LITERATURE AND ACTION.
SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN, in the graceful speech at the dinner of the Royal Academy in which he returned thanks for Literature, quoted, as the " saddest " thing he knew, the saying of a Frenchman who was also a statesman, that "Literature leads to everything, provided that you quit it." The sentence ie a striking one, a bit of that pemmican of thought which Frenchman perhaps, of all men, beat prepare for general consumption ; but we do not quite know why Sir George applied to it the epithet " sad." He meant, no doubt— as, indeed, he said afterwards—that literary men who betake themselves to active life never do good literary work again, Literature demanding from her votaries too exclusive a de- votion ; but then, why is that, taken by itself, so sad ? The epithet implies that work done through the expression of thought is higher than work equally well done by taking part in the active business of life ; but how often ie that true P It is the custom, particularly with journalists, to give vent to this regret, and to moan, sometimes with a little malice of meaning, over a diverted career ; but, except as regards a most minute class, their melancholy has very little motive. Thought is only greater than armies when it is great thought. There have been men, and even men of reflection, to whom the world owed so much for the expression of their ideas that it would be difficult or impossible to think of the form of active life in which they could have effected better things; but they are veryfew. The conquestof Gaul was a greater feat than writing the " Commentaries." Ceteris paribus, action is greater, or at least far more useful to mankind than thought, as is proved by the fact that we measure thought by its influence on action. He is the great writer who over a wide area has affected either the lives of men, or those thoughts upon which the conduct of life is based. A biographer is rarely, indeed never, greater than the subject of his biography ; nor does the sensible historian reckon himself the superior of those who have made history. The orator, indeed, may be, as regards effectiveness, the equal or the superior of the statesman ; but then, in those conditions of mankind amid which alone persuasive speech is a great power, oratory is really not so much literature as action, and action often of the moat energetic kind. Mr. Gladstone is not a litterateur because when he desires to pass laws or work a revolution he pours out splendid speeches; he is a man of action who uses oratory as the instru- ment which, in a country governed by a deliberative Assembly, is the readiest to his hand. The man who has commanded an army has done more for his country than any writer on strategy or military history ; and the statesman who has passed one good law, more than any philosopher not of such rank that good laws have risen out of his philosophy as directly as effect from cause. One or two men, for example, like Adam Smith, may have enriched mankind more than most financiers ; but all the host of writers on finance have hardly accomplished so much for England as Sir Robert Peel, or Mr. Gladstone as his successor in the same great work. Sir George Trevelyan quotes Burke, and Sheridan, and Canning, and John Morley as his typical illustrations ; but Burke and Sheridan, who succeeded in litera- ture, almost failed in action, for their oratory, brilliant as it was, did not carry votes ; while nothing Canning ever wrote could compare for a moment in effect with his foreign policy. He might have written on liberty for ever without securing liberty for millions, as he did when he " called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old." Mr. Morley, as yet, is an unknown quantity in the argument; but suppose Home-rule for a moment to be carried and to succeed. Could all Mr. Morley ever wrote, or gave promise of the potentiality of writing, be compared for an instant, in its results for mankind, with a true and a lasting reconciliation between Ireland and Great Britain ? There is a little literature the importance of which it is impossible to over- rate ; but we habitually overrate the importance of literature in the mass, and especially its kindling effect. Action is con- tagious as well as thought, and the hero makes heroes as quickly as any poetry of heroism. Tyrtaens was a great poet, but Leonidas made Sparta. No thinker could do more to raise the standard of duty than General Gordon's example ; and it is in the states- manship of great statesmen, rather than in their thoughts, that the lesser statesmen seek guidance. Even in theology, where thought would seem to be all, it is the teacher's life that compels conviction, at least as much as his words,—unless, indeed, those words are accepted, like Mahommed's, as directly divine. That the pleasure of the world is sadly diminished when men of literature take to politics, is often true ; but the other results of that course may, and frequently do, outweigh any benefit to be derived from intellectual pleasure. The admirers of incisive writing lost much when Lord Salisbury took to statesmanship ; but then, a great party gained a leader, and England a Premier whose guidance may far outweigh in value for his people tons of the most acridly clever of "contributions." It is, we fear, when men of literature fail in action, and then only, that the world has reason to regret their divergence from their first career.
If this is not so, how shall we explain the frequency with which men of literary promise abandon the study and the pen for a career of action ? Usually, to such men the quieter career is by far the pleasanter. Is it all vanity, a desire to be more visible, a wish for the higher place in society which society, with an incurable perversity that suggests instinct, persists in assigning to the statesmen above the thinkers P We do not believe it. The literary character is not exempt from vanity, but it is usually simple, and the littgrateur who goes out to the battle is mainly influenced by a secret sense that he is not doing his best work, that action is more than writing, that if it is in him, be ought to do something, and not simply write. If he can do it, he is shirking the world's work, and feels that he will be more of a man when he is immersed in it, when he is outside helping the machine along. He ought, he feels, to cure, instead of writing about disease. Very often he mistakes himself, miscalculates his own powers, and in the bitterness of failure,aggravated by temperament,:cnrses his folly in giving up his pen ; but he acted, nevertheless, from a motive which reveals his inner judgment. Take Mr. Morley. Mr. Morley has not succeeded yet, and is weighted by a constitu- tion not perfectly suited to our wearying form of political battle; but Mr. Morley has already done more in the forum than he ever did in the closet, and if he went back to his old labour for any other reason than health, would be the first to acknowledge that, to his own mind and inner conviction, the retracing of his steps signified failure. The life of action was the larger life, with more in it, more to bring out the whole strength of its votary, more to be sure of in its ultimate results. This is so true, that we suspect that one reason why so few men of litera- ture who have become statesmen ever write again, is that they feel writing to be so useless beside action, that they are hardly attracted to such work. They have plenty of time, occasionally at least, under our system ; but they have lost the main impulse, that quantum of belief in the utility of their writing without which few men, except for money, would over be literary producers. The essay seems so trivial beside the speech which carried or defeated the Bill, the book so feeble beside the project of legislation. Virgil was greater than Augustus ? Perhaps, if we remember his influence on men in the Renaissance ; but was Horace P—of all mere littera- Lours who ever lived, perhaps the most successful. We should disagree wholly with Sir George Trevelyan's sentence, and rather say that one of the pleasantest features of modern literature is that it opens the door to so many for the higher work of guiding or ruling, and that once opened, tbey embrace it for ever. Whether they are the best of guides or rulers is a different matter, on which we shall not at the fag-end of an article venture to enter ; but we may just add this sentence. Of the three ruling men of our time who have accomplished most on the Continent, two, Cavonr and Bismarck, have been aristocrats trained to diplo- macy ; but the third, Thiers, who really saved France in 1870 from the Commune, as well as from the Germans, was essentially a iitterateur who accepted the French statesman's advice, and "quitted it." His career is scarcely a proof that it is a " sad " step to take. How much book would have compensated France for his decision that " the Republic divides us least,"—that is, for gaining seventeen years of opportunity to regain her strength P
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