THE DRAWBACKS OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.
WRIT E the advantages of intellectual pursuits have been set forth so often that any attempt to enumerate them must pass over trite ground, and arrive at conclusions which will fail to rouse a single dissentient voice, the drawbacks of these pur- suits seem to us inadequately recognised, and there are special reasons in the circumstances of our own day why they ought to be recognised. The reader, we hope, will not misunderstand an attempt to fill this gap for any depreciation of the intellectual life. It is surely a good thing to remember that when you are going towards the north, you must not expect the productions of the south. We do not depreciate the science of a great mathe- matician, when we say that he is not likely to be an authority on some recondite matter of history. As little ought we to be sup- posed to depreciate the common ground of the mathematician and the historian in urging that it has limits, and that some good things lie beyond them.
Indeed, it is a part of the condition of things, in this tangled and imperfect world, that whatever shuts out much evil must shut out some good. Just as we know the outline of any opaque body if we know the shape of its shadow, the main characteristic of the intellectual life—its power of arresting emotion—may be regarded as advantage or disadvantage, according to our point of view. If we regard it in its influence on sorrow, and confine our attention to its lower stages, this influence will appear as great and unmixed gain. It is a great advantage to a lawyer who has lost his only child, that it is as impossible for him to feel any keen grief while he is making up his mind as to the legal aspect of a quarrel, as it is to be in two places at once ; and it is a great disadvantage to his wife that she may carry on this keen grief through almost everything she does, except her household accounts,—a difference which should not be confused by saying that he is busy and she is idle. That may or may not be true, but it is always true that his occupations shut out sorrow, and hers admit it. It is so great a privilege to hold the key which shuts out sorrow, that we naturally suppose it unmixed gain. But advantages in this world are not pure in proportion to their importance. Perhaps this quality of the in- tellect would be pure gain, if emotion were only arrested as much as a bereaved father's sorrow is arrested by his daily work ; but we are here considering the life of the head at its lowest stage, and the life of the heart at its highest. And there is no doubt that if the ardour of the intellect be intensified, and the claim of the sorrow be diminished, feeling may be suppressed altogether. If, for instance, a person is absorbed in some profound specula- tion, which he is on the verge of conducting to a successful issue, there are many sorrows which he is, for the time, incapable of feeling at all. No doubt a great calamity would lay its hands upon him, and thrust his occupation aside, and it is even possible, though not, we think, very likely, that a nature capable of profound speculation might, under this powerful grasp, find its whole energy converted to suffering, and excel others as much in grief as in mental achievement. But it is clear that no second- rate sorrows could do this. The man of science turns from a letter announcing the death of his dearest friend to some interest- ing experiment, and forgets the loss in watching it, even if after- wards and before he feels it keenly. There is nothing wrong in this, in its measure it is valuable, but it keeps the springs of the moral nature low. It makes a man's experience less human. The thinker resembles a dweller in some region liable to earthquakes who should always have a balloon ready for escape. He dwells amid
shocks from which his refuge is always accessible, he never fully shares the condition of those who must see their homes shattered round them, and be mutilated or buried in the ruins.
There are, however, some influences which tend to conceal this limitation from himself, and still more from those around him. We are all, great and small alike, apt to mistake thoughts about life for life, to think we have experienced what we have understood, that we have felt whatever with the mind's eye we have clearly seen. Yet the lessons we receive against this mistake, though not, perhaps, very common, are emphatic enough. Few persons have come very near a great moral teacher without being forced to realise that the life of thought and of reality were distinct things, and even, in some degree, mutually hostile. A welcome chance, let us suppose, allows us to approach one whose writings have filled us with aspirations that would, if they retained their first vividness, enable us to feel our fortunes rocking beneath us as carelessly as the bird spreading his wings on the bough. We naturally, but most unreasonably, expect from this approach to the fountain of so much new life, a second influx of its first invigorating power. We think that the teaching already conveyed in words will be re- peated now, in a more impressive form, and suppose that one who has led us upwards, by pointing to ideals glimmering above us in radiance and beauty like Alpine summits, must him- self be qualified to guide us along the rocky path that leads towards them. We might just as well expect him to have strong legs because he has keen sight. Nay, we might do so with rather less probability of being disappointed. Keen sight, though it does not imply a vigorous bodily frame, does not imply the contrary. We cannot say this of the moral vision, as we are now considering it. Even if the only difference between our teacher and other men were that we should look at him against the white background of his own ideal, the small moral ugli- nesses which we should pass over in another man would inevitably be greatly exaggerated, but it is greater than this. While they have had the whole energy of their nature at leisure for action, a large part of his is already spent when he enters their world. Force has gone out of him in conceiving and uttering moral ideas, and enough may not remain to work them into life. Strange that what is a truism in physics will seem to many a paradox in morals !
There is another aspect, closely allied to this, of our tendency to misconceive the thinker, on which we should like to say a word. We mean the manner in which ordinary persons are liable to exaggerate the sympathy of genius. Probably most of us would be thought to have acquired an almost miraculous increase in the power of sympathy, if it were suddenly given us to express what we actually felt. How little we can look back on any crisis of life, and feel that we said what we meant ! Even when we understand the misfortunes of those dear to us, how confusedly and blunderingly we endeavour to make them feel this, perhaps insulting a proud nature by pity, or humbling a weak one with advice available only by strength ! Now think what it would be to have no more than the supply of human feeling possessed, we may roughly say, by all of us, and to be able adequately and im- mediately to express it. The nearest approach to such a state of things is to imagine either that every sufferer is a dear friend, or else that we see the sorrows of our fellows at once as we see them after the discipline of long, painful years, and deal with them in experience as we desire to have dealt with them in memory. Now genius enables a man to do this, and much more. He can realise incompatible and unfelt sorrows as we realise the few sorrows we have felt, and (which is an important part of the necessity) have ceased to feel, and he can also express what he does feel. We need a very peculiar training in order to understand anybody as a man of genius understands everybody, and then a peculiar gift to put our understanding into words. We do not think it is possible to avoid misconceiving such a power. The humblest recipient of the sympathy of genius is liable to mistake the peculiarity of its own quality for the peculiarity of his attraction for it—to suppose that with an imaginative thinker, as with himself, a little sympathy given, means a great deal in reserve. Now the very fact that a great poet realises the sorrows of those with whom chance throws him into contact, as the sufferers could only realise the sorrows of a beloved friend, or of one whose experience was lighted up by their own,—this very fact shortens the sympathy it so wonderfully intensifies, for he flashes his in- sight on my life at this moment and on yours the next, and mine must be dark, if yours is to be illuminated. Do not let us be un- grateful for that brilliant illumination, because it is also brief. It is well to have been admitted to a palace, but we cannot expect to be allowed to take up our abode there, and those who have entered and quitted it ought to beware of making the regal spirit regret an admission that was generous, because it entailed a dismissal that was not cruel.
We may be told that in pointing out delusion in the humble guest admitted to the abode of genius, we are quitting the dis- advantages of intellect for the disadvantages of want of intellect.
We urge in reply, first, that this disadvantage being felt only in the presence of great intellectual power, may in some sense be re- garded as its shadow ; and secondly, that although no one would venture to dilate upon the temptations of genius who is conscious of not possessing it, yet illusion is dangerous everywhere, and the illusion we have painted in the guest, cannot, we should think, be entirely confined to him. The man of genius himself must sometimes mistake the vivid and adequate apprehension of other lives for sympathy, and fancy that what has been reflected in his powerful imagination, has reached his heart. And this, indeed, is the danger of imagination always, whether it amounts to the specific power we call genius, or merely leavens the whole nature with its richness. It must always seem to enlarge the moral power which it sets free from shackles and dis- guises, even though it does sometimes in this very liberation tend a little in the opposite direction.
In taking our examples of the dangers of the intellectual life from the life of an average man, and from the life of genius, we may appear to contemplate two things about as different as it is possible to conceive. But we only allude to the ordinary man's occupations so far as they are contrasted with the ordinary woman's, and a busy man seems to us, for the purpose for which we regard him, to stand about half-way between the average woman and a man of genius. He has about as much more drain on his energy of brain than she has, as he has less than the great thinker. Now, all we desire is to extend through the whole scale of the intellectual life that kind of indulgence, if you regard it from one point of view, or caution, if you regard it from another, which you perceive at once to be necessary, if you regard it in either its most brilliant or its most ordinary illustration. Un- questionably there is a different standard for man and for woman ; the claims of a common-place man would in a common-place woman be called decidedly selfish. And all who have really known a person much looked up to on account of his intellectual endowments will be inclined to say the same of him, as compared with other people. We recognise the difference without blame in the ease of the two halves of humanity, because we are so familiar with it, and we do the like in the case of genius, because there the claimant is our master ; but we fail to carry on this simple recognition through the intermediate stages where its necessity is just as real, and indeed, from causes on which we have no space to enter, much more pressing.
It is a loss that we have no epithet for a course of conduct that guards the interest of the self but one so coloured by
condemnation as selfish. A great thinker—or rather, a true
thinker of any calibre—is doing far more for his kind when he takes anxious care of his health, than if he were to injure it in exertions for somebody else ; and indeed, you should call no one selfish for reserving his energies, till you know how he is going to expend them. At the same time, we think it is extremely dangerous for any one to have to make this sort of claim on his own behalf ; and the temptation to do this must, we fear, be reckoned as the one great danger which is fully compensated for, but not annihilated, by the many and enduring blessings of the intellectual life.
We sum up the warning we desire to convey, in saying that the law that work consumes heat is as true for mind as for matter.
A sensible amount of heat, Mr. Tyndall tells us, is consumed by
a cup of tea in dissolving a lump of sugar, and =intense amount of cold may be produced if the chemical work we require is proportionally great. In the moral world, unhappily, the cold- ness may be produced, and the work not done. He who makes the thinker's claim without doing the thinker's work well deserves the condemnation which he generally receives ; but do not judge severely one who overrates his work, or at least, remember in judging him that for a second-rate intellect to discern clearly the limits inexorably set to its achievements, would sometimes be to abandon them altogether.
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