Literature in a Changing Age

THE phenomena which English literature exhibits in changing from its exclusive, institutional character, devoted to the cultivated interests of the few, to its present inclusive, universal appeal in serving the uses of the many, is the subject of Mr. Thorndike's book. The social influences under which the change took place are dealt with in his chapter on The Reading Public. The growth of popular education in the first third of the century whereby "reading has ceased to be an occupation of special classes and has spread to every rank and occupation" was accompanied by mechanical progress, in particular the application of steam to machinery, including the printing press. The changes in transportation made it possible to distribute books widely and rapidly as well as to produce them cheaply. Means of circulation such as newspapers and magazines multiplied, and circulating libraries came into existence. As Mr. Thorndike notes, these last constituted a definite means of public influence upon at least one great department of literature, for "the larger libraries were soon in a position to dictate what sort of fiction they wanted." But as he further concludes, in the face of this "prodigious enlargement of the reading public, wonder will be less at the amount of vulgarization of taste than at the dignity and elevation which literature has maintained during its expansion." The tradition of greatness in literature which had been inherited from the past remained powerful throughout the Victorian Age. In that respect literature retains an advantage over a new form of expression, such as moving pictures, which has sprung into instant and immediate favor with a vast and uncritical public. Literature as the result of its institutional past has historic standards and an artistic inheritance by virtue of which it remains what the moving picture perhaps never can become, a fine art. This inheritance in the period which Mr. Thorndike discusses was immediately derived from the romantic movement of the early years of the century. That was the last age in which literature maintained its esoteric and institutional character. It was a period of philosophic belief in unity, and of romantic aspiration toward the ideal, of which belief and aspiration literature, particularly poetry, was the prophecy, and criticism the law. Mr. Thorndike dismisses with much acuteness the incompatibility of this theory of literature with the world that was coming into being, a world of enormously increased mechanical and social apparatus, production and wealth, education and public consciousness. He makes "the romanticist inheritance modified by a hostile environment of industry, democracy, and science" his formula for the examination of the development of literature in Victorian England. To Carlyle Mr. Thorndike rightly gives a preeminent place among the Victorians. He is a brilliant example of the way in which the romantic inheritance was modified by the new environment created by the industrial, social, and intellectual revolution. For Carlyle conspicuously held the transcendental belief in the absolute, and the prophetic theory of literature, both modified by his recognition of the demands and problems of the new age. "He was the prophet who first summoned literature to look with imagination on the spectacle of the new day and to attack its problems with passionate earnestness." And he was certainly the major influence upon his contemporaries. To name his friends and disciples—Tennyson, Ruskin, Browning, Dickens, Arnold, Clough, Kingsley—is to read the roll-call of the early Victorians.... –The Nation, Vol. 113 [1921]