“Le Superflu, chose très-nécessaire,” to quote Voltaire’s delightful phrase, is a difficult thing to handle with propriety and grace. Where the advantages of early training and inherited habits of indulgence are lacking, men who endeavor to spend a great deal of money show a pitiful incapacity for the task. They spend it, to be sure, but only in augmenting their own and their neighbors’ discomfort; and even this they do in a blundering, unimaginative fashion, almost painful to contemplate. The history of Law’s Bubble, with its long train of fabulous and fleeting fortunes, illustrates the helplessness of men to cope with suddenly acquired wealth. The Parisian nabob who warmed up a ragout with burning bank notes, that he might boast of how much it cost him, was sadly stupid for a Frenchman; but he was kinder to himself, after all, than the house-painter who, bewildered with the wealth of Fortunatus, could think of nothing better to do with it than to hire ninety supercilious domestics for his own misusage and oppression. Since the days of Darius, who required thirty attendants to make his royal bed, there probably never were people more hopelessly in one another’s way than that little army of ninety servants awaiting orders from an artisan. The only creature capable of reveling in such an establishment was the author of “Coningsby” and “Lothair,” to whom long rows of powdered footmen, “glowing in crimson liveries,” were a spectacle as exhilarating as is a troop of Horse Guards to persons of a more martial cast of mind. Readers of “Lothair” will remember the home-coming of that young gentleman to Muriel Towers, where the house steward, and the chief butler, and the head gardener, and the lord of the kitchen, and the head forester, and the grooms of the stud and of the chambers stand in modest welcome behind the distinguished housekeeper, “who curtsied like the old court;” while the underlings await at a more “respectful distance” the arrival of their youthful master, whose sterling insignificance must have been painfully enhanced by all this solemn anticipation. “Even the mountains fear a rich man,” says that ominous Turkish proverb which breathes the corruption of a nation; but it would have been a chicken-hearted molehill that trembled before such a homunculus as Lothair.
The finer adaptability of women makes them a little less uncomfortable amid such oppressive surroundings, and their tamer natures revolt from ridiculous excess. They listen, indeed, with favor to the counsel of Polonius, and their habit is occasionally costlier than their purses can buy; witness that famous milliner’s bill for fifteen thousand pounds, which was disputed in the French courts during the gilded reign of Napoleon III. But, as a rule, the punishment of their extravagances falls on themselves or on their husbands. They do not, as is the fashion with men, make their belongings a burden to their friends. It is seldom the mistress of a curio-laden house who insists with tireless perseverance on your looking at everything she owns; though it was a woman, and a provincial actress at that, raised by two brilliant marriages to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, who came to Abbotsford accompanied by a whole retinue of servants and several private physicians, to the mingled amusement and despair of Sir Walter. And it was a flower girl of Paris who spent her suddenly acquired wealth in the most sumptuous entertainments ever known even to that city of costly caprice. But for stupid and meaningless luxury we must look, after all, to men: to Caligula, whose horse wore a collar of pearls, and drank out of an ivory trough; to Condé, who spent three thousand crowns for jonquils to deck his palace at Chantilly; to the Duke of Albuquerque, who had forty silver ladders among his utterly undesirable possessions. Even in the matter of dress and fashion, they have exceeded the folly of women. It is against the gallants of Spain, and not against their wives, that the good old gossip James Howell inveighs with caustic humor. The Spaniard, it would seem, “tho’ perhaps he had never a shirt to his back, yet must he have a toting huge swelling ruff around his neck,” for the starching of which exquisitely uncomfortable article he paid the then enormous sum of twenty shillings. It was found necessary to issue a royal edict against these preposterous decorations, which grew larger and stiffer every year, even children of tender age wearing their miniature instruments of torture. “Poverty is a most odious calling,” sighs Burton with melancholy candor; but it is not without some small compensations of its own. To realize them, we might compare one of Murillo’s dirty, smiling, half-naked beggar boys with an Infanta by Velasquez, or with Moreelzee’s charming and unhappy little Princess, who, in spreading ruff and stiff pearl-trimmed stomacher, gazes at us with childish dignity from the wall of Amsterdam’s museum. Or we might remember the pretty story of Meyerbeer’s little daughter, who, after watching for a long time the gambols of some ragged children in the street, turned sadly from the window, and said, with pathetic resignation, “It is a great misfortune to have genteel parents.”
LECTURES.
“Few of us,” says Mr. Walter Bagehot in one of his most cynical moods, “can bear the theory of our amusements. It is essential to the pride of man to believe that he is industrious.”
Now, is it industry or a love of sport which makes us sit in long and solemn rows in an oppressively hot room, blinking at glaring lights, breathing a vitiated air, wriggling on straight and narrow chairs, and listening, as well as heat and fatigue and discomfort will permit, to a lecture which might just as well have been read peacefully by our own firesides? Do we do this thing for amusement, or for intellectual gain? Outside, the winter sun is setting clearly in a blue-green sky. People are chatting gayly in the streets. Friends are drinking cups of fragrant tea in pleasant lamp-lit rooms. There are concerts, perhaps, or matinées, where the deft comedian provokes continuous laughter. No; it is not amusement that we seek in the lecture-hall. Too many really amusing things may be done on a winter afternoon. Too many possible pleasures lie in wait for every spare half-hour. We can harbor no delusions on that score.
Is it industry, then, that packs us side by side in serried Amazonian ranks, broken here and there by a stray and downcast man? But on the library shelves stand thick as autumn leaves the unread books. Hidden away in obscure corners are the ripe old authors whom we know by name alone. The mist of an unspoken tongue veils from us the splendid treasures of antiquity, and we comfort ourselves with glib commonplaces about “the sympathetic study of translations.” No; it can hardly be the keen desire of culture which makes us patient listeners to endless lectures. Culture is not so easy of access. It is not a thing passed lightly from hand to hand. It is the reward of an intelligent quest, of delicate intuitions, of a broad and generous sympathy with all that is best in the world. It has been nobly defined by Mr. Symonds as “the raising of the intellectual faculties to their highest potency by means of conscious training.” We cannot gain this fine mastery over ourselves by absorbing—or forgetting—a mass of details upon disconnected subjects,—“a thousand particulars,” says Addison, “which I would not have my mind burdened with for a Vatican.” If we will sit down and seriously try to reckon up our winnings in years of lecture-going, we may yet find ourselves reluctant converts to Mr. Bagehot’s cruel conclusions. It is the old, old search for a royal road to learning. It is the old, old effort at a compromise which cheats us out of both pleasure and profit. It is the old, old determination to seek some short cut to acquirements, which, like “conversing with ingenious men,” may save us, says Bishop Berkeley, from “the drudgery of reading and thinking.”
The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other. At times we envy the happy Hermit of Prague, who never saw pen or ink; at times we think somewhat wistfully of the sedate and dignified methods of the past, when students, to use Sir Walter Scott’s illustration, paid their tickets at the door, instead of scrambling over the walls to distinction. It shows a good deal of agility and self-reliance to scale the walls; and such athletic interlopers, albeit a trifle disordered in appearance, are apt to boast of their unaided prowess: how with “little Latin and less Greek” they have become—not Shakespeares indeed, nor even Scotts—but prominent, very prominent citizens indeed. The notion is gradually gaining ground that common-school education is as good as college education; that extension lectures and summer classes are acceptable substitutes for continuous study and mental discipline; that reading translations of the classics is better, because easier, than reading the classics themselves; and that attending a “Congress” of specialists gives us, in some mysterious fashion, a very respectable knowledge of their specialties. It is after this manner that we enjoy, in all its varied aspects, that energetic idleness which Mr. Bagehot recommends as a deliberate sedative for our restless self-esteem.
Yet the sacrifice of time alone is worth some sorrowful consideration. We laugh at the droning pedants of the old German universities who, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had well-nigh drowned the world with words. The Tübingen chancellor, Penziger, gave, it is said, four hundred and fifty-nine lectures on the prophet Jeremiah, and over fifteen hundred lectures on Isaiah; while the Viennese theologian, Hazelbach, lectured for twenty-two consecutive years on the first chapter of Isaiah, and was cruelly cut off by death before he had finished with his theme. But the bright side of this picture is that only students—and theological students at that—attended these limitless dissertations. Theology was then a battle-field, and the heavy weapons forged for the combat were presumed to be as deadly as they were cumbersome. During all those twenty-two years in which Herr Hazelbach held forth so mercilessly, German maidens and German matrons formed no part of his audience. They at least had other and better things to do. German artisans and German tradesmen troubled themselves little about Isaiah. German ploughmen went about their daily toil as placidly as if Herr Hazelbach had been born a mute. The sleepy world had not then awakened to its duty of disseminating knowledge broadcast and in small doses, so that our education, as Dr. Johnson discontentedly observed of the education of the Scotch, is like bread in a besieged town,—“every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.”
What we lack in quantity, however, we are pleased to make up in variety. We range freely over a mass of subjects from the religion of the Phœnicians to the poets of Australia, and from the Song of Solomon to the latest electrical invention. We have lectures in the morning upon Plato and Aristotle, and in the afternoon upon Emerson and Arthur Hugh Clough. We take a short course of German metaphysics,—which is supposed to be easily compressed into six lectures,—and follow it up immediately with another on French art, or the folk-lore of the North American Indians. No topic is too vast to be handled deftly, and finished up in a few afternoons. A fortnight for the Renaissance, a week for Greek architecture, ten days for Chaucer, three weeks for anthropology. It is amazing how far we can go in a winter, when we travel at this rate of speed. “What under the sun is bringing all the women after Hegel?” asked a puzzled librarian not very long ago. “There isn’t one of his books left in the library, and twenty women come in a day to ask for him.” It was explained to this custodian that a popular lecturer had been dwelling with some enthusiasm upon Hegel, and that the sudden demand for the philosopher was a result of his contagious eloquence. It seemed for the nonce like a revival of pantheism; but in two weeks every volume was back in its place, and the gray dust of neglect was settling down as of yore upon each hoary head. The women, fickle as in the days of the troubadours, had wandered far from German erudition, and were by that time wrestling with the Elizabethan poets, or the constitutional history of republics. The sun of philosophy had set.
One rather dismal result of this rapid transit is the amount of material which each lecture is required to hold, and which each lecture-goer is expected to remember. A few centuries of Egyptian history or of Mediæval song are packed down by some system of mental hydraulic pressure into a single hour’s discourse; and, when they escape, they seem vast enough to fill our lives for a week. “When Macaulay talks,” complained Lady Ashburton tartly, “I am not only overflowed with learning, but I stand in the slops.” We have much the same uncomfortable sensation at an afternoon lecture, when the tide of information, of dry, formidable, relentless facts, rises higher and higher, and our spirits sink lower and lower with every fresh development. “The need of limit, the feasibility of performance,” has not yet dawned upon the new educators who have taken the world in hand; and, as a consequence, we, the students, have never learned to survey our own intellectual boundaries. We assume in the first place that we have an intelligent interest in literature, science, and history, art, architecture, and archæology; and, in the second, that it is possible for us to learn a moderate amount about all these things without any unreasonable exertion. This double delusion lures us feebly on until we have listened to so much, and remembered so little, that we are a good deal like the infant Paul Dombey wondering in pathetic perplexity whether a verb always agreed with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus a bull.