Literary values, and other papers

Title: Literary values, and other papers

Author: John Burroughs

Release date: July 23, 2024 [eBook #74104]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902

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Wake-Robin. Winter Sunshine. Locusts and Wild Honey. Fresh Fields. Indoor Studies. Birds and Poets, with Other Papers. Pepacton, and Other Sketches. Signs and Seasons. Riverby. Whitman: A Study. The Light of Day: Religious Discussions and Criticisms from the Standpoint of a Naturalist. Each of the above, 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.

LITERARY VALUES. A Series of Literary Essays. 16mo, gilt top, $1.10, net. Postage 9 cents.

A YEAR IN THE FIELDS. Selections appropriate to each season of the year, from the writings of John Burroughs. Illustrated from Photographs by Clifton Johnson. 12mo, $1.50.

WHITMAN: A Study. Riverside Edition. 12mo, $1.50, net.

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LITERARY VALUES. Riverside Edition. 12mo, $1.50, net. Postage 12 cents.

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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.

LITERARY VALUES AND OTHER PAPERS

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1902

COPYRIGHT 1902 BY JOHN BURROUGHS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published December, 1902

CONTENTS

[Pg 1]

LITERARY VALUES

I

LITERARY VALUES

I

THE day inevitably comes to every writer when he must take his place amid the silent throngs of the past, when no new work from his pen can call attention to him afresh, when the partiality of his friends no longer counts, when his friends and admirers are themselves gathered to the same silent throng, and the spirit of the day in which he wrote has given place to the spirit of another and a different day. How, oh, how will it fare with him then? How is it going to fare with Lowell and Longfellow and Whittier and Emerson and all the rest of them? How has it fared with so many names in the past, that were, in their own day, on all men’s tongues? Of the names just mentioned, Whittier and Emerson shared more in a particular movement of thought and morals of the times in which they lived than did the other two, and to that extent are they in danger of dropping out and losing their vogue. Both had a significance to their own day and generation[Pg 2] that they can hardly have to any other. The new times will have new soul maladies and need

other soul doctors. The fashions of this world pass away—fashions in thought, in style, in humor, in morals, as well as in anything else.

As men strip for a race, so must an author strip for this race with time. All that is purely local and accidental in him will only impede him; all that is put on or assumed will impede him—his affectations, his insincerities, his imitations; only what is vital and real in him, and is subdued to the proper harmony and proportion, will count. A malformed giant will not in this race keep pace with the lesser but better-built stripling. How many more learned and ponderous tomes has Gilbert White’s little book left behind! Mere novelty, how short-lived is that! Every age will have its own novelties. Every age will have its own hobbies and hobbyists, its own clowns, its own follies and fashions and infatuations. What every age will not have in the same measure is sanity, proportion, health, penetration, simplicity. The strained and overwrought, the fantastic and far-fetched, are sure to drop out. Every pronounced style, like Carlyle’s, is sure to suffer. The obscurities and affectations of some recent English poets and novelists are certain to drag

them down. Browning, with his sudden leaps and stops, and all that Italian rubbish, is fearfully handicapped.

Things do not endure in this world without a certain singleness and continence. Trees do not[Pg 3] grow and stand upright without a certain balance and proportion. A man does not live out half his days without a certain simplicity of life. Excesses, irregularities, violences, kill him. It is the same with books—they, too, are under the same law; they hold the gift of life on the same terms. Only an honest book can live; only absolute sincerity can stand the test of time. Any selfish or secondary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a religious life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreciate the literary value of the staple, fundamental human virtues and qualities—probity, directness, simplicity, sincerity, love. There is just as much room and need for the exercise of these qualities in the making of a book as in the building of a house, or in a business career. How conspicuous they are in all the enduring books—in Bunyan, in Walton, in Defoe, in the Bible! It is they that keep alive such a book as “Two Years before the Mast,” which

Stevenson pronounced the best sea-story in the language, as it undoubtedly is. None of Stevenson’s books have quite this probity and singleness of purpose, or show this effacement of the writer by the man. It might be said that our interest in such books is not literary at all, but purely human, like our interest in “Robinson Crusoe,” or in life and things themselves. The experience itself of a sailor’s life, however, would be to most of us very prosy and distasteful. Hence there is something in the record, something in the man behind the record, that colors his pages, and that is the source of our interest.[Pg 4] This personal element, this flavor of character, is the salt of literature. Without it, the page is savorless.

II

It is curious what an uncertain and seemingly capricious thing literary value is. How often it refuses to appear when diligently sought for, labored for, prayed for; and then comes without call to some simple soul that never gave it a thought. Learning cannot compass it, rhetoric cannot compass it, study cannot compass it. Mere wealth of language is entirely inadequate. It is like religion: often those who have it most have it least, and those who have it least have it most. In the works of the great composers—Gibbon, De Quincey, Macaulay—it is a conscious, deliberate product. Then, in other works, the very absence of the literary motive and interest gives an æsthetic pleasure.

One is surprised to read the remark of the “Saturday Review” on the published letters of Whitman,—letters that have no extrinsic literary value whatever, not one word of style,—namely, that few books are so well calculated to “purge the soul of nonsense;” and the remark of the fastidious Henry James on the same subject, that, with all their enormities of the common, the letters are positively delightful. Here, again, the source of our interest is undoubtedly in the personal revelation,—the type of man we see through the letters, and not in any wit or wisdom lodged in the letters themselves.

One reader seeks religious or moral values alone[Pg 5] in the works he reads; another seeks scientific or philosophical values; another, artistic and literary values; others, again, purely human values. No one, I think, would read Scott or Dickens for purely artistic values, while, on the other hand, it seems to me that one would go to Mr. James or to Mr. Howells for little else. One might read Froude with pleasure who had little confidence in him as an historian, but one could hardly read Freeman and discount him in the same way; one might have great delight in Ruskin, who repudiated much of his teaching.

I suppose one comes to like plain literature as he comes to like plain clothes, plain manners, simple living. What grows with us is the taste for the genuine, the real. The less a writer’s style takes thought of itself, the better we like it. The less his dress, his equipage, his house, concern themselves about appearances, the more we are pleased with them. Let the purpose be entirely serious, and let the seriousness be pushed till it suggests the heroic; that is what we crave as we grow older and tire of the vanities and shams of the world.

To have literary value is not necessarily to suggest books or literature; it is to possess a certain genuineness and seriousness that is like the validity of real things. See how much better literature Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is than the more elaborate and scholarly address of Everett on the same occasion. General Grant’s “Memoirs” have a higher literary value than those of any other general[Pg 6] in our Civil War, mainly because of the greater simplicity, seriousness, and directness of the personality they reveal. There is no more vanity and make-believe in the book than there was in the man. Any touch of the elemental, of the veracity and singleness of the natural forces, gives value to a man’s utterances, and Lincoln and Grant were undoubtedly the two most elemental men brought out by the war. The literary value of the Bible, doubtless, arises largely from its elemental character. The utterances of simple, unlettered men—farmers, sailors, soldiers—often have great force and impressiveness from the same cause; there are in them

the virtue and seriousness of real things. One great danger of schools, colleges, libraries, is that they tend to kill or to overlay this elemental quality in a man—to make the poet speak from his culture instead of from his heart. “To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movement of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art;” and who so likely to do this as the simple, unbookish man? Hence Sainte-Beuve says the peasant always has style.

In fiction the literary value resides in several different things, as the characterization, the action, the plot, and the style; sometimes more in one, sometimes more in another. In Scott, for instance, it is found in the characters and the action; the style is commonplace. In George Eliot, the action, the dramatic[Pg 7] power, is the weakest factor. In Mr. Howells we care very little for the people, but the art, the style, is a perpetual delight. In Hawthorne our pleasure, again, is more evenly distributed. In Poe the plot and the style interest us. In Dickens it is the character and the action. The novelist has many strings to his bow, and he can get along very well without style, but what can the poet, the historian, the essayist, the critic, do without style—that is, without that vital, intimate, personal relation between the man and his language which seems to be the secret of style? The true poet makes the words his own; he fills them with his own quality, though they be the common property of all. This is why language, in the hands of the born

writer, is not the mere garment of thought, not even a perfectly adjusted and transparent garment, as a French writer puts it. It is a garment only as the body is the garment of the soul. This is why a writer with a style loses so much in a translation, while with the ordinary composer translation is little more than a change of garments.

I should say that the literary value of the modern French writers and critics resides more in their style than in anything else, while with the German it resides least in the style; in the English it resides in both thought and style. The French fall below the English in lyric poetry, because, while the Frenchman has more vanity, he has less egoism, and hence less power to make the universe speak through him. The solitude of the lyric is too much for his intensely[Pg 8] social nature, while he excels in the light dramatic forms for this very reason. He has more power of intellectual metamorphosis.

Apart from style and the other qualities I have mentioned, is another gift, the gift of narration—the story-teller’s gift, which novelists have in varying degrees. Probably few of them have this talent in so large a measure as Wilkie Collins had it, yet this power does not of itself seem sufficient to save his work from oblivion. Still apart from these qualities, and of high literary worth, and apart from the attractiveness of the subject matter, is the power to interest. Can you interest me in what you have to say, by your manner of saying it? This is one of the most intimate and personal gifts of all. No matter what the subject, some writers, like some speakers, catch our attention at once, and hold it to the end. They appear to be telling us some important bit of news which they are in a hurry to be delivered of. No time or words are wasted. There is something special and imminent in the look and tone. The sentences are definitely aimed. The man knows what he wants to say and is himself interested in it. His mind is not somnolent or

stagnant; the style is specific and direct—no benumbing effects of vague and featureless generalizations. The thoughts move, they make a current, and the reader quickly yields himself to it. How soon we tire of the mumbling, soliloquizing style, where the writer seems talking to himself. He must talk to his reader and must catch his eye.

[Pg 9]

Then those dead-level sentences that seem to return forever into themselves, that have no direction or fall, that do not point and hurry to some definite conclusion,—we soon yawn over these too.

What rare power the late Henry George had to invest his subject with interest! What a current in his book “Progress and Poverty”!—While it seems to me that in his “Social Evolution” Benjamin Kidd suffers from the want of this talent; I do not get the full force of his periods at the first reading.

III

Literature abounds in attempts to define literature. One of the most strenuous and thorough-going definitions I have seen has lately been published by one of our college professors—it is a most determined attempt to corral the whole subject. “Nothing belongs to real literature,” says the professor, “unless it consists of written words that constitute a carrying statement which makes sense, arranged rhythmically, euphoniously, and harmoniously, and so chosen as to connote an adequate number of ideas and things, the suggestion of which will call up in the reader sustained emotions which do not produce undue tension, and in which the element of pleasure predominates, on the whole, over that of pain. Practically,” the writer goes on to say, “every word of this description should be kept in our minds, so that we may consciously apply it as a test to any piece of writing about the literary character of which we are in doubt.”

[Pg 10]

Fancy a reader, in his quest for the real article, going about with this drag-net of a paragraph in his mind. Will the definition or description bear turning around upon itself? Is it a good sample of literary art? The exactness and literalness of science are seldom permissible in literature. That a definition of anything may have literary value it must possess a certain indirect and imaginative character, as when Carlyle defined poetry as the heroic of speech. Contrast with the above John Morley’s definition of literature: “All the books—and they are not so many—where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.” This is much better literature, because the language is much more flexible and imaginative. It imparts more warmth to the mind; it is more suggestive, while as a literary touchstone it is just as available.

Good literature may be a much simpler thing than our teachers would lead us to believe. The prattle of a child may have rare literary value. The little Parisian girl who, when asked by a lady the price of the trinkets she offered for sale, replied, “Judge for yourself, madam; I have tasted no food since yesterday,” expressed herself with consummate art. If she had said simply, “Whatever your ladyship pleases to give,” her reply would have been graceful, but commonplace. By the personal turn which she gave it, she added almost a lyrical touch. When Thackeray changed the title of one of his novels from “Scenes from Town Life,” or[Pg 11] some such title, to “Vanity Fair,” he achieved a stroke of art. It is said that a now famous line of Keats was first written thus:

How the effect of the line was heightened by the change of one word, and itself became “a joy forever.” Poe, too, altered two lines of his with like magical effect, when for

he wrote:

The phrase “well of pure English” conveys the same idea as “well of English undefiled,” but how much greater the artistic value of the latter than of the former! Thus the literary value of a sentence may turn upon a single word.

The everyday speech of the people is often full of the stuff of which literature is made. No poet could invent better epithets and phrases than abound in the common vernacular. The sayings and proverbs of a people are also, for the most part, of the pure gold of literature.

One trouble with all definitions of literature is that they proceed upon the theory that literature is a definite something that may be determined by definite tests like gold or silver, whereas it is more like life or nature itself. It is not so much something as the visible manifestation of something; it[Pg 12] assumes infinite forms, and is of infinite degrees of potency. There is great literature, and there is feeble and commonplace literature: a romance by Hawthorne and a novel by Haggard; a poem by Tennyson and a poem by Tupper; an essay by Emerson and an essay by John Foster—all literature, all touching the emotions and the imagination with varying degrees of power, and yet separated by a gulf. There are no degrees of excellence in gold or silver, but there are all degrees of excellence in literature. How hard it is to tell what makes a true poem, a lasting poem! When one asks himself what it is, how many things arise, how hard to narrow the list down to a few things! Is it beauty? Then what is beauty? One meets with beautiful poems every day that he never thinks of or recurs

to again. It is certain that without one thing there is no real poetry—genuine passion. The fire came down out of heaven and consumed Elijah’s offering because Elijah was sincere. Plan and build your poem never so deftly, mankind will not permanently care for it unless it has genuine feeling. It must be impassioned.

The genus Literature includes many species, as novels, poems, essays, histories, etc., but our business with them all is about the same—they are books that we read for their own sake. We read the papers for the news, we read a work of science for the facts and the conclusions, but a work of literature is an end in and of itself. We read it for the pleasure and the stimulus it affords us, apart from[Pg 13] any other consideration. It exhibits such a play of mind and emotion upon the facts of life and nature as results in our own mental and spiritual enrichment and edification.