These speculations upon the possibilities and means of raising
the average human result have brought us at last to the problem of
increasing the amount of original intellectual activity in the state, as
a culminating necessity. That average child who threads our speculations
has been bred and fed, we now suppose, educated in school and college,
put under stimulating political and social conditions and brought within
reach and under the influence of the available literature of the time,
and he is now emerging into adult responsibility. His individual thought
and purpose has to swim in and become part of the general thought and
purpose of the community. If that general flow of thought is meagre, his
individual life will partake of its limitations. As the general thought
rises out of its pools and narrow channels towards a wide flood, so
each individual becomes more capable of free movements and spacious
co-operations towards the general end. We have bred our citizen and
trained him only to waste all his energy at last; he is no better than
the water in an isolated dry-season pool in the bed of a tropical river,
unless he can mingle in the end with the general sea of thought and
action.
Thought is the life, the spontaneous flexibility of a community. A
community that thinks freely and fully throughout its population is
capable of a thousand things that are impossible in an unthinking mass
of people. The latter, collectively considered, is a large rigid thing,
a lifeless thing, that will break rather than bend, that will die rather
than develop. Its inevitable end is dust and extinction. Look at the
thing from the baser level of political conceptions, and still that
floating tide of thought is a necessity. With thought and gathered
knowledge things that mean tumult, bloodshed, undying hatreds, schisms
and final disaster to uncivilized races, are accomplished in peace;
constitutional changes, economic reorganizations, boundary modifications
and a hundred grave matters. Thought is the solvent that will make a
road for men through Alpine difficulties that seem now unconquerable,
that will dissolve those gigantic rocks of custom and tradition that
loom so forbiddingly athwart all our further plans. For three thousand
years and more the Book has been becoming more and more the evident
salvation of man. If our present civilization collapse, it will collapse
as all previous civilizations have collapsed, not from want of will
but from the want of organization for its will, for the want of that
knowledge, that conviction, and that general understanding that would
have kept pace with the continually more complicated problems that arose
about it. [Footnote: Dr. Beattie Crozier, in his most interesting and
suggestive _History of Intellectual Development_, terms the literary
apparatus that holds a people together to a common purpose, the “Bible”
of that people, and suggests that the “Bible” of a modern people should
be the History of Civilization. His work expresses by very different
phrases and methods a line of thought closely akin to the thesis of this
paper.]
One writes “our present civilization” and of previous civilizations, but
indeed no civilizations have yet really come into existence. Tribes have
aggregated into nations, nations have aggregated into empires, and then,
after a struggle, has come a great confusion of thought, a failure to
clarify a common purpose, and disintegration. Each successive birth has
developed a more abundant body of thought, a more copious literature
than the last, each has profited by the legacy of the previous failure,
but none have yet developed enough. Mankind has been struggling to win
this step of a permanent civilized state, and has never yet attained
any sort of permanency--unless perhaps in China. And that sole imperfect
permanency was based primarily upon a literature. A literature is the
triumphant instrument of the invincible culture of the Jews. Through the
whole volume of history the thoughtful reader cannot but exclaim,
again and again, “But if they had only understood one another, all this
bloodshed, all this crash, disaster, and waste of generations could
have been avoided!” Our time has come, and we of the European races are
making our struggle in our turn. Slavery still fights a guerilla war in
factory and farm, cruelty and violence peep from every slum, barbaric
habits, rude barbaric ways of thinking, grossness and stupidity are
still all about us. And yet in many ways we seem to have got nearer to
the hope of permanent beginnings than any of those previous essays in
civilization. Collectively we know a great deal more, and more of us are
in touch with the general body of knowledge than was ever the case at
any earlier stage. Assuredly we know enough to hope that we have
passed the last of the Dark Ages. But though we hope, we deal with no
certainties, and it is upon the broadening and increase of the flow of
ideas that our hope depends.
At present this stream of thought and common understanding is not nearly
so wide and deep as it might conceivably become, as it must become if
indeed this present civilization is to be more than another false start.
Our society [Footnote: _Anticipations_, Chapter III. Developing
Social Elements.] has ceased to be homogeneous, and it has become a
heterogeneous confusion without any secure common grounds of action,
under the stress of its own material achievements. For the lack of
a sufficient literature we specialize into inco-ordinated classes.
A number of new social types are developing, ignorant of each other,
ignorant almost of themselves, full of mutual suspicions and mutual
misunderstandings, narrow, limited, and dangerously incapable of
intelligent collective action in the face of crises. The medical man
sees nothing beyond his profession; he misunderstands the artist,
the divine, and the engineer. The engineer hates and despises the
politician, the lawyer misses the aims of the medical man, the artist
lives angrily in a stuffy little corner of pure technique; none of them
read any general literature at all except perhaps a newspaper. Each
thinks parochially in his own limits, and, except for his specialty,
is an illiterate man. It is absolutely necessary to the progress of
our civilization that these isolations should be overcome, that the
community should become aware of itself collectively and should think as
a whole. And the only thing that can overcome these isolations and put
the mass of intelligent men upon a common basis of understanding, is an
abundant and almost universally influential contemporary literature.
We have already discussed the possibility of developing the innervation
of the state, the distribution of books, the stimulation and direction
of reading, and all the peripheral aspects of literature, and we
come now to the difficult and intricate problem of whether we can do
anything, and what it is we may do, to stimulate the central thought.
Can we hope to improve the conditions of literary production, to make
our literature more varied, quintessential and abundant, to enforce it
with honour and help, to attract to its service every man and woman with
gifts of value, and to make the most of these gifts?
Quite a number of people will assert that those things that constitute
literature come and go beyond the control and will of man, they will
speak of Shakespeare as being a sort of mystical consequence, of Roger
Bacon or Newton as men independent of circumstances, inevitably great.
And if they are by way of being comic writers--the word “humorist,” as
Schopenhauer long since pointed out, is a stolen lion’s skin for these
gentry--they will become extremely facetious about the proposed school
for Bacons and Shakespeares. But a little reflection will convince
the reader that none of the great figures of the past appeared without
certain conditions being added to their inherent powers. In the first
place, they had to be reasonably sure of a sympathetic and intelligent
atmosphere, however limited in extent--there was no Plato in the heroic
age, and no Newton during the Heptarchy--and in the second, the medium,
language or what not, had to be ready for their use. In the third place
they needed personally a certain minimum of training and preparation,
and in the fourth they had to feel that for some reason--not necessarily
a worldly one--the thing was “worth while.” Given a “developer” of these
ingredients, and they appeared. But without this developer they would
not have appeared, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose, first,
that a great number of men of a quality as rare as were those who
constitute the unparalleled roll of English intellectual greatness,
lived and died undeveloped before ever the developer was compounded
at all, and that even in the last few hundred years the necessary
combination has fallen upon so small an area of our racial life as to
have missed far more than it has hit. The second of these papers is,
indeed, an attempt to present quite convincingly what the comic man
will probably regard as his effectual objection, that inherent tendency
cannot be produced at will. But that the developer may conceivably be
made in much greater quantities and spread much wider than it is at
present is an altogether different thing. There are, one submits,
enormous reserves of intellectual force unworked and scarcely touched,
even to-day.
We have already discussed the means and possibilities of a net of
education that should sweep through the whole social body, and of the
creation of an atmosphere more alert and active than our present one.
We have now to consider how the greatest proportion of those born with
exceptional literary powers may be picked out and induced to exercise
those powers to the utmost. Let us admit at once that this is a research
of extraordinary subtlety and complexity, that there are ten thousand
ways of going wrong, and perhaps mischievously wrong. That one may
submit, is not a sufficient reason for abandonment and despair. To take
an analogous case, it may be a complex and laborious thing to escape out
of a bear-pit into which one has fallen, but few people will consider
that a reason for inaction. Even if they had small hope of doing
anything effectual they might find speculation and experiments in
escape, a congenial way of passing the time. It is the sort of project
one should only abandon at the final and conclusive proof of its
impossibility. Exactly the same principle applies to human destinies
and the saving of other lives than our own. As a matter of fact, the
enterprise is not at all a hopeless one if it is undertaken honestly,
warily, and boldly.
Let us consider the lines upon which men must go to ensure the greatest
possible growth of original thought in the state, original thought of
which what scientific men call Research is only one phase.
Before we can consider how we may endow him and equip him and help him,
we have to consider how we may find the original thinker, and we have,
if we can, to define him and to discover whatever we can of his
methods and habits, his natural history as it were. We are attempting
generalization about a class of remarkably peculiar and difficult
persons. They are persons either of great intellectual power or simply
of great imaginative power, whose bias and quality it is to apply these
exceptional powers not directly and simply to their personal advancement
and enrichment, but primarily through philosophical, scientific, or
artistic channels, to the increase of knowledge or of wisdom or of both.
And here is the peculiar point in this problem, they are men who put,
or who wish to put the best of themselves and most of themselves into
occupations and interests that do not lead to practical results, that
often for the individual in open competition and the market fail more or
less completely to “pay.” Their activities, of course, pay tremendously
at last for the race, but that is not their personal point of
application. They take their lives and their splendid powers, they waste
themselves in remote and inaccessible regions and bring back precious
things that immediately any sharp commercial-minded man will turn into
current coin for himself and the use of the world.
There are certain things follow naturally from this remote
concentration, and we must persistently keep them in mind. These men
of exceptional mental quality, if they are really to do what they are
specially fitted to do, with all their power, will be unable to give
their personal affairs, their personal advancement, sustained attention.
In a democratic community whose principle is “hustle,” in a leisurely
monarchy where only opulence, a powerful top-note, and conspicuous
social gifts succeed, they will have either to neglect or taint their
special talent in order to survive. It does not follow that because
a man’s special qualities and inclinations are towards, let us say,
illuminating inquiries into the constitution of matter, or profound and
beautiful or simply beautiful renderings of his individual vision of
life, that he is indifferent to or independent of honour, of all the
freedoms to do and to rest from doing that come with wealth, or of
the many lures and pleasures of life. Posthumous Fame is losing its
attractiveness in an age which has discovered excellent reasons for
doubting whether after all _ære perennius_ was not rather too strong
a figure. However powerful the impulse to think, to state and create,
there comes a point--often a point a long way from starvation--at
which a genius will stop working. Your man of scientific, literary,
or artistic genius will not work below his conception of the endurable
minimum, the minimum of hope and honour and attention as well as of
material things, any more than a coal-heaver will--and we live in a
period when the Standard of Life tends to rise. To secure these things
which most men make the entire objective of their lives is, or should
be, an irrelevancy to the man of exceptional gifts. This means an
enormous handicap for him. Unless, therefore, we endow him and make life
easy for him so long as he does his proper work, he will have either to
pervert his powers more or less completely to these irrelevant ends, or
if his powers do not admit of such perversion, he will have no use for
them whatever. He will take some subordinate place in the world as a
rather less than average man and, it may be, find the leisure to give
just an amateurish ineffectual expression of the thing he might have
been.
Now this is the case with a great deal of scientific and artistic work,
and with nearly all literature at the present time, throughout the
English-speaking community. There are a few sciences slightly endowed,
there are a few arts patronized with some intelligence and generosity,
and for the rest there is nothing for it, for the man who wants to do
these most necessary and vital things, but to hammer some at least of
his precious gold into the semblance of a brass trumpet and to devote
a certain proportion of his time and energy to blowing that trumpet and
with that air of conscious modesty the public is pleased to consider
genuine, proclaiming the value of his wares. Some men seem able to do
this sort of thing without any deterioration in quality and some with
only a partial deterioration, but the way of self-advertisement is on a
slippery slope, and it has brought many a man of indisputable gifts to
absolute vulgarity and ineffectiveness of thought and work. At the best
it is a shameful business, this noise and display, for all that Scott
and Dickens were past masters in the art. And some men cannot do it at
all. Moreover, what the good man may do with an effort, the energetic
quack, whose only gift is simulation, can do infinitely better. It is
only in the unprofitable branches of intellectual work that the best now
holds the best positions unchallenged. In the really popular branches
of artistic work every honourable success draws a parasitic swarm of
imitators like fish round bread in a pool. In the world of thought, far
more than in the world of politics, the polling method, the democratic
method has broken down, the method that will only permit an author to
write--unless his subject is one that allows him to hold a Professorial
Chair--on condition that he can get a publisher to induce the public to
buy a certain minimum number of copies of each of his works, a
method that will give him no rest, once he is in the full swing of
“production,” until the end, no freedom to change his style or matter,
lest he should lose that paying following by the transition or the
pause.
Now before we can discuss how else we can deal with those who constitute
the current thought of the community, we must consider how we are to
distinguish what is worth sustaining from what is not.
This is the public aspect of Criticism. It is the mineralogy of
literature and art. At present Criticism, as a public function,
is discharged by private persons, usually anonymous and frequently
mysterious, and it is discharged with an astonishing ineffectiveness.
Nowhere in the whole English-speaking world is there anything one can
compare to a voice and a judgment--much less any discussion between
reputable voices. There are periodicals professing criticism, but
most of them have the effect of an omnibus in which disconnected
heterogeneous people are continually coming and going, while the
conductor asks first one of his fluctuating load and then another
haphazard for an opinion on this or that. The branch of literature
that has first to be put on a sound footing is critical literature. The
organization into efficiency of the criticism of contemporary work one
is forced to believe an almost necessary preliminary to the hopeful
treatment of the rest of the current of thought.
There is, of course, also the suggestion that an English Academy of
Letters might be of great service in discounting vulgar “successes” and
directing respect and attention to literary achievements. One may doubt
whether such an Academy as a Royal Charter would give the world would
be of any service at all in this connection. But Mr. Herbert Trench has
suggested recently that it might be possible to organize a large Guild
of literary men and women, which would include all capable writers, and
from which a sort of Academy could be elected, either by a general
poll or, I would suggest, by a Jury of Election or successive Juries
confirming one another. The New Republican would like to see such a
Guild not purely English, but Anglo-American, or in duplicate for the
two countries. With a very carefully chosen nucleus and some little
elaboration in the admission of new members--whose works might be
submitted to the report of a critical jury--such a Guild might be made
fairly representative of literary capacity. Election, one may suggest,
should be involuntary. There would be a number of literary men, one
fears--great men some of them--who would absolutely refuse to work with
any such body, and from the first the Guild would have to determine to
make such men unwilling members, members to whom all the honours and
privileges of the Guild would be open whenever they chose to abandon
their attitude of scorn or distrust. Such a Guild would furnish a useful
constituency, a useful jury-list. It could be used to recommend writers
for honours, to check the distribution of public pensions for literary
services, perhaps even to send a member or so to the Upper Chamber. It
is, at any rate, an experiment worth trying.
But such a Guild at best is only one of many possible expedients in this
matter. Another is for a few people of means to subsidize a magazine for
the exhaustive criticism of contemporary work for a few years. Quite a
small number of people, serious in this matter, a couple of thousand or
so, could float such a magazine by the simple expedient of guaranteeing
subscriptions. [Footnote: It may be suggested that among other methods
of putting the criticism of contemporary literature upon a better
footing is one that might conceivably be made to pay its own expenses.
There is so much room for endowments nowadays that where one can get at
the purse of the general public one should certainly prefer it to that
of the generous but overtaxed donor. The project would require a strong
endowment, but that endowment might be of the nature of a guarantee
fund, and might in the end return unimpaired to the lender. The
suggestion is the establishment of a well-planned and reasonably cheap
monthly or weekly critical magazine, written on a level at present
unattainable--chiefly because of the low rate of payment for all
literary criticism. There can be no doubt among those who read much
among literary and quasi-literary periodicals in English that there is a
very considerable amount of high critical ability available. Buried and
obscured to an ineffectual degree among much that is formal, foolish,
and venial, there is to be found to-day a really quite remarkable number
of isolated reviews, criticisms and articles in which style is
apparent, in which discrimination shines fitfully, in which there is the
unmistakable note of honest enthusiasm for good work. For the most part,
such criticism bears also the marks of haste--as, indeed, it must do
when a review as long as the column of a daily paper, a day’s work, that
is, of steady writing, earns scarcely a pound. But the stuff is there.
Scarcely a number of the _Academy_, or the _Spectator_, scarcely a week
of the _Morning Post_, the _Daily News_, or the _Daily Chronicle_, but
there is a review, or a piece of a review, that has the stigmata of
literature. And this suggestion is that some of these writers shall
be got together, shall be paid at least as well as popular short-story
writers are paid, shall each have a definite department marked out under
a trustworthy editor, and be pledged to limit their work to the pages of
this new critical magazine. Their work would be signed, and there they
would be, conspicuously urged to do the best that was in them, _apropos_
of more or less contemporary books and writers. They would have leisure
for deliberate judgments, for the development of that consistency of
thought which the condition of journalism renders so impossible. This
review would mean for them status, reputation, and opportunity. They
would deal with contemporary fiction, with contemporary speculative
literature, and with the style, logic, methods and vocabulary of
scientific and philosophical writers. Their work would form the mass of
the magazine, but there would also be (highly paid) occasional writers,
towards whose opinions the regular staff would very carefully define
their attitude. The project, of course, in foolish hands, might be very
foolishly misinterpreted. It might be quite easy to drive a team of
egregious asses in this way over contemporary work, leaving nothing but
hoof-marks and injuries, but we are assuming the thing to be efficiently
done. It is submitted that such a magazine, patiently and generously
sustained for a few years, would at last probably come to pay its way.
Unless the original selection of the staff was badly done, it would by
sheer persistent high quality win its way to authority with the reading
public, and so fill its covers with a swelling mass of advertisement
pages. And once it paid, then forthwith a dozen rivals would be in the
field, all of them, of course, also paying highly for critical matter
and competing for critics of standing. Such an enterprise would be a
lever for criticism through the whole of our literary world.]
Then it should also be possible to endow university lectureships and
readerships in contemporary criticism, lectureships and readerships in
which questions of style and method could be illustrated by quotation
(not necessarily of a flattering sort) from contemporary work.
Why should there not be an endowment which would enable a man of
indisputable critical capacity to talk through an illuminating course,
to sit before a little pile of marked books and reading sometimes here
and sometimes there and talking between, to distinguish the evil from
the good? What a wholesome thing to have Mr. Henley, for example, at
that in the place of some of the several specialists who will lecture
you so admirably on the Troubadours! How good to hear Mr. Frederic
Harrison (with some one to follow) adjusting all our living efforts
to the scale of the divine Comte, and Mr. Walkley and Mr. Herbert Paul
making it perfectly clear that a dead dog is better than a living lion,
by demonstrations on the lion. Criticism to-day is all too much in
the case of that doctor whose practice was deadly, indeed, but his
post-mortems admirable! No doubt such lectures would consist at times
of highly contentious matter, but what of that? There could be several
chairs. It would not be an impossible thing to set a few Extension
Lecturers afloat upon the same channel. We have now numerous courses of
lectures on the Elizabethan Dramatists and the evolution of the Miracle
Play, and the people who listen to this sort of thing will depart
straight away to recreate their souls in the latest triumph of vehement
bookselling. Why not base the literary education of people upon the
literature they read instead of upon literature that they are scarcely
more in touch with than with Chinese metaphysics? A few carefully
chosen pages of contemporary rubbish, read with a running comment, a few
carefully chosen pages of what is, comparatively, not rubbish, a little
lucid discussion of effects and probabilities, would do more to quicken
the literary sense of the average person than all the sham enthusiasm
about Marlowe and Spenser that was ever concocted. There are not a few
authors who would be greatly the better and might even be subsequently
grateful for a lecture upon themselves in this style. Let no one say
from this that the classics of our tongue are depreciated here. But
the point is, that for people who know little of history, little of
our language, whose only habitual reading is the newspaper, the popular
novel, and the sixpenny magazine, to plunge into the study of works
written in the language of a different period, crowded with obsolete
allusions, and saturated with obsolete ideas and extinct ways of
thinking, is pretentious and unprofitable, and that most of such
Extension Lecturing is fruitless and absurd. And I appeal to these two
facts in confirmation, to the thousands of people who every year listen
to such lectures and to the hundreds of thousands of copies of our
national classics sold by the booksellers, on the one hand, and on the
other to the absolute incapacity of our public to judge any new literary
thing or to protect itself in any way from violently and vulgarly
boomed rubbish of the tawdriest description. Without a real and popular
criticism of contemporary work as a preliminary and basis, the criticism
and circulation of the classics is quite manifestly vain.
By such expedients very much might be done for the literary atmosphere.
By endowing a critical review or so, by endowing a few chairs and
readerships in contemporary criticism, by organizing a Guild of
Literature and a system of exemplary honours for literature, by
stimulating the general discussion of contemporary work through lectures
and articles, criticism could, I believe, be made “worth while” to an
extent that is now scarcely imaginable, and there might be created an
atmosphere of attention, appreciation, and judgment that would be in
itself extraordinarily stimulating to all forms of literary effort.
Of course all this sort of thing may be done cheaply, stupidly,
dishonestly, and vulgarly, and one imagines the shy and exquisite
type of mind recoiling from the rude sanity of these suggestions. But,
indeed, they need not be done any other way than finely and well. People
whose conception of what is good in art and literature is inseparable
from rarity ought, I submit, to collect stamps. At an earlier phase in
this series of discussions there was broached a project for an English
Language Society, which would set itself to do or get done a number of
services necessary to the teaching and extension of the language of our
universal peoples. With such a Society those who undertook this project
for the habilitation of criticism would necessarily co-operate and
interlock.
It is upon this basis of an organized criticism and of a well-taught and
cherished language that the English literature of the Twentieth Century,
the literature of analysis and research, and the literature of creative
imagination, has to stand. Upon such a basis it becomes possible to
consider the practicability of the endowment of general literature.
For to that at last we come. I submit that it is only by the payment of
authors, and if necessary their endowment in a spacious manner, and in
particular by the entire separation of the rewards of writing from the
accidents of the book market, that the function of literature can be
adequately discharged in the modern state. The laws of supply and demand
break down altogether in this case. We have to devise some means of
sustaining those who discharge this necessary public function in the
progressive state.
There are several general propositions in this matter that it may be
worth while to state at this point. The first is that both scientific
generalization and literature proper have been and are and must continue
to be the product of a quite exceptionally heterogeneous aggregation of
persons. They are persons of the most various temperaments, of the most
varied lop-sidedness, of the most various special gifts, and the most
various social origins, having only this in common, the ability to add
to the current of the world’s thought. They are not to be dealt with
as though they were a class of persons all of exceptional general
intelligence, of exceptional strength of character, or of exceptional
sanity. To do that, would be to hand over literature from the man of
genius to the man of talent. A single method of selection, help, honour,
and payment, measurement by one general standard cannot, therefore, be
accepted as a solution. There must not be any one single central body,
any authoritative single control, for such a body or authority would
inevitably develop a “character” in its activity and greet with especial
favour (or with especial disfavour) certain types. In this case, at any
rate, organization is not centralization, and it is also not uniformity.
The proposition may indeed be thrown out that the principle of Many
Channels (a principle involving the repudiation both of the monarchical
and the democratic idea) is an essential one to go upon in all questions
of honour and promotion in the modern state. And not only Many Channels,
but Many Methods. Whatever the value of that as a universally valuable
proposition, it certainly applies here.
And next we may suggest that we must take great care that we pay for the
thing we need and not for some subsidiary qualification of less value.
The reward must be directly related to the work, and independent of
all secondary considerations. It must have no taint of charity. The
recipient must not have to show that he is in want. Because a writer or
investigator is a sober, careful body and quite solvent in a modest
way, that is no reason why we should not pay him stimulatingly for his
valuable contributions to the general mind, or because he is a shiftless
seeker of misfortunes, why we should pay him in excess. But pay him
anyhow. Almost scandalous private immorality, I submit, should not bar
the literary worker from his pay any more than it justifies our stealing
his boots. We must deal with immorality as immorality, and with work as
work. Above all, at the present time, we must keep clearly in view that
popularity has no relation to literary, philosophic or scientific value,
it neither justifies nor condemns. At present, except in the case
of certain forms of research and in relation to the altogether too
charitable-looking British Civil List, we make popularity the sole
standard by which a writer may be paid. The novelist, for example,
gets an income extraordinarily made up of sums of from sixpence to two
shillings per person sufficiently interested to buy his or her books.
The result is entirely independent of real literary merit. The sixpences
and shillings are, of course, greatly coveted, and success in getting
them on anything like a magnificent scale makes a writer, good or bad,
vehemently hated and abused, but the hatred and abuse--unaccompanied as
they are by any proposals for amelioration--are hardly less silly than
the system. And for our present purpose it really does not matter if the
fortunate persons who interest the great public are or are not overpaid.
Our concern is with the underpaid, and with all this affair of mammoth
editions and booming only as it affects that aspect. We are concerned
with the exceptional man’s necessities and not with his luxuries. The
fly of envy in the True Artist’s ointment may, I think, very well stop
there until magnanimity becomes something more of a cult in the literary
and artistic worlds than it is at the present time.
This, perhaps, is something of a digression from our second general
proposition, that we must pay directly for the work itself. But it leads
to a third proposition. The whole history of literature and science
abundantly shows that no critical judgment is more than an approximation
to the truth. Criticism should be equal to the exposure of the imitator
and the pure sham, of course, it should be able to analyze and expose
these types, but above that level is the disputed case. At the present
time in England only a very few writers or investigators hold high
positions by anything approaching the unanimous verdict of the
intelligent public--of that section of the public that counts. In the
department of fiction, for example, there is a very audible little
minority against Mr. Kipling, and about Mr. George Moore or Mr. Zangwill
or Mr. Barrie one may hear the most diverse opinions. By the test
of blackballing, only the unknown would survive. The valuation is as
erratic in many branches of science. The development of criticism will
diminish, but it certainly will not end, this sort of thing, and since
our concern is to stimulate rather than punish, we must do just exactly
what we should not do if we were electing men for a club, we must
include rather than exclude. I am told that Americans remark in relation
to University endowments, “we speculate in research,” and that will
serve for only a slight exaggeration of this third proposition. So long
as we get most of the men of exceptional mental gifts in the community
under the best conditions for their work, it scarcely matters if, for
each one of them, we get four or five shams or mere respectabilities
upon our hands. Respectabilities and shams have a fatal facility for
living on the community anyhow, and there is no more reason in not doing
these things on their account than there would be in burning a house
down to get rid of cockroaches and rats. The rat poison of sound
criticism--to follow that analogy--is the remedy here. And if the
respectability lives, his work at any rate dies.
But if the reward must be directly for the work, it must not have any
quantitative relation to the output of work. It is quality we want, not
quantity; we want absolutely to invert the abominable conditions of
the present time by which every exercise of restraint costs an author a
fine. It is my personal conviction that almost every well-known
living writer is or has been writing too much. “No book, no income” is
practically what the world says to an author, and the needy authors make
a pace the independent follow; there is no respect for fine silences, if
you cease you are forgotten. The literature of the past hundred years
is unparalleled in the world’s history in this feature that the greater
portion of it is or has been written under pressure. It was the case
with Scott, the case with Dickens, Tennyson, even with Browning, and
a host of other great contributors to the edifice. No one who loves
Dickens and knows anything of the art he practised but deplores that
evil incessant demand that never permitted him to revise his plans,
to alter, rearrange and concentrate, that never released him from the
obligation to touch dull hearts and penetrate thick skins with obtrusive
pathos and violent caricature.
Once embarked upon his course, he never had a moment for reconstruction.
He had no time to read, no time to think. A writer nowadays has to think
in books and articles; to read a book he must criticize or edit it; if
he dare attempt an experiment, a new departure, comes his agent in a
panic. Every departure from the lines of his previous success involves
chaffering, unless he chance to be a man of independent means. When one
reflects on these things it is only amazing that the average book is not
more copious and crude and hasty than it is, and how much in the way of
comprehensive and unifying work is even now in progress. There are all
too many books to read. It would be better for the public, better
for our literature, altogether better, if this obligation to write
perpetually were lifted. Few writers but must have felt at times the
desire to stop and think, to work out some neglected corner of their
minds, to admit a year’s work as futile and thrust it behind the fire,
or simply to lie fallow, to camp and rest the horses. Let us, therefore,
pay our authors as much not to write as though they wrote; instead of
that twenty or thirty volumes, which is, I suppose, the average product,
let us require a book or so, worth having. Which means, in fact, that we
must find some way of giving an author, once he has proved his quality,
a fixed income quite irrespective of what he does. We might, perhaps,
require evidence that he was doing some work now and then, we might
prohibit alien occupations, but for my own part I do not think even that
is necessary. Most authors so sustained will write, and all will have
written. We are presupposing, be it remembered, the stimulus of honours
and criticism and of further honours and further emoluments.
Finally, in making schemes for the endowment of original mental
activity, we must not ignore the possibility of a perversion that has
already played its part in the histories of painting and music, and
that is the speculative financing of promising candidates for these
endowments. If we are going to make research, criticism, and creation
“worth while” we must see to it that in reality we are not simply making
it worth while for Solomons and Moses to “spot” the early promise, to
stimulate its modesty, to help it to its position, and to draw the major
profits of the enterprise. The struggling young man of exceptional gifts
who is using his brains not to make his position but to do his destined
work, is by that at a great disadvantage in dealing with the business
man, and it is to the interest of the community that he should be
protected from his own inexperience and his own self-distrust. The
average Whitechapel Jew could cheat a Shakespeare into the workhouse in
no time, and our idea is rather to make the world easy for Shakespeares
than to hand it over to the rat activities of the “smart” business man.
Freedom of Contract is an idea no one outside a debating society dreams
of realizing in the state. We protect tenants from landlords in all
sorts of ways, our law overrides all sorts of bargains, and in the
important case of marriage we put almost all the conditions outside
bargaining and speculative methods altogether by insisting upon one
universal contract or none. We protect women who are physically and
economically weak in this manner, not so much for their own good as the
good of the race. The state already puts literary property into a class
apart by limiting its duration. At a certain point, which varies in
different circumstances, copyright expires. It is possible for an
author, whose fame comes late, to be present as a row of dainty volumes
in half the comfortable homes in the world, while his grandchildren
beg their bread. The author’s blood is sacrificed to the need the whole
world has of cheap access to his work. And since we do him this injury
for the sake of our intellectual life, it is surely not unreasonable to
interfere for his benefit also if that subserves the greater end.
Now there are two ways at least in which the author may be and should be
protected from the pressure of immediate necessities. The first of these
is to render his copyright in his work inalienably his, to forbid him to
make any bargain by which the right to revise, abbreviate, or alter what
he has written passes out of his hands, and to make every such bargain
invalid. He would be free himself to alter or to endorse alterations,
but to yield no _carte blanche_ to others. He would be free also to make
whatever bargain he chose for the rights of publication. But, and this
is the second proposal, no bargain he made should be valid for a longer
period than seven years from the date of its making. Every seven years
his book would come back into his control, to suppress, revise, resell,
or do whatever he liked to do with it. Only in one way could he escape
this property, and that would be by declaring it void and making his
copyright an immediate present to the world. And upon this proposal it
is possible to base one form--and a very excellent form--of paying for
the public service of good writing and so honouring men of letters
and thought, and that is by buying and, more or less, completely
extinguishing their copyrights, and so converting them into contemporary
classics.
Throughout these papers a disposition to become concrete has played
unchecked. Always definite proposals have been preferred to vague
generalizations, and here again it will be convenient to throw out an
almost detailed scheme--simply as an illustration of the possibilities
of the case. I am going to suggest to the reader that to endow a
thousand or so authors, as authors, would be a most wise and admirable
proceeding for a modern statesman, and I would ask him before he
dismisses this suggestion as absurd and impossible, to rest contented
with no vague rejection but to put to himself clearly why the thing
should under present conditions be absurd and impossible. Always in the
past the need of some organ for the establishment and preservation of a
common tone and substance of thought in the state has been recognized;
commonly this organ has taken the form of a Church, a group of Churches
(as in America) or an educational system (as in China). But all previous
schemes of social and political organization have been static, have
aimed at a permanent state. Our modern state we know can only live by
adaptation, and we have to provide not a permanent but a developing
social, moral and political culture. Our new scheme must include not
only priests and teachers but prophets and seekers. Literature is a
vitally necessary function of the modern state.
Let us waive for the moment the subtle difficulty that arises when we
ask who are the writers of literature, the guides and makers of opinion,
the men and women of wisdom, insight, and creation, as distinguished
from those who merely resonate to the note of the popular mind; let us
assume that this is determined, and let us make a scheme in the air to
support these people under such conditions as will give us their best.
Suppose the thing done boldly, and that for every hundred thousand
people in our population we subsidize an author--if we can find as many.
Suppose we give him some sort of honour or title and the alternative
of going on writing under copyright conditions--which many popular
favourites would certainly prefer--or of giving up his copyrights to the
public and receiving a fixed income, a respectable mediocre income, £800
or £1000 for example.
That means four hundred or more subsidized authors for Great Britain,
which would work out, perhaps, as eighteen or twenty every year, and a
proportionate number for America and the Colonial States of the British
Empire. Suppose, further, that from this general body of authors we
draw every year four or five of the seniors to form a sort of Academy,
a higher stage of honour and income; this would probably give something
under a hundred on this higher stage. Taking the income of the two
stages as £1000 and £2000 respectively, this would work out at about
£500,000 a year for Great Britain--a quite trivial addition to what
is already spent on educational work. A scheme that would provide for
widows and children whose education was unfinished, and for the official
printing and sale of correct texts of the books written, would still
fall within the dimensions of a million pounds. I am assuming this will
be done quite in addition to the natural growth of Universities and
Colleges, to the evolution of great text-books and criticism, and to the
organization and publication of special research in science and letters.
This is to be an endowment specifically for unspecialized literature,
for untechnical philosophy that is, and the creative imagination.
It must not be imagined that such an endowment would be a new payment,
by the community. In all probability we are already paying as much,
or more, to authors, in the form of royalties, of serial fees, and the
like. We are paying now with an unjust unevenness--we starve the new and
deep and overpay the trite and obvious. Moreover, the community would
have something in exchange for its money; it would have the copyright
of the works written. It may be suggested that by a very simple device a
large proportion of these payments could be recovered. Suppose that
all books, whether copyright or not, and all periodicals sold above a
certain price--sixpence, let us say--had to bear a defaced stamp of--for
example--a halfpenny for each shilling of price. This would probably
yield a revenue almost sufficient to cover these literary pensions. In
addition the books of the pensioned authors might bear an additional
stamp as the equivalent of the present royalty.
The annual selection of eighteen or twenty authors might very well be
a dispersed duty. One or two each might be appointed in some way by
grouped Universities, or by three or four of the Universities taken in
rotation, by such a Guild of Authors as we have already considered, by
the British Academy of History and Philosophy, by the Royal Society,
by the British Privy Council. The Jury system would probably be of very
great value in making these appointments.
That is a rough sketch of a possible scheme--presented in the most
open-minded way. It would not meet all conceivable cases, so it would
need to be supplemented in many directions; moreover, it is presented
with hideous crudity, but for all that, would not something of the
sort work well? How would it work? There would certainly be a great
diminution in the output of written matter from the thousand or more
recognized writers this would give us, and almost as certainly a great
rise in effort and deliberation, in distinction, quality, and value
in their work. This would also appear in the work of their ambitious
juniors. Would it extinguish anything? I do not see that it would. Those
who write trivially for the pleasure of the public would be just as well
off as they are now, and there would be no more difficulty than there is
at present for those who begin writing. Less, indeed; for the thousand
subsidized writers, at least, would not be clamorously competing to fill
up magazines and libraries; they might set a higher and more difficult
standard, but they would leave more space about them. The thing would
scarcely affect the development of publishing and book distribution,
nor injure nor stimulate--except by raising the standard and ideals of
writing--newspapers, magazines, and their contributors in any way.
I do not believe for one moment the thing would stop at such a
subsidized body of authors, such a little aristocracy of thought, as
this project presents. But it would be an efficient starting-point.
There are those who demand a thinking department for Army and Navy; and
that idea admits of extension in this direction, this organized general
literature of mine would be the thinking organization of the race. Once
this deliberate organization of a central ganglion of interpretation and
presentation began, the development of the brain and nervous system in
the social body would proceed apace. Each step made would enable the
next step to be wider and bolder. The general innervation of society
with books and book distributing agencies would be followed by the
linking up of the now almost isolated mental worlds of science, art,
and political and social activity in a system of intercommunication and
sympathy.
We have now already in the history of the world one successful
experiment in the correlation of human endeavour. Compare all that was
accomplished in material science by the isolated work of the great men
before Lord Verulam, and what has been done since the system of
isolated inquiry gave place to a free exchange of ideas and collective
discussion. And this is only one field of mental activity and one
aspect of social needs. The rest of the intellectual world is still
unorganized. The rest of the moral and intellectual being of man is
dwarfed and cowed by the enormous disproportionate development of
material science and its economic and social consequences. What if we
extend that same spirit of organization and free reaction to the whole
world of human thought and emotion? That is the greater question at
which this project of literary endowment aims.
It may seem to the reader that all this insistence upon the supreme
necessity for an organized literature springs merely from the obsession
of a writer by his own calling, but, indeed, that is not so. We who
write are not all so blinded by conceit of ourselves that we do not know
something of our absolute personal value. We are lizards in an empty
palace, frogs crawling over a throne. But it is a palace, it is a
throne, and, it may be, the reverberation of our ugly voices will
presently awaken the world to put something better in our place. Because
we write abominably under pressure and for unhonoured bread, none the
less we are making the future. We are making it atrociously no doubt;
we are not ignorant of that possibility, but some of us, at least, would
like to do it better. We know only too well how that we are out of touch
with scholarship and contemplation. We must drive our pens to live
and push and bawl to be heard. We must blunder against men an ampler
training on either side would have made our allies, we must smart and
lose our tempers and do the foolish things that are done in the heat of
the day. For all that, according to our lights, we who write are trying
to save our world in a lack of better saviours, to change this mental
tumult into an order of understanding and intention in which great
things may grow. The thought of a community is the life of that
community, and if the collective thought of a community is disconnected
and fragmentary, then the community is collectively vain and weak. That
does not constitute an incidental defect, but essential failure. Though
that community have cities such as the world has never seen before,
fleets and hosts and glories, though it count its soldiers by the army
corps and its children by the million, yet if it hold not to the reality
of thought and formulated will beneath these outward things, it will
pass, and all its glories will pass, like smoke before the wind, like
mist beneath the sun; it will become at last only one more vague and
fading dream upon the scroll of time, a heap of mounds and pointless
history, even as are Babylon and Nineveh.