tions; 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 to 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
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 ar