The Intellectual Life

PART V.

THE INFLUENCES OF MONEY.

LETTER I.

TO A VERY RICH STUDENT.

The author of “Vathek”—The double temptation of wealth—Rich men tempted to follow occupations in which their wealth is useful—Pressure of social duties on the rich—The Duchess of Orleans—The rich man’s time not his own—The rich may help the general intellectual advancement by the exercise of patronage—Dr. Carpenter—Franz Wœpke.

It has always seemed to me a very remarkable and noteworthy circumstance that although Mr. Beckford, the author of “Vathek,” produced in his youth a story which bears all the signs of true inventive genius, he never produced anything in after-life which posterity cares to preserve. I read “Vathek” again quite recently, to see how far my early enthusiasm for it might have been due to that passion for orientalism which reigned amongst us many years ago, but this fresh perusal left an impression which only genius leaves. Beckford really had invention, and an extraordinary narrative power. That such faculties, after having once revealed themselves, should contentedly have remained dormant ever afterwards, is one of the most curious facts in the history of the human mind, and it is the more curious that Beckford lived to a very advanced age.

Beckford’s case appears to have been one of those in which great wealth diminishes or wholly paralyzes the highest energy of the intellect, leaving the lower energies free to exert less noble kinds of activity. A refined self-indulgence became the habit of his life, and he developed simply into a dilettant. Even his love for the fine arts did not rise above the indulgence of an elegant and cultivated taste. Although he lived at the very time most favorable to the appearance of a great critic in architecture and painting, the time of a great architectural revival and of the growth of a vigorous and independent school of contemporary art, he exercised no influence beyond that of a wealthy virtuoso. His love of the beautiful began and ended in simple personal gratification; it led to no noble labor, to no elevating severity of discipline. Englishman though he was, he filled his Oriental tower with masterpieces from Italy and Holland, only to add form and color to the luxuries of his reverie, behind his gilded lattices.

And when he raised that other tower at Fonthill, and the slaves of the lamp toiled at it by torchlight to gratify his Oriental impatience, he exercised no influence upon the confusion of his epoch more durable than that hundred yards of masonry which sank into a shapeless heap whilst as yet Azrael spared its author. He to whom Nature and Fortune had been so prodigal of their gifts, he whom Reynolds painted and Mozart instructed, who knew the poets of seven literatures, culling their jewels like flowers in seven enchanted gardens—he to whom the palaces of knowledge all opened their golden gates even in his earliest youth, to whom were also given riches and length of days, for whom a thousand craftsmen toiled in Europe and a thousand slaves beyond the sea,4—what has this gifted mortal left as the testimony of his power, as the trace of his fourscore years upon the earth? Only the reminiscence of a vague splendor, like the fast-fading recollection of a cloud that burned at sunset, and one small gem of intellectual creation that lives like a tiny star.

If wealth had only pleasure to offer as a temptation from intellectual labor, its influence would be easier to resist. Men of the English race are often grandly strong in resistance to every form of voluptuousness; the race is fond of comfort and convenience, but it does not sacrifice its energy to enervating self-indulgence. There is, however, another order of temptations in great wealth, to which Englishmen not only yield, but yield with a satisfied conscience, even with a sense of obedience to duty. Wealth carries pleasure in her left hand, but in her right she bears honor and power. The rich man feels that he can do so much by the mere exercise of his command over the labor of others, and so little by any unaided labor of his own, that he is always strongly tempted to become, not only physically but intellectually, a director of work rather that a workman. Even his modesty, when he is modest, tends to foster his reliance on others rather than himself. All that he tries to do is done so much better by those who make it their profession, that he is always tempted to fall back upon his paying power as his most satisfactory and effective force. There are cases in which this temptation is gloriously overcome, where men of great wealth compel every one to acknowledge that their money is nothing more than a help to their higher life, like the charger that bore Wellington at Waterloo, serving him indeed usefully, but not detracting from the honor which is his due. But in these cases the life is usually active or administrative rather than intellectual. The rich man does not generally feel tempted to enter upon careers in which his command over labor is not an evident advantage, and this because men naturally seek those fields in which all their superiorities tell. Even the well known instance of Lord Rosse can scarcely be considered an exception to this rule, for although he was eminent in a science which has been followed by poor men with great distinction, his wealth was of use in the construction of his colossal telescope, which gave him a clear advantage over merely professional contemporaries.

Besides this natural desire to pursue careers in which their money may lessen the number of competitors, the rich are often diverted from purely intellectual pursuits by the social duties of their station, duties which it is impossible to avoid and difficult to keep within limits. The Duchess of Orleans (mother of the present Count of Paris) arranged her time with the greatest care so as to reserve a little of it for her own culture in uninterrupted solitude. By an exact system, and the exercise of the rarest firmness, she contrived to steal half an hour here and an hour there—enough no doubt, when employed as she employed them, to maintain her character as a very distinguished lady, yet still far from sufficient for the satisfactory pursuit of any great art or science. If it be difficult for the rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven, it is also difficult for him to secure that freedom from interruption which is necessary to fit him for his entrance into the Intellectual Kingdom. He can scarcely allow himself to be absorbed in any great study, when he reflects on all the powerful means of social influence which he is suffering to lie idle. He is sure to possess by inheritance, or to have acquired in obedience to custom, a complicated and expensive machinery for the pleasures and purposes of society. There is game to be shot; there are hunters to be exercised; great houses to be filled with guests. So much is expected of the rich man, both in business and in pleasure, that his time is not his own, and he could not quit his station if he would. And yet the Intellectual Life, in its fruitful perfection, requires, I do not say the complete abandonment of the world, but it assuredly requires free and frequent spaces of labor in tranquil solitude, “retreats” like those commanded by the Church of Rome, but with more of study and less of contemplation.

It would be useless to ask you to abdicate your power, and retreat into some hermitage with a library and a laboratory, without a thought of returning to your pleasant hall in Yorkshire and your house in Mayfair. You will not sell all and follow the Light, but there is a life which you may powerfully encourage, yet only partially share. Notwithstanding the increased facilities for earning a living which this age offers to the intellectual, the time that they are often compelled to give to the satisfaction of common material necessities is so much time withdrawn from the work which they alone can do. It is a lamentable waste of the highest and rarest kind of energy to compel minds that are capable of original investigation, of discovery, to occupy themselves in that mere vulgarization of knowledge, in popular lecturing and literature, which could be done just as efficiently by minds of a common order. It is an error of the present age to believe that the time for what is called patronage is altogether passed away. Let me mention two instances to the contrary: one in which kindly help would have saved fifteen years of a noble life; another in which that kindly help did actually permit a man of exceptional endowment and equally exceptional industry to pursue investigations for which no other human being was so well qualified, and which were entirely incompatible with the earning of the daily bread. Dr. Carpenter has lately told us that, finding it impossible to unite the work of a general practitioner with the scientific researches upon which his heart was set, he gave up nine-tenths of his time for twenty years to popular lecturing and writing, in order that he might exist and devote the other tenth to science. “Just as he was breaking down from the excessive strain upon mind and body which this life involved, an appointment was offered to Dr. Carpenter which gave him competence and sufficient leisure for the investigations which he has conducted to such important issues.” Suppose that during those twenty years of struggle he had broken down like many another only a little less robust—what then? A mind lost to his country and the world. And would it not have been happier for him and for us if some of those men (of whom there are more in England than in any other land), who are so wealthy that their gold is positively a burden and an encumbrance, like too many coats in summer, had helped Dr. Carpenter at least a few years earlier, in some form that a man of high feeling might honorably accept? The other example that I shall mention is that of Franz Wœpke, the mathematician and orientalist. A modest pension, supplied by an Italian prince who was interested in the history of mathematics, gave Wœpke that peace which is incompatible with poverty, and enabled him to live grandly in his narrow lodging the noble intellectual life. Was not this rightly and well done, and probably a much more effectual employment of the power of gold than if that Italian prince had added some rare manuscripts to his own library without having time or knowledge to decipher them? I cannot but think that the rich may serve the cause of culture best by a judicious exercise of patronage—unless, indeed, they have within themselves the sense of that irresistible vocation which made Humboldt use his fortune as the servant of his high ambition. The Humboldts never are too rich; they possess their gold and are not possessed by it, and they are exempt from the duty of aiding others because they themselves have a use for all their powers.

LETTER II

TO A GENIUS CARELESS IN MONEY MATTERS.

Danger of carelessness—Inconveniences of poverty unfavorable to the Intellectual Life—Necessity advances men in industrial occupations, but disturbs and interrupts the higher intellectual life—Instances in science, literature, and art—Careers aided by wealth—Mr. Ruskin—De Saussure—Work spoiled by poverty in the doing—The central passion of men of ability is to do their work well—The want of money the most common hindrance to excellence of work—De Sénancour—Bossuet—Sainte-Beuve—Shelley—Wordsworth—Scott—Kepler—Tycho Brahe—Schiller—Goethe—Case of an eminent English philosopher, and of a French writer of school-primers—Loss of time in making experiments on public taste—Surtout ne pas trop écrire—Auguste Comte—The reaction of the intellectual against money-making—Money the protector of the intellectual life.

I have been anxious for you lately, and venture to write to you about the reasons for this anxiety.

You are neither extravagant nor self-indulgent, yet it seems to me that your entire absorption in the higher intellectual pursuits has produced in you, as it frequently does, a carelessness about material interests of all kinds which is by far the most dangerous of all tempers to the pecuniary well-being of a man. Sydney Smith declared that no fortune could stand that temper long, and that we are on the high road to ruin the moment we think ourselves rich enough to be careless.

Let me observe, to begin with, that although the pursuit of wealth is not favorable to the intellectual life, the inconveniences of poverty are even less favorable to it. We are sometimes lectured on the great benefits of necessity as a stimulant to exertion, and it is implied that comfortable people would go much farther on the road to distinction if they were made uncomfortable by having to think perpetually about money. Those who say this confound together the industry of the industrial and professional classes, and the labors of the more purely intellectual. It is clear that when the labor a man does is of such a nature that he will be paid for it in strict proportion to the time and effort he bestows, the need of money will be a direct stimulus to the best exertion he may be capable of. In all simple industrial occupations the need of money does drive a man forwards, and is often, when he feels it in early life, the very origin and foundation of his fortune. There exists, in such occupations, a perfect harmony between the present necessity and the ultimate purpose of the life. Wealth is the object of industry, and the first steps towards the possession of it are steps on the chosen path. The future captain of industry, who will employ thousands of workpeople and accumulate millions of money, is going straight to his splendid future when he gets up at five in the morning to work in another person’s factory. To learn to be a builder of steam-vessels, it is necessary, even when you begin with capital, to pass through the manual trades, and you will only learn them the better if the wages are necessary to your existence. Poverty in these cases only makes an intelligent man ground himself all the better in that stern practical training which is the basis of his future career. Well, therefore, may those who have reached distinguished success in fields of practical activity extol the teachings of adversity. If it is a necessary part of your education that you should hammer rivets inside a steam-boiler, it is as well that your early habits should not be over-dainty. So it is observed that horny hands, in the colonies, get gold into them sooner than white ones.

Even in the liberal professions young men get on all the better for not being too comfortably off. If you have a comfortable private income to begin with, the meagre early rewards of professional life will seem too paltry to be worth hard striving, and so you will very likely miss the more ample rewards of maturity, since the common road to success is nothing but a gradual increase. And you miss education at the same time, for practice is the best of professional educators, and many successful lawyers and artists have had scarcely any other training. The daily habit of affairs trains men for the active business of the world, and if the purpose of their lives is merely to do what they are doing or to command others to do the same things, the more closely circumstances tie them down to their work, the better.

But in the higher intellectual pursuits the necessity for immediate earning has an entirely different result. It comes, not as an educator, but as an interruption or suspension of education. All intellectual lives, however much they may differ in the variety of their purposes, have at least this purpose in common, that they are mainly devoted to self-education of one kind or another. An intellectual man who is forty years old is as much at school as an Etonian of fourteen, and if you set him to earn more money than that which comes to him without especial care about it, you interrupt his schooling, exactly as selfish parents used to do when they sent their young children to the factory and prevented them from learning to read. The idea of the intellectual life is an existence passed almost entirely in study, yet preserving the results of its investigations. A day’s writing will usually suffice to record the outcome of a month’s research.

Necessity, instead of advancing your studies, stops them. Whenever her harsh voice speaks it becomes your duty to shut your books, put aside your instruments, and do something that will fetch a price in the market. The man of science has to abandon the pursuit of a discovery to go and deliver a popular lecture a hundred miles off, for which he gets five pounds and his railway fare. The student of ancient literature has to read some feeble novel, and give three days of a valuable life to write an anonymous review which will bring him two pounds ten. The artist has to leave his serious picture to manufacture “pot-boilers,” which will teach him nothing, but only spoil his hands and vitiate the public taste. The poet suspends his poem (which is promised to a publisher for Christmas, and will be spoiled in consequence by hurry at the last) in order to write newspaper articles on subjects of which he has little knowledge and in which he takes no interest. And yet these are instances of those comparatively happy and fortunate needy who are only compelled to suspend their intellectual life, and who can cheer themselves in their enforced labor with the hope of shortly renewing it. What of those others who are pushed out of their path forever by the buffets of unkindly fortune? Many a fine intellect has been driven into the deep quagmire, and has struggled in it vainly till death came, which but for that grim necessity might have scaled the immortal mountains.

This metaphor of the mountains has led me, by a natural association of ideas, to think of a writer who has added to our enjoyment of their beauty, and I think of him the more readily that his career will serve as an illustration—far better than any imaginary career—of the very subject which just now occupies my mind. Mr. Ruskin is not only one of the best instances, but he is positively the very best instance except the two Humboldts, of an intellectual career which has been greatly aided by material prosperity, and which would not have been possible without it. This does not in the least detract from the merit of the author of “Modern Painters,” for it needed a rare force of resolution, or a powerful instinct of genius, to lead the life of a severe student under every temptation to indolence. Still it is true that Mr. Ruskin’s career would have been impossible for a poor man, however gifted. A poor man would not have had access to Mr. Ruskin’s materials, and one of his chief superiorities has always been an abundant wealth of material. And if we go so far as to suppose that the poor man might have found other materials perhaps equivalent to these, we know that he could not have turned them to that noble use. The poor critic would be immediately absorbed in the ocean of anonymous periodical literature; he could not find time for the incubation of great works. “Modern Painters,” the result of seventeen years of study, is not simply a work of genius but of genius seconded by wealth. Close to it on my shelves stand four volumes which are the monument of another intellectual life devoted to the investigation of nature. De Saussure, whom Mr. Ruskin reverences as one of his ablest teachers, and whom all sincere students of nature regard as a model observer, pursued for many laborious years a kind of life which was not, and could not be, self-supporting in the pecuniary sense. Many other patient laborers, who have not the celebrity of these, work steadily in the same way, and are enabled to do so by the possession of independent fortune. I know one such who gives a whole summer to the examination of three or four acres of mountain-ground, the tangible result being comprised in a few memoranda, which, considered as literary material, might (in the hands of a skilled professional writer) just possibly be worth five pounds.

Not only do narrow pecuniary means often render high intellectual enterprises absolutely impossible, but they do what is frequently even more trying to the health and character, they permit you to undertake work that would be worthy of you if you might only have time and materials for the execution of it, and then spoil it in the doing. An intellectual laborer will bear anything except that. You may take away the very table he is writing upon, if you let him have a deal board for his books and papers; you may take away all his fine editions, if you leave him common copies that are legible; you may remove his very candlestick, if you leave him a bottle-neck to stick his candle in, and he will go on working cheerfully still. But the moment you do anything to spoil the quality of the work itself, you make him irritable and miserable. “You think,” says Sir Arthur Helps, “to gain a good man to manage your affairs because he happens to have a small share in your undertaking. It is a great error. You want him to do something well which you are going to tell him to do. If he has been wisely chosen, and is an able man, his pecuniary interest in the matter will be mere dust in the balance, when compared with the desire which belongs to all such men to do their work well.” Yes, this is the central passion of all men of true ability, to do their work well; their happiness lies in that, and not in the amount of their profits, or even in their reputation. But then, on the other hand, they suffer indescribable mental misery when circumstances compel them to do their work less well than they know that, under more favorable circumstances, they would be capable of doing it. The want of money is, in the higher intellectual pursuits, the most common hindrance to thoroughness and excellence of work. De Sénancour, who, in consequence of a strange concatenation of misfortunes, was all his life struggling in shallows, suffered not from the privations themselves, but from the vague feeling that they stunted his intellectual growth; and any experienced student of human nature must be aware that De Sénancour was right. With larger means he would have seen more of the world, and known it better, and written of it with riper wisdom. He said that the man “who only saw in poverty the direct effect of the money-privation, and only compared, for instance, an eight-penny dinner to one that cost ten shillings, would have no conception of the true nature of misfortune, for not to spend money is the least of the evils of poverty.” Bossuet said that he “had no attachment to riches, and still if he had only what is barely necessary, if he felt himself narrowed, he would lose more than half his talents.” Sainte-Beuve said, “Only think a little what a difference there is in the starting point and in the employment of the faculties between a Duc de Luynes and a Sénancour.” How many of the most distinguished authors have been dependent upon private means, not simply for physical sustenance, but for the opportunities which they afforded of gaining that experience of life which was absolutely essential to the full growth of their mental faculties. Shelley’s writings brought him no profit whatever, and without a private income he could not have produced them, for he had not a hundred buyers. Yet his whole time was employed in study or in travel, which for him was study of another kind, or else in the actual labor of composition. Wordsworth tried to become a London journalist and failed. A young man called Raisley Calvert died and left him 900l.; this saved the poet in Wordsworth, as it kept him till the publication of the “Lyrical Ballads,” and afterwards other pieces of good luck happened to him, so that he could think and compose at leisure. Scott would not venture to devote himself to literature until he had first secured a comfortable income outside of it. Poor Kepler struggled with constant anxieties, and told fortunes by astrology for a livelihood, saying that astrology as the daughter of astronomy ought to keep her mother; but fancy a man of science wasting precious time over horoscopes! “I supplicate you,” he writes to Mœstlin, “if there is a situation vacant at Tübingen, do what you can to obtain it for me, and let me know the prices of bread and wine and other necessaries of life, for my wife is not accustomed to live on beans.” He had to accept all sorts of jobs; he made almanacs, and served any one who would pay him. His only tranquil time for study was when he lived in Styria, on his wife’s income, a tranquillity that did not last for long, and never returned. How different is this from the princely ease of Tycho Brahe, who labored for science alone, with all the help that the ingenuity of his age could furnish! There is the same contrast, in a later generation, between Schiller and Goethe. Poor Schiller “wasting so much of his precious life in literary hack-work, translating French books for a miserable pittance;” Goethe, fortunate in his pecuniary independence as in all the other great circumstances of his life, and this at a time when the pay of authors was so miserable that they could hardly exist by the pen. Schiller got a shilling a page for his translations. Merck the publisher offered three pounds sterling for a drama of Goethe. “If Europe praised me,” Goethe said, “what has Europe done for me? Nothing. Even my works have been an expense to me.”

The pecuniary rewards which men receive for their labor are so absurdly (yet inevitably) disproportionate to the intellectual power that is needed for the task, and also to the toil involved, that no one can safely rely upon the higher intellectual pursuits as a protection from money-anxieties. I will give you two instances of this disproportion, real instances, of men who are known to me personally. One of them is an eminent Englishman of most remarkable intellectual force, who for many years past has occupied his leisure in the composition of works that are valued by the thinking public to a degree which it would be difficult to exaggerate. But this thinking public is not numerous, and so in the year 1866 this eminent philosopher, “unable to continue losing money in endeavoring to enlighten his contemporaries, was compelled to announce the termination of his series.” On the other hand, a Frenchman, also known to me personally, one day conceived the fortunate idea that a new primer might possibly be a saleable commodity. So he composed a little primer, beginning with the alphabet, advancing to a, b, ab; b, a, ba; and even going so far in history as to affirm that Adam was the first man and Abraham the father of the faithful. He had the wisdom to keep the copyright of this little publication, which employed (in the easiest of all imaginable literary labor) the evenings of a single week. It has brought him in, ever since, a regular income of 120l. a year, which, so far from showing any signs of diminution, is positively improving. This success encouraged the same intelligent gentleman to compose more literature of the same order, and he is now the enviable owner of several other such copyrights, all of them very valuable; in fact as good properties as house-leases in London. Here is an author who, from the pecuniary point of view, was incomparably more successful than Milton, or Shelley, or Goethe. If every intellectual man could shield his higher life by writing primers for children which should be as good as house-leases, if the proverb Qui peut le plus peut le moins were a true proverb, which it is not, then of course all men of culture would be perfectly safe, since they all certainly know the contents of a primer. But you may be able to write the most learned philosophical treatise and still not be able to earn your daily bread.

Consider, too, the lamentable loss of time which people of high culture incur in making experiments on public taste, when money becomes one of their main objects. Whilst they are writing stories for children, or elementary educational books which people of far inferior attainment could probably do much better, their own self-improvement comes to a standstill. If it could only be ascertained without delay what sort of work would bring in the money they require, then there would be some chance of apportioning time so as to make reserves for self-improvement; but when they have to write a score of volumes merely to ascertain the humor of the public, there is little chance of leisure. The life of the professional author who has no reputation is much less favorable to high culture than the life of a tradesman in moderately easy circumstances who can reserve an hour or two every day for some beloved intellectual pursuit.

Sainte-Beuve tells us that during certain years of his life he had endeavored, and had been able, so to arrange his existence that it should have both sweetness and dignity, writing from time to time what was agreeable, reading what was both agreeable and serious, cultivating friendships, throwing much of his mind into the intimate relations of every day, giving more to his friends than to the public, reserving what was most tender and delicate for the inner life, enjoying with moderation; such for him was the dream of an intellectual existence in which things truly precious were valued according to their worth. And “above all,” he said, above all his desire was not to write too much, “surtout ne pas trop écrire.” And then comes the regret for this wise, well-ordered life enjoyed by him only for a time. “La nécessité depuis m’a saisi et m’a contraint de renoncer à ce que je considérais comme le seul bonheur ou la consolation exquise du mélancolique et du sage.”

Auguste Comte lamented in like manner the evil intellectual consequences of anxieties about material needs. “There is nothing,” he said, “more mortal to my mind than the necessity, pushed to a certain degree, to have to think each day about a provision for the next. Happily I think little and rarely about all that; but whenever this happens to me I pass through moments of discouragement and positive despair, which if the influence of them became habitual would make me renounce all my labors, all my philosophical projects, to end my days like an ass.”

There are a hundred rules for getting rich, but the instinct of accumulation is worth all such rules put together. This instinct is rarely found in combination with high intellectual gifts, and the reason is evident. To advance from a hundred pounds to a thousand is not an intellectual advance, and there is no intellectual interest in the addition of a cipher at the bankers’. Simply to accumulate money that you are never to use is, from the intellectual point of view, as stupid an operation as can be imagined. We observe, too, that the great accumulators, the men who are gifted by nature with the true instinct, are not usually such persons as we feel any ambition to become. Their faculties are concentrated on one point, and that point, as it seems to us, of infinitely little importance. We cannot see that it signifies much to the intellectual well-being of humanity that John Smith should be worth his million when he dies, since we know quite well that John Smith’s mind will be just as ill-furnished then as it is now. In places where much money is made we easily acquire a positive disgust for it, and the curate seems the most distinguished gentleman in the community, with his old black coat and his seventy pounds a year. We come to hate money-matters when we find that they exclude all thoughtful and disinterested conversation, and we fly to the society of people with fixed incomes, not large enough for much saving, to escape the perpetual talk about investments. Our happiest hours have been spent with poor scholars, and artists, and men of science, whose words remain in the memory and make us rich indeed. Then we dislike money because it rules and restrains us, and because it is unintelligent and seems hostile, so far as that which is unintelligent can be hostile. And yet the real truth is that money is the strong protector of the intellectual life. The student sits and studies, too often despising the power that shelters him from the wintry night, that gives him roof and walls, and lamp, and books, and fire. For money is simply the accumulated labor of the past, guarding our peace as fleets and armies guard the industry of England, or like some mighty fortress-wall within which men follow the most peaceful avocations. The art is to use money so that it shall be the protector and not the scatterer of our time, the body-guard of the sovereign Intellect and Will.

LETTER III.

TO A STUDENT IN GREAT POVERTY.

Poverty really a great obstacle—Difference between a thousand rich men and a thousand poor men taken from persons of average natural gifts—The Houses of Parliament—The English recognize the natural connection between wealth and culture—Connection between ignorance and parsimony in expenditure—What may be honestly said for the encouragement of a very poor student.

As it seems to me that to make light of the difficulties which lie in the path of another is not to show true sympathy for him, even though it is done sometimes out of a sort of awkward kindness and for his encouragement, I will not begin by pretending that poverty is not a great obstacle to the perfection of the intellectual life. It is a great obstacle; it is one of the very greatest of all obstacles. Only observe how riches and poverty operate upon mankind in the mass. Here and there no doubt a very poor man attains intellectual distinction when he has exceptional strength of will, and health enough to bear a great strain of extra labor that he imposes upon himself, and natural gifts so brilliant that he can learn in an hour what common men learn in a day. But consider mankind in the mass. Look, for instance, at our two Houses of Parliament. They are composed of men taken from the average run of Englishmen with very little reference to ability, but almost all of them are rich men; not one of them is poor, as you are poor; not one of them has to contend against the stern realities of poverty. Then consider the very high general level of intellectual attainment which distinguishes those two assemblies, and ask yourself candidly whether a thousand men taken from the beggars in the streets, or even from the far superior class of our manufacturing operatives, would be likely to understand, as the two Houses of Parliament understand, the many complicated questions of legislation and of policy which are continually brought before them. We all know that the poor are too limited in knowledge and experience, from the want of the necessary opportunities, and too little accustomed to exercise their minds in the tranquil investigations of great questions, to be competent for the work of Parliament. It is scarcely necessary to insist upon this fact to an Englishman, because the English have always recognized the natural connection between wealth and culture, and have preferred to be governed by the rich from the belief that they are likely to be better informed, and better situated for intellectual activity of a disinterested kind, than those members of the community whose time and thoughts are almost entirely occupied in winning their daily bread by the incessant labor of their hands. And if you go out into the world, if you mix with men of very different classes, you will find that in a broad average way (I am not speaking just now of the exceptions) the richer classes are much more capable of entering into the sort of thinking which may be called intellectual than those whose money is less plentiful, and whose opportunities have therefore been less abundant. Indeed it may be asserted, roughly and generally, that the narrowness of men’s ideas is in direct proportion to their parsimony in expenditure. I do not mean to affirm that all who spend largely attain large intellectual results, for of course we know that a man may spend vast sums on pursuits which do not educate him in anything worth knowing, but the advantage is that with habits of free expenditure the germs of thought are well tilled and watered, whereas parsimony denies them every external help. The most spending class in Europe is the English gentry, it is also the class most strikingly characterized by a high general average of information;5 the most parsimonious class in Europe is the French peasantry; it is also the class most strikingly characterized by ignorance and intellectual apathy. The English gentleman has cultivated himself by various reading and extensive travel, but the French peasant will not go anywhere except to the market-town, and could not pardon the extravagance of buying a book, or a candle to read it by in the evening. Between these extremes we have various grades of the middle classes in which culture usually increases very much in proportion to the expenditure. The rule is not without its exceptions; there are rich vulgar people who spend a great deal without improving themselves at all—who only, by unlimited self-indulgence, succeed in making themselves so uncomfortably sensitive to every bodily inconvenience that they have no leisure, even in the midst of an unoccupied life, to think of anything but their own bellies and their own skins—people whose power of attention is so feeble that the smallest external incident distracts it, and who remember nothing of their travels but a catalogue of trivial annoyances. But people of this kind do not generally belong to families on whom wealth has had time to produce its best effects. What I mean is, that a family which has been for generations in the habit of spending four thousand a year will usually be found to have a more cultivated one than one that has only spent four hundred.

I have come to the recognition of this truth very reluctantly indeed, not because I dislike rich people, but merely because they are necessarily a very small minority, and I should like every human being to have the best benefits of culture if it were only possible. The plain living and high thinking that Wordsworth so much valued is a cheering ideal, for most men have to live plainly, and if they could only think with a certain elevation we might hope to solve the great problem of human life, the reconciliation of poverty and the soul. There certainly is a slow movement in that direction, and the shortening of the hours of labor may afford some margin of leisure; but we who work for culture every day and all day long, and still feel that we know very little, and have hardly skill enough to make any effective use of the little that we know, can scarcely indulge in very enthusiastic anticipations of the future culture of the poor.

Still, there are some things that may be rationally and truly said to a poor man who desires culture, and which are not without a sort of Spartan encouragement. You are restricted by your poverty, but it is not always a bad thing to be restricted, even from the intellectual point of view. The intellectual powers of well-to-do people are very commonly made ineffective by the enormous multiplicity of objects that are presented to their attention, and which claim from them a sort of polite notice like the greeting of a great lady to each of her thousand guests. It requires the very rarest strength of mind, in a rich man, to concentrate his attention on anything there are so many things that he is expected to make a pretence of knowing; but nobody expects you to know anything, and this is an incalculable advantage. I think that all poor men who have risen to subsequent distinction have been greatly indebted to this independence of public opinion as to what they ought to know. In trying to satisfy that public opinion by getting up a pretence of various sorts of knowledge, which is only a sham, we sacrifice not only much precious time, but we blunt our natural interest in things. That interest you preserve in all its virgin force, and this force carries a man far. Then, again, although the opportunities of rich people are very superior to yours, they are not altogether so superior as they seem. There exists a great equalizing power, the limitation of human energy. A rich man may sit down to an enormous banquet, but he can only make a good use of the little that he is able to digest. So it is with the splendid intellectual banquet that is spread before the rich man’s eyes. He can only possess what he has energy to master, and too frequently the manifest impossibility of mastering everything produces a feeling of discouragement that ends in his mastering nothing. A poor student, especially if he lives in an out-of-the-way place where there are no big libraries to bewilder him, may apply his energy with effect in the study of a few authors.

I used to believe a great deal more in opportunities and less in application than I do now. Time and health are needed, but with these there are always opportunities. Rich people have a fancy for spending money very uselessly on their culture because it seems to them more valuable when it has been costly; but the truth is, that by the blessing of good and cheap literature, intellectual light has become almost as accessible as daylight. I have a rich friend who travels more, and buys more costly things, than I do, but he does not really learn more or advance farther in the twelvemonth. If my days are fully occupied, what has he to set against them? only other well-occupied days, no more. If he is getting benefit at St. Petersburg he is missing the benefit I am getting round my house, and in it. The sum of the year’s benefit seems to be surprisingly alike in both cases. So if you are reading a piece of thoroughly good literature, Baron Rothschild may possibly be as well occupied as you—he is certainly not better occupied. When I open a noble volume I say to myself, “Now the only Crœsus that I envy is he who is reading a better book than this.”

PART VI.

CUSTOM AND TRADITION.

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO HAD FIRMLY RESOLVED NEVER TO WEAR ANYTHING BUT A GRAY COAT.6

Secret enjoyment of rebellion against custom, and of the disabilities resulting from it—Penalties imposed by Society and by Nature out of proportion to the offence—Instances—What we consider penalties not really penalties, but only consequences—Society likes harmony, and is offended by dissonance—Utility of rebels against custom—That they ought to reserve their power of rebellion for great occasions—Uses of custom—Duty of the intellectual class—Best way to procure the abolition of a custom we disapprove—Bad customs—Eccentricity sometimes a duty.

When I had the pleasure of staying at your father’s house, you told me, rather to my surprise, that it was impossible for you to go to balls and dinner-parties because you did not possess such a thing as a dress-coat. The reason struck me as being scarcely a valid one, considering the rather high scale of expenditure adopted in the paternal mansion. It seemed clear that the eldest son of a family which lived after the liberal fashion of Yorkshire country gentlemen could afford himself a dress-coat if he liked. Then I wondered whether you disliked dress-coats from a belief that they were unbecoming to your person; but a very little observation of your character convinced me that, whatever might be your weaknesses (for everybody has some weaknesses), anxiety about personal appearance was not one of them.

The truth is, that you secretly enjoy this little piece of disobedience to custom, and all the disabilities which result from it. This little rebellion is connected with a larger rebellion, and it is agreeable to you to demonstrate the unreasonableness of society by incurring a very severe penalty for a very trifling offence. You are always dressed decently, you offend against no moral rule, you have cultivated your mind by study and reflection, and it rather pleases you to think that a young gentleman so well qualified for society in everything of real importance should be excluded from it because he has not purchased a permission from his tailor.

The penalties imposed by society for the infraction of very trifling details of custom are often, as it seems, out of all proportion to the offence; but so are the penalties of nature. Only three days before the date of this letter, an intimate friend of mine was coming home from a day’s shooting. His nephew, a fine young man in the full enjoyment of existence, was walking ten paces in advance. A covey of partridges suddenly cross the road: my friend in shouldering his gun touches the trigger just a second too soon, and kills his nephew. Now, think of the long years of mental misery that will be the punishment of that very trifling piece of carelessness! My poor friend has passed, in the space of a single instant, from a joyous life to a life that is permanently and irremediably saddened. It is as if he had left the summer sunshine to enter a gloomy dungeon and begin a perpetual imprisonment. And for what? For having touched a trigger, without evil intention, a little too precipitately. It seems harder still for the victim, who is sent out of the world in the bloom of perfect manhood because his uncle was not quite so cool as he ought to have been. Again, not far from where I live, thirty-five men were killed last week in a coal-pit from an explosion of fire-damp. One of their number had struck a lucifer to light his pipe: for doing this in a place where he ought not to have done it, the man suffers the penalty of death, and thirty-four others with him. The fact is simply that Nature will be obeyed, and makes no attempt to proportion punishments to offences: indeed, what in our human way we call punishments are not punishments, but simple consequences. So it is with the great social penalties. Society will be obeyed: if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

Nature does not desire that thirty-five men should be destroyed because one could not resist the temptation of a pipe; but fire-damp is highly inflammable, and the explosion is a simple consequence. Society does not desire to exclude you because you will not wear evening dress; but the dress is customary, and your exclusion is merely a consequence of your nonconformity. The view of society goes no farther in this than the artistic conception (not very delicately artistic, perhaps) that it is prettier to see men in black coats regularly placed between ladies round a dinner-table than men in gray coats or brown coats. The uniformity of costume appears to represent uniformity of sentiment and to ensure a sort of harmony amongst the convives. What society really cares for is harmony; what it dislikes is dissent and nonconformity. It wants peace in the dining-room, peace in the drawing-room, peace everywhere in its realm of tranquil pleasure. You come in your shooting-coat, which was in tune upon the moors, but is a dissonance amongst ladies in full dress. Do you not perceive that fustian and velveteen, which were natural amongst gamekeepers, are not so natural on gilded chairs covered with silk, with lace and diamonds at a distance of three feet? You don’t perceive it? Very well: society does not argue the point with you, but only excludes you.

It has been said that in the life of every intellectual man there comes a time when he questions custom at all points. This seems to be a provision of nature for the reform and progress of custom itself, which without such questioning would remain absolutely stationary and irresistibly despotic. You rebels against the established custom have your place in the great work of progressive civilization. Without you, Western Europe would have been a second China. It is to the continual rebellion of such persons as yourself that we owe whatever progress has been accomplished since the times of our remotest forefathers. There have been rebels always, and the rebels have not been, generally speaking, the most stupid part of the nation.

But what is the use of wasting this beneficial power of rebellion on matters too trivial to be worth attention? Does it hurt your conscience to appear in a dress-coat? Certainly not, and you would be as good-looking in it as you are in your velveteen shooting-jacket with the pointers on the bronze buttons. Let us conform in these trivial matters, which nobody except a tailor ought to consider worth a moment’s attention, in order to reserve our strength for the protection of intellectual liberty. Let society arrange your dress for you (it will save you infinite trouble), but never permit it to stifle the expression of your thought. You find it convenient, because you are timid, to exclude yourself from the world by refusing to wear its costume; but a bolder man would let the tailor do his worst, and then go into the world and courageously defend there the persons and causes that are misunderstood and slanderously misrepresented. The fables of Spenser are fables only in form, and a noble knight may at any time go forth, armed in the panoply of a tail-coat, a dress waistcoat, and a manly moral courage, to do battle across the dinner-table and in the drawing-room for those who have none to defend them.

It is unphilosophical to set ourselves obstinately against custom in the mass, for it multiplies the power of men by settling useless discussion and clearing the ground for our best and most prolific activity. The business of the world could not be carried forward one day without a most complex code of customs; and law itself is little more than custom slightly improved upon by men reflecting together at their leisure, and reduced to codes and systems. We ought to think of custom as a most precious legacy of the past, saving us infinite perplexity, yet not as an infallible rule. The most intelligent community would be conservative in its habits, yet not obstinately conservative, but willing to hear and adopt the suggestions of advancing reason. The great duty of the intellectual class, and its especial function, is to confirm what is reasonable in the customs that have been handed down to us, and so maintain their authority, yet at the same time to show that custom is not final, but merely a form suited to the world’s convenience. And whenever you are convinced that a custom is no longer serviceable, the way to procure the abolition of it is to lead men very gradually away from it, by offering a substitute at first very slightly different from what they have been long used to. If the English had been in the habit of tattooing, the best way to procure its abolition would have been to admit that it was quite necessary to cover the face with elaborate patterns, yet gently to suggest that these patterns would be still more elegant if delicately painted in water-colors. Then you might have gone on arguing—still admitting, of course, the absolute necessity for ornament of some kind—that good taste demanded only a moderate amount of it; and so you would have brought people gradually to a little flourish on the nose or forehead, when the most advanced reformers might have set the example of dispensing with ornament altogether. Many of our contemporaries have abandoned shaving in this gradual way, allowing the whiskers to encroach imperceptibly, till at last the razor lay in the dressing-case unused. The abominable black cylinders that covered our heads a few years ago were vainly resisted by radicals in custom, but the moderate reformers gradually reduced their elevation, and now they are things of the past.

Though I think we ought to submit to custom in matters of indifference, and to reform it gradually, whilst affecting submission in matters altogether indifferent, still there are other matters on which the only attitude worthy of a man is the most bold and open resistance to its dictates. Custom may have a right to authority over your wardrobe, but it cannot have any right to ruin your self-respect. Not only the virtues most advantageous to well-being, but also the most contemptible and degrading vices, have at various periods of the world’s history been sustained by the full authority of custom. There are places where forty years ago drunkenness was conformity to custom, and sobriety an eccentricity. There are societies, even at the present day, where licentiousness is the rule of custom, and chastity the sign of weakness or want of spirit. There are communities (it cannot be necessary to name them) in which successful fraud, especially on a large scale, is respected as the proof of smartness, whilst a man who remains poor because he is honest is despised for slowness and incapacity. There are whole nations in which religious hypocrisy is strongly approved by custom, and honesty severely condemned. The Wahabee Arabs may be mentioned as an instance of this, but the Wahabee Arabs are not the only people, nor is Nejed the only place, where it is held to be more virtuous to lie on the side of custom than to be an honorable man in independence of it. In all communities where vice and hypocrisy are sustained by the authority of custom, eccentricity is a moral duty. In all communities where a low standard of thinking is received as infallible common sense, eccentricity becomes an intellectual duty. There are hundreds of places in the provinces where it is impossible for any man to lead the intellectual life without being condemned as an eccentric. It is the duty of intellectual men who are thus isolated to set the example of that which their neighbors call eccentricity, but which may be more accurately described as superiority.

LETTER II.

TO A CONSERVATIVE WHO HAD ACCUSED THE AUTHOR OF A WANT OF RESPECT FOR TRADITION.

Transition from the ages of tradition to that of experiment—Attraction of the future—Joubert—Saint-Marc Girardin—Solved and unsolved problems—The introduction of a new element—Inapplicability of past experience—An argument against Republics—The lessons of history—Mistaken predictions that have been based on them—Morality and ecclesiastical authority—Compatibility of hopes for the future with gratitude to the past—That we are more respectful to the past than previous ages have been—Our feelings towards tradition—An incident at Warsaw—The reconstruction of the navy.

The astonishing revolution in thought and practice which is taking place amongst the intelligent Japanese, the throwing away of a traditional system of living in order to establish in its stead a system which, for an Asiatic people, is nothing more than a vast experiment, has its counterpart in many an individual life in Europe. We are like travellers crossing an isthmus between two seas, who have left one ship behind them, who have not yet seen the vessel that waits on the distant shore, and who experience to the full all the discomforts and inconveniences of the passage from one sea to the other. There is a break between the existence of our forefathers and that of our posterity, and it is we who have the misfortune to be situated exactly where the break occurs. We are leaving behind us the security, I do not say the safety, but the feeling of tranquillity which belonged to the ages of tradition; we are entering upon ages whose spirit we foresee but dimly, whose institutions are the subject of guesses and conjectures. And yet this future, of which we know so little, attracts us more by the very vastness of its enigma than the rich history of the past, so full of various incident, of powerful personages, of grandeur, and suffering, and sorrow. Joubert already noticed this forward-looking of the modern mind. “The ancients,” he observed, “said, ‘Our ancestors;’ we say, ‘Posterity.’ We do not love as they did la patrie, the country and laws of our forefathers; we love rather the laws and the country of our children. It is the magic of the future, and not that of the past, which seduces us.” Commenting on this thought of Joubert’s, Saint-Marc Girardin said that we loved the future because we loved ourselves, and fashioned the future in our own image; and he added, with partial but not complete injustice, that our ignorance of the past was a cause of this tendency in our minds, since it is shorter to despise the past than to study it. These critics and accusers of the modern spirit are not, however, altogether fair to it. If the modern spirit looks so much to the future, it is because the problems of the past are solved problems, whilst those of the future have the interest of a game that is only just begun. We know what became of feudalism, we know the work that it accomplished and the services that it rendered, but we do not yet know what will be the effects of modern democracy and of the scientific and industrial spirit. It is the novelty of this element, the scientific spirit and the industrial development which is a part (but only a part) of its results, that makes the past so much less reliable as a guide than it would have been if no new element had intervened, and therefore so much less interesting for us. As an example of the inapplicability of past experience, I may mention an argument against Republics which has been much used of late by the partisans of monarchy in France. They have frequently told us that Republics had only succeeded in very small States, and this is true of ancient democracies; but it is not less true that railways, and telegraphs, and the newspaper press have made great countries like France and the United States just as capable of feeling and acting simultaneously as the smallest Republics of antiquity. The parties which rely on what are called the lessons of history are continually exposed to great deceptions. In France, what may be called the historical party would not believe in the possibility of a united Germany, because fifty years ago, with the imperfect means of communication which then existed, Germany was not and could not be united. The same historical party refused to believe that the Italian kingdom could ever hold together. In England, the historical party predicted the dismemberment of the United States, and in some other countries it has been a favorite article of faith that England could not keep her possessions. But theories of this kind are always of very doubtful applicability to the present, and their applicability to the future is even more doubtful still. Steam and electricity have made great modern States practically like so many great cities, so that Manchester is like a suburb of London, and Havre the Piræus of Paris, whilst the most trifling occasions bring the Sovereign of Italy to any of the Italian capitals.

In the intellectual sphere the experience of the past is at least equally unreliable. If the power of the Catholic Church had been suddenly removed from the Europe of the fourteenth century, the consequence would have been a moral anarchy difficult to conceive; but in our own day the real regulator of morality is not the Church, but public opinion, in the formation of which the Church has a share, but only a share. It would therefore be unsafe to conclude that the weakening of ecclesiastical authority must of necessity, in the future, be followed by moral anarchy, since it is possible, and even probable, that the other great influences upon public opinion may gain strength as this declines. And in point of fact we have already lived long enough to witness a remarkable decline of ecclesiastical authority, which is proved by the avowed independence of scientific writers and thinkers, and by the open opposition of almost all the European Governments. The secular power resists the ecclesiastical in Germany and Spain. In France it establishes a form of government which the Church detests. In Ireland it disestablishes and disendows a hierarchy. In Switzerland it resists the whole power of the Papacy. In Italy it seizes the sacred territory and plants itself within the very walls of Rome. And yet the time which has witnessed this unprecedented self-assertion of the laity has witnessed a positive increase in the morality of public sentiment, especially in the love of justice and the willingness to hear truth, even when truth is not altogether agreeable to the listener, and in the respect paid by opponents to able and sincere men, merely for their ability and sincerity. This love of justice, this patient and tolerant hearing of new truth, in which our age immeasurably exceeds all the ages that have preceded it, are the direct results of the scientific spirit, and are not only in themselves eminently moral, but conducive to moral health generally. And this advancement may be observed in countries which were least supposed to be capable of it. Even the French, of whose immorality we have heard so much, have a public opinion which is gradually gaining a salutary strength, an increasing dislike for barbarity and injustice, and a more earnest desire that no citizen, except by his own fault, should be excluded from the benefits of civilization. The throne which has lately fallen was undermined by the currents of this public opinion before it sank in military disaster. “Aussi me contenterai-je,” says Littré, “d’appeler l’attention sur la guerre, dont l’opinion publique ne tolère plus les antiques barbaries; sur la magistrature, qui répudie avec horreur les tortures et la question; sur la tolérance, qui a banni les persécutions religieuses; sur l’équite, qui soumet tout le monde aux charges communes; sur le sentiment de solidarité qui du sort des classes pauvres fait le plus pressant et le plus noble problème du temps présent. Pour moi, je ne sais caractériser ce spectacle si hautement moral qu’en disant que l’humanité, améliorée, accepte de plus en plus le devoir et la tâche d’étendre le domaine de la justice et de la bonté.”

Yet this partial and comparative satisfaction that we find in the present, and our larger hopes for the future, are quite compatible with gratitude to all who in the past have rendered such improvement possible for us, and the higher improvement that we hope for possible to those who will come after us. I cannot think that the present age may be accused with justice of exceptional ignorance or scorn of its predecessors. We have been told that we scorn our forefathers because old buildings are removed to suit modern conveniences, because the walls of old York have been pierced for the railway, and a tower of Conway Castle has been undermined that the Holyhead mail may pass. But the truth is, that whilst we care a little for our predecessors, they cared still less for theirs. The mediæval builders not only used as quarries any Roman remains that happened to come in their way, but they spoiled the work of their own fathers and grandfathers by intruding their new fashions on buildings originally designed in a different style of art. When an architect in the present day has to restore some venerable church, he endeavors to do so in harmony with the design of the first builder; but such humility as this was utterly foreign to the mediæval mind, which often destroyed the most lovely and necessary details to replace them with erections in the fashion of the day, but artistically unsuitable. The same disdain for the labors of other ages has prevailed until within the memory of living men, and our age is really the first that has made any attempt to conform itself, in these things, to the intentions of the dead. I may also observe, that although history is less relied upon as a guide to the future than it was formerly, it is more carefully and thoroughly investigated from an intellectual interest in itself.

To conclude. It seems to me that tradition has much less influence of an authoritative kind than it had formerly, and that the authority which it still possesses is everywhere steadily declining; that as a guide to the future of the world it is more likely to mislead than to enlighten us, and still that all intellectual and educated people must always take a great interest in tradition, and have a certain sentiment of respect for it. Consider what our feelings are towards the Church of Rome, the living embodiment of tradition. No well-informed person can forget the immense services that in former ages she has rendered to European civilization, and yet at the same time such a person would scarcely wish to place modern thought under her direction, nor would he consult the Pope about the tendencies of the modern world. When in 1829 the city of Warsaw erected a monument to Copernicus, a scientific society there waited in the Church of the Holy Cross for a service that was to have added solemnity to their commemoration. They waited vainly. Not a single priest appeared. The clergy did not feel authorized to countenance a scientific discovery which, in a former age, had been condemned by the authority of the Church. This incident is delicately and accurately typical of the relation between the modern and the traditional spirit. The modern spirit is not hostile to tradition, and would not object to receive any consecration which tradition might be able to confer, but there are difficulties in bringing the two elements together.

We need not, however, go so far as Warsaw, or back to the year 1829, for examples of an unwillingness on the part of the modern mind to break entirely with the traditional spirit. Our own country is remarkable both for the steadiness of its advance towards a future widely different from the past, and for an affectionate respect for the ideas and institutions that it gradually abandons, as it is forced out of them by new conditions of existence, I may mention, as one example out of very many, our feeling about the reconstruction of the navy. Here is a matter in which science has compelled us to break with tradition absolutely and irrevocably; we have done so, but we have done so with the greatest regret. The ships of the line that our hearts and imaginations love are the ships of Nelson and Collingwood and Cochrane. We think of the British fleets that bore down upon the enemy with the breeze in their white sails; we think of the fine qualities of seamanship that were fostered in our Agamemnons, and Victories, and Téméraires. Will the navies of the future ever so clothe their dreadful powers with beauty, as did the ordered columns of Nelson, when they came with a fair wind and all sails set, at eleven o’clock in the morning into Trafalgar Bay? We see the smoke of their broadsides rising up to their sails like mists to the snowy Alps, and high above, against heaven’s blue, the unconquered flag of England! Nor do we perceive now for the first time that there was poetry in those fleets of old; our forefathers felt it then, and expressed it in a thousand songs.7