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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Friends in Council, by Arthur Helps
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Friends in Council
+       First Series
+
+
+Author: Arthur Helps
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 25, 2014  [eBook #7438]
+[This file was first posted on April 30, 2003]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDS IN COUNCIL***
+
+
+This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
+
+                       CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+
+                            Friends in Council
+
+
+                               First Series
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+
+                            SIR ARTHUR HELPS.
+
+                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]
+
+                       CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
+
+                      _LONDON_, _PARIS & MELBOURNE_.
+
+                                  1891.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+ARTHUR HELPS was born at Streatham on the 10th of July, 1813.  He went at
+the age of sixteen to Eton, thence to Trinity College, Cambridge.  Having
+graduated B.A. in 1835, he became private secretary to the Hon. T. Spring
+Rice, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet,
+formed in April, 1835.  This was his position at the beginning of the
+present reign in June, 1837.
+
+In 1839—in which year he graduated M.A.—Arthur Helps was transferred to
+the service of Lord Morpeth, who was Irish Secretary in the same
+ministry.  Lord Melbourne’s Ministry was succeeded by that of Sir Robert
+Peel in September, 1841, and Helps then was appointed a Commissioner of
+French, Danish, and Spanish Claims.  In 1841 he published “Essays Written
+in the Intervals of Business.”  Their quiet thoughtfulness was in accord
+with the spirit that had given value to his services as private secretary
+to two ministers of State.  In 1844 that little book was followed by
+another on “The Claims of Labour,” dealing with the relations of
+employers to employed.  There was the same scholarly simplicity and grace
+of style, the same interest in things worth serious attention.  “We say,”
+he wrote, towards the close, “that Kings are God’s Vicegerents upon
+Earth; but almost every human being has, at one time or other of his
+life, a portion of the happiness of those around him in his power, which
+might make him tremble, if he did but see it in all its fulness.”  To
+this book Arthur Helps added an essay “On the Means of Improving the
+Health and Increasing the Comfort of the Labouring Classes.”
+
+His next book was this First Series of “Friends in Council,” published in
+1847, and followed by other series in later years.  There were many other
+writings of his, less popular than they would have been if the same
+abilities had been controlled by less good taste.  His “History of the
+Conquest of the New World” in 1848, and of “The Spanish Conquest of
+America,” in four volumes, from 1855 to 1861, preceded his obtaining from
+his University, in 1864, the honorary degree of D.C.L.  In June, 1860,
+Arthur Helps was made Clerk of the Privy Council, and held that office of
+high trust until his death on the 7th of March, 1875.  He had become Sir
+Arthur in 1872.
+
+                                                                     H. M.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+NONE but those who, like myself, have once lived in intellectual society,
+and then have been deprived of it for years, can appreciate the delight
+of finding it again.  Not that I have any right to complain, if I were
+fated to live as a recluse for ever.  I can add little, or nothing, to
+the pleasure of any company; I like to listen rather than to talk; and
+when anything apposite does occur to me, it is generally the day after
+the conversation has taken place.  I do not, however, love good talk the
+less for these defects of mine; and I console myself with thinking that I
+sustain the part of a judicious listener, not always an easy one.
+
+Great, then, was my delight at hearing last year that my old pupil,
+Milverton, had taken a house which had long been vacant in our
+neighbourhood.  To add to my pleasure, his college friend, Ellesmere, the
+great lawyer, also an old pupil of mine, came to us frequently in the
+course of the autumn.  Milverton was at that time writing some essays
+which he occasionally read to Ellesmere and myself.  The conversations
+which then took place I am proud to say that I have chronicled.  I think
+they must be interesting to the world in general, though of course not so
+much so as to me.
+
+Milverton and Ellesmere were my favourite pupils.  Many is the heartache
+I have had at finding that those boys, with all their abilities, would do
+nothing at the University.  But it was in vain to urge them.  I grieve to
+say that neither of them had any ambition of the right kind.  Once I
+thought I had stimulated Ellesmere to the proper care and exertion; when,
+to my astonishment and vexation, going into his rooms about a month
+before an examination, I found that, instead of getting up his subjects,
+like a reasonable man, he was absolutely endeavouring to invent some new
+method for proving something which had been proved before in a hundred
+ways.  Over this he had wasted two days, and from that moment I saw it
+was useless to waste any more of my time and patience in urging a scholar
+so indocile for the beaten path.
+
+What tricks he and Milverton used to play me, pretending not to
+understand my demonstration of some mathematical problem, inventing all
+manner of subtle difficulties, and declaring they could not go on while
+these stumbling-blocks lay in their way!  But I am getting into college
+gossip, which may in no way delight my readers.  And I am fancying, too,
+that Milverton and Ellesmere are the boys they were to me; but I am now
+the child to them.  During the years that I have been quietly living
+here, they have become versed in the ways of the busy world.  And though
+they never think of asserting their superiority, I feel it, and am glad
+to do so.
+
+My readers would, perhaps, like one to tell them something of the
+characters of Ellesmere and Milverton; but it would ill become me to give
+that insight into them, which I, their college friend and tutor, imagine
+I have obtained.  Their friendship I could never understand.  It was not
+on the surface very warm, and their congeniality seemed to result more
+from one or two large common principles of thought than from any peculiar
+similarity of taste, or from great affection on either side.  Yet I
+should wrong their friendship if I were to represent it otherwise than a
+most true-hearted one; more so, perhaps, than some of softer texture.
+What needs be seen of them individually will be by their words, which I
+hope I have in the main retained.
+
+The place where we generally met in fine weather was on the lawn before
+Milverton’s house.  It was an eminence which commanded a series of
+valleys sloping towards the sea.  And, as the sea was not more than nine
+miles off, it was a matter of frequent speculation with us whether the
+landscape was bounded by air or water.  In the first valley was a little
+town of red brick houses, with poplars coming up amongst them.  The ruins
+of a castle, and some water which, in olden times, had been the lake in
+“the pleasaunce,” were between us and the town.  The clang of an anvil,
+or the clamour of a horn, or busy wheelwright’s sounds, came faintly up
+to us when the wind was south.
+
+I must not delay my readers longer with my gossip, but bring them at once
+into the conversation that preceded our first reading.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Milverton_.  I tell you, Ellesmere, these are the only heights I care to
+look down from, the heights of natural scenery.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Pooh! my dear Milverton, it is only because the particular
+mounds which the world calls heights, you think you have found out to be
+but larger ant-heaps.  Whenever you have cared about anything, a man more
+fierce and unphilosophical in the pursuit of it I never saw.  To
+influence men’s minds by writing for them, is that no ambition?
+
+_Milverton_.  It may be, but I have it not.  Let any kind critic convince
+me that what I am now doing is useless, or has been done before, or that,
+if I leave it undone, some one else will do it to my mind; and I should
+fold up my papers, and watch the turnips grow in that field there, with a
+placidity that would, perhaps, seem very spiritless to your now restless
+and ambitious nature, Ellesmere.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  If something were to happen which will not, then—O
+Philosophy, Philosophy, you, too, are a good old nurse, and rattle your
+rattles for your little people, as well as old Dame World can do for
+hers.  But what are we to have to-day for our first reading?
+
+_Milverton_.  An Essay on Truth.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, had I known this before, it is not the novelty of the
+subject which would have dragged me up the hill to your house.  By the
+way, philosophers ought not to live upon hills.  They are much more
+accessible, and I think quite as reasonable, when, Diogenes-like, they
+live in tubs upon flat ground.  Now for the essay.
+
+
+
+TRUTH.
+
+
+Truth is a subject which men will not suffer to grow old.  Each age has
+to fight with its own falsehoods: each man with his love of saying to
+himself and those around him pleasant things and things serviceable for
+to-day, rather than the things which are.  Yet a child appreciates at
+once the divine necessity for truth; never asks, “What harm is there in
+saying the thing that is not?” and an old man finds, in his growing
+experience, wider and wider applications of the great doctrine and
+discipline of truth.
+
+Truth needs the wisdom of the serpent as well as the simplicity of the
+dove.  He has gone but a little way in this matter who supposes that it
+is an easy thing for a man to speak the truth, “the thing he troweth;”
+and that it is a casual function, which may be fulfilled at once after
+any lapse of exercise.  But, in the first place, the man who would speak
+truth must know what he troweth.  To do that, he must have an uncorrupted
+judgment.  By this is not meant a perfect judgment or even a wise one,
+but one which, however it may be biassed, is not bought—is still a
+judgment.  But some people’s judgments are so entirely gained over by
+vanity, selfishness, passion, or inflated prejudices and fancies long
+indulged in; or they have the habit of looking at everything so
+carelessly, that they see nothing truly.  They cannot interpret the world
+of reality.  And this is the saddest form of lying, “the lie that sinketh
+in,” as Bacon says, which becomes part of the character and goes on
+eating the rest away.
+
+Again, to speak truth, a man must not only have that martial courage
+which goes out, with sound of drum and trumpet, to do and suffer great
+things; but that domestic courage which compels him to utter small
+sounding truths in spite of present inconvenience and outraged
+sensitiveness or sensibility.  Then he must not be in any respect a slave
+to self-interest.  Often it seems as if but a little misrepresentation
+would gain a great good for us; or, perhaps, we have only to conceal some
+trifling thing, which, if told, might hinder unreasonably, as we think, a
+profitable bargain.  The true man takes care to tell, notwithstanding.
+When we think that truth interferes at one time or another with all a
+man’s likings, hatings, and wishes, we must admit, I think, that it is
+the most comprehensive and varied form of self-denial.
+
+Then, in addition to these great qualities, truth-telling in its highest
+sense requires a well-balanced mind.  For instance, much exaggeration,
+perhaps the most, is occasioned by an impatient and easily moved
+temperament which longs to convey its own vivid impressions to other
+minds, and seeks by amplifying to gain the full measure of their
+sympathy.  But a true man does not think what his hearers are feeling,
+but what he is saying.
+
+More stress might be laid than has been on the intellectual requisites
+for truth, which are probably the best part of intellectual cultivation;
+and as much caused by truth as causing it. {12}  But, putting the
+requisites for truth at the fewest, see of how large a portion of the
+character truth is the resultant.  If you were to make a list of those
+persons accounted the religious men of their respective ages, you would
+have a ludicrous combination of characters essentially dissimilar.  But
+true people are kindred.  Mention the eminently true men, and you will
+find that they are a brotherhood.  There is a family likeness throughout
+them.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+If we consider the occasions of exercising truthfulness and descend to
+particulars, we may divide the matter into the following heads:—truth to
+oneself—truth to mankind in general—truth in social relations—truth in
+business—truth in pleasure.
+
+1.  Truth to oneself.  All men have a deep interest that each man should
+tell himself the truth.  Not only will he become a better man, but he
+will understand them better.  If men knew themselves, they could not be
+intolerant to others.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say much about the advantage of a man knowing
+himself for himself.  To get at the truth of any history is good; but a
+man’s own history—when he reads that truly, and, without a mean and
+over-solicitous introspection, knows what he is about and what he has
+been about, it is a Bible to him.  “And David said unto Nathan, I have
+sinned before the Lord.”  David knew the truth about himself.  But truth
+to oneself is not merely truth about oneself.  It consists in maintaining
+an openness and justness of soul which brings a man into relation with
+all truth.  For this, all the senses, if you might so call them, of the
+soul must be uninjured—that is, the affections and the perceptions must
+be just.  For a man to speak the truth to himself comprehends all
+goodness; and for us mortals can only be an aim.
+
+2.  Truth to mankind in general.  This is a matter which, as I read it,
+concerns only the higher natures.  Suffice it to say, that the
+withholding large truths from the world may be a betrayal of the greatest
+trust.
+
+3.  Truth in social relations.  Under this head come the practices of
+making speech vary according to the person spoken to; of pretending to
+agree with the world when you do not; of not acting according to what is
+your deliberate and well-advised opinion because some mischief may be
+made of it by persons whose judgment in this matter you do not respect;
+of maintaining a wrong course for the sake of consistency; of encouraging
+the show of intimacy with those whom you never can be intimate with; and
+many things of the same kind.  These practices have elements of charity
+and prudence as well as fear and meanness in them.  Let those parts which
+correspond to fear and meanness be put aside.  Charity and prudence are
+not parasitical plants which require boles of falsehood to climb up upon.
+It is often extremely difficult in the mixed things of this world to act
+truly and kindly too; but therein lies one of the great trials of man,
+that his sincerity should have kindness in it, and his kindness truth.
+
+4.  Truth in business.  The more truth you can get into any business, the
+better.  Let the other side know the defects of yours, let them know how
+you are to be satisfied, let there be as little to be found as possible
+(I should say nothing), and if your business be an honest one, it will be
+best tended in this way.  The talking, bargaining, and delaying that
+would thus be needless, the little that would then have to be done over
+again, the anxiety that would be put aside, would even in a worldly way
+be “great gain.”  It is not, perhaps, too much to say, that the third
+part of men’s lives is wasted by the effect, direct or indirect, of
+falsehoods.
+
+Still, let us not be swift to imagine that lies are never of any service.
+A recent Prime Minister said, that he did not know about truth always
+prevailing and the like; but lies had been very successful against his
+government.  And this was true enough.  Every lie has its day.  There is
+no preternatural inefficacy in it by reason of its falseness.  And this
+is especially the case with those vague injurious reports which are no
+man’s lies, but all men’s carelessness.  But even as regards special and
+unmistakable falsehood, we must admit that it has its success.  A
+complete being might deceive with wonderful effect; however, as nature is
+always against a liar, it is great odds in the case of ordinary mortals.
+Wolsey talks of
+
+                      “Negligence
+    Fit for a fool to fall by,”
+
+when he gives Henry the wrong packet; but the Cardinal was quite
+mistaken.  That kind of negligence was just the thing of which far-seeing
+and thoughtful men are capable; and which, if there were no higher
+motive, should induce them to rely on truth alone.  A very close vulpine
+nature, all eyes, all ears, may succeed better in deceit.  But it is a
+sleepless business.  Yet, strange to say, it is had recourse to in the
+most spendthrift fashion, as the first and easiest thing that comes to
+hand.
+
+In connection with truth in business, it may be observed that if you are
+a truthful man, you should be watchful over those whom you employ; for
+your subordinate agents are often fond of lying for your interests, as
+they think.  Show them at once that you do not think with them, and that
+you will disconcert any of their inventions by breaking in with the
+truth.  If you suffer the fear of seeming unkind to prevent your
+thrusting well-meant inventions aside, you may get as much pledged to
+falsehoods as if you had coined and uttered them yourself.
+
+5.  Truth in pleasure.  Men have been said to be sincere in their
+pleasures; but this is only that the taste and habits of men are more
+easily discernible in pleasure than in business.  The want of truth is as
+great a hindrance to the one as to the other.  Indeed, there is so much
+insincerity and formality in the pleasurable department of human life,
+especially in social pleasures, that instead of a bloom there is a slime
+upon it, which deadens and corrupts the thing.  One of the most comical
+sights to superior beings must be to see two human creatures with
+elaborate speech and gestures making each other exquisitely uncomfortable
+from civility: the one pressing what he is most anxious that the other
+should not accept, and the other accepting only from the fear of giving
+offence by refusal.  There is an element of charity in all this too; and
+it will be the business of a just and refined nature to be sincere and
+considerate at the same time.  This will be better done by enlarging our
+sympathy, so that more things and people are pleasant to us, than by
+increasing the civil and conventional part of our nature, so that we are
+able to do more seeming with greater skill and endurance.  Of other false
+hindrances to pleasure, such as ostentation and pretences of all kinds,
+there is neither charity nor comfort in them.  They may be got rid of
+altogether, and no moaning made over them.  Truth, which is one of the
+largest creatures, opens out the way to the heights of enjoyment, as well
+as to the depths of self-denial.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+It is difficult to think too highly of the merits and delights of truth;
+but there is often in men’s minds an exaggerated notion of some bit of
+truth, which proves a great assistance to falsehood.  For instance, the
+shame of some particular small falsehood, exaggeration, or insincerity,
+becomes a bugbear which scares a man into a career of false dealing.  He
+has begun making a furrow a little out of the line, and he ploughs on in
+it to try and give some consistency and meaning to it.  He wants almost
+to persuade himself that it was not wrong, and entirely to hide the
+wrongness from others.  This is a tribute to the majesty of truth; also
+to the world’s opinion about truth.  It proceeds, too, upon the notion
+that all falsehoods are equal, which is not the case; or on some fond
+craving for a show of perfection, which is sometimes very inimical to the
+reality.  The practical, as well as the high-minded, view in such cases,
+is for a man to think how he can be true now.  To attain that, it may,
+even for this world, be worth while for a man to admit that he is
+inconsistent, and even that he has been untrue.  His hearers, did they
+know anything of themselves, would be fully aware that he was not
+singular, except in the courage of owning his insincerity.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  That last part requires thinking about.  If you were to
+permit men, without great loss of reputation, to own that they had been
+insincere, you might break down some of that majesty of truth you talk
+about.  And bad men might avail themselves of any facilities of owning
+insincerity, to commit more of it.  I can imagine that the apprehension
+of this might restrain a man from making any such admission as you allude
+to, even if he could make up his mind to do it otherwise.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes; but can anything be worse than a man going on in a
+false course?  Each man must look to his own truthfulness, and keep that
+up as well as he can, even at the risk of saying, or doing, something
+which may be turned to ill account by others.  We may think too much
+about this reflection of our external selves.  Let the real self be
+right.  I am not so fanciful as to expect men to go about clamouring that
+they have been false; but at no risk of letting people see that, or of
+even being obliged to own it, should they persevere in it.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Milverton is right, I think.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Do not imagine that I am behind either of you in a wish to
+hold up truth.  My only doubt was as to the mode.  For my own part, I
+have such faith in truth that I take it mere concealment is in most cases
+a mischief.  And I should say, for instance, that a wise man would be
+sorry that his fellows should think better of him than he deserves.  By
+the way, that is a reason why I should not like to be a writer of moral
+essays, Milverton—one should be supposed to be so very good.
+
+_Milverton_.  Only by thoughtless people then.  There is a saying given
+to Rousseau, not that he ever did say it, for I believe it was a
+misprint, but it was a possible saying for him, “Chaque homme qui pense
+est méchant.”  Now, without going the length of this aphorism, we may say
+that what has been well written has been well suffered.
+
+    “He best can paint them who has felt them most.”
+
+And so, though we should not exactly declare that writers who have had
+much moral influence have been wicked men, yet we may admit that they
+have been amongst the most struggling, which implies anything but serene
+self-possession and perfect spotlessness.  If you take the great ones,
+Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, you see this at once.
+
+_Dunsford_.  David, St. Paul.
+
+_Milverton_.  Such men are like great rocks on the seashore.  By their
+resistance, terraces of level land are formed; but the rocks themselves
+bear many scars and ugly indents, while the sea of human difficulty
+presents the same unwrinkled appearance in all ages.  Yet it has been
+driven back.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  But has it lost any of its bulk, or only gone elsewhere?
+One part of the resemblance certainly is that these same rocks, which
+were bulwarks, become, in their turn, dangers.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, there is always loss in that way.  It is seldom given
+to man to do unmixed good.  But it was not this aspect of the simile that
+I was thinking of: it was the scarred appearance.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Scars not always of defeat or flight; scars in the front.
+
+_Milverton_.  Ah, it hardly does for us to talk of victory or defeat, in
+these cases; but we may look at the contest itself as something not bad,
+terminate how it may.  We lament over a man’s sorrows, struggles,
+disasters, and shortcomings; yet they were possessions too.  We talk of
+the origin of evil and the permission of evil.  But what is evil?  We
+mostly speak of sufferings and trials as good, perhaps, in their result;
+but we hardly admit that they may be good in themselves.  Yet they are
+knowledge—how else to be acquired, unless by making men as gods, enabling
+them to understand without experience.  All that men go through may be
+absolutely the best for them—no such thing as evil, at least in our
+customary meaning of the word.  But, you will say, they might have been
+created different and higher.  See where this leads to.  Any sentient
+being may set up the same claim: a fly that it had not been made a man;
+and so the end would be that each would complain of not being all.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Say it all over again, my dear Milverton: it is rather
+hard.  [Milverton did so, in nearly the same words.]  I think I have
+heard it all before.  But you may have it as you please.  I do not say
+this irreverently, but the truth is, I am too old and too earthly to
+enter upon these subjects.  I think, however, that the view is a
+stout-hearted one.  It is somewhat in the same vein of thought that you
+see in Carlyle’s works about the contempt of happiness.  But in all these
+cases, one is apt to think of the sage in “Rasselas,” who is very wise
+about human misery till he loses his daughter.  Your fly illustration has
+something in it.  Certainly when men talk big about what might have been
+done for man, they omit to think what might be said, on similar grounds,
+for each sentient creature in the universe.  But here have we been
+meandering off into origin of evil, and uses of great men, and wickedness
+of writers, etc., whereas I meant to have said something about the essay.
+How would you answer what Bacon maintains?  “A mixture of a lie doth ever
+add pleasure.”
+
+_Milverton_.  He is not speaking of the lies of social life, but of
+self-deception.  He goes on to class under that head “vain opinions,
+flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would.”  These
+things are the sweetness of “the lie that sinketh in.”  Many a man has a
+kind of mental kaleidoscope, where the bits of broken glass are his own
+merits and fortunes, and they fall into harmonious arrangements and
+delight him—often most mischievously and to his ultimate detriment, but
+they are a present pleasure.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, I am going to be true in my pleasures: to take a long
+walk alone.  I have got a difficult case for an opinion, which I must go
+and think over.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Shall we have another reading tomorrow?
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, if you are both in the humour for it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+AS the next day was fine, we agreed to have our reading in the same spot
+that I have described before.  There was scarcely any conversation worth
+noting, until after Milverton had read us the following essay on
+Conformity.
+
+
+
+CONFORMITY.
+
+
+The conformity of men is often a far poorer thing than that which
+resembles it amongst the lower animals.  The monkey imitates from
+imitative skill and gamesomeness: the sheep is gregarious, having no
+sufficient will to form an independent project of its own.  But man often
+loathes what he imitates, and conforms to what he knows to be wrong.
+
+It will ever be one of the nicest problems for a man to solve how far he
+shall profit by the thoughts of other men, and not be enslaved by them.
+He comes into the world, and finds swaddling clothes ready for his mind
+as well as his body.  There is a vast scheme of social machinery set up
+about him; and he has to discern how he can make it work with him and for
+him, without becoming part of the machinery himself.  In this lie the
+anguish and the struggle of the greatest minds.  Most sad are they,
+having mostly the deepest sympathies, when they find themselves breaking
+off from communion with other minds.  They would go on, if they could,
+with the opinions around them.  But, happily, there is something to which
+a man owes a larger allegiance than to any human affection.  He would be
+content to go away from a false thing, or quietly to protest against it;
+but in spite of him the strife in his heart breaks into burning utterance
+by word or deed.
+
+Few, however, are those who venture, even for the shortest time, into
+that hazy world of independent thought, where a man is not upheld by a
+crowd of other men’s opinions, but where he must find a footing of his
+own.  Among the mass of men, there is little or no resistance to
+conformity.  Could the history of opinions be fully written, it would be
+seen how large a part in human proceedings the love of conformity, or
+rather the fear of non-conformity, has occasioned.  It has triumphed over
+all other fears; over love, hate, pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride,
+comfort, self-interest, vanity, and maternal love.  It has torn down the
+sense of beauty in the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly
+idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion.
+It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious things, and been listened
+to with abject submission.  Its empire has been no less extensive than
+deep-seated.  The serf to custom points his finger at the slave to
+fashion—as if it signified whether it is an old or a new thing which is
+irrationally conformed to.  The man of letters despises both the slaves
+of fashion and of custom, but often runs his narrow career of thought,
+shut up, though he sees it not, within close walls which he does not
+venture even to peep over.
+
+It is hard to say in what department of human thought and endeavour
+conformity has triumphed most.  Religion comes to one’s mind first; and
+well it may when one thinks what men have conformed to in all ages in
+that matter.  If we pass to art, or science, we shall see there too the
+wondrous slavery which men have endured—from puny fetters, moreover,
+which one stirring thought would, as we think, have burst asunder.  The
+above, however, are matters not within every one’s cognisance; some of
+them are shut in by learning or the show of it; and plain “practical” men
+would say, they follow where they have no business but to follow.  But
+the way in which the human body shall be covered is not a thing for the
+scientific and the learned only: and is allowed on all hands to concern,
+in no small degree, one half at least of the creation.  It is in such a
+simple thing as dress that each of us may form some estimate of the
+extent of conformity in the world.  A wise nation, unsubdued by
+superstition, with the collected experience of peaceful ages, concludes
+that female feet are to be clothed by crushing them.  The still wiser
+nations of the west have adopted a swifter mode of destroying health, and
+creating angularity, by crushing the upper part of the female body.  In
+such matters nearly all people conform.  Our brother man is seldom so
+bitter against us, as when we refuse to adopt at once his notions of the
+infinite.  But even religious dissent were less dangerous and more
+respectable than dissent in dress.  If you want to see what men will do
+in the way of conformity, take a European hat for your subject of
+meditation.  I dare say there are twenty-two millions of people at this
+minute each wearing one of these hats in order to please the rest.  As in
+the fine arts, and in architecture, especially, so in dress, something is
+often retained that was useful when something else was beside it.  To go
+to architecture for an instance, a pinnacle is retained, not that it is
+of any use where it is, but in another kind of building it would have
+been.  That style of building, as a whole, has gone out of fashion, but
+the pinnacle has somehow or other kept its ground and must be there, no
+one insolently going back to first principles and asking what is the use
+and object of building pinnacles.  Similar instances in dress will occur
+to my readers.  Some of us are not skilled in such affairs; but looking
+at old pictures we may sometimes see how modern clothes have attained
+their present pitch of frightfulness and inconvenience.  This matter of
+dress is one in which, perhaps, you might expect the wise to conform to
+the foolish; and they have.
+
+When we have once come to a right estimate of the strength of conformity,
+we shall, I think, be more kindly disposed to eccentricity than we
+usually are.  Even a wilful or an absurd eccentricity is some support
+against the weighty common-place conformity of the world.  If it were not
+for some singular people who persist in thinking for themselves, in
+seeing for themselves, and in being comfortable, we should all collapse
+into a hideous uniformity.
+
+It is worth while to analyse that influence of the world which is the
+right arm of conformity.  Some persons bend to the world in all things,
+from an innocent belief that what so many people think must be right.
+Others have a vague fear of the world as of some wild beast which may
+spring out upon them at any time.  Tell them they are safe in their
+houses from this myriad-eyed creature: they still are sure that they
+shall meet with it some day, and would propitiate its favour at any
+sacrifice.  Many men contract their idea of the world to their own
+circle, and what they imagine to be said in that circle of friends and
+acquaintances is their idea of public opinion—“as if,” to use a saying of
+Southey’s, “a number of worldlings made a world.”  With some unfortunate
+people, the much dreaded “world” shrinks into one person of more mental
+power than their own, or perhaps merely of coarser nature; and the fancy
+as to what this person will say about anything they do, sits upon them
+like a nightmare.  Happy the man who can embark his small adventure of
+deeds and thoughts upon the shallow waters round his home, or send them
+afloat on the wide sea of humanity, with no great anxiety in either case
+as to what reception they may meet with!  He would have them steer by the
+stars, and take what wind may come to them.
+
+A reasonable watchfulness against conformity will not lead a man to spurn
+the aid of other men, still less to reject the accumulated mental capital
+of ages.  It does not compel us to dote upon the advantages of savage
+life.  We would not forego the hard-earned gains of civil society because
+there is something in most of them which tends to contract the natural
+powers, although it vastly aids them.  We would not, for instance, return
+to the monosyllabic utterance of barbarous men, because in any formed
+language there are a thousand snares for the understanding.  Yet we must
+be most watchful of them.  And in all things, a man must beware of so
+conforming himself as to crush his nature and forego the purpose of his
+being.  We must look to other standards than what men may say or think.
+We must not abjectly bow down before rules and usages; but must refer to
+principles and purposes.  In few words, we must think, not whom we are
+following, but what we are doing.  If not, why are we gifted with
+individual life at all?  Uniformity does not consist with the higher
+forms of vitality.  Even the leaves of the same tree are said to differ,
+each one from all the rest.  And can it be good for the soul of a man
+“with a biography of his own like to no one else’s,” to subject itself
+without thought to the opinions and ways of others: not to grow into
+symmetry, but to be moulded down into conformity?
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, I rather like that essay.  I was afraid, at first, it
+was going to have more of the fault into which you essay writers
+generally fall, of being a comment on the abuse of a thing, and not on
+the thing itself.  There always seems to me to want another essay on the
+other side.  But I think, at the end, you protect yourself against
+misconstruction.  In the spirit of the essay, you know, of course, that I
+quite agree with you.  Indeed, I differ from all the ordinary biographers
+of that independent gentleman, Don’t Care.  I believe Don’t Care came to
+a good end.  At any rate he came to some end.  Whereas numbers of people
+never have beginning, or ending, of their own.  An obscure dramatist,
+Milverton, whom we know of, makes one of his characters say, in reply to
+some world-fearing wretch:
+
+                   “While you, you think
+    What others think, or what you think they’ll say,
+    Shaping your course by something scarce more tangible
+    Than dreams, at best the shadows on the stream
+    Of aspen leaves by flickering breezes swayed—
+    Load me with irons, drive me from morn till night,
+    I am not the utter slave which that man is
+    Whose sole word, thought, and deed are built on what
+    The world may say of him.”
+
+_Milverton_.  Never mind the obscure dramatist.  But, Ellesmere, you
+really are unreasonable, if you suppose that, in the limits of a short
+essay, you can accurately distinguish all you write between the use and
+the abuse of a thing.  The question is, will people misunderstand
+you—not, is the language such as to be logically impregnable?  Now, in
+the present case, no man will really suppose it is a wise and just
+conformity that I am inveighing against.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I am not sure of that.  If everybody is to have independent
+thought, would there not be a fearful instability and want of
+compactness?  Another thing, too—conformity often saves so much time and
+trouble.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes; it has its uses.  I do not mean, in the world of
+opinion and morality, that it should be all elasticity and no
+gravitation; but at least enough elasticity to preserve natural form and
+independent being.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I think it would have been better if you had turned the
+essay another way, and instead of making it on conformity, had made it on
+interference.  That is the greater mischief and the greater folly, I
+think.  Why do people unreasonably conform?  Because they feel
+unreasonable interference.  War, I say, is interference on a small scale
+compared with the interference of private life.  Then the absurdity on
+which it proceeds; that men are all alike, or that it is desirable that
+they should be; and that what is good for one is good for all.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I must say, I think, Milverton, you do not give enough
+credit for sympathy, good-nature, and humility as material elements in
+the conformity of the world.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I am not afraid, my dear Dunsford, of the essay doing much
+harm.  There is a power of sleepy conformity in the world.  You may just
+startle your conformists for a minute, but they gravitate into their old
+way very soon.  You talk of their humility, Dunsford, but I have heard
+people who have conformed to opinions, without a pretence of
+investigation, as arrogant and intolerant towards anybody who differed
+from them, as if they stood upon a pinnacle of independent sagacity and
+research.
+
+_Dunsford_.  One never knows, Ellesmere, on which side you are.  I
+thought you were on mine a minute or two ago; and now you come down upon
+me with more than Milverton’s anti-conforming spirit.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  The greatest mischief, as I take it, of this slavish
+conformity, is in the reticence it creates.  People will be, what are
+called, intimate friends, and yet no real interchange of opinion takes
+place between them.  A man keeps his doubts, his difficulties, and his
+peculiar opinions to himself.  He is afraid of letting anybody know that
+he does not exactly agree with the world’s theories on all points.  There
+is no telling the hindrance that this is to truth.
+
+_Milverton_.  A great cause of this, Ellesmere, is in the little reliance
+you can have on any man’s secrecy.  A man finds that what, in the heat of
+discussion, and in the perfect carelessness of friendship, he has said to
+his friend, is quoted to people whom he would never have said it to;
+knowing that it would be sure to be misunderstood, or half-understood, by
+them.  And so he grows cautious; and is very loth to communicate to
+anybody his more cherished opinions, unless they fall in exactly with the
+stream.  Added to which, I think there is in these times less than there
+ever was of a proselytising spirit; and people are content to keep their
+opinions to themselves—more perhaps from indifference than from fear.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes, I agree with you.
+
+By the way, I think your taking dress as an illustration of extreme
+conformity is not bad.  Really it is wonderful the degree of square and
+dull hideousness to which, in the process of time and tailoring, and by
+severe conformity, the human creature’s outward appearance has arrived.
+Look at a crowd of men from a height, what an ugly set of ants they
+appear!  Myself, when I see an Eastern man, one of the people attached to
+their embassies, sweeping by us in something flowing and stately, I feel
+inclined to take off my hat to him (only that I think the hat might
+frighten him), and say, Here is a great, unhatted, uncravated, bearded
+man, not a creature clipt and twisted and tortured into tailorhood.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Ellesmere broke in upon me just now, so that I did not say
+all that I meant to say.  But, Milverton, what would you admit that we
+are to conform to?  In silencing the general voice, may we not give too
+much opportunity to our own headstrong suggestions, and to wilful
+licence?
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes: to be somewhat deaf to the din of the world may be no
+gain, even loss, if then we only listen more to the worst part of
+ourselves; but in itself it is a good thing to silence that din.  It is
+at least a beginning of good.  If anything good is then gained, it is not
+a sheepish tendency, but an independent resolve growing out of our
+nature.  And, after all, when we talk of non-conformity, it may only be
+that we non-conform to the immediate sect of thought or action about us,
+to conform to a much wider thing in human nature.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Ah me! how one wants a moral essayist always at hand to
+enable one to make use of moral essays.
+
+_Milverton_.  Your rules of law are grand things—the proverbs of justice;
+yet has not each case its specialities, requiring to be argued with much
+circumstance, and capable of different interpretations?  Words cannot be
+made into men.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I wonder you answer his sneers, Milverton.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I must go and see whether words cannot be made into
+guineas: and then guineas into men is an easy thing.  These trains will
+not wait even for critics, so, for the present, good-bye.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+ELLESMERE soon wrote us word that he would be able to come down again;
+and I agreed to be at Worth-Ashton (Milverton’s house) on the day of his
+arrival.  I had scarcely seated myself at our usual place of meeting
+before the friends entered, and after greeting me, the conversation thus
+began:
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Upon my word, you people who live in the country have a
+pleasant time of it.  As Milverton was driving me from the station
+through Durley Wood, there was such a rich smell of pines, such a
+twittering of birds, so much joy, sunshine, and beauty, that I began to
+think, if there were no such place as London, it really would be very
+desirable to live in the country.
+
+_Milverton_.  What a climax!  But I am always very suspicious, when
+Ellesmere appears to be carried away by any enthusiasm, that it will
+break off suddenly, like the gallop of a post-horse.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, what are we to have for our essay!
+
+_Milverton_.  Despair.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I feel equal to anything just now, and so, if it must be
+read sometime or other, let us have it now.
+
+_Milverton_.  You need not be afraid.  I want to take away, not to add
+gloom.  Shall I read?
+
+We assented, and he began.
+
+
+
+DESPAIR.
+
+
+Despair may be serviceable when it arises from a temporary prostration of
+spirits: during which the mind is insensibly healing, and her scattered
+power silently returning.  This is better than to be the sport of a
+teasing hope without reason.  But to indulge in despair as a habit is
+slothful, cowardly, short-sighted; and manifestly tends against Nature.
+Despair is then the paralysis of the soul.
+
+These are the principal causes of despair—remorse, the sorrows of the
+affections, worldly trouble, morbid views of religion, native melancholy.
+
+
+
+REMORSE.
+
+
+Remorse does but add to the evil which bred it, when it promotes, not
+penitence, but despair.  To have erred in one branch of our duties does
+not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless we suffer the
+dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may happen almost
+unobserved in the torpor of despair.  This kind of despair is chiefly
+grounded on a foolish belief that individual words or actions constitute
+the whole life of man: whereas they are often not fair representatives of
+portions even of that life.  The fragments of rock in a mountain stream
+may tell much of its history, are in fact results of its doings, but they
+are not the stream.  They were brought down when it was turbid; it may
+now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances as of
+the action of the stream; their history is fitful: they give us no sure
+intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of its
+waters; and may scarcely show more than that it has not been always as it
+is.  The actions of men are often but little better indications of the
+men themselves.
+
+A prolonged despair arising from remorse is unreasonable at any age, but
+if possible, still more so when felt by the young.  To think, for
+example, that the great Being who made us could have made eternal ruin
+and misery inevitable to a poor half-fledged creature of eighteen or
+nineteen!  And yet how often has the profoundest despair from remorse
+brooded over children of that age and eaten into their hearts.
+
+There is frequently much selfishness about remorse.  Put what has been
+done at the worst.  Let a man see his own evil word, or deed, in full
+light, and own it to be black as hell itself.  He is still here.  He
+cannot be isolated.  There still remain for him cares and duties; and,
+therefore, hopes.  Let him not in imagination link all creation to his
+fate.  Let him yet live in the welfare of others, and, if it may be so,
+work out his own in this way: if not, be content with theirs.  The
+saddest cause of remorseful despair is when a man does something
+expressly contrary to his character: when an honourable man, for
+instance, slides into some dishonourable action; or a tender-hearted man
+falls into cruelty from carelessness; or, as often happens, a sensitive
+nature continues to give the greatest pain to others from temper, feeling
+all the time, perhaps, more deeply than the persons aggrieved.  All these
+cases may be summed up in the words, “That which I would not that I do,”
+the saddest of all human confessions, made by one of the greatest men.
+However, the evil cannot be mended by despair.  Hope and humility are the
+only supports under this burden.  As Mr. Carlyle says,
+
+    “What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the
+    inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled,
+    never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten.  ‘It is not in man that
+    walketh to direct his steps.’  Of all acts, is not, for a man,
+    _repentance_ the most divine?  The deadliest sin, I say, were that
+    same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death: the heart
+    so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is dead:
+    it is ‘pure’ as dead dry sand is pure.  David’s life and history, as
+    written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest
+    emblem ever given of a man’s moral progress and warfare here below.
+    All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an
+    earnest human soul towards what is good and best.  Struggle often
+    baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle
+    never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable
+    purpose, begun anew.  Poor human nature! is not a man’s walking, in
+    truth, always that: a ‘succession of falls!’  Man can do no other.
+    In this wild element of a Life, he has to struggle onwards; now
+    fallen, deep abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding
+    heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards.  That his
+    struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: this is the question of
+    questions.”
+
+
+
+THE SORROWS OF THE AFFECTIONS.
+
+
+The loss by death of those we love has the first place in these sorrows.
+Yet the feeling in this case, even when carried to the highest, is not
+exactly despair, having too much warmth in it for that.  Not much can be
+said in the way of comfort on this head.  Queen Elizabeth, in her hard,
+wise way, writing to a mother who had lost her son, tells her that she
+will be comforted in time; and why should she not do for herself what the
+mere lapse of time will do for her?  Brave words! and the stern woman,
+more earnest than the sage in “Rasselas,” would have tried their virtue
+on herself.  But I fear they fell somewhat coldly on the mother’s ear.
+Happily, in these bereavements, kind Nature with her opiates, day by day
+administered, does more than all the skill of the physician moralists.
+Sir Thomas Browne says,
+
+    “Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
+    with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
+    remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave
+    but short smart upon us.  Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows
+    destroy us or themselves.  To weep into stones are fables.
+    Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like
+    snow upon us, which, notwithstanding, is no unhappy stupidity.  To be
+    ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful
+    provision in Nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and
+    evil days, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting
+    remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
+    repetitions.”
+
+The good knight thus makes much comfort out of our physical weakness.
+But something may be done in a very different direction, namely, by
+spiritual strength.  By elevating and purifying the sorrow, we may take
+it more out of matter, as it were, and so feel less the loss of what is
+material about it.
+
+The other sorrows of the affections which may produce despair, are those
+in which the affections are wounded, as jealousy, love unrequited,
+friendship betrayed and the like.  As, in despair from remorse, the whole
+life seems to be involved in one action: so in the despair we are now
+considering, the whole life appears to be shut up in the one unpropitious
+affection.  Yet human nature, if fairly treated, is too large a thing to
+be suppressed into despair by one affection, however potent.  We might
+imagine that if there were anything that would rob life of its strength
+and favour, it is domestic unhappiness.  And yet how numerous is the bond
+of those whom we know to have been eminently unhappy in some domestic
+relation, but whose lives have been full of vigorous and kindly action.
+Indeed the culture of the world has been largely carried on by such men.
+As long as there is life in the plant, though it be sadly pent in, it
+will grow towards any opening of light that is left for it.
+
+
+
+WORLDLY TROUBLE.
+
+
+This appears too mean a subject for despair, or, at least, unworthy of
+having any remedy, or soothing thought out of it.  Whether a man lives in
+a large room or a small one, rides or is obliged to walk, gets a
+plenteous dinner every day, or a sparing one, do not seem matters for
+despair.  But the truth is, that worldly trouble, such for instance, as
+loss of fortune, is seldom the simple thing that poets would persuade us.
+
+    “The little or the much she gave is quietly resigned;
+    Content with poverty, my soul I arm,
+    And virtue, though in rags will keep me warm.”
+
+So sings Dryden, paraphrasing Horace, but each of them with their
+knowledge of the world, cross-questioned in prose, could have told us how
+the stings of fortune really are felt.  The truth is, that fortune is not
+exactly a distinct isolated thing which can be taken away—“and there an
+end.”  But much has to be severed, with undoubted pain in the operation.
+A man mostly feels that his reputation for sagacity, often his honour,
+the comfort, too, or supposed comfort, of others are embarked in his
+fortunes.  Mere stoicism, and resolves about fitting fortune to oneself,
+not oneself to fortune, though good things enough in their way, will not
+always meet the whole of the case.  And a man who could bear personal
+distress of any kind with Spartan indifference, may suffer himself to be
+overwhelmed by despair growing out of worldly trouble.  A frequent origin
+of such despair, as indeed of all despair (not by any means excluding
+despair from remorse), is pride.  Let a man say to himself, “I am not the
+perfect character I meant to be; this is not the conduct I had imagined
+for myself; these are not the fortunate circumstances I had always
+intended to be surrounded by.”  Let him at once admit that he is on a
+lower level than his ideal one; and then see what is to be done there.
+This seems the best way of treating all that part of worldly trouble
+which consists of self-reproval.  We scarcely know of any outward life
+continuously prosperous (and a very dull one it would be): why should we
+expect the inner life to be one course of unbroken self-improvement,
+either in prudence, or in virtue?
+
+Before a man gives way to excessive grief about the fortunes of his
+family being lost with his own, he should think whether he really knows
+wherein lies the welfare of others.  Give him some fairy power,
+inexhaustible purses or magic lamps, not, however, applying to the mind;
+and see whether he could make those whom he would favour good or happy.
+In the East, they have a proverb of this kind, Happy are the children of
+those fathers who go to the Evil One.  But for anything that our Western
+experience shows, the proverb might be reversed, and, instead of running
+thus, Happy are the sons of those who have got money anyhow, it might be,
+Happy are the sons of those who have failed in getting money.  In fact,
+there is no sound proverb to be made about it either way.  We know
+nothing about the matter.  Our surest influence for good or evil over
+others is, through themselves.  Our ignorance of what is physically good
+for any man may surely prevent anything like despair with regard to that
+part of the fortunes of others dear to us, which, as we think, is bound
+up with our own.
+
+
+
+MORBID VIEWS OF RELIGION.
+
+
+As religion is the most engrossing subject that can be presented to us,
+it will be considered in all states of mind and by all minds.  It is
+impossible but that the most hideous and perverted views of religion must
+arise.  To combat the particular views which may be supposed to cause
+religious despair, would be too theological an undertaking for this
+essay.  One thing only occurs to me to say, namely, that the lives and
+the mode of speaking about themselves adopted by the founders of
+Christianity, afford the best contradiction to religious melancholy that
+I believe can be met with.
+
+
+
+NATIVE MELANCHOLY.
+
+
+There is such a thing.  Jacques, without the “sundry contemplation” of
+his travels, or any “simples” to “compound” his melancholy form, would
+have ever been wrapped in a “most humorous sadness.”  It was innate.
+This melancholy may lay its votaries open to any other cause of despair,
+but having mostly some touch of philosophy (if it be not absolutely
+morbid), it is not unlikely to preserve them from any extremity.  It is
+not acute, but chronic.
+
+It may be said in its favour that it tends to make men indifferent to
+their own fortunes.  But then the sorrow of the world presses more deeply
+upon them.  With large open hearts, the untowardness of things present,
+the miseries of the past, the mischief, stupidity, and error which reign
+in the world, at times almost crush your melancholy men.  Still, out of
+their sadness may come their strength, or, at least, the best direction
+of it.  Nothing, perhaps, is lost; not even sin—much less sorrow.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I am glad you have ended as you have: for, previously, you
+seemed to make too much of getting rid of all distress of mind.  I always
+liked that passage in “Philip van Artevelde,” where Father John says,
+
+    “He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
+    Eternity mourns that.”
+
+You have a better memory than I have: how does it go on?
+
+_Milverton_.
+
+                            “’Tis an ill cure
+    For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
+    Where sorrow’s held intrusive and turned out,
+    There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
+    Nor aught that dignifies humanity.”
+
+Still this does not justify despair, which was what I was writing about.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Perhaps it was not a just criticism of mine.  One part of
+the subject you have certainly omitted.  You do not tell us how much
+there often is of physical disorder in despair.  I dare say you will
+think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must
+confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can
+walk down distress of mind—even remorse, perhaps.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes; I am for the Peripatetics against all other
+philosophers.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  By the way, there is a passage in one of Hazlitt’s essays,
+I thought of while you were reading, about remorse and religious
+melancholy.  He speaks of mixing up religion and morality; and then goes
+on to say, that Calvinistic notions have obscured and prevented
+self-knowledge. {42}
+
+Give me the essay—there is a passage I want to look at.  This comparison
+of life to a mountain stream, the rocks brought down by it being the
+actions, is too much worked out.  When we speak of similes not going on
+four legs, it implies, I think, that a simile is at best but a
+four-legged animal.  Now this is almost a centipede of a simile.  I think
+I have had the same thought as yours here, and I have compared the life
+of an individual to a curve.  You both smile.  Now I thought that
+Dunsford at any rate would be pleased with this reminiscence of college
+days.  But to proceed with my curve.  You may have numbers of the points
+through which it passes given, and yet know nothing of the nature of the
+curve itself.  See, now, it shall pass through here and here, but how it
+will go in the interval, what is the law of its being, we know not.  But
+this simile would be too mathematical, I fear.
+
+_Milverton_.  I hold to the centipede.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Not a word has Dunsford said all this time.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I like the essay.  I was not criticising as we went along,
+but thinking that perhaps the greatest charm of books is, that we see in
+them that other men have suffered what we have.  Some souls we ever find
+who could have responded to all our agony, be it what it may.  This at
+least robs misery of its loneliness.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  On the other hand, the charm of intercourse with our
+fellows, when we are in sadness, is that they do not reflect it in any
+way.  Each keeps his own trouble to himself, and often pretending to
+think and care about other things, comes to do so for the time.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, but you might choose books which would not reflect
+your troubles.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  But the fact of having to make a choice to do this, does
+away, perhaps, with some part of the benefit: whereas, in intercourse
+with living men, you take what you find, and you find that neither your
+trouble, nor any likeness of it, is absorbing other people.  But this is
+not the whole reason: the truth is, the life and impulses of other men
+are catching; you cannot explain exactly how it is that they take you out
+of yourself.
+
+_Milverton_.  No man is so confidential as when he is addressing the
+whole world.  You find, therefore, more comfort for sorrow in books than
+in social intercourse.  I mean more direct comfort; for I agree with what
+Ellesmere says about society.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  In comparing men and books, one must always remember this
+important distinction—that one can put the books down at any time.  As
+Macaulay says, “Plato is never sullen.  Cervantes is never petulant.
+Demosthenes never comes unseasonably.  Dante never stays too long.”
+
+_Milverton_.  Besides, one can manage to agree so well, intellectually,
+with a book; and intellectual differences are the source of half the
+quarrels in the world.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Judicious shelving!
+
+_Milverton_.  Judicious skipping will nearly do.  Now when one’s friend,
+or oneself, is crotchety, dogmatic, or disputatious, one cannot turn over
+to another day.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Don’t go, Dunsford.  Here is a passage in the essay I meant
+to have said something about—“why should we expect the inner life to be
+one course of unbroken self-improvement,” etc.—You recollect?  Well, it
+puts me in mind of a conversation between a complacent poplar and a grim
+old oak, which I overheard the other day.  The poplar said that it grew
+up quite straight, heavenwards, that all its branches pointed the same
+way, and always had done so.  Turning to the oak, which it had been
+talking at before for some time, the poplar went on to remark, that it
+did not wish to say anything unfriendly to a brother of the forest, but
+those warped and twisted branches seemed to show strange struggles.  The
+tall thing concluded its oration by saying, that it grew up very fast,
+and that when it had done growing, it did not suffer itself to be made
+into huge floating engines of destruction.  But different trees had
+different tastes.  There was then a sound from the old oak, like an “ah”
+or a “whew,” or, perhaps, it was only the wind amongst its resisting
+branches; and the gaunt creature said that it had had ugly winds from
+without and cross-grained impulses from within; that it knew it had
+thrown out awkwardly a branch here and a branch there, which would never
+come quite right again it feared; that men worked it up, sometimes for
+good and sometimes for evil—but that at any rate it had not lived for
+nothing.  The poplar began again immediately, for this kind of tree can
+talk for ever, but I patted the old oak approvingly and went on.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, your trees divide their discourse somewhat
+Ellesmerically: they do not talk with the simplicity La Fontaine’s would;
+but there is a good deal in them.  They are not altogether sappy.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I really thought of this fable of mine the other day, as I
+was passing the poplar at the end of the valley, and I determined to give
+it you on the first occasion.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I hope, Ellesmere, you do not intend to put sarcastic
+notions into the sap of our trees hereabouts.  There’s enough of sarcasm
+in you to season a whole forest.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Dunsford is afraid of what the trees may say to the country
+gentlemen, and whether they will be able to answer them.  I will be
+careful not to make the trees too clever.
+
+_Milverton_.  Let us go and try if we can hear any more forest talk.  The
+winds, shaped into voices by the leaves, say many things to us at all
+times.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+IN the course of our walk Milverton promised to read the following essay
+on Recreation the next day.  I have no note of anything that was said
+before the reading.
+
+
+
+RECREATION.
+
+
+This subject has not had the thought it merits.  It seems trivial.  It
+concerns some hours in the daily life of each of us; but it is not
+connected with any subject of human grandeur, and we are rather ashamed
+of it.  Schiller has some wise, but hard words that relate to it.  He
+perceives the pre-eminence of the Greeks, who could do many things.  He
+finds that modern men are units of great nations; but not great units
+themselves.  And there is some room for this reasoning of his.
+
+Our modern system of division of labour divides wits also.  The more
+necessity there is, therefore, for funding in recreation something to
+expand men’s intelligence.  There are intellectual pursuits almost as
+much divided as pin-making; and many a man goes through some intellectual
+process, for the greater part of his working hours, which corresponds
+with the making of a pin’s head.  Must there not be some danger of a
+general contraction of mind from this convergence of attention upon
+something very small, for so considerable a portion of a man’s life?
+
+What answer can civilisation give to this?  It can say that greater
+results are worked out by the modern system; that though each man is
+doing less himself than he might have done in former days, he sees
+greater and better things accomplished; and that his thoughts, not bound
+down by his petty occupation, travel over the work of the human family.
+There is a great deal, doubtless, in this argument; but man is not
+altogether an intellectual recipient.  He is a constructive animal also.
+It is not the knowledge that you can pour into him that will satisfy him,
+or enable him to work out his nature.  He must see things for himself; he
+must have bodily work and intellectual work different from his
+bread-getting work; or he runs the danger of becoming a contracted pedant
+with a poor mind and a sickly body.
+
+I have seen it quoted from Aristotle, that the end of labour is to gain
+leisure.  It is a great saying.  We have in modern times a totally wrong
+view of the matter.  Noble work is a noble thing, but not all work.  Most
+people seem to think that any business is in itself something grand; that
+to be intensely employed, for instance, about something which has no
+truth, beauty, or usefulness in it, which makes no man happier or wiser,
+is still the perfection of human endeavour, so that the work be intense.
+It is the intensity, not the nature, of the work that men praise.  You
+see the extent of this feeling in little things.  People are so ashamed
+of being caught for a moment idle, that if you come upon the most
+industrious servants or workmen whilst they are standing looking at
+something which interests them, or fairly resting, they move off in a
+fright, as if they were proved, by a moment’s relaxation, to be
+neglectful of their work.  Yet it is the result that they should mainly
+be judged by, and to which they should appeal.  But amongst all classes,
+the working itself, incessant working, is the thing deified.  Now what is
+the end and object of most work?  To provide for animal wants.  Not a
+contemptible thing by any means, but still it is not all in all with man.
+Moreover, in those cases where the pressure of bread-getting is fairly
+past, we do not often find men’s exertions lessened on that account.
+There enter into their minds as motives, ambition, a love of hoarding, or
+a fear of leisure—things which, in moderation, may be defended or even
+justified; but which are not so peremptory, and upon the face of them
+excellent, that they at once dignify excessive labour.
+
+The truth is, that to work insatiably requires much less mind than to
+work judiciously, and less courage than to refuse work that cannot be
+done honestly.  For a hundred men whose appetite for work can be driven
+on by vanity, avarice, ambition, or a mistaken notion of advancing their
+families, there is about one who is desirous of expanding his own nature
+and the nature of others in all directions, of cultivating many pursuits,
+of bringing himself and those around him in contact with the universe in
+many points, of being a man and not a machine.
+
+It may seem as if the preceding arguments were directed rather against
+excessive work than in favour of recreation.  But the first object in an
+essay of this kind should be to bring down the absurd estimate that is
+often formed of mere work.  What ritual is to the formalist, or
+contemplation to the devotee, business is to the man of the world.  He
+thinks he cannot be doing wrong as long as he is doing that.
+
+No doubt hard work is a great police agent.  If everybody were worked
+from morning till night and then carefully locked up, the register of
+crimes might be greatly diminished.  But what would become of human
+nature?  Where would be the room for growth in such a system of things?
+It is through sorrow and mirth, plenty and need, a variety of passions,
+circumstances, and temptations, even through sin and misery, that men’s
+natures are developed.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Again, there are people who would say, “Labour is not all; we do not
+object to the cessation of labour—a mere provision for bodily ends; but
+we fear the lightness and vanity of what you call recreation.”  Do these
+people take heed of the swiftness of thought—of the impatience of
+thought?  What will the great mass of men be thinking of, if they are
+taught to shun amusements and the thoughts of amusement?  If any
+sensuality is left open to them, they will think of that.  If not
+sensuality, then avarice, or ferocity for “the cause of God,” as they
+would call it.  People who have had nothing else to amuse them have been
+very apt to indulge themselves in the excitement of persecuting their
+fellow creatures.
+
+Our nation, the northern part of it especially, is given to believe in
+the sovereign efficacy of dulness.  To be sure, dulness and solid vice
+are apt to go hand in hand.  But then, according to our notions, dulness
+is in itself so good a thing—almost a religion.
+
+Now, if ever a people required to be amused, it is we sad-hearted
+Anglo-Saxons.  Heavy eaters, hard thinkers, often given up to a peculiar
+melancholy of our own, with a climate that for months together would
+frown away mirth if it could—many of us with very gloomy thoughts about
+our hereafter—if ever there were a people who should avoid increasing
+their dulness by all work and no play, we are that people.  “They took
+their pleasure sadly,” says Froissart, “after their fashion.”  We need
+not ask of what nation Froissart was speaking.
+
+There is a theory which has done singular mischief to the cause of
+recreation and of general cultivation.  It is that men cannot excel in
+more things than one; and that if they can, they had better be quiet
+about it.  “Avoid music, do not cultivate art, be not known to excel in
+any craft but your own,” says many a worldly parent, thereby laying the
+foundation of a narrow, greedy character, and destroying means of
+happiness and of improvement which success, or even real excellence, in
+one profession only cannot give.  This is, indeed, a sacrifice of the end
+of living for the means.
+
+Another check to recreation is the narrow way in which people have
+hitherto been brought up at schools and colleges.  The classics are
+pre-eminent works.  To acquire an accurate knowledge of them is an
+admirable discipline.  Still, it would be well to give a youth but few of
+these great works, and so leave time for various arts, accomplishments,
+and knowledge of external things exemplified by other means than books.
+If this cannot be done but by over-working, then it had better not be
+done; for of all things, that must be avoided.  But surely it can be
+done.  At present, many a man who is versed in Greek metre, and
+afterwards full of law reports, is childishly ignorant of Nature.  Let
+him walk with an intelligent child for a morning, and the child will ask
+him a hundred questions about sun, moon, stars, plants, birds, building,
+farming, and the like, to which he can give very sorry answers, if any;
+or, at the best, he has but a second-hand acquaintance with Nature.
+Men’s conceits are his main knowledge.  Whereas, if he had any pursuits
+connected with Nature, all Nature is in harmony with it, is brought into
+his presence by it, and it affords at once cultivation and recreation.
+
+But, independently of those cultivated pursuits which form a high order
+of recreation, boyhood should never pass without the boy’s learning
+several modes of recreation of the humbler kind.  A parent or teacher
+seldom does a kinder thing by the child under his care than when he
+instructs it in some manly exercise, some pursuit connected with Nature
+out of doors, or even some domestic game.  In hours of fatigue, anxiety,
+sickness, or worldly ferment, such means of amusement may delight the
+grown-up man when other things would fail.
+
+An indirect advantage, but a very considerable one, attendant upon
+various modes of recreation, is, that they provide opportunities of
+excelling in something to boys and men who are dull in things which form
+the staple of education.  A boy cannot see much difference between the
+nominative and the genitive cases—still less any occasion for aorists—but
+he is a good hand at some game or other; and he keeps up his
+self-respect, and the respect of others for him, upon his prowess in that
+game.  He is better and happier on that account.  And it is well, too,
+that the little world around him should know that excellence is not all
+of one form.
+
+There are no details about recreation in this essay, the object here
+being mainly to show the worth of recreation, and to defend it against
+objections from the over-busy and the over-strict.  The sense of the
+beautiful, the desire for comprehending Nature, the love of personal
+skill and prowess, are not things implanted in men merely to be absorbed
+in producing and distributing the objects of our most obvious animal
+wants.  If civilisation required this, civilisation would be a failure.
+Still less should we fancy that we are serving the cause of godliness
+when we are discouraging recreation.  Let us be hearty in our pleasures,
+as in our work, and not think that the gracious Being Who has made us so
+open-hearted to delight, looks with dissatisfaction at our enjoyment, as
+a hard taskmaster might, who in the glee of his slaves could see only a
+hindrance to their profitable working.  And with reference to our
+individual cultivation, we may remember that we are not here to promote
+incalculable quantities of law, physic, or manufactured goods, but to
+become men—not narrow pedants, but wide-seeing, mind-travelled men.  Who
+are the men of history to be admired most?  Those whom most things
+became—who could be weighty in debate, of much device in council,
+considerate in a sick-room, genial at a feast, joyous at a festival,
+capable of discourse with many minds, large-souled, not to be shrivelled
+up into any one form, fashion, or temperament.  Their contemporaries
+would have told us that men might have various accomplishments and hearty
+enjoyments, and not for that be the less effective in business, or less
+active in benevolence.  I distrust the wisdom of asceticism as much as I
+do that of sensuality; Simeon Stylites no less than Sardanapalus.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You alluded to Schiller at the beginning of the essay: can
+you show me his own words?  I have a lawyer’s liking for the best
+evidence.
+
+_Milverton_.  When we go in, I will show you some passages which bear me
+out in what I have made him say—at least, if the translation is faithful.
+{53}
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I have had a great respect for Schiller ever since I heard
+that saying of his about death, “Death cannot be an evil, for it is
+universal.”
+
+_Dunsford_.  Very noble and full of faith.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Touching the essay, I like it well enough; but, perhaps,
+people will expect to find more about recreation itself—not only about
+the good of it, but what it is, and how it is to be got.
+
+_Milverton_.  I do not incline to go into detail about the matter.  The
+object was to say something for the respectability of recreation, not to
+write a chapter of a book of sports.  People must find out their own ways
+of amusing themselves.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I will tell you what is the paramount thing to be attended
+to in all amusements—that they should be short.  Moralists are always
+talking about “short-lived” pleasures: would that they were!
+
+_Dunsford_.  Hesiod told the world, some two thousand years ago, how much
+greater the half is than the whole.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Dinner-givers and managers of theatres should forthwith be
+made aware of that fact.  What a sacrifice of good things, and of the
+patience and comfort of human beings, a cumbrous modern dinner is!  I
+always long to get up and walk about.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Do not talk of modern dinners.  Think what a Roman dinner
+must have been.
+
+_Milverton_.  Very true.  It has always struck me that there is something
+quite military in the sensualism of the Romans—an “arbiter bibendi”
+chosen, and the whole feast moving on with fearful precision and
+apparatus of all kinds.  Come, come! the world’s improving, Ellesmere.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Had the Romans public dinners?  Answer me that.  Imagine a
+Roman, whose theory, at least, of a dinner was that it was a thing for
+enjoyment, whereas we often look on it as a continuation of the business
+of the day—I say, imagine a Roman girding himself up, literally girding
+himself up to make an after-dinner speech.
+
+_Milverton_.  I must allow that is rather a barbarous practice.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  If charity, or politics, cannot be done without such
+things, I suppose they are useful in their way; but let nobody ever
+imagine that they are a form of pleasure.  People smearing each other
+over with stupid flattery, and most of the company being in dread of
+receiving some compliment which should oblige them to speak!
+
+_Dunsford_.  I should have thought, now, that you would always have had
+something to say, and therefore that you would not be so bitter against
+after-dinner speaking.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  No; when I have nothing to say, I can say nothing.
+
+_Milverton_.  Would it not be a pleasant thing if rich people would ask
+their friends sometimes to public amusements—order a play for them, for
+instance—or at any rate, provide some manifest amusement?  They might,
+occasionally with great advantage, abridge the expense of their dinners;
+and throw it into other channels of hospitality.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Ah, if they would have good acting at their houses, that
+would be very delightful; but I cannot say that the being taken to any
+place of public amusement would much delight me.  By the way, Milverton,
+what do you say of theatres in the way of recreation?  This decline of
+the drama, too, is a thing you must have thought about: let us hear your
+notions.
+
+_Milverton_.  I think one of the causes sometimes assigned, that reading
+is more spread, is a true and an important one; but, otherwise, I fancy
+that the present decline of the drama depends upon very small things
+which might be remedied.  As to a love of the drama going out of the
+human heart, that is all nonsense.  Put it at the lowest, what a great
+pleasure it is to hear a good play read.  And again, as to serious
+pursuits unfitting men for dramatic entertainments, it is quite the
+contrary.  A man, wearied with care and business, would find more change
+of ideas with less fatigue, in seeing a good play, than in almost any
+other way of amusing himself.
+
+_Dunsford_.  What are the causes then of the decline of the drama?
+
+_Milverton_.  In England, or rather in London,—for London is England for
+dramatic purposes; in London, then, theatrical arrangements seem to be
+framed to drive away people of sense.  The noisome atmosphere, the
+difficult approach, the over-size of the great theatres, the intolerable
+length of performances.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Hear! hear!
+
+_Milverton_.  The crowding together of theatres in one part of the town,
+the lateness of the hours—
+
+_Ellesmere_.  The folly of the audience, who always applaud in the wrong
+place—
+
+_Dunsford_.  There is no occasion to say any more; I am quite convinced.
+
+_Milverton_.  But these annoyances need not be.  Build a theatre of
+moderate dimensions; give it great facility of approach; take care that
+the performances never exceed three hours; let lions and dwarfs pass by
+without any endeavour to get them within the walls; lay aside all
+ambition of making stage waves which may almost equal real Ramsgate waves
+to our cockney apprehensions.  Of course there must be good players and
+good plays.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Now we come to the part of Hamlet.
+
+_Milverton_.  Good players and good plays are both to be had if there
+were good demand for them.  But, I was going to say, let there be all
+these things, especially let there be complete ventilation, and the
+theatre will have the most abundant success.  Why, that one thing alone,
+the villainous atmosphere at most public places, is enough to daunt any
+sensible man from going to them.
+
+_Dunsford_.  There should be such a choice of plays—not merely
+Chamberlain-clipt—as any man or woman could go to.
+
+_Milverton_.  There should be certainly, but how is such a choice to be
+made, if the people who could regulate it, for the most part, stay away?
+It is a dangerous thing, the better classes leaving any great source of
+amusement and instruction wholly, or greatly, to the less refined
+classes.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Yes, I must confess it is.
+
+Great part of your arguments apply to musical as well as to theatrical
+entertainments.  Do you find similar results with respect to them?
+
+_Milverton_.  Why, they are not attended by any means as they would be,
+or made what they might be, if the objections I mentioned were removed.
+
+_Dunsford_.  What do you say to the out-of-door entertainments for a town
+population?
+
+_Milverton_.  As I said before, my dear Dunsford, I cannot give you a
+chapter of a “Book of Sports.”  There ought, of course, to be parks for
+all quarters of the town: and I confess it would please me better to see,
+in holiday times and hours of leisure, hearty games going on in these
+parks, than a number of people sauntering about in uncomfortably new and
+unaccustomed clothes.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Do you not see, Dunsford, that, like a cautious official
+man, he does not want to enter into small details, which have always an
+air of ridicule?  He is not prepared to pledge himself to cricket, golf,
+football, or prisoner’s bars; but in his heart he is manifestly a Young
+Englander—without the white waistcoat.  Nothing would please him better
+than to see in large letters, on one of those advertising vans, “Great
+match!  Victoria Park!!  Eleven of Fleet Street against the Eleven of
+Saffron Hill!!!”
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, there is a great deal in the spirit of Young England
+that I like very much, indeed that I respect.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I should like the Young England party better myself if I
+were quite sure there was no connection between them and a clan of sour,
+pity-mongering people, who wash one away with eternal talk about the
+contrast between riches and poverty; with whom a poor man is always
+virtuous; and who would, if they could, make him as envious and as
+discontented as possible.
+
+_Milverton_.  Nothing can be more strikingly in contrast with such
+thinkers than Young England.  Young Englanders, according to the best of
+their theories, ought to be men of warm sympathy with all classes.  There
+is no doubt of this, that very seldom does any good thing arise, but
+there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it, which sidles up
+against the reality, mouths its favourite words as a third-rate actor
+does a great part, under-mimics its wisdom, over-acts its folly, is by
+half the world taken for it, goes some way to suppress it in its own
+time, and, perhaps, lives for it in history.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well brought out, that metaphor, but I don’t know that it
+means more than that the followers of a system do in general a good deal
+to corrupt it, or that when a great principle is worked into human
+affairs, a considerable accretion of human folly and falseness mostly
+grows round it: which things some of us had a suspicion of before.
+
+_Dunsford_.  To go back to the subject.  What would you do for country
+amusements, Milverton?  That is what concerns me, you know.
+
+_Milverton_.  Athletic amusements go on naturally here: do not require so
+much fostering as in towns.  The commons must be carefully kept: I have
+quite a Cobbettian fear of their being taken away from us under some
+plausible pretext or other.  Well, then, it strikes me that a great deal
+might be done to promote the more refined pleasures of life among our
+rural population.  I hope we shall live to see many of Hullah’s pupils
+playing an important part in this way.  Of course, the foundation for
+these things may best be laid at schools; and is being laid in some
+places, I am happy to say.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Humph, music, sing-song!
+
+_Milverton_.  Don’t you observe, Dunsford, that when Ellesmere wants to
+attack us, and does not exactly see how, he mutters to himself
+sarcastically, sneering himself up, as it were, to the attack.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You and Dunsford are both wild for music, from
+barrel-organs upwards.
+
+_Milverton_.  I confess to liking the humblest attempts at melody.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I feel as Sir Thomas Browne tells us he felt, that “even
+that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad,
+strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the
+first composer.  There is something in it of divinity more than the ear
+discovers; it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world
+and creatures of God: such a melody to the ear as the whole world well
+understood, would afford the understanding.”
+
+_Milverton_.  Apropos of music in country places, when I was going about
+last year in the neighbouring county, I saw such a pretty scene at one of
+the towns.  They had got up a band, which played once a week in the
+evening.  It was a beautiful summer evening, and the window of my room at
+the end overlooked the open space they had chosen for their performances.
+There was the great man of the neighbourhood in his carriage looking as
+if he came partly on duty, as well as for pleasure.  Then there were
+burly tradesmen, with an air of quiet satisfaction, sauntering about, or
+leaning against railings.  Some were no doubt critical—thought that Will
+Miller did not play as well as usual this evening.  Will’s young wife,
+who had come out to look again at him in his band dress (for the band had
+a uniform), thought differently.  Little boys broke out into imaginary
+polkas, having some distant reference to the music: not without grace
+though.  The sweep was pre-eminent: as if he would say, “Dirty and sooty
+as I am I have a great deal of fun in me.  Indeed, what would May-day be
+but for me?”  Studious little boys of the free-school, all green
+grasshopper-looking, walked about as boys knowing something of Latin.
+Here and there went a couple of them in childish loving way, with their
+arms about each other’s necks.  Matrons and shy young maidens sat upon
+the door-steps near.  Many a merry laugh filled up the interludes of
+music.  And when evening came softly down upon us, the band finished with
+“God save the Queen,” the little circle of those who would hear the last
+note moved off, there was a clattering of shutters, a shining of lights
+through casement-windows, and soon the only sound to be heard was the
+rough voice of some villager, who would have been too timid to adventure
+anything by daylight, but now sang boldly out as he went homewards.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Very pretty, but it sounds to me somewhat fabulous.
+
+_Milverton_.  I assure you—
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes, you were tired, had a good dinner, read a speech for
+or against the corn-laws, fell asleep of course, and had this ingenious
+dream, which, to this day, you believe to have been a reality.  I
+understand it all.
+
+_Milverton_.  I wish I could have many more such dreams.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+OUR last conversation broke off abruptly on the entrance of a visitor: we
+forgot to name a time for our next meeting; and when I came again, I
+found Milverton alone in his study.  He was reading Count Rumford’s
+essays.
+
+_Dunsford_.  So you are reading Count Rumford.  What is it that interests
+you there?
+
+_Milverton_.  Everything he writes about.  He is to me a delightful
+writer.  He throws so much life into all his writings.  Whether they are
+about making the most of food or fuel, or propounding the benefits of
+bathing, or inveighing against smoke, it is that he went and saw and did
+and experimented himself upon himself.  His proceedings at Munich to feed
+the poor are more interesting than many a novel.  It is surprising, too,
+how far he was before the world in all the things he gave his mind to.
+
+Here Ellesmere entered.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I heard you were come, Dunsford: I hope we shall have an
+essay to-day.  My critical faculties have been dormant for some days, and
+want to be roused a little.  Milverton was talking to you about Count
+Rumford when I came in, was he not?  Ah, the Count is a great favourite
+with Milverton when he is down here; but there is a book upstairs which
+is Milverton’s real favourite just now, a portentous-looking book; some
+relation to a blue-book, something about sewerage, or health of towns, or
+public improvements, over which said book our friend here goes into
+enthusiasms.  I am sure if it could be reduced to the size of that
+tatterdemalion Horace that he carries about, the poor little Horace would
+be quite supplanted.
+
+_Milverton_.  Now, I must tell you, Dunsford, that Ellesmere himself took
+up this book he talks about, and it was a long time before he put it
+down.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes, there is something in real life, even though it is in
+the unheroic part of it, that interests one.  I mean to get through the
+book.
+
+_Dunsford_.  What are we to have to-day for our essay?
+
+Milverton.  Let us adjourn to the garden, and I will read you an essay on
+Greatness, if I can find it.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+We went to our favourite place, and Milverton read us the following
+essay.
+
+
+
+GREATNESS.
+
+
+You cannot substitute any epithet for great, when you are talking of
+great men.  Greatness is not general dexterity carried to any extent; nor
+proficiency in any one subject of human endeavour.  There are great
+astronomers, great scholars, great painters, even great poets who are
+very far from great men.  Greatness can do without success and with it.
+William is greater in his retreats than Marlborough in his victories.  On
+the other hand, the uniformity of Cæsar’s success does not dull his
+greatness.  Greatness is not in the circumstances, but in the man.
+
+What does this greatness then consist in?  Not in a nice balance of
+qualities, purposes, and powers.  That will make a man happy, a
+successful man, a man always in his right depth.  Nor does it consist in
+absence of errors.  We need only glance back at any list that can be made
+of great men, to be convinced of that.  Neither does greatness consist in
+energy, though often accompanied by it.  Indeed, it is rather the breadth
+of the waters than the force of the current that we look to, to fulfil
+our idea of greatness.  There is no doubt that energy acting upon a
+nature endowed with the qualities that we sum up in the word cleverness,
+and directed to a few clear purposes, produces a great effect, and may
+sometimes be mistaken for greatness.  If a man is mainly bent upon his
+own advancement, it cuts many a difficult knot of policy for him, and
+gives a force and distinctness to his mode of going on which looks grand.
+The same happens if he has one pre-eminent idea of any kind, even though
+it should be a narrow one.  Indeed, success in life is mostly gained by
+unity of purpose; whereas greatness often fails by reason of its having
+manifold purposes, but it does not cease to be greatness on that account.
+
+If greatness can be shut up in qualities, it will be found to consist in
+courage and in openness of mind and soul.  These qualities may not seem
+at first to be so potent.  But see what growth there is in them.  The
+education of a man of open mind is never ended.  Then, with openness of
+soul, a man sees some way into all other souls that come near him, feels
+with them, has their experience, is in himself a people.  Sympathy is the
+universal solvent.  Nothing is understood without it.  The capacity of a
+man, at least for understanding, may almost be said to vary according to
+his powers of sympathy.  Again, what is there that can counteract
+selfishness like sympathy?  Selfishness may be hedged in by minute
+watchfulness and self-denial, but it is counteracted by the nature being
+encouraged to grow out and fix its tendrils upon foreign objects.
+
+The immense defect that want of sympathy is, may be strikingly seen in
+the failure of the many attempts that have been made in all ages to
+construct the Christian character, omitting sympathy.  It has produced
+numbers of people walking up and down one narrow plank of self-restraint,
+pondering over their own merits and demerits, keeping out, not the world
+exactly, but their fellow-creatures from their hearts, and caring only to
+drive their neighbours before them on this plank of theirs, or to push
+them headlong.  Thus, with many virtues, and much hard work at the
+formation of character, we have had splendid bigots or censorious small
+people.
+
+But sympathy is warmth and light too.  It is, as it were, the moral
+atmosphere connecting all animated natures.  Putting aside, for a moment,
+the large differences that opinions, language, and education make between
+men, look at the innate diversity of character.  Natural philosophers
+were amazed when they thought they had found a new-created species.  But
+what is each man but a creature such as the world has not before seen?
+Then think how they pour forth in multitudinous masses, from princes
+delicately nurtured to little boys on scrubby commons, or in dark
+cellars.  How are these people to be understood, to be taught to
+understand each other, but by those who have the deepest sympathies with
+all?  There cannot be a great man without large sympathy.  There may be
+men who play loud-sounding parts in life without it, as on the stage,
+where kings and great people sometimes enter who are only characters of
+secondary import—deputy great men.  But the interest and the instruction
+lie with those who have to feel and suffer most.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Add courage to this openness we have been considering, and you have a man
+who can own himself in the wrong, can forgive, can trust, can adventure,
+can, in short, use all the means that insight and sympathy endow him
+with.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+I see no other essential characteristics in the greatness of nations than
+there are in the greatness of individuals.  Extraneous circumstances
+largely influence nations as individuals; and make a larger part of the
+show of the former than of the latter; as we are wont to consider no
+nation great that is not great in extent or resources, as well as in
+character.  But of two nations, equal in other respects, the superiority
+must belong to the one which excels in courage and openness of mind and
+soul.
+
+Again, in estimating the relative merits of different periods of the
+world, we must employ the same tests of greatness that we use to
+individuals.  To compare, for instance, the present and the past.  What
+astounds us most in the past is the wonderful intolerance and cruelty: a
+cruelty constantly turning upon the inventors: an intolerance provoking
+ruin to the thing it would foster.  The most admirable precepts are
+thrown from time to time upon this cauldron of human affairs, and
+oftentimes they only seem to make it blaze the higher.  We find men
+devoting the best part of their intellects to the invariable annoyance
+and persecution of their fellows.  You might think that the earth brought
+forth with more abundant fruitfulness in the past than now, seeing that
+men found so much time for cruelty, but that you read of famines and
+privations which these latter days cannot equal.  The recorded violent
+deaths amount to millions.  And this is but a small part of the matter.
+Consider the modes of justice; the use of torture, for instance.  What
+must have been the blinded state of the wise persons (wise for their day)
+who used torture?  Did they ever think themselves, “What should we not
+say if we were subjected to this?”  Many times they must really have
+desired to get at the truth; and such was their mode of doing it.  Now,
+at the risk of being thought “a laudator” of time present, I would say,
+here is the element of greatness we have made progress in.  We are more
+open in mind and soul.  We have arrived (some of us at least) at the
+conclusion that men may honestly differ without offence.  We have learned
+to pity each other more.  There is a greatness in modern toleration which
+our ancestors knew not.
+
+Then comes the other element of greatness, courage.  Have we made
+progress in that?  This is a much more dubious question.  The subjects of
+terror vary so much in different times that it is difficult to estimate
+the different degrees of courage shown in resisting them.  Men fear
+public opinion now as they did in former times the Star Chamber; and
+those awful goddesses, Appearances, are to us what the Fates were to the
+Greeks.  It is hardly possible to measure the courage of a modern against
+that of an ancient; but I am unwilling to believe but that enlightenment
+must strengthen courage.
+
+The application of the tests of greatness, as in the above instance, is a
+matter of detail and of nice appreciation, as to the results of which men
+must be expected to differ largely: the tests themselves remain
+invariable—openness of nature to admit the light of love and reason, and
+courage to pursue it.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I agree to your theory, as far as openness of nature is
+concerned; but I do not much like to put that half-brute thing, courage,
+so high.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, you cannot have greatness without it: you may have
+well-intentioned people and far-seeing people; but if they have no
+stoutness of heart, they will only be shifty or remonstrant, nothing like
+great.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You mean will, not courage.  Without will, your
+open-minded, open-hearted man may be like a great, rudderless vessel
+driven about by all winds: not a small craft, but a most uncertain one.
+
+_Milverton_.  No, I mean both: both will and courage.  Courage is the
+body to will.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I believe you are right in that; but do not omit will.  It
+amused me to see how you brought in one of your old notions—that this age
+is not contemptible.  You scribbling people are generally on the other
+side.
+
+_Milverton_.  You malign us.  If I must give any account for my personal
+predilection for modern times, it consists perhaps in this, that we may
+now speak our mind.  What Tennyson says of his own land,
+
+    “The land where, girt with friend or foe,
+    A man may say the thing he will,”—
+
+may be said, in some measure, of the age in which we live.  This is an
+inexpressible comfort.  This doubles life.  These things surely may be
+said in favour of the present age, not with a view to puff it up, but so
+far to encourage ourselves, as we may by seeing that the world does not
+go on for nothing, that all the misery, blood, and toil that have been
+spent, were not poured out in vain.  Could we have our ancestors again
+before us, would they not rejoice at seeing what they had purchased for
+us: would they think it any compliment to them to extol their times at
+the expense of the present, and so to intimate that their efforts had led
+to nothing?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  “I doubt,” as Lord Eldon would have said; no, upon second
+thoughts, I do not doubt.  I feel assured that a good many of these said
+ancestors you are calling up would be much discomforted at finding that
+all their suffering had led to no sure basis of persecution of the other
+side.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I wonder, Ellesmere, what you would have done in persecuting
+times.  What escape would your sarcasm have found for itself?
+
+_Milverton_.  Some orthodox way, I daresay.  I do not think he would have
+been particularly fond of martyrdom.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  No.  I have no taste for making torches for truth, or being
+one: I prefer humane darkness to such illumination.  At the same time one
+cannot tell lies; and if one had been questioned about the
+incomprehensibilities which men in former days were so fierce upon, one
+must have shown that one disagreed with all parties.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Do not say “one:”  _I_ should not have disagreed with the
+great Protestant leaders in the Reformation, for instance.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Humph.
+
+_Milverton_.  If we get aground upon the Reformation, we shall never push
+off again—else would I say something far from complimentary to those
+Protestant proceedings which we may rather hope were Tudoresque than
+Protestant.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  No, that is not fair.  The Tudors were a coarse, fierce
+race; but it will not do to lay the faults of their times upon them only.
+Look at Elizabeth’s ministers.  They had about as much notion of
+religious tolerance as they had of Professor Wheatstone’s telegraph.  It
+was not a growth of that age.
+
+_Milverton_.  I do not know.  You have Cardinal Pole and the Earl of
+Essex, both tolerant men in the midst of bigots.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, as you said, Milverton, we shall never push off, if
+we once get aground on this subject.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I am in fault: so I will take upon myself to bring you quite
+away from the Reformation.  I have been thinking of that comparison in
+the essay of the present with the past.  Such comparisons seem to me very
+useful, as they best enable us to understand our own times.  And, then,
+when we have ascertained the state and tendency of our own age, we ought
+to strive to enrich it with those qualities which are complementary to
+its own.  Now with all this toleration, which delights you so much, dear
+Milverton, is it not an age rather deficient in caring about great
+matters?
+
+_Milverton_.  If you mean great speculative matters, I might agree with
+you; but if you mean what I should call the greatest matters, such as
+charity, humanity, and the like, I should venture to differ with you,
+Dunsford.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I do not like to see the world indifferent to great
+speculative matters.  I then fear shallowness and earthiness.
+
+_Milverton_.  It is very difficult to say what the world is thinking of
+now.  It is certainly wrong to suppose that this is a shallow age because
+it is not driven by one impulse.  As civilisation advances, it becomes
+more difficult to estimate what is going on, and we set it all down as
+confusion.  Now there is not one “great antique heart,” whose beatings we
+can count, but many impulses, many circles of thought in which men are
+moving many objects.  Men are not all in the same state of progress, so
+cannot be moved in masses as of old.  At one time chivalry urged all men,
+then the Church, and the phenomena were few, simple, and broad, or at
+least they seem so in history.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Very true; still I agree somewhat with Dunsford, that men
+are not agitated as they used to be by the great speculative questions.
+I account for it in this way, that the material world has opened out
+before us, and we cannot but look at that, and must play with it and work
+at it.  I would say, too, that philosophy had been found out, and there
+is something in that.  Still, I think if it were not for the interest now
+attaching to material things, great intellectual questions, not exactly
+of the old kind, would arise and agitate the world.
+
+_Milverton_.  There is one thing in my mind that may confirm your view.
+I cannot but think that the enlarged view we have of the universe must in
+some measure damp personal ambition.  What is it to be a King, Sheik,
+Tetrarch, or Emperor, over a bit of a little bit?  Macbeth’s speech,
+“we’d jump the life to come,” is a thing a man with modern lights,
+however madly ambitious, would hardly utter.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Religious lights, Milverton.
+
+_Milverton_.  Of course not, if he had them; but I meant scientific
+lights.  Sway over our fellow-creatures, at any rate anything but mental
+sway, has shrunk into less proportions.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I have been looking over the essay.  I think you may put in
+somewhere—that that age would probably be the greatest in which there was
+the least difference between great men and the people in general—when the
+former were only neglected, not hunted down.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You are rather lengthy here about the cruelties to be found
+in history; but we are apt to forget these matters.
+
+_Milverton_.  They always press upon my mind.
+
+_Dunsford_.  And on mine.  I do not like to read much of history for that
+very reason.  I get so sick at heart about it all.
+
+_Milverton_.  Ah, yes, history is a stupendous thing.  To read it is like
+looking at the stars; we turn away in awe and perplexity.  Yet there is
+some method running through the little affairs of man as through the
+multitude of suns, seemingly to us as confused as routed armies in full
+flight.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Some law of love.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I am afraid it is not in the past alone that we should be
+awestruck with horrors: we, who have a slave-trade still on earth.  But,
+to go back to the essay, I like what you say about the theory of
+constructing the Christian character without geniality; only you do not
+go far enough.  You are afraid.  People are for ever talking, especially
+you philanthropical people, about making others happy.  I do not know any
+way so sure of making others happy as of being so oneself, to begin with.
+I do not mean that people are to be self-absorbed; but they are to drink
+in nature and life a little.  From a genial, wisely-developed man good
+things radiate; whereas you must allow, Milverton, that benevolent people
+are very apt to be one-sided and fussy, and not of the sweetest temper if
+others will not be good and happy in their way.
+
+_Milverton_.  That is really not fair.  Of course, acid, small-minded
+people carry their narrow notions and their acidity into their
+benevolence.  Benevolence is no abstract perfection.  Men will express
+their benevolence according to their other gifts or want of gifts.  If it
+is strong, it overcomes other things in the character which would be
+hindrances to it; but it must speak in the language of the soul it is in.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Come, let us go and see the pigs.  I hear them grunting
+over their dinners in the farmyard.  I like to see creatures who can be
+happy without a theory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+THE next time that I came over to Worth-Ashton it was raining, and I
+found my friends in the study.
+
+“Well, Dunsford,” said Ellesmere, “is it not comfortable to have our
+sessions here for once, and to be looking out on a good solid English wet
+day?”
+
+_Dunsford_.  Rather a fluid than a solid.  But I agree with you in
+thinking it is very comfortable here.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I like to look upon the backs of books.  First I think how
+much of the owner’s inner life and character is shown in his books; then
+perhaps I wonder how he got such a book which seems so remote from all
+that I know of him—
+
+_Milverton_.  I shall turn my books the wrong side upwards when you come
+into the study.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  But what amuses me most is to see the odd way in which
+books get together, especially in the library of a man who reads his
+books and puts them up again wherever there is room.  Now here is a
+charming party: “A Treatise on the Steam-Engine” between “Locke on
+Christianity” and Madame de Stael’s “Corinne.”  I wonder what they talk
+about at night when we are all asleep.  Here is another happy
+juxtaposition: old Clarendon next to a modern metaphysician whom he would
+positively loathe.  Here is Sadler next to Malthus, and Horsley next to
+Priestley; but this sort of thing happens most in the best regulated
+libraries.  It is a charming reflection for controversial writers, that
+their works will be put together on the same shelves, often between the
+same covers; and that, in the minds of educated men, the name of one
+writer will be sure to recall the name of the other.  So they go down to
+posterity as a brotherhood.
+
+_Milverton_.  To complete Ellesmere’s theory, we may say that all those
+injuries to books which we choose to throw upon some wretched worm, are
+but the wounds from rival books.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Certainly.  But now let us proceed to polish up the weapons
+of another of these spiteful creatures.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Yes.  What is to be our essay to-day, Milverton?
+
+_Milverton_.  Fiction.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Now, that is really unfortunate.  Fiction is just the
+subject to be discussed—no, not discussed, talked over—out of doors on a
+hot day, all of us lying about in easy attitudes on the grass, Dunsford
+with his gaiters forming a most picturesque and prominent figure.  But
+there is nothing complete in this life.  “Surgit amari aliquid:” and so
+we must listen to Fiction in arm-chairs.
+
+
+
+FICTION.
+
+
+The influence of works of fiction is unbounded.  Even the minds of
+well-informed people are often more stored with characters from
+acknowledged fiction than from history or biography, or the real life
+around them.  We dispute about these characters as if they were
+realities.  Their experience is our experience; we adopt their feelings,
+and imitate their acts.  And so there comes to be something traditional
+even in the management of the passions.  Shakespeare’s historical plays
+were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough.  Thousands of Greeks
+acted under the influence of what Achilles or Ulysses did, in Homer.  The
+poet sings of the deeds that shall be.  He imagines the past; he forms
+the future.
+
+Yet how surpassingly interesting is real life when we get an insight into
+it.  Occasionally a great genius lifts up the veil of history, and we see
+men who once really were alive, who did not always live only in history;
+or, amidst the dreary page of battles, levies, sieges, and the
+sleep-inducing weavings and unweavings of political combination, we come,
+ourselves, across some spoken or written words of the great actors of the
+time, and are then fascinated by the life and reality of these things.
+Could you have the life of any man really portrayed to you, sun-drawn as
+it were, its hopes, its fears, its revolutions of opinion in each day,
+its most anxious wishes attained, and then, perhaps, crystallising into
+its blackest regrets—such a work would go far to contain all histories,
+and be the greatest lesson of love, humility, and tolerance, that men had
+ever read.
+
+Now fiction does attempt something like the above.  In history we are
+cramped by impertinent facts that must, however, be set down; by theories
+that must be answered; evidence that must be weighed; views that must be
+taken.  Our facts constantly break off just where we should wish to
+examine them most closely.  The writer of fiction follows his characters
+into the recesses of their hearts.  There are no closed doors for him.
+His puppets have no secrets from their master.  He plagues you with no
+doubts, no half-views, no criticism.  Thus they thought, he tells you;
+thus they looked, thus they acted.  Then, with every opportunity for
+scenic arrangement (for though his characters are confidential with him,
+he is only as confidential with his reader as the interest of the story
+will allow), it is not to be wondered at that the majority of readers
+should look upon history as a task, but tales of fiction as a delight.
+
+The greatest merit of fiction is the one so ably put forward by Sir James
+Mackintosh, namely, that it creates and nourishes sympathy.  It extends
+this sympathy, too, in directions where, otherwise, we hardly see when it
+would have come.  But it may be objected that this sympathy is
+indiscriminate, and that we are in danger of mixing up virtue and vice,
+and blurring both, if we are led to sympathise with all manner of
+wrong-doers.  But, in the first place, virtue and vice are so mixed in
+real life, that it is well to be somewhat prepared for that fact; and,
+moreover, the sympathy is not wrongly directed.  Who has not felt intense
+sympathy for Macbeth?  Yet could he be alive again, with evil thoughts
+against “the gracious Duncan,” and could he see into all that has been
+felt for him, would that be an encouragement to murder?  The intense pity
+of wise people for the crimes of others, when rightly represented, is one
+of the strongest antidotes against crime.  We have taken the extreme case
+of sympathy being directed towards bad men.  How often has fiction made
+us sympathise with obscure suffering and retiring greatness, with the
+world-despised, and especially with those mixed characters in whom we
+might otherwise see but one colour—with Shylock and with Hamlet, with
+Jeanie Deans and with Claverhouse, with Sancho Panza as well as with Don
+Quixote.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+On the other hand, there is a danger of too much converse with fiction
+leading us into dream-land, or rather into lubber-land.  Of course this
+“too much converse” implies large converse with inferior writers.  Such
+writers are too apt to make life as they would have it for themselves.
+Sometimes, also, they must make it to suit booksellers’ rules.  Having
+such power over their puppets they abuse it.  They can kill these
+puppets, change their natures suddenly, reward or punish them so easily,
+that it is no wonder they are led to play fantastic tricks with them.
+Now, if a sedulous reader of the works of such writers should form his
+notions of real life from them, he would occasionally meet with rude
+shocks when he encountered the realities of that life.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+For my own part, notwithstanding all the charms of life in
+swiftly-written novels, I prefer real life.  It is true that, in the
+former, everything breaks off round, every little event tends to some
+great thing, everybody one meets is to exercise some great influence for
+good or ill upon one’s fate.  I take it for granted one fancies oneself
+the hero.  Then all one’s fancy is paid in ready money, or at least one
+can draw upon it at the end of the third volume.  One leaps to remote
+wealth and honour by hairbreadth chances; and one’s uncle in India always
+dies opportunely.  To be sure the thought occurs, that if this novel life
+could be turned into real life, one might be the uncle in India and not
+the hero of the tale.  But that is a trifling matter, for at any rate one
+should carry on with spirit somebody else’s story.  On the whole,
+however, as I said before, I prefer real life, where nothing is tied up
+neatly, but all in odds and ends; where the doctrine of compensation
+enters largely, where we are often most blamed when we least deserve it,
+where there is no third volume to make things straight, and where many an
+Augustus marries many a Belinda, and, instead of being happy ever
+afterwards, finds that there is a growth of trials and troubles for each
+successive period of man’s life.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+In considering the subject of fiction, the responsibility of the writers
+thereof is a matter worth pointing out.  We see clearly enough that
+historians are to be limited by facts and probabilities; but we are apt
+to make a large allowance for the fancies of writers of fiction.  We must
+remember, however, that fiction is not falsehood.  If a writer puts
+abstract virtues into book-clothing, and sends them upon stilts into the
+world, he is a bad writer: if he classifies men, and attributes all
+virtue to one class and all vice to another, he is a false writer.  Then,
+again, if his ideal is so poor, that he fancies man’s welfare to consist
+in immediate happiness; if he means to paint a great man and paints only
+a greedy one, he is a mischievous writer and not the less so, although by
+lamplight and amongst a juvenile audience, his coarse scene-painting
+should be thought very grand.  He may be true to his own fancy, but he is
+false to Nature.  A writer, of course, cannot get beyond his own ideal:
+but at least he should see that he works up to it: and if it is a poor
+one, he had better write histories of the utmost concentration of
+dulness, than amuse us with unjust and untrue imaginings.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I am glad you have kept to the obvious things about
+fiction.  It would have been a great nuisance to have had to follow you
+through intricate theories about what fiction consists in, and what are
+its limits, and so on.  Then we should have got into questions touching
+the laws of representation generally, and then into art, of which,
+between ourselves, you know very little.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Talking of representation, what do you two, who have now
+seen something of the world, think about representative government?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Dunsford plumps down upon us sometimes with awful
+questions: what do you think of all philosophy? or what is your opinion
+of life in general?  Could not you throw in a few small questions of that
+kind, together with your representative one, and we might try to answer
+them all at once.  Dunsford is only laughing at us, Milverton.
+
+_Milverton_.  No, I know what was in Dunsford’s mind when he asked that
+question.  He has had his doubts and misgivings, when he has been reading
+a six nights’ debate (for the people in the country I daresay do read
+those things), whether representative government is the most complete
+device the human mind could suggest for getting at wise rulers.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  It is a doubt which has crossed my mind.
+
+_Milverton_.  And mine; but the doubt, if it has ever been more than mere
+petulance, has not had much practical weight with me.  Look how the
+business of the world is managed.  There are a few people who think out
+things, and a few who execute.  The former are not to be secured by any
+device.  They are gifts.  The latter may be well chosen, have often been
+well chosen, under other forms of government than the representative one.
+I believe that the favourites of kings have been a superior race of men.
+Even a fool does not choose a fool for a favourite.  He knows better than
+that: he must have something to lean against.  But between the thinkers
+and the doers (if, indeed, we ought to make such a distinction), _what a
+number of useful links there are in a representative government_ on
+account of the much larger number of people admitted into some share of
+government.  What general cultivation must come from that, and what
+security!  Of course, everything has its wrong side; and from this number
+of people let in there comes declamation and claptrap and mob-service,
+which is much the same thing as courtiership was in other times.  But
+then, to make the comparison a fair one, you must take the wrong side of
+any other form of government that has been devised.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, but so much power centring in the lower house of
+Parliament, and the getting into Parliament being a thing which is not
+very inviting to the kind of people one would most like to see there, do
+you not think that the ablest men are kept away?
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes; but if you make your governing body a unit or a ten,
+or any small number, how is this power, unless it is Argus-eyed, and
+myriad-minded, and right-minded too, to choose the right men any better
+than they are found now?  The great danger, as it appears to me, of
+representative government is lest it should slide down from
+representative government to delegate government.  In my opinion, the
+welfare of England, in great measure, depends upon what takes place at
+the hustings.  If, in the majority of instances, there were abject
+conduct there, electors and elected would be alike debased; upright
+public men could not be expected to arise from such beginnings; and
+thoughtful persons would begin to consider whether some other form of
+government could not forthwith be made out.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I have a supreme disgust for the man who at the hustings
+has no opinion beyond or above the clamour round him.  How such a fellow
+would have kissed the ground before a Pompadour, or waited for hours in a
+Buckingham’s antechamber, only to catch the faintest beam of reflected
+light from royalty.
+
+But I declare we have been just like schoolboys talking about forms of
+government and so on.
+
+    “For forms of government let fools contest,
+    That which is _worst_ administered is best,”—
+
+that is, representative government.
+
+_Milverton_.  I should not like either of you to fancy, from what I have
+been saying about representative government, that I do not see the
+dangers and the evils of it.  In fact, it is a frequent thought with me
+of what importance the House of Lords is at present, and of how much
+greater importance it might be made.  If there were Peers for life, and
+official members of the House of Commons, it would, I think, meet most of
+your objections, Dunsford.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I suppose I am becoming a little rusty and disposed to
+grumble, as I grow old; but there is a good deal in modern government
+which seems to me very rude and absurd.  There comes a clamour, partly
+reasonable; power is deaf to it, overlooks it, says there is no such
+thing; then great clamour; after a time, power welcomes that, takes it to
+its arms, says that now it is loud it is very wise, wishes it had always
+been clamour itself.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  How many acres do you farm, Dunsford?  How spiteful you
+are!
+
+_Dunsford_.  I am not thinking of Corn Laws alone, as you fancy, Master
+Ellesmere.  But to go to other things.  I quite agree, Milverton, with
+what you were saying just now about the business of the world being
+carried on by few, and the thinking few being in the nature of gifts to
+the world, not elicited by King or Kaiser.
+
+_Milverton_.  The mill-streams that turn the clappers of the world arise
+in solitary places.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Not a bad metaphor, but untrue.  Aristotle, Bacon—
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, I believe it would be much wiser to say, that we
+cannot lay down rules about the highest work; either when it is done,
+where it will be done, or how it can be made to be done.  It is too
+immaterial for our measurement; for the highest part even of the mere
+business of the world is in dealing with ideas.  It is very amusing to
+observe the misconceptions of men on these points.  They call for what is
+outward—can understand that, can praise it.  Fussiness and the forms of
+activity in all ages get great praise.  Imagine an active, bustling
+little prætor under Augustus, how he probably pointed out Horace to his
+sons as a moony kind of man, whose ways were much to be avoided, and told
+them it was a weakness in Augustus to like such idle men about him
+instead of men of business.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Or fancy a bustling Glasgow merchant of Adam Smith’s day
+watching him.  How little would the merchant have dreamt what a number of
+vessels were to be floated away by the ink in the Professor’s inkstand;
+and what crashing of axes, and clearing of forests in distant lands, the
+noise of his pen upon the paper portended.
+
+_Milverton_.  It is not only the effect of the still-working man that the
+busy man cannot anticipate, but neither can he comprehend the present
+labour.  If Horace had told my prætor that
+
+    “Abstinuit Venere et vino, sudavit et alsit,”
+
+“What, to write a few lines!” would his prætorship have cried out.  “Why,
+I can live well and enjoy life; and I flatter myself no one in Rome does
+more business.”
+
+_Dunsford_.  All of it only goes to show how little we know of each
+other, and how tolerant we ought to be of others’ efforts.
+
+_Milverton_.  The trials that there must be every day without any
+incident that even the most minute household chronicler could set down:
+the labours without show or noise!
+
+_Ellesmere_.  The deep things that there are which, with unthinking
+people, pass for shallow things, merely because they are clear as well as
+deep.  My fable of the other day, for instance—which instead of producing
+any moral effect upon you two, only seemed to make you both inclined to
+giggle.
+
+_Milverton_.  I am so glad you reminded me of that.  I, too, fired with a
+noble emulation, have invented a fable since we last met which I want you
+to hear.  I assure you I did not mean to laugh at yours: it was only that
+it came rather unexpectedly upon me.  You are not exactly the person from
+whom one should expect fables.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Now for the fable.
+
+_Milverton_.  There was a gathering together of creatures hurtful and
+terrible to man, to name their king.  Blight, mildew, darkness, mighty
+waves, fierce winds, Will-o’-the-wisps, and shadows of grim objects, told
+fearfully their doings and preferred their claims, none prevailing.  But
+when evening came on, a thin mist curled up, derisively, amidst the
+assemblage, and said, “I gather round a man going to his own home over
+paths made by his daily footsteps; and he becomes at once helpless and
+tame as a child.  The lights meant to assist him, then betray.  You find
+him wandering, or need the aid of other Terrors to subdue him.  I am,
+alone, confusion to him.”  And all the assemblage bowed before the mist,
+and made it king, and set it on the brow of many a mountain, where, when
+it is not doing evil, it may be often seen to this day.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, I like that fable: only I am not quite clear about the
+meaning.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You had no doubt about mine.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Is the mist calumny, Milverton?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  No, prejudice, I am sure.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Familiarity with the things around us, obscuring knowledge?
+
+_Milverton_.  I would rather not explain.  Each of you make your own
+fable of it.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, if ever I make a fable, it shall be one of the
+old-fashioned sort, with animals for the speakers, and a good easy moral.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Not a thing requiring the notes of seven German
+metaphysicians.  I must go and talk a little to my friends the trees, and
+see if I can get any explanation from them.  It is turning out a
+beautiful day after all, notwithstanding my praise of its solidity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+WE met as usual at our old spot on the lawn for our next reading.  I
+forget what took place before reading, except that Ellesmere was very
+jocose about our reading “Fiction” in-doors, and the following “November
+Essay,” as he called it, “under a jovial sun, and with the power of
+getting up and walking away from each other to any extent.”
+
+
+
+ON THE ART OF LIVING WITH OTHERS.
+
+
+The “Iliad” for war; the “Odyssey” for wandering; but where is the great
+domestic epic?  Yet it is but commonplace to say, that passions may rage
+round a tea-table, which would not have misbecome men dashing at one
+another in war-chariots; and evolutions of patience and temper are
+performed at the fireside, worthy to be compared with the Retreat of the
+Ten Thousand.  Men have worshipped some fantastic being for living alone
+in a wilderness; but social martyrdoms place no saints upon the calendar.
+
+We may blind ourselves to it if we like, but the hatreds and disgusts
+that there are behind friendship, relationship, service, and, indeed,
+proximity of all kinds, is one of the darkest spots upon earth.  The
+various relations of life, which bring people together, cannot, as we
+know, be perfectly fulfilled except in a state where there will, perhaps,
+be no occasion for any of them.  It is no harm, however, to endeavour to
+see whether there are any methods which may make these relations in the
+least degree more harmonious now.
+
+In the first place, if people are to live happily together, they must not
+fancy, because they are thrown together now, that all their lives have
+been exactly similar up to the present time, that they started exactly
+alike, and that they are to be for the future of the same mind.  A
+thorough conviction of the difference of men is the great thing to be
+assured of in social knowledge: it is to life what Newton’s law is to
+astronomy.  Sometimes men have a knowledge of it with regard to the world
+in general: they do not expect the outer world to agree with them in all
+points, but are vexed at not being able to drive their own tastes and
+opinions into those they live with.  Diversities distress them.  They
+will not see that there are many forms of virtue and wisdom.  Yet we
+might as well say, “Why all these stars; why this difference; why not all
+one star?”
+
+Many of the rules for people living together in peace follow from the
+above.  For instance, not to interfere unreasonably with others, not to
+ridicule their tastes, not to question and re-question their resolves,
+not to indulge in perpetual comment on their proceedings, and to delight
+in their having other pursuits than ours, are all based upon a thorough
+perception of the simple fact that they are not we.
+
+Another rule for living happily with others is to avoid having stock
+subjects of disputation.  It mostly happens, when people live much
+together, that they come to have certain set topics, around which, from
+frequent dispute, there is such a growth of angry words, mortified
+vanity, and the like, that the original subject of difference becomes a
+standing subject for quarrel; and there is a tendency in all minor
+disputes to drift down to it.
+
+Again, if people wish to live well together, they must not hold too much
+to logic, and suppose that everything is to be settled by sufficient
+reason.  Dr. Johnson saw this clearly with regard to married people, when
+he said, “Wretched would be the pair above all names of wretchedness, who
+should be doomed to adjust by reason every morning all the minute detail
+of a domestic day.”  But the application should be much more general than
+he made it.  There is no time for such reasonings, and nothing that is
+worth them.  And when we recollect how two lawyers, or two politicians,
+can go on contending, and that there is no end of one-sided reasoning on
+any subject, we shall not be sure that such contention is the best mode
+for arriving at truth.  But certainly it is not the way to arrive at good
+temper.
+
+If you would be loved as a companion, avoid unnecessary criticism upon
+those with whom you live.  The number of people who have taken out
+judges’ patents for themselves is very large in any society.  Now it
+would be hard for a man to live with another who was always criticising
+his actions, even if it were kindly and just criticism.  It would be like
+living between the glasses of a microscope.  But these self-elected
+judges, like their prototypes, are very apt to have the persons they
+judge brought before them in the guise of culprits.
+
+One of the most provoking forms of the criticism above alluded to is that
+which may be called criticism over the shoulder.  “Had I been consulted,”
+“Had you listened to me,” “But you always will,” and such short scraps of
+sentences may remind many of us of dissertations which we have suffered
+and inflicted, and of which we cannot call to mind any soothing effect.
+
+Another rule is, not to let familiarity swallow up all courtesy.  Many of
+us have a habit of saying to those with whom we live such things as we
+say about strangers behind their backs.  There is no place, however,
+where real politeness is of more value than where we mostly think it
+would be superfluous.  You may say more truth, or rather speak out more
+plainly, to your associates, but not less courteously than you do to
+strangers.
+
+Again, we must not expect more from the society of our friends and
+companions than it can give, and especially must not expect contrary
+things.  It is something arrogant to talk of travelling over other minds
+(mind being, for what we know, infinite); but still we become familiar
+with the upper views, tastes, and tempers of our associates.  And it is
+hardly in man to estimate justly what is familiar to him.  In travelling
+along at night, as Hazlitt says, we catch a glimpse into cheerful-looking
+rooms with light blazing in them, and we conclude involuntarily how happy
+the inmates must be.  Yet there is heaven and hell in those rooms—the
+same heaven and hell that we have known in others.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+There are two great classes of promoters of social happiness—cheerful
+people, and people who have some reticence.  The latter are more secure
+benefits to society even than the former.  They are non-conductors of all
+the heats and animosities around them.  To have peace in a house, or a
+family, or any social circle, the members of it must beware of passing on
+hasty and uncharitable speeches, which, the whole of the context seldom
+being told, is often not conveying but creating mischief.  They must be
+very good people to avoid doing this; for let Human Nature say what it
+will, it likes sometimes to look on at a quarrel, and that not altogether
+from ill-nature, but from a love of excitement, for the same reason that
+Charles II. liked to attend the debates in the Lords, because they were
+“as good as a play.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+We come now to the consideration of temper, which might have been
+expected to be treated first.  But to cut off the means and causes of bad
+temper is, perhaps, of as much importance as any direct dealing with the
+temper itself.  Besides, it is probable that in small social circles
+there is more suffering from unkindness than ill-temper.  Anger is a
+thing that those who live under us suffer more from than those who live
+with us.  But all the forms of ill-humour and sour-sensitiveness, which
+especially belong to equal intimacy (though indeed, they are common to
+all), are best to be met by impassiveness.  When two sensitive persons
+are shut up together, they go on vexing each other with a reproductive
+irritability. {93}  But sensitive and hard people get on well together.
+The supply of temper is not altogether out of the usual laws of supply
+and demand.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Intimate friends and relations should be careful when they go out into
+the world together, or admit others to their own circle, that they do not
+make a bad use of the knowledge which they have gained of each other by
+their intimacy.  Nothing is more common than this, and did it not mostly
+proceed from mere carelessness, it would be superlatively ungenerous.
+You seldom need wait for the written life of a man to hear about his
+weaknesses, or what are supposed to be such, if you know his intimate
+friends, or meet him in company with them.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Lastly, in conciliating those we live with, it is most surely done, not
+by consulting their interests, nor by giving way to their opinions, so
+much as by not offending their tastes.  The most refined part of us lies
+in this region of taste, which is perhaps a result of our whole being
+rather than a part of our nature, and, at any rate, is the region of our
+most subtle sympathies and antipathies.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+It may be said that if the great principles of Christianity were attended
+to, all such rules, suggestions, and observations as the above would be
+needless.  True enough!  Great principles are at the bottom of all
+things; but to apply them to daily life, many little rules, precautions,
+and insights are needed.  Such things hold a middle place between real
+life and principles, as form does between matter and spirit, moulding the
+one and expressing the other.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Quite right that last part.  Everybody must have known
+really good people, with all Christian temper, but having so little
+Christian prudence as to do a great deal of mischief in society.
+
+_Dunsford_.  There is one case, my dear Milverton, which I do not think
+you have considered: the case where people live unhappily together, not
+from any bad relations between them, but because they do not agree about
+the treatment of others.  A just person, for instance, who would bear
+anything for himself or herself, must remonstrate, at the hazard of any
+disagreement, at injustice to others.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes.  That, however, is a case to be decided upon higher
+considerations than those I have been treating of.  A man must do his
+duty in the way of preventing injustice, and take what comes of it.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  For people to live happily together, the real secret is
+that they should not live too much together.  Of course, you cannot say
+that; it would sound harsh, and cut short the essay altogether.
+
+Again, you talk about tastes and “region of subtle sympathies,” and all
+that.  I have observed that if people’s vanity is pleased, they live well
+enough together.  Offended vanity is the great separator.  You hear a man
+(call him B) saying that he is really not himself before So-and-so; tell
+him that So-and-so admires him very much and is himself rather abashed
+before B, and B is straightway comfortable, and they get on harmoniously
+together, and you hear no more about subtle sympathies or antipathies.
+
+_Dunsford_.  What a low view you do take of things sometimes, Ellesmere!
+
+_Milverton_.  I should not care how low it was, but it is not fair—at
+least, it does not contain the whole matter.  In the very case he has
+put, there was a subtle embarrassment between B and So-and-so.  Well,
+now, let these people not merely meet occasionally, but be obliged to
+live together, without any such explanation as Ellesmere has imagined,
+and they will be very uncomfortable from causes that you cannot impute to
+vanity.  It takes away much of the savour of life to live amongst those
+with whom one has not anything like one’s fair value.  It may not be
+mortified vanity, but unsatisfied sympathy, which causes this discomfort.
+B thinks that the other does not know him; he feels that he has no place
+with the other.  When there is intense admiration on one side, there is
+hardly a care in the mind of the admiring one as to what estimation he is
+held in.  But, in ordinary cases, some clearly defined respect and
+acknowledgment of worth is needed on both sides.  See how happy a man is
+in any office or service who is acknowledged to do something well.  How
+comfortable he is with his superiors!  He has his place.  It is not
+exactly a satisfaction of his vanity, but an acknowledgment of his useful
+existence that contents him.  I do not mean to say that there are not
+innumerable claims for acknowledgment of merit and service made by
+rampant vanity and egotism, which claims cannot be satisfied, ought not
+to be satisfied, and which, being unsatisfied, embitter people.  But I
+think your word Vanity will not explain all the feelings we have been
+talking about.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Perhaps not.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Certainly not.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, at any rate, you will admit that there is a class of
+dreadfully humble people who make immense claims at the very time that
+they are explaining that they have no claims.  They say they know they
+cannot be esteemed; they are well aware that they are not wanted, and so
+on, all the while making it a sort of grievance and a claim that they are
+not what they know themselves not to be; whereas, if they did but fall
+back upon their humility, and keep themselves quiet about their demerits,
+they would be strong then, and in their place and happy, doing what they
+could.
+
+_Milverton_.  It must be confessed that these people do make their
+humility somewhat obnoxious.  Yet, after all, you allow that they know
+their deficiencies, and they only say, “I know I have not much to
+recommend me, but I wish to be loved, nevertheless.”
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Ah, if they only said it a few times!  Besides, there is a
+little envy mixed up with the humility that I mean.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Travelling is a great trial of people’s ability to live
+together.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes.  Lavater says that you do not know a man until you
+have divided an inheritance with him; but I think a long journey with him
+will do.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, and what is it in travelling that makes people
+disagree?  Not direct selfishness, but injudicious management; stupid
+regrets, for instance, at things not being different from what they are,
+or from what they might have been, if “the other route” had been chosen;
+fellow-travellers punishing each other with each other’s tastes; getting
+stock subjects of disputation; laughing unseasonably at each other’s
+vexations and discomforts; and endeavouring to settle everything by the
+force of sufficient reason, instead of by some authorised will, or by
+tossing up.  Thus, in the short time of a journey, almost all modes and
+causes of human disagreement are brought into action.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  My favourite one not being the least—over-much of each
+other’s company.
+
+For my part, I think one of the greatest bores of companionship is, not
+merely that people wish to fit tastes and notions on you just as they
+might the first pair of ready-made shoes they meet with, a process
+amusing enough to the bystander, but exquisitely uncomfortable to the
+person being ready-shod: but that they bore you with never-ending talk
+about their pursuits, even when they know that you do not work in the
+same groove with them, and that they cannot hope to make you do so.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Nobody can accuse you of that fault, Ellesmere: I never
+heard you dilate much upon anything that interested you, though I have
+known you have some pet subject, and to be working at it for months.  But
+this comes of your coldness of nature.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, it might bear a more favourable construction.  But to
+go back to the essay.  It only contemplates the fact of people living
+together as equals, if we may so say; but in general, of course, you must
+add some other relationship or connection than that of merely being
+together.
+
+_Milverton_.  I had not overlooked that; but there are certain general
+rules in the matter that may be applied to nearly all relationship, just
+as I have taken that one from Johnson, applied by him to married life,
+about not endeavouring to settle all things by reasoning, and have given
+it a general application which, I believe, it will bear.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  There is one thing that I should think must often make
+women very unreasonable and unpleasant companions.  Oh, you may both hold
+up your hands and eyes, but I am not married, and can say what I please.
+Of course you put on the proper official look of astonishment; and I will
+duly report it.  But I was going to say that Chivalry, which has
+doubtless done a great deal of good, has also done a great deal of harm.
+Women may talk the greatest unreason out of doors, and nobody kindly
+informs them that it is unreason.  They do not talk much before clever
+men, and when they do, their words are humoured and dandled as children’s
+sayings are.  Now, I should fancy—mind, I do not want either of you to
+say that my fancy is otherwise than quite unreasonable—I should fancy
+that when women have to hear reason at home it must sound odd to them.
+The truth is, you know, we cannot pet anything much without doing it
+mischief.  You cannot pet the intellect, any more than the will, without
+injuring it.  Well then, again, if you put people upon a pedestal and do
+a great deal of worship around them, I cannot think but the will in such
+cases must become rather corrupted, and that lessons of obedience must
+fall rather harshly—
+
+_Dunsford_.  Why, you Mahometan, you Turk of a lawyer—would you do away
+with all the high things of courtesy, tenderness for the weaker, and—
+
+_Milverton_.  No, I see what he means; and there is something in it.
+Many a woman is brought up in unreason and self-will from these causes
+that he has given, as many a man from other causes; but there is one
+great corrective that he has omitted, and which is, that all forms,
+fashions, and outward things have a tendency to go down before realities
+when they come hand to hand together.  Knowledge and judgment prevail.
+Governing is apt to fall to the right person in private as in public
+affairs.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Those who give way in public affairs, and let the men who
+can do a thing do it, are so far wise that they know what is to be done,
+mostly.  But the very things I am arguing against are the unreason and
+self-will, which being constantly pampered, do not appreciate reason or
+just sway.  Besides, is there not a force in ill-humour and unreason to
+which you constantly see the wisest bend?  You will come round to my
+opinion some day.  I do not want, though, to convince you.  It is no
+business of mine.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, I may be wrong, but I think, when we come to consider
+education, I can show you how the dangers you fear may be greatly
+obviated, without Chivalry being obliged to put on a wig and gown, and be
+wise.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Meanwhile, let us enjoy the delightful atmosphere of
+courtesy, unreasonable sometimes, if you like, which saves many people
+being put down with the best arguments in the most convincing manner, or
+being weighed, estimated, and given way to, so as not to spoil them.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Do not tell, either of you, what I have been saying.  I
+shall always be poked up into some garret when I come to see you, if you
+do.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I think the most curious thing, as regards people living
+together, is the intense ignorance they sometimes are in of each other.
+Many years ago, one or other of you said something of this kind to me,
+and I have often thought of it since.
+
+_Milverton_.  People fulfil a relation towards each other, and they only
+know each other in that relation, especially if it is badly managed by
+the superior one; but any way the relationship involves some ignorance.
+They perform orbits round each other, each gyrating, too, upon his own
+axis, and there are parts of the character of each which are never
+brought into view of the other.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I should carry this notion of yours, Milverton, farther
+than you do.  There is a peculiar mental relation soon constituted
+between associates of any kind, which confines and prevents complete
+knowledge on both sides.  Each man, in some measure therefore, knows
+others only through himself.  Tennyson makes Ulysses say,
+
+    “I am a part of all that I have seen;”
+
+it might have run,
+
+    “I am a part of all that I have heard.”
+
+_Dunsford_.  Ellesmere becoming metaphysical and transcendental!
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, well, we will leave these heights, and descend in
+little drops of criticism.  There are two or three things you might have
+pointed out, Milverton.  Perhaps you would say that they are included in
+what you have said, but I think not.  You talk of the mischief of much
+comment on each other amongst those who live together.  You might have
+shown, I think, that in the case of near friends and relations this
+comment also deepens into interference—at least it partakes of that
+nature.  Friends and relations should, therefore, be especially careful
+to avoid needless comments on each other.  They do just the contrary.
+That is one of the reasons why they often hate one another so much.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Ellesmere!
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Protest, if you like, my dear Dunsford.
+
+    Dissentient,
+
+    1.  Because I wish it were not so.
+
+    2.  Because I am sorry that it is.
+
+                                                        (Signed) DUNSFORD.
+
+_Milverton_.  “Hate” is too strong a word, Ellesmere; what you say would
+be true enough, if you would put “are not in sympathy with.”
+
+_Ellesmere_.  “Have a quiet distaste for.”  That is the proper medium.
+Now, to go to another matter.  You have not put the case of over-managing
+people, who are tremendous to live with.
+
+_Milverton_.  I have spoken about “interfering unreasonably with others.”
+
+_Ellesmere_.  That does not quite convey what I mean.  It is when the
+manager and the managee are both of the same mind as to the thing to be
+done; but the former insists, and instructs, and suggests, and foresees,
+till the other feels that all free agency for him is gone.
+
+_Milverton_.  It is a sad thing to consider how much of their abilities
+people turn to tiresomeness.  You see a man who would be very agreeable
+if he were not so observant: another who would be charming, if he were
+deaf and dumb: a third delightful, if he did not vex all around him with
+superfluous criticism.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  A hit at me that last, I suspect.  But I shall go on.  You
+have not, I think, made enough merit of independence in companionship.
+If I were to put into an aphorism what I mean, I should say, Those who
+depend wholly on companionship are the worst companions; or thus: Those
+deserve companionship who can do without it.  There, Mr. Aphoriser
+General, what do you say to that?
+
+_Milverton_.  Very good, but—
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Of course a “but” to other people’s aphorisms, as if every
+aphorism had not buts innumerable.  We critics, you know, cannot abide
+criticism.  We do all the criticism that is needed ourselves.  I wonder
+at the presumption sometimes of you wretched authors.  But to proceed.
+You have not said anything about the mischief of superfluous condolence
+amongst people who live together.  I flatter myself that I could condole
+anybody out of all peace of mind.
+
+_Milverton_.  All depends upon whether condolence goes with the grain, or
+against the grain, of vanity.  I know what you mean, however: For
+instance, it is a very absurd thing to fret much over other people’s
+courses, not considering the knowledge and discipline that there is in
+any course that a man may take.  And it is still more absurd to be
+constantly showing the people fretted over that you are fretting over
+them.  I think a good deal of what you call superfluous condolence would
+come under the head of superfluous criticism.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Not altogether.  In companionship, when an evil happens to
+one of the circle, the others should simply attempt to share and lighten
+it, not to expound it, or dilate on it, or make it the least darker.  The
+person afflicted generally apprehends all the blackness sufficiently.
+Now, unjust abuse by the world is to me like the howling of the wind at
+night when one is warm within.  Bring any draught of it into one’s house
+though, and it is not so pleasant.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Talking of companionship, do not you think there is often a
+peculiar feeling of home where age or infirmity is?  The arm-chair of the
+sick or the old is the centre of the house.  They think, perhaps, that
+they are unimportant; but all the household hopes and cares flow to them
+and from them.
+
+_Milverton_.  I quite agree with you.  What you have just depicted is a
+beautiful sight, especially when, as you often see, the age or infirmity
+is not in the least selfish or exacting.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  We have said a great deal about the companionship of human
+beings; but, upon my word, we ought to have kept a few words for our dog
+friends.  Rollo has been lolling out his great tongue, and looking
+wistfully from face to face, as we each began our talk.  A few minutes
+ago he was quite concerned, thinking I was angry with you, when I would
+not let you “but” my aphorism.  I am not sure which of the three I should
+rather go out walking with now: Dunsford, Rollo, Milverton.  The middle
+one is the safest companion.  I am sure not to get out of humour with
+him.  But I have no objection to try the whole three: only I vote for
+much continuity of silence, as we have had floods of discussion to-day.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Agreed!
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Come, Rollo, you may bark now, as you have been silent,
+like a wise dog, all the morning.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+IT was arranged, during our walk, that Ellesmere should come and stay a
+day or two with me, and see the neighbouring cathedral, which is nearer
+my house than Milverton’s.  The visit over, I brought him back to
+Worth-Ashton.  Milverton saw us coming, walked down the hill to meet us,
+and after the usual greetings, began to talk to Ellesmere.
+
+_Milverton_.  So you have been to see our cathedral.  I say “our,” for
+when a cathedral is within ten miles of us, we feel a property in it, and
+are ready to battle for its architectural merits.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You know I am not a man to rave about cathedrals.
+
+_Milverton_.  I certainly do not expect you to do so.  To me a cathedral
+is mostly somewhat of a sad sight.  You have Grecian monuments, if
+anything so misplaced can be called Grecian, imbedded against and cutting
+into Gothic pillars; the doors shut for the greater part of the day; only
+a little bit of the building used: beadledom predominant; the clink of
+money here and there; white-wash in vigour; the singing indifferent; the
+sermons not indifferent but bad; and some visitors from London forming,
+perhaps, the most important part of the audience; in fact, the thing
+having become a show.  We look about, thinking when piety filled every
+corner, and feel that the cathedral is too big for the Religion which is
+a dried-up thing that rattles in this empty space.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  This is the boldest simile I have heard for a long time.
+My theory about cathedrals is very different, I must confess.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Theory!
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, “theory” is not the word I ought to have used—feeling
+then.  My feeling is, how strong this creature was, this worship, how
+beautiful, how alluring, how complete; but there was something
+stronger—truth.
+
+_Milverton_.  And more beautiful?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes, and far more beautiful.
+
+_Milverton_.  Doubtless, to the free spirits who brought truth forward.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You are only saying this, Milverton, to try what I will
+say; but, despite of all sentimentalities, you sympathise with any
+emancipation of the human mind, as I do, however much the meagreness of
+Protestantism may be at times distasteful to you.
+
+_Milverton_.  I did not say I was anxious to go back.  Certainly not.
+But what says Dunsford?  Let us sit down on his stile and hear what he
+has to say.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I cannot talk to you about this subject.  If I tell you of
+all the merits (as they seem to me) of the Church of England, you will
+both pick what I say to pieces, whereas if I leave you to fight on, one
+or the other will avail himself of those arguments on which our Church is
+based.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, Dunsford, you are very candid, and would make a
+complete diplomatist: truth-telling being now pronounced (rather late in
+the day) the very acme of diplomacy.  But do you not own that our
+cathedrals are sadly misused?
+
+_Dunsford_.  Now, very likely, if more were made of them, you, and men
+who think like you, would begin to cry out “superstition”; and would
+instantly turn round and inveigh against the uses which you now, perhaps,
+imagine for cathedrals.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, one never can answer for oneself; but at any rate, I
+do not see what is the meaning of building new churches in neighbourhoods
+where there are already the noblest buildings suitable for the same
+purposes.  Is there a church religion, and is there a cathedral religion?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You cannot make the present fill the garb of the past,
+Milverton, any more than you could make the past fill that of the
+present.  Now, as regards the very thing you are about to discuss to-day,
+if it be the same you told us in our last walk—Education: if you are only
+going to give us some institution for it, I daresay it may be very good
+for to-day, or for this generation, but it will have its sere and yellow
+leaf, and there will be a time when future Milvertons, in sentimental
+mood, will moan over it, and wish they had it and all that has grown up
+to take its place at the same time.  But all this is what I have often
+heard you say yourself in other words.
+
+_Dunsford_.  This is very hard doctrine, and not quite sound, I think.
+In getting the new gain, we always sacrifice something, and we should
+look with some pious regard to what was good in the things which are
+past.  That good is generally one which, though it may not be equal to
+the present, would make a most valuable supplement to it.
+
+_Milverton_.  I would try and work in the old good thing with the new,
+not as patchwork though, but making the new thing grow out in such a way
+as to embrace the old advantage.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, we must have the essay before we branch out into our
+philosophy.  Pleasure afterwards—I will not say what comes first.
+
+
+
+EDUCATION.
+
+
+The word education is so large, that one may almost as well put “world,”
+or “the end and object of being,” at the head of an essay.  It should,
+therefore, soon be declared what such a heading does mean.  The word
+education suggests chiefly to some minds what the State can do for those
+whom they consider its young people—the children of the poorer classes:
+to others it presents the idea of all the training that can be got for
+money at schools and colleges, and which can be fairly accomplished and
+shut in at the age of one-and-twenty.  This essay, however, will not be a
+treatise on government education, or other school and college education,
+but will only contain a few points in reference to the general subject,
+which may escape more methodical and enlarged discussions.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+In the first place, as regards government education, it must be kept in
+mind that there is a danger of its being too interfering and formal, of
+its overlying private enterprise, insisting upon too much uniformity, and
+injuring local connections and regards.  Education, even in the poorest
+acceptance of the word, is a great thing: but the harmonious intercourse
+of different ranks, if not a greater, is a more difficult one; and we
+must not gain the former at any considerable sacrifice of the latter.
+
+There is another point connected with this branch of the subject which
+requires, perhaps, to be noted.  If government provision is made in any
+case, might it not be combined with private payment in other cases, or
+enter in the way of rewards, so as to do good throughout each step of the
+social ladder?  The lowest kind of school education is a power, and it is
+desirable that the gradations of this power should correspond to other
+influences which we know to be good.  For instance, a hard-working man
+saves something to educate his children; if he can get a little better
+education for them than other parents of his own rank for theirs, it is
+an incentive and a reward to him, and the child’s bringing up at home is
+a thing which will correspond to this better education at school.  In
+this there are the elements at once of stability and progress.
+
+These views may possibly seem too refined, but at any rate they require
+consideration.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+The next branch of the subject is the ordinary education of young persons
+not of the poorest classes, with which the State has hitherto had little
+or nothing to do.  This may be considered under four heads: religious,
+moral, intellectual, and physical education.  With regard to the first,
+there is not much that can be put into rules about it.  Parents and
+tutors will naturally be anxious to impress those under their charge with
+the religious opinions which they themselves hold.  In doing this,
+however, they should not omit to lay a foundation for charity towards
+people of other religious opinions.  For this purpose, it may be
+requisite to give a child a notion that there are other creeds besides
+that in which it is brought up itself.  And especially, let it not
+suppose that all good and wise people are of its church or chapel.
+However desirable it may appear to the person teaching that there should
+be such a thing as unity of religion, yet as the facts of the world are
+against his wishes, and as this is the world which the child is to enter,
+it is well that the child should in reasonable time be informed of these
+facts.  It may be said in reply that history sufficiently informs
+children on these points.  But the world of the young is the domestic
+circle; all beyond is fabulous, unless brought home to them by comment.
+The fact, therefore, of different opinions in religious matters being
+held by good people should sometimes be dwelt upon, instead of being
+shunned, if we would secure a ground-work of tolerance in a child’s mind.
+
+
+
+INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION.
+
+
+In the intellectual part of education there is the absolute knowledge to
+be acquired, and the ways of acquiring knowledge to be gained.  The
+latter of course form the most important branch.  They can, in some
+measure, be taught.  Give children little to do, make much of its being
+accurately done.  This will give accuracy.  Insist upon speed in
+learning, with careful reference to the original powers of the pupil.
+This speed gives the habit of concentrating attention, one of the most
+valuable of mental habits.  Then cultivate logic.  Logic is not the hard
+matter that is fancied.  A young person, especially after a little
+geometrical training, may soon be taught to perceive where a fallacy
+exists, and whether an argument is well sustained.  It is not, however,
+sufficient for him to be able to examine sharply and to pull to pieces.
+He must learn how to build.  This is done by method.  The higher branches
+of method cannot be taught at first.  But you may begin by teaching
+orderliness of mind.  Collecting, classifying, contrasting and weighing
+facts, are some of the processes by which method is taught.  When these
+four things, accuracy, attention, logic, and method are attained, the
+intellect is fairly furnished with its instruments.
+
+As regards the things to be taught, they will vary to some extent in each
+age.  The general course of education pursued at any particular time may
+not be the wisest by any means, and greatness will overleap it and
+neglect it, but the mass of men may go more safely and comfortably, if
+not with the stream, at least by the side of it.
+
+In the choice of studies too much deference should not be paid to the
+bent of a young person’s mind.  Excellence in one or two things which may
+have taken the fancy of a youth (or which really may suit his genius)
+will ill compensate for a complete ignorance of those branches of study
+which are very repugnant to him; and which are, therefore, not likely to
+be learnt when he has freedom in the choice of his studies.
+
+Amongst the first things to be aimed at in the intellectual part of
+education is variety of pursuit.  A human being, like a tree, if it is to
+attain to perfect symmetry, must have light and air given to it from all
+quarters.  This may be done without making men superficial.  Scientific
+method may be acquired without many sciences being learnt.  But one or
+two great branches of science must be accurately known.  So, too, the
+choice works of antiquity may be thoroughly appreciated without extensive
+reacting.  And passing on from mere learning of any kind, a variety of
+pursuits, even in what may be called accomplishments, is eminently
+serviceable.  Much may be said of the advantage of keeping a man to a few
+pursuits, and of the great things done thereby in the making of pins and
+needles.  But in this matter we are not thinking of the things that are
+to be done, but of the persons who are to do them.  Not wealth but men.
+A number of one-sided men may make a great nation, though I much incline
+to doubt that; but such a nation will not contain a number of great men.
+
+The very advantage that flows from division of labour, and the probable
+consequences that men’s future bread-getting pursuits will be more and
+more sub-divided, and therefore limited, make it the more necessary that
+a man should begin life with a broad basis of interest in many things
+which may cultivate his faculties and develop his nature.  This
+multifariousness of pursuit is needed also in the education of the poor.
+Civilisation has made it easy for a man to brutalise himself: how is this
+to be counteracted but by endowing him with many pursuits which may
+distract him from vice?  It is not that kind of education which leads to
+no employment in after-life that will do battle with vice.  But when
+education enlarges the field of life-long good pursuits, it becomes
+formidable to the soul’s worst enemies.
+
+
+
+MORAL EDUCATION.
+
+
+In considering moral education we must recollect that there are three
+agents in this matter—the child himself, the influence of his grown-up
+friends, and that of his contemporaries.  All that his grown-up friends
+tell him in the way of experience goes for very little, except in
+palpable matters.  They talk of abstractions which he cannot comprehend:
+and the “Arabian Nights” is a truer world to him than that they talk of.
+Still, though they cannot furnish experience, they can give motives.
+Indeed, in their daily intercourse with the child, they are always doing
+so.  For instance, truth, courage, and kindness are the great moral
+qualities to be instilled.  Take courage, in its highest form—moral
+courage.  If a child perpetually hears such phrases (and especially if
+they are applied to his own conduct), as, “What people will say,” “How
+they will look at you,” “What they will think,” and the like, it tends to
+destroy all just self-reliance in that child’s mind, and to set up
+instead an exaggerated notion of public opinion, the greatest tyrant of
+these times.  People can see this in such an obvious thing as animal
+courage.  They will avoid over-cautioning children against physical
+dangers, knowing that the danger they talk much about will become a
+bug-bear to the child which it may never get rid of.  But a similar peril
+lurks in the application of moral motives.  Truth, courage, and kindness
+are likely to be learnt, or not, by children, according as they hear and
+receive encouragement in the direction of these pre-eminent qualities.
+When attempt is made to frighten a child with these worldly maxims, “What
+will be said of you?” “Are you like such a one?” and such things, it is
+meant to draw him under the rule of grown-up respectability.  The last
+thing thought of by the parent or teacher is, that such maxims will bring
+the child under the especial guidance of the most unscrupulous of his
+contemporaries.  They will use ridicule and appeal to their little world,
+which will be his world, and ask, “What will be said” of him.  There
+should be some stuff in him of his own to meet these awful generalities.
+
+
+
+PHYSICAL EDUCATION.
+
+
+The physical education of children is a very simple matter, too simple to
+be much attended to without great perseverance and resolution on the part
+of those who care for the children.  It consists, as we all know, in good
+air, simple diet, sufficient exercise, and judicious clothing.  The first
+requisite is the most important, and by far the most frequently
+neglected.  This neglect is not so unreasonable as it seems.  It arises
+from pure ignorance.  If the mass of mankind knew what scientific men
+know about the functions of the air, they would be as careful in getting
+a good supply of it as of their other food.  All the people that ever
+were supposed to die of poison in the middle ages, and that means nearly
+everybody whose death was worth speculating about, are not so many as
+those who die poisoned by bad air in the course of any given year.  Even
+a slightly noxious thing, which is constant, affecting us every moment of
+the day, must have considerable influence; but the air we breathe is not
+a thing that slightly affects us, but one of the most important elements
+of life.  Moreover, children are the most affected by impurity of air.
+We need not weary ourselves with much statistics to ascertain this.  One
+or two broad facts will assure us of it.  In Nottingham there is a
+district called Byron Ward, “the densest and worst-conditioned quarter of
+the town.”  A table has been made by Mr. William Hawksley of the
+mortality of equal populations in different parts of the town:
+
+    “On comparing the diagram No. 1, relating to Park Ward, with the
+    diagram No. 7, relating to Byron Ward, it will be seen that the
+    heavier pressure of the causes of mortality occasions in the latter
+    district such an undue destruction of early life, that towards 100
+    deaths, however occurring, Byron Ward contributes fifty per cent.
+    more of children under five years of age than the Park Ward, for the
+    former sends sixty children to an early grave, while the latter sends
+    only forty.” {116a}
+
+Mr. Hawksley, the former witness alluded to, goes on to say—
+
+    “It has been long known that, with increase of years, up to that
+    period of life which has been denominated the second childhood, the
+    human constitution becomes gradually more resistful, and as it were
+    slowly hardened against the repeated attacks of those more acute
+    disorders, incident to an inferior degree of sanitary civilisation,
+    by which large portions of an infant population are continually
+    overcome and rapidly swept away.  From the operation of these and
+    more extraneous influences of a disturbing character, an infant
+    population is almost entirely exempted; and on this account it is
+    considered that an infant population constitutes, as it were, a
+    delicate barometer, from which we may derive more early and more
+    certain indications of the presence and comparative force of local
+    causes of mortality and disease than can be obtained from the more
+    general methods of investigation usually pursued.”
+
+The above evidence is confirmed by Mr. Toynbee:—
+
+    “The disease of hydrocephalus, of water in the brain, so fatal to
+    children, I find associated with symptoms of scrofula, and arising in
+    abundance in these close rooms.  I believe water in the brain, in the
+    class of patients whom I visit, to be almost wholly a scrofulous
+    affection.”  {116b}
+
+But supposing people aware of the necessity for good air, and therefore
+for ventilation, what is to be done?  In houses in great towns certainly,
+and I should say in all houses, some of the care and expense that are
+devoted to ornamental work, which when done is often a care, a trouble,
+an eyesore, and a mischief, should be given to modes of ventilation,
+{117a} sound building, abundant access of light, largeness of
+sleeping-rooms, and such useful things.  Less ormolu and tinsel of all
+kinds in the drawing-rooms, and sweeter air in the regions above.
+Similar things may be done for and by the poor. {117b}  And it need
+hardly be said that those people who care for their children, if of any
+enlightenment at all, will care greatly for the sanitary condition of
+their neighbourhood generally.  At present you will find at many a rich
+man’s door {117c} a nuisance which is poisoning the atmosphere that his
+children are to breathe, but which he could entirely cure for less than
+one day’s ordinary expenses.
+
+I am afraid that ventilation is very little attended to in school-rooms,
+either for rich or poor.  Now it may be deliberately said that there is
+very little learned in any school-room that can compensate for the
+mischief of its being learned in the midst of impure air.  This is a
+thing which parents must look to, for the grown-up people in the
+school-rooms, though suffering grievously themselves from insufficient
+ventilation, will be unobservant of it. {118}  In every system of
+government inspection, ventilation must occupy a prominent part.
+
+The advantage of simple food for children is a thing that people have
+found out.  And as regards exercise, children happily make great efforts
+to provide a sufficiency of this for themselves.  In clothing, the folly
+and conformity of grown-up people enter again.  Loving mothers, in
+various parts of the world, carry about at present, I believe, and
+certainly in times past, carried their little children strapped to a
+board, with nearly as little power of motion as the board itself.  Could
+we get the returns of stunted miserable beings, or of deaths, from this
+cause, they would be something portentous.  Less in degree, but not less
+fatally absurd in principle, are many of the strappings, bandages, and
+incipient stays for children amongst us.  They are all mischievous.
+Allow children, at any rate, some freedom of limbs, some opportunity of
+being graceful and healthy.  Give Nature—dear motherly, much-abused
+Nature—some chance of forming these little ones according to the
+beneficent intentions of Providence, and not according to the angular
+designs of ill-educated men and women.
+
+I do not say that attention to the above matters of good air, judicious
+clothing, and freedom from bandages, will absolutely secure health,
+because these very things may have been so ill attended to in the parents
+or in the parental stock as to have introduced special maladies; but at
+least they are the most important objects to be minded now; and, perhaps,
+the more to be minded in the children of those who have suffered most
+from neglect in these particulars.
+
+When we are considering the health of children, it is imperative not to
+omit the importance of keeping their brains fallow, as it were, for
+several of the first years of their existence.  The mischief perpetrated
+by a contrary course in the shape of bad health, peevish temper, and
+developed vanity, is incalculable.  It would not be just to attribute
+this altogether to the vanity of parents; they are influenced by a
+natural fear lest their children should not have all the advantages of
+other children.  Some infant prodigy which is a standard of mischief
+throughout its neighbourhood misleads them.  But parents may be assured
+that this early work is not by any means all gain, even in the way of
+work.  I suspect it is a loss; and that children who begin their
+education late, as it would be called, will rapidly overtake those who
+have been in harness long before them.  And what advantage can it be that
+the child knows more at six years old than its compeers, especially if
+this is to be gained by a sacrifice of health which may never be
+regained?  There may be some excuse for this early book-work in the case
+of those children who are to live by manual labour.  It is worth while,
+perhaps, to run the risk of some physical injury to them, having only
+their early years in which we can teach them book-knowledge.  The chance
+of mischief, too, will be less, being more likely to be counteracted by
+their after-life.  But for a child who has to be at book-work for the
+first twenty-one years of its life, what folly it is to exhaust in the
+least the mental energy, which, after all, is its surest implement.
+
+A similar course of argument applies to taking children early to church,
+and to over-developing their minds in any way.  There is no knowing,
+moreover, the disgust and weariness that may grow up in the minds of
+young persons from their attention being prematurely claimed.  We are
+now, however, looking at early study as a matter of health; and we may
+certainly put it down in the same class with impure air, stimulating
+diet, unnecessary bandages, and other manifest physical disadvantages.
+Civilised life, as it advances, does not seem to have so much repose in
+it, that we need begin early in exciting the mind, for fear of the man
+being too lethargical hereafter.
+
+
+
+EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
+
+
+It seems needful that something should be said specially about the
+education of women.  As regards their intellects they have been unkindly
+treated—too much flattered, too little respected.  They are shut up in a
+world of conventionalities, and naturally believe that to be the only
+world.  The theory of their education seems to be, that they should not
+be made companions to men, and some would say, they certainly are not.
+These critics, however, in the high imaginations they justly form of what
+women’s society might be to men, forget, perhaps, how excellent a thing
+it is already.  Still the criticism is not by any means wholly unjust.
+It appears rather as if there had been a falling off since the olden
+times in the education of women.  A writer of modern days, arguing on the
+other side, has said, that though we may talk of the Latin and Greek of
+Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth, yet we are to consider that that was
+the only learning of the time, and that many a modern lady may be far
+better instructed, although she knew nothing of Latin and Greek.  Certain
+it is, she may know more facts, have read more books: but this does not
+assure us that she may not be less conversable, less companionable.
+Wherein does the cultivated and thoughtful man differ from the common
+man?  In the method of his discourse.  His questions upon a subject in
+which he is ignorant are full of interest.  His talk has a groundwork of
+reason.  This rationality must not be supposed to be dulness.  Folly is
+dull.  Now, would women be less charming if they had more power, or at
+least more appreciation, of reasoning?  Their flatterers tell them that
+their intuition is such that they need not man’s slow processes of
+thought.  One would be very sorry to have a grave question of law that
+concerned oneself decided upon by intuitive judges, or a question of fact
+by intuitive jurymen.  And so of all human things that have to be
+canvassed, it is better, and more amusing too, that they should be
+discussed according to reason.  Moreover, the exercise of the reasoning
+faculties gives much of the pleasure which there is in solid
+acquirements; so that the obvious facts in life and history will hardly
+be acquired by those who are not in the habit of reasoning upon them.
+Hence it comes, that women have less interest in great topics, and less
+knowledge of them, than they might have.
+
+Again, if either sex requires logical education, it is theirs.  The sharp
+practice of the world drives some logic into the most vague of men; women
+are not so schooled.
+
+But, supposing the deficiency we have been considering to be admitted,
+how is it to be remedied?  Women’s education must be made such as to
+ensure some accuracy and reasoning.  This may be done with any subject of
+education, and is done with men, whatever they learn, because they are
+expected to produce and use their requirements.  But the greatest object
+of intellectual education, the improvement of the mental powers, is as
+needful for one sex as the other, and requires the same means in both
+sexes.  The same accuracy, attention, logic, and method that are
+attempted in the education of men should be aimed at in that of women.
+This will never be sufficiently attended to, as there are no immediate
+and obvious fruits from it.  And, therefore, as it is probable, from the
+different career of women to that of men, that whatever women study will
+not be studied with the same method and earnestness as it would be by
+men, what a peculiar advantage there is in any study for them, in which
+no proficiency whatever can be made without some use of most of the
+qualities we desire for them.  Geometry, for instance, is such a study.
+It may appear pedantic, but I must confess that Euclid seems to me a book
+for the young of both sexes.  The severe rules upon which the acquisition
+of the dead languages is built would of course be a great means for
+attaining the logical habits in question.  But Latin and Greek is a
+deeper pedantry for women than geometry, and much less desirable on many
+accounts: and geometry would, perhaps, suffice to teach them what
+reasoning is.  I daresay, too, there are accomplishments which might be
+taught scientifically; and so even the prejudice against the manifest
+study of science by women be conciliated.  But the appreciation of
+reasoning must be got somehow.
+
+It is a narrow view of things to suppose that a just cultivation of
+women’s mental powers will take them out of their sphere: it will only
+enlarge that sphere.  The most cultivated women perform their common
+duties best.  They see more in those duties.  They can do more.  Lady
+Jane Grey would, I daresay, have bound up a wound, or managed a
+household, with any unlearned woman of her day.  Queen Elizabeth did
+manage a kingdom: and we find no pedantry in her way of doing it.
+
+People who advocate a better training for women must not, necessarily, be
+supposed to imagine that men and women are by education to be made alike,
+and are intended to fulfil most of the same offices.  There seems reason
+for thinking that a boundary line exists between the intellects of men
+and women which, perhaps, cannot be passed over from either side.  But,
+at any rate, taking the whole nature of both sexes, and the inevitable
+circumstances which cause them to differ, there must be such a difference
+between men and women that the same intellectual training applied to both
+would produce most dissimilar results.  It has not, however, been
+proposed in these pages to adopt the same training: and would have been
+still less likely to be proposed if it could be shown that such training
+would tend to make men and women unpleasantly similar to each other.  The
+utmost that has been thought of here is to make more of women’s
+faculties, not by any means to translate them into men’s—if such a thing
+were possible, which, we may venture to say, is not.  There are some
+things that are good for all trees—light, air, room—but no one expects by
+affording some similar advantages of this kind to an oak and a beech, to
+find them assimilate, though by such means the best of each may be
+produced.
+
+Moreover, it should be recollected that the purpose of education is not
+always to foster natural gifts, but sometimes to bring out faculties that
+might otherwise remain dormant; and especially so far as to make the
+persons educated cognisant of excellence in those faculties in others.  A
+certain tact and refinement belong to women, in which they have little to
+learn from the first: men, too, who attain some portion of these
+qualities, are greatly the better for them, and I should imagine not less
+acceptable on that account to women.  So, on the other side, there may be
+an intellectual cultivation for women which may seem a little against the
+grain, which would not, however, injure any of their peculiar
+gifts—would, in fact, carry those gifts to the highest, and would
+increase withal, both to men and women, the pleasure of each other’s
+society.
+
+There is a branch of general education which is not thought at all
+necessary for women; as regards which, indeed, it is well if they are not
+brought up to cultivate the opposite.  Women are not taught to be
+courageous.  Indeed, to some persons courage may seem as unnecessary for
+women as Latin and Greek.  Yet there are few things that would tend to
+make women happier in themselves, and more acceptable to those with whom
+they live, than courage.  There are many women of the present day,
+sensible women in other things, whose panic-terrors are a frequent source
+of discomfort to themselves and those around them.  Now, it is a great
+mistake to imagine that harshness must go with courage; and that the
+bloom of gentleness and sympathy must all be rubbed off by that vigour of
+mind which gives presence of mind, enables a person to be useful in
+peril, and makes the desire to assist overcome that sickliness of
+sensibility which can only contemplate distress and difficulty.  So far
+from courage being unfeminine, there is a peculiar grace and dignity in
+those beings who have little active power of attack or defence, passing
+through danger with a moral courage which is equal to that of the
+strongest.  We see this in great things.  We perfectly appreciate the
+sweet and noble dignity of an Anne Bullen, a Mary Queen of Scots, or a
+Marie Antoinette.  We see that it is grand for these delicately-bred,
+high-nurtured, helpless personages to meet Death with a silence and a
+confidence like his own.  But there would be a similar dignity in women’s
+bearing small terrors with fortitude.  There is no beauty in fear.  It is
+a mean, ugly, dishevelled creature.  No statue can be made of it that a
+woman would like to see herself like.
+
+Women are pre-eminent in steady endurance of tiresome suffering: they
+need not be far behind men in a becoming courage to meet that which is
+sudden and sharp.  The dangers and the troubles, too, which we may
+venture to say they now start at unreasonably, are many of them mere
+creatures of the imagination—such as, in their way, disturb high-mettled
+animals brought up to see too little, and therefore frightened at any
+leaf blown across the road.
+
+We may be quite sure that, without losing any of the most delicate and
+refined of feminine graces, women may be taught not to give way to
+unreasonable fears, which should belong no more to the fragile than to
+the robust.
+
+There is no doubt that courage may in some measure be taught.  We agree
+that the lower kinds of courage are matter of habit, therefore of
+teaching: and the same thing holds good to some extent of all courage.
+Courage is as contagious as fear.  The saying is, that the brave are the
+sons and daughters of the brave; but we might as truly say that they must
+be brought up by the brave.  The great novelist, when he wants a coward
+descended from a valorous race, does well to take him from his clan and
+bring him up in an unwarlike home. {126}  Indeed, the heroic example of
+other days is in great part the source of courage of each generation; and
+men walk up composedly to the most perilous enterprises, beckoned onwards
+by the shades of the brave that were.  In civil courage, moral courage,
+or courage shown in the minute circumstances of everyday life, the same
+law is true.  Courage may be taught by precept, enforced by example, and
+is good to be taught to men, women, and children.
+
+
+
+EDUCATION TO HAPPINESS.
+
+
+It is a curious phenomenon in human affairs, that some of those matters
+in which education is most potent should have been amongst the least
+thought of as branches of it.  What you teach a boy of Latin and Greek
+may be good; but these things are with him but a little time of each day
+in his after-life.  What you teach him of direct moral precepts may be
+very good seed: it may grow up, especially if it have sufficient moisture
+from experience; but then, again, a man is, happily, not doing obvious
+right or wrong all day long.  What you teach him of any bread-getting art
+may be of some import to him, as to the quantity and quality of bread he
+will get; but he is not always with his art.  With himself he is always.
+How important, then, it is, whether you have given him a happy or a
+morbid turn of mind; whether the current of his life is a clear wholesome
+stream, or bitter as Marah.  The education to happiness is a possible
+thing—not to a happiness supposed to rest upon enjoyments of any kind,
+but to one built upon content and resignation.  This is the best part of
+philosophy.  This enters into the “wisdom” spoken of in the Scriptures.
+Now it can be taught.  The converse is taught every day and all day long.
+
+To take an example.  A sensitive disposition may descend to a child; but
+it is also very commonly increased, and often created.  Captiousness,
+sensitiveness, and a Martha-like care for the things of this world, are
+often the direct fruits of education.  All these faults of the character,
+and they are amongst the greatest, may be summed up in a disproportionate
+care for little things.  This is rather a growing evil.  The painful
+neatness and exactness of modern life foster it.  Long peace favours it.
+Trifles become more important, great evils being kept away.  And so, the
+tide of small wishes and requirements gains upon us fully as fast as we
+can get out of its way by our improved means of satisfying them.  Now the
+unwholesome concern that many parents and governors manifest as to small
+things must have a great influence on the governed.  You hear a child
+reprimanded about a point of dress, or some trivial thing, as if it had
+committed a treachery.  The criticisms, too, which it hears upon others
+are often of the same kind.  Small omissions, small commissions, false
+shame, little stumbling-blocks of offence, trifling grievances of the
+kind that Dr. Johnson, who had known hunger, stormed at Mrs. Thrale for
+talking about, are made much of; general dissatisfaction is expressed
+that things are not complete, and that everything in life is not turned
+out as neat as a Long-Acre carriage; commands are expected to be
+fulfilled by agents, upon very rapid and incomplete orders, exactly to
+the mind of the person ordering;—these ways, to which children are very
+attentive, teach them in their turn to be querulous, sensitive, and full
+of small cares and wishes.  And when you have made a child like this, can
+you make a world for him that will satisfy him?  Tax your civilisation to
+the uttermost: a punctilious, tiresome disposition expects more.  Indeed,
+Nature, with her vague and flowing ways, cannot at all fit in with a
+right-angled person.  Besides, there are other precise, angular
+creatures, and these sharp-edged persons wound each other terribly.  Of
+all the things which you can teach people, after teaching them to trust
+in God, the most important is, to put out of their hearts any expectation
+of perfection, according to their notions, in this world.  This
+expectation is at the bottom of a great deal of the worldliness we hear
+so much reprehended, and necessarily gives to little things a most
+irrational importance.
+
+Observe the effect of this disproportionate care for little things in the
+disputes of men.  A man who does so care, has a garment embroidered with
+hooks which catch at everything that passes by.  He finds many more
+causes of offence than other men; and each offence is a more bitter thing
+to him than to others.  He does not expect to be offended.  Poor man!  He
+goes through life wondering that he is the subject of general attack, and
+that the world is so quarrelsome.
+
+The result of a bad education in developing undue care for trifles may be
+seen in its effect on domestic government and government in general.  If
+those in power have this fault, they will make the persons under them
+miserable by petty, constant blame; or they will make them indifferent to
+all blame.  If this fault is in the governed, they will captiously object
+to all the ways and plans of their superiors, not knowing the difficulty
+of doing anything; they will expect miracles of attention, justice, and
+temper, which the rough-hewed ways of men do not admit of; and they will
+repine and tease the life out of those in authority.  Sometimes both
+superiors and inferiors, governors and governed, have this fault.  This
+must often happen in a family, and is a fearful punishment to the elders
+of it.  Scarcely any goodness of disposition, and what are called great
+qualities, can make such difficult materials work well together.
+
+But I end with somewhat of the same argument as I began with, namely,
+that as a man lives more with himself than with art, science, or even
+with his fellows, a wise teacher, having before him the intent to make a
+happy-minded man of his pupil, will try to lay a groundwork of divine
+contentment in him.  If he cannot make him easily pleased, he will at
+least try and prevent him from being easily disconcerted.  Why, even the
+self-conceit that makes people indifferent to small things, wrapping them
+in an atmosphere of self-satisfaction, is welcome in a man compared to
+that querulousness which makes him an enemy to all around.  But most
+commendable is that easiness of mind which is easy because it is
+tolerant, because it does not look to have everything its own way,
+because it expects anything but smooth usage in its course here, because
+it has resolved to manufacture as few miseries out of small evils as can
+be.
+
+Most of us know what it is to vex our minds because we cannot recall some
+name or trivial thing which has escaped our memory for the moment.  But
+then we think how foolish this is, what little concern it is to us.  We
+are right in that; yet any defect of memory is a great concern compared
+to many of the trifling niceties, comforts, offences, and
+rectangularities which, perhaps, we do not think it an ignoble use of
+heart and time to waste ourselves upon.  It would be well enough to
+entertain the rabble of small troubles and offences, if we could lay them
+aside with the delightful facility of children, who, after an agony of
+tears, are soon found laughing or asleep.  But the chagrin and vexation
+of grown-up people are grown-up too; and, however childish in their
+origin, are not to be laughed or danced or slept away in childlike
+simple-heartedness.
+
+We must not imagine that too much stress can well be laid upon the
+importance of an education to contentment, for it comes under the head of
+those things which are not adjuncts or acquisitions for a man, but which
+form the texture of his being.  What a man has learnt is of importance;
+but what he is, what he can do, what he will become, are more significant
+things.  Finally, it may be remarked, that, to make education a great
+work, we must have the educators great; that book-learning is mainly good
+as it gives us a chance of coming into the company of greater and better
+minds than the average of men around us; and that individual greatness
+and goodness are the things to be aimed at rather than the successful
+cultivation of those talents which go to form some eminent membership of
+society.  Each man is a drama in himself—has to play all the parts in it;
+is to be king and rebel, successful and vanquished, free and slave; and
+needs a bringing-up fit for the universal creature that he is.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You have been unexpectedly merciful to us.  The moment I
+heard the head of the essay given out, there flitted before my frightened
+mind volumes of reports, Battersea schools, Bell, Wilderspin, normal
+farms, National Society, British Schools, interminable questions about
+how religion might be separated altogether from secular education, or so
+much religion taught as all religious sects could agree in.  These are
+all very good things and people to discuss, I daresay; but, to tell the
+truth, the whole subject sits heavy on my soul.  I meet a man of
+inexhaustible dulness, and he talks to me for three hours about some
+great subject—this very one of education, for instance—till I sit
+entranced by stupidity, thinking the while, “And this is what we are to
+become by education—to be like you.”  Then I see a man like D—, a
+judicious, reasonable, conversable being, knowing how to be silent too—a
+man to go through a campaign with—and I find he cannot read or write.
+
+_Milverton_.  This sort of contrast is just the thing to strike you,
+Ellesmere: and yet you know as well as any of us that to bring forward
+such contrasts by way of depreciating education would be most
+unreasonable.  There are three things that go to make a man—the education
+that most people mean by education; then the education that goes deeper,
+the education of the soul; and, thirdly, a man’s gifts of Nature.  I
+agree with all you say about D—; he never says a foolish thing, and does
+a great many judicious ones.  But look what a clever face he has.  There
+are gifts of Nature for you.  Then, again, although he cannot read or
+write, he may have been most judiciously brought up in other respects.
+He may have had two, therefore, out of the three elements of education.
+What such instances would show, I believe, if narrowly looked into, is
+the immense importance of the education of heart and temper.
+
+I feel with you in some measure about the dulness of the subject of
+education.  But then it extends to all things of the institution kind.
+Men must have a great deal of pedantry, routine, and folly of all sorts,
+in any large matter they undertake.  I had had this feeling for a long
+time (you know the way in which you have a thing in your mind, although
+you have never said it out exactly even to yourself)—well, I came upon a
+passage of Emerson’s which I will try to quote, and then I knew what it
+was that I had felt.
+
+“We are full of mechanical actions.  We must needs intermeddle, and have
+things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are
+odious.  Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy.  Our
+Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper societies, are yokes to the
+neck.  We pain ourselves to please nobody.  There are natural ways of
+arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive.  Why
+should all virtue work in one and the same way?” . . . “And why drag this
+dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole of Christendom?  It is
+natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire, and maturity should
+teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked.  Do
+not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the
+children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.”
+
+Now, without agreeing with him in all points, we may sympathise with him.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I agree with him.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I knew you would.  You love an extreme.
+
+_Milverton_.  But look now.  It is well to say, “It is natural and
+beautiful that the young should ask and the old should teach”; but then
+the old should be capable of teaching, which is not the case we have to
+deal with.  Institutions are often only to meet individual failings.  Let
+there be more instructed elders, and the “dead weight” of Sunday-schools
+would be less needed.
+
+I think the result of our thoughts would be, that there should be as much
+life, joy, and Nature put into teaching as can be; but I, for one, am not
+prepared to say that the most mechanical process is not better than none.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, you have now shut up the subject, according to your
+fashion, in a rounded sentence; and you think after that there is nothing
+more to be said.  But I say it goes to my heart—
+
+_Dunsford_.  What is that?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  To my heart to see the unmerciful quantity of instruction
+that little children go through on a Sunday.  I suppose I am a very
+wicked man; but I know how wearied I should have been, at any time of my
+life, if so much virtuous precept and good doctrine had been poured into
+me.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, I will not fight certainly for anything that is to
+make Sunday a wearisome day for children.  Indeed, what I meant by
+putting more joy and life into teaching was, that in such a thing as this
+Sunday-schooling, for instance, a judicious man, far from being anxious
+to get a certain quantity of routine done about it, would do with the
+least—would endeavour to connect it with something interesting—would, in
+a word, love children, and not Sunday-schools.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Ah, we will have no more about Sunday-schools.  I know we
+all agree in reality, although Dunsford has been looking very grave and
+has not said a word.  I wanted to tell you that I think you are quite
+right, Milverton, in saying a good deal about multifariousness of
+pursuit.  You see a wretch of a pedant who knows all about tetrameters or
+statutes of uses, but who, as you hinted an essay or two ago, can hardly
+answer his child a question as they walk about the garden together.  The
+man has never given a good thought or look to Nature.  Well then, again,
+what a stupid thing it is that we are not all taught music.  Why learn
+the language of many portions of mankind, and leave the universal
+language of the feelings, as you would call it, unlearnt?
+
+_Milverton_.  I quite agree with you; but I thought you always set your
+face, or rather your ears, against music.
+
+_Dunsford_.  So did I.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I should like to know all about it.  It is not to my mind
+that a cultivated man should be quite thrown out by any topic of
+conversation, or that there should be any form of human endeavour or
+accomplishment which he has no conception of.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I liked what you said, Milverton, about the philosophy of
+making light of many things, and the way of looking at life that may thus
+be given to those we educate.  I rather doubted at first, though, whether
+you were not going to assign too much power to education in the
+modification of temper.  But, certainly, the mode of looking at the daily
+events of life, little or great, and the consequent habits of
+captiousness or magnanimity, are just the matters which the young
+especially imitate their elders in.
+
+_Milverton_.  You see, the very worst kind of tempers are established
+upon the fretting care for trifles that I want to make war upon in the
+essay.  A man is choleric.  Well, it is a very bad thing; it tends to
+frighten those about him into falseness.  He has outrageous bursts of
+temper.  He is humble for days afterwards.  His dependants rather like
+him after all.  They know that “his bark is worse than his bite.”  Then
+there is your gloomy man, often a man who punishes himself most—perhaps a
+large-hearted, humorous, but sad man, at the same time liveable with.  He
+does not care for trifles.  But it is your acid-sensitive (I must join
+words like Mirabeau’s Grandison-Cromwell, to get what I mean), and your
+cold, querulous people that need to have angels to live with them.  Now
+education has often had a great deal to do with the making of these
+choice tempers.  They are somewhat artificial productions.  And they are
+the worst.
+
+_Dunsford_.  You know a saying attributed to the Bishop of — about
+temper.  No?  Somebody, I suppose, was excusing something on the score of
+temper, to which the Bishop replied, “Temper is nine-tenths of
+Christianity.”
+
+_Milverton_.  There is an appearance we see in Nature, not far from here,
+by the way, that has often put me in mind of the effect of temper upon
+men.  It is in the lowlands near the sea, where, when the tide is not up
+(the man out of temper), there is a slimy, patchy, diseased-looking
+surface of mud and sick seaweed.  You pass by in a few hours, there is a
+beautiful lake, water up to the green grass (the man in temper again),
+and the whole landscape brilliant with reflected light.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  And to complete the likeness, the good temper and the full
+tide last about the same time—with some men at least.  It is so like you,
+Milverton, to have that simile in your mind.  There is nothing you see in
+Nature, but you must instantly find a parallel for it in man.  Sermons in
+stones you will not see, else I am sure you might.  Here is a good hard
+flint for you to see your next essay in.
+
+_Milverton_.  It will do very well, as my next will be on the subject of
+population.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  What day are we to have it?  I think I have a particular
+engagement for that day.
+
+_Milverton_.  I must come upon you unawares.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  After the essay you certainly might.  Let us decamp now and
+do something great in the way of education—teach Rollo, though he is but
+a short-haired dog, to go into the water.  That will be a feat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+ELLESMERE succeeded in persuading Rollo to go into the water, which
+proved more, he said, than the whole of Milverton’s essay, how much might
+be done by judicious education.  Before leaving my friends, I promised to
+come over again to Worth-Ashton in a day or two, to hear another essay.
+I came early and found them reading their letters.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“You remember Annesleigh at college,” said Milverton, “do you not,
+Dunsford?”
+
+_Dunsford_.  Yes.
+
+_Milverton_.  Here is a long letter from him.  He is evidently vexed at
+the newspaper articles about his conduct in a matter of —, and he writes
+to tell me that he is totally misrepresented.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Why does he not explain this publicly?
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, you naturally think so at first, but such a mode of
+proceeding would never do for a man in office, and rarely, perhaps, for
+any man.  At least, so the most judicious people seem to think.  I have
+known a man in office bear patiently, without attempting any answer, a
+serious charge which a few lines would have entirely answered, indeed,
+turned the other way.  But then he thought, I imagine, that if you once
+begin answering, there is no end to it, and also, which is more
+important, that the public journals were not a tribunal which he was
+called to appear before.  He had his official superiors.
+
+_Dunsford_.  It should be widely known and acknowledged then, that
+silence does not give consent in these cases.
+
+_Milverton_.  It is known, though not, perhaps, sufficiently.
+
+_Dunsford_.  What a fearful power this anonymous journalism is!
+
+_Milverton_.  There is a great deal certainly that is mischievous in it;
+but take it altogether, it is a wonderful product of civilisation—morally
+too.  Even as regards those qualities which would in general, to use a
+phrase of Bacon’s, “be noted as deficients” in the press, in courtesy and
+forbearance, for example, it makes a much better figure than might have
+been expected; as any one would testify, I suspect, who had observed, or
+himself experienced, the temptations incident to writing on short notice,
+without much opportunity of after-thought or correction, upon subjects
+about which he had already expressed an opinion.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Is the anonymousness absolutely necessary?
+
+_Milverton_.  I have often thought whether it is.  If the anonymousness
+were taken away, the press would lose much of its power; but then, why
+should it not lose a portion of its power, if that portion is only built
+upon some delusion?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  It is a question of expediency.  As government of all kinds
+becomes better managed, there is less necessity for protection for the
+press.  It must be recollected, however, that this anonymousness (to coin
+a word) may not only be useful to protect us from any abuse of power, but
+that at least it takes away that temptation to discuss things in an
+insufficient manner which arises from personal fear of giving offence.
+Then, again, there is an advantage in considering arguments without
+reference to persons.  If well-known authors wrote for the press and gave
+their signatures, we should often pass by the arguments unfairly, saying,
+“Oh, it is only so-and-so: that is the way he always looks at things,”
+without seeing whether it is the right way for the occasion in question.
+
+_Milverton_.  But take the other side, Ellesmere.  What national dislikes
+are fostered by newspaper articles, and—
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Articles in reviews and by books.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, but somehow or other, people imagine that newspapers
+speak the opinion of a much greater number of people—
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Do not let us talk any more about it.  We may become wise
+enough and well-managed enough to do without this anonymousness: we may
+not.  How it would astound an ardent Whig or Radical of the last
+generation if we could hear such a sentiment as this—as a toast we will
+say—“The Press: and may we become so civilised as to be able to take away
+some of its liberty.”
+
+_Milverton_.  It may be put another way: “May it become so civilised that
+we shall not want to take away any of its liberty.”  But I see you are
+tired of this subject.  Shall we go on the lawn and have our essay?
+
+We assented, and Milverton read the following:—
+
+
+
+UNREASONABLE CLAIMS IN SOCIAL AFFECTIONS AND RELATIONS.
+
+
+We are all apt to magnify the importance of whatever we are thinking
+about, which is not to be wondered at; for everything human has an outlet
+into infinity, which we come to perceive on considering it.  But with a
+knowledge of this tendency, I still venture to say that, of all that
+concerns mankind, this subject has, perhaps, been the least treated of in
+regard to its significance.  For once that unreasonable expectations of
+gratitude have been reproved, ingratitude has been denounced a thousand
+times; and the same may be said of inconstancy, unkindness in friendship,
+neglected merit and the like.
+
+To begin with ingratitude.  Human beings seldom have the demands upon
+each other which they imagine; and for what they have done they
+frequently ask an impossible return.  Moreover, when people really have
+done others a service, the persons benefited often do not understand it.
+Could they have understood it, the benefactor, perhaps, would not have
+had to perform it.  You cannot expect gratitude from them in proportion
+to your enlightenment.  Then, again, where the service is a palpable one,
+thoroughly understood, we often require that the gratitude for it should
+bear down all the rest of the man’s character.  The dog is the very
+emblem of faithfulness; yet I believe it is found that he will sometimes
+like the person who takes him out and amuses him more than the person who
+feeds him.  So, amongst bipeds, the most solid service must sometimes
+give way to the claims of congeniality.  Human creatures are, happily,
+not to be swayed by self-interest alone: they are many-sided creatures;
+there are numberless modes of attaching their affections.  Not only like
+likes like, but unlike likes unlike.
+
+To give an instance which must often occur.  Two persons, both of feeble
+will, act together: one as superior, the other as inferior.  The superior
+is very kind; the inferior is grateful.  Circumstances occur to break
+this relation.  The inferior comes under a superior of strong will, who
+is not, however, as tolerant and patient as his predecessor.  But this
+second superior soon acquires unbounded influence over the inferior: if
+the first one looks on, he may wonder at the alacrity and affection of
+his former subordinate towards the new man, and talk much about
+ingratitude.  But the inferior has now found somebody to lean upon and to
+reverence.  And he cannot deny his nature and be otherwise than he is.
+In this case it does not look like ingratitude, except perhaps to the
+complaining person.  But there are doubtless numerous instances in which,
+if we saw all the facts clearly, we should no more confirm the charge of
+ingratitude than we do here.
+
+Then, again, we seldom make sufficient allowance for the burden which
+there is in obligation, at least to all but great and good minds.  There
+are some people who can receive as heartily as they would give; but the
+obligation of an ordinary person to an ordinary person is more apt to be
+brought to mind as a present sore than as a past delight.
+
+Amongst the unreasonable views of the affections, the most absurd one has
+been the fancy that love entirely depends upon the will; still more that
+the love of others for us is to be guided by the inducements which seem
+probable to us.  We have served them; we think only of them; we are their
+lovers, or fathers, or brothers: we deserve and require to be loved and
+to have the love proved to us.  But love is not like property: it has
+neither duties nor rights.  You argue for it in vain; and there is no one
+who can give it you.  It is not his or hers to give.  Millions of bribes
+and infinite arguments cannot prevail.  For it is not a substance, but a
+relation.  There is no royal road.  We are loved as we are lovable to the
+person loving.  It is no answer to say that in some cases the love is
+based on no reality, but is solely in the imagination—that is, that we
+are loved not for what we are, but for what we are fancied to be.  That
+will not bring it any more into the dominions of logic; and love still
+remains the same untamable creature, deaf to advocacy, blind to other
+people’s idea of merit, and not a substance to be weighed or numbered at
+all.
+
+Then, as to the complaints about broken friendship.  Friendship is often
+outgrown; and his former child’s clothes will no more fit a man than some
+of his former friendships.  Often a breach of friendship is supposed to
+occur when there is nothing of the kind.  People see one another seldom;
+their courses in life are different; they meet, and their intercourse is
+constrained.  They fancy that their friendship is mightily cooled.  But
+imagine the dearest friends, one coming home after a long sojourn, the
+other going out to new lands: the ships that carry these meet: the
+friends talk together in a confused way not relevant at all to their
+friendship, and, if not well assured of their mutual regard, might
+naturally fancy that it was much abated.  Something like this occurs
+daily in the stream of the world.  Then, too, unless people are very
+unreasonable, they cannot expect that their friends will pass into new
+systems of thought and action without new ties of all kinds being
+created, and some modification of the old ones taking place.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+When we are talking of exorbitant claims made for the regard of others,
+we must not omit those of what is called neglected merit.  A man feels
+that he has abilities or talents of a particular kind, that he has shown
+them, and still he is a neglected man.  I am far from saying that merit
+is sufficiently looked out for: but a man may take the sting out of any
+neglect of his merits by thinking that at least it does not arise from
+malice prepense, as he almost imagines in his anger.  Neither the public,
+nor individuals, have the time, or will, resolutely to neglect anybody.
+What pleases us, we admire and further: if a man in any profession,
+calling, or art, does things which are beyond us, we are as guiltless of
+neglecting him as the Caffres are of neglecting the differential
+calculus.  Milton sells his “Paradise Lost” for ten pounds; there is no
+record of Shakespeare dining much with Queen Elizabeth.  And it is
+Utopian to imagine that statues will be set up to right men in their day.
+
+The same arguments which applied to the complaints of ingratitude, apply
+to the complaints of neglected merit.  The merit is oftentimes not
+understood.  Be it ever so manifest, it cannot absorb men’s attention.
+When it is really great, it has not been brought out by the hope of
+reward, any more than the kindest services by the hope of gratitude.  In
+neither case is it becoming or rational to be clamorous about payment.
+
+There is one thing that people hardly ever remember, or, indeed, have
+imagination enough to conceive; namely, the effect of each man being shut
+up in his individuality.  Take a long course of sayings and doings in
+which many persons have been engaged.  Each one of them is in his own
+mind the centre of the web, though, perhaps, he is at the edge of it.  We
+know that in our observations of the things of sense, any difference in
+the points from which the observation is taken gives a different view of
+the same thing.  Moreover, in the world of sense, the objects and the
+points of view are each indifferent to the rest; but in life the points
+of views are centres of action that have had something to do with the
+making of the things looked at.  If we could calculate the moral parallax
+arising from these causes, we should see, by the mere aid of the
+intellect, how unjust we often are in our complaints of ingratitude,
+inconstancy, and neglect.  But without these nice calculations, such
+errors of view may be corrected at once by humility, a more sure method
+than the most enlightened appreciation of the cause of error.  Humility
+is the true cure for many a needless heartache.
+
+It must not be supposed that in thus opposing unreasonable views of
+social affections, anything is done to dissever such affections.  The
+Duke of Wellington, writing to a man in a dubious position of authority,
+says “The less you claim, the more you will have.”  This is remarkably
+true of the affections; and there is scarcely anything that would make
+men happier than teaching them to watch against unreasonableness in their
+claims of regard and affection; and which at the same time would be more
+likely to ensure their getting what may be their due.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_ (clapping his hands).  An essay after my heart: worth tons of
+soft trash.  In general you are amplifying duties, telling everybody that
+they are to be so good to every other body.  Now it is as well to let
+every other body know that he is not to expect all he may fancy from
+everybody.  A man complains that his prosperous friends neglect him:
+infinitely overrating, in all probability, his claims, and his friends’
+power of doing anything for him.  Well, then, you may think me very hard,
+but I say that the most absurd claims are often put forth on the ground
+of relationship.  I do not deny that there is something in blood, but it
+must not be made too much of.  Near relations have great opportunities of
+attaching each other; if they fail to use these, I do not think it is
+well to let them imagine that mere relationship is to be the talisman of
+affection.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I do not see exactly how to answer all that you or Milverton
+have said; but I am not prepared, as official people say, to agree with
+you.  I especially disagree with what Milverton has said about love.  He
+leaves much too little power to the will.
+
+_Milverton_.  I daresay I may have done so.  These are very deep matters,
+and any one view about them does not exhaust them.  I remember C— once
+saying to me that a man never utters anything without error.  He may even
+think of it rightly; but he cannot bring it out rightly.  It turns a
+little false, as it were, when it quits the brain and comes into life.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I thought you would soon go over to the soft side.  Here,
+Rollo; there’s a good dog.  You do not form unreasonable expectations, do
+you?  A very little petting puts you into an ecstasy, and you are much
+wiser than many a biped who is full of his claims for gratitude, and
+friendship, and love, and who is always longing for well-merited rewards
+to fall into his mouth.  Down, dog!
+
+_Milverton_.  Poor animal! it little knows that all this sudden notice is
+only by way of ridiculing us.  Why I did not maintain my ground stoutly
+against Dunsford is, that I am always afraid of pushing moral conclusions
+too far.  Since we have been talking, I think I see more clearly than I
+did before what I mean to convey by the essay—namely, that men fall into
+unreasonable views respecting the affections _from imagining that the
+general laws of the mind are suspended for the sake of the affections_.
+
+_Dunsford_.  That seems safer ground.
+
+_Milverton_.  Now to illustrate what I mean by a very similar instance.
+The mind is avid of new impressions.  It “travels over,” or thinks it
+travels over, another mind; and, though it may conceal its wish for
+“fresh fields and pastures new,” it does so wish.  However harsh,
+therefore, and unromantic it may seem, the best plan is to humour Nature,
+and not to exhaust by overfrequent presence the affection of those whom
+we would love, or whom we would have to love us.  I would not say, after
+the manner of Rochefoucauld, that the less we see of people the more we
+like them; but there are certain limits of sociality; and prudent reserve
+and absence may find a place in the management of the tenderest
+relations.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Yes, all this is true enough: I do not see anything hard in
+this.  But then there is the other side.  Custom is a great aid to
+affection.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes.  All I say is, do not fancy that the general laws are
+suspended for the sake of any one affection.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Still this does not go to the question whether there is not
+something more of will in affection than you make out.  You would speak
+of inducements and counter-inducements, aids and hindrances; but I cannot
+but think you are limiting the power of will, and therefore limiting
+duty.  Such views tend to make people easily discontented with each
+other, and prevent their making efforts to get over offences, and to find
+out what is lovable in those about them.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Here we are in the deep places again.  I see you are
+pondering, Milverton.  It is a question, as a minister would say when
+Parliament perplexes him, that we must go to the country upon; each man’s
+heart will, perhaps, tell him best about it.  For my own part, I think
+that the continuance of affection, as the rise of it, depends more on the
+taste being satisfied, or at least not disgusted, than upon any other
+single thing.  Our hearts may be touched at our being loved by people
+essentially distasteful to us, whose modes of talking and acting are a
+continual offence to us; but whether we can love them in return is a
+question.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, we can, I think.  I begin to see that it is a question
+of degree.  The word love includes many shades of meaning.  When it
+includes admiration, of course we cannot be said to love those in whom we
+see nothing to admire.  But this seldom happens in the mixed characters
+of real life.  The upshot of it all seems to me to be, that, as Guizot
+says of civilisation, every impulse has room; so in the affections, every
+inducement and counter-inducement has its influence; and the result is
+not a simple one, which can be spoken of as if it were alike on all
+occasions and with all men.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I am still unanswered, I think, Milverton.  What you say is
+still wholly built upon inducements, and does not touch the power of
+will.
+
+_Milverton_.  No; it does not.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  We must leave that alone.  Infinite piles of books have not
+as yet lifted us up to a clear view of that matter.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, then, we must leave it as a vexed question; but let it
+be seen that there is such a question.  Now, as to another thing; you
+speak, Milverton, of men’s not making allowance enough for the unpleasant
+weight of obligation.  I think that weight seems to have increased in
+modern times.  Essex could give Bacon a small estate, and Bacon could
+take it comfortably, I have no doubt.  That is a much more wholesome
+state of things among friends than the present.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, undoubtedly.  An extreme notion about independence has
+made men much less generous in receiving.
+
+_Dunsford_.  It is a falling off, then.  There was another comment I had
+to make.  I think, when you speak about the exorbitant demands of
+neglected merit, you should say more upon the neglect of the just demands
+of merit.
+
+_Milverton_.  I would have the Government and the public in general try
+by all means to understand and reward merit, especially in those matters
+wherein excellence cannot, otherwise, meet with large present reward.
+But, to say the truth, I would have this done, not with the view of
+fostering genius so much as of fulfilling duty: I would say to a
+minister—it is becoming in you—it is well for the nation, to reward, as
+far as you can, and dignify, men of genius.  Whether you will do them any
+good or bring forth more of them, I do not know.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Men of great genius are often such a sensitive race, so apt
+to be miserable in many other than pecuniary ways and want of public
+estimation, that I am not sure that distress and neglect do not take
+their minds off worse discomforts.  It is a kind of grievance, too, that
+they like to have.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Really, Ellesmere, that is a most unfeeling speech.
+
+_Milverton_.  At any rate, it is right for us to honour and serve a great
+man.  It is our nature to do so, if we are worth anything.  We may put
+aside the question whether our honour will do him more good than our
+neglect.  That is a question for him to look to.  The world has not yet
+so largely honoured deserving men in their own time, that we can exactly
+pronounce what effect it would have upon them.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Come, Rollo, let us leave these men of sentiment.  Oh, you
+will not go, as your master does not move.  Look how he wags his tail,
+and almost says, “I should clearly like to have a hunt after the
+water-rat we saw in the pond the other day, but master is talking
+philosophy, and requires an intelligent audience.”  These dogs are dear
+creatures, it must be owned.  Come, Milverton, let us have a walk.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+AFTER the reading in the last chapter, my friends walked homewards with
+me as far as Durley Wood, which is about half-way between Worth-Ashton
+and my house.  As we rested here, we bethought ourselves that it would be
+a pleasant spot for us to come to sometimes and read our essays.  So we
+agreed to name a day for meeting there.  The day was favourable, we met
+as we had appointed, and finding some beech logs lying very opportunely,
+took possession of them for our council.  We seated Ellesmere on one that
+we called the woolsack, but which he said he felt himself unworthy to
+occupy in the presence of King Log, pointing to mine.  These nice points
+of etiquette being at last settled, Milverton drew out his papers and was
+about to begin reading, when Ellesmere thus interrupted him:—
+
+_Ellesmere_.  You were not in earnest, Milverton, about giving us an
+essay on population?  Because if so, I think I shall leave this place to
+you and Dunsford and the ants.
+
+_Milverton_.  I certainly have been meditating something of the sort; but
+have not been able to make much of it.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  If I had been living in those days when it first beamed
+upon mankind that the earth was round, I am sure I should have said, “We
+know now the bounds of the earth: there are no interminable plains joined
+to the regions of the sun, allowing of indefinite sketchy outlines at the
+edges of maps.  That little creature man will immediately begin to think
+that his world is too small for him.”
+
+_Milverton_.  There has probably been as much folly uttered by political
+economy as against it, which is saying something.  The danger as regards
+theories of political economy is the obvious one of their abstract
+conclusions being applied to concrete things.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  As if we were to expect mathematical lines to bear weights.
+
+_Milverton_.  Something like that.  With a good system of logic pervading
+the public mind, this danger would of course be avoided; but such a state
+of mind is not likely to occur in any public that we or our grandchildren
+are likely to have to deal with.  As it is, an ordinary man hears some
+conclusion of political economy, showing some particular tendency of
+things, which in real life meets with many counteractions of all kinds:
+but he, perhaps, adopts the conclusion without the least abatement, and
+would work it into life, as if all went on there like a rule-of-three
+sum.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  After all, this error arises from the man’s not having
+enough political economy.  It is not that a theory is good on paper, but
+unsound in real life.  It is only that in real life you cannot get at the
+simple state of things to which the theory would rightly apply.  You want
+many other theories and the just composition of them all to be able to
+work the whole problem.  That being done (which, however, scarcely can be
+done), the result on paper might be read off as applicable at once to
+life.  But now, touching the essay; since we are not to have population,
+what is it to be?
+
+_Milverton_.  Public improvements.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Nearly as bad; but as this is a favourite subject of yours,
+I suppose it will not be polite to go away.
+
+_Milverton_.  No; you must listen.
+
+
+
+PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS.
+
+
+What are possessions?  To an individual, the stores of his own heart and
+mind pre-eminently.  His truth and valour are amongst the first.  His
+contentedness, or his resignation may be put next.  Then his sense of
+beauty, surely a possession of great moment to him.  Then all those mixed
+possessions which result from the social affections—great possessions,
+unspeakable delights, much greater than the gift last mentioned in the
+former class, but held on more uncertain tenure.  Lastly, what are
+generally called possessions?  However often we have heard of the vanity,
+uncertainty, and vexation that beset these last, we must not let this
+repetition deaden our minds to the fact.
+
+Now, national possessions must be estimated by the same gradation that we
+have applied to individual possessions.  If we consider national luxury,
+we shall see how small a part it may add to national happiness.  Men of
+deserved renown, and peerless women, lived upon what we should now call
+the coarsest fare, and paced the rushes in their rooms with as high, or
+as contented thoughts, as their better-fed and better-clothed descendants
+can boast of.  Man is limited in this direction; I mean, in the things
+that concern his personal gratification; but when you come to the higher
+enjoyments, the expansive power both in him and them is greater.  As
+Keats says,
+
+    “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
+    Its loveliness increases; it will never
+    Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
+    A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
+    Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
+
+What then are a nation’s possessions?  The great words that have been
+said in it; the great deeds that have been done in it; the great
+buildings, and the great works of art, that have been made in it.  A man
+says a noble saying: it is a possession, first to his own race, then to
+mankind.  A people get a noble building built for them: it is an honour
+to them, also a daily delight and instruction.  It perishes.  The
+remembrance of it is still a possession.  If it was indeed pre-eminent,
+there will be more pleasure in thinking of it than in being with others
+of inferior order and design.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+On the other hand, a thing of ugliness is potent for evil.  It deforms
+the taste of the thoughtless: it frets the man who knows how bad it is:
+it is a disgrace to the nation who raised it; an example and an occasion
+for more monstrosities.  If it is a great building in a great city,
+thousands of people pass it daily, and are the worse for it, or at least
+not the better.  It must be done away with.  Next to the folly of doing a
+bad thing is that of fearing to undo it.  We must not look at what it has
+cost, but at what it is.  Millions may be spent upon some foolish device
+which will not the more make it into a possession, but only a more
+noticeable detriment.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+It must not be supposed that works of art are the only, or the chief,
+public improvements needed in any country.  Wherever men congregate, the
+elements become scarce.  The supply of air, light, and water is then a
+matter of the highest public importance: and the magnificent
+utilitarianism of the Romans should precede the nice sense of beauty of
+the Greeks.  Or rather, the former should be worked out in the latter.
+Sanitary improvements, like most good works, may be made to fulfil many
+of the best human objects.  Charity, social order, conveniency of living,
+and the love of the beautiful, may all be furthered by such improvements.
+A people is seldom so well employed as when, not suffering their
+attention to be absorbed by foreign quarrels and domestic broils, they
+bethink themselves of winning back those blessings of Nature which
+assemblages of men mostly vitiate, exclude, or destroy.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Public improvements are sometimes most difficult in free countries.  The
+origination of them is difficult there, many diverse minds having to be
+persuaded.  The individual, or class, resistance to the public good is
+harder to conquer than in despotic states.  And, what is most
+embarrassing, perhaps, individual progress in the same direction, or
+individual doings in some other way, form a great hindrance, sometimes,
+to public enterprise.  On the other hand, the energy of a free people is
+a mine of public welfare; and individual effort brings many good things
+to bear in much shorter time than any government could be expected to
+move in.  A judicious statesman considers these things; and sets himself
+especially to overcome those peculiar obstacles to public improvement
+which belong to the institutions of his country.  Adventure in a despotic
+state, combined action in a free state, are the objects which peculiarly
+demand his attention.
+
+To return to works of art.  In this also the genius of the people is to
+be heeded.  There may have been, there may be, nations requiring to be
+diverted from the love of art to stern labour and industrial conquests.
+But certainly it is not so with the Anglo-Saxon race, or with the
+Northern races generally.  Money may enslave them; logic may enslave
+them; art never will.  The chief men, therefore, in these races will do
+well sometimes to contend against the popular current, and to convince
+their people that there are other sources of delight, and other objects
+worthy of human endeavour, than severe money-getting or more material
+successes of any kind.
+
+In fine, the substantial improvement, and even the embellishment of
+towns, is a work which both the central and local governing bodies in a
+country should keep a steady hand upon.  It especially concerns them.
+What are they there for but to do that which individuals cannot do?  It
+concerns them, too, as it tells upon the health, morals, education, and
+refined pleasures of the people they govern.  In doing it, they should
+avoid pedantry, parsimony, and favouritism; and their mode of action
+should be large, considerate, and foreseeing.  Large; inasmuch as they
+must not easily be contented with the second best in any of their
+projects.  Considerate; inasmuch as they have to think what their people
+need most, not what will make most show.  And therefore, they should be
+contented, for instance, at their work going on underground for a time,
+or in byways, if needful; the best charity in public works, as in
+private, being often that which courts least notice.  Lastly, their work
+should be with foresight, recollecting that cities grow up about us like
+young people, before we are aware of it.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Another very merciful essay!  When we had once got upon the
+subject of sanitary improvements, I thought we should soon be five fathom
+deep in blue-books, reports, interminable questions of sewerage, and
+horrors of all kinds.
+
+_Milverton_.  I am glad you own that I have been very tender of your
+impatience in this essay.  People, I trust, are now so fully aware of the
+immense importance of sanitary improvements, that we do not want the
+elementary talking about such things that was formerly necessary.  It is
+difficult, though, to say too much about sanitary matters, that is, if by
+saying much one could gain attention.  I am convinced that the most
+fruitful source of physical evil to mankind has been impure air, arising
+from circumstances which might have been obviated.  Plagues and
+pestilences of all kinds, cretinism too, and all scrofulous disorders,
+are probably mere questions of ventilation.  A district may require
+ventilation as well as a house.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Seriously speaking, I quite agree with you.  And what
+delights me in sanitary improvements is, that they can hardly do harm.
+Give a poor man good air, and you do not diminish his self-reliance.  You
+only add to his health and vigour—make more of a man of him.  But now
+that the public mind, as it is facetiously called, has got hold of the
+idea of these improvements, everybody will be chattering about them.
+
+_Milverton_.  The very time when those who really do care for these
+matters should be watchful to make the most of the tide in their favour,
+and should not suffer themselves to relax their efforts because there is
+no originality now about such things.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Custom soon melts off the wings which Novelty alone has lent
+to Benevolence.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  And down comes the charitable Icarus.  A very good simile,
+my dear Dunsford, but rather of the Latin-verse order.  I almost see it
+worked into an hexameter and pentameter, and delighting the heart of an
+Eton boy.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Ellesmere is more than usually vicious to-day, Milverton.  A
+great “public improvement” would be to clip the tongues of some of these
+lawyers.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Possibly.  I have just been looking again at that part of
+the essay, Milverton, where you talk of the little gained by national
+luxury.  I think with you.  There is an immensity of nonsense uttered
+about making people happy, which is to be done, according to
+happiness-mongers, by quantities of sugar and tea, and such-like things.
+One knows the importance of food, but there is no Elysium to be got out
+of it.
+
+_Milverton_.  I know what you mean.  There is a kind of pity for the
+people now in vogue which is most effeminate.  It is a sugared sort of
+Robespierre talk about “The poor but virtuous People.”  To address such
+stuff to the people is not to give them anything, but to take away what
+they have.  Suppose you could give them oceans of tea and mountains of
+sugar, and abundance of any luxury that you choose to imagine, but at the
+same time you inserted a hungry, envious spirit in them, what have you
+done?  Then, again, this envious spirit, when it is turned to difference
+of station, what good can it do?  Can you give station according to
+merit?  Is life long enough for it?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Of course we cannot always be weighing men with nicety, and
+saying, “Here is your place, here yours.”
+
+_Milverton_.  Then, again, what happiness do you confer on men by
+teaching them to disrespect their superiors in rank, by turning all the
+embellishments which adorn various stations wrong side out, putting
+everything in its lowest form, and then saying, “What do you see to
+admire here?”  You do not know what injury you may do a man when you
+destroy all reverence in him.  It will be found out some day that men
+derive more pleasure and profit from having superiors than from having
+inferiors.
+
+_Dunsford_.  It is seldom that I bring you back to your subject, but we
+are really a long way off at present; and I want to know, Milverton, what
+you would do specifically in the way of public improvements.  Of course
+you cannot say in an essay what you would do in such matters, but amongst
+ourselves.  In London, for instance.
+
+_Milverton_.  The first thing for Government to do, Dunsford, in London,
+or any other great town, is to secure open spaces in it and about it.
+Trafalgar Square may be dotted with hideous absurdities, but it is an
+open space.  They may collect together there specimens of every variety
+of meanness and bad taste; but they cannot prevent its being a better
+thing than if it were covered with houses.  Public money is scarcely ever
+so well employed as in securing bits of waste ground and keeping them as
+open spaces.  Then, as under the most favourable circumstances, we are
+likely to have too much carbon in the air of any town, we should plant
+trees to restore the just proportions of the air as far as we can. {161}
+Trees are also what the heart and the eye desire most in towns.  The
+Boulevards in Paris show the excellent effect of trees against buildings.
+There are many parts of London where rows of trees might be planted along
+the streets.  The weighty dulness of Portland Place, for instance, might
+be thus relieved.  Of course, in any scheme of public improvements, the
+getting rid of smoke is one of the first objects.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes, smoke is a great abuse; but then there is something
+ludicrous about it, just as there is about sewerage.  I believe, myself,
+that for one person that the Corn Laws have injured, a dozen have had
+their lives shortened and their happiness abridged in every way by these
+less palpable nuisances.  But there is no grandeur in opposing them—no
+“good cry” to be raised.  And so, as abuses cannot be met in our days but
+by agitation—a committee, secretaries, clerks, newspapers, and a
+review—and as agitation in this case holds out fewer inducements than
+usual, we have gone on year after year being poisoned by these various
+nuisances, at an incalculable expense of life and money.
+
+_Milverton_.  There is something in what you say, I think, but you press
+it too far; for of late these sanitary subjects have worked themselves
+into notice, as you yourself admit.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Late indeed.
+
+_Milverton_.  Well, but to go on with schemes for improving London.  Open
+spaces, trees—then comes the supply of water.  This is one of the first
+things to be done.  Philadelphia has given an example which all towns
+ought to imitate.  It is a matter requiring great thought, and the
+various plans should be thoroughly canvassed before the choice is made.
+Great beauty and the highest utility may be combined in supplying a town
+like London with water.  By the way, how much water do you think London
+requires daily?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  As much as the Serpentine and the water in St. James’s
+Park.
+
+_Milverton_.  You are not so far out.
+
+Well, then, having gone through the largest things that must be attended
+to, we come to minor matters.  It is a great pity that the system of
+building upon leases should be so commonly adopted.  Nobody expects to
+live out the leasehold term which he takes to build upon.  But things
+would be better done if people were more averse to having anything to do
+with leasehold property.  C. always says that the modern lath-and-plaster
+system is a wickedness, and upon my word I think he is right.  It is
+inconceivable to me how a man can make up his mind to build, or to do
+anything else, in a temporary, slight, insincere fashion.  What has a man
+to say for himself who must sum up the doings of his life in this way, “I
+chiefly employed myself in making or selling things which seemed to be
+good and were not, and nobody has occasion to bless me for anything I
+have done.”
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Humph! you put it mildly.  But the man has made perhaps
+seven per cent. off his money; or, if he has made no per cent., has
+ruined several men of his own trade, which is not to go for nothing when
+a man is taking stock of his good deeds.
+
+_Milverton_.  There is one thing I forgot to say, that we want more
+individual will in building, I think.  As it is at present, a great
+builder takes a plot of ground and turns out innumerable houses, all
+alike, the same faults and merits running through each, thus adding to
+the general dulness of things.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when she came from abroad,
+remarked that all her friends seemed to have got into drawing-rooms which
+were like a grand piano, first a large square or oblong room, and then a
+small one.  Quite Georgian, this style of architecture.  But now I think
+we are improving immensely—at any rate in the outside of houses.  By the
+way, Milverton, I want to ask you one thing: How is it that Governments
+and Committees, and the bodies that manage matters of taste, seem to be
+more tasteless than the average run of people?  I will wager anything
+that the cabmen round Trafalgar Square would have made a better thing of
+it than it is.  If you had put before them several prints of fountains,
+they would not have chosen those.
+
+_Milverton_.  I think with you, but I have no theory to account for it.
+I suppose that these committees are frequently hampered by other
+considerations than those which come before the public when they are
+looking at the work done; and this may be some excuse.  There was a
+custom which I have heard prevailed in former days in some of the Italian
+cities, of making large models of the works of art that were to adorn the
+city, and putting them up in the places intended for the works when
+finished, and then inviting criticism.  It would really be a very good
+plan in some cases.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Now, Milverton, would you not forthwith pull down such
+things as Buckingham Palace and the National Gallery?  Dunsford looks at
+me as if I were going to pull down the Constitution.
+
+_Milverton_.  I would pull them down to a certainty, or some parts of
+them at any rate; but whether “forthwith” is another question.  There are
+greater things, perhaps, to be done first.  We must consider, too,
+
+    “That eternal want of pence
+    Which vexes public men.”
+
+Still, I think we ought always to look upon such buildings as temporary
+arrangements, and they vex one less then.  The Palace ought to be in the
+higher part of the Park, perhaps on that slope opposite Piccadilly.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, it does amuse me the way in which you youngsters go
+on, pulling down, in your industrious imaginations, palaces and national
+galleries, building aqueducts and cloacæ maximæ, forming parks,
+destroying smoke (so large a part of every Londoner’s diet), and
+abridging plaster, without fear of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and the
+resistance of mankind in general.
+
+_Milverton_.  We must begin by thinking boldly about things.  That is a
+larger part of any undertaking than it seems, perhaps.
+
+_Dunsford_.  We must, I am afraid, break off our pleasant employment of
+projecting public improvements, unless we mean to be dinnerless.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  A frequent fate of great projectors, I fear.
+
+_Milverton_.  Now then, homewards.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+MY readers will, perhaps, agree with me in being sorry to find that we
+are coming to the end of our present series.  I say, “my readers,” though
+I have so little part in purveying for them, that I mostly consider
+myself one of them.  It is no light task, however, to give a good account
+of a conversation; and I say this, and would wish people to try whether I
+am not right in saying so, not to call attention to my labour in the
+matter, but because it may be well to notice how difficult it is to
+report anything truly.  Were this better known, it might be an aid to
+charity, and prevent some of those feuds which grow out of the poverty of
+man’s power to express, to apprehend, to represent, rather than out of
+any malignant part of his nature.  But I must not go on moralising.  I
+almost feel that Ellesmere is looking over my shoulder, and breaking into
+my discourse with sharp words; which I have lately been so much
+accustomed to.
+
+I had expected that we should have many more readings this summer, as I
+knew that Milverton had prepared more essays for us.  But finding, as he
+said, that the other subjects he had in hand were larger than he had
+anticipated, or was prepared for, he would not read even to us what he
+had written.  Though I was very sorry for this—for I may not be the
+chronicler in another year—I could not but say he was right.  Indeed, my
+ideas of literature, nourished as they have been in much solitude, and by
+the reading, if I may say so, mainly of our classical authors, are very
+high placed, though I hope not fantastical.  And, therefore, I would not
+discourage anyone in expending whatever thought and labour might be in
+him upon any literary work.
+
+In fine, then, I did not attempt to dissuade Milverton from his purpose
+of postponing our readings: and we agreed that there should only be one
+more for the present.  I wished it to be at our favourite place on the
+lawn, which had become endeared to me as the spot of many of our friendly
+councils.
+
+It was later than usual when I came over to Worth-Ashton for this
+reading; and as I gained the brow of the hill, some few clouds tinged
+with red were just grouping together to form the accustomed pomp upon the
+exit of the setting sun.  I believe I mentioned in the introduction to
+our first conversation that the ruins of an old castle could be seen from
+our place of meeting.  Milverton and Ellesmere were talking about it as I
+joined them.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, Ellesmere, many a man has looked out of those windows
+upon a sunset like this, with some of the thoughts that must come into
+the minds of all men on seeing this great emblem, the setting sun—has
+felt, in looking at it, his coming end, or the closing of his greatness.
+Those old walls must have been witness to every kind of human emotion.
+Henry the Second was there; John, I think; Margaret of Anjou and Cardinal
+Beaufort; William of Wykeham; Henry the Eighth’s Cromwell; and many
+others who have made some stir in the world.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  And, perhaps, the greatest there were those who made no
+stir.
+
+    “The world knows nothing of its greatest men.”
+
+_Milverton_.  I am slow to believe that.  I cannot well reconcile myself
+to the idea that great capacities are given for nothing.  They bud out in
+some way or other.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes, but it may not be in a noisy way.
+
+_Milverton_.  There is one thing that always strikes me very much in
+looking at the lives of men: how soon, as it were, their course seems to
+be determined.  They say, or do, or think, something which gives a bias
+at once to the whole of their career.
+
+_Dunsford_.  You may go farther back than that, and speak of the impulses
+they got from their ancestors.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Or the nets around them of other people’s ways and wishes.
+There are many things, you see, that go to make men puppets.
+
+_Milverton_.  I was only noticing the circumstance that there was such a
+thing, as it appeared to me, as this early direction.  But, if it has
+been ever so unfortunate, a man’s folding his hands over it in a
+melancholy mood, and suffering himself to be made a puppet by it, is a
+sadly weak proceeding.  Most thoughtful men have probably some dark
+fountains in their souls, by the side of which, if there were time, and
+it were decorous, they could let their thoughts sit down and wail
+indefinitely.  That long Byron wail fascinated men for a time; because
+there is that in Human Nature.  Luckily, a great deal besides.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I delight in the helpful and hopeful men.
+
+_Milverton_.  A man that I admire very much, and have met with
+occasionally, is one who is always of use in any matter he is mixed up
+with, simply because he wishes that the best should be got out of the
+thing that is possible.  There does not seem much in the description of
+such a character; but only see it in contrast with that of a brilliant
+man, for instance, who does not ever fully care about the matter in hand.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I can thoroughly imagine the difference.
+
+_Milverton_.  The human race may be bound up together in some mysterious
+way, each of us having a profound interest in the fortunes of the whole,
+and so, to some extent, of every portion of it.  Such a man as I have
+described acts as though he had an intuitive perception of that relation,
+and therefore a sort of family feeling for mankind, which gives him
+satisfaction in making the best out of any human affair he has to do
+with.
+
+But we really must have the essay, and not talk any more.  It is on
+History.
+
+
+
+HISTORY.
+
+
+Among the fathomless things that are about us and within us, is the
+continuity of time.  This gives to life one of its most solemn aspects.
+We may think to ourselves: Would there could be some halting-place in
+life, where we could stay, collecting our minds, and see the world drift
+by us.  But no: even while you read this, you are not pausing to read it.
+As one of the great French preachers, I think, says, We are embarked upon
+a stream, each in his own little boat, which must move uniformly onwards,
+till it ceases to move at all.  It is a stream that knows “no haste, no
+rest”; a boat that knows no haven but one.
+
+This unbated continuity suggests the past as well as the future.  We
+would know what mighty empires this stream of time has flowed through, by
+what battle-fields it has been tinged, how it has been employed towards
+fertility, and what beautiful shadows on its surface have been seized by
+art, or science, or great words, and held in time-lasting, if not in
+everlasting, beauty.  This is what history tells us.  Often in a
+faltering, confused, be-darkened way, like the deed it chronicles.  But
+it is what we have, and we must make the best of it.
+
+The subject of this essay may be thus divided: Why history should be
+read—how it should be read—by whom it should be written—how it should be
+written—and how good writers of history should be called forth, aided,
+and rewarded.
+
+
+
+I.  WHY HISTORY SHOULD BE READ.
+
+
+It takes us out of too much care for the present; it extends our
+sympathies; it shows us that other men have had their sufferings and
+their grievances; it enriches discourse, it enlightens travel.  So does
+fiction.  But the effect of history is more lasting and suggestive.  If
+we see a place which fiction has treated of, we feel that it has some
+interest for us; but show us a spot where remarkable deeds have been
+done, or remarkable people have lived, and our thoughts cling to it.  We
+employ our own imagination about it: we invent the fiction for ourselves.
+Again, history is at least the conventional account of things: that which
+men agree to receive as the right account, and which they discuss as
+true.  To understand their talk, we must know what they are talking
+about.  Again, there is something in history which can seldom be got from
+the study of the lives of individual men; namely, the movements of men
+collectively, and for long periods—of man, in fact, not of men.  In
+history, the composition of the forces that move the world has to be
+analysed.  We must have before us the law of the progress of opinion, the
+interruptions to it of individual character, the principles on which men
+act in the main, the trade winds, as we may say, in human affairs, and
+the recurrent storms which one man’s life does not tell us of.  Again, by
+the study of history, we have a chance of becoming tolerant travelling
+over the ways of many nations and many periods; and we may also acquire
+that historic tact by which we collect upon one point of human affairs
+the light of many ages.
+
+We may judge of the benefit of historical studies by observing what great
+defects are incident to the moral and political writers who know nothing
+of history.  A present grievance, or what seems such, swallows up in
+their minds all other considerations; their little bottle of oil is to
+still the raging waves of the whole human ocean; their system, a thing
+that the historian has seen before, perhaps, in many ages, is to
+reconcile all diversities.  Then they would persuade you that this class
+of men is wholly good, that wholly bad; or that there is no difference
+between good and bad.  They may be shrewd men, considering what they have
+seen, but would be much shrewder if they could know how small a part that
+is of life.  We may all refer to our boyhood, and recollect the time when
+we thought the things about us were the type of all things everywhere.
+That was, perhaps, after all no silly princess who was for feeding the
+famishing people on cakes.  History takes us out of this confined circle
+of child-like thought; and shows us what are the perennial aims,
+struggles, and distractions of mankind.
+
+History has always been set down as the especial study for statesmen, and
+for men who take an interest in public affairs.  For history is to
+nations what biography is to individual men.  History is the chart and
+compass for national endeavour.  Our early voyagers are dead: not a plank
+remains of the old ships that first essayed unknown waters; the sea
+retains no track; and were it not for the history of these voyages
+contained in charts, in chronicles, in hoarded lore of all kinds, each
+voyager, though he were to start with all the aids of advanced
+civilisation (if you could imagine such a thing without history), would
+need the boldness of the first voyager.
+
+And so it would be with the statesman, were the civil history of mankind
+unknown.  We live to some extent in peace and comfort upon the results
+obtained for us by the chronicles of our forefathers.  We do not see this
+without some reflection.  But imagine what a full-grown nation would be
+if it knew no history—like a full-grown man with only a child’s
+experience.
+
+The present is an age of remarkable experiences.  Vast improvements have
+been made in several of the outward things that concern life nearly, from
+intercourse rapid as lightning to surgical operation without pain.  We
+accept them all; still, the difficulties of government, the management of
+ourselves, our relations with others, and many of the prime difficulties
+of life remain but little subdued.  History still claims our interest, is
+still wanted to make us think and act with any breadth of wisdom.
+
+At the same time, however, that we claim for history great powers of
+instruction, we must not imagine that the examples which it furnishes
+will enable its readers to anticipate the experience of life.  An
+experienced man reads that Cæsar did this or that, but he says to
+himself, “I am not Cæsar.”  Or, indeed, as is most probable, the reader
+has not to reject the application of the example to himself: for from
+first to last he sees nothing but experience for Cæsar in what Cæsar was
+doing.  I think it may be observed, too, that general maxims about life
+gain the ear of the inexperienced, in preference to historical examples.
+But neither wise sayings nor historical examples can be understood
+without experience.  Words are only symbols.  Who can know anything
+soundly with respect to the complicated affections and struggles of life,
+unless he has experienced some of them?  All knowledge of humanity
+spreads from within.  So in studying history, the lessons it teaches must
+have something to grow round in the heart they teach.  Our own trials,
+misfortunes, and enterprises are the best lights by which we can read
+history.  Hence it is that many an historian may see far less into the
+depths of the very history he has himself written than a man who, having
+acted and suffered, reads the history in question with all the wisdom
+that comes from action and suffering.  Sir Robert Walpole might naturally
+exclaim, “Do not read history to me, for that, I know, must be false.”
+But if he had read it, I do not doubt that he would have seen through the
+film of false and insufficient narrative into the depth of the matter
+narrated, in a way that men of great experience can alone attain to.
+
+
+
+II.  HOW HISTORY SHOULD BE READ.
+
+
+I suppose that many who now connect the very word history with the idea
+of dulness, would have been fond and diligent students of history if it
+had had fair access to their minds.  But they were set down to read
+histories which were not fitted to be read continuously, or by any but
+practised students.  Some such works are mere framework, a name which the
+author of the _Statesman_ applies to them; very good things, perhaps, for
+their purpose, but that is not to invite readers to history.  You might
+almost as well read dictionaries with a hope of getting a succinct and
+clear view of language.  When, in any narration, there is a constant
+heaping up of facts, made about equally significant by the way of telling
+them, a hasty delineation of characters, and all the incidents moving on
+as in the fifth act of a confused tragedy, the mind and memory refuse to
+be so treated; and the reading ends in nothing but a very slight and
+inaccurate acquaintance with the mere husk of the history.  You cannot
+epitomise the knowledge that it would take years to acquire into a few
+volumes that may be read in as many weeks.
+
+The most likely way of attracting men’s attention to historical subjects
+will be by presenting them with small portions of history, of great
+interest, thoroughly examined.  This may give them the habit of applying
+thought and criticism to historical matters.
+
+For, as it is, how are people interested in history? and how do they
+master its multitudinous assemblage of facts?  Mostly, perhaps, in this
+way.  A man cares about some one thing, or person, or event, and plunges
+into its history, really wishing to master it.  This pursuit extends:
+other points of research are taken up by him at other times.  His
+researches begin to intersect.  He finds a connection in things.  The
+texture of his historic acquisitions gradually attains some substance and
+colour; and so at last he begins to have some dim notions of the myriads
+of men who came, and saw, and did not conquer—only struggled on as they
+best might, some of them—and are not.
+
+When we are considering how history should be read, the main thing
+perhaps is, that the person reading should desire to know what he is
+reading about, not merely to have read the books that tell of it.  The
+most elaborate and careful historian must omit, or pass lightly over,
+many points of his subject.  He writes for all readers, and cannot
+indulge private fancies.  But history has its particular aspect for each
+man: there must be portions which he may be expected to dwell upon.  And
+everywhere, even where the history is most laboured, the reader should
+have something of the spirit of research which was needful for the
+writer: if only so much as to ponder well the words of the writer.  That
+man reads history, or anything else, at great peril of being thoroughly
+misled, who has no perception of any truthfulness except that which can
+be fully ascertained by reference to facts; who does not in the least
+perceive the truth, or the reverse, of a writer’s style, of his epithets,
+of his reasoning, of his mode of narration.  In life, our faith in any
+narration is much influenced by the personal appearance, voice, and
+gesture of the person narrating.  There is some part of all these things
+in his writing; and you must look into that well before you can know what
+faith to give him.  One man may make mistakes in names, and dates, and
+references, and yet have a real substance of truthfulness in him, a wish
+to enlighten himself and then you.  Another may not be wrong in his
+facts, but have a declamatory or sophistical vein in him, much to be
+guarded against.  A third may be both inaccurate and untruthful, caring
+not so much for anything as to write his book.  And if the reader cares
+only to read it, sad work they make between them of the memories of
+former days.
+
+In studying history, it must be borne in mind that a knowledge is
+necessary of the state of manners, customs, wealth, arts, and science at
+the different periods treated of.  The text of civil history requires a
+context of this knowledge in the mind of the reader.  For the same
+reason, some of the main facts of the geography of the countries in
+question should be present to him.  If we are ignorant of these aids to
+history, all history is apt to seem alike to us.  It becomes merely a
+narrative of men of our own time, in our own country; and then we are
+prone to expect the same views and conduct from them that we do from our
+contemporaries.  It is true that the heroes of antiquity have been
+represented on the stage in bag-wigs, and the rest of the costume of our
+grandfathers: but it was the great events of their lives that were thus
+told—the crisis of their passions—and when we are contemplating the
+representation of great passions and their consequences, all minor
+imagery is of little moment.  In a long-drawn narrative, however, the
+more we have in our minds of what concerned the daily life of the people
+we read about, the better.  And in general it may be said that history,
+like travelling, gives a return in proportion to the knowledge that a man
+brings to it.
+
+
+
+III.  BY WHOM HISTORY SHOULD BE WRITTEN.
+
+
+Before entering directly on this part of the subject, it is desirable to
+consider a little the difficulties in the way of writing history.  We all
+know the difficulty of getting at the truth of a matter which happened
+yesterday, and about which we can examine the living actors upon oath.
+But in history the most significant things may lack the most important
+part of their evidence.  The people who were making history were not
+thinking of the convenience of future writers of history.  Often the
+historian must contrive to get his insight into matters from evidence of
+men and things which is like bad pictures of them.  The contemporary, if
+he knew the man, said of the picture, “I should have known it, but it has
+very little of him in it.”  The poor historian, with no original before
+him, has to see through the bad picture into the man.  Then, supposing
+our historian rich in well-selected evidence—I say well-selected,
+because, as students tell us, for many an historian one authority is of
+the same weight as another, provided they are both of the same age;
+still, how difficult is narration even to the man who is rich in
+well-selected evidence.  What a tendency there is to round off a
+narrative into falsehood; or else by parenthesis to destroy its pith and
+continuity.  Again, the historian knows the end of many of the
+transactions he narrates.  If he did not, how differently often he would
+narrate them.  It would be a most instructive thing to give a man the
+materials for the account of a great transaction, stopping short of the
+end, and then see how different would be his account from the ordinary
+ones.  Fools have been hardly dealt with in the saying that the event is
+their master (“eventus stultorum magister”), seeing how it rules us all.
+And in nothing more than in history.  The event is always present to our
+minds; along the pathways to it, the historian and the moralist have
+walked till they are beaten pathways, and we imagine that they were so to
+the men who first went along them.  Indeed, we almost fancy that these
+ancestors of ours, looking along the beaten path, foresaw the event as we
+do; whereas, they mostly stumbled upon it suddenly in the forest.  This
+knowledge of the end we must, therefore, put down as one of the most
+dangerous pitfalls which beset the writers of history.  Then consider the
+difficulty in the “composition,” to use an artist’s word, of our
+historian’s picture.  Before both the artist and the historian lies
+Nature as far as the horizon; how shall they choose that portion of it
+which has some unity and which shall represent the rest?  What method is
+needful in the grouping of facts; what learning, what patience, what
+accuracy!
+
+By whom, then, should history be written?  In the first place, by men of
+some experience in real life; who have acted and suffered; who have been
+in crowds, and seen, perhaps felt, how madly men can care about nothings;
+who have observed how much is done in the world in an uncertain manner,
+upon sudden impulses and very little reason; and who, therefore, do not
+think themselves bound to have a deep-laid theory for all things.  They
+should be men who have studied the laws of the affections, who know how
+much men’s opinions depend on the time in which they live, how they vary
+with their age and their position.  To make themselves historians, they
+should also have considered the combinations amongst men and the laws
+that govern such things; for there are laws.  Moreover our historians,
+like most men who do great things, must combine in themselves qualities
+which are held to belong to opposite natures; must at the same time be
+patient in research and vigorous in imagination, energetic and calm,
+cautious and enterprising.  Such historians, wise, as we may suppose they
+will be, about the affair of other men, may, let us hope, be sufficiently
+wise about their own affairs to understand that no great work can be done
+without great labour, that no great labour ought to look for its reward.
+But my readers will exclaim as Rasselas to Imlac on hearing the
+requisites for a poet, “Enough! thou hast convinced me that no human
+being can ever be an historian.  Proceed with thy narration.”
+
+
+
+IV.  HOW HISTORY SHOULD BE WRITTEN.
+
+
+One of the first things in writing history is for the historian to
+recollect that it is history he is writing.  The narrative must not be
+oppressed by reflections, even by wise ones.  Least of all should the
+historian suffer himself to become entangled by a theory or a system.  If
+he does, each fact is taken up by him in a particular way: those facts
+that cannot be so handled cease to be his facts, and those that offer
+themselves conveniently are received too fondly by him.
+
+Then, although our historian must not be mastered by system, he must have
+some way of taking up his facts and of classifying them.  They must not
+be mere isolated units in his eyes, else he is mobbed by them.  And a man
+in the midst of a crowd, though he may know the names and nature of all
+the crowd, cannot give an account of their doings.  Those who look down
+from the housetop must do that.
+
+But, above all things, the historian must get out of his own age into the
+time in which he is writing.  Imagination is as much needed for the
+historian as the poet.  You may combine bits of books with other bits of
+books, and so make some new combinations, and this may be done
+accurately, and, in general, much of the subordinate preparation for
+history may be accomplished without any great effort of imagination.  But
+to write history in any large sense of the words, you must be able to
+comprehend other times.  You must know that there is a right and wrong
+which is not your right and wrong, but yet stands upon the right and
+wrong of all ages and all hearts.  You must also appreciate the outward
+life and colours of the period you write about.  Try to think how the men
+you are telling of would have spent a day, what were their leading ideas,
+what they cared about.  Grasp the body of the time, and give it to us.
+If not, and these men could look at your history, they would say, “This
+is all very well; we daresay some of these things did happen; but we were
+not thinking of these things all day long.  It does not represent us.”
+
+After enlarging upon this great requisite, imagination, it seems somewhat
+prosaic to come down to saying that history requires accuracy.  But I
+think I hear the sighs, and sounds more harsh than sighing, of those who
+have ever investigated anything, and found by dire experience the
+deplorable inaccuracy which prevails in the world.  And, therefore, I
+would say to the historian almost as the first suggestion, “Be accurate;
+do not make false references, do not mis-state: and men, if they get no
+light from you, will not execrate you.  You will not stand in the way,
+and have to be explained and got rid of.”
+
+Another most important matter in writing history, and that indeed in
+which the art lies, is the method of narrating.  This is a thing almost
+beyond rules, like the actual execution in music or painting.  A man
+might have fairness, accuracy, an insight into other times, great
+knowledge of facts, some power even of arranging them, and yet make a
+narrative out of it all, so protracted here, so huddled together there,
+the purpose so buried or confused, that men would agree to acknowledge
+the merit of the book and leave it unread.  There must be a natural line
+of associations for the narrative to run along.  The separate threads of
+the narrative must be treated separately, and yet the subject not be
+dealt with sectionally, for that is not the way in which the things
+occurred.  The historian must, therefore, beware that those divisions of
+the subject which he makes for our ease and convenience, do not induce
+him to treat his subject in a flimsy manner.  He must not make his story
+easy where it is not so.
+
+After all, it is not by rule that a great history is to be written.  Most
+thinkers agree that the main object for the historian is to get an
+insight into the things which he tells of, and then to tell them with the
+modesty of a man who is in the presence of great events; and must speak
+about them carefully, simply, and with but little of himself or of his
+affections thrown into the narration.
+
+
+
+V.  HOW GOOD WRITERS OF HISTORY SHOULD BE CALLED FORTH, AIDED, AND
+REWARDED.
+
+
+Mainly by history being properly read.  The direct ways of commanding
+excellence of any kind are very few, if any.  When a State has found out
+its notable men, it should reward them, and will show its worthiness by
+its measure and mode of reward.  But it cannot purchase them.  It may do
+something in the way of aiding them.  In history, for instance, the
+records of a nation may be discreetly managed, and some of the minor
+work, therefore, done to the hand of the historian.  But the most likely
+method to ensure good historians is to have a fit audience for them.  And
+this is a very difficult matter.  In works of general literature, the
+circle of persons capable of judging is large; even in works of science
+or philosophy it is considerable: but in history, it is a very confined
+circle.  To the general body of readers, whether the history they read is
+true or not is in no way perceptible.  It is quite as amusing to them
+when it is told in one way as in another.  There is always mischief in
+error: but in this case the mischief is remote, or seems so.  For men of
+ordinary culture, even if of much intelligence, the difficulty of
+discerning what is true or false in the histories they read makes it a
+matter of the highest duty for those few persons who can give us
+criticism on historical works, at least to save us from insolent and
+mendacious carelessness in historical writers, if not by just
+encouragement to secure for nations some results not altogether unworthy
+of the great enterprise which the writing of history holds out itself to
+be.  “Hujus enim fidei exempla majorum, vicissitudines rerum, fundamenta
+prudentiæ civilis, hominum denique nomen et fama commissa sunt.” {183}
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Just wait a minute for me, and do not talk about the essay
+till I come back.  I am going for Anster’s _Faust_.
+
+_Dunsford_.  What has Ellesmere got in his head?
+
+_Milverton_.  I see.  There is a passage where Faust, in his most
+discontented mood, falls foul of history—in his talk to Wagner, if I am
+not mistaken.
+
+_Dunsford_.  How beautiful it is this evening!  Look at that yellow-green
+near the sunset.
+
+_Milverton_.  The very words that Coleridge uses.  I always think of them
+when I see that tint.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I daresay his words were in my mind, but I have forgotten
+what you allude to.
+
+_Milverton_.
+
+    “O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
+    To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
+       All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
+    Have I been gazing on the western sky,
+    And its peculiar tint of yellow-green:
+    And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!
+    And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
+    That give away their motion to the stars;
+    Those stars that glide behind them or between,
+    Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
+    Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
+    In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
+    I see them all so excellently fair,
+    I see, not feel how beautiful they are.”
+
+_Dunsford_.  Admirable!  In the _Ode to Dejection_, is it not? where,
+too, there are those lines,
+
+    “O Lady! we receive but what we give,
+    And in our life alone does Nature live.”
+
+_Milverton_.  But here comes Ellesmere with triumphant look.  You look as
+jovial, my dear Ellesmere, as if you were a Bentley that had found a
+false quantity in a Boyle.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Listen and perpend, my historical friends.
+
+    “To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
+    Are a mysterious book, sealed with seven seals:
+    That which you call the spirit of ages past
+    Is but, in truth, the spirit of some few authors
+    In which those ages are beheld reflected,
+    With what distortion strange heaven only knows.
+    Oh! often, what a toilsome thing it is
+    This study of thine—at the first glance we fly it.
+    A mass of things confusedly heaped together;
+    A lumber-room of dusty documents,
+    Furnished with all approved court-precedents
+    And old traditional maxims!  History!
+    Facts dramatised say rather—action—plot—
+    Sentiment, everything the writer’s own,
+    As it bests fits the web-work of his story,
+    With here and there a solitary fact
+    Of consequence, by those grave chroniclers,
+    Pointed with many a moral apophthegm,
+    And wise old saws, learned at the puppet-shows.”
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes; admirable lines; they describe to the life the very
+faults we have been considering as the faults of badly-written histories.
+I do not see that they do much more.
+
+_Ellesmere_.
+
+    “To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
+    Are a mysterious book.”—
+
+_Milverton_.  Those two first lines are the full expression of Faust’s
+discontent—unmeasured as in the presence of a weak man who could not
+check him.  But, if you come to look at the matter closely, you will see
+that the time present is also in some sense a sealed book to us.  Men
+that we live with daily we often think as little of as we do of Julius
+Cæsar, I was going to say—but we know much less of them than of him.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I did not mean to say that Faust spoke my sentiments about
+history in general.  Still, there are periods of history which we have
+very few authors to tell us about, and I daresay in some of those cases
+the colouring of their particular minds gives us a false idea of the
+whole age they lived in.
+
+_Dunsford_.  This may have happened, certainly.
+
+_Milverton_.  We must be careful not to expect too much from the history
+of past ages, as a means of understanding the present age.  There is
+something wanted besides the preceding history to understand each age.
+Each individual life may have a problem of its own, which all other
+biography accurately set down for us might not enable us to work out.  So
+of each age.  It has something in it not known before, and tends to a
+result which is not down in any books.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Yet history must be of greatest use in discerning this
+tendency.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes; but the Wagner sort of pedant would get entangled in
+his round of history—in his historical resemblances.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Now, Milverton, if you were called upon to say what are the
+peculiar characteristics of this age, what should you say?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  One of Dunsford’s questions this, requiring a stout quarto
+volume with notes in answer.
+
+_Milverton_.  I would rather wait till I was called upon.  I am apt to
+feel, after I have left off describing the character of any individual
+man, as if I had only just begun.  And I do not see the extent of
+discourse that would be needful in attempting to give the characteristics
+of an age.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I think you are prudent to avoid answering Dunsford’s
+question.  For my own part, I should prefer giving an account of the age
+we live in after we have come to the end of it—in the true historical
+fashion.  And so, Dunsford, you must wait for my notions.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I am afraid, Milverton, if you were to write history, you
+would never make up your mind to condemn anybody.
+
+_Milverton_.  I hope I should not be so inconclusive.  I certainly do
+dislike to see any character, whether of a living or a dead person,
+disposed of in a summary way.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  For once I will come to the rescue of Milverton.  I really
+do not see that a man’s belief in the extent and variety of human
+character, and in the difficulty of appreciating the circumstances of
+life, should prevent him from writing history—from coming to some
+conclusions.  Of course such a man is not likely to write a long course
+of history; but that I hold has been a frequent error in historians—that
+they have taken up subjects too large for them.
+
+_Milverton_.  If there is as much to be said about men’s character and
+conduct as I think there mostly is, why should we be content with shallow
+views of them?  Take the outward form of these hills and valleys before
+us.  When we have seen them a few times, we think we know them, but are
+quite mistaken.  Approaching from another quarter, it is almost new
+ground to us.  It is a long time before you master the outward form and
+semblance of any small piece of country that has much life and diversity
+in it.  I often think of this, applying it to our little knowledge of
+men.  Now, look there a moment: you see that house; close behind it is
+apparently a barren tract.  In reality there is nothing of the kind
+there.  A fertile valley with a great river in it, as you know, is
+between that house and the moors.  But the plane of those moors and of
+the house is coincident from our present point of view.  Had we not, as
+educated men, some distrust of the conclusions of our senses, we should
+be ready to swear that there was a lonely house on the border of the
+moors.  It is the same in judging of men.  We see a man connected with a
+train of action which is really not near him, absolutely foreign to him,
+perhaps, but in our eyes that is what he is always connected with.  If
+there were not a Being who understands us immeasurably better than other
+men can, immeasurably better than we do ourselves, we should be badly
+off.
+
+Such precautionary thoughts as these must be useful, I contend.  They
+need not make us indifferent to character, or prevent us from forming
+judgments where we must form them, but they show us what a wide thing we
+are talking about when we are judging the life and nature of a man.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I am sure, Dunsford, you are already convinced: you seldom
+want more than a slight pretext for going over to the charitable side of
+things.  You are only afraid of not dealing stoutly enough with bad
+things and people.  Do not be afraid though.  As long as you have me to
+abuse, you will say many unjust things against me, you know, so that you
+may waste yourself in good thoughts about the rest of the world, past and
+present.  Do you know the lawyer’s story I had in my mind then?  “Many
+times when I have had a good case,” he said, “I have failed; but then I
+have often succeeded with bad cases.  And so justice is done.”
+
+_Milverton_.  To return to the subject.  It is not a sort of equalising
+want of thought about men that I desire; only not to be rash in a matter
+that requires all our care and prudence.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, I believe I am won over.  But now to another point.  I
+think, Milverton, that you have said hardly anything about the use of
+history as an incentive to good deeds and a discouragement to evil ones.
+
+_Milverton_.  I ought to have done so.  Bolingbroke gives in his “Letters
+on History,” talking of this point, a passage from Tacitus, “Præcipuum
+munus annalium,”—can you go on with it, Dunsford?
+
+_Dunsford_.  Yes, I think I can.  It is a passage I have often seen
+quoted.  “Præcipuum munus annalium, reor, ne virtutes sileantur; utque
+pravis dictis factisque ex posteritate et infamiâ metus sit.”
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well done; Dunsford may have invented it, though, for aught
+that we know, Milverton, and be passing himself off upon us for Tacitus.
+
+_Milverton_.  Then Bolingbroke goes on to say (I wish I could give you
+his own flowing words), that the great duty of history is to form a
+tribunal like that amongst the Egyptians which Diodorus tells of, where
+both common men and princes were tried after their deaths, and received
+appropriate honour or disgrace.  The sentence was pronounced, he says,
+too late to correct or to recompense; but it was pronounced in time to
+render examples of general instruction to mankind.  Now, what I was going
+to remark upon this is, that Bolingbroke understates his case.  History
+well written is a present correction, and a foretaste of recompense, to
+the man who is now struggling with difficulties and temptations, now
+overcast by calumny and cloudy misrepresentation.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Yes; many a man makes an appeal to posterity which will
+never come before the court; but if there were no such court of appeal—
+
+_Milverton_.  A man’s conviction that justice will be done to him in
+history is a secondary motive, and not one which, of itself, will compel
+him to do just and great things; but, at any rate, it forms one of the
+benefits that flow from history, and it becomes stronger as histories are
+better written.  Much may be said against care for fame; much also
+against care for present repute.  There is a diviner impulse than either
+at the doing of any actions that are much worth doing.  As a correction,
+however, this anticipation of the judgment of history may really be very
+powerful.  It is a great enlightenment of conscience to read the opinions
+of men on deeds similar to those we are engaged in or meditating.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I think Bolingbroke’s idea, which I imagine was more general
+than yours, is more important: namely, that this judicial proceeding,
+mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, gave significant lessons to all people,
+not merely to those who had any chance of having their names in history.
+
+_Milverton_.  Certainly: for this is one of Bolingbroke’s chief points,
+if I recollect rightly.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Our conversations are much better things than your essays,
+Milverton.
+
+_Milverton_.  Of course, I am bound to say so: but what made you think of
+that now?
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Why, I was thinking how in talk we can know exactly where
+we agree or differ.  But I never like to interrupt the essay.  I never
+know when it would come to an end if I did.  And so it swims on like a
+sermon, having all its own way: one cannot put in an awkward question in
+a weak part, and get things looked at in various ways.
+
+_Dunsford_.  I suppose, then, Ellesmere, you would like to interrupt
+sermons.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Why, yes, sometimes—do not throw sticks at me, Dunsford.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Well, it is absurd to be angry with you; because if you long
+to interrupt Milverton with his captious perhapses and probablys, of
+course you will be impatient with discourses which do, to a certain
+extent, assume that the preacher and the hearers are in unison upon great
+matters.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  I am afraid to say anything about sermons, for fear of the
+argumentum baculinum from Dunsford; for many essay writers, like
+Milverton, delight to wind up their paragraphs with complete little
+aphorisms—shutting up something certainly, but shutting out something
+too.  I could generally pause upon them a little.
+
+_Milverton_.  Of course one may err, Ellesmere, in too much aphorising as
+in too much of anything.  But your argument goes against all expression
+of opinion, which must be incomplete, especially when dealing with
+matters that cannot be circumscribed by exact definitions.  Otherwise, a
+code of wisdom might be made which the fool might apply as well as the
+wisest man.  Even the best proverb, though often the expression of the
+widest experience in the choicest language, can be thoroughly misapplied.
+It cannot embrace the whole of the subject, and apply in all cases like a
+mathematical formula.  Its wisdom lies in the ear of the hearer.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, I not know that there is anything more to say about
+the essay.  I suppose you are aware, Dunsford, that Milverton does not
+intend to give us any more essays for some time.  He is distressing his
+mind about some facts which he wants to ascertain before he will read any
+more to us.  I imagine we are to have something historical next.
+
+_Milverton_.  Something in which historical records are useful.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Really it is wonderful to see how beautifully human nature
+accommodates itself to anything, even to the listening to essays.  I
+shall miss them.
+
+_Milverton_.  You may miss the talk before and after.
+
+_Ellesmere_.  Well, there is no knowing how much of that is provoked
+(provoked is a good word, is it not?) by the essays.
+
+_Dunsford_.  Then, for the present, we have come to an end of our
+readings.
+
+_Milverton_.  Yes, but I trust at no distant time to have something more
+to try your critical powers and patience upon.  I hope that that old
+tower will yet see us meet together here on many a sunny day, discussing
+various things in friendly council.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+ Printed by Cassell and Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London, E.C.
+                                  12—391
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES.
+
+
+{12}  See _Statesman_, p. 30.
+
+{42}  The passage which must have been alluded to is this: “The stricter
+tenets of Calvinism, which allow no medium between grace and reprobation,
+and doom man to eternal punishment for every breach of the moral law, as
+an equal offence against Infinite truth and justice, proceed (like the
+paradoxical doctrine of the Stoics), from taking a half-view of this
+subject, and considering man as amenable only to the dictates of his
+understanding and his conscience, and not excusable from the temptations
+and frailty of human ignorance and passion.  The mixing up of religion
+and morality together, or the making us accountable for every word,
+thought, or action, under no less a responsibility than our everlasting
+future welfare or misery, has also added incalculably to the difficulties
+of self-knowledge, has superinduced a violent and spurious state of
+feeling, and made it almost impossible to distinguish the boundaries
+between the true and false, in judging of human conduct and motives.  A
+religious man is afraid of looking into the state of his soul, lest at
+the same time he should reveal it to heaven; and tries to persuade
+himself that by shutting his eyes to his true character and feelings,
+they will remain a profound secret, both here and hereafter.”
+
+{53}  This was one of the passages which Milverton afterwards read to
+us:—
+
+    “Thus, however much may be gained for the world as a whole by this
+    fragmentary cultivation, it is not to be denied that the individuals
+    whom it befalls are cursed for the benefit of the world.  An athletic
+    frame, it is true, is fashioned by gymnastic exercises; but a form of
+    beauty only by free and uniform action.  Just so the exertions of
+    single talents can create extraordinary men indeed; but happy and
+    perfect men only by their uniform temperature.  And in what relation
+    should we stand, then, to the past and coming ages, if the
+    cultivation of human nature made necessary such a sacrifice?  We
+    should have been the slaves of humanity, and drudged for her century
+    after century, and stamped upon our mutilated natures the humiliating
+    traces of our bondage—that the coming race might nurse its moral
+    healthfulness in blissful leisure, and unfold the free growth of its
+    humanity!
+
+    “But can it be intended that man should neglect himself for any
+    particular design?  Ought Nature to deprive us, by its design, of a
+    perfection which Reason, by its own, prescribes to us?  Then it must
+    be false that the development of single faculties makes the sacrifice
+    of totality necessary; or, if indeed the law of Nature presses thus
+    heavily, it becomes us to restore, by a higher art, this totality in
+    our nature which art has destroyed.”—_The Philosophical and
+    Æsthetical Letters and Essays of_ SCHILLER, _Translated by_ J. WEISS,
+    pp. 74, 75.
+
+{93}  Madame Necker de Saussure’s maxim about firmness with children has
+suggested the above.  “Ce que plie ne peut servir d’appui, et l’enfant
+veut être appuyé.  Non-seulement il en a besoin, mais il le désire, mais
+sa tendresse la plus constante n’est qu’à ce prix.  Si vous lui faites
+l’effet d’un autre enfant, si vous partagez ses passions, ses
+vacillations continuelles, si vous lui rendez tous ses mouvements en les
+augmentant, soit par la contrariété, soit par un excès de complaisance,
+il pourra se servir de vous comme d’un jouet, mais non être heureux en
+votre présence; il pleurera, se mutinera, et bientôt le souvenir d’un
+temps de désordre et d’humeur se liera avec votre idée.  Vous n’avez pas
+été le soutien de votre enfant, vous ne l’avez pas préservé de cette
+fluctuation perpétuelle de la volonté, maladie des êtres faibles et
+livrés à une imagination vive; vous n’avez assuré ni sa paix, ni sa
+sagesse, ni son bonheur, pourquoi vous croirait-il sa mère.”—_L’Education
+Progressive_, vol. i., p. 228.
+
+{116a}  See _Health of Towns Report_, vol. i., p. 336.  A similar result
+may be deduced from a similar table made by the Rev. J. Clay, of Preston.
+See the same Report and vol., p. 175.
+
+{116b}  See _Health of Towns Report_, vol. i., p. 75.
+
+{117a}  See Dr. Arnott’s letter, _Claims of Labour_, p. 282.
+
+{117b}  By zinc ventilators, for instance, in the windows and openings
+into the flues at the top of the rooms.  See _Health of Towns Report_,
+1844, vol. i., pp. 76, 77.  Mr. Coulhart’s evidence.—_Ibid._, pp. 307,
+308.
+
+{117c}  There are several thousand gratings to sewers and drains which
+are utterly useless on account of their position, and positively
+injurious from their emanations.—Mr. Guthrie’s evidence.—_Ibid._, vol.
+ii., p. 255.
+
+{118}  Mr. Wood states that the masters and mistresses were generally
+ignorant of the depressing and unhealthy effects of the atmosphere which
+surrounded them, and he mentions the case of the mistress of a
+dame-school who replied, when he pointed out this to her, “that the
+children thrived best in dirt!”—_Health of Towns Report_, vol. i., pp.
+146, 147.
+
+{126}  See “The Fair Maid of Perth.”
+
+{161}  See “Health of Towns Report,” 1844, vol. i., p. 44.
+
+{183}  Bacon, _de Augmentis Scientiarum_.
+
+
+
+
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