of earthly life, but with the elements of its own creation, and with materials flexible to its own purest preconceptions. It is certain that, were it not for the Literature of Power, these ideals would often remain amongst us as mere arid notional forms; whereas, by the creative forces of man put forth in literature, they gain a vernal life of restoration, and germinate into vital activities. The commonest novel, by moving in alliance with human fears and hopes, with human instincts of wrong and right, sustains and quickens those affections. Calling them into
9. The ladder that the patriarch Jacob saw in a 'an understanding heart to judge thy people.' dream, reaching from the earth to heaven, on 3. Epic poem (French). which the angels were ascending and descending 4. A term in old literary criticism for the distri( Genesis 28.11-12). bution of earthly rewards and punishments, at the 1. Provided with an outlet. end of a work of literature, in proportion to the 2. In 1 Kings 3.9 King Solomon asks the Lord for virtues and vices of the various characters.
.
ALEXANDER POPE / 57 5
action, it rescues them from torpor. And hence the preeminency over all authors that merely teach of the meanest that moves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving. The very highest work that has ever existed in the Literature of Knowledge is but a provisional work: a book upon trial and sufferance, and qnamdiu bene se gesserit.5 Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be but expanded?nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order?and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the Literature of Power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant6 on earth from the first. In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence: 1 st, as regards absolute truth; 2dly, when that combat was over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And as soon as a La Place,7 or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness; by weapons won from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra,8 but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the contrary, the Iliad, the Prometheus of Aeschylus, the Othello or King Lear, the Hamlet or Macbeth, and the Paradise Lost, are not militant, but triumphant forever as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo.9 These things are separated not by imparity, but by disparity. They are not thought of as unequal under the same standard, but as different in kind, and, if otherwise equal, as equal under a different standard. Human works of immortal beauty and works of nature in one respect stand on the same footing: they never absolutely repeat each other, never approach so near as not to differ; and they differ not as better and worse, or simply by more and less: they differ by undecipherable and incommunicable differences, that cannot be caught by mimicries, that cannot be reflected in the mirror of copies, that cannot become ponderable in the scales of vulgar comparison.
Applying these principles to Pope as a representative of fine literature in general, we would wish to remark the claim which he has, or which any equal writer has, to the attention and jealous winnowing of those critics in particular who watch over public morals. Clergymen, and all organs of public criticism put in motion by clergymen, are more especially concerned in the just appreciation of such writers, if the two canons are remembered which we have endeavored to illustrate, viz. that all works in this class, as opposed to those in the literature of knowledge, 1 st, work by far deeper agencies, and, 2dly, are more permanent; in the strictest sense they are KTRPATCL EG &EL' and what evil they do, or what good they do, is commensurate with the national language,
5. As long as it shall conduct itself well (Latin). Celestial Mechanics (1799?1825), was known as 6. Combative. 'Principia': Isaac Newton's great 'the Newton of France.' Philosophiae Natnralis Principia Mathematica 8. Shadow of a name (Latin). (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), 9. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), Republished in 1687, set forth the laws of motion and naissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. the principle of universal gravitation. Praxiteles (4th century B.C.E.), Greek sculptor. 7. Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, mathema-1. Everlasting possessions (Greek). tician and astronomer, author of A Treatise on
.
57 6 / THOMAS DE QUINCEY
sometimes long after the nation has departed. At this hour, five hundred years since their creation, the tales of Chaucer,2 never equaled on this earth for their tenderness, and for life of picturesqueness, are read familiarly by many in the charming language of their natal day, and by others in the modernizations of Dryden, of Pope, and Wordsworth.3 At this hour, one thousand eight hundred years since their creation, the Pagan tales of Ovid,4 never equaled on this earth for the gaiety of their movement and the capricious graces of their narrative, are read by all Christendom. This man's people and their monuments are dust; but he is alive: he has survived them, as he told us that he had it in his commission to do, by a thousand years; 'and shall a thousand more.'
All the literature of knowledge builds only ground-nests, that are swept away by floods, or confounded by the plow; but the literature of power builds nests in aerial altitudes of temples sacred from violation, or of forests inaccessible to fraud. This is a great prerogative of the power literature; and it is a greater which lies in the mode of its influence. The knowledge literature, like the fashion of this world, passeth away. An Encyclopedia is its abstract; and, in this respect, it may be taken for its speaking symbol?that before one generation has passed an Encyclopedia is superannuated; for it speaks through the dead memory and unimpassioned understanding, which have not the repose of higher faculties, but are continually enlarging and varying their phylacteries. 5 But all literature properly so called?literature K?T' et1'j(rv'??for the very same reason that it is so much more durable than the literature of knowledge, is (and by the very same proportion it is) more intense and electrically searching in its impressions. The directions in which the tragedy of this planet has trained our human feelings to play, and the combinations into which the poetry of this planet has thrown our human passions of love and hatred, of admiration and contempt, exercise a power for bad or good over human life that cannot be contemplated, when stretching through many generations, without a sentiment allied to awe.7 And of this let everyone be assured?that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life, like forgotten incidents of his childhood.
1848, 1858
2. The Canterbury Tales were not made public until 1380 or thereabouts; but the composition must have cost thirty or more years; not to mention that the work had probably been finished for some years before it was divulged [De Quincey's note]. 3. Following the example of various earlier poets who wrote modernized versions of Chaucer, Wordsworth had translated 'The Prioress's Tale' and a section of Troilus and Criseyde. 4. Latin poet (43 B.C.E.-18 C.E.), author of Metamorphoses and other books of verse narratives. 5. I.e., preestablished texts. 'Phylacteries' are leather boxes, inscribed with quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures, worn by Orthodox Jews during morning prayer. 6. In the highest degree (Greek). 7. The reason why the broad distinctions between the two literatures of power and knowledge so little fix the attention lies in the fact that a vast proportion of books?history, biography, travels, miscellaneous essays, etc.?lying in a middle zone, confound these distinctions by interblending them. All that we call 'amusement' or 'entertainment' is a diluted form of the power belonging to passion, and also a mixed form; and, where threads of direct instruction intermingle in the texture with these threads of power, this absorption of the duality into one representative nuance neutralizes the separate perception of either. Fused into a tertium quid [a third thing], or neutral state, they disappear to the popular eye as the repelling forces which, in fact, they are [De
