Dreamthorp Part 5

At the outset of his career, the man of letters is confronted by the fact that he must live. The obtaining of a livelihood is preliminary to everything else. Poets and cobblers are placed on the same level so far.

If the writer can barter MSS. for sufficient coin, he may proceed to develop himself; if he cannot so barter it, there is a speedy end of himself, and of his development also. Literature has become a profession; but it is in several respects different from the professions by which other human beings earn their bread. The man of letters, unlike the clergyman, the physician, or the lawyer, has to undergo no special preliminary training for his work, and while engaged in it, unlike the professional persons named, he has no accredited status. Of course, to earn any success, he must start with as much special knowledge, with as much dexterity in his craft, as your ordinary physician; but then he is not recognised till once he is successful. When a man takes a physician's degree, he has done something; when a man betakes himself to literary pursuits, he has done nothing--till once he is lucky enough to make his mark. There is no special preliminary training for men of letters, and as a consequence, their ranks are recruited from the vagrant talent of the world. Men that break loose from the professions, who stray from the beaten tracks of life, take refuge in literature. In it are to be found doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and the motley nation of Bohemians. Any one possessed of a nimble brain, a quire of paper, a steel-pen and ink-bottle, can start business. Any one who chooses may enter the lists, and no questions are asked concerning his antecedents.

The battle is won by sheer strength of brain. From all this it comes that the man of letters has usually a history of his own: his individuality is more p.r.o.nounced than the individuality of other men; he has been knocked about by pa.s.sion and circ.u.mstance. All his life he has had a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is something of the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and he indulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters--the vulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean--arise mainly from the want of harmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staid unmercurial world with which they are brought into conflict. They are unconventional in a world of conventions; they are fanciful, and are constantly misunderstood in prosaic relations. They are wise enough in their books, for there they are sovereigns, and can shape everything to their own likings; out of their books, they are not unfrequently extremely foolish, for they exist then in the territory of an alien power, and are constantly knocking their heads against existing orders of things. Men of letters take prosaic men out of themselves; but they are weak where the prosaic men are strong. They have their own way in the world of ideas, prosaic men in the world of facts. From his practical errors the writer learns something, if not always humility and amendment.

A memorial flower grows on every spot where he has come to grief; and the chasm he cannot over-leap he bridges with a rainbow.

But the man of letters has not only to live, he has to develop himself; and his earning of money and his intellectual development should proceed simultaneously and in proportionate degrees. Herein lies the main difficulty of the literary life. Out of his thought the man must bring fire, food, clothing; and fire, food, clothing must in their turns subserve thought. It is necessary, for the proper conduct of such a life, that while the balance at the banker's increases, intellectual resource should increase at the same ratio. Progress should not be made in the faculty of expression alone,--progress at the same time should be made in thought; for thought is the material on which expression feeds.

Should sufficient advance not be made in this last direction, in a short time the man feels that he has expressed himself,--that now he can only more or less dexterously repeat himself,--more or less prettily become his own echo. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in writing; but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is the only thing he has acquired,--when it has been, perhaps, the only thing he has striven to acquire. Such miscalculation of ways and means suggests vulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint. In the life in which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does not create,--he is only desperately keeping up appearances. He has at once become "a base mechanical," and his successes are not much higher than the successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer. This want of proper relationship between resources of expression and resources of thought, or subject-matter for expression, is common enough, and some slight suspicion of it flashes across the mind at times in reading even the best authors. It lies at the bottom of every catastrophe in the literary life. Frequently a man's first book is good, and all his after productions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of the first. The men who act thus are in the long run deserted like worked-out mines. A man reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as to expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiar bitters of the literary life. Hazlitt tells us that, after one of his early interviews with Coleridge, he sat down to his Essay on the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. "I sat down to the task shortly afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens and paper, determined to make clean work of it, wrote a few sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page, and, after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in which I had plunged myself for four, or five years preceding, gave up the attempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless despondency on the blank unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I was then? oh, no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is worth all the fluency and flippancy in the world."

This regretful looking back to the past, when emotions were keen and sharp, and when thought wore the novel dress of a stranger, and this dissatisfaction with the acquirements of the present, is common enough with the man of letters. The years have come and gone, and he is conscious that he is not intrinsically richer,--he has only learned to a.s.sort and display his riches to advantage. His wares have neither increased in quant.i.ty nor improved in quality,--he has only procured a window in a leading thoroughfare. He can catch his b.u.t.terflies more cunningly, he can pin them on his cards more skilfully, but their wings are fingered and tawdry compared with the time when they winnowed before him in the sunshine over the meadows of youth. This species of regret is peculiar to the cla.s.s of which I am speaking, and they often discern failure in what the world counts success. The veteran does not look back to the time when he was in the awkward squad; the accountant does not sigh over the time when he was bewildered by the mysteries of double-entry. And the reason is obvious. The dexterity which time and practice have brought to the soldier and the accountant is pure gain: the dexterity of expression which time and practice have brought to the writer is gain too, in its way, but not quite so pure. It may have been cultivated and brought to its degree of excellence at the expense of higher things. The man of letters lives by thought and expression, and his two powers may not be perfectly balanced. And, putting aside its effect on the reader, and through that, on the writer's pecuniary prosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this. When the writer expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, however life-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looks back over his uttered past--brown desert to him, in which there is no sustenance--he looks forward to the green _un_uttered future, and beholding its narrow limits, knows it is all that he can call his own,--on that vivid strip he must pasture his intellectual life.

Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one? Granted that the writer is productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he has secured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could be happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat. If a poet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in his ideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if an essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things. He breathes habitually the serener air which ordinary mortals can only at intervals respire, and in their happiest moments. Such conceptions of great writers are to some extent erroneous. Through the medium of their books we know them only in their active mental states,--in their triumphs; we do not see them when sluggishness has succeeded the effort which was delight. The statue does not come to her white limbs all at once. It is the bronze wrestler, not the flesh and blood one, that stands forever over a fallen adversary with pride of victory on his face.

Of the labour, the weariness, the self-distrust, the utter despondency of the great writer, we know nothing. Then, for the attainment of mere happiness or contentment, any high faculty of imagination is a questionable help. Of course imagination lights the torch of joy, it deepens the carmine on the sleek cheek of the girl, it makes wine sparkle, makes music speak, gives rays to the rising sun. But in all its supreme sweetnesses there is a perilous admixture of deceit, which is suspected even at the moment when the senses tingle keenliest. And it must be remembered that this potent faculty can darken as well as brighten. It is the very soul of pain. While the trumpets are blowing in Ambition's ear, it whispers of the grave. It drapes Death in austere solemnities, and surrounds him with a gloomy court of terrors. The life of the imaginative man is never a commonplace one: his lights are brighter, his glooms are darker, than the lights and gloom of the vulgar.

His ecstasies are as restless as his pains. The great writer has this perilous faculty in excess; and through it he will, as a matter of course, draw out of the atmosphere of circ.u.mstance surrounding him the keenness of pleasure and pain. To my own notion, the best gifts of the G.o.ds are neither the most glittering nor the most admired. These gifts I take to be, a moderate ambition, a taste for repose with circ.u.mstances favourable thereto, a certain mildness of pa.s.sion, an even-beating pulse, an even-beating heart. I do not consider heroes and celebrated persons the happiest of mankind. I do not envy Alexander the shouting of his armies, nor Dante his laurel wreath. Even were I able, I would not purchase these at the prices the poet and the warrior paid. So far, then, as great writers--great poets, especially--are of imagination all compact--a peculiarity of mental const.i.tution which makes a man go shares with every one he is brought into contact with; which makes him enter into Romeo's rapture when he touches Juliet's cheek among cypresses silvered by the Verona moonlight, and the stupor of the blinded and pinioned wretch on the scaffold before the bolt is drawn--so far as this special gift goes, I do not think the great poet,--and by virtue of it he _is_ a poet,--is likely to be happier than your more ordinary mortal. On the whole, perhaps, it is the great readers rather than the great writers who are entirely to be envied. They pluck the fruits, and are spared the trouble of rearing them. Prometheus filched fire from heaven, and had for reward the crag of Caucasus, the chain, the vulture; while they for whom he stole it cook their suppers upon it, stretch out benumbed hands towards it, and see its light reflected in their children's faces. They are comfortable: he, roofed by the keen crystals of the stars, groans above.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. The majority of men slip into their graves without having encountered on their way thither any signal catastrophe or exaltation of fortune or feeling.

Collect a thousand ignited sticks into a heap, and you have a bonfire which may be seen over three counties. If, during thirty years, the annoyances connected with shirt-b.u.t.tons found missing when you are hurriedly dressing for dinner, were gathered into a ma.s.s and endured at once, it would be misery equal to a public execution. If, from the same s.p.a.ce of time, all the little t.i.tillations of a man's vanity were gathered into one lump of honey and enjoyed at once, the pleasure of being crowned would not perhaps be much greater. If the equanimity of an ordinary man be at the mercy of trifles, how much more will the equanimity of the man of letters, who is usually the most sensitive of the race, and whose peculiar avocation makes sad work with the fine tissues of the nerves. Literary composition is, I take it, with the exception of the crank, in which there is neither hope nor result, the most exhausting to which a human being can apply himself. Just consider the situation. Here is your man of letters, tender-hearted as Cowper, who would not count upon his list of friends the man who tramples heedlessly upon a worm; as light of sleep and abhorrent of noise as Beattie, who denounces chanticleer for his l.u.s.ty proclamation of morning to his own and the neighbouring farmyards in terms that would be unmeasured if applied to Nero; as alive to blame as Byron, who declared that the praise of the greatest of the race could not take the sting from the censure of the meanest. Fancy the sufferings of a creature so built and strung in a world which creaks so vilely on its hinges as this! Will such a man confront a dun with an imperturbable countenance? Will he throw himself back in his chair and smile blandly when his chamber is lanced through and through by the notes of a street bagpiper? When his harra.s.sed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to stupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier than people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and unhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his brain bread and beer, clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not surprised that he is oftentimes nervous, querulous, impatient. Thinking of these things, I do not wonder at Hazlitt's spleen, at Charles Lamb's punch, at Coleridge's opium. I think of the days spent in writing, and of the nights which repeat the day in dream, and in which there is no refreshment. I think of the brain which must be worked out at length; of Scott, when the wand of the enchanter was broken, writing poor romances; of Southey sitting vacantly in his library, and drawing a feeble satisfaction from the faces of his books. And for the man of letters there is more than the mere labour: he writes his book, and has frequently the mortification of seeing it neglected or torn to pieces.

Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's life. Most men endure criticism with commendable fort.i.tude, just as most criminals when under the drop conduct themselves with calmness. They bleed, but they bleed inwardly. To be flayed in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, for instance,--a whole amused public looking on,--is far from pleasant; and, after the operation, the ordinary annoyances of life probably magnify themselves into tortures. The gra.s.shopper becomes a burden.

Touch a flayed man ever so lightly, and with ever so kindly an intention, and he is sure to wince. The skin of the man of letters is peculiarly sensitive to the bite of the critical mosquito; and he lives in a climate in which such mosquitoes swarm. He is seldom stabbed to the heart--he is often killed by pin-p.r.i.c.ks.

But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to the interior of the citadel, it may be said that great writers, although they must ever remain shining objects of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinary limitations and conditions. They are cabined, cribbed, confined, even as their more prosaic brethren. It is in the nature of every man to be endued with that he works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchant becomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavour of the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine and horse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul--his experiences are docketed in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away in professional pigeon-holes. A man naturally becomes leavened by the profession which he has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams "shop,"

as the colloquial phrase has it. Men of letters are affected by their profession just as merchants, physicians, and lawyers are. In course of time the inner man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper. The agriculturist talks constantly of bullocks--the man of letters constantly of books. The printing-press seems constantly in his immediate neighbourhood. He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourable review,--he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition. The narrowing effect of a profession is in every man a defect, albeit an inevitable one. Byron, who had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of his day, tells us, in "Beppo,"

"One hates an author that's _all author_; fellows In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink."

And his lordship's "hate" in the matter is understandable enough. In his own day, Scott and himself were almost the only distinguished authors who were not "all authors," just as Mr. Helps and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton are almost the only representatives of the cla.s.s in ours. This professional taint not only resides in the writer, impairing his fulness and completion; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs it also.

It is the professional character which authorship has a.s.sumed which has taken individuality and personal flavour from so much of our writing, and prevented to a large extent the production of enduring books. Our writing is done too hurriedly, and to serve a purpose too immediate.

Literature is not so much an art as a manufacture. There is a demand, and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never allowed to lie fallow, and to nourish itself in peacefulness and silence. When so many cups are to be filled, too much water is certain to be put into the teapot. Letters have become a profession, and probably of all professions it is, in the long run, the least conducive to personal happiness. It is the most precarious. In it, above all others, to be weak is to be miserable. It is the least mechanical, consequently the most exhausting; and in its higher walks it deals with a man's most vital material--utilises his emotions, trades on his faculties of love and imagination, uses for its own purposes the human heart by which he lives.

These things a man requires for himself; and when they are in a large proportion transported to an ideal world, they make the ideal world all the more brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary existence all the more arid and commonplace. You cannot spend money and have it; you cannot use emotion and possess it. The poet who sings loudly of love and love's delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of life be all the colder for his singing. The man who has been moved while describing an imaginary death-bed to-day, is all the more likely to be unmoved while standing by his friend's grave to-morrow. Shakspeare, after emerging from the moonlight in the Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet's silvery interchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously enamoured of the autumn on Ann Hathaway's cheek. It is in some such way as this that a man's books may impoverish his life; that the fire and heat of his genius may make his hearth all the colder. From considerations like these, one can explain satisfactorily enough to one's self the domestic misadventures of men of letters--of poets especially. We know the poets only in their books; their wives know them out of them. Their wives see the other side of the moon; and we have been made pretty well aware how they have appreciated _that_.

The man engaged in the writing of books is tempted to make such writing the be-all and end-all of his existence--to grow his literature out of his history, experience, or observation, as the gardener grows out of soils brought from a distance the plants which he intends to exhibit.

The cup of life foams fiercely over into first books; materials for the second, third, and fourth must be carefully sought for. The man of letters, as time pa.s.ses on, and the professional impulse works deeper, ceases to regard the world with a single eye. The man slowly merges into the artist. He values new emotions and experiences, because he can turn these into artistic shapes. He plucks "copy" from rising and setting suns. He sees marketable pathos in his friend's death-bed. He carries the peal of his daughter's marriage-bells into his sentences or his rhymes; and in these the music sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshine and the wind. If originally of a meditative, introspective mood, his profession can hardly fail to confirm and deepen his peculiar temperament. He begins to feel his own pulse curiously, and for a purpose. As a spy in the service of literature, he lives in the world and its concerns. Out of everything he seeks thoughts and images, as out of everything the bee seeks wax and honey. A curious instance of this mode of looking at things occurs in Goethe's "Letters from Italy," with whom, indeed, it was fashion, and who helped himself out of the teeming world to more effect than any man of his time:--

"From Botzen to Trent the stage is nine leagues, and runs through a valley which constantly increases in fertility. All that merely struggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strength and vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is once more belief in a Deity.

"A poor woman cried out to me to take her child into my vehicle, as the soil was burning its feet. I did her this service out of honour to the strong light of Heaven. The child was strangely decked out, _but I could get nothing from it in any way_."

It is clear that out of all this the reader gains; but I cannot help thinking that for the writer it tends to destroy entire and simple living--all hearty and final enjoyment in life. Joy and sorrow, death and marriage, the comic circ.u.mstance and the tragic, what befalls him, what he observes, what he is brought into contact with, do not affect him as they affect other men; they are secrets to be rifled, stones to be built with, clays to be moulded into artistic shape. In giving emotional material artistic form, there is indisputably a certain n.o.ble pleasure; but it is of a solitary and severe complexion, and takes a man out of the circle and sympathies of his fellows. I do not say that this kind of life makes a man selfish, but it often makes him _seem_ so; and the results of this seeming, on friendship and the domestic relationships, for instance, are as baleful as if selfishness really existed. The peculiar temptation which besets men of letters, the curious playing with thought and emotion, the tendency to a.n.a.lyse and take everything to pieces, has two results, and neither aids his happiness nor even his literary success. On the one hand, and in relation to the social relations, it gives him somewhat of an icy aspect, and so breaks the spring and eagerness of affectionate response. For the best affection is shy, reticent, undemonstrative, and needs to be drawn out by its like.

If unrecognised, like an acquaintance on the street, it pa.s.ses by, making no sign, and is for the time being a stranger. On the other hand, the desire to say a fine thing about a phenomenon, whether natural or moral, prevents a man from reaching the inmost core of the phenomenon. Entrance into these matters will never be obtained by the most sedulous seeking.

The man who has found an entrance cannot tell how he came there, and he will never find his way back again by the same road. From this law arises all the dreary conceits and artifices of the poets; it is through the operation of the same law that many of our simple songs and ballads are inexpressibly affecting, because in them there is no consciousness of authorship; emotion and utterance are twin born, consentaneous--like sorrow and tears, a blow and its pain, a kiss and its thrill. When a man is happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness. I am not happy at all unless I am happier than I know. When the tide is full there is silence in channel and creek. The silence of the lover when he clasps the maid is better than the pa.s.sionate murmur of the song which celebrates her charms. If to be near the rose makes the nightingale tipsy with delight, what must it be to be the rose herself?

One feeling of the "wild joys of living--the leaping from rock to rock,"

is better than the "muscular-Christianity" literature which our time has produced. I am afraid that the profession of letters interferes with the elemental feelings of life; and I am afraid, too, that in the majority of cases this interference is not justified by its results. The entireness and simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitive element, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which was much worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies of love, faith, imagination; and happily it is not given to every one to _live_, in the pecuniary sense, by the artistic utilisation and sale of these. You cannot make ideas; they must come unsought if they come at all.

"From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine"

is a profitable occupation enough, if you stumble on the little churchyard covered over with silence, and folded among the hills. If you go to the churchyard with intent to procure thought, as you go into the woods to gather anemones, you are wasting your time. Thoughts must come naturally, like wild flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed--even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past--like exotics. And it is the misfortune of men of letters of our day that they cannot afford to wait for this natural flowering of thought, but are driven to the forcing process, with the results which were to be expected.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF

The present writer remembers to have been visited once by a strange feeling of puzzlement; and the puzzled feeling arose out of the following circ.u.mstance:--He was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,--for, as before mentioned, there was no s.p.a.ce to speak of intervening,--the feeling of puzzlement alluded to arose in his mind. And it consisted in an attempt to solve the existence before him, to enter into it, to understand it, and his inability to accomplish it, or indeed to make any way toward the accomplishment of it. The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognisance; but he could get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him, and look through it. How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love or hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition, of a life akin so far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,--what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could not compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism! Happily before fancy had time to play another vagary, with a snort and pull the train moved on, and my truckful of horned friends were left gazing into empty s.p.a.ce, with the same wistful, patient, and melancholy expression with which, for the s.p.a.ce of five minutes or so, they had surveyed and bewildered me.

A similar feeling of puzzlement to that which I have indicated, besets one not unfrequently in the contemplation of men and women. You are brought in contact with a person, you attempt to comprehend him, to enter into him, in a word to _be_ him, and, if you are utterly foiled in the attempt, you cannot flatter yourself that you have been successful to the measure of your desire. A person interests, or piques, or tantalises you, you do your best to make him out; yet strive as you will, you cannot read the riddle of his personality. From the invulnerable fortress of his own nature he smiles contemptuously on the beleaguering armies of your curiosity and a.n.a.lysis. And it is not only the stranger that thus defeats you; it may be the brother brought up by the same fireside with you, the best friend whom you have known from early school and college days, the very child, perhaps, that bears your name, and with whose moral and mental apparatus you think you are as familiar as with your own. In the midst of the most amicable relationships and the best understandings, human beings are, at times, conscious of a cold feeling of strangeness--the friend is actuated by a feeling which never could actuate you, some hitherto unknown part of his character becomes visible, and while at one moment you stood in such close neighbourhood, that you could feel his arm touch your own, in the next there is a feeling of removal, of distance, of empty s.p.a.ce betwixt him and you in which the wind is blowing. You and he become separate ent.i.ties. He is related to you as Border peel is related to Border peel on Tweedside, or as ship is related to ship on the sea. It is not meant that any quarrel or direct misunderstanding should have taken place, simply that feeling of foreignness is meant to be indicated which occurs now and then in the intercourse of the most affectionate; which comes as a harsh reminder to friends and lovers that with whatsoever flowery bands they may be linked, they are separated persons, who understand, and can only understand, each other partially. It is annoying to be put out in our notions of men and women thus, and to be forced to rearrange them. It is a misfortune to have to manoeuvre one's heart as a general has to manoeuvre his army.

The globe has been circ.u.mnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the servants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings.

Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference, and marriage a parricide. From these accidents to the affections, and from the efforts to repair them, life has in many a patched and tinkered look.

Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and our delight in the recognition; and in men, as in books, we only know that, the parallel of which we have in ourselves. We know only that portion of the world which we have travelled over; and we are never a whit wiser than our own experiences. Imagination, the falcon, sits on the wrist of Experience, the falconer; she can never soar beyond the reach of his whistle, and when tired she must return to her perch. Our knowledge is limited by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations.

And so it comes about, that a man measures everything by his own foot-rule; that if he is ign.o.ble, all the ign.o.bleness that is in the world looks out upon him, and claims kindred with him; if n.o.ble, all the n.o.bleness in the world does the like. Shakspeare is always the same height with his reader; and when a thousand Christians subscribe to one Confession of Faith, hardly to two of them does it mean the same thing. The world is a great warehouse of raiment, to which every one has access and is allowed free use; and the remarkable thing is, what coa.r.s.e stuffs are often chosen, and how scantily some people are attired.

We never get quit of ourselves. While I am writing, the spring is outside, and this season of the year touches my spirit always with a sense of newness, of strangeness, of resurrection. It shoots boyhood again into the blood of middle age. That tender greening of the black bough and the red field,--that coming again of the new-old flowers,--that re-birth of love in all the family of birds, with cooings, and caressings, and building of nests in wood and brake,--that strange glory of sunshine in the air,--that stirring of life in the green mould, making even churchyards beautiful,--seems like the creation of a new world. And yet--and yet, even with the lamb in the sunny field, the lark mile-high in the blue, Spring has her melancholy side, and bears a sadder burden to the heart than Autumn, preaching of decay with all his painted woods. For the flowers that make sweet the moist places in the forest are not the same that bloomed the year before. Another lark sings above the furrowed field. Nature rolls on in her eternal course, repeating her tale of spring, summer, autumn, winter; but life in man and beast is transitory, and other living creatures take their places. It is quite certain that one or other of the next twenty springs will come unseen by me, will awake no throb of transport in my veins. But will it be less bright on that account?

Will the lamb be saddened in the field? Will the lark be less happy in the air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which I sleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by the riverside. The seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care not for our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and on brown labourers among the hay-swaths. Were the world depopulated to-morrow, next spring would break pitilessly bright, flowers would bloom, fruit-tree boughs wear pink and white; and although there would be no eye to witness, Summer would not adorn herself with one blossom the less. It is curious to think how important a creature a man is to himself. We cannot help thinking that all things exist for our particular selves. The sun, in whose light a system lives, warms me; makes the trees grow for me; paints the evening sky in gorgeous colours for me. The mould I till, produced from the beds of extinct oceans and the grating of rock and mountain during countless centuries, exists that I may have m.u.f.fins to breakfast. Animal life, with its strange instincts and affections, is to be recognised and cherished,--for does it not draw my burdens for me, and carry me from place to place, and yield me comfortable broadcloth, and succulent joints to dinner? I think it matter of complaint that Nature, like a personal friend to whom I have done kind services, will not wear c.r.a.pe at my funeral. I think it cruel that the sun should shine, and birds sing, and I lying in my grave. People talk of the age of the world! So far as I am concerned, it began with my consciousness, and will end with my decease.

And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continually besets us, is in itself a misery and a galling chain. We are never happy till by imagination we are taken out of the pales and limits of self. We receive happiness at second hand: the spring of it may be in ourselves, but we do not know it to be happiness, till, like the sun's light from the moon, it is reflected on us from an object outside. The admixture of a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it. Sheridan prepared his good things in solitude, but he tasted for the first time his jest's prosperity when it came back to him in illumined faces and a roar of applause. Your oldest story becomes new when you have a new auditor. A young man is truth-loving and amiable, but it is only when these fair qualities shine upon him from a girl's face that he is smitten by transport--only then is he truly happy. In that junction of hearts, in that ecstasy of mutual admiration and delight, the finest epithalamium ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion. The countryman purchases oranges at a fair for his little ones; and when he brings them home in the evening, and watches his chubby urchins, sitting up among the bed-clothes, peel and devour the fruit, he is for the time-being richer than if he drew the rental of the orange-groves of Seville. To eat an orange himself is nothing; to see _them_ eat it is a pleasure worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over.

There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter; and love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition. Apart from others no man can make his happiness; just as, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no man can become acquainted with his own lineaments.

The accomplishment of a man is the light by which we are enabled to discover the limits of his personality. Every man brings into the world with him a certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith or force his amount of accomplishment is exactly proportioned. It is in this way that every spoken word, every action of a man, becomes biographical. Everything a man says or does is in consistency with himself; and it is by looking back on his sayings and doings that we arrive at the truth concerning him. A man is one; and every outcome of him has a family resemblance. Goldsmith did _not_ "write like an angel and talk like poor Poll," as we may in part discern from Boswell's "Johnson." Strange, indeed, if a man talked continually the sheerest nonsense, and wrote continually the gracefulest humours; if a man was lame on the street, and the finest dancer in the ball-room. To describe a character by ant.i.thesis is like painting a portrait in black and white--all the curious intermixtures and gradations of colour are lost. The accomplishment of a human being is measured by his strength, or by his nice tact in using his strength. The distance to which your gun, whether rifled or smooth-bored, will carry its shot, depends upon the force of its charge. A runner's speed and endurance depends upon his depth of chest and elasticity of limb. If a poet's lines lack harmony, it instructs us that there is a certain lack of harmony in himself. We see why Haydon failed as an artist when we read his life.

No one can dip into the "Excursion" without discovering that Wordsworth was devoid of humour, and that he cared more for the narrow c.u.mberland vale than he did for the big world. The flavour of opium can be detected in the "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel." A man's word or deed takes us back to himself, as the sunbeam takes us back to the sun.

It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice. If you do your fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage--in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste. You may have seen at country fairs a machine by which the rustics test their strength of arm. A country fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, and the amount of the recoil--dependent, of course, on the force with which it is struck--is represented by a series of notches or marks. The world is such a buffer. A man strikes it with all his might; his mark may be 40,000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name in literature or art; but in every case his mark is nicely determined by the force or the art with which the buffer is struck. Into the world a man brings his personality, and his biography is simply a catalogue of its results.

There are some men who have no individuality, just as there are some men who have no face. These are to be described by generals, not by particulars. They are thin, vapid, inconclusive. They are important solely on account of their numbers. For them the census enumerator labours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make the money; they do the ordinary work of the world. They are valuable when well officered. They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman's hand; and are built with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate, they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is the disseminated thoughts of some half a dozen men, who are in all probability sleeping quietly in their graves. They retain dead men's ideas, just as the atmosphere retains the light and heat of the set sun. They are not light--they are twilight. To know how to deal with such men--to know how to use them--is the problem which ambitious force is called upon to solve. Personality, individuality, force of character, or by whatever name we choose to designate original and vigourous manhood, is the best thing which nature has in her gift. The forceful man is a prophecy of the future. The wind blows here, but long after it is spent the big wave which is its creature, breaks on a sh.o.r.e a thousand miles away. It is curious how swiftly influences travel from centre to circ.u.mference. A certain empress invents a gracefully pendulous crinoline, and immediately, from Paris to the pole, the female world is behooped; and neither objurgation of brother, lover, or husband, deaths by burning or machinery, nor all the wit of the satirists, are likely to affect its vitality. Never did an idea go round civilisation so rapidly. Crinoline has already a heavier martyrology than many a creed. The world is used easily, if one can only hit on the proper method; and force of character, originality, of whatever kind, is always certain to make its mark. It is a diamond, and the world is its pane of gla.s.s. In a world so commonplace as this, the peculiar man even should be considered a blessing. Humorousness, eccentricity, the habit of looking at men and things from an odd angle, are valuable, because they break the dead level of society and take away its sameness. It is well that a man should be known by something else than his name; there are few of us who can be known by anything else, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson are the names of the majority.

In literature and art, this personal outcome is of the highest value; in fact, it is the only thing truly valuable. The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself. The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time. It was a difficult thing to discover America; since it has been discovered, it has been found an easy enough task to sail thither. It is this peculiar something resident in a poem or a painting which is its final test,--at all events, possessing it, it has the elements of endurance. Apart from its other values, it has, in virtue of that, a biographical one; it becomes a study of character; it is a window through which you can look into a human interior. There is a cleverness in the world which seems to have neither father nor mother. It exists, but it is impossible to tell from whence it comes,--just as it is impossible to lift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard, and to discover, from its bloom and odour, to what branch it belonged. Such cleverness ill.u.s.trates nothing: it is an anonymous letter. Look at it ever so long, and you cannot tell its lineage. It lives in the catalogue of waifs and strays. On the other hand, there are men whose every expression is characteristic, whose every idea seems to come out of a mould. In the short sentence, or curt, careless saying of such when laid bare, you can read their histories so far, as in the smallest segment of a tree you can trace the markings of its rings. The first dies, because it is shallow-rooted, and has no vitality beyond its own; the second lives, because it is related to and fed by something higher than itself. The famous axiom of Mrs. Gla.s.s, that in order to make hare-soup you "must first catch your hare," has a wide significance.

In art, literature, social life, morals even, you must first catch your man: that done, everything else follows as a matter of course. A man may learn much; but for the most important thing of all he can find neither teachers nor schools.

Each man is the most important thing in the world to himself; but why is he to himself so important? Simply because he is a personality with capacities of pleasure, of pain, who can be hurt, who can be pleased, who can be disappointed, who labours and expects his hire, in whose consciousness, in fact, for the time being, the whole universe lives.

He is, and everything else is relative. Confined to his own personality, making it his tower of outlook, from which only he can survey the outer world, he naturally enough forms a rather high estimate of its value, of its dignity, of its intrinsic worth. This high estimate is useful in so far as it makes his condition pleasant, and it--or rather our p.r.o.neness to form it--we are accustomed to call vanity. Vanity--which really helps to keep the race alive--has been treated harshly by the moralists and satirists. It does not quite deserve the hard names it has been called. It interpenetrates everything a man says or does, but it inter-penetrates for a useful purpose. If it is always an alloy in the pure gold of virtue, it at least does the service of an alloy--making the precious metal workable.

Nature gave man his powers, appet.i.tes, aspirations, and along with these a pan of incense, which fumes from the birth of consciousness to its decease, making the best part of life rapture, and the worst part endurable. But for vanity the race would have died out long ago.

There are some men whose lives seem to us as undesirable as the lives of toads or serpents; yet these men breathe in tolerable content and satisfaction. If a man could hear all that his fellows say of him--that he is stupid, that he is henpecked, that he will be in the _Gazette_ in a week, that his brain is softening, that he has said all his best things--and if he could believe that these pleasant things are true, he would be in his grave before the month was out. Happily no man does hear these things; and if he did, they would only provoke inextinguishable wrath or inextinguishable laughter. A man receives the shocks of life on the buffer of his vanity. Vanity acts as his second and bottleholder in the world's prize-ring, and it fights him well, bringing him smilingly up to time after the fiercest knock-down blows. Vanity is to a man what the oily secretion is to a bird, with which it sleeks and adjusts the plumage ruffled by whatever causes.

Vanity is not only instrumental in keeping a man alive and in heart, but, in its lighter manifestations, it is the great sweetener of social existence. It is the creator of dress and fashion; it is the inventor of forms and ceremonies, to it we are indebted for all our traditions of civility. For vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile. It delights to bask in the sunshine of approbation. Out of man vanity makes _gentle_man. The proud man is cold, the selfish man hard and griping--the vain man desires to shine, to please, to make himself agreeable; and this amiable feeling works to the outside of suavity and charm of manner. The French are the vainest people in Europe, and the most polite.

As each man is to himself the most important thing in the world, each man is an egotist in his thinkings, in his desires, in his fears. It does not, however, follow that each man must be an egotist--as the word is popularly understood--in his speech. But even although this were the case, the world would be divided into egotists, likable and unlikable. There are two kinds of egotism, a trifling vainglorious kind, a mere burning of personal incense, in which the man is at once altar, priest, censer, and divinity; a kind which deals with the accidents and wrappages of the speaker, his equipage, his riches, his family, his servants, his furniture and array. The other kind has no taint of self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, but is rooted in the faculties of love and humour, and this latter kind is never offensive, because it includes others, and knows no scorn or exclusiveness. The one is the offspring of a narrow and unimaginative personality; the other of a large and genial one. There are persons who are the terrors of society. Perfectly innocent of evil intention, they are yet, with a certain brutal unconsciousness, continually trampling on other people's corns. They touch you every now and again like a red-hot iron. You wince, acquit them of any desire to wound, but find forgiveness a hard task. These persons remember everything about themselves, and forget everything about you. They have the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw.

Should your great-grandfather have had the misfortune to be hanged, such a person is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion to your pedigree. He will probably insist on your furnishing him with a sketch of your family tree. If your daughter has made a runaway marriage--on which subject yourself and friends maintain a judicious silence--he is certain to stumble upon it, and make the old sore smart again. In all this there is no malice, no desire to wound; it arises simply from want of imagination, from profound immersion in self. An imaginative man recognises at once a portion of himself in his fellow, and speaks to that. To hurt you is to hurt himself. Much of the rudeness we encounter in life cannot be properly set down to cruelty or badness of heart. The unimaginative man is callous, and although he hurts easily, he cannot be easily hurt in return. The imaginative man is sensitive, and merciful to others, out of the merest mercy to himself.

In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of egotism depends entirely upon the egotist. If he be a conceited man, full of self-admirations and vainglories, his egotism will disgust and repel.

When he sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections are being thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge he calls the writer a c.o.xcomb. If, on the other hand, he be loving, genial, humourous, with a sympathy for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions are forgiven, because while revealing himself, he is revealing his reader as well. A man may write about himself during his whole life without once tiring or offending; but to accomplish this, he must be interesting in himself--be a man of curious and vagrant moods, gifted with the cunningest tact and humour; and the experience which he relates must at a thousand points touch the experiences of his readers, so that they, as it were, become partners in his game. When X. tells me, with an evident swell of pride, that he dines constantly with half-a-dozen men-servants in attendance, or that he never drives abroad save in a coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special grat.i.tude to X. for the information. Possibly, if my establishments boast only of Cinderella, and if a cab is the only vehicle in which I can afford to ride, and all the more if I can indulge in _that_ only on occasions of solemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the other end of the room, and may never afterwards be brought to admit that X. is possessor of a solitary ounce of brains. If, on the other hand, Z. informs me that every February he goes out to the leafless woods to hunt early snowdrops, and brings home bunches of them in his hat; or that he prefers in woman a brown eye to a blue, and explains by early love pa.s.sages his reasons for the preference, I do not get angry; on the contrary, I feel quite pleased; perhaps, if the matter is related with unusual grace and tenderness, it is read with a certain moisture and dimness of eye. And the reason is obvious. The egotistical X. is barren, and suggests nothing beyond himself, save that he is a good deal better off than I am--a reflection much pleasanter to him than it is to me; whereas the equally egotistical Z., with a single sentence about his snowdrops, or his liking for brown eyes rather than for blue, sends my thoughts wandering away back among my dead spring-times, or wafts me the odours of the roses of those summers when the colour of an eye was of more importance than it now is. X.'s men-servants and coach-and-six do not fit into the life of his reader, because in all probability his reader knows as much about these things as he knows about Pharaoh; Z.'s snowdrops and preferences of colour do, because every one knows what the spring thirst is, and every one in his time has been enslaved by eyes whose colour he could not tell for his life, but which he knew were the tenderest that ever looked love, the brightest that ever flashed sunlight. Montaigne and Charles Lamb are egotists of the Z. cla.s.s, and the world never wearies reading them: nor are egotists of the X. school absolutely without entertainment.

Several of these the world reads a.s.siduously too, although for another reason. The avid vanity of Mr. Pepys would be gratified if made aware of the success of his diary; but curiously to inquire into the reason of that success, _why_ his diary has been found so amusing, would not conduce to his comfort.

After all, the only thing a man knows is himself. The world outside he can know only by hearsay. His shred of personality is all he has; than that, he is nothing richer nothing poorer. Everything else is mere accident and appendage. Alexander must not be measured by the shoutings of his armies, nor Lazarus at Dives' gates by his sores. And a man knows himself only in part. In every nature, as in Australia, there is an unexplored territory--green, well-watered regions or mere sandy deserts; and into that territory experience is making progress day by day. We can remember when we knew only the outer childish rim--and from the crescent guessed the sphere; whether, as we advanced, these have been realised, each knows for himself.

A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE

When a man glances critically through the circle of his intimate friends, he is obliged to confess that they are far from being perfect. They possess neither the beauty of Apollo, nor the wisdom of Solon, nor the wit of Mercutio, nor the reticence of Napoleon III. If pushed hard he will be constrained to admit that he has known each and all get angry without sufficient occasion, make at times the foolishest remarks, and act as if personal comfort were the highest thing in their estimation.

Yet, driven thus to the wall, forced to make such uncomfortable confessions, our supposed man does not like his friends one whit the less; nay, more, he is aware that if they were very superior and faultless persons he would not be conscious of so much kindly feeling towards them. The tide of friendship does not rise high on the bank of perfection. Amiable weaknesses and shortcomings are the food of love.

It is from the roughnesses and imperfect breaks in a man that you are able to lay hold of him. If a man be an entire and perfect chrysolite, you slide off him and fall back into ignorance. My friends are not perfect--no more am I--and so we suit each other admirably. Their weaknesses keep mine in countenance, and so save me from humiliation and shame. We give and take, bear and forbear; the stupidity they utter to-day salves the recollection of the stupidity I uttered yesterday; in their want of wit I see my own, and so feel satisfied and kindly disposed. It is one of the charitable dispensations of Providence that perfection is not essential to friendship. If I had to seek my perfect man, I should wander the world a good while, and when I found him, and was down on my knees before him, he would, to a certainty, turn the cold shoulder on me--and so life would be an eternal search, broken by the coldness of repulse and loneliness. Only to the perfect being in an imperfect world, or the imperfect being in a perfect world, is everything irretrievably out of joint.

On a certain shelf in the bookcase which stands in the room in which I am at present sitting--bookcase surmounted by a white Dante, looking out with blind, majestic eyes--are collected a number of volumes which look somewhat the worse for wear. Those of them which originally possessed gilding have had it fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down, and they open of themselves at places wherein I have been happy, and with whose every word I am familiar as with the furniture of the room in which I nightly slumber, each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevant scribbled on their margins. These favourite volumes cannot be called peculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books have I singled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men. I am on easy terms with them, and feel that they are no higher than my heart. Milton is not there, neither is Wordsworth; Shakspeare, if he had written comedies only, would have been there to a certainty, but the presence of the _five_ great tragedies,--Hamlet, Oth.e.l.lo, Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra--for this last should be always included among his supreme efforts--has made me place him on the shelf where the mighty men repose, himself the mightiest of all. Reading Milton is like dining off gold plate in a company of kings; very splendid, very ceremonious, and not a little appalling. Him I read but seldom, and only on high days and festivals of the spirit. Him I never lay down without feeling my appreciation increased for lesser men--never without the same kind of comfort that one returning from the presence feels when he doffs respectful att.i.tude and dress of ceremony, and subsides into old coat, familiar arm-chair, and slippers. After long-continued organ-music, the jangle of the jews-harp is felt as an exquisite relief. With the volumes on the special shelf I have spoken of, I am quite at home, and I feel somehow as if they were at home with me. And as to-day the trees bend to the blast, and the rain comes in dashes against my window, and as I have nothing to do and cannot get out, and wish to kill the hours in as pleasant a manner as I can, I shall even talk about them, as in sheer liking a man talks about the trees in his garden, or the pictures on his wall. I can't expect to say anything very new or striking, but I can give utterance to sincere affection, and that is always pleasant to one's self and generally not ungrateful to others.