The existence of these motives, in various combinations, is evident in all literature. The novelist wishes to create a thing of beauty, to chronicle certain actual or possible events, to attract admiration to himself and perhaps to a certain class or race of men. If he is a great writer he has also, even if he be not thoroughly conscious of it, the desire to worship—he uses his talent honestly and skillfully, for God's sake, making an acceptable offering. He may write a drama of modern life, a story of pioneer days in the Far West, a sonnet to a buttercup, a pamphlet in favor of improved tenement houses, a history of the Spanish-American War. Whatever he may write, his desire is to chronicle, attract, and to create. And if he be a great writer his desire also is to worship.
The power and desire to influence thought possessed by skillful writers has caused the world sometimes to regard them as actually the leaders of mankind's spiritual and intellectual endeavors. Writers themselves are quick to take this point of view; we have in America hundreds of popular novelists who have no hesitation in advising humanity about all its moral problems, thousands of minor poets who will answer the questions of the ages in a sonnet or a handful of free verse. There are some reasons for the writers to be justly considered leaders of popular thought. As a class, they understand humanity, and sympathize with it. They have the passions and hopes and loves of the rest of the world, intensified. Also they have a sense of artistic, or, as it is called, poetic justice, and poetic justice usually is Christian justice.
But writers are unfitted to be leaders of popular thought by many disqualifications inseparable from their craft. Interested as they are in the rest of humanity, they inevitably are set apart from it by reason of their exceptional gift. They show their sense of this separation, even when they do not openly admit it, by dressing and talking and living in a manner different from that common to their fellow-citizens. The velvet jacket, the long hair, the flowing necktie, the Bohemian studio, the defiance of custom and sometimes of law—these things are indications of that separation from mankind which makes the writer an unsafe leader of popular thought. There is also the danger that the writer will, if he become a leader of thought, grow intoxicated with power, and lead thought irresponsibly, foolishly, wickedly, having in mind not the welfare of humanity but the delight of leadership. To this temptation all leaders of thought—politicians, educators, investigators—are liable, but the writers most of all.
The proper function of the writer is rather to interpret than to lead the thought of his time. Seldom does a writer actually give the world a new idea. What he does is to give expression to an idea which has lain dormant in the mind of the people awaiting his revealing and quickening touch. There is a hope or a fear in the minds of men—it finds expression in deeds and simultaneously in words. The events in a nation's history and the intellectual and spiritual causes of those events are revealed to later generations by the poets and story-tellers. The historical development of nations is clear to the students of the world's literature. Take the American Civil War for an example—we find the soul of the North revealed in "Marching Through Georgia" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the soul of the South in "Dixie" and in "Maryland, My Maryland." No volumes of history give us a clearer understanding of the feelings of our fathers than do these poems. So also I believe that the awakening to a sense of the evil of the so-called Reformation, that awakening which is historically recorded by the events associated with the Oxford Movement, found literary expression in the poetry of Rossetti and Patmore and the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Since the development which history records is merely the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual progress, therefore the proper themes of creative literary artists are those things which the professed historians cannot treat—the hidden things, the essentials of history. So the writers whose work endures are those who concern themselves with the interior, not the exterior, of life. The great writers are the spiritual historians of their generation. Physical man is important only in relation to spiritual man. Man by himself, man not considered in respect to God, is unworthy of the attention of any writer. The men and women whose plays and poems and stories endure are those who see that one cannot "know himself" if he "presume not God to scan." They know that the proper study of mankind, and the theme of all literature worthy of the name, is the soul of man.
Literature is a matter of spiritual chronicle and interpretation. Therefore its beauty must, as Keats said, be truth. The writer approaches beauty in proportion as the subject of his interpretation approaches truth. It is a fact that a writer may express an idea which seems contrary to the feeling of his time—may praise economic justice, for instance, in the day of great industrial tyranny, or in general express idealism among materialists. But this should not make us consider him an untruthful interpreter. Ideas implicit in the people may be explicit in the writer. And again the writer may express the thought of a minority more significant than the majority.
The popularity of a writer may be geographical or temporal—perhaps numerical would give a clearer idea of my meaning than geographical. That is, he may be read in his own time by many people, spread over a great part of the world's surface, or he may have the attention of a public which is great because it extends through the ages. The second sort of popularity is that which the great writers receive, and sometimes they have the first kind also. The great writer, the universal writer, is universal in his theme. And there is only one theme that is universal—God.
TWO LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY
THE BALLAD