without the employment of any magic spell, any human being may raise a devil. The whole intercourse of little children with one another, is a series of fallings-out and makings-up again. And in this as in other things, men are but bigger children. Their intercourse is very much the same. Their chills and glows, their quarrellings and re-unions, are less demonstrative: because part of the education of years is to check the expression of feeling, in these as in all things beside. But one day you will be pleased with a friend, and the next day disappointed in him. It will be so to the end and you must make up your mind to it, and not quarrel unless for very grave cause. Your friend, you have found out, is not perfect. Nor are you and you cannot expect to get much more than you give. You must look for much weakness, foolishness, and vanity, in human nature it is unhappy if you are too sharp to see them. CHAPTER XII. MY VESTRY WINDOWS. Now let me wander into the wood, turning out of the hard dusty highway. There are no leaves now, indeed, upon the trees: a cold wind (though from the west) has blown for several days, laden with March dust; and everything looks gray, gloomy, dreary. But to me the branches are leafy, and there is green under foot and green overhead and the sunshine comes warmly through the boughs. These lines may be esteemed as an imaginative and even poetical way of stating the fact that on this Monday morning, having cut up a considerable quantity of blue paper into squares, and mended a new pen, I have begun to write a discursive, uncritical, unhistorical, semi-ecclesiastical essay, as in days long ago. It is in a moral sense that I purpose to turn out of the highway into the shade. The coming-in (however brought about) of a Conservative Government is a true consolation to a stupid Tory: we shall not be worried with any material changes for a while : and the opinion of men whose opinion is worth some thing will have more weight in the direction of great affairs than the opinion of masses of mortals the opinion of each of whom on any subject whatsoever is worth nothing at all. This takes a weight off one. We can look at green fields and old trees without the intruding sense that all that solid landscape is in fact spinning down a break-neck descent that may end Heaven knows where or how. Then, practical life is very hard. The writer hates it. You do not know how disagreeable human beings may be, till you come to deal with them in the details of business more es : pecially in any matter which may cost them money. The reason why the writer is not a Chief Justice is, that in his youth, having (not without success) studied the Law, he discovered what a repellent side of humanity he must be conversant with who gives himself to its severities; and therefore turned aside into a sacred calling in which he vainly thought that the quest of quietness would be successful: whereinto he vainly thought that the sordidness of secular business would not intrude. And no doubt there is less of it in the Church than elsewhere. But there is a great deal too and unless one turns into a cowardly Epicurean, it must be faced and done: while one is not strung up to the facing and doing of it as one would have been under another training. A popular writer has said that considering how noble a profession the Law (theoretically and transcendently) is, it is amazing how it brings one in contact with ugly people, dirty people, and blackguard people. This witness is true, to the writer's own knowledge: but it may well be doubted if in any mode of life, unless that of a selfindulging recluse whose means enable him to live between his library and his trees and flowers, mortal man can be free from the necessity of contact with the three classes named. To which may be added, the pig. headed, the crotchety, the cantankerous, the densely stupid, the pharisaic, the puritanical, the thrawn, the malignant, the slanderous, the boastful. For there is a great deal of human nature in human beings: and there is a great deal in human nature that would be a great deal better away. There are folk whom the highway suits, with its hurry and its dust: who are happy in it, and are able to do their best work in it. Let such be held worthy of all honour the world could not go on without them. There are other folk who, though able to do their work in the thoroughfare, are always thankful to get out of it and to whom the end of work is ever to enjoy rest. Within the writer's experience, these have been the hardest workers of all. : The peculiar fashion in which the present writer gets away from the worry, irritation, and severity of practica! life, is by writing an essay. Would he could write a novel! It would be so sunshiny, so pleasant, so hopeful, so comfortable, that all worried and wearied men of business and of middle age, with families, would fly to it in the evenings, and read it over and over, and find a blessed retreat in it from all their cares. That is the good of fiction. Why on earth, when you are tired of the gray overcast daylight of reality, open a book in which you have the same dreary thing over again : involve yourself in further perplexity and worry when you have more than enough. already? It is true to life, no doubt: but we have the real thing already. We want it idealized: brightened up: let the portrait be flattered greatly. There is that admirably wise and beautiful story Ivan de Biron, which was published a little while ago. It is a vivid historical picture of an extraordinary mode of life: it is full of little passages so wise and beautiful that they make one think of Shakespeare: but the author, resolved to be truthful rather than hopeful, resolutely presses on us from first to last what a disappointment is this life. No doubt it is: but suffer us sometimes to forget it! And there is a cheerful way, not untrue either, of looking at things. Both nature and life sometimes wear a smile. Now, one would wish to catch that, and perpetuate it. Yet, though incapable of writing a story, into whose cheerful sunshine one might retreat from the everyday task and perplexity, one may experience a lesser measure of the like relief in the production of a dissertation. The considerations which you never dream of suggesting to the hard-headed and unsympathetic mortals with whom your daily business must be done, you confide to the ready page: and they will find the people who |