The Intellectual Life Part 18

Let your rest be perfect in its season, like the rest of waters that are still. If you will have a model for your living, take neither the stars, for they fly without ceasing, nor the ocean that ebbs and flows, nor the river that cannot stay, but rather let your life be like that of the summer air, which has times of n.o.ble energy and times of perfect peace.

It fills the sails of s.h.i.+ps upon the sea, and the miller thanks it on the breezy uplands; it works generously for the health and wealth of all men, yet it claims its hours of rest. "I have pushed the fleet, I have turned the mill, I have refreshed the city, and now, though the captain may walk impatiently on the quarter-deck, and the miller swear, and the city stink, I will stir no more until it pleases me."

You have learned many things, my friend, but one thing you have _not_ learned--the art of resting. That stone in Glen Croe ought to have impressed its lesson on the mind of many a traveller, long before Earl Russell gave it a newspaper celebrity. Have we not rested there together, you and I, a little in advance of the coach, which the weary horses were still slowly dragging up the tedious hill? And as we sat on the turf, and looked down the misty glen, did we not read the lesson there engraven? How good and _human_ the idea was, the idea of setting up that graven stone in the wilderness; how full of sympathy is that inscription for all the weakness and weariness of humanity! Once, in the ardor of youth, there shone before me a golden star in heaven, and on the deep azure around it "_Ohne Hast, ohne Rast_," in letters of steady flame; but now I see more frequently a plain little stone set up in the earth, with the inscription, "Rest, and be thankful!"

Is not the stone just a little like a grave-stone, my friend? Perhaps it is. But if we take rest when we require it during life, we shall not need the grave's rest quite so soon.

LETTER VII.

TO AN ARDENT FRIEND WHO TOOK NO REST.

The regret for lost time often a needless one--Tillier's doctrine about _flanerie_--How much is gained in idle hours--Sainte-Beuve's conviction that whatever he did he studied the infinite book of the world and of life--Harness--Free play of the mind necessary--The freedom of a grain of desert-sand--The freedom of the wild bee.

If we asked any intellectual workman what he would do if his life were to be lived over again, I believe the answer, whatever its form, would amount ultimately to this: "I would economize my time better." Very likely if the opportunity were granted him he would do nothing of the sort; very likely he would waste his time in ways more authorized by custom, yet waste it just as extravagantly as he had done after his own original fas.h.i.+on; but it always seems to us as if we could use the time better if we had it over again.

It seems to me in looking back over the last thirty years, that the only time really wasted has been that spent in laborious obedience to some external authority. It may be a dangerous doctrine which Claude Tillier expressed in an immortal sentence, but dangerous or not, it is full of intellectual truth: "Le temps le mieux employe est celui que l'on perd."[11] If what we are accustomed to consider lost time could be removed, as to its effects at least, from the sum of our existence, it is certain that we should suffer from a great intellectual impoverishment. All the best knowledge of mankind, to begin with, is acquired in hours which hard-working people consider lost hours--in hours, that is, of pleasure and recreation. Deduct all that we have learnt about men in times of recreation, in clubs and smoking-rooms, on the hunting-field, on the cricket-ground, on the deck of the yacht, on the box of the drag or the dog-cart, would the residue be worth very much? would it not be a mere heap of dry bones without any warm flesh to cover them? Even the education of most of us, such as it is, has been in a great measure acquired out of school, as it were; I mean outside of the acknowledged duties of our more serious existence. Few Englishmen past forty have studied English literature either as a college exercise or a professional preparation; they have read it privately, as an amus.e.m.e.nt. Few Englishmen past forty have studied modern languages, or science, or the fine arts, from any obedience to duty, but merely from taste and inclination. And even if we studied these things formally, as young men often do at the present day, it is not from the formal study that we should get the _perfume_ of the language or the art, but from idle hours in foreign lands and galleries. It is superfluous to recommend idleness to the unintellectual, but the intellectual too often undervalue it. The laborious intellect contracts a habit of strenuousness which is some times a hindrance to its best activity.

"I have arrived," said Sainte-Beuve, "perhaps by way of secretly excusing my own idleness, perhaps by a deeper feeling of the principle that all comes to the same, at the conclusion that whatever I do or do not, working in the study at continuous labor, scattering myself in articles, spreading myself about in society, giving my time away to troublesome callers, to poor people, to _rendez-vous_, in the street, no matter to whom and to what, I cease not to do one and the same thing, to read one and the same book, the infinite book of the world and of life, that no one ever finishes, in which the wisest read farthest; I read it then at all the pages which present themselves, in broken fragments, backwards, what matters it? I never cease going on. The greater the medley, the more frequent the interruption, the more I get on with this book in which one is never beyond the middle; but the profit is to have had it open before one at all sorts of different pages."

A distinguished author wrote to another author less distinguished: "You have gone through a good deal of really vigorous study, but have not _been in harness_ yet." By harness he meant discipline settled beforehand like military drill. Now, the advantages of drill are evident and very generally recognized, but the advantages of intellectual _flanerie_ are not so generally recognized. For the work of the intellect to be clear and healthy, a great deal of free play of the mind is absolutely necessary. Harness is good for an hour or two at a time, but the finest intellects have never _lived_ in harness. In reading any book that has much vitality you are sure to meet with many allusions and ill.u.s.trations which the author hit upon, not when he was in harness, but out at gra.s.s. Harness trains us to the systematic performance of our work, and increases our practical strength by regulated exercise, but it does not supply everything that is necessary to the perfect development of the mind. The truth is, that we need both the discipline of harness and the abundant nourishment of the free pasture. Yet may not our freedom be the profitless, choiceless, freedom of a grain of desert-sand, carried hither and thither by the wind, gaining nothing and improving nothing, so that it does not signify where it was carried yesterday or where it may fall to-morrow, but rather the liberty of the wild bee, whose coming and going are ordered by no master, nor fixed by any premeditated regulation, yet which misses no opportunity of increase, and comes home laden in the twilight. Who knows where he has wandered; who can tell over what banks and streams the hum of his wings has sounded? Is anything in nature freer than he is; can anything account better for a rational use of freedom? Would he do his work better if tiny harness were ingeniously contrived for him? Where then would be the golden honey, and where the waxen cells?

LETTER VIII.

TO A FRIEND (HIGHLY CULTIVATED) WHO CONGRATULATED HIMSELF ON HAVING ENTIRELY ABANDONED THE HABIT OF READING NEWSPAPERS.

Advantages in economy of time--Much of what we read in newspapers is useless to our culture--The too great importance which they attach to novelty--Distortion by party spirit--An instance of false presentation--Gains to serenity by abstinence from newspapers--Newspapers keep up our daily interest in each other--The French peasantry--The newspaper-reading Americans--An instance of total abstinence from newspapers--Auguste Comte--A suggestion of Emerson's--The work of newspaper correspondents--War correspondents--Mr. Stanley--M. Erdan, of the _Temps_.

Your abstinence from newspaper reading is not anew experiment in itself, though it is new in reference to your particular case, and I await its effects with interest. I shall be curious to observe the consequences, to an intellect const.i.tuted as yours is, of that total cutting off from the public interests of your own century which an abstinence from newspapers implies. It is clear that, whatever the loss may be, you have a definite gain to set against it. The time which you have hitherto given to newspapers, and which may be roughly estimated at about five hundred hours a year, is henceforth a valuable time-income to be applied to whatever purposes your best wisdom may select. When an intellectual person has contrived by the force of one simple resolution to effect so fine an economy as this, it is natural that he should congratulate himself. Your feelings must be like those of an able finance minister who has found means of closing a great leak in the treasury--if any economy possible in the finances of a State could ever relatively equal that splendid stroke of time-thrift which your force of will has enabled you to effect. In those five hundred hours, which are now your own, you may acquire a science or obtain a more perfect command over one of the languages which you have studied. Some department of your intellectual labors which has. .h.i.therto been unsatisfactory to you, because it was too imperfectly cultivated, may henceforth be as orderly and as fruitful as a well-kept garden. You may become thoroughly conversant with the works of more than one great author whom you have neglected, not from lack of interest, but from want of time. You may open some old chamber of the memory that has been dark and disused for many a year; you may clear the cobwebs away, and let the fresh light in, and make it habitable once again.

Against these gains, of which some to a man of your industry are certain, and may be counted upon, what must be our estimate of the amount of sacrifice or loss? It is clear to both of us that much of what we read in the newspapers is useless to our culture. A large proportion of newspaper-writing is occupied with speculation on what is likely to happen in the course of a few months; therefore, by waiting until the time is past, we know the event without having wasted time in speculations which could not effect it. Another rather considerable fraction of newspaper matter consists of small events which have interest for the day, owing to their novelty, but which will not have the slightest permanent importance. The whole press of a newspaper-reading country, like England or America, may be actively engaged during the s.p.a.ce of a week or a fortnight in discussing some incident which everybody will have forgotten in six months; and besides these sensational incidents, there are hundreds of less notorious ones, often fict.i.tious, inserted simply for the temporary amus.e.m.e.nt of the reader. The greatest evil of newspapers, in their effect on the intellectual life, is the enormous importance which they are obliged to attach to mere novelty. From the intellectual point of view, it is of no consequence whether a thought occurred twenty-two centuries ago to Aristotle or yesterday evening to Mr. Charles Darwin, and it is one of the distinctive marks of the truly intellectual to be able to take a hearty interest in all truth, independently of the date of its discovery. The emphasis given by newspapers to novelty exhibits things in wrong relations, as the lantern shows you what is nearest at the cost of making the general landscape appear darker by the contrast. Besides this exhibition of things in wrong relations, there is a positive distortion arising from the unscrupulousness of party, a distortion which extends far beyond the limits of the empire.

An essay might be written on the distortion of English affairs in the French press, or of French affairs in the English press, by writers who are as strongly partisan in another country as in their own. "It is such a grand thing," wrote an English Paris correspondent in 1870, "for Adolphus Thiers, son of a poor laborer of Aix, and in early life a simple journalist, to be at the head of the Government of France." This is a fair specimen of the kind of false presentation which is so common in party journalism. The newspaper from which I have quoted it was strongly opposed to Thiers, being in fact one of the princ.i.p.al organs of the English Bonapartists. It is not true that Thiers was the son of a poor laborer of Aix. His father was a workman of Ma.r.s.eilles, his mother belonging to a family in which neither wealth nor culture had been rare, and his mother's relatives had him educated at the Lycee. The art of the journalist in bringing together the two extremes of a career remarkable for its steady ascent had for its object to produce the idea of incongruity, of sudden and unsuitable elevation. Not only M. Thiers, however, but every human being starts from a very small beginning, since every man begins life as a baby. It is a great rise for one baby to the Presidency of the French Republic; it was also a great rise for other babies who have attained the premiers.h.i.+p of England. The question is, not what Thiers may have been seventy years ago, but what he was immediately before his acceptance of the highest office of the State. He was the most trusted and the most experienced citizen, so that the last step in his career was as natural as the elevation of Reynolds to the presidency of the Academy.

It is difficult for any one who cares for justice to read party journals without frequent irritation, and it does not signify which side the newspaper takes. Men are so unfair in controversy that we best preserve the serenity of the intellect by studiously avoiding all literature that has a controversial tone. By your new rule of abstinence from newspapers you will no doubt gain almost as much in serenity as in time. To the ordinary newspaper reader there is little loss of serenity, because he reads only the newspaper that he agrees with, and however unfair it is, he is pleased by its unfairness. But the highest and best culture makes us disapprove of unfairness on our own side of the question also. We are pained by it; we feel humiliated by it; we lament its persistence and its perversity.

I have said nearly all that has to be said in favor of your rule of abstinence. I have granted that the newspapers cost us much time, which, if employed for great intellectual purposes, would carry us very far; that they give disproportionate views of things by the emphasis they give to novelty, and false views by the unfairness which belongs to party. I might have added that newspaper writers give such a preponderance to politics--not political philosophy, but to the everyday work of politicians--that intellectual culture is thrown into the background, and the election of a single member of Parliament is made to seem of greater national importance than the birth of a powerful idea.

And yet, notwithstanding all these considerations, which are serious indeed for the intellectual, I believe that your resolution is unwise, and that you will find it to be untenable. One momentous reason more than counterbalances all these considerations put together. Newspapers are to the whole civilized world what the daily house-talk is to the members of a household; they keep up our daily interest in each other, they save us from the evils of isolation. To live as a member of the great white race of men, the race that has filled Europe and America, and colonized or conquered whatever other territories it has been pleased to occupy, to share from day to day its cares, its thoughts, its aspirations, it is necessary that every man should read his daily newspaper. Why are the French peasants so bewildered and at sea, so out of place in the modern world? It is because they never read a newspaper.

And why are the inhabitants of the United States, though scattered over a territory fourteen times the area of France, so much more capable of concerted political action, so much more _alive_ and modern, so much more interested in new discoveries of all kinds and capable of selecting and utilizing the best of them? It is because the newspaper penetrates everywhere; and even the lonely dweller on the prairie or in the forest is not intellectually isolated from the great currents of public life which flow through the telegraph and the press.

The experiment of doing without newspapers has been tried by a whole cla.s.s, the French peasantry, with the consequences that we know, and it has also from time to time been tried by single individuals belonging to more enlightened sections of society. Let us take one instance, and let us note what appear to have been the effects of this abstinence. Auguste Comte abstained from newspapers as a teetotaller abstains from spirituous liquors. Now, Auguste Comte possessed a gift of nature which, though common in minor degrees, is in the degree in which he possessed it rarer than enormous diamonds. That gift was the power of dealing with abstract intellectual conceptions, and living amidst them always, as the practical mind lives in and deals with material things. And it happened in Comte's case, as it usually does happen in cases of very peculiar endowment, that the gift was accompanied by the instincts necessary to its perfect development and to its preservation. Comte instinctively avoided the conversation of ordinary people, because he felt it to be injurious to the perfect exercise of his faculty, and for the same reason he would not read newspapers. In imposing upon himself these privations he acted like a very eminent living etcher, who, having the gift of an extraordinary delicacy of hand, preserves it by abstinence from everything that may effect the steadiness of the nerves. There is a certain difference, however, between the two cases which I am anxious to accentuate. The etcher runs no risk of any kind by his rule of abstinence. He refrains from several common indulgences, but he denies himself nothing that is necessary to health. I may even go farther, and say that the rules which he observes for the sake of perfection in his art, might be observed with advantage by many who are not artists, for the sake of their own tranquillity, without the loss of anything but pleasure. The rules which Comte made for himself involved, on the other hand, a great peril. In detaching himself so completely from the interests and ways of thinking of ordinary men, he elaborated, indeed, the conceptions of the positive philosophy, but arrived afterwards at a peculiar kind of intellectual decadence from which it is possible--probable even--that the rough common sense of the newspapers might have preserved him. They would have saved him, I seriously believe, from that mysticism which led to the invention of a religion far surpa.s.sing in unreasonableness the least rational of the creeds of tradition. It is scarcely imaginable, except on the supposition of actual insanity, that any regular reader of the _Times_, the _Temps_, the _Daily News_, and the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, should believe the human race to be capable of receiving as the religion of its maturity the Comtist Trinity and the Comtist Virgin Mother. A Trinity consisting of the Great Being (or humanity), the Great Fetish (or the earth), and the Great Midst (or s.p.a.ce); a hope for the human race (how unphysiological!) that women might ultimately arrive at maternity independently of virile help,--these are conceptions so remote, not only from the habits of modern thought, but (what is more important) from its tendencies, that they could not occur to a mind in regular communication with its contemporaries.

"If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard authors?" To this suggestion of Emerson's it may be answered that the loss would be greater than the gain. The writers of Queen Anne's time could educate an Englishman of Queen Anne's time, but they can only partially educate an Englishman of Queen Victoria's time. The mind is like a merchant's ledger, it requires to be continually posted up to the latest date. Even the last telegram may have upset some venerable theory that has been received as infallible for ages.

In times when great historical events are pa.s.sing before our eyes, the journalist is to future historians what the African traveller is to the map-makers. His work is neither complete nor orderly, but it is the fresh record of an eye-witness, and enables us to become ourselves spectators of the mighty drama of the world. Never was this service so well rendered as it is now, by correspondents who achieve heroic feats of bodily and mental prowess, exposing themselves to the greatest dangers, and writing much and well in circ.u.mstances the most unfavorable to literary composition. How vividly the English war correspondents brought before us the reality of the great conflict between Germany and France! What a romantic achievement, worthy to be sung in heroic verse, was the finding of Livingstone by Stanley! Not less interesting have been the admirable series of letters by M. Erdan in the _Temps_, in which, with the firmness of a master-hand, he has painted from the life, week after week, year after year, the decline and fall of the temporal power of the Papacy. I cannot think that any page of Roman history is better worth reading than his letters, more interesting, instructive, lively, or authentic. Yet with your contempt for newspapers you would lose all this profitable entertainment, and seek instead of it the accounts of former epochs not half so interesting as this fall of the temporal power, accounts written in most cases by men in libraries who had not seen the sovereigns they wrote about, nor talked with the people whose condition they attempted to describe. You have a respect for these accounts because they are printed in books, and bound in leather, and ent.i.tled "history," whilst you despise the direct observation of a man like Erdan, because he is only a journalist, and his letters are published in a newspaper. Is there not some touch of prejudice in this, some mistake, some narrowness of intellectual aristocracy?

LETTER IX.

TO AN AUTHOR WHO APPRECIATED CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.

Miss Mitford on the selfishness of authors--A suggestion of Emerson's--A laconic rule of his--Traces of jealousy--And of a more subtle feeling--A contradiction--Necessary to resist the invasion of the present--A certain equilibrium--The opposite of a pedant--The best cla.s.sics not pedants, but artists.

Reading the other day a letter by Miss Mitford, I was reminded of you as the eye is reminded of green when it sees scarlet. You, whose interest in literature has ever kept pace with the time, to whom no new thing is unwelcome if only it is good, are safe from her accusations; but how many authors have deserved them! Miss Mitford is speaking of a certain writer who is at the same time a clergyman, and whom it is not difficult to recognize.

"I never," she says, "saw him interested in the slightest degree by the work of any other author, except, indeed, one of his own followers or of his own clique, and then only as admiring or helping him. He has great kindness and great sympathy with working people, or with a dying friend, but I profess to you I am amazed at the utter selfishness of authors. I do not know one single poet who cares for any man's poetry but his own.

In general they read no books except such as may be necessary to their own writings--that is to the work they happen to be about, and even then I suspect that they only read the bits that they may immediately want.

You know the absolute ignorance in which Wordsworth lived of all modern works; and if, out of compliment to a visitor, he thought it needful to seem to read or listen to two or three stanzas, he gave unhesitating praise to the writer himself, but took especial care not to repeat the praise where it might have done him good--utterly fair and false."

There are touches of this spirit of indifference to contemporary literature in several writers and scholars whom we know. There are distinct traces of it even in published writings, though it is much more evident in private life and habit. Emerson seriously suggests that "the human mind would perhaps be a gainer if all the secondary writers were lost--say, in England, all but Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, through the profounder study so drawn to those wonderful minds." In the same spirit we have Emerson's laconic rule, "Never read any but famed books,"

which suggests the remark that if men had obeyed this rule from the beginning, no book could ever have acquired reputation, and n.o.body would ever have read anything. The idea of limiting English literature to a holy trinity of Shakespeare, Milton, and Bacon, and voluntarily losing all other authors, seems to me the most intense expression of the spirit of aristocracy in reading. It is as if a man were to decide in his own mind that society would be the better if all persons except the three Emperors were excluded from it. There is a want of reliance upon one's own judgment, and an excess of faith in the estimates of others, when we resolve to read only those books which come to us in the splendor of a recognized intellectual royalty. We read either to gain information, to have good thinking suggested to us, or to have our imagination stimulated. In the way of knowledge the best authors are always the most recent, so that Bacon could not suffice. In the way of thinking, our methods have gained in precision since Milton's time, and we are helped by a larger experience than his. The one thing which Shakespeare and Milton can do for us quite perfectly still, is to fill our imagination richly, and give it a fine stimulus. But modern writers can render us the same service.

Is there not a little jealousy of contemporaries in the persistence with which some authors avoid them, and even engage others to avoid them? May not there be a shade of another feeling than jealousy, a feeling more subtle in operation, the undefined apprehension that we may find, even amongst our more obscure contemporaries, merit equal to our own? So long as we restrict our reading to old books of great fame we are safe from this apprehension, for if we find admirable qualities, we know beforehand that the world has handsomely acknowledged them, and we indulge in the hope that our own admirable qualities will be recognized by posterity with equal liberality. But it creates an unpleasant feeling of uneasiness to see quant.i.ties of obscure contemporary work, done in a plain way to earn a living by men of third or fourth-rate reputation, or of no reputation at all, which in many respects would fairly sustain a comparison with our own. It is clear that an author ought to be the last person to advise the public not to read contemporary literature, since he is himself a maker of contemporary literature; and there is a direct contradiction between the invitation to read his book, which he circulates by the act of publis.h.i.+ng, and the advice which the book contains. Emerson is more safe from this obvious rejoinder when he suggests to us to transfer our reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard authors. But are these suggestions anything more than the reaction of an intellectual man against the too prevalent customs of the world? The reading practised by most people, by all who do not set before themselves intellectual culture as one of the definite aims of life, is remarkable for the regularity with which it neglects all the great authors of the past. The books provided by the circulating library, the reviews and magazines, the daily newspapers, are read whilst they are novelties, but the standard authors are left on their shelves unopened. We require a firm resolution to resist this invasion of what is new, because it flows like an unceasing river, and unless we protect our time against it by some solid embankment of unshakable rule and resolution, every nook and cranny of it will be filled and flooded.

An Englishman whose life was devoted to culture, but who lived in an out-of-the-way place on the Continent, told me that he considered it a decided advantage to his mind to live quite outside of the English library system, because if he wanted to read a new book he had to buy it and pay heavily for carriage besides, which made him very careful in his choice. For the same reason he rejoiced that the nearest English news-room was two hundred miles from his residence.

But, on the other hand, what would be the condition of a man's mind who never read anything but the cla.s.sic authors? He would live in an intellectual monastery, and would not even understand the cla.s.sic authors themselves, for we understand the past only by referring it to what we know in the present.

It is best to preserve our minds in a state of equilibrium, and not to allow our repugnance to what we see as an evil to drive us into an evil of an opposite kind. We are too often like those little toy-fish with a bit of steel in their mouths, which children attract with a magnet. If you present the positive pole of the magnet, the fish rushes at it at once, but if you offer the negative end it retreats continually.

Everything relatively to our character has this positive or negative end, and we either rush to things or rush away from them. Some persons are actually driven away from the most entertaining writers because they happen to be what are called cla.s.sics, because pedants boast of having read them. I know a man who is exactly the opposite of a pedant, who has a horror of the charlatanism which claims social and intellectual position as the reward for having laboriously waded through those authors who are conventionally termed "cla.s.sical," and this opposition to pedantry has given him an aversion to the cla.s.sics themselves, which he never opens. The shallow pretence to admiration of famous writers which is current in the world is so distasteful to the love of honesty and reality which is the basis of his character, that by an unhappy a.s.sociation of ideas he has acquired a repugnance to the writers themselves. But such men as Horace, Terence, Shakespeare, Moliere, though they have had the misfortune to be praised and commentated upon by pedants, were in their lives the precise opposite of pedants; they were _artists_ whose study was human nature, and who lived without pretension in the common world of men. The pedants have a habit of considering these genial old artists as in some mysterious way their own private property, for do not the pedants live by expounding them? And some of us are frightened away from the fairest realms of poetry by the fences of these grim guardians.

LETTER X.

TO AN AUTHOR WHO KEPT VERY IRREGULAR HOURS.

Julian Fane--His late hours--Regularity produced by habit--The time of the princ.i.p.al effort--That the chief work should be done in the best hours--Physicians prefer early to late work--The practice of Goethe and some modern authors--The morning worker ought to live in a tranquil neighborhood--Night-work--The medical objection to it--The student's objection to day-work--Time to be kept in ma.s.ses by adults, but divided into small portions by children--Rapid turning of the mind--Cuvier eminent for this faculty--The Duke of Wellington--The faculty more available with some occupations than others--The slavery of a minute obedience to the clock--Broad rules the best--Books of agenda, good in business, but not in the higher intellectual pursuits.

What you told me of your habits in the employment of your hours reminded me of Julian Fane. Mr. Lytton tells us that "after a long day of professional business, followed by a late evening of social amus.e.m.e.nt, he would return in the small hours of the night to his books, and sit, unwearied, till sunrise in the study of them. Nor did he then seem to suffer from this habit of late hours. His nightly vigils occasioned no appearance of fatigue the next day.... He rarely rose before noon, and generally rose much later."

But however irregular a man's distribution of his time may be in the sense of wanting the government of fixed rules, there always comes in time a certain regularity by the mere operation of habit. People who get up very late hardly ever do so in obedience to a rule; many get up early by rule, and many more are told that they ought to get up early, and believe it, and aspire to that virtue, but fail to carry it into practice. The late-risers are rebels and sinners--in this respect--to a man, and so persistently have the wise, from Solomon downwards, harped upon the moral loveliness of early rising and the degradation which follows the opposite practice, that one can hardly get up after eight without either an uncomfortable sense of guilt or an extraordinary callousness. Yet the late-risers, though obeying no rule, for the abandoned sinner recognizes none, become regular in their late rising from the gradual fixing power of habit. Even Julian Fane, though he regretted his desultory ways, "and dwelt with great earnestness on the importance of regular habits of work," was perhaps less irregular than he himself believed. We are sure to acquire habits; what is important is not so much that the habits should be regular, as that their regularity should be of the kind most favorable in the long run to the accomplishment of our designs, and this never comes by chance, it is the result of an effort of the will in obedience to governing wisdom.

The first question which every one who has the choice of his hours must settle for himself is at what time of day he will make his princ.i.p.al effort; for the day of every intellectual workman ought to be marked by a kind of artistic composition; there ought to be some one labor distinctly recognized as dominant, with others in subordination, and subordination of various degrees. Now for the hours at which the princ.i.p.al effort ought to be made, it is not possible to fix them by the clock so as to be suitable for everybody, but a broad rule may be arrived at which is applicable to all imaginable cases. The rule is this--to do the chief work in the best hours; to give it the pick of your day; and by day I do not mean only the solar day, but the whole of the twenty-four hours. There is an important physiological reason for giving the best hours to the most important work. The better the condition of the brain and the body, and the more favorable the surrounding circ.u.mstances, the smaller will be the cost to the organization of the labor that has to be done. It is always the safest way to do the heaviest (or most important) work at the time and under the conditions which make it the least costly.

Physicians are unanimous in their preference of early to late work; and no doubt, if the question were not complicated by other considerations, we could not do better than to follow their advice in its simplicity.

Goethe wrote in the morning, with his faculties refreshed by sleep and not yet excited by any stimulant. I could mention several living authors of eminence who pursue the same plan, and find it favorable alike to health and to production. The rule which they follow is never to write after lunch, leaving the rest of their time free for study and society, both of which are absolutely necessary to authors. According to this system it is presumed that the hours between breakfast and lunch are the best hours. In many cases they are so. A person in fair health, after taking a light early breakfast without any heavier stimulant than tea or coffee, finds himself in a state of freshness highly favorable to sound and agreeable thinking. His brain will be in still finer order if the breakfast has been preceded by a cold bath, with friction and a little exercise. The feeling of freshness, cleanliness, and moderate exhilaration, will last for several hours, and during those hours the intellectual work will probably be both lively and reasonable. It is difficult for a man who feels cheerful and refreshed, and whose task seems easy and light, to write anything morbid or perverse.

But for the morning to be so good as I have just described it, the workman must be quite favorably situated. He ought to live in a very tranquil neighborhood, and to be as free as possible from anxiety as to what the postman may have in reserve for him. If his study-window looks out on a noisy street, and if the day is sure, as it wears on, to bring anxious business of its own, then the increasing noise and the apprehension (even though it be almost entirely unconscious) of impending business, will be quite sufficient to interfere with the work of any man who is the least in the world nervous, and almost all intellectual laborers _are_ nervous, more or less. Men who have the inestimable advantage of absolute tranquillity, at all times, do well to work in the morning, but those who can only get tranquillity at times independent of their own choice have a strong reason for working at those times, whether they happen to be in the morning or not.

In an excellent article on "Work" (evidently written by an experienced intellectual workman), which appeared in one of the early numbers of the _Cornhill Magazine_, and was remarkable alike for practical wisdom and the entire absence of traditional dogmatism, the writer speaks frankly in favor of night-work, "If you can work at all at night, one hour at that time is worth any two in the morning. The house is hushed, the brain is clear, the distracting influences of the day are at an end.

You have not to disturb yourself with thoughts of what you are about to do, or what you are about to suffer. You know that there is a gulf between you and the affairs of the outside world, almost like the chasm of death; and that you need not take thought of the morrow until the morrow has come. There are few really great thoughts, such as the world will not willingly let die, that have not been conceived under the quiet stars."

The medical objection to night-work in the case of literary men would probably be that the night is _too_ favorable to literary production.

The author of the Essay just quoted says that at night "you only drift into deeper silence _and quicker inspiration_. If the right mood is upon you, _you write on_; if not, your pillow awaits you." Exactly so; that is to say, the brain, owing to the complete external tranquillity, can so concentrate its efforts on the subject in hand as to work itself up into a luminous condition which is fed by the most rapid destruction of the nervous substance that ever takes place within the walls of a human skull. "If the right mood is upon you, _you write on_;" in other words, if you have once well lighted your spirit-lamp, it will go on burning so long as any spirit is left in it, for the air is so tranquil that nothing comes to blow it out. You drift into deeper silence and "quicker inspiration." It is just this quicker inspiration that the physician dreads.

Against this objection may be placed the equally serious objection to day-work, that every interruption, when you are particularly anxious not to be interrupted, causes a definite loss and injury to the nervous system. The choice must therefore be made between two dangers, and if they are equally balanced there can be no hesitation, because all the _literary_ interests of an author are on the side of the most tranquil time. Literary work is always sure to be much better done when there is no fear of disturbance than under the apprehension of it; and precisely the same amount of cerebral effort will produce, when the work is uninterrupted, not only better writing, but a much greater quant.i.ty of writing. The knowledge that he is working well and productively is an element of health to every workman because it encourages cheerful habits of mind.

In the division of time it is an excellent rule for adults to keep it as much as possible _in large ma.s.ses_, not giving a quarter of an hour to one occupation and a quarter to another, but giving three, four, or five hours to one thing at a time. In the case of children an opposite practice should be followed; they are able to change their attention from one subject to another much more easily than we can, whilst at the same time they cannot fix their minds for very long without cerebral fatigue leading to temporary incapacity. The custom prevalent in schools, of making the boys learn several different things in the course of the day, is therefore founded upon the necessities of the boy-nature, though most grown men would find that changes so frequent would, for them, have all the inconveniences of interruption. To boys they come as relief, to men as interruption. The reason is that the physical condition of the brain is different in the two cases; but in our loose way of talking about these things we may say that the boy's ideas are superficial, like the plates and dishes on the surface of a dinner-table, which may be rapidly changed without inconvenience, whereas the man's ideas, having all struck root down to the very depths of his nature, are more like the plants in a garden, which cannot be removed without a temporary loss both of vigor and of beauty, and the loss cannot be instantaneously repaired. For a man to do his work thoroughly well, it is necessary that he should dwell in it long enough at a time to get all the powers of his mind fully under command with reference to the particular work in hand, and he cannot do this without tuning his whole mind to the given diapason, as a tuner tunes a piano.

Some men can tune their minds more rapidly, as violins are tuned, and this faculty may to a certain extent be acquired by efforts of the will very frequently repeated. Cuvier had this faculty in the most eminent degree. One of his biographers says: "His extreme facility for study, and of directing all the powers of his mind to diverse occupations of study, from one quarter of an hour to another, was one of the most extraordinary qualities of his mind." The Duke of Wellington also cultivated the habit (inestimably valuable to a public man) of directing the whole of his attention to the subject under consideration, however frequently that subject might happen to be changed. But although men of exceptional power and very exceptional flexibility may do this with apparent impunity, that still depends very much on the nature of the occupation. There are some occupations which are not incompatible with a fragmentary division of time, because these occupations are themselves fragmentary. For example, you may study languages in phrase-books during very small s.p.a.ces of time, because the complete phrase is in itself a very small thing, but you could not so easily break and resume the thread of an elaborate argument. I suspect that though Cuvier appeared to his contemporaries a man remarkably able to leave off and resume his work at will, he must have taken care to do work that would bear interruption at those times when he knew himself to be most liable to it. And although, when a man's time is unavoidably broken up into fragments, no talent of a merely auxiliary kind can be more precious than that of turning each of those fragments to advantage, it is still true that he whose time is at his own disposal will do his work most calmly, most deliberately, and therefore on the whole most thoroughly and perfectly, when he keeps it in fine ma.s.ses. The mere knowledge that you have three or four clear hours before you is in itself a great help to the spirit of thoroughness, both in study and in production. It is agreeable too, when the sitting has come to an end, to perceive that a definite advance is the result of it, and advance in anything is scarcely perceptible in less than three or four hours.