e" in the matter is understandable enough. In his
own day, Scott and himself were almost the only distinguished authors who
were not "all authors," just as Mr. Helps and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton
are almost the only representatives of the class in ours. This
professional taint not only resides in the writer, impairing his fulness
and completion; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs it also.
It is the professional character which authorship has assumed which has
taken individuality and personal flavour from so much of our writing, and
prevented to a large extent the production of enduring books. Our
writing is done too hurriedly, and to serve a purpose too immediate.
Literature is not so much an art as a manufacture. There is a demand,
and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never allowed to lie
fallow, and to nourish itself in peacefulness and silence. When so many
cups are to be filled, too much water is certain to be put into the
teapot. Letters have become a profession, and probably of all
professions it is, in the long run, the least conducive to personal
happiness. It is the most precarious. In it, above all others, to be
weak is to be miserable. It is the least mechanical, consequently the
most exhausting; and in its higher walks it deals with a man's most vital
material--utilises his emotions, trades on his faculties of love and
imagination, uses for its own purposes the human heart by which he lives.
These things a man requires for himself; and when they are in a large
proportion transported to an ideal world, they make the ideal world all
the more brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary existence all
the more arid and commonplace. You cannot spend money and have it; you
cannot use emotion and possess it. The poet who sings loudly of love and
love's delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of life be all the
colder for his singing. The man who has been moved while describing an
imaginary death-bed to-day, is all the more likely to be unmoved while
standing by his friend's grave to-morrow. Shakspeare, after emerging
from the moonlight in the Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet's silvery
interchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously enamoured of the
autumn on Ann Hathaway's cheek. It is in some such way as this that a
man's books may impoverish his life; that the fire and heat of his genius
may make his hearth all the colder. From considerations like these, one
can