The Timeless Technology of Literature

“ Across the great clamour of blurb and bunk, across the huge muddle of beauty, weariness, and frustration that makes up our daily life—I am always catching his eye.
* * * * * JOURNALISM AND LITERATURE
Art is the only human power that can make life stand still. Each of us, desperately clutching his identity amid the impalpable onward pour of Time and Thought, finds only in art—and chiefly in written art—a means to halt that ceaseless cruel drift. Literature was invented to halt life, to hold it still for us to examine and admire. ”

“ A book is an enigma in which no time exists, and as it is read it brings the reader into its eternal being, for while it sits closed on a shelf it is no more than a forgotten memory, yet when it is opened its contents come to life and its characters and locations are once more existent in the same state as when they were written, the story becomes once more reality. ”

“ The change in [Pg 243] their subject matter will be enormous; they will not change. We may harness the atom, we may land on the moon, we may abolish or intensify warfare, the mental processes of animals may be understood; but all these are trifles, they belong to history not to art. History develops, art stands still. The novelist of the future will have to pass all the new facts through the old if variable mechanism of the creative mind. ”

“ With timeliness, as an incentive, literature has absolutely no concern. Its purpose is to reveal what was and is and evermore shall be. It can never grow old, for the reason that it has never attempted to be new. Early in the nineteenth century, the gentle Elia revolted from the tyranny of timeliness. ”

“ Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to-day as when they first passed through their authors' minds ages ago. What was then said and thought still speaks to us as vividly as ever from the printed page. The only effect of time has been to sift and winnow out the bad products; for nothing in literature can long survive but what is really good. ”

“ If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make time's spoils despised every where.
Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife. ”

“ TIMELESSNESS The inspirations of genius come from a failure of attention to life, which, all paradoxically, brings vision—the power to see life clearly and "see it whole." Consciousness, unconditioned by time, "in a beautiful strong dream," awakens to the perception of a world that is timeless. ”

“ We find the same transformation in the relation of art to Time. Its position is here too frankly ideal. That which in Nature rapidly passes by in art is secured with permanence; the flash of a smile, the sudden curve of roguish merriment on the lips, a glance, a gleam of sunshine, together with all those evanescent traits of human life, events and accidents which come and are gone, and are as quickly lost to memory. There is nothing which she cannot wrest from momentary existence, and in this respect even becomes the vanquisher of Nature herself. ”

“ A life lived, a feeling felt, a volition willed, are certainly impossible to reproduce, because nothing happens more than once, and my situation at the present moment is not that of any other being, nor is it mine of the moment before, nor will be of the moment to follow. But art remakes ideally, and ideally expresses my momentary situation. Its image, produced by art, becomes separated from time and space, and can be again made and again contemplated in its ideal-reality from every point of time and space. ”

“ For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy.
By those who consider a balanced repose the end of culture, the imagination must necessarily be regarded as the one faculty before all others to be suppressed. ”

“ The student of his own times must turn to the life of the yesterdays for answers to the problems which are confronting him. The experience of the past has been chronicled in books in order that we may share the blessings of that experience. How narrow seems the life of the person who is without the power to read even the outlines of that history! We have but to imagine the books of the past as closed [16] to the entire world, and the power of reading as cut off from every one, to realize the individual loss when the power of thus reading is withheld. ”

“ Such must ever feel that books have had a powerful effect in making them all that they are. There are many considerations that go to show the importance of books.
Books are the accumulated treasures of generations.—They are to man what memory is to the individual. If all the libraries in the world were burned and all the books in the world destroyed, the past would be little more than a blank. It would be a calamity corresponding to that of a man losing by a stroke the memory of past years. The literature of the world is the world's memory, the world's experience, the world's failures. ”

“ It clearly results from what precedes that works of history must be considered as works of pure imagination. They are fanciful accounts of ill-observed facts, accompanied by explanations the result of reflection. To write such books is the most absolute waste of time. Had not the past left us its literary, artistic, and monumental works, we should know absolutely nothing in reality with regard to bygone times. ”

“ Observing the history which is in all men's lives, 'Figuring the nature of the times deceased, a man may prophesy,' as it would seem, 'with a near aim,'—quite near—'of the main chance of things, as yet, not come to life, which in their weak beginnings lie intreasured. Such things become the hatch and brood of time,' this Poet says; but art, it seems, anticipates that process. There appears to be more of the future here, than of the times deceased. ”

“ For the novelist therefore it is more important to depict the past as a world different from our own, and to show something of its character and colouring than to map out a particular path in that world and to track down a particular course of public events. It is more important for him to breathe the spirit of a bygone age, and make his book the stuff of its mind, and recapture its turns of thought, its fund of feeling, and all its waywardnesses than to chronicle events with precision and keep tight to big political happenings. ”

“ Having found a mode of transmitting that species of knowledge which could not, like rhythmical tales or sententious problems, be accurately preserved by the memory alone, it was natural that a present age should desire to record and transmit the past— chtaema es aei—an everlasting heirloom to the future. ”

“ And continually it transforms its frustrated hopes into memories, and from these memories it draws fresh hopes. From the subterranean ore of memory we extract the jewelled visions of our future; imagination shapes our remembrances into hopes. ”

“ It is always possible for you or me in daily life to deny that time exists and act accordingly even if we become unintelligible and are sent by our fellow citizens to what they choose to call a lunatic asylum. But it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling however lightly to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder. ”

“ Every plot has its proper duration as well as its appropriate place. Think of administering the same dose of time to all events! of applying the same measure to everything! You would laugh at a cobbler who should attempt to put the same shoe on every foot. To cross unity of time and unity of place like the bars of a cage, and pedantically to introduce therein, in the name of Aristotle, all the deeds, all the nations, all the figures which Providence sets before us in such vast numbers in real life,—to proceed thus is to mutilate men and things, to cause history to make wry faces. ”

“ The ugliest trick it plays at any rate is its effect on that side of the novelist’s effort—the side of most difficulty and thereby of most dignity—which consists in giving the sense of duration, of the lapse and accumulation of time. This is altogether to my view the stiffest problem that the artist in fiction has to tackle, and nothing is more striking at present than the blankness, for the most part, of his indifference to it. The mere multiplication of quoted remarks is the last thing to strengthen his hand. ”

“ The drama exhibits successive imitations of successive actions, and why may not the second imitation represent an action that happened years after the first; if it be so connected with it, that nothing but time can be supposed to intervene? Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily contract the time of real actions, and therefore willingly permit it to be contracted when we only see their imitation. ”

“ I do not know whether worlds are heralded by such glad songs, or whether any have such a fleeting existence, for the mind that reflects truth is deluded with strange phantasies of time and place in which seconds are rolled out into centuries and long cycles are reflected in an instant of time. ”

“ And true as this is in the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession. In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is realised. ”

“ This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. ”

“ How, instead of dealing synthetically with the great problems of humanity, and following, through the events of history, the phases of the regenerating, providential idea, can you waste time writing poetry and novels which lead to nothing, and which do nothing to help the generation forward in the pathway of the future? ”

“ Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought. ”

“ It is because people will only read what is the newest instead of what is the best of all ages, that writers remain in the narrow circle of prevailing ideas, and that the age sinks deeper and deeper in its own mire. ”

“ Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present, to think of the characters and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection ”

“ And we must also remember that the art of the time, whether it be bad or good, has a much more living relation to the generation which is producing it, and exerts a more powerful [16] influence upon it, than the art of any time that is past and gone. It is the same in all aspects of life: it is the book of the day, the hero or statesman of the hour, the newest hope, the latest flash of scientific light, which attracts the people. ”

“ The monumental character of our art will disappear; the clinging and sticking to the past, the selfish care for continuity and possible immortality, we shall cast off; the Past will be Past, the Future will be Future, to us, and we shall live and create only in the Today, in the full Present. Remember that I used to call you happy in your particular art, because you were an immediate artist, actually present, and appealing to the senses at every moment. ”