THE MANAGEMENT OF CHARACTER
Of all the tasks which are set before man in life, the education and
management of his character is the most important, and, in order that it
should be successfully pursued, it is necessary that he should make a
calm and careful survey of his own tendencies, unblinded either by the
self-deception which conceals errors and magnifies excellences, or by
the indiscriminate pessimism which refuses to recognise his powers for
good. He must avoid the fatalism which would persuade him that he has no
power over his nature, and he must also clearly recognise that this
power is not unlimited. Man is like a card-player who receives from
Nature his cards--his disposition, his circumstances, the strength or
weakness of his will, of his mind, and of his body. The game of life is
one of blended chance and skill. The best player will be defeated if he
has hopelessly bad cards, but in the long run the skill of the player
will not fail to tell. The power of man over his character bears much
resemblance to his power over his body. Men come into the world with
bodies very unequal in their health and strength; with hereditary
dispositions to disease; with organs varying greatly in their normal
condition. At the same time a temperate or intemperate life, skilful or
unskilful regimen, physical exercises well adapted to strengthen the
weaker parts, physical apathy, vicious indulgence, misdirected or
excessive effort, will all in their different ways alter his bodily
condition and increase or diminish his chances of disease and premature
death. The power of will over character is, however, stronger, or, at
least, wider than its power over the body. There are organs which lie
wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can
exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral
constitution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.
It has often seemed to me that diversities of taste throw much light on
the basis of character. Why is it that the same dish gives one man keen
pleasure and to another is loathsome and repulsive? To this simple
question no real answer can be given. It is a fact of our nature that
one fruit, or meat, or drink will give pleasure to one palate and none
whatever to another. At the same time, while the original and natural
difference is undoubted, there are many differences which are wholly or
largely due to particular and often transitory causes. Dishes have an
attraction or the reverse because they are associated with old
recollections or habits. Habit will make a Frenchman like his melon with
salt, while an Englishman prefers it with sugar. An old association of
ideas will make an Englishman shrink from eating a frog or a snail,
though he would probably like each if he ate it without knowing it, and
he could easily learn to do so. The kind of cookery which one age or one
nation generally likes, another age or another nation finds distasteful.
The eye often governs the taste, and a dish which, when seen, excites
intense repulsion, would have no such repulsion to a blind man. Every
one who has moved much about the world, and especially in uncivilised
countries, will get rid of many old antipathies, will lose the
fastidiousness of his taste, and will acquire new and genuine tastes.
The original innate difference is not wholly destroyed, but it is
profoundly and variously modified.
These changes of taste are very analogous to what takes place in our
moral dispositions. They are for the most part in themselves simply
external to morals, though there is at least one conspicuous exception.
Many--it is to be hoped most--men might spend their lives with full
access to intoxicating liquors without even the temptation of getting
drunk. Apart from all considerations of religion, morals, social,
physical, or intellectual consequences, they abstain from doing so
simply as a matter of taste. With other men the pleasure of excessive
drinking is such that it requires an heroic effort of the will to resist
it. There are men who not only are so constituted that it is their
greatest pleasure, but who are even born with a craving for drink. In no
form is the terrible fact of heredity more clearly or more tragically
displayed. Many, too, who had originally no such craving gradually
acquire it: sometimes by mere social influence, which makes excessive
drinking the habit of their circle; more frequently through depression
or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which
they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body
which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless,
joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures,
if viciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an
intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case
with all our pleasures. Many are keenly enjoyed when present, yet not
seriously missed when absent. Sometimes, too, the effect of
over-indulgence is to vitiate and deaden the palate, so that what was
once pleasing ceases altogether to be an object of desire. This, too,
has its analogue in other things. We have a familiar example in the
excessive novel-reader, who begins with a kind of mental intoxication,
and who ends with such a weariness that he finds it a serious effort to
read the books which were once his strongest temptation.
Tastes of the palate also naturally change with age and with the
accompanying changes of the body. The schoolboy who bitterly repines
because the smallness of his allowance restricts his power of buying
tarts and sweetmeats will probably grow into a man who, with many
shillings in his pocket, daily passes the confectioner's shop without
the smallest desire to enter it.
It is evident that there is a close analogy between these things and
that collection of likes and dislikes, moral and intellectual, which
forms the primal base of character, and which mainly determines the
complexion of our lives. As Marcus Aurelius said: 'Who can change the
desires of man?' That which gives the strongest habitual pleasure,
whether it be innate or acquired, will in the great majority of cases
ultimately dominate. Certain things will always be intensely
pleasurable, and certain other things indifferent or repellent, and this
magnetism is the true basis of character, and with the majority of men
it mainly determines conduct. By the associations of youth and by other
causes these natural likings and dislikings may be somewhat modified,
but even in youth our power is very limited, and in later life it is
much less. No real believer in free-will will hold that man is an
absolute slave to his desires. No man who knows the world will deny that
with average man the strongest passion or desire will prevail--happy
when that desire is not a vice.
Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great
task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which
are most productive of happiness in life. Here, as in most other things,
opposite exaggerations are to be avoided. There is such a thing as
looking forward too rigidly and too exclusively to the future--to a
future that may never arrive. This is the great fault of the
over-educationist, who makes early life a burden and a toil, and also of
those who try to impose on youth the tastes and pleasures of the man.
Youth has its own pleasures, which will always give it most enjoyment,
and a happy youth is in itself an end. It is the time when the power of
enjoyment is most keen, and it is often accompanied by such extreme
sensitiveness that the sufferings of the child for what seem the most
trivial causes probably at least equal in acuteness, though not in
durability, the sufferings of a man. Many a parent standing by the
coffin of his child has felt with bitterness how much of the measure of
enjoyment that short life might have known has been cut off by an
injudicious education. And even if adult life is attained, the evils of
an unhappy childhood are seldom wholly compensated. The pleasures of
retrospect are among the most real we possess, and it is around our
childish days that our fondest associations naturally cluster. An early
over-strain of our powers often leaves behind it lasting distortion or
weakness, and a sad childhood introduces into the character elements of
morbidness and bitterness that will not disappear.
The first great rule in judging of pleasures is that so well expressed
by Seneca: 'Sic præsentibus utaris voluptatibus ut futuris non
noceas'--so to use present pleasures as not to impair future ones.
Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, habitual extravagance and
self-indulgence, if they become the pleasures of youth, will almost
infallibly lead to the ruin of a life. Pleasures that are in themselves
innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main
object of pursuit.
In starting in life we are apt to attach a disproportionate value to
tastes, pleasures, and ideals that can only be even approximately
satisfied in youth, health, and strength. We have, I think, an example
of this in the immense place which athletic games and out-of-door sports
have taken in modern English life. They are certainly not things to be
condemned. They have the direct effect of giving a large amount of
intense and innocent pleasure, and they have indirect effects which are
still more important. In so far as they raise the level of physical
strength and health, and dispel the morbidness of temperament which is
so apt to accompany a sedentary life and a diseased or inert frame, they
contribute powerfully to lasting happiness. They play a considerable
part in the formation of friendships which is one of the best fruits of
the period between boyhood and mature manhood. Some of them give lessons
of courage, perseverance, energy, self-restraint, and cheerful
acquiescence in disappointment and defeat that are of no small value in
the formation of character, and when they are not associated with
gambling they have often the inestimable advantage of turning young men
away from vicious pleasures. At the same time it can hardly be doubted
that they hold an exaggerated prominence in the lives of young
Englishmen of the present generation. It is not too much to say that
among large sections of the students at our Universities, and at a time
when intellectual ambition ought to be most strong and when the
acquisition of knowledge is most important, proficiency in cricket or
boating or football is more prized than any intellectual achievement. I
have heard a good judge, who had long been associated with English
University life, express his opinion that during the last forty or fifty
years the relative intellectual position of the upper and middle classes
in England has been materially changed, owing to the disproportioned
place which outdoor amusements have assumed in the lives of the former.
It is the impression of very competent judges that a genuine love,
reverence and enthusiasm for intellectual things is less common among
the young men of the present day than it was in the days of their
fathers. The predominance of the critical spirit which chills
enthusiasm, and still more the cram system which teaches young men to
look on the prizes that are to be won by competitive examinations as the
supreme end of knowledge, no doubt largely account for this, but much
is also due to the extravagant glorification of athletic games.
If we compare the class of pleasures I have described with the taste for
reading and kindred intellectual pleasures, the superiority of the
latter is very manifest. To most young men, it is true, a game will
probably give at least as much pleasure as a book. Nor must we measure
the pleasure of reading altogether by the language of the genuine
scholar. It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would
not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very
many would agree with him; but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural
love of knowledge, and the weak health of his early life intensified
this predominant passion. But while the tastes which require physical
strength decline or pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It
is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most
easily satisfied, one of the cheapest, one of the least dependent on
age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid
through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours
of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes
ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an
active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and
sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful
means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. It
is eminently a pleasure which is not only good in itself but enhances
many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our
powers of sympathy and appreciation, it adds incalculably to the
pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of
art, to the interest we take in the vast variety of events which form
the great world-drama around us.
To acquire this taste in early youth is one of the best fruits of
education, and it is especially useful when the taste for reading
becomes a taste for knowledge, and when it is accompanied by some
specialisation and concentration and by some exercise of the powers of
observation. 'Many tastes and one hobby' is no bad ideal to be aimed at.
The boy who learns to collect and classify fossils, or flowers, or
insects, who has acquired a love for chemical experiments, who has begun
to form a taste for some particular kind or department of knowledge, has
laid the foundation of much happiness in life.
In the selection of pleasures and the cultivation of tastes much wisdom
is shown in choosing in such a way that each should form a complement to
the others; that different pleasures should not clash, but rather cover
different areas and seasons of life; that each should tend to correct
faults or deficiencies of character which the others may possibly
produce. The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and
also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means
of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements
of happiness as mere amusements can ever furnish. One set of pleasures,
however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in
themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better
things, exercise an injurious influence on character. Habitual
novel-reading, for example, often destroys the taste for serious
literature, and few things tend so much to impair a sound literary
perception and to vulgarise the character as the habit of constantly
saturating the mind with inferior literature, even when that literature
is in no degree immoral. Sometimes an opposite evil may be produced.
Excessive fastidiousness greatly limits our enjoyments, and the
inestimable gift of extreme concentration is often dearly bought. The
well-known confession of Darwin that his intense addiction to science
had destroyed his power of enjoying even the noblest imaginative
literature represents a danger to which many men who have achieved much
in the higher and severer forms of scientific thought are subject. Such
men are usually by their original temperament, and become still more by
acquired habit, men of strong, narrow, concentrated natures, whose
thoughts, like a deep and rapid stream confined in a restricted channel,
flow with resistless energy in one direction. It is by the sacrifice of
versatility that they do so much, and the result is amply sufficient to
justify it. But it is a real sacrifice, depriving them of many forms
both of capacity and of enjoyment.
The same pleasures act differently on different characters, especially
on the differences of character that accompany difference of sex. I have
myself no doubt that the movement which in modern times has so widely
opened to women amusements that were once almost wholly reserved for men
has been on the whole a good one. It has produced a higher level of
health, stronger nerves, and less morbid characters, and it has given
keen and innocent enjoyment to many who from their circumstances and
surroundings once found their lives very dreary and insipid. Yet most
good observers will agree that amusements which have no kind of evil
effect on men often in some degree impair the graces or characters of
women, and that it is not quite with impunity that one sex tries to live
the life of the other. Some pleasures, too, exercise a much larger
influence than others on the general habits of life. It is not too much
to say that the invention of the bicycle, bringing with it an immense
increase of outdoor life, of active exercise, and of independent habits,
has revolutionised the course of many lives. Some amusements which may
in themselves be but little valued are wisely cultivated as helping men
to move more easily in different spheres of society, or as providing a
resource for old age. Talleyrand was not wholly wrong in his reproach to
a man who had never learned to play whist: 'What an unhappy old age you
are preparing for yourself!'
I have already mentioned the differences that may be found in different
countries and ages, in the relative importance attached to external
circumstances and to dispositions of mind as means of happiness, and the
tendency in the more progressive nations to seek their happiness mainly
in improved circumstances. Another great line of distinction is between
education that acts specially upon the desires, and that which acts
specially upon the will. The great perfection of modern systems of
education is chiefly of the former kind. Its object is to make knowledge
and virtue attractive, and therefore an object of desire. It does so
partly by presenting them in the most alluring forms, partly by
connecting them as closely as possible with rewards. The great principle
of modern moral education is to multiply innocent and beneficent
interests, tastes, and ambitions. It is to make the path of virtue the
natural, the easy, the pleasing one; to form a social atmosphere
favourable to its development, making duty and interest as far as
possible coincident. Vicious pleasures are combated by the
multiplication of healthy ones, and by a clearer insight into the
consequences of each. An idle or inert character is stimulated by
holding up worthy objects of interest and ambition, and it is the aim
alike of the teacher and the legislator to make the grooves and channels
of life such as tend naturally and easily towards good. But the
education of the will--the power of breasting the current of the desires
and doing for long periods what is distasteful and painful--is much less
cultivated than in some periods of the past.
Many things contribute to this. The rush and hurry of modern existence
and the incalculable multitude and variety of fleeting impressions that
in the great centres of civilisation pass over the mind are very
unfavourable to concentration, and perhaps still more to the direct
cultivation of mental states. Amusements, and the appetite for
amusements, have greatly extended. Life has become more full. The long
leisures, the introspective habits, the _vita contemplativa_ so
conspicuous in the old Catholic discipline, grow very rare. Thoughts and
interests are more thrown on the external; and the comfort, the luxury,
the softness, the humanity of modern life, and especially of modern
education, make men less inclined to face the disagreeable and endure
the painful.
The starting-point of education is thus silently changing. Perhaps the
extent of the change is best shown by the old Catholic ascetic training.
Its supreme object was to discipline and strengthen the will: to
accustom men habitually to repudiate the pleasurable and accept the
painful; to mortify the most natural tastes and affections; to narrow
and weaken the empire of the desires; to make men wholly independent of
outward circumstances; to preach self-renunciation as itself an end.
Men will always differ about the merits of this system. In my own
opinion it is difficult to believe that in the period of Catholic
ascendency the moral standard was, on the whole and in its broad lines,
higher than our own. The repression of the sensual instincts was the
central fact in ascetic morals; but, even tested by this test, it is at
least very doubtful whether it did not fail. The withdrawal from secular
society of the best men did much to restrict the influences for good,
and the habit of aiming at an unnatural ideal was not favourable to
common, everyday, domestic virtue. The history of sacerdotal and
monastic celibacy abundantly shows how much vice that might easily have
been avoided grew out of the adoption of an unnatural standard, and how
often it led in those who had attained it to grave distortions of
character. Affections and impulses which were denied their healthy and
natural vent either became wholly atrophied or took other and morbid
forms, and the hard, cruel, self-righteous fanatic, equally ready to
endure or to inflict suffering, was a not unnatural result. But
whatever may have been its failures and its exaggerations, Catholic
asceticism was at least a great school for disciplining and
strengthening the will, and the strength and discipline of the will form
one of the first elements of virtue and of happiness.
In the grave and noble type of character which prevailed in English and
American life during the seventeenth century, the strength of will was
conspicuously apparent. Life was harder, simpler, more serious, and less
desultory than at present, and strong convictions shaped and fortified
the character. 'It was an age,' says a great American writer, 'when what
we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive
materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal
more. The people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence,
which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller
proportion and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and
estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is
partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these
rude shores, having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank
behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong
in him, bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on
long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience; on
endowments of that grave and weighty order which give the idea of
permanence and come under the general definition of respectability.
These primitive statesmen, therefore,--Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley,
Bellingham, and their compeers,--who were elevated to power by the
early choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but
distinguished by a ponderous sobriety rather than activity of intellect.
They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril
stood up for the welfare of the State like a line of cliffs against a
tempestuous tide.'[61]
The power of the will, however, even when it exists in great strength,
is often curiously capricious. History is full of examples of men who in
great trials and emergencies have acted with admirable and persevering
heroism, yet who readily succumbed to private vices or passions. The
will is not the same as the desires, but the connection between them is
very close. A love for a distant end; a dominating ambition or passion,
will call forth long perseverance in wholly distasteful work in men
whose will in other fields of life is lamentably feeble. Every one who
has embarked with real earnestness in some extended literary enterprise
which as a whole represents the genuine bent of his talent and character
will be struck with his exceptional power of traversing perseveringly
long sections of this enterprise for which he has no natural aptitude
and in which he takes no pleasure. Military courage is with most men
chiefly a matter of temperament and impulse, but there have been
conspicuous instances of great soldiers and sailors who have frankly
acknowledged that they never lost in battle an intense constitutional
shrinking from danger, though by the force of a strong will they never
suffered this timidity to govern or to weaken them. With men of very
vivid imagination there is a natural tendency to timidity as they
realise more than ordinary men danger and suffering. On the other hand
it has often been noticed how calmly the callous, semi-torpid
temperament that characterises many of the worst criminals enables them
to meet death upon the gallows.
In courage itself, too, there are many varieties. The courage of the
soldier and the courage of the martyr are not the same, and it by no
means follows that either would possess that of the other. Not a few men
who are capable of leading a forlorn hope, and who never shrink from the
bayonet and the cannon, have shown themselves incapable of bearing the
burden of responsibility, enduring long-continued suspense, taking
decisions which might expose them to censure or unpopularity. The active
courage that encounters and delights in danger is often found in men who
show no courage in bearing suffering, misfortune, or disease. In passive
courage the woman often excels the man as much as in active courage the
man exceeds the woman. Even in active courage familiarity does much;
sympathy and enthusiasm play great and often very various parts, and
curious anomalies may be found. The Teutonic and the Latin races are
probably equally distinguished for their military courage, but there is
a clear difference between them in the nature of that courage and in the
circumstances or conditions under which it is usually most splendidly
displayed. The danger incurred by the gladiator was far greater than
that which was encountered by the soldier, but Tacitus[62] mentions
that when some of the bravest gladiators were employed in the Roman
army they were found wholly inefficient, as they were much less capable
than the ordinary soldiers of military courage.
The circumstances of life are the great school for forming and
strengthening the will, and in the excessive competition and struggle of
modern industrialism this school is not wanting. But in ethical and
educational systems the value of its cultivation is often insufficiently
felt. Yet nothing which is learned in youth is so really valuable as the
power and the habit of self-restraint, of self-sacrifice, of energetic,
continuous and concentrated effort. In the best of us evil tendencies
are always strong and the path of duty is often distasteful. With the
most favourable wind and tide the bark will never arrive at the harbour
if it has ceased to obey the rudder. A weak nature which is naturally
kindly, affectionate and pure, which floats through life under the
impulse of the feelings, with no real power of self-restraint, is indeed
not without its charm, and in a well-organised society, with good
surroundings and few temptations, it may attain a high degree of beauty;
but its besetting failings will steadily grow; without fortitude,
perseverance and principle, it has no recuperative energy, and it will
often end in a moral catastrophe which natures in other respects much
less happily compounded would easily avoid. Nothing can permanently
secure our moral being in the absence of a restraining will basing
itself upon a strong sense of the difference between right and wrong,
upon the firm groundwork of principle and honour.
Experience abundantly shows how powerfully the steady action of such a
will can operate upon innate defects, converting the constitutional
idler into the indefatigably industrious, checking, limiting and
sometimes almost destroying constitutional irritability and vicious
passions. The natural power of the will in different men differs
greatly, but there is no part of our nature which is more strengthened
by exercise or more weakened by disuse. The minor faults of character it
can usually correct; but when a character is once formed, and when its
tendencies are essentially vicious, radical cure or even considerable
amelioration is very rare. Sometimes the strong influence of religion
effects it. Sometimes it is effected by an illness, a great misfortune,
or the total change of associations that follows emigration. Marriage
perhaps more frequently than any other ordinary agency in early life
transforms or deeply modifies the character, for it puts an end to
powerful temptations and brings with it a profound change of habits and
motives, associations and desires. But we have all of us encountered in
life depraved natures in which vicious self-indulgence had attained such
a strength, and the recuperating and moralising elements were so fatally
weak, that we clearly perceive the disease to be incurable, and that it
is hardly possible that any change of circumstances could even seriously
mitigate it. In what proportion this is the fault or the calamity of the
patient no human judgment can accurately tell.
Few things are sadder than to observe how frequently the inheritance of
great wealth or even of easy competence proves the utter and speedy ruin
of a young man, except when the administration of a large property, or
the necessity of carrying on a great business, or some other propitious
circumstance provides him with a clearly defined sphere of work. The
majority of men will gladly discard distasteful work which their
circumstances do not require; and in the absence of steady work, and in
the possession of all the means of gratification, temptations assume an
overwhelming strength, and the springs of moral life are fatally
impaired. It can hardly be doubted that the average longevity in this
small class is far less than in that of common men, and that even when
natural capacity is considerable it is more rarely displayed. To a man
with a real desire for work such circumstances are indeed of inestimable
value, giving him the leisure and the opportunities of applying himself
without distraction and from early manhood to the kind of work that is
most suited to him. Sometimes this takes place, but much more frequently
vicious tastes or a simply idle or purposeless life are the result.
Sometimes, indeed, a large amount of desultory and unregulated energy
remains, but the serious labour of concentration is shunned and no real
result is attained. The stream is there, but it turns no mill.
Most men escape this danger through the circumstances of life which make
serious and steady work necessary to their livelihood, and in the
majority of cases the kind of work is so clearly marked out that they
have little choice. When some choice exists, the rule which I have
already laid down should not be forgotten. Men should choose their work
not only according to their talents and their opportunities, but also,
as far as possible, according to their characters. They should select
the kinds which are most fitted to bring their best qualities into
exercise, or should at least avoid those which have a special tendency
to develop or encourage their dominant defects. On the whole it will be
found that men's characters are much more deeply influenced by their
pursuits than by their opinions.
The choice of work is one of the great agencies for the management of
character in youth. The choice of friends is another. In the words of
Burke, 'The law of opinion ... is the strongest principle in the
composition of the frame of the human mind, and more of the happiness
and unhappiness of man reside in that inward principle than in all
external circumstances put together.'[63] This is true of the great
public opinion of an age or country which envelops us like an
atmosphere, and by its silent pressure steadily and almost insensibly
shapes or influences the whole texture of our lives. It is still more
true of the smaller circle of our intimacies which will do more than
almost any other thing to make the path of virtue easy or difficult. How
large a proportion of the incentives to a noble ambition, or of the
first temptations to evil, may be traced to an early friendship, and it
is often in the little circle that gathers round a college table that
the measure of life is first taken, and ideals and enthusiasms are
formed which give a colour to all succeeding years. To admire strongly
and to admire wisely is, indeed, one of the best means of moral
improvement.
Very much, however, of the management of character can only be
accomplished by the individual himself acting in complete isolation upon
his own nature and in the chamber of his own mind. The discipline of
thought; the establishment of an ascendency of the will over our courses
of thinking; the power of casting away morbid trains of reflection and
turning resolutely to other subjects or aspects of life; the power of
concentrating the mind vigorously on a serious subject and pursuing
continuous trains of thought,--form perhaps the best fruits of judicious
self-education. Its importance, indeed, is manifold. In the higher walks
of intellect this power of mental concentration is of supreme value.
Newton is said to have ascribed mainly to an unusual amount of it his
achievements in philosophy, and it is probable that the same might be
said by most other great thinkers. In the pursuit of happiness hardly
anything in external circumstances is so really valuable as the power of
casting off worry, turning in times of sorrow to healthy work, taking
habitually the brighter view of things. It is in such exercises of will
that we chiefly realise the truth of the lines of Tennyson:
Oh, well for him whose will is strong,
He suffers, but he will not suffer long.
In moral culture it is not less important to acquire the power of
discarding the demoralising thoughts and imaginations that haunt so
many, and meeting temptation by calling up purer, higher and restraining
thoughts. The faculty we possess of alternating and intensifying our own
motives by bringing certain thoughts, or images, or subjects into the
foreground and throwing others into the background, is one of our chief
means of moral progress. The cultivation of this power is a far wiser
thing than the cultivation of that introspective habit of mind which is
perpetually occupied with self-analysis or self-examination, and which
is constantly and remorsefully dwelling upon past faults or upon the
morbid elements in our nature. In the morals which are called minor,
though they affect deeply the happiness of mankind, the importance of
the government of thought is not less apparent. The secret of good or
bad temper is our habitual tendency to dwell upon or to fly from the
irritating and the inevitable. Content or discontent, amiability or the
reverse, depend mainly upon the disposition of our minds to turn
specially to the good or to the evil sides of our own lot, to the merits
or to the defects of those about us. A power of turning our thoughts
from a given subject, though not the sole element in self-control, is at
least one of its most important ingredients.
This power of the will over the thoughts is one in which men differ
enormously. Thus--to take the most familiar instance--the capacity for
worry, with all the exaggerations and distortions of sentiment it
implies, is very evidently a constitutional thing, and where it exists
to a high degree neither reason nor will can effectually cure it. Such a
man may have the clearest possible intellectual perception of its
uselessness and its folly. Yet it will often banish sleep from his
pillow, follow him with an habitual depression in all the walks of life,
and make his measure of happiness much less than that of others who with
far less propitious circumstances are endued by nature with the gift of
lightly throwing off the past and looking forward with a sanguine and
cheerful spirit to the future. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the
different degrees of suffering the same trouble will produce in
different men, and it is probable that the happiness of a life depends
much less on the amount of pleasurable or painful things that are
encountered, than upon the turn of thought which dwells chiefly on one
or on the other. It is very evident that buoyancy of temperament is not
a thing that increases with civilisation or education. It is mainly
physical. It is greatly influenced by climate and by health, and where
no very clear explanation of this kind can be given it is a thing in
which different nations differ greatly. Few good observers will deny
that persistent and concentrated will is more common in Great Britain
than in Ireland, but that the gift of a buoyant temperament is more
common among Irishmen than among Englishmen. Yet it co-exists in the
national character with a strong vein of very genuine melancholy, and it
is often accompanied by keen sensitiveness to suffering. This
combination is a very common one. Every one who has often stood by a
deathbed knows how frequently it will be found that the mourner who is
utterly prostrated by grief, and whose tears flow in torrents, casts off
her grief much more completely and much sooner than one whose tears
refuse to flow and who never for a moment loses her self-command.
But though natural temperament enables one man to do without effort what
another man with the utmost effort fails to accomplish, there are some
available remedies that can palliate the disease. Society, travel and
other amusements can do something, and such words as 'diversion' and
'distraction' embalm the truth that the chief virtue of many pleasures
is to divert or distract our minds from painful thoughts. Pascal
considered this a sign of the misery and the baseness of our nature, and
he describes as a deplorable spectacle a man who rose from his bed
weighed down with anxiety and grave sorrow, and who could for a time
forget it all in the passionate excitement of the chase. But, in truth,
the possession of such a power--weak and transient though it be--is one
of the great alleviations of the lot of man. Religion, with its powerful
motives and its wide range of consolatory and soothing thoughts and
images, has much power in this sphere when it does not take a morbid
form and intensify instead of alleviating sorrow; and the steady
exercise of the will gives us some real and increasing, though
imperfect, control over the current of our feelings as well as of our
ideas.
Often the power of dreaming comes to our aid. When we cannot turn from
some painfully pressing thought to serious thinking of another kind, we
can give the reins to our imaginations and soon lose ourselves in ideal
scenes. There are men who live so habitually in a world of imagination
that it becomes to them a second life, and their strongest temptations
and their keenest pleasures belong to it. To them 'common life seems
tapestried with dreams.' Not unfrequently they derive a pleasure from
imagined or remembered enjoyments which the realities themselves would
fail to give. They select in imagination certain aspects or portions,
throw others into the shade, intensify or attenuate impressions,
transform and beautify the reality of things. The power of filling their
existence with happy day-dreams is their most precious luxury. They feel
the full force of the pathetic lines of an Irish poet:[64]
Sweet thoughts, bright dreams my comfort be,
I have no joy beside;
Oh, throng around and be to me
Power, country, fame and bride.
To train this side of our nature is no small part of the management of
character. There is a great sphere of happiness and misery which is
almost or altogether unconnected with surrounding circumstances, and
depends upon the thoughts, images, hopes and fears on which our minds
are chiefly concentrated. The exercise of this form of imagination has
often a great influence, both intellectually and morally. In childhood,
as every teacher knows, it is often a distracting influence, and with
men also it is sometimes an obstacle to concentrated reasoning and
observation, turning the mind away from sober and difficult thought; but
there is a kind of dreaming which is eminently conducive to productive
thought. It enables a man to place himself so completely in other
conditions of thought and life that the ideas connected with those
conditions rise spontaneously in the mind. A true and vivid realisation
of characters and circumstances unlike his own is acquired. The mere
fact of placing himself in other circumstances and investing himself
with imaginary powers and functions sometimes suggests possible remedies
for great human ills, and gives clearer views of the proportions,
difficulties and conditions of governments and societies. Much discovery
in science has been due to this power of the imagination to realise
conditions that are unseen, and the habit or faculty of living other
lives than our own is scarcely less valuable to the historian, and even
to the statesman, than to the poet or the novelist or the dramatist. It
gives the magic touch which changes mere lifeless knowledge into
realisation.
Its effect upon character also is great and various. No one can fail to
recognise the depraving influence of a corrupt imagination; and the
corruption may spring, not only from suggestions from without, but from
those which rise spontaneously in our minds. Nor is even the imagination
which is wholly pure absolutely without its dangers. It is a well-known
law of our nature that an excessive indulgence in emotion that does not
end in action tends rather to deaden than to stimulate the moral nerve.
It has been often noticed that the exaggerated sentimentality which
sheds passionate tears over the fictitious sorrows of a novel or a play
is no certain sign of a benevolent and unselfish nature, and is quite
compatible with much indifference to real sorrows and much indisposition
to make efforts for their alleviation. It is, however, no less true, as
Dugald Stewart says, that the apparent coldness and selfishness of men
are often simply due to a want of that kind of imagination which enables
us to realise sufferings with which we have never been brought into
direct contact, and that once this power of realisation is acquired, the
coldness is speedily dispelled. Nor can it be doubted that in the
management of thought, the dream power often plays a most important part
in alleviating human suffering; illuminating cheerless and gloomy lives,
and breaking the chain of evil or distressing thoughts.
The immense place which the literature of fiction holds in the world
shows how widely some measure of it is diffused, and how large an amount
of time and talent is devoted to its cultivation. It is probable,
however, that it is really stronger in the earlier and uncultivated than
in the later stages of humanity, as it is more vivid in childhood and in
youth than in mature life. 'A child,' as an American writer[65] has well
said, 'can afford to sleep without dreaming; he has plenty of dreams
without sleep.' The childhood of the world is also eminently an age of
dreams. There are stages of civilisation in which the dream world blends
so closely with the world of realities, in which the imagination so
habitually and so spontaneously transfigures or distorts, that men
become almost incapable of distinguishing between the real and the
fictitious. This is the true age of myths and legends; and there are
strata in contemporary society in which something of the same conditions
is reproduced. 'To those who do not read or write much,' says an acute
observer, 'even in our days, dreams are much more real than to those who
are continually exercising the imagination.... Since I have been
occupied with literature my dreams have lost all vividness and are less
real than the shadows of the trees; they do not deceive me even in my
sleep. At every hour of the day I am accustomed to call up figures at
will before my eyes, which stand out well defined and coloured to the
very hue of their faces.... The less literary a people the more they
believe in dreams; the disappearance of superstition is not due to the
cultivation of reason or the spread of knowledge, but purely to the
mechanical effect of reading, which so perpetually puts figures and
aërial shapes before the mental gaze that in time those that occur
naturally are thought no more of than those conjured into existence by a
book. It is in far-away country places, where people read very little,
that they see phantoms and consult the oracles of fate. Their dreams are
real.'[66]
The last point I would notice in the management of character is the
importance of what may be called moral safety-valves. One of the most
fatal mistakes in education is the attempt which is so often made by the
educator to impose his own habits and tastes on natures that are
essentially different. It is common for men of lymphatic temperaments,
of studious, saintly, and retiring tastes, to endeavor to force a
high-spirited young man starting in life into their own mould--to
prescribe for him the cast of tastes and pursuits they find most suited
for themselves, forgetting that such an ideal can never satisfy a wholly
different nature, and that in aiming at it a kind of excellence which
might easily have been attained is missed. This is one of the evils
that very frequently arise when the education of boys after an early age
is left in the hands of women. It is the true explanation of the fact,
which has so often been noticed, that children of clergymen, or at least
children educated on a rigidly austere, puritanical system, so often go
conspicuously to the bad. Such an education, imposed on a nature that is
unfit for it, generally begins by producing hypocrisy, and not
unfrequently ends by a violent reaction into vice. There is no greater
mistake in education than to associate virtue in early youth with gloomy
colours and constant restrictions, and few people do more mischief in
the world than those who are perpetually inventing crimes. In circles
where smoking, or field sports, or going to the play, or reading novels,
or indulging in any boisterous games or in the most harmless Sunday
amusements, are treated as if they were grave moral offences, young men
constantly grow up who end by looking on grave moral offences as not
worse than these things. They lose all sense of proportion and
perspective in morals, and those who are always straining at gnats are
often peculiarly apt to swallow camels. It is quite right that men who
have formed for themselves an ideal of life of the kind that I have
described should steadily pursue it, but it is another thing to impose
it upon others, and to prescribe it as of general application. By
teaching as absolutely wrong things that are in reality only culpable in
their abuse or their excess, they destroy the habit of moderate and
restrained enjoyment, and a period of absolute prohibition is often
followed by a period of unrestrained license.
The truth is there are elements in human nature which many moralists
might wish to be absent, as they are very easily turned in the direction
of vice, but which at the same time are inherent in our being, and, if
rightly understood, are essential elements of human progress. The love
of excitement and adventure; the fierce combative instinct that delights
in danger, in struggle, and even in destruction; the restless ambition
that seeks with an insatiable longing to better its position and to
climb heights that are yet unscaled; the craving for some enjoyment
which not merely gives pleasure but carries with it a thrill of
passion,--all this lies deep in human nature and plays a great part in
that struggle for existence, in that harsh and painful process of
evolution by which civilisation is formed, faculty stimulated to its
full development, and human progress secured. In the education of the
individual, as in the education of the race, the true policy in dealing
with these things is to find for them a healthy, useful, or at least
harmless sphere of action. In the chemistry of character they may ally
themselves with the most heroic as well as with the worst parts of our
nature, and the same passion for excitement which in one man will take
the form of ruinous vice, in another may lead to brilliant enterprise,
while in a third it may be turned with no great difficulty into channels
which are very innocent.
Take, for example, the case to which I have already referred, of a
perfectly commonplace boy who, on coming of age, finds himself with a
competence that saves him from the necessity of work; and who has no
ambition, literary or artistic taste, love of work, interest in
politics, religious or philanthropic earnestness, or special talent.
What will become of him? In probably the majority of cases ruin,
disease, and an early death lie before him. He seeks only for amusement
and excitement, and three fatal temptations await him--drink, gambling,
and women. If he falls under the dominion of these, or even of one of
them, he almost infallibly wrecks either his fortune or his
constitution, or both. It is perfectly useless to set before him high
motives or ideals, or to incite him to lines of life for which he has no
aptitude and which can give him no pleasure. What, then, can save him?
Most frequently a happy marriage; but even if he is fortunate enough to
attain this, it will probably only be after several years, and in those
years a fatal bias is likely to be given to his life which can never be
recovered. Yet experience shows that in cases of this kind a keen love
of sport can often do much. With his gun and with his hunter he finds an
interest, an excitement, an employment which may not be particularly
noble, but which is at least sufficiently absorbing, and is not
injurious either to his morals, his health, or his fortune. It is no
small gain if, in the competition of pleasures, country pleasures take
the place of those town pleasures which, in such cases as I have
described, usually mean pleasures of vice.
Nor is it by any means only in such cases that field sports prove a
great moral safety-valve, scattering morbid tastes and giving harmless
and healthy vent to turns of character or feeling which might very
easily be converted into vice. Among the influences that form the
character of the upper classes of Englishmen they have a great part,
and in spite of the exaggerations and extravagances that often accompany
them, few good observers will doubt that they have an influence for
good. However much of the Philistine element there may be in the upper
classes in England, however manifest may be their limitations and their
defects, there can be little doubt that on the whole the conditions of
English life have in this sphere proved successful. There are few better
working types within the reach of commonplace men than that of an
English gentleman with his conventional tastes, standard of honour,
religion, sympathies, ideals, opinions and instincts. He is not likely
to be either a saint or a philosopher, but he is tolerably sure to be
both an honourable and a useful man, with a fair measure of good sense
and moderation, and with some disposition towards public duties. A crowd
of out-of-door amusements and interests do much to dispel his peccant
humours and to save him from the stagnation and the sensuality that have
beset many foreign aristocracies. County business stimulates his
activity, mitigates his class prejudices, and forms his judgment: and
his standard of honour will keep him substantially right amid much
fluctuation of opinions.
The reader, from his own experience of individual characters, will
supply other illustrations of the lines of thought I am enforcing. Some
temptations that beset us must be steadily faced and subdued. Others are
best met by flight--by avoiding the thoughts or scenes that call them
into activity; while other elements of character which we might wish to
be away are often better treated in the way of marriage--that is by a
judicious regulation and harmless application--than in the way of
asceticism or attempted suppression. It is possible for men--if not in
educating themselves, at least in educating others--to pitch their
standard and their ideal too high. What they have to do is to recognise
their own qualities and the qualities of those whom they influence as
they are, and endeavour to use these usually very imperfect materials to
the best advantage for the formation of useful, honourable and happy
lives. According to the doctrine of this book, man comes into the world
with a free will. But his free will, though a real thing, acts in a
narrower circle and with more numerous limitations than he usually
imagines. He can, however, do much so to dispose, regulate and modify
the circumstances of his life as to diminish both his sufferings and his
temptations, and to secure for himself the external conditions of a
happy and upright life, and he can do something by judicious and
persevering self-culture to improve those conditions of character on
which, more than on any external circumstances, both happiness and
virtue depend.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, ch. xxii.
[62] _Hist._ ii. 35.
[63] Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.
[64] Davis.
[65] Cable.
[66] Jefferies, _Field and Hedgerow_, p. 242.