But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering 
and delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their lives, if 
the result be regarded, utterly in vain:  a thousand artists, and 
never one work of art.  But the vast mass of mankind are incapable 
of doing anything reasonably well, art among the rest.  The 
worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent 
baker.  And the artist, even if he does not amuse the public, 
amuses himself; so that there will always be one man the happier 
for his vigils.  This is the practical side of art:  its 
inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner.  The direct 
returns - the wages of the trade are small, but the indirect - the 
wages of the life - are incalculably great.  No other business 
offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms.  The soldier 
and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement, but they 
are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar 
language.  In the life of the artist there need be no hour without 
its pleasure.  I take the author, with whose career I am best 
acquainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious material, and 
that the act of writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and 
the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowds upon 
him and words are not wanting - in what a continual series of small 
successes time flows by; with what a sense of power as of one 
moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what 
pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees his airy structure 
growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to which the 
whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a door to 
all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so 
that what he writes is only what he longed to utter.  He may have 
enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the world; 
but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of 
successful work?  Suppose it ill paid:  the wonder is it should be 
paid at all.  Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less 
desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords 
besides an admirable training.  For the artist works entirely upon 
honour.  The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the 
quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your 
endeavours.  Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the 
merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic 
temper easily acquires - these they can recognise, and these they 
value.  But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and 
finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, 
for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a 
miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts 
and revises and rejects - the gross mass of the public must be ever 
blind.  To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch 
of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so 
probable, you fall by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest 
certain they shall never be observed.  Under the shadow of this 
cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from 
day to day his constancy to the ideal.  It is this which makes his 
life noble; it is by this that the practice of his craft 
strengthens and matures his character; it is for this that even the 
serious countenance of the great emperor was turned approvingly (if 
only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that sternly 
gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art.

And here there fall two warnings to be made.  First, if you are to 
continue to be a law to yourself, you must beware of the first 
signs of laziness.  This idealism in honesty can only be supported 
by perpetual effort; the standard is easily lowered, the artist who 
says "IT WILL DO," is on the downward path; three or four pot-
boilers are enough at times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a 
talent, and by the practice of journalism a man runs the risk of 
becoming wedded to cheap finish.  This is the danger on the one 
side; there is not less upon the other.  The consciousness of how 
much the artist is (and must be) a law to himself, debauches the 
small heads.  Perceiving recondite merits very hard to attain, 
making or swallowing artistic formulae, or perhaps falling in love 
with some particular proficiency of his own, many artists forget 
the end of all art:  to please.  It is doubtless tempting to 
exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be 
forgotten, it is he who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face 
of it) for services that he shall desire to have performed.  Here 
also, if properly considered, there is a question of transcendental 
honesty.  To give the public what they do not want, and yet expect 
to be supported:  we have there a strange pretension, and yet not 
uncommon, above all with painters.  The first duty in this world is 
for a man to pay his way; when that is quite accomplished, he may 
plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but emphatically not till 
then.  Till then, he must pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who 
carries the purse.  And if in the course of these capitulations he 
shall falsify his talent, it can never have been a strong one, and 
he will have preserved a better thing than talent - character.  Or 
if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this 
necessity, one course is yet open:  he can desist from art, and 
follow some more manly way of life.

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which I must 
be frank.  To live by a pleasure is not a high calling; it involves 
patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however 
ambitious, along with dancing girls and billiard markers.  The 
French have a romantic evasion for one employment, and call its 
practitioners the Daughters of Joy.  The artist is of the same 
family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade to please 
himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted 
with something of the sterner dignity of man.  Journals but a 
little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and this 
Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the 
example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde.  The poet 
was more happily inspired; with a better modesty he accepted the 
honour; and anonymous journalists have not yet (if I am to believe 
them) recovered the vicarious disgrace to their profession.  When 
it comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do themselves more 
justice; and I shall be glad to think of it; for to my barbarian 
eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in that 
assembly.  There should be no honours for the artist; he has 
already, in the practice of his art, more than his share of the 
rewards of life; the honours are pre-empted for other trades, less 
agreeable and perhaps more useful.

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please.  In 
ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a certain thing or to 
produce a certain article with a merely conventional 
accomplishment, a design in which (we may almost say) it is 
difficult to fail.  But the artist steps forth out of the crowd and 
proposes to delight:  an impudent design, in which it is impossible 
to fail without odious circumstances.  The poor Daughter of Joy, 
carrying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through the crowd, 
makes a figure which it is impossible to recall without a wounding 
pity.  She is the type of the unsuccessful artist.  The actor, the 
dancer, and the singer must appear like her in person, and drain 
publicly the cup of failure.  But though the rest of us escape this 
crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in essence the 
same humiliation.  We all profess to be able to delight.  And how 
few of us are!  We all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to 
delight.  And the day will come to each, and even to the most 
admired, when the ardour shall have declined and the cunning shall 
be lost, and he shall sit by his deserted booth ashamed.  Then 
shall he see himself condemned to do work for which he blushes to 
take payment.  Then (as if his lot were not already cruel) he must 
lie exposed to the gibes of the wreckers of the press, who earn a 
little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which they have 
not read, and the praise of excellence which they cannot 
understand.

And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of 
writers.  LES BLANCS ET LES BLEUS (for instance) is of an order of 
merit very different from LE VICOMTE DE BRAGLONNE; and if any 
gentleman can bear to spy upon the nakedness of CASTLE DANGEROUS, 
his name I think is Ham:  let it be enough for the rest of us to 
read of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart.  Thus in 
old age, when occupation and comfort are most needful, the writer 
must lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner.  The 
painter indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the attention of 
the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel until a 
great age without dishonourable failure.  The writer has the double 
misfortune to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be incapable of 
working when he is old.  It is thus a way of life which conducts 
directly to a false position.

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary) 
must look to be ill-paid.  Tennyson and Montepin make handsome 
livelihoods; but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not 
all perhaps desire to be Montepin.  If you adopt an art to be your 
trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money.  What 
you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry, 
is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a 
twentieth of your nervous output.  Nor have you the right to look 
for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade, 
lies your reward; the work is here the wages.  It will be seen I 
have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist 
class.  Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field 
labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie?  Perhaps they have 
never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer; 
or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more 
important than the services of a colonel?  Perhaps they forget on 
how little Millet was content to live; or do they think, because 
they have less genius, they stand excused from the display of equal 
virtues?  But upon one point there should be no dubiety:  if a man 
be not frugal, he has no business in the arts.  If he be not 
frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of LE VIEUX 
SALTIMBANQUE; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue 
to be honest.  Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door, 
he may be tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a 
slovenly piece of work.  If the obligation shall have arisen 
through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commanded; for 
words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man 
should support his family, than that he should attain to - or 
preserve - distinction in the arts.  But if the pressure comes, 
through his own fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and 
stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way that no law can 
reach him.

And now you may perhaps ask me, if the debutant artist is to have 
no thought of money, and if (as is implied) he is to expect no 
honours from the State, he may not at least look forward to the 
delights of popularity?  Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury 
dish.  And in so far as you may mean the countenance of other 
artists you would put your finger on one of the most essential and 
enduring pleasures of the career of art.  But in so far as you 
should have an eye to the commendations of the public or the notice 
of the newspapers, be sure you would but be cherishing a dream.  It 
is true that in certain esoteric journals the author (for instance) 
is duly criticised, and that he is often praised a great deal more 
than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he prided himself 
on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have denied 
themselves the privilege of reading his work.  But if a man be 
sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive to 
that which often accompanies and always follows it - wild ridicule.  
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 critics 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 the gaining?



CHAPTER XI - PULVIS ET UMBRA



We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not 
success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our 
ineffectual efforts to do well.  Our frailties are invincible, our 
virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down 
of the sun.  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 in 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.  The human race is a thing more 
ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of 
the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more 
ancient still.


I


Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful 
things and all of them appalling.  There seems no substance to this 
solid globe on which we stamp:  nothing but symbols and ratios.  
Symbols and ratios carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; 
gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through 
space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of 
distances; and the suns and worlds themselves, imponderable figures 
of abstraction, NH3, and H2O.  Consideration dares not dwell upon 
this view; that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of 
speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us.  
We behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the 
shards and wrecks of systems:  some, like the sun, still blazing; 
some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in 
desolation.  All of these we take to be made of something we call 
matter:  a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to 
whose incredible properties no familiarity can reconcile our minds.  
This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots 
uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its atoms 
with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become 
independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; 
one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the 
malady proceeds through varying stages.  This vital putrescence of 
the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional 
disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or 
the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our 
breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places.  But none is clean:  
the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it 
bursts out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the 
hard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the 
earth:  the animal and the vegetable:  one in some degree the 
inversion of the other:  the second rooted to the spot; the first 
coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the 
myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of 
birds:  a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, 
the heart stops.  To what passes with the anchored vermin, we have 
little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their 
delights and killing agonies:  it appears not how.  But of the 
locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more.  These 
share with us a thousand miracles:  the miracles of sight, of 
hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the 
miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, 
and when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and 
brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and 
staggering consequences.  And to put the last touch upon this 
mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these 
prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming 
them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat:  
the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion 
of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more 
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied 
ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns 
alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety 
million miles away.


II


What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the 
agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with 
slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of 
himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that 
move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; - 
and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how 
surprising are his attributes!  Poor soul, here for so little, cast 
among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and 
so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, 
irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives:  who should 
have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being 
merely barbarous?  And we look and behold him instead filled with 
imperfect virtues:  infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, 
often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to 
debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising 
up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his 
friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in 
pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young.  To touch 
the heart of his mystery, we find, in him one thought, strange to 
the point of lunacy:  the thought of duty; the thought of something 
owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God:  an ideal of 
decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of 
shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop.  The 
design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked 
natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming 
martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a 
bosom thought:  - Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and 
cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of 
honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we 
know so little:  - But in man, at least, it sways with so complete 
an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the 
selfish:  that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains 
supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a 
glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most cowardly 
stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly 
conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death.  
Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted 
practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life:  
stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think 
this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for 
eternity.  I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and 
misconduct man at large presents:  of organised injustice, cowardly 
violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of 
the best.  They cannot be too darkly drawn.  Man is indeed marked 
for failure in his efforts to do right.  But where the best 
consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should 
continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and 
inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our 
race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, 
be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer 
sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder.  It matters not 
where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of 
society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous 
morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his 
shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the 
ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman 
senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile 
pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened 
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, 
innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to 
drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent 
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the 
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his 
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted 
perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering 
with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) 
kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her 
child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society, 
living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, 
the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour 
and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with 
service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost, 
rejecting riches:  - everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, 
everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the 
ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:  - ah! if I could show you 
this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, 
in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every 
circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without 
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still 
clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, 
the poor jewel of their souls!  They may seek to escape, and yet 
they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their 
doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, 
the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and 
consoling:  that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of 
the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet 
deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and 
live for an ideal, however misconceived.  Nor can we stop with man.  
A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago by canting 
moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our 
thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but 
noble universe.  For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his 
kinship with the original dust.  He stands no longer like a thing 
apart.  Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus:  
and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an 
unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure.  Does it stop 
with the dog?  We look at our feet where the ground is blackened 
with the swarming ant:  a creature so small, so far from us in the 
hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend 
his doings; and here also, in his ordered politics and rigorous 
justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of 
individual sin.  Does it stop, then, with the ant?  Rather this 
desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all the 
grades of life:  rather is this earth, from the frosty top of 
Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of 
ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance.  
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?  It may be, and yet God knows what they should look 
for.  Even while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man 
treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon 
their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den 
of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a 
day is blotted out.  For these are creatures, compared with whom 
our weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span 
eternity.

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and under 
the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the 
erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes - God forbid it 
should be man that wearies in well-doing, that despairs of 
unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint.  Let it be 
enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, 
strives with unconquerable constancy:  Surely not all in vain.



CHAPTER XII - A CHRISTMAS SERMON



BY the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for 
twelve months; and it is thought I should take my leave in a formal 
and seasonable manner.  Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death-
bed sayings have not often hit the mark of the occasion.  Charles 
Second, wit and sceptic, a man whose life had been one long lesson 
in human incredulity, an easy-going comrade, a manoeuvring king - 
remembered and embodied all his wit and scepticism along with more 
than his usual good humour in the famous "I am afraid, gentlemen, I 
am an unconscionable time a-dying."


I


An unconscionable time a-dying - there is the picture ("I am 
afraid, gentlemen,") of your life and of mine.  The sands run out, 
and the hours are "numbered and imputed," and the days go by; and 
when the last of these finds us, we have been a long time dying, 
and what else?  The very length is something, if we reach that hour 
of separation undishonoured; and to have lived at all is doubtless 
(in the soldierly expression) to have served.

There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in the 
German wilderness; of how they mobbed Germanicus, clamouing go 
home; and of how, seizing their general's hand, these old, war-worn 
exiles passed his finger along their toothless gums.  SUNT LACRYMAE 
RERUM:  this was the most eloquent of the songs of Simeon.  And 
when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears his marks of service.  
He may have never been remarked upon the breach at the head of the 
army; at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.

The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble 
character.  It never seems to them that they have served enough; 
they have a fine impatience of their virtues.  It were perhaps more 
modest to be singly thankful that we are no worse.  It is not only 
our enemies, those desperate characters - it is we ourselves who 
know not what we do, - thence springs the glimmering hope that 
perhaps we do better than we think:  that to scramble through this 
random business with hands reasonably clean to have played the part 
of a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often 
resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is 
for the poor human soldier to have done right well.  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.

And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require 
much of others?  If we do not genially judge our own deficiencies, 
is it not to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of 
others?  And he who (looking back upon his own life) can see no 
more than that he has been unconscionably long a-dying, will he not 
be tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably long of getting 
hanged?  It is probable that nearly all who think of conduct at 
all, think of it too much; it is certain we all think too much of 
sin.  We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right; 
Christ would never hear of negative morality; THOU SHALT was ever 
his word, with which he superseded THOU SHALT NOT.  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.  If we cannot drive it from our minds - one 
thing of two:  either our creed is in the wrong and we must more 
indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be in the right, 
we are criminal lunatics and should place our persons in restraint.  
A mark of such unwholesomely divided minds is the passion for 
interference with others:  the Fox without the Tail was of this 
breed, but had (if his biographer is to be trusted) a certain 
antique civility now out of date.  A man may have a flaw, a 
weakness, that unfits him for the duties of life, that spoils his 
temper, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays him into 
cruelty.  It has to be conquered; but it must never he suffered to 
engross his thoughts.  The true duties lie all upon the farther 
side, and must be attended to with a whole mind so soon as this 
preliminary clearing of the decks has been effected.  In order that 
he may be kind and honest, it may be needful he should become a 
total abstainer; let him become so then, and the next day let him 
forget the circumstance.  Trying to be kind and honest will require 
all his thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a wise companion; 
in so far as he has had to mortify an appetite, he will still be 
the worse man; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness will 
be required in judging life, and a great deal of humility in 
judging others.

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's 
endeavour springs in some degree from dulness.  We require higher 
tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have.  
Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too 
inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather 
set ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had 
rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or 
mortify an appetite.  But the task before us, which is to co-endure 
with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the 
heroism required is that of patience.  There is no cutting of the 
Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.

To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little 
less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to 
renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to 
keep a few friends, but these without capitulation - above all, on 
the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a 
task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.  He has an 
ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who 
should look in such an enterprise to be successful.  There is 
indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can 
controvert:  whatever else we are intended to do, we are not 
intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.  It is so in 
every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of 
living well.  Here is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for 
the end of life.  Only self-deception will be satisfied, and there 
need be no despair for the despairer.


II


But Christmas is not only the mile-mark of another year, moving us 
to thoughts of self-examination:  it is a season, from all its 
associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of 
joy.  A man dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to 
sadness.  And in the midst of the winter, when his life runs lowest 
and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well 
he should be condemned to this fashion of the smiling face.  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.  And the kingdom of heaven is of the child-like, of those 
who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure.  Mighty men 
of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have 
lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely 
character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, 
the shame were indelible if WE should lose it.  Gentleness and 
cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect 
duties.  And it is the trouble with moral men that they have 
neither one nor other.  It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom 
Christ could not away with.  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.

A strange temptation attends upon man:  to keep his eye on 
pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to aim all his 
morals against them.  This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) 
proclaimed a crusade against dolls; and the racy sermon against 
lust is a feature of the age.  I venture to call such moralists 
insincere.  At any excess or perversion of a natural appetite, 
their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for 
all displays of the truly diabolic - envy, malice, the mean lie, 
the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the back-biter, the petty 
tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life - their standard is 
quite different.  These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not 
so wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret 
element of gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in 
themselves that they reserve the choicest of their indignation.  A 
man may naturally disclaim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr. 
Zola or the hobgoblin old lady of the dolls; for these are gross 
and naked instances.  And yet in each of us some similar element 
resides.  The sight of a pleasure in which we cannot or else will 
not share moves us to a particular impatience.  It may be because 
we are envious, or because we are sad, or because we dislike noise 
and romping - being so refined, or because - being so philosophic - 
we have an over-weighing sense of life's gravity:  at least, as we 
go on in years, we are all tempted to frown upon our neighbour's 
pleasures.  People are nowadays so fond of resisting temptations; 
here is one to be resisted.  They are fond of self-denial; here is 
a propensity that cannot be too peremptorily denied.  There is an 
idea abroad among moral people that they should make their 
neighbours good.  One person I have to make good:  myself.  But my 
duty to my neighbour is much more nearly expressed by saying that I 
have to make him happy - if I may.


III


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 constitution; 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 very 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.  No man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he 
want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from disuse.  And 
to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor CAPITIS DIMINUTIO 
of social ostracism, is an affair of wisdom - of cunning, if you 
will - and not of virtue.

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to 
profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he 
knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for 
what hire, and must not ask.  Somehow or other, though he does not 
know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, 
though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give 
happiness to others.  And no doubt there comes in here a frequent 
clash of duties.  How far is he to make his neighbour happy?  How 
far must he respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard to 
brighten again?  And how far, on the other side, is he bound to be 
his brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality?  How far 
must he resent evil?

The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ's sayings on 
the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and (the most of 
them) hard to accept.  But the truth of his teaching would seem to 
be this:  in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to 
accept and to pardon all; it is OUR cheek we are to turn, OUR coat 
that we are to give away to the man who has taken OUR cloak.  But 
when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will 
become us best.  That we are to suffer others to be injured, and 
stand by, is not conceivable and surely not desirable.  Revenge, 
says Bacon, is a kind of wild justice; its judgments at least are 
delivered by an insane judge; and in our own quarrel we can see 
nothing truly and do nothing wisely.  But in the quarrel of our 
neighbour, let us be more bold.  One person's happiness is as 
sacred as another's; when we cannot defend both, let us defend one 
with a stout heart.  It is only in so far as we are doing this, 
that we have any right to interfere:  the defence of B is our only 
ground of action against A.  A has as good a right to go to the 
devil, as we to go to glory; and neither knows what he does.

The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and 
militant mongerings of moral half-truths, though they be sometimes 
needful, though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to an 
inferior grade of duties.  Ill-temper and envy and revenge find 
here an arsenal of pious disguises; this is the playground of 
inverted lusts.  With a little more patience and a little less 
temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every 
case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in 
private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act 
against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices, might 
yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.


IV


To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven 
and to what small purpose; and how often we have been cowardly and 
hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day 
and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; - it may 
seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a 
certain consolation resides.  Life is not designed to minister to a 
man's vanity.  He goes upon his long business most of the time with 
a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child.  Full of 
rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or 
the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when 
he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet 
for him no abiding city.  Friendships fall through, health fails, 
weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly 
varying record of his own weakness and folly.  It is a friendly 
process of detachment.  When the time comes that he should go, 
there need be few illusions left about himself.  HERE LIES ONE WHO 
MEANT WELL, TRIED A LITTLE, FAILED MUCH:  - surely that may be his 
epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.  Nor will he complain at 
the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field:  
defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius! - but if there is 
still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured.  The 
faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long 
disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality 
of laying down his arms.  Give him a march with his old bones; 
there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and 
the dust and the ecstasy - there goes another Faithful Failure!

From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one such 
beautiful and manly poem, I take this memorial piece:  it says 
better than I can, what I love to think; let it be our parting 
word.


"A late lark twitters from the quiet skies;
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day's work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.

"The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze.  The spires
Shine, and are changed.  In the valley
Shadows rise.  The lark sings on.  The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night -
Night, with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.

"So be my passing!
My task accomplished and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gathered to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death."

[1888.]