The United States Magazine and Democratic Review
Vol. 22, May, 1848
INFLUENCE OF THE TELEGRAPH UPON LITERATURE.
The Telegraph has ceased to be a wonder. Its astonishing exhibition of human skill no longer excites our admiration. The emotions which the actual display of its magical powers excited in the minds of all beholders— the speculations to which it gave rise among the philosophical—the indefinable visions of commercial advantage which crowded upon the scheming brain of the capitalist and the ignorant wonder of the vulgar, have all passed away, and given place to more practical considerations. And now, amid applications for patents and contracts for constructing lines and the setting up of telegraph offices all over the land, we beg to be excused if we step aside for a moment into an untrodden path, and indulge in a few reflections upon the influence which the Telegraph will have upon literature.
We do not intend to speak of the universal diffusion of intelligence among the mass of the people, which every such great movement is calculated to promote—nor of the consequent increase in the number of those who will devote themselves to learning, and who will unite to lay the foundations of the great Republic of Letters in the West. We shall confine our remarks to a comparatively unimportant branch of the subject—its effect upon Style in Composition. Perhaps a slight sneer disfigures your pretty face, gentle reader, if you have one, at this paradoxical announcement. Perhaps you imagine that there is about as much connection between the two as there is between the shape of a cow's horn and the taste of her butter. We will try to cure you of that, and convince you that " there is something in it," as people say of animal magnetism or any other inexplicable wonder. We are to speak of its probable effect upon Style in Composition. That a great revolution is effecting in this department of literature, or rather that there is manifested a continual progressive tendency towards perfection, must be apparent to every careful observer. The complicated periods which were once so much in vogue—the sentence within sentence, armed with all the paraphernalia of comma, semicolon, colon and dash, and dragging their slow length over almost an entire page before the " full stop" put a period at once to their existence and the reader's perplexity—have been gradually disappearing—having either fallen to pieces from their own clumsy construction, or been shattered by the critic's hammer. The florid verbosity which characterised the ore rotunda style of Dr. Johnson; the polished sentences of Addison, whose smoothly gliding periods might almost have been set to music—have been gradually giving way to a more nervous and rhetorically perfect style. The human race seems ever on the march toward perfection in the use of the instruments which Providence has placed in its hands. At no period of his existence has the material appropriated to the use of man been so economically or skilfully employed as at present. Language is as important an auxiliary to man as the motive power of water or steam, the principles of mechanics, or the facilities which the locomotive or the Telegraph furnish. Language too, like the other great agents employed in his service, has been slowly yet certainly approaching the standard of perfection—becoming, in every succeeding generation, more surely and more readily the exponent of thought.
True, its onward march has often been retarded by the digressions of a false public taste. Often has it delighted to linger among the flowers of fancy, and encumber itself with a troublesome burden of useless trash, which a mistaken admiration hailed as the "graces of rhetoric." Often has it been beguiled from its direct course into some untrodden bye-path, at the beck of a name which happened to be, for a brief period, authority in the world of letters. This vain pursuit after imaginary excellence—this dallying by the way with unreal beauties, has hindered greatly the onward progress of language.
The high point at which it should aim, is this— the communication of thought with the utmost Facility and Clearness, united with the greatest possible Elegance of style. The first element of this perfection, facility of communication and clearness of thought, should never be sacrificed to beauty of style; and the second should always be, and is always in good writing, found in connection with the first. A writer may be forcible, nervous, powerful; he may be mighty to convince the judgment; but when he lacks grace to captivate the sensual ear, and elegance to charm and attract to a willing obedience, he fails in the great essential of all oratory, persuasion. But elegance alone, shorn of the other requisites of a finished style, is yet more inoperative. Beauty of language, unaccompanied with precision and clearness of thought, is not simply powerless—it becomes vapid, unmeaning, even ridiculous; like the fop who excites a smile from the very daintiness and elegance of his apparel, when it is unfortunately contrasted with his lack of energy and the muddiness of his ideas.
Yet perhaps we are making too nice a distinction between these two elements of literary excellence. We are not sure but that they may be found to be eventually the same in principle. May not perspicuity, clearness of thought and facility of communication, be the very perfection of elegance ?—though it is often supposed to consist in finely-rounded periods of different lengths, arranged in alternate succession; or in harmonious sentences skilfully disposed. However this may be, (and we leave the question for critics to settle,) it is certain that the second element of which we have spoken cannot exist without the first—that genuine elegance of style—a beauty which is something more than tawdry finery—cannot be without precision and clearness.
Yet this separation has been attempted more than once in the progress of letters. More than once has a vitiated public taste, blindly following the impulse of some self-constituted authority, mistaken the true standard of literary perfection, and plunged headlong in the chase after some startling novelty—the fancy of an hour. It would be an interesting and a profitable task to trace the various extravagancies which have each in their turn played the Will-o'-the-Wisp to mislead the judgment of the literary public. Looking calmly back from our high stand in the middle of the nineteenth century, many of the great movements which once agitated the public mind—many dicta which were once as the oracles of fate, must needs present an amusing phase to the intelligent observer. Such a retrospect could not but be profitable, for the same extravagancies may be attempted yet again, and happy is he who gathers wisdom for the present from the lessons of the past.
But such a digression would lead us wide of our mark.
We said that the tendency of language is invariably toward the standard of perfection.
Strange as the assertion may seem, we declare that the Telegraph will contribute directly to the attainment of that end wherever it is used. At first view we wonder what connection a mere machine has with literature. At the second thought we recall the astonishing intellectual revolution which followed the invention of the printing press, and we blush at our forgetfulness.
The manner in which the Telegraph must operate for the improvement of language is this.
The Telegraph is necessarily an expensive method of communication; yet it offers facilities which are indispensable to the man of business in this driving age of the world. Costly as it is, it must be employed. Now the desideratum of the Telegraph—the great question most important to all who have any connection with it, is this—How can the greatest amount of intelligence be communicated in the fewest words? Is not this the very question which has been for centuries theoretically proposed by scholars as the ultimatum of language ? Language is but the medium of thought—which flies as rapidly and acts as instantaneously as the invisible element which flashes along the Telegraphic wire. The more closely, then, that it follows the operation of thought, the more perfectly does it perform its office. Every useless ornament, every added grace which is not the very extreme of simplicity, is but a troublesome encumbrance.
Notice the operations of the mind in conversation. Observe how idea follows idea in such rapid succession, flitting so swiftly by that but few of them can be seized, and moulded into tangible form, even by the operation of that almost perfect instrument which the Creator has given to us for communication with our fellows. How much of the freshness and beauty of even these imperfect impressions evaporates in the slow and tedious process of committing them to writing. Especially is this the case where a vitiated public taste has introduced a style which wearies its complicated and prolix verbosity, or one so affectedly brilliant and antithetical that it requires the most minute analysis and laborious study to resolve its meaning. Now the certain effect of the Telegraph, as far as it has any influence upon the language, (and who at the present day will dare to estimate its possible influence in the future,) will be to introduce a style of writing which shall be, first of all, brief. Brevity, it is said, is the soul of wit; it is indeed the soul of all language, grave or gay, for every purpose to which it can be applied, except caricature. We never yet heard that tediousness was the soul of anything in particular. The Telegraphic style, as we shall denominate it, for the benefit of all future writers upon rhetoric, is also terse, condensed, expressive, sparing of expletives and utterly ignorant of synonyms. From its subject matter it has little to do with beauty or grace; but the all-important requisite in fine writing, perspicuity, cannot but be promoted by its prevalence. The first is a rare exotic, cultivated only in the gardens of the learned or the curious. The other is the hardy native plant, which is the very " staff of life" in the world of letters.
Let not the reader imagine that the influence of this invention is to be confined within the narrow precincts of the Telegraph office, or limited to the pen of the operator. When a half column or more of every paper in the Union is filled with Telegraphic despatches; when these reports form a large part of the daily reading of thousands; when correspondence is hourly prepared and revised, throughout the whole extent of the United States, with a view to telegraphic transmission, is it too much to expect that this invention will have an influence upon American literature; and that that influence will be marked and permanent, and withal salutary? We can very easily imagine that in course of time the register may be so much improved that the price of transmission will be materially lessened, and the great reason for brevity and concentration of style partially removed —but this is a thing only probable, by no means certain; and it is quite as probable that a long time must elapse before the present imperfect apparatus will be superceded by a more finished invention.
At all events it must ever be a consideration affecting men's pockets, and of course always operative. Telegraphic despatches will become more extended, more numerous, dealing more in details, yet regard must ever be had to the great principle of their construction; the cost of production must ever incline the balance toward economy, and the aim of the writer must ever be to interest, amuse, or instruct in the most concise and appropriate language of which he is master.
We would by no means be thought to undervalue the "graces of rhetoric," or to declare that beauty and finish of style is not an essential requisite in all good writing. No man in his senses would deny it. The idea with which we wish to impress the reader, is, that perspicuity, a quality of style infinitely more important than elegance, has been sadly neglected by many authors in times gone by; and that the invention of the Telegraph is one of those causes which are about to introduce a better state of things. In these days of Yankee enterprise and activity, we want no prosaic Johnsonism; we can tolerate no dainty euphuist. We have long since consigned to merited oblivion the endless train of harmonious and vapid authors that followed after him, who
"Lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."
Even the polished periods of the graceful Spectator are banished to the shelves of a few philosophically-disposed old gentlemen who can find leisure to enjoy such antiquated pleasures in the quiet solitude of their own libraries, undisturbed by the turmoil and bustle of the great world surging past their doors. Shakspeare has only escaped a similar fate by that prophetical vision of the future public taste which he possessed, and the Yankee directness and concentration of his style. The glittering gems of thought, and the perfect models of composition which lie scattered about among the fragments of classic antiquity, are now only stirred from the slumber of ages, by the careless and unappreciating school boy.
Truly the present is rushing on like an arrow to its mark, scattering the venerable past to the winds. We are borne fleetly onward in the car of time—and as the invisible fluid, which may be, for ought we know, the secret of universal gravitation, flies backward and forward on its wiry track —tic,' tic, tic—like the clicking of the escapement wheels of the universe— all that is great and memorable in the past grows dim in the distance, and fades away like the formless visions of the enchanter's magic circle—while before us rise like exhalations from the western wave the islands of the blessed—the isle of engines, where the human race are to live by machinery, and flash from point to point in polar magnetic chariots; where steam is to perform all the operations of thought; where springs of sarsaparilla and cholagogue, mingled with the elixir of perpetual youth, gush out of the rocks, and where the epitaph of the French infidel, death is but an eternal sleep, will be verified by the use of concentrated chloroform.
No comments:
Post a Comment