at the culmination of its grandeur, when decadence was spiritually but not visibly imminent; it was to show the workings of human passion in the most pregnant and exalted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of immortal poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of a quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working leaven of Christianity. Such a romance would not call the attention of society to the dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgarity of small schoolmasters, the manners of men in livery, or to any other form of uneducated talk and sentiments; its characters would have virtues and vices alike on the grand scale, and would express themselves in an English representing the discourse of the most powerful minds, in the best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there occurred a scene with a Greek philosopher on a visit to Rome, or resident there as a teacher. In this way Pepin would do in fiction what had never been done before; something not at all like "Rienzi" or "Notre Dame de Paris," or any other attempt of that kind, but something at once more penetrating and more magnificent, more passionate and more philosophical, more panoramic yet more select; something that would present a conception of a gigantic period; in short, something truly Roman and world-historical. When Pepin gave me this programme to read he was much younger than at present. Some slight success in another vein diverted him from the production of panoramic and select romance; and the experience of not having tried to carry out his programme has naturally made him more biting and sarcastic on the failures of those who have actually written romances without apparently having had a glimpse of a conception equal to his. Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated naiveté, as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and His paragraphs affectation of power kept strictly in reserve. now seem to have a bitter smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind too penetrating to accept any other man's ideas, and too equally competent in all directions to seclude his power in any one form of creation, but rather fitted to hang over them all as a lamp of guidance to the stumblers below. You perceive how proud he is of not being indebted to any writer; even with the dead he is on the creditor's side, for he is doing them the service of letting the world know what they meant better than those poor pre-Pepinians themselves had any means of doing; and he treats the mighty shades very cavalierly. Is this fellow-citizen of ours, considered simply in the light of a baptized Christian and tax-paying Englishman, really as madly conceited, as empty of reverential feeling, as unveracious and careless of justice, as full of catch-penny devices and stagey attitudinizing, as on examination his writing shows itself to be? By no means. He has arrived at the present pass in "the literary calling" through the selfimposed obligation to give himself a manner which would convey the impression of superior knowledge and ability. He is much worthier and more admirable than his written productions, because the moral aspects exhibited in his writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in the personal relations of life. In blaming Pepin's writing, we are accusing the public conscience, which is so lax and ill-formed on the momentous bearings of authorship, that it sanctions the total absence of scruple in undertaking and prosecuting what should be the best warranted of vocations. Hence I still accept friendly relations with Pepin, for he has much private amiability; and though he probably thinks of me as a man of slender talents, without rapidity of coup d'œil, and with no compensatory penetration, he meets me very cordially, and would not, I am sure, willingly pain me in conversation by crudely declaring his low estimate of my capacity. Yet I have often known him to insult my betters, and contribute (perhaps unreflectingly) to encourage injurious conceptions of them; but that is done in the course of his professional writing, and the public conscience still leaves such writing nearly on a level of the Merry-Andrew's dress, which permits an impudent deportment and extraordinary gambols to one who, in his ordinary clothing, shows himself the decent father of a family. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. ARTICULAR callings, it is known, encourage particular PART diseases. There is a painter's colic; the Sheffield grinder falls a victim to the inhalation of steel-dust; clergymen so often have a kind of sore throat that this otherwise secular ailment gets named after them. And perhaps, if we were to inquire, we should find a similar relation between certain moral ailments and these various occupations, though here in the case of clergymen there would be specific differences; the poor curate, equally with the rector, is liable to clergyman's sore throat, but he would probably be found free from the chronic moral ailments encouraged by the possession of glebe and those higher chances of preferment which follow on having a good position already. On the other hand, the poor curate might have severe attacks of calculating expectancy concerning parishioners' turkeys, cheeses, and fat geese, or of uneasy rivalry for the donations of clerical charities. - Authors are so miscellaneous a class that their personified diseases, physical and moral, might include the whole proces sion of human disorders, led by dyspepsia and ending in madness the awful dumb-show of a world-historic tragedy. Take a large enough area of human life, and all comedy melts into tragedy, like the Fool's part of the side of Lear. The chief scenes get filled with erring heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discoverers, dying deliverers: everywhere the protagonist has a part pregnant with doom. The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if there are loud laughs they seem a convulsive transition from sobs; or if the comedy is touched with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene is one where "Sadness is a kind of mirth, So mingled as if mirth did make us sad But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry me into tragedy, and, in fact, had nothing more serious in my mind than certain small chronic ailments that come of small authorship. I was thinking principally of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth, not only as a portly lady walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book entitled "The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix." I would by no means make it a reproach to her that she wrote no more than one book; on the contrary, her stopping there seems to me a laudable example. What one would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which became oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of those slight chronic forms of disease to which I have just referred. She lived in the considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its own newspaper press, with the usual divisions of political partisanship and the usual varieties of literary criticism - the florid and allusive, the staccato and peremptory, the clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe and pattern-phrased, or what one might call "the manya-long-day style." Vorticella, being the wife of an important townsman, had naturally the satisfaction of seeing "The Channel Islands " reviewed by all the organs of Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturally the opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the reception of "critical opinions." This ornamental volume lay on a special table in her drawing-room, close to the still more gorgeously bound work of which it was the significant 1 The Two Noble Kinsmen. |