reserving what was most tender and delicate | spent with poor scholars, and artists, and men for the inner life, enjoying with moderation; of science, whose words remain in the memsuch for him was the dream of an intellectual ory and make us rich indeed. Then we disexistence in which things truly precious were like money because it rules and restrains us, valued according to their worth. And "above and because it is unintelligent and seems all," he said, above all his desire was not to hostile, so far as that which is unintelligent write too much, “surtout ne pas trop écrire." can be hostile. And yet the real truth is that And then comes the regret for this wise, well-money is the strong protector of the intellectordered life enjoyed by him only for a time. "La nécessité depuis m'a saisi et m'a contraint de renoncer à ce que je considérais comme le seul bonheur ou la consolation exquise du mélancolique et du sage." ual life. The student sits and studies, too often despising the power that shelters him from the wintry night, that gives him roof and walls, and lamp, and books, and fire. For money is simply the accumulated labor of the Auguste Comte lamented in like manner the past, guarding our peace as fleets and armies evil intellectual consequences of anxieties guard the industry of England, or like some about material needs. "There is nothing," mighty fortress-wall within which men follow he said, more mortal to my mind than the necessity, pushed to a certain degree, to have to think each day about a provision for the next. Happily I think little and rarely about all that; but whenever this happens to me I pass through moments of discouragement and positive despair, which if the influence of them became habitual would make me renounce all my labors, all my philosophical projects, to end my days like an ass.” the most peaceful avocations. The art is to use money so that it shall be the protector and not the scatterer of our time, the body-guard of the sovereign Intellect and Will. LETTER III. TO A STUDENT IN GREAT POVERTY. Poverty really a great obstacle-Difference between a thou sand rich men and a thousand poor men taken from persons of average natural gifts-The Houses of Parliament -The English recognize the natural connection between wealth and culture-Connection between ignorance and parsimony in expenditure-What may be honestly said for the encouragement of a very poor student. As it seems to me that to make light of the difficulties which lie in the path of another is not to show true sympathy for him, even though it is done sometimes out of a sort of awkward kindness and for his encouragement, I will not begin by pretending that poverty is not a great obstacle to the perfec tion of the intellectual life. It is a great obstacle; it is one of the very greatest of all obstacles. Only observe how riches and poverty operate upon mankind in the mass. Here and there no doubt a very poor man attains intellectual distinction when he has exceptional strength of will, and health enough to bear a great strain of extra labor that he imposes upon himself, and natural gifts so brilliant that he can learn in an hour what common men learn in a day. But consider There are a hundred rules for getting rich, but the instinct of accumulation is worth all such rules put together. This instinct is rarely found in combination with high intellectual gifts, and the reason is evident. To advance from a hundred pounds to a thousand is not an intellectual advance, and there is no intellectual interest in the addition of a cipher at the bankers'. Simply to accumulate money that you are never to use is, from the intellectual point of view, as stupid an operation as can be imagined. We observe, too, that the great accumulators, the men who are gifted by nature with the true instinct, are not usually such persons as we feel any ambition to become. Their faculties are concentrated on one point, and that point, as it seems to us, of infinitely little importance. We cannot see that it signifies much to the intellectual well-being of humanity that John Smith should be worth his million when he dies, since we know quite well that John Smith's mind will be just as ill-furnished then as it is now. In places where much money is made we easily acquire a positive disgust for it, and the curate seems the most distinguished gen-mankind in the mass. Look, for instance, at tleman in the community, with his old black coat and his seventy pounds a year. We come to hate money-matters when we find that they exclude all thoughtful and disinterested conversation, and we fly to the society of people with fixed incomes, not large enough for much saving, to escape the perpetual talk about investments. Our happiest hours have been our two Houses of Parliament. They are composed of men taken from the average run of Englishmen with very little reference to ability, but almost all of them are rich men not one of them is poor, as you are poor not one of them has to contend against the stern realities of poverty. Then consider the very high general level of intellectual attain whose power of attention is so feeble that the smallest external incident distracts it, and who remember nothing of their travels but a catalogue of trivial annoyances. But people of this kind do not generally belong to families on whom wealth has had time to produce its best effects. What I mean is, that a family which has been for generations in the habit of spending four thousand a year will usually be found to have a more cultivated tone than one that has only spent four hundred. ment which distinguishes those two assem- to the market-town, and could not pardon the blies, and ask yourself candidly whether a extravagance of buying a book, or a candle thousand men taken from the beggars in the to read it by in the evening. Between these streets, or even from the far superior class of extremes we have various grades of the midour manufacturing operatives, would be dle classes in which culture usually increases likely to understand, as the two Houses of very much in proportion to the expenditure. Parliament understand, the many compli- The rule is not without its exceptions; there cated questions of legislation and of policy are rich vulgar people who spend a great deal which are continually brought before them. without improving themselves at all-who We all know that the poor are too limited in only, by unlimited self-indulgence, succeed in knowledge and experience, from the want of making themselves so uncomfortably sensithe necessary opportunities, and too little tive to every bodily inconvenience that they accustomed to exercise their minds in the have no leisure, even in the midst of an untranquil investigations of great questions, to occupied life, to think of anything but their be competent for the work of Parliament. It own bellies and their own skins-people is scarcely necessary to insist upon this fact to an Englishman, because the English have always recognized the natural connection between wealth and culture, and have preferred to be governed by the rich from the belief that they are likely to be better informed, and better situated for intellectual activity of a disinterested kind, than those members of the community whose time and thoughts are almost entirely occupied in winning their daily bread by the incessant labor of their hands. And if you go out into the world, if you mix with men of very different classes, you will I have come to the recognition of this truth find that in a broad average way (I am not very reluctantly indeed, not because I dislike speaking just now of the exceptions) the rich people, but merely because they are necricher classes are much more capable of enter-essarily a very small minority, and I should ing into the sort of thinking which may be like every human being to have the best benecalled intellectual than those whose money is fits of culture if it were only possible. The less plentiful, and whose opportunities have plain living and high thinking that Wordstherefore been less abundant. Indeed it may worth so much valued is a cheering ideal, for be asserted, roughly and generally, that the most men have to live plainly, and if they narrowness of men's ideas is in direct propor- could only think with a certain elevation we tion to their parsimony in expenditure. I do might hope to solve the great problem of hunot mean to affirm that all who spend largely man life, the reconciliation of poverty and attain large intellectual results, for of course the soul. There certainly is a slow movewe know that a man may spend vast sums on ment in that direction, and the shortening of pursuits which do not educate him in any- the hours of labor may afford some margin thing worth knowing, but the advantage is of leisure; but we who work for culture that with habits of free expenditure the germs every day and all day long, and still feel that of thought are well tilled and watered, where- we know very little, and have hardly skill as parsimony denies them every external enough to make any effective use of the little help. The most spending class in Europe is the that we know, can scarcely indulge in very English gentry, it is also the class most strik-enthusiastic anticipations of the future cultingly characterized by a high general average ure of the poor. of information;* the most parsimonious class Still, there are some things that may be in Europe is the French peasantry; it is also rationally and truly said to a poor man who The class most strikingly characterized by ig-desires culture, and which are not without a norance and intellectual apathy. The Eng- sort of Spartan encouragement. You are reish gentleman has cultivated himself by va-stricted by your poverty, but it is not always ious reading and extensive travel, but the a bad thing to be restricted, even from the French peasant will not go anywhere except intellectual point of view. The intellectual powers of well-to-do people are very common*The reader will please to bear in mind that I am speaking ly made ineffective by the enormous multiistocracy, in its spirit, is quite favorable to the exception-plicity of objects that are presented to their attention, and which claim from them a sort ere of broad effects on great numbers. I do not think that ly highest intellectual life. of polite notice like the greeting of a great | certainly not better occupied. When I open lady to each of her thousand guests. It re- a noble volume I say to myself, "Now the quires the very rarest strength of mind, in a only Croesus that I envy is he who is reading rich man, to concentrate his attention on any- a better book than this." thing-there are so many things that he is expected to make a pretence of knowing; but nobody expects you to know anything, and this is an incalculable advantage. I think that all poor men who have risen to subsequent distinction have been greatly indebted to this independence of public opinion as to what they ought to know. In trying to satisfy that public opinion by getting up a pretence of various sorts of knowledge, which is only a sham, we sacrifice not only much PART VI. CUSTOM AND TRADITION. LETTER I. · RESOLVED NEVER TO WEAR ANYTHING BUT A GRAY COAT.* Secret enjoyment of rebellion against custom, and of the disabilities resulting from it-Penalties imposed by Society and by Nature out of proportion to the offence-Instances -What we consider penalties not really penalties, but only consequences-Society likes harmony, and is of fended by dissonance-Utility of rebels against customThat they ought to reserve their power of rebellion for great occasions-Uses of custom--Duty of the intellectual class-Best way to procure the abolition of á custom we disapprove-Bad customs-Eccentricity sometimes a duty. precious time, but we blunt our natural in- TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO HAD FIRMLY terest in things. That interest you preserve in all its virgin force, and this force carries a man far. Then, again, although the opportunities of rich people are very superior to yours, they are not altogether so superior as they seem. There exists a great equalizing power, the limitation of human energy. A rich man may sit down to an enormous banquet, but he can only make a good use of the little that he is able to digest. So it is with the splendid intellectual banquet that is spread before the rich man's eyes. He can only possess what he has energy to master, and too frequently the manifest impossibility of mastering everything produces a feeling of discouragement that ends in his mastering nothing. A poor student, especially if he lives in an out-of-the-way place where there are no big libraries to bewilder him, may apply his energy with effect in the study of a few authors. I used to believe a great deal more in opportunities and less in application than I do now. Time-and health are needed, but with these there are always opportunities. Rich people have a fancy for spending money very uselessly on their culture because it seems to WHEN I had the pleasure of staying at your father's house, you told me, rather to my surprise, that it was impossible for you to go to balls and dinner-parties because you did not possess such a thing as a dress-coat. The reason struck me as being scarcely a valid one, considering the rather high scale of expenditure adopted in the paternal mansion. It seemed clear that the eldest son of a family which lived after the liberal fashion of York shire country gentlemen could afford himself a dress-coat if he liked. Then I wondered whether you disliked dress-coats from a belief that they were unbecoming to your person; but a very little observation of your character convinced me that, whatever might be your weaknesses (for everybody has some weaknesses), anxiety about personal appearance was not one of them. them more valuable when it has been costly; but the truth is, that by the blessing of good and cheap literature, intellectual light has become almost as accessible as daylight. I The truth is, that you secretly enjoy this have a rich friend who travels more, and little piece of disobedience to custom, and all buys more costly things, than I do, but he the disabilities which result from it. This lit does not really learn more or advance farther tle rebellion is connected with a larger rebelin the twelvemonth. If my days are fully lion, and it is agreeable to you to demonstrate occupied, what has he to set against them? the unreasonableness of society by incurring only other well-occupied days, no more. If a very severe penalty for a very trifling of he is getting benefit at St. Petersburg he is missing the benefit I am getting round my fence. You are always dressed decently, you house, and in it. The sum of the year's bene- *The title of this letter seems so odd, that it may be neces sary to inform the reader that it was addressed to a real per it rather pleases you to think that a young | prettier to see men in black coats regularly gentleman so well qualified for society in placed between ladies round a dinner-table everything of real importance should be excluded from it because he has not purchased a permission from his tailor. than men in gray coats or brown coats. The uniformity of costume appears to represent uniformity of sentiment and to ensure a sort of harmony amongst the convives. What society really cares for is harmony; what it dislikes is dissent and nonconformity. It wants peace in the dining-room, peace in the drawing-room, peace everywhere in its realm of tranquil pleasure. You come in your shooting-coat, which was in tune upon the moors,' but is a dissonance amongst ladies in full dress. Do you not perceive that fustian and velveteen, which were natural amongst gamekeepers, are not so natural on gilded chairs covered with silk, with lace and diamonds at a distance of three feet? You don't perceive it? Very well: society does not argue the point with you, but only excludes you. The penalties imposed by society for the infraction of very trifling details of custom are often, as it seems, out of all proportion to the offence; but so are the penalties of nature. Only three days before the date of this letter, an intimate friend of mine was coming home from a day's shooting. His nephew, a fine young man in the full enjoyment of existence, was walking ten paces in advance. A covey of partridges suddenly cross the road: my friend in shouldering his gun touches the trigger just a second too soon, and kills his nephew. Now, think of the long years of mental misery that will be the punishment of that very trifling piece of carelessness! My poor friend has passed, in the space of a single It has been said that in the life of every ininstant, from a joyous life to a life that is per- tellectual man there comes a time when he manently and irremediably saddened. It is questions custom at all points. This seems to as if he had left the summer sunshine to be a provision of nature for the reform and enter a gloomy dungeon and begin a perpet-progress of custom itself, which without such ual imprisonment. And for what? For hav- questioning would remain absolutely stationing touched a trigger, without evil intention, ary and irresistibly despotic. You rebels a little too precipitately. It seems harder against the established custom have your still for the victim, who is sent out of the place in the great work of progressive civilizworld in the bloom of perfect manhood be-ation. Without you, Western Europe would cause his uncle was not quite so cool as he have been a second China. It is to the continought to have been. Again, not far from ual rebellion of such persons as yourself that where I live, thirty-five men were killed last we owe whatever progress has been accomweek in a coal-pit from an explosion of fire-plished since the times of our remotest foredamp. One of their number had struck a fathers. There have been rebels always, and lucifer to light his pipe: for doing this in a the rebels have not been, generally speaking, place where he ought not to have done it, the the most stupid part of the nation. man suffers the penalty of death, and thirty- But what is the use of wasting this benefifour others with him. The fact is simply cial power of rebellion on matters too trivial that Nature will be obeyed, and makes no at- to be worth attention? Does it hurt your contempt to proportion punishments to offences: science to appear in a dress-coat? Certainly indeed, what in our human way we call pun- not, and you would be as good-looking in it as ishments are not punishments, but simple you are in your velveteen shooting-jacket consequences. So it is with the great social with the pointers on the bronze buttons. Let penalties. Society will be obeyed: if you re-us conform in these trivial matters, which nofuse obedience, you must take the consequen- body except a tailor ought to consider worth a ces. Society has only one law, and that is moment's attention, in order to reserve our custom. Even religion itself is socially power-strength for the protection of intellectual libful only just so far as it has custom on its side. erty. Let society arrange your dress for you Nature does not desire that thirty-five men (it will save you infinite trouble), but never should be destroyed because one could not re- permit it to stifle the expression of your sist the temptation of a pipe; but fire-damp is thought. You find it convenient, because you highly inflammable, and the explosion is a are timid, to exclude yourself from the world simple consequence. Society does not desire by refusing to wear its costume; but a bolder to exclude you because you will not wear even-man would let the tailor do his worst, and ing dress; but the dress is customary, and then go into the world and courageously deyour exclusion is merely a consequence of your fend there the persons and causes that are nonconformity. The view of society goes no misunderstood and slanderously misreprefarther in this than the artistic conception sented. The fables of Spenser are fables only (not very delicately artistic, perhaps) that it is in form, and a noble knight may at any time go forth, armed in the panoply of a tail-coat, gradually, whilst affecting submission i a dress waistcoat, and a manly moral courage,ters altogether indifferent, still there are other to do battle across the dinner-table and in the matters on which the only attitude worthy of drawing-room for those who have none to de-a man is the most bold and open resistance to fend them. its dictates. Custom may have a right to auIt is unphilosophical to set ourselves obsti-thority over your wardrobe, but it cannot nately against custom in the mass, for it mul- have any right to ruin your self-respect. Not tiplies the power of men by settling useless only the virtues most advantageous to welldiscussion and clearing the ground for our being, but also the most contemptible and debest and most prolific activity. The business grading vices, have at various periods of the of the world could not be carried forward one world's history been sustained by the full auday without a most complex code of customs; thority of custom. There are places where and law itself is little more than custom slight-forty years ago drunkenness was conformity to ly improved upon by men reflecting together custom, and sobriety an eccentricity. There at their leisure, and reduced to codes and sys-are societies, even at the present day, where tems. We ought to think of custom as a most licentiousness is the rule of custom, and precious legacy of the past, saving us infinite chastity the sign of weakness or want of spirit. perplexity, yet not as an infallible rule. The There are communities (it cannot be necessary most intelligent community would be conser- to name them) in which successful fraud, esvative in its habits, yet not obstinately con-pecially on a large scale, is respected as the servative, but willing to hear and adopt the suggestions of advancing reason. The great duty of the intellectual class, and its especial function, is to confirm what is reasonable in the customs that have been handed down to us, and so maintain their authority, yet at the same time to show that custom is not final, but merely a form suited to the world's convenience. And whenever you are convinced that a custom is no longer serviceable, the way to procure the abolition of it is to lead men very gradually away from it, by offering a substitute at first very slightly different from what they have been long used to. If the English had been in the habit of tattooing, the best way to procure its abolition would have been to admit that it was quite necessary to cover the face with elaborate patterns, yet gently to suggest that these patterns would be still more elegant if delicately painted in water-colors. Then you might have gone on arguing still admitting, of course, the absolute necessity for ornament of some kindthat good taste demanded only a moderate amount of it; and so you would have brought people gradually to a little flourish on the nose or forehead, when the most advanced reformers might have set the example of dispensing with ornament altogether. Many of our TO A CONSERVATIVE WHO HAD ACCUSED THE contemporaries have abandoned shaving in this gradual way, allowing the whiskers to encroach imperceptibly, till at last the razor lay in the dressing-case unused. The abominable black cylinders that covered our heads a few years ago were vainly resisted by radicals in custom, but the moderate reformers gradually reduced their elevation, and now they are things of the past. Though I think we ought to submit to custom in matters of indifference, and to reform it proof of smartness, whilst a man who remains poor because he is honest is despised for slowness and incapacity. There are whole nations in which religious hypocrisy is strongly ap proved by custom, and honesty severely condemned. The Wahabee Arabs may be mentioned as an instance of this, but the Wahabee Arabs are not the only people, nor is Nejed the only place, where it is held to be more virtuous to lie on the side of custom than to be an honorable man in independence of it. In all communities where vice and hypocrisy are sustained by the authority of custom, eccentricity is a moral duty. In all communities where a low standard of thinking is received as infallible common sense, eccentricity be comes an intellectual duty. There are hundreds of places in the provinces where it is impossible for any man to lead the intellectual life without being condemned as an eccentric. It is the duty of intellectual men who are thus isolated to set the example of that which their neighbors call eccentricity, but which may be more accurately described as superiority. LETTER II. AUTHOR OF A WANT OF RESPECT FOR TRA- Transition from the ages of tradition to that of experiment-- |