Will Morrisey Reviews

Philip Gilbert Hamerton: The Intellectual Life.  Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877.

 

It isn’t always easy, Socrates might conclude. The Englishman Hamerton concurs, even as he “propose[s] to consider the possibilities of a satisfactory intellectual life under various conditions of ordinary human existence,” “favorable and unfavorable,” but none so dire as those prevailing in ancient Athens, much less Sparta.  Indeed, even “if a man were so placed and endowed in every way that all his work should be made as easy as the ignorant imagine it to be, that man would find in that very facility itself a condition most unfavorable”—a paradox to which he shall return.

Difficulties notwithstanding, “all who are born with considerable intellectual faculties are urged toward the intellectual life by irresistible instinct, as waterfowl are urged to an aquatic life.” Unlike a duck, whose “life is in perfect accordance with its instincts,” the human intellect is not. It is easily distracted, “hampered by vexatious impediments of the most various and complicated kinds.” That is, the very fact of human intelligence both endows and interferes with the life of the intellect. This requires more than instinct, more than intelligence or even knowledge; it requires virtue. “It is not erudition that makes the intellectual man, but a sort of virtue which delights in vigorous and beautiful thinking, just as moral virtue delights in vigorous and beautiful conduct,” intellectual life being “not so much an accomplishment but a state or condition of mind in which it seeks earnestly for the highest and purest truth,” an “aspiration” to come “a little nearer to the Supreme Intellect whose effulgence draws us whilst it dazzles.” The intellectual quest reveals “a little more, and yet a little more, of the eternal order of the Universe, establishing us so firmly in what is known, that we acquire an unshakable confidence in the laws which govern what is not, and never can be, known.”

Hamerton divides his book into twelve parts, each in the form of a letter, suggesting that the intimate character of advice concerning one’s way of life comports best with the most intimate literary genre. Each letter is to a real (if unidentified) person, although many of them were not sent. Beginning with “the physical basis” of the intellectual life, he moves through personal morality, education or intellectual discipline, the use of time, economics (“the influences of money”), civil society (“custom and tradition”), family (“women and marriage”), politics (“aristocracy and democracy”), with concluding letters on the need for and the dangers of solitude, the importance of “intellectual hygienics,” the lure of trades and professions, and, simply but in some ways comprehensively, “surroundings.”

The life of the mind first requires bodily health, as “all intellectual labor proceeds upon a physical basis”—a “close connection…exists between intellectual production and the state of the body and the brain”—and “the excessive exercise of the mental powers is injurious to bodily health.” Exercise stands as “the best tranquilizer of the nervous system which has yet to be discovered,” the best means of “avoiding the bad effects of an entirely sedentary life.” “Literary work act simply as a strong stimulant, “innocent” and even “decidedly beneficial” in “moderate quantities, but “act[ing] like poison on the nervous system” if overindulged. While the sedentary life inclines to bad digestion, the intellectual life requires plenty of food. Exercise answers the dilemma.

Hamerton holds up the example of Immanuel Kant, who became famous among his neighbors for his daily walks and other regular habits, enabling him to maintain his health throughout a long life. “What a happy man he was to possess that first of blessings, and what a sensible man to know the value of it,” having seen that he had in some ways earned his life rather than resting in “the mere consciousness of possessing one of the unearned gifts of nature.” Kant “walked alone, but ate in company” for “good physiological reasons”—walking, he could keep his own pace—and “good intellectual reasons also”—dining, conversation brings dialectic with it. Hamerton demurs only when he considers the “excessive regularity” of Kant’s habits—rising at exactly the same minute every day, to give one example. Only a man who always stays at home, rejecting the intellectual benefits of travel, only an unmarried man “without a disturbance that would have been intolerable to him,” could have pulled it off. “Few lives can be so minutely regulated without risk of future inconvenience. ” 

Kant viewed beer with horror, but Hamerton comes to the defense of “that honest northern drink.”. While wine is good, “the pure juice of the grape sustain[ing] the force and activity of the brain,” beer “gives rest and calm” to the nervous system; “no other drink can procure [that] so safely.” Admittedly, beer drinkers are said to be slow, “a little stupid,” with an ox-like placidity not quite favorable to any brilliant intellectual display,” “but there are times when this placidity is what the laboring brain most needs.” “After the agitations of too active thinking there is safety in a tankard of ale. The wine drinkers are agile, but they are excitable; the beer drinkers are heavy, but in their heaviness there is peace.” Man being a social and political animal, it must be said that beer has salutary social and political effects, as well. “In that clear golden drink which England has brewed for more than a thousand Octobers, and will brew for a thousand more, we may find perhaps some explanation of that absence of irritability which is the safeguard of the national character which makes it faithful in its affections, easy to govern, not easy to excite to violence.” The English are the sort of people likely to leave livers of the life of the intellect in peace. 

Whatever one’s choice of libation, “not the nectar of the gods themselves were worth the dash of a wave upon the beach, and the pure cool air of the morning.” The best thing is moderate, steady exercise, not sudden exertion. Walking, for example: “nothing in the habits of Wordsworth, that model of excellent habits, can be better as an example to men of letters than his love of pedestrian excursions.” Get outdoors. “The fatal flaw of the studious temper is, that in exercise itself it must find some intellectual charm, so that we quit our books in the library only to go and read the infinite book of nature.” That infinite book very much includes bad weather, and Hamerton commends “daily exposure to the health-giving inclemencies of the weather,” of which his native British Isles have never been ungenerous. Altogether, “the physical activity of men eminent in literature has added abundance to their material and energy to their style,” “the activity of scientific men has led them to innumerable discoveries,” “the more sensitive and contemplative study of the fine arts has been carried to a higher perfection by artists who painted action in which they had had their part or natural beauty which they had traveled far to see,” and “even philosophy itself owes much to mere physical courage and endurance,” as “much that in noblest in ancient thinking may be due to the hardy health of Socrates.”

While “young men are careless of longevity,” they shouldn’t be. “How precious are added years to the fullness of the intellectual life!” “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 increases 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.” Happy the “fortunate old men whose thoughts went deeper and deeper like a wall that runs out into the sea!”

Even as he celebrates vigorous good health, Hamerton warns that “the pets of Nature, who do not know what suffering is, and cannot realize it, have always a certain rawness, like foolish landsmen who laugh at the terrors of the ocean, because they have neither experience enough to know what those terrors are, nor brains enough to imagine them.” Absent the worst pain or prostration, illness may prove a portal “to regions of disinterested thought, where all personal anxieties are forgotten.” Mind and body do not “invariably fail together,” and “minds of great spiritual energy possess the wonderful faculty of indefinitely improving themselves whist the body steadily deteriorates.” The dying man of intellect may consider that “the mind of every intellectual human being is part and parcel of the great permanent mind of humanity; and even if its influence soon ceases to be traceable—if the spoken words are forgotten—if the written volume is not reprinted or even quoted, it has not worked in vain.”

Turning from the physical to the moral basis of intellectual life, Hamerton admits the claim of some moralists, that “intellectual living” gratifies “the love of pleasure.” But so does the moral life. “The two most powerful mental stimulants—since they overcome the fear of death—are unquestionably religion and patriotism.” These enable men “to bear much, to perform much which would be beyond their natural force if it were not sustained” by such stimulants. And so it is with the intellectual life. Because its labors are so severe, its pleasures are glorious. Those labors that require patience, courage, and self-discipline, all with “only the most meager and precarious pecuniary reward.” This is why “the Creator of intellectual man” has made the labor itself “intensely attractive and interesting to the few who were fitted for it by their constitution.” “A divine drunkenness was given to them for their encouragement, surpassing the gift of the grape.”

All work involves drudgery, which requires “moral courage” to face and to endure.  You can “be sure that there has been great moral strength in all who have come to intellectual greatness,” which of course is not to claim that all who have achieved intellectual greatness have been moral exemplars in every respect. “All great artists, without exception, have been distinguished for their firm faith in steady well-directed labor”; the fine arts are a ‘school of patience” and of humility,” a school Hamerton himself knew quite well. As for philosophy, Giordano Bruno’s “noble passion” for it enabled him “to endure labor and pain and exile.” The virtue at first most needed, “intellectual discipline,” finds its support in “the great pleasures of intellectual life,” “not its negation.” “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 discipline itself consists in the establishment of “a strong central authority in the mind” to regulate the mind’s powers; in establishing that power, in curbing the unintellectual passions, a soul can achieve “the most essential virtue” of the intellectual life, its culminating virtue, disinterestedness. All other virtues have been practiced by men “opposed to intellectual liberty,” as “the habits of advocacy…debar them from all elevated speculation.” “Every partisan” falls into that. Thus, a doctor will “never trust” his own judgment when he feels “the approaches of disease” and even the finest lawyer isn’t allowed to be the judge in his own case. The disinterested man will “not look upon an opponent as an enemy to be repelled, but as a torch-bearer to be welcomed for any light that he may bring.” By emphasizing the importance of disinterestedness rather than wisdom, the possession of the “light” itself, Hamerton exercises the caution inculcated by the virtue of humility he has already praised. 

Such disinterestedness may even inflect erotic longings of the less intellectual sort. “A most distinguished foreign writer, of the female sex”—he is almost surely thinking of Georges Sand—has “made a succession of domestic arrangements which, if generally imitated by others, would be subversive of any conceivable system of morality; and yet it is clear in this case that the temptation was chiefly, if not entirely, intellectual,” as “the successive companions of this remarkable woman were all of them men of exceptional intellectual power, and her motive for changing them was an unbridled intellectual curiosity,” along with the unbuttoned physical one. Hamerton soberly reiterates that such conduct, while understandable, would endanger “the well-being of a community,” destroying “the sense of security on which the idea of the family is founded.” One suspects so.

As to education, Hamerton compares it to cooking: it’s not quantity but proportion that counts. With their taste for the well-measured, aristocrats are the ones who best understand that “there is a sort of intellectual chemistry which is quite as marvelous as material chemistry, and a thousand times more difficult to observe.” One must therefore avoid too much exposure to writers who write copiously but with little measure (it is of course possible to do both). He had in mind a friend who wrote with “ease and charm,” and likely would have gone on doing so, had he not “determined to study Locke’s philosophical compositions.” As a result, “my friend’s style suddenly lost its grace”; “having been in too close communication with a writer who was not a literary artist, his own art had deteriorated in consequence.” In fairness to Locke, it must be said that he was a master of the style that suited his intention of deliberate obscurity in some controversial matters; his gracelessness has a grace of its own. The point is nonetheless well taken.

One should educate oneself rather like another Hamertonian acquaintance, an old-fashioned country gentleman who “accumulated his learning as quietly as a stout lady accumulates her fat, by the daily satisfaction of his appetite.” Since “no one can retain knowledge without using it,” and life is short even if art is long, whittle down that appetite. “If you have fifteen different pursuits, ten of them, at any given time, will be lying by neglected.” “It seems like a sort of polygamy to have different pursuits. It is natural to think of them as jealous wives tormenting some Mormon prophet.” Better to learn those things for which you have an “inward want” to know; intellectual eros provides a natural discipline. Don’t waste time on hills too steep for the strength of your legs; “in vain you urge me to go in quest of sciences for which I have no natural aptitude.”

That is, listen first of all to yourself. “Whatever you study, someone will consider that particular study a foolish waste of time.” To such critics there is “one reply”: “We work for culture.” Not for fame or fortune. “More than all other men have authors reason to appreciate the indirect utilities of knowledge that is apparently irrelevant. Who can tell what knowledge will be of most use to them?” Indeed, “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.”

Extraneous pursuits are unfortunately encouraged by the French custom of government prizes for some of them. One should never learn or work at something one doesn’t “really care for.” This in no way precludes “miscellaneous reading”—dipping into things not immediately useful. You never know when they might become so, and, let’s face it, “if the essence of dilettantism is to be contented with imperfect attainment, I fear that all educated people must be considered dilettantes.” The same goes for learning languages. No one really knows more than three modern languages, and it takes five years’ residence in a foreign country to attain mastery.” [1] Generally, “a good literary or artistic memory is not like a post-office that takes in everything, but like a well-edited periodical which prints nothing that does not harmonize with its intellectual life.” Scholarly writing, in contrast, requires you to take notes, too. “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 to the constructive order of nature.”

Constructive order proves needful in the exercise of “time-thrift.” “Nothing is so favorable to sound culture as the definite fixing of limits” to time spent in study. One pursuit, “with several auxiliaries,” so long as they really are auxiliary, “is the true principle of arrangement.” “The most illusory of all the work that we propose to ourselves is reading,” an activity in which our eyes very much tend to be bigger than our stomachs. Do not underestimate the benefits of idleness. “A year of downright loitering” can be “a desirable element in a liberal education” because you will be observing people and things, not only reading books. “What the Philistines call”—he’s read his Matthew Arnold—wasted time “is often rich in the most various experience to the intelligent,” whose minds remain active even when their bodies are not. Your main enemy isn’t idleness but interruption, “the pottering details of business.” Attention isn’t an electric current, which can be turned on and off.

Attention is a thing to be concentrated. “There is great danger in apparently unlimited opportunities, and a splendid compensation for those who are confined by circumstances to a narrow but fruitful field.” Montaigne, with his five shelves of books constantly in front of him, wrote better essays than we do. And in the ancient world, when books were rare, writers were surely no less perspicuous than today. Those were the books Montaigne had, and “to supply our need, within the narrow limits of the few and transient hours that we can call our own, is enough for the wise everywhere, as it was for Montaigne in his tower.”

Money matters do matter, but wealth can be an impediment to the intellectual life, especially for the English, who so often feel compelled to manage it. Given the distracting social obligations they are expected to shoulder, the wealthy best assist culture as patrons. As for young men, they “get on better for not being too comfortably well off.” “All intellectual lives, however much they may differ in the variety of their purposes, have at least this purpose in common, that they are mainly devoted to self-education of one kind or another.” That being so, if you provide a young man “to earn more money than that which comes to him without especial care about it, you interrupt his schooling.” Kepler had “to waste his time over horoscopes in order to make money,” and the same might be said for those who pore over stock market quotes.

“The art is to use money so that it shall be the protector and not the scatterer of our time, the body-guard of the sovereign Intellect and Will.” If you are poor, concentrate your attention on one subject, a few authors. Consider yourself fortunate not to need to “satisfy public opinion,” as prosperous businessmen have done, and must do. Never envy the rich. They are likely to be distracted by the many objects “that are presented to their attention.” “But when I open a noble volume, I say to myself, ‘Now the only Croesus I envy is he who is reading a better book than this.'”

Public opinion is shaped by custom and tradition, by which Hamerton means, primarily, religion. He who essays the intellectual life had better recognize that “the penalties imposed by society for the infraction of very trifling details of custom are often, as it seems out of all proportion to the offense; but so are the penalties of nature,” as those who exercise and ‘eat healthy’ on occasion learn. Like nature, “Society will be obeyed: if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences”; the consequence in a modern liberal society is exclusion. While “in the life of every intellectual man there comes a time when he questions custom at all points,” and while “without you, Western Europe would have been a second China,” your salutary questioning should not extend to customs regarding vice and hypocrisy. Nor should one make petty rebellion against harmless customs—against wearing a dark jacket at a formal dinner. “What is the use of wasting this beneficial power of rebellion on matters too trivial to be worth attention? Does it hurt your conscience to appear in a dress-coat?” If you will “let society arrange your dress for you (it will save you infinite trouble)” you can concentrate on resisting its attempts “to stifle the expression of your thought.”

The authority of tradition has declined. Scientific discoveries and a sort of faith in ‘the future’ have largely replaced it. “There is a break between the existence of our forefathers and that of our posterity, and it is we who have the misfortune to be situated exactly where the break occurs.” The “modern mind” looks forward, not back at tradition. And that mind is ‘democratic,’ in Tocqueville’s sense. It takes its guidance from around itself, not from above itself; “in our day the real regulator of morality is not the church but public opinion.” And finally, the modern mind orients itself by the experimental “scientific spirit,” which Hamerton takes to have been “conducive to moral health generally”—a judgement the experiences of subsequent centuries would call into question. 

Tradition includes religious beliefs. Religion is not philosophy, although there is an “intellectual morality,” and “philosophy is the religion of the intellectual” in that sense. More precisely, “the intellect gives morality, philosophy, precious things indeed, but not religion.” Athens is not Jerusalem. “The difficulty of the intellectual life is, that whilst it can never assume a position of hostility to religion”—he surely means ‘should’—which “it must always recognize as the greatest natural force for the amelioration of mankind, it is nevertheless compelled to enunciate truths which may happen to be in contradiction with dogmas received at this or that particular time.” To attempt to reconcile such truths with such dogmas endangers “intellectual integrity.” “The religious life is based upon authority, the intellectual life is based upon personal investigation,” which requires “intellectual fearlessness which accepts a proved fact without reference to its personal or its social consequences.” Hamerton does not pause to consider whether the modern faith in a future undergirded by experimental science placed at the service of the conquest of nature might deserve such fearless questioning, too. And he does not anticipate (in the 1870s it would have been difficult) the political consequences of that faith under some regimes in the next century, and beyond. When he observes that “the freedom of the intellectual life can never be secured except by treating as if they were doubtful several affirmations which large masses of mankind hold to be certainties as indisputable as the facts of science,” he has in mind the doctrines of Papal and of Scriptural infallibility. “The intellect does not recognize authority in any one,” since “our work is simply to ascertain truth by our own independent methods, alike without hostility to any persons claiming authority, and without any deference to them.”

Custom, especially religious custom, includes marriage, a topic “of which men know less than they know of any other subject of universal interest.” “People are almost always wrong in their estimates of the marriages of others, and the best proof how little we know the real tastes and needs of those with whom we are most intimate, is our unfailing surprise at the marriages they make.” (As André Maurois would put it, much more elegantly, in literature, as in love, we are astonished by what others choose.) 

A man walking the intellectual way of life has “only two courses.” He can marry an unintellectual, loving, and practical woman happy to run the household, tend to children, and “love him in a truthful spirit without jealousy of his occupations,” or marry a woman “willing to become his companion in the arduous paths of intellectual labor.” The practical sort of wife is better for the artist, the companionable sort better for writer. Above all, one must avoid some mixture of the two. A friend of Hamerton’s lamented, “She knew nothing when I married her. I tried to teach her something; it made her angry, and I gave it up.” “It is not by adding to our knowledge, but by understanding us, that women are our helpers,” Hamerton suggests; their “divine sympathy” assuages the “fearfully solitary” intellectual life.

As for Hamerton himself (both writer and artist, and so in bit of a pickle), we know from their joint autobiography-biography that his wife, Eugénie Gindriez, annoyed him somewhat as a critic of his etchings (she was right) while proving an excellent intellectual companion, wife, and mother. “The intellectual ideal seems to be that of a conversation on all the subjects you must care about, which should never lose its interest.” That they had. Social customs themselves had served them well, in this instance, as the intellectual separation of the sexes had declined since the beginning of the century: “Happily we are coming back to the old rational notion of culture independent of the question of sex.” This is fortunate, since “women are by nature more subservient to custom than we are, more than we can easily conceive,” worrying more about what the neighbors will think and, worse, say. “A woman will either take your side against the customs of the little world around, or she will take the side of custom against you.” Women are simply more ‘social’ than men, with “natural sympathy with all the observances of custom” that you, sir, incline to neglect. “Unless you win her wholly to your side, she may undertake the enterprise of curing your eccentricities and adapting you to the ideal of her taste,” that is, to the tastes of those around her. As a result of this ineluctable tension, “conversation between the sexes will always be partially insincere,” as “consideration for the feelings of women gives an agreeable tone to society, but it is fatal to the severity of truth.” Still, “as culture” distinguished from custom “becomes more general women will hear truth more frequently,” he optimistically expects. But for now, “men disguise their thoughts for women as if to venture into the feminine world were a dangerous as traveling in Arabia.”

The problem is even more acute when it comes to mothers. Hamerton writes to a “well educated” young man who found it difficult “to live agreeably with his mother, a person of somewhat authoritative disposition, but uneducated”—not unlike Hamerton’s beloved aunt, who had raised him and hoped that he would join the clergy. Your mother, Hamerton explains, expects deference from her son; deference comports ill with contradiction, which at best can be attempted with discretion; you, however, listen to her heartily asserted opinions, “irresistibly urged to set her right.” “Even before specialists your mother has an independence of opinion, and a degree of faith in her own conclusions, which would be admirable if they were founded upon right reason and a careful study of the subject.” She is, and will remain, “convinced that she knows more about disease than the physician, and more about legal business than an old attorney.” And as for theology, well, “in theology no parson can approach her; but here a woman may consider herself on her own ground, as theology is the specialty of women.” For her son to disagree, he must become didactic, that is, annoying, spoiling her temper without improving her mind. Why so? Because “she does not think simply, ‘Is that true of such a thing?’ but she thinks, ‘Does he love me or respect me?'” And there you have it. Roll with it.

Beyond the family and the customs governing it, fundamentally religious customs and teachings, there are the social classes. In Hamerton’s Victorian England and Third-Republic France, social class mattered more than it does today (which is not to say that it no longer matters). “The love and pursuit of culture lead each of us out of his class” since “class-views of any kind, whether of the aristocracy, or of the middle class, or of the people, inevitably narrow the mind and hinder it from receiving pure truth.” Intellectual love and pursuit yield something like a Platonic ascent from the Cave. The “largest and best minds” may prudently “continue to conform” to the customs of whichever class in which they were raised, but they “always emancipate themselves from it intellectually, and arrive at a sort of neutral region, where the light is colorless, and clear, and equal, like plain daylight out of doors.” Forgetting ourselves, we “become absorbed in our pursuits for their own sakes,” as “the feeling of caste drops from us.” Viewing the most eminent English writers of his century, Hamerton judges Dickens and Burns too democratic (the poet went so far as to rhyme “asses” with “Parnassus”), Trollope and Tennyson too aristocratic, too disdainful of shopkeepers (“the intensity of the prejudices of caste prevents them from seeing any possibility of true gentlemanhood in a draper or a grocer”). And “the consciousness of our contempt embitters the feeling of men of other cates, and prevents them from accepting our guidance when it might be of the greatest practical utility to them.” [2]

That is, aristocrats as customarily defined may be liberal or illiberal. The illiberal spirit “cares nothing for culture, nothing for excellence, nothing for the superiorities that make men truly great; all it cares for is to have reserved seats in the great assemblage of the world.” Hamerton prefers the Aristotelian definition, the gentleman as spoudaios, as the serious man, the man in full. “I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the existence of the complete gentleman.” Amidst the ever-increasing democracy of his time, Hamerton censures enviousness, that characteristic passion of egalitarians. “Instead of rendering a service to itself,” democracy “does exactly the contrary when it cannot endure and will not tolerate the presence of high-spirited gentlemen in the state.” The “class-spirit” or prejudice “is odious in the narrow-minded, pompous, selfish, pitiless aristocrat who thinks that the sons of the people were made by Almighty God to be his lackeys and their daughters to be his mistresses; it is odious also, to the full as odious, in the narrow-minded, envious democrat who cannot bear to see any elegance of living, or grace of manner, or culture of mind above the range of his own capacity or his own purse.”

On balance, Hamerton has stronger hopes for aristocratic liberality than for democratic magnanimity. “The personages most popular in democratic countries are often remarkably deficient in dignity, and liked the better for it.” While “democratic feeling raises the lower classes and increases their self-respect, which is indeed one of the greatest imaginable benefits to a nation, it has a tendency to fix one uniform type of behavior and of thought s the sole type in conformity with what is accepted for ‘common sense.'” This leveling spirit is democracy’s worst feature. “An aristocracy can be very narrow and intolerant, but it can only exclude from its own pale, whereas when a democracy is intolerant it excludes from all human intercourse,” “driv[ing] men of culture into solitude” in the manner of France’s “noxious swarm of Communards.” “Since the year 1870 we do not speculate about the democratic temper in its intensest expression: we have seen it at work, and we know it,” having seen that “every beautiful building, every precious manuscript and treasure, has to be protected” against burning and rioting levelers. “The ultra-democratic spirit is hostile to culture, from its hatred of all delicate and romantic sentiment, form its scorn of the tenderer and finer feelings of our nature, and especially from its brutish incapacity to comprehend the needs of the higher life.” While “the intellectual spirit studies the past critically, and does not accept history as a legend as accepted by the credulous, still the intellectual spirit has deep respect for all that is noble in the past, and would preserve the record of it forever.”

For all that, “our best hopes for the liberal culture of the intellect are centered in the democratic idea” because aristocrats “think too much of persons and positions.” They lack the disinterestedness of the intellect. “From the intellectual point of view, it is a necessary virtue to forget your station to forget yourself entirely, and to think of the subject only, in a manner perfectly disinterested.” The “theoretic equality” of democracy lends itself to such disinterestedness, although it must be said, from the vantage point of a century-and-a-half of further experience of the egalitarian temper, that democrats do not hesitate to engage in character assassination any more than aristocrats do, when democrats go beyond rebellion and assume positions of rule.

What about solitude, then? Intellectual friendships are often useful and temporary, contradicting “the boyish belief in the permanence of human relations,” of ‘friends forever.’ The young often form the best sort of these friendships with the older scholars and artists, incurring a debt they cannot repay, except indirectly, by befriending the next generation. It is living in “fashionable society” that damages intellectual pursuits in the young, “the mind of a fashionable person” being “a gilded mind,” one presenting the appearance of knowledge at the expense of the real thing. “Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.” Fashionable people attend to change but the intellectual life seeks natural, the laws of which endure. The fashionable life “appears the perfect type of that preoccupation about appearance which blinds the genteel vulgar to the true nobility of life.” Hamerton cheerfully concedes, however, that this gilded or “external deference which Society yields to culture is practically of great service” to culture, providing an audience for paintings, books, and concerts even as it flits or dozes through them. “The sort of good effect is in the intellectual sphere what the good effect of a general religious profession in the moral sphere.” True, “fashionable religion differs from the religion of Peter and Paul as fashionable science differs from that of Humboldt an Arago,” but just as “the profession is useful to Society as some restraint, at least during one day out of seven,” so too fashionable culture not only funds writers and artists but occasionally thinks about what they are writing and painting. As for the intellectual himself, he has given up “the varying spectacle of wealth, and splendor, and pleasure” of the wealthy in exchange for “but one satisfaction,” the satisfaction of “coming into contact with some great reality,” and for being recognized for having done so “by other knowers and doers.” “You will live with the realities of knowledge as one who has quitted the painted scenery of the theater to listen by the eternal ocean or gaze at the granite hills.”

As to the path of eschewing polite and impolite society altogether, “nothing can replace the conversation of living men and women; not even the richest literature can replace it.” Admittedly, “the general conversations of English society are dull; it is a national characteristic.” And the English have their reason for this, as they attempt to avoid the bitterness lively conversations may induce. All the more reason to seek “a single interested listener.” More, if such intellectual men withdraw from society, “the national intellect” deteriorates. “The low Philistinism of many a provincial town is due mainly to the shy reserve of the one or two superior men who fancy that they cannot amalgamate with the common intellect of the place.” That goes for intellectual women, too, whom Hamerton suggests might discreetly elevate conversations by introducing a change of the topic.

“Woe unto him that is alone!” and “Woe unto him that is never alone and cannot be to be alone!” “Society is to the individual what travel and commerce are to a nation,” whereas “solitude represents the home life of the nation, during which it develops its especial originality and genius.” It is “only in solitude “that “we learn our inmost nature and its needs.”  “The perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone in the solitude of the infinite sea.” 

Well-married Hamerton knew such a solitary man, his days “long and unbroken,” unostentatious, calm in his leisure. “He wore nothing but old clothes, read only a few old books, without the least regard to the opinions of the learned, and did not take in a newspaper.” He still cherished a few friendships but “felt imprisoned and impeded in his thinking” when he ventured into a town and its crowds. “He had a strong sense of the transitoriness of what is transitory, and a passionate preference for all that the human mind conceives to be relatively or absolutely permanent.” Greater minds than his benefited from such habits: Newton, Comte, Milton, Bunyan, all found themselves most productive when alone.

Do not, then, “encourage in young people the love of noble culture in the hope that it may lead them more into what is called good society. High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within any traversable distance, they sit and work alone.” If such a man thinks thoughts at odds with those held firmly by those around him, “then he must either disguise them, which is always highly distasteful to a man of honor, or else submit to be treated as an enemy to human welfare.” [3]

Understand this: “However much pains you take to keep your culture well in the background, it always makes you rather an object of suspicion to people who have no culture.” What is the meaning of this man’s reserve? What is he thinking? Is it a threat to us decent folk? And “something of your higher philosophy will escape in an unguarded moment, and give offense because it will seem foolish or incomprehensible to your audience.” Even a mis-chosen word will raise doubts or give offense. “Unless you are gifted with a truly extraordinary power of conciliating goodwill,” you will find safety only “in a timely withdrawal.” Find “a society that is prepared to understand you,” since the solitude which is really injurious is the severance from all who are capable of understanding us.” That society, a society within the larger society, may itself need members’ discretion to guard it.

During those prudently timed periods of withdrawal, strict “intellectual hygienics” must be maintained. Be patient with yourself; don’t publish your work too soon. Melancholy being a frequent accompaniment of intellectual labor, undertake hard study at intervals, doing non-intellectual things, too, thereby “brac[ing] the fighting power of the intellect.” The obscurity of intellectual labor can be “rather trying to the moral fiber,” so take the time to share suggestions of it with your neighbors—lending articles, talking about your travels, offering public lectures (what Hamerton calls “adult education”). In these “intellectual charities, let us accustom ourselves to feel satisfied with humble results and small successes.” You won’t ‘change the world,’ much, because the world doesn’t much want to be changed. Hamerton would have demurred, had he listened to young persons with the stated ambition to become ‘public intellectuals.’ 

Do not fail to cultivate “the art of resting.” “Harness is good for an hour or two at a time, but the finest intellects have never lived in harness.” You are, after all, living an intellectual life. To a friend who never rested, Hamerton protested, “You are living a great deal too much like a star,” always shifting position in the sky, “and not enough like a human being.” Or too much like an army that’s always on campaign, suffering attrition because of that. “Rest is necessary to recruit your intellectual forces.”

Hamerton and his readers had no ‘Internet’ to distract them, but they did have newspapers, which could be bad enough. “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.” Truth isn’t necessarily, or even often, a matter of newness. Still, one should read newspapers; by “their rough commons sense” and “direct observation” of current events, they guard intellectuals from a sort of “mysticism,” including the scientistic mysticism of one such as Auguste Comte, who invented “a religion far surpassing in unreasonableness the least rational of the creeds of tradition,’ his ‘Religion of Humanity.’ [4] Also, one should read good contemporary authors, not only the ‘greats,’ past and present (if one or two of them exist, in your generation). 

Speaking of rough common sense, if you wish to combine the intellectual life with a profession, which one should you choose? “The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.” How do the several professions contribute to that, and how do they interfere with it? Generally, “the great instruments of the world’s intellectual culture ought not be, in the ordinary sense, professions,” but some professions conduce more to such culture than others.

“The life of a clergyman is favorable to culture in many ways,” but “not wholly.” Because a clergyman knows that his profession is the one which “most decidedly and mot constantly affects the judgment of persons and opinions,” the intellectual virtue of disinterestedness may go uncultivated. “Accept[ing] truth just as it may happen to present itself, without passionately desiring that one doctrine may turn out to be strong in evidence and another unsupported” often proves difficult. We find clergy “disposed to use their intellects for the triumph of principles that are decided upon beforehand,” with an eye to the good of the flock.

The life of the lawyer, too, seldom aims at “the revelation of pure truth” but in winning the case for a client. And it is an unusually busy life, unconducive to the leisure necessary for sustained intellectual work. Still, “I think that lawyers are often superior to philosophers in their sense of what is relatively important in human affairs with reference to limited spaces of time, such as half a century. They especially know the enormous importance of custom, which the speculative mind very readily forget, and they have in the highest degree that peculiar sense which fits men for dealing with others in the affairs of ordinary life.” This also puts them ahead of clergymen, artists, and men of science. Plato, after all, wrote the Laws, an exercise in political philosophy.

Hamerton judges medicine to be the profession best suited to the intellectual life. Science, the laws of nature: these provide “a solid basis in the ascertainable,” hence good preparation for philosophy. Maimonides and Locke would likely concur. The fine arts are also favorable to that life, as one can listen and think while you paint, which is itself a thoughtful activity. A military life? No: too busy. 

What about writing as a profession? Any professional turns (or attempts to turn) knowledge and talent into “pecuniary profit.” But “the best work is not done as a regular part of professional duty.” With writing, particularly, “it does not pay to do your best“—at least, if your best is any good. Indeed, “one of the greatest privileges which an author can aspire to is to be allowed to write little, and that is a privilege which the professional writer does not enjoy.” Oddly, the one profession Hamerton does not discuss is the profession of teaching, in university or elsewhere. Teachers are not permitted many things, but not-writing isn’t one of them, except at the beginning of a university career, where academic tenure often depends upon publication. 

As to the non-intellectual professions, the most noteworthy new one, for Hamerton, is that of the industrialist. “The chief of industry and the man of letters stand today in the same relation to each other and to mankind as the baron and bishop of the Middle Ages.” Both types of man are “held to be somewhat intrusive by the representatives of a former order of things, and there is or was until very lately, a certain disposition to deny what we consider our natural rights.” No problem: “We know that our powers are not to be resisted, and we have the inward assurance that the forces of nature are with us.” However, each of these ‘new men’ tends to look down on the other. The intellectual man often dismisses the industrialist as a Philistine. Yet where does the wealth of nations, the wherewithal of modern life that pays for books, paintings, statues, universities, symphony orchestras, buildings, and scientific experiments come from? Doesn’t the cotton manufacturer reduce the cost of the paper the writer writes on?

As for the industrialists’ contempt for the intellectual class, “we are not always quite so impractical as you think we are,” as the leisure to make discoveries, which commercial people seldom do, for want of time, makes your coveted technological advances possible.  From the industrialist, the intellectual man can simply pray, “Grant us…the liberty not to make much money, and this being granted, try to look upon our intellectual superiority as a simple natural fact, just as we look upon your pecuniary superiority.” Do not charge me with impertinence in praying so impiously, for “in saying in this plain way that we are intellectually superior to you and your class, I am guilty of no more pride and vanity than you when you affirm or display your wealth.” A lot of work went into my acculturation, “just as you have great factories and estates which are the reward of your life’s patient and intelligent endeavor.” More, “not only are the natural philosophers, the writers of contemporary and past history, the discoverers in science, necessary in the strict sense to the life of such a community as the modern English community, but even the poets, the novelists, the artists are necessary to the perfection of its life.”

And finally, the man walking the intellectual way of life should recognize that “every locality is like a dyer’s vat.” You will absorb the color of what you soak in. “All sights and sounds have their influence on our temper and on our thoughts, and our inmost being is not the same in one place as in another.” True, it’s possible to abstract oneself from unfavorable surroundings, temporarily; Archimedes could think while his city was under siege. But only temporarily. Goethe prospered from the tranquility of Weimar, well away from the hurry of Berlin. And so, “for literary men there is nothing so valuable as a window with a cheerful and beautiful prospect.”

Hamerton had lived in both the Scottish Highlands and, as he wrote this book, in Rome. The Highlands offer nature at its most beautiful, but it is nature without many people. He prefers Rome. “She bears on her walls and edifices the record of sixty generations. Temple, and arch, and pyramid, all these bear witness still, and so do her ancient bulwarks, and many a stately tower. High above all, the cathedral tower is drawn dark in the morning mist, and often in the clear summer evenings it comes brightly in slanting sunshine against the step woods behind. Then the old city arrays herself in the warmest and mellowest tones, and glows as the shadows fall. She reigns over the whole width of her valley in the folds of the far blue hills. Even so ought our life be surrounded by the loveliness of nature—surrounded but not subdued.” Rome stands for the beauty of civil and religious life within nature, in balance with it. Rightly so considered, the city is the true home of intellect.

Now better known, the French Catholic writer A. G. Sertillanges also has a book titled The Intellectual Life. [5]. Praiseworthy though it is, it focuses readers’ attention on the way one ought to prepare oneself to ‘intellect’ things—organizing one’s materials, equipping one’s writing desk. It is a decidedly ‘French’ book, at once a specimen of Cartesian abstraction from most physical things and attentive to general principles. Hamerton gives those inclined to abstraction and attention to general principles a much more ‘English’ splash of cold water—concrete, specific, ‘down to earth.’ The sort of things an ‘intellectual’ type really needs.

 

Notes

1. Hamerton is fully a ‘modern’ man, no lover of the ‘ancients’ or commender of learning their languages. He endorses the Baconian view that we are the true ancients, having more experience than they who lived closer to the birth of the world. He compliments the principal of a French college for endorsing his government’s removal of the requirement to learn Greek from the public schools, judging it a waste of time because the students seldom learn it well enough actually to read Geek. But more, “the modern mind prefers to occupy itself with its own anxieties and its own speculations.” 
2. A century later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would be deprecated as the daughter of a greengrocer—oddly, most often by socialists. In the letter here quoted, addressed “to a young English nobleman,” Hamerton contrasts “the bewilderment of multiplicity” experienced by an aristocrat, for whom the whole world seems spread out before him, with the perspective of an equally intelligent young man of the working class, thereby ‘introducing’ the aristocrat to a person to whom he would never be introduced formally. Like Tocqueville, Hamerton works for inter-class understanding rather than class conflict.
3. See Arthur Melzer: The Lost Art of Esoteric Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
4. See Daniel J. Mahoney: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. New York: Encounter Books, 2019.
5. A. G. Sertillanges: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, conditions, Methods.  Mary Ryan translation. Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 1987.