But apart from the definite steps that the ordinary, moderately interesting, moderately successful man may take, in the direction of a cure for egotism, the best cure, after all, for all faults, is a humble desire to be different. That is the most transforming power in the world; we may fail a thousand times, but as long as we are ashamed of our failure, as long as we do not helplessly acquiesce, as long as we do not try to comfort ourselves for it by a careful parade of our other virtues, we are in the pilgrim's road. It is a childish fault, after all. I watched to-day a party of children at play. One detestable little boy, the clumsiest and most incapable of the party, spent the whole time in climbing up a step and jumping from it, while he entreated all the others to see how far he could project himself. There was not a child there who could not have jumped twice as far, but they were angelically patient and sympathetic with the odious little wretch. It seemed to me a sad, small parable of what we so many of us are engaged all our lives long in doing. The child had no eyes for and no thoughts of the rest; he simply reiterated his ridiculous performance, and claimed admiration. There came into my mind that exquisite and beautiful ode, the work too, strange to say, of a transcendent egotist, Coventry Patmore, and the prayer he made:

"Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath, Nor vexing Thee in death, And Thou rememberest of what toys We made our joys, How weakly understood Thy great commanded good, Then, fatherly not less Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 'I will be sorry for their childishness.'"

This is where we may leave our problem; leave it, that is to say, if we have faithfully struggled with it, if we have tried to amend ourselves and to encourage others; if we have done all this, and reached a point beyond which progress seems impossible. But we must not fling our problems and perplexities, as we are apt to do, upon the knees of God, the very instant they begin to bewilder us, as children bring a tangled skein, or a toy bent crooked, to a nurse. We must not, I say; and yet, after all, I am not sure that it is not the best and simplest way of all!



IX

EDUCATION

I said that I was a public-school master for nearly twenty years; and now that it is over I sometimes sit and wonder, rather sadly, I am afraid, what we were all about.

We were a strictly classical school; that is to say, all the boys in the school were practically specialists in classics, whether they had any aptitude for them or not. We shoved and rammed in a good many other subjects into the tightly packed budget we called the curriculum. But it was not a sincere attempt to widen our education, or to give boys a real chance to work at the things they cared for; it was only a compromise with the supposed claims of the public, in order that we might try to believe that we taught things we did not really teach. We had an enormous and elaborate machine; the boys worked hard, and the masters were horribly overworked. The whole thing whizzed, banged, grumbled, and hummed like a factory; but very little education was the result. It used to go to my heart to see a sparkling stream of bright, keen, lively little boys arrive, half after half, ready to work, full of interest, ready to listen breathlessly to anything that struck their fancy, ready to ask questions—such excellent material, I used to think. At the other end used to depart a slow river of cheerful and conventional boys, well-dressed, well-mannered, thoroughly nice, reasonable, sensible, and good-humoured creatures, but knowing next to nothing, without intellectual interests, and, indeed, honestly despising them. I do not want to exaggerate; and I will frankly confess that there were always a few well-educated boys among them; but these were boys of real ability, with an aptitude for classics. And as providing a classical education, the system was effective, though cumbrous; hampered and congested by the other subjects, which were well enough taught, but which had no adequate time given to them, and intruded upon the classics without having opportunity to develop themselves. It is a melancholy picture, but the result certainly was that intellectual cynicism was the note of the place.

The pity of it is that the machinery was all there; cheerful industry among masters and boys alike; but the whole thing frozen and chilled, partly by the congestion of subjects, partly by antiquated methods.

Moreover, to provide a classical education for the best boys, everything else was sacrificed. The boys were taught classics, not on the literary method, but on the academic method, as if they were all to enter for triposes and scholarships, and to end by becoming professors. Instead of simply reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the languages. It was like setting children of six and seven to write English in the style of Milton and Carlyle.

The solution is a very obvious one; it is, at all costs to simplify, and to relieve pressure. The staple of education should be French, easy mathematics, history, geography, and popular science. I would not even begin Latin or Greek at first. Then, when the first stages were over, I would have every boy with any special gift put to a single subject, in which he should try to make real progress, but so that there would be time to keep up the simpler subjects as well. The result would be that when a boy had finished his course, he would have some one subject which he could reasonably be expected to have mastered up to a certain point. He would have learnt classics, or mathematics, or history, or modern languages, or science, thoroughly; while all might hope to have a competent knowledge of French, English, history, easy mathematics, and easy science. Boys who had obviously no special aptitude would be kept on at the simple subjects. And if the result was only that a school sent out boys who could read French easily, and write simple French grammatically, who knew something of modern history and geography, could work out sums in arithmetic, and had some conception of elementary science—well, they would, I believe, be very fairly educated boys.

The reason why intellectual cynicism sets in, is because the boys, as they go on, feel that they have mastered nothing. They have been set to compose in Greek and Latin and French; the result is that they have no power of composing in any of these languages, when they might have learnt to compose in one. Meanwhile, they have not had time to read any English to speak of, or to be practised in writing it. They know nothing of their own history or of modern geography; and the blame is not with them if they find all knowledge arid and unattractive.

I would try all sorts of experiments. I would make boys do easy precis-writing; to give a set of boys a simple printed correspondence and tell them to analyse it, would be to give them a task in which the dullest would find some amusement. I should read a story aloud, or a short episode of history, and require them to re-tell it in their own words. Or I would relate a simple incident, and make them write it in French; make them write letters in French. And it would be easy thus to make one subject play into another, because they could be made to give an account in French of something that they had done in science or history.

At present each of the roads—Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, science—leads off in a separate direction, and seems to lead nowhere in particular.

The defenders of the classical system say that it fortifies the mind and makes it a strong and vigorous instrument. Where is the proof of it? It is true that it fortifies and invigorates minds which have, to start with, plenty of grip and interest; but pure classics are, as the results abundantly prove, too hard a subject for ordinary minds, and they are taught in too abstruse and elaborate a way. If it were determined by the united good sense of educational authorities that Latin and Greek must be retained at all costs, then the only thing to do would be to sacrifice all other subjects, and to alter all the methods of teaching the classics. I do not think it would be a good solution; but it would be better than the present system of intellectual starvation.

The truth is that the present results are so poor that any experiments are justified. The one quality which you can depend upon in boys is interest, and interest is ruthlessly sacrificed. When I used to press this fact upon my sterner colleagues, they would say that I only wanted to make things amusing, and that the result would be that we should only turn out amateurs. But amateurs are at least better than barbarians; and my complaint is that the majority of the boys are not turned out even professionally equipped in the elaborate subjects they are supposed to have been taught.

The same melancholy thing goes on in the older Universities. The classics are retained as a subject in which all must qualify; and the education provided for the ordinary passman is of a contemptible, smattering kind; it is really no education at all. It gives no grip, or vigour, or stimulus. Here again no one takes any interest in the average man. If the more liberal residents try to get rid of the intolerable tyranny of compulsory classics, a band of earnest, conventional people streams up from the country and outvotes them, saying solemnly, and obviously believing, that education is in danger. The truth is that the intellectual education of the average Englishman is sacrificed to an antiquated humanist system, administered by unimaginative and pedantic people.

The saddest part of it all is that we have, most of us, so little idea of what we want to effect by education. My own theory is a simple one. I think that we ought first of all to equip boys, as, far as we can, to play a useful part in the world. Such a theory is decried by educational theorists as being utilitarian; but if education is not to be useful, we had better close our schools at once. The idealist says, "Never mind the use; get the best educational instrument for the training of the mind, and, when you have finished your work, the mind will be bright and strong, and capable of discharging any labour." That is a beautiful theory; but it is not borne out by results; and one of the reasons of the profound disbelief which is rapidly spreading in the country with regard to our public schools, is that we send out so many boys, not only without intellectual life, but not even capable of humble usefulness. These theorists continue to talk of classics as a splendid gymnastic, but in their hands it becomes a rack; instead of leaving the limbs supple and well knit, they are strained, disjointed, and feeble. Even the flower of our classical system are too often left without any original power of expression; critical, fastidious minds, admiring erudition, preferring the elucidation of second-rate authors to the study of the best. A man who reads Virgil for pleasure is a better result of a system of education than one who re-edits Tibullus. Instead of having original thoughts, and a style of their own to express them in, these high classicists are left with a profound knowledge of the style and usage of ancient authors, a thing not to be undervalued as a step in a progress, but still essentially an anteroom of the mind.

The further task that lies before us educators, when we have trained a mind to be useful, consists in the awakening, in whatever regions may be possible, of the soul. By this I do not mean the ethical soul, but the spirit of fine perception of beauty, of generous admiration for what is noble and true and high. And here I am sure that we fail, and fail miserably. For one thing, these great classicists make the mistake of thinking that only through literature, and, what is more, the austere literature of Greece and Rome, can this sense be developed. I myself have a deep admiration for Greek literature. I think it one of the brightest flowers of the human spirit, and I think it well that any boy with a real literary sense should be brought into contact with it. I do not think highly of Latin literature. There are very few writers of the first rank. Virgil is, of course, one; and Horace is a splendid craftsman, but not a high master of literature. There is hardly any prose in Latin fit for boys to read. Cicero is diffuse, and often affords little more than small-talk on abstract topics; Tacitus a brilliant but affected prosateur, Caesar a dull and uninspiring author. But to many boys the path to literary appreciation cannot lie through Latin, or even Greek, because the old language hangs like a veil between them and the thought within. To some boys the enkindling of the intellectual soul comes through English literature, to some through history, to some through a knowledge of other lands, which can be approached by geography. To some through art and music; and of these two things we trifle with the latter and hardly touch upon the former. I cannot see that a knowledge of the lives, the motives, the performances of artists is in itself a less valuable instrument of education than a knowledge of the lives, motives, and performances of writers, even though they be Greek.

What our teachers fail in—and the most enthusiastic often fail most hopelessly—is sympathy and imagination. They cannot conceive that what moves, touches, and inspires themselves may have no meaning for boys with a different type of mind.

The result of our education can be well reviewed by one who, like myself, after wrestling, often very sorrowfully, with the problems of school education, comes up to a university and gets to know something of these boys at a later stage. Many of them are fine, vigorous fellows; but they often tend to look upon their work as a disagreeable necessity, which they do conscientiously, expecting nothing in particular from it. They play games ardently, and fill their hours of leisure with talk about them. Yet one discerns in mind after mind the germs of intellectual things, undeveloped and bewildered. Many of them have an interest in something, but they are often ashamed to talk about it. They have a deep horror of being supposed to be superior; they listen politely to talk about books and pictures, conscious of ignorance, not ill-disposed to listen; but it is all an unreal world to them.

I am all for hard and strenuous work. I do not at all wish to make work slipshod and dilettante. I would raise the standards of simple education, and force boys to show that they are working honestly. I want energy and zeal above everything. But my honest belief is that you cannot get strenuous and zealous work unless you also have interest and belief in work. At present, education as conducted in our public-school and university system appears to me to be neither utilitarian nor intellectual. It aims at being intellectual first and utilitarian afterwards, and it misses both.

Whether anything can be done on a big scale to help us out of the poor tangle in which we are involved, I do not know. I fear not. I do not think that the time is ripe. I do not believe that great movements can be brought about by prophets, however enlightened their views, however vigorous their personalities, unless there is a corresponding energy below. An individual may initiate and control a great force of public opinion; I do not think he can originate it. There is certainly a vague and widespread discontent with our present results; but it is all a negative opinion, a dissatisfaction with what is being done. The movement must have a certain positive character before it can take shape. There must arise a desire and a respect for intellectual things, a certain mental tone, which is wanting. At present, public opinion only indicates that the rising generation is not well trained, and that boys, after going through an elaborate education, seem to be very little equipped for practical life. There is no complaint that boys are made unpractical; the feeling rather is that they are turned out healthy, well-drilled creatures, fond of games, manly, obedient, but with a considerable aversion to settling down to work, and with a firm resolve to extract what amusement they can out of life. All that is, I feel, perfectly true; but there is little demand on the part of parents that boys should have intellectual interests or enthusiasms for the things of the mind. What teachers ought to aim at is to communicate something of this enthusiasm, by devising a form of education which should appeal to the simpler forms of intellectual curiosity, instead of starving boys upon an ideal of inaccessible dignity. I do not for a moment deny that those who defend the old classical tradition have a high intellectual ideal. But it is an unpractical ideal, and takes no account of the plain facts of experience.

The result is that we teachers have forfeited confidence; and we must somehow or other regain it. We are tolerated, as all ancient and respectable things are tolerated. We have become a part of the social order, and we have still the prestige of wealth and dignity. But what wealthy people ever dream nowadays of building and endowing colleges on purely literary lines? All the buildings which have arisen of late in my University are either buildings for scientific purposes or clerical foundations for ecclesiastical ends. The vitality of our literary education is slowly fading out of it. This lack of vitality is not so evident until you go a little way beneath the surface. Classical proficiency is still liberally rewarded by scholarships and fellowships; and while the classical tradition remains in our schools, there are a good many men, who intend to be teachers, who enter for classical examinations. But where we fail grievously is in our provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not required. It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass degree. No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to cultivate his intelligence in any line. And yet these are our parents in the next generation. And the only way in which we stifle mental revolt is by leaving our victims in such a condition of mental abjectness and intellectual humility, that it does not even occur to them to complain of how unjustly they have been treated. After all, we have interfered with them so little that they have contrived to have a good time at the University. They have made friends, played games, and lived a healthy life enough; they resolve that their boys shall have a good time too, if possible; and so the poor educational farce is played on from generation to generation. It is melancholy to read the sonnet which Tennyson wrote, more than sixty years ago, a grave and bitter indictment of Cambridge—

"Because you do profess to teach, And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart."

That is the mistake: we do not feed the heart; we are too professional; we concern ourselves with methods and details; we swallow blindly the elaborate tradition under which we have ourselves been educated; we continue to respect the erudite mind, and to decry the appreciative spirit as amateurish and dilettante. We continue to think that a boy is well trained in history if he has a minute knowledge of the sequence of events—that is, of course, a necessary part of the equipment of a professor or a teacher; but here again lies one of the fatal fallacies of our system—that we train from the professorial point of view. Omniscience is not even desirable in the ordinary mind. A boy who has appreciated the force of a few great historical characters, who has learnt generous insight into the unselfish patriotism that wins the great victories of the world, who can see the horror of tyranny and the wrongs done to humanity in the name of authority, who has seen how a nation in earlier stages is best ruled by an enlightened despotism, until it has learnt vigour and honesty and truth, who has: learnt to perceive that political agitation only survives in virtue of the justice which underlies its demands—a boy, I say, who has been taught to perceive such things, has learnt the lesson of history in a way which a student crammed with dates and facts may have wholly missed.

The truth is that we do not know what we are aiming at. Our school and university systems aim at present at an austere standard of mental discipline, and then fail to enforce it, by making inevitable concessions to the mental weakness inherited from long generations trained upon the system of starvation. The system, indeed, too often reminds me of an old picture in Punch, of genteel poverty dining in state; in a room hung with portraits, attended by footmen, two attenuated persons sit, while a silver cover is removed from a dish containing a roasted mouse. The resources that ought to be spent on a wholesome meal are wasted in keeping up an ideal of state. Of course there is something noble in all sacrifice of personal comfort and health to a dignified ideal; but it is our business at present to fill the dish rather than to insist on the cover being of silver.

One very practical proof of the disbelief which the public has in education is that, while the charges of public schools have risen greatly in the last fifty years, the margin is all expended in the comfort of boys, and in opportunities for athletic exercises; while masters, at all but a very few public schools, are still so poorly paid that it is impossible for the best men to adopt the profession, unless they have an enthusiasm which causes them to put considerations of personal comfort aside. It is only too melancholy to observe at the University that the men of vigour and force tend to choose the Civil Service or the Bar in preference to educational work. I cannot wonder at it. The drudgery of falling in with the established system, of teaching things in which there is no interest to be communicated, of insisting on details in the value of which one does not believe, is such that few people, except unambitious men, who have no special mental bent, adopt the profession; and these only because the imparting of the slender accomplishments that they have gained is an obvious and simple method of earning a livelihood.

The blame must, I fear, fall first upon the Universities. I am not speaking of the education there provided for the honour men, which is often excellent of its kind; though it must be confessed that the keenest and best enthusiasm seems to me there to be drifting away from the literary side of education. But while an old and outworn humanist tradition is allowed to prevail, while the studies of the average passman are allowed to be diffuse, desultory, and aimless, and of a kind from which it is useless to expect either animation or precision, so long will a blight rest upon the education of the country. While boys of average abilities continue to be sent to the Universities, and while the Universities maintain the classical fence, so long will the so-called modern sides at schools continue to be collections of more or less incapable boys. And in decrying modern sides, as even headmasters of great schools have been often known to do, it is very seldom stated that the average of ability in these departments tends to be so low that even the masters who teach in them teach without faith or interest.

It may be thought of these considerations that they resemble the attitude of Carlyle, of whom FitzGerald said that he had sat for many years pretty comfortably in his study at Chelsea, scolding all the world for not being heroic, but without being very precise in telling them how. But this is a case where individual action is out of the question; and if I am asked to name a simple reform which would have an effect, I would suggest that a careful revision of the education of passmen at our Universities is the best and most practical step to take.

And, for the schools, the only solution possible is that the directors of secondary education should devise a real and simple form of curriculum. If they whole-heartedly believe in the classics as the best possible form of education, then let them realize that the classics form a large and complicated subject, which demands the WHOLE of the energies of boys. Let them resist utilitarian demands altogether, and bundle all other subjects, except classics, out of the curriculum, so that classics may, at all events, be learnt thoroughly and completely. At present they make large and reluctant concessions to utilitarian demands, and spoil the effect of the classics to which they cling, and in which they sincerely believe, by admitting modern subjects to the curriculum in deference to the clamour of utilitarians. A rigid system, faithfully administered, would be better than a slatternly compromise. Of course, one would like to teach all boys everything if it were possible! But the holding capacity of tender minds is small, and a few subjects thoroughly taught are infinitely better than a large number of subjects flabbily taught.

I say, quite honestly, that I had rather have the old system of classics pure and simple, taught with relentless accuracy, than the present hotchpotch. But I earnestly hope myself that the pressure of the demand for modern subjects is too strong to be resisted.

It seems to me that, when the whole world is expanding and thrilling with new life all around us, it is an intolerable mistake not to bring the minds of boys in touch with the modern spirit. The history of Greece and Rome may well form a part of modern education; but we want rather to bring the minds of those who are being educated into contact with the Greek and Roman spirit, as part of the spirit of the world, than to make them acquainted with the philological and syntactical peculiarities of the two languages. It may be said that we cannot come into contact with the Greek and the Roman spirit except through reading their respective literatures; but if that is the case, how can a system of teaching classics be defended which never brings the vast majority of the boys, who endure it, in contact with the literature or the national spirit of the Greeks and Romans at all? I do not think that classical teachers can sincerely maintain that the average product of a classical school has any real insight into, or familiarity with, either the language or the spirit of these two great nations.

And if that is true of average boys educated on this system, what is it that classical teachers profess to have given them? They will say grip, vigour, the fortified mind. But where is the proof of it? If I saw classically educated boys flinging themselves afterwards with energy and ardour into modern literature, history, philosophy, science, I should be the first to concur in the value of the system. But I see, instead, intellectual cynicism, intellectual apathy, an absorbing love of physical exercise, an appetite for material pleasures, a distaste for books and thought. I do not say that these tendencies would at once yield to a simpler and more enlightened system of education; but the results of the present system seem to me so negative, so unsatisfactory, as to justify, and indeed necessitate, the trying of educational experiments. It is terrible to see the patient acquiescence, the humble conscientiousness with which the present system is administered. It is pathetic to see so much labour expended upon an impossible task. There is something, of course, morally impressive about the courage and loyalty of those who stick to a sinking ship, and attempt to bale out with teacups the inrush of the overwhelming tide. But one cannot help feeling that too much is at stake; that year by year the younger generation, which ought to be sent out alive to intellectual interests of every kind, in a period which is palpitating with problems and thrilled by wonderful surprises, is being starved and cramped by an obstinate clinging to an old tradition, to a system which reveals its inadequacy to all who pass by; or, rather, our boys are being sacrificed to a weak compromise between two systems, the old and the new, which are struggling together. The new system cannot at present eject the old, and the old can only render the new futile without exercising its own complete influence.

The best statesmanship in the world is not to break rudely with old traditions, but to cause the old to run smoothly into the new. My own sincere belief is that it is not too late to attempt this; but that if the subject continues to be shelved, if our educational authorities refuse to consider the question of reform, the growing dissatisfaction will reach such a height that the old system will be swept away root and branch, and that many venerable and beautiful associations will thereby be sacrificed. And with all my heart do I deprecate this, believing, as I do, that a wise continuity, a tendency to temperate reform, is one of the best notes of the English character. We have a great and instinctive tact in England for avoiding revolutions, and for making freedom broaden slowly down; that is what, one ventures to hope, may be the issue of the present discontent. But I would rather have a revolution, with all its destructive agencies, than an unintelligent and oppressive tyranny.



X

AUTHORSHIP

I have been sometimes consulted by young aspirants in literature as to the best mode of embarking upon the profession of letters; and if my inquirer has confessed that he will be obliged to earn his living, I have always replied, dully but faithfully, that the best way to realize his ambition is to enter some other profession without delay. Writing is indeed the most delightful thing in the world, if one has not to depend upon it for a livelihood; and the truth is that, if a man has the real literary gift, there are very few professions which do not afford a margin of time sufficient for him to indulge what is the happiest and simplest of hobbies. Sometimes the early impulse has no root, and withers; but if, after a time, a man finds that his heart is entirely in his writing, and if he feels that he may without imprudence give himself to the practice of the beloved art, then he may formally adopt it as a profession. But he must not hope for much monetary reward. A successful writer of plays may make a fortune, a novelist or a journalist of the first rank may earn a handsome income; but to achieve conspicuous mundane success in literature, a certain degree of good fortune is almost more important than genius, or even than talent. Ability by itself, even literary ability of a high order, is not sufficient; it is necessary to have a vogue, to create or satisfy a special demand, to hit the taste of the age. But the writer of belles-lettres, the literary writer pure and simple, can hardly hope to earn a living wage, unless he is content to do, and indeed fortunate enough to obtain, a good deal of hackwork as well. He must be ready to write reviews and introductions; to pour out occasional articles, to compile, to edit, to select; and the chances are that if his livelihood depends upon his labour, he will have little of the tranquillity, the serenity, the leisure, upon the enjoyment of which the quality of the best work depends. John Addington Symonds makes a calculation, in one of his published letters, to the effect that his entire earnings for the years in which he had been employed in writing his history of the Italian Renaissance, had been at the rate of about L100 a year, from which probably nearly half had to be subtracted for inevitable incidental expenses, such as books and travelling. The conclusion is that unless a man has private resources, or a sufficiently robust constitution to be able to carry on his literary work side by side with his professional work, he can hardly afford to turn his attention to belles-lettres.

Nowadays literature has become a rather fashionable pursuit than otherwise. Times have changed since Gray refused to accept money for his publications, and gave it to be understood that he was an eccentric gentleman who wrote solely for his own amusement; since the inheritor of Rokeby found among the family portraits of the magnates that adorned his walls a picture of the novelist Richardson, and was at the pains of adding a ribbon and a star, in order to turn it into a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, that he might free his gallery from such degrading associations.

But now a social personage is hardly ashamed of writing a book, of travels, perhaps, or even of literary appreciations, so long as it is untainted by erudition; he is not averse to publishing a volume of mild lyrics, or a piece of simple fiction, just to show how easy it is, and what he could do, if only, as Charles Lamb said, he had the mind. It adds a pleasant touch of charming originality to a great lady if she can bring out a little book. Such compositions are indubitably books; they generally have a title-page, an emotional dedication, an ultra-modest preface, followed by a certain number of pages of undeniable print. It is common enough too, at a big dinner-party, to meet three or four people, without the least professional dinginess, who have written books. Mr. Winston Churchill said the other day, with much humour, that he could not reckon himself a professional author because he had only written five books—the same number as Moses.* And I am far from decrying the pleasant labours of these amateurs. The writing of such books as I have described has been a real amusement to the author, not entailing any particular strain; the sweet pride of authorship enlarges one's sympathies, and gives an agreeable glow to life. No inconvenient rivalry results. The little volumes just flutter into the sunshine, like gauzy flies from some tiny cocoon, and spread their slender wings very gracefully in the sun.

* This sentence was, of course, written before the publication by Mr. Churchill of the Life of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill.

I would not, then, like some austere critics, forbid such leisurely writers as I have described to indulge in the pleasant diversion of writing books. There are reviewers who think it a sacred duty to hunt and chase these amiable and well-meaning amateurs out of the field, as though they had trespassed upon some sacred enclosure. I do not think that it is necessary or even kind to do this. I would rather regard literature as a kind of Tom Tiddler's ground, where there is gold as well as silver to be picked up. Amateurs tend, it is true, rather to scatter gold and silver in the field of literature than to acquire it; and I had just as soon, after all, that they should lavish their superfluous wealth there, to be picked up by honest publishers, as that they should lavish it in other regions of unnecessary expenditure. It is not a crime, when all is said, to write or even to print an inferior book; I would indeed go further, and say that writing in any shape is at worst a harmless diversion; and I see no reason why people should be discouraged from such diversion, any more than that they should be discouraged from practising music, or making sketches in water-colour, because they only attain a low standard of execution in such pursuits. Indeed, I think that hours devoted to the production of inferior literature, by persons of leisure, are quite as well bestowed as hours spent in golfing and motoring; to engage in the task of writing a book implies a certain sympathy with intellectual things; and I am disposed to applaud and encourage anything which increases intellectual appreciation in our country at the present time. There is not too much of it abroad; and I care very little how it is acquired, if only it is acquired. The only way in which these amateurs can be tiresome is if they insist upon reading their compositions aloud in a domestic circle, or if they request one to read a published book and give them a candid opinion. I once stayed with a worthy country gentleman who, evening after evening, after we had returned from shooting, insisted on reading aloud in the smoking-room, with solemn zest, the novel on which he was engaged. It was heavy work! The shooting was good, but I am not sure that it was not dearly purchased at the price. The plot of the book was intricate, the characters numerous; and I found it almost impossible to keep the dramatis personae apart. But I did not grudge my friend the pleasure he took in his composition; I only grudged the time I was obliged to spend in listening to it. The novel was not worth writing from the point of view of its intrinsic merits; but it gave my old friend an occupation; he was never bored; he flew back to his book whenever he had an hour to spare. It saved him from dulness and ennui; it gave him, I doubt not, many a glowing hour of secret joy; it was an unmixed benefit to himself and his family that he had this indoors resource; it entailed no expense; it was simply the cheapest and most harmless hobby that it is possible to conceive.

It is characteristic of our nation to feel an imperative need for occupation. I suppose that there is no nation in the world which has so little capacity for doing nothing gracefully, and enjoying it, as the English. This characteristic is part of our strength, because it testifies to a certain childlike vitality. We are impatient, restless, unsatisfied. We cannot be happy unless we have a definite end in view. The result of this temperament is to be seen at the present time in the enormous and consuming passion for athletic exercise in the open air. We are not an intellectual nation, and we must do something; we are wealthy and secure, and, in default of regular work, we have got to organize our hours of leisure on the supposition that we have something to do. I have little doubt that if we became a more intellectual nation the change would be signalized by an immense output of inferior books, because we have not the student temperament, the gift of absorbing literature. We have a deep instinct for publicity. If we are athletically gifted, we must display our athletic prowess in public. If we have thoughts of our own, we must have a hearing; we look upon meditation, contemplation, conversation, the arts of leisurely living, as a waste of time; we are above all things practical.

But I would pass on to consider the case of more serious writers; and I would begin by making a personal confession. My own occupations are mainly literary; and I would say frankly that there seems to me to be no pleasure comparable to the pleasure of writing. To find a congenial subject, and to express that subject as lucidly, as sincerely, as frankly as possible, appears to me to be the most delightful occupation in the world. Nature is full of exquisite sights and sounds, day by day; the stage of the world is crowded with interesting and fascinating personalities, rich in contrasts, in characteristics, in humour, in pathos. We are surrounded, the moment we pass outside of the complex material phenomena which surround us, by all kinds of wonderful secrets and incomprehensible mysteries. What is this strange pageant that unrolls itself before us from hour to hour? this panorama of night and day, sun and moon, summer and winter, joy and sorrow, life and death? We have all of us, like Jack Horner, our slice of pie to eat. Which of us does not know the delighted complacency with which we pull out the plums? The poet is silent of the moment when the plate is empty, when nothing is left but the stones; but that is no less impressive an experience.

The wonderful thing to me is, not that there is so much desire in the world to express our little portion of the joy, the grief, the mystery of it all, but that there is so little. I wish with all my heart that there was more instinct for personal expression; Edward FitzGerald said that he wished we had more lives of obscure persons; one wants to know what other people are thinking and feeling about it all; what joys they anticipate, what fears they sustain, how they regard the end and cessation of life and perception, which waits for us all. The worst of it is that people are often so modest; they think that their own experience is so dull, so unromantic, so uninteresting. It is an entire mistake. If the dullest person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work and love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document. My only sorrow is that the amateurs of whom I have spoken above will not do this; they rather turn to external and impersonal impressions, relate definite things, what they see on their travels, for instance, describing just the things which any one can see. They tend to indulge in the melancholy labour of translation, or employ customary, familiar forms, such as the novel or the play. If only they would write diaries and publish them; compose imaginary letters; let one inside the house of self instead of keeping one wandering in the park! The real interest of literature is the apprehending of other points of view; one spends an immense time in what is called society, in the pursuit of other people's views; but what a very little grain results from an intolerable deal of chaff! And all because people are conventional and not simple-minded; because they will not say what they think; indeed they will not as a rule try to find out what they do think, but prefer to traffic with the conventional counters. Yet what a refreshment it is to meet with a perfectly sincere person, who makes you feel that you are in real contact with a human being! This is what we ought to aim at in writing: at a perfectly sincere presentment of our thoughts. We cannot, of course, all of us hope to have views upon art, upon theology, upon politics, upon education, because we may not have any experience in these subjects; but we have all of us experience in life, in nature, in emotion, in religion; and to express what we feel, as sincerely as we can, is certainly useful to ourselves, because it clears our view, leads us not to confuse hopes with certainties, enables us to disentangle what we really believe from what we conventionally adopt.

Of course this cannot be done all at once; when we first begin to write, we find how difficult it is to keep the thread of our thoughts; we keep turning out of the main road to explore attractive by-paths; we cannot arrange our ideas. All writers who produce original work pass through a stage in which they are conscious of a throng of kindred notions, all more or less bearing on the central thought, but the movements of which they cannot wholly control. Their thoughts are like a turbulent crowd, and one's business is to drill them into an ordered regiment. A writer has to pass through a certain apprenticeship; and the cure for this natural vagueness is to choose small precise subjects, to say all that we have in our minds about them, and to stop when we have finished; not to aim at fine writing, but at definiteness and clearness.

I suppose people arrive at their end in different ways; but my own belief is that, in writing, one cannot do much by correction. I believe that the best way to arrive at lucidity is by incessant practice; we must be content to abandon and sacrifice faulty manuscripts altogether; we ought not to fret over them and rewrite them. The two things that I have found to be of infinite service to myself, in learning to write prose, have been keeping a full diary, and writing poetry. The habit of diarizing is easily acquired, and as soon as it becomes habitual, the day is no more complete without it than it is complete without a cold bath and regular meals. People say that they have not time to keep a diary; but they would never say that they had not time to take a bath or to have their meals. A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving a salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation. It is a practice which brings its own reward in many ways; it is a singularly delightful thing to look at old diaries, to see how one was occupied, say, ten years ago; what one was reading, the people one was meeting, one's earlier point of view. And then, further, as I have said, it has the immense advantage of developing style; the subjects are ready to hand; and one may learn, by diarizing, the art of sincere and frank expression.

And then there is the practice of writing poetry; there are certain years in the life of most people with a literary temperament, when poetry seems the most natural and desirable mode of self-expression. This impulse should be freely yielded to. The poetry need not be very good; I have no illusions, for instance, as to the merits of my own; but it gives one a copious vocabulary, it teaches the art of poise, of cadence, of choice in words, of picturesqueness. There comes a time when one abandons poetry, or is abandoned by it; and, after all, prose is the most real and natural form of expression. There arrives, in the case of one who has practised poetical expression diligently, a wonderful sense of freedom, of expansiveness, of delight, when he begins to use what has been material for poetry for the purposes of prose. Poetical expression is strictly conditioned by length of stanzas, dignity of vocabulary, and the painful exigencies of rhyme. How good are the days when one has escaped from all that tyranny, when one can say the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in flowing phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences of poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy—these are the joys of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to make them easy and instinctive.

A word may be said about style. Stevenson said that he arrived at flexibility of style by frank and unashamed imitation of other writers; he played, as he said, "the sedulous ape" to great authors. This system has its merits, but it also has its dangers. A sensitive literary temperament is apt to catch, to repeat, to perpetuate the charming mannerisms of great writers. I have sometimes had to write critical monographs on the work of great stylists. It is a perilous business! If for several months one studies the work of a contagious and delicate writer, critically and appreciatively, one is apt to shape one's sentences with a dangerous resemblance to the cadences of the author whom one is supposed to be criticising. More than once, when my monograph has been completed, I have felt that it might almost have been written by the author under examination; and there is no merit in that. I am sure that one should not aim at practising a particular style. The one aim should be to present the matter as clearly, as vigorously, as forcibly as one can; if one does this sincerely, one's own personality will make the style; and thus I feel that people whose aim is to write vigorously should abstain from even reading authors whose style affects them strongly. Stevenson himself dared not read Livy; Pater confessed that he could not afford to read Stevenson; he added, that he did not consider his own style better than the style of Stevenson—rather the reverse—but he had his own theory, his own method of expression, deliberately adopted and diligently pursued. He therefore carefully refrained from reading an author whom he felt unconsciously compelled to imitate. The question of style, then, is one which a writer who desires originality should leave altogether alone. It must emerge of itself, or it is sure to lack distinctiveness. I saw once a curious instance of this. I knew a diligent writer, whose hasty and unconsidered writings were forcible, lively, and lucid, penetrated by his own poetical and incisive personality; but he set no store by these writings, and if they were ever praised in his presence, he said that he was ashamed of them for being so rough. This man devoted many years to the composition of a great literary work. He took infinite pains with it; he concentrated whole sentences into epithets; he hammered and chiselled his phrases; he was for ever retouching and rewriting. But when the book at last appeared it was a complete disappointment. The thing was really unintelligible; it had no motion, no space about it; the reader had to devote heart-breaking thought to the exploration of a paragraph, and was as a rule only rewarded by finding that it was a simple thought, expressed with profound obscurity; whereas the object of the writer ought to be to express a profound and difficult thought clearly and lucidly. The only piece of literary advice that I have ever found to be of real and abiding use, is the advice I once heard given by Professor Seeley to a youthful essayist, who had involved a simple subject in mazes of irrelevant intricacy. "Don't be afraid," said the Professor, "of letting the bones show." That is the secret: a piece of literary art must not be merely dry bones; the skeleton must be overlaid with delicate flesh and appropriate muscle; but the structure must be there, and it must be visible.

The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as Newman's Apologia or Ruskin's Praeterita, seems to resemble a crystal stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its pebbly bed; the very shape of the channel is revealed; there are transparent glassy water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though the very stream has a beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve and delicate murmur, its chief beauty is in the exquisite transfiguring effect which it has over the shingle, the vegetation that glimmers and sways beneath the surface. How dry, how commonplace the pebbles on the edge look! How stiff and ruinous the plants from which the water has receded! But seen through the hyaline medium, what coolness, what romance, what secret and remote mystery, lingers over the tiny pebbles, the little reefs of rock, the ribbons of weed, that poise so delicately in the gliding stream! What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of gentle tranquillity, it all gives!

Thus it is with the transfiguring power of art, of style. The objects by themselves, in the commonplace light, in the dreary air, are trivial and unromantic enough; one can hold them in one's hand, one seems to have seen them a hundred times before; but, plunged beneath that clear and fresh medium, they have a unity, a softness, a sweetness which seem the result of a magical spell, an incommunicable influence; they bring all heaven before the eyes; they whisper the secrets of a region which is veritably there, which we can discern and enjoy, but the charm of which we can neither analyse nor explain; we can only confess its existence with a grateful heart. One who devotes himself to writing should find, then, his chief joy in the practice of his art, not in the rewards of it; publication has its merits, because it entails upon one the labour of perfecting the book as far as possible; if one wrote without publication in view, one would be tempted to shirk the final labour of the file; one would leave sentences incomplete, paragraphs unfinished; and then, too, imperfect as reviews often are, it is wholesome as well as interesting to see the impression that one's work makes on others. If one's work is generally contemned, it is bracing to know that one fails in one's appeal, that one cannot amuse and interest readers. High literature has often met at first with unmerited neglect and even obloquy; but to incur neglect and obloquy is not in itself a proof that one's standard is high and one's taste fastidious. Moreover, if one has done one's best, and expressed sincerely what one feels and believes, one sometimes has the true and rare pleasure of eliciting a grateful letter from an unknown person, who has derived pleasure, perhaps even encouragement, from a book. These are some of the pleasant rewards of writing, and though one should not write with one's eye on the rewards, yet they may be accepted with a sober gratitude.

Of course there will come moods of discouragement to all authors, when they will ask themselves, as even Tennyson confesses that he was tempted to do, what, after all, it amounts to? The author must beware of rating his own possibilities too high. In looking back at one's own life, in trying to trace what are the things that have had a deep and permanent influence on one's character, how rarely is it possible to point to a particular book, and say, "That book gave me the message I most needed, made me take the right turn, gave me the requisite bias, the momentous impulse"? We tend to want to do things on too large a scale, to affect great masses of people, to influence numerous hearts. An author should be more than content if he finds he has made a difference to a handful of people, or given innocent pleasure to a small company. Only to those whose heart is high, whose patience is inexhaustible, whose vigour is great, whose emotion is passionate, is it given to make a deep mark upon the age; and there is needed too the magical charm of personality, overflowing in "thoughts that breathe and words that burn." But we can all take a hand in the great game; and if the leading parts are denied us, if we are told off to sit among a row of supers, drinking and whispering on a bench, while the great characters soliloquize, let us be sure that we drain our empty cup with zest, and do our whispering with intentness; not striving to divert attention to ourselves, but contributing with all our might to the naturalness, the effectiveness of the scene.



XI

THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS

I was staying the other day in the house of an old friend, a public man, who is a deeply interesting character, energetic, able, vigorous, with very definite limitations. The only male guest in the house, it so happened, was also an old friend of mine, a serious man. One night, when we were all three in the smoking-room, our host rose, and excused himself, saying that he had some letters to write. When he was gone, I said to my serious friend: "What an interesting fellow our host is! He is almost more interesting because of the qualities that he does not possess, than because of the qualities that he does possess." My companion, who is remarkable for his power of blunt statement, looked at me gravely, and said: "If you propose to discuss our host, you must find some one else to conduct the argument; he is my friend, whom I esteem and love, and I am not in a position to criticise him." I laughed, and said: "Well, he is my friend, too, and I esteem and love him; and that is the very reason why I should like to discuss him. Nothing that either you or I could say would make me love him less; but I wish to understand him. I have a very clear impression of him, and I have no doubt you have a very clear impression too; yet we should probably differ about him in many points, and I should like to see what light you could throw upon his character." My companion said: "No; it is inconsistent with my idea of loyalty to criticise my friends. Besides, you know I am an old-fashioned person, and I disapprove of criticising people altogether. I think it is a violation of the ninth commandment; I do not think we are justified in bearing false witness against our neighbour."

"But you beg the question," I said, "by saying 'FALSE witness.' I quite agree that to discuss people in a malicious spirit, or in a spirit of mockery, with the intention of exaggerating their faults and making a grotesque picture of their foibles, is wrong. But two just persons, such as you and I are, may surely talk over our friends, in what Mr. Chadband called a spirit of love?" My companion shook his head. "No," he said, "I think it is altogether wrong. Our business is to see the good points of our friends, and to be blind to their faults." "Well," I said, "then let us 'praise him soft and low, call him worthiest to be loved,' like the people in 'The Princess.' You shall make a panegyric, and I will say 'Hear, hear!'" "You are making a joke out of it," said my companion, "and I shall stick to my principles—and you won't mind my saying," he went on, "that I think your tendency is to criticise people much too much. You are always discussing people's faults, and I think it ends in your having a lower estimate of human nature than is either kind or necessary. To-night, at dinner, it made me quite melancholy to hear the way in which you spoke of several of our best friends." "Not leaving Lancelot brave nor Galahad pure!" I said; "in fact you think that I behaved like the ingenious demon in the Acts, who always seems to me to have had a strong sense of humour. It was the seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, was it not, who tried to exorcise an evil spirit? But he 'leapt upon them and overcame them, so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded.' You mean that I use my friends like that, strip off their reputations, belabour them, and leave them without a rag of virtue or honour?" My companion frowned, and said: "Yes; that is more or less what I mean, though I think your illustration is needlessly profane. My idea is that we ought to make the best of people, and try as far as possible to be blind to their faults." "Unless their fault happens to be criticism?" I said. My companion turned to me very solemnly, and said: "I think we ought not to be afraid, if necessary, of telling our friends about their faults; but that is quite a different thing from amusing oneself by discussing their faults with others." "Well" I said, "I believe that one is in a much better position to speak to people about their faults, if one knows them; and personally I think I arrive at a juster view both of my friends' faults and virtues by discussing them with others. I think one takes a much fairer view, by seeing the impression that one's friends make on other people; and I think that I generally arrive at admiring my friends more by seeing them reflected in the mind of another, than I do when they are merely reflected in my own mind. Besides, if one is possessed of critical faculties, it seems to me absurd to rule out one part of life, and that, perhaps, the most important—one's fellow-beings, I mean—and to say that one is not to exercise the faculty of criticism there. You would not think it wrong, for instance, to criticise books?" "No," said my companion, "certainly not. I think that it is not only legitimate, but a duty, to bring one's critical faculties to bear on books; it is one of the most valuable methods of self-education." "And yet books are nothing but an expression of an author's personality," I said. "Would you go so far as to say that one has no business to criticise one's friends' books?" "You are only arguing for the sake of arguing," said my companion. "With books it is quite different; they are a public expression of a man's opinions, and consequently they are submitted to the world for criticism." "I confess," I said, "that I do not think the distinction is a real one. I feel sure one has a right to criticise a man's opinions, delivered in conversation; and I think that much of our lives is nothing but a more or less public expression of ourselves. Your position seems to me no more reasonable than if a man was to say: 'I look upon the whole world, and all that is in it, as the work of God; and I am not in a position to criticise any of the works of God.' If one may not criticise the character of a friend whom one esteems and loves, surely, a fortiori, we ought not to criticise anything in the world at all. The whole of ethics, the whole of religion, is nothing else than bringing our critical faculties to bear upon actions and qualities; and it seems to me that if our critical faculty means anything at all, we are bound to apply it to all the phenomena we see about us." My companion said disdainfully that I was indulging in the merest sophistry, and that he thought that we had better go to bed, which we presently did.

I have, since this conversation, been reflecting about the whole subject, and I am not inclined to admit that my companion was right. In the first place, if every one were to follow the principle that one had no business to criticise one's friends, it would end in being deplorably dull. Imagine the appalling ponderosity of a conversation in which one felt bound to praise every one who was mentioned. Think of the insensate chorus which would arise. "How tall and stately A—— is! How sturdy and compact B—— is! Then there is dear C——; how wise, judicious, prudent, and sensible! And the excellent D——, what candour, what impulsiveness! E——, how worthy, how business-like! Yes, how true that is! How thankful we should be for the examples of A——, B——, C——, D——, and E——!" A very little of such conversation would go a long way. How it would refresh and invigorate the mind! What a field for humour and subtlety it would open up!

It may be urged that we ought not to regulate our conduct upon the basis of trying to avoid what is dull; but I am myself of opinion that dulness is responsible for a large amount of human error and misery. Readers of The Pilgrim's Progress will no doubt remember the young woman whose name was Dull, and her choice of companions—Simple, Sloth, Presumption, Short-mind, Slow-pace, No-heart, Linger-after-lust, and Sleepy-head. These are the natural associates of Madam Dull. The danger of dulness, whether natural or acquired, is the danger of complacently lingering among stupid and conventional ideas, and losing all the bright interchange of the larger world. The dull people are not, as a rule, the simple people—they are generally provided with a narrow and self-sufficient code; they are often entirely self-satisfied, and apt to disapprove of everything that is lively, romantic, and vigorous. Simplicity, as a rule, is either a natural gift, or else can be attained only by people of strong critical powers, who will, firmly and vigorously, test, examine, and weigh motives, and arrive through experience at a direct and natural method of dealing with men and circumstances. True simplicity is not an inherited poverty of spirit; it is rather like the poverty of one who has deliberately discarded what is hampering, vexatious, and unnecessary, and has learnt that the art of life consists in disentangling the spirit from all conventional claims, in living by trained impulse and fine instinct, rather than by tradition and authority. I do not say that the dull people are not probably, in a way, the happier people; I suppose that anything that leads to self-satisfaction is, in a sense, a cause of happiness; but it is not a species of happiness that people ought to pursue.

Perhaps one ought not to use the word dulness, because it may be misunderstood. The kind of dulness of which I speak is not inconsistent with a high degree, not only of practical, but even of mental, ability. I know several people of very great intellectual power who are models of dulness. Their memories are loaded with what is no doubt very valuable information, and their conclusions are of the weightiest character; but they have no vivid perception, no alertness, they are not open to new ideas, they never say an interesting or a suggestive thing; their presence is a load on the spirits of a lively party, their very facial expression is a rebuke to all light-mindedness and triviality. Sometimes these people are silent, and then to be in their presence is like being in a thick mist; there is no outlook, no enlivening prospect. Sometimes they are talkers; and I am not sure that that is not even worse, because they generally discourse on their own subjects with profound and serious conviction. They have no power of conversation, because they are not interested in any one else's point of view; they care no more who their companions are, than a pump cares what sort of a vessel is put under it—they only demand that people should listen in silence. I remember not long ago meeting one of the species, in this case an antiquarian. He discoursed continuously, with a hard eye, fixed as a rule upon the table, about the antiquities of the neighbourhood. I was on one side of him, and was far too much crushed to attempt resistance. I ate and drank mechanically; I said "Yes" and "Very interesting" at intervals; and the only ray of hope upon the horizon was that the hands of the clock upon the mantelpiece did undoubtedly move, though they moved with leaden slowness. On the other side of the savant was a lively talker, Matthews by name, who grew very restive under the process. The great man had selected Dorchester as his theme, because he had unhappily discovered that I had recently visited it. My friend Matthews, who had been included in the audience, made desperate attempts to escape; and once, seeing that I was fairly grappled, began a conversation with his next neighbour. But the antiquary was not to be put off. He stopped, and looked at Matthews with a relentless eye. "Matthews," he said, "MATTHEWS!" raising his voice. Matthews looked round. "I was saying that Dorchester was a very interesting place." Matthews made no further attempt to escape, and resigned himself to his fate.

Such men as the antiquary are certainly very happy people; they are absorbed in their subject, and consider it to be of immense importance. I suppose that their lives are, in a sense, well spent, and that the world is in a way the gainer by their labours. My friend the antiquary has certainly, according to his own account, proved that certain ancient earthworks near Dorchester are of a date at least five hundred years anterior to the received date. It took him a year or two to find out, and I suppose that the human race has benefited in some way or other by the conclusion; but, on the other hand, the antiquary seems to miss all the best things of life. If life is an educative process, people who have lived and loved, who have smiled and suffered, who have perceived beautiful things, who have felt the rapturous and bewildering mysteries of the world—well, they have learnt something of the mind of God, and, when they close their eyes upon the world, take with them an alert, a hopeful, an inquisitive, an ardent spirit, into whatever may be the next act of the drama; but my friend the antiquary, when he crosses the threshold of the unseen, when he is questioned as to what has been his relation to life, will have seen and perceived, and learnt nothing, except the date of the Dorchester earthworks, and similar monuments of history.

And of all the shifting pageant of life, by far the most interesting and exquisite part is our relations with the other souls who are bound on the same pilgrimage. One desires ardently to know what other people feel about it all—what their points of view are, what their motives are, what are the data on which they form their opinions—so that to cut off the discussion of other personalities, on ethical grounds, is like any other stiff and Puritanical attempt to limit interests, to circumscribe experience, to maim life. The criticism, then, or the discussion, of other people is not so much a CAUSE of interest in life, as a SIGN of it; it is no more to be suppressed by codes or edicts than any other form of temperamental activity. It is no more necessary to justify the habit, than it is necessary to give good reasons for eating or for breathing; the only thing that it is advisable to do, is to lay down certain rules about it, and prescribe certain methods of practising it. The people who do not desire to discuss others, or who disapprove of doing it, may be pronounced to be, as a rule, either stupid, or egotistical, or Pharisaical; and sometimes they are all three. The only principle to bear in mind is the principle of justice. If a man discusses others spitefully or malevolently, with the sole intention of either extracting amusement out of their foibles, or with the still more odious intention of emphasizing his own virtues by discovering the weakness of others, or with the cynical desire—which is perhaps the lowest of all—of proving the whole business of human life to be a vile and sordid spectacle, then he may be frankly disapproved of, and if possible avoided; but if a man takes a generous view of humanity, if he admires what is large and noble, if he gives full credit for kindliness, strength, usefulness, vigour, sympathy, then his humorous perception of faults and deficiencies, of whims and mannerisms, of prejudices and unreasonablenesses, will have nothing that is hard or bitter about it. For the truth is that, if we are sure that a man is generous and just, his little mannerisms, his fads, his ways, are what mostly endear him to us. The man of lavish liberality is all the more lovable if he has an intense dislike to cutting the string of a parcel, and loves to fill his drawers with little hanks of twine, the untying of which stands for many wasted hours. If we know a man to be simple-minded, forbearing, and conscientious, we like him all the better when he tells for the fiftieth time an ancient story, prefacing it by anxious inquiries, which are smilingly rebutted, as to whether any of his hearers have ever heard the anecdote before.

But we must not let this tendency, to take a man in his entirety, to love him as he is, carry us too far; we must be careful that the foibles that endear him to us are in themselves innocent.

There is one particular form of priggishness, in this matter of criticism of others, which is apt to beset literary people, and more especially at a time when it seems to be considered by many writers that the first duty of a critic—they would probably call him an artist for the sake of the associations—is to get rid of all sense of right and wrong. I was reading the other day a sensible and appreciative review of Mr. Lucas's new biography of Charles Lamb. The reviewer quoted with cordial praise Mr. Lucas's remark—referring, of course, to the gin-and-water, which casts, I fear, in my own narrow view, something of a sordid shadow over Lamb's otherwise innocent life—"A man must be very secure in his own righteousness who would pass condemnatory judgment upon Charles Lamb's only weakness." I do not myself think this a sound criticism. We ought not to abstain from condemning the weakness, we must abstain from condemning Charles Lamb. His beautiful virtues, his tenderness, his extraordinary sweetness and purity of nature, far outweigh this weakness. But what are we to do? Are we to ignore, to condone, to praise the habit? Are we to think the better of Charles Lamb and love him more because he tippled? Would he not have been more lovable without it?

And the fact that one may be conscious of similar faults and moral weaknesses, ought not to make one more, but less, indulgent to such a fault when we see it in a beautiful nature. The fault in question is no more in itself adorable, than it is in another man who does not possess Lamb's genius.

We have a perfect right—nay, we do well—to condemn in others faults which we frankly condemn in ourselves. It does not help on the world if we go about everywhere slobbering with forgiveness and affection; it is the most mawkish sentimentality to love people in such a way that we condone grave faults in them; and to condone a fault because a man is great, when we condemn it if he is not great, is only a species of snobbishness. It is right to compassionate sinners, to find excuse for the faults of every one but ourselves; but we ought not to love so foolishly and irrationally, that we cannot even bring ourselves to wish our hero's faults away.

I confess to feeling the most minute and detailed interest in the smallest matters connected with other people's lives and idiosyncrasies. I cannot bear biographies of the dignified order, which do not condescend to give what are called personal details, but confine themselves to matters of undoubted importance. When I have finished reading such books I feel as if I had been reading The Statesman's Year-book, or The Annual Register. I have no mental picture of the hero; he is merely like one of those bronze statues, in frockcoat and trousers, that decorate our London squares.

I was reading, the other day, an ecclesiastical biography. The subject of it, a high dignitary of the Church, had attended the funeral of one of his episcopal colleagues, with whom he had had several technical controversies. On the evening of the day he wrote a very tender and beautiful account of the funeral in his diary, which is quoted at length: "How little," he wrote, "the sense of difference, and how strong my feeling of his power and solid sense; how little I care that he was wrong about the Discipline Bill, how much that he was so happy with us in the summer; how much that he was, as all the family told me, so 'devoted' to my Nellie!"

That is a thoroughly human statement, and preserves a due sense of proportion. In the presence of death it is the kindly human relations that matter more than policies and statesmanship.

And so it may be said, in conclusion, that we cannot taste the fulness of life, unless we can honestly say, Nihil humani a me alienum puto. If we grow absorbed in work, in business, in literature, in art, in policy, to the exclusion of the nearer human elements, we dock and maim our lives. We cannot solve the mystery of this difficult world; but we may be sure of this—that it is not for nothing that we are set in the midst of interests and relationships, of liking and loving, of tenderness and mirth, of sorrow and pain. If we are to get the most and the best out of life, we must not seclude ourselves from these things; and one of the nearest and simplest of duties is the perception of others' points of view, of sympathy, in no limited sense; and that sympathy we can only gain through looking at humanity in its wholeness. If we allow ourselves to be blinded by false conscience, by tradition, by stupidity, even by affection, from realizing what others are, we suffer, as we always suffer from any wilful blindness; indeed, wilful blindness is the most desperate of all faults, perhaps the only one that can hardly be condoned, because it argues a confidence in one's own opinion, a self-sufficiency, a self-estimation, which shut out, as by an opaque and sordid screen, the light of heaven from the soul.



XII

PRIESTS

I have been fortunate in the course of my life in knowing, more or less intimately, several eminent priests; and by this I do not mean necessarily eminent ecclesiastics; several famous ecclesiastics with whom circumstances have brought me into contact have not been priestly persons at all; they have been vigorous, wise, energetic, statesmanlike men, such as I suppose the Pontifex Maximus at Rome might have been, with a kind of formal, almost hereditary, priesthood. And, on the other hand, I have known more than one layman of distinctly priestly character, priestly after the order of Melchizedek, who had not, I suppose, received any religious consecration for his ministry, apart from perhaps a kingly initiation.

The essence of the priest is that he should believe himself, however humbly and secretly, to be set in a certain sense between humanity and God. He is conscious, if not of a mission, at least of a vocation, as an interpreter of secrets, a guardian of mysteries; he would believe that there are certain people in the world who are called to be apostles, whose work it is to remind men of God, and to justify the ways of God to men. He feels that he stands, like Aaron, to make atonement; that he is in a certain definite relation to God, a relation which all do not share; and that this gives him, in a special sense, something of the divine and fatherly relation to men. In the hands of a perfectly humble, perfectly disinterested man, this may become a very beautiful and tender thing. Such a man, from long and intimate relations with humanity, will have a very deep knowledge of the human heart. He will be surprised at no weakness or frailty; he will be patient with all perverseness and obduracy; he will be endlessly compassionate, because he will realize the strength and insistence of temptation; he will be endlessly hopeful, because he will have seen, a hundred times over, the flower of virtue and love blooming in an arid and desolate heart. He will have seen close at hand the transforming power of faith, even in natures which have become the shuddering victims of evil habit.

Such a priest as I describe had occasion once to interview a great doctor about the terrible case of a woman of high social position who had become the slave of drink. The doctor was a man of great force and ability, and of unwearying devotion; but he was what would be called a sceptic and a materialist. The priest asked if the case was hopeless; the great doctor shrugged his shoulders. "Yes," he said, "pathologically speaking, it is hopeless; there may be periods of recovery, but the course that the case will normally run will be a series of relapses, each more serious and of longer duration than the last." "Is there no chance of recovery on any line that you could suggest?" said the priest. The two looked at each other, both good men and true. "Well," said the doctor after a pause, "this is more in your line than mine; the only possible chance lies in the will, and that can only be touched through an emotion. I have seen a religious emotion successful, where everything else failed." The priest smiled and said, "I suppose that would seem to you a species of delusion? You would not admit that there was any reality behind it?" "Yes," said the doctor, "a certain reality, no doubt; the emotional processes are at present somewhat obscure from the scientific point of view: it is a forlorn hope." "Yes," said the priest, "and it is thus the kind of task for which I and those of my calling feel bound to volunteer."

Of course one of the difficulties that the priest has to struggle against is his inheritance. If we trace back the vocation of the priest to the earliest times, we find their progenitors connected with some of the darkest and saddest things in human history. They are of the same tribe as wizards and magicians, sorcerers and medicine-men, the celebrators of cruel and unholy rites. The priests of Moloch, of Chemosh, of Baal, are the dark and ancient ancestors of the same vocation. All who have trafficked in the terrors of mankind, who have gained power by trading on superstitious imaginings, who have professed to propitiate wrathful and malignant spirits, to stand between men and their dreadful Maker—all these have contributed their share to the dark and sad burden which the priest has to bear. As soon as man, rising out of pure savagery, began to have any conception of the laws of nature, he found in himself a deep instinct for happiness, a terror of suffering and death; yet, at the same time, he found himself set in a world where afflictions seemed to be rained down upon humanity by some mysterious, unseen, and awful power. Could man believe that God wished him well, who racked him with cruel pain, sent plagues among his cattle, swept away those whom he loved, destroyed his crops with hail and thunderbolts, and at the end of all dragged him reluctant and shuddering into the darkness, out of a world where so much was kind and cheerful, and where, after all, it was sweet to live?

He turned in his despair to any one who could profess to hold out any shield over him, who could claim to read the dreadful mind of God, and to propitiate His mercy. Even then a demand created a supply. Men have always loved power and influence; and so spirits of sterner and more tenacious mould, who could perhaps despise the lesser terrors of mankind, and who desired, above all things, to hold the destinies of others in their hands, to make themselves felt, naturally seized the opportunity of surrounding themselves with the awe and dignity that the supposed possession of deeper knowledge and more recondite powers offered them.

Then as the world broadened and widened, as reason began to extend its sway, the work of the priest became more beneficent, and tended to bless and hallow rather than to blast and curse. But still the temptation remains a terribly strong one for men of a certain type, men who can afford to despise the more material successes of the world, who can merge their personal ambition in ambitions for an order and a caste, still to claim to stand between man and God, to profess to withhold His blessings, to grasp the keys of His mysteries, to save men from the consequences of sin. As long as human terror exists, as long as men fear suffering and darkness and death, they will turn to any one who can profess to give them relief; and relief, too, will come; for the essence of courage is, for many timid hearts, the dependence upon a stronger will. And if a man can say, with a tranquil conviction, to a suffering and terrified comrade, "There is no need to fear," the fear loses half its terrors and half its sting.

Now, when religion of any kind becomes a part of the definite social life of the world, there must of course be an order of ministers whose business it is to preach it, and to bring it home to the minds of men. Such men will be set apart by a solemn initiation to their office; the more solemn the initiation is, the more faithful they will be. The question rather is what extent of spiritual power such ministers may claim. The essence of religious liberty is that men should feel that there is nothing whatever that stands between themselves and God; that they can approach God with perfect and simple access; that they can speak to Him without concealment of their sins, and receive from Him the comforting sense of the possibility of forgiveness. Of course the sense of sin is a terribly complicated one, because it seems to be made up partly of an inner sense of transgression, a sense of failure, a consciousness that we have acted unworthily, meanly, miserably. Yet the sense of sin follows many acts that are not in themselves necessarily disastrous either to oneself or the community. Then there is a further sense of sin, perhaps developed by long inheritance of instinct, which seems to attend acts not in themselves sinful, but which menace the security of society. For instance, there is nothing sinful in a man's desiring to save himself, and in fact saving himself, from a sudden danger. If a man leaps out of the way of a runaway cart, or throws himself on the ground to avoid the accidental discharge of a gun, he would never be blamed, nor would he blame himself, for any want of courage. Yet if a man in a battle saves himself from death by flight, he would regard himself, and be regarded by others, as having failed in his duty, and he would be apt to feel a lifelong shame and remorse for having yielded to the impulse. Again, the deliberate killing of another human being in a fit of anger, however just, would be regarded by the offender as a deeply sinful act, and he would not quarrel with the justice of the sentence of death which would be meted out to him; but when we transfer the same act to the region of war, which is consecrated by the usage of society, a man who had slain a hundred enemies would regard the fact with a certain complacency, and would not be even encouraged by a minister of religion to repent of his hundred heinous crimes upon his deathbed.

The sense, then, of sin is in a certain degree an artificial sense, and would seem to consist partly of a deep and divine instinct which arraigns the soul for acts, which may be in themselves trifling, but which seem to possess the sinful quality; and partly of a conventional instinct which considers certain things to be abominable, which are not necessarily in themselves sinful, because it is the custom of the world to consider them so.

And then to the philosopher there falls a darker tinge upon the whole matter, when he considers that the evil impulses, to yield to which is sin, are in themselves deliberately implanted in man by his Creator, or at least not apparently eradicated; and that many of those whose whole life has been darkened, embittered, and wrecked by sin, have incurred their misery by yielding to tendencies which in themselves are, by inheritance, practically irresistible.

What room is there, then, in these latter days, when reason and science together have dispelled the darkness of superstition, have diminished the possibility of miraculous occurrences, have laughed empirical occultism out of the field, for the priest?

There is no room for him if there lingers in the depth of his mind any taint of the temptation to serve his own ends, or to exalt himself or his order, by trading on the fears of irrational and credulous humanity. Against such priestcraft as this the true priest must array himself, together with the scientist, the statesman, the physician. Against all personal and priestly domination all lovers of liberty and God must combine. Theirs is the sin of Simon Magus, the sin of Hophni, the sin of Caiaphas; the sin that desires that men should still be bound, in order that they may themselves win worship and honour. It is the deadliest and vilest tyranny in the world.

But of the true priesthood there is more need than there ever was, as the minds of men awaken to the truth; for in a world where there is so much that is dark, men need to be constantly encouraged, reminded, even rebuked. The true priest must leave the social conscience alone, and entrust it to the hands of statesmen and officials. His concern must be with the individual; he must endeavour to make men realize that tranquillity and security of heart can only be won by victories over self, that law is only a cumbrous and incomplete organization for enforcing upon men a sense of equality; and he must show how far law lags behind morality, and that a man may be legally respectable yet morally abominable. The true priest must not obscure the oracles of God; he must beware of, teaching that faith is an intricate intellectual process. He must pare religion to the bone, and show that the essence of it is a perfectly simple relation with God and neighbour. He must not concern himself with policy or ceremony; he must warn men against mistaking aesthetic impulse for the perception of virtue; he must fight against precedent and tradition and custom; he must realize that one point of union is more important than a hundred points of difference. He must set himself against upholsteries and uniforms, against formalities and rituals. He must abjure wealth and position, in favour of humble kindliness and serviceableness. He must have a sense of poetry and romance and beauty about life; where other men are artists in words, in musical tones, in pigments or sculptured stone, he must be an artist in virtue. He must be the friend and lover of humble, inefficient, inarticulate, unpleasing persons; and he must be able to show that there is a desirable quality of beauty in the most sordid and commonplace action, if faithfully performed.

Against such an ideal are arrayed all the forces of the world. Christ and Christ-like men have held up such an ideal to humanity; and the sorrow of it is that, the moment that such thoughts have won for themselves the incredible and instant power that they do win among mortals, men of impure motive, who have desired the power more than the service, have seized upon the source, have fenced it off, have systematized its distribution, have enriched themselves by withholding and denying it to all but those who can pay a price, if not of wealth, at all events of submission and obedience and recognition.

A man who desires the true priesthood may perhaps find it readiest to his hand in some ecclesiastical organization; yet there he is surrounded by danger; his impulses are repressed; he must sacrifice them for the sake of the caste to which he belongs; he is told to be cautious and prudent; he is praised and rewarded for being conventional. But a man may also take such a consecration for himself, as a king takes a crown from the altar and crowns himself with might; he need not require it at the hands of another. If a man resolves not to live for himself or his own ambitions, but to walk up and down in the earth, praising simplicity and virtue and the love of God wherever he sees it, protesting against tyranny and selfishness, bearing others' burdens as far as he can, he may exercise the priesthood of God. Such men are to be found in every Church, and even holding the highest places in them; but such a priesthood is found, though perhaps few suspect it, by thousands among women where it is found by tens among men. Perhaps it may be said that if a man adds the tenderness of a woman to the serene strength of a man, he is best fitted for the task; but the truth lies in the fact that the qualities for the exercise of such an influence are to be found far more commonly among women than among men, though accompanied as a rule by less consciousness of it, and little desire to exercise it officially; indeed it is the very absence of egotism among women, the absence of the personal claim, that makes them less effective than they otherwise might be, because they do not hold an object or an aim dear enough. They desire to achieve, rather than to be known to have achieved; and yet in this unperceptive world, human beings are apt to choose for their guides and counsellors people whom they know by reputation, rather than those whom they know familiarly. And thus mere recognition often brings with it a power of wider influence, because people are apt to trust the judgment of others rather than their own. In seeking for an adviser, men are apt to consider who has the greatest reputation for wisdom, rather than whom they themselves have found wisest; and thus the man who seeks for influence often attains it, because he has a wider circle of those who recommend him. It is this absence of independent judgment that gives strength to the self-seeking priest; while the natural priesthood of women is less recognized because it is attended with no advertisement.

The natural priest is one whom one can instinctively and utterly trust, in whom one can deposit secrets as one deposits them in the custody of a bank, without any fear that they will be used for other purposes. In the true priest one finds a tender compassion, a deep and patient love; it is not worth while to wear disguises before him, because his keen, weary, and amused eye sees through the mask. It is not worth while to keep back, as Ananias did, part of the price of the land, to leave sordid temptations untold, because the true priest loves the sinner even more than he hates the sin; it is best to be utterly sincere with him, because he loves sincerity even more than unstained virtue; and one can confess to him one's desires for good with as little false shame as one can confess one's hankering after evil. Perhaps in one respect the man is more fitted to be a confessor than a woman, because he has a deeper experience of the ardour and the pleasure of temptation; and yet the deeper tenderness of the woman gives her a sympathy for the tempted, which is not even communicated by a wider experience of sin.

Perhaps there is nothing that reflects our anthropomorphic ideas of God more strongly than the fact that no revelation of prophets has ever conceived of the Supreme Deity as other than masculine; and no doubt the Mariolatry of the Church of Rome is the reflection of the growing influence in the world of the feminine element; and yet the conception of God as masculine is in itself a limitation of His infinite perfection. That we should carry our conception of sex into the infinite is perhaps a mere failure of imagination, and if we could divest ourselves of a thought which possibly has no reality in it, we should perhaps grow to feel that the true priesthood of life could be exercised as well by women as by men, or even better. The true principle is that all those who are set free by a natural grace, a divine instinct, from grosser temptations, and whose freedom leads them not to a cold self-sufficiency, to a contempt for what is weaker, but to an ardent desire to save, to renew, to upraise, are the natural priests or priestesses of the world; for the only way in which the priest can stand between man and God is, when smaller and more hampered natures realize that he has a divine freedom and compassion conferred upon him, which sets him above themselves; when they can feel that in religion it is better to agree with the saints than to differ from them; when they can see that there are certain people whose religious intuitions can be trusted, because they are wider and deeper than the narrower intuitions of more elementary natures.

The priest, then, that I would recognize is not the celebrator of lonely and forlorn mysteries, the proprietor of divine blessings, the posturer in solemn ceremonies, but the man or woman of candid gaze, of fearless heart, of deep compassion, of infinite concern. It is these qualities which, if they are there, lend to rite and solemnity a holiness and a significance which they cannot win from antiquity or tradition. Such priests as these are the interpreters of the Divine will, the channels of Divine grace; and the hope of the race lies in the fact that such men and women are sent into the world, and go in and out among us, more than in all the stately organizations, the mysterious secrets, the splendid shrines, devised by the art of man to make fences about the healing spring; shrines where, though sound and colour may lavish their rich hues, their moving tones, yet the raiment of the priest may hide a proud and greedy heart, and the very altar may be cold.



XIII

AMBITION

I am afraid that Milton's great line about ambition,

"That last infirmity of noble minds,"

is responsible for a good deal of harm, because it induces high-minded persons of inexact ideas to think ambition a noble infirmity, or at least to believe that they need not try to get rid of their personal ambitions until they have conquered all their other evil dispositions. I suppose that what Milton meant was that it was the hardest of all faults to get rid of; and the reason why it is so difficult to eject it, is because it is so subtle and ingenious a spirit, and masquerades under such splendid disguises, arrayed in robes of light. A man who desires to fill a high position in the world is so apt to disguise his craving to himself by thinking, or trying to think, that he desires a great place because of the beneficent influence he can exert, and all the good that he will be able to do, which shall stream from him as light from the sun. Of course to a high-minded man that is naturally one of the honest pleasures of an important post; but he ought to be quite sure that his motive is that the good should be done, and not that he should have the credit of doing it. I have burnt my own fingers not once nor twice at the fire of ambition, and the subject has been often in my mind. But my experiences were so wholly unlike anything that I had anticipated, though I suppose they are in reality normal enough, that I will venture to set them down here. The first curious experience was how, on a nearer survey of the prospect of obtaining an important post, all the incidental advantages and conveniences of the position sank into nothingness. This was a quite unexpected development; I had imagined that a prospect of dignity and importance would have had something vaguely sustaining about it. A brilliant satirist once said that a curate did not as a rule desire to be a bishop that he might exercise a wide and useful influence, but primarily that he might be called "my lord." I myself was brought, as a child, in contact with one who was somewhat unexpectedly called to a high office. I was much with him in the days when his honours first invested him, and I confess with a certain shame that it did undoubtedly seem to me that the dignity of the office, the sense of power, the obvious respect paid to him by people of position, were things that must pleasantly sweeten a mortal cup. The other day I was in the company of an eminent prelate; there were three curates present: they hovered round the great man like bees round a flower; they gazed with innocent rapture upon his shapely legs, somewhat strangely swathed, as Carlyle said, his bright, grotesque hat; and I could not help feeling that they thought how well such raiment would become themselves. It is of course a childish view; but then how long our childish views survive, though hidden under grave pretences! To see a great personage move with dignity to his appointed place in a great ceremony, attended by all the circumstances of pomp, a congregation gazing, with an organ above thundering out rich and solemn music, how impressive it all appears! How hard to think that the central actor in such a scene does not feel his heart swell with a complacent joy! And yet I suppose that any sensible man under such conditions is far more likely to be oppressed with a sense of weakness and anxious responsibility; how soon such surroundings ought to, nay, do find their true value in a wise man's mind! The triumph rather is if, in the midst of all this glitter and glory, when a silence is made, the worshipful man speaks simple and strong words out of a pure and noble heart; and then one can feel that the pomp is nothing but the due homage of mankind for real greatness, and that it has followed him rather than been followed by him.