“Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.”
Poetry, however, usually refrains from minute description of expression, a thing impossible in words, and strikes for a vivid, if inexact, impression, by the use of such phrases as “a fiery eye,” “a liquid eye,” and “The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling.”[[22]]
We also get from every art a personal impression that does not come from the imitation of features and tones, nor from a description of these in words, but is the personality of the author himself, subtly communicated by something that we interpret as signs of his state of mind. When one reads Motley’s histories he gets a personal impression not only of the Prince of Orange or Alexander of Parma, but also of Mr. Motley; and the same is true or may be true of any work of art, however “objective” it may be. What we call style, when we say “The style is the man,” is the equivalent, in the artist’s way of doing things, of those visible and audible traits of the form and voice by which we judge people who are bodily present.[[23]] “Every work of genius,” says John Burroughs, “has its own physiognomy—sad, cheerful, frowning, yearning, determined, meditative.” Just as we are glad of the presence of certain forms and faces, because of the mood they put us in, so we are glad of the physiognomy of certain writers in their books, quite apart from the intellectual content of what they say; and this is the subtlest, most durable, most indispensable charm of all. Every lover of books has authors whom he reads over and over again, whom he cares for as persons and not as sources of information, who are more to him, possibly, than any person he sees. He continually returns to the cherished companion and feeds eagerly upon his thought. It is because there is something in the book which he needs, which awakens and directs trains of thought that lead him where he likes to be led. The thing that does this is something personal and hard to define; it is in the words and yet not in any definite information that they convey. It is rather an attitude, a way of feeling, communicated by a style faithful to the writer’s mind. Some people find pleasure and profit, for example, in perusing even the somewhat obscure and little inspired portions of Goethe’s writings, like the “Campaigns in France”; it would perhaps be impossible to tell why, further than by saying that they get the feeling of something calm, free and onward which is Goethe himself, and not to be had elsewhere.
And so anyone who practises literary composition, even of a pedestrian sort, will find at least one reward for his pains in a growing insight into the personality of great writers. He will come to feel that such a word was chosen or such a sentence framed in just that way, under the influence of such a purpose or sentiment, and by putting these impressions together, will presently arrive at some personal acquaintance with any author whose character and aims are at all congenial with his own.
We feel this more in literature than in any other art, and more in prose of an intimate sort than in any other kind of literature. The reason appears to be that writing, particularly writing of a familiar kind, like letters and autobiographies, is something which we all practise in one way or another, and which we can, therefore, interpret; while the methods of other arts are beyond our imaginations. It is easy to share the spirit of Charles Lamb writing his Letters, or of Montaigne dictating his Essays, or of Thackeray discoursing in the first person about his characters; because they merely did what all of us do, only did it better. On the other hand, Michelangelo, or Wagner, or Shakespeare—except in his sonnets—remains for most of us personally remote and inconceivable. But a painter, or a composer, or a sculptor, or a poet, will always get an impression of personality, of style, from another artist of the same sort, because his experience enables him to feel the subtle indications of mood and method. Mr. Frith, the painter, says in his autobiography that a picture “will betray the real character of its author; who, in the unconscious development of his peculiarities, constantly presents to the initiated signs by which an infallible judgment may be pronounced on the painter’s mind and character.”[[24]] In fact, it is true of any earnest career that a man expresses his character in his work, and that another man of similar aims can read what he expresses. We see in General Grant’s Memoirs, how an able commander feels the personality of an opponent in the movements of his armies, imagines what he will do in various exigencies, and deals with him accordingly.
These personal impressions of a writer or other artist may or may not be accompanied by a vague imagination of his visible appearance. Some persons have so strong a need to think in connection with visual images that they seem to form no notion of personality without involuntarily imagining what the person looks like; while others can have a strong impression of feeling and purpose that seems not to be accompanied by any visual picture. There can be no doubt, however, that sensible images of the face, voice, etc., usually go with personal ideas. Our earliest personal conceptions grow up about such images; and they always remain for most of us the principal means of getting hold of other people. Naturally, they have about the same relative place in memory and imagination as they do in observation. Probably, if we could get to the bottom of the matter, it would be found that our impression of a writer is always accompanied by some idea of his sensible appearance, is always associated with a physiognomy, even when we are not aware of it. Can anyone, for example, read Macaulay and think of a soft and delicately inflected voice? I imagine not: these periods must be connected with a sonorous and somewhat mechanical utterance; the sort of person that speaks softly and with delicate inflections would have written otherwise. On the other hand, in reading Robert Louis Stevenson it is impossible, I should say, not to get the impression of a sensitive and flexible speech. Such impressions are mostly vague and may be incorrect, but for sympathetic readers they exist and constitute a real, though subtle, physiognomy.
Not only the idea of particular persons but that of social groups seems to have a sensible basis in these ghosts of expression. The sentiment by which one’s family, club, college, state or country is realized in his mind is stimulated by vague images, largely personal. Thus the spirit of a college fraternity seems to come back to me through a memory of the old rooms and of the faces of friends. The idea of country is a rich and various one and has connected with it many sensuous symbols—such as flags, music, and the rhythm of patriotic poetry—that are not directly personal; but it is chiefly an idea of personal traits that we share and like, as set over against others that are different and repugnant. We think of America as the land of freedom, simplicity, cordiality, equality, and so on, in antithesis to other countries which we suppose to be otherwise—and we think of these traits by imagining the people that embody them. For countless school children patriotism begins in sympathy with our forefathers in resistance to the hateful oppression and arrogance of the British, and this fact of early training largely accounts for the perennial popularity of the anti-British side in international questions. Where the country has a permanent ruler to typify it his image is doubtless a chief element in the patriotic idea. On the other hand, the impulse which we feel to personify country, or anything else that awakens strong emotion in us, shows our imaginations to be so profoundly personal that deep feeling almost inevitably connects itself with a personal image. In short, group sentiment, in so far as it is awakened by definite images, is only a variety of personal sentiment. A sort of vague agitation, however, is sometimes produced by mere numbers. Thus public opinion is sometimes thought of as a vast impersonal force, like a great wind, though ordinarily it is conceived simply as the opinion of particular persons, whose expressions or tones are more or less definitely imagined.
In the preceding I have considered the rise of personal ideas chiefly from the point of view of the visual or auditory element in them—the personal symbol or vehicle of communication; but of course there is a parallel growth in feeling. An infant’s states of feeling may be supposed to be nearly as crude as his ideas of the appearance of things; and the process that gives form, variety, and coherence to the latter does the same for the former. It is precisely the act of intercourse, the stimulation of the mind by a personal symbol, which gives a formative impulse to the vague mass of hereditary feeling-tendency, and this impulse, in turn, results in a larger power of interpreting the symbol. It is not to be supposed, for instance, that such feelings as generosity, respect, mortification, emulation, the sense of honor, and the like, are an original endowment of the mind. Like all the finer and larger mental life these arise in conjunction with communication and could not exist without it. It is these finer modes of feeling, these intricate branchings or differentiations of the primitive trunk of emotion, to which the name sentiments is usually applied. Personal sentiments are correlative with personal symbols, the interpretation of the latter meaning nothing more than that the former are associated with them; while the sentiments, in turn, cannot be felt except by the aid of the symbols. If I see a face and feel that here is an honest man, it means that I have, in the past, achieved through intercourse an idea of honest personality, with the visual elements of which the face before me has something in common, so that it calls up this socially achieved sentiment. And moreover in knowing this honest man my idea of honest personality will be enlarged and corrected for future use. Both the sentiment and its visual associations will be somewhat different from what they were.
Thus no personal sentiment is the exclusive product of any one influence, but all is of various origin and has a social history. The more clearly one can grasp this fact the better, at least if I am right in supposing that a whole system of wrong thinking results from overlooking it and assuming that personal ideas are separable and fragmentary elements in the mind. Of this I shall say more presently. The fact I mean is that expressed by Shakespeare, with reference to love, or loving friendship, in his thirty-first sonnet:
“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,