The Egoist | Page 4

accessories in the exclusive pursuit
of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men;
vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of
persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But there is
a question of the value of a run at his heels.
Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on
earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the
Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. So full of
it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have
written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the
Book needs a powerful compression.
Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can
studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretch from
the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues
dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching breath by
good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of the Pole?
Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers the heart, ages
the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage finally to print
one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic outsider?
We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge we want will not be
more present with us than it was when the chapters hung their end over
the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great lord and master
contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that within!
In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists are difficult: it
is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), the inward mirror, the
embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give us those
interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to the very
Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive him to
indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious transcription of all
the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for
our present branfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the

noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of
sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be
the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for
an antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the
engine-box of headlong trains; and Science introduced us to our
o'er-hoary ancestry--them in the Oriental posture; whereupon we set up
a primaeval chattering to rival the Amazon forest nigh nightfall, cured,
we fancied. And before daybreak our disease was hanging on to us
again, with the extension of a tail. We had it fore and aft. We were the
same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we got from Science.
Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may be left.
The chief consideration for us is, what particular practice of Art in
letters is the best for the perusal of the Book of our common wisdom;
so that with clearer minds and livelier manners we may escape, as it
were, into daylight and song from a land of fog-horns. Shall we read it
by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal,
or pointed with examples and types under the broad Alpine survey of
the spirit born of our united social intelligence, which is the Comic
Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that there is a constant
tendency in the Book to accumulate excess of substance, and such
repleteness, obscuring the glass it holds to mankind, renders us inexact
in the recognition of our individual countenances: a perilous thing for
civilization. And these wise men are strong in their opinion that we
should encourage the Comic Spirit, who is after all our own offspring,
to relieve the Book. Comedy, they say, is the true diversion, as it is
likewise the key of the great Book, the music of the Book. They tell us
how it condenses whole sections of the book in a sentence, volumes in
a character; so that a fair pan of a book outstripping thousands of
leagues when unrolled may he compassed in one comic sitting.
For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the page
before us, if we would be men. One, with an index on the Book, cries
out, in a style pardonable to his fervency: The remedy of your frightful
affliction is here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and not in Science,
nor