IMMORTALITY IN LITERATURE

“Come l’uom s’eterna”

Now that the immortals in literature have been caught and measured; now that we know that they fill not more than five feet of shelf room, we may be pardoned for asking a question or two as to how they “arrived,” what their chances are for “staying put,” and whether the place for classics is inevitably “upon the shelf.” These are of course awkward questions, but there are other regions beside heaven which one must be as a little child to enter—the Garden of Understanding among them.

It is in a certain sense a positive relief to find that the really persistent literature of the past is so compressible, and it is reassuring as one looks forward to the long future, to think that the people towards the end of time will not be so unimaginably burdened with the deathless monuments of their past; although when one multiplies five feet, the sediment of five millennia, by x, the classic library of the end of things seems to us of this unheroic age, a trifle depressing. Of course, the men of the Ultima Thule of time may take their classics less seriously, and it may be that they will find less of a gap than we between the thoughts and speech of the immortals and those of daily intercourse. But since the immortals die not, there is no escaping their accumulation.

Yet after all, come to think of it, there is a good deal of an assumption in the assertion that our five feet of immortals are all going to perch upon that last library shelf. There have been immortals of the past who failed to reach even our days; had they all fulfilled their promise and the prophecies of their friends, the publishers would not be willing to let us buy our modest set of unquestionable classics on monthly payments without the guarantee of our great grandchildren. Paradoxical as it may seem, many immortals have proved mortal, and the deathless have died. We must lay this troublesome fact to the loose speech of our forefathers. They were hyperbolic now and then, and they dubbed a volume immortal without stopping to think whether the twentieth century A. D. would also find it interesting, and so, of course, really immortal. Humanity has been fallible in the past, and the result is that we are forced most unscientifically to accept contradictory ideas with gravity—in short, to speak of “relative immortality.” The work that outlives its contemporaries is, we may admit, relatively deathless. Such a statement makes no prophecy, however, as to the remote future. Relative immortality merely means that a work goes on interesting for a few years, a generation or two, a century or more. It is only the simon pure immortal who will not have to get up at the sound of Gabriel’s trump. Blessed relief—the final shelf of unforgettable classics may be only five feet long after all, and may be even shorter!

Naturally, your enduring work must have a strong constitution; it must have all the characteristics of a live creature except the power of growth within itself, and, alas, of propagating its kind. Perhaps one might liken it to the Leyden jar which we of the older generation used to read of in our physics—I do not know whether it is remembered now-a-days. It has a charge of electricity of more or less strength, and it has a retaining capacity of more or less endurance, so that to touch it as the ages pass, is to receive a spark of life.

Many a work has started out with a tremendous appeal to its first audience, but has not been able to hold its second or third. The first night is not always a sure test of the length of a “run.” Such a work had a momentary word to speak which was appropriate, which came as pat as Vice in the old comedy; but like a jest called out by a passing event, it raised its crackle of laughter and died. One need not go far to find examples. Mrs. Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho is pigeonholed here; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle are tied by the same tape, in spite of a certain uncanny habit of reappearance of Mrs. Stowe’s painful tale. Much literature of this sort is, of course, temporarily valuable; but Time promptly and wisely puts it into the wallet at his back. Without endurance, fame is as the fire of thorns under the pot; without vitality, naught can endure.

As a matter of fact a work need not be brutally vital to have a fair chance at long life. It must interest somebody very much indeed. Of course, the great immortals start out in life popular in the best sense; but there are lesser immortals too. One does not have to be Dante or Shakespeare to win out. So long as the second class passengers persist in interesting a few hearers on the various stages of the road, they will not be forgotten. They may be, as they usually are, caviare to the general, but they find from age to age fit audience. Poets like Horace and Spenser and Blake, the authors of Emma or Cranford may cross the final line side by side with their great competitors. And some of us who venture diffident prophecy, expect greater endurance for Mr. Robert Frost and his shy North of Boston than for the dramatic anachronisms of the late Stephen Phillips, or the epic longueurs of Mr. Alfred Noyes. Long life in literature concerns itself with the length of Clotho’s thread, and not at all with the question as to whether it be labelled “No. 60” or “No. 90.”

But to have transcended its own time by a generation or so is no promise of immortality. Every work if not hopelessly tangled in the perishabilities of its own age, is liable to be so tangled in those of its own century or epoch. How often have men watched with exultation the endurance of a work, and jumped to conclusions, when wisdom would have recognized that it could last only while certain ideals or moods prevailed. Was not Byron a god for a generation? But, alas, as the waters of time rose, he found himself caught in the eel-grass of romanticism, and pulled under. And did not the Romance of the Rose hold men bound by its myriad lines for centuries—and where is it now? Dusty upon dusty shelves. Its voice was that of Mediævalism, not of humanity. It perished with the conventions and provincialism of its era.

The time never was when a new work appeared to the world without some external circumstance to modify for good or ill its early reputation. Even the “anonymous” early ballads must have depended at first in some measure upon the impression of “good time” which lingered in the minds of the junketers among whom they sprang up. Even the Iliad or the Song of Roland must have gained or lost according to the effectiveness of the reciter or the social status of the patron. And to-day it is a thousand times truer than ever before, that at the start the genuine fame which endures is bound up with much that is purely factitious.

A new book comes to birth and finds a waiting world to welcome, but not impartial in its attitude. Have not the friends and family announced the arrival in joyful and ringing tones? Advertiser and advance reviewer have been busy; the publisher now-a-days is preëminently efficient. The result is a sort of pre-natal notoriety built up regardless of real worth. The advertising campaign may be likened to an attack by gas-bombs on the reading public; but fortunately from long experience a large part of the public has provided itself with a tolerably good supply of masks to receive the assault, and—to finish the figure with all possible despatch—“waits till the clouds roll by.”

Then for the first time, the work gradually emerges for what it is worth. The public reads and judges; recommends it to its friends, or warns them off; and speaks the fateful word, which if it is favorable, leads others to read, and at least makes strangers admit that the book is “well spoken of.” Here is real fame, still struggling for existence, yet independent of the handicaps of early puffing. Yet it must be said in all fairness that the early puffing, with its manufactured audience, hastens for the good book the chance for genuine fame; and makes more decisive the collapse of the poor book, by bringing sooner to proof the pinchbeck prophecies.

But even then the new book has got to stand up against convictions and prejudices, conventions and dogmas. The public at large—and incidentally the professional critic—wants more of “the same thing,” more like that of its earlier loves and admirations. Figures of previous experience rise in the readers’ minds with malicious menaces against the upstart—Dickens, Austen or Trollope; Ward, Sinclair or Tarkington; perhaps Fielding or Goldsmith—figures moribund or vigorous still, all are alert to impose “has been” upon “to be.” Let the new book differ at its peril; it becomes easily “revolutionary,” “decadent,” “not art”—is damned, in short, unless, by a curious freak of the moment, it takes the world by storm through its very “freshness.” And even then Kipling joins the ring, and henceforth struggles to impose the Kiplingesque. Such dangers, such threats—mostly unreal when brought to the proof—the new book must live through. The vigorous and vital book will be unabashed, for its claims to long life must rest on stronger virtues than conformity or non-conformity.

The ages confirm with Jovian nod the trite fact that every period has a general cast of opinion about any literary work. San Francisco may not accept the same order among “the best sellers” as New York, nor New York as London; yet we accept the unity of age in our use of older epithets, such as “Elizabethan” and “Victorian,” even while we overlook it in the hurlyburly of the present. It is a complicated and, perhaps, ultimately, an inexplicable phenomenon; but strong leadership plays its part in clarifying and fixing the momentary appraisement. Let Dr. Johnson or the Edinburgh Review utter a critical judgment, and society follows like the traditional flock of sheep. If such notorious dictatorship is rare in our larger world, there are yet many smaller Judges and Prophets scattered abroad, apparent mouthpieces of the Zeitgeist. We are all familiar with the small theatre party. One or two members have definite ideas about the play and its presentation, and the rest experience all the sensations but are more or less neutral. The neutrals inevitably fall in behind the leaders, and the whole party is easily unanimous. Such in miniature is the working of the critical leadership at large. The only requirement is, that the leader must not be too far ahead or behind his time. Thus it would have taken more than Dryden to make Whitman a success in the days of the Restoration; and we can hardly fancy Jeffreys forcing The Widow in the Bye Street upon the Edinburgh subscribers. But as all real leadership is moderate, neat unity seems to be fairly easy to the backward look.

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.