Chapter II: Part 2

The literature of creation naturally falls into two kinds: that which interprets nature or human action, and that which interprets self. Both of these may have the flavor of immortality, but neither unless it be free from self-consciousness. No man, therefore, can create after the best manner in either of these kinds who is an _habitué_ of the circles made so delightful by those interesting men, the modern _literati_, sophisticated in all the fashions, ready in all the catches of the knowing literary world which centres in the city and the university. He cannot always be simple and straightforward. He cannot be always and without pretension himself, bound by no other man’s canons of taste in speech or conduct. In the judgment of such circles there is but one thing for you to do if you would gain distinction: you must “beat the record;” you must do certain definite literary feats better than they have yet been done. You are pitted against the literary “field.” You are hastened into the paralysis of comparing yourself with others, and thus away from the health of unhesitating self-expression and directness of first-hand vision.

It would be not a little profitable if we could make correct analysis of the proper relations of learning--learning of the critical, accurate sort--to origination, of learning’s place in literature. Although learning is never the real parent of literature, but only sometimes its foster-father, and although the native promptings of soul and sense are its best and freshest sources, there is always the danger that learning will claim, in every court of taste which pretends to jurisdiction, exclusive and preëminent rights as the guardian and preceptor of authors. An effort is constantly being made to create and maintain standards of literary worldliness, if I may coin such a phrase. The thorough man of the world affects to despise natural feeling; does at any rate actually despise all displays of it. He has an eye always on his world’s best manners, whether native or imported, and is at continual pains to be master of the conventions of society; he will mortify the natural man as much as need be in order to be in good form. What learned criticism essays to do is to create a similar literary worldliness, to establish fashions and conventions in letters.

I have an odd friend in one of the northern counties of Georgia,--a county set off by itself among the mountains, but early found out by refined people in search of summer refuge from the unhealthful air of the southern coast. He belongs to an excellent family of no little culture, but he was surprised in the midst of his early schooling by the coming on of the war; and education given pause in such wise seldom begins again in the schools. He was left, therefore, to “finish” his mind as best he might in the companionship of the books in his uncle’s library. These books were of the old sober sort: histories, volumes of travels, treatises on laws and constitutions, theologies, philosophies more fanciful than the romances encased in neighbor volumes on another shelf. But they were books which were used to being taken down and read; they had been daily companions to the rest of the family, and they became familiar companions to my friend’s boyhood. He went to them day after day, because theirs was the only society offered him in the lonely days when uncle and brothers were at the war, and the women were busy about the tasks of the home. How literally did he make those delightful old volumes his familiars, his cronies! He never dreamed the while, however, that he was becoming learned; it never seemed to occur to him that everybody else did not read just as he did, in just such a library. He found out afterwards, of course, that he had kept much more of such company than had the men with whom he loved to chat at the post-office or around the fire in the village shops, the habitual resorts of all who were socially inclined; but he attributed that to lack of time on their part, or to accident, and has gone on thinking until now that all the books that come within his reach are the natural intimates of man. And so you shall hear him, in his daily familiar talk with his neighbors, draw upon his singular stores of wise, quaint learning with the quiet colloquial assurance, “They tell me,” as if books contained current rumor; and quote the poets with the easy unaffectedness with which others cite a common maxim of the street! He has been heard to refer to Dr. Arnold of Rugby as “that school teacher over there in England.”

Surely one may treasure the image of this simple, genuine man of learning as the image of a sort of masterpiece of Nature in her own type of erudition, a perfect sample of the kind of learning that might beget the very highest sort of literature; the literature, namely, of authentic individuality. It is only under one of two conditions that learning will not dull the edge of individuality: first, if one never suspect that it is creditable and a matter of pride to be learned, and so never become learned for the sake of becoming so; or, second, if it never suggest to one that investigation is better than reflection. Learned investigation leads to many good things, but one of these is not great literature, because learned investigation commands, as the first condition of its success, the repression of individuality.

His mind is a great comfort to every man who has one; but a heart is not often to be so conveniently possessed. Hearts frequently give trouble; they are straightforward and impulsive, and can seldom be induced to be prudent. They must be schooled before they will become insensible; they must be coached before they can be made to care first and most for themselves: and in all cases the mind must be their schoolmaster and coach. They are irregular forces; but the mind may be trained to observe all points of circumstance and all motives of occasion.

No doubt it is considerations of this nature that must be taken to explain the fact that our universities are erected entirely for the service of the tractable mind, while the heart’s only education must be gotten from association with its neighbor heart, and in the ordinary courses of the world. Life is its only university. Mind is monarch, whose laws claim supremacy in those lands which boast the movements of civilization, and it must command all the instrumentalities of education. At least such is the theory of the constitution of the modern world. It is to be suspected that, as a matter of fact, mind is one of those modern monarchs who reign, but do not govern. That old House of Commons, that popular chamber in which the passions, the prejudices, the inborn, unthinking affections long ago repudiated by mind, have their full representation, controls much the greater part of the actual conduct of affairs. To come out of the figure, reasoned thought is, though perhaps the presiding, not yet the regnant force in the world. In life and in literature it is subordinate. The future may belong to it; but the present and past do not. Faith and virtue do not wear its livery; friendship, loyalty, patriotism, do not derive their motives from it. It does not furnish the material for those masses of habit, of unquestioned tradition, and of treasured belief which are the ballast of every steady ship of state, enabling it to spread its sails safely to the breezes of progress, and even to stand before the storms of revolution. And this is a fact which has its reflection in literature. There is a literature of reasoned thought; but by far the greater part of those writings which we reckon worthy of that great name is the product, not of reasoned thought, but of the imagination and of the spiritual vision of those who see,--writings winged, not with knowledge, but with sympathy, with sentiment, with heartiness. Even the literature of reasoned thought gets its life, not from its logic, but from the spirit, the insight, and the inspiration which are the vehicle of its logic. Thought presides, but sentiment has the executive powers; the motive functions belong to feeling.

“Many people give many theories of literary composition,” says the most natural and stimulating of English critics, “and Dr. Blair, whom we will read, is sometimes said to have exhausted the subject; but, unless he has proved the contrary, we believe that the knack in style is to write like a human being. Some think they must be wise, some elaborate, some concise; Tacitus wrote like a pair of stays; some startle us, as Thomas Carlyle, or a comet, inscribing with his tail. But legibility is given to those who neglect these notions, and are willing to be themselves, to write their own thoughts in their own words, in the simplest words, in the words wherein they were thought.... Books are for various purposes,--tracts to teach, almanacs to sell, poetry to make pastry; but this is the rarest sort of a book,--a book to read. As Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, a good book is one you can hold in your hand, and take to the fire.’ Now there are extremely few books which can, with any propriety, be so treated. When a great author, as Grote or Gibbon, has devoted a whole life of horrid industry to the composition of a large history, one feels one ought not to touch it with a mere hand,--it is not respectful. The idea of slavery hovers over the Decline and Fall. Fancy a stiffly dressed gentleman, in a stiff chair, slowly writing that stiff compilation in a stiff hand; it is enough to stiffen you for life.”

It is devoutly to be wished that we might learn to prepare the best soils for mind, the best associations and companionships, the least possible sophistication. We are busy enough nowadays finding out the best ways of fertilizing and stimulating mind; but that is not quite the same thing as discovering the best soils for it, and the best atmospheres. Our culture is, by erroneous preference, of the reasoning faculty, as if that were all of us. Is it not the instinctive discontent of readers seeking stimulating contact with authors that has given us the present almost passionately spoken dissent from the standards set themselves by the realists in fiction, dissatisfaction with mere recording or observation? And is not realism working out upon itself the revenge its enemies would fain compass? Must not all April Hopes exclude from their number the hope of immortality?

The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men prepare for him,--not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.

III.

ON AN AUTHOR’S CHOICE OF COMPANY.

Once and again, it would seem, a man is born into the world belated. Strayed out of a past age, he comes among us like an alien, lives removed and singular, and dies a stranger. There was a touch of this strangeness in Charles Lamb. Much as he was loved and befriended, he was not much understood; for he drew aloof in his studies, affected a “self-pleasing quaintness” in his style, took no pains to hit the taste of his day, wandered at sweet liberty in an age which could scarcely have bred such another. “Hang the age!” he cried. “I will write for antiquity.” And he did. He wrote as if it were still Shakespeare’s day; made the authors of that spacious time his constant companions and study; and deliberately became himself “the last of the Elizabethans.” When a new book came out, he said, he always read an old one.

The case ought, surely, to put us occasionally upon reflecting. May an author not, in some degree, by choosing his literary company, choose also his literary character, and so, when he comes to write, write himself back to his masters? May he not, by examining his own tastes and yielding himself obedient to his natural affinities, join what congenial group of writers he will? The question can be argued very strongly in the affirmative, and that not alone because of Charles Lamb’s case. It might be said that Lamb was antique only in the forms of his speech; that he managed very cleverly to hit the taste of his age in the substance of what he wrote, for all the phraseology had so strong a flavor of quaintness and was not at all in the mode of the day. It would not be easy to prove that; but it really does not matter. In his tastes, certainly, Lamb was an old author, not a new one; a “modern antique,” as Hood called him. He wrote for his own age, of course, because there was no other age at hand to write for, and the age he liked best was past and gone; but he wrote what he fancied the great generations gone by would have liked, and what, as it has turned out in the generosity of fortune, subsequent ages have warmly loved and reverently canonized him for writing; as if there were a casual taste that belongs to a day and generation, and also a permanent taste which is without date, and he had hit the latter.

Great authors are not often men of fashion. Fashion is always a harness and restraint, whether it be fashion in dress or fashion in vice or fashion in literary art; and a man who is bound by it is caught and formed in a fleeting mode. The great writers are always innovators; for they are always frank, natural, and downright, and frankness and naturalness always disturb, when they do not wholly break down, the fixed and complacent order of fashion. No genuine man can be deliberately in the fashion, indeed, in what he says, if he have any movement of thought or individuality in him. He remembers what Aristotle says, or if he does not, his own pride and manliness fill him with the thought instead. The very same action that is noble if done for the satisfaction of one’s own sense of right or purpose of self-development, said the Stagirite, may, if done to satisfy others, become menial and slavish. “It is the object of any action or study that is all-important,” and if the author’s chief object be to please he is condemned already. The true spirit of authorship is a spirit of liberty which scorns the slave’s trick of imitation. It is a masterful spirit of conquest within the sphere of ideas and of artistic form,--an impulse of empire and origination.

Of course a man may choose, if he will, to be less than a free author. He may become a reporter; for there is such a thing as reporting for books as well as reporting for newspapers, and there have been reporters so amazingly clever that their very aptness and wit constitute them a sort of immortals. You have proof of this in Horace Walpole, at whose hands gossip and compliment receive a sort of apotheosis. Such men hold the secret of a kind of alchemy by which things trivial and temporary may be transmuted into literature. But they are only inspired reporters, after all; and while a man was wishing, he might wish to be more, and climb to better company.

Every man must, of course, whether he will or not, feel the spirit of the age in which he lives and thinks and does his work; and the mere contact will direct and form him more or less. But to wish to serve the spirit of the age at any sacrifice of individual naturalness or conviction, however small, is to harbor the germ of a destroying disease. Every man who writes ought to write for immortality, even though he be of the multitude that die at their graves; and the standards of immortality are of no single age. There are many qualities and causes that give permanency to a book, but universal vogue during the author’s lifetime is not one of them. Many authors now immortal have enjoyed the applause of their own generations; many authors now universally admired will, let us hope, pass on to an easy immortality. The praise of your own day is no absolute disqualification; but it may be if it be given for qualities which your friends are the first to admire, for ’tis likely they will also be the last. There is a greater thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages. It is present in your own day; it is even dominant then, with a sort of accumulated power and mastery. If you can strike it, you will strike, as it were, into the upper air of your own time, where the forces are which run from age to age. Lower down, where you breathe, is the more inconstant air of opinion, inhaled, exhaled, from day to day,--the variant currents, the forces that will carry you, not forward, but hither and thither.

We write nowadays a great deal with our eyes circumspectly upon the tastes of our neighbors, but very little with our attention bent upon our own natural, self-speaking thoughts and the very truth of the matter whereof we are discoursing. Now and again, it is true, we are startled to find how the age relishes still an old-fashioned romance, if written with a new-fashioned vigor and directness; how quaint and simple and lovely things, as well as what is altogether modern and analytic and painful, bring our most judicious friends crowding, purses in hand, to the book-stalls; and for a while we are puzzled to see worn-out styles and past modes revived. But we do not let these things seriously disturb our study of prevailing fashions. These books of adventure are not at all, we assure ourselves, in the true spirit of the age, with its realistic knowledge of what men really do think and purpose, and the taste for them must be only for the moment or in jest. We need not let our surprise at occasional flurries and variations in the literary market cloud or discredit our analysis of the real taste of the day, or suffer ourselves to be betrayed into writing romances, however much we might rejoice to be delivered from the drudgery of sociological study, and made free to go afield with our imaginations upon a joyous search for hidden treasure or knightly adventure.

And yet it is quite likely, after all, that the present age is transient. Past ages have been. It is probable that the objects and interests now so near us, looming dominant in all the foreground of our day, will sometime be shifted and lose their place in the perspective. That has happened with the near objects and exaggerated interests of other days, so violently sometimes as to submerge and thrust out of sight whole libraries of books. It will not do to reckon upon the persistence of new things. ’Twere best to give them time to make trial of the seasons. The old things of art and taste and thought are the permanent things. We know that they are because they have lasted long enough to grow old; and we deem it safe to assess the spirit of the age by the same test. No age adds a great deal to what it received from the age that went before it; no time gets an air all its own. The same atmosphere holds from age to age; it is only the little movements of the air that are new. In the intervals when the trades do not blow, fleeting cross-winds venture abroad, the which if a man wait for he may lose his voyage.

No man who has anything to say need stop and bethink himself whom he may please or displease in the saying of it. He has but one day to write in, and that is his own. He need not fear that he will too much ignore it. He will address the men he knows when he writes, whether he be conscious of it or not; he may dismiss all fear on that score and use his liberty to the utmost. There are some things that can have no antiquity and must ever be without date, and genuineness and spirit are of their number. A man who has these must ever be “timely,” and at the same time fit to last, if he can get his qualities into what he writes. He may freely read, too, what he will that is congenial, and form himself by companionships that are chosen simply because they are to his taste; that is, if he be genuine and in very truth a man of independent spirit. Lamb would have written “for antiquity” with a vengeance had his taste for the quaint writers of an elder day been an affectation, or the authors he liked men themselves affected and ephemeral. No age this side antiquity would ever have vouchsafed him a glance or a thought. But it was not an affectation, and the men he preferred were as genuine and as spirited as he was. He was simply obeying an affinity and taking cheer after his own kind. A man born into the real patriciate of letters may take his pleasure in what company he will without taint or loss of caste; may go confidently abroad in the free world of books and choose his comradeships without fear of offense.

More than that, there is no other way in which he can form himself, if he would have his power transcend a single age. He belittles himself who takes from the world no more than he can get from the speech of his own generation. The only advantage of books over speech is that they may hold from generation to generation, and reach, not a small group merely, but a multitude of men; and a man who writes without being a man of letters is curtailed of his heritage. It is in this world of old and new that he must form himself if he would in the end belong to it and increase its bulk of treasure. If he has conned the new theories of society, but knows nothing of Burke; the new notions about fiction, and has not read his Scott and his Richardson; the new criminology, and wots nothing of the old human nature; the new religions, and has never felt the power and sanctity of the old, it is much the same as if he had read Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and had never opened Shakespeare. How is he to know wholesome air from foul, good company from bad, visions from nightmares? He has framed himself for the great art and handicraft of letters only when he has taken all the human parts of literature as if they were without date, and schooled himself in a catholic sanity of taste and judgment.

Then he may very safely choose what company his own work shall be done in,--in what manner, and under what masters. He cannot choose amiss for himself or for his generation if he choose like a man, without light whim or weak affectation; not like one who chooses a costume, but like one who chooses a character. What is it, let him ask himself, that renders a bit of writing a “piece of literature”? It is reality. A “wood-note wild,” sung unpremeditated and out of the heart; a description written as if with an undimmed and seeing eye upon the very object described; an exposition that lays bare the very soul of the matter; a motive truly revealed; anger that is righteous and justly spoken; mirth that has its sources pure; phrases to find the heart of a thing, and a heart seen in things for the phrases to find; an unaffected meaning set out in language that is its own,--such are the realities of literature. Nothing else is of the kin. Phrases used for their own sake; borrowed meanings which the borrower does not truly care for; an affected manner; an acquired style; a hollow reason; words that are not fit; things which do not live when spoken,--these are its falsities, which die in the handling.

The very top breed of what is unreal is begotten by imitation. Imitators succeed sometimes, and flourish, even while a breath may last; but “imitate and be damned” is the inexorable threat and prophecy of fate with regard to the permanent fortunes of literature. That has been notorious this long time past. It is more worth noting, lest some should not have observed it, that there are other and subtler ways of producing what is unreal. There are the mixed kinds of writing, for example. Argument is real if it come vital from the mind; narrative is real if the thing told have life and the narrator unaffectedly see it while he speaks; but to narrate and argue in the same breath is naught. Take, for instance, the familiar example of the early history of Rome. Make up your mind what was the truth of the matter, and then, out of the facts as you have disentangled them, construct a firmly touched narrative, and the thing you create is real, has the confidence and consistency of life. But mix the narrative with critical comment upon other writers and their variant versions of the tale, show by a nice elaboration of argument the whole conjectural basis of the story, set your reader the double task of doubting and accepting, rejecting and constructing, and at once you have touched the whole matter with unreality. The narrative by itself might have had an objective validity; the argument by itself an intellectual firmness, sagacity, vigor, that would have sufficed to make and keep it potent; but together they confound each other, destroy each other’s atmosphere, make a double miscarriage. The story is rendered unlikely, and the argument obscure. This is the taint which has touched all our recent historical writing. The critical discussion and assessment of the sources of information, which used to be a thing for the private mind of the writer, now so encroach upon the open text that the story, for the sake of which we would believe the whole thing was undertaken, is oftentimes fain to sink away into the foot-notes. The process has ceased to be either pure exegesis or straightforward narrative, and history has ceased to be literature.

Nor is this our only sort of mixed writing. Our novels have become sociological studies, our poems vehicles of criticism, our sermons political manifestos. We have confounded all processes in a common use, and do not know what we would be at. We can find no better use for Pegasus than to carry our vulgar burdens, no higher key for song than questionings and complainings. Fancy pulls in harness with intellectual doubt; enthusiasm walks apologetically alongside science. We try to make our very dreams engines of social reform. It is a parlous state of things for literature, and it is high time authors should take heed what company they keep. The trouble is, they all want to be “in society,” overwhelmed with invitations from the publishers, well known and talked about at the clubs, named every day in the newspapers, photographed for the news-stalls; and it is so hard to distinguish between fashion and form, costume and substance, convention and truth, the things that show well and the things that last well; so hard to draw away from the writers that are new and talked about and note those who are old and walk apart, to distinguish the tones which are merely loud from the tones that are genuine, to get far enough away from the press and the hubbub to see and judge the movements of the crowd!

Some will do it. Choice spirits will arise and make conquest of us, not “in society,” but with what will seem a sort of outlawry. The great growths of literature spring up in the open, where the air is free and they can be a law unto themselves. The law of life, here as elsewhere, is the law of nourishment: with what was the earth laden, and the atmosphere? Literatures are renewed, as they are originated, by uncontrived impulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in the mind. Once conceive the matter so, and Lamb’s quaint saying assumes a sort of gentle majesty. A man should “write for antiquity” as a tree grows into the ancient air,--this old air that has moved upon the face of the world ever since the day of creation, which has set the law of life to all things, which has nurtured the forests and won the flowers to their perfection, which has fed men’s lungs with life, sped their craft upon the seas, borne abroad their songs and their cries, blown their forges to flame, and buoyed up whatever they have contrived. ’Tis a common medium, though a various life; and the figure may serve the author for instruction.

The breeding of authors is no doubt a very occult thing, and no man can set the rules of it; but at least the sort of “ampler ether” in which they are best brought to maturity is known. Writers have liked to speak of the Republic of Letters, as if to mark their freedom and equality; but there is a better phrase, namely, the Community of Letters; for that means intercourse and comradeship and a life in common. Some take up their abode in it as if they had made no search for a place to dwell in, but had come into the freedom of it by blood and birthright. Others buy the freedom with a great price, and seek out all the sights and privileges of the place with an eager thoroughness and curiosity. Still others win their way into it with a certain grace and aptitude, next best to the ease and dignity of being born to the right. But for all it is a bonny place to be. Its comradeships are a liberal education. Some, indeed, even there, live apart; but most run always in the market-place to know what all the rest have said. Some keep special company, while others keep none at all. But all feel the atmosphere and life of the place in their several degrees.

No doubt there are national groups, and Shakespeare is king among the English, as Homer is among the Greeks, and sober Dante among his gay countrymen. But their thoughts all have in common, though speech divide them; and sovereignty does not exclude comradeship or embarrass freedom. No doubt there is many a willful, ungoverned fellow endured there without question, and many a churlish cynic, because he possesses that patent of genuineness or of a wit which strikes for the heart of things, which, without further test, secures citizenship in that free company. What a gift of tongues is there, and of prophecy! What strains of good talk, what counsel of good judgment, what cheer of good tales, what sanctity of silent thought! The sight-seers who pass through from day to day, the press of voluble men at the gates, the affectation of citizenship by mere sojourners, the folly of those who bring new styles or affect old ones, the procession of the generations, disturb the calm of that serene community not a whit. They will entertain a man a whole decade, if he happen to stay so long, though they know all the while he can have no permanent place among them.

’T would be a vast gain to have the laws of that community better known than they are. Even the first principles of its constitution are singularly unfamiliar. It is not a community of writers, but a community of letters. One gets admission, not because he writes,--write he never so cleverly, like a gentleman and a man of wit,--but because he is literate, a true initiate into the secret craft and mystery of letters. What that secret is a man may know, even though he cannot practice or appropriate it. If a man can see the permanent element in things,--the true sources of laughter, the real fountains of tears, the motives that strike along the main lines of conduct, the acts which display the veritable characters of men, the trifles that are significant, the details that make the mass,--if he know these things, and can also choose words with a like knowledge of their power to illuminate and reveal, give color to the eye and passion to the thought, the secret is his, and an entrance to that immortal communion.

It may be that some learn the mystery of that insight without tutors; but most must put themselves under governors and earn their initiation. While a man lives, at any rate, he can keep the company of the masters whose words contain the mystery and open it to those who can see, almost with every accent; and in such company it may at last be revealed to him,--so plainly that he may, if he will, still linger in such comradeship when he is dead.

It would seem that there are two tests which admit to that company, and that they are conclusive. The one is, Are you individual? the other, Are you conversable? “I beg pardon,” said a grave wag, coming face to face with a small person of most consequential air, and putting glass to eye in calm scrutiny--“I beg pardon; but are you anybody in particular?” Such is very much the form of initiation into the permanent communion of the realm of letters. Tell them, No, but that you have done much better--you have caught the tone of a great age, studied taste, divined opportunity, courted and won a vast public, been most timely and most famous; and you shall be pained to find them laughing in your face. Tell them you are earnest, sincere, consecrate to a cause, an apostle and reformer, and they will still ask you, “But are you anybody in particular?” They will mean, “Were you your own man in what you thought, and not a puppet? Did you speak with an individual note and distinction that marked you able to think as well as to speak,--to be yourself in thoughts and in words also?” “Very well, then; you are welcome enough.”

“That is, if you be also conversable.” It is plain enough what they mean by that, too. They mean, if you have spoken in such speech and spirit as can be understood from age to age, and not in the pet terms and separate spirit of a single day and generation. Can the old authors understand you, that you would associate with them? Will men be able to take your meaning in the differing days to come? Or is it perishable matter of the day that you deal in--little controversies that carry no lasting principle at their heart; experimental theories of life and science, put forth for their novelty and with no test of their worth; pictures in which fashion looms very large, but human nature shows very small; things that please everybody, but instruct no one; mere fancies that are an end in themselves? Be you never so clever an artist in words and in ideas, if they be not the words that wear and mean the same thing, and that a thing intelligible, from age to age, the ideas that shall hold valid and luminous in whatever day or company, you may clamor at the gate till your lungs fail and get never an answer.

For that to what you seek admission is a veritable “community.” In it you must be able to be, and to remain, conversable. How are you to test your preparation meanwhile, unless you look to your comradeships now while yet it is time to learn? Frequent the company in which you may learn the speech and the manner which are fit to last. Take to heart the admirable example you shall see set you there of using speech and manner to speak your real thought and be genuinely and simply yourself.

IV.

A LITERARY POLITICIAN.

“Literary politician” is not a label much in vogue, and may need first of all a justification, lest even the man of whom I am about to speak should decline it from his very urn. I do not mean a politician who affects literature; who seems to appreciate the solemn moral purpose of Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior, and yet is opposed to ballot reform. Neither do I mean a literary man who affects politics; who earns his victories through the publishers, and his defeats at the hands of the men who control the primaries. I mean the man who has the genius to see deep into affairs, and the discretion to keep out of them,--the man to whom, by reason of knowledge and imagination and sympathetic insight, governments and policies are as open books, but who, instead of trying to put haphazard characters of his own into those books, wisely prefers to read their pages aloud to others. A man this who knows polities, and yet does not handle policies.

There is, no doubt, a very widespread skepticism as to the existence of such a man. Many people would ask you to prove him as well as define him; and that, as they assume, upon a very obvious principle. It is a rule of universal acceptance in theatrical circles that no one can write a good play who has no practical acquaintance with the stage. A knowledge of greenroom possibilities and of stage machinery, it is held, must go before all successful attempts to put either passion or humor into action on the boards, if pit and gallery are to get a sense of reality from the performance. No wonder that Sheridan’s plays were effective, for Sheridan was both author and actor; but abundant wonder that simple Goldsmith succeeded with his exquisite “She Stoops to Conquer,”--unless we are to suppose that an Irishman of the last century, like the Irishman of this, had some sixth sense which enabled him to understand other people’s business better than his own; for poor Goldsmith could not act (even off the stage), and his only connection with the theatre seems to have been his acquaintance with Garrick. Lytton, we know, had Macready constantly at his elbow, to give and enforce suggestions calculated to render plays playable. And in our own day, the authors of what we indulgently call “dramatic literature” find themselves constantly obliged to turn tragedies into comedies, comedies into farces, to satisfy the managers; for managers know the stage, and pretend to know all possible audiences also. The writer for the stage must be playwright first, author second.

Similar principles of criticism are not a little affected by those who play the parts, great and small, on the stage of politics. There is on that stage, too, it is said, a complex machinery of action and scene-shifting, a greenroom tradition and practice as to costume and make-up, as to entry and exit, necessities of concession to footlights and of appeal to the pit, quite as rigorous and quite as proper for study as are the concomitants of that other art which we frankly call acting. This is an idea, indeed, accepted in some quarters outside the political playhouse as well as within it. Mr. Sydney Colvin, for example, declares very rightly that:--

“Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to declaiming at their ease against the delinquencies of men of action and affairs. The inevitable friction of practical politics,” he argues, “generates heat enough already, and the office of the thinker and critic should be to supply not heat, but light. The difficulties which attend his own unmolested task--the task of seeking after and proclaiming salutary truths--should teach him to make allowance for the far more urgent difficulties which beset the politician; the man obliged, amidst the clash of interests and temptations, to practice from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain and at the same time the most indispensable of the experimental arts.”

Mr. Colvin is himself of the class of men of letters and of thought; he accordingly puts the case against his class much more mildly than the practical politician would desire to see it put. Practical politicians are wont to regard closeted writers upon politics with a certain condescension, dashed with slight traces of uneasy concern. “Literary men can say strong things of their age,” observes Mr. Bagehot, “for no one expects that they will go out and act on them. They are a kind of ticket-of-leave lunatics, from whom no harm is for the moment expected; who seem quiet, but on whose vagaries a practical public must have its eye.” I suppose that the really serious, practical man in politics would see nothing of satirical humor in such a description. He would have you note that, although traced with a sharp point of wit, the picture is nevertheless true. He can cite you a score of instances illustrative of the danger of putting faith in the political judgments of those who are not politicians bred in the shrewd and moving world of political management.

The genuine practical politician, such as (even our enemies being the witnesses) we must be acknowledged to produce in great numbers and perfection in this country, reserves his acidest contempt for the literary man who assumes to utter judgments touching public affairs and political institutions. If he be a reading man, as will sometimes happen, he is able to point you, in illustration of what you are to expect in such cases, to the very remarkable essays of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold on parliamentary policy and the Irish question. If he be not a reading man, as sometimes happens, he is able to ask, much to your confusion, “What does a fellow who lives inside a library know about politics, anyhow?” You have to admit, if you are candid, that most fellows who live in libraries know little enough. You remember Macaulay, and acknowledge that, although he made admirable speeches in Parliament, held high political office, and knew all the considerable public men of his time, he did imagine the creation to have been made in accordance with Whig notions; did hope to find the judgments of Lord Somers some day answering mankind as standards for all possible times and circumstances. You recall Gibbon, and allow, to your own thought at least, that, had he not remained silent in his seat, a very few of his sentences would probably have sufficed to freeze the House of Commons stiff. The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill enough fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For, it must be admitted, things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex. Not all the bindings of a library inclose the various world of circumstance.

But the practical politician should discriminate. Let him find a man with an imagination which, though it stands aloof, is yet quick to conceive the very things in the thick of which the politician struggles. To that man he should resort for instruction. And that there is occasionally such a man we have proof in Bagehot, the man who first clearly distinguished the facts of the English constitution from its theory.

Walter Bagehot is a name known to not a few of those who have a zest for the juiciest things of literature, for the wit that illuminates and the knowledge that refreshes. But his fame is still singularly disproportioned to his charm; and one feels once and again like publishing him, at least to all spirits of his own kind. It would be a most agreeable good fortune to introduce Bagehot to men who have not read him! To ask your friend to know Bagehot is like inviting him to seek pleasure. Occasionally, a man is born into the world whose mission it evidently is to clarify the thought of his generation, and to vivify it; to give it speed where it is slow, vision where it is blind, balance where it is out of poise, saving humor where it is dry,--and such a man was Walter Bagehot. When he wrote of history, he made it seem human and probable; when he wrote of political economy, he made it seem credible, entertaining,--nay, engaging even; when he wrote criticism, he wrote sense. You have in him a man who can jest to your instruction, who will beguile you into being informed beyond your wont and wise beyond your birthright. Full of manly, straightforward meaning, earnest to find the facts that guide and strengthen conduct, a lover of good men and seers, full of knowledge and a consuming desire for it, he is yet genial withal, with the geniality of a man of wit, and alive in every fibre of him, with a life he can communicate to you. One is constrained to agree, almost, with the verdict of a witty countryman of his, who happily still lives to cheer us, that when Bagehot died he “carried away into the next world more originality of thought than is now to be found in the three Estates of the Realm.”

An epitome of Bagehot’s life can be given very briefly. He was born in February, 1826, and died in March, 1877,--the month in which one would prefer to die. Between those two dates he had much quaint experience as a boy, and much sober business experience as a man. He wrote essays on poets, prose writers, statesmen, whom he would, with abundant insight, but without too much respect of persons; also books on banking, on the early development of society, and on English politics, kindling a flame of interest with these dry materials such as made men stare who had often described the facts of society themselves, but who had never dreamed of applying fire to them, as Bagehot did, to make them give forth light and wholesome heat. He set the minds of a few fortunate friends aglow with the delights of the very wonderful tongue which nature had given him through his mother. And then he died, while his power was yet young. Not a life of event or adventure, but a life of deep interest, none the less, because a life in which those two things of our modern life, commonly deemed incompatible, business and literature, namely, were combined without detriment to either; and from which, more interesting still, politics gained a profound expounder in one who was no politician and no party man, but, as he himself said, “between sizes in politics.”

Mr. Bagehot was born in the centre of Somersetshire, that southwestern county of old England whose coast towns look across Bristol Channel to the highlands of Wales: a county of small farms, and pastures that keep their promise of fatness to many generous milkers; a county broken into abrupt hills, and sodden moors hardly kept from the inroads of the sea, as well as rural valleys open to the sun; a county visited by mists from the sea, and bathed in a fine soft atmosphere all its own; visited also by people of fashion, for it contains Bath; visited now also by those who have read Lorna Doone, for within it lies part of that Exmoor Forest in which stalwart John Ridd lived and wrought his mighty deeds of strength and love: a land which the Celts kept for long against both Saxon and Roman, but which Christianity easily conquered, building Wells Cathedral and the monastery at Glastonbury. Nowhere else, in days of travel, could Bagehot find a land of so great delight save in the northwest corner of Spain, where a golden light lay upon everything, where the sea shone with a rare, soft lustre, and where there was a like varied coast-line to that he knew and loved at home. He called it “a sort of better Devonshire:” and Devonshire is Somersetshire,--only more so! The atmospheric effects of his county certainly entered the boy Bagehot, and colored the nature of the man. He had its glow, its variety, its richness, and its imaginative depth.

But better than a fair county is a good parentage, and that, too, Bagehot had; just the parentage one would wish to have who desired to be a force in the world’s thought. His father, Thomas Watson Bagehot, was for thirty years managing director and vice-president of Stuckey’s Banking Company, one of the oldest and best of those sturdy joint-stock companies which have for so many years stood stoutly up alongside the Bank of England as managers of the vast English fortune. But he was something more than a banker. He was a man of mind, of strong liberal convictions in politics, and of an abundant knowledge of English history wherewith to back up his opinions. He was one of the men who think, and who think in straight lines; who see, and see things. His mother was a Miss Stuckey, a niece of the founder of the banking company. But it was not her connection with bankers that made her an invaluable mother. She had, besides beauty, a most lively and stimulating wit; such a mind as we most desire to see in a woman,--a mind that stirs without irritating you, that rouses but does not belabor, amuses and yet subtly instructs. She could preside over the young life of her son in such a way as at once to awaken his curiosity and set him in the way of satisfying it. She was brilliant company for a boy, and rewarding for a man. She had suggestive people, besides, among her kinsmen, into whose companionship she could bring her son. Bagehot had that for which no university can ever offer an equivalent,--the constant and intelligent sympathy of both his parents in his studies, and their companionship in his tastes. To his father’s strength his mother added vivacity. He would have been wise, perhaps, without her; but he would not have been wise so delightfully.

Bagehot got his schooling in Bristol, his university training in London. In Bristol lived Dr. Prichard, his mother’s brother-in-law, and author of a notable book on the Physical History of Men. From him Bagehot unquestionably got his bent towards the study of race origins and development. In London, Cobden and Bright were carrying on an important part of their great agitation for the repeal of the corn laws, and were making such speeches as it stirred and bettered young men to hear. Bagehot had gone to University Hall, London, rather than to Oxford or Cambridge, because his father was a Unitarian, and would not have his son submit to the religious tests then required at the great universities. But there can be no doubt that there was more to be had at University Hall in that day than at either Oxford or Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge were still dragging the very heavy chains of a hindering tradition; the faculty of University Hall contained many thorough and some eminent scholars; what was more, University Hall was in London, and London itself was a quickening and inspiring teacher for a lad in love with both books and affairs, as Bagehot was. He could ask penetrating questions of his professors, and he could also ask questions of London, seek out her secrets of history, and so experience to the full the charm of her abounding life. In after years, though he loved Somersetshire and clung to it with a strong home-keeping affection, he could never stay away from London for more than six weeks at a time. Eventually he made it his place of permanent residence.