thousandth part of our creators' genius? Will you ever write anything like the Blessed Damosel, or have you the wit to guide wandering men to the Earthly Paradise? You may well look and moralize at us; but we, poor and decayed as we are, are better than your best work will ever appear to any one. Whoever troubles to think about your work at all will say just what you are thinking about us, that it shows an incomplete purpose which was too infirm to realize itself."

And even if these spirit-voices are silenced, there are the voices of memory to take up the burden. This Union Library in which we have set our discontented scribbler for the time being, is by no means the resort of old and grizzled scholars, but of minds young, keen, and freshly entering on life. There probably he himself came, if, as we have supposed, he be an Oxford man, on his first impetuous search after universal knowledge, exchanging "Youth's sweet-scented manuscript" for musty rolls whose characters are not nearly so cursive. So he remembers now his own early dallying with the written wisdom, his high enthusiasm (as it seems to him now at all events), and his eager wish to seize for his own all the knowledge that lingers on these seductive shelves. How light and easy he fancied it would be to conquer all the kingdoms of science, to capture all the treasures of literature, to leave no province of history uninvaded, no fortress of philosophy unscaled. Scarce anything short of this would satisfy his Alexandrine ambition in those early days. He would begin and think out anew all the vexed problems of the human life. He would force them to yield a sure and worthy answer. His oracles were to be no Sibylline leaves, brought to illegible disorder by the very entrance of the inquirer, who departed angry and uncounselled, but they should be fixed and orderly, the

beginning of a durable wisdom. But now, in the later days, he should deem himself fortunate if he has fastened on some little corner of literature or philosophy or history, and made it his own. He is happy if he has turned aside from vast and unanswerable questions, and has found a more likely answer to some trifling problem which before was obscure. He is blessed if, neglecting the universe, he has cultivated his little garden well and wisely. With advancing years, how limited. how narrow his aims have become!

And are these humbler aims humble enough for him to realize with that portion of talent which Providence has given him? It is a terrible question. As he looks back, he sees how his poor achievements, whatever they may have been, are not in the least correspondent with his dreams of what they were to have been. They all fall miserably short of his perfect standard. He may say of them, There is none good, no, not one. There are happy moments when he can hide from himself their grosser deficiencies; but now they have ranged themselves out in painful contrast with their ideal counterparts. The biographical article of his, which was to have joined Freeman's erudition to Macaulay's brilliance; that literary trifle, which might have shown the lucidity of Matthew Arnold mingled with the sweetness of Walter Pater; those verses (rejected of many editors), which were to have sung the ecstasy of love to the tune which the sea murmurs on the beach,-how dull they all appear! What an ignoble seizure of alien thoughts by an uncreative mind! what a vain, weak, and unprofitable addition to his inheritance from the past!

But he may have come, it has been hinted, to plan out amid this studious ease a new scheme of work, which is to issue in another effort. Shall he go on with it? Can he hope that this

time he will succeed in melting down his crude facts into a single whole? Could he but discover a true vein of originality which hitherto has lain in him untouched, unsuspected! Will he be able this time to free himself from stale language and trite thoughts, and produce something that really shall not be mediocre? How it were to be desired!

And yet to escape from mediocrity, to find the strait gate and the narrow way, to be admitted even to the very outskirts of the Elysian Plains, this is too daring a hope. We moderns know all about the wastefulness of nature, and how her hand, is it lazy, or careless, or unskilled?-scatters failures to right and left. We have watched her ungerminating seeds and her deserted young. We have seen her encouraging degeneracy as much as progress. Of ten children, it is a chance if three grow to manhood, and of a myriad men, who can say if a single one will possess any pre-eminent gift? Even then he may never discover and rightly use it. He is rash who reckons himself talented, when true talent is so rare. So the spirit of the place seems to exhort the scribbler to surrender hope, and preaches new sermons to him on that ancient text of vanity.

But after all, is it right, and are they wise who say that a man is a fool to scribble unless he can make money by it? We must admit that they sometimes have reason on their side. Rash attempts on literature may end in a tragi-comic manner; they have even ended tragically. Scribbling may have its heroes, but it has also its involuntary martyrs, and those who come near to being its clowns.

Not long ago the papers contained accounts of one of its tragedies. A man, a familiar figure in the reading-room of the British Museum, who made his living by writing chance articles, died of starvation. His single room was

manu

found littered with rejected script. One wonders whether he had given up any more certain means of livelihood for this. How he must have fretted at the sight of well-known names in the tables of contents! How fiercely his heart must have raged against the editors! What a grim spectacle of sordid need must have been witnessed by the interval between the acceptance and the publication of an article!

Luckily such extreme cases are rare, or for the sake of our peace of mind we should be reduced to reading none but the articles signed by the famous and successful. But though such tragedies hardly ever happen, yet, we fancy, those unknown names beneath the articles and stories of our magazines cover more than one tragi-comedy. At least they stand for a strange variety of persons. Some of them must belong to young men just beginning to write, and on their way, easy or difficult as the case may be, to success and fame. Others must signify older hands, who lack thought or force or originality enough ever to come to the front, but who can turn out a little article on an occasional subject with tolerable neatness if not with remarkable felicity. But the rest are more difficult to classify. Somewhere among them are the actors in our tragicomedies.

The more serious sort consists of those whom the scribbling mania leads to over-work. All day long, we may readily suppose, they are concerned with some common-place manner of earning their bread. But they are discontent with their narrow daily round; they fret for a wider sphere of interests, or, it may be, they are actuated by that dullest and commonest of motives, an addition to their income. scribbling-mad, they foredo themselves with supererogatory efforts to produce literature. Already jaded with the

So,

daily labor to procure subsistence, they twist and torture their minds to discover something new to say, and some new way of saying it. They discharge showers of articles or stories upon unhappy editors; and their breakfast-table is woful with creased envelopes addressed in their own hand-writing. Who shall tell the story of their labors and their disappointments? Sooner or later the strain becomes over great, and the wheel is broken at the cistern.

Less painful than these to contemplate, and yet not without their degree of pathos, are the tragi-comedies of self-deception. It is so easy to think ourselves much finer fellows than we are. A little facile inspiration on some trivial matter kindles our minds wonderfully. We fancy we have within our hearts a spark of true Promethean fire; we look forward to work for which we have neither mental range nor moral depth; we attempt it, and perhaps achieve something which we mistake for the reality which we aimed at; but however we may be in love with our deformed offspring, others see its defects clearly enough. We may comfort ourselves for a season by thinking that it is only the proverbial conspiracy of dullards against rising genius; but some time the truth will light upon us with poison in its wings. We see that our Promethean spark was a penny firework; it has fizzled out, and we regard the empty case ourselves with unenviable feelings.

But even so, are we to say that the work of all those who never distinguish themselves in literature is mere waste, that all the effort and hope and regret which this work represents is no more than the fool's-hunt for a garden which proves to be a mirage? Surely not, even though scribbling may have its tragedies and tragi-comedies, ay, and its farces too. These uncollected essays and stories which will never be reprinted may slumber in the vol

umes of old magazines, and never be disturbed, save possibly by the idle curious, when once their brief life upon the library table has departed; but still they may have had a value that is not reckoned in terms of success and failure as the world counts them. Even though they were wholly worthless in themselves, and often they contain much that is curious and interesting, much sound thought and sound English, such as have been sometimes lacking in more successful compositionsbut even, as we said, though they were intrinsically worthless, yet surely they are not entirely to be despised. They had their significance. They are dead now beyond all possibility of resurrec tion; but were none of them once living and keen with hope and purpose? They have failed, their purpose is perhaps unfulfilled, and their hope has perished; but were not many called and few chosen? We shall judge strangely if we say that it is better to have had no stirrings of the heart, no promptings of the brain.

The case, of course, is altered when the heart is only stirred by an uneasy vanity, and the brain prompted by nothing more than a desire of profit. The theatrical performances of divers kinds which we have been noticing. whereof scribbling is accused, ar** really to be attributed to other causes. If you passionately look for results which can only be accomplished by genius, and if, as is only too probable, you have it not, you will infallibly experience bitter disappointment. If you set to work to earn an appreciable income by writing, unless, as is gravely to be doubted, you have some popular talent, you may rely on wasting your time and labor. You will have been trying to illuminate the universe with a tallow candle; you have been expecting to find the thistle covered with rosebuds.

But the other kind of scribbler does

not make these mistakes. He knows bimself for what he is. He writes for the sake of expressing what is best and deepest in him in the best and truest way. He is in no passionate haste, and looks for few results beyond the accomplishment of his self-imposed task.

Of course it is not pleasant for the mediocre person to recognize himself to be so; but that is no good reason why he should forswear the use of talents which he knows to be minor, and qualities which he sees to be imperfect. He need not be inconsolable. It would be very delightful to feel oneself above the crowd, to exercise a persuasive eloquence, and to wield a pointed wit dexterously. But despair for such a cause is ridiculous. We do not mean that we should console ourselves by dwelling on the disabilities of genius as if they could degrade with their mortal alloy the divinest of divine gifts. It is an ill task to belittle genius, as some of our moderns seem to desire to do. Genius is not insane, or irritable, or perverse, for all the individual examples of Turner or Carlyle or Byron. Genius was the sane, the serene, the right-minded part of them. As has already been observed by another, vulpine examples are bad to follow, and fruit is none the sourer for being out of our reach. No. one cannot console oneself by pretending that genius is not worth having, nor yet by exalting the conveniences of the gilded state of mediocrity. We must, like M. Anatole France's hero, recognize our commonplaceness, and then we shall not suffer from having our pet bubbles burst in our straining faces.

Self-knowledge and disinterestedness are characteristic of the wise, of the defensible scribbler; but he profits by a third advantage also, the absence of haste. He is not pressed to finish one study to-day so that he may begin

LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXIV. 1786

another to-morrow. When he has chosen a subject, he can let his thought germinate and grow. He can read leisurely and reflect. He will not grudge an evening to a friend, and meditation is not a thing forbidden. He comes home from his daily work, not to a renewal of effort but to a feast of delight. His books are not acquaintances but friends; and, if his thoughts are neither very profound, nor supremely wise, nor exquisitely subtle, still they are real thoughts, and his work has one of the first merits of literature.-it is sincere.

And not only may the practice of literature be full of delight, but it may also be full of instruction. It will help us to think clearly. Not without reason did Bacon observe, in a phrase which has almost reached the distinction of the copy-book, that writing makes an exact man. For most of us are but imperfectly acquainted with our thoughts. They are something like Mr. Wells's invisible man,-they need clothing before they become apprehensible, even to their owners. Most men's thoughts however are slovenly and ill-apparelled. Their clothes do not fit; there is a bulge here, a wrinkle there; not infrequently the thought outgrows its garment, and protrudes bare wrists and naked shanks into cold invisibility. But to write means to clothe your thought, and to write well to clothe it neatly and exactly. So you come to know your thought, to realize its nature and its value; you learn to mould and order and manipulate it; you may learn to think.

But perhaps the greatest service of all which the practice of literature does to those who are mere scribblers and have no real artistic gifts, is to teach them more wisely to appreciate literature itself. True, it is service which is done to those only who are already predisposed to the love of books