efinement of many
poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling
and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable
length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many
flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur,
but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This
literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this MALADIE DE RENE, as we
like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly
phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private
means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown
and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the
beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques,
and the blue devils dance on all our literary wires.

It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its result,
among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks of men. When our
little poets have to be sent to look at the ploughman and learn wisdom,
we must be careful how we tamper with our ploughmen. Where a man in not
the best of circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of dull and
unremunerative labour; where a man in this predicament can afford a
lesson by the way to what are called his intellectual superiors, there
is plainly something to be lost, as well as something to be gained, by
teaching him to think differently. It is better to leave him as he is
than to teach him whining. It is better that he should go without
the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing
sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight
against that hide-bound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind
which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of
consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and
they will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it,
above all, that we give these lessons in a brave, vivacious note,
and build the man up in courage while we demolish its substitute,
indifference.

*****

All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It
does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really
considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled so far.
This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which ar