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BOOKS AND CULTURE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "MY STUDY FIRE,'

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IX.--PERSONALITY.

It is undeniable," says Matthew Arnold, that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity is the highest function of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happiness." If this be true, and the heart of man apart from all testimony affirms it, then the great books not only embody and express the genius and vital knowledge of the race which created them, but they are the products of the highest activity of man in the finest moments of his life. They represent a high felicity no less than a noble gift; they are the memorials of a happiness which may have been brief, but which, while it lasted, had a touch of the divine in it; for men are never nearer divinity than in their creative impulses and moments. Homer may have been blind, but if he composed the epics which bear his name he must have known moments of purer happiness than his most fortunate contemporary; Dante missed the lesser comforts of life, but there were hours of transcendent joy in his lonely career. For the highest joy of which men taste is the full, free, and noble putting forth of the power that is in them; no moments in human experience are so thrilling as those in which a man's soul goes out from him into some adequate and beautiful form of expression. In the act of creation a man incorporates his own personality into the visible world about him, and in a true and noble sense gives himself to his fellows. When I an artist looks at his work he sees himself; he has performed the highest task of which he is capable, and fulfilled the highest purpose for which he was planned A by an artist greater than himself.

The rapture of the creative mood and moment is the reward of the little group whose touch on any kind of material is imperishable. It comes when the spell of inspired work is on them, or in the moment which follows immediately on completion and before the reaction of depression, which is the heavy penalty of the artistic temperament, has set in.

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Balzac knew it in that frenzy of work which seized him for days together; and Thackeray knew it, as he confesses, when he had put the finishing touches on that striking scene in which Rawdon Crawley thrashes Lord Steyne within an inch of his wicked life. The great novelist, who happened also to be a great writer, knew that the whole scene in conception and execution was a stroke of genius. But while this supreme rapture belongs to a chosen few, it may be shared by all those who are ready to open the imagination to its approach. It is one of the great rewards of the artist that while other kinds of joy are often pathetically short-lived, his joy, having brought forth enduring works, is, in a sense, imperishable. And it not only endures; it renews itself in kindred moments and experiences which it bestows upon those who approach it sympathetically. There are lines in the Divine Comedy which thrill us to-day as they must have thrilled Dante; there are passages in the Shakspearian plays and sonnets which make a riot in the blood to-day as they doubtless set the poet's pulses beating three centuries ago. The student of literature, therefore, finds in its noblest works not only the ultimate results of race experience and the characteristic quality of race genius, but the highest activity of the greatest minds in their happiest and most expansive moments. In this commingling of the best that is in the race and the best that is in the individual lies the mystery of that double revelation which makes every work of art a disclosure not only of the nature of the man behind it, but of all men behind him. In this commingling, too, is preserved the most precious deposit of what the race has been and done, and of what the man has seen, feit, and known. In the nature of things no educational material can be richer; none so fundamentally expansive and illuminative.

This contact with the richest personalties the world has produced is one of the deepest sources of culture; for nothing is more truly educative than asso

ciation with persons of the highest intelligence and power. When a man recalls his educational experience, he finds that many of his richest opportunities were not identified with subjects or systems or apparatus, but with teachers. There is fundamental truth in Emerson's declaration that it makes very little difference what you study, but that it is in the highest degree important with whom you study. There flows from the living teacher a power which no text-book can compass or contain-the power of liberating the imagination and setting the student free to become an original investigator. Text-books supply methods, information, and discipline; teachers impart the breath of life by giving us inspiration and impulse. Now, the great books are different from all other books in their possession of this mysterious vital force; they are not only textbooks by reason of the knowledge they contain, but they are also books of life by reason of the disclosure of personal ity which they make. The student of Faust receives from that drama not only the poet's interpretation of man's life in the world, but he is also brought under the spell of Goethe's personality and, in a real sense, gets from his book that which his friends got from the man. This is not true of secondary books; it is true only of first-hand books. Secondary books are often products of skill, pieces of well-wrought but entirely self-conscious craftsmanship; firsthand books are always the expression of what is deepest, most original, and distinctive in the nature which produces them. In such books, therefore, we get not only the skill, the art, the knowledge; we get, above all, the man. There is added to what he has to give us of thought or form the inestimable boon of his companionship.

The reality of this element of personality and the force for culture which resides in it are clearly illustrated by a comparison of the works of Plato with those of Aristotle. Aristotle was for many centuries the first name in philosophy, and is still one of the greatest; but Aristotle, although a student of the principles of the art of literature and a critic of deep philosophical insight, was primarily a thinker, not an artist. One goes to him for discipline, for thought, for training in a very high sense; one does not go to him for form, beauty, or

personality. It is a clear, distinct, logical order of ideas, a definite system which he gives us ; not a view of life, a disclosure of the nature of man, a synthesis of ideas touched with beauty, dramatically arranged and set in the atmosphere of Athenian life. For these things one goes to Plato, who is not only a thinker, but an artist of wonderful gifts ; one who so closely and beautifully relates Greek thought to Greek life that we seem not to be studying a system of philosophy, but mingling with the society of Athens in its most fascinating groups and at its most significant moments. To the student of Aristotle the personality of the writer counts for nothing; to the student of the Dialogues, on the other hand, the personality of Plato counts for everything. If we approach him as a thinker, it is true, we discard everything except his ideas; but if we approach him as a great writer ideas are but part of the rich and illuminating whole which he offers us. One can imagine a man fully acquainting himself with the work of Aristotle and yet remaining almost devoid of culture; but one cannot imagine a man coming into intimate companionship with Plato and remaining untouched by his rich, representative personality.

From such a companionship something must flow besides an enlargement of ideas or a development of the power of clear thinking; there must flow also the stimulating and illuminating impulse of a fresh contact with a great nature; there must result a certain liberation of the imagination, a certain widening of experience, a certain ripening of the mind of the student. The beauty of form, the varied and vital aspects of religious, social, and individual character, the splendour and charm of a nobly ordered art in temples, speech, manners, and dress, the constant suggestion of the deep humanism behind that art and of the freshness and reality of all its forms of expression-these things are as much and as great a part of the Dialogues as the thought; and they are full of that quality which enriches and ripens the mind that comes under their influence. In these qualities of his style. quite as much as in his ideas is to be found the real Plato, the great artist, who refused to consider philosophy as an abstract creation of the mind, existing, so far as man is concerned, apart

from the mind which formulates it; but who saw life in its totality and made thought luminous and real by disclosing it at all points against the background of the life, the nature, and the habits of the thinker. This is the method of culture as distinguished from that of scholarship; and this is also the disclosure of

the personality of Plato as distinguished from his philosophical genius. Whoever studies the Dialogues with his heart as well as with his mind comes into personal relations with the richest mind of antiquity.

Hamilton W. Mabie.

A NEMESIS FOR CRITICS.

The dinner had reached its end-a remarkably good dinner it was, too. The cat-like waiter, after setting out the demi-tasses, had placed a dainty little silver lamp between us and had disappeared. In the opposite corner the seacoal sent forth a soft glow that gleamed cheerily on the pictures hanging in artistic irregularity upon the dusky wall. The Successful Author selected a long, thin cigar from the box before him, and lighting it in the flame of the lamp, leaned back in his big leathern chair with the benignant look of one who has dined well and for whom, therefore, Fate has no ill in store.

I thought it a propitious moment to speak of the great success of his latest book, which every one was reading. It had been told me that he disliked any mention of such things, but nevertheless I ventured to say a word of congratulation. He listened to me with no sign of impatience.

"Yes," he said at last, very much as though he were speaking of another man's affairs-" yes, it has done very well-wonderfully well. I believe the sale of it has run up to some forty thousand copies, and that it is still selling. A French translation came out last week, and some one is going to put it into German. That is really as much as one could reasonably ask for."

He was so quiet, so impersonal about it, that he piqued my curiosity. I am always curious about the working of authors' minds, anyhow.

"Anybody would suppose that it didn't interest you," I said. "Doesn't a success of that kind give you a sort of thrill-a keen sense of pleasure? I should think it would."

"Oh, one is pleased, of course; but by the time that one is enough of an

old hand to score successes, he has got beyond the point when he has any particular emotions from them. So far as my experience goes, the only authors who get any thrills out of their works are the lucky people whose first books succeed-people who leap into fameand there are precious few of those. Mrs. Humphry Ward and Rudyard Kipling are about the only ones in our generation that I can think of."

"And yourself. I remember well enough the stir your first book made."

"My first novel-yes; but not my first book. You didn't know that I had published anything but novels? Well, that's a proof of what I was saying, that I'm not one of the lucky ones who score successes at the start, and win the big prize in the lottery at the first drawing. drawing. Dear me, one's first book! What a rare and wonderful thing to any author is his first book! How he works over it, and caresses it, and gives it a million little touches, and dreams of it, and wakes up in the night and pictures its coming triumph! How thrilling are the proof-sheets when they first come to him! When the first complete copy of it actually arrives he wants to shout aloud and dance a war dance. has fledged out into authorship, and he walks on air-he is a god. And then when he finds that no one reads it, and that even his next-door neighbour has never heard of it-then he falls so far down from his golden heights that he never quite climbs up to them again.

He

"Now in my own case, looking back on my first attempt, there was no reason why it should have made a great hit. It was not fiction, nor a book that would naturally be especially popular, yet I really think it ought to have had some little success in its way; and even a

little success would have meant so much to me then! It was a work of research, and it really embodied a very good idea. You wouldn't believe the amount of labour and study and thought that I put into it. But it never sold well enough to pay the publisher for making the plates. It fell absolutely flat." "Perhaps it was too good for the public," I said, rather feebly.

"Nothing is too good for the public. That is a saying with which people who fail try to excuse a coup manqué. No, my first book was murdered-killed at its birth by a confounded reviewer.' This made me smile internally. It sounded so much like a very young author, and not at all like a literary vet

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"But can a single adverse review kill a book?" I could not help asking.

"That depends. It killed mine. You see, the book was one that contained a good deal of special knowledge. It was almost technical, and rather too much so for the average reviewer. Consequently the general run of them held off for a time, and the first notice of it appeared in the State. Now, as you know, the State is a very high-class weekly publication. Its reviews are supposed to be -and generally are-from the pens of specialists. Well, the writer who reviewed my unfortunate production simply wrote a few rather tolerantly contemptuous lines about it and passed it by.

All the other reviews and magazines took their cue from this, not having any special knowledge on the subject, and either passed over it altogether, or else simply repeated the State's opinion in different language. The book never got a fair consideration at all.”

"Oh, well," I said, "I suppose every one suffers in that way at some time or another. There isn't any help for it, of

course.

"But why of course'? That raises the whole question, doesn't it, of the responsibility of critics? I don't see the of course' at all. For instance, in reviewing that book of mine, what did the critic say? Why he said that the work before him, while happy in its choice of subject, was not to be considered seriously, because the writer had not qualified himself by any preliminary study and research.' Now this was just the one criticism that could kill the book, because lack of preliminary study was

the

one fault that would make the whole thing worthless."

"Oh, well, one can't quarrel with the personal opinion of a reviewer. Of course, the opinion may be altogether incorrect; yet if he holds it, what are you to do?"

"Yes, but this was not a question of opinion at all, but one of fact. If he had criticised the style, or objected to the logic of the conclusions, or denounced the dangerous tendency of the argument--all this would have been a matter of opinion, and therefore unassailable. But when he said that I had made no preliminary study of the subject, he simply wrote down what was demonstrably untrue. As a matter of fact, I had given the subject a most thorough study. I had read all the literature that bore upon it (it was an historical topic), I had even spent some eighteen months in Berlin and Paris among the original sources, and the thing had been constantly before my mind for five or six years. This criticism was, therefore, not only false, but could be proven so.'

"Well, granting that it could, what then?"

"Why, simply this. By publishing that hasty condemnation, and thus killing the sale of the book, my critic laid himself open, I hold, to legal prosecution. Take a parallel case outside the sphere of literature. Suppose I have a country house that I want to sell. The local newspaper, let us say, speaks of it as a house of no architectural merit, and built on the worst site for getting a good view; it makes fun of the colour of the blinds, and says that the effect of the whole is incongruous and absurd. So far I have no remedy, for those things are matters of opinion. But suppose it goes on to say that the drainage of the house is defective, that the plumbing is unsanitary, and the neighbourhood malarious — those are statements involving questions of fact, and can be disproved; and as they seriously damage the value of my property, I can bring suit against the author of those falsehoods and recover damages. Now why should it be otherwise in literature? I have a book to sell, into which I have put valuable time, labour, and effort. It is just as much property as a house; and if a reviewer makes false statements calculated to affect the value of that property, why

should I not equally recover damages? If he may not steal my book, neither may he wantonly impair its value. And this is just as true of artistic and dramatic criticism as of any other. A critic may find fault with the subject, or the treatment, or the colouring of a picture, and he is well within his rights; but if he says it is out of drawing, then let him. be careful, for he is making a statement for which he can be brought to book. And so if he writes of an actor that he has not got up his lines, or of an operatic débutante that she flatted her notes, he is saying this at his peril !''

"But how would you propose to call the critic to account?"

"Simply by having authors, for instance, combine for their own protection, and after raising a sufficiently large fund for the purpose, appoint a standing committee to investigate all complaints made by any writer against reviewers who misstate facts in their published criticisms. The committee should sue every such reviewer, just as Fenimore Cooper sued his newspaper enemies, and they should follow it up as he

did until it dawns upon those gentry that property in a book is just as sacred as any other property, and that literary libel is just as punishable as any other libel. At first it would be regarded as a huge joke; but after a few reviewers had been made to pay a hundred dollars or so for the pleasure of slating an author whose work they have only half read, they would begin to think it rather an expensive luxury, and would take their métier as seriously as they ought to do."

The Successful Author chuckled at the scheme that he had evolved, and as he finished his cigar, stretched himself luxuriously as though he hugely relished the prospect of a literary vendetta. It was growing late, and I had to come away, leaving him still laughing softly by the fire; but as I walked down the street, it occurred to me to write his notions down to warn the Bludyers of the press that the time may be near at hand when they will actually have to know a little something about the books whose fortunes they so lightly undertake to make or mar. P. K.

A MARGINAL NOTE.

A poet's volume open in my hand,

I read his words the while the mighty sea
Sang in a drowsy undertone to me

Outstretched in ease upon the smooth white sand.
All through the afternoon across the land

A soft, west wind brought hints of melodyMessage of bird and whispering of treeDropping them lightly down upon the strand.

Lyrics and Sonnets-on and on I read,

Unto the music ever listening,

Nor knowing whether sea or west wind said
In measured rhyme the memorable thing,

Or yet if 'twere the poet's voice instead ;

But this I knew-'twas joy to hear them sing!

Frank Dempster Sherman.

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