Literary world

“ It has always been our opinion, that the very essence of poetry—apart from the pathos, the wit, or the brilliant description which may be imbodied in it, but may exist equally in prose—consists in the fine perception and vivid expression of the subtle and mysterious analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world—which makes outward things and qualities the natural types and emblems of inward gifts and emotions, or leads us to ascribe life and sentiment to every thing that interests us in the aspects of external nature. ”

“ However, he leaves us in some confusion, for what, with this enlargement of human nature, is going to become of the plot? In most literary works there are two elements: human individuals, whom we have recently discussed, and the element vaguely called art. ”

“ If things led on from logical step to step, what simple stories would crowd the world. Then indeed the epic and the lyrical, which we perpetually seek in fiction, would divert us in the common affairs of our own lives. ”

“ A book exhibits not only the attainments, culture, and literary art of the writer but also his intellectual force, emotional nature, and moral character. Wide attainments are revealed in breadth of view and in mastery of large resources. Culture is exhibited in a general delicacy of thought, feeling, and expression. Literary art is shown in the choice of words and in their arrangement in sentences and paragraphs. The artistic sense, without which a finished excellence is not attainable, reveals itself in the proportion, symmetry, and completeness of a work. ”

“ In subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions, the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the logical structure:—how wholesome! ”

“ While man busies himself with the world of politics, with the world of commerce, with the rise and fall of empires, with the fortunes and fate of humanity, woman tends the hearth, visits the sick, consoles the suffering—in a word, in all she does, fulfils the sacred offices of love.
Now the highest literature—and Poetry is confessedly the highest literature—is a transfiguring reflex of life; and in its magic mirror we perforce see reflected all the thoughts, feelings, interests, passions, and events of human existence. ”

“ The drama and the choicest forms of prose and poetry in their literary aspects furnish means of presenting great thoughts and high ideals, and, thus combined with the beauty of expression, not only furnish the best evidence of moral and intellectual progress but make a perennial source of information in modern social life. ”

“ The cardinal virtue of poetry, he says, is love, while the cardinal virtue of prose is justice. May we not rather say that the difference is one of plane of consciousness, prose being at the highest level of the rational mind, and poetry at the highest level of the spiritual mind? Yes, but then, in all probability, The Times would regard us as fanciful, for note, anything exact about spiritual things is likely to be dismissed by the Literary Supplement as fanciful and dangerous. ”

“ The newly discovered power and delight of original imaginative writing, and their dissatisfaction with the current tone of thought on all matters deeply affecting human life, alike urged them to some literary enterprise in which imagination and criticism should find harmonious expression. ”

“ I put the poetic and emotional side of literature as the most needed for daily use. I take the books that seek to rouse the imagination, to stir up feeling, touch the heart; the books of art, of fancy, of ideals, such as reflect the delight and aroma of life. ”

“ There lies the future field for the poet, the novelist, and the painter—the idealization of the real world as it is in its highest terms of love and passion, struggle, joy, and sorrow, free from the condescension of superior castes and the mystification of the star-reaching introspective culture which seeks only personal exaltation, and excludes sympathy with the every-day beings and things of earth from its so-called spiritual outlook. ”

“ To this in the first place I reply, because, however I may have restricted myself, there is still left open to me what confessedly constitutes the most valuable object of all writing whether in prose or verse, the great and universal passions of men, the most general and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature, from which I am at liberty to supply myself with endless combinations of forms and imagery. ”

“ It is thus evident that the interest and worth of literature depend largely on the manner in which the thought and emotion are expressed. In general the matter of discourse, which aims at the communication of ideas, is of more importance than the form. Words without thought, no matter how skillfully and musically they may be arranged, are nonsense. But in the lighter sorts of prose, which aim at entertainment, and in poetry, which is dependent on meter and harmony, form is of preëminent importance. ”

“ Sometimes it is designed to throw light on some phase of human character or human experience. And again, it may be a vehicle for conveying some form of teaching or for illustrating the growth of culture and character. In studying a work of fiction the purpose should be clearly apprehended, for the merit of a novel or romance depends in a measure upon the author's aim and his degree of success in realizing it.
(6) Every work of fiction, consciously or unconsciously to the author, is apt to embody a particular view or philosophy of life. ”

“ Art, literary style, study of character, and other of the higher, subtler elements of fiction, good as they are acknowledged to be, must yield first place to "the story," and afterwards shift for themselves the best way they may. ”

“ In the present argument our chief concern is not with the formal use of literary materials for practice in reading, but with the moral culture, conviction, and habit of life they may foster. Nor have we chiefly in view the art side of our best literary pieces. Appreciation of beauty in poetry and of strength in prose, admirable as they may be, are quite secondary to the main purpose. ”

“ Fancy and Imagination, Grace and Beauty, all those qualities which are to the work of Art what scent and colour are to the flower, can only grow towards heaven by taking root in earth. Is not the noblest poetry of prose fiction the poetry of every-day truth? ”

“ Is it not enough to suppose degrees of seemingness, and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of semblance—different valeurs, as the painters say? Why might not the world WHICH CONCERNS US—be a fiction? ”

“ Sons, New York, publishers.
BY HENRY VAN DYKE Every one knows what books are. But what is literature? It is the ark on the flood. It is the light on the candlestick. It is the flower among the leaves; the consummation of the plant's vitality, the crown of its beauty, and the treasure house of its seeds. It is hard to define, easy to describe.
Literature is made up of those writings which translate the inner meanings of nature and life, in language of distinction and charm, touched with the personality of the author, into artistic forms of permanent interest. ”

“ No light literature,—that grace and flower of human culture, that best philosophy of all, humanizing us with gentle art, making us wise through the humours, elevated through the passions, tender in the affections of our kind. ”

“ The art of literature which weaves these living threads into its fabric lies closer to the common life and rises higher into the ideal life than any other art. In the lyric, the drama, the epic, the romance, the fable, the conte, the essay, the history, the biography, it not only speaks to the present hour, but also leaves its record for the future. ”

“ In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point, from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific, indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility of which constitutes it a fine art. ”

“ Literary style employs, besides words common to the colloquial vocabulary, words used in a semi-technical sense expressive of fine shades of thought and emotion. The literary work of art furnishes a happy expression for some situation of the soul, or some train of reflection hitherto unutterable in an adequate manner. ”

“ They will find in them a truth to nature—a freshness and raciness of thought and diction—a freedom from the hackneyed conventionalisms of ordinary story-telling, a descriptive and dramatic power, which lend to them an unfailing charm. ”

“ Hence it is that fiction's peculiar ministry to the human soul is the prose depiction, through the lens of beauty, to the imagination and the emotions, of conflicts of human passions, wills, duties, and fates; a depiction unaccompanied by any tax of intellectual labor, but consistent with all known truth, though without any necessary intervention of actual facts. ”

“ Romance, from the light fabliau to the voluminous fiction, has admitted, in the luxury of our knowledge and curiosity, not only of critical investigation, but of its invention, by tracing it to a single source. ”

“ Under their authority we see introduced into literary work an habitual grace and perfection, a clearness and directness, a light and pliable strength, and a fine shading of expression, such as no other tongue can even define. We see the same high standard in their criticism, in their works of research, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and in short throughout literature. ”

“ Our inquiry concerns the poet's inspiration, his production of beauty in sound and sense, his imagination, passion, insight, thought, motive. Impersonal work may be never so correct, and yet tame and ineffective. Such are many of the formal dramas and pseudo-classical idyls with which modern literature teems. Go to, say their authors, let us choose subjects and make poems. ”

“ I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The mind delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with history, and flouting both. A thought, any thought, pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs matter, custom, and all but itself. ”

“ In respect to other spheres of our present national and social life I would observe in conclusion that in the field of epic poetry there are practically unlimited opportunities for the romance, the narrative, and the novel. ”

“ Let any novel be finished, let all the resources of the mind be conscientiously expended on it, let it become a thorough intellectual creation, and, instead of remaining a novel, it would assume the dignity of an epic, lyric, drama, philosophy, or history. ”

“ To lure their wild minds into reflection, it invested truth and morality with the many-coloured garb of Fiction, and introduced them, through their delighted imagination, to their understanding and their heart ”

“ And I think it is just in this, that the novel is not simply a fictitious record of conduct, but also a study and judgment of conduct, and through that of the ideas that lead to conduct, that the real and increasing value—or perhaps to avoid controversy I had better say the real and increasing importance—of the novel and of the novelist in modern life comes in. ”

“ When the impetus of a profound and powerful emotion, the mighty will of a great event finds expression in literature,—or at least in letters,—the writer’s mind speeds like a greyhound along the track of public sentiment. ”

“ And it is possible, as we have seen, that modern fiction should be at once epic and novelistic in content and in mood,—epic in resuming all aspects of a certain phase of life and in exhibiting a social struggle, and novelistic in casting emphasis upon personal details of character and in depicting intimate emotions. ”

“ ONE must ascend into poetry from prose, and also descend into prose from poetry. There are few who have not felt this; and, perhaps, to ascend and descend gracefully is the art of living—in an aesthetic sense. ”

“ So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. ”

“ But it must always be remembered that in such writing as Comedy and Romance the strict rules of motivation must be relaxed, and indeed in all literature, even in Tragedy, the idealization, condensation, and heightening which are the proper methods of Art require them to be slightly modified. ”

“ To supply these in the picture of humanity is the distinct office of fiction, which, while free in many respects, should still be essentially true. The poetry and fiction of a country should be the worthy companion to its history. The true poet should be the interpreter and illustrator of life. ”

“ In truth, I think that these things are invented by poets in order that we may see our manners sketched under the character of strangers, and the image of our daily life represented under the guise of fiction. ”

“ The flow is easy, the style graceful and natural; but the step from poetry to prose is substantial as well as formal; the imagination is ossified, and we exchange the exuberance of legendary creativeness for the dogmatic record of fact without reality, and fiction without grace. ”