BOOKS OLD AND NEW.
Now that our century has entered upon its last decade, and draws near the hour which will despatch it to join its too frequently and most unjustly despised predecessor, it is pleasing to note how well it has learnt to play the old man’s part. One has only to compare the Edinburgh Review of, say, October, 1807, with its last number, to appreciate the change that has come over us. Cocksureness, once the badge of the tribe of critics, is banished to the schoolroom. The hearty hatreds of our early days would ill befit a death-bed. A keen critic has observed what a noisy place England used to be. Everybody cried out loud in the market-place, in the Senate-house, in the Law Courts, in the Reviews and Magazines. In the year 1845 the Times newspaper incurred the heavy and doubtless the just censure of the Oxford Union for its unprincipled tone as shown in its ‘violent attempts to foment agitation as well by inflammatory articles as by the artifices of correspondents.’ How different it now is! We all move about as it were in list slippers. Our watchword is ‘Hush!’ Dickens tells us how, at Hone’s funeral, Cruikshank, being annoyed at some of the observations of the officiating minister, whispered in Dickens’ ear as they both moved to kneel at prayer, ‘If this wasn’t a funeral I would punch his head.’ It was a commendable restraint. We are now, all of us, exercising it.
A gloomy view is being generally taken of our literary future in the next century. Poetry, it is pretty generally agreed, has died with Lord Tennyson. Who, it is said, can take any pride or pleasure in the nineties, whose memory can carry him back to the sixties? What days those were that gave us brand-new from the press ‘Philip’ and ‘The Four Georges,’ ‘The Mill on the Floss’ and ‘Silas Marner,’ ‘Evan Harrington’ and ‘Rhoda Fleming,’ ‘Maud,’ ‘The Idylls of the King,’ and ‘Dramatis Personæ,’ Mr. Arnold’s New Poems, the ‘Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ,’ and ‘Verses on Various Occasions,’ four volumes of ‘Frederick the Great,’ and ‘The Origin of Species’! One wonders in the retrospect how human stupidity was proof against such an onslaught of wit, such a shower of golden fancies. Why did not Folly’s fortress fall? We know it did not, for it is standing yet. Nor has any particular halo gathered round the sixties—which, indeed, were no better than the fifties or the forties.
From what source, so ask ‘the frosty pows,’ are you who call yourselves ‘jolly candidates’ for 1900, going to get your supplies? Where are your markets? Who will crowd the theatre on your opening nights? What well-graced actors will then cross your stage? Your boys and girls will be well provided for, one can see that. Story-books and handbooks will jostle for supremacy; but your men and women, all a-hungered, how are you going to feed them and keep their tempers sweet? It is not a question of side dishes, but of joints. Sermons and sonnets, and even ‘clergy-poets,’ may be counted upon, but they will only affront the appetites they can never satisfy. What will be wanted are Sam Wellers, Captain Costigans, and Jane Eyres—poetry that lives, controversy that bites, speeches that stir the imagination.
Thus far the aged century. To argue with it would be absurd; to silence it cruel, and perhaps impossible. Greedy Time will soon do that.
But suppose it should turn out to be the fact that we are about to enter upon a period of well-cultivated mediocrity. What then? Centuries cannot be expected to go on repeating the symptoms of their predecessors. We have had no Burns. We cannot, therefore, expect to end with the beginnings of a Wordsworth and a Coleridge; there may likely be a lull. The lull may also be a relief. Of all odd crazes, the craze to be for ever reading new books is one of the oddest.
Hazlitt may be found grappling with this subject, and, as usual, ‘punishing’ it severely in his own inimitable style. ‘I hate,’ says he, in the second volume of ‘The Plain Speaker’—in the essay entitled ‘On Reading Old Books’—‘to read new books;’ and he continues, a page further on, ‘Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes—one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merit of either. One candidate for literary fame who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely and like a man of genius, but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage; another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections.’
Hazlitt was no doubt a good hater. We are now of milder mood. It ought not to be difficult for any of us, if we but struggle a little, to keep a man’s nose out of his novel. But, for all that, it is certain that true literary sway is borne but by the dead. Living authors may stir and stimulate us, provoke our energies, and excite our sympathy, but it is the dead who rule us from their urns.
Authority has no place in matters concerning books and reading, else it would be well were some proportion fixed between the claims of living and dead authors.
There is no sillier affectation than that of old-worldism. To rave about Sir Thomas Browne and know nothing of William Cobbett is foolish. To turn your back upon your own time is simply to provoke living wags, with rudimentary but effective humour, to chalk opprobrious epithets upon your person. But, on the other hand, to depend upon your contemporaries for literary sustenance, to be reduced to scan the lists of ‘Forthcoming Works’ with a hungry eye, to complain of a dearth of new poems, and new novels, and new sermons, is worse than affectation—it is stupidity.
There was a time when old books were hard to procure and difficult to house. With the exception of a few of the greatest, it required as much courage to explore the domains of our old authors as it did to visit Wast Water or Loch Maree before the era of roads and railways. The first step was to turn the folios into octavos, and to publish complete editions; the second was to cheapen the price of issue. The first cheap booksellers were, it is sometimes alleged, men of questionable character in their trade. Yet their names should be cherished. They made many young lives happy, and fostered better taste than either or both the Universities. Hogg, Cooke, Millar, Donaldson, Bell, even Tegg, the ‘extraneous Tegg’ of Carlyle’s famous Parliamentary petition, did good work in their day. Somehow or another the family libraries of the more respectable booksellers hung fire. They did not find their way about. Perhaps their authors were selected with too much care.
‘He wales a portion with judicious care.’
The pious Cottar did well, but the world is larger than the family; besides which it is not always ‘Saturday Night.’ Cooke had no scruples. He published ‘Tom Jones’ in fortnightly, and (I think) sixpenny parts, embellished with cuts, and after the same appetising fashion proceeded right through the ‘British Novelists.’ He did the same with the ‘British Poets.’ It was a noble enterprise. You never see on a stall one of Cooke’s books but it is soiled by honest usage; its odour speaks of the thousand thumbs that have turned over its pages with delight. Cooke made an immense fortune, and deserved to do so. He believed both in genius and his country. He gave the people cheap books, and they bought them gladly. He died at an advanced age in 1810. Perhaps when he came to do so he was glad he had published a series of ‘Sacred Classics,’ as well as ‘Tom Jones.’
We are now living in an age of handsome reprints. It is possible to publish a good-sized book on good paper and sell it at a profit for fourpence halfpenny. But of course to do this, as the profit is too small to bear division, you must get the Authors out of the way. Our admirable copyright laws and their own sedentary habits do this on the whole satisfactorily and in due course. Consequently dead authors are amazingly cheap. Not merely Shakespeare and Milton, Bunyan and Burns, but Scott and Macaulay, Thackeray and Dickens. Living authors are deadly dear. You may buy twenty books by dead men at the price of one work by a living man. The odds are fearful. For my part, I hope a modus vivendi may be established between the publishers of the dead and those of the living; but when you examine the contents of the ‘Camelot Classics,’ the ‘Carisbrooke Library,’ the ‘Chandos Classics,’ the ‘Canterbury Poets,’ the ‘Mermaid Series of the Old Dramatists,’ and remember, or try to remember, the publishing lists of Messrs. Routledge, Mr. Black, Messrs Warne, and Messrs. Cassell, it is easy for the reader to snap his fingers at Fate. It cannot touch him—he can dine for many a day. Even were our ‘lyrical cry’ to be stifled for half a century, what with Mr. Bullen’s ‘Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘More Elizabethan Lyrics,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Dramatists,’ and ‘Lyrics from the Romances,’ and Mr. Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury,’ ‘a man,’ as Mr. Markham observes in ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘might get on very well here,’ even though that man were, as Markham asserted himself to be, ‘hungry all day long.’ A British poet does not cease to be a poet because he is dead, nor is he, for that matter, any the better a poet for being alive.
As for a scarcity of living poets proving national decadence, it would be hard to make out that case. Who sang Chatham’s victories by sea and land?