If- Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN ESSAYS SOCIAL SUBJECTS THE SATURDAY REVIEW That man sat down to write a book to tell the world what the world had all his life been telling him " SECOND SERIES WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXV The Bight of Translation is reserved O J" SAN ?A BARBARA /S7/ ADYEETISEMENT, THE favourable reception of ' Essays on Social Subjects' induces their Author to publish an- other series under the same title, and reprinted from the same source. CONTENTS, PACK JOORNALS, ...... 1 UNCRITICAL READERS, . . . . 12 CHEERFULNESS, ..... 23 QUESTIONS, ...... 33 LEISURE, ...... 43 GRUMBLERS, . . . . . . 51 TALKING AND READING, .... 61 VARIETY, ...... 71 MEANNESS, ...... 82 METAPHORS, ...... 92 GAMES, ...... 102 TASTE, ...... 112 SMALL ECONOMIES, ..... 121 CLEVER CHILDREN, ..... 131 REMORSE, ...... 142 REFINEMENT, . . . . .152 THE PLAIN STYLE, ..... 161 RESPECT, .... .173 Vlll CONTENTS. PAGE COMMONPLACE PEOPLE, .... 184 LETTERS, ...... 195 DISTINCTION, ..... 205 SMILES, ...... 215 JILTING, ...... 225 SOCIAL TRUTH, ..... 237 COMMON SENSE, ..... 247 LADIES' LETTERS, . . . . .257 VANITY, ...... 269 TRAGEDY IN REAL LIFE, .... 280 SIMPLICITY, . . . . . 291 IMPATIENCE, 302 ESSAYS ON SOCIAL SUBJECTS. JOURNALS. THEKE are few things that more clearly show the differ- ence between man and man in points not easily got at, than how they conduct such a private matter as keeping a journal. The practice itself is simple enough, but the purposes for which it is undertaken, and the mode in which it is carried out, show the odd contrasts the entire variance in aim and view that may exist under much outward conformity. Something that must be done daily, and that a task of no absolute necessity, even if it occupy three or at most five minutes of every day, is a burden on time and method which we suspect the majority of men are not equal to. Everybody at some time of his life begins a journal ; but because it exacts a certain punctuality, and because the trouble promises no immediate return, and because, too, people get tired of the seeming monotony of life and the mere bare events of most lives have a way of looking very monotonous when written down it is, we believe, II. A 2 JOURNALS. seldom persisted in. No one understands the value of such a record till it is too late to make it what it might be. We do not suppose there exists a chronicle of the daily doings of a life from childhood to old age, yet we can imagine nothing more interesting and valuable to the man who has kept it ; and who would not be glad if it could be referred to without too keen a self-reproach of a close and exact memorial of his life and actions, and of the influences brought to bear on them by the progress of events ? Are we right in surmising that by many persons whole tracts of life are forgotten lost, never to be re- covered ? If we are mistaken, it is only another proof of those inner differences of mental constitution of which we have spoken. We suspect, however, that it is no unusual thing for men to be separated from certain stages of their life from events that happened after they had begun to reason and to think, and in which they actively shared by a thick veil of uncon- sciousness. It may not be utter oblivion, perhaps. The memory of them may lie hid in some corner of the brain of which we have lost the key ; we may even approach very near their whereabouts at odd times. !Nbw and then they may give a faint intimation of their existence by intangible hints in dreams and fragments, associated with sight, or sound, or scent but eluding all pursuit, all attempt at investigation. We just know that there is more in our past than our memory reports to us, but practically whole periods of it are gone. To how many does not any sudden ques- JOURNALS. 3 tion of our doings and surroundings ten, or fifteen, or even five years ago, fill us with a painful sense of loss of having parted from ourselves ? A gathering in- distinctness mantles over what once engaged our time and interest. A chain is broken, and links are miss- ing, which should at a touch have taken us back to place and scene recalled to us our fellow-actors in them brought back thoughts, words, and doings in their first distinctness and reality and, wanting which, all is dull, misty, disconnected, or at best par- tially remembered. We are impressed with a sense of self-desertion and neglect, as though we had not appre- ciated life, its pleasures, its associations, as we ought. All persons recollect what has once deeply and vehe- mently stirred the feelings ; and every thing and per- son associated with such occasions will always stand out in strong relief. Something brands particular days and moments into the most treacherous memory, or into something which is more part of ourselves than memory seems to be. But where this passionate senti- ment, whether of grief or joy, is missing, as it is in all persons for long tracts of time, all is confused and in- distinct. Our inner tablets are blurred, and have to be deciphered carefully and with very uncertain results. We are drawing an extreme case, perhaps; and there are minds so orderly, and memories so retentive, that our picture will convey to them no meaning. But in so far as it is true, it is an argument for keeping a record of daily events, however seemingly monotonous and trivial and even the more so if they present no 4 JOUKNALS. salient points. For when our days pass in comfort and ease, unmarked by strong excitements, the ingratitude of forgetfulness most naturally slips in ; yet what plea- sant glimpses will a few lines, containing our comings and goings, and certain familiar names, open out to us, if their definiteness furnishes the key that alone is wanting to bring back a distinct picture of a past stage of life ! And how much does the most condensed chronicle convey to us when we are fairly separated from it for ever ! What sentiment, and even dignity, time throws on the persons and influences which we see now so nearly affected us, though we scarcely knew it at the time ! The record of the most uneventful life falls naturally into chapters, and has its epochs and marked periods of time which stand out quite separate when we can survey the whole in distinct groups and distances. Nothing in it is really unimportant unless we were wilful triflers, in which case no elaborate formula of confession and self-accusation need teach us a sterner lesson than this brief epitome of a frivolous existence. Addison gives a journal, studiously without incident, of a useless, insignificant life a model of thousands of lives then and now. It has always struck us as a strong argument for journal-keeping, though this use of his satire was not contemplated by the satirist. What a distinct picture of a state of society, and of an individual growing out of that society, does this week of inanities give ! Gossip turns into history under our eyes. We realise the sleepy, quiet existence when men were content not to think, and clung to authority the JOUKNALS. 5 early hours, the pipe, the coffee-house, the sparse ablu- tions, the antiquated costume and cuisine, the knee- strings, the shoe-buckle, the wig, cane, and tobacco-box, the marrow-bone and oxcheek, the corned beef, plums, and suet, and Mother Cob's mild, and the purl to recover lost appetite. We have the walk in the fields, then possible to London citizens. We have the slow progress of news, kept languidly exciting by uncer- tainty, and all the pros and cons about the Grand Vizier, and what rumour said, and what Mr Nisby thought, and our hero's vacillations of dull awe and interest as either got the ascendant now disturbed dreams when both authorities agree that the Turk is strangled now the cheerful vision, " dreamt that I drank small beer with the Grand Vizier," because Mr Nisby did not be- lieve it then Eumour giving it as her opinion that he was both strangled and beheaded ending our suspense at the week's close with the ultimatum, " Grand Vizier certainly dead," which would have reached us in three minutes, and summed up all we knew or cared about the matter. It is an image of the life, public and private, of the time as no journal which tells events can help being in its degree. The dryest details have a certain touching interest when read years after. The most homely doings are imbued with a certain poetry when we can do them no longer. Facts external to ourselves are invested with an historic value, as telling us of social, or of the world's, changes. But the obvious use, to assist the memory, or rather to construct an external artificial memory, is only one 6 JOUKNALS. out of many reasons for keeping a diary. Diaries kept with this view rarely, if ever, see the light, and ought never to see it. All journals that are published have some other object. There are, of course, the journals avowedly public such as ' Eaikes's Diary/ the work and legacy to posterity of an apparently idle life which aim at being current history, and in which personal matters would be out of place. There is the mixed personal and public journal, as Madame D'Ar- blay's, who could not probably have lived through the cruel dulness of her court life but for taking posterity into her confidence, and pouring into what proved not unwilling or unsympathising ears the indignities and annoyances inflicted on her by the old German Duenna. There is no real freedom, no absolute undress, possible in such compositions ; but the graceful negligee allows an attitude towards self very congenial to some minds a sort of simpering modesty and flirting humbleness of tone, and a bridled licence towards others, midway between caution and outbreak. More is said than might be spoken, while a reticence of expression is maintained which only faintly and coyly reveals the true state of feeling, and yet hopes to excite as much indignant sympathy in the reader as the most unmea- sured vituperation. There are other journals which seem to act the purpose of the child's battered doll a mere vent for passion and sore feeling. The fair page receives all the bitterness, irritation, or malevolence which may not find any other outlet. It is like de- claiming to dead walls. Thoughts are recorded, words JOURNALS. 7 are written down, something is done, and the relief of a scene is secured at no expense either to credit or position. It is something in this spirit that Mrs Thrale writes of her old friends in her journal at the time of her second marriage. One of the most curious diaries on record is that consisting of twenty-seven folio volumes, from which Mr Tom Taylor constructed the Autobiography of Hay- don the painter. It is a work to make one believe in Mr Wilkie Collins's diaries as embodied in his tales, where the people, all of them, spend every alternate waking half-hour, for years together, either in vehe- ment, intense scheming or action, or in writing their schemes and actions down in their journal rushing from action to pen, and laying down the pen to return to action, with a seesaw perseverance which we own we should not have thought probable or natural but for Haydon's twenty-seven volumes. He paints and writes, and writes and paints, much on the same plan, and pours out hopes and fears, and imperiously invokes high Heaven to make him a painter, at the conception and progress of every picture, in a way to make the heart bleed when we see what an intensity of feel- ing and ambition went to the covering of those ugly and huge stretches of canvass where never a man of all his groups stands on his legs. However, the sad moral of wasted hopes and energies is not against journal- keeping, even on a gigantic scale, but against painting enormous historical pictures without knowledge or skill indeed, with few qualifications but faith in the will 8 JOUKNALS. The journal is a first-rate one, though the pictures which constitute its main theme are bad ; and a good journal of a busy life, or rather such a selection of it as Mr Taylor has made, is a gift to the world as good in its way as a fine picture. Most people drawn in any way to the use of the pen have been tempted to an ambitious effort at journal- keeping in early youth. This is really the impulse of composition. If young people have not a story in their brains, they turn their thoughts inward ; the mysteries of being begin to perplex them, and they sit down fairly to face and study self. The notion is natural enough. Whom or what should we understand so well as ourself, which we can look into and ponder upon any time we choose ? So there is written a page of life-history with a good deal of solemnity and effort, which infallibly leads to the discovery that self is not a more easy thing to understand than other people, and soon ends in very weariness of the maze in which the young student finds himself. But there are many people who never make this discovery, who perse- vere in the practice all their days, and through whom ordinary readers mainly know how journals are kept, and are instructed in their use. And it is here we learn that extern al differences between man and man are often merely faint shadows of the inner differences which separate spirit from spirit, in spite of the great family likeness that runs through us all. We beg, in what we say, to distinguish entirely between self- examination as instituted by conscience and subject to JOURNALS. 9 an external law, and religious journals kept not to record events, but to register states of feeling. Let any one to whom the practice is new sit down to describe himself to himself, and he will find it is only the outside he can reach. There is something which we feel defies language which we can only approach by an amount of study and a pursuit into motives which issue in a treatise on the understanding ; we are driven from the private to the general, and landed in metaphysics. We find we have to withdraw from ourself and stand outside before we can say anything intelligible. We are disposed to think that in reading, after an interval, any attempt of this kind, it is not the real old self that we see, but the state of mind then aimed at. We do not recognise ourself in the person drawn. It might pass with a stranger, but we know better. We cannot perhaps attempt a counter-portrait, but we feel this does nothing to represent that in- tricate, contradictory, complicated, mysterious being, one's self mean and poor meaner and poorer than we can find courage to prove ourself by example, yet with gleams of something higher and better than we fancy other people would ever guess, with some- thing to excuse (as it seems to ourselves) our worst and basest acts. In fact, our identity becomes a question as we muse upon the shadow our pen of the past conjures up. Are we the same that wrote this confession twenty years ago? Are we respon- sible, or are we not? We have to sweep away these cobwebs before we can frankly own ourselves, or take 10 JOURNALS. upon our present consciousness the debts and respon- sibilities of our past We are then driven to the conclusion that, strictly for our own use, these personal delineations would be without value would miss their aim as being falla- cious and superficial. We cannot present a picture of our state of mind at any given time which we can honestly call full and accurate. We may say things of ourself that are true, but we cannot read them after- wards without a running comment changing or modi- fying their bearing. And the constant use that these self-portraits are put to, as well as the extreme vague- ness which characterises the self-accusation, even while clothing itself in the strongest language, excuses us in thinking that in the majority of cases self-teaching has not been the only, perhaps not even the main, object. There is often apparent a deliberate intention of utilising the exercise. The thought of other readers comes in with influential force, dictating a formula ; and where this is the case, the journal then only becomes a recognised form of dogmatic teaching, and as based on the fallacy that others are admitted into an inner privacy and retirement where they were never dreamt of surely not the most useful form. Whenever we see that there was actually no thought or apprehension of other eyes whenever the scru- pulous conscience commits itself unreservedly to paper we experience something of the shame of real intruders, and feel we are where we ought not to be as in the case of some of Froude's curious self- JOUKNALS. 11 torturing confessions, or where Henry Martin re- proaches himself for having sat silent, and said nothing to the coachman about his soul, in the few miles' drive between parting with his betrothed and leaving his country for ever. After all, it is a point on which one person has no right to prescribe for another. It is possibly a mere case of sympathy, and there may be high uses in religious biographies to those who can appreciate them. The journal valuable to everybody, however, is the simplest possible record of a man's own doings, and the dates that clear up his past and arrange it in accurate distances. Perhaps, as a fact, the most unevent- ful lives are those most frequently thus noted down. It is something to do, and gives significance to what is felt an unimportant career. Lord Bacon remarks, " It is a strange thing that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sea and sky, men should make diaries ; but in land-travel, wherein much is to be ob- served, for the most part they omit it." The truth is, it is only in novels that the zeal to keep a record increases with the complication of business. After a busy day or week, our journal is a decided bore ; but we need not say the more active and stirring the life we note down, at some cost, it may be of our ease, the more valuable, and even satisfactory though satisfac- tion is by no means the thing to be aimed at or ex- pected-*-will it be in the retrospect, and when we have floated into still waters again. UNCRITICAL READERS, WE may be intimate with people, we may have a hun- dred points in common with them, experience may have taught us to defer to their superior knowledge and quicker perception, and yet we may be surprised at last to find ourselves on unknown ground when we come to talk with them about books. It is not that there is a mere difference of taste and of views, for the foregone knowledge of each other's minds will have prepared both parties for some divergence. The sur- prise comes with the discovery that our friend stands in an unexpected relation to the books he reads that his mind does not work upon books as we know it to do upon life and nature, nor do his intellectual powers find in them the same exercise or nourishment which more genial matter supplies ; and we are thus awakened to the defective sympathy which exists between certain minds and books. If authors came before such persons in bodily shape, acting and talking, their merits, faults, and peculiarities would be met by a practised discern- UNCRITICAL READERS. 13 ment ; but, putting themselves into books, they are hid and disguised altogether. The author is not seen at all, and his work makes but a vague or an exaggerated or a false impression. In some way or other it is not entered into. It is so much the thing now for every one in general society to be able to talk about the books of the day with an air of discrimination, and to use the language of praise and censure in a form implying some com- prehension of the relation between a writer and his book, that one might sometimes suppose that every- body was critical, and knew not only what makes a book good or bad, but how books grow out of an author's mind ; so easily and unconsciously do we all repeat what we hear, fall into the vein of thought most familiar to our ears, and say what we are expected to say. But if we get into a set not even professing to be literary, and hear people talk of books whose in- tellectual activities have gone out in another line whether a philanthropic, religious, political, domestic, or pleasure-taking direction so that society has given them no hints of what they are to say and think of the works that come in their way, it soon becomes appa- rent that the critical faculty, even in its most element- ary undeveloped stage, is by no means universal. There are still a great many persons, some of them very clever ones, in this reading age, who are perfectly in the dark as to how books are written, who read them without any curiosity concerning their authorship ; who regard them as things for which nobody is responsible ; who 14 UNCRITICAL READERS. will go through the contents of a circulating library with no more inquiry how the books came there than how the flints by the wayside came to be what and where they are. Not only may people who really like reading be in this state of mind, but many of the greatest readers, if we judge by the number of pages turned over in a day or year, are so. If they have not heard others talk, they have nothing to say. In their natural unaffected state, they have no inkling of the sort of thing expected from them. The book does not rank in their minds among human efforts, nor has in it the interest of human labour and achievement. A vast proportion of novel -readers care less to know who wrote the books they read, than to know the shops that have supplied the food they eat and the clothes they wear. We take it to be inseparable from the attitude of criticism to trace the thing that interests us to some agent to connect it, if possible, with the mind that wrought it out. The critic cannot listen to music in a comfortable frame till he knows something about the composer. The composition must be characteristic of some combination of heart and intellect, it must be seasoned with humanity, it must have a history, before he can praise or blame, or give himself up to its influ- ences with perfect satisfaction. We need not ask now why it is so, as we are concerned with those who recog- nise no such needs or impulses' ; indeed, who would consider it a presumption on their part to assume the critical posture. Persons and we have noticed this UNCRITICAL READERS. 15 particularly in women who say very distinctly that they hate and detest a book, would feel it to be con- ceited to analyse it and seek out the reason why. To identify a man with his book, to take him to task, to measure the scale of his powers, to pronounce upon his deficiencies and errors, would seem to them a more arrogant proceeding than summarily to condemn in the lump so many pages of printed matter, in what- ever terms of contumely and disparagement. If they have humour, they will be amusing in their evasions and disclaimers ; but a discussion of any nicety as to the grounds and causes of their condemnation is quite out of their line, and they cannot be drawn into it. We see this sometimes even in those who assume the place of the critic, and affect his office. Many a review is simply a statement of liking and disliking, without reason alleged or grounds given. The book is merely a peg for remarks more or less relevant. Whenever Sydney Smith criticised, it was in this vein. Thus he decided that ' Granby' must be a good novel because it produced certain effects upon the reader because it made him too late in dressing for dinner, impatient, inattentive, and incapable (while it lasted) of reading Hallam's 'Middle Ages,' or extracting the root of an im- possible quantity; but the causes that made 'Granby' interesting to him, and Hallam's 'Middle Ages' dull, he did not care to inquire into. He let his reader know, in a diverting way, that one book suited his turn and fancy, and that another did not; but he never com- mitted himself to a reason. And no doubt such an 16 UNCRITICAL READERS. opinion from a superior man is better worth having than the careful criticisms of a small pedantic mind ; but it is not criticism, and he who likes and dislikes on deliberate conscious grounds has a faculty which the other is without, and which, in spite of the glib- ness with which coteries discuss books, is wanting to a vast number of minds. Even a child, if it possesses the critical faculty, unconsciously regards a book as a work of art, and distinguishes between the subject and the performance, which a good many persons never do as long as they live. And this difference will largely influence the choice of books. For instance, a boy of twelve meets with Addison's ' Spectator/ If he has the gift of recognising an author when he comes in the way of one if he can be so far caught by justness of thought, delicacy of humour, and eloquence and grace of expression that these will secure attention and in- terest apart from the immediate attraction of the sub- ject then he is an embryo critic ; and though, of course, it does not do to draw an opposite conclusion from the fact that at an early age the whole thing is alien to him, and takes no hold on thought or fancy, yet, in so far as he manifests distaste for a book writ- ten in a charming style and perfect in its way, he gives no promise of future discernment in the matter of exe- cution. It is true that criticism should exercise itself on the nature and fitness of the subject as well as on the way in which it is worked out, yet the execution is the more common field for its exercise. Thus it is generally for want of the critical faculty that the crowd UNCRITICAL READERS. 17 in a picture-gallery gathers round the most showy and sentimental subjects, and passes by simple or homely scenes of nature and life which are admirable for the painter's close and imaginative rendering of them, for his having caught all the points of truth and beauty which the subject presents to a keen comprehensive observation, and worked them out with the whole skill of his art. Still we have a respect for all people who boldly admire what pleases them: it is a finer position than waiting to be told what they are to like; and it is therefore pleasant and instructive to see an ardent un- critical mind, endowed with perpetual youth, in unso- phisticated action. This may be best seen, where books are concerned, when eyes and attention are glued to the pages of a novel. The novel is more likely than not to be, in the judgment of critics, a very bad one probably beneath criticism, except that it tells a story with at least an affectation of force and spirit. It is almost necessary that it should be at variance with the actual experience of the reader for what is familiar is mis- taken for commonplace and that the plot should be worked out in defiance of the laws of probability ; or there will be a sense of flatness, triviality, or deficiency of moral. Nevertheless, under these conditions, given a proper amount of incident, the reader is rapt into an illusion of reality far beyond what the critic is capable of who never quite forgets that he is engaged upon somebody's performance. The question of truth and nature can find no place when the characters are never II. B 18 UNCRITICAL READERS. regarded as an author's creations, but as so many real actors and sufferers, to be judged by the reader's moral and intellectual standard, and not by the test of con- sistency to a preconceived ideal. Even the anger of simple readers of this sort never reaches the author, but is all expended on the puppets which his pen has set in motion. All this might seem to be the best and highest praise, but that, in fact, it is never bestowed on the highest desert. There is always something in a capital performance which exempts it from this ruder form of appreciation ; and this something is probably a close representation of familiar life, so full and true that the reader can see no merit in it, being possessed by the notion that what everybody may see everybody does see, and therefore everybody might draw if he took the trouble not to add that it is so dull to meet in a book precisely the same company we see every day. We have heard readers of this class regret that there is so much that is " low " in Walter Scott. They take no interest in 'Adam Bede,' because the people are common, and talk a dialect; and they despise Miss Austen's nice variety of fools because they are so fool- ish, and are therefore unworthy an author's pains. In fact, it is a distinct class of minds altogether that value a book because the writer undertakes to do a thing, and does it well because its pages show an observa- tion more than commonly acute, exercised on real life and everyday humanity. The majority neither care for the study itself nor for the performance. It is no more amusing to them to be let into the hidden sources UNCRITICAL READERS. 19 of folly, selfishness, and prejudice than to be subject to the real manifestations of these qualities. A character does not mean with them anything natural or probable, but an agency to work out the plot in an exciting way. They never think of the execution, and are no judges of it, except as everybody is a judge whether a scene is tame or forcible ; for mere dulness is an intelligible quality to all the world. If ever a work of genius is admitted into these readers' highest favour, it will be because it is tinctured by mannerisms and extravagance which effectually remove it from the world they know and the life of their own experience. But, critical or not, these absorbed and simple readers are vastly superior in the higher forms of intelligence to the vulgar notion of a critic, which simply means a fault-finder to the man whom nothing pleases, who only realises an author as something to be worried, and who sets himself to pick holes and turn every thought and sentence the wrong side out. Some fall into this habit from satiety. They have lost the power of reading, from overwork, or fretfulness, and general failure of sympathy. But it is more commonly the mark of a narrow sharpness puffed into conceit by a defective education the sharpness that can hit upon blemishes, but is blind to merits and beauties, and never forgets itself so far as to be lost in a new view or thought, or carried away by another man's imagina- tion. Next to this sour, one-sided form of popular criticism comes the domestic and prejudiced, where one mind, really or professedly critical, rules the house- 20 UNCRITICAL READERS. hold, and all contentedly bow to one dictum. Nothing shows more the rarity of a real, independent, critical exercise of mind than the docility with which a dozen people will take all their opinions of books, for praise or blame, from one ; adopting or renouncing poets, historians, novelists without a question, and regulating their interest at the word of command. And one sees this amongst professed lovers of books, who can quote Tennyson or Wordsworth according as either poet occupies the niche of honour, and who will have rea- sons for their preference which might pass for the results of thought, only that every word and turn can be traced to a dictator. The ears of one whole circle will be charmed with the march of Macaulay's or Kinglake's sentences, while those of another will detect mannerism in every line. One set will have pronounced 'Hiawatha' an insult to the public understanding, while another will have welcomed it as a new sensation ; and we might wonder at the unanimity in each case till ex- perience shows us who gives the cue, and we perceive that each judgment instinctively suspends its action till the voice has spoken just as, years back, before they got used to such things, the people of Hereford waited to know whether they had felt the shock of an earthquake till the 'Times' arrived next morning. When these obedient followers own at all a wilful or eccentric leadership, it is wonderful what names become house- hold words what out-of-the-way, or commonplace, or elsewhere-forgotten authors are the authorities to whom all bow. Nor does this deference belong only to half- UNCRITICAL READERS. 21 taught, out -of -the -world societies, though there it is seen iii its purest simplicity. There is no set so highly trained but it broadly betrays the uncritical temper in its readiness to accept another's judgment, and its sub- mission of understanding, taste, and feeling to another's dictation or to a prejudice. Thus, at Lord Holland's, it used to be the fashion to cry down Sir Walter Scott. When the outer world was entranced by his genius, a promiscuous crowd of visitors took one and the same line of depreciation towards ' Guy Mannering/ or 'Ivan- hoe/ or whatever it might be, till the most sturdy wit of the company, whose sensations were not quite under the same control, was fain to utter his protest : " At Holland House Scott's new novel is much run down. I dare not oppose my opinion to such an assay or proof- house, but it made me cry and laugh very often, and I was very sorry when it was over, and so in conscience I cannot call it dull." Blind faith in authors, as such, is another form of the uncritical temper. There are people who think an author is an author, and look up to him as such, irre- spective of his book. We meet with them sometimes, and we read of them much oftener, for perhaps this amiable and engaging weakness is a little dying out. Of course the attitude of worship is incompatible with criticism. When once we sit in judgment on a book and presume to determine its merits and its defects, we realise the fact of the writer being our own flesh and blood, not the awful image on a pedestal that an im- plicit faith in type makes him. This unquestioning 22 UNCRITICAL READERS. reverence is a good frame for the young, in whom con- scious criticism is often impertinent, and even odious ; but it is servile as some people manage it, bestowing it as they do on unworthy objects, and bowing down to mere shams and the flimsiest idols. But, as we have said, the times do not encourage any reverence for learning and authorship that holds the gazer aloof. We have to assert the rarity of real critical power, or even of the critical turn of mind, against appearances, which in well-bred circles are, we own, dead against us. Criticism used to be a distinct profession, and the poet only had to complain that " Every critic can devour My works and me in half an hour." But now any young lady who reads the reviews, and knows the importance of having something to say, can do the business with a despatch and decision which leave the critic far behind. The only thing is that, whenever people assert opinions with ultra readiness, we have learnt to take it as a sign that their opinions are none of their own forming, but borrowed straight, and probably verbatim, from somebody else. CHEERFULNESS, CHEERFULNESS is universally acknowledged as a duty, and as such is affected by us all. "We are glad, and find pleasure, a dozen times a-day, and do no more than is expected of us in fact, should pass for morose fellows if we did not smile at the accost of every ac- quaintance : and if we can superadd an air of brisk self-gratulation at the good fortune of the encounter, so much the better. If, then, we have all to seem cheer- ful, a few speculations on different kinds of cheerful- ness, what is the best sort, and how we may invest ourselves with it, cannot come amiss. The ideal cheer- ful man is, indeed, a general benefactor. He is a moral tonic to every one about him. For cheerfulness is a genial strength ; it can carry weights and support the weak. At its greatest, it is a form of magnanimity. It is not ignoring the troubles of life, not turning the back upon them, but owning them, meeting them, and rising above them. And it teaches others to do the same. It is a happy union of fine qualities of an 24 CHEEKFULNESS. unruffled temper, a clear judgment, and well-propor- tioned faculties. It is the expression of an inward harmony. However, if we are to have much cheerful- ness, it cannot all be of this superfine quality; and, looking among our acquaintance, the readiest examples are not of the heroic standard ; though even this is not so rare but that we believe every man's experience has, at some time or other, come in happy contact with it. Only cheerfulness in this nobler sense can hardly be spontaneous, this is not compatible with human infir- mity; it may look so, but the man himself is conscious of effort, and has his moments of reaction. We know this by the rules for cheerfulness laid down by persons who have been distinguished for this virtue in con- junction with great powers of mind rules and pre- cepts which all show consciousness of melancholy as an enemy at our very doors. Great powers, as far as we can judge, are not friendly to this habit of mind. Poets, philosophers, deep thinkers, even wits, are not often cheerful men for themselves. All by turns have a touch of poor Bunyan's experience, " as if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give light, and as if the stones in the streets and the tiles upon the houses did bend themselves against them" but this only because these powers are not well balanced ; for where there is excess there is too commonly defect somewhere. There is something pathetic in the broad difference that constantly exists between the cheerful man and the cheerful companion. Even Falstaff is a different man in soliloquy; and many of those most CHEERFULNESS. 25 noted for their powers of raising others' spirits have been habitually hipped and sad in their solitary hours. Sydney Smith is a contrary instance. He did not affect solitude, it is true, but he describes his spirits as perennial, and those who lived with him never saw him depressed, or other than the stay and freshener of the household existence. But even he had his rule namely, to " take short views of life," to hold by the present in all that is good in it, to refuse to look for- ward to a possible change to worse, however imminent that worse may appear ; all things more easily said than done, and not always wise if they could be done. It may, however, be because women are more con- stantly occupied with the immediate present, because their employments are more connected with the time being than with building up a future either of fame or prosperity, as well as because there is in the feminine organisation a more even balance of powers, that our readiest examples of cheerfulness are, we think, women. The girl cheers up home more than the boy, the old maid is unquestionably more cheerful than the old bachelor ; and if we would raise up the image, the very poetry, of cheerfulness, we recall some fair matron, the presiding genius of the hearth, bright-eyed, persuasive, who can " Change by her power Every weed into a flower, Turn each thistle to a vine, Make the bramble eglantine." Every form of this quality, whether in a man's self or for his fellows, should be infectious ; the spring of 26 CHEERFULNESS. content should scatter drops of refreshing, and make us gay too for more than the moment. All cheerful- ness, even to be attractive, ought to do us good, and not to be a mere attribute of the man. But all does not do us this good turn. There is not, for example, a more offensive fellow than one who insists on being jolly, totally irrespective of our mood. A good deal of cheerfulness is on the Miller-of-Dee principle, and con- sists in not caring. So long as we do not find this out, it is all very well ; but the disenchantment is complete when circumstances disclose, under the jaunty, easy hilarity, a hard indifference and positive incapacity for sympathy. Such cheerfulness can only be sustained by selfishness reduced to a system; and there is no greater discouragement, when things are going wrong with us, than to fall in with people who affect " pity in their smiles of comfort," and yet smile on. We must not be hard on merely constitutional cheerfulness. It sometimes seems as if these social butterflies, these summer friends, had a place in our economy, but at best it is only to add to our mirth or to distract us momentarily from our trouble, not really to alleviate it. There is a form of cheerfulness which nobody can stand : ' ' Send me hence ten thousand miles From a face that always smiles " perhaps because it is impossible the smiles should be real, but rather, we incline to think, because smiles should be rare things, and cheerfulness that is always parading itself in smiles is of the wrong sort. People CHEERFULNESS. 27 ostentatiously and notoriously cheerful are at best foolish people, their spirits of a brisk but thin quality nothing about them in good working order. The thing we respect and admire shows itself most unmis- takably in its quiet moments the soul looking out through the eyes. Anybody can smile ; but to look bright, with the muscles all at rest, betokens a habit of seeing things at their best, and making the best of them. Those in whose way it falls to hear of the character- istics of modern ascetisms are constantly informed of the exceeding cheerfulness, the almost childlike hila- rity, observable in persons who have renounced the pleasures of the world, abandoned every natural tie, and made themselves desolate for religion's sake. Whenever a knot of converts get together, we hear of much laughter and boyish ebullitions of animal spirits. No one visits a nunnery but, if the rule admit of his seeing a nun at all, he comes back charmed by her smiles. No young lady falls in with a Sister but she is struck, not by her resigned expression, that " leaden eye that loves the ground," but by her cheerfulness. Perhaps serenity is not enough ; the fair ascetic is positively merry, and laughs with a silvery laugh. Nuns in the hour of recreation are often described as children over again. Some persons regard this con- ventual hilarity as a strong sanction for this mode of life as, in fact, a miraculous reward for utter self-re- nunciation. For our part, whatever reflection we may incur by the avowal, we never hear of these ineffable 28 CHEERFULNESS. good spirits without irritation. What right have these people to be so very happy? why should they have lighter hearts than anybody else ? whence this shim- mer of smiles ? What satisfactory connection is there between seclusion and separation and this exuberant joyousness ? We even ask, If these people who have turned their backs on us laugh while we take life as a very grave affair, are we necessarily in fault ? must the contrast be owing to our worldliness ? What is it that makes men whose lot it is to live in the world often heavy and depressed ? what is it that gives the sense of weight ? Not, we think, satiety of pleasure, as some are pleased to assume, but the burdens of life pressing on shoulders not strong enough or properly disciplined, it may be, to bear them lightly. If the celibate or the nun is merry when we are sad and lumpish, it may of course be the sunshine of a pure conscience breaking out into smiles ; but may it not also be because they are free from the anxieties which oppress us, and which they have taken violent means to be rid of ? There is a certain class of worries in- separable from the exercise of the affections, and which cannot exist where the natural affections are suppressed and superseded. We are not wishing to exchange our burden for theirs. Their existence would be an in- tolerable vacuity and restraint to us ; we lack, it may be, their contemplative faculty. But nevertheless they have shaken themselves loose from the natural trials that beset us, that compose our countenance into grave lines, hinder our smiles from being as frequent CHEERFULNESS. 29 or as beaming as they might be, and make fresh care- less hilarity a thing of memory, with which we can never again expect to have anything to do. For, in truth, the most fortunate existence has cares enough to make gravity our normal condition. The way to be a child again is, it seems, to throw them all over, though it be to assume more onerous tasks, if only these do not pull at the heart-strings. We are not saying that life is not pleasant. If it is an " anxious" being, the most constitutionally melancholy of poets calls it "pleasing" and "cheerful" too. Grave as we are, we are probably happier than we look ; while, on the other hand, we have not much faith in the hilarity we are now speaking of. It is compatible, we know, with long flats of dreariness and misgiving. If it be not also compatible with a latent yearning for "le bon vieux temps quand j'e'tais si malheureux," we are greatly mistaken. The happiness of mature life does not show itself in marked, fussy expression ; it may lurk even under some outward evidence of harassment. It is only the outside part of many a poor recluse that is merry while she laughs like a child, and finds her amusement and refreshment of spirit in childish things which have nothing in them for the woman to relish. But all the same we say that, if she would have been sad at her own old home sad for the brother that has gone astray, for the sister drooping in premature decay, for the mother fretted into ill-temper by her trials and is now merry, having separated herself by one strong act from the tyranny of these carking cares, we 30 CHEEKFULNESS. see no particular reason to reverence her jollity, though we do not grudge it her. We will say also that, what- ever she gains, she is losing one most important point of training the sorrows and pains of the affections. She may serve the outer world, the poor, and the stranger, with an energy of self-sacrifice ; but she can- not love with quaking nerves and throbbing pulses any but the heart's natural belongings. And this fact will be written in the smiles of which so much account is made, which, however beautiful in themselves, do not cheer our spirits, for the very reason that there is, and can be, no sympathy and fellowship in them. But we have digressed, not only into gravity, but into polemics. We sometimes think that mankind must at one time have been endowed with a more robust cheerfulness than our civilisation can boast, to carry them through the trials to which they were exposed in lawless times. History is such a succession of miseries, tyrannies, cruelties, and wrongs, that how people stood it and lived out their days is sometimes a marvel. But some- thing constantly lets out that life under these con- ditions was vigorous that people caught, with an alacrity foreign to us, the pleasures within their reach. Even where torture and hideous forms of death curdle the modern reader's blood, there are continually indi- cations, if we look for them, of a somewhat jovial society in the thick of these horrors, and that not only among the victimisers. In Mr Motley's book on the Netherlands, what a wild cheerfulness characterises all CHEERFULNESS. 31 the actors principally and most fatally concerned ! Spirits may be crushed in the end, but while there is hope, excitement will always engender cheerfulness ; just as soldiers are cheerful ; and probably both from the same necessity of "taking short views of life," while the present is occupied by stirring events. We may be a little over-educated for this frank, careless form of cheerfulness. Ours must be in some degree the result of rule and self-discipline, yet still the first qualification, the indispensable ally, must be courage. There can be no cheerfulness without it. We must have no bugbears, no frightful fiends in our rear which we dare not turn upon. The cheerful man must be able to look everything in the face take it in, in its just proportions, but not dwell upon it. Such remedies as occur to him he applies with prompt- ness, but he broods upon nothing. Hence cheerfulness is most rare and difficult to an active imagination, unless this is allied to the most sanguine temperament. It is all very well to tell some people not to dwell on things, not to look forward, not to devise terrors ; they cannot help themselves. We perceive, therefore, that the cheerful man must be a busy one not a drudge, but always with something in hand to engage and arrest the attention, and impart interest to the present. We do not much believe in that form of it which is fed by illusions. Charles Lamb describes a man who keeps himself and his household in supreme spirits by calling everything by wrong names asking, for example, for the silver sugar-tongs when the thing in- 32 CHEERFULNESS. dicated, and under the very nose of both host and guest, " was but a spoon, and that plated." Eeal, last- ing cheerfulness throws its own hue upon things, but it sees them in exact shape and proportion. It also is one of its secrets to esteem everything the more for the fact of possession. All the cheerful people we know think the better of a thing for being their own ; dis- paragement is altogether alien to this temper, unless of things obviously beyond reach. Cheerful people, again, have few secrets, and no willing ones ; they do not hug mysteries, and, in fact, have a way of scattering them perhaps for the reason that in its nature cheerfulness is akin to daylight, and while other humours shut up men " each in the cave of his own complexion," this brings him into the sunshine. We can see all round him and into him as well, and he is not only illumi- nated, but in his turn an illumination ; so that it is wonderful what a change in morbid states of feeling and general misunderstandings the sudden presence of a cheerful spirit will bring about. QUESTIONS, PROBABLY not one of our readers is so fortunate as not to number among his acquaintance an asker of ques- tions, so curiously infelicitous in the subjects of his inquiries, and so persevering in the pursuit of them, as to make the being " put to the question " a very intel- ligible torture, even with no rack in the background. An adept at awkward questions is, indeed, one of Nature's born tormentors, and his mere presence sends a thrill through any sensitive assembly. We are not speaking of persons who for a purpose, or prompted by malice, ask unpleasant questions. Questions are a natural weapon of offence, and in malignant hands are death-carrying projectiles ; but when a man knows what he is about, he will not, for his own sake, be reck- less in flinging mischief, seeing that it will surely recoil upon himself ; besides that, on the other hand, we know our enemies, and can be on our guard against them. The questioners we mean are well-wishers, unconscious of their mission to scatter mistrust, un- n. c 34 QUESTIONS. easiness, and dismay into every circle they enter. They are as obtuse as old Edie Ochiltree affects to be in his inquiries after the Praetorium, and cannot under- stand why any subject, sustained by a protracted cate- chism of probing questions, is not matter for agreeable conversation. They like the company of their fellow- creatures, and have a sort of backhanded pity for them, which leads them to recognise every one and, as it seems, catalogue him in their minds by his misfor- tunes, mischances, or out-of-sight annoyances, which it is evidently their notion of sympathy to bring into open court. No man is so prosperous, so hedged in by good-luck, but they will prove they know something he would rather not talk about, and make that the basis of their dealing with him. They carry a bunch of keys that unlocks every one's dark closet, have an unfailing scent for the traditionary skeleton, and evi- dently a bewildered notion of the duty of throwing wide open the doors that conceal it ; and all this in blundering good-nature, insensible to the miseries they stir up. How it is that they always remember the wrong thing, and inquire after the wrong people, and take persevering interest in what those most concerned affect to forget, is a perversity beyond reason or analy- sis to account for. We only know that, for our sins, it is so. If the man you have pinned your faith upon has failed you, if you have a son that has come to no good, a daughter whose marriage has disappointed you, or a friend who has used you shabbily, our questioner will, in blind unconsciousness, lay siege to your trouble QUESTIONS. 35 and get at the bottom of it. So you have to tell whether you do or do not hear from your scamp of a brother in Australia, or how a bad speculation has turned out, or what are the particular tenets of the sect your sister has fallen away to. For questions of this sort must be answered. They are put in good faith, and evidently arise out of inherent want of observa- tion, or a different view of life from the ordinary one a view that does not believe in scamps, and recognises no social scale of gentility either in religions or fami- lies. All that can be done is to treat the subject from the questioner's stand-point, and make the best of it ; it would be mere impolicy to resist or resent his inter- rogations. He is led by his instinct to your sore place ; you feel a fate in it, possibly a retribution. There is another sort of questioner, not so terrible in idea, but often, in fact, a cause of equal torment one who will leave your failures and worries alone, his per- ceptions being correct on these points, but who is pos- sessed by an unaccountable curiosity to inform himself of the amount of your knowledge, or, possibly, of your ignorance. These self-constituted inspectors will ask questions with as much system and pertinacity as though they had to furnish a report of your proficiency. There is a sensation of being put upon a chapter of Mangnall, or of being in for another competitive exa- mination. Or the querist wants to know your expe- rience not your opinions, but what you have seen. Your accuracy is tested; you answer, as it were, on oath. Hard questions constantly call you back to 36 QUESTIONS. positive knowledge. "Give me the facts," our ques- tioner seems to say, " and I will find the judgment." Questions may follow all the outer rules of civility, and yet drain us of our self-respect for the time being ; for the mind is so constituted that its own esteem depends on the estimate of others, and if a man in company acts as though we were ignorant or injudicious, we are likely enough to feel so. In both these examples the offence lies in the interrogators' showing themselves, whether instinctively or otherwise, alive to our weak points, and insensible to the more impressive, dignified side of us. We account for it by an evident thick- skinned defect of sympathy, apart from any shade of malignity; but, all the same, we endure an attack, and suffer under a helpless sense of exposure. But, at any rate, these people ask because they want to know. There is a third habit of questioning much more common than either of the two we have indicated, where the inquirer achieves all he aims at by putting an interruption in an interrogative form. Most per- sons known for asking questions never wait for an answer, and never want one. Their share in conversa- tion is not to start a subject, for which they have not sufficient suggestiveness or invention ; but to rush in with irrelevant queries, to interject questions into other people's discourse questions feigning to bear upon the topic under discussion, but really deviating from it and whose only purpose is to relieve the interrupter from the weariness of silence or the faintest effort of thought. No conversation can be sustained under this QUESTIONS. 37 mode of interruption. It is, of course, the habit of children, and the mode of meeting it should be the same with child and man ; they should be made to do penance for every giddy, irrelevant question, by an act of forced attention. It is very rarely only, we should say, in books composed in the form of dialogues that information is ever imparted by the method of delibe- rate question and answer ; for the reason that, in real life, the people who ask the most questions never listen to the answer. They ought to be made to do so if it were not too much trouble. The only weapon against the aggressive mode of questioning is to insist on your right of reply, in spite of the shifts, evasions, and writh- ings of the impatient inquirer caught in the snare of his own setting. A question is often only an assertion with a spice of triumph in it, and so, conspicuously, needs no reply. On all occasions of sudden elation we are liable to this form of vainglory ; and it has, we do not doubt, a good deal to do with the American habit of asking questions, which writers describe as still in full force. Miss Bremer, who writes warmly of the many congenial spirits she finds in New England, makes this almost a solitary exception to the pleasures of intercourse. " But, oh ! how these Americans, especially these Ame- rican ladies, do ask questions !" And we gather that it is all done in the exultation of showing off their country and its wonders to a foreigner. " Have you such scenes or such great works in your country ?" meaning, of course, " you have not." From hence we 38 QUESTIONS. gather that the familiar form of check with which troublesome children of the Old World have been snub- bed for so many generations has never been imposed on the inquiring youth of the New, and would be con- trary to the freedom of American institutions. No Mrs Popchin has awed their infancy with the story of the boy who was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions. In fact, they have never in their lives had " Don't ask questions " said to them a precept which has created a good deal of modern ridicule, but which, meaning, as it generally does, " Don't ask a string of questions in a breath," is a wise one, at once form- ing the manners and referring the mind to its own resources. Another trying form of question does not arise from any vain desire to be talking, but from mere impatience of detail. People will not allow a speaker to tell a story his own way, and to work up the interest by such elaboration as is needed for the fit unfolding of the narrative. They cry " Question !" as it were, and cla- mour for the end, when, in fact, the end is nothing without the middle, and the narrator is balked of his gradual denouement. And there is the question which shows an utter miss of your point, and which drops upon it and extinguishes it like a wet blanket. To know what questions to ask and what to refrain from, is evidently among the first and most imperative prin- ciples of good manners. A question is the natural re- source of a vacant mind, and nothing but the check of politeness prevents vague, desultory people from put- QUESTIONS. 39 ting questions all day long. With them it is an act of self-discipline not to ask of every occupied person, What are you reading ? to whom are you writing ? what are you doing? where are you going? though nothing comes of it, and even the curiosity is not real. It is only an impulse of propelling their vacuity into an- other person's business, and so coming into a sort of contact with occupation through one of the most irri- tating and distracting means of disturbing it. Thus to be, in any of these various ways, known as an asker of questions, is to be known as a bore, as a hindrance to natural flowing intercourse ; but there is a reverse habit of mind which, though less observed, is as great a check to free, comfortable association. There are people who never ask questions, whose minds do not act in that direction, but work by formal state- ment, not in partnership. They never seem to want to know anything you can tell them, whether facts, or domestic details, or opinions. They never begin a sentence with Have you been ? have you done ? have you felt ? do you know ? do you like ? do you wish ? are you glad? are you sorry? And the absence of these feelers and approaches makes conversation with such persons a lasting difficulty. It seems as if we had always to obtrude our thoughts and doings upon them, and to force our way where they do not care to have us. People ought to have a little curiosity about one another, and we feel this without knowing it, through the sense of effort and flatness which oppresses us where the show of it is utterly wanting. This pos- 40 QUESTIONS. ture of mind may be real, deep-seated unsociableness, and most often it is so, but it may be shyness and a merely superficial pride. Thus there are people with such an invincible reluctance or inability to ask a question, that they will prefer walking miles out of the right road to asking their way. They are like ghosts, and cannot speak first or address a stranger with a form of inquiry. The art of drawing out others, as it is sometimes put, conveys an idea of conceit and priggishness in its pro- fessors ; but there is such a power which can be used without offence to our self-love, and to the great bene- fit of society, and this must consist in the knowledge of the right questions to ask, and in a graceful way of putting them. Every one's memory treasures some one who, in his bashful youth, made him feel cleverer and brighter than he knew himself to be; and this agreeable, flattering sensation may always be traced to the questions which seemed to follow one another by a sort of happy chance questions eliciting thought and opinion, and which were just of the kind it was plea- santest and easiest to answer. All conversation ought to begin with question and answer, to put the interlocu- tors on easy, equal terms ; but this should be only the first stage. So soon as people warm to their subject, they give their opinion or tell their tale without ask- ing. One might say that no man who does not know how to ask questions, and the right questions to ask, can have any personal influence. He may teach men in the lump, but he will make no way with them one QUESTIONS. 41 by one. The gift is a token of natural and practised sympathy ; no one can possess himself of it by trying for it just when he wants it. We may any of us con- vince ourselves of this by recalling the abortive efforts we have made upon children and the very young a class who, if they have any shyness in them, hate being questioned, and have a morbid terror of the operation which is apt to extend itself to the operator. But they hate it, and recoil from it, and shut themselves up with a more oyster-like isolation than before, because our attempt has failed in some of the requirements of a tentative question probably in interest in our own in- quiry, certainly in sympathetic insight into their state of mind. It is part of all reserve, adult as well as infantile, to make this insight hard, if not impossible, of attainment to those not possessed of the happy knack ; and the longer we know a reserved man, the more it becomes a liberty to ask him anything. From all this we see that questions answer to the power and sense of touch. A rude question is a clutch or a shove ; a congenial one, opening heart and fancy, is a friendly shake of the hand or a caress. Occasion- ally mind and body work on such precisely similar impulses, that the one acts out the processes of the other. Thus the more terrible form of questioner will address you with eyes staring within six inches of your face, hands holding you by the button, and with other manipulations exactly answering to his concurrent intrusion on your freedom and privacy of thought. However, more people understand the sacred rights of 42 QUESTIONS. person than of mind, though an attention to the analogy between the two might furnish rules as to the mode of approach, regulating its nearness according to the measure of congeniality and the privileges of acquaintance. L E I S UKE. THE season is approaching* when all busy people to whom fate allows the happiness of periodical relaxa- tion take a holiday. The natural transition from labour is rest from mental strain and effort, leisure. This, then, being an intellectual and busy age, leisure, as its corrective, should be cultivated and understood. But it appears to us that real leisure is a neglected if not forgotten pursuit such leisure as gives the charm to Walton's ' Angler,' as breathes in Mr Dyce's well-known picture of Bemerton, and as is so tenderly and graphi- cally described in 'Adam Bede' as belonging to the Sunday afternoons of a past generation. Leisure is, indeed, the natural reaction from work, especially mental work, but it needs some independence and courage to accept it as relaxation in these days. Now that people can do a great deal in a little time, and go far for a little money, mere repose of mind and body, even intelligent repose, seems slow and poor ; and thus * Written August 1861. 44 LEISURE. labour retains its hold on the busy, only changing its aspect, and calling itself amusement and distraction instead of business accepted as a substitute for leisure, but by no means fulfilling its functions. When Charles Lamb declared that, had he a son, he would call him Nothing-to-do, and he should do no- thing, it was the yearning of a mind overwrought in uncongenial work, and deliberately ignoring the nature of leisure. Nothing-to-do would have had no taste for his father's ideal. In fact, it is an accomplishment to be able to enjoy leisure. It needs a mind able for a given time to feed upon itself and to furnish its own delights a condition of which the idle and the over-busy are alike incapable. It is only the mind disciplined by work that can estimate the charm of leisure ; but it must be a mind to which work has been a discipline, not an instinct and a necessity, as it is with some people. What constitutes the desired state is acquies- cence in work as a duty, but never being so far en- grossed by it so far its slave as not to regard leisure as the reward and Sabbatical consummation of labour. On the other hand, Sydney Smith enumerates among the consequences of civilisation a vast number of per- sons with nothing to do, and those, he says, who have nothing to do, must either be amused or expire with gaping. To recommend seasons of leisure to the vic- tims of blank idleness would be a mockery. Their only notion of pleasure is excitement to be relieved for a time from the intolerable burden of themselves. We suppose there is no mind so fertile as not to know LEISURE. 45 what this void is, or to be without experience of the need of stimulants from without, and therefore there is no one who can cheerfully endure long unbroken periods of leisure; but we believe that the richest, fullest minds are the most capable of it, and also find it the most absolute necessity. A great deal of the work of the world is rushed into from the unconscious dread of vacuity. There is no alternative with many people between doing something positive and absolute vacancy. When they stand still from their work, hav- ing nothing to fall back upon, they feel idle. Now idleness and the enjoyment of leisure, however often confused, have really nothing in common. Leisure is a process of mental assimilation and digestion for which habit or nature unfits a good many. Busy un- reflecting minds never can recognise it as relaxation, and therefore must so far sympathise with idleness that they too must seek in diversion and distraction the counterpoise for their ordinary condition. Leisure is the state of receiving impressions without direct deliberate search for them. It implies a mind in a receptive state, all its senses and pores healthily open. What refreshment is equal to this passive re- ception of new and agreeable images during a period of natural fatigue, allowing the time and scene to in- spire their influences without effort or hurry? But it needs not a few requisites to fit a man to be thus ministered to by the occasion. His tastes must be cultivated, and he should have a good faculty of ob- servation ; he must not be a man of one idea ; he must 46 LEISUKE. have a tolerable serenity of temper, and should also possess the quality of patience, permitting surrounding influences due time to work their effects. This faculty of waiting, of taking and giving time and a longer time than active, over-busy temperaments can believe worth while is an essential concomitant of all great efforts. Genius cannot do its work without it. Poets and inventors of all kinds cannot accomplish their mission without periods of passive reception of impres- sions in the gentle trance of leisure which the busy world confounds with idleness and waste of time. We might also claim for love of leisure a conscience free from sudden stings and great alarms, but that this goes beyond our theme. To leisure certainly belongs the power of knowing what we like of being aware of our own tastes and affinities. It takes a long time sometimes a lifetime is not enough to teach people who are doing what other people do and pursuing a routine, how far they are consulting their own happi- ness. Almost all the expensive pleasures, the dissi- pations of life, are committed by persons who have never quietly asked themselves how far they are inter- ested by them or really care for them; but people thrown upon their own resources know immediately when they are bored. The mind which gives itself time to breathe and think is far less liable to these mistakes, if not wholly safe from them, as it is also safe from the danger of possession by a fixed idea. The man who secures to himself intervals of leisure will not often be the victim of hobbies. These will be LEISURE. 47 found to infest minds incapable of thorough, genuine relaxation. As we have said, the true idea of leisure is insepar- able from work. The only animals that seem capable of it are working animals working not from instinct, but compulsion. Leisure must occupy an interval with work behind and before work to look back upon, work in prospect ; and we think also it is more complete and more enjoyed with the labour of others before our eyes and impressing the imagination, as we see horses at pasture spending a good deal of their leisure in calm survey of the turnpike road where the drudgery of their lives is passed. The sight of other horses engaged in the toil from which they are exempt, enhances their sense of rest. 'L' Allegro/ with all rural works and sounds in busy operation, is a poet's exposition of leisure. By a few magic words he brings before us a succession of busy images which we survey in a lull of charmed repose. Tennyson's lotus-eaters, in the land " where it is always afternoon/' induce a sympathetic dreaminess of quite a different temper from the refreshing realities of Milton's rustic muse, and have no affinity with leisure. Again, leisure is to be sought and enjoyed in the fishing village, watching the fisherman's strenuous toil and the fitful picturesque business of the whole population, rather than in the watering-place, where everybody is idle. Here, the idleness infects us, and we feel vacant ; there, we sympathise in our repose with other men's work, not in selfish immunity, but recognising the law of alternate labour and rest to which we ourselves submit. Soon 48 LEISUEE. those athletic workers will abandon themselves to the utter relaxation which only sailors and fishermen can attain to. Soon the village-green and the blacksmith's forge will offer some compensation to the rustic for the day's heat and labour, and soon leisure must give place to work again. The scenes which naturally occur to us as congenial to leisure will imply nature and man work- ing together. The factory and the loom all that has to do with steam are too unremitting, too unvarying, too noisy. Even in the labours of nature where man has no part, those effects are most conducive to leisure which are intermitting and homely, or at least familiar in character. The remote, the sublime, and unchanging in scenery, produce exaltation and excitement when people are duly affected by them, but they do not leave us in sufficiently calm possession of ourselves for leisure. Something new, something of the nature of surprise and change, is necessary to all pleasure ; but leisure asks for it to be of the least exciting character, felt in new effects rather than in new scenes. Under the influence of leisure, these act on the intelligent mind as first impres- sions do on childhood. There is no conscious effort, but there is a receptive power which the over-busy tempera- ment never knows. What are " the children sporting on the shore," or " the forty cattle feeding like one," or the humours of the farmyard, or the evolutions and harmonious clamour of a flock of seagulls, to a man who has so much to do before bedtime so far to go such a train to catch? Yet how freshening and invigorating are such and a thousand similar sights to a man with LEISURE. 49 a mind and senses awake to them, content for a little while to rest on the present, and let what he sees and hears drive off and exorcise all cares and objects beside ! Such being the case, we have often wondered why greater efforts are not made to secure periods of leisure. The busy man, and people who from fashion follow his lead, have spent the spare hours for weeks past in count- ing up how much can be done in a given time, how many miles traversed, how many mountains ascended, how much fatigue undergone. Now, we do not wish to dis- parage travelling, which is sometimes very high, real enjoyment. When it is so, it is worth more than all the money and effort it costs ; but sometimes it is only a pur- suit after home letters from one end of Europe to another, in which a man might at any moment test the amount of his gains by stopping the whirl of machinery he has set to work and standing still forming no plans, but resting where he finds himself ; when he is very likely to realise that he is not at all amused, and in fact long- ing to be back at his more congenial work at home. It is true that leisure has an intense aversion to plans, holding that going to pleasure is nothing like having pleasure come to us. To persons of this temper, the questions, "What are you going to do with yourself? What are your plans for the day ?" fall like a blow. Perhaps this is partly the reason why plans for the en- joyment of leisure are never formed. Persons who care for it could not take these means to acquire it. So, then, things must remain as they are, and people must go through any amount of weariness and expense to pro- n. D 50 LEISURE. cure excitement, while they are fully aware that the most agreeable hours of their lives those most pleasant at the time, and leaving most unalloyed memories belong to some happy period of leisure, especially com- panionship in leisure, which came then with so little trouble that we wonder why it does not come oftener. But perhaps quiet pleasures are least to be reckoned on ; for, after all, they need a mind at ease and in accord with its surroundings. Trouble and care may be for- gotten, driven out by other minor worries and anxieties, but an oasis in our own desert may be harder to find. Yet, if it could be managed if for some short space we could withdraw from our work, not necessarily in body, but in spirit, with some few congenial companions if we could make sure of a few sunny days of real peace and quiet thought and talk if this could now and then be tried, we are sure some happy experiments might be wrought out, sending men back to their work with mind and body more refreshed and purses not so emptied as by the more elaborate and conventional arrangement which is the acknowledged type of holiday in our day. GKUMBLEBS, IP we see three or four men in really confidential talk, thoroughly at ease with one another, meeting perhaps after absence or separation, and relieving their minds of what comes uppermost or if we observe a man in a state of snug, comfortable communicativeness, encircled by sympathising women whom he believes to take an interest in his affairs what may we take for granted that this man or those men are doing and saying ? Without doubt they are grumbling detailing their grievances, letting drop, according to their different methods and characters, how the world has ill-used them, and plotted to deprive them of their deserts. That there is not much ground for this habit, we ought to infer from the little sympathy each man gets from his neighbour beyond the momentary attention of good manners an attention involving no great sacrifice, for the observer of human nature is rewarded for his com- placency by some curious revelations. To be listened to, however, is all that the grumbler expects almost, 52 GRUMBLERS. I indeed, all he requires. It is not a case for active sympathy any more than for activity of any other kind. This pathetic strain of self-pity is simply a natural pro- pensity finding its natural vent. We own it generally strikes us that our neighbours those whose course we have watched have done quite as well in life, are as successful and prosperous as they had any right to expect. If they have failed, we think we see the cause, not so much in the mismanagement, spite, or neglect of others, nor in adverse events, as in something in themselves against getting on. It is a perfectly obvious case of cause and effect. But people will not see this where themselves are concerned. Certainly most men, without any conspicuous vanity or overbear- ing pretension, betray an over-estimate of themselves and their claims on society. They sincerely think they have a right to more of the good things of this world than they possess or than their neighbours get, and they consider the deficit as the immediately traceable result of somebody's fault or mistake. They take their stand on their strongest point their most prominent pretension and infer that all else about them should come up to this standard. That is, their highest pre- tension represents their rights, nor do they think they are fairly used by fortune so long as any condition of completeness lags behind. Everything is a mistake, to be laid to the account of society or an individual, that mars this ideal. They will not see that every position has its wrong side. They will not recognise a balance of good and bad, success and failure, as fair in GRUMBLERS. 53 their case, though it is clear as day where others are concerned. Thus we may observe that the pre-eminent and typical grumbler, whether he betrays vanity and self- conceit or not, has, at some time or other of his life, been lifted out of his natural and just level, and experienced a stimulus to elation of mind and pre- sumption some sudden or unlooked-for good fortune disturbing the equilibrium some marked success. A man who has had a hard life of it, who has had no sig- nal successes, whose existence has been one uniform struggle to keep his head above water without any lifts or stepping-stones that can be pointed out a man who has never seemed to his neighbours lucky is seldom a grumbler. He is not likely to have any extreme view of his own merits and claims ; he is often thankful for what he has, and prone, as a sort of consolation, to con- trast his position advantageously with that of others. It is the men fortunate in the eyes of their friends who are the real grumblers ; and it is easy to trace the habit to some particular circumstance, occasion, or course of events which they had not strength of character to bear with becoming humility. Perhaps a dull man has the good fortune to marry a charming and rich wife, a thousand times too good for him. If his whole career is not en suite, with this commencement, if it only answers to his own character and conduct, he settles into a confirmed grumbler and disappointed man ; and if he happens to have had two rich wives, he only grumbles with the greater pertinacity because the world 54 GRUMBLERS. has not seen with these ladies' eyes. Or a man is visited by a sudden flush of prosperity, unreasonable in its origin, and therefore shortlived he is henceforth a grumbler. A popular preacher who ceases " to draw " is certain to be one. The world has retrograded fear- fully since it left off crowding to hear his sermons ; his work is flat to him through the neglect of old admirers ; he has much to complain of. Again, the member of a large family who has been uniformly most considered, who has had more than his share of its good things, is in a position to be a grumbler. The very sacrifices that have been made for him have inconvenient results, hold- ing him back ; and he realises hindrances and checks to his career which the less favoured do not experience or are insensible to in their graver anxieties. We ac- cept it as an evidence of a future existence of more perfect happiness that every man at once assumes happiness as his natural sphere ; that he immediately settles and expatiates in it, feels it his home, which is very like feeling it his right, and cannot afterwards condescend to a lower level ; and, being what he is, he expresses this want and need of the supreme good, of which he has barely tasted, by murmurs, mutterings, and puzzled speculations on how and why it has eluded his grasp. The grumbler has an ideal. He has felt, though but for a day, a certain expansion, a mastery of a new and wider field, an elevation of spirits, a sense of power, an impression of entering upon a new and bright course; and the man who knows the feeling which success is apt to infuse is loth to fall back to GRUMBLERS. 55 common things, to the knowledge that he is but one of a struggling crowd : he looks about for the cause, and will not see it in himself. He won the success ; it is circumstances that hold him back from reaping the full and due harvest of its fruits. However, transient or unequal success is not the only foundation for a good grumbler. Those who from slug- gishness of nature never assert their rights are standard grumblers. It is a very common mistake to suppose that such people are insensible to their own claims. None are more keenly alive to them, though, from in- dolence or shyness, they never put them forward at the proper time. When they find themselves ignored, and see others do their work for them and stand in their place, they lift up the voice of ineffectual complaint. Their friends are made confidants of the grievance ; and as such grievances are sure to accumulate for no one can keep his place without a pretty tight hold we have a life-long grumbler of the subdued sort ; for our friend is never roused to active remonstrance, and does not seriously wish to reverse matters, but relishes the position of being an " ill-used gentleman," fully sensible of his ill-usage. Again, there are first-rate grumblers in the class of dabblers in science, who know a little of everything and nothing well. These men have a way of suppos- ing themselves the equals of others who are exclusive in their pursuits, and they grudge the rewards due to concentration on one object. As they have a thousand strings to their bow, they have a thousand rivals, who 56 GRUMBLERS. seem to them to be carrying off the fruits of their labours. Every invention has passed in an incomplete impracticable form through their brain. They have been within an inch of a hundred discoveries ; they can encounter every one on his own ground ; and yet here they are stranded while narrower intellects win the day. What tales of neglect and injustice, what hairbreadth misses, what an entanglement of mis- chances, all treasured up in an amplifying memory, have stood in the way of wealth and fame, and are poured by these sufferers into any ear friendly or patient enough to receive them ! Again, those who miss their opportunity are grumblers. They have had a dozen chances and let them all slip ; and they look back with feeble, regretful murmurs against fate, and count up their losses till they are proud of them, and perhaps enjoy the grumble more than it was ever in them to enjoy the good fortune. Indeed, it becomes such a habit that they cannot live without a grievance. They are always wanting the thing they cannot have, and should an unlooked-for opportunity for obtaining it arise, a host of difficulties before unseen confront the weak and frightened fancy, and they recoil from the venture. Men of position without money, or of money without corresponding position, are grumblers. All professions which leave a man a great deal of compul- sory unproductive leisure make grumblers ; and so do all into which the idea of promotion enters. Naval and military men especially the former are grum- blers. Clerks in public offices are notoriously such. GRUMBLERS. 57 They have one and all substantial grievances, we have no doubt; but they have also a superabundance of time to arrange and enhance them. It must be said for the active temperament, that it exempts men from the temptation to grumble. Busy men are not queru- lous. The material for grumbling lies mainly in the memory, and the busy man has no time for retrospect. We have often admired how a real grievance, a posi- tive, undeniable piece of ill-usage, drops off from the consciousness of a hard worker the man whose days are filled up with various occupations. Each day has its burdens, its rubs, its neglects ; but they disappear with the day, and no catalogue of them is kept. We do not know that the habit of grumbling is altogether repulsive. A gentle murmur of regrets and discontents, when not too strongly tinctured by envy or malignity, sometimes makes a man tolerable who in prosperity is not so. It implies reliance and trust in our good-nature, and a need of sympathy which is engaging ; and, to say the least of it, it puts us on a level with the complainant. A man who has un- burdened his breast of a grievance, who has been con- fidingly peevish, who has let us see under, perhaps, some decorous veil of disguise all his inner grudges and his littlenesses generally, cannot ride his high horse with us at any rate. There is, indeed, a philo- sophic form of grumbling which is positively instruc- tive when instigated by a gentle cynicism. A man theorises calmly and dispassionately on human affairs, himself never prominent, but pulling the wires never- 58 GRUMBLERS. theless, while lie proves satisfactorily what a poor and worthless world that must be which leaves cer- tain minds and certain intelligences in unrecognised obscurity. Perhaps this fastidious age may be especially given to grumble. In former times, people worked openly for promotion for their own advantage in any line of life. There was no scruple or disguise about it. We are mending this in delicacy. We assume an air of lofty disregard to material interests ; we will not coarsely put ourselves forward ; we wait for the world's good things to come to us ; we will not clamorously demand them. This is excellent if they do come un- sought, but if they do not ? When, after waiting and, truth to say, expecting, we begin in middle life to realise that the good things are not coming that they are not for us then we grumble. We have indeed known precocious grumblers who prose in their teens about the blunders of their education, but they are monsters, not members of a class. Most people, we suspect, take for granted during youth that a good time is coming that everything, however perverse, may be tending to that good time and are slow to criticise the training they are undergoing. Trials and drawbacks are not supposed to be more than temporary impedi- ments to be certainly surmounted. But a dawning of the true state of things comes in time we shall not fulfil our expectations we shall never make a great figure in the world or enjoy any large share of its prizes. Then, if there is grumbling in us, we begin the habit, and GKUMBLERS. 59 henceforth we are either obtrusive grumblers, mere bores and nuisances or speculative grumblers, tracing all to first principles, serenely reasonable and consist- ent on false premises or humorous grumblers, vent- ing our personal discontent under a quaint veil of satire on the world and its follies or, lastly, grotesque grumblers, attributing every misfortune, small and great, to the evil influence of our domestic star, to something that happened before we were born, or when we went to school, the more far-fetched the better regarding the most ordinary operations of nature and effects of time as something caused by neglect, and which proper vigilance might have prevented. We have known men on the way to threescore, account for failing eyes and incipient wrinkles by some mis- management of their childhood and proving that any defect of mind or body, health or wealth, is directly due to somebody's fault, and a legitimate ground for anathemas in the vein of M. Jourdain " mon pere et ma mere, que je vous dois du mal !" Grumbling is, in fact, a mode of accounting for all our misfortunes without self-reproach or any appeal to conscience. To conclude, grumbling is a privilege it is self- assertion, a sign of individual rights and a recognised status. Perhaps for this reason women are not such grumblers as men. They are often fretful, but fretful- ness is temper, and there is no necessary connection between ill-temper and grumbling. When women grumble, it is for their class, not each on her own account, openly, unblushingly, boastingly, as is the way 60 GRUMBLERS. with men. They are not yet allowed enough inde- pendence of action or play of individual character to have each an appropriate grievance of her own. They complain that their class is not represented ; but what- ever may be said of them, women rarely murmur openly that they have not had their due chance in life that their merits and accomplishments have been underrated. The most strong-minded do not get be- yond general remonstrances at their sex's depressed condition, at the slow recognition of women's claims to equality. When these ladies carry their point, those who live to see the day will hear the women of their acquaintance, each with an independent grievance of her own, emulating their male friends in histories of broken purposes, neglect, indifference, selfishness, blunders of friends, and perversities of fortune. TALKING AND BEADING. WE have read a great deal about the art of conversation, but the conversation which does its work best which fulfils the two requirements of " promoting kindness " and " unburdening a man's mind " is no art at all. It is an exercise an unconscious relaxation, like a walk or a scamper. If all the world took to cultivating their conversational powers, we believe society would become insufferable ; but yet a vast number of persons would be the better for taking more pleasure in talking and hear- ing others talk, and society would be proportionably the gainer. It is very proper, where people make talking the work of their lives, that they should reduce it to rules ; and it is pleasant now and then to be admitted into some crack circle, to share the " very superior oc- casion " of the meeting of two wits, to listen to some great gun, and to air our poor talents in grand company. But it takes a good deal out of us. Where there has been the feast of reason at breakfast, we are not fit for a great deal the rest of the day. Fancy a man, with 62 TALKING AND READING. work of his own to do, a guest at those interminable morning sittings at Coppet, devoted to literary and philosophic topics, where Madame de Stael was sublime in her filial piety, " committing some voluntary mis- take," that her father might have the victory ; or even habitually assisting at those gladiatorial contests which Dr Johnson thought alone worthy of the title of conver- sation literal fights, in which he must either conquer or die. For the real purposes of intercourse, less pre- tentious utterances are far better, where thought is worked out under the irregularities of unprofessional talkers, with all their prolixities, digressions, inaccura- cies, hesitations, habits, and tricks. Our own mind is in a posture of greater independence. We can give and take we can commit a blunder or make a random shot without subsequent self-torment we can hold our own. It must weaken the mind to give itself up out of its own keeping in helpless pursuit of another's speculations ; yet the great converser's end is foiled if he does not carry his hearers with him ; and where in self-defence the attention mutinies and we return to the snuggery of our own thoughts, it is not done without a sense of wasting opportunities. If, on the other hand, we are stimulated by so much eloquence and conspicuous suc- cess, and should by chance be fired with the ambition to be a show talker, talking would still further recede from its office of relaxation, and turn into an arena for display. It was from no exceptional vanity in the circle he described, but an inevitable consequence of great wits being pitted against each other, that Mar- TALKING AND READING. 63 montel could give so unpleasing a picture of the most brilliant conversations of his day : " I soon perceived," he says, " that each guest came there ready to act his part, and that the wish to shine often interrupted conversation from following an easy natural course. Every one seemed anxious to seize as it flew by the opportune moment for uttering his bons mots and his anecdotes, of ushering his maxim or his trait of light and brilliant wit, and this necessary apropos was often far-fetched. In Marivaux, the impatient wish to display his sagacity and finesse was conspicuously manifest. Montesquieu waited with more calmness till the ball should come to him, but he waited for it never- theless. Mairan watched for the favourable opportunity. Astruc disdained to wait. Fontenelle alone let it come to him without seeking for it, and he made so discreet a use of the attention with which he was heard, that his ingenious remarks and charming stories never lasted more than a moment." This all sounds small and vain enough, but neither smaller nor vainer than the majority of men would be if so tried. When talking is lifted out of its easy foot- ing, it is subject to different laws altogether laws which tell a tale. It is observable that, in the very high places of wit and perfect expression, where every word is worth hearing, the impatience of prolonged enforced attention is keenest. The conversation that excites, naturally has this effect. We see constantly, in circles that are not brilliant, that many people are content to be silently attentive when they are not interested, who will not 64 TALKING AND READING. allow a speaker to finish his sentence when he hits upon a topic they care for, and treats it successfully. Their sign of sympathy and approval is interruption. So people do wisely to set themselves rules like the self- denying Frenchman and Swift, who himself never spoke more than a minute at a time, and thus laid down his principles on the subject : " Conversation is but carving ; Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest. Give him always of the prime, And but little at a time ; Carve to all but just enough, Let them neither starve nor stuff ; And, that you may have your due, Let some neighbour carve for you." These are excellent rules for company talk, but they would never teach people to talk well in company. For this there must have been habits of free-and-easy utter- ance, taking time very little into the account, more intent on bringing out thought than on the way it is brought out. And a man must have lived with intimates no less unscrupulously eager with their views. There must have been early felt the relief, delight, nay exultation, of giving voice to opinion and feeling, for a person to acquire the self-confidence and practice necessary to carry weight in general society. But this applies to leading spirits ; whereas all have the gift of speech, and we believe ought to apply themselves to use it rather than to repress it. Talking, with most people, is indis- pensable to acquaint them with themselves, to show them the scope of their powers, the tendency of their TALKING AND READING. 65 habits and thoughts. Moreover, it is a wonderfully cheer- ing and invigorating exercise. It is one of the secrets of longevity, from the glow in which it keeps body and mind. Many people keep themselves alive by talking. This may not recommend the practice to those who feel it their own function and fate to be listeners ; but old men who talk, even with all the accidents of old age upon them, are a great gain to society, and set off the decline of existence in a far more cheering and comfort- able light than those do who doze away their last hours in the chimney-corner. There was Mr Craddock, the octogenarian, who had known all the wits from Warbur- ton downwards, and literally lived upon his memories. Talk was his elixir vitce. " He had such a tendency to apoplexy that he was cupped constantly, sometimes twice a-day, drank no wine, and lived upon turnips and roasted apples ;" but nevertheless he lived to eighty- five, always happy and always telling anecdotes. And we all of us know brisk old gentlemen whose occupation is repeating to the present generation what they have seen, heard, and done in a past one. Perhaps they are prosy, and indefinitely repeat themselves ; but these aged talkers have a real work to do. They are the keepers and handers-on of tradition. They bring us nearer to the past, and connect remote periods with one another. Each generation does well to make much of these Nes- tors to salute them with gracious respect; " Let me embrace thee, good old chronicle, That hast so long walked hand in hand with time." And yet it requires courage in a man to own himself II. E 66 TALKING AND READING. fond of talking. Our age is unusually supercilious towards the instinct of expression. It is the thing to prefer our own ideas and pursuits to conversation. Reading has, indeed, always been the one all-powerful rival to talk, with those minds which are especially formed to treat conversation as an art, to give it point, and make it the expression of intellect ; but modern literature extends its range by making less and less demands on the reader, till the most ordinary sustained conversation is the greater intellectual effort of the two. The passion for reading in many young people, though an excellent thing in reason, is often a blind and para- lysing instinct, a lazy indulgence, a mere bondage to type which cuts them off from half the important in- fluences of their age. The eye fastens on a printed page, the mind helplessly pursues whatever comes to it under this guise, and eye and ear are dead and im- pervious to every other call. There is such bondage to a habit, such mere material craving, in some per- sons' reading, as implies a mind not so much anxious for knowledge, or even amusement, as set against all knowledge and amusement that does not come to it in the received method that calls for independent effort and the employment of unpractised faculties. Those who will only learn through books, who would rather open any page than look into intelligent eyes, to whom cheerful voices and animated discussion are a simple interruption to the preoccupied attention, are leaving things unlearnt which would serve them beyond all comparison in greater stead than the sentences they TALKING AND READING. 67 have hit upon by chance things which would unchain their faculties at the age when habits of observation must be acquired if they are to be possessed at all, and when the art of expression, command of words, an easy range of subjects and light handling of them, should all exist in the germ. Of course all clever boys have fits of reading in which they care for nothing else; but systematically bookish boys developing into bookish men (as they used to be called) can never make the use they ought of their acquirements by talking well, and so improving and enriching the general tone of thought. Thus, in many circles, the talk is all left in ill-informed or frivolous hands. But our present concern is not so much with the use- ful as the pleasant. We are arguing for the beneficent effects of a reasonable love of talking on the talker ; and therefore, if pertinacious reading were shown to contri- bute most lastingly to a man's pleasure, our plea would break down. This is the real question. For, after all, who can look back without yearning, sorrowful tenderness to the early passion for books the sweet lover-like asso- ciation with them in corners, by firelight, everywhere, anywhere, in pleasant shady places, by night or by day, in twilight or dawn, in any posture, at any time, by any light? But and here is the rub suddenly, some day, when we least think it, there is interposed a shadow, which, slight though it be, heralds a break between us and our first love. A dimness, faint and uncertain, passes between us and 'the page we read. Is it giddiness, indigestion, weariness? The appear- 68 TALKING AND READING. ance passes off, and we forget our misgiving ; but again there is a mistiness and that odd flicker ; by chance our hand drops, and the book with it. We see better the dimness goes off but our eyes ache. Can it really be that our focus of sight is changing has changed ? A slight shudder passes through us. Are we, so young, so fresh in all our feelings, henceforth to hold our paper at arm's length like the old fogies in ' Punch ' ? And in the mere imagination there is sown the first seed of disunion between us and the passion of our youth. We probably keep our suspicions to ourselves. This is but a foretaste ; and what it fore- tells is of course still in remotest distance. But as all downward careers are rapid, so, from this first dis- covery of weakness to positive difficulties with small print except under the most friendly circumstances there seems but a step. Eeluctantly, we make our sad way to the optician's not, however, without faint hopes that the obscuration may be only temporary and acci- dental. But these are rudely dispelled. The man has a coarse pleasure in unmasking illusion. He looks at us, sees apparently no discrepancy between us and our case, and thinks it the most natural thing in the world that we should want glasses. He tests us by a printed page which we are pleased to show him presents no difficulties, but he severely points to the numerals as the only criterion. We are fain to confess that the threes and fives dance into a common likeness. He " thought so," and we leave his shop a sadder and a wiser man, with a pair of spectacles in our pocket and TALKING AND READING. 69 a double eye-glass suspended from our neck, thankful that there are such helps to failing vision, but regard- ing our new acquisitions as the fetters they undoubtedly are. This is an epoch. Our independence, our free- dom, our youth is gone. This is travelling farther from the east with a vengeance. What is that about the three warnings ? . But we have positively nothing in common with old Dobson. It must be premature. A twinge of conscience supervenes. Who knows but we may have lost the freshness of our eyesight in re- viewing? Henceforth, reading is not what it was. We read what we- have to read, as before, but there is no more sweet unrestraint. It is astonishing how many books don't seem worth reading if you have to put on glasses and change your seat to read them. Our habits alter. Once we " read like a Turk," voraciously, indiscrimi- nately ; now a third party, in the shape of an intrusive but indispensable bit of glass, breaks in upon the old tete-a-tete. We own that books can never again be what they have been. " The things that I have seen I now may see no more." But in the meanwhile, away from our books, things look precisely as they always did. No change has come over man or landscape ; the near and the distant are as sunny clear as ever ; every general effect, every detail, is what it was before. If there were no such thing as print, we should know nothing about a change. Our friend's smile tells as much as it ever did. The 70 TALKING AND BEADING. glance is as keen, every nicety of expression as fully caught, as it ever was. "We suspect that this is a period that turns a good many into more conversible beings than they have yet thought it worth while to be. "We are, in fact, at the age when good talkers are at their best. But to talk fairly well is matter of prac- tice and habit, not to be taken up because there is nothing better to do with our leisure time. The man is fortunate, and the good fortune extends to his friends, who has not to teach himself to talk when it is hard to learn anything new. Yet many a diffuse and dry elderly gentleman seems very much in this predica- ment. Age is charged with making men prosy. It may be because they have so much more time on their hands, and no stores of general observation to use it upon ; stores acquired before we drift into the helpless period of simple use and acquiescence. Conversation is designed to be the one long-lasting never-failing amusement of mankind. It is the pleasure that sets in earliest, outlives all vicissitudes, and continues ours when we can enjoy nothing else. If, then, talking is the great resource, it is well to train ourselves, while self-education is still possible, to talk agreeably, so that the relaxation of the speaker may not be a selfish one, nor purchased, as it too often is, at the expense of his hearers. Y A E I E T Y, THERE can be no harm in the general belief that our convicts are so well cared for that prison has no terrors for them, and that they like it rather than otherwise. There is no good whatever in fattening garotters, and if any creatures should live on bread and water, it is they ; therefore, by all means, let us have a return to stricter rule. But we have little doubt that our well-ordered prisons are to some of their inmates more hateful than in the old days of lawless wretchedness. It may be questioned whether any human being is so reduced to the condition of a brute as to be content with duly recurring meals, especially where, by heavy experience, the precise weight and quality of those meals is known past the possibility of uncertainty ; and to rogues and vagabonds whose whole life has been a shirking of monotony, an abhorrence of decent habits, and a craving for change, those regular hours, those inevitable periods of labour, and those long silences, must be some substantial punishment. No 72 VARIETY. wonder they practise upon the chaplain. He is their one hope and source of variety for the present as well as the future. Their more naive sisters in crime, when conveyed from one prison to another, betray the exqui- site sense of contrast in even a transient glimpse of the world from which they are shut out : crying, " Oh, is not this first-rate?" as they are whirled past shops, theatres, and placarded walls ; " and they are in chapel now at Brixton !" and we do not doubt that the former life of the thief never looks more attractive than in juxtaposition with the deadly-dull decorum of forced propriety. Such people learn no lessons. They never look an inch before them, but trust to their luck, and plunge headlong into that new world that proves to them the old. Unfortunately, they can only indulge a natural taste for change and novelty at the expense of the community, owing to their false and exceedingly limited range of ideas as to what that pleasurable novelty is without which not only they, but every human being, must be miserable. When Burton would sound the depths of melancholy, he describes the life of one who, from the cradle to old age, " beholds the same still ; still, still, the same, the same " who endures perpetual monotony ; and it is certain that on wise alternations of steady uniformity with variety depend the due development of the in- tellect, the expansion of the moral nature, and the happiness of the life. The different arrangement and proportion of these opposites mark, and probably con- stitute, great national distinctions. The American may VARIETY. 73 well differ from the Briton, though owning the same forefathers, when the change he courts is fundamental as well as constant when he never regards anything as settled, and, as Mr Trollope tells us, if he cannot get along as a lawyer at Salem, he sets up as a shoe- maker at Thermopylae ; or, if he fails in the lumber line at Eleutheria, catches at an opening for a Baptist preacher at Big Mud Creek. Entering on a new occu- pation every six months, is an exhaustive search after novelty which finds no sympathy in the British mind, which, whatever its love of change, feels the need of an anchorage somewhere some standing that it would be terrible to lose ; though, beyond this, we crave variety like our fellow-mortals. Curiosity, which is the desire for new knowledge and new experiences, is part of every sane mind. Now, of course, education is the means by which the noblest curiosity may be both excited and indulged. What is the pursuit of truth which the philosophers press upon us but a search after grand and high-flown novelties ? Happy those who can gratify the craving for the new in so sublime a field, though perhaps it would scarcely be a comfortable world if everybody followed such a chase. But, short of this, education alone enables men to apprehend and relish what is new in a thousand directions. Very few persons can receive impressions on subjects upon which they are wholly ignorant, and on which their observation is unpractised. This is conspicuous in such scenes as the late Interna- tional Exhibition. Not one in a hundred, we will ven- 74 VARIETY. ture to say, of the crowds we saw flocking there, took in a single idea from any object to which the mind had no previous clue. All the strangeness, novelty, and beauty were passed by were not visible, did not reach the brain, did not even catch the sense of the vacant, be- wildered gazer. The artisan studied machinery, the soldier looked at the guns, the rustic at the ploughs and harrows ; but they could not even see the pictures or the statuary which were ranged before them. The women, as a rule, noticed dress and fabrics to the utter exclusion of other things, not from vanity or frivolity, but because these were the only matters their training qualified them to think about. A mist hung between them and all the art, genius, and wealth crowded round them. It was all too strange for the mind to say of anything, " This is new to me " which is, in fact, comparing it with what is old. There was no ground for a comparison. A man sent his cook to spend the day there ; the sole thing that remained on her mind was a kitchen-range, in which she observed some novelties of construction. The majority of all great crowds are like the woman who emigrated to America with her husband, and, returning after some years to her native village, was asked what she had seen. " I can't say," she replied, " as I see'd anything pertick'lar ;" and if she had followed Humboldt over the world, she would have said the same. But who can cast a stone at his neighbour on this point of intelligent curi- osity ? The desire for what is new, and the power of apprehending it, run in grooves. Nobody is inquisitive VARIETY. 75 on all points deserving of inquiry : only the largest mind, most thoroughly cultivated, embraces most. But the desire for novelty and variety which pos- sesses all minds is not commonly associated with the notion of learning and books, nor even with that natural curiosity which is occupied, scarcely con- sciously, on whatever presents itself as striking either in man or nature ; nor yet with that vulgar curiosity which is the craving for new impressions from objects either unworthy and lowering in themselves, or which do not properly come within the scope of the observer (as old people may observe and be curious about many things which it would be odious in children to notice;) it is not the new things we may learn, or observe, or pry into, but the new things that may happen to us something connected with a turn of fortune which is most people's idea of novelty. It is incident, adventure, new experience. All require that something new should constantly be presented to them ; but the amount and quality of the change depend on a hundred conditions : for the necessary stimulant of life must vary with age, temperament, and training, as well as with the nature of that habitual course of action with which the variety is to come in contrast. Provi- dential or self-chosen monotony of existence has, of course, its novelties in proportion. A great many lives seem to us to present no opportunities for anything new in the daily course of them, even in the humblest form of novelty ; but those who live them do find variety enough to distinguish one day from another. 76 VARIETY. Something unexpected, not to be calculated on before- hand, relieves monotony, stirs the blood, creates those little stimulants without which we could not live, or life would become a living death. What surprises a Trappist finds in his silent existence what refreshing changes we do not know, but if he lives and keeps his senses we believe he finds them ; and while he is of this earth, the diversions must be of the earth also, for he needs them as a human being, not as a rapt ethe- realised intelligence. The inhabitants of Pitcairn's Island led a regular, respectable, industrious exist- ence, and had enough of the necessaries of life ; but because their utter isolation diminished the chances of change to a minimum, nobody lived to be old, and the average length of life sank to five-and-thirty or forty. And this from the total absence of vivifying new sensations. There are not a few persons to whom the evening rubber brings a good share of this indispensable change, the mild shocks and minute surprises of each turn of luck not seldom culminating into stirring astonishment at the caprices of fortune, that only charmer whose in- finite variety no custom can stale. Preachers have often been severe on the pleasure the old find in cards, confusing it with the gambler's fierce love of hazard ; whereas they are valued on a contrary principle, because cards exactly answer their temperate demand for some renovator, and because the stimulant is a small and clearly - defined one. People who have lived long enough in the world to know that it will not furnish VARIETY. 77 them with many great pleasurable excitements, who have learnt to fear change, who have settled into habits, who have no longer objects for continuous stir of the affections, and are perforce lookers-on where they were once actors good elderly folks who don't happen to be intellectual, or who have not eyes for all the good books pressed upon them, and who cannot expect to keep about them a buzz of that rarest of all things, brilliant, amusing, or even edifying conversation must surely be allowed to find some of their diversion (which means their variety) in such new combinations as chance and accident permit to their contracted field of obser- vation, and of which all games involving chance are the type. A few new faces, a few unexpected classifications of the old ones, familiar incidents and characters in fresh combinations these suit the natural desire for some- thing new, tKat stays with men to the last, in spite of habit, and a memory living in the past, and dread of change in their own person ; though this passive variety is utterly inadequate to satisfy the eager expectation of youth. For, however demure, sedate, and apparently unimpassioned the young may seem to be, their idea of novelty is necessarily quite distinct from that of their elders. The young regard nothing as real change, no- thing as deserving the name of excitement, that has not some reference, however indirect, to material changes in themselves. They care for nothing new unless they may have a part in it, and unless it brings the notion, however unconsciously, of affecting their future. 78 VARIETY. Society is to them the scene wherein their fate lies. Everything is full of possibilities for them. All sorts of great changes, new openings of life, may happen to them. Every journey is fraught with expectation, every new acquaintance may be a life affair, every new year is big with promise. Honours, fame, wealth, author- ship, successful love youth is candidate for them all. Thus, small varieties that can have no ulterior conse- quences, such as satisfy the elderly lookers-on, though necessary, too, in their way, are treated with contempt by such as are entering upon life, if proposed as speci- mens of what it has to offer of new and strange. Be- tween these two extremes stands middle life, not yet regarding the changing aspects of existence as varied pictures passing before the eyes, but as a scene of action ; yet averse to fundamental novelties, and hold- ing to established place and habits ; so that a man's notion of desirable change is now advance in the line he has chosen. Uncertainty has lost its charm, and is a thing to be feared. The force of habit, so powerful in the middle life and old age not only of individuals but communities, is of course the great hindrance to this natural sympathy with what is new and unaccustomed. Those are wise who resist its encroachments so far at least as always to give a hearing to fresh ideas. It is this wisdom that makes some old people such pictures of an unprejudiced, green old age. We are young so long as we keep open the inlets to new impressions ; and the more numerous these are, the more vigorous are both mind and spirits. VARIETY. 79 But, as a fact, people are very apt to be proud of quite the contrary state of mind. It is constantly thought a very fine thing to be wholly independent of intercourse with, and news from, the outer world. Mrs Delaney mentioned it with complacency that at her friend the Duke of Portland's the newspapers were left unfolded from morning till night ; and there are people who like to say the same thing now. They think it necessarily implies occupation of more importance, and a certain weighty and anti-frivolous character. The mother to whom the absorbing novelty of the week is baby's first tooth, feels herself to be higher in the scale than her neighbour who is up in the American war, skims the debates, and is sensible of a freshened existence in the prospect of some social gathering where eye and ear have a chance of being exercised on new ground. And yet this is a far healthier condition, and she is in less danger of those frenzies of excitement about nothing that a stifled natural craving for variety is apt to plunge into. How many families suffer under the morbid caution against new impressions under the notion that ignorance is innocence and domesticity, and that to learn to talk of and to care for dull things is a virtue ! reminding us of those seven daughters we have read of trained on this principle, who severally related to their father, with fullest detail, as the treasured event of the week, that the pig had got into the garden. Yet pro- bably this is a better extreme than that of forcing variety upon the young. It is better, no doubt, for both feeling and fancy, that the front door- bell should 80 VARIETY. not be rung once a-week as may often happen in a country parsonage than that a child should be crammed with new things before it can digest them. There are persons who from infancy have been so guarded from dulness and kept in such constant excitement, that observation ceases to work because there is nothing to attract it. In the extreme of such a life, affections can have no growth, and associations are impossible ; and a life without associations must also be without thought. We are told of a religious fraternity in Thibet whose members disown a fixed dwelling. Any tent gives them lodging for a night, and every morning they wander forth they neither know nor care whither. Their life is one of perpetual change. They never retread the same ground, they never see again the faces of their entertainers of the night before. Nothing ever is, or has been, familiar to them. There are lives of seeming excitement and variety, under our own observation, that are not so very unlike this, as far as all uses of feeling, memory, and reflection are concerned. Inca- pacitated for new impressions, these are the people who crave for new sensations for some irresistible assault on nerves and senses that shall give them perforce a new experience. Eestlessness and a feverish desire for change are not, however, national vices with us. People who are un- appeasable in their demand for what the world is not various enough to supply may even have a use in counteracting that selfish, respectable contentment with the humdrum requiring that everybody else should VARIETY. 81 be content also which is perhaps the more common extreme ; and may force men to see something more of the needs of human nature than they perhaps quite care to know. It is, in fact, consolatory to see what a compensation for a hundred wants a life of cheerful change offers. A life of new images and new impres- sions, though of the humblest and least exciting sort a life where no strain of sadness can keep its hold un- disturbed, where the outer world in all its shifting variety of incident and picture is always presenting matter for speculation and inquiry, such a life, what- ever its privations, is a happy one. It is happier for most men than a life which has everything that the other wants, but which fails in this one ingredient. Lots in life are more equal than the eye can ever be- lieve them to be ; and of all equalisers the greatest is the calmly pleasurable variety which many a life other- wise unattractive offers. u. MEANNESS, THERE is nothing men fear more than the charge of meanness. To be called mean is to be done for with a good many people ; and perhaps half the liberality in the world is a tax paid to escape the imputation. It is the charge, however, rather than the thing itself, which is dreaded ; whether it be that persons cannot suppose it possible of themselves to fall so far below the heroic as to commit a mean action, or that they have a different estimate from the public one, and are content to be what others pronounce mean, so long as society knows nothing of it. It is certain that many things are called mean unfairly, and that the world has a very coarse standard on this point, as well as a shifting one a standard differing widely in different circles, as men's interests or passions are concerned. In this matter men judge from their own point of view. Poor Toots's pugilistic friend, who was all for pluck and self- assertion, pronounced his patron mean on the occasion of his giving up the woman he loved to the lover MEANNESS. 83 she preferred, and was disgusted accordingly ; and this judgment represents a great many opinions. People who stand up boldly for themselves are not often called mean, though there may be an incredible meanness at the bottom of a free, confident, open-handed manner, extremely taking with people who know only the out- side. The man who gives a shilling where others give sixpence, and is lavish of half-crowns, is certain to have generosity attributed to him by the recipients of his bounty, though he backbites his friends, never goes out of his way to do a generous thing, blinks all occasions of liberality where no credit is to be got, and is actuated solely by the desire to stand well with his own world Everybody feels it horrible to be mean. The man who realises it of himself, and knows that his own is also the world's verdict, suffers the extremity of human de- gradation. And yet this horror and disgrace is so far difficult to account for that no one can say the charge separates him from humanity. It tells something for our aspirations that failure in nobleness should be felt to be so deep a stain when, in fact, it is so common ; when meanness that is, conduct which can only pro- perly be described as mean is to be detected almost universally where the temptation to it has been strong enough. We are not inviting our readers to look among their personal friends for confirmation of our odious assumption. Reading, perhaps more than actual expe- rience, presses this conviction on us ; for all history, especially history treated in modern fashion, betrays this ignominy. What do all these searches into archives 84 MEANNESS. and documents show, but that the high actors in great events were mean ? We knew they were bad in other ways, and we made allowance for temptations ; but now we see they could be mean. What makes the outcry against our poor Elizabeth ? When put to it, she could do a shabby thing a meanness which cannot be ex- plained away. Gloriana might be passionate, jealous, vain, tyrannical, upon provocation but mean! the rays of that bright Occidental star are in danger of being quenched in a fog, for here is a defect we cannot look over. And the biographies of men intellectually great inflict quite as keen wounds on our sensitiveness. The lives of our poets are as depressing reading, in this one respect, as any we know those of our noble writers, our wits, our moralists even. What Dryden, Pope and his set, and all the rest of them names one does not like to set down here could do ! the things they could say of each other ! the little envies, and poor rivalries, and unworthy tricks, and gross flatteries ! And these were men, too, whose power and intellect might have removed them from all shadow of temptation. And, to come to our own time, how few memoirs that are not mere eulogies do not hint at some kindred blot exciting inquiry, something that has to be apologised for and explained, something that offends our moral sense some shirk, some subterfuge, some suspicion of shabbi- ness which looks awkward, to say the least of it ! How few who have been concerned in intricate transactions, involving conflicting interests, high hopes, great risks, strong rivalries, have succeeded in satisfying our high MEANNESS. 85 standard of honour ! As we read, we contrast our purer and exacter sense of fairness with this slippery self- regard ; we feel our own superiority to such temptation, and sigh and wonder as over something unaccountable. For that overriding necessity to accomplish an end, which lies at the bottom of isolated cases of a meanness at odds with the man's general character, is not felt by the reader. There is, in fact, an exaggerated view of things possessing actors in the game, and inducing a mistrust of themselves when the turning-point comes, which makes them victims of a cunning foreign to their ordinaiy nature. If people could trust themselves in critical occasions as they do in their cooler moments, these things would not happen, and the looker-on would not stand at such a uniform advantage over the actor. We none of us know how far our code would relax when everything turns upon it. We are not defending mean- ness ; we are only saying that there are occasions when it is a virtue not to be mean, which in the common course of life it is not. It is sometimes, indeed, the highest heroism. Thus nothing is meaner than for the strong to leave the weak to shift for themselves in a difficulty. Yet when the soldiers in the sinking Birk- enhead suffered the boats to be filled with women and children while they remained where they were, to go down together each man in his place, Sir William Napier with justice pronounces it an act of heroism " unsurpassed in the most noble of the noblest." Here there is no medium between the extremes of praise and blame. We should have called the men base if thev had 86 MEANNESS. deserted the helpless in this extremity ; yet we call them heroes because they resisted the greatest of all temptations. To commit an occasional meanness is not, therefore, necessarily to be mean. When we come to analyse meanness where it tinctures the whole character, we find it to consist in the aim to secure what body and soul desire without adequate payment ; as the mean among the rich and great expect all the privileges of position without fulfilling its obligations. The mean man will lay himself out to get even regard and affection at the cheapest rate, and will please himself with making as little return for kindness, service, and attention as his practised ingenuity can devise ; and this not from mere avarice, but from the satisfaction of making a good bargain. He has a positive pleasure in doing his friendship cheap, and repaying its obligations in that which costs him least. Almost every act of meanness is founded on the notion of some unfair or inadequate exchange giving less than a thing is worth putting off some sham, or what at least is valueless to the giver, as a pretended equivalent ; whether it is gross flattery for solid pudding, professions and promises for deeds, old things for new, gifts of what the owner finds no use for in return for real benefactions, or barren thanks where services should be paid for in a more substantial currency. Thus meanness is under- hand, and has always some private understanding with itself. It is an endeavour to get more for money than money's worth. It is always eluding or evading fit MEANNESS. 87 returns, ever ready with some subterfuge at a pinch ; it hedges, shirks, and is great at excuses ; its gifts are all blown upon. It cannot bear separating what it cares for from its own uses ; and, on the other hand, makes use of every person and influence within its sphere. Meanness will not give respect or even pity gratis, and therefore never shows itself less pleasantly than in face of distress, whether in the shape of fallen greatness or of humbler misery entirely helpless and abject. Thus a mob will hoot at a deposed king, and a judge has been known to play off his wit at a wretched prisoner's expense. It was a like meanness of that appetite-hunting nobleman who, being asked for money by a beggar, on the plea that he was famish- ing with hunger, declared him a happy fellow, and " envied him too much to relieve him." There is always some trick in meanness; things are said and done for something different from their avowed or implied purpose. Avarice is constantly confounded with meanness because it is apt to betray its victims in this direction, but in fact it is an honester thing. It is a question for the casuists which impulse predomi- nated in the case of the great Duke of Marlborough, who, having left off the winner of sixpence after an evening at piquet, insisted with troublesome impor- tunity that his friend should get change for a guinea in order to pay him, on the ground that he wanted the sixpence for his chair home. He carried his point, got the sixpence, and walked home. If he intended to walk from the first, it was mean, but we prefer to sup- 88 MEANNESS. pose that the fatal touch of the silver overcame him on the instant ; the cheat was put, not upon his friend, but himself. It cannot be denied, however, that this fatal fascination of coin on the senses the sordid love of the touch, the chink, and the sight of it has a great deal to do with the more notorious exhibitions of meanness, though it is not of the essence of it. This weakness is compatible with great liberality where the stroke of a pen can remove large sums from the owner's possession. Some people prefer to pay their small debts in cheques rather than specie, on this ground, and as sparing them the lavish sensation of perpetually dip- ping into their purse. It is certain that men may give their thousands and not be safe in this particular. They may reserve only half, or a tenth, or a hundredth of their income for their own expenses, and yet be mean about that hundredth, wanting in proper liber- ality, exacting, grudging a fair and just return for the services of dependants. In serene self-confidence, the profuse giver may be allowing some hidden tendency to get the upper hand; and while he thinks of his large sacrifices, the people about him never knew him so sharp at a bargain, so close-fisted, so vigilant in getting something more than his pennyworth for his penny. Not that this phase of the infirmity is one to excite much disgust ; it is rather an eccentricity than a crime. It is but too natural to give way, to collapse, after some great effort, and we see that some closeness is necessary in all large givers ; " For none can spend like him who learns to spare." MEANNESS. 89 And in this sparing it is so hard to hit the golden mean ! There is no subject in greater favour with satirists than meanness, nor is there a surer card with a certain class of readers ; but it is not really a good subject for delineation in its bare degradation. To say nothing of French writers who delight in a base minuteness of portraiture, Mr Dickens, Mr Trollope, even Thackeray, never keep so near the ground as when drawing some sordid picture of meanness in elaborate detail. It is necessary, too, to make it exaggerated and extreme, to avoid treading on the reader's toes ; and thus it is often a mere caricature of some disease of nature which we ought to shut our eyes upon rather than expose. The real curiosity and interest of the thing, and all its teaching, are to be found in the study of the living subject, when meanness is not seldom modified by counteracting influences into a sort of picturesqueness not incompatible with sympathy, or is painfully start- ling from its discordance wijh our ideas of congruity. The meanness of great wits often seems to imply that some moral obliquity must result (as we see in the case of precocious children) from a want of harmony of parts and an excessive disproportioned development of the brain. There is something awful in the meanness of such minds as Bacon and Goethe, viewed in con- nection with a gigantic intellect, which tempers our disgust with wonder and a cast of tragic pity ; whereas all mere fancy pictures of this pettiest of vices induce in their readers a poor smug complacency. It depends 90 MEANNESS. curiously on the humour of the writer or historian how far this quality tinctures the characters with which he deals. In the grand style we detect very little of what is merely mean ; the personages are great in their errors as well as in their virtues ; but the more familiar searchers into motives have a scent for meanness which amounts to an instinct: and in this department in showing the poor figure our poets sometimes make no one is better at smelling a rat than Dr Johnson, or more unflinching, in a finely candid way, in exposing it. Meanness need not be in the act itself, but may depend on the person that performs it. A poor man, or one of the humblest class, is not mean to claim the reward for a lost article restored ; but we should con- sider a gentleman mean who exacted his rights in this respect. Nor is it mean, as some people think, for servants and officials to receive gratuities for extra services, though some persons shrink from this form of remuneration from mistaken ideas on the subject. Nothing strikes this class as more contemptible than mere grateful thanks when they know that the obliged person is in a position to express his sense of obliga- tion in a more serviceable form, and find him profuse of words in proportion as he is sparing of other things. But, independently of self-interest, no class is so criti- cal and suspicious of meanness as the poor in their estimate of their betters. It naturally enough strikes them as so easy and even delightful to be lavishly generous under circumstances the reverse of their own so broadly differing indeed, that they know nothing MEANNESS. 91 of attendant difficulties, and thus can only attribute the failure of their expectations to some intrinsic poverty, something despicable in the defaulter's nature. It is perhaps a fit, but not very agreeable, conclusion to arrive at, after the consideration of this subject, that people, gentle or simple, are never in such danger of being mean, and never betray such a fellowship with the thing itself, as when they are readiest to charge meanness against others, and occupy themselves most with the tricks and shabbinesses of the people about them or concerned with them. METAPHOKS, THE critics tell us that men were driven to metaphors and similes by the poverty of language, but that the clothing which was first adopted to defend from the cold has since become the especial sign of wealth and affluence. We cannot listen to any ordinary dis- course without being persuaded that, at all events, the first part of the theory holds good. Ordinary people are still driven by their paucity of words to seek for metaphor ; and here we think that poets and other in- genious persons have conferred but a doubtful boon on mankind by their fallacious pictures of luxuriant fancy. If the idea were not prevalent that assertion can always strengthen itself by comparisons, we should not see so many persons hurried into a false position led up to a metaphor which it is assumed will present itself when the moment is urgent, but which will no more come at their call than spirits from the vasty deep. When Shakespeare " Nature's child " too, as we are taught to call him makes a man run off some half- METAPHORS. 93 dozen similes in a breath, on no higher argument than that he is not in fighting mood, as thus ' ' But I am weaker than a woman's tears, Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance. Less valiant than the virgin in the night, And skill-less as unpractised infancy " is he not taking us in ? Might we not expect to find one metaphor to the point where he represents it as easy and natural to use five ? Plain folks might be con- tent to talk plainly but for these tempting, misguiding examples. Nor is it only the poets. Novelists who undertake to represent common homely life are just as treacherous guides. We might count fifty apt meta- phors in as many pages, or even sentences, where Bailie Nicol Jarvie or Andrew Fairservice are the talkers. Mrs Poyser is absolutely brilliant. She "does not ope Her mouth but out there flies a trope ; " and we never exclaim, " Oh, but this is impossible, this outrages nature, and is beyond human faculties to exe- cute impromptu ! " On the contrary, there is such a happy facile air about it all that we are stimulated to try our hand. We have every right to expect to find comparisons as plenty as blackberries } and then there is stammering, floundering, plunging, stumbling, like like, than than, as as, resulting in humiliating failure, or disastrous retreat into the stale or the vulgar. If we would get at the bottom of any phraseology 94 METAPHORS. that strikes us as especially trite, inelegant, unimpres- sive if we would find the reason why some persons' talk wearies us or particularly offends our taste, though there are no flagrant solecisms to account for our dis- like if we would trace out the cause why some people's good common-sense has so little weight, and their point is so conventional we must inquire into their use of metaphor, and we shall almost certainly discover the cause in a habit of using second-hand similes and forced illustrations. We are not saying that every flower of rhetoric should be fresh-gathered from one's own garden, that nobody must venture on a figure that is not struck off by his own brain on the spot, for so much metaphor is wrought into the lan- guage that such a rule would almost reduce us to silence. But this we believe that if we use a metaphor not of our own coinage, it should be as a piece of common property, as likely to be in the hearer's thoughts as in our own. It should be introduced with no airs of in- vention or ownership, but on the understanding that we are selecting from a common stock. The instinct is, we suppose, universal of detecting a metaphor used thus second-hand, though we may never have heard it before, and though it is uttered with an air of possession. How we know this, it is difficult to fathom. Perhaps people who adopt other men's similes use them as demonstration as being endowed with an inherent force of argument ; and they are thus pro- nounced with a positive, satisfied, conclusive air which is offensive. Probably, again, the simile wants the ab- METAPHORS. 95 solute adaptation to the matter in hand which is all- essential ; or something is missing in the telling. In- vention works transparently and visibly. We see, as it were, the processes of that delicate machinery through eye and motion ; we hear it in tone and arti- culation, in those hurries and pauses perceptible to the ear, but too fine for measurement, by which we know that thought is being fitted with words. But, after all, we need not see and hear to be informed on this point. We know as readily when we read a felicitous illus- tration that it was the man's own that it flashed upon him at the right moment, that he then and there saw the affinity of some remote thing with the matter in hand as though we were witness of the feat. We recognise the flash, the hit, the fitness to the mind that struck it off. When Sydney Smith writes to Dean Singleton, " You may as well attempt to poultice the humps off a camel's back as cure mankind of their taste for jobs," we know as well, from the relation of his mind to natural history, that the simile was hit off' fresh and sudden, as when he replied to the child who stroked the turtle's hard shell " to please it," " You might as well stroke the dome of St Paul's to please the Dean and Chapter." But, more than this, we know that a metaphor is original though we know next to nothing of the inventor. When South describes the covetous shopkeeper retailing his goods, " and selling his soul like brown paper into the bargain," there is something in the downright force with which it is put which satisfies us that the thought is his own, as 96 METAPHORS. entirely as though we had personal experience of his wit. In another respect we question the truth of the ablest novelists in this particular. Any one of them would have put this simile of brown paper into the mouth of a grocer instead of a doctor of divinity, and it is thought natural that men's metaphors should be suggested by their craft and daily circumstances. Thus the Bailie, after dangling like the sign of the golden fleece, " my head hanging down on the tae side, and my heels on the tother," likens himself, because he is a weaver, to the yarn-scales in the weigh-house ; and on another occasion he affects to disparage the " nonsense " of gentle blood as " waste threads and thrums." Now, in these instances, we submit that the author is misled. The imagination is, we believe, never so little active as upon a man's daily concerns, among the objects con- nected with the business and drudgery of life. Habit predominates in the scenes which have never been new to him, but always part of himself. It is very natural, when a poet thinks of a weaver, that he should realise all the circumstances of the man's calling ; but the weaver himself exercises his fancy on something more amusing, Observation travels abroad, and sketches on the memory unfamiliar pictures. Business is business. Our homely every-day work is a thing of association, not of fancy. Yet men call it natural where an author always holds in his thoughts the condition and circum- stances of his characters, and talks in their person rather than in his own, because some writers extra- METAPHORS. 97 vagantly err in this particular, and distribute similes at random, making young girls discourse in sea terms, and peasants of affairs of state. We do not observe that Shakespeare makes his people talk in appropriate similes in character, as it may be called. We should not guess the trade of his citizens and subordinates ; they talk as men who have left their calling behind them, and are open to those influences from without which are, we believe, the true storehouse of metaphor Thus the Third Citizen in ' Eichard the Third ' meets his friends in the street, and thinks the times are dangerous. He uses similes that might occur to any- body, not such as prove him to be a scrivener or a shoe- maker, though he may have been either : " When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks ; When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand ; When the sun sets, who does not look for night ? Untimely storms make men expect a dearth. " Dante is fond of taking similes from art, and the right inference from this is the fact that he had friends who were painters not that he painted himself. In Giotto's studio he may have learnt that the painter teaches by example ; so he illustrates his own meaning " Come pintor che con esemplo pinga." Or he has observed the skilled artist's trembling hand, and figures by it how nature comes short of the ideal: " Operando all' artista Ch' ha 1' abito dell' arte e man che trema. " Whenever an author represents a busy, active per- il. G 98 METAPHORS. son, one much absorbed in the daily work of life, as fertile in similes, he seems to us to be investing him with ornaments and graces which are more properly his own. It is not easy for any personal experience to recall cases in point, because, as we have said, so few people are great in metaphor ; but such as do occur to us are those of men with habits of observation, com- bined with much leisure men who are far from care- ful to assign work and duty to every hour of the day. Busy men if they use similes at all, which they often do use other people's. They either adopt proverbial metaphor, or slang metaphor, or what we began by taking exception to, second-hand metaphor, which has pleased themselves so well that they clench arguments with it. No simile is a good one the subject of which has not at some time been studied with an easy dis- engaged mind for its own sake, and occupied the ob- server independently of any use to be made of it. The journalist who likened an officer of the Horse Guards, exposed to the soil and drudgery of camp-service and actual war, to a swan on a turnpike-road, had seen and taken in at leisure the full idea of the majestic bird thus draggled, disgraced, and out of its element. All power of illustration implies a habit of vigilant observation. No person can compare one thing with another, can find the point in common between things dissimilar, who has not seen both. We say this, not forgetting Milton's stupendous metaphors. He literally, we cannot doubt, saw the prodigies his words picture forth ; and, being blind, he may have been driven back to the efforts of METAPHORS. 99 youthful imagination to shape out and embody ancient fable embodiments which were the more fresh and ready to his hand because contemporary nature was shut out, and memory had to do the work of sight. This, at least, may have something to do with his dif- ference from the ordinary system of poets, which is to make us understand great things of which we know- little by things with which we are familiar. A good illustration is a much more usual conversa- tional or rhetorical ornament than a good simile. In fact, it is a much less ambitious decoration, though ordinary talkers are not aware of this ; for whereas they constantly act as though metaphors came by nature, and so lead up to them as making sure they will be there when wanted, a man knows distinctly whether or not he has an illustration to the point ; for an example, in more senses than a moral one, must have some truth in it. It is beyond man's powers to strike off an appropriate anecdote with no foundation of fact, though this power constitutes the charm of Mrs Gamp. Truth may be tampered with to any extent, but a grain of it must be there to start with. That is a happy illustration in the 'Tatler,' of the "modest fel- low's " omnivorous appetite for place : " He is like the young bachelor of arts who came to town recommended to a chaplain's place, but, none being vacant, modestly accepted that of a postillion." Excellent also is that of Pope on the doting politician : " As weak as earnest, and as gravely out As sober Lanesborow dancing in the gout." 100 METAPHOES. But experience, aided by luck, suggested these ; whereas metaphor is the purest piece of invention of which the imagination is capable. Luck, in this case, implies of course wit wit to use the knowledge that intercourse with men gives ; but wit will do nothing in illustrations of this sort without experience. Hence the young can never excel in illustration ; whereas a young genius may be fertile in similes. Indeed, youth is called the time for the greatest redundance of this form of orna- ment, though, where it is so, we doubt whether the similes will be of the most original class. Young writers illustrate by fancy and fable, they borrow from what has struck them as beautiful in their reading, or they invest unknown scenes with beauties, real in themselves, but not characteristic. Macaulay's happy application of a Hindoo fable to the art of literary puf- fing, with which he introduces his review of Eobert Montgomery, is an example of youthful illustration. Men naturally recoil from the trite, whether they know the reason of the recoil or not. Simile is de- lightful, as showing, amongst other things, the spon- taneous flashing character of thought. It is so with us, but we are told that an image never palls on the Ori- ental mind that similes older than the hidden gem, the flower blushing unseen, the upas tree, older than the olive-branch itself, are welcome to them as the freshest novelty. In our half of the world it is cer- tain that those only honestly like worn-out similitudes who use them, and imagine they impart a new mean- ing by their use of them. In conversation, the gift of METAPHORS. 101 metaphor is not only delightful in itself, as throwing a light and charm on the subject, but as a performance ; and this because we know, better than some people's habits might lead one to suppose, that an apt simile new and poetical, or grotesque and startling is about the brightest impromptu achievement that the wit of man can strike out. GAMES, IF games are any sign of mirth, England ought to be called merry England again, for certainly there has been in our time an extraordinary return to play. The young people of to-day abandon themselves to sports unknown to the youth of their elders, who, caught by the infec- tion, may be seen joining, half-ashamed, but not un- amused, in diversions which, in the grave pride of their own earlier years, they would have considered puerile and unworthy. Times go by turns, even in such matters as amusements; and alternate generations are merry over serious things and earnest over trifles. For the first ten or twenty years of the present century, the three staple forms of relaxation seem to have been in full activ- ity. First, there was The Play, par excellence, to which all the world crowded ; next, dancing, which makes so great a figure in the novels of the time, especially in those of Miss Austen, who invests the country-dance with an exquisite social charm, as De Quincey clothes it with a poetical and even mystic significance; and, last GAMES. 103 but not least, cards whether in the institution of whist, with its severe rules, dear to strong heads and mature years, " a clean hearth and the rigour of the game," or, as youth loved them, " in a good noisy round game, with a bit of hot supper after it." All these forms have in them the element of permanence, for they amuse with- out too stringent demands on conscious effort or exer- tion. Thought and motion are at once stimulated and made easy, and diversion comes, in all three cases, with- out direct trouble, and almost involuntarily. For man has the instinct to dance when the fiddle plays ; the drama demands nothing from us but attention, which we can relax at our pleasure ; and cards supply us, for the mere labour of shuffling, with that succession of gentle surprises which is essential to relaxation, and without which it seems as if we could not entertain the notion of pleasure, so entirely is the language for its expression founded on the idea of something fortuitous coming to us, we hardly know how as happy, lucky, fortunate, and so on. Yet, in spite of their adaptation to the theory of amusement, all three sank into temporary eclipse. A dead set was made against them by the re- ligious world. They were denounced, preached against, and eschewed in a great many circles ; and quiet people, even if they did not quite see the force of the objections if they felt that they themselves could dance without any sensation of unhallowed excitement, if they could see a play and feel no harm, and take a hand at whist without giving place to a demon of grasping cupidity yet were willing to own that, in excess, each and all did 104 GAMES. mischief ; that very often they interfered with rational pursuits and sober thought and intelligent conversation, and, above all, that it was not worth while to shock good people's prejudices. Besides, as we have said, amuse- ments too eagerly followed lose their charm. Through whatever cause, a generation came on that rarely danced, that never touched a card, and, if they lived in the country, never saw a play. Quadrilles had taken the place of the genial country-dance ; whist had retreated to the clubs, or belonged exclusively to old ladies who could not acquiesce in the new regime ; and the great actors who had given dignity to the theatre were dead and gone. Youth put on its gravest aspect. Young ladies associated the idea of play with tough piano practice, while the word, with men, meant hard gam- ing or the staking of fortunes. The boys had, indeed, their languid sports, but these made no noise out of the playground, and were never carried on into manhood. Cricket, no doubt, was played, but its empire was local. It was known to a good many mainly as a South-country game which was played in Hampshire on Sunday. Archery was got up in certain state circles, at a pro- digious expense for weapons and uniforms, while the commonalty went to look on ; but it was regarded with suspicion, as amazonian in the ladies and slightly effe- minate in the men. Exercise meant, not the capricious movements of a game, but so many miles out and home again. This was the regulation recipe for health at once of mind and body not a bad one either to those whom it suits. This was the right thing. People played, when GAMES. 105 they did play, apologetically and under a cloud. It was thought boyish, not promising for a man's prospects in life. The vigorous youthful intellect threw itself into party spirit. Freshmen, who would now expend the same amount of zeal on a boat-race or the Oxford and Cambridge cricket-match, committed themselves pre- maturely to a side in politics, or, it may be, purchased a middle life of semi-sceptical indifference by plunging into religious controversy too soon. Of course, youth must be interested in whatever is stirring, and the pas- sion for games may only mean the absence of higher forms of excitement. We are simply concerned with the fact of a change, though both its extent and the rea- sons for it must be open to question ; for English society includes numerous classes, subject indeed in the main to the same influences, affected by the same social habits and fashions of thought, but seldom so affected precisely at the same time. There is a class of games, still partially in vogue, which largely prevailed in this graver epoch. The instinct of play is not to be wholly suppressed ; so, the acknow- ledged modes of amusement being in disgrace, what are called (either seriously or in derision) intellectual games came into favour. These are founded on an absolutely contrary principle to the others throwing the whole labour of production on the brain, and setting it impos- sible tasks on pain of disgraceful exposure. The French and Italians, with their ready wit, pliant minds, and preference for indoor diversions, have always patronised these jeux de societt; but though we have seen our 106 GAMES. quaint English humour come out charmingly in them under favouring circumstances, they can never be a very- popular form of diversion with us. Compulsion seems to contradict the first principles of sport ; so, let the company be ever so carefully chosen, there will always be some unruly spirit, prepared to resist, with resolute obtuseness, any aggression on his readiness, versatility, and invention who will spoil sport by retiring from the contest of wits, dark, sullen, and thundery, scowling defiance from his retreat, or flinging sarcasms at more willing and obedient natures. Yet there is not a little to be said in favour of these exercises, so long as they may be considered hard work, and not the light relaxa- tion they profess to be. They are capital practice for children and young people, and a lesson in good-nature to the seniors of the party. They develop a good deal of cleverness which might not otherwise find an outlet. It is surprising how readily some people respond to the call to be witty, ready, or poetical, at a moment's notice and not the people you would expect. There is, in- deed, a sort of wit that can only act on this compulsion. The quiet people often come out at these times, and strike a balance with their more brilliant neighbours when a pencil is put into their hands, and they have to hit off a couplet, to give a reason, or to find a rhyme. Their faculties are stimulated by the unwonted pressure; an unfamiliar twinkle shows mind at work, and more comes out than anybody gave them credit for ; while the wits of the party, on whom their young friends depended for some display worthy of their powers, not seldom col- GAMES. 107 lapse altogether, or do their best only to find themselves beaten by children and young ladies, and, much worse, by slow fellows whom they look down upon. It is curious to see a certain class of clear heads and keen wits absolutely thrown and incapacitated when forced into these new and uncongenial exercises. It is dislo- cation to them the labour is excruciating. They find it odious and intolerable to have their train of thought broken in upon by other people's absurdities. It is an invasion of their dearest liberties. Addison notices rhyming games as prevalent in country houses, with we could fancy the irritation of a sufferer. He enu- merates the substitutes for wit which dull people invent for themselves, and " which, according to their taste, do the business as well," and speaks slightingly of a great feat in this line which must have cost a clever fellow some pains " a witch's prayer, that fell into verse when it was read either backwards or forward, excepting only that it cursed one way and blessed the other." And yet, as nobody can, without a sense of defeat, fail in what others do well, there is a sort of poetical justice in the whole thing. Those who cannot do what the occa- sion demands from, them learn, in spite of themselves, a lesson of humility and respect, and those who do well earn their laurels and have won a triumph ; for to be wise and witty on another man's text is given to few. However, these contests of wit, though called games, have in them the nature of serious, hard work, and are therefore no characteristic of the theory of amusement current in our time. For, taking all into account, our 108 GAMES. young people, when they are disposed to waste time together in sports, seem to have decided that it is better, as well as a vast deal less trouble, to do silly things than to say them; and hence an apparently deliberate preference for fatuity and unmeaningness in the particular class of games which our youth now play in concert. This shamelessness as to means, so that a certain end is accomplished, betokens, we believe, a self-reliant and conceited age. Our young people in- dulge in fatuity under the shelter of their high preten- sions. Besides, it is a stroke of particular success to get something out of nothing. Laughter is a more clear gain when it comes without cause; and, when neither thought nor skill is required by the avowed occupation, the parties employed have more time to bestow on one another. We are told of circles of more than average intellect and cultivation who think a winter evening well spent in puffing an arrow through a tube; and there are games, fertile in noise and laughter, the whole merit of which seems to lie in the worthlessness of the object, and in the hideous jargon in which their rules and successes are invested. On certain occasions, however, it is desirable to put a com- pany on an absolute level of equality, and for this end foolish games may be more effectual than any other as games of cleverness, wit, or skill, only change the accepted standard, and offer opportunities out of the beaten track. However, both sorts make talk in a wonderful way for those who have talking in them ; though whether it takes the form of that rational con- GAMES. 109 versation which is the ultimate aspiration and supreme good of some well-regulated spirits, is another ques- tion. But who that watches society can fail to see that nonsense has a part to play in the world ? The great point is to give it its right place which is that of the froth on the top of the wave open and apparent, an escape for exuberant animal spirits ; not hiding itself under grave shapes, a flaw at the heart, sapping vital strength, as it may do when too sternly suppressed. Whatever cynicism may have tainted our remarks hitherto must all give way before the outdoor view of the subject, and essentially before Croquet. Simple out-of-door sports, in which the sexes can combine with some equality of skill, must have a good effect in humanising our Cymons and making our young ladies healthy and natural. Sydney Smith liked breakfast- parties, because nobody is conceited before one o'clock in the day; and there is something in the open air quite as opposed to affectation as morning hours. The way in which young men and women meet in lawns and gardens and pleached alleys for a match at mimic cricket is something new. Whether the change is connected with high moral questions whether it has to do with Muscular Christianity, with altered ideas of education, with a relaxation of the old rule of " stick- ing to the last," or with minutiae of costume, male and female, with knickerbockers, hats, and coquettish feathers, and crinoline, and ankles, and strong boots whether it may be traced to remission of maternal severity, or to the gum of an Indian tree, to higher 110 GAMES. notions of the benefits of social intercourse, or to diminished fear of damp feet we need not decide. The fact is so, and that is all that concerns the present subject. To see a party of young people thoroughly in earnest over a game of activity and skill, is as pleasant a recreation as their elders can look for, as well as excellent sport for all most concerned. We need not say that the young ladies have the best of it, and make the show. Stimulated by a noble rivalry, and feeling the credit of their sex at stake, they throw an earnestness and fervour into their strokes, and a vengeance into their reprisals, which, under the favourable circumstances inseparable from the abstract idea of a young lady, cannot but be delightful to the victim while they charm the spectator. The immense amount of comment which the feminine combatants contrive to get up on the progress of this, as indeed of all games, is another of their advantages ; so that, as affording practice in the art of modified public speaking, it is an arena not to be despised. The sort of accuracy required in defin- ing the nicety of a hit is a lesson in expression, while the alternations of the game awaken a series of rapid emotions most favourable to eloquence. Tender sym- pathy, poignant self-reproach, courageous self-assertion, covert irony, vehement vituperation all ending in the sublime despair of failure or in transports of success produce a rhetorical tout ensemble which fills their male hearers with wonder and envy, and proves what a school for elocution is the open air, encouraging as it does the use of action, and rendering pardonable, be- GAMES. Ill cause necessary, that elevation of tone without which passion and enthusiasm cannot express themselves. Thus, the advocates of conversation as the only rational amusement are silenced by demonstration. For one person who can talk well without a stimulant, a hundred can be eloquent with one, always supposing a suitable auditory ; and games furnish just the motive power that so many minds are without. Every stroke furnishes a subject, every turn of a ball or a card sug- gests a theme, and, if the players are of a didactic turn, a moral and an application. They provide a series of beginnings, where a beginning is the only difficulty. The novelty which all crave for, and which few minds can conjure out of their own stores, comes through some outward source ; and that the source and the event are alike utterly trivial may make it the more welcome from two different and opposite causes either as being essentially more congenial to a vacant mind which does not know what great interests mean, or as standing in stronger contrast with serious occupations, and so offering the more effectual relaxation to a fatigued attention. TASTE, THEKE are many good things of which we are only re- minded by the want of them, and amongst these is Taste. If we are led to speculate on what constitutes good taste, it is certain that our attention has first been called to some case of bad taste. People might live in what is called an atmosphere of refinement without being conscious of the purifying processes of discrimi- nation and selection constantly at work. It is when the serenity of the charmed air is disturbed that they perceive to what principle they have been indebted for the genial calm. However, no circle is really refined enough to be safe from the shocks and aggressions of bad taste ; and even if private and domestic life is so guarded as to offer no flagrant examples, the press in a free country will always keep the discerning, critical faculty in exercise. In fact, it is hardly a reproach to the press to say that it teems with instances of egre- gious bad taste, for, as men are made, this is an inevit- able penalty of activity of thought and freedom of ex- TASTE. 113 pression. Certain it is that every newspaper offers some striking illustration of bad taste of opinion that is ren- dered needlessly offensive by this evil influence, of per- sonalities which have their source from this rather than direct malice. And if genius itself is not safe from this infirmity, and is subject to occasional lapses as a conse- quence of being carried away by the imagination, how can it be otherwise where the commonplace business of the world is discussed under the necessity, before all things, of arresting attention ? It is when our feelings, principles, or predilections receive some rub from bad taste, when we are con- scious of gratuitous and undesigned insult, that we are led to consider what taste is how far it is a matter of mental constitution or moral training. Judging of the metaphor by its original meaning and use, we might incline to the first notion, and assume that people are born with good or bad taste ; for even the author of ' Modern Painters ' was willing, in his days of toleration, to admit that a false verdict of the palate might be without moral delinquency, though we can scarcely hope for so lenient a sentence from his ma- turer judgment, or that a man can now prefer mutton to beef providing Mr Euskin's own taste has arrived at a contrary decision without incurring the charge of " baseness." And, indeed, all must own that even the material taste may be trained and refined : the ascetic Jeremy Taylor claims for the scholar a more delicate cuisine than is supplied by the soppets and gobbets of II. H 114 TASTE. the peasant ; and intellectual taste, if subject to influ- ence at all, must be subject to moral influence and control. Though taste can only be seen in its working though it is how people do things, and not why they do them yet the votaries of good taste who make effect their final test and appeal, still claim a moral ground for their preference of smoothness and polish; only they feel themselves better judges of results than their causes, of the manner than of the heart. And if their decision of what constitutes the really graceful and beautiful were infallible, it would indeed matter very little whether they pronounced on actions or motives. A certain mar&hale of the old regime, remarkable for this nicety of observation, avowedly formed all her opinions of men and their doings from this point of good taste, " and, strange to say, this frivolous mode of judging always proved correct." She argued that a person who has opportunities of seeing what is elegant and what is not, and who adopts any mode contrary to the tone of good society, must be destitute of delicacy. Nor was she afraid of forcing her argument to its utmost limits. A discussion being raised as to the composition of certain prayers which offended her taste, it was pleaded that the Divine Being would pay no regard to the wording, but look only at the heart. " Oh, inadame," she exclaimed, " do not take such a notion as that into your head ! " To her it was flat heresy, as confining the sense of beauty and fitness to man alone. The view is, that good thoughts must TASTE. 115 result in good expression, and that every external roughness must have an immoral root. But this is enthusiasm. Mortal man has not an organisation deli- cate enough implicitly to trust his perceptions on this point. A society which judges of things by their out- sides will in fact soon be hollow, superficial, and un- natural. Its maxims may be true, but they do not teach truth. Thus it is very true " that evil-speaking spoils the manners of a woman," and therefore is an objectionable habit; but if the truth went no deeper, some attempt would be made to indulge the practice by a side-wind, and still evade the penalty to smile and smile, and slander by some method that did not damage the play of features. Good taste is both a positive and a relative thing. The amiable marfahale took the positive view, but, popularly considered, it is relative. Thus no one founds his objection to irreverence in the abstract on the ground of its being bad taste ; but we say it is bad taste (among other things) to be irreverent in the com- pany of persons of reverential minds. It is bad taste to wound sensibilities unnecessarily, to put timidity to the blush ; so that what, in this sense, is permissible in one circle or society is bad taste in another. The classes below us have certain ideas of taste stricter than our own, which we might infringe without being in the least aware of it, while, on the other hand, many of our scruples would appear to them fastidious and fantastic. And classes nearer to one another have all 116 TASTE. certain standards of their own, which others criticise. Thus literary, scientific, professional sets are constantly charged with " talking shop," which means narrowness and egotism in fact, bad taste. In this way bad taste is a main instrument of separation and division. Minds of average delicacy do not infringe the conven- tional standard with which they are familiar, but if of no more than the average they certainly will offend the taste of others under new circumstances. It needs an exquisite taste, fine both by nature and education, to know the right thing to do and to be in all companies. Semi - cultivation, ignorance not recognised as ignor- ance, and standards of taste founded on inferior models, furnish the field for satires on manners. The truest representatives of bad taste are, however, those who degrade the tone of their own circle, whether it be high or low, either in grace of manner or refinement of mind ; only, of course, the lower we go, the more violent and excessive are the aberrations. Thus the perceptions of a whole class must have sunk low to produce Mr Trollope's Moulder, and the depths of his outrages against taste, both positive and relative. It needs certain powers considerable force and clever- ness indeed to exceed in bad taste. All persons of marked vulgarity are clever. Mediocrity is mediocrity in what we don't like as well as in what we do ; while a just consciousness of talent adds recklessness to want of perception. But the true arena of bad taste is the jocose element. TASTE. 117 What is grave bad taste to facetious bad taste ? How terrible some people are in their jokes ! And it need not be a bad joke either, to be in bad taste. It is not because the jester is devoid of humour, but because, in his pursuit of it, every consideration of time and place is disregarded, till in fact an offensive inappropriate- ness becomes the very crown of the jest. There are persons who affect in their ordinary manner an ultra- refinement, whose jest yet errs in this direction. Fun is, with them, laying aside their finery and something else as well ; and fun in bad taste lowers the tone of all who enter into it out of all proportion with graver errors. Few things are more important to the young than the sort of wit under which their sense of humour is developed. Without such early initiation while the mind is docile and pliable, many men never catch the point of a joke all their lives. Under rude, finical, or coarse training, the perception may be irreparably damaged, and the victim never be able to distinguish a good thing from a bad ; while a relish and appreciation for refined and delicate humour acquired not only from books though that too is important but from some living genial master of the art, opens the mind and educates the feeling and intellect in a way attainable through no other means. Wit and even the percep- tion of wit is not spontaneous in most men. It must be taught by example, and humour is such a wild dis- cursive thing that to keep it always within bounds is a supreme achievement of good taste. All of us may 118 TASTE. hope, by instinctive caution by a constant sacrifice of impulse to prudence not to offend taste or feeling. But to exercise your gifts, to give them free and joyous play, to assume a careless hilarity, to infuse spirit by your own spirit, to indulge sudden freaks of fancy, to play with every one's peculiarities, to reach the verge and never pass it, to be daring and yet tender, wild and yet discreet in the flush of excitement, in the exuber- ance of invention, never to say a thing better not said to exercise always a nice and true discrimination, to suppress the unseasonable witticism, to quench the sudden flash, to be witty and wise, to observe person, time, and place with an exact propriety, this is to have good taste in its fullest extent ; and, under such an influence, thought enlarges its range, and conversa- tion acquires a point, a spirit, and a grace attainable through no other agency. Good taste is the " luminous shadow " of all the virtues. It is social discretion, it is intellectual kind- ness, it is external modesty and propriety, it is apparent unselfishness. It wounds no feelings, it infringes on no decorums, it respects all scruples. A man thus gifted, even though he be not a wit, spreads a genial influence about him from the trust he inspires. The stiff man can unbend, the cold can thaw, the fastidious can re- pose on him. No one is committed to more than he chooses no ungenerous use is made of an unusual or transient impulse. Good taste is practical knowledge of character ; it is perception of the distinctive points TASTE. 119 of every occasion ; and thus it reconciles and harmonises where bad taste perpetuates differences and necessitates separations. And yet we by no means wish to make good taste a synonym either for virtue or intellect it is rather that quality which sets off both at their best. It is an affair, in some degree, of social training, and is one aspect of knowledge of the. world. Those who are little in general society, who confine themselves to family intercourse or to that of a set or clique what- ever the position, whatever the intellectual or moral pretensions of that clique are almost sure to fail in it in new scenes. All persons of a single idea, engrossed by one object, are perpetually infringing on the rules of good taste. If they are religious, they are pragmati- cal and intolerant, regardless of sensibilities. If they are useful, they do their work with unnecessary fuss. If they are learned, or deep, or clever, they make these good gifts unpopular. If they are merry, we are kept on thorns ; if they are grave, they are a check and restraint. They fail in every social crisis. In every difficulty they take the wrong way. They are forward when they ought to be retiring, and their diffidence is constantly misplaced. There is no knowing where such people are to what lengths an emergency or excited spirits will drive them. It is the cause of half the seeming injustice of society. The man of bad taste cannot comprehend why things are not tolerated in him which are allowed in others. He is the last to see that the presence or absence of a correct taste makes the 120 TASTE. same practice or amusement agreeable or repugnant that nothing can be judged fairly without taking the manner of doing it into consideration. He is therefore for ever grumbling at the inconsistencies and partiali- ties of mankind. The fact is, every hinge with some people grates and creaks, at each turn jarring on sensi- tive nerves ; while good taste is the oil which keeps the machinery of society, with the least wear and tear, noiselessly and profitably at work. SMALL ECONOMIES. BECAUSE men are fallible, and in their nature imper- fect, it seems to be a sort of fatal presumption in any individual man to endeavour after an absolute perfec- tion and completeness in his surroundings. Experience warns us that something about the grandest and the greatest should confess a fellowship with this inherent- shortcoming ; and though an habitual self-restraint in expense is no doubt the best evidence of this sympathy, perhaps it is seen oftenest in certain capricious forms of thrift. From the king on his throne to the humblest of his subjects, we have therefore learnt to regard a certain parsimony, and often an unreasonable parsi- mony, on some one point or other, as a kind of charm a guarantee more to feeling than to reason for the stability of what is showy or pretentious in state or circumstances. Thus the world of observers, on the occasion of the Prince's marriage and the procession that preceded it, exclaimed against the royal equipages as old, shabby, and utterly out of keeping with the 122 SMALL ECONOMIES. splendour of the occasion, and the prodigious sums spent to do it honour ; but, according to our view, this unseasonable economy, this incompleteness, might be accepted as a good omen, inspiring confidence in the national future and in the happiness of the young people themselves. We did not pretend to be wholly without flaw ; we were not presuming to be perfect. It is a danger, we think, of high civilisation, that it aspires to this perfection in its appointments. There are more people now than probably there ever were before with means small in proportion to their taste and perception of elegance and refinement more people who crave for finish and completeness as opposed to mere display, and who argue that this desire is a just and proper one. And this wish is so plausible that, if those who aim at irreproachable completeness would consent to fix their general standard lower than their fortune might war- rant, it would seem as if nothing could be advanced against its prudence. But nobody can make allowance enough ; and, in fact, the sacrifice at starting would, in their eyes, justify such a degree of finish in the humble line to which they limited themselves that the danger would be by no means averted. The bold de- termination to overrule a condition of our being would still excite our anxiety for them. We read somewhere the other day of a young Parisian couple who, being of one mind in their longing to attain to this complete- ness, prudently limited their field for the exercise of taste to a flat of three rooms two for reception, and a bedroom. Being without children, and in receipt of SMALL ECONOMIES. 123 150,000 francs a-year, they hoped to be able to manage. They considered that, being thus moderate in their first plan, they need not economise in dress or furniture, but might work out an idea, and have flowers, and furniture, and hangings, and costume on the scale of finish and consistency which their delicacy of perception dictated. But it did not do ; in a year or two the husband had to renounce his political principles, which were only less dear to him than his taste, and accept a place under the Government which he had hitherto denounced and ridiculed. In truth, consistency, completeness, perfect order, constitute the dearest luxury there is. People and nations may indulge in one-sided extravagance with a sort of shuffling impunity, if there is the set-off of meanness and parsimony somewhere, and a contrast in the way of beggarly defect to all this show and glitter. In Mexico, for example, we have been told that pearls and diamonds used to be at least as much necessaries of life as shoes and stockings; and though this sounds to us like reckless extravagance, people contrived to make both ends meet by doing with- out what we consider indispensable conditions of civi- lised life. A peasantry can deck themselves in other- wise unattainable finery if they eat black bread and never touch butcher-meat. But none of us can have everything, in whatever scale of living we fix ourselves. In theory, of course, we can ; but we appeal to experi- ence. Does anybody know a household, a family, an individual point device, with all belongings in absolute 124 SMALL ECONOMIES. conformity to an ideal, or even making this sort of per- fectness a deliberate aim, where the scale of living, and the dinners, and the furnishings, and the attend- ance, and the dress are all in correct harmony where criticism can fix on no weak spot, and the director and presiding genius of all this not out at elbows ; not, indeed, in his coat, but in his affairs ? This is the meaning to us of Aladdin's lamp. He was safe with the palladium of one shabby blemish. He was not perfect people could pick a hole; and it is the pre- sumptuous ambition to feel ourselves beyond the reach of this hole-picking that so often comes to grief. But mere disorder and incongruity the hut cheek by jowl with the palace are barbarisms not to be tolerated. It is the boast of civilisation that one part of us does not shame the other as it used to do, and that rude show and glitter are superseded by a modest consistency. Our carriages are no longer gilded, but they hang better than they did. We have put down six horses, but we have mended our roads, and two do the work with more ease. The flaring, glaring contrasts which we read of are impossible now ; finish steals upon us, whether we will or no. All of us must sub- mit to the ever-running stream of expense necessary to the keeping up of a certain standard of propriety, and to our own self-respect. But we are still well pleased to trace in persons we care for, and in the stability of whose fortunes we take an interest, an occasional re- sistance to this necessity some sign of misgiving whether they have really a right to have everything SMALL ECONOMIES. 125 handsome and irreproachable about them, revealing itself through some trick and habit of saving some parsimony of their nature struggling and successfully asserting itself against society's imperious demand for keeping. We are glad to see the master of a house conspicuous for its luxurious comfort in a coat or hat that we should be ashamed to wear, to see him hoard- ing ends of string, careful of half-sheets of paper, and thinking twice about writing a letter, mindful of the penny stamp. It is penny wise, no doubt, but there is evidence in the gentle folly of a certain humility at heart. His prosperity does not lord it over us with the same swing as before; his great expense seems more public- spirited not so much personal luxury as a benefaction to society. We gather from trifling indications of this sort that some people are impelled to a lavish outlay by other motives than mere self-indulgence. From the interest they take and the time they will spend in minute economies, it is even possible that saving may be more to their taste than the profusion that flames before the world. In fact, we do see men recklessly making away with large sums, and finding to all appearance little or no enjoyment in it, but looking more at their ease and in better spirits over some small thrift of their own devising, in putting themselves to petty shifts, doing without some neces- sary, acting in grave earnest a little farce of rigid economy. People of this temper lavish though they may often show themselves are, we are disposed to think, more independent of money, sit looser of the 126 SMALL ECONOMIES. show that surrounds them, than where there is the jealous demand for consistency. In their counsels with self there are not so many things that they must have irrespective of the means to obtain them. Their little displays of paltry or careless parsimony we accept as a confession that nothing is a man's own by in- alienable right. The one shabbiness, whatever it may be, is a drop in pretension, an acknowledgment that there is no law of nature requiring him to illustrate a certain dignified scale of living. If he wears a thread- bare coat, no principle is outraged by his also eating an ill-cooked dinner, riding an ill-kept horse, taking his place in a shambling equipage, or using delf instead of china. The danger of this love of finish is that it is insinuat- ing, and can put a good moral face upon its claims. It is so easy to prove to ourself that it is a duty to be orderly ; it is so easy to think we have a right to this modest degree of the good things of this life ! We see that grandeur and show are for other people, not for us ; but simple propriety that is another thing alto- gether. This sounds so true ! only the exactions of simple propriety are, unfortunately, apt to become ex- orbitant. What we say is, that perfect harmony in all our appointments, harmony between one thing and another, and harmony from year's end to year's end perpetual finish, perpetual repair, perpetual freshness is the privilege, not exclusively of the rich, but of no one. The thing is not made for man ; it does not be- long to this world ; and people who think it does, and SMALL ECONOMIES. 127 treat it as a necessity, too often get into trouble. And while absolute perfection is unattainable, all approaches to it are a luxury reserved for the rich, because, as we have said, finish costs so much. In fact, we may say that half of every large fortune goes in it in having everything about an establishment just a little more exact and correct than other people, bought at different shops, and made by experter hands ; though the differ- ence may be only discernible to cultivated tastes. All this points to one of the especial temptations of our time. It was never so great a trial as it is now to live upon a small income. It was never so essential that, when persons meet in society, a certain standard should be reached by all indiscriminately, and that nothing should allow the bystander to distinguish at a glance the owner of three thousand a-year from him or her of three hundred ; and the general eye was never in so cultivated a state as in our day for the detection of minute but telling distinctions. Hence it is clear that there was never a more trying time for good tastes and slender purses. There are two deliberate ways of honestly meeting the predicament two courses, each of which is founded on principle. The taste which cannot indulge its delicacy of perception may sulk, may resign society altogether, rather than make an awkward or mean appearance in it, preferring a negative existence to the sacrifice of its ideal Or, on the other hand, it may submit to circumstances in a wholesale sort of way, defy and blunt its own perceptions, resolutely lower its demands, and put up with things which it 128 SMALL ECONOMIES. set out by pronouncing unendurable, without any at- tempt to screen, modify, or mend them. Both courses have their dangers ; the plunge out of fastidiousness into indifference to appearances certainly has. It needs a strong character for a man to hold his own under the trial. Sydney Smith with a strong relish for the elegancies of life, though none of the slavery to them which is our present topic fresh from the luxurious finish of the highest London society, was equal to it. He must, before all things, lead a vigorous life enjoy himself, and let others enjoy him. If he could not have society under the conditions of his richer friends, he must lower his state to his fortunes. Bather than sit at home, he set up a " Noah's ark " for his family ; rather than see no company, he trained a village girl for his butler ; rather than endure the dimness of sparse but creditable lights, he invented a tallow illumination. But this energy of self- adaptation to circumstances is only fitted for particular temperaments and exceptional powers. There are comparatively few who can sustain intact, under the adversity of mean or disorderly sur- roundings, the manners, bearing, and other qualities which go to make a gentleman ; and though, of the two, it is better to be a man than a gentleman and the poor sullen victim to his niceness runs a chance of being narrowed and soured even out of his humanity yet no person ought voluntarily to lower his personal standard of refinement, or blindly to incur any alarming risk of doing so. What average people must do in the diffi- culty of an income altogether below their estimate of SMALL ECONOMIES. 129 what is necessary for a graceful, harmonious, and de- corous existence, is to resign themselves to a perpetual state of compromise never giving in or relinquishing appearances altogether, but submitting to a good many minor impossibilities, putting up with many (in theory) intolerable solecisms and shortcomings, and reconciling self-respect, which must never be seriously outraged, to a good many minor rubs and snubs. It is better, in these perplexing conditions, to have no fixed rules of action, or at least they must be subject to innumerable exceptions such rules, we mean, as that it is the best economy, in the end, to get good things, that it is wise to go to the best shops, that an ill-made thing has no wear in it. Not that these axioms are not true in the sense in which they are put ; but they are not true in the sense in which they are understood, and these pieces of costly cheapness and economy are all sugges- tive of further expense, and all make the small income appear contemptibly smaller. We suspect that rules about spending money well are expensive things unless they are the vaguest gener- alities, which rules about saving mostly are ; for a practical rule of action must have an imposing sound with it to appeal to our dignity, while the spirit of working economy is often not reasonable on the sur- face, but is inconsistent, and given to extremes and perturbations. The economy that sustains families and households, and protects them from disaster and startling vicissitudes, has often, perhaps generally, some- thing vexing and galling in it, and in details unreason- II. I 130 SMALL ECONOMIES. able. In fact, careful thrift has so little attraction in it, as compared to easy spending, that it can only com- mend itself to practice by means of hobbies. It must infuse into its workings something of the spirit of a collector and of the ardour of a pursuit. People who are only concerned in the sacrifices and inconveniences involved, have little sympathy either with the labour or its results ; but for the man who warms to the work, small savings acquire an interest, as well as an adven- titious value from classification and from their history. They constitute a pecuniary hortus siccus, and repre- sent a series of successes and conquests over difficulty. Nobody but the saver himself can enjoy the acts and processes of saving in this way ; but our theory of luck as attaching even to the eccentricities of this habit may perhaps inspire the sensitive observer or sufferer with at least a philosophical resignation, if not a positive hopeful content. CLEYER CHILDREN, ANY one who has made acquaintance with ' Pet Mar- jorie ' must have speculated on what clever children are made of All people, indeed, who have children of their own can recall reflections on this subject. A first child always seems clever, from the natural consequence of exclusive intercourse with elders infecting it with grown- up manners and ways of thinking ; and as the parental observer sees dawning thought shine through those infantile features as he hears "Imperfect words with childish trips, Half unpronounced, slide through the infant lips, Driving dumb silence from the portal door, Where he had mutely sat two years before " these broken utterances, expressing mind at work and observation alive, inevitably take him by surprise. He had a different notion of children which means, with the majority, no notion at all. He had heard of amus- ing and thoughtful and wonderful children, but this evidence of mind struggling with difficulties and over- 132 CLEVEK CHILDREN. coming them, this power of entering into others' ideas and catching a meaning, this presence of soul, is some- thing when it comes to the point unexpected. That there should be anything in common between us and this mannikin, that we can exchange thoughts and re- ceive impressions through the medium of his " mock apparel " of language, is to the proud parent of the first- born child an ever-fresh marvel, a delightful surprise. It is impossible not to form hopes for the future out of anything so exceptional and extraordinary as are these flashes of intelligence to admiring inexperience. But the practice of observation teaches us to temper all anticipation. If nurses and mothers, in the course of ages, shall ever attain to habits of scientific inquiry, and note down for future nurses and mothers the results each of her own personal experience, the world will arrive at some certainty on points of this nature. Then it will be able to pronounce what sort of sharpness has promise in it, and what other sort is a flash in the pan a mere indication of machinery out of order, or of some error of management. In default of this absolute knowledge, we must fain submit to every form of blunder and dis- appointment; we can foresee no chance of either system or progress ; each person will go on trusting theories formed at hap-hazard on the basis of his own slender experience. The man whose clever child grows up stupid will argue against precocity ; another, who has watched the gradual unfolding of powers which started by being remarkable, will declare that in all things intellect as well as feeling the boy is father to the man. CLEVER CHILDREN. 133 It is very true that, looking back, we do see the germ of the man in the child we see that he has been the same all through. But the question is, What part of him continues the same ? Is it power, or is it character ? Do his good qualities or his deficiencies determine the course of mind and habit ? Almost all childish clever- ness of the conspicuous sort is associated with discre- pancies with an extreme inequality of faculties. A great many things seem very clever in children, which, if the child were only a little cleverer, he would not say or do. Thus caution and judgment are wanting in all talkative children, who say whatever comes uppermost; yet undoubtedly a quick child without judgment passes for a cleverer child because of the want ; while a man without judgment is not a man at all Experience shows that the points which especially attract notice as proofs of cleverness in children, and which make them remark- able, often develop in after days into their least valuable qualities, or into mere peculiarities. The things are the same, but they strike us differently. We expect a child to be incomplete, and estimate him by the scale of his best points ; but when he is grown a man, we take all defects severely into account, and measure the whole man by them. We judge him then, not by what he can do, but by what he is. Take a little girl who charms us by her choice of topics or her savoirfaire; she grows up into conventionalism or love of management, and we are disappointed. But, in fact, it has been the same thing throughout ; only it is delightful to see a mere baby act the woman and order us about, while it is irksome 134 CLEVER CHILDREN. to see a woman a mere reflection of other people's man- ners, or to feel her interference with our social freedom. A child should be a child. All premature manhood or womanhood tells ill for the future, especially if any strain is put upon this precocity. Is there any instance of a man showing himself a man at both ends of his life ? There is a good serviceable cleverness which it is well to start in life with ; but eyes quick to see, memory apt to retain, thought seeking for subject-matter, and a general appetite for knowledge, may exist without any dazzling show, especially if there is reflection. It is the cleverness which breaks into precocious expression, which perhaps asks wonderful questions, and is im- patient of thinking anything out, -that experience has its doubts and misgivings about. Wherever a child may be said to think through its tongue, there will be weak- ness or failure of some sort in after life. In the case of Pet Marjorie, she had a further instrument unfamiliar to infancy. She could use her pen in a very surprising manner. Her diary is about as clever a thing as we know of, but we think it a cleverness which would not have lasted. In her case there was probably brain-ex- citement. From whatever cause, in her eagerness to" express, and her instinctive readiness in uttering, every thought as it arose, we think that we detect a want of reserve and discretion, amounting to defect of judgment. So many thousands of 'Pet Marjorie' have been absorbed by the reading world that we are almost afraid to quote from the book, or to assume any one to be ignorant of the name and qualities of this somewhile favourite and CLEVER CHILDREN. 135 darling of Sir Walter Scott, who lived out her brilliant little life some sixty years ago, and died at eight years old. Yet we will venture on a sentence or two. Here is an entry written at five, or at most six, years old : " The day of my existence here has been delightful and enchanting. On Saturday I expected no less than three well-made Bucks, the names of whom is here ad- vertised Mr Geo. Crakey [Craigie], and Wm. Keith and Jn. Keith : the first is the funniest of every one of them. Mr Crakey and I walked to Crakyhall hand in hand, in Innocence and matitation sweet, thinking on the kind love which flows in our tender-hearted mind, which is overflowing with majestic pleasure. No one was ever so polite to me in the hole state of my existence. Mr Crakey, you must know, is a great Buck, and pretty good-looking." She often enlarges on her love of the country, which is " extremely pleasant to me by the companie of swine, geese, cocks, &c., and they are the delight of my soul [as also at Kavelsten where] I am enjoying nature's fresh air. The birds are singing sweetly the calf doth frisk, and nature shows her glorious face." Here is her feeling on the subject of arithmetic, ex- pressed with an emphasis which betrays rather too free an association with the " Bucks : " " I am now going to tell you of the horrible and wretched plaege [plague] that my multiplication gives me; you can't conceive it. The most devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself can't endure." 136 CLEVER CHILDREN. Yet this tone by no means implies any neglect in her religious education. We find her up in denominations : " An Annibaptist is a thing I am not a member of I am a Pisklepan [Episcopalian] just now, and a Prisbe- teran at Kirkaldy, my native town." The child could write poetry too, which makes very good reading ; could declaim Shakespeare with dramatic power; could criticise the books she read a very mis- cellaneous list and find " the ' Newgate Calendar ' a very instructive book ; " and, after all, talk better than she could do anything else. In fact, there was nothing in her whole being unexpressed. Her knowledge and her ignorance are all declared. She admits of no further search ; we cannot but feel that there is too much per- formance to allow of the idea of promise. Perhaps there was never a more wonderful child than Hartley Coleridge a poet in himself and a cause of poetry in others a very fount of inspiration. He was the child "whose fancies from afar were brought ;" he was "the best philosopher, the little child;" he was the " little actor," for ever " conning different parts ; " he was the poet in arms who, on first sight of London lamps, cried to his mother " Now I know what the stars are; they are lamps that have been good upon earth, and have gone up into heaven." He was the meta- physician of five years old, tormented by Kant's great and inexplicable mystery, that a man should be his own subject and object ; so that, when called for by name, fye inquired which Hartley was wanted, for " there's a deal of Hartleys ; there's Picture-Hartley " CLEVEK CHILDKEN. 137 (alluding to his portrait), "and Shadow-Hartley, and there's Echo-Hartley, and there's Catch-me-fast-Hart- ley," seizing, as he spoke, one arm with the hand of the other. He was the child of six who lived in a dream of invention, and chalked out a political world of his own. He was the child of seven who wrote a tragedy, in which he said his father's was the only bad line. He was the child of such absolute confidence in him- self that he planned a pantomime, of which story, per- sons, and machinery were to be all constructed by him- self, and in all things were to rival the magic of the London boards. It is true that he was a wonderful child, great in hereditary powers; but even here no little of the wonder is due to his leading deficiency ; that defect of reason which left him a slave to his imagination, which for ever confounded fancy with reality, which made him through life form the boldest plans, and never fulfil scarcely ever begin one of them. It was the very same deficiency which set off the glory of his childhood by removing all restraints to self-exhibition, and allowing free play to childish eloquence, that in the end made his life a miserable failure, and his genius a thing only to point a moral. Very reasonable children can hardly, one would think, be show ones. They may have the thoughts of clever children, but along with these they have a sense that they are not things to be said. They are withheld by reserve or discretion, and an extreme dread of appear- ing foolish and committing themselves. However, pre- mature judgment has its dangers, like over-imagina- 138 CLEVER CHILDREN. tion. There never were children more profoundly and demurely wise, more thoughtfully occupied in the study of mankind, than the little Brontes ; but practical wisdom was precisely the quality that did not last, and none of them were qualified to live in the world. Think of a child of four, " Acton Bell," who, on being asked what she most wanted, could reply, " Age and experience !" And the others in the same strain : " What," the boy is asked, " is the best way of know- ing the differences between the intellects of men and women ?" He answers, " By considering the difference between them as to their bodies." " What " (to Char- lotte) " is the best book in the world ?" " The Bible." " What the next best?" "The Book of Nature." To another, "What is the best education for a woman?" " That," replies the premature sage, " which will make her rule her house well." These replies are from chil- dren under ten years old, who all more or less made a failure of life, on which they could moralise so well. Where distinguished people record their own memo- ries of childhood, they tell us nothing of witty sayings or of cleverness in action, or only recall them with sensitive disgust. It is in their brooding, unuttered thoughts that they see the germ of their present selves; and those scenes and associations are dearest which connect the silent, unformed, yearning thought of infancy with present mature achievement. Words- worth likes to picture himself " standing alone beneath the sky," drinking in all the " beauty and the fear" of the wild solitudes of his birthplace ; or, free even from CLEVER CHILDREN. 139 the trammels of clothing, escaping, a "naked little savage, to sport in the thunder-shower," or making a playmate of the river Derwent : " Oh, many a time have I, a five years child, In a small mill-race severed from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer's day ; Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again, Alternate, all a summer's day." Charles Lamb does not remember asking questions, but settling things for himself. Thus he says of the Bencher Mingay with the iron hand : "He had lost his right hand by some accident, and sup- plied it with a grappling-hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute before I was old enough to reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking person ; and I recon- ciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power somewhat like the horns in the forehead of Michael Angelo's 'Moses.'" It is the same writer that says, "Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old mansion ; better if un- or partially occupied, peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the county and justices of the quorum," as furnishing food for solitary musing. His childish plea- sures were unexpressed by words, and were probably beyond his then powers of utterance, as where he so beautifully recalls the delicious pains of infantile anti- cipation before the curtain draws up and reveals Perse- polis and Artaxerxes gorgeous princesses and burning 140 CLEVER CHILDREN. suns. If he had been fluent in speech, his remem- brances would not have been so vivid. Our view is, that in much talking and clever talking at the time, especially if it involve effort, the essence exhales, and true culture of mind those hidden underground pro- cesses by which seed turns to fruit and flower is hindered. However, it is a subject on which no one can safely dogmatise. From what we recollect, Madame de Stael was a talker, and a brilliant talker, all her days ; but our theories, such as they are, are formed upon Brit- ish subjects, not on French men or women, who say of themselves, " We are not born young ; we become so." There used to be a fallacy current with parents, that clever children ought to be the better behaved for their advantages. The view can be put into a syllogism, so as at least to puzzle infant delinquents, yet is pretty uniformly contradicted by experience, and, indeed, is clearly founded on error. Nothing is so trying to the propriety and sanity of any mind as a want of propor- tion in its powers. It is this that makes genius eccen- tric, and every gifted person gifted, that is, with some original qualities in excess hard both for himself and others to manage. And if grown-up cleverness cannot conduct itself up to the world's standard of decorum, what allowance ought we not to make for children, with all their little faculties at sixes and sevens, alter- nate man and baby, and conscience upset or checked in its growth by the undue development of mere intel- lect ! Little children of this sort can at one time be too good to live, and in another day or month up to all CLEVER CHILDREN. 141 sorts of mischief sly, grotesque, unaccountable mis- chief which baffles their elders and throws their parents into momentary despair. It may only be that they have not yet come to their conscience ; human conduct has not ceased to be a mere drama to the morbidly active fancy in which the child acts different parts by turns. Clever children need lenient judges, and do not always find them. When Marjorie has been naughty, she writes in her journal: " My religion is greatly falling off, because I don't pray with so much attention when I am saying my prayers, and my character is lost among the Braehead people. I hope I will be religious again ; but as for regaining my character, I despare for it." And perhaps her despair had some reason, for there would be sure to be some people at Braehead ten times more shocked at her naughtiness than at that of any ordinary child that nobody made any fuss about. Our argument does not go against what we believe to be the truth, that clever men and women have been clever children ; it is only that theirs is the cleverness which, as a rule, furnishes fewest anecdotes, which makes least show, which leaves boys essentially boys often mere cubs not at all like men. To children of this sort the feats of conspicuously clever children are not so much clever as odd, or conceited, or foolish, because they can better imagine thinking the things than saying or doing them. In fact, they unconsciously see character at work, while their elders are intent on an interesting or striking phenomenon. REMORSE. THEEE is no feeling of the reality of which we are more sure than of remorse. We may only half believe in, or merely guess at, love, jealousy, hatred, revenge ; but we know in ourselves that there is such a thing as remorse. We are certain, as of something open to the senses, that pain follows guilt. Our wonder on hearing of any great crime is that the perpetrator was not deterred by dread of remorse. Life, we think, would be a burden too horrible to be endured, exposed to the stings that must follow. There are people who regard remorse as so inevitable and so terrible a consequence of crime that they would leave the criminal to be dealt with by his own conscience, as the most exquisite of all punishments. And this inborn conviction is strengthened and confirmed by masters in the science of human nature. They, too, have no doubt that re- morse follows crime, and have delineated its workings in scenes and by examples which take a lasting hold on the mind. Men believe in remorse, such as is por- REMORSE. 143 trayed in Lady Macbeth, as they believe in a record of inspiration. And yet who has seen remorse ? Who has witnessed for himself the pain of guilt following the commission of crime ? Who knows of it from any private trust- worthy source ? We suspect that remorse pure and unalloyed, rational remorse for moral wrong-doing and commensurate with the occasion, is an exceedingly rare emotion ; and that mistaken ideas on this point lead to much confusion, much misapprehension of history, much sentimental injustice in our own time. If we could realise the fact that men can commit great crimes and never to human eye or judgment betray sorrow for them, we should not be so ready to call every remorseless sinner, who refuses to see his atro- cities with our eyes, a madman. Many would almost go so far as to exact remorse, as the French law exacts confession, as indispensable evidence of guilt. They cannot satisfy themselves of its reality unless the criminal not only commits the crime, but suffers cer- tain pangs of soul consequent upon it. They quite forget to take into account the very slight personal observation on which these expectations are founded. In truth, while our own conscience tells us that remorse belongs to erring humanity, all experience convinces us that it does not as a matter of course belong to the individual man. It would seem, indeed, that, from the time people have speculated on man and his ways at all, this difference of view has perplexed them, and set them at odds. It forms one main ground of the great 144 REMORSE. argument between Job and his friends. They gener- alised, and appealing to the universal belief of all ages disputed the prosperity of the wicked man, be- cause this worm gnawed at the root of his seeming happiness. " Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, yet ... it is the gall of asps within him." " A dreadful sound is in his ears;" "trouble and anguish shall make him afraid." The Patriarch, and the Psalmist after him, argue from personal experience ; they have seen the prosperous wicked man unvisited by com- punctions, and dying as he has lived. And this is the more common witness of all time, though marked by great and startling exceptions sufficient to awe the world, and to convince men, through their senses, of that retribution which every conscience in the abstract believes in. As far as we see, men sustain the heroic standard of this essentially human passion through their imagina- tion, as it were vicariously realising the burden and horror of other men's sins. But, in fact, people who commit crimes are never in the position of the respect- able people who do not commit them. Crime is led up to by a train of thought and action which makes each step natural to the perpetrator, and almost justi- fiable something that must be done, or he would not do it. The arguments of selfishness are very convinc- ing arguments, and have a great air of necessity about them, not only at the time, but in looking back. It is only where crime is committed on a sudden tempta- tion or passion that we can reasonably look for remorse REMORSE. 145 where there is but a temporary congeniality between the man and the deed ; and even here it needs a more than ordinary sensitiveness to be pricked to the quick by memory, when the world smiles in ignorance, and every external circumstance lulls to forgetfulness. Many impulsive persons feel very poignantly the in- convenient consequences of their errors, who yet have not strength or nobleness in them to maintain this vulture as a terrible secret between themselves and their conscience. "Nemesis," it has been well said, " can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our con- sciences, out of the suffering we feel for the suffering we have caused ; there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon." With even the better sort, remorse comes only with dark, threatening days, earthly terrors mingling with divine. For our part, we doubt if the thorough apprehension of remorse enter- tained by respectable people is always derived from their worst actions from the twinges consequent on such lapses into injustice, falsehood, tergiversation, sharp practice, or evil-speaking, as even they deviate into when left to themselves. We suspect it to be rather due to faults of a less moral enormity, which risk the loss of their neighbours' respect, and which partake as much of the nature of blunders as of crimes. Is it not rare enough to be a grand trait in any man's character, when we can say that he stands more in awe of conscience than of human opinion ? The majority have a strange power of thinking of themselves as other men think of them ; and just as the criminal in the sight of men has a n. K 146 REMORSE. hang-dog look, as the proud bearing of conscious inno- cence can hardly be sustained by ordinary men under the eyes of a suspecting and condemning multitude, and for the life of them they cannot help looking the rogue men think them, so a man in favour with his fellows and trusted by them whatever he may have done beyond their cognisance is apt to respond in air and deportment to the good opinion entertained of him. The man universally respected looks the character to ordinary observers ; we say nothing of the wiser few, who, when awkward facts come to light, will tell you they have always seen something in him they did not like. In minds of the ordinary type, remorse is inextricably mixed up with fear of men fear of consequences, fear of discovery. It is when the usurper betrays a terror of his subjects and surrounds himself with defences that he is reminded " But no guard can oppose assaulting fears Or undermining tears, No more than doors or close-drawn curtains keep The swarming dreams out when we sleep. " If it were not so, if the sense of guilt brought adequate pain to all minds, would not those who have the charge of criminals see remorse at its worst ? But the experience of this class confirms our view. An able writer on female prisons, who lived for years amidst the worst of women, has affirmed that she had never herself seen an instance of remorse. All the cul- prits she had to do with took their crimes easily, re- garding their sentences as full absolution, and indeed REMORSE. 147 scarcely thinking so much of the matter as this implies. Murder made no exception to this comfortable view of things. " The deed is done," was a potent argument for thinking no more about it. Thus, " Elizabeth Harris, who had deliberately drowned her two children, was ever a cheerful woman, with a brisk step and a bright smile ; " and Sarah Baker, who had thrown her baby down a pit-shaft, did not allow the crime to press on her conscience. Indeed, the writer adds, " it is a remarkable fact that these serious acts seldom do ; " " with all the prisoners, the crime is of little account, and the sentence for it the only thing to be deplored." This evidence is given of women, but there is no reason to think that in this respect sex makes a difference. Even vicarious remorse does not assert itself in those penal regions ; people are judged by what they are, not by what they have done. In close connection with this subject is the assumed effect upon all minds of imminent contact with death. It belongs to the same class of assumptions that the near certainty of death makes men true, as that crime inevitably brings remorse. Men are believed on their deathbeds as though they were constrained to speak the truth, as necessarily seeing things by a new light and at their real value. A schemer is then supposed to see the worthlessness of his schemes, a worldly man to see the fallacy of his desires, the criminal to realise what his sin has been. It is assumed that, if they have been false hitherto, a new stage is opening upon them; they can deceive no longer either others or 148 EEMORSE. themselves. But, in fact, it is a very great effort both to heart and reason to take up new ideas at this period. Earth may be slipping away from the dying man, but yet it may be the solidest footing he has. He is seeing the last of his fellow-men, but it may be the most earnest wish he is capable of to stand well with them. In fact, habit holds its sway here as else- where. History tells of not a few great criminals who, with courage and a certain loyalty to their past, die in the treacheries and falsehoods in which they have lived. Just as remorse, though there is no necessary touch of salvation in it, argues faith in the unseen and a perception of justice, so clearer views in the prospect of death imply certain spiritual qualities which are by no means universal. In both cases overmastering self- ishness is that " thickness of the blood " which " Stops up the access and passage to remorse." Experience shows us that men may die as they have lived, obstinate in the same errors, bent on the same ends, possessed by the same objects and desires. Espe- cially where they have been in their lives secret, seek- ing no counsel, and with strength of will always to keep true to this fatal trust, does habit sustain its rule to the last, not only in their conduct towards others, but in their inmost self. The interests in which they have lived and laboured have a tighter grip down to the last than anything beyond ; they may feel life at its shortest, and yet value the few remaining sands more than an eternity that lies beyond. REMORSE. 149 But let us turn to a less serious view of our subject, and see how it is we are all so familiar with it in the abstract. All people are in the habit of invoking Re- morse as an avenging deity, and turning it into a mild (and shall we say Christian ?) vengeance. When we think that others ill-use us, are unjust towards us, or neglect us, it is a pretty universal instinct to anticipate the time when they will be sorry for it. It is consola- tory to reflect that so injurious a state of things cannot pass unpunished, and it is wonderful what a weight, what a concentration of bitterness, what a heart-wring- ing is ascribed to this contemplated regret : so that, if we can but assure ourselves that remorse will inflict its sting some day, this conviction soothes away the ache of present resentment, modifies our feeling towards the aggravating cause, and puts us in a sort of charity with our enemy. Yet these secret gloomy maledictions really base themselves on a wonderfully small founda- tion of fact and observation. From whose experience do we expect compunctious visitings to follow neglect or contempt of our merits ? How seldom do we see people troubling themselves about their treatment of their friends and neighbours ! how seldom have we done so ourselves ! and then what a mere momentary twinge, what a trifling puncture where there is such admission or amende at all is thought sufficient for the offence ! We have said, "He will repent it some day," and perhaps he does in some moment of dejection or ennui; but how trivial the infliction, what a mere scourge of feathers performs the awful business of retribution ! 150 REMORSE. This may be so, but the imagination will never take experience into account. There is in the action of a sting or pang of self-reproach something that ignores time. It may be momentary, but even then it satisfies our querulous demand ; and we feel a certain compla- cency in the notion of a stab of remorse that shall, though but for a point of time, make a man feel de- graded and confounded ; that shall confront him with his sin and make him hate himself; recoil from the past, and know what it is to be without hope, defence- less, and unmasked. Something of this sort, an in- stant's lifting of the veil, atones to human fancy, or rather poises the scale against untold atrocities. For instance, in some Italian novels of a past date, writ- ten by men who had brooded over public and pri- vate injustice till they believed in the universal triumph of wrong, the reader's hatred of the more fiendish characters has to slake itself on a few seconds of this vengeance. The wretch is held, perhaps for a minute at farthest, face to face with his crimes, knows what they will bring him to, and looks livid and un- comfortable in the prospect ; and it is surprising how our sense of justice is satisfied, and how, after this insight, we can bear to leave the villain at the last page in bloated prosperity. It all tells a tale, and preaches a moral which we can only hint at here. We have asked our readers, in perhaps a sceptical spirit, whether they have ever witnessed a case of real tragic remorse ; but there is a kind which it does now and then fall in our way to see a remorse at once REMORSE. 151 comic and aggravating, if we know our man and his history sufficiently well to be aware of real errors and follies in abundance that merit regrets of a poignant quality. We mean extravagant, hysterical contrition for trifling peccadilloes, or perhaps for no error at all, but simply for a line of conduct which is only wished other- wise because the penitent would fain have the event otherwise. While genuine remorse confesses, in a rude, often an irreligious way, the existence of a Judge of the world, this spurious thing, this mere parody, ap- proaches, as far as we can see, to that " practical athe- ism " of which we hear so much from angry men, for it is based on a disbelief in any Divinity that shapes our ends. Eeaders of good children's books will recall the great part remorse is made to play in them. Young author- esses make their little people endure agonies for slight offences ; and whether these sensitive examples pro- duce much practical effect or not, they give a form and force to nature's teaching. Christopher North, on the contrary, who did not write for children, and never got beyond Edie Ochiltree's mixture of glee and compunc- tion in the utmost candour of his personal recollec- tions, claims for boys an immunity from this scourge. " Nature," he says, " allows to growing lads a certain range of wickedness, sans peur et sans reproche." We suspect it is quite possible for men to act on the one system, and to have their belief and sympathies en- gaged through life for the other. REFINEMENT, IT is a received opinion that ours is a refined age. Our manners, our language, our social arrangements, all that meets eye and ear, testify this of us in notable contrast to former times, of which we read, and on which we speculate, with a shudder. There are writers who, allowing to Shakespeare ideas in advance of his time, argue that his more delicate feminine conceptions must have been drawn absolutely from imagination, not only unassisted by, but in spite of, his observation and ex- perience of womankind so utterly lost in the gross- ness of plain-speaking, beef and ale, were the ladies in those old days of ruff and fardingale, from which we find ourselves separated by a gulf of restraints and scruples. Now refinement, if it means purity of mind reflected in the manners, is indeed the most exquisite form and mark of progress ; but when people boast of refinement, is it refinement that they mean? Could an individual, at any rate, boast of refinement and at the same time possess it ? We think not. Eefinement, REFINEMENT. 153 like modesty, consists in negatives. It is not coarse, or rude, or impure. It expresses a nature free from "base earthly alloy, in which the precious ore shows itself necessarily, without consciousness or effort. And this very unconsciousness is a safeguard at once from contamination and from suspicion ; so that in no age is individual refinement impossible. Refinement is not quick to impute evil ; it interprets what it sees on the principles of charity. A man is not more refined than another for suspecting the loaf he eats because human hands have kneaded it, and assuming, therefore, that the kneader was a dirty fellow. In truth, refinement, being clean itself, supposes that others are clean also, until forcibly undeceived indeed, resolutely prefers to trust, rather than have the imagination polluted by the repulsive details of over-curious investigators, and would sooner swallow one spider, whether moral or physical, in ignorance, than have the gorge perpetually rising at possible spiders. "When persons or nations boast of refinement, they are proud, not of being re- fined, but of being fastidious. Now we know that fastidiousness passes with some minds for little more than a mere synonym for refinement ; it is refinement carried to excess. But really it is often the least pure minds that are most fastidious. Indeed, it depends on the age he lives in whether a man of this quality of mind is coarse, as he would have been a hundred and fifty years ago, when it was permitted to him to utter his ideas, or fastidiously refined, as he is now, when he can only imply them and act upon them. It is the 154 REFINEMENT. habitual occupation of the thoughts that constitutes the difference between the two. That mind is refined which exercises itself by preference on noble things which recoils from impurity, but never looks for it, and, where it is possible, eliminates the gross from what it sees, and dwells on its purer aspect. That mind is unrefined, whatever its pharisaical pretensions to a discriminating purity, that sees only the low and material in things which have a fair and perhaps an elevated side to them. Eefinement is not suspicious or jealous ; simple minds alone can really possess it as a characteristic ; and thus it constantly sees only fair where others see foul, and can sympathise with the one pity-stirred human heart in the unwashed multi- tude, absolutely forgetful that it is unwashed, while fastidiousness prides itself on smelling the mould be- neath the rose. Eefinement is poetry ; fastidiousness is often very bare prose indeed. It is good to have to do with the really refined, whose simple, trusting tone and manner argue a mind free from taint, seeming to say ' ' By the pattern of mine own thoughts 1 cut out The purity of his " it is a very different sensation to find ourselves with persons who, under studied smoothness and polish, and affected delicacy of expression, betray a conscious- ness of all they deprecate, and disclose thoughts at work on dead men's bones with an assumption, moreover, that other people's thoughts are similarly occupied. REFINEMENT. 155 To our mind, we are too busy just now looking into the wrong side of nature, breaking our pretty things to see what they are made of, and also too complacently absorbed in our necessary purifications, to possess true refinement, though we may be on the way to it. If refinement is purity of thought, it cannot conduce to it to be for ever on the look-out for the impure. Let us ask, for instance, if those perpetual allusions to the "tub," and to our frequent washings, which pervade our light literature, are not a mistake, a grossness, an impertinence, and, besides, an admission that cleanli- ness is not a mere matter of course, but a new national accomplishment. The Dardani, we are told, washed but thrice in their lives when they were born, when they married, and when they died. If suddenly con- verted to the more domestic and familiar uses of ablution, would they not make it a great subject of conversation, write about their new virtue as we do, and boast over their neighbours who still esteemed the bath a ceremonial and typical institution ? And, on the other hand, when a generation or two had washed themselves, would they not get to treat their cleanliness as a matter of course, and prefer ideas less connected with the impurities of poor human nature to think of and to talk about ? "When we have settled about manures, and made our drains, and finished building our baths and wash-houses when we have left off smelling and sniffing with that nose in the air which is the characteristic of prosaic nicety we may then hope for refinement. At present, perhaps, it is no blame 156 REFINEMENT. to the pioneers of this grace that they exalt their own trade, and believe in nothing but leather. We only note as a fact, that an expert in this line, who spends his life in exposing our negligences, sees nothing but dirt and impurity wherever he goes. He lives in a conscious, heart-and-soul encounter with them ; every object takes this one colour. Our old homes are not, with him, the haunts of memory, hung about with associations, but mere pest-houses, gathering on their neglected and unsuspected walls the physical traces of diseased humanity. If he were to penetrate into the bower of the Sleeping Beauty herself, those tresses and closed lids would have no power over his imagination. His attention would be wholly engrossed by sinks and drains unflushed for generations, by tokens of defective ventilation on the staircase, and by the crying neces- sity for a new coat of paint and white-wash over walls on which faint odours and accumulated breathings had mantled and generated miasmas for a hundred years. And if we are thus occupied with physical impurities, what shall we say of that moral cesspool into which it has pleased the politest of our neighbours to pry and inquire with a growing ardour through the greater part of this so-called age of refinement ? But it is not on them that our thoughts at present rest in connection with this subject. The New World, it seems, claims not only to partake of the general refinement of the nineteenth century, but to be in advance of all the rest of mankind, and more especially of the mother country, in this elegant particular. Eefinement in New York REFINEMENT. 157 and Boston is ahead of us all ; and so, no doubt, it is, under a certain interpretation of the term that is, people there think more words and things unrefined and suggestive of improprieties than any other nation under the sun. Every record of antiquity shows us how much men's ideas have changed in matters connected with this sub- ject ; and we are ready to grant that the West, in more senses than one, is farthest from the East, the New World from the Old, in its notions of what is graceful and permissible. It has more entirely broken away from primitive habits of thought, and especially from that deep-seated reverence for the sacredness of the body which marks the earliest antiquity a sacredness which pure, lofty imagination always recognises, and which fastidiousness ignores. The Hebrew poet en- nobles the lowly offices, the humble services, the in- evitable pains and sorrows of humanity, and makes them symbols of the unseen, the immortal, the divine. American refinement wonders how this can be. It cannot comprehend this poetising of things that modern civilisation has agreed to keep out of sight this exaltation of the humblest inevitable incidents of humanity into parables, making them the expressive figures of high mysteries ; and it betrays its perplexi- ties accordingly. It knows nothing of that transfig- uring power of highly wrought, vigorous imagination which can hold its conceptions in their original shape, unsoiled and unchanged by the suggestions of sense ; and therefore finds itself at odds with the language 158 REFINEMENT. that expresses it. It is this strength of grasp which strikes us as especially wanting in the American mind. It may be said to be wanting in the modern mind alto- gether, but, in so far as we are less " refined " than our cousins, we have not so utterly lost it. Nothing illus- trates what we mean more than the changes which the American Episcopal Church has thought it fit and necessary to make in our Book of Common Prayer, to adapt it to the finer sensitiveness of American con- gregations changes which make us conscious of a connection with past ages and primitive habits of thought which the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers have renounced, esteeming themselves all the better and purer for the breach. There is not, at first sight, much in common between the social decorums of Cincinnati and the Far West, as portrayed by English satirists where it is shocking to name a shirt, and the piano's legs are put into petti- coats and the elegant refinement of the accomplished (we are sorry that we must now add late) author of 'Transformation.' Yet we cannot read his works, especially his last on England, without being aware of an affinity between the two. He is revolted where we should not be revolted, and he beholds what is coarse and base beneath things where our eyes are content to rest on the outside, and see no harm. In both there is a certain fuss about refinement which seems to inter- fere with poetry and sentiment. In both, a curiosity to look too far into all the bearings and all the possible suggestions of an object interferes with the simple ap- REFINEMENT. 159 preciation of its fair appearance or obvious uses. And it is uniformly where Mr Hawthorne's patriotism is prominent that this family feature shows itself. When he cannot look on the smooth shoulder of an English girl, and that skin of hers whiter than snow, without speculating on the amount of "clay" beneath that rounds its outline, he shows himself an American, and not of the Old World, whether island or continent. We are content to admire beauty without a thought of what lies beneath the surface ; but Transatlantic ima- gination must analyse. And when he enlarges on British female embonpoint, the national theory of re- finement, intolerant of vulgar weight and bulk, and sparing no minuteness of inquiry as to what goes to the composition of them, still more strikingly reveals itself. If Swift had so written, we should have called it coarse. And this reminds us that perhaps there is no test so unfailing whereby to distinguish between true refinement and its counterfeit as the jest and bad- inage with which each is apt to point its conclusions. It must be granted that the quality that most often gets called refinement is a thing of manners, and not of soul. This was the refinement to which Burke gave a half-allegiance, though he knew that vice lay hid beneath. Yet here the best acting simulates nothing it is a mere freedom from opposites. Nobody can describe refinement, or can pretend to be refined by definite acts or positive statements. We doubt if the idea is once put into words by Shakespeare. When he would convey it to us, it is cunningly done by con- 160 REFINEMENT. trasts ; as where Perdita who, if not a picture of the refined lady, the " real princess," of that day, was surely prophetic of our own ideal is shown in her graceful quiet serenity, not directly, but through the upbraid- ing memories of her foster-father, as he recalls the former mistress of the revels and her energetic bust- lings from end to end of the long table of guests : "Now here, At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle ; On his shoulder, and his ; her face o' fire With labour, and the thing she took to quench it." In one sense, refinement must always have been a shifting, changing, perhaps progressive, quality. The refined of one age may quite innocently shock the scruples of another; but all true refinement must be based on the same early habit of selection and exclu- sion a habit formed before thought can array itself in a garb of reasons, or before the judgment can con- sciously criticise the words and actions of others. THE PLAIN STYLE. THERE is a phrase, heard so often that we should be well content never to hear it again, which condenses truth of expression into " calling a spade a spade " a form so comprehensive with some people as to exhaust the subject, and leave nothing more to be said. Per- sons who call a spade a spade are supposed to be not only more honest, but deeper, than their neighbours ; and even those who like that sort of thing, and despise fine periods and complex thought, come in for some credit. So that, as a good many people, for one reason or another, think it a spirited thing to do, we might suppose not only plain speaking, but the art of plain writing, to be pretty well understood in our time. We do not say "style," and we ought not to have said " art," for there are people who dispute whether there is such a thing as style, and art is supposed to be some- thing shuffling and disingenuous a process for var- nishing over the native truth and simplicity of thought. Little as we agree with these heresies, small faith as II. L 162 THE PLAIN STYLE. we have in the shallow popular short cut to accuracy and honesty, we still think that a real want and literary deficiency of our day may be indicated by them. We believe there are influences at work now which act against the formation of style in its more marked and imposing sense, as a pure, exact, characteristic vehicle of thought ; and especially against the emphatic truth- telling style which calls everything by its right name. We have, indeed, a few writers with the construction of whose sentences we are familiar. We know at once who wrote them, which is a necessary condition of a style. But even where they write well, it is often rather by their mannerisms than by the rhythm and march of their periods that we detect them. It is a difficulty at the veiy outset of this subject that style is almost inseparable from thought. Thus, when we recognise Thackeray by his style, it is often the old thought, the old tone of cynicism, or humour, or pathos, which we recognise. If his thoughts ran in a new line, we should not find him out so instantly. But besides this, there is a measure and order in his sentences, a refined fitness in his choice of words, which constitutes style in a good sense. The same may be said of Sir Bulwer Lytton the same of our best journalists. They write in what is called classical English. Their mean- ing is not only clearly expressed, not only propitiates us by the way in which it is expressed, but it is also characteristic of the writer. We recognise in every one we can call a writer an inseparable partnership between thought and expression. No one can tell THE PLAIN STYLE. 163 whether the time given to composition is spent in working out the thought, or in clothing it in fitting language not even the author himself : we only know that nothing is pleasant reading without it. A clear thinker, for example, has commonly an idiomatic turn of expression, because the idiom of a language can alone neatly and exactly fit ideas conceived in it. This fitting language and idiomatic turn we grant to our best writers. But not the less are we disposed to think that weight and authority are wanting in the writing of our time. A great many people can write creditably and intelligently, leaving little room for criticism ; but we have not many who say what they have to say so forcibly, expressing strength of conviction in a diction of such power and command, as to compel attention, and carry the reader irresistibly along. We recall no living style that, like some clear harmonious voice, holds its own, let who will speak, because it is accus- tomed to be obeyed, and to which our will adapts itself with pleased docility. In a word, we miss that style which puts facts and thoughts before the ordinary reader, at little labour to himself, in their strongest, most obvious light, and in a way to make a vivid and memorable impression. And the reason may be our boasted modern activity of thought. Active thought means progressive thought, where no opinions are allowed to take root undisturbed and in silence, gam- ing strength from mere length of tenure. Crude thought can never be well expressed; and our writers, as a body, do not think the same thing long enough to 164 THE PLAIN STYLE. acquire the gift of expressing it thoroughly. In poetry, all are ready to acknowledge that thought and feeling must have a brooding time time to make a home, to become a habit before they can declare themselves in living harmonious numbers ; and it is really the same in prose, wherever prose takes the rank of composition, and consults force and harmony of arrangement. The examples of a forcible style that occur to us mostly belong to an age when people thought deli- berately, when the growth of ideas was not continuously interfered with from without, when liberality was not much in fashion, when men saw their own side a good deal more clearly than their opponents', and were thoroughly possessed by it. This steady, firm growth of conviction is the groundwork of that style which when it was the fashion to discuss composition, and the subject had a nomenclature was called the Plain Style. It is indispensable to a good style of every kind that a man should have something of his own to say. It is equally essential to the plain forcible style that he should have held his opinion for a good while together, that that opinion should have affinity with the common sense of mankind, and that he should have reached maturity both of thought and age in pretty much the same way of viewing things. It gives scope to every variety of genius, but all who succeed in it must resemble each other in a certain stability and inde- pendence of mind, and a sturdy originality, whether in a wide or narrow field. The restlessness and movement of modern thought do not foster such a character. THE PLAIN STYLE. 165 Most would-be forcible writing, with us, is a spuri- ous imitation. Thus, borrowed convictions are apt to express themselves with ultra-arrogance of decision, just because they are not a man's own as the most dictatorial and positive in conversation are those who speak after some authority, on which, for a time, they have implicitly pinned their faith. But where a writer is forcible on other men's conclusions, there is sure to peep out an offensive assumption, a discrepancy between the speaker and his pretensions, that excites rebellion or ridicule, as the case may be. Strong language, unsupported by weight of thought, is something like the occasional prank of nature in accommodating a very ordinary mind with a visage after the austerest Roman model. The helpless intelligence cannot people such a mansion, and cowers out of sight. The features go their own way, and the result is the wooden hard- ness of outline of a carved walking-stick or a gurgoyle. And there is something offensive, not only in express- ing forcibly or rather positively, for real force is not to be had for the asking what is borrowed, but the conclusions a writer has just arrived at. Thus, no one would care for a young man to start as an author in this style ; nor do we want from him the same concen- tration on the matter in hand. No man can write well without some degree of fancy and imagination, which in youth must have its way, and find play in ornament, metaphor, or discursiveness of some kind. In weighty and mature writers there is not the absence of this fire, but a keeping it under for higher purposes. They are 166 THE PLAIN STYLE. simply engrossed with the pith and marrow of their subject to the exclusion of digressions and vagaries of thought ; starting with a clear knowledge of what they have to say, and holding it with a firm grip to the end. Attention to the measure and cadence of a sentence is by this time a habit, but mere decoration is a i bygone taste. They know that a simile seldom leaves a writer quite at the precise point of his subject where it found him, and would rather forego anything than their hold of the reader ; so they accept of no illustration that does not recommend itself rather by its homely fitness than its beauty. We meet now and then with rules of composition by the masters of this style, which seem at least to prove that forcible simplicity is the result of study and inten- tion as well as happy clearness of brain ; while all shams and imitations of the true nervous vigour the expedients of self-convicted feebleness straining after the impressive find no mercy at their hands. " In modern wit all printed trash is Set off with numerous breaks and doylies. To statesmen would you give a wipe ? You print it in Italic type. When letters are in vulgar shapes, Tis ten to one the wit escapes ; But when in capitals exprest, The dullest reader smokes the jest." Swift's rule, obvious as it seems, fully and suffi- ciently describes this plain style, and no other: " Proper words in proper places make the true defini- tion of a style." Locke, who was pronounced, when THE PLAIN STYLE. 167 people talked and wrote about these things, a great master of the Plain Style, gives his recipe to an op- ponent. " Your lordship says," he writes to the Bishop of Worcester, " ' But now, it seems, nothing is intelligible but what suits with the new way of ideas! My lord, the new way of ideas and the old way of speaking in- telligibly were always, and ever will be, the same ; and, if I may take the liberty to declare my sense of it, herein it consists : 1. That a man use no words but such as he makes the signs of certain determined ob- jects of his mind in thinking, which he can make known to another. 2. Next, that he use the same word steadily for the sign of the same immediate object of his mind in thinking. 3. That he join those words together in propositions, according to the grammatical rules of that language he speaks in. 4. That he unite those sentences in a coherent discourse." In his capa- city of abstract thinker, the philosopher declares him- self indifferent to effect. While he thinks his word sounds better than the proposed substitute, he " will not contend, having no antipathy to any articulate sound." It is all very well for a metaphysician to say so, but the ear has its antipathies ; and happily our language has that wealth of choice that a man can always express his meaning exactly, and give us plea- sure in the process. This Dryden could do, who wrote in this, the only style fit for a poet who is indeed a poet, and not a rhetorician in rhyme. He applied the same terse, condensed, accurate force of expression, which his admirable ear could not fail to make sound- 168 THE PLAIN STYLE. ing and harmonious, to subjects congenial to his genius. And here is the merit of this concise, simple style, above all others that it least shows marks of age. Whether in prose or verse, it is made to last. Every- one knows Dryden's praise of Shakespeare which John- son has incorporated into his preface ; and all his criticism has the same stamp of authority and judg- ment. 'No detached passage can give a fair idea of this, but take his remarks on the drama of his time he might, indeed, be criticising his own plays : " Your lordship knows some modern tragedies which are beautiful on the stage, and yet I am confident you would not read them. Tryphon, the stationer, com- plains that they are seldom asked for in his shop. The poet who flourished in the scene, is damned in the ruelle ; nay more, is not esteemed a good poet by those who see and hear his extravagances with delight. They are a sort of stately fustian and lofty childishness. Nothing but nature can give a sincere pleasure ; where that is not imitated, 'tis grotesque painting ; the fine woman ends in a fish's tail." Or take the simile with which he illustrates the delicacies of refined satire : " A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said to his servant, of a plain piece of work a bare hanging ; but to make a malefactor die sweetly, was only belong- ing to her husband." Perhaps, in his own practical line, Sydney Smith is one of the best modern examples of a forcible style : and the telling, clenching effect of his bold sentences THE PLAIN STYLE. 169 in every controversy he took part in, is still in men's memories. He, too, had his rules of art, though given informally enough. " In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written ; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style." In the same tone, involving the same principle, we find him writing to a correspondent : "Jeffrey has been here with his adjectives, which always travel with him." Adjectives might be all very well for some people, but he knew they were not in his line, and, in fact, he could do very well without them. In another place we find him apologising, as it were, for his own decision. " I write positively, to avoid the long and circuitous language of diffidence" words which might, at first sight, seem to go against true strength of language being an indication of strength of conviction ; but he is really distinguishing between faith in his own conclusions and self-conceit, a weakness incompatible with a plain, clear, convinc- ing tone, which results from a man's being possessed by his subject, and not by himself. Thus, in the in- stances that most naturally suggest themselves of this style, we find the writer, for conciseness' sake, stating his conclusions alone, and not the mental processes and steps by which they are reached, which necessarily involve much self-history dear to the author, and important and interesting to the reader, as these often are. Weight of style can only come of weight of thought ; 170 THE PLAIN STYLE. but, once found, it can be put to as many and various uses as an elephant's trunk. Especially, it is invalu- able in a master's hand in giving that air of mock stability to any freak of fancy which is one of the charms of humour. When Gulliver has related to the Captain who picked him up at sea his adventures at Brobdignag, we are told " He was very well satisfied with this plain relation I had given him, and said he hoped when we returned to England I would oblige the world by putting it on paper and making it public. My answer was, that I thought we were overstocked already with books of travel that nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary ; wherein I doubted some authors less consulted truth than their own vanity or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers. However, I thanked him for his good opinion, and pro- mised to take the matter into my thoughts." Even where a writer's facts or strain of thought run counter to our judgment, and taste of extrava- gance or illusion, if he expresses them with a grave deliberate force which carried conviction when he wrote them for no man can write in this way without, not only being worthy of credit but, secure of receiv- ing it he compels from us more than sympathy for himself; he demands reconsideration for his opinion. We always feel this when subjects which we are used to hear the theme of vague declamation and loose assertion are differently handled. Bunyan, whose style, where it does not rise to poetry, is of the kind under THE PLAIN STYLE. 171 discussion, describes a state of mind which in these days we should dismiss as nervous depression, but which was to him a profound literal experience. What an example of precision is his narrative ! " About this time," says his autobiography, " I took an opportunity to break my mind to an ancient Christian, and told him all my case. I told him also that I was afraid I had sinned the sin against the Holy Ghost He told me that he thought so too. Here, therefore, I had but cold comfort. But, talking a little more with him, I found him, though a good man, a stranger to much combat with the Devil." We may smile, but yet not without a misgiving, and the remembrance that we live in a Sadducean age. There is a redundance and hurry of thought which cannot express itself in this deliberate form without loss of inspiration. There is in some sentences a linked sweetness for which terseness and emphasis would be an ill exchange there are ideas that must be elaborated, and which inevitably involve digressions. This plain style is not the choicest expression of the choicest minds, but it is the form of expression which conveys the thought of the time with most effect to the multitude of readers, and which it is an inestimable benefit to any cause to enlist in its service. A man who has got something to say, though it be confusedly put together, will be read once. If he is read oftener, he owes it to some felicity of execution. No one reads a work again unless led on by the style, which in its 172 THE PLAIN STYLE. perfection has the arresting and enchaining power of music, and compels the reader to go on at whatever page he opens. "Whoever can so order his sentences has a work to do in the world. Perhaps not many have the power in any age certainly not many in our own. RESPECT, IN obituaries, especially of the country press, we constantly see announcements followed by the words " much respected," or very likely " universally re- spected ;" and if we chance to have some acquaintance with the name thus honoured, an opportunity is af- forded us of measuring the idea of Eespect with its familiar uses. "We may perhaps have been ourselves in the way of seeing the deceased periodically in field, street, or market, in his shop or at his own door, or in the proverbial gig ; and if these encounters have been frequent and periodical enough to constitute a habit of seeing, we find ourselves very willing to be classed among the respecters. To see a man often in the course of many years, so that he shall be one of the features of a neighbourhood (though only first dis- covered to be such when he is gone), and to know no particular harm of him, is in this point of view to respect him. This, at least, constitutes the universal respect that attends so many obsequies the respect 174 RESPECT. which follows the announcement that " old Double is dead," or that " Euggins the currycomb-maker is lying in state," and which no one feels to be an overstrained testimony to the virtues of the defunct. We do not despise it, however : let us rather hope, for ourselves and our readers, that we may not be undeserving it when our turn comes. Yet surely it bears very little rela- tion to that incense which one might almost call the most precious and dearest homage that men can confer or receive, and without which, at least, every other form of homage is imperfect. To be respected, to be approached with respect, to be treated with respect, to be listened to with respect, to be spoken of with re- spect, in any genuine, honest meaning of the term, is to be distinguished in a very peculiar way. To deserve respect, what does it not imply ? Even the power to re- spect wisely is a great quality, and almost constitutes a great character. Between persons thus endowed and ordinary " respectable people," as well as between those who profess to respect them, there is a distance which we will not here attempt to define. Our business is with the quality of respect where it is real the only respect that anybody can care for who gets to the bottom of his desires, and which, as a craving, is even more universal than affection itself, and prior in its claim. Eespect is homage to the unseen part of us. In a certain sense it is an inalienable right that is, there is something in every man which ought to be respected, and which it is an injury and injustice to him to slight. M. Victor Hugo, in the person of Valjean, represents RESPECT. 175 this privation as the most terrible to which convict life is subject ; and those who persistently treat with disrespect the persons subject to them, are doing their best to crush the human element out of them, and to reduce them to the state of brutes. It is this necessity for respect which prompts men to confer it. We make kings and emperors in recog- nition of something royal and imperial in ourselves. All conferring of honour is, as we are constituted, a claim on our own part ; and whenever a man loses all experience or hope of respect in his own person, he loses with it the power to respect. For this quality is necessarily a commodity of exchange a social coinage. Whoever is utterly degraded in his own eyes, becomes insolent unless restrained by fear ; in his inmost heart he is insolent to the whole world. It is impossible to respect others while deprived of our own modicum of deference and appreciation, which is a state of moral outlawry. There are persons who, though trained in the ordinary civilities of life, are yet incapable of the idea of respect a sort of convicts by nature, lawless, irreverent, without the excuse of a quarrel with society. But this is an abnormal and monstrous condition ; in- deed, to be born with two heads is a more tolerable deviation from social order than this intellectual crook- edness. Nobody can stand such beings, and it is wise to shun them except in a missionary spirit. Ordinary ill-nature and ill-temper always act in contempt of respects, but . these act in ignorance. They are dull and lumbering in their atrocities, and outrage us with- 176 KESPECT. out seeming to know it as impertinent as Gavroches, wanting his wit and design; and as unscrupulous as the London street-boy, without his fun and malice. History, in great social disruptions, shows such people safe in their insensibility against all reprisals ; and now and then we have an encounter with one of them by hearsay, or in our own person, in which case there is a necessary recourse to the theory of transmigration. We recognise the soul of a cur or a monkey in this nature so dead to the demands of time, place, and presence; or one of the tribe of stoat or weasel is before us creatures which an exasperated naturalist has declared to be, of all the lower creation, most coldly and insolently insensible to the awe and majesty inherent in man. Short of all this, however, there are numerous forms of native disrespect more or less developed by circum- stances. There is the disrespect of low cunning, the disrespect of cynicism, official disrespect, patronising disrespect, and the disrespect of an extreme protuber- ant egotism which recognises no claims, no virtues, no standing but its own. Again, there is the disrespect of importunity. All professional beggars are without respect not only those who clamour for alms, but those who make it a business to lay siege to their fellow-creatures' interest or purse, and a virtue to take no denial. The difference between the wit and the buffoon is often this single one of respect. The buffoon, let him be what or where he will, whether the clown of a circus or the jester of the House of Commons, RESPECT. 177 always shows himself incapable of respect. He neither respects nor cares to be respected ; and this failure of respect where men are accustomed to see it rigidly enforced, constantly passes for wit because it surprises. " I must have liberty Withal ; as large a charter as the wind, To blow on whom I please ; for so fools have." All transformations and disguises are enemies to re- spect. People can do many things under a mask which would be impossible to them in their own per- son. All neglect of order and of the usual decorums argues in the sloven or the lover of singularity some failure here. "We have observed this in women who defy fashion. They do not know, nor indeed care to know, the things they have a right to say, the subjects they may with propriety approach. There is the dis- respect, too, of undue subservience the disrespect of the tuft-hunter, who, submitting to give respect with- out any requital in the circle into which he thrusts himself, indemnifies himself by an attitude of disrespect towards his equals. Any person who is profuse of respect in high places is certain to be guilty elsewhere of counterbalancing impertinences. Much intercourse with a man's social betters, even where it comes natur- ally, has always this tendency, which every one will yield to who is not alive to it, and vigilantly on his guard against it. The world is never without examples of the fatal influence of Court favour in this particular, even on the most blandly-civil natures. Again, all sham respect relieves itself by insolence somewhere. II. M 178 RESPECT. The respect of the couventional beadle and flunky is of this sort, for nature revolts against all respect that is not in its degree reflected back, that has no rebound, that is not given with a tacit understanding of some return. There can be no cringing or toadying without a balance being struck a perpetration of disrespect as gross as the flattery, to indemnify the man for his self- betrayal. And, lastly, the characteristic of a mob is its disrespect. It is a crowd of men deprived by con- tact and excitement of their respect. Nothing and nobody is safe from its tongue or its arm ; it is ready for anything ; it is all insult and aggression. The foundation of the snob is this deficiency. He fails in the power of true respect, and in the percep- tion of what is respectable. He either respects the wrong thing, or he respects the right thing in the wrong way. It is this that tells so terribly on his manners. In the first place, he is obtrusive ; he never recognises that sacred retirement, that inner self in each man which no intimacy, not the closest affection, has a right to invade ; and he admires what is good and noble only for its outside, and for its effect on the greatest number. Thus he misses the true worth of all that most attracts him; and the more ambitious his aims, the more vulgar are his motives of action. But how few people have this gift of respect rightly founded and rightly balanced ! It is accepted as a fact that the highest qualities and duties will always secure respect, but this too much implies that all persons are capable of paying and feeling it. Every one of high RESPECT. 179 social standing is of course secure of a certain amount of nominal serviceable respect, "but this is not the deli- cate testimony we mean. The thing worthy of this respect is an essence, not the signs of it that meet our eye ; and many things and people are worthy of all respect that fail in any very showy manifestation of themselves. The noted letters to Archdeacon Single- ton, in pleading for a sufficient provision for the clergy, complain that all who would confine them to an average of 130 per annum first describe their ideal pastor as learned, of charming manners and dignified deportment, six feet two high, with a mag- nificent countenance expressive of all the Cardinal Virtues and the Ten Commandments, and then ask, Who would not respect such a man, however poor? Very true, is the reply ; but what if the pastor is obese and dumpy, striding over the stiles with a second-rate wife, and so on? It certainly needs the gift of respect, in a sense in which all men have it not, to detect worth under such representment, and to re- spect that worth as sincerely as if it were set off with every worldly and personal advantage. True respect has this habit. It always assumes a principle within, and reverences that. Thus, like charity, it takes a poetical and transcendental view of every condition when it can. It respects old age, because it assumes that with grey hairs come wisdom and experience ; youth, because there should be purity and promise; middle age, because it does the world's work; high station, because it personates a noble past or present 180 KESPECT. achievement ; the masses, because they represent the great aggregate of mankind. It reverences numbers, power, influence, for the great ideas they embody, not for their show or for what it can get out of them. After all, the true quality of respect is to be seen and felt only in private life, and all its delicacies de- velop themselves in the closer intimacies and subtler relations of man with man. All people can be respect- ful and ceremonious ; but the respect we value is that which keeps pace with intimacy, and prevents any degree of familiarity from degenerating even for a moment into the proverbial contempt. Eespect in its purity addresses itself to the moral nature; for the respect paid to great intellect, strength, or beauty is not so much rendered as extorted, or, as we say, com- manded. The respect men claim is due to their place, and every place of standing has it ; but the proper incense is offered to something more intimately our own than any attribute or quality. There is around every man who has not lost himself a certain atmos- phere that keeps him separate and distinct a some- thing that repels close contact, and which every mind of delicacy is careful not to infringe, owning a magic line which must not be stepped over, some shadow of that divinity that hedges kings. True love and friend- ship, which are inseparable from respect, are above all things careful never, even in the most intimate hour, o invade this inner solitude, to pry into this sanctum. They always assume a region of thought into which RESPECT. 181 they have no right to intrude, and the outposts of which must be approached with care, and we may say awe, for without something of the sort there is no respect. The expression of this sentiment, even in family life, used to be through elaborate forms, and in primitive times through gestures and prostrations of the deepest humility; but as society advances in re- finement, it leaves compliments, bowings, and salaams far behind. We do not even say Sir or Madam, or your Ladyship ; they are all superseded and rendered unnecessary by the mere inflections of the voice. A voice trained in good manners and inspired by re- spect conveys the subtlest homage while uttering the simplest things, the merest household phrases of every day; and every voice, whether trained or not, while under this influence, can flatter and soothe with a charm unknown to ' ' the rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence." It is indeed a great thing in social life to cultivate this deference of speech and voice. Nature aids us here, if men do not outrage her promptings by yielding to the temptation which intimacy brings. " We all of us," says Miss Austen, in the person of her wisest hero, " know the difference between the pronouns He, She, and Thou, the plainest-spoken amongst us. We all feel the influence of a something beyond common civility in our intercourse with each other, and some- thing more early implanted. We cannot give any- 182 KESPECT. body the disagreeable hints that we may have been very full of an hour before ; we feel things very differ- ently." This is the respect of intimates, and in sub- stituting the customary you for " thee " we still further express that distance and vagueness which shuns too close quarters an instinct of civility prompting every language to some idiom sacrificing grammatical truth to an idea. To conclude, nothing shows a more candid and fair mind than this quality in full judicious exercise. Most people respect their betters, and despise or else pat- ronise their inferiors : it is only a mind capable of re- spect that does real justice to the classes below him, or in some other way removed from his sympathies. There is nothing which commoner minds like better than to talk of classes and sets, amongst which they do not care to rank themselves, as ruled wholly by the influ- ences of their caste. We always feel in good company when a temper of another sort exercises its discern- ment indiscriminately on high and low, and, through that sympathy which respect always engenders, treats what the world calls an inferior with the interest due to individual character ; estimating his personal ad- vantages, understanding his difficulties, and detecting good taste and right feeling under whatever guise, not in condescension, but in simple fellow-feeling. It is wonderful how many good people, and good books too, fail in this sort of justice, and perhaps how many get to be called amiable and condescending for the want of RESPECT. 183 it; for, after all, there are innumerable people of so little nicety of feeling that fussy praise or patronage is more to them than quiet respect respect which yet, in its perfect development, as the acknowledgment and appreciation of each person's most distinguishing merit, is almost the best gift which the mind of one man can bestow upon another. COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. IP, in any ordinary company, we found ourselves sud- denly possessed of the power of reading thoughts, not a few things would surprise us. There is, we grant, nothing new in this reflection, yet it is a truth which few people practically realise. It is rather supposed that commonplace people are commonplace all through ; that, in seeing their outside, we see all ; that they are incapable of furnishing a surprise, and that it is only the original, the strong-minded, the independent thinkers, whose inner life would present anything strange and unexpected. In fact, it is assumed that the working processes of common minds may be gathered from aspect and conversation ; that they have few ideas, and those all in one mould and borrowed from one another ; and that what they say represents the nature and the range of their thoughts. Now, if anything, we believe that this is less the case with commonplace people than with professed thinkers. Because persons of the same society talk alike and COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. 185 express themselves in one tone on a great many sub- jects, it by no means follows that they take literally the same view, that the eyes of each see things in the same way, that they actually think alike on those points on which they seem to agree. In fact, the more commonplace people are, the more words are conven- tional things with them, and so the less distinctly do they convey the meaning of the speaker, and the more indefinitely are they to be accepted by the hearer. Take a specimen commonplace man a man in habits and expressed thought like a hundred others that we know and try to get at his opinions on subjects not reduced to a formula by frequent discussion, or desire him to define his ideas even on familiar subjects in his own words. It will be perceived that he has wholly dis- tinct, however vague, notions from others ; that he has conceptions, immature perhaps, but starting from a different centre from what we reckoned on, and which, in fact, are incompatible with received views on other matters which he supposes himself to hold as others hold them. Thus he is not what we suppose him to be he has more in him than we gave him credit for. Of course, commonplace people are not what is called original thinkers; they do not hit off new ideas, no flashes of their thought strike across the world ; but they have their own thoughts all the same. No rational being can avoid receiving impressions impressions of things abstract or foreign to personal experience and the direct teaching of the senses ; these he must take in according to his idiosyncrasy ; and if we could see 186 COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. the monstrous divergences and utter contradictions that exist in the apprehension of this class of ideas though expressed in terms that are familiar and undisputed, and supposed to be received by everybody in the same sense we should, as we say, be surprised. A mutual full understanding may be taken for granted, yet the actual thoughts and pictures of the mind may have scarcely anything in common. Just as people who live together may have noted the moon's changes, and walked together in its light, and peeped at it through the same telescope, and discussed its geography in the same terms, and only find out by accident that the eyes of one have always seen its disc the size of a Cheshire cheese, while those of the other hold it to be no bigger than a fourpenny-piece ; so, in a hundred instances, chance alone reveals that people may have talked about the same thing in apparent consent and harmony, and yet meant something which to each other would have conveyed no resemblance. The agreement has been simply in words, and we find, with a sense of wonder, how much easier it is to accept each other's terms than to attach each other's meaning to them. The gift of language is, in fact, the power of giving an outline and boundary to thoughts, and conveying these distinctly to another mind. A master of expres- sion, as such, has more ideas that we can follow than other men ; while people who talk in formulas and these are essentially the commonplace let us know nothing of their inner selves. Take, for instance, the idea of a future life as one which must awaken in every COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. 187 mind a certain train of thought, speculation, suggestion, probably very indefinite, but still, as far as it goes, a man's own one, too, on which we are accustomed to hear others speak, and to which there is continual reference made by our teachers, with efforts to convey distinct and worthy and adequate impressions. Men speak of a future life as if there were some received and common idea attached to it, apart from those more sacred and ineffable points communicated by revelation some recognised ground on which people can under- stand each other. It is not a subject, we grant, on which persons in society often probe one another, but in many different circles, and more especially amongst the poor, it is a frequent topic, and one on which a mutual understanding is always confidently assumed. It is only now and then that we have glimpses of the private interpretations put upon certain accepted terms that are run off by thousands with all the glibness of custom interpretations which range from a rigid con- formity with particular symbols, from shadowy ideas of the illimitable, from visions of boundless knowledge, powers, and activities, to the strangest matter-of-fact repetition of the life of our experience, a future subject to the same restrictions and conditions of time and sense as hold us down here. From the anticipation of a winged existence in space, of flights at will from star to star, they descend to a conception of another world as prosaic as that betrayed by the weary and impatient moribund burdened with messages to the unknown shore " Now do you think I can go rummaging up 188 COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. and down heaven, looking for your first husband?" This was probably the first time the man had ever ex- pressed himself in his own language on this subject, or let his friends know that, while they had always re- garded that other world from its mysterious side, as something exclusively belonging to religion, or perhaps to Church and Sundays, he had always looked on it as the unbroken continuance of his present life, from which he could scarcely separate even his present weakness. But what we would note is, that these low notions may have been formed under many of the same external influences which led the others to their loftier visions ; and that differences as extreme as this may exist among persons who are not accurate or vivid thinkers, without their having the remotest idea of it. Commonplace people, then people who make no figure in conversation, who cannot readily talk of things out of the sphere of absolute knowledge and observation may yet have an inner world of their own ; and this it is that is constantly denied them. Persons are apt to imagine that where they themselves have an under- current of reverie, a thread of thought to be taken up at every pause, or perhaps never fairly out of hand, dull people (as they conceive them) are entirely occu- pied in what seems to engage them that they think, in contradistinction to brighter spirits, of the things they talk about. Now the revelations of our supposed insight into heads and hearts would, to our mind, refute this assumption, and in a good many cases would bring the commonplace on something like a level with their COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. 189 more brilliant associates. The bright man may be showing his best, the dull man only his dullest. There is a great deal in what Addison says : " I have often thought that if the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of the wise man and that of the fool. There are infinite reveries, numberless extravagancies, and a perpetual train of vanities which pass through both. The great difference is, that one knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation by suppressing some and communicating others, whereas the other lets them in- differently fly out in words." This is, in a way, true ; only we are not talking of fools, but of commonplace persons who can keep their reveries to themselves and conduct themselves sensibly; and what we plead on their behalf is, that the difference between them and others who look down on them may be one that the sup- posed revelation would materially diminish. Of course 9 we would not undervalue the taste and discretion which lead to a good choice of subjects, and treat them happily, but it is well to realise that the minds of even the refined and spiritual are constantly engaged upon the homely and material things that dull people talk of. Nay, as likely as not, in our supposed insight into the thoughts of an average company, the dull ones might have the advantage. They might be found en- tangled in a maze of poetry and sentiment they have not words to do justice to, while the more active intel- ligence is caught napping, having slid all unawares into a form of musing familiar even to minds (in their own 190 COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. esteem) of an elevated cast a class of reverie so un- affectedly commemorated by the poet : " I've often wished that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a-year." In fact, it is not most frequently the nature of the topics that engross them which makes the difference between commonplace and distinguished people, or that writes that difference on the countenance. Many dull- looking persons occupy their minds on interesting sub- jects which they cannot make interesting to others, or on which timidity or the want of a vocabulary with- holds them from speaking. We see this when some accident drives them from the platitudes of routine conversation to talk on other and what are felt to be higher things, and they will then show that they have thought, and that they are much more at home on these heights than their ordinary strain of talk has led their hearers to expect. It is the vigour of mind brought to bear, not the amount of judgment at work, which constitutes the most frequent intellectual difference between leaders and the ordinary rank and file. We are, indeed, sometimes forced into the conviction that persons who take a lead, who make themselves a name, whether in society or with a yet wider public, may owe their celebrity and influence as much to their deficiencies as to their gifts. They gain by the fact that their powers want balance, that they have some facul- ties in excess at the cost of a total absence of others ; simply because this defect, inducing deadness of per- ception, assists positiveness. People who have done COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. 191 nothing to distinguish themselves, who have never been praised or set up, are apt to assume that those intel- lectually above them have all the enlightenment they themselves possess, and genius besides. They never suspect the man they reverence and admire of groping in Egyptian darkness, amid regions of thought where they have a very serviceable glimmer if they would but trust it. They give him credit for possessing their own feeble light, and a much stronger flame of reason which outshines it. An entire blank of imagination, an utter deadness to certain impressions, is a great help in this way to theorists and men of one idea, as enabling them in good faith to cry down, to ignore, to be contemptu- ous, to assert themselves. These people do not see the Spanish fleet because 'tis not in sight, and they argue on the non-existence of what they do not see with a strength of conviction and a consistency and cleverness of argument which quite overbear minds which have not the power to realise anything very strongly, but which are nevertheless more far-seeing, and whose imagination, dim though it be, lifts them, if they would but let it, into a range unknown to the other. The same may be said of the sympathy and knowledge of human nature which the majority of men possess for use, though not for show ; the want of which is the removal of so many checks and hindrances to the neat construction of new systems. People are always vainest of a specialty, and a man is pretty sure to be self- reliant in proportion as one quality or faculty represents the whole of his intellectual wealth ; and it is of such 192 COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. that the saying is true, " Le sot trouve toujours quelqu'un plus sot qui 1'admire" the folly of the greater fool consisting in the false humility of not trusting the sense he has. It will hardly be disputed that the attraction of certain popular interpreters of prophecy lies in their representing the most striking and awful predictions as in the very moment of fulfilment, and our own that is their lifetime as the theatre of stupendous events which they are gifted to discern through the world's maze and tumult. What is most mysterious in the Apocalyptic vision they interpret to mean the current course of events. Now we are persuaded that the great majority of hearers who take in these utterances as a sort of gospel, have, if they would only use them, faculties that their teachers want, and for the want of which they are such bold commentators. We believe that they have more intelligent notions of time and distance, that they can better apprehend their own place in the vast scheme of Providence, that it is more possible for them to conceive a pregnant future for the world after they lie forgotten in their graves, that they can take in the idea of history with a clearer under- standing, that they have more of the humility that reason teaches, greater powers of abstraction, and a freer fancy. We believe that, in fact, their minds have a wider scope, and that they have more the gift of look- ing before and after, than the men on whose lips they hang, and to whom they yield an implicit assent, simply because these self-assured expositors of prophecy speak COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. 193 with a boldness, cleverness, and perhaps eloquence which shame their own hesitating apprehension and feeble expression. They have this superiority; that is, they might have it if they would listen to the sug- gestions of their mother wit, which, even as it is, with- holds them from more than a flimsy adhesion, and keeps them rather amused than convinced. After all, they do not really believe that the heretic of the year or the season was distinctly foretold in such a chapter and verse, but it is exciting to hearDr So-and-so prove it " so clearly," and for this stimulant they sell their birthright. Commonplace people who do not wilfully resign the charge of their own judgment have, in fact, a great part to play in the world. We are convinced that society owes one of its heaviest debts to persons of no more than average, but yet well-assorted, faculties. Prominent men, who are the mouth-piece of a party or a circle, so uniformly over-estimate the magnitude of the events and acts in which they themselves are con- cerned, that it might often seem to be one of the necessary conditions of their prominence. Every circle knows some clever, influential man, with whom the transaction in which he is engaged is of overpowering importance, the book that takes his fancy is a classic for all time, the picture he admires is an event in art, the character he looks up to is a hero or a saint, the question of the day is decisive of our place among the nations with whom everything is a turning-point, every achievement unparalleled, every reverse fatal. II. N 194 COMMONPLACE PEOPLE. If these emphatic people really impressed their own one-sided, exaggerated estimate on those about them, and thus gave opinion action and reality, there is no telling what the world would come to. It is common- place people, who see things less vividly but by a correcter scale, that keep things in their places. Their passive resistance holds second-rate genius in salutary check. They exercise this wholesome influence not consciously ; they may even recognise a superior and accept a guidance ; but they have the grand merit of taking things quietly, and regulating the great machine by the juster balance of their moderate powers. L E T T E K S. IT becomes a question whether future biographers will not have to dispense with that volume of letters which formerly, and indeed till lately, formed so important a part of the remains of the great, popular, or distin- guished departed. "Will there ever again be published either the letters of Mr So-and-so, or a correspondence between friends with those headings, " From the Same to the Same," which used to try the patience of the peeping or skipping reader ? It is a point on which experiences probably differ, but our impression is that men have left off letter-writing as a pursuit, as an art, as a practice. They write letters when it is necessary to do so when they have something positive to say but they do not correspond with one another ; at least so we suspect, though possibly we may be mistaken. The fact, if it be a fact, is matter for regret. For something is surely lost to the world if our clever men have left off writing to one another, and exclusively address the world at large, which it is our view of the 196 LETTEKS. case that they do. Letters of a highly intellectual cast may perhaps have filled only a temporary social need. We want something as a substitute for personal intercourse ; and letters, under a certain passing state of things, exactly supplied this need : they took the place of conversation, and were the best medium for news the news of the world and of the day. Certain conditions are necessary for letter- writing of the high- est cast, without which letter-writing, according to our ideas, could not exist. The infinite formality and crabbedness of the fifteenth and sixteenth century letters, even those of the cunningest penmen of the day, show that these conditions had not then been reached that people had not then caught the idea of a letter. Southey, writing of his own day in contrast with past centuries, considered that letters had become one of the greatest pleasures and amusements of life, " perhaps the greatest gratification which the progress of civilisation has given us ;" and he boasted that "now (in his time) a mail-coach could waft a sigh across the country at the rate of eight miles an hour." This mail-coach speed, and a high rate of postage charged exactly by distance, were probably the precise conditions required for the choicest epistolary excel- lence. There is no possible social gain without social loss ; we cannot retain the old with the new. Eail- ways and the penny post have brought with them an amount and complication of change which could scarcely fail to upset the nice adjustment that had directed the general mind in one particular channel. LETTERS. 197 Distance has lost the old ideas attached to it; the press has developed into an ubiquitous, all-absorbing power, and even fills the letter-bag. It was not possible but that the habit of letter- writing should be greatly influenced by such radical changes. At first sight, the facilities for correspondence were indefinitely increased. It was easier than ever to write letters, in that pecuniary scruples were re- moved ; but it was also easier and cheaper to do many other things. When we think of all celebrated cor- respondences and distinguished letter- writers, we feel that the present state of things would have interfered with each and all of them, if not rendered them im- possible. In the first place, no really good letter ever was or will be written but it must certainly have been one main intellectual effort of the day on which it was penned. It does not matter how intimate and easy the tone, and seemingly careless the style ; if it is forcible, bright, telling, interesting, it has cost the writer effort, and taken something out of him. In the days we speak of, it was worth while to bestow this pains ; no labour was wasted. The letter was certain to be honourably received ; it was not likely to be jostled by a dozen others ; it might reckon on not being forestalled in its news ; and there was no other claimant for the freshness of the receiver's attention. But who can say this of any letter of mere friendship, apart from pressing personal interests, when the ' Times' travels along with it and lies on the same breakfast- table ? When men made a business of letter- writing, a 198 LETTERS. newspaper did not necessarily contain news to a man of the world. Horace Walpole stands pre-eminent in all time for the number and the felicity of his letters, but, with the press for his rival, his occupation would have been gone. Not that papers and reviews say what he would have said, but they would have taken the heart and spirit out of his work. He would not have cared to criticise a book unless he knew that his opinion was paramount with his friend, or to tell the events of the day unless he was certain to be first with his story. As it was, he sustained for a long series of years a dozen or more distinct correspondences, each varying in tone and style. Of one correspondent Sir Horace Mann he asks, " What Orestes and Pylades ever wrote to each other for four-and-forty years without once meeting ?" to which our argument adds, What pair of friends ever will do so again? No gifted man lives now to write letters to accept letter-writing as his mission, and make all other occupations and engage- ments bow to it. Before Walpole's day the wits were feeling their way into the real province of letter-writ- ing, but had not reached it. They wrote in lofty recognition of themselves and each other as the intel- lectual quintessence of their time, but even less than Walpole would Pope, Swift, and the rest have written letters if the press had then attained its present wings. They were secretly willing, nay anxious, that the world should share their thoughts, but they acknowledged each other as the only suitable medium for expressing them. It had not yet occurred to men to take the LETTERS. 199 public into direct confidence a modern impulse which is another blow to ideal letter- writing. As no one can escape the influences of his age, even the cordial, intimate, sincere correspondence between Gray and his friends owes much of its merit and charm to the reticence of feeling towards the outer world which was the habit of the time. Gray may be said to have introduced the easy style of letter- writing. He amused himself with the pomposity that prevailed in the "beginnings" of his contemporaries. Indeed, his biographer thought proper to reduce his opening sentences very graceful in their playfulness to measured formality, lest the feelings of old-fa- shioned readers should receive too rude a shock. But some counter attraction would still have interposed itself, had he been of our day, to stop the particular and exclusive interchange of thought. He would not have written so much to Mason, and probably he would have written more for the world. His criticism would not have been content with one auditor, how- ever deferential ; his exquisite descriptions of scenery, and of its effect upon himself, would have appealed to a wider sympathy. Even that choice humour which gains so much by the confidence to which we are ad- mitted could not now be limited to one or two friends, however congenial. In the domestic and religious world, again, there was a certain leisure in those times which made letter-writing a more natural vehicle of expression than we find it now. We should like to know what part of the day a " good man " now can 200 LETTERS. devote to letters of friendship. Not but that some still find letters a natural employment, but the practice requires two to be in the same mind, and a pair of letter-writers can hardly be looked for in one circle. Thus Cowper, had he lived amongst us, would not have found anything that he liked better to do than letter- writing ; he would not have craved a larger sphere, or grudged the time to his friends ; but he would have lacked encouragement, and would have been driven as, from different causes, other men so often are to write to women. This is what Sydney Smith did. Letters were quite an important engine with him. They helped to maintain him in the social position to which his wit had lifted him ; and whenever a neat turn or happy fancy occurred to him, he wrote it off to Lady Grey, or Lady Holland, or the Hon. Mrs So-and-so, from whom he might expect an answer, rather than to their respective lords. Lord Byron's letters were thought a great deal of, but the best of them were not letters at all in any private sense. He intended a great many people to see them, and they were public in all but their form. His publisher had leave to show these " bulletins and manifestoes " to the initiated. There was a gathering at Murray's when it was known he had heard from Byron, and through him were propagated threats to adverse critics of a return to the youthful mode of attack ; as " They may smile How, and so may you, but if I took you all in hand it would not be difficult to cut you up like gourds." Clearly such letters as LETTERS. 201 these would not be written now. Had he lived in our days, the poet would have had his special organ ; he would have cut up his critics and his acquaintances in type, and, for the sake of a larger audience, would have dispensed with the veil of privacy which no doubt added a piquancy to some of his portraits of his friends. We do not believe that Byron's correspondence, had he lived in our time, would have expressed the whole man as it did then. He would have written direct to the world in some way, without the intervention of Moore and Murray. Walter Scott's life revealed almost as genial a correspondence as the world knows, and, as the work of a man whose mind was kept actively engaged in direct literary labours, it is, we should sup- pose, unparalleled. One would allow indeed that a warm heart and perfect facility like his must always fall into letter-writing ; and, in fact, he was one of the few persons whom we can imagine uninfluenced to any great extent by times and general habits, though here, again, the lapse of forty or fifty years would tend to diminish very materially the amount of correspondence expressive of the writer. It was a blind deference to custom which led Professor Wilson's biographer to insert so many of his letters. He was a man by nature without privacy. There was never any reason why he should say what he had to say to an individual rather than to the public ; and so far, perhaps, he anticipated our day, and illustrates our view of the radical change that has come over the world in this respect. The mention of Wilson, however, reminds us of some letters 202 LETTERS. in his life which were of a different order. Lockhart's letters were of the good old type. He honoured his correspondent with the vigour and force of his mind, without any ulterior views of a larger audience. He was an editor, and we are not sure that the position of editor does not still offer a refuge for the failing, waning faculty. There are many reasons why it should be so. The editor must be on his mettle, must maintain the ascendancy due to varied knowledge, and must keep his staff in good humour with him and with them- selves ; but perhaps the chief reason is that letter- writing is his work, and the fatal notion of wasting time does not obtrude itself as it does so constantly when active minds find themselves bestowing their time on an individual, a mere unit, instead of employ- ing it for the benefit of the whole world present and future. But, not to dwell on that conceit of the value of our labours which belongs to the present age, the general amount of intellectual toil in other and new direc- tions implies, indeed compels, some diminution in this quarter. Letters are the fruit of leisure. We suspect that most men, after toiling hard at literary task-work, are indisposed for anything so voluntary as a friendly letter which may as well be written to-morrow. If they write, it is by a sort of moral compulsion, damag- ing to style and interest. There is, of course, a certain relief in indifference to periods and to exact balance of clauses ; but a good letter is a labour of love, uncon- scious of exemptions. The writer has delighted in LETTERS. 203 doing his best ; the pen has flowed rapidly, but taste has kept pace with it ; and there is a particular graceful negligence of expression, to be found nowhere but in good letters, which more than any other style gives the assurance of a gentleman. Our subject, of course, is confined to voluntary letter- writing, the conversational intercourse of friends through the post, and has nothing to do with those letters from a mere letter of business to a despatch which a man's position and duties require him to write. The letters which get men fame are something over and above all this. They are superfluities which need not be undertaken unless inclination on the whole goes that way compacts of friendship for a stated inter- change of ideas, which scholars and gentlemen of the old school even within our own experience have carried through with unfailing spirit and perseverance, but which it does not fall in our way to hear of now. Our view, again, does not interfere with certain fits and visitations of letter-writing which influence most people at one time or other, in the temporary en- thusiasm of a common cause, when it is themselves and their friends against the world, though this is a taste of the same exclusiveness and spirit of clique which had so much to do with the habit as a charac- teristic of a former generation. The less artificial class of letter- writers have probably at no time troubled themselves much about the pre- servation of their letters, yet an understanding that letters are kept must lead materially to a more pains- 204 LETTERS. taking composition of them. At a time when men were reflected upon for neglecting or destroying the letters of a distinguished correspondent, a certain care in composition was felt to be indispensable. On the other hand, we know nothing so damaging to the epistolary art, not even leaving letters about a temp- tation to the supposed curiosity of servants as the habit which some persons indulge in, after glancing through a letter of news, of crushing the crisp paper scored by a friendly hand into a ball, and chucking it, before assembled eyes, into the fire. A decent interval ought to elapse between reading and destruction. Of course it is impossible now to keep all the effusions of the post ; we know that most letters that come to us, we assume that all we write, must be destroyed ; but like the disappearance of those other winged mes- sengers, the small birds the death of a letter should be solitary and secret, a mystery and a regret. All we have said applies only to men. No one can say that women have left off letter-writing, or that they show diminished energy in this department of labour ; but the mode in which change has affected style and matter is too wide a subject to be appended to any other, and must be reserved for separate dis- cussion. DISTINCTION. IN that horror of the merely ordinary and common- place which besets mankind, it is wonderful what men will not accept in the way of distinction. We know of a line of rustics marked by the occasional distinc- tion of three thumbs. "Whenever a child is born with the family peculiarity, the event is hailed with rejoic- ing, nor is the surgeon's knife ever allowed to remove this evident sign of nature's particular regard and in- dividual concern for the race of Stubbs. A coach pas- senger, in old times, excited the attention of his fellow- travellers by a peculiar importance and assiimption of manner, which nothing in his appearance seemed to warrant till he announced himself, with some pomp of preamble, as the father of the man who invented the Woodstock Corset. Something remarkable, something to feed the craving for a separate noticeable individu- ality, is what none would willingly be without, and we cannot pay a more refined compliment to another than by showing our knowledge of the distinction on which 206 DISTINCTION. he values himself. Yet a certain envy, no less com- mon to humanity, is always fighting against this yearning for some creditable difference from everybody else, and shows itself in a delight in destroying illu- sions, in gratuitous pains to make people know their places, " in bringing them down to their proper level," and a hundred hard phrases of the same order. To " take people down," which is some persons' especial mission, is, in fact, to deprive them of a sense of dis- tinction very agreeable to themselves, but supposed to be not only insufferable to the lookers-on, but also in- jurious to the elated person. Yet, in fact, no one is the better for feeling insignificant and merely one of a class. Even though his struggles to emancipate him- self from such a position may take a ridiculous form, he may yet be serving both private and general inter- ests. It was the charge against Toryism that it only permitted the ambition for distinction to favoured classes. The lower orders dwelt on the "level" we have spoken of, and, in the eyes of those who looked down upon them, any differences of stature were un- observed. They were seen en masse / and for one out of the mass to attempt to rise, and control or outshine the rest, called, among the more bigoted of the party, for suspicion or contempt. Yet Kepublicanism is a greater enemy to distinction than ever Toryism was, for the enmity is at once more subtle and more power- ful. Its theory is against it ; its avowed aim is to raise all to make all superior to their former state, but none distinguished. Not that the Americans have DISTINCTION. 207 ever lost the term ; in their peaceful days they were notorious for the number of their distinguished men, for the craving cannot be suppressed, and each little township, from all report, had a dozen of them. But really pre-eminent names are exceptionally rare in America ; even the war has produced few in proportion to the energy of the struggle and the vast interests involved. The cry for equality is, with too many, a cry against others' possessing any distinction that can be withheld from them ; and, if the enthusiasts for this equality ever get their way, distinction will be finally crushed out of the world. Communism, Mutualism, Socialism, Fourierism, all the systems that transcen- dentalists look to for the regeneration of the world, would, in carrying their point, make men as alike and as material as a herd of Scotch bullocks. But the leaders in these schemes are really as great examples as may be found anywhere of the love and the effect of distinctions, and as ingenious in devising them. Thus, Theodore Parker, who was caught by all communistic schemes, was influenced through his whole career by the fact that his grandfather was distin- guished as the man who captured the first musket in the War of Independence, and by his pride in the dis- tinction. This musket stood at the door of his study, and probably suggested the idea of the pistol which graced his pulpit cushion, and added such effect to his anti-slavery eloquence. He finally bequeathed it to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with a general sense of distinguishing and being distinguished by the 208 DISTINCTION. legacy. Distinctions of this sort, we believe, might be found to underlie the differences which are observable in many careers seemingly starting from the same point ; so elevating in their influence are such stimu- lants of the soul, so suggestive and even prophetic in their significance to the man marked by them. But we are not concerned with the distinctions of remark- able men, or with those that make men remarkable. It is on their effect in making average men more distinc- tive and happy in a standing of their own that we would dwell. It was the elevating sense of the dis- tinctions they were born to which kept up the spirit and energy of the French emigrants of the great Kevo- lution when everything else was lost to them, and made them so respectable in low fortune and medio- crity of powers. But a distinction which is known only to a man's self may have a great effect on his habitual deportment, and may help him to a philoso- phic endurance of neglect or more positive evils. A queen in disguise would yet have a grand manner, for she would never forget that she was queen, and would be sustained under all humiliations by a serene con- sciousness of her real place ; and so a man supported by an inner source of self-reliance can endure with a lofty patience a hundred trials and provocations which would upset another without this hidden prop whereon to lean. Nor does it very much matter that the dis- tinction should be morally equal to its burden. It is a great thing that a man should have self-respect, from whatever source. DISTINCTION. 209 We are aware that a good deal of harmless vanity may be the consequence of such secret causes of self-satisfac- tion, causes which it may be a point of honour to keep secret. Few people know how to shut out every inlet to conceit, as the vigilance of their guard in one direc- tion may leave a way open to the enemy in another. We think it is George Sand who describes her tutor as a man of inordinate vanity in little matters, which might be due to an act of extraordinary heroism to which he was never known to allude, in which he had put his life in extremest peril, and sacrificed his pros- pects, to save the life and fortune of his patron. The red Indians, we are told, are scrupulously reserved and veracious in the one distinction open to an Indian the number of his scalps ; but they indemnify them- selves with unlimited falsehood and boasting in lesser matters. So it is well for all persons who can feed on a private self-elevating secret, and are in the habit of stowing away their scalps for private satisfaction, to keep watch and guard over their tongue in the careless intercourse of life ; or their weakness may be played upon, as was that of the wealthy lady in the ' Spectator,' whose heirs succeeded in keeping off a suitor by the timely present of a pair of cherry-coloured garters the hidden distinction so elating her that the lover who might have won upon her good graces at another time was discarded as not equal to her newly-fed sense of desert. Persons are, perhaps, never so little on their guard in minor matters of conduct as when some- thing known to themselves alone makes them tem- II. 210 DISTINCTION. porarily independent of the judgment of those about them. The need of human nature for some distinction, and something to value self upon, constantly leads to exhi- bitions of vanity in another direction, where, perhaps, allowance enough is not made for it. So long as the intellect of woman is not her main field of influence and triumph, so long as personal attractions are the surest way to attention and general appreciation, women will be found to pride themselves, ridiculously as it seems, on little personal merits. The distinction of a pretty arm, or foot, or ankle, will often turn the head of a plain woman. But it must be pleaded that society shares more than half the blame by its exclu- sive notice of externals. If a pretty hand is the sole claim to distinction, it is only common justice to be tender and lenient towards any over-consciousness and parade of the one refuge from insignificance where nature and circumstances have been alike niggards. For the most part, the more prominent distinctions have only been open to women through their sympa- thies their pride in husbands, sons, brothers ; but the present age notoriously shows a higher ambition, and the race of mothers of the Gracchi are fast changing into grandmothers, whose constitutional elation at the achievements of their descendants, and content in re- flected honours, time and progress are not likely to interfere with. This difference between the old and new school was felt when Madame Goethe and DISTINCTION. 211 Madame de Stael were, with some ceremony and much expectation, brought together. "Je suis la mere de Goethe," was the solemn self-introduction of the Ger- man mother, believing that there existed not among women a more magnificent title or a nobler claim to honour. "Ah, j'en suis charme'e," was all that the brilliant Frenchwoman could find to say on the im- pressive occasion. Reflected greatness made no ap- peal to her imagination ; she had realised a quicker, more poignant sensation. We have heard it questioned whether the relish for distinction shown by the Laureate's dying farmer is true to the bucolic nature. It is natural enough that he should relish the real glory of reclaiming a waste and the appreciation of equals ; but that he should care for the "quoloty" pointing him out to one an- other, and exclaiming amongst themselves, "What a mon a bea, sewer-ly!" strikes some critics as an indi- vidual rather than a general trait, and perhaps as be- neath the stolid dignity of the British farmer. But, for ourselves, we believe in it as true to thought, whether a likely utterance or not. All observation shows that the very prosecution of a great work is accompanied by the desire that it should be recognised beyond the mere personal range of acquaintance that a wider and still extending circle should note and esti- mate, not only the labour, but the labourer. In a word, with heroism there is desire for distinction. We have not however, to do with the fame due to 212 DISTINCTION. heroic achievement as an object of desire, but with that degree of notice which shall give to its object a sense of individuality, adding point and dignity to life. "We are advocating indulgence where this longing manifests itself in grotesque expression. The longer we live, the more considerate we learn to be of follies which have this source. The desire itself is one main impulse to progress, always being snubbed and set down, indeed, but happily irrepressible in a vigorous society ; and it is only inexperience that is disdainful of the pettier forms of it. If it was grand in Lord Nelson to think, at a crisis, of a tomb in Westminster Abbey, many a lesser ambition has its justification, though it could not be recorded without sounding like a satire. All that is necessary for its respecta- bility is that the distinction aimed at should be felt to be the meed of real worth ; that it should satisfy some inner sense of desert ; that the beauty, the merit, the association with excellence should all be genuine, in the man's own mind, whatever the cold observer may think of it. Our faith in the charm of distinction, our plea for it as a salutary indulgence, all depends on degree. Whe- ther for pleasure or profit, it should be exhibited in mere globules, and a dose of distinction must be like all other doses to men of average modesty and self-respect. To be always pointed at, always stared at, always hustled, always singled out, should, if realised, be a purgatory. Where it comes of mere place and station, of course it DISTINCTION. 213 takes less hold, and may be forgotten ; but it must, in every case of excess, tend to separation and a dignified exile ; and where it is the result of a man's own work in the world, any excess of notice must lose him more than it gives, and bring about what has been called the greatest misfortune of geniuses, that their very friends are more apt to admire than to love them. Where the nature is not sensitive enough to feel this refinement, the want, once aroused, becomes an appetite or ruling passion, as with poor Sir Godfrey Kneller, who, after craving for notice and praise all his life with a per- fectly indiscriminate appetite, dreamt of distinctions in heaven as he lay on his death-bed, and very compla- cently reported to his friends the effect his name pro- duced when given in at the august portals: "As I approached, St Peter very civilly asked me my name. I said it was Kneller. I had no sooner said so than St Luke, who was standing just by, turned towards me and said, with a great deal of sweetness, ' What ! the famous Sir Godfrey Kneller of England ?' ' The very same, sir,' says I, ' at your service.'" Whether we care for distinctions or not, there can be no doubt that Englishmen have a certain sheepish re- luctance to show any visible tokens of them, though this may not, after all, interfere with an inner satisfaction. The senior wrangler of a former generation who ob- jected to appearing at Covent Garden, where a Kemble was acting, "till the thing had blown over a little," realised the glory of his position to the full, though his 214 DISTINCTION. modesty was needlessly apprehensive of a shock. We should rather recommend a simple enjoyment of the natural consequences of successes, because thus men best learn how short their day is, and because dis- tinctions honestly accepted are the best preservative from morbid self-appreciation and an over-estimate of the worth of a man's own work. SMILES, THERE are some things that familiarity does not teach us. We may be too intimate with the people about us to be able to pronounce on certain points with the cor- rect judgment of mere acquaintances, or even of stran- gers. Amongst these things, we suspect, is the quality of smile with which those nearest to us are endowed. If any chance should bring the question before us, we are thrown back upon our memory, and have to recollect what we thought when we first knew such or such a face. Thus, lovers apostrophise and idolise smiles, but the happiness of husbands and of all homes depends on some more habitual expression. Those who are driven to speculate on smiles in this sphere, and to watch for them, are not fortunate men. If this be true if, our attention being called to smiles, we do not look at home, but amongst acquaintance, casual encounters, new faces we think the fact throws some light upon the worth of smiles, and their value as a test of character. We are not going to disparage the very prettiest thing the 216 SMILES. eye can look upon. Nobody need hope or fear to drive smiles out of fashion. We claim to be as easily led captive by them, as open to their blandishments, as our neighbours as ready to admit that, in the perfect ideal smile, we see the bloom, the light, the glory of the human face divine. It is not the smile, nor the meaning and honesty of the smile, that we bring under discussion. But if it can be shown that the typical smile is for grand occasions, is (shall we say ?) a com- pany rather than a domestic thing, it may place the smile, as a standard of temper and heart, on a different level from the received one.- We are not saying that every home worthy of the name is not wreathed about with good serviceable smiles cheering to heart and eye ; but these are felt in their effects, not studied and ana- lysed. Smiles of name, whether " deep and ambrosial," " superb," " ineffable," " bewitching," " penetrating," " brilliant," " illuminating," " persuasive," " transfigur- ing," or even eminently " expressive," are a different class of thing altogether from these domestic manufac- tures, and are evoked by different causes. Even the " warm genial smile," as a prominent distinction, be- longs to the good manner which gets its possessor talked about. Mr Trollope has made some good remarks on the flattery of a beautiful woman's smile. We believe it is not only modern Griseldas who use their smiles for this purpose, but that, in their very nature, and taken at the best, there is a touch of flattery in the smile that charms us. The real fascinating smile is not for the SMILES. 217 wear and tear of everyday life. It is conscious of itself that is, of the state of mind that elicits it. Though sincere (for feigned smiles are not discussed here), it is prompted by some excitement by the desire to please, to carry a point, to represent self or some cherished object in a favourable aspect and is bestowed on persons not subject, at least not yet subject, to the smiler's habitual influence. "We say of these smiles engaging, beaming, searching, appealing, questioning, captivating smiles making ordinary features beautiful, turning the stern or merely impassive or coldly-regular countenance into a thing instinct with life, thought, and sympathy of the smiles, in short, that literally illumine the features, that they do not tell us half as much of the soul that animates them as we may learn from the same countenance at rest. We think we see refinement, tenderness, geniality, sympathy, even a good conscience, in a smile ; but at the best it rather shows a susceptibility of moral excellences than that practice of them which impresses itself on the face in repose. And, besides, how few can distinguish between mere beauty of form and beauty of expression ! A hundred things over which the soul has no control, must fix the lines which form the graceful " contrac- tion " of a lovely smile. All the moral elements may exist, but some perversity of organisation may result in a mere contortion, while beauty and harmony of feature always please the eye, even where the mind and heart are in no very active fellowship. For it is only those muscles which are in habitual use that the mind 218 SMILES. can train into absolute obedience to its purposes ; and over-practice in smiling never ends in perfection. It is often said, in extenuation of a harsh, coarse, or otherwise unattractive physiognomy, that the owner of it has a sweet smile. " Have you observed his smile ?" we are asked, and constantly this smile is alleged as a guarantee. That man must be sound at the core who has an open, ingenuous, intelligent smile. The rest is accident, or the world's rough usage ; but the smile lifts the veil, and shows us the real temper, mind, and heart, which are understood to be disguised by the usual pose of features. For our part, we trust the ordinary expression ; where that is cold, we believe that the heart is cold too. There is a certain lightning flash illuminating some countenances which may be accepted as a sign of transitory interest and good-will, if people will be content with this; but which, to our fancy, rather sets the smiler in a striking and attractive point of view than brings him nearer to us, or tells us any- thing about the relation of his mind towards others. The smile comes from within from the stir of a certain abstract benevolence, from a fount of satisfied compla- cent thought and shines with the design of revealing something to us ; not in pure sympathy with our homely nature. There need be no inherent coldness here, but we think that people with this brilliant telling smile will often be found, in a quiet way, very full of them- selves, and attributing to themselves a prominent place in the mind and interest of others. The smile has in reality a touch of patronage in it, but, if bright and SMILES. 219 sudden enough, the chill is lost in a sense of favour. This smile is no doubt a mark of that strong "pro- nounced " individuality which puts some characters so far in advance of their less confident fellows ; though people who never break away from the stolidity of their everyday expression, who are aware of an inner sump- tuary law against it, may not necessarily be more self- forgetting than others. Self-consciousness, awkward in many ways, has often the advantage over others in its smile. "My expression is best," said Simeon, "when I am talking to little children." We have little doubt that he was right, and that the smiles lavished on these innocents were of first-rate quality only, unfortunately, he knew it. There is another sort of smile belonging to men of strong characters of which we hear high encomiums the transforming smile, which sets off and humanises the countenance in the most unexpected manner. Conquerors and dictators in all spheres are often de- scribed with this redeeming grace. But it is scarcely a compliment to any man's habitual expression to attri- bute this effect to what can be only an occasional per- formance ; especially as the transforming smile, if we read romances aright, is also the " rare smile " which engages the affections of young ladies who, having never lived under the influence of a bad temper, don't know what it is to watch anxiously for a smile, and think they should rather like it. Where the smile has this double quality, what must be the everyday ex- pression towards people not worth smiling upon ? Give 220 SMILES. us rather for our constant companion a face to which smiles are so natural, and so in sequence with other transitions of expression, as to excite no speculation whose sweetness, at any rate, shall owe none of its effects to sharp contrasts. All smiles, after childhood, are trained by education ; in fact, they are at once the sign of earliest conscious- ness and of the highest development and finish. Per- haps they do not arrive at their more exquisite perfec- tion between the two extremes. Savages, we are told, never smile. Men engaged in the rough work of the world laugh, but seldom smile ; when they do, it is a token of intellectual advance. It is painful to observe how seldom the poor smile, with what grave faces they accost one another, until we chance to reflect how little mirth there often is in our own smiles, and recall the sense of relief which our muscles not seldom find in relaxing from them. We speak of the smile the worldling's smile, as poets and moralists are so good as to call it which represents only that we are on our good behaviour, making the best of things, and concealing indifference from persons who would think ill of us and eschew our company if we did not dress our face in a show of welcome or sympathy. Now, take this smile so much cried down, this type of insin- cerity, and contrast it with those cheerful radiant exhi- bitions which are so constantly set against it, and we are not sure that a good deal may not be said on its side. The difference will not be found so entirely a moral one as is uniformly taken for granted. We are SMILES. 221 not going to set the poor conventional hack smile against the affluence and benediction of that which expresses a full, deeply moved, loving heart ; and un- questionably that smile, whatever its source, is bright- est which comes from being pleased, and need not justify itself by an hypothesis ; but where is the merit of most smiles ? Mrs Browning has personified a whole tribe of beaming, satisfied, youthful radiances in her little Ellie, who ' ' Sits alone, And the smile she softly useth Fills the silence like a speech, While she thinks what shall be done, And the sweetest pleasure chooseth For her future within reach. ' ' Little Ellie in her smile Chooseth ' I will have a lover Riding on a steed of steeds,' " &c. The so-called " worldling " the man who smiles when he is not glad at heart, and has no fair anticipations to retire into at pleasure may have more humanity in his feigning than there is in the other's nature and truth, and is honester than he knows himself to be. He smiles in support of large general principles in acknowledgment that man is a social being, and would be wretched if alienated from his kind. It is no cause of joy, perhaps, that visitors come interrupting or dis- turbing us ; but we smile from a sense of duty to them as men, in fellowship with our kind, in recognition of the truth that, if our solitude were never to be broken in upon, if we were indeed alone, isolated, neglected, 222 SMILES. we should be miserable, and life would be a burden. And the effort is not unrewarded. Cause and effect change places. We do not smile because we are glad, but, by dint of assuming cheerfulness as a duty, we taste a certain satisfaction. The smile of patience, forbearance, good manners, forced and unreal though it be, is worn many times in the day by every person who accepts the responsibilities of life, and acknow- ledges other obligations than his own comfort and inclination. We are apt to class smiles grammatically as mascu- line and feminine. Thus the lightning smile is seen with most effect on men, while the bewitching smile is essentially a woman's weapon. The critical smile, the " slow, gradual smile" a certain subtle, delicate, polite smile of carrying a point in argument is a man's mode of triumph ; while the artless, appealing, " mock- ing," winning, cajoling smile is best pointed with girlish dimples. The best smile of all that of sym- pathy, where the eyes do more than the lips is to be seen wherever true or fine feelings have the luck to meet with features pliant and graceful enough to let them show themselves to advantage. We have kept clear of the whole race of melodra- matic and tragic smiles, whose very last design is to express or to convey pleasure as, for example, the smile of scorn, anger, hate, despair. Nor do we touch on that milder and more domestic provocation, the smile of incredulity, which many besides Thackeray have found " a most naughty and odious expression in SMILES. 223 a young lady's face." Of course the smiles we treat of have no relationship, or only the most distant, to laughter, or to those broad smiles, degenerating into giggling explosiveness, which are the reproach of undisciplined youth. There have been times when laughter was wholly forbidden to the well-bred gentle- woman when it was pronounced vulgar, inadmissible at tournament or court of love. Ladies might never go beyond a smile ; but then that mediaeval smile ! What was not said and sung, what was not borne and suf- fered, for the divine emanation ? The lampeggiar del angelica riso of Laura received its apotheosis; the santo riso of Beatrice has become a constellation since it first shone on Dante, and " that admirable person in a dress of purest white" transfixed him with a smile "of such ineffable courtesy that on the instant he attained the extreme of human happiness." If all this means nothing else, it means that the smile has always been an affair of cultivation, a carefully-trained flower, an influence and power not unknown to the possessor. These historical smiles would have been quite out of place, and in fact impossible, in the merely domestic circle. And so it is still Smiles of the ineffable sort are the expression of thought and feeling, stimulated and exerted in a new field, or wherever opportunities and influence are occasional, and to be made much of. However pleasant the wife's smile to her husband, it was a different smile which first charmed him. The smile of purest benevolence is not lavished on those whose wellbeing is the first duty and daily care. In 224 SMILES. fact, with all these, smiles have done their part. When you know men or women thoroughly, you have got past their smiles ; these will tell you nothing of the disposition or character which you did not know more perfectly in other ways, and you will cease to study them with any nicety of analysis. JILTING, So long as there is love-making in the world, and en- gagements, and talk of weddings and young folks' happy prospects, so long will one shadow haunt these felicities, and experience have its moments of misgiv- ing ; so long will society have to report from time to time of sudden changes, broken promises, feelings out- raged, and hopes blighted in their pride of bloom. Whenever happiness depends on the consent of two, one may fail ; and whatever is possible to human weakness and error will certainly now and then be done. No circle, therefore, is ever long without its interesting case of jilting, whether arousing indignant sympathy or giving play to that refining casuistry which is a feature of our day. The term which we have been forced to adopt was probably devised when constancy was a more unquestioned virtue than it is with us when people were not so much in the habit of analysing their natures, and feelings were supposed to be under absolute moral control ; and thus a certain n. p 226 JILTING. act cannot be expressed summarily without giving it a vulgar name, and so committing the speaker to an adverse judgment. And yet jilting is rarely so simple a business but that something, and generally a great deal, may be said for it, and especially where the per- petrator is a lady. In fact, it is not only that the term itself is feminine, but we believe the act, in its proper typical significance, is most often feminine also where, that is, it results from actual change of mind. Men commit breaches of faith quite as often as women, but when they do so, our own experience has led us to see deliberate self-interest rather than any startling change of feeling, though no experience is wide enough to justify dogmatism on this question. Crosbie, who cre- ditably represents the male jilt, is in a way constant to Lily. His affections were not the things that swerved or changed owners; they simply interfered with his prospects. This was the scrape he found himself in, and he thought he knew his way out of it. A real change of feeling, the act of breaking an engage- ment at the last simply because the person with whom it was contracted has become distasteful, and caprice turns love into loathing, is a woman's act ; and this is the conduct that admits of two sides in social discus- sion. There are plenty of men ready to follow Crosbie's example, plenty of other men to take for granted, in their own minds or amongst men of the world, that there was nothing else to be done: but the tongue does not run on this theme ; in fact, it is one of the things to be done taken for granted not talked of. But all JILTING. 227 the refinements of sentiment, all the subtleties of con- flicting duties, all the mazes of feeling, may be found entangled and complicated in a case of ladylike jilting, where the rules of good-breeding have been observed with discriminating delicacy, and an array of heart- rending scruples pleaded in extenuation. What, it is boldly asked, is a woman to do under such circum- stances? and the reply is not so easy to find as the indignant faction imagine. Take the ordinary case. A young man and woman meet, are mutually attracted, go through a course of flirtation, ripening into courtship on his side, and re- sulting in eager, happy acceptance on hers. Amidst the gratulations of friends and the jubilation of the contracting parties, who enjoy the celebrity and glory of their position, the affair progresses, and the day nears which is to make him " the happiest of men." The lady, in the delicious excitement of her trousseau, suffers feeling to sleep, till suddenly she discovers a change in herself. Her William is no longer all-in-all to her; she wakes to his faults, finds him tiresome, vapid, finally intolerable. William is, in fact, just what he always was his good and bad very much on the surface, his little awkwardnesses always patent to his friends, but a good honest fellow, with a heart only too much in the affair for the success of his hopes. It is she who sees him with different eyes eyes which exaggerate every defect till life looks hideous under the prospect of his inseparable company. To people not in love, and alive to the irksomeness of uncongenial 228 JILTING. society, life-long companionship with anybody to whom they are not used is an alarming if not repulsive idea. Those who reason from what they know in themselves, not upon general principles, and who happen always to have felt constancy in the abstract something of a puzzle, sympathise with a hapless girl entangled in a horrible mesh of promises not in her power to perform. They think her recoil from William not unnatural, and begin to wonder that these things do not happen oftener. Thus, in every affair of this sort where the lady has done nothing flagrant to aggravate her case, there will be strong differences of opinion, and there will be persons to constitute themselves respectively counsel for the prosecution and the defence. The simple people who think a promise binding and con- stancy a virtue, and a very easy virtue too, are on the lover's side. They realise what must be the supreme bitterness of that moment made up of rage, grief, bewilderment, shame, blank void when a man, hav- ing garnered up his hopes on some fair one, has his heart returned upon his hands ; when, having believed himself first in her affections, he finds himself nothing not only not beloved, but repugnant. No, they can- not forgive a woman who can inflict upon the man who loves her, and whom she has once loved, such complicated and humiliating torment. The lady's ad- vocates, on the other hand, assert that constancy is not an affair of the will that the fault lies with destiny, or with William himself, who does not stand the test of close intimacy. And then comes the question, What JILTING. 229 is a woman to do when she finds the prospect of a union with him insupportable? True, she has pro- mised; but is there not a more binding promise be- yond, which she could not undertake without conscious falsehood and hypocrisy ? Would it not be a greater wrong, even to him, to marry than to break away while there is yet time ? The power to answer this question does not really influence our right of censure, but it is put as though the whole point turned upon it. In fact, nobody is in a condition to answer the Yes or the No except the lady herself and her closest intimates, for it hangs on something of which the outside world cannot be the judge, which yet has a right to be angry when it sees an honest attachment brought to grief. Only, if the lady can prove herself in the right in breaking her engagement, our blame ought to be of a severer sort than if the decision of conscience is that she ought to have gone through with the thing at any cost to herself. It all depends on whether she ever cared for her lover in the way her words and actions gave him to understand she did. If she did, if there has been one spark of real love in the business, she should have swallowed her scruples, and all would have come right ; and so she will discover when too late. There are some forms of caprice and change of mind we can pity. There is in the feminine organisation a tendency to sudden misgivings and disgusts, the offspring of nerves rather than feeling, and akin to the spleen and vapours which in old times were such acknowledged sources of inconvenience and perplexity to mankind. 230 JILTING. What so natural as that this should clash now and then with that other characteristic of seeing things, not with the eye of reason, but of imagination that prone- ness to illusion without which perhaps it is impossible ever to be properly in love at all, and which sets off her lover in a glow of colours certainly not all his own ? Is it strange that the veil should flutter aside now and then, that her constitutional fastidiousness should be- tray her into some vagaries ? Nature and society con- spire to make her look forward to marriage as her calling; but there is another side. Something never fairly considered before has to be sacrificed to bring about this consummation. It is no wonder if the prize, when fairly within reach, should lose its prestige at odd moments ; and, if the influence of the hour is allowed its way, it precipitates her into the act of jilt- ing. She shows herself capricious and changeable ; we can boldly pronounce her wrong, and at the same time unhappy in her error, for we know that habit, duty, and the sense of the inevitable, would soon have estab- lished her in the first favourable way of thinking. But what if she has never cared for him ? What if, from the first, her course has been one of simple selfish- ness, of which this is the natural denouement ? What if all along her aim has been to make him wish to marry her, without concerning herself with results ? What if the desire to attract has blinded her to the nature of her own feelings precisely at the time when they would have been her best guides ? In most cases of the kind it is no want of charity to believe that this final act JILTING. 231 has been held in reserve, though perhaps only with a semi-consciousness, from the first. If so, she is quite right in having recourse to it ; but she can only be right now at the cost of having been wrong all along wrong in altogether a deeper, more pervading sense than her weaker but sincerer sister in error. Both are selfish, both have failed to recognise a paramount claim upon them ; but in one case it is an isolated act, in the other a course of action. "We can only argue on simple cases. We know that in actual life they are complicated by a thousand intricacies, demanding the nicest casuistry. No woman is bound to marry a man simply because she has promised him, if he reveals qualities dangerous or incompatible with domestic com- fort. The man who has it in him to cut her throat if thwarted, may fairly be broken with ; though this is a judgment which has found not a few impugners in late discussions on the subject ; as though some power of self-control were no essential and integral part of a man who pretends to a place in human society, and would attach other destinies to his own. Let us finally observe of the jilt proper and unmitigated that, what- ever her profession of regret at giving pain, she would not be pleased would even feel defrauded of her due if her victim did not suffer a considerable intensity of disappointment, and if this did not extend over a long period, and affect his whole life. It is never pleasant to her to hear of his " getting over it," and marrying somebody prettier, richer, and more devoted than herself. The news gives her a sense of jeal- 232 JILTING. OTIS ill-usage, which exhales in pique and disparage- ment. And in this temper we see the essential difference between masculine and feminine heart-treacheries, if our distinction is at all accepted. The man who jilts most commonly, at any rate does it for some substantial advantage, not often from simple vanity or whim. The lady probably wants feeling, but she has not necessarily been prompted by mere vulgar self-interest. She has thought only of herself, but that self need not be the outside self that dresses fine and fares sumptuously. The man has all along better known his own mind. Through all its changes he has had a consistent notion of doing the best for himself a consideration to which the woman's craving for conquest has possibly blinded her. Hence the false lover's course has been a more comprehensive and reasonable affair than the flirt's, and his delinquency more reducible to a pecuniary standard, and appraisable by a jury. In one obvious respect, besides the deeper social injury, his sin is beyond comparison the greater, as being more gratui- tous. He has had the power of selection, and time to deliberate ; with the lady it is now or never, and she may be surprised and flattered into a consent imme- diately repented of. But, on the other hand, the man has one temptation to treachery in a far greater degree than comes to women. He is tried by change change of place, of circumstances, of station in life all bring- ing an army of opposing influences of which few people know the force till they are tried. Thus a man JILTING. 233 engages himself with many a vow of eternal fidelity, and emigrates to the colonies. It may require an ex- ceptional constancy to keep his word at the antipodes, where life perhaps alternates between absolute solitude and when he comes upon female society an easy intimacy of intercourse to which our manners offer no parallel. The officer at country quarters used to be the typical inconstant and breaker of hearts, the man " who loves and rides away." We are not sure that he may not now divide this evil fame with the curates, and for the same reason the trial brought about by change. One consequence of admitting a different social class into the Church will be a countless number of breaches of promise. It is so already. A young man and these ambitious young fellows are all in a hurry to begin life engages himself to a pretty girl of his own class. Something puts it into his head to enter the Church, to which there are so many side-entrances in these days, and his fiancee, between pride in him and the prospect of personal advancement, is delighted. He scrambles into some miserable smattering of learning, and is ordained to a curacy. Here somebody asks him to dinner or to tea. For the first time in his life he finds himself in a drawing-room, and sees ladies in company array. Shy, awkward, and loutish as he seems, his spirit is all agog; a new world opens to him ; he perceives at once that he has thrown himself away. Nothing seems impossible to a man who has begun a career, and- cast off something of his old 234 JILTING. slough ; it is the season for the very intoxication of vanity. His first love is despised in his eyes ; she is a hindrance and a stumblingblock ; but for her he might make some great match. In this temper he can easily find some adviser to press on him the duty of not making a fool of himself, and the rest follows as a matter of course. But, independently of obvious temp- tations of this sort, and where there is no social ad- vancement or novelty of scene to account for them, there has always been an especially clerical form of jilting. The fact is that honour and simple good faith virtues of natural religion are the real guardians of constancy ; and where nature and conscience teach us our duties with sufficient clearness, men have no right whatever to turn their backs upon these counsellors, under the pretence of seeking a higher guidance. Re- velation was given to supplement, not to supersede. But certainly the world has all along allowed to re- ligious teachers a wide licence in this particular. A man's usefulness, or a higher vocation, have been pleaded as justifications in cases where simple laymen would have met with hard measure, and have even gained him credit as evidences of self-denial. It was a very extreme case where mediaeval saints left their wives to shut themselves up in monasteries ; but all orders and sects have their instances where the tie, if not of marriage, yet of solemn betrothal, has been held light in comparison of more spiritual duties ; and nobody has thought much of all the grief and desola- JILTING. 235 tion incident to the suffering and passive victims in these boasted sacrifices. This is the weak side of real enthusiasm, for we are not speaking solely of cases where it is used as a specious veil. The treachery under discussion increases so much with the social standing of the actors, and with their opportunities for refinement, that our judgment must be guided by these considerations. In the uneducated classes, where there is little delicacy of manners or nicety of discrimination where, as it seems, one com- panion does very nearly as well as another, and a lost love can be replaced by another at the shortest notice the grave sin of jilting must dwindle into a pecca- dillo. The less subtle the link that binds, the slighter the obligation. Of course it is quite possible for our housemaid to be jilted in as crushing and blighting a sense as our daughter or sister ; but experience teaches us that our sympathy may safely wait a while before it overflows in the same measure. There are some loves, in all classes, of as low an organisation as cer- tain forms of animal life. Cut them in two with however effectual a snap of the shears, and new tails and budding horns presently assure us of the vitality of the severed members ; or, in other words, there will simply be two couples where before there was one. Nobody really jilts another, in any harsh sense of the word, who does not sin against the respectable public opinion of his class; but, on the other hand, that society must be in an elementary or demoralised 236 JILTING. condition where this rudest form of inconstancy is not regarded as a grave offence, not only to the individual sufferer, but to the circle in which it has been com- mitted, as a breach of public duty, as inflicting a wound on that pure and simple good faith which is the foundation of all social credit and honour. SOCIAL TKUTH. IT may, we suppose, be taken for granted that lying, in cultivated society, is an obsolete vice : nobody, that is, either formally states what is not true in matters of fact, or answers a question with a deliberate falsehood. Ladies and gentlemen, whatever they may have done, do not lie to one another in private life. They think it low, and leave the practice to beggars, impostors, and special pleaders of various classes and degrees. Now, all moral and religious books warn us against lying as an inherent vice of humanity, and thus hardly seem to hit our case. Some people plume themselves upon this reformation as an argument for progress, or as a distinction of the Anglo-Saxon master race. Whatever may once have been, when we speak to a man of our own degree, we are quite sure he is not telling us a lie ; we take for granted that we uni- formly speak truth ourselves ; and it would appear that in historical, mediaeval, or patriarchal times this was by no means the case. " Lie not one to another," 238 SOCIAL TRUTH. says St Paul, as though the caution could not then be dispensed with; and Bacon, who had a strong relish for a lie, giving it as his opinion " that a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure," lays down very definite rules how we are to detect whether the man we converse with is deliberately lying to us or not, as though this were a possibility always to be kept in sight. " There is no such commanded countenance," he tells us, " that can sever from a feigned tale some of these fashions, either a more slight and careless fashion, or more set and formal, or more tedious and wandering, or coming from a man more dryly and hardly." No artifice of dissimulation can prevent one of these evidences of the outspoken lie. This was in his time. In ours, it would not at all do to think every dry, tedious, off-hand talker was only tiresome because he was trying to take us in. Again, we think it is Tillotson who, a century later, complains that " our language is running into a lie " from the excess of dissimulation and compliment, so that words ceased to express men's thoughts. There is evidently a change since those times. But somehow the benefit from this amended state of things is not as great as might be expected. It becomes a question how much we are gamers by the reformation, and how far we are nearer the truth ; for though nobody lies, truth is still not easily got at, and often seems as far off as under the old system. Perhaps people have got cleverer than they used to be, as well as more conscientious, and so have hit upon a way of dispensing with lies upon a SOCIAL TRUTH. 239 knack of misleading and evading unknown to an earlier civilisation, without trenching on the sacred borders of truth, which we all agree to leave inviolate. It is very certain that, in any of the quandaries of which social life is prolific, the sharpest wit, though equally determined with the slower intelligence not to let out some fact, is at a great advantage. It knows how to keep its own counsel and confound the inquirer without incurring a scruple, while the bungler either commits himself or his cause. But apart from these dilemmas of the moment, in which presence of mind is so invaluable an ally to the moral sense, we do not find that the abjuring of the lie par excellence makes people a whit more fair, candid, or reliable where their feelings or interests are concerned. We have such a phrase as that people consult their feelings or their interests in what they say which, while it by no means intends to say that they lie, as little means that they speak the truth. So long as the world does this and we see no early limit to the practice we shall still have to consult, not the countenance or even the manner, after Bacon's plan because the speaker this time is, after a fashion, thinking what he says but probabilities. Certain it is that, under our amended code, the most diametrically opposite statements in matters of fact are still constantly made by people alike credible and opposed to direct fraud and deceit. Perhaps we may say it is not every one that can speak truth, from habitual looseness of thought. To see things, hear things, touch things right, is in fact an 240 SOCIAL TRUTH. accomplishment. We have said what a gain cleverness is as an ally to virtue; but there is nothing like a misty, foggy understanding to enable a man to lie without knowing it, and in such good faith as be- wilderment, not seldom helped on by vanity, will leave him. Where such people have nothing to do but to use their eyes and ears, their eyes will see according to the dictate of the will, and their ears will interpret tones according to their prejudices. They will answer in matters of which they have no cognisance from a subtle persuasion that things must be, and are, as they wish them and fancy them ; and all this is carried out in a certain good faith and with an easy undisturbed conscience, which must be a great improvement upon the old-fashioned lie, whose perpetrator made his way by more direct courses to his end, and had of necessity to endure many a twinge. The fact seems to be, that society has agreed upon a middle distance between telling lies and speaking the truth, as best adapted to our case. If men really believed that other people spoke truth, perhaps they would too ; but bare truth, sent shivering into a world unprepared for it, seems defenceless, has no chance, cannot be trusted to fight our battles, does not look even like being believed. We are obliged to deck it out a little, to fence it with reservations, to give it a colour that may catch the eye. Hence arises a general understanding that the naked verity is in nobody's mind or reckoning a tacit agreement to give and take, a mutual compact that, though nobody speaks severe SOCIAL TRUTH. 241 truth, yet truth is to be the upshot, and abstract truth and right the gainer. We are very particular on this head. One thing, if we come to think of it, is that, even apart from interest, it is difficult to reach unvar- nished truth whenever we get beyond the merest in- different facts. The mind is so used to a process of interpretation, of tracing effects to their causes, and adapting things to probabilities to weighing, clearing, refining, reconciling that there are few statements that can be taken as they stand, or that we can rely on ourselves to make with transparent fidelity. Some people in the effort lose themselves in a maze of detail. A hundred things of no consequence are in- sisted on, corrections and qualifications without end accompany the narrative, till the main point is utterly overlaid and smothered. Thus it is not always easy to speak the truth when we try in our own way ; but when others in a certain frame of mind set them- selves to elicit it, the difficulty is increased indefinitely. What an awkward machinery for extracting truth, for example, is a court of justice ! How entirely the spirit, and really we might almost say the body, of an event seems to vanish before a series of legal interrogatories ! How hard to get hold of anything by the process of an oath, how dull when it is got hold of, what trivialities come in, what important considerations are ignored and allowed no place! How stupefied the witness under so uncongenial a discipline! how blundering the counsel in his efforts to penetrate the bewildered sense! And the art of cross-questioning is not con- II. Q 242 SOCIAL TRUTH. fined to the Bar. The sanctities of private life are in- vaded by men who approach you as though they would tear the truth out of your recreant lips who let us understand that they will not be trifled with, and against whom the very truth in us rises, and will not be got at by such uncivil means. Sometimes the in- quisitor meets his match in a mind not unwilling to be sought into by this hard process, but which, under the emergency, strikes out into a refinement of dis- tinctions, an ingenuity of paradox, a subtlety of pos- sible interpretation, a range of contingencies, which utterly baffle the inquirer, while they would seem to argue even a more fastidious regard for truth than his own. The affair develops itself into a game at hide- and-seek, not unamusing to the bystander, who in his secondary capacity is naturally more interested in the sport than in the object of pursuit. But when the cross-questioner falls in with the timid, the weak, or the puzzle-headed, and, in impatience at their slow, uncertain, unsatisfactory mode of unfolding a state- ment, determines to extract the truth from them at the sword's point by the severe method of question and answer, there ensues such bewilderment of statement, such arguing in a circle, such a labyrinth of self-con- tradiction and seeming prevarication, as can only be compared to the scene in the ' Eehearsal :' " Amaryllis. Villain ! what monster did corrupt thy mind T" attack the noblest soul of human kind ? Fisherman. Prince Prettyman. Amaryllis. To kill whom ? Fisherman. Prince Prettyman. SOCIAL TRUTH. 243 Amaryllis. What ! did Prince Pretty man hire you to kill Prince Prettyman ? Fisherman. No, Prince Volscius. Amaryllis. To kill whom? Fisherman. Prince Volscius. Amaryllis. What ! did Prince Volscius hire you to kill Prince Volscius ? Fisherman. No, Prince Prettyman." We have not seldom been left in the baffled Princess's state of doubt after an hour's brisk investi- gation, earned on under the like condition of a total incompatibility between questioner and respondent. It seems, then, that aiming at the exactest finical accuracy is not the way to attain truth, nor in all cases the way to prove that we regard it as the chief good. Endeavours so conducted always end in failure, and undoubtedly none of the parties in these skirmishes are good company. The lookers-on get tired of the strategics of the principal actors, and regard the whole thing as a bore. A few details may well, it seems to them, be slurred over for the sake of peace and for the general view, especially as they find themselves knowing less of the matter in the end, and more hopeless, not to say indifferent, as to ever knowing more than when the point was started. Nothing lowers truth so much as the want of keeping up a right estimate of what is really important, and what only relatively so a fact which these sticklers seem entirely to ignore. But all are not sticklers. There is another more popular and agreeable class of truth- seekers who act upon diametrically opposite princi- ples, and seem to think that truth in the general can 244 SOCIAL TRUTH. only be got at by a spirited disregard of truth in the particular. In what a wonderful way are certain social and historical theories founded, and our assent demanded, on a basis, evident to us all, of wilful mis- representation in which things are twisted out of their first seeming, because, in a large and elevated point of view, they must, in spite of appearances, have such and such a bearing ! Our social movements, our popular enterprises, how are they sustained on an utter overriding and wilful ignoring of minor or local fact ! What a scene of cooked reports, of suppression, of counter-evidence, of deliberate exaggeration, are our wholesale benevolent undertakings ! What a ferment of inaccuracy and slipperiness lies underneath what is called a broad and general view, as, indeed, in most generalities and summaries ! so that it is scarcely too much to say that a lie lurks in every neatly-turned sentence and smart saying. In this art of ignoring with a high hand all impediments to our conclusions, in the discovery of a philosophy which distils large truth out of the grain of small error, in our aptitude at making a gain of inaccuracy, and profiting by the superficialness of our knowledge, we have hit upon a vein unknown to our ancestors, who, if they knew when they lied, had also a more distinct sense of fact when they spoke the truth. Perhaps, then, after all, lying has not so much quitted our world as changed its ground and aspect no longer conversing with us familiarly in dialogue fashion, but addressing us in masses with general fal- SOCIAL TRUTH. 245 lacies above all, having changed its weapons, and instead of speaking lies as of old, writing and printing them ; evidently a far less embarrassing method in our refined times. It is transparent that most leading articles are written by men who not only know little of the subject they write upon, but who find their ignorance convenient, and do not want to know more. And this we and they alike take as a matter of course. Thus, if society has more repugnance to the lie spoken than it once had, if it is more impossible than ever it was before for a man deliberately to say what he knows to be false except, indeed, in the disinterested support of some principle where the great truth cannot be reached but through a certain dignified unscrupul- ousness there are, it seems, in our time, modes for the exercise of fancy in this department which have not hitherto presented themselves, and a licence in one quarter which atones for our rigid virtue in another. Indeed, the literary public must always be lenient on this point; the line of demarcation between falsehood, and invention is often so impossible to define, and depends so much on the perception of the reader, who likes to have his sharpness tested, and admires every disguise he can unmask : but those principles sustain a shock on finding himself cheated into an ill-founded belief, and who can scarcely acquit the writer of fraud who has misled him by a probable statement : justify- ing his credulity by the argument, " For, let a man be ne'er so wise, He may be caught by sober lies." 246 SOCIAL TRUTH. Truth in its purity, we suppose, will always have to be sought. We are never exonerated from the duties of discrimination and judgment ; only in our day the exercise of these faculties upon the statements of our neighbours and acquaintance is an affair of great nicety, compatible with respect and the admission of good intentions on their part, and always the sounder on our own for a habit of charitable con- struction. COMMON SENSE. THERE does not seem much pretension in assuming to have common sense. Indeed, the claim to it is often made as a sort of disclaimer of higher things. We are apt to regard it as a sixth sense, summing up the con- clusions of the other five as a lingua franca known to everybody, through which men understood one an- other in the less intricate and delicate affairs of ordin- ary life. But, as we think over it, many things tend to disturb this assumption to throw doubt upon our own matter-of-course possession of the gift on the one hand, and to raise its standing amongst the mental powers on the other. There are times when we learn that common sense is by no means universal, and when we perceive that, where it is possessed in a distin- guishing degree, it is an attribute leading to great re- sults. Merely to see things as the majority sees them, which we take to be common sense, and to. act upon this perception, makes some people great, and lifts them to a pinnacle of success, not great in any new 248 COMMON SENSE. line, but for their own purposes and the world's uses. We employ the term common sense to designate this elevating power, rather than discretion, with which it may be confounded, because discretion is conscious weighing and judging, while the quality we mean is an instinct. Men may acquire discretion in a degree, even if they start in life without it ; but if people are born without common sense, no power, no pains, no practice will give it them. And persons thus wanting may have a really magnificent assemblage of faculties. There is no end of the wonderful, out-of-the-way things they may be able to do, the gordian knots they may unravel. They may even have understanding, senses, wits, all on the alert ; for common sense is not any one of these, though perhaps inseparable from their full and perfect use : yet, with all, there is a deficiency, a defective sympathy, which can only be defined as a want of common sense. The missing sympathy is of mind, not of heart, with which common sense need have nothing to do; though, quite as much as sym- pathy of feeling, this intellectual sympathy is necessary to our full enjoyment of each other's society, as keep- ing us aware of our common nature and origin. In some higher world than our own, some planet nearer to the sun, we can imagine a race of beings better and wiser than ourselves, and fuller of benevolence ; but if they do not see things as we see them if with them, for instance, two and two always make five we could have no enjoyment of their company. In certain round games the players are constantly pulled up by COMMON SENSE. 249 some arbitrary check to the sequence, called a stop. Now in conversation we are often led up to such a stop. Our friend has betrayed a want ; he has not seen the obvious, he has not caught what appeared to us the conspicuous and inevitable points of the case ; and we have to begin again. And this is quite different from simply not understanding. People may not compre- hend, and yet may betray no want of common sense ; but there is an active, intelligent deviation from the natural view of things, a dislocation of received ideas, a topsy-turvy estimate of relative importances, which shows us at once that there exists no common ground for discussion, and that it is useless to go on. When men of intellect evince this eccentricity, it is very usual to estimate their genius all the higher for it: "He has every sense but common sense." A mathematician who cannot take a plain statement in its obvious meaning, and who sees life from a distorted point of view, is assumed to be all the clearer and far- seeing in pure science, as though all his reason were concentrated on a single object ; and poets are believed to be more under the influence of their muse the farther their speech and conduct are removed from the habits and perceptions of common men. We say no- thing here about exact science, and perhaps a man may see a long way into optics or the lunar theory, and no way at all into the mind of his fellow-creatures ; but certainly a poet who fails in any point whatever of human sympathy is so far less of a poet for it. He is not matter-of-fact himself, as some people suppose, 250 COMMON SENSE. merely because he can go along with what matter-of- fact men think and feel ; rather this is a very important part of the universal knowledge he ought to possess. No great poet lives in illusions. With him the light of day reigns supreme over the glamours, moonlight, rose-tints, and awful shadows of fancy. He is master of his powers, and, when he wills to be man rather than poet, can lay imagination by as the witch her broom- stick, which conveys her over sea and land all through the night " But with the morning dawn resumes The peaceful state of common brooms." We began by saying that men have a way of attribut- ing to themselves common sense as a matter of course. They see the want of it in others, but, unless they are in the habit of self-inspection, this only leads them to the naive conclusion of the French princess, " II n'y a que moi qui ai toujours raison." Yet looking back in the spirit of self-criticism, it is hardly possible for the most severely sensible of us to be quite satisfied on this point, and it is a very disagreeable sensation to perceive that we have been distinctly deficient in com- mon sense that one quality which, amid many wants, we had relied upon as our own. In seeking for the ground of this failure, people will find it to exist in some new, untried position, which has displaced their ordinary standards. A weight has been removed, they have experienced a temporary elevation through which their estimate of the probable has suddenly changed, and they have done things that afterwards they have COMMON SENSE. 251 wondered at. So much, indeed, does common sense depend upon habit and experience, that perhaps sens- ible conduct, apart from these influences, must always be due to a deliberate exercise of judgment and discre- tion ; for mere common sense is very apt to fail under novel conditions. There must be coolness and equili- brium for common sense to act ; every excess in the system, either selfish or benevolent, disturbs and over- powers it. Thus vanity utterly subdues and blinds it. Indeed, every trait of vanity is simply a violation of some law which our common sense teaches us, and which directs us in our judgment of others. Most people, indeed, have a contemplative good sense which enables them to see clearly what their neighbours should do what is just and reasonable in the abstract but the instinct deserts them in the self-conscious flurry of action. If this desertion is owing to the new- ness of the scene, it is only what might have been ex- pected, and tells nothing against a man's pretensions to common sense ; for common sense never plans for contingencies, but acts from hand to mouth, and is not an hour in advance of the occasion. If, however, it lasts after the strangeness is over, then he is wanting, for a man cannot be said to possess common sense un- less he has it in proportion to his other faculties, and as a guard and director in their right use. We will not allow that a man has common sense who, feeling the weariness of long speeches with nothing in them when spoken by others, delights in making long speeches with nothing in them in his own person. We 252 COMMON SENSE. will not own that a man has it who yet conducts his pecuniary affairs with common sense, if he utterly fails in it in his intercourse with mankind, and will not take what people say to him in the way they meant it. The man marked by this quality is modest, careful not to meddle in things too high for him " For things divine by common sense he knew Must be devoutly seen at distant view." Yet common sense demands self-reliance and a sense of individual responsibility for its exercise. It does not work in numbers, and will not act freely in consultations, committees, nor, especially, in large as- semblies. The magic effect of association quadrup- les that excitement which is fatal to it, and a thou- sand fairly sensible persons will, under the pressure of contact, do a frightfully foolish thing at which each acting alone would stand aghast. The people who collected old postage-stamps by millions were, a good many of them, reasonable and sensible people to talk to, and so no doubt are some of those who want to make it criminal to sell a glass of beer. But the truth is, dread of singularity is the weak point of common sense. It is off its guard in all cases where numbers have given their verdict. Those who dare to stand scornfully aloof from an epidemic of folly are wise with more than the wisdom of instinct and sympathy. Common sense is never at all ashamed of itself when it does absurd things in good company. But at least it can meddle with such pitch and not be deeply defiled by it ; it can pull up when the mania is over. COMMON SENSE. 253 It is used to make the best of things, and to accept the world as it goes as a thing to be humoured. And espe- cially it is careful not to be overwise in its business, not to bring more thought to bear upon a thing than the occasion requires ; so much so, that all persons who carry on the routine of life with much expendi- ture of invention and brains, who do common things with a neatness or fulness or precision which seems to reprove the easy informal management of people in general, will be found conspicuous examples of want of common sense. In this light a teeming invention may be, according to the popular view, a hindrance to common sense, as also may be the speculative faculty when strongly de- veloped ; and common sense, which is the great recon- ciler in all theoretic difficulties, does no doubt find the work easier where these do not press with the impor- tunity with which they do on some clear active minds. Indeed, no anomalies or derangements in a system of fair working efficiency can assert much sway under the reign of absolute common sense, which is always modi- fying personal and individual impressions by probabil- ities, and by the general impression, and never looks or cares for theoretic exactness. It is not illogical, but it would rather be thought so than commit itself to the extreme conclusions of logic. In fact, logical extremes are the precise opposites of those decisions in which com- mon sense reposes with a calm satisfaction that is not to be frightened or disturbed. In great matters and in small, it acts for society like the good housewife, 254 COMMON SENSE. who sets things tidy and in order without speculating on the nature of the furnishings which she has to adapt to human purposes and make the best of. It cannot be denied that, when we search for ex- amples of common sense, we find it, not in those who master their speculative difficulties, but in those who are never visited by such difficulties at all, who take the life that comes to them, and adapt themselves to it : but it is also certain that all language is founded on the assumption of a universal common sense, and that nothing, however difficult and recondite in morals, can be understood without it. Common sense is the indispensable interpreter, the one commentator with- out which no doctrine can hold its right place, no teaching convey its true meaning, no just inference be drawn, no wholesome lessons be gathered. A scrupul- ous conscience is a conscience that discards this inter- pretation, that insists on taking words in an isolated grammatical sense which were spoken, not to the grammatical part of us, but to heart and reason taught by experience and human intercourse. And the victim of metaphysical subtleties chops and refines his mind away from a similar contempt and defiance of the practical suggestions of this accredited nurse and guardian of the intellect. Mere intellect is, in truth, about the most floundering and helpless thing in creation when left to its own vagaries, unaided from within or from without. Yet common sense has its limits. There are regions in which it is powerless, as when, long practised in a COMMON SENSE. 255 certain familiar line, it is confronted with something great and unprecedented. In such cases instinct will not serve beyond confessing its incapacity, and refer- ring all to the stronger, more conscious powers of the soul. To treat grand and startling circumstances with mere common-sense appliances is to be like Marcellus striking the ghost with his partisan, when he both fails in his purpose and betrays a nature dull to perceive things spiritual. Thus common sense constantly falls below itself in great crises. It cannot grapple with unknown forces, such as political and religious con- vulsions, in which history constantly shows the men of common sense adepts at keeping the world going in ordinary times entirely breaking down in emergency, and turned into old women. It is true that these are not familiar displays either for success or failure, only we might idolise common sense too much but for these hints of possible shortcomings. The real charm and worth of this quality is seen where a man has great and exceptional powers, and common sense in propor- tion to them all, subduing vanity, repressing arrogance, and making what might otherwise be a subject for dis- tant wonder and admiration something comfortable and homelike. Sir Walter Scott, in spite of his imprud- ences, was an instance of what we mean delightful in his common sense as in his genius. He saw all things without eccentricity and as other people saw them, and could even play with his most cherished hobbies in amused sympathy with the world's estimate of them. It was a fine thing for him to have common 256 COMMON SENSE. sense, because it extended over so large a surface, but perhaps it is no great thing for ordinary men. Never- theless, if people think they have it, they should act upon it. Every-day life is full of instances where our common sense tells us one thing, but from weakness, idleness, or a cowardly humility, we submit to another dictation. For example, in dealing with servants or workmen, our common sense constantly yields to mere authoritative assertion. What they say with an air of knowing, we submit to in very defiance of our senses ; and when the mischief is done, all that is left for de- spised common sense to do is to pay the penalty with a good grace, and to lay the blame on the right shoul- ders that is, on one's own. LADIES' LETTERS. THE real idea of a letter by no means coines by nature. To some it never comes at all. Even practice, and the habit of sending missives by the post, does not bring it. We once saw a letter penned by a scullery-maid a love-letter, too which illustrates our statement. She had been so far from mastering the epistolary theory as to inscribe her own name on the address, and to deposit her letter, when finished, in her own box, which she relied on for delivering its contents like any other letter-box. There it was found by the policeman who had been summoned to clear up a still more marked and inconvenient confusion in her mind be- tween meum and tuum. As she wrote, she had not known whether she was writing to her lover or to her- self. "Darling Tom" headed the sheet, but she talked to Sarah Ann. And this, we say, is no uncommon state of things. A great many letters betray the same inex- tricable confusion of ideas, and make no account of the mind or interest of the receiver, or of what capacity may II. K 258 LADIES' LETTERS. be even possible in any other person of entering into the writer's train of thought or narrative. She is con- tent with expressing what in a certain degree interests or has interested herself; her mind does not go on to the question whether it can, in the nature of things, concern her correspondent. We are not speaking here of the working of self-conceit, which leads to similar mistakes in all the intercourse of life, but of confusion of ideas. Persons who are quite reasonable in their conversation, and are actuated by commonplace expec- tations in their talk, fall into this error in letters ; and we have used feminine pronouns because, though it may be found everywhere, the most persistent and the most voluminous examples of the unsympathetic style are, we believe, to be found in the letters of women. Children, as a rule, begin in this way ; they cannot propel their thoughts into the minds of the absent and the distant. Boys at school do so from necessity; they have to fill a sheet to mamma, and they have nothing but runs and innings to fill it with, though in their hearts they subscribe to the maxim that no woman ever did or can understand cricket. Serious men of sectarian views also pursue the same practice through mature years, as if in fulfilment of a vow never to write a letter on ordinary principles. They fill a sheet with texts, and append to every text chapter and verse, though the text is perfectly familiar to their corre- spondent, and they do not really expect a single refer- ence to be verified. Such letters, however, whether from masculine or feminine pen, being in fact sermons, LADIES LETTERS. 259 may be put out of court. Letters with an incongruous mass of detail, set down without intelligent recollection of the person addressed mere soliloquies or effusions, engaged in apparently for the purpose of clearing the writer's own mind, or because the point cannot be arrived at till certain irrelevant formulas are gone through are generally, though certainly not uniformly, indited by the female pen. It is an extension of sym- pathy of which all are not capable, to be sympathetic out of sight, and when full of personal affairs. Men are probably oftener than women wanting in this finer sense, but with them the defect shows itself either in blunt terse selfishness when they do write, or in neglect and forgetfulness ; their indifference or deadness to the reader's habits of mind and possible interests is not naturally garrulous. We have thought it well to make this reservation before granting to women that gift of letter- writing so universally accorded to them, and which is supposed to be owing to a more delicate adaptation of subject and style to the correspondent's mind and circum- stances than men are often capable of. Sympathy is unquestionably a feminine attribute. He is singular, and to be pitied, who cannot answer for this from his personal experience, and it had need be an especial requisite in the matter of letter - writing, because women's letters are necessarily longer than men's. Where they amuse or delight us, it is by their closer insight by the life, the order, the meaning they see in little things by narrative which exacts minute 260 LADIES' LETTERS. detail. All this demands time and space. Every woman who writes good letters writes at length ; not always, indeed, for she adapts her style to her subject, but she is never studiously terse. She allows her pen to flow ; she says what she has to say in her own way. Now, it requires a fine perception to know to whom you can be long and even diffuse without being tedious, and this perception sympathy alone can give. Women think it worth while to tell smaller things than men ; and it is worth while, because they see farther into them, and discover character and intention in actions which to men are purely accidental. There are women of such finely microscopic minds that the narrowest sphere and the most seemingly uneventful life furnish to them a field for interest and observation by which we are large gainers at second-hand. Most letters are certainly the better for something positive in the way of events or subject, nor is it wise to exercise too con- tinuously the power of making much out of what to others is nothing, or it results actually in much ado about nothing ; but certainly some of the best ladies' letters we have known have been written under cir- cumstances where others would have found nothing whatever to say. "We see, then, that in one point women have a natural advantage in the art of letter-writing; they may write of things, and often the most obvious things, that men may not. Their natural subjects are of a more domestic character than men's can be, and even social or public matters are all treated from a private LADIES' LETTERS. 261 and personal point of view. We like this, though we could not, and indeed ought not to, imitate it. A man ought never so far to forget his citizenship as to fall habitually into the exclusively domestic vein. He ought to convey a consciousness of something beyond home life, or he will strike us as either selfish or trivial; and this necessarily checks a good deal of detail which would be very pleasant from some pens, but not from his. Glancing over the letters which have won for women their high, acknowledged reputa- tion in the department of manuscript literature, they owe so much of their attractiveness to gossip, to their warm interest in the smaller commerce of life, to feli- citous trifling, that what we began by calling one point we might end by calling the main point of their superiority, where they are superior. Nor is this at all detracting from the merit of this accomplishment. A good piece of gossip, told with playful malice, or with warm, effusive, trusting sentiment, is quite one of the pleasantest gifts the post can bring. Our spirits are the better for it ; it is society at second-hand without the trouble; it is the study of human nature made easy. Another advantage possessed by women is, that they can flatter with a good conscience. The same review of great authorities shows this. All thoroughly satisfactory letters from the feminine pen have a touch of flattery in them, or what would be flattery but that partial knowledge, blind feeling, and affection make it genuine. Madame de Sevigne is always flattering her daughter. The ladies of the last century the Mrs Carters 262 LADIES' LETTERS. and Miss Talbots extol one another in neatly-turned sentences. Miss Burney lays herself at the feet of her correspondents. We look for the most dulcet, gracious criticism from our cleverer and more gifted female friends. They have the art of seeing the best, and can praise with a large, ungrudging expansiveness. We do not expect this from our masculine critics, from whom we should hardly know how to take it ; but it is pleasant nevertheless, and constitutes another feature of that sympathy which we have recognised in ladies of graceful fluent pen. The great test of excellence in letter- writing is, of course, how a letter is received what effect it produces before the seal is broken. We cannot guess what it may be about; the writer may live in scenes remote from our knowledge and personal interests ; but we know, on sight of her handwriting, that she will either find some means of bringing us into close connection with her concerns, or that she will throw herself with warmth and intelligence into ours. It must be owned, however, that the gift of writing very entertaining letters is compatible with a very imperfect sympathy, perhaps not as a natural defect, but one frequently present and uppermost at the time of writing. The temper and the personal habits that lead to letter-writing argue certain qualities and tend- encies. It is a mark of fidelity in friendship to keep up the practice month after month, and year after year, where there is no family necessity for doing so, nor any call of mere interest; but we suspect this LADIES' LETTERS. 263 constancy is often marred by jealousy, and by a prone- ness to unpleasant hints and grievances. A good many people are not as amiable in their letters as in personal intercourse. We think it probable that the task of looking through a past correspondence between intimate friends will, in most cases, leave the impres- sion of a less unbroken harmony than might have been looked for from the renown of their friendship. A printed correspondence, it is true, does not always, nor indeed often, prove this ; but published letters are generally those of women who have lived much in the world, and been concerned with public interests ; be- sides which, there is no knowing what the editor's work may have been in adapting them for publication. Again, the ardour which leads to effective letter- writing often goes with a constitutional want of cau- tion, so that the review of an old correspondence between two active - minded ladies may sometimes amaze us by the imprudence it betrays in the common affairs of life. Every intimate, genuine, clever private correspondence is a revelation. We are perhaps pain- fully impressed by the amount of excitement wasted on what was not worth it ; the vehement likes and dis- likes got up on merely temporary evanescent ques- tions ; the sacrifice of mutual acquaintance to a com- mon cause perhaps a good or generous one, but taken up with a heat and disregard of collateral interests which belong so often to zealous feminine benevolence, and which find a freer (or at any rate a more lasting) expression on paper. It is on reading an intimate cor- 264 LADIES' LETTERS. respondence concerning some long-past social or family crisis that we learn with how small an amount of wisdom not only the great but the little world is governed, though in this lesser sphere there may have been only too much cleverness at work. But, after all, what letters and what management can ever really stand the test we are here proposing ? The age of letter-writing begins earlier and lasts longer with women than with men. It is amazing what good letters girls sometimes write. They have a style peculiar to themselves, in which everything is a sort of quaint sham and pretence ; the experience, the wisdom, the sentiment, the humour. All is an imita- tion of something else, a tone that is caught from somewhere, an echo of society; but put together with a sweet audacity, an innocent swagger of knowledge of the world and of the heart, and an affected precocity, that are often perfectly engaging. We know nothing more cheerful than one of these effusions inspired by hope and bright prospects, redolent of spring, and inso- lent with the spirit of youth and virgin liberty. Our ideas of life gain a temporary glow under the influence. We would particularly entreat young ladies possessing this delightful gift to keep it for their friends, and not to suppose that the eloquence du billet can be diverted into successful novel-writing. A note to a confidante may be a perfect composition in its way ; the gravest critic may read it with approval, wondering how it is done, how anything so graceful and piquante can be made out of such small material ; and yet its bright LADIES' LETTERS. 265 cleverness may have no kindred whatever with the fancy and observation that go to a readable work of fiction. If every young woman does not know this, it is often as much her friends' fault as her own. The present system of postage encourages too easy a style. Children are set to write letters from the cradle, and the result is often a strain of fluent phrases that does not demand the faintest effort of thought. The pen goes quite of itself for three or four sentences to- gether, without a pretence of communication with the brain ; and when it does pause, the merest jog sets it off again, and so on to the end of the paper. This facility of saying things without the trouble of infusing self into them, or any characteristic of the writer, is sometimes the inevitable consequence of drudgery, and, as such, to be excused. Few persons, however, are above boasting of the number of letters they can and do despatch by a single post. It is highly gratifying to an active-minded woman's sense of usefulness and importance to count up the pile before her, but this fluency is as likely as not a sign that her style is con- ventional ; none of those dozen letters have in them, probably, anything of the ideal letter as distinct from the circular. The activity of the present age in its tendency to division of labour is likely to manufacture a vast number of impersonal letter-writers. We have seen it proposed to the daughters of a family that one sister should write to all the brothers at school, and that another should answer all the inquiries about servants' characters, as if both were equally machine 266 LADIES LETTERS. work, to be got through with the least wear and tear of thought and expense of precious time. The young lady who despatches the boys by this steam process may visit the poor in more systematic fashion for this economy of thought, and may influence her generation, but we foresee that she will not powerfully influence her brothers. Yet there must be a family chronicler in every circle, who ought to be excused if she lacks freshness. Who does not know those sheets full of family movements, which are little better than cipher to the uninitiated full of transitions from the Oaks to the Elms, from Marygold Place to Woodbine Cottage, from the Laburnums to the Lilacs, from King's Court to Knight's Pleasaunce ! And what can be more exas- perating reading, if anything depends on following it ? especially if the receiver boasts of no high-sounding or poetical dwelling, but must for his part be defined by his number, like a convict or a policeman. Then there is the journalist, who gives the history of events from day to day. Ladies of this turn get frequently thanked for their "nice long letters." And here, in passing, we would tend advice to all persons who are often complimented with this form. All men and we cannot suppose such a difference in the sexes but we must add, some women have a certain revulsion of feeling on the first sight of several closely -written pages ; unless, indeed, they are cheered by experience, and then they forget the length in grateful acknow- ledgments of another sort. Ladies' letters, as a rule, give a cheerful busy view LADIES' LETTERS. 267 of life. Indeed, most social letters give an idea of greater stir and variety in the existence they picture than is strictly true. Visits, business, and engage- ments take up all the space in telling, and the long, barren, dull intervals are passed over, and make no impression. But some women, bright enough in talk and manner, choose in their letters to represent life as a cheerless void, and their friends as neglectful and in- considerate. In a former generation, the same humour used to show itself in vague melancholy and reproaches against fate. The strictly sentimental letter is of a similar date, and we suspect has gone out with the coming in of the penny post. The moraliser, also, is a thing of the past. When letters cost a good deal, it was supposed that they must have as much weight of matter as the writer could put into them. Trifling details were felt to be unworthy of a long journey and a heavy postage. There is, in our day, a pervading disparagement of good advice that almost influences the giver of it. All our own associations, at least with this style, are connected with large sheets, folded, written close at both ends, perhaps crossed, and with the address inscribed on the back. Nothing that has been said of men, and their change of habits in this respect, can apply to women. The topics that have always formed the staple of their letters are still sacred to privacy. Their time, as a rule, is as much as ever at their own disposal ; their allegiance to friends is still (in the main) undisturbed by conflicting relations with the public. Considering 268 LADIES' LETTEES. the prodigious number of letters written by women, the immense and ever-growing power of the post, the still magical appeal of the unmistakable double-knock considering that the gay, the serious, the descriptive, the didactic, the social correspondence of the world is in their hands, and all the management that grows out 'of it with undisputed command of this engine, men are ready to ask, What can woman possibly want with a wider field of influence or more occupation for her time and energies ? Y A N I T Y, JOHNSON defines vanity as a petty sort of pride ; but, if we could get at the bottom of it, there is a funda- mental distinction in our minds between pride and vanity which this definition does not reach. From the very starting-point the manifestations of the two are different. It is not merely that vanity is a slighter and more trivial thing than its grand ally, but that it is stimulated by different causes, and that the external senses have far more direct concern in it. Probably our modern complexity of thought tends to increase this divergence, as it may have created the necessity for the newer word. Pride, in primitive times, was perhaps more visibly stuck-up than it commonly is nowadays, and showed its haughty spirit in more straightforward fashion. People have now learned to feed their pride at home, without betraying Hainan's anguish at the omission of some formal act of respect. Our march of mind gives to pride a hundred new fields; and where it would be petty and frivolous, it 270 VANITY. shows itself in conceit rather than vanity ; and conceit can even face a multitude and keep some sort of self- control. But vanity, as it seems to us, retains in our own complex days all the marks that distinguished it in primitive times, and has not altered one whit in quality, though it may in name, from the date of Solo- mon's Proverbs or ^Esop's Fables. It is set as com- pletely agog by notice, and as readily loses its head, as before men read and wrote and made a business of thinking. Vanity is the simplest emotion, and is compounded of the fewest parts, of any sentiment in our nature, and, if withheld by no adverse tempera- ment, will take the most direct ways to its indulgence. It is solely a desire to occupy men's eyes and ears assuming, without doubt or speculation, that to occupy them is in the same proportion to win approval. But the approval is not so much the mark specially aimed at that is taken for granted : it is the possession of eye and ear ; possession of eye perhaps more than ear, as the form of notice easiest to realise and more brim- ming full of intoxicating ingredients. Madeline Smith keenly enjoyed the period of her trial, though her life was at stake, because she absorbed an immense amount of eager gazing. We have only to look at some men to become aware that there is a rapturous pleasure to certain natures in merely moving, dancing, mincing, tripping, cutting capers before an attentive multitude. We see this now and then in children. They make mouths and gesticulate under the excitement of many eyes and especially fresh eyes resting on them ; not VANITY. 271 in awkward shyness, but in the unrestrained enjoy- ment of a sensation that will, their whole lives long, bring delirium with it. It is this thrill and impetus in- fused by the presence and witness of numbers this joy of doing and performing under the convergence of many eyes which makes some writers boldly class vanity among the virtues, as being the parent of so many noble deeds. And no doubt a vast proportion of acts of greatest daring have had this stimulus, and a good many of them would not have been performed without it. The same may still more confidently be said of the self-tortures of asceticism. To set out on a forlorn hope without anybody knowing it, to sacrifice your life for your country, to endure voluntary physical pain in the dark, unseen and unrecognised, is a heroism of duty of which even England must not expect too much from her sons certainly not religion, or so-called reli- gion, from her votaries. Such phrases as " a world's," or "a nation's," or "a church's eyes" go for a great deal with some people, taken, as they are, to have a literal meaning ; and the world shows a shrewd notion of their value as a motive force by the fulsome way in which it lavishes them. However, it proves very little to say that the majority of signal acts of courage would not have been done in solitude and obscurity, for other influences beside vanity do their work through publicity and daylight ; but nevertheless we believe that vanity, in its simple form, will be found a characteristic of ro- mantic courage and conspicuous achievement. Nelson is known to have enjoyed in a very marked degree the 272 VANITY. pleasure of being seen and talked of; and there is a story of Buonaparte, in all the glory of his early victories, being visibly offended when a vast assembly simultaneously turned their eyes from him for a mo- ment tq look at a beautiful woman. If vanity of this sort is not a virtue, it is at any rate a weakness which is frequently found an attendant on active virtue ; and it is so far constitutional and be- yond a man's entire control, as not to deserve to be called more than an infirmity. Mr Simeon was a prey to this constitutional vanity. Constantly as it was fed in legitimate ways by popularity and success, it must yet satisfy itself by little extraneous methods of attract- ing attention beyond what the pulpit would furnish; at least with his devout sense of the preacher's office. It betrayed him into ridiculous gestures when he found himself the centre of many eyes, especially under the worship of female admirers. He has been thus de- scribed as comporting himself, the one man among forty women who had put together for his inspection a pile of frippery needlework, which was in some way or other to aid in converting the Jews ; and every one at all familiar with his manner admitted the justness of the portrait: "Immediately upon his entrance, perceiving the display of fancy articles on the table, with almost literally a hop, skip, and jump he darted towards them, and gazing enraptured first on one then on another smiling, nodding, and seeming to me more as if he were performing the part of Grimaldi in a pan- tomime than anything else at length took up a pair VANITY. 273 of baby's shoes, held them before his eyes, smiled at them, nodded at them, laid them down, then sighed profoundly, and then sat down with his hand before his face." It may not be always well to give prominence to the failings of good men ; but such instances have a two- fold significance. If they lower a distinguished name, they teach us to be lenient to native vanity wherever we see it tempted by circumstances and flattery, or indulged to its topmost bent by a mercurial tempera- ment. The excitement which some people find in a crowd, the longing which it creates to be observed, to do something striking to attract attention, the brisk elation of spirits and absolute self-confidence which the position inspires, is, we see, a thing for which a man is hardly responsible. People are probably not aware of the effect of having many eyes upon them till the trial comes. Most persons are sheepish under the ordeal, but some literally rise to the occasion, like one of the beauties of the last century, who, on being re- cognised in a crowded theatre by a burst of applause, stood up in her box to be looked at. When Eousseau, in the full bloom of his celebrity, was in England, he went to see Garrick act. It was known he was to be there, and the house was crowded to see him. Eous- seau was "highly gratified;" but Mrs Ganick, who sat by him, afterwards reported to her friends that she had never passed a more uncomfortable evening, for the recluse philosopher was so very anxious to display himself, and hung so far forward over the IL S 274 VANITY. front of the box, that she was obliged to hold him by the skirt of his coat that he might not fall over into the pit. We doubt if vanity can help showing itself. If its displays are kept under, it is because the thing itself is subdued ; but while it is there, it will work miracles in order to be seen under an aspect that satisfies itself like the female convict who, to the amazement of her warders, succeeded in extending her lank penitential prison garments over an every-day newly-extemporised crinoline. But just as the crinoline would not have fed her vanity if it had been a permitted luxury, so we think that vanity is scarcely nourished, and certainly is not satisfied, by any amount of notice that comes naturally in the way of a person's calling, business, or duty. Great folks the very greatest, decked out in all that fine clothes and jewels can do for them, and inevitably conscious of being the centre of many thousand eyes are not made vain by being stared at ; perhaps a good deal because the gravity or dignity of the occasion absolutely forbids any freedom of expression, or the display of any personal charac- teristics. Whenever personages of highest degree have been possessed by the spirit of vanity, they have al- ways indulged in it, from Nero downwards, by some wholly gratuitous exhibition of themselves. Like Bottom, they must needs prove that they can play every part. And this it is that so often makes the freaks of vanity pass for condescension, if not for posi- tive humility. There is nothing some men will not VANITY. 275 do, no office they will not undertake, to be looked at. The sight of others gaining attention or applause, in whatever arena, stimulates to a rival performance. Thus actors, singers, and dancers can probably go through their parts to perfection, and retain their reason and self-possession, while the applause lavished upon them awakens in some excitable looker-on a frenzied craving for their clappings and encores. The check of duty of a work to be got through is the great subduer ; and the vainest are not so vain or so ridiculous in their appointed sphere as in their gra- tuitous displays. To the observer, vanity of this pure type is always a moving spectacle. To see a person divested of all that fear and mistrust of his fellow- creatures and of the hundred conflicting influences that rule and sadden most of us, and artlessly expanding under the sunshine of our gaze, toiling and perspiring for our applause, eager to show himself off in every character, grasping at distinction in every field, and longing for everybody's laurels, reminds us of childhood and innocence ; and flatters, too, our self-esteem, as the dispensers of the one meed which is above all price. However, this last soon fails to satisfy. Once secure in the fancied possession of our applause, vanity wants something beyond. It is never content with what it has, but, like Alexander, it cries for other worlds to conquer. It is always labouring to enlarge the circle of notice in fact, preferring the latest ad- herent to all others, and the possible one to him. Once know your admirer, and his prestige lessens. The 276 VANITY. people we do not know are not better, grander, more appreciative than the people we do know ; but they are vaguer, and it is possible to endow them in imagi- nation with an ideal enthusiasm, a larger apprehension of our merits. Thus vanity is one of constancy's greatest enemies, from the preference it has for new homage over the old, for hope and desire over fruition. It cannot fan its flame to any height in familiar scenes, or among old acquaintance. A man's wife and the domestic circle may encourage it and keep it going, but only by instilling the notion of a large and ever- growing popularity and interest out of doors. No vain person is satisfied with even the worship of the people he knows best. All this is, to his impatient aspirations, mere neglect and obscurity. Thus bio- graphers tell us of popular preachers who have been much more excited by a paragraph in a newspaper than by churches crowded by parishioners the corner of a provincial paper representing the outer, unknown, and therefore fascinating and tempting world. As vanity is always thinking of self, it follows, being the transparent thing it is, that it always and exclu- sively talks of self, and brings everything round to self. And this is its really intolerable characteristic. The vain man may flourish himself before our eyes in whatever aspects he pleases, and our temper remains serenely indulgent. It is the extreme tension in which he holds our civility while we have to listen that is VANITY. 277 the real trial It is the " insufferable proximity" of a being who, in the vast world of interests, and in the presence of our particular interests, will hold us inex- orably fixed to the concerns, the acts, and the sayings of his own vain and puffed-up self. It is a touching circumstance that the vanity of a considerable proportion of mankind can find its in- dulgence solely through their clothes. Through these alone can they taste the intoxication of general notice, or believe themselves the cynosure of the eyes that compose their world. It is a proof of vanity's undis- criminating appetite that it is as perfectly satisfied with this partnership as it shows itself to be. No one believes in being really and substantially more beautiful for his or her clothes. In fact, it is a sort of humble- ness to put faith in them a confession that our dis- tinction is .not independent or wholly intrinsic. If a typically vain person could, with the assent of society, dispense entirely with this foreign aid, and stand solely on his own merits, he would much rather do so. As it is, in assemblies where, as at a masquerade, choice is permitted, it is often the vainest person that wears the scantiest and the fewest. Witness that Cartha- ginian heroine whose white feet dazzled the Parisian world not long since. But, with the common run of people, fine clothes are the readiest means often the only means that occur to their simplicity for winning admiration, envy, and, above all, notice. When the beautiful Duchess of Queensbury walked in a corona- 278 VANITY. tion procession in garments of an ostentatious plain- ness, it showed that she transcended this raw sim- plicity. It was a vanity in excess of the vulgar standard which made her discard her ornaments. She matched her face and form in dowdy attire against all that art and splendour could do for meaner beauties, and, even thus weighted, felt secured of winning the day. There is such a connection between that need of expression which makes men authors involving, as it does, the further need of sympathetic hearers and the craving for notice and admiration which we call Vanity, that it is no wonder that many authors, and especially many poets, have been called vain, and that the demand for sympathy is found to slide into a thirst for applause in an exclusive jealous sense. There is a decided difference between wanting what you say to be approved and admired, and wanting to be approved and admired because you say it ; but it is a difference easily spanned. Walter Savage Landor says that all poets are vain, and that it does not do to praise before a poet any verses but his own and he himself, we suspect, had never had far to go to verify this state- ment ; but this form of vanity the consequence of a morbid sensitiveness to praise and blame which is almost inseparable from some forms of mental effort has not much in common with the thick-skinned, jubilant, obtrusive quality which we take vanity in its simpler development to be. Few persons have the VANITY. 279 opportunity of judging for themselves whether the great masters of song are really affected by this weak- ness, or are merely slandered by disappointed rivals, or misunderstood by duller men ; but every society has some signal specimen of that Vanity which is gross and easy to understand, and whose aims and course of action are alike intelligible. TRAGEDY IN REAL LIFE, IT is constantly assumed, in discussing fiction, that some writers possess the power of inventing plot, some of depicting character. But, in fact, no student of character can prove his command of his subject except through such an arrangement of incident as shall de- velop emotions unfamiliar to ordinary life ; and this, if sufficient for its purpose, is plot. An author may por- tray society as we see it, and make his personages look fairly like the men and women we meet in company or at our own fireside, and yet be guided by no higher power than imitation. All he gives us is mere outside likeness, involving no knowledge of motives or springs of action. There must be prophecy in all real insight ; that is, from what the seer knows of a man he must be able to foretell how he will act in new circumstances, and under the conditions of mind which these bring. Really to know a man is to know his depths, and to tell how these will be stirred, and through what mani- festations he will reveal that which is in him. Most TRAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. 281 people who are supposed to understand character are mere observers; and though observation, guided by wide and varied experience, can do great things, it does not enable them to draw inferences from what they see. No subtle intuition tells them what their subject would be when stripped of the coating of habit and manners which makes him a member of society rather than his actual self. If called upon to imagine him under new circumstances, their resource would be to divest him of everything peculiar ; on the assumption that in supreme moments, in tempests of passion, men drop their individual selves and approach a common standard. Private experience guiding them no further, they refer to general principles of action, and to the universal experience of mankind. With writers of only this degree of imagination, the invention of plot may seem to belong to another faculty altogether from that which conceives the characters who are to work it out. The plot may be a good plot, though the actors in it are conventional. But while a writer possessing the profoundest knowledge of character can never be satisfied without a plot of sufficient dignity and variety to develop his genius, in his hands the characters make that plot. The conception of Othello makes the play. There may be a skeleton plot at hand ; it is no matter the fancy at once adopts it as its own. The invention springs from point to point, from scene to scene. If the hero is of a jealous nature, how is he to show it? what temper is to act malignantly on his own? how is the demon in him to be evoked? If 282 TEAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. there is genius to play on all the keys of a mighty passion and to exhibit it to the world which is know- ledge of human nature in its highest degree there cannot possibly be any difficulty about constructing a machinery adequate for the purpose. Incident and complexity will construct themselves; they will be part of the apprehension of the idea itself. Plot comes with perception of character as readily as counterpoint comes to the born musician. A character which deserves to be called such must be true to two points to human nature and to itself. The imagination that conceives it must have a distinct idea of the universal influences which tell on all alike, and of those peculiarities in the individual which bias will and action out of the direct line. The heroic type has no character, no individuality. It simply obeys, in a grand way, the dictates of general laws, and repre- sents our nature, whether under the restraints of virtue or abandoned to the passions, performing its part un- interrupted and unswayed by minor tendencies or by local dwarfing circumstances. Character is " The low light that gives the colour." It means those points that make a man himself that modify all general qualities by a thousand private and often conflicting influences, as of country, race, family, temperament, education. And no one can draw a character no one, we will say, can truly understand the living men about him who cannot trace out and follow into action all the sinuosities, conflicting ini- TEAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. 283 pulses, and motives which, though present even in repose, are latent and torpid till occasion calls them into activity. This is the rarest of all gifts. Scarce one man in an age sounds the depths of our nature, analyses its parts, and weighs the value and traces the workings of the opposing forces brought to bear upon it. People without this higher comprehension do wisely, no doubt, to abide by the notion that human nature under the influence of grand emotions rises to the call, and is great because the occasion is great great in magnanimity, great in remorse, great in vil- lany, or in abandonment and self-concentration on one idea. Mere observers who seek to engraft their limited experience upon the received conventional standard make such bad, clumsy work of it, their patching-on of some isolated trait some bare, bald, eccentric fact is often such an outrage on the pro- priety of fiction, that the picture is all the falser for the under-sized bit of common life introduced into it. The actual must have been transfigured by the imagination before it will harmonise ; and harmony is essential to real truth. These writers constantly defend themselves by the old saying, that truth is stranger than fiction ; but we suspect that no truth of action we mean in any great crisis looks very strange at the time, though, transplanted into alien circumstances, it may not only appear, but be, monstrous. We cannot but muse on the discrepancy that exists between reality and almost all fiction not only in the proportions, but in the impulses at work whenever 284 TRAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. we find ourselves witnesses of living tragedy. There scarcely, indeed, seems to be any relation between the real thing and the received model. Is it not the expe- rience of each one of us that, whenever we have found ourselves in startling or tragic scenes, something has happened wholly at variance with our presupposed idea and with all that we have read that things were astonishingly different when we came to think over them and to review them? Nevertheless they were natural at the time, and came by a sort of law. The people about us were following the master motives, the ruling qualities, of their character, and we instinct- ively knew it. Shakespeare alone harmonises the ideal with such nature as we see. There is indeed something in every living scene for which he can fur- nish a counterpart, or at least some faint reflection. We perceive that he could have drawn what we saw if he had so chosen, if he had cared to represent indi- viduals instead of classes. And constantly it is be- cause he is true that we find in him exactly such in- congruities, such departures from preconceived courses of action, as we note in our own experience. If, in- stead of taking Othello magnanimous even in his errors to exemplify the pangs of jealousy and the crimes to which it tempts mankind, he had accepted such an example as a late trial supplies us with, we can quite believe that he might have represented all the circumstances of a murder as they were exhibited to us. We know it from the mutual bearing of Othello and Emilia. But these were tasks which he did not TRAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. 285 set himself, and therefore the tragedy of our day has no parallel in fiction. And yet there were points which might well have lifted the murder at Wigwell Lodge out of the annals of vulgar crime, and given it an ideal character. The heroine filled her part well. Beautiful, attractive, self- reliant, and fearless, as it seems, of that temper which by the murderer's own showing had betrayed itself to her as dangerous bent on softening the blow she must inflict, and not shrinking from scenes that cannot but have been highly wrought and harrowing there was no shortcom- ing here. Townley, too, had some of the qualities we look for in a hero of romance. Tall, handsome, of good bearing, gifted with many of the qualities that ladies love, and capable of a fixed purpose for which he is ready to sacrifice his life at least we should have expected violence from him to harmonise with our poetical con- ceptions of crime to which passion, and no directly sordid aim, is the instigator. Yet what a strange re- velation the whole scene, as we recall it, is of the pre- dominance of habit, of the mastery of the commoner influences over the obvious claims of the occasion, of that slowness to apprehend the bearing and conse- quences of anything terrible or startling, which char- acterises ordinary men so long as circumstances will allow! Even the very properties and surroundings, the images raised by the narrative, excite a sense of indignation at the deference to instincts of the very commonest every-day life in that supremest moment. That sweet girl who had, less than an hour before, left 286 TRAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. her drawing-rooin, her own proper domain, in all the pride of youth and bloom, is carried dead into the kitchen by her lover, and laid on its hard, rude floor. Then, to be sure, follows a melodramatic flourish of heroics. The old grandfather asks him, "What ever made you do it ?" and there is the reply, " The woman that deceives me dies." But here begins and ends the only feature of the scene in common with the romance of fiction. No remorse, no apostrophising! how should there be in the kitchen ? It would seem as if the poor old gentleman, in a vague sense of discom- fort and bewilderment, wanted that great consoler of old age his tea. The murderer had often been his guest. For different reasons he must not leave him in the kitchen ; and the way that suggested itself out of the dilemma was to propose that they should have a cup of tea together, and "talk it over." Townley accordingly goes up-stairs to wash his hands, and sits down with his "Bessie's" grandfather to tea and brandy-and-water. How far, we wonder, did the scene strike the family doctor as natural, when having taken his necessary survey of the murdered girl he had known so well, now stretched cold and stiff on the hard stones he was introduced into the library to find the pair at tea together ? There was, he reported, little conversation during the quarter of an hour of waiting for the policeman. The prisoner, however, was perfectly self-possessed, and alive to little personal inconveniences. "Look here," he says, showing his hand, " I have cut myself too ; can you do something TKAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. 287 for it?" Then arrives the constable. The prisoner gives himself up, asks to see his victim, is taken once more to the kitchen, looks at her, and pronounces him- self far happier than he was before. Now this apathy, this unimpassioned look of things, this routine of every day in such an unspeakable contrast of circumstances, does not, we know, mean all that it appears to do, but it does mean something. "We see a sort of stolid habit prevailing amongst the main actors. The poor old grandfather might think afterwards that he acted with a set purpose of detaining the prisoner ; but in fact, when utterly bewildered, especially at his age, people do follow habit, and the idea "of talking it over at tea" implied, no doubt, a very indistinct notion of what the thing to be talked over was. But how sit down to tea with bloody hands ? therefore his guest must be asked to wash them. And that poor girl on the kitchen floor! Here again it is not in ordinary housewifely human nature in no nature that is not carried out of itself to bring dropping blood, even the life-blood of the dearest, upon carpets and furniture and front stairs. Care in such matters has been drilled into every one of us till it is a universal in- stinct ; therefore the victim must be laid where blood will leave no stain. We resent it all ; but, after all, the main discrepancy between our ideal and the reality rests with the perpetrator of the crime, with the nature or temper which, whether at the time or after, could not be roused into one flash of recognition of its own act, which underwent no transformation, which felt no 288 TKAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. remorse, which could be sensitive to the pain of a scratch, and find a relish for tea, when revenge was satisfied which could look upon an object once loved, and realise the full accomplishment of a cruel purpose, and " feel happier," and keep a good appetite, and be composed and well-behaved, and never for a moment sorry, never stung by memory, never oppressed by that " insupportable and heavy hour " when a soul made for better things wakes to the sense of an irrevocable crime. A restless desire to be comfortable often distinguishes vulgar outrage from the more heroical type a craving for satisfaction, and an immediate relief when it is at- tained. A self-absorption of this magnitude, which can- not regard things for a moment out of their relation to self, so as to be objects of disinterested pity or sorrow, disqualifies crime for the purposes of the dramatist. Eemorse does not know how to find its way into such minds ; they have an idea of something due to them- selves which makes steady head against it. Let who will suffer, they have right to relief and ease of mind. We recollect a similar case where the murderer was a low sort of fellow a pugilist, we believe. He saw his sweetheart two or three times in company with a soldier cousin, "and didn't like it ;" and so he cut her throat, and told the policeman to whom he gave him- self in charge that he felt a deal more comfortable after it. He had but two requests to make after this relief to his feelings the first to the constable, that he TRAGEDY IN REAL LIFE. 289 would allow him to smoke his pipe out, " for perhaps he should never have another" the second to the magistrates that his mother might bring him his Sun- day dinner. Education does not uniformly make a difference. At the bottom of all may lurk the savage, lulled for the moment, and smoothed over by a little outside polish, but only waiting for his occasion. There was a moment when Othello felt a touch of this mood, and he knew it when he felt the rising demon turning that into murder which was sacrifice. But he did not rest an instant in the comfortable stage. Nor did he murder his wife for the sake of his own ease, but on some blind notion of injured honour. He felt for his victim throughout " the pity of it, lago, the pity of it !" and remorse rushed in with the first knowledge that he had accomplished his purpose, not waiting to be undeceived. With him it was, " My wife, my wife ! What wife ? I have no wife I" instead of pipes, and tea, and brandy-and-water. Nor does the startling and sorrowful sequel to the recent case we have dwelt upon affect our argument, which touches solely on the state of mind under the commission of crime and the sub- sequent review of it. We have said that fiction tells us very little how common people behave under the disturbance of the stronger emotions. Tragedy in ordinary life cannot be understood from books, but must be learned piecemeal from witnesses in courts of justice. Nor do we wish it otherwise. Let imagination still maintain the grand II. T 290 TKAGEDY IN HEAL LIFE. style, and observe the conventional decorum and dig- nity of crime. Yet it may not be without its use to show the actual and lasting posture of mind towards himself and towards his victim of a man who know- ingly sacrifices his life for the sake of that which might else be mistaken for a romantic passion. SIMPLICITY, THEKE is no gift of expression that tells more than sim- plicity in its right place. A simple style of talking or writing is an engine of power in good hands, enabling them to undertake tasks forbidden to the world at large. It even fits a man for talking or writing about himself, which only persons endowed with the art of being plain, transparent, and natural ought ever to attempt. Simplicity, as we would view it here, is by no means a merely moral or negative quality. It is so in some cases, but it is then only noticed or appre- ciated for its suggestiveness. Children do not admire each other's simplicity, but we admire it in them, be- cause what is uttered without thought or intention in the child is full of meaning to us. It was more than a simple, it was probably a stupid, little girl that kept reiterating, "We are seven;" but the words suggested deep meanings to the poet. The weeping child apolo- gising at sight of the unfolding handkerchief, " My tears are clean," meant no more than the literal sense 292 SIMPLICITY. of his words, but to the hearer they brought thoughts of guileless innocence, and of other tears that do leave a stain. After childhood no one can retain a simpli- city worthy of admiration without some intellectual power. The unconscious simplicity of a child, when childhood is past, is disagreeable and painful, and is never recognised without a shade of pity or con- tempt. Manly simplicity is intelligent, and knows what it is about. And though, to win our respect, it must of course be real, it may and often is only one side of a many-sided character ; that is, the quality may attach to part, and not to the whole, of a man's nature. The charm of full-grown simplicity always gains by, and we believe even requires, contrast. We must be a little surprised at a man's being simple before we can value the quality in him. Thus the style and man- ners of royal personages are generally simple, and there are doubtless plenty of reasons to make this probable, and a thing to expect ; but persons dazzled by the pomp and circumstance of greatness are de- lighted with this simplicity, which they confound with humility, because it seems to them a striking contrast with state and splendour. So with the aristocracy of intellect and genius : it appears a fine thing for a great author or thinker to be artless and unaffected ; and we like it because, if he chose to be pretentious, we could only say he had more right to be so than his neighbours. But the truth is, these people have not really the temptations to pretence that others, their in- SIMPLICITY. 293 feriors, have. The world allows them so distinguished a place that there is no need for them to struggle and use effort in order to seem something higher and more important than they are. It needs a reliance on self to be perfectly simple in treating of self ; and this reliance, as a conscious quality, it is scarcely modest to bring forward unless the world has given its sanction to the self-estimate. When the Duke of Wellington said publicly, " I should be ashamed to show my face in the streets " under such and such circumstances, the simple phrase, occurring in an important debate, had a noble effect ; but there were not many men in whom it would have been becoming to bring forward self in this artless way in the House of Lords. There is no greater testimony to the weight of a name which once made itself known and felt than the manner of speak- ing of self in Dr Newman's ' Apologia.' Nothing can be more engaging than the simplicity of tone : the touches of personal feeling and recollection, of likes and dislikes, and of self-defence, are given in language the most artless and natural ; but the tone would have been inadmissible if the writer had not had a right to rely on his past influence, and on the interest that still attaches to his name. Nobody can write in this way who does not feel that what he says will be well re- ceived that people will care to hear things personal to himself told in the plainest way because it is himself. Very few men could venture to write their life, even though in self-defence, in this fashion. Indeed, if it comes to a venture, it is all over with 294 SIMPLICITY. him. Simplicity of the great sort is serenely con- fident. All simplicity, however paradoxical it may sound, ought to conceal something rank, or achievement, or high purpose, or extensive knowledge, or covert mean- ing, or a strength of modest purity, or an incorruptible honesty, or a power of self-command, or, in a child, inno- cence. In mature life it must be backed by some inner sense of worth, or at least by a self-respect founded on just grounds, though, perhaps, never consciously dwelt upon. It should have some touch of the heroic. It is impossible for some people to be simple : they are not great enough ; they are born with that foppery which Dr Johnson called the bad stamina of the mind, which, like a bad constitution, can never be rectified " once a coxcomb, always a coxcomb." Indeed people who are not coxcombs often dare not be simple, be- cause they would feel naked and insignificant ; their thoughts must be dressed up to be fit to be seen : in fact, they would not know how to set about it, and could not be simple if they would. Few persons, per- haps, realise the difficulty of mere simplicity of expres- sion. We own it is not difficult to say, "That is a door ; this is my desk ;" but once pass the region of plain statement of what our senses tell us, and the difficulty begins which most people never get over. Scarcely any conversation is simple. Half the hyper- bole of language is no deliberate effort of fancy, and much less is it intentional exaggeration. It is because it is impossible for inaccurate minds to hit the exact SIMPLICITY. 295 truth and describe a thing just as it appeared to them to express degrees of feeling, to observe measures and proportions, to tell a thing as it happened, and define a sensation as it was felt. They cannot represent themselves just as sick or sorry pleased, annoyed, or impressed as they really were. Which of us really manages to do this ? Men rely on the universal licence necessary where accuracy is unattainable, and would feel ashamed to go against the popular phraseology in search of a more formal truth; and wisely, too, for with the run of people it would be a fastidiousness more nice than wise. Violent efforts to be simple would quench the imagination without attaining to effective truth. The poor have little of the simplicity attributed to them in books. They have too great a sense of their own insignificance to presume so far. A rustic has felt indisposed and very uncomfortable in the night; how can he or she expect to rouse sym- pathy for so very commonplace an occurrence ? And yet it is pleasant to be pitied when we are ill. Therefore he says, " I thought I should have died in the night." He says this not because he really thought so, or really wants you to think so, but because it is the only form he knows likely to make an adequate impression on his hearer. He must know how to analyse sensations before he can tell the simple truth about them. In the same way the poor are driven to feeble hyperbole, helplessly reiterated, without a notion that it is hyperbole. Thus an old woman wants to 296 SIMPLICITY. say that she has lost her appetite, and tries her hand at expressing her loss. " One bit of cake is oceans ! oceans it is oceans!" This seems to her nearer the truth, as her hearer will receive it, than the simple announcement that, whereas once she ate her plain food with a relish, now delicacies cannot tempt her ; and probably she is right. Again, uneducated people of a different class never dream of being simple. They talk in great stilted phrases from a mixture of affecta- tion and modesty ; simple statement does seem so very bare and unpresentable as they would manage it. Hence the style of guide-books and penny-a-liners ; they must be gorgeous and poetical, or they would fear to collapse into mere inanity. Strong or ornate language acts as the irons which hold rickety limbs straight. The Cockney dialect is, for somewhat the same reason, the reverse of simple. Everything is done by implication and allusion ; nothing is direct. You require a key of interpretation, and in this elaborateness lies the point. A man loses his personality, and becomes vaguely " a party." He is not said to stand high in his profession, but he is A 1. He is not on the point of ruin, but it is U. P. with him. The person who addresses his friend is not simply "I," "myself," but he conveys the idea mysteriously, as "yours truly." Simplicity is open to all the world, but this recondite speech needs a clue and an accomplice. Vulgarity, as a term of reproach, is never simple. Indeed, it often makes such large demands on the fancy that we only distin- SIMPLICITY. 297 guish it from poetry by its different action on the nerves. Intricacy, allusion, and pretence are of its very essence. Self-instructed persons are rarely simple; nor are those to whom knowledge has not come naturally and by ordinary methods. Hence the terrifying phraseo- logy so common in modern science, and the incursion of new words into our periodical literature ; hence too, in old times, the inflation and effect of would-be learned, " superior " women. Eeally superior perhaps they were, but they had not yet come to the power of taking a simple view of their attainments. When the good woman in a party of blue-stockings whispered to a new-comer, " Nothing but conversation is spoke here," she was awed not so much by the thought as by the fine language in which it was wrapped. Nobody is frightened at thought if put into plain terms ; we may almost say that nobody feels it to be above him. No one can be simple who knows a little of everything, and nothing thoroughly; nor one who thinks it neces- sary to be always laying down his principle of action. There are people of this class who cannot for the life of them give a simple answer, but follow the method of the Eastern traveller, who, being asked his name by an Arab Sheikh, began his reply with a history of the creation of the world. Simplicity, in mature action, is knowing what you have to do, and doing it ; and, in words, it is knowing what to say, and saying it. Half the eloquence of the world is founded on the reverse 298 SIMPLICITY. precept. The simplicity which gets a man a reputa- tion as a writer is not only saying what he has to say in direct terms, but in the best chosen and the fewest, and withal conveying more than meets the eye, as see- ing into the heart of things. Take, for instance, that story told by Addison of the Puritanical Head who examined a youth presented to him for matriculation, not in his learning, but upon the state of his soul, and how far he was prepared for death. " The boy, who had been bred by honest parents, was frighted out of his wits at the solemnity of the proceeding, and by the last dreadful interrogatory, so that, upon making his escape from that house of mourning, he could never be brought a second time to the examination, as not being able to get through the terrors of it." Nothing but a seeming artlessness of phrase akin to the simplicity of these honest folks could have told such a story well. It is through the same admirable adaptation of style to subject that his Sir Eoger de Coverley is what he is. Our older writers sometimes were most felicitous in this vein. We remember a passage in Fuller where he makes us his confidant in the matter of a personal habit displeasing to him a way he had, when sitting down to read his Bible, of turning over the leaf to see if the chapter were long or short, and finding himself not unwilling that it should be short. None but a master of style could touch upon such a trick with sufficient gravity for decorum, but not too nmch for the occasion; or combine an honest shame with an SIMPLICITY. 299 amusement which he intended his reader to share. When it comes to any boast of sharpness or penetra- tion, then the simple style is indispensable. We see it in perfection in Goldsmith, but perhaps a little passage from Gray will be a less familiar instance of what we mean. He writes to a friend : " In my way I saw Winchester Cathedral again with pleasure, and supped with Dr Balguy, who, I perceive, means to govern the Chapter. They give 200 a-year to the poor of the city. His present scheme is to take away this, for it is only an encouragement to laziness. But what do they mean to do with it ? That I omitted to inquire because I thought I knew." It is a bad sign when there is too great a demand for simplicity a token of growing luxury and idleness overtopping themselves. Thus it was when Metastasio wrote. Such was the age that gave birth to Dresden-china shepherdesses and maud- lin pastorals. Moliere takes this tendency in hand when the inanities of Mascarille and Trissotin excite an enthusiasm in his ' Precieuses.' That song which Magdelon would rather have written than un poeme dpique, and which the author dwells on as fa$on de parler naturelle, expressed innocemment sans ma- lice comme un pauvre mouton, is only too like the effusions of a dozen authors whose works find place in our Collected Poets, and whose simplicity is divorced at the same time from purity and sense. There was a whole generation of idyls after the pat- tern of 300 SIMPLICITY. " A party told me t'other day That knew my Colin well, That he should say, that come next May, But what I cannot tell ! " and all of it in the tone of the " dear simplicity" of the waiting-maid in the ' Rivals.' Simplicity made a great start with Wordsworth. With him it was founded on a deep philosophy, and was the most cherished feature of his genius. He de- spised every reader who could not or would not see the profound meaning that lurked in ' Peter Bell,' where simplicity surely borders on affectation. But though the world made a stand here, he taught men to see depths of thought behind many another childlike effusion. Since the ladies came forward and filled the world with their views of life, we think we observe that simplicity, as an object and ideal, has waned and gone out of fashion again. Like the Germans, " they are profounder than we," and probe too deep into motives for any man's simplicity to stand the ordeal, much less any woman's. Again, they are too " rich " and full to overflowing for their own style to be marked by it, while they inculcate too much self-study for us to be able to get up any illusions. We cannot think of the fairest and the most innocent as being ' ' True as truth's simplicity, And simpler than the infancy of truth," as we might in revelling in the romances of the last generation. All their virtues are conscious, all their SIMPLICITY. 301 heroines see right through themselves, and us too ; and simplicity, whether divine or twaddling, waits for a new development, except where, in some wholly unex- pected quarter, it slyly peeps out upon us, takes us by surprise, and once again delights us with the irresistible charm. IMPATIENCE, IT is quite possible that patience in the more trying positions of life may be compatible with impatience of manner and of conduct in little matters where the higher powers of the soul are not called in. " A great patience" is a thing of effort and principle, not of tem- perament. Our present concern, however, is mainly with that impatience which shows itself in the mode of meeting the little rubs of daily life ; or rather, which makes things rubs and trials to some people, which with others pass unnoticed, or which ordinary self-con- trol renders endurable. It is a quality which very often interferes with the ease and pleasure of our inter- course with bright, quick-witted persons, whose society would otherwise be an unqualified refreshment ; for we are not many of us patient enough for two not patient enough to be perfectly serene and unruffled in the close neighbourhood of perturbation and restlessness, whether of movement or of mind. Our sympathy turns against us. What does not annoy us on our own IMPATIENCE. 303 account, becomes a bugbear if it is the sort of thing to try our friend's patience. We are disturbed and ill at ease, we don't know why, even before his characteristic declares itself. We are not at all sure that the humouring of this impatient temper does not quicken and keep in vigour certain forms of cleverness. At any rate, we find it where we see readiness of repartee, and what are called sallies of pleasantry. These volatile spirits find it very hard work to tolerate any state of affairs at all against the grain, and dulness especially is so opposed to their nature that exposure to it becomes a haunting fear, and restraint of any sort unendurable. In the same way, they will not stand anything that grates upon taste, any exhibition of character uncongenial to their own temper ; so that a hundred traits which are not without interest to minds possessing patience to enter into them are to them simply irritating, if they run counter to their own humour. This sort of interest, and the habits induced by it, impatient people are strangers to. Such things as can be taken in at a glance they often see with exceptional penetration, with the rapidity of intuition ; but a man's whole na- ture is not to be apprehended by this quick method, and therefore no impatient person has any real know- ledge of character. It is impossible that he should ; for this knowledge comes with study, in the same way that men learn the habits and ways of every other animal that is, by close observation. However, this is their affair, and it is not because impatient people 304 IMPATIENCE. have certain deficiencies that we complain of them, but for the trepidation, uneasiness, and failure they often induce. To be closely associated with an impatient man, otherwise amiable, is to be deprived of a good share of our own individuality. For, on the one hand, impatience is such a power, we are so annoyed at awaking it in our own person, it wounds our sensitive- ness so keenly, that it drives us back into ourselves ; and, on the other, it imposes upon us an undue burden of civility, forbearance, and good manners, and thus puts us in a false position. But keen and ready wit is by no means the com- monest promoter of impatience. It needs only for a man to think unduly well of himself, and to be bent on self-display, to be impatient in the most tormenting form of the disease. People are often intolerant of the restraints of society because it is impossible to practise the self-glorification which has become essential to happiness, in a scene where a man is obliged to seem one of a body met for general purposes, and occupied with each other's interests. Impatient men of this sort must be king of their company, secure of holding the thread of conversation in their own hands, or of being able to get away the instant they lose it. Again, all men of over-active brain and over-tasked energies are impatient. This, to be sure, is partly a physical infirmity, but the fault is moral also, arising from an- other form of self-occupation. The effort which such people have to make, to bridle their too visible impa- tience where escape is impossible, is sometimes quite IMPATIENCE. 305 pathetic ; there is such an air of the martyr, on occa- sions which, to the cooler observer, are quite inadequate for so piteous a resignation. Yet we ought to be in- dulgent to every effort of self-restraint, for if impati- ence implies no worse temper in its possessor than in others, it necessarily involves failures in good-nature. He eschews all the hard work of society. We are left in the lurch by our impatient friend on occasions where his co-operation might have lightened our load considerably, and where he knows this, but coolly pleads an idiosyncrasy. And impatience has more than passive ill-nature to answer for. No impatient man would like to see written down in black and white the ugly wishes he has bestowed by turns upon all near enough to cause him occasional inconvenience and perplexity. There are few of his best friends, we venture to assert, whom he has not at some time or other wished at the bottom of the sea, or anywhere in or out of space, so they were out of his way for good. And this from no innate hardness, but from abhor- rence of a dilemma, and recoil from some pressing perplexity. There is an impatience that, as far as we can judge, does not go much beyond nerves, which leads to per- petual locomotion. Once indulged, it renders a person incapable of sitting quiet for half an hour at a time. On a large scale, where people have time and money at command, the demon drives them from place to place. They live in railways, are perpetually popping in upon their friends, who know their visitant to be rather fly- IL U 306 IMPATIENCE. ing from what he dreads than prompted by any love of their society. He has just escaped from something in- tolerable, and will presently we care not how soon find us intolerable in our turn. Not that these people are rendered unhappy by their restlessness. A thriv- ing, well-indulged, normal impatience does not appear to disturb the comfort of its possessor. He simply wonders at and despises the apathy of the people about him. The person who cannot stand things, cannot endure things, and is amazed how others can stand, tolerate, put up with the life they lead, always feels the superior, and considers his disgust of sameness a mark of a higher organisation. Impatience of this sort seems to arise from an intolerance of steps and processes. All people have it towards some things ; the impatient man is one who shows it towards every- thing. He rebels against gradual, step-by-step ad- vance against the spaces that occur between the be- ginning and the end of every transaction, and which, indeed, constitute our idea of time. He acts as though he preferred the summary and index to the book itself. Whether the interval be what occurs between going and coming, between sitting down and rising up, be- tween this and dinner-time, between the opening and the climax of a story, between the first statement of an argument and the conclusion, between the present mo- ment and his turn to speak, his craving is that it shall be shortened. He would either do away with time, and thus shorten life, or he would cram it with more than it can hold or than human nature can live IMPATIENCE. 307 through. And we recognise this impatience by signs only too unmistakable, where it is held in the vice of necessity; by sighs, jerks, fidgets, groans, biting of nails, drummings, tappings, y awnings, in various stages of development, as the natural tendency is partially restrained by good manners or allowed full play ; by interruptions and exclamations "Yes, yes !" "Well!" "And so," "And then," "And did he?" and all the interjectional goads to greater despatch ; by rushings hither and thither, by slamming of doors, by callings, by hurry and bustle and flurried footsteps, by an in- capacity to wait for anything, and frequently by an objection to be waited upon ; by an intolerance of peculiarities or unavoidable defects in others, by an exasperation under petty trials and minute inflictions, by a habit of unscrupulous interruption, and an un- reasonable disgust at being interrupted. We say that all these exhibitions and manifestations may proceed from mere restlessness of temperament; but we can never be sure ; and this ought to make us tolerant of some forms of impatience, that it is perhaps the consequence of some temporary disorder and dis- turbance, which would excite our sympathy if we knew it. Thus the girl who tries us by swinging in and out of the room half-a-dozen times within the hour, or who has taken up and flung aside as many books in the same space of time, may be in love ; the young fellow who wonders how we can possibly exist in the dimness and dulness of our study, may be in debt. We all learn or it is inexcusable if we do not to 308 IMPATIENCE. bear with the impatience of physical suffering ; but this is often only a type of worse ailments suspense, gnawing anxiety, or some miserable secret that men carry about with them all unknown to their nearest friends, and which only finds relief in querulous im- patience at trifles. A man has been detected in a rash speculation in the funds by a shrewd observer who knew how to interpret the slight signs of a sup- pressed impatience. The impatience of invalids has the further plea that it is unquestionably a fine re- storative, a healthy sign. Dr Johnson was decidedly better, though not far from his end, on the day when, after having movingly represented to all his friends the vacancy of his life and the value of letters to a sick man far from London and reasonable conversation, imploring them "to write, to write often," he next snubs them all round with " I have three letters this day all about the balloon ; I could have been content with one ; do not write about the balloon, whatever else you may think proper to say." And when our own sick friend, in the same spirit, snaps at us in our efforts for his diversion, with " I have heard that a dozen times ; you have told me that before," we may console ourselves with the reflection that he is in a fair way, and that we are improving his appetite, if not his temper. Sameness and repetition are indeed wormwood to this condition of mind, from whatever cause proceeding. There is an uneasiness that dissolves all ties of habit and association, and that must have change, irrespectively of any other advantage. This IMPATIENCE. 309 is the impatience which Wordsworth has painted in the bereaved lover's " feverish complaint." The " cot- tage," the " oak," the " thrush," are all unendurable in their stationariness, as the rill is intolerable in its flow: "Thou Eglantine, so bright with sunny showers, Proud as a rainbow spanning half the vale, Thou one fair shrub, oh ! shed thy flowers And stir not in the gale. For thus to see thee nodding in the air, To see thy arch thus stretch and bend, Thus rise and thus descend Disturbs me till the sight is more than I can bear." All people, to speak broadly, have their impatient side. Nobody is patient through every test. Very quiet and serene -looking persons are sometimes impatient of choice and deliberation they are impatient, that is, of anything that disturbs the quiet natural flow of events. Those who live by habit and rule are im- patient of interruption to the order of their lives. Many people are nervously impatient of being read to. To have to keep pace with other eyes and tongue, to receive ideas whether they will or no, to be tied down to the civility of listening! altogether it produces a peculiar creepiness of irritation. We do not think we are mistaken in saying that all great talkers are impatient of other talkers, and resent the tax on their attention as a grievance and severe in- fliction ; and we believe that most successful talkers are impatient of every other form of relaxation, and have been so all their lives. Thus Sydney Smith was 310 IMPATIENCE. amusingly impatient of music. " Nothing," he exclaims, " can be more disgusting than an oratorio !" " Music for such a length of time, unless under sentence of a jury, he would not submit to ; " and to offer him the whole range of so-called amusements was like tempting a tiger with barley-meal, or turning a leopard into clover. On the other hand, who can tell the frenzy of impatience that even good talk, if at all continuous, stirs up in persons whose notions of amusement take a more active turn in a party of young people, for example, condemned to listen to the best of conversers in the immediate neighbourhood of a capital croquet- ground ? Society is the one great check and physician for natural impatience that power before which all out- breaks are forbidden, which enjoins external civility to the bore, " though the hearer would prefer toothache or earache to his conversation." It is only in extreme cases that the most impatient give full and free vent to impatience when they know their time is marked out for them, and a certain order of things inevitable. And there are educational lessons in patience which succeed, if not carried beyond endurance, or tried upon the wrong people. A great example of the serene and imperturbable was trained in boyhood to this point by the terrible discipline of sitting at table two hours every day after dinner, doing absolutely nothing. He did not like it any better than other boys, but, fortu- nately for him, he could think, and therefore stood it till practice developed in him a patience of really IMPATIENCE. 311 heroic proportions. Not but that there is a sort of noble impatience which has a work to do in the world, or a vast deal of fine writing in verse and prose has been thrown away. Of this we must presume cutting the Gordian knot to have been an example, and Hotspur a fine specimen. Some enthusiastic Federal would possibly adduce General Grant as another instance, pictured, as he has been to the world, whittling through the course of a battle, to cool the sublime fever of com- mand. However, as a rule, nothing more incapacitates a man for the lead than impatience. No constitutionally impatient man, who has indulged his tendency, ever gets to the bottom of things, or knows with any nicety the standing, disposition, and circumstances of the people he is thrown, or has thrown himself, amongst. Certain salient points he is possessed of, but not what reconciles and accounts for them. Something in him an obtrusive self, or a train of thought, or likings and antipathies will always come between him and an impartial judgment. Neither does he win confidence, for he checks the coy, uncertain advances which are the precursors of it. We doubt if a thoroughly impatient man can read the heart, or be a fair critic, or under- stand the rights of any knotty question, or make him- self master of any difficult situation. The power of waiting, deliberating, hanging in suspense, is necessary for all these the power of staving off for considerable periods of time merely personal leanings. We shall constantly find impatient persons, whatever their natural 312 IMPATIENCE. powers, possessed by mistaken impressions, and taking mistaken views of people and things. A lawyer, it is true, may be an impatient man, and yet a good lawyer, though law needs all the deliberating qualities we have touched upon ; but in this case a great soberer, in the shape of fees, has interposed; for, indeed, who can esti- mate the tranquillising effect, upon the fiery tempera- ment, of the consideration that money is to be got by patience ? So, whatever the original bias of those con- cerned, the business of the world is carried through, dull as much of it seems to the bystander. We have spoken of waiting as a power, and much might be said on this point ; for to know how long to wait and when to cease from waiting, how long to pause and when to resolve, constitutes, in no small degree, the virtue of punctuality and the proper limits of patience. THE END. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH. . 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