Talks on the study of literature.

All follow this, and come to dust.

Hurried over as a catalogue, to take one example more, how dull is the following from Marlowe's "Jew of Malta;" but how sumptuous it becomes when the reader gloats over the name of each jewel as would do the Jew who is speaking: —

The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price
As one of them indifferently rated,
And of a carat of this quantity,
May serve, in peril of calamity,
To ransom great kings from captivity.

I have not much sympathy with the trick of reading into an author all sorts of far-fetched meanings of which he can never have dreamed; but, as it is only by observing these niceties of language that a writer is able to convey delicate shades of thought and feeling, so it is only by appreciation of them that the reader is able to grasp completely the intention which lies wrapped in the verbal form.

To read intelligibly, it is often necessary to know something of the conditions under which a thing was written. There are allusions to the history of the time or to contemporary events which would be meaningless to one ignorant of the world in which the author lived. To see any point to the fiery and misplaced passage in "Lycidas" in which Milton denounces the hireling priesthood and the ecclesiastic evils of his day, one must understand something of theological politics. We are aided in the comprehension of certain passages in the plays of Shakespeare by familiarity with the conditions of the Elizabethan stage and of the court intrigues. In so far it is sometimes an advantage to know the personal history of a writer, and the political and social details of his time. For the most part the portions which require elaborate explanation are not of permanent interest or at least not of great importance. The intelligent reader, however, will not wish to be tripped up by passages which he cannot understand, and will therefore be likely to inform himself at least sufficiently to clear up these.

Any reader, moreover, must to some extent know the life and customs of the people among whom a work is produced. To one who failed to appreciate wherein the daily existence of the ancient Greeks differed from that of moderns, Homer would hardly be intelligible. It would be idle to read Dante under the impression that the Italy of his time was that of to-day; or to undertake Chaucer without knowing, at least in a general way, how his England was other than that of our own time. The force of language at a given epoch, the allusions to contemporary events, the habits of thought and custom must be understood by him who would read comprehendingly.

When all is said there will still remain much that must depend upon individual experience. If one reads in Lowell: —

And there the fount rises; …
No dew-drop is stiller
In its lupin-leaf setting
Than this water moss-bounded;

one cannot have a clear and lively idea of what is meant who has not actually seen a furry lupin-leaf, held up like a green, hairy hand, with its dew-drop, round as a pearl. The context, of course, gives a general impression of what the poet intended, but unless experience has given the reader this bit of nature-lore, the color and vitality of the passage are greatly lessened. One of the priceless advantages to be gained from a habit of careful reading is the consciousness of the significance of small things, and in consequence the habit of observing them carefully. When we have read the bit just quoted, for instance, we are sure to perceive the beauty of the lupin-leaf with its dew-pearl if it come in our way. The attention becomes acute, and that which would otherwise pass unregarded becomes a source of pleasure. The most sure way to enrich life is to learn to appreciate trifles.

There is a word of warning which should here be spoken to the over-conscientious student. The desire of doing well may lead to overdoing. The student, in his anxiety to accomplish his full duty by separate words, often lets himself become absorbed in them. He drops unconsciously from the study of literature into the study of philology. There have been hundreds of painfully learned men who have employed the whole of their misguided lives in encumbering noble books with philological excrescences. I do not wish to speak disrespectfully of the indefatigable clan characterized by Cowper as

Philologists, who chase
A panting syllable through time and space;
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece and into Noah's ark.

These gentlemen are extremely useful in their way and place; but the study of philology is not the study of literature. It is at best one of its humble bond-slaves. A philologist may be minutely acquainted with every twig in the family-tree of each obsolete word in the entire range of Elizabethan literature, and yet be as darkly and as completely ignorant of that glorious world of poetry as the stokers in an ocean steamer are of the beauty of the sunset seen from the deck. It is often necessary to know the derivation of a term, and perhaps something of its history, in order to appreciate its force in a particular usage; but to go through a book merely to pick out examples for philologic research is like picking to pieces a mosaic to examine the separate bits of glass.

While, moreover, attention to the force and value of details is insisted upon, it must never be forgotten that the whole is of more value than any or all of its parts. The reader must strive to receive the effect of a book not only bit by bit, and page by page, and chapter by chapter, but as a book. There should be in the mind a complete and ample conception of it as a unit. It is not enough to appreciate the best passages individually. The work is not ours until it exists in the mind as a beautiful whole, as single and unbroken as one of those Japanese crystal globes which look like spheres of living water. He who knows the worth and beauty of passages is like an explorer. He is neither a conqueror nor a ruler of the territory he has seen until it is his in its entirety.

I believe that to comparatively few readers does it occur to make deliberate and conscious effort to realize works as wholes. The impression which a book leaves in the thought is of course in some sense a result of what the book is as a unit; but this is seldom sharply clear and vivid. The greatest works naturally give the most complete impression, and the power of producing an effect as a whole is one of the tests of art. The writer of genius is able so to choose what is significant, and so to arrange his material that the appreciative reader cannot fail to receive some one grand and dominating impression. It is hardly possible, for instance, for any intelligent person to fail to feel the cumulative passion of "King Lear." The calamities which come upon the old man connect themselves in the mind of the reader so closely with one central idea that it is rather difficult to escape from the dominant idea than difficult to find it. In "Hamlet," on the other hand, it is by no means easy to gain any complete and adequate grasp of the play as a unit without careful and intimate study. It is, moreover, not sure that one has gained a full conception of a work as a whole because one has an impression even so strong as that which must come to any receptive reader of "King Lear" or "Othello." To be profoundly touched by the story is possible without so fully holding the tragedy comprehendingly in the mind that its poignant meaning kindles the whole imagination. We have not assimilated that from which we have received merely fragmentary impressions. The appreciative reading of a really great book is a profound emotional experience. Individual portions and notable passages are at best but as incidents of which the real significance is to be perceived only in the light of the whole.

The power of grasping a work of art as a unit is one which should be deliberately cultivated. It is hardly likely to come unsought, even to the most imaginative. It must rest, in the first place, upon a reading of books as a whole. Whatever in any serious sense is worth reading once is worth rereading indefinitely. It is idle to hope to grasp a thing as a whole until one has become familiar with its parts. When once the details are clear in the mind, it is possible to read with a distinct and deliberate sense of the share that each passage bears in the entire purpose. It is necessary, and I may add that it is enchanting, to reread until the detached points gather themselves together in the inner consciousness as molecules in a solution gather themselves into a crystal. The delight of being able to realize what an author had in mind as a whole is like that of the traveler who at last, after long days of baffling mists which allowed but broken glimpses here and there, sees before him the whole of some noble mountain, stripped clean of clouds, standing sublime between earth and heaven.

Whatever effect a book has must depend largely upon the sympathy between the reader and the author. To read sympathetically is as fundamental a condition of good reading as is to read intelligently. It is well known how impossible it is to talk with a person who is unresponsive, who will not yield his own mood, and who does not share another's point of view. On the other hand, we have all tried to listen to speakers with whom it was not in our power to find ourselves in accord, and the result was merely unprofitable weariness. For the time being the reader must give himself up to the mood of the writer; he must follow his guidance, and receive not only his words but his suggestions with fullest acquiescence of perception, whatever be the differences of judgment. What Hawthorne has said of painting is equally applicable to literature: —

A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out the painter's art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control and work along with him to such an extent that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating. Like all revelations of the better life, the adequate perception of a great work demands a gifted simplicity of vision. —Marble Faun, xxxvii.

Often it is difficult to find any meaning in what is written unless the reader has entered into the spirit in which it was composed. I seriously doubt, for instance, whether the ordinary person, coming upon the following catch of satyrs, by Ben Jonson, is able to find it much above the level of the melodies of Mother Goose: —

"Buz," quoth the blue fly,
"Hum," quoth the bee;
Buz and hum they cry,
And so do we.
In his ear, in his nose,
Thus, do you see?
He ate the dormouse;
Else it was he.

If you are not able to make much out of this, listen to what Leigh Hunt says of it: —

It is impossible that anything could better express than this, either the wild and practical joking of the satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and even harmony, the intercourse, of the musical words, one with another. None but a boon companion, with a very musical ear, could have written it. —A Jar of Honey.

If the reader has the key to the mood in which this catch is written, if he has given himself up to the sportive spirit in which "rare old Ben" conceived it, it is possible to find in it the merit which Hunt points out; but without thus giving ourselves up to the leadership of the poet it is hardly possible to make of it anything at all. The example is of course somewhat extreme, but the principle is universal.

It is always well in a first reading to give one's self up to the sweep of the work; to go forward without bothering over slight errors or small details. Notes are not for the first or the second perusal so much as for the third and so on to the hundredth. Dr. Johnson is right when he says: —

Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasures that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop to correction or explanation.

One of the great obstacles to the enjoyment of any art is the too conscientious desire to enjoy. We are constantly hindered by the conventional responsibility to experience over each classic the proper emotion. The student is often so occupied in painful struggles to feel that which he has been told to feel that he remains utterly cold and unmoved. It is like going to some historic locality of noble suggestion, where an officious guide moves the visitor from one precious spot to another, saying in effect: "Here such an event happened. Now thrill. Sixpence a thrill, please." For myself, being of a somewhat contumacious character, I have never been able to thrill to order, even if a shilling instead of sixpence were the price of the luxury; and in the same way I am unable to follow out a prescribed set of emotions at the command of a text-book on literature. Perhaps my temperament has made me unjustly skeptical, but I have never been able to have much faith in the genuineness of feelings carried on at the ordering of an emotional programme. The student should let himself go. On the first reading, at least, let what will happen so you are swept along in full enjoyment. It is better to read with delight and misunderstand, than to plod forward in wise stupidity, understanding all and comprehending nothing; gaining the letter and failing utterly to achieve the spirit. The letter may be attended to at any time; make sure first of the spirit. I do not mean that one is to read carelessly; but I do mean that one is to read enthusiastically, joyously, and, if it be possible, even passionately.

The best test of the completeness with which one has entered into the heart of a book is just this keenness of enjoyment. Fully to share the mood of the author is to share something of the delight of creation. It is as if in the mind of the reader this work of beauty and of immortal significance was springing into being. This enjoyment, moreover, increases with familiarity. If you find that you do not care to take up again a masterpiece because you have read it once, you may pretty safely conclude that you have never truly read it at all. You have been over it, it may be, and gratified some superficial curiosity; but you have never got to its heart. Does one claim to be won to the heart of a friend and yet to be willing never to see that friend more?

One may, of course, outgrow even a masterpiece. There are authors who are genuine so far as they go, who may be enjoyed at one stage of growth, yet who as the student advances become insufficient and unattractive. The man who does not outgrow is not growing. One does not healthily tire of a real book, however, until he has become greater than that book. The interest which becomes weary of a masterpiece is more than half curiosity, and at best is no more than intellectual. It is not imaginative. Margaret Fuller confessed that she tired of everything she read, even of Shakespeare. She thereby unconsciously discovered the quality of mind which prevented her from being a great woman instead of merely a brilliant one. She fed her intellect upon literature; but she failed because literature does not reach to its highest function unless its appeal to the intellect is the means of touching and arousing the imagination; because the end of all art is not the mind but the emotions.

It may seem that enough has already been required to make reading the most serious of undertakings; yet there is still one requirement more which is of the utmost importance. He is unworthy to share the delights of great work who is not able to respect it; he has no right to meddle with the best of literature who is not prepared to approach it with some reverence. In the greatest books the master minds of the race have graciously bidden their fellows into their high company. The honor should be treated according to its worth. Irreverence is the deformity of a diseased mind. The man who cannot revere what is noble is innately degraded. When writers of genius have given us their best thoughts, their deepest imaginings, their noblest emotions, it is for us to receive them with bared heads. He is greatly to be pitied who, in reading high imaginative work, has never been conscious of a sense of being in a fine and noble presence, of having been admitted into a place which should not be profaned. Only that soul is great which can appreciate greatness. Remember that there is no surer measure of what you are than the extent to which you are able to rise to the heights of supreme books; the extent to which you are able to comprehend, to delight in, and to revere, the masterpieces of literature.

VII

THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE

Whatever intelligence man imparts to man, at least all beyond the crudest rudimentary beginnings, must be conveyed by conventions. There must have been an agreement, tacit or explicit, that a certain sign shall stand for a certain idea; and when that idea is to be expressed, this sign must be used. In order that the meaning of any communication may be understood, it is essential that the means of expression be appreciated by hearer as well as by speaker. We have agreed that in English a given sound shall represent a given idea; and to one who knows this tongue the specified sound, either spoken or suggested by letters, calls that idea up. To one unacquainted with English, the sound is meaningless, because he is not a party to the agreement which has fixed for it a conventional significance; or it may awake in his thought an idea entirely different, because he belongs to a nation where tacit agreement has fixed upon another meaning. The word "dot," for instance, has by English-speaking folk been appropriated to the notion of a trifling point or mark; while those who speak French, writing and pronouncing the word in the same way, take it to indicate a dowry. In order to communicate with any man, it is necessary to know what is the set of conventions with which he is accustomed to convey and to receive ideas.

The principle holds also in art. There is a conventional language in sound or color or form as there is in words. It is broader as a rule, because oftener founded upon general human characteristics, because more directly and obviously borrowed from nature, and because not so warped and distorted by those concessions to utility which have modified the common tongues of men. Indeed, it might at first thought seem that the language of art is universal, but a little reflection will show that this is not the case. The sculpture of the Aztecs, for instance, is in an art language utterly different from that of the sculpture of the Greeks. If you recall the elaborately intricate uncouthness of the gods of old Yucatan, you will easily appreciate that the artists who shaped these did not employ the same artistic conventions as did the sculptors who breathed life into the Venus of Melos, or who embodied divine serenity and beauty in the Elgin marbles. To the Greeks those twisted and thick-lipped Aztec deities, clutching one another by their crests of plumes, or grasping rudely at one another's arms, would have conveyed no sentiment of beauty or of reverence; while it is equally to be supposed that the Aztec would have remained hardly moved before the wonders of Greek sculpture. The Hellenic art conventions, it is true, were more directly founded upon nature, and therefore more readily understood; but even this would not have overcome the fact that one nation had one art language and the other another. Those of you who were at the Columbian Exposition will remember how the music in the Midway Plaisance illustrated this same point. The weird strain of one or another savage or barbaric folk came to the ear with a strangeness which showed how ignorant we are of the language of the music of these dwellers in far lands. To us it was bizarre or moving, but we could form little idea how it struck the hearers to whom it was native and familiar. It was even all but impossible to know whether a given strain was felt by the savage performers to be grave or gay. Of all the varieties of sound which there surprised the ear, that evolved by the Chinese appeared most harsh and unmelodious. The almond-eyed Celestial seemed to delight in a concatenation of crash and caterwauling, mingled in one infernal cacophony at which the nerves tingled and the hair stood on end. Yet it is on record that when in the early days of European intercourse with China, the French missionary Amiot played airs by Rossini and Boieldieu to a Chinese mandarin of intelligence and of cultivation according to eastern standards, the Oriental shook his head disapprovingly. He politely expressed his thanks for the entertainment, but when pressed to give an opinion of the music he was forced to reply: "It is sadly devoid of meaning and expression, while Chinese music penetrates the soul." After we have smiled at the absurdity, from our point of view, of the penetration of the soul by Chinese music, we reflect that after all our music is probably as absurd to them as theirs to us. We perhaps recall the fact that even the cultivated Japanese, with their sensitive feeling for art, and their readiness to adopt occidental customs, complain of the effect of dividing music into regular bars, and making it, as they say, "chip-chop, chip-chop, chip-chop." The fact is that every civilization makes its art language as it makes its word language; and he who would understand the message must understand the conventions by which it is expressed.

We are apt to forget this fact of the conventionality of all language. We become so accustomed both to the speech of ordinary intercourse and to that of familiar art, that we inevitably come to regard them as natural and almost universal. No language, however, is natural, unless it be fair to apply that word to the most primitive signs of savages. It is an arbitrary thing, and as such it must be learned. We acquire the ordinary tongue of our race almost unconsciously, and while we are too young to reason about it. We gain the language of art later and more deliberately, although of course we may owe much to our early surroundings in this as in every other respect. The point to be kept in mind is that we do learn it; that it is not the gift of nature. This is of course true of all art; but here our concern is only with the fact that literature has as truly its own peculiar language as music or painting or sculpture, – its language, that is, distinct from the language of ordinary daily or common speech.

The conventions which serve efficiently to convey ordinary ideas and matter-of-fact statements, are not sufficient for the expression of emotions. The man who has to tell the price of pigs and potatoes, the amount of coal consumed in a locomotive engine, or the effect of political complications upon the stock-market, is able to serve himself sufficiently well with ordinary language. The novelist who has to tell of the bewitchingly willful worldliness of Beatrix Esmond, of the fateful and tragic experiences of Donatello and Miriam, the splendidly real impossibilities of the career of D'Artagnan and his three friends, the passion of Richard Feverel for Lucy, of Kmita for Olenka, of Marius for Cosette; the dramatist who endeavors to make his readers share the emotions of Lear and Cordelia, of Caliban and Desdemona, of Viola and Juliet; the poet who would picture the emotions of Pompilia, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Porphyrio and Madeline, of Prometheus and Asia, – all these require an especial language.

The conveying from mind to mind of emotion is a delicate task. It is not difficult to make a man understand the price of oysters, but endeavor to share with a fellow-being the secrets of a moment of transcendent feeling, and you have an undertaking so complex, and so all but impossible, that if you can perfectly succeed in it you may justly call yourself the first writer of your age. This is the making of the intangible tangible; the highest creative act of the imagination. The cleverness and the skill of man have been exhausted in devising means to impart to readers the thought and feeling, the passion and emotion, which sway the hearts of mankind. It is not necessary here to go into those devices which belong especially to the domain of rhetoric, – the mechanics of style. They are designated in the old-fashioned text-books by tongue-twisting Greek names which most of us have learned, and which all of us have forgotten. It is not with them that I am here concerned. They are meant to affect the reader unconsciously. It is with those matters which appeal to the conscious understanding that we have now to do; the conventions which are the language of literature as Latin was the language of Cæsar or Greek the tongue of Pericles.

I have spoken already of the necessity of understanding what is said in literature; this is, however, by no means the whole of the matter. It is of even greater importance to be clearly aware of what is implied. We test the imaginative quality of what is written by its power of suggestion. The writer who has imagination will have so much to say that he is forced to make a phrase call up a whole train of thought, a word bring vividly to the mind of the reader a picture or a history. This is what critics mean when they speak of the marvelous condensation of Shakespeare; and in either prose or verse the criterion of imaginative writing is whether it is suggestive. Imagination is the realizing faculty. It is the power of receiving as true the ideal. It is the accepting as actual that which is conjured up by the inner vision; the making vital, palpitant, and present that which is known to be materially but a dream. That which is written when the poet sees the unseen palpably before his inner eye is so filled with the vitality and actuality of his vision that it fills the mind of the reader as a tenth wave floods and overflows a hollow in the rocks of the shore. When Keats says of the song of the nightingale that it is

The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,