Relation of Literature to Life

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> Relation of Literature to Life


"And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state,
virtue and the virtuous are dishonored.

"And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is
neglected.

"And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become
lovers of trade and money, and they honor and reverence the rich man and
make a ruler of him, and dishonor the poor man.

"They do so."

The object of a reasonable statesman (it is Plato who is really speaking
in the Laws) is not that the state should be as great and rich as
possible, should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by
sea and land.

The citizen must, indeed, be happy and good, and the legislator will seek
to make him so; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot
be; not at least in the sense in which many speak of riches. For they
describe by the term "rich" the few who have the most valuable
possessions, though the owner of them be a rogue. And if this is true, I
can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be happy: he must
be good as well as rich. And good in a high degree and rich in a high
degree at the same time he cannot be. Some one will ask, Why not? And we
shall answer, Because acquisitions which come from sources which are just
and unjust indifferently are more than double those which come from just
sources only; and the sums which are expended neither honorably nor
disgracefully are only half as great as those which are expended
honorably and on honorable purposes. Thus if one acquires double and
spends half, the other, who is in the opposite case and is a good man,
cannot possibly be wealthier than he. The first (I am speaking of the
saver, and not of the spender) is not always bad; he may indeed in some
cases be utterly bad, but as I was saying, a good man he never is. For he
who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither justly
nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty. On the other
hand, the utterly bad man is generally profligate, and therefore poor;
while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just means
only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be very
poor. The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very rich are
not good, and if they are not good they are not happy.

And the conclusion of Plato is that we ought not to pursue any occupation
to the neglect of that for which riches exist--"I mean," he says, "soul
and body, which without gymnastics and without education will never be
worth anything; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times,
the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts."

Men cannot be happy unless they are good, and they cannot be good unless
the care of the soul occupies the first place in their thoughts. That is
the first interest of man; the interest in the body is midway; and last
of all, when rightly regarded, is the interest about money.

The majority of mankind reverses this order of interests, and therefore
it sets literature to one side as of no practical account in human life.
More than this, it not only drops it out of mind, but it has no
conception of its influence and power in the very affairs from which it
seems to be excluded. It is my purpose to show not only the close
relation of literature to ordinary life, but its eminent position in
life, and its saving power in lives which do not suspect its influence or
value. Just as it is virtue that saves the state, if it be saved,
although the majority do not recognize it and attribute the salvation of
the state to energy, and to obedience to the laws of political economy,
and to discoveries in science, and to financial contrivances; so it is
that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and
not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence
for a civilization that is worth anything, a civilization that does not
by its own nature work its decay, is that which I call literature. It is
time to define what we mean by literature. We may arrive at the meaning
by the definition of exclusion. We do not mean all books, but some books;
not all that is written and published, but only a small part of it. We do
not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science, of medicine,
and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or biography, or
fiction even. These may all be ephemeral in their nature. The term
belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow. In books
of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel, adventure,
biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that possess, or
the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes within our
meaning of literature. It must have in it something of the enduring and
the universal. When we use the term art, we do not mean the arts; we are
indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts. In art and
literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and
in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal
to the universal in the race. It is, for example, impossible for a
Christian today to understand what the religious system of the Egyptians
of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to grasp the
idea conveyed to a Chinaman's thought in the phrase, "the worship of the
principle of heaven"; but the Christian of today comprehends perfectly
the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of Thotmes III., who
described the comical miseries of his campaign with as clear an appeal to
universal human nature as Horace used in his 'Iter Brundusium;' and the
maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the bitter-sweetness of
Thomas a Kempis. De Quincey distinguishes between the literature of
knowledge and the literature of power. The definition is not exact; but
we may say that the one is a statement of what is known, the other is an
emanation from the man himself; or that one may add to the sum of human
knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a higher want in human
nature than the want of knowledge. We select and set aside as literature
that which is original, the product of what we call genius. As I have
said, the subject of a production does not always determine the desired
quality which makes it literature. A biography may contain all the facts
in regard to a man and his character, arranged in an orderly and
comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it may be so
written, like Plutarch's Lives or Defoe's account of Robinson Crusoe,
that it is literature, and of imperishable value as a picture of human
life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is higher
than the want of knowledge. And this contribution, which I desire to be
understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the thing of
most value in the lives of the majority of men, whether they are aware of
it or not. It may be weighty and profound; it may be light, as light as
the fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore; it may be the thought
of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a perfect
state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute beauty,
goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the soul;
or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman: but it has this one
quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for
facts, for knowledge, for wealth.

In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of
literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be
called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized,
in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary
obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back
by equally emphasized contempt. The apostles of light regard the rest of
mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these
self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy
with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions
of life easier. It is natural that every man should magnify the circle of
the world in which he is active and imagine that all outside of it is
comparatively unimportant. Everybody who is not a drone has his
sufficient world. To the lawyer it is his cases and the body of law, it
is the legal relation of men that is of supreme importance; to the
merchant and manufacturer all the world consists in buying and selling,
in the production and exchange of products; to the physician all the
world is diseased and in need of remedies; to the clergyman speculation
and the discussion of dogmas and historical theology assume immense
importance; the politician has his world, the artist his also, and the
man of books and letters a realm still apart from all others. And to each
of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary
importance; he is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing.
To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a litigant; to the grocer the
world is that which eats, and pays--with more or less regularity; to the
scholar the world is in books and ideas. One realizes how possessed he is
with his own little world only when by chance he changes his profession
or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or journalism,
and sees in its true proportion what it was that once absorbed him and
seemed to him so large. When Socrates discusses with Gorgias the value of
rhetoric, the use of which, the latter asserts, relates to the greatest
and best of human things, Socrates says: I dare say you have heard men
singing--at feasts the old drinking-song, in which the singers enumerate
the goods of life-first, health; beauty next; thirdly, wealth honestly
acquired. The producers of these things--the physician, the trainer, the
money-maker--each in turn contends that his art produces the greatest
good. Surely, says the physician, health is the greatest good; there is
more good in my art, says the trainer, for my business is to make men
beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says the money-maker, whether
any one can produce a greater good than wealth. But, insists Gorgias, the
greatest good of men, of which I am the creator, is that which gives men
freedom in their persons, and the power of ruling over others in their
several states--that is, the word which persuades the judge in the court,
or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly: if you
have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your
slave, and the trainer your slave, and the moneymaker of whom you talk
will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for those who are
able to speak and persuade the multitude.

What we call life is divided into occupations and interest, and the
horizons of mankind are bounded by them. It happens naturally enough,
therefore, that there should be a want of sympathy in regard to these
pursuits among men, the politician despising the scholar, and the scholar
looking down upon the politician, and the man of affairs, the man of
industries, not caring to conceal his contempt for both the others. And
still more reasonable does the division appear between all the world
which is devoted to material life, and the few who live in and for the
expression of thought and emotion. It is a pity that this should be so,
for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the
gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature
suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the facts and
feelings of men.

If the poet lives in a world apart from the vulgar, the most lenient
apprehension of him is that his is a sort of fool's paradise. One of the
most curious features in the relation of literature to life is this, that
while poetry, the production of the poet, is as necessary to universal
man as the atmosphere, and as acceptable, the poet is regarded with that
mingling of compassion and undervaluation, and perhaps awe, which once
attached to the weak-minded and insane, and which is sometimes expressed
by the term "inspired idiot." However the poet may have been petted and
crowned, however his name may have been diffused among peoples, I doubt
not that the popular estimate of him has always been substantially what
it is today. And we all know that it is true, true in our individual
consciousness, that if a man be known as a poet and nothing else, if his
character is sustained by no other achievement than the production of
poetry, he suffers in our opinion a loss of respect. And this is only
recovered for him after he is dead, and his poetry is left alone to speak
for his name. However fond my lord and lady were of the ballad, the place
of the minstrel was at the lower end of the hall. If we are pushed to say
why this is, why this happens to the poet and not to the producers of
anything else that excites the admiration of mankind, we are forced to
admit that there is something in the poet to sustain the popular judgment
of his in utility. In all the occupations and professions of life there
is a sign put up, invisible--but none the less real, and expressing an
almost universal feeling--"No poet need apply." And this is not because
there are so many poor poets; for there are poor lawyers, poor soldiers,
poor statesmen, incompetent business men; but none of the personal
disparagement attaches to them that is affixed to the poet. This popular
estimate of the poet extends also, possibly in less degree, to all the
producers of the literature that does not concern itself with knowledge.
It is not our care to inquire further why this is so, but to repeat that
it is strange that it should be so when poetry is, and has been at all
times, the universal solace of all peoples who have emerged out of
barbarism, the one thing not supernatural and yet akin to the
supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid conditions,
tolerable to the race. For poetry is not merely the comfort of the
refined and the delight of the educated; it is the alleviator of poverty,
the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary
pilgrimage. We cannot conceive the abject animal condition of our race
were poetry abstracted; and we do not wonder that this should be so when
we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for
raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as
the body. The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the
office or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical
conditions in which the majority exist. There are races, which we may
call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly exemplified. It
would be difficult to find poverty more complete, physical wants less
gratified, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental
peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the
steppes of Siberia. But there are perhaps none among the more favored
races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and
romance. Watch the throng seated about an Arab or Indian or Persian
story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry,
almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid
condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense
absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement
as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they
are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment that
all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples. Measure, if
you can, what poetry is to them, what their lives would be without it. To
the millions and millions of men who are in this condition, the bard, the
story-teller, the creator of what we are considering as literature, comes
with the one thing that can lift them out of poverty, suffering--all the
woe of which nature is so heedless.

It is not alone of the poetical nations of the East that this is true,
nor is this desire for the higher enjoyment always wanting in the savage
tribes of the West. When the Jesuit Fathers in 1768 landed upon the
almost untouched and unexplored southern Pacific coast, they found in the
San Gabriel Valley in Lower California that the Indians had games and
feasts at which they decked themselves in flower garlands that reached to
their feet, and that at these games there were song contests which
sometimes lasted for three days. This contest of the poets was an old
custom with them. And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had
never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it
down from father to son. We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry
whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power
which literature gives them to live outside it. Through our sacred
Scriptures, through the ancient storytellers, through the tradition which
in literature made, as I said, the chief continuity in the stream of
time, we all live a considerable, perhaps the better, portion of our
lives in the Orient. But I am not sure that the Scotch peasant, the
crofter in his Highland cabin, the operative in his squalid
tenement-house, in the hopelessness of poverty, in the grime of a life
made twice as hard as that of the Arab by an inimical climate, does not
owe more to literature than the man of culture, whose material
surroundings are heaven in the imagination of the poor. Think what his
wretched life would be, in its naked deformity, without the popular
ballads, without the romances of Scott, which have invested his land for
him, as for us, with enduring charm; and especially without the songs of
Burns, which keep alive in him the feeling that he is a man, which impart
to his blunted sensibility the delicious throb of spring-songs that
enable him to hear the birds, to see the bits of blue sky-songs that make
him tender of the wee bit daisy at his feet--songs that hearten him when
his heart is fit to break with misery. Perhaps the English peasant, the
English operative, is less susceptible to such influences than the Scotch
or the Irish; but over him, sordid as his conditions are, close kin as he
is to the clod, the light of poetry is diffused; there filters into his
life, also, something of that divine stream of which we have spoken, a
dialect poem that touches him, the leaf of a psalm, some bit of
imagination, some tale of pathos, set afloat by a poor writer so long ago
that it has become the common stock of human tradition-maybe from
Palestine, maybe from the Ganges, perhaps from Athens--some expression of
real emotion, some creation, we say, that makes for him a world, vague
and dimly apprehended, that is not at all the actual world in which he
sins and suffers. The poor woman, in a hut with an earth floor, a reeking
roof, a smoky chimney, barren of comfort, so indecent that a gentleman
would not stable his horse in it, sits and sews upon a coarse garment,
while she rocks the cradle of an infant about whom she cherishes no
illusions that his lot will be other than that of his father before him.
As she sits forlorn, it is not the wretched hovel that she sees, nor
other hovels like it--rows of tenements of hopeless poverty, the
ale-house, the gin-shop, the coal-pit, and the choking factory--but:

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green"

for her, thanks to the poet. But, alas for the poet there is not a
peasant nor a wretched operative of them all who will not shake his head
and tap his forehead with his forefinger when the poor poet chap passes
by. The peasant has the same opinion of him that the physician, the
trainer, and the money-lender had of the rhetorician.

The hard conditions of the lonely New England life, with its religious
theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as difficult
to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have
been unendurable if they had not been touched with the ideal created by
the poet. There was in creed and purpose the virility that creates a
state, and, as Menander says, the country which is cultivated with
difficulty produces brave men; but we leave out an important element in
the lives of the Pilgrims if we overlook the means they had of living
above their barren circumstances. I do not speak only of the culture
which many of them brought from the universities, of the Greek and Roman
classics, and what unworldly literature they could glean from the
productive age of Elizabeth and James, but of another source, more
universally resorted to, and more powerful in exciting imagination and
emotion, and filling the want in human nature of which we have spoken.
They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of
religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of
life, or a guide to heaven. It supplied the place to them of the
Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab. It opened to
them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination.

What is the Bible? It might have sufficed, accepted as a book of
revelation, for all the purposes of moral guidance, spiritual
consolation, and systematized authority, if it had been a collection of
precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury
of promises. We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training their
intellectual faculties in the knottiest problems of human responsibility
and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling with dogmas and
the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew out of the
Bible: what else it was to them in a degree it has been to few peoples
many age. For the Bible is the unequaled record of thought and emotion,
the reservoir of poetry, traditions, stories, parables, exaltations,
consolations, great imaginative adventure, for which the spirit of man is
always longing. It might have been, in warning examples and commands,
all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on earth and
reach a better country; but it would have been a very different book to
mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it lacked its
wonderful literary quality. It might have enabled men to reach a better
country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in that better
country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of actual life. For,
apart from its religious intention and sacred character, the book is so
written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophecies,
promises, stories, that clear literary quality that supplies, as
certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is
higher than the want of facts or knowledge.

The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it
always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points. And this
is the test of any piece of literature--its universal appeal to human
nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households,
the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh
laws--only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and
Virginia--the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the
expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of
worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and
conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them. It was an
open door into a world where emotion is expressed, where imagination can
range, where love and longing find a language, where imagery is given to
every noble and suppressed passion of the soul, where every aspiration
finds wings. It was history, or, as Thucydides said, philosophy teaching
by example; it was the romance of real life; it was entertainment
unfailing; the wonder-book of childhood, the volume of sweet sentiment to
the shy maiden, the sword to the soldier, the inciter of the youth to
heroic enduring of hardness, it was the refuge of the aged in failing
activity. Perhaps we can nowhere find a better illustration of the true
relation of literature to life than in this example.

Let us consider the comparative value of literature to mankind. By
comparative value I mean its worth to men in comparison with other things
of acknowledged importance, such as the creation of industries, the
government of States, the manipulation of the politics of an age, the
achievements in war and discovery, and the lives of admirable men. It
needs a certain perspective to judge of this aright, for the near and the
immediate always assume importance. The work that an age has on hand,
whether it be discovery, conquest, the wars that determine boundaries or
are fought for policies, the industries that develop a country or affect
the character of a people, the wielding of power, the accumulation of
fortunes, the various activities of any given civilization or period,
assume such enormous proportions to those engaged in them that such a
modest thing as the literary product seems insignificant in comparison;
and hence it is that the man of action always holds in slight esteem the
man of thought, and especially the expresser of feeling and emotion, the
poet and the humorist. It is only when we look back over the ages, when
civilizations have passed or changed, over the rivalries of States, the
ambitions and enmities of men, the shining deeds and the base deeds that
make up history, that we are enabled to see what remains, what is
permanent. Perhaps the chief result left to the world out of a period of
heroic exertion, of passion and struggle and accumulation, is a sheaf of
poems, or the record by a man of letters of some admirable character.
Spain filled a large place in the world in the sixteenth century, and its
influence upon history is by no means spent yet; but we have inherited
out of that period nothing, I dare say, that is of more value than the
romance of Don Quixote. It is true that the best heritage of generation
from generation is the character of great men; but we always owe its
transmission to the poet and the writer. Without Plato there would be no
Socrates. There is no influence comparable in human life to the
personality of a powerful man, so long as he is present to his
generation, or lives in the memory of those who felt his influence. But
after time has passed, will the world, will human life, that is
essentially the same in all changing conditions, be more affected by what
Bismarck did or by what Goethe said?