From: The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Saturday March 26, 1842
WRITING is the act of describing certain figures symbolical of the sounds used by Man, as signs to convey his sensations, thoughts, and emotions, to others; reading, the act of translating those figures into the sounds of which they are the symbols. What miracles are wrought in our simplest acts! How vulgar, and yet how marvellous, is writing! or “putting down words upon paper,” as it is commonly called—words! which are without form and substance! impalpable as moonshine! thoughts wrapt in air! ethereal couriers from mind to mind! volatile as lightning! short-lived as an instant! and yet we transfix them, drag them from the air of which they are part, nail the very breath to paper, and render that which is by nature as transient as time, as permanent as space; giving figure to what the wildest imagination cannot conceive to be figured; sketching sound; making the voice visible, and the eye to hear. It is the distillation of thought! Even as we write, our mind runs liquid through our pen; the very ink grows eloquent, discoursing like the waters of a brook as it flows along the page; the quill (the sage's tongue) speaks like a living thing, and the clear paper mirrors each thought, as it flits across our brain, as a lake reflects each cloud that traverses the sky. Consummate art! that can give mind to matter, sense to the insensate. The dull sheet lies before us, blank as an infant's brain A few magic marks are made upon its surface, and lo! it lives, it feels, it thinks! A human intellect speaks from out it; the mind is painted on it like a landscape; idea after idea glides pictured before our eyes; the diorama of thought— of thought, which (to use the words of D'Alembert) “sees so many things so distant, and yet cannot see itself which is so near.”
Nor is the act of reading a whitless wonderful. We glance at a few fantastic figures, and the inmost recesses of another's soul are instantly revealed to us; the secret processes of his mind are laid bare to us, like so much clockwork: we see him think, and look, as it were, into his very conscience. We cast our eye along a series of grotesque ciphers, and lo! the absent are with us; the past becomes the present; the dead are brought to life. Space melts, and Time rolls backward: Death no longer kills. One word, and the gates of the grave are flung back, and the long-deceased start into life, as did Lazarus of old when Jesus spoke. See! here is what we call a book: what is it really—in itself—physically, what but a collection of sundry scraps of paper, tattooed with curious characters? Has it soul, voice, intellect, imagination? No! it is a dull lump of senseless matter—barren as so much granite—thoughtless as the rags from which it sprang. What is it mentally? What, when looked upon by those skilled in its magic mysteries? he works of William Shakespeare! the heart's historian: nature's evangelist It is the sacred urn treasuring that part of him which could never die—the mausoleum of his immortal mind. To lift back the cover is, as it were, to roll the stone from before the sepulchre, and to see him rise again in all his native glory. These leaves are but the scented cerements embalming his most precious fancy—these characters but so many mystic symbols telling of his high nobility. Here is a page covered with strange ciphers (ciphers which are in themselves only little lines of ink), and yet which, contemplated by the mind, become a garden of most beauteous flowers, in which dwell fairies, honey fragrance, and all the rosy riches of luxurious imagination. Cast but the eye on this, and you shall think as he thought, feel as he felt, dream as he dreamt, two hundred years ago. His spirit shall be with yours, and yours with his, mingling like two rivers. You shall fly with him beyond all space, and look into the bright world of fancy; you shall see with him the springs and movements of the human heart, even as you have, by similar means, seen with Newton the springs and movements of the planets. And yet what is there to connect us living with him dead? What but these mystic characters, and that wonderful little orb, the eye? These are the links which bind him to us—these the spells which can win him back to life and song, though the hand and all of him that penned them be crumbled into dust: nay, though part of that very dust be clinging, as if in fond remembrance, around the pages that it glorified.
“That system of perpetual transmigration, which was but a fable, as believed by Pythagoras, becomes reality,” it has been happily remarked, “when applied to the soul and its feelings in connexion with literature. This is indeed the true metempsychosis by which the poet and the sage spread their conceptions and emotions from breast to breast; and so may be said to extend their existence through an ever-changing immortality.” [Dr. Brown's Lectures.] That strange illusion, the mirror of ink, of which travellers in Egypt speak with so much wonder, and which, on being looked into, presents to the sight the apparition of whomsoever the Magi may command, is no longer a juggle, as shewn in that most common and yet most amazing of all arts, reading. There truly is the ink a magic mirror, in which we have but to look, not only to behold the form, but to hear the voice, nay, to imbibe the very passions of those whom the wizard writer would conjure to our view. In this the mother sees and listens to her absent child; in this, the lover gazes once more upon the darling features of her whom fate has severed from his sight; in this, the lonely widow looks, and hears again the kindly counsellings of him whose voice the grave has hushed; and, poring into this, the student sits and communes with the glorious dead, while the long train of past events, in shadowy procession, sweep before his eyes.
Such is the nature—the extraordinary nature, of those ordinary arts, reading and writing; nor are the advantages accruing from a knowledge of them of a less emiment or less surprising quality. These remain to be set forth. The principal, if not the sole benefit arising from an acquaintance with those arts, consists in the removal of the obstructions which space and time present to the communication, vivá voce, of our thoughts and feelings to others. Speech is not only transient, but limited in its influence. It is a necessary evil attendant upon oral intercourse, that those to whom we speak must be both co-existent and contiguous. By the introduction of literary communion that evil has been remedied; and we are now able, by reading or writing, to transfer our sensations, thoughts, and emotions to others, or to have them transferred to us, though there be the distance of half the earth, or that more formidable barrier, the grave, existing between us. By the gift of speech man was eminently fitted to enjoy that social state which his philanthropy led him to desire; but, by the nature of that gift, not only was the extent of the society, but the term of the enjoyment of it, restricted to narrow limits. By the invention of the arts of reading and writing, these shackles have been cast off, and man (no longer fettered in his desire for communion with his fellow man) has become, as has been beautifully said, “the citizen of every country, the contemporary of every age.” By these simple, but glorious arts, the whole civilized globe has been drawn as it were into one family circle, and a companionship created between those even whom seas divide.
We hear much of the great benefits which our present facilities for local intercommunication have conferred upon mankind. Thus, indeed, has the distance which estranges man from man been abridged, and thus the whole human race have been made neighbours, if not kindred. By these means the blessings of each particular country have been rendered common to all, and the treasures of the most distant lands brought within the reach of the humblest individual in our own. Thus the person of our very pauper is clothed with cotton from the South; his morning meal cheered with tea from the East, sweetened with sugar from the West; while his winter's evenings are illumined with the combustion of the produce of the North. Such are the blessings of our improved means of intercommunication. Ships are fitted out, and the remotest corners of the earth explored, to add to the pleasures even of the poorest amongst us. But eminent as are these benefits, how insignificant do they appear in contrast with those accruing from the arts which we at present contemplate. The same facilities as the steam-engine and the railroad have afforded to the interchange of commodities, have been given by reading and writing to the interchange of thought. Steam only abridges space, whereas literature annihilates it altogether. By the former we can cross the Atlantic (great marvell) in a fortnight; by the latter, we can listen to the philanthropic eloquence of the wise and good Channing (greater marvel still!) without crossing it at all. What, though by the power of the one we can traverse the earth in half the time, can we not, by the magic of the other, sail round the world with Cook, and yet not stir from our seat; or follow Parry to the icy regions of the pole, while sitting by our fire-side; or visit with Park the burning plains of Africa, while our breath freezes on the window-panes at home? What, though the former has brought within the reach of even the humblest amongst us the produce of the richest and most distant quarters of the globe, has not the latter (as it has been truly observed) “given to all who will faithfully use it, the society, the spiritual presence of the greatest and best of our race? No matter how poor I am” (says he, whose writings are in themselves a brilliant instance of the blessings of this noble art),” “no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers will come in and take up their abode with me, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called “the best society’ of the place where I reside.” [Dr Channing on Self Culture]
Another great benefit arising from literary communication is, that the mind has, by these means, become, like our manufactures, capable of exportation. We wrap up our thoughts in a sheet of paper, and transmit them, like a bale of goods, to some far distant land. Our ships are laden not only with the bounty of our soil and the produce of our factories, but with the workings of our brains and the outpourings of our hearts. Scarce a vessel quits our shores that has not its cargo of hopes and fears; of love, sympathy, and counsel; of golden dreams and penniless despair, as well as iron, cotton, and other articles of commerce. Nay, by the happy invention of literature, the very mind has become an article of commerce; and intellect as much a matter of merchandise as cotton and iron themselves. Beautiful and noble thoughts are to be had for money now-a-days, as well as food and raiment. Indeed, for a few pence we may become the possessors of the practical philosophy of Franklin, the gorgeous fancy of Shakespeare, and the silver-toned philanthropy of Channing. Yea, for the matter of a penny a week, we may have our choice of a variety of large sheets, rich in the wonders of the heavens and the earth, and studded with the reflections and actions of the best and wisest of mankind.
But, perhaps, the grandest of all the benefits resulting from a knowledge of reading and writing, lies in the influence which those arts give us over time. By their means, the dark doom of oblivion seems to be annulled, and the changeful and evanescent course of nature rendered immutable and indestructible as truth. Thus, thought (the most volatile of all things in this most volatile world!) has become fixed as fate; and thus that strange, ubiquitous, little point of existence which we call the present; that breadthless line, dividing what has been from what will be; that unsubstantial key-stone to the broad arch of time; that ever-shifting centre of eternity, which no sooner is than it was, has been rescued from the clutches of the past. By these simple arts we are enabled not only to dam up, as it were, the current of events, but to drive back the tide of that mighty principle whose very essence is progression. By literature, that which was even as by science, that which will be — is. Nature stops. There is no past. The thoughts which were present to the mind of Plato two thousand years ago, are now, and, so long as the art endures, shall ever be present to the minds of the existing generation. “It is this permanent transmission of thought which" (it has been truly said) “constitutes the noblest of all the benefits conferred by literary art, giving as it does to each individual the collective powers and wisdom of his species—or rather, giving to every one who desires it, the rich inheritance of the accumulated acquisitions of all the multitudes who, like himself, have, in every preceding age, inquired, meditated, and patiently discovered; or who, by the happy inspiration of genius, have found truths which they scarcely sought, and penetrated with the rapidity of a single glance, those depths of nature which the weak steps and the dim torchlight of generation after generation had vainly laboured to explore.” [Dr. Brown’s Lectures.] Nor is this all. It is this permanent transmission of thought which gives us the power of extending our existsince, as it were, through all the ages which have preceded us, and enjoying the communion of the noblest minds with which those ages were adorned. “We are often in the habit,” says Seneca, in his Treatise on the Shortness of Life, “of complaining that our parents, and all the circumstances of our birth, are not of our choice, but of our fortune. We have it in our power, however, to be born as we please in this second birth of genius. Of the illustrious minds that have preceded us, we have only to determine to whom we wish to be allied, and we are already adopted, not to the inheritance of his mere name, but to the nobler inheritance of his wisdom and his genius.”—What to Teach and How to Teach it.
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