The Enmities of Literature

— Says Macaulay in the essay on Dryden : “ At Talavera, the English and French troops for a moment suspended their conflict to drink of a stream which flowed between them. The shells were passed across from enemy to enemy, without apprehension or molestation. We, in the same manner, would rather assist our political adversaries to drink with us of that fountain of intellectual pleasure, which should be the common refreshment of both parties, than disturb and pollute it with the havoc of unseasonable hostilities.”

When he wrote, the illustration was comically false in fact, but prophetically true. It foretold a coming millennium to which the end of this century is much closer than was the beginning. For Macaulay himself was hardly a pattern observer of this pleasing sentiment. There were times when his honor’s way of pronouncing sentence from the critical bench savored greatly of the urbane suavity of Jeffreys combined with the exquisite science of a Grand Inquisitor presiding over the infliction of the rack, and gauging to the breadth of a nerve the exact amount of torture which the victim could endure and live.

Take the essays on “ Satan Montgomery,” on Barère, on the work of Croker in editing Boswell’s Johnson, and the image which is suggested to the mind’s eye is rather that of the Irish infantry dashing into the ranks of the old guard of Napoleon than of the same warriors amicably exchanging canteens and cups over the rivulet of Talavera.

The late Edmund Quincy once said that the sight of brethren who agreed might be pleasant, but the sight of brethren who disagreed was infinitely more amusing. It is quite sure that the animosities of authors have lent much piquancy to the literature of the world. It is by no means certain that not a little of what seems perfectly harmless and impersonal does not owe its fire and brilliancy to spites carefully concealed under glittering generalities. In Milton’s Lycidas and Banyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one suspects that the authors could, if they had chosen, have put names to the priests and magistrates on whom their pointed passages are sharpened. It is more than likely that Cowper had sat under the preachers who, “ reading what they never wrote,” “ with a well-bred whisper close the scene.” In fact, the lightning of literary indignation does not waste itself in the vague immensity, but requires a point on which to concentrate and explode.

But, as a rule, the irritabile genus of penwielders will not often want a mark at which to aim. Probably some ill-conditioned Ionian who had caused old Homer’s dog to wander out of the smooth way sat for the portrait of Thersites. Evidently, Aristophanes not only had a strong sense of the fitness of Socrates to figure in comedy, but also felt that to all right-thinking and conservative Athenians the husband of Xanthippe was personally obnoxious. The implied satire in making Strepsiades the disciple of the philosopher was a most skillful touch of the lash on the tenderest spot. It was as if the author of the Potiphar Papers had sent Mr. Potiphar to sit admiringly at the feet of Emerson, or as if Thackeray had pictured Charles Honeyman as a devotee of Raskin. But, as the much-to-be-regretted Reminiscences of my Own Time, by Alcibiades, have not survived, this must remain conjectural. One need not press the point, especially since later literature gives ample illustration of the position here taken.

There can be no doubt that Horace and Juvenal freely used their dislikes and enmities to sharpen their verses. Nobody imagines that Dante was aiming at abstract personifications when he filled the circles of the Inferno with the men who had driven him to taste the bitterness of another’s bread, and feel the weariness of climbing another’s stairs. The story-tellers of the Canterbury Tales, the Miller, the Rove, the Frere, and the Sompnour, pay each other off in stories whereof the wit and jovial malice half condone the coarseness.

Shakespeare never forgot the bad quarter of an hour he suffered at the hands of Sir Thomas Lucy, and avenged it most thoroughly in his Justice Shallow. Who does not know how Dryden dealt with his foes, how Swift repaid the slights and disappointments of his early life ? Did not Pope pillory all Grub Street, and requite the fancied treachery of Addison with lines which cut as deeply as the knout of Russia ? Did Churchill spare the men who offended him, from Hogarth down to Murphy ? Was Junius merciful, was Johnson just, was Sheridan forbearing ?

Turn the corner of the eighteenth century, and what a splendid tournament of the paladins and peers of literature ! There is young Lord Byron, like Ivanhoe, with “Desdichado” on his shield, dashing into the mêlée at English bards and Scotch reviewers. There is Wilson marshaling the “ Clan North.” There are Sydney Smith and Jeffrey and Brougham on the one side, Lockhart and Canning and Croker on the other ; Moore, with the instinct of Donnybrook, hitting a head wherever he secs it ; Southey and Coleridge and Shelley, and even Hood and Lamb, ready, aye ready for the field. The English man of letters, like the English gentleman of social life, was expected to take off his coat and put up his fists whenever an opponent faced him. As the early Victorian era dawns, there is still plenty of fighting. Bulwer and Lever, Disraeli and Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray, Tennyson and Aytoun, Macaulay and Carlyle, Freeman and Ruskin, Hughes and Kingsley, are seen stepping into the ring when the challenge comes. They wear, indeed, the gloves which a more fastidious and refilling age demands, but they are of the “ four ounce ” pattern which the Marquis of Queenshury’s rules sanction, and the blows are given with right good will and sufficient science.

So, on this side the Atlantic, Irving and Cooper, Paulding and Halleck, Willis and Poe, and, a little later on, Holmes and Lowell and Whittier, were all proper men of their parts, and none the less liked and cherished because they hit fairly above the belt, and (mostly) took their punishment without flinching.

I have done little more than give suggestive names, without stopping to chronicle or criticise the particular battles in which these champions did their especial devoir and won their pugnacious fame. Every reader of general literature can recall them. But so much the more is it evident that the “ delight of battle ” is growing to be one of the lost pleasures which the author no longer drinks with his peers. For this there are many combining causes. Publishers are more wary; and this, in turn, comes from the fact that readers are more indifferent to controversy. Newspapers and magazines discourage truculence. The rapid march of events, the crowding of news items monopolized by the wire and ocean cable, the faster fashion in which life is lived, all give less and less of room for the keeping up of bitter strifes.

Then, too,— and this is advanced with some hesitation, — there is perhaps a deeper feeling for the rights of others, a heightened consciousness of the pain which sharp words may give. There is less of that insensibility which lies at the root of much offensiveness. The thick-skinned nature which cannot understand small trials is less frequent. Men have learned that

There is a wider considerateness, and a dying out of that which peoples in their childhood so recklessly display, pleasure in others’ pain. There is a greater desire to relieve, as there is less of the temper which inflicts.

Another cause is the wider spread of knowledge, and the consequent weakening of the intensity of conviction. Political partisanship, religious bigotry, scientific dogmatism, have all had their once immutable lines broken through. Men who are no longer willing to be burnt alive for their beliefs are less ready to send others to the stake. The number of those who say, “I do well to be angry,” is less than it was.

So, too, the vast development of travel and intercourse has smoothed away the antipathies of nationality and the prejudices of provincialism, as it has also helped the leveling of the barriers of social rank.

It certainly seems as if men now have fewer excuses than formerly for hating one another with a clear conscience. The clever and reckless author is less disposed to ridicule his rivals, and he knows that he can no longer count on the pleasure of making the laughter of the town applaud his periods. There is also as a deterrent principle the sentiment, dear to all the men of Anglo-Saxon lineage, that it is essentially unmanly to use words of provocation for which no reckoning can be taken. To bandy ill names in public, when the aggrieved is precluded from knocking one down or calling a policeman, is justly felt to be the course of a bully or a coward. In the elder time, it was understood that Robert Acres, Esq., was fully free to summon his maligner or mocker to the field of single combat. Or if the culprit was below the social rank entitled to the use of sword or pistol, he could be cited in the courts, which would heal the hurts of honor by the infliction of fine, imprisonment, and pillory. But for the mercenary the age of exemplary damages has passed, and public sentiment, as well as the statute book, has banished the duel. Hence, men of spirit, who shrink from giving provocation they cannot stand up to, are slower still to resent injuries where the only issue is a scoldingmatch.

Yet we have not lost our relish for witty satire and eloquent invective. We still delight in the combats of old, just as we enjoy reading the ballad of Chevy Chace and the story of the “ gentle passage at arms of Ashby de la Zouche,” though we should hardly care to witness the actual scene, could it be reproduced in all its rough reality. We say with Emerson : —

We may admire and read till we know it by heart that unsurpassable diatribe which begins, —

but hardly one in a thousand of the present writers in the English tongue would be willing to have on his conscience such a sin against a second Addison. We chuckle over Wilson’s reckless fun in the Noctes, but not even to claim with right as our own the Ettrick Shepherd’s exquisite songs would we be willing to father the coarse attacks upon Hunt and Hazlitt, and the leading literati of the Whigs.

The plain truth is that we are no longer capable of feeling toward men of different opinions from our own as we should have felt a century ago. We should hardly name upon our list of friends the man who would needlessly set foot upon a — nihilist. We have learned the lesson of separating men from their opinions. We are even tolerant, too, of whatever manifests artistic merit, though we have to put some canons of morality in our pockets. We hold it bad form to be overearnest or overconfident.

We live in an era of crumbling certainties, A science which admits the possibility of a fourth dimension, which stands ever ready to eat at need its own terms of finality, is necessarily careful not to make its words too difficult of digestion.

All this brings to pass, in literature as in most other matters, the recognition that dwellers in plate-glass-fronted mansions must not encourage “ base-ballers in the public streets ” in the practice of indiscriminate pitching and batting. We are all aware as never before of the fragility of our environments. One must be indeed a dunce inane not to discover that when Birnam wood is bearing down on the fortress of self-esteem, behind it are marching Macduff and Malcolm.

Whether modern literature is the gainer because of this is another question. It is fortunate, perhaps, that while human nature remains as it is, there is an outlet for those whose temperament bids them enjoy the breaking of literary lances and the unhorsing of parading knights, in studying the havoc and the splendor of the battlefields of the past, without being tempted to reproduce and rival those departed glories.