The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Charles Dudley Warner

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Charles Dudley Warner


Never, too, had I been more impressed with the suavity, the
agreeableness, the general charm of his manner. He had determined during
the coming winter to learn to ride the wheel, and we then and there
planned to take a bicycle trip during the following summer, as we had
previously made excursions together on horseback. When we parted, it was
with the agreement that we should meet the next spring in Washington and
fix definitely upon the time and region of our intended ride. It was on a
Saturday morning that I bade him good-by, apparently in the best of
health and spirits. It was on the evening of the following Saturday
--October 20th--that the condensed, passionless, relentless message which
the telegraph transmits, informed me that he had died that afternoon.

That very day he had lunched at a friend's, where were gathered several
of his special associates who had chanced to come together at the same
house, and then had gone to the office of the Hartford Courant. There was
not the slightest indication apparent of the end that was so near. After
the company broke up, he started out to pay a visit to one of the city
parks, of which he was a commissioner. On his way thither, feeling a
certain faintness, he turned aside into a small house whose occupants he
knew, and asked to sit down for a brief rest, and then, as the faintness
increased, to lie undisturbed on the lounge for a few minutes. The few
minutes passed, and with them his life. In the strictest sense of the
words, he had fallen asleep. From one point of view it was an ideal way
to die. To the individual, death coming so gently, so suddenly, is shorn
of all its terrors. It is only those who live to remember and to lament
that the suffering comes which has been spared the victim. Even to them,
however, is the consolation that though they may have been fully prepared
for the coming of the inevitable event, it would have been none the less
painful when it actually came.

Warner as a writer we all know. The various and varying opinions
entertained about the quality and value of his work do not require notice
here. Future times will assign him his exact position in the roll of
American authors, and we need not trouble ourselves to anticipate, as we
shall certainly not be able to influence, its verdict. But to only a
comparatively few of those who knew him as a writer was it given to know
him as a man; to still fewer to know him in that familiarity of intimacy
which reveals all that is fine or ignoble in a man's personality. Scanty
is the number of those who will come out of that severest of ordeals so
successfully as he. The same conclusion would be reached, whether we were
to consider him in his private relations or in his career as a man of
letters. Among the irritable race of authors no one was freer from petty
envy or jealousy. During many years of close intercourse, in which he
constantly gave utterance to his views both of men and things with
absolute unreserve, I recall no disparaging opinion ever expressed of any
writer with whom he had been compared either for praise or blame. He had
unquestionably definite and decided opinions. He would point out that
such or such a work was above or below its author's ordinary level; but
there was never any ill-nature in his comment, no depreciation for
depreciation's sake. Never in truth was any one more loyal to his
friends. If his literary conscience would not permit him to say anything
in favor of something which they had done, he usually contented himself
with saying nothing. Whatever failing there was on his critical side was
due to this somewhat uncritical attitude; for it is from his particular
friends that the writer is apt to get the most dispassionate
consideration and sometimes the coldest commendation. It was a part of
Warner's generous recognition of others that he was in all sincerity
disposed to attribute to those he admired and to whom he was attached an
ability of which some of them at least were much inclined to doubt their
own possession.

Were I indeed compelled to select any one word which would best give the
impression, both social and literary, of Warner's personality, I should
be disposed to designate it as urbanity. That seems to indicate best the
one trait which most distinguished him either in conversation or writing.
Whatever it was, it was innate, not assumed. It was the genuine outcome
of the kindliness and broad-mindedness of his nature and led him to
sympathize with men of all positions in life and of all kinds of ability.
It manifested itself in his attitude towards every one with whom he came
in contact. It led him to treat with fullest consideration all who were
in the least degree under his direction, and converted in consequence the
toil of subordinates into a pleasure. It impelled him to do unsought
everything which lay in his power for the success of those in whom he
felt interest. Many a young writer will recall his words of encouragement
at some period in his own career when the quiet appreciation of one meant
more to him than did later the loud applause of many. As it was in
public, so it was in private life. The generosity of his spirit, the
geniality and high-bred courtesy of his manner, rendered a visit to his
home as much a social delight as his wide knowledge of literature and his
appreciation of what was best in it made it an intellectual
entertainment.


THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.






THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
PRELIMINARY

This paper was prepared and delivered at several of our universities as
introductory to a course of five lectures which insisted on the value of
literature in common life--some hearers thought with an exaggerated
emphasis--and attempted to maintain the thesis that all genuine, enduring
literature is the outcome of the time that produces it, is responsive to
the general sentiment of its time; that this close relation to human life
insures its welcome ever after as a true representation of human nature;
and that consequently the most remunerative method of studying a
literature is to study the people for whom it was produced. Illustrations
of this were drawn from the Greek, the French, and the English
literatures. This study always throws a flood of light upon the meaning
of the text of an old author, the same light that the reader
unconsciously has upon contemporary pages dealing with the life with
which he is familiar. The reader can test this by taking up his
Shakespeare after a thorough investigation of the customs, manners, and
popular life of the Elizabethan period. Of course the converse is true
that good literature is an open door into the life and mode of thought of
the time and place where it originated.




THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE

I hade a vision once--you may all have had a like one--of the stream of
time flowing through a limitless land. Along its banks sprang up in
succession the generations of man. They did not move with the stream-they
lived their lives and sank away; and always below them new generations
appeared, to play their brief parts in what is called history--the
sequence of human actions. The stream flowed on, opening for itself
forever a way through the land. I saw that these successive dwellers on
the stream were busy in constructing and setting afloat vessels of
various size and form and rig--arks, galleys, galleons, sloops, brigs,
boats propelled by oars, by sails, by steam. I saw the anxiety with which
each builder launched his venture, and watched its performance and
progress. The anxiety was to invent and launch something that should
float on to the generations to come, and carry the name of the builder
and the fame of his generation. It was almost pathetic, these puny
efforts, because faith always sprang afresh in the success of each new
venture. Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be launched at
all; they sank like lead, close to the shore. Others floated out for a
time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and
disappeared. Some, not well put together, broke into fragments in the
bufleting of the waves. Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on
their sails, and went away with good promise of a long voyage. But only a
few floated for any length of time, and still fewer were ever seen by the
generation succeeding that which launched them. The shores of the stream
were strewn with wrecks; there lay bleaching in the sand the ribs of many
a once gallant craft.

Innumerable were the devices of the builders to keep their inventions
afloat. Some paid great attention to the form of the hull, others to the
kind of cargo and the loading of it, while others--and these seemed the
majority--trusted more to some new sort of sail, or new fashion of
rudder, or new application of propelling power. And it was wonderful to
see what these new ingenuities did for a time, and how each generation
was deceived into the belief that its products would sail on forever. But
one fate practically came to the most of them. They were too heavy, they
were too light, they were built of old material, and they went to the
bottom, they went ashore, they broke up and floated in fragments. And
especially did the crafts built in imitation of something that had
floated down from a previous generation come to quick disaster. I saw
only here and there a vessel, beaten by weather and blackened by time
--so old, perhaps, that the name of the maker was no longer legible; or
some fragments of antique wood that had evidently come from far up the
stream. When such a vessel appeared there was sure to arise great dispute
about it, and from time to time expeditions were organized to ascend the
river and discover the place and circumstances of its origin. Along the
banks, at intervals, whole fleets of boats and fragments had gone ashore,
and were piled up in bays, like the driftwood of a subsided freshet.
Efforts were made to dislodge these from time to time and set them afloat
again, newly christened, with fresh paint and sails, as if they stood a
better chance of the voyage than any new ones. Indeed, I saw that a large
part of the commerce of this river was, in fact, the old hulks and
stranded wrecks that each generation had set afloat again. As I saw it in
this foolish vision, how pathetic this labor was from generation to
generation; so many vessels launched; so few making a voyage even for a
lifetime; so many builders confident of immortality; so many lives
outlasting this coveted reputation! And still the generations, each with
touching hopefulness, busied themselves with this child's play on the
banks of the stream; and still the river flowed on, whelming and wrecking
the most of that so confidently committed to it, and bearing only here
and there, on its swift, wide tide, a ship, a boat, a shingle.

These hosts of men whom I saw thus occupied since history began were
authors; these vessels were books; these heaps of refuse in the bays were
great libraries. The allegory admits of any amount of ingenious
parallelism. It is nevertheless misleading; it is the illusion of an idle
fancy. I have introduced it because it expresses, with some whimsical
exaggeration--not much more than that of "The Vision of Mirza"--the
popular notion about literature and its relation to human life. In the
popular conception, literature is as much a thing apart from life as
these boats on the stream of time were from the existence, the struggle,
the decay of the generations along the shore. I say in the popular
conception, for literature is wholly different from this, not only in its
effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of lives upon this
earth; it is not only an integral part of all of them, but, with its
sister arts, it is the one unceasing continuity in history. Literature
and art are not only the records and monuments made by the successive
races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and emotion, but
they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on, enduring, amid
the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling the fleeting
generations. Without this continuity of thought and emotion, history
would present us only a succession of meaningless experiments. The
experiments fail, the experiments succeed--at any rate, they end--and
what remains for transmission, for the sustenance of succeeding peoples?
Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and expressed. It is true
that every era, each generation, seems to have its peculiar work to do;
it is to subdue the intractable earth, to repel or to civilize the
barbarians, to settle society in order, to build cities, to amass wealth
in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices such as were
never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance of each
other--lucky if they have anything to say when that is accomplished--to
extend the information of the few among the many, or to multiply the
means of easy and luxurious living. Age after age the world labors for
these things with the busy absorption of a colony of ants in its castle
of sand. And we must confess that the process, such, for instance, as
that now going on here--this onset of many peoples, which is transforming
the continent of America--is a spectacle to excite the imagination in the
highest degree. If there were any poet capable of putting into an epic
the spirit of this achievement, what an epic would be his! Can it be that
there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in
hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say,
it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our
destination sooner--getting there quickly being a supreme object. It is
well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in
masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to
themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal from the bowels
of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift-running carriages,
to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships. This gigantic
achievement strikes the imagination.

If the world in which you live happens to be the world of books, if your
pursuit is to know what has been done and said in the world, to the end
that your own conception of the value of life may be enlarged, and that
better things may be done and said hereafter, this world and this pursuit
assume supreme importance in your mind. But you can in a moment place
yourself in relations--you have not to go far, perhaps only to speak to
your next neighbor--where the very existence of your world is scarcely
recognized. All that has seemed to you of supreme importance is ignored.
You have entered a world that is called practical, where the things that
we have been speaking of are done; you have interest in it and sympathy
with it, because your scheme of life embraces the development of ideas
into actions; but these men of realities have only the smallest
conception of the world that seems to you of the highest importance; and,
further, they have no idea that they owe anything to it, that it has ever
influenced their lives or can add anything to them. And it may chance
that you have, for the moment, a sense of insignificance in the small
part you are playing in the drama going forward. Go out of your library,
out of the small circle of people who talk of books, who are engaged in
research, whose liveliest interest is in the progress of ideas, in the
expression of thought and emotion that is in literature; go out of this
atmosphere into a region where it does not exist, it may be into a place
given up to commerce and exchange, or to manufacturing, or to the
development of certain other industries, such as mining, or the pursuit
of office--which is sometimes called politics. You will speedily be aware
how completely apart from human life literature is held to be, how few
people regard it seriously as a necessary element in life, as anything
more than an amusement or a vexation. I have in mind a mountain district,
stripped, scarred, and blackened by the ruthless lumbermen, ravished of
its forest wealth; divested of its beauty, which has recently become the
field of vast coal-mining operations. Remote from communication, it was
yesterday an exhausted, wounded, deserted country. Today audacious
railways are entering it, crawling up its mountain slopes, rounding its
dizzy precipices, spanning its valleys on iron cobwebs, piercing its
hills with tunnels. Drifts are opened in its coal seams, to which iron
tracks shoot away from the main line; in the woods is seen the gleam of
the engineer's level, is heard the rattle of heavily-laden wagons on the
newly-made roads; tents are pitched, uncouth shanties have sprung up,
great stables, boarding-houses, stores, workshops; the miner, the
blacksmith, the mason, the carpenter have arrived; households have been
set up in temporary barracks, children are already there who need a
school, women who must have a church and society; the stagnation has
given place to excitement, money has flowed in, and everywhere are the
hum of industry and the swish of the goad of American life. On this
hillside, which in June was covered with oaks, is already in October a
town; the stately trees have been felled; streets are laid out and graded
and named; there are a hundred dwellings, there are a store, a
post-office, an inn; the telegraph has reached it, and the telephone and
the electric light; in a few weeks more it will be in size a city, with
thousands of people--a town made out of hand by drawing men and women
from other towns, civilized men and women, who have voluntarily put
themselves in a position where they must be civilized over again.

This is a marvelous exhibition of what energy and capital can do. You
acknowledge as much to the creators of it. You remember that not far back
in history such a transformation as this could not have been wrought in a
hundred years. This is really life, this is doing something in the world,
and in the presence of it you can see why the creators of it regard your
world, which seemed to you so important, the world whose business is the
evolution and expression of thought and emotion, as insignificant. Here
is a material addition to the business and wealth of the race, here
employment for men who need it, here is industry replacing stagnation,
here is the pleasure of overcoming difficulties and conquering obstacles.
Why encounter these difficulties? In order that more coal may be procured
to operate more railway trains at higher speed, to supply more factories,
to add to the industrial stir of modern life. The men who projected and
are pushing on this enterprise, with an executive ability that would
maintain and manoeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, however,
consciously philanthropists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving
employment to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass
grow where one grew before. They enjoy no doubt the sense of power in
bringing things to pass, the feeling of leadership and the consequence
derived from its recognition; but they embark in this enterprise in order
that they may have the position and the luxury that increased wealth will
bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material
advantages--sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which are
the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and
statuary and curiosities, the most showy equipages and troops of
servants; the object being that their wives shall dress magnificently,
glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the
ground; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best
pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and--a consideration
that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our world--that
they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk.

This life--for this enterprise and its objects are types of a
considerable portion of life--is not without its ideal, its hero, its
highest expression, its consummate flower. It is expressed in a word
which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the
word Barnum--for our crude young nation has the distinction of adding a
verb to the French language, the verb to barnum--it is expressed in the
well-known name Croesus. This is a standard--impossible to be reached
perhaps, but a standard. If one may say so, the country is sown with
seeds of Croesus, and the crop is forward and promising. The interest to
us now in the observation of this phase of modern life is not in the
least for purposes of satire or of reform. We are inquiring how wholly
this conception of life is divorced from the desire to learn what has
been done and said to the end that better things may be done and said
hereafter, in order that we may understand the popular conception of the
insignificant value of literature in human affairs. But it is not aside
from our subject, rather right in its path, to take heed of what the
philosophers say of the effect in other respects of the pursuit of
wealth.

One cause of the decay of the power of defense in a state, says the
Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws--one cause is the love of wealth, which
wholly absorbs men and never for a moment allows them to think of
anything but their private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen
hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain; mankind
are ready to learn any branch of knowledge and to follow any pursuit
which tends to this end, and they laugh at any other; that is the reason
why a city will not be in earnest about war or any other good and
honorable pursuit.

The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says
Socrates, in the Republic, is the ruin of democracy. They invent illegal
modes of expenditure; and what do they or their wives care about the law?

"And then one, seeing another's display, proposes to rival him, and thus
the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character.

"After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a
fortune, the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are
placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.

"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.