On Being Original

THEEE has been a radical change during the last hundred years in the world’s attitude toward originality. An age of conformity has given way to an age of self-assertion; so that nowadays a man makes a bid for fame by launching a paradox much as he might have done in the time of Pope by polishing a commonplace. Then, even a person of genuine originality was in danger of being accounted freakish. Now, many a man passes for original who is in reality only freakish. Boileau, speaking for the old criticism, says that Perrault was “bizarre;” Sainte-Beuve, speaking for the new, says that Perrault had genius. From the outset the neo-classic critics stifled free initiative in the name of the “rules,” and opposed to every attempt at innovation the authority of Aristotle and the ancients. The relation of the literary aspirant to the “models” during this period is not unfairly summed up in the words of the comic opera, —

Of course you can never be like us,

But be as like us as you ’re able to be.

Later, under French influence, the tyranny of etiquette was added to the tyranny of classical imitation. Aristotle was reinforced by the dancing master. Social convention so entwined itself about the whole nature of a Frenchman of the Old Régime that it finally became almost as hard for him as we may suppose it is for a Chinaman to disengage his originality from the coils of custom. The very word original was often used as a term of ridicule and disparagement. Brossette writes of the Oriental traveler Tavernier that he is “brutal and even a bit original.” “When it is desired to turn any one to ridicule,” writes Boursault about the same time, “he is said to be an original sans copie.” Anything in literature or art that departed from the conventional type was pronounced “monstrous.” La Harpe applies this epithet to the Divine Comedy and points out how inferior the occasional felicities of this “absurd and shapeless rhapsody ” are to the correct beauties of a true epic like Voltaire’s Henriade.

And so we might go on, as Mr. Saintsbury, for example, does for scores of pages in his History of Criticism, exposing the neo-classic narrowness and setting forth in contrast the glories of our modern emancipation. But this is to give one’s self the pleasure, as the French would say, of smashing in open doors. Instead of engaging in this exhilarating pastime, we might, perhaps, find more profit in inquiring, first, into the definite historical reasons that led to the triumph of the so-called school of good sense over the school of genius and originality; and second, in seeking for the element of truth that lurked beneath even the most arid and unpromising of the neo-classic conventions. For if, like Mr. Saintsbury and many other romanticists, we reject the truth along with the conventions, we shall simply fall from one extreme into another.

The whole subject of originality is closely bound up with what is rather vaguely known as individualism. We must recollect that before the disciplinary classicism of the later Renaissance there was an earlier Renaissance that was in a high degree favorable to originality. At the very beginning of this earlier period, Petrarch made his famous plea for originality in a letter to Boccaccio, and established his claim in this as in other respects to be considered the first modern man. “Every one,” says Petrarch, “has not only in his countenance and gestures, but also in his voice and language, something peculiarly his own (quiddam suum ac proprium) which it is both easier and wiser to cultivate and correct than to alter.” And so many of the Italians who followed Petrarch set out to cultivate the quiddam suum ac proprium, often showing real ardor for self-expression, and still oftener perhaps using the new liberty merely as a cloak for license.

Society finally took alarm, not only at the license, but at the clash of rival originalities, each man indulging his own individual sense without much reference to the general or common sense of mankind. There was a reaction against individualism, and an era of expansion was followed by an era of concentration. This reaction, especially in France and Italy, soon ran into excesses of its own. Yet we must not forget that at the moment when the neo-classic disciplinarian appeared on the scene, the great creative impulse of the early Renaissance was already dying out, or degenerating into affectation. The various forms of bad taste that spread like an epidemic over Europe at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century (cultism, Marinism, euphuism, préciosité, etc.) have their common source in a straining to be original in defiance of sound reason. We may say of the writers of these different schools as a class that in spite of occasional lyrical felicities they have “all the nodosities of the oak without its strength, and all the contortions of the Sibyl without the inspiration.”

The school of good sense was the natural and legitimate protest against this pseudo-originality. But this school can be justified on higher grounds than simply as a reaction from a previous excess. It tried to apply, however imperfectly, the profound doctrine of Aristotle that the final test of art is not its originality, but its truth to the universal. The question is one of special interest because we are living in an age that comes at the end of a great era of expansion, comparable in some ways to the Renaissance. Now, as then, there is a riot of so-called originality. In the name of this originality art is becoming more and more centrifugal and eccentric. As the result of our loss of standards, the classicist would complain, we are inbreeding personal and national peculiarities and getting farther and farther away from what is universally human.

In other words, the chief ambition of our modern art, which resembles in this respect some of the art of the later Renaissance, is to be original. The first aim of both classic and neo-classic art on the other hand was to be representative. Aristotle had said that it is not enough to render a thing as it is in this or that particular case, but as it is in general; and he goes on to say that the superiority of poetry over history lies in the fact that it has more of this universality, that it is more concerned with the essentials and less with the accidents of life. The weakness of neo-classic art was that it substituted the rule of thumb and servile imitation for direct observation in deciding what were accidents and what were essentials. It was ready to proscribe a thing as “monstrous,” that is, as outside of nature, when in reality it was simply outside the bounds set by certain commentators on Aristotle. The artist had to conform to the conventional types established in this way, even if he sacrificed to them poignancy and directness of emotion. He was limited by the type, not only in dealing with any particular literary form, — tragedy, epic, etc., — but even in his creating of individual characters. For example, he must be careful not to paint a particular soldier, but the typical soldier, and, of course, he was not to depart too far from the classical models in deciding what the traits of the typical soldier are. Thus Rymer condemns Iago because he is not true to the character that soldiers have borne in the world for “some thousand of years.” According to Rymer again, the Queen in one of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays oversteps the bounds of decorum. Some particular queen, Rymer admits, may have acted in this way; but she must be rid of all her “accidental historical impudence ” before she can become an orthodox, typical queen entitled to “stalk in tragedy on her high shoes.”

The attempt of the neo-classicists to tyrannize over originality and restrict the creative impulse in the name of the type was bound in the long run to provoke a reaction. There was needed, to carry through the difficult and delicate task of breaking with convention, some man of more than Socratic wisdom; instead, this task was undertaken by the “self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.” In almost the opening sentence of his Confessions, Rousseau strikes the note that is heard throughout the nineteenth century, from the early romanticists to Ibsen and Sudermann: “If I am not better than other men, at least I am different.” By this gloating sense of his own departure from the type, Rousseau became the father of eccentric individualists. By his insistence on the rights and legitimacy of unrestrained emotion he inaugurated the age of storm and stress not only in Germany but throughout Europe. Our modern impressionists, who would make of their own sensibility the measure of all things, are only his late-born disciples.

Emotion, insists the classicist, must be disciplined and subdued to what is typical; else it will be eccentric and not true to the human heart. “The human heart of whom?” cries Alfred de Musset, like a true disciple of Jean-Jacques. “The human heart of what ? Even though the devil be in it, I have my human heart of my own — j’ai mon cœur humain, moi,” The whole of French romanticism is in that moi. Away with stale authority, usage, and tradition that would come between a man and his own spontaneity and keep him from immediate contact with “nature.” Let him strive once more to see the world bathed in the fresh wonder of the dawn. To this end let him discard books (“a dull and endless strife”) and live as if “none had lived before him.”

Every man, in short, is to be an original genius. It was the assumption of this attitude by Rousseau’s followers in Germany that gave its name to a whole literary period — Geniezeit. Germany sought its emancipation from convention, not as Lessing would have wished, through the discipline of reason, but through “genius” and “originality,” which meant in practice the opening of the floodgates of sentiment. We can imagine the disgust with which Lessing looked on the Rousseauism of the youthful Goethe. In Werther critics are accused of being in a conspiracy against originality. Their rules are compared to a system of dams and trenches with which the critics protect their own little cabbage-patches against genius whose impetuous waves would otherwise burst forth and overwhelm them and at the same time astound the world. One thinks of Lessing’s admirable defense of criticism, of the passage in which he confesses that he owes all he has, not to genius and originality, but to a patient assimilation of the wisdom of the past. “Without criticism I should be poor, cold, shortsighted. I am, therefore, always ashamed or annoyed when I hear or read anything in disparagement of criticism. It is said to suppress genius and I flattered myself that I had gained from it something very nearly approaching genius. I am a lame man who cannot possibly be edified by abuse of his crutch.”

We are still inclined to side with original genius against what Lessing calls criticism. Criticism itself has come to mean nowadays mere appreciativeness, instead of meaning as it did for Lessing the application of standards of judgment. It may however appear some day how much the great romantic leaders, Shelley, for example, suffered from the absence of just what Lessing called criticism. Men may then grow weary of a genius and originality that are at bottom only an outpouring of undisciplined emotion. One whole side of our American transcendental school is only a belated echo of German romanticism, which itself continues the age of original genius. There is special danger even in Emerson’s conception of originality and in the unbounded deference with which it fills him for the untrained individual. Every man, to become great, merely needs, it would appear, to plant himself “indomitably on his instincts;” but it is not safe for the average person to trust so blindly to what Rymer would have called his own “maggot.” Hawthorne, the best observer of the group, has left an account of some of the nightmare originalities that were developed under the Concord influence.

We read of a certain character in one of Marivaux’s plays: “He is a man whose first impulse is to ask, not, ‘ Do you esteem me ? ’ but, ‘Are you surprised at me ? ’ His purpose is not to convince us that he is better than other people, but that he resembles himself alone.” The comedy in which this eighteenth-century Bernard Shaw figures was written a number of years before Rousseau assumed the Armenian costume and began to agitate Europe with his paradoxes. Since Rousseau the world has become increasingly familiar with the man who poses and attitudinizes before it, and is not satisfied until he can draw its attention to the traits that establish his own uniqueness. He not only rejoices in his own singularity, but is usually eager to thrust it on other people. His aim is to startle, or, as the French would say, to épater le bourgeois, to make the plain citizen “stare and gasp.” Dr. Johnson said of Lord Monboddo that if he had had a tail he would have been as proud of it as a squirrel. Perhaps Rousseau was never more deeply hurt than by the lady who said on breaking with him, “You’re just like other men.” This, as a French critic remarks, was a home thrust that one of Molière’s soubrettes could not have improved upon. The claim of Rousseau and his earlier followers was not simply to be unique, but unique in feeling. This sentiment of uniqueness in feeling speedily became that of uniqueness in suffering — on the familiar principle, no doubt, that life, which is a comedy for those who think, is a tragedy for those who feel. Hence arose in the romantic school a somewhat theatrical affectation of grief. Byron was far from being the first who paraded before the public “the pageant of his bleeding heart.” Chateaubriand especially nourished in himself the sense of fated and preëminent sorrow, and was ready to exclaim at the most ordinary mischance, “Such things happen only to me! ” Sainte-Beuve makes an interesting comparison between Chateaubriand and another native of Brittany, the author of Gil Blas. “A book like René” says Sainte-Beuve, “encourages a subtle spiritual pride. A man seeks in his imagination some unique misfortune to which he may abandon himself and which he may fold about him in solitude. He says to himself that a great soul must contain more sorrow than a little one; and adds in a whisper that he himself may be this great soul. Gil Blas, on the other hand, is a book that brings you into full contact with life and the throng of your fellow creatures. When you are very gloomy and believe in fatality and imagine that certain extraordinary things happen to you alone, read Gil Blas and you will find that he had that very misfortune or one just like it, and that he took it as a simple mishap and got over it.”

The same contrast might be brought out by comparing Montaigne and Rousseau, the two writers who in a broad sense are the masters, respectively, of Lesage and Chateaubriand. This contrast is easily missed because at first glance Montaigne seems an arch-egotist like Rousseau, and is almost equally ready to bestow his own idiosyncrasies on the reader. Yet in the final analysis Montaigne is interested in Montaigne because he is a human being, Rousseau is interested in Rousseau because he is Jean-Jacques. Montaigne observes himself impartially as a normal specimen of the genus homo. Rousseau, as we have seen, positively gloats over his own otherwiseness. Montaigne aims to be the average, or it would be less misleading to say, the representative man. Rousseau’s aim is to be the extraordinary man, or original genius. Rousseau is an eccentric, Montaigne a concentric individualist. The sentence of Montaigne that sums him up is, “Every man bears within him the entire image of the human lot.” Rousseau is rather summed up in his phrase, “There are souls that are too privileged to follow the common path,” with its corollary that he is himself one of these privileged souls.

The nineteenth century saw the rise of a race of eccentric individualists especially in art and literature who, like Rousseau, scorned the common path and strove to distinguish themselves from the bourgeois and philistine in everything, from the details of their dress to the refinements of their sensations. In this quest of the rare and the original they attained to a departure from the norm that was not only eccentric but pathological. Every man was to have the right to express not only his own particular vision of life, but his own particular nightmare. We finally come to a writer like Baudelaire, who builds himself a “little strangely scented and strangely colored kiosk on the extreme tip of the romantic Kamchatka” and “cultivates his hysteria with delight and terror;” who instead of being true to the human heart, as the old-fashioned classicist would say, makes it his ambition to create a “new shudder.” All the modern writer cares for, says M. Anatole France, is to be thought original. In his fear of becoming commonplace he prides himself, like Victor Hugo, on reading only those books that other men do not read, or else he does not read at all and so comes to resemble that eighteenth-century Frenchwoman who was said to have “respected in her ignorance the active principle of her originality.” The danger of the man who is too assimilative, who possesses too perfectly the riches of tradition, is to feel that originality is henceforth impossible. It is related of a French critic that he used to turn away wearily from every new volume of poetry that was submitted to him with the remark, “All the verses are written.”

Genuine originality, however, is a hardy growth and usually gains more than it loses by striking deep root into the literature of the past. La Bruyère begins his Characters by observing that “Everything has been said,” and then goes on to write one of the most original books in French. Montaigne wrote a still more original book which often impresses the reader as a mere cento of quotations. An excessive respect for the past is less harmful than the excess from which we are now suffering. For example, one of our younger writers is praised in a review for his “stark freedom from tradition ... as though he came into the world of letters without ever a predecessor. He is the expression in literary art of certain enormous repudiations.” It is precisely this notion of originality that explains the immense insignificance of so much of our contemporary writing. The man who breaks with the past in this way will think that he is original when he is in reality merely ignorant and presumptuous. He is apt to imagine himself about a century ahead of his age when he is at least four or five centuries behind it. “ He comes to you,” as Bagehot puts it, “ with a notion that Noah discarded in the ark, and attracts attention to it as if it were a stupendous novelty of his own.”

We may be sure that the more enlightened of the Cave-Dwellers had already made deeper discoveries in human nature than many of our modern radicals. Goethe said that if as a young man he had known of the masterpieces that already existed in Greek he would never have written a line. Goethe carries his modesty too far, but how grateful just a touch of it would be n the average author of to-day. With even a small part of Goethe’s knowledge and insight he would no longer go on serving up to us the dregs and last muddy lees of the romantic and naturalistic movements as originality and genius. He would see that his very paradoxes are stale. Instead of being a half-baked author he would become a modest and at the same time judicious reader; or if he continued to write he would be less anxious to create and more anxious to humanize his creations. Sooner or later every author as well as the characters he conceives will have to answer the question that was the first addressed to any one who designed to enter the Buddhist church: “Are you a human being ?” The world’s suffrage will go in the long run to the writer or artist who dwells habitually in the centre and not on the remote periphery of human nature. Gautier paid a doubtful compliment to Victor Hugo when he said that Hugo’s works seemed to proceed not from a man, but from an element, that they were Cyclopean, “as it were, the works of Polyphemus.” Hugo remained the original genius to the end, in contrast to Goethe, who attained humane restraint after having begun as a Rousseauist.

Romanticism from the very beginning tended to become eccentric through overanxiety to be original; and romanticism is now running to seed. Many of our contemporary writers are as plainly in an extreme as the most extreme of the neo-classicists. They think that to be original they need merely to arrive at self-expression without any effort to be representative. The neo-classicist on the other hand strove so hard to be representative that he often lost the personal flavor entirely and fell into colorless abstraction. Both extremes fail equally of being humane. For to become humane a man needs, as Pascal puts it, to combine in himself opposite extremes and occupy all the space between them. Genuine originality is so immensely difficult because it imposes the task of achieving work that is of general human truth and at the same time intensely individual. Perhaps the best examples of this union of qualities are found in the Greek. The original man for the Greek was the one who could create in the very act of imitating the past. Greek literature at its best is to a remarkable degree a creative imitation of Homer.

The modern does not, like the Greek, hope to become original by assimilating tradition, but rather by ignoring it, or if he is a scholar, by trying to prove that it is mistaken. We have been discussing thus far almost entirely the originality of the Rousseauist or sentimental naturalist but we should not fail to note curious points of contact between sentimental and scientific naturalism. The scientific naturalist, or, as we might call him, the Baconian, aims less at the assimilation of past wisdom than at the advancement of learning. With him too the prime stress is on the new and the original. Formerly there was a pedantry of authority and prescription. As a result of the working together of Rousseauist and Baconian there has arisen a veritable pedantry of originality. The scientific pedant who is entirely absorbed in his own bit of research is first cousin to the artistic and literary pedant who is entirely absorbed in his own sensation. The hero of modern scholarship is not the humanist but the investigator. The pathway to fame is not to know the standard writers, but to disinter writings and reputations to which the past had given decent burials. The man who can dig up an unpublished document from some musty archive outranks the man who can deal judiciously with the documents already in print. The love of truth shades imperceptibly into the love of paradox, and Rousseauist and Baconian often coexist in the same person. A royal road to a reputation for originality is to impugn the verdicts of the past — to whitewash what is traditionally black or to blackwash what is traditionally white. Only the other day one of the English reviews published the “Blackwashing of Dante.” A still better example is Renan’s blackwashing of King David which concludes as follows: “Pious souls when they take delight in the sentiments filled with resignation and tender melancholy contained in the most beautiful of the liturgical books will imagine that they are in communion with this bandit. Humanity will believe in final justice on the testimony of David, who never gave it a thought and of the Sybil who never existed,” etc. The whitewashings have been still more numerous. Rehabilitations have appeared of Tiberius, the Borgias, and Robespierre. A book has also been written to prove that the first Napoleon was a man of an eminently peaceloving disposition. Mr. Stephen Phillips undertakes to throw a poetical glamour over the character of Nero, that amiable youth, who, as the versifier in Punch observes, —

If this whitewashing and blackwashing goes on, the time will soon come when the only way left to be original will be to make a modest plea for the traditional good sense of the world. This traditional good sense was never treated with an easier contempt than at present. A writer named Bax, who recently published a volume rehabilitating the revolutionary monster Marat, says in his preface, “It is in fact a fairly safe rule to ascertain for oneself what most people think on such questions [that is, as the character of Marat] and then assume the exact opposite to be true.” Of books of this kind we may usually say what FitzGerald said of Henry Irving when he made himself up in the rôle of Shylock to look like the Saviour: “It is an attempt to strike out an original idea in the teeth of common sense and tradition.” Of course there are in every age and individual elements, often important elements, that run counter to the main tendency. One of the regular recipes for writing German doctors’ theses is to seize on one of these elements, exaggerate it, and take it as a point of departure for refuting the traditional view. Thus Rousseau says in one place that he has always detested political agitators. We may be sure in advance that some German will start from this to prove that Rousseau has been cruelly maligned in being looked on as a revolutionist.

Even our more serious scholars are finding it hard to resist that something in the spirit of the age which demands that their results be not only just but novel. Even our older universities are becoming familiar with the professor who combines in about equal measure his love of research and his love of the limelight. Most good observers would probably agree that contemporary scholarship and literature are becoming too eccentric and centrifugal; they would agree that some unifying principle is needed to counteract this excessive striving after originality. For example, Professor Gummere, who is one of the most distinguished representatives of the scholarly tradition that ultimately goes back to Herder and the Grimm brothers, diagnoses our present malady with great clearness in a recent article on “Originality and Convention in Literature.” The higher forms of poetry and creative art, he says, are being made impossible by the disintegrating influences at work in modern life and by an excess of analysis. He suggests as remedy that we jettison this intellectual and analytical element and seek to restore once more the bond of communal sympathy. This remedy betrays at once its romantic origin. It is only one form of Rousseau’s assumption that an unaided sympathy will do more to draw men together than the naked forces of egoism and self-assertion will do to drive them asunder. Even in his studies of the beginnings of poetry Professor Gummere should perhaps have insisted more on communal discipline as a needful preliminary to communal sympathy. However that may be, our present hope does not seem to lie in the romanticist’s attempt to revert to the unity of instinct and feeling that he supposes to have existed in primitive life. We need to commune and unite in what is above rather than in what is below our ordinary selves, and the pathway to this higher unity is not through sympathy, communal or otherwise, but through restraint. If we have got so far apart, it is not because of lack of sympathy, but of humane standards.

Without entering fully into so large a topic as the impressionism of our modern society, its loss of traditional standards, and its failure as yet to find new, we may at least point out that education should be less infected than it is with a pedantic straining after originality. In general, education should represent the conservative and unifying principle in our national life. The college especially must maintain humane standards if it is to have any reason at all for existing as something distinct from university and preparatory school. Its function is not, as is so often assumed, merely to help its students to self-expression, but also to help them to become humane. In the words of Cardinal Newman the college is a " great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; ” this end is to supply principles of taste and judgment, and train in sanity and centrality of view; to give background and perspective, and inspire, if not the spirit of conformity, at least a proper respect for the past experience of the world. Most of us have heard of Mrs. Shelley’s reply when advised to send her boy to a school where he would be taught to think for himself: “My God! teach him rather to think like other people.” Mrs. Shelley had lived with a man who was not only a real genius but an original genius in the German sense, and knew whereof she spoke. Now the college should not necessarily teach its students to think like other people, but it should teach them to distinguish between what is original and what is merely odd and eccentric both in themselves and others. According to Lowell this is a distinction that Wordsworth could never make, and Wordsworth is not alone in this respect among the romantic leaders. We must insist at the risk of causing scandal that the college is not primarily intended to encourage originality and independence of thought as these terms are often understood.

The college should guard against an undue stress on self-expression and an insufficient stress on humane assimilation. This danger is especially plain in the teaching of English composition. A father once said to me of a “daily theme” course that it had at least set his son’s wits to working. But what if it set them to working in the void ? The most that can be expected of youths who are put to writing with little or no background of humane assimilation is a clever impressionism. They will be fitted not to render serious service to literature but at most to shine in the more superficial kinds of journalism. Ultimately a great deal of what goes on in the more elementary college courses in English may well be relegated to the lower schools — and the home — and what is done in the advanced courses in composition will probably either be omitted altogether or else done as it is in France in connection with the reading and detailed study of great writers. Assimilation will then keep pace as it should with expression.

Spinoza says that a man should constantly keep before his eyes a sort of exemplar of human nature (idea hominis, tamquam naturœ humanœ exemplar). He should, in other words, have a humane standard to which he may defer and which will not proscribe originality, but will help him to discriminate between what is original and what is merely freakish and abnormal in himself and others. Now this humane standard may be gained by a few through philosophic insight, but in most cases it will be attained if at all by a knowledge of good literature — by a familiarity with that golden chain of masterpieces which links together into a single tradition the more permanent experience of the race; books which so agree in essentials that they seem, as Emerson puts it, to be the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. In short, the most practical way of promoting humanism (if we may be permitted that much-abused word) is to work for a revival of the almost lost art of reading.

As a general rule the humane man will be the one who has a memory richly stored with what is best in literature, with the sound sense perfectly expressed that is found only in the masters. Conversely, the decline of humanism and the growth of Rousseauism has been marked by a steady decay in the higher uses of the memory. For the Greeks the Muses were not the daughters of Inspiration or of Genius, as they would be for a modern, but the daughters of Memory. Sainte-Beuve says that “from time to time we should raise our eyes to the hill-tops, to the group of revered mortals, and ask ourselves, What would they say of us ? ” No one whose memory is not enriched in the way we have described can profit by this advice. Sainte-Beuve himself in giving it was probably only remembering Longinus.