The age in which literature was disseminated and preserved extended
from the time of the earliest intellectual compositions designed for
communication--as the papyri hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt and the
leather and parchment rolls of the early Persian and Jewish peoples;
and included also those compositions which had a limited circulating
character, like the tablets and cylinders of ancient Assyria--down to
the time when the printing-press was invented. This, inclusively, is
the period of the manuscript literature. Throughout this entire period
of the world's ongoing, for many hundreds or some thousands of years,
each and every kind of production, whether in hieroglyph, cuneiform,
or alphabetic characters, was made by itself--the producer inscribing,
painting, or printing (letter by letter or character by character)
through hundreds and thousands of pages. "To the time of the invention
of printing, and until the printed book had driven it out of the field,
the manuscript was the vehicle for the conservation and dissemination
of literature and discharges the function of a printed book."
A _book_ has been defined as "any record of thought in words." This
may be a correct definition as far as it relates to literature but
not as it relates to the "record of thought." There is a "record
of thought" independent of words and, perhaps, long antedating the
record in words of any language. A _word_ has been defined as "the
sign of an idea." But were there not "ideas" long before they were
communicated by words? If there are "songs without words" may there
not be, or, at least may there not have been, "ideas without words"?
An affirmative answer is admirably illustrated--and the illustration
is confirmatory--by a group of six great mural paintings by Mr. John
W. Alexander, in the Library of Congress at Washington. These pictures
illustrate historically the probable genesis and evolution of the
"book." The first painting is of the rude _Cairn_ or heap of stones
piled up on the seashore or elsewhere by prehistoric man in order to
commemorate some event or achievement, and thus to stand as a "record"
or landmark of a fact or truth. The second picture is illustrative of
_Oral Tradition_, and represents the "narration" of facts or doings by
the word of mouth. The third is called the _Pictograph_ which consists
in delineations of events or experiences as drawn by some implement
upon the surface of skins, or on the leaves or bark of trees or plants,
and by means of which there was created a kind of permanent "record" of
past "happenings" or doings. The fourth is the _Hieroglyphics_--which
brings us to the historic period--in which there were carved on the
face of cliffs, on the walls of structures of any kind, or on wood,
the pictured and, may be, progressive delineations of events or ideas.
The fifth is the _Manuscripts_ or the record contained in written
language and which was phonetic, syllabic, or alphabetic,--the end
toward which all earlier stages of "record" tended. The sixth and last
picture is the _Printing Press_, the embodiment and consummation of all
the earlier phases and stages in the "records of the past." It is the
obvious lesson from these great paintings that a "record of thought" by
means of "words" was not fully achieved until the manuscript entered
upon its world-wide and enduring career, or, in which "words" became
the embodiment and depository of permanent and communicable "ideas."
The words of Mr. E. C. Richardson are quoted as bearing upon the period
of manuscript literature: "Some of the pictures on the cave walls of
the neolithic age seem to have the essential characteristics of books
and certainly the earliest clay tablets and inscriptions do. These seem
to carry back with certainty to at least 4,200 B. C. By a thousand
years later, tablet books and inscriptions were common and papyrus
books seem to have been well begun. Another thousand years, or some
time before Hammurabi, books of many sorts were numerous. At the time
of Abraham, books were common all over Egypt, Babylonia, Palestine, and
the eastern Mediterranean as far at least as Crete and Asia Minor.
In the time of Moses, whenever that may have been, the alphabet had
perhaps been invented, books were common among all priestly and
official classes, not only in Babylonia, Asyria, and Egypt, but at
least in two or three scores of places in Palestine, north of Syria and
Cyprus."[4]
The earliest literature of the ancient Greeks was first preserved
in oral traditions, folk-lore, and legendary minstrelsy, and not in
written language. It is possible, nay, probable, that in Greece,
Egypt, China, Japan, and Persia also, folk-lore and folk-tales were
perpetuated through memory by means of recitations, as in the instances
of the _rhapsodists_--the class of professional reciters who publicly
declaimed the Homeric literature and the folk-lore of the ages with
more or less artistic inflection or intonation of the voice. The
proclamations of rulers, the compositions of poets and historians, and
the oracles of religion were anciently published orally, often, by
heralds, minstrels, and prophets. The great Hebrew Lawgiver embodied
a wide-spread principle and practice in his final injunction to the
Hebrew nation: "Now therefore write ye this song for you and teach
it to the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song
may be a witness for me against the children of Israel." (Deut.
31:19.) Aside from narrower applications of this practice, the great
achievements and deliverences of the Israelitish people were celebrated
and perpetually memorialized in song and psalm. On the shores of the
Red Sea, Moses and his people sang their song of deliverance from the
hand of their enemy. And when, at a later age, the Ark of the Covenant
was borne to its resting place within the Sacred City, it was amidst
the antiphonal chanting of the psalm which David, himself, had composed
for the occasion. The psalms in themselves--as one of the purposes of
their composition--were a partial witness to the place and prominence
of song and chant in teaching religious truth and thus in keeping faith
alive on the earth. Plato states that the first laws of all nations
were composed in verse and sung. There is a remembrancer in Plato's
statement concerning the first laws of nations of our own primitive
pedagogical methods within certain departments of learning. And so, by
tradition, recitative, minstrelsy, and psalmody--of wide application
in the early ages--both a wider currency and a more tenacious hold was
taken by these laws, proclamations, and truths upon the popular mind.
Especially so as the popular mind was deficient in the art of reading,
even when literature had been embodied in writing. And this was true in
both sacred and profane history. Thus, minstrelsy, chant, and tradition
have performed an important function in the beginnings of many ancient
peoples. And, strange as it may seem to us, Plato, notwithstanding his
voluminous writings and his place in the literary world for nearly
three thousand years, put a low estimate on the importance of written
as compared with oral teaching.
The Greek classics--the matchless monuments of ancient literature--as
represented in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns were
preserved, perpetuated, and disseminated for generations if not for
centuries, not by written records--as later literature has been handed
down by the written or printed page--but through ballads, minstrelsy,
and recitation. "The Æolic emigrants who settled in the north-west of
Asia-Minor brought with them the warlike legends of their chiefs--the
Archæan princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads of the Æolic
minstrels, and from them passed southward into Ionia, where the Ionian
poets gradually shaped them into higher artistic form."[5] "Mahaffy
and Jevons are in accord," says Mr. Putnam, "in pointing out that the
effort of memory required for the composition and transmission of
long poems without the aid of writing, while implying a power never
manifested among people possessing printed books, is not in itself
at all incredible. Memory was equal to the task, and the earlier
Greeks poems, memorized by the authors as composed, were preserved
by successive generations of bards." And again he says, "It is to be
borne in mind that the (to us) extraordinary extent to which the Greeks
were able to develop their power of memorizing enabled them often to
trust their memory where modern students would be helpless without the
written (or printed) word.... The boys in school were given as their
daily task the memorizing of the works of the poets, and what was begun
under compulsion appears to have been continued in later life as a
pleasure."[6] And in the preface of the book from which the foregoing
statements are quoted, the author says, "It is evident that there were
literary productions in advance, and probably very far in advance, of
the discovery or evolution of literary characters, and also long after
the use of script by authors, the greater portion of the public in
all ancient lands received their literature, not through their eyes,
but through their ears,--not by reading the text, but by listening to
reciters, story-tellers, and 'rhapsodists.'" (P. xiv.) We quote the
following from Mr. E. C. Richardson: "The Vedas were, it is alleged,
handed down for centuries by a rigidly trained body of memorizers. The
memorizing of Confucian books by Chinese students and of the Koran
by Moslem students is very exact."[7] "The office of reading," says
Professor Dobschütz, "was esteemed so highly that it was regarded as
based on a special spiritual gift.... The reader had to know his text
almost entirely by heart to do it well. From the 'Shepherd of Hermes,'
a very interesting book written by a Roman layman about 140 A. D.,
we learn that some people gathered often, probably daily, for the
special purpose of common reading and learning. But even granted that
the memory of these men was not spoiled by too much reading, as is
ours, so that by hearing they were able to learn by heart (it is said
of some rabbis that they did not lose one word of all their master had
told them, and, in fact, the Talmudic literature was transmitted orally
for centuries), nevertheless, we must assume that these Christians had
their private copies of the Bible at home."[8] Prescott says of the
pre-historic Mexico: "Besides the hieroglyphic maps, the traditions of
the country were embodied in songs and hymns.... These were various,
embracing the mystic legends of a heroic age, the warlike achievements
of their own, or the softer tales of love and pleasure."[9] Of the
early times of English literature, D'Israeli states that "before the
people had national books they had national songs," and that "these
songs and these fables, these proverbs and these tales,--all these
were a library without books."[10] And an anonymous author, recently
traveling in a remote portion of northern Albania, records it that "the
wild, inaccessible country is under various independent tribes, ruled
by a chieftain according to unwritten laws handed down orally from
remote ages." He also states that "the country has no written language
and no literature."[11]
Thus, from very early if not from pre-historic times, down to the
present moment there have been repeated if not continuous examples, and
widespread on the earth if not universal, of the place and importance
of oral tradition as a datum of history and source of literature. Says
Professor Sayce: "Archæological research is constantly demonstrating
how dangerous it is to question or deny the veracity of tradition or
of an ancient record until we know all the facts."[12] This much must
be conceded, in holding that oral tradition is secondary to written
records. The reason for their secondary value is obvious from the
fact that "ear impressions tend to be less exact than eye impressions
because they depend on a brief sense impression, while in reading the
eye lingers until the matter is understood. Memory copy tends to fade
away rapidly. This is shown by the great variety in the related legends
of closely related tribes."[13]
But from very early times--just how early cannot be determined,
inasmuch as historiographers and chronologists differ as to
the beginning-times of written literature in the respective
civilizations--literary compositions of every sort, both sacred and
profane, were recorded and disseminated, so far as they were recorded
and disseminated, by the tedious and laborious process of writing or
carving or impressing by hand. Literature, almost entirely, throughout
this long period was contained in and continued by the manuscripts.
The cuneiform writing on tablets and cylinders, though so voluminous
in quantity, seems to have been lost sight of and disregarded for
millenniums of years while they were a sealed literature; and the
hieroglyphic writing of Egypt remained undeciphered for, perhaps, an
equal period of time, down to the close of the eighteenth century.
It is the obvious fact, then, that, in an age of the world's history
when the printing-press with its almost limitless capacity for
extending and preserving literature was yet unknown, all literary
productions of all kinds--including the Bible--must have been meager
in the extreme as compared with the present rapid increase of the
printed page when steam and heat and electricity are motive powers.
A present-generation occurrence will fitly and forcefully illustrate
this proposition: It will be recalled to mind that the Revised New
Testament was issued simultaneously by the Oxford Press in both London
and New York on a designated day of 1881; it may not be remembered,
however, that an enterprising Chicago daily had the entire New
Testament telegraphed from New York, immediately at its issue in that
City, in order that it might be secured and printed in Chicago in an
enormous edition a few hours in advance of the mails and express,
put into circulation and sold to the financial advantage of that
newspaper. Compare that achievement of printing hundreds of thousands
of the New Testament, accomplished within a few hours' time, with the
transcription of a single copy of a book, and you must have a new sense
of the importance of the printing-press in relation to all literature.
And contrast, if you will, the slow and inadequate composition and
dissemination of intelligence by the laborious process of handwriting
with the present-day marvelous facilities for publication when the
linotype is mostly employed in setting the type-plates for periodicals
and books, and when a single press will print and fold about thirty
thousand copies of a metropolitan journal in one hour's time, and, from
both _comparison_ and _contrast_, you must have a higher appreciation
for the printing-press as an instrumentality for the spreading of
intelligence and the progress of civilization.
Consider, too, the all but prohibitive cost of books, when made by hand
and estimated by the labor of their making, and you must have a new
and a truer basis of valuation for manuscript literature. A few facts
and incidents will illustrate and enforce the foregoing observation:
It required nearly three years in the time of Wycliffe (who died in
1384) for a copyist to transcribe the entire Bible, and this labor cost
the equivalent of $1,500. Even tracts of Wycliffe, containing isolated
texts of scripture, were sold for forty or fifty dollars as the
money of that day would be estimated in our currency. (Christ in the
Gospels.) It is credibly stated that, in the century before Wycliffe's
time, "an ordinary folio volume probably cost 400 to 500 franks," or
the sum of eighty to a hundred dollars in present values. Very few
books could be bought at all, at some periods of time, for less than
the equivalent of one hundred dollars; and illuminated or illustrated
and embellished books, of which there then were and there yet remain
exquisite examples, cost much more than this amount. And yet books
never seem to have been a "drug" upon the market. And while it required
four years for Gutenberg to print his first edition of the Bible
(consisting of a hundred copies) yet the time employed in its making,
if compared with the time and labor requisite for the transcription of
a hundred copies of the Bible by hand, would represent a net gain or
saving, in time, of nearly seventy-five years and, in money, of more
than a hundred thousand dollars. It would represent other values: as
uniformity of text, economy of material, and larger aggregate immunity
from error. It is stated that the common price of a Bible in the
thirteenth century ran as high as $300, and that in the fourteenth
century Bibles were sold for as much as $2,000. It is said that Bibles
were left as precious bequests to relatives and friends and that they
were even given as security for large debts.
The cost of materials and of the transcription of books added immensely
to their appraised valuation in the different ages. We quote from a
volume by Mr. Geo. H. Putnam concerning books and their making in
pre-Christian times: "It appears from such references as we find to
the prices paid that, as compared with other luxuries, books remained
very costly up to the time of the Roman occupation of Greece, or
about 150 B. C. ... Plato is reported to have paid for three books of
Philolaüs, which Dion bought for him in Sicily, three Attic talents,
equal in our currency to $3,240,--and the equivalent, of course, of a
much larger sum, estimated in its purchasing power for food.... The
cost of books depended, of course, largely upon the cost of papyrus,
for which Greece was dependent upon Egypt. An inscription of the year
407 B. C., quoted by Rangabé, gives the price of a sheet of papyrus
at one drachma and two oboli, the equivalent of about twenty-five
cents."[14] Ptolemy Philadelphus is said to have authorized the
giving of fifteen talents of silver, the equivalent of about $16,200,
in addition to a shipment of corn, to the famishing Athenians for
certain authenticated copies of the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides for the Alexandrian Library. (Putnam.) And, later, in
the early part of the Christian Era, the price of copying books was
estimated by the number of lines they contained. Diocletian, it is
said, fixed the wage of the copyers of his time at forty _denarii_
or at about twenty-five cents per one hundred lines. Late in the
thirteenth century, the price of transcribing a Bible containing a
commentary thereon, written in a fair hand, ranged from one hundred and
fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars, though earlier in that century
the purchasing power of money was so great and labor so cheap that two
arches of London Bridge were built for the equivalent of a hundred and
twenty-five dollars, or less than the cost of transcribing a Bible with
a commentary. In 1272 the wages of a laboring-man were less than four
cents a day, while the price of a Bible at that time was about one
hundred and eighty dollars. (The Book Record.) In other words, a common
laborer must then have toiled for thirteen years, according to the
current labor values of the time, in order to secure the purchase-price
of a Bible; though in an age when few could read, this was not so large
a deprivation. Now, the American Bible Society can furnish the entire
Christian scriptures, creditably bound in cloth with fair and readable
type, for less than twenty-five cents. A common laborer, who generally
has a rudimentary education at least, can now secure the Bible at the
purchase-price of two hours' toil, or the New Testament for less than
a half-hour's toil; and, what is more, the common laborer can, in most
instances, not only read the Bible but has the respite from excessive
labor to do so.