Chapter 1

If we accept the doctrine of criticism today, originality is a great virtue in a writer, and if we believe the book advertisements, all the new writers as they appear, and as they reappear, have this virtue to a striking, even to an explosive extent. But with all their originality, some of the new books turn out to be dull, and if we reconsider for a moment the books men have finally judged great, we observe that they were rather destitute of the kind of originality we talk of nowadays.

“In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea”, wrote the imagist some time ago, defending the use of free verse. The doctrine was in the interest of the cadence, but it implied something larger and more significant, that in poetry newness of ideas is desirable. More recently, an American critic remarked, in effect, that what Lytton Strachey has accomplished in his literary portraits is nothing but what Gamaliel Bradford accomplished in his, and since Mr. Bradford’s portraits came first, they should have the credit and the praise which an undiscriminating world bestows on Mr. Strachey’s. If the question of priority is raised in this kind of writing, perhaps something should be said for Plutarch; but are we sure we should raise the question of priority? What arrests us in the remark of the American critic is the undebated assumption that literary excellence derives from doing something before somebody else does it. Is it the business of art to discover new ideas, or indeed to busy itself much with any ideas, as separated from emotion and the other elements of complete experience? Is it the originality of genius in art to say something no one has ever thought of before, or to say something we all recognize as important and true? As for the mere question of priority, even stupid things have been said for a first time; do we wear the laurel for being the first to say them?

One suspects that the new cadence will persist in poetry only if we like it, and that Mr. Bradford’s reputation will outstrip Mr. Strachey’s only if we prefer what he wrote, and if by chance we care for neither, then both will be neglected, though one preceded the other by a hundred years. Excellence is the only originality that art considers. They understand these things better in France. There the young poet even of the most radical school will respect the bias of art towards continuity rather than toward novelty, toward the climax of a tradition rather than its beginning; his formula of self-confidence will be, “Victor Hugo was a great poet, Alfred de Musset was a great poet, and now at last I’m here.” But in America the parallel gospel is, “Poor Tennyson couldn’t write, nor Longfellow, of course; now for the first time let’s have some poetry.”

The writers finally judged great, so far from sharing our present concern for originality, would probably not even understand it. What is the object of literature? they would ask. Of course, if it is to portray the individual rather than human nature, or those aspects of life which stand apart from life in general, then each book may have something queer in it, something not in any other book and in that sense original; but then the reader, before long, will be looking for peculiarity in every book he buys—it must be, not better, but “different”, to use an American term in esthetics; and the writer then who would meet this demand for the peculiar must make a fresh start with every book. What bad luck, they would say, to be forever a primitive, to be condemned, after every success, to produce something in another vein, the first of its kind. Originality in this sense will be continually undermined by fame, for the more an author is read, and the more people become accustomed to his world, the less he will seem original. On the other hand, if the reader looks for originality, there will be no fame, for no matter how popular an author is, we shall read his book only once, and then be waiting for his next novelty.

But if the object of literature is still, as it was for the great writers, to portray human nature, then the only new thing the artist will look for is a greater success in his art. Human nature is old and unchangeable; he will hope to make a better portrait than has yet been made—better, at any rate, for his own people and his own age, and if possible better absolutely. There is nothing new about religion or love or friendship, war, sunsets, the sea, danger or death, yet something remains to be told of each eternal theme, and when a book comes which tells the whole, which satisfies some hitherto unexpressed yearnings or defines more sharply something hitherto half-seen, then that portrait of human nature serves our purposes until we have a still finer, and other versions meanwhile are neglected and forgotten. We remember how many accounts of Romeo and Juliet there were before Shakespeare told the story to suit us, and how many records of the journey to hell before Dante told us the whole truth of that pilgrimage; perhaps we know the many desperate attempts, long since mercifully swallowed up in oblivion, to portray the American Indian before Fenimore Cooper made the picture the world wanted. The achievements of literature are all, as in these instances, a gradual reworking of traditional or popular or folk material, and in the process it is precisely because the subject is not original that the audience can decide how well it has been portrayed. A sequence of writers interpreting Life are therefore like a succession of virtuosos playing the classics, each trying to give us the true Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann. Their renderings will be different enough, but the music is the same, and we know it by heart. The player who calls our attention to most beauty in it, will be original or unique in the only way that art permits.

The example of the musician may not seem to all writers a fair parallel; they may protest that the writer creates, as the composer does, but the player only interprets what is already created. But they are wrong, and the parallel is correct. The writer does not create as the composer does. Music is an ultimate pleasure in itself, like the taste of sugar; so long as it delights us, we do not ask what it means. Moreover, since there is no question of its meaning, we may not need a previous experience to find some enjoyment in it; it may be satisfactory at first contact. Of course every art gives a more subtle pleasure as we become practised in appreciating it, yet the contrast between music and literature remains a real one, since without any knowledge of life at all men and even children often penetrate deeply into the heart of music, but without some knowledge of life they are stopped at the very threshold of literature. The key to that door is some first-hand acquaintance with life. Music has no other subject-matter than itself, but literature has life for its content, and to find one’s way about in it, we must recognize what it is dealing with. Life is a music already composed. It has been here a long time, and had become already an ancient history when the first poets began to play upon it. They merely said for us the things we had been vainly feeling after, they brought out the colors our eyes had almost missed, they defined sharply the flavors and the half tastes that had haunted us. The amateurs in the audience listen spellbound when the master plays to perfection a piece they have struggled with; this is more to them than the loveliest of new sonatas, for it is their own world in a better light. So mankind will listen to the authentic poet who completes their half-realized selves; and will say of him, somewhat with the woman of Samaria, “He told me all the things that ever I did.”

If the audience enjoy the music best when they have tried to play it themselves, they love it next best when they have heard it often, and they like it least, sometimes not at all, when they hear it for the first time. The reader likes poetry best when he has lived what it interprets; next best when he has heard often of the adventures it renders; least, even to the point of detestation, when he never entered that region of life at all, not even by hearsay. In such a predicament the real ground of his objection to the art is that it is original, at least so far as he is concerned, but the experience of his discomfort will hide the cause of it from him; not himself but the art will seem to him inadequate—is he not as much alive as any one ever was? The book, he will say, portrays a world that is dead. Let us start fresh and be original; let us portray my world.