26 OCTOBER 1861, Page 16

THE MINOR SOURCES OF LITERARY EbF.H.LT.

LTJTILER used to assign a very characteristic and unique cause for the effectiveness of his sermons and writings. " I have no better `work,'" he said, " than:anger (torn) and zeal; for if I wish to compose, or write, or pray and preach well, I must be angry (zorniy); then all the blood in my veins is stirred, my understanding is shar- pened, and all dismal thoughts and temptations are dissipated." No doubt the Doctor's word was intended to denote rather what we call "indignation" than anger; it is not any selfish resentment which beats in the pulses of that still vivid thought, but a noble scorn of all meanness and evil that seems to play through his writings, and scatter the miserable cobwebs of the heart and brain. But his words have occurred to us as illustrating what is well worth notice with respect to much very able temporary literature, that the source of its peculiar flavour is by no means always as is supposed the intellectual power or capacity of the writer, but very often the effect of very different elements in his character—sometimes weakness and sometimes strength. For example, anger itself, both of the nobler and the pettier kind, is often the secret of literary effect. It is, indeed, only a deep moral indignation, such as Luther speaks of, which gives a permanent depth and force to human thought; but for temporary literary purposes, mere hatred of the lower sort—in a word, temper—is a most powerful literary ingredient. An exceedingly small amount of intellectual power is sufficient to produce a very creditable effect if it be fired by the gunpowder of a little anger. . Some of Dr. Johnson's most pointed sayings must be admitted to owe their concentrated sting rather to frank ill-humour than to any intellectual acumen; for example, that retort on some inopportune laugher, " You dare to laugh, sir ! Could I suppose I had said any- thing you could understand, I should feel it a deep disgrace." And the same is true of a good deal of the " able" writing of every English journal. Which of us would be able to distinguish clearly when we plant what we think a good blow in an adversary's breast, how much of the effect is science and how much is hearty ill- will? But analyzing at our leisure the sources of effective writing in others, we can often see that intellectual capacity forms little or no element in the result. When, for example, the other day, the Times, after its masterly fashion, reviled the Comte de Paris and the Duo de Chartres for taking service with the American Government, no one who calmly analyzed the literary force of the article could resolve it into anything much higher than the kind of power with which a vicious horse stuns those who are unwary enough to approach it. The following, for example, was exceedingly effective writing, and produced, no doubt, on anybody friendly to the young princes who may have lighted upon it unexpectedly in

their morning's paper, much the same cracking effect on the shocked retina as a vigorous blow on the forehead; yet who can say that it is in any sense intellectual?

"It was one thing for princes of the Royal House of France to bear their part in gallant actions under such men as Turenne, Condi, Luxembourg, and Saxe ; it is another thing to study in the ignorant and bloody school of civil war under rude partisans, inexperienced generals, officers taken from the counter, the desk, the shambles, or worse places, with men unwilling to submit to discipline ; and, above all with a press sure to make all the capital that can be made out of per- sons of such high rank by endless calumnies and the most barefaced perversion and fabrication of facts."

The same kind of literary power is not unfrequently to be found, mingled with a great deal that is much higher and truly intellectual, in the trenchant invective of the Saturday Review. The celebrated and able article on "Mrs. Beecher Stowe's Wounded Feelings," for example, drew all its inspiration from the well-directed resolve to make those wounds smart again. The effectiveness—and there was great effectiveness—in the article was entirely of the sort which oil of vitriol produces on a sore place. The lady is held up to ridicule for being feminine, and she is pictured in a feminine rage, and therein consists the barb of the paper—being effectiveness of exactly the

same kind which the curious instinctive acumen of generally lends to the most illiterate man in a mood of contempt or disgust. A fretted mind is naturally awakened and concentrated on the fretting cause, so that home-thrusts suggest themselves naturally enough, which, when beheld by impartial spectators without any such inward irritation to inspire them, have all the character and effect of intellectual force. Much of Swift's apparent intellectual strength was but disguised and malignant rage,—as Luther's consisted, by his own confession, in the pealing thunder of an exalted wrath.

But anger and pique are by no means the only efficient substitutes for intellectual power in literature. There is scarcely any moral power or weakness which may not, under some peculiar conditions, become the defined fountain of literary ability. For instance, a very large portion of the most remarkable literary effects of the present day are produced by a certain cool audacity—sometimes, as in some of Mr. Reade's novels, passing into impudence—which sets at naught the conventionalities of customary speech. Thus some of the best things in the Saturday Review have owed their defined and pungent flavour to the courage with which the writers have expressed what half the world thought it better to assume without expressing. The tenacity with which it has preached the doctrine that any sensible man will, in choosing a wife, be quite justified in guiding his affections by his pecuniary interests, and will find no difficulty in so doing, is an ex- ample of what we mean. Thousands have thought what the Saturday reviewers have simply and boldly put down on paper. They have ably stated and courageously justified what we may call the anxiously common-place view on almost every subject, and the literary effect has been really great. Naked common-place, stripped of all cant and vigorously set forth, has had all the effect of a deeper intellectual view. Yet very often it has represented a perversely shallow intel- lectual view, and the only real power has arisen from the determina- tion to avow, and defend explicitly, the principles from which so many persons really act. The same kind of aplomb carried a little further, and balanced by somewhat less strength of judgment, pro- duces the vivacity for which Mr. Charles Rcade has established a reputation. When, for instance, he tells us that people felt a certain conviction "in their secret souls and pockets—excuse the tautology," we smile at the impertinence of the man, and feel that the sentence is not without an impudent vivacity of its own ; but certainly it is not intellectual power of any sort which constitutes that vivacity.

Again, how rich a source of one kind of literary effect has been the preponderance of a certain simple species of frankly confessed vanity and egotism in men of otherwise no marked imaginative or intellectual capacity. It may be said to form the fundamental substance of the prattling school of German and Danish sentiment represented by Goldschmidt and Andersen, and to mingle not a little in German, French, and Irish works of real genius. Rousseau owed much to it, Goethe much, Sterne and Goldsmith much ; and, we may almost say, that a common order of intellect and imagination is frequently raised into a great literary power by a free admixture of egotistic candour. It is even the source of the extraordinary charm in all the detail of Gibbon's "Autobiography." The well-known passage in which he recounts his father's interference to prevent his marrying the penni- less young lady who afterwards became Madame Necker—" I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son,"—owes its effect as much to the un- conscious egotism which plays through it as to the stately historical style in which it is conveyed. Indeed, almost any peculiarity of personal temperament is capable of becoming a source of literary fascination. Nathaniel Hawthorne has no slight lite- rary powers, but, after all, ha great success could not be ascribed to them alone ; it i3 to the curdling of quite opposite states of sentiment in his mind, the tendency, evidently inherent in him, to dwell on highly morbid contrasts of rival feelings, the mixture of holy and unholy passions, the contrasts of physical taints with mental purity, and so forth, that his works owe their peculiar

and rather unhealthy fascination. And the same is true in even a greater degree of the insane and often disgusting horrors of Edgar Poe.

Literary effect, then, has a thousand subsidiary and minor sources besides proper intellectual power—besides that largeness °fit:exits-- whether:reason, fancy, or imagination—which is its natural and normal cause. We may say, in fact, that the sublimest literature the earth has ever seen owes its greatness far more to the kindled conscience than to the mere imaginative faculty of the world's greatest poets. There is very little reason to suppose that the Hebrew imagination, if isolated from the springs of moral inspiration, was in itself of remark- able scope. The best proof of this is that while we have had great Jewish thinkers like Spinoza, musicians like Mendelssohn, with not a few statesmen and generals, as Mr. Disraeli reminds us, and financiers, private and public, there has not appeared a single great poet that we can remember, except Heinrich Heine (whose marvellous poetics faculty is a variety, though a very fresh variety, of the German genius), since the writer of the Apocalypse ended the strange and pathetic music of those solemn words in which he painted the new heavens and the new earth lighted only by the love of God: We all remember Coleridge's expression of astonishment that the "Hear, 0 Heavens, and give ear, 0 Earth" of Isaiah, and the " 0' clo !' " of Holywell-street, should both be characteristic key-notes to the same national character in different stages of its development. And even if the antithesis be a little more striking than sound, no calm intel- lect will deny that the Hebrew genius was identified, as no other national genius has ever been, with a personal vision of the Eternal Righteousness and Will.

Literary effect, then, if it is sometimes due rather to temper, eccen- tricities, and incapacity, than to great intellectual capacity, is never so great as when it arises from that which is deeper than either our ineapacities or our capacities—that which is altogether beyond human sounding-lines ; the moral of which discussion is, that literary effect, for itself alone, is a very worthless and often really unworthy affair, and should be analyzed a little more carefully than it usually is, before we go into captivity to it as most of us do. When it is, as it often is, a result of shallowness or temper, we may laugh and pass on; when it arises from courage and candour, we should pause and think; when from deeper moral and intellectual insight, we should study; only when it springs from what is deeper than ourselves may we suffer ourselves to be carried away.