The liberal and illiberal spirit of aristocracy--The desire to draw a

line--Substitution of external limitations for realities--The high

life of nature--Value of gentlemen in a State--Odiousness of the

narrow class-spirit--Julian Fane--Perfect knighthood--Democracies

intolerant of dignity--Tendency of democracies to fix one uniform type

of manners--That type not a high one--A descriptive

anecdote--Knowledge and taste reveal themselves in manners--Dr. Arnold

on the absence of gentlemen in France and Italy--Absence of a class

with traditional good manners--Language defiled by the vulgarity of

popular taste--Influence of aristocratic opinion limited, that of

democratic opinion universal--Want of elevation in the French

_bourgeoisie_--Spirit of the provincial democracy--Spirit of the

Parisian democracy--Sentiments and acts of the Communards--Romantic

feeling towards the past--Hopes for liberal culture in the democratic

idea--Aristocracies think too much of persons and positions--That we

ought to forget persons and apply our minds to things, and phenomena,

and ideas.

All you say against the narrowness of the aristocratic spirit is true

and to the point; but I think that you and your party are apt to

confound together two states of feeling which are essentially distinct

from each other. There is an illiberal spirit of aristocracy, and there

is also a liberal one. The illiberal spirit does not desire to improve

itself, having a full and firm belief in its own absolute perfection;

its sole anxiety is to exclude others, to draw a circular line, the

smaller the better, provided always that it gets inside and can keep the

millions out. We see this spirit, not only in reference to birth, but in

even fuller activity with regard to education and employment--in the

preference for certain schools and colleges, for class reasons, without

regard to the quality of the teaching--in the contempt for all

professions but two or three, without regard to the inherent baseness or

nobility of the work that has to be done in them: so that the question

asked by persons of this temper is not whether a man has been well

trained in his youth, but if he has been to Eton and Oxford; not whether

he is honorably laborious in his manhood, but whether he belongs to the

Bar, or the Army, or the Church. This spirit is evil in its influence,

because it substitutes external limitations for the realities of the

intellect and the soul, and makes those realities themselves of no

account wherever its traditions prevail. This spirit cares nothing for

culture, nothing for excellence, nothing for the superiorities that make

men truly great; all it cares for is to have reserved seats in the great

assemblage of the world. Whatever you do, in fairness and honesty,

against this evil and inhuman spirit of aristocracy, the best minds of

this age approve; but there is another spirit of aristocracy which does

not always receive the fairest treatment at your hands, and which ought

to be resolutely defended against you.

There is really, in nature, such a thing as high life. There is really,

in nature, a difference between the life of a gentleman who has culture,

and fine bodily health, and independence, and the life of a Sheffield

dry-grinder who cannot have any one of these three things. It is a good

and not a bad sign of the state of popular intelligence when the people

does not wilfully shut its eyes to the differences of condition amongst

men, and when those who have the opportunity of leading what is truly

the high life accept its discipline joyfully and have a just pride in

keeping themselves up to their ideal. A life of health, of sound

morality, of disinterested intellectual activity, of freedom from petty

cares, _is_ higher than a life of disease, and vice, and stupidity, and

sordid anxiety. I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set

before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the

existence of the complete gentleman, and that an envious democracy,

instead of rendering a service to itself, does exactly the contrary when

it cannot endure and will not tolerate the presence of high-spirited

gentlemen in the State. There are things in this world that it is right

to hate, that we are the better for hating with all our hearts; and one

of the things that I hate most, and with most reason, is the narrow

class-spirit when it sets itself against the great interests of mankind.

It is odious in the narrow-minded, pompous, selfish, pitiless aristocrat

who thinks that the sons of the people were made by Almighty God to be

his lackeys and their daughters to be his mistresses; it is odious also,

to the full as odious, in the narrow-minded, envious democrat who cannot

bear to see any elegance of living, or grace of manner, or culture of

mind above the range of his own capacity or his own purse.

Let me recommend to your consideration the following words, written by

one young nobleman about another young nobleman, and reminding us, as we

much need to be reminded, that life may be not only honest and vigorous,

but also noble and beautiful. Robert Lytton says of Julian Fane--

"He was, I think, the most graceful and accomplished gentleman of the

generation he adorned, and by this generation, at least, appropriate

place should be reserved for the memory of a man in whose character the

most universal sympathy with all the intellectual culture of his age was

united to a refinement of social form, and a perfection of personal

grace, which, in spite of all its intellectual culture, the age is sadly

in want of. There is an artistry of life as well as of literature, and

the perfect knighthood of Sidney is no less precious to the world than

the genius of Spenser."

It is just this "perfect knighthood" that an envious democracy sneers at

and puts down. I do not say that all democracies are necessarily

envious, but they often are so, especially when they first assert

themselves, and whilst in that temper they are very willing to ostracize

gentlemen, or compel them to adopt bad manners. I have some hopes that

the democracies of the future may be taught by authors and artists to

appreciate natural gentlemanhood; but so far as we know them hitherto

they seem intolerant of dignity, and disposed to attribute it (very

unjustly) to individual self-conceit. The personages most popular in

democratic countries are often remarkably deficient in dignity, and

liked the better for the want of it, whilst if on the positive side they

can display occasional coarseness they become more popular still. Then I

should say, that although democratic feeling raises the lower classes

and increases their self-respect, which is indeed one of the greatest

imaginable benefits to a nation, it has a tendency to fix one uniform

type of behavior and of thought as the sole type in conformity with what

is accepted for "common sense," and that type can scarcely, in the

nature of things, be a very elevated one. I have been much struck, in

France, by the prevalence of what may be not inaccurately defined as the

commercial traveller type, even in classes where you would scarcely

expect to meet with it. One little descriptive anecdote will illustrate

what I mean. Having been invited to a stag-hunt in the Cote d'Or, I sat

down to _dejeuner_ with the sportsmen in a good country-house or chateau

(it was an old place with four towers), and in the midst of the meal in

came a man smoking a cigar. After a bow to the ladies he declined to eat

anything, and took a chair a little apart, but just opposite me. He

resumed his hat and went on smoking with a _sans-gene_ that rather

surprised me under the circumstances. He put one arm on the side-board:

the hand hung down, and I perceived that it was dirty (so was the

shirt), and that the nails had edges of ebony. On his chin there was a

black stubble of two days' growth. He talked very loudly, and his dress

and manners were exactly those of a bagman just arrived at his inn. Who

and what could the man be? I learned afterwards that he had begun life

as a distinguished pupil of the _Ecole Polytechnique_, that since then

he had distinguished himself as an officer of artillery and had won the

Legion of Honor on the field of battle, that he belonged to one of the

principal families in the neighborhood, and had nearly 2000_l._ a year

from landed property.

Now, it may be a good thing for the roughs at the bottom of the social

scale to level up to the bagman-ideal, but it does seem rather a pity

(does it not?) that a born gentleman of more than common bravery and

ability should level _down_ to it. And it is here that lies the

principle objection to democracy from the point of view of culture, that

its notion of life and manners is a uniform notion, not admitting much

variety of classes, and not allowing the high development of graceful

and accomplished humanity in any class which an aristocracy does at

least encourage in one class, though it may be numerically a small

class. I have not forgotten what Saint-Simon and La Bruyere have

testified about the ignorance of the old noblesse. Saint-Simon said that

they were fit for nothing but fighting, and only qualified for promotion

even in the army by seniority; that the rest of their time was passed

in "the most deadly uselessness, the consequence of their indolence and

distaste for all instruction." I am sure that my modern artillery

captain, notwithstanding his bad manners, _knew_ more than any of his

forefathers; but where was his "perfect knighthood?" And we easily

forget "how much talent runs into manners," as Emerson says. From the

artistic and poetical point of view, behavior is an expression of

knowledge and taste and feeling in combination, as clear and legible as

literature or painting, so that when the behavior is coarse and

unbecoming we know that the perceptions cannot be delicate, whatever may

have been learned at school. When Dr. Arnold travelled on the Continent,

nothing struck him more than the absence of gentlemen. "We see no

gentlemen anywhere," he writes from Italy. From France he writes: "Again

I have been struck with the total absence of all gentlemen, and of all

persons of the education and feelings of gentlemen." Now, although Dr.

Arnold spoke merely from the experience of a tourist, and was perhaps

not quite competent to judge of Frenchmen and Italians otherwise than

from externals, still there was much truth in his observation. It was

not quite absolutely true. I have known two or three Italian officers,

and one Savoyard nobleman, and a Frenchman here and there, who were as

perfect gentlemen as any to be found in England, but they were isolated

like poets, and were in fact poets in behavior and self discipline. The

plain truth is, that there is no distinct class in France maintaining

good manners as a tradition common to all its members; and this seems to

be the inevitable defect of a democracy. It may be observed, further,

that language itself is defiled by the vulgarity of the popular taste;

that expressions are used continually, even by the upper middle class,

which it is impossible to print, and which are too grossly indecent to

find a place even in the dictionaries; that respectable men, having

become insensible to the meaning of these expressions from hearing them

used without intention, employ them constantly from habit, as they

decorate their speech with oaths, whilst only purists refrain from them

altogether.

An aristocracy may be very narrow and intolerant, but it can only

exclude from its own pale, whereas when a democracy is intolerant it

excludes from all human intercourse. Our own aristocracy, as a class,

rejects Dissenters, and artists, and men of science, but they flourish

quite happily outside of it. Now try to picture to yourself a great

democracy having the same prejudices, who could get out of the

democracy? All aristocracies are intolerant with reference, I will not

say to religion, but, more accurately, with reference to the outward

forms of religion, and yet this aristocratic intolerance has not

prevented the development of religious liberty, because the lower

classes were not strictly bound by the customs of the nobility and

gentry. The unwritten law appears to be that members of an aristocracy

shall conform either to what is actually the State Church or to what has

been the State Church at some former period of the national history.

Although England is a Protestant country, an English gentleman does not

lose caste when he joins the Roman Catholic communion; but he loses

caste when he becomes a Dissenter. The influence of this caste-law in

keeping the upper classes within the Churches of England and of Rome has

no doubt been very considerable, but its influence on the nation

generally has been incomparably less considerable than that of some

equally decided social rule in the entire mind of a democracy. Had this

rule of conformity to the religion of the State been that of the English

democracy, religious liberty would have been extinguished throughout the

length and breadth of England. I say that the customs and convictions of

a democracy are more dangerous to intellectual liberty than those of an

aristocracy, because, in matters of custom, the gentry rule only within

their own park-palings, whereas the people, when power resides with

them, rule wherever the breezes blow. A democracy that dislikes

refinement and good manners can drive men of culture into solitude, and

make morbid hermits of the very persons who ought to be the lights and

leaders of humanity. It can cut short the traditions of good-breeding,

the traditions of polite learning, the traditions of thoughtful

leisure, and reduce the various national types of character to one

type, that of the _commis-voyageur_. All men of refined sentiment in

modern France lament the want of elevation in the _bourgeoisie_. They

read nothing, they learn nothing, they think of nothing but money and

the satisfaction of their appetites. There are exceptions, of course,

but the tone of the class is mean and low, and devoid of natural dignity

or noble aspiration. Their ignorance passes belief, and is accompanied

by an absolute self-satisfaction. "La fin de la bourgeoisie," says an

eminent French author, "commence parcequ'elle a les sentiments de la

populace. Je ne vois pas qu'elle lise d'autres journaux, qu'elle se

regale d'une musique differente, qu'elle ait des plaisirs plus eleves.

Chez l'une comme chez l'autre, c'est le meme amour de l'argent, le meme

respect du fait accompli, le meme besoin d'idoles pour les detruire, la

meme haine de toute superiorite, le meme esprit de denigrement, la meme

crasse ignorance!" M. Renan also complains that during the Second Empire

the country sank deeper and deeper into vulgarity, forgetting its past

history and its noble enthusiasms. "Talk to the peasant, to the

socialist of the International, of France, of her past history, of her

genius, he will not understand you. Military honor seems madness to him;

the taste for great things, the glory of the mind, are vain dreams;

money spent for art and science is money thrown away foolishly. Such is

the provincial spirit." And if this is the provincial spirit, what is

the spirit of the metropolitan democracy? Is it not clearly known to us

by its acts? It had the opportunity, under the Commune, of showing the

world how tenderly it cared for the monuments of national history, how

anxious it was for the preservation of noble architecture, of great

libraries, of pictures that can never be replaced. Whatever may have

been our illusions about the character of the Parisian democracy, we

know it very accurately now. To say that it is brutal would be an

inadequate use of language, for the brutes are only indifferent to

history and civilization, not hostile to them. So far as it is possible

for us to understand the temper of that democracy, it appears to cherish

an active and intense hatred for every conceivable kind of superiority,

and an instinctive eagerness to abolish the past; or, as that is not

possible, since the past will always _have been_ in spite of it, then at

least to efface all visible memorials and destroy the bequests of all

preceding generations. If any one had affirmed, before the fall of Louis

Napoleon, that the democratic spirit was capable of setting fire to the

Louvre and the national archives and libraries, of deliberately planning

the destruction of all those magnificent edifices, ecclesiastical and

civil, which were the glory of France and the delight of Europe, we

should have attributed such an assertion to the exaggerations of

reactionary fears. But since the year 1870 we do not speculate about

the democratic temper in its intensest expression; we have seen it at

work, and we know it. We know that every beautiful building, every

precious manuscript and picture, has to be protected against the noxious

swarm of Communards as a sea-jetty against the Pholas and the Teredo.

Compare this temper with that of a Marquis of Hertford, a Duke of

Devonshire, a Duc de Luynes! True guardians of the means of culture,

these men have given splendid hospitality to the great authors and

artists of past times, by keeping their works for the future with tender

and reverent care. Nor has this function of high stewardship ever been

more nobly exercised than it is to-day by that true knight and

gentleman, Sir Richard Wallace. Think of the difference between this

great-hearted guardian of priceless treasures, keeping them for the

people, for civilization, and a base-spirited Communard setting fire to

the library of the Louvre.

The ultra-democratic spirit is hostile to culture, from its hatred of

all delicate and romantic sentiment, from its scorn of the tenderer and

finer feelings of our nature, and especially from its brutish incapacity

to comprehend the needs of the higher life. If it had its way we should

be compelled by public opinion to cast all the records of our ancestors,

and the shields they wore in battle, into the foul waters of an eternal

Lethe. The intolerance of the sentiment of birth, that noble sentiment

which has animated so many hearts with heroism, and urged them to deeds

of honor, associated as it is with a cynical disbelief in the existence

of female virtue,[9] is one of the commonest signs of this evil spirit

of detraction. It is closely connected with an ungrateful indifference

towards all that our forefathers have done to make civilization possible

for us. Now, although the intellectual spirit studies the past

critically, and does not accept history as a legend is accepted by the

credulous, still the intellectual spirit has a deep respect for all that

is noble in the past, and would preserve the record of it forever. Can

you not imagine, have you not actually seen, the heir of some ancient

house who shares to the full the culture and aspirations of the age in

which we live, and who nevertheless preserves, with pious reverence, the

towers his forefathers built on the ancestral earth, and the oaks they

planted, and the shields that were carved on the tombs where the knights

and their ladies rest? Be sure that a right understanding of the present

is compatible with a right and reverent understanding of the past, and

that, although we may closely question history and tradition, no longer

with childlike faith, still the spirit of true culture would never

efface their vestiges. It was not Michelet, not Renan, not Hugo, who set

fire to the Palace of Justice and imperilled the Sainte-Chapelle.

And yet, notwithstanding all these vices and excesses of the democratic

spirit, notwithstanding the meanness of the middle classes and the

violence of the mob, there is one all-powerful reason why our best hopes

for the liberal culture of the intellect are centred in the democratic

idea. The reason is, that aristocracies think too much of persons and

positions to weigh facts and opinions justly. In an aristocratic society

it is thought unbecoming to state your views in their full force in the

presence of any social superior. If you state them at all you must

soften them to suit the occasion, or you will be a sinner against

good-breeding. Observe how timid and acquiescent the ordinary Englishman

becomes in the presence of a lord. No right-minded person likes to be

thought impudent, and where the tone of society refers everything to

position, you are considered impudent when you forget your station. But

what has my station to do with the truths the intellect perceives, that

lie entirely outside of me? From the intellectual point of view, it is a

necessary virtue to forget your station, to forget yourself entirely,

and to think of the subject only, in a manner perfectly disinterested.

Anonymous journalism was a device to escape from that continual

reference to the rank and fortune of the speaker which is an inveterate

habit in all aristocratic communities. A young man without title or

estate knows that he would not be listened to in the presence of his

social superiors, so he holds his tongue in society and relieves

himself by an article in the _Times_. The anonymous newspapers and

reviews are a necessity in an aristocratic community, for they are the

only means of attracting attention to facts and opinions without

attracting it to yourself, the only way of escaping the personal

question, "Who and what are you, that you venture to speak so plainly,

and where is your stake in the country?"

The democratic idea, by its theoretic equality amongst men, affords an

almost complete relief from this impediment to intellectual

conversation. The theory of equality is good, because it negatives the

interference of rank and wealth in matters that appertain to the

intellect or to the moral sense. It may even go one step farther with

advantage, and ignore intellectual authority also. The perfection of the

intellectual spirit is the entire forgetfulness of persons, in the

application of the whole power of the mind to things, and phenomena, and

ideas. Not to mind whether the speaker is of noble or humble birth, rich

or poor; this indeed is much, but we ought to attain a like indifference

to the authority of the most splendid reputation. "Every great advance

in natural knowledge," says Professor Huxley, "has involved the absolute

rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the

annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of

science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most

venerates hold them, not because their verity is testified by portents

and wonders, but because his experience teaches him that whenever he

chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary

source, Nature--whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to

experiment and to observation--Nature will confirm them."

FOOTNOTES:

[8] I think it right to inform the reader that there is no fiction in

this letter.

[9] The association between the two is this. If you believe that you

are descended from a distinguished ancestor, you are simple enough to

believe in his wife's fidelity.

PART IX.

_SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE._

LETTER I.

TO A LADY WHO DOUBTED THE REALITY OF INTELLECTUAL FRIENDSHIPS.

That intellectual friendships are in their nature temporary, when

there is no basis of feeling to support them--Their freshness soon

disappears--Danger of satiety--Temporary acquaintances--Succession in

friendships--Free communication of intellectual results--Friendships

between ripe and immature men--Rembrandt and Hoogstraten--Tradition

transmitted through these friendships.

I heartily agree with you so far as this, that intellectual relations

will not sustain friendship for very long, unless there is also some

basis of feeling to sustain it. And still there is a certain reality in

the friendships of the intellect whilst they last, and they are

remembered gratefully for their profit when in the course of nature they

have ceased. We may wisely contract them, and blamelessly dissolve them

when the occasion that created them has gone by. They are like business

partnerships, contracted from motives of interest, and requiring

integrity above all things, with mutual respect and consideration, yet

not necessarily either affection or the semblance of it. Since the

motive of the intellectual existence is the desire to ascertain and

communicate truth, a sort of positive and negative electricity

immediately establishes itself between those who want to know and those

who desire to communicate their knowledge; and the connection is

mutually agreeable until these two desires are satisfied. When this

happens, the connection naturally ceases; but the memory of it usually

leaves a permanent feeling of good-will, and a permanent disposition to

render services of the same order. This, in brief, is the whole

philosophy of the subject; but it may be observed farther, that the

purely intellectual intercourse which often goes by the name of

friendship affords excellent opportunities for the formation of real

friendship, since it cannot be long continued without revealing much of

the whole nature of the associates.

We do not easily exhaust the mind of another, but we easily exhaust what

is accessible to us in his mind; and when we have done this, the first

benefit of intercourse is at an end. Then comes a feeling of dulness and

disappointment, which is full of the bitterest discouragement to the

inexperienced. In maturer life we are so well prepared for this that it

discourages us no longer. We know beforehand that the freshness of the

mind that was new to us will rapidly wear away, that we shall soon

assimilate the fragment of it which is all that ever can be made our

own, so we enjoy the freshness whilst it lasts, and are even careful of

it as a fruiterer is of the bloom upon his grapes and plums. It may seem

a hard and worldly thing to say, but it appears to me that a wise man

might limit his intercourse with others before there was any danger of

satiety, as it is wisdom in eating to rise from table with an appetite.

Certainly, if the friends of our intellect live near enough for us to

anticipate no permanent separation by mere distance, if we may expect to

meet them frequently, to have many opportunities for a more thorough and

searching exploration of their minds, it is a wise policy not to exhaust

them all at once. With the chance acquaintances we make in travelling,

the case is altogether different; and this is, no doubt, the reason why

men are so astonishingly communicative when they never expect to see

each other any more. You feel an intense curiosity about some temporary

companion; you make many guesses about him; and to induce him to tell

you as much as possible in the short time you are likely to be together,

you win his confidence by a frankness that would perhaps considerably

surprise your nearest neighbors and relations. This is due to the

shortness of the opportunity; but with people who live in the same

place, you will proceed much more deliberately.

Whoever would remain regularly provided with intellectual friends, ought

to arrange a succession of friendships, as gardeners do with peas and

strawberries, so that, whilst some are fully ripe, others should be

ripening to replace them. This doctrine sounds like blasphemy against

friendship; but it is not intended to apply to the sacred friendship of

the heart, which ought to be permanent like marriage, only to the

friendship of the head, which is of the utmost utility to culture, yet

in its nature temporary. I know a distinguished Englishman who is quite

remarkable for the talent with which he arranges his intellectual

friendships, so as never to be dependent on any one, but always sure of

the intercourse he needs, both now and in the future. He will never be

isolated, never without some fresh and living interest in humanity. It

may seem to you that there is a lamentable want of faith in this; and I

grant at once that a system of this kind does presuppose the extinction

of the boyish belief in the permanence of human relations; still, it

indicates a large-minded confidence in the value of human intercourse,

an enjoyment of the present, a hope for the future, and a right

appreciation of the past.

Nothing is more beautiful in the intellectual life than the willingness

of all cultivated people--unless they happen to be accidentally soured

by circumstances that have made them wretched--to communicate to others

the results of all their toil. It is true that they apparently lose

nothing by the process, and that a rich man who gives some portion of

his material wealth exercises a greater self-denial; still, when you

consider that men of culture, in teaching others, abandon something of

their relative superiority, and often voluntarily incur the sacrifice

of what is most precious to them, namely, their time, I think you will

admit that their readiness in this kind of generosity is one of the

finest characteristics of highly-developed humanity. Of all intellectual

friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old

and ripe men and their younger brethren in science, or literature, or

art. It is by these private friendships, even more than by public

performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is

perpetuated from age to age. Hoogstraten, who was a pupil of Rembrandt,

asked him many questions, which the great master answered thus:--"Try to

put well in practice what you already know; in so doing you will, in

good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about." That

answer of Rembrandt's is typical of the maturest teaching. How truly

friendly it is; how full of encouragement; how kind in its admission

that the younger artist _did_ already know something worth putting into

practice; and yet, at the same time, how judicious in its reserve! Few

of us have been so exceptionally unfortunate as not to find, in our own

age, some experienced friend who has helped us by precious counsel,

never to be forgotten. We cannot render it in kind; but perhaps in the

fulness of time it may become our noblest duty to aid another as we have

ourselves been aided, and to transmit to him an invaluable treasure, the

tradition of the intellectual life.

LETTER II.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO LIVED MUCH IN FASHIONABLE SOCIETY.

Certain dangers to the intellectual life--Difficult to resist the

influences of society--Gilding--Fashionable education--Affectations of

knowledge--Not easy to ascertain what people really know--Value of

real knowledge diminished--Some good effects of affectations--Their

bad effect on workers--Skill in amusements.

The kind of life which you have been leading for the last three or four

years will always be valuable to you as a past experience, but if the

intellectual ambition you confess to me is quite serious, I would

venture to suggest that there are certain dangers in the continuation of

your present existence if altogether uninterrupted. Pray do not suspect

me of any narrow prejudice against human intercourse, or of any wish to

make a hermit of you before your time, but believe that the few

observations I have to make are grounded simply on the desire that your

career should be entirely satisfactory to your own maturer judgment,

when you will look back upon it after many years.

An intellectual man may go into general society quite safely if only he

can resist its influence upon his serious work; but such resistance is

difficult in maturity and impossible in youth.

The sort of influence most to be dreaded is this. Society is, and must

be, based upon appearances, and not upon the deepest realities. It

requires some degree of reality to produce the appearance, but not a

substantial reality. Gilding is the perfect type of what Society

requires. A certain quantity of gold is necessary for the work of the

gilder, but a very small quantity, and skill in applying the metal so as

to cover a large surface, is of greater consequence than the weight of

the metal itself. The mind of a fashionable person is a carefully gilded

mind.

Consider fashionable education. Society imperatively requires an outside

knowledge of many things; not permitting the frank confession of

ignorance, whilst it is yet satisfied with a degree of knowledge

differing only from avowed ignorance in permitting you to be less

sincere. All young ladies, whether gifted by nature with any musical

talent or not, are compelled to say that they have learned to play upon

the piano; all young gentlemen are compelled to affect to know Latin. In

the same way the public opinion of Society compels its members to

pretend to know and appreciate the masterpieces of literature and art.

There is, in truth, so much compulsion of this kind that it is not easy

to ascertain what people do really know and care about until they admit

you into their confidence.

The inevitable effect of these affectations is to diminish the value, in

Society, of genuine knowledge and accomplishment of all kinds. I know a

man who is a Latin scholar; he is one of the few moderns who have really

learned Latin; but in fashionable society this brings him no

distinction, because we are all supposed to know Latin, and the true

scholar, when he appears, cannot be distinguished from the multitude of

fashionable pretenders. I know another man who can draw; there are not

many men, even amongst artists, who can draw soundly; yet in fashionable

society he does not get the serious sort of respect which he deserves,

because fashionable people believe that drawing is an accomplishment

generally attainable by young ladies and communicable by governesses. I

have no wish to insinuate that Society is wrong, in requiring a certain

pretence to education in various subjects, and a certain affectation of

interest in masterpieces, for these pretences and affectations do serve

to deliver it from the darkness of a quite absolute ignorance. A society

of fashionable people who think it necessary to be able to talk

superficially about the labors of men really belonging to the

intellectual class, is always sure to be much better informed than a

Society such as that of the French peasantry, for example, where nobody

is expected to know anything. It is well for Society itself that it

should profess a deep respect for classical learning, for the great

modern poets and painters, for scientific discoverers, even though the

majority of its members do not seriously care about them. The pretension

itself requires a certain degree of knowledge, as gilding requires a

certain quantity of gold.

The evil effects of these affectations may be summed up in a sentence.

They diminish the apparent value of the realities which they imitate,

and they tend to weaken our enthusiasm for those great realities, and

our ardor in the pursuit of them. The impression which fashionable

society produces upon a student who has strength enough to resist it, is

a painful sense of isolation in his earnest work. If he goes back to the

work with courage undiminished, he still clearly realizes--what it would

be better for him not to realize quite so clearly--the uselessness of

going beyond fashionable standards, if he aims at social success. And

there is still another thing to be said which concerns you just now very

particularly. Whoever leads the intellectual life in earnest is sure on

some points to fail in strict obedience to the exigencies of fashionable

life, so that, if fashionable successes are still dear to him, he will

be constantly tempted to make some such reflections as the

following:--"Here am I, giving years and years of labor to a pursuit

which brings no external reward, when half as much work would keep me

abreast of the society I live with, in everything it really cares about.

I know quite well all that my learning is costing me. Other men outshine

me easily in social pleasures and accomplishments. My skill at billiards

and on the moors is evidently declining, and I cannot ride or drive so

well as fellows who do very little else. In fact I am becoming an old

muff, and all I have to show on the other side is a degree of

scholarship which only six men in Europe can appreciate, and a

speciality in natural science in which my little discoveries are sure to

be either anticipated or left behind."

The truth is, that to succeed well in fashionable society the higher

intellectual attainments are not so useful as distinguished skill in

those amusements which are the real business of the fashionable world.

The three things which tell best in your favor amongst young gentlemen

are to be an excellent shot, to ride well to hounds, and to play

billiards with great skill. I wish to say nothing against any of these

accomplishments, having an especially hearty admiration and respect for

all good horsemen, and considering the game of billiards the most

perfectly beautiful of games; still, the fact remains that to do these

things as well as some young gentlemen do them, we must devote the time

which they devote, and if we regularly give nine hours a day to graver

occupations, pray, how and where are we to find it?

LETTER III.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO LIVED MUCH IN FASHIONABLE SOCIETY.

Some exceptional men may live alternately in different

worlds--Instances--Differences between the fashionable and the

intellectual spirit--Men sometimes made unfashionable by special

natural gifts--Sometimes by trifling external circumstances--Anecdote

of Ampere--He did not shine in society--His wife's anxieties about his

material wants--Apparent contrast between Ampere and Oliver Goldsmith.

You ask me why there should be any fundamental incompatibility between

the fashionable and the intellectual lives. It seems to you that the two

might possibly be reconciled, and you mention instances of men who

attained intellectual distinction without deserting the fashionable

world.

Yes, there _have_ been a few examples of men endowed with that overflow

of energy which permits the most opposite pursuits, and enables its

possessors to live, apparently, in two worlds between which there is not

any natural affinity. A famous French novelist once took the trouble to

elaborate the portrait of a lady who passed one half of her time in

virtue and churches, whilst she employed the other half in the wildest

adventures. In real life I may allude to a distinguished English

engraver, who spent a fortnight over his plate and a fortnight in some

fashionable watering-place, alternately, and who found this distribution

of his time not unfavorable to the elasticity of his mind. Many

hard-working Londoners, who fairly deserve to be considered intellectual

men, pass their days in professional labor and their evenings in

fashionable society. But in all instances of this kind the professional

work is serious enough, and regular enough, to give a very substantial

basis to the life, so that the times of recreation are kept daily

subordinate by the very necessity of circumstances. If you had a

profession, and were obliged to follow it in earnest six or eight hours

a day, the more Society amused you the better. The danger in your case

is that your whole existence may take a fashionable tone.

The _esprit_ or tone of fashion differs from the intellectual tone in

ways which I will attempt to define. Fashion is nothing more than the

temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal

business to study the external elegance of life. This custom incessantly

changes. If your habits of mind and life change with it you are a

fashionable person, but if your habits of mind and life either remain

permanently fixed or follow some law of your own individual nature, then

you are outside of fashion. The intellectual spirit is remarkable for

its independence of custom, and therefore on many occasions it will

clash with the fashionable spirit. It does so most frequently in the

choice of pursuits, and in the proportionate importance which the

individual student will (in his own case) assign to his pursuits. The

regulations of fashionable life have fixed, at the least temporarily,

the degree of time and attention which a fashionable person may devote

to this thing or that. The intellectual spirit ignores these

regulations, and devotes its possessor, or more accurately its

_possessed_, to the intellectual speciality for which he has most

aptitude, often leaving him ignorant of what fashion has decided to be

essential. After living the intellectual life for several years he will

know too much of one thing and too little of some other things to be in

conformity with the fashionable ideal. For example, the fashionable

ideal of a gentleman requires classical scholarship, but it is so

difficult for artists and men of science to be classical scholars also

that in this respect they are likely to fall short. I knew a man who

became unfashionable because he had a genius for mechanics. He was

always about steam-engines, and, though a gentleman by birth, associated

from choice with men who understood the science that chiefly interested

him, of which all fashionable people were so profoundly ignorant that he

habitually kept out of their way. He, on his part, neglected scholarship

and literature and all that "artistry of life," as Mr. Robert Lytton

calls it, in which fashionable society excels. Men are frequently driven

into unfashionable existence by the very force and vigor of their own

intellectual gifts, and sometimes by external circumstances, apparently

most trifling, yet of infinite influence on human destiny. There is a

good instance of this in a letter from Ampere to his young wife, that

"Julie" who was lost to him so soon. "I went to dine yesterday at Madame

Beauregard's with hands blackened by a harmless drug which stains the

skin for three or four days. She declared that it looked like manure,

and left the table, saying that she would dine when I was at a distance.

I promised not to return there before my hands were white. Of course I

shall never enter the house again."

Here we have an instance of a man of science who has temporarily

disqualified himself for polite society by an experiment in the pursuit

of knowledge. What do you think of the vulgarity of Madame Beauregard?

To me it appears the perfect type of that preoccupation about

appearances which blinds the genteel vulgar to the true nobility of

life. Were not Ampere's stained hands nobler than many white ones? It is

not necessary for every intellectual worker to blacken his fingers with

chemicals, but a kind of rust very frequently comes over him which ought

to be as readily forgiven, yet rarely is forgiven. "In his relations

with the world," writes the biographer of Ampere, "the authority of

superiority disappeared. To this the course of years brought no

alternative. Ampere become celebrated, laden with honorable

distinctions, the great Ampere! outside the speculations of the

intellect, was hesitating and timid again, disquieted and troubled, and

more disposed to accord his confidence to others than to himself."

Intellectual pursuits did not qualify Ampere, they do not qualify any

one, for success in fashionable society. To succeed in the world you

ought to be _of_ the world, so as to share the things which interest it

without too wide a deviation from the prevalent current of your

thoughts. Its passing interests, its temporary customs, its transient

phases of sentiment and opinion, ought to be for the moment your own

interests, your own feelings and opinions. A mind absorbed as Ampere's

was in the contemplation and elucidation of the unchangeable laws of

nature, is too much fixed upon the permanent to adapt itself naturally

to these ever-varying estimates. He did not easily speak the world's

lighter language, he could not move with its mobility. Such men forget

even what they eat and what they put on; Ampere's young wife was in

constant anxiety, whilst the pair were separated by the severity of

their fate, as to the sufficiency of his diet and the decency of his

appearance. One day she writes to him to mind not to go out in his

shabby old coat, and in the same letter she entreats him to purchase a

bottle of wine, so that when he took no milk or broth he would find it,

and when it was all drunk she tells him to buy another bottle.

Afterwards she asks him whether he makes a good fire, and if he has any

chairs in his room. In another letter she inquires if his bed is

comfortable, and in another she tells him to mind about his acids, for

he has burnt holes in his blue stockings. Again, she begs him to try to

have a passably decent appearance, because that will give pleasure to

his poor wife. He answers, to tranquillize her, that he does not burn

his things now, and that he makes chemical experiments only in his old

breeches with his gray coat and his waistcoat of greenish velvet. But

one day he is forced to confess that she must send him new trousers if

he is to appear before MM. Delambre and Villars. He "does not know what

to do," his best breeches still smell of turpentine, and, having wished

to put on trousers to go to the Society of Emulation, he saw the hole

which Barrat fancied he had mended become bigger than ever, so that it

showed the piece of different cloth which he had sown under it. He adds

that his wife will be afraid that he will spoil his "_beau pantalon_,"

but he promises to send it back to her as clean as when he received it.

How different is all this from that watchful care about externals which

marks the man of fashion! Ampere was quite a young man then, still

almost a bridegroom, yet he is already so absorbed in the intellectual

life as to forget appearances utterly, except when Julie, with feminine

watchfulness, writes to recall them to his mind. I am not defending or

advocating this carelessness. It is better to be neat and tidy than to

go in holes and patches; but I desire to insist upon the radical

difference between the fashionable spirit and the intellectual spirit.

And this difference, which shows itself in these external things, is

not less evident in the clothing or preparation of the mind. Ampere's

intellect, great and noble as it was, could scarcely be considered more

suitable for _le grand monde_ than the breeches that smelt of

turpentine, or the trousers made ragged by aquafortis.

A splendid contrast, as to tailoring, was our own dear Oliver Goldsmith,

who displayed himself in those wonderful velvet coats and satin

small-clothes from Mr. Filby's, which are more famous than the finest

garments ever worn by prince or peer. Who does not remember that

bloom-colored coat which the ablest painters have studiously

immortalized, made by John Filby, at the Harrow, in Water Lane (best

advertised of tailors!), and that charming blue velvet suit, which Mr.

Filby was never paid for? Surely a poet so splendid was fit for the

career of fashion! No, Oliver Goldsmith's velvet and lace were the

expression of a deep and painful sense of personal unfitness. They were

the fine frame which is intended to pass off an awkward and imperfect

picture. There was a quieter dignity in Johnson's threadbare sleeves.

Johnson, the most influential though not the most elegant intellect of

his time, is grander in his neglect of fashion than Goldsmith in his

ruinous subservience. And if it were permitted to me to speak of two or

three great geniuses who adorn the age in which we ourselves are living,

I might add that they seem to follow the example of the author of

"Rasselas" rather than that of Mr. Filby's illustrious customer. They

remind me of a good old squire who, from a fine sentiment of duty,

permitted the village artist to do his worst upon him, and incurred

thereby this withering observation from his metropolitan tailor: "You

are _covered_, sir, but you are _not_ dressed!"

LETTER IV.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO LIVED MUCH IN FASHIONABLE SOCIETY.

Test of professions--Mobility of fashionable taste--Practical service

of an external deference to culture--Incompatibility between

fashionable and intellectual lives--What each has to offer.

Your polite, almost diplomatic answer to my letter about fashionable

society may be not unfairly concentrated into some such paragraph as the

following:--

"What grounds have I for concluding that the professed tastes and

opinions of Society are in any degree insincere? May not society be

quite sincere in the preferences which it professes, and are not the

preferences themselves almost always creditable to the good taste and

really advanced culture of the Society which I suspect of a certain

degree of affectation?"

This is the sense of your letter, and in reply to it I give you a simple

but sure test. Is the professed opinion carried out in practice, when

there are fair opportunities for practice?

Let us go so far as to examine a particular instance. Your friends

profess to appreciate classical literature. Do they read it? Or, on the

other hand, do they confine themselves to believing that it is a good

thing for other people to read it?

When I was a schoolboy, people told me that the classical authors of

antiquity were eminently useful, and indeed absolutely necessary to the

culture of the human mind, but I perceived that they did not read them.

So I have heard many people express great respect for art and science,

only they did not go so far as to master any department of art or

science.

If you will apply this test to the professions of what is especially

called fashionable society it is probable that you will arrive at the

conclusions of the minority, which I have endeavored to express. You

will find that the fashionable world remains very contentedly outside

the true working intellectual life, and does not really share either its

labors or its aspirations.

Another kind of evidence, which tells in the same direction, is the

mobility of fashionable taste. At one time some studies are fashionable,

at another time these are neglected and others have taken their place.

You will not find this fickleness in the true intellectual world, which

steadily pursues all its various studies, and keeps them well abreast,

century after century.

If I insist upon this distinction with reference to you, do not accuse

me of hostility even to fashion itself. Fashion is one of the great

Divine institutions of human society, and the best philosophy rebels

against none of the authorities that be, but studies and endeavors to

explain them. The external deference which Society yields to culture is

practically of great service, although (I repeat the epithet) it is

_external_. The sort of good effect is in the intellectual sphere what

the good effect of a general religious profession is in the moral

sphere. All fashionable society goes to church. Fashionable religion

differs from the religion of Peter and Paul as fashionable science

differs from that of Humboldt and Arago, yet, notwithstanding this

difference, the profession of religion is useful to Society as some

restraint, at least during one day out of seven, upon its inveterate

tendency to live exclusively for its amusement. And if any soul happens

to come into existence in the fashionable world which has the genuine

religious nature, that nature has a chance of developing itself, and of

finding ready to hand certain customs which are favorable to its

well-being. So it is, though in quite a different direction, with the

esteem which Society professes for intellectual pursuits. It is an

esteem in great part merely nominal, as fashionable Christianity is

nominal, and still it helps and favors the early development of the

genuine faculty where it exists. It is certainly a great help to us

that fashionable society, which has such a tremendous, such an almost

irresistible power for good or evil, does not openly discourage our

pursuits, but on the contrary regards them with great external deference

and respect. The recognition which Society has given to artists has been

wanting in frankness and in promptitude, though even in this case much

may be said to excuse a sort of hesitation rather than refusal which was

attributable to the strangeness and novelty of the artistic caste in

England; but Society has far more than a generation professed a respect

for literature and erudition which has helped those two branches of

culture more effectually than great subsidies of money. The exact truth

seems to be that Society is sincere in approving our devotion to these

pursuits, but is not yet sufficiently interested in them to appreciate

them otherwise than from the outside, just as a father and mother

applaud their boys for reading Thucydides, yet do not read him

themselves, either in the original or in a translation.

All that I care to insist upon is that there is a degree of

incompatibility between the fashionable and the intellectual lives which

makes it necessary, at a certain time, to choose one or the other as our

own. There is no hostility, there need not be any uncharitable feeling

on one side or the other, but there must be a resolute choice between

the two. If you decide for the intellectual life, you will incur a

definite loss to set against your gain. Your existence may have calmer

and profounder satisfactions, but it will be less amusing, and even in

an appreciable degree less _human_; less in harmony, I mean, with the

common instincts and feelings of humanity. For the fashionable world,

although decorated by habits of expense, has enjoyment for its object,

and arrives at enjoyment by those methods which the experience of

generations has proved to be most efficacious. Variety of amusement,

frequent change of scenery and society, healthy exercise, pleasant

occupation of the mind without fatigue--these things do indeed make

existence agreeable to human nature, and the science of living agreeably

is better understood in the fashionable society of England than by

laborious students and _savans_. The life led by that society is the

true heaven of the natural man, who likes to have frequent feasts and a

hearty appetite, who enjoys the varying spectacle of wealth, and

splendor, and pleasure, who loves to watch, from the Olympus of his

personal ease, the curious results of labor in which he takes no part,

the interesting ingenuity of the toiling world below. In exchange for

these varied pleasures of the spectator the intellectual life can offer

you but one satisfaction, for all its promises are reducible simply to

this, that you shall come at last, after infinite labor, into contact

with some great _reality_--that you shall know, and do, in such sort

that you will feel yourself on firm ground and be recognized--probably

not much applauded, but yet recognized--as a fellow-laborer by other

knowers and doers. Before you come to this, most of your present

accomplishments will be abandoned by yourself as unsatisfactory and

insufficient, but one or two of them will be turned to better account,

and will give you after many years a tranquil self-respect, and, what is

still rarer and better, a very deep and earnest reverence for the

greatness which is above you. Severed from the vanities of the Illusory,

you will live with the realities of knowledge, as one who has quitted

the painted scenery of the theatre to listen by the eternal ocean or

gaze at the granite hills.

LETTER V.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO KEPT ENTIRELY OUT OF COMPANY.

That Society which is frivolous in the mass contains individuals who

are not frivolous--A piece of the author's early experience--Those who

keep out of Society miss opportunities--People talk about what they

have in common--That we ought to be tolerant of dulness--The loss to

Society if superior men all held aloof--Utility of the gifted in

general society--They ought not to submit to expulsion.

I willingly concede all that you say against fashionable society as a

whole. It is, as you say, frivolous, bent on amusement, incapable of

attention sufficiently prolonged to grasp any serious subject, and

liable both to confusion and inaccuracy in the ideas which it hastily

forms or easily receives. You do right, assuredly, not to let it waste

your most valuable hours, but I believe also that you do wrong in

keeping out of it altogether.

The society which seems so frivolous in masses contains individual

members who, if you knew them better, would be able and willing to

render you the most efficient intellectual help, and you miss this help

by restricting yourself exclusively to books. Nothing can replace the

conversation of living men and women; not even the richest literature

can replace it.

Many years ago I was thrown by accident amongst a certain society of

Englishmen who, when they were all together, never talked about anything

worth talking about. Their general conversations were absolutely empty

and null, and I concluded, as young men so easily conclude, that those

twenty or thirty gentlemen had not half a dozen ideas amongst them. A

little reflection might have reminded me that my own talk was no better

than theirs, and consequently that there might be others in the company

who also knew more and thought more than they expressed. I found out, by

accident, after awhile, that some of these men had more than common

culture in various directions; one or two had travelled far, and brought

home the results of much observation; one or two had read largely, and

with profit; more than one had studied a science; five or six had seen a

great deal of the world. It was a youthful mistake to conclude that,

because their general conversation was very dull, the men were dull

individually. The general conversations of English society _are_ dull;

it is a national characteristic. But the men themselves are individually

often very well informed, and quite capable of imparting their

information to a single interested listener. The art is to be that

listener. Englishmen have the greatest dread of producing themselves in

the semi-publicity of a general conversation, because they fear that

their special topics may not be cared for by some of the persons

present; but if you can get one of them into a quiet corner by himself,

and humor his shyness with sufficient delicacy and tact, he will

disburden his mind at last, and experience a relief in so doing.

By keeping out of society altogether you miss these precious

opportunities. The wise course is to mix as much with the world as may

be possible without withdrawing too much time from your serious studies,

but not to expect anything valuable from the general talk, which is

nothing but a neutral medium in which intelligences float and move as

yachts do in sea-water, and for which they ought not to be held

individually responsible. The talk of Society answers its purpose if it

simply permits many different people to come together without clashing,

and the purpose of its conventions is the avoidance of collision. In

England the small talk is heavy, like water; in France it is light as

air; in both countries it is a medium and no more.

Society talks, by preference, about amusements; it does so because when

people meet for recreation they wish to relieve their minds from serious

cares, and also for the practical reason that Society must talk about

what its members have in common, and their amusements are more in common

than their work. As M. Thiers recommended the republican form of

government in France on the ground that it was the form which divided

his countrymen least, so a polite and highly civilized society chooses

for the subject of general conversation the topic which is least likely

to separate the different people who are present. It almost always

happens that the best topic having this recommendation is some species

of amusement; since amusements are easily learnt outside the business of

life, and we are all initiated into them in youth.

For these reasons I think that we ought to be extremely tolerant of the

dulness or frivolity which may seem to prevail in any numerous company,

and not to conclude too hastily that the members of it are in any degree

more dull or frivolous than ourselves. It is unfortunate, certainly,

that the art of general conversation is not so successfully cultivated

as it might be, and there are reasons for believing that our posterity

will surpass us in this respect, because as culture increases the spirit

of toleration increases with it, so that the great questions of

politics and religion, in which all are interested, may be discussed

more safely than they could be at the present day, by persons of

different ways of thinking. But even the sort of general conversation we

have now, poor as it may seem, still sufficiently serves as a medium for

human intercourse, and permits us to meet on a common ground where we

may select at leisure the agreeable or instructive friends that our

higher intellect needs, and without whom the intellectual life is one of

the ghastliest of solitudes.

And now permit me to add a few observations on another aspect of this

subject, which is not without its importance.

Let us suppose that every one of rather more than ordinary capacity and

culture were to act as you yourself are acting, and withdraw entirely

from general society. Let us leave out of consideration for the present

the loss to their private culture which would be the consequence of

missing every opportunity for forming new intellectual friendships. Let

us consider, this time, what would be the consequence to Society itself.

If all the cultivated men were withdrawn from it, the general tone of

Society would inevitably descend much lower even than it is at present;

it would sink so low that the whole national intellect would undergo a

sure and inevitable deterioration. It is plainly the duty of men

situated as you are, who have been endowed by nature with superior

faculties, and who have enlarged them by the acquisition of knowledge,

to preserve Society by their presence from an evil so surely prolific of

bad consequences. If Society is less narrow, and selfish, and

intolerant, and apathetic than it used to be, it is because they who are

the salt of the earth have not disdained to mix with its grosser and

earthier elements. All the improvement in public sentiment, and the

advancement in general knowledge which have marked the course of recent

generations, are to be attributed to the wholesome influence of men who

could think and feel, and who steadily exercised, often quite obscurely,

yet not the less usefully in their time and place, the subtle but

powerful attraction of the greater mind over the less. Instead of

complaining that people are ignorant and frivolous, we ought to go

amongst them and lead them to the higher life. "I know not how it is,"

said one in a dull circle to a more gifted friend who entered it

occasionally, "when we are left to ourselves we are all lamentably

stupid, but whenever you are kind enough to come amongst us we all talk

very much better, and of things that are well worth talking about." The

gifted man is always welcome, if only he will stoop to conquer, and

forget himself to give light and heat to others. The low Philistinism of

many a provincial town is due mainly to the shy reserve of the one or

two superior men who fancy that they cannot amalgamate with the common

intellect of the place.

Not only would I advocate a little patient condescension, but even

something of the sturdier temper which will not be driven out. Are the

Philistines to have all the talk to themselves forever; are they to

rehearse their stupid old platitudes without the least fear of

contradiction? How long, O Lord? how long? Let us resolve that even in

general society they shall not eternally have things their own way.

Somebody ought to have the courage to enlighten them even at their own

tables, and in the protecting presence of their admiring wives and

daughters.

LETTER VI.

TO A FRIEND WHO KINDLY WARNED THE AUTHOR OF THE BAD EFFECTS OF SOLITUDE.

_Vae solis_--Society and solitude alike necessary--The use of each--In

solitude we know ourselves--Montaigne as a book-buyer--Compensations

of solitude--Description of one who loved and sought it--How men are

driven into solitude--Cultivated people in the provinces--Use of

solitude as a protection for rare and delicate natures--Shelley's

dislike to general society--Wordsworth and Turner--Sir Isaac Newton's

repugnance to society--Auguste Comte--His systematic isolation and

unshakable firmness of purpose--Milton and Bunyan--The solitude which

is really injurious--Painters and authors--An ideal division of life.

You cry to me _Vae solis!_ and the cry seems not the less loud and

stirring that it comes in the folds of a letter. Just at first it quite

startled and alarmed me, and made me strangely dissatisfied with my life

and work; but farther reflection has been gradually reconciling me ever

since, and now I feel cheerful again, and in a humor to answer you.

_Woe unto him that is alone!_ This has been often said, but the studious

recluse may answer, _Woe unto him that is never alone and cannot bear to

be alone!_

We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and

winter, day and night, exercise and rest. I thank heaven for a thousand

pleasant and profitable conversations with acquaintances and friends; I

thank heaven also, and not less gratefully, for thousands of sweet hours

that have passed in solitary thought or labor, under the silent stars.

Society is necessary to give us our share and place in the collective

life of humanity, but solitude is necessary to the maintenance of the

individual life. Society is to the individual what travel and commerce

are to a nation; whilst solitude represents the home life of the nation,

during which it develops its especial originality and genius.

The life of the perfect hermit, and that of those persons who feel

themselves nothing individually, and have no existence but what they

receive from others, are alike imperfect lives. The perfect life is like

that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share

in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone in the

solitude of the infinite sea. We ought to belong to Society, to have our

place in it, and yet to be capable of a complete individual existence

outside of it.

Which of the two is the grander, the ship in the disciplined fleet,

arranged in order of battle, or the ship alone in the tempest, a

thousand miles from land? The truest grandeur of the ship is neither in

one nor the other, but in the capacity for both. What would that captain

merit who either had not seamanship enough to work under the eye of the

admiral, or else had not sufficient knowledge of navigation to be

trusted out of the range of signals?

I value society for the abundance of ideas that it brings before us,

like carriages in a frequented street; but I value solitude for

sincerity and peace, and for the better understanding of the thoughts

that are truly ours. Only in solitude do we learn our inmost nature and

its needs. He who has lived for some great space of existence apart from

the tumult of the world, has discovered the vanity of the things for

which he has no natural aptitude or gift--their _relative_ vanity, I

mean, their uselessness to himself, personally; and at the same time he

has learned what is truly precious and good for him. Surely this is

knowledge of inestimable value to a man: surely it is a great thing for

any one in the bewildering confusion of distracting toils and pleasures

to have found out the labor that he is most fit for and the pleasures

that satisfy him best. Society so encourages us in affectations that it

scarcely leaves us a chance of knowing our own minds; but in solitude

this knowledge comes of itself, and delivers us from innumerable

vanities.

Montaigne tells us that at one time he bought books from ostentation,

but that afterwards he bought only such books as he wanted for his

private reading. In the first of these conditions of mind we may observe

the influence of society; in the second the effect of solitude. The man

of the world does not consult his own intellectual needs, but considers

the eyes of his visitors; the solitary student takes his literature as a

lonely traveller takes food when he is hungry, without reference to the

ordered courses of public hospitality.

It is a traditional habit of mankind to see only the disadvantages of

solitude, without considering its compensations; but there are great

compensations, some of the greatest being negative. The lonely man is

lord of his own hours and of his own purse; his days are long and

unbroken, he escapes from every form of ostentation, and may live quite

simply and sincerely in great calm breadths of leisure. I knew one who

passed his summers in the heart of a vast forest, in a common thatched

cottage with furniture of common deal, and for this retreat he quitted

very gladly a rich fine house in the city. He wore nothing but old

clothes, read only a few old books, without the least regard to the

opinions of the learned, and did not take in a newspaper. On the wall of

his habitation he inscribed with a piece of charcoal a quotation from De

Senancour to this effect: "In the world a man lives in his own age; in

solitude, in all the ages." I observed in him the effects of a lonely

life, and he greatly aided my observations by frankly communicating his

experiences. That solitude had become inexpressibly dear to him, but he

admitted one evil consequence of it, which was an increasing unfitness

for ordinary society, though he cherished a few tried friendships, and

was grateful to those who loved him and could enter into his humor. He

had acquired a horror of towns and crowds, not from nervousness, but

because he felt imprisoned and impeded in his thinking, which needed the

depths of the forest, the venerable trees, the communication with

primaeval nature, from which he drew a mysterious yet necessary

nourishment for the peculiar activity of his mind. I found that his case

answered very exactly to the sentence he quoted from De Senancour; he

lived less in his own age than others do, but he had a fine compensation

in a strangely vivid understanding of other ages. Like De Senancour, he

had a strong sense of the transitoriness of what is transitory, and a

passionate preference for all that the human mind conceives to be

relatively or absolutely permanent. This trait was very observable in

his talk about the peoples of antiquity, and in the delight he took in

dwelling rather upon everything which they had in common with ourselves

than on those differences which are more obvious to the modern spirit.

His temper was grave and earnest, but unfailingly cheerful, and

entirely free from any tendency to bitterness. The habits of his life

would have been most unfavorable to the development of a man of

business, of a statesman, of a leader in practical enterprise, but they

were certainly not unfavorable to the growth of a tranquil and

comprehensive intellect, capable of "just judgment and high-hearted

patriotism." He had not the spirit of the newspapers, he did not live

intensely in the present, but he had the spirit which has animated great

poets, and saints, and sages, and far-seeing teachers of humanity. Not

in vain had he lived alone with Nature, not in vain had he watched in

solemn twilights and witnessed many a dawn. There is, there _is_ a

strength that comes to us in solitude from that shadowy, awful Presence

that frivolous crowds repel!

Solitude may be and is sometimes deliberately accepted or chosen, but

far more frequently men are driven into it by Nature and by Fate. They

go into solitude to escape the sense of isolation which is always most

intolerable when there are many voices round us in loud dissonance with

our sincerest thought. It is a great error to encourage in young people

the love of noble culture in the hope that it may lead them more into

what is called good society. High culture always isolates, always drives

men out of their class and makes it more difficult for them to share

naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the

few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be

had within any traversable distance, they sit and work alone. Very

possibly too, in some instances, a superior culture may compel the

possessor of it to hold opinions too far in advance of the opinions

prevalent around him to be patiently listened to or tolerated, and then

he must either disguise them, which is always highly distasteful to a

man of honor, or else submit to be treated as an enemy to human welfare.

Cultivated people who live in London (their true home) need never

condemn themselves to solitude from this cause, but in the provinces

there are many places where it is not easy for them to live sociably

without a degree of reserve that is more wearisome than solitude itself.

And however much pains you take to keep your culture well in the

background, it always makes you rather an object of suspicion to people

who have no culture. They perceive that you are reserved, they know that

very much of what passes in your mind is a mystery to them, and this

feeling makes them uneasy in your presence, even afraid of you, and not

indisposed to find a compensation for this uncomfortable feeling in

sarcasms behind your back. Unless you are gifted with a truly

extraordinary power of conciliating goodwill, you are not likely to get

on happily, for long together, with people who feel themselves your

inferiors. The very utmost skill and caution will hardly avail to hide

all your modes of thought. Something of your higher philosophy will

escape in an unguarded moment, and give offence because it will seem

foolish or incomprehensible to your audience. There is no safety for you

but in a timely withdrawal, either to a society that is prepared to

understand you, or else to a solitude where your intellectual

superiorities will neither be a cause of irritation to others nor of

vexation to yourself.

Like all our instincts, the instinct of solitude has its especial

purpose, which appears to be the protection of rare and delicate natures

from the commonplace world around them. Though recluses are considered

by men of the world to be doomed to inevitable incompetence, the fact is

that many of them have reached the highest distinction in intellectual

pursuits. If Shelley had not disliked general society as he did, the

originality of his own living and thinking would have been less

complete; the influences of mediocre people, who, of course, are always

in the majority, would have silently but surely operated to the

destruction of that unequalled and personal delicacy of imagination to

which we owe what is inimitable in his poetry. In the last year of his

life, he said to Trelawny of Mary, his second wife, "She can't bear

solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the dead." Here is a

piteous prayer of his to be delivered from a party that he dreaded:

"Mary says she will have a party! There are English singers here, the

Sinclairs, and she will ask them, and every one she or you know. Oh the

horror! For pity go to Mary and intercede for me! I will submit to any

other species of torture than that of being bored to death by idle

ladies and gentlemen." Again, he writes to Mary: "My greatest delight

would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you

and our child to a solitary island in the sea; would build a boat, and

shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world. I would read no

reviews and talk with no authors. If I dared trust my imagination it

would tell me that there are one or two chosen companions beside

yourself whom I should desire. But to this I would not listen; where two

or three are gathered together, the devil is among them." At Marlow he

knew little of his neighbors. "I am not wretch enough," he said, "to

tolerate an acquaintance." Wordsworth and Turner, if less systematic in

their isolation, were still solitary workers, and much of the peculiar

force and originality of their performance is due to their independence

of the people about them. Painters are especial sufferers from the

visits of talkative people who know little or nothing of the art they

talk about, and yet who have quite influence enough to disturb the

painter's mind by proving to him that his noblest thoughts are surest to

be misunderstood. Men of science, too, find solitude favorable to their

peculiar work, because it permits the concentration of their powers

during long periods of time. Newton had a great repugnance to society,

and even to notoriety--a feeling which is different, and in men of

genius more rare. No one can doubt, however, that Newton's great

intellectual achievements were due in some measure to this peculiarity

of his temper, which permitted him to ripen them in the sustained

tranquillity necessary to difficult investigations. Auguste Comte

isolated himself not only from preference but on system, and whatever

may have been the defects of his remarkable mind, and the weakness of

its ultimate decay, it is certain that his amazing command over vast

masses of heterogeneous material would have been incompatible with any

participation in the passing interests of the world. Nothing in

intellectual history has ever exceeded the unshakable firmness of

purpose with which he dedicated his whole being to the elaboration of

the Positive philosophy. He sacrificed everything to it--position, time,

health, and all the amusements and opportunities of society. He found

that commonplace acquaintances disturbed his work and interfered with

his mastery of it, so he resolutely renounced them. Others have done

great things in isolation that was not of their own choosing, yet none

the less fruitful for them and for mankind. It was not when Milton saw

most of the world, but in the forced retirement of a man who had lost

health and eyesight, and whose party was hopelessly defeated, that he

composed the "Paradise Lost." It was during tedious years of

imprisonment that Bunyan wrote his immortal allegory. Many a genius has

owed his best opportunities to poverty, because poverty had happily

excluded him from society, and so preserved him from time-devouring

exigencies and frivolities.

The solitude which is really injurious is the severance from all who are

capable of understanding us. Painters say that they cannot work

effectively for very long together when separated from the society of

artists, and that they must return to London, or Paris, or Rome, to

avoid an oppressive feeling of discouragement which paralyzes their

productive energy. Authors are more fortunate, because all cultivated

people are society for them; yet even authors lose strength and agility

of thought when too long deprived of a genial intellectual atmosphere.

In the country you meet with cultivated individuals; but we need more

than this, we need those general conversations in which every speaker is

worth listening to. The life most favorable to culture would have its

times of open and equal intercourse with the best minds, and also its

periods of retreat. My ideal would be a house in London, not far from

one or two houses that are so full of light and warmth that it is a

liberal education to have entered them, and a solitary tower on some

island of the Hebrides, with no companions but the sea-gulls and the

thundering surges of the Atlantic. One such island I know well, and it

is before my mind's eye, clear as a picture, whilst I am writing. It

stands in the very entrance of a fine salt-water loch, rising above two

hundred feet out of the water and setting its granite front steep

against the western ocean. When the evenings are clear you can see

Staffa and Iona like blue clouds between you and the sunset; and on your

left, close at hand, the granite hills of Mull, with Ulva to the right

across the narrow strait. It was the dream of my youth to build a tower

there, with three or four little rooms in it, and walls as strong as a

lighthouse. There have been more foolish dreams, and there have been

less competent teachers than the tempests that would have roused me and

the calms that would have brought me peace. If any serious thought, if

any noble inspiration might have been hoped for, surely it would have

been there, where only the clouds and waves were transient, but the

ocean before me, and the stars above, and the mountains on either hand,

were emblems and evidences of eternity.

NOTE.--There is a passage in Scott's novel, "The Pirate," which

illustrates what has been said in this letter about the necessity for

concealing superior culture in the presence of less intellectual

companions, and I quote it the more willingly that Scott was so

remarkably free from any morbid aversion to society, and so capable of

taking a sincere interest in every human being.

Cleveland is speaking to Minna:--

"I thought over my former story, and saw that seeming more brave,

skilful, and enterprising than others had gained me command and

respect, and that seeming more gently nurtured and more civilized than

they had made them envy and hate me as a being of another species. _I

bargained with myself then, that since I could not lay aside my

superiority of intellect and education, I would do my best to disguise

and to sink, in the rude seaman, all appearance of better feeling and

better accomplishments._"

A similar policy is often quite as necessary in the society of

landsmen.

PART X.

_INTELLECTUAL HYGIENICS._

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG AUTHOR WHILST HE WAS WRITING HIS FIRST BOOK.

Mr. Galton's advice to young travellers--That we ought to interest

ourselves in the _progress_ of a journey--The same rule applicable in

intellectual things--Women in the cabin of a canal boat--Working

hastily for temporary purposes--Fevered eagerness to get work

done--Beginners have rarely acquired firm intellectual habits--Knowing

the range of our own powers--The coolness of accomplished

artists--Advice given by Ingres--Balzac's method of work--Scott,

Horace Vernet, John Phillip--Decided workers are deliberate workers.

I read the other day, in Galton's "Art of Travel," a little bit which

concerns you and all of us, but I made the extract in my

commonplace-book for your benefit rather than my own, because the truth

it contains has been "borne in upon me" by my own experience, so that

what Mr. Galton says did not give me a new conviction, but only

confirmed me in an old one. He is speaking to explorers who have not

done so much in that way as he has himself, and though the subject of

his advice is the conduct of an exploring party (in the wilds of

Australia, for example) the advice itself is equally useful if taken

metaphorically, and applied to the conduct of intellectual labors and

explorations of all kinds.

"Interest yourself," says Mr. Galton, "chiefly in the progress of your

journey, and do not look forward to its end with eagerness. It is better

to think of a return to civilization, not as an end to hardship and a

haven from ill, but as a thing to be regretted, and as a close to an

adventurous and pleasant life. In this way, risking less, you will

insensibly creep on, making connections, and learning the capabilities

of the country as you advance, which will be found invaluable in the

case of a hurried or a disastrous return. And thus, when some months

have passed by, you will look back with surprise on the great distance

travelled over; for if you average only three miles a day, at the end of

the year you will have advanced 1000, which is a very considerable

exploration. The fable of the hare and the tortoise seems expressly

intended for travellers over wide and unknown tracts."

Yes, we ought to interest ourselves chiefly in the progress of our work,

and not to look forward to its end with eagerness. That eagerness of

which Mr. Galton speaks has spoiled many a piece of work besides a

geographical exploration, and it not only spoils work, but it does

worse, it spoils life also. How am I to enjoy this year as I ought, if I

am continually wishing it were over? A truly intellectual philosophy

must begin by recognizing the fact that the intellectual paths are

infinitely long, that there will always be new horizons behind the

horizon that is before us, and that we must accept a gradual advance as

the law of our intellectual life. It is our business to move forwards,

but we ought to do so without any greater feeling of hurry than that

which affects the most stationary of minds. Not a bad example for us is

a bargeman's wife in a canal-boat. She moves; movement is the law of her

life; yet she is as tranquil in her little cabin as any goodwife on

shore, brewing her tea and preparing her buttered toast without ever

thinking about getting to the end of her journey. For if that voyage

were ended, another would always succeed to it, and another! In striking

contrast to the unhurried bargeman's wife in her cabin is an irritable

Frenchman in the corner of a diligence, looking at his watch every

half-hour, and wishing that the dust and rattle were over, and he were

in his own easy-chair at home. Those who really lead the intellectual

life, and have embraced it for better and for worse, are like the

bargeman's wife; but those who live the life from time to time only, for

some special purpose, wishing to be rid of it as soon as that purpose is

accomplished, are like the sufferer in the purgatory of the diligence.

Is there indeed really any true intellectual life at all when every hour

of labor is spoiled by a feverish eagerness to be at the end of the

projected task? You cannot take a bit out of another man's life and live

it, without having lived the previous years that led up to it, without

having also the assured hopes for the years that lie beyond. The attempt

is constantly made by amateurs of all kinds, and by men of temporary

purposes, and it always fails. The amateur says when he awakes on some

fine summer morning, and draws up his blind, and looks out on the dewy

fields: "Ah, the world of nature is beautiful to-day: what if I were to

lead the life of an artist?" And after breakfast he seeks up his old box

of watercolor and his blockbook, and stool, and white umbrella, and what

not, and sallies forth, and fixes himself on the edge of the forest or

the banks of the amber stream. The day that he passes there looks like

an artist's day, yet it is not. It has not been preceded by the three or

four thousand days which ought to have led up to it; it is not strong in

the assured sense of present skill, in the calm knowledge that the hours

will bear good fruit. So the chances are that there will be some hurry,

and fretfulness, and impatience, under the shadow of that white parasol,

and also that when the day is over there will be a disappointment. You

cannot put an artist's day into the life of any one but an artist.

Our impatiences come mainly, I think, from an amateurish doubt about our

own capacity, which is accompanied by a fevered eagerness to see the

work done, because we are tormented both by hopes and fears so long as

it is in progress. We have fears that it may not turn out as it ought to

do, and we have at the same time hopes for its success. Both these

causes produce eagerness, and deprive us of the tranquillity which

distinguishes the thorough workman, and which is necessary to

thoroughness in the work itself. Now please observe that I am not

advising you to set aside these hopes and fears by an effort of the

will; when you have them they are the inevitable result of your state of

culture, and the will can no more get rid of them than it can get rid of

an organic disease. When you have a limited amount of power and of

culture, and are not quite clear in your own mind as to where the limits

lie, it is natural on the one hand that you should fear the

insufficiency of what you possess, and on the other that in more

sanguine moments you should indulge in hopes which are only extravagant

because your powers have not yet been accurately measured. You will

alternate between fear and hope, according to the temporary predominance

of saddening or cheerful ideas, but both these feelings will urge you to

complete the work in hand, that you may see your own powers reflected in

it, and measure them more exactly. This is the main cause of the

eagerness of young authors, and the reason why they often launch work

upon the sea of publicity which is sure to go immediately to the bottom,

from the unworkmanlike haste with which it has been put together. But

beyond this there is another cause, which is, that beginners in

literature have rarely acquired firm intellectual habits, that they do

not yet lead the tranquil intellectual life, so that such a piece of

work as the composition of a book keeps them in an unwholesome state of

excitement. When you feel this coming upon you, pray remember Mr.

Galton's wise traveller in unknown tracts, or the bargeman's wife in the

canal-boat.

Amongst the many advantages of experience, one of the most valuable is

that we come to know the range of our own powers, and if we are wise we

keep contentedly within them. This relieves us from the malady of

eagerness; we know pretty accurately beforehand what our work will be

when it is done, and therefore we are not in a hurry to see it

accomplished. The coolness of old hands in all departments of labor is

due in part to the cooling of the temperament by age, but it is due even

more to the fulness of acquired experience, for we do not find

middle-aged men so cool in situations where they feel themselves

incompetent. The conduct of the most experienced painters in the

management of their work is a good example of this masterly coolness,

because we can see them painting in their studios whereas we cannot so

easily see or so justly estimate the coolness of scientific or literary

workmen. A painter of great experience will have, usually, several

pictures at a time upon his easels, and pass an hour upon one, or an

hour upon the other, simple as the state of the pigment invites him

without ever being tempted to risk anything by hurrying a process. The

ugly preparatory daubing which irritates the impatience of the beginner

does not disturb _his_ equanimity; he has laid it with a view to the

long-foreseen result, and it satisfies him temporarily as the right

thing for the time being. If you know what is the right thing for the

time being, and always do it, you are sure of the calm of the thorough

workman. All his touches, except the very last touch on each work, are

touches of preparation, leading gradually up to his result. Ingres used

to counsel his pupils to sketch always, to sketch upon and within the

first sketch till the picture came right in the end; and this was

strictly Balzac's method in literature. The literary and artistic labors

of these two men did not proceed so much upon the principle of

travelling as upon that of cultivation. They took an idea in the rough,

as a settler takes a tract from wild nature, and then they went over it

repeatedly, each time pushing the cultivation of it a little farther.

Scott, Horace Vernet, John Phillip, and many others, have worked rather

on the principle of travelling, passing over the ground once, and

leaving it, never coming back again to correct the mistakes of

yesterday. Both methods of work require deliberation, but the latter

needs it in the supreme degree. All very decided workers, men who did

not correct, have been at the same time very deliberate workers--rapid,

in the sense of accomplishing much in the course of the year, or the

life, but cautious and slow and observant whilst they actually labored,

thinking out very carefully every sentence before they wrote it, every

touch of paint before they laid it.

LETTER II.

TO A STUDENT IN THE FIRST ARDOR OF INTELLECTUAL AMBITION.

The first freshness--Why should it not be preserved?--The dulness of

the intellectual--Fictions and false promises--Ennui in work

itself--Duerer's engraving of Melancholy--Scott about Dryden--Byron,

Shelley, Wordsworth--Humboldt, Cuvier, Goethe--Tennyson's

"Maud"--Preventives of _ennui_--Hard study for limited times--The

_ennui_ of jaded faculties.

I have been thinking about you frequently of late, and the burden or

refrain of my thoughts has been "What a blessing he has in that first

freshness, if only he could keep it!" But now I am beginning more

hopefully to ask myself, "Why should he not keep it?"

It would be an experiment worth trying, so to order your intellectual

life, that however stony and thorny your path might be, however

difficult and arduous, it should at all events never be dull; or, to

express what I mean more accurately, that you yourself should never

feel the depressing influences of dulness during the years when they are

most to be dreaded. I want you to live steadily and happily in your

intellectual labors, even to the natural close of existence, and my best

wish for you is that you may escape a long and miserable malady which

brain-workers very commonly suffer from when the first dreams of youth

have been disappointed--a malady in which the intellectual desires are

feeble, the intellectual hopes are few; whose victim, if he has still

resolution enough to learn anything, acquires without satisfaction, and,

if he has courage to create, has neither pride nor pleasure in his

creations.

If I were to sing the praises of knowledge as they have been so often

sung by louder harps than mine, I might avoid so dreary a theme. It is

easy to pretend to believe that the intellectual life is always sure to

be interesting and delightful, but the truth is that, either from an

unwise arrangement of their work, or from mental or physical causes

which we will investigate to some extent before we have done with the

subject, many men whose occupations are reputed to be amongst the most

interesting have suffered terribly from _ennui_, and that not during a

week or two at a time, but for consecutive years and years.

There is a class of books written with the praiseworthy intention of

stimulating young men to intellectual labor, in which this danger of the

intellectual life is systematically ignored. It is assumed in these

books that the satisfactions of intellectual labor are certain; that

although it may not always, or often, result in outward and material

prosperity, its inward joys will never fail. Promises of this kind

cannot safely be made to any one. The satisfactions of intellectual

riches are not more sure than the satisfactions of material riches; the

feeling of dull indifference which often so mysteriously clouds the life

of the rich man in the midst of the most elaborate contrivances for his

pleasure and amusement, has its exact counterpart in the lives of men

who are rich in the best treasures of the mind, and who have infinite

intellectual resources. However brilliant your ability, however brave

and persistent your industry, however vast your knowledge, there is

always this dreadful possibility of _ennui_. People tell you that work

is a specific against it, but many a man has worked steadily and

earnestly, and suffered terribly from _ennui_ all the time that he was

working, although the labor was of his own choice, the labor that he

loved best, and for which Nature evidently intended him. The poets, from

Solomon downwards, have all of them, so far as I know, given utterance

in one page or another of their writings to this feeling of dreary

dissatisfaction, and Albert Duerer, in his "Melencolia," illustrated it.

It is plain that the robust female figure which has exercised the

ingenuity of so many commentators is not melancholy either from weakness

of the body or vacancy of the mind. She is strong and she is learned;

yet, though the plumes of her wings are mighty, she sits heavily and

listlessly, brooding amidst the implements of suspended labor, on the

shore of a waveless sea. The truth is that Duerer engraved the melancholy

that he himself only too intimately knew. This is not the dulness of the

ignorant and incapable, whose minds are a blank because they have no

ideas, whose hands are listless for want of an occupation; it is the

sadness of the most learned, the most intelligent, the most industrious;

the weary misery of those who are rich in the attainments of culture,

who have the keys of the chambers of knowledge, and wings to bear them

to the heaven of the ideal. If you counsel this "Melencolia" to work

that she may be merry, she will answer that she knows the uses of labor

and its vanity, and the precise amount of profit that a man hath of all

his labor which he taketh under the sun. All things are full of labor,

she will tell you; and in much wisdom is much grief, and he that

increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Can we escape this brooding melancholy of the great workers--has any

truly intellectual person escaped it ever? The question can never be

answered with perfect certainty, because we can never quite accurately

know the whole truth about the life of another. I have known several men

of action, almost entirely devoid of intellectual culture, who enjoyed

an unbroken flow of animal energy and were clearly free from the

melancholy of Duerer; but I never intimately knew a really cultivated

person who had not suffered from it more or less, and the greatest

sufferers were the most conscientious thinkers and students. Amongst the

illustrious dead, it may be very safely answered that any poet who has

described it has written from his own experience--a transient experience

it may be, yet his own. When Walter Scott, _a-propos_ of Dryden, spoke

of "the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incident to one

doomed to labor incessantly in the feverish exercise of the

imagination," and of that "sinking of spirit which follows violent

mental exertion," is it not evident that his kindly understanding of

Dryden's case came from the sympathy of a fellow-laborer who knew by his

own experience the gloomier and more depressing passages of the

imaginative life? It would be prudent perhaps to omit the mention of

Byron, because some may attribute his sadness to his immorality; and if

I spoke of Shelley, they might answer that he was "sad because he was

impious;" but the truth is, that quite independently of conduct, and

even of belief, it was scarcely possible for natures so highly

imaginative as these two, and so ethereally intellectual as one of the

two, to escape those clouds of gloom which darken the intellectual life.

Wordsworth was not immoral, Wordsworth was not unorthodox, yet he could

be as sad in his own sober way as Byron in the bitterness of his

desolation, or Shelley in his tenderest wailing. The three men who seem

to have been the least subject to the sadness of intellectual workers

were Alexander Humboldt, Cuvier, and Goethe. Alexander Humboldt, so far

as is known to us, lived always in a clear and cheerful daylight; his

appetite for learning was both strong and regular; he embraced the

intellectual life in his earliest manhood, and lived in it with an

unhesitating singleness of purpose, to the limits of extreme old age.

Cuvier was to the last a model student, of a temper at once most

unflinching and most kind, happy in all his studies, happier still in

his unequalled facility of mental self-direction. Goethe, as all know,

lived a life of unflagging interest in each of the three great branches

of intellectual labor. During the whole of his long life he was

interested in literature, in which he was a master; he was interested in

science, in which he was a discoverer, and in art, of which he was an

ardent though not practically successful student. His intellectual

activity ceased only on rare occasions of painful illness or

overwhelming affliction; he does not seem to have asked himself ever

whether knowledge was worth its cost; he was always ready to pay the

appointed price of toil. He had no infirmity of intellectual doubt; the

powerful impulses from within assured him that knowledge was good for

him, and he went to it urged by an unerring instinct, as a young salmon

bred in the slime of a river seeks strength in the infinite sea. And

yet, being a poet and a man of strong passions, Goethe did not

altogether escape the green-sickness which afflicts the imaginative

temperament, or he could never have written "Werther;" but he cured

himself very soon, and the author of "Werther" had no indulgence for

Wertherism--indeed we are told that he grew ashamed of having written

the book which inoculated the younger minds of Europe with that

miserable disease. In our own time an illustrious poet has given in

"Maud" a very perfect study of a young mind in a morbid condition, a

mind having indeed the student-temper, but of a bad kind, that which

comes not from the genuine love of study, but from sulky rage against

the world.

"Thanks, for the fiend best knows whether woman or man be the worse.

_I will bury myself in my books_, and the Devil may pipe to his own."

This kind of self-burial in one's library does not come from the love of

literature. The recluse will not speak to his neighbor, yet needs human

intercourse of some kind, and seeks it in reading, urged by an inward

necessity. He feels no gratitude towards the winners of knowledge; his

morbid ill-nature depreciates the intellectual laborers:--

"The man of science himself is fonder of glory and vain;

An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor."

What is the life such a spirit will choose for itself? Despising alike

the ignorant and the learned, the acuteness of the cultivated and the

simplicity of the poor, in what form of activity or inaction will he

seek what all men need, the harmony of a life well tuned?

"Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways:

Where, if I cannot be gay, let a passionless peace be my lot."

There are many different morbid states of the mind, and this of the hero

of "Maud" is only one of them, but it is the commonest amongst

intellectual or semi-intellectual young men. See how he has a little fit

of momentary enthusiasm (all he is capable of) about a shell that

suddenly and accidentally attracts his attention. How true to the morbid

nature is that incident! Unable to pursue any large and systematic

observation, the diseased mind is attracted to things suddenly and

accidentally, sees them out of all proportion, and then falls into the

inevitable fit of scornful peevishness.

"What is it? A learned man

Could give it a clumsy name:

Let him name it who can."

The question which concerns the world is, how this condition of the mind

may be avoided. The cure Mr. Tennyson suggested was war; but wars,

though more frequent than is desirable, are not to be had always. And in

your case, my friend, it is happily not a cure but a preventive that is

needed. Let me recommend certain precautions which taken together are

likely to keep you safe. Care for the physical health in the first

place, for if there is a morbid mind the bodily organs are not doing

their work as they ought to do. Next, for the mind itself, I would

heartily recommend hard study, really hard study, taken very regularly

but in very moderate quantity. The effect of it on the mind is as

bracing as that of cold water on the body, but as you ought not to

remain too long in the cold bath, so it is dangerous to study _hard_

more than a short time every day. Do some work that is very difficult

(such as reading some language that you have to puzzle out _a coups de

dictionnaire_) two hours a day regularly, to brace the fighting power of

the intellect, but let the rest of the day's work be easier. Acquire

especially, if you possibly can, the enviable faculty of getting

entirely rid of your work in the intervals of it, and of taking a hearty

interest in common things, in a garden, or stable, or dog-kennel, or

farm. If the work pursues you--if what is called unconscious

cerebration, which ought to go forward without your knowing it, becomes

conscious cerebration, and bothers you, then you have been working

beyond your cerebral strength, and you are not safe.

An organization which was intended by Nature for the intellectual life

cannot be healthy and happy without a certain degree of intellectual

activity. Natures like those of Humboldt and Goethe need immense labors

for their own felicity, smaller powers need less extensive labor. To all

of us who have intellectual needs there is a certain supply of work

necessary to perfect health. If we do less, we are in danger of that

ennui which comes from want of intellectual exercise; if we do more, we

may suffer from that other ennui which is due to the weariness of the

jaded faculties, and this is the more terrible of the two.

LETTER III.

TO AN INTELLECTUAL MAN WHO DESIRED AN OUTLET FOR HIS ENERGIES.

Dissatisfaction of the intellectual when they have not an extensive

influence--A consideration suggested to the author by Mr. Matthew

Arnold--Each individual mind a portion of the national mind, which

must rise or decline with the minds of which it is composed--Influence

of a townsman in his town--Household influence--Charities and

condescendences of the highly cultivated--A suggestion of M.

Taine--Conversation with inferiors--How to make it interesting--That

we ought to be satisfied with humble results and small successes.

There is a very marked tendency amongst persons of culture to feel

dissatisfied with themselves and their success in life when they do not

exercise some direct and visible influence over a considerable portion

of the public. To put the case in a more concrete form, it may be

affirmed that if an intellectual young man does not exercise influence

by literature, or by oratory, or by one of the most elevated forms of

art, he is apt to think that his culture and intelligence are lost upon

the world, and either to blame himself for being what he considers a

failure, or else (and this is more common) to find fault with the world

in general for not giving him a proper chance of making his abilities

tell. The facilities for obtaining culture are now so many and great,

and within the reach of so many well-to-do people, that hundreds of

persons become really very clever in various ways who would have

remained utterly uncultivated had they lived in any previous century. A

few of these distinguish themselves in literature and other pursuits

which bring notoriety to the successful, but by far the greater number

have to remain in positions of obscurity, often being clearly conscious

that they have abilities and knowledge not much, if at all, inferior to

the abilities and knowledge of some who have achieved distinction. The

position of a clever man who remains obscure is, if he has ambition,

rather trying to the moral fibre, but there are certain considerations

which might help to give a direction to his energy and so procure him a

sure relief, which reputation too frequently fails to provide.

The first consideration is one which was offered to me many years ago by

Mr. Matthew Arnold, and which I can give, though from memory, very

nearly in his own words. The multiplicity of things which make claim to

the attention of the public is in these days such that it requires

either uncommon strength of will or else the force of peculiar

circumstances to make men follow any serious study to good result, and

the great majority content themselves with the general enlightenment of

the epoch, which they get from newspapers and reviews. Hence the efforts

of the intellectual produce little effect, and it requires either

extraordinary talent or extraordinary fanaticism to awaken the serious

interest of any considerable number of readers. Yet, in spite of these

discouragements, we ought to remember that our labors, if not applauded

by others, may be of infinite value to ourselves, and also that beyond

this gain to the individual, his culture is a gain to the nation,

whether the nation formally recognizes it or not. For the intellectual

life of a nation is the sum of the lives of all intellectual people

belonging to it, and in this sense your culture is a gain to England,

whether England counts you amongst her eminent sons, or leaves you

forever obscure. Is it not a noble spectacle, a spectacle well worthy of

a highly civilized country, when a private citizen, with an admirable

combination of patriotism and self-respect, says to himself as he

labors, "I know that in a country so great as England, where there are

so many able men, all that I do can count for very little in public

estimation, yet I will endeavor to store my mind with knowledge and make

my judgment sure, in order that the national mind of England, of which

my mind is a minute fraction, may be enlightened by so much, be it never

so little"? I think the same noble feeling might animate a citizen with

reference to his native town; I think a good townsman might say to

himself, "Our folks are not much given to the cultivation of their

minds, and they need a few to set them an example. I will be one of

those few. I will work and think, in order that our town may not get

into a state of perfect intellectual stagnation." But if the nation or

the city were too vast to call forth any noble feeling of this kind,

surely the family is little enough and near enough. Might not a man say,

"I will go through a good deal of intellectual drudgery in order that my

wife and children may unconsciously get the benefit of it; I will learn

facts for them that they may be accurate, and get ideas for them that

they may share with me a more elevated mental state; I will do something

towards raising the tone of the whole household"?

The practical difficulty in all projects of this kind is that the

household does not care to be intellectually elevated, and opposes the

resistance of gravitation. The household has its natural intellectual

level, and finds it as inevitably as water that is free. Cultivated men

are surrounded in their homes by a group of persons, wife, children,

servants, who, in their intercourse with one another, create the

household tone. What is a single individual with his books against these

combined and active influences? Is he to go and preach the gospel of the

intellect in the kitchen? Will he venture to present intellectual

conclusions in the drawing-room? The kitchen has a tone of its own

which all our efforts cannot elevate, and the drawing-room has its own

atmosphere, an atmosphere unfavorable to severe and manly thinking. You

cannot make cooks intellectual, and you must not be didactic with

ladies. Intellectual men always feel this difficulty, and most commonly

keep their intellect very much to themselves, when they are at home. If

they have not an outlet elsewhere, either in society or in literature,

they grow morbid.

Yet, although it is useless to attempt to elevate any human being above

his own intellectual level unless he gradually climbs himself as a man

ascends a mountain, there are nevertheless certain charities or

condescendences of the highly cultivated which may be good for the lower

intelligences that surround them, as the streams from the Alpine snows

are good for the irrigation of the valleys, though the meadows which

they water must forever remain eight or ten thousand feet below them.

And I believe that it would greatly add to the happiness of the

intellectual portion of mankind if they could more systematically

exercise these charities. It is quite clear that we can never effect by

chance conversation that total change in the mental state which is

gradually brought about by the slow processes of education; we cannot

give to an intellect that has never been developed, and which has fixed

itself in the undeveloped state, that power and activity which come only

after years of labor; but we may be able on many occasions to offer the

sort of help which a gentleman offers to an old woman when he invites

her to get up into the rumble behind his carriage. I knew an

intellectual lady who lived habitually in the country, and I may say

without fanciful exaggeration that the farmers' wives round about her

were considerably superior to what in all probability they would have

been without the advantage of her kindly and instructive conversation.

She possessed the happy art of conveying the sort of knowledge which

could be readily received by her hearers, and in a manner which made it

agreeable to them, so that they drew ideas from her quite naturally, and

her mind irrigated their minds, which would have remained permanently

barren without that help and refreshment. It would be foolish to

exaggerate the benefits of such intellectual charity as this, but it is

well, on the other hand, not to undervalue it. Such an influence can

never convey much solid instruction, but it may convey some of its

results. It may produce a more thoughtful and reasonable condition of

mind, it may preserve the ignorant from some of those preposterous

theories and beliefs which so easily gain currency amongst them.

Indirectly, it may have rather an important political influence, by

disposing people to vote for the better sort of candidate. And the

influence of such intellectual charity on the material well being of the

humbler classes, on their health and wealth, may be quite as

considerable as that of the other and more common sort of charity which

passes silver from hand to hand.

Shortly after the termination of the great Franco-German conflict, M.

Taine suggested in the _Temps_ that subscribers to the better sort of

journals might do a good deal for the enlightenment of the humbler

classes by merely lending their newspapers in their neighborhood. This

was a good suggestion: the best newspapers are an important intellectual

propaganda; they awaken an interest in the most various subjects, and

supply not only information but a stimulus. The danger to persons of

higher culture that the newspaper may absorb time which would else be

devoted to more systematic study, does not exist in the classes for

whose benefit M. Taine made his recommendation. The newspaper is their

only secular reading, and without it they have no modern literature of

any kind. In addition to the praiseworthy habit of lending good

newspapers, an intellectual man who lives in the country might adopt the

practice of conversing with his neighbors about everything in which they

could be induced to take an interest, giving them some notion of what

goes on in the classes which are intellectually active, some idea of

such discoveries and projects as an untutored mind may partially

understand. For example, there is the great tunnel under the Mont Cenis,

and there is the projected tunnel beneath the Channel, and there is the

cutting of the Isthmus of Suez. A peasant can comprehend the greatness

of these remarkable conceptions when they are properly explained to

him, and he will often feel a lively gratitude for information of that

kind. We ought to remember what a slow and painful operation reading is

to the uneducated. Merely to read the native tongue is to them a labor

so irksome that they are apt to lose the sense of a paragraph in seeking

for that of a sentence or an expression. As they would rather speak than

have to write, so they prefer hearing to reading, and they get much more

good from it, because they can ask a question when the matter has not

been made clear to them.

One of the best ways of interesting and instructing your intellectual

inferiors is to give them an account of your travels. All people like to

hear a traveller tell his own tale, and whilst he is telling it he may

slip in a good deal of information about many things, and much sound

doctrine. Accounts of foreign countries, even when you have not seen

them personally, nearly always awaken a lively interest, especially if

you are able to give your hearers detailed descriptions of the life led

by foreigners who occupy positions corresponding to their own. Peasants

can be made to take an interest in astronomy even, though you cannot

tell them anything about the peasants in Jupiter and Mars, and there is

always, at starting, the great difficulty of persuading them to trust

science about the motion and rotundity of the earth.

A very direct form of intellectual charity is that of gratuitous

teaching, both in classes and by public lectures, open to all comers. A

great deal of light has in this way been spread abroad in cities, but in

country villages there is little encouragement to enterprises of this

kind, the intelligence of farm laborers being less awakened than that of

the corresponding urban population. Let us remember, however, that one

of the very highest and last achievements of the cultivated intellect is

the art of conveying to the uncultivated, the untaught, the unprepared,

the best and noblest knowledge which they are capable of assimilating.

No one who, like the writer of these pages, has lived much in the

country, and much amongst a densely ignorant peasantry, will be likely

in any plans of enlightenment to err far on the side of enthusiastic

hopefulness. The mind of a farm laborer, or that of a small farmer, is

almost always sure to be a remarkably stiff soil, in which few

intellectual conceptions can take root; yet these few may make the

difference between an existence worthy of a man, and one that differs

from the existence of a brute in little beyond the possession of

articulate language. We to whom the rich inheritance of intellectual

humanity is so familiar as to have lost much of its freshness, are

liable to underrate the value of thoughts and discoveries which to us

have for years seemed commonplace. It is with our intellectual as with

our material wealth; we do not realize how precious some fragments of it

might be to our poorer neighbors. The old clothes that we wear no

longer may give comfort and confidence to a man in naked destitution;

the truths which are so familiar to us that we never think about them,

may raise the utterly ignorant to a sense of their human brotherhood.

Above all, in the exercise of our intellectual charities, let us

accustom ourselves to feel satisfied with humble results and small

successes; and here let me make a confession which may be of some

possible use to others. When a young man, I taught a drawing-class

gratuitously, beginning with thirty-six pupils, who dwindled gradually

to eleven. Soon afterwards I gave up the work from dissatisfaction, on

account of the meagre attendance. This was very wrong--the eleven were

worth the thirty-six; and so long as one of the eleven remained I ought

to have contentedly taught him. The success of a teacher is not to be

measured by the numbers whom he immediately influences. It is enough, it

has been proved to be enough in more than one remarkable instance, that

a single living soul should be in unison with the soul of a master, and

receive his thought by sympathy. The one disciple teaches in his turn,

and the idea is propagated.

LETTER IV.

TO THE FRIEND OF A MAN OF HIGH CULTURE WHO PRODUCED NOTHING.

Joubert--"Not yet time," or else "The time is past"--His weakness for

production--Three classes of minds--A more perfect intellectual life

attainable by the silent student than by authors--He may follow his

own genius--Saving of time effected by abstinence from writing--The

unproductive may be more influential than the prolific.

When I met B. at your house last week, you whispered to me in the

drawing-room that he was a man of the most remarkable attainments, who,

to the great regret of all his friends, had never employed his abilities

to any visible purpose. We had not time for a conversation on this

subject, because B. himself immediately joined us. His talk reminded me

very much of Joubert--not that I ever knew Joubert personally, though I

have lived very near to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where Joubert lived; but

he is one of those characters whom it is possible to know without having

seen them in the flesh. His friends used to urge him to write something,

and then he said, "_Pas encore._" "Not yet; I need a long peace."

Tranquillity came, and then he said that God had only given force to his

mind for a limited time, and that the time was past. Therefore, as

Sainte-Beuve observed, for Joubert there was no medium; either it was

not yet time, or else the time was past.

Nothing is more common than for _other_ people to say this of us. They

often say "He is too young," as Napoleon said of Ingres, or else "He is

too old," as Napoleon said of Greuze. It is more rare for a man himself

to shrink from every enterprise, first under the persuasion that he is

unprepared, and afterwards because the time is no longer opportune. Yet

there does exist a certain very peculiar class of highly-gifted,

diffident, delicate, unproductive minds, which impress those around them

with an almost superstitious belief in their possibilities, yet never do

anything to justify that belief.

But may it not be doubted whether these minds _have_ productive power of

any kind? I believe that the full extent of Joubert's productive power

is displayed in those sentences of his which have been preserved, and

which reveal a genius of the rarest delicacy, but at the same time

singularly incapable of sustained intellectual effort. He said that he

could only compose slowly, and with an extreme fatigue. He believed,

however, that the weakness lay in the instrument alone, in the composing

faculties, and not in the faculties of thought, for he said that behind

his weakness there was strength, as behind the strength of some others

there was weakness.

In saying this, it is probable that Joubert did not overestimate

himself. He _had_ strength of a certain kind, or rather he had quality;

he had distinction, which is a sort of strength in society and in

literature. But he had no productive force, and I do not believe that

his unproductiveness was a productiveness checked by a fastidious taste;

I believe that it was real, that he was not organized for production.

Sainte-Beuve said that a modern philosopher was accustomed to

distinguish three classes of minds--

1. Those who are at once powerful and delicate, who excel as they

propose, execute what they conceive, and reach the great and true

beautiful--a rare _elite_ amongst mortals.

2. A class of minds especially characterized by their delicacy, who feel

that their idea is superior to their execution, their intelligence

greater than their talent, even when the talent is very real; they are

easily dissatisfied with themselves, disdain easily won praises, and

would rather judge, taste, and abstain from producing, than remain below

their conception and themselves. Or if they write it is by fragments,

for themselves only, at long intervals and at rare moments. Their

fecundity is internal, and known to few.

3. Lastly, there is a third class of minds more powerful and less

delicate or difficult to please, who go on producing and publishing

themselves without being too much dissatisfied with their work.

The majority of our active painters and writers, who fill modern

exhibitions, and produce the current literature of the day, belong to

the last class, to which we are all greatly indebted for the daily bread

of literature and art.

But Sainte-Beuve believed that Joubert belonged to the second class, and

I suspect that both Sainte-Beuve and many others have credited that

class with a potential productiveness beyond its real endowments. Minds

of the Joubert class are admirable and valuable in their way, but they

are really, and not apparently, sterile.

And why would we have it otherwise? When we lament that a man of culture

has "done nothing," as we say, we mean that he has not written books. Is

it necessary, is it desirable, that every cultivated person should write

books?

On the contrary, it seems that a more perfect intellectual life may be

attained by the silent student than by authors. The writer for the

public is often so far its slave that he is compelled by necessity or

induced by the desire for success (since it is humiliating to write

unsaleable books as well as unprofitable) to deviate from his true path,

to leave the subjects that most interest him for other subjects which

interest him less, and therefore to acquire knowledge rather as a matter

of business than as a labor of love. But the student who never

publishes, and does not intend to publish, may follow his own genius and

take the knowledge which belongs to him by natural affinity. Add to this

the immense saving of time effected by abstinence from writing. Whilst

the writer is polishing his periods, and giving hours to the artistic

exigencies of mere form, the reader is adding to his knowledge.

Thackeray said that writers were not great readers, because they had not

the time.