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

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

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The eye of fancy lately witnessed in a dream the vision of an age far in
the future. The surface of the earth was covered with lofty rectangles,
built up coral-like from small rectangles. There was neither tree nor
herb nor living creature. Walled paths, excavated ruts, alone broke the
desert-like prospect, as the burrows of life. Penetrating into these,
the eye saw men walking beneath the striated piles, with heads bent
forward and nervous fingering of brow. There the whole world, such as we
have known it, was buried beneath volumes, past all enumeration. There
was neither fauna nor flora, neither wilderness, tempest, nor any
familiar look of Nature, but only one boundless contiguity of books.
There was only man and space and one unceasing library, and the men
neither ate nor slept nor spoke. Nature was transformed into the
processes and products of writing, and man was now no longer lover,
friend, peasant, merchant, naturalist, traveller, gourmet, mechanic,
warrior, worshipper, but only an author. All other faculties had been
lost to him, and all resources for anything else had fled from his
universe. Anon some wrinkled, fidgety, cogitative being in human form
would add a new volume to some slope or tower of the monstrous
omni-patulent mass, or some sharp-glancing youth, with teeth set
unevenly on edge, would pull out a volume, look greedily and
half-believingly for a few moments, return it, and slink away. "What is
this world, and what means this life?" cried I, addressing an old man,
who had just tossed a volume aloft. "Where are we, and what about this?
Tell me, for I have not before seen and do not know." He glanced a
moment, then spoke, like a shade in hell, as follows:--"This is the
world, and here is human life. Man long enjoyed it, with wonderful
fulness and freshness of being. But a madness seized him; everybody
wrote books; the evil grew more and more; nought else was an object of
pursuit; till at last the earth was covered with tomes, and for long
ages now it has been buried beyond the reach of mortal. All forms of
life were exterminated. Man himself survives only as a literary shadow.
Each one writes a book, or a few books, and dies, vanishing into thin
air. Such is life,--a hecatomb!"

But even if it be supposed that mind could survive the toil, and the
earth the quantity of our accumulating books, there are other
difficulties. There are other imperative limitations, beyond which the
art of writing cannot go. Letters themselves limit the possibilities of
literature. For there is only a certain number of letters. These letters
are capable of only a certain number of combinations into words. This
limited number of possible words is capable only of a certain number of
arrangements. Conceive the effect when all these capabilities shall be
exhausted! It will no longer be possible for a new thing to be said or
written. We shall have only to select and repeat from the past. Writing
shall be reduced to the making of extracts, and speaking to the making
of quotations. Yet the condition of things would certainly be improved.
As there is now a great deal of writing without thinking, so then
thinking could go on without writing. A man would be obliged to think
out and up to his result, as we do now; but whether his processes and
conclusions were wise or foolish, he would find them written out for him
in advance. The process of selection would be all. The immense amount of
writing would cease. Authors would be extinct. Thinkers could find their
ideas stated in the best possible way, and the most effective arguments
in their favor. If this event seems at all unlikely to any one, let him
only reflect on the long geological ages, and on the innumerable
writings, short and long, now published daily,--from Mr. Buckle to the
newspapers. Estimate everything in type daily throughout Christendom. If
so much is done in a day, how much in a few decades of centuries?
Surely, at our present rate, in a very conceivable length of time, the
resources of two alphabets would be exhausted. And this may be the
reason and providence in the amount of writing now going on,--to get
human language written up. The earth is as yet not half explored, and
its cultivation and development, in comparison with what shall some time
be, have scarcely begun. Will not the race be blessed, when its two
mortal foes, Nature and the alphabet, have been finally and forever
subdued?

This necessary finiteness of literature may be illustrated in another
way. An English mathematician of the seventeenth century applied the
resources of his art to an enumeration of human ideas. He believed that
he could calculate with rigorous exactness the number of ideas of which
the human mind is susceptible. This number, according to him, (and he
has never been disputed,) was 3,155,760,000. Even if we allowed
a million of words to one idea, according to our present
practice,--instead of a single word to an idea, which would seem
reasonable,--still, all the possible combinations of words and ideas
would finally be exhausted. The ideas would give out, to be sure, a
million of times before the words; but the latter would meet their doom
at last. All possible ideas would then be served up in all possible ways
for all men, who could order them according to their appetites, and we
could dispense with cooks ever after. The written word would be the
finished record of all possible worlds, in gross and in detail.

But the problem whose solution has thus been attempted by desperate
suggestions has, by changing its elements, nullified our calculation. We
have been plotting to cast out the demon of books; and, lo! three other
kindred demons of quarterlies, monthlies, and newspapers have joined
fellowship with it, and our latter estate is worse than our first.
Indeed, we may anticipate the speedy fossilization and extinction of
books, while these younger broods alone shall occupy the earth. Our
libraries are already hardly more than museums, they will soon be
_mausoleums_, while all our reading is of the winged words of the
hurried contributor. Some of the most intelligent and influential men in
large cities do not read a book once a year. The Cadmean magic has
passed from the hands of hierophants into those of the people.
Literature has fallen from the domain of immortal thought to that of
ephemeral speech, from the conditions of a fine to those of a mechanical
art. The order of genius has been abolished by an all-prevailing popular
opinion. The elegance and taste of patient culture have been vulgarized
by forced contact with the unpresentable facts thrust upon us by the
ready writer. Everybody now sighs for the new periodical, while nobody
has read the literature of any single age in any single country.

How like mountain-billows of barbarism do the morning journals, reeking
with unkempt facts, roll in upon the peaceful thought of the soul! How
like savage hordes from some remote star, some nebulous chaos, that has
never yet been recognized in the cosmical world, do they trample upon
the organic and divine growths of culture, laying waste the well-ordered
and fairly adorned fields of the mind, demolishing the intellectual
highways which great engineering thinkers have constructed within us,
and reducing a domain in which poetry and philosophy, with their sacred
broods, dwelt gloriously together, to an undistinguishable level of
ruin! How helpless are we before a newspaper! We sit down to it a highly
developed and highly civilized being; we leave it a barbarian. Step by
step, blow by blow, has everything that was nobly formed within us been
knocked down, and we are made illustrations of the atomic theory of the
soul, every atom being a separate savage, after the social theory of
Hobbes. We are crazed by a multitudinousness of details, till the eye
sees no picture, the ear hears no music, the taste finds no beauty, and
the reason grasps no system. The only wonder is that the diabolical
invention of Faust or Gutenberg has not already transformed the growths
of the mind into a fauna and flora of perdition.

It was a sad barbarism when men ran wild with their own impulses, unable
to control the fierceness of instinct. It is a sadder barbarism when men
yield to every impulse from without, with no imperial dignity in the
soul, which closes the apartments against the violence of the world and
frowns away unseemly intruders. We have no spontaneous enthusiasm, no
spiritual independence, no inner being, obedient only to its own law. We
do not plough the billows of time with true beak and steady weight, but
float, a tossed cork, now one side up and now the other. We live the
life of an insect accidentally caught within a drum. Every steamer that
comes hits the drum a beat; every telegram taps it; it echoes with every
representative's speech, reverberates with every senator's more portly
effort, screams at every accident. Everything that is done in the
universe seems to be done only to make a noise upon it. Every morning,
whatsoever thing has been changed, and whatsoever thing has been
unchanged, during the night, comes up to batter its report on the
omni-audient tympanum of the universe, the drum-head of the press. And
then we are inside of it. It may be music to the gods who dwell beyond
the blue ether, but it is terrible confusion to us.

Virgil exhausted the resources of his genius in his portraiture of
Fame:--

"Fama, malum, quo non aliud velocius ullum:
Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo:
Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras,
Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit.

*** *** *** ***

Tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures.
Nocte volat coeli medio terraeque per umbram
Stridens, nec dulci declinat lumina somno."

What would he have done, had he known our modern monster, the
alphabet-tongued, steel-sinewed, kettle-lunged Rumor? It is a sevenfold
horror. The Virgilian Fame was not a mechanical, but a living thing; it
grew as it ran; it at least gave a poetical impression. Its story grew
as legends grow, full to the brim of the instincts of the popular
genius. It left its traces as it passed, and the minds of all who saw
and heard rested in delightful wonder till something new happened. But
the fact which printed Rumor throws through the atmosphere is coupled
not with, the beauty of poetry, but with the madness of dissertation.
Everybody is not only informed that the Jackats defeated the Magnats on
the banks of the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is
conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the
relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not
poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to
any abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and
prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, not by the hopes and fears
of the soul, but grows by accumulation of the dull details of prose. We
have neither the splendid bewilderments of the twelfth, nor the cold
illumination of the eighteenth century, but bewilderments without
splendor, and coldness without illumination. The world is too wide-awake
for thought,--the atmosphere is too bright for intellectual
achievements. We have the wonders and sensations of a day; but where are
the fathomless profundities, the long contemplations, and the silent
solemnities of life? The newspapers are marvels of mental industry. They
show how much work can be done in a day, but they never last more than a
day. Sad will it be when the genius of ephemerality has invaded all
departments of human actions and human motives! Farewell then to deep
thoughts, to sublime self-sacrifice, to heroic labors for lasting
results! Time is turned into a day, the mind knows only momentary
impressions, the weary way of art is made as short as a turnpike, and
the products of genius last only about as long as any mood of the
weather. Bleak and changeable March will rule the year in the
intellectual heavens.

What symbol could represent this matchless embodiment of all the
activities, this tremendous success, this frenzied public interest? A
monster so large, and yet so quick,--so much bulk combined with so much
readiness,--reaching so far, and yet striking so often! Who can conceive
that productive state of mind in which some current fact is all the time
whirling the universe about it? Who can understand the mania of the
leader-writer, who never thinks of a subject without discovering the
possibility of a column concerning it,--who never looks upon his plate
of soup without mentally reviewing in elaborate periods the whole
vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms?

But what is the advantage of newspapers? Forsooth, popular intelligence.
The newspaper is, in the first place, the legitimate and improved
successor of the fiery cross, beacon-light, signal-smoking summit,
hieroglyphic mark, and bulletin-board. It is, in addition to this, a
popular daily edition and application of the works of Aristotle, St.
Thomas Aquinas, Lord Bacon, Vattel, and Thomas Jefferson. On one page it
records items, on the other it shows the relations between those items
and the highest thought. Yet the whole circle is accomplished daily. The
journal is thus the synopticized, personified, incarnate madness of the
day,--for to-day is always mad, and becomes a thing of reason only when
it becomes yesterday. A proper historical fact is one of the rarest
shots in the journalist's bag, as time is sure to prove. If we had
newspaper-accounts of the age of Augustus, the chances are that no other
epoch in history would be so absolutely problematical, and Augustus
himself would be lucky, if he were not resolved into a myth, and the
journal into sibylline oracles. The dissertational department is equally
faulty; for to first impressions everything on earth is chameleon-like.
The Scandinavian Divinities, the Past, the Present, and the Future,
could look upon each other, but neither of them upon herself. But in the
journal the Present is trying to behold itself; the same priestess
utters and explains the oracle. Thus the journal is the immortal
reproduction of the _jour des dupes_. The editors are like the newsboys,
shouting the news which they do not understand.

The public mind has given itself up to it. It claims the right to
pronounce all the newspapers very bad, but has renounced the privilege
of not reading them. Every one is made _particeps criminis_ in the
course of events. Nothing takes place in any quarter of the globe
without our assistance. We have to connive at _omne scibile_. About
everything natural and human, infernal and divine, there is a general
consultation of mankind, and we are all made responsible for the result.
Yet this constant interruption of our private intellectual habits and
interests is both an impertinence and a nuisance. Why send us all the
crudities? Why call upon us till you know what you want? Why speak till
you have got your brain and your mouth clear? Why may we not take the
universe for granted when we get up in the morning, instead of
proceeding directly to measure it over again? Once a year is often
enough for anybody but the government to hear anything about India,
China, Patagonia, and the other flaps and coat-tails of the world. Let
the North Pole never be mentioned again till we can melt the icebergs by
a burning mirror before we start. Don't report another asteroid till the
number reaches a thousand; that will be time enough for us to change our
peg. Let us hear nothing of the small speeches, but Congress may publish
once a week a bulletin of what it has done. The President and Cabinet
may publish a bulletin, not to exceed five lines, twice a week, or on
rare occasions and in a public emergency once a day. The right, however,
shall be reserved to the people to prohibit the Cabinet from saying
anything more aloud on a particular public question, till they have
settled it. Let no mail-steamer pass between here and Europe oftener
than once a month,--let all other steamers be forbidden to bring news,
and the utterance of news by passengers be treated either as a public
libel or nuisance, or as high treason. Leave the awful accidents to the
parties whom they concern, and don't trouble us, unless they have the
merit of novelty as well as of horror. Tell us only the highest facts,
the boldest strokes, the critical moments of daily chaos, and save us
from multitudinous nonsense.

There are some things which we like to keep out of the
newspapers,--whose dignity is rather increased by being saved from them.
There are certain momentary and local interests which have become shy of
the horn of the reporter. The leading movements in politics, the
advanced guard of scientific and artistic achievement, the most
interesting social phenomena rather increase than diminish their
importance by currency in certain circles instead of in the press. The
prestige of some events in metropolitan cities, a marriage or a party,
depends on their social repute, and they are ambitiously kept out of
the journalist's range. Moreover, in politics, a few leading men meet
together for consultation, and----but the mysteries of political
strategy are unknown here. Certainly the journalist has great influence
in them, but the clubs are centres of information and discussions of a
character and interest to which all that newspapers do is second-rate.
Science has never been popularized directly by the newspapers, but the
erudition of a _savant_ reaches to the people by creating an atmospheric
change, in which task the journals may have their influence. Rightly or
wrongly, the administration in civil affairs at Washington has not
listened to the press much, but it may be different when a new election
approaches. The social, political, scientific, and military Dii Majores
all depend on the journal for a part of their daily breakfast, but all
soar above it.

A well-known and rather startling story describes a being, which seems
to have been neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, which a man made out of the
elements, by the use of his hands, and by the processes of chemistry,
and which at the last galvanic touch rushed forth from the laboratory,
and from the horrified eyes of its creator, an independent, scoffing,
remorseless, and inevitable enemy of him to whose rash ingenuity it owed
its origin.

Such a creature symbolizes some of our human arts and initiations. Once
organized by genius and consecrated by precedent, they become mighty
elements in history, revelling amid the wealthy energy of life,
exhausting the forces of the intellect, clipping the tendrils of
affection, becoming colossal in the architecture of society and dorsal
in its traditions, and tyrannizing with the heedless power of an
element, to the horror of the pious soul which called it into existence,
over all departments of human activity. Such an art, having passed a
period of tameless and extravagant dominance, at length becomes a
fossil, and is regarded only as an evidence of social upheaving in a
remote and unaccountable age.

To charge such a creature with monstrosity during the period of its
power is simply to expose one's self to popular jeers. Having immense
respect for majorities in this country, we only venture obscurely to
hint, that, of all arts, none before has ever been so threatening,
curious, and fascinating a monster as that of printing. We merely
suggest the hypothesis, novel since some centuries, that old Faustus and
Gutenberg were as much inspired by the Evil One as they have been fabled
to be, when they carved out of a mountain of ore the instrument yclept
type, to completely exhaust the possibilities of which is of late
announced as the sum of human destiny. They lived under the
hallucination of dawning literature, when printed books implied sacred
and classical perfection; and they could by no means have foreseen the
royal folios of the "New York Herald" and "Tribune," or the marvellous
inanities about the past, present, and future, which figure in an
indescribable list of duodecimo fiction, theology, and popular science.

But there is nothing so useless as to protest against a universal
fashion. Every epoch must work out its own problem in its own way; and
it may be that it is appointed unto mankind to work through all possible
mistakes as the condition of finally attaining the truth. The only way
is, to encourage the spirit of every age, to hurry on the climax. The
practical _reductio ad absurdum_ and consequent explosion will soon
accomplish themselves.

But a more palpable reason against protesting is, that literature in its
different branches, now as ever, commands the services of the finest
minds. It is the literary character, of which the elder Disraeli has
written the natural history, which now as ever creates the books, the
magazines, the newspapers. That sanctified bookworm was the first to
codify the laws, customs, habits, and idiosyncrasies of literary men. He
was the Justinian of the life of genius. He wandered in abstraction
through the deserted alcoves of libraries, studying and creating the
political economy of thought. What long diversities of character, what
mysterious realms of experience, what wild waywardness of heavenly
endowments, what heroism of inward struggle, what shyness towards
society, what devotion to the beckoning ideal of art, what defeats and
what triumphs, what sufferings and joys, both in excess, were revealed
by him, the great political economist of genius! In his apostolic view,
genius alone consecrated literature, and made a literary life sacred.
Genius was to him that peculiar and spontaneous devotion to letters
which made its possessor indifferent to everything else. For a man
without this heavenly stamp to engage in literature was simply for him
to rush upon his fate, and become a public nuisance. Literature in its
very nature is precarious, and must be plucked from the brink of fate,
from the mouth of the dragon. The literary man runs the risk of being
destroyed in a thousand ways. He has no track laid, no instituted aids,
no specified course of action. The machineries of life are not for him.
He enters into no one of the departments of human routine. He has no
relations with the course of the dull world; he is not quite a man, as
the world goes, and not at all an angel, as the celestials see. He must
be his own motive, path, and guide, his own priest, king, and law. The
world may be his footstool, and may be his slough of despond, but is
never his final end. His aims are transcendental, his realm is art, his
interests ideal, his life divine, his destiny immortal. All the old
theories of saintship are revived in him. He is in the world, but not of
it. Shadows of infinitude are his realities. He sees only the starry
universe, and the radiant depths of the soul. Martyrdom may desolate,
but cannot terrify him. If he be a genius, if his soul crave only his
idea, and his body fare unconsciously well on bread and water, then his
lot is happy, and fortune can present no ills which will not shrink
before his burning eye. But if he be less than this, he is lost, the
sport of devouring elements. As he fights fate on the border of ruin, so
much the more should he be animated by courage, ambition, pride,
purpose, and faith. To him literature is a high adventure, and
impossible as a profession. A profession is an instituted department of
action, resting upon universal and constant needs, and paying regular
dividends. But the fine arts must in their nature be lawless.
Appointments cannot be made for them any more than for the
thunder-storms which sweep the sky. They die when they cease to be wild.
Literary life, at its best, is a desperate play, but it is with guineas,
and not with coppers, to all who truly play it. Its elements would not
be finer, were they the golden and potent stars of alchemistic and
astrological dreams.

Such was genius, and such was literature, in the representation of their
first great lawgiver. But the world has changed. The sad story of the
calamities of authors need not be repeated. We live in the age of
authors triumphant. By swiftly succeeding and countless publications
they occupy the eye of the world, and achieve happiness before their
death. The stratagems of literature mark no longer a struggle between
genius and the bailiffs. What was once a desperate venture is now a
lucrative business. What was once a martyrdom is now its own reward.
What once had saintly unearthliness is now a powerful motor among
worldly interests. What was once the fatality of genius is now the
aspiration of fools. The people have turned to reading, and have become
a more liberal patron than even the Athenian State, monastic order, or
noble lord. No longer does the literary class wander about the streets,
gingerbread in its coat-pockets, and rhymes written on scraps of paper
from the gutter in its waistcoat-pockets. No longer does it unequally
compete with clowns and jockeys for lordly recognition. No longer are
the poet and the fool court-rivals. No longer does it look forward to
the jail as an occasional natural resting-place and paradise. No longer
must the author renounce the rank and robe of a gentleman to fall from
airy regions far below the mechanical artists to the level of
clodhoppers, even whose leaden existence was a less precarious matter.
The order of scholars has ceased to be mendicant, vagabond, and eremite.
It no longer cultivates blossoms of the soul, but manufactures objects
of barter. Now is the happy literary epoch, when to be intellectual and
omniscient is the public and private duty of every man. To read
newspapers by the billion and books by the million is now the common
law. We can conceive of Disraeli moaning that the Titan interests of the
earth have overthrown the celestial hierarchy,--that the realm of genius
has been stormed by worldly workers,--that literature, like the angels,
has fallen from its first estate,--and that authors, no longer the
disinterested and suffering apostles, of art, have chosen rather to bear
the wand of power and luxury than to be inspired. We can imagine his
horror at the sacrilegious vulgarization of print, that people without
taste rush into angelic metre, that dunces and sages thrive together on
the public indiscrimination. How would he marvel to see literary
reputations born, grow old, and die within a season, the owners thereof
content to be damned or forgotten eternally for a moment's incense or an
equally fugitive shilling. Nectar and ambrosia mean to them only
meanness, larceny, sacrilege, and bread and butter.

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