Page:Under the Microscope - Swinburne (1899).djvu/38

 about the opinions held or expressed as to that rank and relation. What is said of him must be either true or false; if false, he would simply be a fool—if true, he would also be a coward—to wish it unsaid; for a lie in the end hurts none but the liar, and a truth is at all times profitable to all. In any case then it can do him no damage; for good work and worthy to last is indestructible; and to destroy with all due speed any destructible person or book not worthy to last is no injury to any one whatever, but the greatest service that can be done to the book and the writer themselves, not less—nay perhaps much more—than to the rest of the poor world which, has no mind to be "pestered with such water-flies—diminutives of nature." In a word, whatever is fit to live is safe to live, and whatever is not fit to live is sure to die, though all men should swear and struggle to the contrary; and it is hard to say which of these is the more consoling certainty. I shall not, therefore, select any book for refutation of its principle, but merely for examination of its argument; my only aim being to test by this simplest of means what may be its purport and its weight. I find for instance that Mr. Austin, satirist and critic by profession, writing with a plain emphatic energy and decision which make his essays on the poetry of the period easily and pleasantly readable by students of the minute, maintains throughout his book the opposition between two leading figures; the same figures since chosen