Yet the judgment of an age may seem to us the veriest nonsense of perversity. It irritates us, at the same time that it flatters our sense of superiority, to see the citizens of the Seventeenth Century tossing up their caps over Cowley, and proclaiming him celestial; and to see those of the Eighteenth lose their heads over Pope. We know better. Cowley and Pope, indeed! Would not any college sophomore place them for us—Why, of course, Cowley wrote the Sonnets of Pindar, and Pope was a pseudonym. It is pedantic to have read them, and we are proud to know them only by reputation. Yet we must not blame our unfortunate ancestors. The old formula reappears:—they clung to what interested them, and called it deathless. The humor lies rather more in the inability of the next generation, perhaps our own, to break away from the stereotyped verdicts of those remote days of questionable authority. We were all taught that Addison was one of the mighty of earth, and that his style was the acme of lucidity and charm—“Spend your days and nights with Addison.” But we must admit that this estimate is but the sluggish echo of auld lang syne. For have you, gentle reader, perused a single Spectator Paper since you were preparing for your college examinations? Of course, if Addison really interested his own age by touching as no one else did its concerns, he deserved the audience he gathered about him and the fame that transpired; but why should we talk of him as if he actually interested us profoundly, when no one reads him? And how about Tom Jones and Clarissa Harlowe and The Tale of a Tub, and Tristram Shandy or The Vicar of Wakefield? It is the tendency of long enduring fame to become sluggish and to sink into dogmatism.
It is one of the duties lying nearest to the present—wherever that present may be—to right the wrongs of the weak, and to humble the pride of usurpers. Distrust of one’s own taste and power, whatever may be the case among individuals, is impossible to a whole generation. To judge and to accept as final one’s own conclusion is the prerequisite for true results and positive progress. The saints have always been vigorous in their unshaken conviction of the truth that is in them; it is the insinuating voice of the devil which doubts. So, without misgiving, the Eighteenth Century which wrote up Addison, wrote down Shakespeare; and the Nineteenth Century which wrote up Browning, wrote down Pope. We, too, are conscious of wise catholicity, and judge with decisive orthodoxy. We adore the vigorous brutalities of Kipling and Masefield, we are interested in the formless feebleness of certain new poets; we scorn Gray and Landor, and overlook the poetry of Arnold. We are hospitable to the “newer movements,” even to the outré; we despise the ways of our parents and our grandparents, though they were men who walked with God. We cannot help it, to be sure, and are most unconscious of our little ways; but now and then it is possible for some of us to transport ourselves in spirit to the higher ground of the next century, and to look back upon the plain of our own time. Then it is hard to be convinced that the universe was not devised to furnish laughter for the gods.
Nothing is harder than for us to laugh at ourselves; we prefer to dwell upon the seriousness, the impressiveness of lasting fame, as proof of the unity of the human race. When the world of twenty-five centuries after Homer can thrill at the twang of the bow of Odysseus, and smile at the laughter of Nausikaa and her maidens, we are kinsmen of the distant Greeks. Time and race are annihilated before the mighty genius which touches the deeps of the heart. Institutions and nations may decay, but the song of Homer calls us brothers. Impressive, indeed, and yet—how many really thrill and smile over the Odyssean tale? How many in this age of broad enlightenment ever read the Odyssey at all, or have dipped into its pages for love of their pure serene? The candid answer is: Very few. And yet Homer is one of the two or three who reign supreme, as we almost all still conventionally admit.
This vaunted proof of racial unity is overworked; Homer has but few relatives to-day, and they are that select handful who love to widen their horizons by looking backwards. In spite of our boasted education—which does not, any more than other panaceas, live up to its promises—the disciples of the great past will always be few. But since no age can walk entirely by its lone, there will always be a loyal band who will spend the best portions of their lives in the great backward and abysm of time, and will with shining faces bring good tidings to their fellowmen. How grateful the early Nineteenth Century should have been to Lamb for his specimens of the well-nigh forgotten Elizabethan Dramatists; how grateful we should be to Mr. Gilbert Murray for pointing out to us once more the splendors of Athenian Tragedy! Upon scholars like these we must rely that too much is not forgotten.
The saying that the greater the fame the fewer the readers, is a random shot, and yet it hits the target, and not the outermost ring. Every approving reader gained for a work hands on the word to a dozen who have not read, nor will ever read it. Fame enlarges its sweep through time like the surge thrown off the prow of a moving steamship, broadening over the sea until it stretches beyond all apparent relation to the ship which first stirred it up. But here the figure breaks: for while in most cases the waves subside, in others, the commotion bids fair to last to the end of human history.
The classic once established becomes so sacred to the unthinking public that to doubt it is lèse majesté; at least, its fame produces a sort of hypnotism. No one, for instance, can approach a play of Shakespeare for the first time unbiassed. He may be actually bored, but he will not admit it. Perhaps he will make himself believe that he enjoys it, but he will not be found with it in his hours of honest play. He hardly dares know what he thinks, lest he should be found heretical, and he feels safer to swell the lusty chorus of praise. The most influential critics in such a case get no real hearing. They may capture a few individual opinions, but the public at large will lend no ear to qualifications. Only if repetition is carried to the point of damnable iteration, will modification of appraisal begin slowly to sink down through class after class; it takes an unconscionable time to reach the bottom, perhaps centuries. One recalls lesser literature still lingering moribund upon front parlor tables in village homes—Thomson’s Seasons or, perhaps, Young’s Night Thoughts. No one reads them; they remain as closely shut as the parlor doors; but there they lie, the cherished signs of family respectability, and still accepted unquestioningly as living things.
Literary fame is a slippery and indefinite thing. There are countless impossible questions one could ask. How many readers must a work have to be considered alive at all? Is fame to be allowed to some of the obscure poets like Campion, Traherne, and Shenstone, who are known only to the specialist? Definiteness and finality are as difficult of attainment as to tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is northerly. But it is certain that the immortals are dependent upon an amazingly small set of followers, which tends to grow smaller as the ages turn. Yet those who deserve long life will in the long run reach an old age, frosty but kindly. And we may leave them with confidence in the hands of Time, who, after all, like Autolycus, pockets only what have come to be unconsidered trifles.