The Intellectual Life
by Philip Gilbert Hamerton · English · Gutenberg #32151 · 839,790 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Intellectual Life
Author: Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Release date: April 27, 2010 [eBook #32151]
Most recently updated: June 19, 2017
Language: English
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Transcriber's note:
The following typographical errors have been corrected:
Page 86: "We bring ourselves, by its help, to face petty details that
are wearisome, and heavy tasks that are almost appalling."
'appalling' amended from 'appaling'.
Page 153: "That which is truly, and deeply, and seriously an injury
to our intellectual life, is the foolishness of the too common
vanity." 'too' amended from 'two'.
Page 161: "the child had the defects of children, but of children
born in the different countries where he lived." 'lived' amended from
'live'.
Page 294: "The girl was uneducated: it seems hopeless to try to
educate the woman". 'educate' amended from 'educated'.
Page 364: "I am sure that my modern artillery captain,
notwithstanding his bad manners." 'notwithstanding' amended from
'notwithstand'.
Page 377: "I know a distinguished Englishman who is quite remarkable
for the talent with which he arranges his intellectual friendships,
so as never to be dependent on any one." 'intellectual' amended from
'inintellectual'.
Page 383: "The truth is, that to succeed well in fashionable society
the higher intellectual attainments are not so useful as
distinguished skill in those amusements which are the real business
of the fashionable world." 'business of' amended from 'busiof'.
Page 387: "To me it appears the perfect type of that preoccupation
about appearances which blinds the genteel vulgar to the true
nobility of life." 'preoccupation' amended from 'pre-occupation'.
Page 417: "She moves; movement is the law of her life; yet she is as
tranquil in her little cabin as any goodwife on shore." 'she' amended
from 'see'.
Page 489: "I certainly think that if a good curé has an exceptional
genius for sanctity." 'sanctity' amended from 'sancitity'.
Page 558 (index): "Dullness of general conversation." 'Dullness'
amended from 'Dulness'.
THE
INTELLECTUAL LIFE,
BY
PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON,
AUTHOR OF "A PAINTER'S CAMP," "THOUGHTS ABOUT ART," "THE UNKNOWN
RIVER," ETC.
NEW YORK
HURST & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
TO EUGÈNIE H.
We have shared together many hours of study, and you have been willing,
at the cost of much patient labor, to cheer the difficult paths of
intellectual toil by the unfailing sweetness of your beloved
companionship. It seems to me that all those things which we have
learned together are doubly my own; whilst those other studies which I
have pursued in solitude have never yielded me more than a maimed and
imperfect satisfaction. The dream of my life would be to associate you
with all I do if that were possible; but since the ideal can never be
wholly realized, let me at least rejoice that we have been so little
separated, and that the subtle influence of your finer taste and more
delicate perception is ever, like some penetrating perfume, in the whole
atmosphere around me.
PREFACE.
I propose, in the following pages, to consider the possibilities of a
satisfactory intellectual life under various conditions of ordinary
human existence. It will form a part of my plan to take into account
favorable and unfavorable influences of many kinds; and my chief
purpose, so far as any effect upon others may be hoped for, will be to
guard some who may read the book alike against the loss of time caused
by unnecessary discouragement, and the waste of effort which is the
consequence of misdirected energies.
I have adopted the form of letters addressed to persons of very
different position in order that every reader may have a chance of
finding what concerns him. The letters, it is unnecessary to observe,
are in one sense as fictitious as those we find in novels, for they have
never been sent to anybody by the post, yet the persons to whom they are
addressed are not imaginary. I made it a rule, from the beginning, to
think of a real person when writing, from an apprehension that by
dwelling in a world too exclusively ideal I might lose sight of many
impediments which beset all actual lives, even the most exceptional and
fortunate.
The essence of the book may be expressed in a few sentences, the rest
being little more than evidence or illustration. First, it appears that
all who are born with considerable intellectual faculties are urged
towards the intellectual life by irresistible instincts, as water-fowl
are urged to an aquatic life; but the lower animals have this advantage
over man, that as their purposes are simpler, so they attain them more
completely than he does. The life of a wild duck is in perfect
accordance with its instincts, but the life of an intellectual man is
never on all points perfectly in accordance with _his_ instincts. Many
of the best intellectual lives known to us have been hampered by
vexatious impediments of the most various and complicated kinds; and
when we come to have accurate and intimate knowledge of the lives led by
our intellectual contemporaries, we are always quite sure to find that
each of them has some great thwarting difficulty to contend against. Nor
is it too much to say that if a man were so placed and endowed in every
way that all his work should be made as easy as the ignorant imagine it
to be, that man would find in that very facility itself a condition most
unfavorable to his intellectual growth. So that, however circumstances
may help us or hinder us, the intellectual life is always a contest or a
discipline, and the art or skill of living intellectually does not so
much consist in surrounding ourselves with what is reputed to be
advantageous as in compelling every circumstance and condition of our
lives to yield us some tribute of intellectual benefit and force. The
needs of the intellect are as various as intellects themselves are
various: and if a man has got high mental culture during his passage
through life it is of little consequence where he acquired it, or how.
The school of the intellectual man is the place where he happens to be,
and his teachers are the people, books, animals, plants, stones, and
earth round about him. The feeling almost always predominant in the
minds of intellectual men as they grow older, is not so much one of
regret that their opportunities were not more abundant, as of regret
that they so often missed opportunities which they might have turned to
better account.
I have written for all classes, in the conviction that the intellectual
life is really within the reach of every one who earnestly desires it.
The highest culture can never be within the reach of those who cannot
give the years of labor which it costs; and if we cultivate ourselves to
shine in the eyes of others, to become famous in literature or science,
then of course we must give many more hours of labor than can be spared
from a life of practical industry. But I am fully convinced of this,
convinced by the observation of living instances in all classes, that
any man or woman of large natural capacity may reach the tone of
thinking which may justly be called intellectual, even though that
thinking may not be expressed in the most perfect language. The essence
of intellectual living does not reside in extent of science or in
perfection of expression, but in a constant preference for higher
thoughts over lower thoughts, and this preference may be the habit of a
mind which has not any very considerable amount of information. This may
be very easily demonstrated by a reference to men who lived
intellectually in ages when science had scarcely begun to exist, and
when there was but little literature that could be of use as an aid to
culture. The humblest subscriber to a mechanics' institute has easier
access to sound learning than had either Solomon or Aristotle, yet both
Solomon and Aristotle lived the intellectual life. Whoever reads English
is richer in the aids to culture than Plato was, yet Plato _thought_
intellectually. It is not erudition that makes the intellectual man, but
a sort of virtue which delights in vigorous and beautiful thinking, just
as moral virtue delights in vigorous and beautiful conduct. Intellectual
living is not so much an accomplishment as a state or condition of the
mind in which it seeks earnestly for the highest and purest truth. It is
the continual exercise of a firmly noble choice between the larger truth
and the lesser, between that which is perfectly just and that which
falls a little short of justice. The ideal life would be to choose thus
firmly and delicately always, yet if we often blunder and fail for want
of perfect wisdom and clear light, have we not the inward assurance that
our aspiration has not been all in vain, that it has brought us a
little nearer to the Supreme Intellect whose effulgence draws us whilst
it dazzles? Here is the true secret of that fascination which belongs to
intellectual pursuits, that they reveal to us a little more, and yet a
little more, of the eternal order of the Universe, establishing us so
firmly in what is known, that we acquire an unshakable confidence in the
laws which govern what is not, and never can be, known.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
THE PHYSICAL BASIS.
LETTER PAGE
I. To a young man of letters who worked excessively 17
II. To the same 22
III. To a student in uncertain health 27
IV. To a muscular Christian 42
V. To a student who neglected bodily exercise 47
VI. To an author in mortal disease 53
VII. To a young man of brilliant ability, who had just taken his
degree 57
PART II.
THE MORAL BASIS.
I. To a moralist who had said that there was a want of moral
fibre in the intellectual, especially in poets and artists 67
II. To an undisciplined writer 80
III. To a friend who suggested the speculation "which of the moral
virtues was most essential to the intellectual life" 91
IV. To a moralist who said that intellectual culture was not
conducive to sexual morality 98
PART III.
OF EDUCATION.
I. To a friend who recommended the author to learn this thing
and that 104
II. To a friend who studied many things 110
III. To the same 120
IV. To a student of literature 130
V. To a country gentleman who regretted that his son had the
tendencies of a dilettant 134
VI. To the principal of a French college 137
VII. To the same 143
VIII. To a student of modern languages 149
IX. To the same 153
X. To a student who lamented his defective memory 165
XI. To a master of arts who said that a certain distinguished
painter was half-educated 170
PART IV.
THE POWER OF TIME.
I. To a man of leisure who complained of want of time 176
II. To a young man of great talent and energy who had
magnificent plans for the future 185
III. To a man of business who desired to make himself better
acquainted with literature, but whose time for reading
was limited 200
IV. To a student who felt hurried and driven 207
V. To a friend who, though he had no profession, could not
find time for his various intellectual pursuits 212
PART V.
THE INFLUENCES OF MONEY.
I. To a very rich student 216
II. To a genius careless in money matters 224
III. To a student in great poverty 239
PART VI.
CUSTOM AND TRADITION.
I. To a young gentleman who had firmly resolved never to wear
anything but a gray coat 246
II. To a conservative who had accused the author of a want of
respect for tradition 254
III. To a lady who lamented that her son had intellectual doubts
concerning the dogmas of the church 263
IV. To the son of the lady to whom the preceding letter was
addressed 269
V. To a friend who seemed to take credit to himself,
intellectually, from the nature of his religious belief 276
VI. To a Roman Catholic friend who accused the intellectual
class of a want of reverence for authority 280
PART VII.
WOMEN AND MARRIAGE.
I. To a young gentleman of intellectual tastes, who, without
having as yet any particular lady in view, had
expressed, in a general way, his determination to get
married 285
II. To a young gentleman who contemplated marriage 291
III. To the same 299
IV. To the same 306
V. To the same 312
VI. To a solitary student 322
VII. To a lady of high culture who found it difficult to associate
with persons of her own sex 325
VIII. To a lady of high culture 330
IX. To a young man of the middle class, well educated, who
complained that it was difficult for him to live agreeably
with his mother, a person of somewhat authoritative
disposition, but uneducated 333
PART VIII.
ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY.
I. To a young English nobleman 341
II. To an English democrat 358
PART IX.
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.
I. To a lady who doubted the reality of intellectual
friendships 374
II. To a young gentleman who lived much in fashionable society 379
III. To the same 384
IV. To the same 391
V. To a young gentleman who kept entirely out of company 397
VI. To a friend who kindly warned the author of the bad effects
of solitude 402
PART X.
INTELLECTUAL HYGIENICS.
I. To a young author whilst he was writing his first book 415
II. To a student in the first ardor of intellectual ambition 422
III. To an intellectual man who desired an outlet for his
energies 431
IV. To the friend of a man of high culture who produced nothing 441
V. To a student who felt hurried and driven 446
VI. To an ardent friend who took no rest 451
VII. To the same 456
VIII. To a friend (highly cultivated) who congratulated himself
on having entirely abandoned the habit of reading
newspapers 466
IX. To an author who appreciated contemporary literature 470
X. To an author who kept very irregular hours 476
PART XI.
TRADES AND PROFESSIONS.
I. To a young gentleman of ability and culture who had not
decided about his profession 488
II. To a young gentleman who had literary and artistic tastes,
but no profession 499
III. To a young gentleman who wished to devote himself to
literature as a profession 504
IV. To an energetic and successful cotton manufacturer 513
V. To a young Etonian who thought of becoming a cotton-spinner 522
PART XII.
SURROUNDINGS.
I. To a friend who often changed his place of residence 530
II. To a friend who maintained that surroundings were a matter
of indifference to a thoroughly occupied mind 539
III. To an artist who was fitting up a magnificent new studio 546
THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.
PART I.
_THE PHYSICAL BASIS._
LETTER I.
TO A YOUNG MAN OF LETTERS WHO WORKED EXCESSIVELY.
Mental labor believed to be innocuous to healthy persons--Difficulty
of testing this--Case of the poet Wordsworth--Case of an eminent
living author--Case of a literary clergyman--Case of an energetic
tradesman--Instances of two Londoners who wrote
professionally--Scott's paralysis--Byron's death--All intellectual
labor proceeds on a physical basis.
So little is really known about the action of the nervous system, that
to go into the subject from the physiological point of view would be to
undertake a most difficult investigation, entirely beyond the competence
of an unscientific person like your present correspondent. You will,
therefore, permit me, in reference to this, to leave you to the teaching
of the most advanced physiologists of the time; but I may be able to
offer a few practical suggestions, based on the experience of
intellectual workers, which may be of use to a man whose career is
likely to be one of severe and almost uninterrupted intellectual labor.
A paper was read several years ago before the members of a society in
London, in which the author maintained that mental labor was never
injurious to a perfectly healthy human organization, and that the
numerous cases of break-down, which are commonly attributed to excessive
brain-work, are due, in reality, to the previous operation of disease.
This is one of those assertions which cannot be answered in a sentence.
Concentrated within the briefest expression it comes to this, that
mental labor cannot produce disease, but may aggravate the consequences
of disease which already exists.
The difficulty of testing this is obvious; for so long as health remains
quite perfect, it remains perfect, of course, whether the brain is used
or not; and when failure of health becomes manifest, it is not always
easy to decide in what degree mental labor may have been the cause of
it. Again, the accuracy of so general a statement cannot be proved by
any number of instances in its favor, since it is universally admitted
that brain-work is not the only cause of disease, and no one affirms
that it is more than one amongst many causes which may impede the bodily
functions.
When the poet Wordsworth was engaged in composing the "White Doe of
Rylstone," he received a wound in his foot, and he observed that the
continuation of the literary labor increased the irritation of the
wound; whereas by suspending his work he could diminish it, and absolute
mental rest produced a perfect cure. In connection with this incident he
remarked that poetic excitement, accompanied by protracted labor in
composition, always brought on more or less of bodily derangement. He
preserved himself from permanently injurious consequences by his
excellent habits of life.
A very eminent living author, whose name I do not feel at liberty to
mention, is always prostrated by severe illness at the conclusion of
each of his works; another is unwell every Sunday, because he does not
write on that day, and the recoil after the mental stretch of the week
is too much for him.
In the case of Wordsworth, the physical constitution is believed to have
been sound. His health at seventy-two was excellent; the two other
instances are more doubtful in this respect, yet both these writers
enjoy very fair health, after the pressure of brain-work has been
removed for any considerable time. A clergyman of robust organization,
who does a good deal of literary work at intervals, told me that,
whenever he had attempted to make it regular, the consequence had always
been distressing nervous sensations, from which at other times he was
perfectly free. A tradesman, whose business affords an excellent outlet
for energetic bodily activity, told me that having attempted, in
addition to his ordinary work, to acquire a foreign language which
seemed likely to be useful to him, he had been obliged to abandon it on
account of alarming cerebral symptoms. This man has immense vigor and
energy, but the digestive functions, in this instance, are sluggish.
However, when he abandoned study, the cerebral inconveniences
disappeared, and have never returned since.
Two Londoners who followed literature as a profession, and who both
worked to excess, had cerebral attacks of a still more decided kind. One
of them, after his recovery, resolved to regulate his work in future, so
that it might never pass the limits of moderation. He is now living, and
in possession of a remarkably clear and richly furnished intellect. The
other, who returned to his old habits, died in two years from softening
of the brain. I am not aware that in these cases there was any other
disease than that produced by an immoderate use of the mental powers.
The health of Sir Walter Scott--we have this on his own testimony--was
uncommonly robust, and there is every reason to believe that his
paralysis was brought on by the excessive labor which resulted from his
pecuniary embarrassments, and that without such excessive mental labor
and anxiety he would have preserved his health much longer. The death of
Byron was due, no doubt, quite as much to habits of dissipation as to
poetical excitement; still it is probable that he would have borne
either of these evil influences if it had not been accompanied by the
other; and that to a man whose way of life was so exhausting as Byron's
was, the addition of constant poetical excitement and hard work in
production, may be said without exaggeration to have killed him. We know
that Scott, with all his facility, had a dread of that kind of
excitement, and withdrew from the poetical arena to avoid it. We know,
too, that the brain of Southey proved ultimately unable to endure the
burden of the tasks he laid upon it.
Difficult as it may be in some instances to ascertain quite accurately
whether an overworked man had perfectly sound bodily health to begin
with, obvious as it may be that in many breakdowns the final failure has
been accelerated by diseases independent of mental work, the facts
remain, that the excessive exercise of the mental powers is injurious to
bodily health and that all intellectual labor proceeds upon a physical
basis. No man can safely forget this, and act as if he were a pure
spirit, superior to physical considerations. Let me then, in other
letters on this subject, direct your attention to the close connection
which exists between intellectual production and the state of the body
and the brain; not with the authority of a physician, but with the
sympathy of a fellow-laborer, who has learned something from his own
experience, and still more from the more varied experience of his
friends.
LETTER II.
TO A YOUNG MAN OF LETTERS WHO WORKED EXCESSIVELY.
Mental labor rarely compatible with the best physical
conditions--Wordsworth's manner of composition--Mr. W. F. A.
Delane--George Sand working under pressure--Sir Walter Scott's
field-sports--Physical exercise the best tranquillizer of the nervous
system--Eugène Sue--Shelley's love of boating--Nervousness the
affliction of brain-workers--Nature's kindly warning--Working by
spurts--Beckford--Byron--Indolence of men of genius
fortunate--Distressing nature of cerebral fatigue.
It is possible that many of the worst results of intellectual labor may
be nothing more than indirect results. We may suffer, not from the work
itself, but from sedentary confinement, from want of exercise, from
insufficient variety and amusement.
Mental labor is seldom compatible with the best physical conditions; it
is so sometimes, however, or may be made so by an effort of will and
resolution. Wordsworth composed his poetry in the open air, as he
walked, and so preserved himself from the evil of close confinement to
the desk. Mr. W. F. A. Delane, who did so much for the organization of
the _Times_ newspaper when it was under his management, began by doing
law reports for that paper, in London and on circuit. His appearance of
rude health surprised other members of his profession, but he accounted
for it by the care he took to compensate for the bad air and sedentary
labor in the courts of law by travelling between the assize towns on
horseback, and also by a more than commonly temperate way of life, since
he carefully avoided the bar dinners, eating and drinking for health
alone. It is possible to endure the most unhealthy labor when there are
frequent intervals of invigorating exercise, accompanied by habits of
strict sobriety. The plan, so commonly resorted to, of trying to get
health in stock for the rest of the year by a fortnight's hurried
travelling in the autumn, is not so good as Mr. Delane's way of getting
the week's supply of health during the course of the week itself.
It happened once that George Sand was hurried by the proprietor of a
newspaper who wanted one of her novels as a _feuilleton_. She has always
been a careful and deliberate worker, very anxious to give all necessary
labor in preparation, and, like all such conscientious laborers, she can
scarcely endure to be pushed. However, on this occasion she worked
overtime, as they say in Lancashire, and to enable herself to bear the
extra pressure she did part of the work at night in order to keep
several hours of daylight clear for her walks in the country, where she
lived. Many writers, in the same situation, would have temporarily
abandoned exercise, but George Sand clung to it all the more at a time
when it was especially necessary that she should be well. In the same
way Sir Walter Scott counterbalanced the effects of sedentary occupation
by his hearty enjoyment of field-sports. It has been supposed that his
outdoor exercise, which to weaker persons appears excessive, may have
helped to bring on the stroke of paralysis which finally disabled him;
but the fact is, that when the stroke arrived Sir Walter had altered his
habits of life in obedience to what he believed to be his duty, and had
abandoned, or nearly so, the active amusements of his happier years. I
believe rather that whilst he took so much exercise his robust
constitution not only enabled him to endure it without injury, but
required it to keep the nervous system healthy, in spite of his hard
work in literary composition. Physical exercise, when the constitution
is strong enough to endure it, is by far the best tranquillizer of the
nervous system which has yet been discovered, and Sir Walter's life at
Abbotsford was, in this respect at least, grounded on the true
philosophy of conduct. The French romancer, Eugene Sue, wrote till ten
o'clock every morning, and passed the rest of the day, when at his
country house, either in horse-exercise, or field-sports, or gardening,
for all of which he had a liking which amounted to passion. Shelley's
delight was boating, which at once exercised his muscles and relieved
his mind from the weariness of incessant invention or speculation. It
will generally be found, that whenever a man of much intellectual
distinction has maintained his powers in full activity, it has been by
avoiding the bad effects of an entirely sedentary life.
I well believe that a person naturally robust, with a clear and powerful
brain, could bear twelve or fourteen hours' work every day for years
together so far as the work itself is concerned, if only so large an
expenditure of time left a sufficient margin for amusement, and
exercise, and sleep. But the privation of exercise, by weakening the
digestive and assimilative powers, reduces the flow of healthy and rich
blood to the brain--the brain requires an enormous quantity of blood,
especially when the cerebral matter is rapidly destroyed by intellectual
labor--and usually brings on nervousness, the peculiar affliction of the
over-driven mental laborer. This nervousness is Nature's kindly warning,
preserving us, if we attend to it in time, from much more serious
consequences. The best preventive of it, and often the only cure, is
plenty of moderate exercise. The customs of the upper classes in England
happily provide this in the best shape, that of amusement enjoyed in
society, but our middle classes in large towns do not get nearly enough
of it, and the most studious are always strongly tempted to neglect it
altogether.
Men of great imaginative power are commonly addicted to a habit which is
peculiarly dangerous. They work as race-horses work, with the utmost
intensity of effort during short spaces of time, taxing all their
powers whilst the brilliant effort lasts. When Beckford wrote the
wonderful tale "Vathek" in his twentieth year, he did it at a single
sitting, which lasted for three days and two nights, and it cost him a
serious illness. Several of the best poems by Byron were written, if not
quite with equal rapidity, still on the same principle of composition at
white heat. In cases of this kind, Nature provides her own remedy in the
indolence of the imaginative temperament, which leaves large spaces of
time for the action of the recuperative processes. The same law governs
the physical energies of the carnivora, which maintain, or recover,
their capacity for extraordinary effort by intervals of absolute repose.
In its long spaces of mental rest the imaginative temperament recruits
itself by amusement, which in England usually includes physical exercise
of some kind.
This fortunate indolence of men of genius would in most instances ensure
their safety if they were not impelled by necessity to labor beyond the
suggestions of inclination. The exhausted brain never of itself seeks
the additional exhaustion of hard work. You know very well when you are
tired, and at such times the natural man in you asks plainly enough for
rest and recreation. The art is so to arrange our lives that the natural
man may sometimes have his way, and forget, if only for a time, the
labors which lead to weariness--not to that pleasant weariness of the
body which promises soundest sleep, but the distressing fatigue of the
exhausted spirit which is tortured by the importunity of ideas which it
is unable to express, and apprehensions that it cannot dismiss, which
fights through the sleepless night the phantoms of unconquerable horror.
NOTE.--The bad effect of literary composition on the physical state
which was observed by Wordsworth in his own case was also noticed by
Shelley during the composition of the "Cenci," which, he said, had
been a fine antidote to nervous medicines, and kept, he believed, the
pain in his side "as sticks do a fire." These influences are best
observed in people whose health is delicate. Although Joubert, for
example, had an extremely clear intellect, he could scarcely write at
all on account of the physical consequences. I have come to the
conclusion that literary work _acts simply as a strong stimulant_. In
moderate quantities it is not only innocent, but decidedly beneficial;
in excess it acts like poison on the nervous system. What constitutes
excess every man has to find out by his own experience. A page was
excess to Joubert, a chapter was moderation to Alexandre Dumas.
LETTER III.
TO A STUDENT IN UNCERTAIN HEALTH.
Habits of Kant, the philosopher--Objection to an over-minute
regularity of habit--Value of independence of character--Case of an
English author--Case of an English resident in Paris--Scott an
abundant eater and drinker--Goethe also--An eminent French
publisher--Turgot--Importance of good cookery--Wine drinking--Ale--The
aid of stimulants treacherous--The various effects of tobacco--Tea and
coffee--Case of an English clergyman--Balzac--The Arabia custom of
coffee-drinking--Wisdom of occasionally using stimulants.
IMMANUEL KANT, who was a master in the art of taking care of himself,
had by practice acquired a dexterous mode of folding himself up in the
bed-clothes, by passing them over and under his shoulders, so that, when
the operation was complete, he was shut up like the silkworm in his
cocoon. "When I am thus snugly folded up in my bed," he would say to his
friends, "I say to myself, can any man be in better health than I am?"
There is nothing in the lives of philosophers more satisfactory than
this little passage. If Kant had said to himself, "Can anybody be wiser,
more learned, more justly deserving of immortal fame than I am?" we
should have felt, that however agreeable this opinion might have been to
the philosopher who held it, his private satisfaction stood in need of
confirmation from without; and even if he had really been all this, we
might have reflected that wisdom and learning still leave their
possessor exposed to the acutest kinds of suffering. But when a
philosopher rolls himself up at night, and congratulates himself on the
possession of perfect health, we only think what a happy man he was to
possess that first of blessings, and what a sensible man to know the
value of it! And Kant had a deeper happiness in this reflection than any
which could spring from the mere consciousness of possessing one of the
unearned gifts of nature. The excellence of his health was due in part
to a sufficiently good constitution, but it was due also to his own
extreme carefulness about his habits. By an unceasing observation of his
own bodily life, as far as possible removed from the anxiety of
hypochondriacs, he managed to keep the physical machine in such regular
order, that for more than thirty years he always rose precisely at the
same minute. If his object had been health for health's sake, the result
would still have been well worth any sacrifices of momentary inclination
that it cost him; but Kant had a higher purpose. He well knew that the
regularity of the intellectual life depended entirely on the regularity
of the bodily functions, and, unlike the foolish men alluded to by
Goethe who pass the day in complaining of headache, and the night in
drinking the wine that produces it, Kant not only knew that regular
health was necessary to his work as a philosopher, but did everything in
his power to preserve it. Few intellectual laborers have in this respect
given evidence of such persistent strength of will.
In his manner of living he did not consult custom, but the needs of his
individual nature. It is not always easy for great brain-workers to
follow with perfect fidelity the customs of the people about them. These
usages have been gradually formed by the majority to suit the needs of
the majority; but there are cases where a close adherence to them would
be a serious hindrance to the highest and best activity. A good example
of this is Kant's intense antipathy to beer. It did not suit him, and he
was right in his non-conformity to German usage on this point, but he
was mistaken in believing beer to be universally injurious. There is a
very general belief in England that what is called a good breakfast is
the foundation of the labor of the day. Kant's breakfast, which he took
at five in the morning at all seasons of the year, consisted of a cup of
tea and a pipe of tobacco. On this he worked eight hours, either in
lecturing or writing--a long stretch of uninterrupted labor. He dined at
one, and this was his only meal, for he had no supper. The single repast
was a deviation from ordinary usage, but Kant found that it suited him,
probably because he read in the evening from six till a quarter to ten,
and a second meal might have interfered with this by diminishing his
power of attention. There exists a strong medical objection to this
habit of taking only one meal in twenty-four hours, which indeed is
almost unknown in England, though not extremely rare on the Continent. I
know an old gentleman who for forty years has lived as Kant did, and
enjoys excellent health and uncommon mental clearness.
A detail which illustrates Kant's attention to whatever could affect his
physical life, is his rule to withdraw his mind from everything
requiring effort fifteen minutes before he went to bed. His theory,
which is fully confirmed by the experience of others, was, that there
was a risk of missing sleep if the brain was not tranquillized before
bed-time. He knew that the intellectual life of the day depended on the
night's rest, and he took this precaution to secure it. The regularity
of his daily walk, taken during the afternoon in all weathers, and the
strict limitation of the hours of rest, also helped the soundness of his
sleep.
He would not walk out in company, for the whimsical reason that if he
opened his mouth a colder air would reach his lungs than that which
passed through the nostrils; and he would not eat alone, but always had
guests to dinner. There are good physiological reasons in favor of
pleasant society at table, and, besides these, there are good
intellectual reasons also.
By attention to these rules of his, Kant managed to keep both body and
mind in a working order, more uninterrupted than is usual with men who
go through much intellectual labor. The solitary objection to his system
is the excessive regularity of habit to which it bound him by chains of
his own forging. He found a quiet happiness in this regularity; indeed,
happiness is said to be more commonly found in habit that in anything
else, so deeply does it satisfy a great permanent instinct of our
nature. But a _minute_ regularity of habit is objectionable, because it
can only be practicable at home, and is compatible only with an
existence of the most absolute tranquillity. Kant did not travel, and
never could have travelled. He was a bachelor, and could not have ceased
to be a bachelor, without a disturbance that would have been intolerable
to him. He enjoyed the full benefits of his system without experiencing
its disadvantages, but any considerable change of situation would have
made the disadvantages apparent. Few lives can be so minutely regulated
without risk of future inconvenience.
Kant's example is a good one so far as this, that it proved a sort of
independence of character which would be valuable to every student. All
who need to keep their minds in the best possible condition ought to
have resolution enough to regulate their living in a manner which
experience, in their case, proves to be most favorable. Whatever may be
the authority of custom, a wise man makes himself independent of usages
which are impediments to his best activity. I know an author who was
always unwell about eleven o'clock in the morning--so unwell that he
could do nothing but lament his miserable fate. Knowing by experience
the powerful effect of regimen, I inquired whether he enjoyed his
breakfast. "No, he did not." "Then why did he attempt to eat any
breakfast?" It turned out that this foolish man swallowed every morning
two cups of bad coffee and a quantity of greasy food, from a patriotic
deference to the customs of his country. He was persuaded to abandon
this unsuitable habit and to eat nothing till half-past ten, when his
adviser prescribed a well-cooked little _déjeuner à la fourchette_,
accompanied by half a bottle of sound Bordeaux. The effect was magical.
My friend felt light and cheerful before _déjeuner_, and worked quite
happily and well, whilst after _déjeuner_ he felt like a horse that has
eaten his corn. Nor was the good effect a transitory one; the bad
symptoms never returned and he still adheres to his new arrangement.
This little reform made a wretched existence happy, and has had for its
result an increase in production with a diminution of fatigue. The
explanation is that the stomach did not ask for the early breakfast, and
had a hard fight to overcome it, after which came exhaustion and a
distaste both for food and work. There are cases where an opposite rule
is the right one. An Englishman living in Paris found the French
_déjeuner_ unsuitable for him, and discovered that he worked best on a
substantial English breakfast, with strong tea, at eight in the morning,
after which he went on working all day without any further nourishment
till dinner at six in the evening. A friend of Sir Walter Scott's, who
had stayed with him at Abbotsford, told me that Sir Walter ate and drank
like everybody else as to times and seasons, but much more abundantly
than people of less vigorous organization. Goethe used to work till
eleven without taking anything, then he drank a cup of chocolate and
worked till one. "At two he dined. This meal was the important meal of
the day. His appetite was immense. Even on the days when he complained
of not being hungry he ate much more than most men. Puddings, sweets,
and cakes were always welcome. He sat a long while over his wine. He was
fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles." An eminent
French publisher, one of the most clear-headed and hard-working men of
his generation, never touched food or drink till six in the evening,
when he ate an excellent dinner with his guests. He found this system
favorable to his work, but a man of less robust constitution would have
felt exhausted in the course of the day.
Turgot could not work well till after he had dined copiously, but many
men cannot think after a substantial meal; and here, in spite of the
example set by Scott and Goethe, let me observe that nothing interferes
so much with brainwork as over-eating. The intellectual workman requires
nourishment of the best possible quality, but the quantity ought always
to be well within the capacity of his digestive powers. The truth
appears to be, that whilst the intellectual life makes very large
demands upon nutrition--for cerebral activity cannot go forward without
constant supplies of force, which must come ultimately from what we have
eaten--this kind of life, being sedentary, is unfavorable to the work of
digestion. Brain-workers cannot eat like sportsmen and farmers without
losing many hours in torpor, and yet they need nutrition as much as if
they led active lives. The only way out of this difficulty is to take
care that the food is good enough for a moderate quantity of it to
maintain the physical and mental powers. The importance of scientific
cookery can hardly be exaggerated. Intellectual labor is, in its
origin, as dependent upon the art of cookery as the dissemination of its
results is dependent upon paper-making and printing. This is one of
those matters which people cannot be brought to consider seriously; but
cookery in its perfection--the great science of preparing food in the
way best suited to our use--is really the most important of all
sciences, and the mother of the arts. The wonderful theory that the most
ignorant cookery is the most favorable to health is only fit for the
dark ages. It is grossly and stupidly untrue. A scientific cook will
keep you in regular health, when an ignorant one will offer you the
daily alternative of starving or indigestion.
The great question of drinks is scarcely less important. Sound natural
wines, not strengthened by any addition of alcohol, are known to supply
both stimulus and nourishment to the brain. Goethe's practice was not
irrational, though he drank fifty thousand bottles in his lifetime.
Still it is not necessary to imitate him to this extent. The
wine-drinking populations have keener and livelier wits than those who
use other beverages. It is proved by long experience that the pure juice
of the grape sustains the force and activity of the brain. The poets who
from age to age have sung the praise of wine were not wholly either
deceivers or deceived. In the lands of the vine, where the plant is
looked upon as a nursing mother, men do not injure their health by
drinking; but in the colder North, where the grape can never ripen, the
deaths from intemperance are frequent. Bread and wine are almost pure
gifts of nature, though both are prepared by man after the old
traditional ways. These are not poisons, but gin and absinthe are
poisons, madness poured out from a bottle! Kant and Goethe loved the
pure Rhine wine, and their brains were clear and vigorous to the utmost
span of life. It was not wine that ruined Burns and Byron, or
Baudelaire, or Alfred de Musset.
Notwithstanding Kant's horror of beer, that honest northern drink
deserves our friendly recognition. It has quite a peculiar effect upon
the nervous system, giving a rest and calm which no other drink can
procure for it so safely. It is said that beer drinkers are slow, and a
little stupid; that they have an ox-like placidity not quite favorable
to any brilliant intellectual display. But there are times when this
placidity is what the laboring brain most needs. After the agitations of
too active thinking there is safety in a tankard of ale. The wine
drinkers are agile, but they are excitable; the beer drinkers are heavy,
but in their heaviness there is peace. In that clear golden drink which
England has brewed for more than a thousand Octobers, and will brew for
a thousand more, we may find perhaps some explanation of that absence of
irritability which is the safe-guard of the national character, which
makes it faithful in its affections, easy to govern, not easy to excite
to violence.
If I have spoken favorably of beer and wine as having certain
intellectual uses, please remember that I recommend only the habitual
use of them, not mad rites of Bacchus, and even the habitual use only
just so far as it may suit the individual constitution. The liberal
regimen of Scott and Goethe would not answer in every case, and there
are organizations, often very robust, in which intoxicating drinks of
all kinds, even in the most moderate quantity, impede the brain's action
instead of aiding it. Two of the most able men I have ever known could
not drink pure wine of any kind because it sent the blood to the head,
with consequent cerebral oppression. And whilst on this subject I ought
to observe, that the aid which these stimulants afford, even when the
body gratefully accepts them, is often treacherous from its very
acceptability. Men who are over-driven--and the number of such men is
unhappily very great in these days--say that without stimulants they
could not get through their labor; but the stimulants often delude us as
to the limits of our natural powers and encourage us to attempt too
much. The help they give us is not altogether illusory; under certain
limitations it is real, but many have gone farther than the reality of
the assistance warranted. The ally brings to us an increase of forces,
but he comes with appearances of power surpassing the reality, and we
undertake tasks beyond our strength. In drinking, as in eating, the best
rule for the intellectual is moderation in quantity with good quality,
a sound wine, and not enough of it to foster self-delusion.
The use of tobacco has so much extended itself in the present generation
that we are all obliged to make a decision for ourselves on the ancient
controversy between its friends and enemies. We cannot form a reasonable
opinion about tobacco without bearing in mind that it produces,
according to circumstances, one of two entirely distinct and even
opposite classes of effects. In certain states of the body it acts as a
stimulant, in other states as a narcotic. People who have a dislike to
smoking affirm that it stupefies; but this assertion, at least so far as
the temporary consequences are concerned, is not supported by
experience. Most of the really brilliant conversations that I have
listened to have been accompanied by clouds of tobacco-smoke; and a
great deal of the best literary composition that is produced by
contemporary authors is wrought by men who are actually smoking whilst
they work. My own experience is that very moderate smoking acts as a
pleasant stimulus upon the brain, whilst it produces a temporary
lassitude of the muscular system, not perceptible in times of rest, but
an appreciable hindrance in times of muscular exertion. It is better
therefore for men who feel these effects from tobacco to avoid it when
they are in exercise, and to use it only when the body rests and the
mind labors. Pray remember, however, that this is the experience of an
exceedingly moderate smoker, who has not yet got himself into the
general condition of body which is brought on by a larger indulgence in
tobacco. On the other hand, it is evident that men engaged in physical
labor find a muscular stimulus in occasional smoking, and not a
temporary lassitude. It is probable that the effect varies with
individual cases, and is never precisely what our own experience would
lead us to imagine. For excessive smokers, it appears to be little more
than the tranquillizing of a sort of uneasiness, the continual
satisfaction of a continual craving. I have never been able to ascertain
that moderate smoking diminished intellectual force; but I have observed
in excessive smokers a decided weakening of the will, and a preference
for talking about work to the effort of actual labor. The opinions of
medical men on this subject are so much at variance that their science
only adds to our uncertainty. One doctor tells me that the most moderate
smoking is unquestionably injurious, whilst others affirm that it is
innocent. Speaking simply from self-observation, I find that in my own
case tea and coffee are far more perilous than tobacco.
Almost all English people are habitual tea-drinkers, and as the tea they
drink is very strong, they may be said to use it in excess. The
unpleasant symptoms which tea-poisoning produces in a patient not inured
by habit, disappear in the seasoned tea-drinker, leaving only a certain
exhilaration, which appears to be perfectly innocuous. If tea is a safe
stimulant, it is certainly an agreeable one, and there seems to be no
valid reason why brain-workers should refuse themselves that solace. I
knew a worthy clergyman many years ago who from the most conscientious
motives denied himself ale and wine, but found a fountain of consolation
in the tea-pot. His usual allowance was sixteen cups, all of heroic
strength, and the effect upon his brain seems to have been altogether
favorable, for his sermons were both long and eloquent, and to this day
he is preaching still, without any diminution of his powers. French
people find in coffee the most efficacious remedy for the temporary
torpor of the mind which results from the processes of digestion. Balzac
drank great quantities of coffee whilst he wrote; and this, it is
believed, brought on the terrible nervous disease that accelerated his
end. The best proof that tea and coffee are favorable to intellectual
expression is that all nations use one or the other as aids to
conversation. In Mr. Palgrave's Travels in Arabia there is never any
talk without the inevitable coffee, that fragrant Arabian berry prepared
with such delicate cunning that it yields the perfect aroma.
The wisdom of occasionally using these various stimulants for
intellectual purposes is proved by a single consideration. Each of us
has a little cleverness and a great deal of sluggish stupidity. There
are certain occasions when we absolutely need the little cleverness
that we possess. The orator needs it when he speaks, the poet when he
versifies, but neither cares how stupid he may become when the oration
is delivered and the lyric set down on paper. The stimulant serves to
bring out the talent when it is wanted, like the wind in the pipes of an
organ. "What will it matter if I am even a little duller afterwards?"
says the genius; "I can afford to be dull when I have done." But the
truth still remains that there are stimulants and stimulants. Not the
nectar of the gods themselves were worth the dash of a wave upon the
beach, and the pure cool air of the morning.
NOTE.--What is said in the above letter about the employment of
stimulants is intended to apply only to cases in which there is no
organic disease. The harm which diseased persons do to themselves by
conforming to customs which are innocent for others is as lamentable
as it is easily avoidable. Two bottles of any natural wine grown above
the latitude of Lyons are a permissible daily allowance to a man whose
organs are all sound; but the doctors in the wine districts
unanimously forbid pure wine when there is a chronic inflammatory
tendency. In these cases even the most honest Bordeaux ought to be
diluted with twice its volume of water. There are many chronic
diseases which tobacco irritates and accelerates. Both wine and
tobacco are injurious to weak eyes.
LETTER IV.
TO A MUSCULAR CHRISTIAN.
Muscular and intellectual tendencies in two boys--Difficulty of
finding time to satisfy both--Plato on the influences of music and
gymnastics--Somnolence and digestion--Neglect of literature--Natural
restlessness of the active temperament--Case of a Garibaldian
officer--Difficulty of taking a sufficient interest in exercise--A
boar hunt.
I know two little boys, sons of a near neighbor, who have from,
childhood exhibited opposite tendencies. One of them is incessantly
active, always out of doors in any weather, busy about horses, and
farming, and game, heedless of his books, and studying only under
positive compulsion. The other sits at home with his lessons or a story
book, and only goes out because he is incited by the fraternal example.
The two lads represent two distinct varieties of human life, the active
and the intellectual. The elder is happiest during physical exertion;
the younger is happiest when his brain is fully occupied. Left entirely
to themselves, without the equalizing influence of the outside world and
the ways of living which general custom has established, they would lead
the most opposite lives. The elder would inevitably become a farmer,
that he might live in the country and take exercise all day long, or
else he would seek adventure in wild travel, or in romantic warfare; but
the younger would very quickly be taken possession of by some engrossing
intellectual pursuit, and lead the life of a sedentary student. The
problem which these two young lives have before them is the
reconciliation of their tendencies. Since they come of cultivated
parents, the intellectual lad has the better chance of following his own
bent. Both will have to take their University degrees, and the younger
has the advantage there. Still there are powerful influences in favor of
the elder. His activity will be encouraged by the admiration of his
companions, and by the example of the country gentlemen who are his
neighbors. He can ride, and row, and swim; he is beginning to shoot; at
twenty he will be a sportsman. When once he has taken his degree, I
wonder what will be the advances in his intellectual culture. Fraternal
and social influences will preserve the younger from absolute physical
inaction; but there are not any influences powerful enough to keep the
elder safe from intellectual rust.
If you, who are a distinguished sportsman and athlete, would kindly
inform us with perfect frankness of the line which your studies have
followed since you quitted Eton, we should be the wiser for your
experience. Have gymnastic exercises hardened you, as Plato said they
did, when pursued excessively? and do you need the musical studies which
he both valued and dreaded as the most powerful of softening influences?
If you have energy enough to lead both lives, pray how do you find the
time?
As to Plato's musical influence, you invite it, and yet you
treacherously elude its power. After being out all day in the pursuit of
sylvan pleasures (if shooting on treeless wastes can be called a sylvan
pleasure), you come home at nightfall ravenous. Then you do ample
justice to your dinner, and having satisfied your _faim de chasseur_,
you go into the drawing-room, and ask your wife to play and sing to you.
If Plato could witness that pretty scene, he would approve your
obedience to his counsels. He would behold an athletic Englishman
stretching his mighty limbs on a couch of soft repose, and letting his
soul grow tender as his ears drank ravishing harmonies. If, however, the
ancient sage, delighted with so sweet a picture of strength refined by
song, were to dwell upon the sight as I have done, he would perceive too
soon that, although your body was present indeed, your soul had become
deaf in sleep's oblivion. So it happens to you night after night, and
the music reaches you no more than the songs of choristers reach the
dead in the graves below.
And the elevating influences of literature? You have books, of course,
in abundance. There is a library, amongst other luxuries of your home.
But the literature your intellect feeds upon is in the columns of the
_Field_, your newspaper. Yet this neglect of the means of culture is not
due to any natural feebleness of the mind. Your brain, by its nature, is
as vigorous as your vigorous body. It is sleep, and weariness, and the
great necessary business of digestion, that drown your intellectual
energies. The work of repairing so great a destruction of muscle is
nature's chief concern. Since you became the mighty hunter that you are,
the wear and tear have been enormous, and the necessary rapidity of
reconstruction has absorbed your rich vitality.
I will not question the wisdom of your choice, if there has been any
deliberate choice, though perhaps the life of action that you lead may
have grown rather out of circumstances determining habit than from any
conscious resolution. Health is so much more necessary to happiness than
culture, that few who could choose between them would sacrifice it for
learning, unless they were impelled by irresistible instincts. And
beyond the great delight of health and strength there is a restlessness
in men born to be active which must have its outlet in activity. I knew
a brave Italian who had followed Garibaldi in all his romantic
enterprises, who had suffered from privation and from wounds, who had
not only faced death in the wildest adventures, but, what is even more
terrible to the active temperament, had risked health from frequent
exposure; and when I asked him whether it was affection to his famous
chief, or faith in a political creed, or some more personal motive that
had led him to this scorn of prudence, he answered that, after honest
self-examination, he believed the most powerful motive to be the
passion for an active life. The active temperament likes physical
action for its own sake, and not as a means of health. Activity renews
itself and claims larger and larger satisfaction, till at last the habit
of it absorbs the whole energy of the man.
Although such a life as yours would be incompatible with the work I have
to do, it would be an unmixed benefit to me to take a greater interest
in exercise. If you could but communicate that interest, how willingly
would I become your pupil! The fatal law of the studious temperament is,
that in exercise itself it must find some intellectual charm, so that we
quit our books in the library only to go and read the infinite book of
nature. We cannot go out in the country without incessantly thinking
about either botany, or geology, or landscape painting, and it is
difficult for us to find a refuge from the importunate habit of
investigation. Sport is the only refuge, but the difficulty is to care
about it sufficiently to avoid _ennui_. When you have not the natural
instinct, how are you to supply its place by any make-believe
excitement? There is no position in the world more wearisome than that
of a man inwardly indifferent to the amusement in which he is trying to
take part. _You_ can watch for game with an invincible patience, for you
have the natural instinct, but after the first ten minutes on the skirts
of the wood I lay my gun down and begin to botanize. Last week a
friendly neighbor invited me to a boar-hunt. The boar was supposed to
be in the middle of a great impenetrable plantation, and all I did
during the whole morning was to sit in my saddle awaiting the exit of
the beast, cantering from one point of the wood's circumference to
another, as the cry of the dogs guided me. Was it pleasure? A true
hunter would have found interest enough in expectation, but I felt like
a man on a railway-platform who is waiting for a train that is late.
LETTER V.
TO A STUDENT WHO NEGLECTED BODILY EXERCISE.
Difficulty of conciliating the animal and the intellectual
lives--Bodily activity sometimes preserved by an effort of the
will--Necessity of faith in exercise--Incompatibility between physical
and intellectual living disappears in large spaces of time--Franklin's
theory about concentration in exercise--Time an essential
factor--Health of a rural postman--Pedestrian habits of
Wordsworth--Pedestrian and equestrian habits of Sir Walter
Scott--Goethe's wild delight in physical exercise--Alexander Humboldt
combated early delicacy by exercise--Intellectual utilities of
physical action.
"We have done those things which we ought not to have done; we have left
undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health
in us."
How applicable, my dear brother, are these words which the Church, in
her wisdom, has seen to be adapted to all sinners--how applicable, I
say, are they to students most especially! They have quite a personal
applicability to you and me. We have read all day long, and written till
three o'clock in the morning; we have taken no exercise for weeks, and
there is no health in us. The doctor scrutinizes our wearied eyes, and
knows that our brains are weary. Little do we need his warnings, for
does not Nature herself remind us of our disobedience, and tell us in
language not to be misinterpreted, to amend the error of our ways? Our
digestion is sluggish and imperfect; we are as nervous as delicate
ladies, and there is no health in us.
How easy it is to follow one of the two lives--the animal or the
intellectual! how difficult to conciliate the two! In every one of us
there exists an animal which might have been as vigorous as wolves and
foxes, if it had been left to develop itself in freedom. But besides the
animal, there existed also a mind, and the mental activity restrained
the bodily activity, till at last there is a serious danger of putting
an end to it altogether.
I know two men, about fifty-five years old both of them, and both of
them admirably active. They tell me that their bodily activity has been
preserved by an effort of the will; that if they had not resolutely kept
up the habit of using legs and arms in daily work or amusement their
limbs would have stiffened into uselessness, and their constitutions
would have been unable to bear the call of any sudden emergency. One of
them has four residences in different parts of the same county, and yet
he will not keep a carriage, but is a pedestrian terrible to his
friends; the other is at the head of a great business, and gives an
example of physical activity to his workpeople. Both have an absolute
faith in habitual exercise; and both affirm that if the habit were once
broken they could never afterwards resume it.
We need this faith in exercise--this firm conviction of its
necessity--the sort of conviction that makes a man go out in all
weathers, and leave the most urgent intellectual labor for the mere
discipline and hardening of the body. Few students possess this faith in
its purity. It is hard to believe that we shall get any good from
exercise proportionate to the sacrifice of time.
The incompatibility between the physical and the intellectual lives is
often very marked if you look at small spaces of time only; but if you
consider broader spaces, such as a lifetime, then the incompatibility is
not so marked, and gives place to a manifest conciliation. The brain is
clearer in vigorous health than it can be in the gloom and misery of
sickness; and although health may last for a while without renewal from
exercise, so that if you are working under pressure for a month the time
given to exercise is so much deducted from the result, it is not so for
the life's performance. Health sustained for many years is so useful to
the realization of all considerable intellectual undertakings, that the
sacrifice to the bodily well-being is the best of all possible
investments.
Franklin's theory about concentrating his exercise for the economy of
time was founded upon a mistake. Violent exertion for minutes is _not_
equivalent to moderate exercise for hours. The desire to concentrate
good of various kinds into the smallest possible space is one of the
commonest of _human_ wishes, but it is not encouraged by the broader
economy of nature. In the exercise of the mind every teacher is well
aware that time is an essential factor. It is necessary to _live_ with a
study for hundreds or thousands of hours before the mind can assimilate
as much of the subject as it may need; and so it is necessary to live in
exercise during a thousand hours of every year to make sure of the
physical benefits. Even the fresh air itself requires time to renovate
our blood. The fresh air cannot be concentrated; and to breathe the
prodigious quantities of it which are needed for perfect energy, we must
be out in it frequently and long.
The inhabitants of great cities have recourse to gymnastics as a
substitute for the sports of the country. These exercises have one
advantage--they can be directed scientifically so as to strengthen the
limbs that need development; but no city gymnasium can offer the
invigorating breezes of the mountain. We require not only exercise but
exposure--daily exposure to the health-giving inclemencies of the
weather. The postman who brings my letters walks eight thousand miles a
year, and enjoys the most perfect regularity of health. There are
operatives in factories who go through quite as much bodily exertion,
but they have not his fine condition. He is as merry as a lark, and
announces himself every morning like a bearer of joyful tidings. What
the postman does from necessity an old gentleman did as regularly,
though more moderately, for the preservation of his health and
faculties. He went out every day; and as he never consulted the weather,
so he never had to consult the physicians.
Nothing in the habits of Wordsworth--that model of excellent habits--can
be better as an example to men of letters than his love of pedestrian
excursions. Wherever he happened to be, he explored the whole
neighborhood on foot, looking into every nook and cranny of it; and not
merely the immediate neighborhood, but extended tracts of country; and
in this way he met with much of his best material. Scott was both a
pedestrian and an equestrian traveller, having often, as he tells us,
walked thirty miles or ridden a hundred in those rich and beautiful
districts which afterwards proved to him such a mine of literary wealth.
Goethe took a wild delight in all sorts of physical exercise--swimming
in the Ilm by moonlight, skating with the merry little Weimar court on
the Schwansee, riding about the country on horseback, and becoming at
times quite outrageous in the rich exuberance of his energy. Alexander
Humboldt was delicate in his youth, but the longing for great
enterprises made him dread the hindrances of physical insufficiency, so
he accustomed his body to exercise and fatigue, and prepared himself for
those wonderful explorations which opened his great career. Here are
intellectual lives which were forwarded in their special aims by habits
of physical exercise; and, in an earlier age, have we not also the
example of the greatest intellect of a great epoch, the astonishing
Leonardo da Vinci, who took such a delight in horsemanship that
although, as Vasari tells us, poverty visited him often, he never could
sell his horses or dismiss his grooms?
The physical and intellectual lives are not incompatible. I may go
farther, and affirm that the physical activity of men eminent in
literature has added abundance to their material and energy to their
style; that the activity of scientific men has led them to innumerable
discoveries; and that even the more sensitive and contemplative study of
the fine arts has been carried to a higher perfection by artists who
painted action in which they had had their part, or natural beauty,
which they had travelled far to see. Even philosophy itself owes much to
mere physical courage and endurance. How much that is noblest in ancient
thinking may be due to the hardy health of Socrates!
LETTER VI.
TO AN AUTHOR IN MORTAL DISEASE.
Considering death as a certainty--The wisdom learned from
suffering--Employment of happier intervals--The teaching of the
diseased not to be rejected--Their double experience--Ignorance of
Nature's spoiled children--Benefit of disinterested thought--Reasons
for pursuing intellectual labors to the last--Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.
When Alexandre Bixio lay on his death-bed, his friend Labrousse visited
him, and exclaimed on entering the room, "How well you are looking
to-day!" To this, Bixio, who was clearly aware of his condition,
answered in these words:--"Voyons, mon pauvre Labrousse; tu viens voir
un homme qui n'a plus qu'un quart d'heure a vivre, et tu veux lui faire
croire qu'il a bonne mine; allons, une poignée de main, cela vaut mieux
pour un homme que tous ces petits mensonges-lá."
I will vex you with none of these well-meant but wearisome little
falsehoods. We both of us know your state; we both know that your
malady, though it may be alleviated, can never be cured; and that the
fatal termination of it, though delayed by all the artifices of science,
will certainly arrive at last. The cheerful courage which enables you to
look this certainty in the face has also enabled you to extract from
years of suffering that profoundest wisdom which (as one of the wisest
of living Englishmen has told us) can be learned from suffering alone.
The admirable elasticity of your intellectual and moral nature has
enabled you, in the intervals of physical uneasiness or pain, to cast
aside every morbid thought, to enter quite fully and heartily into the
healthy life of others, and to enjoy the magnificent spectacle of the
universe with contented submission to its laws--those beneficent yet
relentless laws which to you bring debility and death. You have
continued to write notwithstanding the progress of your malady; and yet,
since it has so pitilessly held you, there is no other change in the
spirit of your compositions than the deepening of a graver beauty, the
addition of a sweeter seriousness. Not one sentence that you have
written betrays either the injustice of the invalid, or his
irritability. Your mind is not clouded by any mist from the fever
marshes, but its sympathies are far more active than they were. Your
pain has taught you a tender pity for all the pain that is outside of
you, and a patient gentleness which was wanting to your nature in its
days of barbarian health.
Surely it would be a lamentable error if mankind were to carry out the
recommendation of certain ruthless philosophers, and reject the help and
teaching of the diseased. Without undervaluing the robust performance of
healthy natures, and without encouraging literature that is morbid, that
is fevered, impatient, and perverse, we may still prize the noble
teaching which is the testament of sufferers to the world. The diseased
have a peculiar and mysterious experience; they have known the
sensations of health, and then, in addition to this knowledge, they have
gained another knowledge which enables them to think more accurately
even of health itself. A life without suffering would be like a picture
without shade. The pets of Nature, who do not know what suffering is,
and cannot realize it, have always a certain rawness, like foolish
landsmen who laugh at the terrors of the ocean, because they have
neither experience enough to know what those terrors are, nor brains
enough to imagine them.
You who are borne along, slowly but irresistibly, to that Niagara which
plunges into the gulf of death,--you who, with perfect self-possession
and heroic cheerfulness, are counting the last miles of the
voyage,--find leisure to study and think as the boat glides onwards
silently to the inevitable end. It is one of the happiest privileges of
the high intellectual life that it can elevate us--at least in the
intervals of relief from complete prostration or acute pain--to regions
of disinterested thought, where all personal anxieties are forgotten. To
feel that he is still able, even in days of physical weakness and
decline, to add something to the world's inheritance of knowledge, or to
bequeath to it some new and noble thought in the pearl of complete
expression, is a profound satisfaction to the active mind that is lodged
in a perishing body. Many diseases fortunately permit this activity to
the last; and I do not hesitate to affirm, that the work done in the
time of physical decline has in not a few instances been the most
perfect and the most permanently valuable. It is not accurately true
that the mind and the body invariably fail together. Physicians who know
how prevalent chronic diseases are, and how many eminent men are
physically inconvenienced by them, know also that minds of great
spiritual energy possess the wonderful faculty of indefinitely improving
themselves whilst the body steadily deteriorates. Nor is there anything
irrational in this persistent improvement of the mind, even to the
extremest limit of material decay; for the mind of every intellectual
human being is part and parcel of the great permanent mind of humanity;
and even if its influence soon ceases to be traceable--if the spoken
words are forgotten--if the written volume is not reprinted or even
quoted, it has not worked in vain. The intellectual light of Europe in
this century is not only due to great luminaries whom every one can
name, but to millions of thoughtful persons, now utterly forgotten, who
in their time loved the light, and guarded it, and increased it, and
carried it into many lands, and bequeathed it as a sacred trust. He who
labors only for his personal pleasure may well be discouraged by the
shortness and uncertainty of life, and cease from his selfish toil on
the first approaches of disease; but whoever has fully realized the
grand continuity of intellectual tradition, and taken his own place in
it between the future and the past, will work till he can work no more,
and then gaze hopefully on the world's great future, like Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire, when his blind eyes beheld the future of zoology.
LETTER VII.
TO A YOUNG MAN OF BRILLIANT ABILITY, WHO HAD JUST TAKEN HIS DEGREE.
A domestic picture--Thoughts suggested by it--Importance of the senses
in intellectual pursuits--Importance of hearing to Madame de
Stael--Importance of seeing to Mr. Buskin--Mr. Prescott, the
historian--How blindness retarded his work--Value of all the five
senses--Self-government indispensable to their perfection--Great value
of longevity to the intellectual life.
It is always a great pleasure to me to pass an evening at your father's
house; but on the last occasion that pleasure was very much enhanced
because you were once more with us. I watched your mother's eyes as she
sat in her place in the drawing-room. They followed you almost without
ceasing, and there was the sweetest, happiest expression on her dear
face, that betrayed her tender maternal love for you and her legitimate
maternal pride. Your father was equally happy in his own way; he was
much more gay and talkative than I have seen him for two or three
anxious years; he told amusing stories; he entered playfully into the
jests of others; he had pleasant projects for the future, and spoke of
them with facetious exaggeration. I sat quietly in my corner, slyly
observing my old friends, and amusing myself by discovering (it did not
need much perspicacity for that) the hidden sources of the happiness
that was so clearly visible. They were gladdened by the first successes
of your manhood; by the evidence of your strength; by the realization of
hopes long cherished.
Watching this charming picture with a perfect sympathy, I began to have
certain thoughts of my own which it is my present purpose to communicate
to you without disguise. I thought, first, how agreeable it was to be
the spectator of so pretty a picture; but then my eyes wandered to a
painting that hung upon the walls, in which also there were a mother and
her son, and this led me a long way. The painting was a hundred years
old; but although the colors were not quite so fresh as when they left
the palette of the artist, the beautiful youth who stood radiant like a
young Apollo in the centre of the composition had not lost one of the
great gifts with which his cunning human creator had endowed him. The
fire of his eye had not been quenched by time; the bloom of his cheek
still flushed with faint vermilion; his lip was full and imperious; his
limbs athletic; his bearing haughty and dauntless. All life seemed
spread before him like a beautiful rich estate of which every acre was
his own. How easily will he conquer fame! how easily kindle passion. Who
shall withstand this pink and perfection of aristocracy--this ideal of
the age of fine gentlemen, with all the gifts of nature helped by all
the inventions of art?
Then I thought farther: "That splendid young nobleman in the picture
will look just as young as he does now when we shall be either
superannuated or dead." And I looked at you and your mother again and
thought: "It is just five minutes since I saw these two living beings,
and in this little space of time they have both of them aged a little,
though no human observer has enough delicacy of perception to detect so
inappreciable an alteration." I went gradually on and on into the
future, trying to imagine the changes which would come over yourself
more especially (for it was you who were the centre of my reverie), till
at last I imagined pretty accurately what you might be at sixty; but
there it became necessary to stop, because it was too difficult to
conceive the processes of decay.
After this, one thought grew upon me and became dominant. I thought, at
present he has all the senses in their perfection, and they serve him
without a hitch. He is an intelligence served by organs, and the organs
are all doing their duty as faithfully as a postman who brings letters.
When the postman becomes too infirm to do his work he will retire on his
little pension, and another will take his place and bring the letters
just as regularly; but when the human organs become infirm they cannot
be taken out and replaced by new ones, so that we must content ourselves
to the end, with their service, such as it may be. Then I reflected how
useful the senses are to the high intellectual life, and how wise it is,
even for intellectual purposes, to preserve them as long as possible in
their perfection.
To be able to see and hear well--to feel healthy sensations--even to
taste and smell properly, are most important qualifications for the
pursuit of literature, and art, and science. If you read attentively the
work of any truly illustrious poet, you will find that the whole of the
imagery which gives power and splendor to his verse is derived from
nature through one or other of these ordinary channels. Some
philosophers have gone much farther than this, and have affirmed that
the entire intellectual life is based ultimately upon remembered
physical sensations; that we have no mental conception that is really
independent of sensuous experience; and that the most abstract thought
is only removed from sensation by successive processes of substitution,
I have not space to enter into so great and mysterious a subject as
this; but I desire to draw your attention to a truth very commonly
overlooked by intellectual people, which is the enormous importance of
the organs of sense in the highest intellectual pursuits. I will couple
together two names which have owed their celebrity, one chiefly to the
use of her ears, the other to the use of his eyes. Madame de Stael
obtained her literary material almost exclusively by means of
conversation. She directed, systematically, the talk of the learned and
brilliant men amongst whom she lived to the subject which for the moment
happened to occupy her thoughts. Her literary process (which is known to
us in detail through the revelations of her friends) was purposely
invented to catch everything that she heard, as a net catches fish in a
river. First, she threw down on paper a very brief rough draft of the
intended literary project. This she showed to few, but from it she made
a second "state" (as an engraver would say), which she exhibited to some
of her trusted friends, profiting by their hints and suggestions. Her
secretary copied the corrected manuscript, incorporating the new matter,
on paper with a very broad margin for farther additions. During all the
time that it took to carry her work through these successive states,
that ingenious woman made the best possible use of her ears, which were
her natural providers. She made everybody talk who was likely to be of
any use to her, and then immediately added what she had caught on the
wide margin reserved for that purpose. She used her eyes so little that
she might almost as well have been blind. We have it on her own
authority, that were it not out of respect to custom, she would not open
her window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whereas she
would travel five hundred leagues to talk with a clever man whom she had
never met.
Now since Madame de Stael's genius fed itself exclusively through the
faculty of hearing, what an enormous difference it would have made to
her if she had been deaf! It is probable that the whole of her literary
reputation was dependent on the condition of her ears. Even a very
moderate degree of deafness (just enough to make listening irksome)
might have kept her in perpetual obscurity.
The next instance I intend to give is that of a distinguished
contemporary, Mr. Ruskin. His peculiar position in literature is due to
his being able to see as cultivated artists see. Everything that is best
and most original in his writings is invariably either an account of
what he has seen in his own independent inimitable way, or else a
criticism of the accurate or defective sight of others. His method of
study, by drawing and taking written memoranda of what he has seen, is
entirely different from Madame de Stael's method, but refers always, as
hers did, to the testimony of the predominant sense. Every one whose
attention has been attracted to the subject is aware that, amongst
people who are commonly supposed, to see equally well, and who are not
suspected of any tendency to blindness, the degrees of perfection in
this sense vary to infinity. Suppose that Mr. Ruskin (to our great
misfortune) had been endowed with no better eyes than many persons who
see fairly well in the ordinary sense, his enjoyment and use of sight
would have been so much diminished that he would have had little
enthusiasm about seeing, and yet that kind of enthusiasm was quite
essential to his work.
The well-known instance of Mr. Prescott, the historian, is no doubt a
striking proof what _may_ be accomplished by a man of remarkable
intellectual ability without the help of sight, or rather helped by the
sight of others. We have also heard of a blind traveller, and even of a
blind entomologist; but in all cases of this kind they are executive
difficulties to be overcome, such that only the most resolute natures
would ever dream of encountering them. When the materials for the "Reign
of Ferdinand and Isabella" arrived in Prescott's house from Europe, his
remaining eye had just suffered from over-exertion to such a degree that
he could not use it again for years. "I well remember," he wrote in a
letter to a friend, "the blank despair which I felt when my literary
treasures arrived, and I saw the mine of wealth lying around me which I
was forbidden to explore." And although, by a most tedious process,
which would have worn out the patience of any other author, Mr. Prescott
did at last arrive at the conclusion of his work, it cost him ten years
of labor--probably thrice as much time as would have been needed by an
author of equal intellectual ability without any infirmity of sight.
Although, of the five senses which God has given us, sight and hearing
are the most necessary to the intellectual life, it may easily be
demonstrated that the lower ones are not without their intellectual
uses. Perfect literature and art can only he produced by men who are
perfect in all their natural faculties. The great creative intellects
have never been ascetics; they have been rightly and healthily sensitive
to every kind of pleasure. The taste of fruits and wines, the perfume of
flowers are a part of the means by which the spirit of Nature influences
our most secret thoughts, and conveys to us suggestions, or carries us
into states of feeling which have an enormous effect upon our thinking,
though the manner in which the effect is produced is one of the deepest
mysteries of our mysterious being. When the Caliph Vathek added five
wings to the palace of Alkoremmi, on the hill of Pied Horses, for the
particular gratification of each of his five senses, he only did on a
uselessly large scale what every properly-endowed human being does, when
he can afford it, on a small one.
You will not suspect me of preaching unlimited indulgence. The very
object of this letter is to recommend, for intellectual purposes, the
careful preservation of the senses in the freshness of their perfection,
and this is altogether incompatible with every species of excess. If you
are to see clearly all your life, you must not sacrifice eyesight by
over-straining it; and the same law of moderation is the condition of
preserving every other faculty. I want you to know the exquisite taste
of common dry bread; to enjoy the perfume of a larch wood at a distance;
to feel delight when a sea-wave dashes over you. I want your eye to be
so sensitive that it shall discern the faintest tones of a gray cloud,
and yet so strong that it shall bear to gaze on a white one in the
dazzling glory of sunshine. I would have your hearing sharp enough to
detect the music of the spheres, if it were but audible, and yet your
nervous system robust enough to endure the shock of the guns on an
ironclad. To have and keep these powers we need a firmness of
self-government that is rare.
Young men are careless of longevity; but how precious are added years to
the fulness of the intellectual life! There are lives, such as that of
Major Pendennis, which only diminish in value as they advance--when the
man of fashion is no longer fashionable, and the sportsman can no longer
stride over the ploughed fields. The old age of the Major Pendennises is
assuredly not to be envied: but how rich is the age of the Hunboldts! I
compare the life of the intellectual to a long wedge of gold--the thin
end of it begins at birth, and the depth and value of it go on
indefinitely increasing till at last comes Death (a personage for whom
Nathaniel Hawthorne had a peculiar dislike, for his unmannerly habit of
interruption), who stops the auriferous processes. Oh, the mystery of
the nameless ones who have died when the wedge was thin and looked so
poor and light! Oh, the happiness of the fortunate old men whose
thoughts went deeper and deeper like a wall that runs out into the sea!
NOTE.--One of the most painful cases of interruption caused by death
is that of Cuvier. His paralysis came upon him whilst he was still in
full activity, and death prevented him from arranging a great
accumulation of scientific material. He said to M. Pasquier, "I had
great things still to do; all was ready in my head. After thirty years
of labor and research, there remained but to write, and now the hands
fail, and carry with them the head." But the most lamentable instances
of this kind of interruption are, from the nature of things, unknown
to us. Even the friends of the deceased cannot estimate the extent of
the loss, for a man's immediate neighbors are generally the very last
persons to become aware of the nature of his powers or the value of
his acquirements.
PART II.
THE MORAL BASIS.
LETTER I.
TO A MORALIST WHO HAD SAID THAT THERE WAS A WANT OF MORAL FIBRE IN THE
INTELLECTUAL, ESPECIALLY IN POETS AND ARTISTS.
The love of intellectual pleasure--The seeking for a
stimulus--Intoxication of poetry and oratory--Other mental
intoxications--The Bishop of Exeter on drudgery--The labor of
composition in poetry--Wordsworth's dread of it--Moore--His trouble
with "Lalla Rookh"--His painstaking in preparation--Necessity of
patient industry in other arts--John Lewis, Meissonier,
Mulready--Drudgery in struggling against technical
difficulties--Water-color painting, etching, oil-painting, fresco,
line-engraving--Labor undergone for mere discipline--Moral strength of
students--Giordano Bruno.
You told me the other day that you believed the inducement to what I
called intellectual living to be merely the love of pleasure--pleasure
of a higher kind, no doubt, than that which we derive from wine, yet
fairly comparable to it. You went on to say that you could not, from the
moral point of view, discern any appreciable difference between
intoxicating oneself by means of literature or art and getting tipsy on
port wine or brandy; that the reading of poetry, most especially was
clearly self-intoxication--a service of Venus and Bacchus, in which the
suggestions of artfully-ordered words were used as substitutes for the
harem and the wine-flask. Completing the expression of this idea, you
said that the excitement produced by oratory was exactly of the same
nature as the excitement produced by gin, so that Mr. Bright and M.
Gambetta--nay, even a gentleman so respectable as the late Lord
Derby--belonged strictly to the same profession as the publicans, being
dealers in stimulants, and no more. The habitual student was, in your
view, nothing better than the helpless victim of unresisted appetite, to
whom intellectual intoxication, having been at first a pleasure, had
finally become a necessity. You added that any rational person who found
himself sinking into such a deplorable condition as this, would have
recourse to some severe discipline as a preservative--a discipline
requiring close attention to common things, and rigorously excluding
every variety of thought which could possibly be considered
intellectual.
It is strictly true that the three intellectual pursuits--literature,
science, and the fine arts--are all of them strong stimulants, and that
men are attracted to them by the stimulus they give. But these
occupations are morally much nearer to the common level of other
occupations than you suppose. There is no doubt a certain intoxication
in poetry and painting; but I have seen a tradesman find a fully
equivalent intoxication in an addition of figures showing a delightful
balance at his banker's. I have seen a young poet intoxicated with the
love of poetry; but I have also seen a young mechanical genius on whom
the sight of a locomotive acted exactly like a bottle of champagne.
Everything that is capable of exciting or moving man, everything that
fires him with enthusiasm, everything that sustains his energies above
the dead level of merely animal existence, may be compared, and not very
untruly, to the action of generous wine. The two most powerful mental
stimulants--since they overcome even the fear of death--are
unquestionably religion and patriotism: ardent states of feeling both of
them when they are genuine; yet this ardor has a great utility. It
enables men to bear much, to perform much which would be beyond their
natural force if it were not sustained by powerful mental stimulants.
And so it is in the intellectual life. It is because its labors are so
severe that its pleasures are so glorious. The Creator of intellectual
man set him the most arduous tasks--tasks that required the utmost
possible patience, courage, self-discipline, and which at the same time
were for the most part, from their very nature, likely to receive only
the most meagre and precarious pecuniary reward. Therefore, in order
that so poor and weak a creature might execute its gigantic works with
the energy necessary to their permanence, the labor itself was made
intensely attractive and interesting to the few who were fitted for it
by their constitution. Since their courage could not be maintained by
any of the common motives which carry men through ordinary
drudgery--since neither wealth nor worldly position was in their
prospects, the drudgery they had to go through was to be rewarded by the
triumphs of scientific discovery, by the felicities of artistic
expression. A divine drunkenness was given to them for their
encouragement, surpassing the gift of the grape.
But now that I have acknowledged, not ungratefully, the necessity of
that noble excitement which is the life of life, it is time for me to
add that, in the daily labor of all intellectual workers, much has to be
done which requires a robustness of the moral constitution beyond what
you appear to be aware of. It is not long since the present Bishop of
Exeter truly affirmed, in an address to a body of students, that if
there were not weariness in work, that work was not so thorough-going as
it ought to be. "Of all work," the Bishop said, "that produces results,
nine-tenths must be drudgery. There is no work, from the highest to the
lowest, which can be done well by any man who is unwilling to make that
sacrifice. Part of the very nobility of the devotion of the true workman
to his work consists in the fact that a man is not daunted by finding
that drudgery must be done; and no man can really succeed in any walk of
life without a good deal of what in ordinary English is called pluck.
That is the condition of all work whatever, and it is the condition of
all success. And there is nothing which so truly repays itself as this
very perseverance against weariness."
You understand, no doubt, that there is drudgery in the work of a lawyer
or an accountant, but you imagine that there is no drudgery in that of
an artist, or author, or man of science. In these cases you fancy that
there is nothing but a pleasant intoxication, like the puffing of
tobacco or the sipping of claret after dinner. The Bishop sees more
accurately. He knows that "of _all_ work that produces results
nine-tenths must be drudgery." He makes no exceptions in favor of the
arts and sciences; if he had made any such exceptions, they would have
proved the absence of culture in himself. Real work of all descriptions,
even including the composition of poetry (the most intoxicating of all
human pursuits), contains drudgery in so large a proportion that
considerable moral courage is necessary to carry it to a successful
issue. Some of the most popular writers of verse have dreaded the labor
of composition. Wordsworth shrank from it much more sensitively than he
did from his prosaic labors as a distributor of stamps. He had that
_horreur de la plume_ which is a frequent malady amongst literary men.
But we feel, in reading Wordsworth, that composition was a serious toil
to him--the drudgery is often visible. Let me take, then, the case of a
writer of verse distinguished especially for fluency and ease--the
lightest, gayest, apparently most thoughtless of modern minstrels--the
author of "The Irish Melodies" and "Lalla Rookh." Moore said--I quote
from memory and may not give the precise words, but they were to this
effect--that although the first shadowy imagining of a new poem was a
delicious fool's paradise, the labor of actual composition was something
altogether different. He did not, I believe, exactly use the word
"drudgery," but his expression implied that there was painful drudgery
in the work. When he began to write "Lalla Rookh" the task was anything
but easy to him. He said that he was "at all times a far more slow and
painstaking workman than would ever be guessed from the result." For a
long time after the conclusion of the agreement with Messrs. Longman,
"though generally at work with a view to this task, he made but very
little real progress in it." After many unsatisfactory attempts, finding
that his subjects were so slow in kindling his own sympathies, he began
to despair of their ever touching the hearts of others. "Had this series
of disheartening experiments been carried on much further, I must have
thrown aside the work in despair." He took the greatest pains in long
and laboriously preparing himself by reading. "To form a storehouse, as
it were, of illustrations purely Oriental, and so familiarize myself
with its various treasures that, quick as Fancy required the aid of
fact in her spiritings, the memory was ready to furnish materials for
the spell-work; such was, for a long while, the sole object of my
studies." After quoting some opinions favorable to the truth of his
Oriental coloring, he says: "Whatever of vanity there may be in citing
such tributes, they show, at least, of what great value, even in poetry,
is that prosaic quality, industry, since it was in a slow and laborious
collection of small facts that the first foundations of this fanciful
romance were laid."
Other fine arts make equally large claims upon the industry of their
professors. We see the charming result, which looks as if it were
nothing but pleasure--the mere sensuous gratification of an appetite for
melody or color; but no one ever eminently succeeded in music or
painting without patient submission to a discipline far from attractive
or entertaining. An idea was very prevalent amongst the upper classes in
England, between twenty and thirty years ago, that art was not a serious
pursuit, and that Frenchmen were too frivolous to apply themselves
seriously to anything. When, however, the different schools of art in
Europe came to be exhibited together, the truth began to dawn upon
people's minds that the French and Belgian schools of painting had a
certain superiority over the rest--a superiority of quite a peculiar
sort; and when the critics applied themselves to discover the hidden
causes of this generally perceived superiority, they found out that it
was due in great measure to the patient drudgery submitted to by those
foreign artists in their youth. English painters who have attained
distinction have gone through a like drudgery, if not in the public
_atelier_ at least in secrecy and solitude. Mr. John Lewis, in reply to
an application for a drawing to be reproduced by the autotype process,
and published in the _Portfolio_, said that his sketches and studies
were all in color, but if we liked to examine them we were welcome to
select anything that might be successfully photographed. Not being in
London at the time, I charged an experienced friend to go and see if
there were anything that would answer our purpose. Soon afterward he
wrote: "I have just been to see John Lewis, and have come away
_astounded_." He had seen the vast foundations of private industry on
which the artist's public work had been erected,--innumerable studies in
color, wrought with the most perfect care and finish, and all for
self-education merely, not for any direct reward in fame. We have all
admired the extraordinary power of representation in the little pictures
of Meissonier; that power was acquired by painting studies _life-size_
for self-instruction, and the artist has sustained his knowledge by
persistence in that practice. Mulready, between the conception of a new
picture and the execution of it, used to give himself a special training
for the intended work by painting a study in color of every separate
thing that was to form part of the composition. It is useless to go on
multiplying these examples, since all great artists, without exception,
have been distinguished for their firm faith in steady well-directed
labor. This faith was so strong in Reynolds that it limited his
reasoning powers, and prevented him from assigning their due importance
to the inborn natural gifts.
Not only in their preparations for work, but even in the work itself, do
artists undergo drudgery. It is the peculiarity of their work that, more
than any other human work, it displays whatever there may be in it of
pleasure and felicity, putting the drudgery as much out of sight as
possible; but all who know the secrets of the studio are aware of the
ceaseless struggles against technical difficulty which are the price of
the charms that pleasantly deceive us. The amateur tries to paint in
water-color, and finds that the gradation of his sky will not come
right; instead of being a sound gradation like that of the heavenly
blue, it is all in spots and patches. Then he goes to some clever artist
who seems to get the right thing with enviable ease. "Is my paper good?
have my colors been properly ground?" The materials are sound enough,
but the artist confesses one of the discouraging little secrets of his
craft. "The fact is," he says, "those spots that you complain of happen
to all of us, and very troublesome they are, especially in dark tints;
the only way is to remove them as patiently as we can, and it sometimes
takes several days. If one or two of them remain in spite of us, we
turn them into birds." In etching, the most famous practitioners get
into messes with the treacherous chemistry of their acids, and need an
invincible patience. Even Méryon was always very anxious when the time
came for confiding his work to what he called the _traitresse liqueur_;
and whenever I give a commission to an etcher, I am always expecting
some such despatch as the following: "Plate utterly ruined in the
biting. Very sorry. Will begin another immediately." We know what a
dreadful series of mishaps attended our fresco-painters at Westminster,
and now even the promising water-glass process, in which Maclise
trusted, shows the bloom of premature decay. The safest and best known
of modern processes, simple oil-painting has its own dangers also. The
colors sink and alter; they lose their relative values; they lose their
pearly purity, their glowing transparence--they turn to buff and black.
The fine arts bristle all over with technical difficulties, and are, I
will not say the best school of patience in the world, for many other
pursuits are also very good schools of patience; but I will say, without
much fear of contradiction from anybody acquainted with the subject,
that the fine arts offer drudgery enough, and disappointment enough, to
be a training both in patience and in humility.
In the labor of the line-engraver both these qualities are developed to
the pitch of perfect heroism. He sits down to a great surface of steel
or copper, and day by day, week after week, month after month, ploughs
slowly his marvellous lines. Sometimes the picture before him is an
agreeable companion; he is in sympathy with the painter; he enjoys every
touch that he has to translate. But sometimes, on the contrary, he hates
the picture, and engraves it as a professional duty. I happened to call
upon a distinguished English engraver--a man of the greatest taste and
knowledge, a refined and cultivated critic--and I found him seated at
work before a thing which had nothing to do with fine art--a medley of
ugly portraits of temperance celebrities on a platform. "Ah!" he said to
me sadly, "you see the dark side of our profession; fancy sitting down
to a desk all day long for two years together with that thing to occupy
your thoughts!" How much moral fibre was needed to carry to a successful
issue so repulsive a task as that! You may answer that a stone-breaker
on the roadside surpasses my line-engraver both in patience and in
humility; but whereas the sensitiveness of the stone-breaker has been
deadened by his mode of life, the sensitiveness of the engraver has been
continually fostered and increased. An ugly picture was torture to his
cultivated eye, and he had to bear the torture all day long, like the
pain of an irritating disease.
Still even the line-engraver has secret sources of entertainment to
relieve the mortal tedium of his task-work. The picture may be hideous,
but the engraver has hidden consolations in the exercise of his
wonderful art. He can at least entertain himself with feats of
interpretative skill, with the gentle treacheries of improving here and
there upon the hatefulness of the intolerable original. He may
congratulate himself in the evening, that one more frightful hat or coat
has been got rid of; that the tiresome task has been reduced by a space
measurable in eights of an inch. The heaviest work which shows progress
is not without _one_ element of cheerfulness.
There is a great deal of intellectual labor, undergone simply for
discipline, which shows no present result that is appreciable, and which
therefore requires, in addition to patience and humility, one of the
noblest of the moral virtues, faith. Of all the toils in which men
engage, none are nobler in their origin or their aim than those by which
they endeavor to become more wise. Pray observe that whenever the desire
for greater wisdom is earnest enough to sustain men in these high
endeavors, there must be both humility and faith--the humility which
acknowledges present insufficiency, the faith that relies upon the
mysterious laws which govern our intellectual being. Be sure that there
has been great moral strength in all who have come to intellectual
greatness. During some brief moments of insight the mist has rolled away
and they have beheld, like a celestial city, the home of their highest
aspirations; but the cloud has gathered round them again, and still in
the gloom they have gone steadily forwards, stumbling often, yet
maintaining their unconquerable resolution. It is to this sublime
persistence of the intellectual in other ages that the world owes the
treasures which they won; it is by a like persistence that we may hope
to hand them down, augmented, to the future. Their intellectual purposes
did not weaken their moral nature, but exercised and exalted it. All
that was best and highest in the imperfect moral nature of Giordano
Bruno had its source in that noble passion for Philosophy, which made
him declare that for her sake it was easy to endure labor and pain and
exile, since he had found "in brevi labore diuturnam requiem, in levi
dolore immensum gaudium, in angusto exilio patriam amplissimam."
LETTER II.
TO AN UNDISCIPLINED WRITER.
Early indocility of great workers--External discipline only a
substitute for inward discipline--Necessity for inward
discipline--Origin of the idea of discipline--Authors peculiarly
liable to overlook its uses--Good examples--Sir Arthur
Helps--Sainte-Beuve--The central authority in the mind--Locke's
opinion--Even the creative faculty may be commanded--Charles
Baudelaire--Discipline in common trades and professions--Lawyers and
surgeons--Haller--Mental refusals not to be altogether
disregarded--The idea of discipline the moral basis of the
intellectual life--Alexander Humboldt.
Sir Arthur Helps, in that wise book of his "Thoughts upon Government,"
says that "much of the best and greatest work in the world has been done
by those who were anything but docile in their youth." He believes that
"this bold statement applies not only to the greatest men in Science,
Literature, and Art, but also to the greatest men in official life, in
diplomacy, and in the general business of the world."
Many of us who were remarkable for our indocility in boyhood, and
remarkable for nothing else, have found much consolation in this
passage. It is most agreeable to be told, by a writer very eminent both
for wisdom and for culture, that our untowardness was a hopeful sign.
Another popular modern writer has also encouraged us by giving a long
list of dunces who have become illustrious.
Yet, however flattering it may be to find ourselves in such excellent
company, at least so far as the earlier half of life may be concerned,
we cannot quite forget the very numerous instances of distinguished
persons who began by submitting to the discipline of school and college,
and gained honors and reputation there, before encountering the
competition of the world.
The external discipline applied by schoolmasters is a substitute for
that inward discipline which we all so greatly need, and which is
absolutely indispensable to culture. Whether a boy happens to be a dunce
at school or a youth of brilliant promise, his future intellectual
career will depend very much on his moral force. The distinguished men
who derived so little benefit from early discipline have invariably
subjected themselves to a discipline of another kind which prepared them
for the labor of their manhood. It may be a pure assumption to say this,
but the assumption is confirmed by every instance that is known to me.
Many eminent men have undergone the discipline of business, many like
Franklin have been self-disciplined, but I have never heard of a person
who had risen to intellectual eminence without voluntary submission to
an intellectual discipline of some kind.
There are, no doubt, great pleasures attached to the intellectual life,
and quite peculiar to it; but these pleasures are the support of
discipline and not its negation. They give us the cheerfulness necessary
for our work, but they do not excuse us from the work. They are like
the cup of coffee served to a soldier on duty, not like the opium which
incapacitates for everything but dreaming.
I have been led into these observations by a perusal of the new book
which you sent me. It has many qualities which in a young writer are
full of promise. It is earnest, and lively, and exuberant, but at the
same time it is undisciplined.
Now I believe it may be affirmed, that although there has been much
literature in former ages which was both vigorous and undisciplined,
still when an age presents, as ours does, living examples of perfect
intellectual discipline, whoever falls below them in this respect
contents himself with the very kind of inferiority which of all
inferiorities is the easiest to avoid. You cannot, by an effort of the
will, hope to rival the brilliance of a genius, but you may quite
reasonably expect to obtain as complete a control over your own
faculties and your own work as any other highly-cultivated person.
The origin of discipline is the desire to do not merely our best with
the degree of power and knowledge which at the time we do actually
happen to possess, but with that which we _might_ possess if we
submitted to the necessary training. The powers given to us by Nature
are little more than a power to become, and this becoming is always
conditional on some sort of exercise--what sort we have to discover for
ourselves.
No class of persons are so liable to overlook the uses of discipline as
authors are. Anybody can write a book, though few can write that which
deserves the name of literature. There are great technical differences
between literature and book-making, but few can clearly explain these
differences, or detect, in their own case, the absence of the necessary
qualities. In painting, the most perfect finish is recognized at a
glance, but the mind only can perceive it in the book. It was an odd
notion of the authorities to exhibit literature in the international
exhibitions; but if they could have made people see the difference
between sound and unsound workmanship in the literary craft, they would
have rendered a great service to the higher intellectual discipline. Sir
Arthur Helps might have served as an example to English writers, because
he has certain qualities in which we are grievously deficient. He can
say a thing in the words that are most fit and necessary, and then leave
it. Sainte-Beuve would have been another admirable example of
self-discipline, especially to Frenchmen, who would do well to imitate
him in his horror of the _á peu près_. He never began to write about
anything until he had cleared the ground well before him. He never spoke
about any character or doctrine that he had not bottomed (to use Locke's
word) as far as he was able. He had an extraordinary aptitude for
collecting exactly the sort of material that he needed, for arranging
and classifying material, for perceiving its mutual relations. Very few
Frenchmen have had Sainte-Beuve's intense repugnance to insufficiency
of information and inaccuracy of language. Few indeed are the French
journalists of whom it might be said, as it may be truly said of
Sainte-Beuve, that he never wrote even an article for a newspaper
without having subjected his mind to a special training for that
particular article. The preparations for one of his _Lundis_ were the
serious occupation of several laborious days; and before beginning the
actual composition, his mind had been disciplined into a state of the
most complete readiness, like the fingers of a musician who has been
practising a piece before he executes it.
The object of intellectual discipline is the establishment of a strong
central authority in the mind by which all its powers are regulated and
directed as the military forces of a nation are directed by the
strategist who arranges the operations of a war. The presence of this
strong central authority is made manifest in the unity and proportion of
the results; when this authority is absent (it is frequently entirely
absent from the minds of undisciplined persons, especially of the female
sex), you have a chaos of complete confusion; when the authority without
being absent is not strong enough to regulate the lively activity of the
intellectual forces, you have too much energy in one direction, too
little in another, a brigade where a regiment could have done the work,
and light artillery where you want guns of the heaviest calibre.
To establish this central authority it is only necessary, in any
vigorous and sound mind, to exercise it. Without such a central power
there is neither liberty of action nor security of possession. "The
mind," says Locke, "should always be free and ready to turn itself to
the variety of objects that occur, and allow them as much consideration
as shall, for that time, be thought fit. To be engrossed so by one
subject as not to be prevailed on to leave it for another that we judge
fitter for our contemplation, is to make it of no use to us. Did this
state of mind always remain so, every one would, without scruple, give
it the name of perfect madness; and whilst it does last, at whatever
intervals it returns, such a rotation of thoughts about the same object
no more carries us forward toward the attainment of knowledge, than
getting upon a mill-horse whilst he jogs on his circular track, would
carry a man on a journey."
Writers of imaginative literature have found in practice that even the
creative faculty might be commanded. Charles Baudelaire, who had the
poetical organization with all its worst inconveniencies, said
nevertheless that "inspiration is decidedly the sister of daily labor.
These two contraries do not exclude each other more than all the other
contraries which constitute nature. Inspiration obeys like hunger, like
digestion, like sleep. There is, no doubt, in the mind a sort of
celestial mechanism, of which we need not be ashamed, but we ought to
make the best use of it. If we will only live in a resolute
contemplation of next day's work, the daily labor will serve
inspiration." In cases where discipline is felt to be very difficult, it
is generally at the same time felt to be very desirable. George Sand
complains that although "to overcome the indiscipline of her brain, she
had imposed upon herself a regular way of living, and a daily labor,
still twenty times out of thirty she catches herself reading or
dreaming, or writing something entirely apart from the work in hand."
She adds that without this frequent intellectual _flânerie_, she would
have acquired information which has been her perpetual but unrealized
desire.
It is the triumph of discipline to overcome both small and great
repugnances. We bring ourselves, by its help, to face petty details that
are wearisome, and heavy tasks that are almost appalling. Nothing shows
the power of discipline more than the application of the mind in the
common trades and professions to subjects which have hardly any interest
in themselves. Lawyers are especially admirable for this. They acquire
the faculty of resolutely applying their minds to the dryest documents,
with tenacity enough to end in the perfect mastery of their contents; a
feat which is utterly beyond the capacity of any undisciplined
intellect, however gifted by Nature. In the case of lawyers there are
frequent intellectual repugnances to be overcome; but surgeons and other
men of science have to vanquish a class of repugnances even less within
the power of the will--the instinctive physical repugnances. These are
often so strong as to seem apparently insurmountable, but they yield to
persevering discipline. Although Haller surpassed his contemporaries in
anatomy, and published several important anatomical works, he was
troubled at the outset with a horror of dissection beyond what is usual
with the inexperienced, and it was only by firm self-discipline that he
became an anatomist at all.
There is, however, one reserve to be made about discipline, which is
this: We ought not to disregard altogether the mind's preferences and
refusals, because in most cases they are the indication of our natural
powers. They are not so always; many have felt attracted to pursuits for
which they had no capacity (this happens continually in literature and
the fine arts), whilst others have greatly distinguished themselves in
careers which were not of their own choosing, and for which they felt no
vocation in their youth. Still there exists a certain relation between
preference and capacity, which may often safely be relied upon when
there are not extrinsic circumstances to attract men or repel them.
Discipline becomes an evil, and a very serious evil, causing immense
losses of special talents to the community, when it overrides the
personal preferences entirely. We are less in danger of this evil,
however, from the discipline which we impose upon ourselves than from
that which is imposed upon us by the opinion of the society in which we
live. The intellectual life has this remarkable peculiarity as to
discipline, that whilst very severe discipline is indispensable to it,
that which it really needs is the obedience to an inward law, an
obedience which is not only compatible with revolt against other
people's notions of what the intellectual man ought to think and do, but
which often directly leads to such revolt as its own inevitable result.
In the attempt to subject ourselves to the inward law, we may encounter
a class of mental refusals which indicate no congenital incapacity, but
prove that the mind has been incapacitated by its acquired habits and
its ordinary occupations. I think that it is particularly important to
pay attention to this class of mental refusals, and to give them the
fullest consideration. Suppose the case of a man who has a fine natural
capacity for painting, but whose time has been taken up by some
profession which has formed in him mental habits entirely different from
the mental habits of an artist. The inborn capacity for art might
whisper to this man, "What if you were to abandon your profession and
turn painter?" But to this suggestion of the inborn capacity the
acquired unfitness would, in a man of sense, most probably reply, "No;
painting is an art bristling all over with the most alarming technical
difficulties, which I am too lazy to overcome; let younger men attack
them if they like." Here is a mental refusal of a kind which the
severest self-disciplinarian ought to listen to. This is Nature's way
of keeping us to our specialities; she protects us by means of what
superficial moralists condemn as one of the minor vices--the
disinclination to trouble ourselves without necessity, when the work
involves the acquisition of new habits.
The moral basis of the intellectual life appears to be the idea of
discipline; but the discipline is of a very peculiar kind, and varies
with every individual. People of original power have to discover the
original discipline that they need. They pass their lives in
thoughtfully altering this private rule of conduct as their needs alter,
as the legislature of a progressive State makes unceasing alterations in
its laws. When we look back upon the years that are gone, this is our
bitterest regret, that whilst the precious time, the irrecoverable, was
passing by so rapidly, we were intellectually too undisciplined to make
the best personal use of all the opportunities that it brought. Those
men may be truly esteemed happy and fortunate who can say to themselves
in the evening of their days--"I had so prepared myself for every
successive enterprise, that when the time came for it to be carried into
execution my training ensured success."
I had thought of some examples, and there are several great men who have
left us noble examples of self-discipline; but, in the range and
completeness of that discipline, in the foresight to discern what would
be wanted, in the humility to perceive that it was wanting, in the
resolution that it should _not_ be wanting when the time came that such
knowledge or faculty should be called for, one colossal figure so far
excels all others that I cannot write down their names with that of
Alexander Humboldt. The world sees the intellectual greatness of such a
man, but does not see the substantial moral basis on which the towering
structure rose. When I think of his noble dissatisfaction with what he
knew; his ceaseless eagerness to know more, and know it better; of the
rare combination of teachableness that despised no help (for he accepted
without jealousy the aid of everybody who could assist him), with
self-reliance that kept him always calm and observant in the midst of
personal danger, I know not which is the more magnificent spectacle, the
splendor of intellectual light, or the beauty and solidity of the moral
constitution that sustained it.
LETTER III.
TO A FRIEND WHO SUGGESTED THE SPECULATION "WHICH OF THE MORAL VIRTUES
WAS MOST ESSENTIAL TO THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE."
The most essential virtue is disinterestedness--The other virtues
possessed by the opponents of intellectual liberty--The Ultramontane
party--Difficulty of thinking disinterestedly even about the affairs
of another nation--English newspapers do not write disinterestedly
about foreign affairs--Difficulty of disinterestedness in recent
history--Poets and their readers feel it--Fine subjects for poetry in
recent events not yet available--Even history of past times rarely
disinterested--Advantages of the study of the dead languages in this
respect--Physicians do not trust their own judgment about their
personal health--The virtue consists in endeavoring to be
disinterested.
I think there cannot be a doubt that the most essential virtue is
disinterestedness.
Let me tell you, after this decided answer, what are the considerations
which have led me to it. I began by taking the other important virtues
one by one--industry, perseverance, courage, discipline, humility, and
the rest; and then asked myself whether any class of persons possessed
and cultivated these virtues who were nevertheless opposed to
intellectual liberty. The answer came immediately, that there have in
every age been men deservedly respected for these virtues who did all in
their power to repress the free action of the intellect. What is called
the Ultramontane party in the present day includes great numbers of
talented adherents who are most industrious, most persevering, who
willingly submit to the severest discipline--who are learned,
self-denying, and humble enough to accept the most obscure and
ill-requited duties. Some of these men possess nine-tenths of the
qualifications that are necessary to the highest intellectual life--they
have brilliant gifts of nature; they are well-educated; they take a
delight in the exercise of noble faculties, and yet instead of employing
their time and talents to help the intellectual advancement of mankind,
they do all in their power to retard it. They have many most respectable
virtues, but one is wanting. They have industry, perseverance,
discipline, but they have _not_ disinterestedness.
I do not mean disinterestedness in its ordinary sense as the absence of
selfish care about money. The Church of Rome has thousands of devoted
servants who are content to labor in her cause for stipends so miserable
that it is clear they have no selfish aim; whilst they abandon all those
possibilities of fortune which exist for every active and enterprising
layman. But their thinking can never be disinterested so long as their
ruling motive is devotion to the interests of their Church. Some of them
are personally known to me, and we have discussed together many of the
greatest questions which agitate the continental nations at the present
time. They have plenty of intellectual acumen; but whenever the
discussion touches, however remotely, the ecclesiastical interests that
are dear to them, they cease to be observers--they become passionate
advocates. It is this habit of advocacy which debars them from all
elevated speculation about the future of the human race, and which so
often induces them to take a side with incapable and retrograde
governments, too willingly overlooking their deficiencies in the
expectation of services to the cause. Their predecessors have impeded,
as far as they were able, the early growth of science--not for
intellectual reasons, but because they instinctively felt that there was
something in the scientific spirit not favorable to those interests
which they placed far above the knowledge of mere matter.
I have selected the Ultramontane party in the Church of Rome as the most
prominent example of a party eminent for many intellectual virtues, and
yet opposed to the intellectual life from its own want of
disinterestedness. But the same defect exists, to some degree, in every
partisan--exists in you and me so far as we are partisans. Let us
suppose, for example, that we desired to find out the truth about a
question much agitated in a neighboring country at the present time--the
question whether it would be better for that country to attempt the
restoration of its ancient Monarchy or to try to consolidate a
Republican form of government. How difficult it is to think out such a
problem disinterestedly, and yet how necessary to the justice of our
conclusions that we should think disinterestedly if we pretend to think
at all! It is true that we have one circumstance in our favor--we are
not French subjects, and this is much. Still we are not disinterested,
since we know that the settlement of a great political problem such as
this, even though on foreign soil, cannot fail to have a powerful
influence on opinion in our own country, and consequently upon the
institutions of our native land. We are spectators only, it is true; but
we are far from being disinterested spectators. And if you desire to
measure the exact degree to which we are interested in the result, you
need only look at the newspapers. The English newspapers always treat
French affairs from the standpoint of their own party. The Conservative
journalist in England is a Monarchist in France, and has no hopes for
the Republic; the Liberal journalist in England believes that the French
dynasties are used up, and sees no chance of tranquillity outside of
republican institutions. In both cases there is an impediment to the
intellectual appreciation of the problem.
This difficulty is so strongly felt by those who write and read the sort
of literature which aspires to permanence, and which, therefore, ought
to have a substantial intellectual basis, that either our distinguished
poets choose their subjects in actions long past and half-forgotten, or
else, when tempted by present excitement, they produce work which is
artistically far inferior to their best. Our own generation has
witnessed three remarkable events which are poetical in the highest
degree. The conquest of the Two Sicilies by Garibaldi is a most perfect
subject for a heroic poem; the events which led to the execution of the
Emperor Maximilian and deprived his Empress of reason, would, in the
hands of a great dramatist, afford the finest possible material for a
tragedy; the invasion of France by the Germans, the overthrow of
Napoleon III., the siege of Paris, are an epic ready to hand that only
awaits its Homer; yet, with the exception of Victor Hugo, who is far
gone in intellectual decadence, no great poet has sung of these things
yet. The subjects are as good as can be, but too near. Neither poet nor
reader is disinterested enough for the intellectual enjoyment of these
subjects: the poet would not see his way clearly, the reader would not
follow unreservedly.
It may be added, however, in this connection, that even past history is
hardly ever written disinterestedly. Historians write with one eye on
the past and the other on the pre-occupations of the present. So far as
they do this they fall short of the intellectual standard. An ideally
perfect history would tell the pure truth, and all the truth, so far as
it was ascertainable.
Artists are seldom good critics of art, because their own practice
biasses them, and they are not disinterested. The few artists who have
written soundly about art have succeeded in the difficult task of
detaching saying from doing; they have, in fact, become two distinct
persons, each oblivious of the other.
The strongest of all the reasons in favor of the study of the dead
languages and the literatures preserved in them, has always appeared to
me to consist in the more perfect disinterestedness with which we
moderns can approach them. The men and events are separated from us by
so wide an interval, not only of time and locality, but especially of
modes of thought, that our passions are not often enlisted, and the
intellect is sufficiently free.
It may be noted that medical men, who are a scientific class, and
therefore more than commonly aware of the great importance of
disinterestedness in intellectual action, never trust their own judgment
when they feel the approaches of disease. They know that it is difficult
for a man, however learned in medicine, to arrive at accurate
conclusions about the state of a human body that concerns him so nearly
as his own, even although the person who suffers has the advantage of
actually experiencing the morbid sensations.
To all this you may answer that intellectual disinterestedness seems
more an accident of situation than a virtue. The virtue is not to have
it, but to seek it in all earnestness; to be ready to accept the truth
even when it is most unfavorable to ourselves. I can illustrate my
meaning by a reference to a matter of everyday experience. There are
people who cannot bear to look into their own accounts from a dread
that the clear revelation of figures may be less agreeable to them than
the illusions which they cherish. There are others who possess a kind of
virtue which enables them to see their own affairs as clearly as if they
had no personal interest in them. The weakness of the first is one of
the most fatal of intellectual weaknesses; the mental independence of
the second is one of the most desirable of intellectual qualities. The
endeavor to attain it, or to strengthen it, is a great virtue, and of
all the virtues the one most indispensable to the nobility of the
intellectual life.
NOTE.--The reader may feel some surprise that I have not mentioned
honesty as an important intellectual virtue. Honesty is of great
importance, no doubt, but it appears to be (as to practical effects)
included in disinterestedness, and to be less comprehensively useful.
There is no reason to suspect the honesty of many political and
theological partisans, yet their honesty does not preserve them from
the worst intellectual habits, such as the habit of "begging the
question," of misrepresenting the arguments on the opposite side, of
shutting their eyes to every fact which is not perfectly agreeable to
them. The truth is, that mere honesty, though a most respectable and
necessary virtue, goes a very little way toward the forming of an
effective intellectual character. It is valuable rather in the
relations of the intellectual man to the outer world around him, and
even here it is dangerous unless tempered by discretion. A perfect
disinterestedness would ensure the best effects of honesty, and yet
avoid some serious evils, against which honesty is not, in itself, a
safeguard.
LETTER IV.
TO A MORALIST WHO SAID THAT INTELLECTUAL CULTURE WAS NOT CONDUCIVE TO
SEXUAL MORALITY.
That the Author does not write in the spirit of advocacy--Two
different kinds of immorality--Byron and Shelley--A peculiar
temptation for the intellectual--A distinguished foreign
writer--Reaction to coarseness from over-refinement--Danger of
intellectual excesses--Moral utility of culture--The most cultivated
classes at the same time the most moral--That men of high intellectual
aims have an especially strong reason for morality--M. Taine's
opinion.
A critic in one of the quarterlies once treated me as a feeble defender
of my opinions, because I gave due consideration to both sides of a
question. He said that, like a wise commander, I capitulated beforehand
in case my arguments did not come up for my relief; nay, more, that I
gave up my arms in unconditional surrender. To this let me answer, that
I have nothing to do with the polemical method, that I do not look upon
an opponent as an enemy to be repelled, but as a torch-bearer to be
welcomed for any light that he may bring; that I defend nothing, but try
to explore everything that lies near enough.
You need not expect me, therefore, to defend very vigorously the
morality of the intellectual life. An advocate could do it brilliantly;
there are plenty of materials, but so clumsy an advocate as your present
correspondent would damage the best of causes by unseasonable
indiscretions. So I begin by admitting that your accusations are most
of them well founded. Many intellectual people have led immoral lives,
others have led lives which, although in strict conformity to their own
theories of morality, were in opposition to the morality of their
country and their age. Byron is a good instance of the first, and
Shelley of the second. Byron was really and knowingly immoral; Shelley,
on the other hand, hated what he considered to be immorality, and lived
a life as nearly as possible in accordance with the moral ideal in his
own conscience; still he did not respect the moral rule of his country,
but lived with Mary Godwin, whilst Harriet, his first wife, was still
alive. There is a clear distinction between the two cases; yet both have
the defect that the person takes in hand the regulation of his own
morality, which it is hardly safe for any one to do, considering the
prodigious force of passion.
I find even in the lives of intellectual people a peculiar temptation to
immorality from which others are exempt. It is in their nature to feel
an eager desire for intellectual companionship, and yet at the same time
to exhaust very rapidly whatever is congenial to them in the intellect
of their friends. They feel a strong intellectual attraction to persons
of the opposite sex; and the idea of living with a person whose
conversation is believed at the time to promise an increasing interest,
is attractive in ways of which those who have no such wants can scarcely
form a conception. A most distinguished foreign writer, of the female
sex, has made a succession of domestic arrangements which, if generally
imitated by others, would be subversive of any conceivable system of
morality; and yet it is clear in this case that the temptation was
chiefly, if not entirely, intellectual. The successive companions of
this remarkable woman were all of them men of exceptional intellectual
power, and her motive for changing them was an unbridled intellectual
curiosity.
This is the sort of immorality to which cultivated people are most
exposed. It is dangerous to the well-being of a community because it
destroys the sense of security on which the idea of the family is
founded. If we are to leave our wives when their conversation ceases to
be interesting, the foundations of the home will be unsafe. If they are
to abandon, us when we are dull, to go away with some livelier and more
talkative companion, can we ever hope to retain them permanently?
There is another danger which must be looked fairly in the face. When
the lives of men are refined beyond the real needs of their
organization, Nature is very apt to bring about the most extraordinary
reactions. Thus the most exquisitely delicate artists in literature and
painting have frequently had reactions of incredible coarseness. Within
the Châteaubriand of Atala there existed an obscene Châteaubriand that
would burst forth occasionally in talk that no biographer could repeat.
I have heard the same thing of the sentimental Lamartine. We know that
Turner, dreamer of enchanted landscapes, took the pleasures of a sailor
on the spree. A friend said to me of one of the most exquisite living
geniuses: "You can have no conception of the coarseness of his tastes;
he associates with the very lowest women, and enjoys their rough
brutality."
These cases only prove, what I have always willingly admitted, that the
intellectual life is not free from certain dangers if we lead it too
exclusively. Intellectual excesses, by the excitement which they
communicate to the whole system, have a direct tendency to drive men
into other excesses, and a too great refinement in one direction may
produce degrading reactions in another. Still the cultivation of the
mind, reasonably pursued, is, on the whole, decidedly favorable to
morality; and we may easily understand that it should be so, when we
remember that people have recourse to sensual indulgences simply from a
desire for excitement, whilst intellectual pursuits supply excitement of
a more innocent kind and in the utmost variety and abundance. If,
instead of taking a few individual instances, you broadly observe whole
classes, you will recognize the moral utility of culture. The most
cultivated classes in our own country are also the most moral, and these
classes have advanced in morality at the same time that they have
advanced in culture. English gentlemen of the present day are superior
to their forefathers whom Fielding described; they are better educated,
and they read more; they are at the same time both more sober and more
chaste.
I may add that intellectual men have peculiar and most powerful reasons
for avoiding the excesses of immorality, reasons which to any one who
has a noble ambition are quite enough to encourage him in self-control.
Those excesses are the gradual self-destruction of the intellectual
forces, for they weaken the spring of the mind, not leaving it well
enough to face the drudgery that is inevitable in every career. Even in
cases where they do not immediately lead to visible imbecility, they
make the man less efficient and less capable than he might have been;
and all experienced wrestlers with fate and fortune know well that
success has often, at the critical time, depended upon some very
trifling advantage which the slightest diminution of power would have
lost to them. No one knows the full immensity of the difference between
having power enough to make a little headway against obstacles, and just
falling short of the power which is necessary at the time. In every
great intellectual career there are situations like that of a steamer
with a storm-wind directly against her and an iron-bound coast behind.
If the engines are strong enough to gain an inch an hour she is safe,
but if they lose there is no hope. Intellectual successes are so
rewarding that they are worth any sacrifice of pleasure; the sense of
defeat is so humiliating that fair Venus herself could not offer a
consolation for it. An ambitious man will govern himself for the sake of
his ambition, and withstand the seductions of the senses. Can he be ever
strong enough, can his brain ever be lucid enough for the immensity of
the task before him?
"Le jeune homme," says M. Taine, "ignore qu'il n'y a pas de pire
déperdition de forces, que de tels commerces abaissent le coeur,
qu'après dix ans d'une vie pareille il aura perdu la moitié de sa
volonté, que ses pensées auront un arrière-goût habituel d'amertume et
de tristesse, que son ressort intérieur sera amolli ou faussé. Il
s'excuse à ses propres yeux, en se disant qu'un homme doit tout toucher
pour tout connaître. De fait, il apprend la vie, mais bien souvent aussi
il perd l'énergie, la chaleur d'âme, la capacité d'agir, et à trente ans
il n'est plus bon qu'à faire un employé, un dilettante, ou un rentier."
PART III.
_OF EDUCATION._
LETTER I.
TO A FRIEND WHO RECOMMENDED THE AUTHOR TO LEARN THIS THING AND THAT.
Lesson learned from a cook--The ingredients of knowledge--Importance
of proportion in the ingredients--Case of an English author--Two
landscape painters--The unity and charm of character often dependent
upon the limitations of culture--The burden of knowledge may diminish
the energy of action--Difficulty of suggesting a safe rule for the
selection of our knowledge--Men qualified for their work by ignorance
as well as by knowledge--Men remarkable for the extent of their
studies--Franz Woepke--Goethe--Hebrew proverb.
I happened one day to converse with an excellent French cook about the
delicate art which he professed, and he comprised the whole of it under
two heads--the knowledge of the mutual influences of ingredients, and
the judicious management of heat. It struck me that there existed a very
close analogy between cookery and education; and, on following out the
subject in my own way, I found that what he told me suggested several
considerations of the very highest importance in the culture of the
human intellect.
Amongst the dishes for which my friend had a deserved reputation was a
certain _gâteau de foie_ which had a very exquisite flavor. The
principal ingredient, not in quantity hut in power, was the liver of a
fowl; but there were several other ingredients also, and amongst these a
leaf or two of parsley. He told me that the influence of the parsley was
a good illustration of his theory about his art. If the parsley were
omitted, the flavor he aimed at was not produced at all; but, on the
other hand, if the quantity of parsley was in the least excessive, then
the _gâteau_ instead of being a delicacy for _gourmets_ became an
uneatable mess. Perceiving that I was really interested in the subject,
he kindly promised a practical evidence of his doctrine, and the next
day intentionally spoiled his dish by a trifling addition of parsley. He
had not exaggerated the consequences; the delicate flavor entirely
departed, and left a nauseous bitterness in its place, like the
remembrance of an ill-spent youth.
And so it is, I thought, with the different ingredients of knowledge
which are so eagerly and indiscriminately recommended. We are told that
we ought to learn this thing and that, as if every new ingredient did
not affect the whole flavor of the mind. There is a sort of intellectual
chemistry which is quite as marvellous as material chemistry, and a
thousand times more difficult to observe. One general truth may,
however, be relied upon as surely and permanently our own. It is true
that everything we learn affects the _whole_ character of the mind.
Consider how incalculably important becomes the question of proportion
in our knowledge, and how that which we are is dependent as much upon
our ignorance as our science. What we call ignorance is only a smaller
proportion--what we call science only a larger. The larger quantity is
recommended as an unquestionable good, but the goodness of it is
entirely dependent on the mental product that we want. Aristocracies
have always instinctively felt this, and have decided that a gentleman
ought not to know too much of certain arts and sciences. The character
which they had accepted as their ideal would have been destroyed by
indiscriminate additions to those ingredients of which long experience
had fixed the exact proportions. The same feeling is strong in the
various professions: there is an apprehension that the disproportionate
knowledge may destroy the professional nature. The less intelligent
members of the profession will tell you that they dread an
unprofessional use of time; but the more thoughtful are not so
apprehensive about hours and days, _they_ dread that sure transformation
of the whole intellect which follows every increase of knowledge.
I knew an English author who by great care and labor had succeeded in
forming a style which harmonized quite perfectly with the character of
his thinking, and served as an unfailing means of communication with
his readers. Every one recognized its simple ease and charm, and he
might have gone on writing with that enviable facility had he not
determined to study Locke's philosophical compositions. Shortly
afterwards my friend's style suddenly lost its grace; he began to write
with difficulty, and what he wrote was unpleasantly difficult to read.
Even the thinking was no longer his own thinking. Having been in too
close communication with a writer who was not a literary artist, his own
art had deteriorated in consequence.
I could mention an English landscape painter who diminished the
pictorial excellence of his works by taking too much interest in
geology. His landscapes became geological illustrations, and no longer
held together pictorially. Another landscape painter, who began by
taking a healthy delight in the beauty of natural scenery, became
morbidly religious after an illness, and thenceforth passed by the
loveliest European scenery as comparatively unworthy of his attention,
to go and make ugly pictures of places that had sacred associations.
For people who produce nothing these risks appear to be less serious;
and yet there have been admirable characters, not productive, whose
admirableness might have been lessened by the addition of certain kinds
of learning. The last generation of the English country aristocracy was
particularly rich in characters whose unity and charm was dependent
upon the limitations of their culture, and which would have been
entirely altered, perhaps not for the better, by simply knowing a
science or a literature that was closed to them.
Abundant illustrations might be collected in evidence of the well-known
truth that the burden of knowledge may diminish the energy of action;
but this is rather outside of what we are considering, which is the
influence of knowledge upon the intellectual and not the active life.
I regret very much not to be able to suggest anything like a safe rule
for the selection of our knowledge. The most rational one which has been
hit upon as yet appears to be a simple confidence in the feeling that we
inwardly want to know. If I feel the inward want for a certain kind of
knowledge, it may perhaps be presumed that it would be good for me; but
even this feeling is not perfectly reliable, since people are often
curious about things that do not closely concern them, whilst they
neglect what it is most important for them to ascertain. All that I
venture to insist upon is, that we cannot learn any new thing without
changing our whole intellectual composition as a chemical compound is
changed by another ingredient; that the mere addition of knowledge may
be good for us or bad for us; and that whether it will be good or bad is
usually a more obscure problem than the enthusiasm of educators will
allow. That depends entirely on the work we have to do. Men are
qualified for their work by knowledge, but they are also negatively
qualified for it by their ignorance. Nature herself appears to take care
that the workman shall not know too much--she keeps him steadily to his
task; fixes him in one place mentally if not corporeally, and conquers
his restlessness by fatigue. As we are bound to a little planet, and
hindered by impassable gulfs of space from wandering in stars where we
have no business, so we are kept by the force of circumstances to the
limited studies that belong to us. If we have any kind of efficiency,
very much of it is owing to our narrowness, which is favorable to a
powerful individuality.
Sometimes, it is true, we meet with instances of men remarkable for the
extent of their studies. Franz Woepke, who died in 1864, was an
extraordinary example of this kind. In the course of a short life he
became, although unknown, a prodigy of various learning. His friend M.
Taine says that he was erudite in many eruditions. His favorite pursuit
was the history of mathematics, but as auxiliaries he had learned
Arabic, and Persian, and Sanskrit. He was classically educated, he wrote
and spoke the principal modern languages easily and correctly;[1] his
printed works are in three languages. He had lived in several nations,
and known their leading men of science. And yet this astonishing list of
acquirements may be reduced to the exercise of two decided and natural
tastes. Franz Woepke had the gift of the linguist and an interest in
mathematics, the first serving as auxiliary to the second.
Goethe said that "a vast abundance of objects must lie before us ere we
can think upon them." Woepke felt the need of this abundance, but he
did not go out of his way to find it. The objectionable seeking after
knowledge is the seeking after the knowledge which does not belong to
us. In vain you urge me to go in quest of sciences for which I have no
natural aptitude. Would you have me act like that foolish camel in the
Hebrew proverb, which in going to seek horns lost his ears?
LETTER II.
TO A FRIEND WHO STUDIED MANY THINGS.
Men cannot restrict themselves in learning--Description of a Latin
scholar of two generations since--What is attempted by a cultivated
contemporary--Advantages of a more restricted field--Privilege of
instant admission--Many pursuits cannot be kept up simultaneously--The
deterioration of knowledge through neglect--What it really is--The
only available knowledge that which we habitually use--Difficulty in
modern education--That it is inevitably a beginning of many things and
no more--The simpler education of an ancient Greek--That of
Alcibiades--How the Romans were situated as to this--The privilege of
limited studies belongs to the earlier ages--They learned and we
attempt to learn.
It appears to be henceforth inevitable that men should be unable to
restrict themselves to one or two pursuits, and you who are in most
respects a very perfect specimen of what the age naturally produces in
the way of culture, have studied subjects so many and so various that a
mere catalogue of them would astonish your grandfather if his shade
could revisit his old home. And yet your grandfather was considered a
very highly cultivated gentleman according to the ideas and requirements
of his time. He was an elegant scholar, but in Latin chiefly, for he
said that he never read Greek easily, and indeed he abandoned that
language entirely on leaving the University. But his Latin, from daily
use and practice (for he let no day slip by without reading some ancient
author) and from the thoroughness and accuracy of his scholarship, was
always as ready for service as the saddled steeds of Branksome. I think
he got more culture, more of the best effects of good literature, out of
that one language than some polyglots get out of a dozen. He knew no
modern tongue, he had not even the common pretension to read a little
French, and in his day hardly anybody studied German. He had no
scientific training of any kind except mathematics, in which I have
heard him say that he had never been proficient. Of the fine arts his
ignorance was complete, so complete that I doubt if he could have
distinguished Rigaud from Reynolds, and he had never played upon any
musical instrument. The leisure which he enjoyed during a long and
tranquil existence he gave entirely to Latin and English literature, but
of the two he enjoyed Latin the more, not with the preference of a
pedant, but because it carried him more completely out of the present,
and gave him the refreshment of a more perfect change. He produced on
all who knew him the impression of a cultivated gentleman, which he was.
There is only an interval of one generation between you and that good
Latinist, but how wide is the difference in your intellectual regimen?
You have studied--well, here is a little list of what you have studied,
and probably even this is not complete:--
Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, mathematics, chemistry,
mineralogy, geology, botany, the theory of music, the practice of music
on two instruments, much theory about painting, the practice of painting
in oil and water-color, photography, etching on copper, etc., etc., etc.
That is to say, six literatures (including English), six sciences
(counting mineralogy and geology as one), and five branches or
departments of the fine arts.
Omitting English literature from our total, as that may be considered to
come by nature to an Englishman, though any real proficiency in it costs
the leisure of years, we have here no less than sixteen different
pursuits. If you like to merge the theory of music and painting in the
practice of those arts, though as a branch of study the theory is really
distinct, we have still fourteen pursuits, any one of which is enough to
occupy the whole of one man's time. If you gave some time daily to each
of these pursuits, you could scarcely give more than half an hour, even
supposing that you had no professional occupation, and that you had no
favorite study, absorbing time to the detriment of the rest.
Now your grandfather, though he would be considered quite an ignorant
country gentleman in these days, had in reality certain intellectual
advantages over his more accomplished descendant. In the first place, he
entirely escaped the sense of pressure, the feeling of not having time
enough to do what he wanted to do. He accumulated his learning as
quietly as a stout lady accumulates her fat, by the daily satisfaction
of his appetite. And at the same time that he escaped the sense of
pressure, he escaped also the miserable sense of imperfection. Of course
he did not know Latin like an ancient Roman, but then he never met with
any ancient Romans to humiliate him by too rapid and half-intelligible
conversation. He met the best Latinists of his day; and felt himself a
master amongst masters. Every time he went into his study, to pass
delightful hours with the noble authors that he loved, he knew that his
admission into that august society would be immediate and complete. He
had to wait in no antechamber of mere linguistic difficulty, but passed
at once into the atmosphere of ancient thought, and breathed its
delicate perfume. In this great privilege of instant admission the man
of one study has always the advantage of men more variously cultivated.
Their misfortune is to be perpetually waiting in antechambers, and
losing time in them. Grammars and dictionaries are antechambers, bad
drawing and bad coloring are antechambers, musical practice with
imperfect intonation is an antechamber. And the worst is that even when
a man, like yourself for instance, of very various culture, has at one
time fairly penetrated beyond the antechamber, he is not sure of
admittance a year hence, because in the mean time the door may have been
closed against him. The rule of each separate hall or saloon of
knowledge is that he alone is to be instantly admitted who calls there
every day.
The man of various pursuits does not, in any case, keep them up
simultaneously; he is led by inclination or compelled by necessity to
give predominance to one or another. If you have fifteen different
pursuits, ten of them, at any given time, will be lying by neglected.
The metaphor commonly used in reference to neglected pursuits is
borrowed from the oxidation of metal; it is said that they become rusty.
This metaphor is too mild to be exact. Rust on metal, even on polished
steel, is easily guarded against by care, and a gun or a knife does not
need to be constantly used to keep it from being pitted. The gunsmith
and the cutler know how to keep these things, in great quantity, without
using them at all. But no one can retain knowledge without using it.
The metaphor fails still more seriously in perpetuating a false
conception of the deterioration of knowledge through neglect. It is not
simply a loss of polish which takes place, not a loss of mere
surface-beauty, but absolute disorganization, like the disorganization
of a carriage when the axle-tree is taken away. A rusty thing may still
be used, but a disorganized thing cannot be used until the lost organ
has been replaced. There is no equivalent, amongst ordinary material
losses, to the intellectual loss that we incur by ceasing from a
pursuit. But we may consider neglect as an enemy who carries away the
girths from our saddles, the bits from our bridles, the oars from our
boats, and one wheel from each of our carriages, leaving us indeed still
nominally possessors of all these aids to locomotion, but practically in
the same position as if we were entirely without them. And as an enemy
counts upon the delays caused by these vexations to execute his designs
whilst we are helpless, so whilst we are laboring to replace the lost
parts of our knowledge the occasion slips by when we most need it. The
only knowledge which is available when it is wanted is that which we
habitually use. Studies which from their nature cannot be commonly used
are always retained with great difficulty. The study of anatomy is
perhaps the best instance of this; every one who has attempted it knows
with what difficulty it is kept by the memory. Anatomists say that it
has to be learned and forgotten six times before it can be counted as a
possession. This is because anatomy lies so much outside of what is
needed for ordinary life that very few people are ever called upon to
use it except during the hours when they are actually studying it. The
few who need it every day remember is as easily as a man remembers the
language of the country which he inhabits. The workmen in the
establishment at Saint Aubin d'Écroville, where Dr. Auzoux manufactures
his wonderful anatomical models, are as familiar with anatomy as a
painter is with the colors on his palette. _They_ never forget it.
_Their_ knowledge is never made practically valueless by some yawning
hiatus, causing temporary incompetence and delay.
To have one favorite study and live in it with happy familiarity, and
cultivate every portion of it diligently and lovingly, as a small yeoman
proprietor cultivates his own land, this, as to study, at least, is the
most enviable intellectual life. But there is another side to the
question which has to be considered.
The first difficulty for us is in our education. Modern education is a
beginning of many things, and it is little more than a beginning. "My
notion of educating my boy," said a rich Englishman, "is not to make him
particularly clever at anything during his minority, but to make him
overcome the rudimentary difficulties of many things, so that when he
selects for himself his own line of culture in the future, it cannot be
altogether strange to him, whatever line he may happen to select." A
modern father usually allows his son to learn many things from a feeling
of timidity about making a choice, if only one thing had to be chosen.
He might so easily make a wrong choice! When the inheritance of the
human race was less rich, there was no embarrassment of that kind. Look
at the education of an ancient Greek, at the education of one of the
most celebrated Athenians, a man living in the most refined and
intellectual society, himself mentally and bodily the perfect type of
his splendid race, an eloquent and powerful speaker, a most capable
commander both by sea and land--look at the education of the brilliant
Alcibiades! When Socrates gave the list of the things that Alcibiades
had learned, Alcibiades could add to it no other even nominal
accomplishment, and what a meagre, short catalogue it was! "But indeed I
also pretty accurately know what thou hast learned; thou wilt tell me if
anything has escaped my notice. Thou hast learned then thy letters
([Greek: grammata]), to play on the cithara ([Greek: kitharizein]) and
to wrestle ([Greek: palaiein]), for thou hast not cared to learn to play
upon the flute. This is all that thou hast learned, unless something has
escaped me." The [Greek: grammata] which Alcibiades had learned with a
master meant reading and writing, for he expressly says later on, that
as for speaking Greek, [Greek: hellênizein], he learned that of no other
master than the people. An English education equivalent to that of
Alcibiades would therefore consist of reading and writing, wrestling and
guitar-playing, the last accomplishment being limited to very simple
music. Such an education was possible to an Athenian (though it is fair
to add that Socrates does not seem to have thought much of it) because a
man situated as Alcibiades was situated in the intellectual history of
the world, had no past behind him which deserved his attention more than
the present which surrounded him. Simply to speak Greek, [Greek:
hellênizein], was really then the most precious of all accomplishments,
and the fact that Alcibiades came by it easily does not lessen its
value. Amongst a people like the Athenians, fond of intellectual talk,
conversation was one of the best and readiest means of informing the
mind, and certainly the very best means of developing it. It was not a
slight advantage to speak the language of Socrates, and have him for a
companion.
The cleverest and most accomplished Romans were situated rather more
like ourselves, or at least as we should be situated if we had not to
learn Latin and Greek, and if there were no modern language worth
studying except French. They went to Greece to perfect themselves in
Greek, and improve their accent, just as our young gentlemen go to Paris
or Touraine. Still, the burden of the past was comparatively light upon
their shoulders. An Englishman who had attempted no more than they were
bound to attempt might be a scholar, but he would not be considered so
He might be a thorough scholar in French and English,--that is, he
might possess the cream of two great literatures,--but he would be
spoken of as a person of defective education. It is the fashion, for
example, to speak of Sir Walter Scott as a half-educated man, because he
did not know much Greek, yet Sir Walter had studied German with success,
and with his habit of extensive reading, and his immense memory,
certainly knew incomparably more about the generations which preceded
him than Horace knew of those which preceded the Augustan era.
The privilege of limiting their studies, from the beginning, to one or
two branches of knowledge, belonged to earlier ages, and every
successive accumulation of the world's knowledge has gradually lessened
it. Schoolboys in our time are expected to know more, or to have
attempted to learn more, than the most brilliant intellectual leaders of
former times. What English parent, in easy circumstances, would be
content that his son should have the education of Alcibiades, or an
education accurately corresponding to that of Horace, or to that which
sufficed for Shakespeare? Yet although the burdens laid upon the memory
have been steadily augmented, its powers have not increased. Our brains
are not better constituted than those of our forefathers, although where
they learned one thing we attempt to learn six. They learned and we
attempt to learn. The only hope for us is to make a selection from the
attempts of our too heavily burdened youth, and in those selected
studies to emulate in after-life the thoroughness of our forefathers.
LETTER III
TO A FRIEND WHO STUDIED MANY THINGS.
An idealized portrait--The scholars of the sixteenth century--Isolated
students--French students of English when isolated from
Englishmen--How one of them read Tennyson--Importance of
sounds--Illusions of scholarship--Difficulty of appreciating the
sense--That Latin may still be made a spoken language--The early
education of Montaigne--A contemporary instance--Dream of a Latin
island--Rapid corruption of a language taught artificially.
In your answer to my letter about the multiplicity of modern studies you
tell me that my portrait of your grandfather is considerably idealized,
and that, notwithstanding all the respect which you owe to his memory,
you have convincing proof in his manuscript annotations to Latin authors
that his scholarship cannot have been quite so thorough as I represented
it. You convey, moreover, though with perfect modesty in form, the idea
that you believe your own Latin superior to your grandfather's,
notwithstanding the far greater variety of your studies. Let me confess
that I _did_ somewhat idealize that description of your grandfather's
intellectual life. I described rather a life which might have been than
a life which actually was. And even this "might have been" is
problematical. It may be doubted whether any modern has ever really
mastered Latin. The most that can be said is that a man situated like
your grandfather, without a profession, without our present temptation
to scatter effort in many pursuits, and who made Latin scholarship his
unique intellectual purpose, would probably go nearer to a satisfactory
degree of attainment than we whose time and strength have been divided
into so many fragments. But the picture of a perfect modern Latinist is
purely ideal, and the prevalent notion of high attainment in a dead
language is not fixed enough to be a standard, whilst if it were fixed
it would certainly be a very low standard. The scholars of this century
do not write Latin except as a mere exercise; they do not write books in
Latin, and they never speak it at all. They do not use the language
actively; they only read it, which is not really using it, but only
seeing how other men have used it. There is the same difference between
reading a language and writing or speaking it that there is between
looking at pictures intelligently and painting them. The scholars of the
sixteenth century spoke Latin habitually, and wrote it with ease and
fluency. "Nicholas Grouchy," says Montaigne, "who wrote a book _de
Comitiis Romanorum_; William Guerente, who has written a commentary upon
Aristotle; George Buchanan, that great Scotch poet; and Marc Anthony
Muret, whom both France and Italy have acknowledged for the best orator
of his time, my domestic tutors (at college), have all of them often
told me that I had in my infancy that language so very fluent and ready
that they were afraid to enter into discourse with me." This passage is
interesting for two reasons; it shows that the scholars of that age
spoke Latin; but it proves at the same time that they cannot have been
really masters of the language, since they were "afraid to enter into
discourse" with a clever child. Fancy an Englishman who professed to be
a French scholar and yet "was afraid to enter into discourse" with a
French boy, for fear he should speak too quickly! The position of these
scholars relatively to Latin was in fact too isolated for it to have
been possible that they should reach the point of mastery. Suppose a
society of Frenchmen, in some secluded little French village where no
Englishman ever penetrates, and that these Frenchmen learn English from
dictionaries, and set themselves to speak English with each other,
without anybody to teach them the colloquial language or its
pronunciation, without ever once hearing the sound of it from English
lips, what sort of English would they create amongst themselves? This is
a question that I happen to be able to answer very accurately, because I
have known two Frenchmen who studied English literature just as the
Frenchmen of the sixteenth century studied the literature of ancient
Rome. One of them, especially, had attained what would certainly in the
case of a dead language be considered a very high degree of scholarship
indeed. Most of our great authors were known to him, even down to the
close critical comparison of different readings. Aided by the most
powerful memory I ever knew, he had amassed such stores that the
acquisitions, even of cultivated Englishmen, would in many cases have
appeared inconsiderable beside them. But he could not write or speak
English in a manner tolerable to an Englishman; and although he knew
nearly all the words in the language, it was dictionary knowledge, and
so different from an Englishman's apprehension of the same words that it
was only a sort of pseudo-English that he knew, and not our living
tongue. His appreciation of our authors, especially of our poets,
differed so widely from English criticism and English feeling that it
was evident he did not understand them as we understand them. Two things
especially proved this: he frequently mistook declamatory versification
of the most mediocre quality for poetry of an elevated order; whilst, on
the other hand, his ear failed to perceive the music of the musical
poets, as Byron and Tennyson. How _could_ he hear their music, he to
whom our English sounds were all unknown? Here, for example, is the way
he read "Claribel:"--
"At ev ze bittle bommess
Azvart ze zeeket lon
At none ze veeld be ommess
Aboot ze most edston
At meedneeg ze mon commess
An lokez dovn alon
Ere songg ze lintveet svelless
Ze clirvoic-ed mavi dvelless
Ze fledgling srost lispess
Ze slombroos vav ootvelless
Ze babblang ronnel creespess
Ze ollov grot replee-ess
Vere Claribel lovlee-ess."
This, as nearly as I have been able to render it in English spelling,
was the way in which a French gentleman of really high culture was
accustomed to read English poetry to himself. Is it surprising that he
should have failed to appreciate the music of our musical verse? He did
not, however, seem to be aware that there existed any obstacle to the
accuracy of his decisions, but gave his opinion with a good deal of
authority, which might have surprised me had I not so frequently heard
Latin scholars do exactly the same thing. My French friend read
"Claribel" in a ridiculous manner; but English scholars all read Latin
poetry in a manner not less ridiculous. You laugh to hear "Claribel"
read with a foreign pronunciation, and you see at once the absurdity of
affecting to judge of it as poetry before the reader has learned to
pronounce the sounds; but you do not laugh to hear Latin poetry read
with a foreign pronunciation, and you do not perceive that we are all of
us disqualified, by our profound ignorance of the pronunciation of the
ancient Romans, for any competent criticism of their verse. In all
poetry, in all oratory, in much of the best and most artistic
prose-writing also, sound has a great influence upon sense: a great
deal is conveyed by it, especially in the way of feeling. If we do not
thoroughly know and practise the right pronunciation (and by the right
pronunciation I mean that which the author himself _thought in_ whilst
he wrote), we miss those delicate tones and cadences which are in
literature like the modulations of the voice in speech. Nor can we
properly appreciate the artistic choice of beautiful names for persons
and places unless we know the sounds of them quite accurately, and have
already in our minds the associations belonging to the sounds. Names
which are selected with the greatest care by our English poets, and
which hold their place like jewels on the finely-wrought texture of the
verse, lose all their value when they are read with a vicious foreign
pronunciation. So it must be with Latin poetry when read by an
Englishman, and it is probable that we are really quite insensible to
the delicate art of verbal selection as it was practised by the most
consummate masters of antiquity.
I know that scholars think that they hear the Roman music still; but
this is one of the illusions of scholarship. In each country Latin
scholars have adopted a conventional style of reading, and the sounds
which are in conformity with that style seem to them to be musical,
whilst other than the accepted sounds seem ridiculous, and grate harshly
on the unaccustomed ear. The music which the Englishman hears, or
imagines that he hears, in the language of ancient Rome, is certainly
not the music which the Roman authors intended to note in words. It is
as if my Frenchman, having read "Claribel" in his own way, had affirmed
that he heard the music of the verse. If he heard music at all, it was
not Tennyson's.
Permit me to add a few observations about sense. My French friend
certainly understood English in a very remarkable manner for a student
who had never visited our country; he knew the dictionary meaning of
every word he encountered, and yet there ever remained between him and
our English tongue a barrier or wall of separation, hard to define, but
easy to perceive. In the true deep sense he never understood the
language. He studied it, laid regular siege to it, mastered it to all
appearance, yet remained, to the end, outside of it. His observations,
and especially his unfavorable criticisms, proved this quite
conclusively. Expressions often appeared to him faulty, in which no
English reader would see anything to remark upon; it may be added that
(by way of compensation) he was unable to appreciate the oddity of those
intentionally quaint turns of expression which are invented by the craft
of humorists. It may even be doubted whether his English was of any
ascertainable use to him. He might probably have come as near to an
understanding of our authors by the help of translations, and he could
not converse in English, for the spoken language was entirely
unintelligible to him. An acquisition of this kind seems scarcely an
adequate reward for the labor that it costs. Compared with living
Englishmen my French friend was nowhere, but if English had been a dead
language, he would have been looked up to as a very eminent scholar, and
would have occupied a professor's chair in the university.
A little more life might be given to the study of Latin by making it a
spoken language. Boys might be taught to speak Latin in their schooldays
with the modern Roman pronunciation, which, though probably a deviation
from the ancient, is certainly nearer to it than our own. If colloquial
Latin were made a subject of special research, it is likely that a
sufficiently rich phrase-book might be constructed from the plays. If
this plan were pursued throughout Europe (always adopting the Roman
pronunciation) all educated men would possess a common tongue which
might be enriched to suit modern requirements without any serious
departure from classical construction. The want of such a system as this
was painfully felt at the council of the Vatican, where the assembled
prelates discovered that their Latin was of no practical use, although
the Roman Catholic clergy employ Latin more habitually than any other
body of men in the world. That a modern may be taught to think in Latin,
is proved by the early education of Montaigne, and I may mention a much
more recent instance. My brother-in-law told me that, in the spring of
1871, a friend of his had come to stay with him accompanied by his
little son, a boy seven years old. This child spoke Latin with the
utmost fluency, and he spoke nothing else. What I am going to suggest is
a Utopian dream, but let us suppose that a hundred fathers could be
found in Europe, all of this way of thinking, all resolved to submit to
some inconvenience in order that their sons might speak Latin as a
living language. A small island might be rented near the coast of Italy,
and in that island Latin alone might be permitted. Just as the
successive governments of France maintain the establishments of Sèvres
and the Gobelins to keep the manufactures of porcelain and tapestry up
to a recognized high standard of excellence, so this Latin island might
be maintained to give more vivacity to scholarship. If there were but
one little corner of ground on the wide earth where pure Latin was
constantly spoken, our knowledge of the classic writers would become far
more sympathetically intimate. After living in the Latin island we
should think in Latin as we read, and read without translating.
But this is dreaming. It is too certain that on returning from the Latin
island into the atmosphere of modern colleges an evil change would come
over our young Latinists like that which came upon the young Montaigne
when his father sent him to the college of Guienne, "at that time the
best and most flourishing in France." Montaigne tells us that,
notwithstanding all his father's precautions, the place "was a college
still." "My Latin," he adds, "_immediately grew corrupt, and by
discontinuance I have since lost all manner of use of it._" If it were
the custom to speak Latin, it would be the custom to speak it badly; and
a master of the language would have to conform to the evil usages around
him. Our present state of ignorance has the charm of being silent,
except when old-fashioned gentlemen in the House of Commons quote poetry
which they cannot pronounce to hearers who cannot understand it.
NOTE.--An English orator quoted from Cicero the sentence "Non
intelligunt homines quam magnum vectigal sit parsimonia." He made the
second vowel in _vectigal_ short, and the House laughed at him; he
tried again and pronounced it with the long sound of the English _i_,
on which the critical body he addressed was perfectly satisfied. But
if a Roman had been present it is probable that, of the two, the short
English _i_ would have astonished his ears the less, for our short _i_
does bear some resemblance to the southern _i_ whereas our long i
resembles no single letter in any alphabet of the Latin family of
languages. We are scrupulously careful to avoid what we call false
quantities, we are quite utterly and ignorantly unscrupulous about
false sounds. One of the best instances is the well-known "veni, vidi,
vici," which we pronounce very much as if it had been written _vinai_,
_vaidai_, _vaisai_, in Italian letters.
LETTER IV.
TO A STUDENT OF LITERATURE.
Studies, whatever they may be, always considered, by some a waste of
time--The classical languages--The higher mathematics--The
accomplishments--Indirect uses of different studies--Influence of
music--Studies indirectly useful to authors--What induced Mr. Roscoe
to write the lives of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X.
Whatever you study, some one will consider that particular study a
foolish waste of time.
If you were to abandon successively every subject of intellectual labor
which had, in its turn, been condemned by some adviser as useless, the
result would be simple intellectual nakedness. The classical languages,
to begin with, have long been considered useless by the majority of
practical people--and pray, what to shopkeepers, doctors, attorneys,
artists, can be the use of the higher mathematics? And if these studies,
which have been conventionally classed as serious studies, are
considered unnecessary notwithstanding the tremendous authority of
custom, how much the more are those studies exposed to a like contempt
which belong to the category of accomplishments! What is the use of
drawing, for it ends in a worthless sketch? Why should we study music
when after wasting a thousand hours the amateur cannot satisfy the ear?
A _quoi bon_ modern languages when the accomplishment only enables us to
call a waiter in French or German who is sure to answer us in English?
And what, when it is not your trade, can be the good of dissecting
animals or plants?
To all questionings of this kind there is but one reply. We work for
culture. We work to enlarge the intelligence, and to make it a better
and more effective instrument. This is our main purpose; but it may be
added that even for our special labors it is always difficult to say
beforehand exactly what will turn out in the end to be most useful.
What, in appearance, can be more entirely outside the work of a
landscape painter than the study of ancient history? and yet I can show
you how an interest in ancient history might indirectly be of great
service to a landscape painter. It would make him profoundly feel the
human associations of many localities which to an ignorant man would be
devoid of interest or meaning; and this human interest in the scenes
where great events have taken place, or which have been distinguished by
the habitation of illustrious men in other ages, is in fact one of the
great fundamental motives of landscape painting. It has been very much
questioned, especially by foreign critics, whether the interest in
botany which is taken by some of the more cultivated English landscape
painters is not for them a false direction and wrong employment of the
mind; but a landscape painter may feel his interest in vegetation
infinitely increased by the accurate knowledge of its laws, and such an
increase of interest would make him work more zealously, and with less
danger of weariness and _ennui_, besides being a very useful help to the
memory in retaining the authentic vegetable forms. It may seem more
difficult to show the possible utility of a study apparently so entirely
outside of other studies as music is: and yet music has an important
influence on the whole of our emotional nature, and indirectly upon
expression of all kinds. He who has once learned the self-control of the
musician, the use of _piano_ and _forte_, each in its right place, when
to be lightly swift or majestically slow, and especially how to keep to
the key once chosen till the right time has come for changing it; he who
has once learned this knows the secret of the arts. No painter, writer,
orator, who had the power and judgment of a thoroughly cultivated
musician, could sin against the broad principles of taste.
More than all other men have authors reason to appreciate the indirect
utilities of knowledge that is apparently irrelevant. Who can tell what
knowledge will be of most use to _them_? Even the very greatest of
authors are indebted to miscellaneous reading, often in several
different languages, for the suggestion of their most original works,
and for the light which has kindled many a shining thought of their own.
And authors who seem to have less need than others of an outward help,
poets whose compositions might appear to be chiefly inventive and
emotional, novelists who are free from the restraints and the
researches of the historian, work up what they know into what they
write; so that if you could remove every line which is based on studies
outside the strict limits of their art, you would blot out half their
compositions. Take the antiquarian element out of Scott, and see how
many of his works could never have been written. Remove from Goldsmith's
brain the recollection of his wayward studies and strange experiences,
and you would remove the rich material of the "Traveller" and the
Essays, and mutilate even the immortal "Vicar of Wakefield." Without a
classical education and foreign travel, Byron would not have composed
"Childe Harold;" without the most catholic interest in the literature of
all the ages, and of many different peoples from the North Sea to the
Mediterranean, our contemporary William Morris would never have
conceived, and could not have executed, that strong work "The Earthly
Paradise." It may not seem necessary to learn Italian, yet Mr. Roscoe's
celebrity as an author was due in the first place to his private
fondness for Italian literature. He did not learn Italian in order that
he might write his biographies, but he wrote about Lorenzo and Leo
because he had mastered Italian, and because the language led him to
take an interest in the greatest house of Florence. The way in which
authors are led by their favorite studies indirectly to the great
performance of their lives has never been more clearly illustrated than
in this instance.
When William Roscoe was a young man he had for his friend Francis
Holden, nephew of Mr. Richard Holden, a schoolmaster in Liverpool.
Francis Holden was a young man of uncommon culture, having at the same
time really sound scholarship in several languages, and an ardent
enthusiasm for literature. He urged Roscoe to study languages, and used
especially, in their evening walks together, to repeat to him passages
from the noblest poets of Italy. In this way Roscoe was led to attempt
Italian, and, having once begun, went on till he had mastered it. "It
was in the course of these studies," says his biographer, "that he first
formed the idea of writing the Life of Lorenzo de' Medici."
LETTER V.
TO A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN WHO REGRETTED THAT HIS SON HAD THE TENDENCIES OF
A DILETTANT.
Inaccuracy of the common distinction between amateur pursuits and more
serious studies--All of us are amateurs in many things--Prince
Albert--The Emperor Napoleon III.--Contrast between general and
professional education--The price of high accomplishment.
I agree with you that amateurship, as generally practised, may be a
waste of time, but the common distinction between amateur pursuits and
serious studies is inconsistent. A painter whose art is imperfect and
who does not work for money is called an amateur; a scholar who writes
imperfect Latin, not for money, escapes the imputation of amateurship,
and is called a learned man. Surely we have been blinded by custom in
these things. Ideas of frivolity are attached to imperfect acquirement
in certain directions, and ideas of gravity to equally imperfect
acquirement in others. To write bad Latin poetry is not thought to be
frivolous, but it is considered frivolous to compose imperfectly and
unprofessionally in other fine arts.
Yet are we not all of us amateurs in those pursuits which constituted
our education--amateurs at the best, if we loved them, and even inferior
to amateurs if we disliked them? We have not sounder knowledge or more
perfect skill in the ancient languages than Prince Albert had in music.
We know something of them, yet in comparison with perfect mastery such
as that of a cultivated old Greek or Roman, our scholarship is at the
best on a level with the musical scholarship of a cultivated amateur
like the Prince Consort.
If the essence of dilettantism is to be contented with imperfect
attainment, I fear that all educated people must be considered
dilettants.
It is narrated of the Emperor Napoleon III. that in answer to some one
who inquired of his Majesty whether the Prince Imperial was a musician,
he replied that he discouraged dilettantism, and "did not wish his son
to be a Coburg." But the Emperor himself was quite as much a dilettant
as Prince Albert; though their dilettantism did not lie in the same
directions. The Prince was an amateur musician and artist; the Emperor
was an amateur historian, an amateur scholar, and antiquary. It may be
added that Napoleon III. indulged in another and more dangerous kind of
amateurship. He had a taste for amateur generalship, and the
consequences of his indulgence of this taste are known to every one.
The variety of modern education encourages a scattered dilettantism. It
is only in professional life that the energies of young men are
powerfully concentrated. There is a steadying effect in thorough
professional training which school education does not supply. Our boys
receive praise and prizes for doing many things most imperfectly, and it
is not their fault if they remain ignorant of what perfection really is,
and of the immensity of the labor which it costs. I think that you would
do well, perhaps, without discouraging your son too much by chillingly
accurate estimates of the value of what he has done, to make him on all
proper occasions feel and see the difference between half-knowledge and
thorough mastery. It would be a good thing for a youth to be made
clearly aware how enormous a price of labor Nature has set upon high
accomplishment in everything that is really worthy of his pursuit. It is
this persuasion, which men usually arrive at only in their maturity,
that operates as the most effectual tranquillizer of frivolous
activities.
LETTER VI.
TO THE PRINCIPAL OF A FRENCH COLLEGE.
The Author's dread of protection in intellectual pursuits--Example
from the Fine Arts--Prize poems--Governmental encouragement of
learning--The bad effects of it--Pet pursuits--Objection to the
interference of Ministers--A project for separate examinations.
What I am going to say will seem very strange to you, and is not
unlikely to arouse as much professional animosity as you are capable of
feeling against an old friend. You who are a dignitary of the
University, and have earned your various titles in a fair field, as a
soldier wins his epaulettes before the enemy, are not the likeliest
person to hear with patience the unauthorized theories of an innovator.
Take them, then, as mere speculations, if you will--not altogether
unworthy of consideration, for they are suggested by a sincere anxiety
for the best interests of learning, and yet not very dangerous to vested
interests of any kind, since they can have little influence on the
practice or opinion of the world.
I feel a great dread of what may be called _protection_ in intellectual
pursuits. It seems to me that when the Government of a country applies
an artificial stimulus to certain branches of study for their
encouragement by the offer of rewards in honor or in money beyond the
rewards inherent in the studies themselves, or coming naturally from
their usefulness to mankind, there is a great danger that men may give a
disproportionate attention to those favored branches of study. Let me
take an example from the practice of the Fine Arts. A Government, by
medals and crosses, or by money, can easily create and foster a school
of painting which is entirely out of relation to the century in which it
exists, and quite incapable of working harmoniously with the
contemporary national life. This has actually been done to a
considerable extent in various countries, especially in France and in
Bavaria. A sort of classicism which had scarcely any foundation in
sincerity of feeling was kept up artificially by a system of
encouragement which offered inducements outside the genuine ambition of
an artist. The true enthusiasm which is the life of art impels the
artist to express his own feeling for the delight of others. The offer
of a medal or a pension induces him to make the sort of picture which is
likely to satisfy the authorities. He first ascertains what is according
to the rule, and then follows it as nearly as he is able. He works in a
temper of simple conformity, remote indeed from the passionate
enthusiasm of creation. It is so with prize poems. We all know the sort
of poetry which is composed in order to gain prizes. The anxiety of the
versifier is to be safe: he tries to compose what will escape censure;
he dreads the originality that may give offence. But all powerful
pictures and poems have been wrought in the energy of individual
feeling, not in conformity to a pattern.
Now, suppose that, instead of encouraging poetry or painting, a
Government resolves to encourage learning. It will patronize certain
pursuits to the neglect of others, or it will encourage certain pursuits
more liberally than others. The subjects of such a Government will not
follow learning exclusively for its delightfulness or its utility;
another consideration will affect their choice. They will inquire which
pursuits are rewarded by prizes in honor or money, and they will be
strongly tempted to select them. Therefore, unless the Government has
exercised extraordinary wisdom, men will learn what they do not really
care for and may never practically want, merely in order to win some
academical grade. So soon as this object has been attained, they will
immediately abandon the studies by which they attained it.
Can it be said that in these cases the purposes of the Government were
fulfilled? Clearly not, if it desired to form a permanent taste for
learning. But it may have done worse than fail in this merely negative
way; it may have diverted its youth from pursuits to which Nature called
them, and in which they might have effectually aided the advancement and
the prosperity of the State.
Let us suppose that a Government were to have a pet study, and offer
great artificial inducements for success in it. Suppose that the pet
study were entomology. All the most promising youth of the country would
spend ten years in emulating Messrs. Kirby and Spence, and take their
degrees as entomological bachelors. But might it not easily happen that
to a majority of the young gentlemen this pursuit would have acted
positively as a hindrance by keeping them from other pursuits more
likely to help them in their professions? It would not only cost a great
deal of valuable time, it would absorb a quantity of youthful energy
which the country can ill afford to lose. The Government would probably
affirm that entomology, if not always practically useful in itself, was
an invaluable intellectual training; but what if this training used up
the early vigor which might be needed for other pursuits, and of which
every human being has only a limited supply? We should be told, no
doubt, that this powerful encouragement was necessary to the advancement
of science, and it is true that under such a system the rudiments of
entomology would be more generally known. But the vulgarization of
rudiments is not the advancement of knowledge. Entomology has gone quite
as far in discovery, though pursued simply for its own sake, as it would
have gone if it had been made necessary to a bachelor's degree.
You will ask whether I would go so far as to abolish degrees of all
kinds, Certainly not; that is not my project. But I believe that no
Government is competent to make a selection amongst intellectual
pursuits and say, "This or that pursuit shall be encouraged by
university degrees, whilst other pursuits of intellectual men shall have
no encouragement whatever." I may mention by name your present autocrat
of Public Instruction, Jules Simon. He is a literary man of some
eminence; he has written several interesting books, and on the whole he
is probably more competent to deal with these questions than many of his
predecessors. But however capable a man may be, he is sure to be biassed
by the feeling common to all intellectual men which attributes a
peculiar importance to their own pursuits. I do not like to see any
Minister, or any Cabinet of Ministers, settling what all the young men
of a country are to learn under penalty of exclusion from all the
liberal professions.
What I should think more reasonable would be some such arrangement as
the following. There might be a board of thoroughly competent examiners
for each branch of study separately, authorized to confer certificates
of competence. When a man believed himself to have mastered a branch of
study, he would go and try to get a certificate for that. The various
studies would then be followed according to the public sense of their
importance, and would fall quite naturally into the rank which they
ought to occupy at any given period of the national history. These
separate examinations should be severe enough to ensure a serviceable
degree of proficiency. Nobody should be allowed to teach anything who
had not got a certificate for the particular thing he intended to
profess. In the confusion of your present system, not only do you fail
to insure the thoroughness of pupils, but the teachers themselves are
too frequently incompetent in some speciality which accidentally fails
to their share. I think that a Greek master ought to be a complete
Hellenist, but surely it is not necessary that he should be half a
mathematician.
To sum up. It seems to me that a Government has no business to favor
some intellectual pursuits more than others, but that it ought to
recognize competent attainment in every one of them by a sort of diploma
or certificate, leaving the relative rank of different pursuits to be
settled by public opinion. And as to the educators themselves, I think
that when a man has proved his competence in one thing, he ought to be
allowed to teach that one thing in the University without being required
to pass an examination in any other thing.
LETTER VII.
TO THE PRINCIPAL OF A FRENCH COLLEGE.
Loss of time to acquire an ancient language too imperfectly for it to
be useful--Dr. Arnold--Mature life leaves little time for
culture--Modern indifference to ancient thinking--Larger experience of
the moderns--The moderns older than the ancients--The Author's regret
that Latin has ceased to be a living language--The shortest way to
learn to read a language--The recent interest in modern languages--A
French student of Hebrew.
I was happy to learn your opinion of the reform so recently introduced
by the Minister of
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