Men, when their affairs require, Must themselves at whiles retire; Sometimes hunt, and sometimes hawk, And not ever sit and talk-- to be dropped at will and left without any answering growl of moroseness; to be consulted again at will and found friendly. For this is the trouble of _professionising_ Literature. We exile it from the business of life, in which it would ever be at our shoulder, to befriend us. Listen, for example, to an extract from a letter written, a couple of weeks ago, by somebody in the Charity Commission: Sir, With reference to previous correspondence in this matter, I am to say that in all the circumstances of this case the Commissioners are of the opinion that it would be desirable that a public enquiry in connection with the Charity should be held in the locality. And the man--very likely an educated man--having written _that,_ very likely went home and read Chaucer, Dante, or Shakespeare, or Burke for pleasure! That is what happens when you treat literature as a 'subject,' separable from life and daily practice. VIII I declare to you that Literature was _not_ written for schoolmasters, nor for schoolmistresses. I would not exchange it for a wilderness of schoolmasters. It should be delivered from them, who, with their silly _Ablauts_ and 'tendencies,' can themselves neither read nor write. For the proof? Having the world's quintessential store of mirth and sharp sorrow, wit, humour, comfort, farce, comedy, tragedy, satire; the glories of our birth and state, piled all at their elbows, only one man of the crowd--and he M. Jusserand, a Frenchman--has contrived to draw out of the mass one interesting well-written history of the 'subject.' IX Is there, then, no better way? Yes there is a better way: for the French have it, with their language and literature. In France, as Matthew Arnold noted, a generation ago, the ordinary journey-man work of literature is done far better and more conscientiously than with us. In France a man feels it almost a personal stain, an unpatriotic _lache,_ to write even on a police-order anything so derogatory to the tradition of his language as our Cabinet Ministers read out as answers to our House of Commons. I am told that many a Maire in a small provincial town in N.E. France, even when overwhelmed--_accable_--with the sufferings of his town-folk, has truly felt the iron enter into his soul on being forced to sign a document written out for him in the invaders' French. Cannot we treat our noble inheritance of literature and language as scrupulously, and with as high a sense of their appertaining to our national honour, as a Frenchman cherishes _his_ language, _his_ literature? Cannot we study to leave our inheritance---as the old Athenian put it temperately, 'not worse but a little better than we found it'?