Essays on Some of the Forms of Literature

[Footnote: “Essays on some of the Forms of Literature.” By T.T. Lynch, Author of “Theophilus Trinal.” Longmans.]

Schoppe, the satiric chorus of Jean Paul’s romance Titan, appears at a masked ball carrying a glass case. In it, with a mirror behind, puppets repeat and reflect the ball, ludicrously aping courtiers whose whole life and show was only a body-mask mechanically moved with the look of real life. The court simulates reality; the masks mock their own unreality, and Schoppe ridicules them as such; the show and its reflection multiply without end in the reflector of Schoppe’s, or Richter’s, or the reader’s imagination. The reviewer is reminded of this retreating and beholding because the last of Mr. Lynch’s essays is partly devoted to reviews: reviews review books, Mr. Lynch reviews the reviews, and the present Reviewer, perhaps presumptuously, tries to review Mr. Lynch. His office must differ greatly from Schoppe’s, though, for the showman and the reviewer correspond more deeply than the outward resemblance that suggested the comparison. Schoppe’s task was to destroy the false by mockery; his glass case was a review uttered by shapes and wires instead of words. The true critic too must sometimes condemn the false and destroy it utterly, scorching its seeming beauty down to dust and ashes. But the false deserves his attack only when it wears the form of beauty, the garment of truth, and so, like the Erl-maidens, has power to bewitch. Many errors, perhaps most, are better left to die of their own weakness, for the galvanic battery of criticism only prolongs their ghastly life. The critic’s highest work must be to direct attention to the true, in whatever form it has found utterance. On this let us hear Mr. Lynch himself in the last of the four lectures he delivered at the Royal Institution, Manchester, now before us as a book:

“The kritikos, the discerner, if he is forever saying This is not gold and never This is, is either humbly useful, or perverse, or unfortunate. This is not gold, he says; we perceived as much. And this is not; true, but we see gold grains glittering in its dark mass. And this, at least, is not; perverse man, are you seeking what is not gold? We are inquiring for what is; and unfortunate are we if, born into a world once so rich, we find it has lost all its wealth. Unhappy the man who, walking his garden, scented only dead leaves and never perceived, even from afar, the heavenly odour of roses fresh from the Maker’s hands. Discerning by spiritual aroma may lead to discernment by the eye, and to the scrutiny and knowledge it serves.”

And again:—

“The critic criticized, if dealt with in the worst fashion of his class, must be called a monster ‘seeking whom he may devour,’ to be hunted down and stuffed for the museum, where he can be regarded with horror but in safety. Dealt with in the best fashion, he has a very honourable and beneficent office, and is warned, though zealously, only against its perversions. A judicial chair in the kingdom of human thought, filled by a man of true integrity, comprehensiveness, and delicacy of spirit, is a seat of terror and praise, most fostering of good and most repressive of evil.… The critic as censurer must controvert, expose, and punish much because literary faults abound; criticism, like warfare, has a right and a wrong side, and as many soldiers are barely tolerable, so are many critics. But the critic is more than the censurer; in his higher and happier aspect he serves us as the discoverer, vindicator, and eulogist of excellence.”

Resisting the temptation to quote more from Mr. Lynch on Criticism, which seemed the natural point of contact between the Reviewer and the book, he goes on, remarking that his present duty is of the nobler sort (nobler in its object, for duty in the man is always the same): the exposition of excellence, not its opposite. Mr. Lynch is a man of true insight and large heart who has already done good and will do more; though he perhaps belongs, more than to any earlier class, to the last class of writers he himself describes in the extract I now give:

“Some of the best books are written, avowedly or evidently, for the select public of deeper minds, or minds ahead of their time; they may be little read or esteemed in their own day, and later extend their fame and readers. Others of the best, written with a pathos and power felt universally, appeal at once to the common humanity of the world and get a strong, immediate response. An ordinary human eye and heart, true and healthy, fit us to say of much that we read, This is good, that is poor; only the educated eye and experienced heart fit us to judge what is veiled from ordinary observation, in the profounder region of thought and emotion. Yet powers that only the few possess may be needed to paint what everybody can see, so that everybody says, How beautiful! how like! And powers adequate to that will often do much more: books or pictures whose singular merit only the few perceive and the many for a while deny, giving the common eye an immediate, pure pleasure and the eye of a deeper, more cultivated soul a far fuller and finer one. There are also men of peculiar powers, rare and fine, who can never hope to please the large public of their own age, but whose writings are a heart’s ease and joy to the select few, heavenly comfort and light for the earth’s journey.”

One other extract from the general remarks on Books in this essay, and we will turn to another:—

“If our reading assists our life, our life also assists our reading. If we let our spirit talk to us in undistracted moments; commune often with serious Nature face to face; pursue honourable aims steadily; learn how a man’s best work falls below his thought, yet how his failure prompts a tenderer love of the thought; live in frank relations with a few friends, sharing their joys and griefs; and look about us on character, marking what we can see and feeling the prompting of a hundred questions about what is beyond our ken: then we shall be good readers and critics of books, and improving ones.”

The second and third essays are chiefly on Biography and Fiction, though they range more widely. Deep is the relation between the life shadowed in a biography and the life a man shadows forth in a fiction of the highest order, written in love and beheld even by its writer with reverence. It must be delightful, and awful too, to read today the embodiment of a man’s noblest thought, following his hero through temptations, contests, and victories in a world which likewise is—

and tomorrow to read the biography of this same writer. What of his own ideal has he realized? Where can the life-fountain be seen within him that found issue in this ideal self? Shall God’s fiction, which is man’s reality, fall short of man’s fiction; shall a man be less than he can conceive and utter? Surely it cannot end thus. If a man lives in harmony with the great laws of being and lets God’s idea in him work itself out, he must one day arrive at something greater than he can now conceive. Yet biography does not so often show the struggles the loftier fiction depicts. One reason may be that the contest is often wholly inward, so a man may have won his spiritual freedom with no outward sign, except, if he is an artist, its expression in fiction, whether in marble, harmony, or ink. Nor can we determine the significance of any living act, being ourselves within the life-mystery and unable to hold it at arm’s length; nor judge a life’s success by what we see. At best it is a truncated spire, whose incompleteness may be the greater for the breadth of its base and its slow taper toward the height it is meant to reach. The idea of our own life is more than we can embrace; it is God’s, not ours, and fades into the infinite. Our comprehension is finite; we ourselves are infinite. We can only trust in God and do the truth; then, and only then, is our life safe, and sure of continuance and development.

But the reviewer too often merely steals his author’s text and writes upon it, or, like a man lying in bed thinking about a dream until he sinks into it, forgets that his place is to behold and passes into spontaneous utterance. What says our author about “biography, autobiography, and history”? This lecture pleased the reviewer most of the four. Read in a lonely place under a tree, it had on him the two effects Mr. Lynch would perhaps most wish: a longing to lead a more true and noble life, and a desire to read more biography. He hopes it does the same for every earnest reader, everyone whose own biography would not be altogether blank in individual will and spiritual aim.

“In meditative hours, when we blend despair of ourself with complaint of the world, the biography of a man successful in this great business of living is like an angel sent to strengthen us. Give the soldier his sword, the farmer his plough, the carpenter his hammer, the manufacturer his machines, the merchant his stores, the scholar his books: these are only implements, and the man is more than his work. How far has he fulfilled the law of his being and attained its desire? Is his life a whole, a well-woven garment, a well-painted picture? Which of two sacrifices has he offered, the one pleasing to the powers of dark worlds, the other to those of bright ones: soul to body, or body to soul? Has he slain what was holiest in him to win gifts from Fashion or Mammon? Or has he, in days like a noble army of martyrs, offered up what was secondary, throwing into the flames the salt of true moral energy and the incense of cordial affections? We want the work to show us the man’s qualities, and the man perfected through his work as well as the work finished by his effort.”

Perhaps the highest moral height a man can reach, and the hardest, is the willingness to be nothing relatively, that he may attain the positive excellence his original conditions make not merely possible but imperative. It is nothing to a man to be greater or less than another, or esteemed or not by the world around him. Does he behold, love, and live the unchangeable, the essential, the divine? This he can do only as God has made him; he can understand God, in the least degree as in the greatest, only by the godlike within him. One who loves the good and great so has no room or need for comparison; the truth satisfies him. God makes the glow-worm as well as the star, and the light in both is divine. If mine is an earth-star to gladden the wayside, I must cultivate its green earth-glow humbly and rejoicingly, not try to blanch it to the whiteness of the stars in the fields of blue. To deny God in my own being is to cease to behold him in any; God and man meet only when the man becomes what God meant him to be. Then he enters the house of life, which is greater than the house of fame. Better to be a child in a green field than a knight of many orders at a state ceremonial.

“One biography may help conjecture or satisfy reason concerning the story of a thousand unrecorded lives. How few even of the deserving multitude can deserve to be shrined in the public heart as ‘dear sons of memory.’ Few of us die unwept, but most of us unwritten; we shall find a grave, less certainly a tombstone, and much less likely a biographer. The ‘bright particular’ stars that look towards us from afar, still individual, are at clearest times only about a thousand; but the milky lustre across mid heaven is a million million lights, no less separate for being seen undistinguishably. Absorbed, not lost, in the multitude of the unrecorded, our private dear ones make part of the blissful shining of the ‘general assembly,’ the great congregation of the skies. Thus the past is aglow with the unwritten, the nameless. The sons of fame are the few whose great individuality burns with distinct starry light through the dark of ages. Such stars, without the starry way, would not teach us the vastness of heaven; and the way, without them, would not glorify the night with pomp of Hierarchical Ascents of Domination.”

The reviewer would gladly enrich his notice with more of this essay, but limits of space, and perhaps justice to an essay that ought to be read whole, forbid. Mr. Lynch looks to the heart of the matter, and makes one ask, “Would not a biography written by Mr. Lynch himself be a valuable addition to this kind of literature?” It would not be an account of outward events and progress, nor even a succession of revelations of inward conditions. We should expect it to lift us to a point of view from which the man’s life takes on an artistic individuality, an isolation of existence; for he could not choose a biography for which this would be impossible, or in which the nerves of purpose did not combine the whole, more or less successfully, into a true and remarkable unity. One passage more from this essay:

“Biography makes life known to us as more wealthy in character, and much more remarkable in its everyday stories, than we had deemed it. It also introduces us to some of our most agreeable and stimulating friendships; we may be more beneficially intimate with one we never saw than with a neighbour or brother. Many a solitary, puzzled, incommunicative person has found society provided, his riddle read, and his heart’s secret spoken out for him in a biography. A love purer than any yet entertained may begin with the visit of a biography, and a pure but ungratified love already existing may find an object. In life you see your friend today and will tomorrow; in the dear book you have him and all his experiences at once and always. He lives for you, and has already died for you, giving finish to the meaning and sanctity of his days; by that fact he is mysteriously above as well as before you. So your intimate is your superior, solace, and support, and an example of the victory to which he calls you. His end is our own in view; the flagging spirit revives, and we gird our loins anew for the race. In lesser matters there is fresh prospect of the game and companionship in the hunt. Biography is also a mirror in which we see ourselves, and the plain signs of deficient health or ill-ruled temper may set us looking for improvement. But it is a water mirror: first you see your face, then it becomes a bath to wash away the stains and restore wrinkles and pallors. What a pleasure to find another so like ourself, saying the same things, feeling the same dreads, shames, and flutterings. His escapes give us hope of deliverance; his patience, better or at least rewarded, freshens us and puts a staff into our hand. Seals of impossibility we had put on the stones beneath which our hopes lay buried are broken by this biography, as by a visiting angel, and our hopes arise. We see life more completely because we see the whole of his or hers, and more calmly and tenderly. Wavering faith is confirmed. Comparing ourselves quietly with one of our own class, or one who has made the mark we strive for, we are shamed to have done no better, and stirred to attempt former things, or fresh ones, in a stronger and more patient spirit.”

It is indeed well with him who has found a friend whose spirit touches his own and illuminates it.

Next to a true, wise, and victorious friend by your fireside, it is blessed to have the spirit of such a friend embodied on your bookshelves, for spirit can assume any embodiment. But there the friendship is all on one side; full friendship needs a friend who loves you and knows that you love him. Surely these biographies are not merely links with past times and vanished minds, producing strong half friendships. Are they not also letters of introduction, sent ahead but not yet followed by the one they introduce, whose step we listen for, and whom we shall meet somewhere in the Infinite, risen from the death of the past into the life of our knowledge and love? Shall I not one day, “somewhere, somehow,” clasp the large hand of Novalis and, gazing on his face, compare his features with those of Saint John?

The essay on light literature must be left to those who already know this book or may be induced by this notice to know it. Before the first essay, on Poetry, its subject suggests mentioning a second edition of the Memorials of Theophilus Trinal, by the same author, partly made up of interspersed poems. These are of true poetic worth; where wanting in rhythmic melody, most have a wild and peculiar rhythm of their own. The reviewer knows some whose hearts this book has made glad, and doubtless there are many.

The essay on Poetry is itself poetic throughout, and how else should Poetry be described than by Poetry? What form shall embrace and define the highest, if not one self-descriptive as self-existent? For what man is to this planet, and the eye to man, Poetry is to Literature. Yet one wishes the poetic forms in this essay were fewer and less minute, and the whole a little more scientific, though it is a question how far we may ask this. The pages seem to sparkle as if strewn with diamond sparks, shining from within as well as on the surface. Still, fancy is too prominent in Mr. Lynch’s writings. His Fancy is indeed the fairy attendant on his Imagination, who uses her for higher ends, and there is little or no mere fancy in his books, for below the surface-form you find a truth. But it were to be desired that the Truth walked forth among her worshippers in the living forms of Imagination, looking on them from living eyes, rather than through the windows of fancy. Sometimes there is an offence against taste, as on page 20; sometimes an image is expanded too much; sometimes the exuberance of fancy (if the combination is correct) brings together images that suggest incongruity. Still the essay is abundantly beautiful and true. Its poetical quotations are not isolated as specimens, but worked into the web of the prose like flowers in damask, and do their part in the continuous thought.

“If poetry, as light from the heart of God, is for our heart, that we may brighten and distinguish individual things; if it transfigures the round, dusk world as by an inner radiance; if it presents human life and history as Rembrandt pictures, in which darkness serves and glorifies light; if, like light, formless in its essence, it shapes all things towards the perfection of their forms; if, entering in single beams, it makes the dimmest places cheerful and sacred with its golden touch: then the heart of the Poet in which this light shines must be a hospice on the mountain pathways of the world, and his verse the lamp seen from far that tells where bread, shelter, drink, fire, and companionship may be found; and he should have the mountaineer’s hardiness and resolution. Poetry comes from the heart as source, to the heart in influence. The inward, the upward, and the onward, of an individual or a nation, may not be separated. Deep and sacred imaginative meditations are needed for the earthward as well as the heavenward progress of peoples. Poetry, old or new, streaming from a heart moved by love, influences the heart public and individual, and thence manners, laws, and institutions. If Poesy visits a whole country after unfruitfully dull years, like a showery wind after drought, she visits the corners and valley-hidings too, perhaps first. The public corn, the bread of the nation’s life, is bettered for miles; and in our own endeared spot the roses yield their colour and fragrance more prosperingly. As midseason rains renew for a while the faded green of spring, and trees in summer, their foliage fixed, put on bright midsummer shoots, so by Poetry the youthful hues of the soul are renewed, and truths long standing full-foliaged in our minds put forth fresh shoots. Thus age, a necessity for the body, may be warded off as a disease from the soul, and we may be like the old man in Chaucer, who had nothing hoary about him but his hairs—”

Hear our author again as to the calling of the poet:—

“To unite earthly love and celestial, ‘true to the kindred points of heaven and home’; to reconcile time and eternity; to draw presage of joy’s victory from the delight of the secret honey dropping from the clefts of rocky sorrow; to harmonize our instinctive longings for the definite and the infinite, in the ideal Perfect; to read creation as a human book of the heart, both plain and mystical, and divinely written: such is the office fulfilled by best-loved poets. Their ladder of celestial ascent must be fixed on its base, earth, if its top is to rest securely on heaven.”

He also describes the birth of Poetry beautifully, though one may doubt its correctness, at least if attributed to the highest kind of poetry.

“When the first pair spoke words of felt truth, in love of their garden, their God, and one another, and felt with joyful surprise that the form and glow of the words answered to the happy thought, then Poetry sprang. And when the first Father and first Mother, settling their soul upon a thought, found it brighten, and other thoughts came from it like branchlets from a branch, falling by the soul’s painless effort into an order felt to be beautiful, pleasant to ear and soul, and fixed in memory by the sweetness of their impression on the heart, then the world’s first poem was composed; and in the joyful flutter of a heart become a maker of a ‘thing of beauty,’ like in beauty even to God’s heaven, trees, and flowers, the secret of Poesy shone tremulously forth.”

Whether this is so or not, the highest poetic feeling we now know springs not from beholding perfected beauty but from the mute sympathy shown us by creation and all its children in the groaning and travailing that looks for the sonship. Because of our need and aspiration, the snowdrop awakens a loftier spiritual and poetic feeling than the rose most perfect in form, colour, and odour. The rose is of Paradise; the snowdrop is of the striving, hoping, longing Earth. Perhaps our highest poetry is the expression of our aspirations in the sympathetic forms of visible nature. Nor is this merely a longing for a restored Paradise; in ordinary history too no man or woman who has fallen can be restored to the former position, but must rise higher, to a place from which that standing lies far beneath: restored by attaining something better than ever was possessed, or not at all. If the law is a weariness, we escape it by being filled with the spirit, for we can fulfil the law only by being above the law. There is for us no escape, save as the Poet counsels us:—

But the Reviewer must hasten, though unwillingly, to take leave of this pleasing, earnest, and profitable book. Perhaps the writer could have helped his readers more into the channel of his thought, made it easier to see where he leads them, called out “Come up hither” before saying “I will show you a thing.” The Reviewer says this with deference, and leaves hoping Mr. Lynch will be listened to for two good reasons: first, that he speaks the truth; last, that he has already suffered for the Truth’s sake.