But there are more
countries than one that are not so - just now; and the world
may ere long have to pay the bitter penalty.
CHAPTER XXXVII
IT is curious if one lives long enough to watch the change of
taste in books. I have no lending-library statistics at
hand, but judging by the reading of young people, or of those
who read merely for their amusement, the authors they
patronise are nearly all living or very recent. What we old
stagers esteemed as classical in fiction and BELLES-LETTRES
are sealed books to the present generation. It is an
exception, for instance, to meet with a young man or young
woman who has read Walter Scott. Perhaps Balzac's reason is
the true one. Scott, says he, 'est sans passion; il
l'ignore, ou peut-etre lui etait-elle interdite par les
moeurs hypocrites de son pays. Pour lui la femme est le
devoir incarne. A de rares exceptions pres, ses heroines
sont absolument les memes ... La femme porte le desordre dans
la societe par la passion. La passion a des accidents
infinis. Peignez donc les passions, vous aurez les sources
immenses dont s'est prive ce grand genie pour etre lu dans
toutes les familles de la prude Angleterre.' Does not
Thackeray lament that since Fielding no novelist has dared to
face the national affectation of prudery? No English author
who valued his reputation would venture to write as Anatole
France writes, even if he could. Yet I pity the man who does
not delight in the genius that created M. Bergeret.
A well-known author said to me the other day, he did not
believe that Thackeray himself would be popular were he
writing now for the first time - not because of his freedom,
but because the public taste has altered. No present age can
predict immortality for the works of its day; yet to say that
what is intrinsically good is good for all time is but a
truism. The misfortune is that much of the best in
literature shares the fate of the best of ancient monuments
and noble cities; the cumulative rubbish of ages buries their
splendours, till we know not where to find them. The day may
come when the most valuable service of the man of letters
will be to unearth the lost treasures and display them,
rather than add his grain of dust to the ever-increasing
middens.
Is Carlyle forgotten yet, I wonder? How much did my
contemporaries owe to him in their youth? How readily we
followed a leader so sure of himself, so certain of his own
evangel. What an aid to strength to be assured that the true
hero is the morally strong man. One does not criticise what
one loves; one didn't look too closely into the doctrine
that, might is right, for somehow he managed to persuade us
that right makes the might - that the strong man is the man
who, for the most part, does act rightly.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 157 of 208
Words from 80078 to 80588
of 106633
