For instance, if, as occasionally happens, a judge makes a bad law, or a surgeon a bad operation, or a manufacturer makes bad food, criticism upon their actions is by law and custom confined to comparatively narrow limits. But if a man, as occasionally happens, makes a book, there is no limit to the criticism that may be directed against it, and it is perfectly as it should be. The world recognizes that little things, like bad law, bad surgery, and bad food, only affect the cheapest commodity that we know about—human life.
Therefore, in these circumstances, men can afford to be swayed by pity for the offender, by interest in his family, by fear, or loyalty, or respect for the organization he represents, or even a desire to do him justice.
But when the question is of words—words that may become alive and walk up and down in the hearts of the hearers—it is then that this world of ours, which is disposed to take an interest in the future, feels instinctively that it is better that a thousand innocent people should be punished than that one guilty word should be preserved, carrying that which is an untrue tale of the tribe.
Remote Chances of a Tale's Survival.
The chances, of course, are almost astronomically remote that any given tale will survive for so long as it takes an oak to grow to timber size. But that guiding instinct warns us not to trust to chance a matter of the supremest concern. In this durable record, if anything short of indisputable and undistilled truth be seen there, we all feel, How shall our achievements profit us?
The record of the tribe is in its enduring literature. The magic of literature lies in the words, and not in any man. Witness, a thousand excellent, strenuous words can leave us quite cold or put us to sleep, whereas a bare half-hundred words breathed upon by some man in his agony, or in his exaltation, or in his idleness, ten generations ago, can still lead a whole nation into and out of captivity, can open to us the doors of three worlds, or stir us so intolerably that we can scarcely abide to look at our own souls.
It is a miracle—one that happens very seldom. But secretly each one of the masterless men with the words has hope, or has had hope, that the miracle may be wrought again through him.
And why not? If a tinker in Bedford jail, if a pamphleteering shopkeeper pilloried in London, if a muzzy Scotsman, if a despised German Jew, or a condemned French thief, or an English admiralty official with a taste for letters can be miraculously afflicted with the magic of the necessary words, why not any man at any time?
Our world, which is only concerned in the perpetuation of the record, sanctions that hope as kindly and just as cruelly as nature sanctions love. All it suggests is that the man with the words shall wait upon the man of achievement, and step by step with him try to tell the story to the tribe. All it demands is that the magic of every word shall be tried out to the very uttermost by every means fair and foul that the mind of man can suggest.
There is no room, and the world insists that there shall be no room, for pity, for mercy, for respect, for fear, or even for loyalty, between man and his fellow man, when the record of the tribe comes to be written.