And yet they fill the globe with
volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration,
and whose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, with
despairing wrath. If I had no better hope than to continue to
revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by
the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate
their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an
hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a
railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could
count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of
these romances seems but dross.
These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was
very true; that it was the same with themselves and other persons
of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were
exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but
that our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) the
average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to
all but the paltriest considerations. I accept the issue. We can
only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague
on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellowmen,
or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average
man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would
not be average. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham
sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and
showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full
of a poetry of his own.
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