Vanishing Roads and Other Essays Part 19

Said Walt Whitman, in his familiar "So Long" to _Leaves of Gra.s.s_:

Camerado, this is no book; Who touches this touches a man.

And, of course, Walt was right about his own book, whether you like the man behind _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ or not; but also that a.s.sertion of his might be chalked as a sort of customs "O.K." on all literary baggage whatsoever that has pa.s.sed free into immortality. There is positively no writer that has withstood the searching examination of time, on whose book that final stamp of literary reality may not be placed. On every cla.s.sic, Time has scrawled ineffaceably:

This is no book; Who touches this touches a man.

I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a living thing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present time, when not only the quant.i.ty of writing is so enormous, but the average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little short of appalling.

In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted with short stories--and novels also, for that matter--told with a skill which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs; confronted, too, with a thousand poets--the number is scarcely an exaggeration--with accomplishments of metre and style that make some famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask oneself:

"Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went before?"

If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no,"

we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained to ask ourselves, what is it?

The men who deal with ma.n.u.scripts--editors, publishers' readers, and publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the book unborn, the vast ma.s.s of writing that never arrives at print--are even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical of a hundred others.

He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of view--plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought.

"But," he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, "there is something the matter with it, after all. I wonder if you can tell me what it is."

The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest. All he could say, he answered, was that he had done his best. The editor, agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not been able to add to his achievement the final "something" that was missing.

"What puzzles me," said the editor finally, "is that, with all the rest, you were not able to add--humanity. Your story seems to have been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man."

And, no doubt, the young story-writer went away sorrowful, in spite of the acceptance of his story--which, after all, was only lacking in that quality which you will find lacking in all the writing of the day, save in that by one or two exceptional writers, who, by their isolation, the more forcibly point the moral.

A wonderful literary machine! The editor's phrase very nearly hits off the situation. As we have the linotype to set up the written words with a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author. In this connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from myself, written _a propos_ a certain chameleonesque writer whose deservedly popular works are among the contemporary books that I most value:

A peculiar skill seems to have been developed among writers during the last twenty years--that of writing in the manner of some master, not merely with mimetic cleverness, but with genuine creative power.

We have poets who write so like Wordsworth and Milton that one can hardly differentiate them from their masters; and yet--for this is my point--they are no mere imitators, but original poets, choosing, it would seem, some old mask of immortality through which to express themselves. In a different way from that of Guy de Maupa.s.sant they have chosen to suppress themselves, or rather, I should say, that, whereas De Maupa.s.sant strove to suppress, to eliminate, himself, their method is that of disguise.

In some respects they remind one of the hermit-crab, who annexes some beautiful ready-made house, instead of making one for himself.

But then they annex it so brilliantly, with such delightful consequences for the reader, that not only is there no ground for complaint, but the reader almost forgets that the house does not really belong to them, and that they are merely entertaining tenants on a short lease.

It is not that one is not grateful to writers of this type. Indeed one is. They not only provide us with genuine entertainment, but, by the skill born of their fine culture, they make us re-taste of the old masters in their brilliant variations. One has no complaint against them. Far from it. Only one wonders why they trouble to attach their own merely personal names to their volumes, for, so far as those volumes are concerned, there is no one to be found in them answering to the name of the ostensible author.

Suppose, for example, that the author's name on the t.i.tle-page is "Brown." Well, so far as we can find out by reading, "Brown" might just as well be "Green." In fact, there is no "Brown" discoverable--no individual man behind the pen that wrote, not out of the fulness of the heart, or the originality of the brain, from any experience or knowledge or temperament peculiar to "Brown," but out of the fulness of what one might call a creatively a.s.similated education, and by the aid of a special talent for the combination of literary influences.

We have had a great deal of pleasure in the reading, we have admired this and that, we may even have been astonished, but I repeat--there is no "Brown." In private life "Brown" may be a forceful and fascinating personality, but, so far as literature is concerned, he is merely a "wonderful literary machine." He has been able, by his remarkable skill, to conjure every other writer into his book--except himself. The name "Brown" on his t.i.tle-page means nothing. He has not "made his name."

The phrase "to make a name" has become so dulled with long usage that it is worth while to pause and consider what a reality it stands for. What it really means, of course, is that certain men and women, by the personal force or quality of their lives, have succeeded in charging their names--names given them originally haphazard, as names are given to all of us--with a permanent significance as unmistakable as that belonging to the commonest noun. The name "Byron" has a meaning as clear and unmistakable as the word "mutton." The words "dog" and "cat" have a meaning hardly more clearly defined than the name "Burns" or "Voltaire."

An oak-tree can no more be mistaken for a willow than Shakespeare can be confused with Spenser. If we say "Coleridge," there is no possibility of any one thinking that perhaps we meant "Browning."

The reason, of course, is that these names are as unmistakably "made"

as a Krupp gun or a Sheffield razor. Sincere, intense life has pa.s.sed into them, life lived as the men who bore those names either chose, or were forced, to live it; individual experience, stern or gentle, in combination with an individual gift of expression.

All names that are really "made" are made in the same way. You may make a name as Napoleon made his, through war, or you may make it as Keats made his, by listening to the nightingale and worshipping the moon. Or you may make it as Charles Lamb made his, merely by loving old folios, whist, and roast pig. All that is necessary--granted, of course, the gift of literary expression--is sincerity, an unshakable faithfulness to yourself.

In really great writers--or, at all events, in those writings of theirs by which they immortally exist--there is not one insincere word. The perishable parts of great writers will, without exception, be found to be those writings which they attempted either in insincere moments, or at the instigation of some surface talent that had no real connection with their deep-down selves.

All real writing has got to be lived before it is written--lived not only once or twice, but lived over and over again. Mere reporting won't do in literature, nor the records of easy voyaging through perilous seas. Dante had to walk through h.e.l.l before he could write of it, and men today who would write either of h.e.l.l or of heaven will never do it by a study of fashionable drawing-rooms, or prolonged sojourns in the country houses of the great.

On the other hand, if you wish to write convincingly about what we call "society," those lords and ladies, for example, who are just as real in their strange way as coal-heavers and mechanics, it is of no use your trying, unless you were fortunate enough to be born among them, or have been unfortunately a.s.sociated with them all your life. To write with reality about the most artificial condition necessitates an intimate acquaintance with it that, at its best, is tragic. Those who would write about the depths and the heights must have dared them, not merely as visitors, but as awestricken inhabitants. Similarly, those who would write about the plain, the long, low levels of commonplace human life, must have dwelt in them, have possessed the dreary, unlaurelled courage of the good bourgeois, have known what it is to live out the day just for the day's sake, with the blessed hope of a reasonably respectable and comfortable conclusion.

Probably it seldom occurs to us to think what a tremendously rooted life is needed to make even one lasting lyric, though the strangeness of the process is but the same strangeness that accompanies the antecedent preparation of a flower.

How many suns it takes To make one speedwell blue--

was no mere fancy of a poet. It is a fact of the long sifting and kneading to which time subjects the material of its perfect things.

One could not get a better example of what I mean than Lovelace's song _To Lucasta, Going to the Wars_, without which no anthology of English verse could possibly be published. Why does generation after generation say over and over, and hand on to its children:

Yet this inconstancy is such As you too shall adore; I could not love thee, dear, so much Loved I not honour more.

Is it merely because it is so well written, or because it embodies a highly moral sentiment suitable to the education of young men? No, it is because the sword and the pen for once met together in the hand of a man, because a soldier and a lover and a poet met together in a song.

One might almost say that Lovelace wrote his lyric first with his sword, and merely copied it out with his pen. At all events, he was first a man and incidentally a poet; and every real poet that ever sang, whether or not he wielded the weapons of physical warfare, has been just the same.

Otherwise he could not have been a poet.

When one speaks of the man behind the pen, one does not necessarily mean that the writer must be a man of dominant personality, suggestive in every sentence of "the strenuous life," and muscle, and "punch."

Literature might be described as the world in words, and as it takes all kinds of men to make a world, so with the world of literature. All we ask is that we should be made aware of some kind of a man. Numerous other qualities besides "the punch" go to the making of living literature, though blood and brawn, not to say brutality, have of late had it so much their own way in the fashionable literature of the day--written by muscular literary gentlemen who seem to write rather with their fists than their pens--that we are in danger of forgetting the rea.s.suring truth.

J.M. Barrie long ago made a criticism on Rudyard Kipling which has always stayed by me as one of the most useful of critical touchstones.

"Mr. Kipling," said he, "has yet to learn that a man may know more of life staying at home by his mother's knee than swaggering in bad company over three continents."

Nor is successful literature necessarily the record of the successful temperament. Some writers, not a few, owe their significance to the fact that they have found humanly intimate expression for their own failure, or set down their weakness in such a way as to make themselves the consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken as the type of such writers. In confiding to his _Journal_ his hopeless inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is infinitely more valuable to us--himself.

Nor, again, does it follow that the man who thus gets himself individualized in literature is the kind of man we care about or approve of. Often it is quite the contrary, and we may think that it had been just as well if some human types had not been able so forcibly to project into literature their unworthy and undesirable selves. Yet this is G.o.d's world, and nothing human must be foreign to the philosophical student of it.

All the "specimens" in a natural history museum are not things of beauty or joy. So it is in the world of books. Francois Villon cannot be called an edifying specimen of the human family, yet he unmistakably belongs there, and it was to that prince of scalawags that we owe not merely that loveliest sigh in literature--"Where are the snows of yester-year?"--but so striking a picture of the underworld of medieval Paris that without it we should hardly be able to know the times as they were.

The same applies to Benvenuto Cellini--bully, a.s.sa.s.sin, insufferable egoist, and so forth, as well as artist. If he had not been sufficiently in love with his own swashbuckler rascality to write his amazing autobiography, how dim to our imaginations, comparatively, would have been the world of the Italian Renaissance!

Again, in our own day, take Baudelaire, a personality even less agreeable still--morbid, diseased, if you will, wasting, you may deem, immense poetic powers on revealing the beauty of those "flowers of evil"

which had as well been left in their native shade. Yet, it is because he saw them so vividly, cared to see little else, dwelt in his own strange corner of the world with such an intensity of experience, that he is--Baudelaire. Like him or not, his name is "made." A queer kind of man, indeed, but not "only a pen."

Certain writers have made a cult of "impersonality" in literature. They would do their utmost to keep themselves out of sight, to let their subject-matter tell its own tale. But such a feat is an impossibility.

They might as well try to get out of their own skins. The mere effort at suppression ends in a form of revelation. Their mere choice of themes and manner of presentation, let them keep behind the scenes as a.s.siduously as they may, will in the end stamp them. However much a man may hide behind his pen, so that indeed his personality, compared with that of more subjective writers, remains always somewhat enigmatic, yet when the pen is wielded by a man, whatever his reticence or his mask, we know that a man is there--and that is all that concerns us.

On the other hand, of course, there are companionable, sympathetic writers whose whole stock-in-trade is themselves, their personal charm, their personal way of looking at things. Of these, Montaigne and Charles Lamb are among the great examples. It matters to us little or nothing what they are writing about; for their subjects, so far as they are concerned, are only important in relation to themselves, as revealing to us by reflection two uncommonly "human" human beings, whom it is impossible to mistake for any one else; just as we enjoy the society of some whimsical talker among our living friends, valuing him not so much for what he says, but for the way he says it, and because it is he, and no one else, that is talking.

Again, there are other men whose names, in addition to their personal suggestion, have an impersonal significance as marking new eras of human development, such as Erasmus or Rousseau or Darwin; men who embodied the time-spirit at crucial moments of world change, men who announced rather than created, the heralds of epochs, men who first took the new roads along which the rest of mankind were presently to travel, men who felt or saw something new for the first time, prophets of dawn while yet their fellows slept.

Sometimes a man will come to stand for a whole nation, like Robert Burns or Cervantes; or a great, half-legendary age of the world, like Homer; or some permanent att.i.tude of the human spirit, like Plato.

No fixed star, great or small, in the firmament of literature ever got there without some vital reason, or merely by writing, however remarkable. The idea that literature is a mere matter of writing is seen to be the hollowest of misconceptions the moment you run over any list of enduring names. Try any such that you can think of, and in every case you will find that the name stands for something more than a writer. Of course, the man had to have his own peculiar genius for writing, but the peculiarity was but the result of his individual being, his own special way of living his life or viewing the world.