LETTER I.
TO A YOUNG ENGLISH NOBLEMAN.
A contrast—A poor student—His sad fate—Class-sentiment—Tycho Brahe—Robert Burns—Shelley’s opinion of Byron—Charles Dickens—Shopkeepers in English literature—Pride of aristocratic ignorance—Pursuits tabooed by the spirit of caste—Affected preferences in intellectual pursuits—Studies that add to gentility—Sincerity of interest needed for genuine culture—The exclusiveness of scholarly caste—Its bad influence on outsiders—Feeling of Burns toward scholars—Sureness of class-instinct—Unforeseen effect of railways—Return to nomadic life and the chase—Advantages and possibilities to life in the higher classes.
It is one of the privileges of authorship to have correspondents in the most widely different positions, and by means of their frank and friendly letters (usually much more frank than any oral communication) to gain a singularly accurate insight into the working of circumstances on the human intellect and character. The same post that brought me your last letter brought news about another of my friends whose lot has been a striking contrast to your own.[8]
Let me dwell upon this contrast for a few minutes. All the sunshine appears to have been on your side, and all the shadow on his. Born of highly cultivated parents, in the highest rank in England under royalty, you have lived from the beginning amongst the most efficient aids to culture, and Nature has so endowed you that, instead of becoming indifferent to these things from familiarity, you have learned to value them more and more in every successive year. The plainest statement of your advantages would sound like an extract from one of Disraeli’s novels. Your father’s principal castle is situated amongst the finest scenery in Britain, and his palace in London is filled with masterpieces of art. Wherever you have lived you have been surrounded by good literature and cultivated friends. Your health is steadily robust, you can travel wherever you choose, and all the benefits of all the capitals of Europe belong to you as much as to their own citizens. In all these gifts and opportunities there is but one evil—the bewilderment of their multiplicity.
My other correspondent has been less fortunately situated. “I began school,” he says, “when six years old, was taken from it at eleven and sent to the mines to earn a little towards my own support. I continued there till fourteen, when through an unlucky incident I was made a hopeless cripple. At that day I was earning the noble sum of eightpence per day, quite as much as any boy of that age got in the lead mines. I suffered much for two years; after that, became much easier, but my legs were quite useless, and have continued so up to the present time. The right thigh-bone is decayed, has not got worse these nine years; therefore I conclude that I may live—say another thirty years. I should like, at all events, for life is sweet even at this cost; not but what I could die quietly enough, I dare say. I have not been idle these years....”
(Here permit me to introduce a parenthesis. He certainly had not been idle. He had educated himself up to such a point that he could really appreciate both literature and art, and had attained some genuine skill in both. His letters to me were the letters of a cultivated gentleman, and he used invariably to insert little pen-sketches, which were done with a light and refined hand.)
“I can do anything almost in bed—except getting up. I am now twenty-two years old. My father was a miner, but is now unable to work. I have only one brother working, and we are about a dozen of us; consequently we are not in the most flourishing circumstances, but a friend has put it in my power to learn to etch. I have got the tools and your handbook on the subject.”
These extracts are from his first letter. Afterwards he wrote me others which made me feel awed and humbled by the manly cheerfulness with which he bore a lot so dreary, and by the firmness of resolution he showed in his pursuits. He could not quit his bed, but that was not the worst; he could not even sit up in bed, and yet he contrived, I know not how, both to write and draw and etch on copper, managing the plaguy chemicals, and even printing his own proofs. His bed was on wheels, on a sort of light iron carriage, and he saw nature out-of-doors. All the gladness of physical activity was completely blotted out of his existence, and in that respect his prospects were without hope. And still he said that “life was sweet.” O marvel of all marvels, how could that life be sweet!
Aided by a beautiful patience and resignation the lamp of the mind burned with a steady brightness, fed by his daily studies. In the winters, however, the diseased limb gave him prolonged agony, and in the autumn of 1872, to avoid the months of torture that lay before him, he had himself put in the railway and sent off, in his bed, to Edinburgh, sleeping in a waiting-room on the way. There was no one to attend him, but he trusted, not vainly, to the humanity of strangers. Just about the same time your lordship went northwards also, with many friends, to enjoy the noble scenery, and the excitement of noble sport. My poor cripple got to Edinburgh, got a glimpse of Scott’s monument and the Athenian pillars, and submitted himself to the surgeons. They rendered him the best of services, for they ended his pains forever.
So I am to get no more of those wonderfully brave and cheerful letters that were written from the little bed on wheels. I miss them for the lessons they quite unconsciously conveyed. He fancied that he was the learner, poor lad! and I the teacher, whereas it was altogether the other way. He made me feel what a blessing it is, even from the purely intellectual point of view, to be able to get out of bed after the night’s rest, and go from one room to another. He made me understand the value of every liberty and every power whilst at the same time he taught me to bear more patiently every limit, and inconvenience, and restriction.
In comparing his letters with yours I have been struck by one reflection predominantly, which is, the entire absence of class-sentiment in both of you. Nobody, not in the secret, could guess that one set of letters came from a palace and the other set from a poor miner’s cottage; and even to me, who do not see the habitations except by an effort of the memory or imagination, there is nothing to recall the immensity of the social distance that separated my two friendly and welcome correspondents. It is clear, of course, that one of them had enjoyed greater advantages than the other, but neither wrote from the point of view which marks his caste or class. It was my habit to write to you, and to him, exactly in the same tone, yet this was not felt to be unsuitable by either.
Is it not that the love and pursuit of culture lead each of us out of his class, and that 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? Have you ever known any person who lived habitually in the notions of a caste, high or low, without incapacitating himself in a greater or less degree for breadth and delicacy of perception? It seems to me that the largest and best minds, although they have been born and nurtured in this caste or that, and may continue to conform externally to its customs, 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. So soon as we attain the forgetfulness of self, and become absorbed in our pursuits for their own sakes, the feeling of caste drops off from us. It was not a mark of culture in Tycho Brahe, but rather of the imperfections of his culture, that he felt so strongly the difficulty of conciliating scientific pursuits with the obligations of noble birth, and began his public discourses on astronomy by telling his audience that the work was ill-suited to his social position—hesitating, too, even about authorship from a dread of social degradation. And to take an instance from the opposite extreme of human society, Robert Burns betrayed the same imperfection of culture in his dedication to the members of the Caledonian Hunt, when he spoke of his “honest rusticity,” and told the gentlefolks that he was “bred to the plough, and independent.” Both of these men had been unfavorably situated for the highest culture, the one by the ignorance of his epoch the other by the ignorance of his class; hence this uneasiness about themselves and their social position. Shelley said of Byron, “The canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out;” and he did not say this from the point of view of a democrat, for Shelley was not precisely a democrat, but from, the broadly human point of view, on which the finest intellects like to take their stand. Shelley perceived that Byron’s aristocracy narrowed him, and made his sympathies less catholic than they might have been, nor can there be any doubt of the accuracy of this estimate of Shelley’s; if a doubt existed it would be removed by Byron’s alternative for a poet, “solitude, or high life.” Another man of genius, whose loss we have recently deplored, was narrowed by his antipathy to the aristocratic spirit, though it is necessary to add, in justice, that it did not prevent him from valuing the friendship of noblemen whom he esteemed. The works of Charles Dickens would have been more accurate as pictures of English life, certainly more comprehensively accurate, if he could have felt for the aristocracy that hearty and loving sympathy which he felt for the middle classes and the people. But the narrowness of Dickens is more excusable than that of Byron, because a kindly heart more easily enters into the feelings of those whom it can often pity than of those who appear to be lifted above pity (though this is nothing but an appearance) and also because it is the habit of aristocracies to repel such sympathy by their manners, which the poor do not.
I have often thought that a sign of aristocratic narrowness in many English authors, including some of the most popular authors of the day, is the way they speak of shopkeepers. This may be due to simple ignorance; but if so, it is ignorance that might be easily avoided. Happily for our convenience there are a great many shopkeepers in England, so that there is no lack of the materials for study; but our novelists appear to consider this important class of Englishmen as unworthy of any patient and serious portraiture. You may remember Mr. Anthony Trollope’s “Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson,” which appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, under Thackeray’s editorship. That was an extreme instance of the way the class is treated in our literature; and then in poetry we have some disdainful verses of Mr. Tennyson’s. It may be presumed that there is material for grave and respectful treatment of this extensive class, but our poets and novelists do not seem to have discovered, or sought to discover, the secret of that treatment. The intensity of the prejudices of caste prevents them from seeing any possibility of true gentlemanhood in a draper or a grocer, and blinds them to the æsthetic beauty or grandeur which may be as perfectly compatible with what is disdainfully called “counter-jumping” as it is admitted to be with the jumping of five-barred gates.
The same caste prejudices have often kept the mass of the upper classes in ignorance of most valuable and important branches of knowledge. The poor have been ignorant, yet never proud of their ignorance; the ignorance that men are proud of belongs to caste always, not always to what we should call an aristocratic caste, but to the caste-feeling in one class or another. The pride of the feudal baron in being totally illiterate amounted to self-exclusion from all intellectual culture, and we may still find living instances of partial self-exclusion from culture, of which pride is the only motive. There are people who pass their time in what are considered amusements (that do not amuse), because it seems to them a more gentlemanly sort of life than the devotion to some great and worthy pursuit which would have given the keenest zest and relish to their whole existence (besides making them useful members of society, which they are not), but which happens to be tabooed for them by the prejudices of their caste. There are many studies, in themselves noble and useful, that a man of good family cannot follow with the earnestness and the sacrifice of time necessary to success in them, without incurring the disapprobation of his friends. If this disapprobation were visited on the breaker of caste-regulations because he neglected some other culture, there would still be something reasonable in it; but this is not the case. The caste-regulation forbids the most honorable and instructive labor when it does not forbid the most unprofitable idleness, the most utter throwing away of valuable time and faculty. Tycho Brahe feared to lose caste in becoming the most illustrious astronomer of his time; but he would have had no such apprehension, nor any ground for such apprehension, if instead of being impelled to noble work by a high intellectual instinct, he had been impelled by meaner passions to unlimited self-indulgence. Even, in our own day these prejudices are still strong enough, or have been until very lately, to keep our upper classes in great darkness about natural knowledge of all kinds, and about its application to the arts of life. How few gentlemen have been taught to draw accurately, and how few are accurately acquainted with the great practical inventions of the age! The caste-sentiment does not, in these days, keep them ignorant of literature, but it keeps them ignorant of things. A friend who had a strong constructive and experimental turn, told me that, as a rule, he found gentlemen less capable of entering into his ideas than common joiners and blacksmiths, because these humble workmen, from their habit of dealing with matter, had acquired some experience of its nature. For my own part, I have often been amazed by the difficulty of making something clear to a classically educated gentleman which any intelligent mechanic would have seen to the bottom, and all round, after five or six minutes of explanation. There is a certain French nobleman whose ignorance I have frequent opportunities of fathoming, always with fresh astonishment at the depths of it, and I declare that he knows no more about the properties of stone, and timber, and metal, than if he were a cherub in the clouds of heaven!
But there is something in caste-sentiment even more prejudicial to culture than ignorance itself, and that is the affectation of strong preferences for certain branches of knowledge in which people are not seriously interested. There is nothing which people will not pretend to like, if a liking for it is supposed to be one of the marks and indications of gentility. There has been an immense amount of this kind of affectation in regard to classical scholarship, and we know for a certainty that it is affectation whenever people are loud in their praise of classical authors whom they never take the trouble to read. It may have happened to you, as it has happened to me from time to time, to hear men affirm the absolute necessity of classical reading to distinction of thought and manner, and yet to be aware at the same time, from close observation of their habits, that those very men entirely neglected the sources of that culture in which they professed such earnest faith. The explanation is, that as classical accomplishments are considered to be one of the evidences of gentility, whoever speaks loudly in their favor affirms that he has the tastes and preferences of a gentleman. It is like professing the fashionable religion, or belonging to an aristocratic shade of opinion in politics. I have not a doubt that all affectations of this kind are injurious to genuine culture, for genuine culture requires sincerity of interest before everything, and the fashionable affectations, so far from attracting sincere men to the departments of learning which happen to be à la mode, positively drive them away, just as many have become Nonconformists because the established religion was considered necessary to gentility, who might have remained contented with its ordinances as a simple discipline for their souls.
I dislike the interference of genteel notions in our studies for another reason. They deprive such culture as we may get from them, of one of the most precious results of culture, the enlargement of our sympathy for others. If we encourage ourselves in the pride of scholarly caste, so far as to imagine that we who have made Latin verses are above comparison with all who have never exercised their ingenuity in that particular way, we are not likely to give due and serious attention to the ideas of people whom we are pleased to consider uneducated; and yet it may happen that these people are sometimes our intellectual superiors, and that their ideas concern us very closely. But this is only half the evil. The consciousness of our contempt embitters the feelings of men in other castes, and prevents them from accepting our guidance when it might be of the greatest practical utility to them. I may mention Robert Burns as an instance of a man of genius who would have been happier and more fortunate if he had felt no barrier of separation between himself and the culture of his time. His poetry is as good rustic poetry as the best that has come down to us from antiquity, and instead of feeling towards the poets of times past the kind of soreness which a parvenu feels towards families of ancient descent, he ought rather to have rejoiced in the consciousness that he was their true and legitimate successor, as the clergy of an authentic Church feel themselves to be successors and representatives of saints and apostles who are gathered to their everlasting rest. But poor Burns knew that in an age when what is called scholarship gave all who had acquired it a right to look down upon poets who had only genius as the illegitimate offspring of nature, his position had not that solidity which belonged to the scholarly caste, and the result was a perpetual uneasiness which broke out in frequent defiance.
And again, in another poem—
| “A set o’ dull, conceited hashes Confuse their brains in college classes! They gang in stirks, and come out asses, Plain truth to speak; An’ syne they think to climb Parnassus By dint o’ Greek!” |
It was the influence of caste that made Burns write in this way, and how unjust it was every modern reader knows. The great majority of poets have been well-educated men, and instead of ganging into college like stirks and coming out like asses, they have, as a rule, improved their poetic faculty by an acquaintance with the masterpieces of their art. Yet Burns is not to be blamed for this injustice; he sneered at Greek because Greek was the mark of a disdainful and exclusive caste, but he never sneered at French or Italian. He had no soreness against culture for its own sake; it was the pride of caste that galled him.
How surely the wonderful class-instinct guided the aristocracy to the kind of learning likely to be the most effectual barrier against fellowship with the mercantile classes and the people! The uselessness of Greek in industry and commerce was a guarantee that those who had to earn their bread would never find time to master it, and even the strange difficult look of the alphabet (though in reality the alphabet was a gate of gossamer), ensured a degree of awful veneration for those initiated into its mysteries. Then the habit our forefathers had of quoting Latin and Greek to keep the ignorant in their places, was a strong defensive weapon of their caste, and they used it without scruple. Every year removes this passion for exclusiveness farther and farther into the past; every year makes learning of every kind less available as the armor of a class, and less to be relied upon as a means of social advancement and consideration. Indeed, we have already reached a condition which is drawing back many members of the aristocracy to a state of feeling about intellectual culture resembling that of their forefathers in the middle ages. The old barbarian feeling has revived of late, a feeling which (if it were self-conscious enough) might find expression in some such words as these:—
“It is not by learning and genius that we can hold the highest place, but by the dazzling exhibition of external splendor in those costly pleasures which are the plainest evidence of our power. Let us have beautiful equipages on the land, beautiful yachts upon the sea; let our recreations be public and expensive, that the people may not easily lose sight of us, and may know that there is a gulf of difference between our life and theirs. Why should we toil at books that the poorest students read, we who have lordly pastimes for every month in the year? To be able to revel immensely in pleasures which those below us taste rarely or not at all, this is the best evidence of our superiority. So let us take them magnificently, like English princes and lords.”
Even the invention of railways has produced the unforeseen result of a return in the direction of barbarism. If there is one thing which distinguishes civilization it is fixity of residence; and it is essential to the tranquil following of serious intellectual purposes that the student should remain for many months of the year in his own library or laboratory, surrounded by all his implements of culture. But there are people of the highest rank in the England of to-day whose existence is as much nomadic as that of Red Indians in the reserved territories of North America. You cannot ascertain their whereabouts without consulting the most recent newspaper. Their life may be quite accurately described as a return, on a scale of unprecedented splendor and comfort, to the life of tribes in that stage of human development which is known as the period of the chase. They migrate from one hunting-ground to another as the diminution of the game impels them. Their residences, vast and substantial as they are, serve only as tents and wigwams. The existence of a monk in the cloister, of a prisoner in a fortress, is more favorable to the intellect than theirs.
And yet notwithstanding these re-appearances of the savage nature at the very summit of modern civilization, the life of a great English nobleman of to-day commands so much of what the intellectual know to be truly desirable, that it seems as if only a little firmness of resolution were needed to make all advantages his own. Surrounded by every aid, and having all gates open, he sees the paths of knowledge converging towards him like railways to some rich central city. He has but to choose his route, and travel along it with the least possible hindrance from every kind of friction, in the society of the best companions, and served by the most perfectly trained attendants. Might not our lords be like those brilliant peers who shone like intellectual stars around the throne of Elizabeth, and our ladies like that great lady of whom said a learned Italian, “che non vi aveva altra dama al mondo che la pareggiasse nella cognizione delle arti e nella notizia delle scienze e delle lingue,” wherefore he called her boldly, in the enthusiasm of his admiration, “grande anfitrite, Diana nume della terra!”