SOMETIMES we tire of being subjugated by our intellectual superiors and coerced by those who set up their moral excellencies in overwhelming array against us. As the schoolboy, when the woods are green with the first fresh tints of June, longs to escape from the majesty of his teacher to the company of vagrant boys whom, through the solid walls of the schoolroom and a mile of intervening fields, he can see splashing in the forbidden stream, so do we long for the delight of freedom in the company of minds of our likeness. And this longing, necessary for our growth, deserves indulgence at all times and gratification as often as possible. After we have been disciplined and instructed, taught with all necessary birching or the threat of it,
To do the thing we never like, | |
Which is the thing we ought, |
He was born at Portsmouth, England, August 14th, 1838. After graduating from Christ College, Cambridge, he was for seven years senior professor in the Royal College at Mauritius. When he returned to London, it was with a determination to adopt literature as a profession, and although it is said that he burned his first novel because a publisher rejected it, he was successful from the beginning. His studies of French poetry and his essays on The French Humorists show his superiority to the style and to the literary tradition of the English Critical Review. They are unmistakably literature in their own right and not mere commentaries on it. The partnership as a novelist formed with James Rice in 1871 resulted in Ready-Money Mortiboy, The Golden Butterfly, and other novels which at once attained international popularity. Rice died in 1882, and in the same year appeared the first of Besants independent novels, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, one result of which was the building of the Peoples Palace in East London.
In 1884 he was elected first president of the English Society of Authors, and in 1887 was again elected, serving until 1892. In 1895 he was knighted and in 1900 became a member of the Advisory Council of the Worlds Best Essays,of which in his own right and as the special representative of England, he is honorary chairman. He has been active in promoting closer relations between England and America, and has taken special pains to promote the convenience and pleasure of Americans visiting London.