PART XII.

SURROUNDINGS.

I. To a friend who often changed his place of residence 530

II. To a friend who maintained that surroundings were a matter

of indifference to a thoroughly occupied mind 539

III. To an artist who was fitting up a magnificent new studio 546

THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.

PART I.

_THE PHYSICAL BASIS._

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG MAN OF LETTERS WHO WORKED EXCESSIVELY.

Mental labor believed to be innocuous to healthy persons--Difficulty

of testing this--Case of the poet Wordsworth--Case of an eminent

living author--Case of a literary clergyman--Case of an energetic

tradesman--Instances of two Londoners who wrote

professionally--Scott's paralysis--Byron's death--All intellectual

labor proceeds on a physical basis.

So little is really known about the action of the nervous system, that

to go into the subject from the physiological point of view would be to

undertake a most difficult investigation, entirely beyond the competence

of an unscientific person like your present correspondent. You will,

therefore, permit me, in reference to this, to leave you to the teaching

of the most advanced physiologists of the time; but I may be able to

offer a few practical suggestions, based on the experience of

intellectual workers, which may be of use to a man whose career is

likely to be one of severe and almost uninterrupted intellectual labor.

A paper was read several years ago before the members of a society in

London, in which the author maintained that mental labor was never

injurious to a perfectly healthy human organization, and that the

numerous cases of break-down, which are commonly attributed to excessive

brain-work, are due, in reality, to the previous operation of disease.

This is one of those assertions which cannot be answered in a sentence.

Concentrated within the briefest expression it comes to this, that

mental labor cannot produce disease, but may aggravate the consequences

of disease which already exists.

The difficulty of testing this is obvious; for so long as health remains

quite perfect, it remains perfect, of course, whether the brain is used

or not; and when failure of health becomes manifest, it is not always

easy to decide in what degree mental labor may have been the cause of

it. Again, the accuracy of so general a statement cannot be proved by

any number of instances in its favor, since it is universally admitted

that brain-work is not the only cause of disease, and no one affirms

that it is more than one amongst many causes which may impede the bodily

functions.

When the poet Wordsworth was engaged in composing the "White Doe of

Rylstone," he received a wound in his foot, and he observed that the

continuation of the literary labor increased the irritation of the

wound; whereas by suspending his work he could diminish it, and absolute

mental rest produced a perfect cure. In connection with this incident he

remarked that poetic excitement, accompanied by protracted labor in

composition, always brought on more or less of bodily derangement. He

preserved himself from permanently injurious consequences by his

excellent habits of life.

A very eminent living author, whose name I do not feel at liberty to

mention, is always prostrated by severe illness at the conclusion of

each of his works; another is unwell every Sunday, because he does not

write on that day, and the recoil after the mental stretch of the week

is too much for him.

In the case of Wordsworth, the physical constitution is believed to have

been sound. His health at seventy-two was excellent; the two other

instances are more doubtful in this respect, yet both these writers

enjoy very fair health, after the pressure of brain-work has been

removed for any considerable time. A clergyman of robust organization,

who does a good deal of literary work at intervals, told me that,

whenever he had attempted to make it regular, the consequence had always

been distressing nervous sensations, from which at other times he was

perfectly free. A tradesman, whose business affords an excellent outlet

for energetic bodily activity, told me that having attempted, in

addition to his ordinary work, to acquire a foreign language which

seemed likely to be useful to him, he had been obliged to abandon it on

account of alarming cerebral symptoms. This man has immense vigor and

energy, but the digestive functions, in this instance, are sluggish.

However, when he abandoned study, the cerebral inconveniences

disappeared, and have never returned since.

Two Londoners who followed literature as a profession, and who both

worked to excess, had cerebral attacks of a still more decided kind. One

of them, after his recovery, resolved to regulate his work in future, so

that it might never pass the limits of moderation. He is now living, and

in possession of a remarkably clear and richly furnished intellect. The

other, who returned to his old habits, died in two years from softening

of the brain. I am not aware that in these cases there was any other

disease than that produced by an immoderate use of the mental powers.

The health of Sir Walter Scott--we have this on his own testimony--was

uncommonly robust, and there is every reason to believe that his

paralysis was brought on by the excessive labor which resulted from his

pecuniary embarrassments, and that without such excessive mental labor

and anxiety he would have preserved his health much longer. The death of

Byron was due, no doubt, quite as much to habits of dissipation as to

poetical excitement; still it is probable that he would have borne

either of these evil influences if it had not been accompanied by the

other; and that to a man whose way of life was so exhausting as Byron's

was, the addition of constant poetical excitement and hard work in

production, may be said without exaggeration to have killed him. We know

that Scott, with all his facility, had a dread of that kind of

excitement, and withdrew from the poetical arena to avoid it. We know,

too, that the brain of Southey proved ultimately unable to endure the

burden of the tasks he laid upon it.

Difficult as it may be in some instances to ascertain quite accurately

whether an overworked man had perfectly sound bodily health to begin

with, obvious as it may be that in many breakdowns the final failure has

been accelerated by diseases independent of mental work, the facts

remain, that the excessive exercise of the mental powers is injurious to

bodily health and that all intellectual labor proceeds upon a physical

basis. No man can safely forget this, and act as if he were a pure

spirit, superior to physical considerations. Let me then, in other

letters on this subject, direct your attention to the close connection

which exists between intellectual production and the state of the body

and the brain; not with the authority of a physician, but with the

sympathy of a fellow-laborer, who has learned something from his own

experience, and still more from the more varied experience of his

friends.

LETTER II.

TO A YOUNG MAN OF LETTERS WHO WORKED EXCESSIVELY.

Mental labor rarely compatible with the best physical

conditions--Wordsworth's manner of composition--Mr. W. F. A.

Delane--George Sand working under pressure--Sir Walter Scott's

field-sports--Physical exercise the best tranquillizer of the nervous

system--Eugene Sue--Shelley's love of boating--Nervousness the

affliction of brain-workers--Nature's kindly warning--Working by

spurts--Beckford--Byron--Indolence of men of genius

fortunate--Distressing nature of cerebral fatigue.

It is possible that many of the worst results of intellectual labor may

be nothing more than indirect results. We may suffer, not from the work

itself, but from sedentary confinement, from want of exercise, from

insufficient variety and amusement.

Mental labor is seldom compatible with the best physical conditions; it

is so sometimes, however, or may be made so by an effort of will and

resolution. Wordsworth composed his poetry in the open air, as he

walked, and so preserved himself from the evil of close confinement to

the desk. Mr. W. F. A. Delane, who did so much for the organization of

the _Times_ newspaper when it was under his management, began by doing

law reports for that paper, in London and on circuit. His appearance of

rude health surprised other members of his profession, but he accounted

for it by the care he took to compensate for the bad air and sedentary

labor in the courts of law by travelling between the assize towns on

horseback, and also by a more than commonly temperate way of life, since

he carefully avoided the bar dinners, eating and drinking for health

alone. It is possible to endure the most unhealthy labor when there are

frequent intervals of invigorating exercise, accompanied by habits of

strict sobriety. The plan, so commonly resorted to, of trying to get

health in stock for the rest of the year by a fortnight's hurried

travelling in the autumn, is not so good as Mr. Delane's way of getting

the week's supply of health during the course of the week itself.

It happened once that George Sand was hurried by the proprietor of a

newspaper who wanted one of her novels as a _feuilleton_. She has always

been a careful and deliberate worker, very anxious to give all necessary

labor in preparation, and, like all such conscientious laborers, she can

scarcely endure to be pushed. However, on this occasion she worked

overtime, as they say in Lancashire, and to enable herself to bear the

extra pressure she did part of the work at night in order to keep

several hours of daylight clear for her walks in the country, where she

lived. Many writers, in the same situation, would have temporarily

abandoned exercise, but George Sand clung to it all the more at a time

when it was especially necessary that she should be well. In the same

way Sir Walter Scott counterbalanced the effects of sedentary occupation

by his hearty enjoyment of field-sports. It has been supposed that his

outdoor exercise, which to weaker persons appears excessive, may have

helped to bring on the stroke of paralysis which finally disabled him;

but the fact is, that when the stroke arrived Sir Walter had altered his

habits of life in obedience to what he believed to be his duty, and had

abandoned, or nearly so, the active amusements of his happier years. I

believe rather that whilst he took so much exercise his robust

constitution not only enabled him to endure it without injury, but

required it to keep the nervous system healthy, in spite of his hard

work in literary composition. Physical exercise, when the constitution

is strong enough to endure it, is by far the best tranquillizer of the

nervous system which has yet been discovered, and Sir Walter's life at

Abbotsford was, in this respect at least, grounded on the true

philosophy of conduct. The French romancer, Eugene Sue, wrote till ten

o'clock every morning, and passed the rest of the day, when at his

country house, either in horse-exercise, or field-sports, or gardening,

for all of which he had a liking which amounted to passion. Shelley's

delight was boating, which at once exercised his muscles and relieved

his mind from the weariness of incessant invention or speculation. It

will generally be found, that whenever a man of much intellectual

distinction has maintained his powers in full activity, it has been by

avoiding the bad effects of an entirely sedentary life.

I well believe that a person naturally robust, with a clear and powerful

brain, could bear twelve or fourteen hours' work every day for years

together so far as the work itself is concerned, if only so large an

expenditure of time left a sufficient margin for amusement, and

exercise, and sleep. But the privation of exercise, by weakening the

digestive and assimilative powers, reduces the flow of healthy and rich

blood to the brain--the brain requires an enormous quantity of blood,

especially when the cerebral matter is rapidly destroyed by intellectual

labor--and usually brings on nervousness, the peculiar affliction of the

over-driven mental laborer. This nervousness is Nature's kindly warning,

preserving us, if we attend to it in time, from much more serious

consequences. The best preventive of it, and often the only cure, is

plenty of moderate exercise. The customs of the upper classes in England

happily provide this in the best shape, that of amusement enjoyed in

society, but our middle classes in large towns do not get nearly enough

of it, and the most studious are always strongly tempted to neglect it

altogether.

Men of great imaginative power are commonly addicted to a habit which is

peculiarly dangerous. They work as race-horses work, with the utmost

intensity of effort during short spaces of time, taxing all their

powers whilst the brilliant effort lasts. When Beckford wrote the

wonderful tale "Vathek" in his twentieth year, he did it at a single

sitting, which lasted for three days and two nights, and it cost him a

serious illness. Several of the best poems by Byron were written, if not

quite with equal rapidity, still on the same principle of composition at

white heat. In cases of this kind, Nature provides her own remedy in the

indolence of the imaginative temperament, which leaves large spaces of

time for the action of the recuperative processes. The same law governs

the physical energies of the carnivora, which maintain, or recover,

their capacity for extraordinary effort by intervals of absolute repose.

In its long spaces of mental rest the imaginative temperament recruits

itself by amusement, which in England usually includes physical exercise

of some kind.

This fortunate indolence of men of genius would in most instances ensure

their safety if they were not impelled by necessity to labor beyond the

suggestions of inclination. The exhausted brain never of itself seeks

the additional exhaustion of hard work. You know very well when you are

tired, and at such times the natural man in you asks plainly enough for

rest and recreation. The art is so to arrange our lives that the natural

man may sometimes have his way, and forget, if only for a time, the

labors which lead to weariness--not to that pleasant weariness of the

body which promises soundest sleep, but the distressing fatigue of the

exhausted spirit which is tortured by the importunity of ideas which it

is unable to express, and apprehensions that it cannot dismiss, which

fights through the sleepless night the phantoms of unconquerable horror.

NOTE.--The bad effect of literary composition on the physical state

which was observed by Wordsworth in his own case was also noticed by

Shelley during the composition of the "Cenci," which, he said, had

been a fine antidote to nervous medicines, and kept, he believed, the

pain in his side "as sticks do a fire." These influences are best

observed in people whose health is delicate. Although Joubert, for

example, had an extremely clear intellect, he could scarcely write at

all on account of the physical consequences. I have come to the

conclusion that literary work _acts simply as a strong stimulant_. In

moderate quantities it is not only innocent, but decidedly beneficial;

in excess it acts like poison on the nervous system. What constitutes

excess every man has to find out by his own experience. A page was

excess to Joubert, a chapter was moderation to Alexandre Dumas.

LETTER III.

TO A STUDENT IN UNCERTAIN HEALTH.

Habits of Kant, the philosopher--Objection to an over-minute

regularity of habit--Value of independence of character--Case of an

English author--Case of an English resident in Paris--Scott an

abundant eater and drinker--Goethe also--An eminent French

publisher--Turgot--Importance of good cookery--Wine drinking--Ale--The

aid of stimulants treacherous--The various effects of tobacco--Tea and

coffee--Case of an English clergyman--Balzac--The Arabia custom of

coffee-drinking--Wisdom of occasionally using stimulants.

IMMANUEL KANT, who was a master in the art of taking care of himself,

had by practice acquired a dexterous mode of folding himself up in the

bed-clothes, by passing them over and under his shoulders, so that, when

the operation was complete, he was shut up like the silkworm in his

cocoon. "When I am thus snugly folded up in my bed," he would say to his

friends, "I say to myself, can any man be in better health than I am?"

There is nothing in the lives of philosophers more satisfactory than

this little passage. If Kant had said to himself, "Can anybody be wiser,

more learned, more justly deserving of immortal fame than I am?" we

should have felt, that however agreeable this opinion might have been to

the philosopher who held it, his private satisfaction stood in need of

confirmation from without; and even if he had really been all this, we

might have reflected that wisdom and learning still leave their

possessor exposed to the acutest kinds of suffering. But when a

philosopher rolls himself up at night, and congratulates himself on the

possession of perfect health, we only think what a happy man he was to

possess that first of blessings, and what a sensible man to know the

value of it! And Kant had a deeper happiness in this reflection than any

which could spring from the mere consciousness of possessing one of the

unearned gifts of nature. The excellence of his health was due in part

to a sufficiently good constitution, but it was due also to his own

extreme carefulness about his habits. By an unceasing observation of his

own bodily life, as far as possible removed from the anxiety of

hypochondriacs, he managed to keep the physical machine in such regular

order, that for more than thirty years he always rose precisely at the

same minute. If his object had been health for health's sake, the result

would still have been well worth any sacrifices of momentary inclination

that it cost him; but Kant had a higher purpose. He well knew that the

regularity of the intellectual life depended entirely on the regularity

of the bodily functions, and, unlike the foolish men alluded to by

Goethe who pass the day in complaining of headache, and the night in

drinking the wine that produces it, Kant not only knew that regular

health was necessary to his work as a philosopher, but did everything in

his power to preserve it. Few intellectual laborers have in this respect

given evidence of such persistent strength of will.

In his manner of living he did not consult custom, but the needs of his

individual nature. It is not always easy for great brain-workers to

follow with perfect fidelity the customs of the people about them. These

usages have been gradually formed by the majority to suit the needs of

the majority; but there are cases where a close adherence to them would

be a serious hindrance to the highest and best activity. A good example

of this is Kant's intense antipathy to beer. It did not suit him, and he

was right in his non-conformity to German usage on this point, but he

was mistaken in believing beer to be universally injurious. There is a

very general belief in England that what is called a good breakfast is

the foundation of the labor of the day. Kant's breakfast, which he took

at five in the morning at all seasons of the year, consisted of a cup of

tea and a pipe of tobacco. On this he worked eight hours, either in

lecturing or writing--a long stretch of uninterrupted labor. He dined at

one, and this was his only meal, for he had no supper. The single repast

was a deviation from ordinary usage, but Kant found that it suited him,

probably because he read in the evening from six till a quarter to ten,

and a second meal might have interfered with this by diminishing his

power of attention. There exists a strong medical objection to this

habit of taking only one meal in twenty-four hours, which indeed is

almost unknown in England, though not extremely rare on the Continent. I

know an old gentleman who for forty years has lived as Kant did, and

enjoys excellent health and uncommon mental clearness.

A detail which illustrates Kant's attention to whatever could affect his

physical life, is his rule to withdraw his mind from everything

requiring effort fifteen minutes before he went to bed. His theory,

which is fully confirmed by the experience of others, was, that there

was a risk of missing sleep if the brain was not tranquillized before

bed-time. He knew that the intellectual life of the day depended on the

night's rest, and he took this precaution to secure it. The regularity

of his daily walk, taken during the afternoon in all weathers, and the

strict limitation of the hours of rest, also helped the soundness of his

sleep.

He would not walk out in company, for the whimsical reason that if he

opened his mouth a colder air would reach his lungs than that which

passed through the nostrils; and he would not eat alone, but always had

guests to dinner. There are good physiological reasons in favor of

pleasant society at table, and, besides these, there are good

intellectual reasons also.

By attention to these rules of his, Kant managed to keep both body and

mind in a working order, more uninterrupted than is usual with men who

go through much intellectual labor. The solitary objection to his system

is the excessive regularity of habit to which it bound him by chains of

his own forging. He found a quiet happiness in this regularity; indeed,

happiness is said to be more commonly found in habit that in anything

else, so deeply does it satisfy a great permanent instinct of our

nature. But a _minute_ regularity of habit is objectionable, because it

can only be practicable at home, and is compatible only with an

existence of the most absolute tranquillity. Kant did not travel, and

never could have travelled. He was a bachelor, and could not have ceased

to be a bachelor, without a disturbance that would have been intolerable

to him. He enjoyed the full benefits of his system without experiencing

its disadvantages, but any considerable change of situation would have

made the disadvantages apparent. Few lives can be so minutely regulated

without risk of future inconvenience.

Kant's example is a good one so far as this, that it proved a sort of

independence of character which would be valuable to every student. All

who need to keep their minds in the best possible condition ought to

have resolution enough to regulate their living in a manner which

experience, in their case, proves to be most favorable. Whatever may be

the authority of custom, a wise man makes himself independent of usages

which are impediments to his best activity. I know an author who was

always unwell about eleven o'clock in the morning--so unwell that he

could do nothing but lament his miserable fate. Knowing by experience

the powerful effect of regimen, I inquired whether he enjoyed his

breakfast. "No, he did not." "Then why did he attempt to eat any

breakfast?" It turned out that this foolish man swallowed every morning

two cups of bad coffee and a quantity of greasy food, from a patriotic

deference to the customs of his country. He was persuaded to abandon

this unsuitable habit and to eat nothing till half-past ten, when his

adviser prescribed a well-cooked little _dejeuner a la fourchette_,

accompanied by half a bottle of sound Bordeaux. The effect was magical.

My friend felt light and cheerful before _dejeuner_, and worked quite

happily and well, whilst after _dejeuner_ he felt like a horse that has

eaten his corn. Nor was the good effect a transitory one; the bad

symptoms never returned and he still adheres to his new arrangement.

This little reform made a wretched existence happy, and has had for its

result an increase in production with a diminution of fatigue. The

explanation is that the stomach did not ask for the early breakfast, and

had a hard fight to overcome it, after which came exhaustion and a

distaste both for food and work. There are cases where an opposite rule

is the right one. An Englishman living in Paris found the French

_dejeuner_ unsuitable for him, and discovered that he worked best on a

substantial English breakfast, with strong tea, at eight in the morning,

after which he went on working all day without any further nourishment

till dinner at six in the evening. A friend of Sir Walter Scott's, who

had stayed with him at Abbotsford, told me that Sir Walter ate and drank

like everybody else as to times and seasons, but much more abundantly

than people of less vigorous organization. Goethe used to work till

eleven without taking anything, then he drank a cup of chocolate and

worked till one. "At two he dined. This meal was the important meal of

the day. His appetite was immense. Even on the days when he complained

of not being hungry he ate much more than most men. Puddings, sweets,

and cakes were always welcome. He sat a long while over his wine. He was

fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles." An eminent

French publisher, one of the most clear-headed and hard-working men of

his generation, never touched food or drink till six in the evening,

when he ate an excellent dinner with his guests. He found this system

favorable to his work, but a man of less robust constitution would have

felt exhausted in the course of the day.

Turgot could not work well till after he had dined copiously, but many

men cannot think after a substantial meal; and here, in spite of the

example set by Scott and Goethe, let me observe that nothing interferes

so much with brainwork as over-eating. The intellectual workman requires

nourishment of the best possible quality, but the quantity ought always

to be well within the capacity of his digestive powers. The truth

appears to be, that whilst the intellectual life makes very large

demands upon nutrition--for cerebral activity cannot go forward without

constant supplies of force, which must come ultimately from what we have

eaten--this kind of life, being sedentary, is unfavorable to the work of

digestion. Brain-workers cannot eat like sportsmen and farmers without

losing many hours in torpor, and yet they need nutrition as much as if

they led active lives. The only way out of this difficulty is to take

care that the food is good enough for a moderate quantity of it to

maintain the physical and mental powers. The importance of scientific

cookery can hardly be exaggerated. Intellectual labor is, in its

origin, as dependent upon the art of cookery as the dissemination of its

results is dependent upon paper-making and printing. This is one of

those matters which people cannot be brought to consider seriously; but

cookery in its perfection--the great science of preparing food in the

way best suited to our use--is really the most important of all

sciences, and the mother of the arts. The wonderful theory that the most

ignorant cookery is the most favorable to health is only fit for the

dark ages. It is grossly and stupidly untrue. A scientific cook will

keep you in regular health, when an ignorant one will offer you the

daily alternative of starving or indigestion.

The great question of drinks is scarcely less important. Sound natural

wines, not strengthened by any addition of alcohol, are known to supply

both stimulus and nourishment to the brain. Goethe's practice was not

irrational, though he drank fifty thousand bottles in his lifetime.

Still it is not necessary to imitate him to this extent. The

wine-drinking populations have keener and livelier wits than those who

use other beverages. It is proved by long experience that the pure juice

of the grape sustains the force and activity of the brain. The poets who

from age to age have sung the praise of wine were not wholly either

deceivers or deceived. In the lands of the vine, where the plant is

looked upon as a nursing mother, men do not injure their health by

drinking; but in the colder North, where the grape can never ripen, the

deaths from intemperance are frequent. Bread and wine are almost pure

gifts of nature, though both are prepared by man after the old

traditional ways. These are not poisons, but gin and absinthe are

poisons, madness poured out from a bottle! Kant and Goethe loved the

pure Rhine wine, and their brains were clear and vigorous to the utmost

span of life. It was not wine that ruined Burns and Byron, or

Baudelaire, or Alfred de Musset.

Notwithstanding Kant's horror of beer, that honest northern drink

deserves our friendly recognition. It has quite a peculiar effect upon

the nervous system, giving a rest and calm which no other drink can

procure for it so safely. It is said that beer drinkers are slow, and a

little stupid; that they have an ox-like placidity not quite favorable

to any brilliant intellectual display. But there are times when this

placidity is what the laboring brain most needs. After the agitations of

too active thinking there is safety in a tankard of ale. The wine

drinkers are agile, but they are excitable; the beer drinkers are heavy,

but in their heaviness there is peace. In that clear golden drink which

England has brewed for more than a thousand Octobers, and will brew for

a thousand more, we may find perhaps some explanation of that absence of

irritability which is the safe-guard of the national character, which

makes it faithful in its affections, easy to govern, not easy to excite

to violence.

If I have spoken favorably of beer and wine as having certain

intellectual uses, please remember that I recommend only the habitual

use of them, not mad rites of Bacchus, and even the habitual use only

just so far as it may suit the individual constitution. The liberal

regimen of Scott and Goethe would not answer in every case, and there

are organizations, often very robust, in which intoxicating drinks of

all kinds, even in the most moderate quantity, impede the brain's action

instead of aiding it. Two of the most able men I have ever known could

not drink pure wine of any kind because it sent the blood to the head,

with consequent cerebral oppression. And whilst on this subject I ought

to observe, that the aid which these stimulants afford, even when the

body gratefully accepts them, is often treacherous from its very

acceptability. Men who are over-driven--and the number of such men is

unhappily very great in these days--say that without stimulants they

could not get through their labor; but the stimulants often delude us as

to the limits of our natural powers and encourage us to attempt too

much. The help they give us is not altogether illusory; under certain

limitations it is real, but many have gone farther than the reality of

the assistance warranted. The ally brings to us an increase of forces,

but he comes with appearances of power surpassing the reality, and we

undertake tasks beyond our strength. In drinking, as in eating, the best

rule for the intellectual is moderation in quantity with good quality,

a sound wine, and not enough of it to foster self-delusion.

The use of tobacco has so much extended itself in the present generation

that we are all obliged to make a decision for ourselves on the ancient

controversy between its friends and enemies. We cannot form a reasonable

opinion about tobacco without bearing in mind that it produces,

according to circumstances, one of two entirely distinct and even

opposite classes of effects. In certain states of the body it acts as a

stimulant, in other states as a narcotic. People who have a dislike to

smoking affirm that it stupefies; but this assertion, at least so far as

the temporary consequences are concerned, is not supported by

experience. Most of the really brilliant conversations that I have

listened to have been accompanied by clouds of tobacco-smoke; and a

great deal of the best literary composition that is produced by

contemporary authors is wrought by men who are actually smoking whilst

they work. My own experience is that very moderate smoking acts as a

pleasant stimulus upon the brain, whilst it produces a temporary

lassitude of the muscular system, not perceptible in times of rest, but

an appreciable hindrance in times of muscular exertion. It is better

therefore for men who feel these effects from tobacco to avoid it when

they are in exercise, and to use it only when the body rests and the

mind labors. Pray remember, however, that this is the experience of an

exceedingly moderate smoker, who has not yet got himself into the

general condition of body which is brought on by a larger indulgence in

tobacco. On the other hand, it is evident that men engaged in physical

labor find a muscular stimulus in occasional smoking, and not a

temporary lassitude. It is probable that the effect varies with

individual cases, and is never precisely what our own experience would

lead us to imagine. For excessive smokers, it appears to be little more

than the tranquillizing of a sort of uneasiness, the continual

satisfaction of a continual craving. I have never been able to ascertain

that moderate smoking diminished intellectual force; but I have observed

in excessive smokers a decided weakening of the will, and a preference

for talking about work to the effort of actual labor. The opinions of

medical men on this subject are so much at variance that their science

only adds to our uncertainty. One doctor tells me that the most moderate

smoking is unquestionably injurious, whilst others affirm that it is

innocent. Speaking simply from self-observation, I find that in my own

case tea and coffee are far more perilous than tobacco.

Almost all English people are habitual tea-drinkers, and as the tea they

drink is very strong, they may be said to use it in excess. The

unpleasant symptoms which tea-poisoning produces in a patient not inured

by habit, disappear in the seasoned tea-drinker, leaving only a certain

exhilaration, which appears to be perfectly innocuous. If tea is a safe

stimulant, it is certainly an agreeable one, and there seems to be no

valid reason why brain-workers should refuse themselves that solace. I

knew a worthy clergyman many years ago who from the most conscientious

motives denied himself ale and wine, but found a fountain of consolation

in the tea-pot. His usual allowance was sixteen cups, all of heroic

strength, and the effect upon his brain seems to have been altogether

favorable, for his sermons were both long and eloquent, and to this day

he is preaching still, without any diminution of his powers. French

people find in coffee the most efficacious remedy for the temporary

torpor of the mind which results from the processes of digestion. Balzac

drank great quantities of coffee whilst he wrote; and this, it is

believed, brought on the terrible nervous disease that accelerated his

end. The best proof that tea and coffee are favorable to intellectual

expression is that all nations use one or the other as aids to

conversation. In Mr. Palgrave's Travels in Arabia there is never any

talk without the inevitable coffee, that fragrant Arabian berry prepared

with such delicate cunning that it yields the perfect aroma.

The wisdom of occasionally using these various stimulants for

intellectual purposes is proved by a single consideration. Each of us

has a little cleverness and a great deal of sluggish stupidity. There

are certain occasions when we absolutely need the little cleverness

that we possess. The orator needs it when he speaks, the poet when he

versifies, but neither cares how stupid he may become when the oration

is delivered and the lyric set down on paper. The stimulant serves to

bring out the talent when it is wanted, like the wind in the pipes of an

organ. "What will it matter if I am even a little duller afterwards?"

says the genius; "I can afford to be dull when I have done." But the

truth still remains that there are stimulants and stimulants. Not the

nectar of the gods themselves were worth the dash of a wave upon the

beach, and the pure cool air of the morning.

NOTE.--What is said in the above letter about the employment of

stimulants is intended to apply only to cases in which there is no

organic disease. The harm which diseased persons do to themselves by

conforming to customs which are innocent for others is as lamentable

as it is easily avoidable. Two bottles of any natural wine grown above

the latitude of Lyons are a permissible daily allowance to a man whose

organs are all sound; but the doctors in the wine districts

unanimously forbid pure wine when there is a chronic inflammatory

tendency. In these cases even the most honest Bordeaux ought to be

diluted with twice its volume of water. There are many chronic

diseases which tobacco irritates and accelerates. Both wine and

tobacco are injurious to weak eyes.

LETTER IV.

TO A MUSCULAR CHRISTIAN.

Muscular and intellectual tendencies in two boys--Difficulty of

finding time to satisfy both--Plato on the influences of music and

gymnastics--Somnolence and digestion--Neglect of literature--Natural

restlessness of the active temperament--Case of a Garibaldian

officer--Difficulty of taking a sufficient interest in exercise--A

boar hunt.

I know two little boys, sons of a near neighbor, who have from,

childhood exhibited opposite tendencies. One of them is incessantly

active, always out of doors in any weather, busy about horses, and

farming, and game, heedless of his books, and studying only under

positive compulsion. The other sits at home with his lessons or a story

book, and only goes out because he is incited by the fraternal example.

The two lads represent two distinct varieties of human life, the active

and the intellectual. The elder is happiest during physical exertion;

the younger is happiest when his brain is fully occupied. Left entirely

to themselves, without the equalizing influence of the outside world and

the ways of living which general custom has established, they would lead

the most opposite lives. The elder would inevitably become a farmer,

that he might live in the country and take exercise all day long, or

else he would seek adventure in wild travel, or in romantic warfare; but

the younger would very quickly be taken possession of by some engrossing

intellectual pursuit, and lead the life of a sedentary student. The

problem which these two young lives have before them is the

reconciliation of their tendencies. Since they come of cultivated

parents, the intellectual lad has the better chance of following his own

bent. Both will have to take their University degrees, and the younger

has the advantage there. Still there are powerful influences in favor of

the elder. His activity will be encouraged by the admiration of his

companions, and by the example of the country gentlemen who are his

neighbors. He can ride, and row, and swim; he is beginning to shoot; at

twenty he will be a sportsman. When once he has taken his degree, I

wonder what will be the advances in his intellectual culture. Fraternal

and social influences will preserve the younger from absolute physical

inaction; but there are not any influences powerful enough to keep the

elder safe from intellectual rust.

If you, who are a distinguished sportsman and athlete, would kindly

inform us with perfect frankness of the line which your studies have

followed since you quitted Eton, we should be the wiser for your

experience. Have gymnastic exercises hardened you, as Plato said they

did, when pursued excessively? and do you need the musical studies which

he both valued and dreaded as the most powerful of softening influences?

If you have energy enough to lead both lives, pray how do you find the

time?

As to Plato's musical influence, you invite it, and yet you

treacherously elude its power. After being out all day in the pursuit of

sylvan pleasures (if shooting on treeless wastes can be called a sylvan

pleasure), you come home at nightfall ravenous. Then you do ample

justice to your dinner, and having satisfied your _faim de chasseur_,

you go into the drawing-room, and ask your wife to play and sing to you.

If Plato could witness that pretty scene, he would approve your

obedience to his counsels. He would behold an athletic Englishman

stretching his mighty limbs on a couch of soft repose, and letting his

soul grow tender as his ears drank ravishing harmonies. If, however, the

ancient sage, delighted with so sweet a picture of strength refined by

song, were to dwell upon the sight as I have done, he would perceive too

soon that, although your body was present indeed, your soul had become

deaf in sleep's oblivion. So it happens to you night after night, and

the music reaches you no more than the songs of choristers reach the

dead in the graves below.

And the elevating influences of literature? You have books, of course,

in abundance. There is a library, amongst other luxuries of your home.

But the literature your intellect feeds upon is in the columns of the

_Field_, your newspaper. Yet this neglect of the means of culture is not

due to any natural feebleness of the mind. Your brain, by its nature, is

as vigorous as your vigorous body. It is sleep, and weariness, and the

great necessary business of digestion, that drown your intellectual

energies. The work of repairing so great a destruction of muscle is

nature's chief concern. Since you became the mighty hunter that you are,

the wear and tear have been enormous, and the necessary rapidity of

reconstruction has absorbed your rich vitality.

I will not question the wisdom of your choice, if there has been any

deliberate choice, though perhaps the life of action that you lead may

have grown rather out of circumstances determining habit than from any

conscious resolution. Health is so much more necessary to happiness than

culture, that few who could choose between them would sacrifice it for

learning, unless they were impelled by irresistible instincts. And

beyond the great delight of health and strength there is a restlessness

in men born to be active which must have its outlet in activity. I knew

a brave Italian who had followed Garibaldi in all his romantic

enterprises, who had suffered from privation and from wounds, who had

not only faced death in the wildest adventures, but, what is even more

terrible to the active temperament, had risked health from frequent

exposure; and when I asked him whether it was affection to his famous

chief, or faith in a political creed, or some more personal motive that

had led him to this scorn of prudence, he answered that, after honest

self-examination, he believed the most powerful motive to be the

passion for an active life. The active temperament likes physical

action for its own sake, and not as a means of health. Activity renews

itself and claims larger and larger satisfaction, till at last the habit

of it absorbs the whole energy of the man.

Although such a life as yours would be incompatible with the work I have

to do, it would be an unmixed benefit to me to take a greater interest

in exercise. If you could but communicate that interest, how willingly

would I become your pupil! The fatal law of the studious temperament is,

that in exercise itself it must find some intellectual charm, so that we

quit our books in the library only to go and read the infinite book of

nature. We cannot go out in the country without incessantly thinking

about either botany, or geology, or landscape painting, and it is

difficult for us to find a refuge from the importunate habit of

investigation. Sport is the only refuge, but the difficulty is to care

about it sufficiently to avoid _ennui_. When you have not the natural

instinct, how are you to supply its place by any make-believe

excitement? There is no position in the world more wearisome than that

of a man inwardly indifferent to the amusement in which he is trying to

take part. _You_ can watch for game with an invincible patience, for you

have the natural instinct, but after the first ten minutes on the skirts

of the wood I lay my gun down and begin to botanize. Last week a

friendly neighbor invited me to a boar-hunt. The boar was supposed to

be in the middle of a great impenetrable plantation, and all I did

during the whole morning was to sit in my saddle awaiting the exit of

the beast, cantering from one point of the wood's circumference to

another, as the cry of the dogs guided me. Was it pleasure? A true

hunter would have found interest enough in expectation, but I felt like

a man on a railway-platform who is waiting for a train that is late.

LETTER V.

TO A STUDENT WHO NEGLECTED BODILY EXERCISE.

Difficulty of conciliating the animal and the intellectual

lives--Bodily activity sometimes preserved by an effort of the

will--Necessity of faith in exercise--Incompatibility between physical

and intellectual living disappears in large spaces of time--Franklin's

theory about concentration in exercise--Time an essential

factor--Health of a rural postman--Pedestrian habits of

Wordsworth--Pedestrian and equestrian habits of Sir Walter

Scott--Goethe's wild delight in physical exercise--Alexander Humboldt

combated early delicacy by exercise--Intellectual utilities of

physical action.

"We have done those things which we ought not to have done; we have left

undone those things which we ought to have done, and there is no health

in us."

How applicable, my dear brother, are these words which the Church, in

her wisdom, has seen to be adapted to all sinners--how applicable, I

say, are they to students most especially! They have quite a personal

applicability to you and me. We have read all day long, and written till

three o'clock in the morning; we have taken no exercise for weeks, and

there is no health in us. The doctor scrutinizes our wearied eyes, and

knows that our brains are weary. Little do we need his warnings, for

does not Nature herself remind us of our disobedience, and tell us in

language not to be misinterpreted, to amend the error of our ways? Our

digestion is sluggish and imperfect; we are as nervous as delicate

ladies, and there is no health in us.

How easy it is to follow one of the two lives--the animal or the

intellectual! how difficult to conciliate the two! In every one of us

there exists an animal which might have been as vigorous as wolves and

foxes, if it had been left to develop itself in freedom. But besides the

animal, there existed also a mind, and the mental activity restrained

the bodily activity, till at last there is a serious danger of putting

an end to it altogether.

I know two men, about fifty-five years old both of them, and both of

them admirably active. They tell me that their bodily activity has been

preserved by an effort of the will; that if they had not resolutely kept

up the habit of using legs and arms in daily work or amusement their

limbs would have stiffened into uselessness, and their constitutions

would have been unable to bear the call of any sudden emergency. One of

them has four residences in different parts of the same county, and yet

he will not keep a carriage, but is a pedestrian terrible to his

friends; the other is at the head of a great business, and gives an

example of physical activity to his workpeople. Both have an absolute

faith in habitual exercise; and both affirm that if the habit were once

broken they could never afterwards resume it.

We need this faith in exercise--this firm conviction of its

necessity--the sort of conviction that makes a man go out in all

weathers, and leave the most urgent intellectual labor for the mere

discipline and hardening of the body. Few students possess this faith in

its purity. It is hard to believe that we shall get any good from

exercise proportionate to the sacrifice of time.

The incompatibility between the physical and the intellectual lives is

often very marked if you look at small spaces of time only; but if you

consider broader spaces, such as a lifetime, then the incompatibility is

not so marked, and gives place to a manifest conciliation. The brain is

clearer in vigorous health than it can be in the gloom and misery of

sickness; and although health may last for a while without renewal from

exercise, so that if you are working under pressure for a month the time

given to exercise is so much deducted from the result, it is not so for

the life's performance. Health sustained for many years is so useful to

the realization of all considerable intellectual undertakings, that the

sacrifice to the bodily well-being is the best of all possible

investments.

Franklin's theory about concentrating his exercise for the economy of

time was founded upon a mistake. Violent exertion for minutes is _not_

equivalent to moderate exercise for hours. The desire to concentrate

good of various kinds into the smallest possible space is one of the

commonest of _human_ wishes, but it is not encouraged by the broader

economy of nature. In the exercise of the mind every teacher is well

aware that time is an essential factor. It is necessary to _live_ with a

study for hundreds or thousands of hours before the mind can assimilate

as much of the subject as it may need; and so it is necessary to live in

exercise during a thousand hours of every year to make sure of the

physical benefits. Even the fresh air itself requires time to renovate

our blood. The fresh air cannot be concentrated; and to breathe the

prodigious quantities of it which are needed for perfect energy, we must

be out in it frequently and long.

The inhabitants of great cities have recourse to gymnastics as a

substitute for the sports of the country. These exercises have one

advantage--they can be directed scientifically so as to strengthen the

limbs that need development; but no city gymnasium can offer the

invigorating breezes of the mountain. We require not only exercise but

exposure--daily exposure to the health-giving inclemencies of the

weather. The postman who brings my letters walks eight thousand miles a

year, and enjoys the most perfect regularity of health. There are

operatives in factories who go through quite as much bodily exertion,

but they have not his fine condition. He is as merry as a lark, and

announces himself every morning like a bearer of joyful tidings. What

the postman does from necessity an old gentleman did as regularly,

though more moderately, for the preservation of his health and

faculties. He went out every day; and as he never consulted the weather,

so he never had to consult the physicians.

Nothing in the habits of Wordsworth--that model of excellent habits--can

be better as an example to men of letters than his love of pedestrian

excursions. Wherever he happened to be, he explored the whole

neighborhood on foot, looking into every nook and cranny of it; and not

merely the immediate neighborhood, but extended tracts of country; and

in this way he met with much of his best material. Scott was both a

pedestrian and an equestrian traveller, having often, as he tells us,

walked thirty miles or ridden a hundred in those rich and beautiful

districts which afterwards proved to him such a mine of literary wealth.

Goethe took a wild delight in all sorts of physical exercise--swimming

in the Ilm by moonlight, skating with the merry little Weimar court on

the Schwansee, riding about the country on horseback, and becoming at

times quite outrageous in the rich exuberance of his energy. Alexander

Humboldt was delicate in his youth, but the longing for great

enterprises made him dread the hindrances of physical insufficiency, so

he accustomed his body to exercise and fatigue, and prepared himself for

those wonderful explorations which opened his great career. Here are

intellectual lives which were forwarded in their special aims by habits

of physical exercise; and, in an earlier age, have we not also the

example of the greatest intellect of a great epoch, the astonishing

Leonardo da Vinci, who took such a delight in horsemanship that

although, as Vasari tells us, poverty visited him often, he never could

sell his horses or dismiss his grooms?

The physical and intellectual lives are not incompatible. I may go

farther, and affirm that the physical activity of men eminent in

literature has added abundance to their material and energy to their

style; that the activity of scientific men has led them to innumerable

discoveries; and that even the more sensitive and contemplative study of

the fine arts has been carried to a higher perfection by artists who

painted action in which they had had their part, or natural beauty,

which they had travelled far to see. Even philosophy itself owes much to

mere physical courage and endurance. How much that is noblest in ancient

thinking may be due to the hardy health of Socrates!

LETTER VI.

TO AN AUTHOR IN MORTAL DISEASE.

Considering death as a certainty--The wisdom learned from

suffering--Employment of happier intervals--The teaching of the

diseased not to be rejected--Their double experience--Ignorance of

Nature's spoiled children--Benefit of disinterested thought--Reasons

for pursuing intellectual labors to the last--Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

When Alexandre Bixio lay on his death-bed, his friend Labrousse visited

him, and exclaimed on entering the room, "How well you are looking

to-day!" To this, Bixio, who was clearly aware of his condition,

answered in these words:--"Voyons, mon pauvre Labrousse; tu viens voir

un homme qui n'a plus qu'un quart d'heure a vivre, et tu veux lui faire

croire qu'il a bonne mine; allons, une poignee de main, cela vaut mieux

pour un homme que tous ces petits mensonges-la."

I will vex you with none of these well-meant but wearisome little

falsehoods. We both of us know your state; we both know that your

malady, though it may be alleviated, can never be cured; and that the

fatal termination of it, though delayed by all the artifices of science,

will certainly arrive at last. The cheerful courage which enables you to

look this certainty in the face has also enabled you to extract from

years of suffering that profoundest wisdom which (as one of the wisest

of living Englishmen has told us) can be learned from suffering alone.

The admirable elasticity of your intellectual and moral nature has

enabled you, in the intervals of physical uneasiness or pain, to cast

aside every morbid thought, to enter quite fully and heartily into the

healthy life of others, and to enjoy the magnificent spectacle of the

universe with contented submission to its laws--those beneficent yet

relentless laws which to you bring debility and death. You have

continued to write notwithstanding the progress of your malady; and yet,

since it has so pitilessly held you, there is no other change in the

spirit of your compositions than the deepening of a graver beauty, the

addition of a sweeter seriousness. Not one sentence that you have

written betrays either the injustice of the invalid, or his

irritability. Your mind is not clouded by any mist from the fever

marshes, but its sympathies are far more active than they were. Your

pain has taught you a tender pity for all the pain that is outside of

you, and a patient gentleness which was wanting to your nature in its

days of barbarian health.

Surely it would be a lamentable error if mankind were to carry out the

recommendation of certain ruthless philosophers, and reject the help and

teaching of the diseased. Without undervaluing the robust performance of

healthy natures, and without encouraging literature that is morbid, that

is fevered, impatient, and perverse, we may still prize the noble

teaching which is the testament of sufferers to the world. The diseased

have a peculiar and mysterious experience; they have known the

sensations of health, and then, in addition to this knowledge, they have

gained another knowledge which enables them to think more accurately

even of health itself. A life without suffering would be like a picture

without shade. The pets of Nature, who do not know what suffering is,

and cannot realize it, have always a certain rawness, like foolish

landsmen who laugh at the terrors of the ocean, because they have

neither experience enough to know what those terrors are, nor brains

enough to imagine them.

You who are borne along, slowly but irresistibly, to that Niagara which

plunges into the gulf of death,--you who, with perfect self-possession

and heroic cheerfulness, are counting the last miles of the

voyage,--find leisure to study and think as the boat glides onwards

silently to the inevitable end. It is one of the happiest privileges of

the high intellectual life that it can elevate us--at least in the

intervals of relief from complete prostration or acute pain--to regions

of disinterested thought, where all personal anxieties are forgotten. To

feel that he is still able, even in days of physical weakness and

decline, to add something to the world's inheritance of knowledge, or to

bequeath to it some new and noble thought in the pearl of complete

expression, is a profound satisfaction to the active mind that is lodged

in a perishing body. Many diseases fortunately permit this activity to

the last; and I do not hesitate to affirm, that the work done in the

time of physical decline has in not a few instances been the most

perfect and the most permanently valuable. It is not accurately true

that the mind and the body invariably fail together. Physicians who know

how prevalent chronic diseases are, and how many eminent men are

physically inconvenienced by them, know also that minds of great

spiritual energy possess the wonderful faculty of indefinitely improving

themselves whilst the body steadily deteriorates. Nor is there anything

irrational in this persistent improvement of the mind, even to the

extremest limit of material decay; for the mind of every intellectual

human being is part and parcel of the great permanent mind of humanity;

and even if its influence soon ceases to be traceable--if the spoken

words are forgotten--if the written volume is not reprinted or even

quoted, it has not worked in vain. The intellectual light of Europe in

this century is not only due to great luminaries whom every one can

name, but to millions of thoughtful persons, now utterly forgotten, who

in their time loved the light, and guarded it, and increased it, and

carried it into many lands, and bequeathed it as a sacred trust. He who

labors only for his personal pleasure may well be discouraged by the

shortness and uncertainty of life, and cease from his selfish toil on

the first approaches of disease; but whoever has fully realized the

grand continuity of intellectual tradition, and taken his own place in

it between the future and the past, will work till he can work no more,

and then gaze hopefully on the world's great future, like Geoffroy

Saint-Hilaire, when his blind eyes beheld the future of zoology.

LETTER VII.

TO A YOUNG MAN OF BRILLIANT ABILITY, WHO HAD JUST TAKEN HIS DEGREE.

A domestic picture--Thoughts suggested by it--Importance of the senses

in intellectual pursuits--Importance of hearing to Madame de

Stael--Importance of seeing to Mr. Buskin--Mr. Prescott, the

historian--How blindness retarded his work--Value of all the five

senses--Self-government indispensable to their perfection--Great value

of longevity to the intellectual life.

It is always a great pleasure to me to pass an evening at your father's

house; but on the last occasion that pleasure was very much enhanced

because you were once more with us. I watched your mother's eyes as she

sat in her place in the drawing-room. They followed you almost without

ceasing, and there was the sweetest, happiest expression on her dear

face, that betrayed her tender maternal love for you and her legitimate

maternal pride. Your father was equally happy in his own way; he was

much more gay and talkative than I have seen him for two or three

anxious years; he told amusing stories; he entered playfully into the

jests of others; he had pleasant projects for the future, and spoke of

them with facetious exaggeration. I sat quietly in my corner, slyly

observing my old friends, and amusing myself by discovering (it did not

need much perspicacity for that) the hidden sources of the happiness

that was so clearly visible. They were gladdened by the first successes

of your manhood; by the evidence of your strength; by the realization of

hopes long cherished.

Watching this charming picture with a perfect sympathy, I began to have

certain thoughts of my own which it is my present purpose to communicate

to you without disguise. I thought, first, how agreeable it was to be

the spectator of so pretty a picture; but then my eyes wandered to a

painting that hung upon the walls, in which also there were a mother and

her son, and this led me a long way. The painting was a hundred years

old; but although the colors were not quite so fresh as when they left

the palette of the artist, the beautiful youth who stood radiant like a

young Apollo in the centre of the composition had not lost one of the

great gifts with which his cunning human creator had endowed him. The

fire of his eye had not been quenched by time; the bloom of his cheek

still flushed with faint vermilion; his lip was full and imperious; his

limbs athletic; his bearing haughty and dauntless. All life seemed

spread before him like a beautiful rich estate of which every acre was

his own. How easily will he conquer fame! how easily kindle passion. Who

shall withstand this pink and perfection of aristocracy--this ideal of

the age of fine gentlemen, with all the gifts of nature helped by all

the inventions of art?

Then I thought farther: "That splendid young nobleman in the picture

will look just as young as he does now when we shall be either

superannuated or dead." And I looked at you and your mother again and

thought: "It is just five minutes since I saw these two living beings,

and in this little space of time they have both of them aged a little,

though no human observer has enough delicacy of perception to detect so

inappreciable an alteration." I went gradually on and on into the

future, trying to imagine the changes which would come over yourself

more especially (for it was you who were the centre of my reverie), till

at last I imagined pretty accurately what you might be at sixty; but

there it became necessary to stop, because it was too difficult to

conceive the processes of decay.

After this, one thought grew upon me and became dominant. I thought, at

present he has all the senses in their perfection, and they serve him

without a hitch. He is an intelligence served by organs, and the organs

are all doing their duty as faithfully as a postman who brings letters.

When the postman becomes too infirm to do his work he will retire on his

little pension, and another will take his place and bring the letters

just as regularly; but when the human organs become infirm they cannot

be taken out and replaced by new ones, so that we must content ourselves

to the end, with their service, such as it may be. Then I reflected how

useful the senses are to the high intellectual life, and how wise it is,

even for intellectual purposes, to preserve them as long as possible in

their perfection.

To be able to see and hear well--to feel healthy sensations--even to

taste and smell properly, are most important qualifications for the

pursuit of literature, and art, and science. If you read attentively the

work of any truly illustrious poet, you will find that the whole of the

imagery which gives power and splendor to his verse is derived from

nature through one or other of these ordinary channels. Some

philosophers have gone much farther than this, and have affirmed that

the entire intellectual life is based ultimately upon remembered

physical sensations; that we have no mental conception that is really

independent of sensuous experience; and that the most abstract thought

is only removed from sensation by successive processes of substitution,

I have not space to enter into so great and mysterious a subject as

this; but I desire to draw your attention to a truth very commonly

overlooked by intellectual people, which is the enormous importance of

the organs of sense in the highest intellectual pursuits. I will couple

together two names which have owed their celebrity, one chiefly to the

use of her ears, the other to the use of his eyes. Madame de Stael

obtained her literary material almost exclusively by means of

conversation. She directed, systematically, the talk of the learned and

brilliant men amongst whom she lived to the subject which for the moment

happened to occupy her thoughts. Her literary process (which is known to

us in detail through the revelations of her friends) was purposely

invented to catch everything that she heard, as a net catches fish in a

river. First, she threw down on paper a very brief rough draft of the

intended literary project. This she showed to few, but from it she made

a second "state" (as an engraver would say), which she exhibited to some

of her trusted friends, profiting by their hints and suggestions. Her

secretary copied the corrected manuscript, incorporating the new matter,

on paper with a very broad margin for farther additions. During all the

time that it took to carry her work through these successive states,

that ingenious woman made the best possible use of her ears, which were

her natural providers. She made everybody talk who was likely to be of

any use to her, and then immediately added what she had caught on the

wide margin reserved for that purpose. She used her eyes so little that

she might almost as well have been blind. We have it on her own

authority, that were it not out of respect to custom, she would not open

her window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whereas she

would travel five hundred leagues to talk with a clever man whom she had

never met.

Now since Madame de Stael's genius fed itself exclusively through the

faculty of hearing, what an enormous difference it would have made to

her if she had been deaf! It is probable that the whole of her literary

reputation was dependent on the condition of her ears. Even a very

moderate degree of deafness (just enough to make listening irksome)

might have kept her in perpetual obscurity.

The next instance I intend to give is that of a distinguished

contemporary, Mr. Ruskin. His peculiar position in literature is due to

his being able to see as cultivated artists see. Everything that is best

and most original in his writings is invariably either an account of

what he has seen in his own independent inimitable way, or else a

criticism of the accurate or defective sight of others. His method of

study, by drawing and taking written memoranda of what he has seen, is

entirely different from Madame de Stael's method, but refers always, as

hers did, to the testimony of the predominant sense. Every one whose

attention has been attracted to the subject is aware that, amongst

people who are commonly supposed, to see equally well, and who are not

suspected of any tendency to blindness, the degrees of perfection in

this sense vary to infinity. Suppose that Mr. Ruskin (to our great

misfortune) had been endowed with no better eyes than many persons who

see fairly well in the ordinary sense, his enjoyment and use of sight

would have been so much diminished that he would have had little

enthusiasm about seeing, and yet that kind of enthusiasm was quite

essential to his work.

The well-known instance of Mr. Prescott, the historian, is no doubt a

striking proof what _may_ be accomplished by a man of remarkable

intellectual ability without the help of sight, or rather helped by the

sight of others. We have also heard of a blind traveller, and even of a

blind entomologist; but in all cases of this kind they are executive

difficulties to be overcome, such that only the most resolute natures

would ever dream of encountering them. When the materials for the "Reign

of Ferdinand and Isabella" arrived in Prescott's house from Europe, his

remaining eye had just suffered from over-exertion to such a degree that

he could not use it again for years. "I well remember," he wrote in a

letter to a friend, "the blank despair which I felt when my literary

treasures arrived, and I saw the mine of wealth lying around me which I

was forbidden to explore." And although, by a most tedious process,

which would have worn out the patience of any other author, Mr. Prescott

did at last arrive at the conclusion of his work, it cost him ten years

of labor--probably thrice as much time as would have been needed by an

author of equal intellectual ability without any infirmity of sight.

Although, of the five senses which God has given us, sight and hearing

are the most necessary to the intellectual life, it may easily be

demonstrated that the lower ones are not without their intellectual

uses. Perfect literature and art can only he produced by men who are

perfect in all their natural faculties. The great creative intellects

have never been ascetics; they have been rightly and healthily sensitive

to every kind of pleasure. The taste of fruits and wines, the perfume of

flowers are a part of the means by which the spirit of Nature influences

our most secret thoughts, and conveys to us suggestions, or carries us

into states of feeling which have an enormous effect upon our thinking,

though the manner in which the effect is produced is one of the deepest

mysteries of our mysterious being. When the Caliph Vathek added five

wings to the palace of Alkoremmi, on the hill of Pied Horses, for the

particular gratification of each of his five senses, he only did on a

uselessly large scale what every properly-endowed human being does, when

he can afford it, on a small one.

You will not suspect me of preaching unlimited indulgence. The very

object of this letter is to recommend, for intellectual purposes, the

careful preservation of the senses in the freshness of their perfection,

and this is altogether incompatible with every species of excess. If you

are to see clearly all your life, you must not sacrifice eyesight by

over-straining it; and the same law of moderation is the condition of

preserving every other faculty. I want you to know the exquisite taste

of common dry bread; to enjoy the perfume of a larch wood at a distance;

to feel delight when a sea-wave dashes over you. I want your eye to be

so sensitive that it shall discern the faintest tones of a gray cloud,

and yet so strong that it shall bear to gaze on a white one in the

dazzling glory of sunshine. I would have your hearing sharp enough to

detect the music of the spheres, if it were but audible, and yet your

nervous system robust enough to endure the shock of the guns on an

ironclad. To have and keep these powers we need a firmness of

self-government that is rare.

Young men are careless of longevity; but how precious are added years to

the fulness of the intellectual life! There are lives, such as that of

Major Pendennis, which only diminish in value as they advance--when the

man of fashion is no longer fashionable, and the sportsman can no longer

stride over the ploughed fields. The old age of the Major Pendennises is

assuredly not to be envied: but how rich is the age of the Hunboldts! I

compare the life of the intellectual to a long wedge of gold--the thin

end of it begins at birth, and the depth and value of it go on

indefinitely increasing till at last comes Death (a personage for whom

Nathaniel Hawthorne had a peculiar dislike, for his unmannerly habit of

interruption), who stops the auriferous processes. Oh, the mystery of

the nameless ones who have died when the wedge was thin and looked so

poor and light! Oh, the happiness of the fortunate old men whose

thoughts went deeper and deeper like a wall that runs out into the sea!

NOTE.--One of the most painful cases of interruption caused by death

is that of Cuvier. His paralysis came upon him whilst he was still in

full activity, and death prevented him from arranging a great

accumulation of scientific material. He said to M. Pasquier, "I had

great things still to do; all was ready in my head. After thirty years

of labor and research, there remained but to write, and now the hands

fail, and carry with them the head." But the most lamentable instances

of this kind of interruption are, from the nature of things, unknown

to us. Even the friends of the deceased cannot estimate the extent of

the loss, for a man's immediate neighbors are generally the very last

persons to become aware of the nature of his powers or the value of

his acquirements.

PART II.

THE MORAL BASIS.

LETTER I.

TO A MORALIST WHO HAD SAID THAT THERE WAS A WANT OF MORAL FIBRE IN THE

INTELLECTUAL, ESPECIALLY IN POETS AND ARTISTS.

The love of intellectual pleasure--The seeking for a

stimulus--Intoxication of poetry and oratory--Other mental

intoxications--The Bishop of Exeter on drudgery--The labor of

composition in poetry--Wordsworth's dread of it--Moore--His trouble

with "Lalla Rookh"--His painstaking in preparation--Necessity of

patient industry in other arts--John Lewis, Meissonier,

Mulready--Drudgery in struggling against technical

difficulties--Water-color painting, etching, oil-painting, fresco,

line-engraving--Labor undergone for mere discipline--Moral strength of

students--Giordano Bruno.

You told me the other day that you believed the inducement to what I

called intellectual living to be merely the love of pleasure--pleasure

of a higher kind, no doubt, than that which we derive from wine, yet

fairly comparable to it. You went on to say that you could not, from the

moral point of view, discern any appreciable difference between

intoxicating oneself by means of literature or art and getting tipsy on

port wine or brandy; that the reading of poetry, most especially was

clearly self-intoxication--a service of Venus and Bacchus, in which the

suggestions of artfully-ordered words were used as substitutes for the

harem and the wine-flask. Completing the expression of this idea, you

said that the excitement produced by oratory was exactly of the same

nature as the excitement produced by gin, so that Mr. Bright and M.

Gambetta--nay, even a gentleman so respectable as the late Lord

Derby--belonged strictly to the same profession as the publicans, being

dealers in stimulants, and no more. The habitual student was, in your

view, nothing better than the helpless victim of unresisted appetite, to

whom intellectual intoxication, having been at first a pleasure, had

finally become a necessity. You added that any rational person who found

himself sinking into such a deplorable condition as this, would have

recourse to some severe discipline as a preservative--a discipline

requiring close attention to common things, and rigorously excluding

every variety of thought which could possibly be considered

intellectual.

It is strictly true that the three intellectual pursuits--literature,

science, and the fine arts--are all of them strong stimulants, and that

men are attracted to them by the stimulus they give. But these

occupations are morally much nearer to the common level of other

occupations than you suppose. There is no doubt a certain intoxication

in poetry and painting; but I have seen a tradesman find a fully

equivalent intoxication in an addition of figures showing a delightful

balance at his banker's. I have seen a young poet intoxicated with the

love of poetry; but I have also seen a young mechanical genius on whom

the sight of a locomotive acted exactly like a bottle of champagne.

Everything that is capable of exciting or moving man, everything that

fires him with enthusiasm, everything that sustains his energies above

the dead level of merely animal existence, may be compared, and not very

untruly, to the action of generous wine. The two most powerful mental

stimulants--since they overcome even the fear of death--are

unquestionably religion and patriotism: ardent states of feeling both of

them when they are genuine; yet this ardor has a great utility. It

enables men to bear much, to perform much which would be beyond their

natural force if it were not sustained by powerful mental stimulants.

And so it is in the intellectual life. It is because its labors are so

severe that its pleasures are so glorious. The Creator of intellectual

man set him the most arduous tasks--tasks that required the utmost

possible patience, courage, self-discipline, and which at the same time

were for the most part, from their very nature, likely to receive only

the most meagre and precarious pecuniary reward. Therefore, in order

that so poor and weak a creature might execute its gigantic works with

the energy necessary to their permanence, the labor itself was made

intensely attractive and interesting to the few who were fitted for it

by their constitution. Since their courage could not be maintained by

any of the common motives which carry men through ordinary

drudgery--since neither wealth nor worldly position was in their

prospects, the drudgery they had to go through was to be rewarded by the

triumphs of scientific discovery, by the felicities of artistic

expression. A divine drunkenness was given to them for their

encouragement, surpassing the gift of the grape.

But now that I have acknowledged, not ungratefully, the necessity of

that noble excitement which is the life of life, it is time for me to

add that, in the daily labor of all intellectual workers, much has to be

done which requires a robustness of the moral constitution beyond what

you appear to be aware of. It is not long since the present Bishop of

Exeter truly affirmed, in an address to a body of students, that if

there were not weariness in work, that work was not so thorough-going as

it ought to be. "Of all work," the Bishop said, "that produces results,

nine-tenths must be drudgery. There is no work, from the highest to the

lowest, which can be done well by any man who is unwilling to make that

sacrifice. Part of the very nobility of the devotion of the true workman

to his work consists in the fact that a man is not daunted by finding

that drudgery must be done; and no man can really succeed in any walk of

life without a good deal of what in ordinary English is called pluck.

That is the condition of all work whatever, and it is the condition of

all success. And there is nothing which so truly repays itself as this

very perseverance against weariness."

You understand, no doubt, that there is drudgery in the work of a lawyer

or an accountant, but you imagine that there is no drudgery in that of

an artist, or author, or man of science. In these cases you fancy that

there is nothing but a pleasant intoxication, like the puffing of

tobacco or the sipping of claret after dinner. The Bishop sees more

accurately. He knows that "of _all_ work that produces results

nine-tenths must be drudgery." He makes no exceptions in favor of the

arts and sciences; if he had made any such exceptions, they would have

proved the absence of culture in himself. Real work of all descriptions,

even including the composition of poetry (the most intoxicating of all

human pursuits), contains drudgery in so large a proportion that

considerable moral courage is necessary to carry it to a successful

issue. Some of the most popular writers of verse have dreaded the labor

of composition. Wordsworth shrank from it much more sensitively than he

did from his prosaic labors as a distributor of stamps. He had that

_horreur de la plume_ which is a frequent malady amongst literary men.

But we feel, in reading Wordsworth, that composition was a serious toil

to him--the drudgery is often visible. Let me take, then, the case of a

writer of verse distinguished especially for fluency and ease--the

lightest, gayest, apparently most thoughtless of modern minstrels--the

author of "The Irish Melodies" and "Lalla Rookh." Moore said--I quote

from memory and may not give the precise words, but they were to this

effect--that although the first shadowy imagining of a new poem was a

delicious fool's paradise, the labor of actual composition was something

altogether different. He did not, I believe, exactly use the word

"drudgery," but his expression implied that there was painful drudgery

in the work. When he began to write "Lalla Rookh" the task was anything

but easy to him. He said that he was "at all times a far more slow and

painstaking workman than would ever be guessed from the result." For a

long time after the conclusion of the agreement with Messrs. Longman,

"though generally at work with a view to this task, he made but very

little real progress in it." After many unsatisfactory attempts, finding

that his subjects were so slow in kindling his own sympathies, he began

to despair of their ever touching the hearts of others. "Had this series

of disheartening experiments been carried on much further, I must have

thrown aside the work in despair." He took the greatest pains in long

and laboriously preparing himself by reading. "To form a storehouse, as

it were, of illustrations purely Oriental, and so familiarize myself

with its various treasures that, quick as Fancy required the aid of

fact in her spiritings, the memory was ready to furnish materials for

the spell-work; such was, for a long while, the sole object of my

studies." After quoting some opinions favorable to the truth of his

Oriental coloring, he says: "Whatever of vanity there may be in citing

such tributes, they show, at least, of what great value, even in poetry,

is that prosaic quality, industry, since it was in a slow and laborious

collection of small facts that the first foundations of this fanciful

romance were laid."

Other fine arts make equally large claims upon the industry of their

professors. We see the charming result, which looks as if it were

nothing but pleasure--the mere sensuous gratification of an appetite for

melody or color; but no one ever eminently succeeded in music or

painting without patient submission to a discipline far from attractive

or entertaining. An idea was very prevalent amongst the upper classes in

England, between twenty and thirty years ago, that art was not a serious

pursuit, and that Frenchmen were too frivolous to apply themselves

seriously to anything. When, however, the different schools of art in

Europe came to be exhibited together, the truth began to dawn upon

people's minds that the French and Belgian schools of painting had a

certain superiority over the rest--a superiority of quite a peculiar

sort; and when the critics applied themselves to discover the hidden

causes of this generally perceived superiority, they found out that it

was due in great measure to the patient drudgery submitted to by those

foreign artists in their youth. English painters who have attained

distinction have gone through a like drudgery, if not in the public

_atelier_ at least in secrecy and solitude. Mr. John Lewis, in reply to

an application for a drawing to be reproduced by the autotype process,

and published in the _Portfolio_, said that his sketches and studies

were all in color, but if we liked to examine them we were welcome to

select anything that might be successfully photographed. Not being in

London at the time, I charged an experienced friend to go and see if

there were anything that would answer our purpose. Soon afterward he

wrote: "I have just been to see John Lewis, and have come away

_astounded_." He had seen the vast foundations of private industry on

which the artist's public work had been erected,--innumerable studies in

color, wrought with the most perfect care and finish, and all for

self-education merely, not for any direct reward in fame. We have all

admired the extraordinary power of representation in the little pictures

of Meissonier; that power was acquired by painting studies _life-size_

for self-instruction, and the artist has sustained his knowledge by

persistence in that practice. Mulready, between the conception of a new

picture and the execution of it, used to give himself a special training

for the intended work by painting a study in color of every separate

thing that was to form part of the composition. It is useless to go on

multiplying these examples, since all great artists, without exception,

have been distinguished for their firm faith in steady well-directed

labor. This faith was so strong in Reynolds that it limited his

reasoning powers, and prevented him from assigning their due importance

to the inborn natural gifts.

Not only in their preparations for work, but even in the work itself, do

artists undergo drudgery. It is the peculiarity of their work that, more

than any other human work, it displays whatever there may be in it of

pleasure and felicity, putting the drudgery as much out of sight as

possible; but all who know the secrets of the studio are aware of the

ceaseless struggles against technical difficulty which are the price of

the charms that pleasantly deceive us. The amateur tries to paint in

water-color, and finds that the gradation of his sky will not come

right; instead of being a sound gradation like that of the heavenly

blue, it is all in spots and patches. Then he goes to some clever artist

who seems to get the right thing with enviable ease. "Is my paper good?

have my colors been properly ground?" The materials are sound enough,

but the artist confesses one of the discouraging little secrets of his

craft. "The fact is," he says, "those spots that you complain of happen

to all of us, and very troublesome they are, especially in dark tints;

the only way is to remove them as patiently as we can, and it sometimes

takes several days. If one or two of them remain in spite of us, we

turn them into birds." In etching, the most famous practitioners get

into messes with the treacherous chemistry of their acids, and need an

invincible patience. Even Meryon was always very anxious when the time

came for confiding his work to what he called the _traitresse liqueur_;

and whenever I give a commission to an etcher, I am always expecting

some such despatch as the following: "Plate utterly ruined in the

biting. Very sorry. Will begin another immediately." We know what a

dreadful series of mishaps attended our fresco-painters at Westminster,

and now even the promising water-glass process, in which Maclise

trusted, shows the bloom of premature decay. The safest and best known

of modern processes, simple oil-painting has its own dangers also. The

colors sink and alter; they lose their relative values; they lose their

pearly purity, their glowing transparence--they turn to buff and black.

The fine arts bristle all over with technical difficulties, and are, I

will not say the best school of patience in the world, for many other

pursuits are also very good schools of patience; but I will say, without

much fear of contradiction from anybody acquainted with the subject,

that the fine arts offer drudgery enough, and disappointment enough, to

be a training both in patience and in humility.

In the labor of the line-engraver both these qualities are developed to

the pitch of perfect heroism. He sits down to a great surface of steel

or copper, and day by day, week after week, month after month, ploughs

slowly his marvellous lines. Sometimes the picture before him is an

agreeable companion; he is in sympathy with the painter; he enjoys every

touch that he has to translate. But sometimes, on the contrary, he hates

the picture, and engraves it as a professional duty. I happened to call

upon a distinguished English engraver--a man of the greatest taste and

knowledge, a refined and cultivated critic--and I found him seated at

work before a thing which had nothing to do with fine art--a medley of

ugly portraits of temperance celebrities on a platform. "Ah!" he said to

me sadly, "you see the dark side of our profession; fancy sitting down

to a desk all day long for two years together with that thing to occupy

your thoughts!" How much moral fibre was needed to carry to a successful

issue so repulsive a task as that! You may answer that a stone-breaker

on the roadside surpasses my line-engraver both in patience and in

humility; but whereas the sensitiveness of the stone-breaker has been

deadened by his mode of life, the sensitiveness of the engraver has been

continually fostered and increased. An ugly picture was torture to his

cultivated eye, and he had to bear the torture all day long, like the

pain of an irritating disease.

Still even the line-engraver has secret sources of entertainment to

relieve the mortal tedium of his task-work. The picture may be hideous,

but the engraver has hidden consolations in the exercise of his

wonderful art. He can at least entertain himself with feats of

interpretative skill, with the gentle treacheries of improving here and

there upon the hatefulness of the intolerable original. He may

congratulate himself in the evening, that one more frightful hat or coat

has been got rid of; that the tiresome task has been reduced by a space

measurable in eights of an inch. The heaviest work which shows progress

is not without _one_ element of cheerfulness.

There is a great deal of intellectual labor, undergone simply for

discipline, which shows no present result that is appreciable, and which

therefore requires, in addition to patience and humility, one of the

noblest of the moral virtues, faith. Of all the toils in which men

engage, none are nobler in their origin or their aim than those by which

they endeavor to become more wise. Pray observe that whenever the desire

for greater wisdom is earnest enough to sustain men in these high

endeavors, there must be both humility and faith--the humility which

acknowledges present insufficiency, the faith that relies upon the

mysterious laws which govern our intellectual being. Be sure that there

has been great moral strength in all who have come to intellectual

greatness. During some brief moments of insight the mist has rolled away

and they have beheld, like a celestial city, the home of their highest

aspirations; but the cloud has gathered round them again, and still in

the gloom they have gone steadily forwards, stumbling often, yet

maintaining their unconquerable resolution. It is to this sublime

persistence of the intellectual in other ages that the world owes the

treasures which they won; it is by a like persistence that we may hope

to hand them down, augmented, to the future. Their intellectual purposes

did not weaken their moral nature, but exercised and exalted it. All

that was best and highest in the imperfect moral nature of Giordano

Bruno had its source in that noble passion for Philosophy, which made

him declare that for her sake it was easy to endure labor and pain and

exile, since he had found "in brevi labore diuturnam requiem, in levi

dolore immensum gaudium, in angusto exilio patriam amplissimam."

LETTER II.

TO AN UNDISCIPLINED WRITER.

Early indocility of great workers--External discipline only a

substitute for inward discipline--Necessity for inward

discipline--Origin of the idea of discipline--Authors peculiarly

liable to overlook its uses--Good examples--Sir Arthur

Helps--Sainte-Beuve--The central authority in the mind--Locke's

opinion--Even the creative faculty may be commanded--Charles

Baudelaire--Discipline in common trades and professions--Lawyers and

surgeons--Haller--Mental refusals not to be altogether

disregarded--The idea of discipline the moral basis of the

intellectual life--Alexander Humboldt.

Sir Arthur Helps, in that wise book of his "Thoughts upon Government,"

says that "much of the best and greatest work in the world has been done

by those who were anything but docile in their youth." He believes that

"this bold statement applies not only to the greatest men in Science,

Literature, and Art, but also to the greatest men in official life, in

diplomacy, and in the general business of the world."

Many of us who were remarkable for our indocility in boyhood, and

remarkable for nothing else, have found much consolation in this

passage. It is most agreeable to be told, by a writer very eminent both

for wisdom and for culture, that our untowardness was a hopeful sign.

Another popular modern writer has also encouraged us by giving a long

list of dunces who have become illustrious.

Yet, however flattering it may be to find ourselves in such excellent

company, at least so far as the earlier half of life may be concerned,

we cannot quite forget the very numerous instances of distinguished

persons who began by submitting to the discipline of school and college,

and gained honors and reputation there, before encountering the

competition of the world.

The external discipline applied by schoolmasters is a substitute for

that inward discipline which we all so greatly need, and which is

absolutely indispensable to culture. Whether a boy happens to be a dunce

at school or a youth of brilliant promise, his future intellectual

career will depend very much on his moral force. The distinguished men

who derived so little benefit from early discipline have invariably

subjected themselves to a discipline of another kind which prepared them

for the labor of their manhood. It may be a pure assumption to say this,

but the assumption is confirmed by every instance that is known to me.

Many eminent men have undergone the discipline of business, many like

Franklin have been self-disciplined, but I have never heard of a person

who had risen to intellectual eminence without voluntary submission to

an intellectual discipline of some kind.

There are, no doubt, great pleasures attached to the intellectual life,

and quite peculiar to it; but these pleasures are the support of

discipline and not its negation. They give us the cheerfulness necessary

for our work, but they do not excuse us from the work. They are like

the cup of coffee served to a soldier on duty, not like the opium which

incapacitates for everything but dreaming.

I have been led into these observations by a perusal of the new book

which you sent me. It has many qualities which in a young writer are

full of promise. It is earnest, and lively, and exuberant, but at the

same time it is undisciplined.

Now I believe it may be affirmed, that although there has been much

literature in former ages which was both vigorous and undisciplined,

still when an age presents, as ours does, living examples of perfect

intellectual discipline, whoever falls below them in this respect

contents himself with the very kind of inferiority which of all

inferiorities is the easiest to avoid. You cannot, by an effort of the

will, hope to rival the brilliance of a genius, but you may quite

reasonably expect to obtain as complete a control over your own

faculties and your own work as any other highly-cultivated person.

The origin of discipline is the desire to do not merely our best with

the degree of power and knowledge which at the time we do actually

happen to possess, but with that which we _might_ possess if we

submitted to the necessary training. The powers given to us by Nature

are little more than a power to become, and this becoming is always

conditional on some sort of exercise--what sort we have to discover for

ourselves.

No class of persons are so liable to overlook the uses of discipline as

authors are. Anybody can write a book, though few can write that which

deserves the name of literature. There are great technical differences

between literature and book-making, but few can clearly explain these

differences, or detect, in their own case, the absence of the necessary

qualities. In painting, the most perfect finish is recognized at a

glance, but the mind only can perceive it in the book. It was an odd

notion of the authorities to exhibit literature in the international

exhibitions; but if they could have made people see the difference

between sound and unsound workmanship in the literary craft, they would

have rendered a great service to the higher intellectual discipline. Sir

Arthur Helps might have served as an example to English writers, because

he has certain qualities in which we are grievously deficient. He can

say a thing in the words that are most fit and necessary, and then leave

it. Sainte-Beuve would have been another admirable example of

self-discipline, especially to Frenchmen, who would do well to imitate

him in his horror of the _a peu pres_. He never began to write about

anything until he had cleared the ground well before him. He never spoke

about any character or doctrine that he had not bottomed (to use Locke's

word) as far as he was able. He had an extraordinary aptitude for

collecting exactly the sort of material that he needed, for arranging

and classifying material, for perceiving its mutual relations. Very few

Frenchmen have had Sainte-Beuve's intense repugnance to insufficiency

of information and inaccuracy of language. Few indeed are the French

journalists of whom it might be said, as it may be truly said of

Sainte-Beuve, that he never wrote even an article for a newspaper

without having subjected his mind to a special training for that

particular article. The preparations for one of his _Lundis_ were the

serious occupation of several laborious days; and before beginning the

actual composition, his mind had been disciplined into a state of the

most complete readiness, like the fingers of a musician who has been

practising a piece before he executes it.

The object of intellectual discipline is the establishment of a strong

central authority in the mind by which all its powers are regulated and

directed as the military forces of a nation are directed by the

strategist who arranges the operations of a war. The presence of this

strong central authority is made manifest in the unity and proportion of

the results; when this authority is absent (it is frequently entirely

absent from the minds of undisciplined persons, especially of the female

sex), you have a chaos of complete confusion; when the authority without

being absent is not strong enough to regulate the lively activity of the

intellectual forces, you have too much energy in one direction, too

little in another, a brigade where a regiment could have done the work,

and light artillery where you want guns of the heaviest calibre.

To establish this central authority it is only necessary, in any

vigorous and sound mind, to exercise it. Without such a central power

there is neither liberty of action nor security of possession. "The

mind," says Locke, "should always be free and ready to turn itself to

the variety of objects that occur, and allow them as much consideration

as shall, for that time, be thought fit. To be engrossed so by one

subject as not to be prevailed on to leave it for another that we judge

fitter for our contemplation, is to make it of no use to us. Did this

state of mind always remain so, every one would, without scruple, give

it the name of perfect madness; and whilst it does last, at whatever

intervals it returns, such a rotation of thoughts about the same object

no more carries us forward toward the attainment of knowledge, than

getting upon a mill-horse whilst he jogs on his circular track, would

carry a man on a journey."

Writers of imaginative literature have found in practice that even the

creative faculty might be commanded. Charles Baudelaire, who had the

poetical organization with all its worst inconveniencies, said

nevertheless that "inspiration is decidedly the sister of daily labor.

These two contraries do not exclude each other more than all the other

contraries which constitute nature. Inspiration obeys like hunger, like

digestion, like sleep. There is, no doubt, in the mind a sort of

celestial mechanism, of which we need not be ashamed, but we ought to

make the best use of it. If we will only live in a resolute

contemplation of next day's work, the daily labor will serve

inspiration." In cases where discipline is felt to be very difficult, it

is generally at the same time felt to be very desirable. George Sand

complains that although "to overcome the indiscipline of her brain, she

had imposed upon herself a regular way of living, and a daily labor,

still twenty times out of thirty she catches herself reading or

dreaming, or writing something entirely apart from the work in hand."

She adds that without this frequent intellectual _flanerie_, she would

have acquired information which has been her perpetual but unrealized

desire.

It is the triumph of discipline to overcome both small and great

repugnances. We bring ourselves, by its help, to face petty details that

are wearisome, and heavy tasks that are almost appalling. Nothing shows

the power of discipline more than the application of the mind in the

common trades and professions to subjects which have hardly any interest

in themselves. Lawyers are especially admirable for this. They acquire

the faculty of resolutely applying their minds to the dryest documents,

with tenacity enough to end in the perfect mastery of their contents; a

feat which is utterly beyond the capacity of any undisciplined

intellect, however gifted by Nature. In the case of lawyers there are

frequent intellectual repugnances to be overcome; but surgeons and other

men of science have to vanquish a class of repugnances even less within

the power of the will--the instinctive physical repugnances. These are

often so strong as to seem apparently insurmountable, but they yield to

persevering discipline. Although Haller surpassed his contemporaries in

anatomy, and published several important anatomical works, he was

troubled at the outset with a horror of dissection beyond what is usual

with the inexperienced, and it was only by firm self-discipline that he

became an anatomist at all.

There is, however, one reserve to be made about discipline, which is

this: We ought not to disregard altogether the mind's preferences and

refusals, because in most cases they are the indication of our natural

powers. They are not so always; many have felt attracted to pursuits for

which they had no capacity (this happens continually in literature and

the fine arts), whilst others have greatly distinguished themselves in

careers which were not of their own choosing, and for which they felt no

vocation in their youth. Still there exists a certain relation between

preference and capacity, which may often safely be relied upon when

there are not extrinsic circumstances to attract men or repel them.

Discipline becomes an evil, and a very serious evil, causing immense

losses of special talents to the community, when it overrides the

personal preferences entirely. We are less in danger of this evil,

however, from the discipline which we impose upon ourselves than from

that which is imposed upon us by the opinion of the society in which we

live. The intellectual life has this remarkable peculiarity as to

discipline, that whilst very severe discipline is indispensable to it,

that which it really needs is the obedience to an inward law, an

obedience which is not only compatible with revolt against other

people's notions of what the intellectual man ought to think and do, but

which often directly leads to such revolt as its own inevitable result.

In the attempt to subject ourselves to the inward law, we may encounter

a class of mental refusals which indicate no congenital incapacity, but

prove that the mind has been incapacitated by its acquired habits and

its ordinary occupations. I think that it is particularly important to

pay attention to this class of mental refusals, and to give them the

fullest consideration. Suppose the case of a man who has a fine natural

capacity for painting, but whose time has been taken up by some

profession which has formed in him mental habits entirely different from

the mental habits of an artist. The inborn capacity for art might

whisper to this man, "What if you were to abandon your profession and

turn painter?" But to this suggestion of the inborn capacity the

acquired unfitness would, in a man of sense, most probably reply, "No;

painting is an art bristling all over with the most alarming technical

difficulties, which I am too lazy to overcome; let younger men attack

them if they like." Here is a mental refusal of a kind which the

severest self-disciplinarian ought to listen to. This is Nature's way

of keeping us to our specialities; she protects us by means of what

superficial moralists condemn as one of the minor vices--the

disinclination to trouble ourselves without necessity, when the work

involves the acquisition of new habits.

The moral basis of the intellectual life appears to be the idea of

discipline; but the discipline is of a very peculiar kind, and varies

with every individual. People of original power have to discover the

original discipline that they need. They pass their lives in

thoughtfully altering this private rule of conduct as their needs alter,

as the legislature of a progressive State makes unceasing alterations in

its laws. When we look back upon the years that are gone, this is our

bitterest regret, that whilst the precious time, the irrecoverable, was

passing by so rapidly, we were intellectually too undisciplined to make

the best personal use of all the opportunities that it brought. Those

men may be truly esteemed happy and fortunate who can say to themselves

in the evening of their days--"I had so prepared myself for every

successive enterprise, that when the time came for it to be carried into

execution my training ensured success."

I had thought of some examples, and there are several great men who have

left us noble examples of self-discipline; but, in the range and

completeness of that discipline, in the foresight to discern what would

be wanted, in the humility to perceive that it was wanting, in the

resolution that it should _not_ be wanting when the time came that such

knowledge or faculty should be called for, one colossal figure so far

excels all others that I cannot write down their names with that of

Alexander Humboldt. The world sees the intellectual greatness of such a

man, but does not see the substantial moral basis on which the towering

structure rose. When I think of his noble dissatisfaction with what he

knew; his ceaseless eagerness to know more, and know it better; of the

rare combination of teachableness that despised no help (for he accepted

without jealousy the aid of everybody who could assist him), with

self-reliance that kept him always calm and observant in the midst of

personal danger, I know not which is the more magnificent spectacle, the

splendor of intellectual light, or the beauty and solidity of the moral

constitution that sustained it.

LETTER III.

TO A FRIEND WHO SUGGESTED THE SPECULATION "WHICH OF THE MORAL VIRTUES

WAS MOST ESSENTIAL TO THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE."

The most essential virtue is disinterestedness--The other virtues

possessed by the opponents of intellectual liberty--The Ultramontane

party--Difficulty of thinking disinterestedly even about the affairs

of another nation--English newspapers do not write disinterestedly

about foreign affairs--Difficulty of disinterestedness in recent

history--Poets and their readers feel it--Fine subjects for poetry in

recent events not yet available--Even history of past times rarely

disinterested--Advantages of the study of the dead languages in this

respect--Physicians do not trust their own judgment about their

personal health--The virtue consists in endeavoring to be

disinterested.

I think there cannot be a doubt that the most essential virtue is

disinterestedness.

Let me tell you, after this decided answer, what are the considerations

which have led me to it. I began by taking the other important virtues

one by one--industry, perseverance, courage, discipline, humility, and

the rest; and then asked myself whether any class of persons possessed

and cultivated these virtues who were nevertheless opposed to

intellectual liberty. The answer came immediately, that there have in

every age been men deservedly respected for these virtues who did all in

their power to repress the free action of the intellect. What is called

the Ultramontane party in the present day includes great numbers of

talented adherents who are most industrious, most persevering, who

willingly submit to the severest discipline--who are learned,

self-denying, and humble enough to accept the most obscure and

ill-requited duties. Some of these men possess nine-tenths of the

qualifications that are necessary to the highest intellectual life--they

have brilliant gifts of nature; they are well-educated; they take a

delight in the exercise of noble faculties, and yet instead of employing

their time and talents to help the intellectual advancement of mankind,

they do all in their power to retard it. They have many most respectable

virtues, but one is wanting. They have industry, perseverance,

discipline, but they have _not_ disinterestedness.

I do not mean disinterestedness in its ordinary sense as the absence of

selfish care about money. The Church of Rome has thousands of devoted

servants who are content to labor in her cause for stipends so miserable

that it is clear they have no selfish aim; whilst they abandon all those

possibilities of fortune which exist for every active and enterprising

layman. But their thinking can never be disinterested so long as their

ruling motive is devotion to the interests of their Church. Some of them

are personally known to me, and we have discussed together many of the

greatest questions which agitate the continental nations at the present

time. They have plenty of intellectual acumen; but whenever the

discussion touches, however remotely, the ecclesiastical interests that

are dear to them, they cease to be observers--they become passionate

advocates. It is this habit of advocacy which debars them from all

elevated speculation about the future of the human race, and which so

often induces them to take a side with incapable and retrograde

governments, too willingly overlooking their deficiencies in the

expectation of services to the cause. Their predecessors have impeded,

as far as they were able, the early growth of science--not for

intellectual reasons, but because they instinctively felt that there was

something in the scientific spirit not favorable to those interests

which they placed far above the knowledge of mere matter.

I have selected the Ultramontane party in the Church of Rome as the most

prominent example of a party eminent for many intellectual virtues, and

yet opposed to the intellectual life from its own want of

disinterestedness. But the same defect exists, to some degree, in every

partisan--exists in you and me so far as we are partisans. Let us

suppose, for example, that we desired to find out the truth about a

question much agitated in a neighboring country at the present time--the

question whether it would be better for that country to attempt the

restoration of its ancient Monarchy or to try to consolidate a

Republican form of government. How difficult it is to think out such a

problem disinterestedly, and yet how necessary to the justice of our

conclusions that we should think disinterestedly if we pretend to think

at all! It is true that we have one circumstance in our favor--we are

not French subjects, and this is much. Still we are not disinterested,

since we know that the settlement of a great political problem such as

this, even though on foreign soil, cannot fail to have a powerful

influence on opinion in our own country, and consequently upon the

institutions of our native land. We are spectators only, it is true; but

we are far from being disinterested spectators. And if you desire to

measure the exact degree to which we are interested in the result, you

need only look at the newspapers. The English newspapers always treat

French affairs from the standpoint of their own party. The Conservative

journalist in England is a Monarchist in France, and has no hopes for

the Republic; the Liberal journalist in England believes that the French

dynasties are used up, and sees no chance of tranquillity outside of

republican institutions. In both cases there is an impediment to the

intellectual appreciation of the problem.

This difficulty is so strongly felt by those who write and read the sort

of literature which aspires to permanence, and which, therefore, ought

to have a substantial intellectual basis, that either our distinguished

poets choose their subjects in actions long past and half-forgotten, or

else, when tempted by present excitement, they produce work which is

artistically far inferior to their best. Our own generation has

witnessed three remarkable events which are poetical in the highest

degree. The conquest of the Two Sicilies by Garibaldi is a most perfect

subject for a heroic poem; the events which led to the execution of the

Emperor Maximilian and deprived his Empress of reason, would, in the

hands of a great dramatist, afford the finest possible material for a

tragedy; the invasion of France by the Germans, the overthrow of

Napoleon III., the siege of Paris, are an epic ready to hand that only

awaits its Homer; yet, with the exception of Victor Hugo, who is far

gone in intellectual decadence, no great poet has sung of these things

yet. The subjects are as good as can be, but too near. Neither poet nor

reader is disinterested enough for the intellectual enjoyment of these

subjects: the poet would not see his way clearly, the reader would not

follow unreservedly.

It may be added, however, in this connection, that even past history is

hardly ever written disinterestedly. Historians write with one eye on

the past and the other on the pre-occupations of the present. So far as

they do this they fall short of the intellectual standard. An ideally

perfect history would tell the pure truth, and all the truth, so far as

it was ascertainable.

Artists are seldom good critics of art, because their own practice

biasses them, and they are not disinterested. The few artists who have

written soundly about art have succeeded in the difficult task of

detaching saying from doing; they have, in fact, become two distinct

persons, each oblivious of the other.

The strongest of all the reasons in favor of the study of the dead

languages and the literatures preserved in them, has always appeared to

me to consist in the more perfect disinterestedness with which we

moderns can approach them. The men and events are separated from us by

so wide an interval, not only of time and locality, but especially of

modes of thought, that our passions are not often enlisted, and the

intellect is sufficiently free.

It may be noted that medical men, who are a scientific class, and

therefore more than commonly aware of the great importance of

disinterestedness in intellectual action, never trust their own judgment

when they feel the approaches of disease. They know that it is difficult

for a man, however learned in medicine, to arrive at accurate

conclusions about the state of a human body that concerns him so nearly

as his own, even although the person who suffers has the advantage of

actually experiencing the morbid sensations.

To all this you may answer that intellectual disinterestedness seems

more an accident of situation than a virtue. The virtue is not to have

it, but to seek it in all earnestness; to be ready to accept the truth

even when it is most unfavorable to ourselves. I can illustrate my

meaning by a reference to a matter of everyday experience. There are

people who cannot bear to look into their own accounts from a dread

that the clear revelation of figures may be less agreeable to them than

the illusions which they cherish. There are others who possess a kind of

virtue which enables them to see their own affairs as clearly as if they

had no personal interest in them. The weakness of the first is one of

the most fatal of intellectual weaknesses; the mental independence of

the second is one of the most desirable of intellectual qualities. The

endeavor to attain it, or to strengthen it, is a great virtue, and of

all the virtues the one most indispensable to the nobility of the

intellectual life.

NOTE.--The reader may feel some surprise that I have not mentioned

honesty as an important intellectual virtue. Honesty is of great

importance, no doubt, but it appears to be (as to practical effects)

included in disinterestedness, and to be less comprehensively useful.

There is no reason to suspect the honesty of many political and

theological partisans, yet their honesty does not preserve them from

the worst intellectual habits, such as the habit of "begging the

question," of misrepresenting the arguments on the opposite side, of

shutting their eyes to every fact which is not perfectly agreeable to

them. The truth is, that mere honesty, though a most respectable and

necessary virtue, goes a very little way toward the forming of an

effective intellectual character. It is valuable rather in the

relations of the intellectual man to the outer world around him, and

even here it is dangerous unless tempered by discretion. A perfect

disinterestedness would ensure the best effects of honesty, and yet

avoid some serious evils, against which honesty is not, in itself, a

safeguard.

LETTER IV.

TO A MORALIST WHO SAID THAT INTELLECTUAL CULTURE WAS NOT CONDUCIVE TO

SEXUAL MORALITY.

That the Author does not write in the spirit of advocacy--Two

different kinds of immorality--Byron and Shelley--A peculiar

temptation for the intellectual--A distinguished foreign

writer--Reaction to coarseness from over-refinement--Danger of

intellectual excesses--Moral utility of culture--The most cultivated

classes at the same time the most moral--That men of high intellectual

aims have an especially strong reason for morality--M. Taine's

opinion.

A critic in one of the quarterlies once treated me as a feeble defender

of my opinions, because I gave due consideration to both sides of a

question. He said that, like a wise commander, I capitulated beforehand

in case my arguments did not come up for my relief; nay, more, that I

gave up my arms in unconditional surrender. To this let me answer, that

I have nothing to do with the polemical method, that I do not look upon

an opponent as an enemy to be repelled, but as a torch-bearer to be

welcomed for any light that he may bring; that I defend nothing, but try

to explore everything that lies near enough.

You need not expect me, therefore, to defend very vigorously the

morality of the intellectual life. An advocate could do it brilliantly;

there are plenty of materials, but so clumsy an advocate as your present

correspondent would damage the best of causes by unseasonable

indiscretions. So I begin by admitting that your accusations are most

of them well founded. Many intellectual people have led immoral lives,

others have led lives which, although in strict conformity to their own

theories of morality, were in opposition to the morality of their

country and their age. Byron is a good instance of the first, and

Shelley of the second. Byron was really and knowingly immoral; Shelley,

on the other hand, hated what he considered to be immorality, and lived

a life as nearly as possible in accordance with the moral ideal in his

own conscience; still he did not respect the moral rule of his country,

but lived with Mary Godwin, whilst Harriet, his first wife, was still

alive. There is a clear distinction between the two cases; yet both have

the defect that the person takes in hand the regulation of his own

morality, which it is hardly safe for any one to do, considering the

prodigious force of passion.

I find even in the lives of intellectual people a peculiar temptation to

immorality from which others are exempt. It is in their nature to feel

an eager desire for intellectual companionship, and yet at the same time

to exhaust very rapidly whatever is congenial to them in the intellect

of their friends. They feel a strong intellectual attraction to persons

of the opposite sex; and the idea of living with a person whose

conversation is believed at the time to promise an increasing interest,

is attractive in ways of which those who have no such wants can scarcely

form a conception. A most distinguished foreign writer, of the female

sex, has made a succession of domestic arrangements which, if generally

imitated by others, would be subversive of any conceivable system of

morality; and yet it is clear in this case that the temptation was

chiefly, if not entirely, intellectual. The successive companions of

this remarkable woman were all of them men of exceptional intellectual

power, and her motive for changing them was an unbridled intellectual

curiosity.

This is the sort of immorality to which cultivated people are most

exposed. It is dangerous to the well-being of a community because it

destroys the sense of security on which the idea of the family is

founded. If we are to leave our wives when their conversation ceases to

be interesting, the foundations of the home will be unsafe. If they are

to abandon, us when we are dull, to go away with some livelier and more

talkative companion, can we ever hope to retain them permanently?

There is another danger which must be looked fairly in the face. When

the lives of men are refined beyond the real needs of their

organization, Nature is very apt to bring about the most extraordinary

reactions. Thus the most exquisitely delicate artists in literature and

painting have frequently had reactions of incredible coarseness. Within

the Chateaubriand of Atala there existed an obscene Chateaubriand that

would burst forth occasionally in talk that no biographer could repeat.

I have heard the same thing of the sentimental Lamartine. We know that

Turner, dreamer of enchanted landscapes, took the pleasures of a sailor

on the spree. A friend said to me of one of the most exquisite living

geniuses: "You can have no conception of the coarseness of his tastes;

he associates with the very lowest women, and enjoys their rough

brutality."