According to the practice of our oldest church, it takes about four hundred years to make a saint. That is to say, during that period one can't be just sure whether he's a saint or not. But if at the end of four hundred years his apparent saintliness has withstood the wear and tear of time, then a saint he is, indubitably and for ever. Many of us no doubt received a pleasant shock of surprise a year or two ago when the venerable victim of Henry VIII, beheaded in 1555 and known in our school books as Sir Thomas More, became henceforth Saint Thomas. I say a pleasant surprise--as helping to emphasize the continuity and permanence of society, a thing grievously in doubt just now.
If therefore in the Spiritual Kingdom there are saints that last, there must be in the Republic of Letters authors whose work remains. But in this case we have no definite process of canonization. In a general way, the world at large refers to certain authors as 'classic'; but how they got to be so, and who makes them so, and what--becomes more mysterious the more you look at it.
As everybody knows, the word 'classic' used to be used to indicate merely the literature of Greece and Rome. It was held commonly to include all the Greek and Roman books that had survived--no very great amount in any case, as a quite small library would hold the lot. But the Romans themselves had used the word a little differently. They meant by 'classics' the best of their books. The word was the adjective from classis--an assembly, a fleet, a class. Oddly enough, when someone introduced for us the cheap word 'classy' he reproduced exactly the old Latin 'classicus.'
But the meaning of the word 'classic' and of 'the classics' has, within a generation or two, been altered, or rather expanded, to mean not only the ancient books, but also all such books of our own time as deserve from their excellence a prominence and permanent place in our literature. Thus Macaulay's works, no one doubts it, are 'classics'; so too those of Emerson and of Hawthorne. So are not, if one may say it with all gentleness, those of the late Edgar Wallace. On the other hand everyone thought, forty years ago, that George Meredith's books would prove to be 'classics': and they haven't.
What, then, makes classics? Who decides what is on the list and what not? Are classics being written now, or will there be no more of them? Does the list indicate the books that are read, or the books that ought to be read, or the books that keep on being read? Must classics be serious, or have heaviness and lightness nothing to do with it? Do the Bab Ballads get in along with the Rubaiyat, and Tom Hood sit beside Robert Browning? Does the mere fact that a vast number of people read and enjoy a book make it at once a classic?
Now I do not think that any of these criteria indicate the test as to what is or what is not a classic. The most widely read book in all the history of the world (as referring to one year's reading) was published only a year ago. Where will it be in five years? Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad is a classic and yet is as light as innocence itself. Karl Marx's Capital, another classic, is as heavy as gold. Maria Chapdelaine is a classic and was written yesterday. Chaucer's Tales, on the shelf alongside of it, are older than printing.
Many people are apt to presume that the classics have their place given to them by scholars and professors, that they are canonized over the heads of the plain people by the academic class. Those who think this feel a certain resentment. It is part of the general objection to what is called highbrow--a sort of assumed superiority which sweeps the area of art, music and literature and takes away from the plain man the pleasure of his plain enjoyment. He stands condemned because he likes to hear his daughter at the piano play In the Gloaming, or to read aloud Ella Wheeler Wilcox's Rock Me to Sleep, Mother. Meantime the professor who condemns him reads Browning's Sordello, and goes into ecstasies over it.
The basis of this resentment of what is highbrow is no doubt sound: subconsciously, people know that a vast mass of aesthetic superiority is false, a substitution of affectation for reality. Very few people can stand the strain of being educated without getting superior over it. Everyone must have noticed how professors of literature annex Shakespeare, and professors of history take over Napoleon, and leave the rest of us out. What we think doesn't matter.
But in the present case I don't think for a moment that professors make the classics. Indeed it is the other way round. In the field of letters, as apart from medicine and science, professors do not lead but follow. Their wisdom is always that of a post-mortem. They made political economy after the industrial revolution, not before it. They explained democracy after the people created it, and it is not till the people have read a book for a hundred years that the professors can explain why. In other words, the cart doesn't go before the horse. Not at all. The horse, the mass of human intelligence, draws along the cart of history in which stands the professor, looking backward and explaining the scenery.
This is not said unkindly. If he looked forward he wouldn't see any more than the horse does; and the horse sees nothing.
Not the professors, then, nor yet the favour of courts and clergy, of kings and noblemen, can make a classic apart from merit. Louis XIV's 'Academie' only recognized what was there already. 'You may admit Moliere,' wrote the king. But Moliere didn't need it. There is no royal road to learning, nor to authorship. One recalls Queen Victoria presenting to Charles Dickens with pathetic modesty her little book, 'Leaves from a 'Life in the Highlands,' and receiving in return Dickens's entire works.
Consider, if you like, how some of the classics came to take rank as such. Take Shakespeare. Here was an unknown person who had a wonderful trick of putting old stories together, so as to turn them into plays. There were lots of people doing it, or trying to. It was the chief creative art of the day: play going, play writing, strolling players, mummers--it was the chief answer, among a nation who couldn't read, to the age-long demand of humanity--'Tell me a story!'
And Shakespeare could not only put a play together, but he had an extraordinary gift of language. When a thing is well said all ears listen to it. When Shakespeare's actor said, 'to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, creeps in life's petty pace from day to day, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death'--even the people in the cheap seats, the groundlings, must have said, 'God save us!' And the thing went on and on. No board of judges, no favour of a court made Shakespeare Shakespeare. As far as I know, no professor ever sat on him till the Germans, the Schlegels, got at him, nearly two hundred years later.
Or take Walter Scott. There came a day when the people in Edinburgh walked up and down the street with their eyes glued on a book called Waverley, and looked up to ask perfect strangers, 'Have ye read it?' Professors don't do that. And about twenty years after that, all England was roaring over Pickwick--except the professors, who haven't started yet. They will, though; in about fifty years more they'll discover Dickens, as the church discovered Thomas More.
No, no--the classics are made so by the appreciation of the people at large. You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people, etc.--we remember what Abraham Lincoln said. Yet not even appreciation will always do it. At times appreciation springs up as fast and withers as quickly as the seed in the bad ground. All the polite world once read Aphra Behm, thrilled over Ossian and shuddered at Mrs. Crowe. In our own time one has seen George Meredith pass to oblivion, and one sees every day the 'Best Sellers' spreading as wide as sunshine, and passing as quickly as the day itself.
And what is more, even appreciation with the lapse of years may shift from its true basis to a false. Shakespeare is admired now, by the 'highbrows,' for things he never thought of, for effects he never planned. Scholars dissect Chaucer and sew him up again all full of 'purpose.' The taxidermists of the colleges have a whole museum full of stuffed authors. In the end it doesn't matter. Native appreciation lives on after the stuffing has fallen out.
The matter stands like this. There is a certain class and kind of literature that has the quality of universality. It has something in it that reaches the high and the low, the wise and the foolish, the educated and the illiterate. This quality in it makes it ring as true as a bell. After all, in this transitory life, we are all, high and low, educated and illiterate, on one and the same pilgrimage. The essential frame of life is the same for all. The Anglo-Saxon who spoke of life as a bird passing a moment through a lighted hall and out again into the darkness, spoke down the ages to twenty generations. When Shakespeare said, 'to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow,' the words were as good yesterday as to-day.
What we call the classics are the books that have enough of this universal appeal to give them their place and keep them there. One might wonder why it often comes about that books that seem written for but one class, or in language largely out of common understanding, yet reach and hold a wide enough world to make them classics. The reason is, I think, that appreciation is a queer thing running in sympathetic channels. Children listen, enthralled with things they cannot understand. Clergymen love sea-stories and sea-captains read theology. When a man sits buried in a book, it is not the man that you see and know that is reading: deep down in him are antecedent generations--soldiers, pirates, martyrs, fading back to cave men. As he reads, the 'universal' book is calling to one of them.
I remember, years ago, how an old gentleman of my acquaintance, the father of one of my class-mates at college, but himself a plain business man, picked up one evening his son's copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He sat down and read it with absorption. 'Fine,' he said. He sat up late that night reading it; didn't finish it, so he told us next day, till nearly one o'clock. Always afterwards he said it was a great book. It must have hit him somewhere. Perhaps he was a far down descendant of the sculptor Rodin's Thinker--who could think without words.
And now I will say one further thing about the classics. There are not going to be any more. We have them all now, all that there are ever going to be.
I cannot imagine any judgment more likely to meet with instant dissent, and to be dismissed with contempt or laughter. It sounds like the opinion of an ageing man, for whom the world is running out with his own years. Such judgments are familiar. But I do not think that this is one. As I see it, the pre-eminence of written books reached its height in the nineteenth century, when for the first time all the world went to school, and before all the world went to moving pictures and 'listened in' on the radio.
In the nineteenth century it was still possible in a world as yet under-developed and under-explored, to reach with a new book a mark so far beyond the previous record that the book became a heritage. There is no such opportunity now. No one can be in political economy an Adam Smith, or in political philosophy a John Stuart Mill, in fiction a Walter Scott or a Charles Dickens. The world of letters now moves forward on a broad front, millions and millions all talking and reading, together. Each little increment of new excellence carries some one a moment into sudden notoriety--greater than that of the Mills and the Darwins--but a notoriety, 'gone with the wind,' vanishing as soon as achieved. We live in an age where universal competence is replacing individual eminence: or rather, since 'eminent' is a comparative word an age in which the eminent man only 'sticks out' a little. I know a little boy who told me the other day that he could easily have won a race at his school except that there was another boy who could run faster. Of such stuff is present eminence made. One recalls Dickens's America, in which every other man was 'the most remarkable man in the country'. So it is in the republic of letters.
Not that you or I and the rest after us will ever realize that the classics have gone, that the list is closed, the booking office shut. Best sellers will still sweep over the landscape remarkable books will convulse society, new works of philosophy will revolutionize human thought, and no one will live long enough to know that they didn't last, and that behind them in the receding landscape of history, Chaucer will be still telling tales--not better, but prior to other people's--and John Stuart Mill remain part of the world's history, having had the good luck to live a century before Professor Jones. So my prophesy of a classicless age to come is a safe one. By the time it's due, it won't matter. 'You said at the last election,' complained once an old farmer to me, 'that the price of marsh hay would go up.' 'Yes,' I answered, 'but the election's over.' So let it be with the withering grass of literature.
