We cannot command veracity at will: the power
of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health
that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient
Rabbi has solemnly said, “The penalty of untruth
is untruth.” But Pepin is only a mild example
of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing
carries internal consequences which have often the
nature of disease. And however unpractical it
may be held to consider whether we have anything to
print which it is good for the world to read, or which
has not been better said before, it will perhaps be
allowed to be worth considering what effect the printing
may have on ourselves. Clearly there is a sort
of writing which helps to keep the writer in a ridiculously
contented ignorance; raising in him continually the
sense of having delivered himself effectively, so
that the acquirement of more thorough knowledge seems
as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a past
occasion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps
his hope of income) in his own shallownesses and mistakes,
and must desire their prosperity. Like the professional
prophet, he learns to be glad of the harm that keeps
up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts
him. It is hard enough for any of us, amid the
changing winds of fortune and the hurly-burly of events,
to keep quite clear of a gladness which is another’s
calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course
which will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of
mind, committing ourselves to be continually pleased
that others should appear to be wrong in order that
we may have the air of being right.
In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin
has remained the more self-contented because he has
not written everything he believed himself
capable of. He once asked me to read a sort of
programme of the species of romance which he should
think it worth while to write—a species
which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions
of illustrious but overrated authors in this branch.
Pepin’s romance was to present the splendours
of the Roman Empire at the culmination of its grandeur,
when decadence was spiritually but not visibly imminent:
it was to show the workings of human passion in the
most pregnant and exalted of human circumstances,
the designs of statesmen, the interfusion of philosophies,
the rural relaxation and converse of immortal poets,
the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of
the quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the
gorgeous delirium of gladiatorial shows, and under
all the secretly working leaven of Christianity.
Such a romance would not call the attention of society
to the dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics,
the vulgarity of small schoolmasters, the manners
of men in livery, or to any other form of uneducated
talk and sentiments: its characters would have
virtues and vices alike on the grand scale, and would
express themselves in an English representing the
discourse of the most powerful minds in the best Latin,