Chapter 2

A genuine love of your own time is the recognition, in what you meet in it, of those best moments which crave to be made accessible even for the remotest of ages following. To immortalize any given moment, however, is to take it out of the temporary and somehow to find a language for it so general in its appeal that hereafter it may preserve in its own significance the trivial circumstances from which it first arose. Whenever a genuine love of life stirs the artist, it will be a passion for what he thinks is the best in his own day; even if he is antiquarian and takes for object of his devotion some medieval phase of life, it is medievalism in his own day that he worships. Such a passion leads the writer toward the future, for since it is an ideal passion, yet to be realized, he instinctively proclaims it to posterity, or tries to; but in his search for the right language in which to utter it, he as instinctively turns to the past. To cultivate the contemporary in art is therefore as absurd as to waste effort cultivating the natural, for the present, like nature, is always with us; but the problem for the artist is to express a vision which necessarily points toward the future in language which necessarily trails from the past. We cannot remind ourselves too often that even the single words of common speech must be used by each one of us perhaps a lifetime before they are charged with emotions or sharpened to precise meanings, and before the writer can use them with full effect they must be so charged and sharpened for all his readers. The language of poetry, moreover, is far more than single words; it is chiefly the metaphors and the legends, the characters and the episodes, which the race has met with so often that at last they suggest accurately to all men the same feelings and the same thoughts. Life at each moment may be on its way to become something to talk with, but only the rash would try to express a serious ideal through a picture of that life which is still near us, and therefore still imperfectly seasoned or digested. The patriotism that Shakespeare dramatized for his audience was certainly a passion for the England of Elizabeth; that is why he expressed it through Faulconbridge, the child of Richard the Lion-Hearted, or through John of Gaunt, or through Henry V. Why did he not put Elizabeth on his stage, with Raleigh and Spenser and Drake and Sidney? Was he blind to the glory of his own hour? He seems not to have been so, but in his own hour neither the Queen nor any of her great courtiers was as clear a figure to the emotions as time has since made them all; the sentiment of the audience would be divided as to each one of them, the adherents to Rome still perhaps cursing Henry’s daughter in their hearts, the friends of Ireland perhaps cursing the poet of the Faerie Queene. But the wise dramatist was on safe ground, he knew, when the audience heard their common love of country issue unprejudiced from the lips of old Gaunt, who died two centuries earlier:

This fortress, built by nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed spot, this earth, this realm, this England.

When a poet turns to the past for language with which to express his love of the present or his vision of the future, he soon learns that not all epochs lend themselves with equal felicity to his purpose; he must select that aspect of the past which is adequate in nobility and energy to what he has to say, and he must select that aspect of the past which will be understood emotionally by his readers. We are prepared, every one of us perhaps, to admit the necessity of this twofold selection, but to admit so much is to admit a good deal; it is to admit that not all epochs are equally available for the language of art, and that though we exist in our own time, it may be the part of wisdom and good taste to derive our artistic speech from another period. When Molière’s hero pronounces his scorn of artificial verse and contrasts with it an old song of the people, he is rejecting a fashion that was contemporary and temporary for one that was lasting. When Homer wrote of ancient Troy, or when Æneas sang the founding of Rome, either poet was choosing the date of his story with the same taste with which he selected his theme, or selected the words of which to make his lines; he was choosing what the race after long reflection had realized was dignified, noble and true in feeling. The poet, whoever he was, that left us the Song of Roland, no doubt was expressing a sentiment toward France which flourished in his own day, and which may have been very foreign to the feelings of the original Roland; as in the other instances, the old story had to be changed and expurgated to make it altogether the vehicle of contemporary experience; yet he was right in taking the great figure of Roland for the outer clothing or language of his emotions, since heroic sentiments had already connected themselves with Charlemagne’s peer, as they had not yet with William of Normandy, nor with his immediate predecessors. In English history there have been efficient and picturesque rulers in plenty, yet the poets were right who have retold their national epics in the story of Arthur rather than in the biographies of Alfred or Edward I or Cromwell; for the Arthurian legend as the race has chosen to remember it is of richer fabric emotionally and of a simpler structure than any nearer and more actual history could well be. Theodore Roosevelt, for all we know, may have been a greater man than Cromwell, and time may make him seem more significant, but if the poet wishes to say things about the strenuous life, he had better say them now through the image of Cromwell, about whom our emotions are more classified; better still if he says them through the image of King Arthur, who much more than Cromwell has become a precise symbol in the imagination. Arthur was to have been the hero of Milton’s epic—at least, Milton considered him for a possible hero but discarded him in favor, not of Cromwell or Hampden, but of Adam; and again the choice was wise, since Adam is still an image more universally understood than any of Milton’s contemporaries, and we know what we are expected to feel when we hear his story.

To say then that in writing, even when our purpose is art and not satire, we should express ourselves in terms of the life about us, is to lay down a formula which has been contradicted in practise by the influential writers of the world. To find a language already wide-spread and therefore intelligible, the artist will always draw to some extent on the past, even though he does so unconsciously, and how far he goes back into the past will depend on what it is he wants to express. In Henry Esmond, Thackeray used the age of Marlborough to express a flavor of romance that could not be said in life of a later date. But when he had satire for his purpose, as in Vanity Fair, he chose a period comparatively modern. It is but fair to observe, however, that Thackeray follows this principle with very uncertain skill. The period he chose for his great satire was somewhat more remote than for Pendennis or The Newcomes, where his purpose was less obviously and exclusively moral; the resulting effect in each case is somewhat peculiar, since most of us, unless we count up the dates, perhaps get the impression that Vanity Fair was the contemporary book. In one sense it makes little difference, and we might use the illustration to indicate that it is the method of treatment, rather than the life portrayed, that will make a book seem contemporary. But we are left to wonder also whether Thackeray did not intend Vanity Fair to be more satirical in its effect than it actually is, and The Newcomes to be less so. Did the great but easy-going artist make here a careless choice of the time for his story?

Even the writers who seem now to have been most contemporary were really not so; what seems contemporary in them are eternal aspects of life, which even in their day were old. We sometimes doubt the value of those scholarly labors which search out for us the sources, so-called, of the great poets, the residuum of earlier times which they adapted to express their genius; but these labors would be justified sufficiently by the answer they give to those who think that art speaks through contemporary life. They think that we should look in our heart and write, as Sidney did, or return directly to nature, as did Wordsworth, forgetting that when Sidney looked in his heart to write, he wrote some masterly translations and paraphrases of earlier Italian or French poems, and that when Wordsworth drew on his personal experience, as in the immortal lines to the Cuckoo, he recast an earlier fine poem by Michael Bruce. The believers in the contemporary urge us to paint the record of our own times as immediately as Chaucer wove his neighbors into the tapestry of the Canterbury Tales; they do not know how many versions there were of the famous tales before Chaucer shaped them to his own purposes. Indeed, so much of the past has gone into all that we now are or say or do, that the attempt to detach ourselves from the best that has gone before is in a way a denial of contemporary character to our own times, or to any other period; for the quality of civilization in 1923 which distinguishes it from civilization in 1823 is the gift, for good or evil, of the hundred years in between; and to be contemporary with any moment in history is to be aware of all the past that still is articulate in that moment.