CHAPTER IV.
"/Lucian./ He that is born to be a man neither should nor can
be anything nobler, greater, and better than a man.
"/Peregrine./ But, good Lucian, for the very reason that he may
not become less than a man, he should be always striving to be
more."--WIELAND'S /Peregrinus Proteus/.
IT was two years from the date of the last chapter before Maltravers
again appeared in general society. These two years had sufficed to
produce a revolution in his fate. Ernest Maltravers had lost the happy
rights of the private individual; he had given himself to the Public; he
had surrendered his name to men's tongues, and was a thing that all had
a right to praise, to blame, to scrutinise, to spy. Ernest Maltravers
had become an author.
Let no man tempt Gods and Columns, without weighing well the
consequences of his experiment. He who publishes a book, attended with
a moderate success, passes a mighty barrier. He will often look back
with a sigh of regret at the land he has left for ever. The beautiful
and decent obscurity of hearth and home is gone. He can no longer feel
the just indignation of manly pride when he finds himself ridiculed or
reviled. He has parted with the shadow of his life. His motives may be
misrepresented, his character belied; his manners, his person, his
dress, the "very trick of his walk" are all fair food for the cavil and
the caricature. He can never go back, he cannot even pause; he has
chosen his path, and all the natural feelings that make the nerve and
muscle of the active being urge him to proceed. To stop short is to
fail. He has told the world that he will make a name; and he must be
set down as a pretender, or toil on till the boast be fulfilled. Yet
Maltravers thought nothing of all this when, intoxicated with his own
dreams and aspirations, he desired to make a world his confidant; when
from the living nature, and the lore of books, and the mingled result of
inward study and external observation, he sought to draw forth something
that might interweave his name with the pleasurable associations of his
kind. His easy fortune and lonely state gave him up to his own thoughts
and contemplations; they suffused his mind, till it ran over upon the
page which makes the channel that connects the solitary Fountain with
the vast Ocean of Human Knowledge. The temperament of Maltravers was,
as we have seen, neither irritable nor fearful. He formed himself, as a
sculptor forms, with a model before his eyes and an ideal in his heart.
He endeavoured, with labour and patience, to approach nearer and nearer
with every effort to the standard of such excellence as he thought might
ultimately be attained by a reasonable ambition; and when, at last, his
judgment was satisfied, he surrendered the product with a tranquil
confidence to a more impartial tribunal.
His first work was successful; perhaps for this reason--that it bore the
stamp of the Honest and the Real. He did not sit down to report of what
he had never seen, to dilate on what he had never felt. A quiet and
thoughtful observer of life, his descriptions were the more vivid,
because his own first impressions were not yet worn away. His
experience had sunk deep; not on the arid surface of matured age, but in
the fresh soil of youthful emotions. Another reason, perhaps, that
obtained success for his essay was, that he had more varied and more
elaborate knowledge than young authors think it necessary to possess.
He did not, like Cesarini, attempt to make a show of words upon a
slender capital of ideas. Whether his style was eloquent or homely; it
was still in him a faithful transcript of considered and digested
thought. A third reason--and I dwell on these points not more to
elucidate the career of Maltravers than as hints which may be useful to
others--a third reason why Maltravers obtained a prompt and favourable
reception from the public was, that he had not hackneyed his
peculiarities of diction and thought in that worst of all schools for
the literary novice--the columns of a magazine. Periodicals form an
excellent mode of communication between the public and an author
/already/ established, who has lost the charm of novelty, but gained the
weight of acknowledged reputation; and who, either upon politics or
criticism, seeks for frequent and continuous occasions to enforce his
peculiar theses and doctrines. But, upon the young writer, this mode of
communication, if too long continued, operates most injuriously both as
to his future prospects and his own present taste and style. With
respect to the first, it familiarises the public to his mannerism (and
all writers worth reading have mannerism) in a form to which the said
public are not inclined to attach much weight. He forestalls in a few
months what ought to be the effect of years; namely, the wearying a
world soon nauseated with the /toujours perdrix/. With respect to the
last, it induces a man to write for momentary effects; to study a false
smartness of style and reasoning; to bound his ambition of durability to
the last day of the month; to expect immediate returns for labour; to
recoil at the "hope deferred" of serious works on which judgment is
slowly formed. The man of talent who begins young at periodicals, and
goes on long, has generally something crude and stunted about both his
compositions and his celebrity. He grows the oracle of small coteries;
and we can rarely get out of the impression that he is cockneyfied and
conventional. Periodicals sadly mortgaged the claims that Hazlitt, and
many others of his contemporaries, had upon a vast reversionary estate
of Fame. But I here speak too politically; to some the /res angustoe
domi/ leave no option. And, as Aristotle and the Greek proverb have it,
we cannot carve out all things with the knife of the Delphic cutler.
The second work that Maltravers put forth, at an interval of eighteen
months from the first, was one of a graver and higher nature; it served
to confirm his reputation: and that is success enough for a second work,
which is usually an author's "/pons asinorum/." He who, after a
triumphant first book, does not dissatisfy the public with a second, has
a fair chance of gaining a fixed station in literature. But now
commenced the pains and perils of the after-birth. By a maiden effort
an author rarely makes enemies. His fellow-writers are not yet prepared
to consider him as a rival; if he be tolerably rich, they unconsciously
trust that he will not become a regular, or, as they term it, "a
professional" author: he did something just to be talked of; he may
write no more, or his second book may fail. But when that second book
comes out, and does not fail, they begin to look about them; envy
wakens, malice begins. And all the old school--gentlemen who have
retired on their pensions of renown--regard him as an intruder: then the
sneer, then the frown, the caustic irony, the biting review, the
depreciating praise. The novice begins to think that he is further from
the goal than before he set out upon the race.
Maltravers had, upon the whole, a tolerably happy temperament; but he
was a very proud man, and he had the nice soul of a courageous,
honourable, punctilious gentleman. He thought it singular that society
should call upon him, as a gentleman, to shoot his best friend, if that
friend affronted him with a rude word; and yet that, as an author, every
fool and liar might, with perfect impunity, cover reams of paper with
the most virulent personal abuse of him.
It was one evening in the early summer that, revolving anxious and
doubtful thoughts, Ernest sauntered gloomily along his terrace,
"And watched with wistful eyes the setting sun."
when he perceived a dusty travelling carriage whirled along the road by
the ha-ha, and a hand waved in recognition from the open window. His
guests had been so rare, and his friends were so few, that Maltravers
could not conjecture who was his intended visitant. His brother, he
knew, was in London. Cleveland, from whom he had that day heard, was at
his villa. Ferrers was enjoying himself in Vienna. Who could it be?
We may say of solitude what we please; but, after two years of solitude,
a visitor is a pleasurable excitement. Maltravers retraced his steps,
entered his house, and was just in time to find himself almost in the
arms of De Montaigne.
