NINETEENTH CENTURY
QUESTIONS

BY
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1897.

COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY ELIOT C. CLARKE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFATORY NOTE

Shortly before his death, Dr. Clarke selected the material for this book, and partly prepared it for publication. He wished thus to preserve some of his papers which had excited interest when printed in periodicals or read as lectures.

With slight exceptions, the book is issued just as prepared by the author.

CONTENTS

LITERARY STUDIES

LYRIC AND DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN LITERATURE AND ART

The German philosophy has made a distinction between the Subjective and the Objective, which has been found so convenient that it has been already naturalized and is almost acclimated in our literature.

The distinction is this: in all thought there are two factors, the thinker himself, and that about which he thinks. All thought, say our friends the Germans, results from these two factors: the subject, or the man thinking; and the object, what the man thinks about. All that part of thought which comes from the man himself, the Ego, they call subjective; all that part which comes from the outside world, the non-Ego, they call objective.

I am about to apply this distinction to literature and art; but instead of the terms Subjective and Objective, I shall use the words Lyric and Dramatic.

For example, when a writer or an artist puts a great deal of himself into his work, I call him a lyric writer or artist. Lyrical, in poetry, is the term applied to that species of poetry which directly expresses the individual emotions of the poet. On the other hand, I call an artist or poet dramatic when his own personality disappears, and is lost in that which he paints or describes. A lyric or subjective writer gives us more of himself than of the outside world; a dramatic or objective writer gives us more of the outside world than of himself.

Lyric poetry is that which is to be sung; the lyre accompanies song. Now, song is mainly personal or subjective. It expresses the singer's personal emotions, feelings, desires; and for these reasons I select this phrase "lyric" to express all subjective or personal utterances in art.

The drama, on the other hand, is a photograph of life; of live men and women acting themselves out freely and individually. The dramatic writer ought to disappear in his drama; if he does not do so he is not a dramatic writer, but a lyrist in disguise.

The dramatic element is the power of losing one's self—opinions, feeling, character—in that which is outside and foreign, and reproducing it just as it is. In perfect dramatic expression the personal equation is wholly eliminated. The writer disappears in his characters; his own hopes and fears, emotions and convictions, do not color his work.

But the lyric element works in the opposite way. In song, the singer is prominent more than what