The Atlantic Monthly | Page 2

deduxere." These were successive
symptoms of the growing malady. But where there was one writer in
the time of 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
mediæval 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