Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

To suppress or to ignore the world of vice and sin is not to be moral; to portray it is not to be immoral. But to gloat over it, to dwell fondly upon it, to return to it, to exaggerate it, to roll it under the tongue as a sweet morsel,—that is to be immoral; and to treat it as time and nature do or as the great artists do, as affording contrasts and difficulties, and disturbing but not destroying the balance of life, is within the scope of the moral. Art must make us free of the whole; every work must in a measure reflect the whole of life; if it dwell too much on that part called sin and evil, it is false to its ideal; it must keep the balance; it must be true to the integrity of nature. All things are permissible in their time and place. That a thing is real and true is no reason why it should go into the artist’s picture; but that it belongs there, that it is organic there, a part of a vital whole, and that that whole is a fair representation of human life—in this is the justification. Not every scene in nature composes well into a picture, and not every phase of human life is equally significant in a creative work. That nature does this of that is no reason why the artist should do it, unless he can show an equal insouciance and an equal prodigality and power. He must take what he can make his own and imbue with the spirit of life. I lately read a novel by one of our most promising young novelists, in which there was a streak of vulgar realism, forced in, evidently, under the pressure of a theory,—the theory that art is never to shrink from the true. It offended because it was entirely gratuitous; there was no necessity for it. If it was true, it was not apt; if it was real, it was not fit; it jarred; it was dragged in by main force; it was a false note. Is not anything disagreeable in a novel of the imagination a false note? Disagreeable, I mean, not by reason of the subject matter, but by reason of the treatment. Dante makes hell fascinating by his treatment.

There are three ways of treating the under side of nature. There is the childlike simplicity of the Biblical writers, who think no evil; there is the artistic frankness of the great dramatic poets, who know the value of foils and contrasts, and who cannot ignore any element of life; and there is the license and levity of the lascivious poets, who live in the erotic alone. Both Ibsen and Tolstoi have been condemned as immoral only because their artistic scheme embraces all the elements that are potent in life. Of levity, of exaggeration, they are not guilty. If Zola is to be condemned, it is probably because he makes too prominent certain things, and thus destroys the proportion. In nature nothing is detached. Her great currents flow on and purify themselves. The ugly, the unclean, are quickly lost sight of; the sky and the sun cover all, bathe all. But art is detachment: our attention is fixed upon a few points, and a drop or two too much of certain things spoils it all. In nature a drop or two too much does not matter; we quickly escape, we find compensation. A bad odor in the open air is of little consequence; but in Zola’s books the bad odors are as in a closed room, and we soon pray to be delivered from them.

VII

DEMOCRACY AND LITERATURE

THE one new thing in the world in our day is democracy, the coming forward of the people, and that which has grown out of it, or which goes along with it,—science, free inquiry, the industrial system, the humanitarian spirit. The old and past world from which we inherit our literary tastes and standards was characterized by a condition of things quite different,—the supremacy of the few, the leadership of the hero, the strong man,—the picturesque age that gave us art, theology, philosophy, and the great epic poems. It was the youth of the race. Mankind seems now fast nearing its majority. The bewitching, the delusive, the unreasoning, pathetic time of youth is past. What the man loses and what he gains in passing from youth to manhood the race has lost and has gained in passing from the age of myth to the age of science. A charm, an innocence, a susceptibility, a credulity, and many other things are gone; a seriousness, a reasonableness, a width of outlook, power to deal with real things, sanity, and self-control, have come. Youth is cruel, age is kind and considerate. All forms, ceremonies, titles, all conferred dignities and arbitrary distinctions, all pomp and circumstance, count for less and less in the world. Art is less and less; nature is more and more. The extrinsic, the put on, the ornamental, the factitious, count for less and less; theology, metaphysics, the sacredness of priests, the divinity of kings, count for less and less, while the real, the true, the essential, in all fields, count for more. It is doubtful if art for art’s sake can ever be in the future what it has been in the past. We are too deeply absorbed in the reality; we care less and less for the symbol and more and more for the thing symbolized. The monarchical idea is dwindling; the throne as a symbol has lost its force; the old religious language of supplication and praise begins to have a hollow, archaic sound. The idea of the fatherhood of God is fast taking the place of the idea of the despotism of God. It has taken mankind all these centuries to rise to the conception of a being with whom the language of excessive flattery and adulation seems out of place. The democratic idea will eventually penetrate and modify our religious notions. We shall no longer seek to propitiate an offended deity by groveling in the dust before an imaginary throne. The despot goes out, the Brother comes in. All these things and many more cluster around the word democracy.

What is the import of the word as applied to literature? How far will it carry in this field? Is the democratic movement favorable or unfavorable to the growth of true literature? It has been often said that literature is essentially aristocratic; that is, I suppose, that it implies a degree of excellence, a kind of excellence, quite beyond the appreciation of the masses. This is no doubt in a measure true, and always has been true. While the mass of the people are not good offhand judges of the best literature, it is equally true that great literature—literature that has breadth and power, like the English Bible or like Bunyan, and many other books that transcend the sphere of mere letters—makes its way more or less among the people. The highest ideals in any sphere can never draw the many; yet the few, the elect who are drawn by them, are probably just as sure to appear in a democracy as in an oligarchy.

To some readers democracy in literature seems to suggest only an incursion of the loud, the vulgar, the cheap and meretricious. Apparently it suggests only these things to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose volume “Questions at Issue” contains an essay upon this subject.

Mr. Gosse congratulates the guild of letters that the summits of literature have not yet been submerged by the flood of democracy. The standards have not been lowered in obedience to the popular taste.

But Mr. Gosse thinks the social revolution or evolution now imminent will require a new species of poetry, that this poetry will be democratic to a degree at present unimaginable, though just what it is to be democratic in poetry is not very clear to him. He says: “The aristocratic tradition is still paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales,” and he does not see what will be left if this romantic phraseology is done away with. We shall certainly have left what we had before these types and symbols came into vogue,—nature, life, man, God. If out of these things we cannot supply ourselves with new types and values, then certainly we shall be hard put.

The critic cites the popularity of Tennyson as an illustration of the influence of literature upon democracy rather than of democracy upon literature. It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the democratic spirit, but by the old feudal spirit; to him the people was but a hundred-headed beast, and his temper toward this beast, if reports are true, was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of the haughty, exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and his popularity simply showed how widespread the appreciation of literary excellence may become in democratic times.