20. Autobiographic Elements. Our knowledge is of two kinds: the first comes from our own experience; the other, from the experience and testimony of our fellow-men. Personal experience carries with it a conviction and power that do not usually belong to the knowledge received from the testimony of others. What we have experienced has become a part of our lives. The writers of vitality and power are those who draw largely on their individual resources,—the treasures of their own experience. They write, not from the memory, but from the heart. If they borrow from others, they assimilate the information, and thus vitalize it before giving it out again.
The best part of our knowledge is that which comes to us through experience and assimilation. It is a permanent possession. When an author's experience, either in an ideal or a realistic form, is introduced in his work, it becomes an interesting biographical element. It presents a part of his life, and often it exhibits the transforming and glorifying power of his genius. In the drama "She Stoops to Conquer," for example, Goldsmith has turned to excellent account a humiliating incident of his youth. His "Deserted Village" is full of childhood reminiscences. Scott's poems and novels are in large measure only an expansion of the mediæval and other lore that he enthusiastically collected in his youth and early manhood. George Eliot's earlier novels are filled with the scenes and characters of her early life; and Dickens's best novel, "David Copperfield," is largely autobiographical. An author's best work—that which possesses the greatest degree of interest and vitality—is generally that which springs from the treasure of his deepest experience, and is the fullest expression of his individual thought and feeling.
21. View of Life. Every writer of originality and power takes a fundamental view of life. He has settled convictions of some sort in regard to the world in which he lives. Sometimes this view comes from religion and sometimes from philosophy or science, though in any case it is apt to be influenced by the writer's physical condition. German philosophy has influenced many able writers,—Coleridge, Carlyle, Emerson, and others in England and America; and at the present time the theory of evolution is leaving a deep impress on literature.
Whence came this magnificent universe? What is the origin and destiny of man? Is the general drift of human affairs upward or downward? These are great fundamental questions, and the answers we give them lie at the bottom of our thinking and give tone to our writing. The world is not the same to the Christian theist and to the agnostic. Human life has a deeper significance to the man who believes in the loving providence of God than to the man who believes only in the existence of matter and natural law. The man who believes in the presence and sovereignty of God in all things looks hopefully to the future. He is optimistic rather than pessimistic. The presence of an exuberant vitality reveals itself in a cheerful, buoyant tone. Scott's exuberant spirit forms a pleasing contrast with Carlyle's dyspeptic cynicism.
It is often highly important to understand the fundamental beliefs of a writer. His works may be in a measure unintelligible till his standpoint is fully understood. Sometimes his various writings are only an expansion and application of one or two great fundamental principles. The works of Herbert Spencer, for example, are in the main an elaboration of the theory of evolution. Byron represented a skeptical reaction against the conventional manners and beliefs of his day. The essential feature of Emerson's work is found in a single sentence in "Nature." "We learn," he says, "that the Highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal Essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one, and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves."
22. Literary School. In like manner it is interesting and sometimes illumining to know the literary school or tendency to which a writer belongs. Every author has his limitations and idiosyncrasies. First of all, he may be a writer of prose alone or of poetry alone. In prose he may confine himself to a single department, as fiction or history; or in poetry he may be chiefly lyric, didactic, or dramatic. Within these narrower spheres he may identify himself with a single tendency or group of writers. In history he may be philosophic or narrative; in fiction he may be a romanticist or a realist; in poetry he may be subjective or objective in his treatment of themes. Scott's romanticism, for instance, which delights in mediæval scenes and incidents, is very unlike Dickens's realism, which depicts the scenes and incidents of actual contemporary life. George Eliot's psychologic novels are different from those of either Scott or Dickens. Bryant's clear descriptions of nature stand in striking contrast with Poe's mystical melodies.
23. Mood and Purpose. It is important to understand the mood and purpose of an author. We are not in a position fairly to judge a work until we know its spirit and object. Until we know whether the writer is playful or earnest, joyous or sad, satirical or serious, we cannot give his words the right tone and value; and until we see clearly what he is driving at, we cannot properly estimate the successive steps in his production nor judge of its worth as a whole.
The moods expressed in literature are exceedingly various. Since literature is the expression of the intellectual life of man, it embodies the various moods and passions to which human nature is subject. Sometimes, for example, there is laughing humor, as in Holmes's "The Deacon's Masterpiece." Sometimes there is violent anger, as in Byron's "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." We feel his unrestrained wrath, as he exclaims,—
"Prepare for rhyme—I'll publish right or wrong;
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song."
Sometimes the mood is one of pensive meditation, as when Gray sits alone in the country churchyard amid deepening twilight: