arsher than
necessary. Is not the moral preacher intruding a little too much on the
province of the literary critic? In fact we fancy that, in the midst of
these energetic remarks, Carlyle is conscious of certain half-expressed
doubts. The name of Shakespeare occurs several times in the course of
his remarks, and suggests to us that we can hardly condemn Scott whilst
acquitting the greatest name in our literature. Scott, it seems, wrote
for money; he coined his brains into cash to buy farms. Did not
Shakespeare do pretty much the same? As Carlyle himself puts it, 'beyond
drawing audiences to the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare contemplated no
result in those plays of his.' Shakespeare, as Pope puts it,

Whom you and every playhouse bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will,
For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.

To write for money was long held to be disgraceful; and Byron, as we
know, taunted Scott because his publishers combined

To yield his muse just half-a-crown per line;

whilst Scott seems half to admit that his conduct required
justification, and urges that he sacrificed to literature very fair
chances in his original profession. Many people might, perhaps, be
disposed to take a bolder line of defence. Cut out of English fiction
all that which has owed its birth more or less to a desire of earning
money honourably, and the residue would be painfully small. The truth,
indeed, seems to be simple. No good work is done when the one impelling
motive is the desire of making a little money; but some of the best work
that has ever been done has been indirectly due to the impecuniosity of
the labourers. When a man is empty he makes a very poor job of it, in
straining colourless trash from his hardbound brains; but when his mind
is full to bursting he may still require the spur of a moderate craving
for cash to induce him to take the decisive plunge. Scott illustrates
both cases. The melancholy drudgery of his later years was forced from
him in spite of nature; but nobody ever wrote more spontaneously than
Scott when he was composing his early poems and novels. If the precedent
of Shakespeare is good for anything, it is good for this. Shakespeare,
it may be, had a more moderate ambition; but there seems to be no reason
why the desire of a good house at Stratford should be intrinsically
nobler than the desire of a fine estate at Abbotsford.