nder--you must be very
differently made from me, and I earnestly believe from the majority of
men. But at least you are in the right to wonder and complain.

To "say all"? Stay here. All at once? That would require a word from the
pen of Gargantua. We say each particular thing as it comes up, and "with
that sort of emphasis that for the time there seems to be no other."
Words will not otherwise serve us; no, nor even Shakespeare, who could
not have put _As You Like It_ and _Timon_ into one without ruinous loss
both of emphasis and substance. Is it quite fair then to keep your face
so steadily On my most light-hearted works, and then say I recognise no
evil? Yet in the paper on Burns, for instance, I show myself alive to
some sorts of evil. But then, perhaps, they are not your sorts.

And again: "to say all"? All: yes. Everything: no. The task were
endless, the effect nil. But my all, in such a vast field as this of
life, is what interests me, what stands out, what takes on itself a
presence for my imagination or makes a figure in that little tricky
abbreviation which is the best that my reason can conceive. That I must
treat, or I shall be fooling with my readers. That, and not the all of
some one else.

And here we come to the division: not only do I believe that literature
should give joy, but I see a universe, I suppose, eternally different
from yours; a solemn, a terrible, but a very joyous and noble universe,
where suffering is not at least wantonly inflicted, though it falls with
dispassionate partiality, but where it may be and generally is nobly
borne; where, above all (this I believe; probably you don't: I think he
may, with cancer), _any brave man may make_ out a life which shall be
happy for himself, and, by so being, beneficent to those about him. And
if he fails, why should I hear him weeping? I mean if I fail, why should
I weep? Why should _you_ hear _me_? Then to me morals, the conscience,
the affections, and the passions are, I will own frankly and sweepingly,
so infinitely more important than the other parts of life, that I
conceive men rather triflers who become immersed in the latter; and I
will always think the man who keeps his lip stiff, and makes "a happy
fireside clime," and carries a pleasant face about to friends and
neighbours, infinitely greater (in the abstract) than an atrabilious
Shakespeare or a backbiting Kant or Darwin. No offence to any of these
gentlemen, two of whom probably (one f