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Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, stories by Washington Irving

The Mutability of Literature

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The Mutability of Literature

A COLLOQUY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

I know that all beneath the moon decays,

And what by mortals in this world is brought,

In time's great periods shall return to nought.

I know that all the muses' heavenly rays,

With toil of sprite which are so dearly bought,

As idle sounds, of few or none are sought--

That there is nothing lighter than mere praise.

DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.

THERE are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we
naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet
haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles
undisturbed. In such a mood I was loitering about the old gray
cloisters of Westminster Abbey, enjoying that luxury of wandering
thought which one is apt to dignify with the name of reflection,
when suddenly an irruption of madcap boys from Westminster
school, playing at football, broke in upon the monastic stillness
of the place, making the vaulted passages and mouldering tombs
echo with their merriment. I sought to take refuge from their
noise by penetrating still deeper into the solitudes of the pile,
and applied to one of the vergers for admission to the library.
He conducted me through a portal rich with the crumbling
sculpture of former ages, which opened upon a gloomy passage
leading to the chapter-house and the chamber in which Doomsday
Book is deposited. Just within the passage is a small door on the
left. To this the verger applied a key; it was double locked, and
opened with some difficulty, as if seldom used. We now ascended a
dark narrow staircase, and, passing through a second door,
entered the library.

I found myself in a lofty antique hall, the roof supported by
massive joists of old English oak. It was soberly lighted by a
row of Gothic windows at a considerable height from the floor,
and which apparently opened upon the roofs of the cloisters. An
ancient picture of some reverend dignitary of the Church in his
robes hung over the fireplace. Around the hall and in a small
gallery were the books, arranged in carved oaken cases. They
consisted principally of old polemical writers, and were much
more worn by time than use. In the centre of the library was a
solitary table with two or three books on it, an inkstand without
ink, and a few pens parched by long disuse. The place seemed
fitted for quiet study and profound meditation. It was buried
deep among the massive walls of the abbey and shut up from the
tumult of the world. I could only hear now and then the shouts of
the school-boys faintly swelling from the cloisters, and the
sound of a bell tolling for prayers echoing soberly along the
roofs of the abbey. By degrees the shouts of merriment grew
fainter and fainter, and at length died away; the bell ceased to
toll, and a profound silence reigned through the dusky hall.

I had taken down a little thick quarto, curiously bound in
parchment, with brass clasps, and seated myself at the table in a
venerable elbow-chair. Instead of reading, however, I was
beguiled by the solemn monastic air and lifeless quiet of the
place, into a train of musing. As I looked around upon the old
volumes in their mouldering covers, thus ranged on the shelves
and apparently never disturbed in their repose, I could not but
consider the library a kind of literary catacomb, where authors,
like mummies, are piously entombed and left to blacken and
moulder in dusty oblivion.

How much, thought I, has each of these volumes, now thrust aside
with such indifference, cost some aching head! how many weary
days! how many sleepless nights! How have their authors buried
themselves in the solitude of cells and cloisters, shut
themselves up from the face of man, and the still more blessed
face of Nature; and devoted themselves to painful research and
intense reflection! And all for what? To occupy an inch of dusty
shelf--to have the titles of their works read now and then in a
future age by some drowsy churchman or casual straggler like
myself, and in another age to be lost even to remembrance. Such
is the amount of this boasted immortality. A mere temporary
rumor, a local sound; like the tone of that bell which has tolled
among these towers, filling the ear for a moment, lingering
transiently in echo, and then passing away, like a thing that was
not!

While I sat half-murmuring, half-meditating, these unprofitable
speculations with my head resting on my hand, I was thrumming
with the other hand upon the quarto, until I accidentally
loosened the clasps; when, to my utter astonishment, the little
book gave two or three yawns, like one awaking from a deep sleep,
then a husky hem, and at length began to talk. At first its voice
was very hoarse and broken, being much troubled by a cobweb which
some studious spider had woven across it, and having probably
contracted a cold from long exposure to the chills and damps of
the abbey. In a short time, however, it became more distinct, and
I soon found it an exceedingly fluent, conversable little tome.
Its language, to be sure, was rather quaint and obsolete, and its
pronunciation what, in the present day, would be deemed
barbarous; but I shall endeavor, as far as I am able, to render
it in modern parlance.

It began with railings about the neglect of the world, about
merit being suffered to languish in obscurity, and other such
commonplace topics of literary repining, and complained bitterly
that it had not been opened for more than two centuries--that the
dean only looked now and then into the library, sometimes took
down a volume or two, trifled with them for a few moments, and
then returned them to their shelves. "What a plague do they
mean?" said the little quarto, which I began to perceive was
somewhat choleric--"what a plague do they mean by keeping several
thousand volumes of us shut up here, and watched by a set of old
vergers, like so many beauties in a harem, merely to be looked at
now and then by the dean? Books were written to give pleasure and
to be enjoyed; and I would have a rule passed that the dean
should pay each of us a visit at least once a year; or, if he is
not equal to the task, let them once in a while turn loose the
whole school of Westminster among us, that at any rate we may now
and then have an airing."

"Softly, my worthy friend," replied I; "you are not aware how
much better you are off than most books of your generation. By
being stored away in this ancient library you are like the
treasured remains of those saints and monarchs which lie
enshrined in the adjoining chapels, while the remains of their
contemporary mortals, left to the ordinary course of Nature, have
long since returned to dust."

"Sir," said the little tome, ruffling his leaves and looking big,
"I was written for all the world, not for the bookworms of an
abbey. I was intended to circulate from hand to hand, like other
great contemporary works; but here have I been clasped up for
more than two centuries, and might have silently fallen a prey to
these worms that are playing the very vengeance with my
intestines if you had not by chance given me an opportunity of
uttering a few last words before I go to pieces."

"My good friend," rejoined I, "had you been left to the
circulation of which you speak, you would long ere this have been
no more. To judge from your physiognomy, you are now well
stricken in years: very few of your contemporaries can be at
present in existence, and those few owe their longevity to being
immured like yourself in old libraries; which, suffer me to add,
instead of likening to harems, you might more properly and
gratefully have compared to those infirmaries attached to
religious establishments for the benefit of the old and decrepit,
and where, by quiet fostering and no employment, they often
endure to an amazingly good-for-nothing old age. You talk of your
contemporaries as if in circulation. Where do we meet with their
works?. What do we hear of Robert Grosteste of Lincoln? No one
could have toiled harder than he for immortality. He is said to
have written nearly two hundred volumes. He built, as it were, a
pyramid of books to perpetuate his name: but, alas! the pyramid
has long since fallen, and only a few fragments are scattered in
various libraries, where they are scarcely disturbed even by the
antiquarian. What do we hear of Giraldus Cambrensis, the
historian, antiquary, philosopher, theologian, and poet? He
declined two bishoprics that he might shut himself up and write
for posterity; but posterity never inquires after his labors.
What of Henry of Huntingdon, who, besides a learned history of
England, wrote a treatise on the contempt of the world, which the
world has revenged by forgetting him? What is quoted of Joseph of
Exeter, styled the miracle of his age in classical composition?
Of his three great heroic poems, one is lost forever, excepting a
mere fragment; the others are known only to a few of the curious
in literature; and as to his love verses and epigrams, they have
entirely disappeared. What is in current use of John Wallis the
Franciscan, who acquired the name of the tree of life? Of William
of Malmsbury--of Simeon of Durham--of Benedict of
Peterborough--of John Hanvill of St. Albans--of----"

"Prithee, friend," cried the quarto in a testy tone, "how old do
you think me? You are talking of authors that lived long before
my time, and wrote either in Latin or French, so that they in a
manner expatriated themselves, and deserved to be forgotten;* but
I, sir, was ushered into the world from the press of the renowned
Wynkyn de Worde. I was written in my own native tongue, at a time
when the language had become fixed; and indeed I was considered a
model of pure and elegant English."

(I should observe that these remarks were couched in such
intolerably antiquated terms, that I have had infinite difficulty
in rendering them into modern phraseology.)

"I cry you mercy," said I, "for mistaking your age; but it
matters little. almost all the writers of your time have likewise
passed into forgetfulness, and De Worde's publications are mere
literary rarities among book-collectors. The purity and stability
of language, too, on which you found your claims to perpetuity,
have been the fallacious dependence of authors of every age, even
back to the times of the worthy Robert of Gloucester, who wrote
his history in rhymes of mongrel Saxon.+ Even now many talk of
Spenser's `well of pure English undefiled,' as if the language
ever sprang from a well or fountain-head, and was not rather a
mere confluence of various tongues perpetually subject to changes
and intermixtures. It is this which has made English literature
so extremely mutable, and the reputation built upon it so
fleeting. Unless thought can be committed to something more
permanent and unchangeable than such a medium, even thought must
share the fate of everything else, and fall into decay. This
should serve as a check upon the vanity and exultation of the
most popular writer. He finds the language in which he has
embarked his fame gradually altering and subject to the
dilapidations of time and the caprice of fashion. He looks back
and beholds the early authors of his country, once the favorites
of their day, supplanted by modern writers. A few short ages have
covered them with obscurity, and their merits can only be
relished by the quaint taste of the bookworm. And such, he
anticipates, will be the fate of his own work, which, however it
may be admired in its day and held up as a model of purity, will
in the course of years grow antiquated and obsolete, until it
shall become almost as unintelligible in its native land as an
Egyptian obelisk or one of those Runic inscriptions said to exist
in the deserts of Tartary. "I declare," added I, with some
emotion, "when I contemplate a modern library, filled with new
works in all the bravery of rich gilding and binding, I feel
disposed to sit down and weep, like the good Xerxes, when he
surveyed his army, pranked out in all the splendor of military
array, and reflected that in one hundred years not one of them
would be in existence."

* "In Latin and French hath many soueraine wittes had great
delyte to endite, and have many noble thinges fulfilde, but
certes there ben some that speaken their poisye in French, of
which speche the Frenchmen have as good a fantasye as w ave in
hearying of Frenchmen's Englishe."--CHAUCER'S Testament of Love.
+ Holinsh d,i his Chronicle, observes, "Afterwards, also, by
diligent vell f Geffry Chaucer and John Gowre, in the time of
Richard the Second, and after them of John Scogan and John
Lydgate, monke of Berrie, our said toong was brought to an
excellent passe, notwithstanding that it never came unto the type
of perfection until the time of Queen Elizabeth, wherein John
Jewell, Bishop of Sarum, John Fox, and sundrie learned and
excellent writers, have fully accomplished the ornature of the
same to their great praise and mortal commendation."

"Ah," said the little quarto, with a heavy sigh, "I see how it
is: these in modern scribblers have superseded all the good old
authors. I suppose nothing is read nowadays but Sir Philip
Sidney's Arcadia, Sackville's stately plays and Mirror for
Magistrates, or the fine-spun euphuisms of the `unparalleled John
Lyly.'"

"There you are again mistaken," said I; "the writers whom you
suppose in vogue, because they happened to be so when you were
last in circulation, have long since had their day. Sir Philip
Sidney's Arcadia, the immortality of which was so fondly
predicted by his admirers,* and which, in truth, was full of
noble thoughts, delicate images, and graceful turns of language,
is now scarcely ever mentioned. Sackville has strutted into
obscurity; and even Lyly, though his writings were once the
delight of a court, and apparently perpetuated by a proverb, is
now scarcely known even by name. A whole crowd of authors who
wrote and wrangled at the time, have likewise gone down with all
their writings and their controversies. Wave after wave of
succeeding literature has rolled over them, until they are buried
so deep, that it is only now and then that some industrious diver
after fragments of antiquity brings up a specimen for the
gratification of the curious.

* "Live ever sweete booke; the simple image of his gentle witt,
and the golden pillar of his noble courage; and ever notify unto
the world that thy writer was the secretary of eloquence, the
breath of the muses, the honey bee of the daintyest flowers of
witt and arte, the pith of morale and intellectual virtues, the
arme of Bellona in the field, the tongue of Suada in the chamber,
the spirits of Practise in esse, and the paragon of excellence in
print."-Harvey Pierce's Supererogation.

"For my part," I continued, "I consider this mutability of
language a wise precaution of Providence for the benefit of the
world at large, and of authors in particular. To reason from
analogy, we daily behold the varied and beautiful tribes of
vegetables springing up, flourishing, adorning the fields for a
short time, and then fading into dust, to make way for their
successors. Were not this the case, the fecundity of nature would
be a grievance instead of a blessing. The earth would groan with
rank and excessive vegetation, and its surface become a tangled
wilderness. In like manner, the works of genius and learning
decline and make way for subsequent productions. Language
gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors
who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise the creative
powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be
completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature.
Formerly there were some restraints on this excessive
multiplication. Works had to be transcribed by hand, which was a
slow and laborious operation; they were written either on
parchment, which was expensive, so that one work was often erased
to make way for another; or on papyrus, which was fragile and
extremely perishable. Authorship was a limited and unprofitable
craft, pursued chiefly by monks in the leisure and solitude of
their cloisters. The accumulation of manuscripts was slow and
costly, and confined almost entirely to monasteries. To these
circumstances it may, in some measure, be owing that we have not
been inundated by the intellect of antiquity--that the fountains
of thought have not been broken up, and modern genius drowned in
the deluge. But the inventions of paper and the press have put an
end to all these restraints. They have made every one a writer,
and enabled every mind to pour itself into print, and diffuse
itself over the whole intellectual world. The consequences are
alarming. The stream of literature has swollen into a
torrent--augmented into a river-expanded into a sea. A few
centuries since five or six hundred manuscripts constituted a
great library; but what would you say to libraries, such as
actually exist, containing three or four hundred thousand
volumes; legions of authors at the same time busy; and the press
going on with fearfully increasing activity, to double and
quadruple the number? Unless some unforeseen mortality should
break out among the progeny of the Muse, now that she has become
so prolific, I tremble for posterity. I fear the mere fluctuation
of language will not be sufficient. Criticism may do much; it
increases with the increase of literature, and resembles one of
those salutary checks on population spoken of by economists. All
possible encouragement, therefore, should be given to the growth
of critics, good or bad. But I fear all will be in vain; let
criticism do what it may, writers will write, printers will
print, and the world will inevitably be overstocked with good
books. It will soon be the employment of a lifetime merely to
learn their names. Many a man of passable information at the
present day reads scarcely anything but reviews, and before long
a man of erudition will be little better than a mere walking
catalogue."

"My very good sir," said the little quarto, yawning most drearily
in my face, "excuse my interrupting you, but I perceive you are
rather given to prose. I would ask the fate of an author who was
making some noise just as I left the world. His reputation,
however, was considered quite temporary. The learned shook their
heads at him, for he was a poor, half-educated varlet, that knew
little of Latin, and nothing of Greek, and had been obliged to
run the country for deer-stealing. I think his name was
Shakespeare. I presume he soon sunk into oblivion."

"On the contrary," said I, "it is owing to that very man that the
literature of his period has experienced a duration beyond the
ordinary term of English literature. There rise authors now and
then who seem proof against the mutability of language because
they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human
nature. They are like gigantic trees that we sometimes see on the
banks of a stream, which by their vast and deep roots,
penetrating through the mere surface and laying hold on the very
foundations of the earth, preserve the soil around them from
being swept away by the ever-flowing current, and hold up many a
neighboring plant, and perhaps worthless weed, to perpetuity.
Such is the case with Shakespeare, whom we behold defying the
encroachments of time, retaining in modern use the language and
literature of his day, and giving duration to many an indifferent
author, merely from having flourished in his vicinity. But even
he, I grieve to say, is gradually assuming the tint of age, and
his whole form is overrun by a profusion of commentators, who,
like clambering vines and creepers, almost bury the noble plant
that upholds them."

Here the little quarto began to heave his sides and chuckle,
until at length he broke out into a plethoric fit of laughter
that had wellnigh choked him by reason of his excessive
corpulency. "Mighty well!" cried he, as soon as he could recover
breath, "mighty well! and so you would persuade me that the
literature of an age is to be perpetuated by a vagabond
deer-stealer! by a man without learning! by a poet! forsooth--a
poet!" And here he wheezed forth another fit of laughter.

I confess that I felt somewhat nettled at this rudeness, which,
however, I pardoned on account of his having flourished in a less
polished age. I determined, nevertheless, not to give up my
point.

"Yes," resumed I positively, "a poet; for of all writers he has
the best chance for immortality. Others may write from the head,
but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always
understand him. He is the faithful portrayer of Nature, whose
features are always the same and always interesting. Prose
writers are voluminous and unwieldy; their pages crowded with
commonplaces, and their thoughts expanded into tediousness. But
with the true poet every thing is terse, touching, or brilliant.
He gives the choicest thoughts in the choicest language. He
illustrates them by everything that he sees most striking in
nature and art. He enriches them by pictures of human life, such
as it is passing before him. His writings, therefore, contain the
spirit, the aroma, if I may use the phrase, of the age in which
he lives. They are caskets which inclose within a small compass
the wealth of the language--its family jewels, which are thus
transmitted in a portable form to posterity. The setting may
occasionally be antiquated, and require now and then to be
renewed, as in the case of Chaucer; but the brilliancy and
intrinsic value of the gems continue unaltered. Cast a look back
over the long reach of literary history. What vast valleys of
dulness, filled with monkish legends and academical
controversies! What bogs of theological speculations! What dreary
wastes of metaphysics! Here and there only do we behold the
heaven-illumined bards, elevated like beacons on their
widely-separated heights, to transmit the pure light of poetical
intelligence from age to age."*

I was just about to launch forth into eulogiums upon the poets of
the day when the sudden opening of the door caused me to turn my
head. It was the verger, who came to inform me that it was time
to close the library. I sought to have a parting word with the
quarto, but the worthy little tome was silent; the clasps were
closed: and it looked perfectly unconscious of all that had
passed. I have been to the library two or three times since, and
have endeavored to draw it into further conversation, but in
vain; and whether all this rambling colloquy actually took place,
or whether it was another of those old day-dreams to which I am
subject, I have never, to this moment, been able to discover.

* Thorow earth and waters deepe,

The pen by skill doth passe:

And featly nyps the worldes abuse,

And shoes us in a glasse,

The vertu and the vice

Of every wight alyve;

The honey comb that bee doth make

Is not so sweet in hyve,

As are the golden leves

That drops from poet's head!

Which doth surmount our common talke

As farre as dross doth lead.

Churchyard.

Washington Irving's short story: The Mutability of Literature

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