The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

Can we escape this brooding melancholy of the great workers—has any truly intellectual person escaped it ever? The question can never be answered with perfect certainty, because we can never quite accurately know the whole truth about the life of another. I have known several men of action, almost entirely devoid of intellectual culture, who enjoyed an unbroken flow of animal energy and were clearly free from the melancholy of Dürer; but I never intimately knew a really cultivated person who had not suffered from it more or less, and the greatest sufferers were the most conscientious thinkers and students. Amongst the illustrious dead, it may be very safely answered that any poet who has described it has written from his own experience—a transient experience it may be, yet his own. When Walter Scott, à-propos of Dryden, spoke of “the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incident to one doomed to labor incessantly in the feverish exercise of the imagination,” and of that “sinking of spirit which follows violent mental exertion,” is it not evident that his kindly understanding of Dryden’s case came from the sympathy of a fellow-laborer who knew by his own experience the gloomier and more depressing passages of the imaginative life? It would be prudent perhaps to omit the mention of Byron, because some may attribute his sadness to his immorality; and if I spoke of Shelley, they might answer that he was “sad because he was impious;” but the truth is, that quite independently of conduct, and even of belief, it was scarcely possible for natures so highly imaginative as these two, and so ethereally intellectual as one of the two, to escape those clouds of gloom which darken the intellectual life. Wordsworth was not immoral, Wordsworth was not unorthodox, yet he could be as sad in his own sober way as Byron in the bitterness of his desolation, or Shelley in his tenderest wailing. The three men who seem to have been the least subject to the sadness of intellectual workers were Alexander Humboldt, Cuvier, and Goethe. Alexander Humboldt, so far as is known to us, lived always in a clear and cheerful daylight; his appetite for learning was both strong and regular; he embraced the intellectual life in his earliest manhood, and lived in it with an unhesitating singleness of purpose, to the limits of extreme old age. Cuvier was to the last a model student, of a temper at once most unflinching and most kind, happy in all his studies, happier still in his unequalled facility of mental self-direction. Goethe, as all know, lived a life of unflagging interest in each of the three great branches of intellectual labor. During the whole of his long life he was interested in literature, in which he was a master; he was interested in science, in which he was a discoverer, and in art, of which he was an ardent though not practically successful student. His intellectual activity ceased only on rare occasions of painful illness or overwhelming affliction; he does not seem to have asked himself ever whether knowledge was worth its cost; he was always ready to pay the appointed price of toil. He had no infirmity of intellectual doubt; the powerful impulses from within assured him that knowledge was good for him, and he went to it urged by an unerring instinct, as a young salmon bred in the slime of a river seeks strength in the infinite sea. And yet, being a poet and a man of strong passions, Goethe did not altogether escape the green-sickness which afflicts the imaginative temperament, or he could never have written “Werther;” but he cured himself very soon, and the author of “Werther” had no indulgence for Wertherism—indeed we are told that he grew ashamed of having written the book which inoculated the younger minds of Europe with that miserable disease. In our own time an illustrious poet has given in “Maud” a very perfect study of a young mind in a morbid condition, a mind having indeed the student-temper, but of a bad kind, that which comes not from the genuine love of study, but from sulky rage against the world.

“Thanks, for the fiend best knows whether woman or man be the worse. I will bury myself in my books, and the Devil may pipe to his own.”

This kind of self-burial in one’s library does not come from the love of literature. The recluse will not speak to his neighbor, yet needs human intercourse of some kind, and seeks it in reading, urged by an inward necessity. He feels no gratitude towards the winners of knowledge; his morbid ill-nature depreciates the intellectual laborers:—

“The man of science himself is fonder of glory and vain; An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor.”

What is the life such a spirit will choose for itself? Despising alike the ignorant and the learned, the acuteness of the cultivated and the simplicity of the poor, in what form of activity or inaction will he seek what all men need, the harmony of a life well tuned?

“Be mine a philosopher’s life in the quiet woodland ways: Where, if I cannot be gay, let a passionless peace be my lot.”

There are many different morbid states of the mind, and this of the hero of “Maud” is only one of them, but it is the commonest amongst intellectual or semi-intellectual young men. See how he has a little fit of momentary enthusiasm (all he is capable of) about a shell that suddenly and accidentally attracts his attention. How true to the morbid nature is that incident! Unable to pursue any large and systematic observation, the diseased mind is attracted to things suddenly and accidentally, sees them out of all proportion, and then falls into the inevitable fit of scornful peevishness.

“What is it? A learned man Could give it a clumsy name: Let him name it who can.”

The question which concerns the world is, how this condition of the mind may be avoided. The cure Mr. Tennyson suggested was war; but wars, though more frequent than is desirable, are not to be had always. And in your case, my friend, it is happily not a cure but a preventive that is needed. Let me recommend certain precautions which taken together are likely to keep you safe. Care for the physical health in the first place, for if there is a morbid mind the bodily organs are not doing their work as they ought to do. Next, for the mind itself, I would heartily recommend hard study, really hard study, taken very regularly but in very moderate quantity. The effect of it on the mind is as bracing as that of cold water on the body, but as you ought not to remain too long in the cold bath, so it is dangerous to study hard more than a short time every day. Do some work that is very difficult (such as reading some language that you have to puzzle out à coups de dictionnaire) two hours a day regularly, to brace the fighting power of the intellect, but let the rest of the day’s work be easier. Acquire especially, if you possibly can, the enviable faculty of getting entirely rid of your work in the intervals of it, and of taking a hearty interest in common things, in a garden, or stable, or dog-kennel, or farm. If the work pursues you—if what is called unconscious cerebration, which ought to go forward without your knowing it, becomes conscious cerebration, and bothers you, then you have been working beyond your cerebral strength, and you are not safe.

An organization which was intended by Nature for the intellectual life cannot be healthy and happy without a certain degree of intellectual activity. Natures like those of Humboldt and Goethe need immense labors for their own felicity, smaller powers need less extensive labor. To all of us who have intellectual needs there is a certain supply of work necessary to perfect health. If we do less, we are in danger of that ennui which comes from want of intellectual exercise; if we do more, we may suffer from that other ennui which is due to the weariness of the jaded faculties, and this is the more terrible of the two.