The Discrowning of Authors

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

CRITICISM, like most things, is mellowed by the advance of time; but there is one point in which it retains even today a great deal of its primitive cruelty. It cannot forgive an author’s inferiority to himself; it is alert for every token of the decline of his powers, and it is eager to declare that the falling-off is irreparable. The living English man of letters best known to the outside world is subjected to a fate not unlike that which he has touchingly sung in his Gentlemen-Rankers. The greatest of the women novelists of contemporary England is accused of having ‘written herself out.’ An English dramatist and lyric poet of rare gifts is spoken of in language which implies the effacement of his power. The greatest, or all but the greatest, of contemporary German dramatists is thought to be the survivor of his own genius.

Let an author publish two or three works of a stamp inferior to early work or public expectation, and the cry of decadence is heard on all sides. The fact is pointed out with great regret, though with singular promptitude; and the news is sped from mouth to mouth, from press to press, from nation to nation, with that cheerful alacrity with which we share with one another the sources of our own depression. The appeal of such a fact (or fiction) to ordinary human nature is intelligible enough. We regard it as an attestation on the part of destiny of that earlyformed and cherished intuition of ours, that nobody is after all much better or abler than ourselves. We are rejoiced to learn that the instances of apparent exception to this wholesome and gratifying law were after all illusory. We are thankful to Providence for the just retribution which an author suffers for the affront to mediocrity implied in the previous display of a presumptuous superiority. Another motive works to the same end. The mere pleasure of reading books — a tame affair at the best — is as nothing compared with the two great excitements of making and breaking a literary idol; and when an author’s fame has put it out of his power to oblige the public with the first of these sensations, it is only fair that he should indemnify it with the other. Anything rather than the tameness of established worship. Every authority tends to enlarge its own functions: the public’s power in authorship is not to write, but to crown and discrown; and it will multiply occasions for the exercise of these privileges.

What do we ourselves gain by our prompt consignment of living authors to the infirmary or asylum? Let us suppose the facts to be on our side. Is the world better off for the demonstration that it has one great man the less, and are our lives richer for the knowledge that one source of pure and refined pleasure is permanently exhausted? Is genius so superabundant on the planet that we should run hither and thither to spread abroad the glad tidings of its depleted quantity or its shortened span? Is any nation, is any age, so affluent in intellectual splendor that men should be not only forward to announce, but eager to anticipate, the obscuration of any brilliant in its tiara of majestic lights?

But this is by no means the most serious aspect of the case; the question is one of justice and humanity. It is one thing to say that one book, two books, three books, are secondary or weak or bad; it is quite another thing to declare that a mind is impaired. It is one thing to weigh the present, and another to prejudge the future. Inequality of performance need not imply decay of faculty; and the inequality may often be referred quite as justly to the fluctuations of a variable and volatile public opinion as to changes in the actual quality of the work. The breath of the public acts upon the reputation of a contemporary like wind upon a torch, now fanning it to feverish and unnatural brightness, now reducing it to extreme and morbid obscurity. Again, is it fair to any man to pit him against himself, to indict him at the bar of his own past, to impale him, as it were, upon his own achievements? Ought it to be as hard for a man to live down a triumph as a crime?

In pointing out distinctions between thisand that product, and this and that period of an author’s career, it is well for us to bear in mind that there is another old-fashioned distinction worthy perhaps of our serious and self-probing meditation, — the distinction between rudeness and courtesy. Were the imputations of decay or dotage uttered in a London or New York drawingroom in the hearing of their objects, they would brand the speakers as forever after ineligible to the society of well-bred men. The very critics concerned would be the first to rebuke. But is not any word uttered on a wellknown living writer in a magazine or newspaper of wide circulation a word uttered to all intents and purposes in the writer’s presence? The drawingroom is a wide one, certainly; but the acoustic properties are wonderfully good. Are gentlemen to be publicly and openly told by other gentlemen that their minds are falling into decay?

The slightest doubt should act in such a case as a seal on all gentle lips; there is only one thing that should seal them more firmly than the slightest doubt, and that thing is the fullest certainty. If it were indeed true that one of the most painful of human possibilities had realized itself in one of the brightest of living souls; if there were no doubt that his May of life had fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, that the prime of his years was the old age of his genius and his power, what louder call could there be to every Christian and chivalric and manly impulse in the human heart to drop the veil of its reverent silence between its own bowed and humbled thought and a calamity too sacred even for sympathetic words? Let us appropriate a part of that fine instinct, which forbids us even to canvass in thought, much more to exploit in public, the failing powers and growing infirmities of our parents and benefactors, to the defense of those other purveyors of noble and exquisite service to whom the lives of all of us are so deeply indebted for refinement, interest, and cheer. Let their misfortune be a sanctuary, impenetrable to any harsher sound than the tender and grateful acclaim in which a sorrowing world records its sense of their excellence and glory.

I have permitted myself to assume for the moment the reality of the deterioration; let us glance at those other cases in which it is largely a figment arising from the pessimism of critics and the levity of newspapers. Where this is true, it is well to remember that great authors hold in their hands the option of requiting our light and thoughtless speech with the most effectual of all revenges, — the revenge of their silence. Could they forget their humanity and self-restraint, other forms of retaliation might be open to their use. Critics who assail or decry the masters of literature might read with profit the account of Coriolanus amid the teasing servants in the hall of Aufidius; or, better yet perhaps, they might recur to another story on which the vividness of childish memory has impressed, it may be, a more poignant emphasis. Let the sons of the Philistines beware how they lead out, for the pastime of a gaping populace, the infirm and despised Samson, weary and bowed perhaps with the grinding of sordid corn for profane appetites in their commercial mills; let them beware how they make a mock in the market-place of his relaxed sinews and his shrunken loins; lest the hour come when they turn with wonder and fear to behold the pillars of their vain and idle temple reeling and crashing into nameless fragments before the wrath of his revived and invincible power!