Mr. Hazlitt has written many essays, but none pleasanter than that
entitled "My First Acquaintance with Poets," which, in the edition edited
by his son, opens the _Wintersloe_ series. It relates almost entirely to
Coleridge; containing sketches of his personal appearance, fragments of
his conversation, and is filled with a young man's generous enthusiasm,
belief, admiration, as with sunrise. He had met Coleridge, walked with
him, talked with him, and the high intellectual experience not only made
him better acquainted with his own spirit and its folded powers, but--as
is ever the case with such spiritual encounters--it touched and
illuminated the dead outer world. The road between Wem and Shrewsbury
was familiar enough to Hazlitt, but as the twain passed along it on that
winter day, it became etherealised, poetic--wonderful, as if leading
across the Delectable Mountains to the Golden City, whose gleam is
discernible on the horizon. The milestones were mute with attention, the
pines upon the hill had ears for the stranger as he passed. Eloquence
made the red leaves rustle on the oak; made the depth of heaven seem as
if swept by a breath of spring; and when the evening star appeared,
Hazlitt saw it as Adam did while in Paradise and but one day old. "As we
passed along," writes the essayist, "between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I
eyed the blue hill tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red,
rustling leaves of the sturdy oak-trees by the wayside, a sound was in my
ears as of a siren's song. I was stunned, startled with it as from deep
sleep; but I had no notion that I should ever be able to express my
admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light
of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the
puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless,
like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now,
bursting from the deadly bands that bound them, my ideas float on winged
words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other
years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark,
obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the
prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a
heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and
brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to
Coleridge." Time and sorrow, personal ambition thwarted and fruitlessly
driven back on itself, hopes for the world defeated and unrealised,
changed the enthusiastic youth into a petulant, unsocial man; yet ever as
he remembered that meeting and his wintry walk from Wem to Shrewsbury,
the early glow came back, and a "sound was in his ears as of a siren's
song."
We are not all hero-worshippers like Hazlitt, but most of us are so to a
large extent. A large proportion of mankind feel a quite peculiar
interest in famous writers. They like to read about them, to know what
they said on this or the other occasion, what sort of house they
inhabited, what fashion of dress they wore, if they liked any particular
dish for dinner, what kind of women they fell in love with, and whether
their domestic atmosphere was stormy or the reverse. Concerning such men
no bit of information is too trifling; everything helps to make out the
mental image we have dimly formed for ourselves. And this kind of
interest is heightened by the artistic way in which time occasionally
groups them. The race is gregarious, they are visible to us in clumps
like primroses, they are brought into neighbourhood and flash light on
each other like gems in a diadem. We think of the wild geniuses who came
up from the universities to London in the dawn of the English drama.
Greene, Nash, Marlowe--our first professional men of letters--how they
cracked their satirical whips, how they brawled in taverns, how pinched
they were at times, how, when they possessed money, they flung it from
them as if it were poison, with what fierce speed they wrote, how they
shook the stage. Then we think of the "Mermaid" in session, with
Shakspeare's bland, oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, and
Ben Jonson's truculent visage, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together
in their beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the drollery, the
repartee, the sage sentences, the lightning gleams of wit, the
thunder-peals of laughter.
"What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid? Heard words that hath been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole soul in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life."
Then there is the "Literary Club," with Johnson, and Garrick, and Burke,
and Reynolds, and Goldsmith sitting in perpetuity in Boswell. The Doctor
has been talking there for a hundred years, and there will he talk for
many a hundred more. And we of another generation, and with other things
to think about, can enter any night we please, and hear what is going on.
Then we have the swarthy ploughman from Ayrshire sitting at Lord
Monboddo's with Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, and the rest.
These went into the presence of the wonderful rustic thoughtlessly
enough, and now they cannot return even if they would. They are
defrauded of oblivion. Not yet have they tasted forgetfulness and the
grave. The day may come when Burns will be forgotten, but till that day
arrives--and the eastern sky as yet gives no token of its approach--_him_
they must attend as satellites the sun, as courtiers their king. Then
there are the Lakers,--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey
burdened with his tremendous dream, Wilson in his splendid youth. What
talk, what argument, what readings of lyrical and other ballads, what
contempt of critics, what a hail of fine things! Then there is Charles
Lamb's room in Inner Temple Lane, the hush of a whist table in one
corner, the host stuttering puns as he deals the cards; and sitting round
about. Hunt, whose every sentence is flavoured with the hawthorn and the
primrose, and Hazlitt maddened by Waterloo and St. Helena, and Godwin
with his wild theories, and Kemble with his Roman look. And before the
morning comes, and Lamb stutters yet more thickly--for there is a slight
flavour of punch in the apartment--what talk there has been of Hogarth's
prints, of Izaak Walton, of the old dramatists, of Sir Thomas Browne's
"Urn Burial," with Elia's quaint humour breaking through every
interstice, and flowering in every fissure and cranny of the
conversation! One likes to think of these social gatherings of wit and
geniuses; they are more interesting than conclaves of kings or
convocations of bishops. One would like to have been the waiter at the
"Mermaid," and to have stood behind Shakspeare's chair. What was that
functionary's opinion of his guests? Did he listen and become witty by
infection? or did he, when his task was over, retire unconcernedly to
chalk up the tavern score? One envies somewhat the damsel who brought
Lamb the spirit-case and the hot water. I think of these meetings, and,
in lack of companionship, frame for myself imaginary conversations--not
so brilliant, of course, as Mr. Landor's, but yet sufficient to make
pleasant for me the twilight hour while the lamp is yet unlit, and my
solitary room is filled with ruddy lights and shadows of the fire.
Of human notabilities men of letters are the most interesting, and this
arises mainly from their outspokenness as a class. The writer makes
himself known in a way that no other man makes himself known. The
distinguished engineer may be as great a man as the distinguished writer,
but as a rule we know little about him. We see him invent a locomotive,
or bridge a strait, but there our knowledge stops; we look at the engine,
we walk across the bridge, we admire the ingenuity of the one, we are
grateful for the conveniency of the other, but to our apprehensions the
engineer is undeciphered all the while. Doubtless he reveals himself in
his work as the poet reveals himself in his song, but then this
revelation is made in a tongue unknown to the majority. After all, we do
not feel that we get nearer him. The man of letters, on the other hand,
is outspoken, he takes you into his confidence, he keeps no secret from
you. Be you beggar, be you king, you are welcome. He is no respecter of
persons. He gives without reserve his fancies, his wit, his wisdom; he
makes you a present of all that the painful or the happy years have
brought him. The writer makes his reader heir in full. Men of letters
are a peculiar class. They are never commonplace or prosaic--at least
those of them that mankind care for. They are airy, wise, gloomy,
melodious spirits. They give us the language we speak, they furnish the
subjects of our best talk. They are full of generous impulses and
sentiments, and keep the world young. They have said fine things on
every phase of human experience. The air is full of their voices. Their
books are the world's holiday and playground, and into these neither
care, nor the dun, nor despondency can follow the enfranchised man. Men
of letters forerun science as the morning star the dawn. Nothing has
been invented, nothing has been achieved, but has gleamed a
bright-coloured Utopia in the eyes of one or the other of these men.
Several centuries before the Great Exhibition of 1851 rose in Hyde Park,
a wondrous hall of glass stood, radiant in sunlight, in the verse of
Chaucer. The electric telegraph is not so swift as the flight of Puck.
We have not yet realised the hippogriff of Ariosto. Just consider what a
world this would be if ruled by the best thoughts of men of letters!
Ignorance would die at once, war would cease, taxation would be
lightened, not only every Frenchman, but every man in the world, would
have his hen in the pot. May would not marry January. The race of
lawyers and physicians would be extinct. Fancy a world the affairs of
which are directed by Goethe's wisdom and Goldsmith's heart! In such a
case, methinks the millennium were already come. Books are a finer world
within the world. With books are connected all my desires and
aspirations. When I go to my long sleep, on a book will my head be
pillowed. I care for no other fashion of greatness. I'd as lief not be
remembered at all as remembered in connection with anything else. I
would rather be Charles Lamb than Charles XII. I would rather be
remembered by a song than by a victory. I would rather build a fine
sonnet than have built St. Paul's. I would rather be the discoverer of a
new image than the discoverer of a new planet. Fine phrases I value more
than bank notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of
words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.
But what of the literary life? How fares it with the men whose days and
nights are devoted to the writing of books? We know the famous men of
letters; we give them the highest place in our regards; we crown them
with laurels so thickly that we hide the furrows on their foreheads. Yet
we must remember that there are men of letters who have been equally
sanguine, equally ardent, who have pursued perfection equally
unselfishly, but who have failed to make themselves famous. We know the
ships that come with streaming pennons into the immortal ports; we know
but little of the ships that have gone on fire on the way thither,--that
have gone down at sea. Even with successful men we cannot know precisely
how matters have gone. We read the fine raptures of the poet, but we do
not know into what kind of being he relapses when the inspiration is
over, any more than, seeing and hearing the lark shrilling at the gate of
heaven, we know with what effort it has climbed thither, or into what
kind of nest it must descend. The lark is not always singing; no more is
the poet. The lark is only interesting _while_ singing; at other times
it is but a plain brown bird. We may not be able to recognise the poet
when he doffs his singing robes; he may then sink to the level of his
admirers. We laugh at the fancies of the humourists, but he may have
written his brilliant things in a dismal enough mood. The writer is not
continually dwelling amongst the roses and lilies of life, he is not
continually uttering generous sentiments, and saying fine things. On
him, as on his brethren, the world presses with its prosaic needs. He
has to make love and marry, and run the usual matrimonial risks. The
income-tax collector visits him as well as others. Around his head at
Christmas-times drives a snow-storm of bills. He must keep the wolf from
the door, and he has only his goose-quills to confront it with. And here
it is, having to deal with alien powers, that his special temperament
comes into play, and may work him evil. Wit is not worldly wisdom. A
man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles on
the road. A man may be able to disentangle intricate problems, be able
to recall the past, and yet be cozened by an ordinary knave. The finest
expression will not liquidate a butcher's account. If Apollo puts his
name to a bill, he must meet it when it becomes due, or go into the
gazette. Armies are not always cheering on the heights which they have
won; there are forced marches, occasional shortness of provisions,
bivouacs on muddy plains, driving in of pickets, and the like, although
these inglorious items are forgotten when we read the roll of victories
inscribed on their banners. The books of the great writer are only
portions of the great writer. His life acts on his writings; his
writings react on his life. His life may impoverish his books; his books
may impoverish his life.
"Apollo's branch that might have grown full straight,"
may have the worm of a vulgar misery gnawing at its roots. The heat of
inspiration may be subtracted from the household fire; and those who sit
by it may be the colder in consequence. A man may put all his good
things in his books, and leave none for his life, just as a man may
expend his fortune on a splendid dress, and carry a pang of hunger
beneath it.
There are few less exhilarating books than the biographies of men of
letters, and of artists generally; and this arises from the pictures of
comparative defeat which, in almost every instance, such books contain.
In these books we see failure more or less,--seldom clear, victorious
effort. If the art is exquisite, the marble is flawed; if the marble is
pure, there is defect in art. There is always something lacking in the
poem; there is always irremediable defect in the picture. In the
biography we see persistent, passionate effort, and almost constant
repulse. If, on the whole, victory is gained, one wing of the army has
been thrown into confusion. In the life of a successful farmer, for
instance, one feels nothing of this kind; his year flows on harmoniously,
fortunately; through ploughing, seed-time, growth of grain, the yellowing
of it beneath meek autumn suns and big autumn moons, the cutting of it
down, riotous harvest-home, final sale, and large balance at the
banker's. From the point of view of almost unvarying success the
farmer's life becomes beautiful, poetic. Everything is an aid and help
to him. Nature puts her shoulder to his wheel. He takes the winds, the
clouds, the sunbeams, the rolling stars into partnership, and, asking no
dividend, they let him retain the entire profits. As a rule, the lives
of men of letters do not flow on in this successful way. In their case
there is always either defect in the soil or defect in the husbandry.
Like the Old Guard at Waterloo, they are fighting bravely on a lost
field. In literary biography there is always an element of tragedy, and
the love we bear the dead is mingled with pity. Of course the life of a
man of letters is more perilous than the life of a farmer; more perilous
than almost any other kind of life which it is given a human being to
conduct. It is more difficult to obtain the mastery over spiritual ways
and means than over material ones, and he must command _both_. Properly
to conduct his life he must not only take large crops off his fields, he
must also leave in his fields the capacity of producing large crops. It
is easy to drive in your chariot two horses of one breed; not so easy
when the one is of terrestrial stock, the other of celestial; in every
respect different--in colour, temper, and pace.
At the outset of his career, the man of letters is confronted by the fact
that he must live. The obtaining of a livelihood is preliminary to
everything else. Poets and cobblers are placed on the same level so far.
If the writer can barter MSS. for sufficient coin, he may proceed to
develop himself; if he cannot so barter it, there is a speedy end of
himself, and of his development also. Literature has become a
profession; but it is in several respects different from the professions
by which other human beings earn their bread. The man of letters, unlike
the clergyman, the physician, or the lawyer, has to undergo no special
preliminary training for his work, and while engaged in it, unlike the
professional persons named, he has no accredited status. Of course, to
earn any success, he must start with as much special knowledge, with as
much dexterity in his craft, as your ordinary physician; but then he is
not recognised till once he is successful. When a man takes a
physician's degree, he has done something; when a man betakes himself to
literary pursuits, he has done nothing--till once he is lucky enough to
make his mark. There is no special preliminary training for men of
letters, and as a consequence, their ranks are recruited from the vagrant
talent of the world. Men that break loose from the professions, who
stray from the beaten tracks of life, take refuge in literature. In it
are to be found doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and the motley nation of
Bohemians. Any one possessed of a nimble brain, a quire of paper, a
steel-pen and ink-bottle, can start business. Any one who chooses may
enter the lists, and no questions are asked concerning his antecedents.
The battle is won by sheer strength of brain. From all this it comes
that the man of letters has usually a history of his own: his
individuality is more pronounced than the individuality of other men; he
has been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he has
had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something
of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he
indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters--the
vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean--arise mainly from the want of
harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid
unmercurial world with which they are brought into conflict. They are
unconventional in a world of conventions; they are fanciful, and are
constantly misunderstood in prosaic relations. They are wise enough in
their books, for there they are sovereigns, and can shape everything to
their own likings; out of their books, they are not unfrequently
extremely foolish, for they exist then in the territory of an alien
power, and are constantly knocking their heads against existing orders of
things. Men of letters take prosaic men out of themselves; but they are
weak where the prosaic men are strong. They have their own way in the
world of ideas, prosaic men in the world of facts. From his practical
errors the writer learns something, if not always humility and amendment.
A memorial flower grows on every spot where he has come to grief; and the
chasm he cannot over-leap he bridges with a rainbow.
But the man of letters has not only to live, he has to develop himself;
and his earning of money and his intellectual development should proceed
simultaneously and in proportionate degrees. Herein lies the main
difficulty of the literary life. Out of his thought the man must bring
fire, food, clothing; and fire, food, clothing must in their turns
subserve thought. It is necessary, for the proper conduct of such a
life, that while the balance at the banker's increases, intellectual
resource should increase at the same ratio. Progress should not be made
in the faculty of expression alone,--progress at the same time should be
made in thought; for thought is the material on which expression feeds.
Should sufficient advance not be made in this last direction, in a short
time the man feels that he has expressed himself,--that now he can only
more or less dexterously repeat himself,--more or less prettily become
his own echo. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in writing;
but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is the
only thing he has acquired,--when it has been, perhaps, the only thing he
has striven to acquire. Such miscalculation of ways and means suggests
vulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint. In the life in
which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no
satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does not
create,--he is only desperately keeping up appearances. He has at once
become "a base mechanical," and his successes are not much higher than
the successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer. This want of proper
relationship between resources of expression and resources of thought, or
subject-matter for expression, is common enough, and some slight
suspicion of it flashes across the mind at times in reading even the best
authors. It lies at the bottom of every catastrophe in the literary
life. Frequently a man's first book is good, and all his after
productions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of the first. The
men who act thus are in the long run deserted like worked-out mines. A
man reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as
to expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiar
bitters of the literary life. Hazlitt tells us that, after one of his
early interviews with Coleridge, he sat down to his Essay on the Natural
Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. "I sat down to the task shortly
afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens and paper, determined to
make clean work of it, wrote a few sentences in the skeleton style of a
mathematical demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page, and,
after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions,
apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in
which I had plunged myself for four, or five years preceding, gave up the
attempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless despondency on the
blank unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I
was then? oh, no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being
able to express it, is worth all the fluency and flippancy in the world."
This regretful looking back to the past, when emotions were keen and
sharp, and when thought wore the novel dress of a stranger, and this
dissatisfaction with the acquirements of the present, is common enough
with the man of letters. The years have come and gone, and he is
conscious that he is not intrinsically richer,--he has only learned to
assort and display his riches to advantage. His wares have neither
increased in quantity nor improved in quality,--he has only procured a
window in a leading thoroughfare. He can catch his butterflies more
cunningly, he can pin them on his cards more skilfully, but their wings
are fingered and tawdry compared with the time when they winnowed before
him in the sunshine over the meadows of youth. This species of regret is
peculiar to the class of which I am speaking, and they often discern
failure in what the world counts success. The veteran does not look back
to the time when he was in the awkward squad; the accountant does not
sigh over the time when he was bewildered by the mysteries of
double-entry. And the reason is obvious. The dexterity which time and
practice have brought to the soldier and the accountant is pure gain: the
dexterity of expression which time and practice have brought to the
writer is gain too, in its way, but not quite so pure. It may have been
cultivated and brought to its degree of excellence at the expense of
higher things. The man of letters lives by thought and expression, and
his two powers may not be perfectly balanced. And, putting aside its
effect on the reader, and through that, on the writer's pecuniary
prosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this. When the
writer expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, however
life-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looks
back over his uttered past--brown desert to him, in which there is no
sustenance--he looks forward to the green _un_uttered future, and
beholding its narrow limits, knows it is all that he can call his
own,--on that vivid strip he must pasture his intellectual life.
Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one? Granted that the writer
is productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he has
secured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could
be happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat. If a
poet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in his
ideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if an
essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things. He
breathes habitually the serener air which ordinary mortals can only at
intervals respire, and in their happiest moments. Such conceptions of
great writers are to some extent erroneous. Through the medium of their
books we know them only in their active mental states,--in their
triumphs; we do not see them when sluggishness has succeeded the effort
which was delight. The statue does not come to her white limbs all at
once. It is the bronze wrestler, not the flesh and blood one, that
stands forever over a fallen adversary with pride of victory on his face.
Of the labour, the weariness, the self-distrust, the utter despondency of
the great writer, we know nothing. Then, for the attainment of mere
happiness or contentment, any high faculty of imagination is a
questionable help. Of course imagination lights the torch of joy, it
deepens the carmine on the sleek cheek of the girl, it makes wine
sparkle, makes music speak, gives rays to the rising sun. But in all its
supreme sweetnesses there is a perilous admixture of deceit, which is
suspected even at the moment when the senses tingle keenliest. And it
must be remembered that this potent faculty can darken as well as
brighten. It is the very soul of pain. While the trumpets are blowing
in Ambition's ear, it whispers of the grave. It drapes Death in austere
solemnities, and surrounds him with a gloomy court of terrors. The life
of the imaginative man is never a commonplace one: his lights are
brighter, his glooms are darker, than the lights and gloom of the vulgar.
His ecstasies are as restless as his pains. The great writer has this
perilous faculty in excess; and through it he will, as a matter of
course, draw out of the atmosphere of circumstance surrounding him the
keenness of pleasure and pain. To my own notion, the best gifts of the
gods are neither the most glittering nor the most admired. These gifts I
take to be, a moderate ambition, a taste for repose with circumstances
favourable thereto, a certain mildness of passion, an even-beating pulse,
an even-beating heart. I do not consider heroes and celebrated persons
the happiest of mankind. I do not envy Alexander the shouting of his
armies, nor Dante his laurel wreath. Even were I able, I would not
purchase these at the prices the poet and the warrior paid. So far,
then, as great writers--great poets, especially--are of imagination all
compact--a peculiarity of mental constitution which makes a man go shares
with every one he is brought into contact with; which makes him enter
into Romeo's rapture when he touches Juliet's cheek among cypresses
silvered by the Verona moonlight, and the stupor of the blinded and
pinioned wretch on the scaffold before the bolt is drawn--so far as this
special gift goes, I do not think the great poet,--and by virtue of it he
_is_ a poet,--is likely to be happier than your more ordinary mortal. On
the whole, perhaps, it is the great readers rather than the great writers
who are entirely to be envied. They pluck the fruits, and are spared the
trouble of rearing them. Prometheus filched fire from heaven, and had
for reward the crag of Caucasus, the chain, the vulture; while they for
whom he stole it cook their suppers upon it, stretch out benumbed hands
towards it, and see its light reflected in their children's faces. They
are comfortable: he, roofed by the keen crystals of the stars, groans
above.
Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. The majority
of men slip into their graves without having encountered on their way
thither any signal catastrophe or exaltation of fortune or feeling.
Collect a thousand ignited sticks into a heap, and you have a bonfire
which may be seen over three counties. If, during thirty years, the
annoyances connected with shirt-buttons found missing when you are
hurriedly dressing for dinner, were gathered into a mass and endured at
once, it would be misery equal to a public execution. If, from the same
space of time, all the little titillations of a man's vanity were
gathered into one lump of honey and enjoyed at once, the pleasure of
being crowned would not perhaps be much greater. If the equanimity of an
ordinary man be at the mercy of trifles, how much more will the
equanimity of the man of letters, who is usually the most sensitive of
the race, and whose peculiar avocation makes sad work with the fine
tissues of the nerves. Literary composition is, I take it, with the
exception of the crank, in which there is neither hope nor result, the
most exhausting to which a human being can apply himself. Just consider
the situation. Here is your man of letters, tender-hearted as Cowper,
who would not count upon his list of friends the man who tramples
heedlessly upon a worm; as light of sleep and abhorrent of noise as
Beattie, who denounces chanticleer for his lusty proclamation of morning
to his own and the neighbouring farmyards in terms that would be
unmeasured if applied to Nero; as alive to blame as Byron, who declared
that the praise of the greatest of the race could not take the sting from
the censure of the meanest. Fancy the sufferings of a creature so built
and strung in a world which creaks so vilely on its hinges as this! Will
such a man confront a dun with an imperturbable countenance? Will he
throw himself back in his chair and smile blandly when his chamber is
lanced through and through by the notes of a street bagpiper? When his
harrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to
stupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier than
people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from
social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom,
and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and
unhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his brain
bread and beer, clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not surprised
that he is oftentimes nervous, querulous, impatient. Thinking of these
things, I do not wonder at Hazlitt's spleen, at Charles Lamb's punch, at
Coleridge's opium. I think of the days spent in writing, and of the
nights which repeat the day in dream, and in which there is no
refreshment. I think of the brain which must be worked out at length; of
Scott, when the wand of the enchanter was broken, writing poor romances;
of Southey sitting vacantly in his library, and drawing a feeble
satisfaction from the faces of his books. And for the man of letters
there is more than the mere labour: he writes his book, and has
frequently the mortification of seeing it neglected or torn to pieces.
Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects
his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To
write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a
sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where
sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism
lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised,
and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's
life. Most men endure criticism with commendable fortitude, just as most
criminals when under the drop conduct themselves with calmness. They
bleed, but they bleed inwardly. To be flayed in the _Saturday Review_,
for instance,--a whole amused public looking on,--is far from pleasant;
and, after the operation, the ordinary annoyances of life probably
magnify themselves into tortures. The grasshopper becomes a burden.
Touch a flayed man ever so lightly, and with ever so kindly an intention,
and he is sure to wince. The skin of the man of letters is peculiarly
sensitive to the bite of the critical mosquito; and he lives in a climate
in which such mosquitoes swarm. He is seldom stabbed to the heart--he is
often killed by pin-pricks.
But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to the interior of the
citadel, it may be said that great writers, although they must ever
remain shining objects of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinary
limitations and conditions. They are cabined, cribbed, confined, even as
their more prosaic brethren. It is in the nature of every man to be
endued with that he works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchant
becomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavour
of the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine and
horse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul--his experiences are docketed
in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away in
professional pigeon-holes. A man naturally becomes leavened by the
profession which he has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams "shop,"
as the colloquial phrase has it. Men of letters are affected by their
profession just as merchants, physicians, and lawyers are. In course of
time the inner man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper. The
agriculturist talks constantly of bullocks--the man of letters constantly
of books. The printing-press seems constantly in his immediate
neighbourhood. He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourable
review,--he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition. The narrowing
effect of a profession is in every man a defect, albeit an inevitable
one. Byron, who had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of his
day, tells us, in "Beppo,"
"One hates an author that's _all author_; fellows
In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink."
And his lordship's "hate" in the matter is understandable enough. In his
own day, Scott and himself were almost the only distinguished authors who
were not "all authors," just as Mr. Helps and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton
are almost the only representatives of the class in ours. This
professional taint not only resides in the writer, impairing his fulness
and completion; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs it also.
It is the professional character which authorship has assumed which has
taken individuality and personal flavour from so much of our writing, and
prevented to a large extent the production of enduring books. Our
writing is done too hurriedly, and to serve a purpose too immediate.
Literature is not so much an art as a manufacture. There is a demand,
and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never allowed to lie
fallow, and to nourish itself in peacefulness and silence. When so many
cups are to be filled, too much water is certain to be put into the
teapot. Letters have become a profession, and probably of all
professions it is, in the long run, the least conducive to personal
happiness. It is the most precarious. In it, above all others, to be
weak is to be miserable. It is the least mechanical, consequently the
most exhausting; and in its higher walks it deals with a man's most vital
material--utilises his emotions, trades on his faculties of love and
imagination, uses for its own purposes the human heart by which he lives.
These things a man requires for himself; and when they are in a large
proportion transported to an ideal world, they make the ideal world all
the more brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary existence all
the more arid and commonplace. You cannot spend money and have it; you
cannot use emotion and possess it. The poet who sings loudly of love and
love's delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of life be all the
colder for his singing. The man who has been moved while describing an
imaginary death-bed to-day, is all the more likely to be unmoved while
standing by his friend's grave to-morrow. Shakspeare, after emerging
from the moonlight in the Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet's silvery
interchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously enamoured of the
autumn on Ann Hathaway's cheek. It is in some such way as this that a
man's books may impoverish his life; that the fire and heat of his genius
may make his hearth all the colder. From considerations like these, one
can explain satisfactorily enough to one's self the domestic
misadventures of men of letters--of poets especially. We know the poets
only in their books; their wives know them out of them. Their wives see
the other side of the moon; and we have been made pretty well aware how
they have appreciated _that_.
The man engaged in the writing of books is tempted to make such writing
the be-all and end-all of his existence--to grow his literature out of
his history, experience, or observation, as the gardener grows out of
soils brought from a distance the plants which he intends to exhibit.
The cup of life foams fiercely over into first books; materials for the
second, third, and fourth must be carefully sought for. The man of
letters, as time passes on, and the professional impulse works deeper,
ceases to regard the world with a single eye. The man slowly merges into
the artist. He values new emotions and experiences, because he can turn
these into artistic shapes. He plucks "copy" from rising and setting
suns. He sees marketable pathos in his friend's death-bed. He carries
the peal of his daughter's marriage-bells into his sentences or his
rhymes; and in these the music sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshine
and the wind. If originally of a meditative, introspective mood, his
profession can hardly fail to confirm and deepen his peculiar
temperament. He begins to feel his own pulse curiously, and for a
purpose. As a spy in the service of literature, he lives in the world
and its concerns. Out of everything he seeks thoughts and images, as out
of everything the bee seeks wax and honey. A curious instance of this
mode of looking at things occurs in Goethe's "Letters from Italy," with
whom, indeed, it was fashion, and who helped himself out of the teeming
world to more effect than any man of his time:--
"From Botzen to Trent the stage is nine leagues, and runs through a
valley which constantly increases in fertility. All that merely
struggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strength
and vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is once more belief
in a Deity.
"A poor woman cried out to me to take her child into my vehicle, as the
soil was burning its feet. I did her this service out of honour to the
strong light of Heaven. The child was strangely decked out, _but I could
get nothing from it in any way_."
It is clear that out of all this the reader gains; but I cannot help
thinking that for the writer it tends to destroy entire and simple
living--all hearty and final enjoyment in life. Joy and sorrow, death
and marriage, the comic circumstance and the tragic, what befalls him,
what he observes, what he is brought into contact with, do not affect him
as they affect other men; they are secrets to be rifled, stones to be
built with, clays to be moulded into artistic shape. In giving emotional
material artistic form, there is indisputably a certain noble pleasure;
but it is of a solitary and severe complexion, and takes a man out of the
circle and sympathies of his fellows. I do not say that this kind of
life makes a man selfish, but it often makes him _seem_ so; and the
results of this seeming, on friendship and the domestic relationships,
for instance, are as baleful as if selfishness really existed. The
peculiar temptation which besets men of letters, the curious playing with
thought and emotion, the tendency to analyse and take everything to
pieces, has two results, and neither aids his happiness nor even his
literary success. On the one hand, and in relation to the social
relations, it gives him somewhat of an icy aspect, and so breaks the
spring and eagerness of affectionate response. For the best affection is
shy, reticent, undemonstrative, and needs to be drawn out by its like.
If unrecognised, like an acquaintance on the street, it passes by, making
no sign, and is for the time being a stranger. On the other hand, the
desire to say a fine thing about a phenomenon, whether natural or moral,
prevents a man from reaching the inmost core of the phenomenon. Entrance
into these matters will never be obtained by the most sedulous seeking.
The man who has found an entrance cannot tell how he came there, and he
will never find his way back again by the same road. From this law
arises all the dreary conceits and artifices of the poets; it is through
the operation of the same law that many of our simple songs and ballads
are inexpressibly affecting, because in them there is no consciousness of
authorship; emotion and utterance are twin born, consentaneous--like
sorrow and tears, a blow and its pain, a kiss and its thrill. When a man
is happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness. I
am not happy at all unless I am happier than I know. When the tide is
full there is silence in channel and creek. The silence of the lover
when he clasps the maid is better than the passionate murmur of the song
which celebrates her charms. If to be near the rose makes the
nightingale tipsy with delight, what must it be to be the rose herself?
One feeling of the "wild joys of living--the leaping from rock to rock,"
is better than the "muscular-Christianity" literature which our time has
produced. I am afraid that the profession of letters interferes with the
elemental feelings of life; and I am afraid, too, that in the majority of
cases this interference is not justified by its results. The entireness
and simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitive
element, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which was
much worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies of love, faith,
imagination; and happily it is not given to every one to _live_, in the
pecuniary sense, by the artistic utilisation and sale of these. You
cannot make ideas; they must come unsought if they come at all.
"From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine"
is a profitable occupation enough, if you stumble on the little
churchyard covered over with silence, and folded among the hills. If you
go to the churchyard with intent to procure thought, as you go into the
woods to gather anemones, you are wasting your time. Thoughts must come
naturally, like wild flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed--even
although aided by the leaf-mould of your past--like exotics. And it is
the misfortune of men of letters of our day that they cannot afford to
wait for this natural flowering of thought, but are driven to the forcing
process, with the results which were to be expected.