The Genius of America (collection)/Literature and the Government of Men
Literature and the Government of Men: an Apology for Letters in the Middle West
Who that sees the meanness of our politics, but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave, who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous, has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.
Often, in the repose of my midday, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of ages.
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now;
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Why apologize for literature at a time when, if we may trust our friends in the eastern provinces who supply us with our weekly reading matter, the entire country is enjoying a literary renascence, and Chicago is its centre? The great industrious city, which one of your own poets has called the "hog-butcher of the world"—this toiling giant has washed his hands of blood and dust, and now in ripe middle age, has turned, we are told, to things of the mind, grants them their full importance, and is become a friend and patron of all the fine arts. This is a very gratifying thought—tinctured only by a grave wonder whether it is true. As I turned over recently the letters of that fine poet and most interesting man, William Vaughn Moody, in whose honor this series of lectures was founded, I could not escape an impression that for him, though he was a native son of our Middle West, his brief sojourn in the city by the inland sea was a restless exile. When he desired to write, he found the air freer in the fishing village of Gloucester. When he hungered for companionship and for recognition, he sought it in the eastern capital. "I feel convinced," he wrote as lately as 1898, "that this [New York] is the place for young Americans who want to do something." On the meridian which runs through Chicago, he felt himself obliged, before he spoke out, to lift the sheer dead weight of a vast busy multitude which attached no importance whatever to what he cared most to say.
Now when an artist is confronted by such a situation, his impulse is to escape; he cannot afford to spend his "bright original strength" in beating against stone walls. For this work, Providence created a lower order of beings, protected by a horny integument from the bruisings of an unsympathetic world: he created the professors and the critics. The first impulse of these creatures when confronted by a hostile situation is to alter the situation. Our Middle-West, in spite of our vaunted literary renascence, is not yet ready to listen very piously to the divine flute-song of "Endymion" or the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." We think a little already, but not in those terms. Our imagination is beginning to stir; but we are still, as an East Indian visitor lately reminded us, "the flattest-minded people on the face of the earth."
In general, our Middle Western situation fairly represents our national situation. There are little glens of Eden along the eastern coast, there is a narrow strip of Paradise along the western coast, where nature encourages the poetic faculties of men by lavish displays of her own poetic powers. But for thousands of miles between these two oases, through monotonous wildernesses of corn, through wide wastes of grey sage-bush and sand, through ghastly white reaches of salt, one hears only the lowlands murmuring heavily, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," and the barren deserts replying, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit." Through these deserts and lowlands runs the Lincoln Highway, more popularly known as Main Street. If the pursuit of letters is to be justified to Main Street, it must be justified with reference to a standard that Main Street understands.
That is one-half the problem, but only one-half. If you are going, as the vile phrase is, "to sell" great literature to Main Street, you have got to believe in it yourself. There is the other half of the problem. You have got to believe in literature against the incredulity of your practical neighbours and against the indifference of the world. You have got to believe in it, furthermore, not as a means of escape from Main Street, not as a refuge from your practical neighbours—not this at all. The task is to frame a defense for it which will decisively remove it from the list of the luxuries and the superfluities of life, and which will give it the unquestioned status of bread and butter, plows, rails, chemicals, and gunpowder. And so I intend as far as possible to abandon the high poetic justification of letters, and to attempt establishing their importance by a plain matter-of-fact consideration of their utility. I shall, however, employ the word utility in a somewhat more fundamental sense than that which is ordinarily attached to it, and I shall touch upon certain elementary philosophical matters. Contrary to the opinions of many editors and publishers, this will not be a deterrent to the Main Street mind. There is nothing at the present time which Main Street so hungrily craves as a philosophy.
So far as I know, the philosophers have never discovered any thoroughly satisfactory final object for human activity, except happiness. The perfect human activity has not yet been discovered. The best that can be said for even the most highly commended pursuits, for the study of science or philosophy or for the practice of beneficence—the best that can be said is, that they are thought useful because they are thought to lead their devotees in the general direction in which happiness has just disappeared over the edge of the horizon.
If I could testify honestly and prove convincingly that the pursuit of letters fills one constantly with pure unalloyed happiness, I should have completed my philosophical justification; and those of you who are bent upon other and competing activities—such as politics, moneymaking, and marrying—should sell your all and live in a library. I shall avoid the extravagance of testimony so exciting. And yet I think it is part of my duty to say, that the pursuit of letters is in my opinion beyond comparison of all human activities the most delightful. To those who are philosophically minded, this will seem to be the most interesting and important thing that I can say about the subject.
Most people, however, are not minded very philosophically; or rather their philosophy fails to include a frank and courageous consideration of the final object of human endeavor. I think this is a pity. I think our society is the poorer because so few of us make intelligent provision in our lives for happiness or even for pleasure—because so few of us pause to inquire whether our hearts are keeping time with the rhythm of pain or with the alternating rhythm of joy which pulses through the universe. Our dear fellow citizens, indeed, many of them, take a kind of sullen pride in doing without pleasure. Now, the man who does without pleasure himself, rarely gives pleasure to anyone else.
What is still more serious, the man who prides himself on doing without pleasure and on doing without happiness, is likely to listen with a sort of sour disdain and contempt to the claims of an activity which proposes as its end the increase of pleasure, the increase of happiness. I go to him and say: "Let us do what we can to encourage the pursuit of letters; for this pursuit is of all human activities the most delightful." He looks at me with a deep puzzled frown of disapprobation, and says: "Yes, yes, my dear man, no doubt. Delightful, no doubt. Delightful—but of what use is it? Of what practical use is it?"
The sort of man who always asks, "Of what practical use is it?" is called a utilitarian; and our American society abounds in him. The artists hate him and call him a Philistine or a Puritan. The literary theorists of the stricter æsthetic schools do all they can to bring him into derision. In order to confuse and confound him, they have invented a number of oracular and, I think, quite unintelligible phrases or slogans, which they are constantly thrusting into his pachydermatous hide as the picadero thrusts his darts into the infuriated bull. I refer to such phrases as "Truth for truth's sake," "Art for art," "Art for art's sake," and "Beauty is its own excuse for being."
If this familiar phrase, art for art's sake, has any meaning at all, it means that art, including literary art, is a form of activity radically different in origin and intention from the political, moral, and other social activities of men, all of which we recognize as having a purpose or end in their effect upon the human spirit. If the phrase means anything, it means that artistic expression is not a vital function of human society at all, but is rather an attractive extraneous thing, a lovely parasite feeding upon the central organism, but related to it only as the mistletoe is related to the oak. Those who contend for this view of art do so, no doubt, with the idea that they are somehow ennobling and elevating art by detaching it from all notions of utility, by stoutly denying that it has any uses.
I think these would-be-friends of art are profoundly mistaken, both in their facts and in their strategy. The wise theorists of literature from the ancient Greeks through the English Renaissance and all the way down to the unwise and bewildered theorists of the twentieth century, have recognized that literary expression is a vital function of society. They have also explained frankly what are its uses. They have not sought to ennoble it by relieving it of service but by making its more splendid service conspicuous. Perceiving that the average man is utilitarian, they have sought to open his mind to literature by widening the scope of his utilitarianism till that enfolding concept contained the uses of the imagination.
The average man, I say, is, in theory, a utilitarian. He is afraid even of such pleasure as he embraces. He is afraid it may not be useful. He will never take seriously to art, to beauty, unless taking to them is presented to him as a duty. One knows the average man. One knows well enough why he attends concerts, visits picture galleries, and, in his student days, reads Ward's English Poets. One knows the average club woman. One knows why she reads the authors that she doesn't more than half understand, and why she comes out to look at the poets and novelists, and to hear lectures by the tedious visiting professor. It is not because she enjoys it—not that precisely, certainly not that primarily. Why, then? It is because the average man and the average woman have somewhere fixed deeply in their natures an ethical impulse driving them to it, in spite of indifference of the mind, in spite of fatigue of the body. It is because in some fashion they have become infected by our mysteriously potent common culture with the notion that it is their duty, their social responsibility, their object in life, to bring their souls to the fullest development of which they are capable. This is the most promising fact that we have to build on. This is the most firmly established point for the organization of human nature.
The average man is on a pretty safe track, and I wish to confirm him in it. I shall try to justify literature to him as a utility, which is capable of assisting him in the performance of his duties. I shall try to justify it as the most potent force in the government of men, an object which every sensible person is already predisposed to support. But I warn you in advance that I don't mean by the government of men exactly what is meant in the department of political science.
In the committee rooms, where practical men decide how much money it is proper for the State to invest in the various activities of the commonwealth, there is very little said about literature. It is ordinarily assumed that there is not much that can be said to the hard-headed type of man about literature. We who are its friends are obliged to admit that it does not directly increase the yield of corn per acre, nor reduce the waste in the consumption of coal, nor prolong the life of steel rails, nor multiply the endurance of reinforced concrete, nor intensify the killing power of chemical gases, nor extend the range of projectiles. The practical man concerns himself with strengthening the sinews of the state. He conceives that agriculture and engineering and business are sinews of the state; and he is right.
But even the most practical of men takes pretty seriously one form of activity which is neither agriculture, engineering, or business; and that form of activity is law-making or legislation. Laws, as he conceives it, are the necessary governors of the sinews of the state. In the degree of importance which he attaches to laws in the government of men and their activities, I think the practical man is wrong. There are six million inhabitants in this state. There is a huge volume of legislation. But I suppose it would be a gross exaggeration to assume that one hundredth part of one per cent. of the population is acquainted with a single page of this volume. The laws of the state are a kind of bony excrescence outside the real life of the people. We never hear of a reduction in the tariff or an increase in the school tax but we find by experience the truth in the lines of an eighteenth century poet:
The part that kings or laws can cause or cure.
Such life and coercive power as there are in the laws flow into them from the organism which exists inside the political government, inside the bony excresence of the laws. Society—spontaneously organized by self-enforcing needs and economic pressures and common standards and desires—society generates the power, develops the emotions and virtues which sustain the laws. And society expresses and executes its will, say in ninety-nine per cent. of its activities, without formally designated legislators, judges or executives; so that a right-minded member of society has occasion, only two or three times a year, to remember that there are such things as laws in existence.
Society, on the other hand, no member of it ever forgets. For society has infinite functions, and makes itself felt as a formative force upon every member of it on every day of his life. It regulates our intimate personal relations and determines their quality. It gives shape to our hopes and fears, our pleasures and pains and despairs. How does it perform these various, complex and all-decisive activities? How does society get its will accomplished? Well, I might ask those who are so fortunate as to be married, How does one's wife get her will accomplished? Interesting question, to which every one knows the answer. Society gets its will accomplished in a similar way—in a somewhat feminine fashion; by lifting its eyebrows, by a disdainful sweep of its skirts, and, above all, by incessantly, tirelessly, day and night, expressing its mind and unpacking its heart in words, till no one fails to understand utterly what it hates and loves and disdains, its enthusiasm and its antipathies, its taboos and sanctions, its penalties and rewards.
We are now prepared for a preliminary definition of our subject: Literature is the effective voice of the social government. It is that form of human activity which results from society's speaking its mind and unpacking its, heart on all the subjects that concern it, past, present and future. The ideal student of letters must, therefore, like Lord Bacon, take all knowledge for his province. The sharp division of the fields of knowledge into departments is an arbitrary and artificial arrangement which exists in universities and in library catalogues but not in the head or heart of man. The modern attempt to distinguish between the field of belles-lettres and the other fields of learning by reference either to the form or to the substance of the productions breaks down at every point.
Shall we make verse the test of belles-lettres? In both ancient and modern times history, politics, science, theology, philosophy, and applied arts and sciences have been seriously treated in verse by writers like Empedocles, Hesiod, Lucretius, Lucan, Milton, Dryden, and Tennyson. Shall we make the subject matter the test of what is not belles-lettres? Many historians, a tolerable number of philosophers, and a few men of science have been eminent men of letters, masters of every art of expression—I am thinking of philosophers like Plato and Bacon, historians like Thucydides and Gibbon, men of science like Pascal and Buffon and Huxley. Literature broadly considered has one subject: the representation of man in his environment. It has one satisfactory form: that which perfectly expresses the subject. It has one final object: the government of men through their ideas and emotions.
Perhaps it may be asked whether what we call the man of letters has any characteristic purpose by which he can be distinguished from what we call "a mere rhetorician" dabbling in history, dabbling in philosophy, dabbling in economics, dabbling in science? Ideally speaking, I should say yes: he aims to grasp a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts. He aims to know the personality, the moving spirit of life, in society. He seeks to know the character of national literature as one knows a person—by a vital imaginative synthesis of diverse phenomena. Consequently his major interest is in those branches of knowledge in which personality predominates; in those expressions of life which are most individual; in those forms of expression which are most clearly marked with the accent and intonation of the human spirit. If this is his point of view, he will be essentially a man of letters whether his field is philosophy, history, or poetry, or whatever else.
The man of letters is studious of the personal and individual elements in literature because he perceives that the social government exists from man to man; and that he who would govern his neighbour must govern him by the stress of spirit upon spirit. It is those men, he sees, that edge the common ideas and feelings of the masses with flame from an enkindled personality who become the chief agents of the social will. "The public," declared Isaac Disraeli, father of the prime minister, "is the creation of the master writers—an axiom as demonstrable as any in Euclid, and a principle as sure in its operations as any in mechanics." The master writers may not in any particular crisis determine the national action taken by the officials in charge of the political government. What they do determine is the national character, which, in the long run, is a far more important object to determine than any particular so-called national act.
In times of critical national action, practical politicians habitually make light of Utopian idealists, doctrinaires, theorists, mere literary men. Any one who occupies himself with the expression of social emotions and sentiments which they regard as inconvenient, they incline to dismiss to limbo as an empty rhetorician. But as a matter of fact, their contempt for the literary men is transparent bravado, masking a secret fear. The practical politicians have betrayed their real attitude towards literature in every age by exhibitions of apprehensive jealousy towards that formidable rival power which is constantly threatening to take government out of their hands—the rival power of the unofficed individual who, by liberating new ideas and emotions, sets the old government building shaking over their heads.
Wherever the vital part of government is not truly popular and social, the official governors are found attempting to control or to suppress the formation and expression of a public mind. Says the ancient Chinese sage of the Taoist sect, "the difficulty in governing the people [he means by edicts from on high] arises from their having too much knowledge, and therefore he who tries to govern a state by wisdom is a scourge to it, while he who does not try to govern thereby is a blessing." Some two thousand years later, Sir William Berkeley, the Governor of Virginia, a man who seems to have had a Taoist strain in his ancestry, wrote to the English Commissioners of Foreign Plantations: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best governments. God keep us from both!"
Now God has not kept us from schools and printing; but politicians frequently have. The Catholic Inquisition of the Middle Ages, the burning of Bibles during the Counter Reformation, the Russian censorship under the czars, the censorship in all the battling nations during the late war, show us what the practical politician, especially the politician of Taoist ancestry, thinks of printing and literature: "God keep us from them both." The censorship of the press is the highest tribute paid to literature by the practical man. It is his attempt to prevent society from governing itself by the expression of its ideas and emotions.
If, now, we enquire rather particularly why literature is actually such a formidable power in the state that Taoist governors ask God to be delivered from it, we shall be on the track of the true utility of literature. Aristotle declared, you remember, that literature is an imitation of life. At first blush, there should seem to be no more innocent and idle occupation than making, with words, a picture or imitation of life. Why is an imitation of life more feared by the Taoist than life itself? The answer to the question involves the essential nature of the literary art.
In the first place, no imitation of life in art is completely reproductive. No novel or poem or history can be anything more than a selective representation. All that it can possibly give us is a reproduction of the impression which life has made upon a particular author. But to select from life is to criticize life. It is to reshape the world in such fashion as to place upon it the stamp of the author's individual point of view.
We talk a good deal of nonsense nowadays about "scientific" history and "realistic" fiction, as if we had learned some new method of presenting a quite depersonalized imitation of reality. And no doubt writers without much character, writers whose souls have no form, can throw handsful of disordered and unrelated facts between the covers of a book without giving to these facts anything but the stamp of a disorderly personality. But the moment an author undertakes to arrange facts in the most elementary way so that they shall have a beginning, a middle, and an end; the moment one undertakes to compose a book, so that it shall have proportions, sequence, design—in that moment he begins to transmit not merely facts of life but a judgment upon the facts of life. In that moment he betrays his invincible intention of governing his readers by offering his eyes for theirs and making their judgment coincide with his. For the primary object of all the arts of expression, is to subject facts to a design; is by logic, grammar, and rhetoric, to arrange thoughts, words, sentences, cadences, accents, and emotional colorings into a comprehensive design of which the final object is persuasion.
When one studies for the first time Greek and Roman treatments of education one is surprised to find what great stress these people placed upon the arts of expression, upon logic, rhetoric, and oratory. Cicero, Tactitus, and Quintilian seem to include all ancient culture, the entire curriculum of ancient learning, in the training of the orator; and to regard the orator as the typical or standard product of the educational system; as if the whole world for each man were thenceforth to be divided into two parts, himself, the speaker, and the rest of mankind, his audience.
What is the significance of that emphasis upon the arts of expression? Why this, I think, that they could not conceive of any educated man who would not desire to express himself; nor could they conceive of any intelligent education which should consist merely in the reception and acquisition of information or of the mere Epicurean enjoyment of the intellect. Every impression should bear fruit in an expression. Every ideal should blossom in an action. Therefore the crown and culmination of learning was speaking or writing with a view to influencing or governing one's fellow men. And that clear purpose, that unifying principle gave to their educational discipline an incentive, a coherence, and a masculine vigor and seriousness, which are altogether too frequently lacking in the lopsided educational programs of our day.
If we aimed, as universities should, at producing complete men; if we aimed, as universities should, at producing the governors of society, we should knit up our literary, historical and scientific studies into an indissoluble bond with the arts of expression, and cease to send out, on the one hand, such shoals of scholars and technical experts who cannot express themselves and, on the other hand, such shoals of scribblers and babblers who have nothing to express.
Every attempt to make an educated man without connecting him with the historical tradition is myopic and absurd; but, on the other hand, all erudition that does not somewhere ultimately come to a focus in the present hour is out of focus; is presbyopic and inefficient.
The ancient Roman writers who thought much more clearly on these questions than most modern writers, drove, even in their histories, frankly at practice. Says Livy: "To the following considerations I wish every one seriously and earnestly to attend: by what kind of men, and by what sort of conduct, in peace and war, the empire has been both acquired and extended: then, as discipline gradually declined, let him follow in his thought the structure of ancient morals— . . . until he arrives at the present times, when our vices have attained to such a height of enormity, that we can no longer endure either the burden of them, or the sharpness of the necessary remedies. This is the great advantage to be derived from the study of history."
Says Tacitus: "I deem it to be the chief function of history to rescue merit from oblivion, and to hold up before evil words and evil deeds the terror of the reprobation of posterity." There is the Roman point of view in historical literature. The Roman historian brings his learning to a focus in the present hour; he seeks to govern men by a powerful impression made upon their imaginations.
In the English Renaissance, so largely influenced by Latin literature, the same point of view is adopted by poets and writers of imaginative fiction. When William Caxton, the first English printer, published Sir Thomas Malroy's great collection of Arthurian stories, he announced that he had done so, that noble men might learn and imitate the manners and morals of knighthood. In his Fairy Queen Spenser contemplated the fashioning of a gentleman. And Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, following Aristotle, placed poetry above history and philosophy, precisely because of its power to kindle the will to action; because of its superior potency in the formation of character and in leading and drawing us to as high a perfection "as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of."
We are now come to a second reason why literature is such a formidable power in the state. The first reason was that literature is a critical and discriminating and persuasive imitation of life, which sets up in the mind of readers a process of comparison frequently unfavorable to the actual order of the world. The second reason is that life itself is, to a far greater extent than we ordinarily recognize, an imitation of literature. The illustrations which come most promptly to remembrance are perhaps life's imitations of religious literature. These come first to remembrance because it is so obvious that the power and the perpetuation of religion depend directly upon the possibility of governing men through their imaginations by inspiring them to imitate some supreme exemplar whose record is literary; so that what is most affecting in the history of ancient Stoicism is the imitation of Plato's Socrates, and the whole history of Christendom, its churches, its institutions, its saints, its sages, and the Holy Roman Empire itself, are imitations, more or less grotesque, of the Old and the New Testaments, just as the moral and spiritual life of Oriental peoples are imitations of the Vedas, and the Koran, and the sayings of Confucius and other eastern wise men.
When we reflect on the imitation of literature by life, we see that there is a third very great reason why literature is so formidable a power. To put the matter in the ordinary way, literature is responsible for calling in allies from the great nations of the dead to intimidate and overawe the living. Governors, still encumbered with the flesh, and the hot-breathed children of the present, who while they strut and fret their little hour upon the stage, like to flatter themselves that the earth is theirs and the fullness thereof—such governors and hot-breathed children like to think that, while they last, they have a right to do with the world what they please and can. Sufficient unto the day, they cry, are the governors thereof; and they bitterly resent what they call the intrusion of the dead hand of the past into to-day's affairs. Now, as a matter of fact, the dead hand of the past never intruded into anybody's affairs. The hands and voices of the past that are felt and heard in to-day's affairs are living hands and voices; are emancipated hands and voices; hands and voices and personalities multiplied and magnified by the reproductive power of the imagination. They belong to the really great society of the world, which is, and always will be, a spiritual society, exempt from the limitations of time and space and death.
To the eager young radical in politics, who is frequently too busy talking to do much think—ing and too busy writing for the newspapers to do much reading in the classics, the man of letters frequently seems to exhibit an exasperating and incomprehensible conservatism. The young radical exclaims with heat and indignation: "Why don't you join us and help us overturn this miserably unsatisfactory society to which we belong?" The man of letters replies, or is frequently disposed to reply:
"My dear sir: We do not belong to that society which you find so miserable and unsatisfactory. We belong to a cosmopolitan society which is as wide as humanity and as old as the world, and infinitely richer and more satisfactory than that composed of those men in the street, who so highly excite your discontent. The trouble with your radical agitation for an international society is that your associates are all men in the street; your cosmopolitanism is merely geographical; your world has no temporal dimensions. You flutter like flies on the window pane; and exclude the larger part of humanity's best hearts and heads. Can you not count on the fingers of your hands all your great men? You are not wise enough to govern the earth."
"Those of the great society, as wise men from Cicero to Ruskin have reminded us, have poets, emperors, priests, philosophers, saints, and sages for their table companions and for the familiars of their peopled solitude—all who for one great virtue or another have merited eternal life. The ideal world in which these presences move seems to our warm youth, eager for sensuous contacts, somewhat cold and insubstantial; but as we advance in age and discover the fickle and transitory character and the emptiness of many of our relationships with those who seem to be living, and, on the other hand, the fidelity and permanence and richness of our relationships with those who seemed to be dead, then the ideal world begins to grow upon us, and its presences appear to our clearer perception to be the objects in our consciousness of the most indisputable reality. Then indeed we know that Socrates and Cicero are with us; St. Paul and Augustine and Aquinas; Petrarch and Machiavelli and Montaigne; Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and Bunyan; Descartes and Locke; Voltaire and Rousseau and Burke and Goethe; Franklin and Adams and Lincoln, Emerson, Whitman, and Mark Twain."
"Our association with this company makes our standards of a 'good society' a little exacting. Till you give us better assurance of the splendor of your own projected commonwealth, we shall retain our free citizenship in this ideal community. You will set up in vain a tyranny of shop keepers over this august republic. We shall not be subject to it. We shall obey and follow the commands of the great society, whose members we have known longer, and more intimately, and more profitably than we have known any one of you; for all the great men of letters have infinitely more power to-day than they had in their bodily life-time; and they retain all the essential and interesting attributes of life. We know their habits and opinions; we hear their voices; we feel their influences; we change our relations to them; we hate and love them; we are intellectually and emotionally begotten and reared and governed by them."
Literature, then, is formidable because it emancipates a man from bondage to the present and makes him a citizen of this state which is as wide as humanity and as old as the world. He may conform outwardly to the government of the men in the street, but his true inward' allegiance is to a state which transcends national society, which transcends the international society of the present; and which has no sovereign but God. I have called it a republic; it is more strictly speaking a natural and entirely free aristocracy where no man has any power whatever but the power of his own spirit upon other spirits.
Living habitually in the company of a true spiritual aristocracy has certain decisive effects upon the character. It creates above all a certain internal serenity of an ineffable sweetness. Yet this serenity is not in its essential nature passive but intensely active. It is the serenity of the will bent with steadfast intention upon accomplishing that whereunto it was sent. I have talked with many artists, some in the flesh and many more in the spirit, and have asked them why they chose a career so arduous and so little regarded by the men in the street. And one, an American writer, who but recently joined the company of pure spirits, answered that he had chosen this career because "the cleanness and quietness of it, the independent effort to do something which shall give joy to man long after the howling has died away to the last ghost of an echo—such a vision solicits one in the watches of the night with an almost irresistible force." And when I asked him whether he had been happy in his work and what had been his chief reward, he replied that "he floated in the felicity of it, in the general encouragement of a sense of the perfectly done." His chief reward, he said, smiling with celestial serenity—his chief reward—was "the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played."
Now these spirits of the great society are ranked in three orders according to the completeness of their felicity, which is almost the same thing as saying, according to the completeness of their powers of expression, the perfectness with which they have accomplished their will. In the lowest order, are those who have managed only to stammer forth some truth; in the second order are those who have expressed some truth beautifully; and in the third and highest order are those who have expressed a great truth beautifully in speech and act. But not even the spirits in the highest order are utterly satisfied with their achievements. Continually before them, imagination projects an elusive vision of the perfect truth, the perfect beauty, the perfect goodness of which the reality is hidden in the bosom of the All-Perfect. Dreamers like Plato and Augustine represented this vision as an ideal republic and as the city of God. Even the strongly practical, the utilitarian, society of ancient Rome, the masters of the world, felt this teasing, irresistible impulse towards the absolute, recognized this impulse in themselves and deified it in their temples to Fides, Clementia, Concordia, and other types of beneficent impulse—divine projections of human desire and unfulfilled hope.
There is a truth for the imagination in all the myths of religion and in all the fables of the poets. Homer tells us that Ulysses sailed to the limits of the world and poured out the blood of sheep, and up from the darkness of Erebus came clamoring the frustrate ghosts of Teresias and Agamemnon, and the shades of many pale passionate women who had fared tragically in their mortal life. Even so, whenever imagination unseals the gate, there return, clamoring for the light and warmth of mortal life, there return the pale frustrate ghosts of Fides, Clementia, and Concordia clamoring for incarnation. And, with their coming, one feels the rushing current of an impulse, like a mighty wind that has blown from eternity, the impulse of the unappeased human passion for perfection. And when the wind of this impulse strikes upon a man with imagination barbaric and carnal, he burns with a desire to erect palaces, and coliseums, and towering pyramids; and he prophesies like the mad King Herod:
To be a counter-glory to the sun.
There shall the eagle blindly dash himself,
There the first beam shall strike, and there the moon
Shall aim all night her argent archery.
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Imagine in marble and in bronze conceive,
Till it shall dazzle pilgrim nations
And stammering tribes from undiscovered lands,
Allure the living God out of the bliss
And all the streaming seraphim from heaven.
But when this breath of inspiration from the ideal world touches upon a great man of letters, a poet like Milton or Sophocles, it wakens his most dangerous and divine faculty; it fills him with the creative Apollonian madness, with a clear luminous dream, in which he seems to himself to behold a law above the law of the State, above the custom of society, beyond the practice of the individual man. His highest function it is, a truly religious function, to declare the new law. For this, he is a member of the great society; for this, he is a free man, acknowledging no sovereign but God: namely, that when the call comes, when new light breaks, when his pulses throb with urgent moral life, he may rise from the slumbers of his old opinions, and, girding up his loins, lead the faithful another march through the wilderness toward the unabiding City of God.
Always the political government lags behind the customs of society; always the customs of society lag behind the practise of the foremost individuals; always the practise of the individual lags behind their private vision and conscience. All the world's bitterest tragedies, its colossal wars and devastations, the execution of Socrates, the crucifixion of Christ, the burnings of saints and sages, the hanging of John Brown, have been due precisely to this, that the imagination of the world was not yet permeated by the light which shone through its heretics and martyrs. That which makes every massacre of innocents so horrid, that which makes so unbearable the destruction of youth and beauty in war, that which gives to the murderous extinction of humanity's light-bringers so piercing a pathos, is that always, in the very hour and place of destruction, there are meek unprotesting witnesses who know that what is being enacted is a mistake; there are souls already on the scene, pure and humane, who pray for a divine interposition, and murmur unheeded by the howling populace, "They know not what they do."
The mission of the man of letters is to be at the point where, through the brazen dome of our old habits and customs, breaks the thin radiance of new truth. His last and highest function, his divinely dangerous function, committed to him by the great society, is to promulgate the new law in despite of the old one, and, by every power of imaginative representation at his command, to make it prevail from end to end of society, and govern in the ideas and emotions of men. His function, in short, is precisely that performed by Sophocles in his Antigone. You will recall that, after the war against Thebes, Creon, the governor, a precisian and a formalist, ordered the body of Polyneices, who had made war against the city, to be left in the fields to be devoured by the dogs, with penalty of death for disobedience. Antigone, the sister of Polyneices, one of those marvellous women of ancient tragedy, who are vessels incandescent with divine light, recognizes a natural law of kinship and humanity above the law of the state, and in defiance of Creon resolves to go out and perform the last services for the dead. To her sister who tries to dissuade her she says:
And good it were, in doing this to die.
Loved I shall be with him whom I have loved, Guilty of holiest crime.
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She is captured and brought before Creon for judgment and sentenced to death by starvation. Says Creon:
She replies:
Nor justice dwelling with the Gods below,
Who traced these laws for all the sons of men:
Nor did I dream these edicts strong enough
That thou, a mortal man, shouldst overpass
The unwritten laws of God that know not change.
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Not through fear
Of any man's resolve was I prepared
Before the Gods to bear the penalty
Of sinning against them.
The Antigone of Sophocles never lived; and yet she lives forever, and preserves about her that atmosphere of sacred awe without which human life becomes flat and unprofitable. Antigone lives forever: and on this fact rests the case for Antigone and Alcestis and Iphigeneia; and for all those proud and gracious figures that sweep along the frieze of the Parthenon; and for all the heroic creations of the poetic mind which fight at humanity's side in the contested passes of history. They never lived; and yet they live more truly than many great ones whose footsteps once left visible imprints on the earth. They live in our hearts and imaginations; and, as truly as Socrates or Lincoln, they augment the power and majesty of that great society in which alone it is worth while to be immortal, in which alone it is desirable to be happy, through which alone it is possible wisely to govern men—because in this society, preserved and in part created by literature, in this alone it is possible to assure victory and reward to those who please the souls they ought to please.
- ↑ The substance of this essay was originally delivered as a lecture on the William Vaughn Moody foundation at the University of Chicago, May 9, 1922.