Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

Carlyle and Ruskin fall into the same category. They sin against the classic virtues of repose, proportion, serenity, but this makes their penetrating power all the greater. Carlyle cannot rank with the great impartial historians, yet as a painter of historical characters and scenes the vividness and reality of his pictures are almost unequaled. Carlyle lacked the disinterestedness of the true artist. He had great power of description and characterization, but he could not as an historian stand apart from his subject as the great Greek and Roman historians do. He is a portion of all that he sees and describes. He is bent upon persuasion quite as much as upon portrayal. He could not succeed as a novelist or a poet, because of his vehement, intolerant nature. He succeeds as an historian only in portraying men in whom he sees the lineaments of his own character, as in Cromwell. He did not or could not live in the whole, as did his master, Goethe. His mind was a steep incline. His opinions were like mountain torrents. Arnold, in one of his letters, complained that in his criticism of Goethe there was too much of engouement,—too much, I suppose, of the fondness of the gourmand for a particular dish, or of the toper for his favorite tipple. His enthusiasm was intemperate, and therefore unsound. Doubtless some such objection as this may be urged against most of Carlyle’s criticisms. He was ruled by his character more than by his intellect; his feeling guided his vision. If he is not always a light to the reason, he is certainly an electric excitant to the imagination and the moral sense. In his essays, pamphlets, histories, we hardly get judicial estimates of things; rather do we get overestimates or under estimates. Yet always is there something that kindles and brings the blood to the surface. Carlyle will beget a stronger race than Arnold, but it will not be so cool and clear-headed. Emerson will fertilize more minds with new thought than Lowell, but there will be many more cranks and fanatics and hobbyists among them.

Professor Dowden says Landor falls below Shelley and Wordsworth because he had no divine message or oracle to deliver to the men of his generation,—no authentic word of the Lord to utter. Landor had great thoughts, but they were not of first-rate importance with reference to his times. He was more thoroughly imbued with the classic spirit than either Shelley or Wordsworth, and the classic spirit is at ease in Zion. The modern world differs from the ancient in its moral stress and fervor. This moral stress and fervor both Shelley and Wordsworth shared, but Landor did not. Where would the world be in thought, in works, in civilization, had there been no one-sided, overloaded, fanatical men,—men of partial views, of half-truths, of one idea? Where would Christianity have been, under the play of disinterested intellect, without disciples, without devotees, without saints and martyrs, without its Paul and its Luther, without prejudice, without superstition, without inflexibility?

We might fitly contrast these two types of mind under the heads of Protestant and Catholic, the one personal, the other impersonal. With the Protestant type goes individualism, which, as I have said, is so marked a feature of the modern world. With the Catholic type goes institutionalism, which was so marked a feature of the ancient world. With the former goes the right of private judgment, innovation, progress, new forms of art; with the latter goes authority, obedience, the power of the past. The Protestant type is more capricious and willful; it is restless, venturesome, impatient of rules and precedents; the older type is more serene, composed, conservative, orderly. In criticism it is more objective; it upholds the standards, it lays down the law; it cherishes the academic spirit. The French mind is the more Catholic; the English the more Protestant. In literature the Protestant type is the more subjective and creative; it makes new discoveries, it founds new orders. Catholicism is exterior, formal, imposing; it takes little account of personal needs and peculiarities, while Protestantism is almost entirely concerned with the private, interior world. Individualism in religion begat Protestantism, and upon Protestantism it begat the numerous progeny of the sects, the thousand and one isms that now divide the religious world. To this spirit religion is something personal and private to every man, and in no sense a matter of forms and rituals. In fact, individualism fairly confronts institutionalism. This spirit carried into the region of æsthetics or literature gives rise to like results,—to a freer play of personal taste and preferences, to more intense individual utterances, to new and unique types of artistic genius, and to new lines of activity in the æsthetic field.

Another name for it is the democratic spirit. Its special dangers are the crude, the odd, the capricious, just as the danger of institutionalism is the coldly formal, the lifeless, the traditional. In English literature the former begat Shakespeare, as it did Tupper; the latter begat Milton, as it did Young and Pollock. With institutionalism goes the divine right of kings, the sacredness of priests, the authority of forms and ceremonies, and the slavery of the masses; with individualism goes the divinity of man, the sacredness of life, the right of private judgment, the decay of traditions and forms, and the birth of the modern spirit. With one goes stateliness, impressiveness, distinction, as well as the empty, the moribund, the despotic; with the other goes force, strenuousness, originality, as well as the loud, the amorphous, the fanatical.

V

Goethe said that a loving interest in the person and the works of an author, amounting to a certain one-sided enthusiasm, alone led to reality in criticism; all else was vanity. No doubt more will come of the contact of two minds under these circumstances than from what is called the judicial attitude; there will be more complete fusion and interpenetration; without a certain warmth and passion there is no fruitfulness, even in criticism. In the field of art and literature, to be disinterested does not mean to be cold and judicial; it means to be free from bias, free from theories and systems, with mind open to receive a clear impression of the work’s characteristic merits and qualities.

It is tradition that always stands in the way of the new man. In politics, it is the political tradition; in religion, the religious tradition; and in literature, the literary tradition. Professional criticism is the guardian of the literary tradition, and this is why any man who essays a new departure in literary art has reason to fear criticism or despise it, as the case may be.

It is when we take up any new work in the judicial spirit, bent upon judging and classifying, rather than upon enjoying and understanding, the conscious analytical intellect on duty and the sympathies and the intuitions under lock and key, that there is danger that judicial blindness will fall upon us. When we approach nature in the spirit of technical science, our minds already preoccupied with certain conclusions and systems, do we get as much of the joy and stimulus which she holds for us as do the children on the way to school of a spring morning with their hands full of wild flowers, or as does the gleesome saunterer over hills in summer with only love and appreciation uppermost in his mind?

Professional criticism often becomes mere pedagogical narrowness and hardness; it gets crushed over with rules and precedents, pinched and sterilized by routine and convention, so that a new work makes no impression upon it. The literary tradition, like the religious tradition, ceases to be vital and formative.

Is it not true that all first-class works have to be approached with a certain humility and free giving of one’s self? In a sense, “except ye become as little children” ye cannot enter the kingdom of the great books.