From impiety of that or any other
kind--save us! An ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense
of proprieties, from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from
weariness, induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the
adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes a mere
"notice," as it were, the relation of a journey where nothing but the
distances and the geology of a new country should be set down; the
glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood and field, the
hairbreadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the sufferings, too! I have
no doubt of the sufferings) of the traveller being carefully kept out;
no shady spot, no fruitful plant being ever mentioned either; so that
the whole performance looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of
a trained pen running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
adventure! "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I should
say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to the worship of
posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles." Neither is the writing
of novels. It isn't, really. Je vous donne ma parole d'honneur that
it--is--not. Not _all_. I am thus emphatic because some years ago, I
remember, the daughter of a general.
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