The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

young nations with withered traditions.  Yet it is before this prospect
that the provincial overseas lifts up his voice in a boast or a promise
common enough among the incapable young, but pardonable only in senility.
He promises the world a literature, an art, that shall be new because his
forest is untracked and his town just built.  But what the newness is to
be he cannot tell.  Certain words were dreadful once in the mouth of
desperate old age.  Dreadful and pitiable as the threat of an impotent
king, what shall we name them when they are the promise of an impotent
people?  'I will do such things: what they are yet I know not.'

A REMEMBRANCE

When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth shall be rolled
up and sealed with their records within them, there will be no
remembrance left open, except this, of a man whose silence seems better
worth interpreting than the speech of many another.  Of himself he has
left no vestiges.  It was a common reproach against him that he never
acknowledged the obligation to any kind of restlessness.  The kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence, but as he did none there was nothing for it
but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure.  The
delicate, the abstinent, the reticent graces were his in the heroic
degree.  Where shall I find a pen fastidious enough to define and limit
and enforce so many significant negatives?  Words seem to offend by too
much assertion, and to check the suggestions of his reserve.  That
reserve was life-long.  Loving literature, he never lifted a pen except
to write a letter.  He was not inarticulate, he was only silent.  He had
an exquisite style from which to refrain.  The things he abstained from
were all exquisite.  They were brought from far to undergo his judgment,
if haply he might have selected them.  Things ignoble never approached
near enough for his refusal; they had not with him so much as that
negative connexion.  If I had to equip an author I should ask no better
than to arm him and invest him with precisely the riches that were
renounced by the man whose intellect, by integrity, had become a presence-
chamber.
It was by holding session among so many implicit safeguards that he
taught, rather than by precepts.  Few were these in his speech, but his
personality made laws for me.  It was a subtle education, for it
persuaded insensibly to a conception of my own.  How, if he would not
define, could I know what things were and what were not worthy of his
gentle and implacable judgment?  I must needs judge them for myself, yet
he constrained me in the judging.  Within that constraint and under that
stimulus, which seemed to touch the ultimate springs of thoughts before
they sprang, I began to discern all things in literature and in life--in
the chastity of letters and in the honour of life--that I was bound to
love.  Not the things of one character only, but excellent things of