One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush 
is certainly difficult to explain.  It comes (I do not quite 
see how) that from having a very supreme sense of pleasure in 
all parts of life - in lying down to sleep, in waking, in 
motion, in breathing, in continuing to be - the lover begins 
to regard his happiness as beneficial for the rest of the 
world and highly meritorious in himself.  Our race has never 
been able contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, 
conducted by a few young gentlemen in a corner of an 
inconsiderable star, does not re-echo among the courts of 
Heaven with quite a formidable effect.  In much the same 
taste, when people find a great to-do in their own breasts, 
they imagine it must have some influence in their 
neighbourhood.  The presence of the two lovers is so 
enchanting to each other that it seems as if it must be the 
best thing possible for everybody else.  They are half 
inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that 
the sky is blue and the sun shines.  And certainly the weather 
is usually fine while people are courting. . .  In point of 
fact, although the happy man feels very kindly towards others 
of his own sex, there is apt to be something too much of the 
magnifico in his demeanour.  If people grow presuming and 
self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, 
they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life 
without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation 
is to love and be loved in return.  Consequently, accepted 
lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other 
men.  An overweening sense of the passion and importance of 
life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner.  To women, they 
feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they 
were so many Joan-of-Arc's; but this does not come out in 
their behaviour; and they treat them to Grandisonian airs 
marked with a suspicion of fatuity.  I am not quite certain 
that women do not like this sort of thing; but really, after 
having bemused myself over DANIEL DERONDA, I have given up 
trying to understand what they like.

If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous 
superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed 
to others, and everybody is made happier in their happiness, 
would serve at least to keep love generous and great-hearted.  
Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after all.  Other 
lovers are hugely interested.  They strike the nicest balance 
between pity and approval, when they see people aping the 
greatness of their own sentiments.  It is an understood thing 
in the play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting on 
the terrace, a rough flirtation is being carried on, and a 
light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the footman 
and the singing chambermaid.  As people are generally cast for 
the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader can 
apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going 
wrong.  In short, they are quite sure this other love-affair 
is not so deep seated as their own, but they like dearly to 
see it going forward.  And love, considered as a spectacle, 
must have attractions for many who are not of the 
confraternity.  The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of 
the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human 
being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness 
without indulgence and sympathy.  For nature commends itself 
to people with a most insinuating art; the busiest is now and 
again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as pacific or 
as cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion 
when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of 
lovers in the lane.

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.  Vanity in a merely personal 
sense exists no longer.  The lover takes a perilous pleasure 
in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one 
after another, accepted and condoned.  He wishes to be assured 
that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for 
himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to 
set forward.  For, although it may have been a very difficult 
thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act 
of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of 
art before every one in this world who cares to set about 
explaining his own character to others.  Words and acts are 
easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all 
the language we have to come and go upon.  A pitiful job we 
make of it, as a rule.  For better or worse, people mistake 
our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation.  And 
generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are 
content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once 
a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a 
point of honour to clear such dubieties away.  He cannot have 
the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; 
and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former 
periods of his life.  To all that has not been shared with 
her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he 
can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the 
will.  That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of 
what alone was really important, that he may have entertained 
the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a 
burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect.  But it is the 
thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a 
poisoned wound.  That he himself made a fashion of being alive 
in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is 
deplorable enough in all good conscience.  But that She should 
have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent 
with a Divine providence.

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that 
it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically 
inconvenient.  This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which 
it merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself 
artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree.  
I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has 
not always been a character of man; formed no part of that 
very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to 
have begun the world: but waited to make its appearance in 
better days and among richer natures.  And this is equally 
true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight 
in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other 
things worth having.  Love, in particular, will not endure any 
historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is 
one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you 
begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in 
Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up, 
and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is 
logical in comparison.  Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the 
consequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but 
there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we 
reflect on the past of those we love.  A bundle of letters 
found after years of happy union creates no sense of 
insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a man sharply.  
The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but 
this pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something 
indelicate.  To be altogether right, they should have had twin 
birth together, at the same moment with the feeling that 
unites them.  Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and 
without reserve or afterthought.  Then they would understand 
each other with a fulness impossible otherwise.  There would 
be no barrier between them of associations that cannot be 
imparted.  They would be led into none of those comparisons 
that send the blood back to the heart.  And they would know 
that there had been no time lost, and they had been together 
as much as was possible.  For besides terror for the 
separation that must follow some time or other in the future, 
men feel anger, and something like remorse, when they think of 
that other separation which endured until they met.  Some one 
has written that love makes people believe in immortality, 
because there seems not to be room enough in life for so great 
a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful 
of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of 
a few years.  Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind 
analogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible.

"The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from the end of 
terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts 
among a fleeting generation.  But for as fast as ever he 
shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from 
under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; 
the other has but time to make one gesture and give one 
passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment.  When 
the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty 
years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage 
of the world, we may ask what has become of these great, 
weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-hearts who despised 
mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show 
us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth 
remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy 
stamp from the disposition of their parents.


IV. - TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE


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.  Even with instruments specially contrived for such a 
purpose - with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite - it is 
not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas! to be inexact.  From 
those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure 
the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly 
stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying 
attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure 
knowledge even of external and constant things.  But it is 
easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the changing 
appearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this 
more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to 
communicate.  Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense - 
not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of 
fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have read 
Cervantes in the original when as a matter of fact I know not 
one syllable of Spanish - this, indeed, is easy and to the 
same degree unimportant in itself.  Lies of this sort, 
according to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a 
certain sense even they may or may not be false.  The habitual 
liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife 
and friends; while another man who never told a formal 
falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie - heart and 
face, from top to bottom.  This is the kind of lie which 
poisons intimacy.  And, VICE VERSA, veracity to sentiment, 
truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, 
never to feign or falsify emotion - that is the truth which 
makes love possible and mankind happy.

L'ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawing-room accomplishment 
unless it be pressed into the service of the truth.  The 
difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what 
you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him 
precisely as you wish.  This is commonly understood in the 
case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or 
writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the 
world.  But one thing you can never make Philistine natures 
understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains 
as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics - 
namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by 
means of this difficult art of literature, and according to a 
man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the 
fulness of his intercourse with other men.  Anybody, it is 
supposed, can say what he means; and, in spite of their 
notorious experience to the contrary, people so continue to 
suppose.  Now, I simply open the last book I have been reading 
- Mr. Leland's captivating ENGLISH GIPSIES.  "It is said," I 
find on p. 7, "that those who can converse with Irish peasants 
in their own native tongue form far higher opinions of their 
appreciation of the beautiful, and of THE ELEMENTS OF HUMOUR 
AND PATHOS IN THEIR HEARTS, than do those who know their 
thoughts only through the medium of English.  I know from my 
own observations that this is quite the case with the Indians 
of North America, and it is unquestionably so with the gipsy."  
In short, where a man has not a full possession of the 
language, the most important, because the most amiable, 
qualities of his nature have to lie buried and fallow; for the 
pleasure of comradeship, and the intellectual part of love, 
rest upon these very "elements of humour and pathos."  Here is 
a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can put 
none of it out to interest in the market of affection!  But 
what is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a 
foreign language is partially true even with the tongue we 
learned in childhood.  Indeed, we all speak different 
dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose and 
meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond 
and fit upon the truth of fact - not clumsily, obscuring 
lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an 
athlete's skin.  And what is the result?  That the one can 
open himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more 
of what makes life truly valuable - intimacy with those he 
loves.  An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial, 
some absurd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he 
insults, by a side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; 
in speaking to one sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another 
in parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for you know his 
task to be delicate and filled with perils.  "O frivolous mind 
of man, light ignorance!"  As if yourself, when you seek to 
explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault, 
speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently 
incensed, were not harnessing for a more perilous adventure; 
as if yourself required less tact and eloquence; as if an 
angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more easy to 
offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians!  Nay, and 
the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses 
have been discussed a thousand times before; language is 
ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut and dry 
vocabulary.  But you - may it not be that your defence reposes 
on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in 
Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must 
venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and 
become yourself a literary innovator?  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.  Do you think it is a hard 
thing to write poetry?  Why, that is to write poetry, and of a 
high, if not the highest, order.

I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic 
literary labours" of my fellow-men, patiently clearing up in 
words their loves and their contentions, and speaking their 
autobiography daily to their wives, were it not for a 
circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my admiration 
by equal parts.  For life, though largely, is not entirely 
carried on by literature.  We are subject to physical passions 
and contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by 
unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible 
countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said 
look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked 
into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with 
appealing signals.  Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a 
flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the 
heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others.  The 
message flies by these interpreters in the least space of 
time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the moment of its 
birth.  To explain in words takes time and a just and patient 
hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close relation, 
patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely.  
But the look or the gesture explains things in a breath; they 
tell their message without ambiguity; unlike speech, they 
cannot stumble, by the way, on a reproach or an allusion that 
should steel your friend against the truth; and then they have 
a higher authority, for they are the direct expression of the 
heart, not yet transmitted through the unfaithful and 
sophisticating brain.  Not long ago I wrote a letter to a 
friend which came near involving us in quarrel; but we met, 
and in personal talk I repeated the worst of what I had 
written, and added worse to that; and with the commentary of 
the body it seemed not unfriendly either to hear or say.  
Indeed, letters are in vain for the purposes of intimacy; an 
absence is a dead break in the relation; yet two who know each 
other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so 
preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet 
on the same terms as they had parted.

Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the 
face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes 
of the voice.  And there are others also to be pitied; for 
there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been 
denied all the symbols of communication, who have neither a 
lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a 
responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory 
speech: people truly made of clay, people tied for life into a 
bag which no one can undo.  They are poorer than the gipsy, 
for their heart can speak no language under heaven.  Such 
people we must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or 
through yea and nay communications; or we take them on trust 
on the strength of a general air, and now and again, when we 
see the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change 
our estimate.  But these will be uphill intimacies, without 
charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief 
ingredient in confidence.  Some minds, romantically dull, 
despise physical endowments.  That is a doctrine for a 
misanthrope; to those who like their fellow-creatures it must 
always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things 
more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities 
as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not 
a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every 
feeling; to be elegant and delightful in person, so that we 
shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may 
never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become 
unconsciously our own burlesques.  But of all unfortunates 
there is one creature (for I will not call him man) 
conspicuous in misfortune.  This is he who has forfeited his 
birthright of expression, who has cultivated artful 
intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet 
monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his means of 
communication with his fellow-men.  The body is a house of 
many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying 
on the passers-by to come and love us.  But this fellow has 
filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured.  His 
house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause 
before the stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor 
must lie languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone.

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.  
And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point 
entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add three 
new offences in the process of excusing one.  It is really a 
most delicate affair.  The world was made before the English 
language, and seemingly upon a different design.  Suppose we 
held our converse not in words, but in music; those who have a 
bad ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce, 
and no better than foreigners in this big world.  But we do 
not consider how many have "a bad ear" for words, nor how 
often the most eloquent find nothing to reply.  I hate 
questioners and questions; there are so few that can be spoken 
to without a lie.  "DO YOU FORGIVE ME?"  Madam and sweetheart, 
so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to 
discover what forgiveness means.  "IS IT STILL THE SAME 
BETWEEN US?"  Why, how can it be?  It is eternally different; 
and yet you are still the friend of my heart.  "DO YOU 
UNDERSTAND ME?"  God knows; I should think it highly 
improbable.

The cruellest 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.  To reconcile averted friends a 
Jesuitical discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a 
kind hearing as to communicate sober truth.  Women have an ill 
name in this connection; yet they live in as true relations; 
the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart.

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful 
passage I remember to have read in any modern author, (1) "two 
to speak truth - one to speak and another to hear."  He must 
be very little experienced, or have no great zeal for truth, 
who does not recognise the fact.  A grain of anger or a grain 
of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects, and makes 
the ear greedy to remark offence.  Hence we find those who 
have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever 
ready to break the truce.  To speak truth there must be moral 
equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and 
child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing 
bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained.  And there is 
another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect 
notion of the child's character, formed in early years or 
during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, 
noting only the facts which suit with his preconception; and 
wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once 
and finally gives up the effort to speak truth.  With our 
chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between 
lovers (for mutual understanding is love's essence), the truth 
is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the 
other.  A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of 
long and delicate explanations; and where the life is known 
even YEA and NAY become luminous.  In the closest of all 
relations - that of a love well founded and equally shared - 
speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process 
or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate 
directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer 
words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each 
other's hearts in joy.  For love rests upon a physical basis; 
it is a familiarity of nature's making and apart from 
voluntary choice.  Understanding has in some sort outrun 
knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the 
acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so 
it is not, like them, to be perturbed or clouded.  Each knows 
more than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by 
a natural compulsion; and between man and wife the language of 
the body is largely developed and grown strangely eloquent.  
The thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress would 
only lose to be set down in words - ay, although Shakespeare 
himself should be the scribe.

(1) A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, 
Wednesday, p. 283.

Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, 
that we must strive and do battle for the truth.  Let but a 
doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and 
confidence is but another charge against the person doubted.  
"WHAT A MONSTROUS DISHONESTY IS THIS IF I HAVE BEEN DECEIVED 
SO LONG AND SO COMPLETELY!"  Let but that thought gain 
entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal.  Appeal to the 
past; why, that is your crime!  Make all clear, convince the 
reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof against you.  "IF 
YOU CAN ABUSE ME NOW, THE MORE LIKELY THAT YOU HAVE ABUSED ME 
FROM THE FIRST."

For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting, 
and they will end well; for your advocate is in your lover's 
heart and speaks her own language; it is not you but she 
herself who can defend and clear you of the charge.  But in 
slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union?  Indeed, 
is it worth while?  We are all INCOMPRIS, only more or less 
concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; 
all fawning at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-
dogs.  Sometimes we catch an eye - this is our opportunity in 
the ages - and we wag our tail with a poor smile.  "IS THAT 
ALL?"  All?  If you only knew!  But how can they know?  They 
do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on the 
indifferent.

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, 
is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others 
that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of 
human feeling the clement judge is the most successful 
pleader.



CHAPTER II - CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH



"You know my mother now and then argues very notably; 
always very warmly at least.  I happen often to differ from 
her; and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we 
very seldom are so happy as to convince one another.  A pretty 
common case, I believe, in all VEHEMENT debatings.  She says, 
I am TOO WITTY; Anglice, TOO PERT; I, that she is TOO WISE; 
that is to say, being likewise put into English, NOT SO YOUNG 
AS SHE HAS BEEN." - Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, CLARISSA, vol. 
ii.  Letter xiii.


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.  The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is 
still in his counting-house counting out his money; and 
doubtless this is a consideration.  But we have, on the other 
hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races 
and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, 
and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog.  
It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such 
sayings with their proverbs.  According to the latter, every 
lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your 
umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser 
flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so 
long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money 
matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man.

It is a still more difficult consideration for our 
average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down 
to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated 
the same ideal of manners, caution, and respectability, those 
characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the 
face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of 
praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of 
our commercial centres.  This is very bewildering to the moral 
sense.  You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and 
reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-
colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the 
enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's 
daughters!  And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered 
America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent 
navigator.  His life is not the kind of thing one would like 
to put into the hands of young people; rather, one would do 
one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of 
adventure and disintegrating influence in life.  The time 
would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history 
whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to 
the business mind.  The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine 
it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar 
attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national 
life.  They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the 
same spirit as they assist at a performance of the LYONS MAIL.  
Persons of substance take in the TIMES and sit composedly in 
pit or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in 
business.  As for the generals who go galloping up and down 
among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats - as for the actors 
who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the 
stage - they must belong, thank God! to a different order of 
beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the 
windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in 
ancient and rather fabulous annals.  Our offspring would no 
more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of 
doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in 
consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of 
their school history of England.

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly 
proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another instance 
of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life 
have been accepted as final.  All sorts of allowances are made 
for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the 
disenchantments of age.  It is held to be a good taunt, and 
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old 
gentleman waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I 
was your age."  It is not thought an answer at all, if the 
young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall most probably 
think when I am yours."  And yet the one is as good as the 
other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver.

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in 
the making."  All opinions, properly so called, are stages on 
the road to truth.  It does not follow that a man will travel 
any further; but if he has really considered the world and 
drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far.  This does not 
apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road to 
nowhere but second childhood and the grave.  To have a 
catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an 
opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one 
for yourself.  There are too many of these catchwords in the 
world for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by way 
of an argument.  They have a currency as intellectual 
counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with 
nothing else.  They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory 
in the background.  The imputed virtue of folios full of 
knockdown arguments is supposed to reside in them, just as 
some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells in the 
constable's truncheon.  They are used in pure superstition, as 
old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism.  And yet 
they are vastly serviceable for checking unprofitable 
discussion and stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings.  
And when a young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual 
growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic at 
once amusing and fortifying to the mind.

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having 
passed through Newhaven and Dieppe.  They were very good 
places to pass through, and I am none the less at my 
destination.  All my old opinions were only stages on the way 
to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to 
something else.  I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot 
Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a 
sucking infant.  Doubtless the world is quite right in a 
million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to 
convince you of the fact.  And in the meanwhile you must do 
something, be something, believe something.  It is not 
possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and 
blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming 
ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be very apt to 
remain in a state of balance and blank to perpetuity.  Even in 
quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing 
to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a 
very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian.  
For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist 
with something like regret.  I have convinced myself (for the 
moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what 
we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more 
perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of 
men.  I seem to see that my own scheme would not answer; and 
all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress 
some elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged 
others.  Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with 
years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and 
travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions.  I submit to 
this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant 
of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not 
acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better - I 
daresay it is deplorably for the worse.  I have no choice in 
the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind 
than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and 
decay.  If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless 
outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about 
that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the 
immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself 
on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism.  
Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become 
cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious.  Whether from the growth 
of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age 
leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of 
course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards 
the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these 
forms and sources of error.

As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of 
knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possibilities, 
now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may compare the 
headlong course of our years to a swift torrent in which a man 
is carried away; now he is dashed against a boulder, now he 
grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is 
hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean.  We 
have no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from 
our theories; we are spun round and round and shown this or 
the other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to 
their opinions.  We take a sight at a condition in life, and 
say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more 
than an impression.  If we had breathing space, we should take 
the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck 
hurry, we are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in 
love than married or jilted, no sooner one age than we begin 
to be another, and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood 
than we begin to decline towards the grave.  It is in vain to 
seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a 
medium so perturbed and fleeting.  This is no cabinet science, 
in which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a 
pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of 
conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgment, but 
to take action, before the hour is at an end.  And we cannot 
even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, 
our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not 
infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the 
masquerade.  In the course of time, we grow to love things we 
hated and hate things we loved.  Milton is not so dull as he 
once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing.  It is decidedly 
harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard to sit still.  
There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide 
and seek has somehow lost in zest.  All our attributes are 
modified or chanced and it will be a poor account of us if our 
views do not modify and change in a proportion.  To hold the 
same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been 
stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a 
prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the 
wiser.  It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from 
the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames 
on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no 
other for the whole voyage.

And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at 
Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea.  SI JEUNESSE SAVAIT, SI 
VIEILLESSE POUVAIT, is a very pretty sentiment, but not 
necessarily right.  In five cases out of ten, it is not so 
much that the young people do not know, as that they do not 
choose.  There is something irreverent in the speculation, but 
perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise 
resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit.  It 
would be an instructive experiment to make an old man young 
again and leave him all his SAVOIR.  I scarcely think he would 
put his money in the Savings Bank after all; I doubt if he 
would be such an admirable son as we are led to expect; and as 
for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out-Herod 
Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush.  
Prudence is a wooden juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin 
walks with the portly air of a high priest, and after whom 
dances many a successful merchant in the character of Atys.  
But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth.  If a man lives 
to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he laments 
his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a 
deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

It is customary to say that age should be considered, 
because it comes last.  It seems just as much to the point, 
that youth comes first.  And the scale fairly kicks the beam, 
if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never 
comes at all.  Disease and accident make short work of even 
the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the 
expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the 
happy heir.  To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of 
ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man 
has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and 
saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it 
becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on 
the confines of farce.  The victim is dead - and he has 
cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities 
none the less absurd for being grim.  To husband a favourite 
claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful 
stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar - a 
whole bodily existence!  People may lay down their lives with 
cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; 
but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all 
its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of 
gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable, 
old age.  We should not compliment a hungry man, who should 
refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the 
dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or 
not.  If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we 
surely have it here.  We sail in leaky bottoms and on great 
and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old 
naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know 
that we shall never see dry land any more.  Old and young, we 
are all on our last cruise.  If there is a fill of tobacco 
among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have 
a pipe before we go!

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous 
preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away.  We fall 
on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us.  
After the sun is down and the west faded, the heavens begin to 
fill with shining stars.  So, as we grow old, a sort of 
equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups 
and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that 
restrains our hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the 
pleasures are less intense, the troubles are milder and more 
tolerable; and in a word, this period for which we are asked 
to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is, in its own 
right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life.  Nay, by 
managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, 
youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age.  A 
full, busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and 
independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into the 
bore.  There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon 
their first romantic voyage at sixty-four.  If we wish to 
scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, 
to go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be 
about it while we are still young.  It will not do to delay 
until we are clogged with prudence and limping with 
rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What does Gravity out 
of bed?"  Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the 
world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners 
of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see 
sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to 
circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a 
mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to 
applaud HERNANI.  There is some meaning in the old theory 
about wild oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness 
and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended on 
as an unvaccinated infant.  "It is extraordinary," says Lord 
Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of 
youths up to the date of his last novel, (1) "it is 
extraordinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings 
of an inexperienced young man."  And this mobility is a 
special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible 
virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt 
through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest 
passages.  Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do 
all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will 
live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse.  
Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair 
chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they 
must have been feeble fellows - creatures made of putty and 
pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, 
in their composition; we may sympathise with their parents, 
but there is not much cause to go into mourning for 
themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the 
worst of mankind.

(1) LOTHAIR.

When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I 
thought when I was your age," he has proved the youth's case.  
Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or decline of 
animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he thought so while 
he was young; and all men have thought so while they were 
young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May; 
and here is another young man adding his vote to those of 
previous generations and rivetting another link to the chain 
of testimony.  It is as natural and as right for a young man 
to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and 
circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing 
newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers 
to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something 
worthier than their lives.

By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more 
than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend 
the following little tale.  A child who had been remarkably 
fond of toys (and in particular of lead soldiers) found 
himself growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood without 
any abatement of this childish taste.  He was thirteen; 
already he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the 
playbox; he had to blush if he was found among his lead 
soldiers; the shades of the prison-house were closing about 
him with a vengeance.  There is nothing more difficult than to 
put the thoughts of children into the language of their 
elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this 
juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings, 
in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure 
myself against idle jeers.  At the same time, I am sure that 
playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up 
out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who are a 
little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as 
they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget.  I 
shall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of 
their foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money, 
I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings until 
the day I die."  Nay, as he was passing in the train along the 
Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he remarked a 
pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and 
decided that this should be his Happy Valley.  Astrea Redux; 
childhood was to come again!  The idea has an air of simple 
nobility to me, not unworthy of Cincinnatus.  And yet, as the 
reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely to be 
carried into effect.  There was a worm i' the bud, a fatal 
error in the premises.  Childhood must pass away, and then 
youth, as surely as age approaches.  The true wisdom is to be 
always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing 
circumstances.  To love playthings well as a child, to lead an 
adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time 
arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist 
in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.