The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Amongst the favorable influences of my early life was the kindness of a venerable country gentleman, who had seen a great deal of the world and passed many years, before he inherited his estates, in the practice of a laborious profession. I remember a theory of his, that experience was much less valuable than is generally supposed, because, except in matters of simple routine, the problems that present themselves to us for solution are nearly always dangerous from the presence of some unknown element. The unknown element he regarded as a hidden pitfall, and he warned me that in my progress through life I might always expect to tumble into it. This saying of his has been so often confirmed since then, that I now count upon the pitfall quite as a matter of certainty. Very frequently I have escaped it, but more by good luck than good management. Sometimes I have tumbled into it, and when this misfortune occurred it has not unfrequently been in consequence of having acted upon the advice of some very knowing and experienced person indeed. We have all read, when we were boys, Captain Marryat’s “Midshipman Easy.” There is a passage in that story which may serve as an illustration of what is constantly happening in actual life. The boats of the Harpy were ordered to board one of the enemy’s vessels; young Easy was in command of one of these boats, and as they had to wait he began to fish. After they had received the order to advance, he delayed a little to catch his fish, and this delay not only saved him from being sunk by the enemy’s broadside, but enabled him to board the Frenchman. Here the pitfall was avoided by idling away a minute of time on an occasion when minutes were like hours; yet it was mere luck, not wisdom, which led to the good result. There was a sad railway accident on one of the continental lines last autumn; a notable personage would have been in the train if he had arrived in time for it, but his miscalculation saved him. In matters where there is no risk of the loss of life, but only of the waste of a portion of it in unprofitable employment, it frequently happens that procrastination, which is reputed to be the thief of time, becomes its best preserver. Suppose that you undertake an enterprise, but defer the execution of it from day to day: it is quite possible that in the interval some fact may accidentally come to your knowledge which would cause a great modification of your plan, or even its complete abandonment. Every thinking person is well aware that the enormous loss of time caused by the friction of our legislative machinery has preserved the country from a great deal of crude and ill-digested legislation. Even Napoleon the Great who had a rapidity of conception and of action so far surpassing that of other kings and commanders that it seems to us almost supernatural, said that when you did not quite know what ought to be done it was best to do nothing at all. One of the most distinguished of living painters said exactly the same thing with reference to the practice of his art, and added that very little time would be needed for the actual execution of a picture if only the artist knew beforehand how and where to lay the color. It so often happens that mere activity is a waste of time, that people who have a morbid habit of being busy are often terrible time-wasters, whilst, on the contrary, those who are judiciously deliberate, and allow themselves intervals of leisure, see the way before them in those intervals, and save time by the accuracy of their calculations.

A largely intelligent thrift of time is necessary to all great works—and many works are very great indeed relatively to the energies of a single individual, which pass unperceived in the tumult of the world. The advantages of calculating time are artistic as well as economical. I think that, in this respect, magnificent as are the cathedrals which the Gothic builders have left us, they committed an artistic error in the very immensity of their plans. They do not appear to have reflected that from the continual changes of fashion in architecture, incongruous work would be sure to intrude itself before their gigantic projects could be realized by the generations that were to succeed them. For a work of that kind to possess artistic unity, it ought to be completely realized within the space of forty years. How great is the charm of those perfect edifices which, like the Sainte Chapelle, are the realization of one sublime idea? And those changes in national thought which have made the old cathedrals a jumble of incongruous styles, have their parallel in the life of every individual workman. We change from year to year, and any work which occupies us for very long will be wanting in unity of manner.

Men are apt enough of themselves to fall into the most astonishing delusions about the opportunities which time affords, but they are even more deluded by the talk of the people about them. When children hear that a new carriage has been ordered of the builder, they expect to see it driven up to the door in a fortnight, with the paint quite dry on the panels. All people are children in this respect, except the workman, who knows the endless details of production; and the workman himself, notwithstanding the lessons of experience, makes light of the future task. What gigantic plans we scheme, and how little we advance in the labor of a day! Three pages of the book (to be half erased to-morrow), a bit of drapery in the picture that will probably have to be done over again, the imperceptible removal of an ounce of marble-dust from the statue that seems as if it never would be finished; so much from dawn to twilight has been the accomplishment of the golden hours. If there is one lesson which experience teaches, surely it is this, to make plans that are strictly limited, and to arrange our work in a practicable way within the limits that we must accept. Others expect so much from us that it seems as if we had accomplished nothing. “What! have you done only that?” they say, or we know by their looks that they are thinking it.

The most illusory of all the work that we propose to ourselves is reading. It seems so easy to read, that we intend, in the indefinite future, to master the vastest literatures. We cannot bring ourselves to admit that the library we have collected is in great part closed to us simply by want of time. A dear friend of mine, who was a solicitor with a large practice, indulged in wonderful illusions about reading, and collected several thousand volumes, all fine editions, but he died without having cut their leaves. I like the university habit of making reading a business, and estimating the mastery of a few authors as a just title to consideration for scholarship. I should like very well to be shut up in a garden for a whole summer with no literature but the “Faëry Queene,” and one year I very nearly realized that project, but publishers and the postman interfered with it. After all, this business of reading ought to be less illusory than most others, for printers divide books into pages, which they number, so that, with a moderate skill in arithmetic, one ought to be able to foresee the limits of his possibilities. There is another observation which may be suggested, and that is to take note of the time required for reading different languages. We read very slowly when the language is imperfectly mastered, and we need the dictionary, whereas in the native tongue we see the whole page almost at a glance, as if it were a picture. People whose time for reading is limited ought not to waste it in grammars and dictionaries, but to confine themselves resolutely to a couple of languages, or three at the very utmost, notwithstanding the contempt of polyglots, who estimate your learning by the variety of your tongues. It is a fearful throwing away of time, from the literary point of view, to begin more languages than you can master or retain, and to be always puzzling yourself about irregular verbs.

All plans for sparing time in intellectual matters ought, however, to proceed upon the principle of thrift, and not upon the principle of avarice. The object of the thrifty man in money matters is so to lay out his money as to get the best possible result from his expenditure; the object of the avaricious man is to spend no more money than he can help. An artist who taught me painting often repeated a piece of advice which is valuable in other things than art, and which I try to remember whenever patience fails. He used to say to me, “Give it time.” The mere length of time that we bestow upon our work is in itself a most important element of success, and if I object to the use of languages that we only half know, it is not because it takes us a long time to get through a chapter, but because we are compelled to think about syntax and conjugations which did not in the least occupy the mind of the author, when we ought rather to be thinking about those things which did occupy his mind, about the events which he narrated, or the characters that he imagined or described. There are, in truth, only two ways of impressing anything on the memory, either intensity or duration. If you saw a man struck down by an assassin, you would remember the occurrence all your life; but to remember with equal vividness a picture of the assassination, you would probably be obliged to spend a month or two in copying it. The subjects of our studies rarely produce an intensity of emotion sufficient to ensure perfect recollection without the expenditure of time. And when your object is not to learn, but to produce, it is well to bear in mind that everything requires a certain definite time-outlay, which cannot be reduced without an inevitable injury to quality. A most experienced artist, a man of the very rarest executive ability, wrote to me the other day about a set of designs I had suggested. “If I could but get the TIME,”—the large capitals are his own,—“for, somehow or other, let a design be never so studiously simple in the masses, it will fill itself as it goes on, like the weasel in the fable who got into the meal-tub; and when the pleasure begins in attempting tone and mystery and intricacy, away go the hours at a gallop.” A well-known and very successful English dramatist wrote to me: “When I am hurried, and have undertaken more work than I can execute in the time at my disposal, I am always perfectly paralyzed.”

There is another side to this subject which deserves attention. Some men work best under the sense of pressure. Simple compression evolves heat from iron, so that there is a flash of fire when a ball hits the side of an ironclad. The same law seems to hold good in the intellectual life of man, whenever he needs the stimulus of extraordinary excitement. Rossini positively advised a young composer never to write his overture until the evening before the first performance. “Nothing,” he said, “excites inspiration like necessity; the presence of a copyist waiting for your work, and the view of a manager in despair tearing out his hair by handfuls. In Italy in my time all the managers were bald at thirty. I composed the overture to ‘Othello’ in a small room in the Barbaja Palace, where the baldest and most ferocious of managers had shut me up by force with nothing but a dish of maccaroni, and the threat that I should not leave the place alive until I had written the last note. I wrote the overture to the ‘Gazza Ladra’ on the day of the first performance, in the upper loft of the La Scala, where I had been confined by the manager, under the guard of four scene-shifters who had orders to throw my text out of the window bit by bit to copyists, who were waiting below to transcribe it. In default of music I was to be thrown out myself.”

I have quoted the best instance known to me of this voluntary seeking after pressure, but striking as it is, even this instance does not weaken what I said before. For observe, that although Rossini deferred the composition of his overture till the evening before the first performance, he knew very well that he could do it thoroughly in the time. He was like a clever schoolboy who knows that he can learn his lesson in the quarter of an hour before the class begins; or he was like an orator who knows that he can deliver a passage and compose at the same time the one which is to follow, so that he prefers to arrange his speech in the presence of his audience. Since Rossini always allowed himself all the time that was necessary for what he had to do, it is clear that he did not sin against the great time-necessity. The express which can travel from London to Edinburgh in a night may leave the English metropolis on Saturday evening although it is due in Scotland on Sunday, and still act with the strictest consideration about time. The blameable error lies in miscalculation, and not in rapidity of performance.

Nothing wastes time like miscalculation. It negatives all results. It is the parent of incompleteness, the great author of the Unfinished and the Unserviceable. Almost every intellectual man has laid out great masses of time on five or six different branches of knowledge which are not of the least use to him, simply because he has not carried them far enough, and could not carry them far enough in the time he had to give. Yet this might have been ascertained at the beginning by the simplest arithmetical calculation. The experience of students in all departments of knowledge has quite definitely ascertained the amount of time that is necessary for success in them, and the successful student can at once inform the aspirant how far he is likely to travel along the road. What is the use, to anybody, of having just enough skill to feel vexed with himself that he has no more, and yet angry at other people for not admiring the little that he possesses?

I wish to direct your attention to a cause which more than any other produces disappointment in ordinary intellectual pursuits. It is this. People can often calculate with the utmost accuracy what they can accomplish in ten minutes or even in ten hours, and yet the very same persons will make the most absurd miscalculations about what they can accomplish in ten years. There is of course a reason for this: if there were not, so many sensible people would not suffer from the delusion. The reason is, that owing to the habits of human life there is a certain elasticity in large spaces of time that include nights, and mealtimes, and holidays. We fancy that we shall be able, by working harder than we have been accustomed to work, and by stealing hours from all the different kinds of rest and amusement, to accomplish far more in the ten years that are to come than we have ever actually accomplished in the same space. And to a certain extent this may be very true. No doubt a man whose mind has become seriously aware of the vast importance of economizing his time will economize it better than he did in the days before the new conviction came to him. No doubt, after skill in our work has been confirmed, we shall perform it with increased speed. But the elasticity of time is rather that of leather than that of india-rubber. There is certainly a degree of elasticity, but the degree is strictly limited. The true master of time-thrift would be no more liable to illusion about years than about hours, and would act as prudently when working for remote results as for near ones.

Not that we ought to work as if we were always under severe pressure. Little books are occasionally published in which we are told that it is a sin to lose a minute. From the intellectual point of view this doctrine is simply stupid. What the Philistines call wasted time is often rich in the most varied experience to the intelligent. If all that we have learned in idle moments could be suddenly expelled from our minds by some chemical process, it is probable that they would be worth very little afterwards. What, after such a process, would have remained to Shakespeare, Scott, Cervantes, Thackeray, Dickens, Hogarth, Goldsmith, Molière? When these great students of human nature were learning most, the sort of people who write the foolish little books just alluded to would have wanted to send them home to the dictionary or the desk. Töpffer and Claude Tillier, both men of delicate and observant genius, attached the greatest importance to hours of idleness. Töpffer said that a year of downright loitering was a desirable element in a liberal education; whilst Claude Tillier went even farther, and boldly affirmed that “le temps le mieux employé est celui que l’on perd.”