BOUGHT WITH THE l»COME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 1891 
 B-.^a.S'i^aBk 3,.4^::': 
 
THE SHIFTING OF 
 LITERARY VALUES 
 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT MORDELL 
 
 THE INTERNATIONAL 
 
 236 Chestnut Street 
 
 Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924026939672 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PN 45.M83 
 
 Shifting of literary values. 
 
 3 1924 026 939 672 
 
THE SHIFTING OF LITERARY 
 VALUES 
 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT MORDELL 
 
 THE INTERNATIONAL 
 
 236 Chestnut Street 
 
 PhiUdelphla, Pa. 
 
 1912 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1912 
 
 by 
 Albert Mordell 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter. Page. 
 
 Peefacb ,. . . 3 
 
 I. LiTEBAEY Values Change 6 
 
 II. Some Overestimated Classics . . ., 21 
 
 III. The Eeroes of Literary Criticism 34 
 
 IV. Literature Progresses Like Science 42 
 
 V. Ideas More Important Than Form 51 
 
 VT. Historical Criticism and The Classics 59 
 
 VII. The Causes op Liteeary Fame 68 
 
 VIII. The Dangerous Influence of Some Classics 79 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 The author of the following essay has undertaken 
 to establish that changes in morality must affect lit- 
 erary values, that some of the classics idealize views 
 of life now obsolete, that these books are therefore 
 responsible for the existence of some of our moral and 
 intellectual stagnancy, and that a new critical outlook 
 upon them is called for. This essay is not the result 
 of a mere desire to dethrone literary idols, but has been 
 the product of a conviction fortified by years of ex- 
 tensive reading and careful deliberation, that litera- 
 ture, having been the depository of men's thoughts in 
 the past, must wane in artistic value, after the world 
 has discovered that these ideas were false. 
 
 The author has purposely endeavored not to allow 
 himself to be influenced by the grand eulogies that have 
 heretofore been pronounced upon these classics; he 
 has resolved not to be daunted even when the oldest 
 and most famous books are involved. But while differ- 
 ing from the doctrines of life taught by them, he has 
 tried to maintain the utmost respect for both book and 
 author. For instance, while he shares the opinions of 
 Taine and Johnson in regard to Paradise Lost, he most 
 ardently admires the personality of Milton. Though 
 he confesses to have been bored by the Iliad and be- 
 lieves that it has been too extravagantly praised, he is 
 greatly moved by the speeches in the sixth, twenty-sec- 
 ond and twenty-fourth books. 
 
 He has also remembered that it is best not to ad- 
 vance one's views in too polemic a spirit ; that an undig- 
 nified defense of the truth itself may displease the 
 reader more than a subdued defense of falsehood. He 
 therefore requests the reader 's indulgence for any por- 
 tions of the essay where the author 's feelings have got- 
 ten the better of his judgment and self-restraint. He 
 
 (3) 
 
does not wish to make any unwilling converts to Ms 
 views and has tried not to shock any one's sensibilities. 
 He merely requests an impartial and critical considera- 
 tion of the principles laid down. 
 
 It will be noticed that the author attacks chiefly 
 those books whose morality is rigorous, crabbed and 
 narrow. He believes that men must be taken as they 
 are, that too much must not be demanded of them ; they 
 must be given a certain measure of liberty. They can- 
 not live in accordance with the doctrines taught by 
 Seneca, Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus of the 
 Pagans, and a Kempis, St. Augustine, Bunyan and 
 Pascal of the Christians. These authors, while often 
 embodying good precepts, also incorporate the most 
 fallacious views of stoicism and monasticism. They 
 decry our instincts and set up abstract theories of con- 
 duct not founded either on experience or human nature. 
 Aristotle long ago deprecated that philosophy which 
 taught that pleasure was bad with the object of draw- 
 ing men towards a possible mean. But he understood 
 that a contrary result is often attained. 
 
 "In matters relating to men's feelings and 
 actions," he said, "theories are less convincing than 
 facts. Whenever, therefore, they are found conflicting 
 with actual experience, they not only are despised, but 
 involve the truth in their fall. ' ' 
 
 The author has also made objects of his attack — 
 and he admits it with reluctance rather than arrogance 
 — some of the world's greatest poets. He believes that 
 they have corrupted their poetry by too close an ad- 
 herence to the errors of their religion. They did not 
 ally themselves with the more progressive element, did 
 not foresee the triumph of more rational and liberal 
 views. Pindar and Aeschylus championed the gods and 
 the superstitions of traditional religion ; they have not 
 the broadness of vision that we find in the Age of Peri- 
 cles. It is well known and admitted by students of Dante 
 
that he was not moved by the richest ideas of the Ren- 
 aissance, while Tasso was too eager to become the poet 
 of Medieval Christianity to concern himself with the 
 more humanistic ideas of the time previous to his. 
 Similarly, Spenser and Milton had been trying to ser- 
 monize in support of their faiths, and as a result we do 
 not get that more wholesome view of life had they 
 thought more of their art and less of th6ir religion. 
 
 If the author has been too harsh with these writers 
 he hopes that he makes amends by his enthusiasm for 
 those other classics, just as famous and often admitted 
 to be greater, where the authors are broader in their 
 outlook upon life and were not too closely tied down 
 to traditional religious errors. He is second to none 
 in his admiration for writers like Aristotle, Thucydides, 
 Plutarch, Lucian, Lucretius, Tacitus, Horace, Machia- 
 veUi, Montaigne, Chaucer, Bacon, Spinoza, Cervantes, 
 Moliere, Fielding, Sterne, Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, 
 etc. 
 
 The author also wishes to state that he has lighted 
 upon the germ of the ideas in this essay in writers, 
 so different as Shaw and Balfour, Maeterlinck and Al- 
 den, the Editor of Harper's Magazine. He must also 
 record his debt of gratitude to those three authors, 
 now dead, but typical of the spirit of the age — 
 Nietzsche, Whitman and Ibsen, and to that greatest liv- 
 ing critic — George Brandes. 
 
 Albebt Moedell. 
 Philadelphia, July, 1912. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 LITERARY VAIUES CHANGE. 
 
 1. There are several hundred universally famous 
 books that have come down to us approved by the voice 
 of the past. There is here and there a dissenting opin- 
 ion in regard to the merits of some of these works, but 
 on the whole the place that they have taken is pretty 
 well established. Mankind seems to be very reluctant 
 in attacking their greatness. 
 
 Yet one may be permitted to ask, Is it not possible 
 that out of these, let us say two or three hundred vol- 
 umes, there may not be a score or even two score of 
 books whose fame is due to other causes than intrinsic 
 literary merit? May not some embody a philosophy 
 of life that is absolutely false and may it not also be 
 couched in a form that is obsolete in our time? May 
 not some be usurpers in the shrine of literary fame and 
 have deserved their reputation much less than more 
 worthy claimants? Is it not rather striking that, dif- 
 fering as we do in our ideas as to what constitutes 
 beauty and truth from the people of past ages, that we 
 should still be agreed with them as to what are the 
 most beautiful books? 
 
 Views of life change; why then should not our 
 attitude towards books, which are only views of life, 
 also change ? Our notion as to what are beautiful forms 
 and truthful ideas alter ; why not our criticism of books 
 which incorporate these forms and ideas ? 
 
 The central idea of modern literature is self-devel- 
 opment as opposed to the hitherto central idea of lit- 
 erature which was self-sacrifice. Modern literature 
 like that of Ibsen is strongly individualistic; it advo- 
 cates self-realization, attacks blind worship of custom, 
 points out the evils of some of our institutions, treats 
 the body with proper respect and allows the pursuit of 
 
 (6) 
 
worldly goods. It is usually conceded that these ideas 
 are saner than those that ruled of old, which taught 
 that the pursuit of happiness was sinful, the develop- 
 ment of one's individuality, a heresy, the martyring of 
 one's self by torturing the body, a virtue. If then the 
 idea of self -development is the true idea and self-sac- 
 rifice the false one, literature founded upon the latter 
 idea must be the inferior. Many of the classics are 
 based on this falser idea. Yet we worship them though 
 we are opposed to all the ideas that they idealize. We 
 are told that just that literature which burns incense 
 before an unreasonable ascetic ideal possesses the high- 
 est merit. 
 
 Many of the books undeservedly famous today are 
 those in which the leading character or hero is some 
 one who follows out all the mandates of puritan- 
 ism or monastic morality, who pays most homage to 
 conventional duty. We are told to admire the ideas of 
 Ibsen and at the same time those books the ideas of 
 which are antagonized by him. 
 
 As a matter of fact these famous books must have 
 less literary value for us, if we discard the notion of 
 self-sacrifice. No matter how old or sacred they are, 
 they become from our point of view immoral and bad 
 art. 
 
 In past literature we often find fashioned theories 
 of life which are not only inappropriate, but actually 
 harmful to us. We find in past literature the formula- 
 tion of worn out and obsolete ethical maxims. We find 
 what we, at least, consider confusion reigning as to 
 what is right and wrong, truth and falsehood, as to 
 what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly. If all these 
 ideas are repugnant to us, our critical attitude towards 
 the books expounding them must change. Whenever 
 moral ideas change the result is a new outlook upon life 
 and hence a new view or criticism of literature which 
 is that outlook upon life. It must be shown that litera- 
 
8 
 
 ture which advocates these worn out doctrines has 
 ebhed in value for us. 
 
 It might be asserted that the great masterpieces 
 are not affected by the changes in ideas. But it is 
 chiefly they that are most affected. The ancient sec- 
 ondary literature was merely concerned with the 
 aesthetic presentation of truisms that never change 
 despite the revolutions in ideas. But it is in the master- 
 pieces in which are crystallized the tendencies of an 
 age that has gone, the ideas of a people which no longer 
 sway mankind, the aspirations and false illusions that 
 have even become the laughing stock of our world. Pre- 
 cisely the classics, particularly the classics of monastic- 
 ism and Puritanism lose in force, for here above all are 
 reflected in every possible manner the various phases 
 of movements that seethed with the errors of mankind. 
 Just those books that were most representative of their 
 age, that most focussed the tendencies of a movement 
 that has disappeared, have lost in artistic value 
 >i for us. When ideas which have been an ancient people 's 
 reality have become for us but a memory, when ideals 
 which were the staff of yesterday have become the stum- 
 bling block of our time, the literature in which these 
 are embodied cannot be our spiritual guides. 
 
 "It is not without deep pain," says Nietzsche, 
 "that we acknowledge the fact that in their loftiest soar- 
 ings, artists of all ages have exalted and divinely trans- 
 figured precisely those ideas which we now recognize 
 as false; they are the glorifiers of humanity's religious 
 and philosophical errors ; and they could not have been 
 this without belief in the absolute truth, of these 
 errors. ' ' 
 
 "We might add that the more sincere the artist was 
 in his convictions and the more he represented the 
 spirit of his times, the more fanatical would his art 
 appear to us. The greater his art was esteemed in his 
 day, the more probably he embodied the chief errors of 
 
his age. The more truthful the utterances appeared to 
 him and his admirers, the more false they are likely to 
 be to us. 
 
 Past literature is a large mausoleum in which lieC_ 
 the eflBgies of the old movements that are dead beyond 
 resurrection. Ethics hampered by absolute standards 
 that did not consider the facts of human nature, dying 
 religions fettered with articles of faith now destroyed 
 by the simplest scientific principles, groundless philo- 
 sophical speculations losing themselves in metaphysical 
 mazes, — 'these are in back of the ideas of life and no- 
 tions of beauty entertained by some of the most promi- 
 nent authors of the past. 
 
 These errors should be allowed to slumber instead 
 of being revived by worshiping the books in which 
 they are incorporated. If monasticism, feudalism, 
 Puritanism and other forms of asceticism, are gradu- 
 ally losing their hold upon the moral and intellectual 
 forces in mankind, one sees no reason why we should 
 enter into the spirit of these movements, by worshiping 
 the books to which they have given birth. These books 
 have a historical value, but they should not be forced 
 upon us when they teach us views of life that it is to the 
 world's interest to let repose in oblivion. 
 
 Where an ancient author has praised is often for 
 us the signal for awakening our deepest hatred ; where 
 he has lavished the most glorious outbursts, is often 
 where we should direct our most malignant venom. If 
 we agree with Ibsen, who shows us that many of the 
 duties that we believe we owe to society are imaginary 
 ones, are merely the result of hide-bound customs, ham- 
 per our spiritual life and are stumbling blocks in 
 our progress, why should we go into raptures over old 
 works of art which strictly enjoin upon us the per- 
 formance of these imaginary duties? We cannot bow 
 down to that which sings of the healthiness of an idea 
 which we perceive to be wrong. 
 
10 
 
 Old classics have cast a halo about duties that 
 superstitious authors thought we owed to the church or 
 the king or the public. If to-day no one thinks that 
 these obligations should be required of him, why this 
 deference to books, that exalt these duties and treat a 
 neglect of their performance, as an odious crime? If 
 a book has been written which treats as a heresy an act 
 which we regard as noble, or condemns a good act or 
 thought as a blasphemous one, or depicts a really 
 worthy character as a base one, we cannot accept it as 
 a great book. If the author allows the characters to be 
 mouthpieces for his own pernicious doctrines and 
 approves of conduct that ought to be censured, his work 
 is artistically affected. 
 
 The fact that we are outgrowing some of the old 
 notions. of morality must necessarily make us less en- 
 raptured with books where these notions are idealized. 
 Since our ideas in art and morality are being modified 
 and often reversed, it would be most extraordinary if 
 we saw in these classics all the merits that the ancients 
 saw therein. Moreover, we should not try to appre- 
 ciate these books lest we descend to the intellectual 
 level of our ancestors. 
 
 The real value of the literary productions of the 
 past should be proportional to the intellectual strength 
 therein. It should depend upon the truth of their cen- 
 tral ideas, upon the soundness of their philosophy of 
 life. That literature which was most thoroughly per- 
 meated with the spirit of an ancient age is now bad art, 
 if that spirit was all wrong. 
 
 Wherever dogma has reigned, it has moulded art 
 to conform to it. Wherever false creeds have pre- 
 vailed, the arts have been corrupted by them. The 
 books that were most impregnated with emotions 
 connected with these false dogmas and creeds are the 
 ones that should not be placed in the list of the 
 world's best books. 
 
11 
 
 2. If art and literature are to teach us what is 
 beautiful, we might reply that many ancient books and 
 art works cannot do this because our conceptions of 
 beauty change. We canot be expected to go to the books 
 of the monastic and puritan ages to teach us anything 
 about beauty. Authors who taught that we should 
 stifle our instincts, not think of sexual matters, and 
 who decried our bodies, cannot be authorities on what 
 is beauty, for a well-developed masculine body is 
 beautiful and our perception of beauty is wrapped up 
 with our sexual instincts. Those books which call 
 upon us not to think of this earth but only of heaven, 
 to hate color, form, scented odors, harmonious sounds, 
 cannot give us the true conception of beauty, when 
 they deprecate all that constitutes it. 
 
 Literature has always described man's attitude 
 towards women, his conception of love and his mode 
 of love-making. But all these change in different ages 
 and the books which describe and defend the old views 
 must lose in artistic value. We cannot approve of 
 those books that treat of love as being nothing more 
 than lust affiliated with none of the finer qualities in 
 human nature. On the other hand, we believe that it 
 is falsely delineated where it is treated only as a gal- 
 lant feeling not in the least tinged with sexual interest. 
 An ignorant person will do his courting in an en- 
 tirely different manner from an intelligent one. At one 
 time force was the only means of courting ; at another 
 time a woman was purchased. The world changes its 
 ways of love-making, and literature, which approvingly 
 depicts an obsolete fashion of courting, cannot mean 
 for us what it formerly meant. 
 
 We do not believe woman to be the immaculate, 
 pale, soulful, useless creature that the age of chivalry 
 regarded her; we do not think she was the vile and 
 cursed person that the monks considered her; we do 
 not look upon her as the mere servant of man as the 
 
12 
 
 ancient Greeks did ; we do not think of her simply as an 
 object to satisfy man's desires, as some of the profli- 
 gate Eomans did. In all those books where women are 
 treated from these viewpoints, we do not find our con- 
 ception of women, and hence these books are false to 
 us. 
 
 Taste changes because human nature changes. 
 What was sublime to one age becomes ridiculous to 
 another age. We do with approval things which would 
 have shocked the sensibilities of our forefathers. We 
 look composedly at spectacles over which they would 
 have wept, we are repelled by deeds which it was the 
 height of their ambition to achieve. Other habits and 
 desires have taken hold upon us and we are not the 
 same kind of people as they were. 
 
 ^ 3. Every new philosophic school, every great scien- 
 tific discovery makes some change in our ethical be- 
 liefs, and hence in our literary judgments. 
 
 When the modern school of philosophy with Des- 
 cartes, Spinoza and Baeoli at their head dealt the 
 death blow to scholastic philosophy, literary opinions 
 that held sway during the ages when scholastic philos- 
 ophy ruled, changed. Many hitherto famous authors 
 were forgotten and obscure ones came into prominence. 
 ^The philosophical principles to which a man adheres 
 largely determines his moral and literary views. A 
 disciple of Kant will in all probability adopt the theory 
 of the Categorical Imperative in morals, namely, to do 
 that which would do no harm if every one else did 
 the same thing. A pupil of Bacon would be very much 
 inclined to attach himself to a morality of expediency. 
 The literature that the former would prefer would be 
 the kind that insists sternly on duty to the exclusion of 
 happiness. The books that the latter would care for 
 would be those where some rein is given to the joyous 
 instincts of mankind. 
 
13 
 
 Discoveries in science must also affect our criti- 
 cism of books. Our attitude towards life and hence 
 art, must be affected by a discovery which teaches man 
 that this planet is but one insignificant world in an in- 
 finite number, instead of being the one for which all 
 the rest have been created; or by a discovery which 
 shows us that we are but one of the myriads of infinite 
 organisms and that the same forces that have governed 
 their growth have evolved us, instead of our being 
 specially brought forth as we are, with all other living 
 creatures placed particularly for our use. If science 
 has taught us that there never was an original state 
 of perfection from which there was a fall but, on the 
 contrary, a gradual rise, if she has shown us that our . 
 morality, intellect, feelings and our most sacred insti- 
 tutions have been made what they are by circum- 
 stances and environment without divine interference; 
 if it has been proven to us that the laws of nature are 
 the same in the remotest corner of the universe as they 
 are on this earth ; how can we be enraptured with liter- 
 ature which teaches us the ideas that man believed 
 when he held the opposite beliefs ? 
 
 "Where the ideas of morality and decency alter 
 from one age to another," Hume points out in an essay 
 on the standard of taste, "and where vicious manners 
 are described without the proper character of blame 
 and disapprobation, this must be allowed to disfigure 
 the poem, and to be a real deformity. * * * We are dis- 
 pleased to find the limits of vice and virtue so much 
 confounded: and whatever indulgence we may give to 
 the writer on account of his prejudices, we cannot pre- 
 vail on ourselves to enter into his sentiments, or bear 
 an affection to characters which we plainly discover 
 to be blamable." 
 
 But are we not asked to enter into the sentiments 
 of these characters which we find blamable, if we are 
 asked to worship the book? One cannot really admire 
 
14 
 
 the book witliout accepting the leading ideas of the 
 book. If manners are described in such a way that it 
 is apparent that the author stamps them as exemplary, 
 we cannot approve of those manners if they are vicious 
 or in bad taste ; hence we cannot love the work where 
 those manners are upheld. If, as Hume says, the 
 limits of vice and virtue are confounded, if that which 
 is permissible or justifiable is described as an enor- 
 mous vice, if that which is blind custom or rank stu- 
 pidity is depicted as a great virtue, we cannot accept 
 the author's notions of art and morality; nor can we 
 worship at the shrine of a book filled with these errors. 
 
 The literature of ancient times after all could do 
 nothing more than to express the then commonly ac- 
 cepted ideas. It did not, as a rule, rise above the in- 
 tellectual level of the age. It conformed to certain 
 standards above which it did not rise, it embodied what 
 it regarded as the highest ethical and sesthetical views 
 of the time. 
 
 If the ideals of the time were shallow, the litera- 
 ture produced was of an inferior order. If wrong con- 
 ceptions of what is beautiful and true prevailed, the 
 literary performances of the age were immoral and 
 inartistic. If the ideas of the time were tainted by a 
 blind worship of custom and an unreasonable clinging 
 to dogma, if the people entertained superstitious views 
 in morality and religion, we cannot expect the prevail- 
 !>ing literature to have ranked very high. As water can- 
 not rise above its own level so the art of a nation cannot 
 go beyond the intellectual level of the times. If the 
 people were ignorant, their ignorance will be seen in 
 their books. 
 
 Many of the books that we fondly revere because 
 they mirror the spirit of their times — times which were 
 periods of mental sloth — are unworthy of our worship. 
 
 In his Romantic School Heine gives only a 
 qualified approval to the doctrines of Goethe's dis- 
 
15 
 
 ciples who held that art must be independent of 
 morality, which changes often; and that although re- 
 ligion and morality change, our conception of art should 
 not. ' ' If art were to be judged, ' ' they thought, * ' by the (^ 
 standard of current morality, each generation would 
 interdict all previous works of art as immoral." (The 
 sentence is from Heine.) 
 
 That is just what each generation should do. c 
 Whether their criticism of a past work of art is just, 
 will depend upon the correctness of their moral views. 
 So the chaste monks, who, as Heine says, gave Aph- 
 rodite an apron, were really acting consistently; they 
 followed out their system of ethics into art criticism; 
 but it was their ethical theories that were wrong and 
 gave rise to their poor artistic taste. 
 
 There is no doubt that had a Kempis or Bunyan «, 
 produced their works in the Age of Pericles if possible, 
 their books would have been looked upon as very poor 
 art. One could not expect a nation worshiping the 
 human body to admire books where the body was dis- 
 credited. A nation can only be expected to allow its 
 moral ideas to influence its art views. It is absurd to 
 say that art is independent of morality. An ascetic 
 nation cannot really worship works of art teeming with 
 love of beauty and the body, any more than a pagan 
 people can really appreciate ascetic art works. 
 
 Art finds its material in the ethical views that 
 prevail; if these views are untrue, the art presenting 
 them ought to be considered great at least by those 
 who maintain these views. There are but few writers 
 who rise above the morality of their times and for this 
 reason ordinary critics do not at first recognize them. 
 
 Art is judged then by the standard of morality 
 that prevails and if this standard changes so must 
 our opinion of art. Each generation is bound to criti- 
 cise art of the past in proportion as morality has 
 changed. If the morality improves so does the art and 
 vice versa. 
 
16 
 
 In short, to sum up, -whatever functions literature 
 may have it is bound to do one of several things: to 
 depict what is beautiful, to teach what is good and evil 
 in conduct and character and to distinguish between 
 intellectual truth and falsehood. Now, it is generally 
 conceded that to a certain extent, our ideas of beauty, 
 goodness and truth alter in different ages, and in many 
 cases improve for the better. If literature be regarded 
 as something whose chief importance is in delineating 
 ideas rather than in cultivating mere style, that past 
 literature which has taught these no longer tenable 
 views should have historical rather than artistic value. 
 If literature represents our outlook upon life and this 
 outlook is constantly changing, can we go to those old 
 books which represent that false outlook upon life, for 
 our aBsthetic and spiritual sustenance? 
 
 If a past book lavished arguments upon proving 
 that a virtue, which we find a vice poisoning the founts 
 of society ; if an old poet sang the praises of an institu- 
 tion that has been overthrown as deteriorated; if the 
 exhibition of beauty in an old art work appears to us 
 nothing more than a gaudy display, something like a 
 discarded fashion; if a false dogma is embellished to 
 wear the trappings of truth ; if a character was drawn 
 as exemplary whom it would be the height of folly to 
 admire and imitate, can we look upon these works as 
 embodying spiritual truths for us, can we worship 
 them as supreme works of art? 
 
 4. To show how the conception of character 
 changes, the story of Griselda, one of the most popular 
 of medieval stories, as told by Boccaccio, will serve 
 well. Boccaccio was free from the asceticism of the 
 times, but in this particular story he gives us the 
 medieval conception of woman in all its hideousness. 
 The story was also used by Chaucer in his Canterbury 
 Tales. 
 
17 
 
 In her day Griselda was the type of the model 
 wife and mother, and women strove to emulate her. 
 Her patience was a by-word, her servility to her hus- 
 band a virtue. She is the willing sufferer of the most 
 outrageous indignities, the victim uncomplaining of the 
 most startling cruelties. She is, it is true, of low birth, 
 and is married to a lord. She agrees to appear naked 
 at the wedding ceremonies. After marriage she even 
 consents to be put away to see her lord satisfied. She 
 allows him to take her two children to be killed because 
 he so desires it, and is even ready to let the servant 
 leave the child to be devoured by the beasts and birds, 
 if her husband commands it. Under the impression 
 that the children are dead she mourns, but says nothing. 
 On being put away she is ready to receive the ladies 
 at the new wedding and make everything comfortable 
 for the new wife. But the new "wife" happens to be 
 her own daughter, and Jier husband had merely been 
 trying her patience. He embraced her saying that he 
 had done all this "Avishing to teach you to be a wife" 
 and to teach the rest of the people "to know how to 
 take and keep one. ' ' The impudence of it ! 
 
 Griselda is without one spark of individuality, 
 utterly without a sentiment of self-respect and an 
 equally guilty party with her husband in the murder 
 of their children, had he really killed them. She is an 
 insult to womanhood. Let us rather have the Nora of 
 Ibsen than a type like hers. In these days when women 
 are seeking suffrage, her type is but the relic of ancient 
 days. We wisely despise her, yet admire the story 
 that tells of her follies. 
 
 The artist has nearly always been prone to be de- 
 pendent upon some one for his views. He usually 
 adopted the views of the most popular philosopher of 
 his time. He cringed before the political powers that 
 happened to rule, he was subservient to the established 
 church. Instead of creating ideas he took those already 
 
18 
 
 accepted and put them in artistic form. He served as 
 a means of propagating errors, of casting abroad and 
 popularizing views that were beneficial to the few in 
 power. It was literature that kept England in dark- 
 ness till the time of Henry VIII; there was not a great 
 independent thinker among the English writers before 
 his time, except Chaucer. 
 
 Authors were formerly connected with some court 
 or followed in the footsteps of some patron. It was 
 not good policy to go counter to the interests of those 
 from whom one derived his success and the authors 
 were usually faithful. A poet had to defend his 
 patron's politics and religion. 
 
 Yet although those things upon which literature 
 one time leaned for support have fallen, we still tried 
 to keep it propped up. The patron has gone with his 
 politics and religion, but we still peruse and admire the 
 books in which these found expression. We look to 
 these books for independent views although they were 
 the result of cringing. 
 
 As Nietzsche says of artists: "They were at all 
 times the chamberlains of some morality or philosophy 
 or religion * * * they always stood in need of a safe- 
 guard, a backing, some firmly established authority; 
 artists never stand alone; they have a deep, and in- 
 stinctive aversion to standing alone." 
 
 When Nietzsche advocated a change in our ethical 
 notions, a transvaluation of our moral values, he under- 
 stood that this also meant a revolution in our sestheti- 
 cal values. He saw that our attitude towards books 
 must be affected by our altered conception as regards 
 I truth and justice. He marvelled that we should take 
 our ideas of art from books written by authors who 
 believed literally in a hell, in oracles, in the devil, in 
 miracles, in insane religious maniacs, in witches, in 
 persecution. 
 
 He was sensitive to the changes going on in the 
 
19 
 
 world in all things, particularly in human taste. Hence 
 he could not admire many of the most famous writers. 
 He was especially hostile to the most famous poet of 
 the medieval times — Dante, whom he called a "hyena c 
 poetizing in the tombs," a quotation that is becoming 
 as famous as Walpole's characterization of Dante as 
 a "Methodist parson in Bedlam." The philosopher c 
 that he disliked intensely was Plato, no doubt because 
 of the many resemblances that Plato's morality bears 
 to that of Christianity, a fact attested to by the great 
 admiration accorded to him by many of the Fathers 
 and the medieval ages. Another author, Landor, has 
 also registered his dislike for Plato and Dante. 
 Nietzsche was bound from his views to think also that 
 Seneca, that favorite of the Fathers, was a "toreador 
 of virtue." "We are not surprised that he could not 
 hold The Imitation of Christ without feeling a physi- 
 ological resistance. 
 
 It was natural for him to prefer those sceptical 
 authors with intellects as great as his own, men like 
 Machiavelli, Thucydides, Montaigne, La Eouche- 
 foucauld, La Bruyere, Stendhal, Goethe and Heine. 
 His attitude towards many of the great writers of the 
 nineteenth century was unjust, no doubt, but we should 
 not nevertheless overlook his services in the field of 
 literary criticism. 
 
 It is true that there are certain ideas that are 
 never changed by the influences that make their way 
 felt in the world. The thoughts that we all have in 
 regard to the brevity of life, the sadness of the parting 
 of lovers, the beauty of natural scenery, the mutability 
 of human affairs, the charm of domestic relations, the 
 pain of death— these are the same in all peoples and 
 in all times. The literature that has expressed these 
 thoughts pleases us whether written by ancients or 
 moderns, pagans or Christians. Such literature may 
 be written by those who have no intellect and its 
 
20 
 
 quality will rather depend upon the form than the sub- 
 stance. 
 
 But on the whole our tastes and literary judg- 
 ments have been pre-ordained for us. We shrink from 
 dissenting from the literary criticisms of our fathers 
 although we hold different and reverse opinions on the 
 most vital subjects. Although other artistic and ethical 
 demands have taken hold upon us, we hesitate to sweep 
 away some of their literary conclusions. 
 
 We must, however, renovate literary criticism and 
 slacken the bonds by which it is held to ancient stand- 
 ards. Other phases of intellectual activity are being 
 transformed. Religious dogmas and moral tenets have 
 been exploded, constant changes are going on in the 
 economical and political world; these facts must affect 
 literature and yet we assume that stationary attitude 
 in our criticism of it. If moral values are being shifted, 
 so are art values. Aesthetics is no more proof against 
 change than morality. We must remember that the 
 most long-lived canons of taste have passed out of 
 existence. We have deservedly forgotten many books 
 that were always classified with the first literary per- 
 formances. Why should we not inquire into the pos- 
 sibility of a transvaluation of many of our literary 
 classics? What is there to prevent us from thinking 
 that many of our masterpieces will not some day be 
 doomed, that what has happened yesterday will not 
 occur tomorrow and on a far larger scale? 
 
 We mould our tastes upon an old taste which we 
 do not admire. We endeavor to persist in the same 
 artistic conclusions although our mental scope has 
 widened and altered. We try to become individuals of 
 past ages instead of our own. We must demand how- 
 ever a satisfaction of our own tastes ; we must resent 
 that cowardly attitude before literary shrines; we 
 must assert our aesthetic claims irrespective of the 
 conclusions of centuries. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 SOME OVERESTIMATED CLASSICS. 
 
 1. All great movements, whether moral, social or 
 religious, have fully permeated the great books that 
 have been written in the times when these movements 
 held complete sway. The ebb and flow in the tide of 
 human affairs has left many of these movements 
 stranded like shipwrecks, but the books themselves are 
 held up to us like beacons. The spirit of an ancient 
 institution may have long since fled, but the book most 
 suffused with it is presumed to be throbbing with life 
 for us. The ideals of a departed state of society may 
 have been pointed out as reeking with error, but the 
 art works hallowing these ideals are still thrust upon us. 
 
 These movements have been chiefly developments 
 of an ascetic ideal and are really related to one another. 
 They are Stoicism, Monasticism, Feudalism and Puri- 
 tanism. They have their representative poets and mor- 
 alists, and the most mystifying thing is the influence 
 of these authors upon a society which has outgrown 
 their art and ideals. 
 
 The two most read works of ancient stoical writ- 
 ers are The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and The 
 Discourses of Epictetus. They are always reprinted 
 in cheap editions and included in the lists of best books. 
 While many of their precepts are pure in their moral 
 outlook, and it is particularly commendable that a Icing 
 and a slave should arrive at many of the same noble 
 ethical ideals, yet careful examination of these pre- 
 cepts will show us that they are often untrue to human 
 nature, that the conception of life is narrow, that the 
 ideals are unworthy of being followed and that the 
 proposed consolations fall flat. "We worship these two 
 authors because they are the least pagan of ancient 
 
 (21) 
 
22 
 
 authors and largely approach, the morality of ascetic 
 Christianity. 
 
 Two other ancient moralists, who were great favor- 
 ites of the Christian world because they were rich in 
 passages that looked as if they might have been gleaned 
 from the New Testament, were Seneca and Plato. 
 
 Monasticism, like stoicism, is practically dead. 
 The remnants of it have been modified by many of the 
 new ideas that have made their way into the world. 
 Yet the most famous poem of Christendom, the most 
 popular collection of maxims and the most noted auto- 
 biography imbued with monastic doctrines are as much 
 read and admired today as though they contained all 
 that man needed to know in order to live properly. 
 "^Every one is forced by the opinion of the public and 
 the critics to think highly of the Divine Comedy of 
 Dante, of the Imitation of Christ of a Kempis and the 
 Confessions of St. Augustine. There is, no doubt, much 
 in these authors that is great in spite of their monasti- 
 cism, that appeals to our human instincts, but in these 
 works are also idealized some of the most pernicious 
 views that ever ruled the world. 
 
 Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy was more 
 read in former times than today, and, next to the works 
 of St. Augustine, is probably the most known monastic 
 work of the Fathers in literature. It was translated 
 by King Alfred and also by Chaucer. 
 
 The most famous classic (outside of those of medi- 
 eval times) of monasticism has no doubt been Pascal's 
 Thoughts. It is absolutely devoid of any of the healthy 
 pagan spirit we find in other writers of his century. 
 It is an overrated book; even liberal thinkers have 
 been attracted to it. The wi-iters of the days preceding 
 the French Revolution would compose short books 
 whose ideas consisted of many of Pascal's Thoughts 
 reversed. Voltaire himself did this. 
 
23 
 
 Two other seventeenth century authors, who are 
 still held to be among the greatest writers of France, 
 were Bossuet and Fenelon, both of them authors of 
 many works fairly reeking wilh the errors of monasti- 
 cism. They have not been sb extensively read in the 
 English speaking world as in France. Then there are 
 the French tragedians, Corneille, whose Polyeucte, and 
 Racine, whose Athalie refle^ct their authors' monastic 
 views. / 
 
 The English epic poera of Feudalism is Spenser's < 
 Faery Queen, a book mor^ valuabTe for its form and 
 language than its ideas. l^Eany of Shakespeare 's plays 
 are imbued with the feudal spirit and he is really great 
 in proportion to its absence. We find much of the 
 feudal spirit in many of the works of modern times, 
 but it is best seen in works that were composed when 
 its influence was strong, as in Malory's Morte Darthur 
 and the Niebelungen Lied. What an influence these two 
 books have exerted can be seen from the fact that Wag- 
 ner based his famous opera on the latter and Tennyson 
 his Idyls of the King chiefly upon Malory. 
 
 Tasso also based his famous poem, Jerusalem De- 
 livered, upon feudal ideas. 
 
 The last of the movements is typically English and 
 American; namely, Puritanism. We are as enthusias- 
 tic as ever about MUton and Bunyan. Although our 
 Puritanism is not so virulent as theirs, we still speak 
 of Paradise Lost as the greatest English epic poem, c 
 and of the Pilgrim's Progress as the greatest English 
 allegory. 
 
 Then there are such famous books of English theol- 
 ogy, that may be mentioned here, as Butler's Analogy, 
 Taylor's Holy Living and Dying and Baxter's Saint's 
 Rest. 
 
 The above-mentioned writers and books may in 
 the future not occupy as high a place as they do today. 
 They will always be known, but there are many less 
 
24 
 
 known authors who will be ranked above them by 
 posterity. 
 
 Most of the authors of Christian nations who are 
 full of the errors of their times were chiefly those who 
 were too much imbued with the spirit of piety, who 
 thought only of justifying the ways of God to man by 
 ^arguments taken from popular sermons. The more 
 the author thought of his religion, the less value did 
 his art have. Literature is not a vehicle for theology. 
 The more ethical precepts that the poet derived from 
 the church, the more ascetic and unpractical did his 
 poetry become. 
 
 Similarly in ancient Grreek and Roman literature, 
 those authors who were most pious and thought pri- 
 marily of the gods, are not on an artistic or intellectual 
 or moral level with those ancient writers who based 
 their conclusions on the facts of life itself. Though 
 the spirit of beauty entered into ancient art more than 
 in that of medieval times, and there was a certain 
 healthy pantheism about ancient paganism, neverthe- 
 less there was cruelty and superstition in ancient reli- 
 gion as well. "We have instances of persecution in the 
 cases of Socrates, Euripides, Aristotle, Anaxagoras, 
 Pericles and others. 
 
 In the poems of the three most famous of the Greek 
 poets, Homer, Pindar and Aeschylus, we find all the 
 evil effects of their authors' extreme piety. Their art 
 suffered; their views are not those we mean when we 
 speak of the noble Greek ideals. Their ideas are alien 
 to the true spirit of Greek art and are not in accord 
 with those held by the more famous thinkers. These 
 poets were most famous in their day because the re- 
 ligion they stood for was the popular religion. Xen- 
 ophanes had, however, severely criticised Homer and 
 Epicurus tried to discredit Greek piety. Aristophanes 
 was another author who hated progress in religion or 
 morals and the merit of his own works is thus effected. 
 
25 
 
 Virgil is the chief Roman poet who was extremely 
 pious, and what interests us in his poems are the human 
 parts, like the story of Dido. 
 
 2. Most of the above authors have been criticised 
 by competent critics, and a few of these criticisms are 
 brought together here. No one will deny that the opin- 
 ions of Symonds, Professors Mahaffy and Jebb, our 
 best critics on Greek literature, are entitled to respect ; 
 nor that the conclusions of English literary historians 
 like Ambassador Jusserand and Professor Courthope 
 deserve consideration when an English author is in 
 question. The criticisms of writers like Landor, Taine, 
 Macaulay, Heine, Nietzsche, Poe and Leigh Hunt 
 always command our attention. 
 
 Of Pindar, Mahaffy says: "He lived a somewhat 
 sacerdotal life, laboring in honour of the gods and seek- 
 ing to spread a reverence for old traditional beliefs." 
 Though Symonds admires him and did not con- 
 sider him credulous or superstitious, he says : ' ' Accept- 
 ing the religious traditions of his ancestors with simple 
 faith, he adds more of spiritual severity and of mystical 
 morality than we find in Homer. ' ' 
 
 Speaking of Aeschylus 's doctrine of retribution. 
 Professor Jebb writes: "Aeschylus put some strain 
 on the facts of human experience, but at any rate he 
 saved the justice of Zeus." 
 
 Symonds declares: "Much of elder superstition 
 clings about his ethics, and an awful sense of guilt and 
 doom attaches to acts in themselves apparently indif- 
 ferent. ' ' 
 
 Of Aristophanes, Symonds says: "The poet, we 
 fear, was very far behind his age. * * * We, who 
 read the history of Athens by the light of our Grote 
 * * * know now how very perverse and unadvanced 
 the poet was." 
 
 The following is from Heine : "He hated the poets, 
 the representatives, as it were, of modern life, of a 
 
26 
 
 life as different from the preceding epoch of Greek 
 gods, heroes and kings, as the present time is from the 
 times of medieval feudalism. ' ' 
 
 Landor was very hostile to Plato. The following 
 is a typical comment: "Politics will gain nothing of 
 the practical from him, philosophy nothing of what is 
 applicable to morals, to science, to the arts or the con- 
 duct of life." 
 
 Nietzsche disliked Plato. He wrote: "Plato is 
 tiresome. In the end my distrust of Plato goes deeper 
 than the surface; I find him strayed from all funda- 
 mental instincts of the Hellenes * * * that I should 
 prefer to employ the hard expression 'superior cheat- 
 ery' with reference to the whole phenomenon of Plato 
 * * * rather than any other term." 
 
 Macaulay did not express himself enthusiastically 
 of Plato. "The more I read, the more I admire his 
 style, and the less I admire his reasonings." 
 
 Of St. Augustine in the Confessions, Macaulay 
 says: "He expresses himself in the style of a field 
 preacher. ' ' 
 
 Of Seneca, he writes : "I have read through Seneca 
 and an affected, empty scribbler he is. ' ' 
 
 Of Dante, Leigh Hunt said : ' ' Such a vision as that 
 of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no 
 better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage, 
 and his nutshell a rottenness to be spit out of the 
 mouth. ' ' 
 
 ' ' It would be difficult, ' ' said Landor, ' ' to form an 
 idea of a poem into which so many personages are 
 introduced, containing so few delineations of charac- 
 ter, so few touches that excite sympathy, so few ele- 
 mentary signs for our instruction, so few topics for 
 our delight, so few excursions for our recreation." 
 
 Goethe and Voltaire did not like Dante. 
 
 Of Paradise Lost, Poe said: "The fact is, if the 
 Paradise Lost were written today (assuming that it 
 
27 
 
 had never been written when it was), not even its emi- 
 nent, although overestimated merits, would counter- 
 balance, either in the public view, or in the opinion of 
 any critic at once intelligent and honest, the multitudi- 
 nous incongruities that are part and parcel of its plot. ' ' 
 
 Taine wrote thus: "He gives us correct solemn 
 discourse, and gives us nothing more; his characters 
 are speeches, and in their sentiments we find only heaps 
 of puerilities and contradictions." 
 
 Of the Pilgrim's Progress, Taine wrote in a letter: 
 "It is a nursery tale, a blood-curdling allegory, show- 
 ing the terrible inner mind of one of those fanatics; 
 groans, invasions of the spirit, the belief in damnation, 
 visions of the devil, scruples, etc." 
 
 Francis Thompson said of it : " We have searched 
 the book in vain for a single scene with a single master- 
 touch of delineation, and the result has been thoroughly 
 to convince us that the man was incapable of such a 
 thing ; he knew himself incapable, and therefore instinc- 
 tively shirked description. ' ' 
 
 Ambassador Jusserand speaks as follows of the 
 Faery Queene ; ' ' But we, unfortunate beings, who, for 
 our merits, doubtless, have not been touched by grace, 
 dazzled as we are by these wondrous sights and de- 
 lighted by the music of the verse, but fatigued by so 
 many inconsistencies, by the mixture of bacchanals and 
 sermons, with so little allowed for true human tender- 
 ness, we feel as we could not breathe; * * * Ten 
 lines of Langland's Visions are worth more than all 
 the moral in 'grave moral Spenser's' seventy- two 
 cantos. ' ' 
 
 Professor Courthope, the historian of English 
 poetry, ranks Spenser below Chaucer. Speaking of 
 Spenser's doctrines taken from the scholastic theology, 
 he says : ' ' Mixed up as these things are with the action 
 of a romantic fable, they have lost that spirit of uni- 
 versal truth which animates them in the verse of the 
 
28 
 
 older poets. * * * The Eeformation has brought 
 into England a new mode of Seriptural interpretation, 
 and with its arrival the old genius of allegoric interpre- 
 tation has departed." 
 
 3. These authors may all ,have their literary merit, 
 but the reader should only be made to remember that 
 they have all been surpassed by other more broad- 
 minded artists. Today Moliere and La Fontaine rank 
 higher than the classical writers of the Age of Louis 
 XIV. St. Beuve places them above Eacine and Boileau. 
 Speaking of Moliere, he says : "He entered into no re- 
 action, religious or literary, as did Bossuet, Eacine, 
 Boileau and three-fourths of Louis XIV 's century." 
 In our own day most critics prefer Moliere and the 
 writers with a similar philosophy of life, like Eabelais, 
 Montaigne and La Fontaine, to Pascal, Eacine, Bos- 
 suet, Corneille and Fenelon. 
 
 The cultured reader will see nothing heterodoxical 
 in a taste which prefers Thucydides, Machiavelli, Spi- 
 noza and Hume to Plato, Seneca, Epictetus and St. 
 Augustine. Are not Nietzsche, Taine and Pater 
 greater moralists and stylists than Marcus Aurelius, 
 Bunyan and aKempis? Goethe, Ibsen, Balzac and 
 Byron are really greater than Milton, Aeschylus, Spen- 
 ser and Tasso. 
 
 These opinions are endorsed by many of our best 
 critics. It would be extraordinary that authors who 
 are often considered the greatest novelists, dramatists, 
 poets and moralists of the nineteenth century should 
 not stand higher than writers who have given expres- 
 sion to medieval views. Our authors were greater 
 geniuses and profited by the new discoveries in the 
 realms of thought. 
 
 It does not, however, follow that authors who are 
 imbued with piety and even superstition, are not there- 
 fore great writers. On many subjects we will find that 
 
29 
 
 utterly irreligious writers and religious ones are re- 
 lated to one another in their ideas. Blake may call 
 himself a Christian, and Nietzsche an atheist, but their 
 views on morality are very much alike. A man's real 
 creed is not necessarily derived from the religion to 
 which he attaches himself. Many a Christian author 
 was pagan in his moral beliefs. The morality in 
 Balzac's novels is surely not the same as that of the 
 Sermon on the Mount. He worships all the things 
 that are there condemned. Milton was as great a 
 Puritan as Balzac was a Catholic, but his ideas on 
 divorce are very modern and liberal, and anything but 
 Puritan. The inner nature and experiences of these 
 two authors forced them to entertain moral views not 
 sanctioned by their religions. 
 
 There are so many ideas we may have and feel- 
 ings that we may be subject to irrespective of our re- 
 ligions. In the work of pious authors we come across 
 beautiful and even liberal passages; we find ideas 
 about whose truth there is no question, as for example, 
 Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University. 
 
 We will thus be able to understand why in works 
 like the Sonnets of Petrarch and the Elegies of 
 TibuUus, though the authors introduced many of the 
 errors and superstitions of their respective religions, 
 yet there are transcripts of genuine feeling felt by all 
 of us. Nevertheless we will find that where the poet 's 
 love is subdued entirely by his religion, there is less 
 literary value for us. 
 
 4. As an illustration of our main theory let us ex- 
 amine two of the most typical of the above mentioned 
 works— TTie Meditations and the Imitation of Christ. 
 
 We do not admire the Stoic philosophy and yet we 
 all join in pronouncing The Meditations of Marcus 
 Aurelius a great classic. Let us see whether the ideas 
 there are still true in our day. 
 
30 
 
 We find that the artificial remedies to alleviate 
 our sorrows do not console us. When we labor Tinder 
 a great misfortune or are in the toils of a strong pas- 
 sion, illogical appeals to our reason do not help us. 
 Whatever emotion possesses us, there is some physical 
 change in the body. The normal condition cannot be 
 restored by false philosophical mediation. We are all 
 bundles of nerves; all our feelings are registered in 
 our brain; after we think we have subdued our 
 emotions a slight cause can evoke the most dormant 
 pain. We are the victims of moods and our emotions 
 are mobile and fickle. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius tells us that if we have a very 
 great misfortune we will be rid of our woes if we 
 reflect that we are part of a whole, that what is well 
 for the whole is also well for the part and can not be 
 injurious to the part ; that if we remember all this we 
 shall be content with whatever happens. (Bk. X, 6.) 
 But a man lives and feels as a part. If he is bereaved 
 of some member of his family, how can we tell him that 
 in the scheme of the universe at large it does not mat- 
 ter that some are cut off in their prime? For in his 
 calamity he feels as a husband or father or son and 
 not as a citizen of the universe. He does not believe 
 that their death is beneficial to the universe. He feels 
 his pain keenly, and by reflecting that what is good 
 for the whole is also good for the part (which he does 
 not believe) he will not be made content with what- 
 ever happens. 
 
 A favorite precept of the Emperor is to tell the 
 reader to forget his surroundings and retire within 
 himself. He thinks that the only space we occupy in 
 the world is in our soul and that this is never affected 
 by external circumstances. Would we retire to the 
 country or seashore ; it is folly ; retire within yourself. 
 (Bk. IV, 3.) A discontented mind can derive all con- 
 solation from within. The sea breeze and mountain 
 
31 
 
 air are nothing compared to reason. Imagine that you 
 are at the shore. "The religious, impassable ocean," 
 says Maeterlinck, speaking of ijie Emperor in his 
 Mystery of Justice, "that excused and protected the 
 retreat into himself of the sage and the man of good, 
 now only exists as a vague recollection. ' ' 
 
 Would we delight ourselves, we are told to reflect 
 that some of our friends are possessed of certain 
 virtues. (Bk. VI, 48.) But if we have not those virtues 
 ourselves we will derive no special pleasure by re- 
 membering that our friends possess them; very likely 
 we will feel rather envious. 
 
 Then what does the reader think of consoling a 
 person who is stricken with an incurable disease from 
 which he will shortly die by telling him that since he 
 has no desire to increase his weight he should have 
 none to increase his length of days (Bk. VI, 49), or that 
 since a few days make little difference as to the time of 
 dying, so should a few years! What a false analogy 
 between the desire to increase one's weight which does 
 not give one material pleasure and the desire to in- 
 crease one's days, which is satisfying our strongest 
 instinct, the will to live. 
 
 Innumerable maxims can be gathered from The 
 Meditations that are stale, flat and unprofitable, such 
 as "It is the power of the soul to maintain its own 
 serenity and tranquillity and not to think that pain 
 is an evil," "Does any one do wrong? It is to him- 
 self that he does wrong." 
 
 He constantly tells us to live according to Nature, 
 but gives us suggestions that are entirely opposed to 
 the promptings of Nature. For instance, he asks us 
 to pray that we should not be afraid to lose our son 
 rather than pray that he live. 
 
 One begins to weary of these hopeless consolations 
 that do not consider the simplest elements of human 
 nature. Philosophy and particularly Stoic philosophy 
 
32 
 
 can do little for us. As Cardinal Newman asked, "Did 
 philosophy support Cicero under the disfavor of the 
 fickle populace or nerve Seneca to oppose an imperial 
 tyrant?" 
 
 The Imitation of Christ sums up the principles of 
 monastic morality as Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 
 does those of Stoic morality. We, at heart, no more 
 believe that a Kempis ' precepts can govern our life 
 than can the Meditations. Yet we affect to admire the 
 book. 
 
 The book insists upon our renouncing our will, 
 upon our suppressing our individuality, upon our 
 stifling our abilities. We suffer many of our mis- 
 fortunes because we cannot will, because we cannot 
 bravely assert our personalities. Yet the criticism of 
 our times sees fit to lavish praises upon a book that 
 encourages us in our weakness in developing our will 
 power. It may no doubt be prudent to crush our will 
 for that which is beyond our power, but to ask us 
 to root out our desires for things that we can attain 
 by a slight exertion, is unfair. We are creatures of 
 flesh and blood and in us have been planted certain 
 instincts, like that of love for knowledge, art, honor, 
 riches and beauty, and it is useless to tell us that we 
 should have contempt for all the things of this world 
 in order to tend towards the Kingdom of Heaven. We 
 will only become the most affected hypocrites pretend- 
 ing to despise what we will be secretly doing. 
 
 The book preaches everything that is opposed to 
 the best in Greek and modern authors. It tells us that 
 the more we can get out of ourselves, the more divine 
 will we be; they tell us that the more we can be our- 
 selves the more will we approach the divine. The 
 Imitation maintains that the less we rely on ourselves 
 and the more we adopt the ideas of others, the nobler 
 will we be. Greek and modern literature recognize 
 that we can only cultivate the best that is in us by trust- 
 
33 
 
 ing solely in ourselves. aKempis repeatedly asserts 
 human nature to be vile, man to be full of sin, not "worth 
 comfort or consolation. Greater authors and deeper 
 thinkers and higher moralists teach us that human 
 nature is not vile, that man is to be treated as dignified. 
 
 Our day has no sympathy with these tirades 
 against the body, against ambition, against pride, ' ' The 
 scheme of the book," said Thackeray, "if carried 
 out would make the world a wretched dreary place of 
 sojourn. There would be no manhood, no love, no 
 tender ties of mother and child, no use of intellect, no 
 trade or science, a set of selfish beings crawling about 
 avoiding one another, and howling a perpetual 
 miserere. 
 
 The author goes so far as to say that even after 
 we have given everything of ourselves, completely re- 
 nounced all the pleasures of this world and entirely 
 suppressed our own individualities, even then we have 
 done nothing. It is at a point like this one loses 
 patience with the philosophy of life laid down and 
 critical examination must stop. 
 
CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE EEBORS OF L.ITEEARY CEITICISM:. 
 
 1. Walt Whttman has pointed out to us that we 
 ought not to set up as literary ideals for America, the 
 pagan and religious and feudal classics which teem with 
 ideas utterly hostile to our theories of life. He saw that 
 conditions and beliefs different entirely from our own 
 caused these works to bloom forth and that hence these 
 can not serve for our spiritual sustenance. Many of 
 them sprouted in castles and temples and monasteries ; 
 hence they are opposed to that spirit of independence 
 and individualism characteristic of democracy. 
 
 Whitman pays these authors the greatest homage 
 and acknowledges their services, but he sees that they 
 give us conceptions of character which we can not fol- 
 low ; he perceives that their notions of beauty are per- 
 verted and can not form a criterion for us. He felt 
 that this constant worship of the classics was a hind- 
 rance to the birth of a literature that would represent 
 our time. He was doubtful as to what evil results might 
 not be produced by the ever-constant harping upon the 
 names of the great poets of the past, fearing that our 
 own poetic channels would be clogged. 
 
 He has no doubt made his mistakes, but he teaches 
 us a healthy spirit of independence. We see a man who 
 does not grovel before great names and who candidly 
 contests the validity of established reputations, who 
 questions the authority of the world's most famous 
 poets — Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Dante, Spenser, 
 Shakespeare and Milton. He thinks that their fame 
 rests more on the "mountain-high growth of associa- 
 tions ' ' connected with their poems, and that the bases 
 on which these were built have become "vacuums." 
 
 If these classics built on the ideas of monasticism, 
 Puritanism, etc., have themselves not been attacked 
 very often by name, at least the ideas on which they 
 
 (34) 
 
35 
 
 are based have been severely criticized. An onslaught 
 upon stoical ideas or a defence of epicurean views is 
 really a criticism of those books where the stoical ideas 
 find expression. If we reproach an author of our day 
 for his monastic views we are also rebuking the classics 
 of monasticism. He has simply put their ideas in 
 another and sometimes better form. We do not have the 
 courage to criticize the master because of the prestige 
 of his name, but we have really attacked him through 
 the channel of some obscurer author. So all along 
 those critics who have dealt severely with feudalistic, 
 puritan, monastic and stoical ideas; who have reviled 
 obscure authors imbued with these ideas; who have 
 based their own essays on the doctrines of a modified 
 paganism or a refined epicureanism, have written 
 against Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, a Kempis, Bunyan, 
 etc. Montaigne tells us how he incorporated ideas and 
 quotations from other authors without naming them, 
 so that the critics would be censuring them when they 
 thought they were attacking him. ' ' I would have them 
 give Plutarch a fillip on my nose, and put themselves 
 in a heat with railing against Seneca, when they think 
 they rail at me. ' ' 
 
 Let us level our criticism where it is due, at those 
 classics from which the minor works of our own day 
 draw their life-blood. 
 
 The fact that in our own compositions we often de- 
 part entirely from some of the forms and ideas of 
 ancient authors signifies that these writers are not 
 sufficient for our own day. If these ideas were always 
 true all that literature would have to do would be to 
 repeat them in another style. If in addition the old 
 forms were still beautiful, literature would then be an 
 art of imitation, of retelling to mankind the old views 
 in the old forms. 
 
 But literature is always creating new forms and 
 taking up ideas rarely or not at all dealt with by older 
 writers. Does this not mean that they are insufficient 
 
36 
 
 for our demands and that in all probability those older 
 authors, had they been living in our day would have 
 written like our own writers'? Probably those who 
 wrote epic poems about war and religion would have 
 given us novels and prose dramas treating of import- 
 ant psychological, moral and sociological questions. 
 
 A new departure in form and thought is always 
 then a tacit criticism of an old book. If the disciple is 
 superior to and hence breaks away from the master, 
 there must be some deficiencies in the master's literary 
 productions. And as a rule it is necessity rather than 
 the desire for novelty that forces the breaking up of 
 the old traditions. The more our writers deviate from 
 the old, the less literary merit the latter must possess. 
 
 2. To judge the literature of the past we should 
 forget all the panegyrics written and criticise the works 
 anew. We should free ourselves from the opinions we 
 have held about ancient authors and take note of the 
 appeal made to us. We would surely discover that we 
 had been deluded into insincere rhapsodic eulogies. 
 
 It does seem strange to see critics pick out the 
 same names to represent the highest achievements in 
 literature. Had the weight of past centuries not borne 
 down upon the critics, other names would have been 
 chosen to represent these achievements. Had Homer 
 been forgotten and then suddenly discovered he would 
 not then be ranked as high as he is today by the critics. 
 The critic, if he has studied history and literature, sees 
 what an immense influence Homer has had, he dis- 
 covers how many great men cared for the Iliad; he 
 reads it himself, is bored by many parts but he then 
 comes to the really passionate speeches in some of the 
 books and he concludes that Homer is one of the first 
 poets ; so he joins in the universal chorus and is flat- 
 tered that his own voice has been re-echoed by past 
 traditions. Had he come across the identical passages 
 
37 
 
 in obscure authors — and as a matter of fact he does — 
 he would not be so extravagant in his eulogy. 
 
 Le Bon, in his The Crowd, calls attention to the 
 tremendous influence that the prestige of an author has 
 upon us. The mob instinct — that instinct to do col- 
 lectively through the hypnotic influence of the crowd 
 what we would not do individually— alone governs us 
 in judging books. 
 
 Our worship of great names is a sort of craze with 
 us that acts upon us very much like a religious revival. 
 We join in, whether we believe or not. Just as the mob 
 consciousness influences respectable law-abiding citi- 
 zens to join in lynching mobs or criminals to enlist 
 themselves in philanthropic movements, so we all join 
 in the frenzied worship of authors whom we, at most, 
 think passable. It is not intellect that plays a great 
 part in the worship of ' ' great" authors. We are swept 
 into the admiring crowd whether we possess intellect 
 or not, whether we admire or not. Even our greatest 
 geniuses are infected by this tendency. Some of our 
 most liberal thinkers cling to the most obsolete dogmas 
 and worship the most effete classics, just as Newton 
 and Locke did. Some of our best authors admire the 
 most famous books in spite of the fact that these are 
 poor. 
 
 Similarly we may possess no intellect and join in 
 the most intellectual movements, drifting along with 
 what is in the air. If the theory of evolution has made 
 such strides it is not necessarily because of the growing 
 love of truth; if morality spread in the first century 
 after Christ it was not because of the growing good- 
 ness; if the worship of art was a feature of the 
 Eenaissance, it was not because of the increasing love 
 of beauty. Darwin and Spencer, Jesus and St. Paul, 
 Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci exerted a 
 hypnotism that was irresistible and the epidemic 
 spread. The most ignorant may attach themselves to a 
 great cause and welcome a profound, idea though they 
 
38 
 
 do not understand these. It did not follow that when 
 the ideas of such intellects like Spinoza and Montaigne 
 and Hobbes and Diderot were spread broadcast during 
 the French Eevolution that every peasant and gamin 
 who embraced them were men of advanced intelligence. 
 So the mob consciousness may make us follow 
 writers who are below us and also worship those who 
 are too far above us to understand them. It is not the 
 possession of intellect that makes us worship the truth 
 any more than the lack of it that makes us follow false- 
 hood. 
 
 3. The difficulty with some of the so-called classics 
 is that they are far removed from life as we find it to- 
 day. Old writers bemoaned calamities that do not af- 
 flict us, they found joy in the realization of ideals that 
 no longer exist for us. If they despaired because they 
 did not see means of fulfilling their whole duty toward 
 God, we are in agony because we cannot perform our 
 duties towards ourselves or those we love. What are the 
 groans of Bunyan, Dante and Pascal to the business 
 man harassed by incessant worry? How can you call 
 upon a man to invent some imaginary grievances about , 
 the state of his soul when he is entangled in some domes- 
 tic woes or is suffering from some painful disease, or is 
 engaged in some drudgery that scarcely gives him a 
 living? 
 
 The epigrams of Marcus Aurelius do not console 
 us when we are the victim of some injustice, a Kempis 
 does not help us in quenching a passion we feel, and in 
 spite of him we all are interested in glory, wealth or 
 power. We are concerned about our futures or the 
 futures of our children; why call upon us to take a 
 deep interest in false philosophy. 
 
 Only that literature can be vital which touches on 
 our own needs and, although many of these classics 
 depict struggles that we ourselves undergo, between 
 
39 
 
 good and evil, between the passions and the reason, 
 and between the flesh and the spirit, we do not have the 
 same conception of these things as they did, and hence 
 our struggles are different. We often try to seek as a 
 goal what they struggled to avoid. 
 
 Men of our own time with moral and aesthetic 
 notions superior to those found in the classics, with a 
 wider range of knowledge and a more keenly developed 
 intellect, are told nevertheless to learn what is truth 
 and beauty from authors with limited intellects and 
 limited experience. An average educated man has a 
 better mind and a greater insight into life than some 
 of our old authors, and yet he is urged to learn from 
 authors than whom he is better informed. 
 
 No one would think of telling a man who has mas- 
 tered the works of a Goethe or a Taine, or a Balzac or 
 a Spencer, or a Brandes, to go off into some obscure 
 haunt where no ideas have made any incursions in 
 centuries, and to learn morality from their most able 
 parson or author. "We would scorn to get ideas of life 
 from people who have had less culture and experience 
 than ourselves. It is just as presumptuous to ask a 
 man who has imbibed the best ideas of our thinkers to 
 learn his morality from Bunyan. 
 
 As a matter of fact a man may have a powerful 
 intellect, a keen sense of literary values, and a highly 
 educated moral sense without having read the classics 
 of stoicism, monasticism and puritanism. They are not 
 necessary for our intellectual, artistic or moral devel- 
 opment ; we are acquainted with their ideas as soon as 
 we think for ourselves. Intuitively we take up the best 
 that is in them, for they have become part of the 
 world's way of thinking. 
 
 We may read a few of our nineteenth century 
 authors and be men of culture for these embody the 
 best that is in the old classics and also the fruit of 
 modern thought. 
 
40 
 
 4. In the times wJieii the church and the state were 
 very powerful and sowed errors and heaped abuses 
 upon the community, just that literature was consid- 
 ered greatest which fostered these errors and condoned 
 or rather urged these wrongs upon the public. The 
 healthiest literature was, under despotic regimes, that 
 which justified evils committed for the personal grati- 
 fication of a few tyrants. When the doctrine of the 
 divine right of kings held sway, the best books were 
 those that attacked any tendencies in the people to- 
 wards democracy or to assert their individuality. 
 When the church was supreme and all its doctrines 
 held divine, only those books were excellent that were 
 composed under the shadows of its altars and had the 
 support of its misguided priests. 
 
 Literary criticism fell into the hands of the cour- 
 tier and the patrons of the established church, or at 
 least authors strongly subject to their influence. Natur- 
 ally only that literature was praised which upheld the 
 corrupt institutions in power and which looked after 
 the interests of the privileged few. 
 
 The influence of this criticism has come down to 
 our own day. We hold practically the same opinions 
 about these books that supported injustice as the an- 
 cient critics, although we hold entirely different polit- 
 ical views, and in many cases the extreme opposite 
 religious views. 
 
 Our tendency to worship books with whose ideas 
 we do not agree can be remedied simply by making 
 our judgment conform to our opinions. No change in 
 our ideas themselves are necessary. 
 
 But we often admire old books with wrong views, 
 because our own views are false, and find in those 
 classics authorities to corroborate us. These books 
 have lived just because they cherished the errors man- 
 kind has believed in ; because they have kept alive the 
 conventions that the world has approved. Mediocre 
 minds worship those books in which their mediocrity is 
 
41 
 
 reflected. Those whose ideas in religion, morality and 
 art are tainted with falsehood, will consider those 
 books the greatest which cast a halo about these false 
 views. 
 
 Literature has often been the weapon wherewith 
 to fight truth and justice, and to keep old traditions 
 still ruling over the world. Books have been the bul- 
 warks behind which ignorance and superstition have 
 shielded themselves. It stands to reason that in a 
 country where the religion is strongly ascetic, the best 
 literature will be that which constantly advocates the 
 doctrine of self -mutilation and self-sacrifice. 
 
 Before we can change our opinions of these books, 
 we must change our ideas altogether, and this is what 
 the pioneers of liberal ideas in our day our trying 
 to do. 
 
 Mankind is not born with all the emotions that they 
 are subject to later in life. Conventional criticism with 
 its insistence upon our worship of certain classics only 
 is nothing more than a plea to us to cultivate only 
 those feelings that are considered proper by society. 
 The classics are praised because it is desired that they 
 inspire us with reverence for that which our religion 
 has taught us is sacred ; to exult in the punishment of 
 transgressors of our old ethical beliefs ; to hate those 
 who sin against the old traditions and institutions. We 
 certainly were not born with our feelings thus directed, 
 but have been brought up so. Max Stirner, in his The 
 Ego and His Own, recognized that a large part of our 
 education was really to teach us to feel the emotions 
 that society deems respectable. 
 
 Criticism has attempted to stifle the admiration for 
 authors who sought to impart feelings to us that society 
 thought improper, no matter how noble they really 
 were. It permitted literature to depict emotions that 
 mediocrity felt, and not those experienced by the great- 
 est people. It would not allow us to lavish our love 
 and hatred where most fitting, but would force us to 
 approve what was countenanced by society. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 LITEBATUEE PEOGBESSES LIKE SCIENCE. 
 
 1. Theories have been advanced to prove that art 
 and literature are not progressive like science, and that 
 great poets are never surpassed. Hazlitt, Macaulay 
 and Hugo indorsed the views that the great ages of 
 art were the periods of their infancy, that in those 
 times the range of ideas was exhausted in some perfect 
 form, and all that we could do was to give new forms 
 to these ideas. According to these critics the early 
 poets had the advantage of being the first to embody 
 ideas that were stUl fresh. 
 
 On the contrary, those authors who live later have 
 the advantage. They can free themselves from the 
 artistic and moral errors that the earlier writer could 
 not recognize as errors. Our later authors can give us 
 both improved technique and truer ideas; they can 
 make use of the heritages bequeathed to them by earlier 
 ages. Since taste and human nature change, our con- 
 ceptions of truth and beauty improve and our style 
 and ideas grow purer ; why should our art works also 
 not be better? If the plane of intellect is higher than 
 it formerly was and we are free from many of the 
 superstitions and dogmas to which our ancestors were 
 subject, if our imagination no longer goes about con- 
 ceiving the most monstrous and ridiculous happenings, 
 why should we say that our literature will not be favor- 
 ably affected by these improvements in ourselves ? Our 
 authors must necessarily create nobler ideals, more 
 adapted, indeed necessitated, by the age in which we 
 live. 
 
 It is held that as the intellect improves, the imag- 
 ination declines ; that as our judgment becomes better, 
 our literary and poetical performances deteriorate; in 
 short, that a great critical age such as ours is not com- 
 
 (42) 
 
43 
 
 patible with a poetic age. Macaulay has developed 
 these ideas m his essay on Milton, but more fully and 
 brilliantly in his essay on Dryden. 
 
 Because mankind has developed intellectually it 
 does not by any means follow that he has lost the fac- 
 ulty of feeling and expressing his emotions. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, we are more sensitive because our nerves 
 have become more highly developed. The increase of 
 neurasthenia and other nervous diseases shows this. 
 We are more stirred than ever the ancients were by 
 great passions. We become obsessed by some over- 
 whelming emotion that rules us and we feel our pains 
 more keenly and experience our pleasures with greater 
 delights. The characters of Balzac are engrossed in 
 their passions more intensely than the characters of 
 Homer, in spite of the fact that Balzac possessed 
 greater judgment and intellect than Homer. 
 
 As the power to think does not choke up the emo- 
 tions, so does it not corrupt the imagination. Our 
 intellects do not permit the imagination to go off into 
 insane flights, to create the most unconceivable alle- 
 gories, to wander about in search of ridiculous solu- 
 tions to natural phenomena. Our imaginative perform- 
 ances are fully alive to the realities of nature and are 
 in awe at the stupendous scientific discoveries. The 
 great writer may avail himself of the researches in 
 psychology and of moral discoveries; he may let his 
 imagination revel over the mysteries of human nature 
 and his book will not suffer because he understands 
 them better. 
 
 It is contended that the spirit of analysis is hostile 
 to poetry and literature. But this spirit teaches us to 
 understand character better, and the true delineation 
 of character is one of the very highest functions of 
 literature. And the more critical and intellectual we 
 become the better are we able to describe character. 
 
44 
 
 The fact that there have been several epic poems 
 composed in primitive times has given rise to this 
 doctrine that the most poetical ages are the ages of 
 barbarism, and that civilization and science are hostile 
 to poetry and literature. Because savage people are 
 easily moved by a song or speak in figurative language 
 is no proof that they produce greater poems than us. 
 
 The greatest literature is produced at the zenith 
 of a nation's civilization. It is then that men have the 
 greatest thoughts and experience the deepest emotions 
 and express themselves most nobly. Life is more com- 
 plex and gives rise to more numerous and complicated 
 situations. It is then that most moral and intellectual 
 forces are brought into play and literature rises to give 
 expression to these new struggles. Civilization is 
 synonymous with the march of great ideas. 
 
 It will be noticed that the great periods of the 
 world's literature were those in which civilization was 
 at its height ; when philosophic speculation was prolific 
 and scientific discoveries were numerous. The ages of 
 Pericles, Augustus, Lorenzo de Medici, Elizabeth, 
 Louis XIV and Voltaire, etc., were the great ages of 
 literature and not the times when the countries were 
 uncultivated. The literatures of Eussia and Scandi- 
 navia only became great in our times, when these coun- 
 tries took up the fruit of the culture of modern Europe. 
 Previously these countries did not possess great litera- 
 tures. 
 
 In the works of primitive times we find that those 
 portions are best where civilization has made itself felt. 
 Take Homer and observe that where there is apparent 
 the influence of culture we find more refinement of 
 feeling, more humanity of treatment. 
 
 The fact that we become more critical does not im- 
 pair our poetical and literary performances. This is 
 apparent from observing that great novelties, drama- 
 tists and poets have also been great critics. And a 
 
45 
 
 really great critic is always a poet whether he writes 
 in verse or not. Surely Pater and Ruskin were poets 
 or they could never have given us those wonderful pas- 
 sages in some of their books. 
 
 Both Poe and Coleridge, Heine and Goethe, were 
 poets and critics and it is still a debatable question in 
 which department they excelled. 
 
 It is, however, particularly in French literature 
 that we see the combination of the critical and imagina- 
 tive faculties in the same authors. Nearly all the great 
 French authors, whether poets, novelists or dramatists, 
 have left us excellent work in literary criticism. 
 Voltaire and Diderot, Stendhal and the Goncourts, 
 Baudelaire and Gautier were all excellent critics. 
 
 These instances are not exceptions but rather ex- 
 amples of the rule that the imaginative and critical 
 faculties are usually combined instead of being di- 
 vested. 
 
 Is not that great work of genius, the Don Quixote, 
 certainly a work of the imagination, really a piece of 
 literary criticism directed against the literary of 
 chivalry? And who that has read Tom Jones does not 
 remember those delightful excursions in criticism par- 
 ticularly at the opening chapters, which linger in the 
 mind when the fighting episodes are forgotten? 
 
 Macaulay thought that the poetry of an author 
 would not be affected whether he believed in a moral 
 sense like Shaftesbury or whether he referred all 
 human actions to self-interest like Helvetius or 
 whether he never thought about the matter at all. But 
 it is just because a poet has a certain moral creed that 
 real value is given to his poetry. If he believes that 
 moral laws are the same in all ages and that they are 
 of divine origin his poetry will differ from the poems 
 where the author's beliefs are influenced by Epicurean 
 or Sceptic moral views. And the greatness of his poem 
 
46 
 
 will depend upon the truth of these moral views. If 
 Macaulay's view were true as regards poetry it would 
 also apply to dramas and essays ; it would matter little 
 what moral views the dramatist or essayist enter- 
 tained ; and we might as well say that it matters little 
 what moral notions are entertained by writers like 
 Marcus Aurelius and La Eouchefoucauld, the Maxims 
 and the Meditations will not be affected by the author's 
 beliefs — ^an assumption too absurd to discuss. Or con- 
 ceive of Ibsen writing his plays had he never given a 
 thought to the question whether moral ideas are not the 
 products of environment, self-interest and expediency. 
 
 If a poet believes that our actions may be traced 
 to self-interest he will very likely write poems singing 
 the joys of satisfying one's instincts, of the evils of 
 convention which hinder the development of one's in- 
 dividuality, if he believes strongly in a moral sense 
 he will probably insist upon the performance of duty 
 at all costs even if it is an imaginary duty. Dante and 
 Groethe differ from one another just 'because of their 
 difference in moral theories. 
 
 If the author writes fiction it depends on his 
 moral views whether he will be a Eichardson or a 
 Fielding, a Malory or a Eabelais. 
 
 Let us not be deceived into believing that igno- 
 rance and poetic literature go together because un- 
 educated authors like Bunyan and Burns have given 
 us famous compositions. Any one who has read Burns ' 
 letters can see that his mind was ripe and that he had 
 wonderful intuitive power. He was intellectual but not 
 educated. Yet a man may be able to write good lyrics 
 without an education just as he may write fair alle- 
 gories. 
 
 But this does not alter the fact that his poetry 
 would be greater if it contained the fruits of the 
 author's intellect as in the case of Byron and Shelley. 
 
47 
 
 2. It is true a nation may progress intellectually 
 and yet its moral sense may have deteriorated, and its 
 sense of beauty may have declined. A nation whose 
 authors are not intellectually high may give us essays 
 sound in their morality and poems of artistic beauty. 
 But it is safe to say that these compositions cannot be- 
 long to the highest realm of art though their excellence 
 may be unquestioned. They will probably be lacking in 
 originality and will confine themselves to commonplace 
 thoughts and feelings. If these performances point out 
 errors in our social life, it will be because innumerable 
 predecessors have done so. If the author sings of cer- 
 tain emotions it will be of those which the world sanc- 
 tions. He will never give us something that we have 
 not known or felt before. He will not produce a work 
 into which can be gathered the essence of the highest 
 beauty and the drawing of the noblest character — that 
 type which practises a morality that is pure but not 
 yet sanctioned by convention. 
 
 But if with the progress of the intellectual there 
 is a corresponding improvement in the sense of beauty 
 and justice then we get the highest form of art. Dur- 
 ing the Age of Pericles and the Eenaissance, the in- 
 tellectual and artistic qualities were blended in most 
 of the artists and writers. And although it is true 
 that morality was not exceedingly high in these ages in 
 the sense that Christianity looks upon morality, it is 
 nevertheless the rule that the greater the intellect a 
 man possesses the better he is prepared for knowing 
 what is right and wrong. The question of the practise 
 of morality has often very little to do with one's 
 theories. 
 
 It is rather the rule than the exception that the 
 more intellectual the author the greater the sense of 
 beauty and morality that one finds in his works. Goethe 
 and Ibsen are examples to the point. 
 
 Literature is concerned with ideas as science is 
 
48 
 
 with facts. The literary man discovers new ideas in 
 the same sense that the scientist does new facts. Time 
 shows us that many of the literary ideas were wrong as 
 it does that many of the scientific facts were false. Our 
 later works of art then become more beautiful as our 
 later scientific works become more truthful. The ad- 
 vanced ethical and artistic ideas of our day are 
 superior to those entertained under monasticism as the 
 Copernican system is truer than the Ptolemaic system. 
 Some day the Paradise Lost with the exceptions of a 
 few passages may be as obsolete as literature as New- 
 ton's Principia is as science. 
 
 An old scientific treatise lives if its principles are 
 true ; when these are discovered to be wrong the work 
 dies and a new and improved book replaces it. Why 
 should the same thing not happen in literature? Why 
 do we say that literature does not improve simply be- 
 cause in the old poem we may find a few beautiful pas- 
 sages? Do we not find in the old scientific treatise 
 many truths still true and the basis of our science? 
 Nevertheless we do not deny that science improves. 
 
 Hugo, in his Shakespeare, remarks that no one can 
 go above Homer or Dante, for here literature has 
 reached its climax and that no one can surpass these 
 poets because art is not progressive. There are several 
 great works of literature in the nineteenth century 
 that are a living refutation of his thesis. He is under 
 the impression that the ideal which is the basis of 
 literature never changes and he emphasizes this fact 
 but it needs very little to convince one that if any- 
 thing does change, it is the ideals of man. It would be 
 folly to say that the ideals of a Kempis were the same 
 as those of Epicurus. 
 
 "Pascal, the servant," says Hugo, "is outrun. 
 Pascal, the writer, is not." 
 
 On the contrary Pascal's ideas are often absurd; 
 his scientific discoveries are still true. 
 
49 
 
 3. Chateaubriand, in his Genie du Christicmism re- 
 viving in the nineteenth century the old quarrel between 
 the ancient and modern authors, maintained that the 
 Christian religion and morality being truer than that 
 of the ancient, therefore Christian literature and art 
 were superior. He derived the greatness of Racine, 
 Tasso and Milton from the fact that they were Christ- 
 ians. There is no doubt that in those phases of 
 morality where Christianity does surpass Paganism, 
 Christian literature based on these particular phases 
 will be the greater. But there are many pagan ideas 
 that are nobler than some of the Christian ideas; 
 literature grounded on those ideas will rank higher. 
 Chateaubriand does not or will not realize that the 
 great period of art and literature in the Eenaissance 
 was due to the flourishing of pagan ideas. The moral 
 of his book is that the more infidelity there is in an 
 age the poorer will be its literature. But the Ages of 
 Pericles and of Lorenzo de Medici were periods of 
 scepticism. 
 
 Chateaubriand at least realized that literature was 
 progressive and that a change in our moral ideas will 
 have an influence upon our passions and hence upon 
 our art. But his premises that all the ethical ideas of 
 Christianity are purer than those of Paganism are 
 false. He was at least consistent, and though his con- 
 clusions about the books of Christian literature being 
 always superior to those of pagan literature is wrong, 
 his main idea about the progressiveness of art is 
 correct. 
 
 Madame Be Stael's book. Literature (1800), shows 
 that she also strongly believed in the progress of 
 literature. She held that literature is nothing more 
 than the transcript of the social ideas of the time and 
 as she believed in human perfectibility and that later 
 times always gave us the truer ideas, she concluded 
 that modern literature is the superior. Except for 
 
50 
 
 the fact that ideas sometimes are falser in a later age 
 than in an earlier one, her main ideas are correct. She 
 does not, like Chateaubriand, base her conclusions on 
 religious grounds. 
 
 But that there are periods of decline in the in- 
 tellectual development of humanity there can be no 
 doubt. Much ancient literature is certainly greater 
 than some of our modern English literature. The 
 period known as the Catholic Reaction is artistically 
 and intellectually inferior to the Renaissance which 
 preceded it. The literature of Madame De Stael's 
 OAvn age is below that of the time of Voltaire. 
 
 Time is not necessarily an important factor in 
 considering the development of intellect and literature. 
 We often find that the older writer is far ahead of us 
 intellectually and that our age is behind him. "We may 
 be deservedly proud of the literature of the last cen- 
 tury but we must not forget the ancients. With 
 thinkers like Aristotle, Thucydides, Tacitus, Cicero, 
 Plutarch, Lucian ; with poets like Sophocles, Euripides, 
 Ovid, Horace, Lucretius, Catullus, not to speak of the 
 innumerable lost works of the ancient poets and philo- 
 sophers, we need not pride ourselves too much upon 
 our superiority to antiquity. Modern times, it is true, 
 may have produced writers greater than any one of 
 these; our own generation may have done so but the 
 sentiments of these authors still move us and their 
 ideas are still fresh to us. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 IDEAS MOBE IMPOETANT THAN FORM. 
 
 1. It has been maintained that the theology and 
 politics of a poet have no effect upon his art ; that ar- 
 tistic merit may be present in spite of false moral and 
 social ideas; that the creed and dogma may be lost 
 sight of in pondering upon a splendid imaginative 
 product; that, in short, it is the form in a great poem 
 that counts. 
 
 But form can do little to save works of art when 
 the life of the matter is gone. Poetry, like other forms 
 of literature, must derive its chief greatness from the 
 ideas rather than the form. Poetry speculates on the 
 great human problems and there is no reason for con- 
 sidering these of secondary importance because they 
 are in verse. All the rhetoric in the world cannot res- 
 cue a false idea. We are too thirsty for real beauty 
 to be cheated out of it by being told that falsehood, 
 garbed in allegory, is beauty. The great poets have 
 lived, not because of their form, but because they were 
 the deepest and truest thinkers, because they summed 
 up the intellectual and moral products of a whole age. 
 If their truth is no longer true, if their moral lessons are 
 false, beautiful phrases cannot avail them. Dante and 
 Homer, Milton and Spenser have lived because the 
 world always believed that they gave the most complete 
 expression to the moral truths of monasticism, pagan- 
 ism, puritanism and feudalism. 
 
 In our own time the poems that we most admire, 
 like Faust and Peer Gynt, are rich in ethical lessons; 
 they are the fruits of modern thought. "We are not en- 
 raptured because of the form or the style, for many 
 an inferior poem excels these in this matter, but because 
 they present some intellectual problem, some universal 
 situation. They, like the old poems, are valuable be- 
 cause they treat of the struggles between good and evil, 
 
 (51) 
 
52 
 
 right and -wrong, but they do not suffer from false 
 religious and moral views, as the older epics. 
 
 Pater was certainly one of the greatest stylists we 
 have had and though he recognizes the importance of 
 style in determining good art, yet he maintained that it 
 was the substance that decided what was great art. He 
 gives illustrations in the Paradise Lost and Divine 
 Comedy of works he considers great because of the 
 importance of the underlying ideas. According to 
 Pater, the greatness of literary art depends "on the 
 quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, 
 its variety, its alliance to. great ends, or the depth of 
 the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it." His 
 theory is correct, but his examples are given in defer- 
 ence to established literary opinion. 
 
 If the hope held out by a classic is now seen to have 
 been based upon illusions, or the great ends to be at- 
 tained are not in harmony with our ideals, the great- 
 ness of the work is a figment. The objection to Dante 
 or Milton is not the presence of the Ptolemaic system 
 of astronomy or even the machinery of Christian and 
 Pagan theology and mythology ; or the introduction of 
 absurd allegory or hopeless pedantry, but that the un- 
 derlying central ideas in regard to life and conduct are 
 often utterly false. And it was the supposed greatness 
 of these central ideas that made the reputation of these 
 poems, and not the form. 
 
 The greatness of art depends, then, upon the vast- 
 ness and truth of the subject-matter, and if this turns 
 out trivial and false, there must be a decline in the 
 greatness of the work in question. 
 
 We can not appreciate to its full extent a poem like 
 Lucretius' Be Rerum Natura unless we are somewhat 
 epicurean in our own beliefs. It is absurd to admire 
 the poem enthusiastically and not believe at all in its 
 philosophy of life. Similarly, we can not love a work 
 like Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, with its piety and 
 monasticism, unless we are ourselves pious. It all de- 
 
53 
 
 pends which is the truer philosophy of life in deciding 
 which is the greater poem. We can not expect people 
 to agree in their literary opinions if they differ in the 
 fundamental views of morality and religion. Critics 
 should not argue about the literary merits of books 
 without discussing the truth of the ideas which form 
 the groundwork of these books. Critics can not expect 
 to agree in secondary matters when they differ in fun- 
 damental principles. One can not expect readers who 
 have pantheistic or agnostic views to admire religious 
 and sacred poetry. If the cardinal principles of the 
 poet's philosophy are crystallized in the poem and this 
 philosophy is religious or monastic, the free-thinking 
 critic can not justly go into raptures over the poem, 
 even though he finds some beautiful passages. 
 
 To appreciate such fime poems like Watson's The 
 Unknown God and The Hope of the World, or David- 
 son's Ballad in Blank Verse or The Man Forbid, we 
 must be sceptical like the authors. If these poems mock 
 some beliefs that we entertain, it is folly to say that 
 nevertheless we can worship these poems. If the ideas 
 in these poems are correct, then the pious man can not 
 appreciate this poetry, for the chief pleasure of poetry 
 consists in contemplating sympathetically the poet's 
 ideas. If we merely value the poetry for the execution 
 and craftsmanship, it might as well contain ideas held 
 by illiterate people. 
 
 2. A work of art should awaken the reader 's mind 
 as well as his emotions. The book should subdue his 
 beliefs to those of its author; it should suffuse him 
 entirely with its character, bring out his complete in- 
 tellectual sympathy and win him over almost uncom- 
 promisingly to its central ideas. When the reader 
 finds that the struggles and ideals of the character are 
 precisely his own, when he believes in nearly all the 
 views of the author, then the book really appeals to 
 him. 
 
54 
 
 Every great writer has put into his book his whole 
 philosophy of life, his whole raoral outlook upon life. 
 All his intellectual sympathies, his psychology and 
 mental attitude lie sealed therein. The artist must 
 make his readers feel that his truth is the truth, that 
 his philosophy is unimpeachable, that his moral out- 
 look is absolutely correct. It is not enough that the 
 readers be thrilled with the craftsmanship. 
 
 Now, if the book contains ideas which the reader, 
 as a whole, does not sympathize with, it does not capti- 
 vate him by those ideas the expression of which really 
 was the object of writing the book. It does not fulfil 
 the first condition of artistic appeal which is the utter 
 assimilation of the reader's soul to the author's. The 
 ideas of reader and author are entirely opposed to 
 one another ; their sublimest intentions do not coincide, 
 their conceptions of beauty are not identical. 
 
 There should be a challenge which the reader finds 
 acceptable. There must be a message which is found 
 irresistible. We must be made to enter into the au- 
 thor's spirit and accept his gospel. It is the message 
 above all that the author bears for us that determines 
 his greatness. If this is no longer true, it is folly to 
 worship the book as a supreme masterpiece on ac- 
 count of the form. 
 
 It is often held in defense of books that are 
 spiritual autobiographies like the Confession of St. 
 Augustine and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress that what 
 we are primarily interested in are the struggles of a 
 peculiar personality without concerning ourselves 
 about his ideas. But in order that these books be great 
 to the reader, he too must have felt those mental crises, 
 undergone the same moral struggles and deliberated on 
 similar questions. He too must arrive at the same 
 conclusions, strive for the same ideals, be in anxiety 
 about the same problems and solve them in the same 
 way. 
 
 Otherwise the books must have for us a value 
 
55 
 
 akin to that which they have for the historian, the 
 antiquarian, the theologian or the psychologist. 
 
 For example, if the reader feels that he is never 
 troubled by a consciousness of sin, that he has other 
 duties in life than to pry constantly into his soul to find 
 undiscovered crimes; if he feels that this world was 
 not created merely to give us an opportunity to haunt 
 ourselves with conceptions of sin; if he believes that 
 the body is sacred, that ambition, beauty, art, power, 
 are allowable pursuits; how can you expect him to 
 love books where the authors are gnashing their teeth 
 because they are always reminded of their sins and 
 where they consider as errors what he deems virtues? 
 If we love something we can not admire a book that 
 decries it. 
 
 If we are agnostics or sceptics we can not admire 
 a book where the author describes his triumph over 
 doubt and his conversion to faith. The book has in it 
 nothing of ourselves. We may like the style, comment 
 upon the sincerity of the author, and be otherwise in- 
 terested. But it is not the history of our struggles, it 
 is not the development of our souls. We are not in ac- 
 cordance with the general spirit of the book and it will 
 never have the real literary value for us, namely, of 
 appealing to us by the intellectual and moral views 
 entertained. 
 
 3. It is apparent that we can not admire the 
 ancient books for their form and style alone from the 
 fact that we can find many books in our own day that 
 are much superior in this respect. We have poems per- 
 fect in technique, stories and essays in majestic and 
 faultless styles, but we do not consider them great litera- 
 ture. There are newspaper editorials and magazine 
 book-reviews written in flawless style which for diction, 
 lucidity, ease, sublimity, power and other qualities 
 are unsurpassed by many of the best prose writers of 
 old. As Cardinal Newman says: "In point of mere 
 
56 
 
 style, I suppose many an article in the 'Times' news- 
 paper, or 'Edinburgh Eeview,' is superior to a preface 
 of Dryden's, or a Spectator, or a pamphlet of Swift's, 
 or one of South's sermons." 
 
 As a matter of f-act in prose essays particularly, 
 it is the style that is of secondary importance. What 
 raises the literary value of the essay is the greatness 
 and truth of the ideas. The quantity and quality of the 
 truths, the profundity of intellect, the capacity for 
 moral and psychological insight are the chief factors 
 in determining literary merit. What the author says 
 rather than how he says it is of most importance. We 
 are so absorbed in finding great books that we forgive 
 the author for paying less attention to his art. Every 
 one can learn how to express an ordinary thought well ; 
 only an original and gifted mind can utter an un- 
 discerned truth. 
 
 Who thinks of the style in reading Aristotle or 
 Spinoza? These authors are so profound and original 
 that no matter how they speak we are only too eager 
 to grasp what they have to say. 
 
 What is true of essays should also apply to fiction. 
 
 There are many novels written in our day that far 
 excel the style of Balzac or Stendhal, that have not the 
 tedious descriptions of the former and the unadorned 
 cut and dried style of the latter. There are best- 
 sellers that preserve the laws of unity and keep up the 
 interest of the reader more than Fielding or Sterne. 
 Even the works of those novelists like Gautier and 
 Flaubert, who held that literature was nothing more 
 than form, live because of their ideas rather than their 
 style. Surely the greatness of Mademoiselle de 
 Maupin and Madame Bovary depends rather upon the 
 character and ideas than the form, beautiful as that is. 
 A novelist, like an essayist, becomes soulless when he 
 is destitute of intellectual faculties. It is because ideas 
 are more important than form in the novel that the 
 psychological novel, the novel of character, is superior 
 
57 
 
 to the novel of adventure or the novel of manners. 
 Hence, French and Eussian fiction are as a whole 
 superior to English fiction. Scott and Thackeray are 
 not as great as Stendhal or Dostoievsky. Novels like 
 Red and Black and Crime and Punishment are not at 
 all remarkable for style and yet they are among the 
 greatest literary productions the world has ever seen. 
 
 Those two great fiction writers — Eabelais and 
 Cervantes — live on account of their ideas solely. One 
 can scarcely find two other writers more deficient in 
 the qualities of literary form. Their outrages upon 
 probability, the ridiculousness of the incidents, the lack 
 of a sense of proportion, the absurdity of the adven- 
 tures, the lack of unity and the irrelevant and dull 
 chapters, would have been fatal to an ordinary work. 
 
 But Eabelais' work and the Don Quixote are in- 
 tellectual performances of universal interest. They 
 are probably the two greatest criticisms of monasticism 
 and feudalism that we have ever had. The moral ideas 
 entertained by monks and knights were exposed by 
 ridicule, the overwhelming influence of theology and 
 mythology were given staggering blows. These works 
 hastened the departure of the medieval ages and are 
 still fresh, for the ideas that they combated still rule 
 us. They contain philosophies of life that we have 
 not yet grasped; their humor still evokes outbursts of 
 laughter ; the very identical problems that faced their 
 heroes still besiege us. We see ourselves described; 
 the character studies in these books are character 
 studies of ourselves. 
 
 It is the substance then rather than the style in 
 these works that have kept them alive. 
 
 The impoverished periods of the world 's literature 
 were those in which the language itself was the end 
 rather than the thought. Eenan, in his Apostles, has 
 shown us how in that period of Eoman literature from 
 the death of Augustus to the accession of Trajan, liter- 
 ature was mediocre because destitute of ideas. The 
 result of ornament for the sake of ornament was that 
 
58 
 
 no permanent literature was produced in that period. 
 Where brilliancy and rhetoric usurp art the age is a 
 barren one. 
 
 In a similar manner and for a like reason, as 
 Symonds has pointed out in his Renaissance studies, 
 the Humanists of the Renaissance have been forgotten. 
 The stress upon form and the aim after rhetoric have 
 covered their ethical treatises and histories with dust 
 in the libraries. Those authors like Machiavelli, who 
 created new ideas entirely instead of adorning in pretty 
 phrases the views of the ancients, survived. 
 
 It will be noticed that wherever there was an age 
 of darkness it was because man laid more stress on 
 form than matter, that no ideas came into prominence 
 because people were too much absorbed in giving re- 
 peated expression to the old commonplace views. And 
 a new age only dawned when importance was again 
 laid upon ideas. The age between Chaucer and Shake- 
 speare was an age in which allegory and metaphor 
 were the goal of all writers. When new ideas burst 
 upon England in the latter part of the reign of Eliza- 
 beth, English literature was re-born. 
 
 It is in aphorisms and reported conversations of 
 great men that one can more readily see that it is the 
 substance that counts rather than the style. Here we 
 immediately look for the ideas expressed. Any man 
 with an original and profound intellect might have a 
 stenographer take down his sayings, and the result 
 might be literature without any change in the form. 
 The aphorisms of La Rouchefoucauld and Guicciardini 
 are chiefly valuable because of the intellect behind 
 them. The conversations and table-talk of Goethe, 
 Johnson, Napoleon, Northcote and Coleridge are 
 chiefly interesting because of what is said, and not how 
 it is said. No doubt the aphorisms and conversations 
 have some sort of style and their form is colored by 
 the authors' personalities. But many journalistic 
 products are better written and yet are not great, be- 
 cause there is no intellect behind them. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 HISTOEICAL CEITICISM AND THE CLASSICS. 
 
 1. In judging the works of former times, we are 
 told that we should not govern ourselves by the stand- 
 ards of our own time. We are told that we should con- 
 sider the ages in which these books were produced and 
 place ourselves in those times, and forget the span of 
 centuries separating us from those books. We pride 
 ourselves on the fact that we have invented historical 
 literary criticism. But when we read a book of the past 
 as literature, we read it for amusement, or its art or its 
 ideas on moral and social subjects. It does not help us 
 to tell us that if we try to have the viewpoint of the 
 olden times we will appreciate their books. For their 
 viewpoint may have been all wrong, and why should 
 we try to cultivate it in order to sympathize with wrong 
 ideas ? 
 
 When we read a book of the past, it is not for those 
 purposes in which historical criticism might be of 
 value ; we do not read to study the manners and morals 
 of an age through the medium of its literary produc- 
 tions, or to discover the peculiarities and characteris- 
 tics of a whole people in some representative literary 
 type. The great Taine was mistaken in considering 
 these the objects of the study of past literature. 
 
 We seek in old books just what we want in the 
 new-^truth and beauty. We seek to know how much 
 of ourselves, of our noblest feelings and profoundest 
 ideas are incorporated in those books. We seek in the 
 works of antiquity for the faintest echo even of a note 
 warbled by our own throats, for a response to the emo- 
 tions awakened in our own hearts. We look for char- 
 acters who are akin to ourselves, for descriptions of 
 conduct and methods of thinking that we approve of. 
 We wish to know the highest ideals entertained of 
 
 (59) 
 
60 
 
 character and justice, and we read ancient books to 
 discover them and not because we find the wrong ideals 
 interesting. 
 
 In his Future of Science, Eenan admits that we do 
 not find our ideal in many of the old masterpieces, but 
 he does not think that this affects their value. He 
 admires the works of Pascal and Bossuet only as works 
 of the seventeenth century. He concedes that if they 
 were to appear today they would scarcely deserve atten- 
 tion. But there were other works of the seventeenth 
 century, in which we do find our ideal, which are as 
 advanced as the greatest books of our own time. These 
 would have attracted attention if published in our own 
 day on account of the advanced views therein. Authors 
 like Moliere, La Eouchefoucauld, Hobbes, Spinoza are 
 not tainted with the errors of their times, as were Mil- 
 ton, Bunyan, Eacine and Pascal. The same circum- 
 stances, the same environment surrounded them, the 
 same religious, philosophic and social errors prevailed 
 when these authors produced their most notable works 
 in the last half of the seventeenth century. Yet we do 
 not read the former as works of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and we do not have to make any allowances for 
 the errors of their age for them. It is poor policy to 
 blame the intellectual poverty and moral errors of an 
 author upon his country and his time. As a great 
 author he is presumed to be above his time and to teach 
 his country the truth instead of being influenced by its 
 wrong ideas. 
 
 All old authors should be judged in the same way. 
 If their ideas are false, then they are poor writers, 
 and we should not judge them in connection with their 
 age, but with ours. If we can judge Spinoza by 
 our age, why not Pascal! If the ideas of and old 
 book can stand the test by being compared with those 
 of a great book of our time, why should we look upon 
 another old book produced at the same time only from 
 the viewpoint of that age? 
 
61 
 
 In his Plato and Platonism, Pater tells us that in 
 reading Plato 's Republic, we should neither agree nor 
 disagree with its ideas, but merely follow the course of 
 the philosopher's mind, and that we should study the 
 book in the conditions in which it was produced. But 
 why should we admire the book if we don't agree with 
 most of its views? If we seek for true ideas on edu- 
 cation or poetry or marriage and we think that those 
 of Plato were wrong, it consoles us little to know that 
 they are wrong because of his age. If Plato tries to 
 prove by bad logic something that is false, it is folly 
 to tell us neither to agree with him nor disagree. 
 
 There is much in Plato that is still true, and we 
 can read those parts of his works and judge them by 
 our own standards. 
 
 In the works of Thucydides, Aristotle, Lucretius, 
 Plutarch and Lucian, of the ancients, we find much that 
 is as true for our own day as the best in our own writ- 
 ers. We do not look upon them as literary curiosities, 
 but as living books. 
 
 We must restore the two methods of literary crit- 
 icism which Pater says are now obsolete, but the uncon- 
 scious use of which raises his own criticisms to the rank 
 of a creative art. These are the dogmatic and the eclec- 
 tic methods. 
 
 The dogmatic method consists in admiring those 
 authors with whose ideas one agrees. It condemns that 
 ultra broad-minded fashion of growing enthusiastic 
 about books with none of whose ideas one agrees. It 
 is based on the most natural way of criticising a book 
 which is to let our own views influence us in our judg- 
 ments. It does not necessarily follow that if we adopt 
 this method that we will not give due credit to books 
 that ably defend a wrong cause; nor that we will ex- 
 pect ancient writers to anticipate all our modern ideas. 
 We can always bear in mind that new conditions give 
 rise to new ideas and that these ideas could not have 
 been brought forth because our conditions did not then 
 
D3 
 
 exist. This method is perfectly rational. It is only 
 to be expected that a man with one range of views 
 should not love books with the opposite views. It would 
 have been absurd for Nietzsche to have admired The 
 Imitation of Christ or Plato. 
 
 The other method, the eclectic method, at first 
 seems opposed to the dogmatic method, but it is really 
 complementary to it. It consists in admiring only those 
 books or parts of books whose ideas are true, irrespec- 
 tive of the creed or school of philosophy to which its 
 author belongs. It can see truths in Nietzsche and Plato, 
 but it will in that case choose some common point of 
 agreement between them. It accepts ideas that are 
 true from the most conflicting sources. This method 
 does not destroy our originality, but rather cultivates . 
 it. 
 
 Historical criticism has one great fatality; it at- 
 tempts to reduce our minds to the level of those whom 
 we have outgrown. It aims to deprive us of the fruits 
 of culture that have bloomed between bur time and the 
 book that we judge. It encourages us to embrace cer- 
 tain superstitions and abandon valuable truths. It is 
 a dangerous playing with falsehood; the artificial 
 courtesy towards falsehood may make us a slave to it. 
 We may begin to think altogether like the inferior peo- 
 ple whose books we judge. 
 
 We soon begin to enjoy every form of beauty indis- 
 criminately, and we lose our capacity to enjoy the high- 
 est kind. We appreciate every idea and we are no 
 longer able to separate the important frora tne trivial, 
 the true from the false. We enter into every viewpoint 
 until we have none of our own. We lose the distinction 
 between health and disease, between psychology and 
 pathology. We become enamored of the imperfections 
 and errors of the past. The final result is, as Nietzsche 
 points out, that our instincts run back in all directions 
 and we become a kind of chaos, and we finally can not 
 appreciate the highest culture. 
 
63 
 
 Professor Jowett, on writing upon the methods of 
 interpreting the Scriptures, came to a very simple con- 
 clusion, and that was that it should be interpreted like 
 any other book. 
 
 In criticising a great classic, the only rule to guide 
 us is a similar one, and that is to criticise a past great 
 book as we would a new book. We seek to know how 
 much truth the book holds and not how much of what 
 was held to be true by our fathers. We look for the 
 best ideas and not only the best Christian views, but 
 also for the best Pagan views. We wish to see life 
 interpreted as we feel and experience it, and not accord- 
 ing to its conformity with some past ideal. We want 
 the old classic to be so eternal that intellectually and 
 morally it is at least as high as the greatest work of 
 our own time. In speaking of Milton's poem in connec- 
 tion with Goethe's, for instance, we are forced to deny 
 the seventeenth century poet the intellectual powers of 
 the nineteenth century poet. And although Milton does 
 show intellectual qualities in a work like his tract on 
 divorce, yet it is not displayed in the Paradise Lost. 
 But when one speaks of a contemporary of Milton like 
 Spinoza, although not a poet, in connection with Groethe, 
 we find that Goethe came to Spinoza for intellectual 
 nourishment. The Ethics is a classic which has im- 
 proved with time, as we find that many of the psycho- 
 logical and moral discoveries of the nineteenth century 
 have been anticipated there. As for Paradise Lost, we 
 find that its intellectual value has deteriorated with 
 time. 
 
 The only question, then, in determining the value 
 of a book is whether it is still true. Does it still give 
 voice to our longings and desires ? Has its value been 
 materially affected by the changes in religion and 
 morality? Are the consolations that it offers and the 
 social remedies it lays down genuine? Is the picture of 
 life presented imbued with the spirit of a discerning 
 
64 
 
 and intelligent mind? Are the passions that are burst- 
 ing forth those we feel and the struggles encountered 
 those we undergo ? 
 
 The truths delineated must be the gleanings of the 
 best elements in Paganism and Chrisiantity, in democ- 
 racy and aristocracy. Both unbounded individualism 
 and unreasonable self-sacrifice must be kept in check; 
 the taste for beauty must be reconciled with the call 
 to duty; there must be a harmony between the body 
 and the soul. The books of the past should remain 
 valuable only on condition that they incorporate the 
 moral views entertained by those of our thinkers who 
 are still ahead of our times. One might almost say 
 that the greatness of a past book depends upon how 
 much of the ethics of the future it contains. If the 
 ethical lessons taught by men like Pater, Whitman, 
 Ibsen, Brandes, Nietzsche, or Goethe are those that are 
 in advance of the ethics of our own time and will be 
 the ethics of tomorrow, surely those classics of the 
 past that contain these same ethical lessons are the 
 ones that above all deserve fame. Those classics that 
 presented an ethical code that is obsolete and that our 
 age is trying to get rid of, are the ones that should be 
 consigned to obscurity. 
 
 If the lost works of Pyrrho, Epicurus and some 
 other of the Greek philosophers could be found, we 
 would probably have a list of books greater than many 
 of our most famous Christian classics. 
 
 2. Literature must not be read with the eye of an 
 antiquarian. It must not be regarded as a scrap heap 
 where all useless and curious ideas have been flung. 
 If an old classic appears to us nothing more than a de- 
 pository for the obsolete views of the world it is no 
 longer literature and in that case does have an an- 
 tiquarian interest for us. But if the old classic has a 
 large residue of truths that are still profound, we must 
 look upon it as though the water of life flowed from it. 
 
65 
 
 It will often follow that the same book will appeal 
 to us both from the antiquarian and literary point of 
 view. It will contain ideas utterly absurd side by side 
 with those that are advanced. A book like this must 
 naturally still possess literary value. 
 
 But the real difficulty with our literary criticism 
 is that we often regard books from a literary point of 
 view when they should be looked upon as possessing 
 chiefly antiquarian interest. Works like The Holy 
 Living and Dying, and The Saint's Rest, belong to this 
 class. And we often look upon books from the anti- 
 quarian's side when they should be looked upon as 
 literature like the undeservedly forgotten works of 
 Charron, Sextus Empiricus, La Mothe le Vayer, Bayle, 
 Gassendi, St. Evremond, Sanchez, Naude, and other 
 now obscure great authors who have anticipated the 
 most advanced ideas of our time. 
 
 It is not necessary in order to judge past books 
 that we put ourselves in the author's age and into the 
 place and mind of the reader of that age. We must 
 remain — indeed we can not avoid it — children of the 
 twentieth century. Anatole France with his usual 
 irony has laughed at these attempts on our part to go 
 out of ourselves. Innumerable causes have made us 
 what we are and we can not really adopt a former gen- 
 eration's attitude and way of thinking. It is impossible 
 for one with a healthy pagan view of life, say like 
 Gautier's, to try to have the consciousness of sin and 
 the torturing anxiety to be saved as Pascal or a Kempis. 
 For in the next instant he is breaking forth, "I am a 
 man of the Homeric Age. For me Christ has never 
 come," etc. 
 
 There is something admirable in the position main- 
 tained by criticism in the eighteenth century against 
 authors like Homer, Milton, Spenser, Bunyan, Shakes- 
 peare and Pascal. There was none of that divine 
 superstitious reverence felt for them that exists in our 
 
DO 
 
 own day. These writers were judged like any other 
 author and did not occupy a too exalted place. 
 
 We are willing to read the works of all obsolete 
 authors, of mystics and alchemists and monks pro- 
 vided that we are not compelled to renounce the 
 heritages of our intellect. We can learn much from the 
 idiosyncrasies of their personalities, truth from their 
 errors, health from their diseases. But we can not say 
 to ourselves that we are one moment denizens of the 
 twentieth century, then of the twelfth and then of the 
 first century. 
 
 Had Cervantes cultivated the historical sense he 
 would have been able to appreciate all the absurd 
 romances of chivalry and in that case he assuredly 
 could not have written Don Quixote. 
 
 All literary criticism is really subjective. Our 
 critical estimate of a book depends upon our prejudices 
 and beliefs, upon our past experience, upon our phy- 
 sical and psychological constitution. Matthew Arnold 
 complained that our personal affinities and likings and 
 circumstances swayed us in our estimate of books. But 
 it is just because we are constituted with such a tem- 
 perament, because we entertain such an idea and be- 
 lief, that must be the determining factor in forming 
 our critical belief. If our temperament is unhealthy 
 or our beliefs wrong, then our literary judgment will 
 be incorrect. In that case we must change both our 
 temperament and our ideas. 
 
 Our criticism is based on all our private beliefs; 
 it represents the convictions that our past training 
 and the bygone events of our lives have forced upon 
 us. If a man has been the victim of public opinion it is 
 only fair to assume that his faith in democracy might 
 be shaken and in that case he is bound to be partial to- 
 wards literature that exalts the ideal of aristocracy of 
 intellect. A woman may have been the martyred 
 scapegoat for the errors of the marriage institution 
 
67 
 
 or the prevailing code of sexual morality. She can 
 not be blamed for letting her sufferings influence her 
 in admiring that literature where the marriage in- 
 stitution or the prevailing code of sexual morality is 
 attacked. There may be the real truth in this aristo- 
 cratic and iconoclastic literature. 
 
 As Oscar Wilde said: "A critic can not be fair in 
 the ordinary sense of the word. ' ' 
 
 Literary criticism is not a fixed science and can 
 not become such. Our opinions about books depend 
 upon our religious and moral views and these are 
 diverse in different men. As long as it is uncertain 
 which ideas are the best ones — and this will always be 
 a matter of doubt — ^we will never be agreed as to our 
 criticisms of books. The present standard that pre- 
 vails is naturally from the standpoint of Christian 
 morality. According to this standard only those are 
 the really great books which are pervaded with this 
 morality; nevertheless the critics have been broad 
 enough to admit the classics of Eome and Greece and 
 also many modern works conceived in a pagan spirit. 
 
 Those who do not accept many of the precepts of 
 Christian morality but have been influenced by the 
 ideas of beauty held by the Greeks and the revolu- 
 tions inaugurated by philosophic and scientific dis- 
 coveries of the last century, judge books from a stand- 
 point that might even be called anti-Christian. The 
 more Christian, or rather the more ascetic a book is in 
 spirit the more objectionable will they find it ; although 
 they may also be broad-minded enough to see greatness 
 in many works ascetic in spirit. 
 
 It is not after all an affection to admire both the 
 works of Voltaire and Bossuet, Lucretius and Tasso, 
 Machiavelli and Pascal, Stendhal and Bunyan, Ibsben 
 and Corneille. The ideas of these authors are utterly 
 opposed to one another ; the former are pagan and the 
 latter are Christian, and one's beliefs must influence 
 him in his preferences for these authors. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE CAUSES OF LITEEABY FAME. 
 
 1. Anatole France tells how an unsigned passage 
 from Michelet at his best, given in a test as dictation, 
 was ridiculed by the critics, one of whom was a great 
 admirer of Michelet; unfortunately, he did not know 
 that the passage was taken from Michelet. Very likely 
 many good passages from the most famous authors 
 might be similarly harshly dealt with, if the names of 
 the authors were not furnished the critics. On the 
 other hand, we might get critics to admire passages 
 from unknown authors, which they are apt to ignore, 
 if we pretend that these passages were written by 
 great writers. Editors and college professors have 
 often been the victims of tricks played upon them by 
 people who signed their names to literary master- 
 pieces, to have their work rejected or mercilessly criti- 
 cised. 
 
 France further tells us that Cousin discovered 
 sublimities in Pascal, which have been since recognized 
 as errors due to a copyist. It only illustrates the 
 tendency of the author's reputation to make us eulogis- 
 tic over that which we might otherwise pass by or even 
 condemn. It is true that nearly every author has writ- 
 ten some works for which the world does not care, in 
 spite of his fame. But the particular works which 
 made his fame are full of passages that we love, be- 
 cause we are in a way hypnotized by the author him- 
 self rather than because of the greatness of these 
 passages. We pick out for our recitations, speeches 
 in Shakespeare which are commonplace and do not 
 represent Shakespeare at his best, but there are many 
 passages in less known authors that are greater than 
 the passage about the seven ages of man or "Wolsley's 
 farewell to his greatness, or even Hamlet's famous 
 soliloquy. 
 
 (68) 
 
69 
 
 ' ' Do you think, ' ' asks France in his Garden of Epi- 
 curus, "there is much freedom of judgment in the 
 approbation we accord the classics, Greek and Latin, 
 or even the French classics ? Even the predilection we 
 display, as a matter of taste, for such and such con- 
 temporary production and our repugnance for another, 
 are these really free and unbiased judgments ? Are they 
 not determined by a host of circumstances foreign to 
 the contents of the work under question, the chief being 
 the spirit of imitation, which is so powerful in man and 
 animals?" 
 
 Many of the books published today and then for- 
 gotten would, if published several generations or cen- 
 turies ago, have attracted considerable attention, 
 created an epoch and have lived today as literature. 
 The converse is true that many books that once aroused 
 a furore and are still looked upon as literature, would 
 have been ignored if published in our own day. We 
 worship a book often only because of our gratitude to 
 it, for the changes that it has introduced. In its day it 
 inaugurated a departure, destroyed some conventional 
 methods and hence was conspicuous; it made literary 
 history and as the result of this rather than real liter- 
 ary merit does its fame come down to us. 
 
 Many a book and author is famous because of the 
 part they played in history, because of the good that 
 they really did, rather than because they are still great 
 today. As Lessing says, "A work of art may deserve 
 all possible approbation without affording any special 
 renown to the artist. On the other hand, an artist may 
 justly demand our admiration even though his works 
 do not afford us full satisfaction. ' ' 
 
 We should learn to distinguish the book which 
 lives because of its literary merit, from that which lives 
 because of historical reasons. A work that has not 
 created an epoch, but is rich in those qualities that 
 make a book great, deserves to be called literature more 
 than one which moulded the taste of its age. No doubt 
 
70 
 
 many novels and dramas of the nineteentli century, 
 which attracted less attention than Waverly and Eer- 
 nani, are greater than these, and yet are not consid- 
 ered to be equal in merit. The historical novel and the 
 French Romantic School date from the years 1814 and 
 1830, when these works appeared. But there is nothing 
 to be connected with many other greater novels and 
 plays beyond the mere fact that they have certain 
 merit. 
 
 2. Among the chief mistakes in neglecting great 
 books, none are more conspicuous than the fate of Car- 
 lyle's Sartor Resartus and Thoreau's WeeJc on the Con- 
 cord and Merrimac Rivers. Here were books that were 
 highly original, in a unique and good forceful style, 
 brimming with the most sagacious remarks. They made 
 not the slightest ripple in the literary world. Today 
 there are many critics that maintain that these are 
 their authors' masterpieces, while everyone concedes 
 that they are at least among the very highest of their 
 authors' achievements. 
 
 Suppose Thoreau and Carlyle had each died be- 
 fore Walden and The French Revolution were written. 
 It was these two books that made the fame of their 
 authors and drew attention to the earlier written works 
 above mentioned. Can we be so sure that we would to- 
 day be ranking Sartor and The Week as high as we do? 
 Might we not have remained in utter ignorance about 
 them? Who knows how many great books there are in 
 the world that have never become known, because their 
 authors did not later in life create a sensation by an- 
 other book that drew the world's attention to his earlier 
 one? Probably the names of the greatest books have 
 never passed our lips. Probably a list of the best books 
 might be formed from books of which we have never 
 heard. 
 
 Fame is not always the reward of merit. It is 
 often the result of the appreciation of a solitary fam- 
 ous critic, who has endorsed the book. He may not be 
 
71 
 
 on hand when he is needed or may never have fallen 
 across the pathway of the book. Emerson, for instance, 
 helped to make Whitman's fame by his famous letter, 
 which Whitman quoted. Mill helped to make Carlyle's 
 fame by his review of The French Revolution. Octave 
 Mirbeau made Maeterlinck famous by the title of the 
 Belgian Shakespeare. Many other instances might be 
 cited of one famous review, bringing an author fame. 
 Had these particular critics not possessed themselves 
 the power to sway opinion, or had they not been on 
 hand or never read the book, and if the authors them- 
 selves had then ceased their writing, the world would 
 have remained possessed of at least one masterpiece 
 in each case of which it would have known little. And 
 that we are in ignorance of many such masterpieces 
 because the right critic was absent, there can be no 
 doubt. 
 
 Had Hume died immediately after his Treatise on 
 Human Nature appeared, that is before his Essays 
 brought him his fame, can we be certain that we would 
 today be ranking the Treatise as one of the greatest 
 achievements in the history of the world's intellectual 
 progress? It fell stillborn from the press and atten- 
 tion was only drawn to it by the essays. Similarly with 
 Schopenhauer's World As Will and Idea. It was 
 ignored when published and attracted attention 
 only after Schopenhauer became famous by his Essays. 
 It is then due to the fact that both Schopenhauer and 
 Hume continued to live after they had produced their 
 masterpieces and popularized their views in essay form, 
 that made the reputation of these authors. 
 
 One might wonder how many other masterpieces 
 were also published that fell stillborn from the press 
 and because their authors either died or did not re- 
 produce their ideas in a popular form, they never be- 
 came known to us. 
 
 "How many admirable men," asked La Bruyere, 
 "and fine geniuses are dead without ever being talked 
 
72 
 
 of? And how many are there living, who neither now 
 nor ever will be talked of?" 
 
 We often can not blame critics for misjudging their 
 contemporaries but they have often been mistaken in 
 their opinions of authors for many years after the 
 deaths of these authors. 
 
 The history of the fame of men like Richardson 
 and Macpherson shows us the instability and uncer- 
 tainty of fame and the length of time it sometimes takes 
 the world to realize its critical errors. No one today 
 reads Eichardson or Macpherson. The former is con- 
 sidered narrow, prudish and verbose; the latter is 
 hysterical, affected and forced. Yet, Ossian was once 
 ranked with Homer ; Hazlitt included him in the list of 
 the four great world poets ; G-oethe quoted long sections 
 in his Werther although later he modified his opinion of 
 it ; and Napoleon was an admirer of Ossian. It was imi- 
 tated by Byron and its fame spread throughout Europe 
 and lived for over a half century after its production. 
 Richardson was considered the world's greatest 
 novelist ; his influence in France was particularly great 
 and curiously enough upon the free-thinkers. The 
 eulogy of Diderot is well known. Johnson thought 
 there was more knowledge of the heart in one letter 
 of Eichardson than in all Tom Jones. 
 
 Usually when an age makes a mistake in regard 
 to its estimate of a poet, it makes amends after his 
 death, as in the case of Keats and Shelley. But here were 
 two authors who were admired extensively and extra- 
 vagantly not only by the greatest men of their time but 
 long after. If the opinion in which Richardson's novels 
 and Ossian are held today is the correct one, and if for 
 fifty years after their death the world was grossly mis- 
 taken, we are led to reflect as to the number of other 
 authors we have been mistaken ; and if we can be mis- 
 taken for fifty years why not for a hundred or a hun- 
 dred and fifty years and possibly more ? 
 
 The history of the fame of authors like Blake and 
 
73 
 
 Stendhal is a travesty upon human judgment. Very 
 few today deny that these authors possessed wonderful 
 genius, that they were men of great power. It is due 
 to the fact that they were too much allied to the 
 twentieth century that their fame was delayed into our 
 own time, so long after their death. Even today, how- 
 ever, they are not popular. But in their own time many 
 an author with less art and thought stood higher than 
 them, in the opinion of the public and of the leading 
 critics. No man would have dared to rank Stendhal 
 higher than Madame De Stael or Chateaubriand or even 
 Sue or Dumas. Cowper and Crabbe, Rogers and Camp- 
 bell stood higher than Blake. 
 
 Today each name stands for all that is highest in 
 literature in their respective countries. Around the 
 names of Stendhal and Blake have rallied the greatest 
 literary movements. The Pre-Eaphaelites, the Celtic 
 and the Symbolistic schools, represented by great 
 poets like Swinburne, Yeats and Symons who wrote 
 excellent essays about him, looked with veneration to- 
 wards Blake. 
 
 Around the name of Stendhal all modernism and 
 psychology in France rallied. Although Goethe and 
 Balzac and our own Hazlitt admired him in his day, 
 his fame rose in the year in which he himself predicted 
 it would come — about 1880. Even so different a writer 
 from him in every respect like Tolstoi has registered 
 his debt to Stendhal. Taine, Merimee, Bourget and 
 Brandes are a gorgeous galaxy of disciples. 
 
 But it is to Nietzsche that these two authors are 
 nearest. To him Stendhal was the greatest psycholo- 
 gist of the nineteenth century. While Blake is now 
 looked upon as a precursor of Nietzsche and Symons 
 in his Blake has shown the similarity of their ideas. 
 
 Are there not authors in our own day who are as 
 little known as Stendhal and Blake were in their day 
 and who will not be known for generations hence and 
 will to posterity rank higher than some of our literary 
 
74 
 
 idols? The future may rally around authors whom 
 today we have amidst us and of whom we know little. 
 
 3. Literary reputations then are made by so many 
 other causes besides the possession of real literary 
 merit. There may be some controversy going on and 
 some book lends its aid to the cause of the party in 
 power or finally victorious. As a result immortality 
 is achieved by a work like Butler's Analogy or Pas- 
 cal's Provincial Letters. These books if produced at 
 another time might not have won the fame they 
 possess. 
 
 A book may appear great because the literature 
 of the age is on a low level, and slight merit will make 
 it tower above the best books of the age. Augustiue's 
 City of God and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy 
 very likely would not have attracted unusual attention 
 in the Victorian Age. 
 
 A book may be considered great because it is 
 needed at a particular moment, and if it appears and 
 checks what is considered an evil at the time, it receives 
 everlasting recognition. To this class belong some of 
 the works of Berkley and Chateaubriand who appeared 
 when the times were weary of scepticism and sought 
 some author to stem its tide. 
 
 There are so many causes that enter into making 
 the fame of a book apart from its literary merit. Asso- 
 ciations cling to it; it becomes bound up with the his- 
 tory of a country; it is carefully analyzed by scholars 
 and is the subject of commentaries. Mysteries of 
 authorship often revolve about it and it forms the sub- 
 ject of controversies of all kinds. It may have been 
 the favorite of several of the world's great men; it 
 may have been brought into fame by a censorship; 
 it may have been inspired by a certain movement. 
 
 But when we criticize the book today we should 
 look upon it aside of the memorie? that cling to it, and 
 if it is still good art, then its fame is truly deserved. 
 
 How often in reading an essay in some periodical 
 
75 
 
 or some prose work, we can say to ourselves that we 
 are reading something that we think better than 
 Epictetus or Pascal; how often do we take up good 
 novels and poems and plays that we are certain excel 
 The Faery Queen and The Aeneidf Many of our 
 writers have given us greater thought, finer descrip- 
 tions and more interesting and passionate scenes than 
 some of our classics, but we fear to express too high a 
 eulogy upon them, as we have as yet not the endorse- 
 ments of ages and sages. 
 
 4. Literary forgeries have done much to shake our 
 confidence in the world's literary opinions. The detec- 
 tion of these forgeries has been chiefly due to the pres- 
 ence of archaeological errors, historical mistakes, 
 modern idioms or illusions to latter events. The forg- 
 ery as a rule was not discovered on account of lack of 
 literary merit or intellectual vigor. Indeed some of 
 the forgeries were as rich, and in some cases richer, 
 than the original in these qualities. Had scholars not 
 exposed the forgeries we might today be as eulogistic 
 about them as about the original. 
 
 For instance, there have been forgeries of Petro- 
 nius that were thought to be genuine until in one case 
 the bad Latin and in another the confession of the 
 forger undeceived the scholars. In the case of the 
 former, a story had been concocted by the forger, 
 Francois Nodot, by which he could not be called upon 
 to produce the original manuscript. In the case of the 
 latter, Marchena, who did not produce a complete 
 Petronius as the former did, the only objection was 
 that he could not produce the original manuscript. 
 
 The conclusion that one is led to is that a really 
 gifted work of forgery should be great after its ex- 
 posure as before. Eenan once said that it was only 
 the discovery that Ossian was a forgery of Macpher- 
 son that took away its literary value. But this dis- 
 covery should not have made it a less work of art in 
 our eyes. The merit of Chatterton's work was not 
 
76 
 
 affected by the discovery that they were forgeries. 
 If the forger is a genius himself we should consider 
 his forgeries as good literature. If Shakespeare had 
 forged some of the lost plays of Sophocles, or Gibbon 
 some of the lost books of Tacitus, the forgeries might 
 have been greater than the original. Had these forg- 
 eries been exposed, their literary value would not have 
 deteriorated. If any one today pretended he had 
 found a lost novel of Balzac's and it was as good as 
 Balzac's best, the discovery of the forgery should not 
 affect its literary value. To be a great forger requires 
 genius. What a genius he would be who could repro- 
 duce works as good as the lost books of the Greek 
 philosophers ! 
 
 5. Who knows but that some day the great poets 
 of the Elizabethan Age will no longer be Shakespeare 
 and Spenser, but some of their contemporaries. 
 Charles Lamb, for instance, preferred Marlowe, Dray- 
 ton, Drummond and Cowley to Shakespeare. Then 
 there were such great intellectual poets like Sir John 
 Bavies, whose Nosce Te Ipsum Was very famous in its 
 day and reminds one of Lucretius, although a belief 
 in immortality mingles with its agnosticism. Then 
 higher still was Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, whose 
 works teem with the most advanced ideas. His plays 
 and his treatises on Fame and Glory, on Religion and 
 others show him a true disciple of the Eenaissance, a 
 man much higher than Spenser. Then there were 
 Donne, Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher and 
 other of the playwrights of the age. Nor must we 
 forget the love poets from Wyatt and Surrey to Her- 
 rick and Suckling. It is doubtful if since that time 
 we have had such beautiful love sonnets and lyrics as 
 the Elizabethan Age has given us. 
 
 Going back further than the Elizabethan Age we 
 find poets who were great social reformers like Lang- 
 land, Robert Lyndsay and John Skelton: poets who 
 boldly attacked the vices of the church and the state, 
 
77 
 
 who were on a higher plane intellectually than their 
 age, although subject to many of its errors. 
 
 Nearly all of these names are obscure to us except 
 those who have made a specialty of early English 
 poetry, but we can scarcely have any idea of the great 
 repute in which they were held in their day. They 
 were most of them cultured liberal thinkers at the same 
 time that they were genuine poets. They have always 
 had admirers, and even today we find attempts made 
 to revive men like Langland by Jusserand who prefers 
 him to Spenser; and we get editions of Davies and 
 Lord Brooke by such an enthusiastic scholar as Gros- 
 sart. 
 
 Then there are authors who were very famous in 
 their own day, but who have been forgotten because 
 their ideas were too advanced and the world was not 
 willing that they shake the repose of its more secure 
 \'iews. But today when views similar to those enter- 
 tained by these forgotten authors are gaining in the 
 world, we must resurrect those authors. If we admire 
 Nietzsche, why should we not again take up Mane- 
 vUle's Fable of the Bees? for the ideas of both authors 
 are similar. Then is it not absurd to neglect Helvetius' 
 Mind while admiring his chief master, La Eouchefou- 
 cauld, and a leading disciple like Stendhal? If we have 
 been influenced by the sane Epicureanism preached by 
 Pater, why should we not again read those famous Epi- 
 curean philosophers of the seventeenth century like 
 St. Evremond and Gassendi, the teacher of Moliere? 
 "Why admire Montaigne and forget a man like Char- 
 ron, who is probably as great? Why revere Voltaire 
 and forget Bayle, from whom he learned much? 
 
 There are many of the French sceptical writers 
 who were very famous in their day, authors with the 
 most advanced views. We often endorse these views 
 when presented by our contemporaries, but ignore 
 them when presented by Naude, Patin, Huet, Bodin, 
 La Mo the le Vayer, Vauvenarges, Chamfort, Fon- 
 tenelle, La Mettrie, Sanchez, etc. 
 
78 
 
 The critics have allowed these authors to die and 
 given us instead Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon and other 
 writers whose ideas are not dangerous. But the real 
 curiosity of literary criticism is seen in the fact that 
 the critics have also let live authors like Eahelais, 
 Montaigne, Moliere, La Rouchefoucauld, Voltaire, 
 Diderot and others, although their ideas are similar 
 to those entertained by the forgotten authors and are 
 not even couched in better or more beautiful form. 
 But it was only by the greatest effort that these authors 
 have been preserved for us, for they were bitterly 
 attacked in their own day and thereafter, particularly 
 by the clergy, who are still hostile to them. 
 
 No doubt the future will entertain many critical 
 judgments that will be more correct than our own. 
 Charron's essays on Wisdom may hold a higher place 
 than Pascal's Thoughts, La Mothe le Vayer and Bayle 
 may be ranked higher than Bossuet and Fenelon. Sex- 
 tus Empiricus may be read and admired more than 
 Marcus Aurelius. 
 
 But what, however, really appals the critics is the 
 idea that some poet could rank higher than one of the 
 great epic poets or another dramatist than the three 
 or four that the world has recognized as being supreme. 
 The critics can not reconcile themselves to the sugges- 
 tion that some one has written greater plays than 
 Shakespeare, Aeschylus or Eacine, or greater poems 
 than those of Homer, Dante or Milton. Of course, we 
 may find portions of the works of these poets, that 
 taken together in each case will still leave the poet 
 occupy a very prominent part in the list of the world's 
 great singers. These epic poems and the few others 
 we know may be placed below some of the great novels 
 of the nineteenth century. What we today regard as 
 the freakish opinion of some of our critics who place 
 both Balzac and Ibsen above Shakespeare may be the 
 verdict of posterity. 
 
CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 THE DANGEROUS INFLTJENCB OF SOME CLASSICS. 
 
 1. Many classics besides often being bad art are 
 immoral and have an evil influence upon society. They 
 are often responsible, directly or indirectly, for much 
 of our social misery. The false ideas that sow error 
 and misery among us are idealized in many classics; 
 the glamor of art conceals the trappings of falsehood. 
 When a book is all wrong in its conceptions of truth 
 and falsehood, right and wrong, good and bad, and 
 these are made attractive by setting them in a back- 
 ground of poetry, romance and religion, these wrong 
 notions will entwine their roots deep in the social soil. 
 If conventional ideas and the blind worship of custom 
 are suffocating us spiritually, the cause lies in our 
 standard of criticism, which prostrates itself before 
 that literature which eulogizes these conventions. 
 
 The classics are the more dangerous because no 
 one questions their authority. An evil brewing doc- 
 trine in a great book has its baleful power doubled and 
 trebled because of the prestige of the author. If many 
 of the erroneous notions that exist today had not 
 received the sanction of some great philosopher, if 
 many works of art which embody these would not be 
 looked upon with awe, the world might have been 
 spared much of its actual wretchedness. It is par- 
 ticularly the ascetic and pious classics that have been 
 the source of immorality, for they cast a halo about 
 ideas which misled men entirely in their outlook upon 
 life. 
 
 If we keep up our unreasonable enthusiasm for 
 the classics, we constantly keep the false ideas before 
 us. If we still are enthusiastic about books that were 
 written to defend the conventional notions of chastity 
 and monogamy, we are encouraging the miseries that 
 the marriage institution and the misconceptions of 
 
 (79) 
 
80 
 
 chastity have wrought in the world. If we still admire 
 the books written in servile patronage of the court or 
 the church, we take part in the evils that these insti- 
 tutions have inflicted upon the world. 
 
 The classics have often written in defense of 
 religious superstitions and implanted in the people 
 a fear for imaginary sins. The unjust past persecu- 
 tions of those who embraced alleged heretical ideas 
 are the fruits of the influence of the classics. Eeligious 
 persecutors have been made the heroes of literature. 
 Those who omitted to follow the so-called duties to- 
 wards God, which were homage to hideous customs, 
 were depicted as sinners and were put in hell. The 
 antagonism towards original thinkers and their mar- 
 tyrdom, in the past and today, also were the results 
 of the teachings of our classics. It might be a painful 
 truth that a few books distilling the spirit of intolera- 
 tion led to the deaths of Socrates and Bruno. 
 
 Works of art have been responsible for whole- 
 sale religious persecutions and for stirring up wars 
 for false causes. The Spanish Inquisition, the 
 Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Edict of Nantes and 
 the Crusades were partly, at least, the products of 
 literature. The spirit that pervaded these movements 
 was breathed into them by ascetic and feudalistic 
 literature. Sismondi calls Calderon the true poet 
 of the inquisition and mentions his play The Devotion 
 to the Cross, whose teaching is that a religious life will 
 exonerate one from the consequences of great crimes. 
 
 Homer and the romances and poems current in 
 the medieval ages have caused many of the wars that 
 the world has seen. One might find it possible to trace 
 some of the world's wars back to the influences of the 
 stories about Achilles, Caesar, Alexander, The Cid and 
 Charlemagne. 
 
 One might also show how the false doctrine of 
 philosophers like Socrates and Seneca inculcated in 
 
81 
 
 pupils like Alcibiades and Nero were responsible for 
 the terrible calamities that these monsters inflicted 
 upon their countries. Both philosophers personally 
 taught their disciples and had the full opportunity of 
 insisting upon the importance of conforming to ab- 
 stract theories of virtue, and the result of this unnat- 
 ural teaching was that the pupils went in the opposite 
 direction. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the writings of the 
 fathers and the chief works of monastic philosophy 
 in the medieval ages were responsible for the igno- 
 rance, darkness and misery that were prevalent in those 
 times. And the works of St. Augustine, a Kempis 
 and Dante in particular, by being worshiped so 
 much in our own day have wafted many of the abuses 
 and errors of medievalism into our own times. Spenser, 
 Milton and Bunyan are largely to blame for the Puri- 
 tanism that infects our morality and our art. 
 
 "What an interesting task it would be for the his- 
 torian to show how the ulcers in our social life, the 
 outcasts of society, the hatred dividing different 
 religions, classes and races are all partly, at least, due 
 to the influences of some famous books. Books have 
 done much to hinder the world's progress. Probably 
 the above authors would have retarded the world's 
 civilization more had Eabelais, Cervantes and Bacon 
 and Montaigne not counteracted them. 
 
 The fact is that one famous book can do much to 
 spread misery, and what must be the result when there 
 are a hundred or more of such books? 
 
 It is no mere fantastic idea to trace many of the 
 corruptions and woes of the world in the past, and also 
 the present, to the influence of certain literary tastes 
 and the apotheosis of some classic. 
 
 In his chapter on the "Burning of Eome" in his 
 Anti-Christ, Eenan has pointed out how the canon- 
 ization of a certain species of literature caused the 
 
82 
 
 degeneration in the time of Nero. Seneca no doubt 
 incurs much, of the blame for the inhuman persecution 
 of the early Christians ; and yet many of his own teach- 
 ings were Christian in spirit. He created a false taste 
 by teaching mankind to affect one feeling when experi- 
 encing another, to reason directly contrary to one's 
 instincts. The aim after rhetoric and pseudo virtue 
 destroyed the taste of the times and corrupted the 
 morality. His essays and dialogues were forced and 
 artificial and genuine feeling departed from the age, 
 and a love for cruelty spread. 
 
 Eenan also shows how Seneca's Tragedies and 
 the Lacoon introduced a love for counterfeit pathos 
 and the expression of the gigantic in art and literature. 
 People began as a consequence to experience a desire 
 to see the myths acted and the tragic catastrophes 
 enacted by living people who were torn by wild beasts 
 and burnt alive, soaked in oil. 
 
 Eousseau tried to prove that our troubles in this 
 world were due to the progress of thought in the realms 
 of art and science. Though this view is no longer 
 seriously entertained, he caught a glimmer of the idea 
 that books in which are incorporated pernicious and 
 artificial ideas are among the chief causes of the misery 
 infecting our social and spiritual life. True civilization 
 may not, as Eousseau thought, be the cause of man's 
 sufferings, but books in which obsolete and false 
 bygone civilizations live over again may be the source 
 of the woes of mankind. 
 
 2. Eeverence for some of the classics prevents us 
 from appreciating the really good books that do 
 appear. It delays the proper estimate of the real mas- 
 terpieces of today. It will be found in most cases that 
 a new genius is usually welcomed by critics who are 
 not blind worshipers of the classics. The classics 
 are made authorities for our taste, which constantly 
 
83 
 
 alters. They hinder it from developing and compel 
 the laws derived from them to govern us in judging 
 new works. 
 
 Admiration for these classics hinders the march 
 of ideas. It tends to keep life and art at a standstill; 
 it is the enemy of the expansion of the individuality. 
 It militates against independent thought and would 
 consider ideas different from those expounded in the 
 classics as erroneous. The fact that many of the 
 famous literary critics could not understand the great 
 authors of their day may lie in a too eager application 
 to some classics. 
 
 As Addington Symonds shows us, the Elizabethan 
 Age was the great period of writers, chiefly because it 
 was an age of individualism in art ; an age where there 
 existed freedom from the influences of preceding 
 authors. Great names were not flaunted into the eyes 
 of the poets to compel them to walk in the beaten path. 
 The laws of art as formulated by critics from past 
 works of art did not exert a tyrannical influence. The 
 Elizabethan dramatists did not write tragedies with 
 Seneca and Aeschylus before them. Bacon became a 
 great philosopher because he overthrew the authority 
 of Plato and Aristotle. The poets, although they were 
 admirers of some of the ancient and Italian writers, 
 nevertheless looked into their own hearts and wrote. 
 
 Authors of great repute influence mankind into 
 developing bad literary taste. They are praised both 
 for their faults and virtues indiscriminately, and the 
 distinction as to which is which is soon lost. Every 
 great author is also instrumental in ruining the moral 
 and intellectual development of his country. His man- 
 nerisms are adopted and his bigoted ideas gain enor- 
 mous popularity. His weaknesses are admired as his 
 strong points ; he gathers about him a host of imitators 
 and rules of art formed from his works are strictly 
 followed. There is no question, for instance, that Pope 
 
84 
 
 was largely responsible for the decline of English 
 poetry in the eighteenth century. The law of poetry 
 was laid down as something that was written in heroic 
 couplets and was correct, artificial and commonplace. 
 Scott is largely to blame for the trashy novels of adven- 
 ture that all Europe began producing after his death. 
 Had he never lived, probably the psychological novel 
 and the novel of character and idea would have been in 
 the ascendant sooner. Chaucer left a host of imitators, 
 and as a result a barren period in English poetry after 
 his death. 
 
 ' ' After the praise of refining the taste of a nation, ' ' 
 says Adam Smith, "the highest eulogy perhaps, which 
 can be bestowed upon an author, is to say that he cor- 
 rupted it. ' ' 
 
 We should fear the influence of our great authors, 
 be on everlasting watch whether we are not admiring 
 them for defects. We should not pride ourselves on the 
 fact that we are always discovering new beauties in 
 the classics. We may be preparing thus the age of 
 artistic corruption. 
 
 To remain on a level with the classics and under 
 their sway is to neglect the richer and more intellectual 
 side of our own nature, to kill our originality, suspend 
 our judgment and retard the progress of our own 
 minds.