"_Come l'uom s'eterna_"
Now that the immortals in literature have been caught and measured; now
that we know that they fill not more than five feet of shelf room, we
may be pardoned for asking a question or two as to how they "arrived,"
what their chances are for "staying put," and whether the place for
classics is inevitably "upon the shelf." These are of course awkward
questions, but there are other regions beside heaven which one must be
as a little child to enter--the Garden of Understanding among them.
It is in a certain sense a positive relief to find that the really
persistent literature of the past is so compressible, and it is
reassuring as one looks forward to the long future, to think that the
people towards the end of time will not be so unimaginably burdened with
the deathless monuments of their past; although when one multiplies five
feet, the sediment of five millennia, by x, the classic library of the
end of things seems to us of this unheroic age, a trifle depressing. Of
course, the men of the Ultima Thule of time may take their classics less
seriously, and it may be that they will find less of a gap than we
between the thoughts and speech of the immortals and those of daily
intercourse. But since the immortals die not, there is no escaping their
accumulation.
Yet after all, come to think of it, there is a good deal of an
assumption in the assertion that our five feet of immortals are all
going to perch upon that last library shelf. There have been immortals
of the past who failed to reach even our days; had they all fulfilled
their promise and the prophecies of their friends, the publishers would
not be willing to let us buy our modest set of unquestionable classics
on monthly payments without the guarantee of our great grandchildren.
Paradoxical as it may seem, many immortals have proved mortal, and the
deathless have died. We must lay this troublesome fact to the loose
speech of our forefathers. They were hyperbolic now and then, and they
dubbed a volume immortal without stopping to think whether the twentieth
century A. D. would also find it interesting, and so, of course, really
immortal. Humanity has been fallible in the past, and the result is that
we are forced most unscientifically to accept contradictory ideas with
gravity--in short, to speak of "relative immortality." The work that
outlives its contemporaries is, we may admit, relatively deathless. Such
a statement makes no prophecy, however, as to the remote future.
Relative immortality merely means that a work goes on interesting for a
few years, a generation or two, a century or more. It is only the simon
pure immortal who will not have to get up at the sound of Gabriel's
trump. Blessed relief--the final shelf of unforgettable classics may be
only five feet long after all, and may be even shorter!
Naturally, your enduring work must have a strong constitution; it must
have all the characteristics of a live creature except the power of
growth within itself, and, alas, of propagating its kind. Perhaps one
might liken it to the Leyden jar which we of the older generation used
to read of in our physics--I do not know whether it is remembered
now-a-days. It has a charge of electricity of more or less strength, and
it has a retaining capacity of more or less endurance, so that to touch
it as the ages pass, is to receive a spark of life.
Many a work has started out with a tremendous appeal to its first
audience, but has not been able to hold its second or third. The first
night is not always a sure test of the length of a "run." Such a work
had a momentary word to speak which was appropriate, which came as pat
as Vice in the old comedy; but like a jest called out by a passing
event, it raised its crackle of laughter and died. One need not go far
to find examples. Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_ is pigeonholed
here; and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and _The Jungle_ are tied by the same
tape, in spite of a certain uncanny habit of reappearance of Mrs.
Stowe's painful tale. Much literature of this sort is, of course,
temporarily valuable; but Time promptly and wisely puts it into the
wallet at his back. Without endurance, fame is as the fire of thorns
under the pot; without vitality, naught can endure.
As a matter of fact a work need not be brutally vital to have a fair
chance at long life. It must interest somebody very much indeed. Of
course, the great immortals start out in life popular in the best sense;
but there are lesser immortals too. One does not have to be Dante or
Shakespeare to win out. So long as the second class passengers persist
in interesting a few hearers on the various stages of the road, they
will not be forgotten. They may be, as they usually are, caviare to the
general, but they find from age to age fit audience. Poets like Horace
and Spenser and Blake, the authors of _Emma_ or _Cranford_ may cross the
final line side by side with their great competitors. And some of us who
venture diffident prophecy, expect greater endurance for Mr. Robert
Frost and his shy _North of Boston_ than for the dramatic anachronisms
of the late Stephen Phillips, or the epic _longueurs_ of Mr. Alfred
Noyes. Long life in literature concerns itself with the length of
Clotho's thread, and not at all with the question as to whether it be
labelled "No. 60" or "No. 90."
But to have transcended its own time by a generation or so is no promise
of immortality. Every work if not hopelessly tangled in the
perishabilities of its own age, is liable to be so tangled in those of
its own century or epoch. How often have men watched with exultation the
endurance of a work, and jumped to conclusions, when wisdom would have
recognized that it could last only while certain ideals or moods
prevailed. Was not Byron a god for a generation? But, alas, as the
waters of time rose, he found himself caught in the eel-grass of
romanticism, and pulled under. And did not the _Romance of the Rose_
hold men bound by its myriad lines for centuries--and where is it now?
Dusty upon dusty shelves. Its voice was that of Mediaevalism, not of
humanity. It perished with the conventions and provincialism of its era.
The time never was when a new work appeared to the world without some
external circumstance to modify for good or ill its early reputation.
Even the "anonymous" early ballads must have depended at first in some
measure upon the impression of "good time" which lingered in the minds
of the junketers among whom they sprang up. Even the _Iliad_ or the
_Song of Roland_ must have gained or lost according to the effectiveness
of the reciter or the social status of the patron. And to-day it is a
thousand times truer than ever before, that at the start the genuine
fame which endures is bound up with much that is purely factitious.
A new book comes to birth and finds a waiting world to welcome, but not
impartial in its attitude. Have not the friends and family announced the
arrival in joyful and ringing tones? Advertiser and advance reviewer
have been busy; the publisher now-a-days is preeminently efficient. The
result is a sort of pre-natal notoriety built up regardless of real
worth. The advertising campaign may be likened to an attack by gas-bombs
on the reading public; but fortunately from long experience a large part
of the public has provided itself with a tolerably good supply of masks
to receive the assault, and--to finish the figure with all possible
despatch--"waits till the clouds roll by."
Then for the first time, the work gradually emerges for what it is
worth. The public reads and judges; recommends it to its friends, or
warns them off; and speaks the fateful word, which if it is favorable,
leads others to read, and at least makes strangers admit that the book
is "well spoken of." Here is real fame, still struggling for existence,
yet independent of the handicaps of early puffing. Yet it must be said
in all fairness that the early puffing, with its manufactured audience,
hastens for the good book the chance for genuine fame; and makes more
decisive the collapse of the poor book, by bringing sooner to proof the
pinchbeck prophecies.
But even then the new book has got to stand up against convictions and
prejudices, conventions and dogmas. The public at large--and
incidentally the professional critic--wants more of "the same thing,"
more like that of its earlier loves and admirations. Figures of previous
experience rise in the readers' minds with malicious menaces against the
upstart--Dickens, Austen or Trollope; Ward, Sinclair or Tarkington;
perhaps Fielding or Goldsmith--figures moribund or vigorous still, all
are alert to impose "has been" upon "to be." Let the new book differ at
its peril; it becomes easily "revolutionary," "decadent," "not art"--is
damned, in short, unless, by a curious freak of the moment, it takes the
world by storm through its very "freshness." And even then Kipling joins
the ring, and henceforth struggles to impose the Kiplingesque. Such
dangers, such threats--mostly unreal when brought to the proof--the new
book must live through. The vigorous and vital book will be unabashed,
for its claims to long life must rest on stronger virtues than
conformity or non-conformity.
The ages confirm with Jovian nod the trite fact that every period has a
general cast of opinion about any literary work. San Francisco may not
accept the same order among "the best sellers" as New York, nor New York
as London; yet we accept the unity of age in our use of older epithets,
such as "Elizabethan" and "Victorian," even while we overlook it in the
hurlyburly of the present. It is a complicated and, perhaps, ultimately,
an inexplicable phenomenon; but strong leadership plays its part in
clarifying and fixing the momentary appraisement. Let Dr. Johnson or the
_Edinburgh Review_ utter a critical judgment, and society follows like
the traditional flock of sheep. If such notorious dictatorship is rare
in our larger world, there are yet many smaller Judges and Prophets
scattered abroad, apparent mouthpieces of the _Zeitgeist_. We are all
familiar with the small theatre party. One or two members have definite
ideas about the play and its presentation, and the rest experience all
the sensations but are more or less neutral. The neutrals inevitably
fall in behind the leaders, and the whole party is easily unanimous.
Such in miniature is the working of the critical leadership at large.
The only requirement is, that the leader must not be too far ahead or
behind his time. Thus it would have taken more than Dryden to make
Whitman a success in the days of the Restoration; and we can hardly
fancy Jeffreys forcing _The Widow in the Bye Street_ upon the Edinburgh
subscribers. But as all real leadership is moderate, neat unity seems to
be fairly easy to the backward look.
Yet the judgment of an age may seem to us the veriest nonsense of
perversity. It irritates us, at the same time that it flatters our sense
of superiority, to see the citizens of the Seventeenth Century tossing
up their caps over Cowley, and proclaiming him celestial; and to see
those of the Eighteenth lose their heads over Pope. We know better.
Cowley and Pope, indeed! Would not any college sophomore place them for
us--Why, of course, Cowley wrote the _Sonnets of Pindar_, and Pope was a
pseudonym. It is pedantic to have read them, and we are proud to know
them only by reputation. Yet we must not blame our unfortunate
ancestors. The old formula reappears:--they clung to what interested
them, and called it deathless. The humor lies rather more in the
inability of the next generation, perhaps our own, to break away from
the stereotyped verdicts of those remote days of questionable authority.
We were all taught that Addison was one of the mighty of earth, and that
his style was the acme of lucidity and charm--"Spend your days and
nights with Addison." But we must admit that this estimate is but the
sluggish echo of auld lang syne. For have you, gentle reader, perused a
single _Spectator_ Paper since you were preparing for your college
examinations? Of course, if Addison really interested his own age by
touching as no one else did its concerns, he deserved the audience he
gathered about him and the fame that transpired; but why should we talk
of him as if he actually interested us profoundly, when no one reads
him? And how about _Tom Jones_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _The Tale of a
Tub_, and _Tristram Shandy_ or _The Vicar of Wakefield_? It is the
tendency of long enduring fame to become sluggish and to sink into
dogmatism.
It is one of the duties lying nearest to the present--wherever that
present may be--to right the wrongs of the weak, and to humble the pride
of usurpers. Distrust of one's own taste and power, whatever may be the
case among individuals, is impossible to a whole generation. To judge
and to accept as final one's own conclusion is the prerequisite for true
results and positive progress. The saints have always been vigorous in
their unshaken conviction of the truth that is in them; it is the
insinuating voice of the devil which doubts. So, without misgiving, the
Eighteenth Century which wrote up Addison, wrote down Shakespeare; and
the Nineteenth Century which wrote up Browning, wrote down Pope. We,
too, are conscious of wise catholicity, and judge with decisive
orthodoxy. We adore the vigorous brutalities of Kipling and Masefield,
we are interested in the formless feebleness of certain new poets; we
scorn Gray and Landor, and overlook the poetry of Arnold. We are
hospitable to the "newer movements," even to the _outre_; we despise the
ways of our parents and our grandparents, though they were men who
walked with God. We cannot help it, to be sure, and are most unconscious
of our little ways; but now and then it is possible for some of us to
transport ourselves in spirit to the higher ground of the next century,
and to look back upon the plain of our own time. Then it is hard to be
convinced that the universe was not devised to furnish laughter for the
gods.
Nothing is harder than for us to laugh at ourselves; we prefer to dwell
upon the seriousness, the impressiveness of lasting fame, as proof of
the unity of the human race. When the world of twenty-five centuries
after Homer can thrill at the twang of the bow of Odysseus, and smile at
the laughter of Nausikaa and her maidens, we are kinsmen of the distant
Greeks. Time and race are annihilated before the mighty genius which
touches the deeps of the heart. Institutions and nations may decay, but
the song of Homer calls us brothers. Impressive, indeed, and yet--how
many really thrill and smile over the Odyssean tale? How many in this
age of broad enlightenment ever read the _Odyssey_ at all, or have
dipped into its pages for love of their pure serene? The candid answer
is: Very few. And yet Homer is one of the two or three who reign
supreme, as we almost all still conventionally admit.
This vaunted proof of racial unity is overworked; Homer has but few
relatives to-day, and they are that select handful who love to widen
their horizons by looking backwards. In spite of our boasted
education--which does not, any more than other panaceas, live up to its
promises--the disciples of the great past will always be few. But since
no age can walk entirely by its lone, there will always be a loyal band
who will spend the best portions of their lives in the great backward
and abysm of time, and will with shining faces bring good tidings to
their fellowmen. How grateful the early Nineteenth Century should have
been to Lamb for his specimens of the well-nigh forgotten Elizabethan
Dramatists; how grateful we should be to Mr. Gilbert Murray for pointing
out to us once more the splendors of Athenian Tragedy! Upon scholars
like these we must rely that too much is not forgotten.
* * * * *
The saying that the greater the fame the fewer the readers, is a random
shot, and yet it hits the target, and not the outermost ring. Every
approving reader gained for a work hands on the word to a dozen who have
not read, nor will ever read it. Fame enlarges its sweep through time
like the surge thrown off the prow of a moving steamship, broadening
over the sea until it stretches beyond all apparent relation to the ship
which first stirred it up. But here the figure breaks: for while in most
cases the waves subside, in others, the commotion bids fair to last to
the end of human history.
The classic once established becomes so sacred to the unthinking public
that to doubt it is _lese majeste_; at least, its fame produces a sort
of hypnotism. No one, for instance, can approach a play of Shakespeare
for the first time unbiassed. He may be actually bored, but he will not
admit it. Perhaps he will make himself believe that he enjoys it, but he
will not be found with it in his hours of honest play. He hardly dares
know what he thinks, lest he should be found heretical, and he feels
safer to swell the lusty chorus of praise. The most influential critics
in such a case get no real hearing. They may capture a few individual
opinions, but the public at large will lend no ear to qualifications.
Only if repetition is carried to the point of damnable iteration, will
modification of appraisal begin slowly to sink down through class after
class; it takes an unconscionable time to reach the bottom, perhaps
centuries. One recalls lesser literature still lingering moribund upon
front parlor tables in village homes--Thomson's _Seasons_ or, perhaps,
Young's _Night Thoughts_. No one reads them; they remain as closely shut
as the parlor doors; but there they lie, the cherished signs of family
respectability, and still accepted unquestioningly as living things.
Literary fame is a slippery and indefinite thing. There are countless
impossible questions one could ask. How many readers must a work have to
be considered alive at all? Is fame to be allowed to some of the obscure
poets like Campion, Traherne, and Shenstone, who are known only to the
specialist? Definiteness and finality are as difficult of attainment as
to tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is northerly. But it is
certain that the immortals are dependent upon an amazingly small set of
followers, which tends to grow smaller as the ages turn. Yet those who
deserve long life will in the long run reach an old age, frosty but
kindly. And we may leave them with confidence in the hands of Time, who,
after all, like Autolycus, pockets only what have come to be
unconsidered trifles.