The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XIV.--SEPTEMBER, 1864.--NO. LXXXIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.

THE CADMEAN MADNESS.

An old English divine fancied that all the world might go mad and nobody
know it. The conception suggests a query whether the standard of sanity,
as of fashions and prices, be not a purely artificial one, an accident
of convention, a law of society, an arbitrary institute, and therefore a
possible mistake. A sage and a maniac each thinks the other mad. The
decision is a matter of majorities. Should a whole community become
insane, it would nevertheless vote itself wise; if the craze of Bedlam
were uniform, its inmates could not distinguish it from a Pantheon; and
though all human history seemed to the gods only as a continuous series
of mediaeval processions _des sots et des anes_, yet the topsy-turvy
intellect of the world would ever worship folly in the name of wisdom.
Arts and sciences, ideas and institutions, laws and learning would still
abound, transmogrified to suit the reigning madness. And as statistics
reveal the late gradual and general increase of insanity, it becomes a
provident people to consider what may be the ultimate results, if this
increase should happen never to be checked. And if sanity be, indeed, a
glory which we might all lose unawares, we may well betake ourselves to
very solemn reflection as to whether we are, at the present moment, in
our wits and senses, or not.

The peculiar proficiencies of great epochs are as astonishing as the
exploits of individual frenzy. The era of the Greek rhapsodists, when a
body of matchless epical literature was handed down by memory from
generation to generation, and a recitation of the whole "Odyssey" was
not too much for a dinner-party,--the era of Periclean culture, when the
Athenian populace was wont to pass whole days in the theatre, attending
with unfaltering intellectual keenness and aesthetic delight to three or
four long dramas, either of which would exhaust a modern audience,--the
wild and vast systems of imaginary abstractions, which the
Neo-Platonists, as also the German transcendentalists, so strangely
devised and became enamored of,--the grotesque views of men and things,
the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the
learned thought of the Middle Ages,--the Buddhistic Orient, with its
subtile metaphysical illusions, its unreal astronomical heavens, its
habits of repose and its tornadoes of passion,--such are instances of
great diversities of character, which would be hardly accountable to
each other on the supposition of mutual sanity. They suggest a
difference of ideas, moods, habits, and capacities, which in
contemporaries and associates would amply justify either party that
happened to be the majority in turning all the rest into insane asylums.
It is the demoniac element, the raving of some particular demon, that
creates greatness either in men or nations. Power is maniacal. A
mysterious fury, a heavenly inspiration, an incomprehensible and
irresistible impulse, goads humanity on to achievements. Every age,
every person, and every art obeys the wand of the enchanter. History
moves by indirections. The first historic tendency is likely to be
slightly askew; there follows then an historic triumph, then an historic
eccentricity, then an historic folly, then an explosion; and then the
series begins again. In the grade of folly, hard upon an explosion, lies
modern literature.

The characteristic mania of the last two centuries is reading and
writing. Solomon discovered that much study is a weariness of the flesh;
Aristophanes complained of the multitude and indignity of authors in his
time; and the famed preacher, Geyler von Kaisersberg, in the age of
prevalent monkery and Benedictine plodding, mentioned erudition and
madness, on equal footing, as the twin results of books: "_Libri quosdam
ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere_." These were successive
symptoms of the growing malady. But where there was one writer in the
time of Geyler, there are a million now. He saw both health and disease,
and could distinguish between them. We see only the latter. Skill in
letters, half a decade of centuries ago, was a miraculous attainment,
and placed its possessor in the rank of divines and diviners; now,
inability to read and write is accounted, with pauperism and crime, a
ground for civil disfranchisement. The old feudal merry and hearty
ignorance has been everywhere corrupted by books and newspapers,
learning and intelligence, the cabalistic words of modern life. Popular
poetry and music, ballads and legends, wit and originality have
disappeared before the barbaric intellectuality of our Cadmean idolatry.
Even the arts of conversation and oratory are waning, and may soon be
lost; we live only in second and silent thoughts: for who will waste
fame and fortune by giving to his friends the gems which will delight
mankind? and how can a statesman grapple eloquently with Fate, when the
contest is not to be determined on the spot, but by quiet and remote
people coolly reading his speech several hours or days later? Even if we
were vagarying into imbecility, like the wildest Neo-Platonic
hierophants, like the monkish chroniclers of the Middle Ages, like other
romantic and fantastic theorists who have leaped out of human nature
into a purely artificial realm, we should not know it, because we are
all doing it uniformly.

The universe is a veiled Isis. The human mind from immemorial antiquity
has ceased to regard it. A small cohort of alphabets has enrobed it with
a wavy texture of letters, beyond which we cannot penetrate. The glamour
is upon us, and when we would see the facts of Nature, we behold only
tracts of print. The God of the heavens and earth has hidden Himself
from us since we gave ourselves up to the worship of the false
divinities of Phoenicia. No longer can we admire the _cosmos_; for the
_cosmos_ lies beyond a long perspective of theorems and propositions
that cross our eyes, like countless bees, from the alcoves of
philosophies and sciences. No longer do we bask in the beauty of things,
as in the sunlight; for when we would melt in feeling, we hear nothing
but the rattling of gems of verse. No longer does the mind, as
sympathetic priest and interpreter, hover amid the phenomena of time and
space; for the forms of Nature have given place to volumes, there are no
objects but pages, and passions have been supplanted by paragraphs. We
no longer see the whirling universe, or feel the pulsing of life.
Thought itself has ceased to be a sprite, and flows through the mind
only in the leaden shape of printed sentences. The symbolism of letters
is over us all. An all-pervading nominalism has completely masked
whatsoever there is that is real. More and more it is not the soul and
Nature, but the eye and print, whose resultant is thought. Nature
disappears and the mind withers. No other faculty has been developed in
man but that of the reader, no other possibility but that of the writer.
The old-fashioned arts which used to imply human nature, which used to
blossom instinctively, which have given joy and beauty to society, are
fading from the face of the earth. Where are the ancient and mediaeval
popular games, those charming vital symptoms? The people now read
Dickens and Longfellow. Where are the old-fashioned instincts of worship
and love, consolation and mourning? The people have since found an
antidote for these experiences in Blair and Tupper, and other authors of
renown. Where are those weird voices of the air and forest and stream,
those symptoms of an enchanted Nature, which used to thrill and bless
the soul of man? The duller ear of men has failed to hear them in this
age of popular science.

Literature, using the word with a benevolent breadth of meaning which
excludes no pretenders, is the result of the invasion of letters. It is
the fort which they occupy, which with too hasty consideration has
usually been regarded as friendly to the human race. Religions, laws,
sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like
into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners
in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality,
surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The
memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every
generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed
the final grace of being forgotten; and omniscience is becoming at once
more and more impossible and more and more fashionable. Whoever reads
only the books of his own time is superficial in proportion to the
thickness of the ages. But neither the genius of man, nor his length of
days, has had an increase corresponding to that of the realm of
knowledge, the requirements of reading, and the conditions of
intelligence. The multiplied attractions only crowd and obstruct the
necessarily narrow line of duty, possibility, and destiny. Life
threatens to be extinguished by its own shadow, by the _debris_ kept in
the current by countless tenacious records. Its essence escapes to
heaven or into new forms, but its ghosts still walk the earth in print.
Like that mythical serpent which advanced only as it grew in length, so
knowledge spans the whole length of the ages. Some philosopher conceived
of history as the migration and growth of reason throughout time,
culminating in successive historical ideas. He, however, supposed that
the idea of every age had nothing to do with any preceding age; it had
passed through whatsoever previous stages, had been somewhat modified by
them, contained in itself all that was best in them, was improved and
elevated at every new epoch; but it had no memory, never looked
backward, and was an ever rolling sphere, complete in itself, leaving no
trail behind. Human life, under the discipline of letters and common
schools, is not thus Hegelian, but advances under the boundless
retrospection of literature. And yet this is probably divine philosophy.
It is probable that the faculty of memory belongs to man only in an
immature state of development, and that in some future and happier epoch
the past will be known to us only as it lives in the present; and then
for the first time will Realism in life take the place of Nominalism.

The largest library in the world, the Bibliotheque Imperiale of Paris,
(it has been successively, like the adventurous and versatile throne of
France, Royale, Nationale, and Imperiale,) contains very nearly one
million of books, the collected fruits of all time. Consider an average
book in that collection: how much human labor does it stand for? How
much capital was invested originally in its production, and how much
tribute of time and toil does it receive per annum? Regarding books as
intellectual estate, how much does it cost mankind to procure and keep
up an average specimen? What quantity of human resources has been
originally and consecutively sunk in the Parisian library? How much of
human time, which is but a span, and of human emotion and thought, which
are sacred and not to be carelessly thrown away, lie latent therein?

The estimate must be highly speculative. Some books have cost a lifetime
and a heartbreak; others have been written at leisure in a week, and
without an emotion. Some are born from the martyrdom of a thinker to
fire the genius of a populace; others are the coruscations of joy, and
have a smile for their immortal heir. Some have made but the slightest
momentary ripple in human affairs; others, first gathering eddies about
themselves, have swept forward in grand currents, engrossing for
centuries whole departments of human energy. Thousands publish and are
forgotten before they die. Spinoza published after his death and is not
yet understood.

We will begin with the destined bibliomacher at the time of his
assumption of short clothes. The alphabet is his first professional
torture, and that only ushers him upon the gigantic task of learning to
read and write his own language. Experience shows that this miracle of
memory and associative reason may be in the main accomplished by the
time he is eight years old. Thus far in his progress towards book-making
he has simply got his fingers hold of the pen. He has next to run the
gauntlet of the languages, sciences, and arts, to pass through the epoch
of the scholar, with satchel under his arm, with pale cheek, an eremite
and ascetic in the religion of Cadmus. At length, at about twenty years
of age, he leaves the university, not a master, but a bachelor of
liberal studies. But thus far he has laid only the foundation, has
acquired only rudiments and generalities, has only served his
apprenticeship to letters. God gave mind and nature, but art has
furnished him a new capacity and a new world,--the capacity to read, and
the world of books. He has simply acquired a new nature, a psychological
texture of letters, but the artificial _tabula rasa_ has yet to be
filled. Twenty obstetrical years have at last made him a literary
animal, have furnished him the abstract conditions of authorship; but he
has yet his life to save, and his fortune to make in literature. He is
born into the mystic fraternity of readers and writers, but the special
studies and experiences which fit him for anything, which make a book
possible, are still in the future. He will be fortunate, if he gets
through with them, and gets his first volume off his hands by the age of
thirty. Authors are the shortest-lived of men. Their average years are
less than fifty. Our bibliomacher has therefore twenty years left to
him. Taking all time together, since formerly authors wrote less
abundantly than now, he will not produce more than one work in five
years, that is, five works in his lifetime of fifty years. The
conclusion to which this rather precarious investigation thus brings us
is, that the original cost of an average book is ten years of a human
life. And yet these ten years make but the mere suggestion of the book.
The suggestion must be developed by an army of printers, sellers, and
librarians. What other institution in the world is there but the
Bibliotheque Imperiale, to the mere suggestion of which ten millions of
laborious years have been devoted?

Startling considerations present themselves. If there were no other
_argumentum ad absurdum_ to demonstrate some fundamental perversity and
absurdity in literature, it might be suspected from the fact that Nature
herself gives so little encouragement to it. Nobody is born an author.
The art of writing, common as it is, is not indigenous in man, but is
acquired by a nearly universal martyrdom of youth. If it had been
providentially designed that the function of any considerable portion of
mankind should have been to write books, we cannot suppose that an
economical Deity would have failed to create them with innate skill in
language, general knowledge, and penmanship. These accomplishments have
to be learned by every writer, yet writers are numberless. They are
mysteries which must be painfully encountered by every one at the
vestibule of the temple of literature, which nevertheless is thronged.
Surely, had this importance and prevalence been attached to them in the
Divine scheme, they would have been born in us like the senses, or would
blossom spontaneously in us, like the corollal growths of Faith and
Conscience. We should have been created in a condition of literary
capacity, and thus have been spared the alphabetical torture of
childhood, and the academic depths of philological despair. Twenty-five
years of preliminaries might have been avoided by changing the peg in
the scale of creation, and the studies of the boy might have begun where
now they end. Twenty-five years in the span of life would thus have been
saved, had what must be a universal acquirement been incorporated into
the original programme of human nature.

Or had the Deity appreciated literature as we do, He would probably have
written out the universe in some snug little volume, some miniature
series, or some boundless Bodleian, instead of unfolding it through
infinite space and time, as an actual, concrete, unwritten reality. Be
creation a single act or an eternal process, it would have been all a
thing of books. The Divine Mind would have revealed itself in a library,
instead of in the universe. As for men, they would have existed only in
treatises on the mammalia. There are some specimens which we hardly
think are according to any anticipation of heavenly reason, and
therefore they would not have existed at all. Nothing would have been
but God and literature. Possibly a responsible creation like ours might
have been formed, nevertheless, by making each letter a living,
thinking, moral agent; and the alphabet might thus have written out the
Divine ideas, as men now work them out. If the conception seem to any
one chilly, if it have a dreary look, if it appear to leave only a
frosty metallic base, instead of the grand oceanic effervescence of
life, let him remember how often earthly authors have renounced living
realities, all personal sympathies and pleasures, communing only with
books, their minds dwelling apart from men. Remember Tasso and Southey;
ay, if you have yourself written a book that commands admiration,
remember what it cost you. Why hesitate to transfer to the skies a type
of life which we admire here below? But God having wrought out instead
of written out His thoughts, does it not appear that He designed for men
to do likewise?

And thus a new consideration is presented. The exhibit of the original
cost of the Bibliotheque Imperiale was the smallest item in our budget.
Mark the history of a book. How variously it engrosses the efforts of
the world, from the time when it first rushes into the arena of life!
The industry of printing embodies it, the energy of commerce disperses
it, the army of critics announce it, the world of readers give their
days and nights to it generation after generation, and its echoes
uninterruptedly repeat themselves along the infinite procession of
writers. The process reverts with every new edition, and eddies mingle
with eddies in the motley march of history. Its story may be traced in
martyrdoms of the flesh, in weary hours, strange experiences, unhappy
tempers, restless struggles, unrequited triumphs,--in the glare of
midnight lamps, and of wild, haggard eyes,--in sorrow, want, desolation,
despair, and madness. Born in sorrow, the book trails a pathway of
sorrow through the ages. And each book in the Parisian library stands
for all this,--some that were produced with tears having been always
read for jest,--some that were lightly written being now severe tasks
for historians, antiquaries, and source-mongers.

Suppose an old Egyptian, who in primaeval Hierapolis incased his thought
in papyrus, to be able now to take a stroll into the Bibliotheque, and
to see what has become of his thought so far as there represented. He
would find that it had haunted mankind ever since. An alcove would be
filled with commentaries on it, and discussions as to where it came from
and what it meant. He would find it modifying and modified by the
Greeks, and reproduced by them with divers variations,--extinguished by
Christianity,--revived, with a new face, among the theurgies and cabala
of Alexandria; he would catch the merest glimpse of it amid the
Christian legends and credulities of the Middle Ages,--but the Arabs
would have kept a stronger hold on it; he would see it in the background
after the revival of learning, till, gradually, as modern commerce
opened the East, scholars, also, discovered that there were wonders
behind the classic nations; and finally he would see how modern
research, rushing back through comparison of language-roots, through
geological data, through ethnological indications, through antiquarian
discoveries, has rooted out of the layers of ages all the history
attendant upon its original production. He would find the records of
this long history in the library around him. In every age, the thought,
born of pain, has been reproduced with travail. It did not do its
mission at once, penetrate like a ray of light into the heart of the
race, and leave a chemical effect which should last forever. No, the
blood of man's spirit was not purified,--only an external application
was made, and that application must be repeated with torture upon every
generation. Was this designed to be the function of thought, the mission
of heavenly ideas?

This is the history of his thought in books. But let us conceive what
might have been its history but for the books;--how it might have been
written in the fibres of the soul, and lived in eternal reason, instead
of having been written on papyrus and involved in the realm of dead
matter. His idea, thrilling his own soul, would have revealed itself in
every particle and movement of his body; for "soul is form, and doth the
body make." Its first product would have been his own quivering,
animated, and animating personality. He would have impressed every one
of his associates, every one of whom would in turn have impressed a new
crowd, and thus the immortal array of influences would have gone on. Not
impressions on parchment, but impressions on the soul, not letters, but
thrills, would have been its result. Thus the magic of personal
influence of all kinds would have radiated from it in omnipresent and
colliding circlets forever, as the mighty imponderable agents are
believed to radiate from some hidden focal force. He would trace his
idea in the massive architecture and groping science of Egypt,--in the
elegant forms of worship, thought, institutes, and life among the
Greeks,--in the martial and systematizing genius of Rome,--and so on
through the ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages, and the political
and scientific ambitions of modern times. Its operations have everywhere
been chemical, not mechanical. It has lived, not in the letter, but in
the spirit. Never dropping to the earth, it has been maintained as a
shuttlecock in spiritual regions by the dynamics of the soul. It has
wrought itself into the soul, the only living and immortal thing, and so
the proper place for ideas. Its mode of transmission has been by the
suffusion of the eye, the cheek, the lip, the manner, not by dead and
unsymbolical letters. It has had life, and not merely duration. It has
been perpetuated in cordate, not in dactylate characters. Its history
must not be sought away from the circle of life, but may be seen in the
current generation of men. The man whom you should meet on the street
would be the product of all the ideas and influences from the
foundation of the world, and his slightest act would reveal them all
vital within him. The libraries, which form dead recesses in the river
of life, would thus be swept into and dissolved in the current, and the
waters would have been deepened and colored by their dissolution.
Libraries are a sort of _debris_ of the world, but the spiritual
substance of them would thus enter into the organism of history. All the
last results of time would come to us, not through books, but through
the impressions of daily life. Whatsoever was unworthy to be woven into
the fibres of the soul would be overwhelmed by that oblivion which
chases humanity; all the time wasted in the wrong-headedness of
archaeology would be saved; for there would be nothing of the past except
its influence on the immediate present, and nothing but the pure human
ingot would finally be left of the long whirlings in the crucible of
history. Some one has said that all recent literature is one gigantic
plagiarism from the past. Why plagiarize with toil the toils of the
past, when all that is good in them lives, necessarily and of its own
tendency, in the winged and growing spirit of man? The stream flows in a
channel, and is colored by all the ores of its banks, but it would be
absurd for it to attempt to take the channel up and carry it along with
itself out into the sea. Why should the tinted water of life attempt to
carry along with it not only the tint, but also the bank, ages back,
from which the tint proceeds?

As the world goes on, the multitude of books increases. They grow as
grows the human race,--but, unlike the human race, they have a material
immortality here below. Fossil books, unlike fossil rocks, have a power
of reproduction. Every new year leaves not only a new inheritance, but
generally a larger one than ever before. What is to be the result? The
ultimate prospect is portentous. If England has produced ten thousand
volumes of fiction (about three thousand new novels) during the last
forty years, how many books of all kinds has Christendom to answer for
in the same period? If the British Museum makes it a point to preserve a
copy of everything that is published, how long will it be before the
whole world will not be sufficient to contain the multitude thereof? At
present all the collections of the Museum, books, etc., occupy only
forty acres on the soil, and an average of two hundred feet towards the
sky. But even these outlines indicate a block of space which under
geometrical increase would in the shortest of geological periods make a
more complete conquest of the earth than has ever been made by fire or
water. To say nothing of the sorrows of the composition of these new
literary stores, how is man, whose years are threescore-and-ten, going
to read them? Surely the green earth will be transformed into a
wilderness of books, and man, reduced from the priest and interpreter of
Nature to a bookworm, will be like the beasts which perish.

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