in vital relation to it, is that, when reproduced by that mind, it shall be with a modification. But worse than the mere incessant reproduction of propositions and particular expressions already worn threadbare, are certain larger accompanying forms of the Trite, which consist in the feeble assumption of entire modes of thought, already exhausted of their virtue by writers in whom they were natural. As an instance, we may cite a certain grandiose habit, common of late in the description of character. Men are no longer men in many of our popular biographic sketches, but prophets, seers, volcanoes, cataracts, whirlwinds of passion-vast physical entities, seething inwardly with unheard-of confusions, and passing, all alike, through a necessary process of revolution which converts chaos into cosmos, and brings their roaring energy at last into harmony with the universe. Now he were a most thankless as well as a most unintelligent reader who did not recognise the noble power of thought, ay, and the exactitude of biographic art, exhibited in certain famous specimens of character-painting which have been the prototypes in this style-who did not see that there the writer began firmly with the actual man, dark-haired or fair-haired, tall or short, who was the object of his study; and, only when he had most accurately figured him and his circumstances, passed into that world of large discourse which each man carries attached to him, as his spiritual self, and in the representation and analysis of which, since it has no physical boundaries, all analogies of volcanoes, whirlwinds, and other spacefilling agencies may well be helpful. But in the parodies of this style all is featureless; it is not men at all that we see, but supposititious beings like the phantoms which are said to career in the darkness over Scandinavian iceplains. Character is the most complex and varied thing extant-consisting not of vague monotonous masses, but of involutions and subtleties in and in for ever; the art of describing it may well employ whole coming generations of

writers; and the fallacy is that all great painting must be done with the big brush, and that even cameos may be cut with pickaxes.

I have had half a mind to include among recent forms of the Trite the habit of incessant allusion to a round of favourite characters of the past, and especially to certain magnates of the literary series-Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Scott, Goethe, and others. But I believe this would be wrong. Although we do often get tired of references to these names, and of disquisitions written about them and about them; although we may sometimes think that the large amount of our literary activity which is devoted to such mere stock-taking of what has been left us by our predecessors is a bad sign, and that we might push intellectually out on our own account more boldly if our eyes were less frequently retroverted; although, even in the interest of retrospection itself, we might desire that the objects of our worship were more numerous, and that, to effect this, our historians would resuscitate for us a goodly array of the Dii minorum gentium, to have their turn with the greater gods-yet, in the main, the intellectual habit of which we speak is one that has had and will have unusually rich results. For these great men of the past are, as it were, the peaks, more or less distant, that surround the plain where we have our dwelling; we cannot lift our eyes without seeing them; and no length or repetition of gaze can exhaust their aspects. here we must guard against a possible misapprehension of what has been said as to the Trite in general. There are notions permanent and elemental in the very constitution of humanity, simple and deep beyond all power of modification, the same yesterday and to-day, incapable almost of being stated by any one except as all would state them, and which yet never are and never can be trite. How man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, how he comes from darkness and disappears in darkness again, how the good that he

And

would he does not and the evil that he would not still he does-these and other forms of the same conception of time and death, interwoven with certain visual conceptions of space, and with the sense of an inscrutable power beyond, have accompanied the race hitherto, as identified with its consciousness. Whether, with one philosophy, we regard these as the largest objects of thought, or, with another, as the necessary forms of human sensibility, equally they are ultimate, and those souls in which they are strongest, which can least tear themselves away from them, are the most truly and grandly human. Add the primary affections, the feelings that belong to the most common and enduring facts of human experience. In recollections of these are the touches that make the whole world kin; these give the melodies to which intellect can but construct the harmonies; it is from a soil of such simple and deep conceptions that all genius must spring. While the branches and extreme twigs are putting forth those fresh sprouts of new truth and new phantasy that we spoke of, nay, in order that this green wealth and perpetual proof of life may not fail, the roots must be there. And so, in literature, return as we may to those oldest facts and feelings, we need never doubt their novelty. Hear how one rude Scottish rhymer found out for himself all over again the fact that life has its sorrows, and, to secure his copyright, registered the date of his discovery :

"Upon the saxteen hundred year

Of God and thretty-three Frae Christ was born, wha bought us dear,

As writings testifie,

On January the sixteenth day,
As I did lie alone,

I thus unto myself did say,

'Ah! man was made to moan.'

with the Trite; when so seldom can one take up a bit of writing and find any stroke of true intellectual action in it; when, time after time, one receives even periodicals of high repute, and, turning over their pages, finds half their articles of a kind the non-existence of which would have left the world not one whit the poorer-here an insipid mince of facts from a popular book, there a twitter of doctrinal twaddle which would weary you from your feeblest relative, and again a criticism on the old "beauty and blemish" plan of a poem long ago judged by everybody for himself; when, worse still, the Trite passes into Cant, and one is offended by knobs and gobbets of a spurious theology, sent floating, for purposes halfhypocritical, down a stream of what else would be simple silliness,-little wonder that men of honest minds find it sound economy to assume habitually a sour mood towards all literature whatever, allowing the opposite mood to develop itself rarely and on occasion. As it may be noted of bank-cashiers that, by long practice, they have learnt to survey the crowd outside the counters rather repellingly than responsively, saving their recognitions for personal friends, and any respect or curiosity that may be left in them for the bearers of very big warrants, so, and by a similar training, have some of the best of our professional critics become case-hardened to the sight of the daily world of writers, each with his little bit of paper, besieging their bar. It is not, however, of this natural callousness that we speak, but of a habit of mind sometimes beginning in this, but requiring worse elements for its formation. No one can look about him without marking the extent to which a blasé spirit is infecting the British literary mind. The thing is complained of everywhere under a variety of phrases-want of faith, want of earnest purpose, scepticism, pococurantism. For our purpose none of these names seems so suitable as the one we have chosen. On the one hand, the charges of "want of faith" and the like are often urged against men who have a

hundred times more of real faith and of active energy directed by that faith than those who bring the charges, and, when interpreted, they often mean nothing more than an intellect too conscientious to surround itself with mystifications and popular deceits of colour when it may walk in white light. On the other hand, by the term Blasé we preserve a sense of the fact that those to whom the vice is attributed, are frequently, if not generally, men of cultivated and even fastidious minds, writing very carefully and pertinently, but ruled throughout by a deplorable disposition ruinous to their own strength, restricting them to a petty service in the sarcastic and the small, and making them the enemies of everything within their range that manifests the height or the depth of the unjaded human spirit. There are, indeed, two classes of critics in whom this vice appears the light and trivial, to whom everything is but matter for witty sparkle; and the grave and acrimonious, who fly more seriously, and carry venom in their stings. But, in both, the forms in which the spirit presents itself are singularly alike.

One form is that of appending to what is meant to be satirized certain words signifying that the critic has looked into it and found it mere imposture. "All that sort of thing" is a favourite phrase for the purpose. "Civil and religious liberty and all that sort of thing," "High art and all that sort of thing," "Young love and all that sort of thing;" is there anything more common than such combinations? Then, to give scope for verbal variety, there are such words as "Dodge" and "Business" equally suitable. "The philanthropic dodge," "The transcendental business"-so and otherwise are modes of thought and action fitted with nicknames. Now, nicknames are legitimate; the power of sneering was given to man to be used; and nothing is more gratifying than to see an idea which is proving a nuisance, sent clattering away with a hue and cry after it and a tinkettle tied to its tail. But the practice we speak of is passing all bounds, and

is becoming a mere trick whereby a few impudent minds may exercise an influence to which they have no natural right, and abase all the more timid intelligence in their neighbourhood down to their own level. For against this trick of nicknames as practised by some of our pert gentry, what thought or fact or interest of man, from the world's beginning till now, so solemn as to be safe? The "Hear, O heaven, and give ear, O earth, business," "the Hamlet's soliloquy dodge," "The death of Socrates, martyrdom for truth, and all that sort of thing"-where lies our security that impudence, growing omnipotent, may not reach even to heights like these? Already that intermediate height seems to be attained, where systems of thought that have occupied generations of the world's intelligence, and swayed for better or worse vast lengths of human action, are disposed of with a sneer. Calvinism figures, we dare say, as "the brimstone business;" German philosophy as "the unconditioned, and all that sort of thing;" and we may hear ere long of one momentous direction of recent scientific thought under the convenient name of "the Darwin dodge." It would be unjust to say that the blasé spirit, wherever it is most respectably represented, has yet become so impertinent as this; and it would be peevish to suppose that a spurt of fun may not ascend occasionally as high as Orion himself without disrespect done or intended. But the danger is that, where this sarcastic mood towards contemporary efforts of thought or movements of social zeal is long kept up without some counteracting discipline, the whole mind will be shrivelled into that one mood, till all distinction of noble and mean is lost sight of, and the passing history of the human mind. seems but an evolution of roguery. A Mephistopheles going about with a Faust, whistling down his grandiloquence and turning his enthusiasms into jest, is but the type perhaps of a conjunction proper to no age in particular; but, necessary as the conjunction may be, who is there that would not

rather have his own being merged in the corporate Faust of his time than be a part of the being of its corporate Mephistopheles?

A more refined manifestation of the blasé spirit in literature occurs in a certain cunning use of quotation-marks for the purpose of discrediting maxims and beliefs in popular circulation. A word or a phrase is put within inverted commas in a way to signify that it is quoted not from any author in particular, but from the common-place book of that great blatant beast, the public. Thus I may say "Civil and Religious Liberty," or "Patriotism," or "Toleration," or "The Oppressed Nationalities," or "Philanthropy," hedging the words in with quotation-marks, so as to hint that I, original-minded person that I am, don't mean to vouch for the ideas corresponding, and indeed, in the mighty voyage of my private intellect, have left them far behind. Now here again there is a fair and a foul side of the practice. Frequently by such a use of quotation-marks all that is meant is that a writer, having no time to adjust his own exact relations to an idea, begs the use of it in a general way for what it seems worth. Farther, when more of scepticism or sarcasm is intended, the practice may still be as fair as it is convenient. When an idea has been long in circulation, ten to one, by the very movement of the collective mind through so much of varied subsequent circumstance, it has ceased to have that amount of vital relationship to the rest of present fact and present aspiration, which would make it fully a truth. No harm, in such a case, in indicating the predicament in which it stands by quotation-marks; no harm if by such a device it is meant even to express more of dissent from the idea than of remaining respect for it. The visible inclosure within quotation-marks is, as it were, a mechanical arrangement for keeping a good-for-nothing idea an hour or so in the stocks. The crowd point their fingers at him; the constables. will know him again; if he has any shame left, he will be off from that parish as soon as he is released. But all

depends on the discretion exercised by those who award the punishment. Where a Regan and a Cornwall are the justices, it may be a Kent, a King's Earl and messenger, that is put in the stocks; and, after his first protest, he may bear the indignity philosophically and suffer not a whit in the regard of the rightminded. And so the office of deciding what are and what are not good-fornothing ideas is one in which there may be fatal mistakes. After all, the fundamental and hereditary articles in the creed of the blatant beast are pretty sure to have a considerable deal of truth in them; and, though it may do the old fellow good to poke him up a bit, there is a point beyond which it may be dangerous to provoke him, and sophisms had better keep out of his way. In other words, though there may be notions or feelings whose tenure is provisional, there are others which humanity has set store by for ages, and shows no need or inclination to part with yet. It is the habit of heartlessly pecking at these that shows a soul that is blasé. Of late, for example, it has been a fashion with a small minority, of British writers to assert their culture by a very supercilious demeanour towards an idea which ought, beyond all others, to be sacred in this island-the idea of Liberty. Listen to them when this notion or any of its equivalents turns up for their notice or comment, and the impression they give by their language is that in their private opinion it is little better than clap-trap. By all that is British, it is time that this whey-faced intellectualism should be put to the blush! Like any other thought or phrase of man, Liberty itself may stand in need of re-definition and re-explication from time to time; but woe to any time in which the vague old sound shall cease to correspond, in the actual feelings of men, with the measureless reality of half their being! From the depths of the past the sound has come down to us; after we are in our graves, it will be ringing along the avenues of the future; and, in the end, it will be the test of the worth of all our philosophy whether this sound has been inter

cepted or deadened by it, or only transmitted the clearer.

What in the blasé habit of mind renders it so hurtful to the interests of literature is that it introduces into all departments a contentedness with the proximate-i.e. with the nearest thing that will do. For real power, for really great achievement in any department of intellect, a certain fervour of feeling, a certain avidity as for conquest, a certain disdain of the petty circle within the horizon as already one's own and possessed, or, at the least, a certain quiet hopefulness, is absolutely necessary. But let even a naturally strong mind catch the contagion of the Blasé, and this spur is gone. The near then satisfiesthe near in fact, which makes History poor and beggarly; the near in doctrine, which annuls Speculative Philosophy, and provides instead a miscellany of little tenets more or less shrewd; the near in imagination, which checks in Poetry all force of wing. I believe that this defect may be observed very extensively in our current literature, appearing in a double form. In the first place, it may be seen affecting the personal literary practice of many men of ability and culture far beyond the average, making them contented on all subjects with that degree of intellectual exertion which simply clears them of the Trite and brings them to the first remove from commonplace, and thus gradually unfitting them for the larger efforts for which nature may have intended them. There are not a few such men-the cochin-chinas of literature, as one might call them; sturdy in the legs, but with degenerate power of flight. In the second place, the same cause produces in these men and in others, when they act as critics, a sense of irritation and of offended taste (not the less mean that it is perfectly honest), when they contemplate in any of their contemporaries the gestures and evolutions of an intellect more natural than their own. The feeling is that which we might suppose in honest poultry, regarding the movements of unintelligible birds overhead such movements do, to the

:

poultry, outrage all principles of correct ornithology. Let any one who wishes to understand more particularly what is meant, read the speeches of the Grecian chiefs in council in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and then fancy how such a bit of writing would fare at the hands of many literary critics now-a-days, if it came before them anonymously. But it is, perhaps, as an influence tending to arrest the development of speculative thought, specially so called, that the distaste of so many literary men for all but the proximate operates most detrimentally. The habit of sneering at Speculative Philosophy, both name and thing, is a world too common among men who ought to know better. Sneer as they will, it has been true from the beginning of time, and will be true to the end, that the precise measure of the total intellectual worth of any man, or of any age, is the measure of the speculative energy lodged in him, or in it. Take our politics of the last twelve years for an example. How much of British political writing during these years has consisted in vilification of certain men, basing their theories on elementary principles, and styled visionaries or fanatics accordingly. And yet, if matters are well looked at, these very men are now seen to be the only men who apprehended tendencies rightly; they alone have not had to recant; and it is the others-the from-hand-to-mouth men in politics-that have turned out to be the fools.

Besides other partial remedies that there may be for the wide-spread and still spreading vice of the Blasé among our men of intellect, there may be in reserve, for aught we know, some form of that wholesale remedy by which Providence in many an instance hitherto has revived the jaded organisms of nations. Those fops in uniform, those loungers of London clubs and ballrooms, who a few years ago used to be the types to our wits of manhood grown useless, from whose lips even their mother-speech came minced and clipped for very languor of life,-how in that Russian peninsula they straightened