Questions at Issue

by Edmund Gosse

As far, then, as the summits of literature are concerned—the great masters of style, the great discoverers, the great intellectual illuminators—it may be said that the influence of democracy upon them is almost nil. It affords them a wider hearing, and therefore a prompter recognition. It gives them more readers, and therefore a more direct arrival at that degree of material comfort necessary for the proper conduct of their investigations, or the full polish of their periods. It may spoil them with its flatteries, or diminish their merit by seducing them to over-production; but this is a question between themselves and their own souls. A syndicate of newspapers, or the editor of a magazine may tempt a writer of to-day, as Villon was tempted with the wine-shop, or Coleridge with laudanum; but that is not the fault of the democracy. Nor, if a writer of real power is neglected, are people more or less to blame in 1892 than they were for letting Otway starve two hundred years ago. Some people, beloved of the gods, cannot be explained to mankind by king or caucus.

So far, therefore, as our present experience goes, we may relinquish the common fear that the summits of literature will be submerged by democracy. When the new spirit first began to be studied, many whose judgment on other points was sound enough were confident that the instinctive programme of the democratic spirit was to prevent intellectual capacity of every kind from developing, for fear of the ascendency which it would exercise. This is communism, and means democracy pushed to an impossible extremity, to a point from which it must rebound. No doubt, there is always a chance that a disturbance of the masses may for a moment wash over and destroy some phase of real intellectual distinction, just as it may sweep away, also for a moment, other personal conditions. But it looks as though the individuality would always reassert itself. The crowd that smashed the porcelain in the White House to celebrate the election of President Andrew Jackson had to buy more to take its place. The White House did not continue, even under Jackson, to subsist without porcelain. In the same way, edicts may be passed by communal councils forbidding citizens to worship the idols which the booksellers set up, and even that consummation may be reached, to which a prophet of our own day looks forward, when we shall all be forced by the police to walk hand in hand with "the craziest sot in the village" as our friend and equal; none the less will human nature, at the earliest opportunity, throw off the bondage, and openly prefer Darwin and Tennyson to that engaging rustic. Indeed, all the signs of the times go to suggest that the completer the democracy becomes, the vaster the gap will be in popular honour between the great men of letters and "the craziest sot in the village." It is quite possible that the tyranny of extreme intellectual popularity may prove as tiresome as other and older tyrannies were. But that's another story, as the new catchword tells us.

Literature, however, as a profession or a calling, is not confined to the writings of the five or six men who, in each generation, represent what is most brilliant and most independent. From the leaders, in their indisputable greatness, the intellectual hierarchy descends to the lowest and broadest class of workers who in any measure hang on to the skirts of literature, and eke out a living by writing. It is in the middle ranks of this vast pyramid that we should look to see most distinctly the signs of the influence of democracy. We shall not find them in the broad and featureless residuum any more than in the strongly individualised summits. But we ought to discover them in the writers who have talent enough to keep them aloft, yet not enough to make them indifferent to outer support. Here, where all is lost or gained by a successful appeal to the crowd as it hastens by, we might expect to see very distinctly the effects of democracy, and here, perhaps, if we look closely, we may see them.

It appears to me that even here it is not so easy as one would imagine that it would be to pin distinct charges to the sleeve of the much-abused democracy. Let us take the bad points first. The enlargement of the possible circle of an author's readers may awaken in the breast of a man who has gained a little success, the desire to arrive at a greater one in another field, for which he is really not so well equipped. An author may have a positive talent for church history, and turning from it, through cupidity, to fiction, may, by addressing a vastly extended public, make a little more money by his bad stories than he was able to make by his good hagiology, and so act to the detriment of literature. Again, an author who has made a hit with a certain theme, or a certain treatment of that theme, may be held nailed down to it by the public long after he has exhausted it and it has exhausted him. Again, the complaisance of the public, and the loyal eagerness with which it cries "Give, give," to a writer that has pleased it, may induce that writer to go on talking long after he has anything to say, and so conduce to the watering of the milk of wit. Or—and this is more subtle and by no means so easy to observe—the pressure of commonplace opinion, constantly checking a writer when he shelves away towards either edge of the trodden path of mediocrity, may keep him from ever adding to the splendid originalities of literature. This shows itself in the disease which we may call Mudieitis, the inflammation produced by the fear that what you are inspired to say, and know you ought to say, will be unpalatable to the circulating libraries, that "the wife of a country incumbent," that terror before which Messrs. Smith fall prone upon their faces, may write up to headquarters and expostulate. In all these cases, without doubt, we have instances of the direct influence of democracy upon literature, and that of a deleterious kind. Not one of them, however, can produce a bad effect upon any but persons of weak or faulty character, and these would probably err in some other direction, even at the court of a grand duke.

On the other hand, the benefits of democratic surroundings are felt in these middle walks of literature. The appeal to a very wide audience has the effect of giving a writer whose work is sound but not of universal interest, an opportunity of collecting, piecemeal, individual readers enough to support him. The average sanity of a democracy, and the habit it encourages of immediate, full, and candid discussion, preserves the writer whose snare is eccentricity from going too far in his folly. The celebrated eccentrics of past literature, the Lycophrons and the Gongoras, the Donnes and the Gombrevilles, were the spokesmen of small and pedantic circles, disdainful of the human herd, "sets" whose members rejoiced in the conceits and extravagance of their respective favourites, and encouraged these talented personages to make mountebanks of themselves. These leaders were in most cases excessively clever, and we find their work, or a little of it, very entertaining as we cross the history of belles-lettres. But it is impossible not to see that, for instance, each of the mysterious writers I have mentioned would, in a democratic age, and healthily confronted with public criticism, have been able to make a much wholesomer and broader use of his cleverness. The democratic spirit, moreover, may be supposed to encourage directness of utterance, simplicity, vividness, and lucidity. I say it may be supposed to do so, because I cannot perceive that with all our liberty the nineteenth century has proceeded any farther in this direction than the hide-bound eighteenth century was able to do. On the whole, indeed, I find it very difficult to discover that democracy, as such, is affecting the quality of such good literature as we possess in any very general or obvious way. It may be that we are still under the oligarchic tradition, and that a social revolution, introducing a sudden breach in our habits, and perhaps paralysing the profession of letters for a few years, would be followed by a new literature of a decidedly democratic class. We are speaking of what we actually see, and not of vague visions which may seem to flit across the spectral mirror of the future.

But when we pass from the quality of the best literature to the quantity of it, then it is impossible to preserve so indifferent or so optimistic an attitude. The democratic habit does not, if I am correct, make much difference in the way in which good authors write, but it very much affects the amount of circulation which their writings obtain. The literature of which I have hitherto spoken is that of which analysis can take cognisance, the writing which possesses a measure, at least, of distinction, of accomplishment, that which, in every class, belongs to the tradition of good work. It is very easy to draw a rough line, not too high, above which all may fairly be treated as literature in posse if not in esse. In former ages, almost all that was published, certainly all that attracted public attention and secured readers, was of this sort. The baldest and most grotesque Elizabethan drama, the sickliest romance that lay with Bibles and with billets-doux on Belinda's toilet-table, the most effete didactic poem of the Hayley and Seward age, had this quality of belonging to the literary camp. It was a miserable object, no doubt, and wholly without value, but it wore the king's uniform. If it could have been better written, it would have been well written. But, as a result of democracy, what is still looked upon as the field of literature has been invaded by camp-followers of every kind, so active and so numerous, that they threaten to oust the soldiery themselves; persons in every variety of costume, from court-clothes to rags, but agreeing only in this, that they are not dressed as soldiers of literature.

These amateurs and specialists, these writers of books that are not books, and essays that are not essays, are peculiarly the product of a democratic age. A love for the distinguished parts of literature, and even a conception that such parts exist, is not common among men, and it is not obvious that democracy has led to its encouragement. Hitherto the tradition of style has commonly been respected; no very open voice having been as yet raised against it. But with the vast majority of persons it remains nothing but a mystery, and one which they secretly regard with suspicion. The enlargement of the circle of readers merely means an increase of persons who, without an ear, are admitted to the concert of literature. At present they listen to the traditional sonatas and mazurkas with bored respect, but they are really longing for music-hall ditties on the concertina. To this ever-increasing congregation of the unmusical comes the technical amateur, with his dry facts and exact knowledge; the flippant amateur, with his comic "bits" and laughable miscellanies; the didactic and religious amateur, anxious to mend our manners and save our souls. These people, whose power must not be slighted, and whose value, perhaps, can only relatively be denied, have something definite, something serviceable to give in the form of a paper or a magazine or a book. What wonder that they should form dangerous rivals to the writer who is assiduous about the way in which a thing is said, and careful to produce a solid and harmonious effect by characteristic language?

It was mainly during the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century that this body of technical, professional, and non-literary writing began to develop. We owe it, without doubt, to the spread of exact knowledge and the emancipation of speculative thought. It was from the law first, then from divinity, then from science, and last from philosophy that the studied graces were excluded—a sacrifice on the altar of positive expression. If a writer on precise themes were to adopt to-day the balanced elegance of Evelyn or Shaftesbury's stately and harmonious periods, he would either be read for his style and his sentiment or not at all. People would go for their information elsewhere. No doubt, in a certain sense, this change is due to the democracy; it is due to the quickening and rarefying of public life, to the creation of rapid needs, to a breaking down of barriers. But so long as the books and papers which deal with professional matters do not utterly absorb the field, so long as they leave time and space for pure literature, there is no reason why they should positively injure the latter, though they must form a constant danger to it. At times of public ferment, when great constitutional or social problems occupy universal attention, there can be no doubt that the danger ripens into real injury. When newspapers are full of current events in political and social life, the graver kind of books are slackly bought, and a "the higher criticism" disappears from the Reviews.

We can imagine a state of things in which such a crowding out should become chronic, when the nervous system of the public should crave such incessant shocks of actuality, that no time should be left for thought or sentiment. We might arrive at the condition in which Wordsworth pictured the France of ninety years ago:

Perpetual emptiness! unceasing change!