literature: so frequent and so easy is the utterance of the

habitual lamentation as to the trouble of a 'vain capacity,' so well
explained has it ever been.

'Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
That I have to be hurt,'

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the
brave Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow

house. Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there,
little argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for

every vain capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain
destinies, for every liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is

the trouble of the wide house we hear of, clamorous of its
disappointments and desires. The narrow house has no echoes; yet

its patheticshortcoming might well move pity. On that strait stage
is acted a generoustragedy; to that inadequate soul is intrusted an

enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement makes its home within that
slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks that timorous heart.

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its
inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its

inadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right
language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do.

Who, for instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word
of his confidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing

the ultimatesyllable of his tenderness? There is a 'pledging of
the word,' in another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and

promise. The poet pledges his word, his sentence, his verse, and
finds therein a peculiarsanction. And I suppose that even physical

pain takes on an edge when it not only enforces a pang but whispers
a phrase. Consciousness and the word are almost as closely united

as thought and the word. Almost--not quite; in spite of its
inexpressive speech, the narrow house is aware and sensitive beyond,

as it were, its poor power.
But as to the whole disparity between the destiny and the nature, we

know it to be general. Life is great that is trivially transmitted;
love is great that is vulgarly experienced. Death, too, is a heroic

virtue; and to the keeping of us all is death committed: death,
submissive in the indocile, modest in the fatuous, several in the

vulgar, secret in the familiar. It is destructive because it not
only closes but contradicts life. Unlikely people die. The one

certain thing, it is also the one improbable. A dreadful paradox is
perhaps wrought upon a little nature that is incapable of death and

yet is constrained to die. That is a true destruction, and the
thought of it is obscure.

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal
pause. It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical

conclusion. Mrs. Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber.
Considering her mental powers, by the way, an illogical conclusion

for her would be manifestly inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed,
having seen a life whole, sees it to an end: sees it out, and

Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the audacity that, having
kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the grotesque man in

literature is immortal, and with something more significant than the
immortality awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is

predurable because he is not completed. His humours are strangely
matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not worthy to die; for

there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be
mortal. I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world. I

thank my fellow-mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke
that the French so pleasantly call une joyeusete; these are to smile

at. But the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the book.
That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living

windows. Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by
moments from eyes that are apt to express none but common things.

There are allusions unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief
glances. Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of

meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting. To be clever
and sensitive and to hurt the foolish and the stolid--wouldst thou

do such a deed for all the world? Not I, by this heavenly light.
REJECTION

Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world. She has a
penitential or a vidual singleness. We can conceive an antique

world in which life, art, and letters were simple because of the
absence of many things; for us now they can be simple only because

of our rejection of many things. We are constrained to such a
vigilance as will not let even a master's work pass unfanned and

unpurged. Even among his phrases one shall be taken and the other
left. For he may unawares have allowed the habitualness that besets

this multitudinous life to take the pen from his hand and to write
for him a page or a word; and habitualness compels our refusals. Or

he may have allowed the easy impulse of exaggeration to force a
sentence which the mere truth, sensitively and powerfully pausing,

would well have become. Exaggeration has played a part of its own
in human history. By depreciating our language it has stimulated

change, and has kept the circulating word in exercise. Our
rejection must be alert and expert to overtakeexaggeration and

arrest it. It makes us shrewder than we wish to be. And, indeed,
the whole endless action of refusal shortens the life we could

desire to live. Much of our resolution is used up in the repeated
mentalgesture of adverse decision. Our tacit and implicit distaste

is made explicit, who shall say with what loss to our treasury of
quietness? We are defrauded of our interiorignorance, which should

be a place of peace. We are forced to confess more articulately
than befits our convention with ourselves. We are hurried out of

our reluctances. We are made too much aware. Nay, more: we are
tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomes

almost inevitable. As for the spiritual life--O weary, weary act of
refusal! O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of

fear! 'We live by admiration' only a shortened life who live so
much in the iteration of rejection and repulse. And in the very

touch of joy there hides I know not what ultimatedenial; if not on
one side, on the other. If joy is given to us without reserve, not

so do we give ourselves to joy. We withhold, we close. Having
denied many things that have approached us, we deny ourselves to

many things. Thus does il gran rifiuto divide and rule our world.
Simplicity is worth the sacrifice; but all is not sacrifice.

Rejection has its pleasures, the more secret the more unmeasured.
When we garnish a house we refuse more furniture, and furniture more

various, than might haunt the dreams of decorators. There is no
limit to our rejections. And the unconsciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness of the decorators

is in itself a cause of pleasure to a mind generous, forbearing, and
delicate. When we dress, no fancy may count the things we will none

of. When we write, what hinders that we should refrain from Style
past reckoning? When we marry--. Moreover, if simplicity is no

longer set in a world having the great and beautiful quality of
fewness, we can provide an equally fair setting in the quality of

refinement. And refinement is not to be achieved but by rejection.
One who suggests to me that refinement is apt to be a mere negative

has offered up a singularblunder in honour of robustiousness.
Refinement is not negative, because it must be compassed by many

negations. It is a thing of price as well as of value; it demands
immolations, it exacts experience. No slight or easy charge, then,

is committed to such of us as, having apprehension of these things,
fulfil the office of exclusion. Never before was a time when

derogation was always so near, a daily danger, or when the reward of
resisting it was so great. The simplicity of literature, more

sensitive, more threatened, and more important than other
simplicities, needs a guard of honour, who shall never relax the

good will nor lose the good heart of their intolerance.
THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE

The landscape, like our literature, is apt to grow and to get itself
formed under too luxurious ideals. This is the evil work of that

LITTLE MORE which makes its insensible but persistent additions to
styles, to the arts, to the ornaments of life--to nature, when

unluckily man becomes too explicitly conscious of her beauty, and
too deliberate in his arrangement of it. The landscape has need of

moderation, of that fast-disappearing grace of unconsciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness, and,
in short, of a return towards the ascetic temper. The English way

of landowning, above all, has made for luxury. Naturally the
country is fat. The trees are thick and round--a world of leaves;

the hills are round; the forms are all blunt; and the grass is so
deep as to have almost the effect of snow in smoothing off all

points and curving away all abruptness. England is almost as blunt
as a machine-made moulding or a piece of Early-Victorian cast-iron

work. And on all this we have, of set purpose, improved by our
invention of the country park. There all is curves and masses. A

little more is added to the greenness and the softness of the forest
glade, and for increase of ornament the fat land is devoted to

idleness. Not a tree that is not impenetrable, inarticulate. Thick
soil below and thick growth above cover up all the bones of the