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.