FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXXIII.
I find some of my readers are more interested in the last two numbers of Fors than I want them to be.
“Give up your Fors altogether, and let us have a life of Scott,” they say.
They must please to remember that I am only examining the conditions of the life of this wise man, that they may learn how to rule their own lives, or their children’s, or their servants’; and, for the present, with this particular object, that they may be able to determine, for themselves, whether ancient sentiment, or modern common sense, is to be the rule of life, and of service.
I beg them, therefore, to refer constantly to that summary of modern common sense given by Mr. Applegarth, and quoted with due commendation by the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ (above, XXVIII., 22):—
“One piece of vigorous good sense enlivened the discussion. It was uttered by Mr. Applegarth, who observed that ‘no sentiment ought to be brought into the subject.’ ”
No sentiment, you observe, is to be brought into your doing, or your whistling, according to Mr. Applegarth.
And the main purpose of Fors is to show you that there is, sometimes, in weak natural whistling quite as much virtue as in vigorous steam whistling. But it cannot show you this without explaining what your darg, or ‘doing,’ is; which cannot be shown merely by writing pleasant biographies. You are always willing enough to read lives, but never willing to lead them. For instance, those few sentences, almost casually given in last Fors, about the Scottish rivers, have been copied, I see, into various journals, as if they, at any rate, were worth extract from the much useless matter of my books. Scotchmen like to hear their rivers talked about, it appears! But when last I was up Huntly Burn way, there was no burn there. It had all been drawn off to somebody’s ‘works;’ and it is painful for me, as an author, to reflect that, “of all polluting liquids belonging to this category (liquid refuse from manufactories), the discharges from paper works are the most difficult to deal with.”[1]