There has been some idea mooted of forming an Academy in England on the
lines of the Academy of France, but it would never be the same kind of
institution, or exercise the same authority. The English temper is not
academic, the Royal Academy is proof enough of that. Moreover,
Englishmen are indifferent to the use or abuse of their language, and
the first care of an Academy must be to keep the national language pure,
and clear, and elegant. The well of English undefiled is sadly muddy,
nowadays, and any roaring screamer of English or American slang is as
welcome to those who call themselves critics as though he wrote like
Matthew Arnold or John Morley. Lacking an Academy of Letters, and the
writers who would make one, there is in London what is called a Society
of Authors, which is supposed to resemble the Societe des Gens de
Lettres in Paris, but the English Society appears to be chiefly an
association for the multiplication and publication of inferior works,
and its authority on literature is _nil_. In addition to these, there
are persons who call themselves literary agents; but the latter have a
decidedly anti-intellectual influence, and to them is probably, in part,
due the enormous increase in the issue of rubbish of all kinds, which is
at the present time doing so much injury to the English literary
reputation.
The number of volumes which pour annually from the English press is, at
the present hour, appalling. One house alone produces, in number, enough
volumes for the whole trade. Why are these volumes, usually worthless,
ever produced? Why do the circulating libraries accept them? Who reads
them? Who buys them? Why does one see in the lists of London
'remainders' the announcement of volumes originally published at six,
eight, ten, twelve shillings, to be sold second-hand, perfectly new and
uncut, at the miserable prices of two shillings, eighteen-pence, one
shilling, and even sixpence? Amongst these is sometimes a work of real
and scholarly worth, which it is painful to see thus sacrificed, but
rarely; for it is rarely that such a work is now issued in London. Where
is this to end? With whom does the fault of it lie? Someone, I suppose,
must gain by such an insane method of over-production, but I cannot see
who it can possibly be. One well-known publisher tells me that he must
issue books thus, or starve. He is not in danger of bodily starvation,
but the public is mentally starved by such a system.
When the three-volume novel was abolished (a course which I urged long
before it was taken) great things were expected by many from its
abolition. I myself hoped that London would adopt the Paris method, and
issue novels and all other works, except _editions de luxe_, at small
prices and in paper covers; not the gaudy, hideous, pictorial, paper
cover, but the pale smooth grey or cream-coloured paper, so easily
obtainable, with the title of the book clearly printed on its flank.
Instead of this result, some unwritten law, as violently despotic as
that which used to compel the three-volume issue, has decreed that the
London romance shall always appear in a cloth-bound volume at six
shillings; the most foolish price that could be selected, too dear to be
suitable for private purchase, too low to allow of a handsome edition
being issued. There is something grotesquely ludicrous, as well as
extremely painful, in seeing the lists of 'ten new six-shilling novels,'
or 'a dozen new six-shilling novels,' whereby some publishers'
advertisement lists are disfigured in the newspapers with every new
season. It makes a commerce of fiction in a manner most injurious and
deplorable.
Again, no sooner has the six-shilling novel been a year before the
public, than the publisher issues the self-same book at
two-and-sixpence. Why does he cut his own throat thus? It is to me as
inexplicable as why the London drapers sell you a stuff at six shillings
a yard in February, but, if you wait till June, sell it you at
two-and-sixpence a yard at the clearance sales. Either the stuff is sold
at a price unjust and unfair to the purchaser in February, or it is sold
at a price unjust and unfair to the vendor in June. From this
proposition there seems to me no escape.
It is the same with the six-shilling book as with the draper's stuffs.
If the first price be correct, why alter it to the second in a year's
time? If the second price be sufficient to pay expense of production,
why not start with it.
The draper, moreover, has an advantage over the publisher. If I want a
stuff whilst it is a novelty, and when its like has not been worn by
shop girls and servant girls, I must buy it at its high price in
February; but if I want to read a novel whilst it is at its highest
price, I can read it in that form, taking it from the libraries, and
wait for a year to buy it at its lower price, if I then care to do so,
which it is improbable that I shall do.
Now, why not have from first to last, in London, an edition of a novel
similar to that French form which is good enough for Pierre Loti, for
Gyp, for Anatole France, for the brilliant Freres Margueritte? Why?
I suppose because our masters, the librarians, will not have it so; or
because some other unwritten law lies like lead on the souls of London
publishers.
I read few English books for pleasure myself, I prefer the literatures
of other countries; but it pains me to see such a deluge of worthless
verbosity pour from London lanes and London streets where printing
presses of yore worked for Addison and Goldsmith, Thackeray and Arthur
Helps.
If this stream of pseudo-literature be not stopped, it will carry away
and swamp all true English literature under it, as a moving bog covers
flocks and pastures, cottages and country seats.
I have asked several London publishers why it is allowed to go on; their
answers are evasive and contradictory. They assert that most of the
volumes published are paid for by the authors; that they themselves must
publish something, or cease to exist as a trade; and that the public
does not know good from bad, so it does not matter what is printed. Yet,
surely to them, as to the drapers, the apparently insensate system must
be lucrative, or it would not be pursued?
There was a comical lamentation in the London Press the other day for
what was called 'the death of the novel'; not the approaching death
which I expect for it by suffocation under the dust-storms of verbosity
and imbecility, but of death by its own suicide, through its own
curtailed proportions. It was indignantly asked why it was not as long
as it used to be in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties, and why novelists now
wrote short stories which in that period would have found no sale, would
not, indeed, have even found the preliminary necessary to a
sale-publication.
Surely we remember some short stories called _The Cricket on the Hearth_
and _The Chimes_, and others telling the adventures of the Great
Hoggarty Diamond and of one Barry Lyndon? As for the length of novels
nowadays, my own _Massarenes_, published in 1897, contains precisely the
same number of words as _Esmond_, and, I think, Mr Mallock's novels, and
those of Mrs Humphry Ward, must surely be quite as long, whilst Mr Hall
Caine's marvellous narratives appear as endless as 'the thread of Time
reel'd off the wheel of Fate.' The critic who grieves over the brevity
of present-day volumes, thinks that Thackeray and Dickens wrote at such
length because they were obliged to fill their monthly numbers! It seems
to me far more likely that they were in love with their characters, as
every writer of true talent is, and lingered tenderly over many needless
details and dialogues out of sheer pleasure in their creations; and it
must be admitted that both of them had naturally a discursive style,
which would have been the better for some excision. But were it true
that there is an unwritten law which limits or expands the length of
romances according to the public caprice or taste, surely nothing could
be more harmful to fiction than such limitation? Every story, if it be
worth the telling, has its own natural length, which cannot be stretched
or shortened arbitrarily without hurt. The sculptor knows that the form
which he creates has its own natural proportions, its own inherent
symmetry according to natural rules, which he must obey. The painter
knows that, according to the nature of his subject, and of his intended
treatment, he must take for his picture, either a small panel, a
kit-kat, or a large canvas; and that if he force its dimensions, either
by over-compression or over-extension, his work will be a failure.
Why is the author not bound by the same canon of art? Artistically, he
certainly is so bound. Intellectually, he certainly is so bound. That
this obligation is continually defied and broken through by many English
writers, proves only that the great majority of these writers are not
artists in any sense of the word.
The brevity or length of a literary work can have nothing to do with its
beauty or excellence. If it be beautiful, if it be excellent, its
proportions will be those which naturally grew out of its subject; and
the writer who is an artist will know, as the painter knows, that he
cannot alter the unwritten law which prescribes to him those
proportions. What has either length or brevity to do with either
excellence or beauty? What give both excellence and beauty are qualities
not to be measured by a publisher's counting up of words, or a printer's
enumeration of pages.
A sketch of a few pages of Maupassant's is worth all the volumes put
together of Georges Ohnet; one of the _Sonnets of Proteus_ is worth the
whole swagger of the _Seven Seas_.
There seems to be, unhappily, an unwritten law in English literature
that cheapness must of necessity be allied to ugliness. A cheap book is
in England an inferior and unlovely thing. But it need not be so. It is
not so everywhere. I have now before me a book of Pompeo Molmenti's,
issued by Bemporad, of Florence; its cost is two francs twenty-five
centiemes; less than one-and-sixpence in your money. It is bound in
thick cream-coloured paper; it is called _Il Moretto di Brescia_, being
a brief study of the life and works of the great artist of whose pure
and noble work the city of Brescia is full. That the text is of rare
scholarly excellence, and of the finest critical and appreciative
qualities, there can be no question, since it is written by the
President of the Accademia delle Arte of Venice. The type is large, the
paper fine, the illustrations (phototyped) are of extreme delicacy and
beauty, rendering worthily the works of the Moretto; the size of the
book is Imperial 8vo.
Will you tell me where I should find anything equal to it at its price
in London?
Your books are all ill-stitched, and fall to pieces as soon as one
handles them. Your type is usually ugly, even at its best; all foreign
readers complain of its clumsiness and confusing effect on the eyes.
Compare a page of a Parisian book at three francs and a half with a page
of a six-shilling English novel. The former is incomparably the
superior. Your cheap illustrated books are still more scandalously
treated. I have before me a book priced four-and-sixpence, more than
double the price of _Il Moretto_. It is a book for children; its
illustrations have been reproduced from earlier works, and they are not
even all of the same method or the same size; some are printed from old
wood-blocks, some are photographed; in one a child is represented the
size of a fly, in another a dog is drawn bigger than a man; anything is
thought good enough, it seems, for children. Artistic beauty is entirely
lacking in the illustrations of English juvenile books; and there is
nothing so irritating as the sight of illustrations of various qualities
bound up in the same volume.
Even certain illustrated periodicals and journals are not above using up
their old wood-blocks in their new numbers. It is a very disgraceful and
unworthy practice. When the illustrations are fresh, the designer
frequently does not attempt to adapt them to the text; a gentlemen is
drawn like a cad, and a Newfoundland dog is drawn like a poodle; a
peasant of the Romagna is drawn like a loafer in Shoreditch, and so on
continually, without the slightest attention to accuracy.
There is also, beyond all doubt, an unwritten law which has been so
universally observed that it has become, properly, as binding as a
written law. I mean the law that when once a romance, or a story, or a
poem have been published they cannot be altered.
What should we think of the painter who repainted his picture after
sale, or of a sculptor who sawed off an arm from his statue, and affixed
another? Both picture and statue may have many faults; they probably
have; but such as they went out from the studio they must remain. This
is the common morality, the elementary honour, of art, and a similar
canon should certainly lie upon literature.
Yet some writers have of late presumed that they had a right to change
the ending of their romances when these were already well known to their
readers. They would urge, I suppose, that they have a right to do what
they like with their own. But your work once given to the public is no
more your own than your daughter is when you have married her, and she
has become the _Gaia_ of her _Gaius_.
Besides, there is an unspoken good faith on the part of the author which
should be observed in his relations towards the public. He should give
them nothing which is incomplete; nothing, at least, which is not as
harmonious as it is in his power to create. Every work of fiction
requires to be long dreamed of, long thought of, clearly seen in the
mind before written; it ought to be no more susceptible of change than a
conclusion in Euclid. To the writer, as to the reader of a story, it
should seem absolutely true; the actors in it should appear absolutely
real. The illusion of reality is only strong in the reader according to
the strength of that illusion in the writer; but some such illusion must
always exist whilst the reader reads fiction, or fiction would have no
attraction for anyone. The writer who alters his romance after it has
once appeared destroys this illusion, and says effectively to his
public, 'What fools you are to take me seriously!' Moreover, he insults
them, for he tells them that he has set before them a half-finished and
immature thing, about which he has entirely changed his mind. He is like
a cook who should snatch off the table a dish just placed on it because
he wished to alter the flavour. A Vaetel or a Soyer would not do that: if
he had made a mistake he would abide by it, though he might kill himself
in despite at it.
In the course of a literary or artistic life, or any other life from
which the blessing of privacy has been lost, there are many wrongs met
with which are real and great wrongs, yet which must be endured because
they cannot be remedied by law suits, and there is no other kind of
tribunal open; nothing analogous, for instance, to the German Courts of
Honour in military matters.
There is, for example, a habit amongst some editors of seeking the
expression of opinion, on some political or public question, of some
well-known writer; printing this expression of opinion, and, before it
is published, showing the proof to some other writer, so that an article
of contrary views and opinions may be written in readiness for the
following number. Now this seems to me an absolutely disloyal betrayal
of trust. In the first place, the proof of an article is of necessity
entirely dependent on the good faith of the editor. It is an understood
thing, a tacit, unwritten law, that no one except the editor is to see
it until the public does so. It is never considered necessary to
stipulate this. To show it to a third person to obtain a refutation, or
a burlesque, of it before the article is published, seems to me a
distinctly incorrect thing to do; an extremely unfair thing to do. Yet
it is becoming a common practice; and a writer has no redress against
it. It is manifestly not the kind of offence which can be taken into a
tribunal, yet it is a very genuine and very annoying injury, and it is
one against which I think that authors, whose names are of value, should
be protected in some manner.
What redress, moreover, is there for the innumerable thefts from which a
writer suffers during his career? I doubt if we, any of us, know the
extent to which we are robbed by bookmakers, who are not of the turf,
but are quite as unscrupulous as those of the turf.
A few years ago I saw, in the pages of one of the highest class of
London periodicals, a story, contained in one number, which was nothing
more or less than the reproduction of the Derbyshire part of my
well-known novel of _Puck_: the narrative of Ben Dare and his love for
his worthless sister Anice. It was far more than a plagiarism; it was a
monstrous theft. The name of a lady was put at the end of it, as that of
the author; of course, I wrote to the editor, expecting, despite
previous experiences, to receive apology and reparation. I misunderstood
my generation. The editor wrote back, with airy indifference, that the
lady who had produced this shameless piracy had never read _Puck_. To
my citation, in reply, of the words of the Emperor Julian, 'If it be
sufficient to deny, who will ever be found guilty?' and to my objection
that an appropriation of an entire section of a novel could not by any
possibility be otherwise than an intentional theft, this model of
editors replied not at all. I ought, perhaps, to have sued the
publisher, who was doubtless quite innocent, but had I done so it is
more than probable that I should have obtained no apology or redress. To
begin a law suit is a very serious thing, and all these grievances and
piracies are so incessant, though few are quite as impudent as was this,
that if one pursued them as they merit one would spend all one's life
and substance in Courts of Law.
Moreover, in the case of the plaintiff in any suit residing out of
England, a large sum for costs must be deposited at the English tribunal
into which the suit is brought; a kind of foregone conclusion that the
plaintiff has no valid case, which seems to me very prejudicial to that
person.
What, then, is to be done in such circumstances?
Nothing at all. You must endure the injury, leave unpunished the
plagiarism; and the offender escapes scot-free.
I do not think that anyone should sue another for any mere expression of
opinion, however hostile or rudely expressed, as Mr Whistler sued Mr
Ruskin, for the liberty of the Press is of more importance than the
annoyance of individuals.
But some protection is required against swindling in literature; and at
the present moment none exists. Practically none exists either against
libel. I saw, a few years ago, three very gross and libellous English
newspaper articles upon myself, and sent them to a high personage in the
law, who is always kind enough to give me his advice, and asked him if
he considered it worth while for me to prosecute them. He wrote me in
answer: 'All three articles are foully slanderous, yet one only,
perhaps, would come within the grip of the law; upon this one you would
most certainly obtain damages, but prosecution entails so much expense,
trouble, worry, and insult, to the aggrieved party, that I would always
say to any friend of mine what I say now to you: Do not do that which
you have a perfect right to do.'
I followed the advice, for if one asks counsel of a person whom one
respects, one ought to submit to it; but the fact remains that, for the
most offensive social libels, there is, neither in law nor in society,
any means of obtaining redress which a great lawyer can honestly
recommend to a friend. For such matters, why cannot there be a tribunal
set apart from other tribunals; one having the attributes of a Court of
Honour, and without the odious publicity of Courts of Law?
Against libel, even of the grossest character, what can one do, as the
law stands, which is not more disagreeable than silently to 'grin and
bear' it? The great preliminary cost; the extreme uncertainty and
irritation involved, the odious publicity necessarily incurred; the
chatter, the comments, the cross-examination; the insolence and the
jeers of the counsel for the defence, are all punishments which fall
upon the plaintiff. What consolation is it for them that he may perhaps
be awarded a thousand pounds damages, though it is more probable that he
will receive only a farthing, and be left to the enjoyment of paying his
own costs? In either result, is the game worth its very costly candle?
Is the injury made less an injury? Is the combat not in every sense most
unjust and unequal, being less a combat indeed than an assassination by
a bravo? To what can we ever look for any remedy of this except from the
unwritten law of opinion? But as the world is at present constituted it
delights far too greatly in this garbage for it ever to rebuke the
providers of it. Hogs do not rend the man who carries the swill-tub.
In one of the Prince Consort's letters to his eldest daughter, then
Crown Princess of Prussia, he tells her to set aside a portion of her
money every year to meet the inevitable blackmail which will certainly
be levied upon her. This blackmail is levied on every kind of success as
well as on royalty. What is to be done? To submit to it, is repugnant to
all one's sense of justice; to rebel against it, however such resistance
be justified, is often ruinous.
The true remedy would lie in a finer, juster, higher kind of public
feeling; but where is there any likelihood of this arising in the world
as it is?
My own feeling is very strongly always against the anonymity of the
Press. Everyone surely should have the candour and courage to put his
signature after his opinions. But, unfortunately, the Press gains so
much importance (fictitious importance) from its anonymity that it is
hopeless to ask for an unwritten or a written law on this subject. The
arrogant 'we' would soon fall to zero in its influence on the public if
it were signed by a Tom, Dick, or Harry, who, as Matthew Arnold used to
say, forms his opinions from what he overhears on the knifeboard of a
city or suburban omnibus. It is, perhaps, worthy of a nation which
treats duelling as a penal offence to countenance anonymous assertions,
anonymous opinions, anonymous bravado, and anonymous insults; but the
result cannot be beneficial to the national character.
For many months in this past year, and in the year before that, hundreds
of anonymous correspondents and leader-writers of the English Press have
been doing their utmost by violence of language to drive to war the
nations of England and of France. Is it not probable, even certain, that
if all these writers had been obliged to sign their names to these
furious articles, they would have paused before making themselves
responsible for such language? I am often accused of using too strong
language; but at all events I sign whatever I say, and I should be
ashamed to do otherwise. An anonymous Press possesses dangerous
privileges; such privileges as the mask gives a masquerade; it also, as
I have said, acquires a dignity and an importance which are not its own;
it is unfair and harmful; it protects exaggeration, hyperbole, flattery,
and calumny, but it is too useful to too many not to be sustained; it
can always serve the Bourses much better than a signed Press could do,
and obey much more efficiently the nods and signs and cypher dispatches
of the great financiers; but it is cowardly, and can easily, if it
chooses, be dishonest.
It will, perhaps, be objected that the anonymity of the Press is more
apparent than real; that the greater writers of the London Press at
least are all recognised by their style, or well known by the initiated;
but this knowledge is limited to a few hundred persons, and can never be
shared by the general public, and it is on the general public that
anonymous journalism has its chief influence.
To whom or what can we look for the pressure of an influence which would
enforce honesty in literature? To public opinion? Undoubtedly we might,
and we should, if public opinion were what it should be. But it is not,
and, most probably, never will be. Breeding and manners grow worse every
day; and it is they alone which could enforce that unwritten code which
is so sorely needed. It is, after all, the absence of moral and
honourable feeling in the world in general which makes the violation of
these not only condoned by others but frequently profitable to the
sinners. Take two instances of this: The sale of private letters both of
the living and of the dead; and the seizure of the plots and characters
of romances by people who are themselves dramatic adapters. The latter
is the more trivial offence of the two; but it is as impudent as it is
dishonest. It is injurious in a great degree, and extremely annoying to
the original author, whose name is bawled and placarded about in
connection with that of his robber, with no consent of his own, and
usually to his extreme irritation, whilst his ideas are borrowed, and
his characters travestied, and his entire creation belittled and
vulgarised. Would the stalls be filled nightly to witness pieces stolen
in this manner were the public governed by any unwritten law of respect
for _meum_ and _tuum_?
The other offence of selling letters is still more heinous; it is
difficult to conceal the piracy of a romance for theatrical purposes,
but it is perfectly easy to conceal the sale of letters; head it the
sale of autographs, and it passes with entire impunity. There is, I
believe, a law (a written law) that letters are the property of the
writer of them; but it is absolutely a dead law; as dead as many of
those of the Tudors or Stuarts. I think that letters ought to be the
property of the recipient, but it should be an inalienable property
which he should be no more able to sell than he is able to sell entailed
property. To write a letter, even a brief one, is, in a sense, an act of
confidence. In writing it we assume that its contents will not be used
against us, either for injury or ridicule. If a conversation be
considered confidential, how much more should a correspondence be so! A
letter, in any degree intimate, is a hostage given into the hands of its
recipient. We are justified in expecting that any sentiments, views, or
opinions it may contain shall not go beyond the reader for whom they
have been penned. This is so much to be desired in the interests of all
letter-writers that no one, I think, can dispute its justice. What,
then, are we to say of the constant appearance in catalogues of sales of
letters of living, and of lately dead, persons?
If it be, as I understand, illegal, why is it permitted publicly? If it
be not thus illegal, why does not general indignation render it
impossible? I have more than once seen, in the autograph-albums of men
and women of the world, letters of the most intimate character by
distinguished writers; letters which have been evidently written in the
careless, open-heartedness of a warm friendship, and which were lying on
a drawing-room or library table, open to the sneer, the jest, or the
wonder of everyone who turned over the pages of the book.
'N'y touchez pas, N'y touchez pas! Je l'ai paye vingt louis!' cried, in
my hearing, a lady (a _rastaquouere_), who owned amongst other
autographs a letter which it was especially wrong to place in such a
collection, since the writer of it is great and is alive. Not for twenty
louis, not for twenty thousand, should it ever have been purchasable.
What traitor sold it? What servant stole it? How did it find its way
into the market, that familiar and intimate thing? Through treachery,
through death, through accident, through greed? We shall never know. It
was certainly not through friendship.
Surely, also, some unwritten law should prescribe and limit the license
of caricature. It is scarcely fair that, because a personality has
interest and eminence attached to it, every draughtsman who can scrawl a
line can make that personality hideous or ridiculous at pleasure.
'You cannot like it?' I said once to a person of considerable eminence,
who was the subject that week of one of the 'Portraits' of a satirical
and political English journal of wide circulation.
'No, I do not!' he answered. 'Of course, I should not object to it if it
were a pen-and-ink drawing being handed about to amuse people in my own
country house; but when one knows that it will be seen by tens of
thousands of people who will never see me in the flesh, the thing
becomes annoying.'
His opinion must be shared by all those who are thus pilloried, even if
they think it politic to laugh and seem indifferent.
It is 'the penalty of distinction,' the offenders reply. But why should
distinction be weighted by a penalty, like the successful racer? I
believe that the world in general is the loser by this kind of
persecution; for dislike to the vulgar ridicule which snarls at the
heels of all eminence in this day, keeps aloof from the public arena men
who would do honour to it, but whose strength of intellect is
accompanied by shyness, pride, and sensitive reserve. Some unwritten law
should also render impossible those verbal libels which are continually
published by persons cunning enough to keep to the windward side of law
in the offensive matter which they write. This is again another
penalty-weight laid on the back of the racer who has won; and it is
precisely this kind of penalty from which an unwritten law, in the
Press, and in the world, should protect such winners of the gold cups of
life.
The unwritten law of common honour should make such a book as that which
was recently issued on Bismarck impossible, because those who would have
the power of writing it would be above the temptation of doing so. There
may be a strong temptation to say what we know better than any other of
one whose name is eminent. But I doubt whether we should yield to the
temptation, even if we ourselves suffer in reputation by not doing so.
But the bookmakers of the world have no such excuse as this temptation
offers; they are merely footmen who have listened with pricked ears
whilst they waited at table on their masters, and when their master is
powerless to chastise, sell what they remember or invent. Even where it
is not libellous, the sickening intrusion into private life which
nowadays disgraces journalism must, to any temper of any refinement and
reserve, be an offence irritating beyond endurance. There are flatteries
and intrusions beside which censure is sweet and obloquy would be
welcome.
There is a great pathos in the fact that the greatest man of these last
fifty years, the man of blood and iron, should, as soon as he lies in
his coffin, be insulted by such a book as this. The hand in its steel
gauntlet, which welded fragments into a nation, is powerless to defend
its owner against betrayal and false witness. The vulgar, insatiable
curiosity of the general world breeds such traitors as these makers of
post-mortem recollections; breeds them, nourishes them, recompenses
them. There would be no supply if there were no demand. The general
world has a greedy appetite for diseased food; as with its jaws it
devours putrid game, decayed oysters, and the swollen livers of tortured
geese, so it loves to devour with its frothy brain all that belittles,
ridicules, dishonours, or betrays the few amongst it--the very few!--who
are above it in mind, in will, in force, in fame. 'Come, come!' they cry
to the great man's servants when the great man lies dead; 'tell us, you
who saw him in his hours of abandonment, tell us of all that can drag
him down nearer to our level! Tell us of his varicocele, tell us of his
dyspepsia, tell us of his caprices, tell us of his humours, tell us of
his tears when his poisoned dog lay dying--you saw them through the
keyhole--tell us of his hasty words, his pettish foibles, his human
mortal waywardness--you know so much about them, you who waited behind
his chair and filled his tobacco-pouch--come, come, comfort us; his
great shadow seems still to lie upon the earth and make us small and
crawling insects crushed by his spurred boot--come, come, comfort us!
Tell us, show us, make us happy belittling him; let us, the envious, the
puny, the mean, rejoice, for you who cleaned his boot and held his bare
foot in your hired hand, can tell us that he, the maker of emperors and
of nations, he, the Mighty, had Achilles' heel!' For there is an
unwritten law, not of literature but of life, which decrees that the
jealousy of the small soul for the great soul shall be cruel and
deathless as Fate.[10]
[Footnote 10: Since this was written, the letters of Ruskin and Rossetti
have been published: a greater offence against dead men could not be
committed.]