INTELLECTUAL STRAINING IN AUTHORSHIP. 93 



INTELLECTUAL STRAINKs^G IN AUTHORSHIP. 



WE hear a good deal of the joylessness of the present generation, 

 and no doubt there is a greater unrest and a greater impatience 

 among those who lead the forward movement of thought than in any 

 former time. And partly, no doubt, this is due to want of trust, want 

 of power to lean on any invisible hand ; partly, too, to a habit closely 

 connected with this want of trust — a habit contracted by men of the 

 greatest intellect, of straining to see or say something new, as if such 

 straining were the only healthy condition of the mind, as if without it 

 one must sink into a sort of death. Carlyle was one of the first to set 

 the example of this straining. His genius, great as it is, may be al- 

 most said to have grown out of the taste for abrupt changes of light 

 and shadow, in the flickerings of which he has contrived to set so 

 considerable a tract of life, both domestic and historic. His peculiar 

 dialect itself is a great instrument for startling men, for giving them 

 little shocks or thrills of unexpected impression. Very often, too, he 

 lias succeeded, as some great photographers have succeeded, in pro- 

 ducing a very powerful impression by deliberately taking his portraits 

 out of focus. Carlyle's influence is in this res2)ect more or less reflect- 

 ed in Ruskin, who has taught the younger generation of Oxford men 

 so much and yet often so grotesquely, who has fostered so much more 

 excitement of mind than is healthy, and who has accustomed them to 

 so much disproportion between the vehemence of what he says and 

 its truth. And, of those of our younger generation who go abroad for 

 tuition, how many prefer Victor Hugo to any home-bred master for 

 this very reason alone — that his genius is so irregular and grotesque, 

 that it combines so much excitement with so much insight, that there 

 is such a piercing glance and so little law ! It is the same in the New 

 World. There are many who believe that Ralph Waldo Emerson is 

 the greatest of living sages. And certainly his career has been calm 

 and sedate enough, and there is real penetration in his glance. But, 

 though he has never thrown much of emotional excitement into his 

 teaching, his philosophy means nothing, if it does not mean that you 

 get a truer view of life by standing on intellectual tiptoe and straining 

 at a universal truth that is not quite within your reach than you do by 

 humbly putting together what you may really be said to understand. 

 There is no greater contrast between intellectual men than there is 

 between the sedate calm of Emerson and the transcendental exulta- 

 tion or anguish of Victor Hugo. But, on a purely intellectual theme, 

 the one reminds us curiously of the other. Here is a preface furnished 

 by Emerson to a series of portraits of the hundred greatest men of the 

 human race, which has just been begun by an enterprising publisher.* 



* Messrs. Sampson Low & Co. 



