The poet who gave us "Ulysses" so long ago, the poet who brought forth
such a magnificent work as "Maud," retained his power so fully that
thirty years after "Maud" he gave us "Rizpah." This continued
freshness, lasting nearly threescore years, is simply due to economy
of physical and mental resource, which is far more important than any
economy of money. Charles Dickens cannot be said to have been fairly
written out at any time; but he was often perilously near that
condition; only his power of throwing himself with eagerness into any
scheme of relaxation saved him; and, but for the readings and the
unhappy Sittingbourne railway accident, he might be with us now full
of years and honours. When he did suffer himself to be worked to a low
ebb for a time, his writing was very bad. Even in the flush of his
youth, when he was persuaded to write "Oliver Twist" in a hurry, he
fell far below his own standard. I have lately read the book after
many years, and while I find nearly all the comic parts admirable,
some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted
and bad that I can hardly bring myself to believe that Dickens touched
them. An affectionate student of his books can almost always account
for the bad patches in Dickens by collating the novels with the
letters and diary. Much of the totally nauseating gush of the Brothers
Cheeryble must have been turned out only by way of stop-gap; and there
are passages in "Little Dorrit" which may have been done speedily
enough by the author, but which no one of my acquaintance can reckon
as bearable. Dickens saw the danger of exhausting himself before he
reached fifty-four years of age, and tried to repair damages inflicted
by past excesses; but he was too late, and though "Edwin Drood" was
quite in his best manner, he could not keep up the effort--and we lost
him.
As for the dismal hacks who sometimes call themselves journalists, I
cannot grow angry with them; but they do test the patience of the most
stolid of men. To call them writers--_écrivains_--would be worse than
flattery; they are paper-stainers, and every fresh dribble of their
incompetence shows how utterly written out they are. Let them have a
noble action to describe, or let them have a world-shaking event given
them as subject for comment, the same deadly mechanical dulness marks
the description and the article. Look at an article by Forbes or
McGahan or Burleigh--an article wherein the words seem alive--and then
run over a doleful production of some complacent hack, and the
astounding range that divides the zenith of journalism from the nadir
may at once be seen. The poor hack has all his little bundle of
phrases tied up ready to his hand; but he has no brain left, and he
cannot rearrange his verbal stock-in-trade in fresh and vivid
combinations. The old, old sentences trickle out in the old, old way.
Our friends, "the breach than the observance," "the cynosure of all
eyes," "the light fantastic toe," "beauty when unadorned," "the poor
Indian," and all the venerable army come out on parade. The weariful
writer fills up his allotted space; but he does not give one single
new idea, and we forget within a few minutes what the article
pretended to say--in an hour we have forgotten even the name of the
subject treated.
As one looks around on the corps of writers now living, one feels
inclined to ask the old stale question, "And pray what time do you
give yourself for thinking?" The hurrying reporter or special
correspondent needs only to describe in good prose the pictures that
pass before his eye; but what is required of the man who stays at home
and spins out his thoughts as the spider spins his thread? He must
take means to preserve his own freshness, or he grows more and more
unreadable with a rapidity which lands him at last among the helpless,
hopeless dullards; if he persists in expending the last remnants of
his ideas, he may at last be reduced to such extremities that he will
be forced to fill up his allotted space by describing the interesting
vagaries of his own liver. Scores of written-out men pretend to
instruct the public daily or weekly; the supply of rank commonplace is
pumped up, but the public rush away to buy some cheap story which has
signs of life in it. My impression is that it is not good for writers
to consort too much with men of their own class; the slang of
literature is detestable, and a man soon begins to use it at all
seasons if he lives in the literary atmosphere. The actor who works in
the theatre at night, and lives only among his peers during the day,
ends by becoming a mummer even in private life; a teacher who does not
systematically shake off the taint of the school is among the most
tiresome of creatures; the man who hurries from race-meeting to
race-meeting seems to lose the power of talking about anything save
horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual
fate of those who narrow their horizon. When a man once settles down
as "literary" and nothing else, he does not take long in reaching
complete nullity. His power of emitting strings of grammatical
sentences remains; but the sentences are only exudations from an awful
blankness--he is written out. The rush after money has latterly
brought some of our most exquisite writers of fiction into a condition
which is truly lamentable; the very beauties which marked their early
work have become garish and vulgarised, and, in running through the
early chapters of a new novel, a reader of fair intelligence discovers
that he could close the book and tell the story for himself. One
artist cannot get away from sentimental merchant-seamen and lovely
lady-passengers; another must always bring in an infant that is cast
on shore near a primitive village; another must have for characters a
roguish trainer of race-horses, an honest jockey, a dark villain who
tampers with race-horses, and a dashing young man who is saved from
ruin by betting on a race; another drags in a surprisingly
lofty-minded damsel who grows up pure and noble amid the most
repulsive surroundings; another can never forget the lost will;
another depends on a mock-modest braggart who kills scores of people
in a humorous way. The mould remains the same in each case, although
there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out
and moulded. All these forlorn folk are either verging toward the
written-out condition or have reached the last level of flatness. Like
the great painters who work for Manchester or New York millionaires,
these novelists produce stuff which is only shoddy; they lower their
high calling, and they prepare themselves to pass away into the ranks
of the nameless millions whose works are ranged along miles of
untouched shelves in the great public libraries. Fame may not be
greatly worth trying for; but at least a man may try to turn out the
very best work of which he is capable. Some of our brightest refuse to
aim at the highest, and they land in the dim masses of the
written-out.
III.
THE DECLINE OF LITERATURE.
It may seem almost an impertinence to use such a word as "decline" in
connection with literature at a date when every crossing-sweeper can
read, when free libraries are multiplied, when a new novel is
published every day all the year round, and when thousands and tens of
thousands of books--scientific, historical, critical--are poured out
from the presses. We have several weekly journals devoted almost
entirely to the work of criticising the new volumes which appear, and
the literary caste in society is both numerous and powerful. In the
face of all this I assert that the true literary spirit is declining,
and that the pure enthusiasm of other days is passing away.
I emphatically deny that the actual literary artists in any line are
inferior to the men of the past, and never cease to contemn the
impudent talk of those who shake their heads and allude to the giants
who are supposed to have lived in some unspecified era of our history.
Lord Salisbury is greater than Dean Swift as a political writer; the
author of "John Inglesant" is a finer stylist than any man of the last
two centuries; as a writer of prose no man known in the world's
history can be compared to Mr. Ruskin; with Messrs. Froude, Gardiner,
Lecky, Trevelyan, Bishop Stubbs, and Mr. Freeman we can hold our own
against the historian of any date; the late Lord Tennyson and Mr.
Arnold have written poetry that must live. Then in science we have a
set of men who present the most momentous theories, the most
profoundly thrilling facts in language which is lucid and attractive
as that of a pretty fairy-tale. If we turn to our popular journals, we
find learning, humour, consummate skill in style from writers who do
not even sign their names. Day by day the stream of wit, logic,
artistic power flows on, and for all these literary wares there must
be a steady sale; and yet I am constrained to declare that literature
is declining. This may sound like juggling with words in the fashion
approved by Dr. Johnson when he was in his whimsical humour; but I am
serious, and my meaning will shortly appear. We have more readers and
fewer students. The person known as "the general reader" is nowadays
fond of literary dram-drinking--he wants small pleasant doses of a
stimulant that will act swiftly on his nerves; and, if he can get
nothing better, he will contentedly batten on the tiny paragraphs of
detached gossip which form the main delight of many fairly intelligent
people. Books are cheap and easily procured, and the circulating
library renders it almost unnecessary for any one to buy books at all.
In myriads of houses in town or country the weekly or monthly box of
books comes as regularly as the supplies of provisions; the contents
are devoured, the dram-drinkers crave for further stimulant, and one
book chases another out of memory. Literature is as good as and better
than ever it was in the fabulous palmy days, but it is not so precious
now; and a great work, so far from being treated as a priceless
possession and a companion, is regarded only as an item in the _menu_
furnished for a sort of literary debauch. A laborious historian spends
ten years in studying an important period; he contrives to set forth
his facts in a brilliant and exhilarating style, whereupon the word is
passed that the history must be read. People meet, and the usual
inquiries are exchanged--"Have you read Brown on the Union of 1707?"
"Yes--skimmed it through last week. But have you seen Thomson's attack
on the Apocrypha?" And so the two go on exchanging notes on their
respective bundles of literary lumber, but without endeavouring to
gain the least understanding of any author's meaning, and without
tasting in the smallest degree any one of the ennobling properties of
ripe thought or beautiful workmanship. The main thing is to be able to
say that you have read a book. What you have got out of it is quite
another thing with which no one is concerned; so that in some
societies where the pretence of being "literary" is kept up the
bewildered outsider feels as though he were listening to the
discussion of a library catalogue at a sale. Timid persons think that
they would be looked on lightly if they failed to show an acquaintance
with the name at least of any new work; and the consequences of this
silly ambition would be very droll did we not know how much loose
thought, sham culture, lowering deceit arise from it. A young man
lately made a great success in literature. For his first book he
gained nothing, but lost a good deal; for his second he obtained
twenty pounds, after he had lost his eyesight for a time, owing to his
toiling by night and day; his third work brought him fame and a
fortune. He happened to be in a bookseller's shop when a lady entered
and said, "What is the price of Mr. Blank's works?" "Thirty shillings,
madam." "Oh, that is far too much! I have to dine with him to-night,
and I wanted to skim the books. But he isn't worth thirty shillings!"
Twenty discourses could not exhaust the full significance of that
little speech. The lady was typical of a class, and her mode of
getting ready her table talk is the same which produces confusion,
mean sciolism, and mental poverty among too many of those who set up
as arbiters of taste. A somewhat cruel man of letters is said to have
led on one of the shallow pretenders in a heartless way until the
victim confidently affected knowledge of a plot, descriptions, and
characters which had no existence. The trick was heartless and
somewhat dishonest; but the mere fact that it could be played at all
shows how far the game of literary racing has done harm.
Let us turn from the book-clubs, the libraries, and the swarming cheap
editions of our own days, and hark back for about seventy-seven years.
The great Sheriff was then in the flush of his glorious manhood, and
it is amazing to discover the national interest that was felt in his
works as they came rapidly out. When "Rokeby" appeared, only one copy
reached Cambridge, and the happy student who secured that was followed
by an eager crowd demanding that the poem should be read aloud to
them. When "Marmion" was sent out to the Peninsula, parties of
officers were made up nightly in the lines of Torres Vedras to hear
and revel in the new marvel. Sir Adam Fergusson and his company of men
were sheltered in a hollow at the battle of Talavera. Sir Adam read
the battle-scene from "Marmion" aloud to pass away the time; and the
reclining men cheered lustily, though at intervals the screech of the
French shells sounded overhead. It may be said that the publication of
a new work by Dickens was a national event only a quarter of a century
ago. True; but somehow even Dickens was not regarded with that grave
critical interest which private citizens of the previous generation
bestowed on Scott. The incomparable Sir Walter at that time was
dwelling far away amid the swamps and grim hills and shaggy thickets
of Ashestiel. Town-life was not for him, and he grudged the hours
spent in musty law-courts. Before dawn he went joyously to his work,
and long before the household was astir he had made good progress. At
noon he was free to lead the life of a country farmer and sportsman;
the ponies were saddled, the greyhounds uncoupled, and a merry company
set off across the hills. The talk was refined and gladsome, and
visitors came back refreshed and improved to the cottage. And now
comes the strange part of the story--this healthy retired sporting
farmer was in correspondence with the greatest and cleverest men in
the British Isles, and the most masterly criticisms of literature were
exchanged with a lavish freedom which seems impossible to us in the
days of the post-card and the hurried gasping telegram. In our day
there is absolutely no time for that leisurely conscientious study
which was usual in the time when men bought their books and paid
heavily for them. Even Mr. Ruskin, in his retirement on the shores of
Coniston, cannot carry on that graceful and ineffably instructive
correspondence which was so easy to Southey, Coleridge, and the others
of that fine company who dwelt in the Lake District. Marvellous it is
to observe the splendid quality of the literary criticisms which were
sent to the great ones by men who had no intention of writing or
selling a line. In studying the memoirs of the century we find that,
long before the education movement began, there were scores of men and
women who had no need to make literature a profession, but who were
nevertheless skilled and cultured as the writers who worked for bread.
Who now talks of Mr. Morritt of Rokeby? Yet Morritt carried on a
voluminous correspondence with Scott and the rest of that brilliant
school. Who ever thinks of George Ellis? But Ellis was the most
learned of antiquaries, and devoid of the pedantry which so often
makes antiquarian discourses repellent. His polished expositions have
the charm that comes from a gentle soul and an exquisite intellect,
while his criticism is so luminous and just that even Mr. Ruskin
could hardly improve upon it. Then there were Mr. Skene, Joanna
Baillie--alas, poor forgotten Joanna!--Erskine, the Shepherd, the
Duke of Buccleuch, Wilson, and so many more that we grow amazed to
think that even Scott was able to rear his head above them. All the
school were alike in their love and enthusiasm for literature; and
really they seemed to have had a better mode of living and thinking
than have the smart gentlemen who think that earnest and conscientious
study is only a heavy species of frivolity. And let it be marked that
this wide-spread company of private citizens and public writers by no
means formed a mutual admiration society, for they criticised each
other sharply and wisely; and the criticism was taken in good part by
all concerned. When Ellis wrote a sort of treatise to Scott in
epistolary form, and complained of the poet's monotonous use of the
eight-syllable line, Scott replied with equanimity, and took as much
pains to convince his friend as though he were discussing a thesis for
some valuable prize. On one occasion a few of the really great men
found themselves in the midst of a society where the practice of
mutual admiration was beginning to creep in. The way in which two of
the most eminent guests snubbed the mutual admirers was at once
delightful and effective. One gentleman had been extravagantly
extolling Coleridge, until many present felt a little uncomfortable.
Scott said, "Well, I have lately read in a provincial paper some
verses which I think better than most of their sort." He then recited
the lines "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter" which are now so famous. The
eulogist of Coleridge refused to allow the verses any merit. To Scott
he addressed a series of questions--"Surely you must own that this is
bad?" "Surely you cannot call this anything but poor?" At length
Coleridge quietly broke in, "For Heaven's sake, leave Mr. Scott alone!
I wrote the poem." This cruel blow put an end to mutual admiration in
that quarter for some time.
Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Jeffrey--all in their several
fashions--regarded literature as a serious pursuit, and they were
followed by the "illustrious obscure" ones whose names are now sunk in
the night. How the whirligig of time sweeps us through change after
change! Any of us can buy for shillings books which would have cost
our predecessors pounds; we can have access to all the wit, poetry,
and learning of our generation at a cost of three guineas a year. For
little more than a shilling per week any reader who lives far away in
the country can have relays of books sent him at the rate of fifteen
volumes per relay. Very satisfactory. Most satisfactory too are the
Board-school libraries, from which a million children obtain the best
and noblest of literature without money and without price. Still there
remains the fact that any man who sat down and wrote long letters on
literary subjects would be looked upon as light-headed. We are too
clever to be in earnest, and the expenditure of earnestness on such a
subject as literature is regarded as evidence of pedantry or folly, or
both. Those men of former days knew their few books thoroughly and
loved them wisely; we know our many books only in a smattering way,
and we do not love them at all. When Mr. Mark Pattison suggested that
a well-to-do man reasonably expend 10 per cent. of his income on
books, he roused a burst of kindly laughter, and it was suggested that
solitary confinement would do him a great deal of good. That was a
fine trenchant mode of looking at the matter. When, in meditative
hours, I compare the two generations of readers, I think that the
mental health of the old school and the new school may be compared
respectively with the bodily health of sober sturdy countrymen and
effete satiated gourmands of the town. The countrymen has no great
variety of good cheer, but he assimilates all that is best of his
fare, and he grows powerful, calm, able to endure heavy tasks. The
jaded creature of the clubs and the race-courses and the ball-room has
swift incessant variety until all things pall upon him. In time he
must begin with damaging stimulants before he can go on with the
interesting pursuits of each day. Every device is tried to tickle his
dead palate; but the succession of dainties is of no avail, for the
man cannot assimilate what is set before him, and he becomes soft of
muscle, devoid of nerve--a weed of civilisation. Are not the cases
analogous to those of the sound reverent student and the weary _blasé_
skimmer of books? So, in sum, I say that, even if our enormous output
of printed matter goes on increasing, and if the number of readers
increases by millions, yet, so long as men read the thoughts of other
men not to search for instruction and high pleasure, but to search for
distraction and vain delirious excitement, then we are justified in
talking of the decline of literature. Far be it from me to say that
people should neglect the study of men and women and devote themselves
to the strained study of books alone. The mere bookman is always more
or less a dolt; but the wise reader who learns from the living voice
and visible actions of his fellow-creatures as well as from the dead
printed pages is on the way to placidity and strength and true wisdom.
Thus much I will say--the flippant devourer of books can neither be
wise nor strong nor useful; and it is his tribe who have discredited a
pursuit which once was noble and of good report.
IV.
COLOUR-BLINDNESS IN LITERATURE.