The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

LETTER V.

TO A FRIEND WHO, THOUGH HE HAD NO PROFESSION, COULD NOT FIND TIME FOR HIS VARIOUS INTELLECTUAL PURSUITS.

Compensations resulting from the necessity for time—Opportunity only exists for us so far as we have time to make use of it—This or that, not this and that—Danger of apparently unlimited opportunities—The intellectual training of our ancestors—Montaigne the Essayist—Reliance upon the compensations.

It has always seemed to me that the great and beautiful principle of compensation is more clearly seen in the distribution and effects of time than in anything else within the scope of our experience. The good use of one opportunity very frequently compensates us for the absence of another, and it does so because opportunity is itself so dependent upon time that, although the best opportunities may apparently be presented to us, we can make no use of them unless we are able to give them the time that they require. You, who have the best possible opportunities for culture, find a certain sadness and disappointment because you cannot avail yourself of all of them; but the truth is, that opportunity only exists for us just so far as we are able to make use of it, and our power to do so is often nothing but a question of time. If our days are well employed we are sure to have done some good thing which we should have been compelled to neglect if we had been occupied about anything else. Hence every genuine worker has rich compensations which ought to console him amply for his shortcomings, and to enable him to meet comparisons without fear.

Those who aspire to the intellectual life, but have no experience of its difficulties, very frequently envy men so favorably situated as you are. It seems to them that all the world’s knowledge is accessible to you, and that you have simply to cull its fruits as we gather grapes in a vineyard. They forget the power of Time, and the restrictions which Time imposes. “This or that, not this and that,” is the rule to which all of us have to submit, and it strangely equalizes the destinies of men. The time given to the study of one thing is withdrawn from the study of another, and the hours of the day are limited alike for all of us. How difficult it is to reconcile the interests of our different pursuits! Indeed it seems like a sort of polygamy to have different pursuits. It is natural to think of them as jealous wives tormenting some Mormon prophet.

There is great danger in apparently unlimited opportunities, and a splendid compensation for those who are confined by circumstances to a narrow but fruitful field. The Englishman gets more civilization out of a farm and a garden than the Red Indian out of the space encircled by his horizon. Our culture gains in thoroughness what it loses in extent.

This consideration goes far to explain the fact that although our ancestors were so much less favorably situated than we are, they often got as good an intellectual training from the literature that was accessible to them, as we from our vaster stores. We live in an age of essayists, and yet what modern essayist writes better than old Montaigne? All that a thoughtful and witty writer needs for the sharpening of his intellect, Montaigne found in the ancient literature that was accessible to him, and in the life of the age he lived in. Born in our own century, he would have learned many other things, no doubt, and read many other books, but these would have absorbed the hours that he employed not less fruitfully with the authors that he loved in the little library up in the third story of his tower, as he tells us, where he could see all his books at once, set upon five rows of shelves round about him. In earlier life he bought “this sort of furniture” for “ornament and outward show,” but afterwards quite abandoned that, and procured such volumes only “as supplied his own need.”

To supply our own need, within the narrow limits of the few and transient hours that we can call our own, is enough for the wise everywhere, as it was for Montaigne in his tower. Let us resolve to do as much as that, not more, and then rely upon the golden compensations.

Note.—“Supposing that the executive and critical powers always exist in some correspondent degree in the same person, still they cannot be cultivated to the same extent. The attention required for the development of a theory is necessarily withdrawn from the design of a drawing, and the time devoted to the realization of a form is lost to the solution of a problem.”—Mr. Ruskin, in the preface to the third volume of “Modern Painters.”

In the case of Mr. Ruskin, in that of Mr. Dante Rossetti, and in all cases where the literary and artistic gifts are naturally pretty evenly balanced, the preponderance of an hour a day given to one or the other class of studies may have settled the question whether the student was to be chiefly artist or chiefly author. The enormous importance of the distribution of time is never more clearly manifested than in cases of this kind. Mr. Ruskin might certainly have attained rank as a painter, Rossetti might have been as prolific in poetry as he is excellent. What these gifted men are now is not so much a question of talent as of time. In like manner the question whether Ingres was to be known as a painter or as a violinist was settled by the employment of hours rather than by any preponderance of faculty.