Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/415

Rh to consist in courage and in openness of mind and soul. Upon the latter condition the author especially insists, showing that the education of a man of open mind is never ended, and that the capacity of a man, at least for understanding, may almost be said to vary according to his powers of sympathy, which is the universal solvent, and which alone can effectually counteract selfishness, encouraging man’s nature to grow out and fix its tendrils upon foreign objects, and frustrating that defective moral system which has produced numbers of people walking up and down one narrow plank of self-restraint, and has succeeded only in the wholesale manufacture of splendid bigots and censorious small people. In a chapter on Reading, considerable stress is laid on the evils of desultory habits; and it is shown, that whatever may be a man’s object in reading—whether amusement or instruction, or a wish to appear well in society, or a desire to pass away time—that object is facilitated by reading with method—the full pleasure of reading being, in fact, unknown to all but those who have felt that keenness of intellectual pursuit which takes away the sense of dulness in details. A man, it is argued, who knows one subject well, cannot, if he would, fail to have acquired much besides; and that man will not be likely to keep fewer pearls, who has a string to put them on, than he who picks them up and throws them together without method. Method would go far to cancel one of the dangers attributable to a life of study, viz., that purpose and decisiveness are worn away; for, pursued methodically, there must be some, and not a little, of the decision, resistance, and tenacity of pursuit which create or further greatness of character in action. As for ordinary readers, their custom is, as Ellesmere says in council, to read a clever article in a newspaper or review, and then wait for another, not bringing any study to bear on the subject meanwhile. The Essay on Criticism is lively and to. the purpose, passing sentence in something of Mr: Landor's stringent fashion upon small critics, who, like ancient Parthians or modern Cossacks, hover on the rear of a great army, transfix a sentinel, surprise an outpost, and harass the army’s march, but rarely determine the campaign. Criticism is charged, in general, with deficiencies of humility, of charity, and of imagination; it is reviewed under the several aspects of the needless, the intentionally unkind, the indiscreet or restless, the religious, the patiently studious, the loving. The chapter on the Art of Living is deservedly a favourite, and highly characteristic of its writer; it suggests many a practical thought on our social intercourse and its anomalies—ridiculing those private assemblies whither a man betakes himself from vain or interested motives, at most unseasonable hours, in very uncomfortable clothes, to sit or stand in a constrained position, inhaling tainted air, suffering from great heat, and his sole occupation or amusement being to talk—only to talk. Various hindrances to the profit and pleasure of society are stated: for instance, want of truth, that fruitful source of needless and painful ostentation; shyness, arising from a morbid egotism and self-consciousness, in so many cases; a foolish concern about trifles; the habit of ridicule, or light, jesting, flippant, unkind mode of talking about things and persons very common in society; and, again, the want of something to do besides talking, a hindrance traced to the Puritanism which forbids many innocent or indifferent amusements. The Art of Living with Inferiors (one of this writer's stock subjects, and always treated as amiably as judiciously) comes under