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.
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 Phœnician 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.