DEPRAVATION OF LITERATURE.
IN the review of the State of the Country, in the last Quarterly, there is a representation of the character of the literary appetite, and the literary supply, which is, in our opinion, strictly accurate. The days of learned works, of profound inquiries, patient researches, and anxious deductions, are past never to return, but consequently on a shock which may bring things back to rude beginnings, and repeal the whole progress of civilization. It is not an agreeable truth, that depravation is a condition of diffusion. As knowledge becomes common, its qua- lity is reduced. Instead of essences, the decoction is the form of intel- lectual nourishment applicable to the many. The times of learned works, or performances finished ad unguem, have been the periods of narrow literary circles ; and as the circle has spread, its food has de- teriorated. The same operation has attended the enlargement of the sphere of letters which has followed the increased size of theatres,— the vulgar predominate ; and theirs is the dictatorial taste, as they are loudest in their censure and readiest with their applause. When men wrote for the smaller coteries of cultivated taste, they relied on an appreciation sooner or later of the finer excellencies they might labour to achieve. Now everything must be done in gross, salient and pal- pable, or it escapes observation. Where the many are, their voice is necessary to the vanity of the aspirant ; and if he cannot obtain it by the means consonant with his own better taste, he will make that taste bend to the given turn of the popular palate. BAYLE, even in his time, deplored the depraving tendency of an increasing reading public ; and declared that the first two volumes of his. Dictionary were his pride, for they were composed for the closet of the learned, but the rest were written for the market. As perfection is concerned, the increase of the literary demand is an evil, and a cureless evil ; but it is not to be de- nied that the wider spread of the inferior productions is a benefit to the world, exceeding that of performances intrinsically of infinitely greater excellence, but only accessible within a very confined circle. It is better for the community that every man should have a mouthful, than that one in ten thousand should enjoy a feast while the rest starve. The Quarterly Review thus describes the roving and superficial cha- racter of the present reading.
" Books are found in every house and on every table, and are resorted to on all occasions when there is nothing else to do. But, though the stream of knowledge has become wider, it has not always become deeper, or more fructifying as it flows. It must be confessed that the present age is unfa- vourable to severe or persevering study. The Greeks had no other litera- ture than their own, enriched with the little they had gleaned from Egypt; the Romans had no other than that of Greece ; and, till within the last fifty years, the learning of a well-read person was confined to that of Greece and Rome, a few of the most celebrated Italian, French, and Spanish writers, and a limited selection from the works published in our own language. To these languages German must now be added ; and in each of them, a list of authors of celebrity might be drawn up, whose works it would require the lifetime of a laborious student to digest. In addition to this, the sciences of agriculture, natural history in all its branches, mechanics, chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, have either been created or exceedingly extended. To master all this is impossible. No perseverance can toil through such a mass, nor me- mory retain it. Besides this, the press teems with new systems, manuals, and abridgments, many of them excellent in their kind, and conveying knowledge more easily, simply, or compendiously. than before, but.certainkt not exercising the powers of the mind so effectually as the original authoe would do from whose works they are compiled. Feeling themselves withott time or strength to embrace the vast field of knowledge now expanded befon them, readers give up profound and systematic application in despair, ant betake themselves to works of a subordinate character, which furnish then with what information they immediately want, or which present science 01 literature in a ready and familiar, form. However convenient this sort of reading may be, it has little tendency to strengthen and enlarge the under standing. A person becomes a mere living dictionary, unless the acqUisition of knowledge has been accompanied with that exertion of his own faculties, by which alone it can be turned to profit. It is the substitution of mere knowledge, for the power of saying and doing that which is fit, which, more than anything besides, contributes to stamp this the age of moderate men, and to render the existing state of society so unfavourable to every sort of extraordinary excellence. Every one is expected to know so much, and gc so much into company, in order either to rise in the world or become knowt —and such encroachments are made upon every one's leisure by his famil, and friends—that few have the opportunity of making great acquirement., and fewer still have the power of turning these to profit. By these meant, the qualifications of readers are reduced below their former standard, aid they bring to the perusal of a book neither the taste nor the judgment of which authors, in former days, had the fear before their eyes. No person willingly sits down to a piece of close or continued reasoning. It is not thought necessary to be oppressed with too many facts at once, and, uriess argument is conveyed in an entertaining form, it will not be listened to at ill."
It represents, and with equal force and truth, a concomitant change in authorship.
"A change similar to that which has taken place among readers has tfken place among authors also. Most of the class are so impatient to reap the reward of their labours, or so apprehensive of being supplanted by comieti- tors for public favour, that few are willing to bestow the time and troThle which are necessary for the composition of a standard work. Nor, when sich works happen to be produced, do the writers of them obtain that eminent and permanent place in public estimation which they have fairly earned. In the eyes of a refined judge, the distance between a first and a second-rate performance is equal probably to that between a second-rate one anc the lowest of all; but by the mass of what is called the literary world, it is scarcely seen and less regarded. Whoever, therefore, endeavours to rival the best models of ancient or modern times, must be sustained by his own inhe- rent love of excellence, without depending upon any other support. He must be satisfied to sink in a short time into the crowd of men who have primed books, and give place to others whom novelty, absurdity, politics, or any silly caprice of that very small and not very wise circle which calls itself tie world, may have raised into unmerited celebrity. This has sensibly degraded the whole body of those who write for public amusement or instruction ; and literature, instead of being the noblest and purest of all pursuits, adopted .rt youth and adhered to in age, for its own sake, and in the generous devoticn of a love and a passion, has sunk into a trade, which hundreds take up, ex- actly as they would cotton-spinning or coach-building."
Previous page
