miss it? That is a problem which I do not think it possible to answer by
a general rule. We rightly honour the Carlyle or the Wordsworth who has
forced the public to admire him in spite of critical gibes and long
obscurity; but we must not forget that even success does not
necessarily justify the audacity which has won it, and that a good many
people who fancied themselves to be capable of enlightening the world
have been empty-headed impostors who would have done better to take the
critic's advice: drop their pens and mind their gallipots. Devotion to
an ideal, like other high qualities, may be misplaced or counterfeited
by mere personal vanity. But leaving each man to decide by the concrete
circumstances of his own case, I still hold that at least we should try
in this respect to act in Carlyle's spirit. I cannot blame the author
who, under certain conditions, feels that his first duty is to pay his
weekly bills, so long, of course, as he does not earn the money by
pandering to the bad passions of his readers; for there are modes of
making a livelihood by the pen to which starvation or the workhouse
would be preferred by any high-minded man. But we will not judge harshly
of the author who lives by supplying innocent, if rather insipid, food
for public amusement. He might be capable of better things; but, then,
he might certainly be doing much worse. Yet in any case, I say that, to
have a tolerably comfortable conscience, an author should try to look a
little farther than this. The great mass of mankind has to devote most
of its energies to employments which require nothing more than honest
work; and yet even the humblest can do something to maintain and elevate
the moral standard of his surroundings. The author, so far as he is
simply a journeyman, a reporter of ordinary events and speeches, for
example, does his duty so far as he reports them honestly; and we have
no more to say to him. But the author who takes part in political and
social or religious discussions has a responsibility which involves
something more. Probably he feels--I am sure enough that I feel--that
his performance makes remarkably little difference to mankind in
general; and that he is playing only an infinitesimal part in the great
processes by which the huge world blunders along, struggling into some
approximation to a more tolerable order. He may compare himself to one
of the myriads of insects building up one square yard on the coral reef
which stretches for hundreds of leagues. Yet even the coral reef depends
on the units, and if the insect's powers are small it concerns him to
make the best of them. Now, to make the best of them implies some
genuine interest in his work; something that makes the reader perceive
that he is being addressed by a human being, not a mere machine for
vamping up old materials. I have been struck in reading newspaper
articles, even my own, by the curious loss of individuality which a man
seems to suffer as a writer. Unconsciously the author takes the colour
of his organ; he adopts not only its sentiment but its style, and seems
to become a mere transmitter of messages, with whose substance he has no
more to do than the wires of the electric telegraph which carries them.
But now and then we suddenly come across something fresh and original;
we know by instinct that we are being addressed by another man, and are
in a living relation to a separate human being, not to a mere drilled
characterless unit of a disciplined army; we find actually thoughts,
convictions, arguments, which, though all arguments are old, have
evidently struck the writer's mind, and not merely been transmitted into
his pen; and then we may know that we are in the presence of a real
force, and meeting with a man who is doing his duty. I refrain from
mentioning, though I easily could mention, living modern instances. But
on looking to the history of the past, it is curious to notice how rare
the phenomenon is, and how important it is when it occurs. Think for a
moment, for example, of old Cobbett, agricultural labourer and soldier,
with nothing to help him but his shrewd mother-wit and his burly English
strength. He wrote much that was poor and clumsy enough; much, too, that
was pure claptrap, and much that was dictated by personal motives and
desire for notoriety. But in spite of this the untaught peasant became
one of the great political forces, more effective than the ninety and
nine elegant _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ reviewers, who had all the
advantages which he lacked. Why? Partly, no doubt, because he was a
really strong man; but also because he had at least one genuine and
deeply-rooted conviction, springing out of his profound desire for the
welfare of the class which was both the largest and the most helpless of
the England of his day. He is, therefore, one example, and there are
many others, of the singular power which is exercised in journalism by a
man, under whatever disadvantages, who possesses, or rather who is
possessed by, some master-thought, and utters it in season and out of
season with perhaps disproportionate intensity, but with perfect
sincerity. Now, though Cobbett would be in some respects a bad model, I
only refer to him in this sense. When my young friends consult me as to
the conditions of successful journalism, my first bit of advice comes to
this: know something really; at any rate, try to know something; be the
slaves of some genuine idea, or you will be the slaves of a newspaper--a
bit of mechanism instead of a man. You can carry on the business with
self-respect--whatever your success--if it is also something more than a
business; if, for example, you can honestly feel that you are helping on
the propaganda of sound principle, denouncing real grievances, and
speaking from genuine belief. No man has a right to lay down the law to
statesmen as though he were in possession of absolute knowledge, or as
though he were a man of science talking to a class of ignorant
schoolboys. But every man ought to believe that truth is attainable, and
to endeavour with all his power to attain it. He should study the great
problems of the day historically: for he must know how they have arisen;
what previous attempts have been made to solve them; how far recent
suggestions are mere reproductions of exploded fallacies; and so qualify
himself to see things in their true relations as facts of a great
process of evolution. He should endeavour to be philosophical in spirit,
so far, at least, as to seek to base his opinions upon general
principles, and to look at the events of the day from a higher point of
view than that of personal or party expediency. And he must, though upon
this it is hardly necessary to insist, be familiar with the affairs of
the day: for no one can apply principles to politics effectively without
a genuine first-hand knowledge of the actual currents of political life.
Unless a man can take up his calling in some such spirit, he can be but
a mere retailer of popular commonplaces, and must live from hand to
mouth or upon the chance utterances of people as thoughtless as
himself, increasing the volume of mere noise which threatens to drown
sense. But if he seriously cultivates his powers, and enriches his mind,
he may feel sure that even in journalism he may be discharging one of
the most important functions which a man can undertake. He may be right
or wrong in the particular doctrines which he supports. Indeed, the
first and most obvious result of any attempt to take wider views of
politics is the admission that wisdom (and as certainly, nonsense) is
not the exclusive possession of any party in politics, literature, or
philosophy. But something is done whenever a man of trained intellect
and genuine conviction lifts popular discussion to a higher plane. At
such times it rises above the region of personal invective or pure
platitude, and involves a conscious reference to great principles and to
the remote conditions of the little bit of history which we are actually
transacting. When John Stuart Mill became a member of the House of
Commons, and was accepted as a philosopher coming among practical men,
he said much that displeased his hearers; but it was observed by
competent judges at the time, that the tone of parliamentary debates was
perceptibly raised. Members of Parliament were forced to reflect for the
moment, not only how their speeches would tell in next day's reports,
and what traps they were setting for opponents, but also for a brief
instant, how their arguments would stand the test of impartial logic.
Mill tells a significant story in his autobiography, which, perhaps,
indicates one source of his influence. When he appeared upon the
hustings he was asked whether he had not said that the English
working-classes were generally liars. He replied simply, "I did," and
the reply was, he says, received with "vehement applause". The incident,
he adds, convinced him that the working-classes valued nothing more than
thorough straightforwardness, and honoured a man for daring to tell them
of their faults. I hope that it is so: I believe, in point of fact, that
no quality is more heartily honoured than unflinching political honesty.
And I confess that I have often wondered why it is that where the reward
is so clear, so few people take the plain road which leads to it. It
seems equally clear that moral courage pays better than any other
quality in politics, and that it is the rarest of all qualities even to
be simulated. We are all anxious to show how profound is our affection
for the masses; but how many candidates for their favour dare to give
Mr. Mill's proof of genuine respect? No doubt you must make it clear
that you possess some other qualities before you can hope to conciliate
the respect of a class by accusing it openly of habitual lying. Indeed,
this might be taken as a test of genuine independence. Till you can
tell men of their faults without being suspected of spite or bad
temper--till you can praise them without being suspected of unworthy
flattery--you are not really in a position worthy to be called
independent. How many journalists--I say nothing of statesmen--stand
firmly enough on their own legs to speak out without giving offence? We
are often told of a great revolution of opinion, and especially of the
abandonment of the old prejudice against government interference. That a
great change has taken place in the opinions which men profess is
undeniable; though how far that change has been due to unbiassed
scientific reflection, and how far to a change in the conditions of
popularity, is a very different question. I see, for example, a
statement by an honourable gentleman that he approves of the Eight Hours
Bill because the principle of non-interference with adult labour is
obsolete. It is too late to avow it. If the honourable gentleman means
to say that experience has proved the principle to be erroneous, he is,
of course, justified in abandoning it. But, if his meaning be simply
that the principle has gone out of fashion, what is this but to admit
that you will abandon any doctrine as soon as it ceases to be popular?
Do we really mean to assert that a fallacious doctrine can never get the
upper hand; that the beliefs of to-day are always better than the
beliefs of yesterday; that every man who has dared to stick to an
opinion condemned by a majority must necessarily be a fool for his
pains? That really seems to be a common opinion. We hear a great deal at
the present day about "mandates," and a mandate seems to be regarded not
simply as a declaration of the will of a majority which must, in point
of fact, be obeyed, but as the official utterance of an infallible
church which cannot in point of logic be erroneous. Now, I confess that
I have always had a weakness for the faithful Abdiel. I believe that a
man is often doing invaluable services who resists the dominant current
of opinion, who denounces fallacies when they are growing and
flourishing, and points out that a revolution in belief, even though it
be inevitable for the time, and even though it contain an element of
right reason, may yet contain errors and hasty judgments and deviations
from the true line of progress, which require exposure the more
unsparing in proportion to their temporary popularity. Is not the
ordinary journalist's frame of mind singularly unfavourable to his
discharge of this function? and is it not inevitable that it should be
so as long as the journalist's only aim is to gain a hearing somehow? It
matters not which side he takes. He denounces some new doctrine, but
only in the name of the current prejudices which it happens to shock.
He advocates it, but only because it is the last new fashion of the day.
In either case he falls into the ordinary party vice of imagining that
his opponents must be fools or knaves, that their opinions are directly
inspired by the devil or a judicial blindness inflicted by Providence,
simply because he will not take the trouble to understand them. The man
who would try to raise himself above the position of the mere pander to
passing antipathies must widen his intellectual horizon. He must qualify
himself to take broad views; he must learn that his little list of
commonplaces does not represent real thought, but is often the
embodiment of mere prejudice, or perhaps the deposit of words left by
thinkers of past generations; he must learn to do more than merely dish
them up with a new sauce; he must concentrate his abilities upon
definite problems, consider how they have arisen, and what is their
relation to the past and the future. To do so requires some
disinterestedness: some love of truth for its own sake; and a capacity
for answering your opponent by explaining him, instead of a mere
quickness for taunting him personally. It requires, no doubt, serious
and prolonged application. Even such a training will not enable a man to
unlock all the puzzles of the day; but it may help towards the
desirable consummation in which a solution is at least sought in
connection with established principles, and with a constant reference to
the organised experience which also can be a safe guide to more
reasonable conclusions. Even the attempt to do so may strengthen a man
against the temptation to take short cuts to notoriety, and seek a
momentary sensation at the sacrifice of permanent effect. We owe
gratitude to all who have acted upon such principles and won the
influence which comes at last, though it comes slowly, to honest work,
bestowed even upon such shifting materials as political and moral
philosophy.
I have dwelt so far chiefly upon political journalism, because it is so
characteristic a part of modern literature, and illustrates so clearly
some obvious tendencies of the time. I must say something, however, of
another department of literature, which is sometimes said to have
nothing at all to do with morality. The poet or the novelist, it is
suggested, has no duties except that duty which Scheherazade discharged
at the risk of her neck,--the duty of keeping her master amused. If,
instead of telling him stories about genii, she had read him every
morning an orthodox sermon or an ethical discourse, the one thousand and
one nights would have been diminished by one thousand. Am I to tell our
modern Scheherazades to forget the _Arabian Nights_, and adopt for our
use passages from the homilies of Tillotson? Some religious persons have
taken that horn of the dilemma, and perhaps with some plausibility. When
the world is heaving with the throes of a social earthquake, what right
have you or I to be lounging on sofas, telling silly stories about young
ladies' and gentlemen's billings and cooings? Perhaps the condemnation
should be extended to recreations less obviously frivolous. Your
philosopher who tries to distinguish or to identify "is" and "is not,"
and to draw the true line between object and subject, has a very
fascinating plaything, but is perhaps as far from influencing the world.
Judging from the history of past philosophical cobwebs, he might as well
be framing conundrums, or learning how to throw grain through the eye of
a needle.
I only refer to this to say that I am not in favour of suppressing
either art or philosophy. I have a kind of hankering after them in some
forms myself. I assume, without further argument, that Shakespeare, and
Milton, and Wordsworth, and Fielding, and Scott, and Dickens, did well
in devoting themselves to literature, and probably did more to make the
world happier and better than if they had composed sermons or systems of
philosophy. I must, as I said, refrain from pronouncing any set eulogy
upon the services rendered by authors. This only I take for granted. No
one, I think, of any intellectual capacity can remember the early days
when his faculties were ripening, when he wandered, for the pure delight
of wandering, in the enchanted world of the great imaginative writers,
saw through their eyes, and unconsciously caught the contagion of their
sympathies, without feeling a deep gratitude to the men who not only
gave him so much innocent pleasure, but who incidentally refined his
taste and roused his enthusiasm, and quickened his perception of
whatever is beautiful, or heroic, or pathetic, in the moral or the
natural world. The highest literature embodies the instincts by which a
cultivated people differs from the barbarous, and the classes are in a
true sense civilised, which enjoy and appreciate the ennobling as
distinguished from the coarser pleasures, and rise above the merely
brutal life. One who aspires to be a leader, or to follow the steps of
the leaders, in this band of crusaders against barbarism, must surely
have some corresponding duties. I am here upon the edge of certain
troublesome controversies which I shall refrain from discussing at
length. This only I need say. Some great authors explicitly accept the
function of preaching. Milton, and, in later days, Wordsworth,
identified the offices of the prophet and the poet, and set themselves
deliberately to expound an ideal of life, and justify the ways of God to
man. And Milton gave the principle in his famous saying, that he who
would write well hereafter of laudable things must be himself a true
poem. Yet men equally great have impressed readers by their apparent
indifference to such considerations. They accept the new commandment
which, as Emerson tells us, the Muse gave to her darling son, "Thou
shalt not preach". Shakespeare and Scott did not consciously and
deliberately write to set forth any ideal; they even wrote, more or
less, to make money; they were magnificent opulent geniuses, who poured
out their imaginative wealth liberally and spontaneously, without a
thought of any particular moral, simply because their minds were full to
overflowing of great thoughts and vivid images, which they diffused as
liberally as the rose gives its scent. Are we to say that they were
wrong or morally inferior, even if artistically superior, to those who
wrote, like Milton or Dante, with a more definite aim? Must I condemn
Scott because he did not write, like the excellent Miss Edgeworth, or
even like Dickens in some of his stories, to preach consciously that
honesty is the best policy, or that selfishness is a vice; and, if so,
must I not condemn a man from whom I have not only received an
incalculable amount of innocent enjoyment, but imbibed--it is my own
fault if I have not imbibed--many thoughts that have strengthened and
stimulated the best elements of my nature? If I insist upon the moral
influences, am I not confounding the poet and the preacher, and falling
under the lash of I know not how many critical connoisseurs? If I
renounce the preachers, I am renouncing some of the greatest artists,
and indirectly sanctioning even such art as is worthy only of Holywell
Street, and panders to the worst passions.
I will say what I think. Great writers, it seems to me, may be great in
two ways; and the greatest is he who combines them most thoroughly. The
first-rate writer, in the first place, must--to use a frequently
misapplied word--be a thorough realist. He is great in proportion to the
width and depth of the truths which he grasps, and to which he gives the
most perfect expression. When we read Shakespeare at his best, what
strikes us is that he has expressed once for all some home-truth about
human nature and the world, round which all inferior writers seem to
have been blundering without ever achieving a complete utterance. More
generally, every great period of our literature has been marked in one
shape or other by a fresh realism, or what is called the desire to
return to Nature: to get rid of the phrases which have become
conventional and unreal, and express the real living ultimate truth.
Shakespeare and the great men of his time were inspired by such a
passion; they were animated by the desire to "hold the mirror up to
Nature" and to portray real vivid human passion, for they had burst
through the old mediaeval chains of theological dogma, and were aroused
to a sudden fresh perception of the beauties which had been unrecognised
and misconceived by ascetic monks. The men of Pope's time, again,
believed in what they, too, called the "religion of Nature," and tried
to hasten the day when enlightened reason should finally crush what
Berkeley called the "pedantry of courts and schools". Wordsworth and his
followers inaugurated a new era by proposing a return to "Nature,"
because the language, which with Pope expressed a real meaning, had
again become the conventional language of a narrow class of critics and
the town. It is in all ages one great function of the imaginative
writers to get rid of mere survivals; to forego the spectacles used by
their ancestors as helps, which have now become encumbrances; to destroy
the formulas employed only to save the trouble of thinking, and make us
see facts directly, instead of being befooled by words. In that sense it
is their great service that they break up the old frost of dreary
commonplace, and give life and power, in place of an acceptance of mere
ossified or fossilised remnants of what once was thought. Briefly, they
teach us to see what is before us. So far the function of the poet
resembles that of the scientific and philosophic observer. He differs
radically in method, because he proceeds by intuition instead of
analysis; shows us the type, instead of cataloguing the attributes of a
class; and gives us a real living man--a Falstaff or a Hamlet--instead
of propounding a psychological theory as to the relations of the will,
the intellect, and the emotions.
I take it, therefore, that realism in this sense is one essential
characteristic of great imaginative power. I hold it to be more than
ever necessary; more necessary because scientific methods of thought are
more developed. It is less possible for a serious writer to make use of
the merely fanciful symbols which were perfectly legitimate as long as
they represented real beliefs, but are now fitter for only the lighter
moods. The greatest writers have to dispense with fairies and fighting
gods and goddesses, and the muses, and to show us a direct portraiture
of the forces by which society is actually moved. But the functions of
the great writer, though they involve a perception of truth, are not
adequately defined by the simple condition of truthfulness. He has to
be--may I say it?--a preacher; he cannot help it; and, so far as he
cannot help it, his preaching will be elevating in proportion as it is
truthful. He does not preach in the sense in which a moralist preaches,
by arguing in favour of this or that doctrine, or expounding the
consequences of opinions. It is not his business to prove, but to see,
and to make you see. But, in another sense, he cannot help preaching,
because his power over you is founded upon sympathy, upon his personal
charms, upon the clearness with which he sees and the vividness with
which he portrays the real nature of the instincts which make men
lovable or hateful. What are really the most fascinating books in the
language? I was impressed the other day by discovering that perhaps the
most popular of all English books, judging by the number of editions, is
Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_. To what does it owe its popularity?
Obviously to the exquisite keenness of Goldsmith's perception of the
moral beauty of a simple character, which is always saved from the
charge of being unctuous or sentimental by the constant play of gentle
and yet penetrative humour. Do we not love Charles Lamb for a similar
reason? Why, again, do we love Scott, as all men ought to love him? Is
it not because his Jeanie Deans and his Dandie Dinmont, and a hundred
more characters, show the geniality, the manliness as well as the
shrewd common-sense of their creator, and his vivid perception of the
elements which ennoble the national character which he loved so well?
Why does the British public love Dickens so well? For his incomparable
fun, no doubt; but also because the fun is always associated with a keen
perception of certain moral qualities which they regard with, it may be,
excessive admiration. But to give no more examples, I am content to say
that the enduring power of every great writer depends not merely on his
intellectual forces, but upon the charm of his character--the clear
recognition of what it really is that makes life beautiful and
desirable, and of what are the baser elements that fight against the
elevating forces. We are under intellectual obligations to the man of
science who will tell us, for example, how mountain chains have been
raised and carved into their present shape. But we are grateful to the
great poets and prose writers, to Wordsworth and Mr. Ruskin, for
interpreting and stimulating the emotions which make the vision of the
great peaks a source of pure delight. We may, in the same way, thank the
psychologist who can make more intelligible the principle of association
of ideas, or trace the development of the moral sense or the social
affections. But we love the man who, like Goldsmith, and Lamb, and
Scott, and Wordsworth, has revealed to us by actual portraits of
typical characters, the sweetness and tenderness and truthfulness which
may be embodied in humble characters. Love, says Wordsworth, of his
shepherd lord--
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His daily teachers had been woods and rills;
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the comely hills.
The power of discovering and of making us discover such thoughts in the
huts of poor men and in natural scenery is the true prerogative of the
poet, and it is to that power that he owes his enduring place in our
hearts.
I have said this much because I think that it is in a perversion of
these principles that we shall find some of the temptations to which the
author is in these days most liable. I can only glance at them briefly.
One perversion, for example, is indicated by the common use of the
phrase "realism". This word has various meanings; but the commonest,
perhaps, would not be misrepresented by saying that it involves a
confusion between the functions of the man of science and the poet. In a
scientific sense, it is a sufficient reason for setting forth any theory
that you believe it to be true. The facts which you describe may be
hideous and revolting: it is not the less desirable that they should be
accurately known. The poet and novelist may be equally justified in
taking hideous and revolting facts into account. That, for example, is
the duty of a satirist; and I am not at all concerned to say that satire
is illegitimate--I think it perfectly legitimate. I should be the last
to assert that a writer should confine himself to such facts as can be
discussed with decency in presence of a young ladies' school. On the
contrary, I think that, if not the most enviable privilege, it is
sometimes a duty of the novelist to set forth vice and crime, and even,
it may be, to set them forth in impressive and startling shapes. It is
his duty to represent them truly and to make them intelligible; to show
how they may be natural, and not to misrepresent even a villain. All I
say is, that he should also recognise the fact that they are hideous and
revolting. And, therefore, this is no excuse for the man who really
dwells upon such facts, not because they are facts, but because he knows
that such descriptions are the easiest way of attracting morbid tastes;
and that he can get a readier market by being irreverent and indecent
than by other expedients. To defend such work on the excuse of realism
is simply to indulge in a bit of contemptible humbug, too transparent to
need exposure. The purpose of an artist, you say, is to give pleasure,
not to preach. That is perfectly true; but to give pleasure to whom? If
it is to give pleasure to the prurient, to the cynical, to the
debauchee, to give the kind of pleasure which, to a pure-minded man, is
pain, and of which even the blackguard is ashamed, then I will not
quarrel over words, and ask whether it can be truly artistic, but I will
simply reply that I should have a greater respect for a man who lived by
picking pockets. But, you reply, it requires a great deal of skill. So
does picking pockets, and so do some other kinds of human energy which I
need not particularise. If the ethical judgment be really irrelevant
aesthetically, the aesthetic judgment must be irrelevant ethically. If
that doctrine be true, we are, therefore, quite at liberty to say that a
thing may be beautiful and at the same time blackguardly and beastly. I
will, however, express my own conviction, that what is disgusting to a
right-minded man cannot be really beautiful, and that the sentiments
which it offends cannot be put out of court simply because they are
called moral. They have as good a right to be considered as any others.
There is a temptation of the opposite kind: the temptation to what I may
briefly call sentimentalism. The virtue of idealism is as necessary as
the virtue of realism; and every great writer shows his greatness by
combining the two. The contradictory of the real is not properly the
ideal, but the unreal--which is a very different thing. For idealism
means properly, as I take it, that quality in virtue of which a poem or
a fiction does not represent merely the scientific or photographic
reproduction of matters of fact, but incarnates an idea and expresses a
sentiment. A great work imparts to us the impression made upon a mind of
unusual power, reflectiveness, and emotional sensibility by some aspect
of the world in which we all live, but which he can see more vividly
than others. To be really impressive, therefore, it must correspond to
facts and be the genuine product of experience. The erroneous idealism
is that which perverts the truth in order to gain apparent emphasis;
which deals in the impossible, the absurd, and the exaggerated; and
supposes a world which cannot even be better than the actual, because it
cannot exist; which, therefore, has the defect of being arbitrary and
inconceivable. So political Utopias are interesting in proportion as
they suggest a legitimate construction, based upon actual facts and
observed laws of human nature. As soon as we see that they presuppose a
world of monstrosities, of impossible combinations of incompatible
qualities, they become mere playthings. And the same is true of every
work of imagination; as soon as it ceases to have a foundation in
truth--to be other than realistic--it loses its real hold upon our
sympathies. You solve no problem when you call in a god to cut the
knot. This is the tendency of the sentimentalist, who refuses to be
bound by the actual conditions. His creations are ephemeral because only
plausible, even to the imagination, so long as the illusions to which
they are congenial survive. And he probably falls into the further error
that the emotion which he utters becomes as factitious as the laws which
he invents. The man who weeps because he is melted at the sight of
misery, touches us; but when he weeps because he finds it pleasant, or
because he wishes to make a public exhibition of his tenderness of
heart, we find him out by degrees and call him a humbug and a
sentimentalist. Sham feelings and moral facts are the staple of the
sentimentalist and the cause of his inevitable decay.
These remarks may serve to suggest the temptations which most beset the
author in our days, though peculiar to our day only in the degree in
which authorship has become more professional. For the ideal author is
the man who, having discovered truth, desires to reveal it to his
fellows, or, being full of perceptions of beauty, cannot resist the
impulse to embody them in words or outward symbols. But when he desires
also to live by his powers, he is at once in a position of which all
authors know the peril. He becomes self-conscious; for he has a
perpetual poultice of public favour or enmity applied to soften his
fibres, and to make him feel, even in his study, that an eye is upon him
and that he must so act as always to preserve attention. He is tempted
to produce sensation at any cost--to shock and startle by horrors if he
cannot move the sympathies by gentle arts: for a man who cannot command
the pathetic, can, at least, always be disgusting. He can turn our
stomachs if he cannot move our hearts. He is tempted, at least, to
caricature--to show how keen is his perception by crude and glaring
colours, and to indulge in the grotesque as an easy substitute for the
really graphic; he can affect a facile cynicism to show how profound is
his penetration, and display that marvellous knowledge of the world and
the human heart, and that power of discovering the emptiness of all
apparent virtues which is so common an endowment of young gentlemen upon
their first initiation into real experience of life. There is nothing
which the author affects so easily at his first start as the world
weariness which comes from long experience and years of disappointed
hope. And when a man has once gained applause for his sentiment, he
finds himself his own covert rival, and is forced to substitute for the
first "sprightly runnings" a fanciful pumping up of the last dregs of
his old feelings. Nothing, unfortunately, is more common, or could be
more easily illustrated by examples of good writers, than the spectacle
of the veteran trying to reproduce in cold blood the effects which he
struck out spontaneously and unconsciously in youth. And, then, at every
instant the poor author feels that he must keep up with the fashion; he
lives in fear of that verdict which will come some day, that he is an
old fogey, and that he is transgressing those eternal principles which
were discovered by some ingenuous youth a fortnight ago.
Some such danger is, indeed, shared by others than the author. It is the
misfortune of his calling that success with him is intrinsically
associated with notoriety. A man may do good work in many departments of
life, of which no one will ever hear beyond a narrow circle. I hold, for
my part, that the greatest part of the good work which is done in the
world is actually of that kind, and that the best is done for the pure
love of work. The world knows nothing of its greatest men, and as
little, perhaps, of its best. But what would be the good of writing even
a _Hamlet_ or a _Divine Comedy_ if nobody was to read it? Some great
writers, I know, have prided themselves on finding fit audience and few;
and I fully agree that a man who could really influence a few seminal
minds might be well content with such a result of his labours. But,
after all, the genuine aim of a great author must be, directly or
indirectly, to affect the world in which he lives, whether by changing
its beliefs or stimulating its emotions. And, as a rule, he cannot do so
without becoming known, and even known to vast numbers of readers. Some
religious writers, the author, for example, of the _Imitation of
Christ_, have influenced many generations, while absolutely concealing
their identity. Even they must, at least, have desired that their works
should be known; and the case is a rare one. For the author generally,
success of the worthiest kind, success in enlightening, encouraging, and
stimulating his fellow-men, is inextricably connected with success of a
lower kind, the success measured by fame and popularity. That, of
course, is equally the case with statesmanship: a statesman has to
appeal to crowds, and is too apt to be fascinated by thunders of
applause; public oratory, even in the pulpit, is a terrible stimulant to
unworthy vanity. The author only differs in this, that his very function
presupposes a temperament of more than average sensibility; that he does
not get that case-hardening which is administered to the statesman by
the opposition orator; and that publicity has a specially intoxicating
effect upon the man whose proper home is in his study, and who, perhaps,
leaves it only to mix with a circle of reverent admirers.