We can put in the
quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday
by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend with his
infinite variety and flexibility, we know-but can we put
him in? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and
imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second,
knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless
arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few
branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of.
*
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the
process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we
should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves,
and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the
busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep
or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be
eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the
noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat
itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
*
The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules
and deforms; the majority fall tamely into the contemporary
shape, and thus attain, in the eyes of the true observer,
only a higher power of insignificance; and the danger is
lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw the
null, and write the novel of society instead of the romance
of man.
*
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll
Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to
gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author
without disparaging all others.
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