CHAPTER II

LITERATURE AND THE AUTHOR

THE questions that arise in connection with the statements about criticism and the critic by Pietro Aretino and Anatole France are difficult ones to answer: What is genius? What are masterpieces? The critic, whether he is to record his impressions, or to enjoy and appreciate, or to judge and evaluate, must discover for himself some solution to these problems; he must determine what he expects to find in the nature of an author whom he calls great or even good, and what he means when he speaks of literature.

The words author and literature are both used very loosely. Technically, the author is the maker of any piece of writing, from the dryest text book to the noblest poem. We have words to distinguish the good from the poor in poetry, for we know the difference immediately between a poet and a rhymer or versifier. We have even that word of contempt, poetaster. But the word author covers a multitude of vices and virtues, and we are helpless to indicate either vice or virtue except by the use of qualifying adjectives or phrases. It is obvious that here we must use the word author in the sense of a writer of genius or at least of talent, and so it must be understood in these pages.

The grading and ranking of authors was the favorite sport of many of the older critics. Joseph Warton, for instance, in his essay on The Genius and Writings of Pope, divides the English poets into four classes, naming

the writers whom he would dispose under each heading. Such a process, unwise as it may be critically, is easier than the attempt so often made to decide which is the greater of two writers. It is impossible to say authoritatively that Shelley is greater than Keats, or Thackeray than Dickens. Relative greatness depends on so many things, and will look so different to different men that a final answer to such a question can never be arrived at. There are even those who question the supreme position in which criticism has generally put Shakespeare. It is easy to say that Swinburne's harmonies and rhythms are more delicate and exquisite than those of Browning, and that Browning is a more profound and helpful thinker than Swinburne; but which is the greater poet, who shall decide? You or I may have an opinion that one quality or the other is more important, but neither of us may be able to convince the other. It is possible, however, to decide what qualities and characteristics make up the writer of genius, and then to determine whether an individual author possesses them in a greater or less degree. This recognition of the presence of certain characteristics in a writer, though it takes care and study, is a comparatively easy scientific process; the evaluation of those characteristics is a much more difficult matter.

As vague as author is the word literature. And reviewers use masterpiece, perfect, greatest so freely and carelessly that they lose all significance. If we were to believe the reviews, we have had in the last few years so many masterpieces that our age ought to surpass that of Elizabeth. A study of a volume of the Book Review Digest will convince anyone on this point. Book after book is hailed by the critics and advertised by its publishers as "the greatest novel of the year," or even as "the great American novel." In order, then, that criticism may have

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meaning and usefulness, it must define as clearly as possible the significance of greatness in literature and point out the qualities that make up a masterpiece. The questions of genius in the author and greatness in the product are bound inextricably together, and a discussion of one involves the other.

The delimitations of literature are not easy to fix. We shall all agree, however, that a partial description of literature is that it is the record of experience. The questions of the nature and value of that experience and of the effectiveness and beauty of the record are the questions that cause the ultimate difficulty. Fundamentally, however, there seems no fault to be found with the statement that literature is the record of the experience of the writer. The reader approaches a book with the expectation of enlarging his own experience, of meeting new people, of becoming acquainted with new ideas, of learning about new countries, of finding new meanings and new beauties in familiar things, of rejoicing his senses with new æsthetic appeals. If readers in general are to secure this enlargement of experience from books, it follows that the authors must be men and women of larger experience, of greater sensitiveness than ordinary men. Wordsworth's description of the poet is true of the author: "What is a Poet? . . . He is a man speaking to men; a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind;

who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him." 1 It is because his experiences are broader that the writer is impelled to set down those experiences for other men to read.

1 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.

Wordsworth's old-fashioned word "sensibility" may be translated sensitiveness. Many of a writer's experiences come to him through the avenue of the senses. A sunset, a bird song has enriched his life; it may enrich the reader's too. That enrichment comes, however, not only from the mere physical experience of sight or hearing, but also from the sensitiveness of his soul which finds beauty and meaning in sight or sound. He is sensitive also to experiences that do not form, primarily, images of sight or sound, but pass directly to what, in older parlance, would have been called the mind and the heart. They stimulate a mental process or arouse an emotional response.

This sensitiveness is not developed in the same directions in all writers. The novelist and the dramatist respond chiefly to human action and human character, the essayist to ideas, the lyric poet to emotions and to sense impressions. In each case, however, the response is quicker and surer than that of the ordinary man, and the quickness and sureness of the response is part of the measure of his greatness. Not often will you find sensitiveness developed along many lines in one man. Of Shakespeare Dryden said in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, "He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul." Coleridge called him "myriad-minded." There have been other, lesser writers, versatile artists, whose souls have approximated comprehensiveness sufficiently to make them sensitive in several directions. Dryden himself wrote various kinds of poetry and excellent critical prose as well. When this happens, however, it is usually the case that the writer carries over from one kind of writing to the other, the same characteristics, the same "sensibilities." Dryden's intellectual keenness and critical temper are evident in his poems as well as in his prose. John

Masefield and William Morris are narrative poets whether they write in verse or prose. Shelley's Defence of Poetry is itself poetic. The prose of Walter de la Mare and James Stephens shows the same whimsical and profound imagination as their poetry.

But whether the response is along one line or many, the experience that accompanies it is a larger experience than that which the average man gets from the same stimulus. Largeness or breadth of experience does not necessarily imply variety or breadth of physical experience. A man may not have travelled far and yet, imaginatively, have visited distant countries; a Defoe can write with convincing power of a journey through Africa or the experiences of a cavalier in Germany without ever having visited those lands. No one has yet explained how it was that the Brontés, living secluded and solitary lives, were able to picture such characters as find their way into their novels. Or the largeness of experience may consist in greater spiritual intensity or profundity, as in the case of Emily Dickinson. Or it may be the richer interpretation of the ordinary contacts and events of a restricted life, as in the case of Wordsworth or Jane Austen, as well as a new vision of realms never seen by the human eye, as in Blake or Shelley. Whatever it is, the writer has something to offer which the reader does not possess, and so will enrich his life by giving him vicarious experience. That is why we read, whether we be children asking for stories with giants in them, or young girls devouring the latest lurid and impossible romances of desert life, or philosophers absorbed in Nietszche, or Santayana, or Havelock Ellis.

If the author had no other characteristic than that of breadth of experience, no other power than that of unusual sensitiveness, his life would be one mass or jumble