The Intellectual Life

The truth seems to be that literature of the highest kind can only in the most exceptional cases be made a profession, yet that a skilful writer may use his pen professionally if he chooses. The production of the printed talk of the day is a profession, requiring no more than average ability, and the tone and temper of ordinary educated men. The outcome of it is journalism and magazine-writing; and now let me say a word or two about these.

The highest kind of journalism is very well done in England; the men who do it are often either highly educated, or richly gifted by nature, or both. The practice of journalism is useful to an author in giving him a degree of readiness and rapidity, a skill in turning his materials to immediate account, and a power of presenting one or two points effectively, which may often be valuable in literature of a more permanent order. The danger of it may be illustrated by a reference to a sister art. I was in the studio of an English landscape-painter when some pictures arrived from an artist in the country to go along with his own to one of the exhibitions. They were all very pretty and very clever—indeed, so clever were they, that their cleverness was almost offensive—and so long as they were looked at by themselves, the brilliance of them was rather dazzling. But the instant they were placed by the side of thoroughly careful and earnest work, it became strikingly evident that they had been painted hastily, and would be almost immediately exhausted by the purchaser. Now these pictures were the journalism of painting; and my friend told me that when once an artist has got into the habit of doing hasty work like that, he seldom acquires better habits afterwards.

Professional writers who follow journalism for its immediate profits, are liable in like manner to retain the habit of diffuseness in literature which ought to be more finished and more concentrated. Therefore, although journalism is a good teacher of promptitude and decision, it often spoils a hand for higher literature by incapacitating it for perfect finish; and it is better for a writer who has ambition to write little, but always his best, than to dilute himself in daily columns. One of the greatest privileges which an author can aspire to is to be allowed to write little, and that is a privilege which the professional writer does not enjoy except in such rare instances as that of Tennyson, whose careful finish is as prudent in the professional sense as it is satisfactory to the scrupulous fastidiousness of the artist.

LETTER IV.

TO AN ENERGETIC AND SUCCESSFUL COTTON MANUFACTURER.

Two classes in their lower grades inevitably hostile—The spiritual and temporal powers—The functions of both not easily exercised by the same person—Humboldt, Faraday, Livingstone—The difficulty about time—Limits to the energy of the individual—Jealousy between the classes—That this jealousy ought not to exist—Some of the sciences based upon an industrial development—The work of the intellectual class absolutely necessary in a highly civilized community—That it grows in numbers and influence side by side with the industrial class.

Our last conversation together, in the privacy of your splendid new drawing-room after the guests had gone away and the music had ceased for the night, left me under the impression that we had not arrived at a perfect understanding of each other. This was due in a great measure to my unfortunate incapacity for expressing anything exactly by spoken words. The constant habit of writing, which permits a leisurely selection from one’s ideas, is often very unfavorable to readiness in conversation. Will you permit me, then, to go over the ground we traversed, this time in my own way, pen in hand?

We represent, you and I, two classes which in their lower grades are inevitably hostile; but the superior members of these classes ought not to feel any hostility, since both are equally necessary to the world. We are, in truth, the spiritual and the temporal powers in their most modern form. The chief of industry and the man of letters stand to-day in the same relation to each other and to mankind as the baron and bishop of the Middle Ages. We are not recognized, either of us, by formally conferred titles, we are both held to be somewhat intrusive by the representatives of a former order of things, and there is, or was until very lately, a certain disposition to deny what we consider our natural rights; but we know that our powers are not to be resisted, and we have the inward assurance that the forces of nature are with us.

This, with reference to the outer world. But there is a want of clearness in the relation between ourselves. You understand your great temporal function, which is the wise direction of the industry of masses, the accumulation and distribution of wealth; but you do not so clearly understand the spiritual function of the intellectual class, and you do not think of it quite justly. This want of understanding is called by some of us your Philistinism. Will you permit me to explain what the intellectual class thinks of you, and what is its opinion about itself?

Pray excuse any appearance of presumption on my part if I say we of the intellectual class and you of the industrial. My position is something like that of the clergyman who reads, “Let him come to me or to some other learned and discreet minister of God’s word,” thereby calling himself learned and discreet. It is a simple matter of fact that I belong to the intellectual class, since I lead its life, just as it is a fact that you have a quarter of a million of money.

First, I want to show that the existence of my class is necessary.

Although men in various occupations often acquire a considerable degree of culture outside their trade, the highest results of culture can scarcely ever be attained by men whose time is taken up in earning a fortune. Every man has but a limited flow of mental energy per day; and if this is used up in an industrial leadership, he cannot do much more in the intellectual sphere than simply ascertain what has been done by others. Now, although we have a certain respect, and the respect is just, for those who know what others have accomplished, it is clear that if no one did more than this, if no one made any fresh discoveries, the world would make no progress whatever; and in fact, if nobody ever had been dedicated to intellectual pursuits in preceding ages, the men who only learn what others have done, would in these days have had nothing to learn. Past history proves the immensity of the debt which the world owes to men who gave their whole time and attention to intellectual pursuits; and if the existences of these men could be eliminated from the past of the human race, its present would be very different from what it is. A list has been published of men who have done much good work in the intervals of business, but still the fact remains that the great intellectual pioneers were absorbed and devoted men, scorning wealth so far as it affected themselves, and ready to endure everything for knowledge beyond the knowledge of their times. Instances of such enthusiasm abound, an enthusiasm fully justified by the value of the results which it has achieved. When Alexander Humboldt sold his inheritance to have the means for his great journey in South America, and calmly dedicated the whole of a long life, and the strength of a robust constitution, to the advancement of natural knowledge, he acted foolishly indeed, if years, and strength, and fortune are given to us only to be well invested in view of money returns; but the world has profited by his decision. Faraday gave up the whole of his time to discovery when he might have earned a large fortune by the judicious investment of his extraordinary skill in chemistry. Livingstone has sacrificed everything to the pursuit of his great work in Africa. Lives such as these—and many resemble them in useful devotion of which we hear much less—are clearly not compatible with much money-getting. A decent existence, free from debt, is all that such men ought to be held answerable for.

I have taken two or three leading instances, but there is quite a large class of intellectual people who cannot in the nature of things serve society effectively in their own way without being quite outside of the industrial life. There is a real incompatibility between some pursuits and others. I suspect that you would have been a good general, for you are a born leader and commander of men; but it would have been difficult to unite a regular military career with strict personal attention to your factories. We often find the same difficulty in our intellectual pursuits. We are not always quite so unpractical as you think we are; but the difficulty is how to find the time, and how to arrange it so as not to miss two or three distinct classes of opportunities. We are not all of us exactly imbeciles in money matters, though the pecuniary results of our labors seem no doubt pitiful enough. There is a tradition that a Greek philosopher, who was suspected by the practical men of his day of incapacity for affairs, devoted a year to prove the contrary, and traded so judiciously that he amassed thereby great riches. It may be doubtful whether he could do it in one year, but many a fine intellectual capacity has overshadowed a fine practical capacity in the same head by the withdrawal of time and effort.

It is because the energies of one man are so limited, and there is so little time in a single human life, that the intellectual and industrial functions must, in their highest development, be separated. No one man could unite in his own person your life and Humboldt’s, though it is possible that he might have the natural capacity for both. Grant us, then, the liberty not to earn very much money, and this being once granted, try to look upon our intellectual superiority as a simple natural fact, just as we look upon your pecuniary superiority.

In saying in this plain way that we are intellectually superior to you and your class, I am guilty of no more pride and vanity than you when you affirm or display your wealth. The fact is there, in its simplicity. We have culture because we have paid the twenty or thirty years of labor which are the price of culture, just as you have great factories and estates which are the reward of your life’s patient and intelligent endeavor.

Why should there be any narrow jealousy between us; why any contempt on the one side or the other? Each has done his appointed work, each has caused to fructify the talent which the Master gave.

Yet a certain jealousy does exist, if not between you and me personally, at least between our classes. The men who have culture without wealth are jealous of the power and privileges of those who possess money without culture; and on the other hand, the men whose time has been too entirely absorbed by commercial pursuits to leave them any margin sufficient to do justice to their intellectual powers, are often painfully sensitive to the contempt of the cultivated, and strongly disposed, from jealousy, to undervalue culture itself. Both are wrong so far as they indulge any unworthy and unreasonable feeling of this kind. The existence of the two classes is necessary to an advanced civilization. The science of accumulating and administrating material wealth, of which you yourself are a great practical master, is the foundation of the material prosperity of nations, and it is only when this prosperity is fully assured to great numbers that the arts and sciences can develop themselves in perfect liberty and with the tranquil assurance of their own permanence. The advancement of material well-being in modern states tends so directly to the advancement of intellectual pursuits, even when the makers of fortunes are themselves indifferent to this result, that it ought always to be a matter of congratulation for the intellectual class itself, which needs the support of a great public with leisure to read and think. It is easy to show how those arts and sciences which our class delights to cultivate are built upon those developments of industry which have been brought about by the energy of yours. Suppose the case of a scientific chemist: the materials for his experiments are provided ready to his hand by the industrial class; the record of them is preserved on paper manufactured by the same industrial class; and the public which encourages him by its attention is usually found in great cities which are maintained by the labors of the same useful servants of humanity. It is possible, no doubt, in these modern times, that some purely pastoral or agricultural community might produce a great chemist, because a man of inborn scientific genius who came into the world in an agricultural country might in these days get his books and materials from industrial centres at a distance, but his work would still be based on the industrial life of others. No pastoral or agricultural community which was really isolated from industrial communities ever produced a chemist. And now consider how enormously important this one science of chemistry has proved itself even to our intellectual life! Several other sciences have been either greatly strengthened or else altogether renewed by it, and the wonderful photographic processes have been for nature and the fine arts what printing was for literature, placing reliable and authentic materials for study within the reach of every one. Literature itself has profited by the industrial progress of the present age, in the increased cheapness of everything that is material in books. I please myself with the reflection that even you make paper cheaper by manufacturing so much cotton.

All these are reasons why we ought not to be jealous of you; and now permit me to indicate a few other reasons why it is unreasonable on your part to feel any jealousy of us.

Suppose we were to cease working to-morrow—cease working, I mean, in our peculiar ways—and all of us become colliers and factory operatives instead, with nobody to supply our places. Or, since you may possibly be of opinion that there is enough literature and science in the world at the present day, suppose rather that at some preceding date the whole literary and scientific and artistic labor of the human race; had come suddenly to a standstill. Mind, I do not say of Englishmen merely, but of the whole race, for if any intellectual work had been done in France or Germany, or even in Japan, you would have imported it like cotton and foreign cereals. Well, I have no hesitation in telling you that although there was a good deal of literature and science in England before the 1st of January, 1800, the present condition of the nation would have been a very chaotic condition if the intellectual class had ceased on that day to think and observe and to place on record its thoughts and observations. The life of a progressive nation cannot long go forward exclusively on the thinking of the past: its thoughtful men must not be all dead men, but living men who accompany it on its course. It is they who make clear the lessons of experience; it is they who discover the reliable general laws upon which all safe action must be founded in the future; it is they who give decision to human action in every direction by constantly registering, in language of comprehensive accuracy, both its successes and its failures. It is their great and arduous labor which makes knowledge accessible to men of action at the cost of little effort and the smallest possible expenditure of time. The intellectual class grows in numbers and in influence along with the numbers and influence of the materially productive population of the State. And not only are the natural philosophers, the writers of contemporary and past history, the discoverers in science, necessary in the strictest sense to the life of such a community as the modern English community, but even the poets, the novelists, the artists are necessary to the perfection of its life. Without them and their work the national mind would be as incomplete as would be the natural universe without beauty. But this, perhaps, you will perceive less clearly, or be less willing to admit.

LETTER V.

TO A YOUNG ETONIAN WHO THOUGHT OF BECOMING A COTTON-SPINNER.

Absurd old prejudices against commerce—Stigma attached to the great majority of occupations—Traditions of feudalism—Distinctions between one trade and another—A real instance of an Etonian who had gone into the cotton-trade—Observations on this case—The trade a fine field for energy—A poor one for intellectual culture—It develops practical ability—Culture not possible without leisure—The founders of commercial fortunes.

It is agreeable to see various indications that the absurd old prejudices against commerce are certainly declining. There still remains quite enough contempt for trade in the professional classes and the aristocracy, to give us frequent opportunities for studying it as a relic of former superstition, unhappily not yet rare enough to be quite a curiosity; but as time passes and people become more rational, it will retreat to out-of-the-way corners of old country mansions and rural parsonages, at a safe distance from the light-giving centres of industry. It is a surprising fact, and one which proves the almost pathetic spirit of deference and submission to superiors which characterizes the English people, that out of the hundreds of occupations which are followed by the busy classes of this country, only three are entirely free from some degrading stigma, so that they may be followed by a high-born youth without any sacrifice of caste. The wonder is that the great active majority of the nation, the men who by their industry and intelligence have made England what she is, should ever have been willing to submit to so insolent a rule as this rule of caste, which, instead of honoring industry, honored idleness, and attached a stigma to the most useful and important trades. The landowner, the soldier, the priest, these three were pure from every stain of degradation, and only these three were quite absolutely and ethereally pure. Next to them came the lawyer and the physician, on whom there rested some traces of the lower earth; so that although the youthful baron would fight or preach, he would neither plead nor heal. And after these came the lower professions and the innumerable trades, all marked with stigmas of deeper and deeper degradation.

From the intellectual point of view these prejudices indicate a state of society in which public opinion has not emerged from barbarism. It understands the strength of the feudal chief having land, with serfs or voters on the land; it knows the uses of the sword, and it dreads the menaces of the priesthood. Beyond this it knows little, and despises what it does not understand. It is ignorant of science, and industry, and art; it despises them as servile occupations beneath its conception of the gentleman. This is the tradition of countries which retain the impressions of feudalism; but notwithstanding all our philosophy, it is difficult for us to avoid some feeling of astonishment when we reflect that the public opinion of England—a country that owes so much of her greatness and nearly all her wealth to commercial enterprise—should be contemptuous towards commerce.

I may notice, in passing, a very curious form of this narrowness. Trade is despised, but distinctions are established between one trade and another. A man who sells wine is considered more of a gentleman than a man who sells figs and raisins; and I believe you will find, if you observe people carefully, that a woollen manufacturer is thought to be a shade less vulgar than a cotton manufacturer. These distinctions are seldom based on reason, for the work of commerce is generally very much the same sort of work, mentally, whatever may be the materials it deals in. You may be heartily congratulated on the strength of mind, firmness of resolution, and superiority to prejudice, which have led you to choose the business of a cotton-spinner. It is an excellent business, and, in itself, every whit as honorable as dealing in corn and cattle, which our nobles do habitually without reproach. But now that I have disclaimed any participation in the stupid narrowness which despises trade in general, and the cotton-trade in particular, let me add a few words upon the effects of the cotton business on the mind.

There appeared in one of the newspapers a little time since a most interesting and evidently genuine letter from an Etonian, who had actually entered business in a cotton factory, and devoted himself to it so as to earn the confidence of his employers and a salary of 400l. a year as manager. He had waited some time uselessly for a diplomatic appointment which did not arrive, and so, rather than lose the best years of early manhood, as a more indolent fellow would have done very willingly, in pure idleness, he took the resolution of entering business, and carried out his determination with admirable persistence. At first nobody would believe that the “swell” could be serious; people thought that his idea of manufacturing was a mere freak, and expected him to abandon it when he had to face the tedium of the daily work; but the swell was serious—went to the mill at six in the morning and stayed there till six at night, from Monday till Saturday inclusive. After a year of this, his new companions believed in him.

Now, all this is very admirable indeed as a manifestation of energy, and that truest independence which looks to fortune as the reward of its own manly effort, but it may be permitted to me to make a few observations on this young gentleman’s resolve. What he did seems to me rather the act of an energetic nature seeking an outlet for energy, than of an intellectual nature seeking pasture and exercise for the intellect. I am far indeed from desiring, by this comparison, to cast any disparaging light on the young gentleman’s natural endowments, which appear to have been valuable in their order and robust in their degree, nor do I question the wisdom of his choice; all I mean to imply is, that although he had chosen a fine large field for simple energy, it was a poor and barren field for the intellect to pasture in. Consider for one moment the difference in this respect between the career which he had abandoned and the trade he had embraced. As an attaché he would have lived in capital cities, have had the best opportunities for perfecting himself in modern languages, and for meeting the most varied and the most interesting society. In every day there would have been precious hours of leisure, to be employed in the increase of his culture. If an intellectual man, having to choose between diplomacy and cotton-spinning, preferred cotton-spinning it would be from the desire for wealth, or from the love of an English home. The life of a cotton manufacturer, who personally attends to his business with that close supervision which has generally conducted to success, leaves scarcely any margin for intellectual pleasure or spare energy for intellectual work. After ten hours in the mill, it is difficult to sit down and study; and even if there were energy enough, the mind would not readily cast off the burden of great practical anxieties and responsibilities so as to attune itself to disinterested thinking. The leaders of industry often display mental power of as high an order as that which is employed in the government of great empires; they show the highest administrative ability, they have to deal continually with financial questions which on their smaller scale require as much forethought and acumen as those that concern the exchequer; but the ability they need is always strictly practical, and there is the widest difference between the practical and the intellectual minds. A constant and close pressure of practical considerations develops the sort of power which deals effectually with the present and its needs but atrophies the higher mind. The two minds which we call intelligence and intellect resemble the feet and wings of birds. Eagles and swallows walk badly or not at all, but they have a marvellous strength of flight; ostriches are great pedestrians, but they know nothing of the regions of the air. The best that can be hoped for men immersed in the details of business is that they may be able, like partridges and pheasants, to take a short flight on an emergency, and rise, if only for a few minutes, above the level of the stubble and the copse.

Without, therefore, desiring to imply any prejudiced contempt for trade, I do desire to urge the consideration of its inevitable effects upon the mind. For men of great practical intelligence and abundant energy, trade is all-sufficing, but it could never entirely satisfy an intellectual nature. And although there is drudgery in every pursuit, for even literature and painting are full of it, still there are certain kinds of drudgery which intellectual natures find to be harder to endure than others. The drudgery which they bear least easily is an incessant attention to duties which have no intellectual interest, and yet which cannot be properly performed mechanically so as to leave the mind at liberty for its own speculations. Deep thinkers are notoriously absent, for thought requires abstraction from what surrounds us, and it is hard for them to be denied the liberty of dreaming. An intellectual person might be happy as a stone-breaker on the roadside, because the work would leave his mind at liberty; but he would certainly be miserable as an engine-driver at a coal-pit shaft, where the abstraction of an instant would imperil the lives of others.

In a recent address delivered by Mr. Gladstone at Liverpool, he acknowledged the neglect of culture which is one of the shortcomings of our trading community, and held out the hope (perhaps in some degree illusory) that the same persons might become eminent in commerce and in learning. No doubt there have been instances of this; and when a “concern” has been firmly established by the energy of a predecessor, the heir to it may be satisfied with a royal sort of supervision, leaving the drudgery of detail to his managers, and so secure for himself that sufficient leisure without which high culture is not possible. But the founders of great commercial fortunes have, I believe, in every instance thrown their whole energy into their trade, making wealth their aim, and leaving culture to be added in another generation. The founders of commercial families are in this country usually men of great mother-wit and plenty of determination—but illiterate.

PART XII.

SURROUNDINGS.

LETTER I.

TO A FRIEND WHO OFTEN CHANGED HIS PLACE OF RESIDENCE.

An unsettled class of English people—Effect of localities on the mind—Reaction against surroundings—Landscape-painting a consequence of it—Crushing effect of too much natural magnificence—The mind takes color from its surroundings—Selection of a place of residence—Charles Dickens—Heinrich Heine—Dr. Arnold at Rugby—His house in the lake district—Tycho Brahe—His establishment on the island of Hween—The young Humboldts in the Castle of Tegel—Alexander Humboldt’s appreciation of Paris—Dr. Johnson—Mr. Buckle—Cowper—Galileo.

I find that there is a whole class of English subjects (you belong to that class) of whom it is utterly impossible to predict where they will be living in five years. Indeed, as you are the worst of correspondents, I only learned your present address, by sheer accident, from a perfect stranger, and he told me, of course, that you had plans for going somewhere else, but where that might be he knew not. The civilized English nomad is usually, like yourself, a person of independent means, rich enough to bear the expenses of frequent removals, but without the cares of property. His money is safely invested in the funds, or in railways; and so, wherever the postman can bring his dividends, he can live in freedom from material cares. When his wife is as unsettled as himself, the pair seem to live in a balloon, or in a sort of Noah’s ark, which goes whither the wind lists, and takes ground in the most unexpected places.

Have you ever studied the effect of localities on the mind—on your own mind? That which we are is due in great part to the accident of our surroundings, which act upon us in one or two quite opposite ways. Either we feel in harmony with them, in which case they produce a positive effect upon us, or else we are out of harmony, and then they drive us into the strangest reactions. A great ugly English town, like Manchester, for instance, makes some men such thorough townsmen that they cannot live without smoky chimneys; or it fills the souls of others with such a passionate longing for beautiful scenery and rustic retirement, that they find it absolutely necessary to bury themselves from time to time in the recesses of picturesque mountains. The development of modern landscape-painting has not been due to habits of rural existence, but to the growth of very big and hideous modern cities, which made men long for shady forests, and pure streams, and magnificent spectacles of sunset, and dawn, and moonlight. It is by this time a trite observation that people who have always lived in beautiful scenery do not, and cannot, appreciate it; that too much natural magnificence positively crushes the activity of the intellect and that its best effect is simply that of refreshment for people who have not access to it every day. It happens too, in a converse way, that rustics and mountaineers have the strongest appreciation of the advantages of great cities, and thrive in them often more happily than citizens who are born in the brick streets. Those who have great facilities for changing their place of residence ought always to bear in mind that every locality is like a dyer’s vat, and that the residents take its color, or some other color, from it just as the clothes do that the dyer steeps in stain. If you look back upon your past life, you will assuredly admit that every place has colored your mental habits; and that although other tints from other places have supervened, so that it may be difficult to say precisely what remains of the place you lived in many years ago, still something does remain, like the effect of the first painting on a picture, which tells on the whole work permanently, though it may have been covered over and over again by what painters call scumblings and glazings.

The selection of a place of residence, even though we only intend to pass a few short years in it, is from the intellectual point of view a matter so important that one can hardly exaggerate its consequences. We see this quite plainly in the case of authors, whose minds are more visible to us than the minds of other men, and therefore more easily and conveniently studied. We need no biographer to inform us that Dickens was a Londoner, that Browning had lived in Italy, that Ruskin had passed many seasons in Switzerland and Venice. Suppose for one moment that these three authors had been born in Ireland, and had never quitted it, is it not certain that their production would have been different? Let us carry our supposition farther still, and conceive, if we can, the difference to their literary performance if they had been born, not in Ireland, but in Iceland, and lived there all their lives! Is it not highly probable that in this case their production would have been so starved and impoverished from insufficiency of material and of suggestion, that they would have uttered nothing but some simple expression of sentiment and imagination, some homely song or tale? All sights and sounds have their influence on our temper and on our thoughts, and our inmost being is not the same in one place as in another. We are like blank paper that takes a tint by reflection from what is nearest, and changes it as its surroundings change. In a dull gray room, how gray and dull it looks! but it will be bathed in rose or amber if the hangings are crimson or yellow. There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the heart goes to the water-brooks; there are other natures that need the solitude of primæval forests and the silence of the Alps. The most popular of English novelists sometimes went to write in the tranquillity of beautiful scenery, taking his manuscript to the shore of some azure lake in Switzerland, in sight of the eternal snow; but all that beauty and peace, all that sweetness of pure air and color, were not seductive enough to overcome for many days the deep longing for the London streets. His genius needed the streets, as a bee needs the summer flowers, and languished when long separated from them. Others have needed the wild heather, or the murmur of the ocean, or the sound of autumn winds that strip great forest-trees. Who does not deeply pity poor Heine in his last sad years, when he lay fixed on his couch of pain in that narrow Parisian lodging, and compared it to the sounding grave of Merlin the enchanter, “which is situated in the wood of Brozeliande, in Brittany, under lofty oaks whose tops taper, like emerald flames, towards heaven. O brother Merlin,” he exclaims, and with what touching pathos! “O brother Merlin, I envy thee those trees, with their fresh breezes, for never a green leaf rustles about this mattress-grave of mine in Paris, where from morning till night I hear nothing but the rattle of wheels, the clatter of hammers, street-brawls, and the jingling of pianofortes!”

In the biography of Dr. Arnold, his longing for natural beauty recurs as one of the peculiarities of his constitution. He did not need very grand scenery, though he enjoyed it deeply, but some wild natural loveliness was such a necessity for him that he pined for it unhappily in its absence. Rugby could offer him scarcely anything of this, “We have no hills,” he lamented, “no plains—not a single wood, and but one single copse; no heath, no down, no rock, no river, no clear stream—scarcely any flowers, for the lias is particularly poor in them—nothing but one endless monotony of enclosed fields and hedgerow trees. This is to me a daily privation; it robs me of what is naturally my anti-attrition; and as I grow older I begin to feel it.... The positive dulness of the country about Rugby makes it to me a mere working-place: I cannot expatiate there even in my walks.”

“The monotonous character of the midland scenery of Warwickshire,” says Dr. Arnold’s biographer, “was to him, with his strong love of natural beauty and variety, absolutely repulsive; there was something almost touching in the eagerness with which, amidst that ‘endless succession of fields and hedgerows,’ he would make the most of any features of a higher order; in the pleasure with which he would cherish the few places where the current of the Avon was perceptible, or where a glimpse of the horizon could be discerned; in the humorous despair with which he would gaze on the dull expanse of fields eastward from Rugby. It is no wonder we do not like looking that way, when one considers that there is nothing fine between us and the Ural mountains. Conceive what you look over; for you just miss Sweden, and look over Holland, the north of Germany, and the centre of Russia.”14

This dreadful midland monotony impelled Dr. Arnold to seek refreshment and compensation in a holiday home in the Lake district, and there he found all that his eyes longed for, streams, hills, woods, and wild-flowers. Nor had his belief in the value of these sweet natural surroundings been illusory; such instincts are not given for our betrayal, and the soul of a wise man knows its own needs, both before they are supplied, and after. Westmorland gave him all he had hoped from it, and more. “Body and mind,” he wrote, “alike seem to repose greedily in delicious quiet, without dulness, which we enjoy in Westmorland.” And again: “At Allan Bank, in the summer, I worked on the Roman history, and hope to do so again in the winter. It is very inspiring to write with such a view before one’s eyes as that from our drawing-room at Allan Bank, where the trees of the shrubbery gradually run up into the trees of the cliff, and the mountain-side, with its infinite variety of rocky peaks and points upon which the cattle expatiate, rises over the tops of the trees.”

Of all happily-situated mental laborers who have worked since the days of Horace, surely Tycho Brahe was the happiest and most to be envied. King Frederick of Denmark gave him a delightful island for his habitation, large enough for him not to feel imprisoned (the circumference being about five miles), yet little enough for him to feel as snugly at home there as Mr. Waterton in his high-walled park. The land was fertile and rich in game, so that the scientific Robinson Crusoe lived in material abundance; and as he was only about seven miles from Copenhagen, he could procure everything necessary to his convenience. He built a great house on the elevated land in the midst of the isle, about three-quarters of a mile from the sea, a palace of art and science, with statues and paintings and all the apparatus which the ingenuity of that age could contrive for the advancement of astronomical pursuits. Uniting the case of a rich nobleman’s existence with every aid to science, including special erections for his instruments, and a printing establishment that worked under his own immediate direction, he lived far enough from the capital to enjoy the most perfect tranquillity, yet near enough to escape the consequences of too absolute isolation. Aided in all he undertook by a staff of assistants that he himself had trained, supported in his labor by the encouragement of his sovereign, and especially by his own unflagging interest in scientific investigation, he led in that peaceful island the ideal intellectual life. Of that mansion where he labored, of the observatory where he watched the celestial phenomena, surrounded but not disturbed by the waves of a shallow sea, there remains at this day literally not one stone upon another; but many a less fortunate laborer in the same field, harassed by poverty, distracted by noise and interruption, has remembered with pardonable envy the splendid peace of Uranienborg.

It was one of the many fortunate circumstances in the position of the two Humboldts that they passed their youth in the quiet old castle of Tegel, separated from Berlin by a pine-wood, and surrounded by walks and gardens. They too, like Tycho Brahe, enjoyed that happy combination of tranquillity with the neighborhood of a capital city which is so peculiarly favorable to culture. In later life, when Alexander Humboldt had collected those immense masses of material which were the result of his travels in South America, he warmly appreciated the unequalled advantages of Paris. He knew how to extract from the solitudes of primæval nature what he wanted for the enrichment of his mind; but he knew also how to avail himself of all the assistance and opportunities which are only to be had in great capitals. He was not attracted to town-life, like Dr. Johnson and Mr. Buckle, to the exclusion of wild nature; but neither, on the other hand, had he that horror of towns which was a morbid defect in Cowper, and which condemns those who suffer from it to rusticity. Even Galileo, who thought the country especially favorable to speculative intellects, and the walls of cities an imprisonment for them, declared that the best years of his life were those he had spent in Padua.

LETTER II.

TO A FRIEND WHO MAINTAINED THAT SURROUNDINGS WERE A MATTER OF INDIFFERENCE TO A THOROUGHLY OCCUPIED MIND.

Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse—Geoffroy St. Hilaire in the besieged city of Alexandria—Goethe at the bombardment of Verdun—Lullo, the Oriental missionary—Giordano Bruno—Unacknowledged effect of surroundings—Effect of Frankfort on Goethe—Great capitals—Goethe—His garden-house—What he said about Béranger and Paris—Fortunate surroundings of Titian.

There are so many well-known instances of men who have been able to continue their intellectual labors under the most unfavorable conditions, that your argument might be powerfully supported by an appeal to actual experience. There is Archimedes, of course, to begin with, who certainly seems to have abstracted himself sufficiently from the tumult of a great siege to forget it altogether when occupied with his mathematical problems. The prevalent stories of his death, though not identical, point evidently to a habit of abstraction which had been remarked as a peculiarity by those about him, and it is probable enough that a great inventor in engineering would follow his usual speculations under circumstances which, though dangerous, had lasted long enough to become habitual. Even modern warfare, which from the use of gunpowder is so much noisier than that which raged at Syracuse, does not hinder men from thinking and writing when they are used to it. Geoffrey St. Hilaire never worked more steadily and regularly in his whole life than he did in the midst of the besieged city of Alexandria. “Knowledge is so sweet,” he said long afterwards, in speaking of this experience, “that it never entered my thoughts how a bombshell might in an instant have cast into the abyss both me and my documents.” By good luck two electric fish had been caught and given to him just then, so he immediately began to make experiments, as if he had been in his own cabinet in Paris, and for three weeks he thought of nothing else, utterly forgetting the fierce warfare that filled the air with thunder and flame, and the streets with victims. He had sixty-four hypotheses to amuse him, and it was necessary to review his whole scientific acquirement with reference to each of these as he considered them one by one. It may be doubted, however, whether he was more in danger from the bombardment or from the intensity of his own mental concentration. He grew thin and haggard, slept one hour in the twenty-four, and lived in a perilous condition of nervous strain and excitement. Goethe at the bombardment of Verdun, letting his mind take its own course, found that it did not occupy itself with tragedies, or with anything suggested by what was passing in the conflict around him, but by scientific considerations about the phenomena of colors. He noticed, in a passing observation, the bad effect of war upon the mind, how it makes people destructive one day and creative the next, how it accustoms them to phases intended to excite hope in desperate circumstances, thus producing a peculiar sort of hypocrisy different from the priestly and courtly kind. This is the extent of his interest in the war; but when he finds some soldiers fishing he is attracted to the spot and profoundly occupied—not with the soldiers, but with the optical phenomena on the water. He was never very much moved by external events, nor did he take that intense interest in the politics of the day which we often find in people less studious of literature and science. Raimond Lullo, the Oriental missionary, continued to write many volumes in the midst of the most continual difficulties and dangers, preserving as much mental energy and clearness as if he had been safe and tranquil in a library. Giordano Bruno worked constantly also in the midst of political troubles and religious persecutions, and his biographer tells us that “il desiderio vivissimo della scienza aveva ben più efficacia sull’ animo del Bruno, che non gli avvenimenti esterni.”

These examples which have just occurred to me, and many others that it would be easy to collect, may be taken to prove at least so much as this, that it is possible to be absorbed in private studies when surrounded by the most disturbing influences; but even in these cases it would be a mistake to conclude that the surroundings had no effect whatever. There can be no doubt that Geoffroy St. Hilaire was intensely excited by the siege of Alexandria, though he may not have attributed his excitement to that cause. His mind was occupied with the electrical fishes, but his nervous system was wrought upon by the siege, and kept in that state of tension which at the same time enabled him to get through a gigantic piece of intellectual labor and made him incapable of rest. Had this condition been prolonged it must have terminated either in exhaustion or in madness. Men have often engaged in literature or science to escape the pressure of anxiety, which strenuous mental labor permits us, at least temporarily, to forget; but the circumstances which surround us have invariably an influence of some kind upon our thinking, though the connection may not be obvious. Even in the case of Goethe, who could study optics on a battle-field, his English biographer recognizes the effect of the Frankfort life which surrounded the great author in his childhood. “The old Frankfort city, with its busy crowds, its fairs, its mixed population, and its many sources of excitement, offered great temptations and great pasture to so desultory a genius. This is perhaps a case wherein circumstances may be seen influencing the direction of character.... A large continuity of thought and effort was perhaps radically uncongenial to such a temperament; yet one cannot help speculating whether under other circumstances he might not have achieved it. Had he been reared in a quiet little old German town, where he would have daily seen the same faces in the silent streets, and come in contact with the same characters, his culture might have been less various, but it might perhaps have been deeper. Had he been reared in the country, with only the changing seasons and the sweet serenities of nature to occupy his attention when released from study, he would certainly have been a different poet. The long summer afternoons spent in lonely rambles, the deepening twilights filled with shadowy visions, the slow uniformity of his external life necessarily throwing him more and more upon the subtler diversities of inward experience, would inevitably have influenced his genius in quite different directions, would have animated his works with a very different spirit.”

We are sometimes told that life in a great capital is essential to the development of genius, but Frankfort was the largest town Goethe ever lived in, and he never visited either Paris or London. Much of the sanity of his genius may have been due to his residence in so tranquil a place as Weimar, where he could shut himself up in his “garden-house” and lock all the gates of the bridge over the Ilm. “The solitude,” says Mr. Lewes, “is absolute, broken only by the occasional sound of the church clock, the music from the barracks, and the screaming of the peacocks spreading their superb beauty in the park.” Few men of genius have been happier in their surroundings than Goethe. He had tranquillity, and yet was not deprived of intellectual intercourse; the scenery within excursion-distance from his home was interesting and even inspiring, yet not so splendid as to be overwhelming. We know from his conversations that he was quite aware of the value of those little centres of culture to Germany, and yet in one place he speaks of Béranger in the tone which seems to imply an appreciation of the larger life of Paris. “Fancy,” he says, “this same Béranger away from Paris, and the influence and opportunities of a world-city, born as the son of a poor tailor, at Jena or Weimar; let him run his wretched career in either of the two small cities, and see what fruit would have grown on such a soil and in such an atmosphere.”

We cannot too frequently be reminded that we are nothing of ourselves, and by ourselves, and are only something by the place we hold in the intellectual chain of humanity by which electricity is conveyed to us and through us—to be increased in the transmission if we have great natural power and are favorably situated, but not otherwise. A child is born to the Vecelli family at Cadore, and when it is nine years old is taken to Venice and placed under the tuition of Sebastian Zuccato. Afterwards he goes to Bellini’s school, and there gets acquainted with another student, one year his junior, whose name is Barbarelli. They live together and work together in Venice; then young Barbarelli (known to posterity as Giorgione), after putting on certain spaces of wall and squares of canvas such color as the world had never before seen, dies in his early manhood and leaves Vecellio, whom we call Titian, to work on there in Venice till the plague stays his hand in his hundredth year. The genius came into the world, but all the possibilities of his development depended upon the place and the time. He came exactly in the right place and precisely at the right time. To be born not far from Venice in the days of Bellini, to be taken there at nine years old, to have Giorgione for one’s comrade, all this was as fortunate for an artistic career as the circumstances of Alexander of Macedon were for a career of conquest.

LETTER III.

TO AN ARTIST WHO WAS FITTING UP A MAGNIFICENT NEW STUDIO.

Pleasure of planning a studio—Opinions of an outsider—Saint Bernard—Father Ravignan—Goethe’s study and bed-room—Gustave Doré’s studio—Leslie’s painting-room—Turner’s opinion—Habits of Scott and Dickens—Extremes good—Vulgar mediocrity not so good—Value of beautiful views to literary men—Montaigne—Views from the author’s windows.

Nothing in the life of an artist is more agreeable than the building and furnishing of the studio in which he hopes to produce his most mature and perfect work. It is so pleasant to labor when we are surrounded by beauty and convenience, that painters find a large and handsome studio to be an addition to the happiness of their lives, and they usually dream of it, and plan it, several years before the dream is realized.

Only a few days ago I was talking on this very subject with an intellectual friend who is not an artist, and who maintained that the love of fine studios is in great part a mere illusion. He admitted the necessity for size, and for a proper kind of light, but laughed at carved oak, and tapestry, and armor, and the knicknacks that artists encumber themselves with. He would have it that a mind thoroughly occupied with its own business knew nothing whatever of the objects that surrounded it, and he cited two examples—Saint Bernard, who travelled all day by the shore of Lake Leman without seeing it, and the père Ravignan, who worked in a bare little room with a common table of blackened pine and a cheap rush-bottomed chair. On this I translated to him, from Goethe’s life by Lewes, a passage which was new to him and delighted him as a confirmation of his theory. The biographer describes the poet’s study as “a low-roofed narrow room, somewhat dark, for it is lighted only through two tiny windows, and furnished with a simplicity quite touching to behold. In the centre stands a plain oval table of unpolished oak. No arm-chair is to be seen, no sofa, nothing which speaks of ease. A plain hard chair has beside it the basket in which he used to place his handkerchief. Against the wall, on the right, is a long pear-tree table, with bookshelves, on which stand lexicons and manuals.... On the side-wall again, a bookcase with some works of poets. On the wall to the left is a long desk of soft wood, at which he was wont to write. A sheet of paper with notes of contemporary history is fastened near the door. The same door leads into a bed-room, if bed-room it can be called, which no maid-of-all-work in England would accept without a murmur: it is a closet with a window. A simple bed, an armchair by its side, and a tiny washing-table with a small white basin on it, and a sponge, is all the furniture. To enter this room with any feeling for the greatness and goodness of him who slept here, and who here slept his last sleep, brings tears into our eyes, and makes the breathing deep.”

When I had finished reading this passage, my friend exclaimed triumphantly, “There! don’t you see that it was just because Goethe had imaginative power of a strong and active kind that he cared nothing about what surrounded him when he worked? He had statues and pictures to occupy his mind when it was disengaged, but when he wrote he preferred that bare little cell where nothing was to be seen that could distract his attention for an instant. Depend upon it, Goethe acted in this matter either from a deliberate and most wise calculation, or else from the sure instinct of genius.”

Whilst we were on this subject I thought over other instances, and remembered my surprise on visiting Gustave Doré in his painting-room in Paris. Doré has a Gothic exuberance of imagination, so I expected a painting-room something like Victor Hugo’s house, rather barbarous, but very rich and interesting, with plenty of carved cabinets, and tapestry, and biblos, as they call picturesque curiosities in Paris. To my surprise, there was nothing (except canvases and easels) but a small deal table, on which tubes of oil-color were thrown in disorder, and two cheap chairs. Here, evidently, the pleasure of painting was sufficient to occupy the artist; and in the room where he made his illustrations the characteristics were simplicity and good practical arrangements for order, but there was nothing to amuse the imagination. Mr. Leslie used to paint in a room which was just like any other in the house, and had none of the peculiarities of a studio. Turner did not care in the least what sort of a room he painted in, provided it had a door, and a bolt on the inside. Scott could write anywhere, even in the family sitting-room, with talk going forward as usual; and after he had finished Abbotsford, he did not write in any of its rich and noble rooms, but in a simple closet with book-shelves round it. Dickens wrote in a comfortable room, well lighted and cheerful, and he liked to have funny little bronzes on his writing-table.

The best way appears to be to surround ourselves, whenever it can be conveniently done, with whatever we know by experience to be favorable to our work. I think the barest cell monk ever prayed in would be a good place for imaginative composition, and so too would be the most magnificent rooms in Chatsworth or Blenheim. A middling sort of place with a Philistine character, vulgar upholstery, and vulgar pictures or engravings, is really dangerous, because these things often attract attention in the intervals of labor and occupy it in a mean way. An artist is always the better for having something that may profitably amuse and occupy his eye when he quits his picture, and I think it is a right instinct which leads artists to surround themselves with many picturesque and beautiful things, not too orderly in their arrangement, so that there may be pleasant surprises for the eye, as there are in nature.

For literary men there is nothing so valuable as a window with a cheerful and beautiful prospect. It is good for us to have this refreshment for the eye when we leave off working, and Montaigne did wisely to have his study up in a tower from which he had extensive views.

There is a well-known objection to extensive views, as wanting in snugness and comfort, but this objection scarcely applies to the especial case of literary men. What we want is not so much snugness as relief, refreshment, suggestion, and we get these, as a general rule, much better from wide prospects than from limited ones. I have just alluded to Montaigne,—will you permit me to imitate that dear old philosopher in his egotism and describe to you the view from the room I write in, which cheers and amuses me continually? But before describing this let me describe another of which the recollection is very dear to me and as vivid as a freshly-painted picture. In years gone by, I had only to look up from my desk and see a noble loch in its inexhaustible loveliness, and a mountain in its majesty. It was a daily and hourly delight to watch the breezes play about the enchanted isles, on the delicate silvery surface, dimming some clear reflection, or trailing it out in length, or cutting sharply across it with acres of rippling blue. It was a frequent pleasure to see the clouds play about the crest of Cruachan and Ben Vorich’s golden head, gray mists that crept upwards from the valleys till the sunshine suddenly caught them and made them brighter than the snows they shaded. And the leagues and leagues of heather on the lower land to the southward that became like the aniline dyes of deepest purple and blue, when the sky was gray in the evening—all save one orange-streak! Ah, those were spectacles never to be forgotten, splendors of light and glory, and sadness of deepening gloom when the eyes grew moist in the twilight and secretly drank their tears.

And yet, wonderful as it was, that noble and passionately beloved Highland scenery was wanting in one great element that a writer imperatively needs. In all that natural magnificence humanity held no place. Hidden behind a fir-clad promontory to the north, there still remained, it is true, the gray ruin of old Kilchurn, and far to the south-west, in another reach of the lake, the island-fortress of Ardhonnel. But there was not a visible city with spires and towers, there were only the fir-trees on the little islands and a few gravestones on the largest. Beyond, were the depopulated deserts of Breadalbane.

Here, where I write to you now, it seems as if mankind were nearer, and the legends of the ages written out for me on the surface of the world. Under the shadow of Jove’s hill rises before me one of the most ancient of European cities, soror et æmula Romæ. She bears on her walls and edifices the record of sixty generations. Temple, and arch, and pyramid, all these bear witness still, and so do her ancient bulwarks, and many a stately tower. High above all, the cathedral spire is drawn dark in the morning mist, and often in the clear summer evenings it comes brightly in slanting sunshine against the steep woods behind. Then the old city arrays herself in the warmest and mellowest tones, and glows as the shadows fall. She reigns over the whole width of her valley to the folds of the far blue hills. Even so ought our life to be surrounded by the loveliness of nature—surrounded, but not subdued.