EVENSONG

The embers of the day are red

Beyond the murky hill.

The kitchen smokes: the bed

In the darkling house is spread:

The great sky darkens overhead,

And the great woods are shrill.

So far have I been led,

Lord, by Thy will:

So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.

The breeze from the enbalmed land

Blows sudden toward the shore,

And claps my cottage door.

I hear the signal, Lord--I understand.

The night at Thy command

Comes. I will eat and sleep and will not question more.

*****

It is not at all a strong thing to put one’s reliance upon logic; and

our own logic particularly, for it is generally wrong. We never know

where we are to end if once we begin following words or doctors. There

is an upright stock in a man’s own heart that is trustier than any

syllogism; and the eyes, and the sympathies, and appetites know a thing

or two that have never yet been stated in controversy. Reasons are as

plentiful as blackberries; and, like fisticuffs, they serve impartially

with all sides. Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proofs, and

are only logical in so far as they are cleverly put. An able

controversialist no more than an able general demonstrates the justice

of his cause.

*****

To any man there may come at times a consciousness that there blows,

through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not

wholly his; that his mind rebels; that another girds him and carries him

whither he would not.

*****

The child, the seed, the grain of corn,

The acorn on the hill,

Each for some separate end is born

In season fit, and still

Each must in strength arise to work the almighty will.

So from the hearth the children flee,

By that almighty hand

Austerely led; so one by sea

Goes forth, and one by land;

Nor aught of all man’s sons escapes from that command.

So from the sally each obeys

The unseen almighty nod;

So till the ending all their ways

Blindfolded loth have trod:

Nor knew their task at all, but were the tools of God.

*****

A few restrictions, indeed, remain to influence the followers of

individual branches of study. The DIVINITY, for example, must be

an avowed believer; and as this, in the present day, is unhappily

considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one

of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus. Some swallow it

in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a credit to believe in

God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher, although it is a

decided slur to believe in Him on His own authority. Others again (and

this we think the worst method), finding German grammar a somewhat dry

morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of independence; and

deny one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold the others without

being laughed at.

*****

In particular, I heard of clergymen who were employing their time in

explaining to a delighted audience the physics of the Second Coming. It

is not very likely any of us will be asked to help. If we were, it is

likely we should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on more

reliable authority. And so I can only figure to myself a congregation

truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as one of veteran

and accomplished saints, who have fought the good fight to an end and

outlived all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as a part of

the Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect company on earth.

*****

The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common

and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers,

the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the

thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of

life, share with us the love of an ideal; strive like us--like us are

tempted to grow weary of the struggle--to do well; like us receive at

times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage;

and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the

members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of

some reward, some sugar with the drug? Do they, too, stand aghast at

unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality,

we take to be just, and the prosperity of such as in our blindness we

call wicked?

*****

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet,

and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the same

mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is

not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much

debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force

of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that

whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original,

that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept....

Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds

a word that transcends all commonplace morality; every now and then

He quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a

pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry

of thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday

conceptions to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher

principle of conduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in

Christ, who stand at some centre not too far from His, and looks at the

world and conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing

attitude--or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ’s philosophy--every

such saying should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration; he

should feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in

the flux of time and chance; each should be another proof that in

the torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great

armaments and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable,

holding by the eternal stars.

*****

Those who play by rule will never be more than tolerable players; and

you and I would like to play our game in life to the noblest and the

most divine advantage....For no definite precept can be more than an

illustration, though its truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was

announced from heaven by the voice of God. And life is so intricate and

changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the

ages, shall we find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it

can apply....

It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and

its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and

religious education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but

the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God’s scholars till

we die. If, as teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose, we must

say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that soul’s

dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul would have him

think of them. If, from some conformity between us and the pupil,

or perhaps among all men, we do in truth speak in such a dialect and

express such views, beyond question we shall touch in him a spring;

beyond question he will recognise the dialect as one that he himself

has spoken in his better hours; beyond question he will cry, ‘I had

forgotten, but now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had forgot to use

them! I too have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I

will listen and conform.’ In short, say to him anything that he has once

thought, or been upon the point of thinking, or show him any view of

life that he has once clearly seen, or been on the point of clearly

seeing; and you have done your part and may leave him to complete the

education for himself.

*****

God, if there be any God, speaks daily in a new language, by the tongues

of men; the thoughts and habits of each fresh generation and each

new-coined spirit throw another light upon the universe, and contain

another commentary on the printed Bibles; every scruple, every true

dissent, every glimpse of something new, is a letter of God’s alphabet;

and though there is a grave responsibility for all who speak, is there

none for those who unrighteously keep silent and conform? Is not that

also to conceal and cloak God’s counsel?

*****

Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in particular.

Every man or woman is one of mankind’s dear possessions; to his or her

just brain, and kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of

its hopes for the future; he or she is a possible wellspring of good

acts and source of blessings to the race.

*****

Morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness every man

fights for his own hand; all the six hundred precepts of the Mishna

cannot shake my private judgment; my magistracy of myself is an

indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time and case.

The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my

tribunal. He has to show not the law, but that the law applies. Can he

convince me? then he gains the cause. And thus you find Christ giving

various counsels to varying people, and often jealously careful to avoid

definite precept. Is He asked, for example, to divide a heritage? He

refuses; and the best advice that He will offer is but a paraphrase of

the tenth commandment which figures so strangely among the rest. Take

heed, and beware of covetousness. If you complain that this is vague, I

have failed to carry you along with me in my argument. For no definite

precept can be more than an illustration, though its truth were

resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven by the voice

of God. And life is so intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty

times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that nice consent

of circumstances to which alone it can apply.

*****

But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses

and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more

unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable

and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself. In

the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear,

strong, and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that we

enjoy communion with our soul. At the worst we are so fallen and passive

that we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor seizes upon men.

Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world,

they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes

engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon loses

both the will and power to look higher considerations in the face. This

is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is temporal damnation,

damnation on the spot and without the form of judgment: ‘What shall it

profit a man if he gain the whole world and LOSE HIMSELF?’

*****

To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way

of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only

greed of hire.

*****

We are are all such as He was--the inheritors of sin; we must all bear

and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all of us--ay, even

in me--a sparkle of the divine. Like Him, we must endure for a little

while, until morning returns, bringing peace.

*****

A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life

as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to

us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of

knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences.

*****

Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from

open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the truth.

It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea

and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration,

such as is often found in mutual love. YEA and NAY mean nothing; the

meaning must have been related in the question. Many Words are often

necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of

exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many

arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the

course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour’s

talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a

single thought.

*****

The cruellist lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a

room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a

disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished

because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame

which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the

critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his

tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed

through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and

part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the

foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law,

and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor

of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement;

the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate

conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of

his own tempers: and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state

the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not

truth to letter, is the true veracity.

*****

He talked for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib,

as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth,

which is the mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random. There

was no particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal,

to flatter himself, and to please and interest the present friend.

*****

How wholly we all lie at the mercy of a single prater, not needfully

with any malign purpose! And if a man but talk of himself in the right

spirit, refers to his virtuous actions by the way, and never applies

to them the name of virtues, how easily his evidence is accepted in the

court of public opinion!

*****

In one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false; and it can

never be safe to suppress what is true.

*****

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by

private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise,

and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any

subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time,

however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,

conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an

exploration.

*****

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,

rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience,

anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the

whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter

in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental

elevation and abasement--these are the material with which talk is

fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is

proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should

proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should

keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses

of men, at the level where history, fiction, and experience intersect

and illuminate each other.

*****

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,

gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an

illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of

time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international

congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public

errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by

day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament

but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no

book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance.

Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of

good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life,

freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and

taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,

tentative, continually ‘in further search and progress’; while written

words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden

dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the

truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can

only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and

may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of

the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or

merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug

is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary

groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like

schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our

period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak;

that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the

harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of

pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our

education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any

age and in almost any state of health.

*****

And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent

means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull’s-eye lantern

wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a

particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that

it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed;

like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our

sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare

to express the merest fraction of a man’s experience in an hour. The

speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the

mind, produce; in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume

to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal

logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of

Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest

process of thought when we put it into words; for the words are all

coloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from

former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the

question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by

the realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent them

in man’s speech; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one

side, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps

inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are

truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication,

not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself,

for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into

the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these

scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree

grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives.

*****

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have

transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man

were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment.

But when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any

good-humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism,

every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and

reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and

ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of

the discipline.

*****

All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the

game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that

reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so

warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other’s eyes to such a vast

proportion. For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits

of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret

pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious,

musical, and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to be.

So they weave for themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace

of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of

the world’s dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And

when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity

and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the

height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension.

*****

No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him

by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally

incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom

comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation,

which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation

of events and circumstances.

*****

Overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element in life--alas!

pain has its own way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon

the fairy garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely

than it rules upon the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god

whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can

protect us from this sting.

*****

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find that in

your Bible? Easy? It is easy to be an ass and follow the multitude like

a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is

what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the

stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.

*****

Though I have all my life been eager for legitimate distinction, I can

lay my hand upon my heart, at the end of my career, and declare there is

not one--no, nor yet life itself--which is worth acquiring or preserving

at the slightest cost of dignity.

*****

For surely, at this time of the day in the nineteenth century, there is

nothing that an honest man should fear more timorously than getting and

spending more than he deserves.

*****

It remains to be seen, by each man who would live a true life to himself

and not a merely specious life to society, how many luxuries he truly

wants and to how many he merely submits as to a social propriety; and

all these last he will immediately forswear. Let him do this, and he

will be surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him in

complete contentment and activity of mind and senses. Life at any level

among the easy classes is conceived upon a principle of rivalry, where

each man and each household must ape the tastes and emulate the display

of others. One is delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in

furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who care nothing for any of

these refinements, who am perhaps a plain athletic creature and love

exercise, beef, beer, flannel-shirts, and a camp bed, am yet called upon

to assimilate all these other tastes and make these foreign occasions

of expenditure my own. It may be cynical; I am sure I will be told it is

selfish; but I will spend my money as I please and for my own intimate

personal gratification, and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to

lay out the colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty.

I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born

with a delight in them. Dress is my own affair, and that of one other

in the world; that, in fact, and for an obvious reason, of any woman who

shall chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind.

If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even

if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation.

*****

To a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every relation

and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must first be

born, and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily, the manners of

a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet with

a certain external acceptation throughout all the others, and this tends

to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements and the amateurish

accomplishments of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human and

central.

*****

Respectability is a very thing in its way, but it does not rise superior

to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it

was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if

a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and

superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as the Church of

England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself and all

concerned.

*****

After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his

neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go

farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that

things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they

do not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they

are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue

altogether. He has learned the first lesson, that no man is wholly good;

but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to

wit, that no man is wholly bad.

*****

Or take the case of men of letters. Every piece of work which is not as

good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely

thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind, who is your paymaster

on parole, and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue

performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart

and condemn you for a thief.

*****

Sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations,

because it supplies us with the materials for wisdom. It is probably

more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular

person.... than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation

against his abstract vices.

*****

In the best fabric of duplicity there is some weak point, if you can

strike it, which will loosen all.

*****

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose

actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The

Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful

carping, but in a heat of admiration.

*****

After an hospital, what uglier piece is there in civilisation than a

court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness to

wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed

households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low building

with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles’s bell told the first

hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the strokes and

wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.

*****

There are two things that men should never weary of--goodness and

humility.

*****

It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earning

itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or something else must

follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious

in itself; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience

why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau

had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and

fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle,

selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to

cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who

can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and

even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it

to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher

moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.

*****

A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail; he will hear

of his failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still do well,

but the critic may have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung

up some new idol of the instant, some ‘dust a little gilt,’ to whom they

now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of

that empty and ugly thing called popularity. Will any man suppose it

worth gaining?

*****

Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon

the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject

which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and

broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the

truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But the truth is

one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered.

*****

For such things as honour and love and faith are not only nobler than

food and drink, but indeed I think that we desire them more, and suffer

more sharply for their absence.

*****

There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.

The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be

received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same

person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he

should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is

conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from

ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And

since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no

doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of

proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to

be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the

successful merchant.

*****

‘You know it very well, it cannot in any way help that you should brood

upon it, and I sometimes wonder whether you and I--who are a pair of

sentimentalists--are quite good judges of plain men.’

*****

For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men

can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find

his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most, palatable, and

make themselves welcome to the mind.

*****

It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of

police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from an

inn-door change your views upon the subject like a course of lectures.

As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to

you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once

get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil. I will give

most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer

them twopence for what remains of their morality.

*****

I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless, perhaps,

the two were the same thing? And yet ‘tis a good tonic; the cold tub and

bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life in cases

of advanced sensibility.

*****

Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the

louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their

friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.

*****

Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this itch of doing

that undoes men.

*****

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

*****

That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go.

*****

It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or

other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.

*****

But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit

squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.

*****

For truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the

enemy.

*****

But O, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!

*****

It is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest

apostle.

*****

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

*****

A man may live in dreams, and yet be unprepared for their realisation.

*****

‘Be soople, Davie, in things immaterial.’

*****

No class of man is altogether bad; but each has its own faults and

virtues.

*****

But it is odd enough, the very women who profess most contempt for

mankind as a sex seem to find even its ugliest particulars rather lively

and high-minded in their own sons.

*****

To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man.

*****

But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to

be as dull and foolish as our neighbours.

*****

It always warms a man to see a woman brave.

*****

Condescension is an excellent thing, but it is strange how one-sided the

pleasure of it is!

*****

Some strand of our own misdoing is involved in every quarrel.

*****

There was never an ill thing made better by meddling.

*****

Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.

*****

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.

*****

A man dissatisfied with endeavour is a man tempted to sadness.

*****

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.

*****

It is one of the most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water

on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything

worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city,

must be judged upon its merits as a whole.

*****

I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative

point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.

Although it runs to considerably over a hundred pages, it contains not

a single reference to the imbecility of God’s universe, nor so much as a

single hint that I could have made a better one myself--I really do not

know where my head can have been.

*****

It’s deadly commonplace, but, after all, the commonplaces are the great

poetic truths.

*****

Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their

recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and

scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a

buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on

the playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which

cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,

the little sunbright pictures of the past still shine in the mind’s eye

with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. GLUCK UND UNGLUCK

WIRD GESANG, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the

original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to

wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps,

to fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and

looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,

substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

*****

Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in yellow overalls, do what

you will, young Jessamy finds young Jenny.

*****

‘You fret against the common law,’ I said. ‘You rebel against the

voice of God, which He has made so winning to convince, so imperious

to command. Hear it, and how it speaks between us! Your hand clings to

mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we

are compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth

remembers its independent life, and yearns to join us; we are drawn

together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb and

flow; by things older and greater than we ourselves.’

*****

‘Olalla,’ I said, ‘the soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love.

What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the

soul cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God’s

signal; and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the

footstool and foundation of the highest.’

*****

She sent me away, and yet I had but to call upon her name and she came

to me. These were but the weaknesses of girls, from which even she, the

strangest of her sex, was not exempted.

*****

For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts,

unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If

the injured one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would

understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown--it has to

be demonstrated in words.

*****

There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits

in a man’s mind, and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it

just seems it was the thing he wanted.

*****

There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him

stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement,

and a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person’s

spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can

dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every

one to fall in love....A wet rag goes safely by the fire; and if a man

is blind, he cannot expect to be much impressed by romantic scenery.

Apart from all this, many lovable people miss each other in the world,

or meet under some unfavourable star.

*****

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most

people would die unwed; and among the others, there would be not a

few tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is

scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love

is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic

sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is

best, but what is worst and smallest, in men’s characters. Just as

some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the

influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting

when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows

enough in the everyday affairs and humours of the world.

*****

There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and

startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him

very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable

variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense;

they form together no more than a sort of background, or running

accompaniment to the man’s own reflections; and he falls naturally into

a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a

conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of

to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friend

and acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometime look

forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But it

is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will

help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly

thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of

the person’s experience.

*****

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first

time after long, like the flowers in spring, to re-awaken in us the

sharp edge of sense, and that impression of mystic strangeness which

otherwise passes out of life with the coming years; but the sight of a

loved face is what renews a man’s character from the fountain upwards.

*****

Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love,

even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of

love, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you

will pay the price in a sufficient ‘amount of what you call life,’ why

then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even

years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourse

as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.

*****

Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. ‘O yes, believe me,’ as the song

says, ‘Love has eyes!’ The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do

we feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and

would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never

will forgive that friend’s misconduct. If you want a person’s faults, go

to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And herein

lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge

without change.

*****

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this

idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the sweethearts. To do

good and communicate is the lover’s grand intention. It is the happiness

of the other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not

possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility,

pity, and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an

unexpected caress. To make one’s self beautiful, to dress the hair, to

excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character

and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only

to magnify one’s self, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same

time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers,

for the essence of love is kindness; and, indeed, it may be best defined

as passionate kindness; kindness, so to speak, run mad and become

importunate and violent.

*****

What sound is so full of music as one’s own name uttered for the first

time in the voice of her we love!

*****

We make love, and thereby ourselves fall the deeper in it. It is with

the heart only that one captures a heart.

*****

O, have it your own way; I am too old a hand to argue with young

gentlemen who choose to fancy themselves in love; I have too much

experience, thank you.

*****

And love, considered as a spectacle, must have attractions for many who

are not of the confraternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace

of the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to

be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and

sympathy. For nature commends itself to people with a most insinuating

art; the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; and you

may be as pacific or as cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help

some emotion when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of

lovers in the lane.

*****

Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like

it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.

*****

With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between

lovers (for mutual understanding is love’s essence), the truth is easily

indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the other. A hint taken,

a look understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate explanations;

and where the life is known even YEA and NAY become luminous. In the

closest of all relations--that of a love well founded and equally

shared-speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process

or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate directly by

their presences, and with few looks and fewer words contrive to share

their good and evil and uphold each other’s hearts in joy.

*****

And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a

strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight,

silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship

more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is

solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man

loves is of all lives the most complete and free.

*****

The flower of the hedgerow and the star of heaven satisfy and delight

us: how much more the look of the exquisite being who was created to

bear and rear, to madden and rejoice mankind!

*****

So strangely are we built: so much more strong is the love of woman than

the mere love of life.

*****

You think that pity--and the kindred sentiments-have the greatest power

upon the heart. I think more nobly of women. To my view, the man

they love will first of all command their respect; he will be

steadfast-proud, if you please; dry-possibly-but of all things

steadfast. They will look at him in doubt; at last they will see that

stern face which he presents to all of the rest of the world soften

to them alone. First, trust, I say. It is so that a woman loves who is

worthy of heroes.

*****

The sex likes to pick up knowledge and yet preserve its superiority.

It is good policy, and almost necessary in the circumstances. If a

man finds a woman admires him, were it only for his acquaintance with

geography, he will begin at once to build upon the admiration. It is

only by unintermittent snubbing that the pretty ones can keep us in

our place. Men, as Miss Howe or Miss Harlowe would have said, ‘are such

encroachers.’ For my part, I am body and soul with the women; and after

a well-married couple, there is nothing so beautiful in the world as

the myth of the divine huntress. It is no use for a man to take to the

woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago, and had a

pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women,

which overtops the best gymnosophist among men, that they suffice

themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance

of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse of a professed

ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to

the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss.

There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency.

And when I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods

all night to the note of Diana’s horn; moving among the old oaks, as

fancy-free as they; things of the forest and the starlight, not touched

by the commotion of man’s hot and turbid life-although there are plenty

other ideals that I should prefer--I find my heart beat at the thought

of this one. ‘Tis to fail in life, but to fail with what a grace!

That is not lost which is not regretted. And where--here slips out the

male--where would be much of the glory of inspiring love, if there were

no contempt to overcome?

*****

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice

and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them

from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy;

their motherly, superior tenderness to man’s vanity and self-importance;

their managing arts-the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured

barbarians-are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify

relations. It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene

that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In

the garden, on the road or the hillside, or TETE-A-TETE and apart from

interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from any single

woman; and nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage is one long

conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they

but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her

at once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the intervals, almost

unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is

turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons

more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process

of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new

worlds of thought.

*****

Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor. Long of

limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her

golden hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had

but caressed and embellished her. By the lines of a rich and vigorous

maternity, she seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother

of their children.

*****

And lastly, he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female,

the everlasting fountain of interest.

*****

The effervescency of her passionate and irritable nature rose within

her at times to bursting point. This is the price paid by age for

unseasonable ardours of feeling.

*****

Weir must have supposed his bride to be somewhat suitable; perhaps he

belonged to that class of men who think a weak head the ornament of

women--an opinion invariably punished in this life.

*****

Never ask women folk. They’re bound to answer ‘No.’ God never made the

lass that could resist the temptation.

*****

It is an odd thing how happily two people, if there are two, can live

in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a

whole life in which you have no part paralyses personal desire. You are

content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands in his door; the

colonel with his three medals goes by to the CAFE at night; the troops

drum and trumpet and man the ramparts as bold as so many lions. It would

task language to say how placidly you behold all this. In a place where

you have taken some root you are provoked out of your indifference; you

have a hand in the game--your friends are fighting with the army. But in

a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so large

as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far apart from

the business that you positively forget it would be possible to go

nearer; you have so little human interest around you that you do not

remember yourself to be a man.

*****

Pity was her weapon and her weakness. To accept the loved one’s faults,

although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain.

*****

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed,

variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so tried among the

inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for islands in the air

or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for solid

ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick,

weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were the

royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have

all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when

we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and

change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but

an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile

of the devil’s. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing

faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and

calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this-that it is a

field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

*****

For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the

step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever

many aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar

company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest

and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is

approached not only through the delights of courtship, but by a public

performance and repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it

will go hard within such august circumvallations. And yet there is

probably no other act in a man’s life so hot-headed and foolhardy as

this one of marriage.

*****

Again, when you have married your wife, you would think you were got

upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you

have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning

love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits;

but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which

both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story

commences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most

beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle

towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable,

from the very fact that they are two instead of one.

*****

When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty

years’ panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the

world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying

loves and the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine

credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a

few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some

happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.

*****

Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on

failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. In the

first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she

is like himself--erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also,

filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with

ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but, ere

you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that

dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that

hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and

yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself

are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfections,

and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and

that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you

will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a

lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you

will constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the

failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain

the sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people continually

spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love

upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come

glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.

*****

But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the

knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences

between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but

principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is

astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the

girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very

small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for

judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely

displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are

taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place

their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What should

be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two

flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we

know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a

raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into

that most serious contract, and setting out upon life’s journey with

ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make

shipwreck, but that any come to port.

*****

Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim

loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, who can

number an infinity of acquaintances, and are not chargeable with any

one friend, promise an easy disposition and no rival to the wife’s

influence. I will not say they are the best of men, but they are

the stuff out of which adroit and capable women manufacture the best

husbands.

*****

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for

absences are a good influence in love, and keep it bright and delicate;

but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit

is too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set.

*****

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would

spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent,

like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily

together, they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born

with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a

woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing

else. She must know HER METIER DE FEMME, and have a fine touch for the

affections. And it is more important that a person should be a good

gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the

thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than that she should

speak with the tongues of men and angels; for a while together by

the fire happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a

distinguished foreigner to dinner.... You could read Kant by yourself,

if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else. You

can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical

disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your

eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way

towards a dissolution of the marriage.

*****

Now this is where there should be community between man and wife. They

should be agreed on their catchword in FACTS OF RELIGION, OR FACTS

OF SCIENCE, OR SOCIETY, MY DEAR; for without such an agreement all

intercourse is a painful strain upon the mind.... For there are

differences which no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian

must not intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel

Budgett, the wife of the successful merchant! The best of men and the

best of women may sometimes live together all their lives, and, for want

of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits

to the end.

*****

Marriage is of so much use to women, opens out to her so much more of

life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and usefulness,

that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit.

It is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women

are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily

married, have often most of the true motherly touch.

*****

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and

cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. Marriage

is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. People who share a

cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited isle,

if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible

ground of compromise. They will learn each other’s ways and humours,

so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean their

whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the settled

habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives may grow

indissolubly into one.

*****

‘Well, an ye like maids so little, y’are true natural man; for God made

them twain by intention, and brought true love into the world, to be

man’s hope and woman’s comfort.’

*****

There are no persons so far away as those who are both married and

estranged, so that they seem out of earshot, or to have no common

tongue.

*****

My idea of man’s chief end was to enrich the world with things of

beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.

*****

But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of

the artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for

the most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not

accustom him to high ideas. But if a man is only so much of an actor

that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a new order of

thoughts. He has something else to think about beside the money-box. He

has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he has

an aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a

pilgrimage that will last him his life long, because there is no end to

it short of perfection. He will better himself a little day by day; or,

even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that once

upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time he

fell in love with a star. ‘Tis better to have loved and lost.’ Although

the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he should

settle down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not think he would move

with a better grace and cherish higher thoughts to the end? The louts he

meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey’s snood; but there is a

reminiscence in Endymion’s heart that, like a spice, keeps it fresh and

haughty.

People do things, and suffer martyrdom, because they have an inclination

that way. The best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity,

but the one who loves the practice of his art. And instead of having a

taste for being successful merchants and retiring at thirty, some people

have a taste for high and what we call heroic forms of excitement.

*****

These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart from

any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

*****

The incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which

we test the flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches and

condemns, and still spurs us up to further effort and new failure.

*****

To please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instruct

while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the

other.

*****

We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in

nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man.

*****

Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious contentment are of the very essence

of the better kind of art.

*****

This is the particular crown and triumph of the artist--not to be true

merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.

*****

Life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having it indefinitely

embittered for them by bad art.

*****

So that the first duty of any man who is to write is intellectual.

Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up for a leader in

the minds of men; and he must see that his own mind is kept supple,

charitable, and bright. Everything but prejudice should find a voice

through him; he should see the good in all things; where he has even

a fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be wholly

silent; and he should recognise from the first that he has only one tool

in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy.

*****

Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of a man’s

affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall find faithfully paraded

the quaintness and the power, the triviality and the surprising

freshness of the author’s fancy; there you shall find him outstripped

in ready symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible

before the eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to

be made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the prints

examined.

*****

And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself

funds of entertainment: to take an admired friend of mine (whom the

reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of

all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave

him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and

his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the

culture of a raw tarpaulin, such physical surgery is, I think, a common

way of ‘making character’; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can

put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday

by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend with his infinite variety

and flexibility, we know-but can we put him in? Upon the first, we must

engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from

the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless

arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that

remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

*****

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself

should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt

clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with

the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of

continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run

thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if

it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

*****

The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules and deforms;

the majority fall tamely into the contemporary shape, and thus attain,

in the eyes of the true observer, only a higher power of insignificance;

and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw

the null, and write the novel of society instead of the romance of man.

*****

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare

and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of

men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.

*****

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does

not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the

one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom,

creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour

of birth, and can be neither learned nor stimulated. But the just and

dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to

another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation

of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character end to

end--these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to

some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.

*****

The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love,

of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation

of the writer and the painter.

*****

The life of the apprentice to any art is both unstrained and pleasing;

it is strewn with small successes in the midst of a career of failure,

patiently supported; the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain

progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer to the art of

Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.

*****

The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes,

but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who reads; and

when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have never done

or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in

past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the

gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and

shades of manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal

with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus

ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the

shepherd’s crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a

near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew

of man’s morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi-artificial

flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the race. A

thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a thousand

perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once the

fashion of an empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse us

to-day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past.

*****

L’ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawing-room accomplishment unless it be

pressed into the service of the truth. The difficulty of literature is

not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but

to affect him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the

case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or writing an

explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing

you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which

yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a

high flight of metaphysics-namely, that the business of life is mainly

carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according

to a man’s proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and fulness of

his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what

he means; and, in spite of their notorious experience to the contrary,

people so continue to suppose.

*****

Even women, who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not

know them well enough for the purposes of art. Take even the very best

of their male creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will

find he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a

comb in the back of his head. Of course, no woman will believe this, and

many men will be so polite as to humour their incredulity.

*****

A dogma learned is only a new error--the old one was perhaps as good;

but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers

climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is

best in themselves, that they communicate.

*****

In this world of imperfections we gladly welcome even partial

intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out our

heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without

dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God.

*****

But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of

this world-all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the best that we find

in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds

many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward

of life. They keep us worthy of. ourselves; and when we are alone, we

are only nearer to the absent.

*****

We are all INCOMPRIS, only more or less concerned for the mischance; all

trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other’s feet like dumb,

neglected lap-dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye-this is our opportunity in

the ages--and we wag our tail with a poor smile. ‘IS THAT ALL?’ All?

If you only knew! But how can they know? They do not love us; the more

fools we to squander life on the indifferent. But the morality of the

thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying

to understand others that we can get our own hearts understood; and

in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the most successful

pleader.

*****

There is no friendship so noble, but it is the product of the time; and

a world of little finical observances, and little frail proprieties and

fashions of the hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect,

the union of spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such

interference. The trick of the country and the age steps in even between

the mother and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly

fingers, and says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall

be a matter of confidence between them, and this other thing shall not.

*****

There is not anything more bitter than to lose a fancied friend.

*****

The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his

wife and friends; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in

his life may yet be himself one lie-heart and face, from top to bottom.

This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice versa,

veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and

your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion--that is the truth which

makes love possible and mankind happy.

*****

But surely it is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give

than to receive, to serve than to use our companions; and, above all,

where there is no question of service upon either side, that it is good

to enjoy their company like a natural man.

*****

A man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one

so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his

happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few

light words, a piece of stamped paper, or a woman’s bright eyes--he may

be left in a month destitute of all.

*****

In these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times disappointed in our

beggarly selves for once that we are disappointed in our friend; that it

is we who seem most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us;

and that it is by our friend’s conduct that we are continually rebuked

and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavour.

*****

‘There are some pains,’ said he, ‘too acute for consolation, or I would

bring them to my kind consoler.’

*****

But there are duties which come before gratitude and offences which

justly divide friends, far more acquaintances.

*****

Life, though largely, is not entirely carried on by literature. We

are subject to physical passions and contortions; the voice breaks and

changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflections; we have

legible countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said look

eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a

dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing signals. Groans

and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or a paleness, are often the most

clear reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of

others.

*****

We are different with different friends; yet if we look closely we shall

find that every such relation reposes on some particular apotheosis of

oneself; with each friend, although we could not distinguish it in words

from any other, we have at least one special reputation to preserve: and

it is thus that we run, when mortified, to our friend or the woman that

we love, not to hear ourselves called better, but to be better men in

point of fact. We seek this society to flatter ourselves with our own

good conduct. And hence any falsehood in the relation, any incomplete or

perverted understanding, will spoil even the pleasure of these visits.

But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other

hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above his

powers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both.

*****

It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made

from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer’s way. His

friends were those of his own blood, or those whom he had known the

longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied

no aptness in the object.

*****

Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect

always something large and public in their way of life, something more

or less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We

should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however

beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a

wife to their bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more

of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their

immediate need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our

association-not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love

only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make

each other happy-by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear

about them-down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces

in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex

makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of

life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received,

when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our

mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a brother

to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed

and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such

friendship is not even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a

woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness

and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the

same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it

would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were,

a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that

he had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong

and positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part

coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain

to himself and others; as one who should go straight before him on a

journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small

lives under foot.

*****

I could have thought he had been eaves-dropping at the doors of my

heart, so entire was the coincidence between his writing and my thought.

*****

A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even

as they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them,

will continue to the end to be one of life’s choicest pleasures.

*****

The morning drum-call on my eager ear

Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew

Lies yet undried along my field of noon.

But now I pause at whiles in what I do,

And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear

(My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.

*****

The ground of all youth’s suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting

of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is

himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his

is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for

where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes

through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose

oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this

poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments;

himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.

But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip

abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an

altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate’s

crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to

value him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not

without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet

storing up.

*****

The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah’s dove,

come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own nature,

that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray

tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his

elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk

among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and

after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to

see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own

for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street,

and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the

meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple,

the sweet whiff of chloroform-for there, on the most thoughtless, the

pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a

divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of

man’s life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his

ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go

again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be

still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.

The parable of the talent is the brief, epitome of youth. To believe in

immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken

gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of

a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet

here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard

alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the

memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon

their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy

of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to

excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity

of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back

not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in

that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding

the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits

us.

*****

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying will

get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay.

He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct; it

may be some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon

the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman’s son and a

second woman’s husband, and a third woman’s father. That life which

began so small has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives

of others. It is not indispensable; another will take the place and

shoulder the discharged responsibilities; but the better the man and

the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the

extinction of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have

lived a generation is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing

medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age

has, for all but the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal.

*****

Even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career,

laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed

with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at

once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited

in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,

foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an

end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those

whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort

of death also in their eye. For, surely, at whatever age it overtake the

man, this is to die young.

*****

And so they were at last in ‘their resting graves.’ So long as men do

their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will be

leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a

martyrs’ monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere

in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless

we temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what

ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for

his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes

us walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs’ monument is a

wholesome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon it, a

brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won their

discharge, and in another phrase of Patrick Walker’s, got ‘cleanly off

the stage.’

*****

It is not only our enemies, those desperate characters-it is we

ourselves who know not what we do;-thence springs the glimmering hope

that perhaps we do better than we think: that to scramble through this

random business with hands reasonably clean, to have played the part of

a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the

diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor human

soldier to have done right well.

*****

We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight;

we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

*****

There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions-eyes

of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in our most

private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our witnesses and

judges.

*****

How unsubstantial is this projection of a man s existence, which can lie

in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up again and set forth for

the consideration of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary’s ink-pot!

This precarious tenure of fame goes a long way to justify those (and

they are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the immediate present.

*****

But I beard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old endless ballad

not far off. It seemed to be about love and a BEL AMOUREUX, her handsome

sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and answered

her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa in

the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told her? Little

enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives and takes

away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into

distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which

makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all,’ outwears the

accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave

and death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God’s mercy, both easy and

grateful to believe!

*****

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful

whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on

conduct under healthy circumstances.... If we clung as devotedly as some

philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half

as frightened as they make out we are, for the subversive accident

that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would

follow them into battle--the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who

would climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if these philosophers were

right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily

peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle-field

in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have

miserably left their bones! What woman would ever be lured into

marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would it

be to grow old?

*****

If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he

will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his

extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves. And, above all, where,

instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment for some

of his money when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit of brisk

living, and, above all, when it is healthful, is just so much gained

upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our

pockets, the more in our stomachs, when he cries, ‘Stand and deliver.’

*****

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a

miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in

the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not

give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push

and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished

undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out

of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending.

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good

work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every

heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse

behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

*****

Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling

weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly

used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the

world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as

he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire,

he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end.

*****

When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left

about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed

much:-surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed,

nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from

the field; defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!--but if

there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured.

The faith which sustained him in his lifelong blindness and lifelong

disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of

laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out

of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the

ecstasy-there goes another Faithful Failure.

*****

We are apt to make so much of the tragedy of the tragedy of death, and

think so little of the enduring tragedy of some men’s lives, that we

see more to lament for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and

love, than in one that miserably survives all love and usefulness, and

goes about the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or any

consolation.

*****

‘You are a strange physician,’ said Will, looking steadfastly upon his

guest.

‘I am a natural law,’ he replied, ‘and people call me Death.’

‘Why did you not tell me so at first?’ cried Will.

‘I have been waiting for you these many years. Give me your hand, and

welcome.’

*****

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live, and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

*****

But the girls picked up their skirts, as if they were sure they had good

ankles, and followed until their breath was out. The last to weary were

the three graces and a couple of companions; and just as they, too,

had had enough, the foremost of the three leaped upon a tree-stump and

kissed her hand to the canoeists. Not Diana herself, although this

was more of a Venus, after all, could have done a graceful thing more

gracefully. ‘Come back again!’ she cried; and all the others echoed

her; and the hills about Origny repeated the words, ‘Come back.’ But the

river had us round an angle in a twinkling, and we were alone with the

green trees and running water.

Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous

stream of life.

‘The merchant bows unto the seaman’s star,

The plowman from the sun his season takes.’

And we must all set our pocket watches by the clock of fate. There is

a headlong, forthright tide, that bears away man with his fancies like

straw, and runs fast in time and space. It is full of curves like this,

your winding river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant

pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at all. For

though it should revisit the same acre of meadow in the same hour, it

will have made an ample sweep between-whiles; many little streams will

have fallen in; many exhalations risen toward the sun; and even although

it were the same acre, it will not be the same river Oise. And thus, oh

graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune of my life should carry

me back again to where you await death’s whistle by the river, that will

not be the old I who walks the streets; and those wives and mothers,

say, will those be you?

*****