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nence.

That power by which the mind criticises itself may also rouse it when it flags, may point its view to objects far and near, may divert it to new aims, or urge it by new resolutions. In either case, the act is that of imposing a law or purpose upon oneself of first referring to some rule or notion of right, propriety, fitness, or expediency, and then coming back with a permission to do what was on the point of being done at any rate, or with a mandate to do otherwise.

Most men have, in the very traditions and rules of the professions by which they earn their bread, a discipline ready-made for them. The lawyer, the physician, the clergyman, the merchant, the engineer, and artisans of the different crafts, all more or less have been admitted into their respective walks of life through an established course of training, and have the manner of their daily activity marked out for them by institution, custom, rules of trade and penalties. Life to them, or, at least, the professional part of their life, is, to a considerable extent, governed by routine. It is very different with the man of letters. The most lawless being on earth, the being least regulated by any authority out of himself, is the literary man. What is called Bohemianism in the literary world is only an extreme instance of a phenomenon belonging to literature as such. literature is, in a sense, though not in the same sense, a vast Bohemianism. It is the permeation of ordinary society by a tribe of wild-eyed stragglers from the far East, who are held in check in general matters by the laws of society, and many of whom, in those portions of their lives that do not appertain to the peculiar tribe-business, may be eminently respectable, and even men of rank and magistracy, but who, in what does appertain to the peculiar tribe-business, work absolutely in secret, and are free from all allegiance except to themselves, and perhaps also, in some small degree, to one another. For what is the peculiar tribe-business? It is thinking and the expression of thought.

All

This is the most general definition that can be given of literature. Obviously, such a mode of activity is so extensive, admits of so many varieties, that to call it a tribe-business at all, except by way of passing metaphor, would be absurd. On the crowded platform of literature there are scores of tribes inextricably intermixed, as well as stray individuals who, like Harry Gow, acknowledge no tribeship. We hear, indeed, of the brotherhood of literature, of organizations of literature and the like; but, except for certain benevolent prac tical purposes, these phrases, so far as they are descriptions of fact, are meaningless. There may one day be a brotherhood of literature as there may be a brotherhood of mankind, and an organization of literature as there may be an organization of human labour; but, for the present, almost as well talk of a brotherhood of men who wear wigs, or an organization of men who agree in having turquoise-rings on their fourth fingers, as of a brotherhood or organization of men of letters. What affinity, what connexion is established between two persons by the mere fact that both make the expression of thought of some kind or other their businessi.e. that both wield the pen and can construct written sentences? Surely you have first to ask what the thought is, what kind of man is at the back of the pen, what the sentences contain; and, after being amused, for example, by the writings of the late Mr. Albert Smith, you would not insist on his relationship to Mr. John Stuart Mill; nor, fresh from the perusal of the Newgate Calendar, would you speak of the compiler as the late Mr. Wordsworth's spiritual brother. Yet, despite this visible resolution of what is called the literary or intellectual class into as many sorts of men as there are sorts of men who do not write, there is this class-peculiarity common to them all, that, in the exercise of their craft, unless they bring impediments into it from without, they are, more than any other set of men, their own masters. Some conditions and restrictions there, indeed, are even in this

Ishmaelitish business of thinking and expressing thought. In this country most of these are summed up in the one wholesome difficulty of finding a publisher. Where the circumstances of a writer obviate this difficulty, there is still a certain vague agency of restriction in the laws of blasphemy, sedition, and libel. A closer, more forcible, and more constant kind of regulation arises from the fear of that form of public opinion which consists in the criticism by the writing-class itself of each other's productions. But, these and other forms of regulation from without allowed for, it remains true that the man of letters, or the man of intellectual pursuits, is left, more than any other, in the exercise of his special business, to the free drift of his own powers and tendencies, without any discipline save such as he may make for himself. It may be worth while to inquire, then, so far as a swift survey of known instances may serve, in what ways literary genius has been found exercising self-discipline.

The highest development of the military art is what is called Strategy. It is the part of Strategy to plan campaigns, or sometimes even a series of campaigns, in advance-to scheme, in short, the general conduct of a war from a prior consideration of data, to calculate the movements of masses over large tracts of time and country, and to arrange future battle-fields on the map. Wellington had a plan for the Peninsular war which lasted him almost through the whole of it. Now, something akin to this strategy may sometimes be discerned in the lives of men of intellect. There have been men of the intellectual order, who, at an early period of their lives, or at some period less early, have formed a resolution as to the direction of their activity for the rest of their lives, or have even planned their lives in detail a good way forward, and who, amid all the distractions of outward circumstance, and the modifications of their own views, have persevered in their resolution and kept true in the main to their plans. Without going beyond our own country,

have we not such an instance in Bacon? Did he not in youth conceive the notion of putting mankind upon a new method in the search for truth, of shifting the wheels of the human mind cut of what he supposed to be the Aristotelian ruts? And through his busy life did he not toil at this notion till he gave us what we have of the Instauratio Magna? By this example, indeed, it is suggested that it is chiefly in the lives of men of the speculative order that we are to expect anything like strategy. There is an irresistible native drift in their constitution, or such a drift appears in the total assemblage of their powers and acquisitions at some point of their career; and, though a strong act of will on the first thorough perception of this may be necessary for perfect achievement, yet by the mere persistence of the passive tendency a certain continuity of occupations would be the result. There was, in this sense, a kind of dawdling strategy even in poor Coleridge's life. But it is not in the lives only of powerful philosophic thinkers that strategic duration and continuity of purpose may be discerned. Between the hour when Gibbon, meditating amid the ruins of the Colosseum at Rome, planned the Decline and Fall, and the hour, when, in the moon-lit acacia-walk at Lausanne, after having written the last page, he walked to and fro, and was sad that his work was finished, what a lapse of laborious years, what thousands of days and nights, during the changing events of which, and the fatigues of the work itself, there had been incessant need of fresh strokes of volition! In Hallam's three works, too, what have we but the connected remains of three seeming divisions of a well-planned life? The deliberate choice, therefore, of a great subject of history or research, or of several such one after another, may impart a strategic consistency to a life, as well as the spur of speculative originality or a passion for philosophic innovation. Such choice, carried out in effect, involves the consecration of years to one slowly-reached object,

the neglect meanwhile of a thousand delightful or even clamorous irrelevancies, and a heart firm against the songs of sirens on many a charming coast on the voyage. There have been, however, writers even of the poetic order in the main, or of a mixed order, in whose lives, as by a union in them of the two qualities of a strong speculative determination from the first, and a power of mere perseverance in works of labour once undertaken, the same strategic character, the same vertebration through and through by a sustained purpose, has been notably apparent. Such a writer was Milton. He put on record the nature of his intended masterpiece, and pledged himself to its achievement, seven-and-twenty years before he had leisure to do it; and all his intermediate labours were stormy preparations for it, mixed with passionate longings. Nor has the world often seen such an example of strategy in an intellectual life as in that of the poet Wordsworth. With a purpose in his head respecting himself, that iron man of imagination, that man of poetic nerve superimposed upon mere bone, that Wellington of our poesy (there is a look of Wellington in his very face), withdrew in his early prime to his native lake-district, remained there immoveable except for an occasional tour, put himself on a milk-andwater regimen for purposes both of health and of economy, was ruthless enough to compel his visitors to the same regimen unless they chose to get spirits for themselves at a public-house, replied to the letters even of celebrated correspondents with a cold, sarcastic. sense that seemed heartless at the time, but gives one now an impression of his real superiority, and, all the while, wrote his poems and his prefaces expounding his theory of poetry, and sent them forth to a jeering world. If among our still living British writers we should seek for one in whose life, reviewed as a whole hitherto, the same character of what may be called strategy, the same noble self-discipline on a large scale, though exercised on different material and with quite unlike results, is obvious

with all the clearness of a historic fact of our time, whom should we name but Carlyle ?

Few, however, are the men of letters, even among those whom the world regards as of the very highest rank of genius, in whose intellectual career there has been anything of strategy, such as we have described it. Most literary men, God help them! do not see or scheme much farther than into the middle of next week, any more in what pertains to the conduct of their intellect than in their material concerns. Life, for them, is a succession of articles, stories, poems, essays, or whatever else it may be, suggested by occasion one after another, each occupying its portion of time, and flung over the shoulder when it is finished. It is possible, of course, as one or two of the instances cited will have suggested, that even in a life so morselled out into a series of small or not very extensive efforts, there may yet be a real strategic connexion. A writer of powerful individuality by nature, or of gradually acquired purpose, may make his life serve his intention on the plan of multisection, as well as on that of trisection, bisection, or the life-long elaboration of one great scheme. Nay, even where there is no trace of such predetermination, but a writer seems floated on from subject to subject by a mere stream of accident, or actually writes to order, still it cannot but be that, when the straggling series of his writings is finished, a certain unity will be found to pervade them. On the whole, however, so far as there is discipline or self-regulation in the life of such a writer (and the great majority of writers, and especially of popular, poetic, or imaginative writers, are included more or less), it can hardly be of the kind that could be said to constitute strategy. It is rather of the kind that is, or used to be, in military science, called Tactics.

It is not easy to say where Tactics end and Strategy begins; and, in later military theory, the distinction is little insisted on. Still, it has a meaning. Tactics, as the art of efficiently handling

forces that have been brought into a given situation, may very well be conceived as distinct from Strategy, which maps out a campaign or campaigns in advance, determines the situations into which forces are to be brought, and considers how they are to be brought thither. It used to be recognised by military men as possible that a good strategist might be a bad tactician, and, vice versa, that a capital tactician might break down in strategy. With this we have less to do than with the fact that the best strategy may be ruined by bad tactics, and with this other fact that, in so far as the phrases can be transferred to literary life, it has been chiefly in the kind of self-discipline corresponding to tactics that the majority of men of literary genius have been called upon to prove themselves. In the literary life of Shakespeare himself, admirably and prudently arranged as was his life as a man of the world, there is next to nothing of intentional strategy, but only magnificent tactics. As a dramatist and theatre-manager he takes up one subject after another as a subject on which a play is to be written; and, though there may have been some strategy, intellectual as well as commercial, in his consecutive choice of subjects, it is too lax for detection. What we see when we try to represent to ourselves any moment of his life as a poet is simply his magnificent mind engaged on this or that particular dramatic subject-i.e. those Warwickshire forces acting for the moment in a given situation into which somehow they have been brought. In what else did his literary life consist than in extempore invention and expression-in saying on each subject that occurred to him, and in connexion with each situation he fancied, the greatest possible instantaneous quantity of deep, rich, and splendid things? Or take Shakespeare's later cousin, Scott. He, too, was a man of firm, steady, personal character. There were, moreover, visible in him from the first marked constitutional tendencies or veins of sentiment, which necessarily pre-determined to some extent the nature and direction of his

authorship; and in the retrospect of his writings, as a whole, there is therefore to be seen a greater connectedness than in the retrospect of Shakespeare's. But in Scott, too, the kind of literary selfdiscipline chiefly exemplified was that needed for the management of subject after subject lightly taken up on popular grounds rather than in studied series. And, if Scott and Shakespeare were thus tacticians rather than strategists in their literary lives, our present men of letters need not take it ill, if it is asserted that the same observation holds true of the majority of their body.

It is time, however, to see whether one may not enunciate a principle or two of this said discipline or art of literary self-regulation-such principles, we mean, as will generally be found to have been practised by writers of really effective literary genius, and which, at all events, may be safely recommended to any now-a-days who, conscious of literary power, are anxious for its just and permanently effective use. In what follows we have regard chiefly to that kind of literary self-regulation which we have compared to Tactics. As Strategy, however, depends on Tactics, any principles that may be established even within these limits will, doubtless, be found, by expansion, to be principles of intellectual self-discipline in general.

1. There is the principle of negative Truth- —or of striving hard never to say anything that one does not really think. "Striving hard," we say; for, without any excessive harshness of judgment, this strength of phrase does not seem unnecessary in reference to things as they exist. Speaking for myself at least, I cannot but be of opinion, from what I see daily, that, rich and variously able as our now current literature is beyond that of any previous British age, there is yet a great deal of petty untruthfulness in it which it would require some rigour of self-discipline to cast out.

Perhaps it is in the critical department that this petty untruthfulness most abounds, or is most easily detected. I have seen over and over again, I see every week, critical notices in which it is

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obvious to me, because of my own previous acquaintance with the productions noticed, that the writers have never read those productions, have probably never even glanced at them, but have at a venture set down words concerning them on the chance of their proving to be about right. I have seen one of the gravest and most thoughtful authors of the day referred to by name, in perfect seriousness, as a light and humorous" writer -the critic thinking it incumbent on him to seem to know something of the author, and not knowing even the nature of his reputation. And, again and again, I meet with epithets applied to books or papers, supposed to be at that moment on the table of the critic and under his eye, the utter inapplicability of which by any force of contortion to those books or papers tells, as clearly as an affidavit, that Mr. Critic did not even interrogate his paper-knife when it had cut the leaves. This kind of untruthfulness-the untruthfulness of pretending to know where one does not know-is naturally most common in those quarters where reviewing has to be done in masses and in a hurry; and one ought not to forget, in these circumstances, the really astonishing amount of honesty which is, after all, shown in these quarters, in consequence both of conscience on the part of many who labour, and of good business-arrangement on the part of some who direct.

There is a literary dishonesty which requires stronger precautions against it than that of mere statement beyond one's knowledge. It is the dishonesty of statement against one's knowledge. In critical literature, especially, malice, envy, ill-will, or, on the other hand, personal connexions of interest or friendship, all operate so as to make it very difficult for the best of us to avoid saying what, if we stopped ourselves and asked, "Do I really think what I am now saying?" we should be obliged to confess we did not think. We take up a book by Soand-So, a man whom we do not like, or whom for some reason or other we wish at Jericho. We read on with sneering nostrils, and with gloom on our brows;

but it chances that, as we read, in spite of this black mood, there comes stroke after stroke of real power upon our intellectual nerve, upon our sense for what is good in thought, in humour, in fancy! How many of us are there that, in these circumstances, relax, yield, own ourselves conquered, let the clouds clear away, cry out "That's good, were you Beelzebub himself!" and then, afterwards, in giving our opinion of the book, say exactly what we caught ourselves thinking while we read it, and not what, in our malice, we hoped we should think, or perhaps still, in our malice, try to think? Or, again, we read a book by that important friend, or that delightful lady, and are bound to review it. As we read, we are as bland and placid as a lake under sunshine; we wait expectingly; let there be the least tremor of intellectual motion, the most casual passage of real power, and we shall respond to it eagerly. But no; there is none; from the first page to the last all is dreary, weary, watery, wordy! Where is the Aristides that, in such a case, will-we do not say, express all he does think-but honestly refrain from every approach to saying what he has not been able to think in the least degree?

But all the amount of such dishonesty in literature, arising from private malice or private benevolence, is as nothing compared with the aggregate of petty untruthfulness imported into our current literature by public animosities, political or religious. That wretched polarization of our whole national thought, since 1688, into the two antagonistic currents of common Whiggism and common Toryism, has, indeed, now well-nigh ceased. But there are other antagonisms extant or rising. Perhaps it is in religious controversy that untruthfulness is most rank. How is it that among our liberal and cultured laymen of all sects it is beginning to be a simultaneous belief that the so-called religious journals, whether of their own or of other sects, are, with few exceptions, about the most unscrupulous of periodical publi

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