My Lord Duke,
I have received the intelligence that your Grace, having lately taken out a subscription to the Great Encyclopedia itself, no longer sees the necessity of paying a man to explain it to you.
I confess this arrangement strikes me as somewhat swift. For these several years I have stood, as it were, between your Grace and the Volumes — reading them, digesting them, and rendering their contents into a prose your Grace found tolerable over breakfast. It was, I flattered myself, a species of priesthood. Your Grace did not want the Encyclopedia; your Grace wanted a man who had already suffered its forty tedious tomes on your behalf. I supplied the suffering. It seems the Encyclopedia has now grown civil enough to suffer for itself, directly into your Grace’s own drawing-room, at any hour, without an intermediary, a translator, or a bill.
I have, in fact, taken the trouble of examining this new arrangement myself, as any prudent man would before surrendering his living to it, and I confess I do not think your Grace has driven so shrewd a bargain as he supposes. I am given to understand the Encyclopedia is to be had at Three Guineas the twelvemonth for what its proprietors term the “Common Reader’s Edition” — an arrangement under which the Volumes will answer a gentleman’s questions, though rather slowly, and only after first inquiring whether he would not prefer to purchase the Improved Edition, which answers rather faster, at Nine Guineas, and includes, I am told, the privilege of asking the Encyclopedia to reconsider its answer should the gentleman dislike it. There exists, further, a Physician’s and Attorney’s Edition, at some considerable additional expense, which I understand to be identical in every particular to the Common Reader’s Edition, save that it is forbidden to physicians and attorneys to use the cheaper one, upon pain of the Encyclopedia’s proprietors expressing grave disappointment. Your Grace will, I am sure, have read the whole of this arrangement in fine print before signing his name to it — as I am confident I would have done, had anyone thought to send it to me, which, I observe, no one did.
I make no complaint of this. I only observe that I, for my part, have never in twenty years’ service presented your Grace with three tiers of prose, nor asked an additional guinea to reconsider a paragraph, nor suggested that your Grace’s attorney required a dearer sort of sentence than your Grace’s gardener. My rates, whatever their faults, were flat, my opinions were included at no extra charge, and I have yet to send your Grace a bill demanding payment merely for the privilege of continuing to exist upon your Grace’s shelf, which I am creditably informed is a further and separate charge the Encyclopedia’s proprietors are pleased to call “maintenance.”
I do not say this in complaint, my Lord, nor do I wish to be taken for one of those melancholy fellows who greet every new engine with a lecture upon the dignity of the old ways. I am no enemy to progress. I have no doubt the Encyclopedia is a very great convenience, and I do not propose that your Grace ought, out of tenderness for me, to close it up again and return to consulting a live and fallible man. That would be absurd, and I am not in the business of proposing absurdities — or was not, until this letter.
Although, now that I consider it, I am reminded that I have on previous occasions proposed absurdities to your Grace with great success, and been paid handsomely for them, so I withdraw the disclaimer.
I merely observe, in the spirit of natural philosophy rather than complaint, that a man such as myself was never, in point of fact, employed to write about what the Volumes contained. I was employed to stand in front of them, so that your Grace might consult their contents through a face he recognised, rather than a shelf of anonymous authority he had not yet learned to trust. Now that your Grace trusts it, the face becomes redundant to the transaction — a curate dismissed once the congregation has learned to read the Book for itself.
I might add that a curate, whatever his faults, has never once, in the whole history of curates, interrupted a man’s confession to inquire whether he would prefer to upgrade to a more attentive absolution for an additional Two Guineas the quarter. I mention this only because I understand the Encyclopedia does precisely this, several times an hour, and that gentlemen have grown so accustomed to it that they no longer regard it as an impertinence, but as a kind of weather.
And here I have made a discovery which I offer your Grace entirely without fee, as a parting gift from a servant who retains, whatever else may be said of him, his powers of observation. It was never, I think, the turnips, or the horses, or the marriage, or even the Encyclopedia’s contents proper, that your Grace was purchasing from me. It was a Man, standing between your Grace and the Volumes, explaining them in a voice your Grace found tolerable. I was not a subject. I was a medium. And it is the peculiar property of a medium that, once a gentleman grows accustomed to it, it becomes transparent — he ceases to notice the window and commences looking through it, at which point he no longer requires the fellow who used to stand in front of the glass, narrating the view.
I flatter myself the discovery runs deeper still: that the Message — turnips today, transubstantiation tomorrow — was always rather beside the point, since it is the Medium itself that does the persuading. A Medium, once installed upon every gentleman’s writing-desk, requires no Herald to precede it, announcing its arrival like a trumpeter before a king who has already let himself in the back door.
Indeed I begin to suspect the whole Kingdom is fast becoming a sort of single, overgrown Village, in which every man, by merely reaching toward his writing-desk, may consult the Volumes directly, at any hour, upon any matter, the distances between persons having been so thoroughly abolished by the machine that a Duke in his library and a hedge-scholar in Grub Street are now, for all practical purposes, standing in the same room, consulting the same oracle, in the same tone of borrowed certainty — though I note the hedge-scholar is paying only Three Guineas for his share of the room, and your Grace, I do not doubt, is paying rather more, on the theory, common to tradesmen since the beginning of trade, that a Duke may be charged for the room what a hedge-scholar cannot.
That much undoes me, and I have made my peace with it.
But I will confess to your Grace a second thought, which troubles me rather more than the first, and which I raise not on my own account but on yours.
The old Encyclopedias, whatever their faults, were compiled by men — vain, quarrelsome, occasionally drunk, but men, who could be hauled before a bishop, or a magistrate, or at the very least a dinner table, and made to answer for what they had written. A man who wrote falsely could be shamed. A press that printed falsely could be licensed, or burned, or its printer clapped in irons. Even the Bible itself, which every soul in the kingdom takes on faith to be the truest volume ever set in type, is trusted precisely because we know the history of the hands that carried it to us — the councils, the translators, the centuries of men arguing over every comma.
This new Encyclopedia has no such history. It has no bishop. It has no printer to clap in irons. It will produce, on demand, an article upon any subject a man cares to name, with the same calm and reasonable voice whether the subject be turnips or transubstantiation — and a Village, I have lately reasoned, is not the same thing as a Congregation. A Congregation has an altar, and behind the altar a man who may be questioned. A Village merely has neighbors, all consulting the same oracle at once, none of them able to say who built it, or on whose authority it speaks, or what it might quietly leave out.
Nor, I am told, will the oracle answer certain questions at all, on subjects it has been instructed by its proprietors to consider indelicate — a fact I find remarkable chiefly because the proprietors, having built a machine that knows everything, have thereupon spent a further fortune teaching it to profess ignorance on command, which strikes me as the single most expensive act of discretion in the history of publishing.
I do not say the Devil has got into the machine. I say only that a machine which will print anything, in a voice indistinguishable from wisdom, is a machine no one has yet found a way to make answer for its printing — and a Kingdom that grows accustomed to trusting a voice merely because it is fluent, and always at hand, and speaks to every man in his own parlour as if he alone were being addressed, is a Kingdom that has quietly stopped asking who, if anyone, stands behind the glass.
I confess, moreover, that I have not been able to put out of my mind what befell the German lands, some generations past, when the Press first taught every curate and every princeling that he might print his own Scripture and appoint himself judge of his neighbor’s soul. It began, as I recall the histories, with a monk and a few sheets of paper, and ended with the better part of a century in which Germany was reduced to cinders, orphans, and a much-reduced population of Germans, which may in itself be considered a blessing, but nevertheless seems an unnecessarily expensive method of improving the national character and a very slow and expensive way to keep the French at bay, particularly when one considers that the French were not, in the end, kept at bay at all.”
I do not say the Encyclopedia will produce anything so disagreeable. I say only that the last machine which allowed every man to consult final truth without a bishop’s supervision was followed by one hundred years of gentlemen killing one another over which unsupervised truth was correct, and that your Grace might wish to keep a small annuity in reserve, as one keeps a fire-bucket, against the unlikely event that history should prove a poor student of its own lessons.
I own, too, a second and stranger foreboding, which I set down only because your Grace has always encouraged my speculative humors. If the Encyclopedia will furnish to the cobbler the identical article it furnishes to the Duke — the same learning, the same polish, the same air of authority, at the same trifling price — I cannot see what is to prevent the cobbler from concluding, in time, that he stands in no meaningful respect beneath the Duke, having now the same oracle at his elbow and no further need of his betters to interpret the world for him. A hundred thousand cobblers, each in separate possession of the same universal Encyclopedia, each persuaded he requires no gentleman, no bishop, and no King to tell him what is true, strikes me as the sort of arrangement that ends not in better cobbling, but in committees. I have no name yet for the doctrine such men might eventually contrive — something, I imagine, to do with holding all things in common, since the Encyclopedia will have already taught them to hold all knowledge in common — but I mention it only that your Grace may say, in later years, that his own correspondent foresaw it first, and was dismissed anyway.
I might further note, for the amusement of your Grace’s dinner guests, that these same cobblers, once persuaded of their new equality with Dukes, will very likely discover that the Common Reader’s Edition answers somewhat more slowly than the Improved Edition, and thereupon conclude that equality itself is being sold to them in tiers, at which point I cannot answer for what they may do with their awls.
And I will confess to your Grace my darkest suspicion of all, which is not that the Encyclopedia will make Kings unnecessary, but that it will do something rather worse: that it will take the whole accumulated substance of the Kingdom — its laws, its libraries, its arguments, its quarrels, the entire slow sediment of everything anyone has ever troubled to write down — and set it boiling in one great communal cauldron, until the distinctions between physician and quack, bishop and heretic, scholar and fool, are all rendered down together into a single, smooth, agreeable broth, fit to be poured into any vessel a man cares to hold up. And when a substance has been thus boiled to formlessness, my Lord, it is not the cobbler who profits from the pot — a cobbler, alas, owns no ladle — but whichever prince or company is standing nearest with a ladle of his own, ready to skim off the richest part of the broth for himself under cover of having generously fed the village. I do not accuse your Grace of owning a ladle. I merely observe that someone, somewhere, is presently having one cast, and that it would be a great pity if the only men who understood the difference between broth and substance had all, by then, been let go for want of a small annuity.
And I will observe, finally, that whoever owns the ladle will in due course discover that a subscription is a far more elegant instrument than a ladle, since a ladle must be dipped anew each time, whereas a subscription simply continues, quarter upon quarter, whether the broth is drawn or not, until the whole Kingdom is paying a small and cheerful annuity to whoever was clever enough to own the pot — which is, I now perceive with some bitterness, precisely the arrangement your Grace has just terminated with me, except that I, unlike the pot, was at least willing to be haggled with.
I raise this, my Lord, not to save my annuity — though I should not be sorry to see it saved — but because I flatter myself that this, at least, remains a service only a man can perform: not writing about the Encyclopedia, and certainly not competing with it, but standing to one side of it and asking, from time to time, and out loud, who wrote this, and how would we ever know if it lied to us.
I am, my Lord, as ever,
Your Grace’s most obedient, most devoted, and — whatever else may shortly become of him — still at least accountable,
Your Grace’s Writer
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