CHAPTER III It Can Give You a Better Knowledge of Human H Nature UMAN nature can be learned from every kind of literature. Even lyric poetry, which does not attempt to create character, reflects at least the character of the writer. Take, for example, William Cullen Bryant's great lyric poem, Thanatopsis. Suppose, now, that you knew absolutely nothing about Bryant except that he was the author of this poem. How much of his human nature could you infer from this poem alone? Read it very carefully with this end in view and see if you agree with these findings: First, he was not only an observer but a lover of nature, at least of nature's "visible forms," the sun, the sky, the ocean, woods, meadows, and mountains. His descriptions, in other words, are not only accurate but affectionate. Second, he seems to have been either a very young man or a very old man when he wrote Thanatopsis because 68 the poem is chiefly about the fear of death, or rather about nature as an antidote to the fear of death. Is it not chiefly to the young or to the old that "thoughts of the last bitter hour come like a blight"? I should incline to the guess that the author was a very young man because his philosophy is immature and thin. As we grow older, nature means a great deal more to us than that at death we shall lie down in good company and have a glorious sepulchre. Third, there is a dignity and simplicity and sincerity in the words and thoughts that seem to be the reflection of the author's character. If he was not himself noble and genuine he was a master in the art of making the style conceal the writer. Fourth, whether young or old his use of beautiful vowel-combinations and sonorous words and phrases marks him out as peculiarly gifted in his feeling for the musical qualities of language. Read almost any of the lines of Thanatopsis aloud and you cannot help feeling that the author's ear for word music was almost perfect. As this quality is well sustained from the beginning of the poem to the end I should expect to find it reappear in every poem that the author wrote. Fifth, the close of the poem shows that the author was not unwilling to have his poems end with a formal moral, a sort of "This-fable-teaches-us." As the moral, though beautiful in itself, is not closely connected with what precedes, I should say that the author had the habit of moralizing. Try the same method with other poems by other authors. There is always the autobiographical element and the attempt to find it will show you that style, as Carlyle puts it, is not the coat of a writer but his skin. Then take poems that are national favourites - The Star-Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key, Home, Sweet liome by John Howard Payne, America by Samuel Francis Smith, The Bivouac of the Dead by Theodore O'Hara, The Blue and the Gray by Francis Miles Finch, Little Boy Blue by Eugene Field and study in them the character of the nation that has taken them to heart. There is danger here that you may overrate the nation's real approval of the poems selected. But you will learn at any rate that just as a man expresses himself in what he writes, so a whole people expresses itself in what it likes. It is to be hoped, too, that the historians of literature will take more pains to find out how popular or unpopular a poem really is before they hold it up to us as a mirror of national taste. Popularity is not a high test of literary excellence but it is a sure test of a people's taste. All literature, then, reveals unconsciously something of the men who made it and something also of the people who like or dislike it. But we wish now to study human nature not as it is unconsciously revealed in literature, but as it is consciously created in literature. We have in mind not lyric poetry but great epics, dramas, novels, and short stories. We are thinking not of the men who wrote these but of the men and women who move through their pages, who give them interest and immortality, and who are themselves more alive than their creators. A study of these men and women, we hold, will greatly widen and deepen your knowledge of human nature. There is no chair of human nature in any of our schools or colleges, though it must be admitted that a knowledge of human nature will yield better returns than a knowledge of anything else. In most professions success is not only conditioned on, but is in almost exact proportion to, a wide and sympathetic knowledge of our fellow-men. No one can expect to be a useful teacher, preacher, doctor, editor, lawyer, business-man, employer, or employee who is ignorant of the motives that govern men in the ordinary affairs of life. Knowledge here is power and opportunity, ignorance is weakness and inefficiency. The knowledge that we get from everyday experience may be good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It is neither broad enough nor deep enough. To make it broader and deeper we must go to the great laboratory of character creation that the masters have fitted up and made accessible to us in literature./ What a strange company it is these men and women who were not born but made! They are They are not ghosts, for they never wore flesh. alive, actively and increasingly alive. Try them by the tests of real life: Do they not influence others? Are they not talked about and written about and thought about? Do they show signs of weakness or old age? Have they not become a part of the very consciousness of men? Do not some of them keep alive the memory of nations otherwise forgotten? Are not many of them found in that "choir invisible whose music is the gladness of the world"? Have they not linked man to man, and nation to nation, and century to century by furnishing a common theme of thought and a com |