Platform Monologues | Page 2

comes home to us with a still
keener delight. We feel all we felt before, but we enjoy it more,
because we understand in some degree why we feel it. Say what we
will, we are never really content with an admiration which cannot
render to itself a reason. What are all the thousand works of literary
criticism called forth by, unless it be by that perpetual question which
nags for an answer in all intelligent minds, the question "What is the
gift which, behind all mere diction, behind all cadence and rhythm and
rhyme, behind all mere lucidity, behind all mere intellect, and behind
all variety of subject matter, makes writing everlastingly fresh,
admirable, a thing of beauty and a joy for ever"?
Alas! we cannot, indeed, necessarily hope to get that gift into our own
power because we can perceive it in the great masters. According to the
Apostle, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and
cometh down from the Father of lights." "Their vigour is of the fire and
their origin is celestial," says the pagan. The coelestis origo is

unpurchasable. Nevertheless, even for the ordinary being who aspires
himself to write, there is this practical benefit to be derived from an
insight into the truth--that he will know in what the supreme gift does
consist. He will not delude himself into fancying that it means merely
grammatical accuracy, or a command of words, or tricks of phrase, or a
faculty for rhyming, or logical precision, or any of those other
commonplace qualities and dexterities which are almost universally
attainable.
He will at least aim at the right thing, and, even if he fails, his work
will be all the higher for that aim.
* * * * *
I do not propose to speak in general of great books, but only of great
literature. Literature proper is not simply writing. You may tell in
writing the most important and unimpeachable truths concerning
science and history, concerning nature and man, without being in the
least literary. You may argue and teach and describe in books which are
of immense vogue and repute, without pretending to be a figure in
literature. But, on the other hand, you may be very wrong; logically,
scientifically, historically, ethically altogether wrong; and yet you may
exercise an irresistible literary fascination over your own generation
and all that follow. Charles Lamb speaks disdainfully of books which
are no books, things in books' clothing. He had in mind Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations, essays on population, treatises on moral philosophy,
and so forth. He meant that such works are works, but no literature.
Mill's Logic, geographical descriptions, guidebooks, the Origin of
Species, whatever may be the value of such volumes for thought or
knowledge, they are not literature. There is only one test to apply to
such books as those. If their statements are true, if their reasoning is
accurate, if their exposition is clear, such works are good of their kind.
Nevertheless, it is scarcely literary judgment which judges them. You
might as well apply "architectural" criticism to our rows of tin-roofed
cottages or to the average warehouse or wool-store or tramshed. These
are buildings, but they are not architecture.
Meanwhile Herodotus, with all his superstitions, his credulity and

mistakes; Plato, with all his blunders in elementary logic; Homer, with
all his naïve ignorance of science and the wide world; Dante, despite
his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse
theologizing--these and their like are, and will always be, literature. No
matter if Carlyle's French Revolution be in reality as far from the literal
truth as the work of Froude, yet Carlyle and Froude are literature, along
with Herodotus and Livy and Froissart, while the most scrupulously
exact of chronicles may be but books.
The charm of supreme literature is independent of its date or country.
The current literary taste varies, we know, at different periods and in
different places. There are successive fashions and schools of literature
and literary principle--an Attic, an Alexandrian, an Augustan, a
Renaissance Italian, an Elizabethan, a Louis Quatorze, a Queen Anne, a
nineteenth century Romantic. And yet from each and all of these there
will stand out one or two writers, sometimes more, whom we have
enthroned in the literary Pantheon, and whose place there among the
gods seems only to grow the more assured as time goes on.
Now, what is it that is left, the common residuum, to all these literary
masters; to Homer, Sappho, Æschylus, Plato, Theocritus, Juvenal; to
Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Molière; to Goethe, Shelley, Victor
Hugo, Carlyle, in spite of all their manifest differences in subject, and
style, in ideas and ideals, in range of thought and knowledge? When we
have got behind all the varying and often contradictory