Present Conditions of Literary Production

THE present interregnum in the realm of the higher creative literature offers an inviting theme for rhetorical variations to the ready writer. The pessimist is prepared to demonstrate that the materialistic temper of the age, the preoccupation of the most vigorous minds with physical science or with the industrial conquest of the world, the exploitation of every incipient notoriety by the “ syndicate,” the debasement of English speech by the newspaper press, the tame cosmopolitan monotony which is everywhere effacing the last vestiges of local color and local feeling, the tyranny exercised by the taste of the common-schooled millions who have been taught to read, but have never learned to discriminate. — that these and other characteristics of our hustling time create an atmosphere that blights in the bud all promise of artistic excellence. The optimist rejoins that these gloomy prognostications are the offspring of the ineradicable illusion that sees the golden age behind us; and that, instead of deploring the extinction of those literary mastodons and dodoes, the epic and the heroic tragedy, and yearning for visitations of that ineffable and indefinable something called genius, we should rather rejoice in the superabundance of vigorous, wholesome talent that we possess. The reviewer of recent poetry accumulates on his desk in six months more good verse than you shall find in an average volume of Johnson’s Poets. Our newspapers and periodicals print every month enough “crisp” prose to fill a wilderness of Tatlers, Idlers, Ramblers, and Citizens of the World. And granting a momentary and accidental dearth of commanding poetic genius, the outlook to-day is surely no darker than it was after the death of Burns, in 1796, two years before the publication of Lyrical Ballads, or in 1824, after the death of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, when Wordsworth’s work was virtually finished and Tennyson’s not yet begun, when Robert Montgomery and Felicia Hemans were the chief luminaries in the poetical firmament, and when Beddoes wrote that the disappearance of Shelley from the world “ seemed to have been followed by instant darkness and owlseason.”

Such special pleadings are quite as entertaining, and perhaps at bottom quite as philosophical, as the illusory endeavor to estimate and accurately to forecast the issues of the inconceivably complex conditions that govern the life of the spirit in modern civilization, and its reflection in literature and art. Yet the attempt may have the tonic value that belongs to all communion with large ideas. It is of the nature of what Renan calls “ a philosophical examination of conscience.” It helps us to find ourselves amid the infinite dispersion of modern intellectual activity, and to adjust our own work to some broad conception of the evolutionary stream of tendency or design of the whole.

The century of literary production whose account is vaguely felt to be closed by the deaths of Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold in England, of Victor Hugo, Renan, and Taine in France, and of the last survivors of the New England poets and essayists in America, is one of the richest in the annals of mankind. Of the three ages that may be fairly compared with it, the Periclean, the Augustan, and the Elizabethan, it is distinctly inferior only to the first. What the literature of the nineteenth century lacks of classic symmetry and finish of form, or of Elizabethan imaginative vigor is more than compensated by its superior range, originality, and subtlety of thought. We stand at the close of one of the most notable efflorescences of the human spirit. By what analogies shall we endeavor to estimate the probable duration of the period of lean years that may reasonably be expected to follow the fat? The intense vitality and the wide diffusion and inexhaustible resources of modern civilization forbid our thinking for a moment of a blight like that which befell Greek letters after Chæroneia, still less of that millennial mediæval silence, broken at last by the voice of Dante, in which the chaotic elements of the modern world took shape. The genius of our race removes the fear of so complete an abdication of literature in favor of science and erudition as that which, in Germany, followed upon the brief reign of Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe ; and the accelerated march of modern progress forbids our anticipating as long a period of stagnation as that which England required, in Lowell’s phrase, “to secrete the materials for another great poet after Chaucer.” We ask rather, Is the present period of dullness merely a temporary lull, such as accident or the rhythmic law of growth imposes on every continuous development, — a break comparable to that which, in the decade following 1825, appears to divide the age of Shelley, Keats, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Lamb, Hallam, Rogers, Moore, Bentham, and Hazlitt from that of

Carlyle, Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, Stuart Mill, Browning, Darwin, Spencer, Ruskin, and Arnold; or does it really mark the close of a secular era, and must we expect to wander for at least a generation in a wilderness of conflicting aims and tentative efforts before creative genius can find a new kingdom of thought and emotion to subdue and cultivate ?

All depends, of course, upon the meaning of our terms. The supply of literature will not fail, if by literature we mean spicy reportorial history of the progress of the world, deftly turned ballads and verses vain, and entertaining fiction. Mr. Traill’s list of authentic living bards. Mr. Stedman’s Poets American and Victorian Anthology, and the recent collections of the poetry of Australia and of Canada offer appalling statistical evidence that, however it be with the taste for reading, the taste for writing verse is not on the wane. The laws of supply and demand will continue to raise up craftsmen who can spin a good yarn, produce a timely magazine article, and cultivate the annual crop of summer novels. We do not apprehend a general decay of talent, nor do we tremble, like the naive disputants in the controversy of the ancients and moderns, lest the effete world may no longer produce the intellectual giants she bore in her lusty prime. “ Summa tamen omnia constant.” The resources of nature are infinite. When we are told that the death of a Shelley, a Tennyson, or even a Shakespeare extinguishes the sun, we smile, and answer with Schopenhauer’s World Spirit, “ The sources from which individuals and their works arise are inexhaustible and infinite as space and time.”

Kipling, Lang, Stevenson, Hardy, Howells, James, Meredith, Watson, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Pierre Loti, Melchior de Vogüé, Bourget, Le Maître, Brunetière, to cite the first that suggest themselves, are endowed, perhaps, with quite as much native talent as the great names that dominate the literature of England and France from 1830 to 1870 ; yet something constrains us to doubt their exerting an equal influence in moulding the thoughts of men, and to ask whether the age of which they are the spokesmen will contribute its quota to the abiding literature of the world. Mr. Howells would turn our thoughts from this unprofitable query to reflection on the relativity of all human duration : let us think of the time when the world with all its literature will grow cold and fall into the sun, and we shall then be content to edify and entertain our contemporaries by honest, veritist novels, without repining that our labors are not likely to endure as long as Paradise Lost or the Critique of Pure Reason. But this argument really proves too much, and drives us directly to the question of Tennyson’s Despair: —

Until this world does fall into the sun, the distinction between books that enter into the permanent literature of a people and books that win a temporary vogue is as real as any other difference that agitates the minds of men. The individual writer would certainly prefer his book to survive. And so, though conscious of the stony face of time and of the sullen Lethe rolling doom, we may justly estimate the artistic achievement of a generation by its permanent qualities, and may reasonably inquire whether there are not in the existing conditions of literary production some serious obstacles to the writing of books that will live. I think we may discern at least two classes of such hindrances: first, the temptation to intellectual dispersion and hasty, premature production ; and second, the temporary exhaustion of available motifs in the higher fields of literature.

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the first point. On the slightest indication of talent, a young writer’s name is heralded to the four quarters of the globe. He is interviewed in the Revue Bleue, and introduced by the Revue des Deux Mondes to its cosmopolitan clientèle. His copy is eagerly competed for by publishers and “syndicates,” and he is tempted to produce copy in excess of his inspiration. Gabriele d’Annunzio, whose poems were published and extensively criticised when he was fourteen, and Rudyard Kipling and Richard Harding Davis, developed by reporting, and celebrities when hardly out of their teens, are typical illustrations of the forcing process which the newspaper age applies to budding genius. No one denies the good side of this commercialism. It is pleasanter for the author than the old alternative of Grub Street or the patron. Everybody recognizes the justice of Thackeray’s and Zola’s manly protests against the silly affectation of scorning to write for pay. The spur of the ambition to get on in the world, to win an honorable competence, is probably helpful to a certain kind of literary craftsmanship. It increases the output without impairing the quality. But it is more hostile than penury, dependence on a patron, or the exercise of a regular profession, to the slow, concentrated brooding necessary to the production of permanent world-books. Dante’s epic would perhaps not have made him lean for twenty years if a nineteenth-century magazine had stood ready to pay the distinguished Florentine exile a thousand florins for a canto. It is true that while noble poetry has rarely been produced for money, the giant novelists of the first two thirds of the century—Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot — made, and aimed at making, large sums by thenpens. But, if I mistake not, they had all, except possibly Dickens, endured a long maturing apprenticeship before the time of temptation came, and even then they generally gave two years to a book, where their livelier successors give one. This modern haste is not always to be deprecated. There are some brains whose first sprightly runnings cannot be improved by pains. But there are others for whom we could desire periods of enforced leisure and abstinence from printer’s ink, even at the cost of some sacrifice of immediate notoriety and material convenience. While Mr. Andrew Lang earns perhaps ten or fifteen thousand a year turning paragraphs for the Daily News or lively introductions to blue and green fairy-books, the magnum opus, of which we all know him to be capable, "goes the way of Mr. Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies.” It is possible that it is not in Mr. Marion Crawford to produce anything more than a good story, but neither he nor anybody else can possibly know till he ceases to turn out a good story every year. When we contemplate the array of volumes written in feverish haste by Stevenson, to pay for oceanic and transcontinental voyagings and the building of roads and chalets on South Sea islands, we cannot suppress the wish that his fine genius could have matured itself more at leisure, and sought its inspirations less exclusively in the picturesque external panorama of the globe. While nobody would wish Mr. Kipling other than he is, the time may come, after the incomparable vivacity of his impressions of the bustling world has been blurred, when the development of his genius will be checked for lack of the very bookish philosophy “that deals with people’s insides from the point of view of men who have no stomachs.” which he now so cordially despises.

But though the commercial spirit may here and there mislead or dissipate a fine talent, its effects are necessarily transient. Men of genuine inspiration will find a way to keep their souls alive, and after a time literature will adjust itself to the new conditions. The dearth of fresh material, if a fact, is a more serious obstacle. If, as La Bruyère said two hundred years ago, “ tout est dit,” if the experience of our age has found adequate expression, literature can only repeat and refine upon what has been said until new revelations are vouchsafed by the Master of the Show. But the optimist will scout the notion that the significance of modern life has been exhausted by the literature of the nineteenth century. Genius may at any time reveal new aspects of life to which we were blind before, or cast the glamour of poetry and art over material hitherto deemed intractable. The progress of science is a daily confutation of those who would prescribe metes and bounds to our thoughts. The spectroscope, the telephone, and the Roentgen rays have thrice within our memory, like the gods in Pindar, made forecast forsworn.” Scientific discovery is followed by mechanical invention, and this by readjustment of industrial and social conditions, with bewildering rapidity ; and while the great world spins down the ringing grooves of change, we need fear no stagnation in literature. Plausible as this may sound, however, it does not touch the real question. We may concede the realization of their wildest dreams to the enthusiasts of modern progress, and still hold that no changes wdiich may reasonably be anticipated will supply fresh motives or forms to the literature of the next few decades.

Something of this exhaustion has been felt at the close of every great creative age of literature. Greek epic perished not merely because the development of Greek civilization had created an environment unfavorable to that species of art, but because the epic ideal of life and the epic form of poetry had yielded all their fruits; because there had been so many and such excellent epics that even in that early day

and as an epic poet of the sixth century B. C. plaintively said, “ the latest runners in the race could find no opening in the press to drive the sacred car of poetry to its goal.”

Greek tragedy virtually died with Euripides, not because Athens ceased to produce men of fine literary genius or because the fourth-century Athenians had duller poetic sensibilities than their ancestors, but because all possible expressions and combinations of the ideals and conventions of heroic tragedy had been essayed, and Euripides himself was forced to innovate to the verge of the fantastic and the grotesque in order to sustain interest in motives and types that had become hackneyed. No really new ideas entered into Greek speculation in the centuries that followed Aristotle, because the analyses and constructions of Plato and Aristotle had taken up the entire experience of the Greek race and exhausted its philosophical significance. A new religion, a new social and political life, a new science, were required to open up fresh fields for philosophy. Similarly, it might be shown how the Italian poetry of the Renascence, the Elizabethan drama, the French classic literature of the seventeenth century, each ran its appointed course, until the aspect of life it reflected lost its interest, or the artistic medium employed, its charm. Or, to generalize more broadly, we might trace the gradual dying out of the impulse of the Renascence and the Reformation during the century and a half that preceded the French Revolution. The fresh forces which entered into life and literature at that time called forth the splendid outburst of nineteenthcentury philosophy and poetry, and now, after the lapse of a hundred years, reflection on the past and observation of the present both indicate that this impulse, too, is spent.

The new criticism and historical science of Germany and the enlargement of the mental horizon by the revelations of physical science broke down the barriers set to free speculation by mediæval orthodoxy, and left thought as untrammeled as it was in early Ionia, while supplying it with an infinitely greater mass of definite fact to work up into its total imaginative interpretation of the world. Aristotle predicted in one of his earlier writings that philosophy would be consummated within a few decades. He was not altogether wrong. No discoveries and no experiences that he could have foreseen would have suggested any further competing schemes for the unification of human knowledge beyond those with which he was familiar. The only distinctively new idea in modern philosophy was the explicit recognition, enforced by the progress of physiological and anatomical discovery, of the purely subjective character of sense perception of the external world. On this centred the whole philosophical movement from Descartes to Kant. The alternatives that remained for speculative and constructive philosophy after the Kantian criticism were hardly more numerous than those that presented themselves to the contemporaries of Empedocles, Parmenides, and Democritus. Before the year 1870 they had all been worked out in imposing and ingenious systems, and the present generation has been able to add nothing of significance. The currents of contemporary philosophic thought may be enumerated on the fingers of one hand. There is positivism for those who acquiesce in the scientific colligation of facts ; positivism plus evolution for Mr. Herbert Spencer, and the disciples who refine upon and improve his expression, but add nothing to his substance ; critical Kantianism for those who prefer to approach positivism by the way of a destructive criticism of the “ metaphysical faculty ; ” sentimental mystical Kantianism for those who employ criticism to reduce reason to a strict neutrality in order that they may philosophize with their hearts ; and lastly, not inconsistent with criticism and evolution, but adding to both an ideal touch of poetic animism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who has now for thirty years been quietly exploited by an increasing number of ingenious writers, and who by the close of another decade will perhaps prove, as the distinguished French critic Ferdinand Brunetière prophesies, the chief philosophical influence in the literature of the second half of the century. I cannot stop to verify these generalizations on the minor philosophical literature of the day. It would not be difficult, after analyzing out the contributions of Kant, Schopenhauer, scientific positivism, and Spencerian evolution, to determine the residue of speculative originality even in such leaders as Wundt, Riehl, and Alfred Fouillée ; still less in the kleine Wundtianer, in the young psychologists who develop suggestions of Taine in France, or in the army of writers in England and America who paraphrase or refute Herbert Spencer.

Philosophical literature promises little beyond elegant eclecticism and special monographs on questions of detail in psychology or the history of philosophy. I do not see that any conceivable advance of physical science could alter these conditions. The reduction of the chemical elements to modifications of one primary substance and the constitution of chemistry as a branch of mathematical physics, the establishment of the spontaneous origin of life, the complete localization or the demonstrated impossibility of the localization of cerebral functions, the convertibility in practice of all forms of energy, the working out of sidereal evolution as fully as biological evolution has been traced, the invention of flying-machines and of instruments to do for the eye what the telephone has done for the ear, — the realization of these and of other dreams of modern science would not appreciably affect our attitude towards ultimate philosophic problems. They have all been discounted in advance. Nothing short of a revolution in human ideas beyond all rational surmise, or a recovery of philosophical naïveté by some violent interruption to our civilization, could make possible hereafter the rearing of those ambitious structures of thought which sheltered and lent unity to the higher intellectual life of the past.

No such general prediction can be ventured with regard to poetry. As long as there are living men there will be songs of life and love and death, and songs sung for the mere delight of singing. When other inspirations fail, we can put all Roman history into madrigals, like Molière’s Marquis, or all the Elizabethan dramatists into sonnets. We can always tell again the tale of Helen of Troy, or lament the decay of poesy at Wordsworth’s grave, or turn the prose of Sir Thomas Malory into melodious triple and quadruple rhymes. “ The future of poetry is immense,” Matthew Arnold tells us. It has an immense future behind it, we are tempted to add, in the words of Heine’s epigram on Alfred de Musset ; for by present indications it will be a future of study and enjoyment of the poetry of the past. There is nothing in this to surprise us. The relative preponderance of the poetry of the present must always decline with every added century of continuous accumulation of literary treasure. And this tendency will be most strongly felt after a period of intellectual expansion such as that through which we have just passed. In such a case, the necessity and the inspiration of a fresh outburst of original song must come from the shock of a revolution in social and industrial conditions, or the revelation of a new world of thought. We can clearly trace the operation of these conditions in the renewal of poetry at the beginning of the past century, and we can as clearly see the improbability of their recurrence in the near future. The poetry of the last hundred years has been inspired by the French Revolution and the rise and progress of democracy ; by the new and grandiose conceptions of modern science ; by the transformation of the material conditions of existence, the growth of population, and the expansion of civilization over the face of the globe which science has made possible; and in part also by a more critical and sympathetic historic study of the past.

The extensive and ever increasing lit erature devoted to the criticism or to the mere exposition and popularization of the thought of Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning indicates how completely their poetry has expressed the new views and aspirations of the century. Now these ideas may have many further developments in practice, for practice always lags behind the prophetic vision of the poet. But what new inspirations have they for poetry ? The possibilities of democracy, we are eloquently told by Symonds, Howells, Gosse, Garland, and countless others, have not begun to be exhausted. Perhaps not in politics and social life, but what remains for the imagination ? The bards of future democracy can hardly sing of

“ man man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree,” with more enthusiasm than Shelley, or declaim more vehemently against the tyranny of priests and kings than Byron and Swinburne, or affirm a more catholic cameradoship than Whitman. Shall they put into rhyme the ingenious visions of Looking Backward or Mr. Walter Besant’s schemes for making a paradise of East London, which after all are hardly as good raw material for poetry as Plato’s Republic ? Is Mr. William Morris more genuinely inspired in News from Nowhere than he was in the mediæval and mythological tales of The Earthly Paradise ?

Similar objections arise when we are told of the new worlds which the revelations of physical science are to open up to the Muse. Wordsworth’s oft-quoted preface predicts that science will become poetical when science has grown familiar to our thoughts. But the larger conceptions of science are anticipated by the poet’s imagination. The passages about evolution in Shelley’s Prometheus, in Browning’s Paracelsus, and in Tennyson’s In Memoriam are finer than anything on the subject written since the publication of The Origin of Species, — better certainly than Mathilde Blind’s Ascent of Man, Watson’s Dream of Man, or anything in Sully-Prudhomme or Madame Ackermann. No Yerkes or Lick telescope can give us a deeper sense of the appalling infinities of space than Tennyson’s Vastness. No new contrivance of inventive ingenuity can surprise the poet who has already seen “ the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue ; ” and it is not probable that the minuter details and processes of science or the ingenuities and conveniences of mechanical invention can ever be turned to poetical uses. Tennyson’s exquisite judgment extinguished the jets of gas that flared in the first edition of The Palace of Art, and replaced them by

The Muse will always prefer such illumination to the latest triumph of the Baconian natural magic of Tesla or Edison. And we may safely predict in general that the unerring instinct of Tennyson has marked the limits which poetry will not soon pass in the use of specific scientific material. For poetry lives in the symbol as shown to the sense and in the meaning as revealed to the spirit, and these the analyses of science do not touch.

There remains the abstract possibility of the evolution of new perceptions and a new æsthetic. “ Anything might happen if you give it time enough,” says the father of history, in this at one with the latest school of thought. But we cannot accept the bizarreries of Mallarmé or of that very Belgian Shakespeare, Maeterlinck, as heralds of the change. The new æsthetic thus far is mainly an exaggeration of well-known procédés of the old rhetoric, — symbolism, suggestion, allegory, far-fetched metaphor and epithet, calculated reticences and mysticism. The trick is altogether too easy, and we feel that the witty good sense of Jules Le Maître has said the last word of sane criticism on this point when he exclaims, “ But after all, how much harder the old masterpieces must have been to write ! ”

In verse construction this straining after novelty manifests itself in the two opposite extremes of form and formlessness. The French poet either seeks with the Parnassians and Hérédia to surpass Victor Hugo in sonorousness and richness of rhyme, or impatiently rejects the yoke of convention, and builds his alexandrines of eleven or thirteen syllables as caprice may dictate. In England and America, a minority, inspired by the practice of Browning and the precept and example of Whitman, are fain “ to break down the barriers of form between prose and poetry, for the most cogent purposes of these great inland states,” while the majority undertake to gild the refined gold and paint the lily of the diction of Tennyson and Keats, or strive with Sidney Lanier after more luscious verbal melodies and more curiously complicated harmonies than Swinburne has achieved.

Nay, the very author of this weighty protest, himself a thoughtful and conscientious artist, is powerless to rise above the limitations which make his volume a cento of reminiscences of the great Victorian poets and thinkers who have already expressed all that he or any poet of the day has to tell us.

But it is not in poetry or philosophy that the heralds of the “ new spirit ” in literature and the new æsthetic put their trust. These outworn vessels cannot contain the strong fermentation of the new truth. The task of literature henceforth is, not to idealize or schematize life, they say, but to paint it with relentless fidelity and analyze it with scientific precision. For these purposes the best adapted literary forms are prose fiction and the realistic modern drama. The true life of literature to-day, they affirm, is with the great Latin masters abroad, and with Ibsen, Tolstóy, Dostoyevsky, and the vigorous young school of local novelists in America. These are the precursors of a new literature, which is to be as much broader, truer, and humaner than the old as the civilization, science, and universal democracy of the twentieth century will surpass the slowly decaying feudalism of the centuries of transition from Shakespeare to Tennyson. To speed the coming of this glorious time, we must dethrone the crumbling literary idols of the past; Europe must purify herself of the last remnants of the insidious feudal poison that lurks in Shakespeare and Scott; free-born America must cast the yoke of Europe from her neck, and the men of the Mississippi Valley, who, we are told, produce more wheat and possess a higher average culture than any equal body of population in the world, must rise in revolt against the provincial despotism of Boston and New York, and create a literature as broad as their prairies and as shaggy in its native strength as their buffaloes.

This is more than a prophecy ; it is a programme. It converts a languid academical discussion into a conflict of aims and ideals. We cannot really forecast the literature of the twentieth century, though it may amuse us to try. But all serious thinkers are bound to have an opinion as to the methods and tendencies in education and the guidance of opinion that will best prepare a healthy soil for its growth. The mature literary worker must seek his inspiration where he finds it. If Mr. Howells really thinks that he feels a deeper debt to Tolstóy than to any other of his literary passions, we must acquiesce in the inexplicable, though rejoicing for his sake that he first formed himself by a long study of saner models. But it is one thing for a master of realist fiction to affirm that Ibsen or Tolstóy or Valdés stimulates him, and another thing to urge, as a recent veritist critic does, that they and their fellows be preferred, in the education and reading of the young, not only to Thackeray, George Eliot, and Scott, but to Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Let us not confuse the issue. We may well concede that the novel of local color and the unconventional naturalistic drama are the most prosperous forms of literature to-day and contain the most promise for the immediate future. We may cordially admit that it is better to do what Miss Wilkins does for the life of the New England village, or Octave Thanet for the thriving towns of Iowa, or Mr. Fuller for the motley procession which strives to keep up with the swift march of events that is converting the overgrown village of Chicago into the metropolis of a continent, or Mr. Cable for his Creoles, or Miss Murfree for her Tennessee Mountaineers, than it would be to invent belated tales of chivalry or impossible adventures in fantastic Eldoradoes of unknown Africa. We may grant all this, and yet demur to the exaltation of this excellent work above all other forms of artistic endeavor. When those who announce the advent of the reign of veritist fiction declare that the literature of the future must, in Emerson’s phrase, “ deal with God’s chancellors, cause and effect; “ that it must represent things, persons, relations, and characters as grown-up men and women know them to be, and not as children and dreamers would fain make believe that they are, we cordially concur, — making only some slight reservation on behalf of the natural human impulse “ to raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”But when they go on to say that this special phase of the development of the novel and the drama is the final flower and consummation of literature, that the study of its masterpieces ought to blot from our memories all trivial fond records of classicism, feudalism, and romanticism, and that to understand and perfect its methods and to multiply its products is to be the one task of studious and literary effort in the coming age, it is necessary to protest.

The ends and aims of literature are as manifold as the instincts and faculties of man. They cannot be limited to the observation and reproduction of the life of the present. What Mr. Howells calls the “ foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life ” is really the everlasting truth that literature and art are not merely the satisfaction of the love of imitation, but the exercise and gratification of tastes and instincts for symmetry, harmony, unity, and definition which life in the ordinary sense fails to satisfy. The limitation of literature to the expression of life holds good only if interpreted as the tautologous truism that one must be very much alive to produce literature that will live. The realistic novel has made it forever impossible that we should acquiesce in violation of essential truth for literary effect. It cannot permanently maintain our present zest of curious interest in the literary reflection of unessential fact. “ I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl boiling her iron teakettle and baking shortcake,” avers the bard of democracy. But men of less catholic sympathy are beginning to find it monotonous, and our grandsons may marvel as much at our enjoyment of a faithful description of flat-hunting, or our toleration of the minute portrayal of the processes of mining in Zola’s Germinal, as we do at the admiration of our grandfathers for the technical accuracy of the description of the method of taking the Azimuth in Falconer’s epic of The Shipwreck. To what can these laborious inventories of unconcerning things lead ? The society depicted by Balzac is obsolete ; that of Zola obsolescent. We need a new Comédie Humaine every thirty years. By the time our rising school of local novelists have recorded every American dialect and taken the precise altitude of the barometer of ennui in their respective Western towns or Kansas farms, the conditions will have changed so that the whole work will have to be done over again, — “ a thing imagination boggles at.” The photographing of the present is an estimable and for the time the most flourishing branch of literary craftsmanship ; but the prospect of its exclusive predominance over the literary activity and intellectual life of the future would be intolerable.

It is not to be feared. There is another factor to be taken into the reckoning beside the temporary failure of inspiration for poetry and philosophy or the growing tyranny of the realist novel. I refer to the influence of our great universities in creating a criticism based on fuller knowledge, in diffusing a truer appreciation of the value of our heritage of three thousand years of European culture, and in establishing a rational adjustment of the claims upon our attention of the present and the past. The growth of graduate instruction in the United States during the last two decades is a phenomenon which cannot be overlooked in any attempt to estimate the forces which are destined to shape the opinions and determine the spiritual life of the coming generation. Twenty years ago, when the Johns Hopkins University opened its doors, there was virtually no systematic non-professional teaching of graduates in this country. The fourth edition of the graduate students’ manual, recently issued, contains a formidable list of advanced courses in seventeen great departments of human knowledge, offered by twenty-four colleges and universities. These institutions award annually more than two hundred fellowships of the value of five hundred dollars or more each, and an equal number of scholarships yielding an income of from one hundred to three hundred dollars. During the past year more than a thousand professors were wholly or partly engaged in giving non-professional graduate instruction to more than three thousand students. The enormous intellectual effort represented by these figures cannot fail in the near future to affect powerfully both the producers and the readers and critics of literature. To begin with, the new highly specialized professorial chairs offer to the literary aspirant, confronted with the alternative of journalism or making a hit with a popular novel, a third possible modus vivendi. Secure in a specialty and an income, he may cultivate at leisure any slender literary faculty he may possess. The divine spark, supposing it to dwell in him, will not necessarily be extinguished in the freer life and less crushing routine of the modern university. But in default of genius, if he will make the effort, as Dryden words it, “ to wear off the rust he has acquired in laying in a stock of learning,” he may hope to contribute a much-needed element of sanity, breadth of view, and respect for sound traditions to a literature too much dominated by the methods of journalism and the short story, and too exclusively preoccupied with the immediate present.

The connection of literature with the professorial chair is, of course, no absolutely new thing, as the names of Ticknor, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and more recently of Boyesen, McMaster, Woodrow Wilson. Shaler, Brainier Matthews, and Woodberry, remind us. The new thing is the rapid diffusion of the university spirit from Maine to California, and the fact that an increasing proportion of the upper class journeyman work of literature is being done by men who have imbibed that spirit. The young doctor who returns from Germany, or goes out from the graduate school of Harvard, Johns Hopkins, or the University of Chicago, takes with him to the smallest college town of Iowa or Nebraska the university ideal, a very different thing from the old college education. He communicates the stimulus of this ideal to the management of the college library, to the local lecture committee, to his oldfashioned colleagues, and to his more ambitious students. Whatever his pedantries or crudities, he represents in one line of intellectual endeavor, which serves him as a norm for others, no local provincial or partial standard, but the absolutely best attainable in the civilized world to-day. There are ten such men in our smaller college towns now where a few years ago there was one. In another generation they will predominate in even the remotest college faculties. They are preparing the improved school and college textbooks of the future. They are writing in The Nation and the Chicago Dial the book reviews that carry most weight with the intelligent public, and some of the more ambitious among them are slowly maturing books which, although belonging to the borderland between literature and scholarship, will perhaps contribute as much to the literature of the future as works that lie on the border-line between literature and journalism.

For one of the ways in which the univeristy spirit will prepare the soil for the literature of the future will be by abolishing the false antithesis between scholarship and life which has been pressed on behalf of a literature and an education wholly dissociated from the past. There is really as much life in hearing a young woman read Sophocles as in watching her boil the teakettle. The impulse that drives our millionaires to lavish their wealth on the endowment of universities is as truly vital as that which makes a howling bedlam of the stock exchange. No one who really knows our great universities can doubt that the pulse of American life beats as full and strong there as in any counting-room, manufactory, or caucus in the land. The error of the bookworm who despises the life of the people is no grosser than that of the popular rhetorician who withholds the name of life from life’s finest and intensest manifestations. Now, scholarship, culture, study, bookishness, in short, so far from losing their hold on the intellectual élite of the world, will occupy a relatively larger place in the literature of the coming age. It is mere rhetoric to oppose the living present to the dead past, and protest that it is our duty to “ surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism,” and descend into the broad, fertile fields of democracy and science.

Literature can never be democratic in the sense of universal in its appeal. It will always be the affair of a minority, — an ever increasing minority, let us hope. The average man will read the newspapers, if he reads at all; little as he may care for Wordsworth or Milton, the veritist novel of the day leaves him still more indifferent. The devotees of Ibsen, Tolstóy, Valdés, and the other Scandinavian or Latin masters whom we are bidden to accept as the latest and greatest birth of time may take heart: a broader and sounder culture, now accessible to all who care for it, will enable them, while relishing the piquancy and actuality of the literature of the moment, to penetrate the slight veil of strangeness that bars them from communion with the master spirits of the past, and to acknowledge in them, no idols, but true divinities. For it is no disparagement of the present, but only an extension back through the ages of that democratic brotherhood of which we hear so much, to recognize that the stored quintessence of thirty centuries of thought and feeling must contain more lasting spiritual sustenance for those who know how to seek it than the utterance of the hour, however timely. The taking stock of this inheritance, the sifting, classification, and reinterpretation of it in relation to the present, has become in France and Germany a branch of literature coordinate with and hardly inferior in general estimation to “ creative ” work. In this great task America has as yet borne little part; but she is now at last prepared to enter upon it, and pending the arrival of a new world-epoch of original creation, the occupation of this field is likely to be the distinctive literary effort of the next quarter of a century. The doctors’ dissertations that are beginning to stream from our university presses do not all belong to literature even by their themes; but the writing and printing among us of even the feeblest of them will seriously modify the tastes and critical standards of a little circle of active minds. Collectively, they will combine with other forces to form a small but influential reading public, that will not only tolerate but demand stronger food than American literature has usually supplied in the past.

The lightness of touch that has given so widespread a popularity to the American magazine is a charming thing ; but no great literature will hereafter be produced among a people so much afraid of serious reading as the American public has hitherto been. I do not mean to imply that the sole service of our university publications to literature will be to inure the public to dry reading. While our traditions and ideals are as yet mainly those of the German universities, there are encouraging signs here and there of an evolution in our scholastic essays towards the type of the French étude, which for all its learning is often a contribution to real literature. The fostering of this tendency will produce among us a band of scholars who will have learned to combine some grace of form with their erudition, and who will meet the serious reading public at least halfway.

The result, if I may hazard a final prediction, will be that we shall soon have, to counterbalance our flourishing local fiction and the pretty bric-à-brac of the magazines, a vigorous and readable literature of scholarship, history, literary interpretation, and criticism, —a literature not without interest and use for the present, and not without promise for the future. For the literature of the future, whatever else it may be, will not be based on ignorance, nor will it contract to the trivialities of the hour the horizon of the being that looks before and after.

Paul Shorey.