PART X. LETTER X. Night-work. the outside world, almost like the chasm of death; and that you need not take thought of the morrow until the morrow has come. There are few really great thoughts, such as the world will not willingly let die, that have not been conceived under the quiet stars." The medical objection to night-work in the case of literary men would probably be that the night is too favourable to literary production. The author of the Essay just quoted says that at night "you only drift into deeper silence and quicker inspiration. If the right mood. is upon you, you write on; if not, your pillow awaits you." Exactly so; that is to say, the brain, owing to the complete external tranquillity, can so concentrate its efforts on the subject in hand as to work itself up into a luminous condition which is fed by the most rapid destruction of the nervous substance that ever takes place within the walls of a human skull. "If the right mood is upon you, you write on;" in other words, if you have once well lighted your spirit-lamp, it will go on burning so long as any spirit is left in it, for the air is so tranquil that nothing comes to blow it out. You drift into deeper silence and "quicker inspiration." It is just this quicker inspiration that the physician dreads. Against this objection may be placed the equally to day work serious objection to day-work, that every interruption, when you are particularly anxious not to be interrupted, causes a definite loss and injury to the nervous system. The choice must therefore be made between two dangers, and if they are equally balanced there can be no hesitation, because all the literary interests of an author are on the side of the most tranquil time. Literary work is always sure to be much better done when there is no fear of disturbance than under the apprehension of it; Objections and precisely the same amount of cerebral effort will produce, when the work is uninterrupted, not only better writing, but a much greater quantity of writing. The knowledge that he is working well and productively is an element of health to every workman because it encourages cheerful habits of mind. In the division of time it is an excellent rule for adults to keep it as much as possible in large masses, not giving a quarter of an hour to one occupation and a quarter to another, but giving three, four, or five hours to one thing at a time. In the case of children an opposite practice should be followed; they are able to change their attention from one subject to another much more easily than we can, whilst at the same time they cannot fix their minds for very long without cerebral fatigue leading to temporary incapacity. The custom prevalent in schools, of making the boys learn several different things in the course of the day, is therefore founded upon the necessities of the boy-nature, though most grown men would find that changes so frequent would, for them, have all the inconveniences of interruption. To boys they come as relief, to men as interruption. The reason is that the physical condition of the brain is different in the two cases; but in our loose way of talking about these things we may say that the boy's ideas are superficial, like the plates and dishes on the surface of a dinner-table, which may be rapidly changed without inconvenience, whereas the man's ideas, having all struck root down to the very depths of his nature, are more like the plants in a garden, which cannot be removed without a temporary loss both of vigour and of beauty, and the loss cannot be instantaneously repaired. For a man to do his work thoroughly well, it is necessary that he should PART X. LET TER Time kept in large masses. Children require frequent change. Boys and men. PART X. LETTER Rapid tuning of Cuvier dwell in it long enough at a time to get all the powers of his mind fully under command with reference to the particular work in hand, and he cannot do this without tuning his whole mind to the given diapason, as a tuner tunes a piano. Some men can tune their minds more the mind. rapidly, as violins are tuned, and this faculty may to a certain extent be acquired by efforts of the will very frequently repeated. Cuvier had this faculty in the most eminent degree. One of his biographers says: "His extreme facility for study, and of directing all the powers of his mind to diverse occupations of study, from one quarter of an hour to another, was one of the most extraordinary qualities of his mind." The Duke of Wellington. Wellington also cultivated the habit (inestimably valuable to a public man) of directing the whole of his attention. to the subject under consideration, however frequently that subject might happen to be changed. But although men of exceptional power and very exceptional flexibility may do this with apparent impunity, that still depends very much on the nature of the occupation. There are some occupations which are not incompatible with a fragmentary division of time, because these occupations are themselves fragmentary. For example, you may study languages in phrase-books during very small. spaces of time, because the complete phrase is in itself a very small thing, but you could not so easily break and resume the thread of an elaborate argument. I suspect that though Cuvier appeared to his contemporaries a man remarkably able to leave off and resume his work at will, he must have taken care to do work that would bear interruption at those times when he knew himself to be most liable to it. And although, when a man's time is unavoidably broken up into fragments, no talent of a Choice of occupations. LETTER Utility of merely auxiliary kind can be more precious than that of PART X. turning each of those fragments to advantage, it is still true that he whose time is at his own disposal will do his work most calmly, most deliberately, and therefore on the whole most thoroughly and perfectly, when he keeps it in fine masses. The mere knowledge that you have three or four clear hours before you is in itself a great help to the spirit of thoroughness, both in study and in production. It is agreeable too, when the sitting has come to an end, to perceive that a definite advance is the result of it, and advance in anything is scarcely perceptible in less than three or four hours. masses of time. Pursuits that cannot be followed in of time. There are several pursuits which cannot be followed in fragments of time, on account of the necessary preparations. It is useless to begin oil-painting unless you have fragments full time to set your palette properly, to get your canvas into a proper state for working upon, to pose the model as you wish, and settle down to work with everything as it ought to be. In landscape-painting from nature you require the time to go to the selected place, and after your arrival to arrange your materials and shelter yourself from the sun. In scientific pursuits the preparations are usually at least equally elaborate, and often much more so. To prepare for an experiment, or for a dissection, takes time which we feel to be disproportionate when it leaves too little for the scientific work itself. It is for this reason more frequently than for any other that amateurs who begin in enthusiasm, so commonly, after a while, abandon the objects of their pursuit. There is a kind of slavery to which no really intellectual man would ever voluntarily submit, a minute obedience. to the clock. Very conscientious people often impose upon themselves this sort of slavery. A person who has Minute obedience to the clock. LETTER X. PART X. hampered himself with rules of this kind will take up a certain book, for instance, when the clock strikes nine, and begin at yesterday's mark, perhaps in the middle of a paragraph. Then he will read with great steadiness till a quarter past nine, and exactly on the instant when the minute-hand gets opposite the dot, he will shut his book, however much the passage may happen to interest him. It was in allusion to good people of this kind that Sir Walter Scott said he had never known a man of genius who could be perfectly regular in his habits, whilst he had known many blockheads who could. It is easy to see that a minute obedience to the clock is unintellectual in its very nature, for the intellect is not a piece of mechanism as a clock is, and cannot easily be made to act like one. There may be perfect correspondence between the locomotives and the clocks on a railway, for if the clocks are pieces of mechanism the locomotives are so likewise, but the intellect always needs a certain looseness and latitude as to time. Very broad rules are the best, such as "Write in the morning, read in the afternoon, see friends in the evening," or else "Study one day and produce another alternately," or even "Work one week and see the world another week alternately." Books of agenda. There is a fretting habit, much recommended by men of business and of great use to them, of writing the evening before the duties of the day in a book of agenda. If this is done at all by intellectual men with reference to their pursuits, it ought to be done in a very broad, loose way, never minutely. An intellectual worker ought never to make it a matter of conscience (in intellectual labour) to do a predetermined quantity of little things. This sort of conscientiousness frets and worries, and is the enemy of all serenity of thought. |