*****

The word 'facts' is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits
and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans
and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the
word 'facts' in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get
no nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them,
seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to
what was, or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we
pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line
and different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy
in the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which
discoloured all experience to its own shade. How would you have people
agree, when one is deaf and the other blind?

*****

The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that
gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to
invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency,
and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truth and
part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced
by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and
indecent himself. New truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy,
our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better
stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm,
and, in the first at least, some good.

*****

The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and
the bones and the revolutions of the Kosmos in whose joints we are but
moss and fungus, more ancient still.

*****

The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look abroad,
even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every
climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a virtue
and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look into our
experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair
of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed
to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and
only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face
of life, faith can read a bracing gospel.

*****

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are
the perfect duties.... If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it
they are wrong. I do not say 'give them up,' for they may be all you
have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of
better and simpler people.

*****

There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the world is
wide, and so are morals. Out of two people who have dipped into Sir
Richard Burton's Thousand and One Nights, one shall have been offended
by the animal details; another to whom these were harmless, perhaps even
pleasing, shall yet have been shocked in his turn by the rascality and
cruelty of all the characters. Of two readers, again, one shall have
been pained by the morality of a religious memoir, one by that of the
VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE. And the point is that neither need be wrong. We
shall always shock each other both in life and art; we cannot get the
sun into our pictures, nor the abstract right (if there be such a thing)
into our books; enough if, in the one, there glimmer some hint of the
great light that blinds us from heaven; enough if, in the other, there
shine, even upon foul details, a spirit of magnanimity.

*****

For to do anything because others do it, and not because the thing
is good, or kind, or honest in its own right, is to resign all moral
control and captaincy upon yourself, and go post-haste to the devil with
the greater number. The respectable are not led so much by any desire of
applause as by a positive need for countenance. The weaker and the tamer
the man, the more will he require this support; and any positive quality
relieves him, by just so much, of this dependence.

*****

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the
relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or
less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our
constitutions; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so
built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness, and so
circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves
very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease more painful.
Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us. It is not even
its own reward, except for the self-centred and--I had almost said--the
unamiable.

*****

Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even
to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the
kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay without.

*****

To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the
imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a
secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell
upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted
pleasure.

*****

There is a certain class, professors of that low morality so greatly
more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you must never
represent an act that was virtuous in itself, as attended by any other
consequences than a large family and fortune.

*****

All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those
about him, and--let us not blink the truth--hurries both him and them
into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault,
as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
consequences, to gloss the matte over, with too polite biographers,
is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous
seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be
talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.

*****

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are
works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he
must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to
the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience,
not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change--that
monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be
so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that
is so serves the turn of instruction.

*****

Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple pleasures
next, if not superior, to virtue.

*****

The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;
to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly,
respectable.

*****

Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than the toughest
theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid judgment and
prompt action are alone possible and right.

*****

Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend;
he must be taught what is without him, that he may be kind to others. It
can never be wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his disputable state,
weaving as he goes his theory of life, steering himself, cheering or
reproving others, all facts are of the first importance to his conduct;
and even if a fact shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best
that he should know it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a
world made easy by educational suppression, that he must win his way to
shame or glory.

*****

A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be
refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some
gracious visitation.

*****

EVENSONG

     The embers of the day are red
     Beyond the murky hill.
     The kitchen smokes: the bed
     In the darkling house is spread:
     The great sky darkens overhead,
     And the great woods are shrill.
     So far have I been led,
     Lord, by Thy will:
     So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.

     The breeze from the enbalmed land
     Blows sudden toward the shore,
     And claps my cottage door.
     I hear the signal, Lord--I understand.
     The night at Thy command
     Comes.  I will eat and sleep and will not question more.

*****

It is not at all a strong thing to put one's reliance upon logic; and
our own logic particularly, for it is generally wrong. We never know
where we are to end if once we begin following words or doctors. There
is an upright stock in a man's own heart that is trustier than any
syllogism; and the eyes, and the sympathies, and appetites know a thing
or two that have never yet been stated in controversy. Reasons are as
plentiful as blackberries; and, like fisticuffs, they serve impartially
with all sides. Doctrines do not stand or fall by their proofs, and
are only logical in so far as they are cleverly put. An able
controversialist no more than an able general demonstrates the justice
of his cause.

*****

To any man there may come at times a consciousness that there blows,
through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not
wholly his; that his mind rebels; that another girds him and carries him
whither he would not.

*****

     The child, the seed, the grain of corn,
     The acorn on the hill,
     Each for some separate end is born
     In season fit, and still
     Each must in strength arise to work the almighty will.

     So from the hearth the children flee,
     By that almighty hand
     Austerely led; so one by sea
     Goes forth, and one by land;
     Nor aught of all man's sons escapes from that command.

     So from the sally each obeys
     The unseen almighty nod;
     So till the ending all their ways
     Blindfolded loth have trod:
     Nor knew their task at all, but were the tools of God.

*****

A few restrictions, indeed, remain to influence the followers of
individual branches of study. The DIVINITY, for example, must be
an avowed believer; and as this, in the present day, is unhappily
considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one
of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus. Some swallow it
in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a credit to believe in
God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher, although it is a
decided slur to believe in Him on His own authority. Others again (and
this we think the worst method), finding German grammar a somewhat dry
morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of independence; and
deny one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold the others without
being laughed at.

*****

In particular, I heard of clergymen who were employing their time in
explaining to a delighted audience the physics of the Second Coming. It
is not very likely any of us will be asked to help. If we were, it is
likely we should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on more
reliable authority. And so I can only figure to myself a congregation
truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as one of veteran
and accomplished saints, who have fought the good fight to an end and
outlived all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as a part of
the Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect company on earth.

*****

The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common
and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers,
the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the
thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of
life, share with us the love of an ideal; strive like us--like us are
tempted to grow weary of the struggle--to do well; like us receive at
times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage;
and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the
members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of
some reward, some sugar with the drug? Do they, too, stand aghast at
unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality,
we take to be just, and the prosperity of such as in our blindness we
call wicked?

*****

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet,
and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the same
mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is
not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much
debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force
of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that
whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original,
that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept....

Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds
a word that transcends all commonplace morality; every now and then
He quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a
pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry
of thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday
conceptions to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher
principle of conduct. To a man who is of the same mind that was in
Christ, who stand at some centre not too far from His, and looks at the
world and conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing
attitude--or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ's philosophy--every
such saying should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration; he
should feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in
the flux of time and chance; each should be another proof that in
the torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great
armaments and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable,
holding by the eternal stars.

*****

Those who play by rule will never be more than tolerable players; and
you and I would like to play our game in life to the noblest and the
most divine advantage....For no definite precept can be more than an
illustration, though its truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was
announced from heaven by the voice of God. And life is so intricate and
changing, that perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the
ages, shall we find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it
can apply....

It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and
its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and
religious education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but
the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till
we die. If, as teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose, we must
say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that soul's
dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul would have him
think of them. If, from some conformity between us and the pupil,
or perhaps among all men, we do in truth speak in such a dialect and
express such views, beyond question we shall touch in him a spring;
beyond question he will recognise the dialect as one that he himself
has spoken in his better hours; beyond question he will cry, 'I had
forgotten, but now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had forgot to use
them! I too have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I
will listen and conform.' In short, say to him anything that he has once
thought, or been upon the point of thinking, or show him any view of
life that he has once clearly seen, or been on the point of clearly
seeing; and you have done your part and may leave him to complete the
education for himself.

*****

God, if there be any God, speaks daily in a new language, by the tongues
of men; the thoughts and habits of each fresh generation and each
new-coined spirit throw another light upon the universe, and contain
another commentary on the printed Bibles; every scruple, every true
dissent, every glimpse of something new, is a letter of God's alphabet;
and though there is a grave responsibility for all who speak, is there
none for those who unrighteously keep silent and conform? Is not that
also to conceal and cloak God's counsel?

*****

Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in particular.
Every man or woman is one of mankind's dear possessions; to his or her
just brain, and kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of
its hopes for the future; he or she is a possible wellspring of good
acts and source of blessings to the race.

*****

Morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness every man
fights for his own hand; all the six hundred precepts of the Mishna
cannot shake my private judgment; my magistracy of myself is an
indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time and case.
The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my
tribunal. He has to show not the law, but that the law applies. Can he
convince me? then he gains the cause. And thus you find Christ giving
various counsels to varying people, and often jealously careful to avoid
definite precept. Is He asked, for example, to divide a heritage? He
refuses; and the best advice that He will offer is but a paraphrase of
the tenth commandment which figures so strangely among the rest. Take
heed, and beware of covetousness. If you complain that this is vague, I
have failed to carry you along with me in my argument. For no definite
precept can be more than an illustration, though its truth were
resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven by the voice
of God. And life is so intricate and changing, that perhaps not twenty
times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that nice consent
of circumstances to which alone it can apply.

*****

But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses
and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more
unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable
and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself. In
the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear,
strong, and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that we
enjoy communion with our soul. At the worst we are so fallen and passive
that we may say shortly we have none. An arctic torpor seizes upon men.
Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world,
they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes
engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon loses
both the will and power to look higher considerations in the face. This
is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is temporal damnation,
damnation on the spot and without the form of judgment: 'What shall it
profit a man if he gain the whole world and LOSE HIMSELF?'

*****

To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a transcendental way
of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only
greed of hire.

*****

We are are all such as He was--the inheritors of sin; we must all bear
and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all of us--ay, even
in me--a sparkle of the divine. Like Him, we must endure for a little
while, until morning returns, bringing peace.

*****

A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life
as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to
us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of
knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences.

*****

Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from
open lies. It is possible to avoid falsehood and yet not tell the truth.
It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea
and nay communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration,
such as is often found in mutual love. YEA and NAY mean nothing; the
meaning must have been related in the question. Many Words are often
necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of
exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can hope is by many
arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the
course of time, for what target we are aiming, and after an hour's
talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a
single thought.

*****

The cruellist lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a
room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a
disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished
because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame
which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the
critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his
tongue? And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed
through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; and
part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the
foulest calumny. A fact may be an exception; but the feeling is the law,
and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The whole tenor
of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement;
the beginning and the end define and travesty the intermediate
conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of
his own tempers: and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state
the true facts, but to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not
truth to letter, is the true veracity.

*****

He talked for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib,
as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth,
which is the mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random. There
was no particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal,
to flatter himself, and to please and interest the present friend.

*****

How wholly we all lie at the mercy of a single prater, not needfully
with any malign purpose! And if a man but talk of himself in the right
spirit, refers to his virtuous actions by the way, and never applies
to them the name of virtues, how easily his evidence is accepted in the
court of public opinion!

*****

In one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false; and it can
never be safe to suppress what is true.

*****

Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by
private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise,
and above all in the experience; for when we reason at large on any
subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time,
however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective,
conquering like war, widening the boundaries of knowledge like an
exploration.

*****

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life,
rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience,
anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the
whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter
in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental
elevation and abasement--these are the material with which talk is
fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is
proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should
proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It should
keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses
of men, at the level where history, fiction, and experience intersect
and illuminate each other.

*****

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable,
gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, or an
illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the flight of
time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international
congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public
errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by
day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Parliament
but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no
book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance.
Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of
good talk; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life,
freedom, and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and
taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,
tentative, continually 'in further search and progress'; while written
words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden
dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the
truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can
only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and
may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of
the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or
merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug
is dissolved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the contemporary
groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like
schoolboys out of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our
period and ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak;
that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the
harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of
pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our
education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any
age and in almost any state of health.

*****

And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an indifferent
means to such an end. Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern
wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of the world; and yet a
particular thing once said in words is so definite and memorable, that
it makes us forget the absence of the many which remain unexpressed;
like a bright window in a distant view, which dazzles and confuses our
sight of its surroundings. There are not words enough in all Shakespeare
to express the merest fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The
speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the continual industry of the
mind, produce; in ten minutes, what it would require a laborious volume
to shadow forth by comparisons and roundabout approaches. If verbal
logic were sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a piece of
Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we make a travesty of the simplest
process of thought when we put it into words; for the words are all
coloured and forsworn, apply inaccurately, and bring with them, from
former uses, ideas of praise and blame that have nothing to do with the
question in hand. So we must always see to it nearly, that we judge by
the realities of life and not by the partial terms that represent them
in man's speech; and at times of choice, we must leave words upon one
side, and act upon those brute convictions, unexpressed and perhaps
inexpressible, which cannot be flourished in an argument, but which are
truly the sum and fruit of our experience. Words are for communication,
not for judgment. This is what every thoughtful man knows for himself,
for only fools and silly schoolmasters push definitions over far into
the domain of conduct; and the majority of women, not learned in these
scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece and unconsciously, as a tree
grows, without caring to put a name upon their acts or motives.

*****

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have
transgressed, and your friend says nothing and avoids your eye. If a man
were made of gutta-percha, his heart would quail at such a moment.
But when the word is out, the worst is over; and a fellow with any
good-humour at all may pass through a perfect hail of witty criticism,
every bare place on his soul hit to the quick with a shrewd missile, and
reappear, as if after a dive, tingling with a fine moral reaction, and
ready, with a shrinking readiness, one-third loath, for a repetition of
the discipline.

*****

All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the
game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that
reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so
warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast
proportion. For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits
of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious,
musical, and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to be.
So they weave for themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace
of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of
the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And
when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity
and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the
height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension.

*****

No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has in him
by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally
incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom
comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation,
which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation
of events and circumstances.

*****

Overmastering pain--the most deadly and tragical element in life--alas!
pain has its own way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon
the fairy garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely
than it rules upon the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-god
whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can
protect us from this sting.

*****

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find that in
your Bible? Easy? It is easy to be an ass and follow the multitude like
a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is
what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the
stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.

*****

Though I have all my life been eager for legitimate distinction, I can
lay my hand upon my heart, at the end of my career, and declare there is
not one--no, nor yet life itself--which is worth acquiring or preserving
at the slightest cost of dignity.

*****

For surely, at this time of the day in the nineteenth century, there is
nothing that an honest man should fear more timorously than getting and
spending more than he deserves.

*****

It remains to be seen, by each man who would live a true life to himself
and not a merely specious life to society, how many luxuries he truly
wants and to how many he merely submits as to a social propriety; and
all these last he will immediately forswear. Let him do this, and he
will be surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him in
complete contentment and activity of mind and senses. Life at any level
among the easy classes is conceived upon a principle of rivalry, where
each man and each household must ape the tastes and emulate the display
of others. One is delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in
furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who care nothing for any of
these refinements, who am perhaps a plain athletic creature and love
exercise, beef, beer, flannel-shirts, and a camp bed, am yet called upon
to assimilate all these other tastes and make these foreign occasions
of expenditure my own. It may be cynical; I am sure I will be told it is
selfish; but I will spend my money as I please and for my own intimate
personal gratification, and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to
lay out the colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty.
I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born
with a delight in them. Dress is my own affair, and that of one other
in the world; that, in fact, and for an obvious reason, of any woman who
shall chance to be in love with me. I shall lodge where I have a mind.
If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even
if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation.

*****

To a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every relation
and grade of society. It is a high calling, to which a man must first be
born, and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily, the manners of
a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet with
a certain external acceptation throughout all the others, and this tends
to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements and the amateurish
accomplishments of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human and
central.

*****

Respectability is a very thing in its way, but it does not rise superior
to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it
was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if
a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and
superfluously useless, although it were as respectable as the Church of
England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself and all
concerned.

*****

After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his
neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go
farther and discover what is really true. He is content to find that
things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they
do not exist at all. He sees our virtues are not what they pretend they
are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession of virtue
altogether. He has learned the first lesson, that no man is wholly good;
but he has not even suspected that there is another equally true, to
wit, that no man is wholly bad.

*****

Or take the case of men of letters. Every piece of work which is not as
good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely
thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind, who is your paymaster
on parole, and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart
and condemn you for a thief.

*****

Sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations,
because it supplies us with the materials for wisdom. It is probably
more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular
person.... than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation
against his abstract vices.

*****

In the best fabric of duplicity there is some weak point, if you can
strike it, which will loosen all.

*****

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose
actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The
Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful
carping, but in a heat of admiration.

*****

After an hospital, what uglier piece is there in civilisation than a
court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all uncharitableness to
wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed
households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low building
with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell told the first
hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the strokes and
wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart.

*****

There are two things that men should never weary of--goodness and
humility.

*****

It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earning
itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or something else must
follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious
in itself; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience
why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau
had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and
fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle,
selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to
cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who
can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and
even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it
to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher
moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.

*****

A man may have done well for years, and then he may fail; he will hear
of his failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still do well,
but the critic may have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung
up some new idol of the instant, some 'dust a little gilt,' to whom they
now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of
that empty and ugly thing called popularity. Will any man suppose it
worth gaining?

*****

Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon
the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject
which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and
broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the
truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. But the truth is
one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered.

*****

For such things as honour and love and faith are not only nobler than
food and drink, but indeed I think that we desire them more, and suffer
more sharply for their absence.

*****

There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.
The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be
received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same
person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he
should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is
conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from
ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And
since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no
doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of
proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to
be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the
successful merchant.

*****

'You know it very well, it cannot in any way help that you should brood
upon it, and I sometimes wonder whether you and I--who are a pair of
sentimentalists--are quite good judges of plain men.'

*****

For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men
can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find
his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most, palatable, and
make themselves welcome to the mind.

*****

It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of
police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from an
inn-door change your views upon the subject like a course of lectures.
As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to
you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once
get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil. I will give
most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer
them twopence for what remains of their morality.

*****

I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless, perhaps,
the two were the same thing? And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold tub and
bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life in cases
of advanced sensibility.

*****

Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the
louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their
friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.

*****

Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this itch of doing
that undoes men.

*****

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

*****

That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go.

*****

It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or
other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.

*****

But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit
squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.

*****

For truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the
enemy.

*****

But O, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!

*****

It is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest
apostle.

*****

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

*****

A man may live in dreams, and yet be unprepared for their realisation.

*****

'Be soople, Davie, in things immaterial.'

*****

No class of man is altogether bad; but each has its own faults and
virtues.

*****

But it is odd enough, the very women who profess most contempt for
mankind as a sex seem to find even its ugliest particulars rather lively
and high-minded in their own sons.

*****

To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man.

*****

But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to
be as dull and foolish as our neighbours.

*****

It always warms a man to see a woman brave.

*****

Condescension is an excellent thing, but it is strange how one-sided the
pleasure of it is!

*****

Some strand of our own misdoing is involved in every quarrel.

*****

There was never an ill thing made better by meddling.

*****

Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.

*****

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.

*****

A man dissatisfied with endeavour is a man tempted to sadness.

*****

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.

*****

It is one of the most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water
on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything
worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city,
must be judged upon its merits as a whole.

*****

I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative
point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.
Although it runs to considerably over a hundred pages, it contains not
a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a
single hint that I could have made a better one myself--I really do not
know where my head can have been.

*****

It's deadly commonplace, but, after all, the commonplaces are the great
poetic truths.

*****

Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their
recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and
scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a
buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on
the playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which
cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,
the little sunbright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye
with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. GLUCK UND UNGLUCK
WIRD GESANG, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to
wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps,
to fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

*****

Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in yellow overalls, do what
you will, young Jessamy finds young Jenny.

*****

'You fret against the common law,' I said. 'You rebel against the
voice of God, which He has made so winning to convince, so imperious
to command. Hear it, and how it speaks between us! Your hand clings to
mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we
are compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth
remembers its independent life, and yearns to join us; we are drawn
together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb and
flow; by things older and greater than we ourselves.'

*****

'Olalla,' I said, 'the soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love.
What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the
soul cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God's
signal; and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the
footstool and foundation of the highest.'

*****

She sent me away, and yet I had but to call upon her name and she came
to me. These were but the weaknesses of girls, from which even she, the
strangest of her sex, was not exempted.

*****

For even in love there are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts,
unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If
the injured one could read your heart, you may be sure that he would
understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown--it has to
be demonstrated in words.

*****

There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits
in a man's mind, and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it
just seems it was the thing he wanted.

*****

There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him
stand and deliver. Hard work, high thinking, adventurous excitement,
and a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person's
spiritual bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can
dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means in the way of every
one to fall in love....A wet rag goes safely by the fire; and if a man
is blind, he cannot expect to be much impressed by romantic scenery.
Apart from all this, many lovable people miss each other in the world,
or meet under some unfavourable star.

*****

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most
people would die unwed; and among the others, there would be not a
few tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is
scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love
is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic
sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is
best, but what is worst and smallest, in men's characters. Just as
some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the
influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting
when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows
enough in the everyday affairs and humours of the world.

*****

There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and
startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him
very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable
variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense;
they form together no more than a sort of background, or running
accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into
a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a
conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of
to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friend
and acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometime look
forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But it
is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will
help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly
thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of
the person's experience.

*****

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first
time after long, like the flowers in spring, to re-awaken in us the
sharp edge of sense, and that impression of mystic strangeness which
otherwise passes out of life with the coming years; but the sight of a
loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.

*****

Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love,
even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of
love, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you
will pay the price in a sufficient 'amount of what you call life,' why
then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even
years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourse
as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.

*****

Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. 'O yes, believe me,' as the song
says, 'Love has eyes!' The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do
we feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and
would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
will forgive that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults, go
to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And herein
lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge
without change.

*****

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this
idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the sweethearts. To do
good and communicate is the lover's grand intention. It is the happiness
of the other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not
possible to disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility,
pity, and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an
unexpected caress. To make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to
excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the character
and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only
to magnify one's self, but to offer the most delicate homage at the same
time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by lovers,
for the essence of love is kindness; and, indeed, it may be best defined
as passionate kindness; kindness, so to speak, run mad and become
importunate and violent.

*****

What sound is so full of music as one's own name uttered for the first
time in the voice of her we love!