II.
We are accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the
circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement
of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically
unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record
their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful
poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators;
for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but
the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically
sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this
MALADIE DE RENE, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many
ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young
gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means
look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the
grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for
life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet
but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all
our literary wires.
It would be a poor service to spread culture, if this be its
result, among the comparatively innocent and cheerful ranks
of men. When our little poets have to be sent to look at the
ploughman and learn wisdom, we must be careful how we tamper
with our ploughmen. Where a man in not the best of
circumstances preserves composure of mind, and relishes ale
and tobacco, and his wife and children, in the intervals of
dull and unremunerative labour; where a man in this
predicament can afford a lesson by the way to what are called
his intellectual superiors, there is plainly something to be
lost, as well as something to be gained, by teaching him to
think differently.
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