Editing

[The fourth of Sir Leslie Stephen’s reminiscent papers.]

IN 1871 I became editor of the Cornhill Magazine, and ceased to do much in the way of journalism. My editorial duties gave me leisure to write a book or two (of which I need say nothing). Meanwhile one great advantage of the Cornhill was that George Smith, already a valued friend, was the most considerate of proprietors, and treated me with, if anything, an excess of confidence. Otherwise, perhaps, I might have been less content to stick in the old ruts. The brilliant youth of the periodical was over ; it had rivals, and as we kept pretty much to our traditions, we did not dazzle the world by any new sensation. I found the duties pleasant enough. My great predecessor, Thackeray, has left a record of the “ thorns in his cushion.” His kindly and sensitive nature suffered from the necessity of rejecting would-be contributors who had no other qualification than pressing need for remuneration. No man indeed, who is not a brute, can fail to be pained by some of the facts that come to his notice, — the hopeless struggles of the waifs and strays who are trying to keep themselves afloat by such a very inadequate life-buoy as unsalable articles. I could comfort myself sufficiently by a very simple consideration. I had only a fixed number of pages at my disposal, and to accept one writer was, therefore, to reject another. It was clearly my duty to take the best article offered, and not to distribute charity at the cost of the magazine and its proprietor. In other respects, I had no cause for complaining of my contributors. They were (except, of course, the poets) more reasonable than I expected. I had (also of course) one or two of the typical forms of perversity. There was the young man (he might have come straight out of the Dunciad) who was aggrieved because I could not advise him to give up a partnership in a good business in order to adopt a literary career, and attributed my rejection of his fiveact tragedy to my jealousy of his anticipated success. I had a difficulty or two of that kind from a rather curious cause. Gladstone, in the midst of his multitudinous occupations, found time to read minor poets, and to applaud them with characteristic warmth. One or two of these came to me with heads turned by such praises, and thought me painfully cold in comparison, I might have reminded them of Blackwood’s very sensible remark, when Lewes complained of strictures upon George Eliot’s first story, that critics who had to act upon their judgment were naturally more guarded than irresponsible eulogists who need only consult their good nature.

An editor, though authors sometimes forget the fact, is always in a state of eagerness for the discovery of the coming man (or woman). In spite of many disappointments, I would take up manuscript after manuscript with a vague flutter of hope that it might be a new Jane Eyre or Scenes of Clerical Life, destined to lift some obscure name to the heights of celebrity. That delight never presented itself ; and yet I do not know that I ever rejected an angel unawares. Had I done so, I should only have been treading in the steps of men more sagacious in gauging aptitude for success. I do not fancy myself to be a good judge of the public taste. I have never clearly discovered what it is that attracts the average reader. Many popular authors would suffer considerably, and at least one obscure writer would gain, if everybody took my view of their merits. I believe, not the less, in the vox populi. Books succeed, I hold, because they ought to succeed. A critic has no business to assume that taste is bad because he does not share it. His business is to accept the fact and try to discover the qualities to which it is due. Sometimes, of course, an ephemeral success may be won by rubbish ; the preacher may please the audience, as Charles II. shrewdly observed, because his nonsense suits their nonsense; but it is idle to condemn lasting popularity. It is too late to set down Shakespeare as simply barbarous: though I admit that it is tempting to try to clear away some of the stupendous rubbish heaps of eulogy which accumulate over the great men when admiration has become obligatory on pain of literary excommunication. Even blasphemy in such cases is better than idolatry. But anticipation, not explanation, of the ultimate verdict is the difficult problem which an editor has to solve; and, if I am not conscious of having nipped any genius in the bud, I dare say that I owe more to good luck than to discrimination. If, on the other hand, I cannot claim to have discovered any new star of the first magnitude, I may plead that the chances were small. The regular contributors to reviews seemed to me to be a small class, like the proverbial stage army which is multiplied by walking round and round. Any one who could reach the regular standard could get admission to the ranks, and so many editors were lying in wait that one’s chance of first catching the early worm was small. I inherited some admirable contributors. Matthew Arnold had to part company after a time, to my great regret, because he wished to discourse upon topics to which we had to give a wide berth. Another old and welcome contributor was John Addington Symonds. I had the good fortune to see him more than once in his retreat at Davos, and the sight was impressive. Shut up in the snow-bound valley, surrounded by patients in the advanced stages of the malady with which he was himself carrying on a precarious struggle, he astonished one by the amazing courage and cheerfulness which turned to account every hour of comparative health. He was keenly interested in all manner of literary and philosophical questions, and ready to discuss them with unflagging vivacity. He was on cordial terms with the natives, delighted in discussing their affairs with them over a pipe and a glass of wine, and not only thoroughly enjoyed Alpine scenery æsthetically, but delighted in the athletic exercise of tobogganing. Far from libraries, he turned out a surprising quantity of work involving very wide reading as well as distinguished by an admirable literary style. His weakness was perhaps his excessive facility ; but no man ever encountered such heavy disadvantages with greater gallantry. His remarkable biography contains some revelations of an inner life which would not suggest this side of him. Readers would hardly expect to find that the æsthetic philosopher had the masculine vigor which made him the most buoyant of invalids.

The most widely popular of my contributors was R. L. Stevenson, and though I did not discover him, I may venture to say that I was the fortunate recipient of most of the early articles which I think contain some of the best examples of his literary skill. I may therefore hope that I did not show obtuseness to his merits. I was specially struck by Will of the Mill, which I had the honor of publishing. I take it to be one of his most characteristic bits of delicate work. It reminds me of another charming story, — Mr. Henry James’s Daisy Miller, which, I hope, did something to establish the author’s reputation here. And that again reminds me that Mr. Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd — a most delightful book of the kind in which he is unrivaled — appeared in the Cornhill, and, I hope, did the same kind of service for him. But I cannot claim the honors of first discovery in any of these cases. I was greatly pleased to see lately, in Mr. Clodd’s life of Grant Allen, encouragement that I had in one case given generously acknowledged. Grant Allen was a man of so versatile and ingenious an intellect that one might have predicted for him a great success in periodical writing. He declared, however, I have heard, that he would rather bring up a son to crossing-sweeping than to literature. He had, I fear, a hard task. He sent some articles upon popular science, which I thought singularly good of their kind, and the kind is to me very attractive. They did not receive, I suppose, the notice which they deserved ; he had to struggle with ill health, and he was forced to take to the more profitable occupation of writing novels. Clever as they were, they hardly corresponded to his best function. Meanwhile he was at work for twenty years, as he tells us, in preparing the book upon the evolution of theology, which, perhaps because his conclusions were unwelcome, scarcely had the success deserved by its brightness and candor. It shows at least that an enthusiastic disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer could impart vivacity to a philosophy to which, as a rule, one can hardly attribute that particular quality.

I will speak of no other contributors. To some still living I have a debt’ of gratitude for their tenderness to that ambiguous personage, the editor, who, like the bat in the fable, holds an equivocal position between the winged and the pedestrian races of author and publisher. I left the Cornhill in order to take up editorial duties of a much more laborious nature. The Dictionary of National Biography has been received with a general chorus of praise which I should be the last person to call excessive. It has, however, like other human productions, certain faults. I leave them to be pointed out by others. Their existence suggests a few words upon the conditions under which it was produced. The general scheme had been conceived by my friend Smith. He had indeed been ambitious enough to contemplate a dictionary of general biography to rival the great French dictionaries. The same thing had been attempted by the old Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and, so far as it went, was very well done. But after completing the letter A in seven volumes, the dictionary broke down, and the Society, I believe, died of the too gigantic effort. The mouse was trying to give birth to a mountain. Smith agreed therefore to my suggestion to limit the enterprise to British lives. I do not think that either he or I quite realized the weight of the burden even so restricted. That it was ever carried to a conclusion was due to Smith’s public spirit, and to the pride which he took in a work costly enough to have ruined most publishers. Smith was thoroughly generous, but he was too good a man of business to pay authors, as a rule, more than their work was really worth. No author, it seems to me, ought to desire to be treated as an object of charity; and a publisher has done quite enough if he is thoroughly honorable in his dealings, without incurring loss for the benefit of authors or of mankind at large. The case is very rare, in which the world would be benefited by the appearance of books unable to pay their expenses ; and there is no obligation upon a publisher to bestowsuch gifts upon the public. Smith soon became aware, if he was not aware at first, that the book would not pay commercially, and that his reward must be the consciousness of having done a real service to the national literature. One point was evident to me. If an intelligent government had appointed such a work, and promised me a comfortable salary till it was finished, I might have taken my time about it. Probably in that case the dictionary might by this time have reached the middle of the alphabet. But as it was after all to be done by private enterprise, I had to take care that the self-imposed sacrifice should not be made more than even a generous proprietor could be expected to stand. I made up my mind in the first place that the book should be finished, if possible, within the lifetime of Smith and myself. I am glad that I succeeded. I have a certain regard for posterity, but something is gained for the present generation by making sure of a relatively imperfect book instead of aiming at an ideal standard which will only benefit their children. However that may be, I thought that it was plainly due to Smith that he should be able to reckon upon the completion of his project. For the same reason, it was desirable to convince the public that the work would not, like many of its predecessors, come to a premature end, or be finished in a perfunctory spirit. We promised four volumes annually, and the promise was kept. In spite of a good many forebodings every volume, including the sixty-third and last, appeared up to time. I had begun by calculating the whole at fifty volumes : and the excess was due to the more elaborate scale on which the lives came to be written.

I say so much to explain the conditions of the most troublesome undertaking in which I was ever involved. I was not, and I have neyer become, an antiquary. I fear that I rather sympathized with Carlyle’s lamentations at having to take service under Dr. Dryasdust and spend years in exploring the rubbish heaps accumulated by former specimens of the genus. The old-fashioned antiquary was what used to be called a “ humourist; ” a man with a quaint and perfectly unreasonable hobby; loving to collect obsolete knowledge the more because it was utterly uninteresting to anybody else. The consciousness of outside contempt often made him sour and crusty, and his love of antiquities went with a devotion to outworn creeds. But the labors undertaken by such men have gained a value which they did not anticipate. Dryasdust has found himself in sympathy with the modern scientific tendencies. Darwin has taught us how much can be learnt even from earthworms; and a modern entomologist, I am told, spent a lifetime upon the history of the house-fly. In the same way Dryasdust, by preserving records, mainly because they were antiquated, has provided materials from which the modern historian undertakes to reconstruct a picture of the past, and to lay the foundations of social science. History, we are told, has to be rewritten by a minute examination of innumerable documents, by ransacking archives, and studying ancient deeds and charters. History has, no doubt, thus become more scientific in method ; but one can hardly say how it has gained in a literary sense. We sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees ; and lose the broad outlines in the multiplicity of detail. Anyhow we have got to make the best of the position; and that consideration prescribed the functions of such a book as the dictionary. We intended, I said at starting, to supply a useful manual for all serious students of British history and literature. We were to achieve that end by bringing together as concisely as possible all that was so far known about every person who might conceivably be interesting to such students, and to indicate clearly the sources from which the narrative was derived. We were to treat of all manner of people, — statesmen, divines, philosophers, poets, soldiers, sailors, artists, musicians, men of scientific and literary mark; and not only men of mark, but every one about whom the question might arise in the course of general reading, who was he ? Some people thought eminent murderers unworthy of record ; but, surely, to the social inquirer the crime of any period is full of instruction. The highwayman is often more interesting to the historian of society than the dignified judge who hangs him.

Without going further, I may say that the first condition was to get competent contributors ; from the grave historian who could speak with authority upon great constitutional events to the specialist who had rummaged up some of the obscure provinces of antiquarian investigation. Above all, it was desirable to get men who would take an interest in the work for its own sake, and discharge minds already full of the required knowledge, instead of cramming up the topic for the immediate purpose. There were, of course, plenty of people who would be willing to undertake such tasks and write about anybody, from Shakespeare to Tupper, in a mechanical fashion. Some men have to make a living (I can only pity them, and wish that their employment was better paid) by laboring in the reading-room of the British Museum, with more or less intelligence, to collect raw material for others, or by working as humble artificers at the trade of “ bookmaking.” We required more enthusiasm, as well as more historical knowledge and literary skill, than such worthy persons could generally supply. We aimed at finding men each of whom would be competent to take charge of some special department, and write both with zeal and authority. To get a fairly organized body of contributors was not at first an easy task. Some men of eminence were fully occupied with labors of their own ; Professor Rawson Gardiner, for example, was good enough to give us many admirable lives of the early seventeenth century, but had far too much on his hands to deal with the smaller characters. Then some men of the antiquarian variety had their little crotchets, and would be unreasonable, so at least I thought, if I would not give as much space to some twopenny halfpenny scribbler, whose only merit was that nobody had ferreted him out before, as to his most eminent contemporaries. Somehow, or other, we gradually got the thing into order; and I owe special gratitude both to distinguished writers whose contributions gave credit to the undertaking and to younger enthusiasts, undeterred by minute drudgery, whom we were fortunate enough to enlist.

I have said “ we ” rather than “ I ” for a sufficient reason. My greatest piece of good fortune, perhaps, was that from the first I had the coöperation of Mr. Sidney Lee as my sub-editor. Always calm and confident when I was tearing my hair over the delay of some article urgently required for the timely production of our next volume ; always ready to undertake any amount of thankless drudgery, and, most thoroughly conscientious in his work, he was an invaluable helpmate. When he succeeded to my post, after a third of the task was done, I felt assured that the dictionary would at least not lose by the exchange. He had, moreover, more aptitude for many parts of the work than I can boast of; for there were moments at which my gorge rose against the unappetizing but, I sorrowfully admit, the desirable masses of minute information which I had to insert. I improved a little under the antiquarian critics who cried for more concessions to Dryasdust; but Mr. Lee had no such defect of sympathy to overcome. Having caught our contributors, the main duties were to keep them up to time, to correct, and to condense. We kept them up to time by steady and remorseless dunning. The correction was of necessity inadequate : I am not omniscient, and the vast sphere of my ignorance includes innumerable matters discussed in the dictionary. A book of which it is the essence that every page should bristle with facts and dates is certain to have errors by the thousand ; unless it should be supervised by a staff of inspectors beyond all possibilities. We made, no doubt, slips enough, and I had in the main to depend upon getting trustworthy contributors and thinning out those in whom I detected inaccuracy. I remember the horror with which I discovered the misdoings of a writer (long since dead) who had the highest recommendations, and in some sense deserved them. He was a man of really wide learning, but demoralized by impecuniosity. He saved trouble, as I discovered, by copying modern and still copyright books, and made a “bogus” list of authorities which had no reference to the statements supposed to be established. When I informed him that I no longer required his services he wrote a reply which I remember as a model of epistolary dignity. I was oppressing him, it appeared, because he was a poor man; and might as well have struck a woman or a child; but the saddest part, he concluded, of all this sad business was that it destroyed the ideal which he had formed for himself of Mr. Leslie Stephen. I did not see my way to apologizing, and hope that I escaped pretty completely from his like. The more serious difficulty was condensing. If the book was ever to be completed, wordiness must be sternly excised, and that is a fault which has many varieties. Some early aspirants, whose articles I had stewed down, were simple enough to be more diffuse next time, in order to allow for probable shrinkage. I parted company with them pretty quickly. But some otherwise valuable contributors had to be trained to submission. One of them, whom I shall always remember with gratitude, wrote to thank me for having reduced an article by at least two thirds, and admitted the great improvement of his style. I believe that he was perfectly sincere ; for he continued to give valuable help. But he was unique. Others kept their gratitude for such services, if they felt it, to themselves. The “ sweating ” of articles was certainly the most trying of my duties. One mystery always puzzled me. It is easy enough to cut out superfluities, sentiment, and rhetoric, and flowers of speech in general. As Canon Ainger put it, we might adopt the phrase of obituary notices: “No flowers, by request.” Though a thoughtless critic might complain of a life for being “unsympathetic,” it was clearly our business to be sternly concise, and to confine comments or criticism to a brief indication of a man’s place in history. My puzzle was that writers who fully appreciated the necessity could yet manage to be long winded. One man will tell a story without introducing any clearly irrelevant remark or assertion, and manage to be twice as long as another who yet omits nothing. The only remedy would, I suppose, be to rewrite the whole on a different scheme. I had work enough on hand without doing that service as systematically as I could have wished. But X learnt to think that the whole art of writing consists in making one word suffice where ordinary men use two. I wish that it were a little more practiced. Meanwhile, I had to take my share in writing lives, and at moments I caught the contagion of the antiquarian fever. There was a certain sense of luxury in sitting in the reading-room of the British Museum, conscious that vast multitudes of books and MSS. were waiting your pleasure, ready to come when you called. Then came the excitement of the chase ; the conjectures as to the most probable place to find your needle in that stupendous bundle of hay ; and now and then, the triumphant conviction that you had run the game to ground and settled some fact, infinitesimal as it might be, which had baffled your predecessors. One such success would compensate for many of the disappointments which were of course more numerous. My enthusiasm, I think, culminated when I had to consider whether Sir Philip Francis was Junius. Many predecessors, of course, had beaten the bush so thoroughly that there was little chance of any new discovery. Still there was a fascination in turning now to old newspapers and pamphlets, verifying or disproving, but always fancying that the next page might contain some pregnant hint hitherto unnoticed. The inquiry, however, ended by rather damping my zeal. In the first place, it permanently lowered my estimate of human intelligence. Some forty-nine of the fifty hypotheses said to have been suggested are really worthless. Many of the socalled arguments are on a level with the proofs that Bacon wrote Shakespeare : that is, they proceed on the assumption that you conclusively establish a proposition by showing that it does not involve a physical impossibility. The only real question is whether the authorship of Francis can be proved. I think that it can, and there was some amusement in bringing together the converging probabilities. But it was also borne in upon me very strongly that it matters not a straw to any human being whether Francis was or was not the author. Considered as a puzzle, the inquiry might be an amusing game, like the solution of a chess problem. But the toil of going through the old documents was more than the pleasure could repay. I need hardly speak of other necessary drudgery; the terrible question of bibliography, for example; the duty of making an accurate list of all the works of some voluminous person, all now securely sunk into tenfold oblivion, and of all the forms in which they have appeared. When some admirable person has done for an author what Professor Masson did for Milton, one could hardly do more than condense and verify. But I have hardly the qualifications of a pioneer. Anyhow my health broke down, partly, at any rate, from the strain of such labors, and though I continued to write lives I handed over the reins to my friend Lee — not without a sense of relief.

The dictionary had one advantage, that is, I could feel that I was employed in a really useful undertaking. I may be allowed to assume that the facilitation of historical inquiry is useful. Contributors could feel themselves to be coöperators, interested in the reputation of the whole work as well as in their own articles. I am specially grateful to many who put an amount of research into the smaller articles which generally pass without notice, but which are perhaps the most valuable part of the book. The popular critic naturally confined his attention to the longer articles upon famous names ; but the real value of the book depends mainly upon less conspicuous people, who are not to be found in easily accessible places. The dictionary thus brought me into contact with a class of writers with whom I had previously had comparatively little to do. I admire the study of history and the students. Professor Gardiner, of whom I have spoken, had in some respects an ideal career. I do not mean that he was a man of most lovable qualities personally, though that would, I believe, be perfectly true. But a man is surely enviable who can devote a lifetime to a single task, learning all that is to be known about a definite period, patiently recording in each year of his life the events which had taken a year to happen, and giving his results with admirable impartiality and with the certainty of turning out a work of permanent value. The average author by profession, who can only reflect at the end of his career, that if he had stuck to one aim, he might have done something worth the labor, is humiliated by thinking of such a calm and honorable self-devotion. The age, we are constantly told, is one of excessive tension and excitement; and the author who has to meet the whims of the world becomes demoralized. I am not about to contradict the many moralists who dwell upon that theme, but I will also say that, somehow or other, I seem to have known a great many authors, who, though subject to such temptation, appeared to me to be very decent fellows in their way. My old friend, James Payn, one of the simplest, most affectionate, and most sociable of men, took to literature from spontaneous enthusiasm ; and he declares, if I remember rightly, in his Reminiscences, after long experience, that the literary profession is the best of all; that its members are the freest from jealousy, and from all the bad passions of which, no doubt, they have a share, but which are developed more abundantly (so it seems to be implied) in clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and men of business. Few authors would have spoken so well of their employment in any previous generation. The lives of authors, authors used to say, are the saddest of all reading except the lives of criminals in the Newgate Calendar. So far, perhaps, Payn’s judgment gives some presumption that things have improved ; but I cannot quote him as an authority, because I have a strong suspicion that, among whatever class of men he had had to live, he would have discovered that they were the best and most charming set of people in the world. Authors, it seems to me, like the proverbial Lord Mayor, are, after all, men. They are made of the same raw material as other men, and if the author and the politician are, as some think, the worst of men, it must be that they have the strongest temptations. Both classes are tempted to overestimate the value of popularity. Even if he is independent of the sale of his work, the author at least writes in the hope of being read. He has not the same temptation as the politician for the grosser kinds of demagogism. Indeed, on the whole, the easiest way to popularity is to take a high moral tone. Edifying moralizing is as easy as lying. But, being in his study, he does not get the case hardening which the politician acquires in the rough and tumble of active life; and is apt to become morbidly sensitive. He seldom learns to take abuse as all in the day’s work, and like Johnson to regard it as a proof that he has hit hard. Criticism stings him to the last, and one generally fancies at the moment that the hostile critic has found one’s weak points with singular subtlety, whereas the complimentary critic has a horrid tendency to praise in just the wrong place.

Whatever the temptations, however, I have, on the whole, thought that authors, as I have known them in a pretty wide experience, are an enviable race. They have the advantage, if, at least, they are authors by nature, that their work has some spice of intellectual interest and a smaller proportion than most occupations of mere humdrum drudgery, and that they have more liberty to work out their own scheme of activity. I have had the good fortune to know some very eminent authors, and can give them a very decent character. If they suffer a little from the author’s disease,—self-consciousness and vanity, — they often take it in a mild form ; Tennyson was, perhaps, an instance. Many years ago I paid some visits to Freshwater, then — for alas ! it has been grievously injured by the growth of the usual wateringplace surroundings — the ideal place for the poet of In Memoriam. It is still “close to the edge of a noble down,” and the old girdle of woods, round which cockneys used to wander in hopes of a glimpse of the bard, still incloses the picturesque lawn and gardens to which the fortunate few found admission and might listen to Maud or an Idyll, gaining new force from the lips of the author. In my day, a little group of reverent admirers was generally gathered there to render acceptable homage. It was impossible for the cynic not to catch a certain comic side to the proceedings, — though, of course, it was very wrong. I remember a dinner from which I fled precipitately in company with a man highly distinguished in official life and solid literature. We confided to each other that it was perfectly right for the ladies of the party to show a certain preference for the man of genius ; but that it was too much to be treated as pariahs, outside of the pale of social equality. “ Stay ! Stay ! Dr. Johnson is going to speak,” would have been fairly resented by Goldsmith even had he not been Goldsmith. Such a steam of incense creates a rather unwholesome atmosphere for a man of specially sensitive nature. Tennyson perhaps suffered a little. He had a right to complain if a certain article in a popular newspaper contained, as he told us, three lies about him in one column; but I did not want to hear the statement repeated daily for a week. He might, too, have been a little less shocked by the apparition on the “ noble down ” of a distant figure — a harmless local laborer — whom he at once assumed to be one of the circumambient cockneys who were always prowling round the protective circle of woods. But I apologize for mentioning these petty foibles. Tennyson was so transparently simple, one might say childlike, in his little vanity, that one only felt something piquant in its combination with the massive frame and the expressive countenance worthy of an intellectual monarch. He was obviously all that one could expect from the poems including the Northern Farmer, which, almost a solitary case in his writings, shows the strong humor that occasionally came up in his talk. There was one lady in the Freshwater circle who could be very outspoken as to the little infirmity at which I have glanced, and he took it as kindly as it was meant. The lady was Mrs. Cameron, who showed real genius in the photographic portraits which, I think, give the best impression of Tennyson and of other eminent men. Mrs. Cameron was unique in her way ; the most warm-hearted and enthusiastic of women ; impulsive to a degree which often startled solid British conventionality, and doing things which nobody else would have done ; but generally because nobody else gave such free play to generous sentiments. She had, therefore, the rare power of giving the heartiest praise without flattery, — at least of the conscious and intentional kind, — and could administer a bit of wholesome advice without a touch of venom. Her enthusiasms included Wordsworth and Carlyle as well as Tennyson : but her closest friendship was for Henry Taylor. Philip van Artevelde, the work from which Taylor took his literary title, is not, I fear, often read in these days. Dramatic in form, it is rather to he classed with the poetry of reflection, full of weighty gnomic utterances, though often really poetical, and always in admirable English. Taylor himself looked the poetic sage. Mrs. Cameron’s portrait justified a remark of his closest friend. “ My infantile idea of the Deity,” said Spedding, “was Henry Taylor sitting on the sofa in his dressinggown.” Most of Taylor’s long life was devoted to his official work at the Colonial Office, where he was my father’s colleague and warm friend. I naturally looked up to him as to one dwelling in serene regions of wisdom and ripe experience ; and I do not think that I was wrong. I have certainly never seen a more imposing figure ; and believe that he fully deserved Mrs. Cameron’s devotion. With him, I associate Spedding, beloved by him and Carlyle and Edward FitzGerald ; wasting thirty years, as FitzGerald complained, in whitewashing Bacon when he might have been the ideal editor of Shakespeare ; but, at any rate, absolutely contented with his self-imposed task, going about it “ without haste and without rest,” and too free from vanity to fancy that he could be wasting his powers. Taylor said that every family should have a Bible, a Shakespeare, and a James Spedding; and his slow and sure judgment, with a substratum of humor and genuine appreciation of literature, made him a critic after FitzGerald’s own heart. Another friend of all the circle was the most amiable poet Aubrey de Vere. I do not read his poetry ; I fear that it might stir me the wrong way ; but the man himself was among the most lovable of human beings ; gentle, courteous, and chivalrous, —clinging to his old friends the more when his conversion to Catholicism made some intellectual separation. Whatever his merits as a poet, to me he suggested the type of saint. — I mean to refer only to the better qualities connoted by that name. The malicious and censorious instincts seemed to have been omitted from his composition. De Vere was of course an enthusiastic Wordsworthian, — and although that name could not be applied to Tennyson, there was this much of affinity that one charm of his poetry is due to the pure and lofty moral sentiment. The men of whom I have been speaking seem to breathe in a wholesome social atmosphere, and, in spite of a foible or two, were lovable human beings as well as men of genius. The moral might be enforced by speaking of the other most famous poets whom I have known, Matthew Arnold and Browning. Arnold had no doubt a touch of the intellectual coxcomb. He preached to the Philistine with a certain air of superiority, and repeated his pet maxims too often and too confidently. If he showed, like Tennyson, a simple-minded delight in receiving compliments, his vanity was equally harmless. He was so full of good nature that even the Philistine and the dissenter or the barbarian in flesh and blood appealed to him at once, and he could drop his magisterial robes to talk in the friendliest terms. The impression which he made was that he was too kindly to be able really to despise even the objects of his theoretical contempt. If Browning had at bottom, as one suspects that he had, a touch of excessive sensitiveness, he concealed it under the reserve which made him pass with superficial observers for nothing but a brilliant conversationalist. He was so anxious not to wear his heart upon his sleeve, that he could conceal even his tender and noble nature from dull eyes; and never condescended to acknowledge a craving for praise or shrinking from blame.

Such characteristics may be of doubtful value in the eyes of some people. The morals of these poets were not disturbed by the dæmonic passions which drive the Byronic race outside the pale of respectability. Wordsworth would not have been so irreproachable a person if the prosaic element had not mastered his higher moods. The “ leader ” would not have been “ lost ” though the man might have got into scrapes. Undoubtedly the poetic fire may often be an unruly element of character, and æsthetic sensibility be galled by the chains of commonplace good sense. The most conspicuous and melancholy illustrations might be taken from Ruskin. I saw him frequently during two summer vacations which I spent at Coniston. The English Lakes, though but a miniature edition of mountain scenery, have always had a special though unanalyzable charm for me; and Ruskin’s home at Brantwood seemed to me to give its very essence. Had I been Ahab he would have been my Naboth, and I dare say that even in that Arcadia I could have found the necessary men of Belial. The house was of the modest dimensions which do not exclude thorough comfort; and I could fancy myself settling there into a sufficiency of books, with a lovely and soothing scenery courting me for a stroll whenever I wished for relaxation. There, certainly, Ruskin had every advantage, in the happiest domestic environment; and when he exhibited his treasures, — a manuscript of Scott or a drawing by Turner,—one could fancy him to be a calm connoisseur with hobbies enough to secure ample and delightful occupation. He received one with the courtesy of a polished gentleman of the old school, and talked delightfully without the least assumption of superiority. I remember how, on my first visit, he gave me a recent number of Fors, in which, he said, I should be interested because it spoke of Alpine traveling. So it did. But he had quite forgotten that he had taken an unfortunate article of mine for a text to illustrate the vulgarity of modern scramblers. He remarked that I thought the Alps improved by the odor of my tobacco smoke. I adhere to that heresy; they were greatly improved for me. I might have claimed to be a disciple and told him that their beauty had been interpreted to me by Modern Painters, though increased by my tobacco, but I thought it better to drop the subject. I remember him, too, entering the room rubbing his hands with no small glee. Somebody, it seemed, had remonstrated with him for one of his slightly extravagant denunciations of the English bishops, — or some such respectable class. Ruskin had replied to the effect that, though he was always scrupulously accurate in the use of language, he had never said anything more carefully measured or more precisely just than in the offending passage. His complacency in making this retort suggested to me at the time that some of his petulant outbreaks did not imply fierceness or loss of temper, but only the delight of a master of logical fence in administering a skillful thrust at the joints of his opponent’s armor. Perhaps that was so, but undoubtedly his wrath was often genuine and painful enough. At the time of which I am speaking, he was beginning to suffer from the excessive nervous tension which upset his powers. He told me, if I remember rightly, that he was correcting eight sets of proofs at once: and the strain showed itself in occasional irritability. Ruskin somewhere compares his state of mind to Swift’s. He was like Swift in that the sight of the misery and corruption of the world stung him to ungovernable indignation. He could not find comfort in art or literature, while the whole world was turning brutal and selfish and sweeping away the old beliefs and institutions, and therefore becoming incapable of appreciating or creating genuine beauty. I don’t ask whether the world is so bad, but the man who would reform it ought, I fancy, to keep his head. He should take time to reflect and coördinate his ideas. For that, Ruskin’s intense sensibility and impetuosity was a disqualification. He could never work at any definite line of thought; and his writings became a mass of more or less incoherent denunciations and exhortations, most amazingly keen and telling at a number of particular points, but leading to unsatisfactory and inconsistent conclusions. We should perhaps be the more thankful for the genius, which struggles through so many infirmities; and Ruskin’s feeling is always so deep and genuine, and is uttered with such singular keenness, that most people forgive the want of intellectual self-control. He is at least a proof that there is some truth in the uncomfortable doctrine that the most effective utterance is only to be won at the cost of the utterer. He is tortured for our benefit, and we admire the man who cannot see wrong without wrath, while we manage to take things more easily ourselves.

That suggests a contrast. Among the objects of Ruskin’s denunciations was the modern man of science. When his mind was losing its balance, he used to speak of a mysterious cloud, such as he had never seen in the days of his youth, which had taken to overshadowing the mountains. It might be a symbol of the scientific materialism which was darkening the intellectual sky. Carlyle had preached the same doctrine; and in a milder form the revolt against some scientific tendencies was most felicitously expressed by Tennyson. Perhaps it might turn out that he had not an immortal soul. Nobody, Huxley is reported to have said, had a clearer view of the issues involved. I, certainly, should have no wish to belittle them, or to deny that Tennyson and his brother poets were uttering emotions which no one can afford to despise. But, I only speak of the fact as reminding me that whatever the goodness or badness of their cause, the leaders of the scientific world were personally as attractive as those who regarded their principles with horror. I had the privilege of seeing something of Darwin in his later years. To me, and my opinion was not exceptional, he appeared to be simply the most lovable person whom I ever encountered. A little party of us used at one time to take long Sunday tramps in the neighborhood of London. Those were days to be marked with a white stone when Darwin received us at the famous house at Down. It is in the quiet region of chalk downs, which had been left untouched in the gaps of the network of railways; and still looked as rural as it had a century earlier. One could expect to meet the old smugglers whose paths from the coast to London were laid through the unfrequented district. There Darwin found an admirable retreat for contemplating flowers and bees and worms, and for slowly elaborating the thoughts which had revolutionized science. He was as free from pretensions as if his investigations had no more claims to respect than those of a commonplace pigeon-fancier. The simplicity of the man was evident in the delightfully easy terms in which he lived with a family which was worthy of his affection. I could sympathize with the young German who burst into tears on leaving the house, touched by the contrast between the famous thinker and the sweetnatured, quiet country gentleman, so free from the pedantry which sometimes haunts the professor’s chair. I remember my quaint sense of humiliation when he asked me quite seriously for my views about the correct definition of instinct. I felt as I once did when a doctor of divinity asked me to explain the origin of evil. It was not a question for me. I will not speak further of qualities sufficiently obvious to every reader of his life. I have only one moral to draw. Darwin himself insists upon his literary shortcomings. He lost a taste for poetry in his old age, and ascribes the loss to his absorption in science. I have observed the same phenomenon in many men who were absolutely unscientific. At all times, he found the labor of expressing his thoughts on paper very trying ; and Huxley declared that he was like an inspired dog, at once inarticulate and full of the most valuable thoughts. Yet I know no pleasanter book of travels than the Voyage of the Beagle, and his letters, though mainly upon topics beyond my knowledge, have a peculiar fascination. They have not the qualities of Mrs. Carlyle’s or of Edward FitzGerald’s, but they have the quality, whatever it may be, which makes even a botanical discussion interesting to one who scarcely knows a poppy from a tulip. The most obvious are the intellectual vivacity, which makes the whole of external nature a collection of fascinating problems, and the generous enthusiasm with which he accepts the help of his fellow workers. Men of science, I fear, are not always free from jealousy; but when Darwin welcomes a friend’s suggestion with his favorite “ By Jove ! ” it suggests the unqualified glee of a schoolboy when a good blow is struck on his side of the game. Darwin, of course, suggests his “ bulldog ” Huxley : the best wrestler in the intellectual ring. I never had the treat, said to have been delightful, of looking on at one of his rounds with W. G. Ward at the Metaphysical Society ; but I saw enough of his contests with other antagonists to appreciate his singular alertness and vigor. Huxley, as I have good reason to know, was not less remarkable for warmth of heart than for keenness in controversy, and sufficiently proved that thorough amiability does not necessarily prescribe a gentle handling of humbug or equivocation. Huxley’s essays are among our very best specimens of one variety of literature. Few controversialists ever hit so hard and so straight and avoided so rigidly the temptation to stray into irrelevant issues. To concentrate your whole force upon the critical point is the great art of intellectual as of physical warfare. Huxley’s style has in the highest degree the merit due to never thinking of the style at all, but simply of the clearest utterance of your thought. In those days the orthodox generally described their adversaries as “ the Huxleys and the Tyndalls,” the complimentary plural. My first contact with Tyndall was not altogether satisfactory. He had joined the Alpine Club and was elected Vice President. He made us an after-dinner speech, eloquent I have no doubt, which somehow suggested an unlucky reply to my youthful impertinence. I asserted that true Alpine travelers loved the mountains for their own sake, and considered scientific intruders with their barometers and their theorizing to be a simple nuisance. When shortly afterwards Tyndall broke off for a time his connection with the club I was accused of having given the offense. How that may be I know not, but I do know that when I met him afterwards, he received me in the friendliest way. Our tramps led us occasionally to Hindhead, the nearest approach to a mountain within reach of London, on the summit of which Tyndall had built a house in late years. He was a delightful host, overflowing with the heartiest talk. Tyndall had some of the characteristics claimed, though I hope not monopolized, by Irishmen. He was easily roused to enthusiastic rhetoric, very different from Huxley’s terse cut and thrust, but showing a poetic imagination stirred by science. One marked quality was the enthusiasm with which he took up the cause of men whom he considered to have been ill treated by their superiors, or to have failed to receive due recognition. He was among the most chivalrous and warm-hearted of men. From Tyndall and Huxley, I might make a natural transition to Mr. Herbert Spencer. It is needless to speak of his heroic devotion of a lifetime to the highest intellectual purposes. What always impressed me most forcibly was the admirable simplicity and candor of the man. I am not quite so convinced as he appears to be that he has found the last word in regard to the great problems of philosophy. But there is something impressive in the sight of a man giving himself up so unreservedly to the guidance of what he takes to be the voice of pure reason, and so absolutely indifferent to any other authority. When he calmly sets aside all other philosophies as so much blundering, he does not, like Carlyle, suggest personal arrogance, but simply his surrender to obviously self-evident truth.

Acquaintance with such men might well convince me that if they were, as Carlyle and Ruskin seemed to think, instruments of the devil, the devil deserves much credit for enlisting good men in his service. I must rather hope that the time will come of true reconciliation between faith and science, or the imagination and the reason, or whatever the right phrase may be which has been the topic of so many controversies. I am only thinking of a much smaller question. The merit of a scientific work depends upon its contents, not its form. The force of Darwin’s arguments was the question, and not his skill in expounding them. If many men of science have written admirably, their literary power was an accident or a subordinate and secondary virtue. They have literary intelligence while aiming at something better or at least less egotistical. The imaginative writer is bound to be emotional and personal; he has to work up his inmost emotions for exhibition, and is thin-skinned and self-conscious. He is apt to quarrel with facts in general; and is tempted either to give up his interest in the brutal outside world and even to become “æsthetic,” or to knock his head passionately against the world at large and find that the world is the harder. Let us hope that he has his reward in the raptures of creation, and be thankful that we are spared his temptations. The quiet man of letters by profession need not bother himself about soul problems, if he is wise enough not to mistake himself for a genius. He may go on like the admirable Trollope, content to provide his fellows with harmless and healthy amusement, and feel that it is well worth while to have increased the stock of innocent pleasure for the moment. Or he may be content with honestly spreading knowledge and interpreting the thoughts of the original minds. It will no doubt occur to him that the world will lose nothing by committing all his works, as it is sure to do, to the newspaper basket. But meanwhile, he will feel, unless indeed he has been face to face with starvation, that he has had very satisfactory employment, with less of worry and responsibility than falls to the lot of most men.

Leslie Stephen .