Philosophical Tendencies in English Literature
Why do people write poems, stories and plays? The obvious and cynical answer is that people write because they are paid for their writing; the poet makes a poem for the same reason that the carpenter makes a bench, and the dramatist has no motive other than that of the bootmaker. There is some truth in this; if people do not begin to write because they consider writing a means of livelihood they often continue to write for that reason. Certainly it is easy to think of contemporary authors of whom it may safely be said that they have no inspiration save the desire for money.
But the existence of literature is not thus easily to be explained. There are so many trades and professions easier and more profitable than that of letters that he would be a very stupid person indeed who selected it with nothing to influence him in that direction but the desire to make money. There is something else beside the perfectly legitimate desire to make a livelihood in the mind of the writer; there is something that makes him undergo poverty and other tribulations for the sake of his craft.
What is this influence? What is it that makes writers write? It is no one thing. The will to write is related to nearly all the passions, ambitions and desires of mankind; it is the result of instincts immemorial and unchanging. There are those who hold a peculiar inspirational theory about writing, who believe that an author is merely the instrument used by some creative power. In so far as this theory coincides with the truth that God is the source of all energy it is, of course, sound. But those who hold it generally base it on some fantastic idea of genius as a magic, unknowable power, irresponsibly wandering through the world and selecting at random the men and women who are to be through its mysterious spell creative artists. It is a fascinating theory, but untrue, being supported only by the citation of numerous particular cases, which cannot in logic establish a general rule.
A careful examination of the nature of genius would here be out of place. It is sufficient for our purposes to consider genius as extraordinary talent, and to know that it is by no means the inevitable companion of the will to write. The great majority of writers, those who are without skill and those who produce some interesting and even important work, are without genius. Yet they have the will to write. And there have been instances of men and women of undoubted genius so lazy that they seemed absolutely to lack the creative urge present in the minds of their less gifted brothers and sisters.
There would be writers if there were no such thing as genius just as there would be writers if it were impossible to make money by writing. Consider the earliest days when first by means of crude symbols chiseled on a rock or by means of rough combinations of sounds a man endeavored to convey to his fellows some message not necessitated by the ordinary conditions of life—some message important for its own sake alone. What caused this man to carve, to chant, to express ideas so that they would be intelligible to his fellows? If we understand the motives for this man’s conduct, if we find out what made him a creative artist, we shall understand why modern man writes. For the motives, emotions, essential habits of mankind do not greatly change with the passing of the ages; the soul of man has the changelessness of immortal things.
Motives are hard to trace and they are usually found in combination. We cannot be sure that the first writer had only one motive, but we can imagine many motives, any one of which would have been sufficient to cause his literary adventure. These may be indicated as the urge to chronicle, the urge to attract, the urge to worship, and the urge to create. And all these are related to and possibly included by the need of self-expression.
Among the simplest and least literary people, events that greatly disturb the routine of life—wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes—seem to develop writers automatically. The great thing has happened and must have a record safer than man’s fickle memory. So inevitably come the chronicler and his chronicle. The demand creates the supply. But the desire to ensure remembrance of events is not in itself sufficient to ensure the existence of literature. There is also what I have termed the urge to attract. The savage warrior may carve on stone or paint upon a strip of pale bark a record of his own brave victory or ingenious escape. This he does to attract the attention and admiration of his public, such as it is, to his courage and intelligence. And also the mere making of the record is in itself an achievement certain to bring to its maker the wonder and esteem of those lacking this strange power. And this sort of admiration, he finds, comes to him even when the things about which he writes are not his own doings. So subjective art comes into existence. Man writes because of the urge to worship to-day, as he has always done. He utters prayers that have been provided for his needs by divinely constituted authorities, and to the unspoken ejaculation of his heart he silently gives the best literary form possible to him—the directness and passionate simplicity proper to great literature. He repeats, when he prays in accordance with the forms prescribed by the Church, great literature which came into existence originally in response to the urge to worship. And in all languages the writings of most enduring loveliness, even apart from those divinely inspired, are those which relate most closely to worship—those writings made immortal by the love of God. So writers may fulfill the purpose for which they are made by writing—may know God better by writing about Him, increase their love of Him by expressing it in beautiful words, serve Him in this world by means of their best talent, and because of this service and His mercy be happy with Him forever in Heaven.
There is also the motive which perhaps gives rise to the common and fallacious idea of the writer’s inspiration—the motive which I have designated as the urge to create. Of course the only true creator is God, and for a creature to seem to create may be a perilous thing, savoring of blasphemy. Certainly the evil egotism of some writers, using their talent for the destruction of their souls and those of others, is a blasphemous thing. This is a matter better suited for discussion by a moral theologian than by a critic, but surely it is possible for the writer to assay his task of creating a work of art the more humbly and the more joyfully because it is done in reverent imitation of the Maker or Poet of the universe.
Now, a writer does not analyze or separate his motives. They all are related to and possibly included by the need of self-expression. There is an idea in the writer’s brain which he wishes to put into words and on paper. He does so, without bothering to try to discover why he has this impulse.
The existence of these motives, in various combinations, is evident in all literature. The novelist wishes to create a thing of beauty, to chronicle certain actual or possible events, to attract admiration to himself and perhaps to a certain class or race of men. If he is a great writer he has also, even if he be not thoroughly conscious of it, the desire to worship—he uses his talent honestly and skillfully, for God’s sake, making an acceptable offering. He may write a drama of modern life, a story of pioneer days in the Far West, a sonnet to a buttercup, a pamphlet in favor of improved tenement houses, a history of the Spanish-American War. Whatever he may write, his desire is to chronicle, attract, and to create. And if he be a great writer his desire also is to worship.
The power and desire to influence thought possessed by skillful writers has caused the world sometimes to regard them as actually the leaders of mankind’s spiritual and intellectual endeavors. Writers themselves are quick to take this point of view; we have in America hundreds of popular novelists who have no hesitation in advising humanity about all its moral problems, thousands of minor poets who will answer the questions of the ages in a sonnet or a handful of free verse. There are some reasons for the writers to be justly considered leaders of popular thought. As a class, they understand humanity, and sympathize with it. They have the passions and hopes and loves of the rest of the world, intensified. Also they have a sense of artistic, or, as it is called, poetic justice, and poetic justice usually is Christian justice.
But writers are unfitted to be leaders of popular thought by many disqualifications inseparable from their craft. Interested as they are in the rest of humanity, they inevitably are set apart from it by reason of their exceptional gift. They show their sense of this separation, even when they do not openly admit it, by dressing and talking and living in a manner different from that common to their fellow-citizens. The velvet jacket, the long hair, the flowing necktie, the Bohemian studio, the defiance of custom and sometimes of law—these things are indications of that separation from mankind which makes the writer an unsafe leader of popular thought. There is also the danger that the writer will, if he become a leader of thought, grow intoxicated with power, and lead thought irresponsibly, foolishly, wickedly, having in mind not the welfare of humanity but the delight of leadership. To this temptation all leaders of thought—politicians, educators, investigators—are liable, but the writers most of all.
The proper function of the writer is rather to interpret than to lead the thought of his time. Seldom does a writer actually give the world a new idea. What he does is to give expression to an idea which has lain dormant in the mind of the people awaiting his revealing and quickening touch. There is a hope or a fear in the minds of men—it finds expression in deeds and simultaneously in words. The events in a nation’s history and the intellectual and spiritual causes of those events are revealed to later generations by the poets and story-tellers. The historical development of nations is clear to the students of the world’s literature. Take the American Civil War for an example—we find the soul of the North revealed in “Marching Through Georgia” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the soul of the South in “Dixie” and in “Maryland, My Maryland.” No volumes of history give us a clearer understanding of the feelings of our fathers than do these poems. So also I believe that the awakening to a sense of the evil of the so-called Reformation, that awakening which is historically recorded by the events associated with the Oxford Movement, found literary expression in the poetry of Rossetti and Patmore and the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Since the development which history records is merely the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual progress, therefore the proper themes of creative literary artists are those things which the professed historians cannot treat—the hidden things, the essentials of history. So the writers whose work endures are those who concern themselves with the interior, not the exterior, of life. The great writers are the spiritual historians of their generation. Physical man is important only in relation to spiritual man. Man by himself, man not considered in respect to God, is unworthy of the attention of any writer. The men and women whose plays and poems and stories endure are those who see that one cannot “know himself” if he “presume not God to scan.” They know that the proper study of mankind, and the theme of all literature worthy of the name, is the soul of man.
Literature is a matter of spiritual chronicle and interpretation. Therefore its beauty must, as Keats said, be truth. The writer approaches beauty in proportion as the subject of his interpretation approaches truth. It is a fact that a writer may express an idea which seems contrary to the feeling of his time—may praise economic justice, for instance, in the day of great industrial tyranny, or in general express idealism among materialists. But this should not make us consider him an untruthful interpreter. Ideas implicit in the people may be explicit in the writer. And again the writer may express the thought of a minority more significant than the majority.
The popularity of a writer may be geographical or temporal—perhaps numerical would give a clearer idea of my meaning than geographical. That is, he may be read in his own time by many people, spread over a great part of the world’s surface, or he may have the attention of a public which is great because it extends through the ages. The second sort of popularity is that which the great writers receive, and sometimes they have the first kind also. The great writer, the universal writer, is universal in his theme. And there is only one theme that is universal—God.