He depicts the good and the bad, the great and the small, with complete detachment. Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfect representation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate the idea of “preaching.” “To go preach to the first passer by,” wrote Montaigne, “to become tutor to the ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor.” He may have abhorred the idea, but through his essays he made himself tutor to innocence and the model of subjective moralizing.
However widely we roam the Republic of Letters, we meet no citizen without a badge of consecrated service. Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers of the titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise. These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerson, the naturalism of Zola, the cynicism of La Rochefoucauld are all convergent streams in the torrent of reforming words which make the soul fertile.
No; the tame and vapid acquiescents are not to be found in literature. Sometimes
they furnish material for literature. Their principal use in life is to kindle the souls of reformers with the resentment of which great deeds are born.
NATIONALITY
I can remember no time in my life when I was not addicted to the study of humanity. The marvels of faces, types, and characteristics were, I feel sure, with me in my cradle. At the age of ten I had evolved a kind of astrological chart of my own, according to which all human beings, including uncles and aunts, grandmothers and children, could be placed in twelve categories. There were the long-nosed, thin-lipped, sandy-haired, over-principled people, who always knew right from wrong and who grudged me an extra chocolate because it was not the hour to have one. There were the snub-nosed, full-lipped, dark-eyed people, whose manners were jolly and who positively encouraged illicit consumption of fruit in the thin-lipped aunt's garden. There were the shortsighted, solemn people with bulging foreheads and studious habits who saw print and nothing else. They bored me and belonged to my eleventh category. As far as I can see now, my categories were a
florid elaboration of the four temperaments of Hippocrates, though I have no idea of the cause of my childish absorption in the subject. It was certainly altogether spontaneous and not encouraged, for I have a vivid recollection of how an eager and eloquent description of my categories (profusely illustrated by mimicry) brought me a sharp reprimand and a very nasty tonic. The tonic was taken under compulsion, but the cure is still unaccomplished.
And now for many years I have sat at my chalet window and seen the world go by. The path from the village below to the peaks and pastures above runs past my nest. On it, in the summer months, there was a straggling procession of tourists and climbers, peasants and townsfolk. They were of all nationalities, and their loud voices proclaimed the immutability of the curse of Babel. I used to be annoyed at the close proximity of the path, until, one day, I discovered its marvellous opportunities for anthropological research. Then I settled down, content to limit my wooing of the solitude to the early morning and the late evening, or the time when the wild autumnal gales brush the mountains clear of trippers and paint the surrounding foliage
in glorious tints of red and gold. For I assure you the proper study of man is man, and the proper study of woman is both man and woman.