THE HEART IN LITERATURE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1212, 24 May 1895, Page 29

THE HEART IN LITERATURE.

By Richard Le Gallienne. It has been the fashion for some little time now to sneer at all who “ show their feelings "in literature. The young Literary Ass of the day has made it his boast to feel as few of the ordinary emotions of humanity as possible, and any that he might be unfashionable enough to fall into, he has successfully hidden behind a mask of | modish imperturbability. “ Though God should come in thunder soon,'' as Mr Davidson sings, he will not move a muscle —he will go on cherishing his stillborn prose. Now this young man, of course, does not really matter. He is tiresome, and in low states of one’s health, he is apt to get on one’s nerves. But really nobody need mind him. He is a familiar phenomenon to literary astronomers, who have, generation after generation, watched him come with comet-like fuss and fume, and waste himself in vain battle against the fixed stars. But, like many silly and evil things, he may serve to provide “a lesson." Nothing in any art is done without j enthusiasm, without strong attraction to, | or maybe repulsion from, the subject j matter, in the first instance, and love for ! the medium in the second ; and the lan- | guid indifference which this young man apparently feels towards everything under the sun is, obviously, the precise opposite of this sole creative mocd. He who is really indifferent about men and women will soon find how terribly indifferent men and women are about him. The nearer our work is to nature, the nearer to fame.

Happily, ever-changing fashion seems once more changing. “ Sentiment," Mr Zangwill has prettily rhymed, “ is back again." At any rate, there are many signs that she is on the way. The long winter of so-called realism and cynicism shows signs of breaking up, and “this snail-beslimed earth " (which I think was the most beautiful thing Baudelaire, or one of his followers, could find to say about it) may once more venture to put forth flowers —even of speech !—and the happy voices of simple lovers be heard once more in the land. The books that have lived, and will live, are the books with the kind hearts —the books of beauty, love and tenderness, the books with pretty girls in them, and simple passionate lovers, the books that tell of noble suffering, and duty done in the face of death : not the books that cruelly sneer at these things, that make light of human destinies, and make mock of human dreams. Need I say that I am far from meaning the goody-goody books, else it would be hard to reconcile one’s theory with the

sturdy immortality of certain amatorious; classics. Ho, let passion have its way With us—in our books ; let us have love* so that it be high and ennobling passion, and no mere cynical animalism. An extreme oi sentiment is better than no feeling at all. Sterne, for example, may nauseate us at times with his extreme lachrymoseness, but it was this very tendency to excess that made him capable of touching us at all —that emotional gift which, when working under control, gave us Corporal Trim and the two immortal brothers. Genius has rarely, if ever, existed without a tendency to hysteria, but some men control it better than others. Because some writers wax over-sentimental, are we to give up hearts altogether ? For my part, I think that, after all is said and done, the heart is mainly in its right place worn upon the sleeve. People can see it then, and it is no nee having a heart of gold if you keep it carefully concealed, or, like Carlyle, guard it with a hide of bristles. And ife does the world good to see a heart occasionally. It gives it heart. Hew sad and hopeless the world has become since it began to have serious doubts of, so to say, the kindheartedness of the universe, to fear that Mr Grant. Allen’s grim picture of God may even he true.

However, whether there be a kind heart beating through the universe or not, there is, for all its surface dandy cynicism, a kind heart in humanity. Of the kindly human emotions, at all events, we are sure ; and while there remains a heart in humanity, there must, inevitably, be a heart in literature. Humanity will not support an inhuman literature. It never has done, does not even now, and never will. All the great books of the world have big kind hearts. Their writers, as Whitman finely says of himself, were “not proud of their songs but of the measureless ocean of love within them." They have written greatly because they have loved much. Men and women without hearts may write clever books that tickle the palate of a jaded time, but they can never write great or even fine ones. Homer, Lucretius, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Fielding, Wordsworth, Shelley, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Browning, Tennyson: all these immortals had great kind hearts. Mi* Meredith, with all his irony and colossal cleverness, is something like a great writer because he has a great heart, a heart that loves and pities, while it laughs at humanity. Great men may be bitter and cynical and despairing —they have their great moods of agony, their little moods of bile —but the main thing that distinguishes them from small men is the great kind heart that you will always find beating somewhere in their books, their central tenderness and sun-like gift of love. Depend upon it, whatever be the passing fashions of the hour, that — Beaut.y’s for the largest heart And all abysses love can bridge. —From Great Thoughts.