The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Now I believe it may be affirmed, that although there has been much literature in former ages which was both vigorous and undisciplined, still when an age presents, as ours does, living examples of perfect intellectual discipline, whoever falls below them in this respect contents himself with the very kind of inferiority which of all inferiorities is the easiest to avoid. You cannot, by an effort of the will, hope to rival the brilliance of a genius, but you may quite reasonably expect to obtain as complete a control over your own faculties and your own work as any other highly-cultivated person.

The origin of discipline is the desire to do not merely our best with the degree of power and knowledge which at the time we do actually happen to possess, but with that which we might possess if we submitted to the necessary training. The powers given to us by Nature are little more than a power to become, and this becoming is always conditional on some sort of exercise—what sort we have to discover for ourselves.

No class of persons are so liable to overlook the uses of discipline as authors are. Anybody can write a book, though few can write that which deserves the name of literature. There are great technical differences between literature and book-making, but few can clearly explain these differences, or detect, in their own case, the absence of the necessary qualities. In painting, the most perfect finish is recognized at a glance, but the mind only can perceive it in the book. It was an odd notion of the authorities to exhibit literature in the international exhibitions; but if they could have made people see the difference between sound and unsound workmanship in the literary craft, they would have rendered a great service to the higher intellectual discipline. Sir Arthur Helps might have served as an example to English writers, because he has certain qualities in which we are grievously deficient. He can say a thing in the words that are most fit and necessary, and then leave it. Sainte-Beuve would have been another admirable example of self-discipline, especially to Frenchmen, who would do well to imitate him in his horror of the á peu près. He never began to write about anything until he had cleared the ground well before him. He never spoke about any character or doctrine that he had not bottomed (to use Locke’s word) as far as he was able. He had an extraordinary aptitude for collecting exactly the sort of material that he needed, for arranging and classifying material, for perceiving its mutual relations. Very few Frenchmen have had Sainte-Beuve’s intense repugnance to insufficiency of information and inaccuracy of language. Few indeed are the French journalists of whom it might be said, as it may be truly said of Sainte-Beuve, that he never wrote even an article for a newspaper without having subjected his mind to a special training for that particular article. The preparations for one of his Lundis were the serious occupation of several laborious days; and before beginning the actual composition, his mind had been disciplined into a state of the most complete readiness, like the fingers of a musician who has been practising a piece before he executes it.

The object of intellectual discipline is the establishment of a strong central authority in the mind by which all its powers are regulated and directed as the military forces of a nation are directed by the strategist who arranges the operations of a war. The presence of this strong central authority is made manifest in the unity and proportion of the results; when this authority is absent (it is frequently entirely absent from the minds of undisciplined persons, especially of the female sex), you have a chaos of complete confusion; when the authority without being absent is not strong enough to regulate the lively activity of the intellectual forces, you have too much energy in one direction, too little in another, a brigade where a regiment could have done the work, and light artillery where you want guns of the heaviest calibre.

To establish this central authority it is only necessary, in any vigorous and sound mind, to exercise it. Without such a central power there is neither liberty of action nor security of possession. “The mind,” says Locke, “should always be free and ready to turn itself to the variety of objects that occur, and allow them as much consideration as shall, for that time, be thought fit. To be engrossed so by one subject as not to be prevailed on to leave it for another that we judge fitter for our contemplation, is to make it of no use to us. Did this state of mind always remain so, every one would, without scruple, give it the name of perfect madness; and whilst it does last, at whatever intervals it returns, such a rotation of thoughts about the same object no more carries us forward toward the attainment of knowledge, than getting upon a mill-horse whilst he jogs on his circular track, would carry a man on a journey.”

Writers of imaginative literature have found in practice that even the creative faculty might be commanded. Charles Baudelaire, who had the poetical organization with all its worst inconveniencies, said nevertheless that “inspiration is decidedly the sister of daily labor. These two contraries do not exclude each other more than all the other contraries which constitute nature. Inspiration obeys like hunger, like digestion, like sleep. There is, no doubt, in the mind a sort of celestial mechanism, of which we need not be ashamed, but we ought to make the best use of it. If we will only live in a resolute contemplation of next day’s work, the daily labor will serve inspiration.” In cases where discipline is felt to be very difficult, it is generally at the same time felt to be very desirable. George Sand complains that although “to overcome the indiscipline of her brain, she had imposed upon herself a regular way of living, and a daily labor, still twenty times out of thirty she catches herself reading or dreaming, or writing something entirely apart from the work in hand.” She adds that without this frequent intellectual flânerie, she would have acquired information which has been her perpetual but unrealized desire.

It is the triumph of discipline to overcome both small and great repugnances. We bring ourselves, by its help, to face petty details that are wearisome, and heavy tasks that are almost appalling. Nothing shows the power of discipline more than the application of the mind in the common trades and professions to subjects which have hardly any interest in themselves. Lawyers are especially admirable for this. They acquire the faculty of resolutely applying their minds to the dryest documents, with tenacity enough to end in the perfect mastery of their contents; a feat which is utterly beyond the capacity of any undisciplined intellect, however gifted by Nature. In the case of lawyers there are frequent intellectual repugnances to be overcome; but surgeons and other men of science have to vanquish a class of repugnances even less within the power of the will—the instinctive physical repugnances. These are often so strong as to seem apparently insurmountable, but they yield to persevering discipline. Although Haller surpassed his contemporaries in anatomy, and published several important anatomical works, he was troubled at the outset with a horror of dissection beyond what is usual with the inexperienced, and it was only by firm self-discipline that he became an anatomist at all.

There is, however, one reserve to be made about discipline, which is this: We ought not to disregard altogether the mind’s preferences and refusals, because in most cases they are the indication of our natural powers. They are not so always; many have felt attracted to pursuits for which they had no capacity (this happens continually in literature and the fine arts), whilst others have greatly distinguished themselves in careers which were not of their own choosing, and for which they felt no vocation in their youth. Still there exists a certain relation between preference and capacity, which may often safely be relied upon when there are not extrinsic circumstances to attract men or repel them. Discipline becomes an evil, and a very serious evil, causing immense losses of special talents to the community, when it overrides the personal preferences entirely. We are less in danger of this evil, however, from the discipline which we impose upon ourselves than from that which is imposed upon us by the opinion of the society in which we live. The intellectual life has this remarkable peculiarity as to discipline, that whilst very severe discipline is indispensable to it, that which it really needs is the obedience to an inward law, an obedience which is not only compatible with revolt against other people’s notions of what the intellectual man ought to think and do, but which often directly leads to such revolt as its own inevitable result.

In the attempt to subject ourselves to the inward law, we may encounter a class of mental refusals which indicate no congenital incapacity, but prove that the mind has been incapacitated by its acquired habits and its ordinary occupations. I think that it is particularly important to pay attention to this class of mental refusals, and to give them the fullest consideration. Suppose the case of a man who has a fine natural capacity for painting, but whose time has been taken up by some profession which has formed in him mental habits entirely different from the mental habits of an artist. The inborn capacity for art might whisper to this man, “What if you were to abandon your profession and turn painter?” But to this suggestion of the inborn capacity the acquired unfitness would, in a man of sense, most probably reply, “No; painting is an art bristling all over with the most alarming technical difficulties, which I am too lazy to overcome; let younger men attack them if they like.” Here is a mental refusal of a kind which the severest self-disciplinarian ought to listen to. This is Nature’s way of keeping us to our specialities; she protects us by means of what superficial moralists condemn as one of the minor vices—the disinclination to trouble ourselves without necessity, when the work involves the acquisition of new habits.

The moral basis of the intellectual life appears to be the idea of discipline; but the discipline is of a very peculiar kind, and varies with every individual. People of original power have to discover the original discipline that they need. They pass their lives in thoughtfully altering this private rule of conduct as their needs alter, as the legislature of a progressive State makes unceasing alterations in its laws. When we look back upon the years that are gone, this is our bitterest regret, that whilst the precious time, the irrecoverable, was passing by so rapidly, we were intellectually too undisciplined to make the best personal use of all the opportunities that it brought. Those men may be truly esteemed happy and fortunate who can say to themselves in the evening of their days—“I had so prepared myself for every successive enterprise, that when the time came for it to be carried into execution my training ensured success.”