The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings
are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by
history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented
to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we
take to be the most awful laboratory of powers--mysterious, unseen, and
absolutely infinite--the second might be represented by the winds, and
the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief
to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the
grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all
other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings
into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the
base to the noble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to
the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply
because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of
celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers
the _genus attonitorum_, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a
splendour not at all _in_ Napoleon, to a baseness which really _is_ in
Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob
by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest
of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the
Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust,
seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory
and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above.
Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic
hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn
the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human
nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary
combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of
scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but
it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.
Wordsworth is always recording phenomena as they are enjoyed; Coleridge
as they reconcile themselves with opposing or conflicting phenomena.
W. W.'s social philosophy is surely shallow. It is true the man who has
a shallow philosophy under the guidance of Christianity has a profound
philosophy. But this apart, such truths as 'He who made the creature
will allow for his frailties,' etc., are commonplace.
* * * * *
_Invention as a Characteristic of Poets._--I happened this evening
(Saturday, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is
so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and
spontaneous thoughts which they have accumulated coming to an end, and
yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round,
like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form
descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that
invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of
poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true
quality.
_Tragedy._--I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons
cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children
often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that
they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that
young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and
sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence
upon them in every act and movement, which _matre præsente_ they would
not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness
of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case).
However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts
in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children,
develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the
world, and would die away, or freeze, or degenerate, if it were
generally balked. Now just such an action has tragedy, and if the
sympathy with calamities caused to noble natures by ignobler, or by dark
fates, were never opened or moved or called out, it would slumber
inertly, it would rust, and become far less ready to respond upon any
call being made. Such sensibilities are not consciously known to the
possessor until developed.
_Punctuation._--Suppose an ordinary case where the involution of clauses
went three deep, and that each was equally marked off by commas, now I
say that so far from aiding the logic it would require an immense effort
to distribute the relations of logic. But the very purpose and use of
points is to aid the logic. If indeed you could see the points at all in
this relation
strophe antistrophe
1 2 3 3 2 1
----, ----, ----, apodosis ----, ----, ----,
then indeed all would be clear, but the six commas will and must be
viewed by every reader unversed in the logical mechanism of sentences as
merely a succession of ictuses, so many minute-guns having no internal
system of correspondence, but merely repeating and reiterating each
other, exactly as in men, guns, horses, timbrels, baggage-waggons,
standards.
_Sheridan's Disputatiousness._--I never heard of any case in the whole
course of my life where disputatiousness was the author of any benefit
to man or beast, excepting always one, in which it became a storm anchor
for poor Sheridan, saving him from sudden shipwreck. This may be found
in Mr. Moore's life, somewhere about the date of 1790, and in chapter
xiii. The book is thirty-seven miles off, which is too far to send for
water, or for scandal, or even for 'extract,' though I'm 'fond of
extract.' Therefore, in default of Mr. Moore's version, I give my own.
The situation was this: Sheridan had been cruising from breakfast to
dinner amongst Jews, Christians, and players (men, women, and
Herveys),[40] and constantly in the same hackney coach, so that the
freight at last settled like the sand-heap of an hour-glass into a
frightful record of costly moments. _Pereunt et imputantur_, say some
impertinent time-pieces, in speaking of the hours. They perish and are
debited to our account. Yes, and what made it worse, the creditor was an
inexorable old Jarvie, who, though himself a creditor, had never heard
the idea of credit. A guinea might be owing, and Sheridan, seldom
remembering his purse, had but a shilling, which even in a court of
Irish law seemed too small a compromise to offer. Black looked the
horizon, stormy the offing, and night was coming on, whilst the port of
consignment was now within thirty minutes' sail. Suddenly a sight of joy
was described. Driving before the wind, on bare poles, was a well-known
friend of Sheridan's, Richardson, famed for various talent, but also for
an invincible headlong necessity of disputing. To pull the check-string,
to take his friend on board, and to rush into fierce polemic
conversation was the work of a moment for Sheridan. He well understood
with this familiar friend how to bring on a hot dispute. In three
minutes it raged, yard-arm to yard-arm. Both grew warm. Sheridan grew
purple with rage. Violently interrupting Richardson, he said: 'And these
are your real sentiments?' Richardson with solemnity and artificial
restraint replied: 'Most solemnly they are.' 'And you stand to them, and
will maintain them?' 'I will,' said Richardson, with menacing solemnity
and even mournfulness. 'I will to my dying day.' 'Then,' said Sheridan
furiously, 'I'm hanged if I'll stay another minute with a man capable of
such abominable opinions!' Bang went the door, out he bounced, and
Richardson, keeping his seat, pursued him with triumphant explosions.
'Ah, wretch! what? you can't bear the truth. You're obliged to hate the
truth. That is why you cut and run before it. Huzza! Mr. Sheridan, M.
P. for Stafford, runs like a hare for fear that he should hear the
truth.' Precisely so, the truth it was that he ran from. The truth at
this particular moment was too painful to his heart. Sheridan had fled;
the awful truth amounted to eighteen shillings.
Yes, virtuous Richardson, you were right; truth it was that he fled
from; truth had just then become too painful to his infirm mind,
although it was useless to tell him so, as by this time he was out of
hearing. 'Yes,' said Richardson meditatively to himself, 'the truth has
at last become insupportable to this unhappy man.' Right, it _had_ so.
And in one minute more it became insupportable even to the virtuous
Richardson, when the coachman revealed the odious extent of the truth,
viz., that the fare now amounted to two-and-twenty shillings.
As I hate everything that the people love, and above all the odious
levity with which they adopt every groundless anecdote, especially where
it happens to be calumnious, I beg not to be supposed a believer in the
common stories current about Sheridan's carelessness of pecuniary
obligations. So far from 'never paying,' which is what public slander
has not ceased to report of him, he was (in Mr. Moore's language)
'_always_ paying;' and for once that he paid too little, a thousand
times he paid a great deal too much. Had, indeed, all his excesses of
payment been gathered into one fund, that fund would have covered his
deficits ten times over. It is, however, true that, whilst he was
continually paying the hundred-pound demands against him, with all their
Jewish accumulations of interest, he was continually unfurnished with
money for his 'menus plaisirs' and trifling personal expenses.
By strong natural tendency of disposition, Sheridan was a man of
peculiarly sensitive honour, and the irregularities into which he fell,
more conspicuously after the destruction of Drury Lane by fire, pained
nobody so much as himself. It is the sense of this fact, and the belief
that Sheridan was never a defaulter through habits of self-indulgence,
which call out in _my_ mind a reaction of indignation at the stories
current against him.
_Bookbinding and Book-Lettering._--Literature is a mean thing enough in
the ordinary way of pursuing it as what the Germans call a
_Brodstudium_; but in its higher relations it is so noble that it is
able to ennoble other things, supposing them in any degree ministerial
to itself. The paper-maker, ergo the rag-maker, ergo the linen
cloth-maker, is the true and original creator of the modern press, as
the Archbishop of Dublin long ago demonstrated. For the art of printing
had never halted for want of the typographic secret; _that_ was always
known, known and practised hundreds of years before the Christian era.
It halted for want of a material cheap enough and plentiful enough to
make types other than a most costly substitute for hand-copying. Do you
hear _that_, gentlemen blockheads, that seldom hear anything but
yourselves? Next after the paper-maker, who furnished the _sine quâ
non_, takes rank, not the engraver or illustrator (our modern novelist
cannot swim without this caricaturing villain as one of his bladders;
all higher forms of literature laugh at him), but the binder; for he, by
raising books into ornamental furniture, has given even to
non-intellectual people by myriads a motive for encouraging literature
and an interest in its extension.
Any specimen of Mr. Ferrar's binding I never saw, but by those who
_have_, it is said to have been magnificent. He and his family were
once, if not twice, visited by Charles I., and they presented to that
prince a most sumptuous Bible of their own binding; which Bible, a lady
once told me, was in that collection gradually formed by George III. at
Buckingham House, and finally presented to the nation by his son. I
should fear it must be in ruins as a specimen of the Little Gidding
workmanship. The man who goes to bed in his coffin dressed in a jewelled
robe and a diamond-hilted sword, is very liable to a visit from the
resurrection-man, who usually disarms and undresses him. The Bible that
has its binding inlaid with gold, sowed with Oriental pearl, and made
horrent with rubies, suggests to many a most unscriptural mode of
searching into its treasures, and too like the Miltonic Mammon's mode of
perusing the gorgeous floors of heaven. Besides that, if the Bible
escaped the Parliamentary War, the true _art_ of the Ferrar family would
be better displayed in a case of less cost and luxury. Certainly, in no
one art was the stupidity of Europe more atrociously recorded than in
this particular art practised by the Ferrars. Boundless was the field
for improvement. And in particular, I had myself drawn from this art, as
practised of old, one striking memorial of that remarkable genius for
stupidity, which in all ages alike seems to haunt man as by an
inspiration, unless he is roused out of it by panic. It is this. Look at
the lettering--that is, the labels lettered with the titles of books--in
all libraries that are not of recent date. No man would believe that the
very earliest attempt to impress a mark of ownership upon some bucket of
the Argonauts, or the rudest scrawl of Polyphemus in forging a tarry
brand upon some sheep which he had stolen, could be _so_ bad, _so_
staggering and illegible, as are these literary inscriptions. How much
better to have had a thin tablet or veneering of marble or iron adjusted
to the back of the book. A stone-cutter in a rural churchyard once told
me that he charged a penny _per_ letter. That may be cheap for a
gravestone, but it seems rather high for a book. _Plato_ would cost you
fivepence, _Aristotle_ would be shocking; and in decency you must put
him into Latin, which would add twopence more to every volume. On a
library like that of Dresden or the Vatican, it would raise a national
debt to letter the books.
_Cause of the Novel's Decline._--No man, it may be safely laid down as a
general rule, can obtain a strong hold over the popular mind without
more or less of real power. A reality there must be. The artifice, the
trickery, cannot arise in this first stage, as by any substitution of a
shadow for a reality. If the mass of readers _feel_ a power, and
acknowledge a power, in that case power there must be. It was the just
remark of Dr. Johnson that men do not deceive themselves in their
amusements. And amusement it is that the great public seek in
literature. The meaner and the more sensual the demands of a man are, so
much the less possible it becomes to cheat him. Seeking for warmth, he
cannot be wrong when he says that he has found it. Asking for _alcohol_,
he will never be cheated with water. His feelings in such a case, his
impressions, instantaneously justify themselves; that is, they bear
witness past all doubting to the certainty of what they report. So far
there is no opening to mistake. The error, the opening to the spurious
on the largest scale, arises first upon the _quality_ of the power.
Strength varies upon an endless scale, not merely by its own gradations,
but by the modes and the degrees in which it combines with other
qualities. And there are many combinations, cases of constant
recurrence, in which some natural vigour, but of no remarkable order,
enters into alliance with animal propensities; where a portentous
success will indicate no corresponding power in the artist, but only an
unusual insensibility to decency and the opinion of thoughtful persons.
Novels are the one sole class of books that ever interest the public,
that reach its heart, or even catch its eye. And the reason why novels
are becoming much more licentious, and much grosser in the arts by which
they court public favour, lies undoubtedly in the quality of that new
reading public which the extension of education has added to the old
one. An education miserably shallow, whilst unavailing for any purpose
of real elevation, lets in upon the theatre of what is called by
courtesy literature a vast additional audience that once would have been
excluded altogether. This audience, changed in no respect from its
former condition of intellect and manners and taste, bringing only the
single qualification of ability to read, is now strong enough in numbers
to impress a new character upon literature in so far as literature has a
motive for applying itself to _their_ wants. The consequences are
showing themselves, and _will_ show themselves more broadly. It is
difficult with proper delicacy to seek illustrations amongst our own
living writers. Illustrations were all too easily found did we care to
enter on the task.
It is true that, during the currency of any year, whilst the quantity
is liable to indeterminate augmentation, ballads will be rather looking
down in the market. But that is a shadow which settles upon every
earthly good thing. No Greek book, for instance, amongst the many that
have perished, would so much rejoice many of us by its resurrection as
the comedies of Menander. Yet, if a correspondent should write word from
Pompeii that twenty-five thousand separate dramas of Menander had been
found in good preservation, adding in a postscript that forty thousand
more had been impounded within the last two hours, and that there was
every prospect of bagging two hundred thousand more before morning, we
should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels
with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against
such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this
one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of
limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that
point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, or class of
compositions, which will not be welcomed into literature provided, as to
matter, that it shall embody some natural strain of feeling, and
provided, as to manner, that it illustrate the characteristic style of a
known generation.
It might suffice for our present purpose to have once firmly
distinguished between the two modes of literature. But it may be as well
to point out a few corollaries from this distinction, which will serve
at the same time to explain and to confirm it. For instance, first of
all, it has been abundantly insisted on in our modern times, that the
value of every literature lies in its characteristic part; a truth
certainly, but a truth upon which the German chanticleer would not have
crowed and flapped his wings so exultingly, had he perceived the
original and indispensable schism between the literature of knowledge
and the literature of power, because in this latter only can anything
characteristic of a man or of a nation be embodied. The science of no
man can be characteristic, no man can geometrize or chemically analyze
after a manner peculiar to himself. He may be the first to open a new
road, and in that meaning it may be called _his_ road; but _his_ it
cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an _incommunicable_
excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is
otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing
little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever
_led_ his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been
otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits
not transferable. Consequently the [Greek: to] characteristic, of which
in German cloudland so noisy a proclamation is made as of some
transcendental discovery, is a mere inference from the very idea of a
literature. For we repeat that in blank knowledge a separate peculiarity
marking the individual is not conceivable, whereas in a true literature
reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it wills, not as a
passive minor, but as a self-moving power, it is not possible to avoid
the characteristic except only in the degree by which the inspiring
nature happens to be feeble. The exorbitations that differentiate them
may be of narrow compass, but only where the motive power was originally
weak. And agreeably to this remark it may be asserted that in all
literature properly so-called genius, is always manifested, and talent
generally; but in the literature of knowledge it may be doubted very
seriously whether there is any opening for more than talent. Genius may
be defined in the severest manner as _that which is generally
characteristic_; but a thousand times we repeat that one man's mode of
knowing an object cannot differ from another man's. It _cannot_ be
characteristic, and its geniality cannot be externally manifested. To
have said, therefore, of the poetry surviving from ancient Latium, from
Castile, from England, that this is nationally characteristic, and
knowable apart by inalienable differences, is saying no more than
follows out of the very definition by which any and every literature
proper is limited and guarded as a mode of power.
Secondly, even in the exceptions and hesitations upon applying the
rigour of this distinction, we may read the natural recognition (however
latent or unconscious) of the rule itself. No man would think, for
example, of placing a treatise on surveying, on mensuration, on
geological stratifications, in any collection of his national
literature. He would be lunatic to do so. A Birmingham or Glasgow
Directory has an equal title to take its station in the national
literature. But he will hesitate on the same question arising with
regard to a history. Where upon examination the history turns out to be
a mere chronicle, or register of events chronologically arranged, with
no principle of combination pervading it, nor colouring from peculiar
views of policy, nor sympathy with the noble and impassioned in human
action, the decision will be universal and peremptory to cashier it from
the literature. Yet this case, being one of degree, ranges through a
large and doubtful gamut. A history like that of Froissart, or of
Herodotus, where the subjective from the writer blends so powerfully
with the gross objective, where the moral picturesque is so predominant,
together with freshness of sensation which belongs to 'blissful
infancy' in human life, or to a stage of society in correspondence to
it, cannot suffer a demur of jealousy as to its privilege of entering
the select fold of literature. But such advantages are of limited
distribution. And, to say the truth, in its own nature neither history
nor biography, unless treated with peculiar grace, and architecturally
moulded, has any high pretension to rank as an organic limb of
literature. The very noblest history, in much of its substance, is but
by a special indulgence within the privilege of that classification.
Biography stands on the same footing. Of the many memorials dedicated to
the life of Milton, how few are entitled to take their station in the
literature! And why? Not merely that they are disqualified by their
defective execution, but often that they necessarily record what has
become common property.