9. Literary

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_ The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we take to be the most awful laboratory of powers--mysterious, unseen, and absolutely infinite--the second might be represented by the winds, and the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the base to the noble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers the _genus attonitorum_, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a splendour not at all _in_ Napoleon, to a baseness which really _is_ in Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust, seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above. Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.

Wordsworth is always recording phenomena as they are enjoyed; Coleridge as they reconcile themselves with opposing or conflicting phenomena.

W. W.'s social philosophy is surely shallow. It is true the man who has a shallow philosophy under the guidance of Christianity has a profound philosophy. But this apart, such truths as 'He who made the creature will allow for his frailties,' etc., are commonplace.

* * * * *

_Invention as a Characteristic of Poets._--I happened this evening (Saturday, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and spontaneous thoughts which they have accumulated coming to an end, and yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round, like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true quality.

_Tragedy._--I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence upon them in every act and movement, which _matre praesente_ they would not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case). However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children, develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the world, and would die away, or freeze, or degenerate, if it were generally balked. Now just such an action has tragedy, and if the sympathy with calamities caused to noble natures by ignobler, or by dark fates, were never opened or moved or called out, it would slumber inertly, it would rust, and become far less ready to respond upon any call being made. Such sensibilities are not consciously known to the possessor until developed.

_Punctuation._--Suppose an ordinary case where the involution of clauses went three deep, and that each was equally marked off by commas, now I say that so far from aiding the logic it would require an immense effort to distribute the relations of logic. But the very purpose and use of points is to aid the logic. If indeed you could see the points at all in this relation

 
              strophe                     antistrophe
      1     2     3                    3     2    1
    ----, ----, ----,       apodosis ----, ----, ----,

then indeed all would be clear, but the six commas will and must be viewed by every reader unversed in the logical mechanism of sentences as merely a succession of ictuses, so many minute-guns having no internal system of correspondence, but merely repeating and reiterating each other, exactly as in men, guns, horses, timbrels, baggage-waggons, standards.

_Sheridan's Disputatiousness._--I never heard of any case in the whole course of my life where disputatiousness was the author of any benefit to man or beast, excepting always one, in which it became a storm anchor for poor Sheridan, saving him from sudden shipwreck. This may be found in Mr. Moore's life, somewhere about the date of 1790, and in chapter xiii. The book is thirty-seven miles off, which is too far to send for water, or for scandal, or even for 'extract,' though I'm 'fond of extract.' Therefore, in default of Mr. Moore's version, I give my own. The situation was this: Sheridan had been cruising from breakfast to dinner amongst Jews, Christians, and players (men, women, and Herveys),[11] and constantly in the same hackney coach, so that the freight at last settled like the sand-heap of an hour-glass into a frightful record of costly moments. _Pereunt et imputantur_, say some impertinent time-pieces, in speaking of the hours. They perish and are debited to our account. Yes, and what made it worse, the creditor was an inexorable old Jarvie, who, though himself a creditor, had never heard the idea of credit. A guinea might be owing, and Sheridan, seldom remembering his purse, had but a shilling, which even in a court of Irish law seemed too small a compromise to offer. Black looked the horizon, stormy the offing, and night was coming on, whilst the port of consignment was now within thirty minutes' sail. Suddenly a sight of joy was described. Driving before the wind, on bare poles, was a well-known friend of Sheridan's, Richardson, famed for various talent, but also for an invincible headlong necessity of disputing. To pull the check-string, to take his friend on board, and to rush into fierce polemic conversation was the work of a moment for Sheridan. He well understood with this familiar friend how to bring on a hot dispute. In three minutes it raged, yard-arm to yard-arm. Both grew warm. Sheridan grew purple with rage. Violently interrupting Richardson, he said: 'And these are your real sentiments?' Richardson with solemnity and artificial restraint replied: 'Most solemnly they are.' 'And you stand to them, and will maintain them?' 'I will,' said Richardson, with menacing solemnity and even mournfulness. 'I will to my dying day.' 'Then,' said Sheridan furiously, 'I'm hanged if I'll stay another minute with a man capable of such abominable opinions!' Bang went the door, out he bounced, and Richardson, keeping his seat, pursued him with triumphant explosions. 'Ah, wretch! what? you can't bear the truth. You're obliged to hate the truth. That is why you cut and run before it. Huzza! Mr. Sheridan, M. P. for Stafford, runs like a hare for fear that he should hear the truth.' Precisely so, the truth it was that he ran from. The truth at this particular moment was too painful to his heart. Sheridan had fled; the awful truth amounted to eighteen shillings.

[Footnote 11: Said of members of the Bristol family.]

Yes, virtuous Richardson, you were right; truth it was that he fled from; truth had just then become too painful to his infirm mind, although it was useless to tell him so, as by this time he was out of hearing. 'Yes,' said Richardson meditatively to himself, 'the truth has at last become insupportable to this unhappy man.' Right, it _had_ so. And in one minute more it became insupportable even to the virtuous Richardson, when the coachman revealed the odious extent of the truth, viz., that the fare now amounted to two-and-twenty shillings.

As I hate everything that the people love, and above all the odious levity with which they adopt every groundless anecdote, especially where it happens to be calumnious, I beg not to be supposed a believer in the common stories current about Sheridan's carelessness of pecuniary obligations. So far from 'never paying,' which is what public slander has not ceased to report of him, he was (in Mr. Moore's language) '_always_ paying;' and for once that he paid too little, a thousand times he paid a great deal too much. Had, indeed, all his excesses of payment been gathered into one fund, that fund would have covered his deficits ten times over. It is, however, true that, whilst he was continually paying the hundred-pound demands against him, with all their Jewish accumulations of interest, he was continually unfurnished with money for his 'menus plaisirs' and trifling personal expenses.

By strong natural tendency of disposition, Sheridan was a man of peculiarly sensitive honour, and the irregularities into which he fell, more conspicuously after the destruction of Drury Lane by fire, pained nobody so much as himself. It is the sense of this fact, and the belief that Sheridan was never a defaulter through habits of self-indulgence, which call out in _my_ mind a reaction of indignation at the stories current against him.

_Bookbinding and Book-Lettering._--Literature is a mean thing enough in the ordinary way of pursuing it as what the Germans call a _Brodstudium_; but in its higher relations it is so noble that it is able to ennoble other things, supposing them in any degree ministerial to itself. The paper-maker, ergo the rag-maker, ergo the linen cloth-maker, is the true and original creator of the modern press, as the Archbishop of Dublin long ago demonstrated. For the art of printing had never halted for want of the typographic secret; _that_ was always known, known and practised hundreds of years before the Christian era. It halted for want of a material cheap enough and plentiful enough to make types other than a most costly substitute for hand-copying. Do you hear _that_, gentlemen blockheads, that seldom hear anything but yourselves? Next after the paper-maker, who furnished the _sine qua non_, takes rank, not the engraver or illustrator (our modern novelist cannot swim without this caricaturing villain as one of his bladders; all higher forms of literature laugh at him), but the binder; for he, by raising books into ornamental furniture, has given even to non-intellectual people by myriads a motive for encouraging literature and an interest in its extension.

Any specimen of Mr. Ferrar's binding I never saw, but by those who _have_, it is said to have been magnificent. He and his family were once, if not twice, visited by Charles I., and they presented to that prince a most sumptuous Bible of their own binding; which Bible, a lady once told me, was in that collection gradually formed by George III. at Buckingham House, and finally presented to the nation by his son. I should fear it must be in ruins as a specimen of the Little Gidding workmanship. The man who goes to bed in his coffin dressed in a jewelled robe and a diamond-hilted sword, is very liable to a visit from the resurrection-man, who usually disarms and undresses him. The Bible that has its binding inlaid with gold, sowed with Oriental pearl, and made horrent with rubies, suggests to many a most unscriptural mode of searching into its treasures, and too like the Miltonic Mammon's mode of perusing the gorgeous floors of heaven. Besides that, if the Bible escaped the Parliamentary War, the true _art_ of the Ferrar family would be better displayed in a case of less cost and luxury. Certainly, in no one art was the stupidity of Europe more atrociously recorded than in this particular art practised by the Ferrars. Boundless was the field for improvement. And in particular, I had myself drawn from this art, as practised of old, one striking memorial of that remarkable genius for stupidity, which in all ages alike seems to haunt man as by an inspiration, unless he is roused out of it by panic. It is this. Look at the lettering--that is, the labels lettered with the titles of books--in all libraries that are not of recent date. No man would believe that the very earliest attempt to impress a mark of ownership upon some bucket of the Argonauts, or the rudest scrawl of Polyphemus in forging a tarry brand upon some sheep which he had stolen, could be _so_ bad, _so_ staggering and illegible, as are these literary inscriptions. How much better to have had a thin tablet or veneering of marble or iron adjusted to the back of the book. A stone-cutter in a rural churchyard once told me that he charged a penny _per_ letter. That may be cheap for a gravestone, but it seems rather high for a book. _Plato_ would cost you fivepence, _Aristotle_ would be shocking; and in decency you must put him into Latin, which would add twopence more to every volume. On a library like that of Dresden or the Vatican, it would raise a national debt to letter the books.

_Cause of the Novel's Decline._--No man, it may be safely laid down as a general rule, can obtain a strong hold over the popular mind without more or less of real power. A reality there must be. The artifice, the trickery, cannot arise in this first stage, as by any substitution of a shadow for a reality. If the mass of readers _feel_ a power, and acknowledge a power, in that case power there must be. It was the just remark of Dr. Johnson that men do not deceive themselves in their amusements. And amusement it is that the great public seek in literature. The meaner and the more sensual the demands of a man are, so much the less possible it becomes to cheat him. Seeking for warmth, he cannot be wrong when he says that he has found it. Asking for _alcohol_, he will never be cheated with water. His feelings in such a case, his impressions, instantaneously justify themselves; that is, they bear witness past all doubting to the certainty of what they report. So far there is no opening to mistake. The error, the opening to the spurious on the largest scale, arises first upon the _quality_ of the power. Strength varies upon an endless scale, not merely by its own gradations, but by the modes and the degrees in which it combines with other qualities. And there are many combinations, cases of constant recurrence, in which some natural vigour, but of no remarkable order, enters into alliance with animal propensities; where a portentous success will indicate no corresponding power in the artist, but only an unusual insensibility to decency and the opinion of thoughtful persons.

Novels are the one sole class of books that ever interest the public, that reach its heart, or even catch its eye. And the reason why novels are becoming much more licentious, and much grosser in the arts by which they court public favour, lies undoubtedly in the quality of that new reading public which the extension of education has added to the old one. An education miserably shallow, whilst unavailing for any purpose of real elevation, lets in upon the theatre of what is called by courtesy literature a vast additional audience that once would have been excluded altogether. This audience, changed in no respect from its former condition of intellect and manners and taste, bringing only the single qualification of ability to read, is now strong enough in numbers to impress a new character upon literature in so far as literature has a motive for applying itself to _their_ wants. The consequences are showing themselves, and _will_ show themselves more broadly. It is difficult with proper delicacy to seek illustrations amongst our own living writers. Illustrations were all too easily found did we care to enter on the task.

It is true that, during the currency of any year, whilst the quantity is liable to indeterminate augmentation, ballads will be rather looking down in the market. But that is a shadow which settles upon every earthly good thing. No Greek book, for instance, amongst the many that have perished, would so much rejoice many of us by its resurrection as the comedies of Menander. Yet, if a correspondent should write word from Pompeii that twenty-five thousand separate dramas of Menander had been found in good preservation, adding in a postscript that forty thousand more had been impounded within the last two hours, and that there was every prospect of bagging two hundred thousand more before morning, we should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, or class of compositions, which will not be welcomed into literature provided, as to matter, that it shall embody some natural strain of feeling, and provided, as to manner, that it illustrate the characteristic style of a known generation.

It might suffice for our present purpose to have once firmly distinguished between the two modes of literature. But it may be as well to point out a few corollaries from this distinction, which will serve at the same time to explain and to confirm it. For instance, first of all, it has been abundantly insisted on in our modern times, that the value of every literature lies in its characteristic part; a truth certainly, but a truth upon which the German chanticleer would not have crowed and flapped his wings so exultingly, had he perceived the original and indispensable schism between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power, because in this latter only can anything characteristic of a man or of a nation be embodied. The science of no man can be characteristic, no man can geometrize or chemically analyze after a manner peculiar to himself. He may be the first to open a new road, and in that meaning it may be called _his_ road; but _his_ it cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an _incommunicable_ excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever _led_ his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits not transferable. Consequently the [Greek: to] characteristic, of which in German cloudland so noisy a proclamation is made as of some transcendental discovery, is a mere inference from the very idea of a literature. For we repeat that in blank knowledge a separate peculiarity marking the individual is not conceivable, whereas in a true literature reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it wills, not as a passive minor, but as a self-moving power, it is not possible to avoid the characteristic except only in the degree by which the inspiring nature happens to be feeble. The exorbitations that differentiate them may be of narrow compass, but only where the motive power was originally weak. And agreeably to this remark it may be asserted that in all literature properly so-called genius, is always manifested, and talent generally; but in the literature of knowledge it may be doubted very seriously whether there is any opening for more than talent. Genius may be defined in the severest manner as _that which is generally characteristic_; but a thousand times we repeat that one man's mode of knowing an object cannot differ from another man's. It _cannot_ be characteristic, and its geniality cannot be externally manifested. To have said, therefore, of the poetry surviving from ancient Latium, from Castile, from England, that this is nationally characteristic, and knowable apart by inalienable differences, is saying no more than follows out of the very definition by which any and every literature proper is limited and guarded as a mode of power.

Secondly, even in the exceptions and hesitations upon applying the rigour of this distinction, we may read the natural recognition (however latent or unconscious) of the rule itself. No man would think, for example, of placing a treatise on surveying, on mensuration, on geological stratifications, in any collection of his national literature. He would be lunatic to do so. A Birmingham or Glasgow Directory has an equal title to take its station in the national literature. But he will hesitate on the same question arising with regard to a history. Where upon examination the history turns out to be a mere chronicle, or register of events chronologically arranged, with no principle of combination pervading it, nor colouring from peculiar views of policy, nor sympathy with the noble and impassioned in human action, the decision will be universal and peremptory to cashier it from the literature. Yet this case, being one of degree, ranges through a large and doubtful gamut. A history like that of Froissart, or of Herodotus, where the subjective from the writer blends so powerfully with the gross objective, where the moral picturesque is so predominant, together with freshness of sensation which belongs to 'blissful infancy' in human life, or to a stage of society in correspondence to it, cannot suffer a demur of jealousy as to its privilege of entering the select fold of literature. But such advantages are of limited distribution. And, to say the truth, in its own nature neither history nor biography, unless treated with peculiar grace, and architecturally moulded, has any high pretension to rank as an organic limb of literature. The very noblest history, in much of its substance, is but by a special indulgence within the privilege of that classification. Biography stands on the same footing. Of the many memorials dedicated to the life of Milton, how few are entitled to take their station in the literature! And why? Not merely that they are disqualified by their defective execution, but often that they necessarily record what has become common property.

[THE END]
[Thomas De Quincey's Essays: Brevia] _


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