The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

It may be accepted for certain, to begin with, that men who like yourself seriously care for culture, and make it, next to moral duty, the principal object of their lives, are but little exposed to waste time in downright frivolity of any kind. You may be perfectly idle at your own times, and perfectly frivolous even, whenever you have a mind to be frivolous, but then you will be clearly aware how the time is passing, and you will throw it away knowingly, as the most careful of money-economists will throw away a few sovereigns in a confessedly foolish amusement, merely for the relief of a break in the habit of his life. To a man of your tastes and temper there is no danger of wasting too much time so long as the waste is intentional; but you are exposed to time-losses of a much more insidious character.

It is in our pursuits themselves that we throw away our most valuable time. Few intellectual men have the art of economizing the hours of study. The very necessity, which every one acknowledges, of giving vast portions of life to attain proficiency in anything makes us prodigal where we ought to be parsimonious, and careless where we have need of unceasing vigilance. The best time-savers are the love of soundness in all we learn or do, and a cheerful acceptance of inevitable limitations. There is a certain point of proficiency at which an acquisition begins to be of use, and unless we have the time and resolution necessary to reach that point, our labor is as completely thrown away as that of a mechanic who began to make an engine but never finished it. Each of us has acquisitions which remain permanently unavailable from their unsoundness, a language or two that we can neither speak nor write, a science of which the elements have not been mastered, an art which we cannot practice with satisfaction either to others or to ourselves. Now the time spent on these unsound accomplishments has been in great measure wasted, not quite absolutely wasted, since the mere labor of trying to learn has been a discipline for the mind, but wasted so far as the accomplishments themselves are concerned. And even this mental discipline, on which so much stress is laid by those whose interest it is to encourage unsound accomplishment, might be obtained more perfectly if the subjects of study were less numerous and more thoroughly understood. Let us not therefore in the studies of our maturity repeat the error of our youth. Let us determine to have soundness, that is, accurately organized knowledge in the studies we continue to pursue, and let us resign ourselves to the necessity for abandoning those pursuits in which soundness is not to be hoped for.

The old-fashioned idea about scholarship in Latin and Greek, that it ought to be based upon thorough grammatical knowledge, is a good example, so far as it goes, of what soundness really is. That ideal of scholarship failed only because it fell short of soundness in other directions and was not conscious of its failure. But there existed, in the minds of the old scholars, a fine resolution to be accurate, and a determination to give however much labor might be necessary for the attainment of accuracy, in which there was much grandeur. Like Mr. Browning’s Grammarian, they said—

“Let me know all! Prate not of most or least Painful or easy!”

and so at least they came to know the ancient tongues grammatically, which few of us do in these days.

I should define each kind of knowledge as an organic whole and soundness as the complete possession of all the essential parts. For example, soundness in violin-playing consists in being able to play the notes in all the positions, in tune, and with a pure intonation, whatever may be the degree of rapidity indicated by the musical composer. Soundness in painting consists in being able to lay a patch of color having exactly the right shape and tint. Soundness in the use of language consists in being able to put the right word in the right place. In each of the sciences, there are certain elementary notions without which sound knowledge is not possible, but these elementary notions are more easily and rapidly acquired than the elaborate knowledge or confirmed skill necessary to the artist or the linguist. A man may be a sound botanist without knowing a very great number of plants, and the elements of sound botanical knowledge may be printed in a portable volume. And so it is with all the physical sciences; the elementary notions which are necessary to soundness of knowledge may be acquired rapidly and at any age. Hence it follows that all whose leisure for culture is limited, and who value soundness of knowledge, do wisely to pursue some branch of natural history rather than languages or the fine arts.

It is well for every one who desires to attain a perfect economy of time, to make a list of the different pursuits to which he has devoted himself, and to put a note opposite to each of them indicating the degree of its unsoundness with as little self-delusion as may be. After having done this, he may easily ascertain in how many of these pursuits a sufficient degree of soundness is attainable for him, and when this has been decided he may at once effect a great saving by the total renunciation of the rest. With regard to those which remain, and which are to be carried farther, the next thing to be settled is the exact limit of their cultivation. Nothing is so favorable to sound culture as the definite fixing of limits. Suppose, for example, that the student said to himself “I desire to know the flora of the valley I live in,” and then set to work systematically to make a herbarium illustrating that flora, it is probable that his labor would be more thorough, his temper more watchful and hopeful, than if he set himself to the boundless task of the illimitable flora of the world. Or in the pursuit of fine art, an amateur discouraged by the glaring unsoundness of the kind of art taught by ordinary drawing-masters, would find the basis of a more substantial superstructure on a narrower but firmer ground. Suppose that instead of the usual messes of bad color and bad form, the student produced work having some definite and not unattainable purpose, would there not be, here also, an assured economy of time? Accurate drawing is the basis of soundness in the fine arts, and an amateur, by perseverance, may reach accuracy in drawing; this, at least, has been proved by some examples—not by many, certainly, but by some. In languages we may have a limited purpose also. That charming and most intelligent traveller, Louis Énault, tells us that he regularly gave a week to the study of each new language that he needed, and found that week sufficient. The assertion is not so presumptuous as it appears. For the practical necessities of travelling M. Énault found that he required about four hundred words, and that, having a good memory, he was able to learn about seventy words a day. The secret of his success was the invaluable art of selection, and the strict limitation of effort in accordance with a preconceived design. A traveller not so well skilled in selection might have learned a thousand words with less advantage to his travels, and a traveller less decided in purpose might have wasted several months on the frontier of every new country in hopeless efforts to master the intricacies of grammatical form. It is evident that in the strictest sense M. Énault’s knowledge of Norwegian cannot have been sound, since he did not master the grammar, but it was sound in its own strictly limited way, since he got possession of the four hundred words which were to serve him as current coin. On the same principle it is a good plan for students of Latin and Greek who have not time to reach true scholarship (half a lifetime is necessary for that), to propose to themselves simply the reading of the original authors with the help of a literal translation. In this way they may attain a closer acquaintance with ancient literature than would be possible by translation alone, whilst on the other hand their reading will be much more extensive on account of its greater rapidity. It is, for most of us, a waste of time to read Latin and Greek without a translation, on account of the comparative slowness of the process; but it is always an advantage to know what was really said in the original, and to test the exactness of the translator by continual reference to the ipsissima verba of the author. When the knowledge of the ancient language is not sufficient even for this, it may still be of use for occasional comparison, even though the passage has to be fought through à coupes de dictionnaire. What most of us need in reference to the ancient languages is a frank resignation to a restriction of some kind. It is simply impossible for men occupied as most of us are in other pursuits to reach perfect scholarship in those languages, and if we reached it we should not have time to maintain it.

In modern languages it is not so easy to fix limits satisfactorily. You may resolve to read French or German without either writing or speaking them, and that would be an effectual limit, certainly. But in practice it is found difficult to keep within that boundary if ever you travel or have intercourse with foreigners. And when once you begin to speak, it is so humiliating to speak badly, that a lover of soundness in accomplishment will never rest perfectly satisfied until he speaks like a cultivated native, which nobody ever did except under peculiar family conditions.

In music the limits are found more easily. The amateur musician is frequently not inferior in feeling and taste to the more accomplished professional, and by selecting those compositions which require much feeling and taste for their interpretation, but not so much manual skill, he may reach a sufficient success. The art is to choose the very simplest music (provided of course that it is beautiful, which it frequently is), and to avoid all technical difficulties which are not really necessary to the expression of feeling. The amateur ought also to select the easiest instrument, an instrument in which the notes are made for him already, rather than one which compels him to fix the notes as he is playing. The violin tempts amateurs who have a deep feeling for music because it renders feeling as no other instrument can render it, but the difficulty of just intonation is almost insuperable unless the whole time is given to that one instrument. It is a fatal error to perform on several different instruments, and an amateur who has done so may find a desirable limitation in restricting himself to one.

Much time is saved by following pursuits which help each other. It is a great help to a landscape painter to know the botany of the country he works in, for botany gives the greatest possible distinctness to his memory of all kinds of vegetation. Therefore, if a landscape painter takes to the study of science at all, he would do well to study botany, which would be of use in his painting, rather than chemistry or mathematics, which would be entirely disconnected from it. The memory easily retains the studies which are auxiliary to the chief pursuit. Entomologists remember plants well, the reason being that they find insects in them, just as Leslie the painter had an excellent memory for houses where there were any good pictures to be found.