The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

The liberal and illiberal spirit of aristocracy—The desire to draw a line—Substitution of external limitations for realities—The high life of nature—Value of gentlemen in a State—Odiousness of the narrow class-spirit—Julian Fane—Perfect knighthood—Democracies intolerant of dignity—Tendency of democracies to fix one uniform type of manners—That type not a high one—A descriptive anecdote—Knowledge and taste reveal themselves in manners—Dr. Arnold on the absence of gentlemen in France and Italy—Absence of a class with traditional good manners—Language defiled by the vulgarity of popular taste—Influence of aristocratic opinion limited, that of democratic opinion universal—Want of elevation in the French bourgeoisie—Spirit of the provincial democracy—Spirit of the Parisian democracy—Sentiments and acts of the Communards—Romantic feeling towards the past—Hopes for liberal culture in the democratic idea—Aristocracies think too much of persons and positions—That we ought to forget persons and apply our minds to things, and phenomena, and ideas.

All you say against the narrowness of the aristocratic spirit is true and to the point; but I think that you and your party are apt to confound together two states of feeling which are essentially distinct from each other. There is an illiberal spirit of aristocracy, and there is also a liberal one. The illiberal spirit does not desire to improve itself, having a full and firm belief in its own absolute perfection; its sole anxiety is to exclude others, to draw a circular line, the smaller the better, provided always that it gets inside and can keep the millions out. We see this spirit, not only in reference to birth, but in even fuller activity with regard to education and employment—in the preference for certain schools and colleges, for class reasons, without regard to the quality of the teaching—in the contempt for all professions but two or three, without regard to the inherent baseness or nobility of the work that has to be done in them: so that the question asked by persons of this temper is not whether a man has been well trained in his youth, but if he has been to Eton and Oxford; not whether he is honorably laborious in his manhood, but whether he belongs to the Bar, or the Army, or the Church. This spirit is evil in its influence, because it substitutes external limitations for the realities of the intellect and the soul, and makes those realities themselves of no account wherever its traditions prevail. This spirit cares nothing for culture, nothing for excellence, nothing for the superiorities that make men truly great; all it cares for is to have reserved seats in the great assemblage of the world. Whatever you do, in fairness and honesty, against this evil and inhuman spirit of aristocracy, the best minds of this age approve; but there is another spirit of aristocracy which does not always receive the fairest treatment at your hands, and which ought to be resolutely defended against you.

There is really, in nature, such a thing as high life. There is really, in nature, a difference between the life of a gentleman who has culture, and fine bodily health, and independence, and the life of a Sheffield dry-grinder who cannot have any one of these three things. It is a good and not a bad sign of the state of popular intelligence when the people does not wilfully shut its eyes to the differences of condition amongst men, and when those who have the opportunity of leading what is truly the high life accept its discipline joyfully and have a just pride in keeping themselves up to their ideal. A life of health, of sound morality, of disinterested intellectual activity, of freedom from petty cares, is higher than a life of disease, and vice, and stupidity, and sordid anxiety. I maintain that it is right and wise in a nation to set before itself the highest attainable ideal of human life as the existence of the complete gentleman, and that an envious democracy, instead of rendering a service to itself, does exactly the contrary when it cannot endure and will not tolerate the presence of high-spirited gentlemen in the State. There are things in this world that it is right to hate, that we are the better for hating with all our hearts; and one of the things that I hate most, and with most reason, is the narrow class-spirit when it sets itself against the great interests of mankind. It is odious in the narrow-minded, pompous, selfish, pitiless aristocrat who thinks that the sons of the people were made by Almighty God to be his lackeys and their daughters to be his mistresses; it is odious also, to the full as odious, in the narrow-minded, envious democrat who cannot bear to see any elegance of living, or grace of manner, or culture of mind above the range of his own capacity or his own purse.

Let me recommend to your consideration the following words, written by one young nobleman about another young nobleman, and reminding us, as we much need to be reminded, that life may be not only honest and vigorous, but also noble and beautiful. Robert Lytton says of Julian Fane—

“He was, I think, the most graceful and accomplished gentleman of the generation he adorned, and by this generation, at least, appropriate place should be reserved for the memory of a man in whose character the most universal sympathy with all the intellectual culture of his age was united to a refinement of social form, and a perfection of personal grace, which, in spite of all its intellectual culture, the age is sadly in want of. There is an artistry of life as well as of literature, and the perfect knighthood of Sidney is no less precious to the world than the genius of Spenser.”

It is just this “perfect knighthood” that an envious democracy sneers at and puts down. I do not say that all democracies are necessarily envious, but they often are so, especially when they first assert themselves, and whilst in that temper they are very willing to ostracize gentlemen, or compel them to adopt bad manners. I have some hopes that the democracies of the future may be taught by authors and artists to appreciate natural gentlemanhood; but so far as we know them hitherto they seem intolerant of dignity, and disposed to attribute it (very unjustly) to individual self-conceit. The personages most popular in democratic countries are often remarkably deficient in dignity, and liked the better for the want of it, whilst if on the positive side they can display occasional coarseness they become more popular still. Then I should say, that although democratic feeling raises the lower classes and increases their self-respect, which is indeed one of the greatest imaginable benefits to a nation, it has a tendency to fix one uniform type of behavior and of thought as the sole type in conformity with what is accepted for “common sense,” and that type can scarcely, in the nature of things, be a very elevated one. I have been much struck, in France, by the prevalence of what may be not inaccurately defined as the commercial traveller type, even in classes where you would scarcely expect to meet with it. One little descriptive anecdote will illustrate what I mean. Having been invited to a stag-hunt in the Côte d’Or, I sat down to déjeuner with the sportsmen in a good country-house or château (it was an old place with four towers), and in the midst of the meal in came a man smoking a cigar. After a bow to the ladies he declined to eat anything, and took a chair a little apart, but just opposite me. He resumed his hat and went on smoking with a sans-gêne that rather surprised me under the circumstances. He put one arm on the side-board: the hand hung down, and I perceived that it was dirty (so was the shirt), and that the nails had edges of ebony. On his chin there was a black stubble of two days’ growth. He talked very loudly, and his dress and manners were exactly those of a bagman just arrived at his inn. Who and what could the man be? I learned afterwards that he had begun life as a distinguished pupil of the Ecole Polytechnique, that since then he had distinguished himself as an officer of artillery and had won the Legion of Honor on the field of battle, that he belonged to one of the principal families in the neighborhood, and had nearly 2000l. a year from landed property.

Now, it may be a good thing for the roughs at the bottom of the social scale to level up to the bagman-ideal, but it does seem rather a pity (does it not?) that a born gentleman of more than common bravery and ability should level down to it. And it is here that lies the principle objection to democracy from the point of view of culture, that its notion of life and manners is a uniform notion, not admitting much variety of classes, and not allowing the high development of graceful and accomplished humanity in any class which an aristocracy does at least encourage in one class, though it may be numerically a small class. I have not forgotten what Saint-Simon and La Bruyère have testified about the ignorance of the old noblesse. Saint-Simon said that they were fit for nothing but fighting, and only qualified for promotion even in the army by seniority; that the rest of their time was passed in “the most deadly uselessness, the consequence of their indolence and distaste for all instruction.” I am sure that my modern artillery captain, notwithstanding his bad manners, knew more than any of his forefathers; but where was his “perfect knighthood?” And we easily forget “how much talent runs into manners,” as Emerson says. From the artistic and poetical point of view, behavior is an expression of knowledge and taste and feeling in combination, as clear and legible as literature or painting, so that when the behavior is coarse and unbecoming we know that the perceptions cannot be delicate, whatever may have been learned at school. When Dr. Arnold travelled on the Continent, nothing struck him more than the absence of gentlemen. “We see no gentlemen anywhere,” he writes from Italy. From France he writes: “Again I have been struck with the total absence of all gentlemen, and of all persons of the education and feelings of gentlemen.” Now, although Dr. Arnold spoke merely from the experience of a tourist, and was perhaps not quite competent to judge of Frenchmen and Italians otherwise than from externals, still there was much truth in his observation. It was not quite absolutely true. I have known two or three Italian officers, and one Savoyard nobleman, and a Frenchman here and there, who were as perfect gentlemen as any to be found in England, but they were isolated like poets, and were in fact poets in behavior and self discipline. The plain truth is, that there is no distinct class in France maintaining good manners as a tradition common to all its members; and this seems to be the inevitable defect of a democracy. It may be observed, further, that language itself is defiled by the vulgarity of the popular taste; that expressions are used continually, even by the upper middle class, which it is impossible to print, and which are too grossly indecent to find a place even in the dictionaries; that respectable men, having become insensible to the meaning of these expressions from hearing them used without intention, employ them constantly from habit, as they decorate their speech with oaths, whilst only purists refrain from them altogether.

An aristocracy may be very narrow and intolerant, but it can only exclude from its own pale, whereas when a democracy is intolerant it excludes from all human intercourse. Our own aristocracy, as a class, rejects Dissenters, and artists, and men of science, but they flourish quite happily outside of it. Now try to picture to yourself a great democracy having the same prejudices, who could get out of the democracy? All aristocracies are intolerant with reference, I will not say to religion, but, more accurately, with reference to the outward forms of religion, and yet this aristocratic intolerance has not prevented the development of religious liberty, because the lower classes were not strictly bound by the customs of the nobility and gentry. The unwritten law appears to be that members of an aristocracy shall conform either to what is actually the State Church or to what has been the State Church at some former period of the national history. Although England is a Protestant country, an English gentleman does not lose caste when he joins the Roman Catholic communion; but he loses caste when he becomes a Dissenter. The influence of this caste-law in keeping the upper classes within the Churches of England and of Rome has no doubt been very considerable, but its influence on the nation generally has been incomparably less considerable than that of some equally decided social rule in the entire mind of a democracy. Had this rule of conformity to the religion of the State been that of the English democracy, religious liberty would have been extinguished throughout the length and breadth of England. I say that the customs and convictions of a democracy are more dangerous to intellectual liberty than those of an aristocracy, because, in matters of custom, the gentry rule only within their own park-palings, whereas the people, when power resides with them, rule wherever the breezes blow. A democracy that dislikes refinement and good manners can drive men of culture into solitude, and make morbid hermits of the very persons who ought to be the lights and leaders of humanity. It can cut short the traditions of good-breeding, the traditions of polite learning, the traditions of thoughtful leisure, and reduce the various national types of character to one type, that of the commis-voyageur. All men of refined sentiment in modern France lament the want of elevation in the bourgeoisie. They read nothing, they learn nothing, they think of nothing but money and the satisfaction of their appetites. There are exceptions, of course, but the tone of the class is mean and low, and devoid of natural dignity or noble aspiration. Their ignorance passes belief, and is accompanied by an absolute self-satisfaction. “La fin de la bourgeoisie,” says an eminent French author, “commence parcequ’elle a les sentiments de la populace. Je ne vois pas qu’elle lise d’autres journaux, qu’elle se régale d’une musique différente, qu’elle ait des plaisirs plus élevés. Chez l’une comme chez l’autre, c’est le même amour de l’argent, le même respect du fait accompli, le même besoin d’idoles pour les détruire, la même haine de toute supériorité, le même esprit de dénigrement, la même crasse ignorance!” M. Renan also complains that during the Second Empire the country sank deeper and deeper into vulgarity, forgetting its past history and its noble enthusiasms. “Talk to the peasant, to the socialist of the International, of France, of her past history, of her genius, he will not understand you. Military honor seems madness to him; the taste for great things, the glory of the mind, are vain dreams; money spent for art and science is money thrown away foolishly. Such is the provincial spirit.” And if this is the provincial spirit, what is the spirit of the metropolitan democracy? Is it not clearly known to us by its acts? It had the opportunity, under the Commune, of showing the world how tenderly it cared for the monuments of national history, how anxious it was for the preservation of noble architecture, of great libraries, of pictures that can never be replaced. Whatever may have been our illusions about the character of the Parisian democracy, we know it very accurately now. To say that it is brutal would be an inadequate use of language, for the brutes are only indifferent to history and civilization, not hostile to them. So far as it is possible for us to understand the temper of that democracy, it appears to cherish an active and intense hatred for every conceivable kind of superiority, and an instinctive eagerness to abolish the past; or, as that is not possible, since the past will always have been in spite of it, then at least to efface all visible memorials and destroy the bequests of all preceding generations. If any one had affirmed, before the fall of Louis Napoleon, that the democratic spirit was capable of setting fire to the Louvre and the national archives and libraries, of deliberately planning the destruction of all those magnificent edifices, ecclesiastical and civil, which were the glory of France and the delight of Europe, we should have attributed such an assertion to the exaggerations of reactionary fears. But since the year 1870 we do not speculate about the democratic temper in its intensest expression; we have seen it at work, and we know it. We know that every beautiful building, every precious manuscript and picture, has to be protected against the noxious swarm of Communards as a sea-jetty against the Pholas and the Teredo.

Compare this temper with that of a Marquis of Hertford, a Duke of Devonshire, a Duc de Luynes! True guardians of the means of culture, these men have given splendid hospitality to the great authors and artists of past times, by keeping their works for the future with tender and reverent care. Nor has this function of high stewardship ever been more nobly exercised than it is to-day by that true knight and gentleman, Sir Richard Wallace. Think of the difference between this great-hearted guardian of priceless treasures, keeping them for the people, for civilization, and a base-spirited Communard setting fire to the library of the Louvre.

The ultra-democratic spirit is hostile to culture, from its hatred of all delicate and romantic sentiment, from its scorn of the tenderer and finer feelings of our nature, and especially from its brutish incapacity to comprehend the needs of the higher life. If it had its way we should be compelled by public opinion to cast all the records of our ancestors, and the shields they wore in battle, into the foul waters of an eternal Lethe. The intolerance of the sentiment of birth, that noble sentiment which has animated so many hearts with heroism, and urged them to deeds of honor, associated as it is with a cynical disbelief in the existence of female virtue,[9] is one of the commonest signs of this evil spirit of detraction. It is closely connected with an ungrateful indifference towards all that our forefathers have done to make civilization possible for us. Now, although the intellectual spirit studies the past critically, and does not accept history as a legend is accepted by the credulous, still the intellectual spirit has a deep respect for all that is noble in the past, and would preserve the record of it forever. Can you not imagine, have you not actually seen, the heir of some ancient house who shares to the full the culture and aspirations of the age in which we live, and who nevertheless preserves, with pious reverence, the towers his forefathers built on the ancestral earth, and the oaks they planted, and the shields that were carved on the tombs where the knights and their ladies rest? Be sure that a right understanding of the present is compatible with a right and reverent understanding of the past, and that, although we may closely question history and tradition, no longer with childlike faith, still the spirit of true culture would never efface their vestiges. It was not Michelet, not Renan, not Hugo, who set fire to the Palace of Justice and imperilled the Sainte-Chapelle.