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Page 37
I could not make the ancient builders and worshipers seem real. It was
a relief to come up into the sunshine where people of our own kind had
walked, the Kings of Tara and their harpers, and St. Patrick and St.
Malachy and Oliver Cromwell and William III. After the unintelligible
symbols on the rocks, how familiar and homelike seemed the sculptures on
the Celtic crosses. They were mostly about people, and people whom we
had known from earliest childhood. There were Adam and Eve, and Cain
slaying Abel, and the Magi. They were members of our family.
But between us and the builders of the under-ground chapel there was a
great gulf. There was no means of spiritual communication across the
abyss. A scrap of writing, a bit of poetry, a name handed down by
tradition, would have been worth all the relics discovered by
arch�ologists.
There is justification for the traveler's preference for the things he
has read about, for these are the things which resist the changes of
time. Only he must remember that they are better preserved in the book
than in the places where they happened. The impression which any
generation makes on the surface of the earth is very slight. It cannot
give the true story of the brief occupancy. That requires some more
direct interpretation.
The magic carpet which carries us into any age not our own is woven by
the poets and historians. Without their aid we may travel through Space,
but not through Time.
THE OBVIOUSNESS OF DICKENS
In the college world it is a point of honor for the successive classes
to treat each other with contumely. The feud between freshman and
sophomore goes on automatically. Only when one has become a senior may
he, without losing caste, recognize a freshman as a youth of promise,
and admit that a sophomore is not half bad. Such disinterested criticism
is tolerated because it is evidently the result of the mellowing
influence of time.
The same tendency is seen in literary and artistic judgments. It is
never good taste to admit the good taste of the generation that
immediately precedes us. Its innocent admirations are flouted and its
standards are condemned as provincial. For we are always emerging from
the dark ages and contrasting their obscurity with our marvelous light.
The sixteenth century scorned the fifteenth century for its manifold
superstitions. Thomas Fuller tells us that his enlightened contempories
in the seventeenth century treated the enthusiasms of the sixteenth
century with scant respect. The price of martyrs' ashes rises and falls
in Smithfield market. At a later period Pope writes,--
"We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow:
Our wiser sons, perhaps, will think us so."
He need not have put in the "perhaps."
The nineteenth century had its fling at the artificiality of the
eighteenth century, and treated it with contempt as the age of
doctrinaires. And now that the twentieth century is coming to the age of
discretion, we hear a new term of reproach, Mid-Victorian. It expresses
the sum of all villainies in taste. For some fifty years in the
nineteenth century the English-speaking race, as it now appears, was
under the sway of Mrs. Grundy. It was living in a state of most
reprehensible respectability, and Art was tied to the apron-strings of
Morality. Everybody admired what ought not to be admired. We are only
now beginning to pass judgment on the manifold mediocrity of this era.
All this must, for the time, count against Dickens; for of all the
Victorians he was the midmost. He flourished in that most absurd period
of time--the time just before most of us were born. And how he did
flourish! Grave lord chancellors confessed to weeping over Little Nell.
A Mid-Victorian bishop relates that after administering consolation to
a man in his last illness he heard him saying, "At any rate, a new
'Pickwick Paper' will be out in ten days."
Everywhere there was a wave of hysterical appreciation. Describing his
reading in Glasgow, Dickens writes: "Such pouring of hundreds into a
place already full to the throat, such indescribable confusion, such
rending and tearing of dresses, and yet such a scene of good humor, I
never saw the slightest approach to.... Fifty frantic men got up in all
parts of the hall and addressed me all at once. Other frantic men made
speeches to the wall. The whole B family were borne on the top of a wave
and landed with their faces against the front of the platform. I read
with the platform crammed with people. I got them to lie down upon it,
and it was like some impossible tableau, or gigantic picnic,--one pretty
girl lying on her side all night, holding on to the legs of my table."
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