So soon as the armed men begin to spring up in our fields, we may be sure that we have not sown in vain.

Properly understood, an enemy is but a negative embodiment of our personalities or ideas.  He is an involuntary witness to our vitality.  Much as he despises us, greatly as he may injure us, he is none the less a creature of our making.  It was we who put into him the breath of his malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice.  Therefore, with his very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his self-conscious disclaimers of our significance.  Though he slay us, we made him—­to ‘make an enemy,’ is not that the phrase?

Indeed, the fact that he is our enemy is his one raison d’etre.  That alone should make us charitable to him.  Live and let live.  Without us our enemy has no occupation, for to hate us is his profession.  Think of his wives and families!

The friendship of the little for the great is an old-established profession; there is but one older—­namely, the hatred of the little for the great; and, though it is perhaps less officially recognised, it is without doubt the more lucrative.  It is one of the shortest roads to fame.  Why is the name of Pontius Pilate an uneasy ghost of history?  Think what fame it would have meant to be an enemy of Socrates or Shakespeare! Blackwood’s Magazine and The Quarterly Review only survive to-day because they once did their best to strangle the genius of Keats and Tennyson.  Two or three journals of our own time, by the same unfailing method, seek that circulation from posterity which is denied them in the present.

This is particularly true in literature, where the literary enemy is as organised a tradesman as the literary agent.  Like the literary agent, he naturally does his best to secure the biggest men.  No doubt the time will come when the literary cut-throat—­shall we call him?—­will publish dainty little books of testimonials from authors, full of effusive gratitude for the manner in which they have been slashed and bludgeoned into fame.  ‘Butcher to Mr. Grant Allen’ may then become a familiar legend over literary shop-fronts:—­

  ’Ah! did you stab at Shelley’s heart
    With silly sneer and cruel lie? 
  And Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats,
    To murder did you nobly try?

  You failed, ’tis true; but what of that? 
    The world remembers still your name—­
  ’Tis fame, for you, to be the cur
    That barks behind the heels of Fame.’

Any one who is fortunate enough to have enemies will know that all this is far from being fanciful.  If one’s enemies have any other raison d’etre beyond the fact of their being our enemies—­what is it?  They are neither beautiful nor clever, wise nor good, famous nor, indeed, passably distinguished.  Were they any of these, they would not have taken to so humble a means of getting their living.  Instead of being our enemies, they could then have afforded to employ enemies on their own account.