In the second of his “Discourses on Art,” Sir Joshua Reynolds says to his students of painting:
Comparing your own efforts with those of some great master is indeed a severe and mortifying task, to which none will submit but such as have great views, with fortitude sufficient to forego the gratifications of present vanity for future honor. When the student has succeeded in some measure to his own satisfaction, and has felicitated himself on his success, to go voluntarily to a tribunal where he knows his vanity must be humbled, and all self-approbation must vanish, requires not only great resolution but great humility. To him, however, who has the ambition to be a real master, the solid satisfaction which proceeds from a consciousness of his advancement (of which seeing his own faults is the first step) will very abundantly compensate for present disappointment.
This need not be said differently to apply to the student of literature.
There is one thing of which he who desires to write literature may be sure, and that is that the unpardonable sin in this as in all art is flippancy. Flippancy is the prevailing literary vice of the age. The periodicals are perhaps more largely to blame for this than any other single cause, but newspapers and magazines by no means have the whole responsibility in this matter. The desire for amusement has eaten us up. The overworked and nerve-shaken public desires entertainment which shall make no call on the intellect and as little as possible on the perception. The man who could devise the means of amusing his fellows without their being obliged even to take the trouble to be aware of it would almost be deified by this age. The modern imagination is harder to awaken than the Sleeping Beauty. An audience at the theatre to-day cannot be persuaded to do anything for itself. In the days of Shakespeare a placard on the stage transferred all the beholders into the Forest of Arden or to the enchanted isle of Prospero. To-day it is difficult to induce the spectators to second the most elaborate devices which have been contrived by scene-painter and carpenter to assist their sluggish fancy. There is even a large class apparently so completely atrophied mentally as to be unable to follow a simple plot on the stage. “Variety shows” to-day take the place which real plays held once; short stories with only so much substance as admits of their being beaten up like the white of egg on a custard are languidly read by the million; and we have even replaced criticism by a sort of shallow flippancy for which no other name seems to me so appropriate as literary skirt-dancing. To be clever in the most superficial sense of that word, to be vulgarly glib, to reverence nothing, and above all to be smart and amusing, seems to be the sum and substance of the creed of writers who practice this art. They substitute adroitness for depth, scoffing for sentiment, and rapidity for brilliancy. Their one aim is to entertain the idle mind, and to win from astonishment the applause which they have not the wit to gain from approbation. The literary gymnastics of writers of these flippant pseudo-criticisms are hardly more intellectual than the supple evolutions of the ballet girl, and it is to be doubted if the dance is not the more moral and less debasing of the two.
This may sound extravagant, but when the influence upon young readers and young writers is considered it hardly seems possible to state the matter too strongly. It is true that these writers profess, so far as they profess anything, allegiance to all the highest virtues, both moral and intellectual. Their books are distinctly amusing—to those whose taste is not offended by the tone of flippancy which pervades them; and what they write is often eminently clever. Their fault is that they do not take life seriously; that they are as devoid of reverence as a stone is of blood; that their temper is as fatal to idealism, to enthusiasm, to aspiration, as carbonic acid gas is to animal life. Even the cynicism with which they are flavored is as sham as is the tint of a glass ruby. For a young writer to fall under this influence seems to me as great a literary misfortune as it would be a physical calamity for him to become crippled. If one wishes to earn a trumpery wage by writing smartly, these are his models; but if he is in love with literature, he must turn his back. The young writer should strive always to be serious before he is smart, sincere before he is clever, and to flee flippancy as he would flee the pestilence that stalketh at noonday.
By serious, I do not necessarily mean grave, and still less do I mean solemn. It is as true for the writer of humorous literature that he should take his art seriously as it is for the writer of history or of sermons. No man ever took literature more seriously than Charles Lamb, yet he remains one of the most deliciously humorous writers of all time. He was gay and whimsical and droll, but he never for a moment failed of a high and noble respect for literature; he was apparently freakish, but he did not for a line become flippant. It would have been impossible for him to be vulgar. His taste always prevented his going too far. Even in the wildest excesses of humorous literature it is still absolutely needful to preserve a serious attitude toward literature and toward life. It is not that this feeling is to be obtruded. It is not meant that the jest shall be made with the sour visage of a Puritan. It is that the author himself shall never lose this inner respect and reverence for the dignities of life and for the truth. If these are a part of his character he cannot write otherwise than with them as it were forming a background to his work; and no literature is of lasting value or even fame which lacks this.
One of the most striking examples of what I mean is furnished by the poet François Villon, thief, house-breaker, and scape-gallows. He believed not in man, woman, or God, but he did hold to faith in literary art. Life as a matter of every-day existence he took flippantly enough, but literature as an expression of life he still regarded seriously,—and thus it happens that his poems live to-day, and that they are part of permanent literature.
Life is after all a serious matter to the lightest human being. However it is embroidered over with joys and jocund devices, with merriment or frivolity, every man knows its solemnity. There are for the most careless of men moments in which the real gravity of his situation, as he stands insecurely for a moment between the cradle and the grave, forces itself upon him. The only universal human experience is pain. To most men comes hope, and to most comes love in some degree of intensity. Joy, ambition, hate, and jealousy, are common to perhaps the great majority of mankind, and the writer who touches strongly and skillfully upon any one of these is sure of appealing to most readers. Only he who portrays sorrow and suffering is dealing with an experience so universal that he is sure that no man can fail of some appreciation of the theme. Such being the case, it is only the author who by his fundamental seriousness implies—remotely, it may be, but surely—that he has a share in the universal heritage, who can long or deeply command the attention of mankind. To be flippant is to be inhuman; and although the world may not analyze this, it is sure to feel it. Style is the unconscious revelation of the writer’s attitude toward life, and if this be not serious all good gifts and graces of technical skill and mental cleverness, all adroitness of wit and strength of intellectual perception, even all vividness of imagination, will fail of making work great and permanently effective.
Volumes might be written upon style and its relations to authorship, but in the end it would still be necessary to acknowledge that the finest essence of literature is too subtle to be seized or analyzed. The aim of these talks was to consider the practical side of composition, and it is therefore aside from the purpose to attempt to discuss further the elusive æsthetic quality. Individual temperament and individual purpose must in the end determine what shall be the quality and style of all work; so that the secrets of this branch of literary art cannot be discovered until man is able to trace the nature and the working of those twin halves of the highest human consciousness, individuality and imagination.