The Portland daily press., 1880-09-15

| Cuiua uuucrtdheS, III tue w ult6Hdil I've
view, to express her views on what Mr.. James
Payn, in the Nineteenth Century, called "The
Literary Calling" She does not wholly agree
| with Mr.. Payn in some of his conclusions. She
| writes:
rs there anything so desolate in the whole
range of human inanities as forced or self-con-
| scous witticisms? And humor is not wit
though the English mind too often confuses
the one with the other. True humor, such as
is contained often in the cartoons of Tenniel
and the social drawings OF Du Maurier, is by
| no means wit, which is thing more subtle,
| more elegant and more incisive. l do not
think that the English public, as a rule
understand wit at at all; they like broad farce,
| and even of humor there is little trace among
their writers now; dull buffoonery, Dick
ens-and water are the too general substitute.
| For of all the dreary things under the sun the
dreariest is that set clowns grin which the
| English mind calls humor' The American
humor is rather the grin on the face of a
corpse: it is real hamor. though of q ghastly
| and grim sort.
| "Humor having been thus inculcated by Mr.
| Payn's scheme, how is the culture of the i'm
| agination to be proceeded with, or rather what
| complete education is not at all times culture
| of the imagination? can conceive nothing
that can be so rich stimulus to the imagina-
| tion as those grand records and grand concep-
| tiOns that pass in the natural course of study
| under the eyes of all classically educated
| youth. That the tone Of school life does its
best to ieer all the effect of this away is true;
but this is defect in the temper of the genera-
| tion that would equally pervade any education
at the present moment. Imagination, like
| every other noble faculty, will be braced and
purified by noble education, but it will never
Oe called into existence ON barren ground BY
any effort Of culture, and it will never be made
for hire as you may make the skill of the
joiner or the gastitter.
"Mr. Payn is inclined to think the distinc-
tion between genius and TALENT wholly fanc-
full so does the man of a certain type think it
wholly fanciful to see any distinction between
the violin OF Joachim and the band of
Strauss; are not both musc?' He kindly OBJ
serves that he does not 'disbeiieve in the
genius OF Sir Walter Scott, but it is very eyi-
dent thai he thinks ne do quite as well,
and that ms young men of the future, ii train
Ell according to his suggestions. would do very
much better. This article of Mr. Payn's is a
literary curiosity; first, it is odd that it should
ever have been published at all in review of
the genius, aims and high pretensions of the
Nineteenth Century; secondly, because it is
equally strange that man should think that
he has any title to write about literature who
says that 'he does not disbelieve'' in the geni-
us of Sir Walter Scott.
'Mr. Payn is OF opinion that there may be
mandatory of talent not OF genius, perhaps,
which to his eyes is a mere chimera seen in
mist, but of talent which shall be every atom
as good, and in his essayshe so entirely confuses
the writing of books with the writing for news
papers that it is hard to tell whether both are
not equal in his eyes; at any rate he is quite
convinced that you can make novelists by the
thOusand and SO, no doubt you can, il you be
not very desirous to have quality that Mr..
Payn probably regards as also purely fancifdl'
4. e., originality. No training ever made orig
inality yet, and, thank God! never will
Training may very likely have crushed out a
good deal.
II remember once hearing clever man
argue that George Eliot was a clever student,
who made talent do the work OF genius, and l
remember objecting to him that talent alone
could easily have produced Middlemarch' and
sRomola,' but that nothing short of genius
could have created the Tulliver family and
old Silas Mariner. Here is a purely fanciful'
distinction, yet it is a very real one; and who
does not regret that the training her mere ftal-
ent has received i'll the dreary and positive dis
putations of science has clouded and cramped
the natural exercise of her imagination, and
thus with it the growth of her genius? Tai
ent does what it can; genius does what it
must Owen Meredith somewhere has said ;
he had better have worded the latter half of
the sentence. what it Wills, for it is just this
free, exuberant and delightful exercise
OF the will which ever marks out the creation
of genius from the labored, however polished
production OF talent. 1t is as the mask freshly
wrought out OF the marble beside the plaster
mask that is only copy. The true poet, the
true artist, always takes delight in creating.
"The mere maker of books or of paintings
does his work as a task: task lucrative, per-
han hl1f a a a q pa N Ia
age of mechanical repetitions, the public, un-
educated though it be as mass, still recog-
nizes the superior value of the hand-chiselled
and hand painted work over the engine-turned
and the color-prnted limitations so the world
happily still recognizes the immense, the inn
measurable, the ineffaceable difference Mr.
Payne thinks it fanciful distinctiOn'-which
sewers by gulf never to be crossed the talent
that tolls from the genius that procreates.
ARTICLES such as this ON the Literary Call
ing, which are written to endeavor to persuade
the people that the engine-turned work is as
| good as the hand-carved wood, are surely en-
tirely mischievous. They are poems in praise
OF pdstiche. The century already is flooded with
torrents of commonplace. Imitation and We
neer have invaded every art. What originate
| ty there is has to struggle against tide of
mediocrity, and as often as not is swamped
under it. Few men have any opinions OF their
l-own, but borrow their views from their favor
| ite journalists. In the study even of classical
q
| quaintance with the surface of things, while
| such superficial series as those of Classical
! Authors for English Readers swell terribly
every year. Drink deep or taste not the Pie
| rian spring is disregarded. With drop al
his fingers end the faster imagineS that he has
| drained all the founts that water Parnassus.
| This feebleness, which is much more marked
just now in English literature than it is in that
of any other nation, may be, AS close observers
| are inclined sadly to believe, one OF those evil
| who are not blinded by party or by prejudice
| have OF late seen i'll the nation itself-the de-
| cay that comes sooner or later to all great en-
| pres.
''There is abundance of thought, but it is in
| the main borrowed thought, and for the most
| part not we'll expressed. The suggestion OF
Mr.. Payn for the training of young men for
| the literary calling could only have good re-
| suit if it induced them to abstain entirely
| from swelling the enormous mass of uncon-
sidered and valueless literature which pours
daily from the printing-presses of Great
Britain. If any one sail or travel, forthwith
| he writes book if an archdeacon or school
| master die, forthwith there is a biography
| replicaS without end appear on every worn-out
| subject, on every historical personage; novels
| come by the thousands without containing in
| their pages even one out of the many qualities
| whose union is absolutely necessary to the
| production of good romance. the period
\ icai literature of the day contains scarcely an
i
| vast mass, and where here and there is piece
| of delicate artistic meditation or OF sbrewd
| political reasoning, it is suffocated between the
heavy masses of padding in which it is EN-.
bedded, and nine times out OF ten passes un
| read
"There can be no good writer without "a
| cultured education; but education will not
| make good writer any more than ten years
| in q studio will make q great painter The
| education hey have have already lFoeey oil
| ought TO prevent the writers for the English
| press making the grotesque errors they daily
| do make; ought to render impossible the
| slipshod language, the tawdry ornament the
| foolish criticism, and the illogical argument
| in which many of them constantly indulge A
man cannot be made to write well; to write
strongly, Itrenchantly, kindly, persuasively,
| eloqnently, is not thing to be taught; but it
| ought to be easy to teach man not to write at
| all in public unless he can write thus ably;
and if educating youth for literature
would do this, namely, it would make
| them at once too modest and too
| sagacious to print commonplaces and publish
borrowed thought. If there be any hope OF
such result as this it wonld be worth while
| to begin the training for the literary calling,
whatever it might be, at once all over the land.
| If young man be left on his own resources,
\