"Time and occasion are the two important circumstances in human life, as

regards which the most mistaken estimates are made. And the error is

universal. It besets even the most studious and philosophic men. This

may notably be seen in the present day, when many most distinguished men

have laid down projects for literature and philosophy, to be

accomplished by them in their own lifetime, which would require several

men and many lifetimes to complete; and, generally speaking, if any

person, who has passed the meridian of life, looks back upon his career,

he will probably own that his greatest errors have arisen from his not

having made sufficient allowance for the length of time which his

various schemes required for their fulfilment."

There are many traditional maxims about time which insist upon its

brevity, upon the necessity of using it whilst it is there, upon the

impossibility of recovering what is lost; but the practical effect of

these maxims upon conduct can scarcely be said to answer to their

undeniable importance. The truth is, that although they tell us to

economize our time, they cannot, in the nature of things, instruct us as

to the methods by which it is to be economized. Human life is so

extremely various and complicated, whilst it tends every day to still

greater variety and complication, that all maxims of a general nature

require a far higher degree of intelligence in their application to

individual cases than it ever cost originally to invent them. Any person

gifted with ordinary common sense can perceive that life is short, that

time flies, that we ought to make good use of the present; but it needs

the union of much experience, with the most consummate wisdom, to know

exactly what ought to be done and what ought to be left undone--the

latter being frequently by far the more important of the two.

Amongst the favorable influences of my early life was the kindness of a

venerable country gentleman, who had seen a great deal of the world and

passed many years, before he inherited his estates, in the practice of

a laborious profession. I remember a theory of his, that experience was

much less valuable than is generally supposed, because, except in

matters of simple routine, the problems that present themselves to us

for solution are nearly always dangerous from the presence of some

unknown element. The unknown element he regarded as a hidden pitfall,

and he warned me that in my progress through life I might always expect

to tumble into it. This saying of his has been so often confirmed since

then, that I now count upon the pitfall quite as a matter of certainty.

Very frequently I have escaped it, but more by good luck than good

management. Sometimes I have tumbled into it, and when this misfortune

occurred it has not unfrequently been in consequence of having acted

upon the advice of some very knowing and experienced person indeed. We

have all read, when we were boys, Captain Marryat's "Midshipman Easy."

There is a passage in that story which may serve as an illustration of

what is constantly happening in actual life. The boats of the _Harpy_

were ordered to board one of the enemy's vessels; young Easy was in

command of one of these boats, and as they had to wait he began to fish.

After they had received the order to advance, he delayed a little to

catch his fish, and this delay not only saved him from being sunk by the

enemy's broadside, but enabled him to board the Frenchman. Here the

pitfall was avoided by idling away a minute of time on an occasion when

minutes were like hours; yet it was mere luck, not wisdom, which led to

the good result. There was a sad railway accident on one of the

continental lines last autumn; a notable personage would have been in

the train if he had arrived in time for it, but his miscalculation saved

him. In matters where there is no risk of the loss of life, but only of

the waste of a portion of it in unprofitable employment, it frequently

happens that procrastination, which is reputed to be the thief of time,

becomes its best preserver. Suppose that you undertake an enterprise,

but defer the execution of it from day to day: it is quite possible that

in the interval some fact may accidentally come to your knowledge which

would cause a great modification of your plan, or even its complete

abandonment. Every thinking person is well aware that the enormous loss

of time caused by the friction of our legislative machinery has

preserved the country from a great deal of crude and ill-digested

legislation. Even Napoleon the Great who had a rapidity of conception

and of action so far surpassing that of other kings and commanders that

it seems to us almost supernatural, said that when you did not quite

know what ought to be done it was best to do nothing at all. One of the

most distinguished of living painters said exactly the same thing with

reference to the practice of his art, and added that very little time

would be needed for the actual execution of a picture if only the artist

knew beforehand how and where to lay the color. It so often happens

that mere activity is a waste of time, that people who have a morbid

habit of being busy are often terrible time-wasters, whilst, on the

contrary, those who are judiciously deliberate, and allow themselves

intervals of leisure, see the way before them in those intervals, and

save time by the accuracy of their calculations.

A largely intelligent thrift of time is necessary to all great

works--and many works are very great indeed relatively to the energies

of a single individual, which pass unperceived in the tumult of the

world. The advantages of calculating time are artistic as well as

economical. I think that, in this respect, magnificent as are the

cathedrals which the Gothic builders have left us, they committed an

artistic error in the very immensity of their plans. They do not appear

to have reflected that from the continual changes of fashion in

architecture, incongruous work would be sure to intrude itself before

their gigantic projects could be realized by the generations that were

to succeed them. For a work of that kind to possess artistic unity, it

ought to be completely realized within the space of forty years. How

great is the charm of those perfect edifices which, like the Sainte

Chapelle, are the realization of one sublime idea? And those changes in

national thought which have made the old cathedrals a jumble of

incongruous styles, have their parallel in the life of every individual

workman. We change from year to year, and any work which occupies us

for very long will be wanting in unity of manner.

Men are apt enough of themselves to fall into the most astonishing

delusions about the opportunities which time affords, but they are even

more deluded by the talk of the people about them. When children hear

that a new carriage has been ordered of the builder, they expect to see

it driven up to the door in a fortnight, with the paint quite dry on the

panels. All people are children in this respect, except the workman, who

knows the endless details of production; and the workman himself,

notwithstanding the lessons of experience, makes light of the future

task. What gigantic plans we scheme, and how little we advance in the

labor of a day! Three pages of the book (to be half erased to-morrow), a

bit of drapery in the picture that will probably have to be done over

again, the imperceptible removal of an ounce of marble-dust from the

statue that seems as if it never would be finished; so much from dawn to

twilight has been the accomplishment of the golden hours. If there is

one lesson which experience teaches, surely it is this, to make plans

that are strictly limited, and to arrange our work in a practicable way

within the limits that we must accept. Others expect so much from us

that it seems as if we had accomplished nothing. "What! have you done

only that?" they say, or we know by their looks that they are thinking

it.

The most illusory of all the work that we propose to ourselves is

reading. It seems so easy to read, that we intend, in the indefinite

future, to master the vastest literatures. We cannot bring ourselves to

admit that the library we have collected is in great part closed to us

simply by want of time. A dear friend of mine, who was a solicitor with

a large practice, indulged in wonderful illusions about reading, and

collected several thousand volumes, all fine editions, but he died

without having cut their leaves. I like the university habit of making

reading a business, and estimating the mastery of a few authors as a

just title to consideration for scholarship. I should like very well to

be shut up in a garden for a whole summer with no literature but the

"Faery Queene," and one year I very nearly realized that project, but

publishers and the postman interfered with it. After all, this business

of reading ought to be less illusory than most others, for printers

divide books into pages, which they number, so that, with a moderate

skill in arithmetic, one ought to be able to foresee the limits of his

possibilities. There is another observation which may be suggested, and

that is to take note of the time required for reading different

languages. We read very slowly when the language is imperfectly

mastered, and we need the dictionary, whereas in the native tongue we

see the whole page almost at a glance, as if it were a picture. People

whose time for reading is limited ought not to waste it in grammars and

dictionaries, but to confine themselves resolutely to a couple of

languages, or three at the very utmost, notwithstanding the contempt of

polyglots, who estimate your learning by the variety of your tongues. It

is a fearful throwing away of time, from the literary point of view, to

begin more languages than you can master or retain, and to be always

puzzling yourself about irregular verbs.

All plans for sparing time in intellectual matters ought, however, to

proceed upon the principle of thrift, and not upon the principle of

avarice. The object of the thrifty man in money matters is so to lay out

his money as to get the best possible result from his expenditure; the

object of the avaricious man is to spend no more money than he can help.

An artist who taught me painting often repeated a piece of advice which

is valuable in other things than art, and which I try to remember

whenever patience fails. He used to say to me, "_Give it time._" The

mere length of time that we bestow upon our work is in itself a most

important element of success, and if I object to the use of languages

that we only half know, it is not because it takes us a long time to get

through a chapter, but because we are compelled to think about syntax

and conjugations which did not in the least occupy the mind of the

author, when we ought rather to be thinking about those things which

_did_ occupy his mind, about the events which he narrated, or the

characters that he imagined or described. There are, in truth, only two

ways of impressing anything on the memory, either intensity or duration.

If you saw a man struck down by an assassin, you would remember the

occurrence all your life; but to remember with equal vividness a picture

of the assassination, you would probably be obliged to spend a month or

two in copying it. The subjects of our studies rarely produce an

intensity of emotion sufficient to ensure perfect recollection without

the expenditure of time. And when your object is not to learn, but to

produce, it is well to bear in mind that everything requires a certain

definite time-outlay, which _cannot_ be reduced without an inevitable

injury to quality. A most experienced artist, a man of the very rarest

executive ability, wrote to me the other day about a set of designs I

had suggested. "If I could but get the TIME,"--the large capitals are

his own,--"for, somehow or other, let a design be never so studiously

simple in the masses, it _will_ fill itself as it goes on, like the

weasel in the fable who got into the meal-tub; and when the pleasure

begins in attempting tone and mystery and intricacy, _away go the hours

at a gallop_." A well-known and very successful English dramatist wrote

to me: "When I am hurried, and have undertaken more work than I can

execute in the time at my disposal, I am always perfectly paralyzed."

There is another side to this subject which deserves attention. Some men

work best under the sense of pressure. Simple compression evolves heat

from iron, so that there is a flash of fire when a ball hits the side

of an ironclad. The same law seems to hold good in the intellectual life

of man, whenever he needs the stimulus of extraordinary excitement.

Rossini positively advised a young composer never to write his overture

until the evening before the first performance. "Nothing," he said,

"excites inspiration like necessity; the presence of a copyist waiting

for your work, and the view of a manager in despair tearing out his hair

by handfuls. In Italy in my time all the managers were bald at thirty. I

composed the overture to 'Othello' in a small room in the Barbaja

Palace, where the baldest and most ferocious of managers had shut me up

by force with nothing but a dish of maccaroni, and the threat that I

should not leave the place alive until I had written the last note. I

wrote the overture to the 'Gazza Ladra' on the day of the first

performance, in the upper loft of the La Scala, where I had been

confined by the manager, under the guard of four scene-shifters who had

orders to throw my text out of the window bit by bit to copyists, who

were waiting below to transcribe it. In default of music I was to be

thrown out myself."

I have quoted the best instance known to me of this voluntary seeking

after pressure, but striking as it is, even this instance does not

weaken what I said before. For observe, that although Rossini deferred

the composition of his overture till the evening before the first

performance, he knew very well that he could do it thoroughly in the

time. He was like a clever schoolboy who knows that he can learn his

lesson in the quarter of an hour before the class begins; or he was like

an orator who knows that he can deliver a passage and compose at the

same time the one which is to follow, so that he prefers to arrange his

speech in the presence of his audience. Since Rossini always allowed

himself all the time that was necessary for what he had to do, it is

clear that he did not sin against the great time-necessity. The express

which can travel from London to Edinburgh in a night may leave the

English metropolis on Saturday evening although it is due in Scotland on

Sunday, and still act with the strictest consideration about time. The

blameable error lies in miscalculation, and not in rapidity of

performance.

Nothing _wastes_ time like miscalculation. It negatives all results. It

is the parent of incompleteness, the great author of the Unfinished and

the Unserviceable. Almost every intellectual man has laid out great

masses of time on five or six different branches of knowledge which are

not of the least use to him, simply because he has not carried them far

enough, and could not carry them far enough in the time he had to give.

Yet this might have been ascertained at the beginning by the simplest

arithmetical calculation. The experience of students in all departments

of knowledge has quite definitely ascertained the amount of time that is

necessary for success in them, and the successful student can at once

inform the aspirant how far he is likely to travel along the road. What

is the use, to anybody, of having just enough skill to feel vexed with

himself that he has no more, and yet angry at other people for not

admiring the little that he possesses?

I wish to direct your attention to a cause which more than any other

produces disappointment in ordinary intellectual pursuits. It is this.

People can often calculate with the utmost accuracy what they can

accomplish in ten minutes or even in ten hours, and yet the very same

persons will make the most absurd miscalculations about what they can

accomplish in ten years. There is of course a reason for this: if there

were not, so many sensible people would not suffer from the delusion.

The reason is, that owing to the habits of human life there is a certain

elasticity in large spaces of time that include nights, and mealtimes,

and holidays. We fancy that we shall be able, by working harder than we

have been accustomed to work, and by stealing hours from all the

different kinds of rest and amusement, to accomplish far more in the ten

years that are to come than we have ever actually accomplished in the

same space. And to a certain extent this may be very true. No doubt a

man whose mind has become seriously aware of the vast importance of

economizing his time will economize it better than he did in the days

before the new conviction came to him. No doubt, after skill in our work

has been confirmed, we shall perform it with increased speed. But the

elasticity of time is rather that of leather than that of india-rubber.

There is certainly a degree of elasticity, but the degree is strictly

limited. The true master of time-thrift would be no more liable to

illusion about years than about hours, and would act as prudently when

working for remote results as for near ones.

Not that we ought to work as if we were always under severe pressure.

Little books are occasionally published in which we are told that it is

a sin to lose a minute. From the intellectual point of view this

doctrine is simply stupid. What the Philistines call wasted time is

often rich in the most varied experience to the intelligent. If all that

we have learned in idle moments could be suddenly expelled from our

minds by some chemical process, it is probable that they would be worth

very little afterwards. What, after such a process, would have remained

to Shakespeare, Scott, Cervantes, Thackeray, Dickens, Hogarth,

Goldsmith, Moliere? When these great students of human nature were

learning most, the sort of people who write the foolish little books

just alluded to would have wanted to send them home to the dictionary or

the desk. Toepffer and Claude Tillier, both men of delicate and observant

genius, attached the greatest importance to hours of idleness. Toepffer

said that a year of downright loitering was a desirable element in a

liberal education; whilst Claude Tillier went even farther, and boldly

affirmed that "le temps le mieux employe est celui que l'on perd."

Let us not think too contemptuously of the miscalculators of time, since

not one of us is exempt from their folly. We have all made

miscalculations, or more frequently have simply omitted calculation

altogether, preferring childish illusion to a manly examination of

realities; and afterwards as life advances another illusion steals over

us not less vain than the early one, but bitter as that was sweet. We

now begin to reproach ourselves with all the opportunities that have

been neglected, and now our folly is to imagine that we might have done

impossible wonders if we had only exercised a little resolution. We

might have been thorough classical scholars, and spoken all the great

modern languages, and written immortal books, and made a colossal

fortune. Miscalculations again, and these the most imbecile of all; for

the youth who forgets to reason in the glow of happiness and hope, is

wiser than the man who overestimates what was once possible that he may

embitter the days which remain to him.

LETTER III.

TO A MAN OF BUSINESS WHO DESIRED TO MAKE HIMSELF BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH

LITERATURE, BUT WHOSE TIME FOR READING WAS LIMITED.

Victor Jacquemont on the intellectual labors of the Germans--Business

may be set off as the equivalent to one of their pursuits--Necessity

for regularity in the economy of time--What may be done in two hours a

day--Evils of interruption--Florence Nightingale--Real nature of

interruption--Instance from the Apology of Socrates.

In the charming and precious letters of Victor Jacquemont, a man whose

life was dedicated to culture, and who not only lived for it, but died

for it, there is a passage about the intellectual labors of Germans,

which takes due account of the expenditure of time. "Comme j'etais

etonne," he says, "de la prodigieuse variete et de l'etendue de

connaissances des Allemands, je demandai un jour a l'un de mes amis,

Saxon de naissance et l'un des premiers geologues de l'Europe, comment

ses compatriotes s'y prenaient pour savoir tant de choses. Voici sa

reponse, a peu pres: 'Un Allemand (moi excepte qui suis le plus

paresseux des hommes) se leve de bonne heure, ete et hiver, a cinq

heures environ. Il travaille quatre heures avant le dejeuner, fumant

quelquefois pendant tout ce temps, sans que cela nuise a son

application. Son dejeuner dure une demi-heure, et il reste, apres, une

autre demi-heure a causer avec sa femme et a faire jouer ses enfants.

Il retourne au travail pour six heures; dine sans se presser; fume une

heure apres le diner, jouant encore avec ses enfants; et avant de se

coucher il travaille encore quatre heures. Il recommence tous les jours,

ne sortant jamais.--Voila,' me dit mon ami, 'comment Oersted, le plus

grand physicien de l'Allemagne, en est aussi le plus grand medecin;

voila comment Kant le metaphysicien etait un des plus savants astronomes

de l'Europe, et comment Goethe, qui en est actuellement le premier

litterateur, dans presque tous les genres, et le plus fecond, est

excellent botaniste, mineralogiste, physicien.'"[2]

Here is something to encourage, and something to discourage you at the

same time. The number of hours which these men have given in order to

become what they were, is so great as to be past all possibility of

imitation by a man occupied in business. It is clear that, with your

counting-house to occupy you during the best hours of every day, you can

never labor for your intellectual culture with that unremitting

application which these men have given for theirs. But, on the other

hand, you will perceive that these extraordinary workers have hardly

ever been wholly dedicated to one pursuit, and the reason for this in

most cases is clear. Men who go through a prodigious amount of work feel

the necessity for varying it. The greatest intellectual workers I have

known personally have varied their studies as Kant and Goethe did, often

taking up subjects of the most opposite kinds, as for instance

imaginative literature and the higher mathematics, the critical and

practical study of fine art and the natural sciences, music, and

political economy. The class of intellects which arrogate to themselves

the epithet "practical," but which we call _Philistine_, always oppose

this love of variety, and have an unaffected contempt for it, but these

are matters beyond their power of judgment. They cannot know the needs

of the intellectual life, because they have never lived it. The practice

of all the greatest intellects has been to cultivate themselves

variously, and if they have always done so, it must be because they have

felt the need of it.

The encouraging inference which you may draw from this in reference to

your own case is that, since all intellectual men have had more than one

pursuit, you may set off your business against the most absorbing of

their pursuits, and for the rest be still almost as rich in time as they

have been. You may study literature as some painters have studied it, or

science as some literary men have studied it.

The first step is to establish a regulated economy of your time, so

that, without interfering with a due attention to business and to

health, you may get two clear hours every day for reading of the best

kind. It is not much, some men would tell you that it is not enough, but

I purposely fix the expenditure of time at a low figure because I want

it to be always practicable consistently with all the duties and

necessary pleasures of your life. If I told you to read four hours every

day, I know beforehand what would be the consequence. You would keep the

rule for three days, by an effort, then some engagement would occur to

break it, and you would have no rule at all. And please observe that the

two hours are to be given quite regularly, because, when the time given

is not much, regularity is quite essential. Two hours a day, regularly,

make more than seven hundred hours in a year, and in seven hundred

hours, wisely and uninterruptedly occupied, much may be done in

anything.

Permit me to insist upon that word _uninterruptedly_. Few people realize

the full evil of an interruption, few people know all that is implied

by it. After warning nurses against the evils of interruption, Florence

Nightingale says:--

"These things are not fancy. If we consider that, with sick as with

well, every thought decomposes some nervous matter--that decomposition

as well as re-composition of nervous matter is always going on, and more

quickly with the sick than with the well,--that to obtrude another

thought upon the brain whilst it is in the act of destroying nervous

matter by thinking, is calling upon it to make a new exertion--if we

consider these things, which are facts, not fancies, we shall remember

that we are doing positive injury by interrupting, by startling a

'fanciful' person, as it is called. Alas, it is no fancy.

"If the invalid is forced by his avocations to continue occupations

requiring much thinking, the injury is doubly great. In feeding a

patient suffering under delirium or stupor you may suffocate him by

giving him his food suddenly, but if you rub his lips gently with a

spoon and thus attract his attention, he will swallow the food

unconsciously, but with perfect safety. Thus it is with the brain. If

you offer it a thought, especially one requiring a decision, abruptly,

you do it a real, not fanciful, injury. Never speak to a sick person

suddenly; but, at the same time, do not keep his expectation on the

tiptoe."

To this you will already have answered, mentally, that you are not a

patient suffering under either delirium or stupor, and that nobody

needs to rub your lips gently with a spoon. But Miss Nightingale does

not consider interruption baneful to sick persons only.

"This rule indeed," she continues, "applies to the well quite as much as

to the sick. _I have never known persons who exposed themselves for

years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects

by it at last._ The process, with them, may be accomplished without

pain. With the sick, pain gives warning of the injury."

Interruption is an evil to the reader which must be estimated very

differently from ordinary business interruptions. The great question

about interruption is not whether it compels you to divert your

attention to other facts, but whether it compels you to tune your whole

mind to another diapason. Shopkeepers are incessantly compelled to

change the subject; a stationer is asked for notepaper one minute, for

sealing-wax the next, and immediately afterwards for a particular sort

of steel pen. The subjects of his thoughts are changed very rapidly, but

the general state of his mind is not changed; he is always strictly in

his shop, as much mentally as physically. When an attorney is

interrupted in the study of a case by the arrival of a client who asks

him questions about another case, the change is more difficult to bear;

yet even here the general state of mind, the legal state of mind, is not

interfered with. But now suppose a reader perfectly absorbed in his

author, an author belonging very likely to another age and another

civilization entirely different from ours. Suppose that you are reading

the Defence of Socrates in Plato, and have the whole scene before you as

in a picture: the tribunal of the Five Hundred, the pure Greek

architecture, the interested Athenian public, the odious Melitus, the

envious enemies, the beloved and grieving friends whose names are dear

to us, and immortal; and in the centre you see one figure draped like a

poor man, in cheap and common cloth, that he wears winter and summer,

with a face plain to downright ugliness, but an air of such genuine

courage and self-possession that no acting could imitate it; and you

hear the firm voice saying--

[Greek: Timatai d' oun moi haner thanatou

Eien.][3]

You are just beginning the splendid paragraph where Socrates condemns

himself to maintenance in the Prytaneum, and if you can only be safe

from interruption till it is finished, you will have one of those

minutes of noble pleasure which are the rewards of intellectual toil.

But if you are reading in the daytime in a house where there are women

and children, or where people can fasten upon you for pottering details

of business, you may be sure that you will _not_ be able to get to the

end of the passage without in some way or other being rudely awakened

from your dream, and suddenly brought back into the common world. The

loss intellectually is greater than any one who had not suffered from it

could imagine. People think that an interruption is merely the unhooking

of an electric chain, and that the current will flow, when the chain is

hooked on again, just as it did before. To the intellectual and

imaginative student an interruption is not that; it is the destruction

of a picture.

LETTER IV.

TO A STUDENT WHO FELT HURRIED AND DRIVEN.

People who like to be hurried--Sluggish temperaments gain vivacity

under pressure--Routine work may be done at increased speed--The

higher intellectual work cannot be done hurriedly--The art of avoiding

hurry consists in Selection--How it was practised by a good landscape

painter--Selection in reading and writing--Some studies allow the play

of selection more than others do--Languages permit it less than

natural sciences--Difficulty of using selection in the fulfilment of

literary engagements.

So you have got yourself into that pleasant condition which is about as

agreeable, and as favorable to fruitful study and observation, as the

condition of an over-driven cab-horse!

Very indolent men, who will not work at all unless under the pressure of

immediate urgency, sometimes tell us that they actually like to be

hurried; but although certain kinds of practical work which have become

perfectly easy from habit may be got through at a great pace when the

workman feels that there is an immediate necessity for effort, it is

certainly not true that hurry is favorable to sound study of any kind.

Work which merely runs in a fixed groove may be urged on occasionally at

express speed without any perceptible injury to the quality of it. A

clever violinist can play a passage _prestissimo_ as correctly as if he

played it _adagio_; a banker's clerk can count money very rapidly with

positively less risk of error than if he counted it as you and I do. A

person of sluggish temperament really gains in vivacity when he is

pressed for time, and becomes during those moments of excited energy a

clearer-headed and more able person than he is under ordinary

circumstances. It is therefore not surprising that he should find

himself able to accomplish more under the great stimulus of an immediate

necessity than he is able to do in the dulness of his every-day

existence. Great prodigies of labor have been performed in this way to

avert impending calamity, especially by military officers in critical

times like those of the Sepoy rebellion; and in the obscurer lives of

tradesmen, immense exertions are often made to avert the danger of

bankruptcy, when without the excitement of a serious anxiety of that

kind the tradesman would not feel capable of more than a moderate and

reasonable degree of attention to his affairs. But notwithstanding the

many instances of this kind which might be cited, and the many more

which might easily be collected, the truth remains that the highest

kinds of intellectual labor can hardly ever be properly performed when

the degree of pressure is in the least excessive. You may, for example,

if you have the kind of ability which makes a good journalist, write an

effective leader with your watch lying on the table, and finish it

exactly when the time is up; but if you had the kind of ability which

makes a good poet, you could not write anything like highly-finished

poetry against time. It is equally clear that scientific discovery,

which, though it may flash suddenly upon the mind of the discoverer, is

always the result of long brooding over the most patient observations,

must come at its own moments, and cannot be commanded. The activity of

poets and discoverers would be paralyzed by exigencies which stimulate

the activity of soldiers and men of business. The truth is, that

intelligence and energy are beneficially stimulated by pressure from

without, whereas the working of the higher intellect is impeded by it,

and that to such a degree that in times of the greatest pressure the

high intellectual life is altogether suspended, to leave free play to

the lower but more immediately serviceable intelligence.

This being so, it becomes a necessary part of the art of intellectual

living so to order our work as to shield ourselves if possible, at least

during a certain portion of our time, from the evil consequences of

hurry. The whole secret lies in a single word--Selection.

An excellent landscape painter told me that whatever he had to do, he

always took the greatest pains to arrange his work so as never to have

his tranquillity disturbed by haste. His system, which is quite

applicable to many other things than landscape painting, was based on

the principle of selection. He always took care to determine beforehand

how much time he could devote to each sketch or study, and then, from

the mass of natural facts before him, selected the most valuable facts

which could be recorded in the time at his disposal. But however short

that time might be, he was always perfectly cool and deliberate in the

employment of it. Indeed this coolness and his skill in selection helped

each other mutually, for he chose wisely because he was cool, and he had

time to be cool by reason of the wisdom of his selection. In his little

memoranda, done in five minutes, the lines were laid just as

deliberately as the tints on an elaborate picture; the difference being

in choice only, not in speed.

Now if we apply this art of selection to all our labors it will give us

much of that landscape painter's enviable coolness, and enable us to

work more satisfactorily. Suppose that instead of painting and sketching

we have to do a great deal of reading and writing: the art is to select

the reading which will be most useful to our purpose, and, in writing,

to select the words which will express our meaning with the greatest

clearness in a little space. The art of reading is to skip judiciously.

Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results

of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again. And

even of the books we decide to read, there are almost always large

portions which do not concern us, and which we are sure to forget the

day after we have read them. The art is to skip all that does not

concern us, whilst missing nothing that we really need. No external

guidance can teach us this; for nobody but ourselves can guess what the

needs of our intellect may be. But let us select with decisive firmness,

independently of other people's advice, independently of the authority

of custom. In every newspaper that comes to hand there is a little bit

that we ought to read; the art is to find that little bit, and waste no

time over the rest.

Some studies permit the exercise of selection better than others do. A

language, once undertaken, permits very little selection indeed, since

you must know the whole vocabulary, or nearly so, to be able to read and

speak. On the other hand, the natural sciences permit the most prudent

exercise of selection. For example, in botany you may study as few

plants as you choose.

In writing, the art of selection consists in giving the utmost effect to

expression in the fewest words; but of this art I say little, for who

can contend against an inevitable trade-necessity? Almost every author

of ordinary skill could, when pressed for time, find a briefer

expression for his thoughts, but the real difficulty in fulfilling

literary engagements does not lie in the expression of the thought, it

lies in the sufficiently rapid production of a certain quantity of copy.

For this purpose I fear that selection would be of very little use--of

no more use, in fact, than in any other branch of manufacture where (if

a certain standard is kept up to) quantity in sale is more important

than quality of material.

LETTER V.

TO A FRIEND WHO, THOUGH HE HAD NO PROFESSION, COULD NOT FIND TIME FOR

HIS VARIOUS INTELLECTUAL PURSUITS.

Compensations resulting from the necessity for time--Opportunity only

exists for us so far as we have time to make use of it--This _or_

that, not this _and_ that--Danger of apparently unlimited

opportunities--The intellectual training of our ancestors--Montaigne

the Essayist--Reliance upon the compensations.

It has always seemed to me that the great and beautiful principle of

compensation is more clearly seen in the distribution and effects of

time than in anything else within the scope of our experience. The good

use of one opportunity very frequently compensates us for the absence of

another, and it does so because opportunity is itself so dependent upon

time that, although the best opportunities may apparently be presented

to us, we can make no use of them unless we are able to give them the

time that they require. You, who have the best possible opportunities

for culture, find a certain sadness and disappointment because you

cannot avail yourself of all of them; but the truth is, that opportunity

only exists for us just so far as we are able to make use of it, and our

power to do so is often nothing but a question of time. If our days are

well employed we are sure to have done some good thing which we should

have been compelled to neglect if we had been occupied about anything

else. Hence every genuine worker has rich compensations which ought to

console him amply for his shortcomings, and to enable him to meet

comparisons without fear.

Those who aspire to the intellectual life, but have no experience of its

difficulties, very frequently envy men so favorably situated as you are.

It seems to them that all the world's knowledge is accessible to you,

and that you have simply to cull its fruits as we gather grapes in a

vineyard. They forget the power of Time, and the restrictions which Time

imposes. "This _or_ that, not this _and_ that," is the rule to which all

of us have to submit, and it strangely equalizes the destinies of men.

The time given to the study of one thing is withdrawn from the study of

another, and the hours of the day are limited alike for all of us. How

difficult it is to reconcile the interests of our different pursuits!

Indeed it seems like a sort of polygamy to _have_ different pursuits.

It is natural to think of them as jealous wives tormenting some Mormon

prophet.

There is great danger in apparently unlimited opportunities, and a

splendid compensation for those who are confined by circumstances to a

narrow but fruitful field. The Englishman gets more civilization out of

a farm and a garden than the Red Indian out of the space encircled by

his horizon. Our culture gains in thoroughness what it loses in extent.

This consideration goes far to explain the fact that although our

ancestors were so much less favorably situated than we are, they often

got as good an intellectual training from the literature that was

accessible to them, as we from our vaster stores. We live in an age of

essayists, and yet what modern essayist writes better than old

Montaigne? All that a thoughtful and witty writer needs for the

sharpening of his intellect, Montaigne found in the ancient literature

that was accessible to him, and in the life of the age he lived in. Born

in our own century, he would have learned many other things, no doubt,

and read many other books, but these would have absorbed the hours that

he employed not less fruitfully with the authors that he loved in the

little library up in the third story of his tower, as he tells us, where

he could see all his books at once, set upon five rows of shelves round

about him. In earlier life he bought "this sort of furniture" for

"ornament and outward show," but afterwards quite abandoned that, and

procured such volumes only "as supplied his own need."

To supply our own need, within the narrow limits of the few and

transient hours that we can call our own, is enough for the wise

everywhere, as it was for Montaigne in his tower. Let us resolve to do

as much as that, not more, and then rely upon the golden compensations.

NOTE.--"Supposing that the executive and critical powers always exist

in some correspondent degree in the same person, still they cannot be

cultivated to the same extent. The attention required for the

development of a theory is necessarily withdrawn from the design of a

drawing, and the time devoted to the realization of a form is lost to

the solution of a problem."--MR. RUSKIN, _in the preface to the third

volume of_ "_Modern Painters_."

In the case of Mr. Ruskin, in that of Mr. Dante Rossetti, and in all

cases where the literary and artistic gifts are naturally pretty

evenly balanced, the preponderance of an hour a day given to one or

the other class of studies may have settled the question whether the

student was to be chiefly artist or chiefly author. The enormous

importance of the distribution of time is never more clearly

manifested than in cases of this kind. Mr. Ruskin might certainly have

attained rank as a painter, Rossetti might have been as prolific in

poetry as he is excellent. What these gifted men are now is not so

much a question of talent as of time. In like manner the question

whether Ingres was to be known as a painter or as a violinist was

settled by the employment of hours rather than by any preponderance of

faculty.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] "Being astonished at the prodigious variety and at the extent of

knowledge possessed by the Germans, I begged one of my friends, Saxon

by birth, and one of the foremost geologists in Europe, to tell me

how his countrymen managed to know so many things. Here is his

answer, nearly in his own words:--'A German (except myself, who am

the idlest of men) gets up early, summer and winter, at about five

o'clock. He works four hours before breakfast, sometimes smoking all

the time, which does not interfere with his application. His

breakfast lasts half an hour, and he remains, afterwards, another

half-hour talking with his wife and playing with his children. He

returns to his work for six hours, dines without hurrying himself,

smokes an hour after dinner, playing again with his children, and

before he goes to bed he works four hours more. He begins again every

day, and never goes out. This is how it comes to pass that Oersted,

the greatest natural philosopher in Germany, is at the same time the

greatest physician; this is how Kant the metaphysician was one of the

most learned astronomers in Europe, and how Goethe, who is at present

the first and most fertile author in Germany in almost all kinds of

literature, is an excellent botanist, mineralogist, and natural

philosopher.'"

[3] The man, then, judges me worthy of death. Be it so.

PART V.

_THE INFLUENCES OF MONEY._

LETTER I.

TO A VERY RICH STUDENT.

The author of "Vathek"--The double temptation of wealth--Rich men

tempted to follow occupations in which their wealth is

useful--Pressure of social duties on the rich--The Duchess of

Orleans--The rich man's time not his own--The rich may help the

general intellectual advancement by the exercise of patronage--Dr.

Carpenter--Franz Woepke.

It has always seemed to me a very remarkable and noteworthy circumstance

that although Mr. Beckford, the author of "Vathek," produced in his

youth a story which bears all the signs of true inventive genius, he

never produced anything in after-life which posterity cares to preserve.

I read "Vathek" again quite recently, to see how far my early enthusiasm

for it might have been due to that passion for orientalism which reigned

amongst us many years ago, but this fresh perusal left an impression

which only genius leaves. Beckford really had invention, and an

extraordinary narrative power. That such faculties, after having once

revealed themselves, should contentedly have remained dormant ever

afterwards, is one of the most curious facts in the history of the

human mind, and it is the more curious that Beckford lived to a very

advanced age.

Beckford's case appears to have been one of those in which great wealth

diminishes or wholly paralyzes the highest energy of the intellect,

leaving the lower energies free to exert less noble kinds of activity. A

refined self-indulgence became the habit of his life, and he developed

simply into a dilettant. Even his love for the fine arts did not rise

above the indulgence of an elegant and cultivated taste. Although he

lived at the very time most favorable to the appearance of a great

critic in architecture and painting, the time of a great architectural

revival and of the growth of a vigorous and independent school of

contemporary art, he exercised no influence beyond that of a wealthy

virtuoso. His love of the beautiful began and ended in simple personal

gratification; it led to no noble labor, to no elevating severity of

discipline. Englishman though he was, he filled his Oriental tower with

masterpieces from Italy and Holland, only to add form and color to the

luxuries of his reverie, behind his gilded lattices.

And when he raised that other tower at Fonthill, and the slaves of the

lamp toiled at it by torchlight to gratify his Oriental impatience, he

exercised no influence upon the confusion of his epoch more durable than

that hundred yards of masonry which sank into a shapeless heap whilst as

yet Azrael spared its author. He to whom Nature and Fortune had been so

prodigal of their gifts, he whom Reynolds painted and Mozart instructed,

who knew the poets of seven literatures, culling their jewels like

flowers in seven enchanted gardens--he to whom the palaces of knowledge

all opened their golden gates even in his earliest youth, to whom were

also given riches and length of days, for whom a thousand craftsmen

toiled in Europe and a thousand slaves beyond the sea,[4]--what has this

gifted mortal left as the testimony of his power, as the trace of his

fourscore years upon the earth? Only the reminiscence of a vague

splendor, like the fast-fading recollection of a cloud that burned at

sunset, and one small gem of intellectual creation that lives like a

tiny star.

If wealth had only pleasure to offer as a temptation from intellectual

labor, its influence would be easier to resist. Men of the English race

are often grandly strong in resistance to every form of voluptuousness;

the race is fond of comfort and convenience, but it does not sacrifice

its energy to enervating self-indulgence. There is, however, another

order of temptations in great wealth, to which Englishmen not only

yield, but yield with a satisfied conscience, even with a sense of

obedience to duty. Wealth carries pleasure in her left hand, but in her

right she bears honor and power. The rich man feels that he can do so

much by the mere exercise of his command over the labor of others, and

so little by any unaided labor of his own, that he is always strongly

tempted to become, not only physically but intellectually, a director of

work rather that a workman. Even his modesty, when he is modest, tends

to foster his reliance on others rather than himself. All that he tries

to do is done so much better by those who make it their profession, that

he is always tempted to fall back upon his paying power as his most

satisfactory and effective force. There are cases in which this

temptation is gloriously overcome, where men of great wealth compel

every one to acknowledge that their money is nothing more than a help to

their higher life, like the charger that bore Wellington at Waterloo,

serving him indeed usefully, but not detracting from the honor which is

his due. But in these cases the life is usually active or administrative

rather than intellectual. The rich man does not generally feel tempted

to enter upon careers in which his command over labor is not an evident

advantage, and this because men naturally seek those fields in which

_all_ their superiorities tell. Even the well known instance of Lord

Rosse can scarcely be considered an exception to this rule, for although

he was eminent in a science which has been followed by poor men with

great distinction, his wealth was of use in the construction of his

colossal telescope, which gave him a clear advantage over merely

professional contemporaries.

Besides this natural desire to pursue careers in which their money may

lessen the number of competitors, the rich are often diverted from

purely intellectual pursuits by the social duties of their station,

duties which it is impossible to avoid and difficult to keep within

limits. The Duchess of Orleans (mother of the present Count of Paris)

arranged her time with the greatest care so as to reserve a little of it

for her own culture in uninterrupted solitude. By an exact system, and

the exercise of the rarest firmness, she contrived to steal half an hour

here and an hour there--enough no doubt, when employed as she employed

them, to maintain her character as a very distinguished lady, yet still

far from sufficient for the satisfactory pursuit of any great art or

science. If it be difficult for the rich man to enter into the kingdom

of heaven, it is also difficult for him to secure that freedom from

interruption which is necessary to fit him for his entrance into the

Intellectual Kingdom. He can scarcely allow himself to be absorbed in

any great study, when he reflects on all the powerful means of social

influence which he is suffering to lie idle. He is sure to possess by

inheritance, or to have acquired in obedience to custom, a complicated

and expensive machinery for the pleasures and purposes of society. There

is game to be shot; there are hunters to be exercised; great houses to

be filled with guests. So much is expected of the rich man, both in

business and in pleasure, that his time is not his own, and he could not

quit his station if he would. And yet the Intellectual Life, in its

fruitful perfection, requires, I do not say the complete abandonment of

the world, but it assuredly requires free and frequent spaces of labor

in tranquil solitude, "retreats" like those commanded by the Church of

Rome, but with more of study and less of contemplation.

It would be useless to ask you to abdicate your power, and retreat into

some hermitage with a library and a laboratory, without a thought of

returning to your pleasant hall in Yorkshire and your house in Mayfair.

You will not sell all and follow the Light, but there is a life which

you may powerfully encourage, yet only partially share. Notwithstanding

the increased facilities for earning a living which this age offers to

the intellectual, the time that they are often compelled to give to the

satisfaction of common material necessities is so much time withdrawn

from the work which they alone can do. It is a lamentable waste of the

highest and rarest kind of energy to compel minds that are capable of

original investigation, of discovery, to occupy themselves in that mere

vulgarization of knowledge, in popular lecturing and literature, which

could be done just as efficiently by minds of a common order. It is an

error of the present age to believe that the time for what is called

patronage is altogether passed away. Let me mention two instances to

the contrary: one in which kindly help would have saved fifteen years of

a noble life; another in which that kindly help did actually permit a

man of exceptional endowment and equally exceptional industry to pursue

investigations for which no other human being was so well qualified, and

which were entirely incompatible with the earning of the daily bread.

Dr. Carpenter has lately told us that, finding it impossible to unite

the work of a general practitioner with the scientific researches upon

which his heart was set, he gave up nine-tenths of his time for twenty

years to popular lecturing and writing, in order that he might exist and

devote the other tenth to science. "Just as he was breaking down from

the excessive strain upon mind and body which this life involved, an

appointment was offered to Dr. Carpenter which gave him competence and

sufficient leisure for the investigations which he has conducted to such

important issues." Suppose that during those twenty years of struggle he

_had_ broken down like many another only a little less robust--what

then? A mind lost to his country and the world. And would it not have

been happier for him and for us if some of those men (of whom there are

more in England than in any other land), who are so wealthy that their

gold is positively a burden and an encumbrance, like too many coats in

summer, had helped Dr. Carpenter at least a few years earlier, in some

form that a man of high feeling might honorably accept? The other

example that I shall mention is that of Franz Woepke, the

mathematician and orientalist. A modest pension, supplied by an Italian

prince who was interested in the history of mathematics, gave Woepke

that peace which is incompatible with poverty, and enabled him to live

grandly in his narrow lodging the noble intellectual life. Was not this

rightly and well done, and probably a much more effectual employment of

the power of gold than if that Italian prince had added some rare

manuscripts to his own library without having time or knowledge to

decipher them? I cannot but think that the rich may serve the cause of

culture best by a judicious exercise of patronage--unless, indeed, they

have within themselves the sense of that irresistible vocation which

made Humboldt use his fortune as the servant of his high ambition. The

Humboldts never are too rich; they possess their gold and are not

possessed by it, and they are exempt from the duty of aiding others

because they themselves have a use for all their powers.

LETTER II

TO A GENIUS CARELESS IN MONEY MATTERS.

Danger of carelessness--Inconveniences of poverty unfavorable to the

Intellectual Life--Necessity advances men in industrial occupations,

but disturbs and interrupts the higher intellectual life--Instances in

science, literature, and art--Careers aided by wealth--Mr. Ruskin--De

Saussure--Work spoiled by poverty in the doing--The central passion of

men of ability is to do their work well--The want of money the most

common hindrance to excellence of work--De Senancour--Bossuet--

Sainte-Beuve--Shelley-- Wordsworth--Scott--Kepler--Tycho

Brahe--Schiller--Goethe--Case of an eminent English philosopher, and of

a French writer of school-primers--Loss of time in making experiments

on public taste--_Surtout ne pas trop ecrire_--Auguste Comte--The

reaction of the intellectual against money-making--Money the protector

of the intellectual life.

I have been anxious for you lately, and venture to write to you about

the reasons for this anxiety.

You are neither extravagant nor self-indulgent, yet it seems to me that

your entire absorption in the higher intellectual pursuits has produced

in you, as it frequently does, a carelessness about material interests

of all kinds which is by far the most dangerous of all tempers to the

pecuniary well-being of a man. Sydney Smith declared that no fortune

could stand that temper long, and that we are on the high road to ruin

the moment we think ourselves rich enough to be careless.

Let me observe, to begin with, that although the pursuit of wealth is

not favorable to the intellectual life, the inconveniences of poverty

are even less favorable to it. We are sometimes lectured on the great

benefits of necessity as a stimulant to exertion, and it is implied that

comfortable people would go much farther on the road to distinction if

they were made uncomfortable by having to think perpetually about money.

Those who say this confound together the industry of the industrial and

professional classes, and the labors of the more purely intellectual. It

is clear that when the labor a man does is of such a nature that he will

be paid for it in strict proportion to the time and effort he bestows,

the need of money will be a direct stimulus to the best exertion he may

be capable of. In all simple industrial occupations the need of money

_does_ drive a man forwards, and is often, when he feels it in early

life, the very origin and foundation of his fortune. There exists, in

such occupations, a perfect harmony between the present necessity and

the ultimate purpose of the life. Wealth is the object of industry, and

the first steps towards the possession of it are steps on the chosen

path. The future captain of industry, who will employ thousands of

workpeople and accumulate millions of money, is going straight to his

splendid future when he gets up at five in the morning to work in

another person's factory. To learn to be a builder of steam-vessels, it

is necessary, even when you begin with capital, to pass through the

manual trades, and you will only learn them the better if the wages are

necessary to your existence. Poverty in these cases only makes an

intelligent man ground himself all the better in that stern practical

training which is the basis of his future career. Well, therefore, may

those who have reached distinguished success in fields of practical

activity extol the teachings of adversity. If it is a necessary part of

your education that you should hammer rivets inside a steam-boiler, it

is as well that your early habits should not be over-dainty. So it is

observed that horny hands, in the colonies, get gold into them sooner

than white ones.

Even in the liberal professions young men get on all the better for not

being too comfortably off. If you have a comfortable private income to

begin with, the meagre early rewards of professional life will seem too

paltry to be worth hard striving, and so you will very likely miss the

more ample rewards of maturity, since the common road to success is

nothing but a gradual increase. And you miss education at the same time,

for practice is the best of professional educators, and many successful

lawyers and artists have had scarcely any other training. The daily

habit of affairs trains men for the active business of the world, and if

the purpose of their lives is merely to do what they are doing or to

command others to do the same things, the more closely circumstances tie

them down to their work, the better.

But in the higher intellectual pursuits the necessity for immediate

earning has an entirely different result. It comes, not as an educator,

but as an interruption or suspension of education. All intellectual

lives, however much they may differ in the variety of their purposes,

have at least this purpose in common, that they are mainly devoted to

self-education of one kind or another. An intellectual man who is forty

years old is as much at school as an Etonian of fourteen, and if you set

him to earn more money than that which comes to him without especial

care about it, you interrupt his schooling, exactly as selfish parents

used to do when they sent their young children to the factory and

prevented them from learning to read. The idea of the intellectual life

is an existence passed almost entirely in study, yet preserving the

results of its investigations. A day's writing will usually suffice to

record the outcome of a month's research.

Necessity, instead of advancing your studies, stops them. Whenever her

harsh voice speaks it becomes your duty to shut your books, put aside

your instruments, and do something that will fetch a price in the

market. The man of science has to abandon the pursuit of a discovery to

go and deliver a popular lecture a hundred miles off, for which he gets

five pounds and his railway fare. The student of ancient literature has

to read some feeble novel, and give three days of a valuable life to

write an anonymous review which will bring him two pounds ten. The

artist has to leave his serious picture to manufacture "pot-boilers,"

which will teach him nothing, but only spoil his hands and vitiate the

public taste. The poet suspends his poem (which is promised to a

publisher for Christmas, and will be spoiled in consequence by hurry at

the last) in order to write newspaper articles on subjects of which he

has little knowledge and in which he takes no interest. And yet these

are instances of those comparatively happy and fortunate needy who are

only compelled to suspend their intellectual life, and who can cheer

themselves in their enforced labor with the hope of shortly renewing it.

What of those others who are pushed out of their path forever by the

buffets of unkindly fortune? Many a fine intellect has been driven into

the deep quagmire, and has struggled in it vainly till death came, which

but for that grim necessity might have scaled the immortal mountains.

This metaphor of the mountains has led me, by a natural association of

ideas, to think of a writer who has added to our enjoyment of their

beauty, and I think of him the more readily that his career will serve

as an illustration--far better than any imaginary career--of the very

subject which just now occupies my mind. Mr. Ruskin is not only one of

the best instances, but he is positively the very best instance except

the two Humboldts, of an intellectual career which has been greatly

aided by material prosperity, and which would not have been possible

without it. This does not in the least detract from the merit of the

author of "Modern Painters," for it needed a rare force of resolution,

or a powerful instinct of genius, to lead the life of a severe student

under every temptation to indolence. Still it is true that Mr. Ruskin's

career would have been impossible for a poor man, however gifted. A poor

man would not have had access to Mr. Ruskin's materials, and one of his

chief superiorities has always been an abundant wealth of material. And

if we go so far as to suppose that the poor man might have found other

materials perhaps equivalent to these, we know that he could not have

turned them to that noble use. The poor critic would be immediately

absorbed in the ocean of anonymous periodical literature; he could not

find time for the incubation of great works. "Modern Painters," the

result of seventeen years of study, is not simply a work of genius but

of genius seconded by wealth. Close to it on my shelves stand four

volumes which are the monument of another intellectual life devoted to

the investigation of nature. De Saussure, whom Mr. Ruskin reverences as

one of his ablest teachers, and whom all sincere students of nature

regard as a model observer, pursued for many laborious years a kind of

life which was not, and could not be, self-supporting in the pecuniary

sense. Many other patient laborers, who have not the celebrity of these,

work steadily in the same way, and are enabled to do so by the

possession of independent fortune. I know one such who gives a whole

summer to the examination of three or four acres of mountain-ground,

the tangible result being comprised in a few memoranda, which,

considered as literary material, might (in the hands of a skilled

professional writer) just possibly be worth five pounds.

Not only do narrow pecuniary means often render high intellectual

enterprises absolutely impossible, but they do what is frequently even

more trying to the health and character, they permit you to undertake

work that would be worthy of you if you might only have time and

materials for the execution of it, and then spoil it in the doing. An

intellectual laborer will bear anything except that. You may take away

the very table he is writing upon, if you let him have a deal board for

his books and papers; you may take away all his fine editions, if you

leave him common copies that are legible; you may remove his very

candlestick, if you leave him a bottle-neck to stick his candle in, and

he will go on working cheerfully still. But the moment you do anything

to spoil the quality of the work itself, you make him irritable and

miserable. "You think," says Sir Arthur Helps, "to gain a good man to

manage your affairs because he happens to have a small share in your

undertaking. It is a great error. You want him to do something well

which you are going to tell him to do. If he has been wisely chosen, and

is an able man, his pecuniary interest in the matter will be mere dust

in the balance, when compared with the desire which belongs to all such

men to do their work well." Yes, this is the central passion of all men

of true ability, _to do their work well_; their happiness lies in that,

and not in the amount of their profits, or even in their reputation. But

then, on the other hand, they suffer indescribable mental misery when

circumstances compel them to do their work less well than they know

that, under more favorable circumstances, they would be capable of doing

it. The want of money is, in the higher intellectual pursuits, the most

common hindrance to thoroughness and excellence of work. De Senancour,

who, in consequence of a strange concatenation of misfortunes, was all

his life struggling in shallows, suffered not from the privations

themselves, but from the vague feeling that they stunted his

intellectual growth; and any experienced student of human nature must be

aware that De Senancour was right. With larger means he would have seen

more of the world, and known it better, and written of it with riper

wisdom. He said that the man "who only saw in poverty the direct effect

of the money-privation, and only compared, for instance, an eight-penny

dinner to one that cost ten shillings, would have no conception of the

true nature of misfortune, for not to spend money is the least of the

evils of poverty." Bossuet said that he "had no attachment to riches,

and still if he had only what is barely necessary, if he felt himself

narrowed, he would lose more than half his talents." Sainte-Beuve said,

"Only think a little what a difference there is in the starting point

and in the employment of the faculties between a Duc de Luynes and a

Senancour." How many of the most distinguished authors have been

dependent upon private means, not simply for physical sustenance, but

for the opportunities which they afforded of gaining that experience of

life which was absolutely essential to the full growth of their mental

faculties. Shelley's writings brought him no profit whatever, and

without a private income he could not have produced them, for he had not

a hundred buyers. Yet his _whole time_ was employed in study or in

travel, which for him was study of another kind, or else in the actual

labor of composition. Wordsworth tried to become a London journalist and

failed. A young man called Raisley Calvert died and left him 900_l._;

this saved the poet in Wordsworth, as it kept him till the publication

of the "Lyrical Ballads," and afterwards other pieces of good luck

happened to him, so that he could think and compose at leisure. Scott

would not venture to devote himself to literature until he had first

secured a comfortable income outside of it. Poor Kepler struggled with

constant anxieties, and told fortunes by astrology for a livelihood,

saying that astrology as the daughter of astronomy ought to keep her

mother; but fancy a man of science wasting precious time over

horoscopes! "I supplicate you," he writes to Moestlin, "if there is a

situation vacant at Tuebingen, do what you can to obtain it for me, and

let me know the prices of bread and wine and other necessaries of life,

for my wife is not accustomed to live on beans." He had to accept all

sorts of jobs; he made almanacs, and served any one who would pay him.

His only tranquil time for study was when he lived in Styria, on his

wife's income, a tranquillity that did not last for long, and never

returned. How different is this from the princely ease of Tycho Brahe,

who labored for science alone, with all the help that the ingenuity of

his age could furnish! There is the same contrast, in a later

generation, between Schiller and Goethe. Poor Schiller "wasting so much

of his precious life in literary hack-work, translating French books for

a miserable pittance;" Goethe, fortunate in his pecuniary independence

as in all the other great circumstances of his life, and this at a time

when the pay of authors was so miserable that they could hardly exist by

the pen. Schiller got a shilling a page for his translations. Merck the

publisher offered three pounds sterling for a drama of Goethe. "If

Europe praised me," Goethe said, "what has Europe done for me? Nothing.

_Even my works have been an expense to me._"

The pecuniary rewards which men receive for their labor are so absurdly

(yet inevitably) disproportionate to the intellectual power that is

needed for the task, and also to the toil involved, that no one can

safely rely upon the higher intellectual pursuits as a protection from

money-anxieties. I will give you two instances of this disproportion,

real instances, of men who are known to me personally. One of them is an

eminent Englishman of most remarkable intellectual force, who for many

years past has occupied his leisure in the composition of works that are

valued by the thinking public to a degree which it would be difficult to

exaggerate. But this thinking public is not numerous, and so in the year

1866 this eminent philosopher, "unable to continue losing money in

endeavoring to enlighten his contemporaries, was compelled to announce

the termination of his series." On the other hand, a Frenchman, also

known to me personally, one day conceived the fortunate idea that a new

primer might possibly be a saleable commodity. So he composed a little

primer, beginning with the alphabet, advancing to a, b, _ab_; b, a,

_ba_; and even going so far in history as to affirm that Adam was the

first man and Abraham the father of the faithful. He had the wisdom to

keep the copyright of this little publication, which employed (in the

easiest of all imaginable literary labor) the evenings of a single week.

It has brought him in, ever since, a regular income of 120_l._ a year,

which, so far from showing any signs of diminution, is positively

improving. This success encouraged the same intelligent gentleman to

compose more literature of the same order, and he is now the enviable

owner of several other such copyrights, all of them very valuable; in

fact as good properties as house-leases in London. Here is an author

who, from the pecuniary point of view, was incomparably more successful

than Milton, or Shelley, or Goethe. If every intellectual man could

shield his higher life by writing primers for children which should be

as good as house-leases, if the proverb _Qui peut le plus peut le moins_

were a true proverb, which it is not, then of course all men of culture

would be perfectly safe, since they all certainly know the contents of a

primer. But you may be able to write the most learned philosophical

treatise and still not be able to earn your daily bread.

Consider, too, the lamentable loss of time which people of high culture

incur in making experiments on public taste, when money becomes one of

their main objects. Whilst they are writing stories for children, or

elementary educational books which people of far inferior attainment

could probably do much better, their own self-improvement comes to a

standstill. If it could only be ascertained without delay what sort of

work would bring in the money they require, then there would be some

chance of apportioning time so as to make reserves for self-improvement;

but when they have to write a score of volumes merely to ascertain the

humor of the public, there is little chance of leisure. The life of the

professional author who has no reputation is much less favorable to high

culture than the life of a tradesman in moderately easy circumstances

who can reserve an hour or two every day for some beloved intellectual

pursuit.

Sainte-Beuve tells us that during certain years of his life he had

endeavored, and had been able, so to arrange his existence that it

should have both sweetness and dignity, writing from time to time what

was agreeable, reading what was both agreeable and serious, cultivating

friendships, throwing much of his mind into the intimate relations of

every day, giving more to his friends than to the public, reserving what

was most tender and delicate for the inner life, enjoying with

moderation; such for him was the dream of an intellectual existence in

which things truly precious were valued according to their worth. And

"_above all_," he said, above all his desire was not to write too much,

"_surtout ne pas trop ecrire_." And then comes the regret for this wise,

well-ordered life enjoyed by him only for a time. "La necessite depuis

m'a saisi et m'a contraint de renoncer a ce que je considerais comme le

seul bonheur ou la consolation exquise du melancolique et du sage."

Auguste Comte lamented in like manner the evil intellectual consequences

of anxieties about material needs. "There is nothing," he said, "more

mortal to my mind than the necessity, pushed to a certain degree, to

have to think each day about a provision for the next. Happily I think

little and rarely about all that; but whenever this happens to me I pass

through moments of discouragement and positive despair, which if the

influence of them became habitual _would make me renounce all my

labors, all my philosophical projects, to end my days like an ass_."

There are a hundred rules for getting rich, but the instinct of

accumulation is worth all such rules put together. This instinct is

rarely found in combination with high intellectual gifts, and the reason

is evident. To advance from a hundred pounds to a thousand is not an

intellectual advance, and there is no intellectual interest in the

addition of a cipher at the bankers'. Simply to accumulate money that

you are never to use is, from the intellectual point of view, as stupid

an operation as can be imagined. We observe, too, that the great

accumulators, the men who are gifted by nature with the true instinct,

are not usually such persons as we feel any ambition to become. Their

faculties are concentrated on one point, and that point, as it seems to

us, of infinitely little importance. We cannot see that it signifies

much to the intellectual well-being of humanity that John Smith should

be worth his million when he dies, since we know quite well that John

Smith's mind will be just as ill-furnished then as it is now. In places

where much money is made we easily acquire a positive disgust for it,

and the curate seems the most distinguished gentleman in the community,

with his old black coat and his seventy pounds a year. We come to hate

money-matters when we find that they exclude all thoughtful and

disinterested conversation, and we fly to the society of people with

fixed incomes, not large enough for much saving, to escape the perpetual

talk about investments. Our happiest hours have been spent with poor

scholars, and artists, and men of science, whose words remain in the

memory and make us rich indeed. Then we dislike money because it rules

and restrains us, and because it is unintelligent and seems hostile, so

far as that which is unintelligent can be hostile. And yet the real

truth is that money is the strong protector of the intellectual life.

The student sits and studies, too often despising the power that

shelters him from the wintry night, that gives him roof and walls, and

lamp, and books, and fire. For money is simply the accumulated labor of

the past, guarding our peace as fleets and armies guard the industry of

England, or like some mighty fortress-wall within which men follow the

most peaceful avocations. The art is to use money so that it shall be

the protector and not the scatterer of our time, the body-guard of the

sovereign Intellect and Will.

LETTER III.

TO A STUDENT IN GREAT POVERTY.

Poverty really a great obstacle--Difference between a thousand rich

men and a thousand poor men taken from persons of average natural

gifts--The Houses of Parliament--The English recognize the natural

connection between wealth and culture--Connection between ignorance

and parsimony in expenditure--What may be honestly said for the

encouragement of a very poor student.

As it seems to me that to make light of the difficulties which lie in

the path of another is not to show true sympathy for him, even though it

is done sometimes out of a sort of awkward kindness and for his

encouragement, I will not begin by pretending that poverty is not a

great obstacle to the perfection of the intellectual life. It _is_ a

great obstacle; it is one of the very greatest of all obstacles. Only

observe how riches and poverty operate upon mankind in the mass. Here

and there no doubt a very poor man attains intellectual distinction when

he has exceptional strength of will, and health enough to bear a great

strain of extra labor that he imposes upon himself, and natural gifts so

brilliant that he can learn in an hour what common men learn in a day.

But consider mankind in the mass. Look, for instance, at our two Houses

of Parliament. They are composed of men taken from the average run of

Englishmen with very little reference to ability, but almost all of them

are rich men; not one of them is poor, as you are poor; not one of them

has to contend against the stern realities of poverty. Then consider the

very high general level of intellectual attainment which distinguishes

those two assemblies, and ask yourself candidly whether a thousand men

taken from the beggars in the streets, or even from the far superior

class of our manufacturing operatives, would be likely to understand, as

the two Houses of Parliament understand, the many complicated questions

of legislation and of policy which are continually brought before them.

We all know that the poor are too limited in knowledge and experience,

from the want of the necessary opportunities, and too little accustomed

to exercise their minds in the tranquil investigations of great

questions, to be competent for the work of Parliament. It is scarcely

necessary to insist upon this fact to an Englishman, because the English

have always recognized the natural connection between wealth and

culture, and have preferred to be governed by the rich from the belief

that they are likely to be better informed, and better situated for

intellectual activity of a disinterested kind, than those members of the

community whose time and thoughts are almost entirely occupied in

winning their daily bread by the incessant labor of their hands. And if

you go out into the world, if you mix with men of very different

classes, you will find that in a broad average way (I am not speaking

just now of the exceptions) the richer classes are much more capable of

entering into the sort of thinking which may be called intellectual

than those whose money is less plentiful, and whose opportunities have

therefore been less abundant. Indeed it may be asserted, roughly and

generally, that the narrowness of men's ideas is in direct proportion to

their parsimony in expenditure. I do not mean to affirm that all who

spend largely attain large intellectual results, for of course we know

that a man may spend vast sums on pursuits which do not educate him in

anything worth knowing, but the advantage is that with habits of free

expenditure the germs of thought are well tilled and watered, whereas

parsimony denies them every external help. The most spending class in

Europe is the English gentry, it is also the class most strikingly

characterized by a high general average of information;[5] the most

parsimonious class in Europe is the French peasantry; it is also the

class most strikingly characterized by ignorance and intellectual

apathy. The English gentleman has cultivated himself by various reading

and extensive travel, but the French peasant will not go anywhere except

to the market-town, and could not pardon the extravagance of buying a

book, or a candle to read it by in the evening. Between these extremes

we have various grades of the middle classes in which culture usually

increases very much in proportion to the expenditure. The rule is not

without its exceptions; there are rich vulgar people who spend a great

deal without improving themselves at all--who only, by unlimited

self-indulgence, succeed in making themselves so uncomfortably sensitive

to every bodily inconvenience that they have no leisure, even in the

midst of an unoccupied life, to think of anything but their own bellies

and their own skins--people whose power of attention is so feeble that

the smallest external incident distracts it, and who remember nothing of

their travels but a catalogue of trivial annoyances. But people of this

kind do not generally belong to families on whom wealth has had time to

produce its best effects. What I mean is, that a family which has been

for generations in the habit of spending four thousand a year will

usually be found to have a more cultivated one than one that has only

spent four hundred.

I have come to the recognition of this truth very reluctantly indeed,

not because I dislike rich people, but merely because they are

necessarily a very small minority, and I should like every human being

to have the best benefits of culture if it were only possible. The plain

living and high thinking that Wordsworth so much valued is a cheering

ideal, for most men have to live plainly, and if they could only think

with a certain elevation we might hope to solve the great problem of

human life, the reconciliation of poverty and the soul. There certainly

is a slow movement in that direction, and the shortening of the hours of

labor may afford some margin of leisure; but we who work for culture

every day and all day long, and still feel that we know very little, and

have hardly skill enough to make any effective use of the little that we

know, can scarcely indulge in very enthusiastic anticipations of the

future culture of the poor.

Still, there are some things that may be rationally and truly said to a

poor man who desires culture, and which are not without a sort of

Spartan encouragement. You are restricted by your poverty, but it is not

always a bad thing to be restricted, even from the intellectual point of

view. The intellectual powers of well-to-do people are very commonly

made ineffective by the enormous multiplicity of objects that are

presented to their attention, and which claim from them a sort of polite

notice like the greeting of a great lady to each of her thousand guests.

It requires the very rarest strength of mind, in a rich man, to

concentrate his attention on anything there are so many things that he

is expected to make a pretence of knowing; but nobody expects _you_ to

know anything, and this is an incalculable advantage. I think that all

poor men who have risen to subsequent distinction have been greatly

indebted to this independence of public opinion as to what they ought to

know. In trying to satisfy that public opinion by getting up a pretence

of various sorts of knowledge, which is only a sham, we sacrifice not

only much precious time, but we blunt our natural interest in things.

That interest you preserve in all its virgin force, and this force

carries a man far. Then, again, although the opportunities of rich

people are very superior to yours, they are not altogether so superior

as they seem. There exists a great equalizing power, the limitation of

human energy. A rich man may sit down to an enormous banquet, but he can

only make a good use of the little that he is able to digest. So it is

with the splendid intellectual banquet that is spread before the rich

man's eyes. He can only possess what he has energy to master, and too

frequently the manifest impossibility of mastering everything produces a

feeling of discouragement that ends in his mastering nothing. A poor

student, especially if he lives in an out-of-the-way place where there

are no big libraries to bewilder him, may apply his energy with effect

in the study of a few authors.

I used to believe a great deal more in opportunities and less in

application than I do now. Time and health are needed, but with these

there are always opportunities. Rich people have a fancy for spending

money very uselessly on their culture because it seems to them more

valuable when it has been costly; but the truth is, that by the blessing

of good and cheap literature, intellectual light has become almost as

accessible as daylight. I have a rich friend who travels more, and buys

more costly things, than I do, but he does not really learn more or

advance farther in the twelvemonth. If my days are fully occupied, what

has he to set against them? only other well-occupied days, no more. If

he is getting benefit at St. Petersburg he is missing the benefit I am

getting round my house, and in it. The sum of the year's benefit seems

to be surprisingly alike in both cases. So if you are reading a piece of

thoroughly good literature, Baron Rothschild may possibly be as well

occupied as you--he is certainly not better occupied. When I open a

noble volume I say to myself, "Now the only Croesus that I envy is he

who is reading a better book than this."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] This sounds like a poetical exaggeration, but it is less than the

bare truth. There were fifteen hundred slaves on two West Indian

estates that Beckford lost in a lawsuit. It is quite certain,

considering his lavish expenditure, that fully a thousand men must

have worked for the maintenance of his luxury in Europe. So much for

his command of labor.

[5] The reader will please to bear in mind that I am speaking here of

broad effects on great numbers. I do not think that aristocracy, in

its spirit, is quite favorable to the exceptionally highest

intellectual life.

PART VI.

CUSTOM AND TRADITION.

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO HAD FIRMLY RESOLVED NEVER TO WEAR ANYTHING BUT

A GRAY COAT.[6]

Secret enjoyment of rebellion against custom, and of the disabilities

resulting from it--Penalties imposed by Society and by Nature out of

proportion to the offence--Instances--What we consider penalties not

really penalties, but only consequences--Society likes harmony, and is

offended by dissonance--Utility of rebels against custom--That they

ought to reserve their power of rebellion for great occasions--Uses of

custom--Duty of the intellectual class--Best way to procure the

abolition of a custom we disapprove--Bad customs--Eccentricity

sometimes a duty.

When I had the pleasure of staying at your father's house, you told me,

rather to my surprise, that it was impossible for you to go to balls and

dinner-parties because you did not possess such a thing as a dress-coat.

The reason struck me as being scarcely a valid one, considering the

rather high scale of expenditure adopted in the paternal mansion. It

seemed clear that the eldest son of a family which lived after the

liberal fashion of Yorkshire country gentlemen could afford himself a

dress-coat if he liked. Then I wondered whether you disliked dress-coats

from a belief that they were unbecoming to your person; but a very

little observation of your character convinced me that, whatever might

be your weaknesses (for everybody has some weaknesses), anxiety about

personal appearance was not one of them.

The truth is, that you secretly enjoy this little piece of disobedience

to custom, and all the disabilities which result from it. This little

rebellion is connected with a larger rebellion, and it is agreeable to

you to demonstrate the unreasonableness of society by incurring a very

severe penalty for a very trifling offence. You are always dressed

decently, you offend against no moral rule, you have cultivated your

mind by study and reflection, and it rather pleases you to think that a

young gentleman so well qualified for society in everything of real

importance should be excluded from it because he has not purchased a

permission from his tailor.

The penalties imposed by society for the infraction of very trifling

details of custom are often, as it seems, out of all proportion to the

offence; but so are the penalties of nature. Only three days before the

date of this letter, an intimate friend of mine was coming home from a

day's shooting. His nephew, a fine young man in the full enjoyment of

existence, was walking ten paces in advance. A covey of partridges

suddenly cross the road: my friend in shouldering his gun touches the

trigger just a second too soon, and kills his nephew. Now, think of the

long years of mental misery that will be the punishment of that very

trifling piece of carelessness! My poor friend has passed, in the space

of a single instant, from a joyous life to a life that is permanently

and irremediably saddened. It is as if he had left the summer sunshine

to enter a gloomy dungeon and begin a perpetual imprisonment. And for

what? For having touched a trigger, without evil intention, a little too

precipitately. It seems harder still for the victim, who is sent out of

the world in the bloom of perfect manhood because his uncle was not

quite so cool as he ought to have been. Again, not far from where I

live, thirty-five men were killed last week in a coal-pit from an

explosion of fire-damp. One of their number had struck a lucifer to

light his pipe: for doing this in a place where he ought not to have

done it, the man suffers the penalty of death, and thirty-four others

with him. The fact is simply that Nature _will_ be obeyed, and makes no

attempt to proportion punishments to offences: indeed, what in our human

way we call punishments are not punishments, but simple consequences. So

it is with the great social penalties. Society _will be obeyed_: if you

refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one

law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only

just so far as it has custom on its side.

Nature does not desire that thirty-five men should be destroyed because

one could not resist the temptation of a pipe; but fire-damp is highly

inflammable, and the explosion is a simple consequence. Society does not

desire to exclude you because you will not wear evening dress; but the

dress is customary, and your exclusion is merely a consequence of your

nonconformity. The view of society goes no farther in this than the

artistic conception (not very delicately artistic, perhaps) that it is

prettier to see men in black coats regularly placed between ladies round

a dinner-table than men in gray coats or brown coats. The uniformity of

costume appears to represent uniformity of sentiment and to ensure a

sort of harmony amongst the _convives_. What society really cares for is

harmony; what it dislikes is dissent and nonconformity. It wants peace

in the dining-room, peace in the drawing-room, peace everywhere in its

realm of tranquil pleasure. You come in your shooting-coat, which was in

tune upon the moors, but is a dissonance amongst ladies in full dress.

Do you not perceive that fustian and velveteen, which were natural

amongst gamekeepers, are not so natural on gilded chairs covered with

silk, with lace and diamonds at a distance of three feet? You don't

perceive it? Very well: society does not argue the point with you, but

only excludes you.

It has been said that in the life of every intellectual man there comes

a time when he questions custom at all points. This seems to be a

provision of nature for the reform and progress of custom itself, which

without such questioning would remain absolutely stationary and

irresistibly despotic. You rebels against the established custom have

your place in the great work of progressive civilization. Without you,

Western Europe would have been a second China. It is to the continual

rebellion of such persons as yourself that we owe whatever progress has

been accomplished since the times of our remotest forefathers. There

have been rebels always, and the rebels have not been, generally

speaking, the most stupid part of the nation.

But what is the use of wasting this beneficial power of rebellion on

matters too trivial to be worth attention? Does it hurt your conscience

to appear in a dress-coat? Certainly not, and you would be as

good-looking in it as you are in your velveteen shooting-jacket with the

pointers on the bronze buttons. Let us conform in these trivial matters,

which nobody except a tailor ought to consider worth a moment's

attention, in order to reserve our strength for the protection of

intellectual liberty. Let society arrange your dress for you (it will

save you infinite trouble), but never permit it to stifle the expression

of your thought. You find it convenient, because you are timid, to

exclude yourself from the world by refusing to wear its costume; but a

bolder man would let the tailor do his worst, and then go into the world

and courageously defend there the persons and causes that are

misunderstood and slanderously misrepresented. The fables of Spenser

are fables only in form, and a noble knight may at any time go forth,

armed in the panoply of a tail-coat, a dress waistcoat, and a manly

moral courage, to do battle across the dinner-table and in the

drawing-room for those who have none to defend them.

It is unphilosophical to set ourselves obstinately against custom in the

mass, for it multiplies the power of men by settling useless discussion

and clearing the ground for our best and most prolific activity. The

business of the world could not be carried forward one day without a

most complex code of customs; and law itself is little more than custom

slightly improved upon by men reflecting together at their leisure, and

reduced to codes and systems. We ought to think of custom as a most

precious legacy of the past, saving us infinite perplexity, yet not as

an infallible rule. The most intelligent community would be conservative

in its habits, yet not obstinately conservative, but willing to hear and

adopt the suggestions of advancing reason. The great duty of the

intellectual class, and its especial function, is to confirm what is

reasonable in the customs that have been handed down to us, and so

maintain their authority, yet at the same time to show that custom is

not final, but merely a form suited to the world's convenience. And

whenever you are convinced that a custom is no longer serviceable, the

way to procure the abolition of it is to lead men very gradually away

from it, by offering a substitute at first very slightly different from

what they have been long used to. If the English had been in the habit

of tattooing, the best way to procure its abolition would have been to

admit that it was quite necessary to cover the face with elaborate

patterns, yet gently to suggest that these patterns would be still more

elegant if delicately painted in water-colors. Then you might have gone

on arguing--still admitting, of course, the absolute necessity for

ornament of some kind--that good taste demanded only a moderate amount

of it; and so you would have brought people gradually to a little

flourish on the nose or forehead, when the most advanced reformers might

have set the example of dispensing with ornament altogether. Many of our

contemporaries have abandoned shaving in this gradual way, allowing the

whiskers to encroach imperceptibly, till at last the razor lay in the

dressing-case unused. The abominable black cylinders that covered our

heads a few years ago were vainly resisted by radicals in custom, but

the moderate reformers gradually reduced their elevation, and now they

are things of the past.

Though I think we ought to submit to custom in matters of indifference,

and to reform it gradually, whilst affecting submission in matters

altogether indifferent, still there are other matters on which the only

attitude worthy of a man is the most bold and open resistance to its

dictates. Custom may have a right to authority over your wardrobe, but

it cannot have any right to ruin your self-respect. Not only the virtues

most advantageous to well-being, but also the most contemptible and

degrading vices, have at various periods of the world's history been

sustained by the full authority of custom. There are places where forty

years ago drunkenness was conformity to custom, and sobriety an

eccentricity. There are societies, even at the present day, where

licentiousness is the rule of custom, and chastity the sign of weakness

or want of spirit. There are communities (it cannot be necessary to name

them) in which successful fraud, especially on a large scale, is

respected as the proof of smartness, whilst a man who remains poor

because he is honest is despised for slowness and incapacity. There are

whole nations in which religious hypocrisy is strongly approved by

custom, and honesty severely condemned. The Wahabee Arabs may be

mentioned as an instance of this, but the Wahabee Arabs are not the only

people, nor is Nejed the only place, where it is held to be more

virtuous to lie on the side of custom than to be an honorable man in

independence of it. In all communities where vice and hypocrisy are

sustained by the authority of custom, eccentricity is a moral duty. In

all communities where a low standard of thinking is received as

infallible common sense, eccentricity becomes an intellectual duty.

There are hundreds of places in the provinces where it is impossible for

any man to lead the intellectual life without being condemned as an

eccentric. It is the duty of intellectual men who are thus isolated to

set the example of that which their neighbors call eccentricity, but

which may be more accurately described as superiority.

LETTER II.

TO A CONSERVATIVE WHO HAD ACCUSED THE AUTHOR OF A WANT OF RESPECT FOR

TRADITION.

Transition from the ages of tradition to that of

experiment--Attraction of the future--Joubert--Saint-Marc

Girardin--Solved and unsolved problems--The introduction of a new

element--Inapplicability of past experience--An argument against

Republics--The lessons of history--Mistaken predictions that have been

based on them--Morality and ecclesiastical authority--Compatibility of

hopes for the future with gratitude to the past--That we are more

respectful to the past than previous ages have been--Our feelings

towards tradition--An incident at Warsaw--The reconstruction of the

navy.

The astonishing revolution in thought and practice which is taking place

amongst the intelligent Japanese, the throwing away of a traditional

system of living in order to establish in its stead a system which, for

an Asiatic people, is nothing more than a vast experiment, has its

counterpart in many an individual life in Europe. We are like travellers

crossing an isthmus between two seas, who have left one ship behind

them, who have not yet seen the vessel that waits on the distant shore,

and who experience to the full all the discomforts and inconveniences of

the passage from one sea to the other. There is a break between the

existence of our forefathers and that of our posterity, and it is we who

have the misfortune to be situated exactly where the break occurs. We

are leaving behind us the security, I do not say the safety, but the

feeling of tranquillity which belonged to the ages of tradition; we are

entering upon ages whose spirit we foresee but dimly, whose institutions

are the subject of guesses and conjectures. And yet this future, of

which we know so little, attracts us more by the very vastness of its

enigma than the rich history of the past, so full of various incident,

of powerful personages, of grandeur, and suffering, and sorrow. Joubert

already noticed this forward-looking of the modern mind. "The ancients,"

he observed, "said, 'Our ancestors;' we say, 'Posterity.' We do not love

as they did _la patrie_, the country and laws of our forefathers; we

love rather the laws and the country of our children. It is the magic of

the future, and not that of the past, which seduces us." Commenting on

this thought of Joubert's, Saint-Marc Girardin said that we loved the

future because we loved ourselves, and fashioned the future in our own

image; and he added, with partial but not complete injustice, that our

ignorance of the past was a cause of this tendency in our minds, since

it is shorter to despise the past than to study it. These critics and

accusers of the modern spirit are not, however, altogether fair to it.

If the modern spirit looks so much to the future, it is because the

problems of the past are solved problems, whilst those of the future

have the interest of a game that is only just begun. We know what became

of feudalism, we know the work that it accomplished and the services

that it rendered, but we do not yet know what will be the effects of

modern democracy and of the scientific and industrial spirit. It is the

novelty of this element, the scientific spirit and the industrial

development which is a part (but only a part) of its results, that makes

the past so much less reliable as a guide than it would have been if no

new element had intervened, and therefore so much less interesting for

us. As an example of the inapplicability of past experience, I may

mention an argument against Republics which has been much used of late

by the partisans of monarchy in France. They have frequently told us

that Republics had only succeeded in very small States, and this is true

of ancient democracies; but it is not less true that railways, and

telegraphs, and the newspaper press have made great countries like

France and the United States just as capable of feeling and acting

simultaneously as the smallest Republics of antiquity. The parties which

rely on what are called the lessons of history are continually exposed

to great deceptions. In France, what may be called the historical party

would not believe in the possibility of a united Germany, because fifty

years ago, with the imperfect means of communication which then

existed, Germany was not and could not be united. The same historical

party refused to believe that the Italian kingdom could ever hold

together. In England, the historical party predicted the dismemberment

of the United States, and in some other countries it has been a favorite

article of faith that England could not keep her possessions. But

theories of this kind are always of very doubtful applicability to the

present, and their applicability to the future is even more doubtful

still. Steam and electricity have made great modern States practically

like so many great cities, so that Manchester is like a suburb of

London, and Havre the Piraeus of Paris, whilst the most trifling

occasions bring the Sovereign of Italy to any of the Italian capitals.

In the intellectual sphere the experience of the past is at least

equally unreliable. If the power of the Catholic Church had been

suddenly removed from the Europe of the fourteenth century, the

consequence would have been a moral anarchy difficult to conceive; but

in our own day the real regulator of morality is not the Church, but

public opinion, in the formation of which the Church has a share, but

only a share. It would therefore be unsafe to conclude that the

weakening of ecclesiastical authority must of necessity, in the future,

be followed by moral anarchy, since it is possible, and even probable,

that the other great influences upon public opinion may gain strength as

this declines. And in point of fact we have already lived long enough

to witness a remarkable decline of ecclesiastical authority, which is

proved by the avowed independence of scientific writers and thinkers,

and by the open opposition of almost all the European Governments. The

secular power resists the ecclesiastical in Germany and Spain. In France

it establishes a form of government which the Church detests. In Ireland

it disestablishes and disendows a hierarchy. In Switzerland it resists

the whole power of the Papacy. In Italy it seizes the sacred territory

and plants itself within the very walls of Rome. And yet the time which

has witnessed this unprecedented self-assertion of the laity has

witnessed a positive increase in the morality of public sentiment,

especially in the love of justice and the willingness to hear truth,

even when truth is not altogether agreeable to the listener, and in the

respect paid by opponents to able and sincere men, merely for their

ability and sincerity. This love of justice, this patient and tolerant

hearing of new truth, in which our age immeasurably exceeds all the ages

that have preceded it, are the direct results of the scientific spirit,

and are not only in themselves eminently moral, but conducive to moral

health generally. And this advancement may be observed in countries

which were least supposed to be capable of it. Even the French, of whose

immorality we have heard so much, have a public opinion which is

gradually gaining a salutary strength, an increasing dislike for

barbarity and injustice, and a more earnest desire that no citizen,

except by his own fault, should be excluded from the benefits of

civilization. The throne which has lately fallen was undermined by the

currents of this public opinion before it sank in military disaster.

"Aussi me contenterai-je," says Littre, "d'appeler l'attention sur la

guerre, dont l'opinion publique ne tolere plus les antiques barbaries;

sur la magistrature, qui repudie avec horreur les tortures et la

question; sur la tolerance, qui a banni les persecutions religieuses;

sur l'equite, qui soumet tout le monde aux charges communes; sur le

sentiment de solidarite qui du sort des classes pauvres fait le plus

pressant et le plus noble probleme du temps present. Pour moi, je ne

sais caracteriser ce spectacle si hautement moral qu'en disant que

l'humanite, amelioree, accepte de plus en plus le devoir et la tache

d'etendre le domaine de la justice et de la bonte."

Yet this partial and comparative satisfaction that we find in the

present, and our larger hopes for the future, are quite compatible with

gratitude to all who in the past have rendered such improvement possible

for us, and the higher improvement that we hope for possible to those

who will come after us. I cannot think that the present age may be

accused with justice of exceptional ignorance or scorn of its

predecessors. We have been told that we scorn our forefathers because

old buildings are removed to suit modern conveniences, because the

walls of old York have been pierced for the railway, and a tower of

Conway Castle has been undermined that the Holyhead mail may pass. But

the truth is, that whilst we care a little for our predecessors, they

cared still less for theirs. The mediaeval builders not only used as

quarries any Roman remains that happened to come in their way, but they

spoiled the work of their own fathers and grandfathers by intruding

their new fashions on buildings originally designed in a different style

of art. When an architect in the present day has to restore some

venerable church, he endeavors to do so in harmony with the design of

the first builder; but such humility as this was utterly foreign to the

mediaeval mind, which often destroyed the most lovely and necessary

details to replace them with erections in the fashion of the day, but

artistically unsuitable. The same disdain for the labors of other ages

has prevailed until within the memory of living men, and our age is

really the first that has made any attempt to conform itself, in these

things, to the intentions of the dead. I may also observe, that although

history is less relied upon as a guide to the future than it was

formerly, it is more carefully and thoroughly investigated from an

intellectual interest in itself.

To conclude. It seems to me that tradition has much less influence of an

authoritative kind than it had formerly, and that the authority which it

still possesses is everywhere steadily declining; that as a guide to

the future of the world it is more likely to mislead than to enlighten

us, and still that all intellectual and educated people must always take

a great interest in tradition, and have a certain sentiment of respect

for it. Consider what our feelings are towards the Church of Rome, the

living embodiment of tradition. No well-informed person can forget the

immense services that in former ages she has rendered to European

civilization, and yet at the same time such a person would scarcely wish

to place modern thought under her direction, nor would he consult the

Pope about the tendencies of the modern world. When in 1829 the city of

Warsaw erected a monument to Copernicus, a scientific society there

waited in the Church of the Holy Cross for a service that was to have

added solemnity to their commemoration. They waited vainly. Not a single

priest appeared. The clergy did not feel authorized to countenance a

scientific discovery which, in a former age, had been condemned by the

authority of the Church. This incident is delicately and accurately

typical of the relation between the modern and the traditional spirit.

The modern spirit is not hostile to tradition, and would not object to

receive any consecration which tradition might be able to confer, but

there are difficulties in bringing the two elements together.

We need not, however, go so far as Warsaw, or back to the year 1829,

for examples of an unwillingness on the part of the modern mind to break

entirely with the traditional spirit. Our own country is remarkable both

for the steadiness of its advance towards a future widely different from

the past, and for an affectionate respect for the ideas and institutions

that it gradually abandons, as it is forced out of them by new

conditions of existence, I may mention, as one example out of very many,

our feeling about the reconstruction of the navy. Here is a matter in

which science has compelled us to break with tradition absolutely and

irrevocably; we have done so, but we have done so with the greatest

regret. The ships of the line that our hearts and imaginations love are

the ships of Nelson and Collingwood and Cochrane. We think of the

British fleets that bore down upon the enemy with the breeze in their

white sails; we think of the fine qualities of seamanship that were

fostered in our _Agamemnons_, and _Victories_, and _Temeraires_. Will

the navies of the future ever so clothe their dreadful powers with

beauty, as did the ordered columns of Nelson, when they came with a fair

wind and all sails set, at eleven o'clock in the morning into Trafalgar

Bay? We see the smoke of their broadsides rising up to their sails like

mists to the snowy Alps, and high above, against heaven's blue, the

unconquered flag of England! Nor do we perceive now for the first time

that there was poetry in those fleets of old; our forefathers felt it

then, and expressed it in a thousand songs.[7]

LETTER III.

TO A LADY WHO LAMENTED THAT HER SON HAD INTELLECTUAL DOUBTS CONCERNING

THE DOGMAS OF THE CHURCH.

The situation of mother and son a very common one--Painful only when

the parties are in earnest--The knowledge of the difference evidence

of a deeper unity--Value of honesty--Evil of a splendid official

religion not believed by men of culture--Diversity of belief an

evidence of religious vitality--Criticism not to be ignored--Desire

for the highest attainable truth--Letter from Lady Westmorland about

her son, Julian Fane.

The difference which you describe as having arisen between your son and

you on the most grave and important subject which can occupy the

thoughts of men, gives the outline of a situation painful to both the

parties concerned, and which lays on each of them new and delicate

obligations. You do not know how common this situation is, and how sadly

it interferes with the happiness of the very best and most pure-minded

souls alive. For such a situation produces pain only where both parties

are earnest and sincere; and the more earnest both are, the more painful

does the situation become. If you and your son thought of religion

merely from the conventional point of view, as the world does only too

easily, you would meet on a common ground, and might pass through life

without ever becoming aware of any gulf of separation, even though the

hollowness of your several professions were of widely different kinds.

But as it happens, unfortunately for your peace (yet would you have it

otherwise?), that you are both in earnest, both anxious to believe what

is true and do what you believe to be right, you are likely to cause

each other much suffering of a kind altogether unknown to less honorable

and devoted natures. There are certain forms of suffering which affect

only the tenderest and truest hearts; they have so many privileges, that

this pain has been imposed upon them as the shadow of their sunshine.

Let me suggest, as some ground of consolation and of hope, that your

very knowledge of the difference which pains you is in itself the

evidence of a deeper unity. If your son has told you the full truth

about the changes in his belief, it is probably because you yourself

have educated him in the habit of truthfulness, which is as much a law

of religion as it is of honor. Do you wish this part of his education to

be enfeebled or obliterated? Could the Church herself reasonably or

consistently blame him for practising the one virtue which, in a

peaceful and luxurious society, demands a certain exercise of courage?

Our beliefs are independent of our will, but our honesty is not; and he

who keeps his honesty keeps one of the most precious possessions of all

true Christians and gentlemen. What state of society can be more

repugnant to high religious feeling than a state of smooth external

unanimity combined with the indifference of the heart, a state in which

some splendid official religion performs its daily ceremonies as the

costliest functionary of the Government, whilst the men of culture take

a share in them out of conformity to the customs of society, without

either the assent of the intellect or the emotion of the soul? All

periods of great religious vitality have been marked by great and open

diversity of belief; and to this day those countries where religion is

most alive are the farthest removed from unanimity in the details of

religious doctrine. If your son thinks these things of such importance

to his conscience that he feels compelled to inflict upon you the

slightest pain on their account, you may rest assured that his religious

fibre is still full of vitality. If it were deadened, he would argue

very much as follows. He would say: "These old doctrines of the Church

are not of sufficient consequence for me to disturb my mother about

them. What is the use of alluding to them ever?" And then you would have

no anxiety; and he himself would have the feeling of settled peace which

comes over a battle-field when the dead are buried out of sight. It is

the peculiarity--some would say the evil, but I cannot think it an

evil--of an age of great intellectual activity to produce an amount of

critical inquiry into religious doctrine which is entirely unknown to

times of simple tradition. And in these days the critical tendency has

received a novel stimulus from the successive suggestions of scientific

discovery. No one who, like your son, fully shares in the intellectual

life of the times in which he lives, can live as if this criticism did

not exist. If he affected to ignore it, as an objection already

answered, there would be disingenuousness in the affectation. Fifty

years ago, even twenty or thirty years ago, a highly intellectual young

man might have hardened into the fixed convictions of middle age without

any external disturbance, except such as might have been easily avoided.

The criticism existed then, in certain circles; but it was not in the

air, as it is now. The life of mankind resembles that of a brook which

has its times of tranquillity, but farther on its times of trouble and

unrest. Our immediate forefathers had the peaceful time for their lot;

those who went before them had passed over very rough ground at the

Reformation. For us, in our turn, comes the recurrent restlessness,

though not in the same place. What we are going to, who can tell? What

we suffer just now, you and many others know too accurately. There are

gulfs of separation in homes of the most perfect love. Our only hope of

preserving what is best in that purest of earthly felicities lies in the

practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for

opinions that are not ours, and a deep trust that the loyal pursuit of

truth cannot but be in perfect accordance with the intentions of the

Creator, who endowed the noblest races of mankind with the indefatigable

curiosity of science. Not to inquire was possible for our forefathers,

but it is not possible for us. With our intellectual growth has come an

irrepressible anxiety to possess the highest truth attainable by us.

This desire is not sinful, not presumptuous, but really one of the best

and purest of our instincts, being nothing else than the sterling

honesty of the intellect, seeking the harmony of concordant truth, and

utterly disinterested.

I may quote, as an illustration of the tendencies prevalent amongst the

noblest and most cultivated young men, a letter from Lady Westmorland to

Mr. Robert Lytton about her accomplished son, the now celebrated Julian

Fane. "We had," she said, "several conversations, during his last

illness, upon religious subjects, about which he had his own peculiar

views. The disputes and animosities between High and Low Church, and all

the feuds of religious sectarianism, caused him the deepest disgust. I

think, indeed, that he carried this feeling too far. He had a horror of

_cant_, which I also think was exaggerated; for it gave him a repulsion

for all outward show of religious observances. He often told me that he

never missed the practice of prayer, at morning and evening, and at

other times. But his prayers were his own: his own thoughts in his own

words. He said that he could not pray in the set words of another; nor

unless he was _alone_. As to joining in family prayers, or praying at

church, he found it impossible. He constantly read the New Testament. He

deprecated the indiscriminate reading of the Bible. He firmly believed

in the efficacy of sincere prayer; and was always pleased when I told

him I had prayed for him."

To this it may be added, that many recent conversions to the Church of

Rome, though apparently of an exactly opposite character, have in

reality also been brought about by the scientific inquiries of the age.

The religious sentiment, alarmed at the prospect of a possible taking

away of that which it feeds upon, has sought in many instances to

preserve it permanently under the guardianship of the strongest

ecclesiastical authority. In an age of less intellectual disturbance

this anxiety would scarcely have been felt; and the degree of authority

claimed by one of the reformed Churches would have been accepted as

sufficient. Here again the agitations of the modern intellect have

caused division in families; and as you are lamenting the heterodoxy of

your son, so other parents regret the Roman orthodoxy of theirs.

LETTER IV.

TO THE SON OF THE LADY TO WHOM THE PRECEDING LETTER WAS ADDRESSED.

Difficulty of detaching intellectual from religious questions--The

sacerdotal system--Necessary to ascertain what religion

is--Intellectual religion really nothing but philosophy--The popular

instinct--The test of belief--Public worship--The intellect moral, but

not religious--Intellectual activity sometimes in contradiction to

dogma--Differences between the intellectual and religious lives.

Your request is not so simple as it appears. You ask me for a frank

opinion as to the course your mind is taking in reference to very

important subjects; but you desire only intellectual, and not religious

guidance. The difficulty is to effect any clear demarcation between the

two. Certainly I should never take upon myself to offer religious advice

to any one; it is difficult for those who have not qualified themselves

for the priestly office to do that with force and effect. The manner in

which a priest leads and manages a mind that has from the first been

moulded in the beliefs and observances of his Church, cannot be imitated

by a layman. A priest starts always from authority; his method, which

has been in use from the earliest ages, consists first in claiming your

unquestioning assent to certain doctrines, from which he immediately

proceeds to deduce the inferences that may affect your conduct or

regulate your thoughts. It is a method perfectly adapted to its own

ends. It can deal with all humanity, and produce the most immediate

practical results. So long as the assent to the doctrines is sincere,

the sacerdotal system may contend successfully against some of the

strongest forms of evil; but when the assent to the doctrines has ceased

to be complete, when some of them are half-believed and others not

believed at all, the system loses much of its primitive efficiency. It

seems likely that your difficulty, the difficulty of so many

intellectual men in these days, is to know where the intellectual

questions end and the purely religious ones can be considered to begin.

If you could once ascertain that, in a manner definitely satisfactory,

you would take your religious questions to a clergyman and your

intellectual ones to a man of science, and so get each solved

independently.

Without presuming to offer a solution of so complex a difficulty as

this, I may suggest to you that it is of some importance to your

intellectual life to ascertain what religion is. A book was published

many years ago by a very learned author, in which he endeavored to show

that what is vulgarly called scepticism may be intellectual religion.

Now, although nothing can be more distasteful to persons of culture

than the bigotry which refuses the name of religion to other people's

opinions, merely because they are other people's opinions, I suspect

that the popular instinct is right in denying the name of religion to

the inferences of the intellect. The description which the author just

alluded to gave of what he called intellectual religion was in fact

simply a description of philosophy, and of that discipline which the

best philosophy imposes upon the heart and the passions. On the other

hand, Dr. Arnold, when he says that by religion he always understands

Christianity, narrows the word as much as he would have narrowed the

word "patriotism" had he defined it to mean a devotion to the interests

of England. I think the popular instinct, though of course quite unable

to construct a definition of religion, is in its vague way very well

aware of the peculiar nature of religious thought and feeling. The

popular instinct would certainly never confound religion with philosophy

on the one hand, nor, on the other, unless excited to opposition, would

it be likely to refuse the name of religion to another worship, such as

Mahometanism, for instance.

According to the popular instinct, then, which on a subject of this kind

appears the safest of all guides, a religion involves first a belief and

next a public practice. The nature of the belief is in these days wholly

peculiar to religion; in other times it was not so, because then people

believed other things much in the same way. But in these days the test

of religious belief is that it should make men accept as certain truth

what they would disbelieve on any other authority. For example, a true

Roman Catholic believes that the consecrated host is the body of Christ,

and so long as he lives in the purely religious spirit he continues to

believe this; but so soon as the power of his religious sentiment

declines he ceases to believe it, and the wafer appears to him a wafer,

and no more. And so amongst Protestants the truly religious believe many

things which no person not being under the authority of religion could

by any effort bring himself to believe. It is easy, for example, to

believe that Joshua arrested the sun's apparent motion, so long as the

religious authority of the Bible remains perfectly intact; but no sooner

does the reader become critical than the miracle is disbelieved. In all

ages, and in all countries, religions have narrated marvellous things,

and the people have always affirmed that not to believe these narratives

constituted the absence of religion, or what they called atheism. They

have equally, in all ages and countries, held the public act of

participation in religious worship to be an essential part of what they

called religion. They do not admit the sufficiency of secret prayer.