Romance | Page 3

books is to study biography and bibliography,
two sciences which between them supply the only competent and
modest part of the history of literature. To discern the significance of
men and books, to classify and explain them, is another matter. We
have not, and we never shall have, a calculus sufficient for human life
even at its weakest and poorest. Let him who conceives high hopes
from the progress of knowledge and the pertinacity of thought tame and
subdue his pride by considering, for a moment, the game of chess. That
game is played with thirty-two pieces, of six different kinds, on a board
of sixty-four squares. Each kind of piece has one allotted mode of
action, which is further cramped by severe limitations of space. The
conditions imposed upon the game are strict, uniform, and mechanical.
Yet those who have made of chess a life- long study are ready to
confess their complete ignorance of the fundamental merits of
particular moves; one game does not resemble another; and from the
most commonplace of developments there may spring up, on the
sudden, wild romantic possibilities and situations that are like miracles.
If these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the chess- board, how shall
we set a limit to the possibilities of human life, which is chess, with
variety and uncertainty many million times increased? It is prudent,
therefore, to say little of the laws which govern the course of human
history, to avoid, except for pastime, the discussion of tendencies and
movements, and to speak chiefly of men and books. If an author can be
exhibited as the effect of certain causes (and I do not deny that some
authors can plausibly be so exhibited) he loses his virtue as an author.
He thought of himself as a cause, a surprising intruder upon the routine
of the world, an original creator. I think that he is right, and that the
profitable study of a man is the study which regards him as an oddity,
not a quiddity.
A general statement of the law that governs literary history may

perhaps be borrowed from the most unreasonable of the arts--the art of
dress. One of the powerful rulers of men, and therefore of books, is
Fashion, and the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a great part of
literary history. If the history of a single fashion in dress could ever be
written, it would illuminate the literary problem. The motives at work
are the same; thoughtful wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are
all trying to do something new, within the limits assigned by practical
utility and social sympathy. Each desires to express himself and yet in
that very act to win the admiration and liking of his fellows. The great
object is to wear the weeds of humanity with a difference. Some
authors, it is true, like timid or lazy dressers, desire only to conform to
usage. But these, as M. Brunetiere remarks in one of his historical
essays, are precisely the authors who do not count. An author who
respects himself is not content if his work is mistaken for another's,
even if that other be one of the gods of his idolatry. He would rather
write his own signature across faulty work than sink into a copyist of
merit. This eternal temper of self-assertion, this spirit of invention, this
determination to add something or alter something, is no doubt the
principle of life. It questions accepted standards, and makes of reaction
from the reigning fashion a permanent force in literature. The young
want something to do; they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom
where no land remains to be taken up, nor will they allow the praise of
the dead to be the last word in criticism. Why should they paraphrase
old verdicts?
The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on a good author just dead,
when the generation that discovered him and acclaimed him begins to
pass away. Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the
younger sort, but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no
great thinker. Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was "Mr.
Pope, the new Poet," has to submit to examination by the Headmaster
of Winchester, who decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior
sense. Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who
demonstrates, with what degree of critical ability is still disputed, but
certainly in clear and vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no
capacity for tragic writing. Dante is banished, by the critics of the
Renaissance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendulum of fashion

swings to and fro, compelled, even in the shortest of its variable
oscillations, to revisit the greatest writers, who