The Intellectual Life Part 2

Then I thought farther: "That splendid young n.o.bleman in the picture will look just as young as he does now when we shall be either superannuated or dead." And I looked at you and your mother again and thought: "It is just five minutes since I saw these two living beings, and in this little s.p.a.ce of time they have both of them aged a little, though no human observer has enough delicacy of perception to detect so inappreciable an alteration." I went gradually on and on into the future, trying to imagine the changes which would come over yourself more especially (for it was you who were the centre of my reverie), till at last I imagined pretty accurately what you might be at sixty; but there it became necessary to stop, because it was too difficult to conceive the processes of decay.

After this, one thought grew upon me and became dominant. I thought, at present he has all the senses in their perfection, and they serve him without a hitch. He is an intelligence served by organs, and the organs are all doing their duty as faithfully as a postman who brings letters.

When the postman becomes too infirm to do his work he will retire on his little pension, and another will take his place and bring the letters just as regularly; but when the human organs become infirm they cannot be taken out and replaced by new ones, so that we must content ourselves to the end, with their service, such as it may be. Then I reflected how useful the senses are to the high intellectual life, and how wise it is, even for intellectual purposes, to preserve them as long as possible in their perfection.

To be able to see and hear well--to feel healthy sensations--even to taste and smell properly, are most important qualifications for the pursuit of literature, and art, and science. If you read attentively the work of any truly ill.u.s.trious poet, you will find that the whole of the imagery which gives power and splendor to his verse is derived from nature through one or other of these ordinary channels. Some philosophers have gone much farther than this, and have affirmed that the entire intellectual life is based ultimately upon remembered physical sensations; that we have no mental conception that is really independent of sensuous experience; and that the most abstract thought is only removed from sensation by successive processes of subst.i.tution, I have not s.p.a.ce to enter into so great and mysterious a subject as this; but I desire to draw your attention to a truth very commonly overlooked by intellectual people, which is the enormous importance of the organs of sense in the highest intellectual pursuits. I will couple together two names which have owed their celebrity, one chiefly to the use of her ears, the other to the use of his eyes. Madame de Stael obtained her literary material almost exclusively by means of conversation. She directed, systematically, the talk of the learned and brilliant men amongst whom she lived to the subject which for the moment happened to occupy her thoughts. Her literary process (which is known to us in detail through the revelations of her friends) was purposely invented to catch everything that she heard, as a net catches fish in a river. First, she threw down on paper a very brief rough draft of the intended literary project. This she showed to few, but from it she made a second "state" (as an engraver would say), which she exhibited to some of her trusted friends, profiting by their hints and suggestions. Her secretary copied the corrected ma.n.u.script, incorporating the new matter, on paper with a very broad margin for farther additions. During all the time that it took to carry her work through these successive states, that ingenious woman made the best possible use of her ears, which were her natural providers. She made everybody talk who was likely to be of any use to her, and then immediately added what she had caught on the wide margin reserved for that purpose. She used her eyes so little that she might almost as well have been blind. We have it on her own authority, that were it not out of respect to custom, she would not open her window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whereas she would travel five hundred leagues to talk with a clever man whom she had never met.

Now since Madame de Stael's genius fed itself exclusively through the faculty of hearing, what an enormous difference it would have made to her if she had been deaf! It is probable that the whole of her literary reputation was dependent on the condition of her ears. Even a very moderate degree of deafness (just enough to make listening irksome) might have kept her in perpetual obscurity.

The next instance I intend to give is that of a distinguished contemporary, Mr. Ruskin. His peculiar position in literature is due to his being able to see as cultivated artists see. Everything that is best and most original in his writings is invariably either an account of what he has seen in his own independent inimitable way, or else a criticism of the accurate or defective sight of others. His method of study, by drawing and taking written memoranda of what he has seen, is entirely different from Madame de Stael's method, but refers always, as hers did, to the testimony of the predominant sense. Every one whose attention has been attracted to the subject is aware that, amongst people who are commonly supposed, to see equally well, and who are not suspected of any tendency to blindness, the degrees of perfection in this sense vary to infinity. Suppose that Mr. Ruskin (to our great misfortune) had been endowed with no better eyes than many persons who see fairly well in the ordinary sense, his enjoyment and use of sight would have been so much diminished that he would have had little enthusiasm about seeing, and yet that kind of enthusiasm was quite essential to his work.

The well-known instance of Mr. Prescott, the historian, is no doubt a striking proof what _may_ be accomplished by a man of remarkable intellectual ability without the help of sight, or rather helped by the sight of others. We have also heard of a blind traveller, and even of a blind entomologist; but in all cases of this kind they are executive difficulties to be overcome, such that only the most resolute natures would ever dream of encountering them. When the materials for the "Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella" arrived in Prescott's house from Europe, his remaining eye had just suffered from over-exertion to such a degree that he could not use it again for years. "I well remember," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "the blank despair which I felt when my literary treasures arrived, and I saw the mine of wealth lying around me which I was forbidden to explore." And although, by a most tedious process, which would have worn out the patience of any other author, Mr. Prescott did at last arrive at the conclusion of his work, it cost him ten years of labor--probably thrice as much time as would have been needed by an author of equal intellectual ability without any infirmity of sight.

Although, of the five senses which G.o.d has given us, sight and hearing are the most necessary to the intellectual life, it may easily be demonstrated that the lower ones are not without their intellectual uses. Perfect literature and art can only he produced by men who are perfect in all their natural faculties. The great creative intellects have never been ascetics; they have been rightly and healthily sensitive to every kind of pleasure. The taste of fruits and wines, the perfume of flowers are a part of the means by which the spirit of Nature influences our most secret thoughts, and conveys to us suggestions, or carries us into states of feeling which have an enormous effect upon our thinking, though the manner in which the effect is produced is one of the deepest mysteries of our mysterious being. When the Caliph Vathek added five wings to the palace of Alkoremmi, on the hill of Pied Horses, for the particular gratification of each of his five senses, he only did on a uselessly large scale what every properly-endowed human being does, when he can afford it, on a small one.

You will not suspect me of preaching unlimited indulgence. The very object of this letter is to recommend, for intellectual purposes, the careful preservation of the senses in the freshness of their perfection, and this is altogether incompatible with every species of excess. If you are to see clearly all your life, you must not sacrifice eyesight by over-straining it; and the same law of moderation is the condition of preserving every other faculty. I want you to know the exquisite taste of common dry bread; to enjoy the perfume of a larch wood at a distance; to feel delight when a sea-wave dashes over you. I want your eye to be so sensitive that it shall discern the faintest tones of a gray cloud, and yet so strong that it shall bear to gaze on a white one in the dazzling glory of suns.h.i.+ne. I would have your hearing sharp enough to detect the music of the spheres, if it were but audible, and yet your nervous system robust enough to endure the shock of the guns on an ironclad. To have and keep these powers we need a firmness of self-government that is rare.

Young men are careless of longevity; but how precious are added years to the fulness of the intellectual life! There are lives, such as that of Major Pendennis, which only diminish in value as they advance--when the man of fas.h.i.+on is no longer fas.h.i.+onable, and the sportsman can no longer stride over the ploughed fields. The old age of the Major Pendennises is a.s.suredly not to be envied: but how rich is the age of the Hunboldts! I compare the life of the intellectual to a long wedge of gold--the thin end of it begins at birth, and the depth and value of it go on indefinitely increasing till at last comes Death (a personage for whom Nathaniel Hawthorne had a peculiar dislike, for his unmannerly habit of interruption), who stops the auriferous processes. Oh, the mystery of the nameless ones who have died when the wedge was thin and looked so poor and light! Oh, the happiness of the fortunate old men whose thoughts went deeper and deeper like a wall that runs out into the sea!

NOTE.--One of the most painful cases of interruption caused by death is that of Cuvier. His paralysis came upon him whilst he was still in full activity, and death prevented him from arranging a great acc.u.mulation of scientific material. He said to M. Pasquier, "I had great things still to do; all was ready in my head. After thirty years of labor and research, there remained but to write, and now the hands fail, and carry with them the head." But the most lamentable instances of this kind of interruption are, from the nature of things, unknown to us. Even the friends of the deceased cannot estimate the extent of the loss, for a man's immediate neighbors are generally the very last persons to become aware of the nature of his powers or the value of his acquirements.

PART II.

THE MORAL BASIS.

LETTER I.

TO A MORALIST WHO HAD SAID THAT THERE WAS A WANT OF MORAL FIBRE IN THE INTELLECTUAL, ESPECIALLY IN POETS AND ARTISTS.

The love of intellectual pleasure--The seeking for a stimulus--Intoxication of poetry and oratory--Other mental intoxications--The Bishop of Exeter on drudgery--The labor of composition in poetry--Wordsworth's dread of it--Moore--His trouble with "Lalla Rookh"--His painstaking in preparation--Necessity of patient industry in other arts--John Lewis, Meissonier, Mulready--Drudgery in struggling against technical difficulties--Water-color painting, etching, oil-painting, fresco, line-engraving--Labor undergone for mere discipline--Moral strength of students--Giordano Bruno.

You told me the other day that you believed the inducement to what I called intellectual living to be merely the love of pleasure--pleasure of a higher kind, no doubt, than that which we derive from wine, yet fairly comparable to it. You went on to say that you could not, from the moral point of view, discern any appreciable difference between intoxicating oneself by means of literature or art and getting tipsy on port wine or brandy; that the reading of poetry, most especially was clearly self-intoxication--a service of Venus and Bacchus, in which the suggestions of artfully-ordered words were used as subst.i.tutes for the harem and the wine-flask. Completing the expression of this idea, you said that the excitement produced by oratory was exactly of the same nature as the excitement produced by gin, so that Mr. Bright and M.

Gambetta--nay, even a gentleman so respectable as the late Lord Derby--belonged strictly to the same profession as the publicans, being dealers in stimulants, and no more. The habitual student was, in your view, nothing better than the helpless victim of unresisted appet.i.te, to whom intellectual intoxication, having been at first a pleasure, had finally become a necessity. You added that any rational person who found himself sinking into such a deplorable condition as this, would have recourse to some severe discipline as a preservative--a discipline requiring close attention to common things, and rigorously excluding every variety of thought which could possibly be considered intellectual.

It is strictly true that the three intellectual pursuits--literature, science, and the fine arts--are all of them strong stimulants, and that men are attracted to them by the stimulus they give. But these occupations are morally much nearer to the common level of other occupations than you suppose. There is no doubt a certain intoxication in poetry and painting; but I have seen a tradesman find a fully equivalent intoxication in an addition of figures showing a delightful balance at his banker's. I have seen a young poet intoxicated with the love of poetry; but I have also seen a young mechanical genius on whom the sight of a locomotive acted exactly like a bottle of champagne.

Everything that is capable of exciting or moving man, everything that fires him with enthusiasm, everything that sustains his energies above the dead level of merely animal existence, may be compared, and not very untruly, to the action of generous wine. The two most powerful mental stimulants--since they overcome even the fear of death--are unquestionably religion and patriotism: ardent states of feeling both of them when they are genuine; yet this ardor has a great utility. It enables men to bear much, to perform much which would be beyond their natural force if it were not sustained by powerful mental stimulants.

And so it is in the intellectual life. It is because its labors are so severe that its pleasures are so glorious. The Creator of intellectual man set him the most arduous tasks--tasks that required the utmost possible patience, courage, self-discipline, and which at the same time were for the most part, from their very nature, likely to receive only the most meagre and precarious pecuniary reward. Therefore, in order that so poor and weak a creature might execute its gigantic works with the energy necessary to their permanence, the labor itself was made intensely attractive and interesting to the few who were fitted for it by their const.i.tution. Since their courage could not be maintained by any of the common motives which carry men through ordinary drudgery--since neither wealth nor worldly position was in their prospects, the drudgery they had to go through was to be rewarded by the triumphs of scientific discovery, by the felicities of artistic expression. A divine drunkenness was given to them for their encouragement, surpa.s.sing the gift of the grape.

But now that I have acknowledged, not ungratefully, the necessity of that n.o.ble excitement which is the life of life, it is time for me to add that, in the daily labor of all intellectual workers, much has to be done which requires a robustness of the moral const.i.tution beyond what you appear to be aware of. It is not long since the present Bishop of Exeter truly affirmed, in an address to a body of students, that if there were not weariness in work, that work was not so thorough-going as it ought to be. "Of all work," the Bishop said, "that produces results, nine-tenths must be drudgery. There is no work, from the highest to the lowest, which can be done well by any man who is unwilling to make that sacrifice. Part of the very n.o.bility of the devotion of the true workman to his work consists in the fact that a man is not daunted by finding that drudgery must be done; and no man can really succeed in any walk of life without a good deal of what in ordinary English is called pluck.

That is the condition of all work whatever, and it is the condition of all success. And there is nothing which so truly repays itself as this very perseverance against weariness."

You understand, no doubt, that there is drudgery in the work of a lawyer or an accountant, but you imagine that there is no drudgery in that of an artist, or author, or man of science. In these cases you fancy that there is nothing but a pleasant intoxication, like the puffing of tobacco or the sipping of claret after dinner. The Bishop sees more accurately. He knows that "of _all_ work that produces results nine-tenths must be drudgery." He makes no exceptions in favor of the arts and sciences; if he had made any such exceptions, they would have proved the absence of culture in himself. Real work of all descriptions, even including the composition of poetry (the most intoxicating of all human pursuits), contains drudgery in so large a proportion that considerable moral courage is necessary to carry it to a successful issue. Some of the most popular writers of verse have dreaded the labor of composition. Wordsworth shrank from it much more sensitively than he did from his prosaic labors as a distributor of stamps. He had that _horreur de la plume_ which is a frequent malady amongst literary men.

But we feel, in reading Wordsworth, that composition was a serious toil to him--the drudgery is often visible. Let me take, then, the case of a writer of verse distinguished especially for fluency and ease--the lightest, gayest, apparently most thoughtless of modern minstrels--the author of "The Irish Melodies" and "Lalla Rookh." Moore said--I quote from memory and may not give the precise words, but they were to this effect--that although the first shadowy imagining of a new poem was a delicious fool's paradise, the labor of actual composition was something altogether different. He did not, I believe, exactly use the word "drudgery," but his expression implied that there was painful drudgery in the work. When he began to write "Lalla Rookh" the task was anything but easy to him. He said that he was "at all times a far more slow and painstaking workman than would ever be guessed from the result." For a long time after the conclusion of the agreement with Messrs. Longman, "though generally at work with a view to this task, he made but very little real progress in it." After many unsatisfactory attempts, finding that his subjects were so slow in kindling his own sympathies, he began to despair of their ever touching the hearts of others. "Had this series of disheartening experiments been carried on much further, I must have thrown aside the work in despair." He took the greatest pains in long and laboriously preparing himself by reading. "To form a storehouse, as it were, of ill.u.s.trations purely Oriental, and so familiarize myself with its various treasures that, quick as Fancy required the aid of fact in her spiritings, the memory was ready to furnish materials for the spell-work; such was, for a long while, the sole object of my studies." After quoting some opinions favorable to the truth of his Oriental coloring, he says: "Whatever of vanity there may be in citing such tributes, they show, at least, of what great value, even in poetry, is that prosaic quality, industry, since it was in a slow and laborious collection of small facts that the first foundations of this fanciful romance were laid."

Other fine arts make equally large claims upon the industry of their professors. We see the charming result, which looks as if it were nothing but pleasure--the mere sensuous gratification of an appet.i.te for melody or color; but no one ever eminently succeeded in music or painting without patient submission to a discipline far from attractive or entertaining. An idea was very prevalent amongst the upper cla.s.ses in England, between twenty and thirty years ago, that art was not a serious pursuit, and that Frenchmen were too frivolous to apply themselves seriously to anything. When, however, the different schools of art in Europe came to be exhibited together, the truth began to dawn upon people's minds that the French and Belgian schools of painting had a certain superiority over the rest--a superiority of quite a peculiar sort; and when the critics applied themselves to discover the hidden causes of this generally perceived superiority, they found out that it was due in great measure to the patient drudgery submitted to by those foreign artists in their youth. English painters who have attained distinction have gone through a like drudgery, if not in the public _atelier_ at least in secrecy and solitude. Mr. John Lewis, in reply to an application for a drawing to be reproduced by the autotype process, and published in the _Portfolio_, said that his sketches and studies were all in color, but if we liked to examine them we were welcome to select anything that might be successfully photographed. Not being in London at the time, I charged an experienced friend to go and see if there were anything that would answer our purpose. Soon afterward he wrote: "I have just been to see John Lewis, and have come away _astounded_." He had seen the vast foundations of private industry on which the artist's public work had been erected,--innumerable studies in color, wrought with the most perfect care and finish, and all for self-education merely, not for any direct reward in fame. We have all admired the extraordinary power of representation in the little pictures of Meissonier; that power was acquired by painting studies _life-size_ for self-instruction, and the artist has sustained his knowledge by persistence in that practice. Mulready, between the conception of a new picture and the execution of it, used to give himself a special training for the intended work by painting a study in color of every separate thing that was to form part of the composition. It is useless to go on multiplying these examples, since all great artists, without exception, have been distinguished for their firm faith in steady well-directed labor. This faith was so strong in Reynolds that it limited his reasoning powers, and prevented him from a.s.signing their due importance to the inborn natural gifts.

Not only in their preparations for work, but even in the work itself, do artists undergo drudgery. It is the peculiarity of their work that, more than any other human work, it displays whatever there may be in it of pleasure and felicity, putting the drudgery as much out of sight as possible; but all who know the secrets of the studio are aware of the ceaseless struggles against technical difficulty which are the price of the charms that pleasantly deceive us. The amateur tries to paint in water-color, and finds that the gradation of his sky will not come right; instead of being a sound gradation like that of the heavenly blue, it is all in spots and patches. Then he goes to some clever artist who seems to get the right thing with enviable ease. "Is my paper good?

have my colors been properly ground?" The materials are sound enough, but the artist confesses one of the discouraging little secrets of his craft. "The fact is," he says, "those spots that you complain of happen to all of us, and very troublesome they are, especially in dark tints; the only way is to remove them as patiently as we can, and it sometimes takes several days. If one or two of them remain in spite of us, we turn them into birds." In etching, the most famous pract.i.tioners get into messes with the treacherous chemistry of their acids, and need an invincible patience. Even Meryon was always very anxious when the time came for confiding his work to what he called the _traitresse liqueur_; and whenever I give a commission to an etcher, I am always expecting some such despatch as the following: "Plate utterly ruined in the biting. Very sorry. Will begin another immediately." We know what a dreadful series of mishaps attended our fresco-painters at Westminster, and now even the promising water-gla.s.s process, in which Maclise trusted, shows the bloom of premature decay. The safest and best known of modern processes, simple oil-painting has its own dangers also. The colors sink and alter; they lose their relative values; they lose their pearly purity, their glowing transparence--they turn to buff and black.

The fine arts bristle all over with technical difficulties, and are, I will not say the best school of patience in the world, for many other pursuits are also very good schools of patience; but I will say, without much fear of contradiction from anybody acquainted with the subject, that the fine arts offer drudgery enough, and disappointment enough, to be a training both in patience and in humility.

In the labor of the line-engraver both these qualities are developed to the pitch of perfect heroism. He sits down to a great surface of steel or copper, and day by day, week after week, month after month, ploughs slowly his marvellous lines. Sometimes the picture before him is an agreeable companion; he is in sympathy with the painter; he enjoys every touch that he has to translate. But sometimes, on the contrary, he hates the picture, and engraves it as a professional duty. I happened to call upon a distinguished English engraver--a man of the greatest taste and knowledge, a refined and cultivated critic--and I found him seated at work before a thing which had nothing to do with fine art--a medley of ugly portraits of temperance celebrities on a platform. "Ah!" he said to me sadly, "you see the dark side of our profession; fancy sitting down to a desk all day long for two years together with that thing to occupy your thoughts!" How much moral fibre was needed to carry to a successful issue so repulsive a task as that! You may answer that a stone-breaker on the roadside surpa.s.ses my line-engraver both in patience and in humility; but whereas the sensitiveness of the stone-breaker has been deadened by his mode of life, the sensitiveness of the engraver has been continually fostered and increased. An ugly picture was torture to his cultivated eye, and he had to bear the torture all day long, like the pain of an irritating disease.

Still even the line-engraver has secret sources of entertainment to relieve the mortal tedium of his task-work. The picture may be hideous, but the engraver has hidden consolations in the exercise of his wonderful art. He can at least entertain himself with feats of interpretative skill, with the gentle treacheries of improving here and there upon the hatefulness of the intolerable original. He may congratulate himself in the evening, that one more frightful hat or coat has been got rid of; that the tiresome task has been reduced by a s.p.a.ce measurable in eights of an inch. The heaviest work which shows progress is not without _one_ element of cheerfulness.

There is a great deal of intellectual labor, undergone simply for discipline, which shows no present result that is appreciable, and which therefore requires, in addition to patience and humility, one of the n.o.blest of the moral virtues, faith. Of all the toils in which men engage, none are n.o.bler in their origin or their aim than those by which they endeavor to become more wise. Pray observe that whenever the desire for greater wisdom is earnest enough to sustain men in these high endeavors, there must be both humility and faith--the humility which acknowledges present insufficiency, the faith that relies upon the mysterious laws which govern our intellectual being. Be sure that there has been great moral strength in all who have come to intellectual greatness. During some brief moments of insight the mist has rolled away and they have beheld, like a celestial city, the home of their highest aspirations; but the cloud has gathered round them again, and still in the gloom they have gone steadily forwards, stumbling often, yet maintaining their unconquerable resolution. It is to this sublime persistence of the intellectual in other ages that the world owes the treasures which they won; it is by a like persistence that we may hope to hand them down, augmented, to the future. Their intellectual purposes did not weaken their moral nature, but exercised and exalted it. All that was best and highest in the imperfect moral nature of Giordano Bruno had its source in that n.o.ble pa.s.sion for Philosophy, which made him declare that for her sake it was easy to endure labor and pain and exile, since he had found "in brevi labore diuturnam requiem, in levi dolore immensum gaudium, in angusto exilio patriam amplissimam."

LETTER II.

TO AN UNDISCIPLINED WRITER.

Early indocility of great workers--External discipline only a subst.i.tute for inward discipline--Necessity for inward discipline--Origin of the idea of discipline--Authors peculiarly liable to overlook its uses--Good examples--Sir Arthur Helps--Sainte-Beuve--The central authority in the mind--Locke's opinion--Even the creative faculty may be commanded--Charles Baudelaire--Discipline in common trades and professions--Lawyers and surgeons--Haller--Mental refusals not to be altogether disregarded--The idea of discipline the moral basis of the intellectual life--Alexander Humboldt.

Sir Arthur Helps, in that wise book of his "Thoughts upon Government,"

says that "much of the best and greatest work in the world has been done by those who were anything but docile in their youth." He believes that "this bold statement applies not only to the greatest men in Science, Literature, and Art, but also to the greatest men in official life, in diplomacy, and in the general business of the world."

Many of us who were remarkable for our indocility in boyhood, and remarkable for nothing else, have found much consolation in this pa.s.sage. It is most agreeable to be told, by a writer very eminent both for wisdom and for culture, that our untowardness was a hopeful sign.

Another popular modern writer has also encouraged us by giving a long list of dunces who have become ill.u.s.trious.

Yet, however flattering it may be to find ourselves in such excellent company, at least so far as the earlier half of life may be concerned, we cannot quite forget the very numerous instances of distinguished persons who began by submitting to the discipline of school and college, and gained honors and reputation there, before encountering the compet.i.tion of the world.

The external discipline applied by schoolmasters is a subst.i.tute for that inward discipline which we all so greatly need, and which is absolutely indispensable to culture. Whether a boy happens to be a dunce at school or a youth of brilliant promise, his future intellectual career will depend very much on his moral force. The distinguished men who derived so little benefit from early discipline have invariably subjected themselves to a discipline of another kind which prepared them for the labor of their manhood. It may be a pure a.s.sumption to say this, but the a.s.sumption is confirmed by every instance that is known to me.

Many eminent men have undergone the discipline of business, many like Franklin have been self-disciplined, but I have never heard of a person who had risen to intellectual eminence without voluntary submission to an intellectual discipline of some kind.

There are, no doubt, great pleasures attached to the intellectual life, and quite peculiar to it; but these pleasures are the support of discipline and not its negation. They give us the cheerfulness necessary for our work, but they do not excuse us from the work. They are like the cup of coffee served to a soldier on duty, not like the opium which incapacitates for everything but dreaming.

I have been led into these observations by a perusal of the new book which you sent me. It has many qualities which in a young writer are full of promise. It is earnest, and lively, and exuberant, but at the same time it is undisciplined.

Now I believe it may be affirmed, that although there has been much literature in former ages which was both vigorous and undisciplined, still when an age presents, as ours does, living examples of perfect intellectual discipline, whoever falls below them in this respect contents himself with the very kind of inferiority which of all inferiorities is the easiest to avoid. You cannot, by an effort of the will, hope to rival the brilliance of a genius, but you may quite reasonably expect to obtain as complete a control over your own faculties and your own work as any other highly-cultivated person.

The origin of discipline is the desire to do not merely our best with the degree of power and knowledge which at the time we do actually happen to possess, but with that which we _might_ possess if we submitted to the necessary training. The powers given to us by Nature are little more than a power to become, and this becoming is always conditional on some sort of exercise--what sort we have to discover for ourselves.

No cla.s.s of persons are so liable to overlook the uses of discipline as authors are. Anybody can write a book, though few can write that which deserves the name of literature. There are great technical differences between literature and book-making, but few can clearly explain these differences, or detect, in their own case, the absence of the necessary qualities. In painting, the most perfect finish is recognized at a glance, but the mind only can perceive it in the book. It was an odd notion of the authorities to exhibit literature in the international exhibitions; but if they could have made people see the difference between sound and unsound workmans.h.i.+p in the literary craft, they would have rendered a great service to the higher intellectual discipline. Sir Arthur Helps might have served as an example to English writers, because he has certain qualities in which we are grievously deficient. He can say a thing in the words that are most fit and necessary, and then leave it. Sainte-Beuve would have been another admirable example of self-discipline, especially to Frenchmen, who would do well to imitate him in his horror of the _a peu pres_. He never began to write about anything until he had cleared the ground well before him. He never spoke about any character or doctrine that he had not bottomed (to use Locke's word) as far as he was able. He had an extraordinary apt.i.tude for collecting exactly the sort of material that he needed, for arranging and cla.s.sifying material, for perceiving its mutual relations. Very few Frenchmen have had Sainte-Beuve's intense repugnance to insufficiency of information and inaccuracy of language. Few indeed are the French journalists of whom it might be said, as it may be truly said of Sainte-Beuve, that he never wrote even an article for a newspaper without having subjected his mind to a special training for that particular article. The preparations for one of his _Lundis_ were the serious occupation of several laborious days; and before beginning the actual composition, his mind had been disciplined into a state of the most complete readiness, like the fingers of a musician who has been practising a piece before he executes it.

The object of intellectual discipline is the establishment of a strong central authority in the mind by which all its powers are regulated and directed as the military forces of a nation are directed by the strategist who arranges the operations of a war. The presence of this strong central authority is made manifest in the unity and proportion of the results; when this authority is absent (it is frequently entirely absent from the minds of undisciplined persons, especially of the female s.e.x), you have a chaos of complete confusion; when the authority without being absent is not strong enough to regulate the lively activity of the intellectual forces, you have too much energy in one direction, too little in another, a brigade where a regiment could have done the work, and light artillery where you want guns of the heaviest calibre.

To establish this central authority it is only necessary, in any vigorous and sound mind, to exercise it. Without such a central power there is neither liberty of action nor security of possession. "The mind," says Locke, "should always be free and ready to turn itself to the variety of objects that occur, and allow them as much consideration as shall, for that time, be thought fit. To be engrossed so by one subject as not to be prevailed on to leave it for another that we judge fitter for our contemplation, is to make it of no use to us. Did this state of mind always remain so, every one would, without scruple, give it the name of perfect madness; and whilst it does last, at whatever intervals it returns, such a rotation of thoughts about the same object no more carries us forward toward the attainment of knowledge, than getting upon a mill-horse whilst he jogs on his circular track, would carry a man on a journey."

Writers of imaginative literature have found in practice that even the creative faculty might be commanded. Charles Baudelaire, who had the poetical organization with all its worst inconveniencies, said nevertheless that "inspiration is decidedly the sister of daily labor.

These two contraries do not exclude each other more than all the other contraries which const.i.tute nature. Inspiration obeys like hunger, like digestion, like sleep. There is, no doubt, in the mind a sort of celestial mechanism, of which we need not be ashamed, but we ought to make the best use of it. If we will only live in a resolute contemplation of next day's work, the daily labor will serve inspiration." In cases where discipline is felt to be very difficult, it is generally at the same time felt to be very desirable. George Sand complains that although "to overcome the indiscipline of her brain, she had imposed upon herself a regular way of living, and a daily labor, still twenty times out of thirty she catches herself reading or dreaming, or writing something entirely apart from the work in hand."

She adds that without this frequent intellectual _flanerie_, she would have acquired information which has been her perpetual but unrealized desire.

It is the triumph of discipline to overcome both small and great repugnances. We bring ourselves, by its help, to face petty details that are wearisome, and heavy tasks that are almost appalling. Nothing shows the power of discipline more than the application of the mind in the common trades and professions to subjects which have hardly any interest in themselves. Lawyers are especially admirable for this. They acquire the faculty of resolutely applying their minds to the dryest doc.u.ments, with tenacity enough to end in the perfect mastery of their contents; a feat which is utterly beyond the capacity of any undisciplined intellect, however gifted by Nature. In the case of lawyers there are frequent intellectual repugnances to be overcome; but surgeons and other men of science have to vanquish a cla.s.s of repugnances even less within the power of the will--the instinctive physical repugnances. These are often so strong as to seem apparently insurmountable, but they yield to persevering discipline. Although Haller surpa.s.sed his contemporaries in anatomy, and published several important anatomical works, he was troubled at the outset with a horror of dissection beyond what is usual with the inexperienced, and it was only by firm self-discipline that he became an anatomist at all.

There is, however, one reserve to be made about discipline, which is this: We ought not to disregard altogether the mind's preferences and refusals, because in most cases they are the indication of our natural powers. They are not so always; many have felt attracted to pursuits for which they had no capacity (this happens continually in literature and the fine arts), whilst others have greatly distinguished themselves in careers which were not of their own choosing, and for which they felt no vocation in their youth. Still there exists a certain relation between preference and capacity, which may often safely be relied upon when there are not extrinsic circ.u.mstances to attract men or repel them.