AMONG the many complaints which men are all now urging against their countrymen, one that is heard, not most frequently nor most vociferously, but still from the kind of men who are best worth listening to, calls attention to the disappearance from among us of the Scholar-the man who loves learning and thinking beyond all other things on earth, and for themselves. Why, it is asked by men who pass no day without contemplation, and even sometimes by the better sort of secondary writers and bookmen themselves-why does England attempt so little in those wide fields of literature and philosophy where so much might be done that demands from the doer, not genius, nor any other miracle, but simply enlightenment and strenuous assiduity? The answer is not very difficult, nor the reason very far to seek. Perhaps the closeness with which the explanation lies to our hand accounts for its having been too much overlooked in favour of more ingenious theories. It is not because he is mainly Saxon, nor because he has learnt too much Latin and Greek and too little of other things, nor because we have no organized bodies for literary direction and guidance, that our average man of letters does so comparatively little for sound learning and wide thought. All these influences may enter into the result, and indirectly pave the way for it. But the immediate cause of what we may without ill-nature call the superficiality of so much of the mass of contemporary literary production is the increasing taste of the times for luxurious living. The present theory of life is that you should live in a very costly manner, and that you should work very hard in order to be able to afford to live in this manner. Such is the gospel of English industrialism, and the man of letters borrows it and acts upon it, with the singular and displeasing, but perfectly natural, consequence, that lite

rature is more and more steadily becoming a purely industrial pursuit.

The writer, after all, is a man even as other men are. He is accessible to the temptations of the flesh like the mortal moulded of ordinary clay, and his fidelity to the Muses may be too severely strained by the attractions of the Graces of society. He is surrounded by the sight of luxury in every form it comes so close to him. No longer relegated, as he was a hundred years ago, to the garret and the tavern and the ham-and-beef shop, he sits at the tables of rich and great people, learns to criticise a menu, and can discriminate to a nicety between the competing flavours of delicate dishes and expensive wines. He is no dim-eyed blockhead that he should be insensible to the graces of handsome glass and plate and sumptuous service. The advantages of fine rooms and splendid furniture are as visible to him as they are to other people. Then he knows people who have horses and carriages, and boxes at the opera, and, by seeing these things closely enough and yet not too closely, he soon discerns how pleasant they are to possess, while he does not know the sort of burdens they entail by way of compensation. Besides all this, he hears acquaintances talk of the joys of travel, how delicious Swiss landscape is, what treasures of art a man may behold at Florence, and Dresden, and Munich, and how the mind is refreshed by such changes of scene and circumstance. The more ready the welcome, therefore, which people who are well-to-do in the world now extend to the man who professes to purvey ideas and knowledge to them, the more inevitably has it brought him into contact with habits and customs that are amazingly graceful and fascinating, but which require a good deal of money every year to keep up in anything like a satisfactory or honest way. And then we come to the other change that

has so obviously taken place in literature. Society will not only ask the author to dinner, but they will read, or at all events they will buy, the books that he writes, provided the books do not fly too high, nor go too deep, nor extend over too many volumes. Thus the taste for fine things is stimulated, and at the same time the means for gratifying it are placed more or less abundantly within reach.

In the old days, to have exhibited to the writer the luxuries of the rich would have been to open a glimpse of Paradise to him, and then instantly to kick him downstairs to the dulness of the hard earth again. It is no longer so. The writer has only to make his commodities of the marketable kind, and send them to market, and he is sure to receive as fair a day's wages for his day's work as if he were offering tallow or calico for sale. Of course, he never makes such incomes as may be made in trade, but money enough is within his reach if he likes to stretch out his arm for it, to give him command of a good many luxuries and an occasional extravagance. He may keep a horse, and belong to a good club, where now and again he entertains in a sufficiently liberal style, and may take his trip in foreign parts like another. His life cannot by any means be described as "plain living and high thinking," but it is very comfortable and very innocent, and must be pronounced a singularly marked improvement upon the manner of existence of such of his predecessors as Dryden, and Goldsmith, and Johnson. And all this time the writer's work is good and useful work. It is eminently desirable that the journalistic business of a country where the influence of journalism is so strong as it is in England should be done by men of cultivation, mixing in humanizing society, and accustomed to something better than the old Bohemian way of viewing things. When people cry out against clever and instructed men frittering their brains away in the production of periodical literature, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the wastepaper basket, they forget that after all,

as periodical literature is that which reaches the greatest number of minds, its worth is in exact proportion to the number of good men who contribute to produce it, and the more good men there are thus engaged, the more generally wholesome is the influence of the press upon public opinion. Journalism is the very last kind of literary production which should be abandoned to weakheaded writers, without capacity or instruction enough for more enduring work. It is a matter for distinct congratulation for the public when a writer of great ability and cultivation happens to select journalism for his walk in life. Improvement in the amount of cultivation, thoughtfulness, and high intelligence brought to bear in periodical writing, is an indispensable element in a progressive and improving popular opinion. Candid Americans, for example, deplore the excessively low average of culture among their journalists, though there are perhaps one or two at the head of the profession not much below the superior London average. Low class journalists are every bit as mischievous among a reading population as an ignorant clergy is among a population theologically minded. It would be more reasonable, therefore, in people to complain not that so many, but that so few, able and highly instructed men waste their time in writing ephemeral pieces, instead of making the best of it by composing great books. At any rate, if it be an evil that so much literary power is expended in criticism of passing events, or in the non-exhaustive treatment of big subjects, at least the evil is not by any means without compensation.

The misfortune about the present position of literature is that the luxury of the times, by the temptations of example, draws not only clever and intelligent men to the more popular, and therefore the more remunerative, kinds of production, but men with qualities somewhat beyond cleverness, and that sort of intelligence which is naturally most useful in popular writing. In constructing a Utopia that should meet the requirements of the modern time in

a rich country like our own, there should be in the literary hierarchy at least two orders. First, there should be the popular and popularizing writer, who might make as much money as he likes, and spend as much as he makes. Second, the scholar proper, a man superior to the fascinations of luxury, not dependent on much income and much outlay for his happiness, and being rich, if not in the abundance of his possessions, at least in the fewness of his wants; therefore able to pursue habits of studious acquisition and ripening meditation, without too much regard to the quantity of grist which such habits might bring to the mill. Scholarly subjects will certainly not be the means of earning enough money for the writer who handles them in a scholarly manner to clothe himself in purple and linen and to fare sumptuously every day out of the proceeds. A man must be either independent of the sale of his works, or else he must produce marketable stuff, to be able to emulate the pleasant habits of those who live in kings' houses. A book about Averroes and Averroism appears in France and not in England, because such a book will not fetch the writer three hundred and sixty-five muttonchops per annum; perhaps barely as many glasses of small ale. How much less then will it supply him with the more delicate meats and choicer drinks which the English author has taught himself a taste for ?

If a book, even on an elaborate subject, rises to the place of a standard work, then its sale, spread over a long course of years, may eventually make it remunerative. But in point of standard works in the main roads of history and philosophy, English literature is not very badly off. It is in the byepaths, which only the student and the scholarly person traverses, unaccompanied by the general reader, that we are left too much without competent guides. And work in these comparatively untrodden regions, lying away from the great tracks, must always, at all events in an industrial country, be a labour of love. This brings us to

another consideration. The prevalent habits of luxury not only lead men who are more or less dependent for incomes upon what they can earn, to the more remunerative kinds of literature: they also spoil the climate for men who have a fervent love of learning and thinking, and and an adequate independence of money to gratify their tastes. For it may be safely said that to do the best things in literature-in the literature that is not of the grand creative kind, one should say-simplicity of life is, to a certain extent, an indispensable quali fication. The reason is plain. The more a man lays himself out for external things, then clearly the less undivided is the energy which is left for ideas and inward contemplation. If his mind run much in the direction of good dinners and agreeable company, and fine turn-outs and expensive gardens, it will run by so much the less in the direction of more incorporeal matters. If his life with cook and groom is too much drest," then too little of it is given to thinking and to books. It is no rare thing for a love of good eating to go with a strong affection for Latin and Greek, and even theology. But then, in people who thus unite the scholar and the gourmand, scholarship takes rank only with the good things of the palate, and not before them, as one would suppose it ought to do. A delightful book occupies the top level along with a delightful sauce. The one is quite as serious an object of attention, criticism, and sympathy as the other. And we cannot deny that a devotion to books, even of this divided and semifleshly kind, is a creditable and harmless thing. It is better than that absorbing and irrational passion about horses, by which so many hundreds of Englishmen habitually make fools of themselves. It is better than the untempered and essentially meaningless hunt after wealth which is another characteristic national folly. But the kid-gloved fancies of the dilettante contribute very little, if indeed they contribute anything, to the formation of that sort of literature of which we are

talking. They may preserve the traditions of an elegant sect, and keep up the not unserviceable breed of literary exquisites; and this is all for which they are of any use. It is not such help nor such defenders that literature needs. It needs men who are willing to descend into dark pits, and there to dig and delve like the Roman slave in the mines. The power of graceful movement counts for little when there is the work of the hodman to do. It is the defect of so many writers that they do not fully and justly realize how much hodman's work is to be done before you can rear ever so modest a structure, provided the structure is meant to outlive the year. A good book is like a gem, which to those who do not know, tells no tale of the toil that brought it out of the depths. The author with a conscience, and with an appreciation of what is required for the production of the kind of books that our literature needs, and that our people need to be instructed to like, is or ought to be prepared for labours, always as hard, often as mechanical, and usually held in as low estimation as those of the navvy-our great type of a certain stamp of effort.

What the average modern English book lacks is thoroughness. Calling ourselves a practical nation, we are in books, as probably in many more other things than we suspect, the least practical people in the world. Look at a German, how he pries aggressively into every nook and corner of his subject, how he tries every spot of the ground with his pick, if peradventure any morsel of treasure should lie hidden anywhere; how deep he digs, how much he brings up out of the earth, even if he does not always arrange his great heaps as neatly and compactly as one could wish. Why does not your practical Englishman go and do likewise, instead of just scratching the earth as with the foot of a fowl or perhaps only mixing a little water with what matter he has got, and making mud-pies? Or even take the too-underrated Frenchman. Take up Ortolan's edition of Justinian, with its splendid and complete apparatus

of introduction, analysis, translation, exhaustive annotation, and everything else that the most exacting student could need or desire. Then take the current English edition, which, to begin with, is to Ortolan as one of our ordinary new and original dramas is to the French play from which it is adapted. The English "Justinian" is not bad, but then by the side of the French edition it is only a shadow, and an uncommonly attenuated shadow into the bargain. This is only an instance out of a hundred. Of course there are French books fully as shallow and flashy as the shallowest and flashiest of English books. But few other men assault big subjects with the levity and slender equipment that one may see in English writers. Instead of gravely sitting down to count the cost of the siege which they meditate, they are constantly seen to fly at it with an unwise intrepidity, hardly surpassed in the Spanish Don's onslaught on the windmills, and their object is far less chivalrous and creditable, being much too often not a desire to do a piece of thoroughly good work, but to scramble up by means of very indifferent work to some coveted position either inside or outside of literature. They are considerably more anxious to knock up a mere rope-ladder for themselves than to erect any monument more enduring than brass for mankind. this purpose it is clear that a thin and vapid book will not only do as well as, but better than, a more substantial work. It will be understood that all this is not meant for an exhaustive description of the universal condition of English literary workmanship. Masterly works are produced among us now as at all times, and this too in every order of subject. Within the last ten years we have seen such monuments of industry illumined by genius as Mr. Maine's book, and, still more distinguished, Mr. Darwin's two works. Even in a field where Germany usually reigns with no rival, we have seen such incomparably good work as Mr. Munro's edition of Lucretius, and Mr. Robinson Ellis's edition of Catullus. We are now speak

For

ing of the average of literary production in this country, of unavoidably secondrate work. The ground of complaint is that the authors of books only meant to be second-rate are content to bring to them labour and devotion not adequate for more than fifth-rate.

One effect of this is worth noticing as we pass. Contemporary literature is full of speculation, and, as speculation expands, the knowledge from which only truly valuable speculation can issue seems to shrink and contract: speculation-of a sort is so easy. You may find theories of history scattered through the pages of periodicals and books as thick as autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. But the number of men with anything like a systematic knowledge of the solid facts and frame-work of history receives no proportionate increase. The old accusation, that we only care for hard facts, and are indifferent to ideas, has ceased to have any truth in it. We have suffered ourselves to be influenced with an enthusiasm for ideas, and have become a little cool in the pursuit of an accurate knowledge of the circumstances of which the idea is only a complex and synthetic expression. A writer would nowadays think but little of himself if he could not sketch you forth in an airy, graphic manner the outlines of human civilization from the time of the Assyrians down to the fall of the Bastille, within the space of about ten pages of this Magazine. Provided one does not happen to know too much real history, the development of a scheme of this sort is as easy as blowing soap-bubbles, if you have only plenty of suds in the shape of technical philosophic phrases. It is a little odd that one of the several causes for this prevalent love of constructing theories of history-philosophical castles in the air-must undoubtedly be sought in the influence of one of the most accurate, unwearied, and laborious of all living authors. Mr. Carlyle can afford to despise Dryasdust and Smelfungus, because he works hard enough to beat them in their own line, to say nothing of what he can add in his own line, which is not as theirs. Rash men read all this, take his

contempt on trust, and then proceed to write history out of their own headswith what disastrous results is known of all men. Every puny writer thinks he can bend the bow of Ulysses; and the worst of it is, that in literature the suitor can very well go on believing that he hits the mark as brilliantly as the great Ulysses himself. Nothing particular happens to undeceive him. And the same influences which have made so many writers prefer the airier kinds of speculation to the grinding search after the foundation-stones of speculation, have bred in readers a corresponding partiality. Then popular taste reacts again on the author, completing a vicious circle; hypothetical explanation of all the transactions that have taken place in the world gradually superseding in the minds of many writers, and more readers, the proper weighty and minute interest in the actual details of these transactions themselves.

This, however, is only an illustration of that taste for short cuts to literary fame and position which is the natural result of the love of the new literary prizes which such a position confers. The Muses are believed to receive unexampled honour in our time, because authors were never so much asked out to dinner. It is not in such form of honour that they can take delight. The air of gilded saloons gives no kindly nourishment to those habits of sober thought, genial, grave meditation, elevated serenity, and industry, which it should be the scholar's steady aim to cultivate. To him the pomps and vanities of the world are as noxious as they used to seem to the old saints. One need take no impossibly ascetic view of things for the world in general to perceive that to him, at all events, the graceful levities, the time-wasting diversions, the spirit-breaking dulnesses, of general society, are discordant and futile.

What, then, it may be said, is Apollo never to unbend the bow? Is the scholar to be inhuman? This he is assuredly not to be. But it is far from clear that the frivolous associations of