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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 n.o.blest 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 ma.s.ses of heterogeneous material would have been incompatible with any partic.i.p.ation in the pa.s.sing 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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sage in Scott's novel, "The Pirate," which ill.u.s.trates 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 ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sed 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 ca.n.a.l-boat. She moves; movement is the law of her life; yet she is as tranquil in her little cabin as any goodwife on sh.o.r.e, brewing her tea and preparing her b.u.t.tered 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sured 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 ca.n.a.l-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 pa.s.s 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, pa.s.sing 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--Durer's engraving of Melancholy--Scott about Dryden--Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 cla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed 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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 Durer, in his "Melencolia," ill.u.s.trated 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 sh.o.r.e of a waveless sea. The truth is that Durer 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 Durer; 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 pa.s.sages 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 appet.i.te 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sions, 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sionless 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 sh.e.l.l 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 quant.i.ty. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.ses, on their health and wealth, may be quite as considerable as that of the other and more common sort of charity which pa.s.ses silver from hand to hand.

Shortly after the termination of the great Franco-German conflict, M.