SILENCE IS GOLD.

'IT is the curious fate of the great man whose Memoirs have been occupying the reading world for the last few years to teach, almost as eloquently by his conduct as by his utterance,

the lesson of our text. Carlyle's sermons on the duty of selfcontrol in expression, like the sermons of many another preacher, have received their most forcible illustration from his own errors. His wordy wailings have to some extent concealed his character. Never was there a case in which it was truer that half is more than the whole. There is a surplusage of ex pression which is all the more misleading because it refers to facts ; and many an error of detail is less important than the loss of proportion which is inevitable when the biographer un veils all he sees. We know more about our great men than we did in the days before it was the fashion to paint them naked, we do not know them better. But this is a theme we have urged before, and to repeat the hopeless protest would be indeed. to illustrate our own warning. We are now seeking to under stand, not to make war upon, the promiscuous expression of our time. The loss of dignified reserve, like almost every other loss, may be minimised by being made conscious. Whatever it be that makes life so much more unclothed than it was in the time of our fathers, it is worth understanding, even if it be something that must be simply accepted ; for it concerns the whole of life, and modifies almost every feeling which is stirred by the intercourse of man with man.

It is the result of two important movements of our day ; of its rapid progress towards democracy, and of its increasing interest in physical science. But, indeed, truly considered, these two things are one. Democracy is triumphant everywhere, and its triumph in the world of education means the substitution of scientific for literary interest. The old ideal of education was aristocratic. It said, "All knowledge is good, but all knowledge is not, in the same degree, educating. One study has this educating influence in a peculiar degree—that which is called literature; and one class of literature has it in a peculiar degree —that to which the consent of Europe has accorded the epithet of classical, and which the intellect of Europe has for centuries been employed in fashioning into an implement of education. Let there be, therefore, a certain stamp of catholic approval on the knowledge of the two languages containing this literature, which is accorded to no other knowledge ; dignifying it with the title of cultivation, and thus raising it on a kind of platform, above the promiscuous crowd of claimants on intel lectual attention." Thus it has arisen that this particular knowledge has a kind of prestige shared by no other. For a man to say that be is ignorant of chemistry is to avow a mere idiosyn crasy ; to make the same avowal about Greek is to give up all claim to a liberal education. And then, again, the same distinction holds good as to the ignorance respectively of Latin

and of German. A certain division of literature, is literature par excellence. It is not that Latin is a casket of more valuable

thought than German is. Quite the reverse. No great nation was ever so little original as the one whose records reach us in that language ; it would be difficult to cite from them a single striking thought. But the student of Latin literature lives in select society. The student of German must pick and choose for himself. When Europe accepted as its educational instru ment a study of the two languages to which the word classical is given, on the ground that they offer nothing which is not classical, a sanction was given to the principle of aristocracy in knowledge, and its influence still holds to a considerable extent, for its roots went deep. But it is fading under the influence of a rival theory. No thoughtful persons would at any time suppose that the sole business of education is the imparting of knowledge; but the premiss of the old school was that certain knowledge is education in a peculiar sense, in opposition to the modern theory that the pupil is to have his faculties trained to the work of acquiring knowledge, and. left to decide for himself what knowledge he requires. The aristocracy of knowledge is to be done away with.

The proclamation of liberty and equality in the world of study appears only to do away with the favoured position of literature. But, in fact, it concedes that position to physical science. Equality is an unstable condition ; as the obliteration of rank brings out the preponderance of wealth, so the dethronement of literature means the enthronement of science. All practical pursuits stand in immediate relation to physical science; the moment you try to make all studies equal. you make this supreme. This change has many kinds of influence; we are concerned with only one. While there was this precedence given to literature, every one, whether he cared for literature or not, was reminded more or less of the existence of a great world of expression, in which silence had its proper

domain. "By what he omits, show me the master in style." Some works which are not at all literary might be made so by mere excision. A great writer, while adding not a single idea, and hardly a word of his own, might sometimes make of an unreadable book a contribution to literature, merely by removing what had better be left out. We have all some experience, some gleam of inspiration, even some thought, which, if we could express that and nothing besides, would be in its degree poetic. But the very power to separate what should be unexpressed from what should be expressed is a part of the literary instinct ; and those who lack it may possess the ore to some amount, but have no smelting furnace. And this is the condition of ordinary humanity.

This self-restraint, this intellectual temperance, is the special characteristic of classical literature, and of all literature that has been much influenced by it even indirectly. Re-read Cicero's literary masterpieces, do you find any light thrown on the problems of life, do you gain a single idea that from the point of view of Science, taking that word in its largest signification, has any value whatever ? Not one. If you look at these productions in that light, they are exceedingly commonplace. But the lightness of touch, which is gone as we feel it, just supplies that suggestion, so faint and yet so distinct, which in its power of reviving individual memories, seems to rouse within us the very feelings it describes. A word more, and the spell is broken. What we value is more what is not said than what is said. The words themselves are not striking, what is striking is the quick passing on from a suggestion that leaves room for memory and imagination to rush in and fill the blank with visions which great genius perhaps could not translate into language. This classic ideal of self-restraint passed into the very life-blood of European literature, and is manifest in those who did not imbibe it at first-hand. It is exhibited nowhere with more distinctness than in the work of one who, in her recently published letters, prettily describes herself as the most ignorant writer who ever handled a pen,—Miss Austen. An article on " Style," in one of the reviews for December, quotes from her a sentence which seems to us a perfect example of this self-restraint in expression. "Their union," she says in describing an ideal constancy perhaps modelled on some actual feeling, "could not any more divide her from other men than their final separation." Dilute that idea as it would be diluted by a writer of our own day, and it becomes trite. Nothing is more commonplace than the idea of a devotion irrespective of all requital, whatever the fact may be, and nothing can be more tedious than most descriptions of it. What gives power and meaning to a sentence which makes us feel merely what every novel-writer tries to make us feel is its exceeding reticence. Describing a strength of feeling wonderfully rare in life, and naturally suggesting superlatives, it takes a negative form, and uses the very fewest and faintest words in which the idea can be expressed. Though Jane Austen knew not a line of Latin and Greek, she shows classic influence in that reticence. And, just as the influence of classic training is felt in the writing of those who know nothing of the classics, so the influence of literary training is felt in the behaviourof those who know nothing of literature. It is the principal part of what we mean by breeding. A man of the world who yawns over a novel or a newspaper shows some trace of inherited cultivation in the criticisms on his neighbours which he keeps to himself ; and even so highly. cultivated a man as Carlyle, perhaps, exhibits the lack of that influence, in remarks which would seem to us less ill-natured, if we remembered his peasant blood.

Now, Science, whatever else it may enforce, certainly drops the literary discipline of reticence. It concerns that about which the more facts are known the nearer we get to the truth, in which it is specially important not to neglect the trivial and the imperfect, and in which the misleading cannot be said to exist. A study of which this is true manifestly encourages all expression. Not that it is satisfied with expression. A man of science is very far from accepting language as an adequate vehicle for his study ; he would say, indeed, that those who know it only through the medium of language, do not know it at all. But still he would allow that the more fully the truth of science is put into words the better. It is no exaggeration to say that the less fully the truth of literature is put into words the better. Of poetry this is eminently true, and it is in poetry that we see this opposition at its height. You may agree or disagree with a scientific writer, but if two persons of average intellect, after reading him attentively, differ as to his meaning, he must have expressed himself badly. But poetry guarded against any varying interpretation by different minds would cease to be poetry. We sometimes see the divergent ideals exhibited in the development of a single mind. As time goes on, a man of science is apt to be dissatisfied with all expression that rather suggests than exhausts its subject-matter. He is surprised at his own loss of literary taste. He turns back to the poems scored by pencilmarks of his youth, and wonders to find their charm is fled, and that he even fails to " understand " them, as he calls it, which, in his sense, is what nobody does. His attention has grown rusty in a certain posture, and he cannot change its focus. He is expecting to carry away from incomplete expression the same kind of intellectual satisfaction that he habitually gains from complete expression. He is looking for the accuracy of science where that kind of accuracy is incompatible with the truth of poetry. And biography in this respect should approach poetry. All narrative that seeks to unfold character has a double principle of rejection, both halves of which are unknown to science. It rejects whatever is trivial, and then, again, it rejects whatever is misleading. Do not tell us your hero's favourite dish ; do not describe at any length his bodily ailments ; do not dwell on his personal appearance. And further, do not tell us of some inexplicable lapse from the kindness, the honour, or the purity which almost invariably distinguished him. Not because you will hurt the feeliugs of his children, not because you will impair the loyalty of his disciples

— these are not motives that should weigh with a biographer

— but because you are not, in so doing, helping us to know him. In his life this strange exception was probably the result of some combination of circumstances hopelessly beyond our recovery, and hopelessly bewildering to our attention if it could be recovered. In our mind it would, from its very strangeness, be the chief thing we should remember about him. Now, in any scientific account, the exceptional is exactly what it would be most important to record. To mention the fact that a man of genius and virtue was once found drunk would be the same kind of mistake as to conceal the fact that a highly respectable comet failed to keep its appointment. Science founded a theory of the Universe on the exception. Literature would find it a mere source of confusion. Where Literature is silent, Science becomes emphatic.

This principle is essential to literature, but is not confined to it. That person is wonderfully fortunate who has not learned by actual experience that the most accurately recorded fact on his lips may become the most hopelessly false theory in his hearers' ears. "The public," it is true, does not distort true fact into false theory quite so much as an individual does, and not quite in the same way. But human character, and the events which unfold and result from it, are never adapted to complete expression, in the same way that all other events are. "Action," says the great writer whose works preach the lesson as forcibly as his biography exhibits the danger of neglecting it, "action is solid, narrative is linear." Carlyle's weighty sentences are almost sufficiently numerous to win oblivion for his unwise utterances; but among them all, and indeed in all literature, we hardly know a warning so pregnant with truth for all time as that implied in those words.

For all time, but especially for our own. We have been taught to neglect it by the tendency of general thought and political change, by the temptation of a cheap stimulus to attention, and lastly, by the teaching of a great genius. The narratives which have combined the interest of dramatic creation and eloquent preaching, the works which have been cited from the pulpit and hailed as a new Bible by those who wished to discard the old, have been modelled more and more on the new reverence for physical science. The change is strikingly apparent when we compare George Eliot with George Sand ; and one character— which we cannot help fancying that the great Englishwoman took from the great Frenchwoman, and in which, therefore, we can compare the two methods of treatment— brings it out very strikingly. Tito Melema, as the incarnate principle of the Renaissance, is the creation of George Eliot ; but as the faithless, frivolous, luxury-loving admirer of Romola, he reminds us of Angiolo, the Venetian singer, who has a similar relation towards Consuelo. But we know Tito as a patient in a hospital ; Angiolo as a personage in a drama. We follow the downfall of the perfidious Greek with the interest with which we study a remarkable case in pathology ; while the perfidious Venetian is known to us as a passing acquaintance is, and leaves us with.

out any feeling that we have before us the complete analysis of his condition. We know him, that is, from a literary, not a scientific, point of view.

"Well," it may be objected, "that so far as it goes, is all on the side of the scientific ideal of fiction, for George Eliot's creation is a more powerful one than George Sand's." To the countrymen of George Eliot, and at the very time of publication, it certainly is. Beyond this limit of time and space we doubt. We have a profound faith in the conservative influence of pure literature, and some distrust of instantaneous impressiveness. The contrast seems to us forcibly exhibited in the earlier and later style of George Eliot herself. "Adam Bede" was a study qf moral aspects, not an analysis of moral conditions ; and it had not so large an audience as its successors had ; perhaps it was uot read with the same keen interest as they were, for the author's power of description and creation remained undimmed, and to these attractions was afterwards added that of a kind of mental stimulus peculiarly flattering to the ordinary intellect. The readers of "Daniel Deronda," breathed an atmosphere impregnated with the problems which that fiction presented in a solid form ; they were prepared to recognise them by innumerable hints and allusions ; they could not take up a magazine, and hardly a newspaper, without being reminded that these were the issues disputed between thinkers ; and when they found these problems, which to a certain extent were familiar, apparently settled in an interesting fiction, the fiction, without losing its own peculiar interest, gained that of philosophy. All this is true only for a generation. We cannot point to any romance of the past as prefiguring what "Daniel Derouda " and " Middlemarch " may be for the readers of the twentieth century, because the ideal on which they are moulded is entirely new. But we may safely predict that when George Eliot's productions come to be read by our grandchildren, her readers will turn most eagerly to those which enter on ground where expression is confessedly incomplete always, rather than to those which change of time can rob of a completeness apparently attempted by their author. Nothing exhaustive, we firmly believe, can ever be perennial.

It may be objected that when we have settled how much detail a writer of fiction had better invent, that does not help to decide how much fact a biographer had better reveal. The objection, however plausible it sound, is a part of the very heresy against which our whole polemic is directed. The aim of Biography is to reveal a character. The character is not to be invented. But the biographer should feel his task just as much one of selection as the writer of fiction does. Only very rarely will he reveal the character he seeks to reveal by telling everything he knows. The most popular biography in the language is an example of just such a fortunate chance as thisBoswell could not have painted a character that needed selective treatment ; Johnson could not have been so vividly known to us by any one who had aimed at selective treatment. Another popular biography—Stanley's "Life of Arnold "—seems to us to have carried the principle of selection too far, and to lose interest with its lack of shadow. But the most erroneous specimens of the kind of biography which embody the aim of revealing a character as a different endeavour from that of describing a thing, seem to us to do more ultimately to further true views of mankind than the most elaborate attempts which ignore this difference, and suppose that what the biographer has to do is to empty his wallet of information. The biographer who forgets his kindred to the poet, and enters into partnership with the student of physiology, starts from an assumption more false than any that could be put into a narrative form. Only he who creates can fully reveal, and he who remembers that truth will reveal least inadequately.

The case in which the scientific ideal is least hurtful to literature is one in which the exception proves the rule, for as memory is a bridge between the regions of sense and imagination, so is history between those of science and literature. Here, no doubt, the two ideals must blend. And yet so intimate, so indissoluble is the connection between the truth of human life, and that selective feeling which belongs to the literary spirit, that even here it seems to us the muse of history descends from her pedestal when she would approach closely to science ; nor should we desire a better illustration of this truth than the two historic works of the great man from whose biography we took our start. The history written in his youth is an original and vivid picture of human life; the history written in his age is an exhaustive account of the greatness of a military nation, which that nation finds itself obliged to study as the best source of accurate information, and we feel no more doubt as to which of these works will be best known to posterity, than we do as to its verdict on the contrast between the purport of his teaching and the disclosures of his biography.