“We take a silent, innocent-seeming volume into our hands, and, when we put it down, we shall never again be what we were before.... St. Augustine opened the book, and one single sentence changed him from the brilliant, godless, self-satisfied rhetorician into a powerful religious force. Here, on the other hand, is a youth who opens a mere magazine article written against his faith. He throws off the early influence of home like a mantle, and plunges thenceforward into the ‘sunless gulf of doubt,’ with the unspeakable morasses at the bottom.”
This is a little like the man who left the Unitarian church because “somebody told him it wasn’t true.” How is a soul so sensitive to be kept in—or out of—any fold? A religion which dissolves before the persuasions of a magazine article must necessarily be as short-lived as the love—“the slight, thin sort of inclination”—which is starved, so Elizabeth Bennett tells us, by a sonnet. “Ten thousand difficulties,” says Cardinal Newman nobly, “do not make one doubt;” but the thinker who cannot surmount the first and feeblest of the difficulties should never have essayed the perilous pathway of the alphabet. Neither was St. Augustine’s inspiration a flashlight upon darkness. The “self-satisfied rhetorician” was not converted, like Harlequin, in one dazzling moment. There had been a long and bitter struggle between the forces of life and death, of the spirit and the flesh, before the word of St. Paul penetrated with overwhelming sweetness into a soul cleared by hard thinking, and cleansed by a passion for perfection.
Man may be an unstable creature,—we have been told so until we believe it,—but he parts reluctantly from his convictions, and is slow to break the habits of a lifetime. Hear what Robert Burton has to say about the obstinate perversity of heretics.
“Single out the most ignorant of them. Convince his understanding. Show him his errors. Prove to him the grossness and absurdities of his sect. He will not be persuaded.”
He will not, indeed, whether persuasion take the form of a sermon, a magazine article, or the stake. Luther said that the more he read the Fathers of the early Church, the more he found himself offended; which proves the strength of a mental attitude to resist the most penetrating of influences. Neither are political heretics any easier to enlighten. “Who,” asks Lord Coleridge, “ever convinced an antagonist by a speech?” On the contrary, there is a natural and healthy sentiment of revolt when views we do not share are set forth with unbroken continuity and insistence. In the give and take of conversation, in the advance and retreat of argument, in the swift intrusion of the spoken word, made overpowering by the charm of personality, we encounter a force too subtle and personal to be resisted. Unconsciously we yield at some point to the insidious attack of thoughts and ideas so presented as to weaken our individual opposition, and adroitly force an entrance to our souls. But books, like sermons, fail by reason of the smoothness of their current; because there is no backwater to stir the eddies, and whirl us into conflict and submission. We feel that, could we have spent our “mornings in Florence” with Mr. Ruskin, have looked with him at frescoes, tombs, and pavements, and have disputed at every point his magnificent assumption of authority, we might have ended by accepting his most unreasonable and intolerant verdicts. Could we free our souls by expressing to Mr. John Morley our sentiments concerning Mr. Gladstone, we might in return be impelled to share the enthusiasm of the enlightened biographer. But neither Mr. Buskin nor Mr. Morley has the same power of persuasiveness in print. The simple process of leaving out whatever is antagonistic makes demonstration easy, but inconclusive. Sometimes the robust directness of the method inclines us peremptorily to resistance. It is hard for a generous heart not to sympathize with the exiled Stewarts, after reading Lord Macaulay’s “History of England.” Mr. Froude must be held responsible for much of the extravagant enthusiasm professed for the Queen of Scots. And I once knew an intelligent girl who had been driven by Mr. Prescott into worshipping Philip II as a hero.
People who have contracted the habit of writing books are naturally prone to exaggerate their importance. It is this sentiment which has provoked the attitude of fault-finding, of continuous grumbling at readers, which is so marked a characteristic of modern criticism. The public is reproached, admonished, warned by Mr. Frederic Harrison that if it feels contumacious—which is not infrequently the case—it should pray for a “cleanlier and quieter spirit.” Whenever a handful of books is presented to a community, addresses are made to show, on the one hand, that reading and writing are better than meat and drink, and, on the other, that the people who read and write are on the brink of abysmal destruction. I have heard a lecturer upon one of these august occasions gloomily prophesy that many of the volumes waiting to be perused would “deprave the taste, irritate the vanity, exaggerate the egotism, and vitiate the curiosity of their readers.” This seemed an unfortunate result for philanthropy to achieve; but the speaker went on to excite the godless interest of his audience by warning them that romance—of which the new library was reasonably full—would exercise a “bewildering and blinding effect” upon their minds, “filling them with false hopes and enervating dreams.” He then defined a good novel as one which should “stimulate a healthy imagination, a sober ambition, a modest ardour, an eager humility, a love of what is truly great;” and left us oppressed with the conviction that the usefulness of our earthly careers and the salvation of our immortal souls depended upon the fiction that we read.
“There is no harm,” says Mr. Birrell sweetly, “in talking about books, still less in reading them; but it is folly to pretend to worship them.” It is folly to exaggerate their controlling influence in our lives. We are not more modestly ardent after reading “Vanity Fair,” nor more eagerly humble after spending long and happy hours with “Emma.” No sober ambition stirs chastely in our souls when we lay down, with a sigh of content, “Pride and Prejudice,” or “Guy Mannering,” or “Henry Esmond,” or “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.” Even “Anna Karénina” fails to inspire us with “false hopes and enervating dreams;” and while we are often bewildered by Mr. Henry James’s masterpieces, we have never been blinded by any. As for the ordinary novels that tumble headlong from the press, it is impossible to imagine them as inspiring either ardour or ambition, egotism or humility. They may perhaps be trusted to weaken our literary instincts, and to induce mental inertia,—“the surest way of having no thoughts of our own,” says Schopenhauer, “is to take up a book every time we have nothing to do,”—but they are not, as their writers and their critics fearfully assert, the arbiters of our destinies.
A belief in the overpowering influence of books was part of Carlyle’s gospel. He had a curious modesty about giving advice, even when it was sought; and—born dictator though he was—he realized that his own literary needs were not necessarily the literary needs of other men. He said as much quite simply and sincerely when people asked him what they should read, holding always, with Dr. Johnson, that inclination must prompt the choice. To be sure, like Dr. Johnson, and like Emerson, he presupposed inclination to be of an austere and seemly order. Emerson never wearied of saying that people should read what they liked; but he plainly expected them to like only what was good. Carlyle was firmly convinced that authorship carried with it responsibilities too serious for trifling. He reverenced the printed page, and he expressed this reverence, this confession of faith, in the most explicit and comprehensive assertion.
“The writer of a book is he not a preacher, preaching, not to this parish or that, but to all men in all times and places? Not the wretchedest circulating library novel which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish girls.”
More than this it would be impossible to say, and few of us, I hope, would be willing to say as much. The idea is too oppressive to be borne. Only authors and critics can afford to take this view of life. Personally I believe that a foolish girl is more influenced by another foolish girl, to say nothing of a foolish boy, than by all the novels on the library shelves. Companionship and propinquity are forces to be reckoned with. Mind touches mind like an electric current. The contagion of folly is spread, like other forms of contagion, by personal contact. Books may, as Carlyle says, preach to all men, in all times and places; but it is precisely their lack of reticence, the universality of their message, their chill publicity of tone which reduces their readers to the level of an audience or of a congregation. If we recall the disclosures with which we have been favoured from time to time by distinguished people who consented to tell the world what books had influenced their lives, we cannot fail to remember the perfunctory nature of these revelations. It was as though the speakers had first marshalled in order the most enduring masterpieces of literature, and had then fitted their own sentiments and experiences into appropriate grooves. This reversal of a natural law is much in favour when what are called epoch-making books come under public discussion. There are enthusiasts who appear to think that Rousseau evoked the French Revolution, and that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was responsible for the Civil War. When the impetus of a profound and powerful emotion, the mighty will of a great event finds expression in literature,—or at least in letters,—the writer’s mind speeds like a greyhound along the track of public sentiment. It does not create the sentiment, it does not appreciably intensify it; but it enables people to perceive more clearly the nature of the course to which they stand committed. These sympathetic triumphs are sometimes mistaken for literary triumphs. They are often thought to lead the chase they follow.