Chapter VIII: Part II: opened with a suite in F Major for orchestra (op. 39) by (2)

I said promptly: “Certainly; _Erewhon_ is quite as good a book as _Hudibras_.”

This was coming it too strong for him, so he thought I had not heard and repeated his question. I said again as before, and he shut up. I sent him a copy of _Erewhon_ immediately after we had completed. It was rather tall talk on my part, I admit, but he should not have challenged me unprovoked.

Life and Habit and Myself

At the Century Club I was talking with a man who asked me why I did not publish the substance of what I had been saying. I believed he knew me and said:

“Well, you know, there’s _Life and Habit_.”

He did not seem to rise at all, so I asked him if he had seen the book.

“Seen it?” he answered. “Why, I should think every one has seen _Life and Habit_: but what’s that got to do with it?”

I said it had taken me so much time lately that I had had none to spare for anything else. Again he did not seem to see the force of the remark and a friend, who was close by, said:

“You know, Butler wrote _Life and Habit_.”

He would not believe it, and it was only after repeated assurance that he accepted it. It was plain he thought a great deal of _Life and Habit_ and had idealised its author, whom he was disappointed to find so very commonplace a person. Exactly the same thing happened to me with _Erewhon_. I was glad to find that _Life and Habit_ had made so deep an impression at any rate upon one person.

A Disappointing Person

I suspect I am rather a disappointing person, for every now and then there is a fuss and I am to meet some one who would very much like to make my acquaintance, or some one writes me a letter and says he has long admired my books, and may he, etc.? Of course I say “Yes,” but experience has taught me that it always ends in turning some one who was more or less inclined to run me into one who considers he has a grievance against me for not being a very different kind of person from what I am. These people however (and this happens on an average once or twice a year) do not come solely to see me, they generally tell me all about themselves and the impression is left upon me that they have really come in order to be praised. I am as civil to them as I know how to be but enthusiastic I never am, for they have never any of them been nice people, and it is my want of enthusiasm for themselves as much as anything else which disappoints them. They seldom come again. Mr. Alfred Tylor was the only acquaintance I have ever made through being sent for to be looked at, or letting some one come to look at me, who turned out a valuable ally; but then he sent for me through mutual friends in the usual way.

Entertaining Angels

I doubt whether any angel would find me very entertaining. As for myself, if ever I do entertain one it will have to be unawares. When people entertain others without an introduction they generally turn out more like devils than angels.

Myself and My Books

The balance against them is now over £350. How completely they must have been squashed unless I had had a little money of my own. Is it not likely that many a better writer than I am is squashed through want of money? Whatever I do I must not die poor; these examples of ill-requited labour are immoral, they discourage the effort of those who could and would do good things if they did not know that it would ruin themselves and their families; moreover, they set people on to pamper a dozen fools for each neglected man of merit, out of compunction. Genius, they say, always wears an invisible cloak; these men wear invisible cloaks—therefore they are geniuses; and it flatters them to think that they can see more than their neighbours. The neglect of one such man as the author of _Hudibras_ is compensated for by the petting of a dozen others who would be the first to jump upon the author of _Hudibras_ if he were to come back to life.

Heaven forbid that I should compare myself to the author of _Hudibras_, but still, if my books succeed after my death—which they may or may not, I know nothing about it—any way, if they do succeed, let it be understood that they failed during my life for a few very obvious reasons of which I was quite aware, for the effect of which I was prepared before I wrote my books, and which on consideration I found insufficient to deter me. I attacked people who were at once unscrupulous and powerful, and I made no alliances. I did this because I did not want to be bored and have my time wasted and my pleasures curtailed. I had money enough to live on, and preferred addressing myself to posterity rather than to any except a very few of my own contemporaries. Those few I have always kept well in mind. I think of them continually when in doubt about any passage, but beyond those few I will not go. Posterity will give a man a fair hearing; his own times will not do so if he is attacking vested interests, and I have attacked two powerful sets of vested interests at once. [The Church and Science.] What is the good of addressing people who will not listen? I have addressed the next generation and have therefore said many things which want time before they become palatable. Any man who wishes his work to stand will sacrifice a good deal of his immediate audience for the sake of being attractive to a much larger number of people later on. He cannot gain this later audience unless he has been fearless and thorough-going, and if he is this he is sure to have to tread on the corns of a great many of those who live at the same time with him, however little he may wish to do so. He must not expect these people to help him on, nor wonder if, for a time, they succeed in snuffing him out. It is part of the swim that it should be so. Only, as one who believes himself to have practised what he preaches, let me assure any one who has money of his own that to write fearlessly for posterity and not get paid for it is much better fun than I can imagine its being to write like, we will say, George Eliot and make a lot of money by it. [1883.]

Dragons

People say that there are neither dragons to be killed nor distressed maidens to be rescued nowadays. I do not know, but I think I have dropped across one or two, nor do I feel sure whether the most mortal wounds have been inflicted by the dragons or by myself.

Trying to Know

There are some things which it is madness not to try to know but which it is almost as much madness to try to know. Sometimes publishers, hoping to buy the Holy Ghost with a price, fee a man to read for them and advise them. This is but as the vain tossing of insomnia. God will not have any human being know what will sell, nor when any one is going to die, nor anything about the ultimate, or even the deeper, springs of growth and action, nor yet such a little thing as whether it is going to rain to-morrow. I do not say that the impossibility of being certain about these and similar matters was designed, but it is as complete as though it had been not only designed but designed exceedingly well.

Squaring Accounts

We owe past generations not only for the master discoveries of music, science, literature and art—few of which brought profit to those to whom they were revealed—but also for our organism itself which is an inheritance gathered and garnered by those who have gone before us. What money have we paid not for Handel and Shakespeare only but for our eyes and ears?

And so with regard to our contemporaries. A man is sometimes tempted to exclaim that he does not fare well at the hands of his own generation; that, although he may play pretty assiduously, he is received with more hisses than applause; that the public is hard to please, slow to praise, and bent on driving as hard a bargain as it can. This, however, is only what he should expect. No sensible man will suppose himself to be of so much importance that his contemporaries should be at much pains to get at the truth concerning him. As for my own position, if I say the things I want to say without troubling myself about the public, why should I grumble at the public for not troubling about me? Besides, not being paid myself, I can in better conscience use the works of others, as I daily do, without paying for them and without being at the trouble of praising or thanking them more than I have a mind to. And, after all, how can I say I am not paid? In addition to all that I inherit from past generations I receive from my own everything that makes life worth living—London, with its infinite sources of pleasure and amusement, good theatres, concerts, picture galleries, the British Museum Reading-Room, newspapers, a comfortable dwelling, railways and, above all, the society of the friends I value.

Charles Darwin on what Sells a Book

I remember when I was at Down we were talking of what it is that sells a book. Mr. Darwin said he did not believe it was reviews or advertisements, but simply “being talked about” that sold a book.

I believe he is quite right here, but surely a good flaming review helps to get a book talked about. I have often inquired at my publishers’ after a review and I never found one that made any perceptible increase or decrease of sale, and the same with advertisements. I think, however, that the review of _Erewhon_ in the _Spectator_ did sell a few copies of _Erewhon_, but then it was such a very strong one and the anonymousness of the book stimulated curiosity. A perception of the value of a review, whether friendly or hostile, is as old as St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. {162}

Hoodwinking the Public

Sincerity or honesty is a low and very rudimentary form of virtue that is only to be found to any considerable extent among the protozoa. Compare, for example, the integrity, sincerity and absolute refusal either to deceive or be deceived that exists in the germ-cells of any individual, with the instinctive aptitude for lying that is to be observed in the full-grown man. The full-grown man is compacted of lies and shams which are to him as the breath of his nostrils. Whereas the germ-cells will not be humbugged; they will tell the truth as near as they can. They know their ancestors meant well and will tend to become even more sincere themselves.

Thus, if a painter has not tried hard to paint well and has tried hard to hoodwink the public, his offspring is not likely to show hereditary aptitude for painting, but is likely to have an improved power of hoodwinking the public. So it is with music, literature, science or anything else. The only thing the public can do against this is to try hard to develop a hereditary power of not being hoodwinked. From the small success it has met with hitherto we may think that the effort on its part can have been neither severe nor long sustained. Indeed, all ages seem to have held that “the pleasure is as great of being cheated as to cheat.”

The Public Ear

Those who have squatted upon it may be trusted to keep off other squatters if they can. The public ear is like the land which looks infinite but is all parcelled out into fields and private ownerships—barring, of course, highways and commons. So the universe, which looks so big, may be supposed as really all parcelled out among the stars that stud it.

Or the public ear is like a common; there is not much to be got off it, but that little is for the most part grazed down by geese and donkeys.

Those who wish to gain the public ear should bear in mind that people do not generally want to be made less foolish or less wicked. What they want is to be told that they are not foolish and not wicked. Now it is only a fool or a liar or both who can tell them this; the masses therefore cannot be expected to like any but fools or liars or both. So when a lady gets photographed, what she wants is not to be made beautiful but to be told that she is beautiful.

Secular Thinking

The ages do their thinking much as the individual does. When considering a difficult question, we think alternately for several seconds together of details, even the minutest seeming important, and then of broad general principles, whereupon even large details become unimportant; again we have bouts during which rules, logic and technicalities engross us, followed by others in which the unwritten and unwritable common sense of grace defies and over-rides the law. That is to say, we have our inductive fits and our deductive fits, our arrangements according to the letter and according to the spirit, our conclusions drawn from logic _secundum artem_ and from absurdity and the character of the arguer. This heterogeneous mass of considerations forms the mental pabulum with which we feed our minds. How that pabulum becomes amalgamated, reduced to uniformity and turned into the growth of complete opinion we can no more tell than we can say when, how and where food becomes flesh and blood. All we can say is that the miracle, stupendous as it is and involving the stultification of every intelligible principle on which thought and action are based, is nevertheless worked a thousand times an hour by every one of us.

The formation of public opinion is as mysterious as that of individual, but, so far as we can form any opinion about that which forms our opinions in such large measure, the processes appear to resemble one another much as rain drops resemble one another. There is essential agreement in spite of essential difference. So that here, as everywhere else, we no sooner scratch the soil than we come upon the granite of contradiction in terms and can scratch no further.

As for ourselves, we are passing through an inductive, technical, speculative period and have gone such lengths in this direction that a reaction, during which we shall pass to the other extreme, may be confidently predicted.

The Art of Propagating Opinion

He who would propagate an opinion must begin by making sure of his ground and holding it firmly. There is as little use in trying to breed from weak opinion as from other weak stock, animal or vegetable.

The more securely a man holds an opinion, the more temperate he can afford to be, and the more temperate he is, the more weight he will carry with those who are in the long run weightiest. Ideas and opinions, like living organisms, have a normal rate of growth which cannot be either checked or forced beyond a certain point. They can be held in check more safely than they can be hurried. They can also be killed; and one of the surest ways to kill them is to try to hurry them.

The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary is it that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally, and that, if possible, he should get the reputation of being well-to-do in the world.

Arguments are not so good as assertion. Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him. Indirect assertion, leaving the hearer to point the inference, is, as a rule, to be preferred. The one great argument with most people is that another should think this or that. The reasons of the belief are details and, in nine cases out of ten, best omitted as confusing and weakening the general impression.

Many, if not most, good ideas die young—mainly from neglect on the part of the parents, but sometimes from over-fondness. Once well started, an opinion had better be left to shift for itself.

Insist as far as possible on the insignificance of the points of difference as compared with the resemblances to opinions generally accepted.

Gladstone as a Financier

I said to my tobacconist that Gladstone was not a financier because he bought a lot of china at high prices and it fetched very little when it was sold at Christie’s.

“Did he give high prices?” said the tobacconist.

“Enormous prices,” said I emphatically.

Now, to tell the truth, I did not know whether Mr. Gladstone had ever bought the china at all, much less what he gave for it, if he did; he may have had it all left him for aught I knew. But I was going to appeal to my tobacconist by arguments that he could understand, and I could see he was much impressed.

Argument

Argument is generally waste of time and trouble. It is better to present one’s opinion and leave it to stick or no as it may happen. If sound, it will probably in the end stick, and the sticking is the main thing.

Humour

What a frightful thing it would be if true humour were more common or, rather, more easy to see, for it is more common than those are who can see it. It would block the way of everything. Perhaps this is what people rather feel. It would be like Music in the _Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day_, it would “untune the sky.”

I do not know quite what is meant by untuning the sky and, if I did, I cannot think that there is anything to be particularly gained by having the sky untuned; still, if it has got to be untuned at all, I am sure music is the only thing that can untune it. Rapson, however, whom I used to see in the coin room at the British Museum, told me it should be “entune the sky” and it sounds as though he were right.

Myself and “Unconscious Humour”

The phrase “unconscious humour” is the one contribution I have made to the current literature of the day. I am continually seeing unconscious humour (without quotation marks) alluded to in _Times_ articles and other like places, but I never remember to have come across it as a synonym for dullness till I wrote _Life and Habit_.

My Humour

The thing to say about me just now is that my humour is forced. This began to reach me in connection with my article “Quis Desiderio . . .?” [_Universal Review_, 1888] and is now, [1889] I understand, pretty generally perceived even by those who had not found it out for themselves.

I am not aware of forcing myself to say anything which has not amused me, which is not apposite and which I do not believe will amuse a neutral reader, but I may very well do so without knowing it. As for my humour, I am like my father and grandfather, both of whom liked a good thing heartily enough if it was told them, but I do not often say a good thing myself. Very likely my humour, what little there is of it, is forced enough. I do not care so long as it amuses me and, such as it is, I shall vent it in my own way and at my own time.

Myself and My Publishers

I see my publishers are bringing out a new magazine with all the usual contributors. Of course they don’t ask me to write and this shows that they do not think my name would help their magazine. This, I imagine, means that Andrew Lang has told them that my humour is forced. I should not myself say that Andrew Lang’s humour would lose by a little forcing.

I have seen enough of my publishers to know that they have no ideas of their own about literature save what they can clutch at as believing it to be a straight tip from a business point of view. Heaven forbid that I should blame them for doing exactly what I should do myself in their place, but, things being as they are, they are no use to me. They have no confidence in me and they must have this or they will do nothing for me beyond keeping my books on their shelves.

Perhaps it is better that I should not have a chance of becoming a hack-writer, for I should grasp it at once if it were offered me.

XI Cash and Credit

The Unseen World

I BELIEVE there is an unseen world about which we know nothing as firmly as any one can believe it. I see things coming up from it into the visible world and going down again from the seen world to the unseen. But my unseen world is to be bona fide unseen and, in so far as I say I know anything about it, I stultify myself. It should no more be described than God should be represented in painting or sculpture. It is as the other side of the moon; we know it must be there but we know also that, in the nature of things, we can never see it. Sometimes, some trifle of it may sway into sight and out again, but it is so little that it is not worth counting as having been seen.

The Kingdom of Heaven

The world admits that there is another world, that there is a kingdom, veritable and worth having, which, nevertheless, is invisible and has nothing to do with any kingdom such as we now see. It agrees that the wisdom of this other kingdom is foolishness here on earth, while the wisdom of the world is foolishness in the Kingdom of Heaven. In our hearts we know that the Kingdom of Heaven is the higher of the two and the better worth living and dying for, and that, if it is to be won, it must be sought steadfastly and in singleness of heart by those who put all else on one side and, shrinking from no sacrifice, are ready to face shame, poverty and torture here rather than abandon the hope of the prize of their high calling. Nobody who doubts any of this is worth talking with.

The question is, where is this Heavenly Kingdom, and what way are we to take to find it? Happily the answer is easy, for we are not likely to go wrong if in all simplicity, humility and good faith we heartily desire to find it and follow the dictates of ordinary common-sense.

The Philosopher

He should have made many mistakes and been saved often by the skin of his teeth, for the skin of one’s teeth is the most teaching thing about one. He should have been, or at any rate believed himself, a great fool and a great criminal. He should have cut himself adrift from society, and yet not be without society. He should have given up all, even Christ himself, for Christ’s sake. He should be above fear or love or hate, and yet know them extremely well. He should have lost all save a small competence and know what a vantage ground it is to be an outcast. Destruction and Death say they have heard the fame of Wisdom with their ears, and the philosopher must have been close up to these if he too would hear it.

The Artist and the Shopkeeper

Most artists, whether in religion, music, literature, painting, or what not, are shopkeepers in disguise. They hide their shop as much as they can, and keep pretending that it does not exist, but they are essentially shopkeepers and nothing else. Why do I try to sell my books and feel regret at never seeing them pay their expenses if I am not a shopkeeper? Of course I am, only I keep a bad shop—a shop that does not pay.

In like manner, the professed shopkeeper has generally a taint of the artist somewhere about him which he tries to conceal as much as the professed artist tries to conceal his shopkeeping.

The business man and the artist are like matter and mind. We can never get either pure and without some alloy of the other.

Art and Trade

People confound literature and article-dealing because the plant in both cases is similar, but no two things can be more distinct. Neither the question of money nor that of friend or foe can enter into literature proper. Here, right feeling—or good taste, if this expression be preferred—is alone considered. If a bona fide writer thinks a thing wants saying, he will say it as tersely, clearly and elegantly as he can. The question whether it will do him personally good or harm, or how it will affect this or that friend, never enters his head, or, if it does, it is instantly ordered out again. The only personal gratifications allowed him (apart, of course, from such as are conceded to every one, writer or no) are those of keeping his good name spotless among those whose opinion is alone worth having and of maintaining the highest traditions of a noble calling. If a man lives in fear and trembling lest he should fail in these respects, if he finds these considerations alone weigh with him, if he never writes without thinking how he shall best serve good causes and damage bad ones, then he is a genuine man of letters. If in addition to this he succeeds in making his manner attractive, he will become a classic. He knows this. He knows, although the Greeks in their mythology forgot to say so, that Conceit was saved to mankind as well as Hope when Pandora clapped the lid on to her box.

With the article-dealer, on the other hand, money is, and ought to be, the first consideration. Literature is an art; article-writing, when a man is paid for it, is a trade and none the worse for that; but pot-boilers are one thing and genuine pictures are another. People have indeed been paid for some of the most genuine pictures ever painted, and so with music, and so with literature itself—hard-and-fast lines ever cut the fingers of those who draw them—but, as a general rule, most lasting art has been poorly paid, so far as money goes, till the artist was near the end of his time, and, whether money passed or no, we may be sure that it was not thought of. Such work is done as a bird sings—for the love of the thing; it is persevered in as long as body and soul can be kept together, whether there be pay or no, and perhaps better if there be no pay.

Nevertheless, though art disregards money and trade disregards art, the artist may stand not a little trade-alloy and be even toughened by it, and the tradesmen may be more than half an artist. Art is in the world but not of it; it lives in a kingdom of its own, governed by laws that none but artists can understand. This, at least, is the ideal towards which an artist tends, though we all very well know we none of us reach it. With the trade it is exactly the reverse; this world is, and ought to be, everything, and the invisible world is as little to the trade as this visible world is to the artist.

When I say the artist tends towards such a world, I mean not that he tends consciously and reasoningly but that his instinct to take this direction will be too strong to let him take any other. He is incapable of reasoning on the subject; if he could reason he would be lost _qua_ artist; for, by every test that reason can apply, those who sell themselves for a price are in the right. The artist is guided by a faith that for him transcends all reason. Granted that this faith has been in great measure founded on reason, that it has grown up along with reason, that if it lose touch with reason it is no longer faith but madness; granted, again, that reason is in great measure founded on faith, that it has grown up along with faith, that if it lose touch with faith it is no longer reason but mechanism; granted, therefore, that faith grows with reason as will with power, as demand with supply, as mind with body, each stimulating and augmenting the other until an invisible, minute nucleus attains colossal growth—nevertheless the difference between the man of the world and the man who lives by faith is that the first is drawn towards the one and the second towards the other of two principles which, so far as we can see, are co-extensive and co-equal in importance.

Money

It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, _exceptis excipiendis_, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view to money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work. If a man has money at his back, he may touch these things and do something which will live a long while, and he may be very happy in doing it; if he has no money, he may do good work, but the chances are he will be killed in doing it and for having done it; or he may make himself happy by doing bad work and getting money out of it, and there is no great harm in this, provided he knows his work is done in this spirit and rates it for its commercial value only. Still, as a rule, a man should not touch any of the arts as a creator unless be has a _discreta posizionina_ behind him.

Modern Simony

It is not the dealing in livings but the thinking they can buy the Holy Ghost for money which vulgar rich people indulge in when they dabble in literature, music and painting.

Nevertheless, on reflection it must be admitted that the Holy Ghost is very hard to come by without money. For the Holy Ghost is only another term for the Fear of the Lord, which is Wisdom. And though Wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can it be gotten without it. Gold, or the value that is equivalent to gold, lies at the root of Wisdom, and enters so largely into the very essence of the Holy Ghost that “No gold, no Holy Ghost” may pass as an axiom. This is perhaps why it is not easy to buy Wisdom by whatever name it be called—I mean, because it is almost impossible to sell it. It is a very unmarketable commodity, as those who have received it truly know to their own great bane and boon.

My Grandfather and Myself

My grandfather worked very hard all his life, and was making money all the time until he became a bishop. I have worked very hard all my life, but have never been able to earn money. As usefulness is generally counted, no one can be more useless. This I believe to be largely due to the public-school and university teaching through which my grandfather made his money. Yes, but then if he is largely responsible for that which has made me useless, has he not also left me the hardly-won money which makes my uselessness sufficiently agreeable to myself? And would not the poor old gentleman gladly change lots with me, if he could?

I do not know; but I should be sorry to change lots with him or with any one else, so I need not grumble. I said in _Luck or Cunning_? that the only way (at least I think I said so) in which a teacher can thoroughly imbue an unwilling learner with his own opinions is for the teacher to eat the pupil up and thus assimilate him—if he can, for it is possible that the pupil may continue to disagree with the teacher. And as a matter of fact, school-masters do live upon their pupils, and I, as my grandfather’s grandson, continue to batten upon old pupil.

Art and Usefulness

Tedder, the Librarian of the Athenæum, said to me when I told him (I have only seen him twice) what poor success my books had met with:

“Yes, but you have made the great mistake of being useful.”

This, for the moment, displeased me, for I know that I have always tried to make my work useful and should not care about doing it at all unless I believed it to subserve use more or less directly. Yet when I look at those works which we all hold to be the crowning glories of the world as, for example, the _Iliad_, the _Odyssey_, _Hamlet_, the _Messiah_, Rembrandt’s portraits, or Holbein’s, or Giovanni Bellini’s, the connection between them and use is, to say the least of it, far from obvious. Music, indeed, can hardly be tortured into being useful at all, unless to drown the cries of the wounded in battle, or to enable people to talk more freely at evening parties. The uses, again, of painting in its highest forms are very doubtful—I mean in any material sense; in its lower forms, when it becomes more diagrammatic, it is materially useful. Literature may be useful from its lowest forms to nearly its highest, but the highest cannot be put in harness to any but spiritual uses; and the fact remains that the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the speech of Hamlet to the players, Bellini’s “Doge” have their only uses in a spiritual world whereto the word “uses” is as alien as bodily flesh is to a choir of angels. As it is fatal to the highest art that it should have been done for money, so it seems hardly less fatal that it should be done with a view to those uses that tend towards money.

And yet, was not the _Iliad_ written mainly with a view to money? Did not Shakespeare make money by his plays, Handel by his music, and the noblest painters by their art? True; but in all these cases, I take it, love of fame and that most potent and, at the same time, unpractical form of it, the lust after fame beyond the grave, was the mainspring of the action, the money being but a concomitant accident. Money is like the wind that bloweth whithersoever it listeth, sometimes it chooses to attach itself to high feats of literature and art and music, but more commonly it prefers lower company . . .

I can continue this note no further, for there is no end to it. Briefly, the world resolves itself into two great classes—those who hold that honour after death is better worth having than any honour a man can get and know anything about, and those who doubt this; to my mind, those who hold it, and hold it firmly, are the only people worth thinking about. They will also hold that, important as the physical world obviously is, the spiritual world, of which we know little beyond its bare existence, is more important still.

Genius

i

Genius is akin both to madness and inspiration and, as every one is both more or less inspired and more or less mad, every one has more or less genius. When, therefore, we speak of genius we do not mean an absolute thing which some men have and others have not, but a small scale-turning overweight of a something which we all have but which we cannot either define or apprehend—the quantum which we all have being allowed to go without saying.

This small excess weight has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble, but he who thus defined it can hardly claim genius in respect of his own definition—his capacity for taking trouble does not seem to have been abnormal. It might be more fitly described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains. People who are credited with genius have, indeed, been sometimes very painstaking, but they would often show more signs of genius if they had taken less. “You have taken too much trouble with your opera,” said Handel to Gluck. It is not likely that the “Hailstone Chorus” or Mrs. Quickly cost their creators much pains, indeed, we commonly feel the ease with which a difficult feat has been performed to be a more distinctive mark of genius than the fact that the performer took great pains before he could achieve it. Pains can serve genius, or even mar it, but they cannot make it.

We can rarely, however, say what pains have or have not been taken in any particular case, for, over and above the spent pains of a man’s early efforts, the force of which may carry him far beyond all trace of themselves, there are the still more remote and invisible ancestral pains, repeated we know not how often or in what fortunate correlation with pains taken in some other and unseen direction. This points to the conclusion that, though it is wrong to suppose the essence of genius to lie in a capacity for taking pains, it is right to hold that it must have been rooted in pains and that it cannot have grown up without them.

Genius, again, might, perhaps almost as well, be defined as a supreme capacity for saving other people from having to take pains, if the highest flights of genius did not seem to know nothing about pains one way or the other. What trouble can _Hamlet_ or the _Iliad_ save to any one? Genius can, and does, save it sometimes; the genius of Newton may have saved a good deal of trouble one way or another, but it has probably engendered as much new as it has saved old.

This, however, is all a matter of chance, for genius never seems to care whether it makes the burden or bears it. The only certain thing is that there will be a burden, for the Holy Ghost has ever tended towards a breach of the peace, and the New Jerusalem, when it comes, will probably be found so far to resemble the old as to stone its prophets freely. The world thy world is a jealous world, and thou shalt have none other worlds but it. Genius points to change, and change is a hankering after another world, so the old world suspects it. Genius disturbs order, it unsettles _mores_ and hence it is immoral. On a small scale it is intolerable, but genius will have no small scales; it is even more immoral for a man to be too far in front than to lag too far behind. The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation, but this is unpractical, so a peck of change is permitted to every one, but it must be a peck only, whereas genius would have ever so many sacks full. There is a myth among some Eastern nation that at the birth of Genius an unkind fairy marred all the good gifts of the other fairies by depriving it of the power of knowing where to stop.

Nor does genius care more about money than about trouble. It is no respecter of time, trouble, money or persons, the four things round which human affairs turn most persistently. It will not go a hair’s breadth from its way either to embrace fortune or to avoid her. It is, like Love, “too young to know the worth of gold.” {176} It knows, indeed, both love and hate, but not as we know them, for it will fly for help to its bitterest foe, or attack its dearest friend in the interests of the art it serves.

Yet this genius, which so despises the world, is the only thing of which the world is permanently enamoured, and the more it flouts the world, the more the world worships it, when it has once well killed it in the flesh. Who can understand this eternal crossing in love and contradiction in terms which warps the woof of actions and things from the atom to the universe? The more a man despises time, trouble, money, persons, place and everything on which the world insists as most essential to salvation, the more pious will this same world hold him to have been. What a fund of universal unconscious scepticism must underlie the world’s opinions! For we are all alike in our worship of genius that has passed through the fire. Nor can this universal instinctive consent be explained otherwise than as the welling up of a spring whose sources lie deep in the conviction that great as this world is, it masks a greater wherein its wisdom is folly and which we know as blind men know where the sun is shining, certainly, but not distinctly.

This should in itself be enough to prove that such a world exists, but there is still another proof in the fact that so many come among us showing instinctive and ineradicable familiarity with a state of things which has no counterpart here, and cannot, therefore, have been acquired here. From such a world we come, every one of us, but some seem to have a more living recollection of it than others. Perfect recollection of it no man can have, for to put on flesh is to have all one’s other memories jarred beyond power of conscious recognition. And genius must put on flesh, for it is only by the hook and crook of taint and flesh that tainted beings like ourselves can apprehend it, only in and through flesh can it be made manifest to us at all. The flesh and the shop will return no matter with how many pitchforks we expel them, for we cannot conceivably expel them thoroughly; therefore it is better not to be too hard upon them. And yet this same flesh cloaks genius at the very time that it reveals it. It seems as though the flesh must have been on and must have gone clean off before genius can be discerned, and also that we must stand a long way from it, for the world grows more and more myopic as it grows older. And this brings another trouble, for by the time the flesh has gone off it enough, and it is far enough away for us to see it without glasses, the chances are we shall have forgotten its very existence and lose the wish to see at the very moment of becoming able to do so. Hence there appears to be no remedy for the oft-repeated complaint that the world knows nothing of its greatest men. How can it be expected to do so? And how can its greatest men be expected to know more than a very little of the world? At any rate, they seldom do, and it is just because they cannot and do not that, if they ever happen to be found out at all, they are recognised as the greatest and the world weeps and wrings its hands that it cannot know more about them.

Lastly, if genius cannot be bought with money, still less can it sell what it produces. The only price that can be paid for genius is suffering, and this is the only wages it can receive. The only work that has any considerable permanence is written, more or less consciously, in the blood of the writer, or in that of his or her forefathers. Genius is like money, or, again, like crime, every one has a little, if it be only a half-penny, and he can beg or steal this much if he has not got it; but those who have little are rarely very fond of millionaires. People generally like and understand best those who are of much about the same social standing and money status as their own; and so it is for the most part as between those who have only the average amount of genius and the Homers, Shakespeares and Handels of the race.

And yet, so paradoxical is everything connected with genius, that it almost seems as though the nearer people stood to one another in respect either of money or genius, the more jealous they become of one another. I have read somewhere that Thackeray was one day flattening his nose against a grocer’s window and saw two bags of sugar, one marked tenpence halfpenny and the other elevenpence (for sugar has come down since Thackeray’s time). As he left the window he was heard to say, “How they must hate one another!” So it is in the animal and vegetable worlds. The war of extermination is generally fiercest between the most nearly allied species, for these stand most in one another’s light. So here again the same old paradox and contradiction in terms meets us, like a stone wall, in the fact that we love best those who are in the main like ourselves, but when they get too like, we hate them, and, at the same time, we hate most those who are unlike ourselves, but if they become unlike enough, we may often be very fond of them.

Genius must make those that have it think apart, and to think apart is to take one’s view of things instead of being, like Poins, a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks. A man who thinks for himself knows what others do not, but does not know what others know. Hence the _belli causa_, for he cannot serve two masters, the God of his own inward light and the Mammon of common sense, at one and the same time. How can a man think apart and not apart? But if he is a genius this is the riddle he must solve. The uncommon sense of genius and the common sense of the rest of the world are thus as husband and wife to one another; they are always quarrelling, and common sense, who must be taken to be the husband, always fancies himself the master—nevertheless genius is generally admitted to be the better half.

He who would know more of genius must turn to what he can find in the poets, or to whatever other sources he may discover, for I can help him no further.

ii

The destruction of great works of literature and art is as necessary for the continued development of either one or the other as death is for that of organic life. We fight against it as long as we can, and often stave it off successfully both for ourselves and others, but there is nothing so great—not Homer, Shakespeare, Handel, Rembrandt, Giovanni Bellini, De Hooghe, Velasquez and the goodly company of other great men for whose lives we would gladly give our own—but it has got to go sooner or later and leave no visible traces, though the invisible ones endure from everlasting to everlasting. It is idle to regret this for ourselves or others, our effort should tend towards enjoying and being enjoyed as highly and for as long time as we can, and then chancing the rest.

iii

Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape their own immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.

iv

Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of it, and it is better organised and more naturally cohesive _inter se_. So the arctic volcano can do no thing against arctic ice.

v

America will have her geniuses, as every other country has, in fact she has already had one in Walt Whitman, but I do not think America is a good place in which to be a genius. A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

Great Things

All men can do great things, if they know what great things are. So hard is this last that even where it exists the knowledge is as much unknown as known to them that have it and is more a leaning upon the Lord than a willing of one that willeth. And yet all the leaning on the Lord in Christendom fails if there be not a will of him that willeth to back it up. God and the man are powerless without one another.

Genius and Providence

Among all the evidences for the existence of an overruling Providence that I can discover, I see none more convincing than the elaborate and for the most part effectual provision that has been made for the suppression of genius. The more I see of the world, the more necessary I see it to be that by far the greater part of what is written or done should be of so fleeting a character as to take itself away quickly. That is the advantage in the fact that so much of our literature is journalism.

Schools and colleges are not intended to foster genius and to bring it out. Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way. They are as the artificial obstructions in a hurdle race—tests of skill and endurance, but in themselves useless. Still, so necessary is it that genius and originality should be abated that, did not academies exist, we should have had to invent them.

The Art of Covery

This is as important and interesting as Dis-covery. Surely the glory of finally getting rid of and burying a long and troublesome matter should be as great as that of making an important discovery. The trouble is that the coverer is like Samson who perished in the wreck of what he had destroyed; if he gets rid of a thing effectually he gets rid of himself too.

Wanted

We want a Society for the Suppression of Erudite Research and the Decent Burial of the Past. The ghosts of the dead past want quite as much laying as raising.

Ephemeral and Permanent Success

The supposition that the world is ever in league to put a man down is childish. Hardly less childish is it for an author to lay the blame on reviewers. A good sturdy author is a match for a hundred reviewers. He, I grant, knows nothing of either literature or science who does not know that a _mot d’ordre_ given by a few wire-pullers can, for a time, make or mar any man’s success. People neither know what it is they like nor do they want to find out, all they care about is the being supposed to derive their likings from the best West-end magazines, so they look to the shop with the largest plate-glass windows and take what the shop-man gives them. But no amount of plate-glass can carry off more than a certain amount of false pretences, and there is no _mot d’ordre_ that can keep a man permanently down if he is as intent on winning lasting good name as I have been. If I had played for immediate popularity I think I could have won it. Having played for lasting credit I doubt not that it will in the end be given me. A man should not be held to be ill-used for not getting what he has not played for. I am not saying that it is better or more honourable to play for lasting than for immediate success. I know which I myself find pleasanter, but that has nothing to do with it.