The power of grasping a work of art as a unit is one which should be deliberately cultivated. It is hardly likely to come unsought, even to the most imaginative. It must rest, in the first place, upon a reading of books as a whole. Whatever in any serious sense is worth reading once is worth rereading indefinitely. It is idle to hope to grasp a thing as a whole until one has become familiar with its parts. When once the details are clear in the mind, it is possible to read with a distinct and deliberate sense of the share that each passage bears in the entire purpose. It is necessary, and I may add that it is enchanting, to reread until the detached points gather themselves together in the inner consciousness as molecules in a solution gather themselves into a crystal. The delight of being able to realize what an author had in mind as a whole is like that of the traveler who at last, after long days of baffling mists which allowed but broken glimpses here and there, sees before him the whole of some noble mountain, stripped clean of clouds, standing sublime between earth and heaven.
Whatever effect a book has must depend largely upon the sympathy between the reader and the author. To read sympathetically is as fundamental a condition of good reading as is to read intelligently. It is well known how impossible it is to talk with a person who is unresponsive, who will not yield his own mood, and who does not share another's point of view. On the other hand, we have all tried to listen to speakers with whom it was not in our power to find ourselves in accord, and the result was merely unprofitable weariness. For the time being the reader must give himself up to the mood of the writer; he must follow his guidance, and receive not only his words but his suggestions with fullest acquiescence of perception, whatever be the differences of judgment. What Hawthorne has said of painting is equally applicable to literature: —
A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out the painter's art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control and work along with him to such an extent that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating. Like all revelations of the better life, the adequate perception of a great work demands a gifted simplicity of vision. —Marble Faun, xxxvii.
Often it is difficult to find any meaning in what is written unless the reader has entered into the spirit in which it was composed. I seriously doubt, for instance, whether the ordinary person, coming upon the following catch of satyrs, by Ben Jonson, is able to find it much above the level of the melodies of Mother Goose: —
"Buz," quoth the blue fly,
"Hum," quoth the bee;
Buz and hum they cry,
And so do we.
In his ear, in his nose,
Thus, do you see?
He ate the dormouse;
Else it was he.
If you are not able to make much out of this, listen to what Leigh Hunt says of it: —
It is impossible that anything could better express than this, either the wild and practical joking of the satyrs, or the action of the thing described, or the quaintness and fitness of the images, or the melody and even harmony, the intercourse, of the musical words, one with another. None but a boon companion, with a very musical ear, could have written it. —A Jar of Honey.
If the reader has the key to the mood in which this catch is written, if he has given himself up to the sportive spirit in which "rare old Ben" conceived it, it is possible to find in it the merit which Hunt points out; but without thus giving ourselves up to the leadership of the poet it is hardly possible to make of it anything at all. The example is of course somewhat extreme, but the principle is universal.
It is always well in a first reading to give one's self up to the sweep of the work; to go forward without bothering over slight errors or small details. Notes are not for the first or the second perusal so much as for the third and so on to the hundredth. Dr. Johnson is right when he says: —
Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils. Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasures that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop to correction or explanation.
One of the great obstacles to the enjoyment of any art is the too conscientious desire to enjoy. We are constantly hindered by the conventional responsibility to experience over each classic the proper emotion. The student is often so occupied in painful struggles to feel that which he has been told to feel that he remains utterly cold and unmoved. It is like going to some historic locality of noble suggestion, where an officious guide moves the visitor from one precious spot to another, saying in effect: "Here such an event happened. Now thrill. Sixpence a thrill, please." For myself, being of a somewhat contumacious character, I have never been able to thrill to order, even if a shilling instead of sixpence were the price of the luxury; and in the same way I am unable to follow out a prescribed set of emotions at the command of a text-book on literature. Perhaps my temperament has made me unjustly skeptical, but I have never been able to have much faith in the genuineness of feelings carried on at the ordering of an emotional programme. The student should let himself go. On the first reading, at least, let what will happen so you are swept along in full enjoyment. It is better to read with delight and misunderstand, than to plod forward in wise stupidity, understanding all and comprehending nothing; gaining the letter and failing utterly to achieve the spirit. The letter may be attended to at any time; make sure first of the spirit. I do not mean that one is to read carelessly; but I do mean that one is to read enthusiastically, joyously, and, if it be possible, even passionately.
The best test of the completeness with which one has entered into the heart of a book is just this keenness of enjoyment. Fully to share the mood of the author is to share something of the delight of creation. It is as if in the mind of the reader this work of beauty and of immortal significance was springing into being. This enjoyment, moreover, increases with familiarity. If you find that you do not care to take up again a masterpiece because you have read it once, you may pretty safely conclude that you have never truly read it at all. You have been over it, it may be, and gratified some superficial curiosity; but you have never got to its heart. Does one claim to be won to the heart of a friend and yet to be willing never to see that friend more?
One may, of course, outgrow even a masterpiece. There are authors who are genuine so far as they go, who may be enjoyed at one stage of growth, yet who as the student advances become insufficient and unattractive. The man who does not outgrow is not growing. One does not healthily tire of a real book, however, until he has become greater than that book. The interest which becomes weary of a masterpiece is more than half curiosity, and at best is no more than intellectual. It is not imaginative. Margaret Fuller confessed that she tired of everything she read, even of Shakespeare. She thereby unconsciously discovered the quality of mind which prevented her from being a great woman instead of merely a brilliant one. She fed her intellect upon literature; but she failed because literature does not reach to its highest function unless its appeal to the intellect is the means of touching and arousing the imagination; because the end of all art is not the mind but the emotions.
It may seem that enough has already been required to make reading the most serious of undertakings; yet there is still one requirement more which is of the utmost importance. He is unworthy to share the delights of great work who is not able to respect it; he has no right to meddle with the best of literature who is not prepared to approach it with some reverence. In the greatest books the master minds of the race have graciously bidden their fellows into their high company. The honor should be treated according to its worth. Irreverence is the deformity of a diseased mind. The man who cannot revere what is noble is innately degraded. When writers of genius have given us their best thoughts, their deepest imaginings, their noblest emotions, it is for us to receive them with bared heads. He is greatly to be pitied who, in reading high imaginative work, has never been conscious of a sense of being in a fine and noble presence, of having been admitted into a place which should not be profaned. Only that soul is great which can appreciate greatness. Remember that there is no surer measure of what you are than the extent to which you are able to rise to the heights of supreme books; the extent to which you are able to comprehend, to delight in, and to revere, the masterpieces of literature.
VII
THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE
Whatever intelligence man imparts to man, at least all beyond the crudest rudimentary beginnings, must be conveyed by conventions. There must have been an agreement, tacit or explicit, that a certain sign shall stand for a certain idea; and when that idea is to be expressed, this sign must be used. In order that the meaning of any communication may be understood, it is essential that the means of expression be appreciated by hearer as well as by speaker. We have agreed that in English a given sound shall represent a given idea; and to one who knows this tongue the specified sound, either spoken or suggested by letters, calls that idea up. To one unacquainted with English, the sound is meaningless, because he is not a party to the agreement which has fixed for it a conventional significance; or it may awake in his thought an idea entirely different, because he belongs to a nation where tacit agreement has fixed upon another meaning. The word "dot," for instance, has by English-speaking folk been appropriated to the notion of a trifling point or mark; while those who speak French, writing and pronouncing the word in the same way, take it to indicate a dowry. In order to communicate with any man, it is necessary to know what is the set of conventions with which he is accustomed to convey and to receive ideas.
The principle holds also in art. There is a conventional language in sound or color or form as there is in words. It is broader as a rule, because oftener founded upon general human characteristics, because more directly and obviously borrowed from nature, and because not so warped and distorted by those concessions to utility which have modified the common tongues of men. Indeed, it might at first thought seem that the language of art is universal, but a little reflection will show that this is not the case. The sculpture of the Aztecs, for instance, is in an art language utterly different from that of the sculpture of the Greeks. If you recall the elaborately intricate uncouthness of the gods of old Yucatan, you will easily appreciate that the artists who shaped these did not employ the same artistic conventions as did the sculptors who breathed life into the Venus of Melos, or who embodied divine serenity and beauty in the Elgin marbles. To the Greeks those twisted and thick-lipped Aztec deities, clutching one another by their crests of plumes, or grasping rudely at one another's arms, would have conveyed no sentiment of beauty or of reverence; while it is equally to be supposed that the Aztec would have remained hardly moved before the wonders of Greek sculpture. The Hellenic art conventions, it is true, were more directly founded upon nature, and therefore more readily understood; but even this would not have overcome the fact that one nation had one art language and the other another. Those of you who were at the Columbian Exposition will remember how the music in the Midway Plaisance illustrated this same point. The weird strain of one or another savage or barbaric folk came to the ear with a strangeness which showed how ignorant we are of the language of the music of these dwellers in far lands. To us it was bizarre or moving, but we could form little idea how it struck the hearers to whom it was native and familiar. It was even all but impossible to know whether a given strain was felt by the savage performers to be grave or gay. Of all the varieties of sound which there surprised the ear, that evolved by the Chinese appeared most harsh and unmelodious. The almond-eyed Celestial seemed to delight in a concatenation of crash and caterwauling, mingled in one infernal cacophony at which the nerves tingled and the hair stood on end. Yet it is on record that when in the early days of European intercourse with China, the French missionary Amiot played airs by Rossini and Boieldieu to a Chinese mandarin of intelligence and of cultivation according to eastern standards, the Oriental shook his head disapprovingly. He politely expressed his thanks for the entertainment, but when pressed to give an opinion of the music he was forced to reply: "It is sadly devoid of meaning and expression, while Chinese music penetrates the soul." After we have smiled at the absurdity, from our point of view, of the penetration of the soul by Chinese music, we reflect that after all our music is probably as absurd to them as theirs to us. We perhaps recall the fact that even the cultivated Japanese, with their sensitive feeling for art, and their readiness to adopt occidental customs, complain of the effect of dividing music into regular bars, and making it, as they say, "chip-chop, chip-chop, chip-chop." The fact is that every civilization makes its art language as it makes its word language; and he who would understand the message must understand the conventions by which it is expressed.
We are apt to forget this fact of the conventionality of all language. We become so accustomed both to the speech of ordinary intercourse and to that of familiar art, that we inevitably come to regard them as natural and almost universal. No language, however, is natural, unless it be fair to apply that word to the most primitive signs of savages. It is an arbitrary thing, and as such it must be learned. We acquire the ordinary tongue of our race almost unconsciously, and while we are too young to reason about it. We gain the language of art later and more deliberately, although of course we may owe much to our early surroundings in this as in every other respect. The point to be kept in mind is that we do learn it; that it is not the gift of nature. This is of course true of all art; but here our concern is only with the fact that literature has as truly its own peculiar language as music or painting or sculpture, – its language, that is, distinct from the language of ordinary daily or common speech.
The conventions which serve efficiently to convey ordinary ideas and matter-of-fact statements, are not sufficient for the expression of emotions. The man who has to tell the price of pigs and potatoes, the amount of coal consumed in a locomotive engine, or the effect of political complications upon the stock-market, is able to serve himself sufficiently well with ordinary language. The novelist who has to tell of the bewitchingly willful worldliness of Beatrix Esmond, of the fateful and tragic experiences of Donatello and Miriam, the splendidly real impossibilities of the career of D'Artagnan and his three friends, the passion of Richard Feverel for Lucy, of Kmita for Olenka, of Marius for Cosette; the dramatist who endeavors to make his readers share the emotions of Lear and Cordelia, of Caliban and Desdemona, of Viola and Juliet; the poet who would picture the emotions of Pompilia, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Porphyrio and Madeline, of Prometheus and Asia, – all these require an especial language.
The conveying from mind to mind of emotion is a delicate task. It is not difficult to make a man understand the price of oysters, but endeavor to share with a fellow-being the secrets of a moment of transcendent feeling, and you have an undertaking so complex, and so all but impossible, that if you can perfectly succeed in it you may justly call yourself the first writer of your age. This is the making of the intangible tangible; the highest creative act of the imagination. The cleverness and the skill of man have been exhausted in devising means to impart to readers the thought and feeling, the passion and emotion, which sway the hearts of mankind. It is not necessary here to go into those devices which belong especially to the domain of rhetoric, – the mechanics of style. They are designated in the old-fashioned text-books by tongue-twisting Greek names which most of us have learned, and which all of us have forgotten. It is not with them that I am here concerned. They are meant to affect the reader unconsciously. It is with those matters which appeal to the conscious understanding that we have now to do; the conventions which are the language of literature as Latin was the language of Cæsar or Greek the tongue of Pericles.
I have spoken already of the necessity of understanding what is said in literature; this is, however, by no means the whole of the matter. It is of even greater importance to be clearly aware of what is implied. We test the imaginative quality of what is written by its power of suggestion. The writer who has imagination will have so much to say that he is forced to make a phrase call up a whole train of thought, a word bring vividly to the mind of the reader a picture or a history. This is what critics mean when they speak of the marvelous condensation of Shakespeare; and in either prose or verse the criterion of imaginative writing is whether it is suggestive. Imagination is the realizing faculty. It is the power of receiving as true the ideal. It is the accepting as actual that which is conjured up by the inner vision; the making vital, palpitant, and present that which is known to be materially but a dream. That which is written when the poet sees the unseen palpably before his inner eye is so filled with the vitality and actuality of his vision that it fills the mind of the reader as a tenth wave floods and overflows a hollow in the rocks of the shore. When Keats says of the song of the nightingale that it is
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,
all the romance and witchery of faery-lore are in this single phrase. The reader feels the glow of delight, the fascination of old tales which have pleased mankind from the childhood of the race. Into two lines the poet has condensed the fragrance of a thousand flowers of folk-lore.
In the best literature what is said directly is often of less importance than what is meant but not said. In dealing with imaginative writers, it is necessary to keep always in mind the fact that the literal meaning is but a part, and often not the greater part. The implied, the indirect, is apt to be that for the sake of which the work is written.
In its earlier stages all language is largely made up of comparisons. The fact that every tongue is full of fossil similes has been constantly commented upon, and this fact serves to illustrate how greatly the force of a word may be diminished if its original meaning is lost sight of. If, in ordinary conversation, to take a common illustration, some old-fashioned body now speak of a clergyman as a "pastor," it is to be feared that the word connotes little, unless it be a suspicion of rustic seediness in apparel, a certain provincial narrowness, and perhaps a conventional piety. When the word was still in its prime, it carried with it the force of its derivation; it spoke eloquently of one who ministered spiritual food to his followers, as a shepherd ministers to his flock. A pastor may now be as good as a pastor was then, but the title has ceased to do him justice. The freshness and force of words get worn off in time, as does by much use the sharpness of outline of a coin. We need constantly to guard against this tendency of language. We speak commonly enough in casual conversation of "a sardonic smile," but the idea conveyed is no more than that of a forced and heartless grin. As far back as the days of Homer, some imaginative man compared the artificial and sinister smile of a cynic to the distortions and convulsions produced by a poisonous herb in Sardinia; and from its very persistence we may fancy how forcible and striking was the comparison in its freshness. Of course, modern writers do not necessarily keep in mind the derivation of every word and phrase which they employ; but they do at least use terms with so much care for propriety and exactness that it is impossible to seize the whole of their meaning, unless we appreciate the niceties of their language. Ruskin says rightly: —
You must get yourself into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, letter by letter… You might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly "illiterate," uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, – that is to say, with real accuracy, – you are forevermore in some measure an educated person. —Of Kings' Treasuries.
Unless our attention has been especially called to the fact, there are few of us who at all realize how carelessly it is possible to read. We begin in the nursery to let words pass without attaching to them any idea which is really clear. We nourish our infant imaginations upon Mother Goose, and are content to go all our days in ignorance even of the meaning of a good many of the words so fondly familiar in pinafore days. We are all acquainted with the true and thrilling tale how
Thomas T. Tattamus took two tees
To tie two tups up to two tall trees;
but how many of us know what either a "tee" or a "tup" is? We have all been stirred in our susceptible youth by the rhyme wherein is recounted the exciting adventure of the four and twenty tailors who set forth to slay a snail, but who retreated in precipitate confusion when
She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow;
but it is to be feared that the proportion of us is not large who have taken the trouble to ascertain what is a Kyloe cow. Or take the well-worn ditty: —
Cross-patch,
Draw the latch,
Sit by the fire and spin.
Have you ever stopped to reflect that "draw the latch" means to pull in the latch-string, and that in the days of homely general hospitality to which this contrivance belonged the image presented by the verse was that of a misanthropic hag, shutting herself off from her neighbors and sulking viciously by her fire behind a door rudely insulting the caller with the empty hole of the latch-string?
Perhaps this seems trifling; and it may easily be insisted that these rhymes become familiar to us while we are still too young to think of the exact meaning of anything. The question then is whether we do better when we are older. We are accustomed, very likely, to hear in common speech the phrase "pay through the nose." Do you know what that means, or that it goes back to the days of the Druids? When you hear the phrase "where the shoe pinches" do you recall Plutarch's story? Does the anecdote of St. Ambrose come to mind when the saying is "At Rome do as the Romans do"? It happens every few years that the newspapers are full of more or less excited talk about a "gerrymander." Does the word bring before the inner eye that uncouth monster wherewith the caricaturist of his day vexed the soul of Governor Gerry? I have tried to select examples which are not remote from the talk of every day. It seems to me that these illustrate well enough how apt we are to accept words and phrases as we accept a silver dollar, with very little idea of the intrinsic worth of what we are getting. This may be made to do well enough in practical buying and selling, but it is eminently unsatisfactory in matters intellectual or æsthetic. In the study of literature approximations are apt to be pretty nearly worthless.
The most obvious characteristic in literary language is that of allusion. Constantly does the reader of imaginative works encounter allusions to the Bible, to mythology, to history, to folk-lore, and to literature itself. To comprehend an author it is needful to realize fully what he had in mind when using these. They are the symbols of thoughts and feelings which are not to be expressed in ordinary ways. When we are familiar with the matter alluded to we see by the sudden and vivid light which is cast over the page by the comparison or the suggestion how expressive and comprehensive this form of language may be. To the reader who is ignorant the allusion is of course a stumbling-block and a rock of offense. It is like a sentence in an unknown tongue, which not only conceals its meaning but gives one an irritated sense of being shut out of the author's counsels.
It is probable that in English literature the allusions to the Bible are more numerous than any other. We shall have occasion later to speak of the place and influence of the King James version upon the literature of our tongue, and here we have to do only with those cases in which a scriptural reference is made part of the special language of an author. Again and again it happens that a writer takes advantage of the associations which cluster about a phrase or an incident of the Bible, and by a simple touch brings up in the mind of the understanding reader all the sentiments connected with the original.
With many of the more common of these phrases it is impossible for any one who associates with educated persons not to be familiar. They have become part and parcel of the common speech of the time. We speak of the "widow's mite," of a "Judas' kiss," of "the flesh-pots of Egypt," of "a still, small voice," of a "Jehu," a "perfect Babel," a "Nimrod," of "bread upon the waters," and of a "Delilah." The phrases have to a considerable extent acquired their own meaning, so that even one who is not familiar with the Scriptures is not likely to have difficulty in getting from them a general idea. To the reader who is acquainted with the force and origin of these terms, however, they have a vigor and significance which for others they must lack. The name Jehu brings up to him not merely a driver on a New England stage-coach, but the figure of the newly crowned usurper rushing down to the slaughter of King Joram, his master, when the watchman upon the wall looked out and said: "The driving is like the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously." The phrase "bread upon the waters" affords a good illustration here. Perhaps most readers are likely to know the origin of the quotation, and probably the promise which concludes it. The number is smaller who realize the figure to be that of the oriental farmer casting abroad the seed-rice over flooded fields, sowing for the harvest which he shall find "after many days." The phrase "a still, small voice" has become dulled by common use, – one might almost say profane, since the quotation is of a quality which should render it too dignified and noble for careless employment. It speaks to the reader who knows its origin of that magnificently impressive scene on Horeb when Elijah stood on the mount before the Lord: —
And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountain, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still, small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out and stood in the entering in of the cave. And behold, there came a voice unto him, and said: "What doest thou here, Elijah?" —1 Kings xix. 11-13.
It is not necessary to dwell upon this class of allusions. The reader who expects to get from them their full force must know the original; and while in ordinary speech these phrases are used carelessly and with little regard for their full significance, they are in the work of imaginative writers to be taken for all that they can and should convey.
There are other Biblical allusions which are less common and less obvious. When in the "Ode on the Nativity," Milton speaks of
– that twice batter'd god of Palestine,
the verse means much to the reader who recalls the double fall of the fish-tailed god Dagon before the captured ark of Israel, but to others it is likely to mean nothing whatever. To be ignorant of the tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego is to miss completely the force of Hazlitt's remark that certain artists are so absorbed in their own productions that "they walked through collections of the finest works like the Children in the Fiery Furnace, untouched, unapproached." Not to know the declaration of St. Paul of what he had suffered for his faith1 is to lose the point of Tennyson's verse
Not in vain,
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death.
Prose and poetry are alike full of scriptural phraseology. In short, for the understanding of the language of allusion in English literature a knowledge of the English Bible is neither more nor less than essential.