Style in letters is a quality of mind—a certain flavor imparted to words by the personality back of them. Pass language through one mind and it is tasteless and colorless; pass it through another, and it acquires an entirely new value and significance and gives us a unique pleasure. In the one case the sentences are artificial; in the other they bud and sprout out of the man himself as naturally as the plants and trees out of the soil.
There is nothing else in the world so sensitive and chameleon-like as language; it takes on at once the hue and quality of the mind that uses it. See how neutral and impersonal, or old and worn and faded the words look in the pages of some writers, then see how drastic or new and individual they become when a mind of another type marshals them into sentences. What vigor and life in them! they seem to have been newly coined since we last met them. It is the test of a writer’s real worth—does the language tarnish, as it were, in his hand, or is it brightened and freshened in his use?
A book may contain valuable truths and sound sentiments of universal appeal, but if the literary coinage is feeble, if the page is not strongly individualized, freshly and clearly stamped by the purpose of the writer, it cannot take rank as good literature. To become literature, truth must be perpetually reborn, reincarnated, and begin life anew.
A successful utterance always has value, always has truth, though in its purely intellectual aspects it may not correspond with the truth as we see it. I cannot accept all of Ruskin’s views upon our civilization or all of Tolstoi’s upon art, yet I see that they speak the truth as it defines itself to their minds and feelings. A counter-statement may be equally true. The struggle for existence goes on in the ideal world as well as in the real. The strongest mind, the fittest statement, survives for the time being. That a system of philosophy or religion perishes or is laid aside is not because it is not or was not true, but because it is not true to the new minds and under the new conditions. It no longer expresses what the world thinks and feels. It is outgrown. Was not Calvinism true to our fathers? It is no longer true to us because we were born at a later day in the world. With regard to truths of science, we may say, once a truth always a truth, because the world of fact and of things is always under the same law, but the truth of sentiments and emotions changes with changing minds and hearts. The tree of life, unlike all other trees, bears different fruit to each generation. What our fathers found nourishing and satisfying in religion, in art, in philosophy, we find tasteless and stale. Every gospel has its day. The moral and intellectual horizon of the race is perpetually changing.
IV
In our modern democratic communities the moral sense is no doubt higher than it was in the earlier ages, while the artistic or æsthetic sense is lower. In the Athenian the artistic sense was far above the moral; in the Puritan the reverse was the case. The Latin races seem to have a greater genius for art than the Teutonic, while the latter excel in virtue. In this country, good taste exists in streaks and spots, or sporadically here and there. There does not seem to be enough to go around, or the supply is intermittent. One writer has it and another has it not, or one has it to-day and not to-morrow; one moment he writes with grace and simplicity, the next he falls into crudenesses or affectations. There is not enough leaven to leaven the whole lump. Some of our most eminent literary men, such as Lowell and Dr. Holmes, are guilty of occasional lapses from good taste, and probably in the work of none of them do we see the thorough ripening and mellowing of taste that mark the productions of the older and more centralized European communities. One of our college presidents, writing upon a serious ethical subject, allows himself such rhetoric as this: “Experiment and inference are the hook and line by which Science fishes the dry formulas out of the fluid fact. Art, on the other hand, undertakes to stock the stream with choice specimens of her own breeding and selection.” We can hardly say of such metaphors what Sainte-Beuve said of Montaigne’s, namely, that they are of the kind that are never “detached from the thought,” but that they “seize it in its very centre, in its interior, and join and bind it.”
V
The keener appreciation in Europe of literature as a fine art is no doubt the main reason why Poe is looked upon over there as our most noteworthy poet. Poe certainly had a more consummate art than any other American singer, and his productions are more completely the outcome of that art. They are literary feats. “The Raven” was as deliberately planned and wrought out as is any piece of mechanism. Its inspiration is verbal and technical. “The truest poetry is most feigning,” says Touchstone, and this is mainly the conception of poetry that prevails in European literary circles. Poe’s poetry is artistic feigning, like good acting. It is to that extent disinterested. He does not speak for himself, but for the artistic spirit. He has never been popular in this country, for the reason that art, as such, is far less appreciated here than abroad. The stress of life here is upon the moral and intellectual elements much more than upon the æsthetic. We demand a message of the poet, or that he shall teach us how to live. Poe had no message but that of art; he made no contribution to our stock of moral ideas; he made no appeal to the conscience or manhood of the race; he did not touch the great common workaday mind of our people. He is more akin to the Latin than to the Anglo-Saxon. Hence his deepest impression seems to have been made upon the French mind. In all our New England poets the voice of humanity, of patriotism, of religious ideas, of strenuous moral purpose, speaks. Art is subordinated to various human passions and emotions. In Poe alone are these emotions subordinated to art. In Poe alone is the effort mainly a verbal and technical one. In him alone is the man lost in the artist. To evoke music from language is his constant aim. No other American poet approaches him in this kind of verbal mastery, in this unfettered creative technical power. In ease, in splendor, in audacity, he is like a bird. One may understand and admire him and not be touched by him. To be moved to anything but admiration is foreign to pure art. Would one make meat and drink of it? Our reading is selfish, we seek our own, we are drawn to the book that is going our way. Can we appreciate beyond our own personal tastes and needs? Can we see the excellence of the impersonal and the disinterested? We want to be touched in some special and intimate way; but art touches us in a general and impersonal way. No one could take to himself Shakespeare, or Milton’s “Lycidas,” or Keats’s odes as directed especially to his own personal wants and aspirations. We forget ourselves in reading these things, and share for the time the sentiment of pure art, which lives in the universal. How crude the art of Whittier compared with that of Poe, and yet Whittier has touched and moved his countrymen, and Poe has not. There is much more of the substance of character, of patriotism, of strenuous New England life, in the one than in the other. “Snow-Bound” is a metrical transcript from experience; not a creation of the imagination, but a touched-up copy from the memory. We cannot say this of “The Bells” or “The Raven,” or of the work of Milton or Keats or Tennyson. Whittier sings what he feels; it all has a root in his own experience. The great poet feigns the emotion and makes it real to us.
We complain of much current verse that it has no feeling. The trouble is not that the poets feign, but that the feigning is feeble; it begets no emotion in us. It simulates, but does not stimulate.
It is not Wordsworth’s art that makes him great; it is his profound poetic emotion when in the presence of simple, common things. Tennyson’s art, or Swinburne’s art, is much finer, but the poetic emotion back of it is less profound and elemental.