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bear any sudden strain, as in the case of a European These are contingencies that should be weighed by statesmen and administrators, and pondered by all who have the responsibility of forming and guiding public opinion. Professional politicians may appeal in fluent rhetoric to popular ignorance, and amiable enthusiasts, dominated by one idea, but unable to take comprehensive views, may propound their social panaceas; but the questions at issue are broader and deeper than they imagine. We have referred already to the exercise of a rigid economy in the great spending departments of the public service, like the army and navy; the restoration to the House of Commons of full financial control; an arrest of the tendency to borrow large sums for local purposes (repayment of which should be spread over not more than thirty years, or one generation); the vast outlay upon experimental and structural works, the rapid growth of officialism, and the craze for municipal trading. There is no heroic method of dealing with the complex difficulties; but it may be urged that the same common-sense and business rules should be applied to national and local expenditure that are considered to be imperative in ordinary life. Commercial men do not conduct their affairs in the reckless fashion often displayed in public administration; or, if they do, the goal of bankruptcy is speedily reached. Domestic outgoings have to be regulated by income; and there is no valid reason why this salutary rule should not control the financial affairs of the Legislature and of local authorities. Instead of this, the first thing done is to decide how much shall be spent, and then the question of ways and means is considered. It is therefore not surprising that the nation has become improvident and wasteful, and is now confronted by problems whose solution will require the ability, the energy, the firmness, and the ingenuity of the wisest statesmen that this country can produce for many years to come.

Art. II.-ORIGINALITY AND CONVENTION IN LITER

ATURE.

1. English Literature and

Society in the Eighteenth Century.

By Sir Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth, 1904. 2. Les Lois de l'Imitation. Paris: Alcan, 1895.

By G. Tarde. Second edition.

3. Physics and Politics. By Walter Bagehot. Third edition. London: King, 1875.

It was certainly an old question, and for sundry critics a superfluous question, when Sir Leslie Stephen, trying in his last book to sum up the worth of literature, asked how much the great writers owe to themselves as individuals, that is, to their invention, and how much to convention, to the traditions and the environment in which they live. No doubt the modern critic will choose a short way with this ancient question, and will deny that it any longer exists. He will refuse to hear of a balance of forces in the literary process, and will recognise convention only as the limit, the adjustment, the imitation, of a single artistic and creative power. Invention, he will say, is the tread of genius in the flesh; convention is the trail of genius gone before. Psychologically, invention is one with sincerity, the expression of self; critically, it is production of high artistic values. Convention, treated historically, would begin, from this point of view, as literal reproduction of the invention, with much verbal repetition, as in the choral songs of savages, yielding, with the progress of the art, to a factor with which every one is now familiar as the mainstay of literature, imitation.

Here, then, is the monistic formula, one may say the accepted modern formula, of any literary process: invention and imitation, corresponding to the Darwinian formula of heredity and variation. Is it, however, a sufficient formula for literature as a social phenomenon, for literature as an element in human life everywhere and at all times? Is it really consistent with the doctrines of sociology? Satisfying the critic, who is mainly concerned with values, 'the reasoned exercise of literary taste,' the laws, tests, decrees, and signs whereby genius can be recognised, how does this formula appeal to the comparative, historical, sociological student of literature who

wishes to deal with his subject, not as an achievement, but as a function? How shall he define convention in terms, not of speculative or judicial fancy, but of those facts which have been observed and rationally connected in the long evolution of literature itself?

Convention, it will surely be granted, is more than simple literary tradition, more than the critical tests; it answers neither to the 'decorum' of Longinus, nor to the 'discretion' which Hobbes in his 'Leviathan' named as the restraining partner of 'fancy 'in any work of art, not even to that comprehensive quality which later critics called taste. No synthesis of appreciations, no summary of the products of genius, can cover it. In any literary process, the force of convention is in good part active, contemporary; it has even a retroactive phase. Convention means something established by consent; invention, or genius, may not only come down to posterity in the acceleration of successive waves of consent, but it may also absorb this power. Posterity can make a genius where no genius, or only a very moderate form of it, existed for contemporary opinion. Shakespeare's text is saturated with an appreciative energy, due to this kind of convention, which compels both wonder and worship, and for which Shakespeare's genius, vast as it was, cannot account; while our English Bible has acquired an emotional power quite beyond reckoning from the consent and passion of religious community. Even in the actual doing of artistic work we feel that an element of the activity is due to consent with a contemporary force, and is quite distinct from imitation of a precedent act. The sweep and compulsion of these forces about one and in one can hardly be traced to a definite source in another individual mind; yet, although in a vague way this assumption is conceded, it gets no hearing as a scientific theory which should help to account for literary art. Modern thought has swung back from the democratic to the monarchical habit. It denies any real validity to such a phrase as religious consent, to such an idea as environment, to such an hypothesis as that of social laws. What these once explained, it explains now in its own way by the formula of monarch and subject, or, in technical words, by the doctrine of invention working directly or through suggestion on imitative individual

minds. The King is again the State; genius explains literature in first as in last analysis.

What we call a commonplace, really the chief haunt of convention and the main achievement of social forces in their literary working, a sentiment or an idea of spontaneous character soaked in communal consent, is for the modern critic merely an outworn expression of genius. It is not, he says, a thing which everybody feels or thinks and one man expresses supremely well, but rather something which some one mind once supremely thought or felt and forced upon the thinking and feeling of an imitative crowd. To-day's tramp wears the coat of yesterday's gentleman: that is commonplace. The critical point of view is thus diametrically opposed to the point of view of romantic criticism a century ago. In the full triumph of that democratic movement in literature, although our sociological terms were then unknown, convention in its higher mood and the nobler commonplace were unduly exalted as the real and almost sole source of all poetic power; the poet was thought to be one who simply took the commonplace sentiment out of its popular rock and set it, as the lapidary sets a gem, in adequate expression and relief. That is to say, where the romantic scholar, the democratic disciple, saw the source of true poetry in the 'great heart of the people,' in humanity at large, in spontaneity and in instinctive utterance, modern critics not only spurn the mob, deny the popular origin, but even declare that instinct and spontaneity are outworn metaphysical terms, confessions of ignorance, which correspond to nothing in actual life.

No better summary of this general doctrine for the fields of sociology and psychology can be found than in the works of the late M. Tarde. His 'Laws of Imitation' is a brilliant study of the subject for sociological ends. And no worse application, it may be added, of this doctrine to literary facts could be imagined than the application which M. Tarde makes here and there in the course of his argument. For this side of the case he does no service which Bagehot, the real founder of the theory of imitation in literature, had not done already; and, when M. Tarde deviates from his master, he falls into demonstrable error. Along with the majority of modern critics he bans utterly what may be called collective sentiment,

and he spurns the literary type.' Environment, Comte's and Taine's milieu, has in itself, by M. Tarde's reckoning, no effect upon art; environment for him is simply the sum of imitative individuals on whom the suggestion of an inventor works by the laws of imitation, and in whom there is no compact, collective, instinctive power. The conventional factor is thus really removed from any literary process; for imitation is either mere reproduction of an invention or, in the more complicated case, a 'secondary invention.' Here, of course, one strikes a very old critical trail. If we set aside the sociological data, which it derives from Bagehot, this theory of M. Tarde's is a mere repetition of early eighteenth century ideas, such as one finds, for example, in a paper which Racine the younger read in 1720 before the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres. 'La bonne imitation,' says Racine, 'est une continuelle invention.' Brilliant,

fervid, rising far above such commonplace, André Chénier, at the end of the century, preached a better doctrine in his famous poem on Invention,' and gave ampler room to conventional forces; he saw the ideal poetry of the future in verses, strictly imitative of ancient art, which should reflect the new thought, the new philosophy, and 'en langage des dieux fasse parler Newton.'

But M. Tarde, with the old and narrow idea of invention and imitation as formula of the literary process, gives a particular illustration of its details, which seems little short of amazing in a countryman of the author of 'L'Évolution Littéraire.' Literature, says M. Tarde, always 'begins with a book'-he is arguing against Spencer's theory of evolution in art-'some poetical work of great relative perfection, some high initial source,' like 'the Iliad, the Bible, Dante.' Most unfortunate examples. Dante, apart from his intense personality, is a poetic summary of the Middle Ages, and is a splendid case of blended invention and convention, each at high pressure; the prophecies of the Bible, to take only one part of it, are the outcome of long evolution from roving bands, who exhorted and warned in mainly spontaneous and choral chant, on through the increasing importance of the leaders, and up to the solitary seer whose lips are touched with the coal from the altar, and who actually composes, not improvises, his impassioned strain. And the Iliad!

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