LETTER IV.
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO LIVED MUCH IN FASHIONABLE SOCIETY.
Test of professions—Mobility of fashionable taste—Practical service of an external deference to culture—Incompatibility between fashionable and intellectual lives—What each has to offer.
Your polite, almost diplomatic answer to my letter about fashionable society may be not unfairly concentrated into some such paragraph as the following:—
“What grounds have I for concluding that the professed tastes and opinions of Society are in any degree insincere? May not society be quite sincere in the preferences which it professes, and are not the preferences themselves almost always creditable to the good taste and really advanced culture of the Society which I suspect of a certain degree of affectation?”
This is the sense of your letter, and in reply to it I give you a simple but sure test. Is the professed opinion carried out in practice, when there are fair opportunities for practice?
Let us go so far as to examine a particular instance. Your friends profess to appreciate classical literature. Do they read it? Or, on the other hand, do they confine themselves to believing that it is a good thing for other people to read it?
When I was a schoolboy, people told me that the classical authors of antiquity were eminently useful, and indeed absolutely necessary to the culture of the human mind, but I perceived that they did not read them. So I have heard many people express great respect for art and science, only they did not go so far as to master any department of art or science.
If you will apply this test to the professions of what is especially called fashionable society it is probable that you will arrive at the conclusions of the minority, which I have endeavored to express. You will find that the fashionable world remains very contentedly outside the true working intellectual life, and does not really share either its labors or its aspirations.
Another kind of evidence, which tells in the same direction, is the mobility of fashionable taste. At one time some studies are fashionable, at another time these are neglected and others have taken their place. You will not find this fickleness in the true intellectual world, which steadily pursues all its various studies, and keeps them well abreast, century after century.
If I insist upon this distinction with reference to you, do not accuse me of hostility even to fashion itself. Fashion is one of the great Divine institutions of human society, and the best philosophy rebels against none of the authorities that be, but studies and endeavors to explain them. The external deference which Society yields to culture is practically of great service, although (I repeat the epithet) it is external. The sort of good effect is in the intellectual sphere what the good effect of a general religious profession is in the moral sphere. All fashionable society goes to church. Fashionable religion differs from the religion of Peter and Paul as fashionable science differs from that of Humboldt and Arago, yet, notwithstanding this difference, the profession of religion is useful to Society as some restraint, at least during one day out of seven, upon its inveterate tendency to live exclusively for its amusement. And if any soul happens to come into existence in the fashionable world which has the genuine religious nature, that nature has a chance of developing itself, and of finding ready to hand certain customs which are favorable to its well-being. So it is, though in quite a different direction, with the esteem which Society professes for intellectual pursuits. It is an esteem in great part merely nominal, as fashionable Christianity is nominal, and still it helps and favors the early development of the genuine faculty where it exists. It is certainly a great help to us that fashionable society, which has such a tremendous, such an almost irresistible power for good or evil, does not openly discourage our pursuits, but on the contrary regards them with great external deference and respect. The recognition which Society has given to artists has been wanting in frankness and in promptitude, though even in this case much may be said to excuse a sort of hesitation rather than refusal which was attributable to the strangeness and novelty of the artistic caste in England; but Society has far more than a generation professed a respect for literature and erudition which has helped those two branches of culture more effectually than great subsidies of money. The exact truth seems to be that Society is sincere in approving our devotion to these pursuits, but is not yet sufficiently interested in them to appreciate them otherwise than from the outside, just as a father and mother applaud their boys for reading Thucydides, yet do not read him themselves, either in the original or in a translation.
All that I care to insist upon is that there is a degree of incompatibility between the fashionable and the intellectual lives which makes it necessary, at a certain time, to choose one or the other as our own. There is no hostility, there need not be any uncharitable feeling on one side or the other, but there must be a resolute choice between the two. If you decide for the intellectual life, you will incur a definite loss to set against your gain. Your existence may have calmer and profounder satisfactions, but it will be less amusing, and even in an appreciable degree less human; less in harmony, I mean, with the common instincts and feelings of humanity. For the fashionable world, although decorated by habits of expense, has enjoyment for its object, and arrives at enjoyment by those methods which the experience of generations has proved to be most efficacious. Variety of amusement, frequent change of scenery and society, healthy exercise, pleasant occupation of the mind without fatigue—these things do indeed make existence agreeable to human nature, and the science of living agreeably is better understood in the fashionable society of England than by laborious students and savans. The life led by that society is the true heaven of the natural man, who likes to have frequent feasts and a hearty appetite, who enjoys the varying spectacle of wealth, and splendor, and pleasure, who loves to watch, from the Olympus of his personal ease, the curious results of labor in which he takes no part, the interesting ingenuity of the toiling world below. In exchange for these varied pleasures of the spectator the intellectual life can offer you but one satisfaction, for all its promises are reducible simply to this, that you shall come at last, after infinite labor, into contact with some great reality—that you shall know, and do, in such sort that you will feel yourself on firm ground and be recognized—probably not much applauded, but yet recognized—as a fellow-laborer by other knowers and doers. Before you come to this, most of your present accomplishments will be abandoned by yourself as unsatisfactory and insufficient, but one or two of them will be turned to better account, and will give you after many years a tranquil self-respect, and, what is still rarer and better, a very deep and earnest reverence for the greatness which is above you. Severed from the vanities of the Illusory, you will live with the realities of knowledge, as one who has quitted the painted scenery of the theatre to listen by the eternal ocean or gaze at the granite hills.