own head, or wherever the intellectual furnace may burn, until you can pour it out in limpid transparent purity. Even the most froth-brained person of this somewhat frothy world should be able to appreciate the Apostolic counsel and to pay the most sacred regard to it. Besides, generally, words should not be multiplied, for, when they accumulate, they are like leaves, and

"When they most abound,

Much fruit of sense beneath is scarcely found." 1

This also should be religiously remembered-concentration with lucidity of expression is a great quality. In the ballad, for instance, of "Fair Ellen of Kirkconnell Lea " a vital tragedy is presented within the short compass of eight-andtwenty lines.

24. And the injunction "Festina ad eventum should not be neglected.-Again, in every plot and narrative we wish to find quickness of movement -to be clearly conscious of progression, almost, in fact, as in the case of a railway journey. “A play analysed," as Lord Kames excellently said, 66 is a chain of connected facts of which each scene makes a link. Each scene accordingly ought to produce some incident relative to the catastrophe or ultimate event by advancing or retarding it. A scene that produces no incident, and for that reason may be termed barren, ought not to be indulged, because it breaks the unity of action. A barren scene can never be entitled to a place,

jungles of distraction that have grown out of their obscure visions and ratiocinations-wildernesses and jungles in which the Human Race have almost completely lost their spiritual reckoning!

1 Hobbes has well remarked in relation to Law that all words are subject to ambiguity, and, therefore, that "multiplication of words in the body of the Law is multiplication of ambiguity.”— 'English Works,' Vol. iii. p. 336.

because the scene is complete without it." 1 All beating about the bush, all running round a ring, all dwelling upon trivialities is to be avoided. A good author, it has been written, "skims over a multitude of circumstances under which an occurrence has taken place, because he is aware that it is proper to reject what is only accessory to the object which he would present in prominence. A vulgar mind forgets and spares nothing.' (Witness whole troops of novelists, living and dead they won't leave a button unnoticed if they can help it.) "He is ignorant that conversation is always but a selection; that every story is subject to the law of dramatic poetry— festina ad eventum; and that what does not concur to the effect weakens it." 2

Thousands

of books-even good ones-are twenty times too long. A wide observance of these cautions would effect an immense saving in the World's Bill for Paper and Ink. Whether your work be a novel or a drama or a poem, whether your poem be idyllic or epic, festina ad eventum. But whether in many or few words, give us lucidity. The task of the Poet is so to visualise and envisage a person or persons, or scenes and things, as to enable us to see and feel them as he himself saw and felt them. Herein I think we have the essence of his Poetry, which will be correspondent with the greatness and importance of the objects which he represents, and the clearness of the vision with which he saw.

66

1 'Elements of Criticism,' Vol. ii. pp. 408-9. An Act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time or change of place. A pause makes a new Act."-Johnson, ' Works,' Vol. v. p. 139.

2 Ancillon, quoted by Sir William Hamilton, 'Lectures on Metaphysics,' Vol. ii. p. 268. See also 'Ars Poetica,' 146-9.

269

CHAPTER XI.

SINCERITY IN LIFE AND LITERATURE.

1. Sincerity in General.—Am I in earnest? Am I sincere? This is one of the most important questions which a man can address to himself, and a question by which every worker should be continually testing himself. The insincere man is quite undeserving of light or any other benefit. It may be assumed, I apprehend, that all benefits are given to us by our Creator in absolute sincerity, and are intended to be used by us in absolute sincerity. It is criminal to be insincere-criminal against both the Highest and ourselves, in any department of life or labour. The liar is one of the worst enemies of Divinity, as might be inferred from his alleged paternity.

2. This great virtue is sometimes credited to fanatics. And let there be no dubiety about the meaning of Sincerity. It simply means the honest determined use of all or any of our faculties either in doing or in refraining from doing anything. I think there can be no real doubt as to the substantial truth of this definition; yet so perversely ingenious are some unhappy persons that they like to cast doubt and confusion upon the meaning of some, even, of the plainest words, and plume themselves in so doing as if it were rather a clever trick. "Words are grown so false," says the clown in Twelfth Night,' "that I am

loath to prove reason with them." Thus the very word Sincerity is, in our day, beaten out so broad by some people as, with them, to cover all manner of sin and folly; and, indeed, with this breadth it sometimes becomes so shallow as to have almost no meaning left in it at all. For example, your most stupid ecclesiastical fanatics of any kind, your Lauds and Torquemadas, grinding their teeth in all hatred of manliness and commonsense, even such as they are credited by a fishblooded school of Historians and Philosophers with this most precious virtue of Sincerity! This is a fashion with which I cannot profess to have much sympathy. If it were truly permissible to suppose that these Lauds and Torquemadas made the best use of their faculties of which they were capable, or even a fairly moderate use of them, when they tortured or murdered their fellowcreatures as heretics, then it would be permissible to think of them (though at the fearful expense of confounding the Moral Law) as sincere men, not otherwise. As I interpret the conduct of such men, they acted mainly as they did under the influence of evil passions. It will never do to gauge a man's sincerity by the turbulence of his passions. By such a mode of reckoning the vilest murderer may be reckoned a sincere character, even though he seems to have entered into a covenant with Hell!

3. Sincerity must be rooted in the intellect, not in the passions.-There is, of course, the possibility of truth and sound conduct being lost to view in the excitement, perhaps, of even a noble passion, as in the frightful case of ascetics and self-immolators : hence the rational necessity of being strictly rational on all occasions to the best of our ability. If the very prophets and apostles had all been strictly rational!-as they should have been. (By this

time they might have reformed the world.) The solution of the difficulty seems to be that your sincerity must be rooted in the Intellect and not in the passions. The erroneous head is a head dominated by passions, by evil passions for the most part. The Devil's, I take to be the most erroneous of all heads. Intellect has obviously been given to us to preside over our lives, and to keep our passions in due subordination. The first condition or warranty of sincerity in the individual is that he make the best use of the faculties he possesses. There is no getting over this position. That man who withdraws from the light of Common-sense on any question is, so far, insincere or crazy; just as he would be insincere or crazy who voluntarily withdrew from daylight into a dungeon to study painting. In accordance with this principle I cannot but hold him to be a scoundrel or else a madman of the most dangerous kind who, in pretended regard for the welfare of Humanity, tramples on the God-created feelings of Humanity, as, for instance, when he forces a tarry jacket on a fellow-creature whom he regards as a heretic and sets fire to him, either for love of that heretic's soul in particular, or for love of other people's souls in general. In such conduct, I maintain, there is no evidence of Sincerity at all, but, on the contrary, I should say, abundant evidence of damnable cruelty or of devilish madness; not light of Heaven in the souls of such wretches by any kind of interpretation, but vermilion glow of Hell in its most terrific hue.

4. The great evil of conventionality in Theology: Originality and Vitality are only to be found in heart sincerity.-Originality and vitality, in any subject whatever, are only to be found in heart sincerity, in personal convictions. "The tendency