may share it
with another, but you must not adopt it from him for the nonce. Of
course, if you are writing humorously or dramatically, you will not be
expected to write your own serious opinions. Humour may take its utmost
licence, yet be sincere. The dramatic genius may incarnate itself in a
hundred shapes, yet in each it will speak what it feels to be the
truth. If you are imaginatively representing the feelings of another,
as in some playful exaggeration or some dramatic personation, the truth
required of you is imaginative truth, not your personal views and
feelings. But when you write in your own person you must be rigidly
veracious, neither pretending to admire what you do not admire, or to
despise what in secret you rather like, nor surcharging your admiration
and enthusiasm to bring you into unison with the public chorus. This
vigilance may render Literature more laborious; but no one ever
supposed that success was to be had on easy terms; and if you only
write one sincere page where you might have written twenty insincere
pages, the one page is worth writing--it is Literature.

Sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less
difficult than is commonly supposed. To take a trifling example: If for
some reason I cannot, or do not, choose to verify a quotation which may
be useful to my purpose, what is to prevent my saying that the
quotation is taken at second-hand? It is true, if my quotations are for
the most part second-hand and are acknowledged as such, my erudition
will appear scanty. But it will only appear what it is. Why should I
pretend to an erudition which is not mine? Sincerity forbids it.
Prudence whispers that the pretence is, after all, vain, because those,
and those alone, who can rightly estimate erudition will infallibly
detect my pretence, whereas those whom I have deceived were not worth
deceiving. Yet in spite of Sincerity and Prudence, how shamelessly men
compile second-hand references, and display in borrowed footnotes a
pretence of labour and of accuracy! I mention this merely to show how,
even in the humbler class of compilers, the Principle of Sincerity may
find fit illustrations, and how honest work, even in references,
belongs to the same category as honest work in philosophy or poetry.
EDITOR.

CHAPTER V.

THE PRINCIPLE OF BEAUTY.

It is not enough that a man has clearness of Vision, and reliance on
Sincerity, he must also have the art of Expression, or he wil