THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE

Dr. John Brown’s pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman who, being asked to account for the gravity of his dog, replied, “Oh, sir! life is full of sairiousness to him—­he can just never get eneugh o’ fechtin’.”  Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it,—­our men of letters.  They are all very serious and very quarrelsome.  To some of them it is dangerous even to allude.  Many are wedded to a theory or period, and are the most uxorious of husbands—­ever ready to resent an affront to their lady.  This devotion makes them very grave, and possibly very happy after a pedantic fashion.  One remembers what Hazlitt, who was neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedantry:—­

“The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature.  The common soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of delight over ‘Coke upon Lyttleton.’  He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.”

Possibly not; but then we are surely not content that our authors should be pedants in order that they may be happy and devoted.  As one of the great class for whose sole use and behalf literature exists,—­the class of readers,—­I protest that it is to me a matter of indifference whether an author is happy or not.  I want him to make me happy.  That is his office.  Let him discharge it.

I recognize in this connection the corresponding truth of what Sydney Smith makes his Peter Plymley say about the private virtues of Mr. Perceval, the Prime Minister:—­

“You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present Prime Minister.  Grant all that you write—­I say, I fear that he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interests of his country; and then you tell me that he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval and kind to the Master Percevals.  I should prefer that he whipped his boys and saved his country.”

We should never confuse functions or apply wrong tests.  What can books do for us?  Dr. Johnson, the least pedantic of men, put the whole matter into a nut-shell (a cocoa-nut shell, if you will—­Heaven forbid that I should seek to compress the great Doctor within any narrower limits than my metaphor requires) when he wrote that a book should teach us either to enjoy life or endure it.  “Give us enjoyment!” “Teach us endurance!” Hearken to the ceaseless demand and the perpetual prayer of an ever unsatisfied and always suffering humanity!

How is a book to answer the ceaseless demand?