Part 6

It would appear, then, that we have no _fortunati_, that we are not yet rich enough to afford the greatest of all luxuries—leisure to cultivate and enjoy “the best that has been known and thought in the world.” This is a pity, because there seems to be money in plenty for so many less valuable things. The yearly taxes of the United States sound to innocent ears like the fabled wealth of the Orient; the yearly expenditures of the people are on no rigid scale; yet we are too poor to harbor the priceless literature of the past because it is not a paying investment, because it will not put bread in our mouths nor clothes on our shivering nakedness. “Poverty is a most odious calling,” sighed Burton many years ago, and we have good cause to echo his lament. Until we are able to believe, with that enthusiastic Greek scholar, Mr. Butcher, that “intellectual training is an end in itself, and not a mere preparation for a trade or a profession;” until we begin to understand that there is a leisure which does not mean an easy sauntering through life, but a special form of activity, employing all our faculties, and training us to the adequate reception of whatever is most valuable in literature and art; until we learn to estimate the fruits of self-culture at their proper worth, we are still far from reaping the harvest of three centuries of toil and struggle; we are still as remote as ever from the serenity of intellectual accomplishment.

There is a strange pleasure in work wedded to leisure, in work which has grown beautiful because its rude necessities are softened and humanized by sentiment and the subtle grace of association. A little paragraph from the journal of Eugénie de Guérin illustrates with charming simplicity the gilding of common toil by the delicate touch of a cultivated and sympathetic intelligence:—

“A day spent in spreading out a large wash leaves little to say, and yet it is rather pretty, too, to lay the white linen on the grass, or to see it float on lines. One may fancy one’s self Homer’s Nausicaa, or one of those Biblical princesses who washed their brothers’ tunics. We have a basin at Moulinasse that you have never seen, sufficiently large, and full to the brim of water. It embellishes the hollow, and attracts the birds who like a cool place to sing in.”

In the same spirit, Maurice de Guérin confesses frankly the pleasure he takes in gathering fagots for the winter fire, “that little task of the woodcutter which brings us close to nature,” and which was also a favorite occupation of M. de Lamennais. The fagot gathering, indeed, can hardly be said to have assumed the proportions of real toil; it was rather a pastime where play was thinly disguised by a pretty semblance of drudgery. “Idleness,” admits de Guérin, “_but idleness full of thought, and alive to every impression_.” Eugénie’s labors, however, had other aspects and bore different fruit. There is nothing intrinsically charming in stitching seams, hanging out clothes, or scorching one’s fingers over a kitchen fire; yet every page in the journal of this nobly born French girl reveals to us the nearness of work, work made sacred by the prompt fulfillment of visible duties, and—what is more rare—made beautiful by that distinction of mind which was the result of alternating hours of finely cultivated leisure. A very ordinary and estimable young woman might have spread her wash upon the grass with honest pride at the whiteness of her linen; but it needed the solitude of Le Cayla, the few books, well read and well worth reading, the life of patriarchal simplicity, and the habit of sustained and delicate thought, to awaken in the worker’s mind the graceful association of ideas,—the pretty picture of Nausicaa and her maidens cleansing their finely woven webs in the cool, rippling tide.

For it is self-culture that warms the chilly earth wherein no good seed can mature; it is self-culture that distinguishes between the work which has inherent and lasting value and the work which represents conscientious activity and no more. And for the training of one’s self, leisure is requisite; leisure and that rare modesty which turns a man’s thoughts back to his own shortcomings and requirements, and extinguishes in him the burning desire to enlighten his fellow-beings. “We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection of energy,” says Mr. Oscar Wilde, who delights in scandalizing his patient readers, and who lapses unconsciously into something resembling animation over the wrongs inflicted by the solemn preceptors of mankind. The notion that it is worth while to learn a thing only if you intend to impart it to others is widespread and exceedingly popular. I have myself heard an excellent and anxious aunt say to her young niece, then working hard at college, “But, my dear, why do you give so much of your time to Greek? You don’t expect to teach it, do you?”—as if there were no other use to be gained, no other pleasure to be won from that noble language, in which lies hidden the hoarded treasure of centuries. To study Greek in order to read and enjoy it, and thereby make life better worth the living, is a possibility that seldom enters the practical modern mind.

Yet this restless desire to give out information, like alms, is at best a questionable bounty; this determination to share one’s wisdom with one’s unwilling fellow-creatures is a noble impulse provocative of general discontent. When Southey, writing to James Murray about a dialogue which he proposes to publish in the “Quarterly,” says, with characteristic complacency: “I have very little doubt that it will excite considerable attention, and lead many persons into a wholesome train of thought,” we feel at once how absolutely familiar is the sentiment, and how absolutely hopeless is literature approached in this spirit. The same principle, working under different conditions to-day, entangles us in a network of lectures, which have become the chosen field for every educational novelty, and the diversion of the mentally unemployed.

Charles Lamb has recorded distinctly his veneration for the old-fashioned schoolmaster who taught his Greek and Latin in leisurely fashion day after day, with no thought wasted upon more superficial or practical acquirements, and who “came to his task as to a sport.” He has made equally plain his aversion for the new-fangled pedagogue—new in his time, at least—who could not “relish a beggar or a gypsy” without seeking to collect or to impart some statistical information on the subject. A gentleman of this calibre, his fellow-traveler in a coach, once asked him if he had ever made “any calculation as to the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London?” and the magnitude of the question so overwhelmed Lamb that he could not even stammer out a confession of his ignorance. “To go preach to the first passer-by, to become tutor to the ignorance of the first thing I meet, is a task I abhor,” observes Montaigne, who must certainly have been the most acceptable companion of his day.

Dr. Johnson, too, had scant sympathy with insistent and arrogant industry. He could work hard enough when circumstances demanded it; but he “always felt an inclination to do nothing,” and not infrequently gratified his desires. “No man, sir, is obliged to do as much as he can. A man should have part of his life to himself,” was the good doctor’s soundly heterodox view, advanced upon many occasions. He hated to hear people boast of their assiduity, and nipped such vain pretensions in the bud with frosty scorn. When he and Boswell journeyed together in the Harwich stage-coach, a “fat; elderly gentle-woman,” who had been talking freely of her own affairs, wound up by saying that she never permitted any of her children to be for a moment idle. “I wish, madam,” said Dr. Johnson testily, “that you would educate me too, for I have been an idle fellow all my life.” “I am sure, sir,” protested the woman with dismayed politeness, “you have not been idle.” “Madam,” was the retort, “it is true! And that gentleman there”—pointing to poor young Boswell—“has been idle also. He was idle in Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He came to London, where he has been very idle. And now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever.”

That there was a background of truth in these spirited assertions we have every reason to be grateful. Dr. Johnson’s value to-day does not depend on the number of essays, or reviews, or dedications he wrote in a year,—some years he wrote nothing,—but on his own sturdy and splendid personality; “the real primate, the soul’s teacher of all England,” says Carlyle; a great embodiment of uncompromising goodness and sense. Every generation needs such a man, not to compile dictionaries, but to preserve the balance of sanity, and few generations are blest enough to possess him. As for Boswell, he might have toiled in the law courts until he was gray without benefiting or amusing anybody. It was in the nights he spent drinking port wine at the Mitre, and in the days he spent trotting, like a terrier, at his master’s heels, that the seed was sown which was to give the world a masterpiece of literature, the most delightful biography that has ever enriched mankind. It is to leisure that we owe the “Life of Johnson,” and a heavy debt we must, in all integrity, acknowledge it to be.

Mr. Shortreed said truly of Sir Walter Scott that he was “making himself in the busy, idle pleasures of his youth;” in those long rambles by hill and dale, those whimsical adventures in farmhouses, those merry, purposeless journeys in which the eager lad tasted the flavor of life. At home such unauthorized amusements were regarded with emphatic disapprobation. “I greatly doubt, sir,” said his father to him one day, “that you were born for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut!” and one half pities the grave clerk to the Signet, whose own life had been so decorously dull, and who regarded with affectionate solicitude his lovable and incomprehensible son. In later years Sir Walter recognized keenly that his wasted school hours entailed on him a lasting loss, a loss he was determined his sons should never know. It is to be forever regretted that “the most Homeric of modern men could not read Homer.” But every day he stole from the town to give to the country, every hour he stole from law to give to literature, every minute he stole from work to give to pleasure, counted in the end as gain. It is in his pleasures that a man really lives, it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self. Perhaps Charles Lamb’s fellow-clerks thought that because his days were spent at a desk in the East India House, his life was spent there too. His life was far remote from that routine of labor; built up of golden moments of respite, enriched with joys, chastened by sorrows, vivified by impulses that had no filiation with his daily toil. “For the time that a man may call his own,” he writes to Wordsworth, “that is his life.” The Lamb who worked in the India House, and who had “no skill in figures,” has passed away, and is to-day but a shadow and a name. The Lamb of the “Essays” and the “Letters” lives for us now, and adds each year his generous share to the innocent gayety of the world. This is the Lamb who said, “Riches are chiefly good because they give us time,” and who sighed for a little son that he might christen him Nothing-to-do, and permit him to do nothing.

WORDS.

“DO you read the dictionary?” asked M. Théophile Gautier of a young and ardent disciple who had come to him for counsel. “It is the most fruitful and interesting of books. Words have an individual and a relative value. They should be chosen before being placed in position. This word is a mere pebble; that a fine pearl or an amethyst. In art the handicraft is everything, and the absolute distinction of the artist lies, not so much in his capacity to feel nature, as in his power to render it.”

We are always pleased to have a wholesome truth presented to us with such genial vivacity, so that we may feel ourselves less edified than diverted, and learn our lesson without the mortifying consciousness of ignorance. He is a wise preceptor who conceals from us his awful rod of office, and grafts his knowledge dexterously upon our self-esteem.

“Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot.”

An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice. Musicians know the value of chords; painters know the value of colors; writers are often so blind to the value of words that they are content with a bare expression of their thoughts, disdaining the “labor of the file,” and confident that the phrase first seized is for them the phrase of inspiration. They exaggerate the importance of what they have to say,—lacking which we should be none the poorer,—and underrate the importance of saying it in such fashion that we may welcome its very moderate significance. It is in the habitual and summary recognition of the laws of language that scholarship delights, says Mr. Pater; and while the impatient thinker, eager only to impart his views, regards these laws as a restriction, the true artist finds in them an opportunity, and rejoices, as Goethe rejoiced, to work within conditions and limits.

For every sentence that may be penned or spoken the right words exist. They lie concealed in the inexhaustible wealth of a vocabulary enriched by centuries of noble thought and delicate manipulation. He who does not find them and fit them into place, who accepts the first term which presents itself rather than search for the expression which accurately and beautifully embodies his meaning, aspires to mediocrity, and is content with failure. The exquisite adjustment of a word to its significance, which was the instrument of Flaubert’s daily martyrdom and daily triumph; the generous sympathy of a word with its surroundings, which was the secret wrung by Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of language,—these are the twin perfections which constitute style, and substantiate genius. Cardinal Newman also possesses in an extraordinary degree Flaubert’s art of fitting his words to the exact thoughts they are designed to convey. Such a brief sentence as “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt” reveals with pregnant simplicity the mental attitude of the writer. Sir Thomas Browne, working under fewer restraints, and without the severity of intellectual discipline, harmonizes each musical syllable into a prose of leisurely sweetness and sonorous strength. “Court not felicity too far, and weary not the favorable hand of fortune.” “Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.” “The race of delight is short, and pleasures have mutable faces.” Such sentences, woven with curious skill from the rich fabric of seventeenth-century English, defy the wreckage of time. In them a gentle dignity of thought finds its appropriate expression, and the restfulness of an unvexed mind breathes its quiet beauty into each cadenced line. Here are no “boisterous metaphors,” such as Dryden scorned, to give undue emphasis at every turn, and amaze the careless reader with the cheap delights of turbulence. Here is no trace of that “full habit of speech,” hateful to Mr. Arnold’s soul, and which, in the years to come, was to be the gift of journalism to literature.

The felicitous choice of words, which with most writers is the result of severe study and unswerving vigilance, seems with a favored few—who should be envied and not imitated—to be the genuine fruit of inspiration, as though caprice itself could not lead them far astray. Shelley’s letters and prose papers teem with sentences in which the beautiful words are sufficient satisfaction in themselves, and of more value than the conclusions they reveal. They have a haunting sweetness, a pure perfection, which makes the act of reading them a sustained and dulcet pleasure. Sometimes this effect is produced by a few simple terms reiterated into lingering music. “We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life.” Sometimes a clearer note is struck with the sure and delicate touch which is the excellence of art. “For the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.” The substitution of the word “glow” for “brightness” would, I think, make this sentence extremely beautiful. If it lacks the fullness and melody of those incomparable passages in which Burke, the great master of words, rivets our admiration forever, it has the same peculiar and lasting hold upon our imaginations and our memories. Once read, we can no more forget its charm than we can forget “that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound,” or the mournful cadence of regret over virtues deemed superfluous in an age of strictly iconoclastic progress. “Never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.” It is the fashion at present to subtly depreciate Burke’s power by some patronizing allusion to the “grand style,”—a phrase which, except when applied to Milton, appears to hold in solution an undefined and undefinable reproach. But until we can produce something better, or something as good, those “long savorsome Latin words,” checked and vivified by “racy Saxon monosyllables,” must still represent an excellence which it is easier to belittle than to emulate.

It is strange that our chilling disapprobation of what we are prone to call “fine writing” melts into genial applause over the freakish perversity so dear to modern unrest. We look askance upon such an old-time master of his craft as the Opium-Eater, and require to be told by a clear-headed, unenthusiastic critic like Mr. George Saintsbury that the balanced harmony of De Quincey’s style is obtained often by the use of extremely simple words, couched in the clearest imaginable form. Place by the side of Mr. Pater’s picture of Monna Lisa—too well known to need quotation—De Quincey’s equally famous description of Our Lady of Darkness. Both passages are as beautiful as words can make them, but the gift of simplicity is in the hands of the older writer. Or take the single sentence which describes for us the mystery of Our Lady of Sighs: “And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium.” Here, as Mr. Saintsbury justly points out, are no needless adjectives, no unusual or extravagant words. The sense is adequate to the sound, and the sound is only what is required as accompaniment to the sense. We are not perplexed and startled, as when Browning introduces us to

“the Tyrrhene whelk’s pearl-sheeted lip,”

or to a woman’s

“morbid, olive, faultless shoulder-blades.”

We are not irritated and confused, as when Carlyle—whose misdeeds, like those of Browning, are matters of pure volition—is pleased, for our sharper discipline, to write “like a comet inscribing with its tail.” No man uses words more admirably, or abuses them more shamefully, than Carlyle. That he should delight in seeing his pages studded all over with such spikes as “mammonism,” “flunkeyhood,” “nonentity,” and “simulacrum,” that he should repeat them again and again with unwearying self-content, is an enigma that defies solution, save on the simple presumption that they are designed, like other instruments of torture, to test the fortitude of the sufferer. It is best to scramble over them as bravely as we can, and forget our scars in the enjoyment of those vivid and matchless pictures in which each word plays its part, and supplies its share of outline and emphasis to the scene. The art that can dictate such a brief bit of description as “little red-colored pulpy infants” is the art of a Dutch master who, on five inches of canvas, depicts for us with subdued vehemence the absolute realities of life.

“All freaks,” remarks Mr. Arnold, “tend to impair the beauty and power of language;” yet so prone are we to confuse the bizarre with the picturesque that at present a great deal of English literature resembles a linguistic museum, where every type of monstrosity is cheerfully exhibited and admired. Writers of splendid capacity, of undeniable originality and force, are not ashamed to add their curios to the group, either from sheer impatience of restraint, or, as I sometimes think, from a grim and perverted sense of humor, which is enlivened by noting how far they can venture beyond bounds. When Mr. George Meredith is pleased to tell us that one of his characters “neighed a laugh,” that another “tolled her naughty head,” that a third “stamped; her aspect spat,” and that a fourth was discovered “pluming a smile upon his succulent mouth,” we cannot smother a dawning suspicion that he is diverting himself at our expense, and pluming a smile of his own, more sapless than succulent, over the naïve simplicity of the public. Perhaps it is a yearning after subtlety rather than a spirit of uncurbed humor which prompts Vernon Lee to describe for us Carlo’s “dark Renaissance face perplexed with an incipient laugh;” but really a very interesting and improving little paper might be written on the extraordinary laughs and smiles which cheer the somewhat saturnine pages of modern analytic fiction. “Correctness, that humble merit of prose,” has been snubbed into a recognition of her insignificance. She is as tame as a woman with only one head and two arms amid her more striking and richly endowed sisters in the museum.

“A language long employed by a delicate and critical society,” says Mr. Walter Bagehot, “is a treasure of dexterous felicities;” and to awaken the literary conscience to its forgotten duty of guarding this treasure is the avowed vocation of Mr. Pater, and of another stylist, less understood and less appreciated, Mr. Oscar Wilde. Their labors are scantily rewarded in an age which has but little instinct for form, and which habitually allows itself the utmost license of phraseology. That “unblessed freedom from restraint,” which to the clear-eyed Greeks appeared diametrically opposed to a wise and well-ordered liberty, and which finds its amplest expression in the poems of Walt Whitman, has dazzled us only to betray. The emancipation of the savage is sufficiently comprehensive, but his privileges are not always as valuable as they may at first sight appear. Mr. Brownell, in his admirable volume “French Traits,” unhesitatingly defines Whitman’s slang as “the riotous medium of the under-languaged;” and the reproach is not too harsh nor too severe. Even Mr. G. C. Macaulay, one of the most acute and enthusiastic of his English critics, admits sadly that it is “gutter slang,” equally purposeless and indefensible. That a man who held within himself the elements of greatness should have deliberately lessened the force of his life’s work by a willful misuse of his material is one of those bitter and irremediable errors which sanity forever deplores. We are inevitably repelled by the employment of trivial or vulgar words in serious poetry, and they become doubly offensive when brought into relation with the beauty and majesty of nature. It is neither pleasant nor profitable to hear the sun’s rays described as