Book: Dreamthorp

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But the man of letters has not only to live, he has to develop himself;
and his earning of money and his intellectual development should proceed
simultaneously and in proportionate degrees. Herein lies the main
difficulty of the literary life. Out of his thought the man must bring
fire, food, clothing; and fire, food, clothing must in their turns
subserve thought. It is necessary, for the proper conduct of such a
life, that while the balance at the banker's increases, intellectual
resource should increase at the same ratio. Progress should not be made
in the faculty of expression alone,--progress at the same time should be
made in thought; for thought is the material on which expression feeds.
Should sufficient advance not be made in this last direction, in a short
time the man feels that he has expressed himself,--that now he can only
more or less dexterously repeat himself,--more or less prettily become
his own echo. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in writing;
but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is the
only thing he has acquired,--when it has been, perhaps, the only thing he
has striven to acquire. Such miscalculation of ways and means suggests
vulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint. In the life in
which this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, no
satisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does not
create,--he is only desperately keeping up appearances. He has at once
become "a base mechanical," and his successes are not much higher than
the successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer. This want of proper
relationship between resources of expression and resources of thought, or
subject-matter for expression, is common enough, and some slight
suspicion of it flashes across the mind at times in reading even the best
authors. It lies at the bottom of every catastrophe in the literary
life. Frequently a man's first book is good, and all his after
productions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of the first. The
men who act thus are in the long run deserted like worked-out mines. A
man reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits as
to expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiar
bitters of the literary life. Hazlitt tells us that, after one of his
early interviews with Coleridge, he sat down to his Essay on the Natural
Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. "I sat down to the task shortly
afterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens and paper, determined to
make clean work of it, wrote a few sentences in the skeleton style of a
mathematical demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page, and,
after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions,
apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in
which I had plunged myself for four, or five years preceding, gave up the
attempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless despondency on the
blank unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I
was then? oh, no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being
able to express it, is worth all the fluency and flippancy in the world."
This regretful looking back to the past, when emotions were keen and
sharp, and when thought wore the novel dress of a stranger, and this
dissatisfaction with the acquirements of the present, is common enough
with the man of letters. The years have come and gone, and he is
conscious that he is not intrinsically richer,--he has only learned to
assort and display his riches to advantage. His wares have neither
increased in quantity nor improved in quality,--he has only procured a
window in a leading thoroughfare. He can catch his butterflies more
cunningly, he can pin them on his cards more skilfully, but their wings
are fingered and tawdry compared with the time when they winnowed before
him in the sunshine over the meadows of youth. This species of regret is
peculiar to the class of which I am speaking, and they often discern
failure in what the world counts success. The veteran does not look back
to the time when he was in the awkward squad; the accountant does not
sigh over the time when he was bewildered by the mysteries of
double-entry. And the reason is obvious. The dexterity which time and
practice have brought to the soldier and the accountant is pure gain: the
dexterity of expression which time and practice have brought to the
writer is gain too, in its way, but not quite so pure. It may have been
cultivated and brought to its degree of excellence at the expense of
higher things. The man of letters lives by thought and expression, and
his two powers may not be perfectly balanced. And, putting aside its
effect on the reader, and through that, on the writer's pecuniary
prosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this. When the
writer expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, however
life-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looks
back over his uttered past--brown desert to him, in which there is no
sustenance--he looks forward to the green _un_uttered future, and
beholding its narrow limits, knows it is all that he can call his
own,--on that vivid strip he must pasture his intellectual life.

Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one? Granted that the writer
is productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he has
secured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life could
be happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat. If a
poet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in his
ideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if an
essayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things. He
breathes habitually the serener air which ordinary mortals can only at
intervals respire, and in their happiest moments. Such conceptions of
great writers are to some extent erroneous. Through the medium of their
books we know them only in their active mental states,--in their
triumphs; we do not see them when sluggishness has succeeded the effort
which was delight. The statue does not come to her white limbs all at
once. It is the bronze wrestler, not the flesh and blood one, that
stands forever over a fallen adversary with pride of victory on his face.
Of the labour, the weariness, the self-distrust, the utter despondency of
the great writer, we know nothing. Then, for the attainment of mere
happiness or contentment, any high faculty of imagination is a
questionable help. Of course imagination lights the torch of joy, it
deepens the carmine on the sleek cheek of the girl, it makes wine
sparkle, makes music speak, gives rays to the rising sun. But in all its
supreme sweetnesses there is a perilous admixture of deceit, which is
suspected even at the moment when the senses tingle keenliest. And it
must be remembered that this potent faculty can darken as well as
brighten. It is the very soul of pain. While the trumpets are blowing
in Ambition's ear, it whispers of the grave. It drapes Death in austere
solemnities, and surrounds him with a gloomy court of terrors. The life
of the imaginative man is never a commonplace one: his lights are
brighter, his glooms are darker, than the lights and gloom of the vulgar.
His ecstasies are as restless as his pains. The great writer has this
perilous faculty in excess; and through it he will, as a matter of
course, draw out of the atmosphere of circumstance surrounding him the
keenness of pleasure and pain. To my own notion, the best gifts of the
gods are neither the most glittering nor the most admired. These gifts I
take to be, a moderate ambition, a taste for repose with circumstances
favourable thereto, a certain mildness of passion, an even-beating pulse,
an even-beating heart. I do not consider heroes and celebrated persons
the happiest of mankind. I do not envy Alexander the shouting of his
armies, nor Dante his laurel wreath. Even were I able, I would not
purchase these at the prices the poet and the warrior paid. So far,
then, as great writers--great poets, especially--are of imagination all
compact--a peculiarity of mental constitution which makes a man go shares
with every one he is brought into contact with; which makes him enter
into Romeo's rapture when he touches Juliet's cheek among cypresses
silvered by the Verona moonlight, and the stupor of the blinded and
pinioned wretch on the scaffold before the bolt is drawn--so far as this
special gift goes, I do not think the great poet,--and by virtue of it he
_is_ a poet,--is likely to be happier than your more ordinary mortal. On
the whole, perhaps, it is the great readers rather than the great writers
who are entirely to be envied. They pluck the fruits, and are spared the
trouble of rearing them. Prometheus filched fire from heaven, and had
for reward the crag of Caucasus, the chain, the vulture; while they for
whom he stole it cook their suppers upon it, stretch out benumbed hands
towards it, and see its light reflected in their children's faces. They
are comfortable: he, roofed by the keen crystals of the stars, groans
above.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. The majority
of men slip into their graves without having encountered on their way
thither any signal catastrophe or exaltation of fortune or feeling.
Collect a thousand ignited sticks into a heap, and you have a bonfire
which may be seen over three counties. If, during thirty years, the
annoyances connected with shirt-buttons found missing when you are
hurriedly dressing for dinner, were gathered into a mass and endured at
once, it would be misery equal to a public execution. If, from the same
space of time, all the little titillations of a man's vanity were
gathered into one lump of honey and enjoyed at once, the pleasure of
being crowned would not perhaps be much greater. If the equanimity of an
ordinary man be at the mercy of trifles, how much more will the
equanimity of the man of letters, who is usually the most sensitive of
the race, and whose peculiar avocation makes sad work with the fine
tissues of the nerves. Literary composition is, I take it, with the
exception of the crank, in which there is neither hope nor result, the
most exhausting to which a human being can apply himself. Just consider
the situation. Here is your man of letters, tender-hearted as Cowper,
who would not count upon his list of friends the man who tramples
heedlessly upon a worm; as light of sleep and abhorrent of noise as
Beattie, who denounces chanticleer for his lusty proclamation of morning
to his own and the neighbouring farmyards in terms that would be
unmeasured if applied to Nero; as alive to blame as Byron, who declared
that the praise of the greatest of the race could not take the sting from
the censure of the meanest. Fancy the sufferings of a creature so built
and strung in a world which creaks so vilely on its hinges as this! Will
such a man confront a dun with an imperturbable countenance? Will he
throw himself back in his chair and smile blandly when his chamber is
lanced through and through by the notes of a street bagpiper? When his
harrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently to
stupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier than
people suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, from
social misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom,
and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised and
unhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his brain
bread and beer, clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not surprised
that he is oftentimes nervous, querulous, impatient. Thinking of these
things, I do not wonder at Hazlitt's spleen, at Charles Lamb's punch, at
Coleridge's opium. I think of the days spent in writing, and of the
nights which repeat the day in dream, and in which there is no
refreshment. I think of the brain which must be worked out at length; of
Scott, when the wand of the enchanter was broken, writing poor romances;
of Southey sitting vacantly in his library, and drawing a feeble
satisfaction from the faces of his books. And for the man of letters
there is more than the mere labour: he writes his book, and has
frequently the mortification of seeing it neglected or torn to pieces.
Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects
his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To
write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a
sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where
sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism
lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised,
and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's
life. Most men endure criticism with commendable fortitude, just as most
criminals when under the drop conduct themselves with calmness. They
bleed, but they bleed inwardly. To be flayed in the _Saturday Review_,
for instance,--a whole amused public looking on,--is far from pleasant;
and, after the operation, the ordinary annoyances of life probably
magnify themselves into tortures. The grasshopper becomes a burden.
Touch a flayed man ever so lightly, and with ever so kindly an intention,
and he is sure to wince. The skin of the man of letters is peculiarly
sensitive to the bite of the critical mosquito; and he lives in a climate
in which such mosquitoes swarm. He is seldom stabbed to the heart--he is
often killed by pin-pricks.

But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to the interior of the
citadel, it may be said that great writers, although they must ever
remain shining objects of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinary
limitations and conditions. They are cabined, cribbed, confined, even as
their more prosaic brethren. It is in the nature of every man to be
endued with that he works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchant
becomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavour
of the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine and
horse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul--his experiences are docketed
in a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away in
professional pigeon-holes. A man naturally becomes leavened by the
profession which he has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams "shop,"
as the colloquial phrase has it. Men of letters are affected by their
profession just as merchants, physicians, and lawyers are. In course of
time the inner man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper. The
agriculturist talks constantly of bullocks--the man of letters constantly
of books. The printing-press seems constantly in his immediate
neighbourhood. He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourable
review,--he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition. The narrowing
effect of a profession is in every man a defect, albeit an inevitable
one. Byron, who had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of his
day, tells us, in "Beppo,"

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

And his lordship's "hate" in the matter is understandable enough. In his
own day, Scott and himself were almost the only distinguished authors who
were not "all authors," just as Mr. Helps and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton
are almost the only representatives of the class in ours. This
professional taint not only resides in the writer, impairing his fulness
and completion; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs it also.
It is the professional character which authorship has assumed which has
taken individuality and personal flavour from so much of our writing, and
prevented to a large extent the production of enduring books. Our
writing is done too hurriedly, and to serve a purpose too immediate.
Literature is not so much an art as a manufacture. There is a demand,
and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never allowed to lie
fallow, and to nourish itself in peacefulness and silence. When so many
cups are to be filled, too much water is certain to be put into the
teapot. Letters have become a profession, and probably of all
professions it is, in the long run, the least conducive to personal
happiness. It is the most precarious. In it, above all others, to be
weak is to be miserable. It is the least mechanical, consequently the
most exhausting; and in its higher walks it deals with a man's most vital
material--utilises his emotions, trades on his faculties of love and
imagination, uses for its own purposes the human heart by which he lives.
These things a man requires for himself; and when they are in a large
proportion transported to an ideal world, they make the ideal world all
the more brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary existence all
the more arid and commonplace. You cannot spend money and have it; you
cannot use emotion and possess it. The poet who sings loudly of love and
love's delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of life be all the
colder for his singing. The man who has been moved while describing an
imaginary death-bed to-day, is all the more likely to be unmoved while
standing by his friend's grave to-morrow. Shakspeare, after emerging
from the moonlight in the Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet's silvery
interchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously enamoured of the
autumn on Ann Hathaway's cheek. It is in some such way as this that a
man's books may impoverish his life; that the fire and heat of his genius
may make his hearth all the colder. From considerations like these, one
can explain satisfactorily enough to one's self the domestic
misadventures of men of letters--of poets especially. We know the poets
only in their books; their wives know them out of them. Their wives see
the other side of the moon; and we have been made pretty well aware how
they have appreciated _that_.

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

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

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

It is clear that out of all this the reader gains; but I cannot help
thinking that for the writer it tends to destroy entire and simple
living--all hearty and final enjoyment in life. Joy and sorrow, death
and marriage, the comic circumstance and the tragic, what befalls him,
what he observes, what he is brought into contact with, do not affect him
as they affect other men; they are secrets to be rifled, stones to be
built with, clays to be moulded into artistic shape. In giving emotional
material artistic form, there is indisputably a certain noble pleasure;
but it is of a solitary and severe complexion, and takes a man out of the
circle and sympathies of his fellows. I do not say that this kind of
life makes a man selfish, but it often makes him _seem_ so; and the
results of this seeming, on friendship and the domestic relationships,
for instance, are as baleful as if selfishness really existed. The
peculiar temptation which besets men of letters, the curious playing with
thought and emotion, the tendency to analyse and take everything to
pieces, has two results, and neither aids his happiness nor even his
literary success. On the one hand, and in relation to the social
relations, it gives him somewhat of an icy aspect, and so breaks the
spring and eagerness of affectionate response. For the best affection is
shy, reticent, undemonstrative, and needs to be drawn out by its like.
If unrecognised, like an acquaintance on the street, it passes by, making
no sign, and is for the time being a stranger. On the other hand, the
desire to say a fine thing about a phenomenon, whether natural or moral,
prevents a man from reaching the inmost core of the phenomenon. Entrance
into these matters will never be obtained by the most sedulous seeking.
The man who has found an entrance cannot tell how he came there, and he
will never find his way back again by the same road. From this law
arises all the dreary conceits and artifices of the poets; it is through
the operation of the same law that many of our simple songs and ballads
are inexpressibly affecting, because in them there is no consciousness of
authorship; emotion and utterance are twin born, consentaneous--like
sorrow and tears, a blow and its pain, a kiss and its thrill. When a man
is happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness. I
am not happy at all unless I am happier than I know. When the tide is
full there is silence in channel and creek. The silence of the lover
when he clasps the maid is better than the passionate murmur of the song
which celebrates her charms. If to be near the rose makes the
nightingale tipsy with delight, what must it be to be the rose herself?
One feeling of the "wild joys of living--the leaping from rock to rock,"
is better than the "muscular-Christianity" literature which our time has
produced. I am afraid that the profession of letters interferes with the
elemental feelings of life; and I am afraid, too, that in the majority of
cases this interference is not justified by its results. The entireness
and simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitive
element, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which was
much worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies of love, faith,
imagination; and happily it is not given to every one to _live_, in the
pecuniary sense, by the artistic utilisation and sale of these. You
cannot make ideas; they must come unsought if they come at all.

"From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine"

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




ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF

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

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