the trite incident of a novel or a play?  Things in life do not happen as they happen in novels or plays.  Oliver Twist, in real life, does not get accidentally adopted by his grandfather’s oldest friend, and commit his sole burglary in the house of his aunt.  We do not want life to be transplanted into trim garden-plots; we want to see it at home, as it grows in all its native wildness, on the one hand; and to know the idea, the theory, the principle that underlie it on the other.  How few of us there are who make our lives into anything!  We accept our limitations, we drift with them, while we indignantly assert the freedom of the will.  The best sermon in the world is to hear of one who has struggled with life, bent or trained it to his will, plucked or rejected its fruit, but all upon some principle.  It matters little what we do; it matters enormously how we do it.  Considering how much has been said, and sung, and written, and recorded, and prated, and imagined, it is strange to think how little is ever told us directly about life; we see it in glimpses and flashes, through half-open doors, or as one sees it from a train gliding into a great town, and looks into back windows and yards sheltered from the street.  We philosophise, most of us, about anything but life; and one of the reasons why published sermons have such vast sales is because, however clumsily and conventionally, it is with life that they try to deal.

This kind of specialising is not recognised as a technical form of it at all, and yet how far nearer and closer and more urgent it is for us than any other kind.  I have a hope that we are at the beginning of an era of plain-speaking in these matters.  Too often, with the literary standard of decorum which prevails, such self-revelations are brushed aside as morbid, introspective, egotistical.  They are no more so than any other kind of investigation, for all investigation is conditioned by the personality of the investigator.  All that is needed is that an observer of life should be perfectly candid and sincere, that he should not speak in a spirit of vanity or self-glorification, that he should try to disentangle what are the real motives that make him act or refrain from acting.

As an instance of what I mean by confession of the frankest order, dealing in this case not only with literature but also with morality, let me take the sorrowful words which Ruskin wrote in his Praeterita, as a wearied and saddened man, when there was no longer any need for him to pretend anything, or to involve any of his own thoughts or beliefs in any sort of disguise.  He took up Shakespeare at Macugnaga, in 1840, and he asks why the loveliest of Shakespeare’s plays should be “all mixed and encumbered with languid and common work—­to one’s best hope spurious certainly, so far as original, idle and disgraceful—­and all so inextricably and mysteriously that the writer himself is not only unknowable, but inconceivable; and his wisdom so useless, that at this time of being and speaking, among active and purposeful Englishmen, I know not one who shows a trace of ever having felt a passion of Shakespeare’s, or learnt a lesson from him.”