Leslie Stephen

“ Holmes, as became a quick logician, was an unequivocal lover of clearness and common sense. He may play with an extravagance, as in the case of Boston, but he is anxious always to show that he sees its extravagance. Lamb loves the quaint and grotesque for its own sake; falls in love with his prejudices; delights in yielding to them unreservedly, and caressing them and flouting the reasonable matter-of-fact person, the solid Scot who demonstrates that an absurdity is absurd. ”

“ A man could hardly take himself so seriously who had any very strong sense of humour. But a sense of humour is hard to reconcile with some cardinal virtues. The true humorist sees that the world is a tragi-comedy, a Vanity Fair, in which enthusiasm is out of place. Southey, with a sense of humour, would have been alive to his own smallness in the general system of things; he would have perceived that even a Quarterly Reviewer cannot make the great current flow backwards, and that a drudging journalist had no right to drape himself in the robes of a prophet. ”

“ We may agree that the true value of a religion is in its ethical force. We may admit that the moral ideas embodied in its teaching are the only part which is valuable when we cease to believe in the history or the dogma; and that they still preserve a very high value. We may still be edified by Homer or by Æschylus, or by Socrates and Epictetus, though we accept not a word of their statements of fact or philosophy. But can the essence of a religion be thus preserved intact when its dogma and its historical assertions are denied? ”

“ When people ask whether 'form' or 'content,' style or matter, be the most important, it is like asking whether order or progress should be the aim of a statesman, or whether strength or activity be most needed for an athlete. Both are essential, and neither excellence will supersede necessity for the other. If you have nothing to say, there is no manner of saying it well; and if not well said, your something is as good as nothing. For Stevenson, the question of style was the most pressing. ”

“ I cannot affect to share Arnold's discomfort. I have never been able—doubtless it is a defect—to sympathise with the Obermanns and Amiels whom Arnold admired; excellent but surely effeminate persons, who taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and finding the taste bitter, go on making wry faces over it all their lives; and, admitting with one party that the old creeds are doomed, assert with the other that all beauty must die with them. The universe is open to a great many criticisms; there is plenty of cause for tears and for melancholy ”

“ When we have a man and a woman of genius, may it not be good for the world to know, even in the fullest detail, how they loved and revealed their love to each other, and how the love ennobled their lives and their work? The case, it might be added, is too rare to be drawn into a precedent. Nobody will learn much from the flirtations of the ordinary human being, or even of the second rank of ephemeral celebrities. ”

“ Man, then is a mere speck in the universe, placed between the two abysses of the infinite and of nothingness, unable to comprehend either; floating on a vast ocean, where as soon as he grasps a fact it changes and vanishes on his hands; where he burns with desire to find a firm base for a structure of belief, and where the whole foundation is always crumbling and the earth opening to the abysses. This, he says, is the misery of man; and yet the misery proves his greatness. Man is great because he knows his misery. ”

“ Now Swedenborg's great merit is the 'immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience.' The 'atmosphere of moral sentiment opens to every wretch that has reason the doors of the universe,' and 'all men are commanded by the saint.' If Emerson's optimism leads him to dwell upon the 'good of evil,' and to see the use of 'scourges of God' and vulgar political scoundrels, it is because they are for him the instruments of an essentially moral force. ”

“ It is needless to speak of the beauty of the domestic life; needless, at any rate, to express more than the sense of satisfaction that, for once, a poet, of abnormally sensitive character even for a poet, was surrounded by an atmosphere of unbroken harmony for so many years. If he lost Hallam, he always preserved the friendship of Carlyle (tempered by an occasional growl) ; of the inimitable FitzGerald, never less delightful because he could never affect insincere admiration; of the wise and placid Spedding, the 'Pope,' as Tennyson called him, of the young men at Trinity ”

“ In his essay upon the 'Function of Criticism,' Arnold explained his lofty conception of the art, and showed why, in his sense of the word, it should be the main aim of all modern literature. 'Criticism,' he said, 'is the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known or thought in the world.' The difference between poetry and criticism is that one gives us the ideal and the other explains to us how it differs from the real. What is latent in the poet is made explicit in the critic. Arnold, himself, even when he turned to criticism, was primarily a poet. ”

“ That is, we want, above all things, to get rid of prejudices in general, not of any special prejudice; to have our opinions constructed out of pure, impartial, unbiassed thought, free from all baser alloy of mephitic vapours. The mere self-willed assertion of our own fancies can never lift us to the higher point of view which would reveal our narrowness and ignorance. Hence the vast importance of 'culture': the one thing needful; which, again, in another view, is equivalent to a frank submission of ourselves to the Zeitgeist. ”

“ Some lovely woman, he hopes, will playfully withdraw the knife which the great man is about to use as a fork, or sacrifice herself by imitating his use of the implement—'how much harder than to plunge it into her bosom like Lucretia!' The true canons of good literature, as of good behaviour, are founded upon the eternal laws of good sense and good feeling: and therefore a revolt against them is not the way to independence, but to degeneration. Holmes, of course, maintained that refinement was compatible with democracy, and that a thorough American might also be the most polished of gentlemen. ”

“ Intellectually, he resembles a short-sighted man to whom every detail is so abnormally vivid in turn that he forgets the whole. He has to make his theories—if theories he must have—not by patient induction, but by flashes of intuition. His theory of the beautiful simply formulates his own childish instincts. Wordsworth had seen, we know, in his own early feelings a proof of the soul's pre-existence 'with God, who is our home.' So Ruskin, though he somewhere calls this fanciful, regards the sense of beauty as a revelation—as something like the inner light of mystics. ”

“ Ten people must try if one is to succeed. Great, at any rate, must be the comfort of such a possession. Vanity, like sleep, 'wraps a man round like a cloak'; it is the natural armour which fits the man of letters for the struggle of existence. Some authors may be simply 'pachydermatous,' though that is a quality which scarcely fits the true literary temperament. Southey, highly strung, sensitive, and ardent, was gifted with that falcon nose and that superlative self-esteem to comfort and support him through failure and obloquy, and the protracted struggle to make both ends meet. ”

“ He could feel, indeed, the irony with which fate treats the great men of action. Masterful ambitions lead to catastrophes, and in the political world, where order and subordination are the essentials, even the ideal hero who can be calm in the storm, and hold his own amidst the struggling elements, is not much the better for it personally. Henry V. is still but a man made to bear the blame of all mishap, and 'subject to the breath of every fool.' He has nothing to show for it, 'save ceremony,' and cannot sleep so soundly as the vacant-minded slave. ”

“ If the founder of a new society could be sure that all his followers would be perfectly good and absolutely obedient, he would, no doubt, have surmounted the great initial difficulty. He is more likely, it is to be feared, to collect a mixed crowd of fanatics and humbugs, ready to dispute his authority or sponge upon his benevolence. But that is the criticism of cold common-sense, which would be inappropriate. The Utopia served to set forth Ruskin's view of the existing social evils and contrast them with an ideal of a purer and sweeter life. ”

“ Meanwhile, it is my belief that nobody is the better in any department of life or literature for being a fool or a brute: and least of all in poetry. I cannot think that a man is disqualified for poetry either by thinking more deeply than others or by having a keener perception of (I hope I may join the two words) moral beauty. A perception of what it is that makes a hero or saint is, I fancy, as necessary to a great literary artist as a perception of what it is that constitutes physical beauty to a painter. ”

“ The mind—one must only judge from one's own—seems to me to be a singularly ill-constructed apparatus. Thoughts are slippery things. It is terribly hard to keep them in the track presented by logic. They jostle each other, and suddenly skip aside to make room for irrelevant and accidental neighbours; till the stream of thought, of which people talk, resembles rather such a railway journey as one makes in dreams, where at every few yards you are shunted on to the wrong line. ”

“ If, as I fancy, Bagehot scarcely received so ready a welcome as he deserved, one cause is obvious. Authors, if I may adopt a formula which he employed rather too often, may be divided into two classes, the sentimentalists and the cynics. There can be no doubt which is the most popular. Everybody likes 'geniality' in print as in talk; and, of course, everybody is quite right in the main. Yet the genial author has the benefit of a packed jury. Each reader perhaps takes to himself the compliment paid to his species: what good fellows we all are! ”

“ All who have meant good work with their whole heart have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. ... Life goes down with a better grace foaming in full tide over a precipice, than miserably struggling to an end in sandy deltas.
That, he explains, is the true meaning of the saying about those whom the gods love. At whatever age death may come, the man who dies so dies young.
This gallant spirit, combined with extraordinarily quick and vivid sympathy, gives, I think, a main secret of the charm which endeared Stevenson both to friends and readers. ”

“ He is a reed, the feeblest in nature; but yet he is a 'thinking reed.' A vapour, a drop of water might kill him; but should the whole universe crush him, he is nobler than it, for he knows that he is crushed, and the universe knows not that it crushes. He is great as a discrowned king. ”

“ The great men, it is true, have not always acknowledged their debt to the genius, whoever he may be, who presides over pedestrian exercise. Indeed, they have inclined to ignore the true source of their impulse. Even when they speak of the beauties of nature, they would give us to understand that they might have been disembodied spirits, taking aerial flights among mountain solitudes, and independent of the physical machinery of legs and stomachs. When long ago the Alps cast their spell upon me, it was woven in a great degree by the eloquence of Modern Painters. ”

“ I do not defend my insensibility nor argue that London walks are the best. I only maintain that even in London, walking has a peculiar fascination. The top of an omnibus is an excellent place for meditation; but it has not, for me at least, that peculiar hypnotic influence which seems to be favourable to thinking, and to pleasant day-dreaming when locomotion is carried on by one's own muscles. The charm, however, is that even a walk in London often vaguely recalls better places and nobler forms of the exercise. ”

“ The power of humour keeps him from the bombastic and the affected, and he sees the facts of life too clearly not to be aware of the vanity of human wishes, the disappointments of successful ambition and the emptiness of its supposed rewards. He is profoundly conscious of the pettiness of human life and of the irony of fate—of which, indeed, he had plenty of instances before him. This, I fancy, implies personal characteristics which fall in very well, so far as they can be grasped, with what we know of the life. Be a Romeo while you can; love is delightful when you are young ”

“ I have been refreshing my memory of them lately, and if I cannot profess myself an ardent disciple, I have at least read with renewed or increased admiration of his literary power. One excellence is conspicuous at first sight. The cardinal virtue of a good style is that every sentence should be alive to its fingers' ends. There should be no cumbrous verbiage: no barren commonplace to fill the interstices of thought: and no mannerism simulating emotion by fictitious emphasis. Ruskin has that virtue in the highest degree. ”

“ Humour which reveals the seamy side of life generally goes with a melancholy temperament, and Lamb's sweetness is generally toned by the sadness, due both to circumstance and to disposition. It is Holmes's special peculiarity that the childish buoyancy remains almost to the end, unbroken and irrepressible. He could hardly indeed have sympathised with the doctrine that heaven lies about us in our infancy, for we cherish that—illusion is it or faith? when we are forced to admit that we can only see the light of common day. ”

“ Another set of walks may, perhaps, appeal to more general sympathy. The voice of the sea, we know, is as powerful as the voice of the mountains; and, to my taste, it is difficult to say whether the Land's End is not in itself a more impressive station than the top of Mont Blanc. The solitude of the frozen peaks suggests tombstones and death. The sea is always alive and at work. ”

“ And yet in this ancient novelist we see the society of the time, the squires and parsons and officials, and the women whom they courted, entirely unconscious of any approaching convulsions; imagining that their little social arrangements were to endure for ever; that their social conventions were the only ones conceivable; and, on the whole, mainly occupied in carrying on business in a humdrum way and sweetening life by flirtation with healthy and pretty young women without two ideas in their heads. ”

“ That represents a delicate problem which his fortune solved with singular felicity.
In the first place, of course, Gibbon must have the great experience of falling in love. It must be a passion strong and exalted enough to let him into the great secret of human happiness, and yet it must not be such as to entangle him too deeply in the active duties of life. A man who has never been stirred to such passion must look too much from outside upon the great drama of life; and yet the passion, if sufficiently powerful, may lead him too far from his predestined functions. ”

“ But if the vision of our political Jeremiahs is to be fulfilled; if the inevitable growth of democracy means a growing uniformity and growing vulgarisation of the human being everywhere; if it implies, too, an indefinite multiplication of masses, in which the individual is insignificant, occupied by the same petty round of interests, and incapable of appreciating refinement or high intellectual powers, there can be no doubt that literature also will become commonplace and vulgar, and so far alike throughout the world. ”