Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

us more for a time; a great people may declare, "Deutschland ist Hamlet," and then lay the lesson to heart and change its ways, as in verity we have seen it do. But for him whose main occupation is literary study there are two dangers in this subjective attitude, by defect and by excess. One is of sentimentalism and superficiality. How can a man of active mind be content with the purely passive part of absorption and appreciation? As a rule he will not be, his main interest will cease to be study, and he will earn his keep by going in for social betterment, administration, popular writing-all of them most salutary things. But his teaching may suffer; there is immense stimulus to good students, even young ones, in the suggestion of new truth to be found. The other danger is over-sublety. Not content with mere sensation, he will analyze his sensations, and teach his students to pore over theirs. The real pulling of literature to pieces is not the minute and accurate study of the meaning of the text, it is the cross-examination of our impressions. The fragile thing is not the text, it is our reaction to it. The investigator of esthetics as a branch of philosophy may have to analyze the flower of poetic pleasure into psychological gases and salts; but it is too bad when we cannot enter the stately mansion builded for our souls without finding it haunted by such ghosts as romanticism, classicism, realism, prose rhythm. I am afraid some timorous folk will camp out for good and all with the daily paper. It is as bad as Carlyle's picture of the aging Coleridge shambling about his garden at Highgate maundering about "summject" and "ommject." I have heard a prominent scholar and teacher avow the pious opinion that we should utterly abolish the words romanticism and the rest. We cannot; they are necessary timesaving categories, and harmless if we realize that romanticism is neither an entity nor a movement nor a doctrine nor a type, but only a taste, a taste for the strange. But most of such discussions give us no new truth or light, are mere questions of definition. Such and such a work is

romantic, romanticism is thus or so related to realism, if you define romanticism so or thus; and not, if you do not. As isms they don't exist, and never did.

I have been generalizing a good deal. He who believes there is divinity in fact never generalizes without compunction; but facts are not spread abroad without the wind which bloweth where it listeth. The generalizations which I have made and shall make are submitted in the spirit of the Frenchman, plainly a reincarnation of Epimenides the Cretan, who said, "No generalization is altogether true; not even this one."

II

The aspect of literature which I wish particularly to speak of is the historical aspect. I do not mean the history of literature, I mean the literature of history, literature as a part of history. We are apt to assume something absolute and fixed in the divisions of human knowledge as set out in the announcements of schools and colleges; but the practical and pedagogical are not the true facts, they are merely founded on them. There exists only knowledge of the world of nature and the world of man. With the world of man there is only the knowledge of what man is and of what he has done, and each teaches us about the other. The whole of knowledge of what man has done is history, and it is only for convenience that we relinquish the word to those who tell us of events in Europe and America (with a few courses on Mesopotamia and Japan). A good part of philosophy is a record of what man has done in the realm of thought; so is a good part of economics; and so is literature. Literary history is one of the most important chapters in the history of the human mind.

There is no lack of literary pleasure to be gained through studying literature in this spirit, to say nothing of purely intellectual pleasure. Astronomers tell us that more is to be seen by indirect than by direct vision; gaze a little to one side of the Pleiades, and you will see more

luminous points than if you look straight at them. In the crowd you may see more of human interest by not letting your eyes follow the spot-light. As you pursue your fact or your interpretation, even if pleasure is a by-product, you will have moments now and again like Saul, who went seeking his father's beasts and found a kingdom. You will have all the charm of finding the human and the beautiful when you are not expecting them. Do you suppose the goldsmith has not his moments of exultation over his gems, as he labors with fire and hammer and file over their settings?

Looked at thus, the works and questions most insignificant to a surface glance become full of interest. Some medieval allegory, some Greek novel, some obscure Elizabethan drama-when were they written, where did the author get his ideas, what was in his mind as he constructed and wrote them? To the student with historical imagination these are not dry disorganized matters; not merely because any problem gets warmth and life when it becomes your problem, but because such things bring you toward an intimacy with a human being long dead. That is it: not to know a string of facts about the past, but through the historical imagination to form a personal and almost emotional relation with it; not so much to say, "What should I have done if it had been I?" for you would not have been you in his day, as to put yourself in his place, his place being encompassed by all the social and intellectual conditions of his time.

But there is much more than this. If we come to as close quarters as we can with a number of elect souls in the past and by the sympathy of the imagination leap to meet advances from them, and take some pains to understand what in the past seems only queer, we learn what it really means to say that literature is one chapter in intellectual history. We have to enlarge our conception of literature. It is no longer the poetry, fiction and essays that in some mystic way (with the help of the publishers)

have got labeled "classic;" it is not only what has high imagination and beauty; it is any writing which is good of its kind, unless it is so technical that none but a highly trained person can read it. This is the conception at the basis of that monumental and illuminating work, The Cambridge History of English Literature. If we include Carlyle's Frederick the Great and Gibbon's Roman Empire in European literature, how can we exclude Darwin's Origin of Species, St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, Gerald de Barri's Topography of Ireland? Are not these far more interesting to any active and liberal-minded person than much imaginative work which anyone would call literature? They are sincere, as Lord Beaconsfield's and Lyly's novels, Young's and Carew's poetry, are not. One thing this historical view of literature enforces on us is that nothing keeps its vitality but sincerity; and that anything which another well-endowed human being has cared enough about to toil over is interesting, is at least interesting enough to be worth grasping in the large. There is no such thing as the queer; it simply means what we have failed to understand. We ought to be ashamed of not understanding. However harsh and dry the cinders which form the mould, they bear the form of humanity, however distorted; like the pumice from Pompeii, full of ghastly cavities, to be seen in the museums of Naples and Berlin. Yet for the omnivorous historical student even the cheap imitative and insincere things have value if they indicate the popular vogue of a device or type; its popularity gives us further insight into the spiritual quality of that age. The amorous allegories of the fifteenth century, wearying to the soul, make us feel how thoroughly the world then still believed that the essential realities are spiritual, that what we see is the accidents and that the substance lies behind; precisely when this world was the center of the material universe, the other world was the center of men's thoughts. The stories of Messrs. J. B. McCutcheon and Harold Magrath will tell our descendants how much those

quaint credulous old souls who lived in the early twentieth century admired breezy efficient young amateurs of both sexes who were equal to an emergency, political or military. Spirituality and efficiency, are those far from being the ideals of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries? What, by the way, will be that of the twenty-fifth-spirituality again, or deficiency?

The historical attitude toward literature takes us farther and farther from the "English classics" notion. One fact about literature the historical student cannot overlook, and that is how arbitrary and even meaningless is that word classic, how fluctuating have been literary reputations, how small the absolute and how great the relative have been in forming them. I am not referring to the appreciation which comes after the death of a man who is ahead of his age, as with Edward Fitzgerald and more recently Samuel Butler. I mean that no great poet of the world has been read and supremely admired from his day to the present (save Virgil alone). In the Middle Ages no one cared enough about Homer to learn to read him; Dante was substantially ignored in England from Chaucer to Coleridge; Voltaire's sneers and faint praise for him and Shakespeare are only symptomatic. Shakespearolatry reached its maximum in that blessed Victorian epoch, with the assumption that Shakespeare was always an oracle which could say no wrong. Signs are not wanting on both sides the Atlantic that a more judicious spirit will prevail; that we shall see him as human and therefore fallible, as a man of his age and therefore conditioned by his age, as often purely practical in his aims and therefore sometimes even-careless. If this means that Shakespeare's glory will seen to some a little dimmed, we must face the fact. We shall love and revere him the more for learning that he was a man of like passions with us. The truly great do not relish undiscriminating admiration. The father values more the appreciation of his grown son than the awe of the child. "Truth is the highest thing that men may keep."

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »