The Atlantic Monthly | Page 2

Geyler, there are a million now. He saw both health and disease, and could distinguish between them. We see only the latter. Skill in letters, half a decade of centuries ago, was a miraculous attainment, and placed its possessor in the rank of divines and diviners; now, inability to read and write is accounted, with pauperism and crime, a ground for civil disfranchisement. The old feudal merry and hearty ignorance has been everywhere corrupted by books and newspapers, learning and intelligence, the cabalistic words of modern life. Popular poetry and music, ballads and legends, wit and originality have disappeared before the barbaric intellectuality of our Cadmean idolatry. Even the arts of conversation and oratory are waning, and may soon be lost; we live only in second and silent thoughts: for who will waste fame and fortune by giving to his friends the gems which will delight mankind? and how can a statesman grapple eloquently with Fate, when the contest is not to be determined on the spot, but by quiet and remote people coolly reading his speech several hours or days later? Even if we were vagarying into imbecility, like the wildest Neo-Platonic hierophants, like the monkish chroniclers of the Middle Ages, like other romantic and fantastic theorists who have leaped out of human nature into a purely artificial realm, we should not know it, because we are all doing it uniformly.
The universe is a veiled Isis. The human mind from immemorial antiquity has ceased to regard it. A small cohort of alphabets has enrobed it with a wavy texture of letters, beyond which we cannot penetrate. The glamour is upon us, and when we would see the facts of Nature, we behold only tracts of print. The God of the heavens and earth has hidden Himself from us since we gave ourselves up to the worship of the false divinities of Phoenicia. No longer can we admire the cosmos; for the cosmos lies beyond a long perspective of theorems and propositions that cross our eyes, like countless bees, from the alcoves of philosophies and sciences. No longer do we bask in the beauty of things, as in the sunlight; for when we would melt in feeling, we hear nothing but the rattling of gems of verse. No longer does the mind, as sympathetic priest and interpreter, hover amid the phenomena of time and space; for the forms of Nature have given place to volumes, there are no objects but pages, and passions have been supplanted by paragraphs. We no longer see the whirling universe, or feel the pulsing of life. Thought itself has ceased to be a sprite, and flows through the mind only in the leaden shape of printed sentences. The symbolism of letters is over us all. An all-pervading nominalism has completely masked whatsoever there is that is real. More and more it is not the soul and Nature, but the eye and print, whose resultant is thought. Nature disappears and the mind withers. No other faculty has been developed in man but that of the reader, no other possibility but that of the writer. The old-fashioned arts which used to imply human nature, which used to blossom instinctively, which have given joy and beauty to society, are fading from the face of the earth. Where are the ancient and medi?val popular games, those charming vital symptoms? The people now read Dickens and Longfellow. Where are the old-fashioned instincts of worship and love, consolation and mourning? The people have since found an antidote for these experiences in Blair and Tupper, and other authors of renown. Where are those weird voices of the air and forest and stream, those symptoms of an enchanted Nature, which used to thrill and bless the soul of man? The duller ear of men has failed to hear them in this age of popular science.
Literature, using the word with a benevolent breadth of meaning which excludes no pretenders, is the result of the invasion of letters. It is the fort which they occupy, which with too hasty consideration has usually been regarded as friendly to the human race. Religions, laws, sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality, surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed the final grace of being forgotten; and omniscience is becoming at once more and more impossible and more and more fashionable. Whoever reads only the books of his own time is superficial in proportion to the thickness of the ages. But neither the genius of man, nor his