When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be rolled
up and sealed with their records within them, there will be no
remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems better
worth interpreting than the speech of many another. Of himself he has
left no vestiges. It was a common reproach against him that he never
acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness. The kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there was nothing for it
but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure. The
delicate, the abstinent, the reticent graces were his in the heroic
degree. Where shall I find a pen fastidious enough to define and limit
and enforce so many significant negatives? Words seem to offend by too
much assertion, and to check the suggestions of his reserve. That
reserve was life-long. Loving literature, he never lifted a pen except
to write a letter. He was not inarticulate, he was only silent. He had
an exquisite style from which to refrain. The things he abstained from
were all exquisite. They were brought from far to undergo his judgment,
if haply he might have selected them. Things ignoble never approached
near enough for his refusal; they had not with him so much as that
negative connexion. If I had to equip an author I should ask no better
than to arm him and invest him with precisely the riches that were
renounced by the man whose intellect, by integrity, had become a presence-
chamber.
It was by holding session among so many implicit safeguards that he
taught, rather than by precepts. Few were these in his speech, but his
personality made laws for me. It was a subtle education, for it
persuaded insensibly to a conception of my own. How, if he would not
define, could I know what things were and what were not worthy of his
gentle and implacable judgment? I must needs judge them for myself, yet
he constrained me in the judging. Within that constraint and under that
stimulus, which seemed to touch the ultimate springs of thoughts before
they sprang, I began to discern all things in literature and in life--in
the chastity of letters and in the honour of life--that I was bound to
love. Not the things of one character only, but excellent things of
every character. There was no tyranny in such a method. His idleness
justified itself by the liberality it permitted to his taste. Never
having made his love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having
bound the literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some of his
delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond the
sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own preferences,
which lay somewhat on the hither side of full effectiveness of style.
These the range of his reading confessed by certain exclusions.
Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he was patient: he did but
respect the power of pause, and he disliked violence chiefly because
violence is apt to confess its own limits. Perhaps, indeed, his own fine
negatives made him only the more sensible of any lack of those literary
qualities that are bound in their full complement to hold themselves at
the disposal of the consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may do
no more.
Men said that he led a _dilettante_ life. They reproached him with the
selflessness that made him somewhat languid. Others, they seemed to
aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living. So
it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that many of
the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands. So it was,
too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not have
loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not have
loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,
studious, docile, austere? An amateur man he might have been called,
too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by
the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which
Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness. He had
always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes. His
sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised. When he had
joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general
sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure. It was his finest
distinction to desire no differences, no remembrance, but loss among the
innumerable forgotten. And when he suffered, it was with so quick a
nerve and yet so wide an apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in
him. He pitied not himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for
pain he was then feelingly persuaded. His darkening eyes said in the
extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the multitude.'