The Fifth Interference:
The Habit of Analysis
I
If Shakespeare Came to Chicago
It is one of the supreme literary excellences of the Bible that, until the other day almost, it had never occurred to any one that it is literature at all. It has been read by men and women, and children and priests and popes, and kings and slaves and the dying of all ages, and it has come to them not as a book, but as if it were something happening to them.
It has come to them as nights and mornings come, and sleep and death, as one of the great, simple, infinite experiences of human life. It has been the habit of the world to take the greatest works of art, like the greatest works of God, in this simple and straightforward fashion, as great experiences. If a masterpiece really is a masterpiece, and rains and shines its instincts on us as masterpieces should, we do not think whether it is literary or not, any more than we gaze on mountains and stop to think how sublimely scientific, raptly geological, and logically chemical they are. These things are true about mountains, and have their place. But it is the nature of a mountain to insist upon its own place—to be an experience first and to be as scientific and geological and chemical as it pleases afterward. It is the nature of anything powerful to be an experience first and to appeal to experience. When we have time, or when the experience is over, a mountain or a masterpiece can be analysed—the worst part of it; but we cannot make a masterpiece by analysing it; and a mountain has never been appreciated by pounding it into trap, quartz, and conglomerate; and it still holds good, as a general principle, that making a man appreciate a mountain by pounding it takes nearly as long as making the mountain, and is not nearly so worth while.
Not many years ago, in one of our journals of the more literary sort, there appeared a few directions from Chicago University to the late John Keats on how to write an “Ode to a Nightingale.” These directions were from the Head of a Department, who, in a previous paper in the same journal, had rewritten the “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” The main point the Head of the Department made, with regard to the nightingale, was that it was not worth rewriting. “‘The Ode to the Nightingale,’” says he, “offers me no such temptation. There is almost nothing in it that properly belongs to the subject treated. The faults of the Grecian Urn are such as the poet himself, under wise criticism” (see catalogue of Chicago University) “might easily have removed. The faults of the Nightingale are such that they cannot be removed. They inhere in the idea and structure.” The Head of the Department dwells at length upon “the hopeless fortune of the poem,” expressing his regret that it can never be retrieved. After duly analysing what he considers the poem’s leading thought, he regrets that a poet like John Keats should go so far, apropos of a nightingale, as to sigh in his immortal stanzas, “for something which, whatever it may be, is nothing short of a dead drunk.”
One hears the soul of Keats from out its eternal Italy—
“Is there no one near to help me
… No fair dawn
Of life from charitable voice? No sweet saying
To set my dull and sadden’d spirit playing?”