The Coming Literary Revival

I.

IT is said that the age of genius in literature, like the age of miracles in religious history, is past. A daring German critic of the last generation declared that the world no longer required a great poet after Goethe, and even ventured to set up a system by which poetry of the first order could be produced as if by machinery. Another philosopher, a man of wide fame, has maintained that the process of reducing all human nature to the level of comfortable mediocrity is already so far advanced that a time can be predicted when art will be for all men what the stage farce of an evening is now for the weary man of business. These are doubtless extreme views, but they are not without mild support in the words that escape more cautious writers. They indicate, at all events, that there is reason for doubt as to the future of letters, as well as room for the discussion of serious questions.

These questions belong, perhaps, to the domain of science rather than to that of the literary essayist. Scientific men have already shown interest in the matter by their investigations concerning the heredity of genius, concerning the relation between genius and insanity, and by varied psychological studies. If these aspects of the subject be left to those competent to depict them, there still remain problems of historical evolution, to solve which may lead, not to the origin of genius in the individual, but to a general law governing its opportunities.

Grant to those who assert it that there have been mute, inglorious Miltons, then the alternative between genius silent and genius vocal must be one of historical necessity. The man of genius is the product of an inevitable evolution. It is easy to say this and to believe it in the light of prevalent scientific opinions. It is not so easy to illustrate it. There can be, this side of Milton’s chaos, nothing more confused or meaningless than the history of the world’s literature estimated as a gradual process, step by step, toward perfection. The endless activity satirized by the Hebrew maxim-maker is lighted here and there by the glow of creative power ; all the rest is a dull glimmer as of subterranean gnomes or cabiri busy at their forges. Criticism misleads because there is a deceitful brilliance about the achievements of one’s own age. They are too near to be properly viewed. This lack of perspective may be corrected in some degree by the effort to imagine how contemporary or very recent writers will look to people one hundred or three hundred or a thousand years hence. In this way the mind may forecast the actual processes of history similar to those by which the settled literary verdicts of the past have been reached.

There are some points in literary history about which there can be no dispute. For example, the world has not made a step forward in epic since the time of Homer; it has not improved the drama since Shakespeare ceased to write ; it has not bettered the novel, unless morally, since Fielding laid down the pen ; it has not surpassed Chaucer in humorous narrative verse, nor Petrarch in sonnet, nor Dante in philosophic satire, nor Milton in expressing the emotion of the infinite, nor Goethe in the power of impersonating an epoch. There is no possibility of comparing these writers among themselves, or of saying from the purely literary criteria which they give whether the world advanced from Homer to Goethe, or went backward in that long interval. Men of the highest genius stand separate from one another. It cannot be said of any one of these creative minds that he was greater than the rest. The standard by which they are to be measured is new in each case, and there is no gradation from one to the next. It is true of some, at least, with whom history has made us familiar, that they stand at the apex in a group where the rise and fall in power of thought and observation can be traced. All that is decipherable in the way of direct evolution in literature can be seen most distinctly in the Elizabethan drama, where there is a manifest increase of skill and power from the rude, inchoate mediæval forms of histrionic art until the climax is reached, followed by a declension, with occasional sallies of brilliant wit and high technical skill; and this declension has lasted to the present day, with no signs of a recurrence to anything like the profound thought, the insight into human nature, the deep originality of Shakespeare. The conditions, national and international, which environed Shakespeare have often been described. It took a world to make him, and the forces of a world were really turned upon the England of his time. But his case is not solitary. It is noteworthy that, with all the toil of the literary rank and file of a race, the crowning genius never emerges without an external shock and pressure and strain which force him to his place, and unite the nation as it were under his feet. Whether this shock be delivered in war, as has most frequently been the case in the past, or in less violent ways, it is indispensable. Look over the lives of men of acknowledged genius and see if there can be found one who truly created his own opportunity.

Meanwhile, another line of instances deserves inspection. Apparently a relation of antecedent and consequent, more rarely of cause and effect, exists between the rise of systems of philosophy and the outbreak of national literary enthusiasm in which genius becomes active. To each age, to every century, belongs a philosophy peculiar to itself. The tendencies of one age, though they result from the thinking and doing of its predecessors, are its own. They give rise to new thoughts and to new problems, and the first to attack the new problems or to utter the new thoughts are the philosophers of the new time. For this reason, philosophy, like literature, moves toward what must be deemed its ultimate goal, not by a steady advance, but by irregular approaches. It may even seem to recede at times, and at other times to be motionless and dead. It cannot transcend the processes of civilization, and, like literature again, it has for its background the general history of culture. It has no other problems than those which arouse and embarrass man and society at a given time, and no material for the solution of these problems except what lies in the general consciousness of the time. Scientific discovery, religious awakening, artistic creativeness, social and political unrest, are fruitful in new impulses for philosophy, and they determine the outlines of its task, though not of its achievement. Where the relation between the various factors of human life, individual, social, political, and the philosophy to which they appeal is simple, the latter is just the expression of the knowledge which the age has of itself. This was never better evinced than in the eclecticism of Cicero, which was the forerunner of the still more elegant literary eclecticism of Virgil and Horace.

On the other hand, an age in which the forces of culture are divergent can find its philosophic expression only in the strife of opinions. In this case civilization fosters the growth of systems of thought which, specious as they are at first glance, are soon seen to be mere makeshifts. But these sports of philosophy are of the highest value in unraveling the history of literature, for it is they that presage by their eccentricities the special phases of intuition and fantasy for which mankind in general is at the moment keeping the sharpest outlook. The more permanent forms of philosophy, since they are deeply imbued with the individuality of their originators, or with some quality to which that name is given for lack of a better, and because they are effective in long reaches of time, find little response in the hearts of the contemporary multitude. In any case, owing to the mutability of human affairs, to the mere fact that men grow old, the conditions in which a philosophy germinates are not those surrounding it at its completion. Its own influence on its votaries and opponents has precluded such uniformity. It has put in words aspirations that were latent. It has formulated thoughts that were strange and foreign to the age just departed, but which seem as familiar as their own perceptions to men who have grown to maturity with it. Tendencies too slight for general observation a little while ago have become dominant, and because the philosopher felt them first, he said, no doubt awkwardly and pedantically, what others must say after him with such smoothness as they can attain, until final expression is reached in the words of a master in literature. Or, again, the tendencies in a philosophy, becoming the tendencies of an age, produce results which imperatively demand expression even in those forms of literature to which philosophy is abhorrent. Thus the process is one in which the thinker leads, and the poet follows ; and this is fit, for after the true poet what is there to say ? Study of the successive revivals of the literary spirit in the history of the world — we are forbidden to amass details — will show that philosophy gropes first in the environment which genius comes later to light up and to inhabit.

In such a study of philosophical movements care must be given to the limits of the inference. There are cases, for example that of Dante, where philosophical development stands to a given literary phenomenon as cause to effect. This is not usual. Were it possible to prove so much, it would not be necessary. What is required is to show that in the whole series of important literary instances there was a significant philosophical forerunning which presaged the advent of genius. This anticipatory stir of minds, however, is not a cause, but an effect of conditions which prepared the way for what was to come. It revealed the sensitiveness of men of thought to obscure tendencies which could become manifest and clear only in the man of intuition, the poet, the artist, the dramatist, or the romancer. Now, the moment this effort is made to trace the relationship between philosophy and literature, it dawns upon one that beneath and above the chaotic perturbations, the renascence and decadence of learning, there is, after all, a unity in the aspirations of the highest genius. Consciously or unconsciously, it must strive to utter, not a mere individual thought, nor the thought of a nation, but the characteristic thought of humanity at the time.

Since history began, this thought has always been cleft in two. The East thinks one way, the West another, and no single mind has yet been able to grasp this divided thought in its entirety and to express it in its primeval oneness. Nevertheless, all the great poets of the West and nearly all the great philosophers have felt themselves confronted by this profoundest of all Eastern Questions. It is the sole reason for the existence of Homer and Herodotus. It causes Virgil to turn his epic into a romance. It is the very crux in Dante’s science of history and in Milton’s theology. It complicates for Shakespeare the characters of Othello and Shylock, and it adds one at least to the puzzles in Goethe’s Faust. It stirs in the most significant myths of Plato. It is exorcised by Aristotle with a Pecksniffian wave of the hand toward his semiOriental predecessors, only to return supreme in neo-Platonism. It furnishes the problems on which Scholasticism goes to pieces. It answers Descartes with Spinoza, and Locke with Berkeley. At the very last, it is conspicuous by its absence from the aims of Kant. He stumbles over it in the literature of thought which it is his task to reduce to a critical unity, but he ignores it. In short, he gives little or no premonition, not even such as is manifest in Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan, of phases of intellectual activity that were to be of absorbing interest within a few decades after his death. This was all the more remarkable because the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had unveiled once for all the cosmopolitan character of literary and philosophical effort at its best. But the Enlightenment was too artificial, too much constrained by rule, to exemplify its own teaching. A reaction was inevitable, and yet no reaction would serve to put the world back into the unconsciousness that had once been broken. Thenceforth genius must achieve what it could, in the full knowledge that its task was to recast the whole of the world’s thought.

The proclamation of this fact almost in so many words, toward the close of the eighteenth century, resounded arrogantly in Germany. Still, it was not arrogance. It was the settled conviction of men who knew themselves capable of great achievement. Nevertheless, the literature which they produced was, taken as a whole, mainly a presage of the future. The Oriental side of civilization is meagrely set forth by the best of them. What they accomplished was to bring all the literary motives, just as Kant brought all the philosophical motives, of the European past to clear presentation on a single canvas, so to speak, with everything in fair perspective. Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and the beginnings of modern life are seen in Faust; while there is only a hint here and there of the other phases of human activity beyond the horizon of Hellenism. The most noteworthy instance is the character of Lynceus in the Helena. There the Orientalism is vivid enough, but it is the Orientalism of those wild races which almost destroyed antique culture before they learned its value. In this meagreness of conception as regards the oldest and most stable aspects of humanity lies the refutation of those who say that after Goethe mankind no longer requires a transcendent poetic genius. When a voice as round and full as that of Dante shall speak for all the earth and all the ages, as Dante spoke for one great period, then the hope of further artistic and poetic achievement may be abandoned.

A common, perhaps an incorrect opinion is that the world is now passing through one of the comparatively dull periods in its literary history. The alleged decadence, it is said, pervades all European civilization. Yet the age is prolific enough. The censure is merely that its productions never rise above mediocrity when measured in the scale of genius, though to this censure is added by some a curious array of pathological conjectures. If this generation had been the first to be criticised in this way, the cry of decadence might fill one with melancholy forebodings. The fact is that these prosaic intervals are the rule, and the visits of genius to the world the rare exception. For example, an acute though academic critic has pointed out that the drama has bloomed in perfection only twice since history began to be recorded ; but this remark has nothing to do with the fact that there are at this moment more playwrights on earth than ever before at any given time since Euripides retired to his cave.

The cavilers must acknowledge that certain fields of literary endeavor were never better cultivated than they are now. Some of these lie in the realm where profound learning, acute and patient observation, and minutely attentive thought supply the place of genius. They produce often works that deserve permanent fame on account of excellence of style. But usually style is a secondary affair with specialists. The incessant outpour of books, monographs, and articles on scientific topics which has been in progress for many years, and bids fair to continue for a long time to come, resembles the deluge of theological and philosophical treatises in the mediæval centuries and at the era of the Reformation. Deeply interesting as these tomes were to the men for whom they were written, they are now useless except to a few investigators. A similar fate awaits the scientific libraries of this day, when results which are now the aim of patient effort shall be part of the experience of humanity.

Not merely in this respect does modern life seem to have entered upon a period mediæval in its analogies. For instance, fiction has been marvelously compressed and shortened of late. Looking back over literary history since the first days of printing, one finds that the abbreviating process has been very gradual. The massive romances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave way slowly to the less heroic narrative with more study of character in fewer words, and this to something better and shorter, and so on, until the short story

— one episode of life beautifully told, every character clearly drawn, every word fitly chosen, every sentence carefully modeled for its place with the rest

— has become the most charming of modern literary products. It is characteristic of modern life — that is, since the Enlightenment — that this result has been attained by conscious effort, though accompanied with an uneasy feeling that the world will never see long novels again as good as those of Fielding and Thackeray. In less conscious fashion and in ruder forms this alternation between the short story and the long novel has been observed in past times, and the short story has always been a marked feature of an age that was looking out for something larger than it had in hand, and something at least different from what it recognized as great in the past. The age of the short story has also been the age of the polished minor poet, whether he wrote social idyls in Alexandria, Latin goliards in a mediæval monastery, songs of love in a Provençal castle, or stanzas and sonnets for a modern magazine.

There are short stories and little poems which will live forever ; but, on the whole, these two classes in literary art lack seriousness, if considered as an end in themselves. They are characteristic of a tentative, a waiting age. The Middle Ages were a time of waiting for the great work that was bound to come. This work, when it came, was a revelation of new form in poesy. The laws of classic verse were broken and new laws enforced by a triumphant example. The present, too, is an age of waiting. The recurrent question, Who is to write the great American novel, or the great American drama, or the great American epic ? is one which has been asked and answered with all degrees of uncertainty. It may never be answered in terms. The American who is to be reckoned the peer of Dante and Shakespeare may have to perfect a form of literature now undreamed of, to which the novel as we know it will be as foreign as the epic or the drama. Besides, this much-desiderated American may never emerge from the obscurity of mute, inglorious Miltonhood, if the following tentative outline of the opportunities of genius is approximately correct :—

First. A literary revival is always a local or national reaction to external influences. It is perfectly good science to say that no effect is ever produced by a single cause acting alone. The inference here drawn excludes none of the impulses attributed to heredity or to abnormal physiological or psychological conditions. It does not conflict with such facts of observation as the fertility of ancient Attica or Renaissance Tuscany in men of mind, as compared with regions hardly a day’s march away from Athens or Florence. It is merely a supplemental necessity of the case.

Second. The greater the force applied from without, the more important the reaction within and the works that belong to it. This proposition may be looked on as a corollary of the ordinary scientific maxim that action and reaction are equal. But it is impossible to apply the rule in all its strictness to literature without the most minute and laborious investigation.

Third. No purely civil convulsion ever evoked a transcendent genius in art or poetry. A possible reason for this is that such a disturbance implies just the lack of that unity which is indispensable to genius. For genius is not scattered, it is concentrated effort.

Fourth. No nation incapable of an original movement in philosophy has ever produced imaginative genius of the highest rank. The only possible exception to this is Homer, and Homer’s antecedents are unknown. The inference does not traverse the instinctive prejudice of the artist against the uninspired, plodding thinker. Everybody knows that systematized æsthetic is like apples of Sodom to the man of intuition. Nevertheless, the race that cannot rise to the level where it may form and express its own theory of beauty will never rise to that higher level where in the works of some master it must make its ideal of beauty actual. No original philosopher, no original genius. This is absolute.

Fifth. The progress of philosophy often indicates the course of national development which creates the environment appropriate to genius. It does not follow, however, that because the mould is ready the statue will be forthcoming. There are contingencies intervening which can be dealt with only by students of heredity and psychology and climate and habitat.

Sixth. The evolution of both philosophy and literature is incidental to the course of national life, and in the long run, doubtless, to that of all humanity. That is to say, neither grows up of its own accord. The background of all literary revivals lies in the history of that universal culture to which literature bears as transient a relation as that of the foliage to the tree. The tree lives long ; the leaves flourish and decay year by year.

Seventh. But within itself the literary revival follows strictly the law of growth ; or, if the phrase be more pleasing, the law of evolution and devolution. A noteworthy fact is, however, that growth appears less gradual than decay. The truth may be that much of the process preliminary to the advent of genius escapes observation. After the fact, many presages are remembered which in their own time passed unnoticed.

Eighth. The reaction passes away without prevision of what is to follow. Perhaps the most signal example of this is the disappearance of the old Republican literature in Rome without a hint of the outburst which heralded and attended the Empire. But there is a chasm equally great, in recent times, between the older literature of America with its colonial impulses and that of the period of growing nationality from Irving to Lowell, and in England between the product of the disturbed Georgian period culminating in Byron and the mild melancholy of Tennyson and the group to which he belonged.

Ninth. But the reaction often projects itself upon other nations or localities, causing a new reaction, and sometimes creating new forms of literature. An instance of this is the Chaucerian cycle in England, affected as it was by motives which had just ceased to be active in Italy and France. French romanticism, the Dantean allegory, and Boccaccio’s novel take a form very different, under the hand of Chaucer, from that which they wore originally. Observe, too, in a later time, what a metamorphosis is shown in the teachings of Locke and the smooth humanity of Pope after they have been transferred to France by Voltaire.

The question remains whether these dicta can be applied to conditions existing at the present day. As to the impact of nation upon nation, even to the point of conflict, it is hardly necessary to say more than that no intelligent man lives anywhere in the bounds of civilization who fails to look “ nights and mornings” now for signs of war. There are even some who seem to be afflicted with visions of Armageddon. This aside, who shall stand as philosopher of the age ? That is an inquiry in which the estimate the age puts upon itself cuts some figure. Whether it is just to itself in adopting a tone of self-depreciation is not important. That the tone is to be heard, and that it is only one signal of a turn of thought generally pessimistic, are significant facts. Optimism can hardly be said to exist as a philosophy at the present time. Evolutionary theories based wholly on physical facts, with a mechanical formula as the goal of the universe expressible in the strictest mathematical way, have driven it to the merely negative hope that everything will turn out for the best. Recent efforts at directing attention anew to Leibnitz attest the lack of initiative among thinkers of optimist preferences. Mr. Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy is now a complete system, and the amount of comfort it gives to the world is very small. In fact, about the only comfort it gives is that it is open to criticism. The tendencies of recent literature — Zola, Tolstoi, Kidd in Social Evolution, Nordau in Degeneration— are so well known that it is needless to specify them. All this has really little value in practical life. Human nature never yet gave up a struggle because of despair, nor ever deemed a hope attained worth a fraction of the unattainable. The true import of pessimism lies in the hint it gives that, unconsciously, mankind is reaching out toward a future as different as possible from the present and the past of which it is weary. It is along this line on which humanity seems to be moving toward a phase of existence different from all, if not better than any, through which it has passed before, that search must be made for philosophic presages of what is to come.

To any one who looks over the systems offered to the present age, it must be obvious that the promise of most of them is very limited, or that it depends on contingencies more or less remote. Thus one sees little of the influence of Herbart, strong thinker as he was, out side of the methods of pedagogy. His individual realism is expounded to deaf ears in the midst of the socialist and pantheistic tendencies of the time. Lotze’s remarkably penetrating thought is just now in process of transmutation through secondary minds. It has a long future, but it may be a remote one, in fee. Scottish philosophy is a mere survival. Besides, it has had its man of genius. If it once proclaimed Rousseau as its ally, it cannot deny Burns.

In America there are advocates of all philosophies, but there is no philosophy. This is not an individual opinion; it is the universal criticism on American learning. America has had one original metaphysician, and he belonged to the time when the social unity of the colonies had not yet given way to the chaos of modern life in the United States. This, again, is no individual dictum. But his thought has already worked itself out in literature. Perhaps somebody may be found to dispute the critical estimate of Hawthorne and Poe as the truly creative American minds in the field of imagination. Nevertheless, the estimate is not at all eccentric. It is based on much the same kind of reasoning as that which, according to a familiar anecdote, established the political and military primacy of Themistocles among the Greeks. The intellectual antecedents of many American men of letters in past generations can be traced largely to the Old World. This is not true of Hawthorne and Poe. The former in particular carried his Puritan environment with him to Italy, as that wonder-work The Marble Faun shows. But the fatalism of these two men in the study of character, a nemesis as unerring as that of the Greeks, is the artistic, emotional counterpart of the stern, unswerving thought of Jonathan Edwards. Whatever may be said of the ethics of The Raven or The Scarlet Letter, it is certain that they never would have emerged except from the culture which also produced A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Notion of FreeWill.

If the hypothesis suggested in these pages be correct, America needs to start a new intellectual cycle ; and it is superfluous to say that the way to start is not to rest in the boasted excellence of some light form of literature, for example the American short story. It will take larger effort than this, and effort along lines illbeset, to bring out the American rival of Homer and Dante and Virgil and Goethe and Shakespeare. There is a deal of meaning in the remark attributed to Horace Greeley, that what the United States needed was a sound thrashing, but that, unfortunately, no other nation on earth was big enough to give it to them. The Old World is well-worn. It is gradually approaching, from sheer weariness, a social if not a political federalism, in which America must be teacher, not pupil. But the only lesson which America is now teaching the world in the ideal realm is precisely the lesson which von Hartmann has already put in words, namely, that the literature of the future is to be as the farce which the Berlin business man goes to see of an evening by way of recreation. It is doing its best to prove that, after Goethe, the rôle of transcendent genius is no longer to be played. By way of bringing about a new movement in letters, it would be an excellent thing if some profoundly one-sided thinker should arise to shake to pieces the eminently respectable but fatally monotonous philosophy of the American schools.

In another article we shall search for our philosopher over a somewhat wider area.

J. S. Tunison.