Emerson’s art is crude, but the stress of his poetic emotion is great; the song is burdened with profound meanings to our moral and spiritual nature. Poe has no such burden; there is not one crumb of the bread of life in him, but there is plenty of the elixir of the imagination.
This passion for art, so characteristic of the Old World, is seen in its full force in such a writer as Flaubert. Flaubert was a devotee of the doctrine of art for art’s sake. He cared nothing for mere authors, but only for “writers;” the work must be the conscious and deliberate product of the author’s literary and inventive powers, and in no way involve his character, temperament, or personality. The more it was written, the more it savored of deliberate plan and purpose,—in other words, the less it was the product of fate, race, or of anything local, individual, inevitable,—the more it pleased him. Art, and not nature, was his aspiration. And this view has more currency in Europe than in this country. In some extreme cases it becomes what one may fairly call the art disease. Baudelaire, for instance, as quoted by Tolstoi, expressed a preference for a painted woman’s face over one showing its natural color, “and for metal trees and a theatrical imitation of water, rather than real trees and real water.” Thus does an overweening passion for art degenerate into a love for the artificial for its own sake. In the cultivation of letters there seems always to be a danger that we shall come to value things, not for their own sake, but for the literary effects that may be wrought out of them. The great artist, I take it, is primarily in love with life and things, and not with art. On these terms alone is his work fresh and stimulating and filled with good arterial blood.
VI
Teaching literature is like teaching religion. You can give only the dry bones of the matter in either case. But the dry bones of theology are not religion, and the dry bones of rhetoric are not literature. The flesh-and-blood reality is alone of value, and this cannot be taught, it must be felt and experienced.
The class in literature studies an author’s sentence-structure and paragraphing, and doubtless could tell the author more about it than he knows himself. The probabilities are that he never thought a moment about his sentence-structure or his paragraphing. He has thought only of his subject-matter and how to express himself clearly and forcibly; the structure of his sentences takes care of itself. From every art certain rules and principles may be deduced, but the intelligent apprehension of those rules and principles no more leads to mastery in that art, or even helps to mastery in it, than a knowledge of the anatomy and the vital processes of the stomach helps a man to digest his dinner, or than the knowledge of the gunsmith helps make a good marksman. In other words the science of any art is of little use to him who would practice that art. To be a fiddler you must fiddle and see others fiddle; to be a painter you must paint and study the painting of others; to be a writer you must write and familiarize yourself with the works of the best authors. Studying an author from the outside by bringing the light of rhetoric to bear upon him is of little profit. We must get inside of him, and we can only get inside of him through sympathy and appreciation. There is only one way to teach literature, only one vital way, and that is by reading it. The laboratory way may give one the dry bones of the subject, but not the living thing itself. If the teacher, by his own living voice and an occasional word of comment, can bring out the soul of a work, he may help the student’s appreciation of it; he may, in a measure, impart to him his own larger and more intelligent appreciation of it. And that is a true service.
Young men and young women actually go to college to take a course in Shakespeare or Chaucer or Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course becomes a mere knowledge course, as Professor Corson suggests. My own first acquaintance with Milton was through an exercise in grammar. We parsed “Paradise Lost.” Much of the current college study of Shakespeare is little better than parsing him. The minds of the pupils are focused upon every word and line of the text, as the microscope is focused upon a fly’s foot in the laboratory. The class probably dissects a frog or a star-fish one day, and a great poet the next, and it does both in about the same spirit. It falls upon one of these great plays like hens upon a bone in winter: no meaning of word or phrase escapes it, every line is literally picked to pieces; but of the poet himself, of that which makes him what he is, his tremendous dramatic power, how much do the students get? Very little, I fear. They have had an intellectual exercise and not an emotional experience. They have added to their knowledge, but have not taken a step in culture. To dig into the roots and origins of the great poets is like digging into the roots of an oak or a maple, the better to increase your appreciation of the beauty of the tree. There stands the tree in all its summer glory; will you really know it any better after you have laid bare every root and rootlet? There stand Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Homer. Read them, give yourself to them, and master them if you are man enough. The poets are not to be analyzed, they are to be enjoyed; they are not to be studied, but to be loved; they are not for knowledge, but for culture—to enhance our appreciation of life and our mastery over its elements. All the mere facts about a poet’s work are as chaff compared with the appreciation of one fine line or fine sentence. Why study a great poet at all after the manner of the dissecting-room? Why not rather seek to make the acquaintance of his living soul and to feel its power?
The mere study of words, too,—of their origin and history, or of the relation of your own language to some other,—how little that avails! As little as a knowledge of the making and tempering of a sword would help a man to be a good swordsman. What avails in literature is a quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality of words—“a sense practiced as a blind man’s touch,” or as a musician’s ear, so that the magic of the true style is at once felt and appreciated; this, and an equally quick and delicate sense of the life and individuality of things. “Is there any taste in the white of an egg?” No more is there in much merely correct writing. There is the use of language as the vehicle of knowledge, and there is the use of it as an instrument of the imagination. In Wordsworth’s line,
“The last to parley with the setting sun,”
in Whitman’s sentence,
“Oh, waves, I have fingered every shore with you,”