Sudbury Town stands here. In an old-world region around it
Tall, dark pines, like spires, with above them a murmur of umbrage,
Guard for us all deep peace. Such peace may the weary suburbans
Know not in even a dream. These, these will an omnibus always,
Ev'n as they sink to a doze just earned by the toil of a daytime,
Rouse, or a horse-drawn dray, too huge to be borne by an Atlas,
Shakes all walls, all roofs, with a sound more loud than an earthquake.[5]
The moral of such experiments seems to me to be this: that even if ancient prosody, such as that of the Virgilian hexameter, could be naturalized completely in English, the emotional effect of the meter would in the two languages be different, and that Anglo-Latin hexameters would, with very rare exceptions, mean no more than successes in a graceful and very difficult game. It is indeed for that very reason that I mention this question here. It is a question of pure literature or of purely literary form. As such, it has proved fascinating to many highly cultivated persons; yet even by such persons themselves it will not be seriously regarded as much better than trivial. But this is not all. From this consideration we are led on to another. If the problems of Anglo-Classical prosody are trivial even for those who happen to find them entertaining, may not all literature, even the highest, when cultivated for its own sake only, be, from certain points of view, a triviality also?
According to differences of taste and temperament, different persons will answer this question differently. Since I am not entering here on any formal argument, but am merely recording my own individual views, I should, speaking for myself, answer this question in the affirmative. I may, indeed, confess that the mere artist in literature—the person for whom literature, as such, is the main interest in life—is a person for whom secretly I have always felt some contempt, even though, for myself personally, this magical triviality has been one of life's chief seductions.
The content and significance of such a feeling are presented in concrete form by such institutions as authors' or writers' clubs. In London and in other capitals so many of these have been established, and continue to flourish, that they obviously perform certain useful and welcome functions; but my own criticism would be that to call them clubs for "authors" or "writers" is a misnomer which fails to particularize the real basis of membership. In the modern world, no doubt, all writers, merely as writers, have certain interests in common. They have, in the first place, to get their works published, and the business of publication is a very complex process, which has necessarily a legal and financial side. Questions are inevitably involved of financial loss or gain, and even writers who are indifferent to profit, and are ready to bear a loss, will desire to be treated fairly. They may be ready to bear a loss, but not a loss which is inequitable, and if any gain should ensue, they will desire an equitable share of it. In connection with such matters, authors' clubs may perform many useful offices for their members. In so far, however, as their functions are limited to offices such as these the proper name for them would be not clubs, but agencies. On the other hand, in the modern world authorship to a great extent is a systematic writing for journals. It has to be performed, in respect both of time and other conditions, in accordance with strict arrangements between the writers themselves and the officials by whom, whether as editors or owners, these journals are managed. For this reason persons who practice journalism—daily journalism in particular—will probably be persons more or less similar in their habits, and clubs for admission to which the main qualification consists in the fact of authorship may provide them with special conveniences which they one and all desire. But for persons whose literary pursuits are carried on in isolation, and who aim at expressing by authorship no thoughts or no sentiments but their own, it seems to me that a club for authors or writers as such represents a conception as wrong as would that of a club for speakers as such or for politicians as such. What bond of union would there be between a Tory and a ferocious Democrat if they neither of them put pen to paper—if they were not authors at all? They would keep, so far as was possible, to different sides of the street. Why, then, should they wish to meet in a club coffee room and lunch at adjacent tables, simply because each, besides holding opinions absolutely odious to the other, should, instead of keeping them to himself, endeavor to disseminate them by writing among as many of his fellow creatures as was possible?
It may be said that two such men might very well wish to do so because, though what each expressed was odious to the other in itself, each was a consummate master of literary art in expressing it, and each admired, and was aware of, the presence of this technical mastery in the other. Now, so far as it goes, this, in numerous cases, may be true. Indeed, such an admission is the very point from which the present argument started. Pure literature, as such, is, no doubt, susceptible of consummate beauties, in their natural admiration of which men who are otherwise the bitterest adversaries may agree. What does this admission cover? It applies, in my own opinion, to minor literature only, though masterpieces of minor literature may be in their own way supreme, as Keats has shown us in such poems as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but, as applied to literature in its higher and greater forms, the admission fails to be true, because it fails to be adequate. A poem by Keats may be admirable so far as it goes, but really great literature, such as Goethe's "Faust," for example, would possess but a minor value unless there were at the back of it something that is more than literature. In the case of a poem like "Endymion" the poem is greater than the man who writes it. In the case of a poem like "Faust" the man is greater than the poem. Behind the poet stands the man of profound reflection, the man of the world, the philosopher, the passionate or disillusioned lover. He is all of these before he is a literary artist. His writing is only the vehicle by which he communicates what he is in all these capacities to others, and so leaves a practical impression on the thoughts and emotions of the world.
And what is true of verse is more obviously true of prose. Of all prose works which have captured attention by their mere merits as literature, no better example can be given than the great masterpiece of Gibbon. But though Gibbon may be read by many for the sake of his mere literary charm, his place in the world as a great writer depends but in a secondary way on this charm in itself. He lives because this charm was used by him to convey the results of research so penetrating and comprehensive, and guided by a mind so sagacious and powerful, that for the most part these results have stood the test of criticism, however keen and hostile; and in accomplishing this feat Gibbon has rendered a service which is still indispensable to the historical students and historical thinkers of to-day, whereas otherwise his merely literary merits would have been merits displayed in vain or relegated to a literary museum which few men cared to enter.
This conception of pure literature as written language which is mainly appreciated for its own sake, and is for that reason in a relative sense trivial, no doubt widens out again when we come to consider the fact that emotion of some kind is, in the last resort, the one thing which gives value to life. But the fact remains that all the desirable emotions are determined by things which are not in themselves emotions, such as knowledge, intellectual beliefs, and the laws, economic and otherwise, which alone render a civilized society possible; and even the greatest of merely literary charms make great literature only in so far as they endow mankind with fundamental things like these.
Throughout these memoirs there has been constant allusion to the relation borne by literary expression to life in the case of the author himself. I have said already that for mere literature as such, and for its practitioners, I have from my youth onward had a certain feeling of contempt, and I now may explain once more what, at least in my own case, such a feeling really means. It means, not that mere literature at its best is not beautiful and delightful, but that it must, in order to be worthy of a serious man's devotion, be a mere part of some whole, the other part of which is incomparably the larger of the two. It means that literature, in order to be great literature, must at the same time be practically a form of action. I have no ambition to impose this opinion on others. I would merely record it as an opinion on which, since the ending of my early days at Oxford, I have myself by instinct acted. Whatever I have written I have written with one or other ulterior object, to which the mere pleasure of literary opposition as such has been altogether subordinate. Of the nature of these objects I have said enough already, but I may once again define them.
One of them relates to religion, to the quality of the lives and the loves of ordinary men and women as affected by it, and also to metaphysics and science, in so far as they leave, or do not leave, the doctrines of religion credible.