goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to our

definition, in spite of its proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin

was not so easily pleased, and readily discovered that the heroic line

consists of four groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four

pauses:

"All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued."

Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the first, in this

case, an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and

the fourth an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, with no other liberty

but that of inflicting pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs.

Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth

orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others. What

had seemed to be one thing it now appears is two; and, like some puzzle

in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in fives and

to read in fours.

But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find verses in six

groups, because there is not room for six in the ten syllables; and we

do not find verses of two, because one of the main distinctions of verse

from prose resides in the comparative shortness of the group; but it is

even common to find verses of three. Five is the one forbidden number;

because five is the number of the feet; and if five were chosen, the two

patterns would coincide, and that opposition which is the life of verse

would instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the effect of

polysyllables, above all in Latin, where they are so common and make so

brave an architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is a group of

Nature's making. If but some Roman would return from Hades (Martial, for

choice), and tell me by what conduct of the voice these thundering

verses should be uttered--"_Aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum_," for a case in

point--I feel as if I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of

the best of human verses.

But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be; by the mere

count of syllables the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a question

of elegance, I doubt if any one of them requires to be so; and I am

certain that for choice no two of them should scan the same. The

singular beauty of the verse analysed above is due, so far as analysis

can carry us, part, indeed, to the clever repetition of L, D and N, but

part to this variety of scansion in the groups. The groups which, like

the bar in music, break up the verse for utterance, fall uniambically;

and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it may so happen that we

never utter one iambic foot. And yet to this neglect of the original

beat there is a limit.

"Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts,"[19]

is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for though it

scarcely can be said to indicate the beat of the iamb, it certainly

suggests no other measure to the ear. But begin

"Mother Athens, eye of Greece,"

or merely "Mother Athens," and the game is up, for the trochaic beat has

been suggested. The eccentric scansion of the groups is an adornment;

but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten, they cease

implicitly to be eccentric. Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy

the original mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and we

fall back on sameness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical measure of the

verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we see the laws of

prosody to have one common purpose: to keep alive the opposition of two

schemes simultaneously followed; to keep them notably apart, though

still coincident; and to balance them with such judicial nicety before

the reader, that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally

prevail.

The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too, we write in

groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is

greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly uttered than the group in

verse; so that not only is there a greater interval of continuous sound

between the pauses, but, for that very reason, word is linked more

readily to word by a more summary enunciation. Still, the phrase is the

strict analogue of the group, and successive phrases, like successive

groups, must differ openly in length and rhythm. The rule of scansion in

verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest

no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as

you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must

not be verse. A single heroic line may very well pass and not disturb

the somewhat larger stride of the prose style; but one following another

will produce an instant impression of poverty, flatness, and

disenchantment. The same lines delivered with the measured utterance of

verse would perhaps seem rich in variety. By the more summary

enunciation proper to prose, as to a more distant vision, these niceties

of difference are lost. A whole verse is uttered as one phrase; and the

ear is soon wearied by a succession of groups identical in length. The

prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less

harmonious, is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a

larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot of an

accepted metre. And this obligation is the third orange with which he

has to juggle, the third quality which the prose writer must work into

his pattern of words. It may be thought perhaps that this is a quality

of ease rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the inherently

rhythmical strain of the English language, that the bad writer--and must

I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood, Captain Reid?--the

inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his earlier attempts to be

impressive, and the jaded writer, as any one may see for himself, all

tend to fall at once into the production of bad blank verse. And here it

may be pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough to

answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and that no verse

can ever sound otherwise than trivial when uttered with the delivery of

prose. But we can go beyond such answers. The weak side of verse is the

regularity of the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive

than the movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this weak

side, and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A peculiar density

and mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, is one of the chief

good qualities of verse; but this our accidental versifier, still

following after the swift gait and large gestures of prose, does not so

much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since he remains unconscious that he

is making verse at all, it can never occur to him to extract those

effects of counterpoint and opposition which I have referred to as the

final grace and justification of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse

in particular.

4. _Contents of the Phrase._--Here is a great deal of talk about

rhythm--and naturally; for in our canorous language rhythm is always at

the door. But it must not be forgotten that in some languages this

element is almost, if not quite, extinct, and that in our own it is

probably decaying. The even speech of many educated Americans sounds the

note of danger. I should see it go with something as bitter as despair,

but I should not be desperate. As in verse no element, not even rhythm,

is necessary; so, in prose also, other sorts of beauty will arise and

take the place and play the part of those that we outlive. The beauty of

the expected beat in verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and more

lawless melody, patent as they are to English hearing, are already

silent in the ears of our next neighbours; for in France the oratorical

accent and the pattern of the web have almost or altogether succeeded to

their places; and the French prose writer would be astounded at the

labours of his brother across the Channel, and how a good quarter of his

toil, above all _invita Minerva_, is to avoid writing verse. So

wonderfully far apart have races wandered in spirit, and so hard it is

to understand the literature next door!

Yet French prose is distinctly better than English; and French verse,

above all while Hugo lives, it will not do to place upon one side. What

is more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in French is easily

distinguishable as comely or uncomely. There is then another element of

comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of the

phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each phrase in

music consists of notes. One sound suggests, echoes, demands, and

harmonises with another; and the art of rightly using these concordances

is the final art in literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to

all young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so

far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable

nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will

not see? The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence,

depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel

demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both

cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a

letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find it,

perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at

you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one

liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will find another

and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two

senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive "unheard melodies";

and the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase.

Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that there

are assonances and alliterations; that where an author is running the

open A, deceived by the eye and our strange English spelling, he will

often show a tenderness for the flat A; and that where he is running a

particular consonant, he will not improbably rejoice to write it down

even when it is mute or bears a different value.

Here, then, we have a fresh pattern--a pattern, to speak grossly, of

letters--which makes the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer, and

the fifth of the versifier. At times it is very delicate and hard to

perceive, and then perhaps most excellent and winning (I say perhaps);

but at times again the elements of this literal melody stand more boldly

forward and usurp the ear. It becomes, therefore, somewhat a matter of

conscience to select examples; and as I cannot very well ask the reader

to help me, I shall do the next best by giving him the reason or the

history of each selection. The two first, one in prose, one in verse, I

chose without previous analysis, simply as engaging passages that had

long re-echoed in my ear.

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and

unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks

out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not

without dust and heat."[20] Down to "virtue," the current S and R are

both announced and repeated unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note

that almost inseparable group PVF is given entire.[21] The next phrase

is a period of repose, almost ugly in itself, both S and R still

audible, and B given as the last fulfilment of PVF. In the next four

phrases, from "that never" down to "run for," the mask is thrown off,

and, but for a slight repetition of the F and V, the whole matter turns,

almost too obtrusively, on S and R; first S coming to the front, and

then R. In the concluding phrase all these favourite letters, and even

the flat A, a timid preference for which is just perceptible, are

discarded at a blow and in a bundle; and to make the break more obvious,

every word ends with a dental, and all but one with T, for which we have

been cautiously prepared since the beginning. The singular dignity of

the first clause, and this hammer-stroke of the last, go far to make the

charm of this exquisite sentence. But it is fair to own that S and R are

used a little coarsely.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan (KANDL)

A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR)

Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR)

Through caverns measureless to man, (KANLSR)

Down to a sunless sea."[22] (NDLS)

Here I have put the analysis of the main group alongside the lines; and

the more it is looked at, the more interesting it will seem. But there

are further niceties. In lines two and four, the current S is most

delicately varied with Z. In line three, the current flat A is twice

varied with the open A, already suggested in line two, and both times

("where" and "sacred") in conjunction with the current R. In the same

line F and V (a harmony in themselves, even when shorn of their comrade

P) are admirably contrasted. And in line four there is a marked

subsidiary M, which again was announced in line two. I stop from

weariness, for more might yet be said.

My next example was recently quoted from Shakespeare as an example of the

poet's colour sense. Now, I do not think literature has anything to do

with colour, or poets anyway the better of such a sense; and I instantly

attacked this passage, since "purple" was the word that had so pleased

the writer of the article, to see if there might not be some literary

reason for its use. It will be seen that I succeeded amply; and I am

bound to say I think the passage exceptional in Shakespeare--exceptional,

indeed, in literature; but it was not I who chose it.

"The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe

BURNt ON the water: the POOP was BeateN gold,

PURPle the sails and so PUR*Fumed that *per

The wiNds were lovesick with them."[23]

It may be asked why I have put the F of perfumed in capitals; and I

reply, because this change from P to F is the completion of that from B

to P, already so adroitly carried out. Indeed, the whole passage is a

monument of curious ingenuity; and it seems scarce worth while to

indicate the subsidiary S, L and W. In the same article, a second

passage from Shakespeare was quoted, once again as an example of his

colour sense:

"A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops

I' the bottom of a cowslip."[24]

It is very curious, very artificial, and not worth while to analyse at

length: I leave it to the reader. But before I turn my back on

Shakespeare, I should like to quote a passage, for my own pleasure, and

for a very model of every technical art:--

"But in the wind and tempest of her frown, W. P. V. F. (st) (OW)[25]

Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, W. P. F. (st) (OW) L

Puffing at all, winnowes the light away; W. P. F. L

And what hath mass and matter by itself W. F. L. M. A.

Lies rich in virtue and unmingled."[26] V. L. M.

From these delicate and choice writers I turned with some curiosity to a

player of the big drum--Macaulay. I had in hand the two-volume edition,

and I opened at the beginning of the second volume. Here was what I

read:--

"The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to the degree

of the maladministration which has produced them. It is therefore

not strange that the government of Scotland, having been during many

years greatly more corrupt than the government of England, should

have fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movement against the last

king of the house of Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland

destructive. The English complained not of the law, but of the

violation of the law."

This was plain-sailing enough; it was our old friend PVF, floated by the

liquids in a body; but as I read on, and turned the page, and still

found PVF with his attendant liquids, I confess my mind misgave me

utterly. This could be no trick of Macaulay's; it must be the nature of

the English tongue. In a kind of despair, I turned half-way through the

volume; and coming upon his lordship dealing with General Cannon, and

fresh from Claverhouse and Killiekrankie, here, with elucidative

spelling, was my reward:--

"Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon's Kamp went on inKreasing. He

Kalled a KOUNCIL of war to Konsider what Kourse it would be advisable

to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had met a preliminary Kuestion

was raised. The army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army. The

recent viKtory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. Great

chie_f_s who had brought siKs or se_v_en hundred _f_ighting men into

the _f_ield, did not think it _f_air that they should be out_v_oted

by gentlemen _f_rom Ireland and _f_rom the Low Kountries, who bore

indeed King James's Kommission, and were Kalled Kolonels and

Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without regiments and Kaptains

without Kompanies."

A moment of FV in all this world of K's! It was not the English

language, then, that was an instrument of one string, but Macaulay that

was an incomparable dauber.

It was probably from this barbaric love of repeating the same sound,

rather than from any design of clearness, that he acquired his

irritating habit of repeating words; I say the one rather than the

other, because such a trick of the ear is deeper seated and more

original in man than any logical consideration. Few writers, indeed, are

probably conscious of the length to which they push this melody of

letters. One, writing very diligently, and only concerned about the

meaning of his words and the rhythm of his phrases, was struck into

amazement by the eager triumph with which he cancelled one expression

to substitute another. Neither changed the sense; both being

mono-syllables, neither could affect the scansion; and it was only by

looking back on what he had already written that the mystery was solved:

the second word contained an open A, and for nearly half a page he had

been riding that vowel to the death.

In practice, I should add, the ear is not always so exacting; and

ordinary writers, in ordinary moments, content themselves with avoiding

what is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare occasion, buttressing a

phrase, or linking two together, with a patch of assonance or a

momentary jingle of alliteration. To understand how constant is this

preoccupation of good writers, even where its results are least

obtrusive, it is only necessary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you

will find cacophony supreme, the rattle of incongruous consonants only

relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases not to be

articulated by the powers of man.

_Conclusion_.--We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style. We

have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases

large, rhythmical and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to

fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of

combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern,

feet and groups, logic and metre--harmonious in diversity: common to

both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into

phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their

argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods--but

this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to

both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words. We

begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how

many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the

stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so

complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of according letters, which

is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the

elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure

intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We

need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages

rarer.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Milton.

[19] Milton.

[20] Milton.

[21] As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English examples,

take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of which it forms a

chief adornment, and do not hold me answerable for the all too Roman

freedom of the sense: "Hanc volo, quae facilis, quae palliolata

vagatur."

[22] Coleridge.

[23] Antony and Cleopatra.

[24] Cymbeline.

[25] The V is in "of."

[26] Troilus and Cressida.

IV

THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS

The profession of letters has been lately debated in the public prints;

and it has been debated, to put the matter mildly, from a point of view

that was calculated to surprise high-minded men, and bring a general

contempt on books and reading. Some time ago, in particular, a lively,

pleasant, popular writer[27] devoted an essay, lively and pleasant like

himself, to a very encouraging view of the profession. We may be glad

that his experience is so cheering, and we may hope that all others, who

deserve it, shall be as handsomely rewarded; but I do not think we need

be at all glad to have this question, so important to the public and

ourselves, debated solely on the ground of money. The salary in any

business under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first, question.

That you should continue to exist is a matter for your own

consideration; but that your business should be first honest, and second

useful, are points in which honour and morality are concerned. If the

writer to whom I refer succeeds in persuading a number of young persons

to adopt this way of life with an eye set singly on the livelihood, we

must expect them in their works to follow profit only, and we must

expect in consequence, if he will pardon me the epithets, a slovenly,

base, untrue, and empty literature. Of that writer himself I am not

speaking: he is diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of

entertainment, and he has achieved an amiable popularity which he has

adequately deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did not when he

first embraced it, regard his profession from this purely mercenary

side. He went into it, I shall venture to say, if not with any noble

design, at least in the ardour of a first love; and he enjoyed its

practice long before he paused to calculate the wage. The other day an

author was complimented on a piece of work, good in itself and

exceptionally good for him, and replied in terms unworthy of a

commercial traveller, that as the book was not briskly selling he did

not give a copper farthing for its merit. It must not be supposed that

the person to whom this answer was addressed received it as a profession

of faith; he knew, on the other hand, that it was only a whiff of

irritation; just as we know, when a respectable writer talks of

literature as a way of life, like shoemaking, but not so useful, that he

is only debating one aspect of a question, and is still clearly

conscious of a dozen others more important in themselves and more

central to the matter in hand. But while those who treat literature in

this penny-wise and virtue-foolish spirit are themselves truly in

possession of a better light, it does not follow that the treatment is

decent or improving, whether for themselves or others. To treat all

subjects in the highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest spirit,

consistent with the fact, is the first duty of a writer. If he be well

paid, as I am glad to hear he is, this duty becomes the more urgent, the

neglect of it the more disgraceful. And perhaps there is no subject on

which a man should speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it may

be, which is the occupation or delight of his life; which is his tool to

earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a

mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders of labouring

humanity. On that subject alone even to force the note might lean to

virtue's side. It is to be hoped that a numerous and enterprising

generation of writers will follow and surpass the present one; but it

would be better if the stream were stayed, and the roll of our old,

honest English books were closed, than that esurient bookmakers should

continue and debase a brave tradition, and lower, in their own eyes, a

famous race. Better that our serene temples were deserted than filled

with trafficking and juggling priests.

There are two just reasons for the choice of any way of life: the first

is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some high utility in the

industry selected. Literature, like any other art, is singularly

interesting to the artist; and, in a degree peculiar to itself among the

arts, it is useful to mankind. These are the sufficient justifications

for any young man or woman who adopts it as the business of his life. I

shall not say much about the wages. A writer can live by his writing. If

not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature

of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the

quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however

much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by

cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a

little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice

of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a

portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the

philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we

can do the most and best for mankind. Now Nature, faithfully followed,

proves herself a careful mother. A lad, for some liking to the jingle of

words, betakes himself to letters for his life; by-and-by, when he

learns more gravity, he finds that he has chosen better than he knew;

that if he earns little, he is earning it amply; that if he receives a

small wage, he is in a position to do considerable services; that it is

in his power, in some small measure, to protect the oppressed and to

defend the truth. So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may

arise from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such, in

particular, is the happy star of this trade of writing, that it should

combine pleasure and profit to both parties, and be at once agreeable,

like fiddling, and useful, like good preaching.

This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the four great

elders who are still spared to our respect and admiration, with Carlyle,

Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson before us, it would be cowardly to

consider it at first in any lesser aspect. But while we cannot follow

these athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very

original, or very wise, I still contend that, in the humblest sort of

literary work, we have it in our power either to do great harm or great

good. We may seek merely to please; we may seek, having no higher gift,

merely to gratify the idle nine-days' curiosity of our contemporaries;

or we may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we shall

have to deal with that remarkable art of words which, because it is the

dialect of life, comes home so easily and powerfully to the minds of

men; and since that is so, we contribute, in each of these branches, to

build up the sum of sentiments and appreciations which goes by the name

of Public Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of a nation's reading, in

these days of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of the nation's

speech; and the speech and reading, taken together, form the efficient

educational medium of youth. A good man or woman may keep a youth some

little while in clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is

all-powerful in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The

copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the Parisian

_chroniqueur_, both so lightly readable, must exercise an incalculable

influence for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all with the

same ungenerous hand; they begin the consideration of all, in young and

unprepared minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some

pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this ugly matter

overwhelms the rarer utterances of good men; the sneering, the selfish,

and the cowardly are scattered in broad sheets on every table, while the

antidote, in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have spoken

of the American and the French, not because they are so much baser, but

so much more readable, than the English; their evil is done more

effectively, in America for the masses, in French for the few that care

to read; but with us as with them, the duties of literature are daily

neglected, truth daily perverted and suppressed, and grave subjects

daily degraded in the treatment. The journalist is not reckoned an

important officer; yet judge of the good he might do, the harm he does;

judge of it by one instance only: that when we find two journals on the

reverse sides of politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece

of news for the interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no

discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so

open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the things that we profess

to teach our young is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this piece

of education will be crowned with any great success, so long as some of

us practise and the rest openly approve of public falsehood.

There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the business

of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. In

every department of literature, though so low as hardly to deserve the

name, truth to the fact is of importance to the education and comfort of

mankind, and so hard to preserve, that the faithful trying to do so will

lend some dignity to the man who tries it. Our judgments are based upon

two things, first, upon the original preferences of our soul; but,

second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God, man, and the

universe which reaches us, in divers manners, from without. For the most

part these divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of

past times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the

medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning from the

same source at second-hand and by the report of him who can. Thus the

sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of good and evil is, in

large measure, the handiwork of those who write. Those who write have to

see that each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make it,

answerable to the facts of life; that he shall not suppose himself an

angel or a monster; nor take this world for a hell; nor be suffered to

imagine that all rights are concentred in his own caste or country, or

all veracities in his own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is

within him, that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is

without him, that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to

tell him the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his

theory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all

facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a fact

shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he should know

it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a world made easy by

educational suppressions, that he must win his way to shame or glory. In

one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false; and it can never

be safe to suppress what is true. The very fact that you omit may be the

fact which somebody was wanting, for one man's meat is another man's

poison, and I have known a person who was cheered by the perusal of

"Candide." Every fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set

together; and none that comes directly in a writer's path but has some

nice relations, unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the

subject under hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more

necessary than others, and it is with these that literature must first

bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish, nature once more easily

leading us; for the necessary, because the efficacious, facts are those

which are most interesting to the natural mind of man. Those which are

coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted in morality, and those, on the

other hand, which are clear, indisputable, and a part of science, are

alone vital in importance, seizing by their interest, or useful to

communicate. So far as the writer merely narrates, he should

principally tell of these. He should tell of the kind and wholesome and

beautiful elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly of the evil

and sorrow of the present, to move us with instances; he should tell of

wise and good people in the past, to excite us by example; and of these

he should tell soberly and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may

neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours.

So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble in itself,

touches in the minds of men the springs of thought and kindness, and

supports them (for those who will go at all are easily supported) on

their way to what is true and right. And if, in any degree, it does so

now, how much more might it do so if the writers chose! There is not a

life in all the records of the past but, properly studied, might lend a

hint and a help to some contemporary. There is not a juncture in

to-day's affairs but some useful word may yet be said of it. Even the

reporter has an office, and, with clear eyes and honest language, may

unveil injustices and point the way to progress. And for a last word: in

all narration there is only one way to be clever, and that is to be

exact. To be vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose the

first; for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to make failure

conspicuous.

But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it may be chronicled with rage,

tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and by each of these the

story will be transformed to something else. The newspapers that told of

the return of our representatives from Berlin, even if they had not

differed as to the facts, would have sufficiently differed by their

spirit; so that the one description would have been a second ovation,

and the other a prolonged insult. The subject makes but a trifling part

of any piece of literature, and the view of the writer is itself a fact

more important because less disputable than the others. Now this spirit

in which a subject is regarded, important in all kinds of literary work,

becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for

there it not only colours but itself chooses the facts; not only

modifies but shapes the work. And hence, over the far larger proportion

of the field of literature, the health or disease of the writer's mind

or momentary humour forms not only the leading feature of his work, but

is, at bottom, the only thing he can communicate to others. In all works

of art, widely speaking, it is first of all the author's attitude that

is narrated, though in the attitude there be implied a whole experience

and a theory of life. An author who has begged the question and reposes

in some narrow faith cannot, if he would, express the whole or even many

of the sides of this various existence; for, his own life being maim,

some of them are not admitted in his theory, and were only dimly and

unwillingly recognised in his experience. Hence the smallness, the

triteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarian religion; and

hence we find equal although unsimilar limitations in works inspired by

the spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste for high society. 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 of 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.[28]

The second duty, far harder to define, is moral. There are a thousand

different humours in the mind, and about each of them, when it is

uppermost, some literature tends to be deposited. Is this to be

allowed? Not certainly in every case, and yet perhaps in more than

rigorists would fancy. It were to be desired that all literary work, and

chiefly works of art, issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent

impulses, whether grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or religious.

Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are partially insane;

some, mostly religious, partially inhuman; and very many tainted with

morbidity and impotence. We do not loathe a masterpiece although we gird

against its blemishes. We are not, above all, to look for faults but

merits. There is no book perfect, even in design; but there are many

that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader. On the one hand,

the Hebrew Psalms are the only religious poetry on earth; yet they

contain sallies that savour rankly of the man of blood. On the other

hand, Alfred de Musset had a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am only

quoting that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, when I accuse him

of a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote was purely

creative, he could give us works like "Carmosine" or "Fantasio," in

which the last note of the romantic comedy seems to have been found

again to touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote "Madame Bovary," I

believe he thought chiefly of a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the

book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality. But

the truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with a soul

of nine-fold power nine times heated and electrified by effort, the

conditions of our being are seized with such an ample grasp, that, even

should the main design be trivial or base, some truth and beauty cannot

fail to be expressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweetness; but an

ill thing poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom. And so this can be

no encouragement to knock-knee'd, feeble-wristed scribes, who must take

their business conscientiously or be ashamed to practise it.

Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express himself and

his own views and preferences; for to do anything else is to do a far

more perilous thing than to risk being immoral: it is to be sure of

being untrue. To ape a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a

sentiment; that will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are

sure you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is probably no

point of view possible to a sane man but contains some truth and, in the

true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the

truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it

impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to

be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to

glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes

into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the

world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is

immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the

world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the

work of one proving dank and depressing; of another, cheap and vulgar;

of a third, epileptically sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In

literature as in conduct, you can never hope to do exactly right. All

you can do is to make as sure as possible; and for that there is but one

rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly. It is

no use to write a book and put it by for nine or even ninety years; for

in the writing you will have partly convinced yourself; the delay must

precede any beginning; and if you meditate a work of art, you should

first long roll the subject under the tongue to make sure you like the

flavour, before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end to

end; or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy, you should

first have thought upon the question under all conditions, in health as

well as in sickness, in sorrow as well as in joy. It is this nearness of

examination necessary for any true and kind writing, that makes the

practice of the art a prolonged and noble education for the writer.

There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again, in the

meantime. Any literary work which conveys faithful facts or pleasing

impressions is a service to the public. It is even a service to be

thankfully proud of having rendered. The slightest novels are a blessing

to those in distress, not chloroform itself a greater. Our fine old

sea-captain's life was justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with "The

King's Own" or "Newton Forster." 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. Some part of the writer or his

life will crop out in even a vapid book; and to read a novel that was

conceived with any force is to multiply experience and to exercise the

sympathies. Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every

_entrefilet_, is destined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of

some portion of the public, and to colour, however transiently, their

thoughts. When any subject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a

paper has the invaluable opportunity of beginning its discussion in a

dignified and human spirit; and if there were enough who did so in our

public press neither the public nor the parliament would find it in

their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. The writer has the chance to

stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, something interesting,

something encouraging, were it only to a single reader. He will be

unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has the chance, besides, to

stumble on something that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and

for a dull person to have read anything and, for that once, comprehended

it, makes a marking epoch in his education.

Here then is work worth doing and worth trying to do well. And so, if I

were minded to welcome any great accession to our trade, it should not

be from any reason of a higher wage, but because it was a trade which

was useful in a very great and in a very high degree; which every honest

tradesman could make more serviceable to mankind in his single

strength; which was difficult to do well and possible to do better every

year; which called for scrupulous thought on the part of all who

practised it, and hence became a perpetual education to their nobler

natures; and which, pay it as you please, in the large majority of the

best cases will still be underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in

the nineteenth century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear

more timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Mr. James Payn.

[28] A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example set before

all young writers in the width of literary sympathy displayed by Mr.

Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, whether in Dickens or

Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or Pope. This is, in criticism,

the attitude we should all seek to preserve, not only in that, but

in every branch of literary work.

V

BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME

The Editor[29] has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his

correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly

cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and

review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in

the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the

life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we

have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we

hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it

should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too

little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the

door of the person who entrapped me.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works

of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must

afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which

he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify

the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us

to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience,

not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change--that

monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To

be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work

that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our

education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe

a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious

characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had

upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last

character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune

to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott

Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me;

nor has the influence quite passed away. Kent's brief speech over the

dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my

reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it

appear in sense, so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and

best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan

of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." I know not a more human soul, nor, in

his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a

pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers.

Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's Progress," a book that breathes of

every beautiful and valuable emotion.

But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and

silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink

them up like water, and are bettered, yet know not how. It is in books

more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and

distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very

influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first,

though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps

still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived: the "Essais"

of Montaigne. That temperate and genial picture of life is a great gift

to place in the hands of persons of to-day; they will find in these

smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique

strain; they will have their "linen decencies" and excited orthodoxies

fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that

these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground of reason;

and (again if they have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing

that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in

a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their contemporaries.

The next book, in order of time, to influence me was the New Testament,

and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it

would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of

imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully

like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it

those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all

modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps

better to be silent.

I come next to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service,

a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a

thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus

shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation

of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book

for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank--I believe

it is so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man

lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of

the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed.

Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the

closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which

is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets

what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New

truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted

to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He

who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There

he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good.

Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the

influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few

better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how

much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his

words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a

spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol,

but still joyful; and the reader will find there a _caput-mortuum_ of

piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its

essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his

intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a

hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.

"Goethe's Life," by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first

fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of man's good

and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a

very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private

life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of

"Werther," and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon,

conscious of the rights and duties of superior talents as a Spanish

inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of his office. And yet

in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and serviceable

friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually

so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the

work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of

man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and

persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this effect,

but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomiser, who is

bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference of

epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and even in the

originals only to those who can recognise their own human virtues and

defects in strange forms, often inverted and under strange names, often

interchanged. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man

new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this

unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and

self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading

Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at

least, until I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a

thousand things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical

conception of the great Roman empire.

This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the

"Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble

forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there

expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its

writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can read it and

not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feelings--those

very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies

further back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you

carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had

touched a loyal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend;

there is another bond on you thenceforward, binding you to life and to

the love of virtue.

Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by

Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a

rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that is in

the lonely hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his

work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not

know that you learn a lesson; you need not--Mill did not--agree with any

one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best

teachers; 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.

I should never forgive myself if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art, if

you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels

I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself.

Here is a Nathan for the modern David; here is a book to send the blood

into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not

great art; we can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be

shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits,

to which we are too blind. And "The Egoist" is a satire; so much must be

allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you

nothing of that obvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with

that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your

own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering

relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr.

Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. "This is too

bad of you," he cried. "Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said

the author, "he is all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five or six

times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young

friend of the anecdote--I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very

serviceable exposure of myself.

I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that

was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and

Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning-point

in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but

strong effect on me, and Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan," wherein I

learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to

his country's laws--a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic islands.

That I should commemorate all is more than I can hope or the editor

could ask. It will be more to the point, after having said so much upon

improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The

gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very

generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual

endowment--a free grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to

understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he

differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them

passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold

them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of

reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the

other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not

change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma,

and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. 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. Something that seems quite

new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a

reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has

the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or

exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily

papers; he will never be a reader.

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my

part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. 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. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he

goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most

of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and

some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides

that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will

be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated;

and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read,

they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears,

and his secret is kept as if he had not written.

FOOTNOTE:

[29] Of _The British Weekly_.

VI

THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW

History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt

correctly; and rival historians expose each other's blunders with

gratification. Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period

he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we

live. The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of

inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity

of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting

of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable

marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by

imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom

not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that

what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying

island of Laputa. It is for this reason in particular that we are all

becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would not in the

least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing

supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our

individualist Jericho--but to the stealthy change that has come over the

spirit of Englishmen and English legislation. A little while ago, and we

were still for liberty; "crowd a few more thousands on the bench of

Government," we seemed to cry; "keep her head direct on liberty, and we

cannot help but come to port." This is over; _laisser faire_ declines in

favour; our legislation grows authoritative, grows philanthropical,

bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of

inspectors, who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of

England. It may be right or wrong, we are not trying that; but one thing

it is beyond doubt: it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is

that we scarcely know it.

Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new

altars. Like all other principles, she has been proved to be

self-exclusive in the long run. She has taken wages besides (like all

other virtues) and dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we were

accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all were

truly benefits of wealth, and took their value from our neighbours'

poverty. A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in the journalistic

phrase) of what the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or shipowners

may imply for operatives, tenants or seamen, and we not unnaturally

begin to turn to that other pole of hope, beneficent tyranny. Freedom,

to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the

free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of

yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed,

ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to

their mines and workshops by the lash of famine. So much, in other men's

affairs, we have begun to see clearly; we have begun to despair of

virtue in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament begin to

discharge upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors. The

landlord has long shaken his head over the manufacturer; those who do

business on land have lost all trust in the virtues of the shipowner;

the professions look askance upon the retail traders and have even

started their co-operative stores to ruin them; and from out the

smoke-wreaths of Birmingham a finger has begun to write upon the wall

the condemnation of the landlord. Thus, piece by piece, do we condemn

each other, and yet not perceive the conclusion, that our whole estate

is somewhat damnable. Thus, piece by piece, each acting against his

neighbour, each sawing away the branch on which some other interest is

seated, do we apply in detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not

perceive that we are all labouring together to bring in Socialism at

large. A tendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible;

and if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every

chance that our grandchildren will see the day and taste the pleasures

of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human

polity. And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or

the horns of his followers; but by the mere glacier movement of the

political soil, bearing forward on its bosom, apparently undisturbed,

the proud camps of Whig and Tory. If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen

humour, which is far from my conception of his character, he might rest

from his troubling and look on: the walls of Jericho begin already to

crumble and dissolve. That great servile war, the Armageddon of money

and numbers, to which we looked forward when young, becomes more and

more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a peaceable and blindfold

evolution, the work of dull men immersed in political tactics and dead

to political results.

The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of

Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of this new evolution

(if it proceed) will fall to be decided; so that the state of Parliament

is not only diagnostic of the present but fatefully prophetic of the

future. Well, we all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of

it. We may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground of Irish

obstruction--a bitter trial, which it supports with notable good humour.

But the excuse is merely local; it cannot apply to similar bodies in

America and France; and what are we to say of these? President

Cleveland's letter may serve as a picture of the one; a glance at almost

any paper will convince us of the weakness of the other. Decay appears

to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land; and

this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of

justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be unravelled, and

ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our frailties and play

for us the part that should be played by our own virtues. For that, in

few words, is the case. We cannot trust ourselves to behave with

decency; we cannot trust our consciences; and the remedy proposed is to

elect a round number of our neighbours, pretty much at random, and say

to these: "Be ye our conscience; make laws so wise, and continue from

year to year to administer them so wisely, that they shall save us from

ourselves and make us righteous and happy, world without end. Amen." And

who can look twice at the British Parliament and then seriously bring it

such a task? I am not advancing this as an argument against Socialism;

once again, nothing is further from my mind. There are great truths in

Socialism, or no one, not even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it;

and if it came, and did one-tenth part of what it offers, I for one

should make it welcome. But if it is to come, we may as well have some

notion of what it will be like; and the first thing to grasp is that our

new polity will be designed and administered (to put it courteously)

with something short of inspiration. It will be made, or will grow, in a

human parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely change is

human nature. The Anarchists think otherwise, from which it is only

plain that they have not carried to the study of history the lamp of

human sympathy.

Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what

headmarks must we look for in the life? We chafe a good deal at that

excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our affairs the

prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of the official. The

official, in all degrees, is already something of a terror to many of

us. I would not willingly have to do with even a police-constable in any

other spirit than that of kindness. I still remember in my dreams the

eye-glass of a certain _attache_ at a certain embassy--an eye-glass that

was a standing indignity to all on whom it looked; and my next most

disagreeable remembrance is of a bracing, Republican postman in the

city of San Francisco. I lived in that city among working folk, and what

my neighbours accepted at the postman's hands--nay, what I took from him

myself--it is still distasteful to recall. The bourgeois, residing in

the upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this

peculiar bowl; but about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps

about a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my friend

of the eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and he may thus

imagine (if he has that faculty of imagination, without which most

faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer neighbours who must

drain it to the dregs. In every contact with authority, with their

employer, with the police, with the School Board officer, in the

hospital, or in the workhouse, they have equally the occasion to

appreciate the light-hearted civility of the man in office; and as an

experimentalist in several out-of-the-way provinces of life, I may say

it has but to be felt to be appreciated. Well, this golden age of which

we are speaking will be the golden age of officials. In all our concerns

it will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with what

obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine. It is likely these

gentlemen will be periodically elected; they will therefore have their

turn of being underneath, which does not always sweeten men's

conditions. The laws they will have to administer will be no clearer

than those we know to-day, and the body which is to regulate their

administration no wiser than the British Parliament. So that upon all

hands we may look for a form of servitude most galling to the

blood--servitude to many and changing masters, and for all the slights

that accompany the rule of jack-in-office. And if the Socialistic

programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall have lost a

thing, in most respects not much to be regretted, but as a moderator of

oppression, a thing nearly invaluable--the newspaper. For the

independent journal is a creature of capital and competition; it stands

and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses and

glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent

to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private

property, the days of the independent journal are numbered. State

railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State

newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.

But again, these officials would have no sinecure. Crime would perhaps

be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose would pass

away. But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness, there would be

more contraventions. We see already new sins springing up like

mustard--School Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act

sins--none of which I would be thought to except against in particular,

but all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a hard

master even in the beginning. If it go on to such heights as we hear

proposed and lauded, if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap,

ruled with iron justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of

all proportion multiplied. Take the case of work alone. Man is an idle

animal. He is at least as intelligent as the ant; but generations of

advisers have in vain recommended him the ant's example. Of those who

are found truly indefatigable in business, some are misers; some are the

practisers of delightful industries, like gardening; some are students,

artists, inventors, or discoverers, men lured forward by successive

hopes; and the rest are those who live by games of skill or

hazard--financiers, billiard-players, gamblers, and the like. But in

unloved toils, even under the prick of necessity, no man is continually

sedulous. Once eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound

the hope of riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and malingering.

Society will then be something not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in

the old days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, with elected

overseers, and, instead of the planter, a chaotic popular assembly. If

the blood be purposeful and the soil strong, such a plantation may

succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long

hours of leisure. But even then I think the whip will be in the

overseer's hands, and not in vain. For, when it comes to be a question

of each man doing his own share or the rest doing more, prettiness of

sentiment will be forgotten. To dock the skulker's food is not enough;

many will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their

shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily. For such as these, then, the

whip will be in the overseer's hand; and his own sense of justice and

the superintendence of a chaotic popular assembly will be the only

checks on its employment. Now, you may be an industrious man and a good

citizen, and yet not love, nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector.

It is admitted by private soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is

an evil not to be combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a

brief while you will either be disgraced or have deserted. And the

sergeant can no longer appeal to the lash. But if these things go on, we

shall see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an

inspector.

This for the unfortunate. But with the fortunate also, even those whom

the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well. It is concluded that

in such a state of society, supposing it to be financially sound, the

level of comfort will be high. It does not follow: there are strange

depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case

of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it

is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into

squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of

human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly;

suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions,

the whole enterprise to be financially sound--a vaulting

supposition--and all the inhabitants to dwell together in a golden mean

of comfort: we have yet to ask ourselves if this be what man desire, or

if it be what man will even deign to accept for a continuance. It is

certain that man loves to eat, it is not certain that he loves that only

or that best. He is supposed to love comfort; it is not a love, at

least, that he is faithful to. He is supposed to love happiness; it is

my contention that he rather loves excitement. Danger, enterprise, hope,

the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to man than regular meals. He does

not think so when he is hungry, but he thinks so again as soon as he is

fed; and on the hypothesis of a successful ant-heap, he would never go

hungry. It would be always after dinner in that society, as, in the land

of the Lotos-eaters, it was always afternoon; and food, which, when we

have it not, seems all-important, drops in our esteem, as soon as we

have it, to a mere pre-requisite of living.

That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals nor

in all ages; yet it has a common base; what he seeks and what he must

have is that which will seize and hold his attention. Regular meals and

weather-proof lodgings will not do this long. Play in its wide sense, as

the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all arts,

will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in the end he

wearies for realities. Study or experiment, to some rare natures, is the

unbroken pastime of a life. These are enviable natures; people shut in

the house by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man

cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes: his feet itch for physical

adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and

triumphs; his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot continue to

look for them in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the

breathing stage of life. Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock

of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles: these are the true

elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they seek alike in their

romantic enterprises and their unromantic dissipations. When they are

taken in some pinch closer than the common, they cry, "Catch me here

again!" and sure enough you catch them there again--perhaps before the

week is out. It is as old as "Robinson Crusoe"; as old as man. Our race

has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers

that we call Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium

of safety; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our

society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any

zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often

out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns.

If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be

killed indeed, but so long as he escaped he would find his blood

oxygenated and his views of the world brighter. If Mr. Mallock, on his

way to the publishers, should have his skirts pinned to a wall by a

javelin, it would not occur to him--at least for several hours--to ask

if life were worth living; and if such peril were a daily matter, he

would ask it never more; he would have other things to think about, he

would be living indeed--not lying in a box with cotton, safe, but

immeasurably dull. The aleatory, whether it touch life, or fortune, or

renown--whether we explore Africa or only toss for halfpence--that is

what I conceive men to love best, and that is what we are seeking to

exclude from men's existences. Of all forms of the aleatory, that which

most commonly attends our working men--the danger of misery from want of

work--is the least inspiriting: it does not whip the blood, it does not

evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is passive; and yet, in

so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly touching them, it does

truly season the men's lives. Of those who fail, I do not speak--despair

should be sacred; but to those who even modestly succeed, the changes of

their life bring interest: a job found, a shilling saved, a dainty

earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing afresh for the

successful poor; and it is not from these but from the villa-dweller

that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of life. Much, then, as the

average of the proletariat would gain in this new state of life, they

would also lose a certain something, which would not be missed in the

beginning, but would be missed progressively and progressively lamented.

Soon there would be a looking back: there would be tales of the old

world humming in young men's ears, tales of the tramp and the pedlar,

and the hopeful emigrant. And in the stall-fed life of the successful

ant-heap--with its regular meals, regular duties, regular pleasures, an

even course of life, and fear excluded--the vicissitudes, delights, and

havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth. This may seem a shallow

observation; but the springs by which men are moved lie much on the

surface. Bread, I believe, has always been considered first, but the

circus comes close upon its heels. Bread we suppose to be given amply;

the cry for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our

descendants be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved

pleasures on which they will be likely to fall back: the pleasures of

intrigue and of sedition.

In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound. I am

no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I know one

thing that bears on the economic question--I know the imperfection of

man's faculty for business. The Anarchists, who count some rugged

elements of common-sense among what seem to me their tragic errors, have

said upon this matter all that I could wish to say, and condemned

beforehand great economical polities. So far it is obvious that they are

right; they may be right also in predicting a period of communal

independence, and they may even be right in thinking that desirable. But

the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality, just

when we were told it was beginning. Communes will not be all equal in

extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will

the surplus produce of all be equally marketable. It will be the old

story of competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears

to me, a new, inevitable danger. For the merchant and the manufacturer,

in this new world, will be a sovereign commune; it is a sovereign power

that will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the

market. And all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be

small. Great powers are slow to stir; national affronts, even with the

aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular consciousness; national

losses are so unequally shared, that one part of the population will be

counting its gains while another sits by a cold hearth. But in the

sovereign commune all will be centralised and sensitive. When jealousy

springs up, when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the

commune of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout

the body politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in

his diet and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the official

correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a man who has

dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a business difference

between communes will take on much the same colour as a dispute between

diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly to the

arbitrament of blows. So that the establishment of the communal system

will not only reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings of

economic inequality, but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a

world of hedgerow warfare. Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on

Dorchester, Wimborne on both; the waggons will be fired on as they

follow the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will

go armed into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of

ballad literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high

vein the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum. At

least this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have welcomed

such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and

irresistibly suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation

of new empires.

VII

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART

With the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of some

practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable) of some

gravity to the world: Should you or should you not become an artist? It

is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I can do is

to bring under your notice some of the materials of that decision; and I

will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by assuring you that all

depends on the vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth

is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and

delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in

the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure,

now with cutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a

total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference,

contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated,

the interest of this series of experiments grows upon him out of all

proportion to the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves,

nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his

sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety

of human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is dulled, all

that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears a face

of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there

be any exception--and here destiny steps in--it is in those moments

when, wearied or surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, he

calls up before memory the image of transacted pains and pleasures. Thus

it is that such an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and

inclines insensibly toward that career of art which consists only in the

tasting and recording of experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of all

other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and, so existing, it will

pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be

regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and when your father

the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so properly discouraged your

ambition, he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his

own experience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the

vocation is rare. But again we have vocations which are imperfect; we

have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the

general _ars artium_ and common base of all creative work; who will now

dip into painting, and now study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing

a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine

knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult

to speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in

literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may be

found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, and turn

at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the necessary

tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and

precise; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion

of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just

as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or

the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. 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. He may have the general vocation too:

he may have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the

mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this

inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above

all) a certain candour of mind, to take his very trifling enterprise

with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the

smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and

industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the

unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their

play. _Is it worth doing?_--when it shall have occurred to any artist to

ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It

does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the

dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the

candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the

bosom of the artist.

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no room

for hesitation: follow your bent. And observe (lest I should too much

discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn so brightly

at the first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and practice sharpen

gifts; the necessity of toil grows less disgusting, grows even welcome,

in the course of years; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with

indulgence into an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look

back over a fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little

more than held its own among the thronging interests of youth. Time will

do the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be

engrossed in that beloved occupation.

But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering and

delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their lives, if the

result be regarded, utterly in vain: a thousand artists, and never one

work of art. But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing

anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The worthless artist

would not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the

artist, even if he does not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that

there will always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is the

practical side of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true

practitioner. The direct returns--the wages of the trade--are small, but

the indirect--the wages of the life--are incalculably great. No other

business offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. The

soldier and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement, but they

are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar

language. In the life of the artist there need be no hour without its

pleasure. I take the author, with whose career I am best acquainted; and

it is true he works in a rebellious material, and that the act of

writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and the temper; but

remark him in his study when matter crowds upon him and words are not

wanting--in what a continual series of small successes time flows by;

with what a sense of power, as of one moving mountains, he marshals his

petty characters; with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees

his airy structure growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to

which the whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a

door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so

that what he writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed

many things in this big, tragic playground of the world; but what shall

he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of successful work? Suppose it

ill-paid: the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay

dearly, for pleasures less desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords

besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon

honour. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest

of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits

of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap

accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires--these

they can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite

refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently

desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac)

he must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after

day, he recasts and revises and rejects--the gross mass of the public

must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest

pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so

probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain

they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought,

alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his

constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his life noble; it is by

this that the practice of his craft strengthens and matures his

character; it is for this that even the serious countenance of the great

emperor was turned approvingly (if only for a moment) on the followers

of Apollo, and that sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his

art.

And here there fall two warnings to be made. First, if you are to

continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first signs of

laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual

effort; the standard is easily lowered, the artist who says "_It will

do_," is on the downward path; three or four pot-boilers are enough at

times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the

practice of journalism a man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap

finish. This is the danger on the one side; there is not less upon the

other. The consciousness of how much the artist is (and must be) a law

to himself debauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite merits very

hard to attain, making or swallowing artistic formulae, or perhaps

falling in love with some particular proficiency of his own, many

artists forget the end of all art: to please. It is doubtless tempting

to exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be

forgotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of

it) for services that he shall desire to have performed. Here also, if

properly considered, there is a question of transcendental honesty. To

give the public what they do not want, and yet expect to be supported:

we have there a strange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all with

painters. The first duty in this world is for a man to pay his way; when

that is quite accomplished, he may plunge into what eccentricity he

likes; but emphatically not till then. Till then, he must pay assiduous

court to the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of

these capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can never have been

a strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than

talent--character. Or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot

stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can desist from art,

and follow some more manly way of life.

I speak of a more manly way of life; it is a point on which I must be

frank. To live by a pleasure is not a high calling; it involves

patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however ambitious,

along with dancing girls and billiard-markers. The French have a

romantic evasion for one employment, and call its practitioners the

Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons of

Joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing

others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man.

Journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage;

and this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the

example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was

more happily inspired; with a better modesty he accepted the honour; and

anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered

the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When it comes to their turn,

these gentlemen can do themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to

think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks

somewhat out of place in that assembly. There should be no honours for

the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his

share of the rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other

trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful.

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please. In

ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a certain thing or to produce a

certain article with a merely conventional accomplishment, a design in

which (we may almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps

forth out of the crowd and proposes to delight: an impudent design, in

which it is impossible to fail without odious circumstances. The poor

Daughter of Joy, carrying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through

the crowd, makes a figure which it is impossible to recall without a

wounding pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful artist. The actor,

the dancer, and the singer must appear like her in person, and drain

publicly the cup of failure. But though the rest of us escape this

crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in essence the same

humiliation. We all profess to be able to delight. And how few of us

are! We all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to delight. And the

day will come to each, and even to the most admired, when the ardour

shall have declined and the cunning shall be lost, and he shall sit by

his deserted booth ashamed. Then shall he see himself condemned to do

work for which he blushes to take payment. Then (as if his lot were not

already cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the

press, who earn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which

they have not read, and the praise of excellence which they cannot

understand.

And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of

writers. "Les Blancs et les Bleus" (for instance) is of an order of

merit very different from "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne"; and if any

gentleman can bear to spy upon the nakedness of "Castle Dangerous," his

name I think is Ham: let it be enough for the rest of us to read of it

(not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart. Thus in old age, when

occupation and comfort are most needful, the writer must lay aside at

once his pastime and his breadwinner. The painter indeed, if he succeed

at all in engaging the attention of the public, gains great sums and can

stand to his easel until a great age without dishonourable failure. The

writer has the double misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and

to be incapable of working when he is old. It is thus a way of life

which conducts directly to a false position.

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary) must

look to be ill-paid. Tennyson and Montepin make handsome livelihoods;

but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not all perhaps desire

to be Montepin. If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at

the outset of all desire of money. What you may decently expect, if you

have some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will

earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. Nor

have you the right to look for more; in the wages of the life, not in

the wages of the trade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It

will be seen I have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the

artist class. Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field

labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie? Perhaps they have never

observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer; or do they

suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more important than

the services of a colonel? Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was

content to live; or do they think, because they have less genius, they

stand excused from the display of equal virtues? But upon one point

there should be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal, he has no business

in the arts. If he be not frugal, he steers directly for that last

tragic scene of _le vieux saltimbanque_; if he be not frugal, he will

find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day, when the butcher is

knocking at the door, he may be tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out

and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen

through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commended; for words

cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support

his family, than that he should attain to--or preserve--distinction in

the arts. But if the pressure comes through his own fault, he has

stolen, and stolen under trust, and stolen (which is the worst of all)

in such a way that no law can reach him.

And now you may perhaps ask me whether--if the debutant artist is to

have no thought of money, and if (as is implied) he is to expect no

honours from the State--he may not at least look forward to the delights

of popularity? Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so

far as you may mean the countenance of other artists, you would put your

finger on one of the most essential and enduring pleasures of the career

of art. But in so far as you should have an eye to the commendations of

the public or the notice of the newspapers, be sure you would but be

cherishing a dream. It is true that in certain esoteric journals the

author (for instance) is duly criticised, and that he is often praised a

great deal more than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he

prided himself on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who

have denied themselves the privilege of reading his work. But if a man

be sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive to

that which often accompanies and always follows it--wild ridicule. 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

critics 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

the gaining?

VIII

PULVIS ET UMBRA

We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not

success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our

ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our

virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the

sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look

abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with

every climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a

virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our

experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the

best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair

of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed

to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and

only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face

of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more

ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the

Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still.

I

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things,

and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe

on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios

carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity, that swings the

incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying

inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds

themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH_{3} and H_{2}O.

Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;

science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no

habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We

behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards

and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting,

like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of

these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no

analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no

familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by

the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life;

seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in

tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent

prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into

one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital

putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with

occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient

turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check

our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean:

the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts

out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the

crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth:

the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the

other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of

its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or

towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so

inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what

passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they

have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it

appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we

can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of

sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space;

the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived,

and, when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and

brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and

staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain

mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each

other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside

themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian,

the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for

the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotary island loaded with predatory life, and more

drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship,

scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks

to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.

II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated

dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,

feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon

with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his

face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier,

known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor

soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with

desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded,

savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow

lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his

destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead

filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably

valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life,

to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the Deity; rising up

to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and

his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with

long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery,

we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought

of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to

his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were

possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not

stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in

picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming

martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom

thought:--Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we

know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the

elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little:--But in

man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish

things come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved,

fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks

from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all but

the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble,

having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and

embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and

perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future

life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think

this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity.

I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man

at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and

treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They

cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his

efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how

tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive: and surely

we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from

which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be a

thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight he

startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under

what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of

ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; by camp-fires in

Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his

blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his

grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to

hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and

a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that,

simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave

to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent

millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the

future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his

virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted

perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with

the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling

with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the

sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on

strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of

thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour and the touch of

pity, often repaying the world's scorn with service, often standing firm

upon a scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches:--everywhere

some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought

and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:--ah!

if I could show you this! if I could show you these men and women, all

the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error,

under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without

thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still

clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the

poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot;

it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom; they are

condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is

at their heels, the implacable hunter.