poetic intuition, without attempting to lay bare the sources of its power, or to institute any comparison between it and the reflective processes. The philosopher reaches his conclusions through investigation and argument; his main resource is the critical faculty, which must fail to exhaust reality, because the spiritual life is so rich and complex "that we can never, by means of reflection, lift into clear consciousness all the ele ments that enter into it." On the other hand, the poet is at his best, not when he argues and tries to demonstrate, but when he yields himself wholly to the moods and inspirations of a direct vision. The poorest pages in Browning's poetry are those which he gives over to formal discussion. If they were expunged, there would be no great loss. In general, it may be said that while art and philosophy pursue different methods, while each has advantages peculiar to itself, yet as both aim at "a thinking of things together," as both strive "to interpret the world in terms of spirit," the suggestion that the distinction between them is not so radical and exclusive as has been commonly supposed may be worthy of consideration. We should expect, therefore, waiving the question of a special divine communication to men through the medium of certain books, that literature would now and then be the source of important the ological movements. The religious agitations which marked the first sixty years of the nineteenth century in England furnish an interesting illustration of this tendency. Philosophers and theologians, it is true, both had a hand in them, effects of such magnitude generally spring from a great variety of causes, but the leadership fell to men of letters. Coleridge belonged to all these guilds, yet, into whatever field he may have ventured, he never ceased to be a poet. Of Carlyle the same thing may be said, with a difference. He was hardly less a creature of the imagination than the man who sat on Highgate Hill. No more magnificent raw material of poetry has been written in the Victorian era than lies scattered over the pages of Sartor Resartus. In Newman and Kingsley literary gifts predominated over all others, while The Christian Year of Keble has become a classic. During the last twenty-five years, although the charge that he was a little too much at ease in Zion for an undoubted prophet might perhaps be sustained, no one has done so much to modify and harmonize theological sentiment as Matthew Arnold, a typical man of letters. In this connection much might be said, and possibly something ought to be said, in reference to the resources of knowledge which we find in literature. The relations which it sustains to theology would seem to indicate that they are large and important. Naturally they will be less in poetry than in prose. But, according to one of the best known descriptions of it, poetry is a criticism of life, and that, to be worth anything, cannot forego knowledge. Or if we prefer to say that "the final test of greatness in a poet is his adequacy to human nature," we imply that all the constituents of it, the grosser and denser not less than the more imponderable, appear in his verse. It is astonishing that men like Professor Freeman should depreciate literature in comparison with history or philology, on the ground that it is out of touch with facts. If there is any truth in what has been said, they cannot be wholly absent even from its most sublimated products. In certain departments of it the element of realism has been very noticeable. Thackeray used to say that Tom Jones and Roderick Random surpassed all the formal histories as a mirror of eighteenth-century society. What is more, since it may involve a writer in serious difficulty if he should tell the truth of contemporaries, or even of the dead, the novel appears to be the only available source of information in respect to certain matters of history and sociology. But it is not in their more material and tangible elements that we find the supreme distinction of great books. The life is ever more than meat, to rouse and inspire a higher service than to swell the stores of information. If it be asked, in view of these superior functions of literature, what special contributions to the furnishing of clergymen may be anticipated from familiarity with it, I make haste to say that it is a sovereign antidote to provincialism. Intellectual and spiritual breadth does not imply uncertainty or laxity of opinion. If it should. lead to indifferentism, if it should melt into a confused mass the sharp outlines of conviction, the less we have of it the better. But we have no reason to anticipate evil consequences of that kind. Literary study certainly tends to establish and fortify definite lines of opinion; and, what is more, it does this with due regard to the laws of proportion. The vice of provincialism is that it ignores perspective, isolates men and things from their natural environment, and, as a result, inevitably falls into gross misconceptions. That great progress has been made in mental enfranchisement will be apparent to any one who will take the trouble to compare the present century with the seventeenth or even the eighteenth, when, to take a single illustration, the highest historic generalization divided the record of mankind into two great sections, one of which was called sacred, and the other profane. We have abandoned this crude philosophy, as we now see that it breaks the unity of human life, restricts the providence of God, and sets religion at odds with reason, if not with morality itself. Literature promotes habits and conditions of mind that exclude provincialism, not so much by virtue of its accumulations of knowledge, however useful they may be, as by bringing men directly into the presence of great thoughts and emotions, which are at once its supreme distinction and capital factors of human progress. No one, for example, can read the six essays of Dr. Johnson selected by Matthew Arnold out of the original half hundred, or the speeches of Burke on American topics, without feeling that his mental horizon has been definitely enlarged, that he sees things in juster relations and proportions. Such reading will communicate whatever breadth of view, whatever insight into the past and present, into the problems of social and religious life, may be gained from association with representative men of the race. Nor will this intimacy be confined to the actual people of history. Books themselves, simply as books, may share in it. Leigh Hunt says that he once saw Charles Lamb give Chapman's Homer a kiss, and that there did not seem to be anything extravagant or unnatural in the act. But more frequently it is rather the people who live in books in the fiction of the novelist or the verse of the poet - who attract us. Indeed, our closest friendships may be with these visionary folk. We sometimes feel that they are the most authentic men and women within the range of our knowledge, feel like the old monk of the Escurial who came to regard the figures which looked out from the canvas of Titian's Last Supper as substantial realities, while the shifting throngs that stared at them and talked about them, in their wanderings through the palace, appeared to be fleeting shadows. The people of literature have a fullness and range of life which those whose being is bounded by the colors of the painter cannot attain. It would be difficult to exaggerate the value of their services to the world, services which the people of flesh and blood have scarcely surpassed. However we may explain the secret of this power, whether it may arise in part from the fact that they are not literal reproductions of living men and women, but creatures of the imagination, freed from all that is local or individual, and therefore exponents of elementary and universal principles of huwe shall not be disposed man nature, to question its wonderful scope and persistence. Out of the hopes and fears, the victories and defeats, of his struggle against arbitrary power the Prometheus of Eschylus still speaks audibly to these later times. Bunyan's Christian walks among us with as firm and veritable a tread as St. Augustine or Thomas à Kempis. For three hundred years what eager audience has there been for my lord Hamlet, what profound admiration of his genius, what patient exploration of the great mystery that darkens his life! It is in connection with this phase of the subject that the unwasting vitality of literature appears in a very striking light. He who said that "the art of printing is the most miraculous of all things man ever devised" spoke the sober truth. It has discovered the secret of immortal youth. Age hath not dimmed the purity of Christabel, nor custom staled the visionary charm of Genevieve. Chaucer's pilgrims are quite as fresh and expectant as on the day when they gathered at the Tabard for their expedition to Canterbury. This art of printing annihilates time and space, even, and makes all generations contemporaries. If we open the pages of Homer, we are transplanted in an instant of time into the earlier world: the Trojan war still rages before wind-swept Ilium, the wrath of Achilles still burns, funeral strains still rise out of the grave of Hector, the tamer of horses. Not only has the vitality of books continued undiminished, in many cases, for centuries, but when we look forward and scan the future, no signs of approaching exhaustion are visible. "We can fancy Shakespeare," said Carlyle, as radiant over all the nations of Englishmen a thousand years hence." We commonly associate fervor with youth. May we expect that the study of literature will kindle enthusiasm in the ministrations of the pulpit? Will it touch the hearts of clergymen as with a live coal from the altar? I have alluded to the impression rife in some quarters that it spoils men for affairs. The impression has also been abroad that it is destructive to fervor. Festus said that books made Paul mad; in later times they have been thought to make preachers dull. But if intimacy with them has any necessary or even probable consequence of this character, it is very singular. Such a result would seem to be in defiance of all recognized laws of cause and effect. We found no blight of dullness on the sermons of the preachers already mentioned. The great divines of the Reformation "lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato," and suffered little loss of vivacity. John Howe's familiarity with Spinoza and Descartes did not kill his unction. Baxter somewhere enumerates the grammarians, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, and theologians whom he studied, but he could write, nevertheless, the impassioned Call to the Unconverted. In place of viewing even technical learning with suspicion, as if somehow it would chill the sensibilities and lower the average of spiritual temperature, clergymen may well incorporate into the liturgy of their private devotions the petition of an ancient bishop, "Lord, send me learning enough that I may preach plain enough." Richard I can indeed understand how exclusive intimacy with the intellectual side of books might have unfortunate consequences. As Mr. Emerson has remarked, the intellect is cool, and if there were nothing else in books it would seriously impair their usefulness. But there are in them other and greater constituents. The professor of homiletics who said that they are for the brain uttered a very mischievous half-truth. Mr. Ruskin has spoken with a keener, more trustworthy insight. After entering into their thoughts, he declares that you have this higher advance to make, "you have to enter into their hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so you must stay with them that you may share at last their great and mighty passion." Hence he contends that it is more important to feel with them what is right than to learn from them what is right. Clergymen who have experienced something of this "great and mighty passion" will not find that it raises barriers between them and their flocks. Nay, it is rather the mysterious power whose touch makes the whole world kin. But, whatever else familiarity with literature may do for the ministry, will it not after all have a tendency to blunt the ethical sensibilities? We must admit that books, as Professor Masson puts it, have given an uncomfortable prominence to the back of the head. The wickedness which is in the world has powerfully affected them. Still, this state of things ought not to surprise us. If they deal truthfully and adequately with life, it is inevitable. Yet it can no longer be regarded as an open question -and this fact is a conclusive answer to all cavils on the score of morality that vicious books are destined to extinction. "If any one thing is proved by the whole history of literature down to the present time," says Symonds, "it is that the self-preservative instinct of humanity rejects such art as does not contribute to its intellectual nutrition or moral sustenance." A constant process of fermentation is in operation by which all vicious and unwholesome elements are thrown off. Within certain limits, the good and evil of literature, it must not be forgotten, are relative, — incidents in the great historic movements of social evolution. What one age considers proper enough, to the next may appear intolerable. None of the devout and, according to contemporary standards, refined ladies to whom Cowper read the life of Mr. Jonathan Wild appear to have been made uncomfortable by the performance. Dryden and the Restoration dramatists would scarcely get the same reception to-day that the seventeenth century accorded them. If the Elizabethan Marston were to write for the present generation, he would need to reform his ethics altogether. However brilliant "the rhetoric of Satan" may be, the time comes, sooner or later, when its charm is gone. So we find that the field of authors who once had great vogue is constantly lessening, and in the inevitable course of events must completely disappear. Yet it is not so much the presence of evil in books as the temper of the writer who deals with it that determines the character of their influence. If the writer is sincere, if his presentation of sin " contains the thrill of pain which touches and teaches," they cannot fairly be called immoral. In Shakespeare there are plenty of coarse passages, but they spread no infection through his plays. His undoubted moral intuition, which is never absent, saves him. The evil which we find in his pages is not there on its own account, - it affords a background upon which virtue is the more effectively set forth. Our appreciation of Cordelia would be less complete were it not for the ugly figures of Goneril and Regan. The coarseness of Caliban and Trinculo brings out with wonderful effect the spiritual ideality of Prospero and Miranda. Without the presence of Falstaff and of his riotous crew we should fail to take the full measure of Shakespeare's favorite hero, Henry V. Admirers of the Italian Machiavelli maintain that in art and knowledge of human nature he rivals the great English dramatist; but unworthy conceptions of life and an evident relish for the baser side of it taint all the creations of his genius, and exclude him irrevocably from the company of immortals. The spokesmen of the race must take service in the cause of truth and purity; and that any class of men who aspire to be ethical and religious teachers should suppose that they can afford to neglect their words is passing strange. Leverett W. Spring. LOUNSBURY'S STUDIES IN CHAUCER. INTO eight monographs, contained in three large and beautifully printed volumes,1 Professor Lounsbury has gathered the fruits of his long devotion to Chaucer. The modest title, Studies, is no index to the riches or the attractiveness of this book, which is not only indispensable to the scholar henceforth, that was to be expected, but is of unusual interest to the general reader. Mr. Lounsbury's style has a peculiar charm it is brilliant without overfinish, it abounds in humor, and it shows a decided turn for epigram. He takes his time, but is never long-winded. One sees so many rough-and-ready compendiums nowadays that it is refreshing to meet with a writer who will not be bullied into unseemly hurry. The first and second chapters are closely related, and, taken together, make up Mr. Lounsbury's life of Chaucer, the best, beyond a doubt, that has yet been written. New facts were scarcely to be expected. A careful sifting of the accumulated material, however, with an appreciation of the hypotheses with which Chaucerians have eked out our scanty information, had become impera tive. In this arduous and delicate investigation Mr. Lounsbury has shown both judgment and acumen. Five moot points will at once occur to everybody who is familiar with the literary controversies of the last twenty or thirty years, 1 Studies in Chaucer. His Life and Writings. BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale the date of Chaucer's birth, his relation to Thomas Chaucer, his supposed meeting with Petrarch, the case of Cecilia Chaumpagne, and the history of his early love. For the date of Chaucer's birth Mr. Lounsbury prefers to 1340 some year between 1331 and 1335, basing his opinion on certain passages in the works of the poet and of his contemporaries, which do not, after all, seem quite conclusive. Yet the earlier date is far from unreasonable. The Petrarch question is examined without sentiment, and with a keen feeling for the humors of the situation. Professor Skeat's dictum that to deny the meeting is to charge Chaucer with "deliberate and unnecessary falsehood" is treated with as much leniency as it deserves. As to Thomas Chaucer, Mr. Lounsbury decides that the weight of evidence is distinctly in favor of his being the poet's son, and to this all sober reasoners will subscribe. The disagreeable guess elaborated by Mrs. Haweis is not even alluded to. The Chaumpagne affair is discussed with great good sense, and felicitously illustrated by an appeal to the manners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Particularly happy is the criticism of that sad pageant of unrequited affection which the ingenuity of scholars has constructed out of shreds and patches of Chaucer's poetry, a tragedy in which Chaucer is made to play the pale complexion of true love, and a high-born lady, fair but unapproachable, University. In three volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1892. |