Prev
| Next
| Contents
CHAPTER II - THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS (11)
THE profession of letters has been lately debated in the
public prints; and it has been debated, to put the matter
mildly, from a point of view that was calculated to surprise
high-minded men, and bring a general contempt on books and
reading. Some time ago, in particular, a lively, pleasant,
popular writer (12) devoted an essay, lively and pleasant
like himself, to a very encouraging view of the profession.
We may be glad that his experience is so cheering, and we may
hope that all others, who deserve it, shall be as handsomely
rewarded; but I do not think we need be at all glad to have
this question, so important to the public and ourselves,
debated solely on the ground of money. The salary in any
business under heaven is not the only, nor indeed the first,
question. That you should continue to exist is a matter for
your own consideration; but that your business should be
first honest, and second useful, are points in which honour
and morality are concerned. If the writer to whom I refer
succeeds in persuading a number of young persons to adopt
this way of life with an eye set singly on the livelihood, we
must expect them in their works to follow profit only, and we
must expect in consequence, if he will pardon me the
epithets, a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty literature. Of
that writer himself I am not speaking: he is diligent,
clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of entertainment,
and he has achieved an amiable popularity which he has
adequately deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did
not when he first embraced it, regard his profession from
this purely mercenary side. He went into it, I shall venture
to say, if not with any noble design, at least in the ardour
of a first love; and he enjoyed its practice long before he
paused to calculate the wage. The other day an author was
complimented on a piece of work, good in itself and
exceptionally good for him, and replied, in terms unworthy of
a commercial traveller that as the book was not briskly
selling he did not give a copper farthing for its merit. It
must not be supposed that the person to whom this answer was
addressed received it as a profession of faith; he knew, on
the other hand, that it was only a whiff of irritation; just
as we know, when a respectable writer talks of literature as
a way of life, like shoemaking, but not so useful, that he is
only debating one aspect of a question, and is still clearly
conscious of a dozen others more important in themselves and
more central to the matter in hand. But while those who
treat literature in this penny-wise and virtue-foolish spirit
are themselves truly in possession of a better light, it does
not follow that the treatment is decent or improving, whether
for themselves or others. To treat all subjects in the
highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest spirit,
consistent with the fact, is the first duty of a writer. If
he be well paid, as I am glad to hear he is, this duty
becomes the more urgent, the neglect of it the more
disgraceful. And perhaps there is no subject on which a man
should speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it may be,
which is the occupation or delight of his life; which is his
tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy,
stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on
the shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subject alone
even to force the note might lean to virtue's side. It is to
be hoped that a numerous and enterprising generation of
writers will follow and surpass the present one; but it would
be better if the stream were stayed, and the roll of our old,
honest English books were closed, than that esurient book-
makers should continue and debase a brave tradition, and
lower, in their own eyes, a famous race. Better that our
serene temples were deserted than filled with trafficking and
juggling priests.
There are two just reasons for the choice of any way of life:
the first is inbred taste in the chooser; the second some
high utility in the industry selected. Literature, like any
other art, is singularly interesting to the artist; and, in a
degree peculiar to itself among the arts, it is useful to
mankind. These are the sufficient justifications for any
young man or woman who adopts it as the business of his life.
I shall not say much about the wages. A writer can live by
his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then
less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day
will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner
at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much it
brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more
by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much
concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations
should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the
business and justification of so great a portion of our
lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the
philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career
in which we can do the most and best for mankind. Now
Nature, faithfully followed, proves herself a careful mother.
A lad, for some liking to the jingle of words, betakes
himself to letters for his life; by-and-by, when he learns
more gravity, he finds that he has chosen better than he
knew; that if he earns little, he is earning it amply; that
if he receives a small wage, he is in a position to do
considerable services; that it is in his power, in some small
measure, to protect the oppressed and to defend the truth.
So kindly is the world arranged, such great profit may arise
from a small degree of human reliance on oneself, and such,
in particular, is the happy star of this trade of writing,
that it should combine pleasure and profit to both parties,
and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, and useful, like
good preaching.
This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the
four great elders who are still spared to our respect and
admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson
before us, it would be cowardly to consider it at first in
any lesser aspect. But while we cannot follow these
athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigorous,
very original, or very wise, I still contend that, in the
humblest sort of literary work, we have it in our power
either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to
please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify
the idle nine days' curiosity of our contemporaries; or we
may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we
shall have to deal with that remarkable art of words which,
because it is the dialect of life, comes home so easily and
powerfully to the minds of men; and since that is so, we
contribute, in each of these branches, to build up the sum of
sentiments and appreciations which goes by the name of Public
Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of a nation's reading,
in these days of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of
the nation's speech; and the speech and reading, taken
together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A
good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in
clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful
in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The
copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the
Parisian CHRONIQUEAR, both so lightly readable, must exercise
an incalculable influence for ill; they touch upon all
subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they
begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared
minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some
pungency for dull people to quote. The mere body of this
ugly matter overwhelms the rare utterances of good men; the
sneering, the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in
broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, in small
volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. I have spoken of the
American and the French, not because they are so much baser,
but so much more readable, than the English; their evil is
done more effectively, in America for the masses, in French
for the few that care to read; but with us as with them, the
duties of literature are daily neglected, truth daily
perverted and suppressed, and grave subjects daily degraded
in the treatment. The journalist is not reckoned an
important officer; yet judge of the good he might do, the
harm he does; judge of it by one instance only: that when we
find two journals on the reverse sides of politics each, on
the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for the
interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no
discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem.
Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the
things that we profess to teach our young is a respect for
truth; and I cannot think this piece of education will be
crowned with any great success, so long as some of us
practise and the rest openly approve of public falsehood.
There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the
business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in
the treatment. In every department of literature, though so
low as hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of
importance to the education and comfort of mankind, and so
hard to preserve, that the faithful trying to do so will lend
some dignity to the man who tries it. Our judgments are
based upon two things: first, upon the original preferences
of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of testimony to the
nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches us, in
divers manners, from without. For the most part these divers
manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past times
and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the
medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read
learning from the same source at second-hand and by the
report of him who can. Thus the sum of the contemporary
knowledge or ignorance of good and evil is, in large measure,
the handiwork of those who write. Those who write have to
see that each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make
it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall not
suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this world
for a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are
concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in
his own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is
within him, that he may strive to mend; he must be taught
what is without him, that he may be kind to others. It can
never be wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his disputable
state, weaving as he goes his theory of life, steering
himself, cheering or reproving others, all facts are of the
first importance to his conduct; and even if a fact shall
discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he should
know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a world
made easy by educational suppressions, that he must win his
way to shame or glory. In one word, it must always be foul
to tell what is false; and it can never be safe to suppress
what is true. The very fact that you omit may be the fact
which somebody was wanting, for one man's meat is another
man's poison, and I have known a person who was cheered by
the perusal of CANDIDE. Every fact is a part of that great
puzzle we must set together; and none that comes directly in
a writer's path but has some nice relations, unperceivable by
him, to the totality and bearing of the subject under hand.
Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more
necessary than others, and it is with these that literature
must first bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish,
nature once more easily leading us; for the necessary,
because the efficacious, facts are those which are most
interesting to the natural mind of man. Those which are
coloured, picturesque, human, and rooted in morality, and
those, on the other hand, which are clear, indisputable, and
a part of science, are alone vital in importance, seizing by
their interest, or useful to communicate. So far as the
writer merely narrates, he should principally tell of these.
He should tell of the kind and wholesome and beautiful
elements of our life; he should tell unsparingly of the evil
and sorrow of the present, to move us with instances: he
should tell of wise and good people in the past, to excite us
by example; and of these he should tell soberly and
truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may neither grow
discouraged with ourselves nor exacting to our neighbours.
So the body of contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble
in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs of thought
and kindness, and supports them (for those who will go at all
are easily supported) on their way to what is true and right.
And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much more might it
do so if the writers chose! There is not a life in all the
records of the past but, properly studied, might lend a hint
and a help to some contemporary. There is not a juncture in
to-day's affairs but some useful word may yet be said of it.
Even the reporter has an office, and, with clear eyes and
honest language, may unveil injustices and point the way to
progress. And for a last word: in all narration there is
only one way to be clever, and that is to be exact. To be
vivid is a secondary quality which must presuppose the first;
for vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to make
failure conspicuous.
But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it may be chronicled
with rage, tears, laughter, indifference, or admiration, and
by each of these the story will be transformed to something
else. The newspapers that told of the return of our
representatives from Berlin, even if they had not differed as
to the facts, would have sufficiently differed by their
spirits; so that the one description would have been a second
ovation, and the other a prolonged insult. The subject makes
but a trifling part of any piece of literature, and the view
of the writer is itself a fact more important because less
disputable than the others. Now this spirit in which a
subject is regarded, important in all kinds of literary work,
becomes all-important in works of fiction, meditation, or
rhapsody; for there it not only colours but itself chooses
the facts; not only modifies but shapes the work. And hence,
over the far larger proportion of the field of literature,
the health or disease of the writer's mind or momentary
humour forms not only the leading feature of his work, but
is, at bottom, the only thing he can communicate to others.
In all works of art, widely speaking, it is first of all the
author's attitude that is narrated, though in the attitude
there be implied a whole experience and a theory of life. An
author who has begged the question and reposes in some narrow
faith cannot, if he would, express the whole or even many of
the sides of this various existence; for, his own life being
maim, some of them are not admitted in his theory, and were
only dimly and unwillingly recognised in his experience.
Hence the smallness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in
works of merely sectarian religion; and hence we find equal
although unsimilar limitation in works inspired by the spirit
of the flesh or the despicable taste for high society. So
that the first duty of any man who is to write is
intellectual. Designedly or not, he has so far set himself
up for a leader of the minds of men; and he must see that his
own mind is kept supple, charitable, and bright. Everything
but prejudice should find a voice through him; he should see
the good in all things; where he has even a fear that he does
not wholly understand, there he should be wholly silent; and
he should recognise from the first that he has only one tool
in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy. (13)
The second duty, far harder to define, is moral. There are a
thousand different humours in the mind, and about each of
them, when it is uppermost, some literature tends to be
deposited. Is this to be allowed? Not certainly in every
case, and yet perhaps in more than rigourists would fancy.
It were to be desired that all literary work, and chiefly
works of art, issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent
impulses, whether grave or laughing, humorous, romantic, or
religious.
Yet it cannot be denied that some valuable books are
partially insane; some, mostly religious, partially inhuman;
and very many tainted with morbidity and impotence. We do
not loathe a masterpiece although we gird against its
blemishes. We are not, above all, to look for faults, but
merits. There is no book perfect, even in design; but there
are many that will delight, improve, or encourage the reader.
On the one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only religious
poetry on earth; yet they contain sallies that savour rankly
of the man of blood. On the other hand, Alfred de Musset had
a poisoned and a contorted nature; I am only quoting that
generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, when I accuse him of
a bad heart; yet, when the impulse under which he wrote was
purely creative, he could give us works like CARMOSINE or
FANTASIO, in which the last note of the romantic comedy seems
to have been found again to touch and please us. When
Flaubert wrote MADAME BOVARY, I believe he thought chiefly of
a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the book turned in his
hands into a masterpiece of appalling morality. But the
truth is, when books are conceived under a great stress, with
a soul of ninefold power, nine times heated and electrified
by effort, the conditions of our being are seized with such
an ample grasp, that, even should the main design be trivial
or base, some truth and beauty cannot fail to be expressed.
Out of the strong comes forth sweetness; but an ill thing
poorly done is an ill thing top and bottom. And so this can
be no encouragement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes,
who must take their business conscientiously or be ashamed to
practise it.
Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he must express
himself and his own views and preferences; for to do anything
else is to do a far more perilous thing than to risk being
immoral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape a
sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a sentiment; that
will not be helpful. To conceal a sentiment, if you are sure
you hold it, is to take a liberty with truth. There is
probably no point of view possible to a sane man but contains
some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable
to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could
tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently
uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be
harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as
to glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all
these extremes into his work, each in its place and
proportion, that work would be the world's masterpiece of
morality as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; for
any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the
world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be
partial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of
another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual;
of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in conduct,
you can never hope to do exactly right. All you can do is to
make as sure as possible; and for that there is but one rule.
Nothing should be done in a hurry that can be done slowly.
It is no use to write a book and put it by for nine or even
ninety years; for in the writing you will have partly
convinced yourself; the delay must precede any beginning; and
if you meditate a work of art, you should first long roll the
subject under the tongue to make sure you like the flavour,
before you brew a volume that shall taste of it from end to
end; or if you propose to enter on the field of controversy,
you should first have thought upon the question under all
conditions, in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as
well as in joy. It is this nearness of examination necessary
for any true and kind writing, that makes the practice of the
art a prolonged and noble education for the writer.
There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say over again,
in the meantime. Any literary work which conveys faithful
facts or pleasing impressions is a service to the public. It
is even a service to be thankfully proud of having rendered.
The slightest novels are a blessing to those in distress, not
chloroform itself a greater. Our fine old sea-captain's life
was justified when Carlyle soothed his mind with THE KING'S
OWN or NEWTON FORSTER. To please is to serve; and so far
from its being difficult to instruct while you amuse, it is
difficult to do the one thoroughly without the other. Some
part of the writer or his life will crop out in even a vapid
book; and to read a novel that was conceived with any force
is to multiply experience and to exercise the sympathies.
Every article, every piece of verse, every essay, every
ENTRE-FILET, is destined to pass, however swiftly, through
the minds of some portion of the public, and to colour,
however transiently, their thoughts. When any subject falls
to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper has the invaluable
opportunity of beginning its discussion in a dignified and
human spirit; and if there were enough who did so in our
public press, neither the public nor the Parliament would
find it in their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. The
writer has the chance to stumble, by the way, on something
pleasing, something interesting, something encouraging, were
it only to a single reader. He will be unfortunate, indeed,
if he suit no one. He has the chance, besides, to stumble on
something that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; and
for a dull person to have read anything and, for that once,
comprehended it, makes a marking epoch in his education.
Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well.
And so, if I were minded to welcome any great accession to
our trade, it should not be from any reason of a higher wage,
but because it was a trade which was useful in a very great
and in a very high degree; which every honest tradesman could
make more serviceable to mankind in his single strength;
which was difficult to do well and possible to do better
every year; which called for scrupulous thought on the part
of all who practised it, and hence became a perpetual
education to their nobler natures; and which, pay it as you
please, in the large majority of the best cases will still be
underpaid. For surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth
century, there is nothing that an honest man should fear more
timorously than getting and spending more than he deserves.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|