THE SPINNING OF LITERATURE.
"Of making many books there is no end," sighed a preacher in times when industrious readers might presumably have kept the run of current literature. Our advantage over Solomon is the utter hopelessness of reading the new works, not to speak of standard acres in the libraries. In this holiday season, chief hatching-time of books, it is pleasant to see them flocking out in numbers so vast. "Germany published 11,315 works of all classes in 1873, 12,070 in 1874, 12,516 in 1875." We rub our hands over statistics like these, because they check any mad ambition to master German contemporary literature; and besides, there are "1,622 newspapers and periodical publications in the German empire." As for the new works in our own tongue, the only way of getting through them would obviously be to do as legislators do with the laws they pass—"read them by title."
Earlier ages, that had not reached this happy hopelessness, produced great bookworms. When the old monks had devoured their convent libraries, they were fain to pay vast sums occasionally for extra reading, as St. Jerome did for the works of Origen; whereas now a reviewer can only glance at his "complimentary copies" of new books, so numerous are they. Bacon argued against abridgements, as if the body of literature could be compassed in his day. A century or two ago there were prodigious Porsons and Johnsons; but such gluttons are now rare. It is true that Mill, between his fourth and eighth years, read in the original all Herodotus and a good part of Xenophon, Lucian, Isocrates, Diogenes Laertius, Plato, and the Annual Register, besides Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Miller, Mosheim, and other historians; while before the age of thirteen he had mastered the whole of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Thucydides, Aristotle's Rhetoric and Logic, Tacitus, Juvenal, Quinctilian, parts of Ovid, Terence, Nepos, Cæsar, Livy, Lucretius, Cicero, Polybius, and many other authors, besides learning geometry, algebra, and the differential calculus. But that lad was crammed scientifically like a Strasbourg goose; our ordinary modern writers are not walking cyclopædias, and are rarely prodigious readers. It is no longer a reproach even for a man not to know all the literature of his specialty; while, as for general reading, when the "Publisher's Circular" tells us that the different books that mankind have made are numbered by millions, we sit down in a most comfortable despair, and pick to our liking.
Thanks to modern fecundity, critics rarely molest authors with demands for the raison d'être of a new book. The reviewer's question used to be, "Why did the man publish? What need was there? What is he trying to show?" One pontiff is said to have suggested burning up all the different books in the world, except six thousand, so that the rest might be read. There used to be pleas for condensations, as if people were still fondly hoping to compass the realm of literature and science, the blessed era of hopelessness having not yet dawned. But it is idle to plead against diffuseness now, when writers are paid by the page or line. "I want," said the editor of "La Situation" to Dumas, "a story from you, entitled 'Terreur Prussienne à Francfort'—60 feuilletons of 400 lines each; total, 84,000 lines." "And if it makes only 58?" responded Dumas. "I require 60, of 400 lines each, averaging 31 letters each line—744,000 letters." At noon of the day agreed upon, the manuscript was in the hands of M. Hollander. If Sir Critic ever came with foot-rule and condensing-pump to gravely detect diffusiveness in the "Terreur Prussienne," it must have diverted the high contracting parties.
It is said that a dialogue of Dumas the elder created a revolution in the French mode of paying romance literature. Dumas, who was reckoned by the line, one day introduced, they say, into his feuilleton this thrilling passage:
My son!
My mother!
Listen!
Speak!
Seest thou?
What?
This poniard!
It is stained—
With blood!
Whose?
Thy father's.
Ah!!!
After that Dumas was paid by the letter. To say sooth, the same incident, with a different catastrophe, is related of Ponson Du Terrail, who, one day, in his "Resurrection de Rocambole," filled about a column with dialogue of this character:
Who?
I.
You?
Yes.
He shuddered.
Accordingly, as the story goes, the author being summoned before the editor of the "Petit Journal," was notified that if this monosyllabic chat went on, he would be paid by the word. "Very well," replied the obliging novelist, "I will change my style;" and next day, M. Millaud was astounded to find the feuilleton introducing a pair of stammerers talking in this agreeable fashion:
"Wou-wou-would you de-de-de-deceive me, you wr-wr-wretch?" said the old corsair in a tone of thunder.
"I ne-ne-ne-never de-de-de-deceived an-an-an-anybody," exclaimed Baccarat, imitating the other's defect in pronunciation.
"Wh-wh-wh-where is Ro-ro-rocam-bo-bole?"
"You ne-ne-never will kn-know."
"He will make all his characters stutter soon," said Millaud. "We had better pay him by the line." Of course this is a story faite à plaisir, as is also the one that as soon as Dumas made his first contract by the line, enchanted with the arrangement, he invented dear old Grimaud, who only opened his mouth to utter "yes," "no," "what?" "ah!" "bah!" and other monosyllables; but when the editor, who knew the cash price of "peuh" and "oh," declared he would only pay for lines half full, Grimaud was slaughtered the next morning. However, these yarns show that the French can satirize their jerky, staccato style of feuilleton, with each sentence staked off in a paragraph by itself, like some grimacing clown, who expects each particular joke or handspring to be observed individually, and to be greeted with separate applause. Across the channel we of course find the English journals going to the other extreme, in insular pride, and packing distinct subjects into the same paragraph.
Greek and Roman Tuppers used, no doubt, to "reel off a couple of hundred lines, standing on one foot;" but the veneering of a thin layer of ideas upon a thick layer of words is naturally the special trait of our age of cheap ink and paper, of steam printing, and of paying for writing by long measure. The "Country Parson" is a favorite writer of this sort, whose excellence is in "the art of putting things," rather than in having many things to put. The essays of the "Spectator," "Guardian," "Tatler," "Rambler," rarely gave only a pennyworth of wit to an intolerable deal of words; but our modern periodical essay achieves success by taking some such assertion as "Old maids are agreeable," or "Old maids are disagreeable," and wire-drawing it into sundry yards of readable matter. Macbeth's
The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon!
Where got'st thou that goose-look?
would supply a modern playwright with a square foot of gold-beaten invective. "True poems," said Irving, "are caskets which enclose in a small compass the wealth of the language—its family jewels." But when poems are paid by the line, bards are pardonable for diffuseness. And then, besides diffuseness, our age has wonderful literary fecundity. Few people know how much painters paint, and how much great writers write; for the bards of a single poem, as Mr. Stedman shows, are exceptional, and rich quantity as well as rich quality is the usual rule for greatness, whether of novelist, poet, essayist, metaphysician, or historian. So here we come upon another source of the accumulated floods of literature. The other day I was looking through a prodigious list of the works of Alexandre Dumas, père. There were 127 of them, mostly novels—"Monte Christo," "Three Musketeers," "Bragelonne," and the rest that we used to read. They made 244 volumes; but the plays were not included, and many slighter miscellanies did not seem to be there; and the posthumous work on cookery was certainly not there; and of course there was no effort to collect everything from "Le Mois," "La Liberté," and the half dozen other journals he edited or wrote in; so that I doubt not the writings of this illustrious man, if ever brought together in a complete edition, would make at least 150 works of 300 or 400 stout volumes. And in English literature we have many Salas and Southworths. I remember an announcement in the "Lancet" that "Mr. G. A. Sala is completely restored to health, and in the full discharge of his professional duties." An expressive term, that "full discharge"!
Again, some popular authors employ apprentices to do the bulk of their work, only touching it up with mannerisms, and so turn out much more than if they wrought it all. The world, too, has now accumulated a myriad handbooks of facts and compilations of statistics, which enable writers with a fondness for theory, like Buckle, to have all their material ready to spin into generalization. Then there is a popular education toward prolixity in the telegraphic part of newspapers. The associated press writers from Washington seem to be selected for their inability to be terse and pithy, and dribble out the simplest fact with pitiful iteration. The special news-writers, being often at their wits' end for their dole of day's work, can hardly be asked to be laconic. The special messages which the ocean wires bring, doubtless with exquisite terseness and picturesqueness, are most carefully interwritten and diluted; so that, for example, the words "Thiers spoke at Coulmiers" become "M. Adolphe Thiers, president of the French Republic before the accession of the present Chief Executive, Marshal MacMahon, delivered an address, or rather made some remarks partly in the nature of an oration or speech on subjects connected with matters of interest at the present time, at the town of Coulmiers, which is situated"—and here follow a dozen lines from the Cyclopædia, but dated at Paris, giving the geography, history, and commerce of Coulmiers. One can fancy in the "Atlantic cable" columns of the "Morning Meteor" the tokens of a standing prescription to dilute foreign facts with nine parts domestic verbiage; and this kind of "editing" educates mankind to padding and patching with superfluous material.
It is harder for French writers to be prolix. The French writer is inevitably epigrammatic first, and, if diffusive afterward, it is with malice aforethought. If we compare, for example, publicists like Guizot and Gladstone, while each has that perfect command of his material, instead of letting the material command him, which marks the skilful writer, yet the Englishman sometimes seems to require two or three consecutive sentences to bring out his thought, whereas M. Guizot packs it into one. But Guizot deliberately goes on to put the identical statement into two or three paraphrased forms. For example, in the "History of Civilization in Europe" there is usually a terse sentence or two in each paragraph which contain the whole of it, packed into briefest compass; were these key sentences repeated on the side of the page as marginal notes, the reader could master the book by mastering the margins. When an English writer is diffuse, he cannot help it; when a French writer is diffuse, he effects it by sheer effort at repetition.
And we humble hack scribblers, who confidingly slip our daily, and weekly, and monthly mites into the vast mass of current reading turned out for an omnivorous public—let us hope that the world's maw may long remain unsated and the market unglutted.