George Meredith

His union of imagination and wit, pathos, realism, and fancifulness gives his verse a remarkable individual quality, which is enhanced by the Doric delicacy of his style.

In order to find so picturesque and exquisite a painter of gardens, woods, and fields as Marvell, one might hesitate to turn to Chaucer, Wordsworth, or Tennyson, or to Mr. George Meredith at his best.

For in this one matter, at least, Marvell ranks only second to Shakespeare.

With his merry humor and joy in the beauty of the world, Marvell, on leaving London for Appleton House, was like a child out on a holiday.

So I only said that if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.

He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her, but did I think that if he made her a present, say the collected works of George Meredith, it would meet the case? I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would spoil its prettiness.

If Miss Thessager didn't want to be paid in one way, she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another.

Perhaps Miss Thessager liked being pretty.

The interest merited by the confirmation of our conception of speech blunders through the great poets justifies the citation of a third example which was reported by Dr. E. Jones.

Our great novelist, George Meredith, in his masterpiece, The Egoist, shows an even finer understanding of the mechanism.

The plot of the novel is shortly as follows.

Sir Willoughby Pattern, an aristocrat greatly admired by his circle, becomes engaged to Miss Constantia Durham.

I was not inordinately vain.

I knew I couldn't ever, with the best will in the world, write like Mr. George Meredith.

Those wondrous works of his, seething with wit, with poetry and philosophy and whatnot, never had beguiled me with the sense that I might do something similar.

I had full consciousness of not being a philosopher, of not being a poet, and of not being a wit.

Thus began the queenship of the little English princess who heretofore had led a quiet, sheltered life in her island home and among the Scottish braes and moors, and in the tranquil atmosphere of the court of St. James.

Queen Victoria at this time may have recalled the lines of George Meredith.

We see in mould the rose unfold, the soul through blood and tears.

Verily the soul of Princess Ena was tempered by fire and brought to its fullness through blood and tears on the day when she became at once a wife and a queen.

Who comes from prayer a better man? His prayer is answered.

George Meredith.

We learned that prayer is only a wish away.

When we wish for recovery more than anything in the world, we found it.

So if you were aware of it, people did speak foreign languages and you can certainly trace a lot of kind of interest and excitement in individual novelists.

Meredith, for instance, George Meredith reviewed Madame Bovary in French when it came out.

He knew all about what the French novel was doing.

Later in the century, George Moore, great novelist, I think, lived in Paris for some decades, a great friend of Manet, knew all about what the French realists were doing.

Deedy and Ferguson, between them, after a patient struggle, had taught daylight poetry, so that in the end he might have been often seen sitting slack in the saddle and dropping down the mountain trails through the sun-flecked woods, chanting aloud Kipling's Tomlinson, or when sharpening his axe, singing into the whirling grindstone Henley's Song of the Sword.

not that he ever became consummately literary in the way his two teachers were beyond frau lippo lippi and caliban and set to bus he found nothing in browning while george meredith was ever his despair It was of his own initiative, however, that he invested in a violin, and practiced so assiduously that in time he and Deedee beguiled many a happy hour playing together after night had fallen.

so all went well with this well-mated pair time never dragged there were always new wonderful mornings and still cool twilights at the end of the day and ever a thousand interests claimed him and his interests were shared by her more thoroughly than he knew he had come to a comprehension of the relativity of things.

In this new game he played, he found in little things all the intensities of gratification and desire that had been found in the frenzied big things when he was a power and rocked half a continent with the fury of the blows he struck.

i cannot

bear to hear the unkind things which even the most tolerant of critics are wont to say about pope's iliad remembering as i do how many boys have received from its pages their first poetic stimulus their first awakening to noble things what a charming picture we have of coleridge a feeble petulant child tossing with fever on his little bed and of his brother francis stealing up in defiance of all orders to sit by his side and read him pope's translation of homer the bond that drew these boys together was forged in such breathless moments and in such mutual pleasures for francis the handsome spirited sailor lad who climbed trees and robbed orchards and led all dangerous sports had a little in common with his small silent precocious brother frank had a violent love of beating me muses coleridge in a tone of mild complaint and no wonder we think for a more beatable child than samuel taylor it would have been hard to find but whenever that was superseded by any humor or circumstance he was very fond of me and used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt more contempt than admiration probably yet was all resentment forgotten and all unkindness at an end while one boy read to the other the story of hector and patroclus and of great ajax with sorrow in his heart pacing round his dead comrade as a tawny lioness paces round her young when she sees the hunters coming through the woods as a companion picture to this we have little dante gabriel rossetti playing othello in the nursery and so carried away by the passionate impulse of these lines in aleppo once where a malignant and a turbaned turk beat a venetian and traduced the state i took by throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus that he struck himself fiercely on the breast with an iron chisel and fainted under the blow we can hardly believe that shakespeare is beyond the mental grasp of childhood when scott at seven crept out of bed on winter nights to read king henry the fourth and rossetti at nine was overwhelmed by the agony of othello's remorse on the other hand there are writers and very brilliant writers too whose early lives appear to have been undisturbed by such keenly imaginative pastimes and for whom there are no well-loved and familiar figures illumined forever in that bright clear undying light that borders the edge of the oblivion of infancy count tolstoi confesses himself to have been half hurt half puzzled by his fellow students at the university of moscow who seemed to him so coarse and inelegant and yet who had read and enjoyed so much pushkin and zukofsky were literature to them he says wistfully and not as to me little books in yellow bindings which i had studied as a child but how one wonders could pushkin have remained merely a little book in yellow binding to any boy who had had the happiness of studying him as a child pushkin is the russian byron and embodies in his poems the same spirit of restless discontent of dejected languor of passionate revolt not revolt against the czar which is a limited and individual judgment but revolt against the bitter penalties of life which is a sentiment common to the youth of all nations and of every age yet there are englishmen who have no word save that of scorn for byron and i feel uncertain whether such critics ever enjoyed the privilege of being boys at all if to george meredith's composed and complacent mind there strays any wanton recollection of young impetuous days how can he write with pen of gall these worse than churlish lines on manfred projected from the bilious child this clatter jaw his foot could set on alps without a breast beguiled to glow in shedding rascal sweat somewhere about his grinder teeth he mouthed of thoughts that grill'd beneath and summon'd nature to her feud with bile and buskin attitude there is more of this pretty poem but i have quoted as much as my own irascibility can bear i at least have been a child and have spent some of my childhood's happiest hours with manfred on the alps and have with him beheld the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs in dizziness of distance and have believed with all a child's sincerity in his remorseful gloom for i have ceased to justify my deeds unto myself the last infirmity of evil every line is inexpressibly dear to me now recalling as it does the time when i was in my father's house and my path ran down with butter and honey once more i see the big bare old-fashioned parlor to dust which was my daily task my mother having striven long and vainly to teach my idle little hands some useful housewifely accomplishment in one corner stood a console table with chilly perean ornaments on top and underneath a pile of heavy books wordsworth more the poems of francis sergeant osgood no lack of variety here the lady of the lake and byron in an embossed brown binding with closely printed double columns well calculated to dim the keenest sight in christendom not that mysterious and malignant mountain which rose frowning from the sea and drew all ships shattered to its feet was more irresistible in its attraction than this brown bulky byron i could not pass it by my dusty never got beyond the table where it lay but sitting crumpled on the floor with the enchanted volume on my lap i speedily forgot everything in the world save only the wandering child who nay in virtue's way did take delight or the corsair or mazeppa or manfred best loved of that dark group perhaps byron is not considered wholesome reading for little girls in these careful days when expurgated editions of the vicar of wakefield and paul in virginia find favor in our nurseries on this score i have no defense to offer and i am not proposing the poet as a safe text-book for early youth but having never been told that there was such a thing as forbidden fruit in literature i was spared at least that alert curiosity concerning it which is one of the most unpleasant results of our present guarded system moreover we have goethe's word for it that byron is not as immoral as the newspapers and certainly he is more agreeable reading i do sincerely believe that if part of his attraction for the young lies in what mr pater calls the grieved dejection the endless regret which to the undisciplined soul sounds like the true murmur of life a better part lies in his large grasp of nature not nature in her minute and lovely detail but in her vast outlines her salient features her solemn majesty and strength crags and misty mountain tops storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of the restless deep these are the aspects of nature that childhood prizes and loves to hear described in vigorous verse the pink-tipped daisy the yellow primrose and the freckled nest-eggs hatching in the hawthorn tree belong to a late state of development eugenie de guerin who recognized as clearly as sainte-beuve the fine penetration peculiar to children and who regarded them ever with half-wistful half-wondering delight has written some very charming suggestions about the kind of poetry pure fresh joyous and delicate which she considers proper food for these highly idealized little people angels upon earth the only discouraging part of her pretty pleading is her frank admission that in french literature at least there is no such poetry as she describes which shows how hard it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excellence she endeavored sincerely in her infantines to remedy this defect to speak to childhood in its own language and her verses on ju ju the angel of the playthings are quaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies no child is strongly moved or taught the enduring delight of song by such lines as these but most children will take a genuine pleasure in the baby angel who played with little abel under the myrtle trees who made the first doll and blew the first bubble and who finds a friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this big gray world strange to say he has his english counterpart in mr robert louis stevenson's unseen playmate that shadowy companion whose home is the cave dug by childish hands and who is ready to share all games in the most engaging spirit of accommodation tis he when you play with your soldiers of tin that sides with the frenchman and never can win a touch of combative veracity which brings us down at once from mademoiselle de gorine's fancy flights to the real playground where real children very faintly resembling angels upon earth are busy with mimic warfare mr stevenson is one of the few poets whose verses written especially for the nursery have found their way straight into little hearts his charming style his quick keen sympathy and the ease with which he enters into that brilliant world of imagination wherein children habitually dwell make him their natural

friend and minstrel

if some of the rhymes in a child's garden of verses seem a trifle bald and babyish even these are guiltless of condescension while others like travel shadow march and the land of story-books are instinct with poetic life i can only regret that a picture so faultless in detail as shadow march where we see the crawling darkness peer through the window pane and hear the beating of the little boy's heart as he creeps fearfully up the stair should be marred at its close by a single line of false imagery all the wicked shadows coming tramp tramp tramp with the black night overhead so fine an artist as mr stevenson must know that shadows do not tramp and that the recurrence of a short vigorous word which tells so admirably in scott's william and helen and wherever the effect of sound combined with motion is to be conveyed is sadly out of place in describing the ghostly things that glide with horrible noiselessness at the feet of the frightened lad children moreover are keenly alive to the value and the suggestiveness of terms a little eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance who was reciting lord ulland's daughter stopped short at these lines adown the glen rode armed men their trampling sounded nearer and called out excitedly don't you hear the horses she at least heard them as if with the swift apprehension of fear heard them loud above the sound of winds and waters and rendered her unconscious tribute of praise to the sympathetic selection of words there is as we know a great deal of poetry written every year for childish readers some of it makes its appearance in christmas books which are so beautifully bound and illustrated that the little foolish feeble verses are forgiven and in fact forgotten ignored altogether amid more important accessories better poems than these are published in children's periodicals where they form a notable feature and are i dare say read by the young people whose tastes are catered to in this fashion those of us who are familiar with these periodicals either weeklies or monthlies are well aware that the verses they offer may be easily divided into three classes first mere rhymes and jingles intended for very little readers and with which it would be simple churlishness to quarrel they do not aspire to be poetry they are sometimes very amusing and they have an easy swing that is pleasant alike to young ears and old it must be a hard heart that does not sympathize with the unlucky and ill-mated gnome who was full of fun and frolic but his wife was melancholic or with the small damsel in pigtail and pinafore who comforts herself at the piano with this engaging but dubious maxim practicing is good for a good little girl it makes her nose straight and it makes her hair curl the second kind of verse appears to be written solely for the sake of the accompanying illustration and is often the work of the illustrator who is more at home with his pencil than his pen occasionally it is comic occasionally sentimental or descriptive for the most part it is something in this style the elf and the bumblebee oh bumblebee bumblebee don't fly so near or you will tumble me over i fear oh funny elf funny elf don't be alarmed i am looking for honey elf you shan't be harmed then tarry oh tarry bee fill up your sack and carry oh carry me now what child will read more than once these empty little verses very prettily illustrated when it is in his power to turn back to other sprites that sing in different strains to the fairy who wanders over hill over dale through bush through brier seeking pearl ear-drops for the cowslip's ears or to that softer shape the music of whose song once heard haunts us for ever full fathom five thy father lies of his bones are coral made those are pearls that were his eyes nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange these are the sweet mysterious echoes of true fairyland where shakespeare and little children wander at their will poems of the third class are intended for growing girls and boys and aspire to be considered literature they are well written as a rule with a smooth fluency that seems to be the distinguishing gift of our minor verse makers who even when they have least to say say it with unbroken sweetness and grace this pretty easy insignificance is much better adapted to adult readers who demand little of poets beyond brevity than to children who love large issues real passions fine emotions and a heroic attitude in life pleasant thoughts couched in pleasant language trivial details and photographic bits of description make no lasting appeal to the expansive imagination of a child analysis is wasted upon him altogether because he sees things swiftly and sees them as a whole he may disregard fine shading and minute merits but there are no boundaries to his wandering vision small sciences are the labors of our manhood but the round universe is the placing of the boy painful lack of distinction in most of the poetry prepared especially for him chills his fine ardor and dulls his imagination subtle verses about moods and tempers calculated to make healthy little readers emulate miss martineau's peevish self-sympathy melancholy verses about young children who suffer poverty and disaster weird and unintelligible verses with all poe's indistinctness and none of his music commonplace verses about bootblacks and newsboys descriptive verses about snowstorms and april showers pious verses about infant prigs verses of every kind all on the same level of agreeable mediocrity and all warranted to be so harmless that a baby could hear them without blushing why the child who reads young lochinvar is richer in that one good and gallant poem than the child who has all these modern substitutes heaped yearly at his foolish feet for the question at issue is not what kind of poetry is wholesome for children but what kind of poetry do children love in nineteen cases out of twenty that which they love is good for them and they can guide themselves a great deal better than we can hope to guide them i once asked a friend who had spent many years in teaching little girls and boys whether her small pupils when left to their own discretion ever chose any of the pretty trivial verses out of new books and magazines for study and recitation she answered never they turned instinctively to the same old favorites she had been listening to so long to the same familiar poems that their fathers and mothers had probably studied and recited before them hohenlinden glenara lord ellen's daughter young lochinvar rosabelle to lucasta on going to the wars the lullaby from the princess lady clara verdiver annabel lee longfellow's translation of the castle by the sea and the skeleton in armor these are the themes of which children never weary these are the songs that are sung forever in their secret paradise of delights the little volumes containing such tried and proven friends grow shabby with much handling and i have seen them marked all over with mysterious crosses and dots and stars each of which denoted the exact degree of affection which the child bore to the poem thus honored and approved i can fancy mr lang's blue poetry book fairly covered with such badges of distinction for never before has any selection of poems appealed so clearly and insistently to childish tastes and hearts when i turn over its pages i feel as if the children of england must have brought their favorite songs to mr lang and prayed each one that his own darling might be admitted as if they must have forced his choice into their chosen channels its only rival in the field palgrave's children's treasury of english song is edited with such nice discrimination such critical reserve that it is well-nigh flawless a triumph of delicacy and good taste but much that childhood loves is necessarily excluded from a volume so small and so carefully considered the older poets it is true are generously treated herrick especially makes a braver show than he does in mr lang's collection and there are plenty of beautiful ballads some of which like the lass of lochroyan we miss sorely from the pages of the blue poetry book on the other hand where in mr palgrave's treasury are those lovely snatches of song familiar to our earliest years and which we welcome individually with a thrill of pleasure as mr lang shows them to us once more rose aylmer county guy proud maisie how sleep the brave nora's vow the delight of my own childhood the pathetic farewell it was afore our rifle king we left fair scotland's strand it was afore our rifle king we e'er saw irish land and hood's silvery little verses beginning a lake and a ferry-boat to sail in the midnight clear and merrily we would float from the dragons that watch us here all these and many more are gathered safely into this charming volume nothing we long to see appears to be left out except indeed waller's go lovely rose and herrick's night-piece both of them very serious omissions it seems strange to find seven of edgar poe's poems in a collection which excludes the night-piece so true a favorite with all girl children and a favorite that once rightfully established can never be thrust from our affections as for praed's red fisherman mr lang has somewhere recorded his liking for this somber tale which i think embodies everything that a child ought not to love it is the only poem in the book that i wish elsewhere but perhaps this is a perverse prejudice on my part there may be little readers to whom its savage cynicism and gloom carry a pleasing terror like that which oppressed my infant soul as i lingered with goodman brown in the awful witch-haunted forest where hawthorne has shown us the triumph of evil things it is his excursions into the unknown world which the child enjoys says mr lang and how shall we set a limit to his wanderings he journeys far with careless secure footsteps and for him the stars sing in their spheres and fairies dance in the moonlight and the hoarse clashing of arms rings bravely from hard-won fields and lovers fly together under the stormy skies he rides with lochinvar and sails with sir patrick spens into the northern seas and chases the red deer with allana dale and stands by marmion's side in the thick of the ghastly fray he has given his heart to helen of troy and to the maid of saragossa and to the pale child who met her death on the cruel gordon spears and to the lady with yellow hair who knelt moaning by bartram's his friends are bold robin hood and lancelot du lac and the white-plumed henry of navarre and the princely scapegrace who robbed the robbers to make laughter for a month and a good jest for ever a lordly company these and seldom to be found in the gray walks of middle age robin hood dwells not on the stock exchange and prince hal dare not show his laughing face before societies for leveling thrones and reorganizing the universe we adults pass our days alas in the town of stupidity aboard of bunyan's soul and our companions are mr worldly wiseman and mr despondency and mr wantwit still scrubbing his ethiopian and mr feeblemind and the deplorable young woman named dull but it is better to be young and to see the golden light of romance in the skies and to kiss the white feet of helen as she stands like a star on the battlements it is better to follow hector to the fight and guenevere to the sad cloisters of almsbury and the ancient mariner to that silent sea where the death-fires gleam by night even to us who have made these magic voyages in our childhood there comes straying at times a pale reflection of that early radiance a faint sweet echo of that early song then the streets of the town of stupidity grow soft to tread and falstaff's great laugh frightens mr despondency into a shadow Then Madeline smiles on us under the wintry moonlight, and Pofiro steals by with strange sweets heaped in baskets of wreathed silver.

it been more than a hundred years since this distinctly modern sentiment was uttered more than a hundred years since the spreading chestnut boughs bent kindly over the lean strenuous caustic disappointed man of genius who always had so much to do and who found in the doing of it a mingled bliss and bitterness that scorched him like fever pain how is it that while dr johnson's sledge-hammer repartees sound like the sonorous echoes of a past age voltaire's remarks always appear to have been spoken the day before yesterday they are the kind of witticisms which we do not say for ourselves simply because we are not witty but they illustrate with biting accuracy the spirit of restlessness of disquiet of intellectual vanity and keen contention which is the brand of our vehement and overzealous generation the gospel of work that is the phrase woven insistently into every homily every appeal made to the conscience or the intelligence of a people who are now straining their youthful energy to its utmost speed blessed be drudgery that is the text deliberately chosen for a discourse which has enjoyed such amazing popularity that sixty thousand printed copies have been found all inadequate to supply the ravenous demand readers of dickens if any one has the time to read dickens nowadays may remember miss monflather's inspired amendment of that familiar poem concerning the busy bee in work work work in work alway let my first years be past and when our first years are past the same programme is considered adequate and satisfactory to the end a whole lifetime of horrid industry to quote mr badgett's uninspired words this is the prize dangled alluringly before our tired eyes and if we are disposed to look askance upon the booty then vanity is suddenly pricked to give zest to faltering resolution our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not they would be laggards in the field if our faults did not sometimes spur them to action it is the paean of orators and from what is courteously called literature that keeps our courage screwed to the sticking place and veils the occasional bareness of the result with a charitable vesture of self-delusion work is good no one seriously doubts this truth adam may have doubted it when he first took spade in hand and eve when she scoured her first pots and kettles but in the course of a few thousand years we have learned to know and value this honest troublesome faithful and extremely exacting friend but work is not the only good thing in the world it is not a fetish to be adored neither is it to be judged like a sum in addition by its outward and immediate results the god of labor does not abide exclusively in the rolling mill the law courts or the cornfield he has a twin sister whose name is leisure and in her society he lingers now and then to the lasting gain of both sainte-beuve writing of mademoiselle de svign in her time says that we with our habits of positive occupation can scarcely form a just conception of that life of leisure and chit-chat conversations were infinite admits mademoiselle svign herself recalling the long summer afternoons when she and her guests walked in the charming woods of le rocher until the shadows of twilight fell the whole duty of life seemed to be concentrated in the pleasant task of entertaining your friends when they were with you or writing them admirable letters when they were absent occasionally there came even to this tranquil and finely poised french woman a haunting consciousness that there might be other and harder work for human hands to do nothing is accomplished day by day she writes doubtfully and life is made up of days and we grow old and die this troubled her a little when she was all the while doing work that was to last for generations work that was to give pleasure to men and women whose great-grandfathers were then unborn not that we have the time now to read mademoiselle de svign why there are big volumes of these delightful letters and who can afford to read big volumes of anything merely for the sake of the enjoyment to be extracted therefrom it was all very well for sainte-beuve to say lisons tout mademoiselle de svign when the question arose how should some long idle days in a country-house be profitably enjoyed it was all very well for sainte-beuve to plead with touching confidence in the intellectual pastimes of his contemporaries let us treat mademoiselle de svign as we treat clarissa harlowe when we have a fortnight of leisure and rainy weather in the country a fortnight of leisure and rainy weather in the country the words would be antiquated even for dr johnson rain may fall or rain may cease but leisure comes not so lightly to our calling nay sainte-beuve's wistful amazement at the polished and cultivated inactivity which alone could produce such a correspondence as mademoiselle de svign is not greater than our wistful amazement at the critic's conception of possible idleness in bad weather in one respect at least we follow his good counsel we do treat mademoiselle de svign precisely as we treat clarissa harlowe that is we leave them both severely alone as being utterly beyond the reach of what we are pleased to call our time and what of the leisure of montaigne who taking his life in his two hands disposed of it as he thought fit with no restless self-accusations on the score of indolence in the world and of the world yet always able to meet and greet the happy solitude of gascony toiling with no thought of toil but rather to entertain my spirit as it best pleased this man wrought out of time a coin which passes current over the reading world and what of horace who enjoyed an industrious idleness the bare description of which sets our hearts aching with desire the picture which horace draws of himself in his country home says an envious english critic affords us a delightful glimpse of such literary leisure as is only possible in the golden days of good haroun horace goes to bed and gets up when he likes there is no one to drag him down to the law courts the first thing in the morning to remind him of an important engagement with his brother scribes to solicit his interest with maecenas or to tease him about public affairs in the latest news from abroad he can bury himself in his greek authors or ramble through the woody glens which lie at the foot of mount ustica without a thought of business or a feeling that he ought to be otherwise engaged swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man counsels sir thomas brown and it may be this gentle current will bear us as bravely through life as if we buffeted our strength away in the restless ocean of endeavour leisure has a value of its own it is not a mere handmaid of labor it is something we should know how to cultivate to use and to enjoy it has a distinct and honorable place wherever nations are released from the pressure of their first rude needs their first homely toil and rise to happier levels of grace and intellectual repose civilization in its final outcome says the keen young author of the chevalier of pensieri vanni is heavily in the debt of leisure and the success of any society worth considering is to be estimated largely by the use to which its fortunati put their spare moments here is a sentiment so relentlessly true that nobody wants to believe it we prefer uttering agreeable platitudes concerning the blessedness of drudgery and the iniquity of eating bread earned by another's hands yet the creation of an artistic and intellectual atmosphere in which workers can work the expansion of a noble sympathy with all that is finest and most beautiful the jealous guardianship of whatever makes the glory and distinction of a nation this is achievement enough for the fortunati of any land and this is the debt they owe it can hardly be denied that the lack of scholarship of classical scholarship especially at our universities is due primarily to the labor worship which is the prevalent superstition of our day and which like all superstitions has gradually degraded its god into an idol and lost sight of the higher powers and attributes beyond the student who is pleased to think a knowledge of german more useful than a knowledge of greek the parent who deliberately declares that his boys have no time to waste over homer the man who closes the doors of his mind to everything that does not bear directly on mathematics or chemistry or engineering or whatever he calls work all these plead and excuse the exigencies of life the absolute and imperative necessity of labor 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 eugenie de guerin 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 oneself homer's nausicaa or one of those biblical princesses who washed their brother's tunics we have a basin at moulinas 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 garin confesses frankly the pleasure he takes in gathering fagots for the winter fire that little task of the wood-cutter which brings us close to nature and which was also a favorite occupation of madame de la 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 diggerine but idleness full of thought and alive to every impression eugenie's labours 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 fulfilment 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 lecala 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 into 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 the 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 gipsy without seeking to collect or to impart some statistical information on the subject a gentleman of this calibre his fellow-traveller 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 gentlewoman 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 shortreads 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 scrapegut 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 recognised keenly that his wasted school-hours entailed on him a lasting loss a loss he was determined his son 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 gaiety 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.

section v of essays in idleness by agnes replier words do you read the dictionary asked m theophile 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 is 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 dried and 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 favoured 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 for ever 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 mona 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 tyrene 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 told 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 naive 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 badgett 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