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 substitutes 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 appetite, 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 constitution. 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, surpassing the gift of the grape.
But now that I have acknowledged, not ungratefully, the necessity of that noble 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 constitution 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 nobility 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 illustrations 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 appetite 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 classes 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 assigning 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 practitioners get into messes with the treacherous chemistry of their acids, and need an invincible patience. Even Méryon 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-glass 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 surpasses 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 space 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 noblest of the moral virtues, faith. Of all the toils in which men engage, none are nobler 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 noble passion 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.”