Our impatiences come mainly, I think, from an amateurish doubt about our own capacity, which is accompanied by a fevered eagerness to see the work done, because we are tormented both by hopes and fears so long as it is in progress. We have fears that it may not turn out as it ought to do, and we have at the same time hopes for its success. Both these causes produce eagerness, and deprive us of the tranquillity which distinguishes the thorough workman, and which is necessary to thoroughness in the work itself. Now please observe that I am not advising you to set aside these hopes and fears by an effort of the will; when you have them they are the inevitable result of your state of culture, and the will can no more get rid of them than it can get rid of an organic disease. When you have a limited amount of power and of culture, and are not quite clear in your own mind as to where the limits lie, it is natural on the one hand that you should fear the insufficiency of what you possess, and on the other that in more sanguine moments you should indulge in hopes which are only extravagant because your powers have not yet been accurately measured. You will alternate between fear and hope, according to the temporary predominance of saddening or cheerful ideas, but both these feelings will urge you to complete the work in hand, that you may see your own powers reflected in it, and measure them more exactly. This is the main cause of the eagerness of young authors, and the reason why they often launch work upon the sea of publicity which is sure to go immediately to the bottom, from the unworkmanlike haste with which it has been put together. But beyond this there is another cause, which is, that beginners in literature have rarely acquired firm intellectual habits, that they do not yet lead the tranquil intellectual life, so that such a piece of work as the composition of a book keeps them in an unwholesome state of excitement. When you feel this coming upon you, pray remember Mr. Galton’s wise traveller in unknown tracts, or the bargeman’s wife in the canal-boat.
Amongst the many advantages of experience, one of the most valuable is that we come to know the range of our own powers, and if we are wise we keep contentedly within them. This relieves us from the malady of eagerness; we know pretty accurately beforehand what our work will be when it is done, and therefore we are not in a hurry to see it accomplished. The coolness of old hands in all departments of labor is due in part to the cooling of the temperament by age, but it is due even more to the fulness of acquired experience, for we do not find middle-aged men so cool in situations where they feel themselves incompetent. The conduct of the most experienced painters in the management of their work is a good example of this masterly coolness, because we can see them painting in their studios whereas we cannot so easily see or so justly estimate the coolness of scientific or literary workmen. A painter of great experience will have, usually, several pictures at a time upon his easels, and pass an hour upon one, or an hour upon the other, simple as the state of the pigment invites him without ever being tempted to risk anything by hurrying a process. The ugly preparatory daubing which irritates the impatience of the beginner does not disturb his equanimity; he has laid it with a view to the long-foreseen result, and it satisfies him temporarily as the right thing for the time being. If you know what is the right thing for the time being, and always do it, you are sure of the calm of the thorough workman. All his touches, except the very last touch on each work, are touches of preparation, leading gradually up to his result. Ingres used to counsel his pupils to sketch always, to sketch upon and within the first sketch till the picture came right in the end; and this was strictly Balzac’s method in literature. The literary and artistic labors of these two men did not proceed so much upon the principle of travelling as upon that of cultivation. They took an idea in the rough, as a settler takes a tract from wild nature, and then they went over it repeatedly, each time pushing the cultivation of it a little farther. Scott, Horace Vernet, John Phillip, and many others, have worked rather on the principle of travelling, passing over the ground once, and leaving it, never coming back again to correct the mistakes of yesterday. Both methods of work require deliberation, but the latter needs it in the supreme degree. All very decided workers, men who did not correct, have been at the same time very deliberate workers—rapid, in the sense of accomplishing much in the course of the year, or the life, but cautious and slow and observant whilst they actually labored, thinking out very carefully every sentence before they wrote it, every touch of paint before they laid it.
LETTER II.
TO A STUDENT IN THE FIRST ARDOR OF INTELLECTUAL AMBITION.
The first freshness—Why should it not be preserved?—The dulness of the intellectual—Fictions and false promises—Ennui in work itself—Dürer’s engraving of Melancholy—Scott about Dryden—Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth—Humboldt, Cuvier, Goethe—Tennyson’s “Maud”—Preventives of ennui—Hard study for limited times—The ennui of jaded faculties.
I have been thinking about you frequently of late, and the burden or refrain of my thoughts has been “What a blessing he has in that first freshness, if only he could keep it!” But now I am beginning more hopefully to ask myself, “Why should he not keep it?”
It would be an experiment worth trying, so to order your intellectual life, that however stony and thorny your path might be, however difficult and arduous, it should at all events never be dull; or, to express what I mean more accurately, that you yourself should never feel the depressing influences of dulness during the years when they are most to be dreaded. I want you to live steadily and happily in your intellectual labors, even to the natural close of existence, and my best wish for you is that you may escape a long and miserable malady which brain-workers very commonly suffer from when the first dreams of youth have been disappointed—a malady in which the intellectual desires are feeble, the intellectual hopes are few; whose victim, if he has still resolution enough to learn anything, acquires without satisfaction, and, if he has courage to create, has neither pride nor pleasure in his creations.
If I were to sing the praises of knowledge as they have been so often sung by louder harps than mine, I might avoid so dreary a theme. It is easy to pretend to believe that the intellectual life is always sure to be interesting and delightful, but the truth is that, either from an unwise arrangement of their work, or from mental or physical causes which we will investigate to some extent before we have done with the subject, many men whose occupations are reputed to be amongst the most interesting have suffered terribly from ennui, and that not during a week or two at a time, but for consecutive years and years.
There is a class of books written with the praiseworthy intention of stimulating young men to intellectual labor, in which this danger of the intellectual life is systematically ignored. It is assumed in these books that the satisfactions of intellectual labor are certain; that although it may not always, or often, result in outward and material prosperity, its inward joys will never fail. Promises of this kind cannot safely be made to any one. The satisfactions of intellectual riches are not more sure than the satisfactions of material riches; the feeling of dull indifference which often so mysteriously clouds the life of the rich man in the midst of the most elaborate contrivances for his pleasure and amusement, has its exact counterpart in the lives of men who are rich in the best treasures of the mind, and who have infinite intellectual resources. However brilliant your ability, however brave and persistent your industry, however vast your knowledge, there is always this dreadful possibility of ennui. People tell you that work is a specific against it, but many a man has worked steadily and earnestly, and suffered terribly from ennui all the time that he was working, although the labor was of his own choice, the labor that he loved best, and for which Nature evidently intended him. The poets, from Solomon downwards, have all of them, so far as I know, given utterance in one page or another of their writings to this feeling of dreary dissatisfaction, and Albert Dürer, in his “Melencolia,” illustrated it. It is plain that the robust female figure which has exercised the ingenuity of so many commentators is not melancholy either from weakness of the body or vacancy of the mind. She is strong and she is learned; yet, though the plumes of her wings are mighty, she sits heavily and listlessly, brooding amidst the implements of suspended labor, on the shore of a waveless sea. The truth is that Dürer engraved the melancholy that he himself only too intimately knew. This is not the dulness of the ignorant and incapable, whose minds are a blank because they have no ideas, whose hands are listless for want of an occupation; it is the sadness of the most learned, the most intelligent, the most industrious; the weary misery of those who are rich in the attainments of culture, who have the keys of the chambers of knowledge, and wings to bear them to the heaven of the ideal. If you counsel this “Melencolia” to work that she may be merry, she will answer that she knows the uses of labor and its vanity, and the precise amount of profit that a man hath of all his labor which he taketh under the sun. All things are full of labor, she will tell you; and in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.