The Intellectual Life Part 13

TO A LADY OF HIGH CULTURE.

Greatest misfortune in the intellectual life of women--They do not hear truth--Men disguise their thoughts for women--Cream and curacoa--Probable permanence of the desire to please women--Most truth in cultivated society--Hopes from the increase of culture.

I think that the greatest misfortune in the intellectual life of women is that they do not hear the truth from men.

All men in cultivated society say to women as much as possible that which they may be supposed to wish to hear, and women are so much accustomed to this that they can scarcely hear without resentment an expression of opinion which takes no account of their personal and private feeling. The consideration for the feelings of women gives an agreeable tone to society, but it is fatal to the severity of truth.

Observe a man of the world whose opinions are well known to you,--notice the little pause before he speaks to a lady. During that little pause he is turning over what he has to say, so as to present it in the manner that will please her best; and you may be sure that the integrity of truth will suffer in the process. If we compare what we know of the man with that which the lady hears from him, we perceive the immense disadvantages of her position. He ascertains what will please her, and that is what he administers. He professes to take a deep interest in things which he does not care for in the least, and he pa.s.ses lightly over subjects and events which he knows to be of the most momentous importance to the world. The lady spends an hour more agreeably than if she heard opinions which would irritate, and prognostics which would alarm her, but she has missed an opportunity for culture, she has been confirmed in feminine illusions. If this happened only from time to time, the effect would not tell so much on the mental const.i.tution; but it is incessant, it is continual. Men disguise their thoughts for women as if to venture into the feminine world were as dangerous as travelling in Arabia, or as if the thoughts themselves were criminal.

There appeared two or three years ago in _Punch_ a clever drawing which might have served as an ill.u.s.tration to this subject. A fashionable doctor was visiting a lady in Belgravia who complained that she suffered from debility. Cod-liver oil being repugnant to her taste, the agreeable doctor, wise in his generation, blandly suggested as an effective subst.i.tute a mixture of cream and curacoa. What that intelligent man did for his patient's physical const.i.tution, all men of politeness do for the intellectual const.i.tution of ladies. Instead of administering the truth which would strengthen, though unpalatable, they administer intellectual cream and curacoa.

The primary cause of this tendency to say what is most pleasing to women is likely to be as permanent as the distinction of s.e.x itself. It springs directly from s.e.xual feelings, it is hereditary and instinctive.

Men will never talk to women with that rough frankness which they use between themselves. Conversation between the s.e.xes will always be partially insincere. Still I think that the more women are respected, the more men will desire to be approved by them for what they are in reality, and the less they will care for approval which is obtained by dissimulation. It may be observed already that, in the most intellectual society of great capitals, men are considerably more outspoken before women than they are in the provincial middle-cla.s.ses. Where women have most culture, men are most open and sincere. Indeed, the highest culture has a direct tendency to command sincerity in others, both because it is tolerant of variety in opinion, and because it is so penetrating that dissimulation is felt to be of no use. By the side of an uncultivated woman, a man feels that if he says anything different from what she has been accustomed to she will take offence, whilst if he says anything beyond the narrow range of her information he will make her cold and uncomfortable. The most honest of men, in such a position, finds it necessary to be very cautious, and can scarcely avoid a little insincerity. But with a woman of culture equal to his own, these causes for apprehension have no existence, and he can safely be more himself.

These considerations lead me to hope that as culture becomes more general women will hear truth more frequently. Whenever this comes to pa.s.s, it will be, to them, an immense intellectual gain.

LETTER IX.

TO A YOUNG MAN OF THE MIDDLE CLa.s.s, WELL EDUCATED, WHO COMPLAINED THAT IT WAS DIFFICULT FOR HIM TO LIVE AGREEABLY WITH HIS MOTHER, A PERSON OF SOMEWHAT AUTHORITATIVE DISPOSITION, BUT UNEDUCATED.

A sort of misunderstanding common in modern households--Intolerance of inaccuracy--A false position--A lady not easily intimidated--Difficulty of arguing when you have to teach--Instance about the American War--The best course in discussion with ladies--Women spoilt by non-contradiction--They make all questions personal--The strength of their feelings--Their indifference to matters of fact.

I have been thinking a good deal, and seriously, since we last met, about the subject of our conversation, which though a painful one is not to be timidly avoided. The degree of unhappiness in your little household, which ought to be one of the pleasantest of households, yet which, as you confided to me, is overshadowed by a continual misunderstanding, is, I fear, very common indeed at the present day. It is only by great forbearance, and great skill, that any household in which persons of very different degrees of culture have to live together on terms of equality, can be maintained in perfect peace; and neither the art nor the forbearance is naturally an attribute of youth. A man whose scholarly attainments were equal to your own, and whose experience of men and women was wider, could no doubt offer you counsel both wise and practical, yet I can hardly say that I should like you better if you followed it. I cannot blame you for having the natural characteristics of your years, an honest love of the best truth that you have attained to, an intolerance of inaccuracy on all subjects, a simple faith in the possibility of teaching others, even elderly ladies, when they happen to know less than yourself. All these characteristics are in themselves blameless; and yet in your case, and in thousands of other similar cases, they often bring clouds of storm and trial upon houses which, in a less rapidly progressive century than our own, might have been blessed with uninterrupted peace. The truth is, that you are in a false position relatively to your mother, and your mother is in a false position relatively to you. She expects deference, and deference is scarcely compatible with contradiction; certainly, if there be contradiction at all, it must be very rare, very careful, and very delicate. You, on the other hand, although no doubt full of respect and affection for your mother in your heart, cannot hear her authoritatively enunciating anything that you know to be erroneous, without feeling irresistibly urged to set her right. She is rather a talkative lady; she does not like to hear a conversation going forward without taking a part in it, and rather an important part, so that whatever subject is talked about in her presence, that subject she will talk about also. Even before specialists your mother has an independence of opinion, and a degree of faith in her own conclusions, which would be admirable if they were founded upon right reason and a careful study of the subject. Medical men, and even lawyers, do not intimidate her; she is convinced that she knows more about disease than the physician, and more about legal business than an old attorney. In theology no parson can approach her; but here a woman may consider herself on her own ground, as theology is the speciality of women.

All this puts you out of patience, and it is intelligible that, for a young gentleman of intellectual habits and somewhat ardent temperament like yourself, it must be at times rather trying to have an AUTHORITY at hand ever ready to settle all questions in a decisive manner. To you I have no counsel to offer but that of unconditional submission. You have the weakness to enter into arguments when to sustain them you must a.s.sume the part of a teacher. In arguing with a person already well-informed upon the subject in dispute, you may politely refer to knowledge which he already possesses, but when he does not possess the knowledge you cannot argue with him; you must first teach him, you must become didactic, and therefore odious. I remember a great scene which took place between you and your mother concerning the American War. It was brought on by a too precise answer of yours relatively to your friend B., who had emigrated to America. You mother asked to what part of America B. had emigrated, and you answered, "The Argentine Republic."

A shade of displeasure clouded your mother's countenance, because she did not know where the Argentine Republic might be, and betrayed it by her manner. You imprudently added that it was in South America. "Yes, yes, I know very well," she answered; "there was a great battle there during the American War. It is well your friend was not there under Jefferson Davis." Now, permit me to observe, my estimable young friend, that this was what the French call a fine opportunity for holding your tongue, but your missed it. Fired with an enthusiasm for truth (always dangerous to the peace of families), you began to explain to the good lady that the Argentine Republic, though in South America, was not one of the Southern States of the Union. This led to a scene of which I was the embarra.s.sed and unwilling witness. Your mother vehemently affirmed that all the Southern States had been under Jefferson Davis, that she knew the fact perfectly, that it had always been known to every one during the war, and that, consequently, as the Argentine Republic was in South America, the Argentine Republic had been under Jefferson Davis.

Rapidly warming with this discussion, your mother "supposed that you would deny next that there had ever been such a thing as a war between the North and the South." Then you, in your turn, lost temper, and you fetched an atlas for the purpose of explaining that the southern division of the continent of America was not the southern half of the United States. You were landed, as people always are landed when they prosecute an argument with the ignorant, in the thankless office of the schoolmaster. You were actually trying to give your mother a lesson in geography! She was not grateful to you for your didactic attentions. She glanced at the book as people glance at an offered dish which they dislike. She does not understand maps; the representation of places in geographical topography has never been quite clear to her. Your little geographical lecture irritated, but did not inform; it clouded the countenance, but did not illuminate the understanding. The distinction between South America and the Southern States is not easy to the non-a.n.a.lytic mind under any circ.u.mstances, but when _amour propre_ is involved it becomes impossible.

I believe that the best course in discussions of this kind with ladies is simply to say _once_ what is true, for the acquittal of your own conscience, but after that to remain silent on that topic, leaving the last word to the lady, who will probably simply re-affirm what she has already said. For example, in the discussion about the Argentine Republic, your proper course would have been to say first, firmly, that the territory in question was not a part of the seceded States and had never been in the Union, with a brief and decided geographical explanation. Your mother would not have been convinced by this, and would probably have had the last word, but the matter would have ended there. Another friend of mine, who is in a position very like your own, goes a step farther, and is determined to agree with his mother-in-law in everything. He always a.s.sents to her propositions. She is a Frenchwoman, and has been accustomed to use _Algerie_ and _Afrique_ as convertible terms. Somebody spoke of the Cape of Good Hope as being in Africa. "Then it belongs to France, as Africa belongs to France." "Oui, chere mere," he answered, in his usual formula; "vous avez raison."

He alluded to this afterwards when we were alone together. "I was foolish enough some years since," he said, "to argue with my _belle mere_ and try to teach her little things from time to time, but it kept her in a state of chronic ill-humor and led to no good; it spoiled her temper, and it did not improve her mind. But since I have adopted the plan of perpetual a.s.sent we get on charmingly. Whatever she affirms I a.s.sent to at once, and all is well. My friends are in the secret, and so no contradictory truth disturbs our amiable tranquillity."

A system of this kind spoils women completely, and makes the least contradiction intolerable to them. It is better that they should at least have the opportunity of hearing truth, though no attempt need be made to force it upon them. The position of ladies of the generation which preceded ours is in many respects a very trying one, and we do not always adequately realize it. A lady like your mother, who never really went through any intellectual discipline, who has no notion of intellectual accuracy in anything, is compelled by the irresistible feminine instinct to engage her strongest feelings in every discussion that arises. A woman can rarely detach her mind from questions of persons to apply it to questions of fact. She does not think simply, "Is that true of such a thing?" but she thinks, "Does he love me or respect me?" The facts about the Argentine Republic and the American War were probably quite indifferent to your mother; but your opposition to what she had a.s.serted seemed to her a failure in affection, and your attempt to teach her a failure in respect. This feeling in women is far from being wholly egoistic. They refer everything to persons, but not necessarily to their own persons. Whatever you affirm as a fact, they find means of interpreting as loyalty or disloyalty to some person whom they either venerate or love, to the head of religion, or of the State, or of the family. Hence it is always dangerous to enter upon intellectual discussion of any kind with women, for you are almost certain to offend them by setting aside the sentiments of veneration, affection, love, which they have in great strength, in order to reach accuracy in matters of fact, which they neither have nor care for.

PART VIII.

_ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY._

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG ENGLISH n.o.bLEMAN.

A contrast--A poor student--His sad fate--Cla.s.s-sentiment--Tycho Brahe--Robert Burns--Sh.e.l.ley's opinion of Byron--Charles d.i.c.kens--Shopkeepers in English literature--Pride of aristocratic ignorance--Pursuits tabooed by the spirit of caste--Affected preferences in intellectual pursuits--Studies that add to gentility--Sincerity of interest needed for genuine culture--The exclusiveness of scholarly caste--Its bad influence on outsiders--Feeling of Burns toward scholars--Sureness of cla.s.s-instinct--Unforeseen effect of railways--Return to nomadic life and the chase--Advantages and possibilities to life in the higher cla.s.ses.

It is one of the privileges of authorship to have correspondents in the most widely different positions, and by means of their frank and friendly letters (usually much more frank than any oral communication) to gain a singularly accurate insight into the working of circ.u.mstances on the human intellect and character. The same post that brought me your last letter brought news about another of my friends whose lot has been a striking contrast to your own.[8]

Let me dwell upon this contrast for a few minutes. All the sunshine appears to have been on your side, and all the shadow on his. Born of highly cultivated parents, in the highest rank in England under royalty, you have lived from the beginning amongst the most efficient aids to culture, and Nature has so endowed you that, instead of becoming indifferent to these things from familiarity, you have learned to value them more and more in every successive year. The plainest statement of your advantages would sound like an extract from one of Disraeli's novels. Your father's princ.i.p.al castle is situated amongst the finest scenery in Britain, and his palace in London is filled with masterpieces of art. Wherever you have lived you have been surrounded by good literature and cultivated friends. Your health is steadily robust, you can travel wherever you choose, and all the benefits of all the capitals of Europe belong to you as much as to their own citizens. In all these gifts and opportunities there is but one evil--the bewilderment of their multiplicity.

My other correspondent has been less fortunately situated. "I began school," he says, "when six years old, was taken from it at eleven and sent to the mines to earn a little towards my own support. I continued there till fourteen, when through an unlucky incident I was made a hopeless cripple. At that day I was earning the n.o.ble sum of eightpence per day, quite as much as any boy of that age got in the lead mines. I suffered much for two years; after that, became much easier, but my legs were quite useless, and have continued so up to the present time. The right thigh-bone is decayed, has not got worse these nine years; therefore I conclude that I may live--say another thirty years. I should _like_, at all events, for life _is_ sweet even at this cost; not but what I could die quietly enough, I dare say. I have not been idle these years...."

(Here permit me to introduce a parenthesis. He certainly had _not_ been idle. He had educated himself up to such a point that he could really appreciate both literature and art, and had attained some genuine skill in both. His letters to me were the letters of a cultivated gentleman, and he used invariably to insert little pen-sketches, which were done with a light and refined hand.)

"I can do anything almost in bed--except getting up. I am now twenty-two years old. My father was a miner, but is now unable to work. I have only one brother working, and we are about a dozen of us; consequently we are not in the most flourishing circ.u.mstances, but a friend has put it in my power to learn to etch. I have got the tools and your handbook on the subject."

These extracts are from his first letter. Afterwards he wrote me others which made me feel awed and humbled by the manly cheerfulness with which he bore a lot so dreary, and by the firmness of resolution he showed in his pursuits. He could not quit his bed, but that was not the worst; he could not even sit up in bed, and yet he contrived, I know not how, both to write and draw and etch on copper, managing the plaguy chemicals, and even printing his own proofs. His bed was on wheels, on a sort of light iron carriage, and he saw nature out-of-doors. All the gladness of physical activity was completely blotted out of his existence, and in that respect his prospects were without hope. And still he said that "life was sweet." O marvel of all marvels, how _could_ that life be sweet!

Aided by a beautiful patience and resignation the lamp of the mind burned with a steady brightness, fed by his daily studies. In the winters, however, the diseased limb gave him prolonged agony, and in the autumn of 1872, to avoid the months of torture that lay before him, he had himself put in the railway and sent off, in his bed, to Edinburgh, sleeping in a waiting-room on the way. There was no one to attend him, but he trusted, not vainly, to the humanity of strangers. Just about the same time your lordship went northwards also, with many friends, to enjoy the n.o.ble scenery, and the excitement of n.o.ble sport. My poor cripple got to Edinburgh, got a glimpse of Scott's monument and the Athenian pillars, and submitted himself to the surgeons. They rendered him the best of services, for they ended his pains forever.

So I am to get no more of those wonderfully brave and cheerful letters that were written from the little bed on wheels. I miss them for the lessons they quite unconsciously conveyed. He fancied that he was the learner, poor lad! and I the teacher, whereas it was altogether the other way. He made me feel what a blessing it is, even from the purely intellectual point of view, to be able to get out of bed after the night's rest, and go from one room to another. He made me understand the value of every liberty and every power whilst at the same time he taught me to bear more patiently every limit, and inconvenience, and restriction.

In comparing his letters with yours I have been struck by one reflection predominantly, which is, the entire absence of cla.s.s-sentiment in both of you. n.o.body, not in the secret, could guess that one set of letters came from a palace and the other set from a poor miner's cottage; and even to me, who do not see the habitations except by an effort of the memory or imagination, there is nothing to recall the immensity of the social distance that separated my two friendly and welcome correspondents. It is clear, of course, that one of them had enjoyed greater advantages than the other, but neither wrote from the point of view which marks his caste or cla.s.s. It was my habit to write to you, and to him, exactly in the same tone, yet this was not felt to be unsuitable by either.

Is it not that the love and pursuit of culture lead each of us out of his cla.s.s, and that cla.s.s-views of any kind, whether of the aristocracy, or of the middle cla.s.s, or of the people, inevitably narrow the mind and hinder it from receiving pure truth? Have you ever known any person who lived habitually in the notions of a caste, high or low, without incapacitating himself in a greater or less degree for breadth and delicacy of perception? It seems to me that the largest and best minds, although they have been born and nurtured in this caste or that, and may continue to conform externally to its customs, always emanc.i.p.ate themselves from it intellectually, and arrive at a sort of neutral region, where the light is colorless, and clear, and equal, like plain daylight out of doors. So soon as we attain the forgetfulness of self, and become absorbed in our pursuits for their own sakes, the feeling of caste drops off from us. It was not a mark of culture in Tycho Brahe, but rather of the imperfections of his culture, that he felt so strongly the difficulty of conciliating scientific pursuits with the obligations of n.o.ble birth, and began his public discourses on astronomy by telling his audience that the work was ill-suited to his social position--hesitating, too, even about authorship from a dread of social degradation. And to take an instance from the opposite extreme of human society, Robert Burns betrayed the same imperfection of culture in his dedication to the members of the Caledonian Hunt, when he spoke of his "honest rusticity," and told the gentlefolks that he was "bred to the plough, and independent." Both of these men had been unfavorably situated for the highest culture, the one by the ignorance of his epoch the other by the ignorance of his cla.s.s; hence this uneasiness about themselves and their social position. Sh.e.l.ley said of Byron, "The canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out;" and he did not say this from the point of view of a democrat, for Sh.e.l.ley was not precisely a democrat, but from, the broadly human point of view, on which the finest intellects like to take their stand. Sh.e.l.ley perceived that Byron's aristocracy narrowed him, and made his sympathies less catholic than they might have been, nor can there be any doubt of the accuracy of this estimate of Sh.e.l.ley's; if a doubt existed it would be removed by Byron's alternative for a poet, "solitude, or high life." Another man of genius, whose loss we have recently deplored, was narrowed by his antipathy to the aristocratic spirit, though it is necessary to add, in justice, that it did not prevent him from valuing the friendship of n.o.blemen whom he esteemed. The works of Charles d.i.c.kens would have been more accurate as pictures of English life, certainly more comprehensively accurate, if he could have felt for the aristocracy that hearty and loving sympathy which he felt for the middle cla.s.ses and the people. But the narrowness of d.i.c.kens is more excusable than that of Byron, because a kindly heart more easily enters into the feelings of those whom it can often pity than of those who appear to be lifted above pity (though this is nothing but an appearance) and also because it is the habit of aristocracies to repel such sympathy by their manners, which the poor do not.

I have often thought that a sign of aristocratic narrowness in many English authors, including some of the most popular authors of the day, is the way they speak of shopkeepers. This may be due to simple ignorance; but if so, it is ignorance that might be easily avoided.

Happily for our convenience there are a great many shopkeepers in England, so that there is no lack of the materials for study; but our novelists appear to consider this important cla.s.s of Englishmen as unworthy of any patient and serious portraiture. You may remember Mr.

Anthony Trollope's "Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson," which appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_, under Thackeray's editorship. That was an extreme instance of the way the cla.s.s is treated in our literature; and then in poetry we have some disdainful verses of Mr.

Tennyson's. It may be presumed that there is material for grave and respectful treatment of this extensive cla.s.s, but our poets and novelists do not seem to have discovered, or sought to discover, the secret of that treatment. The intensity of the prejudices of caste prevents them from seeing any possibility of true gentlemanhood in a draper or a grocer, and blinds them to the aesthetic beauty or grandeur which may be as perfectly compatible with what is disdainfully called "counter-jumping" as it is admitted to be with the jumping of five-barred gates.

The same caste prejudices have often kept the ma.s.s of the upper cla.s.ses in ignorance of most valuable and important branches of knowledge. The poor have been ignorant, yet never proud of their ignorance; the ignorance that men are proud of belongs to caste always, not always to what we should call an aristocratic caste, but to the caste-feeling in one cla.s.s or another. The pride of the feudal baron in being totally illiterate amounted to self-exclusion from all intellectual culture, and we may still find living instances of partial self-exclusion from culture, of which pride is the only motive. There are people who pa.s.s their time in what are considered amus.e.m.e.nts (that do not amuse), because it seems to them a more gentlemanly sort of life than the devotion to some great and worthy pursuit which would have given the keenest zest and relish to their whole existence (besides making them useful members of society, which they are not), but which happens to be tabooed for them by the prejudices of their caste. There are many studies, in themselves n.o.ble and useful, that a man of good family cannot follow with the earnestness and the sacrifice of time necessary to success in them, without incurring the disapprobation of his friends. If this disapprobation were visited on the breaker of caste-regulations because he neglected some other culture, there would still be something reasonable in it; but this is not the case. The caste-regulation forbids the most honorable and instructive labor when it does not forbid the most unprofitable idleness, the most utter throwing away of valuable time and faculty. Tycho Brahe feared to lose caste in becoming the most ill.u.s.trious astronomer of his time; but he would have had no such apprehension, nor any ground for such apprehension, if instead of being impelled to n.o.ble work by a high intellectual instinct, he had been impelled by meaner pa.s.sions to unlimited self-indulgence. Even, in our own day these prejudices are still strong enough, or have been until very lately, to keep our upper cla.s.ses in great darkness about natural knowledge of all kinds, and about its application to the arts of life. How few gentlemen have been taught to draw accurately, and how few are accurately acquainted with the great practical inventions of the age! The caste-sentiment does not, in these days, keep them ignorant of literature, but it keeps them ignorant of _things_. A friend who had a strong constructive and experimental turn, told me that, as a rule, he found gentlemen less capable of entering into his ideas than common joiners and blacksmiths, because these humble workmen, from their habit of dealing with matter, had acquired some experience of its nature. For my own part, I have often been amazed by the difficulty of making something clear to a cla.s.sically educated gentleman which any intelligent mechanic would have seen to the bottom, and all round, after five or six minutes of explanation. There is a certain French n.o.bleman whose ignorance I have frequent opportunities of fathoming, always with fresh astonishment at the depths of it, and I declare that he knows no more about the properties of stone, and timber, and metal, than if he were a cherub in the clouds of heaven!

But there is something in caste-sentiment even more prejudicial to culture than ignorance itself, and that is the affectation of strong preferences for certain branches of knowledge in which people are not seriously interested. There is nothing which people will not pretend to like, if a liking for it is supposed to be one of the marks and indications of gentility. There has been an immense amount of this kind of affectation in regard to cla.s.sical scholarship, and we know for a certainty that it _is_ affectation whenever people are loud in their praise of cla.s.sical authors whom they never take the trouble to read. It may have happened to you, as it has happened to me from time to time, to hear men affirm the absolute necessity of cla.s.sical reading to distinction of thought and manner, and yet to be aware at the same time, from close observation of their habits, that those very men entirely neglected the sources of that culture in which they professed such earnest faith. The explanation is, that as cla.s.sical accomplishments are considered to be one of the evidences of gentility, whoever speaks loudly in their favor affirms that he has the tastes and preferences of a gentleman. It is like professing the fashionable religion, or belonging to an aristocratic shade of opinion in politics. I have not a doubt that all affectations of this kind are injurious to genuine culture, for genuine culture requires sincerity of interest before everything, and the fashionable affectations, so far from attracting sincere men to the departments of learning which happen to be _a la mode_, positively drive them away, just as many have become Nonconformists because the established religion was considered necessary to gentility, who might have remained contented with its ordinances as a simple discipline for their souls.

I dislike the interference of genteel notions in our studies for another reason. They deprive such culture as we may get from them, of one of the most precious results of culture, the enlargement of our sympathy for others. If we encourage ourselves in the pride of scholarly caste, so far as to imagine that we who have made Latin verses are above comparison with all who have never exercised their ingenuity in that particular way, we are not likely to give due and serious attention to the ideas of people whom we are pleased to consider uneducated; and yet it may happen that these people are sometimes our intellectual superiors, and that their ideas concern us very closely. But this is only half the evil. The consciousness of our contempt embitters the feelings of men in other castes, and prevents them from accepting our guidance when it might be of the greatest practical utility to them. I may mention Robert Burns as an instance of a man of genius who would have been happier and more fortunate if he had felt no barrier of separation between himself and the culture of his time. His poetry is as good rustic poetry as the best that has come down to us from antiquity, and instead of feeling towards the poets of times past the kind of soreness which a parvenu feels towards families of ancient descent, he ought rather to have rejoiced in the consciousness that he was their true and legitimate successor, as the clergy of an authentic Church feel themselves to be successors and representatives of saints and apostles who are gathered to their everlasting rest. But poor Burns knew that in an age when what is called scholarship gave all who had acquired it a right to look down upon poets who had only genius as the illegitimate offspring of nature, his position had not that solidity which belonged to the scholarly caste, and the result was a perpetual uneasiness which broke out in frequent defiance.

"There's ither poets, much your betters, Far seen in Greek, deep men o' letters, Hae thought they had ensur'd their debtors A' future ages; _Now moths deform in shapeless tatters, Their unknown pages_."

And again, in another poem--

"A set o' dull, conceited hashes Confuse their brains in college cla.s.ses!

_They gang in stirks, and come out a.s.ses, Plain truth to speak; An' syne they think to climb Parna.s.sus By dint o' Greek!_"

It was the influence of caste that made Burns write in this way, and how unjust it was every modern reader knows. The great majority of poets have been well-educated men, and instead of ganging into college like stirks and coming out like a.s.ses, they have, as a rule, improved their poetic faculty by an acquaintance with the masterpieces of their art.

Yet Burns is not to be blamed for this injustice; he sneered at Greek because Greek was the mark of a disdainful and exclusive caste, but he never sneered at French or Italian. He had no soreness against culture for its own sake; it was the pride of caste that galled him.

How surely the wonderful cla.s.s-instinct guided the aristocracy to the kind of learning likely to be the most effectual barrier against fellowship with the mercantile cla.s.ses and the people! The uselessness of Greek in industry and commerce was a guarantee that those who had to earn their bread would never find time to master it, and even the strange difficult look of the alphabet (though in reality the alphabet was a gate of gossamer), ensured a degree of awful veneration for those initiated into its mysteries. Then the habit our forefathers had of quoting Latin and Greek to keep the ignorant in their places, was a strong defensive weapon of their caste, and they used it without scruple. Every year removes this pa.s.sion for exclusiveness farther and farther into the past; every year makes learning of every kind less available as the armor of a cla.s.s, and less to be relied upon as a means of social advancement and consideration. Indeed, we have already reached a condition which is drawing back many members of the aristocracy to a state of feeling about intellectual culture resembling that of their forefathers in the middle ages. The old barbarian feeling has revived of late, a feeling which (if it were self-conscious enough) might find expression in some such words as these:--

"It is not by learning and genius that we can hold the highest place, but by the dazzling exhibition of external splendor in those costly pleasures which are the plainest evidence of our power. Let us have beautiful equipages on the land, beautiful yachts upon the sea; let our recreations be public and expensive, that the people may not easily lose sight of us, and may know that there is a gulf of difference between our life and theirs. Why should we toil at books that the poorest students read, we who have lordly pastimes for every month in the year? To be able to revel immensely in pleasures which those below us taste rarely or not at all, this is the best evidence of our superiority. So let us take them magnificently, like English princes and lords."

Even the invention of railways has produced the unforeseen result of a return in the direction of barbarism. If there is one thing which distinguishes civilization it is fixity of residence; and it is essential to the tranquil following of serious intellectual purposes that the student should remain for many months of the year in his own library or laboratory, surrounded by all his implements of culture. But there are people of the highest rank in the England of to-day whose existence is as much nomadic as that of Red Indians in the reserved territories of North America. You cannot ascertain their whereabouts without consulting the most recent newspaper. Their life may be quite accurately described as a return, on a scale of unprecedented splendor and comfort, to the life of tribes in that stage of human development which is known as the period of the chase. They migrate from one hunting-ground to another as the diminution of the game impels them.

Their residences, vast and substantial as they are, serve only as tents and wigwams. The existence of a monk in the cloister, of a prisoner in a fortress, is more favorable to the intellect than theirs.

And yet notwithstanding these re-appearances of the savage nature at the very summit of modern civilization, the life of a great English n.o.bleman of to-day commands so much of what the intellectual know to be truly desirable, that it seems as if only a little firmness of resolution were needed to make all advantages his own. Surrounded by every aid, and having all gates open, he sees the paths of knowledge converging towards him like railways to some rich central city. He has but to choose his route, and travel along it with the least possible hindrance from every kind of friction, in the society of the best companions, and served by the most perfectly trained attendants. Might not our lords be like those brilliant peers who shone like intellectual stars around the throne of Elizabeth, and our ladies like that great lady of whom said a learned Italian, "che non vi aveva altra dama al mondo che la pareggia.s.se nella cognizione delle arti e nella notizia delle scienze e delle lingue," wherefore he called her boldly, in the enthusiasm of his admiration, "_grande anfitrite, Diana nume della terra!_"