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TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 BY 
 
 LAFCADIO HEARN 
 
 SELECTED AND EDITED 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN ERSKINE, Ph.D. 
 
 Professor of English, Columbia University 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1920 
 
• • • 
 
 COPYBiGHT, 1915, 1917, 1920, 
 By MITCHELL MoDONALD 
 
 / i-l f) 
 
 WUHJH « 
 
 VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 
 •IMSMAMTOM AND NCW YORK 
 
 • ••••■• • 
 
 •••••••• 
 
 •T» • •• ••,•• • 
 
 
■PA/.5- 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Introduction vii 
 
 I On THE Relation of Life and Charac- 
 ter TO Literature i 
 
 II On Composition ....... 33 
 
 '^'III Studies of Extraordinary Prose ... 72 
 
 I The Norse Writers 72 
 
 II Sir Thomas Browne 86 
 
 III Bjornson 102 
 
 IV Baudelaire 120 
 
 IV The Value of the Supernatural in 
 
 Fiction 130 
 
 V The Question of the Highest Art . . 150 
 
 -fVI Tolstoi's Theory of Art 156 
 
 VII Note upon the Abuse and the Use of 
 
 Literary Societies 174 
 
 VIII On Reading . . . . . . . . .185 
 
 IX Literature and Public Opinion . . . 215 
 
 X Farewell Address 229 
 
 Index 239 
 
 4^9143 
 
These chapters are reprinted from Lafcadlo 
 Hearn's *' Interpretations of Literature," 1915* 
 and from his ''Life and Literature," 1917 — 
 collections of the lectures he gave at the Uni- 
 versity of Tokyo between 1896 and 1902. Since 
 the appearance of these lectures there has been 
 a demand for separate groups of them in a form 
 more available to the student. The present vol- 
 ume, therefore, brings together Hearn's remarks 
 on the art of writing, in the hope that such an 
 anthology of his principles and opinions may aid 
 those who aspire in the literary craft. 
 
 For the benefit of the reader who may make 
 
 the acquaintance of Hearn's lectures for the first 
 
 time in this volume, it should be said that he 
 
 lectured very slowly, choosing simple words and 
 
 constructions, in order that the foreign language 
 
 might be as easy as possible for his Japanese 
 
 students; and some of his students managed to 
 
 take down many of his lectures word for word. 
 
 From their notes — the only record we have of 
 
 Lafcadio Hearn the teacher — these chapters are 
 
 selected. No attempt has been made at what 
 
 might be called a reconstruction of the text. Ob- 
 
 vii 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 vious slips In single words and phrases have been 
 corrected, but passages of any elaborate difficulty 
 have been omitted. The punctuation has been 
 revised, and all dates, titles and quotations have 
 been verified. If there is any oversight in any 
 of these details, the fault is to be laid to the 
 editor and to the note-takers, not to the lecturer. 
 Should the reader be troubled by occasional repe- 
 titions in the various chapters, even by an occa- 
 sional contradiction, he should remember that 
 these are spoken words, which Hearn had no 
 opportunity to revise. 
 
 II 
 
 Lafcadio Hearn's ideas about the art of writing 
 are the Ideas not of a journaHst nor of a theorist, 
 but of one who practises the art. He had a very 
 simple body of doctrine, as available as truth it- 
 self, and perhaps as rarely attended to. Prob- 
 ably he would say that he gave his students noth- 
 ing new; yet what he says comes to us with the 
 force of originality, like all sincere remarks of 
 the craftsman on his experience and his ideals. 
 The most original thing an artist can do, he held, 
 is to tell the truth about life as he has lived it; 
 and the highest originality of the critic is to an- 
 nounce principles, however old, and deductions 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 from those principles, which he has arrived at 
 through experience. Of course the artist will give 
 us truth as it Ts affected by his own personaHty, 
 and the critic will give us principles as he inter- 
 prets them; the Intelligent reader, however, will 
 not be distressed by this mingling, will be pleased 
 by It, rather, since he can always distinguish and 
 enjoy separately both the experience recorded and 
 the poet's way of recording It, both the principles 
 of criticism and the attitude of the critic. 
 
 Lafcadio Hearn believed, in the first place, that 
 literature is an art of emotional expression — 
 that it Is the business of the writer to record an 
 emotion and to produce one. Obviously he fol- 
 lowed the romantic definition of literature, mak- 
 ing it practically Identical with what Sir Philip 
 Sidney meant when he spoke of poetry. This 
 prejudice of Hearn's for the literature of power, 
 for the books that move us, is somewhat singular 
 when we observe the keenness of his appreciation 
 for books of another kind, especially for philo- 
 sophical works such as the writings of his beloved 
 Herbert Spencer. The truth is that Hearn 
 started as a disciple of the romantic school, but 
 his intellectual interests were too great to be con- 
 fined within even romantic horizons. He seems 
 to have been a wide reader in every field, and 
 whatever he read he turned to account in the 
 judgments he pronounced upon life. We may 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 sometimes be uneasy when he limits the term lit- 
 erature to the books of emotional power; we 
 should like to include the great historians, the 
 great scientists and the great philosophers, who 
 have left their ideas in monumental books; but 
 our uneasiness is perhaps premature, for Hearn 
 had somewhat the attitude of the French race 
 which finds emotional possibilities even in the 
 realm of ideas, and to him a book of philosophy 
 can very well be emotional. If we take the lib- 
 erty, moreover, to substitute for his term litera- 
 ture the term poetry, we have no further occa- 
 sion to quarrel with him. Those books are 
 poetical which render the quality of experience, 
 which record not sensations, as he says, but our 
 \ judgment upon sensations, which is emotion. To 
 live In consciousness of the experience we are 
 having, with the mind thoroughly alert to our 
 own pronouncements of good and evil on each 
 moment, is to live poetically. Lafcadio Hearn 
 taught, therefore, that the art of writing is first 
 of all the art of observing one's relations to life, 
 one's emotions, one's memories, one's mature 
 judgments. In the second place the art of writ- 
 ing is the art of recording these memories, emo- 
 tions and judgments. His attitude toward litera- 
 ture needs, perhaps, no further definition. The 
 other Items in his theory are mere deductions from 
 this simple formula. 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 For example, he says that literature should be 
 moral. We are at first surprised to hear this 
 from him, who certainly had little sympathy with 
 those preaching tendencies which often mar the 
 aesthetic inspiration of English letters. We 
 should rather expect from him defence of art for 
 art's sake. But it is, as a matter of fact, when he 
 talks of art for art's sake, that he tells us that 
 literature should be moral. If when we read a 
 book we come in the presence of beauty and re- 
 spond emotionally to that presence, we are train- 
 ing our character and putting ourselves in an atti- 
 tude in which it will be more difficult to feel or 
 think or do an unworthy thing. The greater the 
 beauty which the book brings to us, the more pro- 
 nounced this moral effect will be. This doctrine 
 is of the utmost simplicity, and artists accept it 
 as an obvious statement of what men of their tem- 
 perament observe daily; when you leave the thea- 
 tre after a noble performance, or the concert hall 
 after hearing a great symphony, for the moment 
 at least you are lifted above mean considerations 
 and are less likely than at normal times to act in 
 an unworthy way. This is the effect of great art. 
 There are many readers, however, of the Puritan 
 or literal-minded tradition, who may misread the 
 doctrine — who may think, for example, that a 
 book, to be a work of art, and therefore to pro- 
 duce this moral effect, must concern itself with the 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 preaching of morality. Such readers may not un- 
 derstand that Hearn, like other artists, would get 
 from a page of Flaubert or Maupassant that 
 effect of beauty which in turn produces an eleva- 
 tion of morals. Can a book which deals with an 
 unhappy or not quite respectable subject be beau- 
 tiful, and thereby produce sound training in good- 
 ness? Hearn would answer yes, and he prob- 
 ably would add that in order to produce the train- 
 ing in goodness such a book must not preach, for 
 if it preached, it would be in danger of becoming 
 immoral. No doubt " Moll Flanders " was in- 
 tended by Defoe to teach a sound lesson, but the 
 effect of it is little short of prurient. Much of 
 " Madame Bovary," for an opposite example, is 
 intended to be a work of art, a picture of life 
 which should charm by its beauty; the effect of 
 it, thinks Hearn, is to make us wish, not to be 
 like Madame Bovary, but to be like the author of 
 the book, who could create a thing so beautiful. 
 The brief talk on the " Question of the High- 
 est Art " is important quite out of proportion to 
 its brevity, not only for the illustrations it gives 
 of this doctrine of morals in literature, but also 
 for the suggestion of an attendant truth not yet 
 fully investigated. To prove his point that the 
 highest kind of writing, though pursued for 
 esthetic reasons, will have a moral effect, Hearn 
 cites the experience of love, which furnishes mat- 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 ter for most western poetry, fiction and drama. 
 To love another Is a moral experience, he says, 
 even if the person loved be unworthy. Certainly 
 it is a great misfortune and a great folly to love a 
 bad person; but In spite of the misfortune and the 
 folly a certain moral experience comes of It, which 
 has immense value to a wholesome nature. The 
 experience is one which very few poets and phi- 
 losophers dwell upon; yet it is the Important, the 
 supremely Important, aspect of love. What is it? 
 It is the sudden impulse to unselfishness. Taking 
 it for granted, continues Hearn, that some forms 
 of beauty Inspire men with such affection as to 
 make them temporarily unselfish, there Is little 
 reason to doubt that in future very much higher 
 forms of beauty will produce the same effect. 
 What will those forms of beauty be? Hearn 
 does not know, but the mere suggestion of them 
 reminds us that no one yet knows with certainty 
 the effect of the kinds of beauty which art has 
 already produced. We do not know, for example, 
 the difference in character which would be effected 
 by continued reading of Browning, of Matthew 
 Arnold, of Swinburne. This problem of the 
 power of art on the audience must some day be 
 solved; no science of esthetics will begin to appeal 
 to us until it brings some sort of answer to the 
 question. Though he brought no answer, Hearn 
 constantly played with the mystery, and showed 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 that he realized its importance. So long as we 
 do not know what will happen to the man who 
 reads us, we may preserve our peace of mind by 
 pretending the influence of books is a matter of 
 fortune. When we finally discover, however, 
 what effect each kind of writing has, to write in 
 any kind will be to take a momentous moral de- 
 cision. 
 
 Ill 
 
 These general ideas of Hearn's about the art 
 of writing have a wide and persistent bearing. 
 Perhaps the novice will not be aware of It at 
 once. The reader of these lectures who desires 
 to become a writer will perhaps find a more im- 
 mediate interest in the specific things Hearn says 
 of the craft. First of all, the beginner will learn, 
 with it may be a check to his ardour, that litera- 
 ture is created only by unceasing discipline. The 
 art has been so long practised, Hearn thinks, that 
 we cannot afford to trust simply to native ability, 
 neglecting the hints and directions which our pre- 
 cursors might give us; the artist is primarily, 
 therefore, a disciple, willing to follow proved 
 methods and to master old technique. In the hope 
 of expriessing himself with some originality at 
 last. In this point of view Hearn was not de- 
 parting from the faith of that romantic period in 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 European literature with which his temperament 
 on the whole allied him; Shelley and Byron, Hugo 
 and Baudelaire were comparatively learned men, 
 steeped in old literature, and their technique was 
 not an improvisation but a turning of familiar in- 
 struments to new uses. Moreover, the great lib- 
 erating geniuses of the nineteenth century had a 
 training of the mind which gave them powers 
 of observation such as the improviser can hardly 
 possess. It is the mind that sees, rather than the 
 eye; the right kind of reading and the right sort 
 of meditation will do more to cure us of blind- 
 ness than even an adjustment of our glasses. Of 
 Hearn himself, whose eyesight was cruelly handi- 
 capped, it is said that his acuteness of observation 
 amazed his companions, as indeed it will always 
 astonish his readers. He was disciplined in the 
 two approaches to his art, — in the methods that 
 older masters had used, and in that keenness of 
 sight which is a skill, as I said, less of the eye 
 than of the mind. 
 
 Keenness of sight Hearn places first, as the 
 very foundation of the writer's art. When we 
 know what we wish to say, and not till then, we 
 shall know how to say it. But it is hard indeed 
 to know precisely what we wish to say, and in or- 
 der to secure any portion of this knowledge we 
 must cultivate vision both outward and inward. 
 We may think, for example, that we are familiar 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 with the appearance of our room at home, or of 
 the street down which we daily walk; but when 
 we have occasion to portray the room or the street 
 from memory, try as we will, we are not likely to 
 be faithful to more than a few facts, and those 
 facts, perhaps, will not be the ones we intended to 
 stress. Yet since those facts are the one grip 
 we have on reality, we must train ourselves, by 
 constant exercise of the memory and by compari- 
 son with the original, to see more facts of the 
 same kind, and to build up the picture of truth 
 from whatever foundation our memory thus by 
 instinct and training offers to us. Hearn illus- 
 trates his point by the story of the Japanese pain- 
 ter who when he drew horses always began at 
 the tail. The Westerner would perhaps begin at 
 the head, with some half-realized conviction that 
 the head affords a more auspicious start. But so 
 long as we begin with what we really see, it makes 
 no difference whether head, tail, or hoof show first 
 in the picture. Similarly, we should cultivate and 
 cherish clear sight if we desire to portray inward 
 things — an emotional experience, for example. 
 We must look at the emotion until we have 
 grasped all its features. At our first attempt to 
 record an experience so common yet so subtle, we 
 shall probably be chagrined to discover that the 
 emotion was vaguer than we fancied, and we 
 may too hastily abandon the attempt to record it 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 in words. We should write it down, however, as 
 faithfully as we can; after a few days we should 
 reread the account and substitute a clearer line 
 for whatever seems on that reading to be blurred; 
 after a few days more we should again reread and 
 reread and revise, always with the eye on our 
 memory of the experience, to make sure that the 
 portrait Is constantly approaching the original. 
 This Is severe discipline, but no good work, as 
 Hearn reminds us, can be done without Immense 
 pains. With practice the eye becomes quicker 
 and more critical, and therefore fewer revisions 
 are needed. 
 
 I have spoken of the picture of a thing and 
 the picture of an idea, in order to Illustrate the 
 twofold kind of sight which Hearn would have 
 us cultivate as a first step toward truth-telling in 
 art. But he has no use for the outward vision 
 without the Inward. The picture of the horse, 
 for example, would be meaningless for him if it 
 were merely photographic, if it left you In the 
 position of looking at the horse and nothing more. 
 For the purposes of art, he reminds us, every thing 
 and every experience should carry with it some 
 emotion peculiar to it and peculiar to us; if the 
 rose or the star stirs in the race certain feelings, 
 it should also produce in each of us our version, 
 as it were, of those feelings, and our account of 
 rose or star, therefore, should be marked by some 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 emotional accent peculiarly ours. It is in this 
 sense that art Is a criticism, or sifting, or Interpre- 
 tation, of life; as each of us sincerely reports the 
 truth, we indicate at the same time our Instinctive 
 judgment of what is significant in it. To be im- 
 portant to the human spirit, any statement of 
 truth, thinks Hearn, should be art — should con- 
 tain, that is, the judgment of the individual tem- 
 perament upon the facts. Because he finds this 
 value In the judgment passed upon the crude ex- 
 perience, Hearn is careful to say that art should 
 indicate emotion but not sensation — a quite dif- 
 ferent thing. Sensation is feeling without judg- 
 ment; emotion is the instinctive judgment passed 
 upon sensation. The man who stubs his toe on 
 a concealed brick may have the emotion of anger, 
 or of embarrassment, or of amusement; the sen- 
 sation In any case will have been the same. An 
 attempt to render the sensation without the emo- 
 tion would be as meaningless as an attempt to 
 paint a horse or a landscape without giving any 
 impression of pleasure or displeasure, of beauty 
 or ugliness. 
 
 In his own criticism Hearn left us many illus- 
 trations of the Insight he advocated. One is the 
 remarkable lecture on the value of the super- 
 natural in literature, in which he tells us that 
 what fascinates us in ghost stories is the recogni- 
 tion of emotions we have had In dreams, and that 
 
INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 a great story based on the supernatural must there- 
 fore follow closely the essential characteristics of 
 dream experience. But what are those charac- 
 teristics? He tells us with extraordinary preci- 
 sion, and identifies them in well known tales of 
 the supernatural. To be sure, he draws heavily 
 upon Herbert Spencer in his analysis of dream 
 experience, but he has made the theory his own, 
 and he shows his skill in observation by the bril- 
 liant identification of the theory with the exam- 
 ples he selects. His mind was trained by the 
 philosopher; his eye became consequently more 
 keen. A second illustration of his insight, and 
 one only less remarkable, is his discussion of the 
 Norse sagas and of Bjornson's writing. He is 
 making a contrast between the literature which 
 owes most to keen outward observation, and that 
 which is inward and reflective ; taking a hint from 
 Professor Ker, he shows how the Norse writers 
 give the incidents of an episode in the order in 
 which they presented themselves to the senses, 
 and that the resulting accuracy produces not only 
 the effect of great realism, but also paradoxically 
 the effect of strong personality. Even when we 
 decide to omit from our account of life all that 
 is peculiar to our point of view, our opinion as 
 to what is peculiar in our point of view will set 
 us off from other men. 
 
 When once the writer has seen clearly what he 
 
XX INTRODUCTION 
 
 wishes to say, he has but to find the word for it. 
 Hearn had a natural ear for style in the sense of 
 cadence and verbal decoration, but he resolutely 
 set himself against the admiration of language for 
 language's sake, in order to follow consistently 
 his principle that the idea or the emotion should 
 come first and the word or the phrase should adapt 
 itself to it. It is interesting to watch in the 
 chapter on Sir Thomas Browne, for example, how 
 enthusiastic Hearn really is about a style in which 
 music for its own sake counts as heavily as words 
 for the sake of precision; he loves the ground- 
 swell of Sir Thomas's style, yet he takes pains 
 to warn us against it, and against all seeking after 
 anything in language beyond the faithful service 
 of the subject matter. Here it seems to me 
 Hearn is quite right in his principle, but he presses 
 his principle somewhat narrowly. Granting that 
 the word and the phrase should faithfully serve 
 the subject matter, we may yet hold that there 
 is a subject matter which may properly be served 
 by a style wrought chiefly of verbal music. Not 
 all that Sir Thomas Browne had to convey is 
 summed up by a skeleton outline of his ideas. 
 His style marvellously suggests certain possibili- 
 ties and charms in his character, and without its 
 eloquence we should miss the best part of his con- 
 vincing personality. Hearn seems more at home 
 with his principle of language for the subject's 
 
INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 sake when he discusses individual words. His 
 skill in suggesting to a foreign audience what is 
 felt or half felt by the English reader in such a 
 word as " ghastly," for example, could hardly 
 be bettered by any criticism. In his search for 
 the right word he made himself a scholar of rare 
 sensitiveness, or perhaps it would be better to 
 say, a collector of dehcate connotations; whether 
 he talks from the point of view of the writer or 
 of the reader, his discussion of single words is a 
 most timely inspiration In these days when writers 
 for the most part have ceased to be sensitive to 
 the word and at best put attention only on the 
 large phrase. Hearn is singularly at home with 
 his principle also when he discusses such a style 
 as that of Baudelaire. The difficulty of what he 
 accomplished in his lecture on that French prose 
 poet will be realized if we recall that he was talk- 
 ing to a Japanese audience about the style of a 
 French author, and he lectured In English. Yet 
 we feel In every paragraph, whether he is discuss- 
 ing Baudelaire or translating him, some of that 
 quality in the French master which he is trying to 
 convey. 
 
 The most valuable counsel which Hearn gives 
 us in his discussion of language is the doctrine 
 that every literature must grow out of the vernac- 
 ular. This is a faith apparently understood only 
 by highly sophisticated civilizations. In the 
 
xxii INTRODUCTION 
 
 United States, for example, nothing is more vul- 
 gar at the present time than the half-mastered, 
 but academic, vocabulary used by the journalist 
 or the average magazine contributor In his serious 
 moments — that is, when he is not writing pal- 
 pable slang. It is the person of inadequate read- 
 ing who, when he tries to be dignified or effective, 
 reaches instinctively for a conventional vocabu- 
 lary. The really wise critic, however, has de- 
 veloped an ear for those racy and sincere parts of 
 the vocabulary which are not yet conventional 
 but still carry the smack of the environment and 
 the personality which produce them. Reading 
 over once more all that Hearn says of founding a 
 national literature on the vernacular, I cannot but 
 think of books and articles now discussed in our 
 journals which tell us that there is an American 
 language — as indeed there is — but which try 
 to prove the point by a summary of American 
 slang and American eccentricities. What Hearn 
 was looking for in vernacular speech was the beau- 
 tiful word and the precise word. His doctrine 
 so understood is as sound for us as it was for the 
 Japanese. 
 
INTRODUCTION xxiii 
 
 III 
 
 Next after his discussion of clearsightedness 
 and his doctrine of the vernacular vocabulary I 
 should put Hearn's constant advice to young writ- 
 ers to get some preliminary skill by translating. 
 It should not escape us that in all his talk of trans- 
 lation Hearn maintains at one and the same time 
 both the international and the national points of 
 view. Translation is good practise for the young 
 writer; it also serves to make nations known to 
 each other and to spread the commonwealth of 
 letters. So much for the international point of 
 view. The writer, however, who wishes to make 
 known his own country abroad should be as loy- 
 ally national in his creative work as he is hos- 
 pitably international in his translating. The two 
 points of view are supplemerrtary. When we 
 read or when we translate, we open our hearts to 
 news from other lands — indeed it is our hearts 
 we open, since by such exercises we are training 
 our sympathies as well as our minds to feel our 
 kinship with the race; but if the people of other 
 lands are to have the same benefit of information 
 when they translate our literature into their lan- 
 guage, we must take care that our writing^^will 
 give a faithful picture of our own life. ^he 
 kind of book that, from this point of v^ew, is 
 
xxiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 worth translating is that which will give most in- 
 formation about the race which produced it. 
 When we ourselves write, therefore, if we have 
 any idea that our work is ever to be of value out- 
 side our own borders, we should write of our- 
 selves, and should record not what we imagine 
 will concern the possible foreign reader who may 
 translate us, but what we know does concern us. 
 Hearn was perhaps impelled to give this advice 
 by the tendency among Japanese writers to imi- 
 tate Western literature. When we read the 
 translation of a short story or a novel from Nip- 
 pon, we are sometimes startled to observe that we 
 are merely meeting one more Tolstoi or Mere- 
 dith or Maupassant, transposed in manner but 
 still essentially European in spirit; whereas what 
 we want is not a reflection of the West but an in- 
 forming portrait of the East. Hearn felt that 
 Japan would profit by a knowledge of western 
 literature in translation, but that her own litera- 
 ture, if we are to profit by it, should be racial and 
 original. Once more the advice applies as well 
 to the United States as to Japan. At this mo- 
 ment we are in peculiar need of a contemporary 
 literature which will provide information about 
 us for the curiosity of other nations, yet we have 
 few novels or dramas or poems which on reflec- 
 tion we should care to distribute as our authentic 
 portrait. We have, however, a number of well- 
 
INTRODUCTION xxv 
 
 written books which reflect Europe and European 
 problems. 
 
 IV 
 
 I have mentioned the general attitude Heam 
 took toward literature, as an emotional art, as a 
 moral art, and as a discipline, and I have indi- 
 cated his emphasis upon clear vision as the key 
 to expression, his fear of style for its own sake, 
 his love of the right word and of the vernacular, 
 the value he set on translation both as literary 
 exercise and as international propaganda, and his 
 insistence upon nationalism in creative writing. 
 In his discussion of these points the reader will 
 observe that he was, as he said, a workman talk- 
 ing of his craft. Such talk is for me, at least, 
 the most precious kind of criticism. The poet 
 gives us his observations, his insights, of the ex- 
 perience of life; the critic in turn gives us his 
 observations of the experience of poetry. It is 
 the same art of seeing clearly and reporting cor- 
 rectly. The critic's insight, however, gains im- 
 mensely from the fact that what he talks about 
 he has himself often done. If there is, unfortu- 
 nately, no magic by which a Lafcadio Hearn can 
 teach us to write with his own skill, at least in his 
 talk of his beloved art there is a kindling elo- 
 
xxvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 quence that rouses in us something of his own de- 
 sire to see the beauty of life and to tell the truth 
 about it. 
 
TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
^•t 
 
 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ON THE RELATION OF LIFE AND CHARACTER TO 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 The three main divisions of literature are 
 poetry, drama and fiction. I want to speak of 
 these in relation to the lives of the men who en- 
 gage in their production. That is what is meant 
 by the title of the essay. This is a very import- 
 ant subject for every student of literature to con- 
 sider. Any one wishing to become an author in 
 any one of the three branches of literature that I 
 have mentioned, must ask himself honestly sev- 
 eral questions and be able to answer them in the 
 affirmative. If he cannot answer them in the 
 affirmative, he had better leave literature alone — 
 for the time being at least. 
 
 The first question is, Have I creative power? 
 That is to say. Am I able to produce either poetry, 
 or fiction, or drama, by my own experience, out 
 of my own mental operation, without following 
 the ideas of other people, or being influenced. 
 
^: . .. ...... .TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 consciously or unconsciously, only by the opinions 
 of others. If you cannot answer this question 
 with an honest " Yes," then you can only be an 
 imitator. 
 
 But suppose that you can answer this first ques- 
 tion in the affirmative, there remains another ques- 
 tion almost equally important to ask. It is this: 
 Can I devote my life — or at least the best part 
 of my leisure time — to literary work? If you 
 cannot be sure of much time to spare, you should 
 be sure, at least, of being able to give, every day 
 of your existence, a short time to one sustained 
 object. If you are not sure of being able to do 
 this, you will find the way of literature very hard 
 indeed. 
 
 But there is yet a third question to be asked. 
 Even if you have the power and the time, it is 
 necessary that you should determine this matter: 
 Must I mingle with society and take my part in 
 everyday life, or should I seek quiet and isolation? 
 The third question can be answered only accord- 
 ing to the character of your particular literary 
 power. Certain kinds of literature require soli- 
 tude — cannot be produced without it. Other 
 kinds of literature oblige the author, whether he 
 likes or does not like it, to mix a great deal with 
 people, to observe all their actions, and to fill 
 himself with every possible experience of active 
 life. 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 3 
 
 I think now the ground is swept. We can be- 
 gin the second section of the lecture. 
 
 II 
 
 What I have suggested in the above series of 
 questions, must now be dwelt upon in detail. Let 
 us first consider poetry in its relation to the con- 
 duct of life. 
 
 Poetry is not one of those forms of literature 
 which require that the author shall mix a great 
 deal with active life. On the contrary, poetry is 
 especially the art of solitude. Poetry requires a 
 great deal of time, a great deal of thought, a great 
 deal of silent work, and all the sincerity of which 
 a man's nature is capable. The less that a real 
 poet mingles with social life, the better for his 
 art. This is a well known fact in all countries. 
 It is so well known that if a young poet allows 
 himself to be flattered and petted and made much 
 of by the rich and mighty, it is commonly said 
 that he is going to be ruined. One cannot be 
 perfectly sincere to oneself and become an object 
 of fashionable attention. It is utterly impossible. 
 The art of poetry requires that the poet be as soli- 
 tary in his house as a priest. I do not mean that 
 it should be necessary to be an ascetic, or any- 
 thing of that kind, nor that he should not be 
 
4 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 troubled with family cares. It is very necessary 
 that he should have a family, and know all that 
 the family means, in order to be a good poet. 
 But he must certainly renounce what are gener- 
 ally called social pleasures. In the same degree 
 that he fails to do this, he is almost certain to fail 
 in his poetry. 
 
 Let us here consider a few extraordinary facts 
 about the poetical life. Of course you know that 
 poetry does not mean merely writing verses, no 
 matter how correct the verses may be. It means 
 the power to move men's hearts and minds by 
 verse. Now a Persian poet once observed that 
 no bad man could possibly become a poet. There 
 is a good deal of truth in that statement, not- 
 withstanding some apparent exceptions. You 
 have doubtless read that many European poets 
 were bad men. But you must take such state- 
 ments with a great deal of reserve and qualifica- 
 tion. I imagine, for example, that you will im- 
 mediately think of Byron. But Byron was not 
 fairly judged; and you must not allow yourselves 
 to accept any mere religious or social declara- 
 tion about the character of the poet. The real 
 facts are that Byron was unjustly treated and 
 goaded and irritated into immoral courses. 
 Moreover, the deeper nature of Byron was essen- 
 tially generous and sympathetic, and when he fol- 
 lows the inspiration of his deeper nature, he gives 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 5 
 
 us the best of what he has. I might speak of 
 many other poets ; you will always find that there 
 was something good and generous in the man, 
 however great his faults may have appeared on 
 the surface. Indeed, I knew only one or two ex- 
 ceptions to this Persian observation that no bad 
 man can be a poet, and these exceptions are not 
 satisfactory. We find in the time of the Italian 
 renaissance a few extraordinarily wicked men who 
 made a reputation as poets.- I might mention for 
 example the name of Malatesta. But when we 
 come to examine the literary work of this cruel 
 and ferocious man, we find that its only merit is 
 the perfect correctness of the verse. Perfectly 
 correct verse was greatly esteemed in that age; 
 but we are much wiser today. We now know 
 that no mere correctness qualifies verse as true 
 poetry; and I do not think that the Persian poet 
 would have found any poetry in the love verses of 
 the wicked Malatesta. 
 
 Of course when the Persian poet spoke of a 
 bad man, he meant what is bad according to the 
 consensus of human experience. I should not call 
 a man bad only because he happened to offend 
 against particular conventions. I should call a 
 man bad only in so far as his relation to others 
 proves him to be cruel, unfeeling, selfish, and un- 
 grateful. No such man as that can write poetry. 
 
 So the fundamental truth of this whole matter 
 
6 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 is simply that a poet must be born a poet — as 
 the Enghsh proverb says, " A poet is born, not 
 made." No amount of education will make a 
 man a poet. Every year in England two great 
 universities turn out about four thousand good 
 men stuffed with all that systematic education 
 can force Into them. German universities can 
 do better than that. French universities do quite 
 as well. But out of these thousands and thou- 
 sands, how many can become poets? Not half a 
 dozen in all the countries of Europe together. 
 Education will help a poet; It will greatly enrich 
 his powers of language; it will train his ear to the 
 charm of musical sound, and train his brain to 
 perceive all possible laws of proportion and taste 
 in form. But it cannot make him a poet. I sup- 
 pose there are today in England alone at least 
 thirty thousand people capable of writing almost 
 any form of correct verse. Yet perhaps not 
 even two of them are poets; for poetry is a 
 question of character and temperament. One 
 must be born with a love of the beautiful, with 
 great capacities for sympathy, with a certain gen- 
 tleness of disposition, in order to be able to act 
 upon the feelings of men through literature. 
 The qualities that make the poet belong to the 
 softer side of human nature — hence the proverb 
 that the poet Is a man who Is half a woman. I 
 think that you have all observed that certain ad- 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 7 
 
 mirable but hard kinds of mind are almost in- 
 sensible to sentiment in literature. As a general 
 rule — though exceptions have existed — math- 
 ematicians cannot be poets; the great Goethe, dis- 
 tinguished as he was In science by reason of his 
 constructive imagination, was singularly deficient 
 in mathematical capacity! It would appear that 
 certain powers of the mind cannot be cultivated 
 except at the expense of other faculties. Every- 
 where poets have been recognized as more or less 
 unpractical in active life; they rarely make good 
 business men; they never can do certain things re- 
 quiring insensiblhty to the feelings of others. 
 Essentially sympathetic, their conduct Is ruled in 
 all things by feelings rather than by cold reason, 
 and that Is why they very often make such unfor- 
 tunate mistakes. But they should be thought of 
 as representing In the highest degree what is emo- 
 tional in man. If the whole world were governed 
 by hard and fast rules, it would become very much 
 more difficult to live in than it now is because of 
 the poets who help to keep alive the more gen- 
 erous Impulses of human nature. That Is why 
 they have been called priests. 
 
 I do not think that in Japan the most difficult 
 form of sustained emotional effort has ever been, 
 comparable to the art of poetry In Western coun- 
 tries. It Is, indeed, such a difficult thing, to com- 
 pare the achievements of two countries, that if I 
 
8 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 were speaking only of poetry as embodied in 
 verse, I think that you would find my remarks 
 decidedly extravagant. But poetry is not con- 
 fined to forms of verse. There may be poetry 
 in beautiful prose; and some of the very best 
 English literature deserves to be qualified as 
 prose-poetry, because It produces the emotional 
 effect of verse. Now any form of literature that 
 really does this requires all the time and all the 
 power that the writer can spare. And It Is for 
 this reason that the life of the man who writes 
 it must be solitary — a life of devotion to art. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Let us now turn to fiction — excluding the 
 variety of It which might be termed prose-poetry. 
 Fiction should be. In these times, the Mirror of 
 Life. What is a man to do who would devote 
 his time and life In this direction? We must stop 
 and qualify. 
 
 Although there are nominally so many different 
 schools of European fiction — Classical, Roman- 
 tic, Realistic, Naturalistic, Psychological, Prob- 
 lematical, etc., etc., — we need not bother our- 
 selves with this variety of distinctions, but simply 
 divide fiction into two classes — subjective and 
 objective. Fiction Is either a picture of things 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 9 
 
 imagined, or a picture of things actually seen. 
 Can we make a preference? From the artistic 
 point of view I am not sure that we can; for, con- 
 trary to what vulgar public opinion believes, the 
 greatest works of fiction and drama have really 
 been subjective, not objective. I need not remind 
 you that Shakespeare did not see and did not ex- 
 perience the incidents of his astonishing plays, and 
 I need not remind you that the great Greek dram- 
 atists did not see the facts of tragedy which they 
 put upon the stage and which powerfully move 
 our hearts. This is an astonishing fact, that the 
 mind should perceive more clearly than the eyes 
 — but it Is only when the mind Is that of a genius. 
 From the artistic standpoint we cannot, neverthe- 
 less, dare to say that one method of literature is 
 necessarily better than the other, merely because 
 the greatest work happens to have been done by 
 that method. In some future time we might find ^ f^ 
 an objective method made equally great. And 
 from the individual point of view, from the point 
 of view of the young author, the young student, 
 a preference Is absolutely necessary. It Is all- 
 important that he should discover In what direc- 
 tion his literary strength Is growing. If he feels 
 that he can do better by Imagination than by ob- 
 servation, then let him by all means cultivate 
 romantic work. But if he feels sure that he can 
 do better by using his senses — by observing, 
 
lo TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 comparing — then he must, as a duty to himself, 
 adopt a realistic method. And the conduct of 
 his life in relation to literature must be decided 
 according to which path he decides to take. 
 
 As I told you, the highest forms of fiction 
 and drama have been the work of intuition, of 
 imagination. Thackeray, for example, no more 
 than Shakespeare actually saw or experienced 
 what he put into his novels. Yet those novels 
 much surpassed the novels of Miss Bronte, who 
 only wrote what she heard and saw and felt. If 
 you did not know the real facts of the case, you 
 would think that Thackeray was more realistic 
 than Miss Bronte. Great imaginative work is 
 more realistic than reahty itself, more ap- 
 parently objective than the result of objective 
 study. But as I reminded you, it is only 
 a genius who can reach this sort of realism 
 through intuition. However, there are minor de- 
 grees of genius. You must have noticed some 
 of these among yourselves. In any gathering 
 of students there are always a few remarkable 
 persons in whom the other students are will- 
 ing to put their trust whenever any emergency 
 arises. Suppose a thousand students are in a 
 difficult position of some kind or anxious about 
 something; presently out of that thousand, lead- 
 ers or guides or advisors would come forward. 
 It is not necessary at all that they should 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER ii 
 
 be particularly strong or formidable persons; 
 what is wanted in a time of embarrassment or 
 danger Is a good head, not a strong arm. You 
 instinctively know, I presume, that he who has the 
 best head among you is not necessarily the best 
 scholar. It Is not scholarship that is needed for 
 difficult circumstances; it is what we call ^' mother- 
 wit," strong common sense, that is what we com- 
 monly mean In England by '' a good head." 
 Persons of this kind do not often make mistakes. 
 Notice how they act when they come in contact 
 with strangers — they remain quite at ease, unem- 
 barrassed, and they know what to do and what to 
 say on meeting extraordinary persons or extra- 
 ordinary events. Now what is this power, this 
 " mother-wit "? It is a kind of strong intuition. 
 It is the best of all wits that a man can be born to. 
 If a man have this gift in a very great degree, 
 and if he happen at the same time to have a love 
 of literature, he can be a great dramatist or a 
 great novelist. There Is the real subjective 
 worker. He has no difficulty in creating imagi- 
 nary persons, and making them perform their 
 parts; he has been born with the knowledge of 
 what most kinds of men and women would do 
 under certain circumstances. But a high degree 
 of genius is not often found in this direction; all 
 that I want you to bear clearly in mind, is that 
 for subjective work, imaginative work, you must 
 
12 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 know yourselves to possess a certain amount of 
 this intuition. Unless you have it, it were better 
 to work in other directions. 
 
 The dramatic faculty, this true creative power 
 of which I am speaking, is always rare in the 
 highest degree. When we find it at all in these 
 days, we find it only in minor degrees. Very 
 possibly it exists in varying states in minds that 
 never cultivate it — not at least in a literary di- 
 rection. For men having this power now-a-days 
 are likely to use their constructive imagination in 
 directions which assure material success much 
 more certainly than literature can ever do. They 
 may become diplomatists, or great men of busi- 
 ness, or bankers, or political leaders; their knowl- 
 edge of human nature and their intuition of hu- 
 man motives can help them equally well in many 
 other directions besides literature, and in most 
 directions vastly better. This is a very different 
 kind of character from the character of the emo- 
 tional poet. It is much more varied, and it is 
 much stronger. To speak of any rules for the 
 conduct of literary life in the case of such men is 
 useless. They need no counsel. They do very 
 much as they please, and obstacles never dis- 
 hearten them. It is worth noting, however, that 
 they generally take an active part in social life; 
 it is more interesting for them than a play; it 
 furnishes them with continual motives of inspira- 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 13 
 
 tion; and It has no terror for them of any kind. 
 They are like strong swimmers accustomed to 
 surf. I suppose you know that while almost 
 everybody knows how to swim more or less, surf- 
 swimmers are not very common. In Amerita 
 or other countries good surf-swimmers get high 
 wages in the Government life-saving service; one 
 must not only have learned from childhood, but 
 must have great natural strength and skill. Now 
 in the great sea of social life, where clumsy peo- 
 ple are so easily drowned, the character of which 
 I speak Is like that of a strong surf-swimmer. 
 He has nothing to fear from breakers. Observe 
 also that men of this class, as the history of 
 English literature especially shows, always find 
 time to do what they want, and do not trouble 
 themselves much about the " wear and tear " of 
 social duty. Take, for example, the history of 
 Victorian literature. Only one of the four great 
 Victorian poets possessed the dramatic faculty in 
 a high degree — Robert Browning. Tennyson, 
 Rossetti, and Swinburne led lives of solitude and 
 meditation ; Browning on the other hand was con- 
 stantly in society, studying human nature as well 
 as obtaining enjoyment from social experience. 
 Or take again the prose-writers. The great ro- 
 mantic novelists were all solitary men; the great 
 dramatic novelists were essentially social men. 
 Thackeray, for Instance, was especially a man of 
 
14 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 society. Or to take a still later example, Mere- 
 dith, the greatest of English psychological novel- 
 ists, Is of course a social figure. It was In the life 
 of the upper classes that he found the substance 
 of his extraordinary novels. Not to multiply ex- 
 amples, which would require too much time, It 
 may be said that as a general rule, solitude Is of 
 no use to men of .creative genius. 
 
 IV 
 
 I think I have shown you, or suggested to you, 
 that two great departments of literature — the 
 emotional, as represented especially by poetry; 
 and the creative, as especially represented by 
 drama or the dramatic novels — depend alto- 
 gether upon character, upon Inheritance. You 
 cannot make a great poet or a great dramatist by 
 education, though education may help. And you 
 have seen that the two kinds of character belong- 
 ing respectively to romantic literature and to 
 realistic literature are almost exactly opposed to 
 each other. Both are rare. It Is not likely In 
 these days that many among us can hope to be- 
 long to either class. We generally know whether 
 we belong to one or the other of them at an 
 early period of life. The extraordinary facul- 
 ties usually, though not always, manifest them- 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 15 
 
 selves in youth. It is true that, very rarely, a 
 great talent only develops about middle age — 
 this occurring chiefly in the case of prose-writers. 
 But unless we have the very best of reasons to be- 
 lieve ourselves born to great things in literature, 
 it is much better not to imagine that we have any 
 special mission. Most students of literature are 
 more likely to belong to the third class than to 
 either of the classes preceding, and it is of the 
 third class especially that something useful may 
 be said. 
 
 The ordinary class of literary men must de- 
 pend chiefly upon observation and constant prac- 
 tice. They cannot hope for sudden inspiration or 
 for extraordinary intuition. They must find 
 truth and beauty by painfully searching for them; 
 and they can learn how to express what they see 
 and feel only by years of study and application. 
 Education for these is almost, though not abso- 
 lutely, indispensable. I say " not absolutely," be- 
 cause self-training can sometimes supply all, and 
 more, that the ordinary education is capable of 
 giving. But as a rule to which the exceptions 
 are few, the ordinary student must depend upon 
 his college training. Without it, it is very likely 
 that he will always remain in his work what we 
 call in literature " provincial." Provincialism as 
 a literary term does not mean a country tone, a 
 rustic clumsiness of thinking and speaking; it 
 
1 6 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 means a strong tendency to the commonplace, an 
 inclination to dwell upon things universally known 
 as if they were new discoveries; and it also means 
 the habit of allowing oneself to be so unduly in- 
 fluenced by some one book or another, or by one 
 class of ideas, that any well-educated reader rec- 
 ognizes at once the source of every idea expressed. 
 This is provincialism. The great danger in self- 
 education is that it leaves a man all his life in the 
 provincial stage, unless he happens to have ex- 
 traordinary chances, extraordinary tastes, and 
 very much time to cultivate both. 
 
 The most important thing for the literary stu- 
 dent, with a university training, to do at the be- 
 ginning of a literary career, is to find out as soon 
 as possible in what direction his intellectual 
 strength chiefly lies. It may take years to find 
 this out; but until it is found out he is scarcely 
 likely to do anything great. Where absolute 
 genius does not exist, literature must depend upon 
 the cultivation of a man's best faculties in a single 
 direction. To attempt work in a number of di- 
 rections is always hazardous, and seldom gives 
 good results. Every literary man has to arrive at 
 this conclusion. It is true that you find in foreign 
 literature cases of men not absolute geniuses, who 
 have done well both in poetry and in prose, or in 
 prose-fiction and in drama — that is, in appar- 
 ently two directions. I should not instance Vic- 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 17 
 
 tor Hugo; his is a case of pure genius; but I 
 should take such examples as Meredith in Eng- 
 land, or Bjornson in Norway, as better illustrat- 
 ing what I wish to say. You must remember that 
 in cases like these the two different kinds of litera- 
 ture produced are really very close to each other, 
 so close that one absolutely grows out of the 
 other. For example, the great Norwegian dram- 
 atist began as a writer of stories and novels, all 
 of which were intensely dramatic in form. From 
 the dramatic novel to the play is but a short step. 
 Or in the case of the English novelist and poet, 
 we really find illustrations of only one and the 
 same faculty both in his poetry and in his prose. 
 The novels in one case are essentially psycholog- 
 ical novels; the poetry is essentially psychological 
 poetry. Again Browning's plays are scarcely 
 more than the development in dramatic form of 
 the ideas to be found in the dramatic poems. Or 
 take the case of Kingsley — essentially a roman- 
 tic — romantic of the very first class. He was 
 great in poetry and great in prose; but there is 
 an extraordinary resemblance between the poetry 
 and the prose in his case, and he was wise enough 
 to write very little poetry, for he knew where his 
 chief strength lay. If you want to see and judge 
 for yourself, observe the verse of Kingsley's poem 
 on *' Edith of the Swan-Neck," and then read a 
 page or two of the romance of " Hereward." I 
 
1 8 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 could give you fifty examples of the same kind in 
 English literature. Men have succeeded in two 
 directions only when one of these naturally led 
 into the other. But no student should make the 
 serious mistake — a mistake which hundreds of 
 trained English men of letters are making today 
 — of trying to write in two entirely different and 
 opposed directions — for example, in romantic 
 poetry and realistic prose. It is very necessary 
 to know in which way your tastes should be culti- 
 vated, in which way you are most strong. Me- 
 diocrity is the certain result of not knowing. For 
 after all, this last class of literature, like every 
 other, depends for success upon character — upon 
 inborn conditions, upon inheritance of tastes and 
 feelings and tendencies. Once that you know 
 these, the way becomes plain, though not smooth; 
 everything thereafter depends upon hard work, 
 constant effort. 
 
 Should one seek or avoid solitude in the pur- 
 suance of this ordinary class of literary aims? 
 That again depends upon character. It is first 
 necessary to know your strength, to decide upon 
 the direction to take; these things having been set- 
 tled, you must know whether you have to depend 
 upon feeling and imagination as well as upon ob- 
 servation, or upon observation only. Your nat- 
 ural disposition will then instruct you. If you 
 find that you can work best in solitude, it is a duty 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 19 
 
 both to yourself and to literature to deny your- 
 self social engagements that may interfere with 
 the production of good work. 
 
 All this leads to the subject of an extraordinary 
 difficulty in the way of any new Japanese litera- 
 ture, a difficulty about which I wanted to talk to 
 you from the first. I think you know that leisure 
 is essential to the production of any art in any 
 country — that is, any national art. I am not 
 speaking of those extraordinary exceptions fur- 
 nished by men able to produce wonderful things 
 under any circumstances. Such exceptional men 
 do not make national art; they produce a few 
 inimitable works of genius. An art grows into 
 existence out of the slow labour and thought and 
 feelings of thousands. In that sense, leisure is 
 absolutely necessary to art. Need I remind you 
 that every Japanese art has been the result of 
 generations of leisurely life? Those who made 
 the now famous arts of Japan — literature as 
 well as ceramics or painting or metal work — 
 were not men who did their work in a hurry. 
 Nobody was in a hurry in ancient times. Those 
 elaborate ceremonies, now known as tea-cere- 
 monies, indicate the life of a very leisurely and 
 very aesthetic period. I mention that as one 
 illustration of many things. Today, although 
 some people try to insist that the arts of Japan 
 are as flourishing as ever, the best judges frankly 
 
ao TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 declare that the old arts are being destroyed. It 
 is not only foreign influence in the shape of bad 
 taste that is destroying them; it is the want of 
 leisure. Every year the time formerly allowed 
 for pleasure of any kind is becoming more and 
 more curtailed. None of you who are here 
 listening to me can fail to remember a period 
 when people had much more time than they have 
 now. And none of you will fail to see a period 
 in which the want of time will become much more 
 painful, much more terrible than at present. For 
 your civilization is gradually but surely taking an 
 industrial character; and in the time when it shall 
 have become almost purely industrial there will 
 be very little leisure indeed. Very possibly you 
 are thinking that England, Germany, and France 
 are essentially industrial countries — though able 
 to produce so much art. But the conditions are 
 not the same. Industrialism in other countries 
 has not rendered impossible the formation of 
 wealthy leisure classes; those leisure classes still 
 exist, and they have rendered possible, especially 
 in England, the production of great literature. 
 A very long time indeed must elapse before Japan 
 can present an analogous condition. 
 
 The want of time you will feel every year more 
 and more. And there are other and more seri- 
 ous difficulties to think about. Every few years 
 young Japanese scholars who have been trained 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 21 
 
 abroad In the universities of Europe — who have 
 been greatly praised there, and who show every 
 promise — return to Japan. After their return, 
 what a burden of obhgations is thrust upon their 
 shoulders ! They have, to begin with, to assume 
 the cares of a family; they have to become public 
 officers, and to perform official duty for a much 
 greater number of hours than would be asked of 
 men in similar positions abroad; and under no 
 circumstances can they hope for that right to dis- 
 pose of their own time which is allowed to pro- 
 fessors in foreign countries. No; they must at 
 once accept onerous positions which involve hun- 
 dreds of duties and which are very likely to keep 
 a man occupied on many days of the year from 
 sunrise until a late hour of the night. Even what 
 are thought and what used really to be pleasur- 
 able occasions, have ceased to be pleasing; time is 
 lacking for the pleasure, but the fatigue and the 
 pain remain. I need not particularize how many 
 festivals, banquets, public and private celebra- 
 tions, any public official Is obliged to attend. At 
 present this cannot be helped. It is the struggle 
 between the old state and the new; and the re- 
 adjustment will take many years to effect. But 
 is it any wonder that these scholars do not pro- 
 duce great things in literature? It is common for 
 foreigners to say that the best Japanese scholars 
 do not seem to do anything after they return to 
 
22 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 Japan. The fact is that they do too much, but 
 not of the kind that leaves a permanent work. 
 
 Most of you, whether rich or otherwise, will be 
 asked after your university life is over to do a 
 great deal too much. I imagine that most of you 
 will have to do the work of at least three men. 
 Trained teachers, trained officers, trained men of 
 any kind, are still rare. There are not enough 
 of them; there is too much to do, and too few 
 men to do it. And in the face of these unques- 
 tionable facts, how can you hope to produce any 
 literature? Assuredly It Is very discouraging. 
 It could not be more discouraging. 
 
 There is an old English proverb that seems 
 opportune In this connection : 
 
 For every trouble under the sun 
 There is a remedy, or there Is none. 
 If there is one, try to find it; 
 If there be none, never mind it. 
 
 I think you will agree with me that the remedy 
 is for the moment out of the question; and our 
 duty is to " never mind It," as the proverb says. 
 Discouraging for literature though the prospect 
 seems, I think that strong minds should not be 
 frightened by it, but should try to discover 
 whether modern English literature does not offer 
 us some guiding examples in this relation. It cer- 
 tainly does. A great deal of excellent English 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 23 
 
 literature belonging to that third class which I 
 have specified, has been created under just the 
 same kind of disheartening circumstances. Great 
 poetry has not been written under these conditions 
 — that requires solitude. Great drama and 
 great dramatic novels have never been produced 
 under such conditions. But the literature of the 
 essay, which is very important; the great litera- 
 ture of short stories; and a great deal of thought- 
 ful work of the systematic order, such as historical 
 or social or critical studies, — all this has been 
 done very successfully by men who have had no 
 time to call their own during sunlight. The lit- 
 erature of observation and experience, and the 
 literature of patient research, do not require days 
 of thought and leisure. Much of such work has 
 been produced, for many generations In England,. 
 a little at a time, every night, before going to 
 bed. For example, there is an emment English- 
 man of letters named Morley of whom you have 
 doubtless heard — the author of many books, and 
 a great influence in literature, who Is also ones 
 of the busiest of English lawyers and statesmen. 
 For forty or fifty years this man had never a 
 single hour of leisure by day. All his books were 
 produced, a page or two at a time, late in the 
 evening after his household had gone to sleep. 
 It is not really so much a question of time for this 
 class of literature as a question of perfect regu- 
 
24 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 larity of habits. Even twenty minutes a day, or 
 twenty minutes a night, represents a great deal 
 in the course of a couple of years, and may be so 
 used as to produce great results. The only thing 
 Is that this small space of time should be utilized 
 regularly as the clock strikes — never interrupted 
 except by unavoidable circumstances, such as sick- 
 ness. To fatigue one's body, or to injure one's 
 eyesight, by a useless strain Is simply a crime. 
 But that should not be necessary under any cir- 
 cumstances In good health. Nor Is It necessary 
 to waste time and effort in the production of ex- 
 actly so much finished manuscript. Not at all. 
 The work of literature should especially be a 
 work of thinking and feeling; the end to be greatly 
 insisted upon is the record of every experience of 
 thought and feeling. Make the record even in 
 pencil, in short hand, in the shape of little draw- 
 ings — it matters not how, so long as the record 
 is sufficient to keep fresh the memory when you 
 turn to It again. I am quite sure that the man 
 who loves literature and enjoys a normal amount 
 of good health can make a good book within a 
 year or two, no matter how busy he may other- 
 wise be, if he will follow systematic rules of work. 
 You may ask what kind of work is good to be- 
 gin with. I have no hesitation in replying, trans- 
 lation. Translation is the best possible prepara- 
 tion for original work, and translations are vastly 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 25 
 
 needed In Japan. No knowledge of Western lit- 
 erature can ever become really disseminated In 
 Japan merely through the university and the 
 school; It can be disseminated only through trans- 
 lations. The Influence of French, or German, of 
 Spanish, Italian, and Russian literatures upon 
 English literature has been very largely effected 
 through translations. Scholarship alone cannot 
 help the formation of a new national literature. 
 Indeed, the scholar, by the very nature of his oc- 
 cupation, is too apt to remain unproductive. 
 After some work of this kind, original work 
 should be attempted. Instinctively some Japan- 
 ese scholars have been doing this very thing; they 
 have been translating steadily. But there they 
 have mostly stopped. Yet, really, transla- 
 tion should be only the first step of the literary 
 ladder. 
 
 As to original work, I have long wanted to 
 say to you something about the real function of 
 literature In relation not to the public, but to the 
 author himself. That function should be moral. 
 Literature ought to be especially a moral exer- 
 cise. When I use the word moral, please do not 
 understand me to mean anything religious, or 
 anything in the sense of the exact opposite of Im- 
 moral. I use It here only In the meaning of self- 
 culture — the development within us of the best 
 and strongest qualities of heart and mind. Lit- 
 
26 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 erature ought to be, for him that produces it, the 
 chief pleasure and the constant consolation of life. 
 Now, old Japanese customs recognized this fact 
 in a certain way. I am referring to the custom 
 of composing poetry in time of pain, in time of 
 sorrow, in all times of mental trials, as a moral 
 exercise. In this particular form the custom is 
 particularly Japanese, or perhaps in origin Chin- 
 ese, not Western. But I assure you that among 
 men of letters in the West, the moral idea has 
 been followed for hundreds of years, not only in 
 regard to poetry, but in regard to prose. It has 
 not been understood by Western writers in the 
 same sharp way; it has not been taught as a rule of 
 conduct; it has not been known except to the elect, 
 the very best men. But the very best men have 
 found this out; and they have always turned to 
 literature as a moral consolation for all the 
 troubles of life. Do you remember the story of 
 the great Goethe, who when told of the death of 
 his son, exclaimed " Forward, across the dead '' 
 — and went on with his work? It was not the 
 first time that he had conquered his grief by turn- 
 ing his mind to composition. Almost any author 
 of experience learns to do something of this 
 kind. Tennyson wrote his ''In Memoriam '* 
 simply as a refuge from his great grief. Among 
 the poets about whom I lectured to you this year, 
 there is scarcely one whose work does not yield 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 27 
 
 a record of the same thing. The lover of litera- 
 ture has a medicine for grief that no doctor can 
 furnish; he can always transmute his pain into 
 something precious and lasting. None of us in 
 this world can expect to be very happy; the pro- 
 portion of happiness to unhappiness in the aver- 
 age human life has been estimated as something 
 less than one-third. No matter how healthy or 
 strong or fortunate you may be, every one of you 
 must expect to endure a great deal of pain; and 
 it is worth while for you to ask yourselves whether 
 you cannot put it to good use. For pain has a 
 very great value to the mind that knows how to 
 utilize it. Nay, more than this must be said; 
 nothing great ever was written, or ever will be 
 written, by a man who does not know pain. All 
 great literature has its source in the rich soil of 
 sorrow; and that is the real meaning of the fa- 
 mous verses of Goethe : 
 
 Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate, — 
 Who ne'er the lonely midnight hours, 
 Weeping upon his bed has sat, — 
 He knows ye not, ye Heavenly powers. 
 
 Emerson has uttered very nearly the same idea 
 with those famous verses in which he describes 
 the moral effect upon a strong mind of the great 
 sorrow caused by the death of the woman be- 
 loved : 
 
28 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 Though thou loved her as thyself, 
 
 As a self of purer clay, 
 
 Though her parting dims the day. 
 
 Stealing grace from all alive — 
 
 Heartily know, 
 
 When half-gods go 
 
 The Gods arrive! 
 
 That is to say, even if you loved that woman 
 more than yourself and thought of her as a being 
 superior to humanity, even if with her death the 
 whole world seemed to grow dark, and all 
 things to become colourless, and all life to lose its 
 charm; that grief may be good for you. It is 
 only when the demi-gods, the half-gods, have left 
 us, that we first become able to understand and 
 to see the really divine. For all pain helps to 
 make us wise, howevermuch we may hate it at the 
 time. Of course it is only the young man who 
 sits upon his bed at midnight and weeps; he is 
 weak only for want of experience. The mature 
 man will not weep, but he will turn to literature 
 in order to compose his mind; and he will put his 
 pain into beautiful songs or thoughts that will 
 help to make the hearts of all who read them 
 more tender and true. 
 
 Remember, I do not mean that a literary man 
 should write only to try and forget his suffering. 
 That will do very well for a beginning, for a boy- 
 ish effort. But a strong man ought not to try to 
 forget in that way. On the contrary, he should 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 29 
 
 try to think a great deal about his grief, to think 
 of it as representing only one little drop in the 
 great sea of the world's pain, to think about it 
 bravely, and to put his thoughts about it into 
 beautiful and impersonal form. Nobody should 
 allow himself for a moment to imagine that his 
 own particular grief, that his own private loss, 
 that his own personal pain, can have any value in 
 literature, except in so far as it truly represents 
 the great pain of human life. 
 
 Above all things the literary man must not be 
 selfish in his writing. No selfish reflection is 
 likely to have the least value; that is why no 
 really selfish person can ever become either a 
 great poet or a great dramatist. To meet and to 
 master pain, but especially to master it, is what 
 gives strength. Men wrestle in order to become 
 strong; and for mental strength, one must learn 
 to wrestle with troubles of all kinds. Think of 
 all the similes in literature that express this truth 
 — about fire separating the gold from the rock, 
 about stones becoming polished by striking to- 
 gether in the flow of a stream, about a hundred 
 natural changes representing the violent separa- 
 tion or the destruction of what is superficial. 
 
 Better than any advice about methods or mod- 
 els, is I think the simple counsel: Whenever you 
 are in trouble and do not know exactly what to 
 do, sit down and write something. 
 
30 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 Yet one more thing remains to be said, and it 
 is not unimportant. It is this: A thing once 
 written is not literature. The great difference 
 between literature and everything included under 
 the name of journalism lies in this fact. No man 
 can produce real literature at one writing. I | 
 know that there are a great many stories about 
 famous men sitting down to write a wonderful 
 book at one effort, and never even correcting the 
 manuscript afterwards. But I must tell you that 
 the consensus of literary experience declares 
 nearly all these stories to be palpable lies. To 
 produce even a single sentence of good literature 
 requires that the text be written at least three 
 times. But for one who is beginning, three times 
 three were not too much. And I am not speak- 
 ing of poetry at all — that may have to be writ- 
 ten over as many as fifty times before the proper 
 effect is attained. You will perhaps think this is 
 a contradiction of what I told you before, about 
 the great value of writing down, even in pencil, 
 little notes of your thoughts and feelings. But 
 the contradiction only seems; really there is no 
 contradiction at all. The value of the first notes 
 is very great — greater than the value of any in- 
 termediate form. But the writer should remem- 
 ber that such notes represent only the outline of 
 the foundation, the surveying and the clearing of 
 the ground on which his literary structure is 
 
LIFE AND CHARACTER 31 
 
 slowly and painfully to be raised. The first notes 
 do not express the real thought or the real feel- 
 ing, no matter now carefully you try to write 
 them. They are only signs, ideographs, helping 
 you to remember. And you will find that to re- 
 produce the real thought faithfully in words will 
 require a great deal of time. I am quite sure 
 that few of you will try to do work in this way 
 in the beginning; you will try every other way 
 first, and have many disappointments. Only pain- 
 ful experience can assure you of the necessity of 
 doing this. For literature more than for any 
 other art, the all-necessary thing is patience. 
 That is especially why I cannot recommend jour- 
 nalism as a medium of expression to literary stu- 
 dents — at least, not as a regular occupation. 
 For journalism cannot wait, and the best litera- 
 ture must wait. 
 
 I am not sure that these suggestions can have 
 any immediate value; I only hope that you will 
 try to remember them. But in order to test the 
 worth of one of them, I very much hope that 
 somebody will try the experiment of writing one 
 little story or narrative poem, putting it in a 
 drawer, writing it over again, and hiding it again, 
 month after month, for the time of one year. 
 The work need not take more than a few minutes 
 every day after the first writing. After the last 
 writing at the end of the year, if you read it over 
 
32 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 again, you will find that the difference between 
 the first form and the last Is exactly like the dif- 
 ference of seeing a tree a mile off, first with the 
 naked eye, and afterwards with a very powerful 
 telescope. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ON COMPOSITION 
 I 
 
 I hope to give, at least once in each term, a 
 short lecture upon the practical part of literature 
 and literary study. This will be, or ought to be, 
 of much more value to you than there could be 
 in a single lecture upon the characteristics of an 
 author. I want to speak to you only as a practi- 
 cal man-of-letters, as one who has served his ap- 
 prenticeship at the difficult trade of literature. 
 Please understand that in saying this, I am saying 
 only "I am a workman," just as a carpenter 
 would say to you " I am a carpenter," or a smith, 
 " I am a smith." This does not mean in any 
 sense that I am a good workman. I might be a 
 very bad workman, and still have the right to 
 call myself a workman. When a carpenter tells 
 you, " I am a carpenter," you can beHeve him; 
 but that does not mean that he thinks himself a 
 good carpenter. As for his work, you can judge 
 of that when you find occasion to pay for it. But 
 whether the man be a clumsy and idle workman, 
 or be the best carpenter in town, you know that 
 
 33 
 
34 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 he can tell you something which you do not know. 
 He has learned how to handle tools, and how to 
 choose the kind of wood best adapted to certain 
 sorts of manufacture. He may be a cheat; he 
 may be very careless about what he does; but it Is 
 quite certain that you could learn something from 
 him, because he has served an apprenticeship, and 
 knows, by constant practice of hand and eye, how 
 a carpenter's work should be done. 
 
 So much for my position in the matter. Now I 
 want to begin my lecture by trying to disabuse 
 your minds of two or three common errors in re- 
 gard to literary composition. I do not say that 
 you all indulge these errors; but I think it not 
 improbable. The first error against which I wish 
 to warn you is the very widespread error that the 
 making of hterature — that is to say, the writ- 
 ing of books or poems — is a matter that you can 
 learn through education, through the reading of 
 books, through the mastery of theories. I am 
 going to be absolutely frank with you, but quite 
 heterodox notwithstanding, by telling you that 
 education will not help you to become a poet or a 
 story-teller any more than it could help you to 
 become a carpenter or a blacksmith. There are 
 accessible to you, in libraries, any number of 
 books and treatises about different kinds of 
 woods, about different kinds of tools, and about 
 the Industry of woodwork. You might read all 
 
ON COMPOSITION 35 
 
 of these, and learn by heart every fact of im- 
 portance that they contain; but that would not 
 enable you to make with your own hands a good 
 table or a good chair. So reading about writing 
 will not teach you how' to write. Literature is 
 exactly like a trade in this sense that it can only 
 be acquired by practice. I know that such a 
 statement will shock certain persons of much more 
 learning than I could ever hope to acquire. But 
 I believe this would be entirely due to what is 
 called educational bias. The teachers who teach 
 that literature as a practical art has anything to 
 do with the mere study of books, seem to forget 
 that much of the world's greatest literature was 
 made before there were any books, that the poems 
 of Homer were composed before there were any 
 schools or grammars, that the sacred books of 
 nearly all the great civilizations were written 
 without rules, either grammatical or other — and 
 yet these works remain our admiration for all 
 time. 
 
 Another error to be considered, is that the 
 structure of your own language is of such a kind 
 that Western rules of literary art could not be 
 applied to it. But if there be any truth in such 
 a belief, it is truth of a most unimportant kind. 
 As I have told you that a knowledge of literary 
 technicalities, grammatical or prosodical, will not 
 teach you how to write, you will already be able 
 
36 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 to guess how little I think of the importance to 
 you of what are commonly called rules of com- 
 position. These foreign rules, indeed, are not 
 applicable to your language; but they have no 
 value whatever in the sense I mean. Let us for 
 the time being throw all such rules overboard, and 
 not even think about them. And now that the 
 position is thus made clear, or at least clearer, let 
 me say that the higher rules of literature are uni- 
 versal, and apply equally well to every language 
 under the sun, no matter what its construction. 
 For these universal rules have to do only with 
 the truth ; and truth is truth everywhere, no mat- 
 ter in what tongue it may be spoken. Presently 
 we shall turn back to the subject of the universal 
 rule — indeed it will form the principal part of 
 this lecture. 
 
 The third error against which I wish to warn 
 you Is the foolish belief that great work, or even 
 worthy work, can be done without pains — with- 
 out very great pains. Nothing has been more 
 productive of Injury to young literary students 
 than those stories, or legends, about great writers 
 having written great books in a very short time. 
 They suggest what must be in a million cases im- 
 possible, as a common possibility. You hear of 
 Johnson having written " Rasselas " in a few 
 weeks, or of Beckford having done a similar 
 thing, of various other notables never correcting 
 
ON COMPOSITION 37 
 
 their manuscript — and the youth who has much 
 self-confidence imagines that he can do the same 
 thing and produce hterature. I do not beheve 
 those stories. I do not say exactly that they are 
 not true; I only say that I do not believe them, 
 and that the books, as we have them now, cer- 
 tainly represent much more than the work of a 
 few weeks or even months. It is much more val- 
 uable to remember that Gray passed fourteen 
 years in correcting and Improving a single poem, 
 and that no great poem or book, as we now have 
 the text, represents the first form of the text. 
 Take, for example, the poets that we have been 
 reading. It Is commonly said that Rossettl's 
 *' Blessed Damosel " was written In his nineteenth 
 year. This Is true; but we have the text of the 
 poem as it was written in his nineteenth year, and 
 it is unlike the poem as we now have it; for it was 
 changed and corrected and recorrected scores of 
 times to bring It to Its present state of perfection. 
 Almost everything composed by Tennyson was 
 changed and changed and changed again, to such 
 an extent that In almost every edition the text 
 differed. Above all things do not Imagine that 
 any good work can be done without Immense 
 pains. When Dr. Max Miiller told Froude, the 
 historian, that he never corrected what he wrote, 
 Froude immediately answered " Unless you cor- 
 rect a great many times, you will never be able to 
 
38 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 write good English." Now there is good Eng- 
 lish and good English; and I am not sure that 
 Froude was right. Froude was thinking, I be- 
 lieve, of literary English. Correct English can 
 be written without correction, by dint of long 
 practise In precise writing. Business letters and 
 official documents and various compositions of a 
 kindred sort must be correct English; they are 
 written entirely according to forms and ryles, ex- 
 actly like legal papers in which the mistake of one 
 word might cause unspeakable mischief. But all 
 this has nothing to do with literature. If the 
 art of writing good English or good French or 
 good Japanese were literature, then the lawyers 
 and the bank clerks would represent the highest 
 literature of their respective countries. So far, 
 however, as Froude meant literary English, he is 
 absolutely right. No literature can be produced 
 without much correction. I have told you of 
 primitive literature composed before the time of 
 books and of grammars, which was and is, and 
 will long continue to be, unrivalled literature. 
 But do you suppose that it never was corrected 
 and changed and re-made over and over and over 
 again? Why, most assuredly it was, and cor- 
 rected not by one only but by thousands and 
 thousands of persons who had learned it by heart. 
 Every generation Improved It a little; and at last, 
 when it came to be written down, it had been 
 
ON COMPOSITION 39 
 
 polished and perfected by the labour of hundreds 
 of years. 
 
 Now I suppose all of you have at some time 
 wanted to get books about how to write Eng- 
 lish, I suppose that you have all found them, and 
 that the result was only disappointment. It 
 would have been disappointment just the same 
 if you had been looking for French books on how 
 to write French, or German books on how to 
 write German. No books yet exist that will 
 teach you literary work, which will teach you the 
 real secrets of composition. Some daf, I trust, 
 there will be such books; but at present there are 
 none, simply because the only men capable of 
 writing them are men who have no time to give 
 to such work. But this having been said, let us 
 return to the subject of Japanese composition. 
 Before trying to give you some practical rules, let 
 me assure you of one thing, that all your foreign 
 studies can be of no literary use to you except In 
 relation to your own tongue. You can not write, 
 you will never be able to write, English literature 
 or French literature or German literature, though 
 you might be able, after years of practice and for- 
 eign travel, to write tolerably correct English or 
 French or German — to write a business docu- 
 ment, for example, or to write a simple essay 
 dealing only with bare facts. But none of you 
 can hope to be eloquent in any other tongue than 
 
40 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 your own, or to move the hearts of people by 
 writing in a language which is not your own. 
 There are very few examples in all English litera- 
 ture of a man able to write equally well in two 
 languages — in French and in English for ex- 
 ample, close as are these tongues to each other. 
 With an oriental language for a mother tongue, 
 the only hope of being able to create a literature 
 in a foreign language is in totally forgetting your 
 own. But the result would not be worth the sac- 
 rifice. 
 
 I suppose that many of you will become au- 
 thors, either by accident or by inclination; and 
 if you produce literature, prose or verse, it is to 
 be hoped that you will influence the future litera- 
 ture of your country, by infusing into the work 
 those new ideas which a university course must 
 have forced upon you by thousands. But this 
 alone, this imparting of new ideas, of larger 
 knowledge, would not be literature. Literature 
 is not scholarship, though it may contain scholar- 
 ship. Literature means, as I have said before, 
 the highest possible appeal of language to the 
 higher emotions and the nobler sentiments. It is 
 not learning, nor can it be made by any rules of 
 learning. 
 
 And now we can turn to the practical side of 
 the subject. 
 
 I begin by asking you to remember that the 
 
ON COMPOSITION 41 
 
 principles of literary composition of the highest 
 class must be exactly the same for Japan or for 
 France or for England or for any other country. 
 These principles are of two kinds, elimination 
 and addition — in other words, a taking away or 
 getting rid of the unnecessary, and the continual 
 strengthening of the necessary. Besides this, 
 composition means very little Indeed. The first 
 thing needed, of course. Is a perfect knowledge 
 of your own tongue as spoken; I will not say as 
 written, for a perfect knowledge of any tongue 
 as written Is possible only to scholarship, and is 
 not at all essential to literature. But a knowl- 
 edge of the living speech, in all its forms, high 
 and low, common and uncommon, is very desir- 
 able. If one can not hope to obtain the knowl- 
 edge of the whole spoken speech, then I should 
 'advise him to throw his strength into the study 
 of a part only, the part that is most natural to 
 him. Even with this partial knowledge excellent 
 literature is possible. But full knowledge will 
 produce larger results in the case of large talent. 
 
 II 
 
 In all this lecture you must not forget my def- 
 inition of literature as an art of emotional ex- 
 pression. And the first thing to be considered is 
 
42 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 the emotion Itself, its value, its fugitive subtlety, 
 and the extreme difficulty of *' getting hold of It." 
 
 You might ask why I put the emotion before 
 the sensation. Of course the sensation always 
 precedes the emotion. The sensation means the 
 first impression received from the senses, or the 
 revival in memory of such an impression. The 
 emotion is the feeling, very complex, that follows 
 the sensation or Impression. Do not forget this 
 distinction; for It is very important Indeed. 
 
 Now the reason why I am not going to say 
 much to you about the sensation, is that if a sen- 
 sation could be accurately described in words, the 
 result would be something like a photograph, 
 nothing more. You might say, a coloured photo- 
 graph; and it is true that if we discover (as we 
 shall certainly some day discover) the art of 
 photographing In colours, such a coloured photo- 
 graph would represent almost exactly a visual im- 
 pression. But this would not be art. A photo- 
 graph is not art; and the nearer that a painting 
 resembles a photograph by Its accuracy, the less 
 it is likely to be worth much from the artistic 
 point of view. To describe sensations would be 
 no more literature In the higher sense, than a 
 photograph could be called art In the higher sense. 
 I shall therefore boldly take the position that lit- 
 erature is not a picture of sensations, but of emo- 
 tions. 
 
ON COMPOSITION 43' 
 
 All this must be very fully Illustrated. When 
 I say '' emotion " you perhaps think of tears, sor- 
 row, regret. But this would be a mistake. Let 
 us begin by considering the very simplest kind of 
 emotion — the emotion of a tree. 
 
 Two things happen when you look at a tree. 
 First you have the picture of the tree reflected 
 upon the brain through the medium of sight — 
 that Is to say, a little card picture, a little photo- 
 graph of the tree. But even If you wanted to 
 paint this Image with words you could not do It; 
 and If you could do it, the result would not be 
 worth talking about. But almost as quickly, you 
 receive a second Impression, very different from 
 the first. You observe that the tree gives you a 
 peculiar feeling of some kind. The tree has a 
 certain character, and this perception of the 
 character of the tree. Is the feeling or the emo- 
 tion of the tree. That is what the artist looks 
 for; and that is what the poet looks for. 
 
 But we must explain this a little more. Every 
 object, animate or Inanimate, causes a certain feel- 
 ing within the person who observes It. Every- 
 thing has a face. Whenever you meet a person 
 for the first time, and look at the face of that 
 person, you receive an impression that is imme- 
 diately followed by some kind of feeling. Either 
 you like the face, or you dislike it, or it leaves in 
 you a state of comparative indifference. We all 
 
44 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 know this in regard to faces; but only the artist 
 and poet know it in regard to things. And the 
 difference between the great artist and the great 
 poet and the rest of the world is only that the 
 artist or the poet perceives the face of things, 
 what is called the physiognomy of things — that 
 is to say, their character. A tree, a mountain, a 
 house, even a stone has a face and a character for 
 the artistic eye. And we can train ourselves to 
 see that character by pursuing the proper methods. 
 Now suppose that I were to ask all of you to 
 describe for me a certain tree in the garden of the 
 University. I should expect that a majority 
 among you would write very nearly the same 
 thing. But would this be a proof that the tree 
 had given to all of you the same kind of feeling? 
 No, it would not mean anything of the sort. It 
 would mean only that a majority among you had 
 acquired habits of thinking and writing which are 
 contrary to the principles of art. Most of you 
 would describe the tree in nearly the same way, 
 because, in the course of years of study, your 
 minds have been filled with those forms of lan- 
 guage commonly used to describe trees; you 
 would remember the words of some famous poet 
 or story-teller, and would use them as expressing 
 your own feehngs. But it is perfectly certain that 
 they would not express your own feelings. Edu- 
 cation usually teaches us to use the ideas and the 
 
ON COMPOSITION 45 
 
 language of other men to describe our own feel- 
 ings, and this habit is exactly contrary to every 
 principle of art. 
 
 Now suppose there is one among you of a re- 
 markably powerful talent of the poetical and 
 artistic kind. His description of the tree would 
 be startlingly different from that of the rest of 
 you ; it would surprise you all, so that you would 
 have to look at the tree again in order to see 
 whether the description was true. Then you 
 would be still more astonished to find that it was 
 much more true than any other; and then you 
 would not only discover that he had enabled you 
 to understand the tree in a new way, but also 
 that the rest of you had but half seen it, and that 
 your descriptions were all wrong. He would not 
 have used the words of other men to describe the 
 tree ; he would have used his own, and they would 
 be very simple words indeed, like the words of a 
 child. 
 
 For the child is incomparably superior to the 
 average man in seeing the character of things; 
 and the artist sees like the child. If I were to 
 ask twenty little children ■ — say, five or six years 
 old — to look at the same tree that we were talk- 
 ing about, and to tell me what they think of it, 
 I am sure that many of them would say wonder- 
 ful things. They would come much nearer to the 
 truth than the average university student, and this 
 
46 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 just because of their absolute Innocence. To the 
 child's imagination everything is alive — stones, 
 trees, plants, even household objects. For him 
 everything has a soul. He sees things quite dif- 
 ferently from the man. Nor is this the only rea- 
 son for the superiority of the child's powers of 
 observation. His instinctive knowledge, the 
 knowledge inherited from millions of past lives, 
 is still fresh, not dulled by the weight of the 
 myriad impressions of education and personal ex- 
 perience. Ask a child, for example, what he 
 thinks of a certain stranger. He will look and 
 say " I like him," or " I disHke him." Should you* 
 ask, " Why do you dislike that man? " the child, 
 after some difficulty, will tell you that he does not 
 like something in his face. Press the little fellow 
 further to explain, and after a long and painful 
 effort he will suddenly come out with a compari- 
 son of startling truth that will surprise you, show- 
 ing that he has perceived something in the face 
 that you did not see. This same instinctive 
 power is the real power of the artist, and it is 
 the power that distinguishes literature from mere 
 writing. You will now better understand what I 
 meant by saying that education will not teach a 
 person how to make poetry, any more than a 
 reading of books could teach a man how to make 
 a table or a chair. The faculty of artistic seeing 
 is independent of education, and must be culti- 
 
ON COMPOSITION 47 
 
 vated outside of education. Education has not 
 made great writers. On the contrary, they have 
 become great In spite of education. For the ef- 
 fect of education Is necessarily to deaden and 
 dull those primitive and Instinctive feelings upon 
 which the higher phases of emotional art depend. 
 Knowledge can only be gained In most cases at 
 the expense of certain very precious natural facul- 
 ties. The man who Is able to keep the freshness 
 of the child In his mind and heart, notwithstand- 
 ing all the knowledge that he absorbs, that Is the 
 man who Is likely to perform great things In lit- 
 erature. 
 
 Now we have clearly defined what I mean by 
 the feeling or emotion which the artist In litera- 
 ture must seek to catch and express. We took 
 the simplest example possible, a tree. But every- 
 thing, and every fancy, and every being to be 
 treated of In literature must be considered In pre- 
 cisely the same way. In all cases the object of \ 
 the writer should be to seize and fix the character ■ 
 of the thing, and he can do this only by expressing ' 
 the exact feeling that the thing has produced In 
 his mind. This Is the main work of literature. 
 It is very difficult. But why it Is difficult we have 
 not yet considered. 
 
 What happens when the feehng comes? You 
 feel then a momentary thrill of pleasure or pain 
 or fear or wonder; but this thrill passes away al- 
 
48 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 most as suddenly as it comes. You can not write 
 it down as fast as it vanishes. You are left then 
 only with the sensation or first impression of the 
 thing in your mind, and a mere memory of the 
 feeling. In different natures the feeling is dif- 
 ferent, and it lasts longer in some than in others; 
 but in all cases it passes away as rapidly as smoke, 
 or perfume blown by a wind. If you think that 
 anybody can put down on paper this feeling ex- 
 actly as it is received, immediately upon receiving 
 it, you are much mistaken. This can be accom- 
 plished only by arduous labour. The labour is 
 to revive the feeling. 
 
 At first you will be exactly in the condition of a 
 person trying to remember a dream after waking 
 up. All of us know how difficult it is to remem- 
 ber a dream. But by the help of the sensation, 
 which was received during sleep, the feeling may 
 be revived. My recommendation would be in 
 such a case to write down immediately, as fully as 
 you can, the circumstances and the cause of the 
 emotion, and to try to describe the feeling as far 
 as possible. It makes no difference then whether 
 you write at all grammatically, nor whether you 
 finish your sentences, nor whether you write back- 
 wards or forwards. The all-essential thing is to 
 have notes of the experience. These notes should 
 be the seed from which the plant will be made to 
 grow and to blossom. 
 
ON COMPOSITION 49 
 
 Reading over these quick notes, you will per- 
 ceive that the feeling is faintly revived by them, 
 especially by certain parts of them. But of 
 course, except to you, the notes would still be of 
 no possible value. The next work is to develop 
 the notes, to arrange them in their natural order, 
 and to construct the sentences in a correct way. 
 While doing this you will find that a number of 
 things come back to your mind which you had for- 
 gotten while making the notes. The develop- 
 ment of the notes is likely to be four or f\vt times 
 longer, perhaps even ten times longer, than were 
 the notes themselves. But now, reading over the 
 new writing, you find that the feeling is not re- 
 vived by it; the feeling has entirely vanished, and 
 what you have written Is likely to seem common- 
 place enough. A third writing you will find to 
 better both the language and the thought, but per- 
 haps the feeling does not revive. A fourth and 
 a fifth writing will involve an astonishing number 
 of changes. For while engaged in this tiresome 
 work, you are sure to find that a number of things 
 which you have already written are not necessary, 
 and you will also find that the most important 
 things remaining have not been properly devel- 
 oped at all. While you are doing the work over 
 again, new thoughts come; the whole thing 
 changes shape, begins to be more compact, more 
 strong and simple ; and at last, to your delight, the 
 
so TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 feeling revives — nay, revives more strongly than 
 at first, being enriched by new psychological re- 
 lations. You will be surprised at the beauty of 
 what you have done; but you must not trust the 
 feeling then. Instead of immediately printing the 
 thing, I should advise you to put it into a drawer, 
 and leave it there for at least a month, without 
 looking at it again. When you re-read it after 
 this interval, you are certain to find that you can 
 perfect it a great deal more. After one or two 
 further remodellings it will be perhaps the very 
 best that you can do, and will give to others the 
 same emotion that you yourself felt on first per- 
 ceiving the fact or the object. The process is 
 very much like that of focusing with a telescope. 
 You know that you must pull the tubing out a 
 little further, or push it in a little further, and 
 then pull it again and then push it again many 
 times before you can get the sharpest possible 
 view of a distant object. Well, the literary artist 
 has to do with language what the sight-seer must 
 do with a telescope. And this is the first thing 
 essential in any kind of literary composition. It 
 is drudgery, I know; but there is no escape from 
 it. Neither Tennyson, nor Rossetti, nor any- 
 body else of great importance in English litera- 
 ture has been able to escape from it within our 
 own day. Long practice will not lighten this 
 labour in the least. Your methods may become 
 
ON COMPOSITION 51 
 
 incomparably more skilful; but the actual volume 
 of work will always be about the same. 
 
 I imagine that some of you might ask: *' Is 
 there no other way of expressing emotion or sen- 
 timent than that which you have been trying to 
 describe to us? You say that the highest litera- 
 ture is emotional expression; but there is nothing 
 more difficult than the work you have suggested; 
 is there no other way? " 
 
 Yes, there is another way, and a way which I 
 sometimes imagine is more in harmony with the 
 character of the Japanese genius, and perhaps 
 with the character of the Japanese language. 
 But it is just as difficult; and it has this further 
 disadvantage that it requires immense experience, 
 as well as a very special talent. It is what has 
 been called the impersonal method, though I am 
 not sure that this title is a good one. Very few 
 great writers have been able to succeed at it; and 
 I think that these few have mostly been French- 
 men. And it is a method suitable only for prose. 
 
 An emotion may be either expressed or sug- 
 gested. If it is difficult to express, it is at least 
 quite as difficult to suggest; but if you can sug- 
 gest it, the suggestion is apt to be even more pow- 
 erful than the expression, because it leaVes much 
 more to the imagination. Of course you must re- 
 member that all literary art must be partly sug- 
 gestive — do not forget that. But by the imper- 
 
52 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 sonal method, as It has been called, It becomes 
 altogether suggestive. There Is no expression of 
 emotion by the writer at all — that Is to say, by 
 the narrator. Nevertheless the emotion comes as 
 you read, and comes with extraordinary power. 
 There Is only one very great writer of our own 
 times who succeeded perfectly by this method^ — 
 that was Guy de Maupassant. 
 
 A number of facts may be related, quite dis- 
 passionately and plainly, In such a manner as to 
 arouse very great feeling; or a conversation may 
 be so reported as to convey to the mind the exact 
 feelings of the speakers, and even to suggest every 
 look or action without any description at all. But 
 you will see at once that the great difficulty here 
 lies not so much In the choice of the word values 
 (although that also is Indispensable) as in the 
 choice of facts. You must become a perfect 
 judge of the literary worth — I mean the emo- 
 tional value — of the simplest fact in itself. 
 Now a man who can make such judgments must 
 have had a vast experience of life. He must 
 have the dramatic faculty greatly developed. He 
 must know the conversational peculiarities of the 
 language of all classes. He must be able to 
 group men and women by types. And I doubt 
 very much whether any person can do this while 
 he Is young. In most cases the talent and ca- 
 pacity for It can develop only in middle life, be- 
 
ON COMPOSITION 53 
 
 cause It is only by that time that a person could 
 have the proper experience. Therefore I could 
 not recommend an attempt to follow this method 
 at the beginning of a literary career, though I 
 should strongly recommend every conceivable cul- 
 tivation of the powers which may render it pos- 
 sible. Remember that in addition to experience 
 it requires a natural faculty of perception as vivid 
 as that of a painter. I have mentioned one name 
 only in, relation to this kind of work, but I should 
 also call your attention to such stories as those of 
 Prosper Merimee — ^'Carmen," " Matteo Fal- 
 cone." Occasionally you will find stories by 
 Daudet, especially the little stories of the war 
 between France and Germany, showing the 
 method in question. But in these the style is 
 usually somewhat fixed; there is some description 
 attempted, showing a personal feeling. In the 
 best work of Maupassant and of Merimee, the 
 personal element entirely disappears. There is 
 no description, except In some conversational pas- 
 sages put into the mouth of another person; there 
 are only facts, but they are facts that " take you 
 by the throat," to use a familiar expression. 
 
 I am sure that you are not yet quite satisfied 
 by these definitions, or attempts at definitions, of 
 the two working methods. I suppose that there 
 are among you some good writers capable of writ- 
 ing In a few weeks, or even In a few days, a story 
 
54 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 which if published in a Japanese periodical, 
 would please thousands of readers, and would 
 bring tears perhaps to many eyes. I do not 
 doubt your powers to please the public, to excite 
 their emotions, to strengthen their best senti- 
 ments; and I have said that it is the office of lit- 
 erature to do this. But if you ask me whether 
 I would call this work literature, I should answer 
 "No; that is journalism. It is work which has 
 been quickly, and therefore imperfectly, done. It 
 Is only the ore of literature; it is not literature in 
 the true sense." But you will say, " The public 
 calls it literature, accepts it as literature, pays for 
 it as literature — - what more do you want? " 
 
 I can best explain by an illustration. Next to 
 the Greeks, the Arabs were perhaps the most 
 skilful of poets and artists in describing beauty in 
 words. Every part of the body had a beauty of 
 a special kind; and this special beauty had a spe- 
 cial name. Furthermore all beauty was classified, 
 ranked. If a woman belonged to the first rank of 
 beauty, she was called by a particular name, sig- 
 nifying that when you saw her the first time you 
 were startled, and that every time that you looked 
 at her again after that, she seemed to become 
 more and more and more beautiful until you 
 doubted the reality of your own senses. A 
 woman who belonged only to the second class of 
 beauty would charm you quite as much the first 
 
ON COMPOSITION 55 
 
 time that you saw her; but after that, when you 
 looked at her again you would find that she was 
 not so beautiful as you had thought at first. As 
 for women of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and 
 seventh classes of beauty, it is only necessary to 
 say that the same rule held good; more and more 
 defects would show themselves, according to the 
 class, upon familiarity. Now the difference be- 
 tween cheap emotional literature of the journal- 
 istic sort and true literature, is exactly of the 
 same kind. Cheap literature pays best for the 
 time being, and great literature scarcely pays at 
 all. But a great story written by a master seems 
 more and more beautiful every time that you read 
 it over again; and through generations and cen- 
 turies it seems to be more and more beautiful to 
 those who read it. But cheap literature, although 
 it pleases even more the first time that it was read, 
 shows defects upon a second reading, and more 
 defects upon a third reading, and still more upon 
 a fourth reading, until the appearance of the de- 
 fects spoils all the pleasure of the reader, and he 
 throws away the book or the story in disgust. 
 So do the pubhc act in the long run. What pleases 
 them today they throw away tomorrow ; and they 
 are right in throwing it away, because it does not 
 represent careful work. 
 
 One more general observation may be made, 
 though you should remember that all general 
 
56 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 statements involve exceptions. But bearing this 
 in mind, it is not too much to say that what are 
 called classics in any language are classics because 
 they represent perfect workmanship, and that 
 books which are not classics usually represent im- 
 perfect workmanship. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The next subject to consider will be construc- 
 tion — that is to say, the architecture of the com- 
 position, the first rules for putting the thing to- 
 gether. 
 
 The most common difficulty of literary work 
 is how to begin. Everybody, all over the world, 
 is troubled just this way. A boy is, to whom you 
 give a subject and tell him to write about it. 
 How shall I begin? The greatest poets, the 
 greatest essayists, the greatest dramatists are not 
 all superior to this weakness. They all have to 
 ask themselves the same question at times. The 
 beginning is the difficulty. But the experienced 
 learn how to avoid it. I believe that most of 
 them avoid the trouble of beginning by very sim- 
 ple means. 
 
 What means ? 
 
 By not beginning at all. 
 
 This may require a "little explanation. In the 
 
ON COMPOSITION 57 
 
 old days there were rules for beginning, just as 
 there were rules for everything else. Literature 
 was subjected to the same imposition of rhetoric 
 as were other compositions. We shall have more 
 to say about this when we come to the subject of 
 style. In history, in the critical essay, above all 
 in philosophy, a beginning is very necessary. 
 Scope and plan must be determined beforehand. 
 You must know what you want to say, and how 
 you Intend to say it, and how much space will be 
 required for saying it. Serious and solid work 
 of the purely intellectual kind must be done ac- 
 cording to a fixed and logical method. I am sure 
 that I need not explain why. But It Is quite other- 
 wise In regard to poetry and other forms of emo- 
 tional and imaginative literature. The poet or 
 the story-teller never gets the whole of his in- 
 spiration at once ; it comes to him only by degrees, 
 while he is perfecting the work. His first inspi- 
 ration Is only a sudden flash of emotion, or the 
 sudden shock of a new idea, which at once awakens 
 and sets Into motion many confused trains of other 
 interrelated emotions and Ideas. It ought to be 
 obvious, therefore, that the first inspiration might 
 represent not the beginning of anything, but the 
 middle of It, or the end. 
 
 I was startled some years ago In Kyoto while 
 watching a Japanese artist drawing horses. He 
 drew the horses very well; but he always began at 
 
58 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 the tail. Now it is the western rule to begin 
 at the head of the horse; that is why I was sur- 
 prised. But upon reflection, it struck me that it 
 could not really make any difference whether the 
 artist begins at the head or the tail or the belly 
 or the foot of the horse, if he really knows his 
 business. And most great artists who really 
 know their business do not follow other people's 
 rules. They make their own rules. Every one 
 of them does his work in a way peculiar to him- 
 self; and the peculiarity means only that he finds 
 it more easy to work in that way. Now the very 
 same thing is true in literature. And the ques- 
 tion, " How shall I begin? " only means that you 
 want to begin at the head instead of beginning at 
 the tail or somewhere else. That is, you are not 
 yet experienced enough to trust to your own pow- 
 ers. When you become more experienced you 
 will never ask the question; and I think that you 
 will often begin at the tail — that is to say, you 
 will write the end of the story before you have 
 even thought of the beginning. 
 
 The working rule is this: Develop the first 
 idea or emotion that comes to you before you 
 allow yourself to think about the second. The 
 second will suggest itself, even too much, while 
 you are working at the first. If two or three 
 or four valuable emotions or ideas come to you 
 about the same time, take the most vigorous of 
 
ON COMPOSITION 59 
 
 them, or the one that most attracts you to begin 
 with, unless it happens to be also the most diffi- 
 cult. For the greater number of young writers 
 I should say, follow the line of least resistance, 
 and take the easiest work first. It does not mat- 
 ter at all whether it is to belong to the middle or 
 to the end or to the beginning of a story or poem. 
 By developing the different parts or verses sep- 
 arately from each other, you will soon discover 
 this astonishing fact, that they have a tendency 
 to grow together of themselves, and into a form 
 different from that which you first intended, but 
 much better. This is the inspiration of form as 
 construction. And if you try always to begin at 
 the beginning, you are very likely to miss this in- 
 spiration. The literary law is, let the poem or the 
 story shape itself. Do not try to shape it before 
 it is nearly done. The most wonderful work is 
 not the work that the author shapes and plans; it 
 is the work that shapes itself, the work that obliges 
 him, when it is nearly done, to change it all from 
 beginning to end, and to give it a construction 
 which he had never imagined at the time of be- 
 ginning it. 
 
 You will see that these rules, results of practical 
 experience, and perfectly well known to men of 
 letters in every country of Europe, are exactly 
 the opposite of the rules taught in schools and 
 universities. The student is always told how to 
 
6o TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 begin, and always puzzles himself about a begin- 
 ning. But the men who make literature, the 
 poets, the great story-tellers of the highest rank 
 — they never begin. At least, they never begin 
 at the beginning according to rule; they draw 
 their horses from the hoof or the tail much more 
 often than from the head. 
 
 That is all that I have to say about construc- 
 tion. You may think this is very little. I reply 
 that it is quite enough. Instinct and habit will 
 teach all the rest; and they are better masters 
 than all grammarians and rhetoricians. What a 
 man cannot learn by literary instinct, and cannot 
 acquire by literary habit, he will never, never be 
 able to obtain from rules or books. I am afraid 
 that some of these opinions may seem very 
 heretical, but I must now be guilty of a much 
 greater heresy, when I introduce you to my ideas 
 about style. I think — in fact I feel quite sure — 
 that everything which has been written upon the 
 subject of style is absolute nonsense, because it 
 mistakes results for causes. I hold that such writ- 
 ing has done immense injury to the literary stu- 
 dent in every part of the world; and I propose to 
 prove to you that there is no such thing as style. 
 
ON COMPOSITION 6i 
 
 IV 
 
 I suppose you will ask me, " Why do you talk 
 to us about the styles of Macaulay and Burke and 
 Ruskin, if you do not believe that there is such a 
 thing as style?" I will answer that it is my 
 duty in lectures to explain as far as I can the rea- 
 sons why different writers are valued; and in or- 
 der to do this I must use the word " style " be- 
 cause it is customary, and because it indicates 
 something. But the general notion attaching to 
 that something is wrong. What was called 
 *' style " no longer exists. What is called 
 ** style " ought to be called something else — I 
 should say " character." 
 
 If you look at the dictionary you will find va- 
 rious definitions of the word " style," but all these 
 can be reduced to two. The first, or general style, 
 is simply rhetorical; it means the construction of 
 sentences according to a complete set of rules, gov- 
 erning the form and proportion of every part of 
 the sentence. This once was style. There was 
 a time when everybody was supposed to write 
 according to the same rules, and in almost exactly 
 the same way. We might expect that work done 
 by different individuals according to such rules 
 would be all very much alike; and as a matter 
 of fact, there was a great likeness in the styles of 
 
62 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 French and English writers during the time that 
 classical rules of composition were in force. I 
 suppose you know that by classical I mean rules 
 obtained from study of the Greek and Latin writ- 
 ers. The effort of Western men of letters dur- 
 ing the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- 
 turies was to Imitate the old classics. So they 
 had rules and measures for everything, for every 
 part of a sentence, and for the position of every 
 word. Therefore the styles did greatly resemble 
 each other. In France the similarity I refer to 
 was greater than In England, the French being a 
 more perfect language, and much closer to Latin 
 than English. For example, you would find It 
 very hard to distinguish the style of a story writ- 
 ten by Diderot from the style of a story written 
 by Voltaire. The Encyclopedists, as they are 
 called, wrote very much after the same fashion. 
 But a fine critic could detect differences, neverthe- 
 less. For no matter how exact the rules might 
 be, the way of obeying them would differ accord- 
 ing to differences of character, mental character; 
 I need scarcely tell you that no two minds think 
 and feel in exactly the same way. These differ- 
 ences of individual thinking and feeling necessarily 
 give a slightly different tone to the work of each 
 writer, even in the most rigid period of classical 
 style. And this difference of tone Is what we call 
 style today — after the old classical rules have 
 
ON COMPOSITION 63 
 
 Heen given up. But there is still much popular 
 error upon the subject of individual style. Peo- 
 ple think still with the ideas of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. They think that there are rules for indi- 
 vidual style, because there are rules for classical 
 style. They think that when we talk of the style 
 of Macaulay or Froude, of Arnold or of De 
 Quincey, we mean certain rules of composition by 
 which the literary method of one man can be 
 known from that of another. I should like to 
 see any man living attempt to define these rules. 
 The authors themselves could not define them. 
 There are no such rules. This is altogether an 
 error — and a very serious error. The differ- 
 ences are not due to any definable rules at all; 
 they are due entirely to individual differences of 
 character. And therefore I say that style, in the 
 modern meaning of the word, is character. 
 
 This remains to be proved. Let -^s see what 
 any author's style means today. It means that 
 his method of constructing sentences differs ap- 
 preciably from the method in which other men 
 construct their sentences. And how is the differ- 
 ence shown? Chiefly in three ways: 
 
 1. By a certain metrical form of sentence pe- 
 culiar to the writer. 
 
 2. By a certain quality of sound — sonority — 
 in the sentence, not due merely to measure, but to 
 a sense of the musical value of words. 
 
64 TALKS TO .WRITERS 
 
 3. By choice of words giving particular im- 
 pressions of force or colour. 
 
 Now how can we define and illustrate these 
 three peculiarities in any writer? I say that it 
 cannot be done. One might, as Mr. Saintsbury 
 did, take some sentences from the Bible, or from 
 any volume of rich prose, and arrange the sen- 
 tences so as to show their measure and accent, by 
 the same means that the accent and measure of 
 poetry can be shown. But even thus the ca- 
 dences could not be shown. In order to show the 
 cadence we should have to adopt the suggestion of 
 a very clever American man-of-letters, Sidney 
 Lanier, and set the sentence to music — I mean 
 write it with a musical notation above every word, 
 in addition to the use of accents and feet. So 
 much might be done. But there would still re- 
 main the impossible task of defining an author's 
 conception of word values. Words are very much 
 like lizards; they change colour according to 
 position. Two different writers using the same 
 word to express the same idea can give to that 
 word two entirely different characters, for much 
 depends upon the place of the word in the sen- 
 tence, or, in simpler language, upon the combina- 
 tion to which it belongs. And all this work is 
 more or less unconscious on the author's part. 
 He chooses not by rule, but by feeling, by what 
 is called the literary instinct. Attempts have 
 
ON COMPOSITION 65 
 
 been made to define differences of this kind as 
 exhibited in the styles of different authors by 
 counting and classifying the verbs and adjectives 
 and adverbs used by each. These attempts re- 
 sulted in nothing at all. The same thing has been 
 tried in regard to poetry. How many times 
 Tennyson uses the adjective " red " and how 
 many times Swinburne uses the adjective '* red " 
 may be interesting to know; but it will not help 
 us in the least to understand why the value of the 
 same adjective as Tennyson uses it Is quite differ- 
 ent from the value it obtains as used by Swin- 
 burne. All such differences must be due to psy- 
 chological differences; therefore again I say that 
 style is character. 
 
 And here let me utter a word of warning as to 
 the uselessness of trying to study " style " in 
 modern English, authors. I have often been 
 asked by students whom they should read for the 
 study of style — and other questions of that 
 kind, showing that they did not understand what 
 style really is. I must even venture to say that 
 no Japanese student who has not spent a great 
 many years away from Japan, can possibly un- 
 derstand differences of foreign style. The rea- 
 son must be obvious. To appreciate differences 
 of style in foreign authors, you must have an ab- 
 solutely perfect knowledge of the foreign lan- 
 guage; you must know all its capacities of 
 
66 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 rhythm, accent, sonority, and colour. You must 
 know the comparative values of one hundred 
 thousand words — and that for you is impossible. 
 Therefore, so far as foreign literature is con- 
 cerned, do not trouble yourselves trying to un- 
 derstand anything about style which does not 
 depend upon old forms of rhetoric. And even 
 if you should learn enough of the old rules to un- 
 derstand all the rules and sub-rules for the con- 
 struction of an eighteenth century sentence, the 
 "want of training In Greek and Latin would make 
 that knowledge almost useless to you. Style can 
 be studied by you only In a very vague way. But 
 I hold that way to be the most important, because 
 it means character. What I have just said is, of 
 course, a digression, because It Is of Japanese and 
 not of English composition that I am now going 
 to speak. 
 
 Here you must recognize that I am sadly ham- 
 pered by my absolute Ignorance of the Japanese 
 language. There are many things that I should 
 like to talk to you about which It is out of my 
 power to talk of for this reason. But there are 
 general facts, independent of differences of lan- 
 guage; and I believe that by keeping to those I 
 shall not speak altogether in vain. In Japanese, 
 or in any other language, the style of the writer 
 ought to represent character, if any style, except 
 a purely conventional one, be possible. And now 
 
ON COMPOSITION 67 
 
 what I want to say is this: If any writer does his 
 best to perfect his work, the result of the pains 
 that he takes will be style in the true sense. That 
 is, his work will have an individuality, a character 
 about it, differentiating it from all other work on 
 the same subject. It will be recognizably his, just 
 as much as his face or his way of talking belongs 
 to him and not to anybody else. But just in the 
 same degree to which he does not take pains there 
 will be less evidence of character, therefore less 
 style. The work of many clumsy people will be 
 found to have a general family resemblance. 
 The work of the truly energetic and painstaking 
 will be found to differ prodigiously. The greater 
 the earnestness and the labour, the more marked 
 the style. And now you will see what I am com- 
 ing at — that style is the outcome of character 
 developed through hard work. Style is nothing 
 else than that in any country. 
 
 Here observe another fact. In the general 
 history of literature, wherever we find a uniform- 
 ity of style, we find no progress, and no very great 
 literary achievements. The classic period of the 
 English eighteenth century is an example. But 
 the reverse is the case when general style disap- 
 pears and individual style develops. That ipeans 
 high development, originality, new ideas, every- 
 thing that signifies literary progress. Now one 
 bad sign in the English literature of the close of 
 
68 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 the present century — that Is, the English litera- 
 ture of today — is that style has almost disap- 
 peared. There is a general style again, as there 
 was in the first part of the eighteenth century. 
 Out of a hundred English novels published this 
 month, you would scarcely be able to tell the dif- 
 ference between one author's writing and an- 
 other's. The great stylists are dead, except 
 Ruskin, and he has ceased to write. The world 
 of fiction is again governed by a set of rules 
 which everybody follows; and novel writing, as 
 well as essay writing (with rare exceptions), has 
 become a trade instead of an art. Therefore 
 nothing great appears, and nothing great is likely 
 to appear until a reaction sets in. There is of 
 course the extraordinary genius of Kipling, who 
 keeps aloof from all conventions, and has made 
 new styles of his own in almost every department 
 of pure literature. But there is no other to place 
 beside him, and he probably owes his develop- 
 ment quite as much to the fact that he was born in 
 India as to his really astonishing talent. 
 
 And this brings me to the last section of this 
 lecture — the subject of language. One fact of 
 Kipling's work, and not the least striking fact, is 
 the astonishing use which he has made of the lan- 
 guage of the people. Although a consummate 
 master of serious and dignified style when he 
 pleases to be, he never hesitates to speak the 
 
ON COMPOSITION 69 
 
 speech of the streets when he finds that it serves 
 his purpose better. Well, remember that Emer- 
 son once said, " The speech of the street is in- 
 comparably more forceful than the speech of the 
 academy." 
 
 I now hope that you will have a little patience 
 with me, as I am going to speak against conven- 
 tions. I believe that Japanese literature is still 
 to a great extent in its classic state, that it has not 
 yet freed itself from the conventions of other cen- 
 turies, and that the full capacities of the language 
 are not expressed In its modern productions. I 
 believe that to write in the vernacular, the every 
 day speech of conversation and of the people, is 
 still considered vulgar. And I must venture to 
 express the hope that you will eventually fight 
 boldly against these convictions. I think that It 
 is absolutely essential. I do not believe that any 
 new Japanese literature can come into existence, 
 and influence life and thought and national char- 
 actic, and create for Japan what she very much 
 needs, literary sympathy, until Japan has authors 
 who will not be afraid to write in the true tongue 
 of the people. One thing is certain, that the 
 change must come. Whoever helps It to come 
 
70 TALKS TO "WRITERS 
 
 will be doing his country an inestimable service, 
 for so long as literature Is shaped only to the un- 
 derstanding of a special class of educated per- 
 sons, it cannot Influence the nation at all. The 
 educated classes of any country represent but a 
 very small portion of the great whole. They 
 must be the teachers ; yet they can not teach In the 
 language of the academy. They must teach in 
 the language of the people, just as Wycliffe, and 
 Chaucer, and other great Englishmen of letters 
 once found it necessary to do in order to create 
 a new public opinion. Japan will certainly need 
 a new popular literature; and although you may 
 say that a certain class of popular literature is 
 furnished by a certain class of writers, I would 
 answer that a great popular literature cannot be 
 furnished by uneducated persons, or by persons 
 without a large range of knowledge; It must be 
 furnished by scholars, or at least by men of taste, 
 who are willing to speak to the masses In their 
 mother tongue, and who care to touch the hearts 
 of the millions. This Is the true object of litera- 
 ture in any country. And so far as literary ex- 
 pression is power, think of what is lost by allow- 
 ing that power to be cramped in the same way 
 that English literature was cramped a hundred 
 years ago. Here is a man who can delight ten 
 or twenty thousand readers of culture, but who 
 can not be more than a name to the nation at 
 
ON COMPOSITION 71 
 
 large. Here is another man who can speak to 
 forty millions of people at once, making himself 
 equally well understood by the minister in his 
 office and by the peasant in his rice-field. Who 
 is the greatest force? Who is able to do most 
 for the future of his country? Who represents 
 the greatest power? Certainly it is not the man 
 who pleases only twenty thousand people. It is 
 the man who, like the young English poet already 
 mentioned, can speak to all his countrymen in the 
 world at the same time, and with such power that 
 everybody both feels and understands. Re- 
 cently when the Russian emperor proposed dis- 
 armament of the European powers, our young 
 poet sent to the London Times a Httle poem 
 about a bear — a treacherous bear. There is no 
 part of the English speaking world In which the 
 poem was not read; and I am quite sure that it 
 had much more effect on English public opinion 
 than the message of the Emperor of Russia. 
 That is power. The man who can speak to a 
 hundred millions of people may be stronger than 
 a king. But he must not speak in the language of 
 the academy. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 STUDIES OF EXTRAORDINARY PROSE 
 
 I 
 
 THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER : THE NORSE WRITERS 
 
 In speaking upon the various arts of prose, I 
 do not intend to confine the study especially to 
 something in English literature. For it happens 
 that we can get better examples of the great art 
 of prose writing In other literatures than English, 
 — examples, too, which will better appeal to the 
 Japanese student, especially as some of them bear 
 resemblance to the best work of the old Japanese 
 writers. In English literature it is not very easy 
 to find examples of that simplicity, combined with 
 great vividness, which is to be found in the old 
 Japanese narrative. But we can find this very 
 often In the work of the Norse writers; and their 
 finest pages, translated into the kindred English 
 tongue, do not lose the extraordinary charm of 
 the original. 
 
 Now there are two ways of writing artistic 
 prose (of course there are many different meth- 
 ods, but all can be grouped under two heads), 
 
 72 
 
THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER 73 
 
 both depending a good deal upon the character 
 of the writer. There is a kind of work of which 
 the merit Is altogether due to vivid and powerful 
 senses, well trained In observation. The man 
 who sees keenly and hears keenly, who has been 
 well disciplined how to use his eyes and ears both 
 with quickness and caution, who has been taught 
 by experience the value of accuracy and the dan- 
 ger of exaggeration (exaggeration being, after 
 all, only an incorrect way of observing and think- 
 ing), — such a man, if he can write at all, is apt 
 to write interestingly. The very best examples 
 of strong simple prose are pages written by the 
 old Norsemen who passed most of their lives in 
 fighting and hunting. We have here the result 
 of that training which I have above Indicated. 
 The man who knows that at any hour of the day a 
 mistake may cost his life and the lives of his chil- 
 dren, is apt to be a man of exact observation. 
 He is also apt to be a man with excellent senses 
 and good judgment; for the near-sighted or deaf 
 or stupid could scarcely have existed in the sort 
 of society to which the Norse writers belonged. 
 And I imagine, so far as it is in my power to 
 judge, that some of the old Japanese writers have 
 given in their work evidence of the same faculties 
 of perception and discrimination. Today we 
 have some living examples of European writers 
 whose power depends entirely upon the same 
 
74 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 qualities. Modern writers of this kind are much 
 less simple, it is true, than the writers whom we 
 are about to consider; they have been educated 
 in modern technical schools or universities, and 
 their education has given to their work a certain 
 colour never to be found in the ancient literature. 
 But one or two writers have preserved in a most 
 extraordinary way the best qualities of the old 
 Norse writers, — modern Norsemen, or at least 
 Scandinavians. I think that perhaps the best is 
 Bjornstjerne Bjornson. We shall have occasion 
 to speak of him again at another time. 
 
 The other method of writing artistic prose is 
 more particularly subjective; it depends chiefly 
 upon the man's inner sense of beauty, — upon his 
 power to feel emotionally, and to express the emo- 
 tion by a careful choice of words. Upon this 
 phase of prose writing we need not now dwell; 
 we shall take it up later on. Suflice to say that it 
 does not at all depend upon the possession of 
 well developed exterior senses, nor upon faculties 
 of quick perception and discrimination; indeed, 
 some of its greatest masters have been physically 
 imperfect men, or helpless invalids. 
 
 Now let us take an example of the old Norse 
 style of narrative. It dates back to the early 
 part of the thirteenth century; and the subject is 
 a fight in a little island on the coast of Iceland. 
 There was trouble at the time about a Christian 
 
THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER 75 
 
 bishop called Gudmund, who had been sent out 
 there. Some determined to kill him, others re- 
 solved to stand by him, — and among the latter 
 were two brave friends, Eyjolf and Aron. The 
 summary opens at the point where the bishop's 
 party had been badly handled, and nearly every- 
 body killed except the two friends. Aron, who 
 was the weaker of the two, wanted to stay on the 
 ground and fight until he died. Eyjolf was de- 
 termined that he should not, so he played a trick 
 upon him in order to save him. The whole story 
 is told in the Sturlunga Saga. I hope you will 
 be interested by this; because it seems to me re- 
 markably like some incidents in old Japanese 
 histories. 
 
 Eyjolf took his way to the place where Aron and 
 Sturla had met, and there he found Aron sitting with 
 his weapons, and all about were lying dead men, and 
 wounded. Eyjolf asks his cousin whether he can move 
 at all. Aron says that he can, and stands on his feet; 
 and now they both go together for a while by the shore, 
 till they come to a hidden bay ; — there they saw a boat 
 ready floating, with five or six men at the oars, and the 
 bow to sea. This was Eyjolf's arrangement, in case of 
 sudden need. Now Eyjolf tells Aron that he means the 
 boat for both of them, giving out that he sees no hope 
 of doing more for the Bishop at that time. 
 
 " But I look for better days to come," says Eyjolf. 
 
 '* It seems a strange plan to me," says Aron; "for I 
 thought that we should never part from Bishop Gudmund 
 in this distress. There is something behind this, and I 
 
76 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 VOW that I will not go, unless you go first on board." 
 
 " That I will not, Cousin," says Eyjolf, " for It is 
 shoal water here, and I will not have any of the oars- 
 men leave his oar to shove her off ; and it is far too much 
 for you to go about with wounds like yours. You will 
 have to go on board." 
 
 " Well, put your weapons in the boat," says Aron, 
 " and I will believe you." 
 
 Aron now goes on board, and Eyjolf did as Aron asked 
 him. Eyjolf waded after, pushing the boat, for the shal- 
 lows went far out. And when he saw the right time 
 come, Eyjolf caught up a battle-axe out of the stern of 
 the boat, and gave a shove to the boat with all his might. 
 
 '' Good-bye, Aron," says Eyjolf; " we shall meet again 
 when God pleases." 
 
 And since Aron was disabled with wounds and weary 
 with loss of blood, it had to be even so; and this part- 
 ing was a grief to Aron, for they saw each other no more. 
 
 Now Eyjolf spoke to the oarsmen, and told them to 
 row hard, and not let Aron come back again to Grimsey 
 that day, and not for many a day, if they could help it. 
 
 They row away with Aron in their boat; but Eyjolf 
 turns to the shore again, and to a boat-house with a large 
 ferry-boat in it that belonged to the goodman (farmer) 
 Gnup. And at the same nick of time he sees the Stur- 
 lung company come tearing down from the garth, having 
 finished their mischief there. Eyjolf takes to the boat- 
 house, with his mind made up to defend it, as long as his 
 doom would let him. There were double doors to the 
 boat-house, and he puts heavy stones against them. 
 
 Brand, one of Siglwat's followers, a man of good con- 
 dition, caught a glimpse of a man moving, and said to 
 his companions that he thought he had made out Eyjolf 
 Karrson there, and that they ought to go after him. 
 Sturla was not on the spot. There were nine to ten 
 
THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER 77 
 
 together. So they come to the boat-house. Brand asks 
 who is there, and Eyjolf says that it is he. 
 
 " Then you will please to come out, and come before 
 Sturla," says Brand. 
 
 " Will you promise me grace? " says Eyjolf. 
 
 " There will be little of that," says Brand. 
 
 " Then it is for you to come on," says Eyjolf, " and 
 for me to guard, and it seems to me the shares are ill 
 divided." 
 
 Eyjolf had a coat of mail, and a great axe, and that 
 was all. 
 
 Now they came at him, and he made a good and brave 
 defence ; he cut their pike-shafts through — there were 
 stout blows on both sides. And in that bout Eyjolf 
 broke his axe-shaft, and caught up an oar, and then an- 
 other, and both broke with his blows. And in the bout 
 Eyjolf got a thrust under his arm, and it came home. 
 Some say that he broke the shaft from the spearhead, and 
 let it stay in the wound. He saw now that his defence 
 was ended. Then he made a dash out, and got through 
 them, before they knew. They were not expecting this; 
 still, they kept their heads, and a man named Mar cut at 
 him and caught his ankle, so that his foot hung crippled. 
 With that he rolled down the beach and the sea was at 
 the flood. In such plight as he was in, Eyjolf set to and 
 swam, and swimming he came twelve fathoms from shore 
 to a shelf of rock, and knelt there; and then he fell full 
 length upon the earth, and spread his hands from him, 
 turning to the East, as if to pray. 
 
 Now they launched the boat and went after him. And 
 when they came to the rock, a man drove a spearhead 
 into him, and then another; but no blood flowed from 
 either wound. So they turned to go ashore and find 
 Sturla, and tell him the story plainly how it had all 
 fallen out. Sturla held, and another man too, that this 
 
78 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 had been a glorious defence. He showed that he was 
 pleased at the news. 
 
 Now, do you observe anything peculiar about 
 this very human document? I think you must 
 appreciate the power of it; but I doubt whether 
 you have noticed how very differently from mod- 
 ern methods that power has been employed. 
 
 In the first place, notice that there are scarcely 
 any adjectives; altogether there are nine or ten — 
 suppose we say ten. There are two and a half 
 pages of about three hundred words in a page, in 
 the extract which you have written. That is to 
 say, there are about seven hundred and fifty 
 words, and there are only ten adjectives in the 
 whole — or about one adjective and a fraction to 
 every hundred words. I think that you would 
 have to look through thousands and thousands of 
 modern English books before you could find any- 
 thing like this. And there is no word used which 
 could be left out, without somewhat spoiling the 
 effect. This may not be grace; but it is certainly 
 the economy of force, which is the basis of all 
 grace. 
 
 Next, observe that there is no description — 
 not a particle of description. Houses are men- 
 tioned and rocks and boats, and a fight is nar- 
 rated in the most masterly way; yet nothing is 
 described. And nevertheless how well we see 
 everything — that cold bay of the North Sea with 
 
THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER 79 
 
 the boat floating upon it, and the brave man 
 helping his wounded cousin on board, and the 
 unequal struggle at the boat-house, during which 
 we can actually hear the noise of the oars break- 
 ing. There is no picture of a face; yet I am 
 quite sure that you can see the face of that brave 
 man in every episode of the struggle. The Norse 
 people were perhaps not the first to discover that 
 description was unnecessary in great writing. 
 They loved it in their poetry; they avoided it in 
 their prose. But it requires no little skill to 
 neglect description in this way, — to make the 
 actions and incidents themselves create the pic- 
 ture. At first reading this might seem to you 
 simple as a schoolboy's composition; but there is 
 nothing in the world so hard to do. 
 
 Thirdly, observe that there is no emotion, no 
 partiality, no sympathy expressed. It is true that 
 in one place Eyjolf is spoken of as having made 
 *' a good and brave defence," but the Norsemen 
 never spoke badly of their enemies; and if their 
 greatest enemy could fight well, they gave him 
 credit for It, not as a matter of sympathy but as 
 a matter of truth. Certainly the end of the nar- 
 ration shows us that the adjectives " good " and 
 " brave " do not imply any sympathy at all; for 
 the lord of the men who killed Eyjolf was pleased 
 to hear of the strong fight that he made. Notice 
 this point carefully. Such men found no pleasure 
 
8o TALKS TO WRITERS . 
 
 In killing cowards; they thought It glorious only 
 to kill a good fighter in a good fight. The lord 
 is glad because his men' killed somebody well 
 worth killing. So, as I have already said, there 
 is not one particle of personal emotion in the 
 whole story. Nevertheless what emotion it 
 makes within the reader! And what a wonderful 
 art this is to create emotion in the reader's mind 
 by suppressing It altogether in the narration! 
 This is the supreme art of realism, — about 
 which you may have heard a great deal in these 
 last few years. I know of only one writer of the 
 nineteenth century who had this same realistic 
 power, — the late French story-teller de Maupas- 
 sant. In the days before his brain weakened and 
 madness destroyed his astonishing faculties, he 
 also could create the most powerful emotion with- 
 out the use of a single emotional word or sug- 
 gestion. Some day I shall try to give you in 
 English a short specimen of his power. 
 
 Now If you will consider these three things — 
 the scarcity of adjectives, the absence of descrip- 
 tion, and the suppression of emotion, I think that 
 you will be able to see what a wonderful bit of 
 writing that was. But it is no more than a single 
 example out of a possible hundred. And in a 
 certain way the secret of It Is the same which gave 
 such surprise and delight In modern times to the 
 readers of Hans Andersen. This matchless teller 
 
THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER 8i 
 
 of fairy tales and " wonder-stories " full of deep 
 philosophical meanings, was, as you know, a 
 Norseman, — even by blood a descendant of those 
 same men who could write about the story of 
 Eyjolf in the thirteenth century. I want to give 
 you now another little story of the same kind 
 from the old Icelandic saga of Njal. You will 
 discover all the same qualities in It. The story 
 told might almost be Japanese, — an incident of 
 the old fierce custom of vengeance. Among the 
 Norsemen, as among the men of old Japan, the 
 brother was bound to avenge the death of the 
 brother; the father had to avenge his son; every- 
 body killed had some blood relative to avenge 
 him. If there was no man to do this, there would 
 often appear a brave woman willing and capable 
 of doing it, and in the wars of Katakiuchi there 
 were many brave things done on both sides, even 
 by the little boys and girls. In this case the vic- 
 tims are a little boy and his grandparents. They 
 are locked in a wooden house that has been sur- 
 rounded by their enemies and set on fire. There 
 are many people in the house, and they all are 
 about to be destroyed without pity, — for this is 
 a fight between two clans, and there are many 
 deaths to be avenged. But suddenly the leader 
 of the conquering party remembers that the old 
 man inside used to be his teacher (I think there Is 
 a Japanese incident of almost exactly the same 
 
82 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 kind in the story of a castle siege). Now we 
 will make the old northern story-teller relate the 
 rest. 
 
 Then Flos! went to the door, and called out to Njal, 
 and said he would speak with him and Bergthord. 
 
 Now Njal does so, and Flosi said, " I will offer thee, 
 master Njal, leave to go out; for it is unworthy that thou 
 shouldst burn indoors." 
 
 " I will not go out," said Njal, *' for I am an old man, 
 and little fitted to avenge my sons; but I will not live in 
 shame." 
 
 Then Flosi said to Bergthord : " Come thou out, 
 housewife; for I will for no sake burn thee indoors." 
 
 "I was given away to Njal young," said Bergthord; 
 " and I promised him this, — that we should both share 
 the same fate." 
 
 After that they both went back into the house. 
 
 "What council shall we now take?" said Bergthord. 
 
 " We will go to our bed," says Njal, " and lay us 
 down; I have long been eager for rest." 
 
 Then she said to the boy Thord, Kuri's son: "Thee 
 will I take out, and thou shalt not burn in here." 
 
 " Thou hast promised me this, grandmother," says 
 the boy, " that we should never part so long as I wished 
 to be with thee; but methinks it is much better to die 
 with thee and Njal than to live after you." 
 
 Then she bore the boy to her bed, and Njal spoke to 
 his stew^ard and said: 
 
 " Now thou shalt see where we lay us down, — for I 
 mean not to stir an inch hence, whether reek or burning 
 smart me, and so thou wilt be able to guess where to 
 look for our bones." 
 
 He said that he would do so. 
 
THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER 83 
 
 There had been an ox slaughtered, and the hide lay 
 there. Njal told the steward to spread the hide over 
 them, and he did so. 
 
 So there they lay down both of them in their bed, and 
 put the boy between them. Then they signed them- 
 selves and the boy with the sign of the cross, and gave 
 over their souls unto God's hand; and that was the last 
 word that men heard them utter. 
 
 There are about four adjectives in all this; and, 
 as in the former case, there is no description and 
 no sympathy, — no sentiment. Very possibly this 
 is an absolutely true incident, the steward, who 
 was allowed to go out, having been afterward 
 able to make a faithful report of what the old 
 people and the boy said in the house. The young 
 men said other things, full of fierce mockery, — 
 things that manifest a spirit totally unlike any- 
 thing in modern times. They stood up to be 
 burned or to break their way out if a chance 
 offered. One of the sons seeing the father lying 
 down in the bed sarcastically observed, *' Our 
 father goes early to bed, — and that is what was 
 to be looked for, as he is an old man." This 
 grewsome joke shows that the young man would 
 have preferred the father to die fighting. But the 
 old folks were busy enough in preparing the little 
 boy for death. It is a terrible story, — an atro- 
 ciously cruel one; but it shows great nobility of 
 character in the victims, and the reader is moved 
 
84 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 in spite of himself by this most simple relation 
 of fact. 
 
 Now perhaps you will think that this simple 
 style can only produce such effects when the sub- 
 ject matter of the narrative is itself of a terrible 
 or startling or extraordinary character. I am 
 quite sure that this is not true, because I find ex- 
 actly the same style in such a modern novel as 
 " Synnove Solbakken " by Bjornson, and I find it 
 in such fairy tales of Andersen as " The Ugly 
 Duckling " and " The Little Mermaid." These 
 simplest subjects are full of wonder and beauty 
 for the eyes that can see and the mind that can 
 think; and with such an eye and such a mind, the 
 simple style is quite enough. How trifling at 
 times are the subjects of Andersen's stories — a 
 child's toy, a plant growing in the field, a snow 
 image, made by children somewhat as we make a 
 snow daruma in the farmyard, a rose-bush under 
 the window. It would be nonsense to say that 
 here the interest depends upon the subject mat- 
 ter I In such a story as '^The Little Tin Soldier " 
 we are really affected almost as much as by the 
 story of Eyjolf in the old saga — simply because 
 the old saga-teller and the modern story-teller 
 wrote and thought very much in the same way. 
 Or take another subject, of a more complicated 
 character, the story of the " Nightingale of the 
 Emperor of China and the Nightingale of the 
 
THE ART OF SIMPLE POWER 85 
 
 Emperor of Japan." There is a great deal more 
 meaning here than the pretty narrative itself 
 shows upon the surface. The whole idea is the 
 history of our human life, — the life of the artist, 
 and his inability to obtain just recognition, and 
 the power of the humbug to ignore him. It is 
 a very profound story indeed; and there are pages 
 in it which one can scarcely read with dry eyes. 
 It affects us both intellectually and emotionally to 
 an extraordinary degree; but the style is still the 
 style of the old sagas. Of course I must acknowl- 
 edge that Andersen uses a few more adjectives 
 than the Icelandic writers did, but you will find, 
 on examining him closely, that he does not use 
 them when he can help it. Now the other style 
 that I was telling you about, — the modern artis- 
 tic style, uses adjectives almost as profusely as 
 in poetry. I do not wish to speak badly of it; 
 but scarcely any writer who uses it has been able 
 to give so powerful an impression as the Norse 
 writers who never used it at all. 
 
 In the simple style there is something of the 
 genius of the race. After all, any great literary 
 manner must have its foundation in race char- 
 acter. The manner that I have been describing 
 is an evidence of northern race character at its 
 very best. Quite incidentally I may observe here 
 that another northern race, which has produced 
 a literature only in very recent times, shows some- 
 
86 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 thing of the same simple force of plain style, — I 
 mean Russian literature. The great modern Rus- 
 sian writers, most of all, resemble the old Norse 
 writers In their management of effects with few 
 words. But my purpose in this lecture has been 
 especially to suggest to you a possible resemblance 
 between old Japanese literary methods and these 
 old northern literary methods. I imagine that 
 the northern simple art accords better with Japan- 
 ese genius than ever could the more elaborate 
 forms of literature, based upon the old classic 
 studies. 
 
 ^11 
 
 SIR THOMAS BROWNE 
 
 In our first lecture on prose style you will rec- 
 ollect the extraordinary simplicity of the exam- 
 ples given from some of the old Norse writers. 
 And you will have observed the lasting strength 
 of that undecorated native simplicity. Today I 
 am going to talk to you about a style which offers 
 the very greatest possible contrast and opposition 
 to the style of the Norse writers, — a style which 
 represents the extreme power of great classical 
 culture, vast scholarship, enormous reading, — a 
 style which can be enjoyed only by scholars, which 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 87 
 
 never could become popular, and which neverthe- 
 less has wonderful merit in its way. I do not 
 offer you examples with any idea of encouraging 
 you to imitate it. But it is proper that you 
 should be able to appreciate some of its fine qual- 
 ities and to understand its great importance in 
 the history of English literature. I mean the 
 style of Sir Thomas Browne. 
 
 I have said that the influence of this style has 
 been very great upon English literature. Before 
 we go any further, allow me to explain this in- 
 fluence. Sir Thomas Browne was the first great 
 English writer who made an original classic style. 
 By classic style I mean an English prose style 
 founded upon a profound study of the ancient 
 classic writers, Greek and Latin, and largely col- 
 oured and made melodious by a skilful use of 
 many-syllabled words derived from the antique 
 tongues. There were original styles before. Sir 
 Thomas Malory made a charming innovation in 
 style. Lyly made a new style, too, — a style 
 imitated from Spanish writers, extravagantly 
 ornamented, extravagantly complicated, fantastic, 
 artificial, tiresome, — the famous style called 
 Euphuism. We shall have to speak of Euphuism 
 at another time. It also was a great influence 
 during a short period. But neither the delight- 
 ful prose poetry of Sir Thomas Malory nor the 
 extravagant and factitious style of Lyly has any- 
 
[88 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 thing in common with the style of Sir Thomas 
 Browne. Sir Thomas Browne imitated nobody 
 except the best Latin and Greek writers, and he 
 imitated them with an art that no other English- 
 man ever approached. Moreover, he did not imi- 
 tate them slavishly; he managed always to re- 
 main supremely original, and because he was a 
 true prose poet, much more than because he imi- 
 tated the beauties of the antique writers, he was 
 able to influence English prose for considerably 
 more than two hundred years. Indeed, I think 
 we may say that his influence still continues; and 
 that if he does not affect style today as markedly 
 as he did a hundred years ago, it is only because 
 one must be a very good scholar to do anything 
 in the same direction as that followed by Sir 
 Thomas Browne, and our very good scholars of 
 today do not write very much in the way of essays 
 or of poetry. The first person of great eminence 
 powerfully affected by Sir Thomas Browne was 
 Samuel Johnson. You know that Johnson af- 
 fected the literature of the eighteenth century 
 most powerfully, and even a good deal of the lit- 
 erature of the early nineteenth century. But 
 Johnson was a pupil of Browne, and a rather 
 clumsy pupil at that. He was not nearly so great 
 a scholar as Sir Thomas Browne; he was much 
 less broad-minded — that is to say, capable of 
 liberal and generous tolerance, and he did not 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 89 
 
 have that sense of beauty and of poetry which 
 distinguished Sir Thomas Browne. He made 
 only a very bad imitation of Sir Thomas, exag- 
 gerating the eccentricities and missing the rare 
 and dehcate beauties. But the literary links be- 
 tween Browne and the eighteenth century are very 
 easily estabhshed, and it is certain that Browne in- 
 directly helped to form the literary prose of that 
 period. Thus you will perceive how large a fig- 
 ure in the history of English literature he must be. 
 He was born in 1605, and he died in 1682. 
 Thus he belongs to the seventeenth century, and 
 his long life extends from nearly the beginning to 
 within a few years of the end. We do not know 
 very much about him. He was educated at Ox- 
 ford, and studied medicine. Then he established 
 himself as a doctor in the English country town 
 of Norwich, famous in nursery-rhyme as the town 
 to which the man-in-the-moon asked his way. In 
 the leisure hours of his professional life he com- 
 posed, at long intervals, three small books, re- 
 spectively entitled " Religio Medici," " Pseudo- 
 doxia," and " Hydriotaphia." Neither the first, 
 which is a treatise upon humanism in its relation 
 to life and religion, nor the second, which is a 
 treatise upon vulgar errors, need occupy us much 
 for the present; they do not reveal his style in the • 
 same way as the third book. This "Hydriota- 
 phia " is a treatise upon urn-burial, upon the habit 
 
90 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 of the ancients of burying or preserving the ashes 
 of their dead In urns of pottery or of metal. It 
 is from this book that I am going to make some 
 quotations. During Browne's lifetime he was 
 recognized as a most wonderful scholar and ami- 
 able man, but there were only a few persons who 
 could appreciate the finer beauties of his literary 
 work. Being personally liked, however, he had 
 no difficulty in making a social success; he was 
 able to become tolerably rich, and he was created 
 a knight by King Charles II. After his death his 
 books and manuscript were sold at auction; and 
 fortunately they were purchased afterwards for 
 the British Museum. The whole of his work, In- 
 cluding some posthumous essays, makes three vol- 
 umes in the Bohn Library. Better editions of 
 part of the text, however, have been recently pro- 
 duced; and others are in preparation. It is prob- 
 able that Sir Thomas Browne will be studied very 
 much again within the next fifty years. 
 
 The book about urn-burial really gives the stu- 
 dent the best idea of Sir Thomas Browne. No 
 other of his works so well displays his learning 
 and his sense of poetry. Indeed, even in these 
 days of more advanced scholarship, the learning 
 of Sir Thomas Browne astonishes the most 
 learned. He quotes from a multitude of authors, 
 scarcely known to the ordinary student, as well as 
 from almost every classic author known; likewise 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 91 
 
 from German, Italian, Spanish and Danish writ- 
 ers; likewise from hosts of the philosophers of the 
 Middle Ages and the fathers of the church. 
 Everything that had been written about science 
 from antiquity up to the middle of the seven- 
 teenth century he would appear to have read, — 
 botany, anatomy, medicine, alchemy, astrology; 
 and the mere list of authorities cited by him is ap- 
 palling. But to discover a man of the seven- 
 teenth century who had read all the books in the 
 western world is a much less surprising fact than 
 to find that the omnivorous reader remembered 
 what he read, digested it, organized it, and every- 
 where discovered in it beauties that others had not 
 noticed. Scholarship in itself is not, however, 
 particularly interesting; and the charge of pedan- 
 try, of a needless display of learning, might have 
 been brought against Sir Thomas Browne more 
 than once. Today, you know, it is considered a 
 little vulgar for a good scholar to make quota- 
 tions from Greek and Latin authors when writ- 
 ing an English book. He Is at once accused of 
 trying to show off his knowledge. But even to- 
 day, and while this is the rule, no great critic 
 will charge Sir Thomas Browne of pedantry. 
 He quotes classical authors extensively only 
 while he is writing upon classical subjects; and 
 even then, he never quotes a name or a fact with- 
 out producing some unexpected and surprising 
 
92 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 effect. Moreover, he very seldom cites a Latin 
 or Greek text, but puts the Latin or Greek 
 thought into English. Later on I shall try to 
 show you what are the intrinsic demerits of this 
 style, as well as its merits; but for the present let 
 us study a few quotations. They will serve bet- 
 ter than anything else to show what a curious 
 writer he is. 
 
 In the little book about urn-burial, the first 
 chapter treats generally about the burial customs 
 of all nations of antiquity — indeed I might say 
 of all nations in the world, together with the 
 philosophical or religious reasons for different 
 burial customs; and yet in the original book all 
 this is told in about twenty pages. You will see 
 therefore that Sir Thomas is not prolix; on the 
 contrary, he presses his facts together so power- 
 fully as to make one solid composition of them. 
 Let us take a few sentences from this chapter: 
 
 Some being of the opinion of Thales, that water was 
 the orginal of all things, thought it most equal to submit 
 unto the principle of putrefaction, and conclude in a 
 moist relentment. Others conceived it most natural to 
 end in fire, as due unto the master principle in the com- 
 position, according to the doctrine of Heraclitus; and 
 therefore heaped up large piles, more actively to waft 
 them toward that element, whereby they also declined a 
 visible degeneration into worms, and left a lasting parcel 
 of their composition. . . . But the Chaldeans, the great 
 idolaters of fire, abhorred the burning of their carcasses, 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 93 
 
 as a pollution of that deity. The Persian magi declined 
 it upon the like scruple, and being only solicitous about 
 their bones, exposed their flesh to the prey of birds and 
 dogs. And the Parsees now of India, which expose their 
 bodies unto vultures, and endure not so much as feretra 
 or biers of wood, the proper fuel of fire, are led on with 
 such niceties. But whether the ancient Germans, who 
 burned their dead, held any such fear to pollute their 
 deity of Herthus, or the Earth, we have no authentic 
 conjecture. 
 
 The Egyptians were afraid of fire, not as a deity, but 
 a devouring element, mercilessly consuming their bodies, 
 and leaving too little of them; and therefore by precious 
 embalmments, depositure in dry earths, or handsome en- 
 closure in glasses, contrived the notablest ways of integral 
 conservation. And from such Egyptian scruples, imbibed 
 by Pythagoras, it may be conjectured that Numa and the 
 Pythagorical sect first waved (modern waived) the fiery 
 solution. 
 
 The Scythians, who swore by wind and sword, that is, 
 by life and death, were so far from burning their bodies, 
 that they declined all interment, and made their graves 
 in the air; and the Icthyophagi, or fish-eating nations 
 about Egypt, affected the sea for their grave, thereby de- 
 clining visible corruption, and restoring the debt of their 
 bodies. Whereas the old heroes, in Homer, dreaded 
 nothing more than water or drowning; probably upon the 
 old opinion of the fiery substance of the soul, only ex- 
 tlnguishable by that element; and therefore the poet em- 
 phatically implieth the total destruction in this kind of 
 death, which happened to Ajax Oileus. 
 
 So on, page after page crammed with facts 
 and comments. He mentions even the Chinese 
 
94 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 burial customs — so little known to Europeans of 
 the seventeenth century; and his remarks upon 
 them are tolerably correct, considering all the 
 circumstances. You will acknowledge that a dry 
 subject is here most interestingly treated; this is 
 the art that can give life to old bones. But the 
 main thing is the style, — remember we are still 
 early in the seventeenth century, in the year 1658 ; 
 see how dignified, how sonorous, how finely pol- 
 ished are these rolling sentences, all of which rise 
 and fall with wave-like regularity and roundness. 
 You feel that this is the scholar who writes, — 
 the scholar whose ear has been trained to the 
 long music of Greek and Latin sentences. And 
 even when he uses words now obsolete or changed 
 in meaning, you can generally know very well 
 from the context what is meant. For instance, 
 " relentment," which now has no such meaning, 
 is used in the sense of dissolution, and '' con- 
 clude," of which the meaning is now most com- 
 monly to finish in the literary sense, this old 
 doctor uses in the meaning of to end life, to finish 
 existence. But you do not need to look at the 
 glossary at the end of the book in order to know 
 this. 
 
 We might look to such a writer for all the arts 
 of finished prose known to the best masters of 
 today; and we should find them in the most elab- 
 orate perfection. The use of antithesis, long 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 95 
 
 afterwards made so famous by Macaulay, was 
 used by Browne with quite as much art, and per- 
 haps with even better taste. Certainly his similes 
 are quite as startling: 
 
 Though the funeral pyre of Patroclus took up an hun- 
 dred foot, a piece of an old boat burnt Pompey; and if 
 the burthen of Isaac were sufficient for an holocaust, a 
 man may carry his own pyre. 
 
 The subject Is always made interesting, whether 
 the writer be speaking of mathematics or of gar- 
 dens, of graves or of stars. Hear him when he 
 begins on the subject of ghosts — how curious the 
 accumulation of facts, and how effective the con- 
 trasts : 
 
 The dead seem all alive in the human Hades of Homer, 
 yet cannot well speak, prophesy, or know the living, ex- 
 cept they drink blood, wherein Is the life of man. And 
 therefore the souls of Penelope's paramours, conducted 
 by Mercury, chirped like bats, and those which followed 
 Hercules made a noise but like a flock of birds. 
 
 The departed spirits know things past and to come; 
 yet are Ignorant of things present. Agamemnon foretells 
 what should happen to Ulysses; yet Ignorantly enquires 
 what has become of his own son. The ghosts are afraid 
 of swords In Homer; yet Sibylla tells ^neas In Virgil, 
 the thin habit of spirits was beyond the force of weapons. 
 The spirits put off their malice with their bodies, and 
 Caesar and Pompey accord in Latin hell; yet Ajax, in 
 Homer, endures not a conference with Ulysses; and Dei- 
 phobus appears all mangled in Virgil's ghosts, yet we 
 
96 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 meet with perfect shadows among the wounded ghosts of 
 Homer. 
 
 But these examples do not show Browne at his 
 very best; they merely serve to illustrate his ordi- 
 nary style. To show him at his best through quo- 
 tation is a very difficult thing, as Professor Saints- 
 bury recently pointed out. His splendours are in 
 rare sentences which somehow or other light up 
 the whole page in which they occur. Every stu- 
 dent should know the wonderful passage about 
 the use of Egyptian mummies for medicine, — 
 mummy-flesh being a drug known to English 
 medicine up to the year 1721. I should like to 
 read the whole passage to you in which this sen- 
 tence occurs, but this would require too much 
 time ; suffice to quote the conclusion : 
 
 Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving 
 their bodies in sweet consistencies, to attend the return 
 of their souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and 
 folly. The Egyptian mummies which Cambyses or time 
 hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is be- 
 come merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh 
 is sold for balsams. 
 
 If Sir Thomas Browne had lived in modern 
 times he might have added that mummies were 
 used on the steamboats of the Nile instead of 
 coal — even within our own day. The bodies 
 •of common people were preserved mostly by the 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 97 
 
 use of cheap resinous substances, such as pitch; 
 therefore, as soon as it was found by the steam- 
 boat companies that they would burn very well 
 indeed, they were burned by tens of thousands to 
 make steam ! Also I suppose that you may have 
 heard how mummy dust w^as sold for manure, 
 until English laws were passed to prevent the cus- 
 tom. Sir Thomas Browne's object in these pages 
 is only to point out the folly of funeral pomp, or 
 of seeking to maintain a great fame among men 
 after death, because all things are impermanent 
 and pass away; and his illustrations are always 
 strikingly forcible. On the subject of human im- 
 permanency the book is full of splendid sentences, 
 many of which are worth learning by heart. But 
 let us turn to a less sombre subject — to a beauti- 
 ful paragraph in the fourth chapter of the " Gar- 
 den of Cyrus " : 
 
 Light that makes things seen, makes some things in- 
 visible; were it not for darkness and the shadow of the 
 earth, the noblest part of the creation had remained un- 
 seen, and the stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth 
 day, when they were created above the horizon with the 
 sun, or there was not an eye to behold them. The great- 
 est mystery of religion is expressed by adumbration, and 
 in the noblest part of Jewish types, we find the cherubims 
 shadowing the mercy-seat. Life itself is but the shadow 
 of death, and souls departed but the shadow of the living. 
 All things fall under this name. The sun itself is but 
 the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God. 
 
98 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 The little essay from which I have made this 
 quotation, usually bound up with the work on urn- 
 burial and called the " Garden of Cyrus " is a 
 most curious thing. It is a dissertation upon the 
 Quincunx, or, to use simpler language, a disserta- 
 tion upon the mathematical, geometrical and mys- 
 tical values of the number Five. The doctor, 
 beginning his subject with some remarks about the 
 merit of arranging trees in a garden by groups of 
 five, is led on to consider the signification of five 
 in all its relations to the universe. He discourses 
 upon that number in the heavens and upon the 
 earth and even in the waters which are beneath 
 the earth. He has remarked that not only in the 
 human hand and foot do we find the divisions of 
 five fingers and five toes, but we find like divisions 
 in the limbs of countless animals and in the petals 
 of flowers. He was very near a great discovery 
 in these observations; you know that botany today 
 recognizes the meaning of fives and sixes in floral 
 division; and you know that modern physiology 
 has established beyond any question the fact that 
 even in the hoofs of a horse or of a cow we have 
 the rudiments of five toes that anciently existed. 
 If the doctor had lived a little later — say in the 
 time of that country doctor, Erasmus Darwin, he 
 might have been able to forecast many discoveries 
 of Charles Darwin. Anyhow, his little essay is 
 delightful to read; and if he did not anticipate 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE 99 
 
 some general laws of modern science, he was none 
 the less able to establish his declaration that " all 
 things began in order, so shall they end, and so 
 shall they begin again; according to the ordainer 
 of order and mystical mathematics of the city of 
 heav-en/' 
 
 It would be wrong to call Sir Thomas Browne 
 a mystic outside of the Christian sense. He was 
 really a religious man, and he would not have 
 ventured to put out theories which he believed the 
 church would condemn. But no writer ever felt 
 the poetry of mysticism more than he, or ex- 
 pressed its aspirations better without actually 
 sharing them. Therefore his books have been 
 classed with mystical literature, and are much ad- 
 mired and studied by mystics. It is impossible 
 to read him and not be occasionally astonished by 
 suggestions and thoughts that seem much too 
 large for orthodox Christianity, but which would 
 excellently illustrate the teaching of older east- 
 ern religions. 
 
 I shall be glad if these notes upon Sir Thomas 
 Browne should serve to interest you in some of 
 his best writings. But I think that his value for 
 you will be chiefly in the suggestive direction. 
 He is a great teacher in certain arts of style — in 
 the art of contrast, in the art of compression, in 
 the art of rhythm, and of melody. I do not think 
 that you could, however, learn the latter from 
 
loo TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 him. What you would learn would be the value 
 of contrasts of metaphor, and of a certain fine 
 economy of words; the rest is altogether too 
 classical for you to apprehend the secret of it. 
 Indeed, it Is only a Greek and Latin training that 
 can give full apprehension of what the beauties 
 of his style are. But, like all true style, there is 
 much there that means only character, personal- 
 ity, — the charm of the man himself, the grace of 
 his mind; and all that, you can very well under- 
 stand. I think you could scarcely read the book 
 and not feel strange retrospective affection for the 
 man who wrote it. 
 
 Now the great thing for you to remember 
 about his place in English literature is that he was 
 the father and founder of English classic prose. 
 He was the source from which Dr. Johnson ob- 
 tained inspiration; he was the first also to show 
 those capacities of majesty and sonority in Eng- 
 lish prose which Gibbon afterwards displayed on 
 so vast a scale; he was also the first to use effect- 
 ively that art of contrast and of antithesis which 
 was to make so great a part of the wonderful 
 style of Macaulay. And even today no student 
 can read Sir Thomas Browne without some 
 profit. He is incomparably superior to Bacon 
 and to not a few others who are much more 
 widely known. I do not think that the study of 
 Bacon's essays can be at all profitable to the stu- 
 
SIR THOMAS BROWNE ioi 
 
 ,"" ^ ' » > , , - . ^ ^ , , ^ . . >^ 
 
 dent In the matter of style ^-^Vather ' the reVei'sc.' 
 The value of Bacon is chiefly In his thinking. But 
 Sir Thomas Browne offers you both thoughts and 
 style in the very finest form. 
 
 Nevertheless I must utter a final word of dis- 
 favour. There is one drawback to all such style 
 as that which we have been considering — not 
 excepting the styles of Gibbon or Macaulay. It 
 is the necessarily limited range of their power. 
 You can not appeal to the largest possible audi- 
 ence with a scholarly style. And what is worse, 
 every such style, being artificial more than nat- 
 ural, contains within itself certain elements of 
 corruption and dissolution. We have to read 
 Sir Thomas Browne with a glossary today — that 
 is, if we wish to be very exact in our renderings 
 of his thoughts ; you will find an extensive glossary 
 attached to his work. This you will not find In 
 Gibbon or Macaulay, but this is only because they 
 are still near to us In time. For all that, the 
 language of the former is now found to be de- 
 cidedly old-fashioned, notwithstanding its beauty; 
 and the style of the latter will probably become 
 old-fashioned during the present century. It Is 
 quite otherwise in the case of that simple northern 
 style, of which I gave you specimens in a former 
 lecture. That never can become old-fashioned, 
 even though the language die in which it was orig- 
 inally written. Containing nothing artificial. It 
 
102 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 aist)'Cbil't'a[ins" no 'element of decay. It can im- 
 press equally well the most learned and the most 
 ignorant minds, and if we have to make a choice 
 at all between their perfectly plain style and the 
 gorgeous music and colours of Sir Thomas 
 Browne, I should not hesitate for a moment to 
 tell you that the simple style is much the better. 
 However, that is not a reason for refusing to 
 give to the classic wTiters the praise and admira- 
 tion which they have so justly earned. 
 
 Ill 
 
 BJORNSON 
 
 Before studying some further wonderful prose 
 I want to speak to you about what I believe to be 
 a wide-spread and very harmful delusion in Japan. 
 I mean the delusion that students of English lit- 
 erature ought to study in English only the books 
 originally written in English ; — not English trans- 
 lations from other languages. Of course, in 
 these times, I acknowledge that there is some rea- 
 son for distrust of translations. Translations are ^ 
 luade very quickly and very badly, only for the * 
 purpose of gaining money, and a vast amount of 
 Tiodern translation is absolute trash, but it is very 
 
 ferent in the case of foreign works which ■ 
 
BJORNSON 103 
 
 have been long adopted Into the English language, 
 and which have become practically a common pos- 
 session of Englishmen, — - such as the translation 
 of the "Arabian Nights/' the grand prose transla- 
 tion of Goethe's " Faust," the translation of 
 " Wilhelm Meister " by Carlyle, the translation 
 of "XJndine " which every boy reads, to mention 
 only a few things at random. So with the trans- 
 lations of the great Italian and Spanish and Rus- 
 sian writers, — not to speak of French writers. 
 In fact, if Englishmen had studied only English 
 literature, English literature would never have be- 
 come developed as it is now. And if EngHsh- 
 men had studied foreign literature only in the 
 original tongue, English literature would still 
 have made very little progress. It has been 
 through thousands of translations, not through 
 scholarly study, that the best of our poetry, the 
 best of our fiction, the best of our prose has been 
 modified and improved by foreign influence. As 
 I once before told you, the development of litera- 
 ture Is only in a very limited degree the work of 
 the scholars. The great scholars are seldom pro- 
 ducers of enduring literature. The men who 
 make that must be men of natural genius, which 
 has nothing to do with scholarship; and the ma- 
 jority of them are not, as a rule, even educated 
 beyond the ordinary. To furnish these men with 
 the stimulus of exotic Ideas, those ideas should be 
 
104 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 placed before them In their own tongue. Now it 
 may seem to you very strange that foreign in- 
 fluence should operate chiefly through transla- 
 tions, but the history of nearly every European 
 literature proves that such Is the case. And I am 
 quite sure that if Japan Is to produce an extensive 
 new literature in the future, it will not be until 
 after fresh ideas have become widely assimilated 
 by the nation through thousands of translations. 
 For these reasons, I think It is a very unfortunate 
 notion that the study of English literature should 
 be confined to the study of books originally writ- 
 ten in English, or even written by Englishmen. 
 
 How is the mind of the English boy formed? 
 If you think about that, you will discover that 
 English literature really represents but a part and 
 a small part of world influences on him. After 
 the age of the nursery songs, most of which are 
 really of English origin, comes the age of fairy 
 tales, of which very few can be traced to English 
 sources. Indeed *I beheve that '^ Jack the Giant 
 Killer " and '' Jack and the Beanstalk " are quite 
 exceptional in the fact that they are truly Eng- 
 lish. *' Puss in Boots " is not English, but 
 French; " Cinderella " is French; ^' The Sleeping 
 Beauty " is French; " The White Cat " is French; 
 and " Bluebeard " is French. In fact, the great 
 mass of our fairy tales are translations from 
 French authors such as Perrault and Madame 
 
BJORNSON 105 
 
 d'Aulnoy, to mention only two. When the little 
 boy has feasted himself to repletion upon this 
 imaginative diet, what Is the next course of read- 
 ing? Other fairy tales, of a deeper character — 
 half pure story, half moral teaching; and where 
 do these stories come from? Well, they are not 
 English at all; they are translations from other 
 languages, chiefly German and Swedish. The 
 most important of all works of this kind are those 
 of Hans Andersen. Every child must read them 
 and learn from them, and they have now become 
 so much a part of English child life that we can 
 not help wondering what children did before An- 
 dersen was born. The best German work of this 
 sort Is the work of Grimm. Everybody knows 
 something about that. After this reading, stories 
 of adventure are generally taken up, or slight ro- 
 mances of some kind. There Is " Robinson 
 Crusoe," of course, which Is English, and " Gul- 
 liver's Travels " ; but excepting these two, I be- 
 lieve that most of the first class of juvenile ro- 
 mance consists of translations. For example. In 
 my boyhood the romances of Henry Conscience 
 were read by all boys; and they are translated 
 from the Dutch. And even when a lad has come 
 to delight in Sir Walter Scott, he has still foreign 
 literary influences of even greater power work- 
 ing upon his imagination — such as the magic of 
 the elder Alexandre Dumas. The wonderful 
 
io6 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 stories of " Monte Cristo " and of ** The Three 
 Musketeers " have become indispensable reading 
 for the young, and their influence upon modern 
 English fiction has been very great. Still later 
 one has to read the extraordinary novels of Vic- 
 tor Hugo ; and there is no time at which the Eng- 
 lish student is not directly or indirectly affected 
 by French masters as well as by the German mas- 
 ters. Of course you will say that I am mention- 
 ing modern authors when I speak of Dumas and 
 Hugo. Yes, they are almost contemporaries. 
 But when we look back to the times before these 
 great men were heard of, we still find that for- 
 eign literature influenced Elizabethans quite as 
 much as contemporary English literature. In the 
 eighteenth century the influence was French, and 
 other foreign influences were at work. Then 
 everybody had to read the classic French authors, 
 but even these were not dull; there were story- 
 tellers among them who supplied what the au- 
 thors of the romantic time supplied to the English 
 youth of the nineteenth century. Also in the sev- 
 enteenth century there was some French influence, 
 mixed with Italian and Spanish. In the Eliza- 
 bethan Age, education was not so widely diffused, 
 but we know that the young people of those times 
 used to read Spanish novels and stories, and that 
 no less than one hundred and seventy Spanish 
 books were then translated. 
 
BJORNSON 107 
 
 I think you will see from all this that English 
 literature actually depends for its vitality upon 
 translations, and that the minds of English youth 
 are by no means formed through purely English 
 influences. Observe that I have not said any- 
 thing about the study of Greek and Latin, which 
 are more than foreign influences; they are actually 
 influences from another vanished world. Nor 
 have I said anything about the influence of re- 
 ligious literature, vast as it is — Hebrew litera- 
 ture, literature of the Bible, on which are based 
 the prayers that children learn at their mother's 
 knee. Really, instead of being the principal fac- 
 tor in English education, English literature occu- 
 pies quite a small place. If an Englishman only 
 knew English literature, he would know very little 
 indeed. The best of his literature may be in Eng- 
 lish; he has Shakespeare, for example; but the 
 greater part of it is certainly not English, and 
 even today its yearly production is being more and 
 more affected by the Ideas of France and Italy and 
 Russia and Sweden and Norway — without men- 
 tioning the new influences from many Oriental 
 countries. 
 
 No : you should think of any foreign language 
 that you are able to acquire, not as the medium 
 for expressing only the thoughts of one people, 
 but as a medium through which you can obtain 
 the best thought of the world. If you can not 
 
io8 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 read Russian, why not read the Russian novelists 
 in English or French? Perhaps you can not read 
 Italian or Spanish; but that is no reason why you 
 should not know the poems of Petrarch and 
 Ariosto, or the dramas of Calderon. If you do 
 not know Portuguese, there is a good English 
 translation of Camoens. I suppose that in Tokyo 
 very few persons know Finnish; but the wonder- 
 ful epic of " Kalevala '' can be read today in Eng- 
 lish, French and in German. It is not necessary 
 to have studied Sanskrit in order to know the 
 gigantic epics of India; there are many European 
 translations of the " Mahabharata " and " Rama- 
 yana " — indeed, there are English and French 
 translations of most of the great Sanskrit writers, 
 though the Germans have been perhaps the great- 
 est workers in this field. You can read the 
 Arabian and the Persian poets also in English; 
 and there are Oriental classics that everybody 
 should know something about — such as the 
 ''Shah-Nameh," or " Book of Kings " of Firdusi; 
 *' The Gulistan " of Saadi; and the " Divan " of 
 •Hafiz. And speaking of English translations 
 only, both the written and the unwritten litera- 
 tures of almost every people under the sun can be 
 read in English — even the songs and the prov- 
 erbs of the most savage tribes. There is one 
 great defect in English work of this kind, — a 
 great deal of such translation has been made in 
 
BJORNSON 109 
 
 bad verse. For this reason the French transla- 
 tors who keep to prose are generally to be pre- 
 ferred. But you have certainly learned how 
 great some English translators have proved 
 themselves, even in verse, — for example, Fitz- 
 gerald; and scarcely less interesting and sympa- 
 thetic than Fitzgerald is Palmer's volume of 
 translation from the ancient Arabian poets. 
 However, what I am anxious to impress uport> 
 you is this, — that the English language can give 
 you not only some knowledge of the productions 
 of one race, but the intellectual wealth of the 
 entire world. In England there are many thou-v 
 sarids of persons who can not read German, but 
 there are no educated persons who have not read 
 the German poets in English, and who can not 
 quote to you some verses of Heine. 
 
 Now if you are satisfied that the study of Eng- 
 lish means for you infinitely more than the study 
 of English authors, you will know why I am not 
 attempting to confine these lectures to original 
 English prose. I shall take only the best exam- 
 ples that I can find in any kind of European prose 
 for illustration; because everything depends upon 
 the idea and the form, and neither the idea nor 
 the form of prose (it is not the same in the case 
 of poetry) can be restricted by the boundaries of 
 language. In the last two lectures of this series 
 I gave you two extremely different examples of 
 
no TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 style — one representing the old Norse or saga 
 style; the other the elaborate, fantastic, almost 
 pedantic, but matchlessly beautiful prose of Sir 
 Thomas Browne. Both of these refer to the 
 past; and the contrast was about as strong as It 
 could be made. Now let us turn to modern 
 times, to the nineteenth century, and again take 
 two striking examples of the most simple and the 
 most ornamental varieties of prose. The simple 
 style will again be Norse; for the genius of the 
 race, which showed Itself so markedly in those 
 quotations from the sagas which I gave you, again 
 shows Itself today In the nineteenth century prose 
 of the very same people. Let us now talk about 
 that. 
 
 You must not suppose that Norse literature re- 
 mained unaffected by change through all the cen- 
 turies — I am not speaking of language (that Is 
 not at all the same), but of method. On the 
 contrary, the Norwegians and Swedes and Danes 
 went through very much the same kind of literary 
 experiences as the English and the French, the 
 Italians and the Germans. They had also their 
 romantic and classic periods; even they became 
 for a while artificial, especially the Danes; and 
 the Danish culture remained very conservative in 
 its classicism until well into the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. And at that time it was Danish culture 
 that especially affected education In Norway and 
 
BJORNSON III 
 
 Sweden. But In 1832 there was born a man des- 
 tined to revive the ancient saga literature In mod- • 
 ern times, and so make a new literature unlike 
 anything that had been before it. That man was 
 Bjornstjerne Bjornson. He went through the 
 usual course of university education, and did not 
 prove himself a good scholar. He was always 
 dreaming about other things than Greek or Latin 
 or mathematics, and instead of trying to compete 
 for any university honours, he gave all his spare 
 time to the reading of books having nothing to 
 do with the university course. The ancient 
 Norse literature especially interested him; he read 
 everything relating to It that he could lay hands 
 upon. He had hard work to pass his examina- 
 tions, and his fellow-students never imagined that 
 he would be able to do anything great in the 
 world. But presently, after leaving the univers- 
 ity, this dreaming young man suddenly developed 
 an immense amount of unsuspected intellectual 
 energy. He became a journalist, which, of all 
 professions, is the worst for a man of letters to 
 undertake; and in spite of It he produced a won- 
 derful novel, within quite a short time, which at- 
 tracted the attention of all Europe and has been 
 translated Into most European languages. This 
 novel was " Synnove Solbakken," a story of Nor- 
 wegian peasant life. Bjornson himself was a 
 peasant's son, and he had lived and seen that 
 
112 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 which he described In this novel. But the wonderj 
 of the book was not in the story, not in the plot; 
 It was in the astonishing method of the telling. 
 The book reads as if it had been written by ai 
 saga man of the ninth or tenth century; the life 
 described is indeed modern, but the art of telling 
 it is an art a thousand years old, which scholars 
 imagined could never be revived again. Bjorn- 
 son revived it; and by so doing he has affected 
 almost every literature in Europe. Perhaps he 
 has especially affected some of the great French 
 realists; at all events, he gave everybody inter- 
 ested in literature something new to think about. 
 But this first novel was only the beginning of a 
 surprising series of productions, — poetical, ro- 
 mantic, historical and political. Bjornson went 
 into politics, became a statesman, did honour to 
 his country, did a great many wonderful things. 
 But his chief merit is that he is the father and 
 founder of a new literature, which we may call | 
 modern Norse. The study of the modern Norse | 
 writers ought to be of great service to Japanese 
 students, for this strong and simple style accords 
 remarkably well with the best traditions of Japan- 
 ese prose. Moreover, the works of these writers 
 have been put into English by scholarly men — 
 masters of clear and pure English, who have been 
 able to preserve the values of the original. This 
 is easy to do in the case of the Northern dialects 
 
BJORNSON ii:j 
 
 ' proper, which are very close to English — much' 
 ; closer than French, much closer even than Ger- 
 man. The simpler the style, the less it loses by 
 translation. 
 
 ' Moreover, you will find in the work of this 
 man the most perfect pictures possible to make 
 of the society and the character of a people. The 
 people ought to interest you — ought to interest 
 any student of English literature; for it was out 
 of this far north that came the best element in the 
 English race, the strongest and a good deal of the 
 best feeling that expresses itself in English litera- 
 ture. You will find in these stories, or studies 
 from real life, that the race has remained very 
 jmuch the same from ancient times. It is true 
 that today in all the schools of Norway the stu- 
 ; dents learn English and French; that modern 
 science and modern philosophy are most diligently 
 acquired; that Norway has produced poets, dram- 
 ; atists, men of science, and men of art, well worthy 
 of being compared with those of almost any other 
 country. It is true that writers like Bjornson and 
 Ibsen (the only other Norwegian man of letters 
 I of today who can be compared with Bjornson) 
 i have been actually able to influence English litera- 
 ; ture and European drama in general. But it is 
 not in the cities nor in the most highly cultivated 
 classes that the national distinctiveness in the 
 character of a people can be judged. You must 
 
114 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 go into the country to study that; you must know 
 the peasantry, who really form the body and 
 strength of any nation. Bjornson well knew this; 
 and his university training did not blind him to the 
 literary importance of such studies. The best of 
 his fiction, and the bulk of it, treats of peasant 
 life; and this life he portrayed in a way that has 
 no parallel in European literature, with the pos- 
 sible exception of the Russian work done by 
 Turgueniev and others. He has also given us | 
 studies of Norwegian character among the middle 
 class, among the clergymen, and among the highly 
 cultivated university people, who discuss the phil- 
 osophy of Spencer and the ethics of Kant. But 
 these studies are interesting only to the degree 
 that they show the real Norse character, such as 
 the peasant best exemplifies, in spite of modern 
 education. It is a very stern, strong and terrible 
 character; but it is also both lovable and admir- 
 able. Brutal at moments, it is the most formid- 
 able temperament that we can imagine; but in 
 steadfastness and affection and depth of emo- 
 tional power, it is very grand. At first you will 
 think that these terrible fathers who beat their 
 children, and these terrible young men who fight 
 with demons on occasion, or who climb precipices 
 to court the maiden of their choice, are still sav- 
 age. But after the shock of the strange has 
 passed, you will see that they are after all very 
 
BJORNSON 115 
 
 human and very affectionate; and that if they are 
 rougher than we in their ways, it is because they 
 are stronger and better able to endure and to 
 benefit by pain. Well, as I said, every kind of 
 northern society is depicted in Bjornson's tales, 
 but the greatest of all is the story of " Synnove 
 Solbakken." It is a very simple story of peasant 
 life. It describes the lives of a boy and girl in 
 the country up to the time of their marriage to 
 each other, and it treats especially of the inner 
 life of these two — their thoughts, their troubles, 
 their affections. There is nothing unusual about 
 it except the truth of the delineation. This de- 
 lineation is done very much as the old Norse 
 writers of whom I spoke to you before would 
 have done it. 
 
 I shall quote only a little bit, — because the 
 ancient extracts which I gave you from the saga 
 must have served to show you what I mean. 
 The scene described is that where the boy is 
 taken to church for the first time, and there sees 
 a little girl whom he is to marry many years 
 later. 
 
 There was a little girl kneeling on the bench, and look- 
 ing over the railing. She was still fairer than the man 
 — so fair that he had never seen her equal. She had a 
 red streamer to her cap, and yellow hair beneath this, and 
 she smiled at him — so that for a long time he could not 
 see anything but her white teeth. She held a hymn-book 
 
ii6 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 in one hand, and a folded handkerchief in the other, and 
 was now amusing herself by striking the handkerchief on 
 the hymn-book. The more he stared the more she smiled ; 
 and now he chose also to kneel on the bench just as she 
 was doing. Then she nodded. He looked gravely at her 
 a moment; then he nodded. She smiled and nodded once 
 more; he nodded again, and once more, and still once 
 more. She smiled, but did not nod any more for a little ^ 
 while, until he had quite forgotten ; then she nodded. 
 
 No more natural description was ever given of 
 the manner in which two little children, still un- 
 trained, act upon seeing each other for the first 
 time, without being able to get close enough to 
 talk. They tried to talk by nods and smiles, 
 when they like each other's looks. There is a 
 very fine study of conversation when these two do 
 come together — the random conversation of 
 children, full of affection, also full of innocent 
 vanity and innocent desire to please. But be- 
 fore they come together the little boy has a fight 
 with another little boy, which is also admirably 
 told. You feel that the writer of the book must 
 have had this fight himself. Later on the hero 
 is to have a very terrible fight, with a jealous and 
 powerful man — a fight that almost takes the 
 reader's breath away; and this is told just as a 
 saga man would have told it a thousand years 
 ago. I am not going to attempt to quote it now, 
 for it is too long; and one part can not be ex- 
 
BJORNSON 117 
 
 tracted from the rest without injuring the effect 
 of the whole. But some day when you read it, 
 please to notice that quality in it by which north- 
 ern writers surpass all others — I mean exactness 
 in relating the succession of incidents. This is a 
 quahty to which Professor Ker has but lately 
 called attention. I told you, when we were talk- 
 ing about the sagas, that I believed the style of 
 these men depended upon the perfection of their 
 senses — quickness of eye, accuracy of percep- 
 tion; and what Professor Ker has said in his lec- 
 tures upon this very style would seem to confirm 
 this. For example, he remarks that a writer of 
 today might write in English such a statement as 
 ** he felt the king come behind him and put both 
 hands over his eyes." Professor Ker observes 
 that a Norseman never could have written such a 
 statement, because it is inaccurate in regard to 
 the succession of incidents. The Norse writer 
 would have said, *' he felt some one touching him 
 from behind; and before he could turn his head 
 .to look, a hand was placed over his eyes; and he 
 knew, by the ring upon the hand, that it was the 
 king." That is the proper way to relate the fact 
 accurately. He could not know, when he first 
 felt himself touched behind, that the king was 
 touching him, nor could he know that the king's 
 hands were placed before his eyes, until he saw 
 something about or upon the hands, by which he 
 
ii8 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 could identify them. Seeing the king's ring upon 
 a finger of the hand, he knew that he was being 
 held by the king. In reality all this would hap- 
 pen In a second, and modern writers are not in 
 the habit of studying the succession of the events 
 within so short a time as a second. But the 
 Norseman was obliged to do so; if he could not 
 measure with his eye what took place within even 
 the fraction of a second, he might lose his life at 
 any moment. Now you will find in the descrip- 
 tion of this fight in " Synnove Solbakken " ex- 
 actly the same faultless accuracy as to succession 
 of incidents. One man is drunk, and undertakes 
 to fight because he is drunk; the other man, who is 
 sober, does not wish to fight, nevertheless the 
 fight is forced upon him by a succession of little 
 circumstances, all of which could not have oc- 
 cupied more than five or ten minutes. An Eng- 
 lish story-writer of today would probably have 
 compressed that ten minutes Into two lines of 
 prose. But Bjornson gives three pages to those 
 ten minutes, and by so doing he thrills you with 
 all the excitement and passion of the moment as 
 no English writer can do. Still, you must not 
 think that he Is prolix. Really he never describes 
 anything which is not absolutely necessary. But 
 he knows what is necessary much better than 
 other writers. He does not avoid little details 
 because they happen to be very difficult to recount. 
 
BJORNSON 119 
 
 If any of you have been forced into a quarrel of a 
 dangerous kind, I am sure you will remember 
 that all the little details of those moments before 
 the quarrel, although not remarked perhaps by 
 others present, were extremely clear to your own 
 perception. Danger sharpens the senses, quite 
 independently of the fact that the person is brave 
 or not brave. At any such time you can hear and 
 you can see better than at ordinary times. Bjorn- 
 son knew this. That is what makes his account 
 of the fight between two peasants one of the 
 greatest things in modern fiction. 
 
 Now I want to interest you in Bjornson as the 
 founder of a school, — to make you remember his 
 name, to tempt you to read his wonderful story. 
 But I shall not talk more about him now. 
 Enough to say that he has done in Norway what 
 I hope some future Japanese writer will do in 
 Japan. You know what I mean by Norse style 
 both in ancient ages and in our own day — that 
 is, you must be able after these lectures to have 
 a general idea about it. And now for a contrast. 
 Nothing is more strongly contrasted with this 
 sharply cut hard short style of the Norse than the 
 prose of the modern romantic movement. The 
 romantic movement in prose did not reach its 
 greatest height in England. The English lan- 
 guage is not perfect enough in its prose form for 
 the supreme possibilities of prose. It was in 
 
I20 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 France that romantic prose became most highly- 
 perfected; there were so many masters of style 
 that it is hard to make choice among them. But 
 only one conceived the idea of what we call poet- 
 ical prose — that was Baudelaire; he was, you , 
 know, a great and strange poet who wrote a vol- I 
 ume of splendid but very terrible verse called 
 '' Les Fleurs de Mal,'^ or " Flowers of Evil "— 
 perhaps " venomous or poisonous flowers " would 
 better express the real meaning of the title. He 
 also translated the stories of Poe Into French; 
 and he was in all things an exquisite artist. 
 
 IV 
 
 BAUDELAIRE 
 
 Baudelaire believed that prose could be made 
 quite as poetical as verse or even more so, for a 
 prose that could preserve the rhythm of poetry 
 without Its monotony, and the melody of poetry 
 without rhythm, might become In the hands of 
 the master even more effective than verse. I do 
 not know whether this Is really true. I am In- 
 clined to think that It Is; but I do not feel suf- 
 ficiently learned in certain matters related to the 
 question to venture a definite opinion. Enough 
 to say that Baudelaire thought It possible, and he 
 
BAUDELAIRE 121 
 
 tried to make a new kind of prose ; and the book 
 containing these attempts entitled " Little Poems 
 in Prose " is a wonderful treasure. But Baudel- 
 aire did not say anything very extravagant in 
 its preface. He only expressed the conviction 
 that a poetical prose might be used with good 
 effects for certain particular subjects, — dreams, 
 reveries, the thoughts that men think in solitude, 
 when the life of the world is not about them to 
 disturb their meditations; his prose essays are all 
 reveries, dreams, fantasies. I want to give you 
 a specimen of one of these; and I am going to 
 choose that one which Professor Saintsbury se- 
 lected as the best. But let me tell you in ad- 
 vance that the English language cannot reproduce 
 the real values of Baudelaire's prose. I am not 
 going to attempt an artistic translation for you, 
 but only such a translation as may help to show 
 you in a vague way what poetical prose means. 
 The piece I am going to turn into English is 
 called " Les Bienfaits de la Lune," — that is to 
 say, freely rendered, the Gifts of the Moon, — 
 the word " Bienfaits " (literally, benefit) being 
 here used in the meaning of the present or gift 
 given to a child by a fairy god-mother. 
 
 The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked through the 
 window while thou wert sleeping in thy cradle, and ex- 
 claimed: " That child pleases me! " And she softly de- 
 scended her stairway of clouds, and passed without sound 
 
122 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 through the panes of glass; then she stretched herself 
 above thee, with a mother's supple tenderness, and she put 
 her own colours upon thy face. Wherefore thine eyes 
 have always remained green and thy cheeks extraordinarily 
 pale. It was while contemplating this visitor that thine 
 eyes first became so fantastically large ; and she compressed 
 thy throat so tenderly that since that time thou hast al- 
 ways felt a constant desire to weep. 
 
 Meanwhile, in the expansion of her joy, the Moon 
 filled the whole room, like a phosphoric atmosphere, like 
 a luminous poison; and ail that living light thought and 
 spoke: "Thou shalt eternally . endure the influence of 
 my kiss; thou shalt be beautiful after my fashion; thou 
 shalt love all I love, and all that love me — water, the 
 clouds, the silence, and the night; the waters formless and 
 multiform ; the place where thou shalt never be ; the lover 
 thou shalt never know; monstrous flowers; the perfumes 
 that give delirium; the cats that stretch themselves upon 
 pianos, and moan like women, with a hoarse sweet voice. 
 
 And thou shalt be loved by my lovers, courted by my 
 courtiers. Thou shalt be the queen of green-eyed men, 
 whose throats I have also pressed in my nocturnal caress, 
 — those who love the sea, the immense, tumultuous green 
 sea-water, formless and multiform, the place in which they 
 are not, the woman they know not, the sinister flowers 
 that resemble the censers of some unknown religion, the 
 perfumes that confuse the will, the wild and voluptuous 
 animals that are the emblems of their madness. 
 
 Of course in the French this is incomparably 
 more musical and more strange. You will see 
 that it has the qualities of poetry, although not 
 poetry; it has the same resonance, the same group- 
 ings of vowel sounds, the same alliteration, the 
 
BAUDELAIRE 123 
 
 same cadences; It is very strange, and it is also 
 really beautiful. Probably Baudelaire's poetical 
 prose is the most perfect attempt of the kind 
 ever made; and there is a good deal of it. But 
 being a very great artist, he saw, as I have told 
 you before, that this kind of prose is suitable only 
 for reveries, dreams, philosophical fancies. And 
 thereby comes the question as to whether a book 
 of that kind should be written only in one style. 
 
 Now this may seem to you a queer question, but 
 I think that it is a very important one. The 
 French have solved it; the English have not. 
 Everything depends upon the character of the 
 book. If the book be composed of different kinds 
 of material, it seems to me quite proper that it 
 should be written in different styles to suit the 
 differences of subjects. You cannot do this, how- 
 ever, except in a book which is a miscellany, a 
 mixtui'e of reflection and fact. Combinations of 
 the latter kind are chiefly possible in works of 
 travel. In a book of travel you cannot keep up 
 the tone of poetical prose while describing simple 
 facts ; but when you come to reflect upon the facts, 
 you can then vary the style. French books of 
 travel are much superior to English in point of 
 literary execution, because the writers of therje do 
 this. They do it so naturally that you are at ■ 
 to overlook the fact that there are two styles 11 
 the same book. I know of only one really great 
 
124 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 English book of travel which has the charm of 
 poetical prose, — that is the " Eothen " of King- 
 lake. But in this case the entire book is written 
 in one dream tone. The author has not at- 
 tempted to deal with details to any extent. Beau- 
 tiful as the book is, it does not show the versa- 
 tility which French writers of equal ability often 
 display. While on this subject, it occurs to me 
 to show you an example of the difference in Eng- 
 lish and French methods, as shown by two con- 
 temporary writers in describing Tokyo. The 
 English writer is Kipling. He is certainly the 
 most talented English writer now living in de- 
 scriptive and narrative work. The greatest liv- 
 ing prose writer among the French is Pierre Loti 
 (Julien Viaud), a French naval officer, and you 
 know a member of the Academy. I hope that 
 you have not been prejudiced against him by the 
 stupid criticisms of very shallow men; and that 
 you do not make the mistake of blaming the 
 writer for certain observations regarding Japan, 
 which were made during a stay of only some 
 weeks in this country. Although he was here 
 only for some weeks, and could only describe ex- 
 actly what he saw, knowing nothing about Japan 
 except through his eyes, yet his sketches of Japan 
 are incomparably finer and truer than anything 
 which has been done by any other living writer. 
 His comments, his inferences may be entirely 
 
BAUDELAIRE 125 
 
 wrong (they often are) ; but that has nothing 
 really to do with the merit of his descriptions. 
 When he describes exactly what he sees, then he is 
 like a wonderful magician. There is nobody else 
 living who could do the same thing. I suppose 
 you know that his reputation does not depend 
 upon his Japanese work, however, but upon some 
 twenty volumes of travel containing the finest 
 prose that has ever been written. However, let 
 us first take a few lines from the English trav- 
 eller's letter. It is very simply phrased, and yet 
 very effective. 
 
 Some folks say that Tokyo covers an area equal to Lon- 
 don. Some folks say that it is not more than ten miles 
 long and eight miles broad. There are a good many ways 
 of solving the question. I found a tea-garden situated on 
 a green plateau far up a flight of steps, with pretty girls 
 smiling on every step. From this elevation I looked forth 
 over the city, and it stretched away from the sea, as far 
 as the eye could reach — one grey expanse of packed house- 
 roof, the perspective marked by numberless factory chim- 
 neys. Then I went several miles away and found a park, 
 another eminence, and some more tea-girls prettier than 
 the last; and, looking again, the city stretched out in a 
 new direction as far as the eye could reach. Taking the 
 scope of an eye on a clear day at eighteen miles, I make 
 Tokyo thirty-six miles long by thirty-six miles broad ex- 
 actly; and there may be some more which I missed. The 
 place roared with life through all its quarters. 
 
 Here is the work of a practical man with a 
 
126 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 practical eye — interested in facts above all 
 things, though not indifferent at any time to what 
 is beautiful. Now, anybody who reads that para- 
 graph will have an idea of the size of Tokyo such 
 as pages of description could not give. There is 
 only one half line of description to note, but it 
 is very strong; and the use of house-roof in the 
 singular gives a particular force to it. That is 
 quite enough to satisfy the average mind. But 
 the Frenchman is an infinitely finer artist. He 
 also gives you a description of Tokyo seen as a 
 wilderness of roofs; but he first chooses a beau- 
 tiful place from which to look and a beautiful 
 time of the day in which to see it. Let me trans- 
 late a few sentences for you : 
 
 Uyeno, — a very large park, wide avenues, well grav- 
 elled, — bordered with magnificent old trees, and tufts of 
 bamboos. 
 
 I halt upon an elevation at a point overlooking the 
 Lotos-lake, which reflects the evening, like a sHghtly tar- 
 nished mirror, all the gold of sunset. Yedo is beyond 
 those still waters; Yedo is over there, half -lost in the 
 reddish mist of the Autumn evening; a myriad of infinite 
 little greyish roofs all alike, — the furthest, almost indis- 
 tinguishable in the vague horizon, giving nevertheless an 
 impression that that is not all, — that there are more of 
 them, much more, in distances beyond the view. You 
 can distinguish, amidst the uniformity of the low small 
 houses, certain larger buildings with the angles of their 
 roofs turned up. These are the temples. If it were not 
 for them, you might imagine that you were looking at 
 
BAUDELAIRE 127 
 
 almost any great city quite as well as you could imagine 
 that you were looking at Yedo. Indeed, it requires the 
 effects of distance and of a particular light to make Yedo 
 appear charming; at this moment, for example, I must 
 confess that it is exquisite to see. 
 
 It is dimly outlined in the faintest colours; it has the 
 look of not really existing, — of being only a mirage. 
 Then it seems as if long bands of pink cotton were slowly 
 unrolling over the world, — drawing this chimerical city 
 in their soft undulations. Now one can no longer distin- 
 guish the interval between the lake and the further high 
 land upon which all those myriads of far-away shapes are 
 built. One even doubts whether that really is a lake, or 
 only a very smooth level, reflecting the diffused light of 
 the sky, or simply a stretch of vapour; nevertheless, some 
 few long rosy gleams, still showing upon the surface, al- 
 most suffice to assure you that it is really water, and that 
 Lotus-beds here and there make black patches against the 
 reflecting surface. 
 
 Although this rapid translation does not give 
 you the colour and charm of the original French, 
 you must be able to see even through it how very 
 accurate and fine the description is — an effect 
 of evening sunhght and rosy mist. I think that 
 most of you have enjoyed the same view, and have 
 noticed how black the lotos leaves really do seem, 
 when the surface of the water is turned to gold 
 by sunset. And then the description of the com- 
 ing of the mists like long cloud bands of pink cot- 
 ton is surely as beautiful as it Is true. That is the 
 way that a Japanese painter would paint a picture 
 
128 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 of Tokyo as seen from the same place at the same 
 time. The Englishman would not have noticed 
 all those delicate and dreamy colours, or If he 
 did, would not trouble himself to try to paint 
 them. Really It Is a most difficult thing to do. 
 
 Now after this little digression let me come 
 back to the subject of variety in style. Loti 
 knows the art of It; so does many another French 
 writer; but very few Englishmen do. What I 
 am going to say is this, that an author ought to 
 be able to choose a different style for different 
 kinds of work, — that is, a great author. But it 
 is so much trouble to master even one style per- 
 fectly well, that very few authors attempt this. 
 However, I think it can be laid down as a true 
 axiom that the style ought to vary with the sub- 
 ject in certain cases; and I think that the great 
 writers of the future will so vary it. The poet- 
 ical prose, of which I gave you an example from 
 Loti, is admirably suited for particular kinds of 
 composition — short and dreamy things. It is 
 very exhausting to write much in such a style; it 
 is quite as much labour as to write the same thing 
 in verse. But a whole book upon one subject 
 could not be written in this way. The simple 
 naked style, on the other hand, is particularly 
 adapted to story telling, to narrative, even to cer- 
 tain forms of history. The rhetorical style, orna- 
 mental without being exactly poetical, has also a 
 
BAUDELAIRE 129 
 
 special value ; it is in such a style that logical argu- 
 ment and philosophical work in the form of es- 
 says can perhaps be most effectively presented. I 
 think that some day this will be generally done. 
 But once it becomes a fashion to do it, there will 
 be danger ahead, — the danger of the custom 
 hardening Into conventionalism. Conventional- 
 Ism kills style. The best way, I think, to meet 
 the difficulty suggested will be to persuade one- 
 self that sentiment, artistic feeling, absolute sin- 
 cerity of the emotion and of the thought will guide 
 the writer better than any rules as to what style 
 ought to be used. If you try to imitate a model, 
 you win probably go wrong. All literary imita- 
 tion means weakness. But if you simply follow 
 your own feeling and tastes, trying to be true to 
 them, and to develop them as much as you can — 
 then I think that your style will form itself and 
 win naturally, without direction, take at last the 
 particular form and tone best adapted to the sub- 
 ject. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE VALUE OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 
 
 The subject of this lecture Is much more seri- 
 ous than may appear to you from this title. 
 Young men of your age are not likely to believe 
 In ghosts, nor Inclined to consider the subject as 
 worthy of attention. The first things necessary 
 to understand are the philosophical and literary 
 relations of the topic. Let me tell you that It 
 would be a mistake to suppose that the stories 
 of the supernatural have had their day In fine lit- j 
 erature. On the contrary, wherever fine litera- 
 ture Is being produced, either in poetry or In 
 prose, you will find the supernatural element very 
 much alive. Scientific knowledge has not at all 
 diminished the pleasure of mankind in this field of 
 imagination, though It may have considerably 
 changed the methods of treatment. The success 
 of writers today like Maeterlinck is chiefly ex- 
 plained by their skill In the treatment of the 
 ghostly, and of subjects related to supernatural 
 fear. But without citing other living writers, let 
 me observe that there Is scarcely any really great 
 author in European Hterature, old or new, who 
 
 130 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 131 
 
 has not distinguished himself in the treatment of 
 the supernatural. In English literature, I be- 
 lieve there is no exception — even from the time 
 of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and 
 from Shakespeare to our own day. And this in- 
 troduces us to the consideration of a general and 
 remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember 
 to have seen in any books, but which is of very 
 great philosophical importance; there is some- 
 thing ghostly in all great art, whether of litera- 
 ture, music, sculpture, or architecture. 
 
 But now let me speak to you about this word 
 "ghostly"; it is a much bigger word, perhaps, 
 than some of you imagine. The old English had 
 no other word for " spiritual " or " supernatural " 
 — which two terms, you know, are not English but 
 Latin. Everything that religion today calls di- 
 vine, holy, miraculous, was sufficiently explained 
 for the old Anglo-Saxons by the term ghostly. 
 They spoke of a man's ghost, instead of speaking 
 of his spirit or soul; and everything relating to 
 religious knowledge they called ghostly. In the 
 modern formula of the Catholic confession, which 
 has remained almost unchanged for nearly two 
 thousand years, you will find that the priest is al- 
 ways called a "ghostly" father — which means 
 that his business is to take care of the ghosts or 
 souls of men as a father does. In addressing the 
 priest, the penitent really calls him " Father of 
 
132 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 my ghost.'' You will see, therefore, that a very- 
 large meaning really attaches to the adjective. 
 It means everything relating to the supernatural. 
 It means to the Christian even God himself, for 
 the Giver of Life is always called in Enghsh the 
 Holy Ghost. 
 
 Accepting the evolutional philosophy which 
 teaches that the modern idea of God as held by 
 western nations is really but a development from 
 the primitive belief in a shadow-soul, the term 
 ghost in its reference to the Supreme Being cer- 
 tainly could not be found fault with. On the 
 contrary, there Is a weirdness about this use of the 
 word which adds greatly to its solemnity. But 
 whatever belief we have, or have not, as regards 
 religious creeds, one thing that modern science has 
 done for us, is to prove beyond all question that 
 everything which we used to consider material 
 and solid is essentially ghostly, as is any ghost. 
 If we do not believe in old-fashioned stories and 
 theories about ghosts, we are nevertheless obliged 
 to recognize today that we are ghosts of ourselves 
 — and utterly incomprehensible. The mystery 
 of the universe is now weighing upon us, becoming 
 heavier and heavier, more and more awful, as 
 our knowledge expands, and it is especially a 
 ghostly mystery. All great art reminds us In 
 some way of this universal riddle; that is why I 
 say that all great art has something ghostly in It. 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 133 
 
 It touches something within us which relates to 
 infinity. When you read a very great thought, 
 when you see a wonderful picture or statue or 
 building, and when you hear certain kinds of 
 music, you feel a thrill in the heart and mind 
 much like the thrill which In all times men felt 
 when they thought they saw a ghost or a god. 
 Only the modern thrill is Incomparably larger 
 and longer and deeper. And this Is why, In 
 spite of all knowledge, the world still finds pleas- 
 ure In the literature of the supernatural, and will 
 continue to find pleasure In it for hundreds of 
 years to come. The ghostly represents always 
 some shadow of truth, and no amount of disbe- 
 lief In what used to be called ghosts can ever di- 
 minish human Interest in what relates to that 
 truth. 
 
 So you will see that the subject Is not alto- 
 gether trifling. Certainly it is of very great mo- 
 ment In relation to great literature. The poet 
 or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a 
 little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either 
 a really great writer or a great thinker. I have 
 already said that I know of no exception to this 
 rule In the whole of English literature. Take, 
 for Instance, Macaulay, the most practical, hard- 
 headed, logical writer of the century, the last 
 man In whom you would expect to find the least 
 trace of superstition. Had you read only certain 
 
134 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 of his essays, you would scarcely think him ca- 
 pable of touching the chords of the supernatural. 
 But he has done this in a masterly way in several 
 of the " Lays of Ancient Rome " — for example, 
 in speaking of the apparition of the Twin Breth- 
 ren at the battle of Lake Regillus, and of Tar- 
 quin haunted by the phantom of his victim Lucre- 
 tla. Both of these passages give the ghostly 
 thrill in a strong way; and there Is a fainter thrill 
 of the same sort to be experienced from the read- 
 ing of parts of the " Prophecy of Capys." It 
 Is because Macaulay had this power, though using 
 it sparingly, that his work is so great. If he had 
 not been able to write these Hnes of poetry which 
 I referred to, he could not even have made his his- 
 tory of England the living history that it is. A 
 man who has no ghostly feeling cannot make any- 
 thing alive, not even a page of history or a page 
 of oratory. To touch men's souls, you must know 
 all that those souls can be made to feel by words; 
 and to know that, you must yourself have a 
 *' ghost " in you that can be touched in the same 
 way. 
 
 Now leaving the theoretical for the practical 
 part of the theme, let us turn to the subject of 
 the relation between ghosts and dreams. 
 
 No good writer — no great writer — ever 
 makes a study of the supernatural according to 
 anything which has been done before by other 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 135 
 
 writers. This is one of those subjects upon which 
 you cannot get real help from books. It is not 
 from books, nor from traditions, nor from leg- 
 ends, nor from anything of that kind that you 
 can learn how to give your reader a ghostly thrill. 
 I do not mean that it is of no use for you to read 
 what has been written upon the subject, so far 
 as mere methods of expression, mere effects of 
 literary workmanship, are concerned. On the 
 contrary, it is very important that you should read 
 all you can of what is good in literature upon 
 these subjects; you will learn from them a great 
 deal about curious values of words, about com- 
 pactness and power of sentences, about peculiari- 
 ties of beliefs and of terrors relating to those be- 
 liefs. But you must never try to use another 
 man's ideas or feelings, taken from a book, in 
 order to make a supernatural effect. If you do, 
 the work will never be sincere, and will never make 
 a thrill. You must use your own ideas and feel- 
 ings only, under all possible circumstances. And 
 where are you to get these ideas and feelings 
 from, if you do not beheve in ghosts? From 
 your dreams. Whether you believe in ghosts or 
 not, all the artistic elements of ghostly literature 
 exist in your dreams, and form a veritable treas- 
 ury of literary material for the man that knows 
 how to use them. 
 
 All the great effects obtained by poets and story 
 
136 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 writers, and even by religious teachers, in the 
 treatment of supernatural fear or mystery, have 
 been obtained, directly or indirectly, through 
 dreams. Study any great ghost story in any lit- 
 erature, and you will find that no matter how sur- 
 prising or unfamiliar the incidents seem, a little 
 patient examination will prove to you that every 
 one of them has occurred, at different times, in 
 different combinations, in dreams of your own. 
 They give you a thrill. But why? Because they 
 remind you of experiences, imaginative or emo- 
 tional, which you had forgotten. There can be 
 no exception to this rule — absolutely none. I 
 was speaking to you the other day about a short 
 story by Bulwer Lytton, as being the best ghost 
 story in the English language. The reason why 
 it is the best story of this kind is simply because 
 it represents with astonishing faithfulness the 
 experiences of nightmare. The terror of all great 
 stories of the supernatural is really the terror of 
 nightmare, projected into waking consciousness. 
 And the beauty or tenderness of other ghost 
 stories or fairy-stories, or even of certain famous 
 and delightful religious legends, is the tenderness 
 and beauty of dreams of a happier kind, dreams 
 inspired by love or hope or regret. But in all 
 cases where the supernatural is well treated in 
 literature, dream experience is the source of the 
 treatment. I know that I am now speaking to an 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 137 
 
 audience acquainted with literature of which I 
 know practically nothing. But I believe that 
 there can be no exception to these rules even in 
 the literature of the Far East. I do not mean 
 to say that there may not be in Chinese and in 
 Japanese literature many ghost stories which are 
 not derived from dream-experience. But I will 
 say that if there are any of this kind, they are 
 not worth reading, and cannot belong to any good 
 class of literature. I have read translations of 
 a number of Chinese ghost stories in French, also 
 a wonderful English translation of ghostly Chinese 
 stories in two volumes, entitled *' Strange Stories 
 from a Chinese Studio " by Herbert Giles. These 
 stories, translated by a great scholar, are very 
 wonderful; but I noticed that in every successful 
 treatment of a supernatural subject, the incidents 
 of the story invariably correspond with the phe- 
 nomena of dreams. Therefore I think that I 
 cannot be mistaken in my judgment of the matter. 
 Such Japanese stories as I could get translations 
 of, obeyed the same rule. The other day, in a 
 story which I read for the first time, I was very 
 much interested to find an exact parallel between 
 the treatment of a supernatural idea by the Japa- 
 nese author, and by the best English author of 
 dream studies. The story was about a picture, 
 painted upon a screen, representing a river and a 
 landscape. In the Japanese story (perhaps it 
 
138 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 has a Chinese origin) the painter makes a sign 
 to the screen; and a little boat begins to sail down 
 the river, and sails out of the picture into the 
 room, and the room becomes full of water, and the 
 painter, or magician, or whoever he is, gets into 
 the boat and sails away into the picture again, and 
 disappears forever. This is exactly, in every de- 
 tail, a dream story, and the excellence of it is in 
 its truth to dream experience. The same phe- 
 nomena you will find, under another form, in 
 " AHce in Wonderland," and " Through the Look- 
 ing Glass." 
 
 But to return to the point where we left off. 
 I was saying that all successful treatment of the 
 ghostly or the impossible must be made to corre- 
 spond as much as possible with the truth of dream 
 experience, and that Bulwer Lytton's story of the 
 haunted house illustrates the rule. Let us now 
 consider especially the literary value of nightmare. 
 Nightmare, the most awful form of dream, is also 
 one of the most peculiar. It has probably fur- 
 nished all the important elements of religious and 
 supernatural terror which are to be found in really 
 great literature. It is a mysterious thing in it- 
 self; and scientific psychology has not yet been 
 able to explain many facts in regard to it. We 
 can take the phenomena of nightmare separately, 
 one by one, and show their curious relation to 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 139 
 
 various kinds of superstitious fear and supernat- 
 
 ural belief. 
 
 The first remarkable fact in nightmare is the 
 beginning of it. It begins with a kind of suspi- 
 cion, usually. You feel afraid without knowing 
 why. Then you have the impression that some- 
 thing is acting upon you from a distance —- some- 
 thing like fascination, yet not exactly fascination, 
 for there may be no visible fascinator. But feel- 
 ing uneasy, you wish to escape, to get away from 
 the influence that is making you afraid. Then 
 you find it is not easy to escape. You move with 
 great difficulty. Presently the difficulty increases 
 
 you cannot move at all. You want to cry out, 
 
 and you cannot; you have lost your voice. You 
 are actually in a state of trance — seeing, hear- 
 ing, feeling, but unable to move or speak. This 
 is the beginning. It forms one of the most ter- 
 rible emotions from which a man can suffer. ^ If 
 it continued more than a certain length of time, 
 the mere fear might kill. Nightmare does some- 
 times kill, in cases where the health has been very 
 much affected by other causes. 
 
 Of course we have nothing in ordinary waking 
 life of such experience — the feeling of being de- 
 prived of will and held fast from a great dis- 
 tance by some viewless power. This is the real 
 experience of magnetism, mesmerism; and it is 
 
I40 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 the origin of certain horrible beliefs of the Mid- 
 dle Ages In regard to magical power. Suppose 
 we call it supernatural mesmerism, for want of 
 a better word. It is not true mesmerism, because 
 in real hypnotic conditions, the patient does not 
 feel or think or act mentally according to his own 
 personality; he acts by the will of another. In 
 nightmare the will Is only suspended, and the per- 
 sonal consciousness remains; this Is what makes 
 the horror of it. So we shall call the first stage 
 supernatural mesmerism, only with the above qual- 
 ification. Now let us see how Bulwer Lytton 
 uses this experience in his story. 
 
 A man is sitting in a chair, with a lamp on the 
 table beside him, and is reading Macaulay's es- 
 says, when he suddenly becomes uneasy. A 
 shadow falls upon the page. He rises, and tries 
 to call ; but he cannot raise his voice above a whis- 
 per. He tries to move ; and he cannot stir hand 
 or foot. The spell is already upon him. This is 
 the first part of nightmare. 
 
 The second stage of the phenomenon, which 
 sometimes mingles with the first stage, is the ex- 
 perience of terrible and unnatural appearances. 
 There is always a darkening of the visible, some- 
 times a disappearance or dimming of the light. 
 In Bulwer Lytton's story there Is a fire burning 
 in the room, and a very bright lamp. Gradually 
 both lamp and fire become dimmer and dimmer; 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 141 
 
 at last all light completely vanishes, and the room 
 becomes absolutely dark, except for spectral and 
 unnatural luminosities that begin to make their 
 appearance. This also is a very good study of 
 dream, experience. The third stage of nightmarft> 
 the final struggle, is chiefly characterized by im- 
 possible occurrences, which bring to the dreamer 
 the extreme form of horror, while convincing him 
 of his own impotence. For example, you try to 
 fire a pistol or to use a steel weapon. If a pistol, 
 the bullet will not project itself more than a few 
 inches from the muzzle; then it drops down 
 limply, and there is no report. If a sword or 
 dagger, the blade becomes soft, like cotton or 
 paper. Terrible appearances, monstrous or un- 
 natural figures, reach out hands to touch; if hu- 
 man figures, they will grow to the ceiling, and 
 bend themselves fantastically as they approach. 
 There is one more stage, which is not often 
 reached — the climax of the horror. That is 
 when you are caught or touched. The touch in 
 nightmare is a very peculiar sensation, almost like 
 an electric shock, but unnaturally prolonged. It 
 is not pain, but something worse than pain, an 
 experience never felt in waking hours. 
 
 The third and fourth stages have been artis- 
 tically mixed together by Bulwer Lytton. The 
 phantom towers from floor to ceiling, vague and 
 threatening; the man attempts to use a weapon, 
 
142 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 and at the same time receives a touch or shock 
 that renders him absolutely powerless. He de- 
 scribes the feeling as resembling the sensation of 
 some ghostly electricity. The study Is exactly 
 true to dream-experience. I need not here men- 
 tion this story further, since from this point a 
 great many other elements enter into it which, 
 though not altogether foreign to our subject, djo 
 not illustrate that subject so well as some of the 
 stories of Poe. Poe has given us other peculiar 
 details of nightmare-experience, such as horrible 
 sounds. Often we hear in such dreams terrible 
 muffled noises, as of steps coming. This you will 
 find very well studied in the story called " The 
 Fall of the House of Usher." Again in these 
 dreams inanimate objects either become alive, or 
 suggest to us, by their motion, the hiding of some 
 horrible life behind them — curtains, for exam- 
 ple, doors left half open, alcoves imperfectly 
 closed. Poe has studied these in " Eleonora " 
 and In some other sketches. 
 
 Dreams of the terrible have beyond question 
 had a good deal to do with the inspiration both 
 of rehgious and of superstitious literature. The 
 returning of the dead, visions of heavenly or in- 
 fernal beings, — these, when well described, are 
 almost always exact reproductions of dream-ex- 
 perience. But occasionally we find an element of 
 waking fear mixed with them — for example, in 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 143 
 
 one of the oldest ghost stories of the worid, the 
 story in " The Book of Job." The poet speaks 
 of feeling intense cold, and feeling the hairs of 
 his head stand up with fear. These experiences 
 are absolutely true, and they belong to waking 
 life. The sensation of cold and the sensation of 
 horror are not sensations of dreams. They come 
 from extraordinary terror felt in active existence, 
 while we are awake. You will observe the very 
 same signs of fear in a horse, a dog, or a cat — 
 and there is reason to suppose that in these animal 
 cases, also, supernatural fear is sometimes a cause. 
 I have seen a dog — a brave dog, too — terribly 
 frightened by seeing a mass of paper moved by 
 a slight current of air. This slight wind did not 
 reach the place where the dog was lying; he could 
 not therefore associate the motion of the paper 
 with a motion of the wind; he did not understand 
 what was moving the paper; the mystery alarmed 
 him, and the hair on his back stood up with fear. 
 But the mingling of such sensations of waking fear 
 with dream sensations of fear, in a story or poem, 
 may be very effectually managed, so as to give 
 to the story an air of reality, of actuality, which 
 could not be obtained in any other way. A great 
 many of our old fairy ballads and goblin stories 
 mixed the two experiences together with the most 
 excellent results. I should say that the fine Ger- 
 man story of '' Undine " is a good example of 
 
144 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 this kind. The sight of the faces in the water of 
 the river, the changing of waterfalls and cataracts 
 into ghostly people, the rising from the closed 
 well of the form of Undine herself, the rising of 
 the flood behind her, and the way in which she 
 " weeps her lover to death " — all this is pure 
 dream; and it seems real because most of us have 
 had some such experiences of fancy in our own 
 dreams. But the other part of the story deal- 
 ing with human emotions, fears, passions — these 
 are of waking life, and the mixture is accom- 
 plished in a most artistic way. Speaking of Un- 
 dine obliges me also to speak of Undine's prede- 
 cessors In mediaeval literature — the mediaeval 
 spirits, the succuha and incubi, the sylphs and sala- 
 manders or salamandrlnes, the whole wonderful 
 goblin population of water, air, forest, and fire. 
 All the good stories about them are really dream 
 studies. And coming down to the most romantic 
 literature of our own day, the same thing must be 
 said of those strange and delightful stories by 
 Gautier, " La Morte Amoureuse," " Arria Mar- 
 cella," " Le Pied de Momle." The most remark- 
 able is perhaps " La Morte Amoureuse " ; but 
 there Is in this a study of double personality, which 
 complicates it too much for purposes of present 
 illustration. I shall therefore speak of " Arria 
 Marcella " Instead. Some young students visit 
 the city of Pompeii, to study the ruins and the 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 145 
 
 curiosities preserved in the museum of Naples, 
 nearby. All of them are familiar with classic 
 literature and classic history; moreover, they are 
 artists, able to appreciate the beauty of what they 
 see. At the time of the eruption, which occurred 
 nearly two thousand years ago, many people per- 
 ished by being smothered under the rain of ashes; 
 but their bodies were encased in the deposit so that 
 the form was perfectly preserved as In a mould. 
 Some of these moulds are to be seen in the mu- 
 seum mentioned; and one Is the mould of the body 
 of a beautiful young woman. The younger of the 
 three students sees this mould, and romantically 
 wishes that he could see and love the real per- 
 son, so m^any centuries dead. That night, while 
 his companions are asleep, he leaves his room and 
 wanders Into the ruined city, for the pleasure of 
 thinking all by himself. But presently, as he 
 turns the corner of a street, he finds that the city 
 looks quite different from what It had appeared 
 by day; the houses seem to have grown taller; 
 they look new, bright, clean. While he Is thus 
 wandering, suddenly the sun rises, and the streets 
 fill with people — not the people of today, but 
 the people of two thousand years ago, all dressed 
 in the old Greek and Roman costumes. After a 
 time a young Greek comes up to the student and 
 speaks to him in Latin. He has learned enough 
 Latin at the university to be able to answer, and 
 
146 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 a conversation begins, of which the result is that 
 he is invited to the theatre of Pompeii to see the 
 gladiators and other amusements of the time. 
 While in this theatre, he suddenly sees the woman 
 that he wanted to see, the woman whose figure 
 was preserved in the Naples museum. After the 
 theatre, he is invited to her house; and everything 
 is very delightful until suddenly the girl's father 
 appears on the scene. The old man is a Chris- 
 tian, and he is very angry that the ghost of his 
 daughter should receive a young man in this man- I 
 ner. He makes a sign of the cross, and imme- 
 diately poor Arria crumbles into dust, and the i 
 young man finds himself alone in the ruins of 
 Pompeii. Very beautiful this story is; but every ' 
 detail in it is dream study. I have given so much 
 mention to it only because it seems to me the very 
 finest French example of this artistic use of dream ; 
 experience. But how many other romances be- i 
 long to the same category? I need only mention 
 among others Irving's " The Adalantado of the 
 Seven Cities," which is pure dream, so realistically 
 told that it gives the reader the sensation of being 
 asleep. Although such romances as " The Seven 
 Sleepers," " Rip Van Winkle," and " Urashima," 
 are not, on the other hand, pure dreams, yet the 
 charm of them is just in that part where dream 
 experience is used. The true romance in all is 
 in the old man's dream of being young, and wak- 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 147 
 
 ing up to cold and grave realities. By the way, 
 in the old French lays of Marie de France, there 
 is an almost precisely similar story to the Japa- 
 nese one — similar, at least, at all points except 
 the story of the tortoise. It is utterly impossible 
 that the oriental and the occidental story-tellers 
 could have, either of them, borrowed from the 
 other; more probably each story is a spontaneous 
 !; growth. But it is curious to find the legend sub- 
 stantially the same in other literatures — Indian 
 and Arabian and Javanese. In all of the ver- 
 1 sions the one romantic truth is ever the same — 
 a dream truth. 
 
 Now besides the artistic elements of terror and 
 of romance, dreams certainly furnish us with the 
 most penetrating and beautiful qualities of ghostly 
 tenderness that literature contains. For the dead 
 people that we loved all come back to us occa- 
 sionally in dreams, and look and talk as if they 
 were actually alive, and become to us everything 
 that we could have wished them to be. In a 
 dream-meeting with the dead, you must have ob- 
 served how everything is gentle and beautiful, and 
 yet how real, how true it seems. From the most 
 ancient times such visions of the dead have fur- 
 nished literature with the most touching and the 
 most exquisite passages of unselfish affection. We 
 find this experience in nearly all the ancient ballad- 
 literature of Europe; we find it in all the world's 
 
148 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 epics; we find it in every kind of superior poetry; 
 and modern literature draws from it more and 
 more as the years go by. Even in such strange 
 compositions as the " Kalevala " of the Finns, an 
 epic totally unlike any other ever written in this 
 world, the one really beautiful passage in an emo- 
 tional sense is the coming back of the dead mother 
 to comfort the wicked son, which is a dream study, 
 though not so represented in the poem. 
 
 Yet one thing more. Our dreams of heaven, 
 what are they in literature but reflections in us 
 of the more beautiful class of dreams? In the 
 world of sleep all the dead people we loved meet 
 us again; the father recovers his long-buried child, 
 the husband his lost wife, separated lovers find 
 the union that was impossible in this world, those 
 whom we lost sight of in early years — dead sis- 
 ters, brothers, friends — all come back to us just 
 as they were then, just as loving, and as young, 
 and perhaps even more beautiful than they could 
 really have been. In the world of sleep there is 
 no growing old; there is immortality, there is 
 everlasting youth. And again how soft, how 
 happy everything is; even the persons unkind to 
 us in waking life become affectionate to us in 
 dreams. Well, what is heaven but this? Reli- 
 gion in painting perfect happiness for the good, 
 only describes the best of our dream-life, which 
 is also the best of our waking life; and I think 
 
SUPERNATURAL IN FICTION 149 
 
 you will find that the closer religion has kept to 
 dream experience in these descriptions, the hap- 
 pier has been the result. Perhaps you will say 
 that I have forgotten how religion teaches the ap- 
 parition of supernatural powers of a very peculiar 
 kind. But I think that you will find the sugges- 
 tion for these powers also in dream-life. Do we 
 not pass through the air In dreams, pass through 
 solid substances, perform all kinds of miracles, 
 achieve all sorts of impossible things? I think we 
 do. At all events, I am certain that when, as 
 men-of-letters, you have to deal with any form 
 of supernatural subject — whether terrible, or 
 tender, or pathetic, or splendid — you will do 
 well, if you have a good imagination, not to trust 
 to books for your inspiration. Trust to your own 
 dream-life; study it carefully, and draw your in- 
 spiration from that. For dreams are the primary 
 source of almost everything that is beautiful In 
 the literature which treats of what lies beyond 
 mere daily experience. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE QUESTION OF THE HIGHEST ART 
 
 In taking this title for the present short lec- 
 ture, I have not said *' literary art," but simply 
 art. That is because I think that all the arts 
 are so related to each other, and to some form of 
 highest truth, that each obeys the same laws as 
 the others, and manifests the same principles. Of 
 course I intend to refer especially to literary art; 
 but in order to do this effectually, I must first 
 speak about art in general. 
 
 I take it that art signifies the emotional ex- 
 pression of life in some form or other. This may 
 be expressed in music, in painting, In sculpture, in 
 poetry, in drama, or in fiction. Truth to life is 
 the object even of the best fiction — though the 
 story in itself may not be true, or may even be 
 impossible. But it has of course been said that 
 the kinds of art are almost innumerable. The 
 question that I want to answer is this. What is 
 the highest form of art? 
 
 Without attempting to discuss the different 
 kinds of art in any way, I think we may fairly 
 assume that intellectual life represents something 
 higher than physical life, and that ethical life 
 
 150 
 
THE HIGHEST ART 151 
 
 represents something higher still. In short, the 
 position of Spencer that moral beauty is far su- 
 perior to intellectual beauty, ought to be a satis- 
 factory guide to the answer of this question. If 
 moral beauty be the very highest possible form 
 of beauty, then the highest possible form of art 
 should be that which expresses it. 
 
 I do not think that anybody would deny these 
 premises from a philosophical point of view. But 
 the mere statement that moral beauty ought. to be 
 ranked above all other beauty, and that the high- 
 est art should necessarily express moral beauty,, 
 leaves a vague and unsatisfactory impression upon 
 the mind. It is not very easy to answer the ques- 
 tion, How can music or painting or sculpture or 
 poetry or fiction represent moral beauty? And 
 have I not often told you that books written for 
 a moral purpose are nearly always inartistic and 
 unsatisfactory? 
 
 It seems to me that a solution of this difficulty 
 is at least suggested by the experience of love. 
 
 To love another human being is really a moral 
 experience, although this fact Is very commonly 
 overlooked. You might say. That is all very fine,, 
 but how can it be a moral experience to love a 
 bad person, or to love for sense and self? I 
 shall answer that the selfish side of the feeling has 
 no importance at all; and that whether the per- 
 son loved be good or bad or Indifferent Is also of 
 
152 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 no importance. I mean that the experience is 
 not at all affected as to its moral side by the im- 
 morahty of the conditions of it. Certainly it is a 
 great misfortune and a great folly to love a bad 
 person; but in spite of the misfortune and the 
 folly a certain moral experience comes, which has 
 immense value to a wholesome nature. The ex- 
 perience is one which very few of the poets and 
 philosophers dwell upon; yet it is the only im- 
 portant, the supremely important, part of the ex- 
 perience. What is it? It is the sudden impulse 
 to unselfishness. For there are two sides to every 
 passion of love in a normal human life. One side 
 is selfish; the other side, and the stronger, is un- 
 selfish. In other words, one of the first results 
 of truly loving another human being is the sudden 
 wish to die for the sake of that person, to endure 
 anything, to attempt anything dlflficult or danger- 
 ous for the benefit of the person beloved. That is 
 what Tennyson refers to in the celebrated verse 
 about the chord of Self suddenly disappearing. 
 The impulse to self-sacrifice is the moral expe- 
 rience of loving; and this experience is not neces- 
 sarily confined to the kind of affection described 
 by Tennyson. Other forms of love may produce 
 the same result. Strong faith may do it. Pa- 
 triotism may do it. I have only mentioned the 
 ordinary form of love, because it is the most uni- 
 versal experience, and most likely to produce the 
 
THE HIGHEST ART 153 
 
 moral Impulse, the unselfish desire to suffer pain, 
 to suffer loss, or even to suffer death, for the sake 
 of a person loved. 
 
 I know that mere beauty of form may produce 
 such emotion, though beauty of form Is by no 
 means the highest source of moral inspiration. 
 There is a possible relation between physical and 
 moral beauty; but It does not seem to be a rela- 
 tion now often realized in this imperfect world. 
 Intellectual beauty never, I think, excites our af- 
 fection — though it may excite our admiration. 
 Moral beauty, the highest of all, has indeed been 
 a supreme source of unselfish action; but it has 
 moved men's minds chiefly through superhuman 
 ideals, and very seldom through the words or acts 
 of a person, an Individual. It must be confessed 
 that in a person we are much more ready to per- 
 ceive the lower than the higher forms of beauty. 
 
 But In this we have a suggestion of possible 
 values In regard to future art. Taking it for 
 granted that some forms of beauty inspire men 
 with such affection as to make them temporarily 
 unselfish, I do not see any reason to doubt that in 
 future very much higher forms of beauty will 
 produce the same effect. I should say that the\ 
 highest form of art must necessarily be such art as 
 produces upon the beholder the same moral effect 1 
 that the passion of love produces In a generous \ 
 lover. Such art would be a revelation of moral 
 
154 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 beauty for which it were worth while to sacrifice 
 self, — of moral ideas for which it were a beauti- 
 ful thing to die. Such an art ought to fill men 
 even with a passionate desire to give up life, pleas- 
 ure, everything, for the sake of some grand and 
 noble purpose. Just as unselfishness is the real\ 
 test of strong affection, so unselfishness ought to 
 be the real test of the very highest kind of art. 
 Does this art make you feel generous, make you 
 willing to sacrifice yourself, make you eager to 
 attempt some noble undertaking? If it does, then 
 it belongs to the higher class of art, if not to the 
 very highest. " But if a work of art, whether 
 sculpture or painting or poem or drama, does not 
 make us feel kindly, more generous, morally bet- 
 ter than we were before seeing it, then I should 
 say that, no matter how clever, It does not belong 
 to the highest forms of art.* 
 
 By this statement I do not mean in the least 
 to decry such art as the sculpture of the Greeks, 
 as the painting of the Italians — not at all. The 
 impression of great sculpture and a great painting, 
 like the impression of grand music, is to make us 
 feel more kindly to ourTellowmen, more unselfish 
 in our action, more exalted in our aspirations. 
 When art has not this effect, it is often because 
 the nature of man is deficient, not because his art 
 is bad. But I do not know that any art which 
 has existed in the past could be called the highest 
 
THE HIGHEST ART 155 
 
 possible. The highest possible ought to be, I 
 think, one that treats of ethical ideals, not physical 
 ideals, and of which the effect should be a purely 
 moral enthusiasm. Sculpture, painting, music, — 
 these arts can never, I imagine, attempt the high- 
 est art in the sense that I mean. But drama, 
 poetry, great romance or fiction, in other words, 
 great literature, may attempt the supreme, and 
 very probably will do so at some future time. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Tolstoi's theory of art 
 
 Last year I gave a short lecture in regard to 
 a new theory of art, suggesting that the highest 
 form of any kind of art ought to have the effect 
 of exciting a noble enthusiasm and a sincere de- 
 sire of self-sacrifice. I compared the ideal ef- 
 fect of such an art with the emotional effect of 
 first love upon a generous mind, observing that 
 the real influence of a generous passion is intensely 
 moral, that it creates a desire to sacrifice self. 
 But at that time I had not read Tolstoi's famous 
 essay upon the very same subject. That essay 
 reinforces a great many truths that I have tried 
 to dwell upon in other lectures; and no book of 
 the present time has excited so much furious dis- 
 cussion. So I think that it is quite important 
 enough to talk about today. As university stu- 
 dents it is necessary that you should be fully ac- 
 quainted with what is going on in the literary 
 world; and the appearance of Tolstoi's book (it 
 first appeared only in the form of magazine es- 
 says) is a very great literary event. It is entitled 
 in the French version, '' Qu'est ce que VArtf '' 
 
 Before going any further, I must warn you 
 
 156 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART 157 
 
 not to allow yourselves to be prejudiced against 
 the theory by anything in the way of criticism 
 made upon it. One of the most important things 
 for a literary student to learn is not to allow his 
 judgment to be formed by other people's opin- 
 ions. I have to lecture to you hoping that you 
 will keep to this rule even in regard to my own 
 opinion. Do not think that something is good 
 or bad, merely because I say so, but try to find out 
 for yourself by unprejudiced reading and think- 
 ing whether I am right or wrong. In the case of 
 Tolstoi, the criticisms have been so fierce and in 
 some respects so well founded, that even I hesi- 
 tated for a moment to buy the book. But I sus- 
 pected very soon that any book capable of mak- 
 ing half the world angry on the subject of art 
 must be a book of great power. Indeed, it is 
 rather a good sign that a man is worth something, 
 when thousands of people abuse him simply for 
 his opinions. And now, having read the book, I 
 find that I was quite right in my reflections. It 
 is a very great book, but you must be prepared 
 for starthng errors in it, extraordinary misjudg- 
 ments, things that really deserve harsh criticism. 
 Many great thinkers are as weak in some one di- 
 rection as they happen to be strong in another. 
 Ruskin, who could not really understand Greek 
 art, and who resembled Tolstoi in many ways, 
 was a man of this kind, inclined to abuse what he 
 
158 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 did not understand, Japanese art not less than 
 Greek art. About Greek art one of his judg- 
 ments clearly proves the limitation of his faculty. 
 He said that the Venus de Medici was a very un- 
 interesting little person. Tolstoi has said more 
 extraordinary things than that; he has no liking 
 for Shakespeare, for Dante, for other men whose 
 fame has been established for centuries. He de- 
 nies at once whole schools of literature, whole 
 schools of painting and whole schools of music. 
 If the wrong things which he has said were picked 
 out of his book and printed on a page all by them- 
 selves (this has been done by some critics), you 
 would think after reading that page that Tolstoi 
 had become suddenly insane. But you must not 
 mind these blemishes. Certain giants must never 
 be judged by their errors, but only by their 
 strength, and in spite of all faults the book is a 
 book which will make anybody think in a new and 
 generous way. Moreover, it is utterly sincere and 
 unselfish — the author denouncing even his own 
 work, the wonderful books of his youth, which 
 won for him the very highest place among mod- 
 ern novelists. These, he now tells us, are not 
 works of art. 
 
 There is a qualification to be made in regard to 
 all this. Tolstoi does not deny that most art 
 that he condemns Is art in a narrow sense; he 
 means that it is not good art, not the best, and 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART 159 
 
 therefore ought not to be praised. This being 
 understood, I can better begin to explain his doc- 
 trine. 
 
 The first position which he takes is about as 
 follows : A great deal of what has been called 
 great art cannot be understood except by edu- 
 cated people. You must be educated and re- 
 fined in a considerable degree, in order to under- 
 stand the beauty of a Greek gem or statue, an 
 elaborate piece of music, or a supreme piece of 
 modern poetry. You must be trained to under- 
 stand the beauty of what modern society calls 
 beautiful. Take a peasant from the people, and 
 show to him a great painting, or repeat to him a 
 great poem, or make him listen to a grand piece 
 of harmonized music; and then ask him what- b^ 
 thinks of these things. As a sincere man, he will 
 tell you that he prefers to look at the picture in 
 his village church, to hear the songs of beggar- 
 minstrels, or to listen to a piece of dance music. 
 This Is unquestionable fact; nobody can deny it. 
 
 But the substance of a nation in any country, 
 the mass of its humanity, is not cultured, is not 
 rich, Is not refined; it consists of peasants and 
 workers, not of fine ladies and gentlemen. The 
 cultivated class must always be sm^l; the major- 
 ity of a nation must always remain workers. And 
 according to the common acceptation and practice 
 of art, art is something which only the highly 
 
i6o TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 educated and wealthy can be made to understand 
 and to enjoy. Therefore art is something with 
 which nine-tenths at least, of the human race, can 
 have nothing to do ! 
 
 Yet what of the alleged Inferiority of the 
 masses? Are they really inferior beings, are they 
 unsusceptible to the highest and best emotions? 
 What are these highest and best emotions that 
 artists talk so much about? Are they not loy- 
 alty, love, duty, resignation, patience, courage — 
 everything that means the strength of the race and 
 the goodness of it? Has the peasant no loyalty, 
 no love, no courage, no patience, no patriotism? 
 Or, rather is it not the peasant who is most will- 
 ing to give his life for his emperor and his coun- 
 try, to sacrifice himself for the sake of others, to 
 do in time of danger the greatest deeds of hero- 
 ism, to sacrifice himself In time of peace for the 
 sake of others, to obey under all circumstances? 
 Is it not the peasant really who lo ve§ most ? Who 
 is the best of husbands and fathers? Who, in 
 all that makes religion worth having, is the most 
 devout of believers? Tell the real truth, and 
 acknowledge that the peasant Is morally a better 
 man than the average of the noble and wealthy. 
 He is emotionally better, and he is better in the 
 strength of his character. Where do we find what 
 is called human goodness? Where are we to go 
 to look for everyday examples of every virtue? 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART i6i 
 
 Is it among the wealthy people of cities, or is it 
 among the people of the country, the people who 
 cannot understand art? There is only one an- 
 swer to this question, and it is the same answer 
 that Ruskin made a long time ago. The poor are 
 as a whole the best people. If you want to look 
 for holiness in the sense of human goodness, you 
 must look for it among the poor. Everything 
 noble in the emotional life is there. The evil 
 devices and follies of a few do not signify; the 
 great mass of the people are good. 
 
 Well, the great mass of the people have noth- 
 ing to do with art, though they are good. But 
 what is art? It is the power to convey emotion 
 by means of words, music, colour or form; it is 
 the means of making people feel truth and beauty 
 through their senses. And the common people 
 cannot understand art! Then must we suppose 
 that they have no sense of truth and beauty? 
 Have we not already been obliged to recognize 
 that the best of human emotion belongs to them? 
 And if the mass of the people really possess every 
 noble emotion, and if our so-called art cannot 
 touch their hearts and their minds, where is the 
 fault? It cannot be in the people; it must be in 
 the art. 
 
 This leads to another question — is it really 
 true that what we have been calling great art ap- 
 peals to the best emotions of mankind? It can- 
 
1 62 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 not be true, Tolstoi boldly answers. If It were] 
 true, then the people would be touched by it. 
 They are not touched by it; they do not under- 
 stand it; they do not like it. That is proof posi- 
 tive that it does not appeal to noble emotions. 
 Then what does it appeal to? At this point of 
 the essay Tolstoi's criticism is most telling and 
 most terrible, though weakened by occasional mis- 
 takes. What we have been calling art, he says, 
 appeals to sensualism and lust; but the peasant 
 is chaste. He does not care for pictures of naked 
 women, nor statues of nudity in any form; neither 
 does he care for stories or poems suggesting sen- 
 suality. Sensualism is really weakness; the per- 
 fectly strong man cannot be a sensualist — his life 
 is too normal and too natural; if you like, he is 
 too good an animal to be unchaste. Most ani- 
 mals are chaste. But Western art, Greek art, 
 Italian art, French art, has been through ail these 
 centuries unchaste, appealing only to the sex-in- 
 stincts of the beholder. There are exceptions, no 
 doubt, but in this way of considering the mean- 
 ing of art we must consider the dominant tone. 
 I am afraid that Tolstoi is quite right about that. 
 I do not think that any one can controvert him. 
 
 Next, let us take literature. The peasant can- 
 not understand fine literature; it makes no appeal 
 to him. He has a very simple literature of his 
 own, full of beauty — touching songs and touch- 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART 163 
 
 ing stories about human virtue, and our best crit- 
 ics acknowledge that any poet can obtain the best 
 and truest inspiration from the literature of de- 
 spised peasants. You cannot say that the peas- 
 ant Is Incapable of feeling literary emotion — on 
 the contrary, he can give it, he can teach it; in 
 England he taught it to every English poet since 
 the time of Walter Scott, and to many before that 
 time. The very greatest of Scotch singers was a 
 poor farmer. So we must acknowledge that a 
 peasant is no stranger to the highest form of lit- 
 erary emotion. But our fine literature, our liter- 
 ature of educated men, cannot interest him at all. 
 Therefore, the fault must be In the art, not in the 
 peasant. So let us consider what is the nature of 
 these noble emotions which our highest literary 
 art is supposed to express and to teach. 
 
 Here again we have Tolstoi's terrible criticism. 
 Our greatest plays are plays on the subject of 
 crime, murder, lust, adultery, treachery, every- 
 thing horrible In human nature. Our novels, for 
 the great majority, are stories of social life writ- 
 ten with a view to keeping the sexual feelings of 
 the reader slightly excited. Our poems have been 
 for hundreds of years, a great majority of them, 
 about sexual love, or about a foolish passion of 
 some kind. I am only expressing Tolstoi's view 
 very briefly; It would surprise you to discover 
 how he masses great names together In this con- 
 
1 64 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 demnatlon, and how very right he seems to me to 
 be in spite of it; and then he tells us, " You never 
 can appeal to the honest mass of people, you 
 never can touch their hearts, with stories of lust 
 and crime and luxury. They are too good to 
 find pleasure in such things." 
 
 I will not dwell upon his arraignment of mod- 
 ern music and other branches of art, because the 
 above illustrations are strong enough. His con- 
 clusion is this: " If art be the means of express- 
 ing and conveying emotion, then the noblest art 
 must be that which expresses and conveys the 
 noblest form of emotion. Now the noblest emo- 
 tions are emotions shared by all men; and true art 
 should be able to appeal to all men, not to a class 
 only. The proof that modern art is not great 
 art, the proof that it is even bad art, is that the 
 common people cannot understand it." 
 
 We now come face to face with two serious 
 objections. 
 
 First, you may say that the reason common 
 people cannot understand great art is simply this, 
 that they are stupid and ignorant. How can 
 they comprehend a great work of literature when 
 they cannot understand the language of litera- 
 ture? They can read only very simple things; to 
 read a great poem or a great work of fiction re- 
 quires a knowledge of the language of the edu- 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART 165 
 
 cated. Common people, not being educated, of 
 course cannot understand. 
 
 Very bravely does Tolstoi face this objection. 
 He answers that the so-called language of the edu- 
 cated ought not to be used in a great work of 
 art. A great work ought to be written in the 
 language of the people, which Is really the lan- 
 guage of the country and of the nation, whereas 
 the language of the educated is a special artificial 
 thing, like the language of medicine, the language 
 of botany, or the language of any special science. 
 And he tells us that he thinks it selfish and wicked 
 and unreasonable to make literature Inaccessible 
 to the people by writing it in a special idiom which 
 the people cannot understand. Moreover, he says 
 that the greatest books of the world have never 
 been written In a special literary language, but 
 in the common language of the common people. 
 To illustrate this he quotes the great religious 
 books and great religious poems, the Bible and 
 the books of Buddhism which, in the time of 
 their composition, must have been produced in 
 the living tongue, not in a special language. 
 What reason can possibly be offered except a 
 reason of prejudice for making literature incom- 
 prehensible to the masses? It is no use to say 
 that with common language you cannot express 
 the same ideas which you are in the habit of ex- 
 
1 66 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 pressing through literary language. If you think 
 you cannot utter great thoughts in simple speech, 
 that is because of bad training, bad habits, false 
 education. The greatest thoughts and the deep- 
 est ever uttered, have been written in religious 
 books and in the language of the people. In 
 short, Tolstoi's position is that the whole sys- 
 tem of literary education is wrong from top to 
 bottom. And this statement is worth thinking 
 about. 
 
 Let me give you a quotation, showing his views 
 about the incomprehensibility of art: 
 
 *' To say that a work of art is good, and that 
 it is nevertheless incomprehensible to the majority 
 of men, is just as if one were to say of a certain 
 kind of food that it is good, but that the major- 
 ity of mankind ought to be careful not to eat it. 
 The majority of men, doubtless, may not like to 
 eat rotten cheese or what is called in England 
 * high ' game — that is, the flesh of game which 
 has been allowed to become a little putrid — meat 
 much esteemed by men of perverted taste; but 
 bread and fruits are only good when they please 
 the taste of the majority of mankind. And in the 
 case of art it is just the same thing. Perverted 
 art cannot please the majority of mankind; but 
 good art should of necessity be something ca- 
 pable of pleasing everybody." 
 
 Now let me give you an interesting quotation 
 
TOLSTOrS THEORY OF ART 167 
 
 which illustrates the degree to which what is now 
 called great art seems unnatural to common peo- 
 ple; 
 
 " Among people who have not yet become per- 
 verted by the false theories of our modern so- 
 ciety, among artisans and among children, for ex- 
 ample, nature has created a very clear idea of 
 what deserves to be blamed or to be praised. 
 According to the instincts of the common people 
 and of children, praise rightly belongs only to 
 great physical force " — as in the case of Her- 
 (Cules, of heroes, of conquerors — ^" or else to 
 moral force " — as in the case of Sakya-Muni, re- 
 nouncing beauty and power for the sake of sav- 
 ing man, or the case of Christ dying upon the 
 Cross for our benefit, or as in the case of the 
 saints and the martyrs. These ideas are ideas 
 of the most perfect kind. Simple and frankly 
 honest souls understand very well that it is im- 
 possible not to respect physical force, because 
 ^1 )hysical force is a thing that of itself compels 
 respect; and they also cannot help equally re- 
 specting moral force — the moral strength of the 
 man who works for the sake of good; they feel 
 themselves attracted toward the beauty of moral 
 force by their whole inner nature. " These sim- 
 ple minds perceive that there actually exist in this 
 world men who are more respected than the men 
 respected for physical or moral force — they per- 
 
1 68 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 ceive that there are men more respected, more 
 admired, and better rewarded than all the heroes 
 of strength or of moral good, and this merely 
 because they know how to sing, how to dance, 
 or how to write poems. A peasant can under- 
 stand that Alexander the Great or Genghis Kahn 
 or Napoleon were really great men; he under- 
 stands that because he knows that any one of 
 them would have been able to annihilate him and 
 thousands of his followers. He can also under- 
 stand that Buddha, Socrates, and Christ were 
 great men, because he feels and knows that he 
 himself and all other men ought to try to be like 
 them. But how is it that a man can be called 
 great merely for having written poems about the 
 love of woman? That is a thing which, by no 
 manner of means, could he ever be made to un- 
 derstand." 
 
 Elsewhere he gives a still more amusing Illus- 
 tration. The common people, he says, are accus- 
 tomed to look at statues of divinities, angels, 
 saints, gods, or heroes. They understand quite 
 well the reason for such images. But when they 
 hear that a statue has been set up to honour a 
 man like Baudelaire, who wrote poems of lust or 
 despair, or when they hear of a statue set up ia 
 memory of a man who knew how to play the fid- 
 dle, that appears to them utterly monstrous. And 
 perhaps it is. 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART 169 
 
 I have thought of a second strong objection to 
 Tolstoi's position, an objection which he him- 
 self has not dwelt on — a philosophical objec- 
 tion. It is customary now-a-days to consider su- 
 perior intelligence as connected with a superior 
 nervous system. Many persons, I am sure, would 
 be ready to say that the common people cannot 
 understand high art, because of the inferiority 
 of their nervous system. Compared with edu- 
 cated and wealthy people, they are supposed to 
 be dull, therefore incapable of feeling beauty. 
 They live, in Europe at least, among miserable 
 conditions of dirt and bad smells. How could 
 they appreciate the delicate fine art of civiliza- 
 tion? I say that many persons would argue in 
 this way, but no clear thinker would do so. As 
 a matter of fact, in modern Europe the best think- 
 ers, the best artists, the best scholars, really come 
 from the peasant class. Some farmers have been 
 able with the greatest difficulty to give their chil- 
 dren a better education than the average. Even 
 in the great English universities some of the high- 
 est honours have been taken by men of this kind, 
 proving as Spencer said long ago that the foun- 
 dation of a strong mind is a strong body. I 
 know what Tolstoi would say about the aesthetic 
 refinement of the nervous system. He would sim- 
 ply say that what is called exquisite nervous sen- 
 sibility is nothing more than hyper-aesthesia — 
 
I70 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 that IS, a diseased condition of the nerves. But 
 leaving this matter aside, let me seriously ask a 
 question. Is a common peasant of the poorest 
 class really insensible to beauty? Or what kind 
 of beauty shall we take for a test? The Euro- 
 pean standard of art holds the perception of hu- 
 man beauty to be the highest test-mark of aesthetic 
 ability. Is the common man, the most common 
 and ignorant man of the people, insensible to 
 human beauty? Is he less capable, for example, 
 of judging the beauty of woman than the most 
 accomplished of artists? Now I do not know 
 what you will think of my statement; but I do 
 not hesitate for a moment to say that the best 
 judge of beauty in the world is the comman man 
 of the people. I do not mean that every man 
 of that class is better than others; but I mean 
 that the quickest and best judges of either a man 
 or a woman are the very same persons who are 
 the quickest and best judges of a horse or a cow. 
 For after all, what we call beauty or grace in 
 the best and deepest sense, represents physical 
 force, with which the peasant is much better ac- 
 quainted than we are. He is accustomed to ob- 
 serving life, and he does it instinctively. Beauty 
 means a certain proportion in the skeleton which 
 gives the best results of strength and of easy mo- 
 tion in the animal or the man. Suppose again 
 that we consider the body apart from beauty; 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART 171 
 
 what does It mean? It means the economy of 
 force ; that Is, a body should be so made that the 
 greatest possible amount of strength and activ- 
 ity is obtained with the least possible amount of 
 substance. To say that a man accustomed to 
 judge an animal cannot judge a human being is 
 utter nonsense. Such a man, in fact, is the best 
 of all judges, and seldom makes a mistake. Now 
 history of course has curious instances of the 
 recognition of this fact by great princes. In the 
 time of the greatest luxury of the Caliphs of Bag- 
 dad, when the Prince wished to find a perfectly 
 beautiful woman to be his companion, he did not 
 invariably go to the governors of provinces or to 
 the houses of the nobility in search of such a 
 woman. He went to the wild Arabs of the des- 
 ert, to the breeders of horses, and asked them to 
 find the girl for him. A memorable example is 
 that of Abdul Malik, the fifth Caliph of the house 
 of Ommayad; he asked a common horse-trader 
 how to choose a beautiful woman, and the man 
 at once answered him, " You must choose a 
 woman whose feet are of such a form, etc." — 
 naming and describing every part of the body and 
 its best points exactly as a horse-trader would de- 
 scribe the best points of a horse. The Caliph 
 was astonished to discover that this rude man 
 knew incomparably more about womanly beauty 
 than all his courtiers and his artists. The fact 
 
172 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 is that familiarity with life, with active life, gives 
 the best of all knowledge in the matter of beauty 
 and strength. Once in America I had a curious 
 illustration of what such familiarity can accom- 
 plish in another way. At a certain meeting of 
 men from many parts of the country, there came 
 into the assembly a comman man of the poorest 
 class who could tell the exact weight of any one 
 in the assembly. You must remember that every 
 man was fully dressed. All agreed to pay him 
 something for proof of his skill, for it is very 
 difficult to tell the weight and strength of a man 
 in Western clothes. Well, the man took a little 
 box, put it on the ground, and asked each person 
 present to step over it. As each person stepped, 
 he cried out the weight; and the weight was al- 
 most exactly as announced in every case. After- 
 wards I asked him how he did this extraordinary 
 thing. He answered, *' When you lift your leg 
 to step over the box, I can see the size and the 
 line of the front muscle of the thigh, and from 
 that I can tell any man's weight." There is a 
 good example of what natural observation means. 
 But to return, in conclusion, to the subject of 
 this essay. I think it will give you something to 
 think about; and certainly It confirms the truth of 
 one thing which I have often asserted, that the 
 sooner Japanese authors will resign themselves 
 to write in the spoken language of the people, 
 
TOLSTOI'S THEORY OF ART 173 
 
 the better for Japanese literature and for the gen- 
 eral dissemination of modern knowledge. I think 
 this book Is a very great and noble book; I also 
 think that It Is fundamentally true from beginning 
 to end. There are mistakes In It — as, for In- 
 stance, when Tolstoi speaks of Kipling as an es- 
 sentially obscure writer, Incomprehensible to the 
 people. But Kipling happens to be just the man 
 who speaks to the people. He uses their vernac- 
 ular. Such little mistakes, due to an Imperfect 
 knowledge of a foreign people, do not in the least 
 affect the value of the moral In this teaching. But 
 the reforms advised are at present, of course. Im- 
 possible. Although I believe Tolstoi Is perfectly 
 right, I could not lecture to you — I could not 
 fulfil my duties In this university — by strictly 
 observing his principles. Were I to do that, I 
 should be obHged to tell you that hundreds of 
 books famous in English literature are essentially 
 bad books, and that you ought not to read them 
 at all; whereas I am engaged for the purpose of 
 pointing out to you the literary merits of those 
 very books. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 NOTE UPON THE ABUSE AND THE USE OF 
 LITERARY SOCIETIES 
 
 As I have been asked, on various occasions, to 
 express an opinion as to the use of literary so- 
 cieties, as well as asked to join some of them, I 
 have been thinking that a short lecture, embody- 
 ing my beliefs upon the subject, might be of use 
 to you. It is not at all necessary that you should 
 approve my opinions; but I am sure that you will 
 find them worth thinking about, because they are 
 based upon something better than any experience 
 of my own — the experience and the teaching of 
 really wise men. Let me begin, then, by saying 
 that I am strongly opposed to the existence of 
 most literary societies, and that I believe such so- 
 cieties may do very considerable injury to young 
 talents. 
 
 There is a general principle, especially insisted 
 upon by Herbert Spencer in his Sociology, which 
 applies to the world of literature just as much 
 as it does to the world of political economy, 
 or the world of industrialism. That principle is 
 this: whatever can be done by the individual in 
 the best way possible, is not work for a society 
 
 174 
 
LITERARY SOCIETIES 175 
 
 to attempt, unless this society can greatly improve 
 the work of the individual. You know that so- 
 ciologists are never tired of pointing out that, even 
 in the case of private companies and state under- 
 takings, the private companies invariably do the 
 better work. Of course the larger social ques- 
 tions connected with competition, lie outside of 
 my province; I am reminding you of them, but 
 I have no wish to dwell upon them. Only re- 
 member that the general principle is apphcable 
 to all forms of human work and effort. Co-oper- 
 ation is valuable only when it can accompHsh 
 what is beyond the power of the individual. 
 When it cannot accomplish this, it is much more 
 likely to make mischief or to act as a check than 
 to do any good. One reason for this is very 
 simple — co-oporation is unfavourable to personal 
 freedom of thought or action. If you work with 
 a crowd, you must try to obey the opinions of the 
 majority; you must act in harmony with those 
 about you. How very unfavourable to literary 
 originality such a condition would prove, we shall 
 presently have reason to see. 
 
 But first let me observe that ill kinds of liter- 
 ary societies are not to be indiscriminately con- 
 demned. Some Hterary societies are very useful, 
 and have accomphshed great services to literature, 
 by doing for literature what no individual could 
 possibly do. For example, in England societies 
 
176 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 have been formed for the editing and publishing 
 of valuable old texts. The Early English Text 
 Society is an example, one of perhaps a score. 
 No one man could have done the work of this so- 
 ciety, nor the work of the Percy Text Society, nor 
 the work of a dozen others of which you have 
 undoubtedly heard. Such work requires a great 
 deal of money, such as very few, even rich men 
 could spare, and it requires a vast amount of la- 
 bour, beyond the capacity of any single person. 
 Now in these cases hundreds of people contribute 
 money to support the work, and dozens of schol- 
 ars are thus enabled to concentrate their efforts in 
 a single direction. It would be folly to say that 
 societies of this kind are not of the very highest 
 value. But they are valuable only because they 
 do what individual effort could not do. 
 
 Again, societies formed in colleges and in uni- 
 versities, for the purpose of encouraging literary 
 effort, or debating, or any other beginnings in the 
 great arts of composition or of eloquence, are 
 certainly to be recommended. They are to be 
 recommended because they stimulate the novice to 
 do many things which he might not have self- 
 confidence to attempt without encouragement. 
 How many a student must have first discovered 
 his own abilities in the direction of oratory or 
 poetry or fiction, through the stimulus that his col- 
 lege society first gave him. He thought that he 
 
LITERARY SOCIETIES 177 
 
 could not make a speech, but one day, mucH 
 against his will, he found that the opinion of his 
 fellow students compelled him to make a speech, 
 and the result was that he proved to be better 
 qualified than others to do what he had imagined 
 impossible. So with the first efforts in many di- 
 rections. The majority forces us to make them; 
 and in such instances the influence of the majority 
 is to develop individual power. But I will still 
 say that here the value of such societies begins 
 and ends. There are wonderful societies of this 
 kind in all the great colleges and universities of 
 the world ; and they help to develop the first bud- 
 ding of talent, the first literary and artistic ambi- 
 tion. But the best of them never produce any- 
 thing great. They work with raw material; the 
 very best things published by students of the great 
 English universities, for example, are always some- 
 what immature. If we acknowledge that some 
 stimulus of a healthy kind is given to literary 
 ambition by this form of co-operation, then we 
 grant about all that can be granted. 
 
 Once that the individual mind blossoms and de- 
 velops, from that moment the influence of socie- 
 ties ceases to be a benefit, and threatens to be- 
 come an injury. The very same social opinion 
 \ .that compelled and encouraged the first effort 
 would almost certainly oppose itself to further 
 development after a certain fixed degree. The 
 
lyS TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 early encouragement might be voiced in some such 
 persuasion as this: "Try to show yourself as 
 clever as the rest of us." But at a later time, 
 the social opinion would certainly declare, " You 
 must not be eccentric and think so differently from 
 the rest of us. If you do think that way, please 
 do not express your opinions, for they will not 
 be tolerated." I am putting the case rather 
 strongly, of course. But the second form of ad- 
 dress just quoted is really that form of address 
 which the world uses to every kind of original 
 talent. The world is not nearly so liberal, gen- 
 erous, appreciative, as the literary societies of col- 
 leges and of universities. Public opinion is above 
 all things conservative in almost every direction 
 in which original talent aims. Instinctively it 
 attempts to block every departure from conven- 
 tional ways of thought and action. And any ma- 
 ture society of a certain average size is pretty sure 
 to represent public opinion in a strong form. It 
 will therefore be much more likely to act as a 
 strangling power than as a developing power. I 
 would venture to say, however, that the proper 
 conditions of literary independence and mutual 
 encouragement in a literary society must depend 
 very much upon the number of its members. And 
 I should put the number very low — so low that 
 I think you will be rather surprised at the state- 
 
LITERARY SOCIETIES 179 
 
 ment. I do not think that a literary society of 
 the sort to which I have referred, should consist 
 at any time of more than two or three persons. 
 Combinations of three have been proved both 
 possible and beneficial. Any larger figure, even 
 four, I should think dangerous. And the com- 
 bination of three should be, I think, a combina- 
 tion of differences, not of similarities. The dur- 
 ability of the brotherhood would depend upon 
 mutual appreciation, not upon unity of idealism 
 or singleness of opinion. But naturally this ques- 
 tion comes up, '' Can we call a fraternity of three 
 persons a Hterary society?" Perhaps not; yet 
 I firmly believe that any larger combination of in- 
 dividuals for a literary purpose would not accom- 
 plish any good, and should not be formed, except 
 for such purposes as that of giving financial aid. 
 Now I shall try to explain why. 
 
 Experience among professional men of letters 
 tends to show that there is but on way, one in- 
 fluence, through which they can reali^ assist each 
 other toward the realization of highe'- things — 
 that is, friendship and sympathy, ti'endship, 
 real friendship, admits of perfect freedom be- 
 tween mind and mind, perfect frankness, perfect 
 understanding, and therefore complete sympathy. 
 But the conditions of human nature are such that, 
 even among common minds, perfect friendship 
 
i8o TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 can seldom extend to any considerable number of 
 persons. So there Is a Spanish proverb on the 
 subject, which Is worth quoting: 
 
 Compania de uno, compania nfnguno; 
 Compania de dos, compania de Dios, 
 Compania de tres, compania es; 
 Compania de cuatro, compania de Diablo. 
 
 Which Is to say, one is no company; two Is God's 
 company; three is company; but four Is the Devil's 
 company. Now though It may seem funny, this 
 proverb Is really wise, as most Spanish proverbs 
 are; for it signifies that a perfect friendship of 
 more than three has been found very difficult. 
 When four make the company, a division of opin- 
 ion or feeling is almost certain to result; for two 
 will be apt to unite against one or both of the 
 others, when some vexed question arises. I be- 
 lieve that you must have known this to be true 
 in your own experience. At all events, a literary 
 association made for real and serious literary ob- 
 jects of a high class, can only be beneficial and 
 enduring if built upon friendship and sympathy; 
 and friendship and sympathy of the quality needed 
 cannot be expected from a combination of more 
 than three. 
 
 Perhaps you will think of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 brotherhood, and other societies. But now that 
 we have full details about these societies, we find 
 
LITERARY SOCIETIES i8i 
 
 that they were societies in name rather than in 
 fact. The Pre-Raphaelite society existed only 
 by groups of three, and these groups touched each 
 other only at long intervals. Moreover, the only 
 thing that kept the three affiliated even by the 
 thinnest of threads, was a certain business neces- 
 sity. I believe you will find in the history of Eng- 
 lish literature that nearly all great men have been 
 solitary workers, and have had remarkably few 
 friends. Certainly this has been the case in mod- 
 ern times. I cannot think of any way in which 
 a literary combination could be of serious value 
 to a serious literary worker, except in the manner 
 that I have indicated. 
 
 You will perhaps remember that in England 
 and in America there are thousands of '' literary 
 societies," that almost every country town has a 
 literary society of some kind; indeed, I might re- 
 mark that even in Yokohama and in Kobe the 
 foreign merchants have made a '* literary so- 
 ciety." But it does not at all follow that these 
 societies are literary because they are called Hter- 
 ary. Do not be deceived by this fact of the popu- 
 larity of literary societies in England and else- 
 where. Such societies are formed for purposes 
 of which the average student has no idea. They 
 are formed for purely social purposes, to bring 
 young men and women together, to enable parents 
 to marry their daughters, to enable small musi- 
 
1 82 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 cians or small poets or popular journalists to ob- 
 tain a little social influence. I do not care how 
 big the society may be, that is the real end of it. 
 There is a little music, a little speaking, a common- 
 place essay. Then there is a great deal of in- 
 troduction and of social gossip. This Is only a 
 commonplace and vulgar playing with the subject 
 of literature; it Is worse than playing — It Is pre- 
 tending. And I am speaking to superior men, 
 to educated men. As a university man must take 
 literature seriously, he cannot be Interested In 
 nonsense of the sort which I have been describing, 
 and only as nonsense can the thing exist for him. 
 You do not find real men of letters bothering 
 themselves with societies of that kind. 
 
 Now, to sum up, I will say that literary socie- 
 ties of a serious character, such as those formed 
 in universities, and sometimes outside of them, 
 have this value — they will help men to rise up to 
 the general level. Now " the general level " 
 means mediocrity; It cannot mean anything else. 
 But young students of either sex, or young per- 
 sons of sentiment, must begin by rising to medio- 
 crity; they must grow. Therefore I say that such 
 societies give valuable encouragement to young 
 people. But though the societies help you to rise 
 to the general level, they will never help you to 
 rise above it. And therefore I think that the 
 man who has reached his full intellectual strength 
 
LITERARY SOCIETIES 183 
 
 can derive no benefit from them. Literature, in 
 the true sense, is not what remains at the general 
 level; it is the exceptional, the extraordinary, the 
 powerful, the unexpected, that soars far above the 
 general level. And therefore I think that a uni- 
 versity graduate intending to make literature his 
 profession, should no more hamper himself by 
 belonging to literary societies, than a man intend- 
 ing to climb a mountain should begin by tying a 
 very large stone to the ankle of each foot. 
 
 And yet, in spite of what I have said against 
 the serious value of literary societies, I must con- 
 fess I myself belong to a literary society. But 
 it is really the most sensible society of the kind 
 imaginable. There are no meetings which one is 
 obliged to attend; there Is no demand for liter- 
 ary work of any sort; you are not even obliged 
 to know the other members of the society. We 
 make every year a contribution of money; but we 
 must contribute for twenty years and never get 
 anything in return. Then you might ask, what 
 is the use of such a society? It Is very useful 
 indeed. Thousands of writers belong to It, but 
 very few of them use it. The object of the so- 
 ciety is to provide money for the employment of 
 good lawyers to defend the interests of authors 
 against dishonourable publishers. Authors are 
 generally very poor men, and very easy to take 
 advantage of in business. Tq go to law with a 
 
1 84 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 publisher is out of the power of a poor man, in 
 nine cases out of ten. But if a thousand poor 
 men get together, each to contribute every year 
 a small sum in the interests of right and justice, 
 without asking any direct return for it, then a 
 great deal may be done. As it is, the society 
 employs very skilful lawyers and advisors. If 
 any one member of the society be unjustly treated, 
 all the others thus combine to defend him. Now 
 that is an illustration of what a society really 
 should be formed for — only to do for each of 
 its members what the individuals cannot possibly 
 do for themselves. Otherwise there is absolute 
 independence. No man is obliged to give his 
 time or his work to the society at home; there is 
 no literary labour attempted; all the legal work 
 is done by persons hired by the society. I think 
 that a society of that kind formed with the gen- 
 eral object of protecting the interests of Japa- 
 nese authors, and therefore of protecting the 
 growth of future Japanese literature, would be of 
 great service. But otherwise I can imagine no 
 value to university graduates in a literary society 
 of any sort, containing more than three members. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ON READING 
 
 I wish to keep my promise regarding a series of 
 lectures relating to literary life and work, to be 
 ' given independently of texts or authorities, and 
 ^ to represent, as far as possible, the results of 
 practical experience among the makers of litera- 
 ture in different countries. The subject will be 
 Reading — apparently, perhaps, a very simple 
 subject, but really not so simple as it looks, and 
 much more important than you may think it. I 
 shall begin this lecture by saying that very few 
 persons know how to read. Considerable expe- 
 rience with literature is needed before taste and 
 discrimination can possibly be acquired; and with- 
 out these, it is almost impossible to learn how to 
 read. I say almost impossible; since there are 
 some rare men who, through a natural inborn 
 taste, through a kind of inherited literary instinct, 
 are able to read very .well even before reaching 
 the age of twenty-five years. But these are great 
 exceptions, and I am speaking of the average. 
 
 For, to read the characters or the letters of the 
 text does not mean reading in the true sense. 
 You will often find yourselves reading words or 
 
 185 
 
1 86 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 characters automatically, even pronouncing them 
 quite correctly, while your minds are occupied with 
 a totally different subject. This mere mechanism 
 of reading becomes altogether automatic at an 
 early period of life, and can be performed irre- 
 spective of attention. Neither can I call it read- 
 ing to extract the narrative portion of a text from 
 the rest simply for one's personal amusement, or, 
 in other words, to read a book " for the story." 
 Yet most of the reading that is done in the world 
 is done in exactly this way. Thousands and thou- 
 sands of books are bought every year, every 
 month, I might even say every day, by people who 
 do not read at all. They only think that they read. 
 They buy books just to amuse themselves, " to 
 kill time," as they call it; in one hour or two their 
 eyes have passed over all the pages, and there is 
 left in their minds a vague Idea or two about what 
 they have been looking at; and this they really 
 believe Is reading. Nothing Is more common 
 than to be asked, " Have you read such a book? " 
 or to hear somebody say, " I have read such and 
 such a book." But these persons do not speak 
 seriously. Out of a thousand persons who say, 
 ** I have read this," or " I have read that," there 
 Is not one perhaps who Is able to express any 
 opinion worth hearing about what he has been 
 reading. Many and many a time I hear students 
 say that they have read certain books; but if I 
 
ON READING 187 
 
 ask them some questions regarding the book, I find 
 that they are not able to make any answer, or at 
 best, they will only repeat something that some- 
 body else has said about what they think that 
 they have been reading. But this is not peculiar 
 to students; it is in all countries the way that the 
 great public devour books. And to conclude this- 
 introductory part of the lecture, I would say that 
 the difference between the great critic and the 
 common person Is chiefly that the great critic 
 knows how to read, and that the common person 
 does not. No man is really able to read a book 
 who is not able to express an original opinion re- 
 
 ^ garding the contents of a book. 
 
 ? No doubt you will think that this statement of 
 the case confuses reading with study. You might 
 
 I say, " When we read history or philosophy or sci- 
 ence, then we do read very thoroughly, studying 
 all the meanings and bearings of the text, slowly, 
 and thinking about it. This Is hard study. But 
 when we read a story or a poem out of class-hours, 
 we read for amusement. Amusement and study 
 are two different things." I am not sure that 
 you all think this ; but young men generally do so 
 think. As a matter of fact, every book worth 
 reading ought to be read In precisely the same way 
 that a scientific book Is read — not simply for 
 amusement; and every book worth reading should 
 have the same amount of value in it that a scl- 
 
1 88 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 entific book has, though the value may be of j£ 
 totally different kind. For, after all, the good 
 book of fiction or romance or poetry is a scientific 
 work; it has been composed according to the best 
 principles of more than one science, but especially 
 according to the principles of the great science of 
 life, the knowledge of human nature. 
 
 In regard to foreign books, this is especially 
 true; but the advice suggested will be harder to 
 follow, when we read in a language which is not 
 our own. Nevertheless, how many Englishmen 
 do you suppose really read a good book in Eng- 
 lish? how many Frenchmen read a great book 
 in their own tongue? Probably not more than 
 one in two thousand of those who think that they 
 read. What is more, although there are now 
 published every year in London upwards of six 
 thousand books, at no time has there been so lit- 
 tle good reading done by the average public as 
 today. Books are written, sold, and read after 
 a fashion — or rather according to the fashion. 
 There is a fashion in literature as well as in every- 
 thing else; and a particular kind of amusement 
 being desired by the public, a particular kind of 
 reading is given to supply the demand. So use- 
 less have become to this public the arts and graces 
 of real literature, the great thoughts which should 
 belong to a great book, that men of letters have 
 almost ceased to produce true literature. When 
 
ON READING 189 
 
 a man can obtain a great deal of money by writ- 
 ing a book without style or beauty, a mere narra- 
 tive to amuse, and knows at the same time that if 
 he should give three, five^ or ten years to the pro- 
 duction of a really good book, he would prob- 
 ably starve to death, he is forced to be untrue to 
 the higher duties of his profession. Men happily 
 situated in regard to money matters, might pos- 
 sibly attempt something great from time to time ; 
 but they can hardly get a hearing. Taste is so 
 Inuch deteriorated within the past few years, that, 
 as I told you before, style has practically disap- 
 peared — and style means thinking. And this 
 state of things in England has been largely 
 brought about by bad habits of reading, by not 
 knowing how to read. 
 
 For the first thing which a scholar should bear 
 in mind is that a book ought not to be read for 
 mere amusement. Half-educated persons read 
 for amusement, and are not to be blamed for it; 
 they are incapable of appreciating the deeper 
 qualities that belong to a really great literature. 
 But a young man who has passed through a course 
 of university training should discipline himself at 
 an early day never to read for mere amusement. 
 And once the habit of the discipline has been 
 formed, he will even find it impossible to read 
 for mere amusement. He will then Impatiently 
 throw down any book from which he cannot ob- 
 
190 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 tain intellectual food, any book which does not 
 make an appeal to the higher emotions and to his 
 intellect. But on the other hand, the habit of 
 reading for amusement becomes with thousands 
 of people exactly the same kind of habit as wlne- 
 drinklng or opium-smoking; it Is like a narcotic, 
 something that helps to pass the time, something 
 that keeps up a perpetual condition of dreaming, 
 something that eventually results in destroying 
 all capacity for thought, giving exercise only to 
 the surface parts of the mind, and leaving the 
 deeper springs of feeling and the higher faculties 
 of perception unemployed. 
 
 Let us simply state what the facts are about 
 this kind of reading. A young clerk, for exam- 
 ple, reads every day on the way to his office and 
 on the way back, just to pass the time; and what 
 does he read? A novel, of course; it is very 
 easy work, and it enables him to forget his trou- 
 bles for a moment, to dull his mind to all the 
 the little worries of his dally routine. In one or 
 two days he finishes the novel; then he gets an- 
 other. He reads quickly in these days. By the 
 end of the year he has read between a hundred and 
 fifty and two hundred novels; no matter how 
 poor he is, this luxury Is possible to him, because 
 of the Institution of circulating libraries. At the 
 end of a few years he has read several thousand 
 novels. Does he like them? No; he will tell 
 
ON READING 191 
 
 you that they are nearly all the same, but they 
 help him to pass away his idle time; they have 
 become a necessity for him; he would be very 
 unhappy if he could not continue this sort of read- 
 ing. It is utterly impossible that the result can 
 be anything but a stupefying of the faculties. He 
 cannot even remember the names of twenty or 
 thirty books out of thousands; much less does he 
 remember what they contain. The result of all 
 this reading means nothing but a cloudiness in 
 his mind. That is the direct result. The indi- 
 rect result is that the mind has been kept from 
 developing itself. All development necessarily 
 means some pain; and such reading as I speak 
 of has been employed unconsciously as a means 
 to avoid that pain, and the consequence is atrophy. 
 
 Of course this is an extreme case; but it is the 
 ultimate outcome of reading for amusement when- 
 ever such amusement becomes a habit, and when 
 there are means close at hand to gratify the 
 habit. At present in Japan there is little danger 
 of this state of things; but I use the illustration 
 for the sake of its ethical warning. 
 
 This does not mean that there is any sort of 
 good literature which should be shunned. A 
 good novel is just as good reading as even the 
 greatest philosopher can possibly wish for. (>The 
 whole matter depends upon the way of reading, 
 even more than upon the nature of what is read, j 
 
192 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 Perhaps it is too much to say, as has often been 
 said, that there is no book which has nothing 
 good in it; it is better simply to state that the 
 good of a book depends incomparably more for 
 its influence upon the habits of the reader than 
 upon the art of the .writer, no matter how great 
 that writer may be. 
 
 In a previous lecture I tried to call your atten- 
 tion to the superiority of the child's methods of 
 observation to those of the man; and the same 
 fact may be noticed in regard to the child's 
 method of reading. Certainly the child can read 
 only very simple things; but he reads most thor- 
 oughly; and he thinks and thinks and thinks un- 
 tiringly about what he reads; one little fairy tale 
 will give him mental occupation for a month 
 after he has read it. All the energies of his lit- 
 tle fancy are exhausted upon the tale; and if his 
 parents be wise, they do not allow him to read a 
 second tale, until the pleasure of the first, and its 
 imaginative effect, has begun to die away. Later 
 habits, habits which I shall venture to call bad, 
 soon destroy the child's power of really attentive 
 reading. But let us now take the case of a pro- 
 fessional reader, a scientific reader; and we shall 
 observe the same power, developed of course to 
 an enormous degree. In the ofHce of a great 
 publishing house which I used to visit, there are 
 received every year sixteen thousand manuscripts. 
 
ON READING 193 
 
 All these must be looked at and judged; and such 
 work in all publlshln£ offices Is performed by what 
 is called professional readers. The professional 
 reader must be a scholar, and a man of very un- 
 common capacity. Out of a thousand manu- 
 scripts he will read perhaps not more than one; 
 out of two thousand he may possibly read three. 
 The others he simply looks at for a few seconds 
 — one glance is enough for him to decide whether 
 the manuscript is worth reading or not. The 
 shape of a single sentence will tell him that, from 
 the literary point of view. As regards subject, 
 even the title is enough for him to judge, in a 
 large number of cases. Some manuscripts may 
 receive a minute or even five minutes of his at- 
 tention; very few receive a longer consideration. 
 Out of sixteen thousand, we may suppose that six- 
 teen are finally selected for judgment. He reads 
 these from beginning to end. Having read them, 
 he decides that only eight can be further consid- 
 ered. The eight are read a second time, much 
 more carefully. At the close of the second ex- 
 amination the number is perhaps reduced to 
 seven. These seven are destined for a third 
 reading; but the professional reader knows bet- 
 ter than to read them immediately. He leaves 
 them locked up in a drawer, and passes a whole 
 week without looking at them. At the end of 
 the week he tries to see whether he can remem- 
 
194 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 ber distinctly each of these seven manuscripts 
 and their qualities. Very distinctly he remem- 
 bers three; the remaining four he can not at once 
 recall. With a little more effort, he Is able to 
 remember two more. But two he has utterly for- 
 gotten. This is a fatal defect; the work that 
 leaves no impression upon the mind after two 
 readings can not have real value. He then takes 
 the manuscripts out of the drawer, condemns two 
 — the two he could not remember — and re-reads 
 the five. At the third reading everything is 
 judged — subject, execution, thought, literary 
 quality. Three are discovered to be first class; 
 two are accepted by the publishers only as second 
 class. And so the matter ends. 
 
 Something like this goes on in all great pub- 
 lishing houses; but unfortunately not all literary 
 work is now judged in the same severe way. It 
 is now judged rather by what the public likes; and 
 the public does not like the best. But you may 
 be sure that in a house such as that of the Cam- 
 bridge or the Oxford University publishers, the 
 test of a manuscript is very severe indeed; it is 
 there read much more thoroughly than it is likely 
 ever to be read again. Now this professional 
 reader whom we speak of, with all his knowledge 
 and scholarship and experience, reads the book 
 very much in the same way as the child reads a 
 fairy-tale. He has forced his mind to exert all 
 
ON READING 195 
 
 its powers in the same minute way that the child's 
 mind does, to think about everything in the book, 
 in all its bearings, in a hundred different direc- 
 tions. It is not true that a child is a bad reader; 
 the habit of bad reading is only formed much 
 later in life, and is always unnatural. The nat- 
 ural and also the scholarly way of reading is the 
 child's way. But it requires what we are apt to 
 lose as we grow up, the golden gift of patience; 
 and without patience nothing, not even reading, 
 can be well done. 
 
 Important then as careful reading is, you can 
 readily perceive that it should not be wasted. 
 The powers of a well-trained and highly edu- 
 cated mind ought not to be expended upon any 
 common book. By common I mean cheap and 
 useless literature. Nothing is so essential to self- 
 training as the proper choice of books to read; 
 and nothing is so universally neglected. It is not 
 even right that a person of abihty should waste 
 his time in " finding out " what to read. He can 
 easily obtain a very correct idea of the limits of 
 the best in all departments of literature, and keep 
 to that best. Of course, if he has to become a 
 specialist, a critic, a professional reader, he will 
 have to read what is bad as well as what is good, 
 and will be able to save himself from much tor- 
 ment only by an exceedingly rapid exercise of 
 judgment, formed by experience. Imagine, for 
 
196 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 example, the reading that must have been done, 
 and thoroughly done, by such a critic as Pro- 
 fessor Saintsbury. Leaving out of the question 
 all his university training, and his mastery of 
 Greek and Latin classics, which is no small read- 
 ing to begin with, he must have read some five 
 thousand books in the English of all centuries, — 
 learned thoroughly everything that was in them, 
 the history of each one, and the history of its 
 author, whenever that was accessible. He must 
 also have mastered thoroughly the social and 
 political history relating to all this mass of litera- 
 ture. But this is still less than half his work. 
 For being an authority upon two literatures, his 
 study of French, both old and new French, must 
 have been even more extensive than his study of 
 English. And all his work had to be read as a 
 master reads; there was little mere amusement 
 in the whole from beginning to end. The only 
 pleasure could be in results; but these results are 
 very great. Nothing is more difficult in this 
 world than to read a book and then to express 
 clearly and truly in a few lines exactly what the 
 literary value of the book is. There are not 
 more than twenty people in the world that can do 
 this, for the experience as well as the capacity re- 
 quired must be enormous. Very few of us can 
 hope to become even third or fourth class critics 
 after even a lifetime of study. But we can all 
 
ON READING 197 
 
 learn to read; and that is not by any means a 
 small feat. The great critics can best show us 
 the way to do this, by their judgment. 
 
 Yet after all, the greatest of critics is the pub- 
 lic — not the public for a day or a generation, but 
 the public of centuries, the consensus of national 
 opinion or of human opinion about a book that 
 has been subjected to the awful test of time. 
 Reputations are made not by critics, but by the ac- 
 cumulation of human opinion through hundreds 
 of years. And human opinion is not sharply de- 
 fined like the opinion of a trained critic; it cannot 
 explain; it is vague, like a great emotion of which 
 we cannot exactly describe the nature; it is based 
 upon feeling rather than upon thinking; it only 
 says, ^* we like this." Yet there is no judgment 
 so sure as this kind of judgment, for it is the out- 
 come of an enormous experience. The test of a 
 good book ought always to be the test which hu- 
 man opinion, working for generations, applies. 
 And this is very simple. 
 
 The test of a great book is whether we want 
 to read it only once or more than once. Any 
 really great book we want to read the second 
 time even more than we wanted to read it the first 
 time; and every additional time that we read it we 
 find new meanings and new beauties in it. A 
 book that a person of education and good taste 
 does not care to read more than once is very prob- 
 
198 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 ably not worth much. Some time ago there was a 
 very clever discussion going on regarding the art 
 of the great French novelist, Zola; some people 
 claimed that he possessed absolute genius; others 
 claimed that he had only talent of a very remark- 
 able kind. The battle of argument brought out 
 some strange extravagances of opinion. But 
 suddenly a very great critic simply put this ques- 
 tion: *' How many of you have read, or would 
 care to read, one of Zola's books a second time? " 
 There was no answer; the fact was settled. 
 Probably no one would read a book by Zola more 
 than once; and this Is proof positive that there is 
 no great genius in them, and no great mastery of 
 the highest form of feehng. Shallow or false 
 any book must be, that, although bought by a 
 hundred thousand readers, is never read more 
 than once. But we can not consider the judg- 
 ment of a single individual Infallible. The opin- 
 ion that makes a book great must be the opinion 
 of many. For even the greatest critics are apt to 
 have certain dulnesses, certain Inappreciatlons. 
 Carlyle, for example, could not endure Browning; 
 Byron could not endure some of the greatest of 
 English poets. A man must be many-sided to 
 uuer a trustworthy estimate of many books. We 
 may doubt the judgment of the single critic at 
 times. But there Is no doubt possible In regard 
 to the judgment of generations. Even If we can- 
 
ON READING 199 
 
 not at once perceive anything good in a book 
 which has been admired and praised for hundreds 
 of years, we may be sure that by trying, by study- 
 ing it carefully, we shall at last be able to feel the 
 reason of this admiration and praise. The best 
 of all libraries for a poor man would be a library 
 entirely composed of such great works only, books 
 which have passed the test of time. 
 
 This then would be the most important guide 
 for us In the choice of reading. We should read 
 only the books that we want to read more than 
 once, nor should we buy any others, unless we 
 have some special reason for so investing money. 
 The second fact demanding attention is the gen- 
 eral character of the value that lies hidden within 
 all such great books. They never become old: 
 their youth Is immortal. A great book is not apt 
 to be comprehended by a young person at the 
 first reading except In a superficial way. Only 
 the surface, the narrative, is absorbed and en- 
 joyed. No young man can possibly see at first 
 reading the qualities of a great book. Remem- 
 ber that it has taken humanity In many cases hun- 
 dreds of years to find out all that there Is In such 
 a book. But according to a man's experience of 
 life, the text will unfold new meanings to him. 
 The book that delighted us at eighteen. If it be a 
 good book, will delight us much more at twenty- 
 five, and it will prove like a new book to us at 
 
200 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 thirty years of age. At forty we shall re-read it, 
 wondering why we never saw how beautiful it was 
 before. At fifty or sixty years of age the same 
 facts will repeat themselves. A great book 
 grows exactly in proportion to the growth of the 
 reader's mind. It was the discovery of this ex- 
 traordinary fact by generations of people long 
 dead that made the greatness of such works as 
 those of Shakespeare, of Dante, or of Goethe. 
 Perhaps Goethe can give us at this moment the 
 best illustration. He wrote a number of little 
 stories in prose, which children like, because to 
 children they have all the charm of fairy-tales. 
 But he never intended them for fairy-tales; he 
 wrote them for experienced minds. A young man 
 ifinds very serious reading in them; a middle aged 
 man discovers an extraordinary depth in their 
 least utterance; and an old man will find in them 
 all the world's philosophy, all the wisdom of life. 
 If one is very dull, he may not see much in them, 
 but just in proportion as he is a superior man, 
 and in proportion as his knowledge of life has 
 been extensive, so will he discover the greatness 
 of the mind that conceived them. 
 
 This does not mean that the authors of such 
 books could have preconceived the entire range 
 and depth of that which they put into their work. 
 Great art works unconsciously without ever sus- 
 pecting that it is great; and the larger the genius 
 
ON READING 201 
 
 of a writer, the less chance there is of his ever 
 knowing that he has genius; for his power is less 
 likely to be discovered by the public until long 
 after he is dead. The great things done in lit- 
 erature have not usually been done by men who 
 thought themselves great. Many thousand years 
 ago some wanderer in Arabia, looking at the stars 
 of the night, and thinking about the relation of 
 man to the unseen powers that shaped the world, 
 uttered all his heart in certain verses that have 
 been preserved to us in the Book of Job. To him 
 the sky was a solid vault; of that which might 
 exist beyond it, he never even dreamed. Since 
 his time how vast has been the expansion of our 
 astronomical knowledge ! We now know thirty 
 millions of suns, all of which are probably at- 
 tended by planets, giving a probable total of 
 three hundred millions of other worlds within 
 sight of our astronomical instruments. Probably 
 multitudes of these are inhabited by intelligent 
 life; it is even possible that within a few years 
 more we shall obtain proof positive of the ex- 
 istence of an older civilization than our own upon 
 the planet Mars. How vast a difference between 
 our conception of the universe and Job's concep- 
 tion of it. Yet the poem of that simple minded 
 Arab or Jew has not lost one particle of its beauty 
 and value because of this difference. Quite the 
 contrary! With every new astronomical discov- 
 
202 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 ery the words of Job take grander meanings to 
 us, simply because he was truly a great poet and 
 spoke only the truth that was In his heart thou- 
 sands of years ago. Very anciently also there 
 was a Greek story-teller who wrote a little story 
 about a boy and girl In the country called 
 " Daphnis and Chloe." It was a little story, 
 telling In the simplest language possible how that 
 boy and girl fell In love with each other, and did 
 not know why, and all the Innocent things they 
 said to each other, and how grown-up people 
 kindly laughed at them and taught them some of 
 the simplest laws of life. What a trifling sub- 
 ject, some might think. But that story, trans- 
 lated Into every language In the world, still reads 
 like a new story to us; and every time we re-read 
 it, it appears still more beautiful, because It 
 teaches a few true and tender things about inno- 
 cence and the feeling of youth. It never can 
 grow old, any more than the girl and boy whom 
 it describes. Or, to descend to later times, about 
 three hundred years ago a French priest conceived 
 the idea of writing down the history of a student 
 who had been charmed by a wanton woman, and 
 led by her Into many scenes of disgrace and pain. 
 This little book, called " Manon Lescaut," de- 
 scribes for us the society of a vanished time, a 
 time when people wore swords and powdered 
 their hair, a time when everything was as dlf' 
 
ON READING 203 
 
 ferent as possible from the life of today. But 
 the story is just as true of our own time as of any 
 time in civilization; the pain and the sorrow af- 
 fect us just as if they were our own; and the 
 woman, who is not really bad, but only weak and 
 selfish, charms the reader almost as much as she 
 charmed her victim, until the tragedy ends. 
 Here again is one of the world's great books, 
 that cannot die. Or, to take one more example 
 out of a possible hundred, consider the stories of 
 Hans Andersen. He conceived the notion that 
 moral truths and social philosophy could be better 
 taught through little fairy-tales and child stories 
 than in almost any other way; and with the help 
 of hundreds of old fashioned tales, he made a 
 new series of wonderful stories that have become 
 a part of every library and are read in all coun- 
 tries by grown up people much more than by 
 children. There is in this astonishing collection 
 of stories, a story about a mermaid which I sup- 
 pose you have all read. Of course there can be 
 no such thing as a mermaid; from one point of 
 view the story is quite absurd. But the emotions 
 of unselfishness and love and loyalty which the 
 story expresses are immortal, and so beautiful 
 that we forget about all the unreality of the 
 framework; we see only the eternal truth behind 
 the fable. 
 
 You will understand now exactly what I mean 
 
204 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 by a great book. What about the choice of 
 books? Some years ago you will remember that 
 an Englishman of science, Sir John Lubbock, 
 wrote a list of what he called the best books in 
 the world — or at least the best hundred books. 
 Then some publishers published the hundred 
 books in cheap form. Following the example of 
 Sir John, other literary men made different lists 
 of what they thought the best hundred books in 
 existence; and now quite enough time has passed 
 to show us the value of these experiments. They 
 have proved utterly worthless, except to the pub- 
 lishers. Many persons may buy the hundred 
 books; but very few read them. And this is not 
 because Sir John Lubbock's idea was bad; it Is 
 because no one man can lay down a definite 
 course of reading for the great mass of differently 
 constituted minds. Sir John expressed only his 
 opinion of what most appealed to him; another 
 man of letters would have made a different list; 
 probably no two men of letters would have made 
 exactly the same one. The choice of great books 
 must under all circumstances be an individual one. 
 In short, you must choose for yourselves accord- 
 ing to the light that is in you. Very few persons 
 are so many sided as to feel inclined to give their 
 best attention to many different kinds of litera- 
 ture. In the average of cases it is better for a 
 man to confine himself to a small class of sub- 
 
ON READING 205 
 
 jects — the subjects best according with his nat- 
 ural powers and inclinations, the subjects that 
 please him. And no man can decide for us with- 
 out knowing our personal character and disposi- 
 tion perfectly well and being in sympathy with 
 it, where our powers lie. But one thing is easy 
 to do — that is, to decide, first, what subject in 
 literature has already given you pleasure, to de- 
 cide, secondly, what is the best that has been 
 written upon that subject, and then to study that 
 best to the exclusion of ephemeral and trifling 
 books which profess to deal with the same theme, 
 but which have not yet obtained the approbation 
 of great critics or of a great public opinion. 
 
 Those books which have obtained both are not 
 so many in number as you might suppose. Each 
 great civilization has produced only two or three 
 of the first rank, if we except the single civiliza- 
 tion of the Greeks. The sacred books embody- 
 ing the teaching of all great religions necessarily 
 take place in the first rank, even as literary pro- 
 ductions; for they have been polished and repol- 
 Ished, and have been given the highest possible 
 literary perfection of which the language in which 
 they are written is capable. The great epic 
 poems which express the ideals of races, these 
 also deserve a first place. Thirdly, the master- 
 pieces of drama, as reflecting life, must be con- 
 sidered to belong to the highest literature. But 
 
2o6 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 how many books are thus represented? Not very 
 many. The best, like diamonds, will never be 
 found In great quantities. 
 
 Besides such general indications as I thus ven- 
 tured, something may be said regarding a few 
 choice books — those which a student should wish 
 to possess good copies of and read all his life. 
 There are not many of these. For European 
 students it would be necessary to name a number 
 of Greek authors. But without a study of the 
 classic tongues such authors could be of much less 
 use to the students of this country; moreover, a 
 considerable knowledge of Greek life and Greek 
 civilization is necessary to quicken appreciation 
 of them. Such knowledge is best gained through 
 engravings, pictures, coins, statues — through 
 those artistic objects which enable the imagina- 
 tion to see what has existed; and as yet the artis- 
 tic side of classical study is scarcely possible in 
 Japan, for want of pictorial and other material. 
 I shall therefore say very little regarding the 
 great books that belong to this category. But as 
 the whole foundation of European literature rests 
 upon classical study, the student should certainly 
 attempt to master the outhnes of Greek myth- 
 ology, and the character of the traditions which 
 inspired the best of Greek Hterature and drama. 
 You can scarcely open an English book belonging 
 to any high class of literature, In which you will 
 
ON READING 207 
 
 not find allusions to Greek beliefs, Greek stories, 
 or Greek plays. The mythology is almost nec- 
 essary for you; but the vast range of the subject 
 might well deter most of you from attempting a 
 thorough study of it. A thorough study of it, 
 however, is not necessary. What is necessary is 
 an outhne only; and a good book, capable of giv- 
 ing you that outline in a vivid and attractive man- 
 ner would be of inestimable service. In French 
 and German there are many such books; in Eng- 
 lish, I know of only one, a volume in Bohn's 
 Library, Keightley's '' Mythology of Ancient 
 Greece and Italy." It is not an expensive work; 
 and it has the exceptional quality of teaching in a 
 philosophical spirit. As for the famous Greek 
 books, the value of most of them for you must be 
 small, because the number of adequate transla- 
 tions is small. I should begin by saying that all 
 verse translations are useless. No verse transla- 
 tion from the Greek can reproduce the Greek 
 verse — we have only twenty or thirty lines of 
 Homer translated by Tennyson, and a few lines of 
 other Greek poets translated by equally able men, 
 which are at all satisfactory. Under all circum- 
 stances take a prose translation when you wish to 
 study a Greek or Latin author. We should of 
 course consider Homer first. I do not think that 
 you can afford not to read something of Homer. 
 There are two excellent prose translations in Eng- 
 
2o8 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 llsh, one of the Iliad and one of the Odyssey. 
 The latter is for you the more important of the 
 two great poems. The references to it are in- 
 numerable in all branches of literature; and these 
 references refer usually to the poetry of its theme, 
 for the Odyssey is much more a romance than is 
 the Iliad. The advantage of the prose transla- 
 tion by Lang and Butcher is that it preserves 
 something of the rolling sound and music of the 
 Greek verse, though it is only prose. That book 
 I should certainly consider worth keeping con- 
 stantly by you; its utility will appear to you at a 
 later day. The great Greek tragedies have all 
 been translated; but I should not so strongly rec- 
 ommend these translations to you. It would be 
 just as well, in most cases, to familiarize your- 
 selves with the stories of the dramas through 
 other sources; and there are hundreds of these. 
 You should at least know the subject of the great 
 dramas of Sophocles, iEschylus, and above all 
 Euripides. Greek drama was constructed upon a 
 plan that requires much study to understand cor- 
 rectly; it is not necessary that you should under- 
 stand these matters as an antiquarian does, but it 
 is necessary to know something of the stories of 
 the great plays. As for comedy, the works of 
 Aristophanes are quite exceptional in their value 
 and interest. They require very little explana- 
 tion; they make us laugh today just as heartily 
 
ON READING 209 
 
 as they made the Athenians laugh thousands of 
 years ago; and they belong to immortal literature. 
 There is the Bohn translation in two volumes, 
 which I would strongly recommend. Aristo- 
 phanes is one of the great Greek dramatists whom 
 we can read over and over again, gaining at every 
 reading. Of the lyrical poets there is also one 
 translation likely to become an English classic, 
 although a modern one; that is Lang's translation 
 of Theocritus, a tiny little book, but very precious 
 of its kind. You see I am mentioning very few; 
 but these few would mean a great deal for you, 
 should you use them properly. Among later 
 Greek work, work done in the decline of the old 
 civilization, there is one masterpiece that the 
 world will never become tired of — I mentioned 
 it before, the story of *' Daphnis and Chloe.'* 
 This has been translated into every language, and 
 I am sorry to say that the best translation is not 
 English, but French — the version of Amyot. 
 But there are many English translations. That 
 book you certainly ought to read. About the 
 Latin authors, it is not here necessary to say 
 much. There are very good prose translations 
 of Virgil and Horace, but the value of these to 
 you can not be very great without a knowledge 
 of Latin. However, the story of the ^Eneid is 
 necessary to know, and it were best read in the 
 version of Conington. In the course of your gen- 
 
2IO TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 eral education It is impossible to avoid learning 
 something regarding the chief Latin writers and 
 thinkers; but there is one Immortal book that you 
 may not have often seen the name of; and It Is a 
 book everybody should read — I mean the 
 " Golden Ass " of Apulelus. You have this in a 
 good English translation. It Is only a story of 
 sorcery, but one of the most wonderful stories 
 ever written, and It belongs to world literature 
 rather than to the literature of a time. 
 
 But the Greek myths, although eternally Im- 
 perishable in their beauty, are not more intimately 
 related to English literature than are the myths 
 of the ancient English religion, the religion of the 
 Northern races, which has left its echoes all 
 through our forms of speech, even In the names 
 of the days of the week. A student of English 
 literature ought to know something about North- 
 ern mythology. It is full of beauty also, beauty 
 of another and stranger kind; and It embodied 
 one of the noblest warrior-faiths that ever ex- 
 isted, the religion of force and courage. You 
 have now In the library a complete collection of 
 Northern poetry, I mean the two volumes of the 
 " Corpus Poeticum Boreali." Unfortunately you 
 have not as yet a good collection of the Sagas and 
 Eddas. But, as in the case of the vaster subject 
 of Greek mythology, there is an excellent small 
 book in English, giving an outline of all that is 
 
ON READING 211 
 
 important — I mean necessary for you — in re- 
 gard to both the religion and the literature of the 
 Northern races, Mallet's "Northern Antiquities." 
 Sir Walter Scott contributed the most valuable 
 portion of the translations in this little book; and 
 these translations have stood the test of time re- 
 markably well. The introductory chapters by 
 Bishop Percy are old fashioned, but this fact does 
 not in the least diminish the stirring value of the 
 volume. I think it is one of the books that every 
 student should try to possess. 
 
 With regard to the great modern masterpieces 
 translated into English from other tongues, I can 
 only say that it is better to read them in the orig- 
 inals, if you can. If you can read Goethe's 
 " Faust " in German, do not read it in English; 
 and If you can read Heine in German, the French 
 translation in prose, which he superintended, and 
 the English translations (there are many of 
 them) in verse can be of no use to you. But if 
 German be too difficult, then read " Faust " in 
 the prose version of Hayward, as revised by Dr. 
 Buchhelm. You have that in the library; and it 
 is the best of the kind In existence. " Faust " is a 
 book that a man should buy and keep, and read 
 many times during his life. As for Heine, he is a 
 world poet, but he loses a great deal in transla- 
 tion; and I can only recommend the French prose 
 version of him; the English versions of Brown- 
 
212 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 ing and Lazarus and others are often weak. 
 Some years ago a series of extraordinary trans- 
 lations of Heine appeared In Blackwood's Maga- 
 zine; but these have not appeared, I beheve, In 
 book form. 
 
 As for Dante, I do not know whether he can 
 make a strong appeal to you In any language ex- 
 cept his own; and you must understand the Mid- 
 dle Ages very well to feel how wonderful he was. 
 I might say something similar about other great 
 Italian poets. Of the French dramatists, you 
 must study Mollere ; he Is next In Importance only 
 to Shakespeare. But do not read him In any 
 translation. Here I should say positively, that 
 one who cannot read French might as well leave 
 Mollere alone; the English language cannot re- 
 produce his delicacies of wit and allusion. 
 
 As for modern English literature, I have tried 
 in the course of my lectures to Indicate the few 
 books deserving of a place In world-literature; 
 and I need scarcely repeat them here. Going 
 back a little further, however, I should like to 
 remind you again of the extraordinary merit of 
 Malory's book, the " Morte D'Arthur," and to 
 say that it Is one of the very few that you should 
 buy and keep and read often. The whole spirit 
 of chivalry Is in that book; and I need scarcely tell 
 you how deep is the relation of the spirit of chiv- 
 
ON READING 213 
 
 airy to all modern English literature. I do not 
 recommend you to read Milton, unless you intend 
 to make certain special studies of language; the 
 linguistic value of Milton is based upon Greek 
 and Latin literature. As for his lyrics — that is 
 another matter. Those ought to be studied. As 
 there is little more to say, except by way of sug- 
 gestion, I think that you ought, every one of you, 
 to have a good copy of Shakespeare, and to read 
 Shakespeare through once every year, not caring 
 at first whether you can understand all the sen- 
 tences or not; that knowledge can be acquired at 
 a later day. I am sure that if you follow this ad- 
 vice you will find Shakespeare become larger 
 every time that you read him, and that at last he 
 will begin to exercise a very strong and very 
 healthy influence upon your methods of thinking 
 and feeling. A man does not require to be a 
 great scholar in order to read Shakespeare. And 
 what is true of reading Shakespeare, you will find 
 to be true also in lesser degree of all the world's 
 great books. You will find it true of Goethe's 
 " Faust." You will find it true of the best chap- 
 ters in the poems of Homer. You will find it 
 true of the best plays of Moliere. You will find 
 it true of Dante, and of those books In the Eng- 
 lish Bible about which I gave a short lecture last 
 year. And therefore I do not think that I can 
 
214 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 better conclude these remarks than by repeating 
 an old but very excellent piece of advice which 
 has been given to young readers : " Whenever 
 you hear of a new book being published, read an 
 old one." 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 LITERATURE AND POLITICAL OPINION 
 
 It has been for some time my purpose to de- 
 liver a little lecture illustrating the possible rela- 
 tion between literature and politics — subjects 
 that seem as much opposed to each other as any 
 two subjects could be, yet most intimately re- 
 lated. You know that I have often expressed 
 the hope that some of you will be among those 
 who make the future literature of Japan, the lit- 
 erature of the coming generation; and in this con- 
 nection, I should like to say that I think the crea- 
 tion of Japanese literature (and by literature I 
 mean especially fiction and poetry) to be a polit- 
 ical necessity. If " political necessity " seems to 
 you too strong a term, I shall say national re- 
 quirement; but before I reach the end of this lec- 
 ture, I think you will acknowledge that I used 
 the words *' political necessity " in a strictly cor- 
 rect sense. 
 
 In order to explain very clearly what I mean, 
 I must first ask you to think about the meaning 
 of public opinion in national politics. Perhaps in 
 Japan today public opinion may not seem to you 
 
 215 
 
2i6 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 of paramount Importance In deciding matters of 
 statecraft, though you will acknowledge that it is 
 a force which statesmen have, and must always 
 have, to deal with. But In western countries, 
 where the social conditions are very different, and 
 where the middle classes represent the money 
 power of the nation, public opinion may mean 
 almost everything. I need scarcely tell you that 
 the greatest force in England Is public opinion — 
 that is to say, the general national opinion, or 
 rather feeling, upon any subject of moment. 
 Sometimes this opinion may be wrong, but right 
 or wrong is not here the question. It is the 
 power that decides for or against war; it is the 
 power that decides for or against reform; it is 
 the power that to a very great degree influences 
 English foreign policy. The same may be 
 said regarding public opinion in France. And 
 although Germany is, next to Russia, the most 
 imperial of European powers, and possesses the 
 most tremendous military force that the world 
 has even seen, public opinion there also is still a 
 great power in politics. But most of all, America 
 offers the example of pubHc opinion as govern- 
 ment. There indeed the sentiment of the nation 
 may be said to decide almost every question of 
 great importance, whether domestic or foreign. 
 
 Now the whole force of such opinion in the 
 West depends very much for its character upon 
 
LITERATURE 217 
 
 knowledge. When people are correctly In- 
 formed upon a subject, they are likely, in the 
 mass, to think correctly in regard to it. When 
 they are ignorant of the matter, they are of 
 course apt to think wrongly about it. But this 
 Is not all. What we do not know is always a 
 cause of uneasiness, of suspicion, or of fear. 
 When a nation thinks or feels suspiciously upon 
 any subject, whether through ignorance or other- 
 wise, its action regarding the subject is tolerably 
 certain to be unjust. Nations, hke individuals, 
 have their prejudices, their superstitions, their 
 treacheries, their vices. All these are of course 
 the result of ignorance or of selfishness, or of 
 both together. But perhaps we had better say 
 roundly that all the evil In this world is the result 
 of ignorance, since selfishness itself could not exist 
 but for ignorance. You will also have remarked 
 in your reading of modern history that the more 
 intelligent and educated, that is to say the less 
 ignorant, a nation is, the more likely is Its policy 
 in foreign matters to be marked by something re- 
 sembling justice. 
 
 Now how is national feeling created today 
 upon remote and foreign subjects? Perhaps 
 some of you will answer, by newspapers — and 
 the remark would contain some truth. But only 
 a little truth; for newspapers do not as a rule 
 treat of other than current events, and the writers 
 
2i8 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 of newspapers themselves can write only out of 
 the knowledge they happen to have regarding 
 foreign and unfamiliar matters. I should say 
 that the newspaper press has more to do with 
 the making of prejudice than with the dissemina- 
 tion of accurate knowledge in regard to such mat- 
 ters, and that at all times its influence can be only 
 of the moment. The real power that shapes 
 opinion in regard to other nations and other civil- 
 izations is literature — fiction and poems. What 
 one people in Europe knows about another people 
 is largely obtained, not from serious volumes of 
 statistics, or grave history, or learned books of 
 travel, but from the literature of that people — 
 the literature that is an expression of its emo- 
 tional life. 
 
 Do not think that public opinion in western 
 countries can be made by the teaching of great 
 minds, or by the scholarship of a few. Public 
 opinion, in my meaning, is not an intellectual 
 force at all. It could not possibly be made an 
 intellectual force. It is chiefly emotional, and 
 may be a moral force, but nothing more. Never- 
 theless, even English ministers of state have to 
 respect it always, and have to obey it very often 
 indeed. And it is largely made, as I have told 
 you, by literature — not the literature of philoso- 
 phy and of science, but the literature of imagina- 
 tion and of feeling. Only thousands of people 
 
LITERATURE 219 
 
 can read books of pure science and philosophy; 
 but millions read stories and verses that touch the 
 heart, and through the heart influence the judg- 
 ment. 
 
 I should say that English public feeling regard- 
 ing many foreign countries has been very largely 
 made by such literature. But I have time only 
 to give you one striking example — the case of 
 Russia. When I was a boy the public knew ab- 
 solutely nothing about Russia worth knowing, ex- 
 cept that the Russian soldiers were very hard 
 fighters. But fighting qualities, much as the Eng- 
 lish admired them, are to be found even among 
 savages, and English experience with Russian 
 troops did not give any reason for a higher kind 
 of admiration. Indeed, up to the middle of the 
 present century the Russians were scarcely con- 
 sidered In England as real human kindred. The 
 little that was known of Russian customs and 
 Russian government was not of a kind to correct 
 hostile feeling — quite the contrary. The cruel- 
 ties of military law, the horrors of Siberian pris- 
 ons, — these were often spoken of; and you will 
 find even In the early poetry of Tennyson, even 
 in the text of " The Princess," references to Rus- 
 sia of a very grim kind. 
 
 All that was soon to be changed. Presently 
 translations into French, into German, and into 
 English, of the great Russian authors began to 
 
220 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 make their appearance. I believe the first re- 
 markable work of this sort directly translated into 
 English was Tolstoi's " Cossacks," the translator 
 being the American minister at St. Petersburg, 
 Mr. Schuyler. The great French writer Meri- 
 mee had already translated some of the best work 
 of Gogol and Pushkin. These books began to 
 excite extraordinary interest. But a much more 
 extraordinary interest was aroused by the sub- 
 sequent translations of the great novels of Tur- 
 gueniev, Dostoievsky, and others. Turgueniev 
 especially became a favourite in every cultured 
 circle in Europe. He represented living Russia 
 as it was — the heart of the people, and not only 
 the heart of the people but the feelings and the 
 manners of all classes in the great empire. His 
 books quickly became world-books, nineteenth 
 century classics, the reading of which was con- 
 sidered indispensable for literary culture. After 
 him many other great works of Russian fiction 
 were translated into nearly all the languages of 
 Europe. Nor was this all. The great intellect 
 of Russia, suddenly awakening, had begun to 
 make itself heavily felt in the most profound 
 branches of practical science. The most remark- 
 able discovery of modern times in chemistry, con- 
 cerning the law of atomic weights, was a Russian 
 discovery; the most remarkable work of physiog- 
 raphy accomplished in regard to Northern Asia 
 
LITERATURE 221 
 
 was the work of Prince Kropotkin, who still lives, 
 and writes wonderful books and memoirs. I am 
 mentioning only two cases out of hundreds. In 
 medicine, in linguistics, in many other scientific 
 directions, the influence of Russian work and 
 thought is now widely recognized. But however 
 scientific men might find reason to respect the 
 Russian intellect, it is not by intellect that a na- 
 tion can make itself understood abroad. The 
 great work of making Russia understood was ac- 
 complished chiefly by her novelists and story- 
 tellers. After having read those wonderful 
 books, written with a simple strength of which we 
 have no parallel example in western literature, ex- 
 cept the works of a few Scandinavian writers, the 
 great nations of the West could no longer think 
 of Russians as a people having no kinship with 
 them. Those books proved that the human heart 
 felt and loved and suffered in Russia just as in 
 England, or France, or Germany; but they also 
 taught something about the peculiar and very 
 great virtues of the Russian people, the Russian 
 masses — their infinite patience, their courage, 
 their loyalty, and their great faith. For, though 
 we could not call these pictures of life beautiful 
 (many of them are very terrible, very cruel), 
 there is much of what is beautiful in human na- 
 ture to be read between the lines. The gloom of 
 Turgueniev and of his brothers in fiction only 
 
222 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 serves to make the light seem more beautiful by 
 contrast. And what has been the result? A 
 total change of western feeling towards the Rus- 
 sian people. I do not mean that western opinion 
 has been at all changed as regards the Russian 
 government. Politically Russia remains the 
 nightmare of Europe. But what the people are 
 has been learned, and well learned, through Rus- 
 sian literature; and a general feeling of kindli- 
 ness and of human sympathy has taken the place 
 of the hatred and dislike that formerly used to 
 tone popular utterances in regard to Russians in 
 general. 
 
 Now you will see very clearly what I mean, 
 what I am coming to. Vast and powerful as the 
 Russian nation is, it has great faults, great de- 
 ficiencies, such as have not characterized the peo- 
 ple of this country for thousands of years. So 
 far as civilization signifies manners and morals, 
 education and industry, I should certainly say that 
 the Japanese even hundreds of years ago were 
 more civilized as a nation than the Russians of 
 today, than the Russians can be even for a long 
 time to come. Yet what is known in western 
 countries about Japan? Almost nothing. I do 
 not mean that there are not now hundreds of rich 
 people who have seen Japan, and have learned 
 something about it. Thousands of books about 
 Japan have been written by such travellers. But 
 
LITERATURE 225 
 
 these travellers and writers represent very little; 
 certainly they do not represent national opinion 
 in any way. The great western peoples — the 
 masses of them — know just as little about Japan 
 today as was known about Russia at the beginning 
 of this century. They know that Japan can fight 
 well, and she has railroads, and ships of war; and 
 that is about all that has made an impression 
 upon the public mind. The intellectual classes of 
 Europe know a great deal more, but as I have 
 said, these do not make public opinion, which is 
 largely a matter of feeling, not of thinking. Na- 
 tional feeling can not be reached through the 
 head; it must be reached through the heart. And 
 there is but one class of men capable of doing 
 this — your own men of letters. Ministers, 
 diplomats, representatives of learned societies — 
 none of these can do it. But a single great nov- 
 elist, a single great poet, might very well do it. 
 No one foreign in blood and in speech could do 
 it, by any manner of means. It can only be done 
 by Japanese literature, thought by Japanese, 
 written by Japanese, and totally uninfluenced by 
 foreign thinking and foreign feeling. 
 
 Let me try to put this truth a little more plainly 
 to you by way of illustration. At present the 
 number of books written by foreigners about 
 Japan reaches many thousands; every year at 
 least a dozen new books appear on the subject; 
 
224 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 and nevertheless the western reading public 
 knows nothing about Japan. Nor could It be 
 said that these books have even resulted in les- 
 sening the very strong prejudices that western 
 people feel toward all Oriental nations — preju- 
 dices partly the result of natural race-feeling, and 
 partly the result of religious feeling. Huxley 
 once observed that no man could imagine the 
 power of religious prejudice until he tried to fight 
 it. As a general rule the men who try to fight 
 against western prejudices in regard to the re- 
 ligions of other peoples, are abused whenever 
 possible, and when not possible, they are either 
 ignored or opposed by all possible means. Even 
 the grand Oxford undertaking of the translations 
 of the sacred books of the eastern races was very 
 strongly denounced in many quarters; and the 
 translators are still accused of making eastern re- 
 ligions seem more noble than they really could be. 
 I mention this fact only as an illustration of one 
 form of prejudice; and there are hundreds of 
 others. At the present time any person who at- 
 tempts to oppose these, has no chance of being 
 fairly heard. But the general opinion is that any 
 good things said about the civilization, the ethics, 
 the industry, or the faith of Japan, are said for 
 selfish motives — for reasons of flattery or fear 
 or personal gain; and that the unkind, untruthful, 
 and stupid things said, are said by brave, frank, 
 
LITERATURE 225 
 
 independent, and very wise people. And why is 
 this? Because the good and bad alike have been 
 said only by foreigners. What any foreigner 
 now says about Japanese life and thought and 
 character will have very little influence on the 
 good side, though it may have considerable in- 
 fluence on the other side. This is inevitable. 
 Moreover, remember that the work done by for- 
 eigners in the most appreciative and generous 
 directions has not been of a kind that could reach 
 the western mass of readers. It could reach only 
 small intellectual circles. You can not touch the 
 minds of a great people by mere books of travel, 
 or by essays, or by translations of literature hav- 
 ing nothing in common with western feeling. 
 You can reach them only through more humane 
 literature, fiction and poetry, novels and stories. 
 If only foreigners had written about Russia, the 
 English people would still think of the Russian 
 upper class as barbarians, and would scarcely 
 think of the great nation itself as being humanly 
 related to them. All prejudices are due to ignor- 
 ance; ignorance can be dissipated best by appeals 
 to the nobler emotions. And the nobler emotions 
 are best inspired by pure literature. 
 
 I should suppose that more than one of you 
 would feel inclined to ask, " What need we care 
 about the prejudices and the stupidities of ignor- 
 ant people in western countries? " Well, I have 
 
226 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 already told you that at the present time these 
 relatively Ignorant and stupid millions have a 
 great deal to do with state-policy. It is the opin- 
 ion of the Ignorant, much more than the opinion 
 of the wise, that regulates the policy of western 
 governments with foreign nations. That would 
 be a good reason of itself. But I will now go 
 further, and say that I think the absence of a 
 modern Japanese literature, such as I am advo- 
 cating. Is Indirectly to be regretted also for com- 
 mercial reasons. It Is quite true that commerce 
 and trade are not exactly moral occupations; they 
 are conducted according to relative morality, per- 
 haps, not according to positive morality. In 
 short, business is not moral. It Is a kind of com- 
 petition; and all competitions are in the nature 
 of war. But In this war, which is necessary, and 
 which can not be escaped, a very great deal de- 
 pends upon the feelings with which the antagon- 
 ists regard each other. A very great deal de- 
 pends upon sympathy, even In business, upon an 
 understanding of the simplest feelings regarding 
 right and wrong, pleasure and pain; for, at bot- 
 tom, all human Interests are based upon these. 
 I am quite certain that a Japanese literature cap- 
 able of creating sympathy abroad would have a 
 marked effect In ameliorating business conditions 
 and in expanding commercial possibilities. The 
 great mass of business is risk. Now men are 
 
LITERATURE 227 
 
 more or less in the position of enemies, when they 
 have to risk without perfect knowledge of all the 
 conditions upon the other side. In short, people 
 are afraid of what they do not understand. And 
 there is no way by which the understanding could 
 be so quickly imparted as through the labours of 
 earnest men of letters. I might mention in this 
 connection that I have seen lately letters written 
 by merchants in a foreign country, asking for in- 
 formation in regard to conditions in this country, 
 which J)roved the writers to know even less about 
 Japan than they know about the moon. In ten 
 years, two or three — < nay, even one great book 
 I — would have the effect of educating whole busi- 
 ness circles, whole millions of people in regard to 
 what is true and good in this country. 
 
 Now I have put these thoughts before you in 
 the roughest and simplest way possible, not be- 
 cause I think that they represent a complete argu- 
 ment on the subject, but because I trust they con- 
 tain something which will provoke you to think 
 very seriously about the matter. A man may do 
 quite as great a service to his country by writing 
 a book as by winning a battle. And you had 
 proof of this fact the other day, when a young 
 English writer fell sick, with the result that all 
 over the world the cables were set in motion to 
 express to him the sympathy of millions and 
 millions of people, while kings and emperors 
 
228 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 asked about his health. What had this young 
 man done ? Nothing except to write a few short 
 stories and a few little songs that made all Eng- 
 lishmen understand each other's heart better than 
 before, and that had made other nations better 
 understand the English. Such a man is really 
 worth to his country more than a king. If you 
 will remember this, I believe the lecture I have 
 given will bear good fruit at some future day. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 FAREWELL ADDRESS 
 
 Now that the term comes to a close, I think 
 that it would be well to talk about the possible 
 values of the studies which we have made to- 
 gether, in relation to Japanese literature. For, 
 as I have often said, the only value of foreign 
 literary studies to you (using the word literary 
 in the artistic sense) must be that of their effect 
 upon your own capacity to make literature in your 
 own tongue. Just as a Frenchman does not write 
 English books or a German French books, except 
 in the way of scientific treatise, so the Japanese 
 scholar who makes literature will not waste time 
 by attempting to make it in another language than 
 his own. And as his own is so very differently 
 constructed in all respects from the European lan- 
 guages, he can scarcely hope to obtain much in the 
 way of new form from the study of French or 
 English or German. So I think that we may say 
 the chief benefit of these studies to you must be 
 in thought, imagination and feeling. From west- 
 ern thought and imagination and feeling very 
 much indeed can be obtained which will prove 
 
 helpful in enriching and strengthening the Japan- 
 
 229 
 
230 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 ese literature of the future. It Is by such studies 
 that all western languages obtain — and obtain 
 continually — new life and strength. English 
 literature owes something to almost every other 
 literature, not only in Europe, but even in the 
 whole civilized world. The same can be said 
 of French and German literature — perhaps also, 
 though in less degree, of modern Italian. But 
 notice that the original plant is not altered by the 
 new sap; it is only made stronger and able to 
 bear finer flowers. As English literature re- 
 mains essentially English In spite of the riches 
 gained from all other literatures, so should future 
 Japanese literature remain purely Japanese, no 
 matter how much benefit It may obtain from the 
 ideas and the arts of the West. 
 
 If you were to ask me, however, whether I 
 knew of any great changes so far, I fear that I 
 should be obliged to say, " no.^' Up to the pres- 
 ent I think that there has been a great deal of 
 translation and imitation and adoption Into Jap- 
 anese, from western literatures, but I do not 
 think that there has been what we call true assimi- 
 lation. Literature must be creative, and borrow- 
 ing, or Imitating, or adapting material In the raw 
 state — none of this Is creative. Yet It Is nat- 
 ural that things should be so. This Is the period 
 of assimilation; later on the fine result will show, 
 when all this foreign material has been trans- 
 
FAREWELL ADDRESS 231 
 
 muted, within the crucible of literature, into 
 purely Japanese materials. But this can not be 
 done quickly. 
 
 Now I want to say something about the man- 
 ner in which I imagine that these changes, and a 
 new literature, must come about. I believe that 
 there will have to be a romantic movement in 
 Japan, of a much more deep-reaching kind than 
 may now appear credible. I think that — to say 
 the strangest thing first — the language of schol- 
 arship will have to be thrown away for purposes 
 of creative art. I think that a time must come 
 when the scholar will not be ashamed to write in 
 the language of the common people, to make it a 
 vehicle of his best and strongest thought, to enter 
 into competition with artists who would now be 
 classed as uneducated, perhaps even vulgar men. 
 Perhaps it will seem a strange thing to say, yet I 
 think that there is no doubt about it. Very prob- 
 ably almost any university scholar consciously or 
 unconsciously despises the colloquial art of the 
 professional story-teller and the writer of popular 
 plays in popular speech; nevertheless, if we can 
 judge at all by the history of literary evolutions in 
 other countries, it is the despised drama and the 
 despised popular story and the vulgar song of 
 the people which will prove the sources of future 
 Japanese literature — a finer literature than any 
 which has hitherto been produced. 
 
232 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 I have not the slightest doubt that Shakespeare 
 was considered very vulgar In the time when he 
 wrote his plays — at least by common opinion. 
 There were a few men Intelligent enough to feel 
 that his work was more aUve than any other 
 drama of the time. But these were exceptional 
 men. And you know that in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury the classical spirit was just as strong In Eng- 
 land as it is now, or has been, in Japan. The re- 
 proach of the " vulgar," I mean the reproach of 
 vulgarity, would haVe been brought in Pope's 
 time against anybody who should have tried to 
 write in the form which we now know to be much 
 superior. I have told you also how the great 
 literatures of France and Germany were obliged 
 to pass through a revolution against classical 
 forms, which revolution brought into existence 
 the most glorious work, both in poetry and prose, 
 that either country ever produced. 
 
 But remember how the revolution began to 
 work in all these countries of the West. It began 
 with a careful and loving study of the despised oral 
 literature of the common people. It meant the 
 descent of great scholars from their thrones of 
 learning to mix with peasants and ignorant peo- 
 ple, to speak their dialects, to sympathize with 
 their simple but deep and true emotions. I do 
 not say that the scholar went to live In a farm- 
 house, or to share the poverty and misery of the 
 
FAREWELL ADDRESS 233 
 
 wretched in great cities; I mean only that he de- 
 scended to them in spirit — sympathized with 
 them — conquered his prejudices — learned to 
 love them for the simple goodness and the simple 
 truth in their uneducated natures. I think I told 
 you before that even at one period of old Greek 
 literature, the Greek had to do something of very 
 nearly the same kind. So I say that, in my humx- 
 ble opinion, a future literature in this country 
 must be more or less founded upon a sympathy 
 with and a love for the common, ignorant people, 
 the great mass of the national humanity. 
 
 Now let me try to explain how and why these 
 things have come to pass in almost every civilized 
 country. The natural tendency of society is to 
 produce class distinctions, and everywhere the 
 necessary tendency in the highest classes must be 
 to conservatism — elegant conservatism. Con- 
 servatism and exclusiveness have their values; and 
 I do not mean to suggest the least disrespect to- 
 ward them. But conservatism invariably tends to 
 fixity, to mannerisms, to a hard crystallization. 
 At length refined society obliges everybody to do 
 and say according to rule — to express or to re- 
 press thought and feeling in the same way. Of 
 course men's hearts can not be entirely changed 
 by rule; but such a tyranny of custom can be made 
 that everybody is afraid to express thought or to 
 utter feeling in a really natural way. When life 
 
234 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 becomes intensely artificial, severely conventional, 
 literature begins to die. Then, western experi- 
 ence shows that there is one cure; nothing can 
 bring back the failing life except a frank return 
 to the unconventional, a frank return to the life 
 and thought of the common people, who represent 
 after all the soil from which everything human 
 springs. When a language becomes hopelessly 
 petrified by rules, it can be softened and strength- 
 ened and vivified by taking it back to its real 
 source, the people, and soaking it there as in a 
 bath. Everywhere this necessity has shown it- 
 self; everywhere it has been resisted with all the 
 strength of pride and prejudice; but everywhere 
 its outcome has been the same. French or Ger- 
 man or English alike, after having exhausted all 
 the resources of scholarship to perfect literature, 
 have found literature beginning to dry and wither 
 on their hands ; and have been obliged to remove 
 it from the atmosphere of the schools and to 
 resurrect it by means of the literature of the ig- 
 norant. As this has happened everywhere else, 
 I can not help believing that it must happen here. 
 Yet do not think that I mean to speak at all 
 slightingly about the value of exact learning. 
 Quite the contrary. I hold that it is the man of 
 exact learning who best — providing that he has 
 a sympathetic nature — can master to good result 
 
FAREWELL ADDRESS 235 
 
 the common speech and the unlettered poetry. A 
 Cambridge education, for example, did not pre- 
 vent Tennyson from writing astonishing ballads 
 or dramatic poems in ballad measure in the dif- 
 ficult dialect of the northern English peasant. 
 Indeed, in English literature the great Romantic 
 reformers were all, or nearly all, well schooled 
 men, but they were men who had artistic spirit 
 enough to conquer the prejudices with which they 
 were born, and without heeding the mockery of 
 their own class, bravely worked to extract from 
 simple peasant lore those fresh beauties which 
 give such desirable qualities to Victorian poetry. 
 Indeed, some went further — Sir Walter Scott, 
 for example, who rode about the country, going 
 into the homes of the poorest people, eating with 
 them and drinking with them, and everywhere 
 coaxing them to sing him a song or tell him a 
 story of the past. I suppose there were many 
 people who would then have laughed at Scott. 
 But those little peasant songs which he picked out 
 started the new English poetry. The whole lit- 
 erary tone of the eighteenth century was changed 
 by them. Therefore I should certainly venture 
 to hope that there yet may be a Japanese Walter 
 Scott, whose learning will not prevent him from 
 sympathizing with the unlearned. 
 
 Now I have said quite enough on that subject; 
 
236 TALKS TO WRITERS 
 
 and I have ventured It only through a sense of 
 duty. The rest of what I have to say refers 
 only to literary work. 
 
 I suppose that most of you, on leaving the Uni- 
 versity, win step Into some profession likely to 
 absorb a great deal of your time. Under these 
 circumstances many a young man who loves litera- 
 ture resigns himself foolishly to give up his pleas- 
 ures In this direction ; such young scholars Imagine 
 that they have no time now for poetry or romance 
 or drama — not even for much private study. I 
 think that this is a very great mistake, and that it 
 is the busy man who can best give us new litera- 
 ture — with the solitary exception perhaps of 
 poetry. Great poetry requires leisure, and much 
 time for solitary thinking. But In other depart- 
 ments of literature I can assure you that the men- 
 of-letters throughout the West have been, and 
 still are, to a great extent, very busy men. Some 
 are In the government service, some In post of- 
 fices, some In the army and navy (and you know 
 how busy military and naval officers have to be), 
 some are bankers, judges, consuls, governors of 
 provinces, even merchants — though these are 
 few. The fact is that it is almost impossible for 
 anybody to live merely by producing fine litera- 
 ture, and that the literary man must have, in most 
 cases, an occupation. Every year the necessity 
 for this becomes greater. But the principle of 
 
FAREWELL ADDRESS 237 
 
 literary work is really not to do much at one time, 
 but to do a little at regular intervals. I doubt 
 whether any of you can ever be so busy that you 
 will not be able to spare twenty minutes or half 
 an hour in the course of one day to literature. 
 Even If you should give only ten minutes a day, 
 that will mean a great deal at the end of the 
 year. Put it In another way. Can you not write 
 five lines of literary work daily? If you can, the 
 question of being busy Is settled at once. Multi- 
 ply three hundred and sixty-five by five. That 
 means a very respectable amount of work In 
 twelve months. How much better If you could 
 determine to write twenty or thirty lines every 
 day. I hope that If any of you really love litera- 
 ture you will remember these few words, and 
 never think yourselves too busy to study a little, 
 even though It be only for ten or fifteen minutes 
 every day. And now good-bye. 
 
INDEX 
 
 TOPICS 
 
 Adjectives, 78, 83, 85 
 Antithesis, 95 
 Art, aristocratic, 159 
 democratic, 160 sq 
 emotion in, i6i 
 the highest, introduction, 150 
 
 sq 
 the morality of, introduc- 
 tion, 25, 151 sq 
 
 Beauty, 54 sq, 153, 171 
 
 Character, relation of to lit- 
 erature, I sq 
 Composition, habits of, 33 sq 
 two principles of, 41 
 begins with keenness of ob- 
 servation, introduction, 57 
 
 sq 
 
 the necessity to rewrite, 30, 
 36, 48 sq. 
 
 Description, 78, 79, 83 
 
 Emotion and sensation, 42 
 of a tree, 43 sq 
 of ideas, introduction 
 impersonal suggestion of, 51 
 sq 
 Emotional effect of art, intro- 
 duction, 151 sq 
 Euphuism, 87 
 
 Journalism, 30, 55, 218 
 
 Language, value of the ver- 
 nacular, introduction, 68, 
 69, 165, 231 sq 
 Leisure, its importance to the 
 
 writer, 18 sq, 236 
 Literature, an art of emo- 
 tional expression, introduc- 
 tion, 41, and passim 
 the discipline of, introduc- 
 tion, ^6 sq 
 its influence upon political 
 opinion, 215 sq 
 Literary societies, 174, 180 
 
 Poetry, an art requiring soli- 
 tude, 3, 18 
 
 in prose, 8, 20 sq 
 
 relation of character to, 4 
 Provincialism, 15, 16 
 
 Reading, as an art, 1S5 
 for children, 104 
 in publishing houses, 192 
 and rereading, 197 
 
 Sensation and emotion, 42 
 
 Style, 60, 123, 128 
 
 Succession of events in nar- 
 rative, 117 
 
 Supernatural in literature, in- 
 troduction, 130 sq 
 
 Translation, importance of, in- 
 troduction, 24 sq, I02 sq 
 Truth to life, introduction, 57 
 
 sq 
 
 239 
 
240 
 
 INDEX 
 
 II 
 
 AUTHORS AND TITLES 
 
 "Adalantado of the Seven 
 
 Cities, The," 146 
 "Aeneid, The," 209 
 i^schylus, 208 
 
 "Alice in Wonderland," 138 
 Amyot, 209 
 Andersen, Hans Christian, 80, 
 
 84, 85, 105, 203 
 Apuleius, 2IO 
 
 "Arabian Nights, The," 103 
 Ariosto, Ludovico, 108 
 Aristophanes, 208 
 Arnold, Matthew, introduction, 
 
 63 
 "Arria Marcella," 144 sq 
 d'Aulnoy, Marie Catherine, 
 
 Baronne, 105 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 100, loi 
 Baudelaire, Pierre Charles, in- 
 troduction, 120 sq, 168 
 Beckford, William, 36 
 Bible, The, 64, 107, 165, 213 
 " Bienfaits de la Lune, Les," 
 
 121 
 Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, intro- 
 duction, 17, 74, 84, 102 sq 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 212 
 "Blessed Damozel, The," 37 
 "Bluebeard," 105 
 Bohn Library, The, 90, 207, 
 
 209 
 "Book of Job, The," 143, 201 
 "Book of Kings, The," 108 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 10 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, introduc- 
 tion, 86 sq, no 
 
 Browning, Robert, introduc- 
 tion, 13, 17, 198, 2n 
 
 Bulwer Lytton, Edward 
 George Earle Lytton, first 
 Baron, 136, 138 sq 
 
 "Burnt Njal, Story of," 81 
 
 Byron, Lord George Gordon 
 Noel, introduction, 4 
 
 Calderon, de la Barca, Pedro, 
 
 ic8 
 Camoens, Luis Vaz de, 108 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 103, 198 
 " Carmen," 53 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70 
 " Cinderella," 104 
 Conington, 209 
 Conscience, Henry, 105 
 " Corpus Poeticum Boreali," 
 
 210 
 "Cossacks, The," 220 
 
 Dante Alighieri, 158, 200, 212, 
 
 213 
 " Daphnis and Chloe," 202, 
 
 209 
 Darwin, Charles, 98 
 
 Erasmus, 98 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 53 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 63 
 Diderot, Denis, 62 
 "Divan, The," 108 
 Dostoievsky, Feodor Mikhailo- 
 
 vich, 220 
 Dumas, Alexandre, 105, 106 
 
 Early English Text Society, 
 
 176 
 "Edith of the Swan Neck," 
 
 " Eleonora," 142 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 27, 69 
 
INDEX 
 
 241 
 
 Encyclopedists, The, 62 
 " Eothen," 124 
 Euripides, 208 
 
 "Fall of the House of Usher, 
 
 The," 142 
 " Faust," 103, 211, 213 
 Firdusi, 108 
 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 109 
 Flaubert, Gustav, introduction 
 "Fleurs de Mai, Les," 120 
 Froude, James Anthony, 37, 38, 
 
 63 
 
 "Garden of Cyrus, The," 97, 
 
 98 
 Gautier, Theophile, 144 
 Gibbon, Edward, 100, loi 
 Giles, Professor Herbert, 137 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 
 
 26, 27, 103, 200, 211, 213 
 Gogol, 220 
 
 "Golden Ass, The," 210 
 Gray, Thomas, 37 
 Grimm, Herman, 105 
 "Gulistan, The," 108 
 "Gulliver's Travels," 105 
 
 Hafiz, 108 
 
 Heine, Heinrich, 109, 211, 212 
 
 " Hereward the Wake," 17 
 
 Homer, 35, 207, 213 
 
 Horace, 209 
 
 Hugo, Victor, ij, 106 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 113 
 "Iliad, The," 208 
 " In Memoriam," 26 
 Irving, Washington, 146 
 
 "Jack and the Beanstalk," 104 
 "Jack the Giant-killer," 104 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 36, 88, 100 
 
 "Kalevala, The," 108, 148 
 Kant, Immanuel, 114 
 Keightley, 207 
 Ker, Professor William Paton, 
 
 introduction, 117 
 Kinglake, 85 
 Kingsley, Charles, 17 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 68, 71, 124 
 
 sg, 173 
 
 Kropotkin, Prince Peter Alex- 
 eivich, 221 
 
 La Morte Amoureuse, 144 
 Lang, Andrew, 209 
 Lanier, Sidney, 64 
 "Lays of Ancient Rome," 134 
 " Les Bienf aits de la Lune," 
 
 121 
 " Little Poems in Prose," 121 
 "Little Mermaid, The," 84 
 "Little Tin Soldier, The," 84 
 London Times, The, 71 
 Loti, Pierre (Julien Viaud), 
 
 124, 126-128 
 Lyly, John, 87 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
 63, 95, icx), loi, 133, 134, 
 140 
 
 " Madame Bovary," introduc- 
 tion 
 
 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 130 
 
 " Mahabharata, The," 108 
 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 87, 212 
 
 Mallett, 211 
 
 " Manon Lescaut," 202 
 
 Marie de France, 147 
 
 "Matteo Falcone," 53 
 
 de Maupassant, Guy, introduc- 
 tion, 52, 53, 80 
 
242 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Meredith, George, introduction, 
 
 14, 17 
 Merimee, Prosper, 53, 220 
 Milton, John, 213 
 Moliere, Jean Baptiste Poque- 
 
 lin, 212, 213 
 " Moll Flanders," introduction 
 " Monte Cristo," 106 
 Morley, John, 23 
 "Morte d'Arthur," 212 
 Miiller, Max, 37 
 " Mythology of Ancient Greece 
 
 and Italy," 207 
 
 " Nightingale of the Emperor 
 of China, and the Night- 
 ingale of the Emperor of 
 Japan," 84 
 Norse Writers, 72 sq 
 " Northern Antiquities," 211 
 
 "Odyssey, The," 208 
 
 Palmer, Edward Henry, 109 
 Percy, Bishop Thomas, 2H 
 Percy Society, The, 176 
 Perrault, Charles, 104 
 Petrarch, Francisco Petrarca, 
 
 108 
 Pierre Loti (Julien Viaud), 
 
 124, 126-128 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 120, 142 
 Pope, Alexander, 232 
 PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 
 
 The, 180 
 "Princess, The," 219 
 "Prophecy of Capy», The," 
 
 134 
 " Pseudodoxia," 89 
 Pushkin, 220 
 "Puss in Boots," 104 
 
 " Qu*€St-ce-que VArt?" 156 
 
 " Ramayana," 108 
 "Rasselas," 36 
 "Religio Medici," 89 
 "Rip Van Winkle," 146 
 " Robinson Crusoe," 105 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 13, 37, 
 
 Ruskin, John, 68, 157, 161 
 
 Saadi, 108 
 
 Saintsbury, Professor George, 
 
 64, 96, 121, 196 
 Scott, Walter, 105, 163, 211, 
 
 235 
 "Seven Sisters, The," 146 
 "Shah-Naraeh, The," io8 
 Shakespeare, William, 9, 10, 
 131, 158, 200, 212, 213, 232 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, introduction 
 " Sleeping Beauty, The," 104 
 Sophocles, 208 
 Spencer, Herbert, introduction, 
 
 114, 151, 169, 174 
 " Strange Stories from a Chi- 
 nese Workshop," 137 
 "Sturlunga Saga, The," 75 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 
 introduction, 13, 65 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 13, 26, 37, 
 50, 65, 152, 207, 219, 235 
 
 Thackeray, William Make- 
 peace, 10 
 
 Theocritus, 209 
 
 " Three Musqueteers, The," 
 106 
 
 " Through the Looking Glass," 
 139 
 
 Tolstoi, Count Leo, introduc- 
 tion, 156 sq, 220 
 
INDEX 243 
 
 Turgeniev, Ivan, 114, 220, 221 Voltaire, Francois Marie Arou- 
 
 et de, 62 
 
 ;;iJgly Duckling, The," 84 "Wild Cat, The," 104 
 
 Undine, 143,144 " Wilhelm Meister," 103 
 
 Urashima," 146 WycliflFe, John, 70 
 
 ^^"Sil, 209 Zola, Emile, 198 
 
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