§ 89
Now, not as that all-righting posterity do we approach, of course, the books we actually read. Nobody expects that our judgments of current literature be perennially brazen when two or three unbend in talk about that merchandise which is sold in the same "department" as stationery and string and glue. The rub is, rather, that our chief "classics" appear to have been selected and handed down to fame by the long arm of coincidence. That which remains to us of Greek and Roman literature composes by general consent our greatest treasure, the treasure which time has most thoroughly tested and approved. And it is precisely here that one finds least cause to suspect time of any entangling alliance with justice. There is no vaguest reason to suppose that of the Greek and Roman writers we have preserved, by any standards, what was best worth keeping; nor that of such authors as Æschylos and Aristophanes of whom oblivion has spared more than the name we have retained the masterworks. We cherish, instead, each scrap that accident has made peerless by the destruction of its betters.... I might go on to speak, even more tediously, of Sappho and Petronius and Plutarch, and of Virgil's foiled endeavors to destroy the latter part of his Æneid—and about the dream that revealed the hiding place of Dante's lost cantos, and about John Warburton's cook, and about how the Bible came by its present contents,—to show through what queer accidents the world's chief "classics," the books which are likely always to remain in theory man's finest literary achievements, have been made just what they are. But the point is that they might quite as easily have been something else. The point is that they have not earned their present and probably perpetual rank by their pre-eminence in special qualities, nor by any æsthetic principle whatever. And if the supreme names and masterpieces of the world's literature have been tagged as such by justice,—which always remains just barely possible,—it was done without removing her bandage, in the hazards of a game of blind man's buff.
But I refrain in charity from such pedantic considerations. Here is real need, though, to point out that before printing became pandemic the only way in which anybody's writing won a chance of survival was by some other person's finding its matter sufficiently congenial to be at pains to make a copy of it. In nature, that which most rapturously recorded the inane struck home to most bosoms, upon the chronic principle that still procures admirers for the philosophy of Dr. Frank Crane,[12] and for the novels of Floyd and Ethel Dell:[13] so, from the first, have long odds favored earnest mediocrity.... To the vitality of the mediocre I shall return. Meanwhile that dangerous invention of Gutenberg's has changed all; and has ensured a fair chance of perpetuity for that which is excellent, provided always this excellence be not swept away unnoted and hidden by the spume and froth of the torrential river it floats in, that ever-passing deluge of the current books. Sometimes befalls a favoring miracle of salvage, and such dissimilar lost argosies as those of Samuel Butler and Herman Melville return upstream with flying colors. But who may say how deep, how irretrievably, their betters may not lie sunken? or can gravely assert that literary permanence is in any very general demand among the buyers or publishers or writers of new books?... Indeed, I know of no class of men which quite whole-heartedly desires the production and formal recognizing of any more "classics": since even those who care for fine literature cannot but obscurely feel that there is already a deal more of it existent than any human being can hope to assimilate; and that already the literary pantheon of the self-respecting is thronged with gods whose virtues we are compelled, in this limited lifetime, to accept as an article of faith. There is, for example, Defoe or Richardson—or, of more recent hierarchs, Mr. Thomas Hardy or Mr. Joseph Conrad,—before the shrine of each of whom many are zealous to pass with every form of respect which does not entail stopping. And I suspect, if the persons who cry up Don Quixote were afforded a choice between silence and reading every line of this world-famous "classic," there would no longer be any need to think an instant before you pronounce its name.
§ 90
But I spoke of the vitality of the mediocre. The quality which makes for acknowledged greatness in a writer is—I know not how many textbooks have assured us,—the universality of his appeal. His ideas are, in brief, the ideas which the majority of persons find acceptable; and Shakespeare has been praised, for once with absolute justice, as "the myriad-minded," because myriads have always had just such a mind as his. The writer of "classics," in short, has need of quite honest and limited thinking, and of an ability to utter platitudes with that wholesome belief in their importance which no hypocrisy nor art can ever mimic.... Of the letters of a foreign nation nobody can speak without some danger of magnifying his everyday folly. But it appears safe here to point out that the main treasures of our national literature, including its British tributaries, really are, when considered in the light of the ideas they express, rather startlingly silly. The "ideas" of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, when once looked at without prejudice, appear to wander sheepishly from the platitudinous to the imbecile, the while that their "stories" rove, in somewhat more the manner of the mountain goat, about the heights of idiocy. And when you compare the reality with the ideas which Scott and Thackeray and Dickens quite gravely expressed about human existence, the incongruity breathes more of pathos than of mirth: for these novelists expressed the usual ideas.
Most persons really do believe, for example, that complete and abiding happiness is to be won by marriage until they have tried it: and, for that matter, widows have been known to carry this romanticism to the extreme of taking a second husband. And most persons do honestly believe that, in the outcome, wickedness is punished and virtue is rewarded (again) with a complete and abiding happiness: and in consequence of this belief most persons make it a point in social intercourse to check their natural, not infrequent impulses toward rape and murder. Most persons do, in fact, for various reasons, think it best to be "good"; and do expect, for equally various reasons, to be happy by and by. Now, with hardly an exception, the concededly "classic" writers have, without any detectable scepticism, set forth such popular notions, with every fit adornment of rhetoric and cunning diction: and their ideas have endured for the plain reason that they were endurable.
§ 91
Yet here again, I am afraid, the fool is answered according to his folly. It is, when you think of it, a rather dreadful fate to become a classic. Once the writer is thus deified, his private character is the first burnt offering. He has well hidden himself beneath the effigy he found diverting; he rests thereunder, untroubled: but about his tomb frisk commentators obviously raised, by a superior education, from that troglodytic race which enlivens the public privies with verse. For his cult has need of a legend, and prefers a highly colored epopee of lechery and sexual curiosa, such as affords vicarious outlet to those desires which we imprison fearfully in ourselves, and reveals the demigod to be no better than anybody else. So Mary Fitton and Georgina Hogarth and Mrs. Brookfield are dragged into the saga: stout volumes are devoted to proving that Wordsworth begot a bastard, or that Byron was caught in incest with his sister; nobody appears able to write about Molière without suggesting that his wife was also very probably his daughter: and all our literary gossip becomes a whispered and sniggered ritual of phallic worship.
Nor do many of the auctorially great escape calumny in the form of a Complete Edition, wherein their self-confessed failures at writing, and the chips and rubbish of the workshop, and the rough draughts and notes designed for the waste-basket, and the politic ephemeræ into which most writers are allured by kindness and advertising purposes, are piddlingly amassed to be bound up, in pompous scavengery, with all the unsigned refuse from the back files of magazines which can be "attributed" to the victim. None other of the dead has even his appointed executors combined to convict him of idiocy. And of course those less put-upon immortals who are recollected, however infrequently, by virtue of one book alone are but too apt to get into some such collection as Everyman's Library, and have the upshot of their existence identified with the twaddle and smug tediums of Trollope and Jane Austen and Mary Cowden Clarke.
And the writer who is raised to the peerage of the remembered dead is likewise granted an estate, commensurate with his dignity, in the fields of human aversion. Luckless typesetters have to read every word of his books; in your library he usurps grudged shelfroom in the bright armor of a binding too handsome to be relegated to the dustheap of any married man; the oppressed young have his loathed archaisms included in their "parallel reading" at school, where also they are sometimes put to the peine dure et forte of "parsing" him; in women's clubs he incurs the stigma of being quoted with approval from the platform, by persons in the bankruptcy of mind appropriate to that deadly eminence; and dear old bishops likewise quote him in their sermons, utilizing his dreams as hypnotics.... He becomes, in fine, a nuisance, and is thought of with mingled condescension and haziness and dislike. And it appears, to the considerate, a prodigality of currishness, thus in so many ways to "beat the bones of the buried" because their outcast owner once voiced memorably the common beliefs and hopes,—the tonic fallacies, the sustaining delusions,—which keep a vigorous heart in the ribs, and marrow in the bones, of all that are not buried, not yet.