It is the everlasting gladiatorial show in the arena of the soul of man; all the principalities and powers of the material and the brutish and the things which are seen, in undying conflict with the senses of power and aspiration and the evidence of things not seen. It is the hand-to-hand deathtussle of the Beast with the Angel. Down, down, down the stolid eyes look: surely the Beast is winning the day.

Then must the divine idealiststhe poet, the painter, the tone-maker, the artist of all sorts and conditions of work-cease to be the children of their age?

Not yet not yet hath the Beast chanted his pæan, nor ever will he. Not yet are we on our knees: the saints of old have not yet heard our passing cry, "Save us, or we perish," Israel must ere long leave Pharaoh in the Red Sea, and Miriam sing her pæan in safety on the shore. "The

vain curling of the watery maze" forsooth gives no calm surface for an ideal reflection ; but it must not escape attention that a circle in the water

"Never ceases to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought!"

Then after storm cometh great calm. Petty princes of a day may keep the little nationalities of the East in a perpetual imbroglio for a time; but some day a mutual federation may prove a stern barrier to the interference of meddlesome powers. Glory, as of old, mounts by a ladder of

wretchedness. The pride of Venice, and her freedom of thirteen hundred years, rose "from dirt and seaweed." Propertius was justly proud of the humble origin of mightiest Rome, "a mere grassy hillock before the coming of Phrygian Æneas."

Even for eighteen centuries did the world of science lie eclipsed, from the days of Archimedes, who was disturbed as he was calculating in the dust of his own back garden, to the days of Galileo, who stung the angel of his ideal by a democratic recantation; yet for all that the protoplasm of growth was there. It needed but the peculiar environment, it needed but the application of art to the inquiries of science, and the eclipse was to die away, has died away, and left such a blaze of light as almost to overwhelm the ideal scientists of the present by the fulness of the realisation of their wishes in the past.

Therefore, all Job's comforters, and any pessimists akin thereto, may go to the wall. "All healthy things are sweet-tempered." Gay castles in the air are more enervating than the dungeons conjured up by despair. After all, the rain may come down, but it shall not damp our resolution. We believe there is a divinity to shape the end of all that is divine. The tabernacle of the godlike is with men. Nature uses her crucible as well as her building mortar, and she is faithful even in destruction. She keeps a rag-shop of the torn shreds of human possibilities, as well as a wardrobe of the silks and satins of human accomplishments. The playwright of one age will dress his Macbeth in the distant grandeur of an Eschylus; another will grace his heroine with the poetry of a Sophocles; and yet another will put his Electra into everyday attire, and marry her to a farm

labourer. "Eyes down" may be the

word of command from a sergeantmajor, but for all that he is not a commissioned officer; his company may take his orders, not so the whole battalion. So the creed of a Voltaire,

or rather want of a creed, being an utter want of light, may by its very darkness lead "in the direction of the day."

"There is some soul of goodness in things evil;"

and "Whoso can look on death will start at no shadows," saith the wisdom of the Greek, long before Shakespeare's name was spelt.

The idealist may still be the child of his age, and may take into his horoscope all that is necessary. But let him not forget all that is possible. Let him look upwards. Let him forget his own wants, ay, and his own happiness. Let him despise the littleness of passing corruptions. Like an æolian

harp, he may take the impression of the accidental breeze; but he must not give it back, save in the harmony of a nobler age. Let him remember he must ever be in the van, in the front rank, and even in front of that; let him not shrink to lead the forlorn hope, even though he bear the standard alone.

Then will he teach men to know, to endure, to act, by his own knowledge, his own endurance, his own action. Then will he teach men to strive, to suffer, to be content, by his own toil, his own failure, his own success. Then will labour and duty bring a newer light and a newer freedom. The eyes of the people will look up, and their voice will call him blessed.

G G

No. 318.-VOL. LIII.

I HAVE written in my time a good deal for the magazines: perhaps it would be more truthful to say I have written a good deal to them. Litera scripta manet: much of my writing has remained with me, or vanished in the form of pipe-lights-no doubt a more illuminating form than that originally designed for it. My vanitythe patron saint of Grub Street-will not suffer me to suppose there are no others who have known the same mischance. Their experiences may very possibly march with mine. Different editors have different modes of gilding the nauseous pill of rejection : some I have known to thrust it on you undisguised; and doubtless there are acute stages of the scribbling malady which require such drastic treatment, though the instant cruelty which is to bear the fruit of kindness is perhaps rarely appreciated by the patient. But by far the most common form the bitter message takes-and for all its politeness the most irritating, as the most impossible to gainsay is that which assumes the poor offering, though, like Rose Aylmer, adorned with every virtue and every grace, to lack the one essential quality of being "likely to interest the general reader."

Who is a General Reader? What is he? Does he disburse shillings and half-crowns at the Right Honourable Mr. Smith's book-stalls, and other places where the magazines are gathered together? Or is he, perchance, some nebulous monster, a phantom (not of delight) born of the weary patience of an editor, still striving in his utmost need to be courteous

“.... an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery"?

"Some read to think-these are rare; some to write-these are com

mon; and some read to talk-and these form the great majority. The first page of an author not unfrequently suffices for all the purposes of this latter class, of whom it has been said that they treat books as some do lords, they inform themselves of their titles and then boast of an intimate acquaintance." So says the author of 'Lacon.' Is any one of these a General Reader? Are they all General Readers? I have heard of a man who every morning of his life reads carefully through the 'Times,' the 'Standard,' the 'Daily News,' the 'Morning Post,' and the Daily Telegraph,' supplementing this generous diet in the afternoon with the 'Globe' and the two 'Gazettes,' and then making a light supper off the 'Evening Standard.' What is he, or,

what was he? For it is three or four years since I first heard of him, and can hardly imagine him to be alive

now.

In a most agreeable and instructive little book just lately published1 this voracious bibliophagist rears his unblushing front again, naked and not a whit ashamed. "Your general reader,' like the gravedigger in 'Hamlet,' is hail-fellow with all the mighty dead; he pats the skull of the jester; batters the cheek of lord, lady, or courtier; and uses 'imperious Cæsar' to teach boys the Latin declensions." Mr. Harrison does not, as might be thought from this passage, intend the term for a reproach. On the contrary, he says elsewhere that, "whether our reading be great or small, so far as it goes, it should be general." And again, "If our lives admit of but a short space for reading, all the more reason that, so far as may

1 The Choice of Books and other Literary Pieces.' By Frederic Harrison. London, 1886.

be, it should remind us of the vast expanse of human thought, and the wonderful variety of human nature." And yet again :-"Our reading will be sadly one-sided, however voluminous it be, if it entirely close to us any of the great types and ideals which the creative instinct of man has produced, if it shut out from us either the ancient world, or other European poetry, as important almost as our own. When our reading, however deep, runs wholly into 'pockets,' and exhausts itself in the literature of one age, one country, one type, then we may be sure that it is tending to narrow or deform our minds." Yet he talks also of the 66 'systematic reader," the "student of literature," and so forth. It is a little perplexing.

In the essay, or series of essays, which gives its title to the volume, and with which I am for the present mainly concerned, for the rest contenting myself with a humble but sincere welcome to one book which, amid all this busy garnering of barren sheaves, was really worth the making-in that leading essay Mr. Harrison suggests a course of reading for one whom he himself decides to call a General Reader. It is large and generous enough to have satisfied both Gibbon and Macaulay, those great pre-eminent readers who have recorded that they would not exchange their love of books for all the kingdoms of this world and the riches thereof. In brief it may be said to comprise, to use the old familiar phrase, the best of all that has been thought and said in the world, the best in poetry, philosophy, history, fiction-and the best only.

"To put out of the question that writing which is positively bad, are we not, amidst the multiplicity of books and of writers, in continual danger of being drawn off by what is stimulating rather than solid, by curiosity after something accidentally notorious, by what has no intelligible thing to recommend it except that it is new? Now, to stuff our minds with what is

simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and enlarging, and spiritually sustaining. Whether our neglect of the great books comes from our not reading at all, or from an incorrigible habit of reading the little books, it ends in just the same thing. And that thing is ignorance of all the greater literature of the world. To neglect all the abiding parts of knowledge for the sake of the evanescent parts is really to know nothing worth knowing. It is in the end the same,

whether we do not use our minds for serious study at all, or whether we exhaust them by an impotent voracity for desultory information'—a thing as fruitful as whistling. Of the two evils, I prefer the former. At least, in that case, the mind is healthy and open. It is not gorged and enfeebled by excess in that which cannot nourish much less enlarge and beautify our nature."

Now if the General Reader be one habitually trained on such nourishing diet, so stimulating surely as well as solid, an editor would certainly be right to reject my chapter from the lives of the washerwomen of England, or my essay on Milton's three mothersin-law, deduced from his behaviour to his three wives (Mr. Harrison has suggested these subjects to me), as unlikely to interest an intelligence so formed. But how about my thoughtful and scholarly article (one of the editors who rejected it gave it this praise) on the literature of the Ojib beways, or that other one on the lost Decades of Livy?

We may take Macaulay, I suppose, as a pretty good type of a general reader. Byron, to be sure, must have been no bad one, if the list of books he had read when he was nineteen (including, to his regret, so he says, four thousand novels!—one would hardly have thought so many had been written in the year 1807) be a true one-which, as it rests only on his own word, it possibly was not. For.

though Mr. Ruskin has praised him for the "measured and living truth" of his poetry, it is pretty certain that he had a knack of economising that valuable gift in his more personal moments. I do not know that any one has yet included this economy in the enormous catalogue of crimes the present age has discovered in Macaulay. He may (or he may not) have strayed beyond the strict bounds of fact in his public writings; but in the outpourings of his private pen it must. be clear, even to the most jaundiced eye, that he did not. "I am always glad to make my little girl happy," he writes to his niece Margaret, "and nothing pleases me so much as to see that she likes books. For when she is as old as I am she will find that they are better than all the tarts, and cakes, and toys, and plays, and sights in the world. If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens, and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king. I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading." Who can doubt him?

Now, Mr. Harrison's theory is that every time one reads a bad book- -a book, that is to say, not truly instructive, not formative--so much is taken from our power of recognizing and appreciating a good one. His list is, let me say again, sufficiently catholic,

and should one fancies be found not altogether wanting even by those steadily inclined not to be serious. Shakespeare and Molière, 'Don Quixote' and 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'The Arabian Nights' (not the new Revalenta Arabica of Captain Burton), Tom Jones' and 'Clarissa Harlowe,' Vanity Fair' and 'Pickwick,' and all Sir Walter Scottfor which last Mr. Harrison may be forgiven for suggesting immortality to 'The Last Days of Pompeii' and 'Middlemarch

in

His

Macaulay read these books, not once but many times. An insatiable reader he was, if man ever was, but he was not one of those justly banned by Mr. Harrison who "have read all these household books many years ago, read them, and judged them, and put them away for ever." He had soaked himself in them; their happy thoughts and golden phrases came flowing in unfailing streams to his lips as he talked, to his pen as he wrote. memory, some have said who heard him talk, was prodigious, but a prodigious nuisance. How that may have been we, who never heard him talk, cannot tell; but Charles Greville, who spoke well of few men, at least did not think His memory, to us who can only read him, is certainly no nuisance. What General Reader does not remember that 'Roundabout Paper' in which Thackeray did ample and gracious penance for what was after all but a jest of his frolic time? Who knows not his picture of Macaulay pacing up and down the library of the Athenæum, glorifying with his splashes of imperial purple the milk-white virtues of Clarissa'? "I daresay," writes his amused admiring hearer, "he could have spoken pages of the book of that book, and of what countless piles of others!"

So.

Countless, indeed!-and of others Mr. Harrison certainly would not suffer in his list. "His intimate acquaintance with a work," writes Mr. Trevelyan, "was no proof of its merit." And then he goes on to tell us, on his mother's authority, some of the works his uncle was intimately acquainted with; the romances of Mrs. Meeke and of Mrs. Kitty Cuthbertson, 'Santo Sebastiano, or the Young Protector,'' Adelaide, or the Countercharm,'The Romance of the Pyrenees,' and so forth. The first of these