LETTER Time and opportunity. one opportunity very frequently compensates us for the PART IV. absence of another, and it does so because opportunity is itself so dependent upon time that, although the best opportunities may apparently be presented to us, we can make no use of them unless we are able to give them the time that they require. You, who have the best possible opportunities for culture, find a certain sadness and disappointment because you cannot avail yourself of all of them; but the truth is, that opportunity only exists for us just so far as we are able to make use of it, and our power to do so is often nothing but a question of time. If cur days are well employed we are sure to have done some good thing which we should have been compelled to neglect if we had been occupied about anything else. Hence every genuine worker has rich compensations which ought to console him amply for his shortcomings, and to enable him to meet comparisons without fear. Those who aspire to the intellectual life, but have no experience of its difficulties, very frequently envy men so favourably situated as you are. It seems to them that all the world's knowledge is accessible to you, and that you have simply to cull its fruits as we gather grapes in a vineyard. They forget the power of Time, and the restrictions which Time imposes. "This or that, not this and that," is the rule to which all of us have to submit, and it strangely equalizes the destinies of men. time given to the study of one thing is withdrawn from the study of another, and the hours of the day are limited alike for all of us. How difficult it is to reconcile the interests of our different pursuits! Indeed it seems like a sort of polygamy to have different pursuits. It is natural to think of them as jealous wives tormenting some Mormon prophet. The Restrictions imposed by time. PART IV. LETTER V. Compensations. Case of Montaigne There is great danger in apparently unlimited opportunities, and a splendid compensation for those who are confined by circumstances to a narrow but fruitful field. The Englishman gets more civilization out of a farm and a garden than the Red Indian out of the space encircled by his horizon. Our culture gains in thoroughness what it loses in extent. This consideration goes far to explain the fact that although our ancestors were so much less favourably situated than we are, they often got as good an intellectual training from the literature that was accessible to them, as we from our vaster stores. We live in an age of essayists, and yet what modern essayist writes better than old Montaigne? All that a thoughtful and witty writer needs for the sharpening of his intellect, Montaigne the essayist. found in the ancient literature that was accessible to him, and in the life of the age he lived in. Born in our own century, he would have learned many other things, no doubt, and read many other books, but these would have absorbed the hours that he employed not less fruitfully with the authors that he loved in the little library up in the third storey of his tower, as he tells us, where he could see all his books at once, set upon five rows of shelves round about him. In earlier life he bought "this sort of furniture" for "ornament and outward show," but afterwards quite abandoned that, and procured such volumes only "as supplied his own need." To supply our own need, within the narrow limits of the few and transient hours that we can call our own, is enough for the wise everywhere, as it was for Montaigne in his tower. Let us resolve to do as much as that, not more, and then rely upon the golden compensations. LETTER V. NOTE."Supposing that the executive and critical powers always PART IV. exist in some correspondent degree in the same person, still they cannot be cultivated to the same extent. The attention required for the development of a theory is necessarily withdrawn from the design of a drawing, and the time devoted to the realization of a form is lost to the solution of a problem."-MR. RUSKIN, in the preface to the third volume of "Modern Painters." In the case of Mr. Ruskin, in that of Mr. Dante Rossetti, and in all cases where the literary and artistic gifts are naturally pretty evenly balanced, the preponderance of an hour a day given to one or the other class of studies may have settled the question whether the student was to be chiefly artist or chiefly author. The enormous importance of the distribution of time is never more clearly manifested than in cases of this kind. Mr. Ruskin might certainly have attained rank as a painter, Rossetti might have been as prolific in poetry as he is excellent. What these gifted men are now is not so much a question of talent as of time. In like manner the question whether Ingres was to be known as a painter or as a violinist was settled by the employment of hours rather than by any preponderance of faculty. Dante Rossetti. Ruskin Ingres. PART V. THE INFLUENCES OF MONEY. PART V. LETTER I. of LETTER I. TO A VERY RICH STUDENT. The author of "Vathek "-The double temptation of wealth-Rich men tempted to follow occupations in which their wealth is useful-Pressure of social duties on the rich-The Duchess of Orleans-The rich man's time not his own-The rich may help the general intellectual advancement by the exercise of patronage -Dr. Carpenter-Franz Woepke. It has always seemed to me a very remarkable and noteworthy circumstance that although Mr. Beckford, the The author author of "Vathek," produced in his youth a story which "Vathek." bears all the signs of true inventive genius, he never produced anything in after-life which posterity cares to preserve. I read "Vathek" again quite recently, to see how far my early enthusiasm for it might have been due to that passion for orientalism which reigned amongst us many years ago, but this fresh perusal left an impression. which only genius leaves. Beckford really had invention, and an extraordinary narrative power. That such faculties, after having once revealed themselves, should contentedly have remained dormant ever afterwards, is one of the most curious facts in the history of the human mind, and it is the more curious that Beckford lived to a very advanced age. Beckford's case appears to have been one of those in which great wealth diminishes or wholly paralyses the highest energy of the intellect, leaving the lower. energies free to exert less noble kinds of activity. A refined self-indulgence became the habit of his life, and he developed simply into a dilettant. Even his love for the fine arts did not rise above the indulgence of an elegant and cultivated taste. Although he lived at the very time most favourable to the appearance of a great critic in architecture and painting, the time of a great architectural revival and of the growth of a vigorous and independent school of contemporary art, he exercised no influence beyond that of a wealthy virtuoso. His love of the beautiful began and ended in simple personal gratification; it led to no noble labour, to no elevating severity of discipline. Englishman though he was, he filled his Oriental tower with masterpieces from Italy and Holland, only to add form and colour to the luxuries of his reverie, behind his gilded lattices. And when he raised that other tower at Fonthill, and the slaves of the lamp toiled at it by torchlight to gratify his Oriental impatience, he exercised no influence upon the confusion of his epoch more durable than that hundred yards of masonry which sank into a shapeless heap whilst as yet Azrael spared its author. He to whom Nature and Fortune had been so prodigal of their gifts, he whom Reynolds painted and Mozart instructed, who knew the poets of seven literatures, culling their jewels like flowers in seven enchanted gardens-he to whom the palaces of knowledge all opened their golden gates even | PART V. LETTER I. His dilettantism. His gifts and powers. |