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glad idleness. In some of the sweetest | teaches the dumb animals to love and obey lines of the poem we are told how him, Tubal-Cain, who founds the industrial arts, -Jubal, in whom the new sense of limitation breeds the spirit of poetry and music,

"They laboured gently, as a maid who weaves
Her hair in mimic mats, and pauses oft
And strokes across her hand the tresses soft,
Then peeps to watch the poised butterfly
Or little burthened ants that homeward hie.
Time was but leisure to their lingering
thought,

There was no need for haste to finish aught;
But sweet beginnings were repeated still
Like infant babblings that no task fulfil;
For, love, that loved not change, constrained
the simple will.”

Into this world unconscious of doom, the
knowledge of death enters by the acci-
dental death of one of Lamech's children,
and Cain is compelled to disclose the fate
which remains for all of them by that stern
will of Jehovah, which he has hoped, but
failed to escape by his long pilgrimage: -
"And a new spirit from that hour came o'er
The race of Cain; soft idlesse was no more,
But even the sunshine had a heart of care,
Smiling with hidden dread, -a mother fair
Who folding to her breast a dying child
Beams with feigned joy that but makes

ness mild.

"A yearning for some hidden soul of things, Some outward touch complete on inner springs That vaguely moving bred a lovely pain,A want that did but stronger grow with gain Of all good else, as spirits might be sad For lack of speech to tell us they are glad." Jubal invents the lyre and the art of song, and receives unmeasured glory and gratitude from his kindred, for his gift to them of the new faculty, till he grows weary of hearing the echo of his own words, and resolves to seek some distant land where he can find new harmonies and give up his heart to solitary raptures. He journeys on for ages, sowing music everywhere as he goes, till he reaches the sea, and finds himself so utterly unable to render again the music of that "mighty harmonist " that he touches the lyre no more, and longs again for the land where first he realized the powsad-er which is ebbing away from him as his "heart widens with its widening home." He returns to find his name famous, and temples built in his praise, but also to find a generation which knows him not and which hardly notices the feeble old man who is the true claimant for these divine honours. Jubal feels a passionate desire to identify himself with the object of all this veneration. A germ of selfishness lurks in him still:

Death was now lord of life, and at his word
Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred,
With measured wing now audibly arose
Throbbing through all things to some unseen
close.

Now glad Content by clutching Haste was

torn,

And Work grew eager and Device was born.
It seemed the light was never loved before,
Now each man said, "Twill go and come no
more.'

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"What though his song should spread from man's small race

Out through the myriad worlds that people space,

And make the heavens one joy-diffusing quire?
Still, 'mid that vast would throb the keen de-
sire

Of this poor aged flesh, this eventide,
This twilight soon in darkness to subside,
This little pulse of self that, having glowed
Through thrice three centuries, and divinely
strowed

The light of music through the vague of sound,
Ached smallness still in good that had no
bound."

In other words, the yearning to be personally recognized and identified as the giver of these great gifts to man was the poor alloy still left in Jubal's nature, an alloy which the mere fear of death had, by the way, apparently stimulated rather than diminished, for our author expressly tells us that Tubal-Cain at least, and still more we should think Jubal,

"wot not of treachery,

Or greedy lust, or any ill to be,
Save the one ill of sinking into naught
Banished from action and act-shaping thought."
However, Death itself is to purify Jubal
from this insatiable longing for personal
recognition as the author of the music and
the song which the fear of Death had gen-
erated in him, for Jubal's claim to be the
inventor of the lyre is treated as a profanity,
and he is beaten and driven away from the
temple built in his honour, to die alone.
Dying, a vision comes to him of the " angel
of his life and death," who teaches him that
his life had been full enough of blessing
without his receiving in his own person the
honour due to it, that

"in thy soul to bear The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest Of the world's spring-tide in thy conscious breast,"

give a new keenness of emotion to the race,

and finally, for its power to rob the individual soul of the one selfish husk which clings to all such energy, however disinterested, the craving for personal recogni tion.

-

So we understand the teaching of this very fine legend, and, in parts at least, very fine poem. But the deepest part of the teaching, the part of it most likely to strike the imagination and affect the heart of its readers, seems to us profoundly false. We have already noted the apparent moral contradiction implied in praising death for the stimulus it gives to the generally benefi cent perhaps, but certainly egotistic desire for immortal fame, and yet praising it also for separating the shrivelled, dead husk of the " fleshly self" from the immeasurable life it has engendered in generations to come. But there is a deeper vice still in the doctrine that Death extinguishes that selfish egotism which, as George Eliot so finely says, "ached smallness still in good that has no bound." To extinguish the power of selfish feeling is not a victory over selfish feeling; Jubal dies before he has gained any such victory. If he had gained the victory, there would have been no praise due to Death, by which he could not have gained it. To be willing to submit to annihilation for the infinite good of others might be a noble and disinterested attitude of mind, but then such willingness is not the

- was itself the greatest of all gifts, far greater than any gratitude which might seem to be due to it. Indeed, it was the very intensity of the light he had radiated which caused his old age to be despised, as a shrine too mean for a rumour so divine. Nay, it was the final blessing of Death, so we understand our author to teach, that, after stimulating such creative activity as Jubal's, it destroyed the "fleshly self" with all its egotisms, and left him only an impersonal immortality in that human gladness which, in its rejoicings, does not recog-gift of Death, but of Life, and he who has nize the personal origin of its joys: "This was thy lot to feel, create, bestow, And that immeasurable life to know From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead,

A seed primeval that has forests bred.
It is the glory of the heritage

Thy life has left, that makes thy outcast age;
Thy limbs shall lie, dark, tombless, on this sod,
Because thou shinest in man's soul a god,
Who found and gave new passion and new joy,
That naught but earth's destruction can de-
stroy.

Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone;
'Twas but in giving that thou could'st atone
For too much wealth amid their poverty."
And with these warnings in his ears we
leave Jubal, at the close of this grand but
melancholy legend,

"Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave,

The All-creating Presence for his grave." Whether the poetic form is or is not generally adequate to the thought, at all events the thought itself is gravely passionate, expressing a strange depth of gratitude for the power of Death to stimulate energy and

it can gain nothing by Death, while the uni-
verse loses by it the very flower of its life.
The death of the corn of wheat which, " ex-
cept it die, abideth alone, but if it die bring-
eth forth much fruit," is not the death of
annihilation, but of transfiguration; and the
transfiguration of the highest thing man can
know, personal love, involves the retention
and development of that highest element,
the personality, not its degradation and ex-
tinction. If Jubal instead of being quenched
like “a sun-wave" in the "grave" of an
"All-creating Presence," - what a paradox
is there! had learnt to renounce the pas
sionate desire to be identified with his own
gift to mankind, he would have ceased to
'ache smallness still in good that had no
bound," in a far higher and truer sense than
any in which that can be asserted of a
" which has ceased to
"quenched sun-wave
be at all. The doctrine of this poem really
comes to this, that Death creates by
making us smart under the consciousness
of limitation, by stinging self-love into haste
and energy, -or that purely disinterested
creation, creation without the thirst for per-
sonal recognition, is not for personal beings

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-

like men at all, but the privilege only of unconscious and impersonal life. To that we can only reply that what we do actually experience, in however imperfect a degree, cannot be impossible to us, and that the creative power of purely disinterested love has no fascination, indeed strictly speaking, no meaning, for us, if we drop the thought of the personal centre from which it flows. "Love" implies the self-surrender of a conscious being to the well-being of others. An unconscious stream of beneficent energy is in no sense "love," and excites none of the moral awe which the display of any divine love excites.

From The Saturday Review. THE ART OF RETICENCE.

AMONG other classifications we may divide the world into those who live by impulse and the undirected flow of circumstance, and those who map out their lives according to art and a definite design. These last, however, are wonderfully rare, few people having capacity enough to construct any persistent plan of life or to carry it through if even they have begun one it being so much easier to follow nature and drift with the stream, than to work by rule and square, and build up even a beaver's dam. Now, in the matter of reticence, In the next place, even the true and un- how few people understand this as an art, deniable effect of death in stimulating en- and how almost entirely it is by the mere ergy, and making men, by suggesting loss, chance of temperament whether a person is conscious of the love which otherwise they confidential or reticent, with his heart on his might hardly know, is more or less condi- sleeve or not to be got at by a pickaxe, tional on death's being believed to be not irritatingly silent or contemptibly loquafinal. A man with death near at hand will cious. Sometimes indeed we do find one seldom undertake any task unconnected who, like Talleyrand, has mastered the art with the life into which he believes himself of an eloquent reticence from alpha to about to plunge, because it seems hardly omega and knows how to conceal everything worth while. Those who lose their belief in without showing that he conceals anything; immortality too often sink under the moral but we find such persons very seldom, and paralysis of a creed which seems to leave so we do not always understand his value when little that it is worth while to attempt. we have him. Any one not a born fool can Especially, we believe, that the loss of faith resolve to keep silence on certain points, in immortality usually saps the deepest and but it takes a master mind to be able to talk tenderest affections of human nature, instead and yet not tell. Silence, indeed, self-eviof giving them, as George Eliot intimates, dent and unmasked, though a safe method, a new tenderness. It is clear that the ap- is but a clumsy one, and to be tolerated prehension of loss cannot create feeling; only in very timid and very young people. it can and does only bring home to the heart" Le silence est le parti plus sur pour celui the depth of feeling already cherished there. qui se défie, de soi-même," says RochefouBut the belief in final death does more than cauld; so is total abstinence for him who this; it undermines our respect for the in- cannot control himself; yet we do not trinsic worth of a nature so ephemeral, and preach total abstinence as the best order of makes it seem more reasonable, perhaps life for a wise and disciplined person, any we should say makes it really more reason- more than we would put strong ancles into able, to contract our love into better leg-irons or forbid a rational man to handle keeping with the short minutes during which a sword. Besides, silence may be as exalone it can be entertained. We are quite pressive, as tell-tale even, as speech, and willing to admit that human aspirations have comparatively little to do with the evidence for immortality, except as evidence, if evidence, as we believe, they be, of the purpose of the Creator. But we utterly deny that to lose that faith could quicken life and love, as this poem seems to teach. We hold that it would paralyze life, and sap the very springs of the deepest love.

MR. BENTLEY announces for early publication, "Travels in the Air," by Mr. Glaisher and others, with numerous full-paged coloured lithographs and woodcuts.

at the best there is no art in shutting one's lips and sitting mute; though indeed too few people have got even so far as this in the art of reticence, but tell everything they know as surely as water flows through a sieve, and are safe just in proportion to their ignorance.

But there is art, the most consummate act, in appearing absolutely frank, yet never telling anything which it is not wished should be known, in being pleasantly chatty and conversational, yet never committing oneself to a statement or an opinion which might be used against one afterwards - ars celare artem in keeping one's own counsel as well as in other things. It is only after along acquaintance with this kind of person

them more than they knew before. If only they had spoken, your elation would not have been very long-lived. Of all personal qualities this art of reticence is the most important and valuable for a professional man to possess. Lawyer or physician, be must be able to hold all and hear all with out betraying by word or look, by injudicious defence any more than by overt treachery, by anger at a malicious accusation any more than by a smile at an egre

not exculpatory, to maintain silence, not set up a defence nor yet proclaim the truth. To do this well requires a rare combination of good qualities, among which are tact and self-respect in about equal amount, selfcommand and the power of hitting that fine line which marks off reticence from deception. No man was ever thoroughly suecessful as either a lawyer or a physician who did not possess this combination; and with it even a modest amount of technical skill can be made to go a long way.

that you find out he has been substantially have let them behind the scenes, and told reticent throughout, though apparently so frank. Caught by his easy manner, his genial talk, his ready sympathy, you have confided to him not only all you have of your own, but all you have of other people's; and it is only long after, when you reflect quietly undisturbed by the magnetism of his presence, that you come to the knowledge of how reticent he has been in the midst of this seeming frankness, and how little reciprocity there has been in your confidence together. You know such peo-gious mistake; his business is to be reticent, ple for years, and you never know really more of them at the end than you did in the beginning. You cannot lay your finger on a fact that would in any way place them in your power; and though you did not notice it at the time, and don't know how it has been done now, you feel that they have never trusted you, and have all along carefully avoided anything like confidence. But you are at their mercy by your own rashness, and if they do not destroy you it is because they are reticent for you as well as towards you; perhaps because they are good-natured, perhaps because they despise you for your very frankness too much to hurt you; but above all things not because they are unable. How you hate them when you think of the skill with which they took all that was offered to them, yet never let you see they gave back nothing for their own part- rather by the jugglery of manner made you believe that they were giving back as much as they were receiving! Perhaps it was a little ungenerous; but they had the right to argue that if you could not keep your own counsel you would not be likely to keep theirs, and it was only kind at the time to let you hoodwink yourself so that you might not be offended. In manner genial, frank, conversational, sympathetic -in substance absolutely secret, cautious, never taken off their guard, never seduced into dangerous confidences, as careful for their friends as they are for themselves, and careful even for strangers unknown to them these people are the salvation as they are the charm of society; never making mischief, and by their habitual reticence, raising up barriers at which gossip halts and rumour dies. No slander is ever traced to them, and what they know is as though it were not. Yet they do not make the clumsy mistake of letting you see that they are better informed than yourself on certain subjects, and know more about the current scandals of the day than they choose to reveal; on the contrary, they listen to your crude mistakes with a highly edified air, and leave you elated with the idea that you

Valuable in society, at home the reticent are so many forms of living death. Eyes have they and see not, ears and hear not, and the faculty of speech seems to have been given them in vain. They go out and they come home, and they tell you nothing of all they have seen. They have heard all sorts of news and seen no end of pleasant things, but they come down to breakfast the next morning as mute as fishes, and if you want it you must dig out your own informa tion bit by bit by sequential, categorical questioning. Not that they are surly or ill-natured; they are only reticent. They are disastrous enough to those who are associated with them, and make the worst partners in the world in business or marriage; for you never know what is going on, or where you are, and you must be content to walk blindfold if you walk with them. They tell you nothing beyond what they are obliged, take you into no confidence, never consult you, never arrest their own action for your concurrence; and the consequence is that you live with them in the dark, if you are timid, for ever afraid of looming catastrophes, and more like a captive bound to the car of their fortunes than like the coadjutor with a voice in the manner of the driving and the right to assist in the direction of the journey. This is the reticence of temperament, and we see it in children from quite an early age - those children who are trusted by the servants, and are their favourites in consequence, because they tell no tales; but it is a disposi tion that may become dangerous unless

watched, and that is always liable to degen- | for all that, next to truth, on which society erate into falsehood. For reticence is just rests, mutual knowledge is the best workon the boundary of deception, and it needs ing virtue, and a state of reticent distrust but a very little step to take one over the is more prudent than noble. Many people border. Still nothing can be more foolish think it a fine thing to live with their most or more suicidal, to say nothing of its sin, intimate friends as if they would one day than lying. No man's memory is so good become their enemies, and never let even as to enable him to lie with constant im- their deepest affections strike root so far punity. Some day there must come the down as confidence. They re-arrange La inevitable slip, and one such slip of memory Bruyère's famous maxim, "L'on peut avoir and consequent discovery will undo the la confiance de quelqu'un sans en avoir le careful labour of a life, and reduce the cœur," and take it quite the contrary way; whole fabric to a heap of unsightly ruins. but perhaps the heart which gives itself, divorced from confidence, is not worth accepting, and reticence where there is love sounds almost a contradiction in terms. Indeed, the certainty of unlimited confidences where there is love is one of the strongest of all the arguments in favour of general reticence. For in nine cases out of ten you tell your secrets and open your heart, not only to your friend, but to your friend's wife, or husband, or lover; and secondhand confidence is rarely held sacred if it can be betrayed with impunity.

That obtrusive kind of reticence which parades itself, which makes mysteries and lets you see there are mysteries, which keeps silence and flaunts it in your face as an intentional silence, brooding over things you are not worthy to know that silence which is as loud as words is one of the most irritating things in the world, and can be made one of the most insulting. If words are sharp arrows, this kind of dumbness is even sharper and all the worse because it puts it out of your power to complain. You cannot bring into court a list of looks, By an apparent contradiction, reticent and shrugs, or make it a grievance that a people who tell nothing are often the most man held his tongue while you raved, and charming letter-writers. Full of chit-chat, to all appearance kept his temper when you of descriptions dashed off with a warm and lost yours. Yet all of us who have had flowing pen, giving all the latest news any experience that way know that his hold-well authenticated and not scandalous, and ing his tongue was the very reason why you raved, and that if he had spoken for his own share the worst of the tempest would have been allayed. This is a common manner of tormenting, however, with reticent people who have a moral twist; and to fling stones at you from behind the shield of silence by which they have sheltered themselves is a pastime that hurts only one of the combatants. Reticence, though at times one of the greatest social virtues we possess, is also at times one of the most disastrous personal conditions. Half our modern novels turn on the misery brought about by mistaken reticence; and though novelists generally exaggerate the circumstances they deal with, they are not wrong in their facts. If the waters of strife have been let loose because of many words, there have been broken hearts before now because of none, or not sufficient. Old proverbs, to be sure, inculcate the value of reticence, and the wisdom of keeping one's own counsel. If speech is silvern, silence is golden, in popular philosophy; and the youth is ever enjoined to be like the wise man, and keep himself free from the peril of words. Yet

breathing just the right amount of affec-
tion according to the circumstances of the
correspondents - a naturally eloquent per-
son who has cultivated the art of reticence
writes letters unequalled for charm of
manner. The first impression of them is
superb, enchanting, enthralling, like the
bouquet of old wine; but, on reconsidera
tion, what have they said? Absolutely
nothing. This charming letter, apparently
so full of matter, is an answer to a great,
good, bonest outpour wherein you laid bare
that foolish heart of yours, and delivered
up your soul for anatomical examination;
and you looked for a reply based on the
same lines. At first delighted, you are
soon chilled and depressed by such a
turn, and you feel that you have made a
fool of yourself, and that your correspond-
ent is laughing in his sleeve at your insane
propensity to "gush." So must it be till
that good time comes when man shall have
no need to defend himself against his fel
lows, when confidence shall not bring sor-
row nor trust betrayal, and when the art of
reticence shall be as obsolete as the art of
fence, or the Socratic method.

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