be not only improper, but impious. 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. . . .

Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and then
to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of middle ages, to
lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations of the world's
superficial judgment, shocking to the souls concentrated upon their
own bitter labour in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of
temperance, let us say, or of art, if only the art of cracking jokes
or playing the flute. And thus this general's daughter came to me--or I
should say one of the general's daughters did. There were three of
these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
farm-house in a united and more or less military occupation. The