But I desire here to go into the larger question of forming habits; and as a general rule it may be said that Pater's dictum is entirely untrue, and that success in life depends more upon forming habits than upon anything else, except good health. Indeed, Pater himself is an excellent instance in point. He achieved his large output of beautiful literary work, the amazing amount of perfectly finished and exquisitely expressed writing that he gave to the world, by an extreme and patient regularity of labour. He did not, as some writers do, have periods of energetic creation, interrupted by periods of fallow idleness. Perhaps his work might have been more spontaneous if he could, like Milton's friend, have been wise enough "of such delights to judge, and interpose them oft." But the achievement of Pater was to realize and to carry out his own individual method, and it is upon doing this that successful productivity depends.
I could name, if I chose, two or three friends of my own, men of high and subtle intelligence, admirable humour, undiminished zest, who have failed, and will fail, to realize their possibilities, simply by a lack of method. Who does not know the men whom Mr. Mallock so wittily describes, of whom, up to the age of forty, their friends say that they could do anything if they only chose, and after the age of forty that they could have done anything if they had chosen? I have one particular friend in my eye at this moment, the possessor of wealth and leisure, who is a born writer if any man ever was. He has no particular duties, except the duties of a small landowner and the father of a family; he is a wide reader, and a critic of delicate and sympathetic acuteness. He is bent on writing; and he has written a single book crammed from end to end with good and beautiful things, the stuff of which would have sufficed, in the hands of a facile writer, for half-a-dozen excellent books. He is, moreover, sincerely anxious to write, but he does nothing. If you ask him—and I conceive it to be my duty at intervals to chide him for not producing more—what he does with his time, he says with a melancholy smile: "Oh, I hardly know: it goes!" I trace his failure to produce, simply to the fact that he has never set apart any particular portion of the day for writing; he allows himself to be interrupted; he entertains many guests whom he has no particular wish to see; he "sets around and looks ornery," like the frog; he talks delightfully; an industrious Boswell could, by asking him questions and taking careful notes of his talk, fill a charming volume in a month out of his shrewd and suggestive conversation; of course it is possible to say that he practises the art of living, to talk of "gems of purest ray serene" and flowers "born to blush unseen" and all the rest of it. But his talk streams to waste among guests who do not as a rule appreciate it; and if there is any duty or responsibility in the world at all, it is a duty for men of great endowments, admirable humour, and poetical suggestiveness, to sow the seed of the mind freely and lavishly. We English are of course the chosen race; but we should be none the worse for a little more intellectual apprehension, a little more amiable charm. If my friend had been a professional man, obliged to earn a living by his pen, he would, I do not doubt, have given to the world a series of great books, which would have done something to spread the influence of the kingdom of heaven.
Of course there is a sense in which it is a mistake to let habits become too tyrannical; one ought not to find oneself hopelessly distracted and irritated if one's daily programme is interfered with at any point; one ought to be able to enjoy leisure, to pay visits, to converse volubly. Like Dr. Johnson, one ought to be ready for a frolic. But, on the other hand, if a man takes himself seriously—and I am here not speaking of people with definite engagements, but of people, like writers and artists, who may choose their own times to do their work—he ought to have a regular though not an invariable programme. If he is possessed of such superabundant energy as Walter Scott possessed, he may rise at five, and write ten immortal octavo pages before he appears at breakfast. But as a rule the vitality of ordinary people is more limited, and they are bound to husband it, if they mean to do anything that is worth the name; an artist then ought to have his sacred hours, secure from interruption; and then, let him fill the rest of the day with any amusement that he finds to be congenial.
Of course the thing is easy enough if one's work is really the thing in which one is most interested. There is very little danger, in the case of a man who likes and relishes the work he is doing more than he relishes any form of amusement; but we many of us have the unhappy feeling that we enjoy our work very much, if we can once sit down to it; only we do not care about beginning it. We read the paper, we write a few letters, we look out an address in Who's Who, and we become absorbed in the biographies of our fellow-men; very soon it is time for luncheon, and then we think that we shall feel fresher if we take a little exercise; after tea, the weather is so beautiful that we think it would be a pity not to enjoy the long sunset lights; we come in; the piano stands invitingly open, and we must strike a few chords; then the bell rings for dressing, and the day is gone, because we mistrust the work that we do late at night, and so we go to bed in good time. Not so does a big book get written!
We ought rather to find out all about ourselves; when we can work our best, how long we can work continuously with full vigour; and then round these fixed points we should group our sociability, our leisure, our amusement. If we are altruistically inclined, we probably say that it is a duty to see something of our fellow-creatures, that we ought not to grow morose and solitary; there is an abundance of excuses that can be made; but the artist and the writer ought to realize that their duty to the world is to perceive what is beautiful and to express it as resolutely, as attractively as they can; if a writer can write a good book, he can talk in its pages to a numerous audience; and he is right to save up his best thoughts for his readers, rather than to let them flow away in diffuse conversation. Of course a writer of fiction is bound to make the observation of varieties of temperament a duty; it is his material; if he becomes isolated and self-absorbed, his work becomes narrow and mannerized; and it is true, too, that, with most writers, the collision of mind with mind is what produces the brightest sparks.
And then to step into a still wider field, there is no sort of doubt that the formation of reasonable habits, of method, of punctuality, is a duty, not from an exalted point of view, but because it makes enormously for the happiness and convenience of every one about us. In the old-fashioned story-books a prodigious value, perhaps an exaggerated value, was set upon time; one was told to redeem the time, whatever that might mean. The ideal mother of the family, in the little books which I used to read in my childhood, was a lady who appeared punctually at breakfast, and had a bunch of keys hanging at her girdle. Breakfast over, she paid a series of visits, looked into the larder, weighed out stores, and then settled down to some solid reading or embroidered a fire-screen; the afternoon would be spent in visits of benevolence, carrying portions of the midday dinner to her poorer neighbours; the evening would be given to working at the fire-screen again, while some one read aloud. Somehow it is not an attractive picture, though it need not have been so dull as it appears. The point is whether the solid reading had a useful effect or not. In the books I have in view, it generally led the materfamilias into having an undue respect for correct information, and a pharisaical contempt for people who indulged their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, of fanciful imagination, of simple, neighbourly kindliness. The aim was too much to improve everybody and everything, to impart and retain correct information. Nowadays the pendulum has swung a little too far the other way, and children are too much encouraged, if anything, to be childish; but there is a certain austere charm in the old simple high-minded household life for all that.
The point is that habit should be there, like the hem of a handkerchief, to keep the fabric together; but that it should not be relentlessly and oppressively paraded; the triumph is to have habits and to conceal them, just as in Ruskin's celebrated dictum, that the artist's aim should be to be fit for the best society, and then that he should renounce it. One ought to be reliable, to perform the work that one undertakes without ceaseless reminders, to discharge duties easily and satisfactorily; and then, if to this one can add the grace of apparent leisureliness, the power of never appearing to be interrupted, the good-humoured readiness to amuse and to be amused, one is high upon the ladder of perfection. It is absolutely necessary, if one is to play a satisfactory part in the world, to be in earnest, to be serious; and it is no less necessary to abstain from ostentatiously parading that seriousness. One has to take for granted that others are serious too; and far more is effected by example than by precept, in this, as in most matters. But if one cannot do both, it is better to be serious and to show it, than to make a show of despising seriousness and decrying it. It is better to have habits and to let others know it, than to lose one's soul by endeavouring to escape the reproach of priggishness, a quality which in these easy-going days incurs an excessive degree of odium.