The Intellectual Life Part 6

As we grow older this facility of acquisition gradually leaves us. M.

Philarete Chasles says that it is quite impossible for any adult to learn German: an adult may learn German as Dr. Arnold did for purposes of erudition, for which it is enough to know a language as we know Latin, but this is not mastery. You have met with many foreign residents in England, who after staying in the country for many years can barely make themselves intelligible, and must certainly be incapable of appreciating those beauties of our literature which are dependent upon arrangements of sound. The resisting power of the adult brain is quite as remarkable as the a.s.similating power of the immature brain. A child hears a sound, and repeats it with perfect accuracy; a man hears a sound, and by way of imitation utters something altogether different, being nevertheless persuaded that it is at least a close and satisfactory approximation. Children imitate well, but adults badly, and the acquisition of languages depends mainly on imitation. The resisting power of adults is often seen very remarkably in international marriages. In those cla.s.ses of society where there is not much culture, or leisure or disposition for culture, the one will not learn the other's language from opportunity or from affection, but only under absolute necessity. It seems as if two people living always together would gain each other's languages as a matter of course, but the fact is that they do not. French people who marry foreigners do not usually acquire the foreign language if the pair remain in France; English people under similar conditions make the attempt more frequently, but they rest contented with imperfect attainment.

If the power of resistance is so great in people who being wedded together for life have peculiarly strong inducements for learning each other's languages, it need surprise us little to find a like power of resistance in cases where motives of affection are altogether absent.

Englishmen who go to France as adults, and settle there, frequently remain for many years in a state of half-knowledge which, though it may carry them through the little difficulties of life at railway stations and restaurants, is for any intellectual purpose of no conceivable utility. I knew a retired English officer, a bachelor, who for many years had lived in Paris without any intention of returning to England.

His French just barely carried him through the small transactions of his daily life, but was so limited and so incorrect that he could not maintain a conversation. His vocabulary was very meagre; his genders were all wrong, and he did not know one single verb, literally not one.

His p.r.o.nunciation was so foreign as to be very nearly unintelligible, and he hesitated so much that it was painful to have to listen to him. I could mention a celebrated German, who has lived in or near Paris for the last twenty years, and who can neither speak nor write the language with any approach to accuracy. Another German, who settled in France as a master of languages, wrote French tolerably, but spoke it _in_tolerably. There are Germans in London, who have lived there long enough to have families and make fortunes, yet who continue to repeat the ordinary German faults of p.r.o.nunciation, the same faults which they committed years ago, when first they landed on our sh.o.r.es.

The child hears and repeats the true sound, the adult misleads himself by the spelling. Seldom indeed can the adult recover the innocence of the ear. It is like the innocence of the eye, which has to be recovered before we can paint from nature, and which belongs only to infancy and to art.

Let me observe, in conclusion, that although to know a foreign language perfectly is a most valuable aid to the intellectual life, I have never known an instance of very imperfect attainment which seemed to enrich the student intellectually. Until you can really feel the refinements of a language, your mental culture can get little help or furtherance from it of any kind, nothing but an interminable series of misunderstandings.

I think that in the education of our boys too many languages are attempted, and that their minds would profit more by the perfect acquisition of a single language in addition to the native tongue. This, of course, is looking at the matter simply from the intellectual point of view. There may be practical reasons for knowing several languages imperfectly. It may be of use to many men in commercial situations to know a little of several languages, even a few words and phrases are valuable to a traveller, but all intellectual labor of the higher kind requires much more than that. It is of use to society that there should be polyglot waiters who can tell us when the train starts in four or five languages; but the polyglot waiters themselves are not intellectually advanced by their accomplishment; for, after all, the facts of the railway time-table are always the same small facts, in however many languages they may be announced. True culture ought to strengthen the faculty of thinking, and to provide the material upon which that n.o.ble faculty may operate. An accomplishment which does neither of these two things for us is useless for our culture, though it may be of considerable practical convenience in the affairs of ordinary life. It is right to add, however, that there is sometimes an _indirect_ intellectual benefit from such accomplishments. To be able to order dinner in Spanish is not in itself an intellectual advantage; but if the dinner, when you have eaten it, enables you to visit a cathedral whose architecture you are qualified to appreciate, there is a clear intellectual gain, though an indirect one.

LETTER X.

TO A STUDENT WHO LAMENTED HIS DEFECTIVE MEMORY.

The author rather inclined to congratulation than to condolence--Value of a selecting memory--Studies of the young Goethe--His great faculty of a.s.similation--A good literary memory like a well-edited periodical--The selecting memory in art--Treacherous memories--Cures suggested for them--The mnemotechnic art contrary to the true discipline of the mind--Two instances--The memory safely aided only by right a.s.sociation.

So far from writing, as you seem to expect me to do, a letter of condolence on the subject of what you are pleased to call your "miserable memory," I feel disposed rather to indite a letter of congratulation. It is possible that you may be blessed with a selecting memory, which is not only useful for what it retains but for what it rejects. In the immense ma.s.s of facts which come before you in literature and in life, it is well that you should suffer from as little bewilderment as possible. The nature of your memory saves you from this by unconsciously selecting what has interested you, and letting the rest go by. What interests you is what concerns you.

In saying this I speak simply from the intellectual point of view, and suppose you to be an intellectual man by the natural organization of your brain, to begin with. In saying that what interests you is what concerns you, I mean intellectually, not materially. It may concern you, in the pecuniary sense, to take an interest in the law; yet your mind, left to itself, would take little or no interest in law, but an absorbing interest in botany. The pa.s.sionate studies of the young Goethe, in many different directions, always in obedience to the predominant interests of the moment, are the best example of the way in which a great intellect, with remarkable powers of acquisition and liberty to grow in free luxuriance, sends its roots into various soils and draws from them the const.i.tuents of its sap. As a student of law, as a university student even, he was not of the type which parents and professors consider satisfactory. He neglected jurisprudence, he neglected even his college studies, but took an interest in so many other pursuits that his mind became rich indeed. Yet the wealth which his mind acquired seems to have been due to that liberty of ranging by which it was permitted to him to seek his own everywhere, according to the maxim of French law, _chacun prend son bien ou il le trouve_. Had he been a poor student, bound down to the exclusively legal studies, which did not greatly interest him, it is likely that no one would ever have suspected his immense faculty of a.s.similation. In this way men who are set by others to load their memories with what is not their proper intellectual food, never get the credit of having any memory at all, and end by themselves believing that they have none. These bad memories are often the best, they are often the selecting memories. They seldom win distinction in examinations, but in literature and art. They are quite incomparably superior to the miscellaneous memories that receive only as boxes and drawers receive what is put into them. A good literary or artistic memory is not like a post-office that takes in everything, but like a very well-edited periodical which prints nothing that does not harmonize with its intellectual life. A well-known author gave me this piece of advice: "Take as many notes as you like, but when you write do not look at them--what you remember is what you must write, and you ought to give things exactly the degree of relative importance that they have in your memory. If you forget much, it is well, it will only save beforehand the labor of erasure." This advice would not be suitable to every author; an author who dealt much in minute facts ought to be allowed to refer to his memoranda; but from the artistic point of view in literature the advice was wise indeed. In painting, our preferences select whilst we are in the presence of nature, and our memory selects when we are away from nature. The most beautiful compositions are produced by the selecting office of the memory, which retains some features, and even greatly exaggerates them, whilst it diminishes others and often altogether omits them. An artist who blamed himself for these exaggerations and omissions would blame himself for being an artist.

Let me add a protest against the common methods of curing what are called treacherous memories. They are generally founded upon the a.s.sociation of ideas, which is so far rational, but then the sort of a.s.sociation which they have recourse to is unnatural, and produces precisely the sort of disorder which would be produced in dress if a man were insane enough to tie, let us say, a frying-pan to one of his coat-tails and a child's kite to the other. The true discipline of the mind is to be effected only by a.s.sociating those things together which have a real relation of some kind, and the profounder the relation, the more it is based upon the natural const.i.tution of things, and the less it concerns trifling external details, the better will be the order of the intellect. The mnemotechnic art wholly disregards this, and is therefore unsuited for intellectual persons, though it may be of some practical use in ordinary life. A little book on memory, of which many editions have been sold, suggests to men who forget their umbrellas that they ought always to a.s.sociate the image of an umbrella with that of an open door, so that they could never leave any house without thinking of one. But would it not be preferable to lose two or three guineas annually rather than see a spectral umbrella in every doorway? The same writer suggests an idea which appears even more objectionable. Because we are apt to lose time, we ought, he says, to imagine a skeleton clock-face on the visage of every man we talk with; that is to say, we ought systematically to set about producing in our brains an absurd a.s.sociation of ideas, which is quite closely allied to one of the most common forms of insanity. It is better to forget umbrellas and lose hours than fill our minds with a.s.sociations of a kind which every disciplined intellect does all it can to get rid of. The rational art of memory is that used in natural science. We remember anatomy and botany because, although the facts they teach are infinitely numerous, they are arranged according to the constructive order of nature. Unless there were a clear relation between the anatomy of one animal and that of others, the memory would refuse to burden itself with the details of their structure. So in the study of languages we learn several languages by perceiving their true structural relations, and remembering these.

a.s.sociation of this kind, and the maintenance of order in the mind, are the only arts of memory compatible with the right government of the intellect. Incongruous, and even superficial a.s.sociations ought to be systematically discouraged, and we ought to value the negative or rejecting power of the memory. The finest intellects are as remarkable for the ease with which they resist and throw off what does not concern them as for the permanence with which their own truths engrave themselves. They are like clear gla.s.s, which fluoric acid etches indelibly, but which comes out of vitriol intact.

LETTER XI.

TO A MASTER OF ARTS WHO SAID THAT A CERTAIN DISTINGUISHED PAINTER WAS HALF-EDUCATED.

Conventional idea about the completeness of education--The estimate of a schoolmaster--No one can be fully educated--Even Leonardo da Vinci fell short of the complete expression of his faculties--The word "education" used in two different senses--The acquisition of knowledge--Who are the learned?--Quotation from Sydney Smith--What a "half-educated" painter had learned--What faculties he had developed.

An intelligent lady was lamenting to me the other day that when she heard anything she did not quite agree with, it only set her thinking, and did not suggest any immediate reply. "Three hours afterwards," she added, "I arrive at the answer which ought to have been given, but then it is exactly three hours too late."

Being afflicted with precisely the same pitiable infirmity, I said nothing in reply to a statement you made yesterday evening at dinner, but it occupied me in the hansom as it rolled between the monotonous lines of houses, and followed me even into my bed-room. I should like to answer it this morning, as one answers a letter.

You said that our friend the painter was "half-educated." This made me try to understand what it is to be three-quarters educated, and seven-eighths educated, and finally what must be that quite perfect state of the man who is whole-educated.

I fear that you must have adopted some conventional idea about completeness of education, since you believe that there is any such thing as completeness, and that education can be measured by fractions, like the divisions of a two-foot rule.

Is not such an idea just a little arbitrary? It seems to be the idea of a schoolmaster, with his little list of subjects and his professional habit of estimating the progress of his boys by the good marks they are likely to obtain from their examiners. The half-educated schoolboy would be a schoolboy half-way towards his bachelor's degree--is that it?

In the estimates of school and college this may be so, and it may be well to keep up the illusion, during boyhood, that there is such a thing attainable as the complete education that you a.s.sume. But the wider experience of manhood tends rather to convince us that no one can be fully educated, and that the more rich and various the natural talents, the greater will be the difficulty of educating the whole of them.

Indeed it does not appear that in a state of society so advanced in the different specialities as ours is, men were ever intended to do more than develop by education a few of their natural gifts. The only man who came near to a complete education was Leonardo da Vinci, but such a personage would be impossible to-day. No contemporary Leonardo could be at the same time a leader in fine art, a great military and civil engineer, and a discoverer in theoretical science; the specialists have gone too far for him. Born in our day, Leonardo would have been either a specialist or an amateur. Situated even as he was, in a time and country so remarkably favorable to the general development of a variously gifted man, he still fell short of the complete expansion of all his extraordinary faculties. He was a great artist, and yet his artistic power was never developed beyond the point of elaborately careful labor; he never attained the a.s.sured manipulation of t.i.tian and Paul Veronese, not to mention the free facility of Velasquez, or the splendid audacity of Rubens. His natural gifts were grand enough to have taken him to a pitch of mastery that he never reached, but his mechanical and scientific tendencies would have their development also, and withdrew so much time from art that every renewal of his artistic labor was accompanied by long and anxious reflection.

The word "education" is used in senses so different that confusion is not always avoided. Some people mean by it the acquisition of knowledge, others the development of faculty. If you mean the first, then the half-educated man would be a man who knew half what he ought to know, or who only half knew the different sciences, which the wholly educated know thoroughly. Who is to fix the subjects? Is it the opinion of the learned?--if so, who are the learned? "A learned man!--a scholar!--a man of erudition! Upon whom are these epithets of approbation bestowed? Are they given to men acquainted with the science of government? thoroughly masters of the geographical and commercial relations of Europe? to men who know the properties of bodies, and their action upon each other? No: this is not learning; it is chemistry, or political economy, not learning. The distinguis.h.i.+ng abstract term, the epithet of Scholar, is reserved for him who writes on the aeolic reduplication, and is familiar with the Sylburgian method of arranging defectives in [Greek: o] and [Greek: mi]. The picture which a young Englishman, addicted to the pursuit of knowledge, draws--his _beau ideal_ of human nature--his top and consummation of man's powers--is a knowledge of the Greek language.

His object is not to reason, to imagine, or to invent; but to conjugate, decline, and derive. The situations of imaginary glory which he draws for himself, are the detection of an anapaest in the wrong place, or the restoration of a dative case which Cranzius had pa.s.sed over, and the never-dying Ernesti failed to observe."

By the help of the above pa.s.sage from an article written sixty-three years ago by Sydney Smith, and by the help of another pa.s.sage in the same paper where he tells us that the English clergy bring up the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar schools in little country towns, I begin to understand what you mean by a half-educated person. You mean a person who is only half qualified for keeping a grammar school. In this sense it is very possible that our friend the painter possesses nothing beyond a miserable fraction of education. And yet he has picked up a good deal of valuable knowledge outside the technical acquirement of a most difficult profession. He studied two years in Paris, and four years in Florence and Rome. He speaks French and Italian quite fluently, and with a fair degree of correctness. His knowledge of those two languages is incomparably more complete, in the sense of practical possession, than our fossilized knowledge of Latin, and he reads them almost as we read English, currently, and without translating. He has the heartiest enjoyment of good literature; there is evidence in his pictures of a most intelligent sympathy with the greatest inventive writers. Without having a scientific nature, he knows a good deal about anatomy. He has not read Greek poetry, but he has studied the old Greek mind in its architecture and sculpture. Nature has also endowed him with a just appreciation of music, and he knows the immortal masterpieces of the most ill.u.s.trious composers. All these things would not qualify him to teach a grammar school, and yet what Greek of the age of Pericles ever knew half so much?

This for the acquisition of knowledge; now for the development of faculty. In this respect he excels us as performing athletes excel the people in the streets. Consider the marvellous accuracy of his eye, the precision of his hand, the closeness of his observation, the vigor of his memory and invention! How clumsy and rude is the most learned pedant in comparison with the refinement of this delicate organization! Try to imagine what a disciplined creature he has become, how obedient are all his faculties to the commands of the central will! The brain conceives some image of beauty or wit, and immediately that clear conception is telegraphed to the well-trained fingers. Surely, if the results of education may be estimated from the evidences of skill, here are some of the most wonderful of such results.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] According to M. Taine. I have elsewhere expressed a doubt about polyglots.

PART IV.

THE POWER OF TIME.

LETTER I.

TO A MAN OF LEISURE WHO COMPLAINED OF WANT OF TIME.

Necessity for time-thrift in all cases--Serious men not much in danger from mere frivolity--Greater danger of losing time in our serious pursuits themselves--Time thrown away when we do not attain proficiency--Soundness of former scholars.h.i.+p a good example--Browning's Grammarian--Knowledge an organic whole--Soundness the possession of essential parts--Necessity of fixed limits in our projects of study--Limitation of purpose in the fine arts--In languages--Instance of M. Louis enault--In music--Time saved by following kindred pursuits--Order and proportion the true secrets of time-thrift--A waste of time to leave fortresses untaken in our rear.

You complain of want of time--you, with your boundless leisure!

It is true that the most absolute master of his own hours still needs thrift if he would turn them to account, and that too many _never_ learn this thrift, whilst others learn it late. Will you permit me to offer briefly a few observations on time-thrift which have been suggested to me by my own experience and by the experience of intellectual friends?

It may be accepted for certain, to begin with, that men who like yourself seriously care for culture, and make it, next to moral duty, the princ.i.p.al object of their lives, are but little exposed to waste time in downright frivolity of any kind. You may be perfectly idle at your own times, and perfectly frivolous even, whenever you have a mind to be frivolous, but then you will be clearly aware how the time is pa.s.sing, and you will throw it away knowingly, as the most careful of money-economists will throw away a few sovereigns in a confessedly foolish amus.e.m.e.nt, merely for the relief of a break in the habit of his life. To a man of your tastes and temper there is no danger of wasting too much time so long as the waste is intentional; but you are exposed to time-losses of a much more insidious character.

It is in our pursuits themselves that we throw away our most valuable time. Few intellectual men have the art of economizing the hours of study. The very necessity, which every one acknowledges, of giving vast portions of life to attain proficiency in anything makes us prodigal where we ought to be parsimonious, and careless where we have need of unceasing vigilance. The best time-savers are the love of soundness in all we learn or do, and a cheerful acceptance of inevitable limitations.

There is a certain point of proficiency at which an acquisition begins to be of use, and unless we have the time and resolution necessary to reach that point, our labor is as completely thrown away as that of a mechanic who began to make an engine but never finished it. Each of us has acquisitions which remain permanently unavailable from their unsoundness, a language or two that we can neither speak nor write, a science of which the elements have not been mastered, an art which we cannot practice with satisfaction either to others or to ourselves. Now the time spent on these unsound accomplishments has been in great measure wasted, not quite absolutely wasted, since the mere labor of trying to learn has been a discipline for the mind, but wasted so far as the accomplishments themselves are concerned. And even this mental discipline, on which so much stress is laid by those whose interest it is to encourage unsound accomplishment, might be obtained more perfectly if the subjects of study were less numerous and more thoroughly understood. Let us not therefore in the studies of our maturity repeat the error of our youth. Let us determine to have soundness, that is, accurately organized knowledge in the studies we continue to pursue, and let us resign ourselves to the necessity for abandoning those pursuits in which soundness is not to be hoped for.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned idea about scholars.h.i.+p in Latin and Greek, that it ought to be based upon thorough grammatical knowledge, is a good example, so far as it goes, of what soundness really is. That ideal of scholars.h.i.+p failed only because it fell short of soundness in other directions and was not conscious of its failure. But there existed, in the minds of the old scholars, a fine resolution to be accurate, and a determination to give however much labor might be necessary for the attainment of accuracy, in which there was much grandeur. Like Mr.

Browning's Grammarian, they said--

"Let me know all! Prate not of most or least Painful or easy!"

and so at least they came to know the ancient tongues grammatically, which few of us do in these days.

I should define each kind of knowledge as an organic whole and soundness as the complete possession of all the essential parts. For example, soundness in violin-playing consists in being able to play the notes in all the positions, in tune, and with a pure intonation, whatever may be the degree of rapidity indicated by the musical composer. Soundness in painting consists in being able to lay a patch of color having exactly the right shape and tint. Soundness in the use of language consists in being able to put the right word in the right place. In each of the sciences, there are certain elementary notions without which sound knowledge is not possible, but these elementary notions are more easily and rapidly acquired than the elaborate knowledge or confirmed skill necessary to the artist or the linguist. A man may be a sound botanist without knowing a very great number of plants, and the elements of sound botanical knowledge may be printed in a portable volume. And so it is with all the physical sciences; the elementary notions which are necessary to soundness of knowledge may be acquired rapidly and at any age. Hence it follows that all whose leisure for culture is limited, and who value soundness of knowledge, do wisely to pursue some branch of natural history rather than languages or the fine arts.

It is well for every one who desires to attain a perfect economy of time, to make a list of the different pursuits to which he has devoted himself, and to put a note opposite to each of them indicating the degree of its unsoundness with as little self-delusion as may be. After having done this, he may easily ascertain in how many of these pursuits a sufficient degree of soundness is attainable for him, and when this has been decided he may at once effect a great saving by the total renunciation of the rest. With regard to those which remain, and which are to be carried farther, the next thing to be settled is the exact limit of their cultivation. Nothing is so favorable to sound culture as the definite fixing of limits. Suppose, for example, that the student said to himself "I desire to know the flora of the valley I live in,"

and then set to work systematically to make a herbarium ill.u.s.trating that flora, it is probable that his labor would be more thorough, his temper more watchful and hopeful, than if he set himself to the boundless task of the illimitable flora of the world. Or in the pursuit of fine art, an amateur discouraged by the glaring unsoundness of the kind of art taught by ordinary drawing-masters, would find the basis of a more substantial superstructure on a narrower but firmer ground.

Suppose that instead of the usual messes of bad color and bad form, the student produced work having some definite and not unattainable purpose, would there not be, here also, an a.s.sured economy of time? Accurate drawing is the basis of soundness in the fine arts, and an amateur, by perseverance, may reach accuracy in drawing; this, at least, has been proved by some examples--not by many, certainly, but by some. In languages we may have a limited purpose also. That charming and most intelligent traveller, Louis enault, tells us that he regularly gave a week to the study of each new language that he needed, and found that week sufficient. The a.s.sertion is not so presumptuous as it appears. For the practical necessities of travelling M. enault found that he required about four hundred words, and that, having a good memory, he was able to learn about seventy words a day. The secret of his success was the invaluable art of selection, and the strict limitation of effort in accordance with a preconceived design. A traveller not so well skilled in selection might have learned a thousand words with less advantage to his travels, and a traveller less decided in purpose might have wasted several months on the frontier of every new country in hopeless efforts to master the intricacies of grammatical form. It is evident that in the strictest sense M. enault's knowledge of Norwegian cannot have been sound, since he did not master the grammar, but it was sound in its own strictly limited way, since he got possession of the four hundred words which were to serve him as current coin. On the same principle it is a good plan for students of Latin and Greek who have not time to reach true scholars.h.i.+p (half a lifetime is necessary for that), to propose to themselves simply the reading of the original authors with the help of a literal translation. In this way they may attain a closer acquaintance with ancient literature than would be possible by translation alone, whilst on the other hand their reading will be much more extensive on account of its greater rapidity. It is, for most of us, a waste of time to read Latin and Greek without a translation, on account of the comparative slowness of the process; but it is always an advantage to know what was really said in the original, and to test the exactness of the translator by continual reference to the _ipsissima verba_ of the author. When the knowledge of the ancient language is not sufficient even for this, it may still be of use for occasional comparison, even though the pa.s.sage has to be fought through _a coupes de dictionnaire_.

What most of us need in reference to the ancient languages is a frank resignation to a restriction of some kind. It is simply impossible for men occupied as most of us are in other pursuits to reach perfect scholars.h.i.+p in those languages, and if we reached it we should not have time to maintain it.

In modern languages it is not so easy to fix limits satisfactorily. You may resolve to read French or German without either writing or speaking them, and that would be an effectual limit, certainly. But in practice it is found difficult to keep within that boundary if ever you travel or have intercourse with foreigners. And when once you begin to speak, it is so humiliating to speak badly, that a lover of soundness in accomplishment will never rest perfectly satisfied until he speaks like a cultivated native, which n.o.body ever did except under peculiar family conditions.

In music the limits are found more easily. The amateur musician is frequently not inferior in feeling and taste to the more accomplished professional, and by selecting those compositions which require much feeling and taste for their interpretation, but not so much manual skill, he may reach a sufficient success. The art is to choose the very simplest music (provided of course that it is beautiful, which it frequently is), and to avoid all technical difficulties which are not really necessary to the expression of feeling. The amateur ought also to select the easiest instrument, an instrument in which the notes are made for him already, rather than one which compels him to fix the notes as he is playing. The violin tempts amateurs who have a deep feeling for music because it renders feeling as no other instrument can render it, but the difficulty of just intonation is almost insuperable unless the whole time is given to that one instrument. It is a fatal error to perform on several different instruments, and an amateur who has done so may find a desirable limitation in restricting himself to one.