Fore the 'Judgment of Solomon.' I am no great judg

[Sjogren Chisman]

Rsons, to evolve the truth involved in and manifest through public
events,--the annals recorded are but dry chronology,--a monotonous,
more or less authentic, perhaps quite respectable, but far from a very
important or peculiarly interesting work. Thousands of such cumber the

shelves of libraries
and fill the pages of catalogues,--dusted once a year, perhaps, to
verify a date, to authenticate the details of a treaty, or fix the
statistics

of a war, but never read consecutively and with zest, because there
was no genuine relation between the writer and his book. He undertook
the latter in the spirit of a mechanical job;
industry and learning may be embodied therein, but no moral life, no
human charm; yet the work
is cited with respect, the author enrolled with honor;--whereas,
had he
sought in poetry or philosophy, in a novel or a drama, thus to occupy
and celebrate himself with literature, the failure would have been
signal, the attempt ignominious. There is, indeed, no safer investment
for middling literary abilities than History; for, if it fail to yield
any large harvest of renown, it is comparatively secure from the
assaults

of ridicule, such as make pretension in other spheres of writing
conspicuous. Even in what are considered the successful exemplars in
this department of literature, the errors incident to artificiality,
the conventional forms of writing, are patent.
Only in passages do we recognize that beauty or truth, that reality
and
genuineness, which so often wholly pervade a poem, a story, a memoir,
or even a disquisition: at some point, the flow incident to wilful
instead of soulful utterance becomes apparent;--ambition, pride of
opinion, love of display somewhere manifest th
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: panicking.jpg
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 12314 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://freedesktop.org/archives/dbus-commit/attachments/20100916/37535854/attachment.obj>