An old English divine fancied that all the world might go mad and nobody
know it. The conception suggests a query whether the standard of sanity,
as of fashions and prices, be not a purely artificial one, an accident
of convention, a law of society, an arbitrary institute, and therefore a
possible mistake. A sage and a maniac each thinks the other mad. The
decision is a matter of majorities. Should a whole community become
insane, it would nevertheless vote itself wise; if the craze of Bedlam
were uniform, its inmates could not distinguish it from a Pantheon; and
though all human history seemed to the gods only as a continuous series
of mediæval processions _des sots et des ânes_, yet the topsy-turvy
intellect of the world would ever worship folly in the name of wisdom.
Arts and sciences, ideas and institutions, laws and learning would still
abound, transmogrified to suit the reigning madness. And as statistics
reveal the late gradual and general increase of insanity, it becomes a
provident people to consider what may be the ultimate results, if this
increase should happen never to be checked. And if sanity be, indeed, a
glory which we might all lose unawares, we may well betake ourselves to
very solemn reflection as to whether we are, at the present moment, in
our wits and senses, or not.
The peculiar proficiencies of great epochs are as astonishing as the
exploits of individual frenzy. The era of the Greek rhapsodists, when a
body of matchless epical literature was handed down by memory from
generation to generation, and a recitation of the whole "Odyssey" was
not too much for a dinner-party,--the era of Periclean culture, when the
Athenian populace was wont to pass whole days in the theatre, attending
with unfaltering intellectual keenness and æsthetic delight to three or
four long dramas, either of which would exhaust a modern audience,--the
wild and vast systems of imaginary abstractions, which the
Neo-Platonists, as also the German transcendentalists, so strangely
devised and became enamored of,--the grotesque views of men and things,
the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the
learned thought of the Middle Ages,--the Buddhistic Orient, with its
subtile metaphysical illusions, its unreal astronomical heavens, its
habits of repose and its tornadoes of passion,--such are instances of
great diversities of character, which would be hardly accountable to
each other on the supposition of mutual sanity. They suggest a
difference of ideas, moods, habits, and capacities, which in
contemporaries and associates would amply justify either party that
happened to be the majority in turning all the rest into insane asylums.
It is the demoniac element, the raving of some particular demon, that
creates greatness either in men or nations. Power is maniacal. A
mysterious fury, a heavenly inspiration, an incomprehensible and
irresistible impulse, goads humanity on to achievements. Every age,
every person, and every art obeys the wand of the enchanter. History
moves by indirections. The first historic tendency is likely to be
slightly askew; there follows then an historic triumph, then an historic
eccentricity, then an historic folly, then an explosion; and then the
series begins again. In the grade of folly, hard upon an explosion, lies
modern literature.
The characteristic mania of the last two centuries is reading and
writing. Solomon discovered that much study is a weariness of the flesh;
Aristophanes complained of the multitude and indignity of authors in his
time; and the famed preacher, Geyler von Kaisersberg, in the age of
prevalent monkery and Benedictine plodding, mentioned erudition and
madness, on equal footing, as the twin results of books: "_Libri quosdam
ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere_." These were successive
symptoms of the growing malady. But where there was one writer in the
time of Geyler, there are a million now. He saw both health and disease,
and could distinguish between them. We see only the latter. Skill in
letters, half a decade of centuries ago, was a miraculous attainment,
and placed its possessor in the rank of divines and diviners; now,
inability to read and write is accounted, with pauperism and crime, a
ground for civil disfranchisement. The old feudal merry and hearty
ignorance has been everywhere corrupted by books and newspapers,
learning and intelligence, the cabalistic words of modern life. Popular
poetry and music, ballads and legends, wit and originality have
disappeared before the barbaric intellectuality of our Cadmean idolatry.
Even the arts of conversation and oratory are waning, and may soon be
lost; we live only in second and silent thoughts: for who will waste
fame and fortune by giving to his friends the gems which will delight
mankind? and how can a statesman grapple eloquently with Fate, when the
contest is not to be determined on the spot, but by quiet and remote
people coolly reading his speech several hours or days later? Even if we
were vagarying into imbecility, like the wildest Neo-Platonic
hierophants, like the monkish chroniclers of the Middle Ages, like other
romantic and fantastic theorists who have leaped out of human nature
into a purely artificial realm, we should not know it, because we are
all doing it uniformly.
The universe is a veiled Isis. The human mind from immemorial antiquity
has ceased to regard it. A small cohort of alphabets has enrobed it with
a wavy texture of letters, beyond which we cannot penetrate. The glamour
is upon us, and when we would see the facts of Nature, we behold only
tracts of print. The God of the heavens and earth has hidden Himself
from us since we gave ourselves up to the worship of the false
divinities of Phoenicia. No longer can we admire the _cosmos_; for the
_cosmos_ lies beyond a long perspective of theorems and propositions
that cross our eyes, like countless bees, from the alcoves of
philosophies and sciences. No longer do we bask in the beauty of things,
as in the sunlight; for when we would melt in feeling, we hear nothing
but the rattling of gems of verse. No longer does the mind, as
sympathetic priest and interpreter, hover amid the phenomena of time and
space; for the forms of Nature have given place to volumes, there are no
objects but pages, and passions have been supplanted by paragraphs. We
no longer see the whirling universe, or feel the pulsing of life.
Thought itself has ceased to be a sprite, and flows through the mind
only in the leaden shape of printed sentences. The symbolism of letters
is over us all. An all-pervading nominalism has completely masked
whatsoever there is that is real. More and more it is not the soul and
Nature, but the eye and print, whose resultant is thought. Nature
disappears and the mind withers. No other faculty has been developed in
man but that of the reader, no other possibility but that of the writer.
The old-fashioned arts which used to imply human nature, which used to
blossom instinctively, which have given joy and beauty to society, are
fading from the face of the earth. Where are the ancient and mediæval
popular games, those charming vital symptoms? The people now read
Dickens and Longfellow. Where are the old-fashioned instincts of worship
and love, consolation and mourning? The people have since found an
antidote for these experiences in Blair and Tupper, and other authors of
renown. Where are those weird voices of the air and forest and stream,
those symptoms of an enchanted Nature, which used to thrill and bless
the soul of man? The duller ear of men has failed to hear them in this
age of popular science.
Literature, using the word with a benevolent breadth of meaning which
excludes no pretenders, is the result of the invasion of letters. It is
the fort which they occupy, which with too hasty consideration has
usually been regarded as friendly to the human race. Religions, laws,
sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like
into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners
in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality,
surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The
memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every
generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed
the final grace of being forgotten; and omniscience is becoming at once
more and more impossible and more and more fashionable. Whoever reads
only the books of his own time is superficial in proportion to the
thickness of the ages. But neither the genius of man, nor his length of
days, has had an increase corresponding to that of the realm of
knowledge, the requirements of reading, and the conditions of
intelligence. The multiplied attractions only crowd and obstruct the
necessarily narrow line of duty, possibility, and destiny. Life
threatens to be extinguished by its own shadow, by the _débris_ kept in
the current by countless tenacious records. Its essence escapes to
heaven or into new forms, but its ghosts still walk the earth in print.
Like that mythical serpent which advanced only as it grew in length, so
knowledge spans the whole length of the ages. Some philosopher conceived
of history as the migration and growth of reason throughout time,
culminating in successive historical ideas. He, however, supposed that
the idea of every age had nothing to do with any preceding age; it had
passed through whatsoever previous stages, had been somewhat modified by
them, contained in itself all that was best in them, was improved and
elevated at every new epoch; but it had no memory, never looked
backward, and was an ever rolling sphere, complete in itself, leaving no
trail behind. Human life, under the discipline of letters and common
schools, is not thus Hegelian, but advances under the boundless
retrospection of literature. And yet this is probably divine philosophy.
It is probable that the faculty of memory belongs to man only in an
immature state of development, and that in some future and happier epoch
the past will be known to us only as it lives in the present; and then
for the first time will Realism in life take the place of Nominalism.
The largest library in the world, the Bibliothèque Impériale of Paris,
(it has been successively, like the adventurous and versatile throne of
France, Royale, Nationale, and Impériale,) contains very nearly one
million of books, the collected fruits of all time. Consider an average
book in that collection: how much human labor does it stand for? How
much capital was invested originally in its production, and how much
tribute of time and toil does it receive per annum? Regarding books as
intellectual estate, how much does it cost mankind to procure and keep
up an average specimen? What quantity of human resources has been
originally and consecutively sunk in the Parisian library? How much of
human time, which is but a span, and of human emotion and thought, which
are sacred and not to be carelessly thrown away, lie latent therein?
The estimate must be highly speculative. Some books have cost a lifetime
and a heartbreak; others have been written at leisure in a week, and
without an emotion. Some are born from the martyrdom of a thinker to
fire the genius of a populace; others are the coruscations of joy, and
have a smile for their immortal heir. Some have made but the slightest
momentary ripple in human affairs; others, first gathering eddies about
themselves, have swept forward in grand currents, engrossing for
centuries whole departments of human energy. Thousands publish and are
forgotten before they die. Spinoza published after his death and is not
yet understood.
We will begin with the destined bibliomacher at the time of his
assumption of short clothes. The alphabet is his first professional
torture, and that only ushers him upon the gigantic task of learning to
read and write his own language. Experience shows that this miracle of
memory and associative reason may be in the main accomplished by the
time he is eight years old. Thus far in his progress towards book-making
he has simply got his fingers hold of the pen. He has next to run the
gauntlet of the languages, sciences, and arts, to pass through the epoch
of the scholar, with satchel under his arm, with pale cheek, an eremite
and ascetic in the religion of Cadmus. At length, at about twenty years
of age, he leaves the university, not a master, but a bachelor of
liberal studies. But thus far he has laid only the foundation, has
acquired only rudiments and generalities, has only served his
apprenticeship to letters. God gave mind and nature, but art has
furnished him a new capacity and a new world,--the capacity to read, and
the world of books. He has simply acquired a new nature, a psychological
texture of letters, but the artificial _tabula rasa_ has yet to be
filled. Twenty obstetrical years have at last made him a literary
animal, have furnished him the abstract conditions of authorship; but he
has yet his life to save, and his fortune to make in literature. He is
born into the mystic fraternity of readers and writers, but the special
studies and experiences which fit him for anything, which make a book
possible, are still in the future. He will be fortunate, if he gets
through with them, and gets his first volume off his hands by the age of
thirty. Authors are the shortest-lived of men. Their average years are
less than fifty. Our bibliomacher has therefore twenty years left to
him. Taking all time together, since formerly authors wrote less
abundantly than now, he will not produce more than one work in five
years, that is, five works in his lifetime of fifty years. The
conclusion to which this rather precarious investigation thus brings us
is, that the original cost of an average book is ten years of a human
life. And yet these ten years make but the mere suggestion of the book.
The suggestion must be developed by an army of printers, sellers, and
librarians. What other institution in the world is there but the
Bibliothèque Impériale, to the mere suggestion of which ten millions of
laborious years have been devoted?
Startling considerations present themselves. If there were no other
_argumentum ad absurdum_ to demonstrate some fundamental perversity and
absurdity in literature, it might be suspected from the fact that Nature
herself gives so little encouragement to it. Nobody is born an author.
The art of writing, common as it is, is not indigenous in man, but is
acquired by a nearly universal martyrdom of youth. If it had been
providentially designed that the function of any considerable portion of
mankind should have been to write books, we cannot suppose that an
economical Deity would have failed to create them with innate skill in
language, general knowledge, and penmanship. These accomplishments have
to be learned by every writer, yet writers are numberless. They are
mysteries which must be painfully encountered by every one at the
vestibule of the temple of literature, which nevertheless is thronged.
Surely, had this importance and prevalence been attached to them in the
Divine scheme, they would have been born in us like the senses, or would
blossom spontaneously in us, like the corollal growths of Faith and
Conscience. We should have been created in a condition of literary
capacity, and thus have been spared the alphabetical torture of
childhood, and the academic depths of philological despair. Twenty-five
years of preliminaries might have been avoided by changing the peg in
the scale of creation, and the studies of the boy might have begun where
now they end. Twenty-five years in the span of life would thus have been
saved, had what must be a universal acquirement been incorporated into
the original programme of human nature.
Or had the Deity appreciated literature as we do, He would probably have
written out the universe in some snug little volume, some miniature
series, or some boundless Bodleian, instead of unfolding it through
infinite space and time, as an actual, concrete, unwritten reality. Be
creation a single act or an eternal process, it would have been all a
thing of books. The Divine Mind would have revealed itself in a library,
instead of in the universe. As for men, they would have existed only in
treatises on the mammalia. There are some specimens which we hardly
think are according to any anticipation of heavenly reason, and
therefore they would not have existed at all. Nothing would have been
but God and literature. Possibly a responsible creation like ours might
have been formed, nevertheless, by making each letter a living,
thinking, moral agent; and the alphabet might thus have written out the
Divine ideas, as men now work them out. If the conception seem to any
one chilly, if it have a dreary look, if it appear to leave only a
frosty metallic base, instead of the grand oceanic effervescence of
life, let him remember how often earthly authors have renounced living
realities, all personal sympathies and pleasures, communing only with
books, their minds dwelling apart from men. Remember Tasso and Southey;
ay, if you have yourself written a book that commands admiration,
remember what it cost you. Why hesitate to transfer to the skies a type
of life which we admire here below? But God having wrought out instead
of written out His thoughts, does it not appear that He designed for men
to do likewise?
And thus a new consideration is presented. The exhibit of the original
cost of the Bibliothèque Impériale was the smallest item in our budget.
Mark the history of a book. How variously it engrosses the efforts of
the world, from the time when it first rushes into the arena of life!
The industry of printing embodies it, the energy of commerce disperses
it, the army of critics announce it, the world of readers give their
days and nights to it generation after generation, and its echoes
uninterruptedly repeat themselves along the infinite procession of
writers. The process reverts with every new edition, and eddies mingle
with eddies in the motley march of history. Its story may be traced in
martyrdoms of the flesh, in weary hours, strange experiences, unhappy
tempers, restless struggles, unrequited triumphs,--in the glare of
midnight lamps, and of wild, haggard eyes,--in sorrow, want, desolation,
despair, and madness. Born in sorrow, the book trails a pathway of
sorrow through the ages. And each book in the Parisian library stands
for all this,--some that were produced with tears having been always
read for jest,--some that were lightly written being now severe tasks
for historians, antiquaries, and source-mongers.
Suppose an old Egyptian, who in primæval Hierapolis incased his thought
in papyrus, to be able now to take a stroll into the Bibliothèque, and
to see what has become of his thought so far as there represented. He
would find that it had haunted mankind ever since. An alcove would be
filled with commentaries on it, and discussions as to where it came from
and what it meant. He would find it modifying and modified by the
Greeks, and reproduced by them with divers variations,--extinguished by
Christianity,--revived, with a new face, among the theurgies and cabala
of Alexandria; he would catch the merest glimpse of it amid the
Christian legends and credulities of the Middle Ages,--but the Arabs
would have kept a stronger hold on it; he would see it in the background
after the revival of learning, till, gradually, as modern commerce
opened the East, scholars, also, discovered that there were wonders
behind the classic nations; and finally he would see how modern
research, rushing back through comparison of language-roots, through
geological data, through ethnological indications, through antiquarian
discoveries, has rooted out of the layers of ages all the history
attendant upon its original production. He would find the records of
this long history in the library around him. In every age, the thought,
born of pain, has been reproduced with travail. It did not do its
mission at once, penetrate like a ray of light into the heart of the
race, and leave a chemical effect which should last forever. No, the
blood of man's spirit was not purified,--only an external application
was made, and that application must be repeated with torture upon every
generation. Was this designed to be the function of thought, the mission
of heavenly ideas?
This is the history of his thought in books. But let us conceive what
might have been its history but for the books;--how it might have been
written in the fibres of the soul, and lived in eternal reason, instead
of having been written on papyrus and involved in the realm of dead
matter. His idea, thrilling his own soul, would have revealed itself in
every particle and movement of his body; for "soul is form, and doth the
body make." Its first product would have been his own quivering,
animated, and animating personality. He would have impressed every one
of his associates, every one of whom would in turn have impressed a new
crowd, and thus the immortal array of influences would have gone on. Not
impressions on parchment, but impressions on the soul, not letters, but
thrills, would have been its result. Thus the magic of personal
influence of all kinds would have radiated from it in omnipresent and
colliding circlets forever, as the mighty imponderable agents are
believed to radiate from some hidden focal force. He would trace his
idea in the massive architecture and groping science of Egypt,--in the
elegant forms of worship, thought, institutes, and life among the
Greeks,--in the martial and systematizing genius of Rome,--and so on
through the ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages, and the political
and scientific ambitions of modern times. Its operations have everywhere
been chemical, not mechanical. It has lived, not in the letter, but in
the spirit. Never dropping to the earth, it has been maintained as a
shuttlecock in spiritual regions by the dynamics of the soul. It has
wrought itself into the soul, the only living and immortal thing, and so
the proper place for ideas. Its mode of transmission has been by the
suffusion of the eye, the cheek, the lip, the manner, not by dead and
unsymbolical letters. It has had life, and not merely duration. It has
been perpetuated in cordate, not in dactylate characters. Its history
must not be sought away from the circle of life, but may be seen in the
current generation of men. The man whom you should meet on the street
would be the product of all the ideas and influences from the
foundation of the world, and his slightest act would reveal them all
vital within him. The libraries, which form dead recesses in the river
of life, would thus be swept into and dissolved in the current, and the
waters would have been deepened and colored by their dissolution.
Libraries are a sort of _débris_ of the world, but the spiritual
substance of them would thus enter into the organism of history. All the
last results of time would come to us, not through books, but through
the impressions of daily life. Whatsoever was unworthy to be woven into
the fibres of the soul would be overwhelmed by that oblivion which
chases humanity; all the time wasted in the wrong-headedness of
archæology would be saved; for there would be nothing of the past except
its influence on the immediate present, and nothing but the pure human
ingot would finally be left of the long whirlings in the crucible of
history. Some one has said that all recent literature is one gigantic
plagiarism from the past. Why plagiarize with toil the toils of the
past, when all that is good in them lives, necessarily and of its own
tendency, in the winged and growing spirit of man? The stream flows in a
channel, and is colored by all the ores of its banks, but it would be
absurd for it to attempt to take the channel up and carry it along with
itself out into the sea. Why should the tinted water of life attempt to
carry along with it not only the tint, but also the bank, ages back,
from which the tint proceeds?
As the world goes on, the multitude of books increases. They grow as
grows the human race,--but, unlike the human race, they have a material
immortality here below. Fossil books, unlike fossil rocks, have a power
of reproduction. Every new year leaves not only a new inheritance, but
generally a larger one than ever before. What is to be the result? The
ultimate prospect is portentous. If England has produced ten thousand
volumes of fiction (about three thousand new novels) during the last
forty years, how many books of all kinds has Christendom to answer for
in the same period? If the British Museum makes it a point to preserve a
copy of everything that is published, how long will it be before the
whole world will not be sufficient to contain the multitude thereof? At
present all the collections of the Museum, books, etc., occupy only
forty acres on the soil, and an average of two hundred feet towards the
sky. But even these outlines indicate a block of space which under
geometrical increase would in the shortest of geological periods make a
more complete conquest of the earth than has ever been made by fire or
water. To say nothing of the sorrows of the composition of these new
literary stores, how is man, whose years are threescore-and-ten, going
to read them? Surely the green earth will be transformed into a
wilderness of books, and man, reduced from the priest and interpreter of
Nature to a bookworm, will be like the beasts which perish.
The eye of fancy lately witnessed in a dream the vision of an age far in
the future. The surface of the earth was covered with lofty rectangles,
built up coral-like from small rectangles. There was neither tree nor
herb nor living creature. Walled paths, excavated ruts, alone broke the
desert-like prospect, as the burrows of life. Penetrating into these,
the eye saw men walking beneath the striated piles, with heads bent
forward and nervous fingering of brow. There the whole world, such as we
have known it, was buried beneath volumes, past all enumeration. There
was neither fauna nor flora, neither wilderness, tempest, nor any
familiar look of Nature, but only one boundless contiguity of books.
There was only man and space and one unceasing library, and the men
neither ate nor slept nor spoke. Nature was transformed into the
processes and products of writing, and man was now no longer lover,
friend, peasant, merchant, naturalist, traveller, gourmet, mechanic,
warrior, worshipper, but only an author. All other faculties had been
lost to him, and all resources for anything else had fled from his
universe. Anon some wrinkled, fidgety, cogitative being in human form
would add a new volume to some slope or tower of the monstrous
omni-patulent mass, or some sharp-glancing youth, with teeth set
unevenly on edge, would pull out a volume, look greedily and
half-believingly for a few moments, return it, and slink away. "What is
this world, and what means this life?" cried I, addressing an old man,
who had just tossed a volume aloft. "Where are we, and what about this?
Tell me, for I have not before seen and do not know." He glanced a
moment, then spoke, like a shade in hell, as follows:--"This is the
world, and here is human life. Man long enjoyed it, with wonderful
fulness and freshness of being. But a madness seized him; everybody
wrote books; the evil grew more and more; nought else was an object of
pursuit; till at last the earth was covered with tomes, and for long
ages now it has been buried beyond the reach of mortal. All forms of
life were exterminated. Man himself survives only as a literary shadow.
Each one writes a book, or a few books, and dies, vanishing into thin
air. Such is life,--a hecatomb!"
But even if it be supposed that mind could survive the toil, and the
earth the quantity of our accumulating books, there are other
difficulties. There are other imperative limitations, beyond which the
art of writing cannot go. Letters themselves limit the possibilities of
literature. For there is only a certain number of letters. These letters
are capable of only a certain number of combinations into words. This
limited number of possible words is capable only of a certain number of
arrangements. Conceive the effect when all these capabilities shall be
exhausted! It will no longer be possible for a new thing to be said or
written. We shall have only to select and repeat from the past. Writing
shall be reduced to the making of extracts, and speaking to the making
of quotations. Yet the condition of things would certainly be improved.
As there is now a great deal of writing without thinking, so then
thinking could go on without writing. A man would be obliged to think
out and up to his result, as we do now; but whether his processes and
conclusions were wise or foolish, he would find them written out for him
in advance. The process of selection would be all. The immense amount of
writing would cease. Authors would be extinct. Thinkers could find their
ideas stated in the best possible way, and the most effective arguments
in their favor. If this event seems at all unlikely to any one, let him
only reflect on the long geological ages, and on the innumerable
writings, short and long, now published daily,--from Mr. Buckle to the
newspapers. Estimate everything in type daily throughout Christendom. If
so much is done in a day, how much in a few decades of centuries?
Surely, at our present rate, in a very conceivable length of time, the
resources of two alphabets would be exhausted. And this may be the
reason and providence in the amount of writing now going on,--to get
human language written up. The earth is as yet not half explored, and
its cultivation and development, in comparison with what shall some time
be, have scarcely begun. Will not the race be blessed, when its two
mortal foes, Nature and the alphabet, have been finally and forever
subdued?
This necessary finiteness of literature may be illustrated in another
way. An English mathematician of the seventeenth century applied the
resources of his art to an enumeration of human ideas. He believed that
he could calculate with rigorous exactness the number of ideas of which
the human mind is susceptible. This number, according to him, (and he
has never been disputed,) was 3,155,760,000. Even if we allowed
a million of words to one idea, according to our present
practice,--instead of a single word to an idea, which would seem
reasonable,--still, all the possible combinations of words and ideas
would finally be exhausted. The ideas would give out, to be sure, a
million of times before the words; but the latter would meet their doom
at last. All possible ideas would then be served up in all possible ways
for all men, who could order them according to their appetites, and we
could dispense with cooks ever after. The written word would be the
finished record of all possible worlds, in gross and in detail.
But the problem whose solution has thus been attempted by desperate
suggestions has, by changing its elements, nullified our calculation. We
have been plotting to cast out the demon of books; and, lo! three other
kindred demons of quarterlies, monthlies, and newspapers have joined
fellowship with it, and our latter estate is worse than our first.
Indeed, we may anticipate the speedy fossilization and extinction of
books, while these younger broods alone shall occupy the earth. Our
libraries are already hardly more than museums, they will soon be
_mausoleums_, while all our reading is of the winged words of the
hurried contributor. Some of the most intelligent and influential men in
large cities do not read a book once a year. The Cadmean magic has
passed from the hands of hierophants into those of the people.
Literature has fallen from the domain of immortal thought to that of
ephemeral speech, from the conditions of a fine to those of a mechanical
art. The order of genius has been abolished by an all-prevailing popular
opinion. The elegance and taste of patient culture have been vulgarized
by forced contact with the unpresentable facts thrust upon us by the
ready writer. Everybody now sighs for the new periodical, while nobody
has read the literature of any single age in any single country.
How like mountain-billows of barbarism do the morning journals, reeking
with unkempt facts, roll in upon the peaceful thought of the soul! How
like savage hordes from some remote star, some nebulous chaos, that has
never yet been recognized in the cosmical world, do they trample upon
the organic and divine growths of culture, laying waste the well-ordered
and fairly adorned fields of the mind, demolishing the intellectual
highways which great engineering thinkers have constructed within us,
and reducing a domain in which poetry and philosophy, with their sacred
broods, dwelt gloriously together, to an undistinguishable level of
ruin! How helpless are we before a newspaper! We sit down to it a highly
developed and highly civilized being; we leave it a barbarian. Step by
step, blow by blow, has everything that was nobly formed within us been
knocked down, and we are made illustrations of the atomic theory of the
soul, every atom being a separate savage, after the social theory of
Hobbes. We are crazed by a multitudinousness of details, till the eye
sees no picture, the ear hears no music, the taste finds no beauty, and
the reason grasps no system. The only wonder is that the diabolical
invention of Faust or Gutenberg has not already transformed the growths
of the mind into a fauna and flora of perdition.
It was a sad barbarism when men ran wild with their own impulses, unable
to control the fierceness of instinct. It is a sadder barbarism when men
yield to every impulse from without, with no imperial dignity in the
soul, which closes the apartments against the violence of the world and
frowns away unseemly intruders. We have no spontaneous enthusiasm, no
spiritual independence, no inner being, obedient only to its own law. We
do not plough the billows of time with true beak and steady weight, but
float, a tossed cork, now one side up and now the other. We live the
life of an insect accidentally caught within a drum. Every steamer that
comes hits the drum a beat; every telegram taps it; it echoes with every
representative's speech, reverberates with every senator's more portly
effort, screams at every accident. Everything that is done in the
universe seems to be done only to make a noise upon it. Every morning,
whatsoever thing has been changed, and whatsoever thing has been
unchanged, during the night, comes up to batter its report on the
omni-audient tympanum of the universe, the drum-head of the press. And
then we are inside of it. It may be music to the gods who dwell beyond
the blue ether, but it is terrible confusion to us.
Virgil exhausted the resources of his genius in his portraiture of
Fame:--
"Fama, malum, quo non aliud velocius ullum:
Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo:
Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras,
Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit.
*** *** *** ***
Tot linguæ, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures.
Nocte volat coeli medio terræque per umbram
Stridens, nec dulci declinat lumina somno."
What would he have done, had he known our modern monster, the
alphabet-tongued, steel-sinewed, kettle-lunged Rumor? It is a sevenfold
horror. The Virgilian Fame was not a mechanical, but a living thing; it
grew as it ran; it at least gave a poetical impression. Its story grew
as legends grow, full to the brim of the instincts of the popular
genius. It left its traces as it passed, and the minds of all who saw
and heard rested in delightful wonder till something new happened. But
the fact which printed Rumor throws through the atmosphere is coupled
not with, the beauty of poetry, but with the madness of dissertation.
Everybody is not only informed that the Jackats defeated the Magnats on
the banks of the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is
conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the
relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not
poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to
any abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and
prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, not by the hopes and fears
of the soul, but grows by accumulation of the dull details of prose. We
have neither the splendid bewilderments of the twelfth, nor the cold
illumination of the eighteenth century, but bewilderments without
splendor, and coldness without illumination. The world is too wide-awake
for thought,--the atmosphere is too bright for intellectual
achievements. We have the wonders and sensations of a day; but where are
the fathomless profundities, the long contemplations, and the silent
solemnities of life? The newspapers are marvels of mental industry. They
show how much work can be done in a day, but they never last more than a
day. Sad will it be when the genius of ephemerality has invaded all
departments of human actions and human motives! Farewell then to deep
thoughts, to sublime self-sacrifice, to heroic labors for lasting
results! Time is turned into a day, the mind knows only momentary
impressions, the weary way of art is made as short as a turnpike, and
the products of genius last only about as long as any mood of the
weather. Bleak and changeable March will rule the year in the
intellectual heavens.
What symbol could represent this matchless embodiment of all the
activities, this tremendous success, this frenzied public interest? A
monster so large, and yet so quick,--so much bulk combined with so much
readiness,--reaching so far, and yet striking so often! Who can conceive
that productive state of mind in which some current fact is all the time
whirling the universe about it? Who can understand the mania of the
leader-writer, who never thinks of a subject without discovering the
possibility of a column concerning it,--who never looks upon his plate
of soup without mentally reviewing in elaborate periods the whole
vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms?
But what is the advantage of newspapers? Forsooth, popular intelligence.
The newspaper is, in the first place, the legitimate and improved
successor of the fiery cross, beacon-light, signal-smoking summit,
hieroglyphic mark, and bulletin-board. It is, in addition to this, a
popular daily edition and application of the works of Aristotle, St.
Thomas Aquinas, Lord Bacon, Vattel, and Thomas Jefferson. On one page it
records items, on the other it shows the relations between those items
and the highest thought. Yet the whole circle is accomplished daily. The
journal is thus the synopticized, personified, incarnate madness of the
day,--for to-day is always mad, and becomes a thing of reason only when
it becomes yesterday. A proper historical fact is one of the rarest
shots in the journalist's bag, as time is sure to prove. If we had
newspaper-accounts of the age of Augustus, the chances are that no other
epoch in history would be so absolutely problematical, and Augustus
himself would be lucky, if he were not resolved into a myth, and the
journal into sibylline oracles. The dissertational department is equally
faulty; for to first impressions everything on earth is chameleon-like.
The Scandinavian Divinities, the Past, the Present, and the Future,
could look upon each other, but neither of them upon herself. But in the
journal the Present is trying to behold itself; the same priestess
utters and explains the oracle. Thus the journal is the immortal
reproduction of the _jour des dupes_. The editors are like the newsboys,
shouting the news which they do not understand.
The public mind has given itself up to it. It claims the right to
pronounce all the newspapers very bad, but has renounced the privilege
of not reading them. Every one is made _particeps criminis_ in the
course of events. Nothing takes place in any quarter of the globe
without our assistance. We have to connive at _omne scibile_. About
everything natural and human, infernal and divine, there is a general
consultation of mankind, and we are all made responsible for the result.
Yet this constant interruption of our private intellectual habits and
interests is both an impertinence and a nuisance. Why send us all the
crudities? Why call upon us till you know what you want? Why speak till
you have got your brain and your mouth clear? Why may we not take the
universe for granted when we get up in the morning, instead of
proceeding directly to measure it over again? Once a year is often
enough for anybody but the government to hear anything about India,
China, Patagonia, and the other flaps and coat-tails of the world. Let
the North Pole never be mentioned again till we can melt the icebergs by
a burning mirror before we start. Don't report another asteroid till the
number reaches a thousand; that will be time enough for us to change our
peg. Let us hear nothing of the small speeches, but Congress may publish
once a week a bulletin of what it has done. The President and Cabinet
may publish a bulletin, not to exceed five lines, twice a week, or on
rare occasions and in a public emergency once a day. The right, however,
shall be reserved to the people to prohibit the Cabinet from saying
anything more aloud on a particular public question, till they have
settled it. Let no mail-steamer pass between here and Europe oftener
than once a month,--let all other steamers be forbidden to bring news,
and the utterance of news by passengers be treated either as a public
libel or nuisance, or as high treason. Leave the awful accidents to the
parties whom they concern, and don't trouble us, unless they have the
merit of novelty as well as of horror. Tell us only the highest facts,
the boldest strokes, the critical moments of daily chaos, and save us
from multitudinous nonsense.
There are some things which we like to keep out of the
newspapers,--whose dignity is rather increased by being saved from them.
There are certain momentary and local interests which have become shy of
the horn of the reporter. The leading movements in politics, the
advanced guard of scientific and artistic achievement, the most
interesting social phenomena rather increase than diminish their
importance by currency in certain circles instead of in the press. The
prestige of some events in metropolitan cities, a marriage or a party,
depends on their social repute, and they are ambitiously kept out of
the journalist's range. Moreover, in politics, a few leading men meet
together for consultation, and----but the mysteries of political
strategy are unknown here. Certainly the journalist has great influence
in them, but the clubs are centres of information and discussions of a
character and interest to which all that newspapers do is second-rate.
Science has never been popularized directly by the newspapers, but the
erudition of a _savant_ reaches to the people by creating an atmospheric
change, in which task the journals may have their influence. Rightly or
wrongly, the administration in civil affairs at Washington has not
listened to the press much, but it may be different when a new election
approaches. The social, political, scientific, and military Dii Majores
all depend on the journal for a part of their daily breakfast, but all
soar above it.
A well-known and rather startling story describes a being, which seems
to have been neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, which a man made out of the
elements, by the use of his hands, and by the processes of chemistry,
and which at the last galvanic touch rushed forth from the laboratory,
and from the horrified eyes of its creator, an independent, scoffing,
remorseless, and inevitable enemy of him to whose rash ingenuity it owed
its origin.
Such a creature symbolizes some of our human arts and initiations. Once
organized by genius and consecrated by precedent, they become mighty
elements in history, revelling amid the wealthy energy of life,
exhausting the forces of the intellect, clipping the tendrils of
affection, becoming colossal in the architecture of society and dorsal
in its traditions, and tyrannizing with the heedless power of an
element, to the horror of the pious soul which called it into existence,
over all departments of human activity. Such an art, having passed a
period of tameless and extravagant dominance, at length becomes a
fossil, and is regarded only as an evidence of social upheaving in a
remote and unaccountable age.
To charge such a creature with monstrosity during the period of its
power is simply to expose one's self to popular jeers. Having immense
respect for majorities in this country, we only venture obscurely to
hint, that, of all arts, none before has ever been so threatening,
curious, and fascinating a monster as that of printing. We merely
suggest the hypothesis, novel since some centuries, that old Faustus and
Gutenberg were as much inspired by the Evil One as they have been fabled
to be, when they carved out of a mountain of ore the instrument yclept
type, to completely exhaust the possibilities of which is of late
announced as the sum of human destiny. They lived under the
hallucination of dawning literature, when printed books implied sacred
and classical perfection; and they could by no means have foreseen the
royal folios of the "New York Herald" and "Tribune," or the marvellous
inanities about the past, present, and future, which figure in an
indescribable list of duodecimo fiction, theology, and popular science.
But there is nothing so useless as to protest against a universal
fashion. Every epoch must work out its own problem in its own way; and
it may be that it is appointed unto mankind to work through all possible
mistakes as the condition of finally attaining the truth. The only way
is, to encourage the spirit of every age, to hurry on the climax. The
practical _reductio ad absurdum_ and consequent explosion will soon
accomplish themselves.
But a more palpable reason against protesting is, that literature in its
different branches, now as ever, commands the services of the finest
minds. It is the literary character, of which the elder Disraeli has
written the natural history, which now as ever creates the books, the
magazines, the newspapers. That sanctified bookworm was the first to
codify the laws, customs, habits, and idiosyncrasies of literary men. He
was the Justinian of the life of genius. He wandered in abstraction
through the deserted alcoves of libraries, studying and creating the
political economy of thought. What long diversities of character, what
mysterious realms of experience, what wild waywardness of heavenly
endowments, what heroism of inward struggle, what shyness towards
society, what devotion to the beckoning ideal of art, what defeats and
what triumphs, what sufferings and joys, both in excess, were revealed
by him, the great political economist of genius! In his apostolic view,
genius alone consecrated literature, and made a literary life sacred.
Genius was to him that peculiar and spontaneous devotion to letters
which made its possessor indifferent to everything else. For a man
without this heavenly stamp to engage in literature was simply for him
to rush upon his fate, and become a public nuisance. Literature in its
very nature is precarious, and must be plucked from the brink of fate,
from the mouth of the dragon. The literary man runs the risk of being
destroyed in a thousand ways. He has no track laid, no instituted aids,
no specified course of action. The machineries of life are not for him.
He enters into no one of the departments of human routine. He has no
relations with the course of the dull world; he is not quite a man, as
the world goes, and not at all an angel, as the celestials see. He must
be his own motive, path, and guide, his own priest, king, and law. The
world may be his footstool, and may be his slough of despond, but is
never his final end. His aims are transcendental, his realm is art, his
interests ideal, his life divine, his destiny immortal. All the old
theories of saintship are revived in him. He is in the world, but not of
it. Shadows of infinitude are his realities. He sees only the starry
universe, and the radiant depths of the soul. Martyrdom may desolate,
but cannot terrify him. If he be a genius, if his soul crave only his
idea, and his body fare unconsciously well on bread and water, then his
lot is happy, and fortune can present no ills which will not shrink
before his burning eye. But if he be less than this, he is lost, the
sport of devouring elements. As he fights fate on the border of ruin, so
much the more should he be animated by courage, ambition, pride,
purpose, and faith. To him literature is a high adventure, and
impossible as a profession. A profession is an instituted department of
action, resting upon universal and constant needs, and paying regular
dividends. But the fine arts must in their nature be lawless.
Appointments cannot be made for them any more than for the
thunder-storms which sweep the sky. They die when they cease to be wild.
Literary life, at its best, is a desperate play, but it is with guineas,
and not with coppers, to all who truly play it. Its elements would not
be finer, were they the golden and potent stars of alchemistic and
astrological dreams.
Such was genius, and such was literature, in the representation of their
first great lawgiver. But the world has changed. The sad story of the
calamities of authors need not be repeated. We live in the age of
authors triumphant. By swiftly succeeding and countless publications
they occupy the eye of the world, and achieve happiness before their
death. The stratagems of literature mark no longer a struggle between
genius and the bailiffs. What was once a desperate venture is now a
lucrative business. What was once a martyrdom is now its own reward.
What once had saintly unearthliness is now a powerful motor among
worldly interests. What was once the fatality of genius is now the
aspiration of fools. The people have turned to reading, and have become
a more liberal patron than even the Athenian State, monastic order, or
noble lord. No longer does the literary class wander about the streets,
gingerbread in its coat-pockets, and rhymes written on scraps of paper
from the gutter in its waistcoat-pockets. No longer does it unequally
compete with clowns and jockeys for lordly recognition. No longer are
the poet and the fool court-rivals. No longer does it look forward to
the jail as an occasional natural resting-place and paradise. No longer
must the author renounce the rank and robe of a gentleman to fall from
airy regions far below the mechanical artists to the level of
clodhoppers, even whose leaden existence was a less precarious matter.
The order of scholars has ceased to be mendicant, vagabond, and eremite.
It no longer cultivates blossoms of the soul, but manufactures objects
of barter. Now is the happy literary epoch, when to be intellectual and
omniscient is the public and private duty of every man. To read
newspapers by the billion and books by the million is now the common
law. We can conceive of Disraeli moaning that the Titan interests of the
earth have overthrown the celestial hierarchy,--that the realm of genius
has been stormed by worldly workers,--that literature, like the angels,
has fallen from its first estate,--and that authors, no longer the
disinterested and suffering apostles, of art, have chosen rather to bear
the wand of power and luxury than to be inspired. We can imagine his
horror at the sacrilegious vulgarization of print, that people without
taste rush into angelic metre, that dunces and sages thrive together on
the public indiscrimination. How would he marvel to see literary
reputations born, grow old, and die within a season, the owners thereof
content to be damned or forgotten eternally for a moment's incense or an
equally fugitive shilling. Nectar and ambrosia mean to them only
meanness, larceny, sacrilege, and bread and butter.
And yet, notwithstanding the imaginary reproaches of our great literary
church-father, the most preciously endowed minds are still toiling in
letters. The sad and tortured devotion of genius still works itself out
in them. Writing is now a marvellous craft and industry. The books which
last, the books of a season, the quarterlies, monthlies, weeklies,
dailies, and even the hourlies, are among the institutions of its
fostering. Nor should that vehicle, partly of intelligence, but chiefly
of sentiment, the postal system, be unmentioned, which men and women
both patronize, each after their kind. Altogether, perhaps, in some way
or other, seven-eighths of the life of man is taken up by the Cadmean
Art. The whole fair domain of learning belongs to it; for nowhere now,
in garden, grove, or Stoical Porch, with only the living voices of man
and Nature, do students acquaint themselves with the joyous solemnities,
the mysterious certainties of thought. The mind lives in a universe of
type. There is no other art in which so desperate adventures are made.
Indeed, the normal mental state of the abundant writer is a marvellous
phenomenon. The literary faculty is born of the marriage of chronic
desperation with chronic trust. This may account in part for that
peculiar condition of mind which is both engendered and required by
abundant writing. A bold abandon, a desperate guidance, a thoughtless
ratiocination, a mechanical swaying of rhetoric, are the grounds of
dissertation. A pause for a few days, a visit to the country, anything
that would seem designed to restore the mind to its normal state,
destroys the faculty. The weary penman, who wishes his chaotic head
could be relieved by being transformed even as by Puck, knows that very
whirling chaos is the condition of his multitudinous periods. It seems
as if some special sluices of the soul must be opened to force the pen.
One man, on returning to his desk from a four weeks' vacation, took up
an unfinished article which he had left, and marvelled that such writing
should ever have proceeded from him. He could hardly understand it,
still less could he conceive of the mental process by which he had once
created it. That process was a sort of madness, and the discipline of
newspapers is inflicting it alike upon writers and readers.
Demoralization is the result of a life-long devotion to the maddening
rumors of the day. It takes many a day to recall that fierce caprice, as
of an Oriental despot, with which he watches the tiger-fights of ideas,
and strikes off periods, as the tyrant strikes off heads.
And while no other art commands so universal homage, no other is so
purely artificial, so absolutely unsymbolical. The untutored mind sees
nothing in a printed column. A library has no natural impressiveness. It
is not in the shape of anything in this world of infinite beauty. The
barbarians of Omri destroyed one without a qualm. They have occupied
apartments in seraglios, but the beauties have never feared them as
rivals. Of all human employments, writing is the farthest removed from
any touch of Nature. It is at most a symbolism twice dead and buried.
The poetry in it lies back of a double hypothesis. Supposing the
original sounds to have once been imitations of the voices of Nature,
those sounds have now run completely away from what they once
represented; and supposing that letters were once imitations of natural
signs, they have long since lost the resemblance, and have become
independent entities. Whatever else is done by human artifice has in it
some relic of Nature, some touch of life. Painting copies to the eye,
music charms the ear, and all the useful arts have something of the
aboriginal way of doing things about them. Even speech has a living
grace and power, by the play of the voice and eye, and by the billowy
flushes of the countenance. Mental energy culminates in its modulations,
while the finest physical features combine to make them a consummate
work of art. But all the musical, ocular, and facial beauties are absent
from writing. The savage knows, or could quickly guess, the use of the
brush or chisel, the shuttle or locomotive, but not of the pen. Writing
is the only dead art, the only institute of either gods or men so
artificial that the natural mind can discover nothing significant in it.
For instance, take one of the disputed statements of the Nicene Creed,
examine it by the nicest powers of the senses, study it upwards,
downwards, and crosswise, experiment to learn if it has any mysterious
chemical forces in it, consider its figures in relation to any
astrological positions, to any natural signs of whirlwinds, tempests,
plagues, famine, or earthquakes, try long to discover some hidden
symbolism in it, and confess finally that no man unregenerate to
letters, by any _a priori_ or empirical knowledge, could have at all
suspected that a bit of dirty parchment, with an ecclesiastical scrawl
upon it, would have power to drive the currents of history, inspire
great national passions, and impel the wars and direct the ideas of an
epoch. The conflicts of the iconoclasts can be understood even by a
child in its first meditations over a picture-book; hieroglyphics may
represent or suggest their objects by some natural association; but the
literary scrawl has a meaning only to the initiated. A book is the
prince of witch-work. Everything is contained in it; but even a superior
intelligence would have to go to school to get the key to its mysterious
treasures.
And as the art is thus removed from Nature, so its devotees withdraw
themselves from life. Of no other class so truly as of writers can it be
said that they sacrifice the real to the ideal, life to fame. They
conquer the world by renouncing it. Its fleeting pleasures, its
enchantment of business or listlessness, its social enjoyments, the
vexations and health-giving bliss of domestic life, and all wandering
tastes, must be forsaken. A power which pierces, and an ambition which
enjoys the future, accepts the martyrdom of the present. They feel
loneliness in their own age, while with universal survey viewing the
beacon-lights of history across the peaks of generations. Their seat of
life is the literary faculty, and they prune and torture themselves only
to maintain in this the highest intensity and capacity. They are in some
sort rebels battling against time, not the humble well-doer content
simply to live and bless God. Between them and living men there is the
difference which exists between analytical and geometrical mathematics:
the former has to do with signs, the latter with realities. The former
contains the laws of the physical world, but a man may know and use
them like an adept, and yet be ignorant of physics. He may know all
there is of algebra, without seeing that the universe is masked in it.
The signs would be not means, but ultimates to it. So a writer may never
penetrate through the veil of language to the realities behind,--may
know only the mechanism, and not the spirit of learning and literature.
His mind is then skeleton-like,--his thought is the shadow of a shade.
And yet is not life greater than art? Why transform real ideas and
sentiments into typographical fossils? Why have we forgotten the theory
of human life as a divine vegetation? Why not make our hearts the focus
of the lights which we strive to catch in books? Why should the wealthy
passivity of the Oriental genius be so little known among us? Why
conceive of success only as an outward fruit plucked by conscious
struggle? Banish books, banish reading, and how much time and strength
would be improvised in which to benefit each other! We might become
ourselves embodiments of all the truth and beauty and goodness now
stagnant in libraries, and might spread their aroma through the social
atmosphere. The dynamics would supplant the mechanics of the soul. In
the volume of life the literary man knows only the indexes; but he would
then be introduced to the radiant, fragrant, and buoyant contents, to
the beauty and the mystery, to the great passions and long
contemplations. The eternal spicy breeze would transform the leaden
atmosphere of his thought. An outlaw of the universe for his sins, he
would then be restored to the realities of the heart and mind. He would
then for the first time discover the difference between skill and
knowledge. Readers and writers would then be succeeded by human beings.
The golden ante-Cadmean age would come again. Literary sanctity having
become a tradition, there would be an end of its pretentious
counterfeits. The alphabet, decrepit with its long and vast labors,
would at last be released. The whole army of writers would take their
place among the curiosities of history. The Alexandrian thaumaturgists,
the Byzantine historians, the scholastic dialecticians, the serial
novelists, and the daily dissertationists, strung together, would make a
glittering chain of monomaniacs. Social life is a mutual joy; reading
may be rarely indulged without danger to sanity; but writing, unless the
man have genius, is but creating new rubbish, the nucleus of new deltas
of obstruction, till the river of life shall lose its way to the ocean,
and the Infinite be shut out altogether. The old bibliopole De Bury
flattered himself that he admired wisdom because it purchaseth such vast
delight. He had in mind the luxury of reading, and did not think that in
this world wisdom always hides its head or goes to the stake. Even if
literature were not to be abolished altogether, it is safe to think that
the world would be better off, if there were less writing. There should
be a division of labor; some should read and write, as some ordain laws,
create philosophies, tend shops, make chairs,--but why should everybody
dabble with literature?
In all hypotheses as to the more remote destiny of literature, we can
but be struck by the precariousness of its existence. It is art
imperishable and ever-changing material. A fire once extinguished
perhaps half the world's literature, and struck thousands from the list
of authors. The forgetfulness of mankind in the mysterious mediæval age;
diminished by more than half the world of books. There are many books
which surely, and either rapidly or slowly, resolve themselves into the
elements, but the process cannot be seen. A whole army of books perishes
with every revolution of taste. And yet the amount of current writing
surpasses the strength of man's intellect or the length of his years.
Surely, the press is very much of a nuisance as well as a blessing. Its
products are getting very much in the way, and the impulse of the world
is too strong to allow itself to be clogged by them. Something must be
done.
Among possibilities, let the following be suggested. The world may
perhaps return from unsymbolical to symbolical writing. There is a
science older than anything but shadowy traditions, and immemorially
linked with religion, poetry, and art. It is the almost forgotten
science of symbolism. Symbols, as compared with letters, are a higher
and more potent style of expression. They are the earthly shadows of
eternal truth. It is the language of the fine arts, of painting,
sculpture, the stage,--it will be the language of life, when, rising in
the scale of being, we shall return from the dead sea of literature to
the more energetic algebra of symbolical meanings. In these, the forms
of the reason and of Nature come into visible harmony; the hopes of man
find their shadows in the struggles of the universe, and the lights of
the spirit cluster myriad-fold around the objects of Nature. Let
Phoenician language be vivified into the universal poetry of
symbolism, and thought would then become life, instead of the ghost of
life. Current literature would give way to a new and true mythology;
authors and editors would suffer a transformation similar to that of
type-setters into artists, and of newsboys into connoisseurs; and the
figures of a noble humanity would fill the public mind, no longer
confused and degraded by the perpetual vision of leaden and unsuggestive
letters. From that time prose would be extinct, and poetry would be all
in all. History would renew its youth,--would find, after the struggles,
attainments, and developments of its manhood, that there is after all
nothing wiser in thought, no truer law, than the instincts of childhood.
Or, again: improvements have already been made which promise as an
ultimate result to transform the largest library into a miniature for
the pocket. Stenography may yet reach to a degree that it will be able
to write folios on the thumb-nail, and dispose all the literature of the
world comfortably in a gentleman's pocket, before he sets out on his
summer excursion. The contents of vast tomes, bodies of history and of
science, may be so reduced that the eye can cover them at a glance, and
the process of reading be as rapid as that of thought The mind, instead
of wearying of slow perusal, would have to spur its lightning to keep
pace with the eye. Many books are born of mere vagueness and cloudiness
of thought. All such, when thus compressed into their reality, would go
out in eternal night. There is something overpowering in the conception
of the high pressure to which life in all its departments may some time
be brought. The mechanism of reading and writing would be slight. The
mental labor of comprehending would be immense. The mind, instead of
being subdued, would be spurred, by what it works in. We are now cramped
and checked by the overwhelming amount of linguistic red-tape in which
we have to operate; but then men, freed from these bonds, the husks of
thought almost all thrown away, would be purer, live faster, do greater,
die younger. What magnificent physical improvements, we may suppose,
will then aid the powers of the soul! The old world would then be
subdued, nevermore to strike a blow at its lithe conqueror, man. The
department of the newspaper, with inconceivable photographic and
telegraphic resources, may then be extended to the solar or the stellar
systems, and the turmoils of all creation would be reported at our
breakfast-tables. Men would rise every morning to take an intelligible
account of the aspects and the prospects of the universe.
Or, once more: shall we venture into the speculative domain of the
philosophy of history, and give the rationale of our times? What is the
divine mission of the great marvel of our age, namely, its periodical
and fugitive literature? The intellectual and moral world of mankind
reforms itself at the outset of new civilizations, as Nature reforms
itself at every new geological epoch. The first step toward a reform, as
toward a crystallization, is a solution. There was a solvent period
between the unknown Orient and the greatness of Greece, between the
Classic and the Middle Ages,--and now humanity is again solvent, in the
transition from the traditions which issued out of feudalism to the
novelty of democratic crystallization. But as the youth of all animals
is prolonged in proportion to their dignity in the scale of being, so is
it with the children of history. Destiny is the longest-lived of all
things. We are not going to accomplish it all at once. We have got to
fight for it, to endure the newspapers in behalf of it. We are in a
place where gravitation changing goes the other way. For the first time,
all reigning ideas now find their focus in the popular mind. The giant
touches the earth to recover his strength. History returns to the
people. After two thousand years, popular intelligence is again to be
revived. And under what new conditions? We live in a telescopic,
microscopic, telegraphic universe, all the elements of which are brought
together under the combined operation of fire and water, as erst, in
primitive Nature, vulcanic and plutonic forces struggled together in the
face of heaven and hell to form the earth. The long ranges of history
have left with us one definite idea: it is that of progress, the
intellectual passion of our time. All our science demonstrates it, all
our poetry sings it. Democracy is the last term of political progress.
Popular intelligence and virtue are the conditions of democracy. To
produce these is the mission of periodical literature. The vast
complexities of the world, all knowledge and all purpose, are being
reduced in the crucible of the popular mind to a common product.
Knowledge lives neither in libraries nor in rare minds, but in the
general heart. Great men are already mythical, and great ideas are
admitted only so far as we, the people, can see something in them. By no
great books or long treatises, but by a ceaseless flow of brevities and
repetitions, is the pulverized thought of the world wrought into the
soul. It is amazing how many significant passages in history and in
literature are reproduced in the essays of magazines and the leaders of
newspapers by allusion and illustration, and by constant iteration
beaten into the heads of the people. The popular mind is now feeding
upon and deriving tone from the best things that literary commerce can
produce from the whole world, past and present. There is no finer
example of the popularization of science than Agassiz addressing the
American people through the columns of a monthly magazine. Of the
popular heart which used to rumble only about once in a century the
newspapers are now the daily organs. They are creating an organic
general mind, the soil for future grand ideas and institutes. As the
soul reaches a higher stage in its destiny than ever before, the
scaffolding by which it has risen is to be thrown aside. The quality of
libraries is to be transferred to the soul. Spiritual life is now to
exert its influence directly, without the mechanism of letters,--is
going to exert itself through the social atmosphere,--and all history
and thought are to be perpetuated and to grow, not in books, but in
minds.
And yet, though we thus justify contemporary writing, we can but think,
that, after long ages of piecemeal and _bon-mot_ literature, we shall at
length return to serious studies, vast syntheses, great works. The
nebulous world of letters shall be again concentred into stars. The
epoch of the printing-press has run itself nearly through; but a new
epoch and a new art shall arise, by which the achievements and the
succession of genius shall be perpetuated.