DULNESS AS A SENSATION.

THERE are few things which show a more candid mind than a frank confession of dulness. It is an admission of occasional vacuity, of self-insufficiency, which very few can bring themselves to make, and which, when made, is not always received with the humanity and tenderness such ingenuousness deserves. People who never feel weary of their own company have a contempt for those who do, and often a very ill-founded contempt; for, in the first place, the difference may be one only of circumstances-some people are much more exposed to dulness than others; and, in the next, satisfaction with our own company is wise or foolish according to the grounds on which it is founded. To be ever dull is, no doubt, a mark of human infirmity. For this exquisite mechanism of mind, thought, intelligence, ever to collapse, to lose spring and vigour, to suffer cold obstruction, should be a check to our pride of reason. But it is only felt to be so when our solitude is thus visited. To profess one's self dull in society

where others are amused is a piece of pretension, a sort of boast, as implying a tacit superiority. But, in fact, this too argues deficiency and absence of power, often as great as the other. True vigour of mind and body is never dull, and can turn all painless conditions of being to an element of delight. If people are prone to feel dull, the scene of their dulness is more an affair of temperament, or at most of training, than of intellect.

We need not explain that the dulness we speak of is not any inherent quality of the mind, but a matter of feeling. It indeed implies a certain quickness of apprehension always to know when we are dull. There are existences so void of interesting, elevating, or inspiring circumstances, that only a dull head and a dull heart could reconcile themselves to them; but the leaders of such lives make them what they are, would not change them if they could, are content with them, and value themselves on that content. Supposed im-. munity from dulness, then, may proceed from all sorts of causes, creditable or the reverse. It may arise from activity of mind, fulness of thought, an uninterrupted stream of occupation-which is always the assumed cause, or from slowness, apathy, and a dead sterile imagination. Thus, a man may never be dull because he contains everything within himself, or because his heavy intelligence is on an exact level with his monotonous existence. Certain it is that there are many who avow themselves perfectly satisfied with their own company whose company gives others very little satisfaction-who, if they are not dull, for anything we can

see, ought to be. It is an extremely happy thing in such cases that there is this just balance; for the fact is, it is only very lively or engaging people who can own themselves dull with impunity-who can find sympathy, or even toleration, for their infirmity; and this for the obvious reason that in their case alone society is the gainer by it. Persons who are dull in both senses of the word at once are just the heaviest load social life can be burdened with. But charming people are the more charming because they are not independent of their fellow-creatures-cannot pretend to the pride of seclusion—and are thus driven, as well as led by their nature to show their best, conscious of some hidden far-off bugbear which haunts the long hours of uncongenial solitude, brightening the social scene by the contrast of its gloom. No doubt much. may be done by practice and self-discipline to overcome this weakness, and every one, if he is wise, will struggle against it. But there is, all the same, an inherent difference between man and man which no effort can do away, and the man who wants companionship will always stand in a different relation to the world from the man who is independent of it. What we argue is, that it may be incompleteness, not inferiority: for, wherever the affections predominate, men will be dull when they cannot exercise them; and wherever the mind and intellect are worked by fits and starts, as some people are obliged to work them-effort alternating with the indolence of reaction-these intervals will be subject to conscious dulness.

We use the word dulness because our language has no other, but it is a vast deal easier to feel dull than to know what dulness is so far as to define it. Our classical writers all treat dulness as a quality. Men are dull, and are loathed by the wits accordingly. We do not for a moment assume any of our readers to be dull-it as much as we dare suppose, in this activeminded age, that any of them even feel dull under the ignominious condition of not being absolutely all in all, each to himself. Johnson recognises the word in our sense, but he is obliged to depart from his rule and furnish his own example:-" Dull," "not exhilarating, not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work." But this does not get at the bottom of the thing. Dull work, dull leisure, dull company, dull solitude-what is the common element in them all? Theologians tell us that our nature shrinks from absolute disembodiment that the spiritual part of us recoils from the idea of bare exposure of its essence, of being turned into space shivering, houseless, homeless. If we analyse dulness, there is something of this recoil about it. It is not otherwise easy to understand the horror with which men look forward to a threatened period of simple dulness. The protests, lamentations, self-pity expended on a brief season of dulness, are called morbid, wrong, ridiculous, by the people who say they are never dull. The feeling expressed is so utterly incommensurate with the occasion-taking into account the absence of positive pain, and the brief duration of whatever suffering there is—that the whole thing is to

them affected, unreal, preposterous. It is as if, like fretful children, these clamourers wanted something to cry for; and certainly, if it only meant not being diverted or exhilarated, dulness would be a weak subject of dread. But it is more. There is a foretaste, a threatening, of something worse, a touch of undefined spiritual terrors in all dulness. A day of simple vacuity, of not being amused, has no analogy with the dulness our active imagination realises. Everybody is now and then neither doing anything, nor wanting to do anything-unamused, and not wanting to be amused. Everybody is vacant sometimes, and does not dislike the sensation; but what has all this to do with dulness? A man is dull, it may be, to other people, but not dull to himself. Wordsworth prefers this state far before what he calls personal talk—that is, gossip—the relaxation of half the world.

"Better than such discourse doth silence long,

Long barren silence, square with my desire;

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,

In the loved presence of my cottage fire,

And listen to the flapping of the flame,

Or kettle chirping its faint under-song."

This is a picture of comfort, this is being at home with

our household gods about us. Here the lazy unoccupied spirit misses nothing. When people feel dull, there is a sense of deprivation and exposure. We are without something that answers to the mind for what clothing and shelter are to the body. We are weak, open to aggression; we have lost something; our completeness, our organisation is affected. Time ceases to