Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

“THOU SHALT NOT PREACH ”

After Reading Tolstoi on “What is Art?”

THERE is one respect in which pure art and pure science agree: both are disinterested, and seek the truth, each of its kind, for its own sake; neither has any axe to grind. Both would live in the whole,—one through reason and investigation, the other through imagination and contemplation. Science seeks to understand the universe, art to enjoy it. A man of pure science like Darwin is as disinterested as a great artist like Shakespeare. He has no practical or secondary ends; the truth alone is his quest. He is tracing the footsteps of creative energy through organic nature. He is like a detective working up a case. His theory about it is only provisional, for the moment. Every fact is welcome to him, and the more it seems to tell against his theory of the case, the more eagerly he weighs it and studies it. Indeed, the man of science follows an ideal as truly as does the poet, and will pass by fortune, honors, and all worldly success, to cleave to it. Tolstoi thinks that science for science’ sake is as bad as art for art’s sake; but is not knowledge a reward in itself, and is there any higher good than that mastery of the intellect over the problems of the universe which science gives? By bending science to particular and secondary ends we lay the basis of our material civilization, but it is still true that the final end of science is, not our material benefit, but our mental enlightenment; nor is the highest end of art the good which the preacher and the moralist seek to give us. A poem of Milton’s or Tennyson’s carries its own proof, its own justification. When we demand a message of the poet, or of any artist, outside of himself, outside of the truth which he unconsciously conveys through his own personality and point of view, we degrade his art, or destroy that disinterestedness which is its crown. Art exists for ideal ends; it looks askance at devotees, at doctrinaires, at all men engaged in the dissemination of particular ideas. I am not now thinking of art as mere craft, but as the province of man’s freest, most spontaneous, most joyous, most complete soul activity,—the kind of activity that has no other end, seeks no other reward, than it finds in or of itself, the joy of being and beholding, the free play of creative energy. Art does not rebuke vice, it depicts it; it does not urge reform, it shows us the reformers. Its work is play, its lesson is an allegory. The preacher works by selection and exclusion, the artist by inclusion and contrast.

When the resources of literary art are enlisted in any propaganda, in the dissemination of particular ideas or doctrines, or when the end is moral or scientific or political or philosophical, and not æsthetic, the result is a mixed product, a cross between literature and something else, which may be very vigorous and serviceable, but which cannot give the kind of satisfaction that is imparted by a pure artistic creation. A great poem or work of art does not speak to any special and passing condition, mental or spiritual; its ministrations are neither those of meat nor those of medicine; it does not subserve any private or secondary ends, even the saving of our souls. The books that seem written for us are quite certain to lose in interest to the next generation. A great poem heals, not as the doctor heals, but as nature does, by bringing the conditions of health. It consoles, not as the priest consoles, but as love and life themselves do. It does not offer a special good, but a general benefaction.

I once heard Emerson quote with approval Shakespeare’s saying, “Read what you most affect;” but no doubt a broad culture demands wide reading, and that we be on our guard against our particular predilections, because such predilections may lead us into narrow channels. Do the devotees of Browning, those who cry Browning, Browning, and Browning only, do him the highest honor? Do the disciples of Whitman, who would make a cult of him, live in the spirit of the whole, as Whitman himself tried to live?—Whitman, who said that there may be any number of Supremes, and that the chief lesson to be learned under the master is how to destroy him? Our love for an author must not suggest the fondness of the epicure for a special dish, or partake of the lover’s infatuation for his mistress. Infatuation is not permissible in literature. If art does not make us free of the whole, it fails of its purpose. Only the religious bigot builds upon specific texts, and only the one-sided, half-formed mind sees life through the eyes of a single author. In the æsthetic sphere one may serve many masters; he may give himself to none. One of the latest and most mature perceptions that comes to us is the perception of relativity, in art as well as in all other matters.

With respect to this question, both readers and writers may be divided into two classes, the interested and the disinterested,—those who are seeking special and personal ends, and those who are seeking general, universal ends.

The poet is best pleased with the disinterested readers and admirers of his work; that is, with those who take to it on the broadest human grounds, and not upon grounds merely personal to themselves. Thus Longfellow will find a wider and more disinterested audience than Whittier, because his Muse is less in the service of special ideas; he looks at life less as a Quaker and a Puritan, and more as a man.

The special ideas of an age, its moral enthusiasms and revolts, give place to other ideas and enthusiasms, which in their turn give place to others; but there are certain currents of thought and emotion that are perennial, certain experiences common to all men and peoples. Such a poem as Gray’s Elegy, for instance, is filled with the breadth of universal human life. On the other hand, such a work as Schiller’s “Robbers,” or Goethe’s “Werther,” seems to us like an empty shell picked up on the shore, the life entirely gone out of it. One can see why Poe is looked upon by foreign critics as outranking any of our more popular New England poets. It is because his work has more of the ubiquitous character of true art, is less pledged to moral and special ends, less the result of personal tastes and attractions, and more the pure flame of the unpledged æsthetic nature. The “Raven” and “The Bells” have that play, that scorn of personal ends, that potential spiritual energy, of great art. Poe does not increase our stock of ideas or widen the sphere of our sympathies. He was a conjurer with words. As a poet he used language for the music he could evoke from it. What is the mental content of his “Annabel Lee”? It is as vague and shadowy as its angels and demons, its sepulchres and seraphim, and its kingdom by the sea.

Is it Coleridge who tells of an artist who always copied his wife’s legs in his pictures, and thereby won great fame? The creative touch it is that marks the artist. He smites the rocks, and a fountain gushes forth. Tennyson has the artist nature in greater measure than Wordsworth, a more flexible receptive spirit, though he never attains to the homely pathos or the moral grandeur of the latter. Yet individual convictions and attractions played a less part in his poetry. Wordsworth gathered the harvest of his own feelings and experiences, Tennyson that of other men as well. One reaped only where he had sown, the other where all men had sown. One is colored by Westmoreland, the other by the whole of England. Wordsworth wrote more from character and natural bias than Tennyson. What nature does with a man,—that is no credit to him; but what he does with nature. If his character inspired the poem, is it not less than if his imagination had inspired it? What a man does out of and independent of himself, or the degree in which he transcends his own experience and partialities and rises into universal relations,—is not that the measure of him as an artist? If I tell only what I know, what I have felt, what I have seen, no matter how well I do it, that is not to come into the sphere the artist dwells in. What Wordsworth writes is more personal to himself, more out of his own life, than what Tennyson writes. He is more limited by his temperament and natural bias than Tennyson is by his. His word is more inevitable, more the word of fate, but is it not therefore less the word of art? Be sincere, be sincere; be not too sincere, lest you substitute a moral rigidity for the flexibility demanded by art. The artist is never the slave of his sincerity.

Graphic power is only a minor part of artistic power. One can say what one has felt, and tell what one has experienced; but the artist can tell what he has not experienced, and say what he has not felt. He can make the assumed, the imaginary, real to himself and to his reader. He can depict the passion of love, of anger, of remorse, though he may never have felt them. Many persons have written one good novel, but not a second, because in the first they exhausted their experience; to transcend that is denied them. True art will have many messages and many morals, as life and nature have, but we must draw them out for ourselves. They do not lead, they follow; they do not make the argument, they are made by it. Let us repeat and re-repeat. Art makes us free of the whole,—not art for craft’s sake, but art as implying the entire sphere of man’s spontaneous æsthetic activity. Beauty is indeed its own excuse for being. Literature is an end in and of itself, as much as music is or religion is. Or are we religious only upon pay? What message has a bird, a flower, a summer day, frost, rain, wind, snow? There are sermons in stones—when we put them there. What message has Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Virgil, or any true poet? The message we have the power to draw from him, and no two of us will draw the same. Art is a circle; it is complete within itself; it returns forever upon itself. There is no great poetry without great ideas, and yet the ideas must exist as impulse, will, emotion, and not lie upon the surface as formulas. The enemies of art are reflection, special ideas, conscious intellectual processes, because these things isolate us and shut us off from the life of the whole,—from that which we reach through our sentiments and emotions. The æsthetic mood, says the author of “The Subconscious Self,” “is, in its essence, receptive, contemplative, distinctly personal, and therefore free from purpose and conscious selection.” “Whenever a work of art is the vehicle for an idea or purpose outside of its essential form, it falls short of being a pure art creation, and fails in its appeal to the æsthetic mood, whilst, be it conceded, it may serve some other but secondary purpose, which belongs to the province of the archæologist, the art historian, and the collector,” and, we may add, the moralist and preacher. Wordsworth’s poet was content if he “might enjoy the things that others understood,” and this is always characteristic of the poetic mood. Absorption, contemplation, enjoyment, and not criticism and reflection, are as the air it breathes. Byron was a great poet, but, said Goethe, “the moment he reflects, he is a child.” It is better that the poet should not be a child when he reflects, but it is much more important that he be a child when he feels. His power as a poet does not lie in the reflective faculties, but in the direct, joyous, solvent power of his spirit.