LETTER PART X. they actually laboured, thinking out very carefully every sentence before they wrote it, every touch of paint before they laid it. 1. LETTER effects of LETTER II. TO A STUDENT IN THE FIRST ARDOUR OF INTELLECTUAL AMBITION. The first freshness-Why should it not be preserved?—The dulness of the intellectual-Fictions and false promises-Ennui in work itself-Dürer's engraving of Melancholy-Scott about DrydenByron, Shelley, Wordsworth-Humboldt, Cuvier, GoetheTennyson's “Maud”—Preventives of ennui-Hard study for limited times-The ennui of jaded faculties. I HAVE been thinking about you frequently of late, and It would be an experiment worth trying, so to order your intellectual life, that however stony and thorny your path might be, however difficult and arduous, it should at all events never be dull; or, to express what I mean more accurately, that you yourself should never feel the deDepressing pressing influences of dulness during the years when they are most to be dreaded. I want you to live steadily and happily in your intellectual labours, even to the natural close of existence, and my best wish for you is that you may escape a long and miserable malady which brain-workers very commonly suffer from when the first dreams of youth have been disappointed-a malady in which the intellectual desires are feeble, the intellectual dulness. LETTER hopes are few; whose victim, if he has still resolution PART X. enough to learn anything, acquires without satisfaction, and, if he has courage to create, has neither pride nor pleasure in his creations. truth. If I were to sing the praises of knowledge as they have been so often sung by louder harps than mine, I might avoid so dreary a theme. It is easy to pretend to believe that the intellectual life is always sure to be interesting and delightful, but the truth is that, either from Fiction and an unwise arrangement of their work, or from mental or physical causes which we will investigate to some extent before we have done with the subject, many men whose occupations are reputed to be amongst the most interesting have suffered terribly from ennui, and that not during a week or two at a time, but for consecutive years and years. Ennui. There is a class of books written with the praiseworthy intention of stimulating young men to intellectual labour, in which this danger of the intellectual life is systematically ignored. It is assumed in these books that the satisfactions of intellectual labour are certain; that although it may not always, or often, result in outward and material prosperity, its inward joys will never fail. Promises of this kind cannot safely be made to anyone. The satisfactions of intellectual riches are not more sure than the satisfactions of material riches; the feeling of factions are dull indifference which often so mysteriously clouds the life of the rich man in the midst of the most elaborate contrivances for his pleasure and amusement, has its exact counterpart in the lives of men who are rich in the best treasures of the mind, and who have infinite intellectual resources. However brilliant your ability, however brave and persistent your industry, however vast That intellectual satis not sure. LETTER 11. Ennui. Dürer's "Melencolia." PART X. your knowledge, there is always this dreadful possibility of ennui. People tell you that work is a specific against it, but many a man has worked steadily and earnestly, and suffered terribly from ennui all the time that he was working, although the labour was of his own choice, the labour that he loved best, and for which Nature evidently intended him. The poets, from Solomon downwards, have all of them, so far as I know, given utterance in one page or another of their writings to this feeling of dreary dissatisfaction, and Albert Dürer, in his "Melencolia," illustrated it. It is plain that the robust female figure which has exercised the ingenuity of so many commentators is not melancholy either from weakness of the body or vacancy of the mind. She is strong and she is learned; yet, though the plumes of her wings are mighty, she sits heavily and listlessly, brooding amidst the implements of suspended labour, on the shore of a waveless sea. The truth is that Dürer engraved the melancholy that he himself only too intimately knew. This is not the dulness of the ignorant and incapable, whose minds are a blank because they have no ideas, whose hands are listless for want of an occupation; it is the sadness of the most learned, the most intelligent, the most industrious; the weary misery of those who are rich in the attainments of culture, who have the keys of the chambers of knowledge, and wings to bear them to the heaven of the ideal. If you counsel this "Melencolia" to work that she may be merry, she will answer that she knows the uses of labour and its vanity, and the precise amount of profit that a man hath of all his labour which he taketh under the sun. All things are full of labour, she will tell you; and in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. LETTER Prevalence of melancholy amongst cultivated people. Scott and Dryden. Can we escape this brooding melancholy of the great PART X. 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 labour 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-labourer 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 Byron. Shelley. Wordsworth. PART X. II. Cuvier. Goethe. 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. 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 labour. 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 |