THE LITERARY EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE DAY.
La Bruyère sees in all extravagance of phrase some symptom of weakness. “To say modestly of anything it is good or it is bad, and to give reasons why it is so, needs good sense and expression. It is much shorter to pronounce in a decisive tone either that it is execrable or admirable.” He himself is a model of clearness and exactness of expression. His English counterpart is Swift, of whom Thackeray said: “He writes as if for the police.” Nothing in literature surpasses the vraisemblance of Gulliver’s Travels, which reads like a book of authentic adventure. Its artlessness is the perfection of art concealing art. La Bruyère also says: “What art is needed to be natural (rentrer dans la nature)! What time, what rules, what attention, what labor to dance with the ease and grace with which we walk, to sing as easily as we talk, to speak and express one’s self as one’s self thinks!” To speak or to write as one thinks seems, in these days of tumid and extravagant expression, to be one of the lost arts. We generally say either more or less than we think, usually more. For this reason we should turn to the older classical writers, because of the importance they attribute to diction, and the sense of duty they attach to it.
The new rhetorical doctrine is, “Let the style take care of itself. Give us thought.” Robert Browning, whose poetry nobody understands, probably not even himself, declares in favor of “burrs of expression that will stick in the attention.” Any one who has scrambled through the labyrinths of some of his poems has had “burrs” enough to suffice him for a lifetime. It is clear that this plea for thought to the neglect of style is an excuse for slovenly composition. There is no reason why thought should not have clear, precise, and beautiful expression. Unless style be made a subject of deep attention, and be brought to the severest test of rhetorical criticism, there is an end of literature. If the barbaric “yawp” of Walt Whitman is to pass for poetry; if the pictorial daubs of J. A. Froude are to be considered historical portraitures; and if extravagant and exaggerated forms of speech are to be ranked as striking beauties, the literary critics and the lovers of literature in general must gird themselves for a tougher battle for letters than they ever did for any attack that threatened them from Philistia. What we call the Extravagant School of Literature numbers eminent names, and is by no means confined to the more obvious and pronounced sensationalism of the daily press. Contemporaneous history, criticism, poetry, sectarian theology, and, wonderful to say, philosophy and science deal largely in exaggerated expression and extravagant theory.
It may be some consolation to the newspapers and to the gentler sex, both charged by the critics with the use of exaggeration and hyperbole, that they but follow the example set them by grave modern historians and scientists. The reckless writing in the journals, like the fluent gossip at Mrs. Grundy’s tea-parties, is ephemeral. But extravagance aspires to immortality in the pages of the historian. The description of Mary Stuart’s beheading in Froude lacks even the historical accuracy of a New York Herald reporter’s account of an “execution.” Macaulay’s fantastic analysis of motives exceeds in boldness of conjecture a journalist’s article on the future policy of the Vatican. In both sets of examples there is the same fault—unlimited speculation and unjustifiable comment. Darwin observes some particular facts in natural history, and, in defiance of a familiar rule in syllogisms, leaps at once to a universal conclusion. Matthew Arnold, fired by his name as a critic, indulges in extravagant speculation upon the relations of literature and dogma. Science loses its cool head, and philosophy its cautious pace, on the presentation of hitherto unexplained phenomena. Protestant theology hears aghast that the Greek of the Epistle to the Hebrews is more classic than that in the other Pauline epistles, and telegraphs the discovery to the Board on the Revision of the Scriptures. The dainty trick of Tennyson’s metre is the despair and admiration of inglorious Miltons, whose hands cannot strike the resounding lyre with like skilfulness, and thereupon jangle it in woful measures. Bret Harte makes a “hit” in the delineation of wild Western life, and he is hailed as a new-born genius. John Hay and Joaquin Miller assume the bays. A crowd of nonentities rush before the public on the lecture platform, and their extravagant nonsense brings them fame and fortune. The two classes react upon each other for the worse. The extravagant never corrects his faults, and the public never perceive them, so used have they become to this baneful influence of sensationalism. It permeates popular religion. A Protestant Life of Christ by a prominent preacher reads like a dime novel.
We readily pardon the extravagance of fiction; and catechresis in poetry does not call forth the severest censure of the critic. Any one familiar with the hard conditions of modern newspaper writing will not be disposed to judge harshly if both editor and reporter combine to make their journal “spicy.” It may be that the high-pressure system on which newspapers are conducted has exercised a marked influence upon all classes of readers and writers. The New York dailies have a rather questionable élan, which provincial journals follow from afar off. The stupendous enterprise of sending expeditions to South Africa and to the North Pole, the insatiable quest for news, the undisguised love of the sensational characteristic of foremost journalism, have, in our opinion, a debilitating and disastrous effect upon the scholarship and the intellectual life of America. The showy story, the painfully epigrammatic drama, and the pyrotechnical poetry of the land are newspapery to the last degree. Journalists do not even seem to know or realize the influence which they exert. What is a pointed and brilliant editorial compared to the honest endeavor of a journalist to inculcate sound ethical and social views in the minds of his readers? Who cares about Jones’ slashing attack upon Smith? Why, in the name of common decency, are columns opened to the discussion of Robinson’s domestic infelicities? We do not wish to make up our minds every morning upon the state and prospects of the universe. We are firmly convinced that the world will go on, without being daily buttonholed by talented editors to acquaint us with the fact. The sensational newspaper has spoiled some of the best traits in the American, and it has given abnormal development to his worst tendency—his curiosity. A newspaper would have scattered all the happiness of Rasselas’ valley. It is happy for Americans that they have a weakness for print, and seem rather to enjoy a figure therein. If the Bungtown Bugle did not notice the arrival in town of Mr. Porkpacker, let the editor tremble.
But the extravagance of journalism is mainly confined to words. It is not altogether true that the guiding spirit of the newspaper is sensation. This charge, which can readily be sustained against the contemporary historian, does not hold of the journalist. He makes the most of news, but he rarely invents. He is sensitive on this point. Accuracy is a prime requisite in a reporter. His is the hyperbole of words. This comes generally from a limited education and inexact habits of thought. When we reflect that the first and last lesson of rhetoric is simplicity, we should not expect too much from men who are trained to think and believe that no idea is acceptable unless arrayed in gorgeous imagery and blazing with tawdry rhetoric. A fire with loss of life is a terribly startling thing, and the reporter imagines that he is really describing its horror when, with apt alliteration’s artful aid, he heads his account with “The Fire-fiend Furious—Flaunting Flames Frantically Flashing—Fainting Firemen Fused by the Fierce Fire,” etc. Richard Grant White has wearied his readers for a decade and more on the theme of newspaper English and cognate subjects. The fact is, no man can be an etymologist without a fair knowledge of the languages from which the English is derived, and it is simply wasted labor to counsel the attainment of a classic style from a mere acquaintance with one language, and that the vernacular. The wonder is that so much really good writing is done under such limitations.
It takes some self-denial in a newspaper man to say a thing simply. We understand that Western newspapers have made a new departure in announcing deaths, and that a rather coarse, if not ribald, humor is tolerated. This is an evidence of a lower sensationalism. The West has exercised a rough and energetic influence upon the laughable dilettanteism of the Eastern press, but we must confess our inability to relish its humor. Its humor is extravaganza, and thus would work out the very reform and improvement which it is the design of this article to advocate. The pompous descriptions ending in anti-climax, the open burlesquing of the style of newspaper novelists, the riotous characterization of oddities, and the hearty dislike of sham and cant that one meets in Western journalism must have a good effect upon the general literature of the country. But one tires of Mark Twain, mayhap for the reason that one grows speedily weary of professedly funny papers. The poor court-jesters of the middle ages got more frowns than smiles. Mark Twain has little of that heartiness and bonhomie that are the characteristic of true humor. Real wit he has none, nor does he pretend to it. His humor is extravagance, which, even in this humble but oh! how genial faculty and expression of the human heart, is seen to be out of place and power.
The more we read and write, the clearer becomes to us the wisdom of the Horatian maxim to keep our lucubrations by us for years. Hasty writing is not only hard reading but often dangerous utterance. An editor told the writer that when the news of the late Pope’s death reached us he had his biography already in type, but without editorial comment. It was necessary to compose some sort of editorial upon an event which for a time suspended the breath of Christendom, and our editor, with the nonchalance and conceit which unfortunately characterize so many of the journalistic guild, sat down to dash off as fast as pen could travel his estimate of that great, long-suffering, and heroic man on whose brow, where gathered the glory of Thabor and the gloom of Calvary, rested the mystic diadem of the Supreme Pontificate. “Of course,” said our editor, “I hadn’t time to get up anything very fine, but my Protestant friends were delighted. I gave the good old man some pretty severe raps—that thing, you know, about his being a Mason, and opposed to progress—and—and—Antonelli, and that little love-affair, you know. Ha! ha! ha!” No wonder Dickens impaled the editor of the New York Rowdy. Now, if this man could have waited, and read and reflected, it would have been morally impossible for him to have composed an obituary which, if it had been written of any other man than the dead Vicar of Jesus Christ, would have exposed its author to the pistol-shot of outraged relatives or to the chastisement of public justice.
So long as ignorant and irresponsible men are suffered to guide and control the expression of a journal, so long will the American newspaper fail of any high mission. It is a good sign of the sturdy independence of the American character that it has shaken off the journalistic yoke and thinks for itself. Formerly the editorial pages were the first to be scrutinized and the mysterious oracle consulted. But
“Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine.”
The garish light of day has been poured in upon the sanctum, and the divinity has fled. The newspaper is not likely soon again to attain to that high dignity and power which it held prior to the last Presidential election, for reasons too obvious to the reader to need mention here. Year by year the strongly-marked individuality of the chief editor, so familiar of old, fades out of sight, either because the race of great editors is run or the conditions of newspaper life have changed. We speak of the newspaper only as it falls within the scope of this article, which regards its literary and not its moral aspect. We do not advert to it at all as a teaching or ethical power, for we look upon the average journal with feelings akin to contempt at its blind or wilful neglect of the highest possibilities of good. No men are better acquainted than are newspaper men with the absurdity of Protestantism, its failure both as a public institution and a private religious life, its petty tyrannies, its squeamishness, its rhodomontade, and its helplessness before any attack of sound and manly logic. They know, too, or ought to know, the real good of the Catholic Church. Yet how rarely one sees in a journal even a feeble recognition of the benefits of Catholicity! Why, in many quarters we do not even get the show and hearing graciously accorded to the Mormons. Who has not felt the covert sneer, the poorly-concealed bigotry, and the ignorant prejudice so thinly disguised? When Doyle, England’s best caricaturist, not even excepting Cruikshank, was required by the proprietors of Punch to draw a caricature of the Pope, he threw his pencil in their faces and told them “be ——,” a word which the recording angel certainly blotted out. What are we to think of a journal that seizes the celebration of the feast of a great national saint as a happy occasion for publishing a series of “jocular” and blasphemous articles on the saint’s memory, twice piercing the sensibilities of Irishmen, once through their faith and next through their nationality? Is that honest, worthy, or dignified journalism?
Enough has been said to place the general newspaper press upon a low form in the school of extravagant expression. Not until editors feel a profound moral responsibility, and enlarge their minds with at least a cursory study of Catholic theology—two things which are least likely to come to pass—will the American journal attain any lasting prestige or power. As it is, its tone becomes less dignified and effective year by year, and we should not be surprised to discover in the newspaper, in time, the most stubborn and powerful opponent of Christianity, and even of general morality. Heaven knows what incalculable harm it now does to immortal souls by its constant vomiting forth of social impurities and criminal details. There are certain papers of large circulation and “respectability” which cannot be read by all without proximate danger of mortal sin. But if a Catholic critic ventures to proclaim these manifest truths, he is answered with a howl about the church’s opposition to progress and enlightenment. The newspapers cannot bear criticism whilst savagely attacking any person or institution to which they take a dislike. This sensitiveness is a symptom of weakness.
We turn to the great masters of extravagant expression. At their head we place Lord Macaulay, who has demonstrated the art of making history romantic, and romance historical. Query: whether Sir Walter Scott was not the founder of the contemporaneous historical school? At any rate the cry is, “Let us have no more dryly accurate histories like Lingard’s or Arnold’s. Relegate to an appendix state papers and statistics. Give us delightful conversations between historical personages, somewhat in the style of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, only not so heavy.” It is so delightful to enter into the secret motives of men, to interpret their hidden spirit, and clearly understand their whole mental and moral being. This is the new school of historical writing, carried to extravagant lengths by Macaulay, Froude, and Carlyle. The old-fashioned idea of history was the simple and exact statement of events, the ascertained motives of historical personages, and the actual results of their deeds and decrees. This idea the trio before mentioned scout with derisive laughter. Macaulay writes down “the dignity of history”; Froude penetrates into the arcana of royal bosoms; and Carlyle shrilly hoots at the Dryasdusts for their historical investigations, and makes a bonfire of archives and state papers. Of this precious triad Macaulay is the least vehement, but none the less must we dub him an extravagant. He never can say a thing naturally. He cannot rise above an epigram or an antithesis. Nor was there ever any intellectual growth in him. In Trevelyan’s Life and Letters of Macaulay there is a characteristic anecdote of his boyhood. His mother refused him a piece of cake for some misdemeanor—for missing a lesson, we think. “Very well,” antithetically answered the future reviewer (ætat. 9), “hereafter industry shall be my bread and application my butter.” This might have been written in the Edinburgh forty years after. When the famous essay on Milton appeared, sensationalism had not as yet invaded the prosy precincts of the reviews. Jeffrey’s classic but dull reviews were models; nor did the humor of the “joking parson of St. Paul’s” receive much countenance from the Scotch, on whom the parson revenged himself when he said that a surgical operation was necessary to get a joke into a Scotchman’s head. Macaulay’s brilliancy took the town by storm. But what is there in the review of Milton? of Johnson? of Bacon? He began the carnival of the sensational. George Cornewall Lewis said of Macaulay: “The idea of a man of forty writing such flowery and sentimental stuff! Macaulay will never be anything but a rhetorician.” But the reading people had their appetites whetted by Scott and Byron, and there has been little sobriety in literature since. The extravagance of the praise with which Macaulay bedaubed Milton struck the critics at the time; but when they answered, he was famous. The Americans raved over him. It was perhaps as well that his History was never finished, for it is morally certain that his infatuation for saying brilliant things would have led him to hurl Washington and the American patriots of the Revolution from their pedestals. He could not resist the temptation to bid men abate their admiration of any esteemed character. To wind up with a brilliant period was the height of his poor literary ambition. Of course he received his reward; but no man now who values his reputation for scholarship would think of citing him as an historical or, what may seem stranger, a literary authority. That glowing tribute to the Catholic Church in the review on Ranke has always seemed to us one of his rhetorical bursts. There were in the subject light and color, imposing figures, an atmosphere of art and beauty, and innumerable chances for introducing epigrams and startling paradoxes. He wrote an article which flames like one of Rubens’ pictures. The whole argument is false from beginning to end, and its logic would shame the New Zealander himself. The conclusion which any thoughtful man would draw from the powers and attributes therein ascribed to the Catholic Church is that such an institution must be divine—a conclusion furthest from the reviewer’s thought. He has made the dull pages of English political history as interesting as a fairy-tale, under which designation it no doubt will be tabulated by future scholars; for there is not a point d’appui in the entire history, from his glorification of King William to his defamation of Penn, that has not been shattered by some one. But who should seriously attack romance?
James II. was a poltroon, and William III. was a brave man and a great statesman. Macaulay did not attempt all the possibilities of sensationalism. This was left for J. A. Froude, who now reigns in his stead. Casting about for a striking character, Froude lights on Henry VIII. And it is here that that delightful historico-romantic style soars to hitherto unexplored heights of extravagance. The injured monarch is introduced to the sound of mournful music. His tortured mind is apparent in his anguish-riven face. Contemplate at leisure that Achillean form, that massive brow, the melancholy grace of those royal legs. A pensive smile irradiates a countenance on which all the graces play. He is thinking of Katharine. His conscience is smitten. Enter to him Anne Boleyn. What thoughts are hidden beneath that alabaster brow?—and so on for volumes. The forte of the historian of this school is his thorough knowledge of the thoughts and designs of his personages. Nothing escapes his eagle eye. This wondrous faculty, which has hitherto been considered preternatural, enables him to detect deep meanings in the slightest act. The king smiled significantly. Ah-hah! Sergeant Buzfuz’s interpretation of Pickwick’s note about the warming-pan sinks into obscurity alongside of the calm and connected analysis of motive that Mr. Froude can weave out of King Henry’s stockings. It will amuse our readers to take up a few pages of any of Froude’s historical works, and study out illustrations of this criticism. They will soon discover that it is he who does all the thinking, planning, and suffering for his historical automata, that are moved by the chords of his sympathetic heart. No one would call Froude a historian except in burlesque. He is a romancist.
But what shall we say of the Scotch Diogenes, Carlyle, who hurls books instead of tubs, though the latter missile would do less mischief? He is an extravagant. We have hesitated some time about classing him in the school, but we think that we are justified, at least by the wildness, unconnectedness, and rhapsodical fury of his speech. Besides, he frantically hates and denounces America, which fact would set him down at once as a man of unbalanced intellect and malignant humor. He used to know how to write English, as his Life of Schiller and Life of John Sterling abundantly prove. But in an evil hour he learned German, and the next view of him we have discovers him tossing in a maelstrom of German metaphysics. He certainly deserved a better fate. We very much doubt if any sane man can long keep his wits and study German philosophy, especially in the mad outcomes of Fichte’s Absolute Identity and Schelling’s theories of the το εγο. The best minds of Germany, both Catholic and Protestant, Möhler and Neander, have pronounced the judgment of all sensible men upon these absurdities in one word—rubbish. Carlyle patiently worked in this rubbish for years, and his result is not half so good as his brave old words, spoken out of his honest heart: “Do what you are able to do in this world and leave the rest to God.” In the name of common sense, do rational men care anything about the critic of Pure Reason, or the beer and tobacco speculations of conceited egoists? It were well if men, like the parish priest in Don Quixote, burnt all those foolish books of knight-errantry carried on in a world as dreamy and fantastic as that fabled by the old writers on chivalry. Carlyle’s command of language is marvellous, but his style is hybrid, wearisome, and frequently unintelligible. He is sensational, in a bad sense, too. There is not a hero that he has chosen who was not chosen with an eye to effect: Mohammed, a prophet! Luther, the hero-priest! Cromwell, the hero-king! The selection of these worthies enabled him to say something startling. Then the idea of taking Frederick II. of Prussia as a type of the heroic, kingly, religious, literary, and general excellence of the eighteenth century was carrying the extravagant a little too far. The old man now sits like a bear with a sore head. We pardon him much, for we look upon him as an embittered and disappointed man. He seems not to care what he says nor how rudely he says it. His criticism on Swinburne, the erotic poet, whose success is an indication of something rotten in English letters, is so harsh that we hesitate to quote it, though it is richly deserved: “He is a man up to his neck in a cess-pool, and adding to the filth.” We need Diogenes to snub Alexander and to trample on the pride of Plato. Had Carlyle escaped fantastic Germanism and its wretched philosophizing, he would rank with the greatest masters of language in any tongue. The glow and beauty of many of his descriptions are beyond praise, and no more skilful hand has ever drawn the vast and gloomy tableaux of the French Revolution. His historical method has the same vice as Macaulay’s and Froude’s. He is pictorial, imaginative, and given to unwarranted speculation. His style has the worst faults of the sensational school, though it may be alleged in his defence that his vast knowledge of German has unconsciously and radically modified it. Affectation he has none, which cannot be said of his imitators in word-coining.
Literary criticism, which certainly should have advanced somewhat since the days of Dennis, is at present as “slashing” as that old cynic himself could have desired. The great reviews, spoiled by Macaulay’s example, have adopted a supercilious tone that but ill comports with the dignity and functions of true criticism. We recall only one great exception, John Wilson (Christopher North), in recent English literary criticism, that is not open to the charge of querulous fault-finding. The narrowness of the English reviews, and their fatal obtuseness to see beyond the limits they have drawn for themselves, have deprived them of the proper power of literary judgment or suggestive writing such as we associate with a review. The latest of their number, the Nineteenth Century, is not long enough before us to enable us to form a satisfactory judgment. It lacks unity, but, perchance, this is a merit. The reader knows beforehand the judgment of the Edinburgh, the London and British Quarterlies, and the Westminster on any subject. They are a bench of Lord Jeffreys passing sentence before any evidence is presented to them.
There is no writer on whom sensationalism works such quick and fatal destruction as the critic. We look to him to be above the passions of the hour, the rage of the fashion, and the influence of literary and political cliques. Even his admiration must be tempered. He must betray no weaknesses. When we come across a critique which runs over with passion, weak sentiment, petty jealousies, unworthy bickerings, and a subdued but potent sensationalism, we are shocked and disappointed. Most contemporary reviews are pompous exhibitions of the writer’s own learning, which may be in one sense encyclopædic, and which generally throws the author under review quite in the shade. The older reviewers gave some hearing to an author. They quoted him largely, and enabled the reader to judge for himself. They proffered their opinions modestly, and supported their objections with proof drawn from the book itself. But nowadays, if a reviewer condescends to advert to the book which he is supposed to be reviewing, it is in a high and mighty tone of censure or of autocratic approval. This obtrusion of self and opinions smacks much of the sensational. The reviewer wishes to be seen upon the tripod, and he is convinced in his own heart, or at least allows his reader plainly to understand, that he could write a much better book than that which he has deigned to review. Slashing criticisms are in great favor. Oh! for another Macaulay to blast another Montgomery. We say, Oh! for another Pope to place these gentlemen in another Dunciad. There is no merit in cutting a book to pieces. An eye sharpened by malice and on the lookout for faults will detect blunders in a title. Where merited chastisement must be inflicted it should not be spared; but that is a poor idea of literary criticism that views it as a medium of communicating only stinging comment and bitter diatribe. Criticism is essentially calm and judicial. It should sift a book as law does evidence. No stormy passions should be suffered to disturb its equanimity. There is no other department of letters that invites and exacts such rare scholarship and genial wisdom.
The man who can quickly recognize and honestly praise a work of genius, and, through wise commendation, introduce it to a wide circle of readers, merits a crown more precious than the poet’s. In these days of much bad writing and wide reading there is deep need of such exact criticism, such careful watchfulness over literature, and such sure guidance of the public taste. Keep sensationalism at least out of our reviews and our book notices, for if the critic loses the reckoning we are indeed at sea.
We hinted that sectarian theology has its sensational side. If we can dignify with the name of theology that congeries of books, sermons, pamphlets, and tracts that is the literary outcome of Protestantism, then theology, the queen of the sciences, is in the plight of Hecuba as described in Hamlet:
“But who, oh! who had seen the mobled queen
Run barefoot up and down, threatening the flames,” etc.
No attempt is made to conceal the sensationalism of the Protestant pulpit. A dull preacher had best betake himself to another occupation; say anything that will be listened to, sooner than behold the agonizing sight of a sleeping congregation. Modern congregations do not enjoy the traditional nap. They are kept awake by the attitudinizer in the pulpit. They are not sure of what he is going to say next. Sir Roger de Coverley made his chaplain preach one of Barrow’s sermons, and, thus being assured of orthodoxy, he slept with a quiet conscience. The quality of the majority of Protestant sermons is as spiced and sensational as the average popular lecture. What motive but that of making a sensation can induce Farrar and Stanley to preach against hell in Westminster Abbey? Their sermons are as high colored as a story in the New York Ledger. The new tack which the Protestant hulk is now painfully taking is the harmonization of science and religion. We verily believe that Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall take a malicious pleasure in seeing the squirms of Protestant theologians. Those men know themselves the inconclusiveness of their arguments against revelation, but the fatal spell is on science, too—it must be sensational or nothing. The old scientists worked calmly away for years, and set forth the results of their investigations with the modesty of true merit. But Huxley cannot anatomize the leg of a spider without publishing the process in the newspapers, with some reflections upon its bearing and probably fatal effect upon the Mosaic records.
In summing up the conclusions suggested by our reflections upon the extravagant, we must not forget that the ways and habits of modern social life have almost necessitated this species of literature. It is remarkable that the Latin writers under the later emperors have neither the purity of thought nor of style of the old masters. Literature is the reflex of passing life. Our century is the century of startling discovery, of kaleidoscopic changes, of rapid social life and intense intellectual energy. Its expression must be loud and boisterous. But it is the duty of writers to keep the gross sensational elements of life out of letters. Literature should soothe and compose the mind; should be its refuge from turbulence and care; should be a ministry of peace and refreshment to the wearied spirit. The enduring products of human genius are marked by the calmness and serenity of the great souls that conceived them, and they produce in us the like frame of mind. The public should look coldly upon the class of productions we have been examining, and bid
“The extravagant and erring spirit hie
To its confine.”