SIR STAFFORD NORTHCOTE ON OUR INTELLECTUAL VICES.
IVIIEN Sir Stafford Northcote spoke of the love of excite- ment and the vanity of our generation as the leading intellectual vices of our day, he was no doubt speaking from ob- servation, and from acute observation, not only in the political, but in the social field. But what he forgot, and what speakers on such subjects are apt to forget, is this,—that it is the direct tendency of widely-diffused intellectual interests to raise into the plane of intellectual phenomena what in a former age remained, 'wholly unnoticed by the literary world, in the less conspicuous field of personal habits. Take a man who in a former age found all his excitement in steeple-chases, races, and gambling, and give him a little real literary culture, and the effect may well be that the love of excitement which formerly exhaled itself in a dumb and inarticulate world, may now very probably connect itself with literary interests. Such a man may possibly write novels, or at least become a great consumer of novels, of the " Guy Livingstone" or steeple-chasing order ; or he may delight in pictures such as Mr. Disraeli has given in "The Young Duke" of the passion of gambling ; or he may merely take his daily dram in the shape of writing or enjoying sensational articles on these or kindred subjects in the most sensational of journals. But that will not at all imply that there is more love of ,excitement in the world than there was formerly, but only that what there is, has taken a more literary, and therefore probably a much less undiluted and dangerous form. There is very much less, we should suppose, than there used to be a century ago of the love of violent excitement, among accomplished intellectual men, but in place of it, we see a more widely-diffused craving for excitements of a less stimulating order. Where we had nothing but gambling, duelling, cock-fighting, or, in "society," violent quarrelling and horsewhipping, and in the Press the grossest libelling, we have now diluted literary equivalents for these amusements, special articles of high flavour about the race-course or the battle-field, all sorts of flignificant gossip and social innuendoes in sonae weekly journal, and generally the nearest thing to physical excitement which the literary world can supply. No doubt Sir Stafford .Northcote is quite right, that if you compared the total English literature of this age with the total literature of a hundred years back, you would find in the former a much greater proportion of temporary and even frivolous excitements, as compared with the amount of matter intended at least to be of permanent value, than you could find in the last century. But then that is merely saying that the stratum of excitement which was altogether beneath the literary level a hundred years ago, has risen into the literary level flow; and while this change has seemed to give a new breath of frivolity to literature, it has really only diluted with literary tendencies a love of excitement which had formerly no such tinge in it at all. And the same may be said of modern vanity. It may be true,—though we rather doubt the fact,—that vanity is more often conspicuous in political and literary forms in our own day, than it was in those of our great-grandfathers; and if it is true, the reason no doubt is because all personal qualities which can show them- selves through literature at all get many more opportunities of showing themselves in that form at a time when so many more of their owners are possessed of literary culture, and are aware of the distinction which is to be gained through literature, than was possible at a time when very few indeed could write for the Press, and when there were but very few even to read with interest what those few had written. But that is not saying that vanity itself is on the increase, but only that the vanity which showed itself, in all sorts of merely social absurdities in former days, now rises to the surface of literature in the case of those who have the faculty of literary expression. A man who dressed absurdly, or spoke affectedly, or paraded his absence of mind, in the days when most men were dumb, and when publishers were few and severe in their demands, is now as likely as not to have a chance at least of airing his vanity in a form in which it is perceived by hundreds or thousands of persons, in place of the score or two who perceived it in old days. The fop of other days is the literary exquisite of this, who designs his poems or his essays with as much anxious desire to attract attention as he would have designed his coat or his necktie then. But this is only saying what is obviously true, that as intellectual interests and the various devices for stimulating them become more general, all the ostentatious which were formerly annoying only to a small circle are likely to be annoying to a wide circle, just as many of the higher virtues which were formerly useful only to the few, will now become, by the same means, of the highest service to the many. But we think it should be added that just as the physical excitements in which our great-grandfathers delighted become, on the whole, less dangerous and savage as they take the semi-diluted form of literary stimulants, so also the vanities which were most contemptible in an age of few intellectual in- terests take a milder and perhaps a less coxcombical form when they reach the literary phase. We do not mean that there is not occasionally visible in our present literature intellectual vanity more intense, grotesque, and contemptible than ever there was before, but only this,—that if the same vanity had appeared in the same man, without the atmosphere of the world of thought to tone it down, it would have been still more intense and more con- temptible, though less grotesque, than it is in its intellectual form. It would have more intense and contemptible, because it would have measured itself by poorer standards and not been attenuated, as to some extent it necessarily is, by the larger knowledge of which the vain man who is also well-educated becomes, to some extent, the exponent; less grotesque, because a less intellectual and more personal form is more in keeping with the essence of vanity than is that air of familiarity with the intellectual universe which reminds us of the wide world in which vanity lives, and which suggests so many and such unfavourable comparisons by which to judge it. The vanity of the world, of course, takes much oftener an intellectual type in an age of culture than it does in an age of predominating physical wants, but of the quality itself there is probably rather less than more in a more refined age than in a more barbarous ; since the more extension of know- ledge has certainly a considerable effect in fostering, we will not say humility in the moral sense, but those habits of thought as to the insignificance of individual effort which at least greatly subdue the class of emotions in which vanity is the chief factor. Such quaint exhibitions of mingled ability and vanity as Sir Tollemache Sinclair's last week,—to which we may presume, perhaps, as it appeared on the very morning on which Sir Stafford Northcoto made his speech, that he may have been alluding, in the somewhat enigmatic passage in which he illus- trated his remarks on vanity from his experience in the House of Commons—are, no doubt, much commoner in our age than in any other, but who can question that if Sir Tollemache Sinclair had not been an educated man, his vanity would have been even more prodigious than it now is under the rather depressing influence of wide political knowledge.
But Sir Stafford Northcote is surely wrong when he assumes that the tastes of the modern world supply more food for vanity than the tastes of less educated generations. We should have thought that the very opposite was the case,—tjiat as the collec- tive whole grows in magnitude, the individual dwindles, and that even in the political sphere there is far more danger of fixing too much attention on the mere work to be done and too little on the doers of it, not only than there used to be, but than is at all desirable even in the interests of the work itself. The exigencies of a democratic state of society certainly make the form of political work of less account, and the substance of more account, than the conditions of an aristocratic form of government admitted of ; and probably make the form, as compared with the substance, of far less account than it ought to be. If there be any truth in the common im- pression that the age of eloquence is passed, is not this the explana- tion,—that democracy is to some extent too busy with its own urgent necessities, to some extent even too jealous of concentrated per- sonal influence, to present the best opportunities for the exercise of eloquence ? Large constituencies are apt to be jealous of men of very independent minds, and without independent minds there can be no surpassing eloquence. And precisely the same causes which tend to the discouragement of eloquence tend to the dis- couragement of personal displays of all kinds, and of the vanity which feeds on such displays. Sir Stafford says, "There is a great deal too much tendency among the public at large to think more of what men are able to say and how they are able to dis- tinguish themselves, than of the work which they are able to do ; and the only real remedy to be applied to this increasing evil is the same remedy which I suggested for the former evil of which I was speaking, namely, that you should, as far as possible, look to the work, and not to the men who are doing the work." We should have said that the evil was so far from increasing, that it might even be too rapidly diminishing. These are not the days in which the House of Commons thinks so much of the form in which things are put that it ever adjourns in a tumult of excite- ment after a fine oration, simply because it cannot trust itself not to be carried away by the orator ; or in which Sheridan would have thought it well to fall back as if fainting in Burke's arms, or Burke to conceal a dagger beneath his cloak for the purpose of an oratorical effect. The pressure of popular interests more and more diminishes the value attached to personal capabilities, and even unduly diminishes, we imagine, the import- ance of political form altogether. Imperative as the duty no doubt often is of "swallowing the speech" you had intended to make,—and we are sure that no one performs that duty with more cheerfulness than the leader of the House of Commons himself— one duty is still more important, which is now too often neg- lected, and that is the duty of having a carefully-prepared speech ready to swallow, if the occasion is unfavourable for its delivery. Hand-to-mouth oratory,—and that is almost the best that we now get,—injures very gravely the character of the discussions themselves, and makes them indefinitely less efficient for thrashing out the grain from the chaff than the more formal discussions of old times used to be. You cannot have conversational debates which really put the issues in their full breadth before the House of Commons. After all, the imagination is a great element in the illustration of politics, and modern hurry tends to exclude imagination from debate. To our minds, it is a very characteristic danger of modern politics, that we offer too little temptation to the higher in- tellectual vanity than too much ; that we shuffle away the form too cavalierly in order to get at the substance, and by that means too frequently leave the true "substance "—that which "stands beneath," the apparent issue—out in the cold.
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