The Atlantic Monthly | Page 8

mechanical art. The order of genius
has been abolished by an all-prevailing popular opinion. The elegance
and taste of patient culture have been vulgarized by forced contact with
the unpresentable facts thrust upon us by the ready writer. Everybody
now sighs for the new periodical, while nobody has read the literature
of any single age in any single country.
How like mountain-billows of barbarism do the morning journals,
reeking with unkempt facts, roll in upon the peaceful thought of the
soul! How like savage hordes from some remote star, some nebulous
chaos, that has never yet been recognized in the cosmical world, do
they trample upon the organic and divine growths of culture, laying
waste the well-ordered and fairly adorned fields of the mind,
demolishing the intellectual highways which great engineering thinkers
have constructed within us, and reducing a domain in which poetry and

philosophy, with their sacred broods, dwelt gloriously together, to an
undistinguishable level of ruin! How helpless are we before a
newspaper! We sit down to it a highly developed and highly civilized
being; we leave it a barbarian. Step by step, blow by blow, has
everything that was nobly formed within us been knocked down, and
we are made illustrations of the atomic theory of the soul, every atom
being a separate savage, after the social theory of Hobbes. We are
crazed by a multitudinousness of details, till the eye sees no picture, the
ear hears no music, the taste finds no beauty, and the reason grasps no
system. The only wonder is that the diabolical invention of Faust or
Gutenberg has not already transformed the growths of the mind into a
fauna and flora of perdition.
It was a sad barbarism when men ran wild with their own impulses,
unable to control the fierceness of instinct. It is a sadder barbarism
when men yield to every impulse from without, with no imperial
dignity in the soul, which closes the apartments against the violence of
the world and frowns away unseemly intruders. We have no
spontaneous enthusiasm, no spiritual independence, no inner being,
obedient only to its own law. We do not plough the billows of time
with true beak and steady weight, but float, a tossed cork, now one side
up and now the other. We live the life of an insect accidentally caught
within a drum. Every steamer that comes hits the drum a beat; every
telegram taps it; it echoes with every representative's speech,
reverberates with every senator's more portly effort, screams at every
accident. Everything that is done in the universe seems to be done only
to make a noise upon it. Every morning, whatsoever thing has been
changed, and whatsoever thing has been unchanged, during the night,
comes up to batter its report on the omni-audient tympanum of the
universe, the drum-head of the press. And then we are inside of it. It
may be music to the gods who dwell beyond the blue ether, but it is
terrible confusion to us.
Virgil exhausted the resources of his genius in his portraiture of
Fame:--
"Fama, malum, quo non aliud velocius ullum: Mobilitate viget,

viresque acquirit eundo: Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras,
Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit.
*** *** *** ***
Tot linguæ, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures. Nocte volat coeli
medio terræque per umbram Stridens, nec dulci declinat lumina
somno."
What would he have done, had he known our modern monster, the
alphabet-tongued, steel-sinewed, kettle-lunged Rumor? It is a sevenfold
horror. The Virgilian Fame was not a mechanical, but a living thing; it
grew as it ran; it at least gave a poetical impression. Its story grew as
legends grow, full to the brim of the instincts of the popular genius. It
left its traces as it passed, and the minds of all who saw and heard
rested in delightful wonder till something new happened. But the fact
which printed Rumor throws through the atmosphere is coupled not
with, the beauty of poetry, but with the madness of dissertation.
Everybody is not only informed that the Jackats defeated the Magnats
on the banks of the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is
conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the
relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not
poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to any
abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and
prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, not by the hopes and fears
of the soul, but grows by accumulation of the dull details of prose. We
have neither the splendid bewilderments of the twelfth, nor the cold
illumination of the eighteenth century, but bewilderments without
splendor, and coldness without illumination. The world is too