THE APPRECIATION 
 OF LITERATURE
 
 f 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN OIEGO

 
 THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE
 
 W 
 - 
 H 
 
 < 
 W 
 
 H
 
 THE APPRECIATION 
 OF LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 
 
 tuthor of " Heart of Man," " Poems," 
 "The Torch, "etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
 1909
 
 Copyright, 1907, by 
 THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
 
 Publubed, September, 1907 
 Reprinted, October, 1909 
 
 The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U. A.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. FIRST PRINCIPLES 1 
 
 II. LYRICAL POETRY 28 
 
 III. NARRATIVE POETRY 54 
 
 IV. DRAMATIC POETRY 80 
 
 V. FICTION 108 
 
 VI. OTHER PROSE FORMS .... 147 
 VII. PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Greek Theater at Taormina . Frontispiece 
 
 PACING PAGE 
 
 Keats 28 
 
 Byron 54 
 
 Milton .......... 62 
 
 Globe Theater . . . . ... 80 
 
 Goldsmith . . ... ... . 108 
 
 Lamb . . . . . 147 
 
 Athens Restored .
 
 THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 FIRST PRINCIPLES 
 
 LITERATURE is an art of expression. 
 The material which it employs is ex- 
 perience; or, in other words, literature is the 
 expression of life. Action, emotion and thought 
 are the three great divisions of life, and con- 
 stitute experience. Literature undertakes to 
 represent such experience through the medium 
 of language, and to bring it home to the under- 
 standing 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 under- 
 stood. The reader's own experience is the key 
 to literature. It may be direct experience, 
 events and passions personal to himself; or it 
 
 1
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 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 com- 
 mon human nature and on the share of it 
 which the reader has already realized in his own 
 life and self-consciousness. It is by sympathy 
 and imagination 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 in- 
 dividual 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 enlightenment which litera- 
 ture 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 sym- 
 pathetic 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 
 
 2
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 sensi- 
 bility, 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 essen- 
 tial constituents of literary genius. The appro- 
 priation 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 how- 
 ever 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 im-
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 parting 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
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 inter- 
 ests, 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 
 
 5
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 this the special traits of his age and country, 
 which he also has in common with his fellows; 
 and besides he possesses peculiarities of charac- 
 ter 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 ex- 
 perience most purely in the Shakespearian or 
 Scriptural type. The appreciation of literature 
 in this type is most ready, in the greatest num- 
 ber of cases, because a certain preparation in 
 history or biography is necessary to the com- 
 prehension 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 life is one of the final and 
 persistent impressions made upon the reader 
 
 6
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 lyric poetry of all lands a ritual already written 
 and established. Action, likewise, whose poetic 
 form is epic and dramatic poetry, has a litera- 
 ture of war and passion that passes current 
 everywhere; and thought, the third great form 
 of experience, which is set forth in philosophy 
 or science, sums 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 re- 
 stricted, that there results this easy communi- 
 cation 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 
 
 7
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 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 espe- 
 cially regarded as its works of high genius in 
 creative imagination. The material is still ex- 
 perience, and the expression sought is still the 
 expression of life, but it is experience trans- 
 formed 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 inter- 
 vention 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 litera- 
 
 8
 
 First Principles 
 
 ture, because there would have been no inter- 
 vention 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 construc- 
 tion 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 employment 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 
 
 9
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 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 suffi- 
 ciently to illustrate the use of art made by litera- 
 ture, which is to clarify the experience which 
 is its material; thus plot rationalizes events 
 under the law of cause and effect, and type 
 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 
 aesthetic 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 found be something plucked from the 
 chaos of nature and revealed as an inner har- 
 mony of the universe, or be merely the grace 
 flowing from man upon the world and the illu- 
 sion of his limiting intelligence. The presence of 
 
 10
 
 First Principles 
 
 this order in art is plain ; and also the principle 
 of clarification, of simplification, of economy 
 in the interest of an intelligible and compre- 
 hensive 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 is the 
 simple fact of its presence as the mode by which 
 literature deals with experience in order to draw 
 from life its use and meaning for men. The 
 conclusion is that literature represents life in 
 certain formal ways; a degree of formalism is 
 indeed inseparable from literature, as from all 
 the other arts, and some acquaintance with its 
 traditionary forms is indispensable to the appre- 
 ciation of its contents, while, besides, the pleasure 
 of the forms themselves is a part of its real 
 value. The importance of the formal side of 
 literature is not lessened by the fact that the 
 perception of form and delight in it are not 
 English traits in a high degree; in this respect 
 the southern nations excel the northern peoples 
 by far; it is probable, indeed, that for the Eng- 
 lish generally, in approaching their literature, 
 there is a sense of artificiality in the mere form 
 of verse greater than they feel in the case of a 
 
 11
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 picture or a statue. The external form, which 
 is generally described as technique, is really 
 no more artificial than the internal form, which 
 consists in the development of the theme in- 
 dependently of its melodic investiture; neither 
 is truly artificial, but both belong under artistic 
 formalism, which is the method whereby great 
 imaginative literature takes body and acquires 
 its intense and enduring life. 
 
 In correspondence with the three kinds of 
 experience, personal, national and universal, 
 each recreated in artistic form, there are three 
 modes of critical approach to literature in order 
 to interpret and understand its contents. The 
 first and simplest is the purely aesthetic, and is 
 especially applicable to universal literature; it 
 looks only at the work, which is freed from 
 conditions of time and place and origin, analyzes 
 its qualities, compares it with others, 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 same- 
 ness in the soul, as interpreted by art, which 
 
 12
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 in- 
 fluence. The third mode, which is more 
 proper to the personal element, is the psycho- 
 logical; it looks at the personality of the writer 
 and seeks to interpret his work as the result 
 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 em- 
 ploy 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 
 
 13
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 imperishable aesthetic 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 archa?ology, or any 
 other subsidiary aid; but the characteristic value 
 of any literary work, that which makes it litera- 
 ture, is independent 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 what- 
 ever mode implies study, an acquired knowledge 
 of biography or history or of artistic forms. 
 The direct aim of all art, however, is to please, 
 and to please immediately; study may be a part 
 of the necessary preparation for appreciation, 
 but it does not enter into the appreciation itself. 
 It is useful to recognize at once the fact that 
 literature is not an object of study, but a mode 
 of pleasure; it is not a thing to be known merely 
 like science, but to be lived. If a book does 
 not yield immediate pleasure to the reader, as 
 direct and intimate as sensation or emotion, 
 it fails with that particular person to discharge 
 the proper function of literature. The typical 
 
 14
 
 First Principles 
 
 example of the operation of literature is found 
 in the company of warriors listening to the old 
 minstrel who relates the heroic deeds and tragic 
 histories that make up the tradition of the 
 tribe, or in the groups in the mediaeval market- 
 place who hung on the lips of the traveler telling 
 tales, the poet chanting lays, or the players 
 representing in rude scenes the comedy of 
 human life. This is not to say that the hearer 
 is without some preparation, but not that of 
 study. Even the simplest books, such as those 
 about nature, require that there should have 
 been in the reader some previous life, some 
 training of the eye, some curiosity about birds 
 and beasts and the treasure-trove of the sea- 
 beach. The having lived is the essential con- 
 dition of any appreciation; or, in other words, 
 the appeal to experience, lies back of all literary 
 pleasure. The more direct this is, the better; 
 and literature rises in the scale of value in pro- 
 portion 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 
 
 15
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 nature is employed as the channel of high 
 passion, as the symbol of philosophic truth, or 
 even as the harmonious and enhancing environ- 
 ment 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 con- 
 scious preparation to understand, begins when 
 the difficulty of appreciation becomes insur- 
 mountable 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 dif- 
 ferent 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. 
 
 16
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 in- 
 structed imagination to realize the world of a 
 mediaeval saint or of a Greek sophist or of a 
 Jewish enthusiast of the age of the prophets. 
 If one attempts to reconstruct the physical 
 aspect of such a man's thought of the heavens 
 and the earth, and then adds, as best he can, 
 the intellectual and moral contents of such a 
 mind and heart, he seems moving in a world of 
 mistake and ignorance so different from our own 
 as to seem a mad world. It is curious how often 
 the past world of our own blood, its scheme of 
 knowledge and scope of meditation and passion, 
 take on this form of apparent madness in the 
 eyes of a modern reader who stops to think. 
 Still more, if one attempts to reconstruct the 
 world of the Arab, the Hindoo, the Chinese, the 
 task grows hopeless; looking into the faces of 
 the orientals, eye to eye, is a blanker thing than 
 gazing at the Sphinx; the mystery of personality 
 seems unfathomable in men by whom funda- 
 
 17
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 mental ideas are so differently held and conceived 
 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 that of acquiring the 
 language; at first it seems easy, but with progress 
 it becomes hard; and it is the same, but in an 
 infinitely greater degree, with the task of acquir- 
 ing an Italian or an Arab or a Hindoo soul. 
 The defect of experience in our case allows the 
 imagination to work only imperfectly in con- 
 structing, and the sympathies to flow inade- 
 quately in interpreting, the scenes, passions 
 and moods of other lands and peoples; and 
 literature loses its power in proportion as its 
 necessary appeal to ourselves diminishes. We 
 read Greek books, but not as the Greeks read 
 them; and one of the strange qualities of im- 
 mortal 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 
 
 18
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 appre- 
 ciation, 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 ap- 
 preciation, 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 understand- 
 ing and appropriating unfamiliar experience, 
 so some study of artistic forms of expression 
 assists him in appreciating literature, partic- 
 ularly in its higher and more refined phases. 
 
 19
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 In poetry, especially, a uiodest acquaintance 
 with the melodic modes of languages is indis- 
 pensable; 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, of the different varieties of meter 
 and their combinations, of the technique of 
 verse as taught in books that is necessary; such 
 study is, for the most part, wearisome and 
 fruitless. The essential thing is to be able to 
 read verse, and to read it intelligently so that 
 it declares itself to be verse and not prose by 
 the mere fall of the syllables. It is extraor- 
 dinary how rare this power has become. It is 
 true that in older modes of education, such as 
 the Greek, the melodic modes of the language 
 were defined and held by the concurrence of 
 the instrument and the dance with the choral 
 movement of the words; but verse, even when 
 not so sustained, has a clear movement of its 
 own. The ear should be trained by the oral 
 repetition of verse, if it is to be true; but this is 
 seldom done in any effective way. It is not only 
 the keen sense of the melody of verse which 
 has been lost; the significance of the line and the 
 phrase as units of composition is also seldom 
 
 20
 
 First Principles 
 
 known. It is not possible to appreciate verse 
 unless it is correctly read, nor to realize its 
 beauty without some sense of its structure, that 
 is, of the unitary value of phrase, line, and 
 stanza, and of the mode of their combination to 
 build up the whole into one poem. To per- 
 ceive melodic time in verse with its subtle 
 modulation of cadence and rhythm, and to be 
 aware of the interlacing and close junction of 
 phrase and line in which much of the grace and 
 felicity of poetry resides, are labors neither 
 difficult nor long; a little intelligent attention 
 suffices to acquire this power and with it the 
 formal pleasure of literature begins. The way 
 once entered on may lead so far as to the appre- 
 ciation of a Greek ode or even to pleasure in the 
 intricacies of a Persian song. It is not, how- 
 ever, necessary to go to such lengths. The 
 forms of poetry have their effect, like the forms 
 of other arts, without elaborate study or de- 
 veloped 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 democratic" by itself; and the forms of 
 poetry are similarly grounded upon nature, and 
 its music plays upon the heart and mind of men
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 by a necessity of their constitution. A scientific 
 and technical knowledge is by no means re- 
 quired of the reader; but an elementary acquaint- 
 ance with melody and structure, such as to allow 
 correct reading and the perception of the har- 
 monious 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 aesthetic, exists to 
 be forgotten and laid off as soon as it is com- 
 pleted; 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. 
 
 22
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 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 understand- 
 ing 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 
 
 23
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 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 
 laying the foundation for that principle of con- 
 vention which is fundamental in art and in- 
 dispensable 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 litera- 
 ture 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 pro- 
 ceeding in knowledge from the better-known 
 to less well-known, and because there is the 
 
 24
 
 First Principles 
 
 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 advan- 
 tage for broadening the mind of being a pagan 
 literature and yet closely kindred to our own, 
 presenting human experience under very dif- 
 ferent 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. It is advisable, also, in these early 
 choices and initial steps to consider the season 
 of the reader, to begin with books in which 
 action has a large share and postpone those in 
 which thought is dominant, to favor those of 
 simple rather than of refined emotion, to keep 
 in all things near to the time of life and to that 
 experience especially which is nascent if not 
 already arrived in the reader. And what is 
 true of the beginner is true for every later 
 period. It is best to be honest with oneself, 
 
 25
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 and to respect one's own tastes and predilections; 
 not to read books because they are classics, if 
 they yield no true pleasure, not to force a tame 
 liking, not to feign to oneself, or in other ways 
 to confuse what it is said one ought to like with 
 what one does like sincerely. It is always to 
 be borne in mind that appreciation is a thing of 
 growth. A great book does not give itself all 
 at once, nor perhaps quickly, but the maxim 
 holds good, slow love is long love. Books 
 naturally fall into three classes: those that are 
 outlived, because the experience they contain 
 and address is shallow or transitory; those that 
 are arrived at late because the experience in- 
 volved is mature; and those, the greatest, which 
 give something to the youngest and have some- 
 thing left to give to the oldest, which keep pace 
 with life itself and like life disclose themselves 
 more profoundly, intimately and in expanding 
 values with familiarity. The secret of appre- 
 ciation is to share the passion for life that litera- 
 ture itself exemplifies and contains; out of real 
 experience, the best that one can have, to 
 possess oneself of that imaginary experience 
 which is the stuff of larger life and the place 
 of the ideal expansion of the soul, the gateway 
 
 26
 
 First Principles 
 
 to which is art in all forms and primarily litera- 
 ture; to avail oneself of that for pleasure and 
 wisdom and fulness of life. It is those minds 
 which are thus experienced that alone come to 
 be on the level of the greatest works and to 
 absorb their life; but the way is by a gradual 
 ascent, by natural growth, by maintaining a 
 vital relation with what is read. So long as 
 the bond between author and reader is a living 
 bond, appreciation is secure.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 LYRICAL POETRY 
 
 THE lyric is primarily the expression of 
 emotion. In the beginning emotion was 
 expressed by inarticulate cries, of which the 
 developed artistic form in civilization is pure 
 music. It was originally accompanied by the 
 dance, and the literary element appears to have 
 entered first as a short chanted phrase in mo- 
 notonous repetition. In the evolution of civil- 
 ization these several elements have given rise 
 to different arts, and the lyric now stands by 
 itself as the expression of emotion by words, 
 apart from the dance or music in the strict sense. 
 It remains true, however, that the substance of 
 the lyric, the essential experience which it con- 
 tains, is the emotion, and not the image set 
 forth in words which indeed exists only to sug- 
 gest or discharge the emotion. This is a funda- 
 mental consideration. The emotion is seen 
 throbbing as it were in the image, as you may 
 
 28
 
 KEATS
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 see a bird's throat throb with its song; what you 
 see is the outward color and movement; what 
 you hear is the song, that emotion which in itself 
 is imageless, a thing felt, not beheld. The sub- 
 stance of meaning in the poem is the emotion 
 roused by the suggestion of the image; and 
 however personal the lyric may be, it is univer- 
 salized and made good for all men by the emo- 
 tion which is the same in human nature. Lyrics, 
 strictly speaking, are symbols of universal emo- 
 tion which is conveyed or roused by the imagery. 
 Emotion is constant in life. It is a thing of 
 unrest; it rises, grows, and passes away; but it 
 comes again and again. Life is full of these 
 vague waves; and perhaps one reason why lyric 
 poetry holds so leading a place in literature, and 
 is the quickest and surest appeal of the poets, 
 is because it furnishes definite form, in these 
 symbols of universal emotion, for the concen- 
 tration and expression, under the intellectual 
 form of an image, of that vague feeling that 
 finds its emotional form most surely in music. 
 The lyric defines and releases this vague emotion 
 which is forever arising in experience; this is 
 its function, its ground of being in art, its use 
 to the world. It gives feeling a career in life, 
 
 29
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 and finds for it temporary assuagement and 
 repose. It belongs to the universality of emo- 
 tion that the imagery of lyric poetry has such 
 elements of permanence. It is sometimes made 
 a reproach to poets that they use this ancient 
 and conventional imagery; but the nightingale 
 and the rose, the serenade, the enclosed garden, 
 the Eden-isle are images and situations charged 
 with the associations of long use; they are, in 
 fact, a ritual of love-service, and possess a 
 ceremonial beauty and solemnity ; they are parts 
 of ancient poetic worship. They are like a fixed 
 musical scale on which the emotion, which is 
 the imageless burden of song, rises and falls. 
 
 If the reader be somewhat mature and accus- 
 tomed to poetry, the best general view of the 
 nature and the use of lyric verse, its range and 
 power, is to be found in the Greek Anthology 
 which is open for English readers most profitably 
 in MacKail's volume of selections and there 
 accompanied by a remarkable essay, interpreting 
 the verse and bringing it home as the music of 
 Greek life and of the universal heart at one and 
 the same time. To be familiar with the Greek 
 AntJwlogy is to know well-nigh the whole com- 
 pass of human emotion with regard to earthly 
 
 30
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 things in forms of expression unrivaled for 
 clarity, grace, beauty, and for the wisdom of life. 
 This book is the great monument of the lyric, 
 and stands sole and apart. But to appreciate 
 a work so foreign to our contemporary culture 
 requires a high degree of cultivation; on the 
 principles already laid down, the beginning of 
 appreciation of lyric verse is rather to be made 
 in one's own language and in poets nigh to our 
 own times. Palgrave's Golden Treasury is still 
 the book preferred as a collection of English 
 lyrics ; but even in that, indispensable as it is to 
 the daily lover of English verse, the beginner 
 is forced to pick and choose and to reject. 
 It is best to begin with Scott's lyrics of gallant 
 romance with their warmth of color and out- 
 of-door freshness, or war lyrics like Campbell's 
 with their quick flash, their humble and plain 
 pathos, and the thunderous sound of battle 
 gone into the verse; or, perhaps best of all with 
 Burns, because there are so many of his poems, 
 and the spirit of the lyric is there the master 
 of many revels. Burns has the advantage for 
 beginners, who find it hard to free their minds 
 from the suspicion of effeminacy in poetry, of 
 always making a profoundly masculine impres- 
 
 31
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 sion. Like Scott and Byron he is distinctly a 
 man's poet, and he is more accessible, more 
 various and especially more intimate than they 
 are in the appeal he makes to the nascent 
 passion, thoughts and affections of life; and 
 the experience he brings, though set to melody 
 and rhymes, is untransformed and genuine, and 
 keeps near to earth, to things common and 
 obvious, and to the comrade side of life both 
 for wisdom and abandon. Wordsworth is in 
 important ways a companion spirit to Burns, 
 and Coleridge on certain sides neighbors Scott, 
 though with profound differences. Keats and 
 Shelley each require a certain likeness of tem- 
 perament in the reader, while Byron makes a 
 less subtle appeal. The personal, national and 
 universal elements in these poets are easily 
 discriminated, and their works may readily be 
 related, by the reader who is intent on study 
 and a knowledge of the historic course of litera- 
 ture, to the democratic movement of the time, 
 to the ballad revival and the Hellenic renascence, 
 to the Revolution, and in general to all the 
 literary and social phenomena of that age of 
 romanticism. But this belongs to the history of 
 literature and is a secondary matter. It may 
 
 32
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 be accepted without hesitation that a reader 
 who has familiarized himself with and truly 
 appropriated this group of poets is well pre- 
 pared to appreciate lyric poetry in any field. 
 
 How to read the poets is, nevertheless, an 
 art to be learned, and into it much tact enters if 
 there be not in the reader a native and self -dis- 
 covered susceptibility to literary pleasure. In 
 the initial steps the end should be to make this 
 discovery, to experiment with various authors 
 in search of those to whose books the tempera- 
 ment and experience of the reader respond with 
 spontaneity. There should consequently be 
 great latitude of neglect and a free exercise of it, 
 and the field of literature is so large and various 
 that there is no reason to fear any essential loss. 
 All books are not for all minds; it is a question 
 of the right minds finding the right books by a 
 process of natural affinity. In early years there 
 is, however, a counterbalancing truth. A large 
 proportion of patience is also necessary in order 
 that a book may have a fair chance to win a 
 hearing; and in serious study the various phases 
 of interest in an author should be closely re- 
 garded. As in trained observation the eye is 
 taught to see by having its attention directed 
 
 33
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 to many points of the object and acquires 
 modes and habits of seeing, the mind must be 
 led to look in various directions and acquire 
 habits of conduct in reading. Often the young 
 reader does not know what to look for in a book, 
 as he would not know what to look for in a 
 stone or a flower without some geological or 
 botanical hint. It is at this stage that patience 
 is most needed and the habit of expectant and 
 discursive interest. This is the time of experi- 
 ment when the mind is finding itself, and is 
 often surprised into self -disco very by accident. 
 It is thus that the chance encounter with a book 
 has frequently marked the awakening of a life. 
 It is therefore desirable to open the phases of 
 an author fully, and to relate his work in divers 
 ways to the intelligence and sympathy in search 
 of some response, and in general to proceed from 
 the simpler to the more complex and subtle, 
 from reality and action to imagination and 
 passion, and so on to thought and wisdom 
 that are grounded on the experience depicted. 
 Perhaps an example may be useful, given 
 with some degree of detail. Let the case be 
 Burns. A condensed guide for reading his 
 verse would run somewhat as follows. It would 
 
 34
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 be noticed first that he was familiar with ani- 
 mals, cared for them, handled them, and loved 
 them in their degree. He thinks of them 
 realistically as suffering brutes with a prevailing 
 environment of hardship and sympathizes with 
 them as a part of farm life. To a Mouse and 
 A Winter Night are examples. Similarly, To a 
 Mountain Daisy presents flowers under the 
 same aspect of misfortune. In both cases a 
 moral is added, giving a decided human in- 
 terest to the mere natural objects, as if the 
 mind could not rest in them, but finds only 
 man finally interesting to man according to 
 the old Greek maxim. The animal life mixes 
 with man's life actually in The Auld Farmer 
 to his Auld Mare, and needs no moralizing: in 
 The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, 
 the poet takes the animal's point of view. In 
 The Twa Dogs while the dog character is realis- 
 tic the meaning is wholly human; it is a poem 
 of human life. The landscape, nature in its 
 moods, is seen characteristically in broad sweeps 
 and described barely, with no elaboration, and 
 is predominantly sad, wintry, or pathetic. The 
 external life is Adam's world, a world under a 
 curse of pain, toil or fear; it is the primitive rude 
 
 35
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 farm world. Thomson's Winter has this same 
 atmosphere. The landscape, however, is inci- 
 dental and used as a background for human life 
 or for sentiment, from which it takes emotional 
 beauty a beauty reflected from the human feel- 
 ing, joyful or sad as that is happy or troubled; 
 and often the landscape thus seems to give tone to 
 the poem while in fact it is only the halo round 
 the poem. The moods in which the non- 
 human elements in the verse are presented, 
 whether these are animal or inanimate, are 
 pathos, humor, and sentiment, and rarely awe 
 also in passages of pure description. One 
 should note especially the bare detail of fact, 
 well selected, and in treatment the speed and 
 vigor, the quick realization to the eye or heart, 
 the immediacy of the wit, humor, or sense. 
 
 The Cotter's Saturday Night is Burns' most 
 generally acceptable poem. It is said to be 
 impaired as poetry by its Englishry, or literary 
 tradition in style and diction coming from 
 classic English verse. Burns' religious feeling 
 was very deep down under the surface of his 
 days and weeks, and here is shown by his 
 appreciation of the types in which he had 
 respected piety in his parents. Those who 
 
 36
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 censure the poem for its imperfect art are apply- 
 ing academic criticism, of which the mark is 
 that it attends to art more than to substance, 
 to little purpose: they lose that grip on life 
 which keeps such criticism within bounds of 
 good sense; the poem, whatever its faults, is an 
 imperishable monument of that home-feeling, 
 shown also in Goldsmith's Deserted Village and 
 Whittier's Snow-Bound, which is so profound 
 an element in the character as well as the affec- 
 tions of English-speaking people the world 
 over; the Christian home, whether Scotch, Irish 
 or American, is the same substantially, and 
 shines the more the more humble the home; 
 the poem presents this, and remains, as it should 
 be, more domestic than religious. After this 
 The Vision should be read, the scene being the 
 same, and the subject being what was more to 
 Burns than religion, his call to the poet's 
 life. Opposed to these purer scenes of his own 
 home in its noblest associations stand the 
 satiric poems on the church and its congrega- 
 tion. There has never been so exposing and 
 self -justifying satire in English; as a portrayal 
 of manners and as a moral argument they are 
 equally complete. The series includes The 
 
 37
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 Twa Herds, The Holy Fair, The Ordination, 
 Holy Willie's Prayer, The Kirk's Alarm, Ad- 
 dress to the Deil, Address to the Unco' Guid, To 
 the Rev. John M'Maih; and with these should 
 be read the Epistle to a Young Friend, A Bard's 
 Epitaph, Epistle to James Smith, Epistle to 
 Davie, Epistle to J. Lapraik, Second Epistle 
 to J. Lapraik, Epistle to William Simpson, 
 which sufficiently illustrate Burns' personal 
 moods, both as poet and man. The character 
 drawing, the general social scene, the argument, 
 the observation of life and reflection upon it 
 are all easy to take in. These are all pure 
 Scotch pieces and come out of the core of Burns' 
 life. Tarn O'Shanter should be read as narra- 
 tive; but observe its vivid vision, speed and the 
 variety of feelings excited by it as one reads. 
 It is hardly excelled, except that its subject is 
 slighter, by The Jolly Beggars, which is the 
 masterpiece of the pure Scotch poems; notable 
 in this poem is the absence of any moral attitude 
 toward its matter, the shameless unconscious- 
 ness of it, as of the beggars themselves, which 
 must be reckoned an artistic triumph. Observe 
 also its structure, and the union in it of Burns' 
 two great powers the song-power and the 
 
 38
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 manners-drawing power, which give to it the 
 force of all his capacity as a writer, except as a 
 love-poet. The best of the pure Scotch poems, 
 not already mentioned, are Halloween, Scotch 
 Drink, Poor Mailie's Elegy, To a Louse, Epistle 
 to John Rankine, Death and Doctor Hornbook, 
 A Poet's Welcome, Adam Armour's Prayer, 
 Nature's Law, and the Epistles. 
 
 The best songs are those of mingled imagina- 
 tion and passion with a personal touch, such as 
 Highland Mary, Thou lingering star, Of a' the 
 airts, Ae fond kiss, Mary M orison, O wert thou 
 in the could blast, Here's a health; those of the 
 same sort but more impersonal, such as How 
 lang and drearie, The Banks of Doon, A red, 
 red rose, Coming through the rye, Saw ye bonie 
 Lesley, O this is no my ain lassie, My Nanie, O; 
 those of universal appeal (not love-songs), such 
 as John Anderson, Auld Lang Syne, Scots wha 
 hae, Is there for honest poverty; those of a lighter, 
 careless cast, such as O Whistle, I'm o'er young, 
 Duncan Davison, Duncan Gray, Laddie, lie 
 near me, Whistle o'er the lave of it, The Rantin 
 Dog, O May, thy morn, Corn Rigs, Green grow 
 the rashes; those touched (but hardly touched) 
 with romance, such as M'Pherson's Farewell,
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 The Silver Tassie, My heart's in the highlands, 
 It was a {or our right/ u' king; the drinking songs, 
 such as Willie brew'd a peck o' maut, and others 
 of like rollicking or mocking nature. These 
 titles include nearly all the best lyrics, the 
 characteristic and famous ones. Their qualities 
 are too simple to require further remark. Notice 
 the unity of each, its being all of a piece, in one 
 tone of feeling; the atmosphere of landscape or 
 of incident in some; the temperament prevailing 
 in each, pathos, humor, raillery, gallantry, sen- 
 timent, all of a popular and common kind; the 
 music sharing the spirit of each; and the simple 
 directness of speech, just like natural quick 
 prose, only conveying images and feelings as a 
 rule, or if ideas, then ideas that glow with 
 emotion; and especially notice the complete 
 success of each in what it tries to do. 
 
 It is with some such counsel as this, however 
 obtained, that the reader who is beginning 
 acquaintance with English lyric poetry in the 
 group named should be attended; or, if this be 
 lacking, it is by such attention to many sides of 
 his author that he should endeavor to open his 
 eyes and to multiply his points of contact. A 
 connection is to be made between life in the 
 
 40
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 author and life in himself; the points of 
 power in the one and the points of sensitiveness 
 in the other must mutually find each other. It 
 is only then that appreciation begins. 
 
 One of the liveliest pleasures of literary study 
 in its inception is this rapid multiplication of 
 the interest of life; to become aware of the 
 variety of the surface of life, to enter beneath the 
 surfaces, to penetrate them and realize their 
 significance. Among these new interests some 
 special attention should be given to the artistic 
 forms of the expression, to its modes of handling 
 the theme, even so far as to make a slight 
 analysis, if only to bring them more fully into 
 clear consciousness. The forms of art are then 
 seen to be not something arbitrary, but replicas 
 of life itself. The play of emotion in the poet 
 is not something artificial, nor idiosyncratic and 
 peculiar to himself; in him as in others it follows 
 the ordinary process of experience; but by his 
 art he exhibits this play in forms of greater 
 clarity, brilliance and beauty. For the purposes 
 of brief illustration it will be sufficient to refer 
 to well-known lyrics and to confine attention 
 to those in which nature gives the base of the 
 imagery by means of which the emotion is 
 
 41
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 rendered. In Shelley's lines The Recollection 
 there is a clear-cut example of the way in which 
 a natural scene is handled to develop the climax 
 of an emotional moment. In the first move- 
 ment of the poem the landscape fills the entire 
 field of interest as mere description, and is so 
 rendered as to build up an atmosphere of soli- 
 tude, silence and quiet peace with increasing 
 effect, but without human suggestion, until the 
 scene becomes intense and magnetic, and the 
 mood reaches its height: 
 
 "There seemed, from the remotest seat 
 
 Of the white mountain waste 
 To the soft flower beneath our feet, 
 
 A magic circle traced, 
 A spirit interfused around, 
 
 A thrilling, silent life, 
 To momentary peace it bound 
 
 Our mortal nature's strife; 
 And still I felt the center of 
 
 The magic circle there 
 Was one fair form that filled with love 
 
 The lifeless atmosphere." 
 
 The mood arising out of these natural surround- 
 ings has so moved as to concentrate the whole 
 living world on the figure of the lady suddenly 
 disclosed, and to center the emotion of the 
 scene in her presence so that she seems the 
 
 42
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 source of all life that lives there. The climax 
 of the natural scene in the feminine form is com- 
 plete; the scene, in fact, radiates from her. 
 In Shelley's verse of this kind the emotion which 
 rises out of nature often returns to nature to find 
 there its cessation and repose, and the cycle is 
 then complete and parallels normal experience. 
 In the Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples 
 the example is very perfect, and it should be 
 observed how definitely the successive stages 
 of the mood, as it disengages itself from the 
 scene and becomes purely personal and human, 
 are held each within the limits of the stanza, and 
 how the orderly development of the mood as it 
 rises and falls away is accomplished by means of 
 the stanzaic structure. The variations of the 
 artistic process are infinite. In Keats' Ode to a 
 Nightingale the more common order is reversed ; 
 the poem begins with emotion already present 
 and seeks union with nature as an end in itself; 
 the soul, being already in a certain mood, seeks 
 expression by union with the nightingale's song, 
 seeks self-expression there, and when the song 
 ceases the soul returns to itself and awakes 
 from its dream. The contrast with the Stanzas 
 near Naples is complete. Whereas in Shelley's 
 
 43
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 poem nature is real and the emotion is the 
 emerging dream from which the soul awakes 
 returning to nature, in Keats' ode the emotion 
 is real, and nature the dream from which the 
 soul awakes returning to itself. Another in- 
 teresting example, artistically, is Shelley's Indian 
 Serenade. Here the poem has a prelude in the 
 dream world itself from which the lover awakes 
 into a natural world that has all the charac- 
 teristics of a dream, and thence beginning its 
 emotional career, drops the night-scene and 
 nature completely out of sight and lives only in 
 the world of its own passionate desire. 
 
 Such are some of the examples of the nature 
 lyric of the most poetic type. Less unified, 
 but not less interesting, are those forms that 
 employ the method of parallelism instead of 
 evolution and set the natural scene beside the 
 mind's thought, without losing it from view in 
 the intense oblivion of emotion. Wordsw r orth's 
 Lines Written in Early Spring follows this 
 method, and Tennyson's Break, break, break, 
 is perhaps the finest example of it, setting forth 
 the opposition of life continuing in all its activi- 
 ties in antithesis to the fact of death and per- 
 sonal loss. The same method and situation, 
 
 44
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 but with a closer union of the scene with the 
 sense of lost love, are in Burns' Bonnie Doon. 
 Still another variety of the type, and one widely 
 used, is the method of expanding the emotion 
 by a rising enlargement of the imagery, seen 
 in Burns' M y luve's like a red, red rose; the pas- 
 sage from the symbol of the fresh-sprung rose 
 and the simple tune to the vast imagery of the 
 seas, and the earth's destruction, and distance 
 to the world's end, is simply made, and by this 
 speed with its splendid abandon the immensity 
 of the poet's love is rendered. A curious in- 
 stance of mingled parallelism between the natural 
 scene and the emotional mood, with expansion 
 through the imagery, is found in Tennyson's 
 Tears, idle tears; there is in this poem a rever- 
 beration of emotion, as in instrumental music, 
 and this reverberation is really the poem, as 
 may be known by the use of the refrain. The 
 function of the refrain in verse is precisely to 
 secure this reverberation of one chord of the 
 mood continually rising up and dying, and 
 rising again and dying away, so that the emotion 
 rather than any particular image of the emotion 
 shall fill the mind; for such poems, in which, 
 moreover, the mere monotony of repetition 
 
 45
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 deadens and hypnotizes the intellectual con- 
 sciousness, are like music, - - though floating 
 images may attend the emotion they are sub- 
 ordinate to it; emotion, imageless emotion, is the 
 end sought. 
 
 It will be observed that in the larger number 
 of these examples the effect is one of sadness, 
 and it must be acknowledged that sadness pre- 
 vails in the lyric and in the lyrical temperament. 
 Victorious emotion is sometimes the subject; 
 but emotion is more often fruitless, as it is fleet- 
 ing, and the sadness of the lyric mood results 
 largely from the habitual experience in life of 
 such unfulfilled or thwarted emotion, tending 
 to repeat itself. All art requires repose as its 
 end; and the principle of repose is as necessary 
 in the lyric as elsewhere; but it is found usually 
 in the exhaustion rather than the satisfaction 
 of the emotion. On the scale of longer poetry, 
 this repose is obtained by a prophetic touch. 
 Thus in the great case of English elegy, Milton 
 finds repose at the close of his lament for Lycidas 
 in the imaging of the Saints' paradise, and 
 Tennyson in In Memoriam finds it in a pan- 
 theistic faith of the eternity of love in union 
 with the living divine will, and Shelley finds it 
 
 46
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 in Adonais in the hoped-for escape and near 
 flight of his own soul into that world whither 
 Adonais has gone and from which the soul of 
 Keats "beacons" to him like a star out of 
 eternity; or, in a different field, Shelley finds 
 repose for the passion of humanity in that 
 millennium which he invents and sings in the 
 fourth act of Prometheus Unbound. In short 
 lyrics, however, the repose is often a mere 
 katharsis or relief, an exhaustion with peace 
 following on the subsidence of the emotion, and 
 theoretically in a complete lyric this point should 
 be reached. It is reached in Burns' Highland 
 Mary in the thought of her eternal presence in 
 his memory; it is reached in Keats' Nightingale 
 and in Shelley's Naples' poem; on the other 
 hand it is often not reached, as in Shelley's 
 Indian Serenade, where the poem ends on a note 
 of climbing passion, though the picture is of 
 the exhausted and fainting lover. The type of 
 the lyric that finds no repose the type of de- 
 sire in the broad sense, of all desire as such, is in 
 the lines 
 
 "The desire of the moth for the star, 
 Of the night for the morrow 
 The devotion to something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow!" 
 
 47
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 These are the last lines of the poem to which 
 they belong a poem ending on the climbing 
 note. The mystery of human desire has found 
 no purer expression than in these lines. Lyric 
 poetry in general tells the fate of that desire 
 through the wide range of its many forms, brief 
 or extended, the love-song, the elegy, the choral 
 ode, and if sometimes it sings songs of triumph 
 like Miriam and epithalamiums of happy con- 
 summation like Spenser, yet more often its 
 burden is of failure, of the thwarted life and the 
 unfulfilled dream; and even in the grander 
 forms of the drama and the epic, poetry, using 
 the lyrical note and embodying the passion of 
 man, sets forth the same lesson of the resurrec- 
 tion of that which springs eternally futile in the 
 human breast, the double lesson of love's 
 infinite despair and life's infinite hope. 
 
 This deep note of intense lyrical passion will 
 be felt by the reader only in proportion to the 
 richness and profundity of his own life and his 
 capacity to be so moved. Such poetry gives 
 itself, if at all, unsought, by virtue of its inner 
 intimacy with the experience of the reader; 
 appreciation of it is not arrived at by study, 
 though study in the sense of attentive con- 
 
 48
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 templation, of dwelling on the poem, may assist 
 in finer appreciation of it. The larger part of 
 brief verse, however, makes no such demand 
 upon the reader; much of it, and much that is 
 most useful, lies in the realm of the affections, 
 of incident and action. The lyric naturally 
 lends itself to the representation of dramatic 
 moments and to the interpretation of character 
 in vivid ways. It is thus that Browning habitu- 
 ally employs it. The lyric is limited in length 
 according to the intensity of its feeling; the more 
 intense, the more brief. This does not involve 
 denying that a long poem may be essentially 
 lyrical. Passion in life is, at times, a prolonged 
 and varied experience, but in such a case it 
 proceeds by moments of high feeling separated 
 by periods of repose. It is for this reason that 
 such experience is rendered by a succession of 
 lyrics which in their sequence compose a com- 
 plete poem. Tennyson's In Memoriam is thus 
 built up of "swallow-flights of song"; his 
 Maud is similarly constructed; Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets afford another passionate example. It 
 remains true that these poems and others like 
 them make their impression rather by their 
 detail than as a whole, and are remembered and 
 
 49
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 enjoyed by their fragmentary parts, by special 
 passages and units of the series; they are to be 
 read in rather than to be read through, or if 
 perused consecutively they are seldom to be 
 finished at one sitting. Only the hardened 
 scholar can read an Elizabethan sonnet sequence 
 without taking breath, and then with little 
 pleasure. The lyric, however, lengthens natu- 
 rally in the elegy such as Adonais, in the tale such 
 as Marmion, and in a poem of meditation such 
 as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ; and it takes on 
 a high organic form in the dramatic sphere, 
 though with aid from non-lyrical elements, of 
 which the great example in English is Shelley's 
 Prometheus Unbound. It is by familiarity with 
 its brief forms and a thorough appreciation of 
 these that the rather exceptional power of en- 
 joying and appropriating a long lyrical poem 
 is gained. The better way of approach to 
 lyrical poetry is by the use of anthologies, but 
 preferably by anthologies of a single poet than 
 by those which contain selections from many 
 authors. It is seldom useful to read all the 
 works of a poet at the start; the best writings of 
 each have already been sifted out by consent, 
 and are easily obtained by themselves; but in 
 
 50
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 anthologies confined to one poet personality 
 still binds the poems together, they reflect light 
 one upon another, and by their inward similari- 
 ties they enforce the peculiar traits of the poet, 
 deepen the impression, and give an increasing 
 power of appreciation along the lines of his 
 special powers and sensibilities. If the poet is 
 to be a favorite and to make an engrossing and 
 almost private appeal to the reader, the ac- 
 quaintance with the complete works will become 
 a necessity and be self-enforced by the taste 
 that has been formed ; until then it can well wait. 
 It is seldom that an anthology including many 
 writers possesses any such unity. Palgrave's 
 Golden Treasury is exceptional in this regard; 
 it has the felicity of being an expression of the 
 English genius in poetry, and of so containing 
 an individuality, with powers of mutual reflec- 
 tion of part to part and of an increment of sig- 
 nificance to the whole, similar to that in one 
 man's works. The Greek Anthology is likewise 
 unified by racial genius. The criticism offered 
 by Palgrave in his notes, which are usually 
 neglected, is also singularly admirable, compact, 
 clear, penetrating and governed by a just taste. 
 It contains indeed in its small limits almost an 
 
 51
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 education in poetic taste. A similarly remark- 
 able aid for the lighter forms of verse, including 
 guiding criticism and a characterization of the 
 artistic form, is given by Frederick Lockyer 
 in a final note to his own poems; it suffices of 
 itself to direct the reader through the whole 
 field. Such criticism as is afforded by these 
 two writers, so modestly put forth as to be 
 almost hidden, is very rare, and the reader 
 should avail himself of it for cultivation and 
 information. To apprehend the spirit of lyrical 
 poetry Shelley's Defence of Poetry should be 
 read; to understand some of its ends and means 
 in practise Wordsworth's Prefaces are still the 
 most useful declaration of its principles. 
 
 To these hints and suggestions as to the 
 nature of lyrical poetry and the modes of ap- 
 proach to it a final counsel may be added. It 
 unlocks emotion, and pours it in free and elo- 
 quent forms in an imaginary world; it teaches 
 the wise and beautiful behavior of the soul 
 in its emotional life. The scene is imaginary, 
 but the emotion is real; and it may be more 
 than a sympathetic emotion; it may so repeat 
 the reader's experience and express his actual 
 self as to be personal and his own as if he had 
 
 52
 
 Lyrical Poetry 
 
 written the poem. This is the test of success 
 with the reader, that he shall seem to have 
 written the book. If, however, the emotion 
 remains only sympathetic, it opens to the reader 
 the large passion of the world's life, the hopes 
 and fears of his kind and the modes of man's 
 consolation. It is thus that he becomes human- 
 ized, and adds to his own life the life which is that 
 of man. Emotion so felt may not necessarily 
 result directly in action; but it results in charac- 
 ter; it softens, refines and ennobles the soul, and 
 it illuminates life for the intellect. In that self- 
 development which every live spirit seeks, the 
 power of emotion is a main part of the capacity 
 to live and know and understand. In the private 
 experience of a cultivated man the imaginary 
 life, lived in art and dream and the stirring of 
 the thousand susceptibilities of his nature that 
 never pass from his consciousness outward but 
 are shut in his own silent world, is a large part 
 of reality to him, in the strict sense, it is his 
 larger life, the life of the soul. Lyrical poetry 
 holds its high place by virtue of its power to 
 nourish such a life. 
 
 53
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 NARRATIVE POETRY 
 
 THE second great division of experience is 
 action; it is rendered in the ideal forms 
 of literary art most purely by the epic and the 
 drama; in the first the action is related, in the 
 second it is represented. It is not necessary 
 for the beginner to enter upon the aesthetic 
 theory of these two modes of literature; his 
 business is rather to make an acquaintance with 
 the books, to have a first view of their contents, 
 than to analyze their philosophic structure. 
 Epic and drama, too, are only the highest 
 forms of the literature of action; narrative 
 poetry includes much that can hardly be charac- 
 terized as epic, and it is convenient to treat 
 under this head poetry which is not strictly a 
 narration of action, but which describes or sets 
 forth experience at length, such as Virgil's 
 Georgics, Lucretius, or the long poems of Words- 
 worth. The most easy introduction to narra- 
 
 54
 
 BYRON
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 tive poetry in English is by means of Scott's 
 tales in verse, romantic in atmosphere, gallant 
 in action and swift in movement; their objec- 
 tive realism, similar to that of man's earliest 
 poetry, is a point of great advantage, and assists 
 immediate appreciation by simple and untrained 
 minds. Byron's Tales which naturally follow 
 are more full of adventure and passion, melo- 
 dramatic, and as they in their time outrivaled 
 and silenced Scott's saner genius, they still in 
 the reading are more effective in rousing and 
 exciting the mind; but Scott's tales have shown 
 the more enduring quality, possibly, after all, 
 and are more widely popular. If there be in 
 the reader any capacity to be stirred by romantic 
 narrative, these two poets will bring it forth 
 without fail; and the entrance on the path once 
 being made, the way onward has an open career 
 by many issues. Concurrently with the tale 
 of adventure the romantic life of nature may 
 well be approached as it is set forth, for example, 
 in Longfellow's Hiawatha, which appeals to 
 simple poetic tastes requiring a high degree of 
 objective reality in a poem. It is a poem in 
 which nature is so romantically presented as to 
 become almost a fresh creation of the wilderness 
 
 55
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 and a renewal of primitive life; it gives great 
 pleasure to the young and is an admirable 
 approach to the poetical view of nature which in 
 modern English verse is so fundamental, en- 
 grossing and various in its results. 
 
 Though it is not commonly thought to be the 
 case, it is likely that the longer poems of Words- 
 worth, The Prelude and The Excursion, are 
 more available in developing this point of view 
 and habit of mind than is supposed. Words- 
 worth is usually a favorite poet with young 
 students, and he especially appeals to the 
 quieter and self -commanded temperaments, to 
 whom the abandon of intenser masters is un- 
 natural; his moods are more even with life, his 
 message is plain, and in all ways he is a most 
 accessible poet to those less poetically inclined. 
 The Prelude and The Excursion are regarded 
 as tedious poems, and to have read them is 
 commonly considered a victorious trial of the 
 spirit. I frankly confess to wishing that they 
 were longer than they are. The two poems 
 together present the poetic history of an extraor- 
 dinarily sensitive and masculine mind, and such 
 an autobiography of a poet's introduction to life 
 may well be full of useful lights on the things 
 
 56
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 of the poetic life, especially for the reader who 
 is himself just entering on that life and who 
 realizes that it is indeed a life and not merely 
 a study that he is entering on. These poems 
 contain a fund of great truths relating to that 
 life nowhere else so well coordinated and set 
 forth in coherency with life's whole. 
 
 Preeminent among these traits is that of the 
 function of nature in giving a scale to life, some 
 sort of perspective in which man may take a 
 relative measure of himself and of his mortal 
 career. In the mere massiveness of nature, in 
 the comparative eternity of her life in the ele- 
 ments of air, earth and ocean, in the impressive 
 tumult and the no less impressive peace of her 
 changing moods from day to day, in the vast 
 power and certainty of her life-processes in sun- 
 light, the succession of the seasons and the 
 phenomena of the death and birth of things in 
 multitude of being, in all this there is the 
 sense of that infinite in opposition to which man 
 recognizes his own finitude. One who lives in 
 comparative solitude, like the dalesmen whom 
 Wordsworth knew, always in the presence of 
 nature, has close at hand an unceasing correc- 
 tion of that egotism that grows up in cities, 
 
 57
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 in the sphere, that is, where human energies 
 seem to occupy the scene, and the ambitions 
 and worldly aims of men seem to be all in all. 
 Napoleon, absorbed in the spectacle and mastery 
 of merely human things, there where human 
 qualities of intelligence, force and strategy 
 count for most, may seem even to himself a 
 kind of demigod whom life obeys; but the 
 dalesman, constantly in the sight of the hills 
 and streams and their tempests, constantly 
 aware of the conditioning might of nature in 
 harvest and herds, constantly open to the in- 
 flowing on his soul of the mysterious agencies 
 of cloud and sunshine, of darkness and peril, 
 and of the various beneficence as well as of the 
 hard rebuffs of nature, retains the true sane 
 sense of humanity as a creature. So Words- 
 worth presents the case, in describing the 
 advantage of the countryman over the dweller 
 in cities, and of a life led in alliance with nature 
 over the life of the market and the court. The 
 idea is not unlike that belonging to Greek 
 tragedy. The spectacle of tragedy in the lives 
 of kings and princes and favorites of the gods, 
 which was the sort that the Greek stage habitu- 
 ally presented, was believed to be wholesome 
 
 58
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 for the ordinary body of spectators, because 
 they thereby found a scale of misfortune so 
 much exceeding anything in their own lives that 
 their mishaps appeared not only more bearable 
 but really of slight importance. In comparison 
 with the woes of Agamemnon or (Edipus, their 
 own lives were felicity. In the same way, if 
 one has the scale of nature in continual sight, 
 he lives with the infinite of power and the in- 
 finite of repose close to him, and he is thereby 
 kept humble in thought, and an anodyne of 
 peace steals into his soul to quiet, to console 
 and heal. Nature thus first dilates the mind 
 with her own spectacle, gives to it touches of 
 her own infinitude, and yet preserves the mind's 
 humility at the very moment that it adds to the 
 mind's majesty in living; and next it tranquilizes 
 the soul in mortal grief. In its most common 
 form, then, and for all, even unlettered men, 
 nature is the familiar presence of the infinite; 
 and those who live in its presence truly find at 
 once and without effort, find in boyhood and 
 youth in an unconscious process, that scale of 
 the infinite for their lives, which the soul needs 
 in order to be truly born. This is the doctrine 
 which is elaborated in the Prelude and illus- 
 
 59
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 trated in the Excursion, permeating both poems; 
 and it is presented both externally in the lives 
 of the dalesmen, and personally as the life of 
 Wordsworth's dawning mind. If the doctrine 
 be well apprehended, it is of itself a large prepa- 
 ration for the poetic life which lies in the appre- 
 ciation of modern poetry, so far as the description 
 and interpretation of nature enter into it; and 
 in all its narrative poetry this is a large element. 
 Narrative poetry, such as that of Scott, Byron 
 and Wordsworth, is found in great profusion in 
 literature and is of every degree of merit. It 
 does not differ in its kind of interest from the 
 record of similar experience or reflection upon 
 experience in prose, and much of it indeed is a 
 survival in a late age of the habits of that early 
 period when, prose not having been developed, 
 poetry was the normal mode of all literary 
 composition. That is one reason why so large 
 a part of narrative poetry is quickly dead. 
 The poetic form gives condensation, speed 
 and brilliancy to narrative, but in general the 
 narrative succeeds in proportion to its brevity. 
 It requires a master of narrative like Chaucer 
 to maintain interest in poetic fiction; and as a 
 rule, narrative poems, owing to the difficulty 
 
 60
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 of sustaining emotional interest for a prolonged 
 time, are remembered by their glowing, pic- 
 turesque and romantic passages. The break- 
 ing up of long poems into books and cantos, or 
 into single adventures separately treated as by 
 Tennyson, is a device to avoid this difficulty. 
 In prose the telling of a story as such is more 
 facile and generally more effective; if a modern 
 narrative in verse succeeds, it is by virtue of 
 something besides the story. The literature 
 of all nations is strewn with the stranded wrecks 
 of poetic narratives, from the times of Greece 
 through the interminable garrulity of the middle 
 ages and the spawning epics of the south of 
 Europe down to the days of Southey. In its 
 rivalry with prose, poetic narrative succeeds 
 only by emotional intensity, as in Keats, or by 
 some romance in the tale favored by grace in 
 the telling. 
 
 The truth is that poetic narrative in its great 
 examples, those that are supreme works of the 
 race, is much more than simple narration of an 
 action, description of a scene, or meditation 
 upon a theme. The epic exceeds these lesser 
 poems by virtue of being a summary of times 
 past, of civilizations entire, of phases of man's 
 
 61
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 long abiding moods of contemplating life; the 
 epic contains the genius of the race that pro- 
 duces it, and is the attempt of that race to realize 
 its dream of what it has been, is and shall be, 
 not in any practical achievement in the real 
 world but in its own consciousness of its ideals. 
 They belong to the most impersonal of man's 
 works; they are social poems, condensations of 
 broad human life into which centuries are 
 compressed, landmarks of the progress of the 
 race through change. If the poet individually 
 writes them, they are no less the combination 
 of ages of tradition, its product and embodiment. 
 In the earlier examples the tradition is national; 
 in Homer and Virgil, it is Greek and Roman 
 genius that are treasured up; but in later writers 
 it is rather the tradition of the civilization to 
 which they belong than the pure national 
 tradition that is expressed. In English the 
 great examples are three, Spenser's Faery 
 Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost and Tennyson's 
 Idyls of the King. The first and second are 
 poems of the Renaissance spirit, and involve, 
 one the tradition of chivalry and the middle 
 age, the other that of Christian story and an- 
 tiquity, while Tennyson resumes the Arthurian 
 
 62
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 legend. It is obvious that such poems require 
 in the reader much preparation by study before 
 they can be intelligently read; for such reading 
 there must be a knowledge of Scripture, my- 
 thology and chivalry in particular, but also 
 much besides. These poems are, in truth, the 
 most fascinating form of history, and perhaps 
 its most efficient form ; and as the English kings 
 are most humanly known in Shakespeare, past 
 history in general is most alive in the epics 
 that sum it up imaginatively and interpret it in 
 terms of the immortal spirit of man. Actual 
 history, life as it was, is to this reincarnation of it 
 in poetry merely dead annals ; like the excavated 
 ruins of Troy, in comparison with the Iliad, 
 a desolation, debris, a thing of the gray annihila- 
 tion of time. The power of historical imagina- 
 tion is, therefore, indispensable to the reader, 
 whose assimilation of the poem will be propor- 
 tionate to his exercise of it. For each of the 
 great epics there is a stock of interpretative and 
 illustrative criticism easily accessible and ad- 
 mirably ordered; but after all aids have done 
 their utmost, the reader is still keenly aware 
 of the dividing power of time which corrodes 
 and effaces the material of the poem, impairs 
 
 63
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 sympathy and not seldom transforms its original 
 charm into charm of another sort which, how- 
 ever attractive, he knows to be different. This 
 difficulty of complete comprehension is greater 
 as he approaches foreign epics and those of 
 antiquity. Tasso is, perhaps, most nigh with 
 his Jerusalem Delivered; for Ariosto's Orlando 
 Furioso a special culture is necessary; and 
 Camoens, in his Lusiads, is perhaps the most 
 unseizable of the moderns. Dante's Divine 
 Comedy requires prolonged study; Lowell said, 
 somewhat hyperbolically, that the thirteenth 
 century existed to annotate this poem, but by 
 the phrase he conveyed a truth and indicated 
 the immense significance of the poem. Not- 
 withstanding their distance in time, Virgil and 
 Homer still remain near to the classically edu- 
 cated reader, one by virtue of his temperament, 
 the other by his reality; both, besides their 
 powerful historical interpretation of race, en- 
 gage human interest deeply in romantic forms. 
 The epics, in their true significance, are only 
 for strong minds. They afford, however, the 
 best introduction to a foreign literature or to that 
 of a past stage of culture. They involve such an 
 illumination of the period and yield such an 
 
 64
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 insight into the racial qualities and career of 
 the peoples whose ideals they summarize that 
 the entire literature of those nations in other 
 forms becomes intelligible, capable of appre- 
 ciation, provocative of sympathy to as high a 
 degree as it is possible to reach. It is seldom 
 that a foreigner ever appreciates literature as 
 a native, owing to the barriers of language and 
 the difference in heredity, education and race 
 genius; but it is in the epics, which have indeed 
 a more cosmopolitan character than other forms 
 of literature through the community of their 
 literary tradition, that the genius of a nation 
 or the spirit of a long age is most thoroughly 
 and deeply felt and perceived. No literary 
 study is on the whole more fruitful in broadening 
 the mind and sympathies by forcing them to 
 range widely in the history of the human spirit 
 and to observe its modes in distant times and 
 contrasted ages and in nations of high achieve- 
 ment. It is through them that the conception 
 of world-literature, as opposed to special litera- 
 tures, most readily begins to form. 
 
 The epic even in its greatest examples does 
 not escape from the general difficulty of narra- 
 tive poetry in sustaining interest for a long time. 
 
 65
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 Homer nods, and his successors inherited the 
 weakness with the art. Every device has, 
 nevertheless, been availed of to avoid such 
 defects of tediousness or of waning interest. 
 The art of narrative is carried to its highest 
 point in the manner of presenting the story, of 
 displaying the characters, of interweaving epi- 
 sodes, of varying the matter, contrasting it, 
 heightening it; and one result is that the epics 
 are remembered by their eloquent passages, 
 their dramatic moments, their episodes and 
 their highly finished parts rather than as wholes; 
 it is, perhaps, only by the scholar that the effect 
 of the work as a whole is felt and its unities 
 recognized. In writing it each new poet has 
 availed himself of all that has gone before, and 
 has freely imitated, incorporated and rewritten 
 the work of his predecessors, so that the art 
 gained cumulative power in a remarkable meas- 
 ure, and this not only by the use of old modes 
 and resources but by an appropriation of the 
 substance itself by means of translation or 
 imitation that was equivalent to direct copy 
 though often accompanied by improvement. 
 The epics have a family resemblance, and show 
 their descent by their features. It is instructive 
 
 66
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 to notice also, in their succession, how they 
 reflect the growth of civilization by their in- 
 creasing social complexity, the softening of 
 their manners, the development of the element 
 of love in contrast to war, the changes in their 
 divine scheme, the refinement in moral ideals, 
 and, in general, the inwardness of the life they 
 set forth in proportion as the world ripens in 
 time at the season of their coming. No part of 
 literature reflects so clearly and continuously 
 the gradual spiritualization of human life in 
 the evolution of our Western civilization. It 
 is not, however, its narrative art, its brilliant 
 passages, its record of social and spiritual 
 progress, and still less is it the mere tale of love 
 and war in their individual accidents, that have 
 gained for the epics the high esteem, and indeed 
 veneration, in which they are held. This pro- 
 ceeds from the fact that the epic poets knew 
 how to set forth the tale so that it should be a 
 tissue of that symbolical truth which is the stuff 
 of all great literature, and so to present the story 
 of a great design, like the siege of Troy or the 
 founding of Rome, or of a great event like the 
 fall of man, or of a great adventure like that 
 of Spenser's knights or Camoens' sailors, in such 
 
 67
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 a way that while true in its individual traits it 
 should also represent and express the fates of 
 human life in general as they were seen and 
 known; they told a tale, not of men's lives, but 
 of man's life, and of man's life at its highest 
 energy, luster and endurance, its utmost power 
 of life. Achilles was such a man as every 
 Greek would wish to be in action, and the tale 
 was of what was possible to such a man, for 
 triumph and for sorrow, in life as the Greek 
 knew it. The breadth oi interpretation achieved, 
 such that the poem was the expression of a 
 race, an age, a great mood of life acting and 
 suffering, was the measure of its catholic power 
 to express life, to define its fortunes, to unload 
 its burdens, to declare its meaning. This is 
 ideal truth, as poetic art knows it, written large. 
 One does not go far in literature in any direc- 
 tion without coming into deep waters, a fact 
 that the study of the epic quickly reveals. With- 
 out entering upon aesthetic theory in detail or 
 developing the philosophical interest of the epic 
 fully, it is of use to glance at the moral signifi- 
 cance of epic poetry in which so much of its 
 power lies. The epic is a high organic form of 
 art, and this form is realized with different 
 
 68
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 degrees of fulness and clearness in different 
 examples. It is grounded on the operation of 
 the will, which is the source of action; and in 
 the epic form it is the social will that is con- 
 templated, organized in the life of nations. 
 The epic centers about a collision which takes 
 place in the social sphere rather than in that of 
 personal life, and it has an historical basis or 
 one that is accepted as historical. The conflict 
 is between opposed nations or races, in which 
 different ideals of civilization challenge each 
 other to deadly encounter. It is sometimes 
 stated that these are opposed, as a higher to a 
 lower civilization, a higher to a lower will; and 
 as the will of the social group is always inter- 
 preted by the members of that group as being 
 the will of its ruling and providential gods, it is 
 often represented that in the epic the divine will 
 is involved, and adds its power of victory to 
 the winning arms, overthrowing the lower will 
 of a barbarous and profane foe. Thus the 
 conflict of Greece with Troy, of the fates of 
 Rome with the Carthaginian and the Italian, 
 of the arms of the Crusaders with the Saracen, 
 of the genius of Portugal with the Moslem, of the 
 soul with sense in Spenser's and in Tennyson's 
 
 69
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 knights, of Satan with the Omnipotent in Mil- 
 ton's legend of creation, all these involve the 
 divine will in one or another mode of its mani- 
 festation through human fortunes. In the Iliad 
 it is natural to think of the Greeks as the em- 
 bodiment of the higher civilization and the 
 defenders of the better cause; in the jEneid, as 
 the mind looks back on the vast beneficence of 
 Rome as the unifier and legislator of the Medi- 
 terranean world and the civilizer of the bar- 
 barous North, it is likewise natural to regard 
 the fortunes of .Eneas as the fates of the future, 
 and the triumph of Rome over all people as the 
 victory of that Providence which was then 
 known as the divine will of Jupiter, the Olym- 
 pian; in the Christian epics a like view is less a 
 preconception of our minds than a part of our 
 idea of the world. Optimism, the final victory 
 of the best, would seem to belong to the epic 
 and to be contained in its very idea. 
 
 Yet, as in lyrical poetry the prevailing tone 
 is of sadness, so in the epic the story is one of 
 the sorrows of mankind. Tragedy stamps them 
 from the first line of the Iliad to the farewell of 
 the dying Arthur. It is obvious at once that 
 in all epics the side that loses finds its career 
 
 70
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 one of pure tragedy, and in its fall bears always 
 deeply graved the tragic mark of fatality. The 
 defeat of the Trojans, the defeat of Turnus, the 
 defeat of any beaten cause has this trait in a 
 marked form, and this is the more clearly felt 
 in proportion as the fatality embodied in the 
 new power of the victors is also represented as 
 the working of the divine will adding its supreme 
 might to that power. The issue for the con- 
 quered is not merely defeat, but the tragic issue 
 of death, complete extinction, the funeral pyre 
 of Hector, the ashes of Troy. The principle of 
 repose invoked to complete the work of art is 
 that of tragic repose, death. The tragic mark 
 also appears in the apparent injustice done to a 
 noble nature, for it is not felt that Hector de- 
 serves his fate; he is a victim of the adverse gods, 
 the same that Turnus feared in his last mortal 
 struggle. Nor is the tragic note confined to 
 the beaten cause. In the victorious cause 
 tragedy has a large field all its own. The price 
 of the victory of the divine will, or of the higher 
 civilization, is in all these great poems a tragic 
 price, and is the more plainly and openly so 
 in proportion to the height of the poem. In 
 this impression the epic faithfully repeats that 
 
 71
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 historic experience which it records and idealizes; 
 it is grounded, as all poetry is, in life; and, still, 
 as we mark the doomed nations and races going 
 into extinction, see them pressed westward to 
 the seas and decimated and engulfed, it is little 
 joy to the mind to contemplate the victory of the 
 will of civilization thus enforced by battle-axe 
 and cannon over the weaker and less fortunate 
 tribes of men. Sacrifice is a word writ large 
 in the epical life, sacrifice of both victor and 
 vanquished. It is obvious that the optimism 
 of the epic lies in the efficacy of the sacrifice, 
 that is, in the validity of the idea of social 
 progress. 
 
 As the epic enters the religious sphere, it 
 develops its central conceptions of human life 
 most remarkably. Here it unfolds the most 
 tragic situation that it has been given to man 
 to conceive. It is nothing less than the notion 
 that in the confused field of human action there 
 is a supreme and fatal collision between the 
 human will as such and the divine will in om- 
 nipotence. At all times, even in the barbaric 
 past, there have been what men thought of as 
 collisions between men and the gods, there 
 have been blasphemy and sacrilege; but the 
 
 72
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 reason, which finds its career in generalization, 
 has here, if anywhere, carried its generalizing 
 power to the madness of extremes, and evolved 
 the theory that not men, but man, not in- 
 dividuals of exceptional wickedness but the race, 
 is in opposition to God by virtue of the human 
 will in its essence being in conflict with the divine 
 will, and this doctrine is summed up in the 
 notion of original sin. In this idea the tragic 
 element is present in all its phases; tragedy is 
 complete. Fate, or necessity, constrains the 
 victim by his own nature which is already born 
 into this collision and finds the struggle pre- 
 determined; overwhelming defeat accompanies 
 the struggle; and the end, the tragic repose, 
 comes, not only in mortal death, but in that 
 extinction of the will itself which is involved in 
 the conception of damnation. This is the essen- 
 tial, the spiritual tragedy of mankind, looked at 
 from the darker side. On the other hand the 
 principle of sacrifice is invoked in order to 
 secure alleviation of this situation; but the 
 sacrifice is the highest conceivable, consisting 
 in the suffering and temporary defeat of the 
 Divine itself, in the scheme of salvation; and 
 even under the operation of this sacrifice there 
 
 73
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 remains, as in all epic, the tragic destruction of 
 the beaten cause and its adherents in hell. 
 These ideas are set forth in poetry in two great 
 examples. In Milton the fable is fully con- 
 structed ; on the side of the history of the human 
 will it is fully developed in Paradise Lost, and 
 on the side of the Divine will partially developed 
 in the Paradise Regained. In Dante's Divine 
 Comedy, though the matter is not there pre- 
 sented in the form of action but in a symbolical 
 picture of the results in the after world of Hell, 
 Purgatory and Paradise, the substance of the 
 situation is the same; here is the fifth act of the 
 spiritual tragedy in which the moment of repose 
 must come, and it is found in two forms, the 
 death of the wicked, which is a tragic issue 
 without relief, and the salvation of the blessed, 
 which is the victory of the higher will through 
 sacrifice, manifested in the direction of longer 
 and fuller life, a strictly epic issue. It is 
 plainly only a tempered optimism that the epic 
 permits to the reflective man. 
 
 Such are some of the directions in which the 
 mind makes out, if it would grasp the pro- 
 founder significance of epical poetry; it may 
 rest in the pleasure of contemplating the march 
 
 74
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 of great events, the display of great character in 
 action, the play of individual adventure and the 
 many forms of imaginative delight that the 
 epic utilizes to enrich and relieve its graver 
 matter, but the greater the mental power of the 
 reader the more he will endeavor to comprehend 
 the profounder contents of the epic in its medi- 
 tation on human fate, on the operation of the 
 will, not in individuals merely but in society, or 
 the view of history which it inculcates. History, 
 indeed, holds the same relation to it that biog- 
 raphy does to lyrical verse. The reader of the 
 lyric comes to love the author, to desire to know 
 his life and to become, in a sense, his comrade, 
 because he feels that the poems are, after all, 
 only fragments of the man and that they, or the 
 spirit they express, are integrated in the poet's 
 own nature, the poet's soul. In the heart of the 
 poet he finds at last the song. In a like way 
 life on the large social scale, history, lies back 
 of epical verse, but not history in any narrow 
 sense of politics, institutions, manners; it is life 
 as it has been broadly lived in the past, inclusive 
 of all that entered into it, Greek life, Roman 
 life, the life of the Renaissance, that must be 
 more fully resuscitated in the mind before the 
 
 75
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 epics give up their treasure. Such study be- 
 longs to the enthusiast, perhaps, to the reader 
 who finds in literature the greater part of his 
 mental life; in general he must content himself 
 with something far short of this, and be con- 
 fined to the immediate pleasure of the obvious 
 part of the poem, its events, characters, and 
 situations. Epic poetry is rich in such pleasure 
 because it is seldom attempted except by great 
 masters of the poetic art who are accustomed 
 to give such high finish to their work as lesser 
 men can afford only to short attempts. Virgil, 
 Tennyson and Milton exhausted art in giving 
 beauty to every line and phrase, to every incident, 
 episode, picture by itself. The surface of their 
 poetry is perfect and brilliant as with a mosaic 
 incrustation of color, scene, and divine glow of 
 art like that of the builders of Italy. In the 
 contemplation of this resides the pure poetic 
 pleasure undisturbed by philosophy and un- 
 shadowed by remoter thought. It is thus that 
 the epics should be first known and appro- 
 priated by their direct objective beauty in 
 detail, as a vision of human experience in the 
 large; the rest will come later, if at all, and unless 
 the philosophic interest is roused in the reader 
 
 76
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 so as to become a commanding need, it may be 
 spared, for above all things poetic appreciation 
 should have spontaneity. 
 
 Other forms of narrative poetry are best 
 read in the same way with a preliminary atten- 
 tion to beauty of detail, to simple scenes and 
 passages that of themselves attract and hold 
 the reader. The poetic value of the Georgics 
 or of Lucretius is thus most readily found, and 
 the way opened to the appreciation of the poems 
 in their entirety. Into the perception of the 
 wholeness of a great poem, even of moderate 
 length, so many elements enter, and for the 
 most part the habit of the mind in artistic 
 appreciation is so imperfect and unfamiliar, 
 that it is not to be expected that the reader 
 should arrive at facility in such understanding 
 except slowly and by much practise. The idyl, 
 of which the great English masters are Milton 
 and Tennyson, perhaps best trains the mind in 
 the appreciation of beauty in detail and the 
 understanding of that glowing surface of color 
 and picture which is the poetic method of the 
 greatest masters, those who have had most 
 patience with their art. These exquisite scenes 
 of the idyls, each wrought out with the fineness 
 
 77
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 of a cameo and linked one with another so 
 subtly that the passing of the eye from one to 
 the next is hardly marked, are triumphs of ex- 
 pression; if the reader has the sense of beauty, 
 they educate it with great rapidity, and they 
 accustom him to that slow reading which is 
 necessary in poetry in order to give time for the 
 contemplation of the scene to have its effect 
 on the mind. Tennyson's idyls were the prin- 
 cipal education of his generation in the sense 
 of beauty in life, and the vogue of his method 
 and melody through the English world indicates 
 the lack, almost the void, that it supplied, 
 though Landor and Keats were before him and 
 Milton survived as the best English master of 
 the method. It is essentially the classic method, 
 the Greek tradition. The reader once brought 
 to true delight in the idyl finds the way to 
 pastoral poetry open and soon adapts himself 
 to the conventions of that world, so remote from 
 actuality, where the dream of life as it might be 
 fills the scene and human experience is freed 
 from its discordant elements and poetry be- 
 comes more like picture and statue and music 
 than in any other part of its domain. This 
 Arcadian world, which is the most insubstan- 
 
 78
 
 Narrative Poetry 
 
 tial part of poetry to the English reader, is by 
 its spirit rather a division of lyrical than of 
 narrative poetry; but it presents a vision of life 
 and is descriptive of a realm of imagination, 
 and it is characteristically a telling of life, though 
 by a singing voice, as in Theocritus, Virgil and 
 the Italians. Pastoral poetry is a highly refined 
 form of the art, and the taste for it indicates 
 that the education of the reader approaches 
 completion in so far as his induction into its 
 forms is concerned. But the nature of narra- 
 tive poetry in its various phases has been suffi- 
 ciently opened; in general, as lyrical poetry 
 develops personality through emotion, narra- 
 tive verse displays the various scene of the 
 world, society in action, the breadth of experi- 
 ence, and develops social power, knowledge 
 and a many-sided touch with life. It is the 
 vision of life, and presents experience exten- 
 sively rather than intensively, with objective 
 reality; it provokes thought and initiates the 
 individual into the world life of man both his- 
 torically and ideally. 
 
 79
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 DRAMATIC POETRY 
 
 THE drama has many claims to be re- 
 garded as the highest form of literary 
 art. It deals with the material of human 
 experience immediately, giving bodily form to 
 life; even all that is invisible, belonging in the 
 unseen world of inward experience, and all that 
 is ineffable in passion, is presented at least as 
 plainly as in the life itself by the intervention of 
 speech, gesture and the visible presence of the 
 event. The form of art, too, employed by the 
 drama is highly organic; reason enters into it 
 with stern insistence, and intellectualizes the 
 life set forth, relating one part to another with 
 a rational end in view. Dramatic theory may 
 be best illustrated by the example of tragedy. 
 The essence of tragedy is a collision in the 
 sphere of the will; the will strives to realize 
 itself in action, and in the attempt collides with 
 some obstacle. The action thus entered upon 
 
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 In faurtrru Volumes lai-p-e Folio, 
 
 Bequeathed bv the- lat.- John Diaries Oowle 
 To flie British Museum, 
 
 Gl^OBJi
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 is fatally controlled, both as to its occasion and 
 issue; in no part of literary art is the rule laid 
 down so rigorously as here that the action shall 
 be made up of a chain of events linked together 
 by causal necessity. To uncover this chain 
 and show its connection is the province of the 
 reason. Every extraneous and unrelated ele- 
 ment is cut away; all is simplified to the point 
 that the spectator must be convinced that the 
 result obtained in the issue was inevitable and 
 could not possibly have been otherwise than it 
 was. The power which is invoked is fate; it is 
 a power that clings to, weighs upon and drags 
 down its prey, be he never so strong and noble; 
 it is a manifestation of the unsearchable law 
 of human destiny. This is tragedy as it was 
 first conceived and practised by the Greek 
 genius, and it remains unchanged in its essential 
 conception. The discords that arise in life are 
 infinite in variety, and the kinds of tragic con- 
 flict as various as the combinations of the will 
 with life. The simplest collision is with exter- 
 nal circumstance; the most complex is that 
 when the will is internally divided against itself 
 by some fact of character; and the two forms 
 may be combined in the same play. The 
 
 81
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 working of fate in the play may be attended 
 with all degrees of interpretation from clearness 
 to mystery; it is most clear when it is ethical, 
 it is most mysterious when it transcends any 
 scheme of justice known to men. Fate into 
 which a retributory element enters, pursuing a 
 sin-stricken house like that of Atreus, is intel- 
 ligible to the conscience; but tragedy is not 
 restrained within these limits in art any more 
 than in life, and fate in proportion as it sinks 
 into facts of circumstance, such as heredity, and 
 blends with a generous nature such as Hamlet 
 or Othello, becomes mysterious, a part of the 
 unsolved spectacle of life. In its progress as 
 an art tragedy seems to leave ethics behind and 
 to become insoluble. 
 
 The Greek drama is the best introduction to 
 the study of tragedy. It presents several points 
 of advantage in inducting the reader into the 
 nature of what is attempted, the point of view, 
 the modes of evolving the action, the resources 
 of the theatrical representation. In the first 
 place, it is extraordinarily simple in its state- 
 ment of the tragic problem, using plain ele- 
 ments in the tale, few characters and well 
 defined situations. The simplicity of Greek 
 
 82
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 tragedies, indeed, strikes the modern reader 
 as paucity; the action, the thought, the mental 
 and moral substance of the play are almost 
 skeletonized in their obviousness; and for the 
 aesthetic effect, it is evident, reliance was largely 
 placed on the presentation with its open-air 
 atmosphere, its sculpturesque grouping and its 
 choral accompaniments. In the second place, 
 the prepossession of the play with ethics is 
 marked. The Greek genius undertook by a 
 natural inclination to impose an ethical mean- 
 ing on life as known in the legend of the race; 
 it would find moral harmony in the dealings of 
 the divine with mankind, and beginning with 
 ^Eschylus it exalted the conception of righteous- 
 ness as an element in fatality, and ending with 
 Euripides it was still concerned with the moral 
 aspect of human affairs. Aristotle reduced the 
 practise of the dramatists to a theory, and simply 
 excluded from the art all such representation 
 as could not be rationalized for the conscience, 
 on the ground that such representations would 
 be impiety to the gods. The ethical school of 
 criticism of the drama still rests substantially 
 on these prepossessions, inherited from the 
 Greeks, which presumed a law of righteousness 
 
 83
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 manifest in the tragedies that befall mankind. 
 The Greek drama is also convenient for study 
 because it exemplifies with great lucidity and 
 speed in development the evolution of the art, 
 not only in its emergence from its early state as 
 a choral act of religion into a more theatrical 
 representation of individuals and their relations, 
 but also in its movement from a rough and 
 broad typical treatment, as in ^Eschylus, through 
 the perfect balance of Sophocles to the extreme 
 individualization of Euripides; in these dram- 
 atists the normal evolution of every fine art 
 is illustrated by the example of tragedy passing 
 from a lofty and abstract idealism to the various 
 forms of realism and romanticism. Besides 
 these three marked traits of simplicity, ethical 
 quality, and artistic development, the Greek 
 drama is also distinguished by great interest 
 inherent in itself. The subjects were narrowly 
 limited by tradition to the group of legends and 
 tales that contained the religious and historic 
 imagination of the race already embodied in 
 great events and surpassing characters; the 
 action is consequently always one that has 
 distinction in itself, and the playing of the 
 dramatist's thought about the action was the 
 
 84
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 point of novelty in each new representation; 
 the drama is thus a great text freshly commented 
 upon and interpreted by the contemporary 
 spirit of Greece in the person of her best masters 
 of poetic genius. It is true that the external 
 part of life, the action, holds the first place in 
 interest, and this is a part of the native sim- 
 plicity of Greek drama; it is primarily events 
 that are to be set forth; the purpose of the poet 
 is to draw forth their law as intelligible to the 
 conscience. The character interest is different 
 from that of modern tragedy, and seldom 
 admits of that special trait of internal develop- 
 ment which belongs predominantly to later art. 
 But the characters, though fixed, are equal to 
 the events in which their fortunes are engaged, 
 worthy of them, and surpassing in human 
 interest. Their mere names have served for 
 ages as types both of human nature and of 
 tragic destiny. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, 
 Antigone, Orestes, Medea, Hippolytus, and 
 a score of others make a list that, if Shakespeare 
 be excepted, no other literature is able to ap- 
 proach in definite and powerful impressiveness ; 
 they are for the imagination what Plutarch's 
 men are for history, a gallery without a rival. 
 
 85
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 It is also true that Greek tragedy, if it be thor- 
 oughly read, presents a greater variety of 
 interest for romantic pleasure as well as for 
 intellectual activity than is commonly thought; 
 its poetic riches, as Milton well knew, are un- 
 told; there is, indeed, no single body of litera- 
 ture comparable to it even when read, as there 
 was never its equal for blended a?sthetic pleasures 
 when acted under the pure skies of Athens. 
 
 For the English reader, nevertheless, the 
 natural way to appreciate dramatic poetry is 
 to read Shakespeare. He is one of those 
 authors so greatly assimilative, so like to life 
 itself, that no preparation is needed to read him 
 beyond mere living from the time that boyhood 
 awakes to life. It is always wise to approach 
 literature by reading one author much rather 
 than many authors a little; and to read Shakes- 
 peare thoroughly so shapes and informs the 
 mind that no part of imaginative literature will 
 thereafter be dark to it. If it be impossible to 
 assign him such a place in English education as 
 Homer filled in Greece, his works are neverthe- 
 less a sort of secular Bible for English-speaking 
 peoples, and express the English apprehension 
 of life in the large both in the way of ideal 
 
 86
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 types of character, of romantic or profound 
 courses of events and of practical wisdom formu- 
 lated in pregnant phrase. To know Shakespeare 
 well is to have sufficient depth in literary edu- 
 cation though not sufficient range, since he was 
 of his age as well as for all time. Such an edu- 
 cation requires to be supplemented; yet in the 
 English drama it is well-nigh exhaustive. At 
 the first glance it is apparent that with Shake- 
 speare the Greek drama has been left far behind. 
 It is not characteristic of Shakespeare to be 
 either simple or ethical. He had, back of his 
 dramas, for subject-matter English and Roman 
 history and the romance tales of the continent; 
 this body of tradition was not comparable to 
 Greek legend in having been subjected to the 
 rationalizing power of the imagination through 
 long time, and it consequently was more mis- 
 cellaneous, inchoate and undigested, mixed of 
 heterogeneous and incompatible elements, less 
 pure as material for the creative reason that 
 genius exercises. Shakespeare, too, was him- 
 self less penetrated with the Greek instinct for 
 ethical order, for harmony, in life; he was of a 
 northern stock, and what to a Greek would 
 have seemed barbaric habits of mind were 
 
 87
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 still implicit in his nature, in his thought and 
 feeling. The world, besides, had long broken 
 old molds of ethical theory, and in expanding 
 had included new experience of manifold variety- 
 Life as it came to Shakespeare's knowledge was 
 a greater and subtler thing than it had been in 
 antiquity; it was full of new and unmeasured 
 elements; it did not suggest harmony, it did not 
 enforce on the mind any ethical law controlling 
 its phenomena, it offered rather at the best an 
 opportunity for moral exploration and mental 
 experiment. These are some of the reasons 
 why Shakespeare's plays cannot be described 
 as ethical in the old and severe sense; they dis- 
 play ethical meaning only partially and often 
 ignore that side of life; they are supremely con- 
 cerned only with the representation of life, 
 however confused and mysterious a phase it 
 may wear to the moral judgment. 
 
 The reader must therefore be prepared to 
 abandon that strict idea of tragedy as the 
 rationalization of life under an ethical con- 
 ception, and often to accept it here as the spec- 
 tacle of mere fate, the law of human destiny 
 manifest in examples, but seen rather than 
 understood. The laxer hold of any informing 
 
 88
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 rational principle in the play, this free move- 
 ment of life in it, this grasp of the problem 
 without eliminating insoluble elements belongs 
 to Shakespeare, and is a part of the breadth 
 and comprehe.nsiveness of his method. It is 
 because of this, together with other cognate 
 qualities, that critics often speak of his genius 
 as being half -barbaric. He includes much more 
 than art would include, nor is he careful to 
 attend to the necessities of art; he created with 
 his whole power of man rather than by any 
 special faculty in a piecemeal way, and hence 
 his work departs from art but it always departs 
 in the direction of more life. To familiarize 
 the mind with his habits, it is best to follow 
 him in his growth from play to play, and so to 
 grow with him into k*'s practise, moods, and 
 changes of interest, style and meditation; it is 
 a richly developing life that will be so led. The 
 histories, even those in which his hand is doubt- 
 ful or partial, have the good of introducing one 
 to the Elizabethan theater and accustoming the 
 reader to its conventions, its kinds of interest, 
 its atmosphere; and with Richard II, Richard 
 III, Henry V, King John, Shakespeare already 
 begins to be greatly known; the other plays 
 
 89
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 follow in their order, the romantic comedies, 
 the tragedies and Roman plays, the romances, 
 as they were chronologically written; and as 
 each one is mastered and understood, so far as 
 the reader at the time can appropriate it, the 
 nature of Shakespeare's art and the power of 
 his genius will open, and the wide meaning of 
 the plays, which are a blended product of both 
 art and genius, will be more fully comprehended. 
 One should read the plays, and not indulge too 
 fondly in the comment. If one is led on to further 
 study and meditation, the Variorum edition of 
 Furness offers every needed facility and is 
 library enough; with Shakespeare, never forget, 
 "the play's the thing." The question of periods, 
 the Elizabethan vocabulary, stage history, may 
 take care of themselves for the time being; so 
 may the sources of the plots and analysis of the 
 characters; so may the symbolical interpretation 
 of both; life is not long enough to read Shake- 
 speare in that way, if one has other business; 
 but a man, even much occupied with many 
 affairs, may read all Shakespeare's plays thor- 
 oughly and intelligently with true appreciation, 
 and acquire an excellent literary education 
 thereby. 
 
 90
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 Shakespeare suffices singly so much more than 
 other authors because he includes within the 
 work of one personality so extraordinary a 
 range of dramatic art. The Greek drama in 
 comparison with the Shakespearian is as the 
 beautiful but confined Mediterranean world to 
 the world of the world navigators. He adds 
 to tragedy the province of comedy, but the ex- 
 pansion of the field is much more than that; 
 he so treats the story that is the nucleus of the 
 play as to make it a theme of life as various as it 
 is universal. He presents many kinds of life, 
 environments, atmospheres, without ceasing to 
 be great in the treatment of them; in reading 
 him one is not confined to history or tragedy 
 or comedy or pastoral or any mode of life or 
 art, but may pass from one to the other and 
 still remain under the sway of one power; in 
 other words, life here retains its individuality, 
 its being one life, without losing its diversity 
 of scene, business, and function. Humanity is, 
 in a sense, harmonized by being thus held within 
 the limits of his temperament. In no dramatist 
 is there so large a geography of the world of the 
 mind. It is true that his Athens is not the city 
 of Theseus nor his Rome the city of Coriolanus 
 
 91
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 or of Caesar, nor England the England of Lear 
 nor Scotland the Scotland of Macbeth; yet each 
 is in turn really Athenian, Roman, British, and 
 Scotch, and gives a true illusion of historic 
 phases of life each at one with itself; and, be- 
 sides, there are the fairy world, the witches, the 
 dream world of The Tempest, the world of 
 Arden, of Venice and Verona, each yielding a 
 true illusion of imaginative phases of life simi- 
 larly at harmony within its own domain. The 
 expansion given to life by the revelation of 
 each new play comes with the effect of mental 
 and imaginative discovery; it is an invigorating 
 shock and adds new horizons to the reader's 
 consciousness of life. If it is a chief end of 
 literary study to reveal new interests in life, to 
 multiply the points of contact between the mind 
 and human experience, to open out new ways 
 of thought and feeling, Shakespeare serves this 
 end with a stimulation, an abundance and sur- 
 prise, and with a perfection in surrendering the 
 new world into the hands and comprehension 
 of the reader, entirely beyond comparison with 
 others. It is, however, not so much by the extent, 
 variety and freshness of the worlds of life which 
 he evokes that he informs and shapes the mind 
 
 92
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 and gives it great horizons, as it is by the free 
 play of life in its element which he uncovers in 
 the action and the characters, whether it be 
 tragic or mirthful, in the lofty or the low persons 
 of the drama, flushed with passion, crossed 
 with melancholy or salt with cynicism, what- 
 ever it be, it is life in its own element and un- 
 confmed. Fate rules in it, and most plainly 
 in the greatest dramatic moments, but it is 
 Shakespeare's fate, the unsearchable law of 
 human destiny that escapes moral statement 
 and is more largely if more blindly conceived 
 than in old days. In Lear and its attendant 
 great tragedies, pity and terror, the tragic motives, 
 are at their height partly because of the paralysis 
 of the reason in view of the spectacle ; the moral 
 order has vanished and gone forever, and no 
 power of art can bring it back by skill in the 
 solution of the action. Fate such as this makes 
 the greatness of the passionate plays, and in 
 lesser forms it is present in all as the spirit 
 abiding in life that has its will in the end, the 
 genius of the play. Shakespeare never loses 
 touch with this mystic element in life, and he is 
 fond of putting it forth as an enchantment, 
 especially in the happier phases of his art; the 
 
 93
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 ways in which life escapes understanding are 
 in no author so large a part of the substance, 
 the charm, one may almost say the meaning. 
 It is thus that his art transcends Greek art, and 
 incarnates the modern spirit. Though his art 
 would be described by its traits as belonging to 
 the Renaissance, the modern spirit was born 
 there like Athene from the head of Zeus. No 
 other author gives forth that spirit with like 
 power and light, illuminating the self-conscious- 
 ness of humanity, its realization of human 
 nature and human life. To read Shakespeare 
 is not, as is sometimes said, to feudalize the 
 imagination and befool the mind with aristo- 
 cratic and dead ideals ; but to be myriad -minded, 
 like Shakespeare, is to be modern-minded, 
 ever to comprehend and interpret more of life 
 with an increasing sense of its insoluble ele- 
 ments, to live in a world of new discovery, 
 of information, of revelation with suspense of 
 judgment, to become more tolerant, more hu- 
 mane, with a serener view of the blended terror 
 and enchantment of the scene, the golden days 
 and doubtful fates of life, nowhere so romanti- 
 cally, passionately and wisely bodied forth as 
 on Shakespeare's page. The way to read Shakes- 
 
 94
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 peare is to take the dramas which most attract 
 and interest the reader and become thoroughly 
 familiar with those, neglecting the others until 
 their time shall come. 
 
 All other drama pales beside Shakespeare's. 
 The revival of the Elizabethan drama that was 
 an element in the romantic movement of the 
 last century in England brought back into view 
 the entire stage of that era and also its historic 
 forerunners in English dramatic life. The 
 pre-Shakespearians, nevertheless, have little in- 
 trinsic interest except of an historical kind; they 
 live, even his great contemporaries live, largely 
 by the reflected light of Shakespeare in the 
 penumbra of his fame. Each has qualities of 
 distinction, vigor, grace, charm, wit, picturesque- 
 ness, intellectual power, dramatic skill; some 
 have one, some another of these traits; but in 
 no one of them is the combination so happy or 
 the work so excellent as to give their plays the 
 quality that makes literature enduringly power- 
 ful as an expression of life in the ideal. Mar- 
 lowe alone of the predecessors and Jonson 
 alone of the contemporaries arouse other than 
 a scholar's interest; such writers as Greene and 
 
 Peele and Lodge are negligible; and the whole 
 
 95
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 mass of moralities and miracle plays, though 
 historically valuable, and often touched by a 
 happy strain of human truth or picturesqueness, 
 is as literature a thing of naught. The post- 
 Shakespearians have greater literary skill, but 
 they had lost in the wholeness of their grasp on 
 life and present the traits of a decadence, even 
 in Beaumont and Fletcher and more markedly 
 in Webster and Ford. It is possible to become 
 greatly interested in some one or other of the 
 more famous plays, even to reach a degree of 
 enthusiasm, but these are special experiences 
 of the reader and depend much on tempera- 
 ment and accident. In general, Lamb's Speci- 
 mens and what he said of them are sufficient to 
 satisfy curiosity or open the way to experiment, 
 and Lowell's lectures on these dramatists give 
 all needful information and show at the same 
 time a diminishing interest in the writers which 
 is the sign of a wise literary choice. The later 
 history of English drama is comparatively 
 barren ground. The Restoration drama is es- 
 sentially prosaic and an expression of English 
 genius the least admirable either for sound taste 
 or fine feeling in English literary annals; it is 
 only for the curious. The prose comedy of 
 
 96
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 Congreve, and later of Goldsmith and Sheridan, 
 is the best in the language, and should be read, 
 as novels or essays are read, upon a lower 
 level of interest than dramatic poetry. The 
 choral dramas of Milton and Shelley open a 
 new source and outflow of English genius in its 
 noblest forms, but they are rather lyrical than 
 dramatic. The nineteenth century produced 
 no great drama in English, though occasionally, 
 as in Manfred, it gave forth a work of dramatic 
 intensity, or as in some of Browning's poems it 
 produced drama in a fragmentary form of 
 romance and passion. On great lines, and for 
 the reader who is not limited to dramatic in- 
 terests, it remains true that Shakespeare, sup- 
 plemented by a play here and there, suffices for 
 dramatic reading, and after him Milton and 
 Shelley, in their choral dramas, are the great 
 masters in English of the truth that drama can 
 put forth by poetic imagination. 
 
 The approach to foreign drama, except the 
 Greek, is best made by the way of comedy, 
 especially by Moliere and Goldoni. Foreign 
 tragedy, whether French, German, or Italian, is 
 very remote from the reader. Spanish drama, a 
 form intrinsically as interesting in many ways 
 
 97
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 as the Greek and the Shakespearian and making 
 with them a third definite form of this art in its 
 supreme practise, is still more remote from the 
 English reader and requires for its appreciation 
 great cultural preparation and much plasticity 
 in the literary habits of the mind. Such read- 
 ing as Calderon or the classic French drama or 
 even Goethe and Schiller is for scholars. 
 Foreign drama may now be more profitably 
 approached by the contemporary forms, Scan- 
 dinavian, German, French and Italian, than by 
 its older historic examples. These plays are 
 filled with a modern spirit that is becoming 
 more and more cosmopolitan and pervasive, 
 even among English-speaking people; the sub- 
 stance of them is not narrowly national, but 
 universal in interest and in presentation; and 
 the needful critical aids to assist the reader are 
 plentiful and accessible. 
 
 The drama, as an artistic form, is of course 
 much more complex than has been indicated; 
 other things besides literature enter into it in 
 its theatrical representation, and the appre- 
 ciation of it as a spectacle involves other prepa- 
 ration and rests on other principles in addition 
 to what belongs to it as literature. How great 
 
 98
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 a part the scenic and choral arrangement 
 played in the Greek drama has been already 
 pointed out, and in the modern drama the im- 
 portance of the theatrical elements is often such 
 that as an art of the stage the play need not be 
 literature at all. The scant resources of the 
 Elizabethan stage threw a heavier burden on 
 the literature of the text and brought the purely 
 mental reproduction of life to the fore; and the 
 power of Shakespeare as a writer is due to the 
 genius he had for this mental representation of 
 life without much aid from material conditions. 
 It follows from this that his drama when read 
 merely and not enacted yields a vision and a 
 realization of life beyond that of theatrical 
 writers or playwrights generally, so vivid and 
 intense as to set the plays apart, not as closet 
 dramas so-called to be read in the study, but 
 as literature which gives up its full contents to 
 the eye of the mind unaided by the scene. 
 Many, indeed, believe, as Lamb did, that such 
 private reading is more satisfactory than any 
 public representation, inasmuch as the presen- 
 tation on the stage falls short of the scene and 
 also of the actors that the imagination of the 
 reader supplies. The stage craft of Shakespeare 
 
 99
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 was of great assistance to him in casting 
 the action, in handling its development and in 
 suggesting modes of arrangement and display; 
 but his poetic genius, achieving a vivid repre- 
 sentation of life by purely mental means, made 
 the plays great literature. The function of 
 dramatic poetry, in comparison with epic poetry 
 which presents life socially and by a method 
 of extension, is to set life forth individually and 
 by a method of intension; the drama is an 
 intensive rendering of life by individual ex- 
 amples of human fortune which compress the 
 truth of life into a brief abstract. Poetic 
 dramatic genius by its powers of ideality con- 
 denses such general truth the law of life - 
 whether in action or character, and the greater 
 the condensation the more brilliant and intense 
 is the effect. Dramatic poetry involves the 
 presentation of life in its supreme moments, its 
 surpassing characters and its greatest problems, 
 because it is in these that the intensity it seeks 
 resides and the truth it would express is most 
 vividly condensed. In tragedy, especially, the 
 most obstinate evil, the most mysterious dis- 
 pensations, the darkest moral problems, are set 
 forth; what life contains of pessimism and 
 
 100
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 ignorance is here heaped up; the theme indeed 
 is often such an outbreak of passion, such crime 
 or sacrilege, such violation as is seldom treated 
 except in tragedy, and dramatic poetry has a 
 certain peculiar power to treat such tales and 
 characters as phenomena of life and passion 
 still within the pale of understanding, and even 
 of sympathy, because human. The tragic imag- 
 ination, when morbid and exclusive, seeks such 
 themes; and if, as in Greece, they exist in the 
 great tradition of the race, they are deeply 
 meditated, as in the stories of (Edipus, Phaedra 
 and the Orestean trilogy. In modern tragedy 
 one sups on horrors quite as much as in the 
 palace of the Atridae, though with a difference; 
 yet it is the same presence of the terrible in hu- 
 man fate, of the issue of evil in sacrifice, expia- 
 tion, suffering for the innocent and tragic death 
 for the guilty, it is the pity of it even in lives of 
 wrongful passion, that loads the theme in the 
 great English plays as in the old Greek ex- 
 amples. If the great English themes as sym- 
 bols of life seem nearer to reality in the 
 deepest consciousness of modern times, the 
 Greek themes in their own age were nearer to 
 that consciousness in the antique; the supreme 
 
 101
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 crises of action and passion, of man doing and 
 suffering, do not change in substance but in 
 the kind of interest taken in them and the in- 
 terpretation given. Tragic themes are not in- 
 stances of crime but instances of nature; it is 
 because they are so regarded that they are 
 tolerated by the contemplating mind; the will 
 and responsibility of the spectator are not 
 roused because there is no possibility of his 
 interference, and he is not called on to give 
 judgment or to correct, but only to observe, to 
 know. This detachment from the practical 
 sphere is a condition of tragic pleasure, which 
 lies largely in the illumination of life given, in 
 mere knowledge; in the antique world it was 
 predominantly moral and religious knowledge; 
 in the modern world it is perhaps mainly psycho- 
 logical and philosophic knowledge. Philosophy, 
 therefore, in a special way belongs to dramatic 
 poetry and is its natural ally in deepening 
 appreciation of it, as biography is of lyrical and 
 history of narrative poetry. The drama ad- 
 dresses the reason, and endeavors to enlighten 
 the understanding with regard to the law of 
 human destiny; it is essentially philosophical, 
 disclosing the abstract of truth, the constitution 
 
 102
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 of the human world, the law of character and 
 event. It wears this aspect the more plainly in 
 proportion as it is great, more simply repre- 
 sentative, more profoundly interpretative; and 
 tragedy holds the first place in it because the 
 problems there probed engage philosophical in- 
 terest most deeply. 
 
 Tragedy, however, does not monopolize the 
 philosophical meaning of dramatic poetry. In 
 Shelley's choral drama, such as the Prometheus 
 Unbound, the intellectual abstraction is the 
 fundamental substance of the poem; the charac- 
 ters are themselves allegorical and in their 
 mythical personality stand for principles of life, 
 while the action itself is a symbol of human 
 progress. The play is merely a pictorial woof 
 of music and light, a fleeting vision of lovely 
 scenes, unless its intellectual element of ethical 
 thought be clearly grasped to give it meaning; 
 and it is in this significance to the mind, a 
 philosophical significance, that the play becomes 
 great, the only great play of the English genius 
 in poetry in modern times. It is a reconcilia- 
 tion play, conceived in Shakespeare's last man- 
 ner and as such is cognate to The Tempest as 
 well as by its lyricism. The division of the 
 
 103
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 thought from the characters is, perhaps, too 
 much felt, the philosophy is too explicit and 
 separable; but the theme, transforming the 
 Revolution into the Millennium, is a great 
 argument set forth dramatically and addressed 
 to the reason. The most interesting drama, 
 however, apart from tragedy, is that in which 
 life is set forth with the effect of a dream, of a 
 life that might be, of which the best examples 
 in English are the plays of Shakespeare's middle 
 period and his last romances. They are charac- 
 terized by a predominant lyricism in the treat- 
 ment. The lyrical and epical elements in his 
 genius were the first to come to maturity; in the 
 English and Roman plays the epical element is 
 plain, and the lyrical element appears in the 
 early comedies, reaching its greatest purity and 
 height in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The 
 dream atmosphere of this play gives, perhaps, 
 the type; but something of the same quality is 
 in Love's Labour's Lost, at the beginning of his 
 career, and is the source of the profound fas- 
 cination of such ripe comedies as Twelfth Night, 
 As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice. 
 The dramatic method is the same here as always, 
 - an intensive representation of life by indi- 
 
 104
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 vidual examples; but here it is the romance of 
 life in its felicities that is set forth, with only 
 such saddening as more endears it. In the 
 three last romances, Cymbeline, A Winter's 
 Tale and The Tempest, the dream is still the 
 atmosphere of the play, but the felicity is en- 
 hanced by the darker elements that enter into 
 the themes, and the hand that wrote these 
 dramas is one that had been dipped deep in 
 tragedy. They are the climax of dramatic art 
 in England as an art that gives pleasure to the 
 mind and also renders up wisdom. In other 
 authors, too, it is the lyrical treatment of life in 
 this dreamful way that most attracts the reader; 
 in Jonson, in Beaumont and Fletcher, in Milton's 
 Comus, the pastoral and masque elements are 
 those on which the memory most dwells. After 
 tragedy this lyrical drama of Shelley, Shakes- 
 peare and Milton must be reckoned the greatest 
 achievement in English, and the human philos- 
 ophy which it gives out in forms of beauty is a 
 high-water mark of the wisdom that literature 
 reaches. 
 
 Poetry in its main forms, lyrical, narrative 
 and dramatic, has now been touched upon with 
 a view to suggest its nature, the way of approach 
 
 105
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 to it, and the spirit that should attend the reader. 
 It is obvious that the divisional marks are 
 terms of convenience; there are lyrical and 
 epical elements in drama, dramatic elements in 
 lyric and epic; poetry treats life as a whole, and 
 its power is integral, one power, whether put 
 forth lyrically, epically, or dramatically. Yet 
 it is true that lyrical poetry mainly exercises the 
 emotions; the epic discloses life in its extension 
 in the social sphere; the drama embodies life 
 intensively; and in each case severally, biog- 
 raphy, or the love of the author, history, or a 
 sense of the life of the race, and philosophy, or 
 an interpretation of human nature, are the 
 natural aids to appreciation in each kind. The 
 end of poetry is to illuminate life from within 
 the consciousness of the reader, to realize there 
 his own emotions, the scene of life in the world, 
 the constitution of passion and fate in man and 
 his circumstances, to make him acquainted 
 with the nature of man in him. Progress in 
 this knowledge is usually more rapid in poetry 
 than in prose, because of the condensation of 
 life achieved by poetry, the use of the economies 
 of art and the methods of reason in statement, 
 and the emotional vividness that belongs to all 
 
 106
 
 Dramatic Poetry 
 
 poetic modes. In a field so immense as poetic 
 literature presents, much must necessarily be 
 neglected; the safest guide is the reader's in- 
 stinct, the choice made by his own tempera- 
 ment and powers. The degree of appreciation 
 will necessarily vary from the least to the most 
 complete; but it need not be complete in order 
 to be useful. The greatest books are those in 
 which one grows the most and the longest. 
 The end being to know human life, what man 
 in his essence is, what he has been, what he is 
 capable of, there is no goal to the study; and the 
 further one proceeds in it, the more, perhaps, 
 he is burdened with the knowledge; but surely 
 the destiny of the mind, if man has any destiny, 
 is to lay this burden upon itself. 
 
 107
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 FICTION 
 
 * I S HE art of literature, when it works in 
 A prose, does not change its method from 
 that employed in poetry nor is its material 
 different. Prose makes a less rigorous demand 
 upon the reader's attention and ability; but the 
 action of the mind involved is the same as in 
 verse, the aims of study are the same and the 
 modes of appreciation are identical. Art, or 
 the universal form into which reason casts 
 experience by means of the imagination, con- 
 trols great works of prose as it rules great 
 poems; fiction stands at the head of prose be- 
 cause it is the sphere in which such art works 
 most freely and effectively; and in proportion 
 to the presence of such art is fiction great and 
 enduring. Poetry achieves the extreme of con- 
 densation of life and truth, and hence the appre- 
 ciation of it requires a mind naturally rapid and 
 strong in apprehension; a high-strung nature 
 
 108
 
 GOLDSMITH
 
 Fiction 
 
 finds poetry fitted to it ; but the reader generally, 
 less intense in mental application and concen- 
 tration, prefers prose as more adapted to the 
 normal movement of his mind. This choice 
 continues to operate even in prose, and the 
 effort of the mind is relaxed in proportion as 
 formative art is less present in the work and 
 what is told is set forth in its natural and raw 
 state of facts as they occur. Every nation has 
 tales, and primitive people possess a store of 
 folk-lore, but fiction as a special mode of litera- 
 ture develops somewhat late in civilization. 
 It has a literary ancestry, an historic evolution, 
 which can readily be studied, and in its origins 
 it is much mixed with poetry. In our own 
 time it has come to fill so large a portion of the 
 literary field as to be engrossing ; it is in a pecul- 
 iar sense the people's literature in our democra- 
 cies, characterized by popular education, by 
 home leisure, and by an extraordinary awaken- 
 ing of curiosity in large masses. It is a power- 
 ful means for the spread of information of all 
 kinds and for the propagation of ideas; all 
 knowledge is most interesting when given out 
 in the form of imagination, and the demand for 
 knowledge was never so great as now; it is alto- 
 
 109
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 gether natural that the novel, the most flexible 
 form of writing for imaginative propaganda, 
 should be the preferred modern form of litera- 
 ture. 
 
 If one searches for the occasion of fiction and 
 considers its wide range of topic and interest, 
 it would seem that no more satisfactory answer 
 can be given than mere human curiosity. In 
 response to this, all that is knowable now takes 
 on the form of the novel. In approaching the 
 field choice seems almost impossible, so varied 
 are the interests involved and all with many 
 claims to regard. The young mind, however, 
 has a native instinct of its own grounded in 
 human nature. The first interest of men is in 
 action, in the event, the thing which is done. 
 This is the interest of the boy, of the practical 
 man, of the man whose meditative and fuller 
 spiritual life is only begun. The type of fiction 
 of this sort is Robinson Crusoe. It is a tale of 
 the facts of life in a wonderfully interesting form, 
 and the literary life of thousands has begun 
 with it. The more exalted type is the novels 
 of Dumas, where in a romantic form the life of 
 action is set forth with the interest of vividness, 
 surprise and the fascination of adventure. 
 
 110
 
 Fiction 
 
 Nothing can be better than Dumas to arouse 
 in a boy the sense of the power of life, the 
 ambition of doing, the wonder of the things 
 that can be done, the whole charm and 
 marvel of the world of the deed. Romance is 
 at its highest in this field, and the awakening 
 influence of romance on the mind cannot be 
 overvalued; it opens out the roads of all the 
 earth and the seas, and gives the career of a 
 gallant will in meeting the unknown and finding 
 the hidden treasure of a man's destiny. Herod- 
 otus was in history the very type of such spirit 
 as this, and it made his history one of the great 
 books of the world. Travelers often show and 
 breed the spirit of their tales, and the heroes 
 are made of it from the voyage of the Argo to 
 the days of the search for the Pole. In imagi- 
 native literature Dumas is the great example, 
 and in the many volumes that bear his name 
 there is endless store of the most inspiriting 
 kind of such action. 
 
 The first advance is made when the mind is 
 no longer content with the action in itself, but 
 meditates it, and finds its true interest to lie in 
 what the act reveals of the character of the man 
 who performs it. In other words, character 
 
 111
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 is a higher interest than action, and supplants 
 it as the object of attention in a maturing 
 mind. Character is, in fact, a summary of 
 action and contains both the effect of past and 
 the promise of future acts; it is, as it were, 
 a brief abstract of action, its potentiality. Man 
 here comes into his rights as the leading interest 
 in the scene, independent of the events. Charac- 
 ter is necessarily ideal in literature; it is set 
 forth by its ruling passion, and in the beginning 
 is simple rather than complex, since its presen- 
 tation is limited to that class of action in which 
 its distinction resides; one reason of the effect- 
 iveness of character in its more antique or 
 primitive embodiments is this simplicity flow- 
 ing from the extreme ideality or abstractness 
 of the type. The Greek heroes share somewhat 
 in the trait of being by virtue of which the gods 
 are ideal, each having a function of his own, 
 being an Ajax, Patroclus, Orestes, Jason 
 Heracles, and hence marked out for his work. 
 Character is thus in its early forms action 
 viewed in one mode, as it were, and compacted 
 into human power, unified, individualized, per- 
 sonified. The act is of interest in itself still, 
 but it is of more interest as being the act
 
 Fiction 
 
 of Achilles or Ulysses and as declaring what 
 manner of men they were. Character is more 
 profound than action, and hence to a mature 
 mind is more engaging. This is especially 
 noticeable in those persons who are named 
 characters in our common speech, the usually 
 eccentric personalities who are peculiarly speci- 
 mens of human nature out of the ordinary, and 
 by their words or actions give a fresh, piquant, 
 or humorous impression. Without regard to 
 such exceptions, however, character awakes a 
 profound interest because in its types are 
 stored ideals of what men are, the forms cast 
 by the moral habits and the aspirations and 
 experiences of the race, the qualities consonantly 
 to be found within the limits of one personality, 
 the discords possible within the same range; 
 character is thus a compend of the results of 
 life, of its possibilities in the individual, of its 
 fusion in a single mold. In this stage charac- 
 ter is not divorced from action, but both are 
 present; the character is seen acting; the actions 
 however various are resumed in the character. 
 The type of such interest, of balance between 
 action and character such that nevertheless 
 the character rather than the action impresses 
 
 113
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 the mind and memory, is given in Sir Walter 
 Scott's novels, and the unique place that Scott 
 holds in English fiction is due to this firm grasp 
 of life in the form of character which is still 
 kept close to action. This is the trait by which 
 his art as a creator is so supreme, though the 
 power with which he seizes the reader also 
 owes much to the intrinsic nature of the charac- 
 ter displayed, to its being national in type 
 whether Scotch or English and showing that 
 nationality strongly and finely in essential traits, 
 to its being doubly presented as of the peasant 
 and the noble classes, and in each exemplified 
 with truth to the life of the one and the ideal 
 of the other, and also to its being inclusive in 
 its eccentric or abnormal instances of so much 
 that is plain human nature, so that one may say 
 indeed that no types are so universally true as 
 those which seem most peculiar in his pages, 
 such as the old antiquary, Norna or the saints 
 of the Covenant. Scott is the great master of 
 character; not that other English novelists have 
 not equaled him in such portrayal, but none 
 have created character upon such a scale, in 
 such profusion, with such social comprehensive- 
 ness, and at the same time with such unfailing 
 
 114
 
 Fiction 
 
 human reality. In his works one always finds 
 the substance is not the stream of events, how- 
 ever romantic and involved in mystery, but 
 man acting and suffering; not the plot, but the 
 character. There is a perennial attraction in 
 character that does not pertain to mere story; 
 and this mastery of character is the trait which 
 makes Scott to be so often re-read and to be a 
 favorite in later as well as in youthful years. 
 
 Character develops a new kind of interest 
 when attention is fastened, not on what it is, 
 but on how it came to be what it is. The inter- 
 nal life here comes to the fore; the evolution of 
 personality, a train of inward phenomena, is 
 substituted for a course of external events as 
 the subject of interest, however much events 
 may be mixed with the story. This study of 
 motivation and internal reaction marks the final 
 stage of the development of the novel in its 
 presentation of life and completes the circuit of 
 its sphere. Psychology, analysis, introspection, 
 characterize it, and it requires in the reader an 
 intellectual interest perhaps stronger than the 
 imaginative interest. The history of a soul, 
 rather as a phase of inward experience than of 
 action, is the focus of attention. The intro- 
 
 115
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 spective novel in the emotional sphere, the 
 novel of sentiment, is an early form of such 
 analysis and is illustrated in Richardson, but 
 in its higher and more complex examples the 
 psychological novel full-grown naturally allies 
 itself to some theory of morals, some abstract 
 element in religion or ethics, and sets forth life 
 as an education of the character in such a view. 
 The type, perhaps, in which the various con- 
 stituents are the most clear and at the same time 
 noble, is George Eliot's Romola, in which great 
 and conflicting ideals of life are presented 
 through the medium of the leading characters 
 by a psychological and largely introspective 
 treatment. Her interest in life was that of a 
 philosophical moralist, and her fiction showed 
 increasingly the analytical habit. The simpler 
 blends of character and action in her earlier 
 tales give place in her fully ripened work to a 
 wide and complex exposition of the nature of 
 her persons in which the element of thought 
 finally overweights the narrative. Just as dra- 
 matic poetry issues in a philosophical interest, 
 so the novel, as it develops power and grasps 
 life more profoundly and naturally, appeals 
 with greater directness to the intellect in its 
 
 116
 
 Fiction 
 
 effort to understand human life. It may de- 
 velop this intellectual quality in either of the 
 three forms of pure action, of synthetic or of 
 analytic character, but the quality is most 
 pronounced, pervasive and engrossing in the 
 last. In such writers as Henry James and 
 George Meredith it reaches a climax. Litera- 
 ture, moreover, must always be viewed his- 
 torically as obeying the general law of evolution 
 in society; its movement is constantly toward 
 a representation of the inward nature of life, 
 to bring out man's self-consciousness, to reveal 
 personality. The problems of personality are 
 those which finally engage the mature mind in a 
 highly developed literature, and the psychologi- 
 cal novel is the center where this study is most 
 active. This line of development is not peculiar 
 to fiction, but belongs to literature in general, 
 which tends more and more to become a con- 
 fessional of the soul's experience, a dissection 
 of life, a pursuit of the motives and reactions 
 of the inner world, of the moods and methods of 
 thought and passion in their intimate cells, 
 of all the secrets, in one word, of personality. 
 
 The interest of the novel being thus distributed 
 in these three general modes of action, charac- 
 
 117
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 ter in action, and personality for its own sake, 
 the story itself may be unfolded in any one of 
 many ways or by a blend of several, the chief 
 elements being plot, character, situation, dia- 
 logue, sentiment, and the like, variously com- 
 pounded according to the talent and purpose 
 of the writer. A greater emphasis on any one 
 of these elements gives a special quality to the 
 work and makes a particular appeal to some 
 one class of readers whose taste is for that 
 element. Whatever methods be employed, the 
 enduring worth of the novel in its English ex- 
 amples depends much on the success of the 
 writer in giving the scene of life as a whole, in 
 securing the illusion of a full world, or one that 
 at least is complete for the characters inhabit- 
 ing it. The perfection of this environing of 
 the characters with a world is seen in Shake- 
 speare's plays ; and in proportion as the novelists 
 achieve this effect, and at the same time obtain 
 human reality, they show the highest imagina- 
 tive power, true creative faculty. There is no 
 surer sign of greatness in a novel than this 
 large grasp of general life, the crowded stage, 
 the throng of affairs, the sense of a world of 
 men. It was thus that Dickens began to dis- 
 
 118
 
 Fiction 
 
 play his remarkable faculty in Pickwick Papers, 
 rendering the various face of English life and 
 manners in a series of loosely connected sketches. 
 Character and manners, seconded by genial 
 good nature and humorousness, make the per- 
 ennial attraction of that marvelous piece of 
 entertainment, which was the precursor of great 
 novels conceived on more rigorous lines of con- 
 struction and with more breadth and poignancy 
 of interest, but all alike in this power to render 
 life as a miscellaneous scene of human activity. 
 Scott similarly in his greatest tales never fails 
 to give largeness to his world and to fill it with 
 currents of social life, with events of high 
 interest and with a multitude of persons. 
 Thackeray in a narrower sphere of society 
 follows the same method in Vanity Fair, and 
 Fielding in Tom Jones. In all these authors 
 the hero counts for little; the particular tale of 
 individuals involved, the plot, the mere personal 
 story, however well constructed and interesting 
 that part of the work may be, is yet repre- 
 sented as a portion of the world only, a world 
 that embraces them in its larger being. In 
 David Copperfield the tale of Emily and that 
 of Agnes divide the interest, but they seem 
 
 119
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 episodes; it is the picture of life as a whole that 
 dwells in the memory. In this larger world it 
 may be character and manners or the interplay 
 of events, it may be superficial movement, as 
 in the picaresque novel generally, or it may be 
 profound social movement, as in the greater 
 historical novels, that holds the front place; 
 but whatever the method, the substance is of 
 the world of men. 
 
 The highest degree of universality and in- 
 clusiveness is reached in Cervantes 's Don 
 Quixote, which while remaining a tale of 
 individuals sums up the national scene, the 
 elements of Spain, its genius, its history, and 
 also gives through this the sense of human life 
 in the broad, the truth of human nature as it 
 is everywhere. Don Quixote is the greatest of 
 all novels because singly it contains so large a 
 world. In lesser novels of similar type the 
 world set forth does not lose unity, it does not 
 seem partial, but yet it comprehends only some 
 portion of the scene, as in the provincial novel 
 generally, or some strip of time, as in the his- 
 torical novel. The breadth of the theme makes 
 a large part of the intrinsic value of such novels, 
 which offer an embodiment, for example, of 
 
 120
 
 Fiction 
 
 present life, or a panorama of an epoch, or a 
 rehabilitation of an antique age. Irish tales 
 are good in proportion as they give the Irish 
 spirit and environment. Reade's The Cloister 
 and the Hearth is a great historical novel be- 
 cause of its breadth of treatment, and Kingsley's 
 Hypatia excels because of its comprehensive- 
 ness, its being a summary of one moment of 
 ancient life intensely imagined. In all these 
 novels there is a theme, which in a certain sense 
 exceeds and contains the personal theme, a 
 theme of time, of Alexandria, of the Middle 
 Ages, of Ireland. It is not at all essential that 
 this outer theme should be rendered with his- 
 torical accuracy or be true in its details in the 
 sense of fact. What is necessary is that an 
 illusion of truth should be arrived at by fidelity 
 to the general traits of the city, the age, or the 
 land, so that the world of the story shall be 
 representative of what was. One reason of the 
 facility with which the historical novel is written 
 and received is because this outer theme, Rome 
 or Italy or France, is in itself great, and an 
 undying interest of powerful fascination belongs 
 to it independent of the particular tale that 
 may be narrated as a personal history within
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 its limits. Such a theme naturally induces a 
 series, the Jacobite novels of Scott, the Indian 
 and sea-tales of Cooper; each particular story 
 is but one product of it, and no author exhausts 
 it though he may exhaust his own power of 
 dealing w r ith it. The theme, the world of men 
 involved, diminishes in importance in propor- 
 tion as the particular tale makes head and 
 absorbs attention; but, in general, great novelists 
 give the scene of the world, the picture of life, 
 whether in a contemporary or historical range, 
 the first place in their representation. This 
 is true without reference to the scale of that 
 world; it is, for example, the method of Gold- 
 smith in The Vicar of Wakefield. The novel is 
 indeed the form of literary art best adapted to 
 representing man as a social being and to setting 
 forth in imagination social phenomena; this is 
 one reason, also, why its evolution is so late in 
 the history of literature. 
 
 The art of literature in passing into the novel 
 does not lose its function of presenting general 
 truth. That is still its main aim. The neces- 
 sity of doing so, in fact, underlies all that has 
 been said of the part taken in the novel by the 
 scene of life, the illusion that it must give of a 
 
 122
 
 Fiction 
 
 world, whether in the sphere of manners or 
 history, not actual but containing the general 
 reality of human events in a particular time or 
 country and of human nature in its essential 
 traits. There is an epical element, as is plain, 
 in the description which fiction of the sort that 
 has been treated gives of life. When the 
 social theme is less prominently brought for- 
 ward and the particular story of a few indi- 
 viduals enlists attention for its own sake, then 
 the novel avails itself of the same resources 
 used in dramatic art. It represents the general 
 law of life and the constitution of human nature 
 by means of examples, and the worth of the 
 novel depends, just as in a play, on the sim- 
 plicity, clearness and profundity with which 
 it accomplishes the task. There is no material 
 difference between the novel and the drama 
 so far as the handling of plot, situation and 
 dialogue are concerned, except that in a novel 
 the writer has a free hand and can use more 
 means of displaying his characters and their 
 career. In George Eliot's Adam Bede, for 
 example, there is, it is true, a background of 
 country and clerical life and of religious agita- 
 tion; but the story is mainly conducted in the 
 
 123
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 fortunes of a few individuals placed in the 
 foreground. It is a tragic history that is re- 
 lated. Its profound interest is its life interest, 
 the illustration it gives of human events, the 
 light it throws on principles of conduct, belief, 
 the operation of wrong, facts of passion, theories 
 of sin and salvation and the like. The story 
 exists and was written for the sake of its teach- 
 ing power; and this is more manifest than in 
 the drama because in the medium of prose the 
 teaching can be more plainly brought out and 
 emphasized. Such novels are dramatic in their 
 interest; they cover the same tracts of life as 
 the drama, whether in comedy or tragedy, and 
 the mode of mental approach to them is the 
 same, except that the novelist makes under- 
 standing of his theme more easy for the reader 
 by the greater fulness of the presentation and 
 by the comment that, whether explicit or im- 
 plicit, is always to be found in the text. It may 
 be said, indeed, that there is no form of poetic 
 truth that the novel in one way or another may 
 not present, usually but not always with less 
 intensity; the analysis of the novel discloses the 
 same substance as poetry, the same funda- 
 mental human life which is the matter of all 
 
 124
 
 Fiction 
 
 literature. Symbolical truth is that which is, 
 perhaps, thought of as most characteristic of 
 poetry; but it exists in the novel quite as plainly 
 and in its most apparent forms. Bunyan's 
 Pilgrim's Progress is a work of fiction which 
 has all its meaning in the spiritual truth which 
 is there set forth in allegory, and it is one of the 
 most widely distributed of English books. The 
 type of the method, is, however, rather to be 
 found in Hawthorne. In his short romantic 
 tales it is commonly used, as, for example, in 
 Rappaccini's Daughter and The Artist of the 
 Beautiful, where the reader who does not in- 
 terpret the symbols misses the meaning. The 
 Scarlet Letter is a still more striking example 
 of the symbolic representation of life; the back- 
 ground of the Puritan world is but slightly 
 indicated by the romancer, but he blazes forth 
 its essence by a series of picturesque scenes 
 that are like a sign language of the imagination. 
 The same author's Marble Faun pursues the 
 same method; the world involved is but lamely 
 made out, and so inadequately that even Dona- 
 tello seems an alien in it, like the rest, but none 
 the less a theory of sin is symbolized by means 
 of it with a refinement and intimacy such that 
 
 125
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 one seems rather to be looking at pictures and 
 statues than listening to a tale of events. To 
 render life by symbols of landscape and idyllic 
 situations belongs peculiarly to poetry, but in 
 the Greek novel it is found as charmingly set 
 forth as in verse, and the pastoral enters as an 
 element into much prose fiction in various forms. 
 In Watts-Dunton's Aylwin characteristically 
 poetic modes are prevailingly employed to 
 render gypsy nature. So near is romance to 
 poetry that it often makes the distinct poetic 
 appeal, as, to take a great instance, in Black- 
 more's Lorna Doone. The lyric, dramatic and 
 epic elements, being fundamental in literature, 
 are all to be found in prose fiction, and the 
 art employed is the same creative imagination 
 constructing an illusory world in order to set 
 forth the general truth of human life. 
 
 Fiction, therefore, in its great examples ap- 
 proaches poetry because it uses the same ma- 
 terial to the same ends and proceeds by the 
 same method of art, universalizing life and 
 formulating it; but it differs from poetry because 
 it is less delicate in the selection of its material, 
 less exacting of a high degree of art in dealing 
 with it, and directed to utilities that poetry 
 
 126
 
 Fiction 
 
 ignores. The art of fiction is two-faced; it is 
 both a fine and a useful art; and if on the one 
 hand in works of great genius it comes nigh to 
 the supreme masters of the drama, on the other 
 extreme it neighbors that universal human 
 service of which the modern name is journalism, 
 the literature of information, propagand- 
 ism, world-wide curiosity, discussion, specu- 
 lation, of which it may be said more truly than 
 of any other form of writing that nothing human 
 is alien to it. Journalism is the most catholic 
 form of the written word. The novel is the next 
 most embracing, and its flexibility as a social 
 instrument under present conditions has given 
 it the commanding practical place which it 
 holds among readers. It is by the novel that 
 the life-knowledge of modern peoples is most 
 fully realized to themselves, in every degree of the 
 scale of society, in popular apprehension. This 
 great change was largely effected by the advent 
 of democracy. In the old literature the national 
 tradition and morality were concentrated in the 
 history, real or imaginary, of the aristocratic 
 class with but slight popular elements, and this 
 was handed down in poetry and chronicle and 
 tale; but with the coming of modern democracy 
 
 127
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 the popular life itself came into the field of 
 interest, and literature giving more and more 
 attention to the citizen life ended by assigning to 
 the common lot of men the place which has 
 formerly been held by the aristocracy. The 
 democratizing of literature which began with 
 Richardson and Fielding, in the novel, and with 
 Burns and Wordsworth, in poetry, resulted in 
 the last century in England in a representation 
 of life in all its classes, provinces, and interests, 
 such as no civilization had ever before placed 
 on record about itself. The reading class was 
 democratic, and men like to read about them- 
 selves, to see their own lives reflected, their 
 opinions expressed, and their ideals defined; they 
 also desire information about the way other 
 men live whose modes of behavior and thought, 
 though they may be members of the same 
 society, are not well or intimately known; a 
 public thus came into existence for which tin* 
 minute and detailed portrayal of all sorts and 
 conditions of Englishmen, and of every nook 
 of English ground, was interesting. The field 
 of human life covered by the novel became 
 immense in variety and comprehensiveness. 
 There were certain preferred tastes inherent in 
 
 128
 
 Fiction 
 
 English society, and the English novel showed 
 these preferences ; the writers, too, could deal 
 individually only with such phases of life as 
 they knew; the novel remained socially aris- 
 tocratic and middle-class, with an episodic 
 attention to the lower state of society, but it 
 faithfully reflected the consciousness of the 
 English people, and the growth of the democ- 
 racy is shown in the ever increasing emergence 
 of the literature of the least favored, the stricken 
 and abandoned class. Dickens was the leader 
 and marks the powerful entrance of philan- 
 thropy into the novel, and the portraiture of 
 the lower class by him and others perhaps made 
 up in genius what it lacked in quantity. The 
 English, however, are not a frank race, and 
 various as their picture of life is in the novel, 
 it is still discreet and controlled. France, in 
 the representation of life given by her novelists, 
 exceeded the English in the comprehensive ful- 
 ness of the portrayal; both Balzac and Zola 
 attempted a survey of life more systematic and 
 complete than any single English author con- 
 ceived, and the French novel surpasses the 
 English as an ample expression of human 
 nature in all social degrees and conditions. 
 
 129
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 There was an advantage in the concentration 
 of the national tradition and morality in the 
 old literature which was especially favorable 
 to poetry; on the other hand the dispersion of 
 interest by the democracy through all classes 
 of society and in all parts of the national body 
 creates a stronger social bond, develops hu- 
 manitarianism and is vastly more informing to 
 the mind. The exposure of human conditions 
 accomplished by the novel is a powerful ele- 
 ment in social progress. 
 
 The expansion of the historical consciousness 
 of modern society was an element hardly less 
 important than the democratization of fiction as 
 an influence on the development of the novel. 
 What is loosely termed the Gothic revival with 
 its resuscitation of the mediaeval age and its 
 discovery of the primitive poetry of the North, 
 and the Hellenic revival with its reinvigoration 
 of Latin studies and its discovery of archaeology 
 in the South, opened between them the whole 
 past of Europe through its entire extent, while 
 the developing contact of England with the East 
 brought with it the fiction of the Orient as well 
 as its poetry. History in many forms was 
 pursued in order to unveil the past and the 
 
 130
 
 Fiction 
 
 distant, and it laid open new material for the 
 novelist; as soon as Scott had so brilliantly 
 shown that history was most fascinating in the 
 form of imaginative romance, the novel entered 
 upon its career of recreating the past with 
 extraordinary vigor, and it has found in this 
 field a scope and diversity that make the his- 
 torical novel perhaps the preferred form of the 
 art. The history of the world has been re- 
 written in the last century as fiction; even 
 what is most recondite and obscure, and belongs 
 to the world of the learned, has been clothed 
 with color and vitality as if contemporary, in 
 the tales of Roman Africa, Egypt and Byzan- 
 tium in which the French especially excel. 
 In the more barbarous parts of history, such as 
 the East of Europe, native writers have recon- 
 structed the past and made it available for 
 other nations. The reader of the historical 
 novel, in fact, without effort commands an 
 intelligent knowledge of the history of the 
 European world and its antecedent classical 
 sources such as would not have been possible 
 even to a scholar in the last age. 
 
 The novel thus contains a vast fund of in- 
 formation which it diffuses. It is a teaching 
 
 131
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 power of immense efficiency, and still more 
 useful for the spread of ideas than for the 
 diffusion of facts. It has developed a power 
 of propagandism which has previously been 
 found mainly in eloquent discourse. The type 
 of such use of the novel is Mrs. Stowe's Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin. In a lower form it is constantly 
 employed as an instrument of discussion. A 
 good example is Bronte's Jane Eyre, in which 
 a moral situation is presented in conflict with 
 human law. Every cause finds in the novel a 
 mode of presenting the facts, and advocating 
 the ideas, which it is especially concerned to 
 make known. One of the most precious of 
 human rights, the right to be heard, is prac- 
 tically secured by the wide-spread and habitual 
 employment of fiction as a public forum. All 
 knowledge gains by being put into the form of 
 a tale; it travels faster, it enters the mind more 
 vividly, it enlists the emotions more powerfully. 
 The power of propaganda is one of the chief 
 traits of the novel as a social force. The novel, 
 moreover, vivifies intellectual interest of all 
 kinds. It follows, for example, in the wake of 
 scientific discovery, of exploration, of mere 
 speculation, and forthwith builds a tale on the 
 
 132
 
 Fiction 
 
 new ground. The most recent knowledge of for- 
 eign lands, wars, industrial adventure, commer- 
 cial progress, social experiment, is immediately 
 popularized in this form. Every community, 
 every employment of men, every idea is gathered 
 in this drag-net of the time ; the novel has become 
 the epitome of the modern world. 
 
 In the case of a form of literature so variously 
 characterized, so miscellaneously reproductive 
 of experience and in its mass hardly to be 
 divided from life itself, the reader finds himself 
 bewildered and choice is difficult. The literary 
 principle of worth is plain, but other values 
 enter in, and disturb and deflect the decision of 
 the mind. The utilities of reading are so 
 many, and in some cases so attractive, that the 
 confinement of choice by the principle of art 
 is often felt to be a hardship and to result in 
 substantial loss. To state the principle broadly, 
 fiction as an art has worth in proportion to the 
 fulness of its representation, to the arc of life 
 it includes -within a single work, where the 
 treatment is extensive in method, or to the 
 intensity of its representation, to the power of 
 life it includes, when the treatment is intensive. 
 The more of life, in extension or intension, 
 
 133
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 that any book has, the greater is the book. This 
 is the general principle, true of all literature, 
 because the literary art has for its end to con- 
 centrate life and truth by the use of the imagina- 
 tion in examples that are finally interpreted by 
 the mind, consciously or unconsciously, as 
 universal symbols. Those novels are highest 
 in literary interest which accomplish this pur- 
 pose with most fulness. Don Quixote has 
 already been cited as the type of such greatness 
 and rank; and, in general, the sign of fulness 
 of meaning in the extensive sense is, as has been 
 said, the presence in the novel of the great 
 scene of life. Ideal literature, greatly inclusive 
 of life and character, holds the first place in 
 fiction as in poetry. 
 
 The English novel of itself yields some 
 guidance. It is, perhaps the purest growth of 
 English literary genius, that in which native 
 power is most unmixed with foreign elements. 
 English poetic genius is largely indebted to 
 foreign grafts, to the continental mediums of 
 the old tradition and to that tradition in its 
 antique sources. English poetry cannot be very 
 intelligently understood except by a classically 
 educated mind, and its creators directly or in- 
 
 134
 
 Fiction 
 
 directly were bred of the South of Europe and 
 heirs of the Mediterranean. With English fic- 
 tion the case is different. Character has always 
 held a favored place in the minds of the English ; 
 whether in the form of practical action or of 
 moral precept a prime value has been placed 
 upon it; the English mind is prepossessed with 
 the moral meaning of life, with its practical 
 issues, with its ethical reality. Reality, too, in 
 its obvious forms of fact, event, fixed trait, is a 
 large ingredient in the interest the English take 
 in life; they are attached to the soil and to the 
 characters that grow out of it, to human nature 
 as modified and modeled by it, to the strength 
 of life that thrives there. English life, in the 
 home-bred, high-flavored, obvious form was the 
 subject of the English novel from the first 
 moment of its greatness, and a predominant 
 interest in character controlled it. The tradi- 
 tion of Fielding was never lost; the handling 
 of genuine human events for the display of 
 character, and both in close neighborhood with 
 the soil, is characteristic of the English novel 
 in the great line of its development. It followed 
 from this that the novel entered easily into 
 national literature. What makes literature 
 
 135
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 national is its embodiment of the national 
 tradition and the national morality; it is plain 
 at a glance that Fielding and Scott accom- 
 plished this with great power, and Dickens and 
 Thackeray likewise in their turn; in these four 
 writers their countrymen are presented with 
 extraordinary fidelity in the scene of their life 
 and with reality. It is the life of England and 
 of Englishmen, of Scotland and of Scotchmen, 
 that is read in these books; and the minor 
 novelists, Goldsmith, Smollett, Sterne, Austen, 
 Bronte, supplement the great masters with a 
 picture of life similarly English-bred. The 
 work of George Eliot and Kingsley is most 
 interesting, and is either great or approaches 
 greatness, in proportion as it adds to the stream 
 of national tradition, in the scene of English life, 
 and of national morality, in the display of man- 
 ners and ideals of plain English mold. The 
 reader who is seeking the substance of life in 
 the novel should keep close to this great tra- 
 dition of English life in the books where it is 
 most vividly put forth and is felt to be most 
 national. A national literature is always great, 
 because it contains the ideal form of the nation 
 reminiscently beheld. Those English novels 
 
 136
 
 Fiction 
 
 have the most worth in which life and character 
 are most nationally portrayed with breadth, 
 reality, and affection ; they are found in the line 
 of the standard tradition. 
 
 What makes literature standard is that it 
 permanently embodies the national conscious- 
 ness in its historic forms as each ceases to be 
 contemporary and passes into memory. Stand- 
 ard literature is consequently always partially 
 out-of-date and falls to the scholar or to the 
 reader who desires to realize the past. It often 
 happens, however, that standard literature long 
 retains a living relation to successive genera- 
 tions by virtue of its containing some element 
 that does not grow out of date, and literature 
 is great in proportion as it contains this prin- 
 ciple of life. Achilles and Ulysses, for example, 
 continued through ages to be real and nigh to 
 the Greek consciousness of life. The novel, 
 inasmuch as it is more mixed with contemporary 
 and transitory elements than poetry, passes 
 more quickly into the past; but the standard 
 English novel still retains many characters and 
 much action that are as contemporary to our 
 minds as when the story was originally written. 
 A man, nevertheless, must live and die with his 
 
 137
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 own generation, and the literature that is really 
 out of date need not greatly concern him, ex- 
 cept so far as he desires to be informed about 
 the past of his people and their writers. 
 
 A second guiding principle in the field of the 
 novel may be found in the power it has to ex- 
 pand the mind and interests of the reader. The 
 office of the novel in expanding knowledge, in 
 making the world known to itself in all parts, 
 has been touched on; in the individual case the 
 reader may be guided in his choice in propor- 
 tion as he finds the material and power of the 
 writer working this effect in himself. This 
 expansion of the mind is most valuable when it 
 takes place in the world of humanity at large 
 so that the reader becomes better informed 
 with regard to the common lot of mankind and 
 is thereby made more humane, more fully man, 
 more sympathetically at one with his fellows. 
 Perhaps the greatest humanitarian novel is 
 Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, both by the scope 
 of its scene and action and by the ideas that 
 shape and create the story. In a broader way 
 the Russian novel, taken in its whole career, 
 gives a revelation of the lot of mankind which 
 is to the reader like the discovery of a new land, 
 
 138
 
 Fiction 
 
 and in connection with it stand humanitarian 
 ideas closely joined; the expansion both of 
 knowledge and of sympathy is most serviceable 
 and the literary type of the Russian novel is 
 itself high both for plot, character and passion. 
 The power of expansion, however, does not 
 reside only in foreign novels or depend on a new 
 and distant scene or a strange mode of life. 
 Any great experience expands the mind; and, 
 in a secondary way, to read of a great experience 
 has the same effect. The experience of a great 
 love is the most transforming power in life, and 
 hence no type of story is so constant, so sure 
 of interest, or so valuable. This is the fascina- 
 tion of Lorna Doone, and of many another tale. 
 The experience of a great repentance makes the 
 attraction of The Scarlet Letter. The great 
 novels of tragedy and passion have their power 
 over the reader in the sense of this experience, 
 which he lives through in imagination and takes 
 partially at least to himself. If the mind 
 expands either in information and sympathy, 
 leading to a fuller comprehension of the com- 
 mon lot, or in realizing the great experiences of 
 life, the reader may well be assured that he is 
 in a right path. 
 
 139
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 A third working principle, and one of the 
 widest application, is recreation. Fiction is 
 the home of mental leisure; and nowhere is the 
 fundamental aim of literature, the will to please, 
 pursued so purely and with such unrestricted 
 freedom. Men take their recreation variously, 
 and no rule can be laid down. Some enjoy 
 reading about themselves and their neighbors 
 and seeing life as they know it, in a book. The 
 more common way is to desire a change of scene, 
 a new environment and a tale that shall take 
 us out of ourselves. The presence of excite- 
 ment in the story is the surest means of caus- 
 ing absorption of interest and securing that 
 release from the every-day world which is sought, 
 a break in the monotony of life and affairs, or 
 rest from its overtaxing business; and in the 
 present time often the w r ish is to escape from 
 the world of thought. The great hold of the 
 novel of adventure on the public is due to such 
 desires; it is action that is wanted, or character 
 which puts all of itself into deeds and is scarcely 
 known except as it acts. This is the simplest 
 form of fiction and makes the least demand 
 upon the reader, while it allows him to lead in 
 fancy and sympathy a life which is stirring and 
 
 140
 
 Fiction 
 
 at the same time irresponsible. The novel of 
 adventure holds the first place in the literature 
 of recreation and is to be found wherever tales 
 are told. It has the advantage of always hav- 
 ing a story to tell; it blends with the great 
 events and famous personages of history and 
 also with the unknown on sea and land, with 
 lonely peril, with villainy of every kind; it taxes 
 human energy and resource to the utmost, and 
 appeals to that love of the heroic which is the 
 most deep-seated of the noble instincts of man. 
 It is not surprising that it should always have 
 been the prime element in fiction as it was in 
 poetry, the literature of the deed done in danger, 
 whether for war or love or in the contest with 
 the elements, the story of man's gallantry, trial 
 and rescue in every race and under every sky. 
 To read it is to return to the youth of the world 
 and of life, to dip in action and to forget, for 
 the dream of action is the most complete of 
 dreams; it "covers one all over, thoughts and 
 all," like Sancho's sleep. Such romance, too, 
 recreates the vigor and cheerfulness of life, as it 
 stimulates youthful energy; it is refreshing, not 
 merely by change, but by its electrical charging 
 of the original instincts of man and the excite- 
 
 141
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 ment it imparts to them. Romance believes in 
 man and in life, as youth does, and develops 
 positive power, assertion and daring in the 
 temperament that it imbues; it repairs the waste 
 of faith and hope and resolution, as poetry does, 
 and gives back to instinct what thought has 
 taken from its power. The war sagas of old, 
 the minstrel's tale in the baron's hall, the 
 episodes and cycles of chivalry were such a 
 reinvigoration in primitive days, and modern 
 romance in its infinitely varied forms, from 
 peril by sea and land to peril for a faith, a 
 crown or a cause, is the lineal descendant of 
 these and serves in modern life a like need. 
 It is that part of literature where impulse has 
 the largest play; and it gives freedom of move- 
 ment and a life in the imagination to impulses 
 that life confines; it enlarges life and provides 
 that supplement to reality which human nature 
 requires for its wholeness. The inexhaustible 
 demand for it shows that it is grounded on a 
 real need. 
 
 The tale of adventure, in every period of 
 literature, has been thus highly prized as a 
 form of recreation. It blends naturally with 
 the tale of mystery, or the wonder-tale, which 
 
 142
 
 Fiction 
 
 perhaps holds the second place in general 
 favor. In its form of pure marvel the treasure- 
 house of this sort of literature is The Arabian 
 Nights. They suggest childhood to us, and 
 the childhood of a race also, but the experience 
 of a mature and old race is curiously mixed with 
 the picture of life they represent. English 
 literature is rich in translations, adaptations 
 and imitations of this oriental play of fancy, 
 actual manners and wisdom; they make an 
 interesting episode in the history of the English 
 genius so eagerly assimilative of every foreign 
 strain and closely in contact with the Oriental 
 people. Pure marvel, however, is too baseless 
 a fabric for the English temperament, and the 
 tale of mystery in the history of the English 
 novel has preferred the form in which the 
 mystery is solved. The episode of what is 
 called the Gothic romance, Walpole's Castle 
 of Otranto, with its successors by Mrs. Radcliffe 
 and Monk Lewis, introduced the wonder-story 
 that is solved, the supernatural there being 
 explained by mechanical means; it was followed 
 by the mystery tales of Poe, in the next genera- 
 tion, and the detective tale, but the explanation 
 involved in these is a weakness in interest. 
 
 143
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 The tales are discredited by the completeness 
 of the explanation, and it is only by the subtlety 
 of the reasoning involved and something ab- 
 normal in the circumstances, as in The Murders 
 in the Rue Morgue, that they maintain a lasting 
 life in literature. Mystery, as an enduring 
 theme, prefers its old lairs; in the cruder form 
 it requires the Rosicrucians, the secret orders 
 and problems, the theosophists of India, and 
 leaves something still doubtful and inscrutable 
 at the end; or it contents itself with the interest 
 of a well-concealed plot which finally discloses 
 its secret to the relief of the mind. Science and 
 the scientific spirit killed the wonder-story in 
 its supernatural and merely marvelous form, 
 its fairy and spirit play; nor has scientific 
 marvel in becoming itself the subject of imag- 
 ination at all filled the old place which it emptied 
 of meaning. The sea is the natural abode of 
 mystery, but the sea-novel has not been espe- 
 cially successful in retaining that element from 
 the days before the oceans were known and 
 charted. Mystery is, however, so inherent in 
 life, and it is so fascinating to men, that its 
 older forms will long retain imaginative power, 
 and in the greatest novels in which it takes 
 
 144
 
 Fiction 
 
 on a moral form, the mystery of man's life and 
 fates, it will remain imbedded, not merely as an 
 artifice of the plot, but as the substance of the 
 meaning. 
 
 Mystery and romance do not exhaust the 
 interest of the novel of recreation, which has 
 infinite variety; but they sufficiently illustrate 
 its nature. A third sort should, perhaps, be 
 noticed; the tale which by its representation of 
 quiet life and humble folks, like the pastoral 
 idyl of old days, acts rather as an anodyne. 
 Such stories of simplicity are numerous in 
 literature; they are, indeed, a perennial product 
 in all lands and times and often are wrought 
 with high and enduring art. The old country 
 life of England and America affords them as a 
 product of the native soil, and in the fiction of 
 the south of Europe they make one of the 
 purest elements of charm, as in the Sicilian and 
 Sardinian novel of the day. The life of people 
 near the soil, truly told in its human interests, 
 secures almost without effort some of the best 
 results of art by virtue of what it excludes and 
 the simplicity and truth of what remains. 
 Reality, such as this, mystery and romance are, 
 perhaps, the most important forms of recreation 
 
 145
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 afforded by the novel; they are, at least, charac- 
 teristic forms. A long catalogue would not 
 exhaust the varieties of interest here to be 
 found; the novel, as was said, is the epitome of 
 modern life. At last the question of approach 
 to the novel is one of individual liking, tempera- 
 ment, experience, inclination and necessities; 
 seriously read, the novel is a study of life; prac- 
 tically it is a mode of recreation, entertainment, 
 amusement. Desultory reading is one of the 
 most useful as well as pleasurable of literary 
 pursuits; and nowhere is it more in place or 
 more fruitful than in the novel. 
 
 146
 
 LAMB
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 OTHER PROSE FORMS 
 
 THE principal supports of imaginative 
 literature, as has been indicated, are 
 biography, history and philosophy. In pure 
 imagination ideality is the characteristic product 
 of the art, and measures its power and success; 
 next to it in literary interest is personality. 
 Those books, of whatever sort, that contain 
 personality in interesting forms best illustrate 
 life and are most attractive and enduring in 
 minor literature. Biography succeeds best 
 when the subject of it and the circumstances of 
 his life and the events of his career are de- 
 scribed with the closest approximation to imag- 
 inative methods, so that he lives and is seen 
 with the clear vitality of characters in a novel. 
 It was BoswelPs power to render character 
 by dialogue and anecdote that made his life of 
 Johnson a classic biography. There are few 
 lives that even approach that work as a truthful 
 
 147
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 picture of a man in his peculiar individuality. 
 Autobiography is generally a surer way to vivid 
 personality, and the great autobiographies are 
 sincere or unconscious confessions; of the first 
 type Franklin gave a memorable example, and 
 of the second Pepys' Diary is the immortal 
 instance. Letters are an autobiographic form 
 essentially, but they usually give a picture of 
 the society of the writer, and are often as in- 
 teresting for what they contain of the age as 
 for what they reveal of the person. Walpole's 
 letters are such a view of a period of English 
 culture; and the letters of Gray, Cowper and 
 Fitzgerald, each in his own social group, have 
 such a double value, social and personal. The 
 letters of Byron and of Shelley both contain 
 more of the personality of those poets than has 
 ever passed into any of the many lives of each 
 of them. In biography, generally, which avails 
 itself of letters, as one element of the story, the 
 reader is content with a diluted personality, 
 and finds the subject set forth, not directly, 
 but by narrative and criticism, with reflected 
 lights from the environment and social group of 
 the subject; but whatever is human, if it be 
 sincerely described, is so surely interesting that 
 
 148
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 biography has long been a large part of second- 
 ary literature. It has the advantage to some 
 minds, less capable of seizing truth abstractly 
 in ideal persons, of bringing to them something 
 that is known to be real. It has the felicity 
 also of illustrating the richness of life in refined 
 or capable natures, and of the excellence of men 
 and women in careers perhaps not of remark- 
 able distinction, but of great usefulness and 
 noble in service. That biography which is 
 rather a portion of history and sets forth sur- 
 passing character, such as Plutarch's Lives, is 
 not far below heroic poetry in its power of ideal 
 type; and the far larger portion which relates 
 the lives of men notable for their experience, 
 for individual talent or social service or for 
 romance in their fortunes, is not far removed 
 from character in fiction. Choice in biography 
 is commonly a matter of accident, an affair of 
 private preference or interest; but its chief use 
 is to enrich the reader's sense of character and 
 the value he places on human qualities, on per- 
 sonality. Biography, too, unlocks the sym- 
 pathies, and often exercises an intimate and 
 direct awakening influence, especially upon 
 practical natures less open to ideal enthusiasm. 
 
 149
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 Those sporadic books which obtain the place 
 of classics in literature often seem to owe their 
 vogue to a biographical element in them, in so 
 far as they are representative of the peculiar 
 mind and tastes of their authors. The type 
 is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Walton's 
 Complete Angler or Browne's Religio Medici, 
 or the writings of the modern American "Auto- 
 crat," Dr. Holmes. They contain a miscellany 
 of matters, interesting in themselves, but which 
 have passed through the individuality of their 
 authors and acquired a certain human unity 
 and new significance from a living contact, 
 even when the matter itself is antiquarian or 
 remote, or merely singular in a humoristic 
 sense. They give the mind of the man, and 
 are distinguished by originality such as has its 
 only source in character. Enjoyment of them 
 depends on some special aptitude of the reader 
 for appreciating the kind of mind involved, 
 and some intellectual sympathy with the matter 
 which takes its stamp. To give the mind of 
 the man is a distinction for any book. It is 
 of more interest when the mind is typical, as 
 Wellington's letters give the mind of the soldier. 
 When the mind takes on great ideal breadth, 
 
 150
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 the book becomes a classic of the world, as in 
 Thomas a Kempis' Imitatio Christi or St. 
 Francis' Fioretti which yield the mind of the 
 Christian and of the saint. It often happens 
 that biography, without being widely inclusive 
 of a human type, nevertheless reflects human 
 experience in narrower bands and gives the 
 spectrum of special moods of human nature. 
 The lives of the saints, and religious biography 
 in general, owe much of their interest to this 
 reflection of private experience, and more bril- 
 liant or pure expression of moods already 
 partially known or latent in the reader; as 
 heroic lives appeal to instinctive ambition and 
 desire for adventure, these appeal to the in- 
 stinctive piety of men. To give the life in a 
 person is the quality in these books which 
 makes them commanding. Wherever the sub- 
 ject is taken up, it is personality that is the 
 secret of all such literature. It is sometimes 
 represented that personality, especially in the 
 autobiographic sense, is modern in literature, 
 and specifically that it was a discovery of 
 Petrarch; but, though the principle has had a 
 great career in modern writing, so broad a state- 
 ment must be doubtfully regarded. Lives were 
 
 151
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 a favorite form of ancient literature. The 
 Commentaries of Caesar are not so different from 
 Wellington's Correspondence, the Meditations 
 of Marcus Aurelius from the Imitation of 
 Christ, the Confessions of St. Augustine from 
 those of Rousseau; Pythagoras and Epicurus 
 were men who made an immense personal 
 impression, and the power of a personality as 
 well as of a doctrine made the victory of Chris- 
 tianity over the third part of the world. In the 
 centuries of Roman greatness just before and 
 after Christ personality was a main object of 
 literary attention, and probably interest in it 
 did not vary much from that felt in the Renais- 
 sance, though the record of it was seldom put 
 forth autobiographically. It is probably an 
 error to think that any form of individualism 
 was unknown to the Roman world, and our 
 biographic records of antiquity are on the 
 whole rich. We know nearly as much, for 
 example, of Sophocles as of Shakespeare. 
 
 Travel, which is popularly so fascinating a 
 branch of literature, is a near neighbor to biog- 
 raphy. The character of the traveler and the 
 human interest of his journey make a large part 
 of the charm of what he tells. Everything is 
 
 152
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 seen through his eyes, his curiosity controls 
 the view, his pursuits confine the attention. 
 Herodotus was one of the best of travelers, as 
 eager to know men and manners as Ulysses, 
 full of the romance of things freshly known; a 
 more interesting book was hardly handed down 
 by antiquity. Travel attracts the reader mainly 
 by the unknown, and perhaps the best of travel 
 is now historic; for the story of travel has 
 always attended the story of national greatness. 
 The mass of it is that which was written in the 
 years of the discovery of the world beyond 
 Europe on all its horizons, and for English 
 readers is to be found in the great collections of 
 Hakluyt and others. In a later time the story 
 of exploration in Africa and Asia and about the 
 Pole contains its most vivid chapters and 
 blends the pleasure of new knowledge with 
 individual adventure. A finer literary quality, 
 however, belongs to writers who are not ex- 
 plorers, but who in romantic lands or strange 
 environments feel and render the local color 
 and incident and novelty of what is before 
 them, and, in a literary sense, are masters of 
 atmosphere. The French are good travelers, 
 and none are more expert in modern days in 
 
 153
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 giving atmosphere. The literary treatment of 
 travel is more a French than an English art. 
 Kinglake's long famous Eothen was an excellent 
 narrative, strong and vivid in rendering the 
 eastern scene and its figures, but he had 
 neither the subtilty nor the sympathy of the 
 southern temperament, and none of the imag- 
 inativeness of the French masters such as Loti. 
 Irving is, perhaps, the best of our travelers of 
 the literary habit, who use their material with 
 an eye to its effect as an intimate imaginative 
 portrayal. His writings on special topics realize 
 the romance of the land, the figures of knight 
 and Moor the life of an historically enchanted 
 soil; and even in England he is still the best of 
 American travelers for the sentiment of the 
 scene. Literary travel is, however, hardly a 
 considerable portion of the field. It is rather 
 in simpler narratives, that detail the truth of 
 the country districts of Europe or the adventure 
 of some long ride in the East or the South, that 
 most pleasure is to be found; and though past 
 voyages were the novel of travel, and their 
 literature was immense, it is seldom now that 
 any voyage is interesting except it be scientific. 
 Anthropology and archaeology, in their attempt 
 
 154
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 to realize primitive life and past epochal civi- 
 lization, embody a large element of travel in 
 very interesting forms. The reader who pur- 
 sues any of these lines, scientific, literary or 
 adventurous, enlarges his horizon materially, 
 and few kinds of reading are more useful. To 
 know ourselves better through literature is not 
 difficult, but to know what is not ourselves is an 
 exceedingly hard task. It is safer to distrust 
 one's impression of the foreign, the distant and 
 the long past, however exact it may appear; 
 but though the result may be imperfect, there is 
 no better means than by intelligent and sym- 
 pathetic books of travel to free the mind from 
 the intolerance that belongs to it by nature and 
 to lessen the narrowness inherent in race, faith 
 and habit. 
 
 History is a province by itself, and it has 
 been much contested whether it should be 
 regarded more as science or more as literature. 
 A large part of history, as it has been written 
 in the past, nevertheless, is of literary quality, 
 and many historians would have been tenacious 
 of its literary rights. It is clear from the dis- 
 cussion that history with a literary intention 
 has certain traits of its own. The question 
 
 155
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 here is only what history should be preferred 
 by readers whose primary interest is in litera- 
 ture. It is not a matter merely of rhetorical 
 style or the mode of presentation, but of the 
 ends sought and the methods of construction 
 followed by the historian. He endeavors to 
 reproduce the past; but as the story is passed 
 through his personality, it suffers the modi- 
 fication due to that medium and is recreated in 
 certain lines of choice, insight and judgment 
 belonging to the historian; it wears the colors 
 of his mind. Thucydides, who first undertook 
 to write history philosophically, presented it 
 in a highly imaginative form, by persons and 
 events, dramatically. Macaulay, the most ab- 
 sorbing modern narrator, makes of his work 
 an impassioned plea with the conscious re- 
 sources of an ancient orator, picturing the 
 scene, making the persons alive, appealing to 
 the sympathies of the reader. In Robertson, 
 Prescott and Motley, history is a stately pro- 
 cession. The works of the more recent his- 
 torians of the scientific school, however more 
 useful they may be in the field of knowledge, 
 do not enter popularly into literature; they may 
 clarify the past with which they deal, but they do 
 
 156
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 not permanently embody national tradition and 
 morality ideally to anything like the same 
 degree or in the same way as the older histories; 
 they lack the imaginative power, and are hence 
 ineffective in literature. The reader who makes 
 a literary demand desires primarily the human 
 truth of history, its course of great events 
 shown through famous characters, or its picture 
 of the life of cities and of the common lot given 
 in their human phenomena; he asks for the 
 old spectacle of men, or masses of men, doing 
 and suffering; history has a literary interest 
 for him in proportion as it becomes epical. 
 Other kinds of history may be more exact and 
 detailed, and enter upon parts of the field that 
 dramatic and picturesque history ignores; but 
 they have less human truth, or present truth in 
 a less human form. Thucydides, Livy and 
 Tacitus present this truth in an enduring form, 
 and no literature is more imperishable in 
 interest; the chroniclers of the Crusades, such 
 as Froissart, composed vivid pictures of events 
 which they witnessed that are incomparable 
 portrayals of character, scene and the pageantry 
 of stirring life in their day; and the historians 
 who have been famous in English follow this 
 
 157
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 literary tradition. Gibbon was, perhaps, the 
 greatest of them by virtue of the magnitude of 
 his work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire. It is a great history, and though it 
 may be corrected and supplemented by the 
 researches of scholarship, all such labor is of 
 the nature of a comment on the text; the work 
 itself will never be supplanted. In proportion 
 as the literary tradition is departed from, his- 
 tory relegates itself to the field of scholarship 
 and becomes a department of scientific knowl- 
 edge rather than of literature. 
 
 Philosophy in the sense of metaphysics plays 
 but a small part in literary education, though 
 in the comprehension of the final thought of 
 Wordsworth, Shelley and Tennyson some 
 tincture of philosophy, such as these poets 
 themselves had, is required, and it is con- 
 venient in other minor parts of English poetry. 
 Some acquaintance with Platonic conceptions 
 is especially to be desired, because they are a 
 part of the tradition of English poetry. But 
 the philosophy which most supports imagina- 
 tive literature is rather what is sometimes 
 called wisdom-literature, proverbial sentences 
 and, in general, ethical thought, playing about 
 
 158
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 the nature of action, conscience, responsibility, 
 the frailties of human nature, the issues of 
 right and wrong, the morality of life. Such 
 knowledge in English has mainly flowed from 
 the Bible and passes current in the general 
 mind without much distinction of literary stamp. 
 Franklin and Emerson, however, are illustrious 
 American names in this field, and in English 
 the type is found in Bacon's Essays. Greater 
 books than these are the Imitation of Christ 
 and Marcus Aurelius* Meditations, already 
 mentioned, and on a lower plane Montaigne's 
 Essays. The French, unlike the English, are 
 peculiarly rich in books of maxims, pensees and 
 characters, and can show a long series of bril- 
 liant and talented masters in worldly and 
 moral dicta which make a unique and charac- 
 teristic part of their classic literature. The 
 sense of the weight of meaning in the phrase, 
 such as Burke was a master of, and of the salt 
 of truth, is one of the last fruits of literary study 
 and requires maturity both of mind and of ex- 
 perience. Such literature in an express form 
 is consequently rarely sought by the reader for 
 its own sake and is commonly forced on him 
 by its fame rather than by his original liking 
 
 159
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 in the first instance. Ethical knowledge is 
 generally implicit in the reader's character and 
 prejudices, in his instinctive judgment, and 
 plays its part in literary appreciation involun- 
 tarily and without his being aware of it except 
 in its results. 
 
 The essay opens a province of literature 
 almost as broad and varied as that of the novel. 
 It may have any subject and treat it to any end. 
 The familiar essay in particular offers the most 
 free play to the personality of the author, who 
 shows his own tastes in it with naturalness and 
 brings forward whatever of interest he has found. 
 It also corresponds to the greatest disengage- 
 ment of the reader's mind. One tires of long 
 and serious pursuit and studious zeal in any 
 subject; here is the opportunity for wandering, 
 for the avocations of literature, for diversion. 
 In the essay the author gives his companion- 
 ship to the reader on a footing of friendly 
 mutual interest in some passing matters as in 
 conversation. The familiar essay is best when 
 it approaches this form of talk with the reader, 
 and solicits him without emphasis or resistance 
 to a brief partnership in social pleasure. The 
 master of the mode, it would be commonly 
 
 160
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 allowed, is Charles Lamb. In Elia there is the 
 first requisite, a richly human personality. 
 Lamb was a poet and a humorist, and thus 
 yoked two elements of the most delightful play 
 of life, sentiment and fun, in a companionable 
 nature. He was fond of humanity and saw 
 the spectacle of its daily affairs and its ordinary 
 guises with sympathy that passes from laughter 
 to pathos almost without knowing the change, 
 so absorbing and real is the human aspect of it 
 all ; he is full of reminiscences, of life lived in his 
 own neighborhood, even in his own home, and 
 gives his reflections and anecdotes with intimacy ; 
 he takes the reader into his life and gives him 
 his confidence. Even in the purely literary 
 parts of his work he never loses the sense that 
 the poets and the old writers of golden prose 
 are a part of himself, and to the reader they 
 become phases of Lamb's personality and are 
 more valued for showing his likings than for 
 their private worth. In every essay of Elia, 
 whatever the topic, it is the company of Lamb 
 that makes the pleasure. He escapes the for- 
 mality of autobiography and the fragmentariness 
 of letters, but keeps the intimate charm of the 
 one and the discursive happiness of the other; 
 
 161
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 as one reads, it seems the talk of a man that is 
 not quite soliloquy nor yet is it conversation, 
 and it gives more than thought and anecdote, - 
 it gives the presence of the man, his idiosyn- 
 crasy; the tones of his voice are felt in the 
 cadences of the style, and the moods of his 
 eyes in the sly humors and pathetic stops of the 
 page. It is not strange that Lamb is so much 
 beloved since he has this power of silent famili- 
 arity in so penetrating and agreeable a way, 
 and his nature was itself so refined and touched 
 with human friendliness. It is the prime 
 quality of the familiar essayist to be able to give 
 himself to the reader thus and to be received. 
 In no other author is the trait so clear. 
 
 De Quincey illustrates better the miscellane- 
 ous power of the essay and its capacity to turn 
 itself to many uses both of instruction and 
 entertainment. His personality is hardly less 
 felt through the living matter and vivid style 
 of his work than is Lamb's in his more kindly 
 way. Here, too, the most engaging part is 
 autobiographical; and though much of this 
 is contained in the larger works, in particular 
 The Concessions of an English Opium~EcUer, 
 yet this book is really a group of essays, and 
 
 162
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 written in the manner of the essayist. Indeed 
 De Quincey knew no other mode of writing, 
 and whether his subject was metaphysics or 
 antiquity or a tale, he made an essay of it. His 
 recollection, mingled here and there with the 
 text, are of the same quality as Lamb's pictures 
 of his school days, and the theme of revery, 
 the dream touched with sentiment, is common 
 to both. De Quincey excels by his pictorial 
 power, and especially in that fantasy which 
 paints the void, and in the imaginative sym- 
 bolism which belongs more properly to visible 
 art; even when it is the mind that acts, it is the 
 eye that dreams, as, to take the great instance, 
 in the almost hieratic figures of The Three 
 Ladies of Sorrow. He excels also by his mar- 
 velous verbal eloquence, with its exquisite 
 sonorous and melodic effects, its march of 
 climax and question, its vivid images of figures 
 and situations, while sound and color seem 
 as much a part of the work as in music or 
 painting. Such passages as are to be found 
 in The Caesars or in Joan of Arc are hardly to 
 be matched elsewhere for rich stylistic effects, 
 and for the full flow and powerful molding of 
 language to the uses of the voice which makes 
 
 163
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 eloquence. In the miscellaneous works of De 
 Quincey it is such passages found at random, 
 and also the dozen pieces of various kinds of 
 interest in which picturesqueness is sustained 
 throughout, that stand prominently forth; but 
 the subtlety of others, the extraordinary mental 
 activity displayed, afford an interest hardly 
 less absorbing to the intelligence than the 
 better known pieces are to the imagination. 
 De Quincey is becoming, perhaps, a somewhat 
 neglected author, as it is quite natural that he 
 should be; but no author better shows the 
 versatility of the essay, its adaptability to a 
 variously stored and widely curious mind, its 
 supple response to a flexible hand; and in the 
 modes of thought, color and sound he was a 
 master of intellectual and imaginative style, 
 while the substance of his work retains great 
 literary power. At the end, however, he leaves, 
 as the best essayists always do, a personal 
 impression and the sense of intellectual com- 
 panionship. 
 
 The essayists pass quickly away, because their 
 service is for the most part a contemporary 
 matter, engaged in observation and comment 
 on the ideas, interests and things of the day. 
 
 164
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 Carlyle, like De Quincey, begins to be disre- 
 garded. Though he wrote history, the more 
 characteristic expression of his genius was in 
 his earlier life in the form of the essay and of 
 Sartor Resartus, which is substantially and in 
 manner the work of an essayist. He illustrates 
 the essay of the Quarterlies that is now out of 
 date, with its long Presbyterian wind, its 
 omniscience, dogmatism and belligerency, but 
 also with its high intellectual quality and sound 
 moral fiber. In Carlyle the type had most 
 literary power. He made it, after the way of 
 the essayist, the channel of his personality, and 
 showed increasingly the eccentric and repellant 
 traits of his temperament, to which the Teu- 
 tonism of his style and matter gave at first a 
 grotesque quality. It is likely that this trait, 
 which hindered his acceptance by the public 
 at the start, already proves a disqualification 
 in the end as well, and is one reason for the 
 lessening of his vogue. His personality is not 
 attractive, and the dress in which it is put forth 
 is still less so; but it is a powerful personality, 
 and its effect is the greater because, in the main 
 part of his characteristic work, it is through the 
 praise and apotheosis of personality in sur- 
 
 165
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 passing men that it is put forth and reflected. 
 He wrote of the hero in every part of the field, 
 and made hero-worship a kind of initiation 
 into his later more abstract doctrines of the 
 divine right of force, the aristocracy of genius, 
 the incompetency of masses, and all the rest of 
 the reactionary gospel he preached in his vio- 
 lent denunciations of modern democracy. The 
 reader need not accompany him to the end; 
 but in the earlier great essays, such as those on 
 Burns, Goethe, Voltaire, and the like, and more 
 particularly in Sartor Resarttis, which is always 
 an illuminating and invigorating book, he finds 
 views of life and its workings in which philoso- 
 phy takes more effective possession of the essay 
 than in any other writer. It is, too, philosophy 
 in a highly imaginative form, whether stated 
 in a system, if one can give that name to what 
 is hardly more than one huge metaphor, in 
 Sartor Resartus, or introduced as a comment 
 in the critical biographical essays and the 
 chapters on heroism. The interest is, of course, 
 predominantly moral or social, but it finds 
 literary expression, is blended with great figures 
 and great events, with epical elements, with 
 surpassing characters, with human truth, and 
 
 166
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 it never fails to be picturesque, fervid, glowing 
 with conviction. The genius of Carlyle was, 
 like De Quincey's, primarily one for expression; 
 it is by its literary quality that his work con- 
 tinues to make its appeal; among the essayists 
 he is the moralist, the social philosopher, whose 
 material is rather human life doing and suffer- 
 ing than any abstract principle, and who sees 
 it through the imagination. 
 
 Lamb, De Quincey and Carlyle illustrate the 
 essay in the three fields of sympathy, imagina- 
 tion and morality, and they are excellent types 
 of the English handling of the form which is 
 very free. The varieties of it cannot be ex- 
 hausted in a list. The tradition, perhaps, still 
 is that the early essayists of the Queen Anne age 
 are the classical exemplars of it, especially 
 Addison and Steele; in both the reader feels the 
 personality of the writer, as he also does in 
 Goldsmith, somewhat with the intimate touch 
 that Lamb gives, and when these three writers 
 have human character for their subject, their 
 charm lasts; but what really survives of them 
 can be included in a small volume. The Eng- 
 lish scholar will be acquainted with the essay 
 of the eighteenth century and appreciate it, 
 
 167
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 but the reader will commonly spare it and turn 
 to the quite different essayists of a later time, 
 to the measured literary talk of Arnold or the 
 exquisite portraits of Pater, who are the two 
 last well-established names in England, and to 
 Lowell and Emerson among Americans, both 
 of whom in different ways were masters of the 
 form. The essay keeps pace with the novel as 
 the kind of writing that seems best suited to 
 the uses of our public, and like that varies from 
 instruction to mere entertainment and takes 
 every color from the artistic to the humorous, 
 reflecting the entire range of literary tastes and 
 pursuits. 
 
 There are other forms of prose, but these are 
 the main forms in which a literary value is 
 found and sufficiently illustrate the nature of 
 literature, the objects of its attention and the 
 modes of its appeal in its lesser phases. In the 
 mass of miscellaneous books there is often the 
 characteristic material of literature and a literary 
 treatment which make the author's work in- 
 teresting, though it may not reach any high 
 degree of distinction and may remain practi- 
 cally unknown. It is a common experience of 
 the reader, especially if he have desultory 
 
 168
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 habits, to find such volumes and to profit by 
 them. It is well to read books that have an 
 established place and authors of reputation; 
 but an open welcome and a broad tolerance 
 also have their advantages, and there is often 
 a freshness in the unknown writer, a sense of 
 discovery and a heightened interest that are 
 lacking in the books that all men read. In 
 books of character and observation, especially, 
 one finds this treasure-trove, which wins the 
 reader more frequently by the wealth of its 
 material than by the literary treatment, for a 
 writer has often genuine matter who lacks the 
 skill to adorn it in the telling. A plain tale, 
 if it be originally interesting, always holds its 
 interest. When so much is written as in our 
 day, a great portion must have only a restricted 
 vogue, but its excellence for those who find it 
 is the same. In these humbler walks of litera- 
 ture there is much more of actual entertainment 
 and profit than is commonly acknowledged. 
 The interest is the same as that of a classic, 
 though it may not be so finely embodied, and 
 the vitalizing power is the same, though it may 
 not be so rich. The better way is to give a 
 hearing to every promising book, without too 
 
 169
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 proud a scanning of its source and stamp, and 
 to have familiar acquaintance with many books 
 outside the sacred presence of standard litera- 
 ture. One acquires thus a truer sense of the 
 value of the classic, and at the same time keeps 
 in current touch with his contemporaries; nor 
 is he really assured of his own discrimination 
 until he finds books for himself and knows that 
 they are sound. The power to appreciate 
 literature does not involve its constant exercise 
 upon the highest examples. The essential 
 thing is to know what makes literary quality, 
 what are the ends and means of the art, what 
 are the modes of intimacy with its works; 
 when this is known and it is best known 
 through standard authors the best use of the 
 knowledge is, perhaps, not to master a past 
 literature in its great compass and detail, but 
 to apply it to the contemporary world in the 
 natural course of reading what attracts our 
 tastes and draws out our sympathies in our 
 own time. It is natural for a book to die; few 
 l>ooks that are old have a vital connection with 
 life as it now is, but these if they appeal to us 
 are favorites, the books to which one returns 
 and that we regard as silent friends of life, 
 
 170
 
 Other Prose Forms 
 
 comrades of our fortunes and our moods; they 
 are strong in our affection because they are a 
 part of our past. Such books stand apart on a 
 shelf of their own, and are mainly classics with 
 some humble companions; not to know litera- 
 ture through its length and breadth and to be 
 wise judges in its presence, but to gather this 
 little shelf-ful, is the best fruit of literary appre- 
 ciation. 
 
 171
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS 
 
 LITERARY counsel is not far to seek. 
 The apparatus for literary study is plenti- 
 ful ; manuals, histories, commentaries and guides 
 to the choice of books exist in profusion. There 
 is an embarrassment of such riches. The objec- 
 tion to these is that, of the two traditional ends 
 of literature, to please and to instruct, they take 
 note too exclusively of the second. The two 
 ends should not be made to neutralize each 
 other; yet this is often the case. Excess of 
 instruction leads to one's being bored; excess 
 of pleasure leads to frivolity. It is, perhaps, 
 better to consider the process rather than the 
 ends. Literature is a key to one's own heart; 
 it is also a key to the lives of others; there are 
 other ways of learning one's own nature and 
 human nature in general, but outside of direct 
 experience and observation literature is the 
 principal means of obtaining knowledge of 
 
 172
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 human life. The most efficient form of the 
 knowledge is that which art gives, storing it in 
 typical examples in imaginative literature; but 
 it also is found where art is imperfectly applied, 
 as in the subsidiary forms of literature, or even 
 where art is absent and truth is set forth barely 
 and abstractly. Imaginative art condenses and 
 recreates experience in order to clarify it for the 
 reason and magnetize it for the affections and 
 sympathies. It seeks to include all of life and 
 know it in its essentials. Instruction proceeds 
 from the matter, pleasure from the form. The 
 definition is somewhat narrow, however, and 
 too antithetical, taking too exclusive note of 
 merely aesthetic pleasure, whereas the pleasure 
 arising from literature springs also from other 
 than formal sources and is mixed of many 
 kinds. The knowledge of human life is ante- 
 cedent to the pleasure flowing from such knowl- 
 edge in any form, and is the condition without 
 which there can be no pleasure. The acquisi- 
 tion and interpretation of experience is the core 
 of the process, which looks to a broad compre- 
 hension and penetration of the nature of hu- 
 manity and its career in the past and the present. 
 The starting point, however, is the individual, 
 
 173
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 the reader himself. It is this fact that makes 
 it difficult to lay down a definite rule in literary 
 study. The personality of the reader is never 
 to be lost sight of. He has special aptitudes 
 and tastes which make one book rather than 
 another, one kind of literature rather than 
 another, one epoch rather than another, a better 
 mode of access to experience, a stronger stimu- 
 lus to the imagination, a more vitalizing power 
 to his whole being. Literature unlocks power 
 of life in the individual as well as gives knowl- 
 edge of life; it is best, in any instance, when 
 the two are one act and the knowledge is given 
 by the unlocking of power and as a consequence 
 of it. The personality of the individual is the 
 prime element in determining what is best for 
 his growth in order that there may always be 
 the greatest vital connection in his study of life 
 between himself and his instruments; they 
 should be, as it were, extensions of his own 
 power, outgrowths of himself. It is wise for 
 the reader, therefore, to have a large share of 
 self-respect, to prefer his own natural choices, 
 to give latitude to his own wandering tastes, 
 to indulge his own character. He will give a 
 fair trial to poetry and prose, to this or that 
 
 174
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 author, especially when recommended by long 
 reputation and the judgment of generations, 
 but, in the end, he will read or not read ac- 
 cording as he finds his own account in it. 
 The good reader is one who never abdicates; 
 with him rests the decision in his own case. 
 Though appearances may be against him, 
 though he may remain long or even always in a 
 lower range of taste and a narrower sphere of 
 knowledge, it is better so than that he should 
 default to himself. He cannot profitably get 
 ahead, in his reading, of the man he is; he can- 
 not out-race his own shadow on life; he must 
 build knowledge, experience, feeling, his world, 
 in his own image, interpreting what is new by 
 his own past and passing from the man he 
 is to the man he may become by successive 
 and natural stages of self -development. Self-re- 
 liance, to trust one's own nature, is as radical a 
 necessity in literary study as in other parts of 
 life; it is the best way of man-making. 
 
 It has already been remarked that the simplest 
 approach to literature is by means of the books 
 nearest to the reader, which are in the main 
 those of his own time and of the next preceding 
 
 age. He is thus introduced to the living ideas 
 
 175
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 and most vivid interests of humanity in the 
 world in which he has to live. An exception 
 should be made of the greatest books of world 
 literature, but the exception is often more 
 apparent than real. In their universal appeal 
 these books are contemporary with every age. 
 Don Quixote, the Iliad, Dante's Divine Comedy, 
 for example, should be read in early life; such 
 books are landmarks of the intellectual life and 
 give proportion to all later reading; others, like 
 Plutarch's Lives and Gibbon's History, should 
 also be read in youth, and they have the advan- 
 tage of giving a vast amount of human history 
 at a single stroke, expanding and storing the 
 mind wonderfully with a sense of the extent and 
 majestic movement of man's historic career. 
 To read these works, whether of fiction, poetry, 
 or history, is, at the time, an intellectual feat, 
 and as conducive to confidence and vigor in the 
 intellectual part of youth as winning a cup or 
 turning the tide of a game in its physical part. 
 It is immaterial to what degree the works be 
 comprehended in their fulness and power; 
 the reader takes what he can of them, and 
 though he were a mature man he can do no 
 more, for no one exhausts their richness; it is 
 
 176
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 sufficient that in his youth he be in touch with 
 life in its greatness, and there is besides a power 
 in the years of boyhood to give charm to such 
 literature that is missed if it be read too late. 
 The youth reads everything as romance, such is 
 his mental freshness and the warmth of life in 
 him and the fascination of the discovery of the 
 scene of life and its doings. In the biography 
 of the boyhood of genius such books continu- 
 ally crop out as the great events and reveal- 
 ing moments of the boy's life, those from which 
 he dates his emergence into the world of men, 
 his consciousness of the powers within and 
 about him, his awakening; and what takes place 
 in the boyhood of genius measurably occurs in 
 ordinary youth placed in the same circum- 
 stances. The great books of the world should 
 be put into the hands of youth at the earliest 
 possible time. 
 
 In the case of works of less eminence the 
 natural way is to read English books, and, in 
 particular, those of the last century. A so- 
 called course of reading of any sort is seldom 
 a very good mode of procedure. It is better to 
 read single authors that attract the reader, to 
 read a good deal of one author at a time, 
 
 177
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 to become familiar with him and his interests in 
 life, as shown in his books, and with his ideas. 
 If one has appropriated a few books thus with 
 vivacity of interest and vigor of mind, if one has 
 made friends with a few authors so as to know 
 and love them and prize them, he has learned 
 the first secret, however unconsciously, and 
 mastered the power of appreciation. The rest 
 is only a repetition of the process as new authors 
 come into the field of attention and new tastes 
 and interests develop within and the old grow 
 and fructify. In such a way of reading enthu- 
 siasm should be an increasing trait, and enjoy- 
 ment also. The value of a few authors well 
 known and liked is greater to the mind than 
 that of many authors imperfectly mastered; it 
 is what friendship is to mere acquaintance in 
 society. A course of reading in the ordinary 
 sense, as of the nineteenth-century poets, for 
 example, has its principal convenience in the 
 ample opportunity it gives the reader for such 
 a private selection, but he should consign his 
 fortunes to his own choices or seek only such 
 guidance as may serve to direct him to new 
 lines of attention, to open ideas to him, to ex- 
 ercise his reflection in fresh ways and to give 
 
 178
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 him the sense of sympathy in his pleasures and 
 support in them. It is the reader who reads 
 the book, and what he puts into it is unknown 
 to any one else except by an intuitive sympathy; 
 the reaction of his own past on the book is often 
 the most living part of its value to him ; he should 
 be left much to himself, or if not so left he 
 should keep much to himself. The best readers 
 in colleges are those who take their own way 
 somewhat carelessly but obstinately like Cal- 
 verley and Emerson. After a while the spheres 
 of the favorite authors who are known and 
 prized will begin to grow more inclusive; the 
 authors will gather into groups, the Lake 
 School, the brotherhood of Keats and Shelley, 
 the neo-pagans, as the case may be, and the 
 groups will begin to coalesce into the romantic 
 movement as a whole. When this stage is 
 reached, the time has come for such aid as 
 literary histories can give in tracing the con- 
 nections of the age, drawing out the general 
 traits, the historic position, the antecedents of 
 the whole; such information, though it belongs 
 to history, is an aid to the fuller and especially 
 the more intelligent appreciation of the authors. 
 It is, however, the authors that should be in 
 
 179
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 the foreground of early literary study, and not 
 the period or the movement which embraces 
 them, so far at least as the characteristic literary 
 power plays a part in self-education. 
 
 It is by no means necessary to restrict one's 
 choice of books within nearly contemporary 
 literature until the whole is grasped as a his- 
 torical period. It is better to take the great 
 authors first, who give scale to their contem- 
 poraries and to time; to know Shakespeare, 
 Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, among the poets, 
 and Bacon, Swift, Fielding, Goldsmith, Burke 
 among the prose writers. The rule is to know 
 first the greatest of all and to be familiar with 
 them. In English it is of little utility to ascend 
 higher than the Elizabethan age. Chaucer is 
 a great writer, but to all intents and purposes 
 his language is a past dialect of English, and 
 to the general reader is unintelligible; outside 
 of Chaucer early English literature has only a 
 scholastic interest. It is agreeable, even if one 
 should never command justly a whole period 
 of English, to make acquaintance with some 
 minor period, or rather group, and to know it 
 with thoroughness. The Lake School, or the 
 Queen Anne essayists, or the religious writers 
 
 180
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 of the seventeenth century, or the cavalier poets, 
 or Dr. Johnson's circle, are examples; intimate 
 knowledge of such a group, with which the 
 reader has a natural sympathy, discloses attract- 
 iveness and significance in literature in quite 
 a different way from its appreciation in single 
 authors, and to have such an acquaintance with 
 a group is a mental satisfaction. The minor 
 literature of both prose and poetry in English 
 can be easily controlled in books of selections, 
 either confined to a single author, as in the case 
 of Swift, or in anthologies, as in the case of 
 the Elizabethan lyric. In general, it is unde- 
 sirable to confine one's choice either to prose or 
 poetry, or to any one kind of literature; fiction 
 should alternate with drama, and the essay with 
 the lyric, since the complexion of life is thus 
 better preserved and wholeness of literary taste 
 secured. Neither should one read the classics 
 always, and think time wasted if bestowed on 
 less imposing books; it is as if one were to make 
 the week one eternal Sabbath. One cannot 
 in literature any more than in life live at the 
 top of his forces; and whether it be "the difficult 
 air of the iced mountain's top" or the breath of 
 Arcady that the reader inhales, he must be 
 
 181
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 content with a less refined mental diet and 
 common books. Humbler literature has also 
 its place, practically, in life, and discharges 
 the function of literature, to enlighten and con- 
 sole, with wide effectiveness. 
 
 The manner of reading which has been in- 
 dicated might not make a man a scholar in 
 English literature; but it is assumed that what 
 the reader desires is the power of literature 
 and not knowledge of it in itself. If one desires 
 the knowledge of it, he approaches it scholasti- 
 cally through dictionaries, manuals, histories, 
 the hundred varieties of comment. A certain 
 degree of knowledge is serviceable; but if much 
 is required to make a book intelligible, it is 
 practically a dead book for the general reader. 
 Literary history is the most untrustworthy form 
 of history, and is to be read with much dubious- 
 ness; the subject is complex and involves many 
 intangible elements. The shorter it is and the 
 more confined to a tabulation of external fact 
 and well made out general traits, the more 
 useful it is to the reader. The other illumina- 
 tion that he may desire is better found in the 
 essays of appreciative critics like Lamb or acute 
 commentators like Coleridge, in biographies 
 
 182
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 strongly personal in their narrative, and in the 
 history of social manners, the fund of reminis- 
 cence and other side-lights which make us 
 acquainted with such a group as that of Pope 
 or of Johnson. The reading of memoirs, gen- 
 erally, is a great aid to literary study since they 
 present the facts in a strongly human form. It 
 is human truth that is the great subject of litera- 
 ture; it is the scene and play and fortune of life 
 itself; and to substitute literary history for it, 
 as a matter of lives, dates, periods, movements, 
 and styles, and social and political phenomena 
 and the like, is as if in art one were to read 
 manuals and catalogues and theories of per- 
 ception instead of looking at pictures and 
 statues. It is true that the education of the 
 eye and heart by contemplation of visible beauty 
 is a subtle thing; so is the education of the soul 
 by literature; but it is a very real thing, well- 
 nigh omnipresent in life; and it issues not in 
 information, however detailed and well-ordered, 
 about the thing, but in insight into life and fate, 
 in sympathy with whatever is human, in appre- 
 hension of what seems the divine, issues, that 
 is, in the greater power to live. This, and not 
 mere instruction, is the end of literature; and 
 
 183
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 this, and not mere information, is the end of 
 literary study. 
 
 The approach to foreign literature, outside 
 of the universal works already mentioned, is a 
 more difficult matter; yet to know English 
 literature alone is like knowing English history 
 without the history of the continent, and it is 
 the more defective because foreign elements 
 enter strongly into English literature which 
 has displayed great assimilative and sympathetic 
 power with regard to the literature of other 
 lands. The question of translations is to be 
 met at the threshold. Greatly as opinions 
 differ on the subject, it is useless for the reader 
 to suppose that even in the best translations 
 he gets either the original work, or its equivalent 
 as a form of art, or in its native meaning to its 
 own people. In poetry, more particularly, he 
 gets only a diminished glory; to read a great 
 poet in a translation is like seeing the sun 
 through smoked glass. There is a double 
 obstacle; the form itself is untranslatable, the 
 melodic mold of life in language; and, in 
 addition, the native temperament, mixed of 
 race, circumstances and long tradition, is as- 
 sumed in the poem to be in alliance with it, 
 
 184
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 to respond to and support it and assist in its 
 understanding, and the more national the work 
 the greater is its reliance on this suggestiveness, 
 which is only completed in meaning and reach 
 by the power of the race, its intuition, its ideals, 
 its associations, all that is unspoken in it pass- 
 ing into the poem and becoming a silent but 
 potent language there. To understand a can- 
 zone of Dante or of Leopardi one must feel as 
 an Italian feels; to appreciate its form he must 
 know the music of the form as only the Italian 
 language can hold and eternize it. Translation 
 is impotent to overcome either of these difficul- 
 ties; at the best it yields an imperfect rendering 
 of both form and meaning, making an indiffer- 
 ent appeal by inferior means; generally in the 
 translation of a great classic the uninstructed 
 mind naively wonders why it was ever thought 
 great. Prose suffers less than poetry, it is true, 
 but the case of Don Quixote, perhaps the most 
 untranslatable of prose works though many 
 times attempted, shows the presence there of 
 the same difficulty. 
 
 The natural approach to foreign literature is 
 through those portions of it which have a near 
 tie to English. The fundamental tradition of 
 
 185
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 English poetry, on its foreign side, is classical 
 in its sources and is continued by the medium 
 of the South mainly by Italian literature. 
 Greece and Italy have contributed most to Eng- 
 lish poetry; familiarity with their literature and 
 the Latin, which naturally binds them and is 
 intermediary, is most useful to the reader in 
 his study of English, and also most easy in the 
 expansion of his interest beyond the domain 
 of English. Greek is so fundamental in our 
 culture that it is hardly possible to overestimate 
 its importance. Whenever the reader finds 
 anything about Greece that he has not read, 
 it is a safe rule to read it; he is sure to find it 
 useful. Whether in the form of direct trans- 
 lations or of those scholarly interpretations of 
 the Greek genius, literary, artistic, and social, 
 in which English is uncommonly rich, the 
 study of the Greek is a means of growth in 
 literary power and in command of literary 
 methods and points of view, more valuable by 
 far than is the case with any single literature 
 of the later world. Its usefulness in the drama 
 has already been mentioned; but it illustrates 
 every poetic form with brilliant examples and 
 is hardly less universal in prose. The novel, 
 
 186
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 in its perfection, was a later product ; other kinds 
 of narrative, however, were practised with un- 
 surpassed skill; and, speaking generally, Greek 
 prose is unrivaled in beauty, while in matter 
 it is full of wisdom that grows not old. The 
 Greek is full of ideas and deeply engaged with 
 them, and in intellectual interest is on a parity 
 with modern literatures. The more the reader 
 enters into these writings, the more he wonders 
 at the intelligence of that people and at the 
 amount of their literature which is still modern 
 in interest, whether as a picture of life or as 
 a discussion of truth or for simply aesthetic 
 qualities. Greece is the most interesting coun- 
 try of all in a human way, and excelled all in 
 the art of literature, which is the most human 
 of the arts. The more familiar the reader be- 
 comes with Greek books, and with the ideals 
 of the people that produced them, and the 
 more he is able to take the intellectual and 
 aesthetic mold of the Greek into his own mind 
 and have Greek habits of perception, the better 
 is he fitted for literary appreciation of any 
 kind; he has the criteria of judgment planted in 
 himself and carries them about implicit in his 
 mind. It is for this reason that in literature 
 
 187
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 classical education was so efficient in the past; 
 it developed much that underlies literature and 
 makes it instinctive. The reader, though not 
 classically educated, can still regain for himself 
 a certain part of this lost benefit, by attention 
 to Greek; the literature is in itself of the highest 
 interest, and mastery of it gives also an under- 
 standing and command of the literatures that 
 grew out of it in later days, which nothing else 
 can replace. 
 
 Next to Greek the Italian is most important, 
 both in connection with English poetry, which 
 has often been in close touch with it, and for 
 its own poetic value; but Italian literature need 
 not be so thoroughly known as the Greek. 
 In general, English acquaintance with it is con- 
 fined to the few famous poets and one or two 
 prose writers. Italian literature is very exten- 
 sive and is of a high degree of culture, but it is 
 not easily appreciated unless the reader has an 
 acquaintance with the country itself and a love 
 of the people that comes from personal con- 
 tact. The Latin literature, also, is to be known 
 rather by a few great writers than in its broad 
 extent. It is best approached through French 
 critics, who present it with more intelligence 
 
 188
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 than other scholars and with the comprehen- 
 sion of minds native to it. Finally, French 
 literature is the most useful in the modern field, 
 both for the abundance and vigor of its ideas 
 and for entertainment, for the scope of its view 
 of life and the world and its skill in the literary 
 interpretation of life through imagination and 
 reflection. Paris is still the intellectual center 
 of Europe, of ideas and the pleasures of a 
 refined culture of every sort, and in French is 
 found the best practise of the literary art in the 
 modern world. Though sporadic writers of 
 genius are scattered here and there through 
 Europe, it is in France that the art is most 
 surely sustained, most variously illustrated, and 
 fills the largest sphere. Its literature in the 
 past, too, is one of the most splendid in the 
 world; for centuries it has not failed in great- 
 ness in any age. It is nearer in temperament 
 and substance to the English than is the Italian, 
 and therefore more accessible, and a compre- 
 hensive study of it is the most substantially 
 fruitful of all foreign study, though it is less 
 formative than the Greek. The German liter- 
 ature has had but slight contact with English, 
 and that not important; though kindred in 
 
 189
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 language and to a less extent in race, the Eng- 
 lish is by its culture nearer to the southern and 
 Latin peoples, and much that is characteris- 
 tically German finds scant welcome in English 
 tastes. Carlyle illustrates what disqualifica- 
 tions a native writer may acquire by being 
 Teutonized in matter and style. German litera- 
 ture has but few great works, and though it had 
 one flourishing period during which it gave 
 world-currency to its ideas, it is rather by its 
 philosophy than by its imagination that the 
 German genius has affected other nations and 
 found expression for itself. The English reader 
 naturally looks toward France, Italy, and Greece, 
 and is more sympathetic with Spain and the 
 Orient than with the north and east of Europe. 
 It is only by the novel, which in a sense has 
 become independent of nationality, that foreign 
 literatures outside those mentioned are prac- 
 tically known. 
 
 In conclusion, to summarize most briefly 
 what has been said, the prime consideration in 
 the whole field of literary appreciation is to avoid 
 making literary study a study of something 
 else. Nothing is more common in practise 
 than to do this. All knowledge that exercises 
 
 190
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 the mind is useful in its own way; but cul- 
 ture and not learning is the true end of literary 
 study. It is a power of life that is sought, 
 "more life and fuller that we want." Imagina- 
 tive literature is a great resource for such 
 growth; to live over again the vivid moments of 
 life, as they are set forth by the poets, the 
 dramatists and the novelists, to see the procession 
 of historic life in its great events and the con- 
 stitution of man in its surpassing characters 
 and its crises of fate and passion, to know the 
 human truth of life in whatever form, is the end 
 in view. It is, therefore, a fatal diversion of 
 interest to attend to the facts of literary history, 
 to biographical and social detail, to discussion 
 of the problems involved, and in general to sub- 
 stitute the comment for the text. Such study 
 should be kept strictly subsidiary to the eluci- 
 dation of the matter, and so far as possible 
 should be dispensed with. The question is 
 not how much the reader can know about the 
 work, the author and the age, but whether he 
 truly responds to the poem, romance, or essay, 
 and finds there an expansion of his conscious- 
 ness of life, a stimulation of his own powers, an 
 inner light for his own soul. He should avoid 
 
 191
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 the comment in all its forms, so far as is pos- 
 sible, and give himself to the work. 
 
 Secondly, he should take the greatest masters 
 first, in the order in which interest in them 
 naturally arises in his mind. Some reasons for 
 this have already been given. The main rea- 
 son, however, is that in their works the great 
 and commanding features of life, its contour 
 both as romance, fate and character, its moral 
 geography, are to be found. One who has read 
 the Hebrew prophets, the Greek dramatists 
 and Shakespeare has a view of the essentials 
 of life in its greatness that requires little sup- 
 plementing; his reading thereafter is for defini- 
 tion and detail, for the temporal modeling of 
 life in different periods and races and nations, 
 for the illumination of it in exceptional men 
 and women and in high types of character or 
 romantic circumstances; it is, in general, rather 
 verification of old truth than anything more 
 that he finds. In this sense the great writers 
 suffice of themselves, if they be thoroughly 
 known, without the need of reading many books; 
 this is often to be observed in life, for it is not 
 needful to read much but to read well ; yet it is 
 only in maturity that the depth and power of 
 
 192
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 life in the great writers is realized, and the way 
 in which they summarize and contain the 
 lesser multitudinous books of their time, and 
 become lasting memorials of man's life in their 
 age, is understood. If these writers are early 
 known a longer time is given for the develop- 
 ment of this richer meaning that only familiarity 
 and the passage of time can bring out of the 
 page. 
 
 Lastly, as was said at the beginning, litera- 
 ture is a means of extending and interpreting 
 experience so that the reader by mental growth 
 may become more truly man by including in 
 his view the compass of man's life and develop- 
 ing in himself the powers of response to it that 
 he possesses; it exists for the use of the indi- 
 vidual in self -development. This is the point 
 of view that has been maintained with perhaps 
 wearisome iteration in these chapters. It is 
 the personal appeal of literature that has been 
 dwelt on as being its characteristic value in cul- 
 ture. Personality is the genius of life. It is 
 natural, therefore, that those books should 
 be preferred in which the personal appeal is 
 strongest, and this has been indicated as being 
 the right choice of the reader; and also those 
 
 193
 
 The Appreciation of Literature 
 
 books should be preferred in which the matter 
 is put forth in the most personal form, whether 
 by the creative power of the imagination in the 
 greater kinds of literature or by the power of 
 narrative and criticism in its lesser forms. In 
 this way life is seen most vividly, picturesquely 
 and with human excitement; life yields itself 
 most richly in the forms of romance, whether in 
 imagination or in fact. Personality in the 
 presentation does not involve any diminution 
 of the truth. It is mental truth, not material 
 fact, that literature gives; literature is careless 
 of fact as such, it is nothing whether the thing 
 was actual; the reader must learn to live in the 
 mind and not in the senses, in principles and 
 not in facts, in ideal reality as it is to the shap- 
 ing mind and the dreaming heart of the writer; 
 and even when the traveler relates an adventure 
 or describes a landscape before his eyes, it is by 
 an ideal element in it that he makes the true 
 appeal. Ideal truth has its best embodiment 
 in a person and the human events that happen 
 to him. Life is then at its high tide. Study 
 has great deadening power over life; and when 
 the reader finds this deadening influence in his 
 pursuit of literature, when personality begins to 
 
 194
 
 Practical Suggestions 
 
 fade from the page, and the abstract, the para- 
 sitical, the fact encroach, and literature becomes 
 rather a form of knowledge than of life, then 
 he is losing the proper good of literature; 
 and he should seek again in himself and his 
 authors the vitality of a personal touch, the 
 connection of life, the power of human truth. 
 The great thing is to remain alive, in one's 
 reading, and nowhere should the principle of 
 life be more sacredly guarded than in its most 
 immortal presence, imaginative literature and 
 those other forms that take their color from its 
 human methods. 
 
 195
 
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