Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Too Ready Writer

One who talks too much, hindering the rest of the company from taking

their turn, and apparently seeing no reason why they should not rather

desire to know his opinion or experience in relation to all subjects, or

at least to renounce the discussion of any topic where he can make no

figure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly of work

which others would willingly have shared in. However various and

brilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of impoverishing us by

excluding the contributions of other minds, which attract our curiosity

the more because he has shut them up in silence. Besides, we get tired

of a "manner" in conversation as in painting, when one theme after

another is treated with the same lines and touches. I begin with a

liking for an estimable master, but by the time he has stretched his

interpretation of the world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I have

had what the cautious Scotch mind would call "enough" of him. There is

monotony and narrowness already to spare in my own identity; what comes

to me from without should be larger and more impartial than the judgment

of any single interpreter. On this ground even a modest person, without

power or will to shine in the conversation, may easily find the

predominating talker a nuisance, while those who are full of matter on

special topics are continually detecting miserably thin places in the

web of that information which he will not desist from imparting. Nobody

that I know of ever proposed a testimonial to a man for thus

volunteering the whole expense of the conversation.

Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writer

who plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker plays

in what is traditionally called conversation? The busy Adrastus, whose

professional engagements might seem more than enough for the nervous

energy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chief

current subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the Idea of the

Infinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and the

grape disease in the south of France, is generally praised if not

admired for the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers of

work. Poor Theron, who has some original ideas on a subject to which he

has given years of research and meditation, has been waiting anxiously

from month to month to see whether his condensed exposition will find a

place in the next advertised programme, but sees it, on the contrary,

regularly excluded, and twice the space he asked for filled with the

copious brew of Adrastus, whose name carries custom like a celebrated

trade-mark. Why should the eager haste to tell what he thinks on the

shortest notice, as if his opinion were a needed preliminary to

discussion, get a man the reputation of being a conceited bore in

conversation, when nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself in

print? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering at a time, and

there is the comfort of thinking that everywhere else other

fellow-citizens who have something to say may get a chance of delivering

themselves; but the exorbitant writer can occupy space and spread over

it the more or less agreeable flavour of his mind in four "mediums" at

once, and on subjects taken from the four winds. Such restless and

versatile occupants of literary space and time should have lived earlier

when the world wanted summaries of all extant knowledge, and this

knowledge being small, there was the more room for commentary and

conjecture. They might have played the part of an Isidor of Seville or a

Vincent of Beauvais brilliantly, and the willingness to write everything

themselves would have been strictly in place. In the present day, the

busy retailer of other people's knowledge which he has spoiled in the

handling, the restless guesser and commentator, the importunate hawker

of undesirable superfluities, the everlasting word-compeller who rises

early in the morning to praise what the world has already glorified, or

makes himself haggard at night in writing out his dissent from what

nobody ever believed, is not simply "gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihil

agens"--he is an obstruction. Like an incompetent architect with too

much interest at his back, he obtrudes his ill-considered work where

place ought to have been left to better men.

Is it out of the question that we should entertain some scruple about

mixing our own flavour, as of the too cheap and insistent nutmeg, with

that of every great writer and every great subject?--especially when our

flavour is all we have to give, the matter or knowledge having been

already given by somebody else. What if we were only like the Spanish

wine-skins which impress the innocent stranger with the notion that the

Spanish grape has naturally a taste of leather? One could wish that even

the greatest minds should leave some themes unhandled, or at least leave

us no more than a paragraph or two on them to show how well they did in

not being more lengthy.

Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected from the young; but

happily their readiness to mirror the universe anew for the rest of

mankind is not encouraged by easy publicity. In the vivacious Pepin I

have often seen the image of my early youth, when it seemed to me

astonishing that the philosophers had left so many difficulties

unsolved, and that so many great themes had raised no great poet to

treat them. I had an elated sense that I should find my brain full of

theoretic clues when I looked for them, and that wherever a poet had not

done what I expected, it was for want of my insight. Not knowing what

had been said about the play of Romeo and Juliet, I felt myself capable

of writing something original on its blemishes and beauties. In relation

to all subjects I had a joyous consciousness of that ability which is

prior to knowledge, and of only needing to apply myself in order to

master any task--to conciliate philosophers whose systems were at

present but dimly known to me, to estimate foreign poets whom I had not

yet read, to show up mistakes in an historical monograph that roused my

interest in an epoch which I had been hitherto ignorant of, when I

should once have had time to verify my views of probability by looking

into an encyclopaedia. So Pepin; save only that he is industrious while

I was idle. Like the astronomer in Rasselas, I swayed the universe in my

consciousness without making any difference outside me; whereas Pepin,

while feeling himself powerful with the stars in their courses, really

raises some dust here below. He is no longer in his spring-tide, but

having been always busy he has been obliged to use his first impressions

as if they were deliberate opinions, and to range himself on the

corresponding side in ignorance of much that he commits himself to; so

that he retains some characteristics of a comparatively tender age, and

among them a certain surprise that there have not been more persons

equal to himself. Perhaps it is unfortunate for him that he early gained

a hearing, or at least a place in print, and was thus encouraged in

acquiring a fixed habit of writing, to the exclusion of any other

bread-winning pursuit. He is already to be classed as a "general

writer," corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the "general

reader," and with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him to

keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds himself under an

obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; and

having habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, his

interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a

mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to

decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that

dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which

were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape

as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into "style," and

into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the

presence of other men's failures is turning into the official arrogance

of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been

called on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken on

a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences.

He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus who

combines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in a

lunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in various

forms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre of

all American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, what

shall we say to the man who believes himself in possession of the

unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all

sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin,

though less political, may by-and-by manifest a persuasion hardly more

sane, for he is beginning to explain people's writing by what he does

not know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stage

which I have confessed to be that of my own early astonishment at my

powerful originality; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan,

I may say, "But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry might

have been mine."

Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting printed)

before he had considered whether he had the knowledge or belief that

would furnish eligible matter. At first perhaps the necessity galled him

a little, but it is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a

habit as the outpouring of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually being

condemned to have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness of

enjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what is before him: his

perceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms suitable to a

printed judgment, and hence they will often turn out to be as much to

the purpose if they are written without any direct contemplation of the

object, and are guided by a few external conditions which serve to

classify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty of

accurate mental vision: having bound himself to express judgments which

will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted

his perceptions by continual preoccupation. We cannot command veracity

at will: the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health

that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly

said, "The penalty of untruth is untruth." But Pepin is only a mild

example of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing

carries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease.

And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have

anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has

not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth

considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly

there is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a

ridiculously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the sense

of having delivered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of more

thorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a

past occasion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income)

in his own shallownesses and mistakes, and must desire their prosperity.

Like the professional prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that

keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him.

It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of fortune and

the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is

another's calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course which

will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves

to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order

that we may have the air of being right.

In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin has remained the

more self-contented because he has _not_ written everything he believed

himself capable of. He once asked me to read a sort of programme of the

species of romance which he should think it worth while to write--a

species which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions of

illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's romance was to

present the splendours of the Roman Empire 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 the

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

_na*****_ 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

affectation of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs 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

baptised 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 attitudinising as

on examination his writing shows itself to be? By no means. He has

arrived at his present pass in "the literary calling" through the

self-imposed 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 informed 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'oeil_ 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 was done in the course of his professional

writing, and the public conscience still leaves such writing nearly on

the 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.