Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/81

Rh Now, as a matter of fact, the great literary artists have possessed such a knowledge of the minds of their readers, such a skill in applying it to common human nature, as to at least ensure the popularity and in some cases the immortality of their works. The poet who feels that his verse will stand "to times in hope" speaks with a certainty that few formal doctrines can claim. Poets know by natural tact and through experiment the esthetic probability of achieving desired emotional effects by certain literary means. It is true that there are limitations to their success. Eacine, Lamartine, La Fontaine, can never appeal to the English mind as to the French. Many well-equipped Germans will continue to find their translations of Shakespeare—for us grotesque—better—for them—than the original. The ultra-democrat and the moujik philosopher may be blind to the charm of Elizabethan art. Nevertheless, the greatest literary artists made their appeal not to the adventitious, but to the permanent in human nature, and a psychological study of their masterpieces should enable us to make explicit and doctrinal what with them was implicit and more or less intuitive.

Criticism itself has developed from a consideration of oratory. It was an attempt on the part of the rhetoricians to analyze the work of the orator with the intention of profiting by his successes and of taking warning from his failures. Some general theory of style is presupposed. The profundity to which this study was carried led to the clear recognition among the Greeks and Romans of the psychological significance involved in oratory and rhetoric. The orator is a philosopher with something added. The rhetorician must know the true and the false, he must understand the human mind even if his sole purpose be to deceive. The artist who ventures to play upon us must have a just appreciation of our tendencies and susceptibilities.

That recent rhetoricians take a less serious view of their vocation can be shown by a reference to their pages. One proclaims, for example, that "every piece of style may be said to impress readers in three ways—intellectually, emotionally, esthetically." This dictum forms the basis of a theory of style that cost its author ten years of study. A little further study along philosophical lines might have convinced him that a distinction between the emotional and the esthetic is not so radical as his classification implies. In fact, a glance at recent rhetorics might indicate that as far as the rhetoricians are concerned the same condition prevails now as Spencer complained of over half a century ago: No general theory of expression seems yet to have been enunciated. It was the desire to discover the psychological basis of the heterogeneous rules of the rhetoricians that led him to formulate his theory of the economy of mental energies and sensibilities. The little essay that sets forth his theory, refused by one magazine and dubbed by the editor of a second with the grandiose title Philosophy of Style,