UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 MY STUDY FIRE 
 
 SECOND SERIES 
 
 . , I
 
 WORKS BY MR. MABIE. 
 
 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 MY STUDY FIRE, Second Series. 
 
 UNDER THE TREES AND ELSE 
 WHERE. 
 
 SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE. 
 
 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRE 
 TATION.
 
 MY STUDY FIRE ** BY 
 
 HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 
 SECOND SERIES. 
 
 NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY, 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 MDCCCXCVI
 
 Copyright, 1894, 
 
 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY. 
 AU rights reserved. 
 
 SStubetsit? $ress: 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
 
 PS 
 
 TO 
 
 LORRAINE 
 
 AND 
 
 HELEN
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE BOOK AND THE READER 
 
 THE READER'S SECRET 
 
 THE POETRY OF FLAME . 
 
 THE FINALITIES OF EXPRESSION 17 
 
 ENJOYING ONE'S MIND 23 
 
 A NEGLECTED GIFT 29 
 
 CONCERNING CULTURE 34 
 
 THE MAGIC OF TALK 39 
 
 WORK AND ART 46 
 
 JOY IN LIFE 51 
 
 THE REAL AND THE SHAM 57 
 
 LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH 63 
 
 THE POETS' CORNER 68 
 
 .THE JOY OF THE MOMENT 74 
 
 THE LOWELL LETTERS 79 
 
 THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS 86 
 
 THE SPELL OF STYLE 91 
 
 THE SPEECH AS LITERATURE 96
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A POET OF ASPIRATION 101 
 
 THE READING PUBLIC 107 
 
 SANITY AND ART 113, 
 
 MANNER AND MAN 119! 
 
 THE OUTING OF THE SOUL 123 
 
 THE POWER WHICH LIBERATES 128 
 
 THE UNCONSCIOUS ARTIST 133 
 
 THE LAW OF OBEDIENCE 138 
 
 STRUGGLE IN ART 14; 
 
 THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION 
 
 CRITICISM AS AN INTERPRETER 153 
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL QUALITY OF CRITICISM .... 158 
 
 PLATO'S DIALOGUES AS LITERATURE , . 16; 
 
 THE POWER OF THE NOVEL i6< 
 
 CONCERNING ORIGINALITY 17; 
 
 BY THE WAY 17*
 
 PS 
 
 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 THE BOOK AND THE READER. 
 
 MRS. BATTLE, intent upon whist, insisted upon "a 
 clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game." 
 The veteran reader, who has corne to love his occupa 
 tion not only for what it gives him but for itself, is 
 equally punctilious ; he must have a quiet room, a 
 cheerful blaze, and the book that fits his mood. He 
 has meditated before the fire, book in hand, so many 
 silent and happy days that he knows all the subtle 
 adjustments which a man may make between himself 
 and his library. I rarely look at my books in that 
 leisurely half-hour which precedes getting to work 
 without fancying myself at the keyboard of an organ, 
 the pipes' of which are the gilded and many-coloured 
 rows on the shelves about me. One may have any 
 kind of music he chooses ; it is only a question of 
 mood. There is no deep harmony, no haunting mel 
 ody, ever heard by the spirit of man which one may 
 not hear if he knows his books thoroughly. The great 
 gales that swept Ulysses into unknown seas, and the 
 soft winds that stirred the myrtles and brought down
 
 2 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the pine cones about Theocritus are still astir, if one 
 knows how to listen. And those inner melodies which 
 the heart of man has been singing to itself these thou 
 sands of years are audible above all. the tumult of the 
 world if one has a place of silence, an hour of solitude, 
 and a heart that has kept the freshness of its youth. 
 
 The quality which makes a reader master of the 
 secret of books is primarily of the soul, and only sec 
 ondarily of the mind ; and to get the deepest and 
 sweetest out of literature one must read with the heart. 
 A book read with the mind only is skimmed ; true 
 reading involves the imagination and the feelings. 
 And it is for this reason that one needs to select a 
 book for the day, instead of taking the first one that 
 comes to hand. If one reads simply as a mental exer 
 cise or for information, one book is as good as another ; 
 but if one reads for personal enlargement and enrich 
 ment, every hour has its own book. There are days 
 for Sir Thomas Browne and days for Lamb although 
 I am often of opinion that all days are for Lamb ; 
 there are days for Shakespeare and days for Words 
 worth, days for Scott and days for Thackeray. The 
 great days when one is buoyant, fertile, virile, belong 
 to the great writers. Emerson says, with regard to 
 that difficult dialogue of Plato's, the " Timseus," that 
 one must wait long for the fit hour in which to read it : 
 " At last the elect morning arrives, the early dawn a 
 few lights conspicuous in the heavens, as of a world 
 just created and still becoming and in its wide 
 leisure one dare open that book." These hours of
 
 THE BOOK AND THE READER. 3 
 
 health and vitality belong to Dante, Shakespeare, and 
 Goethe, and their kindred. The morning hours are 
 due to the mountain summits, and it is a sad waste 
 to bestow them on any outlook narrower than the 
 horizons. But there are other days, hardly less profit 
 able, when one does not stir with the lark, but lingers 
 under the shadow of the roof-tree ; and for these more 
 subdued hours there are voices equally musical, if not 
 so compelling, voices of personal it not of universal 
 truth. A reader of catholic temper will welcome all 
 the great spirits at his hearthstone, and will leave the 
 latch-string out for the new-comer whose name still 
 lingers in that delightful obscurity which precedes fame. 
 It is a mistake to read too many books, to permit 
 x the habit of reading to obscure the ends of reading ; 
 but it is equally a mistake to read exclusively in a very 
 few directions. There are people whose egotism trans 
 forms their very faults into virtues, and who imagine that 
 their love of books is profound because it is limited. 
 One can have but few intimate friends, but it is wise to 
 choose these friends from among the greatest, and 
 especially from among those whose temperament, 
 habit, and surroundings are, different from our own. 
 It was said of Dr. Mulford that he was narrow on great 
 lines ; the difficulty with many men is that they are' ' 
 narrow on small lines. It is wise to follow one's taste, 
 for that is the line of least resistance, but it must not 
 be forgotten that what is commonly called taste is not 
 necessarily , good taste; it is merely personal, inclina 
 tion : good taste involves education. Our companions
 
 4 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 of the mind ought, therefore, to be, not those who 
 confirm us in our preconceptions and build our limita 
 tions still more massively about us, but those who lib 
 erate us from the defects of our nature and the faults 
 of our training. " Our friends," says Emerson, " are 
 those who make us do what we can." The friend who 
 entertains us is welcome, but if he does not pass 
 beyond that stage in our intercourse he never really 
 touches what is deep and individual in us ; there is no 
 real commerce of soul between us. The wise reader, 
 therefore, will not always turn to one corner of his 
 library, but will pass from shelf to shelf, and will know 
 best those who are best worth knowing. 
 
 Those only who can command the highest pleasures 
 of life solitude, leisure, and books are able to 
 realize the temptations which beset the reader and lure 
 him often from the strait and narrow way which leads 
 to the deepest and richest intellectual life. Sitting in 
 slippered ease before a merry fire, the earth white to 
 the horizon, the air keen as that at Elsinore, bells in 
 the distance and silence and warmth within doors, one 
 feels the danger of becoming a callous monopolist. 
 The consciousness that one is steeping his mind in 
 pure comfort, in unmixed delight, while most men are 
 toiling in offices and rushing about crowded streets, 
 sometimes breeds a dangerous sense of being favoured 
 of fortune. The scholar has ever been the most fortu 
 nate of men, because he is free to pursue the things of 
 the mind, while his fellows are compelled to pursue 
 the things of the body. But the scholar is sometimes
 
 THE BOOK AND THE READER. 5 
 
 as arid as some men of affairs, as juiceless and unin 
 teresting as some capitalists. Acquisition for its own 
 sake develops the same quality of character whether 
 one devotes himself to the hoarding of money or of 
 facts. There is, however, a largeness, a vitality, about 
 books which helps one against the very temptations 
 which they present to the man who loves them. To 
 read for the mere luxury of reading is to miss the best 
 things which they have to give. In every true com 
 panionship there is an interchange ; one gives as well 
 as receives. The best reading the most intelligent 
 and fruitful involves a community of interest and 
 thought between the reader and the writer; the con 
 tribution of the latter is positive, and that of the former 
 negative, but both are real and both are necessary. 
 The actor speaks in vain unless the imagination of the 
 theatre kindles and co-operates with him. In every 
 audience there are listeners who have almost as much 
 to do with the speaker's felicity and eloquence as he 
 has himself; they are persons who listen actively, not 
 passively. There are readers who hang like dead 
 weights on the skirts of a writer, and there are those 
 who walk beside him buoyant with his strength, eager 
 with his energy of spirit, and kindled with the glow of 
 his thought. These are the readers who make a true 
 exchange with the writer, who are not weakened by 
 many books, who select the best, and become com 
 panions of the heart as well as of the mind.
 
 THE READER'S SECRET. 
 
 ONE of the secrets of the artist is the facility and 
 completeness with which he turns his conscious pro 
 cesses of mind into unconscious ones, and so does 
 without effort that which costs a man less thoroughly 
 trained no little toil. To do with ease what one began 
 to do with effort is to have passed from the state of 
 the artisan to that of the artist. Art involves the hard 
 est kind of work, but in its essence it is play ; for it is 
 always an overflow of the creative force of a rich nature, 
 and never power strained to the last point of endurance. 
 A great picture, poem, or symphony always leaves the 
 impression of something behind richer and profounder 
 than that which it conveys ; it makes one conscious, 
 as Ruskin has said, of a great power rather than of 
 great effort. A man is never master of his material 
 and his art until they have become so much a part of 
 him that he can hardly separate himself from them. 
 The material has been absorbed by his imagination 
 and brooded over so long that it becomes his own by 
 the only absolute right of possession known among 
 men. So Shakespeare took the story of the " Tem 
 pest " as he found it in some Italian or Spanish tale, 
 and meditated upon it until the whole wealth of his
 
 THE READER'S SECRET. / 
 
 nature passed into it and the bare framework became 
 incrusted with such pearls as lie only in the great deeps 
 of such a heart as his. The art has been so lovingly 
 studied and so loyally practised that it becomes a 
 skill of the soul rather than a dexterity of the hand, 
 and what was at first calculated with nicest sense of 
 proportion and adjustment becomes at last a natural and 
 almost effortless putting forth of strength. 
 
 Now, the trained reader who has mastered his art 
 passes through a kindred progress from the conscious 
 to the unconscious. He begins with rules, times, and 
 habits ; these are the mechanical side of his training ; 
 but when he has learned his craft he has long ago for 
 gotten them. The artist's education is of supreme 
 importance to him ; but when he comes at last to 
 handle his brush with creative freedom and force, the 
 processes of his training are as far behind him and out 
 of his thought as is the hard discipline of learning one's 
 letters out of mind when one is deep in " Henry 
 Esmond" or "The Tale of Two Cities." The con 
 scious process has become unconscious ; that which 
 one began to do as work he now does as play. The 
 attitude of the reader toward his book is at last one 
 of unconscious receptivity ; his intelligence is keenly 
 awake and active, but it has ceased to be conscious 
 of itself: the whole nature is absorbed in the book. 
 This means true reading, reading, not for entertain 
 ment, but for personal enrichment and enlargement. 
 One may skim a book as a swallow skims through the 
 air and leaves no trace of its flight ; or one may build
 
 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 a nest in a book and make it one of the homes' of the 
 spirit in the brief summer of life. The great works of 
 the imagination ought to be part of our lives as they 
 were once of the very substance of the men who made 
 them. 
 
 To see only the splendid pageantry of the Shake 
 spearean drama is to suffer the eye to cheat the imagi 
 nation. Shakespeare speaks to that which is deepest 
 and most individual in us ; his word is for the soul, 
 not for the ear only. To catch the matchless music 
 of his verse is, indeed, one of the joys of life ; but that 
 faultless melody, which drains into its harmonious flow 
 all the rills of music hidden in spoken words, is but 
 the sign and symbol of the life which it contains and 
 reveals. When the young Goethe said, after reading 
 Shakespeare for the first time, that he felt as if he had 
 been reading the book of fate with the hurricane of 
 life sweeping through it and tossing its leaves to and 
 fro, he made it clear that he had read Shakespeare with 
 his heart ; he had touched the vital power in the great 
 dramatist, and he had been enriched for all time. 
 Every great book is charged with life ; the measure 
 of its greatness is the degree in which it has been vital 
 ised by the great nature out of which it issued. This 
 vital power is the heart and soul of the book, and to 
 get at it and possess it is the highest task and the su 
 preme reward of the reader of the book. When he 
 has reached a point where, his intelligence alert and 
 eager, he unconsciously absorbs the book, he has be 
 come co-operative with the writer, and, in a sense, on
 
 THE READER'S SECRET. 9 
 
 a level with him. It is to such readers that the great 
 minds speak, and from such readers they hold back 
 nothing they have learned of the mystery of life and 
 art. 
 
 One may read the play of " Antony and Cleopatra " 
 and get nothing from it but a series of brilliant pictures ; 
 or one may read it and add a large measure of Eastern 
 and Roman life to his own life, and push back the 
 horizons of his own experience so as to include these 
 great and tragical workings-out of human destiny under 
 both eternal and historical conditions. Could a day 
 of solitude and silence be given to a richer use than 
 this? One will not drain the play of its meaning in 
 many days, but one day set apart to it will make the 
 work of succeeding days easy and inevitable. Here 
 is a great piece of art, which is, like all kindred works, 
 a great piece of life. To get at its secret one must 
 use all intelligence, but above all one must open his 
 heart to it ; one must be willing, first of all, to receive 
 it fully and unresistingly ; there will be time enough for 
 criticism later ; the first thing to be done is to possess the 
 poem. When one forgets himself and surrenders him 
 self to a work of art, he feels at the very start its obvious 
 beauty ; he gets the first intention of the poet ; he aban 
 dons himself to the music with which the thought first 
 speaks to him, to the colour and form which instantly ad 
 dress the eye. He who would master a noble piece of 
 art must begin with the purest, fullest, and simplest joy 
 in its most obvious beauty. 
 
 This very beauty awakens the imagination, and now
 
 IO MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the reader becomes a poet no less than the writer ; he 
 confirms the true art of the play by disclosing in him 
 self the miracle which true art always works. For 
 great art is never complete in itself ; it is complete 
 only in the imagination of him who really sees it, and 
 when that imagination finishes the sublime work which 
 the greatest poet can only begin. And now Rome 
 and Egypt cease to be geographical expressions ; they 
 rise on the horizon of thought; they are thronged 
 with hurrying feet, and life surges through their streets 
 and beats itself out against their walls. And that life 
 takes on its own form and atmosphere : Rome, mas 
 sive, virile, masterful ; Egypt, languorous, voluptuous, 
 enervating. Cities, dress, atmosphere, are recreated ; 
 and, touched by the same spell, men and women whose 
 names were fading on the dusty page of history live 
 and move with a vitality which once made them 
 masters of the world-movements. These striking 
 persons reveal their several characters, disclose their 
 relations to the time, the institutions, and the his 
 toric movement ; we are absorbed in their personal 
 destiny as it is wrought out against the background of 
 two civilisations. The story runs on with an ever- 
 widening sweep and with ever-clearing tendency, and 
 slowly, out of that which is personal and individual, 
 the vaster drama of the soul unfolds itself, and what 
 was Roman and Egyptian becomes universal and for 
 all time. When at last the curtain falls, we have made 
 conquest of a striking bit of history, of two diverse 
 kinds of civilisation, of one of the most splendid and
 
 THE READER'S SECRET. II 
 
 significant stories of human passion and suffering, 
 and of a great chapter out of the spiritual story of the 
 race. This appropriation has come to us, not by 
 analysis, but by the co-operating activity of the imagi 
 nation, opening the mind and the heart to the free 
 play of the poet's purpose and genius ; analysis may 
 come later, but the vital quality and the spiritual secret 
 of the play are mastered by unconscious receptivity. 
 It is always better to give than to receive, and in giving 
 ourselves we have gained Shakespeare.
 
 THE POETRY OF FLAME. 
 
 ONE who has the passion for reading learns to read 
 under all conditions ; but there are books which refuse 
 to compromise with the convenience of the reader, 
 and demand not only the right moment but the har 
 monious atmosphere. One may read Dickens with 
 impunity anywhere ; the human interest in his stories 
 is so close and so catholic that they gain rather than 
 lose by the sense of the nearness and pressure of 
 human life ; but it would be little less than sacrilege to 
 open Landor's " Hellenics " in a street-car, or Sir 
 Philip Sidney's " Arcadia " on a ferry-boat. Books of 
 this temper will not bear contact with the hard actuali 
 ties of human condition ; they exact the reverence of 
 a quiet mood and an hour of solitude. So, I some 
 times fancy, every book guards its innermost secret 
 with certain conditions which, like the hedge of thorns 
 about the sleeping Princess, preserve it for those 
 elected by taste and temperament to master it. There 
 are poems which need the high light of summer morn 
 ings out-of-doors ; and there are poems which need 
 the ruddy flame of the wood fire. All motion has a 
 rhythm, if we are keen enough to detect it ; and I 
 suspect that every dancing flame playing capriciously
 
 POETRY OF FLAME. 13 
 
 along the glowing logs has a music of its own. Some 
 times, when one is in the mood, the rhythm of the fire 
 strikes into the rhythm of the verse, and the two flow 
 on together. Fortunate is the poet when Nature takes 
 up his song in her own key, and fortunate is the reader 
 when this special felicity befalls him ! 
 
 An open fire finds its peculiar charm in the libera 
 tion of imagination which it effects. It is all colour, 
 motion, sound, and change, and he must be dull 
 indeed who does not straightway become a poet under 
 its spell. For the work of the fire is a symbol of the 
 work of the imagination ; it liberates the ethereal 
 qualities prisoned in the dense fibres of the wood ; it 
 transforms the prose of hard material into the poetry 
 of flame. Whether we respond to it or not, the hum 
 of the fire is a song out of the music to which all 
 things are set, and its brief burning is part of the 
 process by which, to those who see with the imagina 
 tion, this hard, intractable world is always bearing that 
 harvest of poetry of which Emerson was thinking when 
 he wrote : " Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, 
 saw the splendour of meaning that plays over the visible 
 world; knew that a tree has another use than for 
 apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of 
 the earth than for tillage and roads ; that these things 
 bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being 
 emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their 
 natural history a certain mute commentary on human 
 life." 
 
 The open fire sings its song, heard or unheard, in
 
 14 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 all ears. It is the oldest and most primitive of all the 
 forms of service which men exact from nature ; but, 
 glowing on all hearths and for all sorts and conditions 
 of men, it is always and everywhere transforming the 
 prose of life into poetry ; for poetry, being the soul of 
 things, is universal. It is only the very highest gifts 
 which, as Lowell has said of heaven, are to be had for 
 the asking. To a few are given the shows of rank and 
 the luxury of wealth, but purity, nobility, and self- 
 sacrifice are to be had by every comer. We are all 
 born poets, although so many of us defeat the purposes 
 of nature. For the world produces poetry as naturally 
 and inevitably as a tree bears its blossoms, and we are 
 compelled to close our eyes to avoid seeing that which 
 the imagination must see if it see at all. It is in what 
 we call common things that poetry hides, and he who 
 cannot find it there cannot find it anywhere. It is 
 absence of the poetic mind, not lack of poetic material, 
 which makes some periods so sterile in imaginative 
 production. When the imagination is powerful and 
 creative, everything turns to poetry, the stranded 
 ship on the bar, the rusty anchor at the wharf, the 
 glimpse of cloud at the end of the street, the shout of 
 children at play, the crumbling hut, the work-stained 
 man returning from his task, the whole movement 
 and stir of life in the vast range of common incident 
 and universal experience. Touch life anywhere with 
 the imagination and it turns into gold, or into some 
 thing less material and perishable. We live, move, and 
 have our being in the atmosphere of poetry ; for every
 
 THE POETRY OF FLAME. 15 
 
 act of sacrifice, every touch of tenderness, every word 
 of love, every birth of aspiration, is so much experience 
 transformed into poetry. Could anything be more 
 commonplace, to the mind that has not learned that 
 the commonplace is always an illusion, than the fact 
 that a young girl, living in rural solitude, had died? 
 That was the bare fact, the prose rendering ; and this 
 is the truth, the poetic rendering : 
 
 " She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
 
 Beside the springs of Dove ; 
 A maid whom there were none to praise, 
 And very few to love. 
 
 " A violet by a mossy stone 
 
 Half hidden from the eye ! 
 Fair as a star, when only one 
 Is shining in the sky. 
 
 " She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 But she is in her grave, and, oh, 
 The difference to me ! " 
 
 There is a kind of elemental simplicity of feeling, 
 imagery, and diction in these brief lines that touches 
 us like the ripple of a brook in the woods. Life has 
 few facts more unadorned than those which furnish the 
 material for these verses, but does the imagination 
 flash its mysterious light anywhere in literature more 
 distinctly? The little poem is as quiet, simple, solitary 
 as the mountain tarn, but it is as deep ; and there are 
 stars in its depths. It is an illusion that some things are
 
 1 6 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 commonplace, some experiences without significance, 
 and some lives without vision and beauty. The wood 
 becomes flame, the seed turns into flower, the mist 
 athwart the rays of light is changed into the gold of the 
 evening sky, the hidden and unconscious sacrifice 
 flashes suddenly into one of those deeds which men 
 count for proofs of immortality, the uncouth pleader of 
 the frontier becomes the hero of the " Commemora 
 tion Ode,"- 
 
 " New birth of our new soil, the first American."
 
 THE FINALITIES OF EXPRESSION. 
 
 SOCRATES seems to most of us an eminently whole 
 some character, incapable of corrupting the youth, 
 although adjudged guilty of that grave offence, and 
 altogether a man fo be trusted and honoured. And 
 the tradition of Xantippe adds our sympathy to our 
 faith. But Carlyle evidently distrusted Socrates, for 
 he says of him, reproachfully, that he was " terribly at 
 ease in Zion." It is quite certain that neither within 
 Zion nor outside its walls was Carlyle at ease. No 
 sweating smith ever groaned more at his task than 
 did this greatest of modern English literary artists. 
 He fairly grovelled in toil, bemoaning himself and 
 smiting his fellow-man in sheer anguish of spirit ; pro 
 ducing his masterpieces to an accompaniment of pas 
 sionate but unprofane curses on the conditions under 
 which, and the task upon which, he worked. This, 
 however, was the artisan, not the artist, side of the 
 great writer ; it was the toil-worn, unrelenting Scotch 
 conscience astride his art and riding it at times as 
 Tarn o' Shanter spurred his gray mare, Meg, on the 
 ride to Kirk Alloway. Socrates, on the other hand, 
 is always at ease and in repose. His touch on the 
 highest themes is strong and sure, but light almost as 
 
 2
 
 1 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 air. There seem to be no effort about his morality, 
 no self-consciousness in his piety, no strain in his phi 
 losophy. The man and his words are in perfect har 
 mony, and both seem to be a natural flowering and 
 fulfilment of the higher possibilities of life. Uncouth 
 as he was in person, there was a strange and com 
 pelling beauty in this unconventional teacher ; for the 
 expression both of his character and of his thought was 
 wholly in the field of art. He was an artist Just as 
 truly as Phidias or Pericles or Plato ; one, that is, who 
 gave the world not the processes but the results of 
 labour ; for grace, as George Macdonald somewhere 
 says, is the result of forgotten toil. Socrates had his 
 struggles, but what the world saw and heard was the 
 final and harmonious achievement; it heard the fin 
 ished speech, not the orator declaiming on the beach 
 with pebbles in his mouth ; it saw the completed picture, 
 not the artist struggling with those obdurate patches 
 of colour about which Hamerton tells us. When 
 the supreme moment and experience came, Socrates 
 was calm amid his weeping friends, and died with the 
 quiet assurance of one to whom death was so entirely 
 incidental that any special agitation would seem to exag 
 gerate its importance ; and exaggeration is intolerable 
 in art. 
 
 This bit of vital illustration may suggest a deeper 
 view of art than that which we habitually take, and a 
 view which may make us for a moment conscious 
 of the loss which modern life sustains in having .lost 
 so largely the art spirit. Men degenerate without a
 
 THE FINALITIES OF EXPRESSION. 19 
 
 strong grasp on morality, but they grow deformed and 
 unhappy without art. For art is as truly the final ex 
 pression of perfect character as of perfect thought, 
 and beauty is as much a quality of divinity as right 
 eousness. When goodness gets beyond self-conscious 
 ness, when the love of man for God becomes as genu 
 ine and simple and instinctive as the love of a child 
 for its father, both goodness and love become beauti 
 ful. Beauty is the final form of all pure activities, and 
 truth and righteousness do not reach their perfect 
 stage until they take on beauty. Struggle is heroic, 
 and our imaginations are deeply moved by it, but 
 struggle is only a means to an end, and to rest in it 
 and glorify it is to exalt the process above the consum 
 mation. We need beauty just as truly as we'need 
 truth, for it is as much a part of our lives. A beauti 
 ful character, like a beautiful poem or statue, becomes 
 a type or standard ; it brings the ideal within our 
 vision, and, while it fills us with a divine discontent, 
 satisfies and consoles us. The finalities of character 
 and of art restore our vision of the ends of life, and, 
 by disclosing the surpassing and thrilling beauty of the 
 final achievement, reconcile us to the toil and anguish 
 which go before it. The men and women are few 
 who would not gladly die if they might do one worthy 
 thing perfectly. 
 
 The conscience of most English-speaking people 
 has been trained in the direction of morality, but not 
 in the direction of beauty. We hold ourselves with 
 painful solicitude from all contact with that which cor-
 
 2O MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 rupts or defiles, but we are absolutely unscrupulous 
 when it comes to colour and form and proportion. We 
 are studious not to offend the moral sense, but we 
 do not hesitate to abuse the aesthetic sense. We fret 
 at political corruption, and at long intervals we give 
 ourselves the trouble of getting rid of it ; but we put 
 up public buildings which may well make higher intel 
 ligences than ours shudder at such an uncovering of 
 our deformity. We insist on decent compliance with 
 the law, but we ruthlessly despoil a beautiful landscape 
 and stain a fair sky, as if these acts were not flagrant 
 violations of the order of the universe. The truth is, 
 our consciences are like our tastes ; they are only 
 half trained. They operate directly and powerfully 
 on one side of our lives, and on the other they are 
 dumb and inactive. 
 
 An intelligent conscience insists on a whole life no 
 less than on a clean one ; it exacts obedience, not to 
 one set of laws, but to law ; it makes us as uncomfort 
 able in the presence of a neglected opportunity as in 
 the presence of a misused one. It is not surprising 
 that men are restless under present conditions ; there 
 is a squalor in many manufacturing and mining coun 
 tries which eats into the soul, an ugliness that hurts 
 the eye and makes the heart ache. Blue sky and green 
 grass cry out at such profanation, and it is not strange 
 that the soul of the man who daily faces that hideous 
 deformity of God's fair world grows savage and that he 
 becomes a lawbreaker like his employer. For lawbreak- 
 ing is contagious, and he who violates the wholesome
 
 THE FINALITIES OF EXPRESSION'. 21 
 
 beauty of the world lets loose a spirit which will not 
 discriminate between general and particular property, 
 between the landscape and the private estates which 
 compose it. The culprit who defaces a picture in a pub 
 lic gallery meets with condign punishment, but the man 
 who defaces a lovely bit of nature, a living picture set in 
 the frame of a golden day, goes unwhipped of justice ; 
 for we are as yet only partly educated, and civilization 
 ends abruptly in more than one direction. 
 
 The absence of the corrective spirit of art is seen 
 in the obtrusiveness of much of our morality and re 
 ligion ; we formulate and methodise so much that 
 ought to be spontaneous and free. The natural key 
 is never out of harmony with the purest strains of 
 which the soul is capable, but we distrust it to such 
 an extent that much of the expression of religious life 
 is in an unnatural key. We are afraid of simple good 
 ness, and are never satisfied until we have cramped it 
 into some conventional form and substituted for the 
 pure inspiration a well-contrived system of mechanism ; 
 for the Psalms we are always substituting the Cate 
 chism, and in all possible ways translating the deep 
 and beautiful poetry of the spiritual life into the hard 
 prose of ecclesiasticism and dogmatism. The perfect 
 harmony of the life and truth of the divinest character 
 known to men teaches a lesson which we have yet to 
 learn. If the words of Christ and those of any cate 
 chism are set in contrast, the difference between the 
 crudity of provisional statements and the divine per 
 fection of the finalities of truth and life is at once
 
 22 MY S7VDY FIRE. 
 
 apparent. We have learned in part the lesson of 
 morality, but we have yet to learn the lesson of beauty. 
 We have not learned it because in our moral education 
 we have stopped short of perfection ; for the purest 
 and highest morality becomes a noble form of art.
 
 ENJOYING ONE'S MIND. 
 
 WHO that lives in this busy, noisy age has not envied 
 the lot of Gilbert White, watching with keen, quiet 
 eyes the little world of Selborne for more than fifty 
 uneventful years ? To a mind so tranquil and a spirit 
 so serene the comings and goings of the old domesti 
 cated turtle in the garden were more important than 
 the debates in Parliament. The pulse of the world 
 beat slowly in the secluded hamlet, and the roar ot 
 change and revolution beyond the Channel were only 
 faintly echoed across the peaceful hills. The methodi 
 cal observer had as much leisure as Nature herself, and 
 could wait patiently on the moods of the seasons for 
 those confidences which he always invited, but which 
 he never forced ; and there grew up a somewhat 
 platonic but very loyal friendship between him and the 
 beautiful rural world about him. How many days of 
 happy observation were his, and with what a sense of 
 leisure his discoveries were set down, in English as 
 devoid of artifice or strain or the fever of haste as the 
 calm movements of the seasons registered there ! 
 There was room for enjoyment in a life so quietly 
 ordered ; time for meditation and for getting acquainted 
 with one's self.
 
 24 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 Most of us use our minds as tools, which are nevei 
 employed save in our working hours ; we press them 
 constantly to the limits of endurance, and often 
 beyond. Instead of cultivating intimate friendship 
 with them, we enslave them, and set them to tasks 
 which blight their freshness and deplete their vitality. 
 A mind cannot be always hard at work earning money 
 for a man, and at the same time play the part of friend 
 to him. Treated with respect and courtesy, there is 
 no better servant than the mind ; when this natural 
 and loyal service is turned into drudgery, however, the 
 servant makes no complaint and attempts no evasion, 
 but the man loses one of the greatest and sweetest ol 
 all the resources of life. For there is no better fortune 
 than to be on good terms with one's mind, and to live 
 with it in unrestrained good-fellowship. We cannot 
 escape living with it ; even death is powerless to sepa 
 rate us ; but, so far as pleasure is concerned, every 
 thing depends on the nature of the relation. The 
 mind is ready to accept any degree of intimacy, but it 
 is powerless to determine what that degree shall be ; it 
 must do as it is bid, and is made a friend or a slave 
 without any opportunity of choice. 
 
 To enjoy one's mind one must take time to become 
 acquainted with it. Our deepest friendships are not 
 affairs of the moment ; they ripen slowly on the sunny 
 side of the wall, and a good many seasons go to their 
 perfect mellowness and sweetness. The man who 
 wishes to get delight out of his mind, and be enter 
 tained by it, must give it time. The mind needs
 
 ENJOYING ONE'S MIND. 2$ 
 
 freedom and leisure, and cannot be its best without 
 them. A good talker, who has a strain of imagination 
 and sentiment in him, cannot be pushed into brilliant 
 or persuasive fluency. If you are hurried and can 
 give only partial attention, he is silent : the atmos 
 phere does not warm his gift into life. The mind is 
 even more sensitive to your mood and dependent on 
 your attitude. If you are so absorbed in affairs that 
 you can never give it anything better than your cast- 
 off hours, do not expect gay companionship from it , 
 for gayety involves a margin of vitality, an overflow of 
 spirits. It is oftener on good terms with youth than 
 with maturity, because young men drive it less and 
 live with it more. They give it room for variety of 
 interests and time for recreation, and it rewards them 
 with charming vivacity. It craves leisure and ease of 
 mood because these furnish the conditions under 
 which it can become confidential ; give it a summer 
 day, and, if you have made it your friend, it will give 
 you long hours of varied and wholesome entertain 
 ment. It has sentiment, imagination, wit, and mem 
 ory at its command, and, like an Eastern magician, 
 will transport you to any climate or bring any object to 
 pour feet. Never was there so willing a friend, not 
 Mie whose resources are so constantly ignored. 
 
 What a man finds in his mind and gets out of it 
 depends very much on himself; for the mind fits its 
 entertainment to the taste of its one tyrannical auditor. 
 Probably few men have ever lived more loyally with 
 their minds than Wordsworth. Fame found him a
 
 26 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 recluse and left him solitary ; crowds had no charms 
 for him, and at dinner-tables he had no gifts. He 
 was at his best pacing his garden walk and carrying on 
 that long colloquy with his mind which was his one 
 consuming passion. The critics speak of him as an 
 isolated, often as a cold, nature ; but no man of his j 
 time, not even Byron, put more passion into his work : 
 only his passion was not for persons, it was for ideas.! 
 He had great moments with his mind, for he was 
 repaid for the intensity of his surrender of other occu 
 pations and interests by thrilling inspirations, those! 
 sudden liftings of the man into the clearness and 
 splendour of vision which the mind commands in its 
 highest moods. He who has felt that exaltation knows 
 not only what must have come often to Wordsworth 
 when the hills shone round him with a light beyond 
 that of the sun, but has touched the very highest bound 
 of human experience. A mind enriched by long con 
 tact with the best in thought and life, and cherished 
 by loving regard for its needs, often repays in a single 
 hour the devotion of a lifetime. Sometimes, beside 
 the lamp at evening, the book closes in the hand! 
 because the mind swiftly flies from it to some distant 
 and splendid outlook ; or, on the solitary walk, the ; 
 man stands still with beating heart because the mind 
 has suddenly disclosed another and diviner landscape* 
 about him. 
 
 Wordsworth found imagination and sentiment in 
 his mind, as did the beautiful singer upon whom the) 
 laurel next descended; but Charles Lamb had the
 
 ENJOYING ONE'S MIND. 2 7 
 
 delights of wit. No men are on better terms with 
 their minds than men of wit ; one of the pleasures 
 which they give their fellows of slower movement is 
 the enjoyment which comes to them from their own 
 unexpectedness. Most of us know what we shall 
 think and say next ; or, if we do not know, we have no 
 reason to anticipate either surprise or satisfaction from 
 that part of the future which is to take its colour from 
 our thoughts and words. A witty man, on the other 
 hand, never knows what his mind will give him next; 
 it is the unexpected which always happens in his men 
 tal history. Watch him as he talks, and note his 
 delight in the tricks which his mind is playing upon 
 him. He is as much in the dark as his auditors, and 
 has as little inkling of the turn the talk will take next. 
 His real antagonist is not the man who sends the ball 
 back to him, but his own mind, which he is humour 
 ously prodding, and which is giving sharp thrusts in 
 response. Charles Lamb found as much delight in his 
 own quaintness as did any of his friends, and was as 
 much surprised by those inimitable puns which stut 
 tered themselves into speech as if they were being 
 translated out of some wittier language than ours. It 
 is pleasant to think of the suppressed fun that went on 
 within him on the high seat at the India House. And 
 Sydney Smith was another beneficiary of his own mind, 
 whose way through life was so constantly enlivened by 
 the gayest companionship that even the drowsy 
 English pulpit of his time had little power to subdue 
 his spirits or dull the edge of his wit. Who that has
 
 28 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 talked with Dr. Holmes has not witnessed that charm- j 
 ing catastrophe which befalls a man when his mind 
 runs away with him and dashes into all manner of 
 delightful but unsuspected roads, to bring back the 
 listener at last with a keen consciousness that there is a 
 good deal of undiscovered country about him, and that 
 he was a dull fellow not to have known it before. The 
 trouble is that he can never get himself run away with 
 in like fashion ! And yet most of us would be more 
 inspiring, more entertaining, and much wittier if we 
 gave ourselves a chance to get on terms of intimacy 
 with our own minds. Old Dyer had found, three 
 centuries ago, the delights of this fellowship when he 
 sang : 
 
 " My mind to me a kingdom is : 
 
 Such present joys therein I find, 
 That it excels all other bliss 
 
 That earth affords or grows by kind ; 
 Though much I want which most would have, 
 Yet still my mind forbids to crave."
 
 A NEGLECTED GIFT. 
 
 SYDNEY SMITH undoubtedly said aloud what a great 
 many people were saying in an undertone when he 
 called Macaulay" an instrument of social oppression." 
 The brilliant historian and essayist had notable gifts, 
 and has done much for the solace and entertainment 
 of mankind ; but his memory must have had an appall 
 ing aspect for those who sat near him at a dinner- 
 table. It was relentlessly accurate, and the boundaries 
 of it seemed to fade out in an infinity of miscellaneous 
 information. The man who knew his Popes so well 
 that he could repeat them backward, stood in sore 
 need of the grace of forgetfulness to save him from 
 becoming a scourge to his kind. The glittering eye of 
 the Ancient Mariner did not hold the wedding guest 
 more mercilessly to his gruesome narrative than does a 
 tyrannical memory bind the weary listener to the re 
 cital of things it cannot forget. Burton analysed Mel 
 ancholy with great subtlety and particularity, but one 
 wonders whether Burton's companionship would not 
 have induced in another the very thing of which he 
 tried to rid himself. Mr. Caxton was a dangerous per 
 son in his talking moods, as Pisistratus discovered at 
 an early age, and needed to be diverted from themes
 
 3O MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 which unlocked the stores of his knowledge. Foij 
 some men hold their information in great masses liki 
 the snow on the high Alps, and an unwary step wil. 
 often bring down an avalanche. Knowledge is of great 
 moment and of lasting interest, but, like money, it 
 must be used with tact and skill. A good library has a 
 solid foundation of books of reference ; but they are 
 subordinate to a superstructure of art, grace, vitality, 
 and truth. 
 
 If one had to choose between Macaulay, who never 
 forgot anything, and Emerson, who rarely remembered 
 anything in an exact, literal way, one would fasten 
 upon the man of insight, and let the man of memory 
 go his own way. In these days the art of memorizing 
 has had great attention, but the art of forgetting has 
 no professed masters or teachers. It is, nevertheless, 
 one of the most important and charming of the arts ; 
 the art of arts, indeed. For the skill of the artist is in 
 his ability to forget the non-essentials and to remember 
 the essentials. The faculty of forgetting gives the 
 mind a true perspective, and shows past events in their 
 just proportions and right relations. The archaeolog 
 ical painter forgets nothing, and his picture leaves us 
 cold ; the poetic painter forgets everything, save the 
 two or three significant things, and his picture sets our 
 imagination aflame. There is entertainment in old 
 Burton, because the man sometimes gets the better of 
 his memory ; there is inspiration in Emerson, because 
 the man speaks habitually as if all things were new- 
 created, and there were nothing to remember. The
 
 A NEGLECTED GIFT. 31 
 
 )ast is a delightful friend if one can live without it, but 
 to the man who lives in it there is no greater tyrant. 
 
 As the world grows older, the power to forget must 
 jrow with it, or mankind will bend, like Atlas, under a 
 weight which will put movement out of the question. 
 That only which illumines, enlarges, or cheers men 
 ought to be remembered ; everything else ought to be 
 brgotten. The rose in bloom has no need of the 
 calyx whose thorny shielding it has outgrown. When 
 he recollection of the past stimulates and inspires, it 
 has immense value ; when its splendours make us con- 
 ent to rest on ancestral achievements, it is a sore hin 
 drance. Filial piety holds the names of the fathers 
 acred ; but we are living our lives, not theirs, and it is 
 ar more important that we should do brave and just 
 deeds than that we should remember that others have 
 lone them. The burning of the Alexandrian Library 
 'as not without its compensations, and the rate at 
 which books are now multiplied may some day compel 
 uch burnings at stated intervals, for the protection of 
 in oppressed race. The books of power are always 
 ew and precious, and long life is decreed for them by 
 eason of the very vitality which gives them their place ; 
 3ut the books of information must be subjected to a 
 mnciple of selection, more and more rigorously applied 
 is the years go by. Our posterity must conscientiously 
 brget most of the books we have written. 
 
 For the characteristic of art the thing that sur- 
 dves is not memory, but insight. Our chief concern 
 s to know ourselves, not our forbears ; and to master
 
 32 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 this modern world, not the world of Caesar or that 01 
 Columbus. The great writer speaks out of a persona 
 contact with life, and while he may enrich his report 
 by apt and constant reference to the things that have 
 been, his authority rests on his own clarity of visiot 
 and directness of insight. " Our age," says Emerson 
 "is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the 
 fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism 
 The foregoing generations beheld God and nature fac 
 to face ; we, through their eyes. Why should not \v 
 also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Wh 
 should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insigh 
 and not tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, an 
 not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a seaso 
 in nature, whose floods of life stream around an 
 through us, and invite us, by the powers they suppl; 
 to action proportioned to nature, why should we grop* 
 among the dry bones of the past, or put the living gen 
 eration into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe 
 The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool an 
 flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, nev 
 thoughts. Let us demand our own works and law 
 and worship." 
 
 Progress is largely conditioned on the ability to for 
 get the views and conclusions which have become au 
 thoritative. It took nearly a century of adventurou 
 sailing and perilous adventure to persuade Europe tha 
 there was an undiscovered continent between Indi 
 and its own shores, so possessed was the Europeai 
 mind by the consistent blunders of the past abou
 
 A NEGLECTED GIFT. 33 
 
 this Western hemisphere. In the history of art, what 
 are called the classical epochs the periods of pre 
 cision, accuracy, and conventional restraint are in 
 spired by memory; but the creative moments are 
 moments of forgetfulness. The Renaissance was a 
 moment of rediscovery, not of memory ; the literary 
 movement of this century involved a determined for 
 getting of the standards and methods of the last cen 
 tury. The age that lives in its memory of other times 
 and men is always timid and imitative ; the age that 
 trusts its own insight is always audacious and creative. 
 If we are to be ourselves, we must forget a good deal 
 more than we remember. 
 
 There is a real grace of character in forgetting the 
 things' that disturb the harmony of life. A keen re 
 membrance of injustice or suffering breeds cynicism; 
 the power to forget that we have been wronged, or that 
 life has pressed heavily upon us, develops sweetness, 
 ripeness, and harmonious strength. On the threshold 
 of any future life, one must pass through a great wave 
 of forgetfulness ; it were better for us all if heaven 
 were nearer to us by reason of the swift oblivion to 
 which we consigned the wrongs we suffer in this brief 
 burning of the candle of life.
 
 CONCERNING CULTURE. 
 
 THERE are certain books which are touchstones 
 personal culture and taste, books like Amiel's " Jour-J 
 nal," Arnold's " Culture and Anarchy," Lander's " Hel4 
 lenics/' and Thackeray's " Henry Esmond," whichj 
 involve a certain preparation of the mind for their recepJ 
 tion and appreciation. For these books, and all books' 
 of their peculiar quality, contain an element of culture: 
 as well as of native gift ; and a certain degree of cul-i 
 ture must precede their appropriation by the reader.: 
 It used to be said that the odes of Horace were the] 
 special solace of gentlemen, of men of a certain] 
 social training, which brought them into sympathetic] 
 contact with the worldly minded but charmingly trained 
 poet of the Mantuan farm. There is a flavour as of 
 old wine in many of the Horatian odes, and its deli-j 
 cacy is discerned only by the trained palate. In like] 
 manner the work of certain modern writers possesse: 
 a peculiar quality, impossible to define but readil 
 detected, which finds its full recognition by, and 
 closes its entire charm to, minds which have 
 contact with the best in thought and life. 
 
 There was a time, fifteen or twenty years ago, whe: 
 what is technically called culture was taken up by th
 
 CONCERNING CULTURE. 35 
 
 intellectually curious and the socially idle, and made 
 a fad ; and, like all other fads, it became, for the time 
 being, a thing abhorred of all serious-minded and 
 sincere people. For a fad is always a sham, and a 
 sham in the world of art or of literature is peculiarly 
 offensive and repugnant; it is the perversion, some 
 times in the grossest form, of something essentially 
 sound and noble. The ideal which took violent pos 
 session of so many people two decades ago was de 
 fective in that quality which is the very substance of 
 genuine culture, the quality of ripeness. True culture 
 involves a maturing of taste, intellect, and nature which 
 comes only with time, tranquillity, and reposeful asso 
 ciations of the best sort. The more one really cares 
 Jar it, the less he professes it ; the more one comes 
 into possession of it, the less conscious does his pur- 
 jjuit of it become. It marks an advanced stage of a 
 general maturing and ripening, and it discloses its 
 presence in fulness of knowledge, easy command of 
 resources, maturity and sureness of taste, and that 
 sense of power which conveys the impression of a 
 large and spontaneous force playing through a rich 
 nature. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that this ripening of the 
 man depends on a large acquaintance with books, 
 although in these days, in most cases, books are indis 
 pensable aids. The Attic Greeks, the most genuinely 
 cultivated people whom the world has yet known, had 
 very slight contact with books; but they had the 
 faculty, due largely to the strain of poetry and hence
 
 36 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 of imagination in their education, of getting the soul 
 out of life. They discerned and appropriated, by a 
 training which had become instinctive, the best in life. 
 They chose the beautiful as readily and constantly as 
 we choose the inharmonious and the ugly ; they built 
 in harmony with the laws of art as uniformly as we 
 build in violation of those laws. Their Parthenon 
 was as easy of accomplishment to them as the post- 
 offices of Boston, New York, and Chicago were to us. 
 They did not build better than they knew ; they built 
 because they knew, and their knowledge was due to 
 their culture. That culture was based on life, not on 
 art, and hence their art had the compelling note of 
 an original utterance, and not the faint music of an 
 echo. 
 
 Shakespeare was a typical man of culture, whose 
 knowledge of a few books is beyond question, but 
 whose knowledge of many books is more than doubt 
 ful. Oxford might have enriched him, as it did his 
 great contemporary Spenser, but he enriched himself 
 under circumstances apparently the most adverse. 
 There is no rawness in his thought, nor in his art ; his 
 insight is not surer than his touch upon language. In 
 every play there is the richness of substance, the ful 
 ness of thought, the easy hand upon all the keys of 
 speech, which betray the affluent nature, ripened be 
 yond strength into sweetness. Shakespeare was riper, 
 in some ways, than Goethe, whose whole life was 
 rigidly subordinated to the laws of growth. 
 
 This quality of ripeness, shared by Tennyson, Lowell,
 
 CONCERNING CULTURE. 37 
 
 Amicl, Arnold, is sometimes lacking in writers of great 
 force and originality, and its absence always involves 
 a certain impoverishment. If there is no obvious 
 crudity, there is a certain thinness of tone, a rigidity 
 of manner, a hardness of spirit. The ease, the grace, 
 the charming unconsciousness, are absent ; one is con 
 tinually aware of limitations, instead of being cheered 
 and buoyed up by a sense of unexhausted power. 
 Lowell gives his readers no greater delight than the 
 impression, conveyed by every page of his writing, 
 that he has not said half he has in mind. The land 
 scape of thought, imagination, and knowledge through 
 which he takes one, with a gait so easy and a humour 
 so contagious, is full of variety and loveliness, but you 
 are continually teased by vistas which hint at outlooks 
 still more beautiful. What grace of bearing, modu 
 lation of tone, charm of manner, entire self-possession ! 
 Here is no gifted and virile provincial who has broken 
 away from hard conditions without rising above them, 
 but a true man of the world of letters. This Olympian 
 ease, which is the mark of the artist, is never the pos 
 session of the Titan, however strong. 
 
 It is culture which conveys this impression and con 
 fers this charm, and culture does not come by nature ; 
 it does not come by work even, for strenuousness is 
 the very thing it rids a man of; it comes of lying fal 
 low and letting knowledge take possession of us. It 
 is possible to know a great deal and be wholly without 
 culture ; some scholars are as free from all trace of it 
 as some well-conditioned men are of the charm of
 
 38 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 good-manners. Culture is knowledge become part of 
 the soil of a man's life ; it is not knowledge piled up 
 like so many pieces of wood. It is knowledge ab 
 sorbed and transmuted by meditation into character. 
 And this process involves leisure, solitude, the ability 
 to keep one's hands and eyes idle at times. To get 
 out of the current without losing its momentum is the 
 problem of the man who wishes to be ripe as well as 
 active. To possess one's mind, one must command a 
 certain solitude and quiet ; for there is deep truth in 
 Goethe's saying that while character is formed in the 
 stream of the world, talent is formed in quietness. 
 That ripeness of nature which Americans are quick to 
 notice in the best English writers, scholars, and think 
 ers is the result of a rich meditative strain running 
 through lives of steadfast but unhasting industry. A 
 bit of knowledge cannot enrich a man until he has 
 brooded over it in the solitude of quiet hours. An 
 Oxford man once said that the perfection of the lawns 
 in the college gardens was only a matter of three or 
 four centuries of rolling and cutting ; and the faces of 
 some famous university writers and thinkers betray the 
 long years rich, not only in study, but in meditation, 
 that quiet brooding over knowledge and experience 
 which drains them of their significance and power for 
 the lasting enrichment of our own natures. 

 
 THE MAGIC OF TALK. 
 
 THOSE who have the privilege of hearing really good 
 talk know that it is the most delightful of all the re 
 sources which the fortunate man commands. A gen 
 uine talk, free, spontaneous, sincere, and full of 
 intelligence, is always a thing to be remembered. It 
 is a delight to the mind so keen as to be almost sen 
 suous ; but it is a joy which effects a certain liberation 
 in those who share it. A talk is often the starting- 
 point in a brilliant or commanding career. Everybody 
 recalls Hazlitt's account of his earliest hours with 
 Coleridge, and how the magic of that rare mind 
 wrought upon him until it seemed as if he had 
 broken into a new world. The originative impulse 
 which makes a man conscious of his power and con 
 fident in it sometimes comes from a book, but oftener 
 from a talk. For a talk has the great advantage over 
 a book of bringing the whole man into play. There is 
 a flow of individual force, a free outgoing of personal 
 energy, in talk, which give not only the full weight of 
 the thought, but the entire impetus of the man ; and 
 to listen to a rare man in full and free talk is not only 
 to get the measure of his mind, but to feel the charm
 
 40 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 of his temperament; and temperament is half of 
 genius. 
 
 There is an impression that writers put their best 
 thought into books ; but those who know the makers 
 of books care, as a rule, more for the men than for the 
 work they have done. There are, it is true, a few men 
 from whom the gift of. familiar and telling speech is 
 withheld, and whose thought flows freely only from 
 the point of the pen. Such men are so rare, however, 
 that they confirm the almost universal possession of 
 the genius for talk by men who hold genius in any 
 other form. As a rule, the talk of men of letters is 
 superior to their writing, and possesses a charm which 
 their work fails to convey. A man of real strength is 
 always greater than any specific putting forth of that 
 strength ; and the moments which make us aware of 
 the general force give us also the adequate expression 
 of the man's range and talent. Most men of rich and 
 trained personality fail of complete expression in any 
 formal way, and it is a common feeling among the 
 friends of men whose writing attracts wide attention 
 that it does not completely express the man. There 
 was something in the force and directness of Ten 
 nyson's talk which did not make itself felt in his 
 melodious verse ; and, in spite of the poet's noble 
 achievement, it is easy to understand the feeling of 
 Fitzgerald that the Laureate never put his whole power 
 forth. This was notably true of Lowell, whose opu 
 lence of intellectual resource and whose peculiarly rich 
 and attractive personality gave his work, to many who
 
 THE MAGIC OF TALK. 41 
 
 knew the man, the air of brilliant improvisation rather 
 than the final and masterful utterance of his affluent 
 nature. Doubtless the friends of Shakespeare, the 
 greatest of all improvisers, and apparently the most 
 indifferent to the fate of his work, had a kindred feel 
 ing concerning the plays and poems of one whom his 
 friends and earliest editors called " so worthy a friend 
 and fellow," " whose wit can no more lie hid than it 
 could be lost." 
 
 We shall never know what we have lost by the 
 absence of a Boswell from the Mermaid Tavern on 
 those evenings when Shakespeare, in those last rich 
 years of his life, came up from Stratford and found in 
 the fellowship of his old friends that solvent which gave 
 his wit, his imagination, and his insight the liberation 
 of a genial hour and company. Shakespeare's Boswell 
 would probably have written the most deeply interest 
 ing book in all literature, a pre-eminence of which 
 Boswell's matchless account of Johnson comes within 
 measurable distance. Johnson is, indeed, the fore 
 most illustration of the general truth that men of 
 letters are greater than their works. The author of 
 11 Rasselas " is very indifferently read in these days, 
 but the great talker at the Literary Club and in the 
 library at Streatham is probably the best-known figure 
 of the last century. The writer was solemnly .eloquent 
 in that sonorous Latin style of his ; but the talker had 
 a force and freshness which took by instinct to the 
 sturdy Saxon side of the language. Great writing is 
 never artificial, a mode of speech which differs from
 
 42 MY STUD Y FIRE. 
 
 the vernacular as a carefully planned lawn differs from 
 the opulent carelessness of nature, it is, rather, the 
 inevitable form of expression to which a thought must 
 ultimately come when it sinks into the consciousness 
 of a race and become part of its deepest life. The 
 supreme charm of talk lies in its unforced freshness 
 and power ; in the fact that the impulse takes a man 
 unaware, and what is deepest and truest in him finds 
 its way into speech. 
 
 The community of feeling which talk brings about 
 sets the most sluggish fancy free, and solicits frankness 
 from the most reticent. The greatest minds are not 
 independent of their fellows ; on the contrary, the 
 measure of their greatness is accurately recorded in 
 the extent of their obligations to others. A lyric poet 
 may strike a few clear notes, as musical and as solitary 
 as those of the hermit thrush hidden in the woods ; 
 but the rich, full music of the great dramatic poet 
 draws its deep and victorious sweetness from the 
 universal human experience, whose meaning it con 
 veys and preserves. The touch of hand upon hand is 
 not so real as the touch of mind upon mind ; and as 
 the contact of the hands gives a sense of sympathy 
 and fellowship, so does the contact of mind give a 
 sense of kinship of thought. To be alone is to be 
 silent ; to be with others is to express that which 
 silence has brought us. Companionship of the right 
 kind not only draws our hidden thought from its 
 seclusion, but invites new thoughts to give it welcome 
 and keep it company. The first half- hour may find
 
 THE MAGIC OF TALK. 43 
 
 
 
 the circle about the fire still somewhat constrained and 
 slow of tongue ; for we people of English speech do 
 not give ourselves freely to others ; but the second 
 half-hour sees everybody intent and alert. There is a 
 contagious quality in the air, and every man craves his 
 moment of speech. When talk gets down to the solid 
 ground of entire truth and sincerity in those who share 
 it, a capitalisation of knowledge is speedily and in 
 formally effected. There lies in each mind a piece of 
 information, and in every memory a bit of experience, 
 which are freely contributed to the general fund. 
 
 The thought-product or result is, however, but a 
 small part of the total outcome of a genuine talk; 
 under such a spell men speak their minds freely, but 
 they also reveal themselves. There is a gift of per 
 sonal quality which is more rare than the gift of 
 thought. The thought of a great nature is precious, 
 but the way in which it approaches the thought, and 
 the significance it attaches to it, are still more valuable. 
 Shakespeare was repeating a commonplace when he 
 said, " We are such stuff as dreams are made of," but 
 the commonplace became suddenly luminous and 
 beautiful in a setting which turned its alloy into pure 
 gold of insight and poetry. The mystery and sublim 
 ity of life were familiar ideas when they took posses 
 sion of Carlyle's imagination, but they returned from 
 it flaming with an awful splendour which men had well- 
 nigh forgotten. That which is really rare in a man is 
 not his thought, but himself; and it is this self, so
 
 44 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 hidden, so reticent, so marvellous, that somehow es 
 capes from him in talk. When one thinks of Lowell, 
 he does not recall " The Cathedral," but some hour 
 before the fire, or some ramble over the hills, when the 
 man behind the work somehow escaped from all asso 
 ciation with it, and took on all the magic of a new 
 acquaintance, added to the steadfast power of an old 
 friend ; and of Emerson it is pre-eminently true that 
 no one could really know him who had not come under 
 the spell of his singular and indescribable personality. 
 " Emerson's oration," wrote Lowell to a friend in 
 1867, "was more disjointed than usual, even with 
 him. It began nowhere and ended everywhere, and 
 yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling 
 that something beautiful had passed that way, some 
 thing more beautiful than anything else, like the rising 
 and setting of stars. ... He boggled, he lost his 
 place, he had to put on his glasses ; but it was as if 
 a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in 
 our fogs, and it was our fault, not his." His works 
 have a quality like light, and a purity as of snows 
 caught in the high Alps ; but the man was still clearer 
 and rarer, a nature not to be reflected in print, how 
 ever skilfully ordered. It is this by-play of person 
 ality which gives talk a charm beyond all other forms 
 of uttered speech. The literature one hears some 
 times seems so much richer than the literature one 
 reads that there comes with the rarest privilege regret 
 that so much wealth is being spent on a few. Nature
 
 THE MAGIC OF TALK. 45 
 
 is always prodigal, however, and the supreme function 
 of life is to produce great natures rather than great 
 books. There is, moreover, a great hope hidden in 
 this lavish indifference to the particular work and this 
 steady emphasis on the superiority of the worker. 
 
 -
 
 WORK AND ART. 
 
 THE most mysterious and irritating quality in a work 
 of art is the impression of ease which it conveys ; it 
 seems to have been a piece of play ; we cannot asso 
 ciate work with it. Its charm lies in its detachment 
 from this workaday world, and its suggestion of inti 
 macy with some other world where the most perfect 
 things are done with a prodigal easefulness. Nobody 
 ever happened upon Nature in her working hours ; 
 apparently she is always at leisure. There is an illu 
 sion, however, in this apparent ease, which owes its 
 power of deception to our limitations. As a matter of 
 fact, Nature is never at rest ; she is always at work ; 
 but her work is so instinctive, so entirely within the 
 range of her force, so perfectly expressive of the energy 
 behind it, that it is, in the deepest sense, play. There 
 is no compulsion behind it, no shrinking from it, no 
 strain in it ; it is quiet, easeful, normal, and adequate. 
 The artist finds Nature a teacher in this as in other 
 matters, and learns that the eternal charm of beauty 
 }ies in its complete severance from all trace of work. 
 It is a bit of pure delight which comes to us from the 
 few lines in which the lyric poet, with winning sim 
 plicity, records an impression or confides an experience,
 
 WORK AND ART. 47 
 
 or from the few inches of canvas on which the artist 
 preserves a swift glance at the landscape growing 
 vague and mysterious in the twilight. The faintest 
 odor of the lamp would empty the lines of their magic ; 
 a hint of toil would destroy the illusion of a power 
 behind the picture similar in kind, however inferior in 
 degree, to that behind the landscape. 
 
 Behind every bit of genuine art there lies a training, 
 always arduous, sometimes rigorous to the point of 
 pain. There is no greater popular fallacy than the 
 impression that men of letters and artists of all kinds 
 are men of leisure. They are, on the contrary, men 
 whose work never ends, and whose mastery is not only 
 secured, but sustained, at immense cost of time, 
 strength, thought, emotion, and will. The grace which 
 banishes the thought of toil was bought at a great 
 price ; it is a flower whose roots have often been 
 watered by tears. Its perfection lies in its effacement 
 of the " painful steps and slow " by which it has been 
 reached ; so that its highest success involves the com 
 plete forgetfulness of the toil behind. The artist 
 whose touch on the keys has a magical ease which 
 revives our childhood's faith in the world of the 
 " Arabian Nights " is a heroic worker, who pays for 
 his success a price from which most men of affairs 
 would shrink back appalled. The writer whose hand 
 rests so lightly on the strings of speech, and makes 
 them sing or thunder with such indifferent ease, knows 
 that " torment of style " which pursued Flaubert all 
 his days, that painful pursuit of free, sincere, and
 
 48 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 noble expression, which is so constantly baffled, and 
 so rarely touches the elusive goal. Two thousand 
 and more sketches give a faint idea of the herculean 
 toil behind Michel Angelo's " Last Judgment" 
 
 From this toil genius is no more exempt than talent ; 
 for perfection never comes by instinct ; it is always the 
 final expression of a perfectly harmonised nature. 
 Shakespeare had his years of apprenticeship not less 
 necessary and arduous than those of Gray ; and Millet 
 paid a great price for that marvellous skill of his. 
 The first task laid upon the artist the submission to 
 the law of work when his mind is fomenting with all 
 manner of spontaneous impulses is so hard that art 
 is allied forever to morality by the self-discipline which 
 it involves ; but the second task the obliteration of 
 every evidence of toil is still more difficult. It is at 
 this point that the artist reveals himself. He sets out 
 with a goodly company, eager for that training which 
 guards the gates of artistic achievement ; but he is 
 wellnigh deserted when he passes on into the next 
 stage and begins to work with a free hand. Many men 
 can work with sustained and noble energy, but very 
 few men can transform work into play by coming to do 
 instinctively, and with the ease of almost unconscious 
 mastery, that which they began to do with deliberation 
 and intention. In art it is pre-eminently and painfully 
 true that many are called but few are chosen ; and 
 there is something pathetic, almost tragic, in the pains 
 taking and tireless toil which is always climbing but 
 which never plucks the flower of ease. For this reason
 
 WORK AND ART. 49 
 
 there is a great'gulf set between the amateur and the 
 artist which is never crossed ; for the artist is the ser 
 vant of toil that he may become the master of his craft, 
 while the amateur, by evading the service, forever for 
 feits the mastery. It is this last gift of ease that evi 
 dences genius and shows that the workman has become 
 a magician, one who knows how to make the flower 
 bloom without the aid of botany, and the stars shine 
 without invoking astronomy. He who once did things 
 as work now does them as play, and, therefore, in the 
 creative spirit and with the creative force and simplicity. 
 When he was an apprentice he could explain his 
 methods, but now that he is a master the thing he does 
 with consummate skill and with such a touch of finality 
 is as much a mystery to him as to others ; it is no 
 longer a contrivance, it is the deep and beautiful 
 product of his whole nature working together with that 
 mysterious force that resides in a rich personality. 
 
 There is something baffling in the quality of these 
 final touches in art. Why should these few lines on 
 paper, this bit of marble, this little group of verses, 
 stand apart from the toiling world as if they belonged 
 to another order of life and had their affinities with the 
 things that grow and bloom rather than with those that 
 are made and perish in the making? Why should a 
 civilisation fade out of human memory, and the delicate 
 vase or the fragile lyric survive? The answer to these 
 questions is found in Alfred de Mussel's deep saying, 
 " It takes a great deal of life to make a little art." In 
 this vast workshop of life, with its dust and sweat and 
 4
 
 50 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 din, it is the worker that is perfected (fftener than the 
 work ; and when some bit of perfection emerges from 
 the dust and turmoil, it not only explains and justifies 
 the toil behind it, but takes on a beauty which is half a 
 prophecy. 
 
 A civilisation is not lost if, beyond the mysterious 
 training of men which it silently effects, it leaves behind 
 a few final touches, strokes, and songs as a bequest to 
 that art which, by its very perfection, is the visible evi 
 dence of immortality. For when the worker so mas 
 ters his material that skill is no longer mechanical but 
 vital, no longer wholly calculated but largely instinc 
 tive, he becomes the instrument of a genius greater 
 than his, and the channel of a truth deeper than any 
 he has compassed. He escapes the limitations of the 
 artisan and gains the freedom of the artist to whom 
 finality of expression is as natural as the gush of song 
 from the wood or the glow of light in the east. For 
 the highest form of all things is beauty ; and art, in 
 tha<- deep sense which allies it with the spontaneity, 
 the ease, the grace, and the play of nature, is the 
 finality for which all toil prepares and in which all 
 work ends. It takes centuries to make the soil, and 
 then, born of earth and nurtured by the sky, blooms 
 the flower, without care or toil, mysterious and inex 
 plicable, the touch of the imperishable beauty resting 
 for an hour on its fragile petals.
 
 JOY IN LIFE. 
 
 BROWNING'S " Saul " is one of those superb outbursts 
 of poetic force which have for modern ears, accustomed 
 to overmuch smooth, careful, and uninspired versifica 
 tion, not only the charm of beauty and energy in high 
 degree, but of contrast as well. It sweeps along, eager, 
 impetuous, resistless as the streams which descend the 
 Alps and rush seaward with the joy of mountain tor 
 rents. So much contemporary verse is dainty, melo 
 dious, and unimpassioned that the tumultuous music of 
 a virile song, overflowing all the shallow channels of 
 artifice, and sweeping into the deep courses of human 
 experience and emotion, is as thrilling as a glimpse of 
 the sea after long hours on some pretty lake in some 
 well-ordered park. Great art of any kind involves a 
 great temperament even more than great intellect; 
 since the essence of art is never intellectual, but always 
 the complete expression of the whole nature. A great 
 temperament is a rarer gift than a great mind ; and it 
 is the distinctive gift of the artist. Browning had the 
 vitality, the freshness of feeling, the eagerness of inter 
 est, the energy of spirit, which witness this tempera 
 ment. He had an intense joy in life simply as life, in 
 nature simply as nature, without reference to what lay
 
 52 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 behind. For one must feel freshly and powerfully 
 through the senses before one can represent the inner 
 meaning of life and nature in art. In " Saul " there 
 are elements of profound psychologic interest, but first 
 and foremost there is the intense and vivid conscious 
 ness of the glory of life for a healthy human being, 
 and of the splendour of the world. Rarely has this 
 superb health found such thrilling expression as on the 
 lips of the young poet beguiling the furious spirit in 
 the mighty Saul : 
 
 "Oh, our manhood's prime vigour ! no spirit feels waste, 
 Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 
 Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping front rock up to rock, 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool 
 
 silver shock 
 
 Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, 
 And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
 And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust 
 
 divine, 
 And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 
 
 wine, 
 
 And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
 That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
 How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy ! " 
 
 After the wailing monotones and the chorus of lam 
 entation which of late years have risen in .so many 
 quarters, such music as this song of David's thrills the 
 blood like a bugle-call ; and such a victorious strain was 
 the natural prelude to the great vision of faith in which 
 the song rises to its noble climax.
 
 JOY IN LIFE. 53 
 
 Brilliancy of temperament and the freshness and 
 spontaneity of feeling which go with it are a part of 
 the inheritance of such men as Gautier, whose virile 
 face, with its great shock of yellow hair, had at times 
 a leonine aspect ; but one hardly anticipates the pos 
 session of such gifts by a sick and overburdened man 
 like Richard Jefferies, who was so long in finding his 
 field, and who, when it was found, had so short a 
 working-day in it. This temperament is, however, in 
 a way, independent of physical condition; it is much 
 more the buoyancy of a rich nature than the surplusage 
 of a strong physique. In his last years Jefferies rivalled 
 Heine in the intensity of his sufferings, but to the very 
 end he answered the appeal of nature to the senses 
 with passionate longing. In such men vitality triumphs 
 over all moods and asserts the sovereignty of life even 
 while life is swiftly receding from them. Few men 
 have known the black shadows on the landscape more 
 intimately than Jefferies, and rarely have these shadows 
 been reflected with more appalling realism than in 
 some of his pages. " Our bodies," he says, " are full 
 of unsuspected flaws, handed down, it may be, for 
 thousands of years, and it is of these that we die, and 
 not of natural decay. . . . The truth is, we die through 
 our ancestors ; we are murdered by our ancestors. 
 Their dead hands stretch forth from the tomb and drag 
 us down to their mouldering bones." All the horror 
 of Ibsen's "Ghosts" is condensed in that last sen 
 tence ; it falls on the ear like the sudden clang of the 
 bell on the ear of the man waiting for the guillotine.
 
 54 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 And yet Jefferies, being a really noble artist in the 
 force of his feeling for nature and his power of record 
 ing her phenomena and reflecting her moods, had the 
 deep, natural joyousness and the invincible vitality of 
 the artistic temperament. He was sensitive to those 
 gradations of colour and form of which the less gifted 
 observer takes no account. " Colour and form and 
 light," he says, "are as magic to me; it is a trance ; 
 it requires a language of ideas to express it. ... A 
 fagot, the outline of a leaf, low tints without reflecting 
 power, strike the eye as a bell the ear. To me they 
 are intensely clear, and the clearer the greater the 
 pleasure. It is often too great, for it takes me away 
 from solid pursuits merely to receive the impression, 
 as water is still to receive the trees." With this quick 
 impressionability there goes a passionate love of life 
 and a passionate longing to have it flowing through 
 him like a tide instead of ebbing with an ever-feebler 
 current. In that heart-breaking book, " The Story of 
 My Heart," this longing breaks from him in an anguish 
 of unsatisfied desire : 
 
 " There, alone, I went down to the sea. I stood where 
 the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit 
 waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the har 
 vest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back ; its 
 strength and firmness under me. The great sun shone 
 above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet 
 and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and 
 the sea, the glow of the sun, filled me ; I touched the 
 surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened
 
 JOY IN LIFE. 55 
 
 my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the 
 waves my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed 
 with the sea's might. Give me fulness of life like to the 
 sea and sun, and to the earth and the air ; give me ful 
 ness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness ; 
 give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all 
 things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in 
 me like a tide give it to me with all the force of 
 the sea ! " 
 
 To some people this outcry for abundance of life 
 and the joy of the senses may seem like a pagan 
 mood ; but if it be, it is a form of paganism sadly 
 needed in these days of depression and debility. One 
 would better be a frank and healthy pagan than a dis 
 eased and wailing pessimist ; for paganism had its 
 faith, its ideals, and its glorious productiveness, while a 
 despairing melancholy has nothing but its own morbid 
 self consciousness. A return to the right kind of pa 
 ganism might deliver us from some of the evils which 
 have ensnared us. But the essence of the longing for 
 the joy of the senses and for fulness of life, expressed 
 in so many ways by so many men of artistic nature, is 
 not sensuousness but vitality ; it is the hunger of the 
 whole nature for a deeper draught at the fountain 
 whence its being flows ; and its presence in the artist 
 temperament explains its presence in great art. For 
 the great art of the world is instinct with vitality ; it 
 overflows with life; it is full of joy and strength. 
 Touching, as it does so constantly, the tragic themes, 
 it is not mastered by them, but interprets them in the
 
 56 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 light of those higher laws whose servants we are. 
 Shakespeare turns away from no tragic situation, and 
 shrinks from no tragic problem ; but how serene he is, 
 and what marvellous freshness of feeling shines through 
 his work and gives it the touch of that Nature whose 
 dews fall with every eve, and whose flowers bloom 
 afresh with every dawn !
 
 THE REAL AND THE SHAM. 
 
 THERE is, perhaps, no better test of mastership in 
 any kind of artistic work than the effacement of the 
 method by which the result is secured. A true work 
 of art can never be taken apart ; it is a living whole, and, 
 although much may be said about it by way of analy 
 sis or of criticism, it is impossible to explain how it 
 was put together. The same distinction exists be 
 tween pedantry and culture ; the trail of the pedant 
 can be followed through his library back to the point 
 {from which he set out ; he never for an instant gets 
 off the beaten path. The man of culture, on the other 
 hand, suggests his methods of personal training and 
 enrichment no more than he suggests the air he 
 breathes. He is so ripe in tone, so easily in com 
 mand of his resources, and so sure of his tenure that 
 there is no touch of professionalism about him. His 
 personality is so rich and so interesting that one for 
 gets that he is a writer or a painter or an orator. Mr. 
 Booth found genuine pleasure in Mr. Sargent's strik 
 ing portrait because it is free from all suggestion of 
 the stage ; it is the portrait of a man, not of an actor. 
 And Mr. Booth was a charming example of a great 
 artist devoid of the atmosphere of professionalism.
 
 58 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 His talk touched naturally on incidents and themes 
 which appealed to him by reason of his profession, 
 and often lingered about experiences which had been 
 part of his arduous and brilliant career; but it was 
 the talk of a man of distinct individuality and force, 
 not of an actor fitted into the grooves of a profession 
 and moulded entirely to its uses. 
 
 The phrase " man of letters " is a happy one, because 
 it emphasises the individual quality rather than the 
 form of its expression; because it brings the man 
 rather than the profession before us. One of the 
 signs of mastery in art is freedom from mannerisms, 
 from professional methods of securing effects. The 
 finest orators have no set manner ; the most inspiring 
 preachers are free from the clerical habit and air ; 
 the greatest writers are the most difficult to imitate, 
 because they offer the fewest obvious peculiarities. 
 The real man of letters is always a man primarily, and 
 a writer secondarily. His fingers are not blackened 
 with ink, and his talk is devoid of that kind of pedan 
 try which is never happy unless its theme is the latest 
 book. 
 
 The love of literature is one of the noblest of human 
 passions, but it has many degrees, and it is, unfortu 
 nately, easily imitated. There are a good many men 
 and women who take up literary subjects and interests 
 as they take up the latest fashions, putting them on, 
 so to speak, as they put on garments of the latest cut. 
 There are so-called literary circles as devoid of true 
 feeling for literature as the untutored tourist, restlessly
 
 THE REAL AND THE SHAM. 59 
 
 rushing through art galleries with his Baedeker in his 
 hand, is devoid of any real insight into art or love for 
 it. Writers of force and originality are often slow in 
 coming to their own, and are sometimes suddenly 
 discovered by the many, long after they have been 
 well known to the few ; but the waves of interest in 
 particular writers which sweep over society are a hollow 
 mockery of any real and genuine knowledge. To rush 
 wildly with the maddened throng after Browning for 
 one short winter, to be diverted the next season by 
 Ibsen, is to carefully destroy all hope of coming into 
 real contact with either of these writers. A real love 
 of art is shy of crowds, and wary of too close contact 
 with " circles ; " it does not protest too much ; it 
 hates, above all things, that pretentious use of techni 
 cal phrases and that putting forward of the latest " dis 
 covery " which so often pass as literary conversation. 
 
 The spread of a sincere, unobtrusive, and teachable 
 interest in books and other forms of art among the 
 people of this country is a thing to recognise and 
 rejoice in wherever it appears. It is not the crudity 
 of undeveloped interest which is to be dreaded, but 
 the crudity of sham interest ; and the sham element 
 is to be detected by its simulation of that which it 
 does not possess. It is pretentious, and therefore it 
 is essentially vulgar. It mistakes talk about books for 
 that kind of conversation which is supposed to go on 
 among literary folk ; it dwells long and lovingly on 
 personal contact with second and third rate authors ; 
 its test of literary quality is the professional air and
 
 6O MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 manner. It gathers its small verse-writers, whom it 
 profanely calls poets, listens to their smooth and hol 
 low lines, applauds, drinks its tea, and goes home in 
 the happy faith that it has poured another libation at 
 the shrine of art. There is just now, and there proba 
 bly will be for some time to come, a great deal of this 
 sham love of literature in society; it is to be hoped 
 that a sounder culture will some day make an end 
 of it. 
 
 For the real love of books, like the real genius to 
 write them, cometh not by observation ; its roots are 
 in the soul, and, being a part of a man's deepest na 
 ture, it is shy of any expression that departs a hair's 
 line from absolute sincerity and simplicity. It detests 
 the signs and insignia of professionalism; it shrinks 
 from exploitation ; it resents the profanation of that 
 publicity which fastens on the manner in which the 
 thing is done rather than on its aim and spirit. The 
 world is prone to love wonders ; it cares much more 
 for the miracle than for the power which the miracle 
 discloses, or the truth which it reveals. It has been 
 in every age the anguish of the worker of wonders 
 that he was sought as a magician rather than as a 
 revealer of the mystery of life ; and it is the prevalence 
 of this spirit which makes the man of real artistic 
 spirit so often indifferent to contemporary praise. 
 
 The simplicity and sincerity of a great man of letters 
 have rarely been more clearly or attractively revealed 
 than in the recently published correspondence of Sir 
 Walter Scott The enormous productivity of the great
 
 THE REAL AND THE SHAM. 6 1 
 
 novelist was conditioned on long and arduous work ; 
 it would seem as if a man who was pouring out, through 
 so many years, an unbroken stream of narrative would 
 have become, in interest and habit no less than in oc 
 cupation, a story-writer and nothing but a story-writer. 
 But this is precisely what Scott did not become. The 
 smell of ink is never upon his garments ; he seems to 
 care for everything under the Scotch heavens except 
 books. Professionalism never gets the better of him, 
 and he goes on to the tragical but noble end telling 
 stories like a true-hearted man rather than like a trained 
 raconteur. Other and lesser men may squander body 
 and soul for a few new sensations, a little addition to 
 literary capital ; Scott remains sane, simple, and whole 
 some to the last day. One can imagine his scorn of 
 literary fads, and of those who follow them ; for litera 
 ture was to him, not a matter of phrases and manner 
 isms and social conventions, it was as simple, as 
 native, and as much of out-of-doors as the Highlands 
 whose secrets he discovered. There is a fine uncon 
 sciousness of any special gifts or calling in his letters ; 
 he writes about himself, as about all other things, in a 
 natural key. Upon the appearance of " St. Ronan's 
 Well," in 1824, Lady Abercorn tells him how greatly 
 the book has affected her. " I like the whole book," 
 she says ; " it, like all the rest of those novels, makes 
 one feel at home, and a party concerned. . . . Every 
 body reads these novels, and talks of them quite as 
 much as the people do in England. . . . People are 
 still curious as ever to find out the Author." And the
 
 62 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 "Author," at the flood-tide of the most magnificent 
 popular success in the history of English literature, 
 replies at length, touching upon the novels in a purely 
 objective and semi-humourous spirit, and then goes 
 on to talk about his boy Charles, who is soon to leave ; 
 for Oxford ; about his " black-eyed lassie," who is] 
 " dancing away merrily ; " about his nephew Walter, 
 and about many other personal and every-day matters 
 which touch the man, but which have nothing to do i 
 with the writing of books. The soundness of the 
 Waverley Novels comes from the soundness of the 
 simple, brave, true-hearted Sir Walter. 
 
 " My dear," he said to Lockhart, as he lay dying 
 that September day; "my dear, be a good man." 
 There is a tonic quality in such unconsciousness on : 
 the part of a man so opulent in some of the finest 
 literary gifts, a man of childlike nature, who drew | 
 his wonderful stories from the hills rather than fror 
 his libraries ; who was not shaken by the storm of 
 popularity which burst upon him, nor dismayed by 
 the disaster which threw its shadow like a vast eclipse 
 on his magical prosperity; a great writer, who was 
 first and always a man. It is well to seek refuge in 
 such a great career from the passing fashions of the 
 hour, from the exaggerations of unintelligent and ca 
 pricious praise of commonplace men, and from that 
 idle following of art which has as little veracity and j 
 reality in it as the rush and huzza of the crowd about 
 the local statesman returned to his ward after a brief 
 foreign tour.
 
 LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH. 
 
 ONE of the happiest evidences that work has become 
 play, and the strenuous temper of the artisan has 
 given place to the artist's ease of mood, is that peculiar 
 lightness of touch which is so elusive, so difficult, and 
 yet so full of the ultimate charm of art. Does not 
 Professor J. R. Seeley miss the point when he says : 
 " Literature is perhaps at best a compromise between 
 truth and fancy, between seriousness and trifling. It 
 cannot do without something of popularity, and yet 
 the writer who thinks much of popularity is unfaithful 
 to his mission ; on the other hand, he who leans too 
 heavily upon literature breaks through it into science 
 or into practical business " ? He is speaking of 
 Goethe, who sometimes leans so heavily on his art 
 that he breaks through into philosophy, and whose 
 verse, in didactic moods, comes perilously near prose ; 
 but is his general statement of the matter adequate or 
 accurate? There is, it is true, literature so light in 
 treatment and so unsubstantial in thought that it is 
 distinctly trifling. "The Rape of the Lock," for 
 instance, is in one sense a trifle, but as a trifle it is so 
 perfect that it betrays a strong and steady hand behind 
 it. Professor Seeley does not, however, limit the
 
 64 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 application of his statement; he evidently means to 
 suggest that there is an element of trifling in literature 
 as an art, for he puts it in antithesis with seriousness. 
 Is there not an imperfect idea of art involved in this 
 statement, and does not Professor Seeley confuse the 
 ease and grace of literature with trifling? 
 
 There is, especially among English-speaking peoples 
 a lack of the artistic instinct, nowhere more discernible 
 than in the inability to take art itself seriously, and ii 
 the tendency to impute to it a lack which inheres not ii 
 art itself, but in the perception of the critic. Mora 
 seriousness is a very noble quality, but it is by no means 
 the only form of seriousness. It may even be suspected 
 that there is something beyond it, a seriousness less 
 strenuous, and therefore less obvious, but a seriousnes 
 more fundamental because more reposeful, and sus 
 tained by a wider range of relationships. Strain am 
 stress have a dramatic as well as a moral interest, am 
 often quite obscure those silent and unobtrusive victories 
 which are won, not without sore struggle, but without 
 dust and tumult. There are few things so deceptive 
 the lightness of touch which evidences the presence of 
 the highest art ; it means that the man is doing crea- I 
 lively what he once did mechanically. It is the very I 
 highest form of seriousness, because it has forgotten that I 
 it is serious ; it has passed through self-consciousness 
 into that unconscious mood in which a man does the! I 
 noblest and most beautiful things of which he is ca 
 able, without taking thought that they are noble 01 
 beautiful. In the unfolding of character, where mo:
 
 LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH. 65 
 
 aims are most distinct and moral processes most con 
 stant, there must come a time when a man is genuine 
 and sound, as nature is fruitful, by the law of his own 
 being. He passes beyond the stage when he needs 
 to say to himself every hour and with intensest self- 
 consciousness, " I must do right ; " it becomes his 
 habit to do right. 
 
 Lightness of touch is not based on lack of serious 
 ness ; it is, rather, the product of a seriousness which 
 no longer obtrudes itself, because it has served its 
 purpose. Shakespeare was not less serious when he 
 wrote the exquisite calendar of flowers in "The 
 Winter's Tale " than when he drew the portrait of 
 Hector, but he was a greater artist ; he had mastered 
 his material more completely ; he had touched the 
 ultimate goal of his art. His touch is infinitely lighter 
 in " The Tempest," where his imagination plays with 
 the freedom and ease of a natural force, than in 
 "Troilus and Cressida," where he more than once 
 leans too heavily on poetry and breaks through into 
 philosophy. The philosophy is extremely interesting, 
 but it is not poetry ; it rather illustrates the difference 
 between the strenuous and the artistic mood, and 
 throws a clear light on the process of evolution by 
 which the heavy touch is transformed into that light, 
 sure, self-effacing touch which gives us the thing to be 
 expressed without any consciousness of the manner of 
 the expression. 
 
 Milton's voice has great compass and his manner 
 great nobleness in " Paradise Lost," but the purest 
 
 5
 
 66 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 and therefore the best poetry that came from his hand 
 is to be found in " L'Allegro," "II Penseroso," " Lyci- 
 das," the masque of " Comus," and the fragments of 
 the "Arcades." These tender and beautiful lyrics, in 
 which nobility of idea and ease of manner are so 
 perfectly blended, were the products of the poet's 
 most harmonious hours, when he was not less a Puri 
 tan because he was so much more the poet ; when 
 his mood was not less serious, but his relation to his 
 time had less of self-consciousness in it ; when he 
 touched the deepest themes with consummate grace 
 and lightness. 
 
 Goethe is at his best when his touch is lightest, and 
 at his worst when it is heaviest. His lyrics are un 
 surpassed in that magical ease whose secret is known 
 only to the masters of verse ; he is as spontaneous, 
 unforced, and fresh as a mountain rivulet. In his 
 letters to Schiller he emphasises the dependence of 
 the poet on the unconscious, creative mood. When 
 this mood possesses him, the didactic tendency dis 
 appears, and the glowing spirit of poetry shines in 
 song, ballad, and lyrical romance ; he is all fire, grace, 
 and lightness. But when the spontaneous mood for 
 sakes him, and he writes by force of his training and 
 skill, how slow and heavy is his flight, how cold and 
 obvious his touch ! He is nowhere more in earnest 
 than in these inimitable songs, and has nowhere else a 
 touch so devoid of manner, so instinct with grace and 
 freedom. 
 
 The lightness of touch which charms us in literature
 
 LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH. 6/ 
 
 is not trifling ; it is mastery. Whoever possesses it 
 has gotten the better of his materials and of himself, 
 and has brought both into subjection to that creative 
 mood which pours itself out in finalities and perfec 
 tions of speech and form as naturally as the vitality of 
 a plant bursts into a flower which is both obviously 
 and inexplicably beautiful. Whenever we come upon 
 lightness of touch, we are in contact with a work of 
 art ; whenever we miss it, the work that lacks it may 
 be noble, worthy, full of evidences of genius, but it is 
 not a work of supreme artistic excellence.
 
 THE POETS' CORNER. 
 
 ON dark days, when the fire sings its merry song in 
 the teeth of sullen winds, the poets' corner is a place 
 of refuge. There the great singers stand, row upon 
 row, a silent but immortal choir ; and the serene face 
 of Emerson hangs on the little space of wall beside 
 them. In the glorious company are those who sang 
 the first notes in the earliest dawn of history, and those 
 whose voices are just rising above the turmoil of to-day. 
 What a vast movement of life have they set to music, 
 and how many generations have they stirred to heroism 
 or charmed into forgetfulness ! There have been great 
 teachers, but none so persuasive as these ; there have 
 been great leaders, but none so inspiring as these. I 
 have often envied the Athenian boy sans grammar, sans 
 arithmetic, sans reading-books, sans science primer; 
 with no text-book but his Homer, but with Homer 
 stored in his memory and locked in his heart. To be 
 educated on the myths those rich, deep interpreta 
 tions of life and upon the heroic history of one's 
 race ; to have constantly before the imagination, not 
 isolated incidents and unrelated facts, but noble figures 
 and splendid achievements ; to breathe the atmosphere 
 of a religion interwoven with the story of one's race,
 
 THE POETS' CORNER. 69 
 
 and to approach all this at the feet of a great poet 
 were ever children more fortunate? And when it 
 comes to results, was ever educational system so fruit 
 ful as that which in the little city of Athens, in the 
 brief period of a century and a half, produced a group 
 of men whose superiority as soldiers, statesmen, poets, 
 orators, architects, sculptors, and philosophers seems 
 somehow to have been secured without effort, so per 
 fectly is the spirit of their achievements expressed in 
 the forms which they took on? The superiority of 
 that training lay in its recognition of the imagination, 
 and in its appeal, not to the intellect alone, but to the 
 whole nature. We have great need of science, and 
 science has been a grave and wise teacher, but the 
 heart of life and the meaning of it belong to poetry ; 
 for poetry, as Wordsworth says, is " the impassioned 
 expression which is in the face of all science." Science 
 gives us the face, but poetry gives us the countenance 
 which is the soul irradiating its mask and revealing 
 itself. 
 
 Upon all those who " cannot heare the Plannet-like 
 Musick of Poetrie," Sir Philip Sidney, a poet in deed 
 as in word, called down the direful curse, " in the be- 
 halfe of all Poets," " that while you live, you live in 
 love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a Sonnet ; 
 and when you die, your memory die from the earth for 
 want of an Epitaph." The range of that curse is 
 more limited than appears at first sight, for while it is 
 true that many of us have never listened to the chil 
 dren of the Muses, those of us are few who are not in
 
 /O MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 some way poets. We call ourselves practical, and im 
 agine, in our ignorance, that there is a certain supe 
 riority in thus separating ourselves from the idealists, 
 the dreamers, the singers. But Nature is wiser than 
 we, and suffers us to apply these belittling epithets to 
 ourselves, but all the time keeps us in contact with the 
 living streams of poetry. The instant our nobler in 
 stincts are appealed to, and we cease to be traffickers 
 and become fathers, mothers, children, lovers, patriots, 
 we become poets. To get away from poetry one must 
 begin by emptying the universe of God ; to rid life of 
 poetry one must end by following the hint of the great 
 pessimist and persuading men to commit universal sui 
 cide. While the days come to us with such radiancy 
 of dawn, and depart from us with such splendour of 
 eve ; while flowers bloom, and birds sing, and winds 
 sport with clouds ; while mountains hold their sublime 
 silence against the horizon, and the sea sings its end 
 less monotone ; while hope, faith, and love teach their 
 great lessons, and win us to work, sacrifice, purity, and 
 devotion, we shall be poets in spite of ourselves and 
 whether we know it or not. There is no choice about 
 the matter; there is a divine compulsion in it; we 
 must be poets because we are immortal. 
 
 But there is a great difference between being or 
 doing something by compulsion, and being or doing 
 something by choice. They only get the joy of poetry 
 who love it and make fellowship with it. The richest 
 poetry must always be that which lies in one's soul, in 
 its deep and silent communion with nature and with
 
 THE POETS' CORNER. Jl 
 
 life ; but this unuttered and, in a true sense, unutter 
 able poetry, becomes more definite and available as a 
 resource if we make intimate friends with the masters 
 of poetical expression. Shakespeare saw more of life 
 than falls to the lot of all save his greatest readers; 
 perhaps no one has yet brought to his pages the same 
 degree of force and veracity of insight which are to be 
 found in them. To read Shakespeare, therefore, is, 
 for the greatest no less than for the least, a resource of 
 the noblest kind ; it is an interpretation of life through 
 the imagination ; a disclosure of what lies in its depths, 
 to be revealed only when those depths are stirred by 
 the tempests of passion, or by some searching experi 
 ence. A recent writer says that Shakespeare is to 
 mankind at large what a man of perfect vision would be 
 in a world of half-blind persons, people who saw 
 nothing clearly or accurately. Shakespeare does not 
 describe an imaginary race and a visionary world ; he 
 describes men as they are, and the world as it is ; the 
 sense of unreality in his work, if one has it, comes 
 from one's own limitations of sight. In other words, 
 it is not the so-called practical mind which sees things 
 as they are, but the mind of imaginative force and 
 poetic insight. We move about in a world half real 
 ised, full of dim figures, vague outlines, hazy vistas ; 
 Shakespeare lived in a world which lay in clear light, 
 and which he searched through and through with those 
 marvellous glances of his. Who has read English his 
 tory with such an eye as the greatest of English poets? 
 Hume recites the facts about Henry V. in an orderly 
 and careful manner, but Shakespeare looks into the
 
 72 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 soul of the robust and virile king, and makes us see, 
 not the trappings and insignia of power, but the inte 
 rior source of that authority which flung the English 
 yeomen like a foaming wave over the walls of Harfleur. 
 The diamond is none the less in the quartz because we 
 fail to see it, and the heroic and tragic possibilities are 
 not lacking in hosts of human lives which seem entirely 
 commonplace to most of us. That which makes some 
 ages so much more inspiring and productive than 
 others is not so much a difference in the material at 
 hand as in the skill and power with which the possi 
 bilities of that material are discerned and turned to 
 account ; men do not differ so much in the possession 
 of opportunities as in the clearness of sight to discern 
 them and the force to make the most of them. This 
 world can never be commonplace save to the dull and 
 unseeing ; and life can never be devoid of tragic in 
 terest save to those who fail to recognise the elements 
 at work in every community and in every individual 
 S soul. 
 
 The men of poetic mind have many gifts, but none 
 so rare and of such moment to their fellows as this 
 clearness of vision. To really see clearly into the soul 
 of things is one of the rarest of gifts, and it is the 
 characteristic gift of the poetic imagination. That 
 second harvest of which Emerson speaks is reaped 
 only by the sickle of the imagination ; to the common 
 vision it does not even exist. This round world is 
 distinctly visible to the dullest mind ; but to such a 
 mind the beauty, wonder, and mystery in which its 
 secret lies hidden, are as if they were not. Men walk
 
 THE POETS' CORNER. 73 
 
 through life almost without consciousness of the daily 
 miracle performed under their eyes ; they become so 
 familiar with their surroundings that they lose the sense 
 of awe and wonder which flows from the clear per 
 ception of the fathomless sea of force in which all 
 things are borne onward. One may drop his plummet 
 in the nearest pool, and, behold, it also is fathomless. 
 Every path leads into the presence of that infinite 
 power to which we give different names, but which is 
 the one great and eternal reality behind these appari 
 tions of to-day. Now, of this unseen but sublime 
 presence the imagination keeps us continually con 
 scious ; and the great poetic minds, in prose and 
 verse, in Plato's " Dialogues " and in Dante's " Di 
 vine Comedy," fulfil their highest office in seeing 
 and compelling us to see the spirit behind the form, 
 the soul within the body. In the records which the 
 imagination has kept in the art of the world are written 
 the true story of the soul of man, the authentic his 
 tory of his life on earth. And the charm of this reve 
 lation lies in its freshness, its variety, and its beauty. 
 It does not preserve the past after the manner of the 
 historians by pressing it like dried and faded flowers 
 between the leaves of massive quartos ; it preserves 
 the very vitality which flowered centuries ago. The 
 one supreme quality by which it lives is its marvellous 
 life, that life which keeps Ulysses still sailing the an 
 cient seas, and Romeo still young and beautiful with 
 the passion which, in spite of its own short life, is the 
 evidence of immortality.
 
 THE JOY OF THE MOMENT. 
 
 THE first warm spring days stir something like 
 resentment against those ascetic and monastic ideas 
 which for so many centuries set men at odds with 
 nature, and almost broke the bonds between them. 
 There is a delight in life which is often called pagan, 
 so grossly has Christianity been misread. This delight, 
 born of the pure joy of the mind in recognising the 
 beauty of the world and its own inalienable share in it, 
 is quite as much a duty as the most definite moral 
 obligation ; but a long education will be needed before 
 the real meaning of beauty is discerned, and the har 
 mony between man and nature, shattered by Latin 
 medievalism, is restored. Meantime, fortunate are 
 they to whom the bloom of the world is a never-ending 
 joy, and who are able to snatch this unforced delight 
 in an age when so few things are sought spontaneously, 
 and so many are striven for with a strenuousness which 
 defeats itself. 
 
 There was a great deal of Christianity in Paganism, 
 if one goes to the New Testament for his ideals ; and 
 there is, accordingly, a great deal of Paganism coming 
 out in Christianity. The world is as beautiful as it 
 was before the shadow of a divisive thought of himself
 
 THE JOY OF THE MOMENT. 75 
 
 made man a stranger in the house built for him with a 
 splendour fit for immortal spirits ; and the alien begins 
 once more to find himself at home under the kindly 
 stars and amid the ministrations of the seasons. There 
 are few things which the modern world needs more 
 than the power to take the joy of the moment, without 
 that blighting afterthought which scatters every rose in 
 barren analysis, and flings every fragment of gold into 
 the crucible. The first use of the world is to see it, 
 and get the delight which comes from the vision ; but 
 there are hosts of men so bent upon understanding 
 how things are made that they pull them to pieces 
 before they have really looked at them. One longs at 
 times for the mood of the myth-makers, who often mis 
 read the facts, but who had a rare faculty of getting at 
 the truth, and who had the joy of seeing the world as a 
 great living whole, overflowing with beauty and divinity. 
 There were greater things to learn in nature than some 
 of the Greek poets saw ; but they had a true instinct 
 for getting into intimate relations with nature, and they 
 knew how to enrich themselves with the loveliness 
 which encircled them in sky and sea and woodland. 
 There is a charm in Theocritus, for instance, with which 
 the dawning summer puts one in renewed fellowship ; 
 a charm which seems to disclose a new reality when 
 the advancing season becomes its comment and illus 
 tration. That charm resides in an immense capacity 
 for enjoyment ; in the power of surrendering one's self 
 to the moment so completely that one slips the bonds 
 of consciousness and loses himself in the flowing life of
 
 76 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the world. When one has, so to speak, shed himself, 
 he is in the way of some of the rarest joys which mor 
 tal lips ever taste joys as pure and sweet as any that 
 are yielded to the highest moods. " The unconscious 
 ness of the child," says Froebel, "is rest in God," a 
 very deep and beautiful saying, which we shall do well 
 to lay to heart. Too many of us are under the delu 
 sion that nothing counts save activity, and that to rest 
 in nature at times is to commit the sin of slothfulness. 
 
 The herdsmen whom Theocritus has immortalised 
 were not always models of conscious rectitude, but 
 they are often models of unconscious enjoyment. 
 They note the seasons by a thousand delicate signs, 
 and they mark the hours by a registry of time more 
 sensitive than that on any dial. The sky, the clouds, 
 the sea, have perpetual interest for them ; and birds, 
 leaves, winds, and flowers so mingle with their thoughts 
 and occupations that the inward and the outward hap 
 penings seem all of a piece. Nature has share in 
 every moment, and divides her fruits and charms as if 
 there were a secret contract between the fruit-bearer 
 and the fruit-taker ; between the brook and the figure 
 that bends over it ; between the sloping hillside and 
 the herdsman who feeds his flock on the grass creeping 
 close to the olive-trees. 
 
 " Thyrsis, let honey and the honeycomb 
 Fill thy sweet mouth, and figs of ./Egilus : 
 For ne'er cicala trilled so sweet a song. 
 Here is the cup; mark, friend, how sweet it smells: 
 The Hours, thou 'It say, have washed it in their well."
 
 THE JOY OF THE MOMENT. 77 
 
 We have gone a long way in our real education 
 when we have learned how to yield ourselves com 
 pletely to the hour and the scene, for in this mood we 
 learn secrets which defy our keenest scrutiny. Nature 
 often has things to say to our silence which remain 
 unspoken while we insist upon having speech with her. 
 To sit at her feet is often more fruitful than to persist 
 in putting our thought into her mind. Above all, to 
 surrender ourselves to her mood is to feel her beauty 
 with a keenness of delight which is like the adding of 
 a new joy to life. To those who are preoccupied with 
 their own thoughts a whole realm of happiness is as 
 effectively closed as if it were walled and barred. To 
 leave ourselves at home and go into the woods to find 
 what is there, and not what we have brought there, is 
 to come into a kingdom of God which, being without 
 us, illuminates with a new and kindling light the 
 kingdom within us. There are a delicacy of colour, a 
 charm of changefulness, a swiftly shifting loveliness, 
 which elude our hours of self-consciousness and 
 reserve their enchantment for our moments of self- 
 forgetfulness. As we open ourselves to these elusive 
 influences, they not only silently steal into our souls, 
 but they become more real and more constant. A 
 new sense, or rather a new delicacy of sense, is bora 
 within us; we hear sounds which were inaudible 
 before, and we see things that were invisible to our 
 preoccupation. 
 
 And from this freshening of perception there comes 
 not only a new joy in nature, but a new insight into
 
 78 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 poetry. For the poets find their sphere in the obser 
 vation and record of this more delicate and unobtru 
 sive loveliness, and their power of beguiling us out of 
 ourselves lies in their faculty of finer vision. No truer 
 disclosure of this sensitiveness of spirit to the beauty of 
 the world has recently been made than that which 
 finds its record in William Watson's invocation to 
 " The First Skylark of Spring : " 
 
 " The springtime bubbled in his throat, 
 
 The sweet sky seemed not far above, 
 And young and lovesome came the note ; 
 Ah, thine is Youth and Love. 
 
 " Thou sing'st of what he knew of old, 
 
 And dreamlike from afar recalls ; 
 In flashes of forgotten gold 
 An Orient glory falls. 
 
 " And as he listens, one by one 
 
 Life's utmost splendours blaze more nigh : 
 Less inaccessible the sun, 
 Less alien grows the sky. 
 
 " For thou art native to the spheres, 
 
 And of the courts of heaven art free, 
 And carriest to his temporal ears 
 News from eternity. 
 
 " And lead'st him to the dizzy verge, 
 
 And lur'st him o'er the dazzling line, 
 Where mortal and immortal merge, 
 And human dies divine."
 
 THE LOWELL LETTERS. 
 
 IT has long been the habit of many people to speak 
 of letter-writing as a lost art, and to intimate that its 
 disappearance is a phase of that deterioration of mind 
 and manners which is constantly charged upon the 
 spread of the democratic idea. Suits of armour having 
 been relegated to the Tower, and the splendid dress 
 of the Renaissance period no longer charming the eye 
 save on festive occasions, the habit of exchanging con 
 fidences and opinions at length between friends has 
 gone the way of all the earth ! That there has been 
 a change in the manner of letter-writing is beyond 
 question, but that the change has been a deterioration 
 is more than doubtful. When Mile de Scudery wrote 
 " The Grand Cyrus," nothing short of the most stately 
 figures, the most elaborate style, and a long row of 
 volumes would suffice for a dignified romance ; to 
 day we have some very humble people, some very 
 simple speech, and a single volume of moderate size 
 for the story of " Adam Bede." Will any one say, 
 therefore, that the novel has lost dignity, power, or 
 reality? In these days friends no longer constitute 
 themselves reporters and news-gatherers, as in the
 
 80 MV STUDY FIRE. 
 
 time when the news-letter, written over a cup of choco 
 late in some London coffee-house, was the principal 
 means of communication between the metropolis and 
 the provinces. Changed conditions involve changed 
 methods and manners, but not necessarily worse ones. 
 French women have a genius and a training for social 
 life, for living together in a real and true way, from which 
 women of the English-speaking race are, as a rule, 
 debarred. Our strong and persistent sense of person 
 ality has certain fine rewards, but it costs a good deal 
 on the side of free and intimate relationship with others. 
 There are half a dozen groups of letters written by 
 French women which may be said to fix the standard 
 of this kind of writing ; but those who know the France 
 of to-day intimately declare that this art was never 
 practised with more skill and charm than at this 
 moment. 
 
 However the case may be in France, it is certain 
 that this century has been peculiarly rich in this kind 
 of literature among English-speaking people, and some 
 of the very best modern writing in our language has 
 taken this form. When it comes to the question of 
 literary quality, there is nothing in letter-writing, from 
 the time of Howell down, more admirable than that 
 which makes every bit and fragment from Thackeray's 
 pen literature. In those estrays, to which he probably 
 attached no value, and to which in many cases he 
 certainly gave little time or thought, the touch of the 
 master is in every line, that indefinable quality which 
 forever differentiates writing from literature. This
 
 THE LOWELL LETTERS. 8 1 
 
 quality, which is personality plus the artistic power, 
 is quite as likely to discover itself in the briefest note 
 as in the most elaborate work ; indeed, the careless 
 ease with which a man often writes to his friend is 
 more favourable to free and unconscious expression of 
 himself than the essay or the novel over which he 
 broods and upon which he works month after month, 
 perhaps year after year. The suspicion of toil is fatal 
 to a work of art, for the essence of art is ease ; and 
 for this reason the letters of some writers are distinctly 
 the best things they have given us. Unfortunately, 
 even letter-writers do not always escape the temptation 
 to write with an eye to the future, and to put one's 
 best foot forward, instead of opening one's mind and 
 heart without care or consciousness. 
 
 Mr. Lowell's letters are not free from faults, but 
 their faults spring from his conditions and temperament, 
 and not from proximity to a large and admiring audi 
 ence. The letters are simple, frank, and often charm 
 ingly affectionate ; they reveal the heart of the man, 
 and perhaps their best service to us is the impression 
 they convey that the man and his work were of a piece, 
 and that the fine idealism of the poet was but the ex 
 pression of what was most real and significant to the 
 man. The self-consciousness of the young Lowell 
 comes out very strongly if one reads his letters in con 
 nection with those of the young Walter Scott ; but it 
 was a self-consciousness inherited with the Puritan 
 temperament rather than developed in the individual 
 nature. The strong, quiet, easy relations of Scott to 
 6
 
 82 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 his time and world are very suggestive of a power 
 which has so far eluded our grasp, a power which, 
 could we grasp it, would make the production of great 
 literature possible to us. Lowell had so many elements 
 of greatness that one is often perplexed by the fact 
 that, as a writer, with all his gifts, he somehow falls 
 short of greatness. May it not be that all that stood 
 between Lowell and those final stretches of achieve 
 ment where the great immortal things are done was 
 his self-consciousness ? He was never quite free; he 
 could never quite let himself go, so to speak, and let 
 the elemental force sweep him wholly out of himself. 
 But it is not probable that any one could have grown 
 up in the New England of his boyhood and possessed 
 this last gift of greatness. " I shall never be a poet," 
 he wrote in 1865, " till I get out of the pulpit ; and 
 New England was all meeting-house when I was grow 
 ing up." A generation later this unconsciousness had 
 become possible, for Phillips Brooks possessed it in 
 rare degree ; it was the secret of that contagious 
 quality which gave him such compelling power when 
 ever he rose to speak. 
 
 Lowell's letters have the great charm of frankness, 
 a charm possessed only by natures of a high order. 
 One is constantly struck with his simplicity, that 
 simplicity which is so often found in a nature at once 
 strong and rich. Life consists, after all, in a very few 
 things, and no one knows this so well as the man who 
 has tried many things. There was in the heart of the 
 old diplomatist the same hunger and thirst that were
 
 THE LOWELL LETTERS. 83 
 
 in the heart of the young poet. Leslie Stephen says 
 of him : " He was one of those men of whom it might 
 be safely said, not that they were unspoiled by popu 
 larity and flattery, but that it was inconceivable that 
 they should be spoiled. He offered no assailable 
 point to temptation of that kind. For it is singularly 
 true of him, as I take it to be generally true of men 
 of the really poetical temperament, that the child in 
 him was never suppressed. He retained the most 
 transparent simplicity to the end." And this comment 
 is delightfully confirmed by an incident reported by 
 the " Universal Eavesdropper : " " Passing along the 
 Edgware Road with a friend two years ago, their eyes 
 were attracted by a sign with this inscription : ' Hos 
 pital for Incurable Children.' Turning to his com 
 panion with that genial smile for which he is remarka 
 ble, Lowell said quietly, ' There 's where they '11 send 
 me one of these days.' ?; He professed not to know 
 of what Fountain of Youth he had drank, but he could 
 hardly have been ignorant that there was such a 
 fountain in his own nature. The " exhaustless fund 
 of inexperience " which he said was somewhere about 
 him was simply the richness of a nature which never 
 reached its limits and flowed back upon itself with that 
 silent but desolating reaction which sometimes gives 
 age a touch of tragedy. 
 
 The simplicity of Lowell's nature comes out also in 
 his dealing with ethical questions. He never sophisti 
 cates, or perplexes himself or his readers with the 
 effort to justify the right and just thing by a train of
 
 84 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 reasoning ; he strikes straight at the heart of the mat 
 ter. Nothing seems to confuse him or to distort his 
 vision ; he sees clearly, and what he sees he accepts 
 with childlike simplicity of faith. This is the secret 
 of his singular effectiveness when he speaks on moral 
 questions. There is an elemental Tightness in his 
 view and an elemental authority in his voice. Whether 
 he is dealing with the burning question of slavery, or 
 with the delusion of spiritualism, or with incorrupti 
 bility in public life, or with honest payment of public 
 obligations, or with the right of property in books, 
 his perception flies like an arrow to its mark ; tradition, 
 custom, casuistry, not only do not confuse him they 
 do not even reach him. This quality of directness is 
 one of the most convincing evidences of greatness. 
 In a man of Lincoln's opportunities and experiences 
 its presence is not surprising, although none the less 
 admirable and rare ; but in a man of Lowell's culture 
 and wide contact with life it shines with a beauty made 
 more effective by the richness of the medium which it 
 masters. 
 
 " I love above all other reading the early letters of 
 men of genius. In that struggling, hoping, confident 
 time, the world has not slipped in with its odious con 
 sciousness, its vulgar claim of confidantship between 
 them and their inspiration. In reading these letters I 
 can recall my former self, full of an aspiration which 
 had not learned how hard the hills of life are to climb, 
 but thought rather to alight upon them from its winged 
 vantage-ground." These words, called out by a gift
 
 THE LOWELL LETTERS. 85 
 
 of " Keats's Life," are expressive of the feeling with 
 which one dips into these letters written by the same 
 hand, letters full of disclosures of character ; of side 
 lights on a life of sustained dignity and fruitfulness ; 
 of wit, humor, wisdom, and art.
 
 THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 
 
 MR. LOWELL speaks of himself, in one of his most 
 characteristic letters, as one of the last of the great 
 readers, a fortunate few who have had leisure and 
 opportunity to stray at will through the whole field of 
 literature. The true book-lover counts his easy inti 
 macy with his library as a privilege beyond the pur 
 chasing power of money or fame, and would sooner 
 part with all hope of share in either than with a 
 resource which is a measureless delight. For the love 
 of books becomes a passion in the end, and when the 
 heart once falls a prey to this passion, most things 
 that other men care for become dross. Great fortunes 
 do not so much as touch the imagination that has kept 
 company with Una and Rosalind ; and the fret and 
 fever of the rush for place have no power to mar the 
 repose of the library in which the devout reader sits as 
 in a shrine. To those who have become past-masters 
 of the art of reading, the spell of the book is not to be 
 resisted ; but no description can convey an idea of its 
 power to those who have not fallen under it. The 
 real reader believes in his heart that every hour apart 
 from his books is an hour lost ; that all duties and 
 necessities which draw him away are not only inter-
 
 THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 8/ 
 
 ruptions, but impertinences ; and that the busy, rest 
 less, distracted world has no more right to disturb him 
 in his devotions than had the marauding bands of 
 mediaeval warfare to break in upon the fugitives who 
 had taken refuge in the sanctuaries. This is what the 
 past-master of the art of reading believes in his heart ; 
 but he has kept good company too long to exalt his 
 privilege at the expense of his fellows by making public 
 confession of his faith. 
 
 We often need, however, to protect ourselves from 
 our friends ; for we cannot bring the best gifts to the 
 service of friendship unless we guard the independence 
 of our own thought and action against even the solici 
 tation of affection. Lovelace struck a very deep note 
 when he sang : 
 
 " I could not love thee, Dear, so much 
 Loved I not Honour more." 
 
 A great affection is often a great peril, and a great 
 passion brings with it a commensurate danger. The 
 great reader is the most fortunate of men, but he is 
 also one of the most sorely tempted ; and his temp 
 tation is the more seductive because it comes in the 
 guise of an opportunity. It seems a great waste of 
 time, and a piece of very bad taste as well, to spend 
 much time with one's own thought when the best 
 thought of the world may be had for the opening of 
 a volume close at hand. There is a kind of brazen 
 effrontery in trying to think things out for ourselves 
 when Plato's Dialogues let us into a world of thought
 
 88 MY STUDY FJRE. 
 
 not only very noble in its structure, but enchanting in 
 its atmosphere. In the long run, however, one would 
 better do without Plato than lose the habit of thinking. 
 And how shall a man justify serious and prolonged 
 observation of life when the plays of Shakespeare lie 
 on his table, to be opened in any hour, and never to 
 be closed without a fresh sense of the marvellous 
 searching of the heart and mind of man which has 
 made its registry on every page? No reader ever 
 gets to the bottom of Shakespeare's thought, and surely 
 it is folly to try to master life for ourselves when we 
 are unable to fully possess ourselves of this interpreta 
 tion of it ! In like manner, Theocritus and Words 
 worth and Burns make our efforts to establish personal 
 relations with nature seem at once intrusive and ridic 
 ulous. Whichever way we turn we are confronted by 
 our betters, and the sensitive spirit feels abashed and 
 appalled in the presence of the masters who have 
 possessed themselves in advance of every field which 
 he wishes to explore. The great reader, with so much 
 unappropriated material at hand, is tempted to become 
 a mere receptacle for knowledge or a mere taster of 
 the vintages of past years. 
 
 A good deal of originative force is absorbed in 
 enjoyment in the library, and many a man who might 
 have seen and said things for himself sees them only 
 through the eyes of others and says them only in their 
 language. Activity, it is true, is often only a mis 
 chievous form of idleness, and it would be better if 
 some men were content to enjoy instead of striving to
 
 THE TYRANNY OF BOOKS. 89 
 
 create ; much current writing brings this truth home 
 to us. Nevertheless, a man would better be himself 
 in a poor way than be somebody else in a very rich 
 way. The modest house which a man builds for him 
 self, with his own brains and hands, is more creditable 
 to him than the great house which he occupies by the 
 grace or good-will of another. A man owes it to him 
 self to stand in personal relations with life, and not to 
 touch it at second hand ; and one would better see it 
 for himself than get report of it from the keenest 
 observer that ever studied it ; one would better scrape 
 acquaintance with nature on any terms than get his 
 knowledge of her at second hand. The chief thing 
 for every man is to come into actual contact with the 
 things that make for his life ; and for that contact no 
 price is too great, not even the price of turning the 
 key in the library door and suffering the cobwebs to 
 cloud the titles of the books. The bookworm has an 
 enjoyment so keen that we must envy even while we 
 condemn it. But the pleasure costs too much. It 
 costs that which no man has a right to pay. 
 
 It involves, among other losses, a diminution of the 
 power of appreciation and appropriation ; for the man 
 who is always and only a reader fails to get the last 
 flavour out of his pursuit. There is not only a great 
 freshening of the receptive sense by variation of occu 
 pation and experience, but there is also notable gain 
 in insight by supplementing the observation of others 
 with studies of our own. No man can fully enter into 
 the Shakespearean comment upon life until he has first
 
 9O MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 learned something of life at his "own charges; and no 
 man can feel the ultimate charm of Wordsworth and 
 Burns who has not first plucked the daffodil and the 
 daisy with his own hands. The men of many books 
 are often impoverished so far as real wealth of thought, 
 knowledge, and feeling is concerned, and the men of 
 few books are often incalculably rich in these posses 
 sions. Burton loved his books well and not unwisely, 
 but we read his pages of compacted quotation only at 
 intervals and with great temperance ; while of Shake 
 speare, the man of few books, and those few mainly 
 translations, we can never get enough. It is true that 
 there has been but one Shakespeare, and in any age 
 the men are few who have any original comments to 
 make. If life were chiefly a matter of expression, it 
 would be better every way that a few should speak and 
 that the rest of us should keep silence in the presence 
 of our betters ; but expression is the gift of the few, 
 while experience, and the growth which comes through 
 it, is a birthright which no man can sell without selling 
 himself. Whether silent or speaking, a man must be 
 himself, see with his own eyes, and work with his own 
 hands. The crowd of glorious witnesses who look 
 down upon his toil from the shelves of his library will 
 not despise it because it is humble, nor will they scorn 
 his achievement because it is meagre and imperfect. 
 Their noblest service is to give us faith in ourselves 
 and joy in our work.
 
 THE SPELL OF STYLE. 
 
 THE reality of art is constantly affirmed by the sud 
 den flaming of the imagination and the swift response 
 of the emotions to its silent appeal. Whenever a real 
 sentence is spoken on the stage, what a silence falls on 
 the theatre ! Something has gone home to every audi 
 tor, and the hush of recognition or expectancy is in 
 stantaneous. There is, perhaps, no scene in the modern 
 lyrical drama which is more beautiful in its suggestive- 
 ness than that in which Siegfried strives to comprehend 
 the song of the birds, and vainly shapes his stubborn 
 reed to give them note for note. The light sifts down 
 through the trees ; the leaves sway gently in the cur 
 rents of air, rising and falling as if touched by the ebb 
 and flow of invisible tides ; the sound of running 
 water, cool, pellucid, unstained by human association, 
 steals in among the murmurous tones ; and in the 
 midst of this mysterious stir of life sits Siegfried, pa 
 thetically eager to catch the keynote of a harmony 
 whose existence he feels, but the significance of which 
 escapes him. The baffling sense of a music just be 
 yond our hearing continually besets us, and, like Sieg 
 fried, we are forever striving to master this mysterious 
 melody.
 
 92 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 There is in all artistic natures a conviction that a 
 deep and universal accord exists between all created 
 things, and that beyond all apparent discords there is 
 an eternal harmony. This fundamental unity philoso 
 phy is always searching for and art is always finding, 
 and the thrill which runs through us when a perfect 
 phrase falls on our ears, or a new glimpse of beauty 
 passes before our eyes, is something more than the 
 joy of the aesthetic sense ; it is the joy of the soul in a 
 new disclosure of life itself. There is a deep mystery 
 in this matter of harmony and of its power over us : 
 the mystery which hides the soul of life and art. If 
 we could penetrate that mystery we should master the 
 secret of existence, and find truth and beauty, life and 
 its final expression, so blended and fused that we could 
 no more separate them than we can separate the form, 
 the colour, and the fragrance of the flower ; for they 
 have one root, and are but different manifestations of 
 the same vital force. 
 
 The psychologists tell us that every man has a 
 rhythm discoverable in his walk, gesture, voice, modu 
 lation, and sentences ; a rhythm which is the natural 
 expression of the man when all the elements of his 
 nature come into harmony, and the inner and outward, 
 the spiritual and the physical, flow together in perfect 
 unison. At rare intervals such a man throws his spell 
 over us with written or spoken words, and we are 
 drawn out of ourselves and borne along by a music of 
 speech which touches the senses as delicately and 
 surely as it touches the soul. Such a nature has passed
 
 THE SPELL OF STYLE. 93 
 
 beyond the secondary processes of the intellect into 
 the region of ultimate truth, and speaks, not with the 
 divisive tongue of the Scribe, but with the authority of 
 Nature herself. For the power of the masters is a 
 mystery even to themselves ; it is a power so largely 
 unconscious that the deepest knowledge its possessor 
 has of it is the knowledge that at times he can com 
 mand it, and at other times it eludes him. 
 
 " I know very well," says Lowell, " what the charm 
 of mere words is. I know very well that our nerves 
 of sensation adapt themselves, as the wood of the vio 
 lin is said to do, to certain modulations, so that we 
 receive them with a readier sympathy at every repeti 
 tion. This is a part of the sweet charm of the classics." 
 It is a part, indeed, but only a part ; the spell is deeper 
 and more lasting, for it is the spell which the vision of 
 the whole has for him who has seen only a part ; which 
 a sudden glimpse of the eternal has for him whose 
 sight rests on the temporal ; which a disclosure of per 
 fection has for him who lives and strives in a world of 
 fragments. The tones of the violin get their resonance 
 and fulness from the entire instrument, from the 
 body no less than from the strings ; and the magical 
 melody which a Paganini evokes from it is the har 
 mony of a perfected violin. In like manner the magi 
 cal spell lies within the empire of that man alone 
 whose whole being has found its keynote and natural 
 rhythm. 
 
 This lets us into the secret of style, that elusive 
 quality which forever separates the work of the artist
 
 94 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 from that of the artisan. For the final form which a 
 great thought or a great emotion takes on is as far 
 removed from accident, caprice, or choice as are the 
 shape and colour of the flower ; it was ordained before 
 the foundations of the world, by the hand which made 
 all life of a piece and decreed that the great things 
 should grow by an interior law, instead of being fash 
 ioned by mechanical skill. Body, mind, and spirit are 
 so blended in every work of art that they are not only 
 inseparable, but form a living whole. Not only is the 
 Kalevala, in idea, imagery, and words, a creation out 
 of the soul of the race that fashioned it, but its metre 
 was determined by the actual heart-beat and respiratory 
 action of the men who, age after age, recited it from 
 memory. Every original metre and all rhythm have 
 their roots in the rhythmical action of the body ; lan 
 guage, arrangement, and selection, in the rhythmical 
 action of the mind ; and emotion and passion, in the 
 currents of the soul : so that every real poem is a 
 growth of the entire life of a man ; and the spell of its 
 deep harmony of parts, as well as its melody of words, 
 is compounded of his very substance. 
 
 This spell, which issues from all art, resides in no 
 verbal sleight of hand, no tricks with phrases : it is a 
 sudden flashing out of the perfection at the heart of 
 things ; and we are thrilled by it because in it we rec 
 ognise what is deepest and divinest in our own natures. 
 If this spell were at the command of any kind of dex 
 terity, it would be sought and gained by a host of 
 mechanical experts ; but it is the despair of the dex-
 
 THE SPELL OF STYLE. 95 
 
 terous and the strenuous : it is as elusive as the wind, 
 and as completely beyond human control. Nothing is 
 more certain than that Shakespeare has a style ; he 
 has a way of saying things so entirely his own that one 
 is never at a loss to identify his phrase in any com 
 pany ; indeed, it is not too much to say that if some 
 stray line of his were to come to light, with no formal 
 trace of authorship about it, the great poet would not 
 be despoiled of his own for an hour. And yet no one 
 has ever imitated Shakespeare ! The Shakespearean 
 idiom is absolutely incommunicable. The secondary 
 work of Milton has often been copied , it is, indeed, 
 easily imitated, for it is full of mannerisms ; but Shakes 
 peare, in the processes of his spell-weaving, is no more 
 to be overtaken than is the tide of life silently rising 
 into leaf and flower. At his best, Shakespeare is magi 
 cal ; he is beyond analysis or imitation ; he has come 
 into such touch with nature that the inner harmony, 
 the ultimate music, becomes audible through him. 
 When the real significance of style dawns upon us, it is 
 not difficult to understand the spell which resides in 
 this perfection of phrase, nor the eagerness with which 
 men pursue it. The true artist lives in the constant 
 anticipation of seeing life as it is, and putting the 
 vision into words that bring with them the power and 
 harmony of that tremendous revelation.
 
 THE SPEECH AS LITERATURE. 
 
 IN the earlier days of the literary art, when life and 
 its expression in speech were in closest relation, voice, 
 gesture, and personality, revealed in face and bearing, 
 were as much a part of literature as language itself. 
 The Greek choral dance, which Mr. Moulton aptly 
 calls " literary protoplasm," was the expression of the 
 soul through all the forms at its command, words, 
 song, gesture, movement. The balladist and, later, the 
 bard gave their recitations or chanting monologues an 
 effective accompaniment of intonation, accent, empha 
 sis, and gesture ; and the result was, in some cases 
 literature, which was something more than words set in 
 beautiful or impressive order. 
 
 In like manner, there has always been an oratory 
 which was something more than spoken thought 
 which has had all the elements of art, and has been 
 therefore, to the men who came under its spell, spoken 
 literature. The great mass of speaking is, necessarily 
 for the moment only ; it has an immediate object ; it 
 is addressed to a special audience ; it finds its inspira 
 tion in an occasion. Such speaking is often forcible, 
 witty, eloquent, and effective ; but it is not literature. 
 It is distinctly ephemeral, and, having accomplished 
 its purpose, it is forgotten, like all other tools and
 
 THE SPEECH AS LITERATURE. 97 
 
 implements of construction. The oratory which is 
 literature, on the other hand, touches great themes, 
 allies itself with beauty or majesty of form, and, 
 although addressed to an immediate and visible audi 
 ence, makes its final appeal to that unseen but innu 
 merable company who, in succeeding ages, gather 
 silently about the great artists and are charmed and 
 inspired by these unforgotten masters. 
 
 To this company of orators who made speech litera 
 ture by dignity of theme, breadth of view, beauty of 
 form, and harmony of delivery, George William Curtis 
 belonged. He was not the greatest of those who, in 
 this New World, have used the platform as a vantage- 
 ground of leadership. He had not the organ-tones of 
 Webster, nor the incisive style and matchless vocal 
 skill of Phillips, nor the compass of Beecher ; but in 
 that fine harmony of theme, treatment, style, and per 
 sonality which make the speech literature, he surpassed 
 them all. Less effective for the moment than Phillips, 
 his art has a finer fibre and a more enduring charm. 
 When he spoke, it seemed as if one were present at 
 the creation of a piece of literature. He saw his 
 theme in such large relations, he touched it with a 
 hand so true and so delicate, he phrased his thought 
 with such lucid and winning refinement and skill, his 
 bearing, enunciation, voice, and gesture were so har 
 monious, that what he said and his manner of saying 
 it seemed all of a piece, and the product was a beauti 
 ful bit of art, something incapable of entire preserva 
 tion, and yet possessing the quality of the things that 
 7
 
 98 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 endure. The enchantments of speech were his beyond 
 any man of his generation, and he gave them a grace 
 of manner which deepened and expanded their charm. 
 Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Mr. Curtis's 
 oratory was its harmony. There were no dissonances 
 in it ; there was none of that falling apart of thought 
 and expression which so constantly mars the charm of 
 public address. Thought, language, voice, and ges 
 ture flowed together, and ran at times like a shining 
 stream, rippling into humour, breaking into musical 
 cadences, but sweeping on with continuous and 
 unbroken flow. Such speech was literature in a very 
 high sense, because it was essentially art, native force, 
 a trained personality, and a sure and varied craftsman 
 ship combining in a result which obliterated all trace 
 of processes, and existed only as a complete expression 
 of a high and noble nature. For there was no disso 
 nance between Mr. Curtis's aims and spirit and his 
 oratory. The fatal fluency which makes a man the 
 characterless reflection of the mood and moment was 
 utterly alien to him ; he was free from that beguiling 
 immorality to which so many men of easy speech fall 
 a prey, the immorality of high-flying rhetoric and 
 low-flying thought and aim. He held himself above 
 his gift, and turned all its possibilities of temptation 
 into sources of power and influence. For he spoke 
 out of a deep sincerity, and with a steadfastness of 
 purpose which made his long public life one long 
 integrity. There was a great personal peril in an 
 optimism so persistently avowed, in an ideal of life so
 
 THE SPEECH AS LITERATURE. 99 
 
 steadily held aloft in speech as splendid as itself, the 
 peril of making the speaker's life meagre and dwarfed 
 in contrast with the richness and beauty of his art. 
 But Mr. Curtis's life and his art were of a piece ; and, 
 while his judgment was not free from the errors which 
 beset all human judgment, no man can point to any 
 severance between the image of life which he revealed 
 to the souls of countless young men and the life he 
 lived with tireless industry and unflagging energy to the 
 day of his death. 
 
 The harmony which characterised his addresses was 
 significant of the artistic quality which he possessed in 
 very rare degree. It is true that his life ran very 
 largely in ethical channels, and that he used the plat 
 form especially to influence the wills of his auditors 
 and to inspire them to definite courses of action ; but 
 even in dealing with moral questions he was pre 
 eminently an artist. Right thought and right action 
 seemed to him essential to harmonious living ; and he 
 was moved not so much by the wrong against which 
 he spoke as by the ideal of symmetrical life which its 
 very existence violated and jeopardised. He was long 
 in the very thick of the bitterest controversy of the 
 century, but there was always a finer note than that of 
 antagonism in his pleas and arguments ; he touched 
 the great chords of justice, freedom, and brotherhood. 
 A reformer of a radical type, he always rose out of the 
 atmosphere of agitation ; it was not destruction which 
 he sought, it was the demolition of the false construc 
 tion, in order that the noble lines of the true structure
 
 100 MY STUDY FIRE, 
 
 might become as clear to others as they were to him. 
 Whether he pleaded for the emancipation of the slave 
 or the removal of the last vestige of restriction on the 
 private and public action of women, he spoke always 
 as one before whose eyes a great vision of the future 
 shines, and in whose soul that vision has become an 
 article of faith. It was completeness and harmony of 
 life which he sought ; and while his ethical sense had a 
 Puritan keenness and authority, it had also the wider 
 vision and the broader relationships of one who sees 
 life as a whole, and who sees it as a great harmony, 
 whose final and eternal expression is beauty. 
 
 Art is so precious, and, in these later days, so rare 
 and so difficult of possession, that it is hard to recon 
 cile one's self to the disappearance of such an artist as 
 Mr. Curtis. For, while the words which he spoke 
 remain, the charm, the delicacy, the spell, can never 
 be recalled ; they are a part of that spoken literature 
 which has often calmed or stirred the hearts of men, 
 but which perishes even in the moment of its flowering. 
 And yet, in a deep sense, all art is imperishable ; for 
 the goal of ultimate excellence can never be touched 
 in any generation without imparting that deep and 
 noble delight which is the swift recognition by every 
 soul of its own ideals. When art comes back to us 
 once more, in some riper and sweeter time, perhaps 
 we shall care more for the delight of its birth than for 
 its power to persist. When the streams run with 
 brimming current, we are indifferent to the reservoirs ; 
 our joy is not in the volume of water, but in the sweep 
 and rush of the living tide.
 
 A POET OF ASPIRATION. 
 
 THERE are few names in this century which have 
 had, for young men especially, greater attractive power 
 than that of Arthur Hugh Clough. This power has 
 never been widely, but in many cases it has been 
 deeply, felt. It has its source more in the nature of 
 the man and in the conditions of his life than in his 
 work, although the latter is full of the elevation, the 
 aspiration, and the beauty of a very noble mind. But 
 it is not as a finished artist, as a singer whose message 
 is clear and whose note is resonant, that Clough 
 attracts ; it is rather as a child of his time, as one in 
 whom the stir and change of the century were most 
 distinctly reflected. There was an intense sympathy 
 with his age in the heart of Clough, a sensitiveness to 
 the tidal influences of thought and emotion, which 
 made his impressionable nature, for a time at least, a 
 prey to agitation and turmoil ; and there is no more 
 delicate registry of the tempestuous weather of the 
 second quarter of the century than that which is found 
 in his work. 
 
 It was in November, 1836, that Clough, a boy of 
 seventeen, exchanged school life at Rugby for college
 
 102 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 life at Oxford. He had always been in advance of his 
 opportunities ; he had led each form successively ; he 
 was the best swimmer and the first runner in the 
 school ; he was so manly, genuine, and wholly lovable 
 that when he left for Oxford every boy in the school 
 waited to shake hands with him ; his scholarly prom 
 inence was so marked that in his last year Dr. Arnold 
 broke the silence which he invariably had preserved in 
 awarding prizes, and publicly congratulated him on 
 having secured every prize and won every honour which 
 Rugby offered, and crowned his achievements by gain 
 ing the Balliol scholarship, then and now the highest 
 honor open to the English school-boy. With such a 
 record of fidelity and ability behind him, Clough en 
 tered upon his career at Oxford. He had not won the 
 heart and enjoyed the teaching of Arnold without 
 some comprehension of the largeness of thought and 
 the noble intellectual sympathy which made his master 
 the ideal teacher of his time ; his mind was already 
 playing, with a boy's eager and buoyant expectancy, 
 about the problems of the age. He had learned 
 already that loyalty to truth, whatever it costs and 
 wherever it leads, is the only basis of a life of intel 
 lectual integrity. At Rugby he left one of the largest, 
 freest, and most progressive minds of a generation rich 
 in men of commanding ability ; at Oxford he met 
 those persuasive, subtle, and eloquent teachers who 
 were to lead the greatest reactionary movement of the 
 time. John Henry Newman, luminous in thought, 
 fervent in spirit, winning in speech, was steadily draw-
 
 A POET OF ASPIRATION. 1 03 
 
 ing away from modern life to the repose and authority 
 of the Middle Ages. The very air throbbed with the 
 stir of a conflict which drew all sensitive minds within 
 the circle of its agitation, and the eager expectancy 
 which filled the hearts of the leaders seemed to prom 
 ise a new day of spiritual impulse and ecclesiastical 
 splendour. Then, if ever, was realised that beautiful 
 vision of Oxford which Dr. Arnold's son has given to 
 the world, when she lay " spreading her gardens to the 
 moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last 
 enchantments of the middle age." 
 
 Clough, in the fulness of his early intellectual 
 awakening, had already passed beyond the spell even 
 of an enchantment so alluring and magical as that 
 which Newman's eloquence was throwing around many 
 an eager spirit ; he had gone too far on the road to a 
 free and noble mental life ever to turn back and sit 
 once more in the shadows that fell from cathedral 
 towers, and leave to others the guidance and direction 
 of his thought. But no young man could live in that 
 seething vortex and not be driven hither and thither 
 by the mere force of the currents of thought ; for two 
 years, he says, " I was like a straw drawn up the 
 draught of a chimney." He had passed from the 
 influence of one of the freest to the influence of one 
 the most reactionary minds of the day, and the tumult 
 of conflicting opinion compelled him to examine and 
 re-examine questions the consideration of which be 
 longs to maturer years. Amid the conflict which went 
 on about and within him, he carried himself with such
 
 104 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 a steady resolution and with such a calmness of faith 
 in the victory of truth that among his contemporaries 
 he was soon felt as an independent force, preserving 
 amid the agitation the quietude of soul which is the 
 possession of the true thinker. Clough was not long 
 overwhelmed and tossed helplessly from one side to 
 the other of the whirling vortex of discussion ; he was 
 stimulated by the agitation into larger and freer play 
 of mind upon the great questions of life, and he was 
 filled as an open mind cannot but be filled when all 
 the elements are in motion with the hope of a 
 nobler world of faith some day to roll out of the cloud 
 and darkness. In this eager expectancy, this pure and 
 breathless aspiration, he may well stand in our thought 
 for a whole group of men upon whom the questioning 
 of this century has come, not to paralyse, but to inspire. 
 Let him speak for himself : 
 
 " 'T is but the cloudy darkness dense ; 
 
 Though blank the tale it tells, 
 No God, no Truth ! yet He, in sooth, 
 
 Within the sceptic darkness deep 
 He dwells that none may see, 
 
 Till idol forms and idol thoughts 
 Have passed and ceased to be : 
 
 No God, no Truth ! ah, though, in sooth, 
 So stand the doctrine's half ; 
 
 On Egypt's track return not back, 
 Nor own the Golden Calf. 
 
 " Take better part, with manlier heart, 
 
 Thine adult spirit can ; 
 No God, no Truth ! receive it ne'er 
 Believe it ne'er O man !
 
 A POET OF ASPIRATION. 1 05 
 
 No God, it saith ; ah, wait in faith 
 
 God's self-completing plan ; 
 Receive it not, but leave it not, 
 
 And wait it out, O man ! " 
 
 Defective as poetry, these verses express, neverthe 
 less, the spirit and attitude of a free, religious nature, 
 and they have the charm of Clough's habitual veracity. 
 And where shall we find a truer expression of the 
 feeling which lies deepest in the heart of this century 
 than that contained in these striking verses : 
 
 " Go from the East to the West, as the sun and the stars direct 
 
 thee, 
 
 Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass the earth. 
 Not for the gain of the gold for the getting, the hoarding, 
 
 the having, 
 
 But for the joy of the deed ; but for the Duty to do. 
 Go with the spiritual life, the higher volition and* action, 
 With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth. 
 
 " Go ; say not in thy heart And what then were it accom 
 plished, 
 
 Were the wild impulse allayed, what were the use or the 
 good ! 
 
 Go, when the instinct is stilled, and when the deed is accom 
 plished, 
 
 What thou hast done and shall do shall be declared to thee 
 then. 
 
 Go with the sun and the stars, and yet evermore in thy spirit 
 
 Say to thyself : It is good ; yet is there better than it. 
 
 This that I see is not all, and this that I do is but little ; 
 
 Nevertheless it is good, though there is better than it." 
 
 It is the spirit of youth which breathes in these 
 impressive lines and gives them a tonic quality. At a
 
 106 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 time when so much diseased and cowardly thought 
 finds its record in verse, it seems almost a duty to 
 recall the large and hopeful utterance of a sane and 
 healthy nature, in full sympathy with the time, and 
 often in genuine anguish of spirit because of it, and 
 yet serene and aspiring to the very end.
 
 
 THE READING PUBLIC. 
 
 MR. HOWELLS, who is not only a prolific and suc 
 cessful writer, but a faithful custodian of the dignity of 
 his craft, has recently said that publishers have their 
 little superstitions and their " blind faith in the great 
 god Chance." This worship of the uncertain deity is 
 perhaps explained by the statement that 
 
 "a book sells itself, or does not sell at all. . . . With 
 the best or the worst will in the world, no publisher can 
 force a book into acceptance. Advertising will not avail, 
 and reviewing is notoriously futile. If the book does not 
 strike the popular fancy, or deal with some universal in 
 terest, which need by no means be a profound or impor 
 tant one, the drums and the cymbals shall be beaten in 
 vain. The book may be one of the best and wisest books 
 in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal in it, the 
 readers of it, and worse yet, the purchasers, will remain 
 few, though fit. The secret of this, like most other se 
 crets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the awful keeping 
 of fate, and we can hope to surprise it only by some lucky 
 chance." 
 
 These are the words of a man who, by virtue of the 
 quality of his work and the long-continued and close 
 relations he has maintained with what is popularly
 
 108 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 called the reading public in this country, has every 
 right to claim attention when he speaks on such a 
 subject. The publisher of largest experience is, as a 
 rule, freest to confess his inability to predict in ad 
 vance the fate of a book by a new author, or, for that 
 matter, the fate of any particular book ; and this fact 
 seems to prove that there is in the business of offering 
 literary work to the public a large element of what, for 
 lack of a better name, the publisher calls luck or 
 chance. 
 
 And yet the mind rebels against the presence of 
 so unintelligent a factor as chance in the relation of 
 readers to literature ; for literature is not only the 
 greatest of arts, but stands in most intimate relations 
 with those who come under its influence, and there is 
 a certain profanation in the determination of such a 
 relation by the accident of a manner which fits the 
 mood of the moment, or of a style which captures the 
 wayward or idle fancy of the passing crowd. The 
 mind revolts against chance as a determining factor in 
 any field, but the persistency of its revolt in this par 
 ticular field is evidenced by the constantly repeated 
 effort to secure trustworthy data regarding the relative 
 popularity of books. These efforts assume that there 
 are principles of taste or conditions of culture deter 
 mining the choice of books, which may be discovered 
 if the data can be collected. Such attempts to ascer 
 tain the tastes of the reading public are often, noj 
 doubt, stimulated by curiosity ; but the subject is one 
 of prime importance, not only to the writer and the
 
 THE READING PUBLIC. 1 09 
 
 publisher, but to the community at large ; since there 
 is no more decisive test of intelligence than the quality 
 and character of the books most widely read. 
 
 In this country one great difficulty in dealing with 
 the matter lies in the fact that there are, not one, but 
 many, reading publics which are mutually exclusive of 
 one another ; for the public that concerns itself with 
 Dante and Goethe, for instance, is not only indifferent 
 to the productions of the cheap novelist, but is in 
 blissful ignorance of the depressing fact that her pro 
 ductions are sold by the thousand at the news-stands. 
 A homogeneous reading public does not exist, at this 
 moment, in this country, although there is good reason 
 to believe that we are on the way to form such a com 
 munity. It may be that we shall not produce our 
 greatest books until we have first secured, not only the 
 possibility of a wide and representative appreciation of 
 them, but that pressure for expression of deep and 
 universal emotion and thought which fairly forces great 
 books into being. The closest relation between the 
 writer and the public which has ever existed produced, 
 or at least recognised at the first glance, the most per 
 fect literature the world has yet known. The Athenian 
 writer of the great period was so intimate with his 
 audience that his constant appeal was not to his own 
 consciousness, but to theirs ; and to every allusion in 
 the play, the dramatist knew that the whole city, assem 
 bled about the stage, would instantly respond. Inac 
 curacy, false sentiment, or defective art could not 
 survive the ordeal of a presentation so close and a
 
 1 10 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 hearing at once so swiftly appreciative and so relent 
 lessly critical. The Athenian audience did not read, 
 it listened; and to the sensitive imagination of the 
 writer there must have been a compelling power in the 
 silent urgence of a craving for race- expression at once 
 so intense and so exacting. Such an appeal could 
 have come only from a constituency united by homo 
 geneous ideas, traditions, and intelligence. The chief 
 value of this fact for us lies in the illustration which it 
 offers of the normal, that is to say the highest, relation 
 between writers and readers. 
 
 Among English-speaking people the existence of a 
 reading public a body of readers, that is, representa 
 tive of all classes does not date farther back than the 
 time of De Foe, whose "True-Born Englishman " was 
 one of the first pieces of writing in our language to 
 secure, by reason of its timely interest and its charac 
 teristic vigour, a national reading. The people who, a 
 little later, found delight in the society of " The Spec 
 tator " were no small company, but they must have 
 been, from the nature of those charming chapters of 
 Addisonian comment and chronicle, a homogeneous 
 group, sharing a certain degree of social opportunity 
 and general culture. And this statement holds true of 
 the constituency of the greater part of the writers of 
 the last century, who, despite many differences of 
 talent and method, held certain literary traditions in 
 common, and rarely strayed beyond the horizon of the 
 small world of cultivated people. 
 
 In this century, however, writers have come to deal
 
 THE READING PUBLIC. Ill 
 
 in the most direct and uncompromising manner with 
 every form of human experience ; while, at the same 
 time, the wide diffusion of elementary education and 
 the ease with which books of every kind are set up, 
 printed, bound, and offered for sale, have formed a 
 large reading public without intellectual training, and 
 have supplied this public with a mass of books devoid 
 of all literary quality, and having nothing in common 
 with literature save the outward aspect of page, type, 
 and cover. The knowledge of good and evil in art, 
 which can hardly be said to have come to the Athenian, 
 so uniformly high was the quality of the work offered 
 him, is possessed in fullest measure by the reading 
 publics of to-day ; and it is this very fact which gives 
 their choice of books its significance. For there is to 
 day, for the first time, entire freedom of choice ; there 
 have been worthless books before, but they were never 
 so numerous, so accessible, and so low in price as dur 
 ing the last twenty-five years. They are thrust upon 
 us at every turn, at prices which bring them within 
 reach of the meditative bootblack. When it was diffi 
 cult to find publishers for worthless books, and neces 
 sary to sell them at prices which put them on the top 
 shelf so far as the poorer people were concerned, there 
 was, naturally, a very small publication of such books, 
 and a still smaller constituency for them. It is well to 
 remember, therefore, that the old audience of cultivated 
 readers has not ceased to exist, there is every reason 
 to believe that it constantly grows larger, but it is 
 swallowed up in a vast assemblage of readers gathered
 
 112 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 from all classes in the community, and furnished with a 
 practically unlimited supply of reading-matter of every 
 kind. If our sins are more numerous than the sins of 
 our fathers, let us do ourselves the justice to remem 
 ber that our temptations are multiplied many fold ; 
 and that while they had to seek evil and pay for 
 it, we must strive in all public conveyances to keep it 
 out of our hands, at a price which, under the delusion 
 of getting something for nothing, becomes a new 
 temptation.
 
 SANITY AND ART. 
 
 IN reading Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, 
 one is constantly impressed not only with the range 
 and power of these great artists, but with their sanity 
 and health. Their supreme authority in the realm of 
 art resides as much in their clearness of vision as in 
 their artistic quality ; they were essentially sound and 
 wholesome natures. They had the fresh perception, 
 the true vision, the self-control, of health. The world 
 was not distorted or overshadowed to them ; they saw 
 it as it was, and they reported it as they saw it. Health 
 is, indeed, one of the great qualities of the highest 
 art, because veracity of mind and of emotion depends 
 largely upon health, and veracity lies at the base of all 
 enduring art. To the reader of contemporary books 
 Homer is the greatest of antiseptics ; after so many 
 records of diseased minds, so many confessions of 
 morbid souls, the " Odyssey " is a whiff of air from the 
 sea, borne into the suffocating midsummer atmosphere 
 of a city street. To exchange Marie Bashkirtseffs 
 " Journal " for the great epic of the sea is like coming 
 out of some vaporous tropical swamp into the sweep 
 of the ocean currents, free airs blowing from every 
 quarter, and the whole stretch of sky visible from
 
 114 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 horizon to horizon. Mr. Higginson has somewhere 
 told the story of an English scholar who gave his 
 entire time to Homer, reading the " Iliad " three or 
 four times every winter, and the " Odyssey " as many 
 times every summer. There might be a certain con 
 traction of interests in such a life, but there could 
 hardly be any disease. 
 
 Vitality, the power to live deeply and richly, is per 
 haps the surest evidence of greatness ; to be great, one 
 must have compass and range of life. The glorious 
 fulness of strength which prompts a man not to skirt 
 the shore of the sea of experience, but to plunge into 
 its depths, has something divine in it ; it confirms our 
 latent faith in the high origin and destiny of humanity. 
 The ascetic saints, about whose pale brows the mediae 
 val imagination saw the halo slowly form, were noble 
 in self-sacrifice and heroic purity ; but there will come 
 a higher type of goodness, the goodness which tri 
 umphs by inclusion, not by exclusion ; by mastering 
 and directing the physical impulses, the primitive 
 forces, not by denying them. For the highest spiritual 
 achievement is not for those who shun life, but for 
 those who share it, and the sublimest victory is to him 
 who meets all foes in the open field. 
 
 The first tumultuous outburst of vitality, often very 
 unconventional in its manifestations, is not to be con 
 fused with vice, which is always and everywhere a 
 kind of disease. " We are somewhat mad here, and 
 play the devil's own game," wrote Goethe to Merck 
 during that first wild winter at Weimar, when Wieland
 
 SANITY AND ART. 115 
 
 could find no epithet but wiithig to describe him, and 
 the good Klopstock wrote his famous letter of expostu 
 lation and warning, and received his still more famous 
 and stinging reply. No doubt the strong currents of 
 life overflowed the normal barriers in those gay months 
 when the Urn blazed with torches at night and the 
 masked skaters swept past to the strains of music, the 
 Poet and his Duke leading the riot. But it was a 
 festival of youth far more than an outbreak of vice, 
 as the sternest censors soon saw'; and in that splendid 
 vitality there was the prophecy of eighty-four years of 
 unhasting and unresting energy. 
 
 The early letters of Scott have a delightful freshness 
 and buoyancy born of the man's soundness of nature, 
 a soundness which was untouched by the mistakes and 
 misfortunes of his later life ; and the perennial charm 
 of the Waverley Novels resides very largely in their 
 healthfulness. They take us entirely out of ourselves, 
 and absorb us in the world of incident and action. If 
 they are not always great as works of art, they are 
 always great in that health of mind and soul which is 
 elemental in all true living. Men cannot be too grate 
 ful for a mass of writing so genuine in tone, so free 
 from morbid tendencies, so true to the fundamental 
 ethics of living. 
 
 Disease is essentially repulsive to all healthy natures ; 
 it is abnormal, and, although pathetically common, 
 it is in a sense unnatural. It seems like a violation of 
 the natural order ; and, in the long run it is, since it 
 finds its cause or opportunity in the violation of some
 
 1 1 6 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 law of life. We never accustom ourselves to it, and 
 we never cease to resent it as the intrusion of a foreign 
 element into the normal development of life, and an 
 interference with the free play of its forces. And 
 our instinct is sound : disease is unnatural ; it is a 
 deflection from the normal line and order. Its victim 
 is, for that reason, incompetent to report the facts of 
 life correctly, or to reach trustworthy conclusions in 
 regard to it. 
 
 Because it is a deflection from the line of health 
 and a departure from the normal order, disease has 
 rightly a deep and painful interest ; it throws light on 
 the conditions upon which health rests ; but no physi 
 cian studies disease to discover the normal action of 
 the organs. And yet this is precisely what we have 
 been doing during the last two centuries ; for we have 
 accepted in very large measure the conclusions of dis 
 eased natures regarding the significance, the character, 
 and the value of life. We have suffered men of dis 
 eased minds to be our teachers, and, instead of looking 
 up into the clear skies, or seeking the altitudes of the 
 hills, or finding fellowship with strong, natural men in 
 the normal vocations, we have waited in hospitals, and 
 listened eagerly to the testimony of sick men touching 
 matters about which they were incompetent to speak. 
 We have suffered ourselves to become the victims of 
 other men's morbid tendencies and distorted vision. 
 
 The men and women whose judgment of the nature 
 and value of life has any authority are few ; for the 
 phenomena of life are manifold, and most men and
 
 SANITY AND ART. 1 1/ 
 
 women have neither the mental grasp, nor the range 
 of knowledge, nor the breadth of experience requisite 
 for a mastery of these phenomena. Other men and 
 women are disqualified to pass judgment upon life 
 because they are too constantly subject to moods to 
 see clearly and to report accurately what they see ; 
 and a deep dispassionateness lies at the foundation 
 of all adequate judgment of life. For obvious reasons, 
 the testimony of the diseased mind is untrustworthy ; 
 it is often deeply interesting, but it has no authority. 
 The " Journal " of Marie Bashkirtseff has a peculiar 
 interest, a kind of uncanny fascination, because it is 
 the confession of a human soul, and everything that 
 reveals the human soul in any phase of experience is 
 interesting ; but as a criticism of life the " Journal " 
 does not count. The novels of Guy de Maupassant 
 have a great charm ; they are full of a very high order 
 of observation ; they are skilful works of art ; but they 
 are misleading interpretations of life because they were 
 the work of a man of diseased nature, a man of 
 distorted vision. Beauty of form does not always 
 imply veracity of idea ; and while beauty has its own 
 claim upon us, the ideas which it clothes have no claim 
 upon us unless they are the product of clear vision 
 and sound judgment. It is one of the tragic facts of 
 life that a thing may be beautiful and at the same 
 time poisonous ; but we do not take the poison because 
 it comes in a beautiful form. We are too much the 
 prey of invalidism ; we give too much credence to hos 
 pital reports of life. We need more Homers and
 
 Il8 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 Scotts, and fewer Rousseaus and Bashkirtseffs. We 
 need to rid ourselves of the delusion that there is any 
 distinction about disease, any rare and precious quality 
 in morbid tastes, temperamental depression, and pessi 
 mism. The large, virile, healthful natures, who see 
 things as they are, and rise above the mists and fogs 
 of mood, are the only witnesses whose testimony about 
 life is worth taking, for they are the only witnesses 
 who know what life is.
 
 MANNER AND MAN. 
 
 RUSKIN'S declaration that when we stand before a 
 great work of art we are conscious that we are in the 
 presence, not of a great effort, but of a great power, 
 touches the very heart of the artist's secret. For there 
 is nothing so clear to the student of art in all its forms 
 as the fact that its mysterious charm resides, not in any 
 specific skill or gift, but in its quality, that subtle 
 effluence of its inward nature. The loveliness of 
 nature is sometimes so transcendent that the delight it 
 conveys is akin to pain ; it brings us so near the 
 absolute beauty that a keen sense of separation and 
 imperfection besets us. The still, lustrous evenings 
 on the Mediterranean sometimes bring with them an 
 almost overwhelming loneliness ; they fill the imagina 
 tion with the vision of a beauty not yet held in sure pos 
 session. About every work of art there is something 
 baffling ; we do not quite master it ; we are not able 
 to go with free foot where it leads. Nor are we able 
 to explain the processes by which it receives and con 
 veys its charm. If it were merely a great effort, we 
 could discover its secret ; but it is not a great effort, 
 it is a great power. 
 
 Nothing that flows from a great work is so significant 
 or so impressive as this impression of power, of a
 
 120 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 great inward wealth in the nature of the artist which is 
 inexhaustible. A hint of toil dispels the magic of a 
 picture as certainly as the smell of the midnight lamp 
 robs the written word of its charm, or the perception 
 of calculated effects breaks the spell of oratory. The 
 artist does not become an artist until craftsmanship 
 has become so much a part of himself that it has 
 ceased to have any abstract being to his thought ; it 
 has simply become his way of doing things, his manner 
 of expression. There is nothing more significant of 
 the reality and the finality of art than the searching 
 tests which confront the man who endeavours to master 
 it, tests which protect it from the touch of all save 
 the greatest, and preserve it inviolate from the contanvj 
 ination of low aims and vulgar tastes. Nothing is so 
 absolutely secure as art; its integrity is inviolate 
 because, by the law of its nature, it cannot be created 
 save by those who comprehend and reverence it. It 
 is as impossible to make art common or vulgar as to 
 stain the heavens or rob the Jungfrau of its soft anq 
 winning majesty. It is easy to call commonplace or 
 ignoble productions works of art, to exploit them and 
 hold them before the world as types and standards oil 
 beauty ; but popular ignorance is powerless to convey 
 to a book or a picture that which it does not possess 
 in itself. There is a brief confusion of ideas, a shortt 
 lived popularity, and then comes that final oblivion 
 which awaits the common and the inferior masquerade- 
 ing in the guise of art. " The Heavenly Twins " and 
 the " Yellow Aster " provoke wide comment, and
 
 MANNER AND MAN. 121 
 
 Harm the timid who love real books and dread any 
 jcheapening of the noble art of literature ; but there is 
 mo cause for alarm : these books of the moment, and 
 jail books of their kind, are separated from literature as 
 jobviously and as finally as the wax imitation from the 
 Mower that blooms, dewy, fragrant, and magically fresh, 
 [on the edges of the wood. What is called popular 
 jtaste does not decide the question of the presence or 
 [absence of artistic quality ; a work of art justifies itself ; 
 nor its appeal is not to the taste of the moment, but to 
 jthat instinct for beauty in the soul which sooner or 
 Hater recognises the conformity of the human product 
 to the divine reality. It is to the eternal element in 
 [men that the great work speaks, and its place is deter 
 mined, not by capricious and changing tastes, but by 
 its fidelity to that absolute beauty of which every touch 
 of art is the revelation. The ignorance of a genera 
 tion may pass by the masterful works of Rembrandt, 
 but the question of the greatness and authority of 
 " The Night- Watch " and " The Gilder " was never for 
 a moment in the .hands of the artist's contemporaries 
 or successors ; it was in Rembrandt's hands alone. 
 Taste changes, but beauty is absolute and eternal. 
 
 The law which bases the power to produce art, not 
 upon external skill, but upon the nature of the artist, 
 not only protects it forever from pretenders and 
 tricksters, but allies it to what is deepest and greatest 
 in the life of the world. The magic of Shakespeare's 
 style is not more wonderful than the veracity of his 
 thought. The old proverb, " Manners maketh man,"
 
 122 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 was never more clearly verified than in the case of this 
 noble artist, whose style is at once so unmistakable andj 
 so literally inimitable. Those who have not learned 
 the interior relation of style to soul, and who do non 
 clearly see that style is not an element in literature,! 
 but literature itself, will do well to meditate on " The 
 Tempest," or even on " The Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona." For in Shakespeare at his best we have 
 that identification of the artist with life, that absorption . 
 of knowledge into personality, that realisation of the] 
 eternal unity between truth of idea and beauty of' 
 form, which mark the perfection of art. In the finest 
 Shakespearean dramas we are never conscious of 
 effort ; we are always conscious of power. The 
 knowledge, the manner, and the man are one ; there 
 is perfect assimilation of the outward world by the] 
 inward spirit ; idea and expression are so harmonious 
 that the form is but the flowering of the soul. \Yhen 
 observation has passed into meditation, and meditatior 
 has transformed knowledge into truth, and the brood 
 ing imagination has incorporated truth into the nature 
 of the artist, then comes the creative moment, and the 
 outward form grows not only out of the heart of the 
 thought, but out of the soul of the man. Shakespeare 
 is full of these magical transformations by which knowl 
 edge^ becorrjes power, and power passes on into 
 Beauty; and in these transformations- the mystery anc 
 the processes of art are hidden but not wholly 
 concealed.
 
 THE OUTING OF THE SOUL. 
 
 THE gospel of personal righteousness finds many 
 voices ; the gospel of a full and rich life, fed from all 
 the divine sources of truth, beauty, and power, still 
 needs advocates. The old atheism which shut God 
 out of a large part of his world. still lingers like those 
 drifts of snow that, in secluded places, elude the 
 genial sun. Men are as slow to learn the divinity of 
 nature as they have been"""to learn the divinity of 
 humanity ; as slow to accept the revelation of nature 
 as to accept that of the human soul. It is difficult to 
 realise how completely nature was lost to men during 
 the Middle Ages ; how comparatively untouched hu 
 man life was by association with the countless aspects 
 of sea and sky ; how generally the union between 
 men and the sublime house in which they lived was 
 broken. For several centuries the great mass of men 
 and women were so estranged from nature that they 
 forgot their kinship. It is true that there were in 
 every generation men and women to whom the beauty 
 of the world did not appeal in vain, but it was a beauty 
 obscured by mists of superstition, and the perception 
 of which was painfully limited by lack of the deeper
 
 124 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 insight and the larger vision. Woods, flowers, and 
 streams, so close at hand, so intimately associated with 
 the richest experiences, could not wholly fail of that 
 charm which they possess to-day; but while these 
 lovely details were seen, the picture as a whole was 
 invisible./ The popular ballads and epics are not 
 lacking in pretty bits of description and sentiment, but 
 nature is wholly subordinate ; the sublime background 
 against which all modern life is set is invisible. 
 
 It is difficult to imagine a time when men had no 
 eye for the landscape, and yet it is one of the most 
 notable facts about Petrarch that he was the first man 
 of his period to show any interest in that great vision 
 which a lofty mountain opens, and which has for the 
 men of to-day a delight so poignant as to be almost 
 painful. Dante had struck some deep notes which 
 showed clearly enough that he was alive to the mystery 
 and marvel of the physical world, but Petrarch was the 
 earliest of those who have seen clearly the range and 
 significance of nature as it stands related to the life of 
 men. He celebrated the charms of Vancluse in letters 
 which might have been written by Maurice de Guerin, 
 so modern is their tone, so contemporaneous their note 
 of intimate companionship. "This lovely region," he 
 writes, " is as well adapted as possible to my studies 
 and labours, so long as iron necessity compels me to 
 live outside of Italy. Morning and evening the hills 
 throw welcome shadows ; in the valleys are sun-warmed 
 gaps, while far and wide stretches a lovely landscape, 
 in which the tracks of animals are seen oftener than
 
 THE OUTING OF THE SOUL. 12$ 
 
 those of men. Deep and undisturbed silence reigns 
 everywhere, only broken now and then by the murmur 
 of falling waters, the lowing of cattle, and the songs of 
 birds." But it was the ascent of Mont Ventoux, 
 accompanied by his younger brother and two country 
 men, which stamps Petrarch as one of the great dis 
 coverers of the natural world. There are few more 
 significant or fascinating moments in the history of hu 
 man development than that which gave Petrarch his 
 first glimpse of the beautiful landscape about Avignon, 
 from the crest of the hill ; it marked the begin 
 ning of a new era in the history of the human soul. 
 That the majesty of the outlook so overwhelmed 
 Petrarch that it drove him back upon himself, brought 
 all his sins to mind, and sent him to the " Confes 
 sions of St. Augustine," showed that he was still the 
 child of his age ; but the longing which led him to 
 make the ascent, despite the warning of the old herds 
 men at the foot of the mountain, showed that he was 
 also a man of the new time, and that he had uncon 
 sciously assumed the attitude of the modern mind 
 towards nature. 
 
 The redemption of nature from the shadow of sin 
 which, to the mediaeval mind, rested upon and dark 
 ened it, has been very slowly accomplished ; but the 
 poets, the naturalists, and the scientists have taught us 
 much, and our hearts have taught us more. Nature 
 has become not only an inexhaustible delight, a con 
 stant and fascinating friend, but the most vital and 
 intimate of teachers ; in fact, it is from the study of
 
 126 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 nature, in one form or another, that much of the ' 
 advance in educational efficiency has come ; not the 
 improvements in method, but the freshening and deep 
 ening of the educational aim and spirit. / Nature, 
 through the discoveries of science, has restored bal 
 ance to the mind, and sanity to the spirit of men by 
 correcting the false perspective of abstract thinking, by 
 flooding the deepest questions with new light, by bring 
 ing into activity a set of faculties almost disused, and 
 by adding immeasurably to the resources of the human 
 spirit. In the Middle Ages attention was concentrated 
 upon the soul, and men learned much from their 
 eager and passionate self-questioning ; but it was a 
 very inadequate and distorted view of life which they 
 reached, because one of the great sources of revelation 
 was left untouched. In modern times the world of 
 nature has been searched with tireless patience, great 
 truths relating to man's place in the sublime move 
 ment of the universe have come to light, and the dis 
 torted vision of the inward world has been corrected 
 by the clear vision of the outward world. The study 
 of nature has yielded a new conception of the nature 
 of the divine will expressed through law, of the divine 
 design interpreted by the order and progress of the 
 phenomena of the physical universe, of the marvellous 
 beauty of the divine mind which Tennyson was think 
 ing of when, looking long and steadfastly into the 
 depths of a slow-moving stream, he cried out in awe 
 and wonder, " What an imagination God has ! " 
 
 Men are saner, healthier, wiser, since they began to
 
 THE OUTING OF THE SOUL. 
 
 127 
 
 find God in nature and $0 receive the facts of nature 
 bs a divine revelation./ / The soul has looked away from 
 herself and out into the marvellous universe, and 
 learned from a new teacher the wonder, the beauty, 
 and the greatness of her life.
 
 THE POWER WHICH LIBERATES. 
 
 IN Dr. Parsons' fine lines " On a Bust of Dante | 
 there is a verse which suggests even more than it 
 conveys : 
 
 " Faithful if this wan image be, 
 
 No dream his life was but a fight 1 
 Could any Beatrice see 
 
 A lover in that anchorite ? 
 To that cold Ghibeline's gloomy sight 
 
 Who could have guessed the visions came 
 Of Beauty, veiled with heavenly light, 
 
 In circles of eternal flame ? " 
 
 The contrast between the outward and the inward 
 the one all shadow and hardship, the other afl 
 splendour and affluence has never been more impre* 
 sively disclosed than in the story of the Florentine 
 poet whose brief and bitter years have in their train a 
 fame of universal range and almost piercing lustre, ft 
 may be doubted whether the " Divine Comedy f 
 would have been so widely treasured if the story of the 
 singer had been less pathetic and significant. If its; 
 authorship were unknown, it would still remain one ot 
 the incomparable achievements of art ; but the pefr! 
 sonal anguish behind it lends it that spell which issuff
 
 THE POWER WHICH LIBERATES. 12$ 
 
 out of experience, and to which no human heart can 
 
 be wholly indifferent. There are many to whom the 
 
 poem would be incomprehensible ; there are few to 
 
 whom the poet would appeal in vain. If his thought 
 
 [often took wing beyond the range of the common 
 
 thought, his experience shared with all humanity that 
 
 visitation of sorrow from which none wholly escape. 
 
 ! The very completeness of the shipwreck of his per- 
 
 (sonal fortunes makes the greatness of his achieve- 
 
 I ment the more impressive ; and the hardness of his 
 
 lot lends a new splendour to his imagination. 
 
 For Dante, the imagination meant not only the 
 power of creating on a great scale, but also liberation 
 from the iron bars of circumstance which imprisoned 
 him. He was banished from Florence, but no decree 
 could shut his thought out from the streets and squares 
 that were so dear to him. It is true that he has spoken 
 in memorable words of the sadness of revisiting in 
 dreams alone the places one loves ; but there was, 
 nevertheless, in that power of passing at will from 
 Verona to Florence, a resource of incalculable value. 
 The body might be bound ; the man was free. This 
 faculty, which sets us free from so many of our limita 
 tions and gives us citizenship in all ages and countries, 
 is not only the one creative power in us, but is also our 
 greatest resource. No gift is so rare and none so 
 priceless as a powerful and productive imagination. 
 That it is rare, the mass of contemporary verse-writing 
 demonstrates with almost pathetic conclusiveness ; that 
 it is above price, the great works of art abundantly 
 9
 
 130 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 prove. But from the purely personal point of view; 
 the interest, the variety, and the power of the individ 
 ual life no gift is so much to be prized. To the] 
 possessor of this magical faculty the outward happen 
 ings are, at the worst, of secondary importance."; 
 Homer will not find blindness too great a trial, if Troyl 
 still stands in his vision with the hosts contending] 
 about it, and the white-armed Nausicaa still greets the! 
 much-travelled Ulysses on the beach; and Shake-j 
 speare could have borne heavier sorrows than most 
 men have known, the Forest of Arden, Prospero's 
 Island, and the enchanted woodland of the Midsummer 
 Night's Dream being open to him. Spenser couk 
 find refuge from the tumult of Ireland in the dominion 
 of the Faery Queen ; Milton, with sealed eyes, solitary 
 in an age apostate to his faith and hope, saw Paradise 
 with undimmed vision ; and Browning, in the uproar 
 contention, and uncertainty of this turbulent century 
 heard Pippa, unconsciously touching the tragedy o 
 life at so many points, still serenely singing her song 
 of faith and peace. 
 
 It is doubtful whether any of us understand what 
 the imagination means to us simply as the liberating 
 force which throws the doors and windows open 
 When imagination withers and art dies, discontent 
 misery, and revolutions are in order. It is the outlook 
 through the windows, the breath of air through the 
 open door, that keeps men content in their workshops 
 where the outlook is shut off and the air no longer 
 comes fresh and vital into the close room the workers
 
 THE POWER WHICH LIBERATES. 131 
 
 grow reckless and hopeless. For without the imagina 
 tion the power to look through and beyond our 
 conditions life would be intolerable. Better a great 
 activity of the imagination and hard conditions than 
 ease of condition and poverty of imagination ; for men 
 are never so dangerous as when their bodies are fed 
 and their souls starved. A perfectly comfortable 
 society deprived of the resources of the imagination, 
 would invite and foster the most desperate anarchism ; 
 for men live by ideas, not by things. A man who sees 
 a great purpose shining before him can endure all 
 hardness for the glory that is to come ; the man who 
 no longer has desires, because all his wants are met, 
 suffers a swift deterioration of nature, and is at last the 
 victim of his own prosperity. The Roman noble, in 
 Mr. Arnold's striking poem, finds life unbearable 
 because his passions are sated, his appetites fed, and 
 his imagination dead. He is suffocated by his own 
 luxury. Dante, on the other hand, feels keenly his 
 condition, but lives more deeply and gloriously than 
 any man of his time because, in spite of the hardness 
 of his lot, his imagination travels through all worlds, 
 and beyond the barren hour discerns the splendours of 
 Paradise. The prophets, teachers, and poets, who 
 ' alone have made life bearable, have been the children 
 of the imagination, and have had the supreme consola 
 tion of looking through the limitations into which every 
 man is born into the great heavens flaming with other 
 worlds than ours. For it is the imagination which 
 realises the soul in things material and reads this
 
 132 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 universe of matter as a symbol, and so liberates us 
 from the oppression which comes from mere magnitude 
 and mass ; which discerns the inner meaning of the 
 family, the Church, and the State, and, in spite of all 
 frailties and imperfections, makes their divine origin 
 credible ; which discovers the end of labour in power, 
 of self-denial in freedom, of hardness and suffering in 
 the perfecting of the soul. " I am never confused," 
 said Emerson, " if I see far enough ; " and the imagi 
 nation is the faculty which sees. Of the several facul 
 ties by the exercise of which men live, it is most 
 necessary, practical, and vital ; and yet so little is it 
 understood that it is constantly spoken of as something 
 very beautiful in its activity, but the especial property 
 of artists, poets, and dreamers 1
 
 THE UNCONSCIOUS ARTIST. 
 
 GOETHE used to smile when he was asked for an 
 explanation of certain oracular or enigmatical sayings 
 in the second part of " Faust." One of the minor 
 pleasures of his old age was the consciousness that a 
 great many disciples believed in their hearts that he 
 had the key to the mysteries in his keeping, and that, 
 if he chose, he could answer all the questions which 
 had tormented the race from the beginning. There 
 was a mysterious reticence, an Olympian reserve, about 
 the old poet which went far to confirm this faith, and 
 it must be said that Goethe did not go out of his way 
 to dispel the illusion. No man knew better than he 
 the limitations of knowledge ; he was too great and 
 too honest to play with his public ; but when the great 
 man has become an absolute sovereign, and has grown 
 gray upon the solitary throne, and when, moreover, he 
 has the resource of humour for his waning days, he may 
 be pardoned for suffering men to entertain a belief in 
 an infallibility of the reality of which he is sometimes 
 half persuaded himself. " Master," said an awestruck 
 young man in Victor Hugo's salon one evening not 
 long before the poet's death, "this age has known 
 many great spirits, but thou art the greatest of them
 
 134 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 all." "Yes," answered the old poet, without even a, 
 ghost of a smile, " and the age is passing, and I, too, 
 am nearing the end ! " Goethe was free from the 
 colossal egotism of Hugo, and, even if he had pos 
 sessed it, his humour would have protected him from 
 any .expression of it ; but Goethe was not above the 
 pleasure of being thought great, nor could he deny 
 himself the satisfaction of being regarded as an oracle. 
 Probably no man could resist an appeal to self-love so 
 unsolicited and so beguiling. 
 
 There is no reason to doubt, however, that Goethe 
 sometimes took refuge in silence because he could not 
 answer the questions that were propounded to him 
 about his own work. When such questions were asked 
 he always assumed an oracular manner which deepened 
 the impression that, if he chose, he might disclose 
 very deep things, and withdraw the veil from very great 
 mysteries. This evasion must not be set down to his 
 discredit, however; it was the refuge of a man who 
 knew too much and had done too many great things to 
 dread that confession of ignorance from which a man 
 of lesser range and mind might have shrunk. He had 
 a touch of vanity like his fellows, however, and his turn 
 for proverbial and epigrammatic speech made the orac 
 ular tone very attractive to him. The fundamental 
 fact about the matter is, however, that there were many 
 things in Goethe's work of which he could not have 
 given a clear explanation, because, like every other 
 great mind, he builded better than he knew. The 
 critical habit was strong with him, and very few men
 
 THE UNCONSCIOUS ARTIST. 
 
 135 
 
 have thought more exhaustively and thoroughly about 
 the principles and processes of art than he ; neverthe 
 less, it remains true that the deepest and richest parts 
 of his work were the creation of the unconscious rather 
 than the conscious Goethe. 
 
 It was one of Goethe's most profound and fruitful 
 ideas that what a man would do greatly he must do 
 with his whole nature. He was the first great artist to 
 formulate clearly the fundamental law that the artist is 
 conditioned by his own nature, that art rests upon life, 
 and that there is, therefore, in a true work of art an 
 expression of a man's complete nature, his body, his 
 mind, and his heart. For the artist is not a mechanic 
 who skilfully devises processes to secure a certain defi 
 nite end ; he is not a trained mind and a trained hand 
 working by rule and system ; he is a spontaneous and 
 original force in the world, as mysterious to himself as 
 to others, full of unknown possibilities ; fed, sleeping 
 and waking, by a thousand invisible streams of impulse 
 and power ; expanded unconsciously to himself by the 
 very process of living ; developed as much by feeling 
 as by thought ; and slowly gathering to himself a great 
 inward wealth of knowledge, vitality, beauty, and power. 
 When at last such a nature produces, it does not work 
 mechanically ; it creates by giving itself; by expressing 
 what is deepest and truest in itself through the forms 
 of art. In every product of mechanical skill, however 
 perfect, the process can be discovered ; but no analysis 
 ever yet surprised nature in the making of a flower. 
 The living thing that reaches its perfection by growth,
 
 136 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 being, so to speak, all of a piece, and attaining its de 
 velopment by the unfolding of itself, eludes the keenest 
 analysis and remains a mystery in spite of the almost 
 infinite patience of science. In like manner, a work 
 of art, being a growth and not a mechanical product, 
 remains mysterious and inexplicable even to its creator. 
 There are certain elements in it which he consciously 
 contributes ; there are other elements which are there 
 without his planning or knowledge. A work of art is 
 the joint product of the conscious and the unconscious 
 man, and there is, consequently, much in every such 
 work which transcends, not the nature, but the mind, of 
 the artist. For every great man builds better than he 
 knows. 
 
 It is not difficult to believe, therefore, that there 
 were things in " Faust " which Goethe could not com 
 pletely explain. The poem was, in fact, of wider range 
 than he knew. Its significance as an interpretation or 
 representation of life was not undervalued by him, but 
 there are many truths in it of which he did not perceive 
 the full import, and later students find in it much which 
 is unquestionably present in it, but of which Goethe 
 was unconscious. The conscious Goethe, planning, 
 brooding, shaping, did much ; but the unconscious 
 Goethe, living, feeling, suffering, acting, did more. And 
 this is true not only of " Faust," but of the Book of 
 Job, of the " Iliad," of the " Divine Comedy," and of 
 " Lear" and "The Tempest." It is certainly not true 
 that the great artist is the tool of an impulse, an irre 
 sponsible inspiration, and puts forth the sublimest con-
 
 THE UNCONSCIOUS ARTIST. 137 
 
 ceptions without any idea of their depth and range. 
 Those who believe that the author of " Hamlet " and 
 " The Tempest " had a magical gift of dramatic expres 
 sion, but no comprehension of philosophic relations 
 and values, cannot have read " Troilus and Cressida " 
 with any care. Shakespeare knew what he was doing 
 when he wrote " Lear," as did Goethe when he wrote 
 " Faust," and Tennyson when he wrote " In Memo- 
 riam ; " in each case, however, there was inwrought 
 into the very nature of the poet a prophetic element 
 which gave his thought a range beyond that of his 
 experience, and his vision a clearness and scope be 
 yond those of his thought. It is the peculiar gift of 
 the man of genius that when he portrays the individual 
 he brings the type before us, when he gives the fact he 
 suggests the truth which interprets it, when he reports 
 the phenomena he reveals the law behind it; and so 
 he constantly, and for the most part, unconsciously, lets 
 us into the universal by setting before us the particular.
 
 THE LAW OF OBEDIENCE. 
 
 IN reading Marlowe one is brought face to face, not 
 only with tragic situations, but with the elemental 
 tragedy, the tragedy which has its rise in the conflict 
 between the infinite desires of the soul and rigid re 
 strictions of its activity. The master of " the mighty 
 line " never learned that lesson of self-mastery which 
 Shakespeare studied so faithfully ; he was always wast 
 ing his immense force on the impossible, and matching 
 his powerful genius against those immutable conditions 
 imposed upon men, not to dwarf but to develop them. 
 In art no less than in morals supreme achievement is 
 conditioned not only upon a free use of one's powers, 
 but upon a clear recognition of their limits ; the great 
 artist never attempts the impossible. In "Tambur- 
 laine " Marlowe strove not only to portray a person 
 ality striving to transcend human limitations, but to 
 pass beyond them himself by the sheer force of his 
 genius ; but neither the conqueror nor the dramatist 
 evaded the play of that law which binds ultimate 
 freedom to immediate obedience. Shakespeare, on the 
 other hand, achieved the most impressive success in 
 modern literature when he dealt with the same problem 
 in " Lear," a success based on a clear perception of 
 the exact limits within which the human personality 
 may express itself.
 
 THE LAW OF OBEDIENCE. 139 
 
 We touch at this point not only the essence of 
 the deepest tragedy, but the secret of the highest art ; 
 for the elemental tragedy is the struggle between the 
 will and the conditions imposed upon its expres 
 sion, and the secret of art resides, not only in 
 the depth and vitality of the artist's mastery of his 
 materials, but also in the clearness of his perception of 
 the decisive line between the possible and the impos 
 sible. The Classical writers, with their delicate sense 
 of proportion, harmony, and form, never attempted to 
 pass beyond the limits of a sound art ; they were 
 sometimes formal and cold, but they were never tumul 
 tuous, unbalanced, and lawless. In Sophocles, for in 
 stance, one never loses consciousness of the presence 
 of a genius which, dealing with the most perplexing 
 and terrible questions of destiny, is never tempted to 
 pass the bounds of clear and definite artistic expression, 
 but sustains the theme to" the end with a masterful 
 self-restraint and majesty of repose. In that noble 
 balance, based on the harmony, not on the subjection 
 of the heart and mind of the artist, one gets a glimpse 
 of one of the great ends of art ; which is not to ex 
 press but to suggest that which transcends human 
 thought and speech. For the great play, statue, pic 
 ture, speech are prophetic, and find their fulfilment, 
 not in themselves, but in the imagination which comes 
 under their spell ; the more complete their beauty, 
 therefore, the more powerfully do they affirm the exist 
 ence of a beauty beyond themselves. The definite- 
 ness of Greek art was not a limitation ; it was a source
 
 140 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 of transcendent power. It is true, it shut the Greek 
 artist out of some great fields ; but he was not ready 
 to enter them, and the divine apparition of beauty 
 always moved with his work and issued out of it as 
 a soul is revealed by a body as beautiful as itself. 
 The Venus of Milos is not the image of a saint, but 
 there is that in the mutilated statue which makes the 
 divine perfection not only credible but actual. 
 
 For there is, in supreme excellence of any kind, an 
 immense exhilaration for the human spirit, a power 
 of impulsion, which leads or drives it out of itself into 
 new spiritual quests and ventures. Dante had no 
 thought of a re-awakening of the mind of man ; he 
 did not discern that thrilling chapter of history so soon 
 to be written ; but to that great movement the " Divine 
 Comedy " was one of the chief contributing forces. 
 The production of such a masterpiece was in itself a 
 new liberation of the human spirit, and set the cur 
 rents of imagination and action flowing freely once 
 more. It matters little whether a great book has defi 
 nite teaching for men or not ; it is always a mighty 
 force for liberation. Greek art had its limitations of 
 theme and manner, but its perfection brought con 
 stantly before the mind that ultimate perfection, which 
 it evaded so far as definite treatment was concerned, 
 but the existence of which was implied in its own 
 existence, and the fuller revelation of which it was 
 always unconsciously predicting. 
 
 This thought hints at the working out in art of that 
 deepest and most mysterious of all the laws of life,
 
 THE LAW OF OBEDIENCE. 141 
 
 which declares that he who would save his life must 
 lose it : that sublime contradiction which seems always 
 to be assailing man's happiness and is always preserv 
 ing it. The restraint of the great Classical dramatists, 
 which to a man like Marlowe seems a surrender of 
 power, is, in reality, the disclosure of a power so great 
 that it makes one forget the limitations of the artist by 
 giving us the freedom of the art. For when a man 
 submits himself to the laws of his craft he ceases to 
 be its bondman and becomes its master. Marlowe 
 evaded or refused this submission, and his work, while 
 it discloses great force, makes us painfully aware of 
 limitations and crudity; Shakespeare, on the other 
 hand, cheerfully submitted to the laws of his craft, and 
 his work, by reason of its balance and harmony, con 
 veys a sense of limitless power, of boundless capacity 
 for mastering the most difficult problems of life and 
 art. Never was the glorious commonplace that a 
 man becomes free by obedience more beautifully 
 illustrated. 
 
 The Greek artist registered one of the most decisive 
 advances in human thought when for the Oriental 
 indeterminateness he substituted his own definiteness ; 
 and the human spirit took a great forward step when 
 it discerned that by subjection to the law of its growth 
 it would ultimately achieve that freedom which the 
 Oriental mind had attempted to grasp at once, and 
 which it had failed to seize. Between Plato and 
 Aristotle and the Oriental thinkers before them there 
 was a great gulf fixed which remains to-day impassable,
 
 142 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 although many fragile and fantastic structures have of 
 late years swung airily over the abyss. In the Greek 
 thought the foundations of Western civilisation are set, 
 and in that thought rest also the eternal foundations 
 of art. For personality, freedom, and responsibility 
 were the fundamental Greek ideas, and they are the 
 ideas which underlie Western life and art. The Greek j 
 artist recognised the integrity of his own nature, and j 
 discerned his consequent freedom and responsibility. 
 He did not lose himself in God, nor merge himself 
 in nature ; he stood erect ; he worshipped, he observed, 
 and he created. He did not, through failure of clear 
 thought, attempt the impossible, as did his fellow in 
 the farther East ; he saw clearly the limitations of his ' 
 faculty, and he discerned that freedom and power lay 
 in accepting, not in ignoring, those limitations. He 
 constructed the Parthenon instead of miles of rock- 
 hewn temple ; and for monsters, and gigantic, unreal 
 symbols he carved the Olympian Zeus and the in 
 imitable Venus of the Louvre Gallery. He peopled the 
 world with divinities, and in his marvellous illustration 
 of the fecundity of the human spirit, and of its power, 
 he created an art which not only affirms the integrity 
 of the soul, but predicts its immortality. There have 
 been great artists from that day to this, and art has 
 passed through many phases, but the old law finds 
 constant illustration ; and between Tennyson and 
 Swinburne, as between Shakespeare and Marlowe, 
 one discerns the gain and the waste of power inherent, 
 the first in self-restraint, the second in self-assertion.
 
 STRUGGLE IN ART. 
 
 MARLOWE'S excess and lack of restraint debarred 
 him from the highest achievement as an artist ; but his 
 vitality and force were qualities of lasting attraction 
 and incalculable value. By virtue of his rich and pas 
 sionate nature he stands in close proximity to the 
 great group from whose magic circle he was shut out 
 only by his failure to obey the laws of his art. Few 
 writers have possessed a force of imagination and 
 passion so great and so impressive ; and it is interest 
 ing to note how much more quickly men are drawn 
 to the Titan than to the Olympian ; for struggle is 
 pathetically universal, and the repose of harmonious 
 achievement pathetically rare among men. The greater 
 the art, the slower the recognition, as a rule. The im 
 pression made by a lawless or unregulated force is 
 always more immediate than that made by a mastered 
 and harmonised power. The rending of a cliff makes 
 every observer conscious of the force of the explosive, 
 but how few ever think of the force put forth in lifting 
 an oak from its rootage in the earth to the great height 
 where all the winds of heaven play upon it ! 
 
 The " storm and stress " period moves all hearts and 
 stirs in the young imagination one knows not what
 
 144 MY STUDY FIRE, 
 
 dreams and desires, but when the ferment of spirit is 
 past, and the new thought has taken its enduring form, 
 what a sense of disappointment comes to a host of 
 aspiring souls ! The struggle touched and intoxicated 
 them with a sense of something not only great but 
 akin to their own experience; the clarification and 
 final expression of the new spirit in art seems some 
 how remote and cold. When the " Sorrows of 
 Werther " appeared a thrill ran through Germany ; but 
 when " Tasso " and " Iphigenia " were given to the 
 world with what indifference they were received ! The 
 boy reads "The Robbers" with bated breath, but ten 
 years later he knows that the Schiller of the Wallen- 
 stein trilogy was an incomparably greater writer than 
 the Schiller of " The Robbers." Revolt is easier than 
 reconstruction ; at the barricade every one is swept by 
 a consuming enthusiasm, but the moment the attempt 
 is made to give the new time order and stability, 
 divisions and indifference appear. Struggle, however 
 noble, is for the moment ; achievement has something 
 of eternity in it. The Titan is always a striking figure, 
 but it is the Olympian who endures and rules. 
 
 The element of struggle is, however, a part of the 
 greatest art, and the motive of much of the highest 
 work done by men has been the harmonising of antag 
 onistic forces and the final and beautiful synthesis of 
 contending ideas. It is by struggle that life is broad 
 ened, and the human spirit freed from many of its 
 limitations ; and there is nothing nobler in man than 
 that constant dissatisfaction with his condition which
 
 STRUGGLE IN ART. 145 
 
 provokes the struggle. The race is always reaching 
 forward to grasp better things than it yet possesses. 
 It is haunted by visions of perfection, and driven on 
 by aspirations and dreams which will not suffer it to 
 rest in any present achievement. This discontent is 
 not a superficial restlessness ; it is the evidence of the 
 infinite possibilities of man's nature, and of his inability 
 to stop short of complete development. All literature 
 bears witness to this arduous, sorrowful, inspiring 
 struggle for a more harmonious life, so often defeated, 
 so constantly renewed. 
 
 In the record of this sublime drama, of which man 
 himself is the protagonist, there is found one great 
 means of escape from those limitations of experience 
 which give us such constant pain and fill us with a 
 consuming desire to escape from ourselves. " Sensa 
 tions of all kinds have been crowding upon me," writes 
 Amiel, " the delights of a walk under the rising sun, 
 the charms of a wonderful view, longing for travel, 
 and thirst for joy, hunger for work, for emotion, for 
 life, dreams of happiness and of love. A passionate 
 wish to live, to feel, to express, stirred the depths of 
 my heart. It was a sudden reawakening of youth, a 
 flash of poetry, a renewing of the soul, a fresh growth 
 of the wings of desire. I was overpowered by a host 
 of conquering, vagabond, adventurous aspirations. I 
 forgot my age, my obligations, my duties, my vexa 
 tions, and youth leapt within me as though life were 
 beginning again. It was as though something explo 
 sive had caught fire, and one's soul were scattered to 
 10
 
 146 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the four winds ; in such a mood one would fain devour 
 the whole world, experience everything, see every 
 thing. Faust's ambition enters into one universal 
 desire a horror of one's own prison cell. One 
 throws off one's hair shirt, and one would fain gather 
 the whole of nature into one's arms and heart." 
 
 How often Amiel made the rounds of his cell, and 
 how vainly he strove to break the bars of his temper 
 ament, the world knows from that incomparable record, 
 in the writing of which his spirit found the escape 
 sought for in vain in other directions. Self-contaiued, 
 reticent, shy, how few dreamed of the turbulence in 
 the soul of the formal and didactic teacher in the 
 formal and rather pedantic little city of Calvin and 
 Rousseau ! Without the " Journal," the struggle and 
 the wealth of AmieFs nature would never have been 
 known ; it adds another chapter to that book of life 
 in which the race records its secret hopes and de 
 spairs. And is it not pathetically significant that the 
 motive with which the Greek dramatists dealt with so 
 strong a hand reappears in this quiet drama enacted 
 in the soul of the Genevan Professor of Moral Phil 
 osophy? On the widest as on the narrowest stage it 
 is the motive which all men understand, because it is 
 a part of every human experience. The Old Testa 
 ment, the Epics of Homer, the " Divine Comedy," 
 the plays of Shakespeare, and " Faust " are among its 
 greatest records, but its story is in all lives. 
 
 To every man comes the struggle, to a few great 
 writers the power to interpret the struggle and predict
 
 STRUGGLE IN ART. 147 
 
 or portray its issue in immediate reconciliation or in 
 ultimate achievement. And so art becomes an avenue 
 of escape from the prison of personal experience, not 
 only by taking us out of ourselves, but by disclosing 
 the identity of our individual struggle with the universal 
 struggle of humanity. It opens the door out of the 
 particular into the universal, and it constantly predicts 
 the final resolution of discords into harmony, the ulti 
 mate reconciliation of contending ideas and forces ; 
 and when, as in " Lear," it gives no suggestion of an 
 answer to the problems involved, the very magnitude 
 of the drama which it unfolds compels the inference of 
 an adequate solution on some other and larger stage.
 
 THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION. 
 
 IT is one of the pains of the artistic temperament 
 that its exaltations of mood and its ecstasies of spirit 
 must be largely solitary. The air of this century is 
 not genial to that intimacy with beauty which solicits 
 easy interchange of confidences among those who 
 enjoy it The mass of men are preoccupied and 
 unsensitive on that side of life which has for the artist 
 the deepest reality ; they are given over to pursuits 
 which are imperative in their demands, and fruitful in 
 their rewards, but which lead far from the pursuit of 
 beauty. There have been times when the artistic 
 temper, if not widely shared, was generally under 
 stood, and such times will come again when the 
 modern world becomes more thoroughly harmonised 
 with itself; meantime the man who has the joys of the 
 artistic temperament will accept them as a sufficient 
 consolation for its pains. 
 
 For the essence of this temperament is not so much 
 its sensitiveness to every revelation of the beautiful as 
 its passion for perfection. There is in the life of the 
 artist an element of pain, which never goes beyond a 
 dumb sense of discontent in men of coarser mould ; 
 for the artist is compelled to live with his ideals ! 

 
 THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION. 149 
 
 Other men have occasional glimpses of their ideals ; 
 the artist lives his life in their presence and under their 
 searching glances. A man is in the way to become 
 genuine and noble when his ideals draw near and make 
 their home with him instead of floating before him like 
 summer clouds, forever dissolving and reforming on the 
 distant horizon ; but he is also in the way of very real 
 anguish of spirit. Our ideals, when we establish them 
 under our own roofs, are as relentless as the Furies 
 who thronged about Orestes ; they will not let us rest. 
 The world may applaud, but if they avert their faces 
 reputation is a mockery and success a degradation. 
 The passion for perfection is the divinest possession of 
 the soul, but it makes all lower gratifications, all com 
 promises with the highest standards, impossible. The 
 man whom it dominates can never taste the easy satis 
 factions which assuage the thirst of those who have 
 it not ; for him it must always be the best or nothing. 
 
 Flaubert, Mr. James tells us, ought always to be 
 cited as one of the martyrs of the plastic idea ; the 
 " torment of style " was never eased in his case, and 
 despite his immense absorption and his tireless toil, he 
 failed to touch the invisible goal for which he set out. 
 " Possessed," says one of his critics, who was also a 
 devotee of the supreme excellence, "of an absolute 
 belief that there exists but one way of expressing one 
 thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, 
 one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman 
 labour for the discovery, in every phrase, of that 
 word, that verb, that epithet. In this way he believed
 
 150 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 in some mysterious harmony of expression, and when 
 a true word seemed to him to lack euphony, still went 
 on seeking another with invincible patience, certain 
 that he had not yet got hold of the unique word. . . . 
 A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the 
 same moment, always with this desperate certitude 
 fixed in his spirit, among all the expressions in the 
 world, there is but one one form, one mode to 
 express what I want to say." 
 
 To a mind capable of absolute devotion, such an 
 ideal as Flaubert set before him not only draws him 
 on through laborious days, deaf to the voices of pleas 
 ure, but consumes him with an inward fire. The aim 
 of the novelist was not simply to set the best words in 
 the best order ; it was to lay hold upon perfection ; 
 to touch those ultimate limits beyond which the 
 human spirit cannot go, and where that spirit stands 
 face to face with the absolute perfection. This pas 
 sionate pursuit of the finalities of form and expression 
 is as far removed from the pursuit of mere craftsman 
 ship as art itself is separated from mere mechanical 
 skill ; and yet so little is the real significance of art 
 understood among us that it is continually confused 
 with craftsmanship, and spoken of as something apart 
 from a man's self, something born of skill and akin to 
 the mechanical, instead of being the very last and 
 supreme outflowing of that within us which is spon 
 taneous and inspired. In a fine burst of indignation 
 at this profanation of one of the greatest words in 
 human speech, Mr. Aldrich says :
 
 THE PASSION FOR PERFECTION. I 5 I 
 
 " ' Let art be all in all,' one time I said, 
 
 And straightway stirred the hypercriric gall ; 
 I said not, ' Let technique be all in all,' 
 But art a wider meaning. Worthless, dead 
 The shell without its pearl, the corpse of things, 
 Mere words are, till the spirit lends them wings ; 
 The poet who breathes no soul into his lute 
 Falls short of art : 't were better he were mute. 
 
 " The workmanship wherewith the gold is wrought 
 Adds yet a richness to the richest gold : 
 Who lacks the art to shape his thought, I hold, 
 
 Were little poorer if he lacked the thought. 
 
 The statue's slumbers were unbroken still 
 
 Within the marble, had the hand no skill. 
 
 Disparage not the magic touch that gives 
 
 The formless thought the grace whereby it lives ! " 
 
 Flaubert did not touch the goal, in spite of his 
 heroic toil, and largely because of that toil. For he 
 sought too strenuously, with intention too insistent and / 
 dominant ; he was driven by his passion instead of 
 being inspired by it. It is as true of our relations with 
 our ideals as of our relations with our friends that we 
 must preserve our independence ; our ideals must 
 lead, but they must not tyrannise over us. There is 
 something in us which even our ideals must respect, 
 and that something is our own individuality. The per 
 fection which a man pursues must be the perfection 
 of his own quality, not a perfection which is foreign to 
 him. It is himself which he is to raise to the highest 
 point of power, not something outside of himself. 
 Flaubert understood this, for he once wrote : " In
 
 152 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 literature the best chance one has is by following one's 
 temperament and exaggerating it." Nevertheless, one 
 of the defects of his work is the fact that its perfection 
 is not the perfection of his temperament, is, indeed, 
 a kind of objective perfection, which seems at times 
 detached so entirely from temperament that it is hard 
 and cold and devoid of atmosphere. To this detach 
 ment is due perhaps the failure to secure that ultimate 
 excellence of which his whole life was one arduous pur 
 suit. For Flaubert rarely passed beyond the stage of 
 effort ; his pen rarely caught that native rhythm which 
 we detect in Scott and Thackeray and Tolstoi at their 
 best, that perfect adequacy, manifested in perfect 
 ease, which makes us forget the toil in the perfection 
 of the work, and which assures us that the slow hand 
 of the artisan has become the swift hand of the artist 
 Surely the way of perfection is straight and narrow, 
 and few there be who follow it to the end !
 
 CRITICISM AS AN INTERPRETER. 
 
 A GOOD deal has been said about the influence of 
 criticism as a restraining and corrective force con 
 stantly and effectively brought to bear on writers ; and 
 it is probably true that no small gains in the direction 
 of better and sounder work have been made as a result 
 of criticism, even when it has been inadequate and 
 coarse in tone. There is good reason to believe that 
 Tennyson felt keenly the unnecessary offensiveness 
 with which the tinge of sentimentality and the defective 
 energy of expression in his work given to the world in 
 1832 were pointed out by more than one critical 
 writer of the time ; nevertheless, the young poet prof 
 ited by correction so ungraciously administered, and 
 what might have developed into an unsound strain be 
 came, ten years later, the evidence of a peculiar ripe 
 ness and beauty. In many cases, doubtless, criticism, 
 even when it has fallen below its highest levels, has 
 been a useful teacher and monitor, and in this way 
 has rendered genuine service to literature. But this 
 service of criticism is, after all, secondary and inci 
 dental ; for it is the writer, and not the critic, who 
 makes literature, not only in the sense of creating, but 
 also of determining its forms. The critic often tells
 
 154 M Y STUDY FIRE. 
 
 the writer facts about himself which are of lasting 
 
 O 
 
 value in his artistic education, but in the end it is 
 the writer who marks out the lines along which the 
 critic must move. 
 
 Criticism was long oblivious of this fundamental fact 
 in its relation to distinctively creative work ; it was long 
 under the impression that the final authority resided in 
 itself rather than in the work upon which it passed 
 judgment with entire confidence in its own com 
 petency. It was not until criticism passed into the 
 hands of men of insight and creative power that it 
 discovered its chief function to be that of compre 
 hension, and its principal service that of interpretation. 
 Not that it has surrendered its function of judging 
 according to the highest standards, but that it has 
 discovered that the forms of excellence change from 
 time to time, and that the question with regard to a work 
 of art is not whether it conforms to types of excellence 
 already familiar, but whether it is an ultimate expres 
 sion of beauty or power. In every case the artist 
 creates the type, and the critic proves his competency 
 by recognising it ; so that while the critic holds the 
 artist to rigid standards of veracity and craftsmanship, it 
 is the artist who lays down the law to the critic. As 
 an applied art, based on deduction, and constructing 
 its canons apart from the material which literature 
 furnishes, criticism was notable mainly for its fallibility. 
 As an art based on induction, and framing its laws ac 
 cording to the methods and principles illustrated in 
 the best literature, it has advanced from a secondary
 
 CRITICISM AS AN INTERPRETED. 155 
 
 to a leading place among the literary forms now most 
 widely employed and most widely influential. 
 
 The real ..-ervice of criticism is to the reader rather 
 than to the writer, and it serves literature chiefly by 
 making its recognition on the part of the reader more 
 prompt and more complete. A work of art does not 
 need to be preserved, it preserves itself; there is in 
 it a vitality which endures indifference and survives 
 neglect. What is often lost, however, is the immediate 
 influence of such a work. It has happened again and 
 again in the history of literature that a great book has 
 been long unrecognised ; and a resource which might 
 have enriched life has been put aside until men were 
 educated to receive and use it. It is as an educative 
 force that criticism has developed its most immediate 
 and, perhaps, its most lasting usefulness. 
 
 For while great works of art do not need the aid 
 of criticism to preserve them from the danger of actual 
 disappearance, they do need its service as an inter 
 preter. What Addison had to say about Milton did 
 not protect the Puritan poet from any danger of per 
 manent obscurity, but it went far toward making a 
 clearer understanding of his greatness possible. It 
 was a service to the English people, and, in so much 
 as it opened their eyes to an excellence which had 
 been widely denied, it was also a service to English 
 literature. The old dramas which Lamb loved with 
 such missionary zeal were in no sense dependent upon 
 that zeal for their preservation ; but they gained by it a 
 recognition more general and more intelligent than they
 
 1 56 MY STUD Y FIRE. 
 
 had won even from the generation which had heard 
 their noble or terrible lines declaimed on the stage. 
 Cromwell would have remained the great soul he was had 
 Carlyle passed him by, but it was Carlyle's searching 
 insight and victorious art which restored the Protector 
 to his place in the history and the heart of England. 
 To comprehend a work of art, a certain degree of 
 education must be attained ; and the greater and more 
 original the work of art, the deeper and more thorough 
 the education required. For it is the peculiar quality 
 of genius to be prophetic, and to create in advance 
 sometimes far in advance of general comprehension. 
 Society must grow into the larger thought which at first 
 often escapes it, and grow into the openmindedness to 
 which beauty in a new form successfully makes its ap 
 peal. The greater writers, whose creative energy finds 
 new channels and manifests itself under unfamiliar 
 aspects, are always in advance of the general capacity 
 of appreciation, and are always in need of interpreters ; 
 and this office of interpretation has become the chief 
 function of criticism. Taine interprets English liter 
 ature by effectively, if somewhat coarsely, filling in the 
 background of the environment and experience of the 
 race ; while Sainte-Beuve interprets the book by sug 
 gesting with delicate but impressive skill the person 
 ality of the writer. 
 
 When a man like Goethe takes up criticism, its 
 range and power become at once apparent. Insight 
 is substituted for literary tradition, and sympathy is 
 emphasised as the keyword of the critical art. We are
 
 CRITICISM AS AN INTERPRETER. 157 
 
 no longer dealing with a police magistrate intent upon 
 the rigid administration of a petty local code, but with 
 a man of universal interests, familiar with all standards, 
 quick to feel all kinds of excellence, and eager to dis 
 cern in a work of art, not only its relation to the past, 
 but its fresh revelation of what is in man and in his life, 
 and its new disclosure of the exhaustless power of the 
 imagination to create forms. After such a critic has 
 spoken, and has suggested the possibilities of criticism, 
 it is not surprising to find so many minds of the 
 highest order drawn to it. So far from being the 
 secondary or derivative art which it is often declared 
 to be, criticism, on its higher plane, involves the 
 possession of an insight, a breadth of intelligence, and 
 a faculty of expression which in their combination 
 must be regarded as belonging to the sphere of 
 the creative forces. Coleridge, Carlyle, Sainte-Beuve, 
 Amiel, Arnold, Emerson, and Lowell represent criticism 
 at its best, and are, therefore, the men by whose work 
 it must be judged.
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL QUALITY OF 
 CRITICISM. 
 
 THE prime characteristic of the work of the great 
 critics is interpretation, and its deepest influence is 
 educational. It is true that all art is educational, and 
 that literature, as Matthew Arnold long ago said in one 
 of his suggestive school reports, contains the best 
 possible material for education ; but criticism is pe 
 culiarly and definitely educational, because it brings 
 into clear light the significance of literature as a 
 whole. The immediate and vital relationship between 
 art and life, which has given literature an entirely 
 new meaning to modern men, was largely discerned 
 and disclosed by the great modern critics. To them 
 we owe not only clear ideas of the specific work and 
 personal quality of each writer, but clear ideas of his 
 relation to his time and to his race, of his signi 
 ficance in the development of literature and in the 
 history of the human soul. There is a distinct and 
 definite educational value in the comprehension of 
 Montaigne's relation to his age, of the influences which 
 found their expression in Voltaire and Rousseau, and 
 of the facts of race inheritance and social condition 
 which made so deep an impress on the artistic temper 
 ament of Tourguenieff. There is indeed no educational
 
 EDUCATIONAL QUALITY OF CRITICISM. 159 
 
 material of such interest and importance as that pre 
 served in books, because nowhere else has the life of 
 men made a record at once so frank, so searching, 
 and so appealing. It was a profound thought of 
 Froebel's that the true teacher of each individual is 
 the race, and that what the race has thought, felt, and 
 accomplished is the richest material for educational 
 uses. And literature, being the fullest and frankest 
 revelation of what is in men and of what they have 
 experienced, is the most vital and persuasive teacher 
 of humanity. 
 
 It is and has been the function of criticism in the 
 hands of the masters of the art to bring into clear light 
 this educational significance of literature ; to trace its 
 intimate and necessary relations with the time which 
 produced it ; to indicate the racial elements which enter 
 into it ; to point out the impress of personality ; and 
 to set each great work in true relation to that disclosure 
 of the nature of man of which art has kept so faithful a 
 record. In thus dealing with literary works as parts of 
 one great expression of the soul, criticism has not lost 
 its judicial spirit nor parted with its instinct for per 
 fection of form. It has simply struck a true balance 
 between the human and the artistic elements in works 
 of literature ; it has shown the rootage of art in life ; it 
 has set the man beside his work, and made the work - - 
 the~revelation of the man. The value of the general ' 
 service of such a new reading of literature cannot be 
 estimated, so wide, so deep, and so subtle are those 
 educational influences which play upon the spirits of
 
 160 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 men as part of the atmosphere which they breathe. 
 This is, however, a service to literature itself which is 
 often overlooked. The quality of disinterestedness, 
 upon which Mr. Arnold insisted at the very beginning 
 of his career as a critic, carries with it an inevitable 
 enlargement of thought. It is impossible to study 
 literary works as they appear fresh from widely differ 
 ing conditions of race and individual life without 
 receiving, consciously or unconsciously, an education 
 of a very high order. Insular ignorance, class pre 
 judice, national antagonism, race hostility, individual 
 prepossession and limitation are insensibly modified by 
 contact with life, unifying such a variety of conditions, 
 and revealing itself with equal authority through such 
 different forms of expression. The men are few whose 
 literary creeds can remain provincial in the face of the 
 catholicity of modern criticism. One may be wedded 
 to Romanticism, but he must be uncommonly unre 
 sponsive if he fails to feel the power of such verse as 
 Landor and Arnold have given us. In these days it 
 is possible to be a lover of Flaubert and De Mau 
 passant and yet enjoy George Sand; to care for 
 Corneille and yet recognise the power of Ibsen. 
 
 To put aside accidental methods, accepted stand 
 ards, and personal prepossessions, and witli_ open 
 mind to search each work of literature for its aim, its 
 reality, and its excellence, is not only to receive that 
 kind of education which affects the quality of a man's 
 nature, but to make it easier for the writer with the 
 new word and the new spirit to secure a hearing. Many
 
 EDUCATIONAL QUALITY OF CRITICISM. l6l 
 
 changes have taken place since Rabelais found it neces 
 sary to veil his attack on the educational methods of 
 the Church ; a man may now speak his thought without 
 peril to his head. But freedom of opinion was more 
 easily won than freedom of artistic expression. Even 
 in our own time there has been more than one demon 
 stration of the danger which the artist faces when he 
 ventures into a fresh field and employs a new method. 
 Carlyle, Browning, Ibsen, and Whitman remind us, in 
 different chapters of their experience, that artistic toler 
 ance has not yet come to perfect flower, and that 
 disinterestedness is not yet universal. Nevertheless, it 
 remains true that the conception of literature was 
 never so broad as at this moment, and there have 
 never been so many intelligent persons eager to recog 
 nise beauty, truth, and power, however strangely garbed. 
 When a critic so fastidious as Matthew Arnold recog 
 nises the literary quality shared in common by men as 
 diverse in temperament, idea, aim, and artistic method 
 as Wordsworth, Byron, Gray, Shelley, Heine, and 
 Tolstoi, the genuine catholicity of modern criticism 
 may be regarded as nearly complete. If the new 
 method must still win its way against prejudice and 
 conventional notions of art, it is rather because of in 
 difference and inertia than of intentional antagonism. 
 In these days genius is in greater peril from premature 
 than from postponed recognition ; it is more likely to 
 be forced than to be repressed. 
 
 The larger thought of literature, as an expression of 
 the soul under the conditions of life and in the forms
 
 1 62 
 
 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 of art, not only gives it a foremost place among the 
 forces which civilise men, but gives it the stimulus of 
 a great function and the freedom of a governing power. 
 Criticism has not only opened the minds of readers, 
 but it has invited writers to a freedom which they 
 formerly were compelled to fight for ; and who can 
 doubt that in the long run this broader education of 
 those to whom literature makes its appeal will react upon 
 literary artists through provocation of earlier recog 
 nition, quicker response, and truer comprehension'
 
 PLATO'S DIALOGUES AS LITERATURE. 
 
 WHEN Dr. Jowett's translation of Plato's " Dialogues " 
 appeared in this country twenty years ago, a story was 
 current that a Western newspaper closed its review of 
 the work with the remark that Plato was one of the 
 greatest of English prose writers ! No finer tribute 
 was ever paid to a translator, and that Plato got the 
 credit of Dr. Jowett's beautiful skill was the most un 
 affected of compliments to the art of the accomplished 
 Master of Balliol College. Plato had long been studied 
 as a thinker, but the " Dialogues " as literature had re 
 ceived small attention. An occasional scholar had 
 paused by the way in his philosophical studies to note 
 the range and beauty of Plato's style, and to feel the 
 charm of a literary quality rare at all times, and in no 
 other instance possessed in equal degree by a thinker of 
 the first order. For while there have been philosophi 
 cal writers of force and clearness, Plato is the only 
 great literary artist who has drawn upon all the re 
 sources of language to give philosophic thought vivid 
 ness, adequacy, and perfection of expression. 
 
 The Greek genius gave many illustrations of the 
 power of art to receive and communicate the most 
 virile and powerful as well as the most subtle and
 
 1 64 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 delicate impress of the soul of man on his fellows 
 and his time, but in nothing was the depth and 
 force of the artistic impulse more impressively shown 
 than in the ease of manner, the amplitude of mood, 
 the ripeness of spirit, and perfection of form with 
 which a system of thought was set forth. Under 
 the spell of an artistic impulse so pervasive and so 
 genuine, statesmanship became a matter of harmony 
 and co-ordination quite as distinctly as sculpture or 
 architecture, for Pericles was as great an artist as 
 Phidias ; oratory touched the sources of power in 
 speech with an instinct as sure and true as that of the 
 poet, for Demosthenes was as genuine an artist as 
 Sophocles. It was reserved for Plato, however, to 
 discuss the profoundest questions of life, not with the 
 aridity of a purely logical method, but with the fresh 
 ness, the charm, and the grace of one to whom the 
 divine Maker never ceased to be the divine Artist. 
 The structure of the Parthenon discloses complete 
 mastery of the art of building, but in the thought of its 
 builders the pure construction of that noble treasure- 
 house was never separated from the obvious and 
 matchless beauty which makes it a thing of joy even 
 in its ruins. In like manner, the most poetic of Greek 
 thinkers did not divorce, even in thought, the massive 
 structure of the universe from that beauty which clothes 
 it in the sense in which beauty clothes the flower, by 
 growing out of its hidden substance. 
 
 It is fortunate for the English-speaking peoples that 
 this artist in thought and speech found a translator
 
 PLATO'S DIALOGUES AS LITERATURE. 165 
 
 whose scholarship was equal to the large demands of 
 the " Dialogues," and whose literary instinct and faculty 
 were at once so responsive and so adequate. Plato 
 could not have been translated save by a man of rare 
 literary gift, and the possession of such a gift was the 
 foremost qualification of Dr. Jowett. It is the fashion 
 among some academicians to sneer at the literary 
 faculty, but the fashion is a harmless one ; or, if it 
 harms any one, harms only its votaries. The artistic 
 element is the creative element, and is, therefore, dis 
 tinctly the most precious quality of the human mind, 
 the quality which manifests itself in clear supremacy 
 whenever character, thought, action, or achievement of 
 any kind approaches perfection. Scholarship is com 
 paratively common in the dullest age, but the artistic 
 gift is rare in the greatest age. In Plato this element 
 is so pervasive and so characteristic that to translate 
 the " Dialogues " without reproducing their atmosphere 
 would be like giving us the measurements of the Sistine 
 Madonna without giving us contour, colour, or expres 
 sion. The criticism which has sometimes assailed Dr. 
 Jowett's translation because of its grace and fluency 
 has been an unintentional tribute to the excellence of 
 a work which, with refreshing disregard of academic 
 notions, is not only accurate, but has dared to be as 
 charming as its original ! 
 
 In Dr. Jowett's full and ripe English, Plato's thought 
 and expression are so faithfully preserved that one 
 stands in no need of the Introductions to discern the 
 quality which makes the " Dialogues " literature quite
 
 1 66 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 as distinctly as they are philosophy. For the abiding 
 and varied charm of these discussions is the person 
 ality which pervades them. Plato was not a profes 
 sional thinker, intent upon uncovering the logical order 
 of material and spiritual construction ; he was a richly 
 endowed personality, to whose mobile imagination and 
 quick artistic perceptions the movement of the world 
 was full of vitality, colour, and harmony. Thought was 
 never divorced from feeling, abstracted from the whole 
 of things ; it was involved in the general order and 
 inseparable from it. To comprehend the universe, one 
 must not only perceive its structure, but feel its fath 
 omless beauty and bathe in its flowing tides of vitality. 
 This steadfast determination to see things in their vi 
 tal movement gives us that harmony which is so pro 
 nounced in Plato's thought, and gives us also those 
 charming groups which are associated with the " Dia 
 logues." It was a consummate art which made each 
 discussion a chapter out of contemporary life, hinting 
 at the limitations of thought by skilfully bringing out 
 the limitations of the individual mind and experience, 
 and keeping always in view the dependence of thought 
 on temperament, education, and character; to say 
 nothing of the luminous side-lights thrown on the pro- 
 foundest themes by interlocutors who contribute not 
 only their thoughts, but themselves, to the debate, and 
 who give the hour and the question a rich and lasting 
 human interest. It is the constant spell of this human 
 interest which makes some of the dialogues the 
 " Phaedo," the " Phsedrus," and the " Symposium," for
 
 PLATO'S DIALOGUES AS LITERATURE. 167 
 
 instance literary classics. For the essence of art is 
 that it is concrete instead of being abstract, and that it 
 realises its thought in symbols and persons instead of 
 putting it into propositions or maxims. If Plato had 
 been simply a philosopher, he would have given the 
 world the dissertation with which it has been familiar 
 from the time of Aristotle to that of Kant ; but because 
 he was also an artist he immersed his thought in the 
 warm atmosphere of human life, and at every stage 
 gave it the dramatic interest of intimate human 
 association. 
 
 Those changing groups whose talk we seem to over 
 hear in so many pages of the " Dialogues " bring 
 before us the mobility of the Ionic spirit, that sensi 
 tiveness to form and colour, that quick interest in every 
 thing which touched the life of men, that instinct for 
 the harmonious, which, in their combination, explain 
 not only the Attic genius but the charm of Plato as a 
 writer. There is an intense vitality in him, as there 
 was in the Greek culture ; but it is restrained and 
 harmonised. There is everywhere a strong sense of 
 reality ; but it is reality in its very highest and most 
 lasting forms. We are introduced to many persons, 
 but most of them are of surpassing interest. The 
 human element, in delicately drawn contrasts of char 
 acter, constantly divides attention with the thought, 
 and while we climb the loftiest heights we are con 
 scious at every step of human companionship. The 
 freshness, buoyancy, and vivacity of youth relieve the 
 tension of speculation, and sometimes, as in the famous
 
 1 68 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 passage in the " Symposium," the strain of pure thought 
 becomes a kind of introduction to a bit of drama of 
 surpassing charm. Plato's imagination is revealed in 
 the structure of the " Dialogues," and in his conception 
 of the form in which his thought is cast ; it finds, how 
 ever, specific disclosure in those fables which often 
 contain the profoundest essence of his thought, but 
 which are singularly beautiful in imagery and symbol 
 ism. It is found also in his style, in its variety, flex 
 ibility, fluidity, colour, and freshness, a style delicate 
 enough to receive the lightest impression, and stable 
 enough to contain and communicate the profound 
 est thought. Says Mr. Pater : " No one, perhaps, 
 has with equal power literally sounded the unseen 
 depths of thought, and, with what may be truly called 
 ' substantial ' word and phrase, given locality there to 
 the mere adumbration, the dim hints and surmises, of 
 the speculative mind." 
 
 Whoever opens the " Dialogues " knows that here 
 there is the magic of art in lasting alliance with high 
 and exacting thought, and that between these pages 
 there is found not only the mind but the immortal life 
 and freshness of Greece : " We shall meet a number of 
 our youth there : we shall have a dialogue : there will 
 be a torchlight procession in honour of the goddess, an 
 equestrian procession, a novel feature ! What? 
 torches in their hands, passed on as they race ? Ay, 
 and an illumination through the entire night. It will 
 be worth seeing ! "
 
 THE POWER OF THE NOVEL. 
 
 THE interest excited by books of such substance and 
 quality as Mrs. Ward's " Marcella " shows very clearly 
 that the attractive power of fiction, after all these years 
 of immense productivity in that department, is still un 
 spent. Mn Crawford, who is one of the most widely 
 read novelists of the day, is of the opinion that the 
 novel has passed its prime ; but neither the quality of 
 work in fiction nor the popular interest in it shows as 
 yet any evidence of decrepitude. On the contrary, at 
 the close of a century which has been dominated by 
 the novel as a literary form, fiction still remains, on the 
 whole, the most real and vital of all the forms of ex 
 pression which literary men are using, and is probably 
 the form which exerts the widest influence upon the 
 reading public. It would be unwise to predict the 
 form of literature for which the men and women of 
 the close of the twentieth century will care most, but 
 the prediction that a hundred years from now the novel 
 will still be universally read would be perhaps less rash 
 than most literary predictions. In this country it can 
 not be said that we have produced any novelist of the 
 first rank since Hawthorne, but we have produced a 
 goodly number of novelists of high rank and a multi-
 
 I/O MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 tude of short-story writers whose work betrays the pres 
 ence of both nature and art in very uncommon and 
 delightful combination. The fact that we have pro 
 duced no great novelist, and that the novel is still so 
 widely read, shows that its spell resides in some^ ele 
 ment aside from the individual power of the writer, and 
 that there is in the novel, as a form of literature, a 
 charm which the men and women of these days feel 
 very deeply. 
 
 That charm resides in the force, the directness, and 
 the delicacy with which fiction has interpreted and por 
 trayed human life. The human drama in these later 
 days is engrossing to all serious-minded people, and 
 wherever the moral or spiritual fact or experience is 
 dramatized by the novelist with even a fair degree of 
 power, the novel which results is certain to have a 
 wide reading. The world-wide movement which has 
 already made such modifications in the social condi 
 tions, and which is silently effecting such a revolution 
 in the relations of men with men and of class with class, 
 finds its way into art through the insight, the observa 
 tion, and the skill of the great novelist ; and such a 
 book as " Marcella," entirely aside from its dramatic 
 effectiveness, gains an immense power simply from the 
 fact that it deals with questions in which everybody is 
 interested, and introduces with great directness that 
 human element which is to-day part and parcel of 
 every religious, political, or industrial problem. The 
 same impulse which gives the novel such a hold upon 
 readers produces also the great novelist ; for behind
 
 THE POWER OF THE NOVEL. \J\ 
 
 every widespread literary movement there is always a 
 vital movement of experience ; and the great writer, 
 while his power resides in his own personality, is, in a 
 deep and true sense, the child of his time and the 
 interpreter of its thought. 
 
 This deeper source of interest must not tempt us to 
 forget, however, that the art of literature still involves 
 both pleasure and recreation, and that the sole end of 
 the book is not to instruct, inspire, and expand. These 
 are, indeed, the inevitable results of the greatest works 
 of art, but there is still a legitimate field for the solace, 
 the entertainment, and the recreation of mankind in 
 the hands of the story-tellers. It is safe to say, in the 
 face of all the tendency novels and the novels of pur 
 pose which have flooded the world in recent years 
 and some of them are notable and permanent contri 
 butions to literature that men and women still crave 
 the novel of adventure and the romantic story. The 
 old story-tellers who recited the " Arabian Nights " 
 hundreds of years ago, and are still repeating them in 
 the East to-day, meet what is commonly known as 
 " a real need," the need of change, diversion, rest, 
 and pleasure. And the great story-tellers, like Walter 
 Scott and Dumas, who do not represent a school of 
 thought, and do not set about a specific work of reform, 
 have their place quite as distinctly as George Eliot or 
 Charles Dickens. The story of adventure and the 
 romantic novel are dear to the human heart, and are 
 certain to reappear at intervals, no matter how marked 
 the occasional reaction against them may be, as long
 
 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 as books are written. Indeed, there will be a question 
 in many minds whether, as literary artists, some of these 
 occasionally discredited writers for pleasure and enter 
 tainment are not greater than those who use the novel 
 as a means of teaching. That is too large a question 
 to discuss at this moment. It is enough to point out 
 the fact that Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Crockett, Mr. Weyman, 
 and Mr. Doyle are in every sense legitimate novelists. 
 Indeed, they may point to the greatest masters of fic 
 tion as the exemplars of the particular art which they 
 themselves are illustrating. Certainly the world never 
 needed diversion of the right sort more than it needs it 
 to-day, and there cannot be too many wholesome 
 stories of the kind that lighten the burdens, divert the 
 attention, and refresh the souls of men. Art stands in 
 relations with life too intimate and vital to escape the 
 claims of contemporaneous passions, convictions, and 
 movements ; but the deepest notes it has struck have 
 issued from that fundamental human nature which lies 
 below the mutations of society. " Don Quixote " is a 
 book for the world and for all time, not because it 
 satirized with such destructive power the extravagant 
 and over- wrought romances of chivalry, but because it 
 is one of those documents of human character which 
 are independent of the social conditions which called 
 them forth.
 
 CONCERNING ORIGINALITY. 
 
 No modern man has said so many masterly things 
 about art and the creative side of life as Goethe ; his 
 comments and reflections form the finest body of 
 maxims, suggestions, and principles extant, for one 
 who seeks to know how to live fully and freely in the 
 intellect. It is easy to point out his limitations, but it 
 is not easy to discover the boundaries of his knowledge 
 and activities, or to indicate the limits of his influence. 
 He created on a great scale; but, on a still greater 
 scale, he rationalized and moralized the education, the 
 materials, the methods, and the moods of the creative 
 man among his fellows. He was not a Titan, strug 
 gling fiercely with intractable elements ; he was, 
 rather, an Olympian, easily and calmly doing his work 
 and living his life, with a masterful obedience to the 
 laws of the mind, and a masterful command of his 
 time, his talent, and his tools. In all that concerns 
 art in its fundamental relations to the life of the artist 
 and to society, he is the greatest modern authority. 
 
 Goethe had not only the insight, but the courage 
 and the frankness of genius ; for genius, unlike talent, 
 has no tricks, dexterities, or secrets of method ; it is 
 as mysterious as the sunlight, and as open and acces-
 
 174 
 
 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 sible. It is true, he sometimes took a mischievoi 
 delight in mystifying his critics, but he made no seer 
 of his methods. There was no sleight-of-hand- abo 
 his skill, it was large, free, elemental power, t 
 used the common artistic material as freely as Shake 
 peare, and with as little concealment. He did n 
 take pains to be original in the popular sense of tl 
 word. In a letter to his friend, Professor Norto 
 Mr. Lowell says : " The great merit, it seems to m 
 of the old painters was that they did not try to 1 
 original. 'To say a thing,' says Goethe, 'that evei 
 body else has said before, as quietly as if nobody h; 
 ever said it, that is originality.' " The great Germa 
 who was the most profoundly original of modern me 
 has put this idea in several forms, and given it, 
 repetition, an emphasis which indicates the importan 
 he attached to it. " There is nothing worth thinking 
 he says, "but it has been thought before; we mi 
 only try to think it again." In another maxim 
 declares that " the most foolish of all errors is f 
 clever young men to believe that they forfeit thi 
 originality in recognizing a truth which has alrea> 
 been recognized by others." 
 
 The greatest minds see most clearly the long proce 
 of education which lies behind a new thought, and a 
 quickest to know, therefore, that in the bringing 
 new truth to light there is always a wide division 
 work and a general sharing of the honor of discovei 
 It is, indeed, only a small mind that can produ 
 something new in the sense that the like of it h
 
 CONCERNING ORIGINALITY. 175 
 
 never been seen before ; for such a bit of newness 
 can never be other than a touch of individualism, an 
 unexpected turn of expression, a quaint phrase, an 
 odd fancy, a fresh bit of observation. A deep thought, 
 a wide generalization, are always based on something 
 greater than individualism ; they involve wide com 
 munion with nature or humanity. The quickly appre 
 ciated writers often have a kind of superficiality, a 
 telling and effective way of putting things. CA fresh 
 touch makes a familiar commonplace shine, and it 
 passes current for the moment as a new coin ; but it 
 remains, nevertheless, the old piece whose edges have 
 been worn these many years by much handling.^) 
 
 The fresh touch is something to be grateful for, but 
 it does not evidence the possession of that rare and 
 noble quality which we call originality. If we go to 
 the great writers for illustration of originality, we do 
 not find it in eccentricity of thought, in piquancy of 
 phrase, in unusual diction, in unexpected effects of 
 any kind. The original writers are peculiarly free 
 from those taking mannerisms which are so constantly 
 mistaken for evidences of originality, and so often 
 imitated. These masters of original thought and style 
 are singularly simple, open, and natural. Their power 
 obviously lies in frank and unaffected expression of 
 their own natures. .''"For originality, like happiness, 
 comes to those who oo not seek it ; to set it before 
 one as an aim is to miss it altogether. The man who 
 strives to be original is in grave peril of becoming 
 sensational, and therefore, from the standpoint of art,
 
 176 MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 vulgar; or, if he escapes this danger, he is likely to 
 become self-conscious and artificial. There is nothing 
 more repulsive to genuine spiritual insight than the 
 cheap and tawdry declamation which sometimes passes 
 in the pulpit for originality, and nothing more repug 
 nant to true artistic feeling than the posing and strain 
 ing which are sometimes accepted for the moment as 
 evidences of creative power. Power of the highest 
 kind is largely unconscious, and partakes too much of 
 the nature of the divine power to be made the servant 
 of ignoble and petty ends ; and the artist whose aim is 
 simply to catch the eye of the world will not long 
 retain the power that is in him. 
 / Originality of the highest and most enduring type 
 has no tricks, mannerisms, or devices ; it is elemental ; 
 it is largely unconscious ; it rests, not upon individual 
 cleverness, but upon broad and deep relationships 
 between the artist and the world which he interprets. 
 Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are the most original 
 men who have appeared in the history of literature ; 
 but they are singularly devoid of novelty in the cus 
 tomary sense of the word. They are, on the contrary, 
 singularly familiar ; every reader feels that they have 
 somehow gotten the advantage of him by expressing 
 at an earlier age the thoughts and feelings which he 
 had supposed to be peculiarly his own. Nothing really 
 great is ever unexpected ; for the really great work is 
 always based on something universal, in which every 
 man has a share. A conceit, a bit of quaintness, a 
 cunning device, a sudden turn of thought or speech,
 
 CONCERNING ORIGINALITY, 177 
 
 takes us unaware and puzzles us ; it is individual, and 
 we have no share in it. But a great idea, or a piece 
 of great art, finds instant recognition of its veracity 
 and reality in the swift response of our souls. It not 
 only speaks to us, it speaks in us and for us. It is 
 great because so vast a sweep of life is included in it ; 
 it is deep because it strikes below all differences of 
 experience into the region of universal experience. 
 Homer and Shakespeare are, in a way, as elemental as 
 the sky which overarches all men, and which every 
 man sees, or may see, every day of his life. But the 
 sky is not the less wonderful because it belongs to the 
 whole earth, and is as much the possession of the clown 
 as of the poet. The power which hangs it before 
 every eye has furnished no more compelling evidence 
 of its mysterious and incalculable resources. In like 
 manner, the highest power illustrated in art demon 
 strates its depth and creative force by the elemental 
 simplicity and range of its creations, by its insight 
 into those things which all men possess in common. 
 The distinctive characteristic of the man of profound 
 originality is not that he speaks his own thought, but 
 that he speaks my thought ; not that he surprises me 
 with novel ideas and phrases, but that he makes me 
 acquainted with myself.
 
 BY THE WAY. 
 
 How much of what is best and pleasantest in life 
 comes to us by the way ! The artist forms great plans 
 and sets about great achievements, but when he comes 
 to the hour of realization he discovers that the personal 
 reward has come mainly by the way. The applause of 
 which he dreamed, the fame for which he hoped, bring 
 small satisfaction ; the joy of the work was largely in 
 the doing of it, and was taken in the long days of toil 
 and the brief times of rest which were part of the great 
 undertaking. To the man or woman who looks for 
 ward from the heights of youth life seems to be an 
 artistic whole, which can be completely shaped by the 
 will, and wrought out with perfection of detail in the 
 repose and silence of the workshop. In that glowing 
 time the career of a great man appears to be so sym 
 metrical, so rounded, so complete, that it seems to be 
 a veritable work of art, thought out and executed with 
 out hindrance, and with the co-operation of all the 
 great forces. Nights of rest and days of work, unin 
 terrupted and cumulative, with bursts of applause 
 widening and deepening as the years go by, with fame 
 adding note after note to her hymn of praise, is not
 
 BY THE WAY. 179 
 
 this the dream of young ambition as it surveys the field 
 from the place of preparation ? 
 
 The ideal is not an ignoble one, but it falls far short 
 of the great reality in range and effort. There is an 
 artistic harmony in a great life ; but it is not a con 
 scious beauty deliberately evoked by a free hand bent 
 only on the illustration of its skill ; it is a beauty born of 
 pain, self-sacrifice, and arduous surrender to the stern 
 conditions of success. A bit of fancy lightly inspires 
 the singer, and as lightly borrows the wings of verse ; 
 a great vision of the imagination demands years and 
 agonies. A bit of verse, such as serves for the small 
 currency of poetry, runs off the pen on a convenient 
 scrap of paper ; a great poem involves a deep move 
 ment of human life, something vast, profound, mys 
 terious. A great life is a work of art of that noble 
 order in which a man surrenders himself to the creative 
 impulse, and becomes the instrument of a mightier 
 thought and passion than he consciously originates. 
 There is a deep sense in which we make our careers, 
 but there is a deeper sense in which our careers are 
 made for us. The greater the man the greater the 
 influences that play upon him and centre in him ; it 
 is more a question of what he shall receive than of 
 what he shall do. His life-work is wrought out in no 
 well-appointed atelier, barred against intrusion, enfolded 
 in silence ; the task must be accomplished in the great 
 arena of the world, jostled by crowds, beaten upon by 
 storms, broken in upon by all manner of interruptions. 
 The artist does not stand apart from his work, survey-
 
 I SO MY STUDY FIRE. 
 
 ing its progress from hour to hour, and with a skilful 
 hand bringing his thought in ever clearer view ; for the 
 work is done, not by, but within him ; his aspiring soul, 
 passionate heart, and eager mind are the substance 
 upon which the tools of the graver work. Death and 
 care, disease and poverty, do not wait afar off, awed 
 by greatness and enthralled by genius ; the door is 
 always open to them, and they are often familiar com 
 panions. The work of a great life is always accom 
 plished with toil, self-sacrifice, and with incessant 
 intrusions from without ; it is often accomplished amid 
 bitter sorrows and under the pressure of relentless 
 misfortune. 
 
 Yet these things, that break in upon the artistic 
 mood and play havoc with the artistic poise, make the 
 life-work immeasurably nobler and richer ; the reality 
 differs from the ideal of youth in being vaster, and 
 therefore more difficult and painful of attainment. 
 The easy achievement, always well in hand, and exe 
 cuted in the quiet of reposeful hours, gives place to the 
 sublime accomplishment wrought out amid the uproar 
 of the world and under the pressure of the sorrow and 
 anguish which are a part of every human lot. The 
 toil is intense, prolonged, and painful because it is to 
 be imperishable ; there is a divine element in it, and 
 the work takes on a form of immortality. The little 
 time which falls to the artist here is inadequate to the 
 greatness of his task ; the applause, small or great, 
 which accompanies his toil is but a momentary and 
 imperfect recognition of what has been done with
 
 BY THE WAY. l8l 
 
 strength and beauty. It is pleasant when men see 
 what one has done, but the real satisfaction is the con 
 sciousness that something worthy of being seen has 
 been accomplished. The rewards of great living are 
 not external things, withheld until the crowning hour 
 of success arrives ; they come by the way, in the 
 consciousness of growing power and worth, of duties 
 nobly met, and work thoroughly done. To the true 
 artist, working always in humility and sincerity, all life 
 is a reward, and every day brings a deeper satisfaction. 
 Joy and peace are by the way. 
 
 THE END.
 
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