in English literature, or indeed, in any literature. That is
what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had your
earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all
round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a
steam-engine and can imagine no other--still to be able to think, still to
be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the
opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak
anything _but what the Lord has put in your mouth_. I know nothing more
striking, and I must add that I know nothing more un-English.

For the Englishman in general is like my friend the Member of Parliament,
and believes, point-blank, that for a thing to be an anomaly is absolutely
no objection to it whatever. He is like the Lord Auckland of Burke's day,
who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution, talks of "certain
miscreants, assuming the name of philosophers, who have presumed
themselves capable of establishing a new system of society." The
Englishman has been called a political animal, and he values what is
political and practical so much that ideas easily become objects of
dislike in his eyes, and thinkers "miscreants," because ideas and thinkers
have rashly meddled with politics and practice. This would be all very
well if the dislike and neglect confined themselves to ideas transported
out of their own sphere, and meddling rashly with practice; but they are
inevitably extended to ideas as such, and to the whole life of
intelligence; practice is everything, a free play of the mind is nothing.
The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a
pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider
of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may
have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into
an Englishman's thoughts. It is noticeable that the word _curiosity_,
which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and
fine quality of man's nature, just this disinterested love of a free play
of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake--it is noticeable, I say,
that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a
rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is
essentially the exercise of this very quality; it obeys an instinct
prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought