The Rhythm of Life and other Essays | Page 6

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
every character. There was no tyranny in such a method. His idleness
justified itself by the liberality it permitted to his taste. Never having
made his love of letters further a secondary purpose, never having
bound the literary genius--that delicate Ariel--to any kind of servitude,
never having so much as permitted himself a prejudice whereby some
of his delights should be stinted while others were indulged beyond the
sanctions of modest reason, he barely tolerated his own preferences,
which lay somewhat on the hither side of full effectiveness of style.
These the range of his reading confessed by certain exclusions.
Nevertheless it was not of deficiencies that he was patient: he did but
respect the power of pause, and he disliked violence chiefly because
violence is apt to confess its own limits. Perhaps, indeed, his own fine
negatives made him only the more sensible of any lack of those literary
qualities that are bound in their full complement to hold themselves at
the disposal of the consummate author--to stand and wait, if they may
do no more.
Men said that he led a DILETTANTE life. They reproached him with
the selflessness that made him somewhat languid. Others, they seemed
to aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living.
So it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that
many of the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands. So
it was, too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not
have loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not
have loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed,
studious, docile, austere? An amateur man he might have been called,
too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or
shaken by the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative
quality of which Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our
happiness. He had always prayed temperate prayers and harboured

probable wishes. His sensibility was extreme, but his thought was
generalised. When he had joy he tempered it not in the common way by
meditation upon the general sorrow but by a recollection of the general
pleasure. It was his finest distinction to desire no differences, no
remembrance, but loss among the innumerable forgotten. And when he
suffered, it was with so quick a nerve and yet so wide an apprehension
that the race seemed to suffer in him. He pitied not himself so tenderly
as mankind, of whose capacity for pain he was then feelingly persuaded.
His darkening eyes said in the extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the
multitude.'

THE SUN

Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so
divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so
immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a
plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky. The curious have an
insufficient motive for going to the mountains if they do it to see the
sunrise. The sun that leaps from a