Part 6

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.

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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.

CARLYLE AND KULTUR

I

The opinions anyone holds in this momentous crisis are largely determined by those he has imbibed from the thinkers of the past, and it is interesting to notice how much Carlyle has been brought into the discussion on both sides. A somewhat systematic consideration of the bearing of his teachings on the present war may therefore not be altogether profitless.

For many reasons he is not the sort of man to invite much attention from journalistic, academic, and dilettante writers. He is unpopular in a double sense; for he is neither superficial nor facile, and his ideas are opposed to the optimistic convictions that dominate in this generation. Some insist that he is responsible for the extravagant paradox and persistent denial of the obvious and the accepted indulged in so freely by such journalistic products as Shaw and Chesterton, but these men only imitate his manner to pervert his meaning. That they imitate him, however, is proof of his influence; for the popular writer does not imitate anyone whose repute is not of the highest.

The academic mind is indifferent or hostile to him because the formlessness of his writings and their abnormal character seem serious defects to those to whom the formal is more important than the substantial. His learning, too, while undoubtedly extensive, is not always accurate or orthodox. The king is not the "cunning or the kenning" man, and his contempt for "logic-choppers" and "word-mongers" does not commend him to such as value the theoretical above the practical.

To the dilettante he is equally repellant. He hated mediocrity and superficiality, and he had inconveniently high standards. This latter reason is the openly avowed one for hostility towards him in the case of an English writer, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, who freely denounces him in his diffuse discussions of the war, but also cites facts that tend to disprove his contention that Carlyle is without influence; for he tells of repeated experiences with British workingmen who were readers of Carlyle and ardent believers in his gospel.

Carlyle is undoubtedly a strong influence in Great Britain. The superficial regard him as a reactionary and an obscurantist who believed in despotism and serfdom, but those who live closer to the realities of life detect in his writings a passionate sympathy for the humble and the oppressed. He may not exert much influence in the learned or the artistic world, but he is certainly a social and a political force. Writers on British politics constantly refer to his influence over the more intelligent voters of the working classes, and this demonstrates power of the most pregnant kind.

Outside of Great Britain, too, there are evidences of his influence. It is mostly within the English speaking world, but some accuse him of being the progenitor of Nietzsche and his cult of the superman. This is only superficially true, however, for Nietzsche was exactly the sort of person he denounced as "quack" and "simulacrum;" but, as in the case of Shaw and Chesterton, this proves influence, even though it be of a negative sort. In the United States his _French Revolution_ has apparently had much influence in the way of making our attitude towards the past less formal and academic, and in bringing about a tendency to look more at the principles than at the facts of history. He has also given us such familiar expressions as "captains of industry," the "unspeakable Turk," and many others not generally recognized as his; and the man who fashions our daily speech gives the strongest possible proof of influence. Here, too, however, his influence is chiefly in the political and social world, and we can see the effect of his ideas in one of our most important pieces of recent legislation, the selective draft; for this act aims to realize his cardinal principle, that the necessary work of a nation shall be compulsory and shall be apportioned equitably and in such a way as to ensure each man getting the task for which he is fitted.

II

The chief question about Carlyle at present, however, is not the extent of his influence, but how far his teachings justify the theories and practices now dominant in Germany. The Germans point to his advocacy of their cause in 1870, and to his glorification of Frederick the Great, as proofs that he would approve of, and even exalt, all that they have done. The kaiser has quoted him in a widely discussed speech about "one man with God being a majority," while less prominent Germans have freely appealed to his authority. The English speaking world has seemed, on the whole, disposed to admit that Carlyle's doctrines justify, or at least tend to produce, ideas such as those that now obsess Germany. Some writers, like the Mr. Hueffer already mentioned, have seized the opportunity to belabor his memory as a traitor; while others have risen up to defend him, although they seem to do so less from conviction than a desire to deprive the Germans of support. Anyone who knows Carlyle more than superficially, however, knows that the present German policy would earn from him nothing but furious denunciation; and the reason would not be because the Germans began the war, as D. A. Wilson argues in _The Fortnightly Review_ for February, 1916, nor because he was pro-Russian, nor because of any other personal prejudice or predilection, but because the German nation today exhibits about all the vices he inveighed against as most dangerous to the peace of the world and the progress of civilization.

It would be idle to deny that Carlyle did exalt the German nation and German policies to the English-speaking world, but we shall have to qualify this exaltation if we accept Dr. Johnson's principle that an author's works need editing a generation or so after their composition. This dictum is based on the obvious necessity of recognizing that the force of what a man says is conditioned by the current opinion of his time and by his attitude towards it, and it also recognizes the truth of one of Carlyle's own observations: "It is man's nature to change his dialect from century to century; he cannot help it though he would." The dialect of the nineteenth century was not that of the twentieth, and Carlyle's use of it was affected by several things that still further obscure his meaning for us. He opposed strongly what he regarded as many popular fallacies of his time, and in opposing them he overemphasized things that seemed to him to discredit or to disprove them. To the undisciplined British populace, impatient of all control and clamoring for the removal of all restrictions on individual liberty, he extolled the docile German people; but it was not their absolute so much as their comparative virtue that he was praising, and he would have recognized that, under other circumstances, their submissiveness could prove a vice, as, indeed, it has. Another fact, pointed out by Colonel T. W. Higginson, a man whose extreme humanitarianism was calculated to make him unsympathetic towards the eulogist of Dr. Francia, is that Carlyle was a humorist and a man to whom the humorous attitude was second nature. It will be necessary, therefore, to discount his praise of the German people and of German institutions, for two reasons; the first, because it was heightened to serve as a corrective to the tendency towards license in his countrymen; and the second, because, as a humorist, and also because of his ardent temperament, he invariably indulged in over-statement.

There is much besides this to indicate that Carlyle's praise of Germany in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is anything but evidence that he would endorse Kultur and Schrecklichkeit. His fundamental teaching is that we must not be formal, rigidly logical, or addicted to any fixed method of thinking. The nature of things must be determined from their effects, and not from any external characteristics. The national attributes of any people are not permanent, but they are capable of wide variation, and much of his invective and striking metaphor was poured forth in an effort to prove that this variation is very largely a question of good or bad leadership. In sustaining this thesis he traces the history of Germany more completely than he does that of any other country; and he indicates several periods, notably that of the Thirty Years' War, and the reign of Frederick I, when Prussia, at least, was contemptible in its policies. France, too, he argues, has not always been the mischief-maker of Europe; for to him the French Revolution was a salutary outburst of the native integrity of the French people, to sweep away the intolerable hypocrisies and injustices of the Old Regime, and to improve not only French, but human society as well.

* * * * *

It is plain, therefore, that he did not affirm the Germans to be intrinsically good and the French intrinsically bad. His aim was to show that nations rise in proportion to the extent to which their purposes are just and their methods intelligent, and that they invariably fall if they deal unjustly with their own citizens or their neighbors. Sometimes he contrasted the French unfavorably with the Germans, as, for instance, when he says that the martial ardor of the French may be compared to blazing straw, while that of the Germans is more like the burning of anthracite coal. This, however, is due to his having, like a great many other people, an impression that the French are more likely to exhibit superficial and glittering qualities, while the Germans are conspicuous for the commonplace virtues of industry and thoroughness. Nothing was more insidious, in his opinion, than to prefer brilliancy to solid worth; and it was the danger of this preference he was emphasizing, more than the native depravity of the French national character, when he compared the Gallic temperament unfavorably with the Teutonic.

III