The Intellectual Life

by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

TO A FRIEND (HIGHLY CULTIVATED) WHO CONGRATULATED HIMSELF ON HAVING ENTIRELY ABANDONED THE HABIT OF READING NEWSPAPERS.

Advantages in economy of time—Much of what we read in newspapers is useless to our culture—The too great importance which they attach to novelty—Distortion by party spirit—An instance of false presentation—Gains to serenity by abstinence from newspapers—Newspapers keep up our daily interest in each other—The French peasantry—The newspaper-reading Americans—An instance of total abstinence from newspapers—Auguste Comte—A suggestion of Emerson’s—The work of newspaper correspondents—War correspondents—Mr. Stanley—M. Erdan, of the Temps.

Your abstinence from newspaper reading is not anew experiment in itself, though it is new in reference to your particular case, and I await its effects with interest. I shall be curious to observe the consequences, to an intellect constituted as yours is, of that total cutting off from the public interests of your own century which an abstinence from newspapers implies. It is clear that, whatever the loss may be, you have a definite gain to set against it. The time which you have hitherto given to newspapers, and which may be roughly estimated at about five hundred hours a year, is henceforth a valuable time-income to be applied to whatever purposes your best wisdom may select. When an intellectual person has contrived by the force of one simple resolution to effect so fine an economy as this, it is natural that he should congratulate himself. Your feelings must be like those of an able finance minister who has found means of closing a great leak in the treasury—if any economy possible in the finances of a State could ever relatively equal that splendid stroke of time-thrift which your force of will has enabled you to effect. In those five hundred hours, which are now your own, you may acquire a science or obtain a more perfect command over one of the languages which you have studied. Some department of your intellectual labors which has hitherto been unsatisfactory to you, because it was too imperfectly cultivated, may henceforth be as orderly and as fruitful as a well-kept garden. You may become thoroughly conversant with the works of more than one great author whom you have neglected, not from lack of interest, but from want of time. You may open some old chamber of the memory that has been dark and disused for many a year; you may clear the cobwebs away, and let the fresh light in, and make it habitable once again.

Against these gains, of which some to a man of your industry are certain, and may be counted upon, what must be our estimate of the amount of sacrifice or loss? It is clear to both of us that much of what we read in the newspapers is useless to our culture. A large proportion of newspaper-writing is occupied with speculation on what is likely to happen in the course of a few months; therefore, by waiting until the time is past, we know the event without having wasted time in speculations which could not effect it. Another rather considerable fraction of newspaper matter consists of small events which have interest for the day, owing to their novelty, but which will not have the slightest permanent importance. The whole press of a newspaper-reading country, like England or America, may be actively engaged during the space of a week or a fortnight in discussing some incident which everybody will have forgotten in six months; and besides these sensational incidents, there are hundreds of less notorious ones, often fictitious, inserted simply for the temporary amusement of the reader. The greatest evil of newspapers, in their effect on the intellectual life, is the enormous importance which they are obliged to attach to mere novelty. From the intellectual point of view, it is of no consequence whether a thought occurred twenty-two centuries ago to Aristotle or yesterday evening to Mr. Charles Darwin, and it is one of the distinctive marks of the truly intellectual to be able to take a hearty interest in all truth, independently of the date of its discovery. The emphasis given by newspapers to novelty exhibits things in wrong relations, as the lantern shows you what is nearest at the cost of making the general landscape appear darker by the contrast. Besides this exhibition of things in wrong relations, there is a positive distortion arising from the unscrupulousness of party, a distortion which extends far beyond the limits of the empire.

An essay might be written on the distortion of English affairs in the French press, or of French affairs in the English press, by writers who are as strongly partisan in another country as in their own. “It is such a grand thing,” wrote an English Paris correspondent in 1870, “for Adolphus Thiers, son of a poor laborer of Aix, and in early life a simple journalist, to be at the head of the Government of France.” This is a fair specimen of the kind of false presentation which is so common in party journalism. The newspaper from which I have quoted it was strongly opposed to Thiers, being in fact one of the principal organs of the English Bonapartists. It is not true that Thiers was the son of a poor laborer of Aix. His father was a workman of Marseilles, his mother belonging to a family in which neither wealth nor culture had been rare, and his mother’s relatives had him educated at the Lycée. The art of the journalist in bringing together the two extremes of a career remarkable for its steady ascent had for its object to produce the idea of incongruity, of sudden and unsuitable elevation. Not only M. Thiers, however, but every human being starts from a very small beginning, since every man begins life as a baby. It is a great rise for one baby to the Presidency of the French Republic; it was also a great rise for other babies who have attained the premiership of England. The question is, not what Thiers may have been seventy years ago, but what he was immediately before his acceptance of the highest office of the State. He was the most trusted and the most experienced citizen, so that the last step in his career was as natural as the elevation of Reynolds to the presidency of the Academy.

It is difficult for any one who cares for justice to read party journals without frequent irritation, and it does not signify which side the newspaper takes. Men are so unfair in controversy that we best preserve the serenity of the intellect by studiously avoiding all literature that has a controversial tone. By your new rule of abstinence from newspapers you will no doubt gain almost as much in serenity as in time. To the ordinary newspaper reader there is little loss of serenity, because he reads only the newspaper that he agrees with, and however unfair it is, he is pleased by its unfairness. But the highest and best culture makes us disapprove of unfairness on our own side of the question also. We are pained by it; we feel humiliated by it; we lament its persistence and its perversity.

I have said nearly all that has to be said in favor of your rule of abstinence. I have granted that the newspapers cost us much time, which, if employed for great intellectual purposes, would carry us very far; that they give disproportionate views of things by the emphasis they give to novelty, and false views by the unfairness which belongs to party. I might have added that newspaper writers give such a preponderance to politics—not political philosophy, but to the everyday work of politicians—that intellectual culture is thrown into the background, and the election of a single member of Parliament is made to seem of greater national importance than the birth of a powerful idea. And yet, notwithstanding all these considerations, which are serious indeed for the intellectual, I believe that your resolution is unwise, and that you will find it to be untenable. One momentous reason more than counterbalances all these considerations put together. Newspapers are to the whole civilized world what the daily house-talk is to the members of a household; they keep up our daily interest in each other, they save us from the evils of isolation. To live as a member of the great white race of men, the race that has filled Europe and America, and colonized or conquered whatever other territories it has been pleased to occupy, to share from day to day its cares, its thoughts, its aspirations, it is necessary that every man should read his daily newspaper. Why are the French peasants so bewildered and at sea, so out of place in the modern world? It is because they never read a newspaper. And why are the inhabitants of the United States, though scattered over a territory fourteen times the area of France, so much more capable of concerted political action, so much more alive and modern, so much more interested in new discoveries of all kinds and capable of selecting and utilizing the best of them? It is because the newspaper penetrates everywhere; and even the lonely dweller on the prairie or in the forest is not intellectually isolated from the great currents of public life which flow through the telegraph and the press.

The experiment of doing without newspapers has been tried by a whole class, the French peasantry, with the consequences that we know, and it has also from time to time been tried by single individuals belonging to more enlightened sections of society. Let us take one instance, and let us note what appear to have been the effects of this abstinence. Auguste Comte abstained from newspapers as a teetotaller abstains from spirituous liquors. Now, Auguste Comte possessed a gift of nature which, though common in minor degrees, is in the degree in which he possessed it rarer than enormous diamonds. That gift was the power of dealing with abstract intellectual conceptions, and living amidst them always, as the practical mind lives in and deals with material things. And it happened in Comte’s case, as it usually does happen in cases of very peculiar endowment, that the gift was accompanied by the instincts necessary to its perfect development and to its preservation. Comte instinctively avoided the conversation of ordinary people, because he felt it to be injurious to the perfect exercise of his faculty, and for the same reason he would not read newspapers. In imposing upon himself these privations he acted like a very eminent living etcher, who, having the gift of an extraordinary delicacy of hand, preserves it by abstinence from everything that may effect the steadiness of the nerves. There is a certain difference, however, between the two cases which I am anxious to accentuate. The etcher runs no risk of any kind by his rule of abstinence. He refrains from several common indulgences, but he denies himself nothing that is necessary to health. I may even go farther, and say that the rules which he observes for the sake of perfection in his art, might be observed with advantage by many who are not artists, for the sake of their own tranquillity, without the loss of anything but pleasure. The rules which Comte made for himself involved, on the other hand, a great peril. In detaching himself so completely from the interests and ways of thinking of ordinary men, he elaborated, indeed, the conceptions of the positive philosophy, but arrived afterwards at a peculiar kind of intellectual decadence from which it is possible—probable even—that the rough common sense of the newspapers might have preserved him. They would have saved him, I seriously believe, from that mysticism which led to the invention of a religion far surpassing in unreasonableness the least rational of the creeds of tradition. It is scarcely imaginable, except on the supposition of actual insanity, that any regular reader of the Times, the Temps, the Daily News, and the Saturday Review, should believe the human race to be capable of receiving as the religion of its maturity the Comtist Trinity and the Comtist Virgin Mother. A Trinity consisting of the Great Being (or humanity), the Great Fetish (or the earth), and the Great Midst (or space); a hope for the human race (how unphysiological!) that women might ultimately arrive at maternity independently of virile help,—these are conceptions so remote, not only from the habits of modern thought, but (what is more important) from its tendencies, that they could not occur to a mind in regular communication with its contemporaries.

“If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the newspaper to the standard authors?” To this suggestion of Emerson’s it may be answered that the loss would be greater than the gain. The writers of Queen Anne’s time could educate an Englishman of Queen Anne’s time, but they can only partially educate an Englishman of Queen Victoria’s time. The mind is like a merchant’s ledger, it requires to be continually posted up to the latest date. Even the last telegram may have upset some venerable theory that has been received as infallible for ages.

In times when great historical events are passing before our eyes, the journalist is to future historians what the African traveller is to the map-makers. His work is neither complete nor orderly, but it is the fresh record of an eye-witness, and enables us to become ourselves spectators of the mighty drama of the world. Never was this service so well rendered as it is now, by correspondents who achieve heroic feats of bodily and mental prowess, exposing themselves to the greatest dangers, and writing much and well in circumstances the most unfavorable to literary composition. How vividly the English war correspondents brought before us the reality of the great conflict between Germany and France! What a romantic achievement, worthy to be sung in heroic verse, was the finding of Livingstone by Stanley! Not less interesting have been the admirable series of letters by M. Erdan in the Temps, in which, with the firmness of a master-hand, he has painted from the life, week after week, year after year, the decline and fall of the temporal power of the Papacy. I cannot think that any page of Roman history is better worth reading than his letters, more interesting, instructive, lively, or authentic. Yet with your contempt for newspapers you would lose all this profitable entertainment, and seek instead of it the accounts of former epochs not half so interesting as this fall of the temporal power, accounts written in most cases by men in libraries who had not seen the sovereigns they wrote about, nor talked with the people whose condition they attempted to describe. You have a respect for these accounts because they are printed in books, and bound in leather, and entitled “history,” whilst you despise the direct observation of a man like Erdan, because he is only a journalist, and his letters are published in a newspaper. Is there not some touch of prejudice in this, some mistake, some narrowness of intellectual aristocracy?