LETTER VIII.
TO A FRIEND (HIGHLY CULTIVATED) WHO CONGRATULATED HIMSELF ON HAVING ENTIRELY ABANDONED THE HABIT OF READING NEWSPAPERS.
Advantages in economy of time—Much of what we read in newspapers is useless to our culture—The too great importance which they attach to novelty—Distortion by party spirit—An instance of false presentation—Gains to serenity by abstinence from newspapers—Newspapers keep up our daily interest in each other—The French peasantry—The newspaper-reading Americans—An instance of total abstinence from newspapers—Auguste Comte—A suggestion of Emerson’s—The work of newspaper correspondents—War correspondents—Mr. Stanley—M. Erdan, of the Temps.
Your abstinence from newspaper reading is not anew experiment in itself, though it is new in reference to your particular case, and I await its effects with interest. I shall be curious to observe the consequences, to an intellect constituted as yours is, of that total cutting off from the public interests of your own century which an abstinence from newspapers implies. It is clear that, whatever the loss may be, you have a definite gain to set against it. The time which you have hitherto given to newspapers, and which may be roughly estimated at about five hundred hours a year, is henceforth a valuable time-income to be applied to whatever purposes your best wisdom may select. When an intellectual person has contrived by the force of one simple resolution to effect so fine an economy as this, it is natural that he should congratulate himself. Your feelings must be like those of an able finance minister who has found means of closing a great leak in the treasury—if any economy possible in the finances of a State could ever relatively equal that splendid stroke of time-thrift which your force of will has enabled you to effect. In those five hundred hours, which are now your own, you may acquire a science or obtain a more perfect command over one of the languages which you have studied. Some department of your intellectual labors which has hitherto been unsatisfactory to you, because it was too imperfectly cultivated, may henceforth be as orderly and as fruitful as a well-kept garden. You may become thoroughly conversant with the works of more than one great author whom you have neglected, not from lack of interest, but from want of time. You may open some old chamber of the memory that has been dark and disused for many a year; you may clear the cobwebs away, and let the fresh light in, and make it habitable once again.
Against these gains, of which some to a man of your industry are certain, and may be counted upon, what must be our estimate of the amount of sacrifice or loss? It is clear to both of us that much of what we read in the newspapers is useless to our culture. A large proportion of newspaper-writing is occupied with speculation on what is likely to happen in the course of a few months; therefore, by waiting until the time is past, we know the event without having wasted time in speculations which could not effect it. Another rather considerable fraction of newspaper matter consists of small events which have interest for the day, owing to their novelty, but which will not have the slightest permanent importance. The whole press of a newspaper-reading country, like England or America, may be actively engaged during the space of a week or a fortnight in discussing some incident which everybody will have forgotten in six months; and besides these sensational incidents, there are hundreds of less notorious ones, often fictitious, inserted simply for the temporary amusement of the reader. The greatest evil of newspapers, in their effect on the intellectual life, is the enormous importance which they are obliged to attach to mere novelty. From the intellectual point of view, it is of no consequence whether a thought occurred twenty-two centuries ago to Aristotle or yesterday evening to Mr. Charles Darwin, and it is one of the distinctive marks of the truly intellectual to be able to take a hearty interest in all truth, independently of the date of its discovery. The emphasis given by newspapers to novelty exhibits things in wrong relations, as the lantern shows you what is nearest at the cost of making the general landscape appear darker by the contrast. Besides this exhibition of things in wrong relations, there is a positive distortion arising from the unscrupulousness of party, a distortion which extends far beyond the limits of the empire.
An essay might be written on the distortion of English affairs in the French press, or of French affairs in the English press, by writers who are as strongly partisan in another country as in their own. “It is such a grand thing,” wrote an English Paris correspondent in 1870, “for Adolphus Thiers, son of a poor laborer of Aix, and in early life a simple journalist, to be at the head of the Government of France.” This is a fair specimen of the kind of false presentation which is so common in party journalism. The newspaper from which I have quoted it was strongly opposed to Thiers, being in fact one of the principal organs of the English Bonapartists. It is not true that Thiers was the son of a poor laborer of Aix. His father was a workman of Marseilles, his mother belonging to a family in which neither wealth nor culture had been rare, and his mother’s relatives had him educated at the Lycée. The art of the journalist in bringing together the two extremes of a career remarkable for its steady ascent had for its object to produce the idea of incongruity, of sudden and unsuitable elevation. Not only M. Thiers, however, but every human being starts from a very small beginning, since every man begins life as a baby. It is a great rise for one baby to the Presidency of the French Republic; it was also a great rise for other babies who have attained the premiership of England. The question is, not what Thiers may have been seventy years ago, but what he was immediately before his acceptance of the highest office of the State. He was the most trusted and the most experienced citizen, so that the last step in his career was as natural as the elevation of Reynolds to the presidency of the Academy.
It is difficult for any one who cares for justice to read party journals without frequent irritation, and it does not signify which side the newspaper takes. Men are so unfair in controversy that we best preserve the serenity of the intellect by studiously avoiding all literature that has a controversial tone. By your new rule of abstinence from newspapers you will no doubt gain almost as much in serenity as in time. To the ordinary newspaper reader there is little loss of serenity, because he reads only the newspaper that he agrees with, and however unfair it is, he is pleased by its unfairness. But the highest and best culture makes us disapprove of unfairness on our own side of the question also. We are pained by it; we feel humiliated by it; we lament its persistence and its perversity.
I have said nearly all that has to be said in favor of your rule of abstinence. I have granted that the newspapers cost us much time, which, if employed for great intellectual purposes, would carry us very far; that they give disproportionate views of things by the emphasis they give to novelty, and false views by the unfairness which belongs to party. I might have added that newspaper writers give such a preponderance to politics—not political philosophy, but to the everyday work of politicians—that intellectual culture is thrown into the background, and the election of a single member of Parliament is made to seem of greater national importance than the birth of a powerful idea. And yet, notwithstanding all these considerations, which are serious indeed for the intellectual, I believe that your resolution is unwise, and that you will find it to be untenable. One momentous reason more than counterbalances all these considerations put together. Newspapers are to the whole civilized world what the daily house-talk is to the members of a household; they keep up our daily interest in each other, they save us from the evils of isolation. To live as a member of the great white race of men, the race that has filled Europe and America, and colonized or conquered whatever other territories it has been pleased to occupy, to share from day to day its cares, its thoughts, its aspirations, it is necessary that every man should read his daily newspaper. Why are the French peasants so bewildered and at sea, so out of place in the modern world? It is because they never read a newspaper. And why are the inhabitants of the United States, though scattered over a territory fourteen times the area of France, so much more capable of concerted political action, so much more alive and modern, so much more interested in new discoveries of all kinds and capable of selecting and utilizing the best of them? It is because the newspaper penetrates everywhere; and even the lonely dweller on the prairie or in the forest is not intellectually isolated from the great currents of public life which flow through the telegraph and the press.
The experiment of doing without newspapers has been tried by a whole class, the French peasantry, with the consequences that we know, and it has also from time to time been tried by single individuals belonging to more enlightened sections of society. Let us take one instance, and let us note what appear to have been the effects of this abstinence. Auguste Comte abstained from newspapers as a teetotaller abstains from spirituous liquors. Now, Auguste Comte possessed a gift of nature which, though common in minor degrees, is in the degree in which he possessed it rarer than enormous diamonds. That gift was the power of dealing with abstract intellectual conceptions, and living amidst them always, as the practical mind lives in and deals with material things. And it happened in Comte’s case, as it usually does happen in cases of very peculiar endowment, that the gift was accompanied by the instincts necessary to its perfect development and to its preservation. Comte instinctively avoided the conversation of ordinary people, because he felt it to be injurious to the perfect exercise of his faculty, and for the same reason he would not read newspapers. In imposing upon himself these privations he acted like a very eminent living etcher, who, having the gift of an extraordinary delicacy of hand, preserves it by abstinence from everything that may effect the steadiness of the nerves. There is a certain difference, however, between the two cases which I am anxious to accentuate. The etcher runs no risk of any kind by his rule of abstinence. He refrains from several common indulgences, but he denies himself nothing that is necessary to health. I may even go farther, and say that the rules which he observes for the sake of perfection in his art, might be observed with advantage by many who are not artists, for the sake of their own tranquillity, without the loss of anything but pleasure. The rules which Comte made for himself involved, on the other hand, a great peril. In detaching himself so completely from the interests and ways of thinking of ordinary men, he elaborated, indeed, the conceptions of the positive philosophy, but arrived afterwards at a peculiar kind of intellectual decadence from which it is possible—probable even—that the rough common sense of the newspapers might have preserved him. They would have saved him, I seriously believe, from that mysticism which led to the invention of a religion far surpassing in unreasonableness the least rational of the creeds of tradition. It is scarcely imaginable, except on the supposition of actual insanity, that any regular reader of the Times, the Temps, the Daily News, and the Saturday Review, should believe the human race to be capable of receiving as the religion of its maturity the Comtist Trinity and the Comtist Virgin Mother. A Trinity consisting of the Great Being (or humanity), the Great Fetish (or the earth), and the Great Midst (or space); a hope for the human race (how unphysiological!) that women might ultimately arrive at maternity independently of virile help,—these are conceptions so remote, not only from the habits of modern thought, but (what is more important) from its tendencies, that they could not occur to a mind in regular communication with its contemporaries.
“If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard authors?” To this suggestion of Emerson’s it may be answered that the loss would be greater than the gain. The writers of Queen Anne’s time could educate an Englishman of Queen Anne’s time, but they can only partially educate an Englishman of Queen Victoria’s time. The mind is like a merchant’s ledger, it requires to be continually posted up to the latest date. Even the last telegram may have upset some venerable theory that has been received as infallible for ages.
In times when great historical events are passing before our eyes, the journalist is to future historians what the African traveller is to the map-makers. His work is neither complete nor orderly, but it is the fresh record of an eye-witness, and enables us to become ourselves spectators of the mighty drama of the world. Never was this service so well rendered as it is now, by correspondents who achieve heroic feats of bodily and mental prowess, exposing themselves to the greatest dangers, and writing much and well in circumstances the most unfavorable to literary composition. How vividly the English war correspondents brought before us the reality of the great conflict between Germany and France! What a romantic achievement, worthy to be sung in heroic verse, was the finding of Livingstone by Stanley! Not less interesting have been the admirable series of letters by M. Erdan in the Temps, in which, with the firmness of a master-hand, he has painted from the life, week after week, year after year, the decline and fall of the temporal power of the Papacy. I cannot think that any page of Roman history is better worth reading than his letters, more interesting, instructive, lively, or authentic. Yet with your contempt for newspapers you would lose all this profitable entertainment, and seek instead of it the accounts of former epochs not half so interesting as this fall of the temporal power, accounts written in most cases by men in libraries who had not seen the sovereigns they wrote about, nor talked with the people whose condition they attempted to describe. You have a respect for these accounts because they are printed in books, and bound in leather, and entitled “history,” whilst you despise the direct observation of a man like Erdan, because he is only a journalist, and his letters are published in a newspaper. Is there not some touch of prejudice in this, some mistake, some narrowness of intellectual aristocracy?
LETTER IX.
TO AN AUTHOR WHO APPRECIATED CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.
Miss Mitford on the selfishness of authors—A suggestion of Emerson’s—A laconic rule of his—Traces of jealousy—And of a more subtle feeling—A contradiction—Necessary to resist the invasion of the present—A certain equilibrium—The opposite of a pedant—The best classics not pedants, but artists.
Reading the other day a letter by Miss Mitford, I was reminded of you as the eye is reminded of green when it sees scarlet. You, whose interest in literature has ever kept pace with the time, to whom no new thing is unwelcome if only it is good, are safe from her accusations; but how many authors have deserved them! Miss Mitford is speaking of a certain writer who is at the same time a clergyman, and whom it is not difficult to recognize.
“I never,” she says, “saw him interested in the slightest degree by the work of any other author, except, indeed, one of his own followers or of his own clique, and then only as admiring or helping him. He has great kindness and great sympathy with working people, or with a dying friend, but I profess to you I am amazed at the utter selfishness of authors. I do not know one single poet who cares for any man’s poetry but his own. In general they read no books except such as may be necessary to their own writings—that is to the work they happen to be about, and even then I suspect that they only read the bits that they may immediately want. You know the absolute ignorance in which Wordsworth lived of all modern works; and if, out of compliment to a visitor, he thought it needful to seem to read or listen to two or three stanzas, he gave unhesitating praise to the writer himself, but took especial care not to repeat the praise where it might have done him good—utterly fair and false.”
There are touches of this spirit of indifference to contemporary literature in several writers and scholars whom we know. There are distinct traces of it even in published writings, though it is much more evident in private life and habit. Emerson seriously suggests that “the human mind would perhaps be a gainer if all the secondary writers were lost—say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, through the profounder study so drawn to those wonderful minds.” In the same spirit we have Emerson’s laconic rule, “Never read any but famed books,” which suggests the remark that if men had obeyed this rule from the beginning, no book could ever have acquired reputation, and nobody would ever have read anything. The idea of limiting English literature to a holy trinity of Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, and voluntarily losing all other authors, seems to me the most intense expression of the spirit of aristocracy in reading. It is as if a man were to decide in his own mind that society would be the better if all persons except the three Emperors were excluded from it. There is a want of reliance upon one’s own judgment, and an excess of faith in the estimates of others, when we resolve to read only those books which come to us in the splendor of a recognized intellectual royalty. We read either to gain information, to have good thinking suggested to us, or to have our imagination stimulated. In the way of knowledge the best authors are always the most recent, so that Bacon could not suffice. In the way of thinking, our methods have gained in precision since Milton’s time, and we are helped by a larger experience than his. The one thing which Shakespeare and Milton can do for us quite perfectly still, is to fill our imagination richly, and give it a fine stimulus. But modern writers can render us the same service.
Is there not a little jealousy of contemporaries in the persistence with which some authors avoid them, and even engage others to avoid them? May not there be a shade of another feeling than jealousy, a feeling more subtle in operation, the undefined apprehension that we may find, even amongst our more obscure contemporaries, merit equal to our own? So long as we restrict our reading to old books of great fame we are safe from this apprehension, for if we find admirable qualities, we know beforehand that the world has handsomely acknowledged them, and we indulge in the hope that our own admirable qualities will be recognized by posterity with equal liberality. But it creates an unpleasant feeling of uneasiness to see quantities of obscure contemporary work, done in a plain way to earn a living by men of third or fourth-rate reputation, or of no reputation at all, which in many respects would fairly sustain a comparison with our own. It is clear that an author ought to be the last person to advise the public not to read contemporary literature, since he is himself a maker of contemporary literature; and there is a direct contradiction between the invitation to read his book, which he circulates by the act of publishing, and the advice which the book contains. Emerson is more safe from this obvious rejoinder when he suggests to us to transfer our reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard authors. But are these suggestions anything more than the reaction of an intellectual man against the too prevalent customs of the world? The reading practised by most people, by all who do not set before themselves intellectual culture as one of the definite aims of life, is remarkable for the regularity with which it neglects all the great authors of the past. The books provided by the circulating library, the reviews and magazines, the daily newspapers, are read whilst they are novelties, but the standard authors are left on their shelves unopened. We require a firm resolution to resist this invasion of what is new, because it flows like an unceasing river, and unless we protect our time against it by some solid embankment of unshakable rule and resolution, every nook and cranny of it will be filled and flooded. An Englishman whose life was devoted to culture, but who lived in an out-of-the-way place on the Continent, told me that he considered it a decided advantage to his mind to live quite outside of the English library system, because if he wanted to read a new book he had to buy it and pay heavily for carriage besides, which made him very careful in his choice. For the same reason he rejoiced that the nearest English news-room was two hundred miles from his residence.
But, on the other hand, what would be the condition of a man’s mind who never read anything but the classic authors? He would live in an intellectual monastery, and would not even understand the classic authors themselves, for we understand the past only by referring it to what we know in the present.
It is best to preserve our minds in a state of equilibrium, and not to allow our repugnance to what we see as an evil to drive us into an evil of an opposite kind. We are too often like those little toy-fish with a bit of steel in their mouths, which children attract with a magnet. If you present the positive pole of the magnet, the fish rushes at it at once, but if you offer the negative end it retreats continually. Everything relatively to our character has this positive or negative end, and we either rush to things or rush away from them. Some persons are actually driven away from the most entertaining writers because they happen to be what are called classics, because pedants boast of having read them. I know a man who is exactly the opposite of a pedant, who has a horror of the charlatanism which claims social and intellectual position as the reward for having laboriously waded through those authors who are conventionally termed “classical,” and this opposition to pedantry has given him an aversion to the classics themselves, which he never opens. The shallow pretence to admiration of famous writers which is current in the world is so distasteful to the love of honesty and reality which is the basis of his character, that by an unhappy association of ideas he has acquired a repugnance to the writers themselves. But such men as Horace, Terence, Shakespeare, Molière, though they have had the misfortune to be praised and commentated upon by pedants, were in their lives the precise opposite of pedants; they were artists whose study was human nature, and who lived without pretension in the common world of men. The pedants have a habit of considering these genial old artists as in some mysterious way their own private property, for do not the pedants live by expounding them? And some of us are frightened away from the fairest realms of poetry by the fences of these grim guardians.
LETTER X.
TO AN AUTHOR WHO KEPT VERY IRREGULAR HOURS.
Julian Fane—His late hours—Regularity produced by habit—The time of the principal effort—That the chief work should be done in the best hours—Physicians prefer early to late work—The practice of Goethe and some modern authors—The morning worker ought to live in a tranquil neighborhood—Night-work—The medical objection to it—The student’s objection to day-work—Time to be kept in masses by adults, but divided into small portions by children—Rapid turning of the mind—Cuvier eminent for this faculty—The Duke of Wellington—The faculty more available with some occupations than others—The slavery of a minute obedience to the clock—Broad rules the best—Books of agenda, good in business, but not in the higher intellectual pursuits.
What you told me of your habits in the employment of your hours reminded me of Julian Fane. Mr. Lytton tells us that “after a long day of professional business, followed by a late evening of social amusement, he would return in the small hours of the night to his books, and sit, unwearied, till sunrise in the study of them. Nor did he then seem to suffer from this habit of late hours. His nightly vigils occasioned no appearance of fatigue the next day.... He rarely rose before noon, and generally rose much later.”
But however irregular a man’s distribution of his time may be in the sense of wanting the government of fixed rules, there always comes in time a certain regularity by the mere operation of habit. People who get up very late hardly ever do so in obedience to a rule; many get up early by rule, and many more are told that they ought to get up early, and believe it, and aspire to that virtue, but fail to carry it into practice. The late-risers are rebels and sinners—in this respect—to a man, and so persistently have the wise, from Solomon downwards, harped upon the moral loveliness of early rising and the degradation which follows the opposite practice, that one can hardly get up after eight without either an uncomfortable sense of guilt or an extraordinary callousness. Yet the late-risers, though obeying no rule, for the abandoned sinner recognizes none, become regular in their late rising from the gradual fixing power of habit. Even Julian Fane, though he regretted his desultory ways, “and dwelt with great earnestness on the importance of regular habits of work,” was perhaps less irregular than he himself believed. We are sure to acquire habits; what is important is not so much that the habits should be regular, as that their regularity should be of the kind most favorable in the long run to the accomplishment of our designs, and this never comes by chance, it is the result of an effort of the will in obedience to governing wisdom.
The first question which every one who has the choice of his hours must settle for himself is at what time of day he will make his principal effort; for the day of every intellectual workman ought to be marked by a kind of artistic composition; there ought to be some one labor distinctly recognized as dominant, with others in subordination, and subordination of various degrees. Now for the hours at which the principal effort ought to be made, it is not possible to fix them by the clock so as to be suitable for everybody, but a broad rule may be arrived at which is applicable to all imaginable cases. The rule is this—to do the chief work in the best hours; to give it the pick of your day; and by day I do not mean only the solar day, but the whole of the twenty-four hours. There is an important physiological reason for giving the best hours to the most important work. The better the condition of the brain and the body, and the more favorable the surrounding circumstances, the smaller will be the cost to the organization of the labor that has to be done. It is always the safest way to do the heaviest (or most important) work at the time and under the conditions which make it the least costly.
Physicians are unanimous in their preference of early to late work; and no doubt, if the question were not complicated by other considerations, we could not do better than to follow their advice in its simplicity. Goethe wrote in the morning, with his faculties refreshed by sleep and not yet excited by any stimulant. I could mention several living authors of eminence who pursue the same plan, and find it favorable alike to health and to production. The rule which they follow is never to write after lunch, leaving the rest of their time free for study and society, both of which are absolutely necessary to authors. According to this system it is presumed that the hours between breakfast and lunch are the best hours. In many cases they are so. A person in fair health, after taking a light early breakfast without any heavier stimulant than tea or coffee, finds himself in a state of freshness highly favorable to sound and agreeable thinking. His brain will be in still finer order if the breakfast has been preceded by a cold bath, with friction and a little exercise. The feeling of freshness, cleanliness, and moderate exhilaration, will last for several hours, and during those hours the intellectual work will probably be both lively and reasonable. It is difficult for a man who feels cheerful and refreshed, and whose task seems easy and light, to write anything morbid or perverse.
But for the morning to be so good as I have just described it, the workman must be quite favorably situated. He ought to live in a very tranquil neighborhood, and to be as free as possible from anxiety as to what the postman may have in reserve for him. If his study-window looks out on a noisy street, and if the day is sure, as it wears on, to bring anxious business of its own, then the increasing noise and the apprehension (even though it be almost entirely unconscious) of impending business, will be quite sufficient to interfere with the work of any man who is the least in the world nervous, and almost all intellectual laborers are nervous, more or less. Men who have the inestimable advantage of absolute tranquillity, at all times, do well to work in the morning, but those who can only get tranquillity at times independent of their own choice have a strong reason for working at those times, whether they happen to be in the morning or not.
In an excellent article on “Work” (evidently written by an experienced intellectual workman), which appeared in one of the early numbers of the Cornhill Magazine, and was remarkable alike for practical wisdom and the entire absence of traditional dogmatism, the writer speaks frankly in favor of night-work, “If you can work at all at night, one hour at that time is worth any two in the morning. The house is hushed, the brain is clear, the distracting influences of the day are at an end. You have not to disturb yourself with thoughts of what you are about to do, or what you are about to suffer. You know that there is a gulf between you and the affairs of the outside world, almost like the chasm of death; and that you need not take thought of the morrow until the morrow has come. There are few really great thoughts, such as the world will not willingly let die, that have not been conceived under the quiet stars.”
The medical objection to night-work in the case of literary men would probably be that the night is too favorable to literary production. The author of the Essay just quoted says that at night “you only drift into deeper silence and quicker inspiration. If the right mood is upon you, you write on; if not, your pillow awaits you.” Exactly so; that is to say, the brain, owing to the complete external tranquillity, can so concentrate its efforts on the subject in hand as to work itself up into a luminous condition which is fed by the most rapid destruction of the nervous substance that ever takes place within the walls of a human skull. “If the right mood is upon you, you write on;” in other words, if you have once well lighted your spirit-lamp, it will go on burning so long as any spirit is left in it, for the air is so tranquil that nothing comes to blow it out. You drift into deeper silence and “quicker inspiration.” It is just this quicker inspiration that the physician dreads.
Against this objection may be placed the equally serious objection to day-work, that every interruption, when you are particularly anxious not to be interrupted, causes a definite loss and injury to the nervous system. The choice must therefore be made between two dangers, and if they are equally balanced there can be no hesitation, because all the literary interests of an author are on the side of the most tranquil time. Literary work is always sure to be much better done when there is no fear of disturbance than under the apprehension of it; and precisely the same amount of cerebral effort will produce, when the work is uninterrupted, not only better writing, but a much greater quantity of writing. The knowledge that he is working well and productively is an element of health to every workman because it encourages cheerful habits of mind.
In the division of time it is an excellent rule for adults to keep it as much as possible in large masses, not giving a quarter of an hour to one occupation and a quarter to another, but giving three, four, or five hours to one thing at a time. In the case of children an opposite practice should be followed; they are able to change their attention from one subject to another much more easily than we can, whilst at the same time they cannot fix their minds for very long without cerebral fatigue leading to temporary incapacity. The custom prevalent in schools, of making the boys learn several different things in the course of the day, is therefore founded upon the necessities of the boy-nature, though most grown men would find that changes so frequent would, for them, have all the inconveniences of interruption. To boys they come as relief, to men as interruption. The reason is that the physical condition of the brain is different in the two cases; but in our loose way of talking about these things we may say that the boy’s ideas are superficial, like the plates and dishes on the surface of a dinner-table, which may be rapidly changed without inconvenience, whereas the man’s ideas, having all struck root down to the very depths of his nature, are more like the plants in a garden, which cannot be removed without a temporary loss both of vigor and of beauty, and the loss cannot be instantaneously repaired. For a man to do his work thoroughly well, it is necessary that he should dwell in it long enough at a time to get all the powers of his mind fully under command with reference to the particular work in hand, and he cannot do this without tuning his whole mind to the given diapason, as a tuner tunes a piano. Some men can tune their minds more rapidly, as violins are tuned, and this faculty may to a certain extent be acquired by efforts of the will very frequently repeated. Cuvier had this faculty in the most eminent degree. One of his biographers says: “His extreme facility for study, and of directing all the powers of his mind to diverse occupations of study, from one quarter of an hour to another, was one of the most extraordinary qualities of his mind.” The Duke of Wellington also cultivated the habit (inestimably valuable to a public man) of directing the whole of his attention to the subject under consideration, however frequently that subject might happen to be changed. But although men of exceptional power and very exceptional flexibility may do this with apparent impunity, that still depends very much on the nature of the occupation. There are some occupations which are not incompatible with a fragmentary division of time, because these occupations are themselves fragmentary. For example, you may study languages in phrase-books during very small spaces of time, because the complete phrase is in itself a very small thing, but you could not so easily break and resume the thread of an elaborate argument. I suspect that though Cuvier appeared to his contemporaries a man remarkably able to leave off and resume his work at will, he must have taken care to do work that would bear interruption at those times when he knew himself to be most liable to it. And although, when a man’s time is unavoidably broken up into fragments, no talent of a merely auxiliary kind can be more precious than that of turning each of those fragments to advantage, it is still true that he whose time is at his own disposal will do his work most calmly, most deliberately, and therefore on the whole most thoroughly and perfectly, when he keeps it in fine masses. The mere knowledge that you have three or four clear hours before you is in itself a great help to the spirit of thoroughness, both in study and in production. It is agreeable too, when the sitting has come to an end, to perceive that a definite advance is the result of it, and advance in anything is scarcely perceptible in less than three or four hours.
There are several pursuits which cannot be followed in fragments of time, on account of the necessary preparations. It is useless to begin oil-painting unless you have full time to set your palette properly, to get your canvas into a proper state for working upon, to pose the model as you wish, and settle down to work with everything as it ought to be. In landscape-painting from nature you require the time to go to the selected place, and after your arrival to arrange your materials and shelter yourself from the sun. In scientific pursuits the preparations are usually at least equally elaborate, and often much more so. To prepare for an experiment, or for a dissection, takes time which we feel to be disproportionate when it leaves too little for the scientific work itself. It is for this reason more frequently than for any other that amateurs who begin in enthusiasm, so commonly, after a while, abandon the objects of their pursuit.
There is a kind of slavery to which no really intellectual man would ever voluntarily submit, a minute obedience to the clock. Very conscientious people often impose upon themselves this sort of slavery. A person who has hampered himself with rules of this kind will take up a certain book, for instance, when the clock strikes nine, and begin at yesterday’s mark, perhaps in the middle of a paragraph. Then he will read with great steadiness till a quarter-past nine, and exactly on the instant when the minute-hand gets opposite the dot, he will shut his book, however much the passage may happen to interest him. It was in allusion to good people of this kind that Sir Walter Scott said he had never known a man of genius who could be perfectly regular in his habits, whilst he had known many blockheads who could. It is easy to see that a minute obedience to the clock is unintellectual in its very nature, for the intellect is not a piece of mechanism as a clock is, and cannot easily be made to act like one. There may be perfect correspondence between the locomotives and the clocks on a railway, for if the clocks are pieces of mechanism the locomotives are so likewise, but the intellect always needs a certain looseness and latitude as to time. Very broad rules are the best, such as “Write in the morning, read in the afternoon, see friends in the evening,” or else “Study one day and produce another, alternately,” or even “Work one week and see the world another week, alternately.”
There is a fretting habit, much recommended by men of business and of great use to them, of writing the evening before the duties of the day in a book of agenda. If this is done at all by intellectual men with reference to their pursuits, it ought to be done in a very broad, loose way, never minutely. An intellectual worker ought never to make it a matter of conscience (in intellectual labor) to do a predetermined quantity of little things. This sort of conscientiousness frets and worries, and is the enemy of all serenity of thought.
PART XI.
TRADES AND PROFESSIONS.
LETTER I.
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF ABILITY AND CULTURE WHO HAD NOT DECIDED ABOUT HIS PROFESSION.
The Church—Felicities and advantages of the clerical profession—Its elevated ideal—That it is favorable to noble studies—French priests and English Clergymen—The professional point of view—Difficulty of disinterested thinking—Colored light—Want of strict accuracy—Quotation from a sermon—The drawback to the clerical life—Provisional nature of intellectual conclusions—The legal profession—That it affords gratification to the intellectual powers—Want of intellectual disinterestedness in lawyers—Their absorption in professional life—Anecdote of a London lawyer—Superiority of lawyers in their sense of affairs—Medicine—The study of it a fine preparation for the intellectual life—Social rise of medical men coincident with the mental progress of communities—Their probable future influence on education—The heroic side of their profession—The military and naval professions—Bad effect of the privation of solitude—Interruption—Anecdote of Cuvier—The fine arts—In what way they are favorable to thought—Intellectual leisure of artists—Reasoning artists—Sciences included in the fine arts.
It may be taken for granted that to a mind constituted as yours is, no profession will be satisfactory which does not afford free play to the intellectual powers. You might no doubt exercise resolution enough to bind yourself down to uncongenial work for a term of years, but it would be with the intention of retiring as soon as you had realized a competency. The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.
You had thoughts, at one time, of the Church, and the Church would have suited you in many respects very happily, yet not, I think, in all respects. The clerical profession has many great felicities and advantages: it educates and develops, by its mild but regular discipline, much of our higher nature; it sets before us an elevated ideal, worth striving for at the cost of every sacrifice but one, of which I intend to say something farther on; and it offers just that mixture of public and private life which best affords the alternation of activity and rest. It is an existence in many respects most favorable to the noblest studies. It offers the happiest combination of duties that satisfy the conscience with leisure for the cultivation of the mind; it gives the easiest access to all classes of society, providing for the parson himself a neutral and independent position, so safe that he need only conduct himself properly to preserve it. How superior, from the intellectual point of view, is this liberal existence to the narrower one of a French curé de campagne! I certainly think that if a good curé has an exceptional genius for sanctity, his chances of becoming a perfect saint are better than those of a comfortable English incumbent, who is at the same time a gentleman and man of the world, but he is not nearly so well situated for leading the intellectual life. Our own clergy have a sort of middle position between the curé and the layman, which without at all interfering with their spiritual vocation, makes them better judges of the character of laymen and more completely in sympathy with it.
And yet, although the life of a clergyman is favorable to culture in many ways, it is not wholly favorable to it. There exists, in clerical thinking generally, just one restriction or impediment, which is the overwhelming importance of the professional point of view. Of all the professions the ecclesiastical one is that which most decidedly and most constantly affects the judgment of persons and opinions. It is peculiarly difficult for a clergyman to attain disinterestedness in his thinking, to accept truth just as it may happen to present itself, without passionately desiring that one doctrine may turn out to be strong in evidence and another unsupported. And so we find the clergy, as a class, anxious rather to discover aids to faith, than the simple scientific truth; and the more the special priestly character develops itself, the more we find them disposed to use their intellects for the triumph of principles that are decided upon beforehand. Sometimes this disposition leads them to see the acts of laymen in a colored light and to speak of them without strict accuracy. Here is an example of what I mean. A Jesuit priest preached a sermon in London very recently, in which he said that “in Germany, France, Italy, and England, gigantic efforts were being made to rob Christian children of the blessing of a Christian education.” “Herod, though dead,” the preacher continued, “has left his mantle behind him; and I wish that the soldiers of Herod in those countries would plunge their swords into the breasts of little children while they were innocent, rather than have their souls destroyed by means of an unchristian and uncatholic education.” No doubt this is very earnest and sincere, but it is not accurate and just thinking. The laity in the countries the preacher mentioned have certainly a strong tendency to exclude theology from State schools, because it is so difficult for a modern State to impose any kind of theological teaching without injustice to minorities; but the laity do not desire to deprive children of whatever instruction may be given to them by the clergy of their respective communions. May I add, that to the mind of a layman it seems a sanguinary desire that all little children should have swords plunged into their breasts rather than be taught in schools not clerically directed? The exact truth is, that the powerful lay element is certainly separating itself from the ecclesiastical element all over Europe, because it is found by experience that the two have a great and increasing difficulty in working harmoniously together, but the ecclesiastical element is detached and not destroyed. The quotation I have just made is in itself a sufficient illustration of that very peculiarity in the more exalted ecclesiastical temperament, which often makes it so difficult for priests and governments, in these times, to get on comfortably together. Here is first a very inaccurate statement, and then an outburst of most passionate feeling, whereas the intellect desires the strictest truth and the most complete disinterestedness. As the temper of the laity becomes more and more intellectual (and that is the direction of its movement), the sacerdotal habit will become more and more remote from it.
The clerical life has many strong attractions for the intellectual, and just one drawback to counterbalance them. It offers tranquillity, shelter from the interruptions and anxieties of the more active professions, and powerful means of influence ready to hand; but it is compatible with intellectual freedom and with the satisfaction of the conscience, only just so long as the priest really remains a believer in the details of his religion. Now, although we may reasonably hope to retain the chief elements of our belief, although what a man believes at twenty-five is always what he will most probably believe at fifty, still, in an age when free inquiry is the common habit of cultivated people of our sex, we may well hesitate before taking upon ourselves any formal engagement for the future, especially in matters of detail. The intellectual spirit does not regard its conclusions as being at any time final, but always provisional; we hold what we believe to be the truth until we can replace it by some more perfect truth, but cannot tell how much of to-day’s beliefs to-morrow will retain or reject. It may be observed, however, that the regular performance of priestly functions is in itself a great help to permanence in belief by connecting it closely with practical habit, so that the clergy do really and honestly often retain through life their hold on early beliefs which as laymen they might have lost.
The profession of the law provides ample opportunities for a critical intellect with a strong love of accuracy and a robust capacity for hard work, besides which it is the best of worldly educations. Some lawyers love their work as passionately as artists do theirs, others dislike it very heartily, most of them seem to take it as a simple business to be done for daily bread. Lawyers whose heart is in their work are invariably men of superior ability, which proves that there is something in it that affords gratification to the intellectual powers. However, in speaking of lawyers, I feel ignorant and on the outside, because their profession is one of which the interior feelings can be known to no one who has not practised. One thing seems clear, they get the habit of employing the whole strength and energy of their minds for especial and temporary ends, the purpose being the service of the client, certainly not the revelation of pure truth. Hence, although they become very acute, and keen judges of that side of human nature which they habitually see (not the best side), they are not more disinterested than clergymen.12 Sometimes they take up some study outside of their profession and follow it disinterestedly, but this is rare. A busy lawyer is much more likely than a clergyman to become entirely absorbed in his professional life, because it requires so much more intellectual exertion. I remember asking a very clever lawyer who lived in London, whether he ever visited an exhibition of pictures, and he answered me by the counter-inquiry whether I had read Chitty on Contracts, Collier on Partnerships, Taylor on Evidence, Cruse’s Digest, or Smith’s Mercantile Law? This seemed to me at the time a good instance of the way a professional habit may narrow one’s views of things, for these law-books were written for lawyers alone, whilst the picture exhibitions were intended for the public generally. My friend’s answer would have been more to the point if I had inquired whether he had read Linton on Colors, and Burnet on Chiaroscuro.
There is just one situation in which we all may feel for a short time as lawyers feel habitually. Suppose that two inexperienced players sit down to a game of chess, and that each is backed by a clever person who is constantly giving him hints. The two backers represent the lawyers, and the players represent their clients. There is not much disinterested thought in a situation of this kind, but there is a strong stimulus to acuteness.
I think that lawyers are often superior to philosophers in their sense of what is relatively important in human affairs with reference to limited spaces of time, such as half a century. They especially know the enormous importance of custom, which the speculative mind very readily forgets, and they have in the highest degree that peculiar sense which fits men for dealing with others in the affairs of ordinary life. In this respect they are remarkably superior to clergymen, and superior also to artists and men of science.
The profession of medicine is, of all fairly lucrative professions, the one best suited to the development of the intellectual life. Having to deal continually with science, being constantly engaged in following and observing the operation of natural laws, it produces a sense of the working of those laws which prepares the mind for bold and original speculation, and a reliance upon their unfailing regularity, which gives it great firmness and assurance. A medical education is the best possible preparation for philosophical pursuits, because it gives them a solid basis in the ascertainable. The estimation in which these studies are held is an accurate meter of the intellectual advancement of a community. When the priest is reverenced as a being above ordinary humanity, and the physician slightly esteemed, the condition of society is sure to be that of comparative ignorance and barbarism; and it is one of several signs which indicate barbarian feeling in our own aristocracy, that it has a contempt for the study of medicine. The progress of society towards enlightenment is marked by the steady social rise of the surgeon and the physician, a rise which still continues, even in Western Europe. It is probable that before very long the medical profession will exercise a powerful influence upon general education, and take an active share in it. There are very strong reasons for the opinion that schoolmasters educated in medicine would be peculiarly well qualified to train both body and mind for a vigorous and active manhood. An immense advantage, even from the intellectual point of view, in the pursuit of medicine and surgery, is that they supply a discipline in mental heroism. Other professions do this also, but not to the same degree. The combination of an accurate training in positive science with the habitual contempt of danger and contemplation of suffering and death, is the finest possible preparation for noble studies and arduous discoveries. I ought to add, however, that medical men in the provinces, when they have not any special enthusiasm for their work, seem peculiarly liable to the deadening influences of routine, and easily fall behind their age. The medical periodicals provide the best remedy for this.
The military and naval professions are too active, and too much bound to obedience in their activity, for the highest intellectual pursuits; but their greatest evil in this respect is the continual privation of solitude, and the frequency of interruption. A soldier’s life in the higher ranks, when there is great responsibility and the necessity for personal decision, undoubtedly leads to the most brilliant employment of the mental powers, and develops a manliness of character which is often of the greatest use in intellectual work; so that a man of science may find his force augmented, and better under control, for having passed through a military experience; but the life of barracks and camps is destructive to continuity of thinking. The incompatibility becomes strikingly manifest when we reflect how impossible it would have been for Ney or Massena to do the work of Cuvier or Comte. Cuvier even declined to accompany the expedition to Egypt, notwithstanding the prospects of advantage that it offered. The reason he gave for this refusal was, that he could do more for science in the tranquillity of the Jardin des Plantes. He was a strict economist of time, and dreaded the loss of it involved in following an army, even though his mission would have been purely scientific. How much more would Cuvier have dreaded the interruptions of a really military existence! It is these interruptions, and not any want of natural ability, that are the true explanation of the intellectual poverty which characterizes the military profession. Of all the liberal professions it is the least studious.
Let me say a word in conclusion about the practical pursuit of the fine arts. Painters are often remarkable for pleasant conversational power, and a degree of intelligence strikingly superior to their literary culture. This is because the processes of their art can be followed, at least under certain circumstances, by the exercise of hand and eye, directed merely by artistic taste and experience, whilst the intellect is left free either for reflection or conversation. Rubens liked to be read to when he painted; many artists like to hear people talk, and to take a share occasionally in the conversation. The truth is that artists, even when they work very assiduously, do in fact enjoy great spaces of intellectual leisure, and often profit by them. Painting itself is also a fine discipline for some of the best faculties of the mind, though it is well known that the most gifted artists think least about their art. Still there is a large class of painters, including many eminent ones, who proceed intellectually in the execution of their works, who reason them out philosophically step by step, and exercise a continual criticism upon their manual labor as it goes forward. I find, as I know art and artists better, that this class is more numerous than is commonly suspected, and that the charming effects which we believe to be the result of pure inspiration have often been elaborately reasoned out like a problem in mathematics. We are very apt to forget that art includes a great science, the science of natural appearances, and that the technical work of painters and engravers cannot go forward safely without the profoundest knowledge of certain delicate materials, this being also a science, and a difficult one. The common tendency is to underrate (from ignorance) what is intellectual in the practice of the fine arts; and yet the artists of past times have left evidence enough that they thought about art, and thought deeply. Artists are often illiterate; but it is possible to be at the same time illiterate and intellectual; as we see frequent examples of book-learning in people who have scarcely a single idea of their own.
LETTER II.
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO HAD LITERARY AND ARTISTIC TASTES, BUT NO PROFESSION.
The world only recognizes performance—Uselessness of botch-work—Vastness of the interval between botch-work and handicraft—Delusions of the well-to-do—Quotation from Charles Lever—Indifference, and even contempt, for skill—Moral contempt for skill—The contempt which comes from the pride of knowledge—Intellectual value of skill and of professional discipline.
It is not a graceful thing for me to say, nor pleasant for you to hear, that what you have done hitherto in art and literature is neither of any value in itself nor likely to lead you to that which is truly and permanently satisfying. I believe you have natural ability, though it would not be easy for any critic to measure its degree when it has never been developed by properly-directed work. Most critics would probably err on the unfavorable side, for we are easily blind to powers that are little more than latent. To see anything encouraging in your present performance, it would need the sympathy and intelligence of the American sculptor Greenough, of whom it was said that “his recognition was not limited to achievement, but extended to latent powers.” The world, however, recognizes nothing short of performance, because the performance is what it needs, and promises are of no use to it.
In this rough justice of the world there is a natural distribution of rewards. You will be paid, in fame and money, for all excellent work; and you will be paid, in money, though not in fame, for all work that is even simply good, provided it be of a kind that the world needs, or fancies that it needs. But you will never be paid at all for botch-work, neither in money nor in fame, nor by your own inward approval.
For we all of us either know that our botch-work is worthless, or else have serious misgivings about it. That which is less commonly realized by those who have not undergone the test of professional labor is the vastness of the interval that separates botch-work from handicraft, and the difficulty of getting over it. “There are few delusions,” Charles Lever said in “The Bramleighs,” “more common with well-to-do people than the belief that if ‘put to it’ they could earn their own livelihood in a variety of ways. Almost every man has some two or three or more accomplishments which he fancies would be quite adequate to his support; and remembering with what success the exercise of these gifts has ever been hailed in the society of his friends, he has a sort of generous dislike to be obliged to eclipse some poor drudge of a professional, who, of course, will be consigned to utter oblivion after his own performance. Augustus Bramleigh was certainly not a conceited or a vain man, and yet he had often in his palmy days imagined how easy it would be for him to provide for his own support. He was something of a musician; he sang pleasingly; he drew a little; he knew something of three or four modern languages; he had that sort of smattering acquaintance with questions of religion, politics, and literature which the world calls being ‘well-informed,’ and yet nothing short of the grave necessity revealed to him that towards the object of securing a livelihood a cobbler in his bulk was out-and-out his master. The world has no need of the man of small acquirements, and would rather have its shoes mended by the veriest botch of a professional than by the cleverest amateur that ever studied a Greek sandal.”
Something of this illusion, which Charles Lever has touched so truly, may be due to a peculiarity of the English mind in its present (not quite satisfactory) stage of development, a peculiarity which I am not the first to point out, since it has been already indicated by Mr. Pointer, the distinguished artist; and I think that this peculiarity is to be found in very great force, perhaps in greater force than elsewhere, in that well-to-do English middle class in which you have been born and educated. It consists in a sort of indifference to skill of all kinds, which passes into something not very far from active contempt when a call is made for attention, recognition, admiration. The source of this feeling will probably be found in the inordinate respect for wealth, between which and highly developed personal skill, in anything, there is a certain antagonism or incompatibility. The men of real skill are almost always men who earn their living by their skill. The feeling of the middle-class capitalists concerning the skilful man may be expressed, not unjustly, as follows: “Yes, he is very clever; he may well be clever—it is his trade; he gets his living by it.” This is held to exonerate us from the burden of admiration, and there is not any serious interest in the achievements of human endeavor as evidence of the marvellous natural endowments and capabilities of the human organism. In some minds the indifference to skill is more active and grows into very real, though not openly expressed contempt. This contempt is partly moral. The skilful man always rejoices in his skill with a heaven-bestowed joy and delight—one of the purest and most divine pleasures given by God to man—an encouragement to labor, and a reward, the best reward, after his arduous apprenticeship. But there is a sour and severe spirit, hating all innocent pleasures, which despises the gladness of the skilful as so much personal vanity.
There is also the contempt for skill which comes from the pride of knowledge. To attain skill in anything a degree of application is necessary which absorbs more time than the acquisition of knowledge about the thing, so that the remarkably skilful man is not likely to be the erudite man. There have been instances of men who possessed both skill and learning. The American sculptor Greenough, and the English painter Dyce, were at the same time both eminently skilful in their craft and eminently learned out of it; but the combination is very rare. Therefore the possession of skill has come to be considered presumptive evidence of a want of general information.
But the truth is that professional skill is knowledge tested and perfected by practical application, and therefore has a great intellectual value. Professional life is to private individuals what active warfare is to a military state. It brings to light every deficiency, and reveals our truest needs. And therefore it seems to me a matter for regret that you should pass your existence in irresponsible privacy, and not have your attainments tested by the exigencies of some professional career. The discipline which such a career affords, and which no private resolution can ever adequately replace, may be all that is wanting to your development.
LETTER III.
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO WISHED TO DEVOTE HIMSELF TO LITERATURE AS A PROFESSION.
Byron’s vexation at the idea of poetry being considered a profession—Buffon could not bear to be called a naturalist—Cuvier would not be called a Hellenist—Faraday’s life not professional—The intellectual life frequently protected by professions outside of it—Professional work ought to be plain business work—Michelet’s account of the incubation of a book—Necessity for too great rapidity of production in professional literature—It does not pay to do your best—Journalism and magazine-writing—Illustration from a sister art—Privilege of an author to be allowed to write little.
Do you remember how put out Byron was when some reviewer spoke of Wordsworth as being “at the head of the profession”? Byron’s vexation was not entirely due to jealousy of Wordsworth, though that may have had something to do with it, nor was it due either to an aristocratic dislike of being in a “profession” himself, though this feeling may have had a certain influence; it was due to a proper sense of the dignity of the intellectual life. Buffon could not bear to be called a “naturalist,” and Cuvier in the same way disliked the title of Hellenist, because it sounded professional: he said that though he knew more Greek than all the Academy he was not a Hellenist as Gail was, because he did not live by Greek.
Now, if this feeling had arisen merely from a dislike to having it supposed that one is obliged to earn his own living, it would have been a contemptibly vulgar sentiment, whoever professed it. Nothing can be more honorable to a man than to earn his bread by honest industry of any kind, whether it be manual or intellectual, and still I feel with Byron, and Buffon, and Cuvier, that the great instruments of the world’s intellectual culture ought not to be, in the ordinary sense, professions. Byron said that poetry, as he understood it, was “an art, an attribute,” but not what is understood by a “profession.” Surely the same is true of all the highest intellectual work, in whatever kind. You could scarcely consider Faraday’s life to be what is commonly understood by a professional life. Tyndall says that if Faraday had chosen to employ his talents in analytical chemistry he might have realized a fortune of 150,000l. Now that would have been a professional existence; but the career which Faraday chose (happily for science) was not professional, but intellectual. The distinction between the professional and the intellectual lives is perfectly clear in my own mind, and therefore I ought to be able to express it clearly. Let me make the attempt.
The purpose of a profession, of a profession pure and simple, is to turn knowledge and talent to pecuniary profit. On the other hand, the purpose of cultivated men, or men of genius, who work in an unprofessional spirit, is to increase knowledge, or make it more accurate, or else simply to give free exercise to high faculties which demand it. The distinction is so clear and trenchant that most intellectual men, whose private fortunes are not large, prefer to have a profession distinct from their higher intellectual work, in order to secure the perfect independence of the latter. Mr. Smiles, in his valuable book on “Character,” gives a list of eminent intellectual men who have pursued real professional avocations of various kinds separately from their literary or scientific activity, and he mentions an observation of Gifford’s which is much to my present purpose:—“Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly, who knew the drudgery of writing for a living, once observed that ‘a single hour of composition, won from the business of the day, is worth more than the whole day’s toil of him who works at the trade of literature: in the one case, the spirit comes joyfully to refresh itself, like a hart to the water-brooks; in the other, it pursues its miserable way, panting and jaded, with the dogs of hunger and necessity behind.’” So Coleridge said that “three hours of leisure, unalloyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial than weeks of compulsion.” Coleridge’s idea of a profession was, that it should be “some regular employment which could be carried on so far mechanically, that an average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge.” Without in the least desiring to undervalue good professional work of any kind, I may observe that, to be truly professional, it ought to be always at command, and therefore that the average power of the man’s intellect, not his rare flashes of highest intellectual illumination, ought to suffice for it. Professional work ought always to be plain business work, requiring knowledge and skill, but not any effort of genius. For example, in medicine, it is professional work to prescribe a dose or amputate a limb, but not to discover the nervous system or the circulation of the blood.
If literature paid sufficiently well to allow it, a literary man might very wisely consider study to be his profession, and not production. He would then study regularly, say, six hours a day, and write when he had something to say, and really wanted to express it. His book, when it came out, would have had time to be properly hatched, and would probably have natural life in it. Michelet says of one of his books: “Cette œuvre a du moins le caractère d’être venue comme vient toute vraie création vivante. Elle s’est faite à la chaleur d’une douce incubation.”13 It would be impossible, in so short a space, to give a more accurate description of the natural manner in which a book comes into existence. A book ought always to be “fait à la chaleur d’une douce incubation.”
But when you make a profession of literature this is what you can hardly ever get leave to do. Literary men require to see something of the world; they can hardly be hermits, and the world cannot be seen without a constant running expenditure, which at the end of the year represents an income. Men of culture and refinement really cannot live like very poor people without deteriorating in refinement, and falling behind in knowledge of the world. When they are married, and have families, they can hardly let their families live differently from themselves; so that there are the usual expenses of the English professional classes to be met, and these are heavy when they have to be got out of the profits of literature. The consequence is, that if a book is to be written prudently it must be written quickly, and with the least amount of preparatory labor that can possibly be made to serve. This is very different from the “douce incubation” of Michelet. Goldsmith said of hack-writing, that it was difficult to imagine a combination more prejudicial to taste than that of the author whose interest it is to write as much as possible, and the bookseller, whose interest it is to pay as little as possible. The condition of authors has no doubt greatly improved since Goldsmith’s time, but still the fact remains that the most careful and finished writing, requiring extensive preparatory study, is a luxury in which the professional writer can only indulge himself at great risk. Careful writing does, no doubt, occasionally pay for the time it costs; but such writing is more commonly done by men who are either independent by fortune, or who make themselves, as authors, independent by the pursuit of some other profession, than by regular men of letters whose whole income is derived from their inkstands. And when, by way of exception, the hack-writer does produce very highly-finished and concentrated work, based upon an elaborate foundation of hard study, that work is seldom professional in the strictest sense, but is a labor of love, outside the hasty journalism or magazine-writing that wins his daily bread. In cases of this kind it is clear that the best work is not done as a regular part of professional duty, and that the author might as well earn his bread in some other calling, if he still had the same amount of leisure for the composition of real literature.
The fault I find with writing as a profession is that it does not pay to do your best. I don’t mean to insinuate that downright slovenly or careless work is the most profitable; but I do mean to say that any high degree of conscientiousness, especially in the way of study and research, is a direct injury to the professional writer’s purse. Suppose, for example, that he is engaged in reviewing a book, and is to get 3l. 10s. for the review when it is written. If by the accident of previous accumulation his knowledge is already fully equal to the demand upon it, the review may be written rapidly, and the day’s work will have been a profitable one; but if, on the other hand, it is necessary to consult several authorities, to make some laborious researches, then the reviewer is placed in a dilemma between literary thoroughness and duty to his family. He cannot spend a week in reading up a subject for the sum of 3l. 10s. Is it not much easier to string together a few phrases which will effectually hide his ignorance from everybody but the half-dozen enthusiasts who have mastered the subject of the book? It is strange that the professional pursuit of literature should be a direct discouragement to study; yet it is so. There are hack-writers who study, and they deserve much honor for doing so, since the temptations the other way are always so pressing and immediate. Sainte-Beuve was a true student, loving literature for its own sake, and preparing for his articles with a diligence rare in the profession. But he was scarcely a hack-writer, having a modest independency, and living besides with the quiet frugality of a bachelor.