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Human Intercourse

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Title: Human Intercourse

Author: Philip Gilbert Hamerton


        
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Language: English

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  HUMAN INTERCOURSE.


  BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON,
  AUTHOR OF "THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE," "A PAINTER'S CAMP,"
  "THOUGHTS ABOUT ART," "CHAPTERS ON ANIMALS," "ROUND MY
  HOUSE," "THE SYLVAN YEAR" AND "THE UNKNOWN RIVER,"
  "WENDERHOLME," "MODERN FRENCHMEN," "LIFE OF J. M. W.
  TURNER," "THE GRAPHIC ARTS," "ETCHING AND ETCHERS,"
  "PARIS IN OLD AND PRESENT TIMES," "HARRY BLOUNT."


  "I love tranquil solitude,
      And such society
  As is quiet, wise, and good."
                    SHELLEY.


  BOSTON:
  LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
  1898.




  AUTHOR'S EDITION.

  University Press:
  JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.




To the Memory of Emerson.


_If I dedicate this book on Human Intercourse to the memory of one whose
voice I never heard, and to whom I never addressed a letter, the seeming
inappropriateness will disappear when the reader knows what a great and
persistent influence he had on the whole course of my thinking, and
therefore on all my work. He was told of this before his death, and the
acknowledgment gave him pleasure. Perhaps this public repetition of it may
not be without utility at a time when, although it is clear to us that he
has left an immortal name, the exact nature of the rank he will occupy
amongst great men does not seem to be evident as yet. The embarrassment of
premature criticism is a testimony to his originality. But although it may
be too soon for us to know what his name will mean to posterity, we may
tell posterity what service he rendered to ourselves. To me he taught two
great lessons. The first was to rely confidently on that order of the
universe which makes it always really worth while to do our best, even
though the reward may not be visible; and the second was to have
self-reliance enough to trust our own convictions and our own gifts, such
as they are, or such as they may become, without either echoing the
opinions or desiring the more brilliant gifts of others. Emerson taught
much besides; but it is these two doctrines of reliance on the
compensations of Nature, and of a self-respectful reliance on our own
individuality, that have the most invigorating influence on workers like
myself. Emerson knew that each of us can only receive that for which he
has an affinity, and can only give forth effectually what is by
birthright, or has become, his own. To have accepted this doctrine with
perfect contentment is to possess one's soul in peace._

_Emerson combined high intellect with pure honesty, and remained faithful
to the double law of the intellectual life--high thinking and fearless
utterance--to the end of his days, with a beautiful persistence and
serenity. So now I go, in spirit, a pilgrim to that tall pine-tree that
grows upon "the hill-top to the east of Sleepy Hollow," and lay one more
wreath upon an honored grave._

_June 24, 1884._




PREFACE.


When this book was begun, some years ago, I made a formal plan, according
to which it was to have been one long Essay or Treatise, divided into
sections and chapters, and presenting that apparently perfect _ordonnance_
which gives such an imposing air to a work of art. I say "apparently
perfect _ordonnance_," because in such cases the perfection of the
arrangement is often only apparent, and the work is like those formal
pseudo-classical buildings that seem, with their regular columns, spaces,
and windows, the very highest examples of method; but you find on entering
that the internal distribution of space is defective and inconvenient,
that one room has a window in a corner and another half a window, that one
is needlessly large for its employment and another far too small. In
literature the ostentation of order may compel an author to extreme
condensation in one part of his book and to excessive amplification in
another, since, in reality, the parts of his subject do not fall more
naturally into equal divisions than words beginning with different letters
in the dictionary. I therefore soon abandoned external rigidity of order,
and made my divisions more elastic; but I went still further after some
experiments, and abandoned the idea of a Treatise. This was not done
without some regret, as I know that a Treatise has a better chance of
permanence than a collection of Essays; but, in this case, I met with an
invisible obstacle that threatened to prevent good literary execution.
After making some progress I felt that the work was not very readable, and
that the writing of it was not a satisfactory occupation. Whenever this
happens there is sure to be an error of method somewhere. What the error
was in this case I did not discover for a long time, but at last I
suddenly perceived it. A formal Treatise, to be satisfactory, can only be
written about ascertained or ascertainable laws; and human intercourse as
it is carried on between individuals, though it looks so accessible to
every observer, is in reality a subject of infinite mystery and obscurity,
about which hardly anything is known, about which certainly nothing is
known absolutely and completely. I found that every attempt to ascertain
and proclaim a law only ended, when the supposed law was brought face to
face with nature, by discovering so many exceptions that the best
practical rules were suspension of judgment and a reliance upon nothing
but special observation in each particular case. I found that in real
human intercourse the theoretically improbable, or even the theoretically
impossible, was constantly happening. I remember a case in real life which
illustrates this very forcibly. A certain English lady, influenced by the
received ideas about human intercourse which define the conditions of it
in a hard and sharp manner, was strongly convinced that it would be
impossible for her to have friendly relations with another lady whom she
had never seen, but was likely to see frequently. All her reasons would be
considered excellent reasons by those who believe in maxims and rules. It
was plain that there could be nothing in common. The other lady was
neither of the same country, nor of the same religious and political
parties, nor exactly of the same class, nor of the same generation. These
facts were known, and the inference deduced from them was that intercourse
would be impossible. After some time the English lady began to perceive
that the case did not bear out the supposed rules; she discovered that the
younger lady might be an acceptable friend. At last the full strange truth
became apparent,--that she was singularly well adapted, better adapted
than any other human being, to take a filial relation to the elder,
especially in times of sickness, when her presence was a wonderful
support. Then the warmest affection sprang up between the two, lasting
till separation by death and still cherished by the survivor. What becomes
of rules and maxims and wise old saws in the face of nature and reality?
What can we do better than to observe nature with an open, unprejudiced
mind, and gather some of the results of observation?

I am conscious of several omissions that may possibly be rectified in
another volume if this is favorably accepted. The most important of these
are the influence of age on intercourse, and the effects of living in the
same house, which are not invariably favorable. Both these subjects are
very important, and I have not time to treat them now with the care they
would require. There ought also to have been a careful study of the
natural antagonisms, which are of terrible importance when people,
naturally antagonistic, are compelled by circumstances to live together.
These are, however, generally of less importance than the affinities,
because we contrive to make our intercourse with antagonistic people as
short and rare as possible, and that with sympathetic people as frequent
and long as circumstances will permit.

I will not close this preface without saying that the happiness of
sympathetic human intercourse seems to me incomparably greater than any
other pleasure. I may be supposed to have passed the age of enthusiastic
illusions, yet I would at any time rather pass a week with a real friend
in any place that afforded simple shelter than with an indifferent person
in a palace. In saying this I am thinking of real experiences. One of my
friends who is devoted to archæological excavations has often invited me
to share his life in a hut or a cottage, and I have invariably found that
the pleasure of his society far overbalanced the absence of luxury. On the
other hand, I have sometimes endured extreme _ennui_ at sumptuous feasts
in richly appointed houses. The result of experience, in my case, has been
to confirm a youthful conviction that the value of certain persons is not
to be estimated by comparison with anything else. I was always a believer,
and am so at this day more than ever, in the happiness of genuine human
intercourse, but I prefer solitude to the false imitation of it. It is in
this as in other pleasures, the better we appreciate the real thing, the
less we are disposed to accept the spurious copy as a substitute. By far
the greater part of what passes for human intercourse is not intercourse
at all, but only acting, of which the highest object and most considerable
merit is to conceal the weariness that accompanies its hollow observances.

One sad aspect of my subject has not been touched upon in this volume. It
was often present in my thoughts, but I timidly shrank from dealing with
it. I might have attempted to show in what manner intercourse is cut short
by death. All reciprocity of intercourse is, or appears to be, entirety
cut short by that catastrophe; but those who have talked with us much in
former years retain an influence that may be even more constant than our
recollection of them. My own recollection of the dead is extremely vivid
and clear, and I cultivate it by willingly thinking about them, being
especially happy when by some accidental flash of brighter memory a more
than usual degree of lucidity is obtained. I accept with resignation the
natural law, on the whole so beneficent, that when an organism is no
longer able to exist without suffering, or senile decrepitude, it should
be dissolved and made insensible of suffering; but I by no means accept
the idea that the dead are to be forgotten in order that we may spare
ourselves distress. Let us give them their due place, their great place,
in our hearts and in our thoughts; and if the sweet reciprocity of human
intercourse is no longer possible with those who are silent and asleep,
let the memory of past intercourse be still a part of our lives. There are
hours when we live with the dead more than with the living, so that
without any trace of superstition we feel their old sweet influence acting
upon us yet, and it seems as if only a little more were needed to give us
"the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still."

Closely connected with this subject of death is the subject of religious
beliefs. In the present state of confusion and change, some causes of
which are indicated in this volume, the only plain course for honorable
men is to act always in favor of truthfulness, and therefore against
hypocrisy, and against those encouragers of hypocrisy who offer social
advantages as rewards for it. What may come in the future we cannot tell,
but we may be sure that the best way to prepare for the future is to be
honest and candid in the present. There are two causes which are gradually
effecting a great change, and as they are natural causes they are
irresistibly powerful. One is the process of analytic detachment, by which
sentiments and feelings once believed to be religious are now found to be
separable from religion. If a French peasant has a feeling for
architecture, poetry, or music, or an appreciation of eloquence, or a
desire to hear a kind of moral philosophy, he goes to the village church
to satisfy these dim incipient desires. In his case these feelings and
wants are all confusedly connected with religion; in ours they are
detached from it, and only reconnected with it by accident, we being still
aware that there is no essential identity. That is the first dissolving
cause. It seems only to affect the externals of religion, but it goes
deeper by making the consciously religious state of mind less habitual.
The second cause is even more serious in its effects. We are acquiring the
habit of explaining everything by natural causes, and of trying to remedy
everything by the employment of natural means. Journals dependent on
popular approval for the enormous circulation that is necessary to their
existence do not hesitate, in clear terms, to express their preference of
natural means to the invocation of supernatural agencies. For example, the
correspondent of the "Daily News" at Port Said, after describing the
annual blessing of the Suez Canal at the Epiphany, observes: "Thus the
canal was solemnly blessed. The opinion of the captains of the ships that
throng the harbor, waiting until the block adjusts itself, is that it
would be better to widen it." Such an opinion is perfectly modern,
perfectly characteristic of our age. We think that steam excavators and
dredgers would be more likely to prevent blocks in the Suez Canal than a
priest reading prayers out of a book and throwing a golden cross into the
sea, to be fished up again by divers. We cannot help thinking as we do:
our opinion has not been chosen by us voluntarily, it has been forced upon
us by facts that we cannot help seeing, but it deprives us of an
opportunity for a religious emotion, and it separates us, on that point,
from all those who are still capable of feeling it. I have given
considerable space to the consideration of these changes, but not a
disproportionate space. They have a deplorable effect on human intercourse
by dividing friends and families into different groups, and by separating
those who might otherwise have enjoyed friendship unreservedly. It is
probable, too, that we are only at the beginning of the conflict, and that
in years not immeasurably distant there will be fierce struggles on the
most irritating of practical issues. To name but one of these it is
probable that there will be a sharp struggle when a strong and determined
naturalist party shall claim the instruction of the young, especially with
regard to the origin of the race, the beginnings of animal life, and the
evidences of intention in nature. Loving, as I do, the amenities of a
peaceful and polished civilization much better than angry controversy, I
long for the time when these great questions will be considered as settled
one way or the other, or else, if they are beyond our intelligence, for
the time when they may be classed as insoluble, so that men may work out
their destiny without bitter quarrels about their origin. The present at
least is ours, and it depends upon ourselves whether it is to be wasted in
vain disputes or brightened by charity and kindness.




CONTENTS.


  ESSAY                                                     PAGE

      I. ON THE DIFFICULTY OF DISCOVERING FIXED LAWS           3

     II. INDEPENDENCE                                         12

    III. OF PASSIONATE LOVE                                   33

     IV. COMPANIONSHIP IN MARRIAGE                            44

      V. FAMILY TIES                                          63

     VI. FATHERS AND SONS                                     78

    VII. THE RIGHTS OF THE GUEST                              99

   VIII. THE DEATH OF FRIENDSHIP                             110

     IX. THE FLUX OF WEALTH                                  119

      X. DIFFERENCES OF RANK AND WEALTH                      130

     XI. THE OBSTACLE OF LANGUAGE                            148

    XII. THE OBSTACLE OF RELIGION                            161

   XIII. PRIESTS AND WOMEN                                   175

    XIV. WHY WE ARE APPARENTLY BECOMING LESS RELIGIOUS       205

     XV. HOW WE ARE REALLY BECOMING LESS RELIGIOUS           215

    XVI. ON AN UNRECOGNIZED FORM OF UNTRUTH                  232

   XVII. ON A REMARKABLE ENGLISH PECULIARITY                 239

  XVIII. OF GENTEEL IGNORANCE                                253

    XIX. PATRIOTIC IGNORANCE                                 264

     XX. CONFUSIONS                                          280

    XXI. THE NOBLE BOHEMIANISM                               295

   XXII. OF COURTESY IN EPISTOLARY COMMUNICATION             315

  XXIII. LETTERS OF FRIENDSHIP                               336

   XXIV. LETTERS OF BUSINESS                                 354

    XXV. ANONYMOUS LETTERS                                   370

   XXVI. AMUSEMENTS                                          383

  INDEX                                                      403




HUMAN INTERCOURSE.




HUMAN INTERCOURSE.




ESSAY I.

ON THE DIFFICULTY OF DISCOVERING FIXED LAWS.


A book on Human Intercourse might be written in a variety of ways, and
amongst them might be an attempt to treat the subject in a scientific
manner so as to elucidate those natural laws by which intercourse between
human beings must be regulated. If we knew quite perfectly what those laws
are we should enjoy the great convenience of being able to predict with
certainty which men and women would be able to associate with pleasure,
and which would be constrained or repressed in each other's society. Human
intercourse would then be as much a positive science as chemistry, in
which the effects of bringing substances together can be foretold with the
utmost accuracy. Some very distant approach to this scientific state may
in certain instances actually be made. When we know the characters of two
people with a certain degree of precision we may sometimes predict that
they are sure to quarrel, and have the satisfaction of witnessing the
explosion that our own acumen has foretold. To detect in people we know
those incompatibilities that are the fatal seeds of future dissension is
one of our malicious pleasures. An acute observer really has considerable
powers of prediction and calculation with reference to individual human
beings, but there his wisdom ends. He cannot deduce from these separate
cases any general rules or laws that can be firmly relied upon as every
real law of nature can be relied upon, and therefore it may be concluded
that such rules are not laws of nature at all, but only poor and
untrustworthy substitutes for them.

The reason for this difficulty I take to be the extreme complexity of
human nature and its boundless variety, which make it always probable that
in every mind which we have not long and closely studied there will be
elements wholly unknown to us. How often, with regard to some public man,
who is known to us only in part through his acts or his writings, are we
surprised by the sudden revelation of characteristics that we never
imagined for him and that seem almost incompatible with the better known
side of his nature! How much the more, then, are we likely to go wrong in
our estimates of people we know nothing about, and how impossible it must
be for us to determine how they are likely to select their friends and
companions!

Certain popular ideas appear to represent a sort of rude philosophy of
human intercourse. There is the common belief, for example, that, in order
to associate pleasantly together, people should be of the same class and
nearly in the same condition of fortune, but when we turn to real life we
find very numerous instances in which this fancied law is broken with the
happiest results. The late Duke of Albany may be mentioned as an example.
No doubt his own natural refinement would have prevented him from
associating with vulgar people; but he readily associated with refined and
cultivated people who had no pretension to rank. His own rank was a power
in his hands that he used for good, and he was conscious of it, but it did
not isolate him; he desired to know people as they are, and was capable of
feeling the most sincere respect for anybody who deserved it. So it is,
generally, with all who have the gifts of sympathy and intelligence.
Merely to avoid what is disagreeable has nothing to do with pride of
station. Vulgar society is disagreeable, which is a sufficient reason for
keeping aloof from it. Amongst people of refinement, association or even
friendship is possible in spite of differences of rank and fortune.

Another popular belief is that "men associate together when they are
interested in the same things." It would, however, be easy to adduce very
numerous instances in which an interest in similar things has been a cause
of quarrel, when if one of the two parties had regarded those things with
indifference, harmonious intercourse might have been preserved. The
livelier our interest in anything the more does acquiescence in matters of
detail appear essential to us. Two people are both of them extremely
religious, but one of them is a Mahometan, and the other a Christian; here
the interest in religion causes a divergence, enough in most cases to make
intercourse impossible, when it would have been quite possible if both
parties had regarded religion with indifference. Bring the two nearer
together, suppose them to be both Christians, they acknowledge one law,
one doctrine, one Head of the church in heaven. Yes, but they do not
acknowledge the same head of it on earth, for one accepts the Papal
supremacy, which the other denies; and their common Christianity is a
feeble bond of union in comparison with the forces of repulsion contained
in a multitude of details. Two nominal, indifferent Christians who take no
interest in theology would have a better chance of agreeing. Lastly,
suppose them to be both members of the Church of England, one of the old
school, with firm and settled beliefs on every point and a horror of the
most distant approaches to heresy, the other of the new school, vague,
indeterminate, desiring to preserve his Christianity as a sentiment when
it has vanished as a faith, thinking that the Bible is not true in the old
sense but only "contains" truth, that the divinity of Christ is "a past
issue,"[1] and that evolution is, on the whole, more probable than direct
and intentional creation,--what possible agreement can exist between these
two? If they both care about religious topics, and talk about them, will
not their disagreement be in exact proportion to the liveliness of their
interest in the subject? So in a realm with which I have some
acquaintance, that of the fine arts, discord is always probable between
those who have a passionate delight in art. Innocent, well-intentioned
friends think that because two men "like painting," they ought to be
introduced, as they are sure to amuse each other. In reality, their
tastes may be more opposed than the taste of either of them is to perfect
indifference. One has a severe taste for beautiful form and an active
contempt for picturesque accidents and romantic associations, the other
feels chilled by severe beauty and delights in the picturesque and
romantic. If each is convinced of the superiority of his own principles he
will deduce from them an endless series of judgments that can only
irritate the other.

Seeing that nations are always hostile to each other, always watchfully
jealous and inclined to rejoice in every evil that happens to a neighbor,
it would appear safe to predict that little intercourse could exist
between persons of different nationality. When, however, we observe the
facts as they are in real life, we perceive that very strong and durable
friendships often exist between men who are not of the same nation, and
that the chief obstacle to the formation of these is not so much
nationality as difference of language. There is, no doubt, a prejudice
that one is not likely to get on well with a foreigner, and the prejudice
has often the effect of keeping people of different nationality apart, but
when once it is overcome it is often found that very powerful feelings of
mutual respect and sympathy draw the strangers together. On the other
hand, there is not the least assurance that the mere fact of being born in
the same country will make two men regard each other with kindness. An
Englishman repels another Englishman when he meets him on the
Continent.[2] The only just conclusion is that nationality affords no
certain rule either in favor of intercourse or against it. A man may
possibly be drawn towards a foreign nationality by his appreciation of its
excellence in some art that he loves, but this is the case only when the
excellence is of the peculiar kind that supplies the needs of his own
intelligence. The French excel in painting; that is to say, that many
Frenchmen have attained a certain kind of excellence in certain
departments of the art of painting. Englishmen and Americans who value
that particular kind of excellence are often strongly drawn towards Paris
as an artistic centre or capital; and this opening of their minds to
French influence in art may admit other French influences at the same
time, so that the ultimate effect of a love of art may be a breaking down
of the barrier of nationality. It seldom happens that Frenchmen are drawn
towards England and America by their love of painting, but it frequently
happens that they become in a measure Anglicized or Americanized either by
the serious study of nautical science, or by the love of yachting as an
amusement, in which they look to England and America both for the most
advanced theories and the newest examples.

The nearest approach ever made to a general rule may be the affirmation
that likeness is the secret of companionship. This has a great look of
probability, and may really be the reason for many associations, but after
observing others we might come to the conclusion that an opposite law
would be at least equally applicable. We might say that a companion, to be
interesting, ought to bring new elements, and not be a repetition of our
own too familiar personality. We have enough of ourselves in ourselves; we
desire a companion who will relieve us from the bounds of our thoughts, as
a neighbor opens his garden to us, and delivers us from our own hedges.
But if the unlikeness is so great that mutual understanding is impossible,
then it is too great. We fancy that we should like to know this or that
author, because we feel a certain sympathy with him though he is very
different from us, but there are other writers whom we do not desire to
know because we are aware of a difference too excessive for companionship.

The only approximation to a general law that I would venture to affirm is
that the strongest reason why men are drawn together is not identity of
class, not identity of race, not a common interest in any particular art
or science, but because there is something in their idiosyncrasies that
gives a charm to intercourse between the two. What it is I cannot tell,
and I have never met with the wise man who was able to enlighten me.

It is not respect for character, seeing that we often respect people
heartily without being able to enjoy their society. It is a mysterious
suitableness or adaptability, and _how_ mysterious it is may be in some
degree realized when we reflect that we cannot account for our own
preferences. I try to explain to myself, for my own intellectual
satisfaction, how and why it is that I take pleasure in the society of one
very dear friend. He is a most able, honorable, and high-minded man, but
others are all that, and they give me no pleasure. My friend and I have
really not very much in common, far less than I have with some perfectly
indifferent people. I only know that we are always glad to be together,
that each of us likes to listen to the other, and that we have talked for
innumerable hours. Neither does my affection blind me to his faults. I see
them as clearly as if I were his enemy, and doubt not that he sees mine.
There is no illusion, and there has been no change in our sentiments for
twenty years.

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

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




ESSAY II.

INDEPENDENCE.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The French ideal of "good form" is to be undistinguishable from others; by
which it is not understood that you are to be undistinguishable from the
multitude of poor people, but one of the smaller crowd of rich and
fashionable people. Independence and originality are so little esteemed in
what is called "good society" in France that the adjectives
"_indépendant_" and "_original_" are constantly used in a bad sense. "_Il
est très indépendant_" often means that the man is of a rude,
insubordinate, rebellious temper, unfitting him for social life. "_Il est
original_," or more contemptuously, "_C'est un original_," means that the
subject of the criticism has views of his own which are not the
fashionable views, and which therefore (whatever may be their accuracy)
are proper objects of well-bred ridicule.

I cannot imagine any state of feeling more destructive of all interest in
human intercourse than this, for if on going into society I am only to
hear the fashionable opinions and sentiments, what is the gain to me who
know them too well already? I could even repeat them quite accurately with
the proper conventional tone, so why put myself to inconvenience to hear
that dull and wearisome play acted over again? The only possible
explanation of the pleasure that French people of some rank appear to take
in hearing things, which are as stale as they are inaccurate, repeated by
every one they know, is that the repetition of them appears to be one of
the signs of gentility, and to give alike to those who utter them and to
those who hear, the profound satisfaction of feeling that they are present
at the mysterious rites of Caste.

There is probably no place in the whole world where the feeling of mental
independence is so complete as it is in London. There is no place where
differences of opinion are more marked in character or more frank and open
in expression; but what strikes one as particularly admirable in London is
that in the present day (it has not always been so) men of the most
opposite opinions and the most various tastes can profess their opinions
and indulge their tastes without inconvenient consequences to themselves,
and there is hardly any opinion, or any eccentricity, that excludes a man
from pleasant social intercourse if he does not make himself impossible
and intolerable by bad manners. This independence gives a savor to social
intercourse in London that is lamentably wanting to it elsewhere. There is
a strange and novel pleasure (to one who lives habitually in the country)
in hearing men and women say what they think without deference to any
local public opinion.

In many small places this local public opinion is so despotic that there
is no individual independence in society, and it then becomes necessary
that a man who values his independence, and desires to keep it, should
learn the art of living contentedly outside of society.

It has often occurred to me to reflect that there are many men in London
who enjoy a pleasant and even a high social position, who live with
intelligent people, and even with people of great wealth and exalted rank,
and yet who, if their lot had been cast in certain small provincial towns,
would have found themselves rigorously excluded from the upper local
circles, if not from all circles whatsoever.

I have sometimes asked myself, when travelling on the railway through
France, and visiting for a few hours one of those sleepy little old
cities, to me so delightful, in which the student of architecture and the
lover of the picturesque find so much to interest them, what would have
been the career of a man having, for example, the capacity and the
convictions of Mr. Gladstone, if he had passed all the years of his
manhood in such a place.

It commonly happens that when Nature endows a man with a vigorous
personality and its usual accompaniment, an independent way of seeing
things, she gives him at the same time powerful talents with which to
defend his own originality; but in a small and ancient city, where
everything is traditional, intellectual force is of no avail, and learning
is of no use. In such a city, where the upper class is an exclusive caste
impenetrable by ideas, the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone would be
ineffectual, and if exercised at all would be considered in bad taste. His
learning, even, would tend to separate him from the unlearned local
aristocracy. The simple fact that he is in favor of parliamentary
government, without any more detailed information concerning his political
opinions, would put him beyond the pale, for parliamentary government is
execrated by the French rural aristocracy, who tolerate nothing short of a
determined monarchical absolutism. His religious views would be looked
upon as those of a low Dissenter, and it would be remembered against him
that his father was in trade. Such is the difference, as a field for
talent and originality, between London and an aristocratic little French
city, that those very qualities which have raised our Prime Minister to a
not undeserved pre-eminence in the great place would have kept him out of
society in the small one. He might, perhaps, have talked politics in some
café with a few shop-keepers and attorneys.

It may be objected that Mr. Gladstone, as an English Liberal, would
naturally be out of place in France and little appreciated there, so I
will take the cases of a Frenchman in France and an Englishman in England.
A brave French officer, who was at the same time a gentleman of ancient
lineage and good estate, chose (for reasons of his own which had no
connection with social intercourse) to live upon a property that happened
to be situated in a part of France where the aristocracy was strongly
Catholic and reactionary. He then found himself excluded from "good
society," because he was a Protestant and a friend to parliamentary
government. Reasons of this kind, or the counter-reasons of Catholicism
and disapprobation of parliaments, would not exclude a polished and
amiable gentleman from society in London. I have read in a biographical
notice of Sidney Dobell that when he lived at Cheltenham he was excluded
from the society of the place because his parents were Dissenters and he
had been in trade.

In cases of this kind, where exclusion is due to hard prejudices of caste
or of religion, a man who has all the social gifts of good manners,
kind-heartedness, culture, and even wealth, may find himself outside the
pale if he lives in or near a small place where society is a strong little
clique well organized on definitely understood principles. There are
situations in which exclusion of that kind means perfect solitude. It may
be argued that to escape solitude the victim has nothing to do but
associate with a lower class, but this is not easy or natural, especially
when, as in Dobell's case, there is intellectual culture. Those who have
refined manners and tastes and a love for intellectual pursuits, usually
find themselves disqualified for entering with any real heartiness and
enjoyment into the social life of classes where these tastes are
undeveloped, and where the thoughts flow in two channels,--the serious
channel, studded with anxieties about the means of existence, and the
humorous channel, which is a diversion from the other. Far be it from me
to say anything that might imply any shade of contempt or disapprobation
of the humorous spirit that is Nature's own remedy for the evils of an
anxious life. It does more for the mental health of the middle classes
than could be done by the most sublimated culture; and if anything
concerning it is a subject for regret it is that culture makes us
incapable of enjoying poor jokes. It is, however, a simple matter of fact
that although men of great culture may be humorists (Mr. Lowell is a
brilliant example), their humor is both more profound in the serious
intention that lies under it, and vastly more extensive in the field of
its operations than the trivial humor of the uneducated; whence it follows
that although humor is the faculty by which different classes are brought
most easily into cordial relations, the humorist who has culture will
probably find himself _à l'étroit_ with humorists who have none, whilst
the cultured man who has no humor, or whose humorous tendencies have been
overpowered by serious thought, is so terribly isolated in uneducated
society that he feels less alone in solitude. To realize this truth in its
full force, the reader has only to imagine John Stuart Mill trying to
associate with one of those middle-class families that Dickens loved to
describe, such as the Wardle family in Pickwick.

It follows from these considerations that unless a man lives in London, or
in some other great capital city, he may easily find himself so situated
that he must learn the art of being happy without society.

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so
there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an
overpowering dread of solitude.

There are two good reasons against the excessive dread of solitude. The
first is that solitude is very rarely so absolute as it appears from a
distance; and the second is that when the evil is real, and almost
complete, there are palliatives that may lessen it to such a degree as to
make it, at the worst, supportable, and at the best for some natures even
enjoyable in a rather sad and melancholy way.

Let us not deceive ourselves with conventional notions on the subject. The
world calls "solitude" that condition in which a man lives outside of
"society," or, in other words, the condition in which he does not pay
formal calls and is not invited to state dinners and dances. Such a
condition may be very lamentable, and deserving of polite contempt, but it
need not be absolute solitude.

Absolute solitude would be the state of Crusoe on the desert island,
severed from human kind and never hearing a human voice; but this is not
the condition of any one in a civilized country who is out of a prison
cell. Suppose that I am travelling in a country where I am a perfect
stranger, and that I stay for some days in a village where I do not know a
soul. In a surprisingly short time I shall have made acquaintances and
begun to acquire rather a home-like feeling in the place. My new
acquaintances may possibly not be rich and fashionable: they may be the
rural postman, the innkeeper, the stone-breaker on the roadside, the
radical cobbler, and perhaps a mason or a joiner and a few more or less
untidy little children; but every morning their greeting becomes more
friendly, and so I feel myself connected still with that great human race
to which, whatever may be my sins against the narrow laws of caste and
class, I still unquestionably belong. It is a positive advantage that our
meetings should be accidental and not so long as to involve any of the
embarrassments of formal social intercourse, as I could not promise myself
that the attempt to spend a whole evening with these humble friends might
not cause difficulties for me and for them. All I maintain is that these
little chance talks and greetings have a tendency to keep me cheerful and
preserve me from that moody state of mind to which the quite lonely man
exposes himself. As to the substance and quality of our conversations, I
amuse myself by comparing them with conversations between more genteel
people, and do not always perceive that the disparity is very wide. Poor
men often observe external facts with the greatest shrewdness and
accuracy, and have interesting things to tell when they see that you set
up no barrier of pride against them. Perhaps they do not know much about
architecture and the graphic arts, but on these subjects they are devoid
of the false pretensions of the upper classes, which is an unspeakable
comfort and relief. They teach us many things that are worth knowing.
Humble and poor people were amongst the best educators of Shakspeare,
Scott, Dickens, Wordsworth, George Eliot. Even old Homer learned from
them touches of nature which have done as much for his immortality as the
fire of his wrathful kings.

Let me give the reader an example of this chance intercourse just as it
really occurred. I was drawing architectural details in and about a
certain foreign cathedral, and had the usual accompaniment of youthful
spectators who liked to watch me working, as greater folks watch
fashionable artists in their studios. Sometimes they rather incommoded me,
but on my complaining of the inconvenience, two of the bigger boys acted
as policemen to defend me, which they did with stern authority and
promptness. After that one highly intelligent little boy brought paper and
pencil from his father's house and set himself to draw what I was drawing.
The subject was far too difficult for him, but I gave him a simpler one,
and in a very short time he was a regular pupil. Inspired by his example,
three other little boys asked if they might do likewise, so I had a class
of four. Their manner towards me was perfect,--not a trace of rudeness nor
of timidity either, but absolute confidence at once friendly and
respectful. Every day when I went to the cathedral at the same hour my
four little friends greeted me with such frank and visible gladness that
it could neither have been feigned nor mistaken. During our lessons they
surprised and interested me greatly by the keen observation they
displayed; and this was true more particularly of the bright little leader
and originator of the class. The house he lived in was exactly opposite
the rich west front of the cathedral; and I found that, young as he was (a
mere child), he had observed for himself almost all the details of its
sculpture. The statues, groups, bas-reliefs, and other ornaments were all,
for him, so many separate subjects, and not a confused enrichment of
labored stone-work as they so easily might have been. He had notions, too,
about chronology, telling me the dates of some parts of the cathedral and
asking me about others. His mother treated me with the utmost kindness and
invited me to sketch quietly from her windows. I took a photographer up
there, and set his big camera, and we got such a photograph as had been
deemed impossible before. Now in all this does not the reader perceive
that I was enjoying human intercourse in a very delicate and exquisite
way? What could be more charming and refreshing to a solitary student than
this frank and hearty friendship of children who caused no perceptible
hindrance to his work, whilst they effectually dispelled sad thoughts?

Two other examples may be given from the experience of a man who has often
been alone and seldom felt himself in solitude.

I remember arriving, long ago, in the evening at the head of a salt-water
loch in Scotland, where in those days there existed an exceedingly small
beginning of a watering-place. Soon after landing I walked on the beach
with no companion but the beauty of nature and the "long, long thoughts"
of youth. In a short time I became aware that a middle-aged Scotch
gentleman was taking exercise in the same solitary way. He spoke to me,
and we were soon deep in a conversation that began to be interesting to
both of us. He was a resident in the place and invited me to his house,
where our talk continued far into the night. I was obliged to leave the
little haven the next day, but my recollection of it now is like the
memorandum of a conversation. I remember the wild romantic scenery and the
moon upon the water, and the steamer from Glasgow at the pier; but the
real satisfaction of that day consisted in hours of talk with a man who
had seen much, observed much, thought much, and was most kindly and
pleasantly communicative,--a man whom I had never spoken to before, and
have never seen or heard of since that now distant but well-remembered
evening.

The other instance is a conversation in the cabin of a steamer. I was
alone, in the depth of winter, making a voyage by an unpopular route, and
during a long, dark night. It was a dead calm. We were only three
passengers, and we sat together by the bright cabin-fire. One of us was a
young officer in the British navy, just of age; another was an
anxious-looking man of thirty. Somehow the conversation turned to the
subject of inevitable expenses; and the sailor told us that he had a
certain private income, the amount of which he mentioned. "I have exactly
the same income," said the man of thirty, "but I married very early and
have a wife and family to maintain;" and then--as we did not know even his
name, and he was not likely to see us again--he seized the opportunity
(under the belief that he was kindly warning the young sailor) of telling
the whole story of his anxieties in detail. The point of his discourse was
that he did not pretend to be poor, or to claim sympathy, but he
powerfully described the exact nature of his position. What had been his
private income had now become the public revenue of a household. It all
went in housekeeping, almost independently of his will and outside of his
control. He had his share in the food of the family, and he was just
decently clothed, but there was an end to personal enterprises. The
economy and the expenditure of a free and intelligent bachelor had been
alike replaced by a dull, methodical, uncontrollable outgo; and the man
himself, though now called the head of a family, had discovered that a new
impersonal necessity was the real master, and that he lived like a child
in his own house. "This," he said, "is the fate of a gentleman who marries
on narrow means, unless he is cruelly selfish."

Frank and honest conversations of this kind often come in the way of a man
who travels by himself, and they remain with him afterwards as a part of
his knowledge of life. This informal intercourse that comes by chance is
greatly undervalued, especially by Englishmen, who are seldom very much
disposed to it except in the humbler classes; but it is one of the broadly
scattered, inestimable gifts of Nature, like the refreshment of air and
water. Many a healthy and happy mind has enjoyed little other human
intercourse than this. There are millions who never get a formal
invitation, and yet in this accidental way they hear many a bit of
entertaining or instructive talk. The greatest charm of it is its
consistency with the most absolute independence. No abandonment of
principle is required, nor any false assumption. You stand simply on your
elementary right to consideration as a decent human being within the great
pale of civilization.

There is, however, another sense in which every superior person is greatly
exposed to the evil of solitude if he lives outside of a great capital
city.

Without misanthropy, and without any unjust or unkind contempt for our
fellow-creatures, we still must perceive that mankind in general have no
other purpose than to live in comfort with little mental exertion. The
desire for comfort is not wholly selfish, because people want it for their
families as much as for themselves, but it is a low motive in this sense,
that it is scarcely compatible with the higher kinds of mental exertion,
whilst it is entirely incompatible with devotion to great causes. The
object of common men is not to do noble work by their own personal
efforts, but so to plot and contrive that others may be industrious for
their benefit, and not for their highest benefit, but in order that they
may have curtains and carpets.

Those for whom accumulated riches have already provided these objects of
desire seldom care greatly for anything except amusements. If they have
ambition, it is for a higher social rank.

These three common pursuits, comfort, amusements, rank, lie so much
outside of the disciplinary studies that a man of studious habits is
likely to find himself alone in a peculiar sense. As a human being he is
not alone, but as a serious thinker and worker he may find himself in
complete solitude.

Many readers will remember the well-known passage in Stuart Mill's
autobiography, in which he dealt with this subject. It has often been
quoted against him, because he went so far as to say that "a person of
high intellect should never go into unintellectual society, unless he can
enter it as an apostle," a passage not likely to make its author beloved
by society of that kind; yet Mill was not a misanthropist, he was only
anxious to preserve what there is of high feeling and high principle from
deterioration by too much contact with the common world. It was not so
much that he despised the common world, as that he knew the infinite
preciousness, even to the common people themselves, of the few better and
higher minds. He knew how difficult it is for such minds to "retain their
higher principles unimpaired," and how at least "with respect to the
persons and affairs of their own day they insensibly adopt the modes of
feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company
they keep."

Perhaps I may do well to offer an illustration of this, though from a
department of culture that may not have been in Mill's view when he wrote
the passage.

I myself have known a certain painter (not belonging to the English
school) who had a severe and elevated ideal of his art. As his earnings
were small he went to live in the country for economy. He then began to
associate intimately with people to whom all high aims in painting were
unintelligible. Gradually he himself lost his interest in them and his
nobler purposes were abandoned. Finally, art itself was abandoned and he
became a coffee-house politician.

So it is with all rare and exceptional pursuits if once we allow ourselves
to take, in all respects, the color of the common world. It is impossible
to keep up a foreign language, an art, a science, if we are living away
from other followers of our pursuit and cannot endure solitude.

It follows from this that there are many situations in which men have to
learn that particular kind of independence which consists in bearing
isolation patiently for the preservation of their better selves. In a
world of common-sense they have to keep a little place apart for a kind of
sense that is sound and rational but not common.

This isolation would indeed be difficult to bear if it were not mitigated
by certain palliatives that enable a superior mind to be healthy and
active in its loneliness. The first of these is reading, which is seldom
valued at its almost inestimable worth. By the variety of its records and
inventions, literature continually affords the refreshment of change, not
to speak of that variety which may be had so easily by a change of
language when the reader knows several different tongues, and the other
marvellous variety due to difference in the date of books. In fact,
literature affords a far wider variety than conversation itself, for we
can talk only with the living, but literature enables us to descend, like
Ulysses, into the shadowy kingdom of the dead. There is but one defect in
literature,--that the talk is all on one side, so that we are listeners,
as at a sermon or a lecture, and not sharers in some antique symposium,
our own brows crowned with flowers, and our own tongues loosened with
wine. The exercise of the tongue is wanting, and to some it is an
imperious need, so that they will talk to the most uncongenial human
beings, or even to parrots and dogs. If we value books as the great
palliative of solitude and help to mental independence, let us not
undervalue those intelligent periodicals that keep our minds modern and
prevent us from living altogether in some other century than our own.
Periodicals are a kind of correspondence more easily read than manuscript
and involving no obligation to answer. There is also the great palliative
of occasional direct correspondence with those who understand our
pursuits; and here we have the advantage of using our own tongues, not
physically, but at least in an imaginative way.

A powerful support to some minds is the constantly changing beauty of the
natural world, which becomes like a great and ever-present companion. I am
anxious to avoid any exaggeration of this benefit, because I know that to
many it counts for nothing; and an author ought not to think only of those
who have his own mental constitution; but although natural beauty is of
little use to one solitary mind, it may be like a living friend to
another. As a paragraph of real experience is worth pages of speculation,
I may say that I have always found it possible to live happily in
solitude, provided that the place was surrounded by varied, beautiful, and
changeful scenery, but that in ugly or even monotonous places I have felt
society to be as necessary as it was welcome. Byron's expression,--

  "I made me friends of mountains,"

and Wordsworth's,

      "Nature never did betray
  The heart that loved her,"

are not more than plain statements of the companionship that _some_ minds
find in the beauty of landscape. They are often accused of affectation,
but in truth I believe that we who have that passion, instead of
expressing more than we feel, have generally rather a tendency to be
reserved upon the subject, as we seldom expect sympathy. Many of us would
rather live in solitude and on small means at Como than on a great income
in Manchester. This may be a foolish preference; but let the reader
remember the profound utterance of Blake, that if the fool would but
persevere in his folly he would become wise.

However powerful may be the aid of books and natural scenery in enabling
us to bear solitude, the best help of all must be found in our occupations
themselves. Steady workers do not need much company. To be occupied with a
task that is difficult and arduous, but that we know to be within our
powers, and to awake early every morning with the delightful feeling that
the whole day can be given to it without fear of interruption, is the
perfection of happiness for one who has the gift of throwing himself
heartily into his work. When night comes he will be a little weary, and
more disposed for tranquil sleep than to "danser jusqu' au jour chez
l'ambassadeur de France."

This is the best independence,--to have something to do and something that
can be done, and done most perfectly, in solitude. Then the lonely hours
flow on like smoothly gliding water, bearing one insensibly to the
evening. The workman says, "Is my sight failing?" and lo the sun has set!

There is but one objection to this absorption in worthy toil. It is that
as the day passes so passes life itself, that succession of many days. The
workman thinks of nothing but his work, and finds the time all too short.
At length he suddenly perceives that he is old, and wonders if life might
not have been made to seem a little longer, and if, after all, it has been
quite the best policy always to avoid _ennui_.




ESSAY III.

OF PASSIONATE LOVE.


The wonder of love is that, for the time being, it makes us ardently
desire the presence of one person and feel indifferent to all others of
her sex. It is commonly spoken of as a delusion, but I do not see any
delusion here, for if the presence of the beloved person satisfies his
craving, the lover gets what he desires and is not more the victim of a
deception than one who succeeds in satisfying any other want.

Again, it is often said that men are blinded by love, but the fact that
one sees certain qualities in a beloved person need not imply blindness.
If you are in love with a little woman it is not a reason for supposing
her to be tall. I will even venture to affirm that you may love a woman
passionately and still be quite clearly aware that her beauty is far
inferior to that of another whose coming thrills you with no emotion,
whose departure leaves with you no regret.

The true nature of a profound passion is not to attribute every physical
and mental quality to its object, but rather to think, "Such as she is,
with the endowments that are really her own, I love her above all women,
though I know that she is not so beautiful as some are, nor so learned as
some others." The only real deception to which a lover is exposed is that
he may overestimate the strength of his own passion. If he has not made
this mistake he is not likely to make any other, since, whatever the
indifferent may see, or fail to see, in the woman of his choice, he surely
finds in her the adequate reason for her attraction.

Love is commonly treated as if it belonged only to the flowering of the
spring-time of life, but strong and healthy natures remain capable of
feeling the passion in great force long after they are supposed to have
left it far behind them. It is, indeed, one of the signs of a healthy
nature to retain for many years the freshness of the heart which makes one
liable to fall in love, as a healthy palate retains the natural early
taste for delicious fruits.

This freshness of the heart is lost far more surely by debauchery than by
years; and for this reason worldly parents are not altogether dissatisfied
that their sons should "sow their wild oats" in youth, as they believe
that this kind of sowing is a preservative against the dangers of pure
love and an imprudent or unequal marriage. The calculation is well
founded. After a few years of indiscriminate debauchery a young man is
likely to be deadened to the sweet influences of love and therefore able
to conduct himself with steady worldliness, either remaining in celibacy
or marrying for position, exactly as his interests may dictate.

The case of Shelley is an apt illustration of this danger. He had at the
same time a horror of debauchery and an irresistible natural tendency to
the passion of love.

From the worldly point of view both his connections were degrading for a
young gentleman of rank. Had he followed the very common course of a
_real_ degradation and married a lady of rank after ten years of
indiscriminate immorality, is it an unjust or an unlikely supposition that
he would have given less dissatisfaction to his friends?

As to the permanence of love, or its transitoriness, the plain and candid
answer is that there is no real assurance either way. To predict that it
will certainly die after fruition is to shut one's eyes against the
evident fact that men often remain in love with mistresses or wives. On
the other hand, to assume that love is fixed and made permanent in a
magical way by marriage is to assume what would be desirable rather than
what really is. There are no magical incantations by which Love may be
retained, yet sometimes he will rest and dwell with astonishing tenacity
when there seem to be the strongest reasons for his departure. If there
were any ceremony, if any sacrifice could be made at an altar, by which
the capricious little deity might be conciliated and won, the wisest might
hasten to perform that ceremony and offer that acceptable sacrifice; but
he cares not for any of our rites. Sometimes he stays, in spite of
cruelty, misery, and wrong; sometimes he takes flight from the hearth
where a woman sits and grieves alone, with all the attractions of health,
beauty, gentleness, and refinement.

Boys and girls imagine that love in a poor cottage or a bare garret would
be more blissful than indifference in a palace, and the notion is thought
foolish and romantic by the wise people of the world; but the boys and
girls are right in their estimate of Love's great power of cheering and
brightening existence even in the very humblest situations. The possible
error against which they ought to be clearly warned is that of supposing
that Love would always remain contentedly in the cottage or the garret.
Not that he is any more certain to remain in a mansion in Belgrave Square,
not that a garret with him is not better than the vast Vatican without
him; but when he has taken his flight, and is simply absent, one would
rather be left in comfortable than in beggarly desolation.

The poets speak habitually of love as if it were a passion that could be
safely indulged, whereas the whole experience of modern existence goes to
show that it is of all passions the most perilous to happiness except in
those rare cases where it can be followed by marriage; and even then the
peril is not ended, for marriage gives no certainty of the duration of
love, but constitutes of itself a new danger, as the natures most disposed
to passion are at the same time the most impatient of restraint.

There is this peculiarity about love in a well-regulated social state. It
is the only passion that is quite strictly limited in its indulgence. Of
the intellectual passions a man may indulge several different ones either
successively or together; in the ordinary physical enjoyments, such as the
love of active sports or the pleasures of the table, he may carry his
indulgence very far and vary it without blame; but the master passion of
all has to be continually quelled, the satisfactions that it asks for have
to be continually refused to it, unless some opportunity occurs when they
may be granted without disturbing any one of many different threads in the
web of social existence; and these threads, to a lover's eye, seem
entirely unconnected with his hope.

In stating the fact of these restraints I do not dispute their necessity.
On the contrary, it is evident that infinite practical evil would result
from liberty. Those who have broken through the social restraints and
allowed the passion of love to set up its stormy and variable tyranny in
their hearts have led unsettled and unhappy lives. Even of love itself
they have not enjoyed the best except in those rare cases in which the
lovers have taken bonds upon themselves not less durable than those of
marriage; and even these unions, which give no more liberty than marriage
itself gives, are accompanied by the unsettled feeling that belongs to all
irregular situations.

It is easy to distinguish in the conventional manner between the lower and
the higher kinds of love, but it is not so easy to establish the real
distinction. The conventional difference is simply between the passion in
marriage and out of it; the real distinction would be between different
feelings; but as these feelings are not ascertainable by one person in the
mind or nerves of another, and as in most cases they are probably much
blended, the distinction can seldom be accurately made in the cases of
real persons, though it is marked trenchantly enough in works of pure
imagination.

The passion exists in an infinite variety, and it is so strongly
influenced by elements of character which have apparently nothing to do
with it, that its effects on conduct are to a great extent controlled by
them. For example, suppose the case of a man with strong passions combined
with a selfish nature, and that of another with passions equally strong,
but a rooted aversion to all personal satisfactions that might end in
misery for others. The first would ruin a girl with little hesitation; the
second would rather suffer the entire privation of her society by quitting
the neighborhood where she lived.

The interference of qualities that lie outside of passion is shown very
curiously and remarkably in intellectual persons in this way. They may
have a strong temporary passion for somebody without intellect or culture,
but they are not likely to be held permanently by such a person; and even
when under the influence of the temporary desire they may be clearly aware
of the danger there would be in converting it into a permanent relation,
and so they may take counsel with themselves and subdue the passion or fly
from the temptation, knowing that it would be sweet to yield, but that a
transient delight would be paid for by years of weariness in the future.

Those men of superior abilities who have bound themselves for life to some
woman who could not possibly understand them, have generally either broken
their bonds afterwards or else avoided as much as possible the
tiresomeness of a _tête-à-tête_, and found in general society the means of
occasionally enduring the dulness of their home. For short and transient
relations the principal charm in a woman is either beauty or a certain
sweetness, but for any permanent relation the first necessity of all is
that she be companionable.

Passionate love is the principal subject of poets and novelists, who
usually avoid its greatest difficulties by well-known means of escape.
Either the passion finishes tragically by the death of one of the parties,
or else it comes to a natural culmination in their union, whether
according to social order or through a breach of it. In real life the
story is not always rounded off so conveniently. It may happen, it
probably often does happen, that a passion establishes itself where it has
no possible chance of satisfaction, and where, instead of being cut short
by death, it persists through a considerable part of life and embitters
it. These cases are the more unfortunate that hopeless desire gives an
imaginary glory to its own object, and that, from the circumstances of the
case, this halo is not dissipated.

It is common amongst hard and narrow people, who judge the feelings of
others by their own want of them, to treat all the painful side of passion
with contemptuous levity. They say that people never die for love, and
that such fancies may easily be chased away by the exercise of a little
resolution. The profounder students of human nature take the subject more
seriously. Each of the great poets (including, of course, the author of
the "Bride of Lammermoor," in which the poetical elements are so abundant)
has treated the aching pain of love and the tragedy to which it may lead,
as in the deaths of Haidée, of Lucy Ashton, of Juliet, of Margaret. In
real life the powers of evil do not perceive any necessity for an
artistic conclusion of their work. A wrinkled old maid may still preserve
in the depths of her own heart, quite unsuspected by the young and lively
people about her, the unextinguished embers of a passion that first made
her wretched fifty years before; and in the long, solitary hours of a dull
old age she may live over and over again in memory the brief delirium of
that wild and foolish hope which was followed by years of self-repression.

Of all the painful situations occasioned by passionate love, I know of
none more lamentable than that of an innocent and honorable woman who has
been married to an unsuitable husband and who afterwards makes the
discovery that she involuntarily loves another. In well-regulated, moral
societies such passions are repressed, but they cannot be repressed
without suffering which has to be endured in silence. The victim is
punished for no fault when none is committed; but she may suffer from the
forces of nature like one who hungers and thirsts and sees a fair banquet
provided, yet is forbidden to eat or drink. It is difficult to suppress
the heart's regret, "Ah, if we had known each other earlier, in the days
when I was free, and it was not wrong to love!" Then there is the haunting
fear that the woful secret may one day reveal itself to others. Might it
not be suddenly and unexpectedly betrayed by a momentary absence of
self-control? This has sometimes happened, and then there is no safety but
in separation, immediate and decided. Suppose a case like the following,
which is said to have really occurred. A perfectly honorable man goes to
visit an intimate friend, walks quietly in the garden one afternoon with
his friend's wife, and suddenly discovers that he is the object of a
passion which, until that moment, she has steadily controlled. One
outburst of shameful tears, one pitiful confession of a life's
unhappiness, and they part forever! This is what happens when the friend
respects his friend and the wife her husband. What happens when both are
capable of treachery is known to the readers of English newspaper reports
and French fictions.

It seems as if, with regard to this passion, civilized man were placed in
a false position between Nature on the one hand and civilization on the
other. Nature makes us capable of feeling it in very great strength and
intensity, at an age when marriage is not to be thought of, and when there
is not much self-control. The tendency of high civilization is to retard
the time of marriage for men, but there is not any corresponding
postponement in the awakening of the passions. The least civilized classes
marry early, the more civilized later and later, and not often from
passionate love, but from a cool and prudent calculation about general
chances of happiness, a calculation embracing very various elements, and
in itself as remote from passion as the Proverbs of Solomon from the Song
of Songs. It consequently happens that the great majority of young
gentlemen discover early in life that passionate love is a danger to be
avoided, and so indeed it is; but it seems a peculiar misfortune for
civilized man that so natural an excitement, which is capable of giving
such a glow to all his faculties as nothing else can give, an excitement
which exalts the imagination to poetry and increases courage till it
becomes heroic devotion, whilst it gives a glamour of romance to the
poorest and most prosaic existence,--it seems, I say, a misfortune that a
passion with such unequalled powers as these should have to be eliminated
from wise and prudent life. The explanation of its early and inconvenient
appearance may be that before the human race had attained a position of
any tranquillity or comfort, the average life was very short, and it was
of the utmost importance that the flame of existence should be passed on
to another generation without delay. We inherit the rapid development
which saved the race in its perilous past, but we are embarrassed by it,
and instead of elevating us to a more exalted life it often avenges itself
for the refusal of natural activity by its own corruption, the corruption
of the best into the worst, of the fire from heaven into the filth of
immorality. The more this great passion is repressed and expelled, the
more frequent does immorality become.

Another very remarkable result of the exclusion of passionate love from
ordinary existence is that the idea of it takes possession of the
imagination. The most melodious poetry, the most absorbing fiction, are
alike celebrations of its mysteries. Even the wordless voice of music
wails or languishes for love, and the audience that seems only to hear
flutes and violins is in reality listening to that endless song of love
which thrills through the passionate universe. Well may the rebels against
Nature revolt against the influence of Art! It is everywhere permeated by
passion. The cold marble warms with it, the opaque pigments palpitate
with it, the dull actor has the tones of genius when he wins access to its
perennial inspiration. Even those forms of art which seem remote from it
do yet confess its presence. You see a picture of solitude, and think that
passion cannot enter there, but everything suggests it. The tree bends
down to the calm water, the gentle breeze caresses every leaf, the
white-pated old mountain is visited by the short-lived summer clouds. If,
in the opening glade, the artist has sketched a pair of lovers, you think
they naturally complete the scene; if he has omitted them, it is still a
place for lovers, or has been, or will be on some sweet eve like this.
What have stars and winds and odors to do with love? The poets know all
about it, and so let Shelley tell us:--

  "I arise from dreams of Thee
   In the first sweet sleep of night,
   When the winds are breathing low
   And the stars are shining bright:
   I arise from dreams of thee,
   And a spirit in my feet
   Has led me--who knows how?--
   To thy chamber-window, Sweet!
   The wandering airs they faint
   On the dark, the silent stream;
   The champak odors fail
   Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
   The nightingale's complaint
   It dies upon her heart,
   As I must die on thine
   O belovèd as thou art!"




ESSAY IV.

COMPANIONSHIP IN MARRIAGE.


If the reader has ever had for a travelling-companion some person totally
unsuited to his nature and quite unable to enter into the ideas that
chiefly interest him, unable, even, to _see_ the things that he sees and
always disposed to treat negligently or contemptuously the thoughts and
preferences that are most his own, he may have some faint conception of
what it must be to find one's self tied to an unsuitable companion for the
tedious journey of this mortal life; and if, on the other hand, he has
ever enjoyed the pleasure of wandering through a country that interested
him along with a friend who could understand his interest, and share it,
and whose society enhanced the charm of every prospect and banished
dulness from the dreariest inns, he may in some poor and imperfect degree
realize the happiness of those who have chosen the life-companion wisely.

When, after an experiment of months or years, the truth becomes plainly
evident that a great mistake has been committed, that there is really no
companionship, that there never will be, never can be, any mental
communion between the two, but that life in common is to be like a stiff
morning call when the giver and the receiver of the visit are beating
their brains to find something to say, and dread the gaps of silence, then
in the blank and dreary outlook comes the idea of separation, and
sometimes, in the loneliness that follows, a wild rebellion against social
order, and a reckless attempt to find in some more suitable union a
compensation for the first sad failure.

The world looks with more indulgence on these attempts when it sees reason
to believe that the desire was for intellectual companionship than when
inconstant passions are presumed to have been the motives; and it has so
happened that a few persons of great eminence have set an example in this
respect which has had the unfortunate effect of weakening in a perceptible
degree the ancient social order. It is not possible, of course, that there
can be many cases like that of George Eliot and Lewes, for the simple
reason that persons of their eminence are so rare; but if there were only
a few more cases of that kind it is evident that the laws of society would
either be confessedly powerless, or else it would be necessary to modify
them and bring them into harmony with new conditions. The importance of
the case alluded to lies in the fact that the lady, though she was
excluded (or willingly excluded herself) from general society, was still
respected and visited not only by men but by ladies of blameless life. Nor
was she generally regarded as an immoral person even by the outer world.
The feeling about her was one of regret that the faithful companionship
she gave to Lewes could not be legally called a marriage, as it was
apparently a model of what the legal relation ought to be. The object of
his existence was to give her every kind of help and to spare her every
shadow of annoyance. He read to her, wrote letters for her, advised her on
everything, and whilst full of admiration for her talents was able to do
something for their most effectual employment. She, on her part, rewarded
him with that which he prized above riches, the frank and affectionate
companionship of an intellect that it is needless to describe and of a
heart full of the most lively sympathy and ready for the most romantic
sacrifices.

In the preceding generation we have the well-known instances of Shelley,
Byron, and Goethe, all of whom sought companionship outside of social
rule, and enjoyed a sort of happiness probably not unembittered by the
false position in which it placed them. The sad story of Shelley's first
marriage, that with Harriett Westbrook, is one of the best instances of a
deplorable but most natural mistake. She is said to have been a charming
person in many ways. "Harriett," says Mr. Rossetti, "was not only
delightful to look at but altogether most agreeable. She dressed with
exquisite neatness and propriety; her voice was pleasant and her speech
cordial; her spirits were cheerful and her manners good. She was well
educated, a constant and agreeable reader; adequately accomplished in
music." But in spite of these qualities and talents, and even of
Harriett's willingness to learn, Shelley did not find her to be
companionable for him; and he unfortunately did discover that another
young lady, Mary Godwin, was companionable in the supreme degree. That
this latter idea was not illusory is proved by his happy life afterwards
with Mary so far as a life could be happy that was poisoned by a tragic
recollection.[3] Before that miserable ending, before the waters of the
Serpentine had closed over the wretched existence of Harriett, Shelley
said, "Every one who knows me must know that the partner of my life should
be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriett is a noble
animal, but she can do neither." Here we have a plain statement of that
great need for companionship which was a part of Shelley's nature. It is
often connected with its apparent opposite, the love of solitude. Shelley
was a lover of solitude, which means that he liked full and adequate human
intercourse so much that the insufficient imitation of it was intolerable
to him. Even that sweetest solitude of all, when he wrote the "Revolt of
Islam" in summer shades, to the sound of rippling waters, was willingly
exchanged for the society of the one dearest and best companion:--

  "So now my summer-task is ended, Mary,
       And I return to thee, mine own heart's home;
   As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faëry,
       Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome.
       Nor thou disdain that, ere my fame become
   A star among the stars of mortal night
       (If it indeed may cleave its native gloom),
     Its doubtful promise thus I would unite
   With thy beloved name, thou child of love and light.

  "The toil which stole from thee so many an hour
       Is ended, and the fruit is at thy feet.
   No longer where the woods to frame a bower
       With interlaced branches mix and meet,
       Or where, with sound like many voices sweet,
   Waterfalls leap among wild islands green
       Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat
     Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen:
   But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been."

It is not surprising that the companionship of conjugal life should be
like other friendships in this, that a first experiment may be a failure
and a later experiment a success. We are all so fallible that in matters
of which we have no experience we generally commit great blunders.
Marriage unites all the conditions that make a blunder probable. Two young
people, with very little conception of what an unsurmountable barrier a
difference of idiosyncrasy may be, are pleased with each other's youth,
health, natural gayety, and good looks, and fancy that it would be
delightful to live together. They marry, and in many cases discover that
somehow, in spite of the most meritorious efforts, they are not
companions. There is no fault on either side; they try their best, but the
invisible demon, incompatibility, is too strong for them.

From all that we know of the characters of Lord and Lady Byron it seems
evident that they never were likely to enjoy life together. He committed
the mistake of marrying a lady on the strength of her excellent
reputation. "She has talents and excellent qualities," he said before
marriage; as if all the arts and sciences and all the virtues put together
could avail without the one quality that is _never_ admired, _never_
understood by others,--that of simple suitableness. She was "a kind of
pattern in the North," and he "heard of nothing but her merits and her
wonders." He did not see that all these excellencies were dangers, that
the consciousness of them and the reputation for them would set the lady
up on a judgment seat of her own, from which she would be continually
observing the errors, serious or trivial, of that faulty specimen of the
male sex that it was her lofty mission to correct or to condemn. All this
he found out in due time and expressed in the bitter lines,--

  "Oh! she was perfect past all parallel
     Of any modern female saint's comparison

      *       *       *       *       *

   Perfect she was."

The story of his subsequent life is too well known to need repetition
here. All that concerns our present subject is that ultimately, in the
Countess Guiccioli, he found the woman who had, for him, that one quality,
suitableness, which outweighs all the perfections. She did not read
English, but, though ignorant alike of the splendor and the tenderness of
his verse, she knew the nature of the man; and he enjoyed in her society,
probably for the first time in his life, the most exquisite pleasure the
masculine mind can ever know, that of being looked upon by a feminine
intelligence with clear sight and devoted affection at the same time. The
relation that existed between Byron and the Countess Guiccioli is one
outside of our morality, a revenge of Nature against a marriage system
that could take a girl not yet sixteen and make her the third wife of a
man more than old enough to be her grandfather. In Italy this revenge of
Nature against a bad social system is accepted, within limits, and is an
all but inevitable consequence of marriages like that of Count Guiccioli,
which, however they may be approved by custom and consecrated by religious
ceremonies, remain, nevertheless, amongst the worst (because the most
unnatural) immoralities. All that need be said in his young wife's defence
is that she followed the only rule habitually acted upon by mankind, the
custom of her country and her class, and that she acted, from beginning to
end, with the most absolute personal abnegation. On Byron her influence
was wholly beneficial. She raised him from a mode of life that was
deplored by all his true friends, to the nearest imitation of a happy
marriage that was accessible to him; but the irregularity of their
position brought upon them the usual Nemesis, and after a broken
intercourse, during which he never could feel her to be really his own, he
went to Missolonghi and wrote, under the shadow of Death,--

  "The hope, the fear, the jealous care,
     The exalted portion of the pain
   And power of love, I cannot share,
     But wear the chain."

The difference between Byron and Goethe in regard to feminine
companionship lies chiefly in this,--that whilst Byron does not seem to
have been very susceptible of romantic love (though he was often entangled
in _liaisons_ more or less degrading), Goethe was constantly in love and
imaginative in his passions, as might be expected from a poet. He appears
to have encouraged himself in amorous fancies till they became almost or
quite realities, as if to give himself that experience of various feeling
out of which he afterwards created poems. He was himself clearly conscious
that his poetry was a transformation of real experiences into artistic
forms. The knowledge that he came by his poetry in this way would
naturally lead him to encourage rather than stifle the sentiments which
gave him his best materials. It is quite within the comprehensive powers
of a complex nature that a poet might lead a dual life; being at the same
time a man, ardent, very susceptible of all passionate emotions, and a
poet, observing this passionate life and accumulating its results. In all
this there is very little of what occupies us just now, the search for a
satisfactory companionship. The woman with whom he most enjoyed that was
the Baroness von Stein, but even this friendship was not ultimately
satisfying and had not a permanent character. It lasted ten or eleven
years, till his return from the Italian journey, when "she thought him
cold, and her resource was--reproaches. The resource was more feminine
than felicitous. Instead of sympathizing with him in his sorrow at leaving
Italy, she felt the regret as an offence; and perhaps it was; but a truer,
nobler nature would surely have known how to merge its own pain in
sympathy with the pain of one beloved. He regretted Italy; she was not a
compensation to him; she saw this, and her self-love suffered."[4] And so
it ended. "He offered friendship in vain; he had wounded the self-love of
a vain woman." Goethe's longest connection was with Christiane Vulpius, a
woman quite unequal to him in station and culture, and in that respect
immeasurably inferior to the Baroness von Stein, but superior to her in
the power of affection, and able to charm and retain the poet by her
lively, pleasant disposition and her perfect constancy. Gradually she rose
in his esteem, and every year increased her influence over him. From the
precarious position of a mistress out of his house she first attained that
of a wife in all but the legal title, as he received her under his roof in
defiance of all the good society of Weimar; and lastly she became his
lawful wife, to the still greater scandal of the polite world. It may even
be said that her promotion did not end here, for the final test of love is
death; and when Christiane died she left behind her the deep and lasting
sorrow that is happiness still to those who feel it, though happiness in
its saddest form.

The misfortune of Goethe appears to have been that he dreaded and avoided
marriage in early life, perhaps because he was instinctively aware of his
own tendency to form many attachments of limited duration; but his
treatment of Christiane Vulpius, so much beyond any obligations which,
according to the world's code, he had incurred, is sufficient proof that
there was a power of constancy in his nature; and if he had married early
and suitably it is possible that this constancy might have stayed and
steadied him from the beginning. It is easy to imagine that a marriage
with a cultivated woman of his own class would have given him, in course
of time, by mutual adaptation, a much more complete companionship than
either of those semi-associations with the Frau von Stein and Christiane,
each of which only included a part of his great nature. Christiane,
however, had the better part, his heartfelt affection.

The case of John Stuart Mill and the remarkable woman by whose side he
lies buried at Avignon, is the most perfect instance of thorough
companionship on record; and it is remarkable especially because men of
great intellectual power, whose ways of thinking are quite independent of
custom, and whose knowledge is so far outside the average as to carry
their thoughts continually beyond the common horizon, have an extreme
difficulty in associating themselves with women, who are naturally
attached to custom, and great lovers of what is settled, fixed, limited,
and clear. The ordinary disposition of women is to respect what is
authorized much more than what is original, and they willingly, in the
things of the mind, bow before anything that is repeated with
circumstances of authority. An isolated philosopher has no costume or
surroundings to entitle him to this kind of respect. He wears no vestment,
he is not magnified by any architecture, he is not supported by superiors
or deferred to by subordinates. He stands simply on his abilities, his
learning, and his honesty. There is, however, this one chance in his
favor, that a certain natural sympathy may possibly exist between him and
some woman on the earth,--if he could only find her,--and this woman would
make him independent of all the rest. It was Stuart Mill's rare
good-fortune to find this one woman, early in life, in the person of Mrs.
Taylor; and as his nature was intellectual and affectionate rather than
passionate, he was able to rest contented with simple friendship for a
period of twenty years. Indeed this friendship itself, considered only as
such, was of very gradual growth. "To be admitted," he wrote, "into any
degree of mental intercourse with a being of these qualities, could not
but have a most beneficial influence on my development; though the effect
was only gradual, and many years elapsed before her mental progress and
mine went forward in the complete companionship they at last attained. The
benefit I received was far greater than any I could hope to give.... What
I owe, even intellectually, to her, is in its detail almost infinite."

Mill speaks of his marriage, in 1851 (I use his words), to the lady whose
incomparable worth had made her friendship the greatest source to him both
of happiness and of improvement during many years in which they never
expected to be in any closer relation to one another. "For seven and a
half years," he goes on to say, "that blessing was mine; for seven and a
half only! I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest
manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would have
wished it, I endeavor to make the best of what life I have left and to
work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived
from thoughts of her and communion with her memory.... Since then I have
sought for such alleviation as my state admitted of, by the mode of life
which most enabled me to feel her still near me. I bought a cottage as
close as possible to the place where she is buried, and there her daughter
(my fellow-sufferer and now my chief comfort) and I live constantly during
a great portion of the year. My objects in life are solely those which
were hers; my pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, or
sympathized, and which are indissolubly associated with her. Her memory is
to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as
it does all worthiness, I endeavor to regulate my life."

The examples that I have selected (all purposely from the real life of
well-known persons) are not altogether encouraging. They show the
difficulty that there is in finding the true companion. George Eliot found
hers at the cost of a rebellion against social order to which, with her
regulated mind and conservative instincts, she must have been by nature
little disposed. Shelley succeeded only after a failure and whilst the
failure still had rights over his entire existence. His life was like one
of those pictures in which there is a second work over a first, and the
painter supposes the first to be entirely concealed, which indeed it is
for a little time, but it reappears afterwards and spoils the whole.
Nothing could be more unsatisfactory than the domestic arrangements of
Byron. He married a lady from a belief in her learning and virtue, only to
find that learning and virtue were hard stones in comparison with the
daily bread of sympathy. Then, after a vain waste of years in error, he
found true love at last, but on terms which involved too heavy sacrifices
from her who gave it, and procured him no comfort, no peace, if indeed
his nature was capable of any restfulness in love. Goethe, after a number
of attachments that ended in nothing, gave himself to one woman by his
intelligence and to another by his affections, not belonging with his
whole nature to either, and never in his long life knowing what it is to
have equal companionship in one's own house. Stuart Mill is contented, for
twenty years, to be the esteemed friend of a lady married to another,
without hope of any closer relation; and when his death permits them to
think of marriage, they have only seven years and a half before them, and
he is forty-five years old.

Cases of this kind would be discouraging in the extreme degree, were it
not that the difficulty is exceptional. High intellect is in itself a
peculiarity, in a certain sense it is really an eccentricity, even when so
thoroughly sane and rational as in the cases of George Eliot, Goethe, and
Mill. It is an eccentricity in this sense, that its mental centre does not
coincide with that of ordinary people. The mental centre of ordinary
people is simply the public opinion, the common sense, of the class and
locality in which they live, so that, to them, the common sense of people
in another class, another locality, appears irrational or absurd. The
mental centre of a superior person is not that of class and locality.
Shelley did not belong to the English aristocracy, though he was born in
it; his mind did not centre itself in aristocratic ideas. George Eliot did
not belong to the middle class of the English midlands, nor Stuart Mill to
the London middle classes. So far as Byron belonged to the aristocracy it
was a mark of inferiority in him, owing to a touch of vulgarity in his
nature, the same vulgarity which made him believe that he could not be a
proper sort of lord without a prodigal waste of money. Yet even Byron was
not centred in local ideas; that which was best in him, his enthusiasm for
Greece, was not an essential part of Nottinghamshire common sense. Goethe
lived much more in one locality, and even in a small place; but if
anything is remarkable in him it is his complete independence of Weimar
ideas. It was the Duke, his friend and master, not the public opinion of
Weimar, that allowed Goethe to be himself. He refused even to be classed
intellectually, and did not recognize the vulgar opinion that a poet
cannot be scientific. In all these cases the mental centre was not in any
local common sense. It was a result of personal studies and observations
acting upon an individual idiosyncrasy.

We may now perceive how infinitely easier it is for ordinary people to
meet and be companionable than for these rare and superior minds. Ordinary
people, if bred in the same neighborhood and class, are sure to have a
great fund of ideas in common, all those ideas that constitute the local
common sense. If you listen attentively to their conversations you will
find that they hardly ever go outside of that. They mention incidents and
actions, and test them one after another by a tacit reference to the
public opinion of the place. Therefore they have a good chance of
agreeing, of considering each other reasonable; and this is why it is a
generally received opinion that marriages between people of the same
locality and the same class offer the greatest probability of happiness.
So they do, in ordinary cases, but if there is the least touch of any
original talent or genius in one of the parties, it is sure to result in
many ideas that will be outside of any local common sense, and then the
other party, living in that sense, will consider those ideas peculiar, and
perhaps deplorable. Here, then, are elements of dissension lying quite
ready like explosive materials, and the merest accident may shatter in a
moment the whole fabric of affection. To prevent such an accident an
artificial kind of intercourse is adopted which is not real companionship,
or anything resembling it.

The reader may imagine, and has probably observed in real life, a marriage
in which the husband is a man of original power, able to think forcibly
and profoundly, and the wife a gentle being quite unable to enter into any
thought of that quality. In cases of that kind the husband may be
affectionate and even tender, but he is careful to utter nothing beyond
the safest commonplaces. In the presence of his wife he keeps his mind
quite within the circle of custom. He has, indeed, no other resource.
Custom and commonplace are the protection of the intelligent against
misapprehension and disapproval.

Marriages of this unequal kind are an imitation of those equal marriages
in which both parties live in the local common sense; but there is this
vast difference between them, that in the imitation the more intelligent
of the two parties has to stifle half his nature. An intelligent man has
to make up his mind in early life whether he has courage enough for such
a sacrifice or not. Let him try the experiment of associating for a short
time with people who cannot understand him, and if he likes the feeling of
repression that results from it, if he is able to stop short always at the
right moment, if he can put his knowledge on the shelf as one puts a book
in a library, then perhaps he may safely undertake the long labor of
companionship with an unsuitable wife.

This is sometimes done in pure hopelessness of ever finding a true mate. A
man has no belief in any real companionship, and therefore simply conforms
to custom in his marriage, as Montaigne did, allying himself with some
young lady who is considered in the neighborhood to be a suitable match
for him. This is the _mariage de convenance_. Its purposes are
intelligible and attainable. It may add considerably to the dignity and
convenience of life and to that particular kind of happiness which results
from satisfaction with our own worldly prudence. There is also the
probability that by perfect courtesy, by a scrupulous observance of the
rules of intercourse between highly civilized persons who are not
extremely intimate, the parties who contract a marriage of this kind may
give each other the mild satisfactions that are the reward of the
well-bred. There is a certain pleasure in watching every movement of an
accomplished lady, and if she is your wife there may also be a certain
pride. She receives your guests well; she holds her place with perfect
self-possession at your table and in her drawing-room; she never commits a
social solecism; and you feel that you can trust her absolutely. Her
private income is a help in the maintenance of your establishment and so
increases your credit in the world. She gives you in this way a series of
satisfactions that may even, in course of time, produce rather
affectionate feelings. If she died you would certainly regret her loss,
and think that life was, on the whole, decidedly less agreeable without
her.

But alas for the dreams of youth if this is all that is to be gained by
marriage! Where is the sweet friend and companion who was to have
accompanied us through prosperous or adverse years, who was to have
charmed and consoled us, who was to have given us the infinite happiness
of being understood and loved at the same time? Were all those dreams
delusions? Is the best companionship a mere fiction of the fancy, not
existing anywhere upon the earth?

I believe in the promises of Nature. I believe that in every want there is
the promise of a possible satisfaction. If we are hungry there is food
somewhere, if we are thirsty there is drink. But in the things of the
world there is often an indication of order rather than a realization of
it, so that in the confusion of accidents the hungry man may be starving
in a beleaguered city and the thirsty man parched in the Sahara. All that
the wants indicate is that their satisfaction is possible in nature. Let
us believe that, for every one, the true mate exists somewhere in the
world. She is worth seeking for at any cost of trouble or expense, worth
travelling round the globe to find, worth the endurance of labor and pain
and privation. Men suffer all this for objects of far inferior
importance; they risk life for the chance of a ribbon, and sacrifice
leisure and peace for the smallest increase of social position. What are
these vanities in comparison with the priceless benefit, the continual
blessing, of having with you always the one person whose presence can
deliver you from all the evils of solitude without imposing the
constraints and hypocrisies of society? With her you are free to be as
much yourself as when alone; you say what you think and she understands
you. Your silence does not offend her; she only thinks that there will be
time enough to talk together afterwards. You know that you can trust her
love, which is as unfailing as a law of nature. The differences of
idiosyncrasy that exist between you only add interest to your intercourse
by preventing her from becoming a mere echo of yourself. She has her own
ways, her own thoughts that are not yours and yet are all open to you, so
that you no longer dwell in one intellect only but have constant access to
a second intellect, probably more refined and elegant, richer in what is
delicate and beautiful. There you make unexpected discoveries; you find
that the first instinctive preference is more than justified by merits
that you had not divined. You had hoped and trusted vaguely that there
were certain qualities; but as a painter who looks long at a natural scene
is constantly discovering new beauties whilst he is painting it, so the
long and loving observation of a beautiful human mind reveals a thousand
unexpected excellences. Then come the trials of life, the sudden
calamities, the long and wearing anxieties. Each of these will only reveal
more clearly the wonderful endurance, fidelity, and fortitude that there
is in every noble feminine nature, and so build up on the foundation of
your early love an unshakable edifice of esteem and respect and love
commingled, for which in our modern tongue we have no single term, but
which our forefathers called "worship."




ESSAY V.

FAMILY TIES.


One of the most remarkable differences between the English and some of the
Continental nations is the comparative looseness of family ties in
England. The apparent difference is certainly very great; the real
difference is possibly not so great. It may be that a good deal of that
warm family affection which we are constantly hearing of in France is only
make-believe, but the keeping-up of a make-believe is often favorable to
the reality. In England a great deal of religion is mere outward form; but
to be surrounded by the constant observance of outward form is a great
practical convenience to the genuine religious sentiment where it exists.

In boyhood we suppose that all gentlemen of mature age who happen to be
brothers must naturally have fraternal feelings; in mature life we know
the truth, having discovered that there are many brothers between whom no
sentiment of fraternity exists. A foreigner who knows England well, and
has observed it more carefully than we ourselves do, remarked to me that
the fraternal relationship is not generally a cause of attachment in
England, though there may be cases of exceptional affection. It certainly
often happens that brothers live contentedly apart and do not seem to feel
the need of intercourse, or that such intercourse as they have has no
appearance of cordiality. A very common cause of estrangement is a natural
difference of class. One man is so constituted as to feel more at ease in
a higher class, and he rises; his brother feels more at ease in a lower
class, adopts its manners, and sinks. After a few years have passed the
two will have acquired such different habits, both of thinking and living,
that they will be disqualified for equal intercourse. If one brother is a
gentleman in tastes and manners and the other not a gentleman, the
vulgarity of the coarser nature will be all the more offensive to the
refined one that there is the troublesome consciousness of a very near
relationship and of a sort of indefinite responsibility.

The frequency of coolness between brothers surprises us less when we
observe how widely they may differ from each other in mental and physical
constitution. One may be a sportsman, traveller, man of the world; another
a religious recluse. One may have a sensitive, imaginative nature and be
keenly alive to the influences of literature, painting, and music; his
brother may be a hard, practical man of business, with a conviction that
an interest in literary and artistic pursuits is only a sign of weakness.

The extreme uncertainty that always exists about what really constitutes
suitableness is seen as much between brothers as between other men; for we
sometimes see a beautiful fraternal affection between brothers who seem to
have nothing whatever in common, and sometimes an equal affection appears
to be founded upon likeness.

Jealousy in its various forms is especially likely to arise between
brothers, and between sisters also for the same reason, which is that
comparisons are constantly suggested and even made with injudicious
openness by parents and teachers, and by talkative friends. The
development of the faculties in youth is always extremely interesting, and
is a constant subject of observation and speculation. If it is interesting
to on-lookers, it is still more likely to be so to the young persons most
concerned. They feel as young race-horses might be expected to feel
towards each other if they could understand the conversations of trainers,
stud-owners, and grooms.

If a full account of family life could be generally accessible, if we
could read autobiographies written by the several members of the same
family, giving a sincere and independent account of their own youth, it
would probably be found in most cases that jealousies were easily
discoverable. They need not be very intense to create a slight fissure of
separation that may be slowly widened afterwards.

If you listen attentively to the conversation of brothers about brothers,
of sisters about sisters, you will probably detect such little jealousies
without difficulty. "My sister," said a lady in my hearing, "was very much
admired when she was young, _but she aged prematurely_." Behind this it
was easy to read the comparison with self, with a constitution less
attractive to others but more robust and durable, and there was a faint
reverberation of girlish jealousy about attentions paid forty years
before.

The jealousies of youth are too natural to deserve any serious blame, but
they may be a beginning of future coolness. A boy will seem to praise the
talents of his brother with the purpose of implying that the facilities
given by such talents make industry almost superfluous, whilst his own
more strenuous efforts are not appreciated as they deserve. Instead of
soothing and calming these natural jealousies some parents irritate and
inflame them. They make wounding remarks that produce evil in after years.
I have seen a sensitive boy wince under cutting sarcasms that he will
remember till his hair is gray.

If there are fraternal jealousies in boyhood, when the material comforts
and the outward show of existence are the same for brothers, much more are
these jealousies likely to be accentuated in after-life, when differences
of worldly success, or of inherited fortune, establish distinctions so
obvious as to be visible to all. The operation of the aristocratic custom
by which eldest sons are made very much richer than their brethren can
scarcely be in favor of fraternal intimacy. No general rule can be
established, because characters differ so widely. An eldest brother _may_
be so amiable, so truly fraternal, that the cadets instead of feeling envy
of his wealth may take a positive pride in it; still, the natural effect
of creating such a vast inequality is to separate the favored heir from
the less-favored younger sons. I leave the reader to think over instances
that may be known to him. Amongst those known to me I find several cases
of complete or partial suspension of intercourse and others of manifest
indifference and coolness. One incident recurs to my memory after a lapse
of thirty years. I was present at the departure of a young friend for
India when his eldest brother was too indifferent to get up a little
earlier to see him off, and said, "Oh, you're going, are you? Well,
good-by, John!" through his bedroom door. The lad carried a wound in his
heart to the distant East.

There is nothing in the mere fact of fraternity to establish friendship.
The line of "In Memoriam,"--

  "More than my brothers are to me,"

is simply true of every real friend, unless friendship adds itself to
brotherhood, in which case the intimacy arising from a thousand details of
early life in common, from the thorough knowledge of the same persons and
places, and from the memories of parental affection, must give a rare
completeness to friendship itself and make it in these respects even
superior to marriage, which has the great defect that the associations of
early life are not the same. I remember a case of wonderfully strong
affection between two brothers who were daily companions till death
separated them; but they were younger sons and their incomes were exactly
alike; their tastes, too, and all their habits were the same. The only
other case that occurs to me as comparable to this one was also of two
younger sons, one of whom had an extraordinary talent for business. They
were partners in trade, and no dissension ever arose between them, because
the superiority of the specially able man was affectionately recognized
and deferred to by the other. If, however, they had not been partners it
is possible that the brilliant success of one brother might have created
a contrast and made intercourse more constrained.

The case of John Bright and his brother may be mentioned, as he has made
it public in one of his most charming and interesting speeches. His
political work has prevented him from laboring in his business, but his
brother and partner has affectionately considered him an active member of
the firm, so that Mr. Bright has enjoyed an income sufficient for his
political independence. In this instance the comparatively obscure brother
has shown real nobility of nature. Free from the jealousy and envy which
would have vexed a small mind in such a position he has taken pleasure in
the fame of the statesman. It is easy to imagine the view that a mean mind
would have taken of a similar situation. Let us add that the statesman
himself has shown true fraternal generosity of another kind, and perhaps
of a more difficult kind, for it is often easier to confer an obligation
than to accept it heartily.

It has often been a subject of astonishment to me that between very near
relations a sensitive feeling about pecuniary matters should be so lively
as it is. I remember an instance in the last generation of a rich man in
Cheshire who made a present of ten thousand pounds to a lady nearly
related to him. He was very wealthy, she was not; the sum would never be
missed by him, whilst to her it made a great difference. What could be
more reasonable than such a correction of the inequalities of fortune?
Many people would have refused the present, out of pride, but it was much
kinder to accept it in the same good spirit that dictated the offer. On
the other hand, there are poor gentlefolks whose only fault is a sense of
independence, so _farouche_ that nobody can get them to accept anything of
importance, and any good that is done to them has to be plotted with
consummate art.

A wonderful light is thrown upon family relations when we become
acquainted with the real state of those family pecuniary transactions that
are not revealed to the public. The strangest discovery is the widely
different ways in which pecuniary obligations are estimated by different
persons, especially by different women. Men, I believe, take them rather
more equally; but as women go by sentiment they have a tendency to
extremes, either exaggerating the importance of an obligation when they
like to feel very much obliged, or else adopting the convenient theory
that the generous person is fulfilling a simple duty, and that there is no
obligation whatever. One woman will go into ecstasies of gratitude because
a brother makes her a present of a few pounds; and another will never
thank a benefactor who allows her, year by year, an annuity far larger
than is justified by his precarious professional income. In one real case
a lady lived for many years on her brother's generosity and was openly
hostile to him all the time. After her death it was found that she had
insulted him in her will. In another case a sister dependent on her
brother's bounty never thanked him or even acknowledged the receipt of a
sum of money, but if the money was not sent to the day she would at once
write a sharp letter full of bitter reproaches for his neglect. The marvel
is the incredible patience with which toiling men will go on sending the
fruits of their industry to relations who do not even make a pretence of
affection.

A frequent cause of hostility between very near relations is the
_restriction_ of generosity. So long as you set no limit to your giving it
is well, you are doing your duty; but the moment you fix a limit the case
is altered; then all past sacrifices go for nothing, your glory has set in
gloom, and you will be considered as more niggardly than if you had not
begun to be generous. Here is a real case, out of many. A man makes bad
speculations, but conceals the full extent of his losses, and by the
influence of his wife obtains important sums from a near relation of hers
who half ruins himself to save her. When the full disaster is known the
relation stops short and declines to ruin himself entirely; she then
bitterly reproaches him for his selfishness. A very short time before
writing the present Essay I was travelling, and met an old friend, a
bachelor of limited means but of a most generous disposition, the kindest
and most affectionate nature I ever knew in the male sex. I asked for news
about his brother. "I never see him now; a coldness has sprung up between
us."--"It must be his fault, then, for I am sure it did not originate with
you."--"The truth is, he got into money difficulties, so I gave him a
thousand pounds. He thought that under the circumstances I ought to have
done more and broke off all intercourse. I really believe that if I had
given him nothing we should have been more friendly at this day."

The question how far we are bound to allow family ties to regulate our
intercourse is not easily treated in general terms, though it seems
plainer in particular cases. Here is one for the reader's consideration.

Owing to natural refinement, and to certain circumstances of which he
intelligently availed himself, one member of a family is a cultivated
gentleman, whose habitual ways of thinking are of rather an elevated kind,
and whose manners and language are invariably faultless. He is blessed
with very near relations whose principal characteristic is loud,
confident, overwhelming vulgarity. He is always uncomfortable with these
relations. He knows that the ways of thinking and speaking which are
natural to him will seem cold and uncongenial to them; that not one of his
thoughts can be exactly understood by them; that his deficiency in what
they consider heartiness is a defect he cannot get over. On the other
hand, he takes no interest in what they say, because their opinions on all
the subjects he cares about are too crude, and their information too
scanty or erroneous. If he said what he felt impelled to say, all his talk
would be a perpetual correction of their clumsy blunders. He has,
therefore, no resource but to repress himself and try to act a part, the
part of a pleased companion; but this is wearisome, especially if
prolonged. The end is that he keeps out of their way, and is set down as a
proud, conceited person, and an unkind relative. In reality he is simply
refined and has a difficulty in accommodating himself to the ways of all
vulgar society whatever, whether composed of his own relations or of
strangers. Does he deserve to be blamed for this? Certainly not. He has
not the flexibility, the dramatic power, to adapt himself to a lower
state of civilization; that is his only fault. His relations are persons
with whom, if they were not relations, nobody would expect him to
associate; but because he and they happen to be descended from a common
ancestor he is to maintain an impossible intimacy. He wishes them no harm;
he is ready to make sacrifices to help them; his misfortune is that he
does not possess the humor of a Dickens that would have enabled him to
find amusement in their vulgarity, and he prefers solitude to that
infliction.

There is a French proverb, "Les cousins ne sont pas parents." The exact
truth would appear to be rather that cousins are relations or not just as
it pleases them to acknowledge the relationship, and according to the
natural possibilities of companionship between the parties. If they are of
the same class in society (which does not always happen), and if they have
pursuits in common or can understand each other's interests, and if there
is that mysterious suitableness which makes people like to be together,
then the fact of cousinship is seized upon as a convenient pretext for
making intercourse more frequent, more intimate, and more affectionate;
but if there is nothing to attract one cousin to another the relationship
is scarcely acknowledged. Cousins are, or are not, relations just as they
find it agreeable to themselves. It need hardly be added that it is a
general though not an invariable rule that the relationship is better
remembered on the humbler side. The cousinly degree may be felt to be very
close under peculiar circumstances. An only child looks to his cousins
for the brotherly and sisterly affection that fate has denied him at home,
and he is not always disappointed. Even distant cousins may be truly
fraternal, just as first cousins may happen to be very distant, the
relationship is so variable and elastic in its nature.

Unmarried people have often a great vague dread of their future wife's
relations, even when the lady has not yet been fixed upon, and married
people have sometimes found the reality more terrible even than their
gloomy anticipation. And yet it may happen that some of these dreaded new
relations will be unexpectedly valuable and supply elements that were
grievously wanting. They may bring new life into a dull house, they may
enliven the sluggish talk with wit and information, they may take a too
thoughtful and studious man out of the weary round of his own ideas. They
may even in course of time win such a place in one's affection that if
they are taken away by death they will leave a great void and an enduring
sorrow. I write these lines from a sweet and sad experience.[5]

Intellectual men are, more than others, liable to a feeling of
dissatisfaction with their relations because they want intellectual
sympathy and interest, which relations hardly ever give. The reason is
extremely simple. Any special intellectual pursuit is understood only by a
small select class of its own, and our relations are given us out of the
general body of society without any selection, and they are not very
numerous, so that the chances against our finding intellectual sympathy
amongst them are calculably very great. As we grow older we get accustomed
to this absence of sympathy with our pursuits, and take it as a matter of
course; but in youth it seems strange that what we feel and know to be so
interesting should have no interest for those nearest to us. Authors
sometimes feel a little hurt that their nearest relations will not read
their books, and are but dimly aware that they have written any books at
all; but do they read books of the same class by other writers? As an
author you are in the same position that other authors occupy, but with
this difference, which is against you, that familiarity has made you a
commonplace person in your own circle, and that is a bad opening for the
reception of your higher thoughts. This want of intellectual sympathy does
not prevent affection, and we ought to appreciate affection at its full
value in spite of it. Your brother or your cousin may be strongly attached
to you personally, with an old love dating from your boyhood, but he may
separate _you_ (the human creature that he knows) from the author of your
books, and not feel the slightest curiosity about the books, believing
that he knows you perfectly without them, and that they are only a sort of
costume in which you perform before the public. A female relative who has
given up her mind to the keeping of some clergyman, may scrupulously avoid
your literature in order that it may not contaminate her soul, and yet she
may love you still in a painful way and be sincerely sorry that you have
no other prospect but that of eternal punishment.

I have sometimes heard the question proposed whether relations or friends
were the more valuable as a support and consolation. Fate gives us our
relations, whilst we select our friends; and therefore it would seem at
first sight that the friends must be better adapted for us; but it may
happen that we have not selected with great wisdom, or that we have not
had good opportunities for making a choice really answering to our deepest
needs. Still, there must have been mutual affinity of some kind to make a
friendship, whilst relations are all like tickets in a lottery. It may
therefore be argued that the more relations we have, the better, because
we are more likely to meet with two or three to love us amongst fifty than
amongst five.

The peculiar peril of blood-relationship is that those who are closely
connected by it often permit themselves an amount of mutual rudeness
(especially in the middle and lower classes) which they never would think
of inflicting upon a stranger. In some families people really seem to
suppose that it does not matter how roughly they treat each other. They
utter unmeasured reproaches about trifles not worth a moment's anger; they
magnify small differences that only require to be let alone and forgotten,
or they relieve the monotony of quarrels with an occasional fit of the
sulks. Sometimes it is an irascible father who is always scolding,
sometimes a loud-tongued matron shrieks "in her fierce volubility." Some
children take up the note and fire back broadside for broadside; others
wait for a cessation in contemptuous silence and calmly disregard the
thunder. Family life indeed! domestic peace and bliss! Give me, rather,
the bachelor's lonely hearth with a noiseless lamp and a book! The manners
of the ill-mannered are never so odious, unbearable, exasperating, as they
are to their own nearest kindred. How is a lad to enjoy the society of his
mother if she is perpetually "nagging" and "nattering" at him? How is he
to believe that his coarse father has a tender anxiety for his welfare
when everything that he does is judged with unfatherly harshness? Those
who are condemned to live with people for whom scolding and quarrelling
are a necessary of existence must either be rude in self-defence or take
refuge in a sullen and stubborn taciturnity. Young people who have to live
in these little domestic hells look forward to any change as a desirable
emancipation. They are ready to go to sea, to emigrate. I have heard of
one who went into domestic service under a feigned name that he might be
out of the range of his brutal father's tongue.

The misery of uncongenial relations is caused mainly by the irksome
consciousness that they are obliged to live together. "To think that there
is so much space upon the earth, that there are so many houses, so many
rooms, and yet that I am so unfortunate as to be compelled to live in the
same lodging with this uncivilized, ill-conditioned fellow! To think that
there are such vast areas of tranquil silence, and yet that I am compelled
to hear the voice of that scolding woman!" This is the feeling, and the
relief would be temporary separation. In this, as in almost everything
that concerns human intercourse, the rich have an immense advantage, as
they can take only just so much of each other's society as they find by
experience to be agreeable. They can quietly, and without rudeness, avoid
each other by living in different houses, and even in the same house they
can have different apartments and be very little together. Imagine the
difference between two rich brothers, each with his suite of rooms in a
separate tower of the paternal castle, and two very poor ones,
inconveniently occupying the same narrow, uncomfortable bed, and unable to
remain in the wretched paternal tenement without being constantly in each
other's way. Between these extremes are a thousand degrees of more or less
inconvenient nearness. Solitude is bad for us, but we need a margin of
free space. If we are to be crowded let it be as the stars are crowded.
They look as if they were huddled together, but every one of them has his
own clear space in the illimitable ether.




ESSAY VI.

FATHERS AND SONS.


There is a certain unsatisfactoriness in this relation in our time which
is felt by fathers and often avowed by them when they meet, though it does
not occupy any conspicuous place in the literature of life and manners. It
has been fully treated by M. Legouvé, the French Academician, in his own
lively and elegant way; but he gave it a volume, and I must here confine
myself to the few points which can be dealt with in the limits of a short
Essay.

We are in an interregnum between two systems. The old system, founded on
the stern authority of the father, is felt to be out of harmony with the
amenity of general social intercourse in modern times and also with the
increasing gentleness of political governors and the freedom of the
governed. It is therefore, by common consent, abandoned. Some new system
that may be founded upon a clear intelligence of both the paternal and the
filial relations has yet to come into force. Meanwhile, we are trying
various experiments, suggested by the different characters and
circumstances of fathers and sons, each father trying his own experiments,
and we communicate to each other such results as we arrive at.

It is obvious that the defect here is the absence of a settled public
opinion to which both parties would feel bound to defer. Under the old
system the authority of the father was efficiently maintained, not only by
the laws, but by that general consensus of opinion which is far more
powerful than law. The new system, whatever it may be, will be founded on
general opinion again, but our present experimental condition is one of
anarchy.

This is the real cause of whatever may be felt as unsatisfactory in the
modern paternal and filial relations. It is not that fathers have become
more unjust or sons more rebellious.

The position of the father was in old times perfectly defined. He was the
commander, not only armed by the law but by religion and custom.
Disobedience to his dictates was felt to be out of the question, unless
the insurgent was prepared to meet the consequences of open mutiny. The
maintenance of the father's authority depended only on himself. If he
abdicated it through indolence or weakness he incurred moral reprobation
not unmingled with contempt, whilst in the present day reprobation would
rather follow a new attempt to vindicate the antique authority.

Besides this change in public opinion there is a new condition of paternal
feeling. The modern father, in the most civilized nations and classes, has
acquired a sentiment that appears to have been absolutely unknown to his
predecessors: he has acquired a dislike for command which increases with
the age of the son; so that there is an unfortunate coincidence of
increasing strength of will on the son's part with decreasing disposition
to restrain it on the father's part. What a modern father really desires
is that a son should go right of his own accord, and if not quite of his
own accord, then in consequence of a little affectionate persuasion. This
feeling would make command unsatisfactory to us, even if it were followed
by a military promptitude of obedience. We do not wish to be like
captains, and our sons like privates in a company; we care only to
exercise a certain beneficent influence over them, and we feel that if we
gave military orders we should destroy that peculiar influence which is of
the most fragile and delicate nature.

But now see the unexpected consequences of our modern dislike to command!
It might be argued that there is a certain advantage on our side from the
very rarity of the commands we give, which endows them with extraordinary
force. Would it not be more accurate to say that as we give orders less
and less our sons become unaccustomed to receive orders from us, and if
ever the occasion arises when we _must_ give them a downright order it
comes upon their feelings with a harshness so excessive that they are
likely to think us tyrannical, whereas if we had kept up the old habits of
command such orders would have seemed natural and right, and would not
have been less scrupulously obeyed?

The paternal dislike to give orders personally has had a peculiar effect
upon education. We are not yet quite imbecile enough to suppose that
discipline can be entirely dispensed with; and as there is very little of
it in modern houses it has to be sought elsewhere, so boys are placed
more and more completely under the authority of schoolmasters, often
living at such a distance from the father of the family that for several
months at a time he can exercise no direct influence or authority over his
own children. This leads to the establishment of a peculiar boyish code of
justice. Boys come to think it not unjust that the schoolmaster should
exercise authority, when if the father attempted to exercise authority of
equal rigor, or anything approaching it, they would look upon him as an
odious domestic tyrant, entirely forgetting that any power to enforce
obedience which is possessed by the schoolmaster is held by him
vicariously as the father's representative and delegate. From this we
arrive at the curious and unforeseen conclusion that the modern father
only exercises _strong_ authority through another person who is often a
perfect stranger and whose interest in the boy's present and future
well-being is as nothing in comparison with the father's anxious and
continual solicitude.

The custom of placing the education of sons entirely in the hands of
strangers is so deadly a blow to parental influence that some fathers have
resolutely rebelled against it and tried to become themselves the
educators of their children. James Mill is the most conspicuous instance
of this, both for persistence and success. His way of educating his
illustrious son has often been coarsely misrepresented as a merciless
system of cram. The best answer to this is preserved for us in the words
of the pupil himself. He said expressly: "Mine was not an education of
cram," and that the one cardinal point in it, the cause of the good it
effected, was that his father never permitted anything he learnt to
degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He greatly valued the training
he had received, and fully appreciated its utility to him in after-life.
"If I have accomplished anything," he says, "I owe it, amongst other
fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training
bestowed on me by my father I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage
of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries."

But though in this case the pupil's feeling in after-life was one of
gratitude, it may be asked what were his filial sentiments whilst this
paternal education was going forward. This question also is clearly and
frankly answered by Stuart Mill himself. He says that his father was
severe; that his authority was deficient in the demonstration of
tenderness, though probably not in the reality of it; that "he resembled
most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the
absence of demonstration starving the feelings themselves." Then the son
goes on to say that it was "impossible not to feel true pity for a father
who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so
valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that
fear of him was drying it up at its source." And we probably have the
exact truth about Stuart Mill's own sentiments when he says that the
younger children loved his father tenderly, "and if I cannot say so much
of myself I was always loyally devoted to him."

This contains the central difficulty about paternal education. If the
choice were left to boys they would learn nothing, and you cannot make
them work vigorously "by the sole force of persuasion and soft words."
Therefore a severe discipline has to be established, and this severity is
incompatible with tenderness; so that in order to preserve the affection
of his children the father intrusts discipline to a delegate.

But if the objection to parental education is clear in Mill's case, so are
its advantages, and especially the one inestimable advantage that the
father was able to impress himself on his son's mind and to live
afterwards in his son's intellectual life. James Mill did not _abdicate_,
as fathers generally do. He did not confine paternal duties to the simple
one of signing checks. And if it is not in our power to imitate him
entirely, if we have not his profound and accurate knowledge, if we have
not his marvellous patience, if it is not desirable that we should take
upon ourselves alone that immense responsibility which he accepted, may we
not imitate him to such a degree as to secure _some_ intellectual and
moral influence over our own offspring and not leave them entirely to the
teaching of the schoolfellow (that most influential and most dangerous of
all teachers), the pedagogue, and the priest?

The only practical way in which this can be done is for the father to act
within fixed limits. May he not reserve to himself some speciality? He can
do this if he is himself master of some language or science that enters
into the training of his son; but here again certain difficulties present
themselves.

By the one vigorous resolution to take the entire burden upon his own
shoulders James Mill escaped minor embarrassments. It is the _partial_
education by the father that is difficult to carry out with steadiness and
consistency. First, as to place of residence. If your son is far away
during his months of work, and at home only for vacation pleasures, what,
pray, is your hold upon him? He escapes from you in two directions, by
work and by play. I have seen a Highland gentleman who, to avoid this and
do his duty to his sons, quitted a beautiful residence in magnificent
scenery to go and live in the dull and ugly neighborhood of Rugby. It is
not convenient or possible for every father to make the same sacrifice,
but if you are able to do it other difficulties remain. Any speciality
that you may choose will be regarded by your son as a trifling and
unimportant accomplishment in comparison with Greek and Latin, because
that is the school estimate; and if you choose either Greek or Latin your
scholarship will be immediately pitted against the scholarship of
professional teachers whose more recent and more perfect methods will
place you in a position of inferiority, instantly perceived by your pupil,
who will estimate you accordingly. The only two cases I have ever
personally known in which a father taught the classical languages failed
in the object of increasing the son's affection and respect, because,
although the father had been quite a first-rate scholar in his time, his
ways of teaching were not so economical of effort as are the professional
ways; and the boys perceived that they were not taking the shortest cut to
a degree.

If, to avoid this comparison, you choose something outside the school
curriculum, the boy will probably consider it an unfair addition to the
burden of his work. His view of education is not your view. _You_ think it
a valuable training or acquirement; _he_ considers it all task-work, like
the making of bricks in Egypt; and his notion of justice is that he ought
not to be compelled to make more bricks than his class-fellows, who are
happy in having fathers too indolent or too ignorant to trouble them. If,
therefore, you teach him something outside of what his school-fellows do,
he does not think, "I get the advantage of a wider education than theirs;"
but he thinks, "My father lays an imposition upon me, and my
school-fellows are lucky to escape it."

In some instances the father chooses a modern language as the thing that
he will teach; but he finds that as he cannot apply the school discipline
(too harsh and unpaternal for use at home), there is a quiet, passive
resistance that will ultimately defeat him unless he has inexhaustible
patience. He decrees, let us suppose, that French shall be spoken at
table; but the chief effect of his decree is to reveal great and
unsuspected powers of taciturnity. Who could be such a tyrant as to find
fault with a boy because he so modestly chooses to be silent? Speech may
be of silver, but silence is of gold, and it is especially beautiful and
becoming in the young.

Seeing that everything in the way of intellectual training is looked upon
by boys as an unfair addition to school-work, some fathers abandon that
altogether, and try to win influence over their sons by initiating them
into sports and pastimes. Just at first these happy projects appear to
unite the useful with the agreeable; but as the youthful nature is much
better fitted for sports and pastimes than middle-age can pretend to be,
it follows that the pupil very soon excels the master in these things, and
quite gets the upper hand of him and offers him advice, or else dutifully
(but with visible constraint) condescends to accommodate himself to the
elder man's inferiority; so that perhaps upon the whole it may be that
sports and pastimes are not the field of exertion in which paternal
authority is most likely to preserve a dignified preponderance.

It is complacently assumed by men of fifty that over-ripe maturity is the
superior of adolescence; but an impartial balance of advantages shows that
some very brilliant ones are on the side of youth. At fifty we may be
wiser, richer, more famous than a clever boy; but he does not care much
for our wisdom, he thinks that expenses are a matter of course, and our
little rushlights of reputations are as nothing to the future electric
illumination of his own. In bodily activity we are to boyhood what a
domestic cow is to a wild antelope; and as boys rightly attach an immense
value to such activity they generally look upon us, in their secret
thoughts, as miserable old "muffs." I distinctly remember, when a boy,
accompanying a middle-aged gentleman to a country railway station. We were
a little late, and the distance was long, but my companion could not be
induced to go beyond his regular pace. At last we were within half a mile,
and the steam of the locomotive became visible. "Now let us run for it," I
cried, "and we shall catch the train!" Run?--_he_ run, indeed! I might as
well have asked the Pope to run in the streets of Rome! My friend kept in
silent solemnity to his own dignified method of motion, and we were left
behind. To this day I well remember the feelings of contemptuous pity and
disgust that filled me as I looked upon that most respectable gentleman. I
said not a word; my demeanor was outwardly decorous; but in my secret
heart I despised my unequal companion with the unmitigated contempt of
youth.

Even those physical exertions that elderly men are equal to--the ten
miles' walk, the ride on a docile hunter, the quiet drive or sail--are so
much below the achievements of fiery youth that they bring us no more
credit than sitting in a chair. Though our efforts seem so respectable to
ourselves that we take a modest pride therein, a young man can only look
upon them with indulgence.

In the mental powers elderly men are inferior on the very point that a
young man looks to first. His notion of cleverness, by which he estimates
all his comrades, is not depth of thought, nor wisdom, nor sagacity; it is
simply rapidity in learning, and there his elders are hopelessly behind
him. They may extend or deepen an old study, but they cannot attack a new
one with the conquering spirit of youth. _Too late! too late! too late!_
is inscribed, for them, on a hundred gates of knowledge. The young man,
with his powers of acquisition urging him like unsatisfied appetites, sees
the gates all open and believes they are open for him. He believes all
knowledge to be his possible province, knowing not yet the chilling,
disheartening truth that life is too short for success in any but a very
few directions. Confident in his powers, the young man prepares himself
for difficult examinations, and he knows that we should be incapable of
the same efforts.

Not having succeeded very well with attempts to create intercourse through
studies and amusements, the father next consoles himself with the idea
that he will convert his son into an intimate friend; but shortly
discovers that there are certain difficulties, of which a few may be
mentioned here.

Although the relationship between father and son is a very near
relationship, it may happen that there is but little likeness of inherited
idiosyncrasy, and therefore that the two may have different and even
opposite tastes. By the law or accident of atavism a boy may resemble one
of his grandfathers or some remoter ancestor, or he may puzzle theorists
about heredity by characteristics for which there is no known precedent in
his family. Both his mental instincts and processes, and the conclusions
to which they lead him, may be entirely different from the habits and
conclusions of his father; and if the father is so utterly unphilosophical
as to suppose (what vulgar fathers constantly _do_ suppose) that his own
mental habits and conclusions are the right ones, and all others wrong,
then he will adopt a tone of authority towards his son, on certain
occasions, which the young man will excusably consider unbearable and
which he will avoid by shunning the paternal society. Even a very mild
attempt on the father's part to impose his own tastes and opinions will be
quietly resented and felt as a reason for avoiding him, because the son is
well aware that he cannot argue on equal terms with a man who, however
amiable he chooses to be for the moment, can at any time arm himself with
the formidable paternal dignity by simply taking the trouble to assume it.

The mere difference of age is almost an insuperable barrier to
comradeship; for though a middle-aged man may be cheerful, his
cheerfulness is "as water unto wine" in comparison with the merriment of
joyous youth. So exuberant is that youthful gayety that it often needs to
utter downright nonsense for the relief of its own high spirits, and feels
oppressed in sober society where nonsense is not permitted. Any elderly
gentleman who reads this has only to consult his own recollections, and
ask himself whether in youth he did not often say and do utterly
irrational things. If he never did, he never was really young. I hardly
know any author, except Shakspeare, who has ventured to reproduce, in its
perfect absurdity, the full flow of youthful nonsense. The criticism of
our own age would scarcely tolerate it in books, and might accuse the
author himself of being silly; but the thing still exists abundantly in
real life, and the wonder is that it is sometimes the most intelligent
young men who enjoy the most witless nonsense of all. When we have lost
the high spirits that gave it a relish, it becomes very wearisome if
prolonged. Young men instinctively know that we are past the appreciation
of it.

Another very important reason why fathers and sons have a difficulty in
maintaining close friendships is the steady divergence of their
experience.

In childhood, the father's knowledge of places, people, and things
includes the child's knowledge, as a large circle includes a little one
drawn within it. Afterwards the boy goes to school, and has comrades and
masters whom his father does not personally know. Later on, he visits many
places where his father has never been.

The son's life may socially diverge so completely from that of the father
that he may really come to belong to a different class in society. His
education, habits, and associates may be different from those of his
father. If the family is growing richer they are likely to be (in the
worldly sense) of a higher class; if it is becoming poorer they will
probably be of a lower class than the father was accustomed to in his
youth. The son may feel more at ease than his father does in very refined
society, or, on the other hand, he may feel refined society to be a
restraint, whilst he only enjoys himself thoroughly and heartily amongst
vulgar people that his father would carefully avoid.

Divergence is carried to its utmost by difference of professional
training, and by the professional habit of seeing things that follows from
it. If a clergyman puts his son into a solicitor's office, he need not
expect that the son will long retain those views of the world that prevail
in the country parsonage where he was born. He will acquire other views,
other mental habits, and he will very soon believe himself to possess a
far greater and more accurate knowledge of mankind, and of affairs, than
his father ever possessed.

Even if the son is in the father's own profession he will have new views
of it derived from the time at which he learns it, and he is likely to
consider his father's ideas as not brought down to the latest date. He
will also have a tendency to look to strangers as greater authorities than
his father, even when they are really on the same level, because they are
not lowered in his estimate by domestic intimacy and familiarity. Their
opinion will be especially valued by the young man if it has to be paid
for, it being an immense depreciation of the paternal counsel that it is
always given gratuitously.

If the father has bestowed upon his son what is considered a "complete"
education, and if he himself has not received the same "complete"
education in his youth, the son is likely to accept the conventional
estimate of education because it is in his own favor, and to estimate his
father as an "uneducated" or a "half-educated" man, without taking into
much account the possibility that his father may have developed his
faculties by mental labor in other ways. The conventional division between
"educated" and "uneducated" men is so definite that it is easily seen. The
educated are those who have taken a degree at one of the Universities; the
rest are uneducated, whatever may be their attainments in the sciences, in
modern languages, or in the fine arts.

There are differences of education even more serious than this, because
more real. A man may be not only conventionally uneducated, but he may be
really and truly uneducated, by which I mean that his faculties may never
have been drawn out by intellectual discipline of any kind whatever. It is
hard indeed for a well-educated young man to live under the authority of
a father of that kind, because he has constantly to suppress reasons and
motives for opinions and decisions that such a father could not possibly
enter into or understand. The relationship is equally hard for the father,
who must be aware, with the lively suspicion of the ignorant, that his son
is not telling him all his thought but only the portion of it which he
thinks fit to reveal, and that much more is kept in reserve. He will ask,
"Why this reserve towards _me_?" and then he will either be profoundly
hurt and grieved by it at times, or else, if of another temper, he will be
irritated, and his irritation may find harsh utterance in words.

An educated man can never rid himself of his education. His views of the
most ordinary things are different from the views of the uneducated. If he
were to express them in his own language they would say, "Why, how he
talks!" and consider him "a queer chap;" and if he keeps them to himself
they say he is very "close" and "shut up." There is no way out of the
dilemma except this, that kind and tender feelings may exist between
people who have nothing in common intellectually, but these are only
possible when all pretence to paternal authority is abandoned.

Our forefathers had an idea with regard to the opinions of their children
that in these days we must be content to give up. They thought that all
opinions were by nature hereditary, and it was considered an act of
disloyalty to ancestors if a descendant ventured to differ from them. The
profession of any but the family opinions was so rare as to be almost
inconceivable; and if in some great crisis the head of a family took a
new departure in religion or politics the new faith substituted itself for
the old one as the hereditary faith of the family. I remember hearing an
old gentleman (who represented old English feeling in great perfection)
say that it was totally unintelligible to him that a certain Member of
Parliament could sit on the Liberal side of the House of Commons. "I
cannot understand it," he said; "I knew his father intimately, and he was
always a good Tory." The idea that the son might have opinions of his own
was unthinkable.

In our time we are beginning to perceive that opinions cannot be imposed,
and that the utmost that can be obtained by brow-beating a son who differs
from ourselves is that he shall make false professions to satisfy us.
Paternal influence may be better employed than in encouraging habits of
dissimulation.

M. Legouvé attaches great importance to the religious question as a cause
of division between fathers and sons because in the present day young men
so frequently imbibe opinions which are not those of their parents. It is
not uncommon, in France, for Catholic parents to have unbelieving sons;
and the converse is also seen, but more frequently in the case of
daughters. As opinions are very freely expressed in France (except where
external conformity is an affair of caste), we find many families in which
Catholicism and Agnosticism have each their open and convinced adherents;
yet family affection does not appear to suffer from the difference, or is,
at least, powerful enough to overcome it. In old times this would have
been impossible. The father would have resented a difference of opinion
in the son as an offence against himself.

A very common cause of division between father and son, in old times, was
the following.

The father expressed a desire of some kind, mildly and kindly perhaps, yet
with the full expectation that it should be attended to; but the desire
was of an exorbitant nature, in this sense, that it involved something
that would affect the whole course of the young man's future life in a
manner contrary to his natural instincts. The father was then grievously
hurt and offended because the son did not see his way to the fulfilment of
the paternal desire.

The strongest cases of this kind were in relation to profession and
marriage. The father wished his son to enter into some trade or profession
for which he was completely unsuited, or he desired him to marry some
young lady for whom he had not the slightest natural affinity. The son
felt the inherent difficulties and refused. Then the father thought, "I
only ask of my son _this one simple thing_, and he denies me."

In these cases the father was _not_ asking for one thing, but for
thousands of things. He was asking his son to undertake many thousands of
separate obligations, succeeding each other till the far-distant date of
his retirement from the distasteful profession, or his release, by his own
death or hers, from the tedious companionship of the unloved wife.
Sometimes the concession would have involved a long series of hypocrisies,
as for example when a son was asked to take holy orders, though with
little faith and no vocation.

Peter the Great is the most conspicuous example in history of a father
whose idiosyncrasy was not continued in his son, and who could not
understand or tolerate the separateness of his son's personality. They
were not only of independent, but even of opposite natures. "Peter was
active, curious, and energetic. Alexis was contemplative and reflective.
He was not without intellectual ability, but he liked a quiet life. He
preferred reading and thinking. At the age when Peter was making
fireworks, building boats, and exercising his comrades in mimic war,
Alexis was pondering over the 'Divine Manna,' reading the 'Wonders of
God,' reflecting on Thomas à Kempis's 'Imitation of Christ,' and making
excerpts from Baronius. While it sometimes seemed as if Peter was born too
soon for the age, Alexis was born too late. He belonged to the past
generation. Not only did he take no interest in the work and plans of his
father, but he gradually came to dislike and hate them.... He would
sometimes even take medicine to make himself ill, so that he might not be
called upon to perform duties or to attend to business. Once, when he was
obliged to go to the launch of a ship, he said to a friend, 'I would
rather be a galley-slave, or have a burning fever, than be obliged to go
there.'"[6]

In this case one is sorry for both father and son. Peter was a great
intelligent barbarian of immense muscular strength and rude cerebral
energy. Alexis was of the material from which civilization makes priests
and students, or quiet conventional kings, but he was even more unlike
Peter than gentle Richard Cromwell was unlike authoritative Oliver. The
disappointment to Peter, firmly convinced, as all rude natures are, of the
perfection of his own personality, and probably quite unable to appreciate
a personality of another type, must have been the more bitter that his
great plans for the future required a vigorous, practically minded
innovator like himself. At length the difference of nature so exasperated
the Autocrat that he had his son three times tortured, the third time in
his own presence and with a fatal result. This terrible incident is the
strongest expression known to us of a father's vexation because his son
was not of his own kind.

Another painful case that will be long remembered, though the character of
the father is less known to us, is that of the poet Shelley and Sir
Timothy. The little that we do know amounts to this, that there was a
total absence of sympathy. Sir Timothy committed the very greatest of
paternal mistakes in depriving himself of the means of direct influence
over his son by excluding him from his own home. Considering that the
supreme grief of unhappy fathers is the feebleness of their influence over
their sons, they can but confirm and complete their sorrow by annihilating
that influence utterly and depriving themselves of all chance of
recovering and increasing it in the future. This Sir Timothy did after the
expulsion from Oxford. In his position, a father possessing some skill and
tact in the management of young men at the most difficult and wayward
period of their lives would have determined above all things to keep his
son as much as possible within the range of his own control. Although
Shelley afterwards returned to Field Place for a short time, the scission
had been made; there was an end of real intercourse between father and
son; the poet went his own way, married Harriett Westbrook, and lived
through the rest of his short, unsatisfactory existence as a homeless,
wandering _déclassé_.

This Essay has hitherto run upon the discouraging side of the subject, so
that it ought not to end without the happier and more hopeful
considerations.

Every personality is separate from others, and expects its separateness to
be acknowledged. When a son avoids his father it is because he fears that
the rights of his own personality will be disregarded. There are fathers
who habitually treat their sons with sneering contempt. I have myself seen
a young man of fair common abilities treated with constant and undisguised
contempt by a clever, sardonic father who went so far as to make brutal
allusions to the shape of the young man's skull! He bore this treatment
with admirable patience and unfailing gentleness, but suffered from it
silently. Another used to laugh at his son, and called him "Don Quixote"
whenever the lad gave expression to some sentiment above the low
Philistine level. A third, whom I knew well, had a disagreeable way of
putting down his son because he was young, telling him that up to the age
of forty a man "might have impressions, but could not possibly have
opinions." "My father," said a kind-hearted English gentleman to me, "was
the most thoroughly unbearable person I ever met with in my life."

The frank recognition of separate personality, with all its rights, would
stop this brutality at once. There still remains the legitimate power of
the father, which he ought not to abdicate, and which is of itself enough
to prevent the freedom and equality necessary to perfect friendship. This
reason, and the difference of age and habits, make it impossible that
young men and their fathers should be comrades; but a relation may be
established between them which, if rightly understood, is one of the most
agreeable in human existence.

To be satisfactory it must be founded, on the father's side, on the idea
that he is repaying to posterity what he has received from his own
parents, and not on any selfish hope that the descending stream of benefit
will flow upwards again to him. Then he must not count upon affection, nor
lay himself out to win it, nor be timidly afraid of losing it, but found
his influence upon the firmer ground of respect, and be determined to
deserve and have _that_, along with as much unforced affection as the son
is able naturally and easily to give. It is not desirable that the
affection between father and son should be so tender, on either side, as
to make separation a constant pain, for such is human destiny that the two
are generally fated to see but little of each other.

The best satisfaction for a father is to deserve and receive loyal and
unfailing respect from his son.

No, this is not quite the best, not quite the supreme satisfaction of
paternity. Shall I reveal the secret that lies in silence at the very
bottom of the hearts of all worthy and honorable fathers? Their
profoundest happiness is to be able themselves to respect their sons.




ESSAY VII.

THE RIGHTS OF THE GUEST.


If hospitality were always perfectly practised it would be the strongest
of all influences in favor of rational liberty, because the host would
learn to respect it in the persons of his guests, and thence, by extension
of habit, amongst others who could never be his guests.

Hospitality educates us in respect for the rights of others. This is the
substantial benefit that the host ought to derive from his trouble and his
outlay, but the instincts of uncivilized human nature are so powerful that
this education has usually been partial and incomplete. The best part of
it has been systematically evaded, in this way. People were aware that
tolerance and forbearance ought to be exercised towards guests, and so, to
avoid the hard necessity of exercising these qualities when they were
really difficult virtues, they practised what is called exclusiveness. In
other words, they accepted as guests only those who agreed with their own
opinions and belonged to their own class. By this arrangement they could
be both hospitable and intolerant at the same time.

If, in our day, the barrier of exclusiveness has been in many places
broken down, there is all the greater need for us to remember the true
principle of hospitality. It might be forgotten with little inconvenience
in a very exclusive society, but if it were forgotten in a society that is
not exclusive the consequences would be exactly the opposite of what every
friend of civilization most earnestly desires. Social intercourse, in that
case, so far from being an education in respect for the rights of others,
would be an opportunity for violating them. The violation might become
habitual; and if it were so this strange result would follow, that society
would not be a softening and civilizing influence, but the contrary. It
would accustom people to treat each other with disregard, so that men
would be hardened and brutalized by it as schoolboys are made ruder by the
rough habits of the playground, and urbanity would not be cultivated in
cities, but preserved, if at all, in solitude.

The two views concerning the rights of the guest may be stated briefly as
follows:--

1. The guest is bound to conform in all things to the tastes and customs
of his host. He ought to find or feign enjoyment in everything that his
host imposes upon him; and if he is unwilling to do this in every
particular it is a breach of good manners on his part, and he must be made
to suffer for it.

2. The guest should be left to be happy in his own way, and the business
of the host is to arrange things in such a manner that each guest may
enjoy as much as possible his own peculiar kind of happiness.

When the first principle was applied in all its rigor, as it often used to
be applied, and as I have myself seen it applied, the sensation
experienced by the guest on going to stay in certain houses was that of
entirely losing the direction of himself. He was not even allowed, in the
middle classes, to have any control over his own inside, but had to eat
what his host ordered him to eat, and to drink the quantity of wine and
spirits that his host had decided to be good for him. Resistance to these
dictates was taken as an offence, as a crime against good fellowship, or
as a reflection on the quality of the good things provided; and
conversation paused whilst the attention of the whole company was
attracted to the recalcitrant guest, who was intentionally placed in a
situation of extreme annoyance and discomfort in order to compel him to
obedience. The victim was perhaps half an invalid, or at least a man who
could only keep well and happy on condition of observing a certain
strictness of regimen. He was then laughed at for idle fears about his
health, told that he was a hypochondriac, and recommended to drink a
bottle of port every day to get rid of such idle nonsense. If he declined
to eat twice or three times as much as he desired, the hostess expressed
her bitter regret that she had not been able to provide food and cookery
to his taste, thus placing him in such a position that he must either eat
more or seem to condemn her arrangements. It was very common amongst
old-fashioned French _bourgeois_ in the last generation for the hostess
herself to heap things on the guest's plate, and to prevent this her poor
persecuted neighbor had to remove the plate or turn it upside down. The
whole habit of pressing was dictated by selfish feeling in the hosts. They
desired to see their guests devour voraciously, in order that their own
vanity might be gratified by the seeming appreciation of their things.
Temperate men were disliked by a generation of topers because their
temperance had the appearance of a silent protest or censure. The
discomfort inflicted by these odious usages was so great that many people
either injured their health in society or kept out of it in self-defence,
though they were not sulky and unsociable by nature, but would have been
hearty lovers of human intercourse if they could have enjoyed it on less
unacceptable terms.

The wholesome modern reaction against these dreadful old customs has led
some hosts into another error. They sometimes fail to understand the great
principle that it is the guest alone who ought to be the judge of the
quantity that he shall eat and drink. The old pressing hospitality assumed
that the guest was a child, too shame-faced to take what it longed for
unless it was vigorously encouraged; but the new hospitality, if indeed it
still in every case deserves that honored name, does really sometimes
appear to assume (I do not say always, or often, but in extreme cases)
that the guest is a fool, who would eat and drink more than is good for
him if he were not carefully rationed. Such hosts forget that excess is
quite a relative term, that each constitution has its own needs. Beyond
this, it is well known that the exhilaration of social intercourse enables
people who meet convivially to digest and assimilate, without fatigue, a
larger amount of nutriment than they could in dull and perhaps dejected
solitude. Hence it is a natural and long-established habit to eat and
drink more when in company than alone, and the guest should have the
possibility of conforming to this not irrational old custom until, in
Homer's phrase, he has "put from him the desire of meat and drink."

Guests have no right whatever to require that the host should himself eat
and drink to keep them in countenance. There used to be a belief (it
lingers still in the middle classes and in country places) that the laws
of hospitality required the host to set what was considered "a good
example," or, in other words, to commit excesses himself that his friends
might not be too much ashamed of theirs. It is said that the Emperor
William of Germany never eats in public at all, but sits out every banquet
before an empty plate. This, though quite excusable in an old gentleman,
obliged to live by rule, must have rather a chilling effect; and yet I
like it as a declaration of the one great principle that no person at
table, be he host or guest, ought to be compelled to inflict the very
slightest injury upon his own health, or even comfort. The rational and
civilized idea is that food and wines are simply placed at the disposal of
the people present to be used, or abstained from, as they please.

It is clear that every invited guest has a right to expect some slight
appearance of festivity in his honor. In coarse and barbarous times the
idea of festivity is invariably expressed by abundance, especially by vast
quantities of butcher's meat and wine, as we always find it in Homer,
where princes and gentlemen stuff themselves like savages; but in refined
times the notion of quantity has lost its attraction, and that of
elegance takes its place. In a highly civilized society nothing conveys so
much the idea of festivity as plenty of light and flowers, with beautiful
table-linen and plate and glass. These, with some extra delicacy in
cookery and wines, are our modern way of expressing welcome.

There is a certain kind of hospitality in which the host visibly declines
to make any effort either of trouble or expense, but plainly shows by his
negligence that he only tolerates the guest. All that can be said of such
hospitality as this is that a guest who respects himself may endure it
silently for once, but would not be likely to expose himself to it a
second time.

There is even a kind of hospitality which seems to find a satisfaction in
letting the guest perceive that the best in the house is not offered to
him. He is lodged in a poor little room, when there are noble bedchambers,
unused, in the same house; or he is allowed to hire a vehicle in the
village, to make some excursion, when there are horses in the stables
plethoric from want of exercise. In cases of this kind it is not the
privation of luxury that is hard to bear, but the indisposition to give
honor. The guest feels and knows that if a person of very high rank came
to the house everything would be put at his disposal, and he resents the
slight put upon his own condition. A rich English lady, long since dead,
had a large mansion in the country with fine bedrooms; so she found a
pleasure in keeping those rooms empty and sending guests to sleep at the
top of the house in little bare and comfortless chambers that the
architect had intended for servants. I have heard of a French house where
there are fine state apartments, and where all ordinary guests are poorly
lodged, and fed in a miserable _salle à manger_. An aggravation is when
the host treats himself better than his guest. Lady B. invited some
friends to a country-house; and they drove to another country-house in the
neighborhood in two carriages, one containing Lady B. and one friend, the
other the remaining guests. Her ladyship was timid and rather selfish, as
timid people often are; so when they reached the avenue she began to fancy
that both carriages could not safely turn in the garden, and she
despatched her footman to the second carriage, with orders that her guests
(amongst whom was a lady very near her confinement) were to get out and
walk to the house, whilst she drove up to the door in state.

A guest has an absolute right to have his religious and political opinions
respected in his presence, and this is not invariably done. The rule more
generally followed seems to be that class opinions only deserve respect
and not individual opinions. The question is too large to be treated in a
paragraph, but I should say that it is a clear breach of hospitality to
utter anything in disparagement of any opinion whatever that is known to
be held by any one guest present, however humble may be his rank. I have
sometimes seen the known opinions of a guest attacked rudely and directly,
but the more civilized method is to do it more artfully through some other
person who is not present. For example, a guest is known to think, on
important subjects, very much as Mr. Herbert Spencer does; then the host
will contrive to talk at him in talking about Spencer. A guest ought not
to bear this ungenerous kind of attack. If such an occasion arises he
should declare his opinions plainly and with firmness, and show his
determination to have them respected whilst he is there, whatever may be
said against them in his absence. If he cannot obtain this degree of
courtesy, which is his right, let him quit the house and satisfy his
hunger at some inn. The innkeeper will ask for a little money, but he
demands no mental submission.

It sometimes happens that the nationality of a foreign guest is not
respected as it ought to be. I remember an example of this which is
moderate enough to serve as a kind of type, some attacks upon nationality
being much more direct and outrageous. An English lady said at her own
table that she would not allow her daughter to be partially educated in a
French school, "because she would have to associate with French girls,
which, you know, is undesirable." Amongst the guests was a French lady,
and the observation was loud enough for everybody to hear it. I say
nothing of the injustice of the imputation. It was, indeed, most unjust,
but that is not the point. The point is that a foreigner ought not to hear
attacks upon his native land even when they are perfectly well founded.

The host has a sort of judicial function in this way. The guest has a
right to look to him for protection on certain occasions, and he is likely
to be profoundly grateful when it is given with tact and skill, because
the host can say things for him that he cannot even hint at for himself.
Suppose the case of a young man who is treated with easy and rather
contemptuous familiarity by another guest, simply on account of his youth.
He is nettled by the offence, but as it is more in manner than in words he
cannot fix upon anything to answer. The host perceives his annoyance, and
kindly gives him some degree of importance by alluding to some superiority
of his, and by treating him in a manner very different from that which had
vexed him.

A witty host is the most powerful ally against an aggressor. I remember
dining in a very well-known house in Paris where a celebrated Frenchman
repeated the absurd old French calumny against English ladies,--that they
all drink. I was going to resent this seriously when a clever Frenchwoman
(who knew England well) perceived the danger, and answered the man herself
with great decision and ability. I then watched for the first opportunity
of making him ridiculous, and seized upon a very delightful one that he
unwittingly offered. Our host at once understood that my attack was in
revenge for an aggression that had been in bad taste, and he supported me
with a wit and pertinacity that produced general merriment at the enemy's
expense. Now in that case I should say that the host was filling one of
the most important and most difficult functions of a host.

This Essay has hitherto been written almost entirely on the guest's side
of the question, so that we have still briefly to consider the limitations
to his rights.

He has no right to impose any serious inconvenience upon his host. He has
no right to disturb the ordinary arrangements of the house, or to inflict
any serious pecuniary cost, or to occupy the host's time to the prejudice
of his usual pursuits. He has no right to intrude upon the privacy of his
host.

A guest has no right to place the host in such a dilemma that he must
either commit a rudeness or put up with an imposition. The very courtesy
of an entertainer places him at the mercy of a pushing and unscrupulous
guest, and it is only when the provocation has reached such a point as to
have become perfectly intolerable that a host will do anything so painful
to himself as to abandon his hospitable character and make the guest
understand that he must go.

It may be said that difficulties of this kind never occur in civilized
society. No doubt they are rare, but they happen just sufficiently often
to make it necessary to be prepared for them. Suppose the case of a guest
who exceeds his invitation. He has been invited for two nights, plainly
and definitely; but he stays a third, fourth, fifth, and seems as if he
would stay forever. There are men of that kind in the world, and it is one
of their arts to disarm their victims by pleasantness, so that it is not
easy to be firm with them. The lady of the house gives a gentle hint, the
master follows with broader hints, but the intruder is quite impervious to
any but the very plainest language. At last the host has to say, "Your
train leaves at such an hour, and the carriage will be ready to take you
to the station half an hour earlier." This, at any rate, is intelligible;
and yet I have known one of those clinging limpets whom even this
proceeding failed to dislodge. At the approach of the appointed hour he
was nowhere to be found! He had gone to hide himself in a wood with no
companion but his watch, and by its help he took care to return when it
was too late. That is sometimes one of the great uses of a watch.




ESSAY VIII.

THE DEATH OF FRIENDSHIP.


A sad subject, but worth analysis; for if friendship is of any value to us
whilst it is alive, is it not worth while to inquire if there are any
means of keeping it alive?

The word "death" is correctly employed here, for nobody has discovered the
means by which a dead friendship can be resuscitated. To hope for that
would be vain indeed, and idle the waste of thought in such a bootless
quest.

Shall we mourn over this death without hope, this blank annihilation, this
finis of intercourse once so sweet, this dreary and ultimate conclusion?

The death of a friendship is not the death of a person; we do not mourn
for the absence of some beloved person from the world. It is simply the
termination of a certain degree and kind of intercourse, not of necessity
the termination of all intercourse. We may be grieved that the change has
come; we may be remorseful if it has come through a fault of our own; but
if it is due simply to natural causes there is small place for any
reasonable sorrow.

Friendship is a certain _rapport_ between two minds during one or more
phases of their existence, and the perfection of it is quite as dependent
upon what is not in the two minds as upon their positive acquirements and
possessions. Hence the extreme facility with which schoolboys form
friendships which, for the time, are real, true, and delightful. School
friendships are formed so easily because boys in the same class know the
same things; and it rarely happens that in addition to what they have in
common either one party or the other has any knowledge of importance that
is not in common.

Later in life the pair of friends who were once comrades go into different
professions that fill the mind with special professional ideas and induce
different habits of thought. Each will be conscious, when they meet, that
there is a great range of ideas in the other's mind from which he is
excluded, and each will have a difficulty in keeping within the smaller
range of ideas that they have now in common; so that they will no longer
be able to let their _whole_ minds play together as they used to do, and
they will probably feel more at ease with mere acquaintances who have what
is _now_ their knowledge, what are now their mental habits, than with the
friend of their boyhood who is without them.

This is strongly felt by men who go through a large experience at a
distance from their early home and then return for a while to the old
place and old associates, and find that it is only a part of themselves
that is acceptable. New growths of self have taken place in distant
regions, by travel, by study, by intercourse with mankind; and these new
growths, though they may be more valuable than any others, are of no
practical use, of no social availableness, in the little circle that has
remained in the old ways.

Then there are changes of temper that result from the fixing of the
character by time. We think we remain the same, but that is one of our
many illusions. We change, and we do not always change in the same way.
One man becomes mellowed by advancing years, but another is hardened by
them; one man's temper gains in sweetness and serenity as his intellect
gains in light, another becomes dogmatic, peremptory, and bitter. Even
when the change is the same for both, it may be unfavorable to their
intercourse. Two merry young hearts may enjoy each other's company, when
they would find each other dull and flat if the sparkle of the early
effervescence were all spent.

I have not yet touched upon change of opinion as a cause of the death of
friendship, but it is one of the most common causes. It would be a calumny
on the intelligence of the better part of mankind to say that they always
desire to hear repeated exactly what they say themselves, though that is
really the desire of the unintelligent; but the cleverest people like to
hear new and additional reasons in support of the opinions they hold
already; and they do not like to hear reasons, hitherto unsuspected, that
go to the support of opinions different from their own. Therefore a slow
divergence of opinion may carry two friends farther and farther apart by
narrowing the subjects of their intercourse, or a sudden intellectual
revolution in one of them may effect an immediate and irreparable breach.

"If the character is formed," says Stuart Mill, "and the mind made up on
the few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of conviction and
feeling on these has been felt at all times to be an essential requisite
of anything worthy the name of friendship in a really earnest mind." I do
not quote this in the belief that it is absolutely true, but it expresses
a general sentiment. We can only be guided by our own experience in these
matters. Mine has been that friendship is possible with those whom I
respect, however widely they differ from me, and not possible with those
whom I am unable to respect, even when on the great matters of opinion
their views are identical with my own.

It is certain, however, that the change of opinion itself has a tendency
to separate men, even though the difference would not have made friendship
impossible if it had existed from the first. Instances of this are often
found in biographies, especially in religious biographies, because
religious people are more "pained" and "wounded" by difference of opinion
than others. We read in such books of the profound distress with which the
hero found himself separated from his early friends by his new conviction
on this or that point of theology. Political divergence produces the same
effect in a minor degree, and with more of irritation than distress. Even
divergence of opinion on artistic subjects is enough to produce coolness.
Artists and men of letters become estranged from each other by
modifications of their critical doctrines.

Differences of prosperity do not prevent the formation of friendship if
they have existed previously, and can be taken as established facts; but
if they widen afterwards they have a tendency to diminish it. They do so
by altering the views of one of the parties about ways of living and about
the multitude of things involving questions of expense. If the enriched
man lives on a scale corresponding to his newly acquired wealth, he may be
regarded by the other as pretentious beyond his station, whilst if he
keeps to his old style he may be thought parsimonious. From delicacy he
will cease to talk to the other about his money matters, which he spoke of
with frankness when he was not so rich. If he has social ambition he will
form new alliances with richer men, and the old friend may regard these
with a little unconscious jealousy.

It has been observed that young artists often have a great esteem for the
work of one of their number so long as its qualities are not recognized
and rewarded by the public, but that so soon as the clever young man wins
the natural meed of industry and ability his early friendships die. They
were often the result of a generous indignation against public injustice,
so when that injustice came to an end the kindness that was a protest
against it ceased at the same time. In jealous natures it would no doubt
be replaced by the conviction that public favor had rewarded merit far
beyond its deserts.

In the political life of democracies we see men enthusiastically supported
and really admired with sincerity so long as they remain in opposition,
and their friends indulge the most favorable anticipations about what they
would do if they came to power; but when they accept office they soon lose
many of these friends, who are quite sure to be disappointed with the
small degree in which their excessive hopes have been realized. There is
no country where this is seen more frequently than in France, where
Ministers are often criticised with the most unrelenting and uncharitable
acerbity by the men and newspapers that helped to raise them.

Changes of physical constitution may be the death of friendship in this
way. A friendship may be founded upon some sport that one of the parties
becomes unable to follow. After that the two men cease to meet on the
particularly pleasant occasions that every sport affords for its real
votaries, and they only meet on common occasions, which are not the same
because there is not the same jovial and hearty temper. In like manner a
friendship may be weakened if one of the parties gives up some indulgence
that both used to enjoy together. Many a friendship has been cemented by
the habit of smoking, and weakened afterwards when one friend gave up the
habit, declined the cigars that the other offered, and either did not
accompany him to the smoking-room or sat there in open and vexatious
nonconformity.

It is well known, so well known indeed as scarcely to require mention
here, that one of the most frequent and powerful causes of the death of
bachelor friendships is marriage. One of the two friends takes a wife, and
the friendship is at once in peril. The maintenance of it depends upon the
lady's taste and temper. If not quite approved by her, it will languish
for a little while and then die, in spite of all painful and visible
efforts on the husband's part to compensate, by extra attention, for the
coolness of his wife. I have visited a Continental city where it is always
understood that all bachelor friendships are broken off by marriage. This
rule has at least the advantage of settling the question unequivocally.

Simple neglect is probably the most common of all causes deadly to
friendship,--neglect arising either from real indifference, from
constitutional indolence, or from excessive devotion to business. Friendly
feelings must be either of extraordinary sincerity, or else strengthened
by some extraneous motive of self-interest, to surmount petty
inconveniences. The very slightest difficulty in maintaining intercourse
is sufficient in most cases to insure its total cessation in a short time.
Your house is somewhat difficult of access,--it is on a hill-side or at a
little distance from a railway station: only the most sincere friends will
be at the trouble to find you unless your rank is so high that it is a
glory to visit you.

Poor friends often keep up intercourse with rich ones by sheer force of
determination long after it ought to have been allowed to die its own
natural death. When they do this without having the courage to require
some approach to reciprocity they sink into the condition of mere clients,
whom the patron may indeed treat with apparent kindness, but whom he
regards with real indifference, taking no trouble whatever to maintain the
old connection between them.

Equality of rank and fortune is not at all necessary to friendship, but a
certain other kind of equality is. A real friendship can never be
maintained unless there is an equal readiness on both sides to be at some
pains and trouble for its maintenance; so if you perceive that a person
whom you once supposed to be your friend will not put himself to any
trouble on your account, the only course consistent with your dignity is
to take exactly the same amount of pains to make yourself agreeable to
him. After you have done this for a little time you will soon know if the
friendship is really dead; for he is sure to perceive your neglect if he
does not perceive his own, and he will either renew the intercourse with
some _empressement_ or else cease from it altogether.

In early life the right rule is to accept kindness gratefully from one's
elders and not to be sensitive about omissions, because such omissions are
then often consistent with the most real and affectionate regard; but as a
man advances towards middle-age it is right for him to be somewhat careful
of his dignity and to require from friends, whatever may be their station,
a certain general reciprocity. This should always be understood in rather
a large sense, and not exacted in trifles. If he perceives that there is
no reciprocity he cannot do better than drop an acquaintance that is but
the phantom and simulacrum of Friendship's living reality.

It is as natural that many friendships should die and be replaced by
others as that our old selves should be replaced by our present selves.
The fact seems melancholy when first perceived, but is afterwards accepted
as inevitable. There is, however, a death of friendship which is so truly
sad and sorrowful as to cast its gloomy shadow on all the years that
remain to us. It is when we ourselves, by some unhappy fault of temper
that might have been easily avoided, have wounded the kind breast of our
friend, and killed the gentle sentiment that was dwelling happily within.
The only way to be quite sure of avoiding this great and irretrievable
calamity is to remember how very delicate friendly sentiments are and how
easy it is to destroy them by an inconsiderate or an ungentle word.




ESSAY IX.

THE FLUX OF WEALTH.


We become richer or poorer; we seldom remain exactly as we were. If we
have property, it increases or diminishes in value; if our income is
fixed, the value of money alters; and if it increased proportionally to
the depreciation of money, our position would still be relatively altered
by changes in the fortunes of others. We marry and have children; then our
wealth becomes less our own after every birth. We win some honor or
professional advancement that seems a gain; but increased expenditure is
the consequence, and we are poorer than we were before. Amidst all these
fluctuations of wealth human intercourse either continues under altered
conditions or else it is broken off because they are no longer favorable
to its maintenance. I propose to consider, very briefly, how these altered
conditions operate.

We have to separate, in the first place, intercourse between individuals
from intercourse between families. The distinction is of the utmost
importance, because the two are not under the same law.

Two men, of whom one is extremely rich and the other almost penniless,
have no difficulty in associating together on terms agreeable to both when
they possess intellectual interests in common, or even when there is
nothing more than an attraction of idiosyncrasy; but these conditions only
subsist between one individual and another; they are not likely to subsist
between two families. Intercourse between individuals depends on something
in intellect and culture that enables them to understand each other, and
upon something in character that makes them love or respect each other.
Intercourse between families depends chiefly on neighborhood and
similarity in style of living.

This is the reason why bachelors have so much easier access to society
than men with wives and families. The bachelor is received for himself,
for his genius, information, manners; but if he is married the question
is, "What sort of people are _they_?" This, being interpreted, means,
"What style do they live in?" "How many servants do they keep?"

Whatever may be the variety of opinions concerning the doctrines of the
Church of Rome, there is but one concerning her astuteness. There can be
no doubt that she is the most influential association of men that has ever
existed; and she has decided for celibacy, that the priest might stand on
his merits and on the power of the Church, and be respected and admitted
everywhere in spite of notorious poverty.

Mignet, the historian, was a most intimate and constant friend of Thiers.
Mignet, though rich in reality, as he knew how to live contentedly on
moderate means, was poor in comparison with his friend. This inequality
did not affect their friendship in the least; for both were great workers,
well qualified to understand each other, though Thiers lived in a grand
house, and Mignet in a barely furnished lodging high up in a house that
did not belong to him.

Mignet was a bachelor, and they were both childless men; but imagine them
with large families. One family would have been bred in the greatest
luxury, the other in austere simplicity. Children are keenly alive to
these distinctions; and even if there had been neither pride in the rich
house nor envy in the poorer one the contrast would have been constantly
felt. The historical studies that the fathers had in common would probably
not have interested their descendants, and unless there had been some
other powerful bond of sympathy the two families would have lived in
different worlds. The rich family would have had rich friends, the poorer
family would have attached itself to other families with whom it could
have exchanged hospitality on more equal terms. This would have happened
even in Paris, a city where there is a remarkable absence of contempt for
poverty; a city where the slightest reason for distinction will admit any
well-bred man into society in spite of narrow means and insure him
immunity from disdain. All the more certainly would it happen in places
where money is the only regulator of rank, the only acknowledged claim to
consideration.

I once knew an English merchant who was reputed to be wealthy, and who,
like a true Englishman as he was, inhabited one of those great houses that
are so elaborately contrived for the exercise of hospitality. He had a
kind and friendly heart, and lived surrounded by people who often did him
the favor to drink his excellent wines and sleep in his roomy
bedchambers. On his death it turned out that he had never been quite so
rich as he appeared and that during his last decade his fortune had
rapidly dwindled. Being much interested in everything that may confirm or
invalidate those vi

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