628 APPENDIX

THE AUTHOR’S CHARACTER AND TEACHING

[This passage is from the MS., not of Præterita, but of the intended Preface for Proserpina, of which a preceding part is printed above, pp. xxxv.-xxxviii.]

In its simplest terms, my scheme of education is only that all the energies of the mind shall be founded on affection and benevolence; and that all the faculties of the body shall be developed in due time to healthy and balanced strength. One thing only has given a peculiar and, it seemed, a personal colour to the development of these quite general ideas, namely, the extreme importance attached to the faculty of Sight, and the studies which cultivate it. That of Hearing had been exhaustively treated of by Plato, and, in the modern art and science of Music, addressed with servile and extravagant indulgence: while the faculty of sight has been virtually despised by every leader in education, its sensibilities not only uncared for, but insulted; and the pleasures derivable from it usually narrowed into the lazy perception that roses are pleasingly red, gold attractively yellow, and diamonds conspicuously bright. In the third of the essays I lately began on the laws of Fiction, I claimed for myself a peculiar fineness in the pleasures of sight, such as had been possessed in the same degree only by four other men in the last century;¹ yet this special faculty would never have been allowed by me to give any prevailing colour or direction to my work, had it not been compelled by the scorn of it in the thoughts of all other teachers and philanthropists. I have not written about clouds and flowers because I love them myself, but because the energies of mankind are devoted all around me to the pollution of skies and desolation of fields; and I have not written of pictures because I loved pictures, but because the streets of London were posted over with handbills, and caricatures, and had become consistent and perpetual lessons in abomination and abortion to every soul that traversed them, so far as it used its sight.

I have not-again let me say with insistence-written of any of these things because I especially loved them. I hear it often said by my friends that my writings are transparent, so that I may myself be clearly seen through them. They are so, and what is seen of me through them is truly seen, yet I know no other author of candour who has given so partial, so disproportioned, so steadily reserved a view of his personality. Who could tell from my books, for instance, except in the course and common event of the abandonment of a sectarian doctrine, what has been the course of religious effort and speculation in me? Who could learn anything of my friendships or loves, and the help or harm they have done me? Who could find the roots of my personal angers? or see the dark sprays of them in the sky? The only parts of me that my readers know, even if they have common-sense, are, first, my love of material as well as human beauty (so that when another man, reduced to despair, suppose, by a cruel shepherdess, would go miauling and howling about the vale and the valleys, I can climb the nearest crag, and silence, if not solace, myself in the study of granite, as uncomplainingly and irrefragably cleft); secondly, my love of justice and hatred of thieves; and thirdly, my general wish

¹ [Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 73 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 343).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]