*
Study and experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken
pastime of a life. These are enviable natures; people shut
in the house by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the
commoner man cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes:
his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood boils for
physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the
looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them
in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing
stage of life.
*
Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by
the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once
to the eye, to the ear, to the mind--the seat of wonder, to
the touch--so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly--so
imperious when starved. It combines and employs in its
manifestation the method and material, not of one art only,
but of all the arts. Music is but an arbitrary trifling
with a few of life's majestic chords; painting is but a
shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature
does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moral
obligation, of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony,
with which it teems. To 'compete with life,' whose sun we
cannot look upon, whose passions and diseases waste and
slay us--to compete with the flavour of wine, the beauty of
the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death
and separation here is, indeed, a projected escalade of
heaven; here are, indeed, labours for a Hercules in a dress
coat, armed with a pen and a dictionary to depict the
passions, armed with a tube of superior flake-white to
paint the portrait of the insufferable sun.
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