Speech which goes from one to
another between two natures, and, what is worse, between
two experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries
his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and
all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language until
it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
*
Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field which
is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with which
we can perceive relations in that field, whether great
or small.
*
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.
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