UPTON,
Nov. 1, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have read, after a fashion, in the course of the
last month, the Autobiography of Herbert Spencer. I know nothing of his
philosophy--I doubt if I have read half-a-dozen pages of his writings;
and the man, as revealed in his own transparent confessions, is almost
wholly destitute of attractiveness. All the same it is an intensely
interesting book, because it is the attempt of a profound egotist to
give a perfectly sincere picture of his life. Of course, I should have
read it with greater appreciation if I had studied or cared for his
books; but I take for granted that he was a great man, and accomplished
a great work, and I like to see how he achieved it.
The book is the strongest argument I have ever yet read against a
rational education. I who despair of the public-school classical
system, am reluctantly forced to confess that it can sow the seeds of
fairer flowers than ever blossomed in the soul of Herbert Spencer. He
was by no means devoid of aesthetic perception. He says that the sight
of a mountain, and music heard in a cathedral were two of the things
that moved him most. He describes a particular sunset which he saw in
Scotland, and describes the experience as the climax of his emotional
sensations. He was devoted to music, and had a somewhat contemptuous
enjoyment of pictures. But the arrogance and impenetrability of the man
rise up on every page. He cannot say frankly that he does not
understand art and literature; he dogmatises about them, and gives the
reader to understand that there is really nothing in them. He
criticises the classics from the standpoint of a fourth form boy. He
sits like a dry old spider, spinning his philosophical web, with a
dozen avenues of the soul closed to him, and denying that such avenues
exist. As a statistical and sociological expert he ought to have taken
into account the large number of people who are affected by what we may
call the beautiful, and to have allowed for its existence even if he
could not feel it. But no, he is perfectly self-satisfied, perfectly
decided. And this is the more surprising because the man was in reality
a hedonist. He protests finely in more than one place against those who
make life subsidiary to work. He is quite clear on the point that work
is only a part of life, and that to live is the object of man. Again,
he states that the pursuit of innocent pleasure is a thing to which it
is justifiable to devote some energy, and yet this does not make him
tolerant. The truth is that he was so supremely egotistical, so
entirely wrapped up in himself and his own life, that what other people
did and cared for was a matter of entire indifference to him. His
social tastes, and they were considerable, were all devoted to one and
the same purpose. He liked staying at agreeable country houses, because
it was a pleasant distraction to him and improved his health. He liked
dining out, because it stimulated his digestion. All human
relationships are made subservient to the same end. It never seems to
him to be a duty to minister to the pleasure of others. He takes what
he can get at the banquet of life, and, having secured his share, goes
away to digest it. When, at the end of his life, social entertainments
tried his nerves, he gave them up. When people came to see him, and he
found himself getting tired or excited by conversation, if it was not
convenient to him to leave the room, he put stoppers in his ears to
blur the sense of the talk. What better parable of the elaborate
framework of egotism on which his life was constructed could there be
than the following legend, not derived from the book? One evening, the
story goes, the philosopher had invited, at his club, a youthful
stranger to join him in a game of billiards. The young man, who was a
proficient, ran out in two breaks, leaving his rival a hopeless
distance behind. When he had finished, Spencer, with a severe air, said
to him: "To play billiards in an ordinary manner is an agreeable
adjunct to life; to play as you have been playing is evidence of a
misspent youth." A man who was not an egotist and a philosopher,
however much he disliked the outcome of the game, would have attempted
some phrases of commendation. But Spencer's view was, that anything
which rendered a player of billiards less useful to himself, by giving
him fewer opportunities in the course of a game for what he would have
called healthful and pleasurable recreation, was not only not to be
tolerated, but was to be morally reprobated.
As to his health, a subject which occupies the larger part of the
volumes, it is evident that, though his nervous system was deranged, he
was a complete hypochondriac. There is very little repining about the
invalid conditions under which he lived; and it gradually dawned upon
me that this was not because he had resolved to bear it in a stoical
and courageous manner, but because his ill-health, seen through the
rosy spectacles of the egotist, was a matter of pleasurable excitement
to him; he complains a good deal of the peculiar sensations he
experienced, and his broken nights, but with a solemn satisfaction in
the whole experience. He never had to bear physical pain, and the worst
evil from which he suffered was the boredom resulting from the way in
which he had to try, or conceived that he had to try, to kill time
without reading or working.
Of course one cannot help admiring the tenacious way in which he
carried out his great work under unfavourable conditions. Yet there is
something ridiculous in the picture of his rowing about in a boat on
the Regent's Park Lake, with an amanuensis in the stern, dictating
under the lee of an island until his sensations returned, and then
rowing until they subsided again. As a hedonist, he distinctly
calculated that his work gave the spice to his life, and that he would
not have been so happy had he relinquished it. But there is nothing
generous or noble about his standpoint; he liked writing and
philosophising, and he preferred to do it even though it entailed a
certain amount of invalidism, in the same spirit in which a man prefers
to drink champagne with the prospect of suffering from the gout, rather
than to renounce champagne and gout alike.
The man's face is in itself a parable. He has the high, domed forehead
of the philosopher, and a certain geniality of eye; but the hard,
thin-lipped mouth, with the deep lines from the nose, give him the air
of an elderly chimpanzee. He has a hand like a bird's claw; and the
antique shirt-front and small bow-tie denote the man who has fixed his
opinions on the cut of his clothes at an early date and does not intend
to modify them. Quite apart from the intense seriousness with which the
sage took himself, down to the smallest details, the style of the book,
dry as it is, is in itself grotesquely attractive.
There is something in the use of solemn scientific terminology, when
dealing with the most trivial matters, which makes many passages
irresistibly ludicrous. I wish that I could think that the writer of
the following lines wrote them with any consciousness of how humorous a
passage he was constructing--
"With me any tendency towards facetiousness is the result of temporary
elation, either . . . caused by pleasurable health-giving change, or
more commonly by meeting old friends. Habitually I observed that on
seeing the Lotts after a long interval, I was apt to give vent to some
witticisms during the first hour or two, and then they became rare."
I can't say that the life is a sad one, because, on the whole, it is a
contented one; but it is so one-sided and so self-absorbed that one
feels dried-up and depressed by it. One feels that great ability, great
perseverance, may yet leave a man very cold and hard; that a man may
penetrate the secrets of philosophy and yet never become wise; and one
ends by feeling that simplicity, tenderness, a love of beautiful and
gracious things are worth far more than great mental achievement. Or
rather, I suppose, that one has to pay a price for everything, and that
the price that this dyspeptic philosopher paid for his great work was
to move through the world in a kind of frigid blindness, missing life
after all, and bartering reality for self-satisfaction.
Curiously enough, I have at the same time been reading the life of
another self-absorbed and high-minded personality--the late Dean
Farrar. This is a book the piety of which is more admirable than the
literary skill; but probably the tender partiality with which it is
written makes it a more valuable document from the point of view of
revealing personality than if it had been more critically treated.
Farrar was probably the exact opposite of Herbert Spencer in almost
every respect. He was a litterateur, a rhetorician, an idealist, where
Spencer was a philosopher, a scientific man, and a rationalist. Farrar
admired high literature with all his heart; though unfortunately it did
not clarify his own taste, but only gave him a rich vocabulary of
high-sounding words, which he bound into a flaunting bouquet. He was
like the bower-bird, which takes delight in collecting bright objects
of any kind, bits of broken china, fragments of metal, which it
disposes with distressing prominence about its domicile, and runs to
and fro admiring the fantastic pattern. The fabric of Farrar's writing
is essentially thin; his thoughts rarely rose above the commonplace,
and to these thoughts he gave luscious expression, sticking the flowers
of rhetoric, of which his marvellous memory gave him the command, so as
to ornament without adorning.
Every one must have been struck in Farrar's works of fiction by the
affected tone of speech adopted by his saintly and high-minded heroes.
It was not affectation in Farrar to speak and write in this way; it was
the form in which his thoughts naturally arranged themselves. But in
one sense it was affected, because Farrar seems to have been naturally
a kind of dramatist. I imagine that his self-consciousness was great,
and I expect that he habitually lived with the feeling of being the
central figure in a kind of romantic scene. The pathos of the situation
is that he was naturally a noble-minded man. He had a high conception
of beauty, both artistic and moral beauty. He did live in the regions
to which he directed others. But this is vitiated by a desire for
recognition, a definite, almost a confessed, ambition. The letter, for
instance, in which he announces that he has accepted a Canonry at
Westminster is a painful one. If he felt the inexpressible distress, of
which he speaks, at the idea of leaving Marlborough, there was really
no reason why he should not have stayed; and, later on, his failure to
attain to high ecclesiastical office seems to have resulted in a sense
of compassion for the inadequacy of those who failed to discern real
merit, and a certain bitterness of spirit which, considering his
services to religion and morality, was not wholly unnatural. But he
does not seem to have tried to interpret the disappointment that he
felt, or to have asked himself whether the reason of his failure did
not rather lie in his own temperament.
The kindness of the man, his laboriousness, his fierce indignation
against moral evil, to say nothing of his extraordinary mental powers,
seem to have been clogged all through life by this sad
self-consciousness. The pity and the mystery of it is that a man should
have been so moulded to help his generation, and then that this
grievous defect of temperament should have been allowed to take its
place as the tyrant of the whole nature. And what makes the whole
situation even more tragic is that it was through a certain
transparency of nature that this egotism became apparent to others. He
was a man who seemed bound to speak of all that was in his mind; that
was a part of his rhetorical temperament. But if he could have held his
tongue, if he could have kept his own weakness of spirit concealed, he
might have achieved the very successes which he desired, and, indeed,
deserved. The result is that a richly endowed character achieves no
conspicuous greatness, either as a teacher, a speaker, a writer, or
even as a man.
The moral of these two books is this: How can any one whose character
is deeply tinged by this sort of egotism--and it is the shadow of all
eager and sensitive temperaments--best fight against it? Can it be
subdued, can it be concealed, can it be cured? I hardly dare to think
so. But I think that a man may deliberately resolve not to make
recognition an object; and next I believe he may most successfully
fight against egotism in ordinary life by regarding it mainly as a
question of manners. If a man can only, in early life, get into his
head that it is essentially bad manners to thrust himself forward, and
determine rather to encourage others to speak out what is in their
minds, a habit can be acquired; and probably, upon acquaintance, an
interest in the point of view of others will grow. That is not a very
lofty solution, but I believe it to be a practical one; and certainly
for a man of egotistic nature it is a severe and fruitful lesson to
read the lives of two such self-absorbed characters as Spencer and
Farrar, and to see, in the one case, how ugly and distorting a fault,
in the other, how hampering a burden it may become.
Egotism is really a failure of sympathy, a failure of justice, a
failure of proportion, and to recognise this is the first step towards
establishing a desire to be loving, just, and well-balanced.
But still the mystery remains: and I think that perhaps the most
wholesome attitude is to be grateful for what in the way of work, of
precept, of example these men achieved, and to leave the mystery of
their faults to their Maker, in the noble spirit of Gray's Elegy:--
"No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
(There they alike in trembling hope repose),
The bosom of his Father and his God."
--Ever yours,