← catalogue

Inquiries and Opinions

by Brander Matthews · English · Gutenberg #16746 · 380,420 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Inquiries and Opinions
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Inquiries and Opinions

Author: Brander Matthews


        
Release date: September 25, 2005 [eBook #16746]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16746

Credits: Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, Janet Blenkinship
        and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
        https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INQUIRIES AND OPINIONS ***




Produced by Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, Janet Blenkinship
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net











  INQUIRIES AND OPINIONS





  Copyright, 1907, by
  BRANDER MATTHEWS

  _Published September, 1907_






  TO MY FRIEND AND FELLOW CRAFTSMAN
  HENRY ARTHUR JONES





        CONTENTS


                                                         PAGE

     I _Literature in the New Century_                     1

    II _The Supreme Leaders_                              27

   III _An Apology for Technic_                           49

    IV _Old Friends with New Faces_                       73

     V _Invention and Imagination_                        95

    VI _Poe and the Detective-story_                     111

   VII _Mark Twain_                                      137

  VIII _A Note on Maupassant_                            167

    IX _The Modern Novel and the Modern Play_            179

     X _The Literary Merit of our Latter-day Drama_      205

    XI _Ibsen the Playwright_                            227

   XII _The Art of the Stage-manager_                    281






LITERATURE IN THE NEW CENTURY

[This paper was read on September 24th, 1904, in the section of
Belles-lettres of the International Congress of the Arts and Sciences,
held at St. Louis.]


There is no disguising the difficulty of any attempt to survey the whole
field of literature as it is disclosed before us now at the opening of a
new century; and there is no denying the danger of any effort to declare
the outlook in the actual present and the prospect in the immediate
future. How is it possible to project our vision, to foresee whither the
current is bearing us, to anticipate the rocks ahead and the shallows
whereon our bark may be beached?

But one reflection is as obvious as it is helpful. The problems of
literature are not often merely I literary; and, in so far as literature
is an honest attempt to express life,--as it always has been at the
moments of highest achievement,--the problems of literature must have an
intimate relation to the problems which confront us insistently in life.
If we turn from the disputations of the schools and look out on the
world, we may discover forces at work in society which are exerting also
a potent influence upon the future of literature.

Now that the century in which we were born and bred is receding swiftly
into the past, we can perceive in the perspective more clearly than ever
before its larger movements and its main endeavor. We are at last
beginning to be able to estimate the heritage it has left us, and to see
for ourselves what our portion is, what our possessions are, and what
our obligations. While it is for us to make the twentieth century, no
doubt, we need to remember that it was the nineteenth century which made
us; and we do not know ourselves if we fail to understand the years in
which we were molded to the work that lies before us. It is for us to
single out the salient characteristics of the nineteenth century. It is
for us to seize the significance of the striking advance in scientific
method, for example, and of the wide-spread acceptance of the scientific
attitude. It is for us, again, to recognize the meaning of that
extension of the democratic movement, which is the most obvious
characteristic of the past sixscore years. It is for us, once more, to
weigh the importance of the intensifying of national spirit and of the
sharpening of racial pride. And, finally, it is for us to take account
also of the growth of what must be called "cosmopolitanism," that
breaking down of the hostile barriers keeping one people apart from the
others, ignorant of them, and often contemptuous.

Here, then, are four legacies from the nineteenth century to the
twentieth:--first, the scientific spirit; second, the spread of
democracy; third, the assertion of nationality; and, fourth, that
stepping across the confines of language and race, for which we have no
more accurate name than "cosmopolitanism."


I

"The scientific spirit," so an acute American critic defined it recently
in an essay on Carlyle,--who was devoid of it and detested it,--"the
scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and verification,
between statement and proof, between appearance and reality. It is
inspired by the impulse of investigation, tempered with distrust and
edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty and skeptical of
seeming. It is enthusiastically patient, nobly literal, candid,
tolerant, hospitable." This is the statement of a man of letters, who
had found in science "a tonic force" stimulating to all the arts.

By the side of this, it may be well to set also the statement of a man
of science. In his address delivered in St. Louis in December, 1903, the
President of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science,--who is also the president of one of the foremost of American
universities,--declared that "the fundamental characteristic of the
scientific method is honesty.... The sole object is to learn the truth
and to be guided by the truth. Absolute accuracy, absolute fidelity,
absolute honesty are the prime conditions of scientific progress." And
then Dr. Remsen went on to make the significant assertion that "the
constant use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress
upon him who uses it. A life spent in accord with scientific teaching
would be of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings
of the highest type of religion."

This "use of the scientific method" is as remote as may be from that
barren adoption of scientific phrases and that sterile application of
scientific formulas, which may be dismissed as an aspect of "science
falsely so called." It is of deeper import also than any mere
utilization by art of the discoveries of science, however helpful this
may be. The painter has been aided by science to perceive more precisely
the effect of the vibrations of light and to analize more sharply the
successive stages of animal movement; and the poet also has found his
profit in the wider knowledge brought to us by later investigations.
Longfellow, for example, drew upon astronomy for the figure with which
he once made plain his moral:

  Were a star quenched on high,
    For ages would its light,
  Still travelling downward from the sky,
    Shine on our mortal sight.

  So, when a great man dies,
    For years beyond our ken
  The light he leaves behind him lies
    Upon the paths of men.

Wordsworth, a hundred years ago, warmly welcomed "the remotest
discoveries of the chemist, the botanist and mineralogist," as "proper
objects of the poet's art," declaring that "if the time should ever come
when what is now called 'science,' thus familiarized to men, shall be
ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will
lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the
being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of
man."

Again, the "use of the scientific method" is not equivalent to the
application in the arts of scientific theories, altho here once more the
man of letters is free to take these for his own and to bend them to his
purpose. Ibsen has found in the doctrine of heredity a modern analog of
the ancient Greek idea of fate; and altho he may not "see life steadily
and see it whole," he has been enabled to invest his somber 'Ghosts'
with not a little of the inerrable inevitability which we feel to be so
appalling in the master work of Sophocles. Criticism, no less than
creation, has been stimulated by scientific hypothesis; and for one
thing, the conception of literary history has been wholly transformed
since the theory of evolution was declared. To M. Brunetière we owe the
application of this doctrine to the development of the drama in his own
language. He has shown us most convincingly how the several literary
forms,--the lyric, the oration, the epic, with its illegitimate
descendant, the modern novel in prose,--may cross-fertilize each other
from time to time, and also how the casual hybrids that result are ever
struggling to revert each to its own species.

Science is thus seen to be stimulating to art; but the "use of the
scientific method" would seem to be more than stimulation only. It leads
the practitioners of the several arts to set up an ideal of
disinterestedness, inspired by a lofty curiosity, which shall scorn
nothing as insignificant, and which is ever eager after knowledge
ascertained for its own sake. As it abhors the abnormal and the
freakish, the superficial and the extravagant, it helps the creative
artist to strive for a more classic directness and simplicity; and it
guides the critic toward passionless proportion and moderation. Altho it
tends toward intellectual freedom, it forces us always to recognize the
reign of law. It establishes the strength of the social bond, and
thereby, for example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is ever
young and ever true, what is known as "neo-romanticism," with its
reckless assertion of individual whim, is anti-social, and therefore
probably immoral.

The "use of the scientific method" will surely strengthen the conscience
of the novelist and of the dramatist; and it will train them to a
sterner veracity in dealing with human character. It will inhibit that
pitiful tendency toward a falsification of the facts of life, which
asserts the reform of a character in the twinkling of an eye just before
the final fall of the curtain. It will lead to a renunciation of the
feeble and summary psychology which permits a man of indurated habits of
weakness or of wickedness to transform himself by a single and sudden
effort of will. And, on the other hand, it may tempt certain students of
life, subtler than their fellow-craftsmen and more inquisitive, to dwell
unduly on the mere machinery of human motive and to aim not at a rich
portrayal of the actions of men and women, but at an arid analysis of
the mechanism of their impulses. More than one novelist of the twentieth
century has already yielded to this tendency. No doubt, this is only the
negative defect accompanying a positive quality,--yet it indicates an
imperfect appreciation of the artist's duty. "In every art," so Taine
reminded us, "it is necessary to linger long over the true in order to
attain the beautiful. The eye, fixing itself on an object, begins by
noting details with an excess of precision and fulness; it is only
later, when the inventory is complete, that the mind, master of its
wealth, rises higher, in order to take or to neglect what suits it."

The attitude of the literary critic will be modified by the constant use
of the scientific method, quite as much as the attitude of the literary
creator. He will seek to relate a work of art, whether it is an epic or
a tragedy, a novel or a play, to its environment, weighing all the
circumstances of its creation. He will strive to estimate it as it is,
of course, but also as a contribution to the evolution of its species
made by a given people at a given period. He will endeavor to keep
himself free from lip-service and from ancestor-worship, holding himself
derelict to his duty if he should fail to admit frankly that in every
masterpiece of the past, however transcendent its merits, there must
needs be much that is temporary admixt with more that is
permanent,--many things which pleased its author's countrymen in his own
time and which do not appeal to us, even tho we can perceive also what
is eternal and universal, even tho we read into every masterpiece much
that the author's contemporaries had not our eyes to perceive. All the
works of Shakspere and of Molière are not of equal value,--and even the
finest of them is not impeccable; and a literary critic who has a
scientific sincerity will not gloss over the minor defects, whatever his
desire to concentrate attention on the nobler qualities by which
Shakspere and Molière achieved their mighty fame. Indeed, the scientific
spirit will make it plain that an unwavering admiration for all the
works of a great writer, unequal as these must be of necessity, is proof
in itself of an obvious inability to perceive wherein lies his real
greatness.

Whatever the service the scientific spirit is likely to render in the
future, we need to be on our guard against the obsession of science
itself. There is danger that an exclusive devotion to science may starve
out all interest in the arts, to the impoverishment of the soul. Already
there are examples of men who hold science to be all-sufficient and who
insist that it has superseded art. Already is it necessary to recall
Lowell's setting off of "art, whose concern is with the ideal and the
potential, from science which is limited by the actual and the
positive." Science bids us go so far and no farther, despite the fact
that man longs to peer beyond the confines. Vistas closed to science are
opened for us by art; and science fails us if we ask too much; for it
can provide no satisfactory explanation of the enigmas of existence.
Above all, it tempts us to a hard and fast acceptance of its own
formulas, an acceptance as deadening to progress as it is false to the
scientific spirit itself. "History warns us," so Huxley declared, "that
it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies, and to end
as superstitions."


II

The growth of the scientific spirit is not more evident in the
nineteenth century than the spread of the democratic movement. Democracy
in its inner essence means not only the slow broadening down of
government until it rests upon the assured foundation of the people as a
whole, it signifies also the final disappearance of the feudal
organization, of the system of caste, of the privileges which are not
founded on justice, of the belief in any superiority conferred by the
accident of birth. It starts with the assertion of the equality of all
men before the law; and it ends with the right of every man to do his
own thinking. Accepting the dignity of human nature, the democratic
spirit, in its finer manifestations, is free from intolerance and rich
in sympathy, rejoicing to learn how the other half lives. It is
increasingly interested in human personality, in spite of the fact that
humanity no longer bulks as big in the universe as it did before
scientific discovery shattered the ancient assumption that the world had
been made for man alone.

Perhaps, indeed, it is the perception of our own insignificance which is
making us cling together more closely and seek to understand each other
at least, even if we must ever fail to grasp the full import of the
cosmic scheme. Whatever the reason, there is no gainsaying the growth of
fellow-feeling and of a curiosity founded on friendly interest,--both of
which are revealed far more abundantly in our later literatures than in
the earlier classics. In the austere masterpieces of the Greek drama,
for example, we may discover a lack of this warmth of sympathy; and we
can not but suspect a certain aloofness, which is akin to callousness.
The cultivated citizens of Athens were supported by slave-labor; but
their great dramatic poets cast little light on the life of the slaves
or on the sad conditions of their servitude. Something of this narrow
chilliness is to be detected also in the literature of the court of
Louis XIV; Corneille and Racine prefer to ignore not only the peasant
but also the burgher; and it is partly because Molière's outlook on life
is broader that the master of comedy appears to us now so much greater
than his tragic contemporaries. Even of late the Latin races have seemed
perhaps a little less susceptible to this appeal than the Teutonic or
the Slavonic, and the impassive contempt of Flaubert and of Maupassant
toward the creatures of their imaginative observation is more
characteristic of the French attitude than the genial compassion of
Daudet. In Hawthorne and in George Eliot there is no aristocratic
remoteness; and Turgenieff and Tolstoi are innocent of haughty
condescension. Everywhere now in the new century can we perceive the
working of the democratic spirit, making literature more clear-sighted,
more tolerant, more pitying.

In his uplifting discussion of democracy, Lowell sought to encourage the
timid souls who dreaded the danger that it might "reduce all mankind to
a dead level of mediocrity" and that it might "lessen the respect due to
eminence whether in station, virtue, or genius;" and he explained that,
in fact, democracy meant a career open to talent, an opportunity equal
to all, and therefore in reality a larger likelihood that genius would
be set free. Here in America we have discovered by more than a century
of experience that democracy levels up and not down; and that it is not
jealous of a commanding personality even in public life, revealing a
swift shrewdness of its own in gaging character, and showing both
respect and regard for the independent leaders strong enough to
withstand what may seem at the moment to be the popular will.

Nor is democracy hostile to original genius, or slow to recognize it.
The people as a whole may throw careless and liberal rewards to the
jesters and to the sycophants who are seeking its favor, as their
forerunners sought to gain the ear of the monarch of old, but the
authors of substantial popularity are never those who abase themselves
or who scheme to cajole. At the beginning of the twentieth century there
were only two writers whose new books appeared simultaneously in half a
dozen different tongues; and what man has ever been so foolish as to
call Ibsen and Tolstoi flatterers of humanity? The sturdy independence
of these masters, their sincerity, their obstinate reiteration each of
his own message,--these are main reasons for the esteem in which they
are held. And in our own language, the two writers of widest renown are
Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, known wherever English is spoken, in
every remote corner of the seven seas, one an American of the Americans
and the other the spokesman of the British Empire. They are not only
conscientious craftsmen, each in his own way, but moralists also and
even preachers; and they go forward in the path they have marked out,
each for himself, with no swervings aside to curry favor or to avoid
unpopularity.

The fear has been exprest freely that the position of literature is made
more precarious by the recent immense increase in the reading public,
deficient in standards of taste and anxious to be amused. It is in the
hope of hitting the fancy of this motley body that there is now a
tumultuous multiplication of books of every degree of merit; and amid
all this din there must be redoubled difficulty of choice. Yet the
selection gets itself made somehow, and not unsatisfactorily. Unworthy
books may have vogue for a while, and even adulation; but their fame is
fleeting. The books which the last generation transmitted to us were,
after all, the books best worth our consideration; and we may be
confident that the books we shall pass along to the next generation will
be as wisely selected. Out of the wasteful overproduction only those
works emerge which have in them something that the world will not
willingly let die.

Those books that survive are always chosen from out the books that have
been popular, and never from those that failed to catch the ear of their
contemporaries. The poet who scorns the men of his own time and who
retires into an ivory tower to inlay rimes for the sole enjoyment of his
fellow mandarins, the poet who writes for posterity, will wait in vain
for his audience. Never has posterity reversed the unfavorable verdict
of an artist's own century. As Cicero said--and Cicero was both an
aristocrat and an artist in letters,--"given time and opportunity, the
recognition of the many is as necessary a test of excellence in an
artist as that of the few." Verse, however exquisite, is almost
valueless if its appeal is merely technical or merely academic, if it
pleases only the sophisticated palate of the dilettant, if it fails to
touch the heart of the plain people. That which vauntingly styles itself
the _écriture artiste_ must reap its reward promptly in praise from the
_précieuses ridicules_ of the hour. It may please those who pretend to
culture without possessing even education; but this aristocratic
affectation has no roots and it is doomed to wither swiftly, as one fad
is ever fading away before another, as Asianism, euphuism, and Gongorism
have withered in the past.

Fictitious reputations may be inflated for a little space; but all the
while the public is slowly making up its mind; and the judgment of the
main body is as trustworthy as it is enduring. 'Robinson Crusoe' and
'Pilgrim's Progress' hold their own generation after generation, altho
the cultivated class did not discover their merits until long after the
plain people had taken them to heart. Cervantes and Shakspere were
widely popular from the start; and appreciative criticism limped lamely
after the approval of the mob. Whatever blunders in belauding, the plain
people may make now and again, in time they come unfailingly to a hearty
appreciation of work that is honest, genuine, and broad in its appeal;
and when once they have laid hold of the real thing they hold fast with
abiding loyalty.


III

As significant as the spread of democracy in the nineteenth century is
the success with which the abstract idea of nationality has exprest
itself in concrete form. Within less than twoscore years Italy has
ceased to be only a geographical expression; and Germany has given
itself boundaries more sharply defined than those claimed for the
fatherland by the martial lyric of a century ago. Hungary has asserted
itself against the Austrians, and Norway against the Swedes; and each by
the stiffening of racial pride has insisted on the recognition of its
national integrity. This is but the accomplishment of an ideal toward
which the western world has been tending since it emerged from the Dark
Ages into the Renascence and since it began to suspect that the Holy
Roman Empire was only the empty shadow of a disestablished realm. In the
long centuries the heptarchy in England had been followed by a monarchy
with London for its capital; and in like manner the seven kingdoms of
Spain had been united under monarchs who dwelt in Madrid. Normandy and
Gascony, Burgundy and Provence had been incorporated finally with the
France of which the chief city was Paris.

Latin had been the tongue of every man who was entitled to claim benefit
of clergy; but slowly the modern languages compacted themselves out of
the warring dialects when race after race came to a consciousness of its
unity and when the speech of a capital was set up at last as the
standard to which all were expected to conform. In Latin Dante discust
the vulgar tongue, tho he wrote the 'Divine Comedy' in his provincial
Tuscan; yet Petrarch, who came after, was afraid that his poems in
Italian were, by that fact, fated to be transitory. Chaucer made choice
of the dialect of London, performing for it the service Dante had
rendered to the speech of the Florentines; yet Bacon and Newton went
back to Latin as the language still common to men of science. Milton
practised his pen in Latin verse, but never hesitated to compose his
epic in English. Latin served Descartes and Spinoza, men of science
again; and it was not until the nineteenth century that the invading
vernaculars finally ousted the language of the learned which had once
been in universal use. And even now Latin is retained by the church
which still styles itself Catholic.

It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of the
learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of the
people, each in its own region best fitted to phrase the feelings and
the aspirations of races dissimilar in their characteristics and in
their ideals. No one tongue could voice the opposite desires of the
northern peoples and of the southern; and we see the several modern
languages revealing by their structure as well as by their vocabularies
the essential qualities of the races that fashioned them, each for its
own use. Indeed, these racial characteristics are so distinct and so
evident to us now that we fancy we can detect them even tho they are
disguised in the language of Rome; and we find significance in the fact
that Seneca, the grandiloquent rhetorician, was by birth a Spaniard, and
that Petronius, the robust realist, was probably born in what is now
France.

The segregation of nationality has been accompanied by an increasing
interest in the several states out of which the nation has made itself,
and sometimes even by an effort to raise the dialects of these provinces
up to the literary standard of the national language. In this there is
no disloyalty to the national ideal,--rather is it to be taken as a
tribute to the nation, since it seeks to call attention again to the
several strands twined in the single bond. In literature this tendency
is reflected in a wider liking for local color and in an intenser relish
for the flavor of the soil. We find Verga painting the violent passions
of the Sicilians, and Reuter depicting the calmer joys of the
Platt-Deutsch. We see Maupassant etching the canny and cautious Normans,
while Daudet brushed in broadly the expansive exuberance of the
Provençals. We delight alike in the Wessex-folk of Mr. Hardy and in the
humorous Scots of Mr. Barrie. We extend an equal welcome to the patient
figures of New England spinsterhood as drawn by Miss Jewett and Miss
Wilkins, and to the virile Westerners set boldly on their feet by Mr.
Wister and Mr. Garland.

What we wish to have explored for us are not only the nooks and corners
of our own nation; those of other races appeal also to our sympathetic
curiosity. These inquiries help us to understand the larger peoples, of
whom the smaller communities are constituent elements. They serve to
sharpen our insight into the differences which divide one race from
another; and the contrast of Daudet and Maupassant on the one hand with
Mark Twain and Kipling on the other brings out the width of the gap that
yawns between the Latins (with their solidarity of the family and their
reliance on the social instinct) and the Teutons (with their energetic
independence and their aggressive individuality). With increase of
knowledge there is less likelihood of mutual misunderstandings; and here
literature performs a most useful service to the cause of civilization.
As Tennyson once said: "It is the authors, more than the diplomats, who
make nations love one another." Fortunately, no high tariff can keep out
the masterpieces of foreign literature which freely cross the frontier,
bearing messages of good-will and broadening our understanding of our
fellowmen.


IV

The deeper interest in the expression of national qualities and in the
representation of provincial peculiarities is to-day accompanied by an
increasing cosmopolitanism which seems to be casting down the barriers
of race and of language. More than fourscore years ago, Goethe said that
even then national literature was "rather an unmeaning term" as "the
epoch of world-literature was at hand." With all his wisdom Goethe
failed to perceive that cosmopolitanism is a sorry thing when it is not
the final expression of patriotism. An artist without a country and with
no roots in the soil of his nativity is not likely to bring forth flower
and fruit. As an American critic aptly put it, "a true cosmopolitan is
at home,--even in his own country." A Russian novelist set forth the
same thought; and it was the wisest character in Turgenieff's 'Dimitri
Roudine' who asserted that the great misfortune of the hero was his
ignorance of his native land:--"Russia can get along without any of us,
but we cannot do without Russia. Wo betide him who does not understand
her, and still more him who really forgets the manners and the ideas of
his fatherland! Cosmopolitanism is an absurdity and a zero,--less than a
zero; outside of nationality, there is no art, no truth, no life
possible."

Perhaps it may be feasible to attempt a reconciliation of Turgenieff and
Goethe, by pointing out that the cosmopolitanism of this growing century
is revealed mainly in a similarity of the external forms of literature,
while it is the national spirit which supplies the essential inspiration
that gives life. For example, it is a fact that the 'Demi-monde' of
Dumas, the 'Pillars of Society' of Ibsen, the 'Magda' of Sudermann, the
'Grand Galeoto' of Echegaray, the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray' of Pinero, the
'Gioconda' of d'Annunzio are all of them cast in the same dramatic mold;
but it is also a fact that the metal of which each is made was smelted
in the native land of its author. Similar as they are in structure, in
their artistic formula, they are radically dissimilar in their essence,
in the motives that move the characters and in their outlook on life;
and this dissimilarity is due not alone to the individuality of the
several authors,--it is to be credited chiefly to the nationality of
each.

Of course, international borrowings have always been profitable to the
arts,--not merely the taking over of raw material, but the more
stimulating absorption of methods and processes and even of artistic
ideals. The Sicilian Gorgias had for a pupil the Attic Isocrates; and
the style of the Athenian was imitated by the Roman Cicero, thus helping
to sustain the standard of oratory in every modern language. The 'Matron
of Ephesus' of Petronius was the great-grandmother of the 'Yvette' of
Maupassant; and the dialogs of Herondas and of Theocritus serve as
models for many a vignette of modern life. The 'Golden Ass' went before
'Gil Blas' and made a path for him; and 'Gil Blas' pointed the way for
'Huckleberry Finn.' It is easy to detect the influence of Richardson on
Rousseau, of Rousseau on George Sand, of George Sand on Turgenieff, of
Turgenieff on Mr. Henry James, of Mr. James on M. Paul Bourget, of M.
Bourget on Signor d'Annunzio; and yet there is no denying that
Richardson is radically English, that Turgenieff is thoroly Russian, and
that d'Annunzio is unquestionably Italian.

In like manner we may recognize the striking similarity--but only in so
far as the external form is concerned--discoverable in those
short-stories which are as abundant as they are important in every
modern literature; and yet much of our delight in these brief studies
from life is due to the pungency of their local flavor, whether they
were written by Kjelland or by Sacher-Masoch, by Auerbach or by Daudet,
by Barrie or by Bret Harte. "All can grow the flower now, for all have
got the seed"; but the blossoms are rich with the strength of the soil
in which each of them is rooted.

This racial individuality is our immediate hope; it is our safeguard
against mere craftsmanship, against dilettant dexterity, against
cleverness for its own sake, against the danger that our cosmopolitanism
may degenerate into Alexandrianism and that our century may come to be
like the age of the Antonines, when a "cloud of critics, of compilers,
of commentators darkened the face of learning," so Gibbon tells us, and
"the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste." It
is the spirit of nationality which will help to supply needful idealism.
It will allow a man of letters to frequent the past without becoming
archaic and to travel abroad without becoming exotic, because it will
supply him always with a good reason for remaining a citizen of his own
country.

     (1904.)




THE SUPREME LEADERS


In the fading annals of French Romanticism it is recorded that at the
first performance of an early play of the elder Dumas at the Odéon, a
band of enthusiasts, as misguided as they were youthful, were so
completely carried away that they formed a ring and danced in derision
around a bust of Racine which adorned that theater, declaring
boisterously that the elder dramatist was disgraced and disestablished:
_'Enfoncé Racine!'_

This puerile exploit took place not fourscore years ago, and already has
this play of Dumas disappeared beneath the wave of oblivion, its very
name being recalled only by special students of the history of the
French stage, while the Comédie-Française continues, year in and year
out, to act the best of Racine's tragedies, now nearly two centuries and
a half since they were first performed.

Again, in the records of the British theater of the eighteenth century,
we find mention of a countryman of John Home, who attended the first
performance of the reverend author's 'Douglas.' The play so worked upon
the feelings of this perfervid Scot that he was forced to cry out
triumphantly: "Whaur's your Wully Shakspere noo?"

And yet this Scottish masterpiece failed to establish itself finally on
the stage; and it has long since past out of men's memories, leaving
behind it only a quotation or two and a speech for boys to spout. So in
every age the disinterested observer can take note of the rise and fall
of some unlucky author or artist, painter or poet, widely and loudly
proclaimed as a genius, only to be soon forgotten, often in his own
generation. He may have soared aloft for a brief moment with starry
scintillations, like a rocket, only at last to come down like the stick,
empty and unnoticed.

The echoes of the old battle of the Ancients and Moderns have not died
away, even yet; and there is never a time when some ardent disciple is
not insisting that his immediate master must be admitted as one of the
immortals, and when some shrill youth is not ready to make room for the
new-comer by ousting any number of the consecrated chiefs of art. Now
and again, of course, the claim is allowed; the late arrival is made
welcome in the Pantheon; and there is a new planet on high. But most of
those who are urged for this celestial promotion prove to be mere
shooting-stars at best, vanishing into space before there is opportunity
to examine their spectrum and to compare it with that of the older orbs
which have made the sky glorious thru the long centuries.

It is only by comparison with these fixt stars that we can measure the
light of any new luminary which aspires to their lofty elevation. It is
only by keeping our gaze full upon them that we may hope to come to an
understanding of their immeasurable preëminence. Taine has told us that
"there are four men in the world of art and of literature exalted above
all others, and to such a degree as to seem to belong to another
race--namely, Dante, Shakspere, Beethoven, and Michelangelo. No profound
knowledge, no full possession of all the resources of art, no fertility
of imagination, no originality of intellect, sufficed to secure them
this position, for these they all had. These, moreover, are of secondary
importance; that which elevated them to this rank is their soul."

Here we have four great lights for us to steer by when we are
storm-driven on the changing sea of contemporary opinion and
contemporary prejudice; and by their aid we may hope to win safety in a
harbor of refuge.

Perhaps it is a praiseworthy striving for a permanent standard of value
which accounts for the many attempts to draw up lists of the Hundred
Best Books and of the Hundred Best Pictures. It may be admitted at once
that these lists, however inadequate they must be, and however
unsatisfactory in themselves, may have a humble utility of their own as
a first aid to the ignorant. At least, they may serve to remind a man
lost in a maze amid the clatter and the clutter of our own time, that
after all this century of ours is the heir of the ages, and that it is
for us to profit by the best that the past has bequeathed to us. Even
the most expertly selected list could do little more than this.

Nevertheless these attempts, after all, cannot fail to be more or less
misleading, since the best books and the best pictures do not number
exactly a hundred. Nor can there be any assured certainty in the
selection, since no two of those most competent to make the choice would
be likely to agree on more than half of the masterpieces they would
include.

The final and fatal defect in all these lists is that they seek to
single out an arbitrary number of works of the highest distinction,
instead of trying to find out the few men of supreme genius who were
actually the makers of acknowledged masterpieces. It is of no
consequence whether we hold that 'Hamlet' or 'Macbeth' is the most
splendid example of Shakspere's surpassing endowment, or whether we
consider the 'Fourth Symphony' or the 'Seventh' the completest
expression of Beethoven's mastery of music. What it is of consequence
for us to recognize and to grasp effectually is that Shakspere and
Beethoven are two of the indisputable chiefs, each in his own sphere.
What it imports us to realize is that there is in every art a little
group of supreme leaders; they may be two or three only; they may be
half a dozen, or, at the most, half a score; but they stand in the
forefront, and their supremacy is inexpugnable for all time.

Every one recognizes to-day that "certain poets like Dante and
Shakspere, certain composers like Beethoven and Mozart, hold the
foremost place in their art." So Taine insisted, adding that this
foremost place is also "accorded to Goethe, among the writers of our
century; to Rembrandt among the Dutch painters; to Titian among the
Venetians." And then Taine asserted also that "three artists of the
Italian renascence, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, rise,
by unanimous consent, far above all others."

No doubt this list of supreme leaders in the arts is unduly scanted; but
there is wisdom in Taine's parsimony of praise. The great names he has
here selected for signal eulogy are those whose appeal is universal and
whose fame far transcends the boundaries of any single race.

It may have been from Sainte-Beuve that Taine inherited his catholicity
of taste and his elevation of judgment; and it was due to the influence
of Sainte-Beuve also that Matthew Arnold attained to a breadth of vision
denied to most other British critics. Arnold invited us to "conceive of
the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual and
spiritual purposes, one great confederation whose members have a due
knowledge both of the past out of which they all proceed, and of one
another." He went on to suggest that for any artist or poet "to be
recognized by the verdict of such a confederation as a master is indeed
glory, a glory which it would be difficult to rate too highly. For what
could be more beneficent, more salutary? The world is forwarded by
having its attention fixt on the best things; and here is a tribunal,
free from all suspicion of national and provincial partiality, putting a
stamp on the best things and recommending them for general honor and
acceptance." Then he added the shrewd suggestion that there would be
direct advantage to each race in seeing which of its own great men had
been promoted to the little group of supreme leaders, since "a nation is
furthered by recognition of its real gifts and successes; it is
encouraged to develop them further."

Who, then, are the supreme leaders in the several departments of human
endeavor? By common consent of mankind who are the supreme soldiers, the
supreme painters, the supreme poets? To attempt to name them is as
difficult as it is dangerous; but the effort itself may be profitable,
even if the ultimate result is not wholly satisfactory. To undertake
this is not to revive the puerile debate as to whether Washington or
Napoleon was the greater man; rather it is a frank admission that both
were preëminent, with the further inquiry as to those others who may
have achieved a supremacy commensurate with theirs. To seek out these
indisputable masters is not to imitate the vain desire of the pedagog to
give marks to the several geniuses, and to grade the greatest of men as
if they were school-boys. There is no pedantry in striving to ascertain
the list of the lonely few whom the assembled nations are all willing
now to greet as the assured masters of the several arts.

The selection made by a single race or by a single century is not likely
to be widely or permanently acceptable. Long years ago the Italians were
wont to speak of the Four Poets, _quattro poete_, meaning thereby Dante,
Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso. But this was a choice far too local and
far too narrow. Of these four Italian poets perhaps only the severe
Florentine has won his way outside of the boundaries of the language he
did so much to ennoble,--altho it may be admitted that the gentle
Petrarch had also for a century a wide influence on the lyrists of other
tongues.

Lowell had a more cosmopolitan outlook on literature, when he discust
'The Five Indispensable Authors'--Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakspere,
and Goethe. "Their universal and perennial application to our
consciousness and our experience accounts for their permanence and
insures their immortality." We may admit that all five of the authors
designated by Lowell are truly indispensable, just as we must accept
also the incomparable position of the four leaders in the several arts
whom Taine set apart in lonely elevation. But both Taine's list and
Lowell's we feel to be too brief. The French critic had ranged thru
every realm of art to discover finally that the incontestable masters
were four and four only. The American critic, altho he limited himself
to the single art of literature, dealt with it at large, not
distinguishing between the poets and the masters of prose.

If we strike out of Lowell's list the single name of Cervantes, who was
a poet only in a special and arbitrary sense, we shall have left the
names of the four poets whose fame is world-wide--Homer, Dante,
Shakspere, Goethe--the only poets whose supremacy is admitted thruout
our modern civilization.

To these Matthew Arnold insisted on adjoining a fifth, Milton; and we
who speak the same tongue would gladly enroll the blind singer with the
other four. Indeed, we might even hold Milton to be securer in this
place than Goethe, who has not yet been a hundred years in his grave.
But if we ask the verdict of "the whole group of civilized nations,"
which Matthew Arnold himself impaneled as "free from all suspicion of
national and provincial partiality," we are met with the doubt whether
Milton has established himself among the races that inherit the Latin
tradition as securely as Dante has been accepted by the peoples of
Teutonic stock. However high our own appreciation of Milton may be, the
cosmopolitan verdict might not include him among the supreme poets.
Indeed, we may doubt whether Vergil might not have more votes than
Milton, when the struck jury is polled.

Here, perhaps, we may find our profit in applying a test suggested by
Lowell--the test of imitability. "No poet of the first class has ever
left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable," whereas "the
secondary intellect seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates
itself into mannerism." The greater geniuses may have influenced those
who came after them by their thoughts, by what they have contributed to
the sum of human knowledge; but "they have not infected contemporaries
or followers with mannerism." Then Lowell points out that "Dante,
Shakspere, and Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their
expression."

It was in his lecture on Emerson that Matthew Arnold asked: "Who are the
great men of letters?"--meaning thereby the masters of prose. "They are
men like Cicero, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire--writers with, in
the first place, a genius and instinct for style, writers whose prose is
by a kind of native necessity true and sound." The British critic added
that: "It is a curious thing, that quality of style, which marks the
great writer, the born man of letters. It resides in the whole tissue of
his work, and of his work regarded as a composition for literary
purposes." The six masters of prose whom Arnold chose have all of them
this quality of style; and their prose is true and sound. Altho this
list of six was selected by an Englishman, and altho it contains the
names of two Englishmen, it would be acceptable, one may venture to
believe, to the cosmopolitan tribunal, to the heirs of the Latin
tradition and to the peoples of the Teutonic stock. It may lack the
completeness and the finality of the limitation of the supreme poets to
four; but it must be taken as a not unsuccessful attempt to select the
supreme prose-writers.

Arnold excluded Emerson from the class of "great men of letters" because
the American philosopher had not the instinct for style, and because
his prose was not always true and sound. Lowell, in a letter to a
friend, protested against this, suggesting that the Oxford critic was
like Renan in that he was apt to think "the _super_fine as good as the
fine, or better even than that." Yet we may agree with the lecturer in
holding that Emerson was rather to be ranked with Marcus Aurelius as
"the friend of those who would live in the spirit," than to be classed
with Cicero and with Swift, obviously inferior in elevation and in aim,
but both of them born men of letters.

In like manner we must strike out the name of Burke from among the great
orators. A political philosopher he was of keenest insight and of
unfailing eloquence; but he was a poor speaker, and he did not often
rivet the attention of the audiences he addrest. This is why he cannot
establish a claim to inclusion among the supreme orators. Perhaps such a
claim could be made good before the cosmopolitan tribunal by two
speakers only, both belonging far back in the history of our
civilization--Demosthenes and Cicero. Both revealed the needful double
qualifications of the real orator, who shall hold his hearers in the
hollow of his hand while he is speaking, bending them to his will and
swaying them to the course he advocates, while the words he spoke then
must survive now for our delight in their style and in their substance,
a delight independent of the occasion of their utterance.

Others there are, no doubt, who were also possest of this double gift.
The French, for instance, might well urge the claim of Bossuet to be
raised to the same pinnacle; but the English and the Germans have not
yielded to the spell of his majestic periods. Perhaps we here in the
United States should not be extravagant if we set up also a claim for
Daniel Webster; but, however firm our faith, and however solid our
justification, we should be met with a silent stare from the French and
the Italians and the Spaniards, who might fail even to recognize
Webster's name. Demosthenes and Cicero alone would be hailed as the
supreme orators thruout the whole group of civilized nations.

There is close kinship between oratory and history; and as the supreme
orators are only two, one a Greek and the other a Roman, so the supreme
historians, however tightly we may restrict the selection, will include
a Greek, Thucydides, and a Roman, Tacitus. With them, and not inferior,
stands Gibbon; and perhaps these three, Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon,
are all about whom there would be nowhere any dispute. But there is need
to note that Taine held Macaulay to be in no wise inferior to Gibbon.
Again, it may be well to mention also that an American authority insists
on elevating Voltaire also, as the earliest of the modern masters of
history.

So we find that the supreme historians are three at the least, and at
most four or five, just as the supreme poets are four, the supreme
masters of prose are perhaps six, and the supreme orators are only two.
And if we apply the same standards, if we disregard personal and
provincial and national predilections and preferences, if we try to take
the verdict of the cosmopolitan tribunal, we should find that the
supreme dramatists are but three--Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière.
These three only were at once playwrights of contemporary popularity,
masters of dramaturgic craftsmanship, creators of character independent
of their own personality, makers of plays which deal with themes of an
import at once permanent and universal, and poets also, each with his
own philosophy of life.

Others there are who unite some of these qualifications, but none who
can make good a right to be ranked with the mighty three. It is true
that the power of Æschylus is as undeniable as the pathos of Euripides;
but it is always the clear-eyed Sophocles whom Aristotle accepted as the
master of all who strive for distinction in the theater. And
Aristophanes, with all his exuberance of humor and all his lyric
elevation, is, after all, too local and too temporary to be ranked with
the broad-minded Molière. So also Calderon, whom the polemic Schlegel
wisht to promote to an equality with the very greatest of dramatic
poets, is too careless of form and too medieval in spirit. Promotion
must also be denied, for one reason or another, to Ben Jonson, to
Corneille and Racine, to Schiller, to Alfieri, and to Victor Hugo.
However ardently their claims may be urged by their compatriots, the
international tribunal would refuse to admit any one of them to an
equality with Sophocles, Shakspere, and Molière, the greatest of the
Greeks, the greatest of the English, the greatest of the French, the
three races that have excelled in the arts of the theater.

Even tho no German can sustain a claim to supremacy in the drama, it is
to the Germans that the consent of the whole world now awards the
incontestable supremacy in the sister art of music. To the race that
gave birth to Bach and Beethoven, to Mozart and Schubert and Wagner, it
matters little whether the chiefs of music number two only, or whether
they may be so many as four or five. Indeed, it may be admitted at once
that the list would need to be widely extended before it would include
the name of any composer who was not a scion of the Teutonic stock.

There is a certain significance, also, in the probability that the
outsider who could best justify a claim for inclusion would be a Russian
rather than an Italian or a Frenchman. And this estimate, it may be well
to confess, is not personal to the present writer, who has no skill in
music and scant acquaintance with its intricacies; it is the outcome of
a disinterested endeavor to discover the consensus of expert opinion,
free from any racial bias.

But the northern races who excel in the art of the musician seem to be
inferior to the southern in the arts of the painter and of the
sculptor,--more particularly in the latter. The supreme sculptors are
apparently two or three: Phidias and Michelangelo, beyond all question,
and with them probably we ought also to place Donatello. Of Praxiteles
we know too little. Of most other artists in marble and in bronze we
know too much, however fine their occasional achievements,--Verrocchio's
'Colleoni,' for example. They do not sustain themselves at the lofty
level on which Michelangelo moves with certainty and ease--"the greatest
of known artists," so Mr. Lafarge has ventured to acclaim him; and just
as Shakspere is unsurpassed as a poet and also as a playwright, just as
Cicero takes a foremost place as an orator and also as a writer of
prose, so Michelangelo is mighty as a sculptor, as an architect, and as
a painter.

As a painter he has more rivals than as a sculptor. We may limit the
supreme masters of the plastic art to two, or to three at the most; but
the supreme masters of the pictorial art are twice three, at the very
least. By the side of Michelangelo there is Raphael, also an Italian;
and has any one really a right to exclude Titian from their fellowship?
Then there are Velasquez, the Spaniard, and Dürer, the German. And
farther north in the Netherlands, there are Rembrandt and Rubens; and
ought not Vandyke to be allowed to stand aloft with them? Six, at the
lowest count, and eight by the more liberal estimate, are the men who
have gone to the forefront in the art of the brush, half of them from
the north and half of them from the south; and among them all not one
who had English for his native speech, and not one whose mother-tongue
was French. Indeed, at least one German, Holbein, and two or three more
Italians would be admitted within the sacred enclosure before any
Frenchman or any Englishman could have free entry.

Those who speak French and those who speak English fare no better when
we turn from the arts of peace to the art of war. Every race takes pride
in the renown of the far-sighted and swift-striking commanders who have
led it to victory, and every race is prone to over-estimate the military
genius of its own successful soldiers. Here in the United States we
seek to set up Washington and Grant and Lee as the rivals of the most
gifted warriors that the old world has to show in all the long centuries
of its incessant warfare; and in Great Britain our kin across the sea
are led by local loyalty to do the same disservice to Marlborough and
Wellington. But if we were to search the countless treatises on battles
and campaigns written in every modern language, we should soon be forced
to record that there were five men, and only five, whom the experts of
every race united in singling out. In any list of the ten greatest
soldiers, prepared in any country in the world, these five names would
surely appear, even tho the other names on the several lists might be
those of merely national heroes. The five international masters of war
are Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon.

Napoleon, altho he rose to be Emperor of the French, was a Corsican by
birth and an Italian by descent. The French have ever battled bravely
for military glory; but they have not brought forth one of the supreme
soldiers. The race that speaks English has done its full share of
fighting on land and on sea, but it is on the blue water that it can
give the best account of itself. The supreme leaders in war at sea
worthy to be set by the side of the five supreme leaders in war on land
are two at the very utmost; and probably an international tribunal
would hold that Nelson alone was to be classed with Alexander, Hannibal,
Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon. But it is the opinion of the foremost
living expert on sea-power that Farragut deserves to be placed not far
distant from Nelson, and that the gap which separates the American
sailor from the British is smaller than that which stretches between
Farragut and the third claimant, whoever he may be and of whatever
nationality.

Turning from the art of war and from the arts of peace to the sciences
whereon all the arts are based, we find that the English and the French
are richly represented. The supreme leaders in science, the men whose
discoveries have been fecundating and fundamental, seem to be at least
seven--Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, Lavoisier, and
Darwin. This list might well be larger; it could not be less; and no
matter how it might be extended it would include these seven. None of
them was merely an inventor of specific devices; all of them were
discoverers of essential principles, and thereby contributors to the
advancement of civilization and to man's mastery of knowledge.

It would be interesting, as it would be instructive, if we could also
enumerate the supreme leaders in religion; but this is a field in which
prejudice is too violent ever to permit a serene view, and there is no
hoping for an international verdict. Nor would it be possible to find
any agreement as to the supreme statesmen, leaders of men and makers of
nations. That Washington could not be excluded from any choice, however
limited, we may rest assured; but who or how many might really deserve
to be set beside him, we can only guess. National pride is as potent as
religious feeling, and there is no likelihood that rival patriotisms can
ever be reconciled.

A comparison of the several lists will serve to show the field in which
each of the great races of the world has revealed its native qualities;
and, as Matthew Arnold suggested, this is most useful, since a nation is
benefitted "by recognition of its real gifts and successes; it is
encouraged to develop them further."

And a consideration also of the character of each of the men whose names
have here been set on high as the supreme leaders of humanity will make
clear once more what is often clouded and obscured--the fact that the
true genius is never an erratic creature, irregular and irresponsible,
clamoring for indulgence and appealing for pity. He is always strong and
sane and wholesome. Clear-eyed and broad-minded, he has self-control and
common-sense.

     (1905.)




AN APOLOGY FOR TECHNIC


If the chief end of all art is delight, there is small blame to be
attached to most of us in that we are glad to take our pleasure
carelessly and to give little thought to the means whereby we have been
moved. Properly enough, the enjoyment of most of us is unthinking; and
in the appreciation of the masterpieces of the several arts few of us
are wont to consider curiously the craftsmanship of the men who wrought
these marvels, their skill of hand, their familiarity with the mechanics
of their art, their consummate knowledge of technic. Our regard is
centered rather on the larger aspects of the masterwork, on its meaning
and on its veracity, on its intellectual elevation, and on its moral
appeal. No doubt this is best, for it is only by its possession of these
nobler qualities that a work of art endures. On the other hand, these
nobler qualities by themselves will not suffice to confer immortality,
unless they are sustained by the devices of the adroit craftsman. As
Massinger asserted long ago:

                      No fair colors
  Can fortify a building faintly joined.

Technic is most successful when its existence is least suspected, and
this is one reason why it is often overlooked and neglected in the very
achievements which owe to its aid their vitality. Perhaps this happens
the more frequently because it is the affectation of many an artist to
hurry his tools out of sight as swiftly as he can, and to sweep up the
chips of his workshop as soon as may be, so that the result of his
effort shall seem almost as if it were the sudden effect of the
inspiration that is believed to visit a genius now and again. He may
have toiled at it unceasingly for months, joying in the labor and
finding keen pleasure in every workmanlike artifice he had used to
attain his end; and yet he refrains from confessing his many struggles
with his rebellious material, wisely preferring to let what he has done
speak for itself, simply and without commentary. But the artists know
that the pathway to achievement is never along the line of least
resistance; and they smile when they hear Mascarille, in Molière's
little comedy, tell the affected young ladies whom he is seeking to
impress that all he did "was done without effort." By this the artists
at once perceive the fellow to be a pretender, who had never
accomplished anything and who never would. They know, as no others can
know, that there is no cable-road to the tops of the twin-peaks of
Parnassus, and that he who would climb to these remote heights must
trudge afoot,--even if he is lucky enough now and again to get a lift on
Pegasus.

What the artists do not care to parade, it is the duty of the
commentators to point out; and an understanding of the technic of any
art, of its possibilities and of its limitations, is as necessary for
the critics as for the creators. Perhaps it is not pedantic to suggest
that the critic who seeks to be of service ought to be able to see in
every masterpiece the result of the combined action of three forces,
without any one of which that work of art could not have come into
being. First, there is the temperament of the artist himself, his native
endowment for the practise of that special art, his gift of
story-telling or of play-making, as the case may be. Second, there is
the training of the artist, his preparation for his work, his slowly
acquired mastery of the processes of his craft, his technical
accomplishments. And, thirdly, there is the man's own character, his
intelligence, and energy, and determination, his moral sense, his
attitude toward life and its insistent problems. Now, of these three
necessary factors--first, his native gift; second, his technic; and,
third, his character--only the second is improvable by taking thought.
The native gift must remain ever what it is, neither more nor less; and
it cannot be enlarged by any effort of will. So also the character,
which is conditioned by much that is beyond a man's control,--which can
be bettered, perhaps, but only as the man himself climbs upward.

Technic, however, can be had for the asking. Any man can acquire it if
he will but pay the price,--the needful study and experiment. Any man
can make himself a master of his craft, if he will but serve his
apprenticeship loyally. The beginner in painting, for example, can go
into the studio of an older practitioner to get grounded in the grammar
of his art, and to learn slowly how to speak its language, not
eloquently at first, but so as to make his meaning clear. In that
workshop he soon awakens to the fact that permanent success is never won
by any audacity of ignorance, and that the most famous artists are those
who acquainted themselves with every artifice of their craft and with
every trick of their trade. They went to school to certain of their
elders to acquire that tradition of technic, past along from hand to
hand, enriched by the devices of one after another of the strong men who
had practised the art, following each in the other's footsteps and
broadening the trail blazed by those who went first.

Every generation is privileged to stand on the shoulders of its
predecessors, and it is taller by what they accomplished. The art of
fiction, for example, is a finer art to-day than it was yesterday; and
so is every other art, even tho the artists themselves are no greater
now than then, and even tho genius is no more frequent than it was
formerly. Ghirlandajo and Marlowe and Cervantes were men of genius; but
their technic is seen to-day to be as primitive as their native talent
is indisputable. We can perceive them doubtfully feeling for a formula,
fumbling in the dark, for want of the model which they themselves were
to aid in establishing and which every novice nowadays has ready to his
hand, even tho he may lack the temperament to profit by what is set
before him.

It is significant that not a few of the masters, in the days when they
were but novices, found so much satisfaction in this mere acquiring of
the secrets of the craft, that they chose to linger in the
apprentice-stage longer than might seem necessary. In their earlier work
they were content modestly to put in practise the technical principles
they had just been acquiring; and for a little while they sought
scarcely more than mere technical adroitness. Consider the firstlings of
Shakspere's art and of Molière's; and observe how they reveal these
prentice playwrights at work, each seeking to display his cleverness
and each satisfied when he had done this. In 'Love's Labor's Lost,'
Shakspere is trying to amuse by inventive wit and youthful gaiety and
ingenuity of device, just as Molière in the 'Étourdi' is enjoying his
own complicating of comic imbroglios, not yet having anything of
importance to say on the stage, but practising against the time when he
should want to say something. Neither in the English comedy nor in the
French is there any purpose other than the desire to please by the
devices of the theater.

There is so little hint of a deeper meaning in either 'Love's Labor's
Lost' or the 'Étourdi,' of a moral, so to speak, of a message of
ulterior significance, that, if Shakspere and Molière had died after
these plays were produced, nobody would ever have suspected that either
youthful playwright had it in him to develop into a philosophic observer
of the deeper realities of life. Of course, neither of them was long
satisfied with this dexterous display of technical adroitness alone;
and, as they grew in years, we find their plays getting richer in
meaning and dealing more seriously with the larger problems of
existence. But technic was never despised; and, if it was not always the
chief end of the playwright, it remained the means whereby he was
enabled to erect the solid framework of masterpieces like 'Othello' and
'Tartuffe,' in which the craftsmanship is overshadowed by the nobler
qualities, no doubt, but in which the stark technical skill is really
more abundant than in the earlier and emptier plays.

As Shakspere and Molière matured mentally and morally, so also did they
grow in facility of accomplishment, in the ease with which they could
handle the ever-present problems of exposition and construction. The
student of dramaturgy notes with increasing delight the ingenuity with
which the first appearance of Tartuffe is prepared; and he finds an
almost equal joy in the bolder beginnings of 'Romeo and Juliet' and of
'Hamlet,' where the difficulty was less, it may be, but where the
interest of the craftsman in the excellence of his device is quite as
obvious. Shakspere was the greatest of dramatic poets and Molière was
the greatest of comic dramatists; and both of them were good workmen,
taking an honest pride in the neatness with which they finished a job.
In his later years, Shakspere seems to have relaxed a little his
interest in technic, and the value of his work is at once seen to
suffer. Altho his mind is as powerful as ever up to the last years of
his stay in London, 'Cymbeline' and 'A Winter's Tale' are far inferior
to 'Hamlet' and to 'Macbeth'; and the cause is apparently little more
than a carelessness of technic, an unwillingness to take the trouble
needful to master his material and to present it in due proportion.

If Shakspere and Molière ever meet in that other world which was so much
in the mind of the one and so little in the thought of the other, and if
they chance to fall into chat--Shakspere spoke French, pretty certainly,
even if Molière knew no English--we may rest assured that they will not
surprize each other by idle questions about the meaning of this play or
that, its moral purpose or its symbolic significance. We may be
confident that their talk would turn promptly to technic; and, perhaps,
Shakspere would congratulate Molière on his advantage in coming later,
when the half-open, semi-medieval playhouse, with which the English
dramatist had perforce to be contented, had been superseded by a more
modern theater, roofed and lighted and set with scenery. And, in his
turn, Molière might be curious to inquire how the English playwright was
able to produce upon the spectators the effect of a change of scene
when, in fact, there was no actual scenery to change.

To suggest that these two masters of the dramatic art would probably
confine their conversation to matters of mere technic is not so vain or
adventurous as it may seem, since technic is the one theme the
dramatists from Lope de Vega to Legouvé have always chosen to discuss,
whenever they have been emboldened to talk about their art in public.
Lope's 'New Art of Writing Plays' is in verse, and it has taken for its
remote model Horace's 'Art of Poetry,' but none the less does it contain
the practical counsels of a practical playwright, advising his
fellow-craftsmen how best to succeed on the stage; and it is just as
technical in its precepts as Mr. Pinero's acute lecture on the probable
success of Robert Louis Stevenson as a dramatist, if only the Scots
romancer had taken the trouble to learn the rules of the game, as it is
played in the theater of to-day.

In thus centering the interest of their public utterance upon the
necessities of craftsmanship, the dramatists are in accord with the
customs of the practitioners of all the other arts. Consider the
criticism of poetry by the poets themselves, for example,--how narrowly
it is limited to questions of vocabulary or of versification, whether
the poet-critic is Dryden or Wordsworth or Poe. Consider the criticism
of painting by the painters themselves,--how frankly it is concerned
with the processes of the art, whether the painter-critic is Fromentin
or La Farge. It is La Farge who records that Rembrandt was a "workman
following his trade of painting to live by it," and who reminds us that
"these very great artists"--Rembrandt and his fellows--"are primarily
workmen, without any pose or assumption of doing more than a daily
task." What they did was all in the day's work. One of the most
distinguished of American sculptors was once standing before a
photograph of the Panathenaic frieze, and a critical friend by his side
exprest a wonder as to "what those old Greeks were thinking of when they
did work like that?" The professional artist smiled and responded: "I
guess that, like the rest of us, they were thinking how they could pull
it off!"

The method, the tricks of the trade, the ingenious devices of one kind
or another, these are what artists of all sorts like to discuss with
fellow-practitioners of the art; and it is by this interchange of
experiences that the means of expression are multiplied. The inner
meaning of what they have wrought, its message, its morality, its
subtler spirit, the artists do not care ever to talk over, even with
each other. This is intangible and incommunicable; and it is too
personal, too intimate, to be vulgarized in words; it is to be felt
rather than phrased. Above all, it must speak for itself, for it is
there because it had to be there, and not because the artist put it
there deliberately. If he has not builded better than he knew, then is
the result of his labor limited and narrow. A story is told of
Thorwaldsen in his old age, when a friend found him disconsolate before
a finished statue and inquired if he was despondent because he had not
been able to realize his ideal. And the sculptor responded that, on the
contrary, he had realized his ideal, and therefore he was downcast; for
the first time his hand had been able to accomplish all that his mind
had planned.

"Neither in life, nor even in literature and in art, can we always do
what we intend to do," M. Brunetière once asserted, adding that, "in
compensation, we have not always intended to do all that we have
actually accomplished." Often no one is more astonished than the artist
himself--be he poet or painter--at what the critics sometimes find in
his work; and he is frankly unaware of any intention on his part to do
all the fine things which he is told that he has done. But the critics
may be justified, despite the disclaimer of the artist; and the fine
things are, of a truth, to be discovered even tho they get into the work
by accident, as it were, and even tho they may be the result of an
intention which was either unconscious on the artist's part, or
subconscious.

We cannot help feeling the sublimity so obvious in the frescos of the
Sistine Chapel; and yet it is equally obvious--if we care to look for
the evidence--that while he was at this work the mind of Michelangelo
was absorbed by the conquest of a host of technical difficulties. Of
course, it would be going too far to assert that the great artist did
not actually intend the sublimity that we admire and wonder at; but we
may be sure that this sublimity is not something deliberately planned
and achieved by him. It is there because the theme evoked it, and
because Michelangelo was himself a man of the noblest character and of
the loftiest imagination. It was inherent and latent in him, and it had
to come out, inevitably and mightily, when he was engaged on a piece of
work that tasked all his powers.

An ideal, a significance, a moral, that has to be inserted into a work
of art and that might have been omitted, is not likely to be firmly
joined; and it is liable to fall apart sooner or later. Morality, for
example, is not something to be put in or left out, at the caprice of
the creator; it is, as Mr. Henry James once called it, "a part of the
essential richness of inspiration." Therefore the artist need not give
thought to it. If his own soul is as clean as may be, and if his vision
is clear, the moral of his work may be left to take care of itself.
Nearly always when an artist has been over-anxious to charge his work
with a moral message, written so plain that all who run may read, he has
failed to attain either of his ends, the ethical or the esthetic. There
is a purpose plainly exprest in Miss Edgeworth's 'Moral Tales' and in
her 'Parent's Assistant'; and the result is that healthy girls and
wholesome boys are revolted. There was no moral intent in her
ever-delightful 'Castle Rackrent'; and yet it has an ethical
significance which few of its readers can have failed to feel.

Perhaps 'Castle Rackrent' is the finest of Miss Edgeworth's stories,
because it is the only one in which she had set herself a technical
problem of exceeding difficulty. She chose to use the faithful old
retainer to tell the tale of the family's downfall in consequence of its
weakness, its violence, and its vice. Thady has never a word of blame
for any son of the house he has served generation after generation.
Indeed, he is forever praising his succession of masters; but so
artfully does the author utilize the device of transparency that the
reader is put in possession of the damning facts, one by one, and is
soon able to see the truth of the matter which Thady himself has no
thought of revealing,--which, indeed, he would probably deny indignantly
if it was suggested by any one else.

The chief reason why the novel is still held to be inferior to the drama
is to be found in its looseness of form. The novel is not strictly
limited, as the play must be by the practical necessities of the
theater; and the practitioners of the art of fiction permit themselves a
license of structure which cannot but be enfeebling to the artists
themselves. Few of the novelists have ever gone about a whole winter
with a knot in their foreheads, such as Hawthorne carried there while he
was thinking out the 'Scarlet Letter.' And only by strenuous grappling
with his obstacles was he able to attain the masterly simplicity of that
Puritan tragedy. A resolute wrestling with difficulty is good not only
for the muscles but also for the soul; and it may be because they know
this, that artists are inclined to go afield in search of difficulties
to be overthrown, that they set themselves problems, that they accept
limitations. Herein we may see a cause for the long popularity of the
sonnet, with its restricted scheme of rimes. Herein, again, we may see a
reason for the desire of the novelist to try his fate as a dramatist.
"To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws," so Mr. James
once declared, "is always a strong man's highest ideal of success." The
novelist often fails as a dramatist, because he has the gift of the
story-teller only, and not that of the play-maker, but more often still
because the writing of fiction has provided him with no experience in
working beneath any law other than his own caprice.

The modern sculptor, by the mere fact that he may now order marble of
any shape and of any size, finds his work far easier and, therefore,
far less invigorating than it was long ago, when the artist needed to
have an alerter imagination to perceive in a given piece of marble the
beautiful figure he had to cut out of that particular block and no
other. Professor Mahaffy has suggested that the decay of genius may be
traced to the enfeebling facilities of our complex civilization. "In
art," he maintained, "it is often the conventional shackles,--the
necessities of rime and meter, the triangle of a gable, the circular top
of a barrel--which has led the poet, the sculptor, or the painter, to
strike out the most original and perfect products of their art.
Obstacles, if they are extrinsic and not intrinsic, only help to feed
the flame." Professor Butcher has declared that genius "wins its most
signal triumphs from the very limitations within which it works." And
this is what Gautier meant when he declared that the greater the
difficulty the more beautiful the work; or, as Mr. Austin Dobson has
paraphrased it:

  Yes; when the ways oppose--
    When the hard means rebel,
  Fairer the work outgrows,--
    More potent far the spell.

Not only has a useful addition to the accepted devices of the craft been
the guerdon of a victorious grapple with a difficulty, but the
successful effort to solve a purely technical problem has often led to
an ennobling enlargement of the original suggestion, with which the
artist might have rested content if he had not been forced to the
struggle. From the history of sculpture and of architecture here in the
United States during the last years of the nineteenth century, it is
easy to select two instances of this enrichment of the fundamental idea,
as the direct consequence of an unexpected obstacle which the artist
refused to consider a stumbling-block, preferring to make it a
stepping-stone to a loftier achievement.

When the city of New York was making ready to welcome the men of the
navy on their return from Manila and Santiago, the Architectural League
offered to design a triumphal arch. The site assigned, in front of
Madison Square, just where Broadway slants across Fifth Avenue, forced
the architect to face a difficulty seemingly unsurmountable. The line of
march was to be along Fifth Avenue, and, therefore, the stately monument
was set astride that street. But the line of approach, for most of the
multitude certain to come to gaze on the temporary addition to civic
beauty, was along Broadway; and the arch built squarely across the
avenue would seem askew to all who first caught sight of it from the
other street. To avoid this unfortunate effect the designer devised a
colonnade, extending north and south, up and down the avenue. Thus he
corrected the apparent slant by emphasizing the fact that it was the
avenue in which the arch was placed and not the more popular highway
that chanced to cut across it. But this colonnade, invented solely to
solve a difficulty, lent itself readily to rich adornment. It became at
once an integral element of the architectural scheme, to which it gave
breadth as well as variety. It was accepted instantly as a welcome
modification of the tradition,--as an amplification not to be wantonly
disregarded by any architect hereafter called upon to design a triumphal
arch.

To this illustration from architecture may be added another from
sculpture, as suggestive and as useful in showing how a conquest of
technical difficulty is likely ever to increase the resources of the
art. The sculptor of the statue of Lincoln, which ennobles a park of
Chicago, was instructed that the work of his hands was to stand upon a
knoll, visible from all sides, stark against the sky, unprotected by any
background of entablature or canopy. The gaunt figure of Lincoln is not
a thing of beauty to be gazed at from all the points of the compass; and
the stern veracity of the artist would not permit him to disguise the
ill-fitting coat and trousers by any arbitrary draperies, mendaciously
cloaking the clothes which were intensely characteristic of the man to
be modeled. To shield the awkwardness of the effigy when seen from the
rear, a chair was placed behind it; and so the sculptor was led to
present Lincoln as the Chief Magistrate of the Republic, arisen from the
chair of state, to address the people from whom he had received his
authority. And thus, at that late day, at the end of the nineteenth
century, Mr. Saint-Gaudens did a new thing; altho there had been
standing statues and seated statues, no sculptor had ever before
designed a figure just rising from his seat.

It is by victories like these over technical difficulties that the arts
advance; and it is in combats like these that the true artist finds his
pleasure. The delight of battle is his, as he returns to the attack,
again and again, until at last he wins the day and comes home laden with
the spoil. The true artist hungers after technic for its own sake, well
knowing the nourishment it affords. He even needlessly puts on fetters
now and again, that he may find sharper zest in his effort. This
ravenous appetite for technic leads many an artist to go outside his own
art in search of unforeseen but fascinating difficulties. The painter is
tempted to stretch his muscles by a tussle with the unknown obstacles of
the sculptor; and the sculptor in his turn contends with the limitations
of the painter. Michelangelo called himself a sculptor and pretended to
be no more; but in time he took up the craft of the architect, of the
painter and of the poet. And this interchange of field in search of new
worlds to conquer seems to be characteristic of the great periods of
artistic activity and achievement. In all such periods, the more
accomplished craftsmen have never wearied of technical experiment to the
constant enrichment of the processes of their art.

It is the uncreative critics, it is never the creative craftsmen, who
dwell on the danger of taking too much interest in technic. The critics
may think that the more attention the artist pays to his manner, the
less he has for his matter, and that he is in peril of sacrificing
content to form. But the craftsmen themselves know better; they know
that no one may surely separate manner and matter, form and content,
Siamese twins often, coming into being at a single birth. Furthermore,
the artist knows that technic is the one quality he can control, every
man for himself, every man improving himself as best he can. His native
gift, his temperament,--this is what it is; and what it is it must be;
and no man can better it by any effort. His character, also, the
personality of the artist, that which gives a large meaning to his
work,--how little can any man control this result of heredity and
environment?

If an artist has anything to say it will out, sooner or later, however
absorbed he may be in finding the best way of saying it. If he has
nothing to say, if he has no message for the heart of man, he may at
least give some pleasure to his contemporaries by the sheer dexterity of
his craftsmanship. There would have been no more meaning in Poe's verse,
if there had been less melody, if the poet had less devotedly studied
the "book of iambs and pentameters." There would have been no larger
significance in the painted epigrams of Gérôme, if that master of line
had cared less for draftsmanship. There would have been no more solid
value in the often amusing plays of Sardou, if he had not delighted in
the ingenuity of his dramaturgical devices. At bottom, Sardou, Gérôme,
and Poe, had little or nothing to say; that is their misfortune, no
doubt; but it is not their fault, for, apparently, each one of them made
the best of his native gift.

In his time Milton was the most careful and conscientious of artists in
verse-making, and so, in his turn, was Pope, whose ideals were
different, but whose skill was no less in its kind. So, again, was
Tennyson untiring in seeking to attain ultimate perfection of phrase,
consciously employing every artifice of alliteration, assonance and
rime. But, if Milton's verse seems to us now noble and lofty, while
Pope's appears to us as rather petty and merely clever, surely this is
because Milton himself was noble and his native endowment lofty, and
because Pope himself was petty and his gift only cleverness; surely it
is not because they were both of them as much interested in the
mechanics of their art as was Tennyson after them.

One of the wittiest critics of our modern civilization, the late
Clarence King, remarked, some ten years ago, that the trouble with
American fiction just then lay in the fact that it had the most
elaborate machinery,--and no boiler. But the fault of our fiction at
that time was to be sought in the absence of steam,--and not in the
machinery itself which stood ready to do its work, to the best advantage
and with the utmost economy of effort, just so soon as the power might
be applied.

     (1904.)




OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES


Thackeray was frequent in praise of Fenimore Cooper, hailing
Leatherstocking as better than any of "Scott's lot"; and this laudation
appeared in the 'Roundabout Papers' long after the British novelist had
paid to the American romancer the sincere flattery of borrowing from the
last words of Natty Bumppo the suggestion, at least, of the last words
of Colonel Newcome. Cooper's backwoodsman, hearing an inaudible
roll-call had responded "Here!" a score of years before Thackeray's old
soldier had become again a child to answer "Adsum!" Not less than a
score of years later an old sailor in one of the stories of Sir Walter
Besant made his final exit from this world with a kindred phrase, "Come
on board, sir!" And then, once more, in one of Mr. Kipling's 'Plain
Tales from the Hills,' we find the last dying speech and confession of a
certain McIntosh who had been a scholar and a gentleman in days gone by,
and who had sunk into irredeemable degradation in India. When his hour
came, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly, "Not guilty, my
Lord!" Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died.

There are criticasters not a few who would denounce Thackeray and Besant
and Mr. Kipling as arrant plagiarists; but critics of a more delicate
perception of the principles of art would rather praise these authors
for the ingenuity with which they had successively made use of Cooper's
original device. Indeed, the more delicate the perceptions of the critic
the less likely would he be to assert positively that all four authors
had not hit on the same effect independently. Thackeray may have taken
it over from Cooper, consciously or unconsciously; Besant may have
borrowed it from either his British or his American predecessor; and
Kipling may have been familiar with it in the pages of Cooper, of
Thackeray, and of Besant, and still have found amusement in giving a new
twist to an old trick. But it is perfectly possible that we have here an
instance of purely accidental similarity, such as keen-eyed readers can
discover abundantly in the highways and byways of literary history.

The theme of M. Paul Bourget's 'André Cornélis' is that of 'Hamlet,' but
in all probability the French novelist was not aware that he was
treading in the footsteps of the English dramatist until his own plot
had taken shape in his mind. A situation in 'Vanity Fair'--that of
Dobbin in love with the widowed Amelia and yet unwilling to break down
her belief in her dead husband's fidelity--was utilized in the
'Henrietta' of Mr. Bronson Howard, who was characteristically scrupulous
in recording on the playbill his indebtedness to Thackeray's novel; and
this same situation at about the same time had been utilized also in a
little one-act play, 'This Picture and That,' by an author who had never
doubted it to be of his own invention (altho he had read 'Vanity Fair'
more than once), and who did not discover how he had exposed himself to
the accusation of plagiarism until he happened to see the 'Henrietta'
acted, and to perceive the full significance of Mr. Howard's memorandum.

It deserves to be noted also that when Colonel Esmond broke his sword
before the unworthy prince whom he had served so long and so loyally, he
was only following an example which had been set by the noble Athos, who
had snapt his weapon asunder before Louis XIV because that inhuman
monarch had taken for himself Mlle. de la Vallière, the young lady
beloved by the Vicomte de Bragelonne, the son of Athos. And the same
effect is to be found also in the opera of 'La Favorite.' The book of
Donizetti's opera bears the names of Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz;
but it is said to have been revised by Scribe. It was derived from a
forgotten play called the 'Comte de Comminges,' written by one
Baculard-D'Arnaud, and this in turn had been taken from a novel written
by the notorious Mme. de Tencin, the callous mother of D'Alembert. The
scene of the sword-breaking is not in the novel or the play; and quite
possibly it may have been introduced into the book of the opera by the
fertile and ingenious Scribe. 'La Favorite' was produced in 1840, when
Thackeray was in Paris preparing the 'Paris Sketch Book.' It was in 1850
that Dumas published the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne'; and it was in 1852
that Thackeray put forth 'Henry Esmond.' But it was back in 1829 that
the commandant Hulot in Balzac's 'Chouans' had broken his sword across
his knee rather than carry out an order that seemed to him unworthy.
This is not quite the same effect that we find in 'La Favorite'; but
none the less Scribe may have been indebted to Balzac for the
suggestion.

There is no denying that the striking situation which Thackeray used
with so much skill in his novel had already been utilized in the
stirring romance of Durras and in the pathetic libretto of Royer, Vaëz,
and Scribe. Did Thackeray borrow it from the romance or from the
libretto? Or did he reinvent it for himself, forgetting that it had
already served? He was in Paris when Donizetti's tuneful music was
first heard; and he was going to the opera as often as he could. He was
fond of Dumas's interminable tales of adventure; and he had a special
liking for Athos. It is in one of the 'Roundabout Papers'--'On a Peal of
Bells'--that he declared his preference. "Of your heroic heroes, I think
our friend, Monseigneur Athos, Comte de la Fère, is my favorite." Is
this a case of conveyance, such as is often carelessly called
plagiarism? or is it a case of unconscious reminiscence? That Dumas knew
what he was doing when he lifted the situation out of 'La Favorite' is
very likely, for it was not his custom to be overscrupulous in taking
what he could make his own. But Thackeray had been careful to credit the
suggestion of one or two of his earlier French sketches to the Parisian
story-tellers he had put under contribution. Besides he was a man of
transparent honesty; and it is therefore highly probable that he had no
consciousness that the scene was not original with him.

In one of his conversations with Eckermann, Goethe declared that Byron
had not known how to meet the charge of levying on the earlier poets.
The German sage asserted that the English bard should have been far
bolder in his own defence, and far franker also. Byron should have said:
"What is there, is mine; and whether I got it from a book or from life,
is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use
of it." And then Goethe added that in one of the Waverley novels Scott
had appropriated a scene from 'Egmont'; "and he had a right to do so;
and because he did it well, he deserves praise." Goethe seemed to think
that the privilege of using again what had been invented by another was
justified only when the later author improved on the earlier, or at
least attained to an equal level. He noted that Scott had taken Mignon
in 'Wilhelm Meister' as the model of Fenella in 'Peveril of the
Peak'--"but whether with equal judgment is another question."

Goethe was wise enough to know that human invention is finite and that
the number of possible effects is limited. He once told Eckermann and
Soret that the Italian playwright, Gozzi, had asserted the existence of
only thirty-six possible tragic situations, and that Schiller had taken
much trouble in trying to prove that there were more, only in the end to
find himself unable to gather even so many as Gozzi had collected. "It
is almost impossible, in the present day," commented Goethe, "to find a
situation which is thoroly new. Only the manner of looking at it can be
new, and the art of treating it and representing it."

Unfortunately, we have not Gozzi's list of the three dozen situations,
nor Schiller's smaller catalog to compare with it. Gérard de
Nerval--that strangest figure of a strange period--considered the matter
anew in the fervid days of French romanticism, and decided that there
were in reality only twenty-four typical situations available for the
theater; but his classification has also failed to come down to us.
However, in the last decade of the nineteenth century an ingenious
Frenchman, M. Georges Polti, accepting the number originally proposed by
Gozzi, examined the plots of several thousand plays, classified the
result of his arduous investigation, and published a little book of two
hundred pages on the '36 Situations Dramatiques.'

Highly interesting as is M. Polti's book, there is not a little
difficulty in grasping the theory upon which he has assorted his immense
collection into exactly three dozen divisions. The logic of his grouping
is not immediately apparent, as it would have been had he taken the
passions, for instance, as the several foundations. His first situation,
for example, is that which we find in one of the earliest of Greek
plays, the 'Suppliants.' M. Polti entitles it 'To Implore,' and he
indicates varying possible subdivisions: (A1) Fugitives imploring
shelter against their enemies, as in the tragedy of Æschylus, the second
act of Shakspere's 'King John,' and repeatedly in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin';
(B1) the ship-wrecked imploring hospitality, as in more than one ancient
drama. But this first situation of his M. Polti finds to be infrequent
on the modern stage, altho often met with in the Greek theater. His
second situation, which we may call 'To Rescue from Imminent Danger,'
has been widely popular alike with the ancients and the moderns, so we
have in subdivision (A) a condemned person rescued by a hero, as in the
myth of Andromeda, the folk-tale of Bluebeard, and the first act of
'Lohengrin'; and in subdivision (B2) a condemned person rescued by a
guest of the house, as in the 'Alcestis' of Euripides.

These two situations, however, are far less effective in evoking the
special pleasure proper to the theater than the nineteenth on M. Polti's
list, "To kill unknowingly one of your own blood." The full force of the
theatric effect of this situation is dependent on the spectators'
complete knowledge of the relationship of slayer and slain, unsuspected
by the victims themselves; and the strength of the situation resides not
in the mere killing, which may indeed be averted at the last moment, but
in the steadily gathering dread which ought to accompany the
preparations for the evil deed. This situation in one or another of its
subdivisions we find in 'Nicholas Nickleby,' as well as in 'OEdipus
the King' and in 'Lady Inger of Ostraat'; in Sophocles it is a son who
murders his unknown father, and in Ibsen it is a mother who murders her
unknown son. It is to be found in the 'Semiramis' of Voltaire, in the
'Merope' of Alfieri, in the 'Ion' of Euripides, and again and again in
Victor Hugo's dramas. M. Polti points out that this single situation is
utilized as the culminating point at the very end of four of Hugo's
plays--the 'Burgraves,' 'Marie Tudor,' 'Lucrèce Borgia' and 'Le Roi
s'amuse' (which supplied the plot for the opera of 'Rigoletto') and he
insists further that one or another subdivision of this situation has
been employed by Hugo at least five times in the single drama of
'Lucrèce Borgia.' If there are still any who hold that Hugo as a
dramatist was "of the race and lineage of Shakspere," they may find
instruction in the fact that this highly artificial situation, which the
superb French lyrist was seemingly unable to leave out of his
arbitrarily complicated plots, was not employed even once by the great
English dramatist.

Probably nothing would have more disagreeably surprized Hugo--who held
himself to be extraordinarily prolific and various, and who indeed had
abundant reason for this belief--than the disclosure of the fact that he
had made use so often of a single situation. And this is evidence, if
any was needed, that the repetition of the same situation by the same
author, or even by a succession of authors down thru the ages, is more
often than not wholly unconscious, and that it is the result, not so
much of any poverty of invention, as of the absolute limitation of the
number of possible situations. The utmost of novelty that any plot-maker
may hope to attain now in the twentieth century is only the result of
his own shuffling of the same pack with which all the plot-makers of the
past have been playing. A new principle he can scarcely hope to invent
for himself; and all that he can safely claim for his most original
sequence of scenes is a patent on the combination.

M. Polti, indeed, has bravely offered to supply ten thousand new plots,
put together by combining and recombining the manifold subdivisions of
his thirty-six situations, some of which he has ascertained to have been
sadly neglected by the playwrights of our time. One may venture to doubt
whether there would be profit in taking advantage of this generous
offer, for if certain situations essayed in the past have not been
popular of late, there is warrant for wondering whether this neglect is
not due to an instinctive feeling on the part of the playwright of the
present that these situations would fail to excite the interest of the
playgoers of our own time and to evoke an emotional response. To insure
the success of a play, it is not enough that the author should combine
an ingenious sequence of striking scenes; he has always the spectators
to reckon with also, their likes and dislikes. The practical playwright
knows only too well, and often by sad experience, that the audience of
to-day does not relish certain situations which run counter to its
prejudices and its predilections, however pleasing these same situations
may have been to audiences of the past. The duty of personal vengeance,
for example--which was at the center of the tragedy-of-blood, ever
delightful to Tudor theatergoers--has been disestablished by the advance
of civilization; and it is therefore no longer acceptable as the
dominant motive of a drama of modern life.

There is not a little significance, however, in another of M. Polti's
suggestions--that perhaps a portion of the beauty and power we discern
in the great plays of the Greeks was directly due to the accepted
limitation of the themes which a tragic writer held himself authorized
to treat. The restriction of the number of available legends forced the
successive dramatists of Athens to handle again, each in his turn, the
dark stories already dealt with by his predecessors. The fateful lives
of OEdipus, for example, and of his family, of Agamemnon, and of his
unhappy offspring--these were shown in action in the orchestra of the
theater of Dionysus again and again, by Æschylus, by Sophocles, by
Euripides, and by many another poet-playwright of that splendid epoch
whose works have not descended to us. Of necessity, the dramatist was
nerved to keenest endeavor by the knowledge that his play had to
withstand a comparison with other plays presenting the same characters
in the same situations, and by the certainty that his personal
contribution would stand out sharply. A similar ordeal was undergone by
the great painters of the Italian Renascence, who tried their hands,
almost all of them, on the Madonna with the Holy Child, on the Descent
from the Cross, and on every other of the score of stock subjects then
in favor for the appropriate decoration of altar and alcove and dome.
There is wisdom in M. Brunetière's assertion that "just as obedience is
the apprenticeship of command, so is imitation the novitiate of
originality."

We may be assured that this narrow limiting of the number of themes
likely to be treated by the painters of Italy and by the playwrights of
Greece at once diminished the demand on them for mere invention and left
them free to put forth the utmost strength of their imagination, so that
the artist could express himself fully and interpret in his own fashion
a subject certain to be handled sooner or later by the chief of his
fellow-crafts-men. And if the descent from the sublime is not too
sudden, attention might here be called to the similar method of
measuring the skill of the individual performer which we perceive in a
later and more scientific development of what was once almost a game of
chance. In "duplicate whist," as it is called, identical hands are
played in turn by a succession of players, who are thus put to the test
sharply, each withstanding comparison with every one of his rivals.

A strange fascination there is in the wish that it might be possible to
apply to the art of fiction--which is often little more than a game of
chance--the comparative method of duplicate whist. It would be possible
for us to weigh the merits of the novelists far more exactly, if we
could only impose upon all of them, once in a way, the treatment of the
same theme, every successive story-teller making it his own for the
moment, assimilating it, handling it as he pleased, in accordance with
his own instincts and his own principles. It would enable us to note how
adroitly the artist in narrative could deal with a topic which he did
not feel to be sympathetic or stimulating; and on the other hand, it
would show us how much this author or that has been sustained by the
signal good fortune which put into his hands once at least the one
subject best suited to his method and his temperament. In time, it
would train the critical reader in the habit of distinguishing between
theme and treatment; and it would encourage him to face the task of
weighing the merits of each of these separately.

Altho we cannot insist that the novelists of the twentieth century shall
undergo this ordeal, we may amuse ourselves by guessing at the result if
the test had been applied to the novelists of the centuries that have
gone before. There is no difficulty in picking out a plot familiar to
all of us now and universal in its appeal--a plot which any story-teller
of any age might have chosen to develop in his own fashion. And perhaps
no story is better fitted for this experiment than the heart-rending
tale which Shakspere took from the Italian and transfigured by his
genius into the immortal tragedy of 'Romeo and Juliet.' Quarrels between
rival families have been frequent enough, and young couples there have
always been who loved wilfully in spite of a heritage of hate. There is
a never-fading enchantment in the story of their struggles, whatever the
country where they lived and died, and whatever their station in
society.

How would this tale have been told in the eighteenth century by the
author of 'Robinson Crusoe'? by the author of 'Clarissa Harlowe'? by the
author of 'Tom Jones'? by the author of 'Tristram Shandy'? How would it
have fared in the nineteenth century if Dickens had been attracted to
it, or Thackeray? How would it be presented now in the twentieth century
if it should be chosen again by Mr. Howells or by Mr. James? We need not
ask what Mark Twain would do with it, because he has shown us in the
Shepardson-Grangerford episode of 'Huckleberry Finn' that he could bring
out its inherent romance, even tho he intrusted the telling to the
humorous realist who was the son of the town drunkard. Nor have we to
inquire how it would have presented itself to Erckmann-Chatrian, because
the Alsatian collaborators made it their own in the somber pages of the
'Rantzau.'

It is not rash to assume that Defoe would have set up rival shopkeepers,
one with a son and the other with a daughter; and he would have
delighted in accumulating the minutest details of the daily life of the
competing tradesmen. The fathers would have been sturdy Englishmen, both
of them, obstinate and pious; and the preaching of a sound morality
would never have been neglected. The narrative would purport to be
truth; and probably it would be credited to the pen of one of the
partisans, setting down in the first person a conscientious record of
what he had seen with his own eyes. But if Richardson had wisht to make
our ancestors weep at the woes of Romeo and the sad trials of Juliet, he
would have abandoned the autobiographic form characteristic of Defoe's
method of approach, for the epistolary, in which the author of 'Pamela'
felt himself more at ease; and he would have spared us none of the
letters of Romeo to Juliet, and of Juliet to Romeo, and of Romeo to
Mercutio, and of Juliet to her nurse. The tenser the tragic gloom, the
more voluminous these letters would become, the more self-analytical,
and at the same time, the more pathetic. If Fielding had selected this
story as the basis of a prose-epic we should have a masterly structure,
perhaps distorted by an undue insistence upon Romeo's youthful intrigue
with Rosaline. And if Sterne had pretended to play with this tragic
tale, he would have given us the married life of Juliet's parents, with
all the humorous whims of old Capulet; and after unending digressions
the author might die himself before his heroine was fairly out of the
arms of the nurse.

To declare how Dickens might have presented the same theme is not
difficult. The tragedy would sink to tortuous melodrama, and there would
be much mystery-mongering, with a careful covering up of dark secrets to
be revealed only at an opportune moment. The large simplicity of the
theme would be frittered away, and every opportunity for deliberate
pathos would be insisted upon. Probably Juliet would die in blank verse,
disguised as prose. But Mercutio, altho he would certainly cease to be a
gentleman, would be a most amusing personality whose whimsical behavior
would seem highly laughable; and the nurse might become another Mrs.
Gamp, with a host of peculiarities realized with riotous humor. And it
is possible also to make a guess at the treatment which would have been
accorded to the pitiful tale if Thackeray had undertaken it. The tragedy
would have softened into a tragi-comedy with a happy ending probably,
the loving couple being reprieved somehow in the final chapters just
before the kindly author put his puppets away, after preaching a last
gentle sermon on the vanity of life. The background would be the British
society of the middle of the nineteenth century; and some Lady Kew,
delightfully clever and selfishly arrogant, might be the chief of one
clan, and some Lord Steyne, bitter and masterful, might head the rival
house. And not improbably the narrator would be Mr. Arthur Pendennis
himself.

Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. March might constitute the chorus, if Mr. Howells
were to lay the scene here in New York, bringing one family from the
West, endowed somehow with a certain elemental largeness of mold, and
importing the other from that New England which could be held
responsible for the sensitiveness of their self-torturing consciences.
There would be no blinking of the minor selfishnesses of humanity; and
neither hero nor heroine would stand forth flawless. Their failures
would be very human; and the author would withhold all comment, leaving
the veracity of the portrayal to speak for itself. There would be
unrolled before the reader the broad panorama of the cosmopolitan
metropolis, infinitely variegated, often harsh in color, but forever
fascinating in the intensity of its vitality. The modern tragedy with
its catastrophe internal rather than external, would be laid before us
in a narrative containing endless miracles of delicate observation and
countless felicities of delicate phrasing.

Like many another distinguished painter, Mr. Henry James has at least
three manners, following one another in the order of time; and there is
no certainty at which stage of his career he might be tempted to the
telling of this tale. Early in his evolution as a novelist, he might
have seized upon it as the promising foundation for an international
complication, altho even then he would have attenuated the more violent
crudities of the original story. Later, he might have been lured into
essaying the analysis of Juliet's sentiments, as she was swayed by her
growing attachment for Romeo, and as she was restrained by her
indurated fidelity to the family tradition. More recently still, Mr.
James might have perceived the possibility of puzzling us by letting us
only dimly surmise what had past behind the closed doors that shut in
the ill-fated lovers, and of leaving us in a maze of uncertainty and a
mist of doubt, peering pitifully, and groping blindly for a clew to
tangled and broken motives.

Perhaps it is idle thus to wonder how any one of a dozen novelists of
distinctive talent would have treated this alluring theme had he taken
it for his own. But of this we may be certain, that any novelist of
individuality who had chosen it would have made it his own, and would
have sent it forth stamped with his own image and superscription.
Indeed, the same tale told by Richardson and by Sterne, altho they were
contemporary sentimentalists, would have had so little in common that
the careless reader might fail to see any similarity whatsoever; and
probably even the pettiest of criticasters would feel no call to bring
an accusation of plagiarism against either of them.

     (1905.)




INVENTION AND IMAGINATION


Probably not a few readers of Prof. Barrett Wendell's suggestive
lectures on the 'Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English
Literature' were surprized to be told that a chief peculiarity of the
greatest of dramatic poets "was a somewhat sluggish avoidance of
needless invention. When anyone else had done a popular thing, Shakspere
was pretty sure to imitate him and to do it better. But he hardly ever
did anything first." In other words, Shakspere was seeking, above all
else, to please the contemporary playgoers; and he was prompt to
undertake any special type of piece they had shown a liking for; so we
can see him borrowing, one after another, the outer form of the
chronicle-play from Marlowe, of the tragedy-of-blood from Kyd, of
romantic-comedy from Greene, and of dramatic-romance from Beaumont and
Fletcher. And in like manner Molière was content to return again and
again to the type of play which he had taken over from the Italian
comedy-of-masks.

This "sluggish avoidance of needless invention," which is
characteristic of Shakspere--and of Molière also, altho in a less
degree--is evidenced not only by their eager adoption of an accepted
type of play, an outer form of approved popularity, it is obvious also
in their plots, wherein we find situations, episodes, incidents drawn
from all sorts of sources. In all the twoscore of Shakspere's plays,
comic and tragic and historic, there are very few, indeed, the stories
of which are wholly of his own making. The invention of Molière is not
quite so sluggish; and there are probably three or four of his plays the
plots of which seem to be more or less his own; but even in building up
these scant exceptions he never hesitated to levy on the material
available in the two hundred volumes of uncatalogued French and Spanish
and Italian plays, set down in the inventory of his goods drawn up at
his death. Apparently Shakspere and Molière accepted in advance Goethe's
theory that much time may be lost in mere invention, whereas, "with a
given material all goes easier and better. Facts and characters being
provided, the poet has only the task of animating the whole. He
preserves his own fulness ... since he has only the trouble of
execution."

It has long been a commonplace of criticism that great poets seldom
invent their myths; and it may in time become a commonplace of
criticism that they seldom invent their forms. But in default of the
lesser invention, they have the larger imagination; and there is no
pedantry in seeking to emphasize the distinction between these two
qualities, often carelessly confused. Invention is external and
imagination is internal. The poets, by the mere fact that they are
poets, possess the power of imagination, which alone gives vitality and
significance to the ready-made plots they are willing to run into
ready-made molds. Invention can do no more than devise; imagination can
interpret. The details of 'Romeo and Juliet' may be more or less
contained in the tale of the Italian novelist; but the inner meaning of
that ideal tragedy of youthful love is seized and set forth only by the
English dramatist.

Imagination in its fullest meaning must be held to include invention;
but invention is only one of the less important elements of imagination;
and it is the element which seems to be more or less negligible when the
other elements are amply developed. La Fontaine, one of the most
individual of French poets, devised only a few--and not the best--of the
delightful fables he related with unfailing felicity. Calderon, who was
the most imaginative of the dramatists of Spain, was perhaps the least
inventive of them all, contentedly availing himself of the situations,
and even of the complete plots of his more fertile fellow-playwrights;
and two of his most characteristic dramas, for example, two in which he
has most adequately exprest himself, the 'Alcalde of Zalamea' and the
'Physician of His Own Honor,' are borrowed almost bodily from his fecund
contemporary Lope de Vega. Racine seems to have found a special pleasure
in treating anew the themes Euripides had already dealt with almost a
score of centuries earlier. Tennyson, to take another example, displayed
not a little of this "sluggish avoidance of needless invention," often
preferring to apply his imagination to the transfiguring of what Malory
or Miss Mitford, Froude or Freeman had made ready for his hand. This
eschewing of overt originality fitted him all the more to be spokesman
of his time, and to voice the ideals of his race and of his day.
Tennyson, so Sir Leslie Stephen told us, "could express what occurred to
everybody in language that could be approached by nobody." Browning, on
the other hand, made his own plots, and on the whole made them none too
well, especially in his dramatic poems, in the structure of which he was
entirely neglectful of the accepted forms of the theater of his own
time--accepted forms of which Shakspere and Molière would have availed
themselves instinctively. It was not Browning, but Whitman--and Whitman
in 1855, when the bard of Manhattan had not yet shown the stuff that
was in him--that Lowell had in mind in the letter where he says "when a
man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously
unoriginal.... The great fellows have always let the stream of their
activity flow quietly."

What is true of the poets is true also of the painters; and Lowell, who
did not lose his Yankee shrewdness in the galleries of Italy, saw this
also and phrased it happily in another of his letters. "The great merit,
it seems to me, of the old painters was that they did not try to be
original." The old painters were following in the footsteps of painters
still older, from whom they received the accepted formulas for
representing the subjects most likely to be ordered by customers. These
accepted formulas representing the Annunciation, for instance, the
Disputing in the Temple, the Crucifixion even, were passed down from one
generation of artists to another; and in each successive generation the
greatest painter was generally he who had no strong desire to be
different from his fellows, and who was quite willing to express himself
in the patterns which were then accepted traditions of his craft. To a
student of the work of the generation that went before, there is often
little or no invention in some of the mightiest masterpieces of
painting, however much imagination there may be. The painters who
wrought these masterpieces were only doing what their immediate
predecessors had been doing, the same thing more or less in the same
way--but with infinitely more insight, power, and inspiration. As
Professor Butcher has put it tersely, "the creative art of genius does
not consist in bringing something out of nothing, but in taking
possession of material that exists, in appropriating it, interpreting it
anew."

In the very ingenious and highly original tale called the 'Murders in
the Rue Morgue,' the earliest of all detective-stories, Poe displayed
his remarkable gift of invention; but he revealed his share of
penetrative imagination far more richly in the simpler story of the
'Fall of the House of Usher.' Wilkie Collins had more invention than
Dickens, as Dickens had more than Thackeray. Indeed, Thackeray, indolent
as he was by temperament, was not infrequently "sluggish in his
avoidance of needless invention." He kept his eye intent on the lurking
inconsistencies of human nature, and did not give his best thought to
the more mechanical element of the novelist's art. Cooper and Dumas were
far more fertile in the invention of situations than was Thackeray; and
even Scott, careless as he was in his easy habit of narration, gave more
of his thought to the constructing of unexpected scenes.

Three centuries ago Sidney asserted that "it is not riming and versing
that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate"; and
to-day we know that it is not skill in plot-making or ingenuity in
devising unforeseen situations which proves the story-teller's
possession of imagination. It is scarcely needful now to repeat that
'Called Back' and 'She'--good enough stories, both of them, each in its
kind--did not demand a larger imaginative effort on the part of their
several authors than was required to write the 'Rise of Silas Lapham' or
'Daisy Miller.' More invention there may be in the late Hugh Conway's
tale and in Mr. Haggard's startling narrative of the phenix-female; but
it is invention that we discover in their strange stories rather than
imagination. Indeed, he is an ill-equipt critic who does not recognize
the fact that it calls for less imagination to put together a sequence
of unexpected happenings such as we enjoy in the fictions of the
neo-romanticists than is needed to vitalize and make significant the
less exciting portrayals of character which we find in the finer
narratives of the true realists.

It was Dr. Johnson who declared, rather ponderously, it is true, but
none the less shrewdly, that "the irregular combinations of fanciful
invention may delight a while by that novelty of which the common
satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden
wonder are soon exhausted and the many can only repose on the stability
of truth." Johnson was speaking here from the point of view of the
reader only; but he might have noted also that the "irregular
combinations of fanciful invention" tend to lose their interest even for
the very writers who have been successful in supplying their readers
with the "pleasures of sudden wonder." For example, in the opening years
of this twentieth century the witty historian of the kingdom of
Zenda--that land of irresponsible adventure which lies seemingly between
the Forest of Arden and the unexplored empire of Weissnichtwo--this
historian, after regaling us with brisk and brilliant chronicles of that
strange country and of the adjacent territory, apparently wearied of
these pleasant inventions of his and wisht to come to a closer grapple
with the realities of life and character. But he soon found that this
task was not so easy as it appeared--not so easy, indeed, as the earlier
writing had been; and 'Quisanté,' for all its cleverness, did not prove
its author's possession of the informing imagination which alone can
give life and meaning to a novel dealing with men and women as they are
in the real world.

Not unlike is the case of the narrator of the manifold and varied
deductions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that British reincarnation of Poe's
M. Dupin. There is danger of unfairness in accepting the authenticity
of words put into a man's mouth by any interviewer, however well
intentioned; and there is, therefore, a possibility that the biographer
of the Brigadier Gerard did not confess his own slight esteem for the
many tales of invented adventure which had given him his wide-spread
popularity. But there is an accent of veracity in the reported assertion
of the author of 'A Duet with an Occasional Chorus' that this is the
book closest to his heart, because it is an honest attempt to deal with
the facts of life as they stare us in the face to-day. And yet 'A Duet'
is unknown to a tithe of the countless readers who have devoured its
writer's other volumes with avidity. And what is more to the point, it
does not--favorite of its author tho it is--it does not deserve to be
known so widely. This is because it is not so good as the other books of
the same writer, not so good in its kind as they are in theirs. The
tales that dealt with Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard and the White
Company are works of invention mainly; and the writer had proved himself
capable of adroit and ingenious invention. 'A Duet,' dealing with the
commonplaces of life, needed not invention, which would indeed almost be
out of place in a humdrum chronicle; it demanded imagination to
interpret the commonplace and to transfigure the humdrum, revealing
their essential significance. And this imagination the author had not
at his call, in spite of his command over the more showy invention.

It may not be without interest to consider how another writer of our
time, not seeking for originality, happened to find it, and how his
acceptance of certain literary patterns, so to call them--patterns
inherited from the remote and shadowy past of our race--led him to an
unforeseen effort of illuminative imagination, which suddenly elevated
what he had done and gave it a significance far wider and far deeper
than the author had foreseen. In the two successive volumes of the
'Jungle Book' (as it was originally published) there are two sets of
stories commingled and yet sharply distinct. One group deals with the
boyhood of Mowgli among the beasts of the forest; and to many of us
these linked tales represent the highest achievement of Mr. Kipling's
genius; they seem as assured of survival as anything which the
nineteenth century has transmitted to the twentieth. The other stories,
the 'White Seal' and the 'Undertakers' and their companions, stand on a
lower level; they are good stories, no doubt,--very good, indeed, one or
two of them. But they have an added importance in that they seem to have
been the needful accompaniment of the Mowgli tales; they may be
considered as the underbrush that at first protected the growth of the
loftier tree.

They are modern examples of the beast-fable, latter-day amplifications
of the simple tale of animals credited with human cunning, such as
primitive man told to his naked children as they huddled around the
embers in the cave, which was then their only home. The beast-fable is a
literary pattern of an undiscoverable antiquity, as alluring to-day as
ever before, since the child in us fortunately never dies. It is a
pattern which Mr. Kipling has handled with a constant affection and with
a large freedom. His earlier animal tales dealt with wild beasts, or at
least with the creatures of the forests and of the ocean beyond the
influence of man and remote from his haunts. Soon he availed himself of
the same pattern to tell stories of animals domesticated and in close
contact with man; and thus he gave us the 'Walking Delegate' and the
'Maltese Cat.' In time betook a further step and applied to the iron
horse of the railroad the method which had enabled him to set before us
the talk of the polo pony and of the blooded trotter; and thus he was
led to compose '007,' in which we see the pattern of the primitive
beast-fable so stretched as to enable us to overhear the intimate
conversation of humanized locomotives, the steeds of steel that puff and
pant in and out of the roundhouse in an American railroad yard. Yet one
more extension of the pattern enabled him to take a final step; after
having given a human soul to separate engines, he proceeded then to
animate the several parts of a single machine. And thus we have 'How the
Ship Found Herself' and the later 'Below the Mill-dam.' But altho these
are successive stages of the primitive beast-fable as it has been
modified in Mr. Kipling's restless hands, there is little flagrant
originality, even at the end, since 'How the Ship Found Herself' is seen
to be only an up-to-date version of one of the earliest fables, the
'Belly and the Members.'

Interesting as it may be to clamber up into the spreading family-tree of
fiction, it is not here that we must seek for the stem from which the
Mowgli stories ultimately flowered. These stories are not directly
derived from the beast-fable, altho his mastery of that literary pattern
may have helped the author to find his final form. They are a
development from one of his own tales, 'In the Rukh,' included at first
in 'Many Inventions,' and now transferred to its proper place at the end
of the book in which the adventures of Mowgli are recorded. In that
first tale, which is now the last, we have set before us the impression
Mowgli and his little brothers, the wolves, made upon two white men in
the Indian service; and incidentally we are permitted to snatch a
glimpse or two of Mowgli's youth in the jungle. But the story is told
from the point of view of these white men; and it is small wonder that
when the author came to look again at what he had written he saw how
rich it was in its possibilities. He was moved to go back to narrate the
whole series of Mowgli's adventures from the very beginning, with Mowgli
himself as the center of the narrative and with little obtrusion of the
white man's civilization.

There was invention in this early story, and imagination also, altho not
so abundant. But as the author brooded over the incidents of Mowgli's
babyhood there in the thick of the forest, in the midst of the beasts,
whose blood-brother he became, suddenly his imagination revealed to him
that the jungle and all its inhabitants must be governed by law, or else
it was a realm of chaos. It is this portrayal of wild life subject to an
immitigable code which gives its sustaining moral to the narrative of
Mowgli's career. As Mr. Kipling said to me once, "When I had found the
Law of the Jungle the rest was easy!" For him it may have been easy,
since his invention is ever fresh and fertile; but the finding of the
Law of the Jungle--that transcended mere invention with all its
multiplied ingenuities--that was a stroke of imagination.

This distinction between imagination and invention may not be as
important as that between imagination and fancy urged by Wordsworth a
century ago; and no doubt there is always danger in any undue
insistence upon catchwords, which are often empty of meaning, and which
are sometimes employed to convey a misleading suggestion. This
distinction has its own importance, however, and it is not empty or
misleading. It needs to be accepted in art as it has been accepted in
science, in which domain a fertile discovery is recognized as possible
only to the imagination, while a specific device is spoken of as an
invention. Newton and Darwin were discoverers by their possession of
imagination; whereas the telegraph and the telephone are to be credited
to humbler inventors, making application of principles already
discovered.

This opening century of ours is an era of extraordinary dexterity and of
wide-spread cleverness, and we need to be put on our guard against the
risk of mistaking the products of our abundant invention for the rarer
gifts of inspiring imagination. It is well for us to be reminded now and
again that the great masters, painters and poets alike, novelists and
dramatists, have often displayed "a sluggish avoidance of needless
invention" at the very minute when their robust imagination was putting
forth its full strength.

     (1904.)




POE AND THE DETECTIVE-STORY


I

In one of those essays which were often as speculative and suggestive as
he claimed, the late John Addington Symonds called attention to three
successive phases of criticism, pointing out that the critics had first
set up as judges, delivering opinions from the bench and never
hesitating to put on the black cap; that then they had changed into
showmen, dwelling chiefly on the beauties of the masterpieces they were
exhibiting; and that finally, and only very recently, they had become
natural historians, studying "each object in relation to its antecedents
and its consequences" and making themselves acquainted "with the
conditions under which the artist grew, the habits of his race, the
opinions of his age, his physiological and psychological peculiarities."
And Symonds might have added that it is only in this latest phase, when
the critics have availed themselves of the methods of the comparative
biologists, that they are concerned with the interesting problems
connected with the origin of the several literary species.

All over the world to-day devoted students are working at the hidden
history of the lyric, for example, and of certain subdivisions of this
species, such as the elegy, as it flowered long ago in Greece and as it
has flourished in most of the literatures of modern Europe. To the
"natural historian" of literary art, these subdivisions of a species are
becoming more and more interesting, as he perceives more clearly how
prone the poets have always been to work in accord with the pattern
popular in their own time and to express themselves freely in the form
they found ready to their hands. The student of the English drama is
delighted when he can seize firmly the rise and fall of the
tragedy-of-blood for one example, of the comedy-of-humors for another,
and of sentimental-comedy for a third; just as the investigator into the
annals of fiction is pleased to be able to trace the transformations of
the pastoral, of the picaresque romance, and of the later short-story.

The beginnings of a species, or of a subspecies, are obscure more often
than not; and they are rarely to be declared with certainty. "Nothing is
more difficult than to discover who have been in literature the first
inventors" of a new form, so M. Jules Lemaître once asserted, adding
that innovations have generally been attempted by writers of no great
value, and not infrequently by those who failed in those first efforts,
unable to profit by their own originality. And it is natural enough that
a good many sighting shots should be wasted on a new target before even
an accomplished marksman could plump his bullet in the bull's-eye. The
historical novel as we know it now must be credited to Scott, who
preluded by the rather feeble 'Waverley,' before attaining the more
boldly planned 'Rob Roy' and 'Guy Mannering.' The sea-tale is to be
ascribed to Cooper, whose wavering faith in its successful
accomplishment is reflected in the shifting of the successive episodes
of the 'Pilot' from land to water and back again to land; and it was
only when he came to write the 'Red Rover' that Cooper displayed full
confidence in the form he had been the first to experiment with. But the
history of the detective-story begins with the publication of the
'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' a masterpiece of its kind, which even its
author was unable to surpass; and Poe, unlike most other originators,
rang the bell the very first time he took aim.


II

The detective-story which Poe invented sharply differentiates itself
from the earlier tales of mystery, and also from the later narratives
in which actual detectives figure incidentally. Perhaps the first of
these tales of mystery is Walpole's 'Castle of Otranto,' which appears
to us now clumsy enough, with its puerile attempts to excite terror. The
romances of Mrs. Radcliffe are scarcely more solidly built--indeed, the
fatigue of the sophisticated reader of to-day when he undertakes the
perusal of these old-fashioned and long-winded chronicles may be
ascribed partly to the flimsiness of the foundation which is supposed to
support the awe-inspiring super-structure. Godwin's 'Caleb Williams' is
far more firmly put together; and its artful planning called for
imagination as well as mere invention. In the 'Edgar Huntley' of Charles
Brockden Brown the veil of doubt skilfully shrouds the unsuspected and
the unsuspecting murderer who did the evil deed in his
sleep--anticipating the somnambulist hero of Wilkie Collins's
'Moonstone.'

The disadvantages of this mystery-mongering have been pointed out by Poe
with his wonted acuteness in his criticism of 'Barnaby Rudge.' After
retelling the plot of Dickens's contorted narrative, and after putting
the successive episodes into their true sequence, Poe asserted that "the
thesis of the novel may thus be regarded as based upon curiosity," and
he declared that "every point is so arranged as to perplex the reader
and whet his desire for elucidation." He insisted "that the secret be
well kept is obviously necessary," because if it leaks out "against the
author's will, his purposes are immediately at odds and ends." Then he
remarked that altho "there can be no question that ... many points ...
which would have been comparatively insipid even if given in full detail
in a natural sequence, are endued with the interest of mystery; but
neither can it be denied that a vast many more points are at the same
time deprived of all effect, and become null, through the impossibility
of comprehending them without the key." In other words, the novelist has
chosen to sacrifice to the fleeting interest which is evoked only by
wonder the more abiding interest which is aroused by the clear
perception of the inter-play of character and motive. Poe suggested that
even 'Barnaby Rudge'--in spite of its author's efforts to keep secret
the real springs of action which controlled the characters--if taken up
a second time by a reader put into possession of all that had been
concealed, would be found to possess quadruple brilliance, "a brilliance
unprofitably sacrificed at the shrine of the keenest interest of mere
mystery."

Dickens was not the last novelist of note to be tempted and to fall
into this snare. In the 'Disciple,' and again in 'André Cornélis' M.
Paul Bourget was lured from the path of psychologic analysis into the
maze of mystery-mongering; but he had the tact to employ his secrets to
excite interest only in the beginning of what were, after all, studies
from life, each of them setting forth the struggle of a man with the
memory of his crime. In the 'Wreckers' Stevenson and his young
collaborator attempted that "form of police novel or mystery-story which
consisted in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and
finishing it anywhere but at the end." They were attracted by its
"peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar difficulties that attend
its execution." They were "repelled by that appearance of insincerity
and shallowness of tone which seems its inevitable drawback," because
"the mind of the reader always bent to pick up clews receives no
impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate
mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but insignificant, like a
game of chess, not a work of human art." They hoped to find a new way of
handling the old tale of mystery, so that they might get the profit
without paying the price. But already in his criticism of 'Barnaby
Rudge' had Poe showed why disappointment was unavoidable, because the
more artfully the dark intimations of horror are held out, the more
certain it is that the anticipation must surpass the reality. No matter
how terrific the circumstances may be which shall appear to have
occasioned the mystery, "still they will not be able to satisfy the mind
of the reader. He will surely be disappointed."

Even Balzac, with all his mastery of the novelist's art, lost more than
he gained when he strove to arouse the interest of his readers by an
appeal to their curiosity. His mystery-mongering is sometimes perilously
close to blatant sensationalism and overt charlatanry; and he seems to
be seeking the bald effect for its own sake. In the 'Chouans,' and again
in the 'Ténébreuse Affaire,' he has complicated plots and counterplots
entangled almost to confusion, but the reader "receives no impression of
reality or life" even if these novels cannot be dismist as empty
examples of "airless, elaborate mechanism."

The members of the secret police appearing in these stories have all a
vague likeness to Vidocq, whose alleged memoirs were published in 1828,
a few years before the author of the 'Human Comedy' began to deal with
the scheming of the underworld. Balzac's spies and his detectives are
not convincing, despite his utmost effort; and we do not believe in
their preternatural acuteness. Even in the conduct of their intrigues
we are lost in a murky mistiness. Balzac is at his best when he is
arousing the emotions of recognition; and he is at his worst when he
sinks to evoking the emotions of surprize.


III

In the true detective-story as Poe conceived it in the 'Murders of the
Rue Morgue,' it is not in the mystery itself that the author seeks to
interest the reader, but rather in the successive steps whereby his
analytic observer is enabled to solve a problem that might well be
dismist as beyond human elucidation. Attention is centered on the
unraveling of the tangled skein rather than on the knot itself. The
emotion aroused is not mere surprize, it is recognition of the
unsuspected capabilities of the human brain; it is not a wondering
curiosity as to an airless mechanism, but a heightening admiration for
the analytic acumen capable of working out an acceptable answer to the
puzzle propounded. In other words, Poe, while he availed himself of the
obvious advantages of keeping a secret from his readers and of leaving
them guessing as long as he pleased, shifted the point of attack and
succeeded in giving a human interest to his tale of wonder.

And by this shift Poe transported the detective-story from the group of
tales of adventure into the group of portrayals of character. By
bestowing upon it a human interest, he raised it in the literary scale.
There is no need now to exaggerate the merits of this feat or to suggest
that Poe himself was not capable of loftier efforts. Of course the 'Fall
of the House of Usher,' which is of imagination all compact, is more
valid evidence of his genius than the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' which
is the product rather of his invention, supremely ingenious as it is.
Even tho the detective-story as Poe produced it is elevated far above
the barren tale of mystery which preceded it and which has been revived
in our own day, it is not one of the loftiest of literary forms, and its
possibilities are severely limited. It suffers to-day from the fact that
in the half century and more since Poe set the pattern it has been
vulgarized, debased, degraded by a swarm of imitators who lacked his
certainty of touch, his instinctive tact, his intellectual
individuality. In their hands it has been bereft of its distinction and
despoiled of its atmosphere.

Even at its best, in the simple perfection of form that Poe bestowed on
it, there is no denying that it demanded from its creator no depth of
sentiment, no warmth of emotion, and no large understanding of human
desire. There are those who would dismiss it carelessly, as making an
appeal not far removed from that of the riddle and of the conundrum.
There are those again who would liken it rather to the adroit trick of a
clever conjurer. No doubt, it gratifies in us chiefly that delight in
difficulty conquered, which is a part of the primitive play-impulse
potent in us all, but tending to die out as we grow older, as we lessen
in energy, and as we feel more deeply the tragi-comedy of existence. But
inexpensive as it may seem to those of us who look to literature for
enlightenment, for solace in the hour of need, for stimulus to stiffen
the will in the never-ending struggle of life, the detective tale, as
Poe contrived it, has merits of its own as distinct and as undeniable,
as those of the historical novel, for example, or of the sea-tale. It
may please the young rather than the old, but the pleasure it can give
is ever innocent; and the young are always in the majority.


IV

In so far as Poe had any predecessor in the composing of a narrative,
the interest of which should reside in the application of human
intelligence to the solution of a mystery, this was not Balzac,--altho
the American romancer was sufficiently familiar with the 'Human Comedy'
to venture quotation from it. Nor was this predecessor Cooper, whom
Balzac admired and even imitated, altho Leatherstocking in tracking his
redskin enemies revealed the tense observation and the faculty of
deduction with which Poe was to endow his Dupin. The only predecessor
with a good claim to be considered a progenitor is Voltaire, in whose
'Zadig' we can find the method which Poe was to apply more elaborately.
The Goncourts perceived this descent of Poe from Voltaire when they
recorded in their 'Journal' that the strange tales of the American poet
seemed to them to belong to "a new literature, the literature of the
twentieth century, scientifically miraculous story-telling by A + B, a
literature at once monomaniac and mathematical, Zadig as
district-attorney, Cyrano de Bergerac as a pupil of Arago."

Voltaire tells us that Zadig by study gained "a sagacity which
discovered to him a thousand differences where other men saw only
uniformity"; and he describes a misadventure which befell Zadig when he
was living in the kingdom of Babylon. One day the chief eunuch asked if
he had seen the queen's dog. "It's a female, isn't it?" returned Zadig;
"a spaniel, and very small; she littered not long ago; she is lame of
the left forefoot; and she has very long ears." "So you have seen her?"
cried the eunuch. "No," Zadig answered; "I have never seen her; and I
never even knew that the queen had a dog."

About the same time the handsomest horse in the king's stables escaped;
and the chief huntsman, meeting Zadig, inquired if he had not seen the
animal. And Zadig responded: "It is the horse that gallops the best; he
is five feet high; his shoe is very small; his tail is three and a half
feet long; the knobs of his bit are of twenty-three-carat gold; and he
is shod with eleven-penny silver." And the chief huntsman asked, "Which
way did he go?" To which Zadig replied: "I have not seen him; and I have
never heard anything about him."

The chief eunuch and the chief huntsman naturally believed that Zadig
had stolen the queen's dog and the king's horse; so they had him
arrested and condemned, first to the knout, and afterward to exile for
life in Siberia. And then both the missing animals were recovered; so
Zadig was allowed to plead his case. He swore that he had never seen
either the dog of the queen or the horse of the king. This is what had
happened: He had been walking toward a little wood and he had seen on
the sand the track of an animal, and he judged that it had been a dog.
Little furrows scratched in the low hillocks of sand between the
footprints showed him that it was a female whose teats were pendent, and
who therefore must have littered recently. As the sand was less deeply
marked by one foot than by the three others, he had perceived the
queen's dog to be lame.

As for the larger quadruped, Zadig, while walking in a narrow path in
the wood, had seen the prints of a horse's shoes, all at an equal
distance; and he had said to himself that here was a steed with a
perfect stride. The path was narrow, being only seven feet wide, and
here and there the dust had been flicked from the trees on either hand,
and so Zadig had made sure that the horse had a tail three and a half
feet long. The branches crossed over the path at the height of five
feet, and as leaves had been broken off, the observer had decided that
the horse was just five feet high. As to the bit, this must be of gold,
since the horse had rubbed it against a stone, which Zadig had
recognized as a touchstone and on which he had assayed the trace of
precious metal. And from the marks left by the horse's shoes on another
kind of stone Zadig had felt certain that they were made of eleven-penny
silver.

Huxley has pointed out that the method of Zadig is the method which has
made possible the incessant scientific discovery of the last century. It
is the method of Wellington at Assaye, assuming that there must be a
ford at a certain place on the river, because there was a village on
each side. It is the method of Grant at Vicksburg, examining the
knapsacks of the Confederate soldiers slain in a sortie to see if these
contained rations, which would show that the garrison was seeking to
break out because the place was untenable. It is also the method of Poe
in the 'Gold-Bug' and in the 'Murders of the Rue Morgue.' In all
probability Poe borrowed it directly from Voltaire, who had taken it
over from Oriental folklore.

In his application of this method, not casually, playfully, and with
satiric intent, as Voltaire had applied it, but seriously and taking it
as the mainspring of his story, Poe added an ingenious improvement of
his own devising. Upon the preternaturally acute observer who was to
control the machinery of the tale, the American poet bestowed a
companion of only an average alertness and keenness; and to this
commonplace companion the romancer confided the telling of the story. By
this seemingly simple device Poe doubled the effectiveness of his work,
because this unobservant and unimaginative narrator of the unraveling of
a tangled skein by an observant and imaginative analyst naturally
recorded his own admiration and astonishment as the wonder was wrought
before his eyes, so that the admiration and astonishment were
transmitted directly and suggestively, to the readers of the narrative.

In the 'Gold-Bug' the wonder-worker is Legrand, and in both the 'Murders
in the Rue Morgue' and the 'Purloined Letter' he is M. Dupin; and in all
three tales the telling of the story is entrusted to an anonymous
narrator, serving not only as a sort of Greek chorus to hint to the
spectators the emotions they ought to feel, but also as the describer of
the personality and peculiarities of Legrand and Dupin, who are thus
individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had
not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood,
they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied
intelligences working in a vacuum.

This device of the transmitting narrator is indisputably valuable; and,
properly enough, it reappears in the one series of detective tales which
may be thought by some to rival Poe's. The alluring record of the
investigations of Mr. Sherlock Holmes is the work of a certain Dr.
Watson, a human being but little more clearly characterized than the
anonymous narrators who have preserved for us the memory of Legrand and
Dupin. But Poe here again exhibited a more artistic reserve than any of
his imitators, in so far as he refrained from the undue laudation of the
strange intellectual feats which are the central interest of these
three tales. In the 'Gold-Bug' he even heightens his suspense by
allowing the narrator to suggest that Legrand might be of unsound mind;
and in the 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' the narrator, altho lost in
astonishment at the acuteness of Dupin, never permits his admiration to
become fulsome; he holds himself in, as tho fearing that overpraise
might provoke a denial. Moreover, Poe refrained from all exhibitions of
Dupin's skill merely for its own sake--exhibitions only dazzling the
spectators and not furthering his immediate purpose.

Nothing could be franker than Sir Conan Doyle's acknowledgment of his
indebtedness. "Edgar Allen Poe, who, in his carelessly prodigal fashion,
threw out the seeds from which so many of our present forms of
literature have sprung, was the father of the detective tale, and
covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers
can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own. For
the secret of the thinness and also of the intensity of the
detective-story is that the writer is left with only one quality, that
of intellectual acuteness, with which to endow his hero. Everything else
is outside the picture and weakens the effect. The problem and its
solution must form the theme, and the character drawing is limited and
subordinate. On this narrow path the writer must walk, and he sees the
footmarks of Poe always in front of him. He is happy if he ever finds
the means of breaking away and striking out on some little side-track of
his own."

The deviser of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes hit on a happy phrase
when he declared that "the problem and its solution must form the
theme." This principle was violated by Dumas, in the 'Vicomte de
Bragelonne,' giving us the solution before the problem, when he showed
how d'Artagnan used the method of Zadig to deduce all the details of the
duel on horseback, after the author had himself described to us the
incidents of that fight. But when he was thus discounting his effect
Dumas probably had in mind, not Poe, but Cooper, whose observant
redskins he mightily admired and whom he frankly imitated in the
'Mohicans of Paris.'


V

Altho Poe tells these three stories in the first person, as if he was
himself only the recorder of the marvelous deeds of another, both
Legrand and Dupin are projections of his own personality; they are
characters created by him to be endowed with certain of his own
qualifications and peculiarities. They were called into being to be
possest of the inventive and analytical powers of Poe himself. "To be
an artist, first and always, requires a turn for induction and
analysis"--so Mr. Stedman has aptly put it; and this turn for induction
and analysis Poe had far more obviously than most artists. When he was a
student he excelled in mathematics; in all his other tales he displays
the same power of logical construction; and he delighted in the exercise
of his own acumen, vaunting his ability to translate any cipher that
might be sent to him and succeeding in making good his boast. In the
criticism of 'Barnaby Rudge,' and again in the explanation of the
Maelzel chess-player, Poe used for himself the same faculty of
divination, the same power of seizing the one clue needful, however
tangled amid other threads, which he had bestowed upon Legrand and
Dupin.

If we may exclude the 'Marie Roget' narrative in which Poe was working
over an actual case of murder, we find him only three times undertaking
the "tale of ratiocination," to use his own term; and in all three
stories he was singularly happy in the problem he invented for solution.
For each of the three he found a fit theme, wholly different from that
employed in either of the others. He adroitly adjusted the proper
accessories, and he created an appropriate atmosphere. With no sense of
strain, and no awkwardness of manner, he dealt with episodes strange
indeed, but so simply treated as to seem natural, at least for the
moment. There is no violence of intrigue or conjecture; indeed Poe
strives to suggest a background of the commonplace against which his
marvels may seem the more marvelous. In none of his stories is Poe's
consummate mastery of the narrative art, his ultimate craftsmanship, his
certain control of all the devices of the most accomplished
story-teller, more evident than in these three.

And yet they are but detective-stories, after all; and Poe himself,
never prone to underestimate what he had written, spoke of them lightly
and even hinted that they had been overpraised. Probably they were easy
writing--for him--and therefore they were not so close to his heart as
certain other of his tales over which he had toiled long and
laboriously. Probably also he felt the detective-story to be an inferior
form. However superior his stories in this kind might be, he knew them
to be unworthy of comparison with his more imaginative tales, which he
had filled with a thrilling weirdness and which attained a soaring
elevation far above any height to be achieved by ingenious narratives
setting forth the solving of a puzzle.

It is in a letter to Philip Pendleton Cooke, written in 1846, that Poe
disparaged his detective-stories and declared that they "owe most of
their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say
that they are not ingenious--but people think them more ingenious than
they are--on account of their method and _air_ of method. In the
'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' for instance, where is the ingenuity of
unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the
express purpose of unraveling? The reader is made to confound the
ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the
story." Here, surely, Poe is over-modest; at least he over-states the
case against himself. The ingenuity of the author obviously lies in his
invention of a web which seemingly cannot be unraveled and which
nevertheless one of the characters of the tale, Legrand or Dupin,
succeeds in unraveling at last. This ingenuity may be, in one way, less
than that required to solve an actual problem in real life; but it is
also, in another way, more, for it had to invent its own puzzle and to
put this together so that the secret seemed to be absolutely hidden,
altho all the facts needed to solve it were plainly presented to the
reader.

In the same letter to Cooke, Poe remarked on the "wide diversity and
variety" of his tales when contrasted one with another; and he asserted
that he did not consider any one better than another. "There is a vast
variety of kinds, and in degree of value these kinds vary--but each tale
is equally good _of its kind_." He added that "the loftiest kind is that
of the highest imagination." For this reason only he considered that
'Ligeia' might be called the best of his stories. Now, after a lapse of
threescore years, the 'Fall of the House of Usher,' with its "serene and
somber beauty," would seem to deserve the first place of all. And among
the detective-stories, standing on a lower plane as they do, because
they were wrought by invention rather than by the interpreting
imagination, the foremost position may be given to the 'Murders in the
Rue Morgue.' In this tale Poe's invention is most ingenious and his
subject is selected with the fullest understanding of the utmost
possibilities of the detective-story. At the core of it is a strange,
mysterious, monstrous crime; and M. Anatole France was never wiser than
when he declared the unfailing interest of mankind in a gigantic misdeed
"because we find in all crimes that fund of hunger and desire on which
we all live, the good as well as the bad." Before a crime such as this
we seem to find ourselves peering into the contorted visage of primitive
man, obeying no law but his own caprice.

The superiority of the poet who wrote the first detective-story over all
those who have striven to tread in the trail he blazed is obvious
enough. It resides not only in his finer workmanship, his more delicate
art, his surer certainty of execution, his more absolute knowledge of
what it was best to do and of the way best to do this; it is to be seen
not only in his command of verisimilitude, in his plausibility, in his
faculty of enwrapping the figures of his narrative in the atmosphere
most fit for them; it is not in any of these things or in all of them
that Poe's supremacy is founded. The reason of that supremacy must be
sought in the fact that, after all, Poe was a poet, and that he had the
informing imagination of a poet, even tho it was only the more prosaic
side of the faculty divine which he chose to employ in these tales of
ratiocination.

It is by their possession of poetry, however slight their portion might
be, that Fitzjames O'Brien and M. Jean Richepin and Mr. Rudyard Kipling
were kept from frank failure when they followed in Poe's footsteps and
sought to imitate, or at least to emulate his more largely imaginative
tales in the 'Diamond Lens' of the Irish-American, in the 'Morts
Bizarres' of the Frenchman, and in half a dozen tales of the
Anglo-Indian. But what tincture of poesy, what sweep of vision, what
magic of style, is there in the attempts of the most of the others who
have taken pattern by Poe's detective-stories? None, and less than
none. Ingenuity of a kind there is in Gaboriau's longer fictions, and
in those of Fortuné du Boisgobey, and in those of Wilkie Collins; but
this ingenuity is never so simply employed, and it is often artificial
and violent and mechanical. It exists for its own sake, with little
relation to the admitted characteristics of our common humanity. It
stands alone, and it is never accompanied by the apparent ease which
adds charm to Poe's handling of his puzzles.

Consider how often Gaboriau puts us off with a broken-backed narrative,
taking up his curtain on a promising problem, presenting it to us in
aspects of increasing difficulty, only at last to confess his impotence
by starting afresh and slowly detailing the explanatory episodes which
happened before the curtain rose. Consider how frequently Fortuné du
Boisgobey failed to play fair. Consider how juiceless was the
documentary method of Wilkie Collins, how mechanical and how arid, how
futilely complicated, how prolonged, and how fatiguing. Consider all the
minor members of the sorry brood hatched out of the same egg, how cheap
and how childish the most of them are. Consider all these; and we are
forced to the conclusion that if the writing of a good detective-story
is so rare and so difficult, if only one of Poe's imitators has been
able really to rival his achievement, if this single success has been
the result of an acceptance of Poe's formula and of a close adherence to
Poe's practise, then, what Poe wrought is really unique; and we must
give him the guerdon of praise due to an artist who has accomplished the
first time of trying that which others have failed to achieve even after
he had shown them how.

     (1904.)




MARK TWAIN

[This biographical criticism was written to serve as an introduction to
the complete edition of Mark Twain's Works.]


It is a common delusion of those who discuss contemporary literature
that there is such an entity as the "reading public," possest of a
certain uniformity of taste. There is not one public; there are many
publics,--as many in fact as there are different kinds of taste; and the
extent of an author's popularity is in proportion to the number of these
separate publics he may chance to please. Scott, for example, appealed
not only to those who relished romance and enjoyed excitement, but also
to those who appreciated his honest portrayal of sturdy characters.
Thackeray is preferred by ambitious youths who are insidiously flattered
by his tacit compliments to their knowledge of the world, by the
disenchanted who cannot help seeing the petty meannesses of society, and
by the less sophisticated in whom sentiment has not gone to seed in
sentimentality. Dickens in his own day bid for the approval of those who
liked broad caricature (and were, therefore, pleased with Stiggins and
Chadband), of those who fed greedily on plentiful pathos (and were,
therefore, delighted with the deathbeds of Smike and Paul Dombey and
Little Nell) and also of those who asked for unexpected adventure (and
were, therefore, glad to disentangle the melodramatic intrigues of Ralph
Nickleby).

In like manner the American author who has chosen to call himself Mark
Twain has attained to an immense popularity because the qualities he
possesses in a high degree appeal to so many and so widely varied
publics,--first of all, no doubt, to the public that revels in hearty
and robust fun, but also to the public which is glad to be swept along
by the full current of adventure, which is sincerely touched by manly
pathos, which is satisfied by vigorous and exact portrayal of character,
which respects shrewdness and wisdom and sanity and which appreciates a
healthy hatred of pretense and affectation and sham. Perhaps no one book
of Mark Twain's--with the possible exception of 'Huckleberry Finn'--is
equally a favorite with all his readers; and perhaps some of his best
characteristics are absent from his earlier books or but doubtfully
latent in them. Mark Twain is many-sided; and he has ripened in
knowledge and in power since he first attracted attention as a wild
Western funny man. As he has grown older he has reflected more; he has
both broadened and deepened. The writer of "comic copy" for a
mining-camp newspaper has developed into a liberal humorist, handling
life seriously and making his readers think as he makes them laugh,
until to-day Mark Twain has perhaps the largest audience of any author
now using the English language. To trace the stages of this evolution
and to count the steps whereby the sage-brush reporter has risen to the
rank of a writer of world-wide celebrity, is as interesting as it is
instructive.


I

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born November 30, 1835, at
Florida, Missouri. His father was a merchant who had come from Tennessee
and who removed soon after his son's birth to Hannibal, a little town on
the Mississippi. What Hannibal was like and what were the circumstances
of Mr. Clemens's boyhood we can see for ourselves in the convincing
pages of 'Tom Sawyer.' Mr. Howells has called Hannibal "a loafing,
out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town"; and
the elder Clemens was himself a slave-owner, who silently abhorred
slavery.

When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had
to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he got little
and of book-learning still less; but life itself is not a bad teacher
for a boy who wants to study, and young Clemens did not waste his
chances. He spent three years in the printing office of the little local
paper,--for, like not a few others on the list of American authors that
stretches from Benjamin Franklin to William Dean Howells, he began his
connection with literature by setting type. As a journeyman printer the
lad wandered from town to town and rambled even as far east as New York.

When he was seventeen he went back to the home of his boyhood resolved
to become a pilot on the Mississippi. How he learnt the river he has
told us in 'Life on the Mississippi,' wherein his adventures, his
experiences, and his impressions while he was a cub-pilot are recorded
with a combination of precise veracity and abundant humor which makes
the earlier chapters of that marvelous book a most masterly fragment of
autobiography. The life of a pilot was full of interest and excitement
and opportunity, and what young Clemens saw and heard and divined during
the years when he was going up and down the mighty river we may read in
the pages of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson.' But toward the
end of the fifties the railroads began to rob the river of its supremacy
as a carrier; and in the beginning of the sixties the Civil War broke
out and the Mississippi no longer went unvext to the sea. The skill,
slowly and laboriously acquired, was suddenly rendered useless, and at
twenty-five the young man found himself bereft of his calling. As a
border state, Missouri was sending her sons into the armies of the Union
and into the armies of the Confederacy, while many a man stood doubting,
not knowing which way to turn. The ex-pilot has given us the record of
his very brief and inglorious service as a soldier of the South. When
this escapade was swiftly ended, he went to the northwest with his
brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Nevada. Thus the
man who had been born on the borderland of North and South, who had gone
East as a jour printer, who had been again and again up and down the
Mississippi, now went West while he was still plastic and
impressionable; and he had thus another chance to increase that intimate
knowledge of American life and American character which is one of the
most precious of his possessions.

While still on the river he had written a satiric letter or two signed
"Mark Twain"--taking the name from a call of the man who heaves the lead
and who cries "By the mark, three," "Mark twain," and so on. In Nevada
he went to the mines and lived the life he has described in 'Roughing
It,' but when he failed to "strike it rich," he naturally drifted into
journalism and back into a newspaper office again. The 'Virginia City
Enterprise' was not overmanned, and the new-comer did all sorts of odd
jobs, finding time now and then to write a sketch which seemed important
enough to permit of his signature. The name of Mark Twain soon began to
be known to those who were curious in newspaper humor. After a while he
was drawn across the mountains to San Francisco, where he found casual
employment on the 'Morning Call,' and where he joined himself to a
little group of aspiring literators which included Bret Harte, Noah
Brooks, Charles Henry Webb, and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddart.

It was in 1867 that Webb published Mark Twain's first book, the
'Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras'; and it was in 1867 that the
proprietors of the 'Alta California' supplied him with the funds
necessary to enable him to become one of the passengers on the steamer
_Quaker City_, which had been chartered to take a select party on what
is now known as the Mediterranean trip. The weekly letters, in which he
set forth what befell him on this journey, were printed in the 'Alta'
Sunday after Sunday, and were copied freely by the other Californian
papers. These letters served as the foundation of a book published in
1869 and called the 'Innocents Abroad,' a book which instantly brought
to the author celebrity and cash.

Both of these valuable aids to ambition were increased by his next step,
his appearance on the lecture platform. Noah Brooks, who was present at
his first attempt, has recorded that Mark Twain's "method as a lecturer
was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious
and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort
with which he framed his sentences, the surprize that spread over his
face when the audience roared with delight or rapturously applauded the
finer passages of his word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind
they had ever known." In the many years since that first appearance the
method has not changed, altho it has probably matured. Mark Twain is one
of the most effective of platform-speakers and one of the most artistic,
with an art of his own which is very individual and very elaborate in
spite of its seeming simplicity.

Altho he succeeded abundantly as a lecturer, and altho he was the author
of the most widely-circulated book of the decade, Mark Twain still
thought of himself only as a journalist; and when he gave up the West
for the East, he became an editor of the 'Buffalo Express,' in which he
had bought an interest. In 1870 he married; and it is perhaps not
indiscreet to remark that his was another of those happy unions of which
there have been so many in the annals of American authorship. In 1871 he
removed to Hartford, which was to be his home for thirty years; and at
the same time he gave up newspaper work.

In 1872 he wrote 'Roughing It,' and in the following year came his first
sustained attempt at fiction, the 'Gilded Age,' written in collaboration
with Charles Dudley Warner. The character of Colonel Mulberry Sellers
Mark Twain soon took out of this book to make it the central figure of a
play, which the late John T. Raymond acted hundreds of times thruout the
United States, the playgoing public pardoning the inexpertness of the
dramatist in favor of the delicious humor and the compelling veracity
with which the chief character was presented. So universal was this type
and so broadly recognizable its traits that there were many towns in
which someone accosted the actor who impersonated the ever-hopeful
schemer with the declaration: "I'm the original of _Sellers_! Didn't
Mark ever tell you? Well, he took the _Colonel_ from me!"

Encouraged by the welcome accorded to this first attempt at fiction,
Mark Twain turned to the days of his boyhood and wrote 'Tom Sawyer,'
published in 1875. He also collected his sketches, scattered here and
there in newspapers and magazines. Toward the end of the seventies he
went to Europe again with his family; and the result of this journey is
recorded in 'A Tramp Abroad,' published in 1880. Another volume of
sketches, the 'Stolen White Elephant,' was put forth in 1882; and in the
same year Mark Twain first came forward as a historical novelist--if the
'Prince and the Pauper' can fairly be called a historical novel. The
year after he sent forth the volume describing his 'Life on the
Mississippi'; and in 1884 he followed this with the story in which that
life has been crystallized forever, 'Huckleberry Finn,' the finest of
his books, the deepest in its insight, and the widest in its appeal.

This Odyssey of the Mississippi was published by a new firm, in which
the author was a chief partner, just as Sir Walter Scott had been an
associate of Ballantyne and Constable. There was at first a period of
prosperity in which the house issued the 'Personal Memoirs' of Grant,
giving his widow checks for $350,000 in 1886, and in which Mark Twain
himself published 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court,' a
volume of 'Merry Tales,' and a story called the 'American Claimant,'
wherein Colonel Sellers reappears. Then there came a succession of hard
years; and at last the publishing-house in which Mark Twain was a
partner failed, as the publishing-house in which Walter Scott was a
partner had formerly failed. The author of 'Huckleberry Finn' was past
sixty when he found himself suddenly saddled with a load of debt, just
as the author of 'Waverley' had been burdened full threescore years
earlier; and Mark Twain stood up stoutly under it as Scott had done
before him. More fortunate than the Scotchman, the American lived to pay
the debt in full.

Since the disheartening crash came, he has given to the public a third
Mississippi River tale, 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' issued in 1894; and a third
historical novel, 'Joan of Arc,' a reverent and sympathetic study of the
bravest figure in all French history, printed anonymously in 'Harper's
Magazine' and then in a volume acknowledged by the author in 1896. As
one of the results of a lecturing tour around the world he prepared
another volume of travels, 'Following the Equator,' published toward the
end of 1897. Mention must also be made of a fantastic tale called 'Tom
Sawyer Abroad,' sent forth in 1894, of a volume of sketches, the
'Million Pound Bank-Note,' assembled in 1893, and also of a collection
of literary essays, 'How to Tell a Story,' published in 1897.

This is but the barest outline of Mark Twain's life,--such a brief
summary as we must have before us if we wish to consider the conditions
under which the author has developed and the stages of his growth. It
will serve, however, to show how various have been his forms of
activity,--printer, pilot, miner, journalist, traveler, lecturer,
novelist, publisher,--and to suggest the width of his experience of
life.


II

A humorist is often without honor in his own country. Perhaps
this is partly because humor is likely to be familiar, and familiarity
breeds contempt. Perhaps it is partly because (for some strange reason)
we tend to despise those who make us laugh, while we respect those who
make us weep--forgetting that there are formulas for forcing tears quite
as facile as the formulas for forcing smiles. Whatever the reason, the
fact is indisputable that the humorist must pay the penalty of his
humor, he must run the risk of being tolerated as a mere fun-maker, not
to be taken seriously, and not worthy of critical consideration. This
penalty has been paid by Mark Twain. In many of the discussions of
American literature he has been dismist as tho he were only a competitor
of his predecessors, Artemus Ward and John Phoenix, instead of being,
what he is really, a writer who is to be classed--at whatever interval
only time may decide--rather with Cervantes and Molière.

Like the heroines of the problem-plays of the modern theater, Mark
Twain has had to live down his past. His earlier writing gave but little
promise of the enduring qualities obvious enough in his later works.
Noah Brooks has told us how he was advised if he wisht to "see genuine
specimens of American humor, frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious," to
look up the sketches which the then almost unknown Mark Twain was
printing in a Nevada newspaper. The humor of Mark Twain is still
American, still frolicsome, extravagant, and audacious; but it is riper
now and richer, and it has taken unto itself other qualities existing
only in germ in these firstlings of his muse. The sketches in the
'Jumping Frog' and the letters which made up the 'Innocents Abroad' are
"comic copy," as the phrase is in newspaper offices--comic copy not
altogether unlike what John Phoenix had written and Artemus
Ward,--better indeed than the work of these newspaper humorists (for
Mark Twain had it in him to develop as they did not), but not
essentially dissimilar.

And in the eyes of many who do not think for themselves, Mark Twain was
only the author of these genuine specimens of American humor. For when
the public has once made up its mind about any man's work, it does not
relish any attempt to force it to unmake this opinion and to remake it.
Like other juries, it does not like to be ordered to reconsider its
verdict as contrary to the facts of the case. It is always sluggish in
beginning the necessary readjustment, and not only sluggish, but
somewhat grudging. Naturally it cannot help seeing the later works of a
popular writer from the point of view it had to take to enjoy his
earlier writings. And thus the author of 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Joan of
Arc' was forced to pay a high price for the early and abundant
popularity of the 'Innocents Abroad.'

No doubt, a few of his earlier sketches were inexpensive in their
elements; made of materials worn threadbare by generations of earlier
funny men, they were sometimes cut in the pattern of his predecessors.
No doubt, some of the earliest of all were crude and highly colored, and
may even be called forced, not to say violent. No doubt, also, they did
not suggest the seriousness and the melancholy which always must
underlie the deepest humor, as we find it in Cervantes and Molière, in
Swift and in Lowell. But even a careless reader, skipping thru the book
in idle amusement, ought to have been able to see in the 'Innocents
Abroad,' that the writer of this liveliest of books of travel was no
mere merry-andrew, grinning thru a horse-collar to make sport for the
groundlings; but a sincere observer of life, seeing thru his own eyes
and setting down what he saw with abundant humor, of course, but also
with profound respect for the eternal verities.

George Eliot in one of her essays calls those who parody lofty themes
"debasers of the moral currency." Mark Twain is always an advocate of
the sterling ethical standard. He is ready to overwhelm an affectation
with irresistible laughter, but he never lacks reverence for the things
that really deserve reverence. It is not at the Old Masters that he
scoffs in Italy, but rather at those who pay lip-service to things which
they neither enjoy nor understand. For a ruin or a painting or a legend
that does not seem to him to deserve the appreciation in which it is
held he refuses to affect an admiration he does not feel; he cannot help
being honest--he was born so. For meanness of all kinds he has a burning
contempt; and on Abelard he pours out the vials of his wrath. He has a
quick eye for all humbugs and a scorching scorn for them; but there is
no attempt at being funny in the manner of the cockney comedians when he
stands in the awful presence of the Sphinx. He is not taken in by the
glamor of Palestine; he does not lose his head there; he keeps his feet;
but he knows that he is standing on holy ground; and there is never a
hint of irreverence in his attitude.

'A Tramp Abroad' is a better book than the 'Innocents Abroad'; it is
quite as laughter-provoking, and its manner is far more restrained. Mark
Twain was then master of his method, sure of himself, secure of his
popularity; and he could do his best and spare no pains to be certain
that it was his best. Perhaps there is a slight falling off in
'Following the Equator'; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of
disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly
humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author's possession of a
pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest
predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in
his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him;
the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is
not all laughter, but whose eye is as clear as ever and whose tongue is
as plain-spoken.

These three books of travel are like all other books of travel in that
they relate in the first person what the author went forth to see.
Autobiographic also are 'Roughing It' and 'Life on the Mississippi,' and
they have always seemed to me better books than the more widely
circulated travels. They are better because they are the result of a
more intimate knowledge of the material dealt with. Every traveler is of
necessity but a bird of passage; he is a mere carpet-bagger; his
acquaintance with the countries he visits is external only; and this
acquaintanceship is made only when he is a full-grown man. But Mark
Twain's knowledge of the Mississippi was acquired in his youth; it was
not purchased with a price; it was his birthright; and it was internal
and complete. And his knowledge of the mining-camp was achieved in early
manhood when the mind is open and sensitive to every new impression.
There is in both these books a fidelity to the inner truth, a certainty
of touch, a sweep of vision, not to be found in the three books of
travels. For my own part I have long thought that Mark Twain could
securely rest his right to survive as an author on those opening
chapters in 'Life on the Mississippi' in which he makes clear the
difficulties, the seeming impossibilities, that fronted those who wisht
to learn the river. These chapters are bold and brilliant; and they
picture for us forever a period and a set of conditions, singularly
interesting and splendidly varied, that otherwise would have had to
forego all adequate record.


III

It is highly probable that when an author reveals the power of evoking
views of places and of calling up portraits of people such as Mark
Twain showed in 'Life on the Mississippi,' and when he has the masculine
grasp of reality Mark Twain made evident in 'Roughing It,' he must needs
sooner or later turn from mere fact to avowed fiction and become a
story-teller. The long stories which Mark Twain has written fall into
two divisions,--first, those of which the scene is laid in the present,
in reality, and mostly in the Mississippi Valley, and second, those of
which the scene is laid in the past, in fantasy mostly, and in Europe.

As my own liking is a little less for the latter group, there is no need
for me now to linger over them. In writing these tales of the past Mark
Twain was making up stories in his head; personally I prefer the tales
of his in which he has his foot firm on reality. The 'Prince and the
Pauper' has the essence of boyhood in it; it has variety and vigor; it
has abundant humor and plentiful pathos; and yet I for one would give
the whole of it for the single chapter in which Tom Sawyer lets the
contract for white-washing his aunt's fence.

Mr. Howells has declared that there are two kinds of fiction he likes
almost equally well,--"a real novel and a pure romance"; and he joyfully
accepts 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court' as "one of the
greatest romances ever imagined." It is a humorous romance overflowing
with stalwart fun; and it is not irreverent but iconoclastic, in that it
breaks not a few disestablished idols. It is intensely American and
intensely nineteenth century and intensely democratic--in the best sense
of that abused adjective. The British critics were greatly displeased
with the book:--and we are reminded of the fact that the Spanish still
somewhat resent 'Don Quixote' because it brings out too truthfully the
fatal gap in the Spanish character between the ideal and the real. So
much of the feudal still survives in British society that Mark Twain's
merry and elucidating assault on the past seemed to some almost an
insult to the present.

But no critic, British or American, has ventured to discover any
irreverence in 'Joan of Arc,' wherein indeed the tone is almost devout
and the humor almost too much subdued. Perhaps it is my own distrust of
the so-called historical novel, my own disbelief that it can ever be
anything but an inferior form of art, which makes me care less for this
worthy effort to honor a noble figure. And elevated and dignified as is
the 'Joan of Arc,' I do not think that it shows us Mark Twain at his
best; altho it has many a passage that only he could have written, it is
perhaps the least characteristic of his works. Yet it may well be that
the certain measure of success he has achieved in handling a subject so
lofty and so serious, helped to open the eyes of the public to see the
solid merits of his other stories, in which his humor has fuller play
and in which his natural gifts are more abundantly displayed.

Of these other stories three are "real novels," to use Mr. Howells's
phrase; they are novels as real as any in any literature. 'Tom Sawyer'
and 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' are invaluable
contributions to American literature--for American literature is nothing
if it is not a true picture of American life and if it does not help us
to understand ourselves. 'Huckleberry Finn' is a very amusing volume,
and a generation has read its pages and laughed over it immoderately;
but it is very much more than a funny book; it is a marvelously accurate
portrayal of a whole civilization. Mr. Ormsby, in an essay which
accompanies his translation of 'Don Quixote,' has pointed out that for a
full century after its publication that greatest of novels was enjoyed
chiefly as a tale of humorous misadventure, and that three generations
had laughed over it before anybody suspected that it was more than a
mere funny book. It is perhaps rather with the picaresque romances of
Spain that 'Huckleberry Finn' is to be compared than with the
masterpiece of Cervantes; but I do not think that it will be a century
or that it will take three generations before we Americans generally
discover how great a book 'Huckleberry Finn' really is, how keen its
vision of character, how close its observation of life, how sound its
philosophy, and how it records for us once and for all certain phases of
southwestern society which it is most important for us to perceive and
to understand. The influence of slavery, the prevalence of feuds, the
conditions and the circumstances that make lynching possible--all these
things are set before us clearly and without comment. It is for us to
draw our own moral, each for himself, as we do when we see Shakspere
acted.

'Huckleberry Finn,' in its art, for one thing, and also in its broader
range, is superior to 'Tom Sawyer' and to 'Pudd'nhead Wilson,' fine as
both these are in their several ways. In no book in our language, to my
mind, has the boy, simply as a boy, been better realized than in 'Tom
Sawyer.' In some respects 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' is the most dramatic of
Mark Twain's longer stories, and also the most ingenious; like 'Tom
Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn,' it has the full flavor of the
Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from
contact with the soil of which he has always risen reinvigorated.

It is by these three stories, and especially by 'Huckleberry Finn,' that
Mark Twain is likely to live longest. Nowhere else is the life of the
Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded. Nowhere else can we find a
gallery of southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those
Huck Finn met in his wanderings. The histories of literature all praise
the 'Gil Blas' of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural
characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty; and
the praise is deserved. But in every one of these qualities 'Huckleberry
Finn' is superior to 'Gil Blas.' Le Sage set the model of the picaresque
novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is
richer than the French--deeper, finer, stronger. It would be hard to
find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples
of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the
reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain's account of the
Shepardson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of
Boggs by Sherbourn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherbourn
afterward.

These scenes, fine as they are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in
their restraint, can be matched in the two other books. In 'Tom Sawyer'
they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girl are
lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance,
discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he
has in the world. In 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' the great passages of
'Huckleberry Finn' are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak
son willing to sell his own mother as a slave "down the river." Altho no
one of the books is sustained thruout on this high level, and altho, in
truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could
wish away (because they are not worthy of the association in which we
find them), I have no hesitation in expressing here my own conviction
that the man who has given us four scenes like these is to be compared
with the masters of literature; and that he can abide the comparison
with equanimity.


IV

Perhaps I myself prefer these three Mississippi Valley books above all
Mark Twain's other writings (altho with no lack of affection for those
also) partly because these have the most of the flavor of the soil about
them. After veracity and the sense of the universal, what I best relish
in literature is this native aroma, pungent, homely, and abiding. Yet I
feel sure that I should not rate him so high if he were the author of
these three books only. They are the best of him, but the others are
good also, and good in a different way. Other writers have given us
this local color more or less artistically, more or less convincingly:
one New England and another New York, a third Virginia, and a fourth
Georgia, and a fifth Wisconsin; but who so well as Mark Twain has given
us the full spectrum of the Union? With all his exactness in reproducing
the Mississippi Valley, Mark Twain is not sectional in his outlook; he
is national always. He is not narrow; he is not western or eastern; he
is American with a certain largeness and boldness and freedom and
certainty that we like to think of as befitting a country so vast as
ours and a people so independent.

In Mark Twain we have "the national spirit as seen with our own eyes,"
declared Mr. Howells; and, from more points of view than one, Mark Twain
seems to me to be the very embodiment of Americanism. Self-educated in
the hard school of life, he has gone on broadening his outlook as he has
grown older. Spending many years abroad, he has come to understand other
nationalities, without enfeebling his own native faith. Combining a
mastery of the commonplace with an imaginative faculty, he is a
practical idealist. No respecter of persons, he has a tender regard for
his fellowman. Irreverent toward all outworn superstitions, he has ever
revealed the deepest respect for all things truly worthy of reverence.
Unwilling to take pay in words, he is impatient always to get at the
root of the matter, to pierce to the center, to see the thing as it is.
He has a habit of standing upright, of thinking for himself, and of
hitting hard at whatsoever seems to him hateful and mean; but at the
core of him there is genuine gentleness and honest sympathy, brave
humanity and sweet kindliness. Perhaps it is boastful for us to think
that these characteristics which we see in Mark Twain are
characteristics also of the American people as a whole; but it is
pleasant to think so.

Mark Twain has the very marrow of Americanism. He is as intensely and as
typically American as Franklin or Emerson or Hawthorne. He has not a
little of the shrewd common-sense and the homely and unliterary
directness of Franklin. He is not without a share of the aspiration and
the elevation of Emerson; and he has a philosophy of his own as
optimistic as Emerson's. He possesses also somewhat of Hawthorne's
interest in ethical problems, with something of the same power of
getting at the heart of them; he, too, has written his parables and
apologs wherein the moral is obvious and unobtruded. He is
uncompromisingly honest; and his conscience is as rugged as his style
sometimes is.

No American author has to-day at his command a style more nervous, more
varied, more flexible, or more direct than Mark Twain's. His colloquial
ease should not hide from us his mastery of all the devices of rhetoric.
He may seem to disobey the letter of the law sometimes, but he is always
obedient to the spirit. He never speaks unless he has something to say;
and then he says it tersely, sharply, with a freshness of epithet and an
individuality of phrase always accurate, however unacademic. His
vocabulary is enormous, and it is deficient only in the dead words; his
language is alive always, and actually tingling with vitality. He
rejoices in the daring noun and in the audacious adjective. His instinct
for the exact word is not always assured, and now and again he has
failed to exercise it; but we do not find in his prose the flatting and
sharping he censured in Fenimore Cooper's. His style has none of the
cold perfection of an antique statue; it is too modern and too American
for that, and too completely the expression of the man himself, sincere
and straightforward. It is not free from slang, altho this is far less
frequent than one might expect; but it does its work swiftly and
cleanly. And it is capable of immense variety. Consider the tale of the
Blue Jay in 'A Tramp Abroad,' wherein the humor is sustained by unstated
pathos; what could be better told than this, with every word the right
word and in the right place? And take Huck Finn's description of the
storm when he was alone on the island, which is in dialect, which will
not parse, which bristles with double negatives, but which none the less
is one of the finest passages of descriptive prose in all American
literature.


V

After all, it is as a humorist pure and simple that Mark Twain is best
known and best beloved. In the preceding pages I have tried to point out
the several ways in which he transcends humor, as the word is commonly
restricted, and to show that he is no mere fun-maker. But he is a
fun-maker beyond all question, and he has made millions laugh as no
other man of our century has done. The laughter he has aroused is
wholesome and self-respecting; it clears the atmosphere. For this we
cannot but be grateful. As Lowell said, "let us not be ashamed to
confess that, if we find the tragedy a bore, we take the profoundest
satisfaction in the farce. It is a mark of sanity." There is no laughter
in Don Quixote, the noble enthusiast whose wits are unsettled; and there
is little on the lips of _Alceste_, the misanthrope of Molière; but for
both of them life would have been easier had they known how to laugh.
Cervantes himself, and Molière also, found relief in laughter for their
melancholy; and it was the sense of humor which kept them tolerantly
interested in the spectacle of humanity, altho life had prest hardly on
them both. On Mark Twain also life has left its scars; but he has bound
up his wounds and battled forward with a stout heart, as Cervantes did,
and Molière. It was Molière who declared that it was a strange business
to undertake to make people laugh; but even now, after two centuries,
when the best of Molière's plays are acted, mirth breaks out again and
laughter overflows.

It would be doing Mark Twain a disservice to compare him to Molière, the
greatest comic dramatist of all time; and yet there is more than one
point of similarity. Just as Mark Twain began by writing comic copy
which contained no prophesy of a masterpiece like 'Huckleberry Finn,' so
Molière was at first the author only of semi-acrobatic farces on the
Italian model in no wise presaging 'Tartuffe' and the 'Misanthrope.'
Just as Molière succeeded first of all in pleasing the broad public that
likes robust fun, and then slowly and step by step developed into a
dramatist who set on the stage enduring figures plucked out of the
abounding life about him, so also has Mark Twain grown, ascending from
the 'Jumping Frog' to 'Huckleberry Finn,' as comic as its elder brother
and as laughter-provoking, but charged also with meaning and with
philosophy. And like Molière again, Mark Twain has kept solid hold of
the material world; his doctrine is not of the earth earthy, but it is
never sublimated into sentimentality. He sympathizes with the spiritual
side of humanity, while never ignoring the sensual. Like Molière, Mark
Twain takes his stand on common-sense and thinks scorn of affectation of
every sort. He understands sinners and strugglers and weaklings; and he
is not harsh with them, reserving his scorching hatred for hypocrites
and pretenders and frauds.

At how long an interval Mark Twain shall be rated after Molière and
Cervantes it is for the future to declare. All that we can see clearly
now is that it is with them that he is to be classed,--with Molière and
Cervantes, with Chaucer and Fielding, humorists all of them, and all of
them manly men.

     (1898.)




A NOTE ON MAUPASSANT


A student of the literature of our own time who has only recently
completed his first half century of life cannot help feeling suddenly
aged and almost antiquated when he awakes to the fact that he has been
privileged to see the completed literary career of two such accomplished
craftsmen as Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant. In youth they
were full of promise, and in maturity they were rich in performance; and
all too soon the lives of both came to an end, when their powers were
still growing, when their outlook on life was still broadening, and when
they bid fair, both of them, to bring forth many another book riper and
wiser than any they had already given us.

The points of contrast between the two men thus untimely taken away are
as striking as the points of similarity. Both were artists ardently in
love with the technic of their craft, delighting in their own skill, and
ever on the alert to find new occasion for the display of their mastery
of the methods of fiction. Stevenson was a Scotchman; and his
pseudo-friend has told us that there was in him something of "the
shorter catechist." Maupassant was a Norman, and he had never given a
thought to the glorifying of God. The man who wrote in English found the
theme of his minor masterpieces in the conflict of which the
battle-ground is the human heart. The man who wrote in French began by
caring little or nothing for the heart or the soul or the mind, and by
concentrating all his skill upon a record of the deeds of the human
body. The one has left us 'Markheim' and the 'Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde,' while the other made his first bid for fame with 'Boule
de suif.'

In the preface of 'Pierre et Jean,' Maupassant has recorded how he
acquired from Louis Bouilhet the belief that a single lyric, a scant
hundred lines, would give immortality to a poet if only the work were
fine enough, and that for the author who sought to escape oblivion there
was only one course to pursue--to learn his trade thoroly, to master
every secret of the craft, to do his best always, in the hope that some
fortunate day the Muse would reward his unfailing devotion. And from
Flaubert, the author of that merciless masterpiece 'Madame Bovary,' the
young man learned the importance of individuality, of originality, of
the personal note which should be all his own, and which should never
suggest or recall any one else's. Flaubert was kindly and encouraging,
but he was a desperately severe taskmaster. At Flaubert's dictation
Maupassant gave up verse for prose; and for seven years he wrote
incessantly and published nothing. The stories and tales and verses and
dramas of those seven years of apprenticeship were ruthlessly criticized
by the author of 'Salammbô,' and then they were destroyed unprinted. In
all the long history of literature there is no record of any other
author who served so severe a novitiate.

Douglas Jerrold once said of a certain British author who had begun to
publish very young that "he had taken down the shutters before he had
anything to put up in the shop window." From being transfixt by such a
jibe Maupassant was preserved by Flaubert. When he was thirty he
contributed that masterpiece of ironic humor 'Boule de suif,' to the
'Soirées de Médan,' a volume of short-stories put forth by the late
Émile Zola, with the collaboration of a little group of his friends and
followers. On this first appearance in the arena of letters Maupassant
stept at once to a foremost place. That was in 1880; and in 1892 his
mind gave way and he was taken to the asylum, where he soon died. In
those twelve years he had published a dozen volumes of short-stories
and half a dozen novels. Of the novel he might have made himself master
in time; of the short-story he proved himself a master with the very
earliest of all his tales.

It must be admitted at once that many of Maupassant's earlier
short-stories have to do with the lower aspects of man's merely animal
activity. Maupassant had an abundance of what the French themselves
called "Gallic salt." His humor was not squeamish; it delighted in
dealing with themes that our Anglo-Saxon prudery prefers not to touch.
But even at the beginning this liking of his for the sort of thing that
we who speak English prefer to avoid in print never led him to put dirt
where dirt was not a necessary element of his narrative. Dirty many of
these tales were, no doubt; but many of them

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/16746