• THE IMPERISHABLENESS OF MODERN LITERATURE.
MR. MORLEY, in returning thanks at the Academy dinner on behalf of Literature, ended a bright little speech by calling it "the happiest of all callings, and the most imperishable of all arts." Mr. Morley, when in his natural position, either as litterateur or literary orator, does not scatter his epithets out of a pepper-box; and these two coming from him gave us at first a sensation of surprise. There seems little reason why literature should be the happiest of callings,—why, that is, the production of a book should cause more pleasure to the producer than the production of a picture, a statue, or a building. The desire to create, so intense with those who have the faculty of creation, is fully gratified in either achievement, and the work done is as great in the eyes of the doer in the one case as in the other. The sculptor loves the thing he has made at least as much as the author; and the architect, we suspect, is often more blindly attached to his creation than either. We should ourselves hold, and so would Mr. Morley, that, ceteris paribus, the book was the nobler work ; bat the painter would angrily deny it; the sculptor would only smile, being conscious in England of imperfect apprecia- tion; while the architect would swear aloud : and it is the feeling of the artist himself, not of his audience, from which his happiness must spring. We should say that timong artists, the great composer—and the speaker was not at the moment thinking of the little folk, though he loves them so much in politics—must be the happiest, for he not only creates a work, not only makes of his thought a living reality, but enjoys in the very act of creation an exquisite sensuous delight unknown to the man who writes or paints, or carves or builds. While his rivals must wait to complete their work before they can fully enjoy, the great composer is enchanted with every note. A moment's reflection, however, told us that the epithet was partly dictated by personal his- tory, and that one who had quitted literature for politics, and those the gritty politics of to-day, must feel with poignant regret the loss of happiness that, to all but a few men of eager ambition, such a change must involve. It is a sad lot for a thinking man to exchange the library for the bull-ring, and Mr. Morley, who has done it, is a thinking man.
Then there is the adjective "imperishable." It seems at first sight infelicitous, for of all literature, 90 per cent. at least must die like an actor's work, leaving behind nothing but a vague memory, which also will pass away. The journalist's work ends at once, even if it has had, as so little of his work has, some effect for the hour; and so do most books, even if they have in them the quality of distinction. Ninety- nine per cent. of them will perish, lingering only on the shelves of great collections, as unread and as unremembered of mankind as if they had been physically lost like the book of the prophet Iddo, which might, who knows ? had it survived, have yielded him reverence for ever. Nothing dies in a spiritual sense, unless it be the mind stricken with idiotcy, so completely as the book of which only its paper and print remain. Mr. Morley, however, was not thinking of literature as a whole, but of that minute per-centage of literary work which does in truth survive, as the " Prometheus " has survived, or the Book of Job, a living possession for genera- tions; and of such his epithet may be found to be even strangely true. The Book of Job will outlast the Pyramids, and the Mad will survive every Greek statue as it has already sur- vived every Greek picture. Ancient literature has come down from the past, though the past is separated from us by such cataclysmal occurrences; and there are conditions attaching to modern literature which secure to it imperishableness such as no other art can enjoy. Alone among the arts, it possesses, involved in its very life, that supernatural quality given, the men of science say, to the original monad, the quality un- traceable, but all-powerful, which ensures through the ages the survival of the fittest. The inferior statue may last like "the atone that breathes and struggles, the brass that seems to speak ;" and indeed the oldest statue on earth, the wooden Sheikh of Memphis, is very like a fifth-rate ship's figure-head; and the amazing picture with which Sir Coutts Lindsay has this year adorned his gallery may survive the Sistine Madonna or the Monna Lisa. Some Scotch cottages will outlive the greatest triumphs of modern architecture, perishing only as rocks perish ; and if any music outlasts a millennium—and, remember, all ancient music has perished, and some of it was produced by Greeks—it may as well be a jingle loved of the populace as the noblest oratorio. But a poor book is a book born with a mortal disease, and in literature the best survives. Moreover, under modern con- ditions, this one art, alone among arts, suffers no loss from repetition. The best replica is but inferior work, lacking at least something of the spontaneity of the original, while from almost every copy the life once there has departed ; but if, ten thousand years hence, the printer should reproduce "Crossing the Bar," it will be the same as when Tennyson threw his swan-song, all unconscious of its surpassing beauty even when judged by his own work, before an instantly appreciating world. We mention that little poem because the world cannot so change, while man retains his present nature, as to cease to understand its meaning or fail to sympathise with its emotion; and as to all other conditions of intelligibility, and therefore of imperishableness, literature has before it novel chances. Mr. Morley's speech at the Academy banquet may be understood five thousand years hence. It is just conceivable that " Anarchy " may win, and that civilisation may be buried amidst the hot lava thrown out in an outburst of the social volcanco which some think exists below modern society; or that the Chinese, getting rifles, may overwhelm Europe under showers of bullets poured upon her from human machines. It is, however, more probable that the brain will govern the hand, as it has always hitherto done; that Spartacus will be defeated when triumph seems in- evitable; and that the white man will successfully call on Science to hurl back his yellow adversary. The locusts are never less than millions, but they never, extinguish any- thing, not even the grass of the fields. If no such catastrophe occurs, literature should endure as it has never yet endured, for its former grand enemy, the alteration of human speech, has been shorn of half its power, or even conceivably of all. There will be, failing the Chinese, no such cataclysm in the means of transmitting human thought as was produced by the barbarian conquest, and the inrush which accompanied it of Northern speech upon the old literary tongues. Language, no doubt, used even in peace to alter rapidly ; but that was when its form depended mainly on oral tradition, and when districts could be so secluded that the utterance of each could grow unintelligible to any other in one generation, as it does, they say, among the Negro tribes of Africa, and the wandering warrior clans which still survive in North America. Language alters slowly now, and we understand Shakespeare almost every word, though the time which has elapsed since he wrote—say three hundred years—sufficed to change Anglo-Saxon into the tongue of Chaucer, a tongue so nearly our own that five-sixths of his poetry would be understood if read aloud in a London Board school. Printing, among its other services, has fixed language; intercommunication is making the fixity greater; and while the spoken dialects vary quickly, the language of literature may become as persistent as printed character. We are hardly conscious of change as we read the "Paradise Lost;" nor, as every school hands on the tradition, is it certain that in the year A.D. 5000 any one who calls his language English will need, if he wishes to study " Locksley Hall," to seek the assistance of a glossary. New words there will be in thousands; but the old will be comprehended still. That, if we are right, is a guarantee for the imperishableness of literature such as the world has never yet enjoyed. So, too, we may fairly hope will be the enormously increased number of those who can understand. We all forget, when we speak of the preservation of written literature, how exceedingly small in all ages but our own must have been the caste to which that preservation was due. Before the invention of printing, was the Iliad, think you, ever accessible to ten thousand persons all living at any one time,—persons, that is who could at once read, obtain the manuscripts needful, and understand them when read? Fifty millions now possess, can read, and understand the English translation of the Psalms, and before two centuries have elapsed, there will be two hundred millions in the same position. That all should lose that won- derful possession, that all should fail to hand it on, that all should lose interest in its study, is almost inconceivable ; and till they do, that small body of poetry at least must retain the quality Mr. Morley intended his epithet to imply. He did not quite mean "imperishableness" in its literal sense, for that is not a quality to be predicated even of a potsherd, the despised thing which, of all known products of human skill, endures the longest, being, in fact, as indestructible as the clay of which it is made ;* but he did mean durability beyond any period to which man can clearly see. We use the translation of the Psalms as our illustration designedly, because it is almost sure, or quite sure, to escape the only new danger which threatens the durability of books. It will not be buried under the mountains of printed matter which, as the centuries roll on, will accumulate until the world grows weary, and the tired brain of humanity exults in its for- getfulness of literature as it exults in sleep. Already men are subdividing their attention to books, and within a few hundred years that subdivision will be carried so far that some works which ought to live may drop, as it were, acci- dentally down through the chinks. The mass of good poetry, for example, may be so overwhelming that Fitzgerald's " Omar Khayyam," a little volume in its way unique and priceless, may be as if neither the Persian Sufee nor his English adorer had ever set foot on earth. That danger will, however, spare most great books; and we agree with what we believe to have been Mr. Morley's thought, though he used words which half- conceal it in their unavoidable exaggeration, that a great book produced to-morrow would have every chance of surviving every artistic work of this generation, even if we include among artistic works the specimen of Cyclopean architecture which Lord Salisbury described at the same banquet as "the red house on the Embankment."
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