harry and Lucy, no matter 
 whether they want to write them or not, and of 
 insisting that they inflict them upon adult audi- 
 ences. I am also moved to pity, when I see teach- 
 ers loaded down with bundles of essays on literary 
 topics which they have conceived it to be their 
 
1 76 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 duty to demand from every member of their 
 classes. I cannot help believing that nine out of 
 ten of those essays give no real evidence of any 
 higher power than that of extracting jejune informa- 
 tion from encyclopaedias and from the writings of 
 other people. The tenth, perhaps, gives evidence 
 of something better; but cannot the teacher 
 find out this tenth student without making the 
 other nine dish up a hebdomadal hash of plati- 
 tudes ? 
 
 Any teacher who will not encourage and guide 
 any student honestly desirous of learning how to 
 write upon literary topics is unworthy of the name 
 of teacher. Any man of letters who does not 
 remember that he was once a neophyte himself, 
 and gladly give what help he can to a competent 
 young man or woman purposing to enter upon a 
 literary life, is unworthy of the standing he has 
 obtained. But the teacher or man of letters who 
 encourages every one, regardless of natural 
 aptitude, to write literary essays upon every 
 possible occasion seems to me to be doing little 
 good either to the individual encouraged or to 
 the cause of education. If the amount of time 
 spent by average school children and college 
 students in consulting encyclopaedias and compiling 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 1 77 
 
 essays were devoted to good reading, I fancy that 
 the cause of culture would be greatly subserved. 
 I would give every child the chance to develop 
 whatever faculty it may have for writing — just as 
 I would give it the chance to develop its presump- 
 tive faculty for drawing, for music, and for the 
 other arts — but I think that this should be done 
 by the teacher of composition, who can easily call 
 in the teacher of literature to lend his aid should 
 the case seem to require it. For the teacher of 
 literature, however, to divert his energies from his 
 greatest task of inculcating a love of wide reading 
 to inculcating in Harry and Lucy a desire to 
 see themselves in print or to hear themselves 
 on a commencement platform is to me at least 
 a most questionable procedure. 1 And surely the 
 mere knowledge amassed by the essay writer does 
 not compensate for the injury that may be done 
 him in the ways I have mentioned. 
 
 I cannot forbear suggesting here, at the risk 
 of being accused of impertinence in discussing 
 matters about which I am not expert, that latter- 
 
 1 Some relief seems to be in sight, especially in the large uni- 
 versities, probably in part on account of the size of their graduating 
 classes. Columbia has for some years heard no student orations on 
 commencement day and has just (1905) ceased to require gradu- 
 ation theses. 
 
178 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 day teachers of composition have as many fun- 
 damental problems to solve as confront teachers 
 of literature. It is very doubtful, as some of the 
 inaugurators of the modern " theme-courses " con- 
 fess, whether the expensive and time-consuming 
 methods of teaching boys and girls to write with 
 something approaching a style have produced 
 results at all commensurate with the labor ex- 
 pended. Perhaps it has not been realized that 
 all instruction in composition after the pupil has 
 been trained, if he can be, to write a short series 
 of coherent and intelligible paragraphs, fairly 
 idiomatic and free from blunders, — a not dis- 
 creditable letter, for example, — is at bottom, so 
 far as concerns style, instruction in an art. It 
 follows that the experience and practice of the 
 world in the matter of teaching the fine arts 
 should be carefully studied by the teacher of the 
 higher grades of composition. We are beginning 
 to see, as I have just intimated, that it is only 
 fair to any child to give it an opportunity to 
 show whether it has any aptitude for music, draw- 
 ing, and the other arts. Just so, I repeat, we 
 ought to give and are giving our children an 
 opportunity in the elementary courses in composi- 
 tion to show whether they have in them the faint- 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 1 79 
 
 est desire or capacity to do creative writing and 
 to acquire the rudiments of a style. It would be 
 sheer folly, however, to keep a boy or girl at the 
 study of music or drawing to the age of twenty 
 or thereabouts when not a trace of aptitude for 
 either art had ever been apparent in them. Is 
 it particularly wise to encourage equally incom- 
 petent students of the art of writing to manufac- 
 ture short stories or sets of verses or essays or 
 book reviews — especially to do this at the ex- 
 pense of training in old-fashioned, but not useless, 
 formal rhetoric ? Cannot some of the " required " 
 hours in English during the Freshman and Sopho- 
 more years be saved for reading under the super- 
 vision of an instructor skilled in pointing out 
 stylistic features, and ought we not to recognize 
 the fact that, save in exceptional cases, the proper 
 affiliations of good work in advanced composition 
 are with logic rather than with the fine arts. For 
 one good story-teller or essayist turned out by our 
 colleges they might furnish us, I suspect, a hun- 
 dred good debaters, if they only would. 
 
 Perhaps I ought to give two experiences I have 
 had in this connection that will help to explain the 
 strong language I have employed. I shall not 
 §oon forget the disgust I felt when an old teacher 
 
l8o TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 of mine — a most admirable man in many ways — 
 once told his class complacently how he had won 
 a prize of fifty dollars for an essay on Chaucer. 
 He had never read a line of that great poet, but 
 he took " Poole's Index," read up his subject in 
 various magazine articles, and was clever enough 
 to win the prize. He told us that story with pride, 
 and practically said to each one of us, " Go thou 
 and do likewise." It seemed to me that although 
 he had not cut off his hand before writing that 
 essay, he ought to have cut out his tongue before 
 boasting about it. Yet how much smattering and 
 intellectual dishonesty similar to his must have 
 been fostered in this country by the givers of 
 prizes, the assigners of essays, the conductors of 
 literary clubs! 
 
 My second experience was more amusing and 
 less nauseating. I used, years ago, to be pestered 
 by a worthy but very immature student to give 
 him bibliographies that would help him to write 
 essays on Dante, Petrarch, and other great poets 
 of whose works I knew he had never read a line. 
 The same student was acting as private secretary 
 to one of my friends, and, whenever his em- 
 ployer went out, this youthful essayist would go 
 to the front door and hail passers-by with the 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE l8l 
 
 request that they would spell for him words of two 
 or more syllables that occurred in the letters he 
 had to typewrite. I am not, I believe, niggardly 
 of my time where students are concerned ; but the 
 incursions of that young man into my study for 
 books on Italian literature, when he should have 
 asked to borrow a Webster's Spelling Book, tried 
 my patience sorely. 
 
 Now a word in conclusion with regard to that 
 unknown minimum of knowledge of literary his- 
 tory and biography, and of metrical, rhetorical, and 
 linguistic facts, which a Freshman should be pre- 
 sumed to possess on entering college. My lan- 
 guage here must be very tentative, for I must 
 confess that the topic is one that has long puzzled 
 me sorely. As for the metrical, rhetorical, and lin- 
 guistic facts, it would be a comfort to rely for 
 instruction in them on the teacher of English 
 composition. As for the literary history and bi- 
 ography, it would be a comfort to rely on the 
 teacher of history proper ; for literature is a part 
 of culture, and we must sooner or later wake up to 
 the fact that culture-history should share with 
 political and military history the attention of school 
 children. But I doubt whether the teachers of 
 history and of composition will care to have their 
 
1 82 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 labors greatly increased, and I suppose we must 
 blunder along until some one writes us a common 
 sense "Introduction to the Study of Literature" 
 in which this minimum of positive knowledge is 
 conveyed in an agreeable fashion. 
 
 But I have promulgated heresies enough for one 
 paper. I have frankly stated my belief that the 
 time devoted to spiritual inculcation and to aesthetic 
 training is of far more importance than that de- 
 voted to instruction in the facts of literature, and 
 I draw hence the conclusion that we teachers of 
 literature ought bravely to say to our fellow- 
 teachers something like this : " We can, if we 
 please, make our examinations as rigid as you do 
 yours, but we do not believe that our facts are as 
 important as yours, or at any rate that they may 
 be acquired with so much advantage to our pupils. 
 We wish to grade and advance our pupils on more 
 flexible lines than you adopt, because we believe 
 that the nature of our subject makes such flexible 
 lines advisable. We believe that both the subject 
 we teach and the subjects you teach are necessary 
 to a catholic education ; but that, while we are 
 contributing to the same end as you, our means 
 must be different from yours." 
 
 Some such appeal, accompanied by friendly 
 
TEACHING LITERATURE 183 
 
 discussion, will, I am sure, in time satisfy every 
 intelligent person that no harm to school discipline 
 will be done if the teaching of literature finally 
 resolves itself into little more than securing a wide 
 amount of reading from children during their 
 school years. It will, I trust, in time satisfy the 
 colleges that the examinations they now hold on 
 selected English classics are more or less useless 
 and should be modified or dropped. Finally, I 
 hope that the study we must all give to the prob- 
 lems connected with the teaching of literature 
 will sooner or later lead us — I will not say to be- 
 came teetotalers with regard to our national dissi- 
 pation in essay-writing — but at least moderate in 
 our use of that seductive form of mental titillation. 
 When I see young ladies and gentlemen armed 
 with their numerous and formidable essays, I am 
 irresistibly reminded of the young woman who 
 drank so many cups of tea that the elder Mr. 
 Weller was compelled to exclaim that she was 
 " a swellin' wisibly." I seem to see the young 
 lady and gentleman essayists " swellin' wisibly " 
 with mental pride. Let us have fewer new bad 
 essays written and more good old books read. 1 
 
 1 I may be permitted, I trust, to express here my gratification 
 at the notice taken of this article by The Dial, The Evening Post, 
 
1 84 TEACHING LITERATURE 
 
 and other journals, and also to thank the persons who wrote me 
 expressing their sympathy with my views. One letter in par- 
 ticular from Dean Sidney Edward Mezes of the University of Texas 
 contained a passage which I extract, with the writer's permission. 
 
 " One suggestion in a matter of detail I wish to make, to meet 
 the objection, on the part of teachers of other subjects, that liter- 
 ature without examinations or other tests is a • snap.' Why might 
 not the literature classes meet with the instructor for twice or even 
 three times as many hours as other classes that count equally 
 toward degrees? This would put them, in important respects, on 
 a par with laboratory courses, and, I think, would do away with 
 the objection mentioned." 
 
 Certainly, if the cost of such extra instruction could be met and 
 if the additional hours were secured equitably to all parties and 
 studies concerned, no believer in the good effects of adequate 
 instruction in literature would be likely to demur to Dean Mezes's 
 suggestion. 
 
VII 
 
 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN 
 BOOK-BURNING 
 
[Read in part before the English Club of Amherst College, 
 April 27, 1905.] 
 
VII 
 
 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN 
 BOOK-BURNING 
 
 I 
 
 I have just been reading for the first time James 
 Anthony Froude's notorious rather than famous 
 religious story, " The Nemesis of Faith, or, The 
 History of Markham Sutherland." This far from 
 ponderous or formidable deliverance of a brilliant 
 young Oxford deacon, who had passed from under 
 the sway of Newman only to experience soon that 
 of Carlyle and, to a less extent, that of Emerson, 
 went through two editions, and then, save for an 
 American reprint of 1880, practically disappeared 
 from public attention for fifty-four years. In 1903 
 the story was reissued with an introduction by Mr. 
 Moncure D. Conway, and it was this resuscitation, 
 together with an anecdote Mr. Conway tells, that 
 prompted me to make it a text for the present 
 discussion. 
 
 187 . 
 
1 88 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 As a piece of fiction the book, though not 
 commonplace, is thin enough. It consists of ten 
 letters from a young man describing how he 
 had lost his hold on Christianity, how he is per- 
 suaded to take orders, how he fails as a priest. 
 Then follow some of this Markham Sutherland's 
 reflections on religious topics, then his " Confes- 
 sions of a Sceptic," and, in conclusion, a friendly 
 hand describes his miserable fate. Seeking health 
 and peace of mind in Italy, he encounters a mar- 
 ried woman to whom he becomes devoted, and 
 whose love he wins because she has never loved 
 her husband — a gentleman who displays singu- 
 lar obtuseness in the whole affair. The lovers 
 stop short of adultery ; but the woman's little 
 daughter falls into a mortal illness, partly through 
 their negligence ; they are racked by remorse ; 
 and each dies miserable — under the shadow of 
 the Church of Rome. 
 
 Of immoral intent the book was plainly in- 
 nocent ; of noxious effect it must have been 
 almost equally innocent. Historical and philo- 
 sophical doubts with regard to the truth of the 
 Christian mysteries were in the air, as the Tran- 
 scendental Movement in America and, in the op- 
 posite sense, the reactionary Tractarian Movement 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 1 89 
 
 in England had plainly shown, and as Tennyson's 
 " In Memoriam" was conclusively to prove the next 
 year. Froude set forth his hero's doubts with not 
 a little learning and with more eloquence — in- 
 deed, there are two brilliant pages descriptive of 
 the " Pagani, Pagans, the old country villagers " 
 loyal to their gods, which the later master of Eng- 
 lish prose might have owned with pride. But 
 his book was amorphous, it shifted its centre of 
 interest, it was over-hospitable to purple passages 
 of rhetoric — in short, it was too full of youthful 
 faults to shake the faith of many souls in stolid 
 England. The question of morals raised by its 
 closing pages — to wit, the innocence or guilt 
 of the love given by a married woman to the 
 first man who has truly touched her heart — was 
 undoubtedly offensive to many persons, espe- 
 cially in view of the fact that Froude was a dea- 
 con and a fellow at Oxford ; but his handling of 
 the delicate situation was surely not such as to 
 increase the number of separations and divorces. 
 What chiefly strikes one on reading this sup- 
 posedly advanced, if not incendiary, book of 1849, 
 is how far it falls short of what would be deemed 
 shockingly radical in 1905. Since " The Nemesis 
 of Faith " was first published, Darwin and Spencer 
 
I90 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 and the philosophy of evolution have had to be 
 reckoned with, to say nothing of the highest 
 claims of the so-called " higher criticism " ; yet 
 Faith is still far from admitting that she has 
 seen her Nemesis, whether in sober treatise or in 
 persuasive story. Since Froude's book, " Robert 
 Elsmere " and many another religious novel have 
 come and gone ; and the limits of the fiction of 
 passion have been pushed back almost far enough 
 to satisfy a Frenchman. Mr. James's cracked 
 " Golden Bowl " may, for aught I know, be sym- 
 bolical of the disastrous fate awaiting, if it has 
 not overtaken, that singular product of art, the 
 English novel for family consumption. 
 
 But, as if men could never learn the lesson 
 that denunciation and persecution are the most 
 effective forms of propaganda, as if they could 
 never see that any manifestation of hatred is 
 likely to produce results unforeseen and undesired 
 in a world in which the law of love is almost as 
 potent and universal in the moral sphere as that 
 of gravitation is in the physical sphere, this youth- 
 ful manifesto of scepticism met a fate at Oxford 
 at the middle of the nineteenth century not so 
 very different from what it would have encoun- 
 tered at Rome or at Geneva at the middle of the 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 191 
 
 sixteenth. " Froude's novel," says Mr. Conway, 
 "must be introduced to the twentieth century 
 with the distinction of being the only book 
 piously burnt at Oxford in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. On February 27, 1849, a few weeks after 
 its publication, Professor Sewell, lecturer in Ex- 
 eter College, vehemently denounced the work 
 in his lecture, and, discovering that a student 
 present had a copy before him, seized it fu- 
 riously and dashed it into the hall fire. In 1892, 
 when Froude was appointed Regius Professor 
 of Modern History at Oxford, some efforts were 
 made to relieve the university of all responsi- 
 bility for this conduct of a professor whose 
 subsequent career was not honorable. But the 
 university made itself a passive accessory by 
 uttering no protest. Froude was a fellow of the 
 college in which the incident occurred, and im- 
 mediately sent in his resignation. Exeter Col- 
 lege saw its ablest fellow driven out without a 
 word of protest. His friend Clough soon after 
 resigned his fellowship in Balliol, no doubt feel- 
 ing that Oxford was no place for him if Froude 
 could be dishonored there with impunity." 
 
 The immediate result was, of course, the sale of 
 the entire edition. A less immediate but almost 
 
192 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 equally inevitable result was that Professor Will- 
 iam Sewell is to-day known, if at all save to theo- 
 logians, chiefly through his absurd attention to the 
 Exeter Hall fire of half a century ago, and that, in 
 consequence, the fact that he could not pay his 
 debts, and was forced to take up his residence 
 on the Continent, like some of Thackeray's shady 
 characters, is remembered whenever his name is 
 recalled. Doubtless, as Mr. Conway says, he 
 would not have acted so foolishly if he had not 
 been outraged, not merely by Froude's heresies, 
 but by the latter's failure to take an orthodox 
 attitude toward the moral or immoral relations 
 of his hero and heroine. The man who com- 
 pounds for sins he is inclined to by damning 
 those he has no mind to has been a sufficiently 
 familiar phenomenon from Adam to Butler, from 
 Butler to Sewell, and from Sewell to us. It is 
 only fair to add that Professor Sevvell's debts 
 seem to have been incurred in founding a high 
 church college and a similar school, so that Mr. 
 Conway's unqualified assertion of his "notorious 
 laxity in money affairs" does him an injury 
 which, in a sense, is only poetic justice. 
 
 But all this does not prove that Professor 
 Sewell, though a book-burner, was a biblio- 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 1 93 
 
 phobe. Himself the author of at least four 
 novels, of reviews and sermons and theological 
 tracts and treatises, he must have been, not 
 merely a scholar, but something of a man of 
 letters. I must frankly say that I have no in- 
 tention of taking the time and pains to deter- 
 mine whether I am correct in my suspicion that, 
 if I may parody Pope, he was one of those people 
 who to books repair, not for the pleasure but the 
 doctrine there. His action in the lecture room 
 that day leaves him exposed to the charge that, 
 at times at least, he was more anxious to have a 
 book give support to his own views than to have it 
 exhibit all the literary virtues. But, at bottom, 
 the man who cares only for the books that ex- 
 pound and defend the causes he espouses is 
 really a foe, and a very dangerous one, to litera- 
 ture. 
 
 He is in much the position of the man who is 
 pleasant to his friends and works with his party 
 or his church, but is destitute of the truly humane 
 spirit because he is npt broad-minded and large- 
 hearted enough to sympathize with the stranger 
 and the alien. He that is not for us is against 
 us is a saying that has a far wider application 
 than we are generally aware of. Not to be for 
 
194 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 our race is to be really against it — it is to be es- 
 sentially selfish and self-centred, even when " self " 
 is stretched to include social set, and college, and 
 church, and party, and town, and state, and nation. 
 So it is with literature and art and all the things 
 of the mind. Not to be for them all — how- 
 ever slightly in our poor finiteness we may com- 
 prehend their full scope and adequately share the 
 pleasures every mental pursuit yields those that 
 love it — is, surely, in the final analysis, to be 
 not a little against them. It is, at least, to limit 
 that sympathy which every true artist and student 
 may claim as his right from the fellow-men in 
 whose behalf he labors ; and by as much as the 
 world's stock of sympathy is lessened, by so much 
 is the way of the altruistic lover of the true, the 
 beautiful, and the good made more arduous. Mil- 
 ton's aphorism might truly run — " As well not 
 love a good man as not love a good book." 
 
 But Professor Sewell doubtless thought very 
 honestly that Froude's book was a thoroughly 
 bad one. It is just here that his example should 
 serve as a warning — of a sort perennial, indeed, 
 but apparently always necessary. The book that 
 seems bad to us is so likely to seem innocuous, if 
 not positively good, to a later generation. We 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 195 
 
 are so prone to be hard and fast in our demands 
 upon books and writers that the risk of doing them 
 serious injustice is very great. With a little ex- 
 perience we can learn fairly well, I think, to pick 
 out the trivial, the insincere, the positively obscene, 
 the coarsely irreverent. No reader, for example, 
 of some of Rochester's poems has at any time for 
 two centuries and a quarter been at a loss for a 
 verdict as to their essential immorality. But 
 when the offence against morals ceases to be so 
 plain that it can be dealt with under positive 
 statutes, and when the triviality and insincerity are 
 not vouched for in plain ways, — for example, by 
 the low type of periodical or publisher responsible 
 for their affronting the sun, — the lessons of literary 
 history teach us that we should be exceedingly 
 careful in asserting that any book is foolish or 
 vicious. But does not experience tell us that we 
 ought to be just as careful with regard to think- 
 ing such things about any man whom we have 
 had no opportunity thoroughly to study ? We 
 are careful not to say or write such things 
 about men, for the libel suit remains where the 
 horsewhipping has disappeared. But how often 
 we think them and later discover the injustice we 
 have done ; and how often we think and say and 
 
1 96 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 write things about books and authors that we live 
 to be ashamed of ! 
 
 I know I am telling a twice-told tale, but it will 
 surely bear repetition, as long as scientific and 
 artistic and theological and political partisanship 
 may be everywhere seen among men. History 
 teaches us that the accursed of to-day may be — 
 perhaps, is likely to be — the blessed of to-morrow; 
 yet we continue to curse and excommunicate and 
 to fancy that in so doing we are sending up grate- 
 ful incense to the God of peace and love. We 
 fancy that we thereby show our zeal for the true, 
 the beautiful, and the good, when we are only 
 giving a needless additional illustration of how 
 aptly the theory of the simian descent of man fits 
 the facts of human life. We seem somehow to 
 think that our manhood is proportional to the 
 positiveness of our opinions upon disputed points, 
 much as some people appear to regard war as 
 a heaven-appointed agent for making men and 
 nations brave. That partisans may be manly and 
 lovers of war brave no intelligent person will deny; 
 but it is safer to affirm that the catholic-minded 
 man is the more manly and the lover of peace the 
 braver. 
 
 There is no need to dwell further on the matter, 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 197 
 
 save to say that the Professor Sewells have by no 
 means disappeared, even from this so-called liberal 
 country of ours. Every now and then some clergy- 
 man makes himself conspicuous by denounc- 
 ing the godless character of modern learning ; 
 some artist, equally ignorant of what men are 
 doing outside his own sphere of activity, declares 
 that a great university is destitute of idealism, or 
 that the public is far sunk in bourgeois insensibility 
 and imbecility. Worse still, books dealing with 
 politics and economics in a fashion that does not 
 accord with the notions prevailing in this or that lo- 
 cality are made the objects of popular clamor, while 
 their authors are fortunate if they do not lose social 
 position and, in some cases, the means of liveli- 
 hood. The thoughtless public and newspapers of 
 the baser sort fan these, it must be confessed, 
 comparatively mild flames of persecution. This is 
 not surprising, and it will continue for many a day. 
 What is more surprising and more pitiful is to see 
 an entire college or university faculty stand quiet, 
 as Exeter College stood, when one of its members 
 is denounced for exercising his right to think and 
 to express in reputable language the results of his 
 thinking. Fortunately, it is not always thus. In 
 a New England state noted for its political corrup- 
 
198 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 tion, one college faculty in quite recent times has 
 stood out in a most manly fashion for free- 
 dom of speech in politics and economics — even 
 for freedom to utter what many of its members 
 regarded as the grossest of economic heresies. 
 
 It behooves most of us, however, to remember 
 that, even when we do not cast books we deem ob- 
 noxious into the fire, even when we do not join in 
 the outcry against their writers, we are still par- 
 takers of the sin, or the fault, or whatever we may 
 call it, of the bibliophobe, of the man who does not 
 love books and literature enough to trust them in 
 their beneficent work of enlightening the world, 
 who sets up his small prejudices against the dictates 
 of charity and the lessons of history. " He that is 
 not for me is against me ; " he that is silent when 
 freedom is threatened and assailed is in his heart 
 a slave. The rights of books is but another phrase 
 for the rights of man ; the active bibliophobe, if 
 he were not so silly and comparatively harmless, 
 would be as loathsome as a tyrant; the passive 
 bibliophobe, as despicable as a thrall. And let us 
 remember that bibliophobia and tyranny join hands 
 when, as in these United States within the past 
 ten years, it is seriously proposed, in the press and 
 in conversation, to punish as traitors men who 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 199 
 
 deem it their duty to denounce the foreign policy 
 of the majority toward alien races. 
 
 II 
 
 Professor Sewell seems to have lineal descend- 
 ants, or, at least, disciples, in America. Not long 
 ago the newspapers printed a despatch from one 
 of our Western towns which described how a cer- 
 tain clergyman thought it proper to burn in a 
 stove in the centre of his church, before his awe- 
 struck or snickering congregation, the writings of 
 certain authors whom the world has long looked 
 upon with favor. Among the writers thus con- 
 signed to the flames in the persons of their books 
 — long after their bones had been consigned to 
 earth and their souls, I fear, in the opinion of our 
 good clergyman, to fiercer flames than those of his 
 stove — were William Shakspere and George 
 Gordon, Lord Byron. Most of the persons who 
 read the despatch were, naturally, tempted to smile 
 at this recrudescence of the spirit which led the 
 English Puritans to smash cathedral windows — 
 indeed, the despatch would not have been sent out 
 to the newspapers of the country if the minister's 
 performance had not been deemed erratic enough 
 
2CO SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 to furnish food for a small amount at least of 
 national merriment. It is a form of amusement 
 not infrequently vouchsafed us. For example, a 
 rather distinguished and somewhat venerable 
 American poet, in discussing the decline of popu- 
 lar interest in poetry, has lately enlarged upon 
 what he considers the overweening and overshad- 
 owing influence of Shakspere and Milton, who, he 
 thinks, have no real message for our day, with its 
 special problems, and whom, accordingly, he be- 
 rates severely. It is not, however, the element of 
 amusement involved in these and similar acts and 
 expressions of opinion on which I wish to com- 
 ment for a moment; it is rather the serious element 
 that can be discovered in them. 
 
 I doubt whether it is safe to set down, as some 
 people are often inclined to do, ebullitions of puri- 
 tanism such as that of the Western clergyman, to 
 the only too common desire to make one's self 
 conspicuous in one way or another. It is by no 
 means certain that this latest book-burner fondly 
 hoped that he would be remembered as a second 
 Omar — granting that Omar really did destroy the 
 Alexandrian Library — or as a second Erostratus, 
 — the vain person, it will be remembered, who, 
 on the night Alexander the Great was born, set 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 201 
 
 fire to the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus 
 merely that he might be remembered for his crime, 
 — a purpose more signally accomplished in his 
 case than many a better one has been. Perhaps 
 our zealous Westerner never heard of Erostratus 
 or of Omar or of Professor Sewell, though he 
 doubtless knew that it used to be the custom to 
 burn in public books deemed to be pernicious. He 
 apparently forgot that it was the public hangman 
 that usually performed this questionable service. 
 
 No, I do not think that his extraordinary action 
 proceeded from vanity. I suspect that he was 
 merely doing what we are all continually doing, or 
 ought to be doing, — simply trying to square his 
 own soul with its environment and by his example 
 to help other souls to square themselves. Life to 
 that man was largely a question of following liter- 
 ally certain straight lines of conduct laid down by 
 his religion and of holding tenaciously certain 
 tenets laid down by his church, and he not only 
 found little or nothing in the works of Shakspere 
 and Byron that helped him to do this, but he found 
 many a page dealing with lust and crime in a way 
 that repelled his simple soul and hindered him from 
 following the lines of conduct and opinion which 
 in his judgment lead to eternal life. Once pos- 
 
202 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 sessed of such an idea, what should a good pastor 
 do but seek to warn his flock in the most impres- 
 sive manner possible against the dangers he had 
 discovered and shunned ? He should not have 
 been so narrow-minded, we reply ; he should not 
 have been so conceited as to set up his individual 
 opinion of Shakspere against that of the edu- 
 cated world; he should have possessed some at 
 least of the elements of humor. 
 
 But given his environment, given his opportu- 
 nities of culture, how could he have been anything 
 else than narrow-minded, and how many narrow- 
 minded bigots of one sort or another there are in 
 America and in the world, and how far do we our- 
 selves escape being narrow-minded in one respect 
 or another ? How many of us are absolutely 
 broad-minded in politics, in our social relations, in 
 our tastes and sympathies in matters of religion 
 and art and literature? Suppose the injunction 
 were given us, " Let him who is without small- 
 mindedness be the first to sneer or laugh at this 
 preacher taken in the act of burning Shak- 
 spere," how many of us would be inclined to 
 indulge in scorn or hilarity ? It was precisely 
 because he was narrow-minded and earnest that 
 he set his own judgment over against that of the 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 203 
 
 world and made himself appear ridiculously con- 
 ceited. It was precisely because he was the 
 product of a cramped and cramping environment, 
 that he did not have that saving sense of humor 
 which often, though by no means always, prevents 
 us from doing things as ridiculous in their way 
 as burning the works of Byron in a church stove. 
 To say that such a man should not have been 
 narrow, conceited, and lacking in humor is to say 
 that he should not have been himself, — that is, 
 that he should not have been the product of 
 several centuries of lower middle class Philis- 
 tinism. 
 
 And not only was this primitive-minded pastor 
 in all probability acting in good faith and in ac- 
 cordance with all the light he had, but he was 
 answering in his own way a question the world 
 has been putting to itself for ages, viz., What 
 should be the attitude of the man who believes 
 that conduct is three-fourths or more of life 
 toward the arts that to a greater or less degree 
 influence conduct, and what responsibilities rest 
 upon the artist in this regard ? A tremendously 
 puzzling question it has proved to be — one that 
 has never been fully answered, one that cannot, 
 perhaps, be answered save in a halting and a 
 
204 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 partial manner. Plato, as we all know, excluded 
 most of the poets from his " Republic" — for rea- 
 sons, much less crudely expressed, but not cer- 
 tainly wiser, than those of his latest follower. 
 Milton, though he had likened the killing of a 
 good book to the killing of a good man, did not 
 altogether escape a few years later, especially 
 with regard to Shakspere himself, from show- 
 ing some, at least, of the moral intolerance dis- 
 played by Plato in the third and tenth books of his 
 " Republic." On the other hand, — particularly 
 in our own day, — certain artists and critics have 
 passed to the opposite extreme, and, preaching 
 from the text, " Art for art's sake," have practi- 
 cally proclaimed that to consider the effects of 
 art upon conduct is a piece of impertinence 
 toward art and artists. Between these two ex- 
 tremes men have wandered up and down seeking 
 a plain path to follow. Their common sense tells 
 them that to read bad books is but another way of 
 keeping bad company, but they have found it as 
 hard to tell the good book from the bad as they 
 have often found it to judge a man's real character 
 before years of association have slowly brought 
 some knowledge of it. 
 
 Our clergyman, as we have seen, solved this 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 205 
 
 ever present problem in a rough and ready way. 
 Our ultra-aesthetic friends, the advocates of art 
 for art's sake, solve the problem by practising 
 the alleged trick of the ostrich, — they stick their 
 heads in the sands of fallacy and say in their 
 hearts, " There is no problem to solve." But 
 what shall we do who want to order our conduct 
 aright, and who want to read the books of the 
 past and present that have won and are winning 
 places in the literature of our race ? I know of 
 no simple answer to this question. I can say only 
 that the more we read, the more we educate 
 ourselves, the more we travel, the more we see of 
 life, the more completely we realize that there is a 
 diversity of tastes and opinions among men, the 
 less the chance that the classic books of the past 
 and the books of to-day vouched for by reputable 
 authorities will do us any harm whatsoever. Ex- 
 perience seems to show that vile books and trivial 
 books stand little chance of surviving. It also 
 seems to show that every year added to our age 
 diminishes the probability that a book containing 
 questionable elements will do us harm either men- 
 tally or morally. But experience also shows that 
 no critic or teacher can ever in this matter take 
 the place of one's individual conscience. The 
 
206 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 book that by its descriptions of vicious characters 
 and incidents merely amuses or interests one man 
 in a harmless way may actually instruct another, 
 and prove deleterious to a third. Any wide 
 reader, if he is frank, will admit that there are 
 certain books that he personally has never been 
 able to read with profit — nay, even without loss. 
 He will confess also that there are books which he 
 can read in certain moods with enjoyment and no 
 loss of self-respect, but which in other moods he 
 cannot venture to take up. What is this but to 
 say that we must all learn to read precisely as we 
 learn to live — applying to the problem all the 
 experience and all the conscientiousness we can. 
 There is no royal road to learning or to reading 
 or to conduct, nor shall we be helped on our way 
 either by imitating our clerical friend or by laugh- 
 ing at him. He represents a class of pious souls 
 we must reckon with — a somewhat decivilizing 
 influence to be counteracted in legitimate ways. 
 Time and education will give him and his like 
 their euthanasia. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Actual book-burners are not so numerous as 
 to set a dangerous example, but there are people 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 207 
 
 who, in a sense, are determined foes to books — 
 people who, having thrown themselves heart and 
 soul into the philanthropical movements of our 
 time, tend to prize literature almost solely as it 
 makes or does not make for their own ideas of 
 social progress, or, to be more exact, of socialistic 
 propaganda. 1 Zealous spirits these, of true cru- 
 sading quality — the stuff of which martyrs are 
 made, — and if they did not exist, nay more, if they 
 did not increase in our country, I should come as 
 near as, I suppose, an American can to despairing 
 of the Republic. Valuable citizens as these social 
 enthusiasts are, however, I cannot but think that 
 they go astray in their reasoning and lead others 
 astray whenever they undertake to discuss the 
 relations society sustains or should sustain to the 
 literature and art of the present and the past. 
 
 The line of argument adopted by one of the 
 most zealous social reformers I have ever known 
 may be given almost in his own words. First, 
 he thinks, with Tolstoy, that a man or woman 
 should do his or her own share in the necessary 
 
 1 It is interesting to compare their views with those of root-and- 
 branch religious fanatics ; such, for example, as that Pere Onorio 
 whose extreme views on modern civilization are presented with 
 great literary skill in Letter XI of George Sand's " Mademoiselle 
 La Quintinie." 
 
208 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 manual toil of the world, earning a living by the 
 sweat of the brow, and not till then spend a mo- 
 ment's time in reading or writing or teaching or 
 preaching, much less in ordinary money-getting. 
 It is easy, to be sure, to offset this argument by 
 the statement that the world has other necessary 
 work to do besides the physical, and that it has dis- 
 covered that by division of labor it gets all its kinds 
 of work better done. It is not true, moreover, 
 that only physical labor is accomplished in the 
 literal sweat of one's brow. Brain workers suffer 
 from exhaustion far more than hand workers, and 
 if they were to earn their living as hand workers 
 they would soon cease to be brain workers. This 
 consequence would not disturb such social reform- 
 ers as denounce, logically enough, art and letters 
 and other high manifestations of civilization. But 
 it must disturb those of us who have no precon- 
 ceived theories — who are only striving to see our 
 duty in this complex life and to do it. Yet, how- 
 ever much we may believe that this claim of the 
 Tolstoyans that all men and women should do 
 manual labor is erroneous, we ought not to shut 
 our eyes to the fact that the Russian reformer has 
 emphasized a great truth which most of us keep 
 in the background. He has perceived that di- 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN ROOK-BURNING 209 
 
 vision of labor has separated men into classes 
 which are alienated from one another through lack 
 of sympathy caused by diversity of interests and 
 disproportion of wealth. He feels that this lack 
 of sympathy is the devil's work, not God's, for all 
 men and women are children of God and should 
 love one another according to the Golden Rule of 
 Christ. He knows, furthermore, that to live in 
 comparative luxury one's self while doing philan- 
 thropical work — whether giving money for chari- 
 table purposes or preaching or lecturing to the 
 poor — is not the best way to assist our brothers, 
 because it is generally done across a social chasm. 
 So he has concluded that all of us who do not live 
 by physical toil must cross the chasm and take up 
 our lot with our brothers on the other side. My 
 reforming friend thinks that this conclusion is cor- 
 rect, and has acted upon it. I think that the con- 
 clusion is wrong, but only in so far as relates to 
 crossing the chasm. Let us try to fill it up instead 
 — which brings us to the second reason of my 
 friend. 
 
 A man's share in the world's goods, he says, 
 is food to eat, clothes to protect him from the 
 weather, and a roof to sleep under, for without 
 these he cannot live. After he has these, he has 
 
2IO SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 no right to anything more until at least this mini- 
 mum is assured to all other men. When this is 
 done, he has a right to the same share of the 
 superfluity of this world's goods as another man, 
 the same right that his brother has through his 
 sonship to God. No man would be true to his 
 highest nature if he could be content to live in 
 purple while his brother by blood lived in rags ; 
 but neither should he be content, while his brother 
 through Christ lives in rags. 
 
 Is this good reasoning ? " It is rank socialism," 
 some will say. Perhaps so, perhaps not ; but the 
 main question is, Does this zealous reformer rea- 
 son correctly, and does he lay down rules of action 
 that all should follow ? For my own part, I think 
 that his reasoning requires only one emendation 
 to make it sound and obligatory upon all of us 
 who are trying to do our duty in this world. 
 Society has already assumed that every man has a 
 right to food, clothes, and a roof — a right which 
 involves, of course, the correlative duty to work 
 for them. Our organized charities and other 
 philanthropical enterprises may not secure this 
 right to all men in the best possible way, but 
 they really owe their existence to our acknowl- 
 edgment of this human right. Yet what of 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 2 1 1 
 
 the equal division of the superfluities of life ? 
 Have we any right to more of them than our 
 brother has ? This question will naturally sug- 
 gest answers summed up in such words as " prop- 
 erty," "right of inheritance," "greater use of 
 opportunities," and the like ; but I fancy that the 
 arguments involved in these and similar phrases 
 could be easily overthrown. I fancy that ethically 
 the contention that we have a right only to so 
 much wealth as every other man and woman has 
 is in need of but one qualification in order to be 
 sound. That qualification is, that we have a right 
 merely to such an extra amount of this world's 
 superfluities as will enable us to do to the best 
 advantage the necessary work of the world, espe- 
 cially that which is not physical. The physician 
 must have his instruments, the student his books, 
 the artist his studio and casts. But sheer luxury 
 for the sake of luxury, superfluous wealth to en- 
 able us to do little beside racing in automobiles or 
 playing golf, — no man or woman seems to have 
 an indefeasible moral right to, however clear the 
 legal or the prescriptive social right may be. And 
 here, again, the conscience of our age has begun 
 to make itself felt. The gifts of rich men for pub- 
 lic purposes have their basis, not merely in indi- 
 
212 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 vidual generosity and desire for notoriety or fame, 
 but in a slowly growing perception of the great 
 truth that no man has a right to any extra share of 
 the world's wealth that is not needed by him for 
 the accomplishment of the special work he is 
 doing for the world. This may involve recreation, 
 it may involve the appliances of art and culture, 
 but it does not involve unproductive idleness, it 
 does not involve the pampered existence of the 
 votary of fashion. 
 
 How far wrong, then, was my friend when he 
 declared that his conscience told him he was do- 
 ing evil in accepting as his own more money than 
 three families often have to live upon ? After he 
 had paid his board, he had sixty dollars a month 
 left, and he did not know how to spend it in a way 
 useful to all his fellows. So he gave up his salary 
 for working with his brains, and went to working 
 with his hands. 
 
 Was he quixotic ? Perhaps so, perhaps not. 
 He was wrong, 1 think, if by keeping that sixty 
 dollars he could have bought books, educated 
 himself still further, and, as an educated man, 
 have accomplished more good for the world than 
 he could possibly do by following the course he 
 determined upon. He was right if, by sharing 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 213 
 
 the life of the poor, he could become a better 
 teacher to them and help to lift them up in the 
 scale of civilization. Who is to decide this ques- 
 tion if not the man who is most concerned ? 
 
 But what conclusion are we reaching ? From 
 all I have said it would seem that I am in favor of 
 letting each man decide how much he shall keep 
 for himself of the wealth he is able to acquire. I 
 believe that this is nearly the position we ought to 
 take, provided we insist that each man make his 
 decision with the most enlightened conscience that 
 he can develop. The socialist on the one hand 
 and the cynic on the other will declare that this is 
 leaving the matter indefinite, and too much in the 
 hands of very fallible mortals. But it is that and 
 it is there already. My friend who has begun to 
 do manual labor has had to choose his occupation, 
 his clothes to wear, his food to eat, his room to 
 sleep in. He has found it impossible to eschew 
 superfluities entirely ; he has had to choose what to 
 do with five extra dollars a month instead of sixty. 
 From the lowest estate to the highest this indi- 
 vidual responsibility in the sight of God for our 
 use of wealth and culture and time and labor must 
 ever be felt, and, according as we answer to it 
 faithfully, so will our lives be accounted worthy by 
 
214 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 God and by our fellows. Neither the philosophy 
 of complete renunciation taught by the mediaeval 
 ascetics and by Tolstoy, nor that of complete self- 
 ishness taught by the hedonists of all ages, and 
 especially by the gilded youth of our own day, can 
 satisfy us. The problem is too complex for a 
 simple solution. It will be solved, if at all, only 
 by the enlightened conscience of humanity after 
 the lapse of many generations. But I cannot help 
 believing that it will be solved, not by all men get- 
 ting on one side of the social chasm, but by all 
 men striving to fill it up by throwing into it their 
 wealth, their labor, and, if need be, their very 
 souls and bodies. 
 
 Now to point the moral of this part of my 
 discussion, which seems to be much more socio- 
 logical than literary in character. My Tolstoyan 
 friend and all who think like him are in a way 
 infected with bibliophobia because they are 
 jealous of the time and devotion able men and 
 women give to literature and art, which seems 
 to be subtracted from what might be given to the 
 social regeneration of mankind. They belong to 
 the not innumerous body of those who cannot 
 make haste slowly. They see their high goal and 
 dash impatiently toward it. They ignore the 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 2 1 5 
 
 lessons of history and the complexity of life. 
 They tend to forget the part that books and 
 pictures and statues and music have played in 
 developing the sympathies and rendering sensi- 
 tive the consciences of men to the point at which 
 philanthropy on a large scale has become possible. 
 In their vision of an equalization of wealth they 
 forget that, until the world has vastly increased 
 its powers of production and its store of desirable 
 objects, equalization of wealth would really mean 
 equalization of poverty. They fail to realize how 
 art and science, which minister directly and in- 
 directly to increasing the efficiency of those 
 directors of labor, those captains of industry 
 without whom human effort, even under a co- 
 operative or a socialistic system, would be in 
 vain, so far as we can now see, — they fail to 
 realize how art and science, which from this point 
 of view have a strictly utilitarian value, would 
 droop and die, deprived as they would inevitably 
 be of the whole-hearted devotion of their votaries 
 and, as the enthusiasts would like to have it, of 
 their relations to the art and learning of the past. 
 I say nothing of the loss of patronage they would 
 sustain, because it is undoubtedly the intention of 
 our socialist friends, when they come into their 
 
2l6 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 kingdom, to substitute the social for the demo- 
 cratic public as the patron of the arts and 
 sciences. That much might be lost in any such 
 exchange of patrons seems possible, but the point 
 need not be dwelt upon. 
 
 What concerns us chiefly is the fact that it is 
 easy for the writer and the student of books, 
 watching the more ostensibly active and philan- 
 thropical work of others, to grow pessimistic and 
 to think of himself as "side tracked," as some- 
 thing of a drone. It is given to but few to 
 blend, like William Morris, the functions of an 
 "idle singer of an empty day" with those of a 
 socialistic agitator. Especially when one lives in 
 a large city and sees misery swarm but a stone's 
 throw from the haunts of fabulous opulence is 
 one impelled to close one's books and volunteer in 
 the war for civic and social betterment. There 
 is no reason why one should not, to a moderate 
 extent, yield to this laudable impulse; but if one 
 looks upon it as an injunction from heaven, one 
 is only too likely to close one's books in order to 
 follow a will-o'-the-wisp. To do thus is but to 
 show a distrust of literature and art as real, 
 though not so petty, as is shown by those 
 who distrust all art and learning that does not 
 
SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 217 
 
 advance the causes, religious and political, that 
 they have espoused. In the last analysis your 
 social enthusiast, your root-and-branch philan- 
 thropist, is as much a creature of prejudices as 
 your religious or political partisan. He looks on 
 to the future, while they, as a rule, look back at 
 the past ; he is an idealist, while they are formal- 
 ists ; but both he and they are far from being 
 truly balanced, catholic-minded men, " looking be- 
 fore and after." 
 
 The real lover of books and pictures, the genuine 
 student of letters and the arts, ought, on the other 
 hand, to be of all men least the creature of 
 prejudices and party passions and fanatical en- 
 thusiasms. It is his to enter upon and to enjoy 
 the stored-up wisdom and the embodied beauty 
 of the past, and he can do this without losing 
 his sympathy with legitimate present efforts to 
 improve the world or his faith in the future 
 triumphs of the social spirit of man. He who 
 loves books truly is by that fact enfranchised; 
 he becomes a full citizen of the most ideal of 
 all republics, the republic of thought and feel- 
 ing. He who does not trust literature to do its 
 noble part in the salvation of the race, who 
 would shackle men's thoughts and kill their 
 
2l8 SOME REMARKS ON MODERN BOOK-BURNING 
 
 books, the children of their brains and hearts 
 — even he who would persuade those chosen to 
 love books that their entire devotion is due to 
 more obvious and concrete forms of philanthropy- 
 is careless or ignorant of his own best interests, 
 and is not to be listened to without danger by the 
 young and ardent soul. 
 
VIII 
 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
[A paper read before the Men's English Graduate Club of 
 Columbia University, December 16, 1904.] 
 
VIII 
 
 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 There has been much discussion of late rel- 
 ative to the qualifications requisite to the success- 
 ful teaching and studying of English, and, more 
 particularly, of English literature. The topic I 
 wish to say something about belongs, I think, 
 among these qualifications, although it is not 
 absolutely essential to good teaching or to fair 
 attainments in certain portions of the field of 
 English. It is a useful asset, rather than a sine 
 qua non. If you will let me put it in Greek, now 
 that I have already offended by deserting the 
 vernacular, I will say that it is a Krrjixa et? aei. 
 The love of poetry — for that is what I want to talk 
 about — deserves, if anything does, the encomium 
 involved in the Greek phrase and in Keats's 
 equivalent for it, " a joy forever." But I have 
 known excellent teachers and students of English 
 literature who were honest enough to lay no 
 claim to this eternal possession. 
 
222 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 Theirs was what we may call the sense for 
 prose. Fiction, the essay, history and biography, 
 criticism, prose comedy — in the interpretation 
 of these admirable forms of literature they ex- 
 celled. The poetic tragedy they could compass 
 on its dramaturgical side. Society-verse, flying 
 as it does at a low level, and some of the most 
 characteristic work of Pope and Dryden, they 
 felt to lie within their province. But for what some 
 critics like to denominate essential poetry — for 
 the masterpieces of Spenser and Milton, for the 
 lyrics of Blake and Coleridge, for the subtle verse 
 of Donne — for these and even for far less quin- 
 tessential poetry, they would admit, in moments 
 of confidence, that they had no genuine aptitude. 
 On this side their teaching of English literature 
 became perfunctory, and, like honest men, they 
 eschewed it as far as they could. I wonder how 
 many honest men and women there are to-day 
 teaching prescribed English classics in our schools 
 who would gladly leave instruction in the poetical 
 texts to those of their fellows who are born lovers 
 of poetry? I wonder how many of the girls and 
 boys who must be drilled in those poetical texts 
 would be glad to secede and to take up strictly 
 prose work with those prose-loving teachers. 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 223 
 
 Let us suppose the exodus accomplished, and 
 inquire into the probable results. Would the 
 poetry-loving teachers, on the whole, do as well 
 by their pupils as the prose-loving teachers ? 
 They might conceivably do better, if they were 
 to give prose its due place in their teaching ; for 
 they would presumably teach poetry better, and 
 lovers of poetry are not, in consequence of their 
 predilection, necessarily insensible to the power 
 and charm of the best prose. Poets themselves 
 frequently write good prose, and a sense for prose 
 diction and prose rhythms is, I think, for obvious 
 reasons, to be expected of lovers of poetry. 
 When poetry-loving teachers slight prose, the 
 fact is generally due, not to inability to appreciate 
 works of art composed in unmeasured rhythm, 
 but rather to a yielding to the temptation to 
 overemphasize the more cherished form of litera- 
 ture and to the perception of the greater adapta- 
 bility of poetry to the purposes of the instructor, 
 owing to its comparative succinctness. The 
 teacher of poetry can deal with products that 
 are artistic wholes complete in themselves more 
 easily than the teacher of prose can ; he can satis- 
 factorily cover a larger number of writers through 
 specimens; he can deal with the total work of 
 
224 THE L0VE 0F p O ET RY 
 
 more masters. Your prose writer bulks larger, 
 as a rule, than your poet ; and the matter of 
 quantity thus making against the one, and that 
 of quality, in popular estimation at least, making 
 for the other, it would be rather strange if poetry- 
 loving teachers did not somewhat sacrifice prose. 
 I believe that investigation will show that they do 
 sacrifice it. 
 
 If they do, and if prose-loving teachers tend to 
 teach poetry perfunctorily, why should we not 
 call matters even, except for those rather rare 
 cases in which teachers who love poetry neverthe- 
 less manage to do ample justice to prose ? Is 
 there any good reason for ranking the teacher 
 of poetry above the teacher of prose? 
 
 An affirmative answer is not, I fancy, so readily 
 given to the latter question to-day as it would have 
 been not many years ago. Poetry still holds, by 
 force of tradition, its place of supremacy among 
 the arts ; prose still seems to many the product of 
 a form of genius more pedestrian than that with 
 which the poet is supposed to be endowed. But' 
 more and more we are being told that this is all an 
 assumption. Lovers of music tell us that that is 
 now considered, or else soon will be considered, 
 the greatest of the arts. Some persons point to 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 225 
 
 the growth of prose in scope and influence ; to its 
 flexibility, to its possession of rhythmic cadences, 
 which to their ears are more satisfying than the 
 cadences of poetry. They declare that ours is an 
 age of prose, that the votaries of poetry, if more in- 
 tense, form a smaller fraction of the total number 
 of readers than was ever before the case. Against 
 these assertions what has the lover of poetry to 
 oppose except a personal conviction of the superior 
 glory of poetry over all the other forms of art in 
 which the human spirit has sought to express 
 itself, or else the personal conviction of some other 
 mortal or mortals, less fallible perhaps than him- 
 self, but still fallible ? Will any amount of reason- 
 ing, especially of deductive reasoning, enable the 
 partisan of poetry to put to silence the partisan of 
 prose ? I am inclined to answer in the negative. 
 I see little use in arguing that the one form of 
 expression is superior to the other, just as I see 
 little use in denying that prose has caught up 
 with or surpassed poetry in the estimation of the 
 majority. When Matthew Arnold wrote that "the 
 future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, 
 where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, 
 as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer 
 stay," he may have proved himself to be an inspired 
 
226 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 prophet; but I am not sure of it now, although I 
 could have sworn to his inspiration twenty years 
 ago. Now, I blush to confess it, I am not even 
 certain that I can analyze his sentence correctly. 
 All I am sure of is that I hope he was right, pro- 
 vided I understand him. 
 
 But whither am I leading you ? I began by an- 
 nouncing my purpose of talking about " The Love 
 of Poetry," and I made a sort of separation of the 
 sheep from the goats among teachers and stu- 
 dents, and here I am basely surrendering poetry 
 and one of her high priests, so far as lies in my 
 power, into the hands of the Philistines. As a 
 matter of fact, all that I have been guilty of so 
 far is to grant that poetry may not mean so much 
 in the future as it does to-day, and to express 
 the opinion that it does not mean so much to-day 
 as it meant in the past, if we may judge from 
 the declining ratio of its lovers to the lovers of 
 prose. This does not mean that I have felt my 
 own allegiance to poetry abate one jot, or that I 
 proclaim that allegiance without fervor and with- 
 out the hope that long after I am dead and gone 
 some one will be standing in my place proclaiming 
 his allegiance to poetry in more effective tones than 
 I can compass and to hearers even more keenly 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 227 
 
 responsive than any of you. It merely means that 
 in my judgment there are some causes that are 
 served better through the witness borne by love 
 than through the support rendered by argument, 
 that I have very little confidence in the power of 
 tradition to maintain for long any form of suprem- 
 acy that has once been seriously questioned, and 
 that finally, the older I grow, the less store I set 
 by prophecy. 
 
 I return, therefore, to the proposition with which 
 I started, a proposition which no mortal will deny, 
 that a love of poetry is or may be made a valuable 
 asset to teachers and students of literature, — a 
 fact which may be gathered inferentially from a 
 consideration of the value of a love of poetry to 
 you and me as individuals. 
 
 But this is a theme that has occupied the pens 
 of poets and critics ever since the Muses gave to 
 Linus "to sing with a clear voice a song to men." 
 Why not make a choice anthology of passages in 
 praise of poetry, and read it, and have done ? 
 Chiefly because such a compilation is bound to be 
 somewhat conventional and to lack the peculiar 
 sort of appeal made by any one who bears per- 
 sonal witness to a conviction, a passion, an ob- 
 session. I propose instead to try to tell you 
 
228 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 some of the reasons that make me love and value 
 poetry. 
 
 In order to get at the chief reason it seems to 
 me that I ought to ask what effect corresponds in 
 me with the inspiration which prompts the poet to 
 his highest utterance. When the poet is in a fine 
 frenzy, to adapt Shakspere's phrase, what am I 
 in, or what should I be in ? I know of no better 
 answer to this question than that given by the word 
 — rapture. A fine frenzy seizes the poet's heart 
 and brain, transmits itself to his verse, passes 
 through that medium into me, and, losing for the 
 time being its creative quality, is transformed into 
 that more or less passive state we call rapture. 
 This is to me the supreme value of great poetry, 
 that, more than anything else, with fewer draining 
 demands upon my store of vitality, my time, my 
 purse, — in short, upon the essential me and my 
 accessories, — it lifts me higher toward heaven, 
 opens my eyes more surely to the Beatific Vision, 
 wraps me " out of space, out of time," transmutes 
 me and transforms me more completely and 
 ecstatically than any other transmuting and trans- 
 forming agent of which I have knowledge. I 
 readily grant that it is only the greatest poetry 
 which has this wonderful power, that there is much 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 229 
 
 poetry which gives me pleasure only, and often a 
 pleasure differentiated but slightly from that given 
 by prose. I grant also that rapture may be given 
 by prose — for me personally chiefly by some of 
 the prose of one poet, Milton, who, when he was 
 composing it, slipped his singing robes half on, in 
 a fit of aberration. But the main points are that 
 great poetry more surely than anything else pro- 
 duces in me the most desirable condition known 
 to me, — that of rapture, and that I can read 
 poetry at all times and seasons and of all qualities 
 and kinds, carried along by the hope that, if only 
 by accident, the poet will fall into a fine frenzy 
 and so cause me to fall into a fine rapture; or, if 
 falling suggests dropping, and that in turn bathos, 
 I will put it differently and say that I read on 
 buoyed by the hope that the poet will soar aloft 
 in a fine frenzy and carry me up with him into the 
 heaven of rapture. For although I know by ex- 
 perience that I shall not often be carried all the 
 way, I know also by experience that there are re- 
 gions of delight short of the heaven of rapture, and 
 spaces of quiet joy short of the regions of delight, 
 and fleecy cloud-strata of pleasure short of the 
 spaces of quiet joy to any one of which the capable 
 poet may lift me, the confiding lover of poetry. 
 
23O THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 These metaphors which, without evincing con- 
 ceit, I may call elevated, seem likely to mislead us 
 unless we are careful not to draw inferences from 
 them. It is correct enough to say that great poetry 
 elevates, but it would be a mistake to suppose that 
 great poetry is coextensive with what we call sub- 
 lime poetry. The supreme English master of the 
 sublime shows us in his so-called minor poems that 
 elemental purity and rich beauty may make poetry 
 great and induce in us rapture of the most authen- 
 tic kind. The speeches of the Lady in " Comus," 
 the flower passage in " Lycidas," the pictures in 
 " L'Allegro " and " II Penseroso," may produce 
 rapture or something not far short of it, but they 
 are not sublime poetry. I will admit that in my 
 judgment rapture is rarely produced, as a rule, by 
 anything that is destitute of the magical power of 
 transporting us out of our present environment, 
 indeed of carrying us far away from it. The 
 poetry of commonplace sentiment, the poetry of 
 modern realism, which is quite content to deal with 
 steam engines and automobiles, and often succeeds 
 in making them puff rhythmically, the poetry that 
 bears the marks of any reigning fad or fashion, 
 and hence never lets us forget that we are readers 
 belonging to the first decade of the twentieth cen- 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 23 1 
 
 tury — such poetry may frequently give us pleas- 
 ure, and, when it is fresh, it may even give us 
 delight; but I think it can give us rapture only 
 when we are ignorant of the poetry which by 
 transporting yields us, if I may play on words, 
 true transports. This does not mean, of course, 
 that the work of a contemporary poet cannot yield 
 us rapture, for a great poet like Wordsworth or 
 Coleridge can transport the few souls that first 
 lend capable ears into new worlds of imagination 
 and spiritual experience, and in those worlds those 
 souls feel rapture unalloyed. All I would contend 
 for is that poetry gains through age, as many pic- 
 tures do, and that it is the transporting quality of 
 poetry, especially of much of the best of the older 
 poetry, that gives it, in conjunction with its uni- 
 versality, with its truth to life and to nature, the 
 rapture-producing power with which we are deal- 
 ing. Universality, truth to life and to nature, when 
 they can be truly predicated of any work of con- 
 temporary art ought, indeed, involving as they 
 must do the power of approximately perfect ex- 
 pression, to appeal to us profoundly and yield us 
 rapture. Unfortunately, however, we are so con- 
 stituted that there are a thousand chances that we 
 shall see the universal in what time soon proves 
 
232 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 to be but fragmentary and transient, to one that 
 we shall be able to recognize it in the rare work in 
 which it is really embodied. Hence I think I am 
 right in advising you to seek rapture where it is 
 most certainly to be found — that is, in reading 
 the works of the great transporting poets of the 
 past. It is great poetry — not the rapid transit 
 inventions of modern science, wonderful as these 
 are — that comes nearest in our mortal life to dis- 
 charging the functions of those admirable carpets 
 which in " The Arabian Nights " fly through the 
 air bearing hero and heroine to some far-off land 
 where the streams run felicity and the winds 
 breathe joy. 
 
 You will doubtless have perceived that I am 
 emulating the modern physicist who reduces 
 everything to a form of motion. Rapture, — which 
 implies being snatched, — transporting, carrying 
 away — these are the words on which I have rung 
 the changes in this talk about "The Love of 
 Poetry." But does not poetry give wings to the 
 soul, and are we not always wishing for wings ? 
 Men wanted to fly before Daedalus, and they will 
 launch themselves for centuries from the roof of 
 the Smithsonian Institution. The flying I am here 
 recommending is done much more easily and with 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 233 
 
 far less danger. And it is done not merely in 
 space, but in time. Borne upwards with Milton 
 we can penetrate the heaven of heavens ; borne 
 backwards with Homer we can visit either the 
 ringing plains of windy Troy or the peaceful 
 homes of the blessed Phaeacians, " mariners of 
 renown, outermost of men, living far apart in the 
 wash of the waves." We exclaim at the wonders 
 produced by the pressing of an electric button ; 
 do they really surpass the wonders evoked by the 
 sight of a tiny group of letters — 
 
 " All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely 
 word." 
 
 But some verbal stickler — are they ever real 
 word-lovers ? — may ask what I meant by saying 
 that I almost never get rapture from prose, when 
 I have just practically admitted that I can get 
 rapture from a single word. Do words lose their 
 qualities when a Milton turns them over to a 
 Burke? It would be foolish, I think, to answer 
 "Yes"; but while I stand convicted of verbal 
 contradiction and of apparent exaggeration, the 
 facts of my personal experience are about as I 
 have stated them. However much I may admire 
 prose, the stately march of Gibbon, the magnifi- 
 
234 THE L0VE 0F POETRY 
 
 cence of Burke, the gorgeous splendor of Ruskin, 
 the grace and ease of Arnold — it rarely or never 
 induces in me the intimate delight, the gratitude, 
 the reverence that accompany my reading of great 
 poetry. Long experience has taught me this, and 
 hence it is, perhaps, that I do not bring to my 
 study and appreciation of the details of a prose 
 composition a mind and soul so enraptured, so ex- 
 hilarated as to invest them with a halo, a glamour. 
 In studying, or better in enjoying, poetry, it seems 
 to me that, partly through stored-up experiences of 
 delight, partly through what I must vaguely call 
 present flow and continuity of enjoyment, I am in 
 a state of mind propitious to the discovery and 
 appreciation of aesthetic beauties in word and 
 phase and cadence — beauties which, as it were, 
 accelerate the momentum of my imagination's 
 flight or divert into gracious meanders my fancy's 
 play. I admit that all I am saying is unphilo- 
 sophical, unscientific, unworthy, possibly, of serious 
 discussion. It may be only the illogical utterance 
 of a misguided enthusiast who sees the arch of 
 heaven in his mistress's eyebrow. But I have 
 made no pretensions to being anything but a lover, 
 and perhaps true love for poetry admits divided 
 affections as little as true love for a woman does. 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 235 
 
 Perhaps the lovers of prose of whom I spoke, the 
 honest men and women who confess they do not 
 love poetry, are led by great prose to heights of 
 rapture high enough to overlook those to which 
 great poetry leads its votaries. Of that I know 
 nothing and cannot know. I love great prose, I 
 think truly, but I have adored — or, if that is too 
 strong — I have given my allegiance to poetry 
 ever since I was old enough to know that the 
 prime law of our spiritual life is to give ourselves 
 to something other than ourselves — to something 
 better, truer, and more beautiful. 
 
 From illogical enthusiasm you will please permit 
 me to pass to a sort of reminiscential garrulity. 
 While I have remained true to my love of poetry 
 ever since when, as a boy of ten or twelve, I used 
 to declaim Byron's " Napoleon's Farewell " to a 
 group of admiring relatives, — the relatives, I may 
 say, admired me, but I admired Byron, and that 
 admiration has withstood the stress and strain of 
 thirty years, — while I have felt as though I should 
 like to adapt the words of Coleridge and call upon 
 the powers of nature to bear witness for me 
 
 " With what deep worship I have still adored 
 The spirit of divinest " Poetry — 
 
236 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 I have had love affairs with quite as many 
 different kinds of poetry as Cowley had with im- 
 aginary sweethearts. If I may trust the evidence 
 of old books, — pathetically cheap editions, for 
 modern poets were not to be found in some 
 Southern libraries at least, and a boy born in war 
 times saw a dollar in the seventies about as often 
 as your modern youth sees ten, — if I may trust 
 the dates written in execrable copies of ecstatically 
 prized volumes, it was Keats and his favorite 
 Spenser that succeeded Byron in my catalogue of 
 poet-masters ; but it was Horace who first made 
 me flatter myself that I might become a rational 
 lover of poetry. This means that whatever critical 
 capacity I have was first awakened by Horace — 
 to whom I owe a debt and for whom I cherish a 
 love which when I cease to acknowledge, deterred 
 by modern undervaluation of his admirable poetic 
 gifts, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my 
 mouth. Shelley, Tennyson, and Pope followed 
 almost immediately, and I was delighted by all 
 three, and have no word of apology to offer for the 
 combination. Then came Coleridge; then Long- 
 fellow, the only American poet I remember to have 
 enjoyed in early years ; for about my first acquaint- 
 ance with Poe, to whom for one reason or another 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 237 
 
 I have since devoted many pages, I have ab- 
 solutely no recollection. I recollect well, however, 
 that no alienation of South from North, no in- 
 herited belief that America had made but a poor 
 showing in creative literature, kept me from per- 
 ceiving, what I still in the face of over-subtle 
 recent criticism perceive, the essential worth and 
 homely charm of Longfellow's simple poetry. If 
 I had known Emerson and Poe then, I should 
 have thought, I am sure, as now, that it is the 
 great merit of the latter that he rarely or never 
 appeared in public without his singing robes about 
 him, and that it is the great error or misfortune of 
 the former that he too often knocked about in a 
 rhyming jacket. 
 
 How should I have thought otherwise then, 
 when from Coleridge I passed to Shakspere and 
 .0 Milton, and a little later to Sophocles ? In 
 other words, could a youth of few books — but 
 those the best in English, Greek and Latin, 
 French and German — fail to perceive that true 
 poetry is as much a matter of style as of sub- 
 stance ? How could I from the start yield 
 my full allegiance to any poet who does not 
 marry wisdom to immortal verse ? As the years 
 have gone by, I hope that I have learned to 
 
238 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 give to that line of Wordsworth's a flexible 
 interpretation, — wisdom of a sort is married to 
 immortal verse of a sort as well in Byron's " Don 
 Juan " as in his " Childe Harold," most Anglo- 
 Saxon critics in their native cant to the con- 
 trary notwithstanding, — but I trust that I have 
 never for a moment ceased to believe that the 
 Muse must be lovely as well as wise and good. 
 This may be a digression, but I said that I 
 would be garrulous, and I confess I am moved 
 to as much wrath as is good for me, when I 
 hear well-meaning people counsel other people 
 to overlook a poet's technical defects and get 
 at his message, in total oblivion of the fact that 
 their favorite prophet or preacher is entitled to 
 only a very low place on Parnassus. Many 
 Browningites, Emersonians, Whitmanites, even 
 Shaksperians, make me wonder whether, because 
 sending messages with or without wires and 
 with or without rapping-tables has become com- 
 mon, the chief end of existence is to receive 
 them. Poor benighted Southerner that I was, 
 I grew up in comparative ignorance of the 
 latter-day cults of poet-prophets ; the only mes- 
 sage my poets brought me was that the 
 gardens of the Hesperides need be counted no 
 
THE LOVE OF TOETRY 239 
 
 myth, that I had but to open any of my well- 
 loved volumes to be transported thither, where 
 I could wander at will and pluck the golden 
 fruit. As I think of those unsophisticated days, 
 when I fondly deemed that poetry meant joy, — 
 not messages and ideas and problems, — I can 
 truly exclaim with Wordsworth, — 
 
 " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven." 
 
 And yet, poor heathen, there was no Emerson 
 or Whitman, or Walter Pater or Ibsen or 
 George Bernard Shaw or " R. L. S." or Rud- 
 yard Kipling for me. I had only the poets I 
 have named, — and some novelists like Thack- 
 eray, who was dead, and George Eliot and dear 
 old Trollope and excellent Charles Reade, who 
 were living, — and I added Moore and Campbell 
 and one or two other old-fashioned writers for 
 my acquaintance with whom, I suppose, if I 
 were not past forty, it would be my duty to 
 blush. 
 
 Some of the things I read were not designed, 
 I apprehend, for the perusal of a youngster. For 
 example, I took a rather thorough course in 
 Restoration comedy, and although the volumes 
 
240 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 bore on their fly leaves the name of my grand- 
 mother, I do not care to shelter myself under 
 that respectable aegis. I am sure I should have 
 enjoyed Congreve, even if I had not known 
 that ladies read him a hundred years before. 
 I am equally sure that if I had had a father 
 alive who could have kept those and certain 
 other books out of my way until I was older, 
 I should have been no worse off. They did 
 not prevent me, however, from having as bad 
 a case of Wordsworth fever as any one ever 
 had on attaining his majority; nor did Words- 
 worth keep me from seeing in Homer, not 
 merely the Father but the King of Poets, to 
 whom I still maintain that Dante, Chaucer, 
 Shakspere, and Milton should make obeisance 
 as to their rightful lord. Yet Homer, Sophocles, 
 and Euripides, the writers I was reading 
 when people around me were praising the 
 men who were removing the reproach of lit- 
 erary sterility from the South, Sidney Lanier, 
 Cable, Harris, and the rest — even the great 
 Greeks, could not wean me from a love that 
 has grown with my growth and strengthened 
 with my strength — a love for those wits of 
 Queen Anne's day to whom Thackeray, who, 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 24 1 
 
 by the way, was never much attracted to great 
 poetry, so completely lost that capacious heart 
 of his. It was in the days following graduation 
 that I picked up at book auctions little copies 
 of Prior and Gay that I would not exchange 
 for their weight in gold. Cowper declared that 
 poor, ill-fated Robert Lloyd was 
 
 " Sole heir and single 
 Of dear Mat Prior's easy jingle ; " 
 
 but Prior was far more than a jingler, and he 
 left no heirs, only some very respectable collateral 
 relations. He and Gay can scarcely be described 
 as rapture producers, but the man they do not 
 charm has had some very humane elements omitted 
 from his composition. I felt this nearly twenty 
 years ago, and at a time when, strange as it may 
 appear, I was enjoying the work of Matthew Ar- 
 nold and the treasures of Ward's " English Poets." 
 Nor could the glorious rhythms of Swinburne 
 or the deep, passionate poems of Browning, the 
 next objects of my adoration, make me swerve 
 in my affection for the eighteenth-century mas- 
 ters. I am certain — as certain as I am of my 
 existence — that a love of poetry is an unceasing 
 source of joy; I am almost equally certain that 
 
242 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 a catholic, as opposed to a narrow, appreciation, is 
 indispensable to any form of healthy love. 
 
 I have now given you " The Confessions of a 
 Lover of Poetry down to his Twenty-fifth Year," 
 which I hope are at least a little less nai've than 
 some of the autobiographies more distinguished 
 persons are persuaded to contribute to our maga- 
 zines. I cut my recital short, not only because I 
 do not wish to bore you, but also because I have 
 carried it to the point where in addition to being 
 a lover, I became a teacher of poetry. From being 
 irresponsible I became responsible. Henceforth 
 there was to be less flitting from flower to flower 
 and more storing up of honey in a hive. I was 
 soon to learn that the teaching and the study of 
 poetry, as opposed to browsing in it, are attended 
 by drawbacks that often try one's soul. It is not 
 easy to talk about what one would rather worship 
 silently ; it is not easy to teach the delights of 
 poetry to superior young persons who, with the 
 wide knowledge of human life derived from after- 
 noon teas or the football field, think of one as 
 merely a harmless old fool ; it is not easy to ex- 
 tend one's knowledge over the tremendous field 
 of English literature in order that one may partly 
 understand how the poets and the poetry one loves 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 243 
 
 came to be what they are. Such of you as have 
 taught already will know what I mean when I say 
 that the teacher who has to feed gaping mouths 
 — not ears — with choice morsels of poetry often 
 wonders why schools and colleges exist. You will 
 know what I mean when I say that the sight of 
 rows upon rows of poets and commentators upon 
 them that one has never read, that one scarcely 
 hopes ever to get time to read, makes the teacher 
 of poetry long for a better world where great 
 verse will be diffused in the air, not gathered 
 between the boards of books. 
 
 But while these difficulties of the teacher and 
 the thorough student are very real ones, a love of 
 poetry will enable him to surmount them as 
 nothing else will. It is chiefly because this is so 
 that I began by assuring you that the love of 
 poetry is a possession forever. To poetry you 
 can apply those marvellous verses of the youthful 
 Poe to Helen — themselves an almost matchless 
 illustration of essential poetic charm : — 
 
 "... Thy beauty is to me 
 
 Like those Nicaean barks of yore, 
 That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, 
 The weary, wayworn wanderer bore 
 To his own native shore." 
 
244 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 The spirit of poetry will not desert you when the 
 day's work is over, and you are alone with your 
 books. A line or two of a dearly loved poem, and 
 you are under the spell and you will take up the 
 task of preparing for to-morrow's class as though 
 to-day's had not filled you with despair for your- 
 self, your pupils, and some mighty poet in his 
 undreamed of misery dead. 
 
 Yes, there is nothing like poetry for true restor- 
 ative powers. Each of us, doubtless, has his own 
 verse-specific which he not only employs, but takes 
 pleasure in recommending. Mine are numerous 
 sonnets of Shakspere and lines from the dramas, 
 sundry periods of Milton, not a few whole poems 
 and passages of Wordsworth, things of Byron, 
 Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning 
 — but more especially of Keats — yet why not 
 say Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," with Ward's 
 " English Poets " thrown in, and have done with 
 it ? How is one to narrow one's affections when 
 English poetry resembles a field covered with 
 daisies ? And if one turns to other literatures, 
 one experiences the same embarrassment. Some 
 wiseacres tell us that the French have little genius 
 for essential poetry, but many and many a time, 
 reading this or that great poet in that exquisite 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 245 
 
 language, I have been tempted to apply to him 
 in my stammering way the words of Alfred de 
 Musset to Malibran, — 
 
 " C'est cette voix du coeur qui seule au coeur arrive 
 Que nul autre apres toi ne nous rendra jamais." 
 
 And as for what the Greeks and especially 
 Homer have left us, and the tender Roman elegists, 
 — the smooth elegiac poets as Milton calls them, — 
 there is simply nothing to be said to those who 
 knowing do not love such inestimable treasures. 
 Men may be great philosophers and not love 
 Homer, — Herbert Spencer has just proved it, — 
 they may even appreciate many other forms of 
 verse and fail to come under his ineffable spell; 
 but if thirty years of devotion to poetry give me 
 the right to express a very positive opinion, I 
 will say that the man or woman who is denied the 
 privilege of undergoing the effects of Homer's 
 power and Homer's charm is deprived of a 
 rapture absolutely unique and supreme among 
 the raptures the Muses bestow upon their wor- 
 shippers. I know that this is mere assertion. I 
 can no more prove it than I can prove to a certain 
 friend of mine that a real Havana cigar is better 
 than the abominable weeds he genuinely enjoys 
 
246 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 and regularly presents me when I dine with him. 
 There is no way known to me of proving that 
 Homer's Nausicaa is a creation of a higher order 
 than the astonishing heroines of some of our most 
 popular novelists ; but fortunately the need of such 
 proof is by no means so great as the difficulty of 
 furnishing it. 
 
 The mention of Nausicaa brings, however, to my 
 mind what I can pronounce unhesitatingly to be 
 in my judgment the most consummate product of 
 the art of poetry that it has ever been my for- 
 tune to read. I am judging simply through the 
 quantity and the quality of the rapture it gave 
 me when I first read it nearly twenty years ago, 
 through the impression it has left ever since on 
 my memory, through the rapture it gives me to- 
 day. Nothing for me quite takes the place of the 
 pristine purity, the paradisiacal charm that ir- 
 radiates the sixth book of the Odyssey, with its 
 description of the white-armed daughter of King 
 Alcinous confronting on the shore of the sound- 
 ing sea, in all the dignity of maiden innocence, 
 the ship-wrecked favorite of Athene, the much- 
 wandered, much-enduring Odysseus. I have seen 
 great pictures that made the blood leave my 
 heart and rush to my cheeks and temples. One 
 
THE LOVE OF POETRY 247 
 
 such I specially remember — a marvellous, a divine 
 angel that burst upon me from a dark canvas by 
 Titian in a dark church in Venice. I have for- 
 gotten the name of the church and the subject of 
 the picture, but that angel and that moment of 
 unexpected rapture I can never forget. Yet even 
 this luminous point in my memory pales before 
 the moment when Nausicaa first swam within my 
 ken, when I first saw the throned Dawn awaken 
 her, saw her put on her fair robes and hasten 
 through the palace halls to tell her dream to her 
 parents, saw her standing tall beside her mother, 
 in the midst of the handmaidens spinning purple 
 yarn, saw her taking counsel with her kingly 
 father, saw her harness the mules to the polished 
 car, store it with the shining raiment, and take 
 her way with her maidens to the sea. As for the 
 game of ball played by her and her blameless 
 Phaeacian attendants there in the dawn of time 
 beside the primitive waves, what words save those 
 of Homer are adequate to describe it ! Who save 
 Homer could have put fitting speech into her 
 mouth before the naked stranger, or have filled 
 her mind with the innocent guile of the marriage- 
 able maiden ? " Shakspere," you answer, and 
 thinking of Ferdinand and Miranda I pause — and, 
 
248 THE LOVE OF POETRY 
 
 after due deliberation, reply " Not so." Beside 
 Nausicaa, even Miranda seems to me sophisticated, 
 though to say that appear at first blush to be 
 equivalent to saying that the sun in his meridian 
 splendor is jet black. But I do say it, because it 
 was not Shakspere's fortune first of mortals to 
 behold the filleted Muses advance from out the 
 mists of the young world's dawn, and take their 
 predestined places upon their golden and eternal 
 thrones. 
 
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