Literary values, and other papers

by John Burroughs

Of course universal suffrage is of slight import in literature: not by the vote of the many, but by the judgment of the few, are the true standards upheld. The novels that sell by the hundred thousand will not be the best, or even the second or third best, and their great vogue only indicates that the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged the reading public, and that in democratic times, as in all other times, there never has been and probably never will be enough good taste to go around.

Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, literature, no more means a lowering of the standard of excellence than it means a lowering of the standards in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering or ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It means a lifting up of the average, with the great prizes, the high ideals, as attractive and as difficult as ever. Because the people are crude and run for the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are not therefore to infer that the cheap and meretricious will permanently content them. Democracy in literature, as exemplified by the two great modern democrats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new and more deeply religious way of looking at mankind, as well as at all the facts and objects of the visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding of new artistic motives and values in the people, in science and the modern spirit, in liberty, fraternity, equality, in the materialism and industrialism of man’s life as we know it in our day and land,—the carrying into imaginative fields the quality of common humanity, that which it shares with real things and with all open-air nature, with hunters, farmers, sailors, and real workers in all fields.

The typical democratic poet will hold and wield his literary and artistic endowment as a common, everyday man, the brother and equal of all, and never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts and advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poems will imply a great body of humanity—the masses, the toilers—and will carry into emotional and ideal fields the atmosphere of these.

Behold the artistic motives furnished by feudalism, by royalty, by lords and ladies, by the fears and superstitions of the past, by mythology and ecclesiasticism, by religious and political terrorism in all their manifold forms. Art and literature have lived upon these things for ages. Can democracy, can the worth and picturesqueness of the people, furnish no worthy themes and motives for the poets? Can science, can the present day, can the religion of humanity, the conquest of nature’s forces, inspire no poetic enthusiasm and give rise to great art rivaling that of the past? As between the past and the present, undoubtedly the difficulty is not in the poverty of the material of to-day, but in the inadequacy of the man. It requires a great spirit, a powerful personality, to master and absorb the diverse and complex elements of our time and imbue them with poetic enthusiasm.

The humanitarian enthusiasm as a motif in literature and art,—the inspiration begotten by the contemplation of the wrongs, the sufferings, and the hopes of the people,—undoubtedly came in with democracy. It was quite unknown to the ancient and to the feudal world. To all the more vital voices of our time this enthusiasm gives the tone. How pronounced it is in two of our latest and most promising poets, Mr. Edwin Markham and Mr. William Vaughn Moody!

It is hard to shake off the conviction that the old order of things had the advantage of picturesqueness. Is it because it is so hard to free ourselves from the illusions of time and distance? Charm, enticement, dwell with the remote, the unfamiliar. The now, the here, are vulgar and commonplace. We find it hard to realize that the great deeds were done on just such a day as this, and that the actors in them were just such men as we see about us. Then the days of one’s youth seem strange and incredible; how different their light from this hard, prosy glare! Our distrust of our own day and land as furnishing suitable material for poetry and romance doubtless springs largely from this illusion.

At the same time, a mechanical and industrial age like ours no doubt offers a harder problem to the imaginative producer than the ages of faith and fanaticism of the past. The steam whistle, the type of our civilization, what can the poet make of it? The clank of machinery, it must be confessed, is less inspiring than the clash of arms; the railroad is less pleasing to look upon than the highway, because it is more arbitrary and mechanical. In the same way, the steamship seems unrelated to the great forces and currents of the globe. Yet to put these things in poetry only requires time, only requires a more complete adjustment of our lives to them, and hence the proper vista and association. As is always the case, it is a question of the man and not of the material. Goethe said to Eckermann, “Our German æsthetical people are always talking about poetical and unpoetical objects, and in one respect they are not quite wrong; yet at bottom no real object is unpoetical, if the poet knows how to use it properly,”—if he can throw enough feeling into it. I lately read a poem by one of our younger poets on an entirely modern theme, the building of the railroad,—the gang of men cutting through hills, tunneling mountains, filling valleys, bridging chasms, etc. But, though vividly described, it did not quite reach the poetical; it lacked the personal and the human; it was realistic without the freeing touch of the idealistic. Some story, some interest, some enthusiasm overarching it, would have supplied an atmosphere that was lacking. We cannot be permanently interested in the gigantic or in sheer brute power unless they are in some way related to life and its aspirations. The battle of man with man is more interesting than the battle of man with rocks and chasms, because men can strike back, and victory is not to be had on such easy terms.

The same objection cannot be urged against Mr. William Vaughn Moody’s poem on the steam engine, which he treats under the figure of “The Brute,”—a poem of great imaginative power in which the human interest is constantly paramount. The still small voice of humanity is always heard through the Brute’s roar, as may be seen in the first stanza:—

“Through his might men work their wills;

They have boweled out the hills