The Revenge of the Bards
“The natural desire of every man,” says Peacock in The Four Ages of Poetry, “to engross to himself as much power and property as he can acquire by any of the means which might makes right, is accompanied by the no less natural desire of making known to as many people as possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this universal game. The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes a king; his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of poetry.... The first rude songs of all nations... tell us how many battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many breastplates he has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds, and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.” The bards meanwhile, according to Peacock, do not neglect their own status. “They are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and fighting: and though their object be nothing more than to secure a share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by intellectual, not by physical, power: their success excites emulation to the attainment of intellectual eminence: thus they sharpen their own wits and awaken those of others.... Their familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of inspiration... being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.”
This is the revenge of the bards: from singing of godlike men they come to feel themselves godlike; and in time they persuade a respectable portion of the community to take them at their own value. Now it is their turn to share—almost to usurp—the glory of the kings and warriors their former patrons. Homer takes as high a rank as Agamemnon and Achilles and Ulysses, who are remembered because Homer admitted them to his narrative. The bard establishes the canon of the memorable. May there not have been other men as wise as Moses or as patient as Job or as strong as Samson? There may have been, but as they lacked bards they dropped out of the race for perennial honor. That race, at least, is not for the swift alone. Socrates had a better bard than Pericles; he had Plato. Caesar had a better bard than Pompey: he had himself. If there were more Caesars, history might be different; certainly historiography would be. As it is, accident and art play an enormous part in fixing human fame.
The process continues to the present day, for the biographer who has succeeded to the bard has the bard’s habits in no very different degree. But he is no longer quite so dependent as his ancestor, no longer quite so official. Like will to like in biography as elsewhere. So long as the craft of making reputations is left to the guild of letters, so long will the guild impress it with its special prejudices. It will choose to write about those great men whose careers best conform to some classic type or fit some dramatic mode or flatter some literary sentiment. A great man who has been a conspicuous patron of the arts has ten times the chances at posterity that a mere man of power or money has; but so has a great man who has been eloquent or who has borne himself like Cato or who has had a fate in some way or other resembling Napoleon’s.
Not only does the literary guild choose men of action on literary grounds to write about: it chooses disproportionately to write about its members. There are as many lives of thinkers and artists as of generals and monarchs. Philostratus wrote about the sophists and Eunapius and Diogenes Laertius about the philosophers and Suetonius about the grammarians; in the Middle Ages monks wrote particularly about monks who succeeded in their business and turned saints; Vasari in the Renaissance said less about even the princes who encouraged painters than about the painters themselves; Boswell chose not Burke nor Chatham but Johnson to stand as the centre of his society; Goethe’s Duke survives primarily in the various lives of Goethe; how many passionate, beautiful books there are about Poe and Keats and Byron and Heine and Hugo and Pushkin and Leopardi!
The situation has consequences. Though the king who can command a poet or the politician who can catch a biographer will always have one, few other persons outside the poet’s or the biographer’s own caste boast any such intercessors with the future. The most mighty man of business perishes from the public memory almost as speedily as the most petty trader. The artisan who has invented no matter how comfortable devices and the athlete who has been no matter how much on the tongues of men leave but short wakes of fame behind them. Now this may hint that those who do not survive actually merit oblivion, but it does not prove it. Rather, it proves that peoples have the best memories with regard to those men and women about whom there are voices to go on speaking. In any given generation rumour widens out in various ways: its heroes are pugilists and saints and misers and entertainers and generals and statesmen and orators and preachers and lovers and murderers and philanthropists and scholars and poets and humorists and musicians and detectives—all mingled in one vast confusion. But with posterity selection intervenes. A hundred fames grow dim because no one has a special reason for perpetuating them; word of mouth in general is not enough. Even particular professions in time forget those who once practised them eminently. Only of the men of letters—bards and biographers—is it the trade as well as the delight to keep old reputations burning. And it is only certain things that they remember: blood and glory and learning. Paul Revere gave a lifetime to a noble craft and a few hours all told to a midnight ride which any man might have made who was able to sit a horse and follow a dark road. Who now hears of Revere’s craft? He is merely a demigod and Longfellow is his prophet; the two of them symbolize the past, as most men see it, and the way of the bards with the past.
For it is clear, upon reflection, that just as the current world comes to the perceptions of mankind through the interpretations of artists or demagogues or prophets, so the past comes to them through the interpretations of its chroniclers. There lies the past, enormous and unformed; here are the men of pen and book who make the lenses through which it is perceived, who fix the frame of the picture, who choose what shall be looked at and what not. They are artists and the past is their material. Let a given chronicler be as honest as he can or will be; he is still a member of a limited class of men and he is interested in a limited range of life. Let all the chroniclers be honest, and they are still chroniclers: they will set down what interests their caste. They will shape their material in epic or dramatic form; they will find arguments for their favourite convictions; they will cherish or neglect in accordance with their dispositions. Sophisticate and complicate the matter as they will, they tend in all ages and the latest age to do what they did at first. They see the rulers of men sitting on their proper thrones and they sing in verse or say in prose how those rulers came there; they remember themselves and they pay natural honour to their fellows of the guild. In a sense, the plain man cannot feel that he has a past. He looks into histories and sees very little of the world he knows. That older world is much too full of kings and bards for him to feel at home.