LETTER IX.
TO AN AUTHOR WHO APPRECIATED CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.
Miss Mitford on the selfishness of authors—A suggestion of Emerson’s—A laconic rule of his—Traces of jealousy—And of a more subtle feeling—A contradiction—Necessary to resist the invasion of the present—A certain equilibrium—The opposite of a pedant—The best classics not pedants, but artists.
Reading the other day a letter by Miss Mitford, I was reminded of you as the eye is reminded of green when it sees scarlet. You, whose interest in literature has ever kept pace with the time, to whom no new thing is unwelcome if only it is good, are safe from her accusations; but how many authors have deserved them! Miss Mitford is speaking of a certain writer who is at the same time a clergyman, and whom it is not difficult to recognize.
“I never,” she says, “saw him interested in the slightest degree by the work of any other author, except, indeed, one of his own followers or of his own clique, and then only as admiring or helping him. He has great kindness and great sympathy with working people, or with a dying friend, but I profess to you I am amazed at the utter selfishness of authors. I do not know one single poet who cares for any man’s poetry but his own. In general they read no books except such as may be necessary to their own writings—that is to the work they happen to be about, and even then I suspect that they only read the bits that they may immediately want. You know the absolute ignorance in which Wordsworth lived of all modern works; and if, out of compliment to a visitor, he thought it needful to seem to read or listen to two or three stanzas, he gave unhesitating praise to the writer himself, but took especial care not to repeat the praise where it might have done him good—utterly fair and false.”
There are touches of this spirit of indifference to contemporary literature in several writers and scholars whom we know. There are distinct traces of it even in published writings, though it is much more evident in private life and habit. Emerson seriously suggests that “the human mind would perhaps be a gainer if all the secondary writers were lost—say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, through the profounder study so drawn to those wonderful minds.” In the same spirit we have Emerson’s laconic rule, “Never read any but famed books,” which suggests the remark that if men had obeyed this rule from the beginning, no book could ever have acquired reputation, and nobody would ever have read anything. The idea of limiting English literature to a holy trinity of Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, and voluntarily losing all other authors, seems to me the most intense expression of the spirit of aristocracy in reading. It is as if a man were to decide in his own mind that society would be the better if all persons except the three Emperors were excluded from it. There is a want of reliance upon one’s own judgment, and an excess of faith in the estimates of others, when we resolve to read only those books which come to us in the splendor of a recognized intellectual royalty. We read either to gain information, to have good thinking suggested to us, or to have our imagination stimulated. In the way of knowledge the best authors are always the most recent, so that Bacon could not suffice. In the way of thinking, our methods have gained in precision since Milton’s time, and we are helped by a larger experience than his. The one thing which Shakespeare and Milton can do for us quite perfectly still, is to fill our imagination richly, and give it a fine stimulus. But modern writers can render us the same service.
Is there not a little jealousy of contemporaries in the persistence with which some authors avoid them, and even engage others to avoid them? May not there be a shade of another feeling than jealousy, a feeling more subtle in operation, the undefined apprehension that we may find, even amongst our more obscure contemporaries, merit equal to our own? So long as we restrict our reading to old books of great fame we are safe from this apprehension, for if we find admirable qualities, we know beforehand that the world has handsomely acknowledged them, and we indulge in the hope that our own admirable qualities will be recognized by posterity with equal liberality. But it creates an unpleasant feeling of uneasiness to see quantities of obscure contemporary work, done in a plain way to earn a living by men of third or fourth-rate reputation, or of no reputation at all, which in many respects would fairly sustain a comparison with our own. It is clear that an author ought to be the last person to advise the public not to read contemporary literature, since he is himself a maker of contemporary literature; and there is a direct contradiction between the invitation to read his book, which he circulates by the act of publishing, and the advice which the book contains. Emerson is more safe from this obvious rejoinder when he suggests to us to transfer our reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard authors. But are these suggestions anything more than the reaction of an intellectual man against the too prevalent customs of the world? The reading practised by most people, by all who do not set before themselves intellectual culture as one of the definite aims of life, is remarkable for the regularity with which it neglects all the great authors of the past. The books provided by the circulating library, the reviews and magazines, the daily newspapers, are read whilst they are novelties, but the standard authors are left on their shelves unopened. We require a firm resolution to resist this invasion of what is new, because it flows like an unceasing river, and unless we protect our time against it by some solid embankment of unshakable rule and resolution, every nook and cranny of it will be filled and flooded. An Englishman whose life was devoted to culture, but who lived in an out-of-the-way place on the Continent, told me that he considered it a decided advantage to his mind to live quite outside of the English library system, because if he wanted to read a new book he had to buy it and pay heavily for carriage besides, which made him very careful in his choice. For the same reason he rejoiced that the nearest English news-room was two hundred miles from his residence.
But, on the other hand, what would be the condition of a man’s mind who never read anything but the classic authors? He would live in an intellectual monastery, and would not even understand the classic authors themselves, for we understand the past only by referring it to what we know in the present.
It is best to preserve our minds in a state of equilibrium, and not to allow our repugnance to what we see as an evil to drive us into an evil of an opposite kind. We are too often like those little toy-fish with a bit of steel in their mouths, which children attract with a magnet. If you present the positive pole of the magnet, the fish rushes at it at once, but if you offer the negative end it retreats continually. Everything relatively to our character has this positive or negative end, and we either rush to things or rush away from them. Some persons are actually driven away from the most entertaining writers because they happen to be what are called classics, because pedants boast of having read them. I know a man who is exactly the opposite of a pedant, who has a horror of the charlatanism which claims social and intellectual position as the reward for having laboriously waded through those authors who are conventionally termed “classical,” and this opposition to pedantry has given him an aversion to the classics themselves, which he never opens. The shallow pretence to admiration of famous writers which is current in the world is so distasteful to the love of honesty and reality which is the basis of his character, that by an unhappy association of ideas he has acquired a repugnance to the writers themselves. But such men as Horace, Terence, Shakespeare, Molière, though they have had the misfortune to be praised and commentated upon by pedants, were in their lives the precise opposite of pedants; they were artists whose study was human nature, and who lived without pretension in the common world of men. The pedants have a habit of considering these genial old artists as in some mysterious way their own private property, for do not the pedants live by expounding them? And some of us are frightened away from the fairest realms of poetry by the fences of these grim guardians.