Appreciation of literature, and America in literature

Front matter

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Chapter I

Literature is an art of expression. The material which it emplojre is experience; or, in other words, literature is the expression of life. Action, emotion and thought are the three great divisions of life, and constitute experience. Literature undertakes to represent such experience through the mediimi of language, and to bring it home to the understanding of the reader. It is obvious that literature makes its appeal to the individual mind and is intelligible only in so far as the individual is able to comprehend its language and interpret the experience there embedded.

A good reader is an author's best fortune, for the writer strives in vain unless he be imderstood. The reader's own experience is the key to literature. It may be direct experience, events and passions personal to himself; or it may be indirect, events and passions observed in the career of others, or at least learned by report; but in any case the power to understand indirect experience, that is, experience not one's own, depends on the existence of a common human nature and on the share of it which the reader has already realized in his own life and self-consciousness.

It is by sjmipathy and ima'gination that one enters into the lives and fortunes of others; and these two faculties, which are the great interpretative powers of literature, have richness, strength and scope in proportion to the quality and quantity of individual experience, to the depth and range of one's own life. Sympathy and imagination are the faculties which literature most cultivates by exercise, and the enlightenihent which literature brings is in the main achieved through them.

It is plain that the appreciation of literature is a continuing process, and depends on increase of experience in the personal life and on growth of the imaginative and sympathetic powers; hence it is changeable in taste and standard, and varies from one stage of life to another. It is a measure of growth because it proceeds from growth; to love the poets is a certificate of manhood, a proof that one has put forth the powers and appropriated the means of life, that one is on the way at least to be humanized.

Literature is the foremost of the humanities, of those instrumentalities by which man becomes more completely human; and in the individual this end is furthered in proportion as he understands human nature in others under its various modes and brings forth from it in himself the richest experience of its capacities. Openness to experience, or sensibility, is the prime quality of the good reader; and to this the writer adds, on the active or creative side, the power of expression through language. These two faculties are the essential constituents of literary genius.

The appropriation of a work of genius is, in a certain sense, a repetition of the act of creation under different circumstances, and the good reader must share in the genius of his author in however pale a form and on however low a scale. It has long been recognized that this likeness exists between the two; for the act of reading is a blending of two souls, nor is it seldom that the reader brings the best part, vivifying his author with his own memory and aspiration and imparting a flame to the words from his own soul.

The appreciation of literature is thus by no means a simple matter; it is not the ability to read, nor even a canon of criticism and rules of admiration and censure that are required; but a live soul, full of curiosity and interest in life, sensitive to impressions, acute and subtle in reception, prompt to complete a suggestion, and always ready with the light of its own life to serve as a lamp unto its feet. Appreciation of literature, too, is neither rapid nor final; it moves with no swifter step than life itself, and it opens, like life, always on larger horizons and other labors.

Experience, such as has been indicated, is usually found in literature in a complex form. It may be usefully discriminated as either personal, national or universal, and in authors individually some one of these kinds is generally predominant. Byron is the type of the personal writer, interested in his own moods and fortunes, egotistic in all his life forces, creating his heroes in his own image and repeating in them his qualities, his ambitions and disillusions, giving his confession through their lips. Virgil is the most distinguished example of the national writer; one always thinks of Rome in the same breath, — "Roman Virgil," as Tennyson begins his noble tribute. Virgil set forth the specific and peculiar experience of the Roman state, giving expression to common traits and interests, the tradition and ideals and manners of the empire that had come to be out of the toil of the fathers and was then the glory of the earth.

Universal experience is that which is the same for all men, whatever their race, country or age, and is exemplified most plainly by the stories of Scripture which have had greatest currency, and in a single author most purely by Shakespeare. The scale of experience with which literature deals, in other words, begins with the narrow circle of the writer's own life and widens out through his city, people, nation, his age, until it includes humanity as such; and in the final and simplest form this experience is of interest, not because it was one man's or one nation's, but because it may be the experience of any man put in such circumstances.

Every man has this threefold ply in his life; he has that human nature which is common to the race with its unchanging passions, needs and vicissitude of human events, and he adds to this the special traits of his age and country, which he also has in common with his fellows; and besides he possesses peculiarities of character and temperament and fortune in life in which his individuality lies.

Literature corresponds to this arrangement by presenting its work similarly woven of individual, national and universal strands, and it has more breadth of significance in proportion as it embodies experience most purely in the Shakesperian or Scriptural type. The appreciation of literature in this type is most ready, in the greatest number of cases, because a certain preparation in history or biography is necessary to the comprehension of the national and personal types. The direct appeal to experience, in other words, without the intervention of study, is made on the ground of universal life; and to this kind, by virtue of the universal element in it, the most enduring literature belongs.

To approach the matter in another way, life is infinite in the number of its phenomena, which taken together make up experience; but there is great sameness in the phenomena. The monotony of human Hfe is one of the final and persistent impressions made upon the reader as upon the traveler. It is natural, therefore, that a love song that was merely a personal effusion of feeling sung in Persia centuries ago should seem to pour forth the genuine emotion of some lover of to-day in a far-off land and should serve him as the verbal channel of his joy or grief.

Emotion has thus prepared for it in l3n:ic poetry of all lands a ritual already written and established. Action, likewise, whose poetic form is epic and dramatic poetry, has a literature of war and passion that passes current evers^here; and thought, the third great form of experience, which is set forth in philosophy or science, simis up its formulas of knowledge and wisdom which serve equally in all languages. The common element is so great, the limits of human experience in all its forms are so restricted, that there results this easy communication and interchange between races and ages.

Literature, so built up and disseminated, while it always offers a wealth of expression for the normal and mediocre experience of life, the commonplace, nevertheless tends to prefer, in its high examples, that which is surpassing in emotion, action and thought, and to conserve this, however far beyond reality, as the mode of overflow of the human soul in its aspiration and its dream of what is possible to itself. Man is a dreamer even more than he is an actor; his actions indeed are hardly more than fragments and relics of his dreams. This is the realm of the ideal, and literature treasures there its greatest works, those which are especially regarded as its works of high genius in creative imagination.

The material is still experience, and the expression sought is still the expression of life, but it is experience transformed by being newly arranged and it is life expressed rather in its function of power than in its operation of reality. This change which passes upon experience and gives scope to the soul's power is brought about by the intervention of art; for literature is not a record of experience primarily and simply, but it is an art using experience for ulterior ends.

Experience, things as they occur, the mere material of expression, is raw material, a crude agglomeration, life just as it comes to pass. If a newspaper were the complete history of a day, as a journalist once defined it, this would be an example of the expression in language of such experience; but it would not be literature, because there would have been no intervention of art in the case.

The primary step in art is selection from the crude mass of material of such parts as will serve the purpose of the writer; these parts are then combined so as to make a whole, that is, they are put in necessary relations one with another such that if any part were to be taken away the whole would fall to pieces through lack of support; a whole so constructed is said to have organic unity, the unity of an organism. This unity is the end of art, and the steps to it are selection and logical combination. This is true of the arts in general, and gave rise to Michael Angelo's well-known definition,— "art is the purgation of superfluities." In literature such construction is illustrated by the general nature of plot, which is a connection of events in the relation of cause and effect such that each is necessary to the course and issue of the action as a whole, and none superfluous.

Hardly inferior to the use of plot in the field of action as an artistic resource in literature is the emplo3mient of type in the field of character; here a similar process of selection takes place in consequence of which the person, or type, possesses all the qualities common to a class of individuals and no quality peculiar to any one individual; this is ideal character. Thus Romeo is all a lover, Achilles all a hero, lago all a villain. Ideal character, or type, and ideal action, or plot, are the two great modes of creative art in imaginative literature; but there are besides many other artistic means employed by literature in its representation of life. These two serve sufficiently to illustrate the use of art made by literature, which is to clarify the experience which is its material; thus plot rationalizes events under the law of cause and effect, and t3^e simplifies character by presenting it under a single and immutable aspect, or by restricting attention to a few phases of it within a narrow range.

Without entering on the mazes of esthetic theory, where there is little certainty, it is enough to observe that art in general seeks order in life and obtains it by a process of segregation and recombination, whether the order so foimd be something plucked from the chaos of nature and revealed as an inner harmony of the universe, or be merely the grace flowing from man upon the world and the illusion of his limiting intelligence.

The presence of this order in art is plain; and also the principle of clarification, of simphfication, of economy in the interest of an intelhgible and comprehensive conception of experience, operating to disclose this order, is likewise to be observed. Whatever may be the validity of art, in the philosophic sense, what is essential here the simple fact of its presence as the mode by wh Uterature deals with experience in order to draw fn life its use and meaning for men.

The conclusion is that literature represents life certain formal ways; a degree of formalism is ind( inseparable from literature, as from all the other arts, a some acquaintance with its traditionary forms is inc pensable to the appreciation of its contents, while, sides, the pleasure of the forms themselves is a part of real value. The importance of the formal side of Ht ature is not lessened by the fact that the perception form and delight in it are not English traits in a h degree; in this respect the southern nations excel northern peoples by far; it is probable, indeed, that the English generally, in approaching their literati there is a sense of artificiality in the mere form of ve greater than they feel in the case of a picture or a stat The external form, which is generally described as te nique, is really no more artificial than the internal fo: which consists in the development of the theme indepe ently of its melodic investiture; neithe^: is truly artific but both belong under artistic formalism, which is method whereby great imaginative literature takes b( and acquires its intense and enduring life.

In correspondence with the three kinds of experiei personal, national and universal, each recreated in arti form, there are three modes of critical approach to lit( ture in order to interpret and understand its conte

The first and simplest is the purely esthetic, and is es dally applicable to universal literature; it looks onlj the work, which is freed from conditions of time and p] and origin, analyzes its qualities, compares it with oth

FIRST PRINCIPLES ii

classifies, and so judges it under formal criteria by itself alone and for its own sake as an incarnation of that human life, an expression of that human spirit, which is the same yesterday, to-day and forever, at least within the range of the arc which art has thus far measured; it is this sameness in the soul, as interpreted by art, which justifies the absolute nature of this mode of criticism.

The second is the purely historical mode of approach, and is appropriate to the national element in experience and the works which most embody it in whatever form, it looks at the environment, examines race, country and epoch, and seeks to understand the work as merely the result of general social forces and broad conditions and as the necessary and, as it were, fatal expression of these, and allows the least possible part to individual choice or influence.

The third mode, which is more proper to the personal element, is the psychological; it looks at the personality of the writer and seeks to interpret his work as the resxilt and expression of his peculiar temperament and faculty under the personal conditions of his birth, education and opportunities.

All three are useful methods and are alike indispensable; and as literature normally presents the three kinds of experience blended, and seldom singly in a pure form, it is generally necessary to employ the three kinds of criticism, without giving undue advantage to any one of them, in order to grasp any great work fully in its personality, its historical significance and its universal and imperishable esthetic value. It is nevertheless true that mere biography and mere history are not, properly speaking, literary elements, when literature is regarded as a fine art; they are adjuncts to the interpretation of the work just as grammar may be, or archeology, or an; other subsidiary aid; but the characteristic value of an; hterary work, that which makes it literature, is inde pendent of these and is a more vital and enduring thing This value lies in its being a work of art.

The critical approach to literature by whatever mod implies study, an acquired knowledge of biography or his tory or of artistic forms. The direct aim of all art, how ever, is to please, and to please immediately; study ma; be a part of the necessary preparation for appreciatior but it does not enter into the appreciation itself. It i useful to recognize at once the fact that literature is nc an object of study, but a mode of pleasure; it is not thing to be known merely like science, but to be lived If a book does not yield immediate pleasure to the readei as direct and intimate as sensation or emotion, it fail with that particular person to discharge the proper func tion of literature. The typical example of the operatio: of literature is found in the company of warriors listenin to the old minstrel who relates the heroic deeds and tragi histories that make up the tradition of the tribe, or i the groups in the medieval market-place who hung o the lips of the traveler telling tales, the poet chanting lay; or the players representing in rude scenes the comedy c human life.

This is not to say that the hearer is without som preparation, but not that of study. Even the simples books, such as those about nature, require that ther should have been in the reader some previous lif( some training of the eye, some curiosity about birds an beasts and the treasure-trove of the seabeach. Tli having lived is the essential condition of any appreciation or, in other words, the appeal to experience, lies back c all literary pleasure. The more direct this is, the better; and literature rises in the scale of value in proportion as the appeal is made to broader and wider experience, to more and more of life already realized in the reader himself. His life with nature must be wide and deep before he can appreciate normally and easily the greater works of poetic imagination in which nature is employed as the channel of high passion, as the symbol of philosophic truth, or even as the harmonious and enhancing environment of scenes of love or tragedy. That reader does best who in his use of literature insists on the presence of this immediate appeal to himself in the books he reads. If the book does not have this effect with him, if it does not cooperate with his own taste and interest, it may be the best of books for others, but it is not for him, — at least it is not yet for him.

Study, the conscious preparation to understand, begins when the difficulty of appreciation becomes insurmountable by private and personal experience. The obstacle is, in the main, merely a defect in experience such as to impair his powers of imagination and sympathy which interpret other lives and experience not his own to himself. This obstacle rises especially in past literature and it increases in proportion to the antiquity or foreignness of the literature, in general, in the degree to which the literature involves different conditions of life from those which are contemporary. It is here that scholarship of all sorts has its function in the endeavor to make contemporary in thought the past phases of life.

The soul is essentially the same in all men; yet its temperament, its consciousness of the world and of itself, its faith and the modes of its ambition and consolation are widely different in the various races and civilizations.

It is extremely difficult even for a trained and instructe( imagination to realize the world of a medieval saint or o a Greek sophist or of a Jewish enthusiast of the age o the prophets. If one attempts to reconstruct the physica aspect of such a man's thought of the heavens and th earth, and then adds, as best he can, the intellectual an( moral contents of such a mind and heart, he seems moviu] in a world of mistake and ignorance so different from ou own as to seem a mad world.

It is curious how often the past world of our owi blood, its scheme of knowledge and scope of meditatioi and passion, take on this form of apparent madness ii the eyes of a modern reader who stops to think. Stil more, if one attempts to reconstruct the world of thi Arab, the Hindoo, the Chinese, the task grows hopeless looking into the faces of the orientals, eye to eye, is ; blanker thing than gazing at the Sphinx; the myster of personality seems unfathomable in men by whon fundamental ideas are so differently held and conceivec as often to be unintelligible to us and hardly recognizable and we conclude briefly, — "the oriental is inscrutable.' The attempt to fathom a foreign literature is like tha of acquiring the language; at first it seems easy, bu with progress it becomes hard; and it is the same, but ii an infinitely greater degree, with the task of acquirinj an Italian or an Arab or a Hindoo soul.

The defect of experience in our case allows the imagina tion to work only imperfectly in constructing, and th sympathies to flow inadequately in interpreting, th scenes, passions and moods of other lands and peoples and literature loses its power in proportion as its nee essary appeal to ourselves diminishes. We read Greel books, but not as the Greeks read them; and one of th

Strange qualities of immortal books is that they permit themselves to be so read and yet to give forth an intelligible and supreme meaning. The reader takes so much of the book as has affinity with him, and it is as if the book were re- written in his mind; indeed, it often happens that the book which was written is not the book which is read, so great is the reader's share in that blending of two souls which is the act of reading; it was certainly thus, for example, that Emerson read Hafiz. The reader's mind enters into every book, but especially into works of imagination; there is something private in his understanding of his author, and this is a greater element in proportion to the vitality and richness of his mind; what he makes of an ancient or a foreign book is often, it must be suspected, something that departs widely from the original author's design. The function of scholarship, in appreciation, is so to inform the reader with respect to the material and environment of the book that he may have the truest possible operation of imagination and the freest possible play of sympathy in appropriating the book; but, in comparison with contemporary and native appreciation, it is usually a limited success which is thus gained.

As the study of biography, history, archaeology and other lights on past conditions or alien civilizations are aids to the reader in understanding and appropriating unfamiliar experience, so some study of artistic forms of expression assists him in appreciating literature, particularly in its higher and more refined phases. In poetry, especially, a modest acquaintance with the melodic modes of languages is indigpensable; but it need not exceed the limits which would similarly be set for an elementary appreciation of music. It is not a knowledge of prosody, i6 APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

of the different varieties of meter and their combinations of the technique of verse as taught in books that is nee essary; such study is, for the most part, wearisome an( fruitless.

The essential thing is to be able to read verse, am to read it intelligently so that it declares itself to b( verse and not prose by the mere fall of the syllables. I is extraordinary how rare this power has become. It ii true that in older modes of education, such as the Greek the melodic modes of the language were defined and helc by the concurrence of the instrument and the dance witl the choral movement of the words; but verse, even whei not so sustained, has a clear movement of its own. Th( ear should be trained by the oral repetition of verse, i: it is to be true; but this is seldom done in any effectiv( way. It is not only the keen sense of the melody^ of vers( which has been lost; the significance of the line and th< phrase as units of composition is also seldom known. Il is not possible to appreciate verse unless it is correctlj read, nor to realize its beauty without some sense of its structure, that is, of the unitary value of phrase, line, anc stanza, and of the mode of their combination to build up the whole into one poem. To perceive melodic time ir verse with its subtle modulation of cadence and rhythm and to be aware of the interlacing and close junction ol phrase and line in which much of the grace and felicitj of poetry resides, are labors neither difficult nor long; z little intelligent attention suffices to acquire this powei and with it the formal pleasure of literature begins. Th( way once entered on may lead so far as to the appreciation of a Greek ode or even to pleasure in the intricaciej of a Persian song.

It is not, however, necessary to go to such lengths,

The forms of poetry have their effect, like the forms of other arts, without elaborate study or developed knowledge of technique. Oratory is a mode of address full of artifice, but it is artifice grounded upon nature, so that it sways the "fierce democratie" by itself, and the forms of poetry are similarly grounded upon nature, and its music plays upon the heart and mind of men by a necessity of their constitution. A scientific and technical knowledge is by no means required of the reader; but an elementary acquaintance with melody and structure, such as to allow correct reading and the perception of the harmonious confinement of thought within the limits of the musical beats of phrase and line, is hardly to be "dispensed with.

It is questionable, on the other hand, whether much is gained by study of the artistic field in larger matters, such as, for example, dramatic construction. In that direction the reader turns his attention from the work to the workmanship, and may embarrass himself with theory, or preconceptions not universally applicable. But without setting limits to study of whatever sort, for all modes of study have possible uses, it is to be laid down in general that all study of literature in the way of preparation to grasp and understand, whether it be linguistic, historical or esthetic, eyists to be forgotten and laid off as soon as it is completed; its end is to withdraw one by one the veils, and leave the reader alone with the spirit of the book, which then speaks to him face to face. All the rest was but preliminary; it is only then that he begins to read.

The uses of study in all its kinds being thus subsidiary and a means of remedying defects in the power of imagination, sympathy and perception of form, the reader is i8 APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

at last thrown fairly back upon his own experience, or the kind and quality of the life he has lived, for his appreciation of literature; he is left to himself. If the light is not in him, he cannot see; and, in general, large parts of literature remain dark and, even in authors whom he comprehends in the main portions, continue obscure. This is especially true of the greatest works of genius. For the reader the measure of his understanding of the author is the measure of the author; and from this there is no appeal. It results from these conditions that literature is slowly appropriated and is a thing of growth. The reader cannot transcend at the moment his own season; as a child he reads as a child, and as a man as a man. A boy of ten may read Homer, but he reads him with the power of a boy of ten. It is a child's Homer. The dependence of the book on the reader being so strict, it is always advisable to keep literary study on a near level with life as it is in the individual case.

The natural introduction to literature for the very young is by means of that universal sort which is selected from all ages and requires no study, such as the stories of Scripture, short legendary tales of history, beast and bird fables, fairy tales and the like. They have, besides their intelligibility, the advantage of accustoming the mind to a make-believe world, natural to childish fancy, and so lasdng the foundation for that principle of convention which is fundamental in art and indispensable in its practise, and also of making the contemplation of imaginary experience habitual so that there is no shock between it and truth. The transposition by which human experience is placed in the bird and beast world is a literary fiction; as an element in early education it helps to give that plasticity to the world of fact which is essential to the artistic interpretation of life and the imaginary habit of mind. The serious study of one's own literature is most fruitfully begun by acquaintance with those authors who are in vogue and nearly contemporary, the literature of the century preceding, on the well-worn principle of proceeding in knowledge from the better-known to less well-known, and because there is the minimum of necessary study intervening between author and reader.

To approach and have practise in the literature that requires study there is nothing better for the beginner than Greek literature, and it has the peculiar advantage for broadening the mind of being a pagan literature and yet closely kindred to our own, presenting human experience under very different conditions from the present, and yet easily realizable in wise and beautiful forms. In Greek literature, too, the universal element is greater than in any other, and this facilitates its comprehension while the mind becomes accustomed to the mixture with the universal of the past, the temporal, the racial, the obscure, the dead.