LETTER III.
TO A MAN OF BUSINESS WHO DESIRED TO MAKE HIMSELF BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH LITERATURE, BUT WHOSE TIME FOR READING WAS LIMITED.
Victor Jacquemont on the intellectual labors of the Germans—Business may be set off as the equivalent to one of their pursuits—Necessity for regularity in the economy of time—What may be done in two hours a day—Evils of interruption—Florence Nightingale—Real nature of interruption—Instance from the Apology of Socrates.
In the charming and precious letters of Victor Jacquemont, a man whose life was dedicated to culture, and who not only lived for it, but died for it, there is a passage about the intellectual labors of Germans, which takes due account of the expenditure of time. “Comme j’étais étonné,” he says, “de la prodigieuse variété et de l’étendue de connaissances des Allemands, je demandai un jour à l’un de mes amis, Saxon de naissance et l’un des premiers géologues de l’Europe, comment ses compatriotes s’y prenaient pour savoir tant de choses. Voici sa réponse, à peu près: ‘Un Allemand (moi excepté qui suis le plus paresseux des hommes) se lève de bonne heure, été et hiver, à cinq heures environ. Il travaille quatre heures avant le déjeuner, fumant quelquefois pendant tout ce temps, sans que cela nuise à son application. Son déjeuner dure une demi-heure, et il reste, après, une autre demi-heure à causer avec sa femme et à faire jouer ses enfants. Il retourne au travail pour six heures; dîne sans se presser; fume une heure après le dîner, jouant encore avec ses enfants; et avant de se coucher il travaille encore quatre heures. Il recommence tous les jours, ne sortant jamais.—Voilà,’ me dit mon ami, ‘comment Oersted, le plus grand physicien de l’Allemagne, en est aussi le plus grand médecin; voilà comment Kant le métaphysicien était un des plus savants astronomes de l’Europe, et comment Goethe, qui en est actuellement le premier littérateur, dans presque tous les genres, et le plus fécond, est excellent botaniste, minéralogiste, physicien.’”[2]
Here is something to encourage, and something to discourage you at the same time. The number of hours which these men have given in order to become what they were, is so great as to be past all possibility of imitation by a man occupied in business. It is clear that, with your counting-house to occupy you during the best hours of every day, you can never labor for your intellectual culture with that unremitting application which these men have given for theirs. But, on the other hand, you will perceive that these extraordinary workers have hardly ever been wholly dedicated to one pursuit, and the reason for this in most cases is clear. Men who go through a prodigious amount of work feel the necessity for varying it. The greatest intellectual workers I have known personally have varied their studies as Kant and Goethe did, often taking up subjects of the most opposite kinds, as for instance imaginative literature and the higher mathematics, the critical and practical study of fine art and the natural sciences, music, and political economy. The class of intellects which arrogate to themselves the epithet “practical,” but which we call Philistine, always oppose this love of variety, and have an unaffected contempt for it, but these are matters beyond their power of judgment. They cannot know the needs of the intellectual life, because they have never lived it. The practice of all the greatest intellects has been to cultivate themselves variously, and if they have always done so, it must be because they have felt the need of it.
The encouraging inference which you may draw from this in reference to your own case is that, since all intellectual men have had more than one pursuit, you may set off your business against the most absorbing of their pursuits, and for the rest be still almost as rich in time as they have been. You may study literature as some painters have studied it, or science as some literary men have studied it.
The first step is to establish a regulated economy of your time, so that, without interfering with a due attention to business and to health, you may get two clear hours every day for reading of the best kind. It is not much, some men would tell you that it is not enough, but I purposely fix the expenditure of time at a low figure because I want it to be always practicable consistently with all the duties and necessary pleasures of your life. If I told you to read four hours every day, I know beforehand what would be the consequence. You would keep the rule for three days, by an effort, then some engagement would occur to break it, and you would have no rule at all. And please observe that the two hours are to be given quite regularly, because, when the time given is not much, regularity is quite essential. Two hours a day, regularly, make more than seven hundred hours in a year, and in seven hundred hours, wisely and uninterruptedly occupied, much may be done in anything.
Permit me to insist upon that word uninterruptedly. Few people realize the full evil of an interruption, few people know all that is implied by it. After warning nurses against the evils of interruption, Florence Nightingale says:—
“These things are not fancy. If we consider that, with sick as with well, every thought decomposes some nervous matter—that decomposition as well as re-composition of nervous matter is always going on, and more quickly with the sick than with the well,—that to obtrude another thought upon the brain whilst it is in the act of destroying nervous matter by thinking, is calling upon it to make a new exertion—if we consider these things, which are facts, not fancies, we shall remember that we are doing positive injury by interrupting, by startling a ‘fanciful’ person, as it is called. Alas, it is no fancy.
“If the invalid is forced by his avocations to continue occupations requiring much thinking, the injury is doubly great. In feeding a patient suffering under delirium or stupor you may suffocate him by giving him his food suddenly, but if you rub his lips gently with a spoon and thus attract his attention, he will swallow the food unconsciously, but with perfect safety. Thus it is with the brain. If you offer it a thought, especially one requiring a decision, abruptly, you do it a real, not fanciful, injury. Never speak to a sick person suddenly; but, at the same time, do not keep his expectation on the tiptoe.”
To this you will already have answered, mentally, that you are not a patient suffering under either delirium or stupor, and that nobody needs to rub your lips gently with a spoon. But Miss Nightingale does not consider interruption baneful to sick persons only.
“This rule indeed,” she continues, “applies to the well quite as much as to the sick. I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last. The process, with them, may be accomplished without pain. With the sick, pain gives warning of the injury.”
Interruption is an evil to the reader which must be estimated very differently from ordinary business interruptions. The great question about interruption is not whether it compels you to divert your attention to other facts, but whether it compels you to tune your whole mind to another diapason. Shopkeepers are incessantly compelled to change the subject; a stationer is asked for notepaper one minute, for sealing-wax the next, and immediately afterwards for a particular sort of steel pen. The subjects of his thoughts are changed very rapidly, but the general state of his mind is not changed; he is always strictly in his shop, as much mentally as physically. When an attorney is interrupted in the study of a case by the arrival of a client who asks him questions about another case, the change is more difficult to bear; yet even here the general state of mind, the legal state of mind, is not interfered with. But now suppose a reader perfectly absorbed in his author, an author belonging very likely to another age and another civilization entirely different from ours. Suppose that you are reading the Defence of Socrates in Plato, and have the whole scene before you as in a picture: the tribunal of the Five Hundred, the pure Greek architecture, the interested Athenian public, the odious Melitus, the envious enemies, the beloved and grieving friends whose names are dear to us, and immortal; and in the centre you see one figure draped like a poor man, in cheap and common cloth, that he wears winter and summer, with a face plain to downright ugliness, but an air of such genuine courage and self-possession that no acting could imitate it; and you hear the firm voice saying—
| Τιμᾱται δ᾽ ούν μοι ἁνὴρ θανάτου Εἱεν.[3] |
You are just beginning the splendid paragraph where Socrates condemns himself to maintenance in the Prytaneum, and if you can only be safe from interruption till it is finished, you will have one of those minutes of noble pleasure which are the rewards of intellectual toil. But if you are reading in the daytime in a house where there are women and children, or where people can fasten upon you for pottering details of business, you may be sure that you will not be able to get to the end of the passage without in some way or other being rudely awakened from your dream, and suddenly brought back into the common world. The loss intellectually is greater than any one who had not suffered from it could imagine. People think that an interruption is merely the unhooking of an electric chain, and that the current will flow, when the chain is hooked on again, just as it did before. To the intellectual and imaginative student an interruption is not that; it is the destruction of a picture.