in Emerson’s description of an Indian-summer day, “the day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm, wide fields”—in these and such as these we see the imaginative use of words.
Most of the Dantean and Homeric and Shakespearean scholarship is the mere dust of time that has accumulated upon these names. In the course of years it will accumulate upon Tennyson, and then we shall have Tennysonian scholars and learned dissertations upon some insignificant detail of his work. Think of the Shakespeareana with which literature is burdened! It is mostly mere shop litter and dust. In certain moods I think one may be pardoned for feeling that Shakespeare is fast becoming a curse to the human race. Of mere talk about him, it seems, there is to be no end. He has been the host of more literary parasites probably than any other name in history. He is edited and re-edited as if a cubit could be added to his stature by marginal notes and comments. On the contrary, the result is, for the most part, like a mere growth of underbrush that obscures the forest trees. The reader’s attention is being constantly diverted from the main matter—he is being whipped in the face by insignificant twigs. Criticism may prune away what obscures a great author, but what shall we say when it obstructs the view of him by a multitude of unimportant questions?
The main aim of the teacher of literature should be to train and quicken the student’s taste—his sense of the fitness and proportion of things—till he can detect the true from the false, or the excellent from the common. There is but one way to learn to detect the genuine from the counterfeit in any department of life, and that is by experience. Familiarize the student with the works of the real masters of literature and you have safeguarded him against the pretenders. After he has become acquainted with the look and the ring of the pure gold he is less likely to be imposed upon by the counterfeit. The end here indicated cannot be reached by analysis, or by a course in rhetoric and sentence structure, or by a microscopical examination of the writer’s vocabulary, but by direct sympathetic intercourse with the best literature, through the living voice, or through your own silent perusal of it. The great Dantean and Shakespearean scholar is usually the outcome of a mental habit that would make Dante and Shakespeare impossible.
So eminent a critic as Frederic Harrison is reported as praising this sentence from the new British author Maurice Hewlett: “In the milk of October dawns her calm brows had been dipped.” The instructor in literature should be able to show his class why this is not good literature. The suggestion of brows dipped in milk is not a pleasant one. One cannot conceive of any brow the beauty of which would be enhanced by it, even by the milk of October dawns, if there were anything in October dawns that in the remotest way suggested milk. Mr. Hewlett is so in love with a crisp style that he describes his heroine as lying white and twisting on a couch, crisping and uncrisping her little hands.
Such things come from straining after novelty. They proceed from an unripe taste. Men of real genius and power are at times guilty of such lapses, or go astray in quest of novel images. Walter Bagehot sometimes did. Writing of Sydney Smith, his rhetoric shows its teeth in this fashion: “Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders; Sydney Smith was a molar. He did not run a long sharp argument into the interior of a question; he did not, in the common phrase, go deeply into it; but he kept it steadily under the contact of a strong, capable, jawlike understanding, pressing its surface, effacing its intricacies, grinding it down.” Such a comparison has the merit of being vivid; it also has the demerit of an unworthy alliance,—it marries the noble and the ignoble. You cannot lift mastication up to the level of intellectual processes, and to seriously compare the two is to degrade the latter. Sydney Smith himself could not have been guilty of such bad taste.
Let me finish this chapter with a bit of prose from Ben Jonson.
“Some words are to be culled out for ornament and color, as we gather flowers to strow houses or make garlands; but they are better when they grow to our style; as in a meadow where, though the mere grass and greenness delight, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten and beautify.”
II
ANALOGY—TRUE AND FALSE
I HAVE never seen any thorough examination of the grounds of analogy. The works on logic make but slight reference to them, yet the argument from analogy is one of the most frequent forms of argument, and one of the most convincing. It is so much easier to captivate the fancy with a pretty or striking figure than to move the judgment with sound reasons,—so much easier to be rhetorical than to be logical.