which there is similarity of pursuits, of language, of education, of every thing that is likely to permit men to talk easily together, and yet there is some obstacle that makes any real intercourse impossible. What the obstacle is I am unable to explain even to myself. It need not be any unkind feeling, nor any feeling of disapprobation; there may be good-will on both sides and a mutual desire for a greater degree of intimacy, yet with all this the intimacy does not come, and such intercourse as we have is that of simple politeness. In these cases each party is apt to think that the other is reserved, when there is no wish to be reserved but rather a desire to be as open as the unseen obstacle will allow. The existence of the obstacle does not prevent respect and esteem or even a considerable degree of affection. It divides people who seem to be on the most friendly terms; it divides even the nearest relations, brother from brother, and the son from the father. Nobody knows exactly what it is, but we have a word for it,—we call it incompatibility. The difficulty of going farther and explaining the real nature of incompatibility is that it takes as many shapes as there are varieties in the characters of mankind.

Sympathy and incompatibility,—these are the two great powers that decide for us whether intercourse is to be possible or not, but the causes of them are dark mysteries that lie undiscovered far down in the “abysmal deeps of personality.”

ESSAY II.

INDEPENDENCE.

There is an illusory and unattainable independence which is a mere dream, but there is also a reasonable and attainable independence not really inconsistent with our obligations to humanity and our country.

The dependence of the individual upon the race has never been so fully recognized as now, so that there is little fear of its being overlooked. The danger of our age, and of the future, is rather that a reasonable and possible independence should be made needlessly difficult to attain and to preserve.

The distinction between the two may be conveniently illustrated by a reference to literary production. Every educated man is dependent upon his own country for the language that he uses; and again, that language is itself dependent on other languages from which it is derived; and, farther, the modern author is indebted for a continual stimulus and many a suggestion to the writings of his predecessors, not in his own country only but in far distant lands. He cannot, therefore, say in any absolute way, “My books are my own,” but he may preserve a certain mental independence which will allow him to say that with truth in a relative sense. If he expresses himself such as he is, an idiosyncrasy affected but not annihilated by education, he may say that his books are his own.

Few English authors have studied past literature more willingly than Shelley and Tennyson, and none are more original. In these cases idiosyncrasy has been affected by education, but instead of being annihilated thereby it has gained from education the means of expressing its own inmost self more clearly. We have the true Shelley, the born Tennyson, far more perfectly than we should ever have possessed them if their own minds had not been opened by the action of other minds. Culture is like wealth, it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves. The real nature of the poor and the ignorant is an obscure and doubtful problem, for we can never know the inborn powers that remain in them undeveloped till they die. In this way the help of the race, so far from being unfavorable to individuality, is necessary to it. Claude helped Turner to become Turner. In complete isolation from art, however magnificently surrounded by the beauties of the natural world, a man does not express his originality as a landscape-painter, he is simply incapable of expressing anything in paint.

But now let us inquire whether there may not be cases in which the labors of others, instead of helping originality to express itself, act as a check to it by making originality superfluous.

As an illustration of this possibility I may take the modern railway system. Here we have the labor and ingenuity of the race applied to travelling, greatly to the convenience of the individual, but in a manner which is totally repressive of originality and indifferent to personal tastes. People of the most different idiosyncrasies travel exactly in the same way. The landscape-painter is hurried at speed past beautiful spots that he would like to contemplate at leisure; the archæologist is whirled by the site of a Roman camp that he would willingly pause to examine; the mountaineer is not permitted to climb the tunnelled hill, nor the swimmer to cross in his own refreshing, natural way the breadth of the iron-spanned river. And as individual tastes are disregarded, so individual powers are left uncultivated and unimproved. The only talent required is that of sitting passively on a seat and of enduring, for hours together, an unpleasant though mitigated vibration. The skill and courage of the horseman, the endurance of the pedestrian, the art of the paddler or the oarsman, are all made superfluous by this system of travelling by machines, in which previous labors of engineers and mechanics have determined everything beforehand. Happily, the love of exercise and enterprise has produced a reaction of individualism against this levelling railway system, a reaction that shows itself in many kinds of slower but more adventurous locomotion and restores to the individual creature his lost independence by allowing him to pause and stop when he pleases; a reaction delightful to him especially in this, that it gives him some pride and pleasure in the use of his own muscles and his own wits. There are still, happily, Englishmen who would rather steer a cutter across the Channel in rough weather than be shot through a long hole in the chalk.

What the railway is to physical motion, settled conventions are to the movements of the mind. Convention is a contrivance for facilitating what we write or speak by which we are relieved from personal effort and almost absolved from personal responsibility. There are men whose whole art of living consists in passing from one conventionalism to another as a traveller changes his train. Such men may be envied for the skill with which they avoid the difficulties of life. They take their religion, their politics, their education, their social and literary opinions, all as provided by the brains of others, and they glide through existence with a minimum of personal exertion. For those who are satisfied with easy, conventional ways the desire for intellectual independence is unintelligible. What is the need of it? Why go, mentally, on a bicycle or in a canoe by your own toilsome exertions when you may sit so very comfortably in the train, a rug round your lazy legs and your softly capped head in a corner?

The French ideal of “good form” is to be undistinguishable from others; by which it is not understood that you are to be undistinguishable from the multitude of poor people, but one of the smaller crowd of rich and fashionable people. Independence and originality are so little esteemed in what is called “good society” in France that the adjectives “indépendant” and “original” are constantly used in a bad sense. “Il est très indépendant” often means that the man is of a rude, insubordinate, rebellious temper, unfitting him for social life. “Il est original,” or more contemptuously, “C’est un original,” means that