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it, and another! In striking contrast to the effort of the will; when you have them they unhurried bargeman's wife in her cabin is an are the inevitable result of your state of cultirritable Frenchman in the corner of a dili-ure, and the will can no more get rid of them gence, looking at his watch every half-hour, than it can get rid of an organic disease. and wishing that the dust and rattle were When you have a limited amount of power over, and he were in his own easy-chair at and of culture, and are not quite clear in your home. Those who really lead the intellectual own mind as to where the limits lie, it is life, and have embraced it for better and for natural on the one hand that you should fear worse, are like the bargeman's wife; but the insufficiency of what you possess, and on those who live the life from time to time only, the other that in more sanguine moments for some special purpose, wishing to be rid of you should indulge in hopes which are it as soon as that purpose is accomplished, only extravagant because your powers have are like the sufferer in the purgatory of the not yet been accurately measured. You will diligence. Is there indeed really any true in- alternate between fear and hope, accord. tellectual life at all when every hour of labor ing to the temporary predominance of sadis spoiled by a feverish eagerness to be at the dening or cheerful ideas, but both these feelend of the projected task? You cannot take ings will urge you to complete the work in a bit out of another man's life and live it, hand, that you may see your own powers without having lived the previous years that reflected in it, and measure them more exled up to it, without having also the assured actly. This is the main cause of the eagerhopes for the years that lie beyond. The at-ness of young authors, and the reason why tempt is constantly made by amateurs of all kinds, and by men of temporary purposes, and it always fails. The amateur says when he awakes on some fine summer morning, and draws up his blind, and looks out on the dewy fields: 'Ah, the world of nature is beautiful to-day: what if I were to lead the life of an artist?" And after breakfast he seeks up his old box of watercolor and his blockbook, and stool, and white umbrella, and what not, and sallies forth, and fixes himself on the edge of the forest or the banks of the amber stream. The day that he passes there looks like an artist's day, yet it is not. It has not been preceded by the three or four thousand days which ought to have led up to it; it is not strong in the assured sense of present skill, in the calm knowledge that the hours will bear good fruit. So the chances are that there will be some hurry, and fretfulness, and impatience, under the shadow of that white parasol, and also that when the day is over there will be a disappointment. You cannot put an artist's day into the life of any one but an artist.

Our impatiences come mainly, I think, from an amateurish doubt about our own capacity, which is accompanied by a fevered eagerness to see the work done, because we are tormented both by hopes and fears so long as it is in progress. We have fears that it may not turn out as it ought to do, and we have at the same time hopes for its success. Both these causes produce eagerness, and deprive us of the tranquillity which distinguishes the thorough workman, and which is necessary to thoroughness in the work itself. Now please observe that I am not advising you to set aside these hopes and fears by an

they often launch work upon the sea of publicity which is sure to go immediately to the bottom, from the unworkmanlike haste with which it has been put together. But beyond this there is another cause, which is, that beginners in literature have rarely acquired firm intellectual habits, that they do not yet lead the tranquil intellectual life, so that such a piece of work as the composition of a book keeps them in an unwholesome state of excitement. When you feel this coming upon you, pray remember Mr. Galton's wise traveller in unknown tracts, or the bargeman's wife in the canal-boat.

Amongst the many advantages of experience, one of the most valuable is that we come to know the range of our own powers, and if we are wise we keep contentedly within them. This relieves us from the malady of eagerness; we know pretty accurately beforehand what our work will be when it is done, and therefore we are not in a hurry to see it accomplished. The coolness of old hands in all departments of labor is due in part to the cooling of the temperament by age, but it is due even more to the fulness of acquired experience, for we do not find middle-aged men so cool in situations where they feel themselves incompetent. The conduct of the most experienced painters in the management of their work is a good example : of this masterly coolness, because we can see them painting in their studios whereas we cannot so easily see or so justly estimate the coolness of scientific or literary workmen. A painter of great experience will have, usually, several pictures at a time upon his easels, and pass an hour upon one, or an hour upon the other, simple as the state of the pigment

invites him without ever being tempted to It would be an experiment worth trying, risk anything by hurrying a process. The so to order your intellectual life, that howugly preparatory daubing which irritates the ever stony and thorny your path might be, impatience of the "beginner does not dis- however difficult and arduous, it should at turb his equanimity; he has laid it with a all events never be dull; or, to express what view to the long-foreseen result, and it satis-I mean more accurately, that you yourself fies him temporarily as the right thing for should never feel the depressing influences of the time being. If you know what is the dulness during the years when they are most right thing for the time being, and always do to be dreaded. I want you to live steadily it, you are sure of the calm of the thorough and happily in your intellectual labors, even workman. All his touches, except the very to the natural close of existence, and my best last touch on each work, are touches of prep-wish for you is that you may escape a long aration, leading gradually up to his result. and miserable malady which brain-workers Ingres used to counsel his pupils to sketch very commonly suffer from when the first always, to sketch upon and within the first dreams of youth have been disappointed-a sketch till the picture came right in the end; malady in which the intellectual desires are and this was strictly Balzac's method in lit-feeble, the intellectual hopes are few; whose erature. The literary and artistic labors of victim, if he has still resolution enough to these two men did not proceed so much learn anything, acquires without satisfaction, upon the principle of travelling as upon that and, if he has courage to create, has neither of cultivation. They took an idea in the pride nor pleasure in his creations. rough, as a settler takes a tract from wild nature, and then they went over it repeatedly, each time pushing the cultivation of it a little farther. Scott, Horace Vernet, John Phillip, and many others, have worked rather on the principle of travelling, passing over the ground once, and leaving it, never coming back again to correct the mistakes of yesterday. Both methods of work require deliberation, but the latter needs it in the supreme degree. All very decided workers, men who did not correct, have been at the same time very deliberate workers-rapid, in the sense of accomplishing much in the course of the year, or the life, but cautious and slow and observant whilst they actually labored, thinking out very carefully every sentence before they wrote it, every touch of paint before they laid it.

LETTER II.

If I were to sing the praises of knowledge as they have been so often sung by louder harps than mine, I might avoid so dreary a theme. It is easy to pretend to believe that the intellectual life is always sure to be interesting and delightful, but the truth is that, either from an unwise arrangement of their work, or from mental or physical causes which we will investigate to some extent before we have done with the subject, many men whose occupations are reputed to be amongst the most interesting have suffered terribly from ennui, and that not during à week or two at a time, but for consecutive years and years.

t

There is a class of books written with the praiseworthy intention of stimulating young men to intellectual labor, in which this danger of the intellectual life is systematically ignored. It is assumed in these books that the satisfactions of intellectual labor are certain; that although it may not always, or often, result in outward and material pros

TO A STUDENT IN THE FIRST ARDOR OF INTEL-perity, its inward joys will never fail. Prom

LECTUAL AMBITION.

ises of this kind cannot safely be made to any one. - The satisfactions of intellectual riches The first freshness-Why should it not be preserved?-The are not more sure than the satisfactions of dulness of the intellectual-Fictions and false promises material riches; the feeling of dull'indifferEnnui in work itself-Dürer's engraving of MelancholyScott about Dryden---Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth-Hum-ence which often so mysteriously clouds the boldt, Cuvier, Goethe-Tennyson's "Maud "--Preventives life of the rich man in the midst of the most of ennui-Hard study for limited times-The ennui of elaborate contrivances for his pleasure and jaded faculties.

I HAVE been thinking about you frequently of late, and the burden or refrain of my thoughts has been "What a blessing he has in that first freshness, if only he could keep it!" But now I am beginning more hopefully to ask myself, "Why should he not keep it?"

amusement, has its exact counterpart in the lives of men who are rich in the best treasures of the mind, and who have infinite intellectual resources. However brilliant your ability, however brave and persistent your industry, however vast your knowledge, there is always this dreadful possibility of ennui. People tell you that work is a specific

against it, but many a man has worked to one doomed to labor incessantly in the steadily and earnestly, and suffered terribly feverish exercise of the imagination," and of from ennui all the time that he was working, that "sinking of spirit which follows violent although the labor was of his own choice, the mental exertion," is it not evident that his } labor that he loved best, and for which Na-kindly understanding of Dryden's case came ture evidently intended him. The poets, from from the sympathy of a fellow-laborer who Solomon downwards, have all of them, so far knew by his own experience the gloomier and as I know, given utterance in one page or an- more depressing passages of the imaginative other of their writings to this feeling of life? It would be prudent perhaps to omit dreary dissatisfaction, and Albert Dürer, in the mention of Byron, because some may athis "Melencolia," illustrated it. It is plain tribute his sadness to his immorality; and if I that the robust female figure which has exer- spoke of Shelley, they might answer that he cised the ingenuity of so many commentators was "sad because he was impious;" but the is not melancholy either from weakness of truth is, that quite independently of conduct, the body or vacancy of the mind. She is and even of belief, it was scarcely possible strong and she is learned; yet, though the for natures so highly imaginative as these plumes of her wings are mighty, she sits two, and so ethereally intellectual as one of heavily and listlessly, brooding amidst the the two, to escape those clouds of gloom implements of suspended labor, on the shore which darken the intellectual life. Wordsof a waveless sea. The truth is that Dürer worth was not immoral, Wordsworth was engraved the melancholy that he himself only not unorthodox, yet he could be as sad in his too intimately knew. This is not the dulness own sober way as Byron in the bitterness of of the ignorant and incapable, whose minds his desolation, or Shelley in his tenderest are a blank because they have no ideas, whose wailing. The three men who seem to have hands are listless for want of an occupation; been the least subject to the sadness of intelit is the sadness of the most learned, the most lectual workers were Alexander Humboldt, intelligent, the most industrious; the weary Cuvier, and Goethe. Alexander Humboldt, misery of those who are rich in the attain- so far as is known to us, lived always in a ments of culture, who have the keys of the clear and cheerful daylight; his appetite for chambers of knowledge, and wings to bear learning was both strong and regular; he emthem to the heaven of the ideal. If you coun- braced the intellectual life in his earliest mansel this "Melencolia" to work that she may hood, and lived in it with an unhesitating be merry, she will answer that she knows singleness of purpose, to the limits of extreme the uses of labor and its vanity, and the pre-old age. Cuvier was to the last a model stucise amount of profit that a man hath of all dent, of a temper at once most unflinching his labor which he taketh under the sun. All things are full of labor, she will tell you; and in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

and most kind, happy in all his studies, hap pier still in his unequalled facility of mental self-direction. Goethe, as all know, lived a life of unflagging interest in each of the three Can we escape this brooding melancholy of great branches of intellectual labor. During the great workers-has any truly intellectual the whole of his long life he was interested in person escaped it ever? The question can literature, in which he was a master; he was never be answered with perfect certainty, be- interested in science, in which he was a discause we can never quite accurately know coverer, and in art, of which he was an arthe whole truth about the life of another. I dent though not practically successful stuhave known several men of action, almost dent. His intellectual activity ceased only entirely devoid of intellectual culture, who on rare occasions of painful illness or overenjoyed an unbroken flow of animal energy, whelming affliction; he does not seem to and were clearly free from the melancholy of have asked himself ever whether knowledge Dürer; but I never intimately knew a really was worth its cost; he was always ready to cultivated person who had not suffered from pay the appointed price of toil. He had no it more or less, and the greatest sufferers infirmity of intellectual doubt; the powerful were the most conscientious thinkers and impulses from within assured him that knowlstudents. Amongst the illustrious dead, it edge was good for him, and he went to it may be very safely answered that any poet urged by an unerring instinct, as a young who has described it has written from his salmon bred in the slime of a river seeks own experience-a transient experience it strength in the infinite sea. And yet, being may be, yet his own. When Walter Scott, a poet and a man of strong passions, Goethe à-propos of Dryden, spoke of "the appar- did not altogether escape the green-sickness ently causeless fluctuation of spirits incident which afflicts the imaginative temperament,

or he could never have written "Werther; "| Let me recommend certain precautions which but he cured himself very soon, and the au- taken together are likely to keep you safe. thor of "Werther" had no indulgence for Care for the physical health in the first place, Wertherism-indeed we are told that he for if there is a morbid mind the bodily organs grew ashamed of having written the book are not doing their work as they ought to do. which inoculated the younger minds of Eu- Next, for the mind itself, I would heartily rope with that miserable disease. In our recommend hard study, really hard study, own time an illustrious poet has given in taken very regularly but in very moderate "Maud" a very perfect study of a young quantity. The effect of it on the mind is as mind in a morbid condition, a mind having indeed the student-temper, but of a bad kind, that which comes not from the genuine love of study, but from sulky rage against the world.

"Thanks, for the fiend best knows whether woman or man

be the worse.

own."

I will bury myself in my books, and the Devil may pipe to his
This kind of self-burial in one's library does

bracing as that of cold water on the body, but as you ought not to remain too long in the cold bath, so it is dangerous to study hard more than a short time every day. Do some work that is very difficult (such as reading some language that you have to puzzle out à coups de dictionnaire) two hours a day regularly, to brace the fighting power of the intellect, but let the rest of the day's work be easier. Acquire especially, if you possibly can, the enviable faculty of getting entirely rid of your work in the intervals of it, and of taking a hearty interest in common things, seeks it in reading, urged by an inward in a garden, or stable, or dog-kennel, or necessity. He feels no gratitude towards the farm. If the work pursues you-if what is winners of knowledge; his morbid ill-nature called unconscious cerebration, which ought depreciates the intellectual laborers:

not come from the love of literature. The

recluse will not speak to his neighbor, yet needs human intercourse of some kind, and

to go forward without your knowing it, becomes conscious cerebration, and bothers you, then you have been working beyond your cerebral strength, and you are not safe. An organization which was intended by Nature for the intellectual life cannot be healthy and happy without a certain degree of intellectual activity. Natures like those of Humboldt and Goethe need immense labors for their own felicity, smaller powers need less extensive labor. To all of us who have intellectual needs there is a certain supply of work necessary to perfect health. If we do less, we are in danger of that ennui which comes from want of intellectual exercise; if we do more, we may suffer from that other ennui which is due to the weariness of the jaded faculties, and this is the more terrible of the two.

"The man of science himself is fonder of glory and vain; An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor." What is the life such a spirit will choose for itself? Despising alike the ignorant and the learned, the acuteness of the cultivated and the simplicity of the poor, in what form of activity or inaction will he seek what all men need, the harmony of a life well tuned? "Be mine a philosopher's life in the quiet woodland ways; Where, if I cannot be gay, let a passionless peace be my lot." There are many different morbid states of the mind, and this of the hero of "Maud " is only one of them, but it is the commonest amongst intellectual or semi-intellectual young men. See how he has a little fit of momentary enthusiasm (all he is capable of) about a shell that suddenly and accidentally attracts his attention. How true to the morbid nature is that incident! Unable to pursue any large and systematic observation, the diseased mind is attracted to things suddenly and accidentally, sees them out of all propor- TO AN INTELLECTUAL MAN WHO DESIRED AN tion, and then falls into the inevitable fit of scornful peevishness.

"What is it? A learned man
Could give it a clumsy name:
Let him name it who can."

The question which concerns the world is, how this condition of the mind may be avoided. The cure Mr. Tennyson suggested was war; but wars, though more frequent than is desirable, are not to be had always. And in your case, my friend, it is happily not a cure but a preventive that is needed.

LETTER III.

OUTLET FOR HIS ENERGIES.

Dissatisfaction of the intellectual when they have not an extensive influence-A consideration suggested to the author by Mr. Matthew Arnold-Each individual mind a portion of the national mind, which must rise or decline with the minds of which it is composed-Influence of a townsman in his town-Household influence-Charities and condescendences of the highly cultivated-A suggestion of M. Taine-Conversation with inferiors-How to make it interesting-That we ought to be satisfied with humble results and small successes.

THERE is a very marked tendency amongst persons of culture to feel dissatisfied with

themselves and their success in life when they | your culture is a gain to England, whether do not exercise some direct and visible in- England counts you amongst her eminent fluence over a considerable portion of the pub- sons, or leaves you forever obscure. Is it lic. To put the case in a more concrete form, not a noble spectacle, a spectacle well worthy it may be affirmed that if an intellectual of a highly civilized country, when a private young man does not exercise influence by lit- citizen, with an admirable combination of erature, or by oratory, or by one of the most patriotism and self-respect, says to himself as elevated forms of art, he is apt to think that he labors, "I know that in a country so great his culture and intelligence are lost upon the as England, where there are so many able world, and either to blame himself for being men, all that I do can count for very little in what he considers a failure, or else (and this public estimation, yet I will endeavor to store is more common) to find fault with the world my mind with knowledge and make my judgin general for not giving him a proper chance ment sure, in order that the national mind of of making his abilities tell. The facilities for England, of which my mind is a minute fracobtaining culture are now so many and great, tion, may be enlightened by so much, be it and within the reach of so many well-to-do never so little"? I think the same noble feelpeople, that hundreds of persons become really ing might animate a citizen with reference to very clever in various ways who would have his native town; I think a good townsman remained utterly uncultivated had they lived might say to himself, "Our folks are not in any previous century. A few of these dis- much given to the cultivation of their minds, tinguish themselves in literature and other and they need a few to set them an example. pursuits which bring notoriety to the success- I will be one of those few. I will work and ful, but by far the greater number have to re-think, in order that our town may not get main in positions of obscurity, often being into a state of perfect intellectual stagnation." clearly conscious that they have abilities and But if the nation or the city were too vast to knowledge not much, if at all, inferior to the call forth any noble feeling of this kind, surely abilities and knowledge of some who have the family is little enough and near enough. achieved distinction. The position of a clever Might not a man say, "I will go through a man who remains obscure is, if he has ambi- good deal of intellectual drudgery in order tion, rather trying to the moral fibre, but that my wife and children may unconsciously there are certain considerations which might get the benefit of it; I will learn facts for them help to give a direction to his energy and so that they may be accurate, and get ideas for procure him a sure relief, which reputation them that they may share with me a more too frequently fails to provide. elevated mental state; I will do something towards raising the tone of the whole household "?

The first consideration is one which was of fered to me many years ago by Mr. Matthew Arnold, and which I can give, though from memory, very nearly in his own words. The multiplicity of things which make claim to the attention of the public is in these days such that it requires either uncommon strength of will or else the force of peculiar circumstances to make men follow any serious study to good result, and the great majority content themselves with the general enlightenment of the epoch, which they get from newspapers and reviews. Hence the efforts of the intellectual produce little effect, and it requires either extraordinary talent or extraordinary fanaticism to awaken the serious interest of any considerable number of readers. Yet, in spite of these discouragements, we ought to remember that our labors, if not applauded by others, may be of infinite value to ourselves, and also that beyond this gain to the individual, his culture is a gain to the nation, whether the nation formally recognizes it or not. For the intellectual life of a nation is the sum of the lives of all intellectual people belonging to it, and in this sense

The practical difficulty in all projects of this kind is that the household does not care to be intellectually elevated, and opposes the resistance of gravitation. The household has its natural intellectual level, and finds it as inevitably as water that is free. Cultivated men are surrounded in their homes by a group of persons, wife, children, servants, who, in their intercourse with one another, create the household tone. What is a single individual with his books against these combined and active influences? Is he to go and preach the gospel of the intellect in the kitchen? Will he venture to present intellectual conclusions in the drawing-room? The kitchen has a tone of its own which all our efforts cannot elevate, and the drawing-room has its own atmosphere, an atmosphere unfavorable to severe and manly thinking. You cannot make cooks intellectual, and you must not be didactic with ladies. Intellectual men always feel this difficulty, and most commonly keep their intellect very much to themselves, when they are at home. If they have not an outlet else

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