XXVIII

A few days ago an old friend of mine, who has been a good friend to me,

who is more careful of my reputation even than myself, gave me some

serious advice. He said, speaking with affectionate partiality, that I

had considerable literary gifts, but that I was tending to devote

myself too much to ephemeral and imaginative literature, and that I

ought to take up a task more worthy of my powers, write a historical

biography such as a Life of Canning, or produce a complete annotated

edition of the works of Pope, with a biography and appendices. I

assured him that I had no talents for research, and insufficient

knowledge for a historical biography. He replied that research was a

matter of patience, and that as for knowledge, I could acquire it.

I thanked him sincerely for his thoughtful kindness, and said that I

would hear it in mind.

The result of my reflections is that the only kind of literature worth

writing is literature with some original intention. Solid works have a

melancholy tendency to be monumental, in the sense that they cover the

graves of literary reputations. Historical works are superseded with

shocking rapidity. One remembers the description which FitzGerald gave

of the labours of his friend Spedding upon Bacon. Spedding gave up the

whole of his life, said FitzGerald, to editing works which did not need

editing, and to whitewashing a character which could not be

whitewashed. It is awful to reflect how many years Walter Scott gave to

editing Dryden and Swift and to writing a Life of Napoleon--years

which might have given us more novels and poems. Did Scott, did anyone,

gain by the sacrifice? Of course one would like to write a great

biography, but the biographies that live are the lives of men written

by friends and contemporaries, living portraits, like Boswell's

_Johnson_ or Stanley's _Arnold_. To write such a book, one needs to

have been in constant intercourse with a great personality, to have

seen him in success and failure, in happiness and depression, in health

and sickness, in strength and weakness. Such an opportunity is given to

few.

Of course, if one has a power of wide and accurate historical survey, a

trustworthy memory, a power of vitalising the past, one may well give

one's life to producing a wise and judicious historical work. But here

a man must learn his limitations, and one can only deal successfully

with congenial knowledge. I have myself a very erratic and

unbusinesslike mind. There are certain things, like picturesque

personal traits, landscape, small details of life and temperament, that

lodge themselves firmly in my mind; but when I am dealing with

historical facts and erudite matters, though I can get up my case and

present it for the time being with a certain cogency, the knowledge all

melts in my mind; and no one ought to think of attempting historical

work unless his mind is of the kind that can hold an immense amount of

knowledge in solution. I have a friend, for instance, who can put all

kinds of details into his mind--he has an insatiable appetite for

them--and produce them again years afterwards as sharp and definite in

outline as when he put them away. His mind is, in fact, a great

spacious and roomy warehouse, where things are kept dry and in

excellent order. But with myself it is quite different. To store

knowledge of an uncongenial kind in my own mind is just as though I put

away a heap of snowballs. In a day or two their outline is blurred and

blunted; in a few months they have melted away and run down the

gutters. So much for historical work.

Then there comes the question of editorial work: and here again I have

the greatest admiration for men like Dr. Birkbeck Hill or Professor

Masson, who will devote a lifetime to patiently amassing all the facts

that can be gleaned about some great personality. But this again

requires a mind of a certain order, and there is no greater mistake in

literary work than to misjudge the quality and force of one's mind.

My own work, I am certain, must be of a literary kind; and when one

goes a little further back and asks oneself what it is that makes great

personalities, like Milton or Dr. Johnson, worth spending all this

labour about, why one cares to know about their changes of lodgings and

their petty disbursements, it is, after all, because they are great

personalities, and have displayed their greatness in imaginative

writings or in uttering fertile and inspiring conversational dicta.

Imagine what one's responsibility would have been if one could have

persuaded Charles Lamb to have taken up the task of editing the works

of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to have deserted his ephemeral

contributions to literature. Or if one could have induced Shelley to

give up writing his wild lyrics, and devote himself to composing a work

on Political Justice. Jowett, who had a great fancy for imposing

uncongenial tasks on his friends, is recorded to have said that

Swinburne was a very brilliant, young man but that he would never do

anything till he had given up wasting his time in poetry. Imagine the

result if Jowett had had his way!

Of course, it all depends upon what one desires to achieve and the sort

of success one sets before oneself. If one is enamoured of academical

posts or honorary degrees, why, one must devote oneself to research and

be content to be read by specialists. That is a legitimate and even

admirable ambition--admirable all the more because it brings a man a

slender reputation and very little of the wealth which the popular

writer hauls in.

The things which live in literature, the books which make a man worth

editing a century or two after he is dead, are, after all, the creative

and imaginative books. It is not in the hope of being edited that

imaginative authors write. Milton did not compose _L'Allegro_ in the

spirit of desiring that it might be admirably annotated by a Scotch

professor. Keats did not write _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ in order that

it might be printed in a school edition, with a little biography

dealing with the paternal livery-stable. It may be doubted whether any

very vital imaginative work is ever produced with a view to its effect

even upon its immediate readers. A great novelist does not write with a

moral purpose, and still less with an intellectual purpose. He sees the

thing like a picture; the personalities move, mingle, affect each

other, appear, vanish, and he is haunted by the desire to give

permanence to the scene. For the time being he is under the thrall of a

strong desire to make something musical, beautiful, true, life-like. It

is a criticism of life that all writers, from the highest to the

humblest, aim at. They are amazed, thrilled, enchanted by the sight and

the scene, by the relationships and personalities they see round them.

These they must depict; and in a life where so much is fleeting, they

must seek to stamp the impression in some lasting medium. It is the

beauty and strangeness of life that overpowers the artist. He has

little time to devote himself to things of a different value, to the

getting of position or influence or wealth. He cannot give himself up

to filling his leisure pleasantly, by society or amusement. These are

but things to fill a vacant space of weariness or of gestation. For him

the one important thing is the shock, the surprise, the delight, the

wonder of a thousand impressions on his perceptive personality. And his

success, his effect, his range, depend upon the uniqueness of his

personality in part, and in part upon his power of expressing that

personality.

Of course, there are natures whose perceptiveness outruns their power

of expression--and these are, as a rule, the dissatisfied, unhappy

temperaments that one encounters; there are others whose power of

expression outruns their perceptiveness, and these are facile, fluent,

empty, agreeable writers.

There are some who attain, after infinite delays, a due power of

expression, and these are often the happiest of all writers, because

they have the sense of successful effort. And then, lastly, there are a

divine few, like Shakespeare, in whom both the perception and the power

of expression seem limitless.

But if a man has once embraced the artistic ideal, he must embark upon

what is the most terrible of all risks. There is a small chance that he

may find his exact subject and his exact medium, and that the subject

may be one which is of a widespread interest. But there are innumerable

chances against him. Either the fibre of his mind is commonplace; or he

is born out of his due time, when men are not interested in what are

his chief preoccupations; or he may miss his subject; or he may be

stiff, ungainly, puerile in expression.

All of these are our literary failures, and life is likely to be for

them a bitter business. I am speaking, of course, of men who embrace

the matter seriously; and the misery of their position is that they

will be confounded with the dilettantes and amateurs who take up

literature as a fancy or as a hobby, or for even less worthy motives.

A man such as I have described, who has the passion for authorship, and

who fails in the due combination of gifts, must face the possibility of

being regarded as a worse than useless being; as unpractical, childish,

slipshod, silly, worth no one's attention. He is happy, however, if he

can find a solace in his own work, and if he is sustained by a

hopefulness that makes light of results, if he finds pleasure in the

mere doing of unrecognised work.

And thus, in my own case, I have no choice, I must perfect my medium as

far as I can, and I must look diligently for a congenial subject. I

must not allow myself to be discouraged by advice, however kindly and

well-intentioned, to devote myself to some more dignified task. For if

I can but see the truth, and say it perfectly, these writings, which it

is so easy to call ephemeral, will become vital and enriching. It is

not the subject that gives dignity; it is not wholly the treatment

either; it is a sort of fortunate union of the two, the temperament of

the writer exactly fitting the mould of his subject--no less and no

more.

In saying this I am not claiming to be a Walter Scott or a Charles

Lamb. But I can imagine a friend of the latter imploring him not to

waste his time, with his critical gifts, upon writing slender, trifling

essays; and I maintain that if Charles Lamb knew that such essays were

the work that he did best, with ease and delight, he had the right to

rebuff the hand that held out a volume of Marlowe and begged him to

annotate it. What spoils our hold on life for so many of us is this

false sense of conventional dignity. In art there is no great and

small. Whatever a mind can conceive clearly and express beautifully,

that is good art, whether it be a harrowing tragedy in which murders

and adulteries cluster as thick as flies, or the shaking of a reed in a

stream as the current plucks it softly from below. If a man can

communicate to others his amazed bewilderment in the presence of the

tragedy, or his exquisite delight in the form and texture and motion of

the reed, he is an artist. Of course, there will always be more people

who will be affected by a melodrama, by strange and ghastly events, by

the extremes of horror and pathos, than will be affected by the

delicate grace of familiar things--the tastes of the multitude are

coarse and immature. But a man must not measure his success by the

range of his audience, though the largest art will appeal to the widest

circle. Art can be great and perfect without being large and

surprising. And thus the function of the artist is to determine what he

can see clearly and perfectly, and to take that as his subject. It may

be to build a cathedral or to engrave a gem; but the art will be great

in proportion as he sees his end with absolute distinctness, and loves

the detail of the labour that makes the execution flawless and perfect.

The artist, if he would prevail, must not be seduced by any temptation,

any extraneous desire, any peevish criticism, any well-meant rebuke,

into trying a subject that he knows is too large for him. He must be

his own severest critic. No artistic effort can be effective, if it is

a joyless straining after things falteringly grasped. Joy is the

essential quality; it need not always be a present, a momentary joy.

There are weary spaces, as when a footsore traveller plods along the

interminable road that leads him to the city where he would be. But he

must know in his heart that the joy of arrival will outweigh all the

dreariness of the road, and he must, above all things, mean to arrive.

If at any moment the artist feels that he is not making way, and doubts

whether the object of his quest is really worth the trouble, then he

had better abandon the quest; unless, indeed, he has some moral motive,

apart from the artistic motive, in continuing it. For the end of art is

delight and the quickening of the pulse of emotion; and delight cannot

be imparted by one who is weary of the aim, and the pulse cannot be

quickened by one whose heart is failing him. There may, as I say, be

moral reasons for perseverance, and if a man feels that it is his duty

to complete a work when his artistic impulse has failed him, he had

better do it. But he must have no delusions in the matter. He must not

comfort himself with the false hope that it may turn out to be a work

of art after all. His biographer draws a terrible picture of Flaubert

pacing in his room, flinging himself upon his couch, rising to pace

again, an agonised and tortured medium, in the search of the one

perfect word. But the misery was worth it if the word was found, and

the fierce faint joy of discovery was worth all the ease and serenity

of declining upon the word that sufficed, instead of straining after

the word required.