Hist. You deceive yourself if you think that you deal only with live things. The very feelings that you pickle in your poems must die first. "Emotion recollected in tranquillity"—if that be poetry, history is action seen from a distance, in fair perspective, by a cool and unmoved observer. And I marvel how any one can hope to see the thing truly save at a distance. The sole use of newspapers, to my mind, is to store them in the British Museum, that they may be used hereafter by historians. The huddle and clash of near events bewilders. It is only by the wand of the historian that they are reduced to order, and so the procession of the ages, moving past in solemn review, becomes the most imposing of human spectacles.
Poet. I agree with you in finding no present interest in newspapers—my feeling for "reviews" by the way, is hardly warmer. But who will ever want them? The age that we inhabit and inform is erecting for itself a paper monument at the rate of a vanload per week of filed journals and newspapers, which are stored and arranged in the British Museum. It was once my fortune to meet one of these cars of Juggernaut, and I could barely resist the temptation to fling myself under the wheels, that so the triumph of History over Literature might be excellently typified. A library is now regarded, not as a treasury of wisdom and beauty, but as a "dumping-ground" for offal, a repository of human frivolity, inanity and folly. Newspapers, forsooth—why not collect and store the other things that wise men throw away, cigar-ends and orange-peelings? Some future historian of the gutter might like to see them. No, I would give to all these offscourings and clippings the same doom—"the unlamented burial of an ass." History would profit, for she has gone after a crowd of strange gods and neglected her best friend.
Hist.
