II

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.

It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) bard in almost

every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice

is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’s

imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud;

there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells

delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will

have some kind of a bull’s-eye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of Dancer,

the miser, as he figures in the “Old Bailey Reports,” a prey to the most

sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired

man, his house beleaguered by the impish schoolboy, and he himself

grinding and fuming and impotently fleeing to the law against these

pin-pricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly prolong a

life so destitute of charm and dignity; and then you call to memory that

had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed at

once from these trials, and might have built himself a castle and gone

escorted by a squadron. For the love of more recondite joys, which we

cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man had willingly

forgone both comfort and consideration. “His mind to him a kingdom was”;

and sure enough, digging into that mind, which seems at first a

dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels. For Dancer must have had

the love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble character in

itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief part of what is commonly

called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable end, that finest trait of

mankind; scorn of men’s opinions, another element of virtue; and at the

back of all, a conscience just like yours and mine, whining like a cur,

swindling like a thimble-rigger, but still pointing (there or

there-about) to some conventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait

to which Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne

either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us

that throb of the miser’s pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast

arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what: insatiable, insane, a

god with a muck-rake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom of the miser,

consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more,

indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to epics; and tracing that

mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortable

house, spies within him a blazing bonfire of delight. And so with

others, who do not live by bread alone, but by some cherished and perhaps

fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye, and

possibly to themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens; who

have not one virtue to rub against another in the field of active life,

and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the saints. We

see them on the street, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows

in what they pride themselves! heaven knows where they have set their

treasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable of

the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song,

hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger

at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his

comrades there survived but one to recognise him. It is not only in the

woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He

sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and

the days are moments. With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling

lantern I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not

merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and

hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and

the delight of each so incommunicable. And just a knowledge of this, and

a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us,

that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the realist.

There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of

mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are

ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but

of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have been

boys and youths; they have lingered outside the window of the beloved,

who was then most probably writing to some one else; they have sat before

a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere continents of congested

poetry, not one line of which would flow; they have walked alone in the

woods, they have walked in cities under the countless lamps; they have

been to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they have longed to knife

a man, and maybe done it; the wild taste of life has stung their palate.

Or, if you deny them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted

to the full—their books are there to prove it—the keen pleasure of

successful literary composition. And yet they fill the globe with

volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration, and

whose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, with despairing

wrath. If I had no better hope than to continue to revolve among the

dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the paltry hopes and

fears with which they surround and animate their heroes, I declare I

would die now. But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so dully

yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some

scattering thoughts, I could count some grains of memory, compared to

which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was very

true; that it was the same with themselves and other persons of (what

they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were exceptional,

and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must

deal exclusively with (what they call) the average man, who was a

prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest

considerations. I accept the issue. We can only know others by

ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does

not make us different from our fellowmen, or it would make us incapable

of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just

like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped

a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew

very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys

and full of a poetry of his own. And this harping on life’s dulness and

man’s meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of two

things: the cry of the blind eye, _I cannot see_, or the complaint of the

dumb tongue, _I cannot utter_. To draw a life without delights is to

prove I have not realised it. To picture a man without some sort of

poetry—well, it goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may

have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old, small-minded,

impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and

probably beset by small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer

as . . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen (with a more

becoming modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails; they

did not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living in

a book: and it is there my error would have lain. Or say that in the

same romance—I continue to call these books romances, in the hope of

giving pain—say that in the same romance, which now begins really to take

shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead the Harrow

boys; and say that I came on some such business as that of my

lantern-bearers on the links; and described the boys as very cold, spat

upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they

were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I

might upon these lines, and had I Zola’s genius, turn out, in a page or

so, a gem of literary art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a

master, and lay on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and

when all was done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and

dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied the

boys! To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and

indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they are discussing (as it is

highly proper they should) the possibilities of existence. To the eye of

the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask

themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the

ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.