“Again, mental life is so conditioned by sensations that every man should ask himself Professor Dowden’s list of questions concerning them. What did not Tennyson owe to his hearing, Keats to his taste and smell? Has anything ever affected human character more than the present eye-mindedness due to printing and artificial lighting? We have recently been shown the relation between thought and the jerks of the eye in reading, and even between pessimism and eye-strain. What might not be explained by nervous tension or arterial pressure, in Dr. Holmes’s ‘bulbous-headed men’ or Donizetti’s creative headaches. The very posture of the body is important in mental labor—many books are cramped from being bent over. Writers in bed have scientific endorsement for their approach to the horizontal. Yet, as this is hard on the eyes, a reclining-chair like Milton’s seems better. But no habit should be too rigid. It is unwise to risk Kant’s distress at the loss of the weather-vane he gazed at While pondering; and one doubts whether Schiller’s odor of rotten apples, or Gautier’s cat in his lap, or Marryat’s lion-skin table were worth the trouble.
“Accommodation must be practiced also with regard to youth and age. Whether through cellular differentiation or bacteria, age so profoundly affects the mind that books might almost be classified according to the productive ages of their authors.
“The influence of climate on mental life is beyond control, except as we may choose our place of residence and vary our occupation according to the season or the weather. Days vary according to the ebb and flow of the vitality stored at week-ends—Monday often wasting energy that is much missed by Friday. Deliberation and determination can do much to increase efficiency and well-being by employing one’s best times appropriately: prizing the cumulative value of unbroken hours,—of morning concentration, afternoon acquisition, and evening meditation. Those who cannot control the day must use the night—a French scientist even advocates a watch in the middle of the night. There are no rules of universal applicability, but study of the characteristics and circumstances of our best moments may make possible their easy and frequent duplication. That was Pater’s recipe for successful living.
“In the matter of environment, congenial surroundings means spontaneous action. Yet lack of harmony may stimulate: pastoral poetry and landscape painting are the work of men weary of towns. Both town stimulus and country composure have corresponding values. Many realistic and introspective writers agree with Poe that circumscription of space aids concentration of attention: Pope worked best in his grotto, Montaigne in his tower, and many great books have been written in prisons. Many romanticists and philosophers, on the other hand, prefer wide views from hills or mountains, or to be beside or upon the sea. There are similar differences with regard to tidiness or disorder among scholarly paraphernalia and personal belongings. Both efficiency and happiness depend upon a nice individual balance of habit and variety, freedom and restraint. Flaubert used the same study for forty years, and Lecky could think only when perfectly tranquil; but William Morris and Anthony Trollope liked to write on railway trains.
“As for mental society or solitude, there has been, as Edmund Gosse puts it, ‘a strong sentiment of intellectual comradeship in every age of real intellectual vitality.’ Philip Gilbert Hamerton was probably right in saying that intellectual traditions persist more through coteries than through books. Some general society is necessary to cultivate tolerance and sympathy. One must also come to some adjustment with democracy—its freedom and unrest, its ideal foundation and materialistic structure, its lack of prejudice and its inexperience—we cannot rest in Socrates’ opinion that the majority is merely a heap of bad pennies. After the demands of social service are arranged for, however, the intellect must look through and beyond popular standards, and purchase independence at whatever cost. Much seclusion is essential for knowledge, some solitude for wisdom. Both independence and sympathy are attained through an inner circle of select companions, kept in what Dr. Johnson called repair, by Emerson’s plan of allowing the less interested to fall away and be replaced by choice additions.
“Mental health, moreover, demands some conscious agreement with one’s income, and some mastery of expenditure. Too much money is as bad as too little. A generous amount insures free activity and rich material, but it relaxes determination and demands discrimination. Wealth is essential for works of great accumulation in history, or of fine appreciation in the arts. But humanists appear to be none the worse for poverty—Cervantes was a public letter-writer, and his family took in washing. It is well, in any case, to learn with Socrates how many things one does not need, and to remember that there are uses even for adversity.
“From physical foundation and social setting we approach personality:—that something peculiarly our own which, in the words of Petrarch, ‘it is both easier and wiser to cultivate and to correct than to alter;’ that something within us which, in the words of Emerson, ‘accepts and disposes of impressions after a native, individual law.’ We grow in wisdom as we grow in the knowledge of such inner laws. They are fundamental and inevitable. They control mental life and are not to be controlled save through much self-realization. Is a man instinctively active, or does he love contemplation and the forsaking of works? Is he single-minded, identified with his occupation, or does he work merely for bread and live, for himself alone, in some dear avocation? The single-minded may look forward to the perfection that comes from practice—and toward becoming subdued to what he works in. Hence Charles Lamb on the melancholy of tailors and Dr. Robertson Nicoll on Matthew Arnold as ever the inspector of schools. Other men show their spontaneity and genuineness in their avocations—witness Michael Angelo’s sonnets and Victor Hugo’s sketches. Little intentional literature has charmed the world like the amateur quatrains of Omar the astronomer, translated by Fitzgerald the dilettante.
“Is a man an idealist or a realist? Let him ponder Don Quixote’s impracticality and Sancho Panza’s aimlessness, following inner impulse or outward stimulus, denying the world or losing his own soul. Let him ponder, moreover, Rembrandt’s struggle to serve both at the same time. The pitfalls of the realist are proverbial, but ideals, also, may be dangerous, through mistaken selection, partial generalization, or imperfect adjustment to the facts in hand.
“What, again, are our innate or acquired interests and desires? Does their vision of the future help or hinder our realization of the present? Do we aspire after the impossible, expecting precision or clarity, brevity or completeness, where they cannot or should not be? Do we apprehend the unlikely? ‘If anything external vexes you,’ says Marcus Aurelius, ‘take notice that it is not the thing which disturbs you, but your notion about it, which notion you may dismiss at once if you please.’ Disappointment, says Dr. Johnson, ‘you may easily compensate by enjoining yourself some particular study, or opening some new avenue to information.’ If we cannot attain, like Lamb, to hissing our failures, let us, like La Motte, retire to a Trappist monastery, and drown consciousness in study. Let us not expect ideal conditions—Spencer and Huxley could work but three hours a day. Let us look, if necessary, to our compensations. Napoleon had satisfactions in spite of his standing forty-second at military school. Darwin’s inability to master languages and his loss of pleasure in poetry, painting, music, and natural scenery were more than made up for. Let us hope for no ‘simple, plausible, easy solution of life that will free us from all responsibility;’ but endeavor to apprehend and ennoble our practical religion, that scale of values according to which we spend our hoard of life.
“Mental action varies with individuals, yet Emerson’s general statement is true—‘thought is a kind of reception uncontrolled by will; we can only open our senses and clear away obstructions; suddenly thought engages us; afterward we remember the process and its results.’ Attention, however, may be led, if not driven; sensibility may become dirigible; it is possible to learn how to keep a fresh eye. Observation of our reactions will make possible a wise selection among stimuli; so Gray learned to seek music, Darwin to avoid it, and many have come to some conscious relation between reading and writing. Experience will teach us how to free the mind from haunting suggestions by fixing and holding their values; how to recollect emotion in tranquillity; how to begin work slowly, and steadily, and then accelerate; how to value the process as well as the product of acquisition. We may learn, through the slowness of accumulation, that we retain only what we use, that a bad memory may be the best, because selective, that even leisure may be well employed. ‘Whatever I do or do not do,’ said Sainte-Beuve, ‘I cease not to learn from the book of life.’ Lope de Vega, sailing with the Armada, sacrificed all his manuscripts for gun-wads, but landed with eleven thousand new verses.