Ernest Maltravers — Volume 05 eBook

It would not suit the design of this work to follow Maltravers step by step in his course.  I am only describing the principal events, not the minute details, of his intellectual life.  Of the character of his works it will be enough to say that, whatever their faults, they were original—­they were his own.  He did not write according to copy, nor compile from commonplace books.  He was an artist, it is true,—­for what is genius itself but art? but he took laws, and harmony, and order, from the great code of Truth and Nature:  a code that demands intense and unrelaxing study—­though its first principles are few and simple:  that study Maltravers did not shrink from.  It was a deep love of truth that made him a subtle and searching analyst, even in what the dull world considers trifles; for he knew that nothing in literature is in itself trifling—­that it is often but a hairsbreadth that divides a truism from a discovery.  He was the more original, because he sought rather after the True than the New.  No two minds are ever the same; and therefore any man who will give us fairly and frankly the results of his own impressions, uninfluenced by the servilities of imitation, will be original.  But it was not from originality, which really made his predominant merit, that Maltravers derived his reputation, for his originality was not of that species which generally dazzles the vulgar—­it was not extravagant nor bizarre—­he affected no system and no school.  Many authors of his day seemed more novel and unique to the superficial.  Profound and durable invention proceeds by subtle and fine gradations—­it has nothing to do with those jerks and starts, those convulsions and distortions, which belong not to the vigour and health, but to the epilepsy and disease, of Literature.

CHAPTER VII.

  “Being got out of town, the first thing I did was to give my
   mule her head.”—­Gil Blas.

ALTHOUGH the character of Maltravers was gradually becoming more hard and severe,—­although as his reason grew more muscular, his imagination lost something of its early bloom, and he was already very different from the wild boy who had set the German youths in a blaze, and had changed into a Castle of Indolence the little cottage tenanted with Poetry and Alice,—­he still preserved many of his old habits; he loved, at frequent intervals, to disappear from the great world—­to get rid of books and friends, and luxury and wealth, and make solitary excursions, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, through this fair garden of England.