Southern Branch of the University of California Los Angeles Form L I This book is DUE on the. last date stamped below ,lfl, 1* ^^^ ny^ r \^ ■^^ ^OV 3 1927 ^'^R 2S 1928 ■AY 6 W Konn L-9-15m-8,*26 NOV 9«^ M 3 1935 Jt^'M - 7 1346 ■JUNI ^*^ MAR 1 2 'i9S4 THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER /j'4^^ NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & liUOTUEIiS rUiJLISUEKH 19U4 rji 1907 By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. THE GOLDEN HOUSE. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Half Lenther, $2 00. A IJTTI.K JOURNEY IN THE WOULD. Poet 8vo, Half Leather, $1 50; Paper, 75 cents. THEIR PILGRIMAGE. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Half Leather, $2 00. STUDIES IN THE SOUTH AND WEST. Post 8vo, Halt Leather, $1 75. OUR ITALY. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50. AS WE GO. Illustrated. 16mo, Cloth, $1 00. AS WE WERE SAYING. Illustrated. 16ino, Cloth, $100. THE WORK OP WASHINGTON IRVING. Illus- trated. Square 32mu, Cloth, 50 cents. PuBLisuKD BY HARPER & BROTHERS, Nkw York. I t t t ' ' c e « 1 * « C I « 4 C ( « I. « ' « , ' . • •• I « .• •»• • ' ' • ■ .'' Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothees. All rightt reserved. 7 2 0b NOTE The paper that gives the title to this volnme of essays has not been printed before. The other papers have appeared from time to time in the Atlantic Monthly and the Century Maga- zine, and I desire to express my sincere thanks for the privilege of reproducing them. They have been selected for their general relation to the theme of the title essay, that is to say, the connection between our literary, educational, and social progress. The dates of their first publication are given in explanation of the al- lusions to passing events. C. D. W. CONTENTS PASS The Relation of Literature to Life . . 1 Simplicity 43 "Equality" 5T What is Your Culture to Me ? . . . . 99 Modern Fiction 133 Thoughts Suggested by Mr. Froude's "Progress" 169 England 207 The English Volunteers during the Late Invasion 243 The Novel and the Common School . . 261 A Night in the Garden of the Tuileries . 297 THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE rn 45 W^4 THE RELATIO:?^ OF LITEEATUEE TO LIFE /jf^ 2 2. [This paper was prepared and delivered at several of our universities as introductory to a course of five lectures wbich insisted on the value of literature in common life — some hearers thought with an exag- gerated emphasis — and attempted to maintain the thesis \ that all genuine, enduring literature is the outcome of / the lime that produces it, is responsive to the generslw sentiment of its time ; that tliis close relation to hu- man life insures its welcome ever after as a true rep- I\ resentation of ]ium:in nature ; and that consequently >^ the most remunerative method of studying a litera- r\ ture isto study the people for whom it was produced. , Illustrations of this were drawn from tiic Greek, the Frencl), and the English literatures. This study al- ways throws a flood of light upon the meaning of the text of an old autlinr, tlie same light that the reader uncon.seiously has upon contemporary pages dealing with the life with which he is familiar. The reader can test thi.s by taking up his Shakespeare ufler a thorough in- 4 RELATION OF LITERATURK TO LIFE vestigiition of the customs, maunors, and popular life of the Elizabetlum period. Of course the converse is true that good literature is an open door into the life and mode of thought of the time and place where it originated.] I HAD a vision once — you may all have had a like one — of the stream of time flowing through a limitless land. Along its banks sprang up in succession the generations of man. The\' did not move with the stream — they lived their lives and sank away ; and al- ways below them new generations appeared, to play their brief parts in what is called his- tory — the sequence of human actions. The stream flowed on, opening for itself forever a way through the land. I saw that these suc- cessive dwellers on the stream were busy in constructing and setting afloat vessels of vari- ous size and form and rig — arks, galleys, gal- leons, sloops, brigs, boats propelled by oars, by sails, by stoam. I saw the anxiety Avith which each builder launched his venture, and watched its performance and progress. The anxiety was to invent and launch something that should float cJn to the generations to come, and carry RELATION OF LITEKATUEE TO LIFE 5 the name of the builder and the fame of his generation. It was almost pathetic, these puny efforts, because faith alwaj'^s sprang afresh in the success of each new venture. Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be launched at all ; they sank like lead, close to the shore. Others floated out for a time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and disappeared. Some, not well put to- gether, broke into fragments in the buffeting of the waves. Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on their sails, and went awav with good promise of a long voyage. But only a few floated for any length of time, and still fewer were ever seen by the generation succeeding that which launched them. The shores of the stream were strewn with wrecks ; there lay bleaching in the sand the ribs of many a once gallant craft. Innumerable were the devices of the build- ers to keep their inventions afloat. Some paid great attention to the form of the hull, others to the kind of cargo and the loading of it, while others — and these seemed the majority — trusted more to some new sort of sail, or new fashion of rudder, or new application of pro- pelling power. And it was wonderful to see what these new ingenuities did for a time, and 6 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE how each generation was deceived into the be- lief that its products would sail on forever. But one fate practically came to the most of them. They were too heavy,^tJM^were too light, they were built of old i^^BRi^ and they went to the bottom, they wenfTBiore, they broke up and floated in fragments. And especially did the crafts built in imitation of something that had floated down from a previous gen- eration come to quick disaster. I saw only here and there a vessel, beaten by weather and blackened by time— so old, perhaps, that the name of the maker was no longer legible ; or some fragments of antique wood that had ev- idently come from far up the stream. When such a vessel appeared there was sure to arise great dispute about it, and from time to time expeditions were organized to ascend the river and discover the place and circumstances of its origin. Along the banks, at intervals, whole fleets of boats and fragments had gone ashore, and were piled up in bays, like the drift-wood of a subsided freshet. Efforts were made to dislodge these from time to time and set them afloat again, newly christened, with fresh paint and sails, as if they stood a better chance of the voyage than any new ones. In- deed, I saw that a large part of the commerce RELATION OF LITEKATFRE TO LIFE 7 of this river was, in fact, the old hulks and stranded wrecks that each generation had set afloat again. As I saw it in this foolish vis- ion, how pathetic this labor was from genera- tion to generation ; so many vessels launched ; so few making a voyage even for a lifetime ; so many builders confident of immortality ; so many lives outlasting this coveted reputa- tion ! And still the generations, each with touching hopefulness, busied themselves with this child's play on the baidcs of the stream ; and still the river flowed on, whelming and wrecking the most of that so confidently com- mitted to it, and bearing only here and there, on its swift, wide tide, a ship, a boat, a shin- gle. These hosts of men whom I saw thus occu- pied since history began were authors ; these vessels were books; these heaps of refuse in the bays were great libraries. The allegory admits of any amount of ingenious parallel- ism. It is nevertheless misleading; it is the illusion of an idle fancy. I have introduced it because it expresses, with some whimsical ex- aggeration—not much inoie than that of " The Vision of Mirza" — the popular notion about literature and its relation to human life. In the popular conception, literature is as mucii.a 8 RELATION OF LITER ATUKE TO LIFE thing apart from life as these boats on the stream of time were from the existence, the struggle, the decay of the generations along the shore . . I say in the popular conception, forQ jterat ure^ is -wholly different from this, not only in its effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of lives upon this earth ; it is not only an integral part of all of them, but, with its sister arts, It is the one unceasing continuity in history. Literature and art are not only the records and monuments made by the successive races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and emotion, but they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on, enduring, amid the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling the fleet- ing generations. Without this continuity of thought and emotion, history would present us only a succession of meaningless experi- ments. The experiments fail, the experiments succeed — at any rate, they end — and what re- mains for transmission, for the sustenance of succeeding peoples ? Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and expressed. It is true that every era, each generation, seems to have its peculiar work to do ; it is to subdue the in- tractable earth, to repel or to civilize the bar- barians, to settle society in order, to build cities, RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 9 to amass wealth in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices such as were never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance of each other — luclvy if they have anything to say when that is accomplished — to extend the information of the few among the many, or to multiply the means of easy and luxurious living. Age after age the world labors for these things with the busy absorp- tion of a colony of ants in its castle of sand, 'And we must confess that the process, such, for instance, as that now going on here — this onset of many peoples, which is transforming the continent of America — is a spectacle to ex- cite the imagination in the highest degree. If there were any poet capable of putting into an epic the spirit of this achievement, what an epic would be his ! Can it be that there is any- thing of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we roach our destination sooner — getting there (piickly being a supreme ob- ject. It is well to force the soil to yield a linndred-fold, to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, 10 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE draff coal and metal from the bowels of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift- running carriages, to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships. This gigantic achievement strikes the imagination. If the world in whicii you live happens to be the world of books, if your pursuit is to know what has been done and said in the world, to the end .that your own conception of the value of life may be enlarged, and that better things may be done and said hereafter, this world and this pursuit assume supreme im- portance in your mind. But you can in a mo- ment place yourself in relations — you have not to go far, perhaps only to speak to your next neighbor — where the very existence of your world is scarcely recognized. All that has seemed to you of supreme importance is ig- nored. You have entered a world that is called practical, where the things that we have been speaking of are done ; you have interest in it and sympathy with it, because your scheme of life embraces the development of ideas into actions ; but these men of realities have only the smallest conception of the world that seems to you of the highest importance ; and, further, they have no idea that they owe anything to it, that it h& ever influenced their RELATION OF LITEKATURE TO LIFE 11 lives or can add anything to them. And it may chance that you have, for the moment, a sense of insignificance in the small part you are playing in the drama going forward. Go out of your library, out of the small circle of people who talk of books, who are engaged in research, whose liveliest interest is in the prog- ress of ideas, in the expression of thought and emotion that is in literature ; go out of this at- mosphere into a region where it does not exist, it may be into a place given up to commerce and exchange, or to manufacturing, or to the development of certain other industries, such as mining, or the pursuit of office — which is sometimes called politics. You will speedily be aware how completely apart from human life literature is held to be, how few people re- gard it seriously as a necessary element in life-, as anything more than an amusement or a vexation. I have in mind a mountain district, stripped, scarred, and blackened by the ruth- less lumbermen, ravished of its forest wealth, divested of its beauty, which has recently be- come the field of vast coal-mining operations. Kemote from communication, it was yester- day an exhausted, wounded, deserted country. To-day audacious railways are entering it, crawling up its mountain slopes, rounding its 13 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE dizz}' pi'ccii)iccs, spcanning its valleys on iron cobwebs, piercing its hills with tunnels. Drifts are opened in its coal seams, to which iron tracks shoot away from the main line; in the woods is seen the gleam of the engineer's level, is heard the rattle of heavily-laden wagons on the newly-made roads ; tents are pitched, uncouth shanties have sprung up, great stables, boarding-houses, stores, work- shops; the miner, the blacksmith, the mason, the carpenter have arrived ; households have been set up in temporary barracks, children are alreadv there who need a school, women who must have a church and society ; the stagnation has given place to excitement, money has flowed in, and everywhere are the hum of industry and the swish of the goad of American life. On this hillside, which in June was covered with oaks, is already in October a town ; the stately trees have been felled ; streets are laid out and graded and named ; there are a hundred dwellings, there are a store, a post-office, an inn ; the telegraph has reached it, and the telephone and the electric light ; in a few weeks more it will be in size a city, with thousands of people — a town made out of hand by drawing men and women from other towns, civilized men and women, who have voluntarily RELATIOX OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 13 put themselves in a position where they must be civilized over again. This is a marvellous exhibition of what ener- gy and capital can do. You acknowledge as much to the creators of it. You remember that not far back in history such a transfor- mation as this could not have been wrouglit in a hundred years. This is really life, this is doing something in the world, and in the pres- ence of it you can see why the creators of it regard your world, which seemed to you so im- portant, the world whose business is the evolu- tion and expression of thought and emotion, as insignificant. Here is a material addition to the business and wealth of the race, here em- ployment for men who need it, here is indus- try replacing stagnation, here is the pleasure of overcoming difficulties and conquering ob- stacles. Why encounter these difficulties ? In order that more coal may be procured to op- erate more railway trains at higher speed, to supply more factories, to add to the industrial stir of modern life. The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an ex- ecutive ability that would maintain and ma- noeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, how- ever, consciously philantliro])ists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving cniploymcnt 14 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before. Tliey enjoy no doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of leader- ship and the consequence derived from its rec- ognition ; but they embark in this enterprise in order that they may liave the position and the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material advantages: sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which arc the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy equi- pages and troops of servants; the object be- ing that their wives shall dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the ground ; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and — a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our woi-ld— that the}^ may impress and re- duce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk. This life — for this enterprise and its objects are types of a considerable portion of life — is not without its ideal, its hero, its highest expression, its consummate flower. It is ex- pressed in a word which I use without any RELATION or LITERATURE TO LIFE 15 sense of its personalit}'', as the French use the word Barnum — for our crude young nation has the distinction of adding a verb to the French lanofuao-e, the verb to harmiin — it is expressed in the well-known name Croesus, This is a standard — impossible to be reached perhaps, but a standard. If one may say so, the country is sown with seeds of Croesus, and the crop is forward and promising. The in- terest to us now in the observation of this phase of modern life is not in the least for purposes of satir e or of reform. We are in- quiring how whoU}' this conception of life is divorced from the desire to learn what has been done and said to the end that better things may be done and said hereafter, in order that we may understand the popular concep- tion of the insignificant value of literature in human affairs. But it is not aside from our subject, rather right in its path, to take heed of what the philosophers say of the effect in other respects of the pursuit of wealth. One cause of the decay of the power of de- fence in a state, says the Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws—onG, cause is the love of wealth, which wholly aljsorbs men and never for a momont allows them to think of anything but their i)rivatc possessions; on this the soul of 16 KELATION OF LITKUATUKK TO LIFE every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain; mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and thej'^ laugh at any other ; that is the rea- son why a city will not be in earnest about war or any other good and honorable pursuit. The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says Socrates, in the Re- public^ is the ruin of democrac}'. They in- vent illegal modes of expenditure ; and what do they or their wives care about the law ? " And then one, seeing another's display, proposes to rival him, and thus the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character, " After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a fortune, the less they think of virtue ; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls. " And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state, virtue and the virtu- ous are dishonored. "And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is neglected. " And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money, and they honor and reverence the rich RELATION OF LITEKATURE TO LIFE 17 man and make a ruler of him, and dishonor the poor man. " They do so." The object of a reasonable statesman (it is Plato who is really speaking in the Laws) is not that the state should be as great and rich as possible, should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by sea and land. The citizen must, indeed, be happy and good, and the legislator will seek to make him so ; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot be ; not at least in the sense in which many speak of riches. For they describe by the term " rich " the few who have the most valuable possessions, though the owner of them be a rogue. And if this is true, I can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be haj)py : he must be good as well as rich. And good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time he cannot be. Some one will ask, Why not ? And we shall answer, Because acquisitions which come from sources which are just and unjust indifferently are more than double those which come from just sources -only; and the sums which are expended neither honorably nor disgracefully are only half as great as those which are expendi'd honorably and on honorable purposes. Thus if one ac- 18 RELATION OF LITEUATLKK TO LIKE quires double and spends half, the other, who is in the opposite case and is a good man, can- not possibly be wealthier than he. The first (I am speaking of the saver, and not of the spender) is not always bad; he may indeed in some cases be utterl}' bad, but as I was say- ing, a good man he never is. For he who re- ceives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither justly nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty. On the other hand, the utterly bad man is generally profli- gate, and therefore poor ; while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just means only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be very poor. The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very rich are not good, and if they are not good they are not happy. r And the conclusion of Plato is that we ought not to pursue any occupation to the neglect of that for which riches exist — " I mean," he says, "soul and body, which without gymnastics and without education will never be worth any- thing ; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times, the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts." ^ Men cannot be happy unless they are good, and they cannot be good unless the care of RELATION OF LITERATUKE TO LIFE 19 the soul occupies the first place in their thoughts. That is the first interest of man ; the interest in the body is midway ; and last of all, when rightly regarded, is the interest about money. ^»^ The majority of mankind reverses this order of interests, and therefore it sets literature to one side as of no practical account in human hfe. More than this, it not onh'- drops it out of mind, but it has no conception of its influ- ence and power, in the very affairs from which it seems to be excluded. It is my pur|3ose to show not only the close relation of literature to ordinary life, but its eminent position in y life, and its saving power in lives which do not suspect its inftuence or value. Just as it is virtue that saves the state, if it be saved, al- though the majority do not recognize it and attribute the salvation of the state to energy, and to obedience to the laws of political econo-"^. my, and to discoveries in science, and to finan- cial contrivances; /so it is that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence for a civiliza- tion that is worth anything, a civilization that • loes not by its own nature work its decay, is tliat which I ciil literature. 20 RELATION OF LITEKATCRE TO LIFE It is tjiiie to define what we mean by litera- ture. We may arrive at the meaning by the definition of exclusion. We do not mean all books, but some books ; not all that is written and published, but only a small part of it. ^Ve do not mean books of law, of theology, of pol- itics, of science, of medicine, and not neces- sarily books of travel, or adventure, or biog- ra})hy, or fiction even. These may all be ephemeral in their nature. The term lelles- lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow. In books of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel, adventure, biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that possess, or the whole contents may pos- sess, that quality which comes within our meaning of literature. It must have in it \ r - something of the enduring and the universal. \^ When we use the term, art, we do not mean the arts ; we are indicating a quality that may be in an}'- of the arts. In art and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and in human life, but of feelinsr, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal to the universal in the race. It is, for exam- ple, impossible for a Christian to-day to under- stand what the religious system of the Egyp- tians of three thousand years ago was to the ^ i RELATION OF LITEfiATUEE TO LIFE 21 Egyptian mind, or to grasp the idea conveyed to a Chinaman's thought in the phrase, " the worship of the principle of heaven "; but the Christian of to-day comprehends perfect!}" the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of Thotmes III., who described the comical mis- eries of his campaign with as clear an appeal to universal human nature as Horace used in his Iter Bnuulusium; and the maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the bitter- sweetness of Thomas a Kempis. De Quince}^ distinguishes between the literature of knowl- edge and the literature of power. The defini- tion is not exact ; but we may say that the one is a statement of what is known, the other is^ an emanation from the man himself ; or that one may add to the sum of human knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a higher want in human nature than the want of knowledfje. We select and set aside as literature that which' is original, the product of what we call genius. As I have said, the subject of a production does not always determine the desired quality which makes it literature. A biograi)hy may con- tain all the facts in regard to a man and his character, arranged in an orderly and comprc- liensible manner, and yet not be literature ; but it may be so written, like Tlutarch's Lives or 22 RELATIOM OF LITERATURE TO LIFE Defoe's account of Robinson Crusoe, that it is literature, and-^f imperishable value as a picture of human life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is higher than the want of knowledge. And this contribu- tion, which I desire to be understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the thing of most value in the lives of the major- ity of men, whether they are aware of it or not. It may be weighty and profound ; it may be light, as light as the fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore ; it may be the thought of Plato when he discourses of the character nec- essary in a perfect state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute beauty, goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the soul ; or it may be the love-\ - song of a Scotch ploughman : but it has thisr •■ " one quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for facts, for knowl- edge, for wealth./ In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be called the arrogance of culture, an ar- rogance that has been emphasized, in these days of reaction from the old attitude of liter- ary obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and KELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 33 hard words, which are paid back by equally emphasized contempt. The apostles of light resrard the rest of mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these self -constituted apostles are idle word -mon- gers, without any sympathy v/ith humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions of life easier. It is natural that every man should magnify the circle of the world in which he is active and imagine .that all outside of it is comparatively unimportant. Everybody who is not a drone has his sufficient world. To the lawyer it is his cases and the body of law, it is the legal relation of men that is of supreme importance; to the merchant and manufacturer all the world consists in buying and selling, in the production and exchange of products ; to the physician all the world is dis- eased and in need of remedies ; to the clergy- man speculation and the discussion of dogmas and historical theology assume immense im- portance ; the politician has his world, the art- ist his also, and the man of l)ooks and letters a realm still apart from all others. And to each of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary importance; ho is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing. To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a 24 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE litigant; to the grocer the world is that which eats, and pays — with more or less regularity ; to the scholar the world is in books and ideas. One realizes how possessed he is with his own little world only when by chance he changes his profession or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or journalism, and sees in its true proportion what it was that once absorbed him and seemed to him so large. "When Socrates discusses with Gorgias the value of rhetoric, the use of which, the latter * asserts, relates to the greatest and best of hu- man things, Socrates says: I dare say you have heard men singing at feasts the old drinking-song, in which the singers enumerate the goods of life — first, health ; beauty next ; thirdly, wealth honestly acquired. The pro- ducers of these things — the physician, the trainer, the monev-maker — each in turn con- tends that his art produces the greatest good. Surely, says the physician, health is the great- est good ; there is more good in my art, says the trainer, for my business is to make men beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says the money-maker, whether any one can produce a greater good than wealth. But, in- sists Gorgias, the greatest good of men, of which I am the creator, is that which gives ^> RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 25 men freedom in their persons, and the power of ruling over others in their several states — that is, the word which persuades the judge in the court, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly : if you have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and the money - maker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for those w^ho are able to speak and persuade the multitude. l/r What we call life is divided into occupations and interests, and the horizons of mankind are bounded by them. It happens naturally enough, therefore, that there should be a want of sympathy in regard to these pursuits among men, the politician despising the scholar, and the scholar looking down upon the politician, and the man of affairs, the man of industries, not caring to conceal his contempt for both the others. And still more reasonable does the division appear between all the world which is devoted to material life, and the few who live in and for the expression of thought and emotion. It is a pity that this should be so, for it can be shown that life Avould not bo worth living divorced from the gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that X 26 REI-ATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE literature suffers atrophy when it does not V^oncern itself with the facts and feelings of men. ^ If the poet lives in a world apart from the vulgar, the most lenient apprehension of him is that his is a sort of fool's paradise. One of the most curious features in the relation of literature to life is this, that while poetry, the production of the poet, is as necessary to uni- versal man as the atmosphere, and as accept- able, the poet is regarded with that minghng of compassion and undervaluation, and per- haps awe, wliich once attached to the weak- minded and insane, and which is sometimes ex- pressed by the term " inspired idiot." How- ever the poet may have been petted and crown(Hl, however his name may have been diffused among peoples, I doubt not that the popular estimate of him has always been sub- stantially what it is to-day. And we all know that it is true, true in our individual conscious- ness, that if a man be known as a poet and nothing else, if his character is sustained by no other achievement than the production of poetry, he suffers in our opinion a loss of re- spect. And this is only recovered for him after he is dead, and his poetry is left alone to speak for his name. However fond my lord RELATION OF LITERATUKE TO LIFE 27 and lady were of the ballad, the place of the minstrel was at the lower end of the hall. If we are pushed to say why this is, wh}- this happens to the poet and not to the producers of anything else that excites the admiration of mankind, we are forced to admit that there is something in the poet to sustain the popular judgment of his inutility. In all the occupa- tions and professions of life there is a sign put , up, invisible but none the less real, and ex- pressing an almost universal feeling — " jSTo poet need apply." And this is not because there are so many poor poets ; for there are ]wor lawyers, poor soldiers, poor statesmen, incom- petent business men ; but none of the personal disparagement attaches to them that is affixed to the poet. Tliis popular estimate of the poet extends also, possibly in less degree, to all the producers of the literature that does not con- cern itself with knowledge. It is not our care to inquire further why this is so, but to repeat that it is strange that it should be so when poetry is, and has been at all times, the uni- versal solace of all peoples who have emerged out of barbarism, the one tiling not sujier- natural and yet akin to the supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid condi- tions, tolerable to the race. For poetry is not 28 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE merely the comfort of the refined and the de- lio-ht of the educated ; it is the alleviator of poverty, the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary pilgrimage. We cannot conceive the abject animal condi- tion of our race were poetry abstracted ; and we do not wonder that this should be so when we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as the body. The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the ofRce or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical conditions in which the majority exist. There are races, which we may call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly ex- emplified. It would be difficult to find pov- erty more complete, physical wants less grati- fied, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the steppes of Siberia. But there are perhaps none among the more favored races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and romance. Watch the throng seat- ed about an Arab or Indian or Persian story- teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry, almost naked, with- RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 29 out any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid condition ; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense absorption ; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they are free for the hour to Avander, tasting a keen and deep enjojnnent that all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples. Measure, if you can, what poetry is to them, what their lives would be without it| To the millions and millions of men who are in this condition, the bard, the story-teller, the cre- ator of what we are considering as literature, comes with the one thing that can lift them out of poverty, suffering — all the woe of which nature is so heedless. It is not alone of the poetical nations of \ the East that this is true, nor is this desire for the higher enjoyment always wanting in the savage tribes of the AVest. AVhen the Jesuit Fathers in 17G8 landed upon the almost untouched and unexplored southern Pacific coast, they found in the San Gabriel Valley in Lower California that the Indians had games and feasts at which they decked them- selves in flower garlands that reached to their feet, and that at these games there were song 80 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE contests which sometimes lasted for three daN^s. This contest of the poets was an old custom with them. And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it down from father to son. We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry whose abject poverty is not in some measure alle- viated by this power wiiich literature gives them to live outside it. Through our sacred Scriptures, through the ancient storv - tellers, through the tradition which in literature made, as I said, the chief continuity in the stream of time, we all live a considerable, perhaps the better, portion of our lives in the Orient. But I am not sure that the Scotch peasant, the crofter in his Iligliland cabin, the operative in his squalid tenement-house, in the hopeless- ness of povert}", in the grime of a life made twice as hard as that of the Arab by an inim- ical climate, does not owe more to literature than the manof cp^tu re. whose material sur- roundings are heaven in the imagination of the poor. Think what his wretched Hfe would be, in its naked deformity, without the popu- lar ballads, Avithout the romances of Scott, which have invested his hind for him, as for us, with enduring charm ; and especially with- RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 31 out the songs of Burns, which keep alive in him the feehng that he is a man, which im- part to his blunted sensibihty the delicious throb of spring — songs that enable him to hear the birds, to see the bits of blue sky — sono-s that make him tender of the wee bit daisy at his feet — songs that hearten him when his heart is fit to break with misery. Perhaps the English peasant, the English operative, is less susceptible to such influences than the Scotch or the Irish ; but over him, sordid as his conditions are, close kin as he is to the clod, the light of poetry is diffused ; there fil- ters into his life, also, something of that divine stream of which we have spoken, a dialect poem that touches him, the leaf of a psalm, some bit of imagination, some tale of pathos, set afloat by a poor writer so long ago that it has become the common stock of human tra- dition — maybe from Palestine, maybe from the Ganges, perhaps from Athens— some ex- pression of real emotion, some creation, we say, that makes for him a world, vague and dimly appreh(Mided, that is not at all the act- ual world in which he sins and suffers. The poor woman, in a hut with an earth floor, a reeking roof, a smoky chimney, barren of com- fort, so indecent that a gentleman would not 82 RELATION OK LITERATURE TO LII'IJ stable his horse in it, sits and sews upon a coarse garment, while she rocks the cradle of an infant about whom she cherishes no illu- sions that his lot will be other than that of his father before him. As she sits forlorn, it is not the wretched hovel that she sees, nor other hovels like it — rows of tenements of hopeless povert}^ the ale-house, the gin-shop, the coal-pit, and the choking factory — but "Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood Stand dressed in living green" for her, thanks to the poet. But, alas for the poet ! there is not a peasant nor a wretched operative of them all who will not shake his head and tap his forehead with his forefinger when the poor poet chap passes by. The peasant has the same opinion of him that the physician, the trainer, and the money-lender had of the rhetorician. The hard conditions of the lonely New Eng- land life, with its religious theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as diffi- cult to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have been unendura- bl^ilihey had not been touched with the ideal created by the poet. There was in creed and purpose the virility that creates a state, and. RELATION OF LITKRATUKE TO LIFE 33 as Menander says, the country Avhich is cul- tivated with difficulty produces brave men; but we leave out an important element in the lives of the Pilgrims if we overlook the means thev had of living above their barren circum- stances. I do not speak only of the culture — which many of them brought from the univer- sities, of the Greek and Iloman classics, and what unworldly literature they could glean from the productive age of EHzabeth and James, but of another source, more univer- sally resorted to, and more powerful in ex- citing imagination and emotion, and filling the want in human nature of which we have spoken. They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of life, or a guide to heaven. It supplied the place to them of the Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab. It opened to them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination. What is the Biljle i It niiglit have sufficed, accepted as a book of revehition, for all the ])urposes of moral guidance, spii'itual consola- tion, and systematiz(;d authority, if it had been a collection of precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury of 34 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE promises. We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training- their intellectual facul- ties in the knottiest problems of human re- sponsibilit)^ and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling with dogmas and the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew out of the Bible : what else it was to them in a deo^ree it has been to few peoples in any age. iJfFor the Bible is the un- / equalled record of Mioughf and elnoflbn, the / reservoir of poetry, traditions^ stories, para-/ bles, exaltations, consolations, great imagina-l tive adventure, for which the spirit of man isl always lunging.Nlt might have been, in warn- ing examples aii>l commands, all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on * earth and reach a better country ; but it would have been a very different book to mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it lacked its wonderful literary quality. It might have enabled men to reach a better country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in that better country, orfto live in a region above the sordidness of actual lifej For, apart from its religious intention and sa- cred character, the book is so written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophe- cies, promises, stories, that clear literary qual- RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 35 ity that supplies, as certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is higher than the want of facts or knowledge/ The Bible is the best illustration of the lit-/ erature of power, for it always concerns itself I y'^ , with life, it touches it at all points. And this is K the test of any piece of literature — its universal I appeal to human nature.!. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh laws — only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and Virginia — the weary drudgery, the few pleas- ures, the curb upon the expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them. It was an open door into a world where emotion is ex- • pressed, where imagination can range, where \/^'' love and longing find a language, where im- agery is given to every noble and sup])rcssed passion of the soul, where every asi)iration llnds wings. It was history, or, as Thucyd- ides said, philosophy teaching by example; it was the romance of real life ; it was entertain- ment unfailing ; the wonder-book of childhood, the volume of sweet sentiment to tlie shy 36 RELATION OF I,[TERATURE TO LIFE maiden, the sword to the soldier, the inciter of the 3'^outh to heroic enduring of hardness, it was the refuge of the aged in failing activity. Perhaps we can nowhere find a better illus- tration of the true relation of literature to life than in this example. Let us consider the comparative value of lit- erature to mankind. By comparative value I mean its worth to men in comparison with other things of acknowledged importance, such as the creation of industries, the government of states, the manipulation of the politics of an age, the achievements in war and discovery, and the lives of admirable men. It needs a certain perspective to judge of this aright, for the near and the immediate always assume im- portance. The work that an age has on hand, whether it be discovery, conquest, the wars that determine boundaries or are fought for policies, the industries that develop a country or affect the character of a people, the wield- ing of power, the accumulation of fortunes, the various activities of an}^ given civilization or period, assume such enormous proportions to those engaged in them that such a modest thing as the literary product seems insignifi- cant in comparison ; and hence it is that the man of action always holds in slight esteem S-/ RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 37 the man of thought, and especially the ex- presser of feeling and emotion, the poet and the humorist. It is only when we look back over the ages, when civilizations have passed or changed, over the rivalries of states, the ambitions and enmities of men, the shining deeds and the base deeds that make up history, that we are enabled to see what remains, what is permanent. Perhaps the chief result left to the world out of a period of heroic exertion, of passion and struggle and accumulation, is a sheaf of poems, or the record by a man of let- ters of some admirable character. Spain filled a large place in the world in the sixteenth cen- tury, and its influence upon history is by no means spent yet ; but we have inherited out of that period nothing, I dare say, that is of more value than the romance oiDon Quixote. It is true that the best heritage of generation from generation is the character of great men ; but we always owe its transmis.sion to the poet and the writer. Without Phito there would be no V Socrates. There is no influence comparable in liuman life to the personality of a powerful man, so long as he is present to his generation, or lives in the memory of those who felt his influence. Hut after time has passed, will the world, will human life, that is essentially the 38 RELATION OF LITEKATUKE TO LIFE •same in all changing conditions, be more af- fected by what Bismarck did or by what Goethe said? We may without impropriety take for an illustration of the comparative value of liter- ature to human needs the career of a man now living. In the opinion of many, Mr. Glad- stone is the greatest Englishman of this age. What would be the position of the British em- pire, what would be the tendency of English politics and society without him, is a matter for speculation. He has not played such a role for England and its neighbors as Bismarck has played for Germany and the Continent, but he has been one of the most powerful influ- ences in moulding English action. He is the foremost teacher. Earely in history has a nation depended more upon a single man, at times, than the English upon Gladstone, upon his will, his ability, and especially his char- acter. In certain recent crises the thought of losing him produced something like a panic in the English mind, justifying in regard to him the hj^perbole of Choate upon the death of AYebster, that the sailor on the distant sea would feel less safe — as if a protecting provi- dence had been withdrawn from the world. Ilis mastery of finance and of economic prob- RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE 39 lems, his skill in debate, bis marvellous acbieve- ments in oratory, bave extorted tbe admiration of bis enemies. Tbere is scarcel}' a province in government, letters, art, or researcb in wbicb tbe mind can win triumpbs tbat be bas not invaded and displaj^'ed bis power in ; scarcely a question in politics, reform, letters, religion, archaeology, sociology, wbicb be bas not dis- cussed witb ability. He is a scholar, critic, parliamentarian, orator, voluminous writer. He seems equally at home in every field of human activit}'' — a man of prodigious capacity and enormous acquirements. He can take up, witb a turn of the band, and alwavs with vi^or, the cause of the Greeks, Papal power, educa- tion, theology, the influence of Egypt on Homer, the effect of English legislation on King O'Brien, contributing something note- worthy to all the discussions of the day. But I am not aware that he bas ever produced a'' single page of literature. "Whatever space he has filled in his own country, whatever and however enduring the impression be has made upon English life and society, does it seem likely that the sum total of his immense activ- ity in so many fields, after the passage of so many years, will be wortii to tlie \v<^rld as much as the simple story of Rah and his Friendti'^ 40 RELATION OF I.ITKRATURE TO LIFE Already in America I doubt if it is. The il- lustration might have more weight with some minds if I contrasted the work of this great man — as to its answering to a deep want in hu- man nature — with a novel like Ilenry Esmond or a poem like In Memoriam; but I think it is sufficient to rest it upon so slight a perform- ance as the sketch by Dr. John Brown, of Ed- inburgh. For the truth is that a little page of literature, nothing more than a sheet of paper with a poem written on it, may have that vi- tality, that enduring quality, that adaptation to life, that make it of more consequence to all who inherit it than every material achiev^ement of the age that produced it. It was nothing but a sheet of paper with a poem on it, carried to the door of his London patron, for which the poet received a guinea, and perhaps a seat at the foot of my lord's table. What was that scrap compared to my lord's business, his great establishment, his equipages in the Park, his position in society, his weight in the House of Lords, his influence in Europe ? And yet that scrap of paper has gone the world over ; it has been sung in the camp, wept over in the lonely cottage ; it has gone with the marching regiments, wath the explorers — with mankind, in short^onJts_^vayLdQ5nL_tlie ages, brigh.tea- RELATION OF LITER ATU RE TO LIFE 41 JDg, consoling, elevating life ; and my lord, who regarded as scarcely above a menial the poet to whom he tossed the guinea— my lord, with all his pageantry and power, has utterly trone and left no witness. (1886.) SIMPLICITY SIMPLICITY No doubt one of the most charming crea- tions in all poetry is Nausicaii, the white-armed dauirhter of Kinf; Alcinous. There is no scene, no picture, in the lieroic times more pleasing than the meeting of Ulysses with this dam- sel on the wild sea -shore of Scheria, where the Wanderer had been tossed ashore by the tempest. The place of this classic meeting was probably on the west coast of Corfu, that incomparable island, to whose beauty the legend of the exquisite maidenhood of the daufjhter of the king of the Pha?acians has added an immortal bloom. We have no dilliculty in recalling it in all its distinctness: the bright morning on which Nausicaii came forth from the palace, where her mother sat and turned the distaff loaded with a fleece dyed in sea-purple, mounted the car piled with the robes to be gleansed in the stream, and, attended by her bi-ight- haired, laughing handmaidens, drove to the banks of 40 RELATION OF LITERATDEE TO LIFE the river, where out of its sweet grasses it flowed over clean sand into the Adriatic. The team is loosed to browse the grass ; the gar- ments are flung into the dark water, then trampled with hasty feet in frolic rivalry, and spread upon the gravel to dry. Then the maidens bathe, give their limbs the delicate oil from the cruse of gold, sit by the stream and eat their meal, and, refreshed, mistress and maidens lay aside their veils and play at ball, and Nausicaii begins a song. Though all were fair, like Diana was this spotless virgin midst her maids. A missed ball and maidenly screams waken Ulysses from his sleep in the thicket. At the apparition of the unclad, shipwrecked sailor the maidens flee rights and left. Nausicaii alone keeps her place, secure in her unconscious modesty. To the aston- ished Sport of Fortune the vision of this ra- diant girl, in shape and stature and in noble air, is more than mortal, yet scarcely more than woman : "Like thee, I saw of late, In Delos, a j'oung palm-tree growing up Beside Apollo's altai'." "When the Wanderer has bathed, and been clad in robes from the pile on the sand, and SIMPLICITY 47 refreshed with food and wine which the hos- pitable maidens put before him, the train sets out for the town, Ulysses following the chariot among the bright-haired women. But before that Nausicaa, in the candor of those early days, says to her attendants : "I would that I might call A man like him my husband, dwelling here, And here content to dwell." Is there any woman in history more to be desired than this sweet, pure-minded, honest- liearted girl, as she is depicted with a few swift touches by the great poet? — the du- tiful daughter in her father's house, the joy- ous companion of girls, the beautiful woman whose modest bearing commands the instant homage of man. Nothing is more enduring in literature than this girl and the scene on the Corfu sands. The sketch, though distinct, is slight, little more than outlines; no elaboration, no anal}'- sis ; just an incident, as real as the blue sky of Scheria and the waves on the yellow sand. All the elements of the picture are simple, luiman, natural, standing in ns unconfused relations as any events in common life. T am not recalling it because it is a consi)icuons in- 48 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE stance of the true realism that is touched with the ideality of genius, which is the immortal element in literature, but as an illustration of the other necessary quality in all productions of the human mind that remain a^e after aee, and that is simplicity. This is the stamj) of all enduring work ; this is what appeals to the universal understanding from generation to generation. All the masterpieces that en- dure and become a part of our lives are char- acterized by it. The eye, like the mind, hates confusion and overcrowding. All the ele- ments in beautj^, grandeur, pathos, are sim- ple — as simple as the lines in a Nile picture : the strong river, the yellow desert, the palms, the pyramids ; hardly more than a horizontal line and a perpendicular line ; only there is the sky, the atmosphere, the color — those need genius. We may test contemporary^ literature by its conformity to the canon of simplicity — that is, if it has not that, we may conclude that it lacks one essential lasting quality. It may please ; it may be ingenious — brilliant, even ; it may be the fashion of the day, and a fash- ion that will hold its power of pleasing for half a century, but it will be a fashion. Man- nerisms of course will not deceive us, nor ex- SIMPLICITY 49 travagances, eccentricities, affectations, nor the straining after effect b}'^ the use of coined or far-fetched words and prodigality in adjec- tives. But, style ? Yes, there is such a thing as stvle, ffood and bad : and the style should be the writer's own and characteristic of him, as his speech is. But the moment I admire a style for its own sake, a style that attracts my attention so constantly that I say, How good that is ! I begin to be suspicious. If it is too good, too pronouncedly good, I fear I shall not like it so well on a second reading. If it comes to stand between me and the thought, or the personality behind the thought, I grow more and more sus[)icious. Is tlie book a win- dow, through which I am to see life? Then 1 cannot have the glass too clear. Is it to af- fect me like a strain of music? Then I am still more disturbed l)y any affectations. Is it to produce the effect of a picture? Then I know I want the simplest harmony of color. And I have learned that the most effective word-painting, as it is called, is the simplest. This is true if it is a question oidy of present enjoyment. Hut we may be sure that any piece of literature which attracts only by souKi trick of style, however it ma}' blaze up for a day and startle the woild with its flasli, 50 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE lacks the element of endurance. We do not need much experience to tell us the difference between a lamp and a Roman candle. Even in our day we have seen man}' reputations flare up, illuminate the sk}', and then go out in utter darkness. When we take a proper historical perspective, we see that it is the universal, the simple, that lasts. I am not sure whether simplicity is a matter of nature or of cultivation. Barbarous nature likes display, excessive ornament ; and when we have arrived at the nobly simple, the per- fect proportion, we are always likely to re- lapse into the confused and the complicated. The most cultivated men, we know, are the simplest in manners, in taste, in their style. It is a note of some of the purest modern writers that they avoid comparisons, similes, and even too much use of metaphor. But the mass of men are always relapsing into the tawdrv and the over - ornamented. It is a characteristic of youth, and it seems also to be a characteristic of over - develop- ment. Literature, in any language, has no sooner arrived at the highest vigor of simple expression than it begins to run into pretti- ness, conceits, over -elaboration. This is a fact which may be verified by studying differ- SniPLICITY 51 ent periods, from classic literature to our own day. It is the same with architecture. The clas- sic Greek runs into the excessive elabora- tion of the Roman period, the Gothic into the flamboyant, and so on. "We have had several attacks of architectural measles in this coun- try, which have left the land spotted all over ■with houses in bad taste. Instead of develop- ing the colonial simplicity on lines of dignity and harmony to modern use, we stuck on the pseudo-classic, we broke out in the Mansard, we broke all up into the whimsicalities of the so-called Queen Anne, without regard to cli- mate or comfort. The eye speedily tires of all these things. It is a positive relief to look at an old colonial mansion, even if it is as plain as a barn. What the eye demands is simple lines, proportion, harmony in mass, dignity ; above all, adaptation to use. And what we must have also is individuality in house and in furniture ; that makes the city, the vil- lage, picturescjue and interesting. The highest thing in architecture, as in literature, is the development of individuality in simplicity. Dress is a dangerous topic to meddle with. I myself like the attire of the maidens of Scheria, though Nausicail, we must note, was 52 RELATION OF LITEKATUKE TO LIFE " clad royally." But climate cannot be disre- garded, and the vestment that was so fitting on a Greek girl whom I saw at the Second Cataract of the Nile would scarcely be appro- priate in New York, If the maidens of one of our colleges for girls, say Yassar for illus- tration, habited like the Phasacian girls of Scheria, went down to the Hudson to cleanse the rich robes of the house, and were sur- prised by the advent of a stranger from the city, landing from a steamboat — a wandering broker, let us say, clad in wide trousers, long top-coat, and a tall hat — I fancy that he would be more astonished than Ulysses was at the bevy of girls that scattered at his ap- proach. It is not that women must be all things to all men, but that their simplicity must conform to time and circumstance. What I do not understand is that simplicity gets ban- ished altogether, and that fashion, on a dicta- tion that no one can trace the origin of, makes that lovely in the eyes of women to-day which will seem utterly abhorrent to them to-mor- row. There appears to be no line of taste running through the changes. The only con- solation to you, the woman of the moment, is that while the costume j^our grandmother wore makes her, in the painting, a guy in your SIIIPLICITY 53 eyes, the costume you wear will give your grandchildren the same impression of j^ou. And the satisfaction for you is the thought that the latter raiment will be worse than the other two — that is to say, less well suited to display the shape, station, and noble air which brought Ulysses to his knees on the sands of Corfu. Another reason why I say that I do not know whether simplicity belongs to nature or art is that fashion is as strong to pervert and disfiofure in savage nations as it is in civilized. It runs to as much eccentricity in hair-dressing and ornament in the costume of the jingling belles of Nootka and the maidens of Nubia as in any court or coterie which we aspire to imitate. The only difference is that remote and unso- phisticated communities are more constant to a style they once adopt. There are isolated peasant communities in Europe who have kept for centuries the most uncoutli and inconven- ient attire, while we have run through a dozen variations in the art of attraction by dress, from the most pullVd and bulbous ballooning to the extreme of limpness and lankness. I can only conclude that the civilized human being is a restless creature, whose motives in regard to costume are utterly unfathomable. 54 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE TVe need, however, to go a little further in this question of simplicity. Nausicaii was " clad royally." There was a distinction, then, between her and her handmaidens. She was clad simply, according to her condition. Taste does not by any means lead to uniformity. I have read of a commune in which all the women dressed alike and unbecomingly, so as to discourage all attempt to please or attract, or to give value to the different accents of beauty. The end of those women was worse than the beginning. Simplicity is not ugli- ness, nor poverty, nor barrenness, nor necessa- rily plainness. What is simplicity for another may not be for you, for your condition, your tastes, especially for your wants. It is a per- sonal question. You go beyond simplicity when you attempt to appropriate more than your wants, your aspirations, whatever they are, demand — that is, to appropriate for show, for ostentation, more than your life can assim- ilate, can make thoroughly yours. There is no limit to what you may have, if it is neces- sary for you, if it is not a superfluity to you. What would be simplicity to j^ou may \)e superfluity to another. The rich robes that Kausicaii wore she wore like a goddess. The moment your dress, your house, your house- SIMPLICITY 55 grounds, your furniture, 3'our scale of living, are beyond the rational satisfaction of your own desires — that is, are for ostentation, for imposition upon the public — they are super- fluous, the line of simplicity is passed. Every human beinf]: has a rioht to whatever can best feed his life, satisfy his legitimate desires, contribute to the growth of his soul. It is not for me to judge whether this is luxury or want. There is no merit in riches nor in poverty. There is merit in that simplicity of life which seeks to grasp no more than is nec- essary for the development and enjoyment of the individual. Most of us, in all conditions, are weighted down with superfluities or wor- ried to acquire them. Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. The needs of every person differ from the needs of every other ; we can make no stand- ard for wants or possessions. But the world would be greatly transformed and much more easy to live in if everybody limited liis acqui- sitions to his ability to assimilate them to his life. The destruction of simplicity is a crav- ing for things, not because we need them, l)ut because otliers have them, jiocause one man who lives in a plain little house, in all the 66 KELATION OF LITERATURE TO IJFE restrictions of mean surroundings, would be happier in a mansion suited to bis taste and his wants, is no argument that another man, living in a palace, in useless ostentation, would not be better off in a dwelling which conforms to his cultivation and habits. It is so hard to learn the lesson that there is no satisfaction in gaining more than we personally want. The matter of simplicity, then, comes into literary style, into building, into dress, into life, individualized always by one's personality. In each we aim at the expression of the best that is in us, not at imitation or ostentation. The women in history, in legend, in poetry, whom we love, we do not love because they are "clad royally." In our day, to be clad royally is scarcely a distinction. To have a superfluity is not a distinction. But in those moments when we have a clear vision of life, that which seems to us most admirable and desirable is the simplicity that endears to us the idyl of Nausicaa. (1889.) EQUALITY »j "EQUALITY" In accordance with the advice of Diogenes of Apollonia in the beginning of his treatise on ^N'atural Philosophy — "It appears to me to be well for every one who commences any sort of philosophical treatise to lay down some un- deniable principle to start with" — weofferthis: All men are created unequal. It would be a most interesting study to trace the growth in the world of the doctrine of "equality." That is not the purpose of this essay, any further than is necessary for defini- tion. We use the term in its popular sense, in the meaning, somewhat vague, it is true, which it has liad since the middle of the eighteenth ccnturv. In the popular appreliension it is apt to be confounded with uniformity; and this not without reason, since in many applications of the theory the tendency is to produce like- ness or uniformity. Nature, witii equal laws, tends always to diversity; and doubtless the just notion of equality in human alTairs consists 60 KELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE with unlikeness. Our purpose is to note some of the tendencies of the do^ma as it is at pres- ent understood by a considerable portion of mankind. "VVe regard the formulated doctrine as mod- ern. It would be too much to say that some notion of the " equality of men " did not un- derlie the socialistic and communistic ideas which prevailed from time to time in the an- cient world, and broke out with volcanic vio- lence in the Grecian and Roman communities. But those popular movements seem to us rath- er blind struggles against physical evils, and to be distinguished from those more intelli- gent actions based upon the theory which be- gan to stir Europe prior to the Reformation. It is sufficient for our purpose to take the well-defined theory of modern times. Whether the ideal republic of Plato w^as merely a con- venient form for philosophical speculation, or whether, as the greatest authority on political economy in Germany, Dr. William Roscher, thinks, it " was no mere fancy ;" Avhether Plato's notion of the identity of man and the state is compatible with the theory of equality, or whether it is, as many communists say, in- dispensable to it, we need not here discuss. It is true that in his Rejpublic almost all the " EQUALITY " 61 social theories which have been deduced from the modern proclamation of equality are elabo- rated. Tiiere was to be a community of prop- erty, and also a community of wives and cliildren. The equality of the sexes was in- sisted on to the extent of living in common, identical education and pursuits, equal share in all labors, in occupations, and in government. Between the sexes there was allowed only one ultimate difference. The Greeks, as Professor Jowett says, had noble conceptions of woman- hood ; but Plato's ideal for the sexes had no counterpart in their actual life, nor could they have understood the sort of equality upon which he insisted. The same is true of the Romans throughout their history. More than any other Oriental peoples the Egyptians of the Ancient Empire entertained the idea of the equality of the sexes ; but the equality of man was not conceived by them. Still less did any notion of it exist in the Jew- ish state. It was the fasiiion with the socialists of 1793, as it has been with the international assemblages at Geneva in our own day, to traco the genesis of their notions back to the first Christian aire. The far-reaching influence of the new gospel in the liberation of the iiu- iiian mind and in promoting just and divinely 62 RELATION OF LITEKATUKE TO LIFE ordered relations among men is admitted ; its origination of the social and political dogma we are considering is denied. We do not lind that Christ himself anywhere expressed it or acted on it. He associated with the lowly, the vile, the outcast; he taught that all men, ir- respective of rank or possessions, are sinners, and in equal need of help. But he attempted no change in the conditions of society. The "communism" of the early Christians was the temporary relation of a persecuted and isolated sect, drawn together by common necessities and dangers, and by the new enthusiasm of self-surrender.* Paul announced the universal brotherhood of man, but he as clearly recog- nized the subordination of society, in the duties of ruler and subject, master and slave, and in all the domestic relations ; and although his gospel may be interpreted to contain the ele- * "Tlie community of goods of the first Christians at Jerusalem, so frequently cited and extolled, wafe only a community of use, not of ownership (Acts iv. 82), and throughout a voluntary act of love, not a duty (v. 4); least of all, a right which the poorer might assert. Spite of all this, that community of goods produced a chronic state of poverty in the church of Jerusalem." {Principles of Political Economy. By William Roscher. Note to Section LXXXI. English translation. New York : Henry Holt «k Co. 1878.) « -r-Z^T- A T Trr-D- » EQUALITY 63 ments of revolution, it is not probable that he undertook to inculcate, by the proclamation of '• universal brotherhood," anything more than the duty of universal sympathy between all peoples and classes as society then existed. If Christianity has been and is the force in promoting and shaping civilization that we regard it, we may be sure that it is not as a political agent, or an annuller of the inequali- ties of life, that we are to expect aid from it. Its office, or rather one of its chief offices on earth, is to diffuse through the world, regard- less of condition or possessions or talent or opportunity, sympathy and a recognition of the value of manhood underlying every lot and everv diversity — a value not measured by earthly accidents, but by heavenly standards. This we understand to be "Christian equal- ity." Of course it consists with inequalities of condition, Avith subordination, discipline, obedience ; to obey and serve is as honorable as to command and to be served. If the religion of Christ should ever be ac- climated on earth, the result would not be the removal of hardships and suffering, or of the necessity of self-sacrifice; but the bitterness and discontent at unequal conditions would measurably dis.'i])poar. At the bar of Cliris- 64 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE tianity the poor man is the equal of the rich, and the learned of the unlearned, since intel- lectual acquisition is no guarantee of moral worth. The content that Christianity would bring to our perturbed society would come from the practical recognition of the truth that all conditions may be equally honorable. The assertion of the dignity of man and of labor is, we imagine, the sum and substance of the equality and communism of the New Tes- tament. But we are to remember that this is not merely a " gospel for the poor." Whatever the theories of the ancient world were, the development of democratic ideas is sufficiently marked in the fifteenth century, and even in the fourteenth, to rob the eigh- teenth of the credit of originating the doctrine of equality. To mention only one of the ear- ly writers,* Marsilio, a physician of Padua, in 1324, said that the laws ought to be made by * For copious references to authorities on the spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of the world's his- tory — namely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration of the Roman republic, among the moderns in the age of the Reformation, and again in our own day — see Roscher's Political Economy, notes to Section LXXIX., et seq. " EQUALITY " 65 all the citizens ; and he based this sovereignty of the people upon the greater likelihood of laws being better obeyed, and also being good laws, when they were made by the whole body of the persons affected. In 1750 and 1753, J. J. Rousseau published his two discourses on questions proposed by the Academy of Dijon : " Has the Restoration of Sciences Contributed to Purify or to Cor- rupt Mannersf and "AVhat is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and is it Authorized by Natural Law ^" These questions show the direction and the advance of thinking on so- cial topics in the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury. Rousseau's Contrat-Soclal and the novel Eifdle were published in 17G1. But almost three-quarters of a century be- fore, in 1090, John Locke published his two treatises on government. Rousseau was fa- miliar with them. Mr. John Morley, in his admirable study of Rousseau,* fully discusses the latter's obligation to Locke ; and the expo- sition leaves Rousseau little credit for original- ity, but considerable for illogical misconcep- tiiHi. lie was, in fact, the most illogical of * Roumieau. ]'>y John Morley. London : Chapman & H;ill. 1873. I have used it freely in the glance at this period. 6 66 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE great men, and the most inconsistent even of geniuses. The Contrat-Social is a reaction in many things from the discourses, and Eniile is ahnost an entire reaction, especially in the theory of education, from both. His central doctrine of popular sovereignty was taken from Locke. The English philoso- pher said, in his second treatise, " To under- stand political power aright and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in ; and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dis- pose of their persons and possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nat- ure, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man — a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdic- tion is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, with- out subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should by any manifest declaration of His will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear ap- pointment an undoubted right to dominion and « •r.^TT i T rrry^ » EQUALITY " 67 sovereignty." But a state of liberty is not a state of license. We cannot exceed our own rights without assailing the rights of others. There is no such subordination as authorizes us to destroy one another. As every one is ])Ound to preserve himself, so he is bound to preserve the rest of mankind, and except to do justice upon an offender we may not impair the life, liberty, health, or goods of another. Here Locke deduces the ])ower that one man may have over another ; community could not exist if transgressors were not punished. Every wrong-doer places himself in "a state of war." Here is the difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which men, says Locke, have confounded — alluding probably to Hobbes's notion of the lawlessness of human society in the original condition. The portion of Locke's treatise which was not accepted by the French theorists was that relating to property. J'roperty in lands or goods is due wholly and only to the labor man has put into it. By labor he has removed it from the common state in which nature has placed it, and annexed something to it that excludes the common rights of other men. Rousseau borrowed from llobbcs as well as from Locke in his conception of popular sover- 68 RELATION OF LITEKATDKE TO LIFE eignty ; but this was not his only lack of orig- inality. His discourse on primitive society, his unscientific and unhistoric notions about the original condition of man, were those common in the middle of the eighteenth century. All the thinkers and philosophers and fine ladies and gentlemen assumed a certain state of nat- ure, and built upon it, out of words and phrases, an airy and easy reconstruction of society, with- out a thought of investigating the past, or inquiring into the development of mankind. Every one talked of " the state of nature " as if he knew all about it, "The conditions of primitive man," says Mr. Morley, " were dis- cussed by very incompetent ladies and gentle- men at convivial supper -parties, and settled with complete assurance." That was the age when solitary Frenchmen plunged into the wilderness of North America, confidently ex- pecting to recover the golden age under the shelter of a wigwam and in the society of a squaw. The state of nature of Rousseau was a state in which inequality did not exist, and with a fervid rhetoric he tried to persuade his readers that it was the happier state. He recognized inequality, it is true, as a word of two differ- ent meanings- first, physical inequality, differ- « T;.,^TT » T T1-TT " EQUALITY 69 ence of age, strength, health, and of intelligence and character; second, moral and political in- equality, difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment of others — such as riches, honor, power. The first difference is established by nature, the second by man. So long, hon-ever, as the state of nature endures, no disadvantages flow from the natural in- equalities. In Rousseau's account of the means by which equality was lost, the incoming of the ideas of property is prominent. From prop- erty arose civil society. With property came in inequality. His exposition of inequality is confused, and it is not possible always to tell whether he means inequality of possessions or of political rights. His contemporary, Morel- ly, who published the Bas'deade in 1753, was troubled by no such ambiguity. He accepts the doctrine that men are formed by laws, but holds that they are by nature good, and that laws, by establishing a division of the products of nature, l)roke uj) the sociability of men, and that all political and moral evils are the result of private property. Political inequality is an accident of inequality of possessions, and the renovation of the latter lies in the abolition of the former. 70 RKLATJON OF IJTKKATCKE TO LIKE The oponing sentence of the Contrat-Social is, " Man is born free, and everywhere he is a slave," a statement which it is difficult to recon- cile with the fact that every human being is born helpless, dependent, and into conditions of subjection, conditions that we have no rea- son to suppose were ever absent from the race. But Rousseau never said, "All men are born equal." He recognized, as we have seen, nat- ural inequality. Wliat he held was that the artificial differences springing from the social union were disproportionate to the capacities springing from the original constitution; and that society, as now organized, tends to make the gulf wider between those who have privi- leges and those who have none. The well - known theory upon which Eous- seau's superstructure rests is • that society is the result of a compact, a partnership between men. They have not made an agreement to submit their individual sovereignty to some superior power, but they have made a covenant of brotherhood. It is a contract of association. Men were, and ought to be, equal co-operators, not only in politics, but in industries and all the affairs of life. All the citizens are partici- pants in the sovereign authority. Their sov- ereignty is inalienable ; power may be trans- ^^ Ti-WTT A T T^r-v '" EQUALITY 71 mitted, but not will ; if the people promise to obey, it dissolves itself by the veiy act — if there is a master, there is no longer a people. Sovereio'ntv is also indivisible ; it cannot be split up into legislative, judiciary, and execu- tive power. Society being the result of a compact made by men, it followed that the partners could at any time remake it, their sovereignty being inalienable. And this the French socialists, misled by a priori notions, attempted to do, on the theory of the Contrat-Soclal, as if they had a tabula rasa, without regarding the ex- isting constituents of society, or traditions, or historical growths. Equality, as a phrase, having done duty as a dissolvent, was pressed into service as a con- structor. As this is not so much an essay on the nature of equality as an attempt to indi- cate some of the modern tendencies to carry out what is illusory in the dogma, perhaps enough has been said of tliis pci'iod. ]\Ir. ]\rorley very well remarks that the doctrine of cfjualit}'' as a demand for a fair chance in the world is unanswerable ; but that it is false when it puts him who uses his chance well on the same level with liim who uses it ill. There is no doubt that when (,'ondorcet said, "Not 72 KELATION OF LITERATURE TO IJFE only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the social art," he uttered the sen- timents of the socialists of the Revolution. The next authoritative announcement of equality, to which it is necessary to refer, is in the American Declaration of Independence, in these words : " We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed." And the Declaration goes on, in temperate and guarded language, to assert the right of a people to change their form of government when it becomes destructive of the ends named. Although the genesis of these sentiments seems to be French rather than English, and equality is not defined, and critics have differed as to whether the equality clause is indepen- dent or qualified by what follows, it is not necessary to suppose that Thomas Jefferson meant an\'thing inconsistent with the admit- ted facts of nature and of history. It is im- portant to bear in mind that the statesmen of " EQUALITY " 73 our Eevolution were inaugurating a political and not a social revolution, and that the gra- vamen of their protest was against the au- thority of a distant crown. Nevertheless, these dogmas, independent of the circum- stances in which thev were uttered, have ex- ercised and do exercise a very powerful influ- ence upon the thinking of mankind on social and political topics, and are being applied without limitations, and without recognition of the fact that if they are true, in the sense meant by their originators, they are not the whole truth. It is to be noticed that riglits are mentioned, but not duties, and that if po- litical rights only are meant, political duties are not inculcated as of equal moment. It is not announced that political power is a func- tion to be discharged for the good of the whole bod}', and not a mere right to be en- joyed for the advantage of the possessor ; and it is to be noted also that this idea did not enter into the conception of Kousseau. The dogma that " government derives its just power from the con.sentof the governed" is entirely consonant with the book theories of the eighteenth century, and needs to be confronted, and practically is confronted, with the equally good dogma that " governments 74 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE derive their just power from conformity with the principles of justice." We are not to im- agine, for instance, that the framers of the Declaration really contemplated the exclusion from political organization of all higher law than that in the " consent of the governed," or the application of the theory, let us say, to a colony composed for the most part of out- casts, murderers, thieves, and prostitutes, or to such states as to-day exist in the Orient. The Declaration was framed for a highly intelli- gent and virtuous societv. Many writers, and some of them English, have expressed curiosity, if not wonder, at the different fortunes which attended the doctrine of equality in America and in France. The explanation is on the surface, and need not be sought in the fact of a difference of social and political level in the two countries at the start, nor even in the further fact that the colonies were already accustomed to self-government. The simple truth is that the dogmas of the Declaration were not put into the fundament- al law. The Constitution is the most practical state document ever made. It announces no dogmas, proclaims no theories. It accepted society as it was, with its habits and tradi- tions, raising no abstract questions whether " EQUALITY " 75 men are born free or equal, or how society ought to be organized. It is simply a working compact, made by " the people," to promote union, establish justice, and secure the bless- ings of liberty; and the equality is in the as- sumption of the right of "the people of the United States " to do this. And yet, in a re- cent number of BlackwoorFs Magazine, a writ- er makes the amusing statement, "I have never met an American who could deny that, while firmly maintaining that the theory was sound which, in the beautiful language of the Con- stitution, proclaims that all men were born equal, he was," etc. An enlightening commentary on the mean- ing of the Declaration, in the minds of the American statesmen of the period, is fur- nished by the opinions which some of them ex- pressed upon the French Revolution while it was in progress. Gouverneur Morris, minister to Franco in 17S0, was a conservative repub- lican; Thomas Jefferson was a radical demo- crat. Both of them had a, warm sympathy with the P'rench "people" in the Revolution ; both hoped for a republic; ])oth recognized, we may reasonably infer, tlic sufficient cause of the Revolution in the long-continued cor- ruption of court and nol)iIity, and flin intolcr- 76 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIKE able sufferings of the lower orders ; and both, we have equal reason to believe, thought that a fair accommodation, short of a dissolution of society, was defeated by the imbeciUty of the king and the treachery and malignity of a considerable portion of the nobility. The Revolution was not caused by theories, how- ever much it may have been excited or guided by them. But both Morris and Jefferson saw the futility of the application of the abstract dogma of equality and the theories of the Social Contract to the reconstruction of gov- ernment and the reorganization of society in France. If the aristocracy were malignant — though numbers of them were far from being so — there was also a malignant prejudice aroused against them, and M. Taine is not far wrong when he says of this prejudice, "Its hard, dry kernel consists of the abstract idea of equal- ity." * Taine's French Revolution is cj^nical, and, with all its accumulation of material, omits some facts necessary to a philosophical history ; but a passage following that quoted is worth reproducing in this connection: "The * Tlie French Bevolution. By H. A. Taine. Vol. i.,bk. ii., chap, ii., sec. iii. Traii-slation. New York: Henry Holt & Co. " EQUALITY " "^^ treatment of the nobles of the Assembly is the same as the treatment of the Protestants by Louis XIV One hundred thousand French- men driven out at the end of the seventeenth century, and one hundred thousand driven out at the end of the eighteenth ! Mark how an intolerant democracy completes the work of an intolerant monarchy ! The moral aristocracy was mowed down in the name of uniformity ; the social aristocracy is mowed down in the name of equality. For the second time an abstract principle, and with the same effect, buries its blade in the heart of a living soci- ety." Notwithstanding the world-wide advertise- ment of the French experiment, it has taken almost a century for the dogma of equality, at least outside of France, to filter down from the speculative thinkers into a general popu- lar acceptance, as an active principle to be used in the sha})ing of affairs, and to become more potent in the popular miiul than tradi- tion or habit. The attempt is made to api)ly it to society with a brutal hjgic; and we might despair as to tlio result, if wc did not know that the worhl is not ruled by logic. Nothing is so fascinating in the hands of the half-informed as a neat dogma; it seems the 78 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE perfect key to all difficulties. The formula is applied in contempt and ignorance of the past, as if building up were as easy as pulling down, and as if society were a machine to be moved by mechanical appliances, and not a living or- ganism composed of distinct and sensitive be- ings. Along with the spread of a belief in the uniformity of natural law has unfortu- nately gone a suggestion of parallelism of the moral law to it, and a notion that if we can discover the right formula, human society and government can be organized with a mathe- matical justice to all the parts. By many the dogma of equality is held to be that formula, and relief from the greater evils of the social state is expected from its logical extension. Let us now consider some of the present movements and tendencies that are related, more or less, to this belief : I. Absolute equality is seen to depend upon absolute supremacy of the state. Professor Henry Fawcett says, "Excessive dependence on the state is the most prominent character- istic of modern socialism." " These proposals to prohibit inheritance, to abolish private prop- erty, and to make the state the owner of all the capital and the administrator of the entire industry of the country are put forward as rep- " EQUALITY " resenting socialism in its ultimate and highest development." * Society and government should be recast till they conform to the theory, or, let us say, to its exao^oerations. Men can unmake wljat they have made. There is no higher author- ity anywhere than the will of the majority, no matter what the majority is in intellect and morals. Fifty -one ignorant men have a natural rig^ht to leo:islate for the one hundred, as against forty-nine intelligent men. All men being equal, one man is as fit to legislate and execute as another, A recently elected Congressman from Maine vehemently repudiated in a public address, as a slander, the accusation that he was educated. The theory was that, uneducated, he was the prop- er representative of the average ignorance of his district, and that ignorance ought to be represented in the legislature in kind. The ignorant know better what they want than the educated know for them. "Their educa- tion [that of college menj destroys natural perception and judgment ; so that cultivated people are one-sided, and their judgment is * " Socialism in Germany and tbe United States," Fort- nightly lieview, November, 1878. 80 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE often inferior to that of the working people." " Cultured jieople have made up their minds, and are hard to move." " No lawyer should be elected to a place in any legislative bod}''."* Experience is of no account, neither is his- tory, nor tradition, nor the accumulated wis- dom of ages. On all questions of political econ- omy, finance, morals, the ignorant man stands on a par with the best informed as a legisla- tor. We might cite any number of the re- sults of these illusions. A member of a re- cent House of Kepresentatives declared that we " can repair the losses of the war by the issue of a sufficient amount of paper money." An intelligent mechanic of our acquaintance, a leader among the Nationals, urging the the- ory of his party, that banks should be de- stroyed, and that the government should issue to the people as much " paper money " as they need, denied the right of banks or of any in- dividuals to charge interest on money. Yet he would take rent for the house he owns. Laws must be the direct expression of the will of the majority, and be altered solely on its will. It would be well, therefore, to have *Opinions of working-men, reported in "The Nationals, tlieir Orif!;iii and their Aims," The Atlantic Monthly, No- vember, 1878. <« T^/^r-ATTTiir " EQUALITY 81 a continuous election, so that, any day, the electors can change their representative for a new man. " If my caprice be the source of law, then my enjoyment may be the source of the division of the nation's resources." * Property is the creator of inequality, and this factor in our artificial state can be elim- inated only by absorption. It is the duty of the government to provide for all the people, and the sovereign people will see to it that it does. The election franchise is a natural right — a man's Aveapon to protect himself. It may be asked, If it is just this, and not a sa- cred trust accorded to be exercised for the ben- efit of society, why may not a man sell it, if it is for his interest to do so? What is there illogical in these positions from the premise given ? " Communism," says ItOscher,t " is the logically not inconsist- ent exaggeration of tlie principle of equality. Men who hear themselves designated as ' the sovereign people,' and their welfare as the su- preme law of the state, are more apt than otiiers to feel more keenly the distance which separates their own misery from the super- * Stahl's RerhtHi)hilo80]ihie, quolcil by Rosclicr. t I'oliliiud Eroiiomi/, bk. i., ch. v., § 78. 82 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE abundance of others. And, indeed, to what an extent our physical wants are determined by our intellectual mould !" The tendency of the exaggeration of man's will as the foundation of government is dis- tinctl}' materialistic; it is a self-sufficiency that shuts out God and the higher law.* We need to remember that the Creator of man, and not man himself, formed society and instituted government; that God is always behind hu- man society and sustains it ; that marriage and the family and all social relations are di- vinely established ; that man's duty, coinciding * "And, indeed, if the will of man is all-powerful, if states are to be distinguished from one another only by their boundaries, if everything may be changed like the scenery in a play by a flourish of the magic wand of a system, if man may arbitrarily make the right, if nations can be put through evolutions like regiments of troops, what a field would the world present for attempts at the realizations of the wildest dreams, and wliat a temptation would be offered to take possession, by main force, of the government of human affairs, to destroy the rights of property and the rights of capital, to gratify ardent loug- iugs without trouble, and to provide the much-coveted means of enjoytnent ! The Titans have tried to scale the heavens, and have fallen into the most degrading material- ism. Purely speculative dogmatism sinks into material- ism. " (iM. Wulowski's Esmy on the Historical Method, pre- fixed to his translation of Roscher's Political Economy .) " EQUALITY " 83 with his right, is, by the light of history, by experience, by observation of men, and by the aid of revelation, to find out and make opera- tive, as well as he can, the divine law in hu- man affairs. And it may be added that the sovereignty of the people, as a divine trust, may be as logically deduced from the divine institution of government as the old divine right of kings. Government, by whatever name it is called, is a matter of experience and expediency. If we submit to the will of the majority, it is because it is more conven- ient to do so ; and if the republic or the democ- racy vindicate itself, it is because it works best, on the whole, for a particular people. But it needs no prophet to say that it will not work lono- if God is shut out from it, and man, in a full-blown socialism, is considered the ultimate authority. II. Equality of education. In our Ameri- can system there is, not only theoretically but practically, an etjuality of opportunity in the public schools, which are free to all children, and rise by gradations from the primaries to the high -schools, in which the curriculum in most respects ccjuals, and in variety exceeds, that of many third-class "colleges." In these schools nearly the whole round of learning, in 84 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE languages, science, and art, is touched. The svstem has seemed to be the best that could be devised for a free society, where all take part in the government, and where so much depends upon the intelligence of the electors. Certain objections, however, have been made to it. As this essay is intended only to be tentative, we shall state some of them, with- out indulging in lengthy comments. (1.) The first charge is superficiality — a nec- essary consequence of attempting too much — and a want of adequate preparation for special pursuits in life. (2.) A uniformity in mediocrity is alleged from the use of the same text-books and meth- ods in all schools, for all grades and capaci- ties. This is one of the most common criti- cisms on our social state by a certain class of writers in England, who take an unflagging interest in our development. One answer to it is this : There is more reason to expect va- riety of development and character in a gen- erallv educated than in an ignorant commu- nity ; there is no such uniformity as the dull level of ignorance. (3.) It is said that secular education — and the general schools open to all in a communi- ty of mixed religions must be secular — is train- « T:.^TT * T TT^TT " EQUALITY 85 ing the rising generation to be materialists and socialists. (4.) Perhaps a better-founded charge is that a s^'stem of equal education, with its superli- ciality, creates discontent with the condition in w^hich a majority of men must be— that of labor — a distaste for trades and for hand- work, an idea that what is called intellectual labor (let us say, casting up accounts in a shop, or writino^ trash v stories for a sensational news- paper) is more honorable than physical labor ; and encourages the false notion that " the ele- vation of the working classes " implies the re- moval of men and women from those classes. We should hesitate to draw adverse conclu- sions in regard to a s^^stem yet so young that its results cannot be fairly estimated. Only after two or three generations can its effects upon the character of a great people be meas- ured. Observations differ, and testimony is ilillicult to obtain. "\Vc tiiink it safe to say that those states are most prosperous which have the best free schools. But if the pliiloso- phcr in([uires as to the general effect up(m the national character in respect to the objections named, he must wait for a reply. III. The j)ursuit of the chimera of social equality, fiom the belief that it should logi- 86 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE cally follow political equality ; resulting in ex- travagance, misapplication of natural capaci- ties, a notion that physical labor is dishonor- able, or that the state should comj)el all to labor alike, and in efforts to remove inequali- ties of condition by legislation. IV. The equality of the sexes. The stir in the middle of the eighteenth century gave a great impetus to the emancipation of woman ; though, curiously enough, Rousseau, in unfold- ing his plan of education for Sophie, in Emile, inculcates an almost Oriental subjection of woman — her education simply that she may please man. The true enfranchisement of woman — that is, the recognition (by herself as well as by man) of her real place in the econ- omy of the world, in the full development of her capacities — is the greatest gain to civiliza- tion since the Christian era. The movement has its excesses, and the gain has not been without loss. " When we turn to modern lit- erature," writes Mr. Morley, "from the pages in which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent — that some ineffable es- sence has passed out from our hearts ?" How far the expectation has been realized that women, in fiction, for instance, would be « t:.^tt a t tt^ » EQUALITY 87 more accurately described, better understood, and appear as nobler and lovelier beings when women wrote the novels, this is not the place to inquire. The movement has results which are unavoidable in a period of transition, and probabl}^ only temporary. The education of woman and the development of her powers hold the greatest promise for the regenera- tion of society. But this development, yet in its infancy, and pursued with much crudeness and misconception of the end, is not enough. "Woman would not only be equal with man, but would be like him ; that is, perform in society the functions he now performs. Here, again, the notion of equality is pushed tow- ards uniformity. The reformers admit struct- ural differences in the sexes, though these, they say, are greatly exaggerated by subjection ; but the functional differences are mainly to be eliminated. AVomen ought to mingle in all the occupations of men, as if the physical dif- ferences did not exist. The movement goes to obliterate, as far as possible, the distinction between sexes. Nature is, no doubt, amused at this attempt. A recent writer * says : " The * "Biology aud Woman'.s Kiglils," (Quarterly Journul of Science, November, 1878. 88 KKI^TION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE femme lib re [free woman] of the new social order may, indeed, escape the charge of neg- lecting her family and her household by con- tending that it is not her vocation to become a wife and a mother ! Why, then, we ask, is she constituted a woman at all ? Merely that she may become a sort of second-rate man ?" The truth is that this movement, based al- wa3^s upon a misconception of equality, so far as it would change the duties of the sexes, is a retrograde.* One of the most striking features * " It has been frequently observed that among declining nations the social differences between the two sexes are first obliterated, and afterwards even the intellectual dif- ferences. The more masculine the women become, tlie more effeminate become the men. It is no good symptom when there are almost as many female writers and female rulers as there are male. Such was the case, for instance, in the Hellenistic kingdoms, and in the age of the Caesars. What today is called by many the emancipation of woman would ultimately end in the dissolution of the family, and, if carried out, render poor service to the majority of women. If man and woman were placed entirely on the same level, and if in the competition between the two sexes notbing but an actual superiority should decide, it is to be feared that woman would soon be relegated to a condition as hard as that in which she is found among all barbarous nations. It is precisely fannly life and liigher civilization that have emancipated woman. Those the- orizers who, led astray by the dark side of higher civiliza- tion, preach a community of goods, generally contemplate " EQUALITY " 89 in our progress from barbarism to civilization is the proper adjustment of the work for men and women. One test of a civilization is the difference of this work. This is a question not merelv of division of labor, but of differentia- tion with regard to sex. It not only takes into account structural differences and physiologi- cal disadvantages, but it recognizes the finer and higher use of woman in society. The attainable, not to say the ideal, society requires an increase rather than a decrease of the differences between the sexes. The differ- ences may be due to physical organization, but the structural divergence is but a faint type of deeper separation in mental and spiritual con- stitution. That which makes the charm and power of woman, that for which she is created, is as distinctly feminine as that which makes the charm and power of men is masculine. Progress requires constant differentiation, and the line of this is the development of each sex in its special functions, each being true to the in tlic'ir simultaneous rccnmmondalion of thcematicip.ilion of woman a more or less (icv(,Iopc'(l form of a community of wives. Tlie grounds of tiie two institutions are very similar." (Roschcr's Political Economy, % 250). Note also tiiat ject, ;md shall be quite satisfied if we have suggested thf)Ugiit in the direction indicated. But in this limited view of our complex human problem it is time to ask if we have not pushed the dogma of c(|ual- ity far enough. Is it not time to look the 96 RELATION OF IJTERATURE TO LIFE facts squarely in the face, and conform to them in our efforts for social and political amelioration ? Inequality appears to be the divine order; it always has existed ; undoubtedly it will continue; all our theories and a jpriori specu- lations will not change the nature of things. Even inequality of condition is the basis of progress, the incentive to exertion. Fortu- nately, if to-day we could make every man white, every woman as like man as nature per- mits, give to every human being the same opportunity of education, and divide equally among all the accumulated w^ealth of the world, to-morrow differences, unequal posses- sion, and differentiation would begin again. "We are attempting the regeneration of society with a misleading phase ; we are wasting our time with a theory that does not fit the facts. There is an equality, but it is not of out- ward show ; it is independent of condition ; it does not destroy property, nor ignore the dif- ference of sex, nor obliterate race traits. It is the equality of men before God, of men be- fore the law ; it is the equal honor of all honor- able labor. Ko more pernicious notion ever ob- tained lodgement in society than the common one that to " rise in the world " is necessai-ily " EQUALITY " 97 to change the " condition." Let there be con- tent with condition ; discontent with individual ignorance and imperfection. " We want," says Emerson, •• not a farmer, but a man on a farm." What a mischievous idea is that which has ffrown, even in the United States, that man- ual hibor is discreditable! There is surely some defect in the theory of equality in our society which makes domestic service to be shunned as if it were a disgrace. It must be observed, further, that the dogma of equality is not satisfied by the usual admis- sion that one is in favor of an equality of rights and opportunities, but is against the sweeping- application of the theory made by the social- ists and communists. The obvious reply is that equal rights and a fair chance are not possible without equality of condition, and that property and the whole artificial consti- tution of society necessitate inccjuality of con- dition. The damage from the current exag- geration of equality is that the attempt to realize tlio dogma in fact — and the attempt is everywhere on foot — can lead only to mischief and disappointment. Jt would be considered a humorous suggest- ion to advocate inecjuality as a theory or as a working dogma. Let us recognize it, however, 98 RELATION OF LITER ATUKE TO LIFE as a fact, and shape the efforts for the im- provement of the race in accordance with it, encouraging it in some directions, restraining it from injustice in others. Working by this recognition, we shall save the race from many failures and bitter disappointments, and spare the world the spectacle of repubhcs ending in despotism and experiments in government ending in anarchy. (1880.) WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME? i WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME?* Twenty-one years ago in this house I heard a voice calling me to ascend the platform, and there to stand and deliver. The voice was the voice of President Korth ; the language was an excellent imitation of that used by Cicero and Julius Caesar. I remember the flattering invi- tation — it is the classic tag that clings to the graduate long after he has forgotten the gen- der of the nouns that end in mn— orator ijrodo- imus, the grateful voice said, ascendat, videlicet^ and so forth. To be proclaimed an orator, and an ascendmg orator, m such a sonorous tongue, in the face of a world waiting for orators, stirred one's blood like the herald's trumpet when the hsts are thrown open. Alas! for most of us, who crowded so eagerly into the arena, it was the last appearance as orators on any stage. The facility of the world for swallowing up * Delivered before the Alumni of Iliimilton College, Clinton, N. Y., Wcduesdiiy, June 20lh, 1872. 102 KEI^TION OF LITEKATURE TO LIFE orators, and company after company of edu- cated young men, has been remarked. But it is almost incredible to me now that the class of 1851, with its classic sympathies and its many revolutionary ideas, disap})carcd in the flood of the world so soon and so silently, causing scarcely a ripple in the smoothly flow- ing stream. I suppose the phenomenon has been repeated for twenty years. Do the young gentlemen at Hamilton, I wonder, still carry on their ordinary conversation in the Latin tongue, and their familiar vacation correspond- ence in the language of Aristophanes? I hope so. I hope they are more proficient in such exercises than the young gentlemen of twenty years ago Avere, for I have still great faith in a culture that is so far from any sordid aspira- tion as to approach the ideal; although the young graduate is not long in learning that there is an indifference in the public mind with regard to the first aorist that amounts nearly to apathy, and that millions of his fel- low-creatures will probably live and die with- out the consolations of the second aorist. It is a melancholy fact that, after a thousand years of missionary effort, the vast majority of civilized men do not know that gerunds are found only in the singular number. WHAT IS YOUK CULTURE TO ME? 103 I confess that this failure of the annual graduating class to make its expected impres- sion on the world has its pathetic side. Youth is credulous — as it always ought to be — and full of hope — else the world were dead already — and the graduate steps out into life with an ingenuous self-confidence in his resources. It is to him an event, this turning-point in the career of what he feels to be an important and immortal being. His entrance is public and with some dignity of display. For a day the world stops to see it; the newspapers spread abroad a report of it, and the modest scholar feels that the eyes of mankind are fixed on him in expectation and desire. Though mod- est, he is not insensible to the responsibility of his position. He has only packed away in his mind the wisdom of the ages, and he does not intend to be stingy about communicating it to the world which is awaiting his graduation. Fresh from the communion with o-reat thou transcrilK; fi-oni memory withoiil. 114 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE the error of a point, or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder that China is to-day more like an herbarium than anything else. Learning is a kind of fetish, and it has no influence whatever upon the great inert mass of Chinese humanit3\ I suppose it is possible for a young gentle- man to be able to read — just think of it, after ten years of grammar and lexicon, not to know Greek literature and have flexible com- mand of all its richness and beauty, but to read it ! — it is possible, I suppose, for the grad- uate of college to be able to read all the Greek authors, and yet to have gone, in re- gard to his own culture, very little deeper than a surface reading of them ; to know very little of that perfect architecture and what it expressed ; nor of that marvellous sculpture and the conditions of its immortal beauty ; nor of that artistic development which made the Acropolis to bud and bloom under the blue sky like the final flower of a perfect nature ; nor of that philosophy, that politics, that society, nor of the life of that polished, crafty, joyous race, the springs of it and the far-reaching, still unexpended effects of it. "WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME? 115 Yet as surely as that nothing perishes, that the Providence of God is not a patchwork of uncontinued efforts, but a plan and a prog- ress, as surely as the Pilgrim embarkation at Delfshaven has a relation to the battle of Gettysburg, and to the civil rights bill giving the colored man permission to ride in a pub- lic conveyance and to be buried in a public cemetery, so surely has the Parthenon some connection with your new State capitol at Albany, and the daily life of the vine-dresser of the Peloponnesus some lesson for the American day -laborer. The scholar is said to be the torch - bearer, transmitting the in- creasing light from generation to generation, so that the feet of all, the humblest and the lowliest, may walk in the radiance and not stumble. But he very often carries a dark lantern. Not what is the use of Greek, of any cult- ure in art or literature, but what is the good to me of your knowing Greek, is the latest question of the ditch-digger to the scholar — what better off am I for your learning? And the question, in view of th(; intor-dopendence of all members of society, is one that cannot be put away as idle. One re;ison why the scholar does not inako tiie woiM of tlu^ past, 116 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE the world of books, real to his fellows and serviceable to them, is that it is not real to himself, but a mere unsubstantial place of intellectual idleness, where he dallies some years before he begins his task in life. And another reason is that, while it may be real to him, while he is actually cultured and trained, he fails to see or to feel that his cult- ure is not a thing apart, and that all the world has a right to share its blessed influ- ence. Failing to see this, he is isolated, and, wanting his sympathy, the untutored world mocks at his superfineness and takes its own rough way to rougher ends. Greek art was for the people, Greek poetry was for the peo- ple; Kaphael painted his immortal frescoes where throngs could be lifted in thought and feeling by them ; Michael Angelo hung the dome over St. Peter's so that the far-ofl" peas- ant on the Campagna could see it, and the maiden kneeling by the shrine in the Alban hills. Do we often stop to think what influ- ence, direct or other, the scholar, the man of high culture, has to-day upon the great mass of our people ? Why do they ask, what is the use of your learning and your art? The artist, in the retirement of his studio, finishes a charming, suggestive, historical pict- WHAT IS TOUR CULTURE TO ME ? 117 ure. The rich man buys it and hangs it in his library, Avhere the privileged few can see it. I do not deny that the average rich man needs all the refining influence the picture can exert on hira, and that the picture is do- ing missionary work in his house ; but it is nevertheless an example of an educating in- fluence withdrawn and appropriated to nar- row uses. But the engraver comes, and, by his mediating art, transfers it to a thousand sheets, and scatters its sweet influence far abroad. All the world, in its toil, its hunger, its sordidness, pauses a moment to look on it — that gray sea -coast, the receding May- flov;er^ the two young Pilgrims in the fore- ground regarding it, with tender thoughts of the far home — all the world looks on it per- haps for a moment thoughtfully, perhaps tear- fully, and is touched with the sentiment of it, is kindled into a glow of nobleness by the sight of that faith and love and resolute de- votion which have tinged our earl}^ history with the faint light of romance. So art is no longer the enjoyment of the few, but the help and solace of the many. The scholar who i.s cultured by books, re- flection, travel, by a refined society, consorts j with his kind, and more and more removes \ 118 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE himself from the sympathies of common life. I know how almost inevitable this is, how al- most impossible it is to resist the segregation of classes according to the affinities of taste. But by what mediation shall the culture that is now the possession of the few be made to leaven the world and to elevate and sweeten ordinary life ? By books ? Yes. By the news- paper? Yes. By the diffusion of works of art ? Yes. But when all is done that can be done by such letters-missive from one class to another, there remains the need of more personal contact, of a human sympathy, dif- fused and living. The world has had enough of charities. It wants respect and consideration. We desire no longer to be legislated for, it says; we want to be legislated with. Why do you never come to see me but you bring me something? asks the sensitive and poor seam- stress. Do you always give some charity to your friends ? I want companionship, and not cold pieces ; I want to be treated like a human being who has nerves and feelings, and tears too, and as much interest in the sunset, and in the birth of Christ, perhaps, as you. And the mass of uncared-for ignorance and brutality, finding a voice at length, bitterly repels the condescensions of charity ; 3^ou have your cult- WHAT IS TOUR CULTURE TO ME ? 119 ure, 3'our libraries, your fine houses, your church, your religion, and your God, too ; let us alone, we want none of them. In the bear-pit at Berne, the occupants, who are the wards of the city, have had meat thrown to them daily for I know not how long, but they are not tamed by this charity, and would probably eat up any careless person who fell into their clutches, without apology. Do not impute to me quixotic notions with resrard to the duties of men and women of culture, or tliink that I undervalue the diffi- culties in the way, the fastidiousness on the one side, or the jealousies on the other. It is by no means easy to an active participant to define the drift of his own age; but I seem to see plainly that unless the culture of the age finds means to diffuse itself, working downward and reconciling antagonisms by a commonness of thought and feeling and aim in life, society must more and more separate itself into jarring classes, with mutual misun- derstandings and hatred and war. To suggest remedies is much more dillicult than to see evils ; but the comprehension of dangers is the first step towards mastering them. Tiie prob- lem of our own time — the reconciliation of the interests of classes — is as yet very illy defined. 120 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE This great movement of labor, for instance, does not know definitely what it wants, and those who are spectators do not know what their relations are to it. The first thing to be done is for them to try to understand each other. One class sees that the other has light- er or at least different labor, opportunities of travel, a more liberal supply of the luxuries of life, a higher enjoyment and a keener relish of the beautiful, the immaterial. Looking only at external conditions, it concludes that all it needs to come into this better place is wealth, and so it organizes war upon the rich, and it makes demands of freedom from toil and of compensation which it is in no man's power to give it, and which would not, if granted over and over again, lift it into that condition it desires. It is a tale in the Gulistan, that a king placed his son with a preceptor, and said, "This is your son; educate him in the same manner as your own." The preceptor took pains with him for a year, but without success, whilst his own sons were completed in learn- ing and accomplishments. The king reproved the preceptor, and said, " You have broken your promise, and not acted faithfully." lie replied, " O king, the education was the same, but the capacities are different. Although WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME? 121 silver and gold are produced from a stone, yet these metals are not to be found in every stone. The star Canopus shines all over the world, but the scented leather comes only from Yemen." '* 'Tis an absolute, and, as it were, a divine perfection," says Montaigne, "for a man to know how loyally to enjo}' his being. "We seek other conditions, b}^ reason we do not understand the use of our own ; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside." But nevertheless it becomes a necessity for us to understand the wishes of tiiose who demand a change of condition, and it is nec- essary that they should understand the com- pensations as well as the limitations of every condition. The dervish congratulated himself that although the only monumeni of his grave would be a brick, he should at the last day arrive at and enter the gate of Paradise before the king liad got from under the heavy stones of his costlv tomb. Nothinfi- will brinir us into this desirable mutual understandinir except sympathy and personal contact. Laws will not do it ; institutions of charity and relief will not do it. We must believe, for one thing, that the graces of culture will not be thrown away if 132 RELATION OP' LITERATURE TO LIFE exercised among the humblest and the least cultured ; it is found out that flowers are often more welcome in the squalid tenement- houses of Boston than loaves of bread. It is difficult to say exactly how culture can extend its influence into places uncongenial and to people indifferent to it, but I will try and illustrate what I mean by an example or two. Criminals in this country, when the law took hold of them, used to be turned over to the care of men who often had more sympathy with the crime than with the criminal, or at least to those who were almost as coarse in feeling and as brutal in speech as their charges'. There have been some changes of late years in the care of criminals, but does public opinion yet everywhere demand that jailers and prison- keepers and executioners of the penal law should be men of reflneraent, of high character, of any degree of culture ? I do not know any class more needing the best direct personal influence of the best civilization than the criminal. The problem of its proper treatment and reforma- tion is one of the most pressing, and it needs practically the aid of our best men and women, I should have great hope of any prison estab- lishment at the head of which was a gentleman of fine education, the purest tastes, the most ■WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME? 123 elevated morality and lively sympathy with men as such, provided he had also will and the power of command. I do not know what might not be done for the viciously inclined and the transgressors, if they could come under the in- fluence of refined men and women. And yet you know that a boy or a girl may be arrest- ed for crime, and pass from officer to keeper, and jailer to warden, and spend years in a career of vice and imprisonment, and never once see any man or woman, officially, who has tastes, or sympathies, or aspirations much above that vulgar level whence the criminals came. Anybody who is honest and vigilant is considered good enough to take charge of prison birds. The ajre is merciful and abounds in chari- ties — houses of refuge for poor women, soci- eties for the conservation of the exposed and the reclamation of the lost. It is willing to pay liljerally for their support, and to hire ministers and distributors of its benefactions. But it is beginning to see that it cannot hire the distribution of love, nor buy brotherly feeling. The most encouraging thing I have seen lately is an experiment in one of our cit- ies. In the thick of tiie town the ladies of the city have furnished and opened a reading- 124 RELATION OF LrTKKA.TURE TO LIFE room, sewing -room, conversation -room, or what not, where young girls, who work for a living and have no opportunity for any cult- ure, a,t home or elsewhere, may spend their evenings. Tliey meet there always some of the ladies I have spoken of, whose unosten- tatious duty and pleasure it is to pass the evening with them, in reading or music or the use of the needle, and the exchange of the courtesies of life in conversation. What- ever grace and kindness and refinement of manner they carry there, 1 do not suppose are wasted. These are some of the ways in which culture can serve men. And I take it that one of the chief evidences of our prog- ress in this century is the recognition of the truth that there is no selfishness so supreme — not even that in the possession of wealth — as that which retires into itself with all the accomplishments of liberal learning and rare opportunities, and looks upon the intellectual poverty of the world without a wish to relieve it. " As often as I have been among men," says Seneca, " I have returned less a man." And Thomas a Kempis declared that " the greatest saints avoided the company of men as much as they could, and chose to live to God in secret." The Christian philosophy WHAT IS TOrR CULTURE TO ME? 125 was no improvement upon the pagan in this respect, and was exactly at variance witli the teaching and practice of Jesus of Kazareth. The American scholar cannot afford to live for himself, nor merely for scholarship and the delights of learning. He must make himself more felt in the material life of this country. I am aware that it is said that the culture of the age is itself materialistic, and that its refinements are sensual; that there is little to choose between the coarse excesses of poverty and the polished and more deco- rous animality of the more fortunate. AVith- out entering directly upon the consideration of this much-talked-of tendency, I should like to notice the inlluence upon our present and probable future of the bount}', fertility, and extraordinary o])portunities of this still new land. The American grows and develops himself with few restraints. Foreigners used to de- scribe him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt, inquisitive, inventive, restless, and cer- tain to shrivel into physical inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere. The apprehension is not well founded. It is quieted by his achievements the continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in 126 EKLATTON OF LITEKATURE TO LIFE war and in the most difficult explorations, his resistance of the influence of great cities tow- ards effeminacy and loss of physical vigor. If ever man took large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own use, it is the American. We are gross eaters, we are great drinkers. We sliall ex- cel the English when we have as long prac- tice as they. I am filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the prairies, marchin": straio^ht down the throats of Eastern people. Thousands are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling, to slake the immortal thirst of the country. We take, indeed, strong hold of the earth ; we absorb its fatness. When Leicester entertained Eliz- abeth at Kenilworth, the clock in the great tower was set perpetuallj'' at twelve, the hour of feasting. It is alwa3''s dinner - time in America. I do not know how much land it takes to raise an average citizen, but I should say a quarter section. lie spreads himself abroad, he riots in abundance ; above all things he must have profusion, and he wants things that are solid and strong. On the Sorrentine promontory, and on the WHAT IS YOUR CULTUKE TO ME ? 127 island of Capri, the hardy husbandman and fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and from a scant patch of ground. One msiy feast on a fish and a handful of olives. The dinner of the laborer is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some cheese, a glass of thin wine. His wants at-e few and easily supplied. lie is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I should say that he would pay little to the physician, that familiar of other countries whose familv office is to counteract the effects of over-eating. He is temperate, frugal, con- tent, and apparently draws not more of his life from the earth or the sea than from the genial sky. He would never build a Pacific Railway, nor write a liundred volumes of com- mentary on the Scriptures ; but he is an exam- ple of how little a man actually needs of the gross products of the earth. I suppose that life was never fuller in cer- tain ways than it is here in America. If a civilization is judged by its wants, we are cer- tainly highly civilized. We cannot get land enough, nor clothes enough, nor houses enough, nor food enough. A liodouin tribe would fare sum})tuously on what one American fam- ily consumes and wastes. The revenue re- quired for the wardrobe of one woman of fash- 128 RELATION OF LITERATL'RK TO LIFE ion AYOiikl suffice to convert the inhabitants of I know not how many square miles in Africa. It absorbs the income of a province to bring up a baby. We riot in prodigality, we vie with each other in material accumulation and expense. Our thoughts are mainly on how to increase the products of the world, and get them into our own possession. I think this gross material tendency is strong in America, and more likely to get the mastery over the spiritual and the intellectual here than elsewiiere, because of our exhaust- less resources. Let us not mistake the nature of a real civilization, nor suppose we have it because we can convert crude iron into the most delicate mechanism, or transport our- selves sixty miles an hour, or even if we shall refine our carnal tastes so as to be satisfied at dinner with the tongues of ortolans and the breasts of singing-birds. Plato banished the musicians from his feasts because he would not have the charms of con- versation interfered with. By com})arison, music was to him a sensuous enjoyment. In any society the ideal must be the banishment of the more sensuous; the refinement of it will only repeat the continued experiment of history — the end of a civilization in a polished "WHAT IS YOUE CULTURE TO ME? 139 materialism, and its speedy fall from that into grossness. I am sure that the scholar, trained to " plain living and high thinking," knows that the prosperous life consists in the culture of the man, and not in the refinement and accu- mulation of the material. The word culture is often used to signify that dainty intellectu- ahsm whicli is merely a sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable from the healthy traininir of the mind as is the education of the body in athletic exercises from the petting of it by luxurious baths and unguents. Culture is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of the age but the seed of the future. The so-called culture, a mere fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower. You would expect spurious culture to stand aloof from common life, as it does, to extend its charities at the end of a pole, to make of religion a mere cultus, to construct for its heaven a sort of Paris, where all the inhabi- tants dress becomingly, and whei'c there are no Communists. Culture, like line manners, is not always the result of wealth or position. When monseigncur the archbishoj) makes his rare tour tlin^ugh the Swiss mountains, the simple peasants do not crowd upon him 130 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LITE ■with boorish impudence, but strew his stony- path with flowers, and receive him with joy- ous but modest sincerity. When the Russian prince made his landing in America the de- termined staring of a bevy of accomphshed American women nearly swept the young man o£f the deck of the vessel. One cannot but respect that tremulous sensitiveness which caused the maiden lady to shrink from staring at the moon when she heard there was a man in it. The materialistic drift of this age — that is, its devotion to material development — is fre- quently deplored. I suppose it is like all other ages in that respect, but there appears to be a more determined demand for change of condition than ever before, and a deeper movement for equalization. Here in America this is, in great part, a movement for merely physical or material equalization. The idea seems to be wellnigh universal that the millen- nium is to come by a great deal less work and a great deal more pay. It seems to me that the millennium is to come by an infusion into all society of a truer culture, which is neither of poverty nor of wealth, but is the beautiful fruit of the development of the higher part of man's nature. ■WHAT IS TOUK CULTURE TO ME? 131 And the thought I wish to leave with you, as scholars and men who can command the best culture, is that it is all needed to shape and control the strong growth of material develop- ment here, to guide the blind instincts olJJie mass_£t£ men who are^ struggling for a freer place and_ a breath of fresh air ; that you can- n'oTstand aloof in a class isolation ; that your power^is^in a personal sympathy with the hu- manity^ ^wtdch is ignorant but discontented; and that the question which the man with the spade asks about the use of your culture to him is a menace. (1872.) MODERN FICTION MODERN FICTION One of the worst characteristics of modern fiction is its so-called truth to nature. For fiction is an art, as painting is, as sculpture is, as acting is. A photograph of a natural object is not art ; nor is the plaster cast of a man's face, nor is the bare setting on the stage of an actual occurrence. Art requires an idealiza- tion of nature. The amateur, though she may be a lady, who attempts to represent upon the stage the lady of the drawing-room, usually fails to convey to the spectators the impression of a lady. She lacks the art by which tlie trained actress, who may not be a lady, suc- ceeds. The actual transfer to the stage of the drawing-room and its occupants, with the be- havior common in well-bred society, would no doubt fail of the intended dramatic effect, and the spectators would dcclan; the representa- tion unnatural. However our jargon of criticism may con- found terms, we do not nood to Ije reminded 136 RELATION OK IJTERATURE TO LIFE that art and nature are distinct; that art, though dependent on nature, is a separate creation ; that art is selection and idealization, with a view to impressing the mind with human, or even higher than human, senti- ments and ideas. We may not agree whether the perfect man and woman ever existed, but we do know that the highest representations of them in form — that in the old Greek sculpt- ures — were the result of artistic selection of parts of many living figures. When we praise our recent fiction for its photographic fidelity to nature we condemn it, for Ave deny to it the art which would give it value. We forget that the creation of the novel should be, to a certain extent, a syn- thetic process, and impart to human actions that ideal quality which we demand in paint- ing. Heine regards Cervantes as the origi- nator of the modern novel. The older novels sprang from the poetry of the Middle Ages ; their themes were knightly adventure, their personages were the nobility ; the common peo- ple did not figure in them. These romances, which had degenerated into absurdities, Cer- vantes overthrew by Don Quixote. But in put- ting an end to the old romances he created a new school of fiction, called the modern MODERN FICTION 137 novel, b}" introducing into his romance of pseudo-knighthood a faithful description of the lower classes, and intermingling the phases of popular life. But he had no one-sided ten- dency to portray the vulgar only ; he brought together the higher and the lower in society, to serve as light and shade, and the aristo- cratic element was as prominent as the popu- lar. This noble and chivalrous element dis- appears in the novels of the English who imi- tated Cervantes. "These English novelists since Richardson's reign," says Heine, "are prosaic natures ; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the Channel those honrgeoisie novels arise, wherein the petty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted." But Scott appeared, and effected a restoration of the balance in fiction. As Cervantes had intro- duced the democratic element into romances, so Scott rephaced the aristocratic element, when it had disappeared, and only a prosaic, hourf/eoisle fiction existed. He restored to romances the symmetry which we admire in Don Qaixote. Tlie characteristic feature of Scott's historical romances, in the opinion of the great German critic, is the harmony be- 188 EELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE tween the aristocratic and democratic ele- ments. Tliis is true, but is it the last analysis of the subject ? Is it a sufficient account of the genius of Cervantes and Scott that they com- bined in their romances a representation of the higher and lower classes? Is it not of more importance how they represented them? It is only a part of the achievement of Cer- vantes that he introduced the common people into fiction ; it is his higher glory that he idealized this material; and it is Scott's dis- tinction also that he elevated into artistic creations both nobility and commonalty. In short, the essential of fiction is not diversity of social life, but artistic treatment of what- ever is depicted. The novel may deal wholly with an aristocracy, or wholly with another class, but it must idealize the nature it touches into art. The fault of the hourgeoisi.e novels, of which Heine complains, is not that they treated of one class only, and excluded a higher social range, but that they treated it without art and without ideality. In nature there is nothing vulgar to the poet, and in human life there is nothing uninteresting to the artist ; but nature and human life, for the purposes of fiction, need a creative genius. MODERN FICTION 139 The importation into the novel of the vulgar, sordid, and ignoble in life is always unbear- able, unless genius first fuses the ravs^ material in its alembic. When, therefore, we say that one of the worst characteristics of modern fiction is its so-called truth to nature, we mean that it dis- regards the higher laws of art, and attempts to give us unidealized pictures of life. The failure is not that vulgar themes are treated, but that the treatment is vulgar; not that common life is treated, but that the treatment is common ; not that care is talvcn with details, but that no selection is made, and everything is photographed regardless of its artistic value. I am sure that' no one ever felt any repug- nance on being introduced by Cervantes to the muleteers, contrabandistas, servants and serving-maids, and idle vagabonds of Spain, any more than to an acquaintance with the beggar- boys and street gamins on the canvases of Murillo. And 1 lielieve that the philosophic reason of the disgust of Heine and of every critic with the English hovrgenlsie novels, describing the petty, humdrum life of the middle classes, was simply the want of art in the writers; the failure on their part to see that a literal transcript of nature is poor stuff 140 KELATION OF I.ITERATUllK TO I.llK in litornturo. Wc do not need to go back to Richardson's time for illustrations of that truth. Every week the English press — which is even a greater sinner in this respect than the American — turns out a score of novels which are mediocre, not from their subjects, but from their utter lack of the artistic qual- ity. It matters not whether they treat of middle-class life, of low, slum life, or of draw- ing-room life and lords and ladies ; they are equally flat and dreary. Perhaps the most inane thing ever put forth in the name of lit- erature is the so-called domestic novel, an in- digestible, culinary sort of product, that might be named the doughnut of fiction. The usual apology for it is that it depicts family life with fidelity. Its characters are supposed to act and talk as people act and talk at home and in society. I trust this is a libel, but, for the sake of the argument, suppose they do. "Was ever produced so insipid a result ? They are called moi'al ; in the higher sense they are im- moral, for they tend to lower the moral tone and stamina of every reader. It needs genius to import into literature ordinary conversa- tion, petty domestic details, and the common- place and vulgar phases of life. A report of ordinary talk, Avhich appears as dialogue in MODERN FICTION 141 domestic novels, rauy be true to nature ; if it is, it is not worth writing or worth reading. I cannot see that it serves any good purpose whatever. Fortunately, we have in our day illustrations of a different treatment of the vulgar. I do not know any more truly real- istic pictures of certain aspects of New Eng- land life than are to be found in Judd's Mar- garet^ wherein are depicted exceedingly pinched and ignoble social conditions. Yet the char- acters and the life are drawn with the artistic purity of Flaxman's illustrations of Homer. Another example is Thomas Hardy's Far from the Maddhnj Croivd. Every character in it is of the lower class in England. But what an exquisite creation it is I You have to turn back to Shakespeare for any talk of peasants and clowns and shepherds to compare with the conversations in this novel, so racy are they of the soil, and yet so touched with the finest art, the enduring art. Here is not the realism of the photograph, but of the artist ; that is to say, it is nature idealized. When we criticise our recent liction, it is obvious that we ought to remember that it only conforms to the tendencies of our social life, our prevailing ethics, and to the art con- ditions of our time. Literature is never in 143 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE any age an isolated product. It is closely re- lated to tlie development or retrogression of the time in all departments of life. The lit- erarj?^ production of our day seems, and no doubt is, more various than that of any other, and it is not easy to fix upon its leading ten- dency. It is claimed for its fiction, however, that it is analytic and realistic, and that much of it has certain other qualities that make it a new school in art. These aspects of it I wish to consider in this paper. It is scarcely possible to touch upon our re- cent fiction, any more than upon our recent poetry, v.'ithout taking into account what is called the ^Esthetic movement — a movement more prominent in England than elsewhere. A slight contemplation of this reveals its re- semblance to the Koraantic movement in Ger- many, of which the brothers Schlegel were apostles, in the latter part of the last century. The movements are alike in this : that they both sought inspiration in medioevalism, in feudalism, in the symbols of a Christianity that ran to mysticism, in the quaint, strictly pre-Ea])hael art which was supposed to be the result of a simple faith. In the one case, the artless and childlike remains of old German pictures and statuary were exhumed and set MODERN FICTION 143 up as worthy of imitation ; in the other, we have carried out in art, in costume, and in do- mestic hfe, so far as possible, what has been wittily and accurately described as "stained- glass attitudes." With all its peculiar vaga- ries, the English school is essentially a copy of the German, in its return to mediaevalism. The two movements have a further likeness, in that they are found accompanied by a highly symbolized religious revival. English a?stheti- cism would probably disown any religious in- tention, although it has been accused of a re- fined interest in Pan and A^enus ; but in all its feudal sympathies it goes along with the re- ligious art and vestment revival, the return to symbolic ceremonies, monastic vigils, and sis- terhoods. Years ago, an acute writer in the Catholic World claimed Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a Catholic writer, from the internal evi- dence of his poems. Tlie German Romanti- cism, which was fostered by the Romish priest- hood, ended, or its disciples ended, in the bos- om of the Roman Catholic Church, It will l)e interestinjr to note; in what ritualistic harbor the a?stheticism of our day will finally moor. That two similar revivals should come so near t()"-t!ther in time makes us feel tliat the world moves onward — if it does move onward — in cir- 144 RELATION OF LITKKATURK TO LIFE cular li^urcs of veiy short radii. There seems to bo only one thing certain in our Christian era, and that is a periodic return to classic models ; the only stable standards of resort seem to be Greek art and literature. The characteristics which are prominent, when we think of our recent fiction, are a wholly unidealized view of human society, which has got the name of realism; a delight in representing the worst phases of social life ; au extreme analysis of persons and motives ; the sacrifice of action to psychological study ; the substitution of studies of character for anything like a story ; a notion that it is not artistic, and that it is untrue to nature to bring any novel to a definite consummation, and especially to end it happily ; and a despondent tone about society, politics, and the whole drift of modern life. Judged by our fiction, we are in an irredeemably bad way. There is little beaut}^, joy, or light- hearted ness in living; the spontaneity and charm of life are analyzed out of existence; sweet girls, made to love and be loved, are extinct ; melancholy Jaques never meets a Itosalind in the forest of Arden, and if he sees her in the drawing-room he poisons his pleasure with the thought that she is scheming and artificial; there are no MODERN FICTION 145 happy marriages — indeed, marriage itself is almost too inartistic to be permitted by our novelists, unless it can be supplemented by a div^orce, and art is supposed to deny any happy consummation of true love. In short, modern society is going to the dogs, notwithstanding money is only three and a half per cent. It is a gloomy business life, at the best. Two learned but despondent university professors met, not long ago, at an afternoon "coffee," and drew sympathetically together in a corner. "AVhat a world this would be," said one, " without coffee !" " Yes," replied the other, stirring the fragrant cup in a dejected aspect — " yes ; but what a hell of a world it is with coffee !" The analytic method in fiction is interesting, when used by a master of dissection, but it has this fatal defect in a novel — it destroys illu- sion. We want to tliink that the characters in a story are real persons. AVe cannot do this if we see the author set them up as if they were marionettes, and take them to pieces every few pages, and show their interior structure, and the machinery by which they are moved. Not only is the ilUision gone, but the movement of tlie story, if tliero is a story, is retarded, till the reader loses all enjoyment 10 110 RKLATION OK IJTEKATURE TO LIFE ill impatience and weariness. You find your- self saying, perhaps, What a very clever fellow the author is ! What an ingenious creation this character is ! How brightly the author makes his people talk ! This is high praise, but by no means the highest, and when we re- flect w^e see how immeasurably inferior, in fiction, the anal3^tic method is to the dramatic. In the dramatic method the characters appear, and show what they are by what they do and say; the reader studies their motives, and a part of his enjoyment is in analyzing them, and his vanity is flattered by the trust reposed in his perspicacity. We realize how unneces- sary minute analysis of character and long descriptions are in reading a drama by Shake- speare, in which the characters are so vividly presented to us in action and speech, without the least interference of the author in descrip- tion, that we regard them as persons with whom we might have real relations, and not as bundles of traits and qualities. True, the conditions of dramatic art and the art of the novel are different, in that the drama can dis- pense with delineations, for its characters are intended to be presented to the eye; but all the same, a good drama will explain itself without the aid of actors, and there is no MODERN FICTION 147 doubt that it is the higher art in the novel, when once the characters are introduced, to treat them dramatically, and let thera work out their own destiny according to their char- acters. It is a truism to say that when the reader perceives that the author can compel his characters to do what he pleases all inter- est in them as real persons is gone. In a novel of mere action and adventure, a lower order of fiction, where all tlie interest centres in the unravelling of a plot, of course this does not so much matter. Not long ago, in Edinburgh, I amused my- self in looking up some of the localities made famous in Scott's romances, which are as real in the mind as any historical places. After- wards I read The Heart of Midlothian. I was surprised to find that, as a work of art, it was inferior to my recollection of it. Its style is open to the charge of ])rolixity, and even of slovenliness in some parts; and it docs not move on with increasing momentum and con- centration to a climax, as many of Scott's nov- els do; the story drags along in the disposi- tion of one character after another. Yet, when I had finished tli<.' book and ])ut it away, a singular thing happened. It suddenly came to me that in reading it T had not once 148 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE thought of Scott as the maker; it had never occurred to uie that he had created the people in whose fortunes I had been so intensely ab- sorbed ; and I never once had felt how clever the novelist was in the naturally dramatic dia- logues of the characters. In short, it had not entered my mind to doubt the existence of Jeanie and EfRe Deans, and their father, and Reuben Butler, and the others, who seem as real as historical persons in Scotch history. And when I came to think of it afterwards, reflecting upon the assumptions of the modern realistic school, I found that some scenes, nota- blv the nio;ht attack on the old Tolbooth, were as real to me as if I had read them in a police report of a newspaper of the day. Was Scott, then, only a reporter? Far from it, as you would speedily see if he had thrown into the novel a police report of the occurrences at the Tolbooth before art had shorn it of its irrelevancies, magnified its effective and salient points, given events their proper perspective, and the whole picture due light and shade. The sacrifice of action to some extent to psychological evolution in modern fiction may be an advance in the art as an intellectual en- tertainment, if the writer does not make that evolution his end, and does not forget that the MODERN FICTION 149 indispensable thing in a novel is the story. The novel of mere adventure or mere plot, it need not be urged, is of a lower order than that in which the evolution of characters and their interaction make the story. The highest fiction is that which embodies both ; that is, the story in which action is the result of mental and spiritual forces in play. And we protest against the notion that the novel of the future is to be, or should be, merely a study of, or an essay or a series of analytic essays on, certain phases of social life. It is not true that civilization or cultivation has bred out of the world the liking for a story. In this the most highly educated Londoner and the Egyptian fellah meet on common human ground. The passion for a story has no more died out than curiosity, or than the passion of love. The truth is not that stories are not demanded, but that the born raconteur and story-teller is a rare person. The faculty of telling a story is a much rarer gift than the ability to analyze character, and even than the ability truly to draw character. It may be a higher or a lower power, but it is rarer. It is a natural gift, and it seems that no amount of culture can attain it, any more than learning can make a poet. Nor is the complaint well 150 RELATION OF LITEKATUKE TO LIFE founded that the stories have all been told, the possible plots all been used, and the combina- tions of circumstances exhausted. It is no doubt our individual experience that we hear almost every day — and we hear nothing so eagerl}' — some new story, better or worse, but new in its exhibition of human character, and in the combination of events. And the strange, eventful histories of human life will no more be exhausted than the possible arrangements of mathematical numbers. We might as well say that there are no more good pictures to be painted as that there are no more good stories to be told. Equally baseless is the assumption that it is inartistic and untrue to nature to bring a novel to a definite consummation, and especially to end it happily. Life, we are told, is full of in- completion, of broken destinies, of failures, of romances that begin but do not end, of ambi- tions and purposes frustrated, of love crossed, of unhappy issues, or a resultless play of in- fluences. Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the prepara- MODERN FICTION 151 tions of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in de- scribing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story, Kor am I any better satisfied when you de- scribe two persons whom 3'ou know, whose characters are interesting, and who become in- volved in all manner of entanglements, and then stop your narration ; and when I ask, say you have not the least idea whetJjer they got out of their difficulties, or what became of them. In real life we do not call that a story where evervthine: is left unconcluded and in the air. In point of fact, romances are daily beginning and daily ending, well or otherwise, under our observation. Should they alwa^'S end well in the novel? I am very far from saying that. Tragedy and the pathos of failure have their places in liter- ature as well as in life. I only say that, artis- ticall}'', a good ending is as pi'oper as a bad ending. Yet the main object of the novel is to entertain, and the best entertainment is that whicii lifts the imagination and quickens the spirit; to lighten the burdens of life by taking us for a time out of oui- humdrum and perhaps sordid conditions, so that we can see familiar 153 KELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE life somewhat idealized, and probably see it all the more truly from an artistic point of view. For the majority of the race, in its hard lines, fiction is an inestimable boon. Incidentally the novel may teach, encourage, refine, elevate. Even for these purposes, that novel is the best which shows us the best possibilities of our lives — the novel which gives hope and cheer instead of discouragement and gloom. Famil- iarity with vice and sordidness in fiction is a low entertainment, and of doubtful moral value, and their introduction is unbearable if it is not done with the idealizing touch of the artist. Do not misunderstand me to mean that com- mon and low" life are not fit subjects of fiction, or that vice is not to be lashed by the satirist, or that the evils of a social state are never to be exposed in the novel. For this, also, is an office of the novel, as it is of the drama, to hold the mirror up to nature, and to human nature as it exhibits itself. But when the mirror shows nothing but vice and social disorder, leaving out the saving qualities that keep soci- ety on the whole, and family life as a rule, as sweet and good as they are, the mirror is not held up to nature, but more likely reflects a morbid mind. Still it must be added that the study of unfortunate social conditions is a legit- MODERN FICTION 153 imate one for the author to make ; and that we may be in no state to judge justly of his exposure while the punishment is being in- flicted, or while the irritation is fresh. For, no doubt, the reader winces often because the novel reveals to himself certain possible base- ness, selfishness, and meanness. Of this, how- ever, I (speaking for myself) may be sure : that the artist who so represents vulgar life that I am more in love with m}'^ kind, the satirist who so depicts vice and villanj^ that I am strength- ened in my moral fibre, has vindicated his choice of material. On the contrary, those novelists are not justified whose forte it seems to be to so set forth goodness as to make it un- attractive. But we come back to the general proposition that the indispensable condition of the novel is that it shall entertain. And for this purpose the world is not ashamed to own that it wants, and always will Avant, a story — a story tliat has an ending ; and if not a good ending, then one that in noble tragedy lifts up our nature into a high plane of sacrifice and pathos. In proof of this we have only to refer to the masterpieces of fiction which the world cher- ishes and loves to recur to. I confess that I am harassed with the iucom- 154 RELATION OF UTEKATUKE TO LIFE plete romances, that leave me, when the book is closed, as one might be on a waste plain at midnight, abandoned by his conductor, and without a lantern. I am tired of accompany- ing people for hours through disaster and per- plexity and misunderstanding, only to see them lost in a thick mist at last. I am weary of going to funerals, which are not my funerals, however chatty and amusing the undertaker may be. I confess that I should like to see again the lovely heroine, the sweet woman, capable of a great })assion and a great sacrifice ; and I do not object if the novelist tries her to the verge of endurance, in agonies of mind and in perils, subjecting her to wasting sicknesses even, if he onlj' brings her out at the end in a blissful compensation of her troubles, and en- dued with a new and sweeter charm. No doubt it is better for us all, and better art, that in the novel of society the destiny should be decided by character. AVhat an artistic and righteous consummation it is when we meet the shrewd and wicked old Baroness Bernstein at Continental gaming-tables, and feel that there was no other logical end for the worldly and fascinating Beatrix of Henry Esmond ! It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right the wrongs of life, to do justice to the deserv- MODERN FICTION 155 ing and the vicious. It is wholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often see it in society. It is true that h3^pocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often succeed in life, occupy- ing high places, and make their exit in the pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accu- rate measure of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous man amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splen- dor, and dies in the odor of respectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and defrauded, hves in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. The novel- ist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience as shall destroy for us the artistic value of liis fiction, and bring upon his work the deserved reproach of indiscrimi- nately *' rewardmg tlie good and punishing the bad." But we have a right to ask that he shall reveal the real heart and cliaracter of this passing show of life; for not to (U) this, to content himself inorely with exterior appear- ances, is for the majority of liis readers to \'>(t RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE efTace the lines between virtue and vice. And wo ask this not for the sake of the moral lesson, but because not to do it is, to our deep consciousness, inartistic and untrue to our judg- ment of life as it goes on. Thackeray used to say that all his talent was in his eyes; meaning that he was only an observer and reporter of what he saw, and not a Providence to rectify human affairs. The great artist undervalued his genius. He reported what he saw as Raphael and Murillo reported what they saw. With his touch of genius he assigned to every- thing its true value, moving us to tenderness, to pity, to scorn, to righteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity. I find in him the highest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deep currents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm and sym- pathy, which has got the name of " art for art's sake." Literary fiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for men. " Art for art's sake" is a good and defensible phrase, if our definition of art includes the ideal, and not otherwise. I do not know how it has come about that in so large a proportion of recent fiction it is held to be artistic to look almost altogether upon the shady and the seamy side of life, giving to MODERN FICTION 157 this view the name of "realism"; to select the disagreeable, the vicious, the imwhole- some ; to give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the " shady " — to borrow the language of the society she seeks — the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious ; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state ; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fract- ured precipice of the seventh commandment ; to bring us into relations only with the sordid and the common ; to force us to sup with un- wholesome company on misery and sensuous- ness, in tales so utterly unpleasant that we are ready to welcome any disaster as a relief ; and then — the latest and finest touch of modern art — to leave the whole Aveltering mass in a chaos, without conclusion and without possible issue. And this is called a picture of real life ! Heavens! Is it true that in England, where a great proportion of tiic fiction we describe and loathe is produced ; is it true that in our New Enghind society there is nothing but frivolity, sordidness, decay of purity and faith, ignoble 158 RELATION OF r.ITKRATUKE TO LIFE ambition and ignoble living? Is there no charm in social life — no self-sacrifice, devo- tion, courage to stem materialistic conditions, and live above them? Are there no noble AYomen, sensible, beautiful, winning, with the grace that all the world loves, albeit with the feminine weaknesses that make all the world hope? Is there no manliness left? Are there no homes where the tempter does not live with the tempted in a mush of sentimental affinity? Or is it, in fact, more artistic to ignore all these, and paint only the feeble and the repulsive in our social state ? The feeble, the sordid, and the repulsive in our social state nobody denies, nor does anybody deny the exceeding cleverness with which our social disorders are reproduced in fiction by a few masters of their art ; but is it not time that it should be considered good art to show some- thing of the clean and bright side? This is pre-eminently the age of the novel. The development of variety of fiction since the days of Scott and Cooper is prodigious. The prejudice against novel-reading is quite broken down, since fiction has taken all fields for its province; everybody reads novels. Three-quarters of the books taken from the circulating library are stories; they make up MODERN FICTION 159 half the libran^ of the Sunda3^-schools. If a writer has anything to sa}'', or thinks he has, he knows that he can most certainly reach the ear of the public by the medium of a storv. So we have novels for children : nov- els religious, scientific, historical, archaeolog- ical, psychological, pathological, total - absti- nence; novels of travel, of adventure and ex- ploration ; novels domestic, and the perpetual spawn of books called novels of societ}'. Xot only is everything turned into a story, real or so called, but there must be a story in every- thing. The stump-speaker holds his audience by well-worn stories ; the preacher wakes up his congregation bv a grapiiic narrative ; and the Sunday-school teacher leads his children into all goodness by the entertaining path of romance ; we even had a President who gov- erned the country nearly by anecdotes. The result of tliis universal demand for fic- tion is necessarily an enormous supply, and as everybody wi-ites, without reference to gifts, the product is mainly trash, and trash of a deleterious sort ; ioi- bad art in literature is bad morals. 1 am not sure but the so-called domestic, the diluted, the "goody," nambv- ])ami>y, unrobust stories, which are so largely leud by school-girls, young ladies, and women. 160 RELATION OK r.ITl'.RATURE TO LIFE do more harm than the "knowing," auda- cious, wicked ones, also, it is reported, read by them, and written largely by their own sex. For minds enfeebled and relaxed by stories lacking even intellectual fibre are in a poor condition to meet the perils of life. This is not the place for discussing the stories written for the young and for the Sunday-school. It seems impossible to check the flow of them, now that so much capital is invested in this industry ; but I think that healthy public sen- timent is beginning to recognize tlie truth that the excessive reading of this class of literature by the young is weakening to the mind, besides being a serious hinderance to study and to attention to the literature that has substance. In his account of the Romantic School in Germany, Heine says, " In the breast of a nation's authors there always lies the image of its future, and the critic who, with a knife of sufficient keenness, dissects a new poet can easily prophesy, as from the entrails of a sac- rificial animal, what shape matters will as- sume in Germany." Now if all the poets and novelists of England and America to-day w^ere cut up into little pieces (and we might sacri- fice a few for the sake of the experiment), MODERN FICTION 161 there is no inspecting augur who could divine therefrom our literary future. The diverse indications would puzzle the most acute dis- sector. Lost in the variety, the multiplicity of minute details, the refinements of analysis and introspection, he would miss any leading indications. For with all its variet}^ it seems to me that one characteristic of recent fiction is its narrowness — narrowness of vision and of treatment. It deals with lives rather than with life. Lacking ideality, it fails of broad perception. We are accustomed to think that with the advent of the genuine novel of so- ciety, in the first part of this century, a great step forward was taken in fiction. And so there was. If the artist did not use a bie: canvas, he adopted a broad treatment. But the tendency now is to push analj'sis of indi- vidual peculiarities to an extreme, and to sub- stitute a study of traits for a representation of human life. It scarcely need be said that it is not multi- tude of figures on a literary canvas that se- cures breadth of treatment. The novel may be narrow, tiiough it swarms with a hundred pei'sonages. It may be as wide as life, as high as imagination can lift itself; it may image to us a whole social state, though it 11 102 KELATION OF LITEllATURE TO IJFE puts ill motion no more persons than we made the acquaintance of in one of the romances of Hawthorne. Consider for a moment how Thackeray produced ids marvellous results. We follow with him, in one of his novels of society, the fortunes of a very few people. They are so vividl}'' portrayed that we are convinced the author must have known them in that great world with which he was so fa- miliar; we should not be surprised to meet any of them in the streets of London. When we visit the Charterhouse School, and see the old forms where the boys sat nearly a century ago, we have in our minds Colonel Newcome as really as we have Charles Lamb and Cole- ridge and De Quincey. We are absorbed, as "we read, in tlie evolution of the characters of perhaps only half a dozen people ; and yet all the world, all great, roaring, struggling Lon- don, is in the story, and Clive, and Pliilip, and Ethel, and Becky Sharpe, and Captain Costi- gan are a part of life. It is the flowery month of May ; the scent of the hawthorn is in the air, and the tender flush of the new spring sufl'uses the Park, where the tide of fashion and pleasure and idleness surges up and down — the sauntering throng, the splendid equi- pages, the endless cavalcade in Rotten Row, in MODERN FICTION 163 which Clive descries afar off the white plume of his lady-love dancing on the waves of an unattainable society ; the club windows are all occupied; Parliament is in session, with its nightly echoes of imperial pohtics ; the thronged streets roar with life from morn till nearly morn again; the drawing-rooms hum and sparkle in the crush of a London season ; as you walk the midnight pavement, through the swinging doors of the cider-cellars comes the burst of bacchanalian song. Here is the world of the press and of letters; here are institutions, an army, a navy, commerce, glimpses of great ships going to and fro on distant seas, of India, of Australia. This one book is an epitome of English life, almost of the empire itself. We are conscious of all this, so much breadth and atmosphere has the artist given his little history of half a dozen people in this struggling world. But this background of a great city, of an empire, is not essential to the breadth of treat- ment upon which wu insist in fiction, to broad characterization, to the play of imagination about C(jmmon things which transfigures them into the immortal beauty of artistic creations. What a simple idyl in itself is (ioethe's Her- mann (uvl fhroihca! U is the creation of a 164 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE few master-touches, using only common ma- terial. Yet it has in it the breadth of life itself, the depth and passion of all our human struggle in the world — a little story with a vast horizon. It is constantly said that the conditions in America are unfavorable to the higher fic- tion; that our society is unformed, without centre, without the definition of classes, which give the light and shade that Heine speaks of in Don Quixote ; that it lacks types and cus- toms that can be widely recognized and ac- cepted as national and characteristic; that we have no past; that we want both ro- mantic and historic background ; that we are in a shifting, flowing, forming period which fiction cannot seize on ; that we are in diversity and confusion that baffle artis- tic treatment ; in short, that American life is too vast, varied, and crude for the purpose of the novelist. These excuses might be accepted as fully accounting for our failure — or shall we say our delay ? — if it were not for two or three of our literary performances. It is true that no novel has been written, and we dare say no novel will be written, that is, or will be, an epitome of the manifold diversities of Ameri- MODERN FICTION 165 can life, unless it be in the form of one of Walt Whitman's catalogues. But we are not without peculiar types ; not without charac- ters, not without incidents, stories, heroisms, inequalities ; not without the charms of nat- ure in infinite varietv; and human nature is the same here that it is in Spain, France, and England. Out of these materials Cooper wrote romances, narratives stamped with the distinct characteristics of American life and sceneiy, that were and are eagerly read by all civilized peoples, and which secured the universal ver- dict which only breadth of treatment com- mands. Out of these materials, also, Haw- thorne, child endowed with a creative imag- ination, wove those tragedies of interior life, those novels of our provincial New England, which rank among the great masterpieces of the novelist's art. The master artist can ideal- ize even our crude material, and make it serve. These exceptions to a rule do not go to prove the general assertion of a poverty of material for fiction here; the simple truth probably is that, for reasons incident to the development of a new region of the earth, creative genius has been turned in other di- rections than that of fictitious literature. Nor 166 RELATION OF I>1 IKKATUKE TO LIFE do I think tliat we need to take shelter be- hind the well-worn and convenient observa- tion, the truth of which stands in much doubt, that literature is the final flower of a nation's civilization. However, this is somewhat a digression. We are speaking of the tendency of recent fiction, very much the same everywhere that novels are written, which we have imperfectly sketched. It is probably of no more use to protest against it than it is to protest against the vulgar realism in pictorial art, which holds ugliness and beauty in equal esteem ; or against sestheticism gone to seed in languid affecta- tions ; or against the enthusiasm of a social life which wreaks its religion on the color of a vestment, or sighs out its divine soul over an ancient pewter mug. Most of our fiction, in its extreme analysis, introspection and self- consciousness, in its devotion to details, in its disregard of the ideal, in its selection as well as in its treatment of nature, is simply of a piece with a good deal else that passes for genuine art. Much of it is admirable in work- manship, and exhibits a cleverness in details and a subtlety in the observation of traits which many great novels lack. But I should be sorry to think that the historian will judge MODERN FICTION 167 our social life by it, and I doubt not that most of us are ready for a more ideal, that is to say, a more artistic, view of our per- formances in this bright and pathetic world. (1883.) THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. FROUDE'S "PROGRESS" THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. FROUDE'S ''PROGRESS" To revisit this earth, some ages after their departure from it, is a common wish among men. "We frequently hear men say that they would give so many months or years of their lives in exchange for a less number on the globe one or two or three centuries from now. Merely to see the world from some remote sphere, like the distant spectator of a play which passes in dumb show, would not suffice. They would like to be of the world again, and enter into its feelings, passions, hopes; to feel the sweep of its current, and so to comprehend what it has become. I suppose that we all who are thoroughly interested m this world have this desire. There are some select souls who sit apart in calm en- durance, waiting to be translated out of a Avorld they are almost tired of patronizing, to whom the whole thing seems, doubtless, like a cheap performance. They sit on the fence of criti- cism, and cannot for the life of them see what 172 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE the vulgar crowd make such a toil and sweat about. The prizes are the same dreary, old, fading bay wreaths. As for the soldiers march- ing past, their uniforms are torn, their hats are shocking, their shoes are dusty, they do not appear (to a man sitting on the fence) to march with any kind of spirit, their flags are old and tattered, the drums they beat are bar- barous ; and, besides, it is not probable that they are going anyAvhere ; they will mere- ly come round again, the same people, like the marching chorus in the Beggar's Opera. Such critics, of course, would not care to see the vulgar show over again ; it is enough for them to put on record their protest against it in the weekly Judgment Days which they edit, and by-and-by "withdraw out of their pri- vate boxes, with pity for a world in the crea- tion of which they were not consulted. The desire to revisit this earth is, I think, based upon a belief, wellnigh universal, that the world is to make some progress, and that it will be more interesting in the future than it is now. I believe that the human mind, whenever it is developed enough to compre- hend its own action, rests, and has always rest- ed, in this expectation. I do not know any period of time in which the civilized mind has MR. FROUDe's " PROGRESS " 173 not had expectation of something better for the race in the future. This expectation is sometimes stronger than it is at others ; and, again, there are always those who say that the Golden Age is behind them. It is always be- hind or before us ; the poor present alone has no friends ; the present, in the minds of many, is only the car that is carrying us away from an age of virtue and of happiness, or that is perhaps bearing us on to a time of ease and comfort and security. Perhaps it is worth while, in view of certain recent discussions, and especially of some free criticisms of this country, to consider whether there is any intention of progress in this world, and whether that intention is discoverable in the age in w^hich we live. If it is an old ques- tion, it is not a settled one ; the i)ractical dis- belief in any such progress is widely enter- tained. Not long ago ^Ir. James Anthony PVoude published an essay on Progress, in which he examined some of the evidences upon which we rely to prove that we live in an " era of progress." It is a melancholy es- say, for its tone is that of profound scepticism as to certain iiitlucnces and means of progress up^)n which wo in this country most rely. "With the illustrative arguments of Mr. Froudc's 174 RELATION OF LITKKATl'UK TO LIKIi essay I do not purpose specially to meddle ; I recall it to the attention of the reader as a rep- resentative type of scepticism regarding prog- ress which is somewhat common among intel- lectual men, and is not confined to England. It is not exactl}^ an acceptance of Eousscan'^; notion that civilization is a mistake, and that it would be better for us all to return to a state of nature — though in John Kuskin's case it nearly amounts to this ; but it is a hostilitj^ in its last analysis to what we understand by the education of the people, and to the gov- ernment of the people by themselves. If Mr. Fronde's essay is anything but an exhibition of the scholarly weapons of criticism, it is the expression of a profound disbelief in the intel- lectual education of the masses of the people. Mr. Ruskin goes further. He makes his open proclamation against any emancipation from hand-toil. Steam is the devil himself let loose from the pit, and all labor-saving machinery is his own invention. Mr. Euskin is the bull that stands upon the track and threatens with an- nihilation the on-coming locomotive; and 1 think that any spectator who sees his men- acing attitude and hears his roaring cannot but have fears for the locomotive. There are two sorts of infidelity concerning MR. FROUDE's "progress" 175 humanity, and I do not know which is the more withering in its effects. One is that which regards this world as only a waste and a desert, across the sands of which we are merely fugitives, fleeing from the wrath to come. The other is that doubt of any divine intention in development, in history, which we call progress from age to age. In the eyes of this latter infidelity history is not a procession or a progression, but only a series of disconnected pictures, each little era rounded with its own growth, fruitage, and de- cay, a series of incidents or experiments, with- out even the string of a far-reaching purpose to connect them. There is no intention of progress in it all. The race is barbarous, and then it changes to civilized ; in the one case the strong rob the weak by brute force ; in the other the crafty rob the unwary by finesse. The latter is a more agreeable state of thinirs; but it comes to about the same. The robber used to knock us down and take away our sheepskins; he now administers chloroform and relieves us of our watciies. It is a iren- tlemanly j)rocoeding, and scientific, and we call it civilization. AleantinK^ liuman nature remains the same, and the whole thing is a weary round that has no advance in it. 176 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE If this is true the succession of men and of races is no better than a vegetable succession ; and Mr. Froude is quite right in doubting if education of the brain will do the English agricultural laborer any good ; and Mr. Euskin ought to be aided in his crusade against ma- chinery, which turns the world upside down. The best that can be done with a man is the best that can be done with a plant — set him out in some favorable locality, or leave him where he happened to strike root, and there let him grow and mature in measure and quiet — especially quiet — as he may in God's sun and rain. If he happens to be a cabbage, in Heaven's name don't try to make a rose of him, and do not disturb the vegetable maturing of his head by grafting ideas upon his stock. The most serious difficulty in the way of those who maintain that tliere is an intention of progress in this world from century to cen- tury, from age to age — a discernible growth, a universal development — is the fact that all na- tions do not make progress at the same time or in the same ratio ; that nations reach a cer- tain development, and then fall away and even retrograde ; that while one may be advancing into high civilization, another is lapsing into deeper barbarism, and that nations appear to MK. FKOUDE's " PROGRESS " 177 have a limit of gro\vth. If there were a law of progress, an intention of it in all the world, ought not all peoples and tribes to advance jxiri passu, or at least ought there not to be discernible a general movement, historical and contemporary ? There is no such general movement which can be computed, the law of which can be discovered — therefore it does not exist. In a kind of despair, we are apt to run over in our minds empires and pre-emi- nent civilizations that have existed, and then to doubt whether life in this world is intended to be anything more than a series of experi- ments. There is the German nation of our day, the most aggressive in various fields of intellectual activity, a Hercules of scholarship, the most thoroughly trained and powerful — tliough its civilization marches to the noise of the hateful and barbarous drum. In Avhat points is it better than tlie Greek nation of tlie age of its superlative artists, philosophers, poets — the age of the most joyous, elastic hu- man souls in the most perfect human bodies^ Again, it is perhaps a fanciful notion that the Athintis of Plato was the northern part of tlie Scjutii American continent, projecting out towards Africa, and that the Antilles are the ])eaks and headlands of its sunken bulk. r,ut 12 178 RELATION OF LITEKATDRE TO LIFE tliore are evidences enough that the shores of the (xulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea were within liistoric periods the seat of a very considerable civilization — the seat of cities, of commerce, of trade, of palaces and pleasure- gardens — faint images, perhaps, of the luxu- rious civilization of Baitc and Pozzuoli and Capri in the most profligate period of the Iwoman empire. It is not more difficult to believe that there was a great material de- velopment here than to believe it of the Afri- can shore of the Mediterranean. Not to mul- tiply instances that will occur to all, we see as many retrograde as advance movements, and we see, also, that while one spot of the earth at one time seems to be the chosen theatre of progress, other portions of the globe are abso- lutely dead and without the least leaven of advancing life, and we cannot understand how this can be if there is any such thing as an all-pervading and animating intention or law of progress. And then we are reminded that the individual human mind long ago attained its height of power and capacity. It is enough to recall the names of Moses, Buddha, Confu- cius, Socrates, Paul, Homer, David. No doubt it has seemed to other periods and other nations, as it now does to the MR. FROUDES "PROGRESS 179 present civilized races, that they were the chosen times and peoples of an extraordinary and limitless development It must have seemed so to the Jews who overran Palestine and set their shining cities on all the hills of heathendom. It must have seemed so to the Babylonish conquerors who swept over Pales- tine in turn, on their way to greater conquests in Egypt. It must have seemed so to Greece when the Acropolis was to the outlying world what the imperial calla is to the marsh in which it lifts its superb flower. It must have seemed so to Rome when its solid roads of stone ran to all parts of a tributary world — the highways of the legions, her ministers, and of the wealth that poured into her treas- ury. It must have seemed so to followers of Mahomet, when the crescent knew no pause in its march up the Arabian peninsula to the Bosporus, to India, along the Mediterranean .shores to Spain, where in the eighth century it flowered into a culture, a learning, a re- finement in art and manners, to which the Christian world of that day was a stranger. It must have seemed so in llio awaken ins: of the sixteenth century, when Europe, Spain leading, began that great movement of dis- covery and aggrandizement which has, in the 180 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE end, been profitable only to a portion of the adventurers. And what shall we say of a nation as old, if not older than any of these we have mentioned, slowly building up mean- time a civilization and perfecting a s^^stem of government and a social economy which should outlast them all, and remain to our da}^ almost the sole monument of permanence and stability in a shifting world. How many times has the face of Europe been changed — and parts of Africa, and Asia Minor too, for that matter — by conquests and crusades, and the rise and fall of civilizations as well as dynasties? while China has endured, almost undisturbed, under a system of law, ad- ministration, morality, as old as the Pyramids probably — existed a coherent nation, highly developed in certain essentials, meeting and mastering, so far as we can see, the great problem of an over - populated territory, liv- ing in a good degree of peace and social order, of respect for age and law, and mak- ing a continuous history, the mere record of which is printed in a thousand bulky vol- umes. Yet we speak of the Chinese empire as an instance of arrested growth, for which there is no salvation, except it shall catch the spirit of progress abroad in the world. MR. FROUDe's " PROGRESS " 181 "What is this progress, and where does it come from ? Think for a moment of this significant situation. For thousands of 3"ears, empires, systems of society, systems of civilization — Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Eoman, Moslem, Feudal — have flourished and fallen, grown to a certain height and passed away ; great or- ganized fabrics have gone down, and, if there has been any progress, it has been as often defeated as renewed. And here is an empire, apart from this scene of alternate success and disaster, which has existed in a certain con- tinuity and stability, and yet, now that it is uncovered and stands face to face with the rest of the world, it finds that it lias little to teach us, and almost everything to learn from us. The old empire sends its students to learn of us, the newest child of civilization ; and through us they learn all the great past, its literature, law, science, out of which we sprang. It appears, then, that progress has, after all, been with the shifting world, that has been all this time going to ])ieces, rather than with the world that has been permanent and unshaken. AVhen we speak of progress we may mean two things. We may mean a lifting of the races as a whole by reason of more power 182 IIKLATION OF LITERATURE TO I.TFE over the material world, by reason of what we call the conquest of nature and a practical use of its forces; or we may moan a higher de- velopment of the individual man, so that he shall be better and happier. If from age to age it is discoverable that the earth is better adapted to man as a dwelling-place, and he is on the whole fitted to get more out of it for his own growth, is not that progress, and is it not evidence of an intention of progress ? Now, it is sometimes said that Providence, in the economy of this world, cares nothing for the individual, but works out its ideas and purposes through the races, and in certain periods, slowly bringing in, by great agencies and by processes destructive to individuals and to millions of helpless human beings, truths and principles ; so laying stepping- stones onward to a great consummation. I do not care to dwell upon this thought, but let us see if we can find any evidence in his- tor}'- of the presence in this world of an in- tention of progress. It is common to say that, if the world makes progress at all, it is by its great men, and when anything important for the race is to be done, a great man is raised up to do it. Yet another way to look at it is, that the ME. FROUDe's "pEOGEESS" 183 doing of sometbiDg at the appointed time makes the man who docs it great, or at least celebrated. The man often appears to be only a favored instrument of communication. As we glance back we recognize the truth that, at this and that period, the time had come for certain discoveries. Intelligence seemed pressing in from the invisible. Many minds were on the alert to apprehend it. "We believe, for instance, that if Gutenberg had not in- vented movable types, somebody else would have given them to the world about that time. Ideas, at certain times, throng for admission into the world ; and we are all familiar with the fact that the same important idea (never before revealed in all the ages) occurs to separate and widely distinct minds at about the same time. The invention of the electric telegraph seemed to burst upon the world simultaneously from many quarters — not per- fect, ])erhaps, but the time for the idea had come — and happy was it for the man who en- tertained it. We have agreed to call Colum- bus the discoverer of America, but I suppose there is no doubt that America had been visited by European, and pi'obably Asiatic, jxiople ages before Columljus; that four or live centuries before him people from northern 184 KELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE Europe had settlements here; he was for- tunate, liowever, in "discovering" it in the fuhiess of time, when the world, in its prog- ress, was ready for it. If the Greeks had had gunpowder, electro - magnetism, the printing press, history would need to be rewritten. Why the inquisitive Greek mind did not find out these things is a mystery upon any other theory than tlie one we are considering. And it is as mysterious that China, having gunpowder and the art of printing, is not to- day like Germany. There seems to me to be a progress, or an intention of progress, in the world, indepen- dent of individual men. Things get on by all sorts of instruments, and sometimes by very poor ones. There are times when new thoughts or applications of known principles seem to throng from the invisible for expression through human media, and there is hardly ever an important invention set free in the world that men do not appear to be ready cordially to receive it. Often we should be justified in saying that there was a widespread expectation of it. Almost all the great inven- tions and the ingenious application of prin- ciples have many claimants for the honor of priority. MR. froude's " progress " 185 On any other theory than this, that there is present in the world an intention of prog- ress which outlasts individuals, and even races, I cannot account for the fact that, while civil- izations decay and pass away, and human systems go to pieces, ideas remain and ac- cumulate. We, the latest age, are the inherit- ors of all the foregoing ages. I do not believe that anything of importance has been lost to the world. The Jewish civilization was torn up root and branch, but whatever was valu- able in the Jewish polity is ours now. We may say the same of the civilizations of Athens and of Rome ; though the entire organization of the ancient world, to use Mr. Froude's figure, collapsed into a heap of incoherent sand, the ideas remained, and Greek art and Roman law are part of the world's solid pos- sessions. Even those who question the value to the individual of what we call progress, admit, I suppose, the increase of knowledge in the world from age to age, and not only its in- crease, but its diffusion. The intelligent school - boy to - day knows more than the ancient sages knew — more about the visible heavens, more of the secrets of the earth, more of the human body. The rudiments 186 JiELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE of his education, the common experiences of his every-day Hfe, were, at the best, the guesses and specuhitions of a remote age. There is certainly an accumulation of facts, ideas, knowledge. Whether this makes men better, wiser, happier, is indeed disputed. In order to maintain the notion of a general and intended progress, it is not necessary to show that no preceding age has excelled ours in some special development. Phidias has had no rival in sculpture, we may admit. It is possible that glass was once made as flexible as leather, and that copper could be hardened like steel. But I do not take much stock in the "lost arts," the wondering theme of the lyceums. The knowledge of the natural world, and of materials, was never, I believe, so extensive and exact as it is to-day. It is possible that there are tricks of chemistry, ingenious processes, secrets of color, of which we are ignorant ; but I do not believe there was ever an ancient alchemist who could not be taught something in a modern laboratory. The vast engineering works of the ancient Egyptians, the remains of their temples and pyramids excite our wonder; but I have no doubt that President Grant, if he becomes the tyrant they say he is becoming, and commands MR. FKOUDES "PROGRESS 187 the labor of forty millions of slaves — a large proportion of them office - holders, — could build a Karnak, or erect a string of pyramids across New Jersey. Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of sub- jects upon which tlie believer in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world calls this progress — he calls it only change. I suppose he means by this two things: that these great movements of our modern Hfe are not any evidence of a perma- nent advance, and that our whole structure may tumble into a heap of incoherent sand, as systems of society have done before; and, again, that it is questionable if, in what we call a stride in civilization, the individual cit- izen is becoming any purer or more just, or if iiis intelligence is directed towards learning and d(^ing what is riglit, or only to the means of more extended pleasures. It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the first of these points — the permanence of our ad- vance, if it is an advance. liut we may be encouraged by one thing that distinguishes this period — say from the middle of the eighteenth century — from any that lias i»re- cedcd it. I mean the introduction of machin- ery, applied to the multiplication of man's 188 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE power in a hundred directions — to manufactur- ing, to locomotion, to tlie diffusion of thouglit and of knowledge. I need not dwell upon tliis familiar topic. Since this period began there has been, so far as I know, no retrograde move- ment anywhere, but, besides the material, an intellectual and spiritual kindling the world over, for Avhich history has no sort of parallel. Truth is always the same, and will make its way, but this subject might be illustrated by a study of the relation of Christianity and of the brotherhood of men to machinery. The theme would demand an essay by itself. I leave it with the one remark, that this great change now being wrought in the world by the multi- plicity of machinery is not more a material than it is an intellectual one, and that we have no instance in history of a catastrophe wide- spread enough and adequate to sweep away its results. That is to say, none of the catastrophes, not even the corruptions, which brought to ruin the ancient civilizations, would work any- thing like the same disaster in an age which has the use of machinery that this age has. For instance : Gibbon selects the period be- tween the accession of Trajan and the death of Marcus Aurelius as the time in which the human race enjoyed more general happiness MR. FROUDe's "progress" 189 than they had ever known before, or had since known. Yet, says Mr. Froude, in the midst of this prosperity the heart of the empire was dying out of it ; luxury and selfishness were eating away the principle that held society to- gether, and the ancient world was on the point of collapsing into a hcaj) of incoherent sand. Now, it is impossible to conceive that the catastrophe which did happen to that civiliza- tion could have happened if the world had then possessed the steam-engine, the printing- press, and the electric telegraph. The Roman power might have gone down, and the face of the world been recast; but such universal chaos and such a relapse for the individual people would seem impossible. If we turn from these general considera- tions to the evidences that tiiis is an "era of progress" in the condition of individual men, we are met by more sj)ecific denials. Granted, it is said, all your faciUtics for travel and com- munication, for cheap ;ind easy manufacture, for the distribution of cheap literature and news, your cheap education, better homes, and all the comforts and luxuries of your machine civilization, is the average man, the agricult- urist, the machinist, the laborer any better for it all? An; tiiore more pui'ity, more honest, 190 RELATION OF IJTKRATURE TO LIFE fair dealing, genuine work, fear and honor of God ? Are the proceeds of labor more evenly distributed? These, it is said, are the criteria of progress ; all else is misleading. Now, it is true that the ultimate end of any system of government or civilization should be the improvement of the individual man. And yet this truth, as Mr. Froude puts it, is only a half-truth, so that this single test of any system may not do for a given time and a limited area. Other and wider considerations come in. Disturbances, which for a while unsettle soci- ety and do not bring good results to individuals, may, nevertheless, be necessary, and may be a sign of progress. Take the favorite illustration of Mr. Froude and Mr. Ruskin — the condition of the agricultural laborer of England. If I understand them, the civilization of the last century has not helped his position as a man. If I understand them, he was a better man, in a better condition of earthly happiness, and with a better chance of heaven, fifty years ago than now, before the " era of progress " found him out. (It ought to be noticed here, that the report of the Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the English agricultural laborer does not sustain Mr. Froude's assump- tions. On the contiiuy, the report shows that MK. FEOUDe's " PROGRESS " 191 his condition is in almost all respects vastly better than it was fifty years ago.) Mr. Euskin would remove the steam-engine and all its devilish works from his vicinity; he would abolish factories, speedy travel by rail, new- fangled instruments of agriculture, our patent education, and remit him to his ancient con- dition — tied for life to a bit of ground, which should supply all his simple wants; his wife should weave the clothes for the familv: his children should learn nothing but the catechism and to speak the truth; he should take his religion without question from the hearty, fox- hunting parson, and live and die undisturbed by ideas. jS'ow, it seems to me that if Mr. Kuskin could realize in some isolated nation this idea of a pastoral, simple existence, under a paternal government, he would have in time an ignorant, stupid, brutal community in a great deal worse case than tlie agricultural laborers of England are at present. Three- fourths of the crime in the kingdom of Bavaria is committed in the Ultramontane region of the Tyrol, where the conditions of popular education are about thhink. It says, "]\Ir. lihink resorts to the common device of 204 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE the rogue — the affidavit. If he had been con- scious of rectitude, would he not have relied upon his simple denial?" Now, if an extreme case like this could oc- cur, it would be bad enough. But, in our free society, the remedy would be at hand. The constituents of Mr. Blank would elect him in triumph. The newspaper would lose public confidence and support and learn to use its position more justly. What I mean to indi- cate by such an extreme instance as this is, that in our very license of individual freedom there is finally a correcting power. We might pursue this general subject of progress by a comparison of the society of this country now with that fifty years ago. I have no doubt that in every essential this is better than that, in manners, in morality, in charity and toleration, in education and re- ligion. I know the standard of morality is higher. I know the churches are purer. Not fifty years ago, in a New England town, a distinguished doctor of divinity, the pastor of a leading church, was part owner in a dis- tillery. He was a great light in his denom- ination, but he was an extravagant liver, and, being unable to pay his debts, he was arrest- ed and put into jail, with the liberty of the MR. FROUDE S " PROGRESS 205 " limits." In order not to interrupt his minis- terial work, the jail limits were made to include his house and his church, so that he could still go in and out before his people. I do not think that could occur anywhere in the United States to-day. I will close these fragmentary suggestions bv savins: that I, for one, should like to see this country a century from now. Those who live then will doubtless say of this period that it was crude, and rather disorderly, and fer- menting with a great many new projects ; but I have great faith that they will also say that the present extending notion, that the best government is for the people, by the people, was in the line of sound progress. I should expect to find faith in humanity greater and not less than it is now, and I should not ex- pect to find that ViW Fronde's mournful ex- pectation had been realized, and that the belief in a life beyond the grave had been withdrawn. (1874.) ENGLAND ENGLAND England has played a part in modern his- tory altogether oat of pro))ortion to its size. The whole of Great Britain, including Ire- land, has only eleven thousand more square miles than Italy ; and England and Wales alone are not half so large as Italy. Englaad alone is about the size of North Carolina. It is, as Franklin, in 1703, wrote to Mary Steven- son in London, "• that petty island which, com- pared to America, is but a stepping-stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry." A considerable portion of it is under water, or water-soaked a good part of the year, and 1 supp(jse it has more acres for breeding frogs than any other northern land, except Holland. Old Harrison says tliat the North Britons when overcome by hunger used to creep into the marslies till the water was up to their chins and there remain a long time, "onlie to (pialifio the ln-ats of their stomachs by vio- 14 210 RELATION OF MTERATURE TO LIFE Icnce, which otherwise would have wrought and beene readie to oppresse them for hunger and want of sustinance." It hos so far north — the latitude of Labrador — that the winters are lonir and the climate inhosi)itable. It would be severely cold if the (iulf Stream did not make it always damp and curtain it with clouds. In some parts the soil is heavy with water, in others it is only a thin stratum above the chalk ; in fact, agricultural produc- tion could scarcely be said to exist there until fortunes made in India and in other foreign adventure enabled the owners of the land to pile it knee-deep with fertilizers from Peru and elsewhere. Thanks to accumulated wealth and the Gulf Stream, its turf is green and soft ; jBirs, which will not mature with us north of the capes of Virginia, ripen in sheltered nooks in Oxford, and the large and unfrequent straw- berry sometimes appears upon the dinner- table in such profusion that the guests can indulge in one apiece. Yet this small, originally infertile island has been for two centuries, and is to-day, the most vital influence on the globe. Cast your eye over the world upon her possessions, insular and continental, into any one of which, almost, England might be dropped, with sliglit dis- ENGLAND 211 turbance, as 3'ou would transfer a hanging garden. For any parallel to her power and possessions 3'ou must go back to ancient Rome. Eg3'pt under Thotmes and Seti over- ran the then known world and took tribute of it ; but it was a temporary wave of conquest and not an assimilation. Rome sent her laws and her roads to the end of the earth, and made an empire of it ; but it was an empire of barbarians largely, of dynasties rather than of peoples. The dynasties fought, the dynas- ties submitted, and the dynasties paid the tribute. The modern "people" did not exist. One battle decided the fate of half the world — it might be lost or won for a woman's eyes ; the flight of a chieftain might settle the fate of a province ; a campaign might determine the allegiance of half Asia. There was but one compact, disciplined, law-ordered nation, and that had its seat on the Tiber. Under what different circumstances did England win her position ! Before she came to the front, Venice controlled, and almost monopolized, the trade of the Orient. When she entered upon her career Spain was almost omnipotent in Europe, and was in possession of more than iiiiir the Western world; and be- sides Spain, England had, wherever she went, 212 KELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE to contend for a foothold with Portugal, skilled in trade and adventure ; and with Holland, rich, and powerful on the sea. That is to say, she met everywhere civilizations old and techni- cally her superior. Of the ruling powers, she was the least in arts and arms. If you will take time to fill out this picture, you will have some conception of the marvellous achieve- ments of England, say since the abdication of the Emperor Charles V. This little island is to-day the centre of the wealth, of the solid civilization, of the w^orld. I will not say of art, of music, of the lighter social graces that make life agreeable ; but I will say of the moral forces that make prog- ress possible and worth while. Of this island the centre is London ; of London the heart is " the City,'' and in the City you can put your finger on one spot where the pulse of the world is distinctly felt to beat. The Moslem regards the Kaaba at Mecca as the centre of the universe; but that is only a theological phrase. The centre of the world is the Bank of England in Leaden hall Street. There is not an occurrence, not a conquest or a defeat, a revolution, a panic, a famine, an abundance, not a change in value of money or material, no depression or stoppage in trade, no recov- ENGLAND 313 ery, no political, and scarcely any great relig- ious movement — say the civil deposition of the Pope or the "Wahhabee revival in Arabia and India— that does not report itself instantly at this sensitive spot. Other capitals feel a local influence; this feels all the local influences. Put your ear at the door of the Baijk or the Stock Exchange near by, and you hear the roar of the world. But this is not all, nor the most striking thing, nor the greatest contrast to the em- pires of Rome and of Spain. The civilization that has gone forth from England is a self- sustaining one, vital to grow where it is planted, in vast communities, in an order that does not depend, as that of the Roman world did, upon edicts and legions from the capital. And it must be remembered that if the land empire of England is not so vast as that of Rome, England has for two centuries been mistress of the seas, with all the consequences of that opportunity — consequences to trade beyond comjnitation. And we must add to all this that an intellectual and moral power has been put fortii from England clear round the globe, and felt beyond th»^ limits of the English tongue. IIow is it that England has attained this 214 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE supremacy — a supremac}'^ in vain disputed on land and on sea by France, but now threat- ened by an equipped and disciplined Ger- many, by an unformed Colossus — a Slav and Tartar conglomerate ; and perhaps by one of her own children, the United States? I will raentior^some of the things that have deter- mined England's extraordinary career; and they will help us to consider her prospects. I name: 1. The Race. It is a mixed race, but with certain dominant qualities, which we call, loose- ly, Teutonic; certainly the most aggressive, tough, and vigorous people the world has seen. It does not shrink from any climate, from any exposure, from any geographic condition ; yet its choice of migration and of residence has mainly been on the grass belt of the globe, where soil and moisture produce good turf, where a changing and unequal climate, with extremes of heat and cold, calls out the phys- ical resources, stimulates invention, and re- quires an aggressive and defensive attitude of mind and body. The early history of this people is marked by two things : (1) Town and village organizations, nurs- eries of law, order, and self-dependence, nuclei of power, capable of indefinite expansion, lead- ENGLAND 215 ing directly to a free and a strong govern- ment, the breeders of civil liberty. (2) Individualism in religion, Protestantism in the widest sense : I mean by this, cultiva- tion of the individual conscience as against authorit}'. This trait was as marked in this sturdy people in Catholic England as it is in Protestant England. It is in the blood. Eng- land never did submit to Rome, not even as France did, though the Gallic Church held out well. Take the struggle of Henry II. and the hierarchy. Read the fight witli prerogative all along. The English Church never could submit. It is a shallow reading of history to attribute the final break with Rome to the un- bridled passion of Ilenr}' VIII.; that was an occasion only : if it had not been that, it would have been something else. Here we have the two necessary traits in the character of a great people : the love and the habit of civil liberty and religious conviction and independence. Allied to these is another trait — truthfulness. To speak the truth in word and action, to the verge of bluntness and offence — and with more reHsh sometimes be- cause it is individually obnoxious and unlovely — is an Englisii trait, clearly to be traced in the character of this people, notwithstanding 216 KEIATION OK MrERATUKK TO LIFE the equivocations of Elizabethan diplomacy, the proverbial lying of English shopkeepers, and the fraudulent adulteration of English manufactures. Not to lie is perhaps as much a matter of insular pride as of morals ; to lie is unbecoming an Englishman. When Captain Burnaby was on his way to Khiva he would tolerate no Oriental exaggeration of his army rank, although a higher title would have smoothed his way and added to his consider- ation. An English official who was a captive at Bokhara (or Khiva) was offered his life by the Khan if he would abjure the Christian faith and say he Avas a Moslem ; but he pre- ferred death rather than the advantage of a temporary equivocation. I do not suppose that he was a specially pious man at home or that he was a martyr to religious principle, but for the moment Christianity stood for England and English honor and civilization. I can believe that a rough English sailor, who had not used a sacred name, except in vain, since he said his prayer at his mother's knee, accepted death under like circumstances rath- er than say he was not a Christian. The next determining cause in England's career is 11. The insular position. Poor as the island ENGLAND 217 was, this was the opportunity. See what came of it : (1) Maritime opportunity. The irregular coast -lines, the bays and harbors, the near islands and mainlands invited to the sea. The nation became, jper force, sailors — as the an- cient Greeks were and the modern Greeks are: adventurers, discoverers — hardy, ambitious, seeking food from the sea and wealth from every side. (2) Their position protected them. What they got they could keep ; wealth could ac- cumulate. Invasion was difficult and prac- tically imi)ossible to their neighbors. And yet they were in the bustling world, close to the continent, commanding the most important of the navigable seas. The wealth of Holland was on the one hand, the wealth of France on the other. They held the keys. (3) The insular position and their free institu- tions invited refugees from all the Continent, ar- tisans and skilled laborers of all kinds. Hence, the beginning of their great industries, which made England rich in proportion as her au- thority and chance of trade expanded over dis- tant islands and continents. l>ut this would not have been possible without the third ad- vantage which I shall mention, and that is: 218 RELATION OF LITEKATCRE TO LIFE III. Coal. England's power and wealth rest- ed upon her coal-beds. In this bounty nature was more liberal to the tight little island than to any other spot in AVestern Europe, and England took early advantage of it. To be sure, her coal-field is small compared with that of the United States — an area of only 11,900 square miles to our 192,000. But Ger- many has only 1770; Belgium, 510; France, 2086 ; and Russia only in her expansion of ter- ritory leads Europe in this respect, and has now 30,000 square miles of coal-beds. But see the use England makes of this material: in 1877, she took out of the ground 134,179,968 tons. The United States the same year took out 50,000,000 tons; Germany, 48,000,000; France, 16,000,000 ; Belgium, 14,000,000, This tells the story of the heavy industries. We have considered as elements of national greatness the race itself, the favorable position, and the material to work with. I need not enlarge upon the might and the possessions of England, nor the general beneficence of her occupation wherever she has established fort, factor}^, or colony. With her flag go much injustice, domineering, and cruelty; but, on the whole, the best elements of civilization. The intellectual domination of England has ENGLAND 219 been as striking as the ph^'sical. It is stamped upon all her colonies ; it has by no means dis- appeared in the United States. For nioi'e than fifty years after our independence we import- ed our intellectual food— with the exception of politics, and theology in certain forms — and largely our ethical guidance from England. We read English books, or imitations of the English way of looking at things ; we even ac- cepted the English caricatures of our own life as genuine — notably in the case of the so- called typical Yankee. It is only recently that our writers have begun to describe our own life as it is, and that readers begin to feel that our society may be as interesting in print as that English society which they have been all their lives accustomed to read about. The read inn- -books of children in schools were filled with English essays, stories, English views of life; it was the English heroines over whoso woes the girls wept ; it was of the Eng- lish heroes that the boys declaimed. I do not know how much the imagination has to do in shaping the national character, but for half a century English writers, by poems and novels, controlled the imagination of this country. The principal reading then, as now— and per- haps more then than now — was fiction, and 230 KELATION OF LITERATDKE TO LIFE nearly all of this England supplied. "We took in with it, it will be noticed, not only the ro- mance and gilding of chivalry and legitimacy, such as Scott gives us, but constant instruction in a society of ranks and degrees, orders of no- bility and commonalty, a fixed social status, a well-ordered, and often attractive, permanent social inequality, a state of hfe and relations based upon lingering feudal conditions and prej- udices. The background of all English fic- tion is monarchical ; however liberal it may be, it must be projected upon the existing order of things. We have not been examining these foreign social conditions with that simple curi- osity which leads us to look into the social life of Russia as it is depicted in Russian novels; we have, on the contrary, absorbed them gen- eration after generation as part of our intel- lectual development, so that the novels and the other English literature must have had a vast influence in moulding our mental character, in shaping our thinking upon the political as well as the social constitution of states. For a long time the one American counter- action, almost the only, to this English influ- ence was the newspaper, which has always kept alive and diffused a distinctly American spirit — not always lovely or modest, but na- ENGLAND 221 tional. The establishment of periodicals which could afford to pay for fiction written about our society and from the American point of view has had a great effect on our literary emancipation. The wise men whom we elect to make our laws— and who represent us in- tellectually and morally a good deal better than we sometimes like to admit— have al- ways gone upon the theory, with regard to the reading for the American people, that the chief requisite of it was cheapness, with no re- gard to its character so far as it is a shaper of notions about government and social life. What educating influence English fiction was having upon American life they have not in- quired, so long as it Avas furnished cheap, and its authors were cheated out of any copyright on it. At the North, thanks to a free press and periodicals, to a dozen reform agitations, and to the intellectual stir generally accompanying industries and commerce, we have been devel- oping an immense intellectual activity, a por- tion of which has found expression in fiction, in poetry, in essays, that are instinct with American life and aspiration ; so that now for over thirty years, in the field of literature, we have had a vigorous offset to the English 223 RELATION OF LITERATURP: TO LIFE intellectual domination of Avhich* I spoke. How far this has in the past moulded Ameri- can thoiiglit and sentiment, in what degree it should be held responsible for the infidelity in regard to our "American experiment," I will not undertake to say. The South furnishes a very interesting illustration in this connection. When the civil war broke down the barriers of intellectual non- intercourse behind which the South had ensconced itself, it was found to be in a colonial condition. Its libraries were English libraries, mostly composed of old English literature. Its literary growth stopped with the reign of George III. Its latest news was the Spectator and the Tatler. The social order it covered was that of mo- narchical England, undisturbed bv the fierv philippics of Bj^ron or Shelley or the radical- ism of a manufacturing age. Its chivalry was an imitation of the antiquated age of lords and ladies, and tournaments, and buckram cour- tesies, when men were as touchy to fight, at the lift of an eyelid or the drop of a glove, as Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and as ready for a drinking - bout as Christopher North. The intellectual stir of the North, with its disor- ganizing radicalism, was rigorously excluded, and with it all the new life pouring out of ENGLAND 233 its presses. The South was tied to a repub- lic, but it was not republican, either in its pol- itics or its social order. It was, in its mental constitution, in its prejudices, in its tastes, ex- actly what 3'ou would expect a people to be, excluded from the circulation of free ideas by its system of slavery, and fed on the English literature of a century ago. I dare say that a majority of its reading public, at any time, would have preferred a monarchical system and a hierarchy of rank. To return to England. I have said that Eng- lish domination usually carries the best ele- ments of civilization. Yet it must be owned that England has pursued her magnificent career in a policy often insolent and brutal, and generally selfish. Scarcely any consider- ations have stood in the way of her trade and ])rofit. I will not dwell upon her opium cult- ure in India, which is a pro.ximate cause of famine in district after district, nor upon her forcing the drug upon China — a policy dis- graceful to a Christian queen and people. We have only just got rid of slavery, sustained so long by Biblical and ollicial sanction, and may not yet set up as critics. IJut I will refer to a case with which all are familiar — England's treatment of her American colonies. In 17^0 224 KELATION OF IJTERATURK TO LIFE and onward, when Franklin, the agent of the colonies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, was cooling his heels in lords' waiting-rooms in London, America was treated exactly as Ireland was — that is, discriminated against in every way ; not allowed to manufacture ; not permitted to trade with other nations, except under the most vexatious restrictions ; and the effort was continued to make her a mere agricultural producer and a dependent. All that England cared for us was that we should be a market for her manufactures. This same selfishness has been the key-note of her policy down to the present day, except as the force of circumstances has modified it. Steadily pursued, it has contributed largely to make England the monetary and industrial master of the world. "With this outline I pass to her present con- dition and outlook. The dictatorial and selfish policy has been forced to give way somewhat in regard to the colonies. The spirit of the age and the strength of the colonies forbid its exercise; they cannot be held by the old policy. Aus- tralia boldly adopts a protective tariff, and her parliament is oidy nominally controlled by the crown. Canada exacts duties on Eng- ENGLAND 235 lish goods, and England cannot help herself. Even with these concessions, can England keep her great colonies ? They are still loyal in word. They still affect English manners and English speech, and draw their intellect- ual supplies from England. On the prospect of a war with Eussia they nearly all offered volunteers. But evei-ybody knows that alle- giance is on the condition of local autonomy. If united Canada asks to go, she will go. So with Australia. It may be safely predicted that England will never fight again to hold the sovereignty of her new-world possessions against their present occupants. And, in the judgment of many good observers, a dissolu- tion of the empire, so far as the Western col- onies are concerned, is inevitable, unless Great Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial federation, with parlia- ments distinct and independent, the crown the only bond of union— the crown, and not the English parliament, being the titular and act- ual sovereign. Sovereign ]iower over Amer- ica in the parliament Franklin never would admit. His idea was that all the inhabitants of the empire must be citizens, not some of them subjects ruled by the home citizens. The two great political parties of England IS 226 RELATION OF UTEKATUKE TO LIFE are reall}' formed on lines constructed after the passage of the Eeform Bill of 1832. The Tories had been long in power. They had made many changes and popular concessions, but they resisted parliamentary reform. The great Whig lords, who had tried to govern England without the people and in opposition to the crown in the days of George III., had learned to seek po})ular support. The Reform Bill, which was ultimately forced through by popular pressure and threat of civil war, abol- ished the rotten boroughs, gave representa- tion to the large manufacturing towns and in- creased representation to the counties, and the suffrage to'all men who had paid ten pounds a year rent in boroughs, or in the counties owned land worth ten pounds a year or paid fifty pounds rent. Tlie immediate result of this was to put power into the hands of the mid- dle classes and to give the lower classes high hopes, so that, in 1839, the Chartist movement began, one demand of which was universal suffrage. The old party names of Whig and Tor}'- had been dropped and the two parties had assumed their present appellations of Con- servatives and Liberals. Both i)arties had, however, learned that there was no rest for any ruling party except a popular basis, and ENGLAND 227 the Conservative party had the good sense to strengthen itself in 1867 by carrying through Mr. Disraeli's bill, which gave the franchise in boroughs to all householders paying rates, and in counties to all occupiers of property rated at fifteen pounds a year. This broaden- ing of the suffrage places the power irrevo- cably in the hands of the people, against whose judgment neither crown nor ministry can venture on any important step. In treneral terras it mav be said that of these two great parties the Conservative wishes to preserve existing institutions, and latterly has leaned to the prerogatives of the crown, and tlie Liberal is inclined to progress and reform, and to respond to changes demanded by the people. Both parties, however, like parties elsewhere, propose and oppose measures and movements, and accept or reject policies, sim- ply to get office or keep office. The Conserv- ative party of late years, principally because it has the simple task of holding back, has been better able to define its lines and preserve a compact organization. Tlie Liberals, with a multitude of reformatory projects, have, of course, a less homogeneous organization, and for some years have been without well-defined issues. Tiie Conservative aristocracy seemed 228 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE to form a secure alliance with the farmers and the great agricultural interests, and at the same time to have a strong hold upon the lower classes. In what his opponents called liis " policy of adventure," Lord Beaconsfield had the support of the lower populace. The Liberal party is an incongruous host. On one winof are the Whio: lords and great land-own- ers, who cannot be expected to take kindly to a land reform that would reform them out of territorial power; and on the other wing are the Radicals, who would abolish the pres- ent land system and the crown itself, and in- stitute the rule of a democrac3^ Between these two is the great body of the middle class, a considerable portion of the educated and university trained, the majorities of the manufacturing towns, and perhaps, we may say, generally the ISTonconformists. There are some curious analogies in these two parties to our own parties before the war. It is, perhaps, not fanciful to suppose that the Conservative lords resemble our own aristocratic leaders of democracy, who contrived to keep near the people and had affiliations that secured them the vote of the least educated portion of the voters ; while the great Liberal lords are not unlike our old aristocratic Whigs, of the cotton ENGLAND 229 order, who have either little sympathy with the people or little faculty of showing it. It is a curious fact that during our civil war re- spect for authority gained us as much sym- pathy from the Conservatives, as love for freedom (hampered by the greed of trade and rivalry in manufactures) gained us from the Liberals. To return to the question of empire. The bulk of the Conservative party would hold the colonies if possible, and pursue an imperial policy ; while certainly a large portion of the Liberals — not all, by any means — would let the colonies go, and, with the Manchester school, hope to hold England's place by free- trade and active competition. The imperial policy may be said to have two branches, in regard to wliich parties will not sharply di- vide: one is the relations to be held towards the Western colonies, and the other in the pol- icy to be pursued in the East in reference to India and to the development of the Indian empire, and also the policy of aggression and subjection in South Africa. An imperial policy does not necessarily imply such vagaries as the forcible detention of the forcibly annexed Boer roj)ul)lic. P.iil everybody sees that the time is near when 230 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE England must say definitely as to the imperial policy generally whether it will pursue it or abandon it. And it may be remarked in pass- ing that the Gladstone government, thus far, though pursuing this policy more moderately than the Beaconsfield government, shows no intention of abandoning it. Almost every- body admits that if it is abandoned England must sink to the position of a third-rate power like Holland. For what does abandonment mean ? It means to have no weight, except that of moral example, in Continental affairs : to relinquish her advantages in the Mediter- ranean ; to let Turkey be absorbed by Russia ; to become so weak in India as to risk rebel- lion of all the provinces, and probable attack from Russia and her Central Asian allies. But this is not all. Lost control in Asia is lost trade; this is evident in every foot of control Russia has gained in the Caucasus, about the Caspian Sea, in Persia. There Russian manu- factures supplant the English; and so in an- other quarter : in order to enjoy the vast opening trade of Africa, England must be on hand with an exhibition of power. We might show by a hundred examples that the imperial idea in England does not rest on pride alone, on national glory altogether, though that is ENGLAND 231 a large element in it, but on trade instincts. '•Trade follows the flag" is a well-known motto ; and that means that the lines of com- merce follow the limits of empire. Take India as an illustration. Why should England care to keep India? In the last forty years the total revenue from India, set down up to 1S80 as £1,517,000,000, has been £53,000,000 less than the expenditure. It varies with the years, and occasionally the Ijalance is favorable, as in 1879, when the ex- penditure was £63,400,000 and the revenue was £01,400,000. But to offset this average deticit the very [)rofitable trade of India, which is mostly in British hands, swells the national wealth ; and this trade would not be so largely in British hands if the flag were away. But this is not the only value of India. Grasp on India is part of the vast Oriental network of English trade and commerce, the carrying trade, the supply of cotton and iron goods. This largely dcj)ends upon EngHsh l)restigc in the Orient, and to lose India is to lose the grip. On practically the same string with India are Egypt, Central Africa, and the Euphrates valh^y. A vast empire of trade opens out. To sink the im|)erial i)olicy is to shut this vision. With Russia pressing 232 KKLATION OF LITKRATUKE TO MFE on one side and America competing on the other, England cannot afford to lose her mil- itary lines, her control of the sea, her pres- tige. Again, India offers to the young and the adventurous a career, military, civil, or com- mercial. This is of great weight — great social weight. One of the chief wants of England to-day is careers and professions for her sons. The population of the United Kingdom in 1876 was estimated at near thirty-four millions; in the last few decades the decennial increase had been considerably over two millions ; at that rate the po])ulation in 1900 would be near forty millions. How can they live in their narrow limits? They must emigrate, go for good, or seek employment and means of wealth in some such vast field as India. Take away India now, and you cut off the career of hundreds of thousands of young Englishmen, and the hope of tens of thousands of house- holds. There is another aspect of the case Avhich it would be unfair to ignore. Opportunity is the measure of a nation's responsibility. I have no doubt that Mr. Thomas Hughes spoke for a very respectable portion of Christian Eng- land, in 1861, when he wrote Mr. James Eus- ENGLAND 233 sell Lowell, in a prefator}' note to Tom Brown at Oxford^ these words : " Tlie great tasks of the world are only laid on the sirongest shoulders. We, who have India to guide and train, who have for our task the educating of her wretched people into free men, who feel that the work cannot be shifted from ourselves, and must be done as God would have it done, at the peril of England's own life, can and do feel for 5-ou." It is safe, we think, to say that if the British Empire is to be dissolved, disintegration cannot be permitted to begin at home. Ireland has always been a thorn in tlie side of England. And the policy towards it could not have been much worse, either to impress it with a respect for authority or to win it by conciliation ; it has been a strange mixture of untimely con- cession and untimely cruelty. The problem, in fact, has physical and race elements that make it almost insolvable. A water-logged country, of which nothing can surely l>e ])redicted but the uncertainty of its harvests, inhabited by a people of mut geography settles some things in this world, and the act of union that bound Ireland to the United Kingdom in Isoo was 234 RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE as much a necessity of the situation as the act of union that obliterated the boundary hne between Scotland and England in 1707. The , Irish parliament was confessedly a failure, and it is scared}'' within the possibilities that the experiment will be tried again. Irish inde- pendence, so far as English consent is con- cerned, and until England's power is utterly broken, is a dream. Great changes will doubt- less be made in the tenure and transfer of land, and these changes will react upon Eng- land to the ultimate abasement of the landed aristocracy ; but this equalization of conditions would work no consent to separation. The undeniable growth of the democratic spirit in England can no more be relied on to bring it about, when we remember what renewed ex- ecutive vigor and cohesion existed with the Commonwealth and the fiery foreign policy of the first republic of France. For three years past we have seen the British Empire in peril on all sides, with the addition of depression and incipient rebellion at home, but her hori- zon is not as dark as it was in 1780, when, with a failing cause in America, England had the whole of Europe against her. In any estimate of the prospects of Eng- land we must take into account the recent ENGLAND 235 marked changes in the social condition, Mr. Escott has an instructive chapter on this in his excellent book on England. He notices that the English character is losing its insu- larity, is more accessible to foreign influences, and is adopting foreign, especially French, modes of living. Country life is losing its charm; domestic life is changed; people live in "flats" more and more, and the idea of home is not what it was ; marriage is not exactly what it was; the increased free and independent relations of the sexes are some- what demoralizing ; women are a little intoxi- cated with their newly-acquired freedom ; so- cial scandals are more frequent. It should be said, however, that perhaps the present perils are due not to the new system, but to the fact that it is new ; when the novelty is worn off the peril may cease. Mr. Escott notices primogeniture as one of the stable and, curious enough, one of the dem- ocratic institutions of society. It is owing to primogeniture that while there is a nobility in Enirland there is no noUesse. If titles and lands went to all the children there would be the multitudinous noUesm of the Continent. Now, by primogeniture, enough is retained for a small noljility, but all the younger sons must 236 KEI.ATION OF LITERATURE TO LIKE go into the world and make a living. The three respectable professions no longer offer suificicnt inducement, and tliey crowd more and more into trade. Thus the middle class is constantly recruited from the upper. Besides, the upper is all the time recruited from the wealtliy middle ; the union of aristocracy and plutocracy may be said to be complete. But merit makes its way continually from even the lower ranks upward, in the professions, in the army, the law, the church, in letters, in trade, and, what Mr. Escott does not mention, in the reformed civil service, newly opened to the humblest lad in the land. Thus there is con- stant movement up and down in social Eng- land, approaching, except in the traditional nobility, the freedom of movement in our own country. This is all wholesome and sound. Even the nobility itself, driven by ennui, or a loss of former political control, or by the ne- cessity of more money to support inherited es- tates, goes into business, into journalism, writes books, enters the professions. What are the symptoms of decay in Eng- land ? Unless the accumulation of wealth is a symptom of decay, I do not see many. I look at the people themselves. It seems to me that never in their history were they more ENGLA>^D 237 full of vigor. See what travellers, explorers, adventurers they are. See what sportsmen, in ever}'' part of the globe, how much they endure, and how hale and jolly they are — women as well as men. The race, certainly, has not decayed. And look at letters. It may be said that this is not the age of pure litera- ture — and I'm sure I hope the English pat- ent for producing machine novels will not be infrintjed — but the English languao:e was never before written so vigorously, so clearly, and to such purpose. And this is shown even in the excessive refinement and elaboration of trifles, the minutia of reflection, the keen- ness of analj'sis, the unrelenting pursuit of every social topic into subtleties untouched by the older essayists. And there is still more vigor, without affectation, in scientific inves- tigation, in the daily conquests made in the realm of social economy, the best methods of living and ffettin^c tlie most out of life. Art also keeps pace with luxury, and shows abun- dant life and promise for the future. I believe, from these and otiier consider- ations, that this vigorous people will find a way out of its present eml)arrassmont, and a way out without retreating. For myself, I like to see the English sort of civilization 238 RELATION OK LITEKATL'KK TO LIFE spreading over the world rather than the Russian or the French. I hope Enghind will hang on to the East, and not give it over to tlie havoc of squabbling tribes, with a dozen religions and five hundred dialects, or to the military despotism of an empire whose moral- ity is only matched by the superstition of its religion. The relations of England and the United States are naturally of the first interest to us. Our love and our hatred have always been that of true relatives. For three-quarters of a century our amour propre was constantly kept raw by the most supercilious patronage. Dur- ing the past decade, when the quality of Eng- land's regard has become more and more a matter of indifi'erence to us, we have been the subject of a more intelligent curiosity, of increased respect, accompanied with a sin- cere desire to understand us. In the diplo- matic scale "Washington still ranks below the Sublime Porte, but this anomaly is due to tradition, and does not represent England's real estimate of the status of the republic. There is, and must be, a good deal of selfish- ness mingled in our friendship — patriotism itself being a form of selfishness — but our ideas of civilization so nearly coincide, and ENGLAND 239 we have so many common aspirations for humanity that we must draw nearer together, notwithstanding old grudges and present dif- ferences in social structure. Our intercourse is likely to be closer, our business relations will become more inseparable. I can conceive of nothing so lamentable for the progress of the world as a C]uarrel between these two English-speaking people. But, in one respect, we are likely to diverge. I refer to literature ; in that, assimilation is neither probable nor desirable. We were brought up on the literature of England ; our first efiforts were imitations of it ; we were criticised — we criticised ourselves — on its standards. "We compared every new aspirant in letters to some English writer. We were patted on the buck if we resembled the Eng- lish models; we were stared at or sneered at if we did not. When we began to produce some- thing that was the product of our own soil and our own social conditions, it was still judged by the old standards, or, if it was too original for that, it was only accepted because it was curious or l)izarre, interesting for its oddity. The criticism that wo received for our best was evidently founded on such indillerence or toleration that it was galling. At first we 240 RELATION OF LITKKATURE TO LIFE were surprised ; then we were grieved ; then we were indignant. We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anvthing the English critics say of us. We have recovered our balance. We know that since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to KiiickerhocJcer' s New York ; that not in this century has any English writer equalled the wit and satire of the Blglow Papers. We used to be irritated at what Ave called the snobbishness of English critics of a certain school ; we are so no longer, for we see that its criticism is only the result of ignorance — simply of inability to understand. And we the more readily pardon it, because of the inability we have to understand Eng- lish conditions, and the Enghsh dialect, which has more and more diverged from the lan- guage as it was at the time of the separation. We have so constantly read English litera- ture, and kept ourselves so well informed of their social life, as it is exhibited in novels and essays, that we are not so much in the dark with regard to them as they are with regard to us ; still we are more and more bothered by the insular dialect. I do not propose to criticise it ; it is our misfortune, e::gland 241 perhaps our fault, that we do not understand it ; and I only refer to it to say that we should not be too hard on the Saturday Review critic when he is complaining of the American dialect in the English that Mr. Howells writes. How can the Englishman be expected to come into sympathy with the fiction that has New England for its subject — from Hawthorne's down to that of our present novelists — when he is ignorant of the whole background on which it is cast ; when all the social conditions are an enigma to him ; when, if he has, his- torically, some conception of Puritan society, he cannot have a glimmer of comprehension of the subtle modifications and changes it has undergone in a century ? When he visits America and sees it, it is a puzzle to him. How, then, can he be expected to comprehend it when it is depicted to the life in books ? No, we must expect a continual divergence in our literatures. And it is best that there should be. There can be no development of a nation's literature worth anything that is not on its own lines, out of its own native materials. We must not expect that the Eng- lish will understand that literature that ex- presses our national life, character, conditions, any better tli.m they un