Democracy and Literature

I

READING, some time ago, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, I came upon this sentence: ‘Democracy is full of menace to the finer hopes of civilization.’ The idea, of course, is not a new one, and yet I found myself dwelling on it as if it had never been expressed before. Democracy! The panacea of all social diseases, the manifest destiny of the modern world, a political creed held by millions of people with a fervor that hardly any religious creed now commands —democracy ‘full of menace to the finer hopes of civilization’!

Instinctively I asked myself, ‘What, are those hopes that even seem to be incompatible with this supreme political good? Are they hopes that we have a right to cherish? If it is true, as Aristotle thought, that man cannot reach the perfection of which his nature is capable unless he unites with ot her men to constitute a state; if the state, in other words, is the indispensable condition of the perfection of human nature; and if the form of that state toward which humanity is tending is unmistakably democratic, what are we to think of hopes, however lofty, to which such a state offers no promise of fulfillment? Is it possible that democracy and civilization are not quite the same thing? Is it possible that civilization is a larger, a more inclusive thing than democracy, of more irresistible authority and of wider scope?’

These are some of the quest ions to which Gissing’s quiet sentence gave rise in my mind, and to which I venture to think that I have found answers valid for those, at least, whose democracy is ‘tempered,’ as Arnold said his liberalism was, ‘by experience, reflection, and renouncement.’

For most of us, the democratic idea is not so tempered. We live in a great democracy, cut off by miles of ocean from contact with any other form of society. We breathe democratic air. We view everything, instinctively and necessarily, from the democratic angle. Our notions of education, of social relations, of public and private behavior are different from what they would be under another system of government. It may be, even, that our notions of religion are different, or will become so. Indeed, we are invited by certain philosophers of the Bergsonian school to abandon our monarchical theology and to bring our religion into line with our politics and our science. It is intimated that ‘Thy kingdom come’ is a prayer that sounds oddly on democratic lips. For, just as the democratic state is a heterogeneous mass of humanity, moving, without plan or prevision, toward an end which no one can foresee; just as in the natural world, even in that part of it which we have been accustomed to call inanimate, t here are evidences of life, perhaps of conscious life, striving blindly toward an unknown goal; so He whom we name God, far from being the architect and sovereign of the universe, is only this creat ive evolutionary force in man and nature, working out, He too, his mysterious destiny. Biology, sociology, and theology, as seen with democratic eyes, are all engaged in the same task, ‘the effort to break down all barriers, to link all the orders of the world together in an essential oneness of quality and process.’¹

Evidently, then, if we are to be good democrats at church as well as in the laboratory and at the polls, we must rid ourselves of our theological inconsistency, and bring ourselves, if we can, to accept the God of democracy. And so our philosophical system comes to be of a beautiful completeness. As we find our own essence in the plant, the animal, the stone; as our sole aim is to detect ‘the essential oneness of quality and process’ in nature and society, so we find nothing more than this in the heavenly places. Our God, the God of democracy, is but our democratic selves writ large.

But it is not my purpose to discuss this interesting and — from certain points of view —amusing hypothesis. The ‘democratic conception of God’ may be safely left to the theologians — at least it may be safely left to some of them. I wish only to point out that this — a democracy of such reach and consistency as this — is what we appear to be coming to; but it is a consoling reflection that we may after all be saved from the extreme logic of our theory by those amiable weaknesses of our nature which have saved us so often, — our indolence, our slender reasoning faculty, and our incorrigible sense of humor.

II

There are many minds, perhaps the majority of those most heartily committed to the democratic idea, to whom

it will seem the veriest trifling to inquire, as I must proceed to do, what is to be the place of literature in a worldorder like this. And by literature, I hasten to say, I mean those works in which the deepest mind of man has been expressed — his highest hope, his sternest conviction, his most radiant aspiration, his profoundest intuition, his most soaring imagination, his most poignant anguish, his most ecstatic joy. I do not mean the tales and ditties by which the rank and file of men beguile their empty leisure. I mean the Iliad, the Æneid, the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles and Shakespeare, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost and Faust. I mean those works which demand the exercise of powers of heart and mind at their best, the works in which the keenest-sighted and highest-hearted of men find most profit, works which are not exhausted by generations of students during years of study, works for the comprehension of which the utmost refinement and subtlety of mind are no less necessary than grasp and vigor; works, in short, which but one man in a century is capable of writing and but few, comparatively, in a generation are capable of fully understanding.

For it is an absurd not ion that these great works are classics because they are popular. They are classics because the best minds of every age have found them an inexhaustible source of power and beauty. I do not forget such encouraging experiences as those of Miss MacCracken, who found tenementdwellers who knew by the light of nature that William Shakespeare was a true interpreter of the human heart and Mr. Hall Caine a false one. But take the mass of men and women, by and large, who make up our democratic world; take even the mass of those persons who are said to be ‘readers ’; take the average man of business, the average professional man, the average woman immersed in the social duties of a town small or large, and apply to them the practical test, — the only one that counts, — do they instinctively prefer Shakespeare to Mr. Pinero, Milton to Mr. John Masefield, Thackeray to Mr. Winston Churchill, and they will candidly answer that they do not.

It is not necessary to apologize for a preference for the modern in literature; but such a test is conclusive that literature, in the sense in which I use the term, is not a popular and an easy thing, a thing which appeals naturally to the man in the street, but a highly select and exacting thing, a thing — dare I venture it? — which has most of the qualities that we stigmatize as aristocratic.

Now, in the thorough-going democracy of the future to which all the signs are pointing, literature, in this sense, seems likely to be an anachronism. It is an aristocratic discord in the great hymn — a little monotonous, it must be granted — that we are raising to ‘the essential oneness of quality and process.’ In a society where the whole emphasis is on resemblances rather than on differences; where there is no master, no guide; where it is collective, not individual wisdom that practically counts; where, if there be an end toward which the whole is moving, no one can possibly know what it is; where, practically speaking, the movement is itself the end, — in a world like this, what has literature to do, literature, in which the differences, the distinctions between things are all-important; in which the individual is everything, the group little or nothing; in which an end, foreseen from the beginning, conditions all movement; in which an intelligible order is the sine qua non; in which permanence, stability, completeness are the essentials? The ‘democratic conception of God’ has little in common with St. James’s idea of a Being ‘in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning’; yet it is of such a Being that literature, in the high sense, inevitably reminds us.

Perhaps, after all, Matthew Arnold’s somewhat daring prophecy stands a chance of fulfillment. More than thirty years ago he wrote: ‘The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry . . . our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. . . . The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry.’ ‘The priest departs,’ cries Walt Whitman; ‘the divine literatus comes.’ While we are probably not ready yet to substitute even Dante’s or Milton’s poem for the four Gospels, still, if we must choose between the democratic chaos and the Divine Comedy as a symbol for deity, we should have little difficulty, I think, in making a choice.

But I am reminded that literature, too, illustrates ‘the essential oneness of quality and process.’ Poetry is only another product of the democratic chaos. If the scholars are right, its beginnings were humble enough. In some rude primeval community the folk gather to celebrate a victory in battle or the fame of a dead warrior. They begin, all together, an exultant or a solemn rhythmic dance. Presently some one utters a cry which expresses their common sense of triumph or grief. It is caught up and repeated and varied, adapted to the movement of the dancing band. Presently another participant contributes a cry, which is added to the first. This process is repeated again and again, as the tribe feels the need of expressing its emotions rhythmically, until, little by little, something like an ode or hymn is developed by the whole community working under the inspiration of a common emotion. And so the majesty of Homer and Pindar is born.

It is plain that this process admirably exemplifies the growth of the democratic state, the collective work of a whole people, coöperating toward an end that is unforeseen. But here the parallel ceases. After all, there are still some steps to take from the highest achievement of the folk working collectively, to the Odes of Pindar. With the best democratic intentions in the world, we cannot resist the conviction that at some stage of the process there has intervened a gifted individual; and from that point on, the evolving ode is no longer a communal but an individual affair. Indeed, if strict justice were done, it seems to me that we should attach more importance than we do to that first inarticulate cry which began the evolution. The poor fellow who made it had one, at least, and that an important one, of the qualifications of the poet; he felt the emotion which his companions felt, but, unlike them, he was able to express it. However, we will waive t his objection to the illustration, and grant that, at least up to the moment of the intervention of the individual singer, poetry, too, illustrates ‘the essential oneness of quality and process,’ that poetry, too, is democratic.

As I was thinking over these things one day in our college library, my eye fell upon the portrait bust of an unknown Roman priest or citizen, who gazes benignantly, if somewhat satirically, upon the intellectual activity going on about him; and, somehow, in the light of his fine smile, ‘the essential oneness of quality and process,’ at least as applied to art, began to seem less important. There he was, the finished product of a great civilization, rendered by the artist with a subtle truth which is itself the mark of a high distinction. And he seemed to say to me, ‘Is the process by which I became what you see so all-important as to make you forget what I am? No doubt, at bottom I am, as one of your own poets has said, “blood-brother to the stone”; but practically, what of it? Between that stage and this, there have intervened how many individuals of the highest and rarest gifts! It is they who have made me what I am, and without them I should have been little more than those rude, unhewn resemblances to man that stand out from bluff or boulder on the untraveled mountain-side.’

The lesson to me, at any rate, is plain. Art, literature, however communal in origin, are, in the only form in which they concern us, individual in essence, and few things are more absurd than to talk of their democratic origin, with our Roman friend before us and the literature of all the ages on the shelves about us.

Now it is plain, not only that the democratic spirit in its extreme form is alien to the essential quality of literature, but that it implies a different ideal of humanity from that of t he older civilization which it is superseding, an ideal that is summed up succinctly in Walt Whitman’s phrase ‘ the divine average.’ The older civilizat ion assumed strength, vigor, boldness, courage, all the aggressive masculine virtues, as, of course, elements in its human ideal; but it added to these grace and refinement of expression, delicacy of perception and taste, intellectual balance and self-restraint, patient submission to mental discipline — in short, all that class of qualities which were believed to mark the cultivated man; qualities, I need hardly observe, which are not common or easily attainable or within the reach of every one. Democratic culture, says Whitman, — and in quoting Whitman I am, of course, quoting the very foremost exponent of the relation of literature to the new age,— ‘must have for its spinal meaning the formation of typical personality of character, eligible to the uses of the high average of men — and not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses. T he best culture will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts, and loving perceptions, and of self-respect.’

I am not disposed to set one of these ideals of culture over against the other, much less to decide between them. But what, if the newer ideal prevails, is to become of literature? What place in such a moral scheme of things is there for a form of human activity which knows nothing of averages; which does not demand, first of all, courage and loving perceptions and self-respect, but delicacy and subtlety and poise of mind and imaginative power; which implies distinction and proclaims privilege?

It is, of course, possible to deny that I have correctly described literature. I only maintain that I have described it as it once was understood. And if this be indeed literature, how can it be expected to thrive in the new democracy? Is it conceivable that we are going to whistle down the wind the fruit of ages of civilization? Life is wasteful, we know, but is it really as wasteful as that? Has humanity been on a false tack all these centuries? It seems incredible, yet it looks as if, for a long time to come, literature, in the highest sense of the word, could do little more than feed the regrets of a few backward-looking, over-sophisticated persons for whom democracy has no use.

There died two years ago in California a gentleman who had given more than thirty years of his life to the conduct of a literary journal, —the only purely critical journal which this country boasts. I allude to Mr. Francis Browne, the editor of The Dial. He had not devoted those thirty years to creative literature, so-called. His name was not widely known and he did not seek reputation. He had no fortune and he sought none. For thirty years he sacrificed fame and money and health to keeping alive a bi-monthly literary review. And for what? In order that a few hundred persons might be supplied with trustworthy accounts of new and important books. He was himself a man of rare distinction of mind. He loved literature as its greatest lovers have loved it, *— with something like passion. He loved literature as Macaulay loved it, and Arnold and Norton. He knew his poets by heart and quoted them with endless zest. What place will there be, I ask, for a Francis Browne in the new democratic world?

This is, to be sure, no grave charge to bring against the new era. More than one admirable human type seems to have perished, or to survive here and there only in a few belated individuals to whom we refer as statesmen or gentlemen or men of letters ‘of the old school.’ I chose Mr. Browne merely as an excellent example of what we used to mean by t he man of letters, to make it plain how little the type is suited to the cultural requirements of democracy as Whitman has outlined them.

But Whitman, of course, is assured that democracy will produce its own literature to suit the needs of its new human type. The old literature expresses a conception of life which he stigmatizes as feudal, which is ours no longer. It must give way to an art which shall be indeed the voice of the new world. ‘Democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil,’ he says, ‘until it founds and luxuriously grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.’ This is consoling. We had begun to fear that the new democratic era was to have no art, and I cannot help feeling that, in strict logic, it will have no right to any. Yet Whitman will mitigate the inevitable aristocracy of literature as far as possible.

Ah! democracy, then, is safe. If its prophet will accept from its poets only that which every one may have in equal measure, we may be sure that the sweet democratic harmony will not be seriously interrupted. Great literature is not to be had on those terms.

III

And this brings me to the point at which I have been aiming. I do not, of course, believe that literature is about to perish from the face of the earth, nor do I believe that what has been meant in the past by literature is to be superseded by what Whitman means by it. It is evident, indeed, that a democratic era is upon us, in which so aristocratic a product as literature will not easily thrive. It is evident, moreover, that this era will have, that it already has, at least two marked and serious defects. Those two defects I believe that literature is in a position, in some measure, to remedy, and that it is the service which literature can perform for democracy which will save literature in a democratic world. For its capacity to perform this service proves that literature belongs to a larger, a more inclusive order of things than democracy, than any form of government, than any single scheme of life. Literature belongs to the order of civilization. Empires, monarchies, anarchies, even democracies pass, but civilization abides. It has been won by the coöperative effort of races and nations and individuals without number, who agreed in but one thing, their common hope and aim. Citizens of no mean city were they all, whatever their dress and tongue and customs; citizens of a continuing city, as broad as the world, as old as recorded time, as endless as humanity. Literature, in the great sense, knows no bounds of time or place, and it is therefore in a position to correct, to restrain, to enlarge systems of a less ample scope. There have always been, there will always be persons who acknowledge no narrower allegiance than literature itself acknowledges, the allegiance of civilization. Never will it come to pass in the best regulated, the most thoroughly consistent state that every one will bow the knee to Baal, by whatever name he may be called. Some persons there will always be, and they not the least worthy, who will confess no sovereignty but the highest, and those persons are the hope of literature, and perhaps the hope of democracy as well.

Now the two defects of democracy to which I have alluded, and the existence of which will be denied by no thoughtful person, are these: the lack of perspective and the lack of discrimination. Democrats, I suppose, are not more ignorant of history than other men. They know that political and social wisdom did not come into the world with the French and American revolutions. Yet there is something in the aggressive hopefulness of the democratic spirit which leads men practically to ignore their political inheritance, to speak always of the future, never of the past except to discredit it; to talk much of hope and little of memory. The immediate problem is so pressing, the needs of every day are so insistent, that even the wise may be pardoned if, in Burke’s phrase, they consult their invention and reject their experience. It is not remarkable, then, if the less wise, who after all make up the body of the state, fail to remember that there is any experience to reject; if, slightly varying the patriarch’s language, they exclaim, ‘No doubt we are the people, and wisdom was born with us.’

This spirit is exhilarating but it is obviously perilous. And even if it were not perilous, it is ill-founded. It is impossible to admire without reservation a spirit which ignores the inherited wisdom of twenty-five centuries, which leaves the refined gold of the ages to gather dust unused while it trades upon its own tiny acquisitions.

And here is the corrective function of literature. For literature is the wisdom of man and the history of man. ‘It acquaints the mind,’ — I am quoting a man of affairs, the President of the United States, — ‘by direct contact, with the forces which really govern and modify the world from generation to generation. There is more of a nation’s politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic writers upon public affairs and constitutions.’

‘My notion of the literary student’ — I am quoting now Lord Morley, whosedemocracy, however ‘tempered,’ is beyond suspicion — ‘ is one who through books explores the strange voyages of man’s moral reason, the impulses of the human heart, the changes and chances that have overtaken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue.’ ‘The strange voyages of man’s moral reason’! Could a phrase more happily hit off the curious and endless adventures on which man has embarked, bringing home with him what cargoes of moral, that is, social, political, ethical treasure, or wrecking his craft upon what unseen reefs? And the record of this is literature. Can it be that such a record has nothing to say to the voyagers who are still setting out on the great adventure? ‘Yes,’ cries Lord Morley, ‘let us read to weigh and to consider. In the times before us that promise or threaten deep political, economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce our people to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate energy without impatience, activity without restlessness, inflexibility without ill-humor.’ Impatience, restlessness, ill-humor! — to these minor evils democratic societies are peculiarly exposed, and from these literature may help to save us.

It may help to save us, too, from a greater evil than these, a lack of discrimination. The doctrine of political equality is, in practice, a leveling doctrine, and the tendency of democracies, large and small, is to discount great talents and to look askance at any head which raises itself too high above the welter. This is natural. This is the lesson that tyrants and demagogues have taught democracy. Now, literature does it a great service by reminding it of the fact of inequality. Genius — what is that? It is the incalculable, the arbitrary, the distinguished. It is the very type and symbol of special privilege. Inequality, literature tells us, is the law of life. It is very well to proclaim political equality. It is well to assume social equality. But such proclamations and assumptions are perilous. They may lead us to assume that men are really equal. Practically they have led us to assume just that. ‘Democracy,’ wrote William James some years ago, ‘is on its trial and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny.’ And he proceeds to affirm, in words which cannot be too often read, that the great end of education is to learn to recognize distinction, to acquire a feeling, as he puts it, for ‘a good human job’ — and this, in order that the majorities who make up our democracy may know from whom to ‘take their cue.’

There is no doubt that our educational systems in the past have had too much in view the exceptional man. That is one of the reasons why education, like everything else, is becoming democratized. But it would not be difficult to prove that there is grave danger that education may aim too low. Literature, I repeat, the study of it, the due appreciation of it, may help to save us from this peril. It will teach us to admire the admirable, it will save us from an indiscriminate leveling, it will preserve for us the image of a true aristocracy, which, if it can no longer mould our institutions, can at least give them moderation, wisdom, and, it may be, permanence. In some such sense as this, poetry may indeed be what Matthew Arnold called it, — ‘a criticism of life.’