LITERATURE AND TIME.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 330, 17 October 1908, Page 12

LITERATURE AND TIME.

A contributor to tho "Manchester Guardian" writes delightfully on tho influence of time upon literature.

People tell us (he says) there are pictures tho influence.of time on which has been entirely for the good. Time has so mellowed and harmonised their colours that they are better pictures to-day than when they camo from tho artist's easel. One may say much the same thing in-literature. Time often does a great deal to incroaso even the literary value of a book. That there exist in old English poets merits which do not owe their presenco.ther6.tp the genius of the poet was a thought .fthich presented itself to the mind of Lowell, but be gave a wrong explanation of the fact. He ascribed it to tho circumstance that the ordinary speech of the time was poetic, so that just as a painter in an age when costume is magnificent has only to copy what he sees and the result his pictures are, so a poet in such a time has only to write as people talk. This explanation cannot be accepted without at least; a distinguo. Perhaps it has never happened that in any age the speech in-use has seemed-poetio to those who used it. M. Jourdain in all.generations has ever spoken: only the .plainest of prose. But it may well happen that the speech which was prose to tnose who employed it should becomo manifest poetry in the oyes of a later generation.-••Thus an idiom which was commonplaco ~ in its'"own day may, by becoming obsolete, set off with the literary note of quaintness'the truth it helps to express, and, 'similarly, words which have survived'may have acquired a shade of meaning 'which..taakes their use in some juncture that was -to;the poet a sheer felicity. On the whole we may well believe that in the poems of the older English makers there aro more merits than the poets put there. But whatever time may in this way add to the literary quality of a work never.compensates, for what intakes away in rupturing .that:'subtle' thread"of sympathy between it and the generation' in which it is produced which males its appeal far more powerfully to its own than to any subsequent age. The appeal to its own age is often tho only appeal, a book has, and.thus, having served its aiy,' it incontinently dies. That is the norImaL'fatS of-''v-book. The book over which to-day ; Jack chuckles'.with glee and that over which Jill weeps for tenderness will presently be dropped into oblivion's wallet, and we contemplate tho prospect with dry eyes. The wonder that books which are so much alive to-day should ever ceaso to be alive must be set over against the wonder that othor books that are visibly dead should ever have been, alive.. One takes up the "Leoni- ' das" of good Master Richard Glover and wonders what people ever saw in it. They tell us that it was a. spell of war-feoling which carried an epic in nine books and consisting of thousands-of lines of the blankest of verse into edition after edition. Wo have seen in our own time how martial feeling may lead people to mistake doggerel for high, poetry, but if tha 4 t had been a full explanation of the popularity of "Leonidas" one would have expected that on every subsequent recurrence of war-fever ,it would become readable. It does .not. .Jts voice sdunds thin and small as k. voice in a telephone. The book is a.s dead as anything over which the burial service is read, and on its tombstone no man shall carve "Resurgam." Even in the case of those'books which are destined to survive and delight postority no later generation has the thrill of pleasure which' tha.t has which rends them as they come from tho press. Thus mankind will never tiro of the works of Sir Wajter Scott, but that old. enthusiasm will never return which urged young men to' walk numberless miles to meet the stage-coach bearing tho latest "Scottish novel."