The Upton Letters | Page 4

one appreciates the benefits and
beauty of sincerity, to say what one really thinks, without reference to
what one supposes the person one is talking to would like or expect one
to think--and to do it, too, without brusqueness or rudeness or
self-assertion.
Boys are generally ashamed of saying anything that is good about each
other; and yet they are as a rule intensely anxious to be POPULAR, and
pathetically unaware that the shortest cut to popularity is to see the
good points in every one and not to shrink from mentioning them. I
once had a pupil, a simple-minded, serene, ordinary creature, who
attained to extraordinary popularity. I often wondered why; after he had
left, I asked a boy to tell me; he thought for a moment, and then he said,
"I suppose, sir, it was because when we were all talking about other
chaps--and one does that nearly all the time--he used to be as much
down on them as any one else, and he never jawed--but he always had
something nice to say about them, not made up, but as if it just came
into his head."
Well, I must stop; I suppose you are forging out over the Bay, and
sleeping, I hope, like a top. There is no sleep like the sleep on a
steamer--profound, deep, so that one wakes up hardly knowing where
or who one is, and in the morning you will see the great purple
league-long rollers. I remember them; I generally felt very unwell; but
there was something tranquillising about them, all the same-- and then
the mysterious steamers that used to appear alongside, pitching and
tumbling, with the little people moving about on the decks; and a mile
away in a minute. Then the water in the wake, like marble, with its

white-veined sapphire, and the hiss and smell of the foam; all that is
very pleasant. Good night, Herbert!--Ever yours,
T. B.

UPTON, Feb. 9, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I hope you have got Lockhart's Life of Scott
with you; if not, I will send it out to you. I have been reading it lately,
and I have a strong wish that you should do the same. It has not all the
same value; the earlier part, the account of the prosperous years, is
rather tiresome in places. There is something boisterous,
undignified--even, I could think, vulgar--about the aims and ambitions
depicted. It suggests a prosperous person, seated at a well-filled table,
and consuming his meat with a hearty appetite. The desire to stand well
with prominent persons, to found a family, to take a place in the county,
is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire; but it is a commonplace
ambition. There is a charm in the simplicity, the geniality, the childlike
zest of the man; but there is nothing great about it. Then comes the
crash; and suddenly, as though a curtain drew up, one is confronted
with the spectacle of an indomitable and unselfish soul, bearing a heavy
burden with magnificent tranquillity, and settling down with splendid
courage to an almost intolerable task. The energy displayed by our hero
in attempting to write off the load of debt that hung round his neck is
superhuman, august. We see him completing in a single day what
would take many writers a week to finish, and doing it day by day, with
bereavements, sorrows, ill- health, all closing in upon him. The quality
of the work he thus did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of
life when under normal circumstances he would probably have laid his
pen down. But the spectacle of the man's patient energy and divine
courage is one that goes straight to the heart. It is then that one realises
that the earlier and more prosperous life has all the value of contrast;
one recognises that here was a truly unspoilt nature; and that, if we can
dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that
overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune,
but gifts from the very hand of the Father--to purify a noble soul from

the dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity
of living in a way that should furnish an eternal and imperishable
example.
I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble and
beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years. The
simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page. There are
no illusions about himself or his work. He hears that Southey has been
speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says plainly that
such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel case; that