The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

In saying this, it is probable that Joubert did not overestimate himself. He had strength of a certain kind, or rather he had quality; he had distinction, which is a sort of strength in society and in literature. But he had no productive force, and I do not believe that his unproductiveness was a productiveness checked by a fastidious taste; I believe that it was real, that he was not organized for production.

Sainte-Beuve said that a modern philosopher was accustomed to distinguish three classes of minds—

1. Those who are at once powerful and delicate, who excel as they propose, execute what they conceive, and reach the great and true beautiful—a rare élite amongst mortals.

2. A class of minds especially characterized by their delicacy, who feel that their idea is superior to their execution, their intelligence greater than their talent, even when the talent is very real; they are easily dissatisfied with themselves, disdain easily won praises, and would rather judge, taste, and abstain from producing, than remain below their conception and themselves. Or if they write it is by fragments, for themselves only, at long intervals and at rare moments. Their fecundity is internal, and known to few.

3. Lastly, there is a third class of minds more powerful and less delicate or difficult to please, who go on producing and publishing themselves without being too much dissatisfied with their work.

The majority of our active painters and writers, who fill modern exhibitions, and produce the current literature of the day, belong to the last class, to which we are all greatly indebted for the daily bread of literature and art.

But Sainte-Beuve believed that Joubert belonged to the second class, and I suspect that both Sainte-Beuve and many others have credited that class with a potential productiveness beyond its real endowments. Minds of the Joubert class are admirable and valuable in their way, but they are really, and not apparently, sterile.

And why would we have it otherwise? When we lament that a man of culture has “done nothing,” as we say, we mean that he has not written books. Is it necessary, is it desirable, that every cultivated person should write books?

On the contrary, it seems that a more perfect intellectual life may be attained by the silent student than by authors. The writer for the public is often so far its slave that he is compelled by necessity or induced by the desire for success (since it is humiliating to write unsaleable books as well as unprofitable) to deviate from his true path, to leave the subjects that most interest him for other subjects which interest him less, and therefore to acquire knowledge rather as a matter of business than as a labor of love. But the student who never publishes, and does not intend to publish, may follow his own genius and take the knowledge which belongs to him by natural affinity. Add to this the immense saving of time effected by abstinence from writing. Whilst the writer is polishing his periods, and giving hours to the artistic exigencies of mere form, the reader is adding to his knowledge. Thackeray said that writers were not great readers, because they had not the time.

The most studious Frenchman I ever met with used to say that he so hated the pen as scarcely to resolve to write a letter. He reminded me of Joubert in this; he often said, “J’ai horreur de la plume.” Since he had no profession his leisure was unlimited, and he employed it in educating himself without any other purpose than this, the highest purpose of all, to become a cultivated man. The very prevalent idea that lives of this kind are failures unless they leave some visible achievement as a testimony and justification of their labors, is based upon a narrow conception both of duty and of utility. Men of this unproductive class are sure to influence their immediate neighborhood by the example of their life. Isolated as they are too frequently in the provinces, in the midst of populations destitute of the higher culture, they often establish the notion of it notwithstanding the contemptuous estimates of the practical people around them. A single intellectual life, thus modestly lived through in the obscurity of a country-town, may leave a tradition and become an enduring influence. In this, as in all things, let us trust the arrangements of Nature. If men are at the same time constitutionally studious and constitutionally unproductive, in must be that production is not the only use of study. Joubert was right in keeping silence when he felt no impulses to speak, right also in saying the little that he did say without a superfluous word. His mind is more fully known, and more influential, than many which are abundantly productive.