Time of the Great Invention.—A First Gift.—The Use of the Alphabet.—A New Era.—Royal Printers.—Knights of Type and Pen.—A Mighty Engine.—Gutenberg’s Dream.—The Press mighty.
If the “undevout astronomer is mad,” what shall be thought of the unbelieving observer of God’s dealings with the human race? If evidences of infinite design appear in the material bodies that people space, can we think that God has stamped his creating, ordering hand less distinctly on the affairs connected with the progress of the souls for whom all things exist? The needle pointing to the pole helps on navigation; it is the servant of the seamen: without it, what would commerce do? But how happened it that the principle of the mariner’s compass was discovered just when in the turmoil of events it would be most useful—when it could suitably and most effectively introduce the old to the new world? How providential, too, the time of the invention of the art of printing! Had it been much earlier, the materials for writing were so scarce that it must have come to naught. Had it been deferred, doubtless many works which we prize as among the most valuable and excellent would have been lost. In less than a half-century from the invention of the wonderful art, the continent of America was discovered by Columbus, in 1492. In less then a century, Copernicus discovered the true theory of the planetary motions; and, shortly after, only a few years intervening, he was succeeded by the three great heralds of Newton,—Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo.
Man is above nature. The senses only, do not constitute man; for the brutes have some senses like us, and, not seldom, stronger, more delicate, more subtile, quicker to act, more infallible. It is thought, then, that gives man the preËminence. But what if thought could never be expressed? What if the members of the human race could never discover thought to each other, never reveal what passed within the mysterious and mighty laboratory of the mind only as the infant seeks to make its wants known, by gestures and moans and “inarticulate cries?” But the Creator gave man speech; God’s first grand interposition for the soul was the gift of speech! “We believe,” says a brilliant French writer, “that speech was not born of itself on the lips of primitive man,” as some affirm, “like a stammering of chance, attaching, from age to age, certain vague significations to certain inarticulated sounds, and giving to others, by the sound and connection of these human cries, lessons which he who uttered them had not himself received. To reach thence from these instinctive cries to speech; from speech to the unanimous agreement of the meaning of words—of the sense of certain words to the verb and phrase—of the verb and phrase to logical syntax—of this syntax to the language of Moses, David, Cicero, Confucius, Racine, it is necessary to suppose more ages of existence to the human race on this earthly globe than there are stars, visible and invisible, in the Milky Way. It is necessary to suppose numberless ages of stupidity during which the human race, essentially moral and intellectual, should vainly search, like the brutes, its instrument of morality and knowledge, without power to find it only after myriads of generations. Humanity deaf and mute during a hundred thousand years! I shudder at the blasphemy of believing such a mystery. I love better to believe in the other; that is to say, in the fatherly mystery of the Creator himself, inspiring on the lips of his infant creature, speech; the word, the sentence, the inborn expression, which at sight gave things names appropriate to their form and nature.” And when we consider how necessary the use of language is to the convenience, comfort, and progress of man, and that man had at once conferred upon him a body “curiously and wonderfully made,” and a mind capacious, active, strong, and penetrating, can we harbor the idea that after his creation, God left him,—a perfect, full-grown being, the noblest of his works, and the lord of nature,—without speech? Rather must we not infer, with a distinguished writer, that “the same Divine Author of the physical organs of speech imparted to man the knowledge of their use and power”?
But speech carries thought from the mouth to the ear by sound, and then perishes like the medium which conveyed it there. There needed to be, therefore, a process to preserve thought, by reducing it to material signs on some enduring substance. So writing was given to the world. And the wonderful discovery of alphabetical writing, how did it come about? By chance? by human ingenuity? or through the “fatherly mystery of the Creator inspiring it” in man? Says the learned Shackford, “That men should immediately fall on such a project, to express sounds by letters, and expose to sight all that may be said or thought in about twenty characters variously placed, exceeds the highest notions we can have of the capacities with which we are endowed.” How difficult to submit our reason to the theories which have been argued of a gradual construction of alphabetical letters! Is it reasonable to suppose, for example, that the old Shemitish letter D was suggested by the word door, or the letter H by the word fence, and the V by a hook or nail? Do we not find evidence, that alphabetical writing was divinely revealed, in the tables of stone written by the finger of God and given to Moses on the Mount? In those ten commandments so anciently bestowed, all the Hebrew letters, with one exception, are found—every guttural, labial, lingual, and dental is disclosed. Some quote the Chinese as leading the way in imprinting language. But their writing was hieroglyphical, they did not reach alphabetical writing, and they use one hundred and twenty thousand characters to express thought.
But whether writing, which has well been spoken of as “nearly divine,” is the invention of man, or is truly divine in its origin, its possession was a great step in human progress. By it speech became enduring and universal; it could be preserved, it could be diffused. Poetry, history, science, law, art, religion, thus found expression for all time. Through it we commune with the thinkers of antiquity. By its aid “the Book” has come down to us. Nevertheless, this mode of transmitting knowledge was slow, toilsome, costly, and not available to the masses. At the beginning of the eleventh century, for example, books were so scarce in Spain that one and the same copy of the Bible, St. Jerome’s Epistles, and some volumes of ecclesiastical offices, served several different monasteries. Books were the privilege of the wealthy and the powerful; and the common people had them not. “The head of society was in the light, the feet in the shade,” and “the progress of truth, science, letters, politics, arts, was slow, and suspended through long periods.” Some process was needed by which the written thoughts of the thinkers could be reproduced with greater rapidity, and thus placed within the reach even of the poor. This, John Gutenberg, in the good providence of God, gave mankind, in the discovery of printing. With the new art came a new era for the world. In a few years after Gutenberg’s death all the capitals of Europe had their printing-presses. France, England, Holland, Germany, Venice, Genoa, Rome, Poland, seized the invention, and spread abroad religious and secular works. In 1500 the Jews published tracts on Rabbinical literature in Constantinople. And Russia, in 1680, established a press in Moscow.
The invention had its enemies, and printing its martyrs; but its glory could not be dimmed, nor its progress arrested. Kings and queens turned engravers and compositors, glorying to labor with their own hands in the wonderful art. The wife of Henry IV. designed and printed cuts for some royal publications, and engraving with her own hand a figure of a young girl, presented it to “Philip de Champagne.” Louis XV. in his youth, printed in his own palace a “Treatise on European Geography.” The chief printers of the times succeeding that of Gutenberg were often the artists, the learned men, the writers. They not only reproduced the buried works of antiquity, but were able to explain and interpret them.
The Emperor Maximilian ennobled the printers and compositors of the new art, authorizing them to wear robes braided with gold and silver, such as the nobility only had the right to wear, and giving them, for a coat of arms, an eagle with wings extended on the globe, symbol of free and rapid flight and universal conquest. Deserved honor! fitting symbol! What marvels has printing wrought. It has given elementary instruction to the masses,—putting into every hand, however humble or toilworn, the printed page, multiplying books to teach, amuse, and elevate even the little child. It has reformed corrupt religions, fashioned and developed philosophy anew, and permeated laws with their true spirit. Before its magic touch, the old feudal despotisms of the dark ages have fallen, and later and no less oppressive systems have wasted away. By its aid time and space seem annihilated, as “railways open to it routes, steam lends to it wings, and the electric telegraph gives it the instantaneousness of powder!” The “preserver of all arts,” it broods over and perpetuates all useful institutions and discoveries; and trade and commerce are stimulated, guided, systematized, enlarged, and furnished with boundless facilities. But this mighty engine can be used for evil as well as for good, and strike like the thunder-bolt the best interests of man. The poet-historian from whom we have before quoted, illustrates this by a dream of Gutenberg’s, which he is said to have related to his friends, and to have been translated from the German, at Strasbourg, by Mr. Garaud.
Gutenberg had succeeded in an important experiment. His success filled him with such enthusiasm that he scarcely slept the night following. In his troubled and imperfect rest he had his dream,—a dream so prophetic, and so near to the truth, that one questions, in reading it, if it be not the reflecting presentiment of a wakeful sage rather than the fevered dream of a slumbering artisan. This is the account or legend of this dream as it is preserved in the library of the counsellor Aulique Beck:—
“In a cell of a cloister of Arbogast sits a man with a wan forehead, a long beard, and fixed look, before a table, supporting his head with his hand. Suddenly he passes his fingers through his beard with a quick joyous movement—the hermit of the cell has discovered a solution of the problem he sought! He rises and utters a cry; it was as a relief to a long pent-up thought. He hastily turns to his trunk, opens it, and takes therefrom a cutting instrument; then, with nervous jerking movements, he sets himself to carve a small piece of wood. In all these movements there was joy and anxiety, as if he feared that his idea would escape,—the diamond he had found, and which he wished to set and polish for posterity. Gutenberg cut roughly and with feverish activity, his brow covered with drops of sweat, while his eyes followed with ardor the progress of his work. He wrought thus a great while, but the time seemed short. At length, he dipped the wood in a black liquid, placed it on parchment, and bearing the weight of his body on his hand in the manner of a press, he printed the first letter which he had cut, in relief. He contemplated the result, and a second cry, full of the ecstasy of satisfied genius, burst from his lips; then he closed his eyes with an air of happiness such as would befit the saints in paradise, and fell exhausted on a joint-stool; when overcome of sleep, he murmured, ‘I am immortal!’
“Then he had a dream which troubled him. ‘I heard two voices,’ said he, in relating it; ‘two unknown and of a different sound, which spoke alternately in my soul. One said to me, “Rejoice, John; thou art immortal! Henceforth, light shall be spread by thee throughout the world. People who dwell a thousand leagues from thee, strangers to the thoughts of our country, shall read and comprehend all the ideas now mute,—spread and multiplied as the reverberations of the thunder, by thee, by thy work. Rejoice, thou art immortal! for thou art the interpreter whom the nations await that they may converse together. Thou art immortal; for thy discovery comes to give perpetual life to the genius which would be still-born without thee, and who, by acknowledgment, shall all make known in their turn the immortality of him who immortalized them!” The voice ceased, and left me in the delirium of glory. But I heard another voice. It said to me, “Yes, John, thou art immortal. But at what a price? Thought not unlike thine, is it always pure and holy enough to be worthy of being delivered to the ears and eyes of the human race? Are there not many—the greater number it may be—which merit rather a thousand times to be annihilated, and sink to oblivion, than to be repeated and multiplied in the world? Man is oftener perverse than wise and good; he will profane the gift that you make him; he will abuse the new faculty that you create for him. More of the world, in place of blessing, will curse thee. Some men will be born with souls powerful and seductive, and hearts proud and corrupt. Without thee, they would rest in the shade; shut in a narrow circle, they would be known only to their associates, and during their lives. By thee, they will bear folly, mischief, and crime to all men and all ages. See thousands corrupted with the disease of one! See young men depraved by books whose pages distill soul-poison! See young women become immodest, false, and hard to the poor, by books which have poisoned their hearts! See mothers mourning their sons! See fathers blushing for their daughters! Is not immortality too dear which costs so many tears and such anguish? Dost thou desire glory at such a price? Art thou not appalled at the responsibility with which this glory will weigh down thy soul? Listen to me, John: live as if thou hadst discovered nothing. Regard thy invention as a seductive but fatal dream, whose execution would be useful and holy, if only man was good. But man is evil. And in lending arms to the evil, art thou not a participator in his crimes?”
“‘I awoke in a horror of doubt! I hesitated an instant; but I considered that the gifts of God, though they were sometimes very perilous, were never bad, and that to give an instrument to aid reason, and advance human liberty, was to give a vaster field to intelligence and to virtue,—both divine. I pursued the execution of my discovery.’”
Thus has the art of printing come down to us consecrated by the martyr struggles of a heroic soul. He died poor, able only to leave a few books to his loving sister, yet enriching all mankind by the fruits of his genius. “I bequeath to my sister,” said he in his will, “all the books printed by me in Strasbourg.”
But which of the voices that the legend represents as speaking to Gutenberg in his dream, shall prove a true prophet of the art? Shall its resistless power blast the world with error and crime, or bless the ages with truth and purity? “The first cries of the press,” says a historian, “were praise and prayer.” Let its utterances be for religion and learning, God and humanity; then welcome the hour when the earth shall be covered with its swiftly multiplying issues, “the leaves of the tree which are for the healing of the nations.”
THE END.
