LETTER VI. Shelley's dread of Society. Shelley's passion for retirement. PART IX. the influences of mediocre people, who, of course, are always in the majority, would have silently but surely operated to the destruction of that unequalled and personal delicacy of imagination to which we owe what is inimitable in his poetry. In the last year of his life, he said to Trelawny of Mary, his second wife, "She can't bear solitude, nor I society-the quick coupled with the dead." Here is a piteous prayer of his to be delivered from a party that he dreaded: "Mary says she will have a party! There are English singers here, the Sinclairs, and she will ask them, and everyone she or you know. Oh the horror! For pity go to Mary and intercede for me! I will submit to any other species of torture than that of being bored to death by idle ladies and gentlemen." Again, he writes to Mary: "My greatest delight would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea; would build a boat, and shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world. I would read no reviews and talk with no authors. If I dared trust my imagination it would tell me that there are one or two chosen companions beside yourself whom I should desire. But to this I would not listen; where two or three are gathered together, the devil is among them." At Marlow he knew little of his neighbours. "I am not wretch enough," he said, "to tolerate an acquaintance." Wordsworth and and Turner. Turner, if less systematic in their isolation, were still solitary workers, and much of the peculiar force and originality of their performance is due to their independence of the people about them. Painters are especial sufferers from the visits of talkative people who know little or nothing of the art they talk about, and yet who have quite influence enough to disturb the painter's mind Wordsworth Painters. LETTER Newton's repugnance to society. by proving to him that his noblest thoughts are surest PART IX. to be misunderstood. Men of science, too, find solitude favourable to their peculiar work, because it permits the concentration of their powers during long periods of time. Newton had a great repugnance to society, and ever to notoriety—a feeling which is different, and in men of genius more rare. No one can doubt, however, that Newton's great intellectual achievements were due in some measure to this peculiarity of his temper, which permitted him to ripen them in the sustained tranquillity necessary to difficult investigations. Auguste Comte isolated himself not only from preference but on system, and whatever may have been the defects of his remarkable mind, and the weakness of its ultimate decay, it is certain that his amazing command over vast masses of heterogeneous material would have been incompatible with any participation in the passing interests of the world. Nothing in intellectual history has ever exceeded the unshakable firmness of purpose with which he dedicated his whole being to the elaboration of the Positive philosophy. He sacrificed everything to it-position, time, health, and all the amusements and opportunities of society. He found that commonplace acquaintances disturbed his work and interfered with his mastery of it, so he resolutely renounced them. Others have done great things in isolation that was not of their own choosing, yet none the less fruitful for them and for mankind. It was not when Milton saw most of the world, but in the forced retirement of a man who had lost health and eyesight, and whose party was hopelessly defeated, that he composed the "Paradise Lost." It was during tedious years of imprisonment that Bunyan wrote his immortal allegory. Many a genius has owed his best Selfisolation of Auguste Comte. Milton Bunyan. LETTER PART IX opportunities to poverty, because poverty had happily excluded him from society, and so preserved him from time-devouring exigencies and frivolities. VI. ments of isolation. The solitude which is really injurious is the severance from all who are capable of understanding us. Painters say that they cannot work effectively for very long together when separated from the society of artists, and that they must return to London, or Paris, or Rome, to Discourage avoid an oppressive feeling of discouragement which paralyses their productive energy. Authors are more fortunate, because all cultivated people are society for them; yet even authors lose strength and agility of thought when too long deprived of a genial intellectual Country life. atmosphere. In the country you meet with cultivated individuals; but we need more than this, we need those general conversations in which every speaker is worth listening to. The life most favourable to culture would have its times of open and equal intercourse with the best minds, and also its periods of retreat. My ideal would be a house in London, not far from one or two houses that are so full of light and warmth that it is a liberal education to have entered them, and a solitary tower on some island of the Hebrides, with no companions but the sea-gulls and the thundering surges of the Atlantic. One such island I know well, and it is before my mind's eye, clear as a picture, whilst I am writing. It stands in the very entrance of a fine saltwater loch, rising above two hundred feet out of the water and setting its granite front steep against the western ocean. When the evenings are clear you can see Staffa and Iona like blue clouds between you and the sunset; and on your left, close at hand, the granite hills of Mull, with Ulva to the right across the narrow An ideal division time. strait. It was the dream of my youth to build a tower there, with three or four little rooms in it, and walls as strong as a lighthouse. There have been more foolish dreams, and there have been less competent teachers than the tempests that would have roused me and the calms that would have brought me peace. If any serious thought, if any noble inspiration might have been hoped for, surely it would have been there, where only the clouds and waves were transient, but the ocean before me, and the stars above, and the mountains on either hand, were emblems and evidences of eternity. NOTE.-There is a passage in Scott's novel, "The Pirate," which illustrates what has been said in this letter about the necessity for concealing superior culture in the presence of less intellectual companions, and I quote it the more willingly that Scott was so remarkably free from any morbid aversion to society, and so capable of taking a sincere interest in every human being. Cleveland is speaking to Minna :— "I thought over my former story, and saw that seeming more brave, skilful, and enterprising than others had gained me command and respect, and that seeming more gently nurtured and more civilized than they had made them envy and hate me as a being of another species. I bargained with myself then, that since I could not lay aside my superiority of intellect and education, I would do my best to disguise, and to sink, in the rude seaman, all appearance of better feeling and better accomplishments." A similar policy is often quite as necessary in the society of landsmen. PART IX. LETTER A solitude in the Hebrides. Quotation from Sir Walter Scott. PART X. INTELLECTUAL HYGIENICS. PART X. advice to travellers. LETTER I. TO A YOUNG AUTHOR WHILST HE WAS WRITING HIS FIRST BOOK. Mr. Galton's advice to young travellers-That we ought to interest ourselves in the progress of a journey-The same rule applicable in intellectual things-Woman in the cabin of a canal boatWorking hastily for temporary purposes-Fevered eagerness to get work done-Beginners have rarely acquired firm intellectual habits-Knowing the range of our own powers-The coolness of accomplished artists-Advice given by Ingres-Balzac's method of work-Scott, Horace Vernet, John Phillip-Decided workers are deliberate workers. Mr. Galton's I READ the other day, in Galton's "Art of Travel," a little bit which concerns you and all of us, but I made the extract in my commonplace-book for your benefit rather than my own, because the truth it contains has been "borne in upon me" by my own experience, so that what Mr. Galton says did not give me a new conviction, but only confirmed me in an old one. He is speaking to explorers who have not done so much in that way as he has himself, and though the subject of his |