THE DEFICIENCIES OF A "WELL-REGULATED MIND."
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, in the pleasant little book, to which 1.3 we have once before referred, on "The Pleasures of Life," has produced what we may regard as a very taking picture of what used to be called, in the days of Mies Edgeworth and her contemporaries, a " well.regulated mind." A well-regulated mind is, according to this book, a mind that insists on the duty of happiness and rejoices in the happiness of duty; that exults in the inexhaustible treasures of books, and has a happy art of selecting them well ; that is duly grateful for the blessings of friends, and has a deep sense of the value of time; that enjoys the pleasures of travel and the still greater pleasures of home; that is so rich in intelligent cariosity that science is a constant source of ever new delight, and has a turn for educating others "so that every country walk may be a pleasure to the young under its influence, and every school over which it has any control may be a centre of vivid and harmless enjoyment. The book is a very thoughtful book, showing Sir John's various and happily selected reading ; and yet after reading it and turning again to the preface, one draws a sigh of relief at the sentence which lets out the secret that it does not perfectly represent what the accomplished author is, but only what it is his ideal to be. "Being myself," he writes, "rather prone to suffer from low spirits, I have at several of these gatherings" [gather- ings where he was asked to give away prizes and to improve the occasion] "taken the opportunity of dwelling on the privileges and blessings we enjoy hoping that the thoughts and quotations in which I have myself found most comfort may perhaps be of use to others also." It seems a rather unkind state of mind to feel real relief that any man to whom all these beautiful thoughts are familiar should suffer from "low spirits," and we are far from rejoicing in the bare fact of any man's low spirits, least of all in the low spirits of one to whom we owe so large a debt for exciting OUT interest, giving us good counsel, and stand- ing up firmly for what is wise and right when men of genius are leading the multitude into dangerous paths, as we do to Sir John Lubbock. Nevertheless, it must even be confessed that there is a deep sense of relief in ascertaining that a mind nourished on all these admirable thoughts is not absolutely guaranteed against depression by counsels of perfection so sober and so enlightened. Only a few years ago it was the fashion to panegyrise and emulate men who derived their credit for the most part from having what the Edgeworths of the early days of the century would have called ill-regulated minds. Carlyle introduced a school of preference much more fascinating and much more likely to be put to evil uses than Sir John Lubbock's,—a school which regarded hypochondria as a sort of merit. All the older men amongst us will remember the consequences of Carlyle's panegyrics on those who suffered from what he termed hypochondria, but what the world is apt to call blue-devils. "Poor Cromwell! Great Cromwell !" he wrote in his " Hero- Worship," "The inarticulate Prophet ; Prophet who could not speak. Rude, confused, struggling to utter himself, with his savage depth, with his wild humanity; and he looked so strange among the elegant Euphuisms, dainty little Falklands, didactic Chilling- worths, diplomatic Clarendons ! Consider him. An outer hull of chaotic confusion, vu3' ions of the Devil, nervous dreams, almost semi.madness ; and yet such a clear determinate man's energy working in the heart of that. A kind of chaotic man. The ray as of pare starlight and fire, working in such an element of boundless hypochondria, unformed black of darkness ! And yet withal, this hypochondria, what was it but the very greatness of the man ? The depth and tenderness of his wild affections ; the quantity of sympathy he had with things, the quantity of insight he would yet get into the heart of things, the mastery he would yet get over things; this was his hypochondria. The man's misery, as man's misery always does, came of his great- ness. Samuel Johnson, too, is that kind of man. Sorrow- stricken, half-distracted ; the wide element of mournful blade enveloping him,—wide as the world. It is the character of a prophetic man ; a man with his whole soul seeing and struggling to see." We can many of us remember what an unfortunate influence Carlyle had in introducing an affectation of hypo- chondria into the literature of England, in spite of the fact that he gave us some new glimpses into the true causes of human melancholy and the confusions of the universe. Undoubtedly, when Carlyle got hold of men who were not very genuine men indeed, his pupils were more injured than helped by these fantastic doctrines of his, these praises of hypochondria, of Norse fury, of the frenzy of reckless souls, of the sullenness of hearts that foundthemselves at odds with the world, and supposed that it was because their world was unworthy of them, not because they were unworthy of their world. It is very curious to contrast the ideal of Sir John Lubbock's educational addresses with the ideal of Carlyle's lectures on the characters which he held up to our admiration. But the outcome of the comparison is, as we have said, that while we feel how much better Sir John Lubbock's counsels are for the purpose of impressing the greater number of those who are looking out for guidance in the way of education, we are distinctly thankful to
find that the accomplished author of these addresses does not himself find in his own ideals any satisfaction so deep that he can deny the existence of a considerable void to be filled up even after he has taken to heart all these beautiful counsels.
For the truth is that, much as we enjoy reading these addresses and appreciate the happy form generally given to the advice which Sir John Lubbock has collected for us from all the regions of literature, we rebel against the ideal as a whole. The addresses imply that human nature can be, what it cannot be, self-centred, and yet benignant, intelligent, and happy, and therefore it is that one feels a sensible relief when the author intimates that these thoughts do not satisfy him after all, though they are the thoughts in which he has found "most comfort." Consider, for example, the lesson which Sir John enforces from the boasts of Epictetus, and consider those boasts themselves :—" If, indeed," says Sir John, "we cannot be happy, the fault is generally in ourselves. Epictetus was a poor slave, and yet, how much we owe him ! " And then he quotes from Epictetus :— " How is it possible that a man who has nothing, who is naked, honseless, without a hearth, squalid, without a slave, without a city, can pass a life that flows easily? God has sent you a man to show you that it is possible. Look at me, who am without a city, without a house, without possessions, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have no wife, no children, no pre3torium, but only the earth and heavens and one poor cloak. And what do I want? Am I not without sorrow ? Am I not without fear ? Am I not free ? When did any of you see me failing in the object of my desire? or ever falling into that which I would avoid? Did lever blame God or man? Did lever accuse any man? Did any of you ever see me with a sorrowful coun- tenance P And how do I meet with those whom you are afraid of and admire P Do not I treat them like slaves ? Who when he sees me does not think that he sees his king and master ?" "Think," says Sir John, after giving us this picture of Epictetus drawn by Epictetus himself, "how much we have to be thankful for." A great deal, no doubt; but this delineation of himself by Epictetus is hardly, in our opinion, one of our blessings. The profound moral pride in that picture is, to our mind at all events, revolting. We prefer the deep.rooted gloom and hypochondria which Carlyle so vaunts in Cromwell and Johnson, to the self-congratulation of the Stoic teacher on impressing every one who saw him with the potion that he was their king and master. He was not their king and master, and he had too deep a self-knowledge to believe wholly that he was. He concealed, we believe, anxiously from himself, the depth of his own self. dissatisfaction. Or take another of Sir John's °Wise's, given us in the address on "The Value of Time," the one borrowed from Sir Arthur Helps. "In London," says Sir John, "we may unavoidably suffer, but" (with all the museums and galleries to which we have access) "no one has any excuse for being dull. And yet some people are dull They talk of a better world to come, while, whatever dullness there may be here, is all their own. Sir Arthur Helps has well said: What, dull, when you do not know what gives its loveliness of form to the lily, its depth of colour to the violet, its fragrance to the rose ; when you do not know in what consists the venom of the adder, any more than you can imitate the glad movements of the dove What ! dull when earth, air, and water are all alike mysteries to you, and when as you stretch out your hand you do not touch anything the properties of which you have mastered ; while all the time Nature is inviting you to talk earnestly with her, to understand her, to subdue her, and to be blessed by her ! Go away, lean; learn something, do something, understand something, and let me hear no more of your dullness." With great deference to Sir John Lubbock, we must say that that rather pedantic burst of a thoroughly well-regulated mind on the part of Sir Arthur Helps, does not inspire in every reader a strong desire to have such a well-regulated mind for himself. What in the world has it to do with the dullness of "such beings as we are in such a world as the present," that we are not acquainted with the secret of the venom of the adder, the colour of the violet, and the perfume of the rose? Can a more priggish bit of didacticism be conceived than the advice to one who is, we may suppose, heavy with the sense of his own powerlessness to be of any sub- stantial service to himself or his fellow-men, to consider the causes of the venom of the adder or of the perfume of the rose ? Is not even the gloomy hypochondria of a Cromwell or a Johnson a better ideal than the docility of a mind which, when it is weary of its own stagnation,—of the leadenness of its own effort,' as it tries to overtake the duties before it,—can at once accept the kind invitation to cure itself by addressing itself to the causes of the venom of the adder OT the perfume of the rose P The truth is that the people who give us this sort of advice do not understand the maladies from which human nature suffers most, while Carlyle at least did understand them, though he could not suggest any effectual remedy. There is clearly something in us which will engender a very deep hypo- chondria indeed, if our only health is to be found in the gratifi- cation of an intelligent curiosity such as that which Sir Arthur Helps worked himself up into recommending in tones of semi- theatrical authority. The philanthropists, whose ideal of a good work in life, is to make men "benignant, intelligent, and clean," do not know the stuff of which human nature is made. And we very much wish that Sir John Lubbock, who has admitted that in spite of all these delightful resources of a cultivated intellect, he is prone to suffer from low spirits, would, in his future addresses, pierce a little below "the duty of happiness" and the 4. happiness of duty," and examine not the secret of "the venom of the adder and the perfume of the rose," but the root of that deep hypochondria in human nature, of which Carlyle so much overrated the moral value, and for which Epictetus certainly had not found the cure, though he gave it out so loudly that he had cured himself.
Previous page
