Earmarks of literature

Foreword

This is an attempt to gather and group together many things that are discussed more thoroughly and at greater length in other places, but nowhere, the writer believes, all in one place, or in a style that will commend them to the general reader.

The book is based on a series of lectures given first to the training class of the Brooklyn Public Library, afterward to that of the New York Public Library, and finally to that of the St. Louis Public Library. The series has grown from year to year by the inclusion of material that seemed necessary to supplement and round out the knowledge commonly obtained in the schools.

Arthur E. Bostwick.

St. Louis Public Library.

I

Chapter I

S THERE anything about real literature that marks it for what it is? May we learn to recognize the blooded literary stock from the " mavericks" — the waifs and strays of literature? The untrained reader may sometimes err; that is because he does not know where to seek for the marks of identification. The earmarks of literature may not be evident to a careless passer-by, but they exist, and it may be worth while to try to define and describe some of them. And at the outset it should be noted that the word "literature" itself has been used in various senses. In its broadest use the term includes all that has been put into written words since the earliest dawn of time. Even the rude l scribblings of Roman loungers on columns and doorways, preserved to us by the storm of ashes that overwhelmed Pompeii, are part of it, and we can not deny the claim of the rudest picture-writing of the earliest savage to be placed in the same category. The multiplication table is literature in this sense, and the class includes every book in the largest library. It is in this sense that we speak of the "literature" of arithmetic or of agriculture, meaning all that has been written on those subjects.

In its narrowest sense the class includes only such writings as have permanent value due to their form and the treatment of their subject-matter, independently of their substance itself. They may have and should have value for the latter reason also, but their value should not rest entirely on this. To illustrate: we are not accustomed to rank works on fishing as literature; yet Izaak Walton's Complete Angler stands in the very first rank among purely literary compositions simply on account of the manner in which it is written. Manner can make anything good literature, no matter what it is about.

Between these two classes — literature in its widest and literature in its narrowest sense — the word has been used and can be used to mean almost any desired class or combination of written works. Is it any wonder that there is continued dispute about whether this or that work is " literature?" For instance, many authorities would exclude from the class all works not marked by nobility of thought, and all that are on special as opposed to general subjects. This would make substance have a good deal to do with the definition. The class as defined in the Dewey Decimal Classification, used in many libraries, is mixed. It is determined partly by form, because poetry, drama, essays, etc., are made sub-classes, and partly by the character of the subject-matter, because humor, fiction, etc., are made other sub-classes. In other words, in this classification, poetry, no matter what its subject may be, is classed as literature because of its peculiar form. Humor, no matter in what form it may be, is classed there because its subject matter is " funny." Of course this is scarcely logical, but a strictly logical system of library classification is impossible. When a writer on the subject speaks of " literature " he may include very much more, or very much less, than is contained in the library class of that name.

We shall consider here literature in its narrowest meaning, which is at the same time its highest; namely, those writings that have permanent value due to their form independently of their substance.

We have already seen, in our glance at the decimal classification, that certain formal arrangements of words or sentences entitle the works in which they are used to be regarded as literature from the standpoint of library classification. This, of course, is not the only case in which classification must take pretense into account instead of facts. When Dr. Cook's narrative of North Pole discovery was first discredited, there was an amusing newspaper controversy over its proper library classification. Reporters waited upon public librarians, in various parts of the country, to inquire whether the book was to be catalogued as travel or fiction. Evidently if the classification is to depend on the result of an investigation of the credibility of a work, the classifier might have to wait long to complete it, and in controverted instances different librarians would classify differently, causing much confusion. Here the author's intention must govern us. No one would call Baron Munchausen's book history, because the author himself did not intend us to believe it. David Copperfield is not autobiography, for the same reason. But General Butler's Own Story would be so classed, even by one who considered it largely fiction.

The same thing is true of classification from the standpoint of literary form. Thus, if a work is written in meter, it is poetry from a library standpoint and must be classified as such. We do not inquire whether it is good or bad poetry. But in the highest sense of the word, as we have just defined it, only good poetry is literature, and, indeed, only good poetry is poetry at all in the best sense. Schoolboy doggerel may be verse, and a good deal that is little better finds its way into our libraries. It must then be classified as " literature" under " poetry," but it is neither poetry nor literature in the best sense. When a work is dismissed, then, with the remark, " It is all very well, but it is not literature," the speaker means simply that it will never have permanent value from its form alone. This may or may not be a condemnation, according as the work does or does not aspire to have such value. To say that Robinson's High School Algebra or Roscoe and Schorlemmer's Chemistry is " not literature" is in no wise derogatory, because these aim to be of value only through their subject-matter. Such books must, it is true, conform to certain rules of form. They must be plainly and grammatically written and the subject-matter must be logically expressed. But their permanent value is due not to this form but to the information that they contain. In a book of this kind the form is generally only the handmaiden of the subject, while in a purely literary work the subject is generally but the foundation on which the literary qualities of the work are built up. To say that Martin's Physiology is not literature is not therefore to condemn it, but to say the same thing of a piece of verse is to say of it the very worst thing that could be thought of, because here the form is everything. If it is literature it is so by virtue of its poetic form and style, and to say that it is not literature is to condemn these as hopelessly bad.

It may be well to repeat here that very few works of pure literature have not also valuable subject-matter, and that very many technical books can claim to be also works of literature by reason of their perfect form. That is the case with Walton's book on angling, mentioned at the outset of this chapter. It may be the case even with so dry a work as a mathematical treatise. This is notably so in the French language, where beauty of form is prized more highly than it is in English.

From this point of view the Romance languages — that is, those derived from the Latin, like French, Italian, and Spanish — are more literary than Teutonic tongues like English and German. Not that their highest points overtop us, for Shakespeare is higher than Moliere and Goethe than Cervantes, but that on the whole the general level of writing rises more nearly to a good literary plane. From the standpoint of literary style alone, a trashy French novel is apt to be better than a far more serious work in English, and the general run of German fiction is still further down than our own.

It may happen, curiously enough, that a work written as a serious contribution to knowledge survives only through its excellent literary form, its facts being out of date, or that a work intended as a literary masterpiece is of value now only because it contains curious facts, like Erasmus Darwin's poem The Botanick Garden.

In order to be good literature, therefore, a work must possess good form. The work of literature is the polished gentleman among other works. A man may have sterling worth, but he cannot hope to move among cultivated people if he eats with his knife or sits with his boots on the table.

Now there are kinds of form which all literary works must possess, and there are in addition rules to which each work must conform when it is written according to some special formula, as in poetry, the drama, or the essay. General literary form is called style, and we shall take up this before considering the rules of the various kinds of special literary form. Style is nothing more nor less than the manner in which an author expresses himself. To pass muster it must be: (i) Grammatical; (2) clear; (3) appropriate to its subject; (4) characteristic of the writer.

We shall consider these qualities in turn in the chapters that follow.

N

Chapter II

O WORK is entitled to rank as good literature that is not written grammatically. By this I mean that it must conform in all respects with the mode of writing generally accepted among educated persons as correct. It must be properly expressed, and properly capitalized and punctuated.

What determines whether it is so or not? Here we find that authorities differ, being divided, in the main, into two schools: those who believe that the rules as laid down in text books and treatises rest on certain scientific principles of language and that these rules and principles may always be applied to test correctness; and those, on the other hand, who believe that the sole test of correctness is good usage, and that no matter how contrary to fixed grammatical rules an expression may be, it becomes correct as soon 10 as it is in general use among cultivated persons. According to the first view, what is good English today will be good English twenty years hence; according to the other view, an expression that is positively incorrect today may be good English in 1920.

As is usual in such cases the truth doubtless lies between these extremes. In the first place, the rules in the books are deduced from the language itself, not the language from the rules. If I wish to write a grammar of some savage tongue that has never been reduced to writing, I cannot do it from my own inner consciousness ; I must go and observe how the language is used by those who speak it. Doubtless I shall find that, in general, it conforms to rules and laws; all natural phenomena do that; but if I write them down I must follow what I find ; if my written rules do not agree with the language, so much the worse for the rules — not so much the worse for the language. The fact is that man is part of nature, not apart from it, and that his languages are a part of natural phenomena.

Their laws are therefore on a par with other natural laws. Astronomers once deduced from their observations the rule that all the planets moved in circles. Years afterward closer observation showed that the curves were not circles after all. The astronomers did not shut their eyes to the new facts and hold to the old rules; they made new rules to fit the facts. This is what natural philosophers are continually doing and grammarians will have to do the same.

Again, students of nature now recognize the fact of growth and development everywhere. Language is not exempt from this. If a language is alive it will grow and therefore change. We may not want it to grow; but it will, for all that; just as trees will grow even when we much prefer that they should remain as they are. Growth, however, does not mean exemption from law. On the contrary, it always takes place along certain lines, although we may not always be able to tell beforehand what those lines may be. The usage of words and their changes are likewise not erratic, although they may seem to be so. One of the great sources from which our stock of words is replenished is slang. Slang has been called " language in the making." Now slang does not arise haphazard. Slang words become popular usually because of their extreme aptness ; that is, they have some special connection with the language in the light of existing conditions that makes them more expressive than any legitimate word. Often they last but a short time and are forgotten ; sometimes they continue in use, are taken first into colloquial speech and then into more careful diction, and finally become regular literary forms. The same is true of new grammatical forms, which starting in slang phrases may at last end as recognized idioms. Now it is quite possible to look ahead and at least to surmise whether an expression, not now good English, may ever become so. For instance, I do not believe that the slang expression "to douse the glim," meaning to put out the light, will ever be literary English. My reason is that it has been recognized as slang for a hundred years or more; that it is not in very common use and that if there had been need for it in literary English it would have reached its goal long ago. This is not by any means certain, however. The word "kid," meaning a child, was originally slang used by thieves and exactly on a par with " douse the glim." It has recently come into wide use in colloquial speech, and it is within the bounds of possibility that it may one day be literary English. In the compound "kidnap" it is so already.

To take an expression that is not slang but simply incorrect, I do not believe that literary English will ever sanction the double negative. We shall probably never be allowed to say "he didn't go no farther." It is usual to teach children that this is wrong because it is not logical. "If he didn't go no farther, he must have gone somewhat farther." But the double negative is used in Greek, and the negatives there are regarded as strengthening each other, not as destroying each other. And the double negative is used in English by quite as many people as do not use it. The trouble with it is that it has always been used by people of imperfect education and has always been regarded as a special mark of lack of education. Hence it is quite improbable that it will ever be thought fit for good company.

Again, some expressions have been for some time on the borders of good literary society but have never succeeded in gaining admittance. Such a form is "you was," for the second person singular of the past tense of the verb " to be." This is still occasionally used by educated persons. In Fielding's Tom Jones all the characters use it. Jane Austen, in her novels, frequently makes her characters employ it, but never when she represents them as persons of great cultivation. Those who still use it call our attention to the fact that originally and properly "thou" and not "you" is the singular pronoun of the second person. "You" is plural, and was used for the singular originally as a polite form. It has now taken the place of "thou" everywhere except in solemn and provincial diction. Now when the pronoun "you" is used as a singular, why should it not take the singular verb? This is logical enough, but the same logic would permit us to say "you is" which never pretended to be correct. This is only one more of the instances that show plainly how little logic has to do with the matter. "You were" is the correct form simply because it is used by the great majority of educated persons.

Good English, then, is determined by good usage, and good usage follows definite lines both in what it is and in the changes that occur in it, although we may not always see that any lines at all are being followed. One thing is certain : a man will never write good English simply by following rules. That results in what has been called "school teacher's English," which can be told by an expert as soon as he hears it, and which is apt to lead to the conclusion that the user has been accustomed to speak very incorrectly and is trying to mend his fault by observing certain set rules.

The rigid following of rules would tend to destroy all the characteristics of a language. The forms in which a language seems to break rules and to cut out new paths for itself are called idioms, and no one can write a language well who does not write it idiomatically. Idioms, though they seem to be departures from rules, are usually only the result of growth in an unusual direction. Sometimes their origin has been forgotten, and then those who would adhere too closely to rule pounce upon them and brand them as incorrect. I have heard of a school teacher who insisted that "methinks" was incorrect and that it was simply an illiterate form of " I think." He did not know, evidently, that the last syllable of the word is not our present word " think" but an obsolete similar form meaning to seem, and that "me" is the indirect object. " Methinks" is simply " it seems to me." But suppose that there was no record of this old form, and that we could not explain

"methinks" any more than we can explain many other idiomatic forms. Its use in good literature would still sustain it and we should be sure that it arose in some logical way.

This is the attitude to take in all disputed questions of good or bad English. I do not mean to say that it is always possible to decide at once. The best authorities may differ and do differ. It may be necessary to take all sorts of circumstances into account. Only, a critic should never point triumphantly to a rule without giving any other reason. When Archbishop Trench stoutly maintained that "It is me" is perfectly good English, he brought down on himself a storm of protest. Most of it was based simply on the fact that the form violates the rule of grammar that requires a predicate pronoun to agree with the subject. Yet the French say c'est mot, which is the same thing, and there is no dispute about it in their language. The only reason for a dispute in English is that usage is divided. The best writers and speakers nowadays do not say "it is me," and if that form was ever idiomatic English it has dropped, or is dropping, from good literary use. Doubtless the reason it has so dropped is that it appears to be against rule, and rules do thus have a powerful effect in forcing a language to conform to them unless an idiom is very strongly established. It is well that this is so, for no one wants a language consisting entirely of idioms.

What I have said applies also to pronunciation, although I shall not touch on that here, as it is a part of spoken, not of written language. It applies also to capitalization and punctuation. Of these I will say only that the tendency of the language is to use as few capitals and marks of punctuation as usage will permit. We go further in both directions in this country than they do in England.

The question of good English is very much more difficult than the corresponding one in many other languages. In France, for instance, there is a body — the Academy — whose word on literary matters is law. There is no question, therefore, on matters of good

French, when the academicians have made a decree. Some have lamented because there is no such body to settle English usage, but it is probably better that there is none. English thus remains a very vital tongue, sending out feelers in all directions like a vigorous vine, making some mistakes but keeping to the same general trend. It has always been so and its freedom has made it, as we whose mother tongue it is like to think and proclaim, the most flexible and best vehicle of expression on the globe — perhaps the destined world-language to which some enthusiasts look forward. The question of good English is treated sanely in the appendix on Faulty Diction in the Standard Dictionary, and currently in the Bookman Letter-box and in some of the daily papers, notably the New York Sun. Among good books on the subject are White's Words and Their Uses, Trench's Study of Words, and the works of Prof. Lounsbury of Yale. An amusing controversy on the subject is contained in Dean Alvord's The Queen's English, followed by Moon's The Dean's English.

N

Chapter III

O STYLE is good that is not clear. In fact, ^no book is a work of good literature when the ordinary reader cannot understand the author's meaning readily, whether his difficulty arises from the subject or from the way in which it is treated. If the subject is a complex or confusing one, which requires close study, the book is a technical treatise or a text book, and is therefore, as we have seen, without the borders of pure literature. If, on the other hand, there is no particular difficulty with the ideas that the writer wishes to impart, but his meaning is obscure owing to the way in which he tries to express them, then his want of clearness mars the literary quality which his work would otherwise possess.

These two kinds of obscurity are frequently confused by readers. Both prevent a work 21 from being classed with literature in the purest sense; but the first kind — that due to deep thought — may of course exist in a work of the very highest plane — for instance, a philosophical treatise. The difficulty here is that the writer is trying to impart unfamiliar ideas which cannot be grasped without mental effort. But the fact that you find it hard to grasp an author's ideas may be due to his own inability to realize exactly what they are, or at any rate, to express them clearly. More than one writer or speaker has received credit for profound thought, when he should have been censured for lack of clearness and conciseness.

It should be remembered that this question is, in the main, entirely apart from that of grammar. An ungrammatical sentence may be perfectly clear and a grammatical one very obscure. If a boy says, " I hain't got no money," we are in no doubt whatever of his meaning. If, on the other hand, we are informed that "John asked James to tell his aunt to mend his coat," the use of the pronouns makes the meaning quite confused, although the fault in the sentence is rhetorical, not grammatical. This illustrates how a sentence containing only half a dozen words or so may be quite confused. On the other hand a sentence two pages in length may be quite clear, although the construction of such a sentence requires care and is a piece of work that not every one can do. William M. Evarts was noted for his long sentences, and yet so nicely balanced were they that no one could fail to understand them.

Occasionally the necessity for clearness conflicts very sharply with grammatical rules. For instance, grammarians have always objected to "splitting the infinitive," that is, to the insertion of modifying words between " to," used as the infinitive sign, and the verb itself. Thus they tell us we must not say " to greatly err," but " greatly to err" or "to err greatly." There is no particular logical reason for this rule, for the word "to," here, was originally only the preposition and not a component part of the verb — no more so, at any rate, than the auxiliaries in such forms as " can be " or " may be." No one objects to our saying "it may not be" or "it may possibly be." There can be no doubt, however, that a "split" infinitive is regarded as inadmissible by most good authorities on English. There can be as little doubt, probably, that almost all good writers have used it, either habitually or occasionally. The reason is that clearness often requires it. English has lost almost all its inflections and is obliged to make the relations of its words clear by their position in the sentence. "John hit James" and "James hit John " mean very different things ; but in Latin the shifting of names would not change the meaning. The name of the boy who did the hitting would be in the nominative case, and that of the one who was hit would be in the accusative, no matter what position they might occupy. The only thing effected by shifting the names about would be a slight alteration in the emphasis. With pronouns, when we still have distinct forms for the cases, the same is true in English. "I saw him"

and "Him saw I" mean precisely the same thing, although the latter order of words would be used only in poetry.

Now the clearest place in the world for an adverbial modifier is within the verb-phrase itself, when this phrase consists of more than one word. Here it cannot possibly be misunderstood. And writers who are accustomed to place it so in verbal forms with auxiliaries are very apt to claim the same privilege with the infinitive. The more outrageous the " split" is, the truer this is, and it is truer in spoken than in written language. Take the following: "I wish emphatically and with as much deliberation as possible to say." Here the speaker "wishes to say." Does the long modifier tell how he wishes or how he is to say? The meaning is somewhat ambiguous even in the written form, but the reader will glance ahead and may make up his mind that the modifier belongs to the infinitive. But when the sentence is spoken the hearer does not know what is coming until after the word "possible." In his mind the modifier may belong to "wish" or it may go with something that is yet to come. The doubt confuses him. The speaker is very apt, therefore, to put his infinitive sign before the modifier and say "I wish to — emphatically and with as much deliberation as possible — say that," etc., etc. When chided for so absurd a "split," he would be very likely to plead : " Oh yes ; I know it is incorrect, but I could make my meaning plainer that way."

In a colloquial or impromptu address, or in a similar form of writing, as in a newspaper article, this reason holds good, whereas in a more formal composition, where the writer has time to rearrange his sentences and secure clearness, if possible, by some other method, it ought not to be accepted. Much more might be said on this conflict of clearness and good usage, and such things are doubtless playing their part in the slow alteration of the language.

Obscurity, however, may exist or be avoided in ways that have nothing to do with either grammatical or rhetorical rules. A writer, for instance, may use obsolete or provincial forms of expression, or foreign words, in doing either of which he lays himself open to the charge of using bad English as well as obscure diction. A foreign word, of course, may or may not be clear, according to the degree of knowledge of the person to whom it is addressed. It used to be presumed that every well-educated person knew Latin, and it was therefore admissible to use Latin words and quotations quite freely in any work addressed to people of education. But in our time education does not follow fixed lines, and it is quite possible that one may be well-educated without a knowledge of the classical tongues. Much Latin, or even any Latin at all, therefore, may sin against clearness. The same may be said of French, German, and other languages. In an essay intended to be used by those who are presumably familiar with those languages, words and expressions may be freely used that in another class of writing would be hopelessly obscure. The same is true of all sorts of allusions, technical or otherwise. Clerk Maxwell, the great English physicist, wrote numerous poems embodying in every line reference to the quantities and processes of higher mathematics. To a mathematician these were thoroughly clear, and indeed approached closely to literature, while to the ordinary reader they conveyed no more meaning than if they had been written in the Choctaw language. The classical allusions with which Milton's works are often loaded, were doubtless familiar to those to whom they were especially addressed, but nowadays even the student needs a note now and then to help him. If a twentieth century poet should follow Milton's example in this regard, he would be pronounced pedantic.