the education and comfort of
mankind, and so hard to preserve, that the faithful trying to do so will
lend some dignity to the man who tries it. Our judgments are based upon
two things, first, upon the original preferences of our soul; but,
second, upon the mass of testimony to the nature of God, man, and the
universe which reaches us, in divers manners, from without. For the most
part these divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of
past times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the
medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning from the
same source at second-hand and by the report of him who can. Thus the
sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of good and evil is, in
large measure, the handiwork of those who write. Those who write have to
see that each man's knowledge is, as near as they can make it,
answerable to the facts of life; that he shall not suppose himself an
angel or a monster; nor take this world for a hell; nor be suffered to
imagine that all rights are concentred in his own caste or country, or
all veracities in his own parochial creed. Each man should learn what is
within him, that he may strive to mend; he must be taught what is
without him, that he may be kind to others. It can never be wrong to
tell him the truth; for, in his disputable state, weaving as he goes his
theory of life, steering himself, cheering or reproving others, all
facts are of the first importance to his conduct; and even if a fact
shall discourage or corrupt him, it is still best that he should know
it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a world made easy by
educational suppressions, that he must win his way to shame or glory. In
one word, it must always be foul to tell what is false; and it can never
be safe to suppress what is true. The very fact that you omit may be the
fact which somebody was wanting, for one man's meat is another man's
poison, and I have known a person who was cheered by the perusal of
"Candide." Every fact is a part of that great puzzle we must set
together; and none that comes directly in a writer's path but has some
nice relations, unperceivable by him, to the totality and bearing of the
subject under hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact eternally more
necessary than others, and it is with these that literature must first
bestir itself. They are not hard to distinguish, nature once more easily
leading us; for the necessary, because th