The Atlantic Monthly | Page 4

anything, which make a book
possible, are still in the future. He will be fortunate, if he gets through
with them, and gets his first volume off his hands by the age of thirty.

Authors are the shortest-lived of men. Their average years are less than
fifty. Our bibliomacher has therefore twenty years left to him. Taking
all time together, since formerly authors wrote less abundantly than
now, he will not produce more than one work in five years, that is, five
works in his lifetime of fifty years. The conclusion to which this rather
precarious investigation thus brings us is, that the original cost of an
average book is ten years of a human life. And yet these ten years make
but the mere suggestion of the book. The suggestion must be developed
by an army of printers, sellers, and librarians. What other institution in
the world is there but the Bibliothèque Impériale, to the mere
suggestion of which ten millions of laborious years have been devoted?
Startling considerations present themselves. If there were no other
argumentum ad absurdum to demonstrate some fundamental perversity
and absurdity in literature, it might be suspected from the fact that
Nature herself gives so little encouragement to it. Nobody is born an
author. The art of writing, common as it is, is not indigenous in man,
but is acquired by a nearly universal martyrdom of youth. If it had been
providentially designed that the function of any considerable portion of
mankind should have been to write books, we cannot suppose that an
economical Deity would have failed to create them with innate skill in
language, general knowledge, and penmanship. These accomplishments
have to be learned by every writer, yet writers are numberless. They are
mysteries which must be painfully encountered by every one at the
vestibule of the temple of literature, which nevertheless is thronged.
Surely, had this importance and prevalence been attached to them in the
Divine scheme, they would have been born in us like the senses, or
would blossom spontaneously in us, like the corollal growths of Faith
and Conscience. We should have been created in a condition of literary
capacity, and thus have been spared the alphabetical torture of
childhood, and the academic depths of philological despair.
Twenty-five years of preliminaries might have been avoided by
changing the peg in the scale of creation, and the studies of the boy
might have begun where now they end. Twenty-five years in the span
of life would thus have been saved, had what must be a universal
acquirement been incorporated into the original programme of human
nature.

Or had the Deity appreciated literature as we do, He would probably
have written out the universe in some snug little volume, some
miniature series, or some boundless Bodleian, instead of unfolding it
through infinite space and time, as an actual, concrete, unwritten reality.
Be creation a single act or an eternal process, it would have been all a
thing of books. The Divine Mind would have revealed itself in a library,
instead of in the universe. As for men, they would have existed only in
treatises on the mammalia. There are some specimens which we hardly
think are according to any anticipation of heavenly reason, and
therefore they would not have existed at all. Nothing would have been
but God and literature. Possibly a responsible creation like ours might
have been formed, nevertheless, by making each letter a living,
thinking, moral agent; and the alphabet might thus have written out the
Divine ideas, as men now work them out. If the conception seem to any
one chilly, if it have a dreary look, if it appear to leave only a frosty
metallic base, instead of the grand oceanic effervescence of life, let him
remember how often earthly authors have renounced living realities, all
personal sympathies and pleasures, communing only with books, their
minds dwelling apart from men. Remember Tasso and Southey; ay, if
you have yourself written a book that commands admiration, remember
what it cost you. Why hesitate to transfer to the skies a type of life
which we admire here below? But God having wrought out instead of
written out His thoughts, does it not appear that He designed for men to
do likewise?
And thus a new consideration is presented. The exhibit of the original
cost of the Bibliothèque Impériale was the smallest item in our budget.
Mark the history of a book. How variously it engrosses the efforts of
the world, from the time when it first rushes into the arena of life! The
industry of printing embodies it, the energy of commerce disperses it,
the army of critics announce it, the world of readers give their days and
nights to it generation after generation, and its echoes uninterruptedly
repeat themselves